John Romita... And All That Jazz Preview

presents

...And All That Jazz!

by Roy Thomas & Jim Amash

Introduction

By Stan Lee

JOHN ROMITA ...And All That Jazz!

Table of Contents

Introduction by Stan Lee: A Few Boring Words about John Romita . . . . . . . .5 Preface by Roy Thomas: Romita Revisited . . . . . . .6 Preface by Jim Amash: John Romita – An Artist’s POV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 John Romita: Fifty Years on the “A” List . . . . . . .12 interview conducted by Roy Thomas

“Captain America Was a Dirty Name!” . . . . . . . .64 interview conducted by Jim Amash

John Romita: The 2006-2007 Interview . . . . . . . .73 conducted by Jim Amash

Afterword by Amash & Thomas . . . . . . .189

Romita pencil art courtesy of Mike Burkey.

[Mary Jane Watson-Parker TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Fifty Years On The “A” List

A Candid Conversation With Marvel Artist/Art Director Supreme Why Is This Man Smiling?

A 1996 Romita Spider-Man sketch, flanked by Jazzy Johnny hard at work in 1967 amid furniture he made himself (“I must’ve been crazy!” he says).

Art courtesy of Mike Burkey. Photo courtesy of and art ©2007 John Romita. [Spider-Man TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

R

OY THOMAS: Okay, John, just to get it out of the way— you were born in Brooklyn in 1930, right?

JOHN ROMITA: Yeah. Just maybe five years too early—no, too late. Because one of my biggest regrets is that I wasn’t in the first generation of comic artists. While I was in junior high school, Joe Kubert, who’s only a few years older than me, got in on it, doing “Hawkman”!

RT: Of course, if you’d had your wish, you’d be a decade older.

ROMITA: Yeah, I’d be eighty now. [laughs] I started drawing when I was five. Parents and relatives say, “Ooh” and “Ahh” and how great it is, and you continue drawing because you like to get the pats on the back.

12 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

JOHN ROMITA Conducted by Roy Thomas Transcribed by Brian K. Morris I was a street performer when I was about ten. The gang of kids I hung out with used to scrounge bits of plaster from torn-down buildings, because we couldn’t afford chalk, and I would draw on the streets. Once I did a 100-foot Statue of Liberty, starting at one manhole and finishing at the next. That was the distance between manholes in Brooklyn.

RT: “From sewer to shining sewer,” huh?

ROMITA: People were coming from other neighborhoods to see it and hoping it wouldn’t rain. I also used to draw Superman, Batman— all the super-heroes that were coming out. [Virginia Romita says something in the background.] Virginia reminds me, as she always does, that I also became the source of little drawings of nude girls for all the boys in the neighborhood. Guys would beg me to do them,

You Name ’Em—Romita’s Drawn ’Em! John’s preliminary pencils to the wraparound cover of the 1996 Marvel one-shot Heroes and Legends. Courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

and she would say she was disappointed in me for doing those drawings. She was nine when I was eleven. Actually, she caused me to stop doing them.

When they did plays at the school auditorium, I was stuck with doing the backgrounds and scenery. Once they taped a huge roll of wrapping paper along the entire school corridor, and I did a mural down both sides of all the heroes I knew of, even Zorro, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan.

RT: The comics pros a little older than you had grown up before Superman, so when they started drawing super-heroes, it wasn’t as natural a thing to them.

ROMITA: Yeah, but they probably did Washington and Lincoln, like I did. I became a celebrity in school. I used to carve Lincoln heads, Mickey Mouse, things like that, out of cakes of soap. When I was 1213, my buddies thought we were gonna go into business. They actually broke into the basement of a Turkish bath to get me a boxful of soap, so help me! I can still see this one kid half a block down the street in the tenement section of Brooklyn—you could see for two blocks, no trees, no nothing—there’s a policeman talking to him, and

this kid—his name was Louie McDuff and he was a real weasel—was practically in tears. I can see him pointing to my house and telling the cop, “That’s the guy who told me to get the soap.” I never asked him to get the soap—I just stayed there in the cellar. I thought I was going to be arrested for stealing a box of soap!

When I was choosing a high school, somebody told me about the School of Industrial Arts in the city, where you were taught by professional artists. That captured my imagination. My local priest wanted me to go to a Catholic high school and later become a priest, but I wasn’t going to give up girls.

But one of my buddies, who was doing full-color posters when I was just doing line-art stuff—truthfully, he was much better than I was—he advised me, “John, you shouldn’t waste your time going to the School of Industrial Arts. You’re not polished enough.” He went to the same school I did, and he never, ever made a living at artwork. [laughs] RT: Some people have talent but never get it together to actually do anything with it.

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 13

and the Pirates stuff—well, it’s probably partly because of Noel Sickles. They shared a studio for a time. Caniff helped Sickles with storytelling, and Sickles helped Caniff learn how to turn out a daily page without laboring over it. If Sickles hadn’t gotten tired of his own Scorchy Smith, there’s no telling how big it might have become, because that strip was an adventure story on the quality level of a Hitchcock movie. I’m telling you, the stories, the visuals, were so great—I don’t know about the dialogue, because Caniff had his own dialogue, that probably surpassed everybody.

I had to scrounge up old Famous Funnies comics to get all of Terry! Each issue reprinted maybe two or three Sundays, or maybe two Sundays and the dailies in-between.

RT: Moving to the Kirby half of my Caniff-Kirby equation—you were probably one of those kids who liked Simon and Kirby without knowing who did what.

Three of A Kind JR says: “I saw George Tuska at the MegaCon this April [2001]. He’s still drawing. He and Nick Cardy and I posed for pictures. It was wonderful.”

[L. to r.: Tuska, Romita, & Cardy; photo courtesy of John Romita.]

Biro was a genius. I maintain that Biro did a lot of the stuff that Stan did later, but it wasn’t noticed, even though he was putting a lot of personality into his comics.

George Tuska did a lot of work for Biro. When I met Tuska in the late ’60s, I said, “I’ll tell you how far back I’ve been noticing your work. I remember ‘Shark Brodie’!” That was a back-up feature, a hobo adventurer connected with the sea. He was always on a dock somewhere. Actually, I’d seen Tuska years earlier, when I was delivering a horror story to Stan in the ’50s. I saw this big, strapping guy, and I didn’t know it was Tuska till afterward. He looked like a superhero himself!

RT: Doing Crime Does Not Pay stories for Biro, Tuska was one of the most influential artists in the field. Later, for several years in the ’70s, he was one of only two artists who could draw any Marvel book and it’d sell. You were the other one. I remember he did two issues of Sub-Mariner and sales shot up. They went back down as soon as he left!

ROMITA: I was aware of everything Jack did from the time I was eleven. I’d tell my buddies, “This guy is great! Look at this stuff that’s popping out of the pages. Look at how he does that!” They thought the comics were some kind of tricky photo technique. They would say, “Aw, you’re crazy. Nobody’s going to do all those drawings by hand.” Years later, I used to hear that echoing, and say, “What am I, crazy, doing 120 drawings for how many stories?” [laughs] RT: You found out how many drawings people can do, right?

ROMITA: I learned the hard way. But for a while I definitely felt I was doing comics only on a temporary basis. In the Army I did fullcolor illustrations and posters. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal—there were about a dozen magazines that had double-page illustrations to make your mouth water; but that field was slowly dying. My final year in art school, I studied magazine illustration and had given up on comics. I wanted to be a magazine illustrator.

RT: Not a baker? [laughs]

ROMITA: I remember. Everything he touched was great. He once did a thumbnail version of a Spider-Man from a plot by Stan. I was supposed to blow the thumbnails up and lightbox them—all contrived to save me time.

It was a very interesting-looking job, with a lot of people in overcoats, and some beautiful shadows; I was dying to do it. But Stan said, “No, it just doesn’t look like a Spider-Man story,” and he decided not to use it. I could kill myself for losing those thumbnails.

RT: Two of the comics artists most influential on your style—especially during the period I became aware of your work back in the early ’50s with “Captain America”—were Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff. That wasn’t just my imagination, was it?

ROMITA: No. Milton Caniff was my god. Before I got into comic books, his Terry and the Pirates was my Bible. I used to spend hours looking at those pages. I still have two or three years of Sundays in an envelope. I still look at them and admire and sigh. Everything I’ve ever learned, I think, was established in those pages.

He did some beautiful work later in Steve Canyon, but the Terry

A Tuska Tableau A recent George Tuska illo of heroes he drew during the 1970s.

[Heroes TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 17

Milton & The Pirates John (left) with his childhood idol Milt Caniff (center), circa ’70s. The longtime Marvel artist/production man at right jokingly titled this pic: “Hey, who’re those two guys with Tony Mortellaro?” The Terry and the Pirates daily for 2-8-38 featured two of Caniff’s trademark women—Burma and the ever-delightful Dragon Lady.

As for Tony—he often slipped the name “Mort” onto backgrounds when working with John. [Photo courtesy of John Romita; Terry art ©2007 Chicago Tribune-NY News Syndicate, Inc., or successors in interest.]

ROMITA: Well, not a baker—but I was going to drive the bread truck. My father was a baker, and he had a chance to open up a bakery when I was 14-15. He envisioned me delivering bread when I got my license. It sounded like a good family business. But we’d have had to relocate upstate, near Albany, and my mother didn’t want to leave her family and friends in Brooklyn. That was probably the reason, not me. But she said, “No, he’s going to stay in the city. He’s going to become an artist.” Can you believe it?

RT: Clearly, she had faith in you. What were your other pre-comics jobs in the late ’40s?

ROMITA: The first one, a couple of months after the hospital exhibit, was for $26 a week with Forbes Lithograph. I took home $21 after taxes, working forty hours a week and also having to go in sometimes on Saturdays. They did speculation stuff, mostly on companies like Coca-Cola. You know the festoons they used to have behind soda fountains,with a big picture of a girl and some flowers drawn strung up, and then on the end they’d have Coke bottles?

Well, designing those festoons and printing them in their litho plant was Forbes’ main business. I was there from the middle of ’47 until at least the middle of ’49. I did a lot of full-color comprehensives and a lot of touching-up of Coke bottles to the point where, I think, if I had to do one tomorrow, I’d be ready! [laughs] You know how they used to do the water dripping down the side of the bottle? I had that technique down perfect, because I had to match the style of Haddon Sundblum and Harry Anderson, who were the best Coke artists in the world. The sunlight and the reflected firelight on Santa Claus’ face—those were all Haddon Sundblum. He was a genius, and I dreamed of doing that stuff. If not for comics, I’d probably have become a lithographic illustrator.

RT: Which brings us at last to comic books. You mentioned at the 1995 Stan Lee Roast in Chicago how in ’49 you started out

Classic Kirby John says, “I was aware of everything Jack did from the time I was eleven”—which is roughly the time Captain America #8 came out from Simon & Kirby and Timely.[©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

18 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

I remember Carmine [Infantino] and Joe Kubert did a Western for Avon while I was working there. I think it was Jesse James. That might be the job they said they did in a day or two, but to me it was like a work of art. And Everett Raymond Kinstler did covers for Avon; he later became an illustrator.

These guys knocked my socks off, which didn’t help my ego. It was very embarrassing to bring my artwork in. But I only did a few issues for Avon.

That’s another place I used to run into Jack Abel and Ed Winiarski and other guys. John Forte was there, and Tony Di Preta, who later did Joe Palooka. Colan did some Westerns for Avon, too, I think.

RT: When did you draw for Avon?

ROMITA: While I was working for Lester Zakarin, I would have time between jobs, and he had a list of all the editors in the city, all the companies in the city, maybe half a dozen. I went up to Avon Comics, whose editor was a guy named Sol Cohen. He was a nervous wreck who spoke a mile-aminute, had no patience, and was cruel—as cruel as could be. He treated young artists like dirt. He used to tell me, “You call this artwork? This is crap. This is no good. This is garbage.”

I did love stories for him, and he had somebody ink it who must have used a toothbrush or a whiskbroom on it. I labored over a love story, and this guy went over it with a big, heavy hand and mutilated everything. The second story I did, I complained to Cohen about the inking: “You know, I could ink this better than this guy.” He says, “Who the hell do you think you are? This guy’s a professional.

You could never ink as good as him as long as you live!” He tried to tear down my confidence, but I knew better. I mean, that guy was a terrible inker!

28 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

I worked for one guy who was a real strange duck. I sometimes think he didn’t really have an office but was using somebody else’s office at lunchtime, when I would deliver work to him. The outfit was called Trojan Comics. He was doing bondage covers. Every time I did a Western cover for him, there were no horses on it. Instead, there was a girl with half her blouse torn away,

Commie Smasher The cover and all three titlehero splashes from C.A. #78.

How could John R. ever have imagined his art was responsible for the failure of Cap’s 1950s revival? But note the lack of inked stripes on Cap’s shield. The single red and white stripes in the printed issue were laid in crudely by the hardpressed ladies at Eastern Color! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan would call them in and have them do corrections on the spot.

RT: Your cover for Cap #77 is the pier scene with a guy dangling over a big octopus.

ROMITA: By the way, that guy hanging there was originally Bucky.

If you look at the sketch, it not only was Bucky, but I even had two possible positions for the head.

RT: And already, I see Cap’s shield has only two stripes, with no inked lines in them.

ROMITA: I sold Stan a bill of goods on that one. Actually, I was good at drawing circles. I could draw them freehand, and guys would think I was using one of those aids they call an ellipse. But I didn’t want to spend time drawing all those circular stripes on Cap’s shield, so I talked Stan into having them just color-held, with no black lines.

It didn’t work out very well, though. [laughs] RT: They evidently didn’t use color-hold markings, ’cause the red stripes wandered all over the place. They were just blobs of color!

Do you know anything about the decision to bring Cap and the other two heroes back in ’53?

ROMITA: I don’t remember Stan telling me anything about it. I was just so excited that he’d let me do “Captain America”! I was paralyzed with fear, but excited, and I was feeling so lucky to get the chance that I never even questioned it. I was just thinking that it foretold a good period of steady work; that’s all I cared about.

An Abel Inker?

Romita inked by Abel?

Could be. From Captain America #76. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

tied up on a chair, with some villain approaching her with his gun, and the hero comes crashing through the window, or something, to save her.

I did maybe two or three Western covers for this guy, and he paid me $45 a cover, more than anyone else paid at the time, so I couldn’t stop doing them. I don’t remember that guy’s name.

But I know he was a nebbish.

