Sal Buscema: Comics' Fast & Furious Artist

Comics’ Fast & Furious Artist

by Jim Amash with Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Comics’ Fast & Furious Artist

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S A L BU S C E M A COMICS’ FAST AND FURIOUS ARTIST Written by Jim Amash Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Jim Amash Designed by Eric Nolen-Weathington Introduction by Walter Simonson Published by TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Trademarks & Copyrights

First Printing • February 2010 • All rights reserved • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-021-2 • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-022-9

All illustrations contained herein are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders and are reproduced for historical reference and research purposes.

The Abomination, Absorbing Man, Angel, Ant-Man, Archangel, Atlas, Avengers, Beast, The Beetle, Bishop, Black Knight, Black Panther, Bucky, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Carnage, Carrion, The Collector, Collosus, Cyclops, Daredevil, The Defenders, The Destroyer, Dr. Strange, Dragon Man, The Eternals, The Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Gambit, The Gardener, Goliath, Green Goblin, Goliath, Grim Reaper, The Gunhawks, Harry Osborn, Havok, Hawkeye, The Headmen, Hobgoblin, Hulk, Human Torch, Iceman, Invisible Girl, Iron Man, J. Jonah Jameson, Kang the Conqueror, Killraven, Lady Liberty, The Lethal Legion, Living Laser, Loki, Man-Ape, Man-Bull, Man-Thing, Mantis, Mr. Fantastic, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Nebulon, New Mutants, Nightcrawler, Nighthawk, Nightmare, Nomad, Nova, Odin, Phoenix, Power Man, Professor X, Psylocke, Quicksilver, Rawhide Kid, Red Skull, Rogue, Ronan the Accuser, Scarlet Witch, The Sentry, Shanna the She-Devil, She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Sin-Eater, Spider-Girl, Spider-Man, Storm, The Swordsman, Thing, Thor, Ultron, Undertaker, Valkyrie, Venom, Vision, Vulture, Wasp, Watcher, Whizzer, Wolverine, Wrecking Crew, X-Men, Yellow Jacket, and all related characters are ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Marvel Comics logos and indicia are ™ Marvel Characters, Inc. Batman, Commission Jim Gordon, The Creeper, Green Arrow, Killer Croc, Mad Hatter, The Penguin, Robin, Scarecrow, Steel, Superboy, Superman, The Ventriloquist, The Visitor, Wonder Woman, and all related characters are ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

All DC Comics logos and indicia are ™ DC Comics.

Johnny Hazard, Prince Valiant, and all related characters are™ and ©2010 King Features Syndicate.

Doc Savage is ™ and ©2010 Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc. D/B/A Condé Nast Publications.

Tarzan is ™ and ©2010 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Conan is ™ and ©2010 Conan Properties International, LLC. Johnny Hazard is ™ and ©2008 Todd Livingston, Robert Tinnell, and Neil Vokes.

Rom ™ and ©2010 Parker Brothers.

Savior 28 and all related characters are ™ and ©2010 J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Cavallaro Editorial package ©2010 Jim Amash, Eric Nolen-Weathington, and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To my wife, Heidi, and to Roy Thomas for his patience and understanding. — Jim

Special Thanks The vast majority of the art shown in this book has been reproduced directly from original art or photocopies of the original art.

This would not have been possible without the help of the following people, and we give them our sincere thanks for their help: Heritage Auctions — www.ha.com

Anthony Snyder of Anthony’s Comic Book Art — www.anthonysnyder.com/art Eelco Veldhuizen

and:

Terry Austin, Spencer Beck, Jeff Bell, Al Bigley, Jerry Boyd, Bruno Rey Fernandez, Edward Fields, Raimon Fonseca, Foundation’s Edge, Sam Newkirk, Joe Sinnott, Mark Sinnott, and Joe Staton

Table of Contents Introduction by Walter Simonson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Chapter One: Inspiration All Around. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Chapter Two: A Heroic Departurre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Chapter Three: How to Break in the Marvel Way . . . . . . . . . . 33 Chapter Four: The Workhorse Hits His Stride . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Chapter Five: A New Start with a Different Company . . . . . . . . . 87 Chapter Six: The Craft of Creating Comic Book Art . . . . . . . . . . 97 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

DR. STRANGE, HULK, SILVER SURFER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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Introduction

By Walter Simonson

S

And Sal was as good as the best. Writing the script from his art was not only a pleasure, but inspirational. Ideas for dialogue, descriptive passages, even sound effects, flowed effortlessly from his comprehensive understanding of storytelling. Everything was clear; the visual logic of the story completely realized in the panel-to-panel continuity. And there was drama, great and small, in the gestures and expressions of the characters.

Suffice it to say that that issue of Thor remains one of my personal favorites from my entire run. Some of my best writing is in that story, inspired by the work Sal did.

