A Timely Pair
Classics
An interview with Bonnie and Arnold Hano, by David Laurence Wilson
(right) A recent photo of Bonnie and Arnold Hano. (below) Splash panel detail from Captain America Comics #10 (Jan. 1942), produced by Simon & Kirby just prior to leaving Timely Comics for DC. Though the Hanos worked at Timely in-between Jack’s 1940s and 1950s stints at the company, this interview should give readers a sense of what it was like at the offices there. (next page, bottom) Stan Lee in the 1950s, when Bonnie was his assistant.
[Editor’s Note: The following interview was conducted on December 19, 2013, and submitted to TJKC. While it doesn’t focus specifically on Kirby, I felt it gives a fascinating inside look at the workings of Timely Comics, with commentary about both Stan Lee and Martin Goodman. I have edited it to keep it more germain to topics that would likely interest TJKC readers.]
becoming an editor at Timely/Atlas. (He later wrote numerous acclaimed books on baseball and westerns.) Bonnie (who married Arnold in 1951), worked alongside Stan Lee in the early 1950s to keep the stories coming from Timely Comics. Those years, 1951-1954, were an industry-wide trough between waves of superheroes, with a wider range of titles, publishers, and readers in the industry than there has been since. Visiting the Hanos at their charming home, on a quiet street two or three blocks from the main thoroughfares of Laguna Beach, California, would clarify what Bonnie Hano had done or didn’t do so many years ago. The couple had not kept up with the comics business. They couldn’t describe “Ultron” if you spotted them two Silver Surfers and a Black Widow. Bonnie said: “Who ever knew that Stan Lee was going to become the big famous deal that he is today?” Both of them were surprised when I showed them hardbound copes of Atlas Comics produced during their tenure, issues that might even contain some of the stories they had written. Neither of them had ever attended a comic book convention. It was not going to be like a conversation with Jack Kirby, who seemed to be familiar with not only the past but the future. First of all, Mrs. Hano had a bone to pick with the scholars of the comics industry:
n the 1950s, Arnold and Bonnie Hano were the power-couple at Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management company at New York’s Empire State Building. It was a dull, gray-suited name for an empire of publications that emanated from Goodman’s equally unassuming office. Goodman was a fellow who played hunches and took gambles but not risks, and if a magazine was unsuccessful, it would be quickly canceled. The company was better known by what you might call its pseudonyms: Timely (now Marvel) Comics; men’s magazines, especially Stag magazine; and Red Circle Books, a sensationalistic line of paperbacks that would soon be revised and renamed as Lion Books, a short-lived but important paperback company. Arnold Hano was born in Manhattan but he grew up in the Bronx. He received a degree from Long Island University and then higher education, as a copy boy at the New York Daily News. After action in World War Two, he worked as Managing Editor at Bantam Books and then Editor-in-Chief at Lion Books in 1949, before
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BONNIE: Do you know what’s so crazy? I looked up something one day, and I found on the Internet that I was Hank Chapman’s first wife. I don’t know where they ever got that. When I met Hank, he was married to Gloria, whom he called Toni, and we knew her as Toni. They became very good friends of ours. So how did I get married to Hank on the Internet? How do things like that happen? Chapman was one of the top writers at Timely, one of the few writers to be credited on many of his stories, receiving credit even before the artists. His best known story may have been “The Nightmare” from Astonishing #4 (June 1951), a story illustrated by Wayne Boring in which a writer for Marvel Tales and Astonishing named Hank Chapman is terrorized by vengeful characters from his stories. 32