RT: It turned out not to last very long. But I can see where it looked like the coming thing, because by the time those books were cancelled, there’d been five different comics titles starring the “Big Three,” counting the two anthologies. Young Men had even gone from bimonthly to monthly!

ROMITA: I think I inked all the Captain America stories until Jack Abel inked the three stories in the last issue [#78]. I think we did something with a Korean prison camp, too.

RT: Getting back to that mid-’50s super-hero revival: When I showed you the splash for the first “Captain America” story in it [Young Men #24], you said it was by Mort Lawrence, though you drew the rest of the story. You thought he might’ve been slated to be the original artist.

RT: You actually drew two POW-camp stories—one in Cap #76—and another in #77, which you signed. The one in #76—with the charming title, “Come to the Commies!”—is not signed. Did you sign stories when someone else inked them?

ROMITA: I think he started the story and Stan stopped him, for some reason. When I came in, the splash was done and it was signed “Mort Lawrence.” Stan asked me to do the rest of the story. I’m not sure if there were any panels underneath the splash or not.

RT: The two other panels on that page in the printed book are by you. In fact, the only “Captain America” work in 1953-54 that wasn’t by you was that first splash—one story totally drawn (and signed) by Lawrence— and I presume the first of the three covers of the Captain America title—#76, which has that thin-line approach for backgrounds we were discussing—and there’s a cartoony smile on Cap’s face.

ROMITA: Stan probably had somebody touch it up. Whoever was out in his waiting room,

ROMITA: No.

Let A Smile Be Your... Shield Les Daniels’ praiseworthy 1991 tome Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics lists the cover artist of C.A. #76 as Syd Shores, but we’ve still got our doubts. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: Then you must have inked all of the last issue, because all three “Cap” stories in #78 are signed by you! Besides the two stories Lawrence worked on, there are only four “Cap” stories out of the 16 in that whole revival that aren’t signed by you: the first and last stories in Captain America #76—the lead story in #77—and the

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 29

one in Young Men #27. All four of those look like your art, though, even the splashes.

ROMITA: Maybe somebody else fixed them up. I remember vaguely that I was hurt that Stan rejected one of my splashes.

RT: Now that you mention it, the two unsigned stories in Cap #76—“The Betrayers!” and “Come to the Commies!”—do look as if they could have been inked by Jack Abel. They have a thinner, less bold and thick line than you were using then.

ROMITA: I remember the one with the prison camp, because the reference I had for the Communist uniforms was like a pinstripe or cross-stitch, like a pinstripe suit—and Jack did a very fine line on it, finer than I would have, very delicate, and I was conscious of it.

When Comics Went To The Dogs Contrary to John’s memory, the cover of Western Kid #1 (Dec. 1954) is definitely his work. Joe Maneely did the next six! At right is one of the Gil Kane Rex covers John used for inspiration. Thanks to Frank Motler & James Cassara. [Western Kid ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.; Rex ©2007 DC Comics.]

RT: I don’t expect you to have total recall, but I’m determined to learn everything I can about those 1950s issues. If not you, then who else am I gonna ask? Stan?

Like he says, he does good to remember what he did last week! We don’t even know who wrote the “Cap” stories, though you’ve said you think Stan wrote some of them.

Not to start you feeling like a failure again, but do you have any theory as to why, even though Cap was the most popular of Timely’s “Big Three” back in the ’40s, he got less play than the other two in the ’50s?

Young Men #24 has a 9-page “Torch” and an 8-page “Sub-Mariner”—but only a 6-page “Captain America,” tucked in between them. And the division in the other six anthology issues was 8-7-8, with “Cap” always a page shorter than the other two. Also, the Torch was cover-featured on all seven anthology issues—and there wound up being fewer stories of Cap than of the Torch, let alone Sub-Mariner with his TV option.

ROMITA: I have no idea. Maybe Mort Lawrence had done a whole issue and Stan decided not to print it. Dick Ayers was working steadily for Stan at that time, and maybe he was turning out more stories than me. I know

A Real Dog-And-Pony Show Here’s one of those scrumptious “man-dog-horse” fights John remembers from Western Kid in the 1950s: the Kid grabs one owlhoot… the dog Whirlwind tackles another… while the Kid’s horse Lightning leads a whole herd against the rest of the bad guys. You can’t write or draw a better Western scene than a bunch of outlaws with their hands raised, facing a bunch of stallions! Repro’d from an Australian reprint, courtesy of Michael Baulderstone. See the entire story in Marvel Visionaries: John Romita Sr. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

30 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

half a dozen issues of Rex by Gil Kane in front of me every time I had to do that dog! I used Gil’s work for animating him. Gil had this great ability to twist his body— RT: He was one of the best guys around for drawing animals in action. So how did things go bad for you at Timely?

ROMITA: Around 1957 was when Stan and I were at our lowest ebb in our relationship. In the last year, he cut my rate every time I turned in a story.

He was not even talking to me then.

He was embarrassed, because he had given me raises for two years every time I went in, and then he took it all away. I went from $44 a page to $24 a page in a year.

RT: As Gil was fond of saying, “Comics giveth and comics taketh away.”

beautiful brown hair, I forget her name but she was adorable—and she says, “John, I have to tell you that Stan says to stop work on the Western book because we’re going to cut down on a lot of titles.”

I said to her, “Well, I spent three days on it. I’d like to get $100 for the work, to tide me over.” She said, “Okay, I’ll mention it to Stan.” I never heard another word about the money, and I told Virginia, “If Stan Lee ever calls, tell him to go to hell.” [laughs] And that was the last work I did for him until 1965.

RT: Stan told me that Goodman would give him the word to fire everybody, and then Goodman would go off to Florida and play golf. [laughs]

ROMITA: Oh, I understand Stan’s pain, because I went through that, too, towards the end of working at The Man & The Jazzy One ROMITA: Virginia kept saying, “Well, Marvel in the ’90s, and it was no fun.

We guess John never did tell Stan Lee to go to hell! how long are you going to take the I remember I had just fought for and A late-’70s publicity photo, courtesy of JR. cuts until you go somewhere else?” gotten a raise for one guy in the And I told her, “I’ll hang on, I’ll hang on.” Then, when it came time spring—and then in the summer we had to let him go. And I’m telling that he ran out of money and had to shut down, or cut down to the him, “Listen, it’s got nothing to do with your work. They’re just bone, I had done two or three days’ work, ruling up the pages, cutting down everybody here.” But it was mortifying to have to do lettering the balloons, and blocking in the figures on a story—and that. I had to watch him get this incredulous look on his face, saying, here comes a call from his assistant—she had beautiful bangs, “Are you kidding me?” But, yes, that’s how the Timely thing ended,

Did They Get A Discount?

Stan Lee may have talked John out of going into advertising, but years later he drew plenty of commercial art for Marvel—including this piece for Slurpee displays at 7-11 stores. Repro’d from original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

34 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

bulk of my work.” She said, “We’ll try to get you more work.”

But I said, “I have to decide now because I can’t gamble. If you can’t give me the work Stan is giving me, then I’ll be out.” And then, six months later, he let me go through his secretary.

and I wound up going to DC. RT: Hadn’t you done a little work for DC during that last year before Timely collapsed?

ROMITA: Yeah. I did a couple of romance stories for them, trying to supplement my income; but it was too much hard work, because I was not fast enough to do two stories at once. So that would always cut into how much I did for Stan. Stan had me in once and said, “I notice you’ve been doing some romance stuff for DC.” I said, “Yeah, to get some extra money.” And he said, “Well, I gotta tell you, you know you’re on my ‘A’ list, meaning if I got two scripts, you’re gonna get one of them. But I’m going to have to take you off my ‘A’ list if you’re going to do work for DC.”

I was so mad, partly because he had kept me from making extra money. Stan didn’t know that I couldn’t really earn any extra money—[laughs]—although he had gotten an idea by then that I was pretty slow. But that really tore me up, because I was thinking, “Gee, I’ll never get into DC again.” And a little later I walked in there and they welcomed me with open arms and I went from $24 a page to $35-$38 a page.

RT: If they’d made that offer before, you’d probably have been there a year earlier.

So I called up Zena Brody, the romance editor at DC—she was a nice girl and a pretty good editor, too—and told her I couldn’t do any more for her, and she was very upset. She said, “Gee, I was counting on you.” She was talking about doing a steady series with me. I told her, “I’m sorry, but Stan Lee is giving me the

ROMITA: No, because I was making over $40 a page at Timely before the cuts started. It’s funny, too, because when I lost the work from Stan, Virginia had run right out and got a job!

Love That Romita!

John waltzed his way through two companies and three decades, becoming one of the best romance artists around. (Clockwise from above left:) My Own Romance #40 (Oct. 1954); with thanks to Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] Young Love #51 (Sept.-Oct. 1965)—though here he’s inked by another artist.

With thanks to John Wells. [©2007 DC Comics.]

The cover of My Love #35 (July 1975), from a period when John would again be called on to draw in that genre—only, this time, it would be in between working on the likes of The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four! Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 35

route is not enough money,” so she got a job.

And then a week after that, I brought in a bigger check than I had ever got at Stan’s!

Virginia had taken a job to fill in for vacationers, and she felt embarrassed to leave them in the lurch. So she stayed for most of the summer, and it killed her because it was a porkrendering place. They would reduce fat to chemicals. From what I hear—I have no sense of smell—it was the worst smell in the world. And she had to work in that building for two months, and I don’t think she ever got over it. [laughs] RT: When you went back to DC, was Zena Brody still there?

ROMITA: I believe she was just leaving, but she recommended me highly, so I worked for this other, very sweet girl who had a severe limp.

And then a very good person took over, Phyllis Reed. She and I worked together very well for years. She used me as her main artist. I would work out the cover ideas out with her, and she’d have the writers base the scripts on our covers.

And then I would get the story that fit the cover.

They’d use the cover as the splash on one story, which was usually the last story in the book. That saved them the cost of a page, so the cover cost the same as one of the pages. You’d get a 15-page job and only get 14 pages of artwork.

RT: Several Timely people like Colan and others went over to DC after the ’57 collapse.

“I Now Pronounce You—Pencil Layouts” JR’s rough pencils for a Marvel Age cover (we think) depicting the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Fantastic. At one time or another, John drew each of these mostly-Kirby-designed heroes for Marvel—but he can’t help wondering how he’d have fared on The New Gods or Mr. Miracle!

Courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©Marvel Characters, Inc.]

RT: Was it you or she who once had a route delivering newspapers?

ROMITA: I did that in ’56, but that was mostly for exercise. I was getting fat. I almost got a job on the docks. Some longshoreman friends were going to get me a longshoreman union card, and I figured I could work 2-3 days a week and get all the exercise I needed and make some extra money.

RT: You’d have had to watch out for all those Communist octopuses!

ROMITA: More that that: I’d have had to watch out for gang bosses that would have you beaten up if you tried to get work. But then I saw this newspaper route for sale—$4000 to deliver 300 papers a day—so I borrowed the money and I got the route. I used to get up at three in the morning and deliver papers until seven, then take a nap and get up again around ten or eleven and start working on comics.

That was like a year and a half before Stan cut me off. Even though it was a drag to get up seven days a week and deliver papers, it kept us solvent for a while. But when Timely folded, Virginia said, “The paper

36 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

ROMITA: Jack Abel was there, too. I met Frank Giacoia doing romances. I met Sy Barry. I worked with Sekowsky but I never met him; I inked a couple of his romance stories—very educational. Working on Sekowsky’s strong pencils was a great boon to me; I learned how to do a lot of things. There was Werner Roth, who later did X-Men.

I inked Arthur Peddy a few times. The only problem with him was, I had to shorten all the arms. He had the habit of making people’s upper arms so long and gorilla-like they would reach their lap. I never asked the editor; I just corrected them. I couldn’t stand them. Sort of like Rob Liefeld, back in the ’90s. I had to shorten the legs and arms on everything he did.

I inked almost as much as I penciled, for a while; but maybe that was before I left Stan. When Phyllis Reed came, I did all pencils and very little inking.

RT: Was there anyone besides Stan counted as an editor at Timely in the late ’40s or early ’50s? Don Rico seems to have functioned as one, earlier—at least Gil told me he handed out assignments— Vince Fago was editor-in-chief while Stan was in the Army—and Dorothy Woolfolk, or Roubicek, was there briefly in the mid-’40s.

But none of them was editing at Timely by ’49.

ROMITA: Don Rico wasn’t doing drawings then; I only knew him as a name on a script. Vince Fago—I remember the name, but I never dealt with anybody at Marvel except Stan until you took over. The only other editors I worked for were the romance editors at DC, and

me, and I think I can make it worth your while. It would be a terrific idea.” And I said, “You know, I got to think it over, Jack.”

I told Virginia, and she almost had a heart attack. She said, “First of all, if you go with Jack, you’re going to be a Jack Kirby clone.”

And I said, “Well, I don’t know how. I’m not going to be working on his artwork. He’s going to be writing and I’m going to be penciling”—although he might have broken them down for me. But he could break down a hundred stories for me and it wouldn’t affect me, because he didn’t do details on his breakdowns. He did silhouettes and rough scribbles. She said, “No, you’re going to end up working for Kirby. Your personality will be buried and nobody will know anything about you.” I couldn’t argue with it, but I was tempted.

I’ll never quite forgive myself for not giving that a try, notwithstanding Virginia’s protests, because there’s no telling whether I could have made a difference on Mister Miracle. He might not have gotten so exhausted on the whole thing.

RT: You’d also have been in line to be an editor, since Carmine was hiring artisteditors by then. We never know what might’ve happened on the road not taken.

In the very early ’70s, when Stan was having trouble with [Martin] Goodman near the end, he met with DC about going over there. I didn’t learn about it till later. He told me, “If I’d gone to DC, I’d have taken you with me.” Of course, I might’ve decided to stay at Marvel and become editor-in-chief a year or so early. Still, I’d probably have gone with him; I felt a great loyalty to Stan. Besides, DC had all these heroes I liked! Sometimes I even wonder—what if Mort Weisinger hadn’t been so impossible and I’d stayed at DC in ’65 instead of going to Marvel?

ROMITA: Imagine, you could have wound up editor-inchief of DC! Just like I often wonder what would have happened if I had accepted Kirby’s offer. It’s a wild gap in my life, and I would love to have seen how it would have worked out.

RT: You never have done any work for DC since ’65, have you?

ROMITA: No, I never have.

Here Comes Romita... Man Without Peer John’s hand-lettered comments on this historic pencil drawing say it all!

Courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

had a close call with Kirby in the ’70s, of course....