And when I decided to relinquish the drawing on the title, I asked Sal take over the art. He did so, wonderfully.

ome thoughts about one of my favorite artists...

I don’t remember the first time I saw Sal Buscema’s art, but it was almost certainly some of his early work for Marvel Comics, and most likely his work on The Avengers. Back in the mid-1960s, I was a heavy Marvel Comics reader and followed all ten or eleven of their monthly comics then. Yes. I said ten or eleven monthly comics. It was a different time, folks.

I thought Sal’s was interesting work, but I was generally following titles and not creators in those days. Over the years, I watched his efforts on The Avengers, Spectacular Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, New Mutants, and other titles. I read the comics, enjoyed them, and then put them aside. I didn’t analyze exactly what he was doing. His professionalism was always a beacon for the rest of us; I only gradually began to understand how smooth his storytelling was, how effective his ability to communicate.

Sal’s brother, John, was certainly one of the finest draftsmen to ever draw a comic book. It’s my understanding, but only as hearsay, that John once said about Jack Kirby that he was a great draftsman because his work was the essence of communication. I don’t know if John really said something like that, but it’s not a bad definition for anybody who draws comics.

And by it, Sal — one of his brother’s biggest fans — is right up there with the best.

Then about 13 years into my career in the comics industry, I got the chance to team up with Sal. I was writing and drawing Thor in the mid-’80s, and after working on a long saga about Thor and the great enemy of the gods, Surtur, I was slightly burned. So I wrote a single-issue story (Thor #355), designed the main guest star (a guy named Tiwaz), and asked for Sal to draw it (with my editor’s approval naturally).

It’s hard for me to express in words how delighted I was with the art and the storytelling when Sal turned in the book. The work was beautiful. And part of the beauty was the grace with which the story was told visually. I knew Sal was good, which is why I had asked for him; I just hadn’t realized quite how good. But when you start writing over somebody else’s art, you see everything, from the nuances of character to the individual choices of shot, with remarkable clarity.

Back then, we were all pretty much working “Marvelstyle.” The writer would turn in a plot, the penciler would produce 22 pages of visual continuity, and the writer would write his script from the art. Much depended, of course, on the gifts of the penciler to tell the story effectively as he converted a plot into pictures.

One final note — it’s likely that Sal and I did the first comic book to travel into space. Naturally, since Sal and I were merely the freelancers who had done the comic, we were the last to find out. But I was in a vice-president’s office at Marvel many years ago, and happened to see a plaque on the wall with a familiar cover engraved in its center above some copy. Intrigued, I read the plaque and discovered that some youth group dedicated to space flight had chosen Thor #355 to be placed together with some other items and sent up into space.

Apparently, the group’s collection rode the space shuttle, Challenger, into the startled forests of night in July, 1985. Given Thor’s rather cosmic history, the honor couldn’t be more appropriate. And for the son of Asgard, and for an artist who was such a pleasure to work with as well as one of the nicest human beings on the face of the planet, I couldn’t be more delighted.

Walter Simonson New York, 2009 4

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ODIN, THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

Chapter One

Inspiration All Around Jim Amash: You probably don’t remember when this happened, but I know you know when and where you were born.

Sal Buscema: Of course. [laughs] I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 26, 1936.

My father’s name was John, and my mother’s was Sadie. My brother John was eight years older than I, born December 11, 1927.

(below) For many years, Sal participated in Friday night live model drawing sessions at a local college. While in his teens, he had to rely on drawing from the statues housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

JA: Do you have any other brothers or sisters?

SB: Yes, though unfortunately they’re all deceased. The oldest, Al, was born on July 28, 1923. My sister, Carol was born on June 22, 1929.

JA: Who was the first one to draw in your family?

SB: In so far as I can remember, it was John.

I recall a couple of occasions — and this is a

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recollection from when I was five or six years old — when my brothers both painted a landscape of some kind. It was sort of a friendly competition. I think they may have been painting from a photograph. They were both working in oils, and having a good time. It was just a fun thing that they were doing.

John was always dabbling in this kind of stuff. He loved to draw and paint. I think Al — there was a very friendly sibling rivalry between them. They were very close, very devoted to each other. They loved each other dearly, as we all did. Al may have been kidding around and said, “Hey, I can do as well or better than you can. I’m going to paint a picture of this right next to you.” They both had canvas boards and a couple of easels.

JA: What inspired you and John to draw?

SB: My maternal grandfather, whom I never knew — my mother was just 13 when he passed away — was a musician by profession.

He taught music; I believe it was the accordion that he taught. He also made accordions, and was an amateur artist. According to my mother he was quite good. She described in great detail some of the work he did. I believe he worked mostly in charcoal. I remember one description she related to us about a drawing he did that was rather large of this young boy and young girl running through a forest in a wind storm with the trees blowing around them. The way she described it was quite impressive. Unfortunately, all his work is lost. We never saw it, so I only have her descriptions to go by. But that may be where we got some of the genes.

