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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