Just a day or two after Kirby left Marvel, he called me up and said, “John, here’s the story—you know I’m going to DC.” I said, “Yeah.”

And he said, “Here’s what I’d like you to do: I would like you to come over with me and help me. What I want to do is, I want to write more than I draw.” In other words, he envisioned writing a line of books, like Stan, and he wanted to get me to draw some of his main characters. I might have worked on New Gods or Mister Miracle... probably Mr. Miracle. He said he’d love to have me do the pencils for his stuff, and we could set up some kind of a stable. He said, “I got some great inkers ready to work on your stuff. It would be great for

40 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

RT: Bob Kanigher edited mostly war stuff. Did you do any work for him?

ROMITA: I drew some of his romance stories. Phyllis Reed gave me her two main titles, Young Love and Young Romance. She had steady soap opera series in both books: “The Diary of a Nurse,” and another one about an airline stewardess. So I had steady characters—a brunette airline stewardess and a blonde nurse. The blonde nurse was based on Kathy Tucker from Terry and the Pirates. [laughs] I couldn’t help that.

All the captions were done longhand, as if out of the nurse’s diary.

I did the longhand, and Ira Schnapp, the letterer, would follow my lettering on it. I used to letter every word in pencil and outline every caption and every balloon. In fact, after a while, I was in such a hurry that I used to outline the balloons in ink and Ira would fit the copy

in an elevator going down and he said to me, “I like your stuff. The stories are really coming out good.” I said, “Gee, I’m glad it doesn’t bother you that I make changes.” And his eyes almost popped out of his head. I said, “You know, sometimes I separate your balloons and move a balloon from one panel to the next, or I put in an extra narrow balloon as a transition panel when I think it needs it. Sometimes I break up your captions into two different panels.” [laughs] Well, he almost had a heart attack, and before I got to the ground floor, he destroyed me! He said, “Who the hell do you think you are, you young punk? You’re changing my scripts? Where do you come off doing that?” I said, “You just told me you liked the stuff.”

I guess he didn’t read the finished stories through too carefully. He just thumbed through them. I got such a kick out of that in retrospect, but while it happened, I thought, “Oh, sh*t. There goes my career.” He could have killed me. He could have had my head if he wanted. So I give him credit that he didn’t. Maybe he looked over the stories and realized that I’d improved them, because a lot of times he left no transition time in between panels, so I would have somebody walking away, instead of, from one panel to the next, they’re just gone.

RT: Didn’t Stan call you a time or two about work during that period?

ROMITA: He called me in ’63 and ’64 and said, “We’re starting to move.”

A Pair Of Pencil Pushers Steve Ditko’s rough pencils (above) for a page from Amazing SpiderMan #38 (July 1966)—and John Romita’s far tighter pencils (right) for issue #51 (Aug. 1967). In both cases the penciler inked the stories, but John’s could more easily have been inked by another artist. JR pencils courtesy of John Romita. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

over my pencil copy inside the balloons. So I would put pointers on balloons and caption outlines in the story and then ink them, and he would letter them after I had finished the inking. I did those two series, and Kanigher wrote both of them.

I didn’t work for him; he was not my editor. Phyllis Reed was, and she shielded me. But every once in a while he and I would meet in the corridor. I didn’t want to work for him because I had seen him berate Gene Colan in the bullpen once. He just had laid him out. He said, “Your women are too fat; they don’t have long enough legs. What the hell kind of drawing is this?” And Colan was enraged. I think he wanted to kill him. Kanigher was a very hard guy to work with, so I wasn’t interested in working for him, so I was glad I never got work from him.

He was a good writer, but he used to ask for the damnedest things! I remember one episode about a romance at a ski resort. He had this scene where the two of them are standing on skis at the top of a hill and they’re kissing. I called him up and said, “Gee, I’m going to have a hard time with this, because how the hell do I have them look like they’re not going to fall over?” He had actually written in the script: “I know this is going to be hard to do but it can be done. I’ve done it.” [laughs] Like he’s trying to brag to me.

Towards the end of my stay at DC, Kanigher and I were

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 41

And I knew that they’d started to sell, because DC used to have conferences about, why is Stan Lee selling? I was at one of them—I guess because I had been there for eight years. They had Stan’s covers up, and they put some DC covers up next to them. They were trying to decide what the hell made Stan’s books sell. They said, “Stan Lee’s covers look crude. Look at those big, ugly blurbs”—with the big, jagged edges Artie Simek used to do.

RT: You remember in ’66, when they made Andru and Esposito do a sort of campy copy of H.G. Peter’s work on Wonder Woman? I asked Mike [Esposito] about it at a poker game at Phil Seuling’s, and he said it was because the DC editors were convinced that the secret of Marvel was bad drawing.

ROMITA: That’s what I remember them saying: “Maybe the stuff is like rock’n’roll, you know? It makes kids feel like they can be in that world,” that kind of stuff. It was hysterical, the way they were talking.

Most of them said, “Ahh, it’s a fad. It will pass. Hey, what are you trying to find good? It’s garbage.”

RT: But you knew that one of the secrets was Jack Kirby.

ROMITA: DC had let Kirby go because he wasn’t disciplined enough. They wanted neat, clean stuff, and Jack was a wild man.

He told me he almost killed an editor once because the guy told him he didn’t show the shoelaces on a Cavalry man’s boots! And Jack almost went ballistic. “What the hell does anybody care about shoes?” [laughs] And another editor told him he had an Indian get on a horse from the wrong side. Kirby said, “You’re out of your mind. You think the kids care about that?” You know, he would never put Cavalry buttons on the right way. He would rather invent a new uniform.

RT: So Stan would offer you work, but I guess the money was less?

ROMITA: He would say, “John, we’re really starting to roll. It would be great if you could come back.” And I’d say, “Stan, I’m making $45 a page. What are you paying?” He’d say, “Twenty-five a page.” And I’d say, “How can I take a $20 a page cut?” “Well,” he says, “maybe we can make it up to you.” I said, “Stan, I can’t give this up as long as I’ve got it, you know.” He called me three or four times, and I just

42 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

Green Grow The Goblins When John began drawing Spider-Man with issue #39 (Aug. 1966), he started right out with The Green Goblin. This 1970s convention pencil sketch is courtesy of—you guessed it—Mike Burkey.

[Green Goblin TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

kept telling him no. But I didn’t tell him to go to hell, like I’d threatened. [laughs] RT: Did you feel a secret glee that you were able to say no, after that other period?

ROMITA: Actually, I felt vindicated. It helped that DC had wanted me, too, and that I was making more money there. Besides, I didn’t

somewhere as Spider-Man, we had to show how he transported his clothes. It drove me nuts, and I drove Stan nuts with it, but sometimes it led to some interesting storylines.

guy, or that guy, and get him to do something.” I used to ask Stan, “How come I come in to you with one problem, and I walk out with two?”

RT: When you were drawing Spidey, Stan was always trying to find ways to get more out of you—like with those Tuska thumbnails. Then there was that “Spider-Man” story penciled by Ross Andru that wound up in Marvel Super-Heroes #14 [May 1968]. I don’t recall much about it, but I’ve always figured it was meant to be a fill-in issue of Spider-Man, but that Stan didn’t like it much, and that’s why it got sidetracked into another mag.

RT: That’s because Stan knew there were guys he could trust to take the burden off his shoulders—in those days, it was you, Sol Brodsky, and me... Marie Severin, too. I’ve got to ask you this: You’ve said that, when you found out Kirby had quit, you thought at first that Marvel would have to drop Fantastic Four. Did you really feel that? Carmine Infantino supposedly said the same thing to people over at DC at the time....

ROMITA: Or maybe it had to do with the fact that the story was about voodoo. It was a good story, but a little different for the way Spider-Man was being done at that time.

ROMITA: Yeah, because I didn’t think there was anybody else who could do it. I asked Stan who was going to draw it, and he said, “You are!” I thought he was out of his mind. He took me off SpiderMan—which had become our #1 book—to do Fantastic Four, which was our #2 book.

RT: Yet Stan had at least co-plotted it. I don’t think he was ever as much an admirer of Ross’ art as you were, as I was, as a lot of the other guys at the time were.

ROMITA: I think the thing that showed how good Ross was, was that Superman vs. Spider-Man book. Do you remember that twopage spread at the start of the book? That was terrific!

RT: As Gil used to say, Ross was one of the few comics artists who had a real “sense of space.” When he drew a city seen from the air, you could get vertigo staring into the pencils! But somehow some of his penciling strengths never quite translated when the work was inked. Ross clearly wasn’t the answer for what Stan wanted with Spider-Man. ROMITA: Stan was always trying to speed me up. He had Don Heck penciling over my breakdowns for a while. Stan would have me lay out the story. Then, when Don had finished the pencils, he’d call me in to fix up anything Don had done that he didn’t like. Even after it was inked, he’d have me changing what the inker had done. I told him, “This was supposed to save me time, but it isn’t!”

He tried Dick Ayers at it, too. In fact, there’s one splash page that was used, based on what Dick did—it was a splash that was mostly just webbing. But Stan didn’t like the way Dick drew Peter Parker, so we settled on John Buscema.

RT: Well, it was still Marvel’s flagship title, so to speak. It said up there at the top of every cover: “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine!”—so Stan felt an obligation to try to live up to that. Hey, John, you ought to know as well as anybody—“With great power, there must come great responsibility!” [laughs] ROMITA: But I didn’t think I was the guy to do the FF. If you look at those four issues I did, you’ll

RT: Who hated drawing Spider-Man. Yet he became the third Spidey penciler.

ROMITA: Yeah, though he mostly just did layouts. I’d call him up to give him a quick plot outline, and he’d say, “We’re not gonna do another one of those, are we? I hate Spider-Man!” But then he’d do this great job. I wish I could have inked some of his stories, but I was busy on Fantastic Four and Captain America.

RT: I was very happy when you took over Cap for a while, obviously. How did you feel about doing that book again? I think its sales had been dropping a bit.

ROMITA: That’s why I was put onto it. In some ways the book I was happiest doing was Captain America. That was a character I always felt comfortable with.

RT: You and Gary Friedrich turned out some good Cap issues.

Meanwhile, Stan saw to it that you always had a “presence” on Spider-Man. ROMITA: He kept my name on that book with all kinds of ploys.

Do you remember? I was “artist emeritus” for a while, whatever the hell that means. I was always kept busy doing other things. I would go in to see Stan with a problem, and he’d tell me, “Okay, call this

Forever Femizon!

A detailed “Femizon” drawing from the early ’70s, courtesy of Mike Burkey. [Art ©2007 John Romita.]

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 51

bought a few years earlier by Perfect Film [a conglomerate which soon changed its name to Cadence]. Do you remember dealing with Chip?

ROMITA: By that point, I don’t think Chip Goodman liked Stan, so there was friction. In 1972 Stan and I did two weeks of dailies and a year’s worth of plots for a Spider-Man newspaper strip. We gave it to Chip in a big envelope; he was supposed to try to sell it to a syndicate. Months later, when he was gone, we found the envelope still on his desk, still sealed. He had never even opened it.

I always thought that maybe the reason why he didn’t try to sell it was because he didn’t want Stan to have any more success. I don’t think he had the knife in for me, but maybe he had it in for Stan.

RT: Chip tried hard, but he could never live up to his father’s expectations. I believe he had a brother who was sort of a black sheep and refused to have anything to do with his father’s publishing empire.

ROMITA: After Goodman sold the company to Perfect Film in the late ’60s, he was supposed to stick around for three years, or whatever it was. Chip was supposed to take his place. But that part of it must not have been on paper, because as soon as Martin was gone, they got rid of Chip. That’s why Martin started Atlas Comics. It was pure revenge.

RT: In 1972 Stan had gained control of the company and was both publisher and president of Marvel for a while. That’s when I became editor-in-chief, and Frank Giacoia became “associate art director.” Didn’t you still do unofficial artdirecting during those several months, before you officially became art director?

The Satana Verses The first page and final panels of John and Roy’s only story collaboration— the “Satana” four-page intro in Vampire Tales #3 (Oct. 1973); it’s reprinted here from the Italian edition of The Art of John Romita. And, before anybody mentions it—yeah, Roy swiped the opening, and even some of the sound effects, from Harvey Kurtzman’s “V-V-Vampires!” in Mad #3 (Feb.-March 1953). [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

see everything was taken from Jack. If there’s any Romita in there, it’s only because I couldn’t find a shot to swipe! I was glad to get off the book after a few issues. Besides, Stan still had me doing fix-up work on Spider-Man at the same time!

RT: Yet, for those few issues you did, the sales of Fantastic Four actually went up.

ROMITA: I think it’s just because everybody was watching and wondering what the hell was gonna happen!

RT: How did it work out with Gil Kane penciling Spider-Man? ROMITA: Gil was great. He thought about SpiderMan in a different way from the way I did—and from the way Stan did—but it worked out pretty well for a long time. I loved inking him, though that meant changing his work somewhat and adding lots of blacks.

RT: In the early ’70s Martin Goodman’s son Chip became publisher of Marvel, which had been

52 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

ROMITA: Stan told Frank he could lay out covers, which was what he wanted to do, and Frank started saying he was the art director. Or maybe Stan let him do that, instead of paying him more money.

RT: Frank was an excellent inker, but he was never secure in his penciling, so his job designing the covers didn’t work out for long. I think he held it against you—and probably against Stan and me, as well. Which is a shame, because we were really all in his corner.

“X” Marks The Spot!

Think we’re gonna miss a chance to toss in some X-Men art? Pencil roughs for X-Men cards, 1993-94. Repro’d from photocopies of the original art—all except The Beast courtesy of Al Bigley. To contact Al re sales, trades, or his recent Image comic Geminar, phone (704) 289-2346, or e-mail him at geminar@earthlink.net.

Beast rough courtesy of Mike Burkey. See the inked, colored versions of several of these sketches in the Color Section of the hardcover edition of this book! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

62 | FIFTY YEARS ON THE “A” LIST

“Captain America Was A Dirty Name!”

JOHN ROMITA on the First Super-Hero Feature He Ever Drew –––“Captain America” Interview Conducted & Transcribed by Jim Amash Heavy Hitters (Left:) A somewhat fuzzy photo showing (l. to r.) Jazzy Johnny Romita, Rascally Roy Thomas, and Smilin’ Stan Lee at the 2000 MegaCon in Orlando, Florida, where they competed with a trio of youngish artists on a trivia panel to raise money for charity.

Marvel’s 1960s brain trust nosed out the young punks—just barely.