The earliest recollection that I have is of John sitting at the dining room table drawing.

He loved to draw. I would say that John was greatly responsible for me pursuing drawing.

He always said that as a kid I was better than he was. I’m not sure I agree with that, because I always believed that John was maybe not necessarily more gifted than I — although his drawing was much better. I did not consider myself a really good draughtsman by any stretch of the imagination, and

John was definitely much more dedicated than I. John was definitely an inspiration, but I got my inspiration from other areas, as well. I loved to go to museums as a kid.

When I was in high school, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art as often as I could. It was almost like a home away from home for me. I particularly loved the room they had devoted to Michaelangelo’s sculptures. Of course, primarily they were all reproductions, but excellent ones. I just loved that room. I spent hours in there drawing the sculptures.

JA: What time period are we talking about?

SB: I went to a junior high school that was actually the first year of high school. So when I went to the High School of Music & Art in New York, which is now the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts — John went there also, by the way — I was actually in my second year, which would put me at about 14 and a half.

JA: When you were drawing the sculptures, what were you paying attention to?

SB: At that age you’re really not paying attention, Jim, because you’re so young.

You’re a neophyte in whatever you’re endeavoring to do. I was simply trying to reproduce what I saw. That’s all. I was just having fun because I enjoyed drawing.

JA: There were two high schools in New York: Music & Art and the School of Industrial Arts. Why did you choose Music & Art? SB: Probably because that’s the school that John went to. [laughs] Being eight years older than I, you have to consider that I was just a little kid when John was going to high school.

John was kind of a hero to me. Even in later life he was a man that I greatly admired. If it was good enough for John, it was good enough for me. In later years I somewhat regretted it, because Music & Art was devoted to the finer arts, whereas Industrial Arts was devoted to commercial arts. And that was what I wanted to be: a commercial artist.

When you graduate from Music & Art, you really don’t know anything about the commercial art industry, which is the field that I wanted to enter. In the Industrial Arts high school, you would have gotten some very, very pertinent training in that respect.

JA: Would John ever critique your work to try to help you?

SB: Absolutely, constantly. I remember one instance. There was a photograph of an Oriental man, a rather large profile shot in Life magazine. I decided, “Oh, I’d just love to draw this,” and I drew it on a pad with a regular #2 pencil. I always showed my drawings to John and the rest of my family. He just flipped over it. “Boy, this is just terrific!” and he explained to me why he thought it was so good; that the pencil strokes I had used gave the flesh an almost breathable feeling. I’m paraphrasing what he said, but words to that effect. He was very encouraging. I remembered what he said, and tried to apply it to another drawing that I did of a similar head, but it didn’t come out nearly as good. [laughter] So what I did subconsciously did not work consciously.

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(above) Sal’s older brother, John Buscema, at his drawing board, circa mid-1970s.

(above) A 1973 photo of jazz pianist/composer Stan Kenton, a favorite of Sal’s and John’s. (right) A 1973 photo of Kenton leading his band.

PHOTOS ©1973 HANS BERNHARD

John was always constructively critical of my work. In later years, when I began to come into my own as an artist, I would do the same with him. We would bounce off of each other quite a bit.

JA: I’d like to explore the relationship between you and your brother. Because there’s an eight-year difference, you’re not going to have the same friends, for instance.

And you likely didn’t play ball together.

SB: None of that actually happened. I mean, we kidded around a lot, and he was a great big brother. But I remember having fights. John was a pretty big, strong guy, and he would always take it easy with me. I remember my mother telling him, “John, be careful. Don’t hurt him.” [laughter] We would have a lot of fun in that respect — a lot of roughhousing.

We had a wonderful relationship. And, as I said, John was kind of a role model for me.

He was a good guy, he was a very decent and very gifted man.

JA: Did his influence on you extend to more than just art, like, say, music?

SB: Definitely music. Of course, we got a lot of that from my mother and father, too, because my father was born in Italy, and was a great opera lover. He would listen to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera every Saturday. My father was a barber, and Saturday was a very busy day for him. I remember walking into the shop and always hearing opera on the radio.

Because of that the whole family had a great appreciation for opera and classical music in general. John loved it, and I grew up loving it, 8

too, but I think the influence there was more from my parents rather than just John.

JA: Were you paying attention to popular music, too?

SB: Oh, sure. We all were. We loved Frank Sinatra. Jazz bands were very big back then, and the one that John and I both flipped over was Stan Kenton. His music was 30 years ahead of its time, which is one of the reasons why he was either loved or despised. There was no in between with him.

JA: Did you listen to many radio shows?

Which ones did you like?

SB: The Shadow, Inner Sanctum. We liked the mystery stuff. Suspense, The Whistler — I could probably still whistle that tune. We listened to a lot of the sitcoms of the day — Fibber McGee and Molly, The Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Show, Jack Benny — all of the great comics of the day.

JA: How did you spend family time? Did you all eat at the same time?

SB: We did, except for my dad because of the business. Back then barber shops were open six days a week, and they closed when the last customer left. They really didn’t have set hours, especially in a close-knit neighborhood like ours. The customers my father had were also friends, and if some of them came late, even after the door was locked as he finished up a last customer, invariably he would let them in. He couldn’t turn them down and say, “No, I don’t have time to do it.” You didn’t do things like that in those days. So my father

very seldom got home in time to eat with the family. The only time that we did that was on Sunday. Sunday was ritualistic in my family.

We always had dinner together, and my mother would put out a fantastic meal: your typical seven-course Italian dinner. We would all pig out. [laughter] It was a wonderful time.

JA: Would your family go to church?

SB: No, we were not church-going people. I’m not sure I would characterize us as religious.

My mother probably was more than my father. I was baptized in the Catholic church.

We all grew up Catholic, but I wouldn’t say that we were overly religious. We did not go to church that often.

JA: Would you consider your family to have been middle-class?

SB: I would say probably lower-middle-class.

If you consider five quintiles that we talk about today, we were probably in the fourth quintile.

we both loved them. We loved the syndicated strips, too, like Prince Valiant. Hal Foster was a wonderful draughtsman as was Alex Raymond. John really recognized the exceptional draughtsmen very early on.

Subsequently, I gained an appreciation for them, too. In later years I became a big fan of EC comics. You remember all the controversy that they created? I thought their stories were fascinating. I thought they were very well written — as a kid. If I read them now, they’d probably seem silly. But they also had terrific artists for the day. Wally Wood and so on.

JA: So John got a job at Timely. What was your reaction?

SB: The whole family just flipped out. “Our son is drawing comic books!” You have to consider the fact that my father was against this

JA: Did you play any sports?

SB: I did, but it was mostly unorganized stuff, the stuff kids did in the street. I loved baseball, and was a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan.

When I got into my teens, I would go to Ebbett’s Field as frequently as money would allow. I loved Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Carl Erskine, Don Newcombe. Carl Furillo was in right field. For a good period of time Andy Pafco was in left field — I think they got him from the Cubs. Terrific ballplayer.

Billy Cox was at third, Pee Wee Reese at short.

I think I mentioned Campanella already behind the plate. That was always a big controversy: Who was the better catcher, Campanella or Yogi Berra? And who was the better shortstop, Pee Wee Reese or Phil Rizutto?

JA: Oh, Reese was the better shortstop.

SB: I think he was, too.

JA: When you started high school, John was already working in the business.

SB: Right. I was twelve years old when John got his first job with Timely. Stan Lee hired him. John was 20.

JA: What was it like to have an older brother working in comic books? Did you grow up reading comic books?

SB: I was not a fanatic, but I always bought comic books. John bought comic books, and 9

(below) A panel from the January 14, 1951 Prince Valiant strip, drawn

by Hal Foster.

PRINCE VALIANT ©2010 KING FEATURES SYNDICATE, INC.

SB: Well, he saw what a success John was.

Once that barrier was broken, there was no barrier for me. That’s what I wanted to pursue, even though I wasn’t able to at the time, because the comic book industry was dead by the mid-’50s. That was almost the beginning of the end. It was toward the latter part of the decade and especially the early ’60s when comics started making a big comeback. It was a time when — this is kind of an exaggeration, obviously — you had a comic publisher every six blocks in Manhattan. There were a bunch of little fly-by-night outfits that would produce maybe half a dozen books a month.

When I was 16, I made up a bunch of samples and ran around to all these places. I’d look them up in the phonebook and pay them a visit, and I told them the same thing every time. I’d walk into the reception area and say, “I’d like to speak to the art director, please. I have some work that I think he might be interested in.” And, of course, they never were, because I was terrible at 16. How good could I be? But it was an experience for me. By the time I was ready there was no comic book industry to get into. As a matter of fact, John lost work, and that’s when he went into advertising illustration.

JA: I guess he was still living at home. Did you watch him work?

SB: He got married when he was 24, I think.

But I did watch him frequently.

(above) Some of Sal’s earliest work in comics was done in the early 1950s when he assisted (uncredited) his brother, John, by drawing backgrounds for his Dell assignments, which included Westerns. Sal was able to put that experience to use early on in his career at Marvel. His first assignment was a Western (“Gun Hawk”), and he also inked Rawhide Kid #68 over Larry Lieber’s pencils.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS (WWW.HA.COM) RAWHIDE KID ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

from the beginning. He thought it was just nonsense. “How are you going to earn a living as an artist?” He wanted John to be a barber.