Photo by Dann Thomas.

(Below:) John drew Captain America many times after 1954— including this commercial illo of the Star-Spangled Avenger hitting what just has to be a home run! [Art ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

I

NTERVIEWER’S NOTE: Roy Thomas interviewed his longtime Bullpen colleague John Romita pretty thoroughly three years ago in A/E V3#9; so, I leaped at the opportunity to ask John a few questions about Cap’s 1950s revival. This interview is meant to complement the earlier one, but we also veered off into other areas. In addition, I wanted the chance to publicly thank John for all the help he gave me when I was trying to break into comics. He was always there when I needed advice. The time I remember most occurred when I came up to the Marvel offices from North Carolina, looking for a break. I knocked on his door, and he said he didn’t have time to talk right then, because he only had an hour to finish a cover rough. He asked if I was having any luck—I wasn’t—and he suddenly realized I didn’t live in town. “You came from North Carolina, didn’t you?” I said I did, so he pushed aside the rough and said, “Okay. I’ll give you twenty minutes.” He proceeded to go over my samples, pointing out my weaknesses, saying, “You’re ready to go pro, but here’s a few things you still need to work on.” Armed with that advice, I went home, did a brand new portfolio, and immediately broke into Marvel Comics as an inker. For that kindness when he really couldn’t spare the time—and for all the other times, too—I’ll always be grateful to John Romita. —Jim. JIM AMASH: Roy covered most of the bases in regard to your comic book career [in A/E #9], but I’d like to fill in a couple of areas. Stan didn’t use your original “Captain America” splash for Young Men #24.

JOHN ROMITA: That was an interesting thing. At the beginning of my Timely career, I used to go in and drop stuff off. I didn’t see the finished product until the book came out. I wasn’t hurt by the change, but was very disappointed and felt I was still an amateur, because Stan had replaced my splash with someone else’s. But, as I recently told Roy, when I saw my splash for that story again after all these years, I realized Stan did the right thing in not using it. It was pretty hokey, and Captain America looked liked he was 12 feet tall. Stan was right, and I should have known he was right all along. The published splash wasn’t inspiring, but it was certainly better than mine.

64 | CAPTAIN AMERICA WAS A DIRTY NAME!

Cap Makes A Big Splash (Left:) The balloon-less black-&-white copy of the full (and signed) John Romita “Captain America” splash page from Young Men #24, courtesy of Robert Wiener. The sound effects in panels 2-3 must’ve been done by John. A few of the thinner inklines, e.g., some of the scaling on Cap’s shirt in panel 3, are nearly lost on these proofs. Of this long-lost 1953 splash, John wrote in a 2003 e-mail, after seeing it for the first time in exactly fifty years: “I didn’t recall how silly looking that first splash was… Stan helped my career by not using it… and that Red Skull was pathetic… I’m not sure I should let you print it (just kidding… at my stage in life it’s historic… or hysterical).” Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself, John!

(Right:) The published version, with the Mort Lawrence splash panel, repro’d from b&w proofs from a sadly forgotten source. But, judging by Cap’s dialogue in panel 2, it seems that a Red Skull balloon (“Let ’em have it!” or some such) was dropped somewhere along the line. [©Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: Were you were supposed to be the artist of “Captain America” from the beginning?

ROMITA: No. Mort Lawrence started the story, and either he or Stan was disappointed by the results. I happened to be in the office, and Stan said, “How would you like to be the artist on ‘Captain America’?” I almost jumped out of my skin, because I was a Jack Kirby freak. Stan showed me the finished page, and I even think a cover was done.

JA: Could that have been the cover to Captain America #76, where Cap has that cartoony smile on his face?

ROMITA: It was either that or the cover to Young Men #24.

Lawrence didn’t do any covers after the Captain America title started.

JA: So Mort Lawrence had already done a splash of his own?

ROMITA: I think so. Far as I recall, Stan took the two bottom panels from my first page and put them under the Lawrence splash. But it never occurred to me to ask for my [unused] original splash back. I was too young and innocent to even think about it. I’ve made so many mistakes of omission and gave away so many wonderful things over the years that I should have kept.

Frankly, in the 1950s, I was sure comics were only going to last another year or so. I even threw out my sketches back then, so you can’t go by what I thought. I picked up a photostat of a George Tuska page, which he inked with a number five brush. I pinned it to my drawing table and used it for inspiration for about a year. I used a number 5 brush and was doing all this fine detail work with a fat brush and a sharp point, and as long as I wasn’t tired, the lines came out just fine. As soon as I got tired, the lines came out ugly and thick.

JA: What made you think that comics weren’t going to last?

ROMITA: I was under that impression when I started in 1949, ghostpenciling for Les Zakarin, who was working for Timely and other places. I figured I’d just do these stories to make a few extra bucks. I had no plans to stay in comics. Everyone I spoke to thought we were treading water. Even Stan said he was waiting for comics to get so small that he couldn’t make a living anymore, so that he could write novels and screenplays. Everybody I knew felt they were in it on a temporary basis, including Davey Berg, who was doing mystery stories and then war stories for Timely. He hadn’t started at Mad yet.

As people like Dave, Jack Abel, and myself sat in the Timely waiting room for scripts or art approval, we would talk. We all had the feeling that comics were a dying industry and wondered what

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 65

ROMITA: Well, at the time, it seemed like it [the Torch book] went on for a while.

Jack came back to Cap in 1976. It was the cover of issue #193, and it looked very three-dimensional.

JA: Maybe you’re just remembering that the Sub-Mariner book lasted a year longer. Dick Ayers told me that Stan told him that the Human Torch was cancelled because of complaints from parental groups.

ROMITA: You know, there’s a story about that cover that nobody knows about. That cover was never meant to be printed as it was. That cover was drawn as an experiment in 3-D. I inked it on six layers of acetate. I did his fist on one layer, his arm on another layer, his torso on another layer, his legs on another layer, and the backgrounds on another layer. It was meant to be published in 3-D, with the illusion of his fist coming out of the panel.

When you see it without 3-D, the fist looks like a gargantuan’s oversized fist and Captain America looks like some kind of freak with tiny legs.

ROMITA: They were afraid that kids would set fire to themselves, imitating the Torch. In fact, that kept The Human Torch off the animated television show, SpiderMan and His Amazing Friends. We came up with another character in his place, Firestar. Firestar was my idea. The network would not let us use The Human Torch in that series.

Later on, Stan told me Captain America was cancelled [in 1954] because of its politics. Timely got a lot of mail complaining about chauvinism. The American flag was a dirty word in those days, because of the backlash of the Korean War. We had gone to war seemingly unnecessarily. It was a “police action” and people died. People were saying that America was putting the American flag over human safety, and that they weren’t going to buy Captain America, because it’s an excuse for people to kill other people in the world for America’s sake. You remember how they burned American flags in the 1960s? For a while, Captain America was a dirty name! That’s the reason they dropped it.

JA: Yeah, but it’s still a powerful image. So where was this drawing supposed to be published?

ROMITA: It was supposed to be a demonstration piece. What they did was to make a red-and-green Xerox of each of the parts. It was a test to see if we could do 3-D stuff, like a 3-D Captain America comic. I remember seeing the acetate version of it, and when you viewed it with 3-D glasses, the illusion worked Now It Can Be Told, Part II very well. But they abandoned the The Kirby/Romita cover for Captain America #193 (Jan. 1976)—the first idea. Lots of times, Stan would start issue in which Jack returned to write and pencil the comic he and Joe projects and Martin Goodman—or Simon had co-created in 1940—was originally intended as a someone else—would say, “The hell demonstration of a 3-D drawing. Hey, it almost makes it even without with it. It’s not worth it,” and we’d wearing red-and-green glasses! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] just drop it. We did 3-D photographic stuff where I would do backgrounds in tone, and then someone would do a laser copy to try and get a 3-D look. Do you remember those holographic covers we JA: Did you ever hear how the sales figures were on Cap? did on a few comics? Those were all demonstrating the holographic look that we were planning on doing. I did original drawings and ROMITA: Sales probably weren’t that good, but there was a flurry sometimes I inked someone else’s version on this project. of interest at first. It’s too bad it died too soon. It would have been nice to see if we could have built some momentum. Stan was doing short stories, and they weren’t like the human interest stories Marvel did later. We knocked those stories out just like we did the westerns.

JA: When you did Captain America in the 1970s, you were locked into your style and weren’t thinking about Jack Kirby by then.

ROMITA: I wasn’t. By then, I was doing it my own way and was doing it like a cross between Caniff and Kirby. One of the fun things I did in those years had to do with a new character in Captain America. Remember when we had Steve Rogers become a policeman?

Stan introduced a new character that was basically an update of Cap’s wartime sergeant, Sgt. Duffy. This sergeant was called Muldoon, for whom I used Jack Kirby as a model… though Stan had his hair colored red in order to look like an Irishman. That was a labor of love, which I did for fun. It was a cartoony version of Jack; I put a cigar in his mouth and gave him sort-of a crewcut like Jack had.

JA: You inked one of my favorite Captain America covers when

70 | CAPTAIN AMERICA WAS A DIRTY NAME!

I used to spend weeks and weeks on projects like that, which no one ever knew about. Being in the office, it’s a wonder I ever got any work done at all. I worked on a 3-D box, where I had to do cut-out figures and color them... it was like a shadowbox, where they’d light it up like a miniature stage set. I did Spider-Man dangling from a web and swinging through the shadowbox. I did a cityscape for the background. If I had saved all this stuff, I could have made a fortune on them, but it would have been a museum piece.

I also did toy designs which sometimes got made and sometimes didn’t. I spent a couple of years doing toy designs. I also designed the Spider-Man balloon in the Macy’s parade with Manny Bass, who was the engineer in charge of balloons. He was a genius! He explained the aerodynamics of balloons, so I could design it to work. Manny gave me a great compliment when he said, “It’s one of the best balloons we have.”

I spent a lot of time doing things that weren’t comics. I did

coloring books and children’s books, which is something I always forget to tell people. Sol Brodsky and I ran the special projects department, so I was out of mainstream comics for 3-4 years, starting in 1981. That’s about the time I gave up the Spider-Man newspaper strip. I worked for Marvel for 40 years, 30 of it on staff, from 1966 to 1996. And Virginia worked on staff for 21 years, from 1975 to 1996.

JA: Since we’ve strayed off the subject a bit, let me ask you about a couple of people you knew while on staff at Marvel. Like Bill Everett.

ROMITA: That’s one of my cherished periods. There was a time when I was sitting three feet away from Jerry Siegel, who was proofreading for us. Now, I was buying Sub-Mariner when I was ten years old and Bill Everett was one of the top guys in the business. And here I was, working near Bill Everett and gabbing all day long. Now I had Jerry Siegel sitting there on my left—I was like a kid in heaven. It was amazing! I had great experiences like that. Gil Kane used to come in and talk all the time and it was wonderful.

JA: Jerry Siegel was the other guy I was going to ask you about.

How long did he work there?

ROMITA: About four months, I think. He needed some money, and I think Stan was glad to have him proofread for a while. He was very

The Gloves Are Coming Off! Is the splash of this unsigned lead-off story from Captain America #77 drawn completely by Romita? It’s a beaut, either way. The remaining two panels are certainly all-Romita. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

quiet and certainly didn’t blow his own horn; he didn’t talk a lot.

He’d wear a blue shirt and a dark tie and sweater. He didn’t come in looking like one of the guys who created the industry. Maybe some other guys would have been strutting around like roosters, but he was not that kind of guy.

Besides what happened to him with Superman, Jerry also had that bad stretch at Ziff-Davis, which ended up in failure. That must have been hard on him, after being top-dog for so long and having to admit he couldn’t make a buck anymore. I’m sure he wasn’t having fun at that time and had no reason to blow his own horn. I always felt terrible for him. I wanted to go over to him and act like a fan, but I never did. I should have done that, but you know how it is. You want to be a pro and not embarrass anybody.

JA: Did anybody ever really talk to him in the office?

ROMITA: I’m sure they did; I’m sure Stan did. But I was always working with my head down. I didn’t pay a lot of attention, unfortunately. That was a bad mistake I made. I wish I had paid more attention to my surroundings.

JA: Let’s get back to Bill Everett.

Willing & Abel Jack Abel inked at least two of John’s three stories in Captain America #76, the first revival issue, such as this lead-off tale. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

ROMITA: Bill was a wonderful guy to work with. I can’t tell you what a joy it was to work with him, though he had health problems.

He used to tell us stories about working in the old Timely bullpen with John Severin and Joe Maneely. Can you imagine those three in

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 71

JOHN ROMITA – The 2006-2007 Interview One Of Comics’ Major Talents Talks About His Years At Marvel, DC, & Elsewhere Conducted by Jim Amash

T

his third and final interview took place over the course of several phone calls in late 2006 and early 2007. Because it was originally scheduled to appear in an issue of Alter Ego magazine, Jim made a conscious effort to avoid covering ground that had been walked in the two Romita interviews he and I had done earlier… and to talk with John not only about his own work, and to a certain extent about that of his wife Virginia and his son John, Jr., but also about the many artists, writers, editors, letterers, and others he has known in the course of a career which spans well over half a century. —Roy.

Transcribed by Brian K. Morris Wonderful Women John Romita by John Romita—flanked by two of his fabulous females. What? You say JR never penciled Wonder Woman? Well, maybe not for DC Comics, but he drew her for WW collector extraordinary Joel Thingvall—only giving her Mary Jane’s face and hair! Below is a drawing of earlier ladyfriend Gwen Stacy, with Spider-Man on her arm. Spidey and portrait pencils courtesy of Aaron Sultan. [Portrait ©2007 John Romita; Wonder Woman TM & ©2007 DC Comics; Gwen & Spider-Man TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Felt Like I Couldn’t Pencil Any More” JIM AMASH: Why did you decide to work on staff at Marvel, rather than freelance?

JOHN ROMITA: After fifteen years in the business—the last eight years between ’58 and the middle of ’65 when I worked at DC—I felt like I couldn’t pencil any more. I was burned out and figured there was no way I could make a living if I had to struggle to pull pencil work out of me every day.

So I decided that I was going to ink only. On top of that, when I talked to Stan in ’65, I told him I was getting out of comics due to burn-out. I had a terrible couple of months; I actually couldn’t produce. There were days when I produced not a single panel, and I wasn’t making any money; and I was practically in tears a couple of times, because I was figuring I couldn’t make a living any more.