“If you’re a barber, you’ll always have a job.

You’ll always have food on the table.” This kind of story has been told a million times. My mother encouraged John, and kept our father at bay.

“He has a gift. Let him pursue it.” Obviously, as they say, the rest is history. Luckily, I didn’t have to put up with that. Once John made that breakthrough, then I had no problem.

JA: When did your father pass away?

SB: In January of 1973.

JA: So he lived long enough to see you make a success of comics, too. How did he feel about you wanting to go into comics?

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JA: He inked some of the work he did at that time, but not all of it. Would you ever erase pages for him, or just sit and watch?

SB: I remember one particular time... I must have been in high school. I remember this one time asking him for one of his pages. I said, “I’d like to try to ink these.” And he said, “Okay, go ahead.” So I started inking someone’s head. I got up for school the next morning, and John had already left for work, but my mother told me that he’d flipped out over the inking that I did on that head. That was the beginning of my love for inking. That’s what I consider myself: an old inker. Always have been and always will be.

JA: How did you learn to ink? Did you practice?

SB: That was my practice. I just picked up the brush, and it came naturally. I honestly don’t remember doing that much inking before

then. It was just something that came to me naturally. I felt very comfortable with a brush in my hand. It didn’t feel foreign to me at all.

JA: You did some backgrounds for him for about a year while he was working for Dell Publications around 1953. Roy Rogers was one of the features.

SB: Yeah, that’s right. A lot of times he would ask me to come in and help him out, because he was late with a job. There was one time it was hilarious. I had a job — it was the first or second job I had out of high school. I opted to go right to work out of high school rather than go to college, even though I had the opportunity to go to college. I just wanted to get into this business, and to this day I have no regrets about that, because I had a tremendous head start, and as far as the commercial art education, it was invaluable and much better than I could have gotten from any college curriculum.

But on this one occasion I had gotten home from work, and John called me and said, “I need you over here. I’m really in trouble. I’ve got to get this job finished and deliver it to the office by tomorrow morning first thing. Can you help me out?” I said, “Sure.” I went to his apartment — he’d been married for about a year — and we worked through the night. His wife was a nurse, so she was able to get us pills that would keep us awake. [laughter] The problem was that once John delivered his job, he went home and went to bed. I had to go to work. [laughter] I had gotten no sleep, I went

to work, worked that entire day, and when I got home I was an absolute zombie. I mean, I was almost incoherent from the lack of sleep.

But that was the kind of relationship we had where work was concerned.

That didn’t happen all the time. I don’t want to give that impression. I only worked with John on a part-time basis. I did mostly backgrounds. Depending on how tight John’s schedule was, he would rough out the pencils and I would tighten them up. I didn’t do that a lot, because John was a very jealous draughtsman, and he wanted his drawings to be just so, which is why he was never satisfied with anybody who inked him, including me. [laughter] JA: There were other people from Music & Art who went into comics. Did you go to school with any of them?

SB: I don’t recall anybody going into comics from my graduating class. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I was very dismayed about was the fact that not only comic books but syndicated comic strips were looked down upon. If you said, as I did numerous times, that you aspired someday to do either comic books or syndicated strips, kids would look at you like you had three heads.

One time we had a career discussion in one class, and I happened to say that I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I hoped that one day I might even be able to do a syndicated strip, so they started asking me questions. I could almost sense the disdain in the questions 11

(above) A panel from Rawhide Kid #68, featuring Sal’s inks over Larry Lieber’s pencils.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS (WWW.HA.COM)

RAWHIDE KID ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) A painted illustration from Sal’s days as a commercial artist.

that were being submitted until I started talking about the income of some of the syndicated comic strip artists. They were absolutely amazed, because at the time some of these guys were making two or three hundred thousand dollars a year because they were syndicated in literally thousands of newspapers across the country, back when we had thousands of

newspapers. All of a sudden I could detect a certain amount of respect there. [laughter] Money is a great motivator.

JA: Was John one of the reasons you wanted to go into comics?

SB: I guess. I can’t say for sure. I wanted to do commercial art. I loved the commercial illustrators of the day, guys like Robert Fawcett, Al Parker, Norman Rockwell... all of those guys. John and I used to just drool over their work. We bought all the weekly magazines just to see their illustrations. And I still have a lot of them in my scrap file.

JA: Where did you go to work when you graduated from high school?

SB: I got a job in a small, two-man advertising art studio in Manhattan through a newspaper ad in The New York Times. I wrote a letter and they asked me to come in for an interview. I got the job, and I think I was fired three months later. [laughter] I wanted to draw, and they wanted me to learn the production stuff, which I didn’t care for. Also, it was right after Korea, and a young guy who used to work for them came back from the war and didn’t have a job.