So I told Stan that I was going to work in an advertising agency from 9-to5. What he did to keep me in the business was to say, “Suppose I pay you a salary and you come into the office?

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 73

ROMITA: I still had a page rate to do freelance work.

JA: But not for what you were doing in the office.

ROMITA: Right, but technically I didn’t have a quota. However, I had an obligation that, if I took on a job, I had to get it in on time.

When I was working at home, Stan gave me a guaranteed salary, but I had to get in like ten pages every five days or so. I couldn’t work with a quota, so I took the salary and a freelance rate, and whatever work I got done on my own time was gravy. Whatever sleep I missed was my problem.

JA: You were unable to draw, but once you got the staff job, you were able to draw again. How did you fight that problem?

ROMITA: Well, I inked one story and two or three covers, and I was convinced that that’s what I was going to do—just inking, from then on. My biggest fear was that I was going to be given all the garbage, because if you were an inker that could correct weak pencils—I got a reputation up at DC late in the ’50s. When I first went to DC, I was inking people who were not very good pencilers, and they were counting on me to correct and to dress up the rather dull pencils. I would pretty up the girls and jazz up their hairstyles. Arthur Peddy drew pretty girls, but he made their arms very long. I used to shorten all the arms. [mutual laughter] He was one of the DC romance artists and he did nice stuff, but it was very quiet. Everybody was sort-of half-awake in the books, so I used to jazz them up. I put bigger smiles on their faces, and gave them a little bone structure, so they didn’t look like they were all Barbie dolls. The biggest problem I had with him was to shorten their arms. I mean, I shortened every girl’s arms in every story I did for him. [mutual laughter] When they had their hand up to their face, their elbows reached below their waist.

Once An Avengers Artist…

Splash of Romita’s inking of Don Heck’s pencils on The Avengers #23 (Dec. 1965).

Repro’d from The Essential Avengers, Vol. 1. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

You don’t have to come in every day if you don’t want, but the office is here. If you want to come in every day, fine. But if you want to work at home one day and come into the office the next day, it’s okay, and I’ll guarantee you $250 a week.” At that time, that’s what I needed to make my payments on my mortgage and things. I was going to take an entry-level job at BBD&O, and I think the job was going to pay two-fifty. A neighbor of mine was an art director there; he told me to come up there and get work. And I was going to work with Mort Meskin. So I told Stan, “Okay, one of the things that I think screwed me up was the fact that I couldn’t be disciplined when I worked at home. If I take the job, I’ll come into the office as often as I can get myself out of the house, depending on if I work late at home.”

Stan gave me a desk in the production room, and he gave me supplies, and I started going in. At first, I used to leave around 4:00 in the afternoon to beat the rush, because I wasn’t on any clock.

Sometimes I worked late at night. I would get home and get rolling, and work until two or three in the morning, so I wouldn’t go to the office the next day. But I realized I was better off going into the office every day, so I did, and I got more work done. Pretty soon, I was obliged to come in and punch a clock every day, [mutual laughter] and that’s how come I was in the office from January of ’66 until March 30th of ’96. I was in the office every day!

JA: You didn’t have a page rate—you just had a salary, right?

74 | JOHN ROMITA: THE 2006-2007 INTERVIEW

When I told Stan that I wanted to ink, I remembered my DC days and thought to myself, “I bet I’m going to start getting all the dregs of pencils. He won’t give me Jack Kirby, and he won’t give me the top artists. He will give me all the guys who can’t draw. I could end up killing myself here. They’ll be making the money and I’ll be breaking my neck.”

JA: The first person you inked was Kirby, wasn’t it?

ROMITA: It was a Kirby Avengers #23 cover. [NOTE: See p. 39.]

Then I inked the story over Don Heck, which was a natural for me, because I had worked with Heck a couple of times in the romance department at DC. In fact, Heck, ironically enough, helped bail me out during one of those dry [DC] periods when I couldn’t pencil. I called Don Heck and begged him to help me out, and he penciled a 7pager in about two days. I told him he didn’t have to spot any blacks, just draw some outlines. He saved my life, because I wouldn’t have gotten any money for about two weeks there, and I remembered it fondly. When I went to ink his Avengers, it was like, wow, this is amazing. It’s payback time. I had such a ball inking that Avengers story.

JA: Don Heck’s pencils were normally very complete, weren’t they?

ROMITA: Yes, but very stylized. He’d have three-quarters views that had a certain similarity. Everybody had the same three-quarter view.

Everybody sort-of had a short nose. He was very stylized, to the point where he would not change features on a lot of people. But by the time he was doing The Avengers, his stuff was terrific. It was better than his romance stuff.

JA: He probably felt freer and probably was more challenged. Like you said, you get bored drawing romance stories all day long.

ROMITA: Absolutely. Don was a very good penciler and drew beautiful women. The shapes weren’t always the same as my natural

roundhouse blow and have the other guy crash through a wall. What Stan wants is more excitement, more exaggeration. If a guy’s pounding on his desk, he’s shaking the desk, he’s shaking the floor, that kind of stuff. It’s not like you’re far away from what Stan wants, he just wants you to add a certain amount of little extra strength and intensity in it, a little bit of power.”

Don tried, but he never quite satisfied Stan. Don had the same problem with other Marvel editors. I constantly tried to keep him trying, and he would say, “I can’t do it. I obviously don’t please these guys.” It was very hard, because I always felt like if I could have Don in the office with me for a couple of days, maybe we could work it out, but we never had the opportunity. It broke my heart, because he was one of the first guys to draw the Marvel super-heroes, like “Iron Man.” I felt like this is crazy. If Ditko’s leaving and Don Heck can’t get along with Stan, I felt like we were losing something.

JA: But some of that life was in Don’s inks over Kirby.

ROMITA: He could do beautiful ink jobs, but I don’t think he liked inking a lot. He preferred to pencil. Actually, I think Stan thought his ink line was a little bit too delicate, too fine. He used a very fine pen line, and Stan liked a little bit more guts in his inking—like Joe Sinnott, Frank Giacoia, and a few other guys. I don’t think Don Heck wanted to be just an inker, because he would have been doing corrections on people’s stuff, and everybody else would have been doing the storytelling. When Don left that day, I felt blue for like a week. I called him up a couple of times and said, “Don, have you thought it over? Do you want to reconsider and not—?” And he said, “Naw, I’m finished with Stan. I’m tired of taking that criticism.” It was one of the worst days I had.

Let Your Model Sheet Be Your Guide (Above:) A super-hero model sheet John prepared for artists in the late 1960s. Just add costume and stir. Roy Thomas believes it may have been over copies of this sheet that he designed the look of the original four members of the Squadron Sinister/Supreme for The Avengers, and later of Union Jack for The Invaders. With something like this to work with, anybody could be an artist!

(Right:) A 1976 “Marvel Tryout Artist Guide” sheet prepared under Romita’s supervision, featuring Captain America poses penciled by himself and others—most particularly by Jack Kirby, at right center. The inking of that Kirby figure is John’s. Thanks to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Don’s work needed to be fixed up a little bit. He always asked me to correct certain things, and somewhere along the line he seemed to be a little critical of him, and Heck just said, “To hell with this, I’m not going to do it any more.” It bothered me very much, because I was thinking to myself, “How can I talk this guy into meeting Stan halfway?”

It happened to other artists down through the years. There were a couple of guys who got a lot of flak from Stan because there wasn’t enough excitement in their work. When their characters were shouting, their mouths were only half-open. With Kirby, when somebody shouted, his jaw got disconnected; you could see his tongue and tonsils, and all his teeth. Don was a very good artist, but Stan and he were constantly at each other because Stan would say, “Well, it’s a little too mild. You need a little bit more excitement here, a little more intensity, a little more flashing in the eyes, a little more jagged edges.” Don was doing the best he could. Once I spent two hours on the phone with him. He lived out of town, and he called me, saying, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t seem to please Stan.” I told him, “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with the work you do. If you’re going to have somebody punch somebody, have him punching with a

76 | JOHN ROMITA: THE 2006-2007 INTERVIEW

“If You’re Going To Pay Kirby, You Should Use Kirby The Way He Is” JA: Obviously, if Stan didn’t like his work, he wouldn’t have hired him in the first place.

ROMITA: That’s what I said, but Don was saying, “Stan gives me jobs, but he asks me to be somebody else.” And, you know, even Jack Kirby used to feel the same way.

Whenever we had to make a change, I used to explain to Jack I wasn’t changing anything because Stan didn’t like the way it looked. I changed it because Stan said, “I want a smile on this girl. I don’t want her frowning.” He would change the meaning of a story by changing the characters’ reactions. Jack would have a calm look on a girl’s face or a frown, and Stan would decide to make a joke in that panel to lighten the mood, so he would ask me to put a smile on the girl’s face, which made Jack angry.

I remember Jack saying, “If you’re going to pay Kirby, you should use Kirby the way he is.” I understood what he meant, but I told Jack the change was done because Stan was changing the thrust of a certain scene to get either humor or more emotion into it, or less emotion into it. But I couldn’t quite reach Jack, because he didn’t like the idea of anybody changing his stuff.

But when he worked with Joe Simon, I think Joe used to make him make changes, which was one of the reasons they didn’t stay together. Joe Simon used to constantly ask him to change this, change that. And when Jack worked with Stan, Stan was always making little suggestions that bothered him; then, when he went to DC, they did the same thing. They had people changing his Superman faces. I didn’t talk to Jack for about three or four years while he was at DC, except for the time he asked me to go over and draw one of his features for Surf’s Up! the Fourth World. I was really very tempted Romita’s own version of The Silver Surfer, in a layout also featuring Dr. Doom and a nameless android. Thanks to do it, but I was too chicken. Actually, if he to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.] had stayed in New York, instead of moving that DC had this mindset that they were doing comics like history to California, I might have done it, because I really admired him. I books. And the editors had nothing else to do but to criticize. Almost would have loved to work with him. every DC editor I knew criticized just for the fact that they could I think I asked Stan this once. I said, “Stan, if I had gone with Jack criticize, and they felt that, this way, they were earning their money. and had helped him out doing penciling, one of those books or maybe Stan wasn’t like that: most of the time, he accepted stuff from artists two of those books, do you think it might have changed the reaction like Jack. But the same kind of editorial attitude they gave Kirby... this from DC?” And he said he didn’t know. He said he wondered, is what Don Heck was tired of hearing, because he had the same because DC was very critical of Jack. They never seemed to accept criticism at DC at times.

Jack for what he was.

Only Stan Lee would have accepted The Silver Surfer. If you took One reason he left Challengers of the Unknown [in 1959] was The Silver Surfer to a DC editor, he would have laughed at you. Who that the DC editors were brutal to him. They used to criticize little can believe that a guy could take a surfboard, and travel through space things. He did a Western for them once, and they criticized him on it? I used to tell Stan that, if I had enough imagination to come up because he had the Indian getting on the wrong side of the horse. He with that idea, I would have discounted it. I would have thought, said, “No kid cares what side an Indian gets on the horse!” I told him “Naw, that’s too silly.” I also said, “It’s not only a tribute to Jack

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 77

always a diplomat. Stan told me what to tell them, and I would try to sugarcoat it.

JA: It was easier for you to talk to another artist because you were an artist and Stan wasn’t.

ROMITA: Exactly. I could also taper it off and not make it as severe as Stan would. Stan would sometimes say the stuff was much too dull, it needs to be jazzed up—and I would sort-of sweeten the pot and tell them if you do this, this, and that, you’ll probably be okay. I was sort-of his hitman for a while there, and I used to give young people Stan’s indoctrination speech. It was like “How To Do It the Marvel Way.” I would tell a young guy, “What you need to do is get a little more excitement in your stuff.” I told them all the things that Stan told me for ten years.

JA: You told me once that, the first day you started there, Marie Severin was making corrections on a Jack Kirby cover.

ROMITA: I don’t remember that. But we all did some corrections on other people’s work. One of the first days I went up there, I was turning in the Avengers inks, and at that time I met Jack Kirby, who was correcting a Steve Ditko cover. Quite often, we would have to make slight changes in the Kirby covers because he would draw the costume wrong, or use the wrong villain, or Stan would decide to put another character in there, or take one out. So there were always slight changes being done in the pencils before they got inked, or after.

JA: I love your inks over Kirby. At times, where Jack would just draw slashes, you would impressionistically put the muscles in. And sometimes you would realistically put the muscles on Jack’s figures.

ROMITA: Sometimes Stan asked me to do that, and I’ll tell you who else used to do it. For a while, Stan fell in love with Vinnie Colletta’s scratchy pen technique to delineate musculature.

If you look at my first Daredevil cover, I didn’t do half of those pen lines in Ka-Zar’s arms and legs. Most of them were done by Vinnie Colletta.

Stan would notice that Kirby simplified the tendon lines and drew big slashing lines through the middle of an arm, and he would ask me to show the bicep more, or to show the muscles in the forearm more.

So I would add a few extra little lines in there to try and make it look a little bit rounder in places.

Taking Up A Collection John’s pencils for an unused Amazing Spider-Man cover that would’ve showed that acquisitive alien, The Collector, about to collect nothing less than Abraham Lincoln! Thanks to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“I Thought The Way [Jack Kirby] Did Things Was The Way To Do Everything” JA: Of course, your line was more organic than Jack’s, too.

ROMITA: Yeah, actually, sometimes it would be good. I remember when I did that Daredevil #13 cover—you know, with the manhole, and Ka-Zar coming out? I loved that. I had so much fun doing that cover, I was like a kid at a toyshop. I would have done that for nothing. And sometimes, everything clicked. That Daredevil figure just clicked. Everything Jack penciled, I knew how to ink it and I felt like it was right. Some of the stuff with Ka-Zar, I think I got lost a

little bit because Jack’s pencils weren’t as definite, and my choices might not have been perfect. My memory of it is that I did a good Daredevil, right? [mutual laughter] You know, my personal images of what I was supposed to be doing was always much more—I had much more expectation than satisfaction. I always imagined it being like a work of art, and I would always have to settle for what I ended up with, and nobody knew what I wanted it to look like.

JA: I saw some pencil Xeroxes of a “Captain America” story Kirby had done, where you had redrawn Sharon Carter, Agent 13.

[NOTE: See next page.] Did Stan ask you to do that? Did he just not like the way Jack drew women, or did he want them prettier?

ROMITA: Stan told me to do that. I would never do that on my own.

Sometimes Jack would make them too wide-faced. Stan would ask me

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 79

Hangin’ Around the work, he would say, “No, that’s not what we agreed on.” And I’d say, “Yeah, don’t you remember? You said, ‘Go ahead with that.’” So everybody has his own memory. I went home and tried to remember what we talked about, but I had trouble separating what I remembered that Stan said, and what I wanted to do. I should have taken notes, but I couldn’t because I was so busy trying to juggle ideas with him.

We would always throw things up in the air and try to figure out some way around them. If I had kept notes, I’d have gone crazy, but I should have recorded our conversations. I’d have remembered what he suggested and which ones sounded more convincing to me, and which ones were more important to him than others.

If John R. sometimes found working with Stan Lee “nervewracking,” he should’ve taken his cue from Spidey.

Nothing like being able to spin your own hammock out of webbing anytime you want it! These pencils were done for a design for the Marvel Company Picnic t-shirt in 1993.

Courtesy of JR. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: So Stan was very involved, at least in a somewhat detailed plot, by the time you started to work on it.

ROMITA: It varied, depending on how much time we had.

Sometimes we would be uninterrupted for an hour and a half; sometimes we would get ten interruptions in an hour.

We should have gone to a private place. I don’t think we had conference rooms in those days, as we did later on.

Many times, we were halfway through a plot and he’d say, “Okay, John. I’ve got to talk to this guy in California.

Let’s get together in an hour and finish up the plot.” And we never got a chance to finish it. I’d have to piece it together, and then sometimes I would ask him a couple of questions, and nine times out of ten, I used to go home with a very vague idea of what Stan wanted. I had a couple of prominent things like who the villain was, the general premise of the story, and what kind of personal life to weave in; and then the rest of it was up to me. I’d come up with an opening, and a middle, and I would have a tough time bridging sequences. In other words, it would open up with a fight and then go to the private life, and then go back to another fight, and go back to the private life. And I would have all these nightmare problems with trying to how to make it work. Why did they break up the fight and how do they get together again?

It was nerve-wracking.

JA: When you introduced a new character like The Kingpin or The Shocker, did you have to submit a character design to Stan?

ROMITA: Yes. Usually, he just took whatever I gave him. He was very seldom critical of that kind of stuff.

All he used to do was leave me a note, saying, “Next month, I want a character called ‘The Kingpin of Crime.’” The first one was, I think, The Rhino. He said, “I want a character called The Rhino.” So I started doing some Rhino sketches, and I did what I felt was the most pedantic way to do it. I put the face in the rhino’s open mouth, that kind of stuff. I

Romita Fits Spidey To A “T”!

A T-shirt design by Jazzy Johnny. Thanks to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 83

Kirby was doing more than artwork; he was bringing all sorts of things to the table. He was bringing characters, plots, and inspiration to Stan. He was making Stan ten times a better writer, and there’s no way to limit what you could give a guy like Jack. I would have given him whatever he wanted. But businessmen don’t see that. For a couple of years, after I’d been doing Spider-Man, I was in the office, and I wasn’t doing Spider-Man any more. Believe it or not, there were times when Martin Goodman would come in when I was doing other things like covers and sketches, and ask Stan and Sol, “What does John Romita do around here?” [Jim chuckles] And when I asked for a raise one time, he didn’t want to give it to me, so I told Stan, “I’m going to have to walk.” I had gone a couple years with no raise, and I just thought I had to stand up and get it.

“Martin Goodman Was Absolutely Without Any Kind Of Compass” JA: Whom did you talk to about the raise?

ROMITA: I asked Sol, I think, because I probably asked Stan and he told me to ask Sol. Sol would tell Martin Goodman, and Martin Goodman would say, “Well, what does he do around here?” He had a terrible habit. If Stan wanted a raise, Stan would have to justify it. In other words, “What are you bringing in that’s special? Are you doing anything different than what you’ve already brought to the table?”

One of the reasons that Stan took back the title “Art Director” for a while was just to justify a raise.

Martin Goodman was absolutely without any kind of compass. He had no Like Father… direction in his Martin Goodman (on right) and son Charles “Chip” thinking. He was Goodman enjoy their cigars at a 1966 dinner party thinking small all the given for editor Bruce Jay Friedman when he left time. He was always Goodman’s company Magazine Management to pursue thinking, “Preserve a (successful) career as a freelance writer, playwright, my small profits and and novelist. Chip served as publisher of Marvel for a year or so circa 1971. Photo courtesy of margins, don’t try to Bruce Jay Friedman. get too big, don’t get bigger than my britches. We’re making good money, let’s not make any waves.”

He didn’t want to do the Spectacular Spider-Man magazine; he didn’t want to do any expensive comics, he didn’t want to do adult comics, he didn’t want to do anything that was going to make waves.

He canceled Spectacular before it got off the ground because it was oversized and because his friends told him, “Martin, what are you doing? Where are we going to fit this in? The comics racks don’t hold those magazines.”

JA: Do you think Martin Goodman didn’t fully understand what he had?

ROMITA: I don’t think he realized it. I think he was one of those guys who thought, “If I make too much money, the government’s going to come and check my books.” He was that way. He used to say to Stan, “I don’t want to make waves. Let’s not do this, let’s not do that.” But as soon as there was a slump, he would come in and say, “Stan, do something!” [mutual laughter] JA: Stan made some waves in those SpiderMan drug stories, when he went against the Comics Code Authority, and printed them anyway.

A Drug On The Market What a difference a few months had wrought! Gil Kane’s cover for The Amazing Spider-Man #96 (May 1971) gave no hint that the story inside dealt with drugs—while, only three months (and some fateful Comics Code changing in wording!) later, Green Lantern #85 (Aug.-Sept. 1971) could reveal up front that Green Arrow’s partner Speedy was a junkie. Without the Marvel tale, the DC tale might never have happened. Romita inked Kane’s pencils in the former story. GL cover by Neal Adams. [Spider-Man cover ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.; GL cover ©2007 DC Comics.]

92 | JOHN ROMITA: THE 2006-2007 INTERVIEW

ROMITA: We were not taking on the world.

We responded to a request from a government agency. Stan had gotten a letter, saying they think it might be good for Stan to do something that would be anti-drug, that the comic readers would be able to identify with.

He took the bull by the horns and did this whole three-part story, and we got criticized.

We were stymied by the Code Authority, and Stan said, “What, are you crazy? I’ll show you the letter from the government agency, asking us to do it.” They were so scared and they had their tail between their legs before we even started. Stan conned Martin Goodman into saying, “All right, we’re going to do this, and we’ll do it without the Code Authority.” It was the gutsiest move Stan ever made, and I think it’s probably the only good thing that Martin Goodman ever did.

We did get some fallout, and Stan had a wonderful comeback for it.

Some people accused him of glamorizing drugs by putting drugs in an entertainment package, where kids who shouldn’t even be thinking of drugs were now thinking of drugs. Stan told them, “We’ll point out one thing. This is not an advertisement for drugs. We’re not promoting its usage. We did these stories that were entertaining and fit within the Spider-Man storyline, just showing that some of the characters that we’ve been used to can suddenly succumb to drugs.

Here’s Harry Osborne, who’s a rich man’s son, and suddenly finds himself on the verge of suicide from drugs.”

DC did a drug series in Green Lantern/Green Arrow, after us.

They tried to capture some of the waves. They did it more clinically; they didn’t do it as entertainingly as we did. Stan would point out with pride, “You look at our story and there isn’t any place where the drugs take precedence over the characters.” And people still criticized, but he had a lot of support, and as you can see, it did not hurt us. It gave us a lot of outside publicity.

JA: To get off Spider-Man for a minute, for about a year or so, you went back and did Captain America in the 1970s.

ROMITA: Stan used to do that to me all the time. He was always trying to find a way for me to do more stuff. He’d say, “Could you add Captain America to your schedule?” I told him I was barely getting Spider-Man in on time. And so he started to scheme up ways: “Suppose we plot the story and somebody else pencils it.”

JA: Did he put you on Captain America, thinking you would help the sales?

ROMITA: Yes. Whenever a book was having troubles. Stan would try to use me on it. If I could have drawn faster, I would have done two books a month. I could have been doing Daredevil, I could have been doing Avengers, anything that Stan could have gotten me time to do.

The same thing when I did the Spider-Man newspaper strip. When I gave up the regular comics and was doing the newspaper strip, Stan said, “We should do another strip, nothing to do with Spider-Man.” I looked at him like he was crazy. “I can’t get any sleep now. How am I going to do another strip?” He always said he used to forget how long it took me to draw a week’s worth of strips, because he could write it in a day. He never let it sink in that I couldn’t do my part in a day. [laughs] JA: Maybe Kirby spoiled Stan because he was so fast.

ROMITA: Kirby and John Buscema both spoiled him. He used to call them up and ask, “Can you just throw in another book this month?”

And they’d say, “Sure, send it over.” I couldn’t do that. I’d say, “Listen, Stan, when I break down a story, I put so much thought into

What A “Marooned”!

Stu Schwartzberg (seen at top center in a photo from the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual) had the respect of his Marvel peers for the humor work he did on such comics as Spoof #1 (Oct. 1970). Even with his offbeat style, the caricatures of Gregory Peck and David Jansen from the film Marooned were right on target—and so was his script. When he wrote and did story breakdowns for a parody of the Ray Millard horror movie Frogs for Spoof #2 (with finished art by Marie Severin & Herb Trimpe), he had Bullpenners rolling on the floor laughing. Stu also did fine work for Crazy magazine. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

it, it takes me just as long as penciling it. I spend most of the time breaking down the story, then I finish it up quickly. But if I break it down, it doesn’t save me much time.

“When I Got There…” [Marvel 1965] JA: When you started working on staff, how many people were working in the office and who were they?

ROMITA: When I got there, Marie Severin had just been hired to do production work. Sol Brodsky was sort of an office manager and had been doing production work before Marie came in. It was only Stan, Sol Brodsky, and Stan’s secretary Flo Steinberg. In fact, Flo acted as a secretary for both Stan and Sol. Roy Thomas started almost exactly the same time as I; he came over from DC about two weeks before I did. A short while after I went on staff in January, John Verpoorten came in to do production work. Marie was also doing a lot of coloring, especially cover coloring.

That was it for a while, and then we got a stat [= Photostat] man. I think it was Herb Trimpe, believe it or not. The first job Herb Trimpe did in the Bullpen was stat work, which he did for about six months,

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I Have Seen The Future… And It Shoots Webs Maybe if this lovely lady mentioned below had looked into her crystal ball, she’d have seen that the bomb scare was a hoax. A John Romita pencil sketch for a possible cover for a story labeled “Spider-Man vs. the Mexican Princess.” Thanks to Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

interesting stuff in that department. Some of it made me proud, and some of it was a little crazy, because we were always on a low budget, and I had dreams of doing a lot of young people’s art. I was hoping we could revive the Spidey Super Stories in that department, but we never did. So it was sort of a strange time. I was welcoming the change of pace because I got tired of doing comics, but I was still doing some freelance at the time.

JA: Tell me about Sol personally.

ROMITA: We used to play poker: Sol, Al Milgrom, Roy Thomas, Stan Goldberg, Mike Esposito, Carl Wershba, and me. And Al Sulman, who used to be a Marvelite from before Marvel Time, when the company was known as Timely. They all almost killed me with cigar smoke, I’ll tell you that. [Jim laughs] I used to come home, looking like I had been in a fight. My wife Virginia used to say, “My God, your eyes are swollen.” With my throat raw and my nose plugged, I’d say, “These guys were smoking cigars all night,” and I don’t smoke at all. So the solution was that we ended up having the card game at my house, and Virginia had the whole card room surrounded with candles. She would light the candles up, [chuckles] and believe it or not, the cigar smoke would get eaten up by the candles.

Sol and I go back to when I started at Marvel in ’65. And I still, to this day, regret missing those years before then, when the Fantastic Four started, and the beginning of “The Hulk,” and the beginning of “Spider-Man,” and the beginning of The X-Men. It kills me that I missed those years. But I was at DC, not even knowing what they were doing at Marvel. It’s the only thing I would have changed in my life, except I couldn’t have afforded it because I was making more money at DC then.

Sol was a hell of a guy. We often had lunch together, even when we weren’t going to the Playboy Club. Sol was with us at the Playboy Club with Stan and Jack and whoever else was there. Sol was always one of the boys. When he became vice-president, we were very proud of him. It was a strange time when he left to start his own publishing venture at Skywald, but he came back again. And Stan wanted him to be editor-in-chief. Believe it or not, some of the people in the Bullpen were opposed to it. They were opposed to it because he had left us, and been in competition with us. They felt like, why reward a guy who, for about two years, was trying to compete with us? He had promised that he wasn’t going to compete, that he was only going to do reprints—no new material. When Skywald started doing original stuff, he turned off some of the people that he had known at Marvel.

But Stan was willing to forgive and forget. Believe it or not, everybody went in and told Stan in no uncertain terms, “No, no, we don’t want Sol Brodsky as editor-in-chief.”

We had a lot of laughs. The only thing was, they would give him budgets to run projects. For instance, when we were together in Marvel Books and they gave him a budget, his first philosophy was to save the company money. And no matter how much I wanted to do the quality stuff, he was always lowballing the budget, so we always had disagreements. He wanted to bring projects in at such a low price that they would always make money, because that would be a feather in his cap, you know? Meanwhile, I was trying to do the best stuff we could, but we couldn’t afford any good artists. Suddenly, because of our budget, we would end up with the guy who didn’t have any work from anybody else, the second-line artists. So I used to have disagreements with him. And then he got cancer, and for the last year it was terrible. I felt so guilty that I was always disagreeing with him. It was

hard, and when we lost him, it was terrible. One of those sad moments.

“National Lampoon Got A Package And They Suspected It Was Dangerous” JA: Tell me about the time there was a bomb threat at Marvel.

ROMITA: We had a couple of evacuations, I remember. We had one scare—our offices happened to be under National Lampoon, I think.