I think it was a combination of the two. I wasn’t really working out the way they wanted me to, and they thought they should give this guy a job. I couldn’t disagree with that.

I went to another commercial art studio.

This time it was a much larger studio. They did everything: they had airbrush artists there and photo retouchers and letterers. It was probably a 20- to 25-man studio. I was a gofer. Delivery jobs to clients and so on. But I was also learning a tremendous amount from all the people on staff. And it grew from there.

I left that job for some reason I can’t recall. It may have been because I was doing too much running around delivering packages rather than sitting down at a board and doing work, which is obviously what I wanted to do. So I quit, and I tried to get another job.

By that time I had turned 18 and I had to register for the military draft. When you registered, businesses wouldn’t hire you, because they figured they’d train you for six months to a year and then you’d be drafted. So I was desperate. I needed a job, and I took a job with a jewelry manufacturing company in midtown Manhattan: J.R. Wood and Sons. At the time they were the largest ring manufacturer in the world. I worked in their wedding ring depart-

12

ment, filling orders. Obviously I didn’t want to do that for a career, so I upped my draft. I went to the draft board and put my name higher on the list. I probably worked there for less than a year before I was drafted into the Army.

And it was all because I couldn’t get a job as an artist, because of my 1-A classification.

JA: The shooting war in Korea was over by then.

SB: Luckily for me it was over. There was only one skirmish we were concerned about, and that was the Suez Canal problem where Eisenhower sent in some planes. There was some talk about maybe shipping troops over there. I was with the Engineers Corps stationed at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia. Believe it or not, they made me an illustrator. [laughter] I went into the Army hearing all these stories about if you’re a doctor, they’re going to make you a cook, and if you’re a cook, they’re going to make you a truck driver. So I thought, “God knows what they’re going to make me.”

You fill out a questionnaire giving them your qualifications and so on, and they made me an illustrator. I can’t remember what the designation was. They shipped me down to Ft. Belvoir to the Training Aid Branch of the Engineer School, and I was an illustrator for

21 months. I did training aids for the Engineer Corps. We were doing film strips and charts.

Once I did an illustration of a tank crashing through a small bridge. It had something to do with the fact that the bridge was not built properly, and this M-61 tank had crashed through it into the water. Oh, man, did I have fun illustrating that. [Jim laughs] It was a black-and-white illustration — just a series of gray tones — and our captain came up to me and said, “How long are you going to take to do that thing? You should have been finished by now.” And I told him, “No, captain, this kind of thing takes time.” He was not an artist.

The guy had no art training at all and had no idea what he was talking about. Of course, I wanted to work on it as long as possible, so I told him it was going to take a long time, because, after all, this was art. [laughter] I kind of got him off my back with some B.S. JA: Did you ever work for a camp newspaper or anything like that?

SB: No. I never did anything like that. I was too occupied with the job that I had, which to an extent was a lot of fun. I mean, there was some drudgery, but I felt very fortunate that I had been designated an illustrator. I was in the Army for two years. I was drafted in 1956, 13

(above) Another illustration from Sal’s days as a commercial artist, this one done with gray tones.

and I was discharged in ’58 as a Specialist 3rd Class, which is equivalent to Corporal.

(below) A stylized fashion illustration from Sal’s commercial art days.

JA: And I take it you had no intention to reenlist?

SB: No, no. The whole purpose of pushing my draft number up was to get my military obligation over with so that I could get back into what I really wanted to do.

JA: When you were discharged, what did you do?

SB: I came home. We were going through a bit of a recession at the time, and it was not easy getting a job. I was told by the division head of the department I had worked for that, “We have some of the finest art studios around in the Washington, DC area. If you ever need a job, please don’t hesitate to let me know, and I’ll be able to connect you with some people at some really good art studios.” Obviously, I wanted to go home, and I got a job at a oneman art studio. He was a very nice man, but it was kind of a sweatshop. It was not at all what I wanted to do, so I contacted this gentleman I had worked for. Unfortunately, I don’t remember his name. He was true to his word, and he got me an interview with Creative Arts Studio, which at the time was the largest and best-known art studio in the Washington, DC area. They had probably 75 people or so working for them. They did an awful lot of government work. I would say 6570% of the work they did was for the government.

I got the job, by the way, at a salary that blew my mind. I asked for it thinking they were going to knock me down, and they didn’t. I was just beside myself with joy. I was floored that I actually got the salary I was asking for. It was $125 a week [laughs], which sounds ridiculous today. You can make more than that going to work for McDonald’s. But back then, it was a darn good salary, which was great, because I was still sending money home to my mom.

The first job they put me on was a training aids film strip. They were done in full color, but had a certain technique where they would use a particular kind of colored paper that you would cut out. These were realistic illustrations done in line, so it was like doing comics. I just fell right into it, and they loved what I was doing right off the bat.

I was so fortunate, because this was right up my alley. If they had asked me to paint anything — which they did later on — it was a bit more of a struggle, because I was not that proficient a painter. But, of course, I did learn an awful lot, because they had some really fine illustrators working for them.

JA: They sort of started you at the bottom and let you work your way up. Is that what you’re saying?

14

SB: Actually, what I found out later was that I came into the studio as one of the highest paid artists there. I could not believe it, because I considered myself a beginner. But here’s the difference: In New York, the experience I had as an illustrator in the military was worthless.

When I told people in New York during interviews — for jobs, by the way, offering less than half the money I made in Washington — about my experience as an illustrator in the Army, they said, “Who cares?” But in Washington, because of the fact that so much of it was government work, it counted for an awful lot. I didn’t realize it until later on, but when I showed them a reproduction of that illustration I did of the tank crashing into the water, essentially, that got me the salary that I wanted.

JA: Were you also doing ads and illustration?

SB: They didn’t do a lot of advertising work, but I did a lot of illustration. We would do illustrations for different departments in the government like the Department of Agriculture. I did a lot of work for the Pentagon, and a lot of it was fully painted illustrations. It was almost like I had died and gone to heaven. [Jim laughs] Really. It was a phenomenal studio with some very talented people, and the learning process there for me was just unbelievable.

JA: Was there a point where you considered yourself one of the top people there?

SB: I would say so. It took me a little while to get there. I was certainly one of the better draughtsmen in the place. A lot of the guys there were gifted, but were not gifted draughtsmen. Whenever they had figure work to do, I was the guy they usually turned to. Whether it was black-and-white or painting or whatever.

That was kind of a feather in my cap.

JA: Were you living in Washington or Virginia?

SB: I lived in Washington for the first three months. My godparents lived down here, which was great when I was stationed at Ft. Belvoir, because I used to visit them quite often. They were wonderful people. I loved them dearly. I lived with them for about three months until I could find a place of my own.

Then I ran into an old army buddy who was in the Washington area looking for a job. He was looking for a place to live, too, so we roomed together. We found a really nice, furnished efficiency apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.

JA: What was it like to live there as opposed to what you had been used to in Brooklyn?

SB: I loved it. It’s a very funny thing. I’ve lived in Virginia most of my life. My wife Joan and I have made frequent trips to New York — obviously to visit family up there, but also on our own. The last visit we made was for an anniversary. We decided to take a long weekend and go to New York. We went to a show and did all of the stuff that you do when you’re in New York. It was kind of an up and down weekend. I said to her, “Gee, people always say you can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the boy.

Well, that’s not true for me.” I consider myself a 100% red-blooded Virginian. I’ve been living here since I was in my early 20s.

JA: So living there wasn’t that hard of a transition then.

SB: Not at all. I loved it. I was a young guy, independent. I was on my own living in my own apartment with a good buddy. I started dating Joan, whom I met at Creative Arts Studio, in late 1958. She was the secretary to the president and the account executive of the company.

We started dating in February of ’59 and were married in May of 1960. We were married eight years before we had our first child. Then in the space of four years we had three. It’s feast or famine with us. [laughter] My oldest son is Joe; number two is Tony; and number three is Mike.

15

(above) A self-illustration done in the late ’60s/early ’70s. ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

JA: Were you and John critical of each other’s work there?

SB: Constantly. At that point, I’m a professional, he’s a professional. Even though he had been a professional quite a bit longer than I had, most of his experience was in comic books.

(above) Like John, Sal did not use models when he drew for comics or illustration work, but he does draw from models for his own pleasure and for the knowledge and experience he gains from it. ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

JA: How long were you at Creative Arts Studio?

SB: I worked for them for a couple of years.

Then I got a call from New York from John.

The comics industry had pretty much gone to pot. He had a job with an advertising/illustration studio in New York City called Alexander Chaite, Inc. Ironically, I had gone up to them for an interview years earlier when I first got out of high school, and I was turned down by them. Now I was presented with this opportunity because they wanted somebody in my mold. I filled the bill perfectly, which is why John called me. Joan and I moved to New York. We lived up there for about a year and a half. That was in 1961.

JA: What was it like working in a studio with John?

SB: We had a great time. It was the kind of studio where you were either working yourself to death or were sitting around for hours with nothing to do — sometimes for a day or two. At those times we would play chess and all kinds of silly stuff. It was just a great atmosphere, and I had a chance to work with some of the most gifted and talented illustrators that I have ever worked with before or since. It was a fabulous place in that respect.

Bob Peak got his start there.