National Lampoon got a package and they suspected it was dangerous, so we had to empty out the building. They were one floor above us, and sure enough, there was, I think, a package with six sticks of dynamite in it. I remember having to get Tony Mortellaro out of the building. He was an assistant production man and the guy who did my backgrounds at times. He wouldn’t leave. He said, “Aah, it’s probably a false alarm.” I had to go in and pull him out. I said, “You can’t take a chance. Suppose there’s something wrong.” He says, “There’s never anything wrong.” I said, “Listen, you gotta get out of here. Otherwise, the firemen are going to come and drag you out.” So I finally got him down on the street. Thank God it was a warm day. It was a nice spring day, and when we got down on the street... First of all, we took our pages with us. I don’t know if Mike Esposito was there or not, but Frank Giacoia and I were inking on some pages that we had to finish up that day. We grabbed the pages, mostly because we figured if there’s a fire or something, or if there’s any damage from the firemen, they’re going to mess up the pages, so we took them with us. Frank said, “I’m bringing along some ink and some pens and some

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One other time, I think some kind of a UN mission was in the building and we had a bomb scare, and had to evacuate that building. But we didn’t do any artwork that day. [mutual laughter] But Frank and I, generally what we would do is we would switch pages. If I was doing the outlines and Frank was doing the blacks, I would do all the outlines and then give him the page. Then I would take the other page and start doing outlines and he’d do the blacks on one, but we didn’t often work on the same page because the drawing tables were usually tilted.

When we had a flat table, that was different.

JA: Were you doing any detail work or was Frank inking the shrubbery, or the cracks in bricks, or whatever?

ROMITA: Well, sometimes I would do an outline with a pen or a fine brush, Kirby-style, and then when I got to it, I would do the blacks.

Or if I didn’t have time, somebody like Frank or Mike put the blacks in. I would ink the faces and the outline of things, then they would take a big, bold brush and put some big folds in the coats, and put in solid blacks and feathering.

It was interchangeable. I did the same thing with John Verpoorten on my daily Spider-Man strips. I would ink the faces and the outlines of a lot of things, and he would finish them up. This was a common thing we used to do. Whenever you were very late, anything went. You know, all the rules were shot to hell then.

JA: Wasn’t there an inker there called “Many Hands”? [mutual laughter] ROMITA: That’s right. And they used to have other names for mass-suicide stuff over the years—you know, “inked by The Lemmings.” [mutual laughter]

Spidey Drops By Maybe to warn the Daily Bugle crew about a bomb scare? Funny, Roy T.’s always thought it was colorist/production man George Roussos (another reclusive type) rather than Tony Mortellaro who refused to leave the Marvel offices after the warning, but John’s probably right. How would Roy know? When that event occurred (in the early 1970s, he recalls), he decided it was time to enjoy a long, leisurely haircut, a block or two away from any potential falling debris! This promotional poster by JR is repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Mike Burkey. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

brushes.” Thank God he did, because we didn’t know how long it was going to take to get back there. We walked down to Third Avenue, which was a street and a half away, to a place that Frank liked. We sat down at one of the tables, and ordered food and drink.

We’re looking at the pages, and Frank said, “You know, why don’t we fill in some blacks?” So we put the page between us on one of those dark mahogany tables. I’m on one side of the table, Frank’s on the other, and I think Frank was doing the blacks in an upside down panel, and I’m doing some finishing touches with technique, maybe shrubbery or something on the other end of the page. We worked for about an hour and a half, and we’re trying to eat without messing up the pages, [mutual laughter] and finally, somebody came over and told us that the building was cleared and we went back up there. But it was one of those days that was really a riot. We were laughing our heads off the whole time.

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JA: I remember “Many Hands” had a brother: “Diverse Hands.” [mutual laughter] Any other kind of crazy Bullpen stories like that that come to mind?

ROMITA: John Buscema did a couple of “Warriors of the Shadow Realm” magazines. It was a beautiful, very exotic thing, with all these wonderful characters. Peter Ledger painted the covers. He was a very strange duck from Australia. A lot of times, he walked around the office barefoot. I mean, he was a guy right out of Crocodile Dundee. He was either crashing at a friend’s apartment, or going to the “Y,” or sleeping on the floor in the office. The only problem was, he didn’t always bathe. And people were starting to get very nervous. They would come into the office and they would say, “I think he’s still here,” because they could tell by the fumes coming out from under the doors. [mutual laughter]

He was a very talented guy, but a real loose cannon. But we’ve had a few episodes like that, where guys came up and slept in the office. If you’re working through the night, I guess it’s one thing. But if you’re sleeping there because you don’t have a place to sleep, that’s something else.

Unfortunately, whenever we had guys with body odor in the

“The Production Manager Handed Out The Work” JA: Let me ask you about John Verpoorten. He was working under Sol Brodsky before Sol went to Skywald, and then John took over, right?

ROMITA: He was production manager. Brodsky wasn’t the production manager then. He was already like an administrator. He was like Stan’s assistant editor-in-chief. I think John was already sortof autonomous in the production department, and I don’t know if Sol was considered just a production manager before that.

[NOTE FROM ROY: I must admit that I myself never thought of Sol as anything other than production manager—but in the late 1960s that was plenty! He certainly did have administrative duties.

I was officially associate editor at that stage, and not exactly under Sol—but I sure knew I wasn’t over him! The schedule ruled—and Sol ruled the schedule—and that was that! John Verpoorten picked up where Sol left off.]

JA: What was John Verpoorten like in the offices? You’ve got to be tough on your creative people because some people don’t make deadlines.

ROMITA: Oh, yeah, let me tell you. At the time, the production manager handed out the work. Not the editors and not the writers; the production manager assigned the work. Editors would come in and say, “I want John Romita to do a book,” and he’d say, “No, I can’t give you John Romita. I’ll give you somebody else.” It was a very strange time, because there was no real official procedure in those days. People just sort-of established their own tricks and methods, and if you got away with them, fine. If you didn’t get away with them, then there would be a change. For a while there, John Verpoorten was like a dictator in the production department. He thought he was a benevolent dictator, but once you get that kind of power, then you start to wield it and you start peddling your influence.

There was nothing ever wrong about John except that he used to bully some of the poor editors. He used to tell them, “Get out of my office.” In those days, the editors were like just another part of the chain, and the production manager called the shots because Sol Brodsky used to assign the work when he was in charge. And so,

Forbush And Friends (Left:) “Jumbo John” Verpoorten circa the mid-1970s, and (above) his splash page for Not Brand Echh #8 (June 1968). Photo by Alan Kupperberg. [Page ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

when John Verpoorten took over, he just took over the same function and assigned the work, probably conferring with Stan and Sol Brodsky. But then, after a while, when they were busy, he would just assign the work, especially on the second- and third-line books. What I think is, he started to be a little bit tough on some editors. If he didn’t like the editor, that guy was in trouble. And then, who was going to do the lettering and who was going to do the coloring? Thus, you wield a lot of power if you’re the one making those decisions.

And the guys who were friends of his probably got away with stuff, and the guys that he didn’t get along with probably didn’t get away with stuff, you know? It was an unfortunate situation that always bothered me. I did not like tension or any kind of bullying in the office. To me, if you didn’t get along with people, I thought it was a terrible distraction and screwed up things.

JA: Verpoorten died at the end of 1977. Did he work that way up until his passing, or did things change?

ROMITA: I don’t know. I got along with him very well, and I didn’t know a lot of what he was doing. I was away from the production department. I was on the other side of the Bullpen and was so busy with my corrections, and my instruction of artists, and plotting with Stan. I was always very busy. I got along with him on a personal basis,

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way he spoke. You want to talk about funny stuff? There were a couple of summers where I was wearing really goofy clothes. I would wear very lightweight summer clothing. In New York, it gets very hot and I would get these crazy plaid pants and crazy patterned pants, and I was wearing a lot of Hawaiian shirts. John made fun of me every time I came into the office. One day, when I wore a particularly ugly set of pants, really crazy colors and everything, he came to the door—and I think somebody was in there, talking to me—John looked at me because he sees my pants—I’ve got my legs sticking out—and he starts to imitate a calliope. You know the calliope from a circus? You know, [sings a brief passage of high-wire music]? Only he does it like a calliope. [imitates calliope music ] After he does the song, he says, “Somewhere, there’s a hole in a circus tent.” [mutual laughter] John Verpoorten was a Beatles fanatic, and because I was a square and a dummy, I used to say to him that the Beatles were phonies. I should have known better, because my favorite composer was Irving Berlin, and people used to say Irving Berlin didn’t write all those songs because of the wide variety My Love Does It Good of styles. They were lighthearted, John Romita’s drawings of Paul McCartney as Titanium Man—and of Linda McCartney as one of the singing group they were heavy, they were strong, called The Stripes. [©2007 John Romita.] they were tender... he wrote every and he used to ink a lot of my stuff. There were a lot of times I would kind of song conceivable. So I told John that if Irving Berlin keeps do a cover in a very rough style or in blue pencil, and John would ink getting criticized because other people wrote his music, I’d guarantee it. When I did the Spider-Man newspaper strip in ’77, he was my aceyou that those stupid four Limeys didn’t write all this music. [Jim in-the-hole. If I couldn’t get it inked, he would help me out. For laughs] We used to this big running argument between us. I told him weeks on end, he would ink the whole thing. The only thing I would that The Beatles were phonies, I can’t stand their music, although I’ve do was the faces. John had a style very similar to mine and Frank come to love some of their stuff. But he was always on my case, Giacoia’s, so we were very compatible. He was a good inker. He inked saying, “What does an old Italian know? [laughter] What do you some of my FFs, too. know?”

JA: He also inked several issues of The Eternals when Kirby came back in the ’70s. I thought that was some of the best inking Jack got at the time.

ROMITA: John was a very good inker, and I often wondered... I even asked him, “Why don’t you just stay home and ink full-time?” He said he preferred to be in the office. He didn’t have a subway trip or a car trip. He just walked home.

He probably loved inking at home at night and weekends, and he was still getting his salary, so it was good for him, I guess.

Did you know that John had a great voice? If he were alive today, he could make a fortune doing cartoon voices because his voice was like basso profundo. He had a deep, wonderful voice, and a great laugh, and was very theatrical in the

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“The Band You’ve Known For All These Years” John V. got a chance to draw his beloved Beatles in the final panel of Not Brand Echh #8.

Script by Roy Thomas. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

John Makes A Bullseye One of John’s many character designs: the Daredevil villain Bullseye. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: What did you think of his work when you first saw it?

ROMITA: Actually, the first story he did was an “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” story, if I’m not mistaken. He was like anybody who had been doing non-comic book illustrations in that his work was a little mild, not very explosive. Stan asked me to talk to him, and I immediately realized that I didn’t have much to teach him. I told him what Stan used to always tell me: never to do it the mild way, do it as excitingly as possible. And so once he got that indoctrination, he immediately started rolling. When he learned to take some of Kirby’s tricks and turn them into the beautiful finishes that he did, then of course he was unmatched.

JA: Right. His pencils in those days were pretty complete, weren’t they?

ROMITA: Oh, yes. When he started rolling and he was doing those Avengers, the whole office used to come and look at his artwork every time it came in. And as soon as Xerox copies were available, people were making copies of his artwork. All the wannabe artists, and all the guys like Larry Lieber and me, were all wanting to get copies of them. One of my painful annoyances is that I’ve never kept any of those. I had a box with about a hundred sheets of Xeroxes of some of the best stuff he did. And let me tell you, it was out of this world. It was unbelievable. The stuff was full of life and beauty.

JA: After Kirby, you and John Buscema became, more or less, the Marvel Look.

ROMITA: Well, we tried, because that was not an accident. We did that on purpose and, yeah, I guess we carried through. I mean, the only time it got interrupted was when Neal Adams came and brought a different style to Marvel.

JA: Yes, but his influence on the company wasn’t as great as yours or John’s.

ROMITA: He did bring a bunch of wannabe Neal Adamses with him.

All the guys that worked with him at Continuity, plus guys like Bill Sienkiewicz, were striving to be another Neal Adams.

JA: Jack leaves Marvel in 1970. The house style is still Kirby, but it’s also becoming John Buscema and John Romita.

ROMITA: There’s another thing that was very shrewd of Stan: He didn’t tell us to draw like Kirby. All he asked of us was to approach a story with the same reckless abandon and wild parameters. In other words, don’t be limited by normal limits. Think big, think oversized, think overact. In the early ’50s, before Stan worked with Jack, he already was preaching the silent film acting technique. The silent film actors had to overact. Their expressions and body motions were over the top. They were acting with their bodies.

Axe Me No Questions…

John Buscema’s favorite drawing subject—aside from beautiful women—was barbarians, as a few of you may have guessed already. When he wasn’t drawing “Conan” stories in Marvel’s three mags about the swashbuckling Cimmerian, he was penciling (and often inking!) related sketches on the backs of pages of original art. That’s probably the source of this drawing, supplied by David G. Hamilton. [©2007 Estate of John Buscema.]

When I first started at Timely in the 1950s, Stan told me that you can’t just do mild stuff. You’ve got to bend the characters’ backs, you’ve got to extend their arms, you’ve got to pound their fists— don’t do anything mild. Stan didn’t have to tell Jack that. All he had to do was let Jack go. When John Buscema, Gene Colan, and I went to Marvel, every one of us had a different style. John was an illustrator, I was a romance artist, and Colan was a war expert and a romance artist. When John Buscema started, his work was very mild, very illustrative and realistic. Stan steered him in the direction of using Kirby’s extreme action and over-the-top characterization.

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John once told me, “Once I understood what Stan wanted...” it didn’t matter how you drew the characters because John, Gene Colan and I certainly didn’t draw like Jack Kirby. As you know, I tried to draw like Jack Kirby more than once, but I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t natural for me.

JA: So you think the evolution of the house style was a natural thing?

ROMITA: Yes. We were telling stories like Jack, but with our own interpretation and our own shapes. The storytelling style was Jack Kirby’s and Stan Lee’s, and all of us incorporated that style, which made every one of us a better artist. Think about guys like Barry Smith with all his imitations, and how little background he had, and suddenly Barry Smith becomes a storyteller. Bill Sienkiewicz and John Byrne and everybody else came in with their own approach—even Neal Adams. When Neal Adams worked for Stan, it was different work than he did for DC. The reason was that the storytelling that Stan espoused triggered something in all of us that was different than we might have done.

If I’d stayed in DC, I would have been a Carmine Infantino clone. I didn’t become a Kirby clone—I became a Marvel Clone and a Marvel Storyteller—but it was always me, and even though I thought I was lost in the shuffle as a generic artist, everybody recognized my stuff. Which surprised me.

JA: You absorbed the “Marvel Way” of doing it, and you filtered it through your own sensibility.

ROMITA: Absolutely. That’s the only reason we were able to survive, because you can only try to be somebody else for a short time. I tried to be Ditko for about a year and a half, and it was terrible for me because it was unnatural for me.

JA: You were also trying to be Kirby a little bit when you took over Fantastic Four.

ROMITA: I did it unabashedly, because I was really raised in the syndicated artists ghost period. In other words, if you drew The Phantom, you drew like Sy Barry. When Sy Barry took over The Phantom, he started drawing like Wilson McCoy, but he changed it to his own style. During my young years, everybody who took over a strip did that.

“I Believed In Drawing Attractive, Glamorous People” JA: Because you had this glamorous style that was, in a sense, formed from your romance comics at DC, I feel you brought some humanity to the Marvel look that hadn’t been there before.

I’ve Got You Covered!

As a custodian and major proponent of the Marvel style, it was John Romita that Stan Lee (and Simon & Schuster Books) turned to in 1977 to design and paint the cover of the trade paperback collection Bring On the Bad Guys. Above is an unused version of the sketch; at top right, the finished cover. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

ROMITA: I take credit for that a little bit, but the reason for that is that I believed in drawing attractive, glamorous people. You can make Dr. Doom grotesque in his iron mask, but you also have to add a certain amount of glamour, because a villain needs to have two appeals. He’s got to terrify the reader, but he’s got to be attractive enough not to be distasteful. I used tell artists, “There’s a way to do Dr. Doom that’s glamorous.” You do it with a slick style, and you do techniques. Some of the techniques that Jack used made Dr. Doom look very ugly. I tried to make Dr. Doom a little more glamorous, even though he was still doing ferocious things. I tried to glamorize him a little bit to make him

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And when I did The Punisher, I made him as neat as possible. I did not want to make him look like a ragamuffin street assassin. I wanted him to look scary, but slick.

JA: Whose idea was it to redesign Doctor Octopus?

ROMITA: I don’t remember. They did that after me.

JA: No, you did it. You gave him a different kind of glasses and — ROMITA: Oh, yeah. He just had regular dark glasses before.

JA: You changed the glasses to goggles, and dressed him better.

ROMITA: I don’t know if I even was conscious of it. I think I tried to make him look more like a costumed super-hero than just an old man. I wanted him to be a little bit more buff, a little bit less flabby-looking, because he was an old scientist. I figured he’d look a little bit more like a match for Spider-Man if he had a little bit of muscle, and even though I made him wide at the waist, I still gave him a waistline instead of just a fat old guy. I didn’t even realize I was doing a lot of it.

It’s like when I made Peter Parker too glamorous for Stan’s tastes. I couldn’t help myself, sometimes.

We also felt like we needed to make The Vulture a younger character. It seemed more realistic to have a younger man be that kind of villain, rather than have him be as old as Steve Ditko had envisioned. Ditko’s version was very striking, though.

JA: Even though you made things cleaner, prettier, and more glamorous, you also had a very active ink line. When somebody broke a wooden two-by-four over somebody’s head, you saw splinters. And when you drew The Gibbon’s costume, the way you inked the brush lines to delineate the texture of the costume was active and passionate.

I Blast, Therefore I Am A pencil drawing of Spidey vs. Dr. Doom. Nobody seems to know what this illo was done for— but hey, it exists, so here it is! [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Why, Octavius, You Look Beautiful In Your New Glasses!

A Real Shocker!

The Shocker makes his debut in Amazing Spider-Man #46 (March 1967)…and in black-&-white, years later, in The Essential Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 3. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

John slightly redesigned Dr. Octopus’ glasses—giving them more of a “goggles” look—when he reintroduced the villain in ASM #53 (Oct. 1967). [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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Three To Get Ready As John says, after Jack Kirby’s 1970 departure, his own art and John Buscema’s became “the look” for Marvel’s comics.

John R. drew three of its prime icons for a promotional comic for Paragon Software, as per this pencil layout. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JA: Let’s get back to art corrections for a moment.

You hardly ever corrected John Buscema’s work.

ROMITA: That’s true. The only time was when we were working together on Spider-Man. Stan and I would plot the stories and I would give them to John over the phone. And of course, you know about those stories. He would complain, “I hate these characters. Do we have to have all these characters?” [Jim laughs] He used to say he hated Spider-Man. He really did.

JA: And he used to say, “Why can’t we get rid of Aunt May?” ROMITA: Oh, God, yes. He really did. He was doing the rough pencils on Spider-Man. I never did them for him. I did do layouts for Don Heck. But Stan wanted John to take the time to do the story because that saved me a lot of time. When Don Heck worked with me, it didn’t save me a lot of time because I would do the basic storytelling in blue pencil, before I did the finished pencils. Basic storytelling took all my time, but finishing up from the blue pencils was quick. Stan figured that, “Okay, if he saves you half a day, it’s still something.”

So I would do the blue pencils with Don, but I really didn’t save that much time. And there were a lot of times I would have to make changes when Heck’s stuff came in, because Stan would say that Heck didn’t do exactly what we asked him to in the plot.

I would make minor changes in Don Heck’s stuff, but when John Buscema took the plots from me, a lot of times, he would cut corners in storytelling. He’d do some great battle scenes and then slough off on some of the personal life stuff. He drew beautiful women. He made Gwen and Mary Jane sensational-looking.

JA: How complete or loose were his layouts?

ROMITA: They were just light pencils, no blacks—very, very light and very sketchy, but everything was there. I mean, you didn’t have all the fingernails on the hand, but when there was a hand, you saw five fingers. And he didn’t do circles with dots for eyes like Gil Kane did. [mutual laughter] No, John did a very expressive kind of breakdown—it wasn’t layouts. Layouts were very rough. Layouts were like Jack Kirby gave me, which was just silhouettes and initials for who the characters were. And if a character was smiling, he’d smile it and if it was a frown, it’d be a frown, but that’s about all.

They were just layouts, but John’s breakdowns were a real storytelling job; all that was missing was tightening up the lines and putting blacks in.

JA: Did John really hate it, or was he just saying that?

ROMITA: Well, my theory was that he really didn’t want to do it. So what he was saying is he hated the characters; he didn’t like doing any modern stories. I think he got tired of The Avengers, too, and I don’t blame him for that because I wouldn’t have done The Avengers. You had to draw a thousand characters coming and going.

JA: And you get no extra rate for that work.

ROMITA: Oh, no, no. John never worried about anything. He could

just handle anything, but the thing is that he wanted more fun and the only fun he ever had was on Conan and Tarzan. When he was doing buildings and a lot of side characters and a lot of personal life stuff, he was always a little squirmy and a little bit uncomfortable. He used to say, “I can’t stand Spider-Man.” What he meant was he couldn’t stand the super-hero in New York, which involved too much detail work and not enough room in the panel, because the Spider-Man story technique was to use a lot of panels and have a lot of dialogue between the personal life characters. Steve Ditko used to do 9 and 10 panels on a page. John was like me: he liked to do 4 or 5 panels on a page, and you can get some real movement and have people zooming through space then. It’s very hard to even get any action at all in a 12panel page. And it’s a sacrifice, but the reason I sacrificed was I knew that that was what had been established as Spider-Man storytelling, and I wasn’t going to change it. Let me tell you, I suffered with it, too. It’s not easy and I’d have preferred not to do that. When I was doing Daredevil, I had plenty of room for what I wanted to do. I could do 4 or 5 panels when I needed it, and then get a little bit more busy when there was personal life. It wasn’t as restrictive as SpiderMan. Spider-Man was always extra work for me, and I think if I had worked on X-Men or something like that, I would have had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know how my son ever did it.

JA: Did you spend any time with John outside of a professional relationship?

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Go, Team!

When John says he needed help with covers, he must mean simply in terms of quantity— ’cause it’s crystal clear he didn’t need any help with the quality! Case in point: his pencils for Marvel Team-Up #48 (Aug. 1976). Repro’d from a photocopy of the original art, courtesy of Al Bigley. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

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was very good on it. He was doing a lot of silly stuff like the Living Wall character. I mean, here’s a guy who’s a section of brick wall, walking around with eyes and mouth, and Mortimer took it all in stride. He was capable of doing the most beautiful artwork, but he was always relegated to doing second-level stuff. It killed me. When he did Night Nurse, he would do the damnedest job on Night Nurse. People still remember it.

He lived in upstate New York, and he had a lodge in Canada, which drove me crazy. You know, I had a little bungalow in Queens. [mutual laughter] It’s just that hearing about a lodge in Canada where he could hunt on his own land was very impressive to me. I only knew guys from Brooklyn who had lived in lower middle-income houses, and they worked their way up to a nice house on the island or in Connecticut.

We used to have a lot of talks. I drew the covers on his Spidey Super Stories, and he would be stuck with some of my interpretations of the characters, but he was able to handle it all. He was maybe ten years older than I was. I always admired and respected his stuff very much. He was rather lowkey, and looked like a guy who would have lunch with Norman Rockwell every day. [mutual chuckling]

“[Ross Andru And I] Were Kindred Spirits In A Way” JA: Individually and collectively, tell me about Ross Andru and Mike Esposito.

ROMITA: Well, I’ve known Mike a long time. I knew Ross all the time he was working for Marvel. I didn’t know him as well as Mike, but they were quite a team, and one of the things that irks me is that Ross doesn’t get mentioned enough when they talk about SpiderMan artists. Ross was a guy who deserves to be mentioned. He had a long run, and he was one of the good ones. I think if there was any fault he had, it was a slight—not awkwardness, but a slight lack of glamour, or less glamour than a lot of guys. John Buscema was probably the most glamorous artist I ever saw, and he could make everybody look beautiful and heroic, and then he could do ferocity, too. Ross was a serious story-

Look! Up In The Sky! John Romita himself drew a mean Superman— if only for this 1997 fan drawing. But why the gloves, JR? [Superman TM & ©2007 DC Comics.]

146 | JOHN ROMITA: THE 2006-2007 INTERVIEW

The Green Goblin Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out! “Every time I inked Gil Kane, I learned something.” We’re not sure what John learned on this final page from Amazing Spider-Man #96, but readers were about to learn—in the very next issue—that a two-part super-hero dealing with drugs could have a considerable impact.

Repro’d from the original art, courtesy of Aaron Sultan. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

180 | JOHN ROMITA: THE 2006-2007 INTERVIEW

Robbins. It was the “Marvel” Frank Robbins. I wish I could have inked Johnny Hazard just once. I enjoyed working with Sergio Aragonés, believe it or not. I did a 3-page or 4-page sequence. I think we all did a couple of pages in it. That was fun.

JA: I don’t know if you know much about this person, but just in case you happened to run into her sometime...

Virginia Romita. Have you ever heard of her?

ROMITA: I don’t know anything about her at all! I’ve known Virginia since she was about 9 years old. When I was 11 and she was 9, I moved into her neighborhood. You know, we used to open up the hydrants in the summer heat to cool off.

Well, we were playing that way on a Brooklyn street and there’s this little brat [laughs] and she’s got an empty Coke bottle that she’s splashing people with. She would get water in it and throw it at people. She’d say, “I’ll throw the bottle,” and they were saying, “I dare ya!” And son of a gun, she lets it go and I just caught it, like about a half inch from hitting the pavement and scattering all over the place. That was my first memory of Virginia.

JA: How long did it take her to get interested in you?

ROMITA: Well, it’s funny. I was so shy, I couldn’t talk to people. I moved into her building about a year after the first time I met her. If she was coming out, and I was going in, I’d be too shy to say hello. And she thought I was crazy. She thought, “What’s the matter with this guy?” It’s just a neighborly thing to say hello, and I was too stupid to say hello.

When we were teenagers, her brother and I used to be buddies, and when we started going out to church functions like basketball and dances and things like that, she’d come along a lot of times. I got to know her because maybe a dozen of us would travel together. And later on, it was like she was an old friend to me. As she matured, and I matured, it became a little more. [laughs] And it was nice. It developed very well.

JA: It seems like it’s worked out.

ROMITA: Yeah, I think it’s going to last. [Jim laughs] We’ve been married 55 years now.

We’re very proud of that.

dressed in a Spider-Man outfit showed people around. He’d go to each office and say, “This is the office of John Romita, the Spider-Man artist. He’s our art director.”

And then he’d go down into the other offices. “This is the editor for The X-Men, there’s the editor for Spider-Man.” And he’d get down to the production office where Virginia was the traffic manager.

And the Spider-Man guide would say, “This is John Romita’s wife.” [mutual chuckling] And she wanted to hear them say, “This is Virginia Romita. She’s our traffic manager.” All they kept saying was, “She’s John Romita’s wife.”

JA: Was there ever any kind of weird feeling because you two worked in the office together?

ROMITA: No, no. But one time, she got overly efficient. I was trying to help her out with an emergency, and she was trying to handle the problem herself. And I think I said one thing too many and she said, “Get out of my office!” [mutual laughter] That was when I realized, hey, I was not dealing with my wife, I was dealing with the production manager.

Did I tell you the story about whenever there was a tour in the office? Down through the years, they had regular tours. A guy

Two Romitas—And A RomitaMan (Above:) John Sr. & John Jr., seated—with collector Mike Burkey, a.k.a. RomitaMan. (Top right:) John Romita, Jr., does his own rendition of SpiderMan and MJ, for Spider-Man #11 (June 1991); inks by Scott Hanna.

Repro’d from a photocopy of the (autographed) original art, courtesy of Anthony Snyder. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The funny thing was, years later, I wasn’t doing Spider-Man and the SpiderMan guy comes in and he goes down to the production department and he says, “This is Virginia Romita, production manager.”

And then he comes all the way down the other end of the floor to my office and says, “And this is John Romita, Virginia

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | 181

Romita In Color

John’s cover for a 1972 rock album. Thanks to Mike Catron. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JOHN ROMITA... AND ALL THAT JAZZ! | i

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

Trading card art starring the original X-Men. Along with preliminary color art for an alternate Beast card, sent by Al Bigley. [©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.]

JOHN ROMITA And All That Jazz

"Jazzy" John Romita—the artist who made The Amazing Spider-Man Marvel's #1-selling comic book in the 1960s—talks about his life, his art, and his contemporaries! Authored by former Marvel Comics editor in chief and top writer Roy Thomas, and noted historian Jim Amash, it features the most definitive interview Romita's ever given, about working with such comics legends as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, following Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko as artist on the strip, and more! Plus, Roy Thomas shares memories of working with Romita in the 1960s-70s, and Jim Amash examines the awesome artistry of Ring-aDing Romita! Lavishly illustrated with Romita art—original classic art, and unseen masterpieces—as well as illos by some of Marvel's and DC's finest, this is at once a career overview of a comics master, and a firsthand history of the industry by one of its leading artists!

(192-page trade paperback) $24.95 (208-page hardcover with bonus color pages) $44.95 • (Digital Edition) $10.95 http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=562

iv | JOHN ROMITA COLOR GALLERY