John and I were doing mostly comprehensives, or comps, which are rough drawings of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We did them in color with pastels. They were fullcolor and there were certain techniques that you had to use, and it was something I had to learn how to do. It was rather difficult, because these had to look very, very finished, and working with chalk is not that easy. But they had some masters there, and I learned so much from these people. It was a fantastic education.

16

JA: So in this case it wasn’t as big brother and little brother, it was as equals.

SB: Pretty much. He still looked upon me as his kid brother. He always did. But there was nothing wrong with that. I humored him. [laughter] JA: John had spent such a long time in comics and here he was doing something else. How do you think he felt about it?

SB: He loved it, because he did not enjoy comics. He told everybody that, including me about 842,000 times. He loved what he was doing there; this was what he really wanted to do. I was very, very happy for him, because I felt that John should have been doing more serious work. He was that gifted. And the reason he got a job with this company was not because he knew how to do the kind of work they wanted him to do, because he had no experience doing that kind of work. He got it because of his drawing ability. When he showed them his samples and they saw his drawing ability, the first thing they asked him was, “Do you hire models?” He said, “No, I draw from memory.” They could not believe it. He got the job based upon that strength. I got the job because I had the experience. I had been in the field for two or three years.

After a year and a half, things were not going well at the company, and I could see the handwriting on the wall. John saw it, too, and we both decided we’d better start looking around. At the time, one of the account executives at Creative Arts Studio, my good friend Mel Emde opened his own studio [Design Center] in Washington, DC, with a couple of partners who also came from Creative Arts.

He was a very dynamic guy and I had a tremendous amount of respect for him. They said, “Any time you want, come on down and we’ll have a spot for you.” That’s when I left Chaite, who was out of business less than a year later. I worked for Design Center until 1968, when I got my first comic book job.

Chapter Two

A Heroic Departure

JA: John had already come back to comics before you got into the field. Why did John go back to comics?

SB: John lived in Port Jefferson, Long Island, which is quite a distance from Manhattan. He had to commute, I think it was close to five hours a day. Maybe not quite that much, but pretty close. It was really wearing him out. He would get home very late at night. It was the type of business where if they asked you to work on the weekend, you had to work on the weekend. If he had to work at night, a lot of times he would miss the last train going out to Long Island, and have to spend the night in the city. He really hated that side of it. He loved the work, but he hated the commute. It was a real conflict for him.

Ironically, he ran into Stan Lee on the street one day. They got to talking and Stan said, “Hey, the comic book industry is beginning to flourish again, John. Come and see me. We need guys.” When he saw that opportunity of being able to work at home, it was no contest. He took it up right away.

JA: What did you do? Did you make an appointment with Stan?

SB: I actually made up six pages of pencil samples — just a very simple storyline. I used the Incredible Hulk as the character.

Let me digress for a minute. I had to learn how to do comic books. I had never drawn super-heroes before. I had storytelling ability because of my training in film strips and that kind of thing, but I had no idea how to do comics. So I went out and bought a whole bunch of Marvel comics. I bought those drawn

JA: Why did you leave Design Center to go into comics?

SB: For the simple reason that I’d always liked them. I didn’t have that [chuckles] hatred that John said he had. And it also afforded me the opportunity of working at home. That is a tremendous plus. You have that independence and freedom. I’m a fairly disciplined person, so I didn’t have to worry about goofing off. For as long as I’ve been doing comics I put in a regular five-day week, eight hours a day. I was commuting into Washington, DC, and the traffic was horrible. It took me over an hour to get to work and over an hour to get home, unless there was an accident and it took a lot longer.

Once I added it all together and saw that comics were on the way back and things were going well again, I said, “Let’s take a shot and see what happens.”

JA: So John didn’t suggest it to you.

SB: Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I asked him, “Do they need guys?” and he said, “Yes.” 17

(below) Opening splash page from The Incredible Hulk Annual #14. It is fitting that Sal used Hulk in the samples he drew in order to get work at Marvel. Sal went on to draw The Incredible Hulk over an incredible tenyear run.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(above) A photo of Sal during his Avengers days used in Marvel editorial material.

(below) For this 1969 cover illustration for Marvelmania Catalog #2, Sal reworked his splash page from Avengers #71.

ART COURTESY OF JERRY BOYD

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

by Jack Kirby and Gene Colan and all the guys who worked for Marvel, and literally worked every night for about a year to learn how to do these things. I was that determined to do it. I thought my wife was going to divorce me. [laughter] Literally, I would come home from work, we’d eat dinner, and I’d go down to my studio. I had a studio at home even though I didn’t do any freelance work. And I would just work and practice, and work and practice.

JA: What were you concentrating on?

SB: How to produce a dynamic page. When I saw what guys like Kirby and Gene Colan, and my brother, and Jim Steranko were doing, I would draw up a page and I would look at it and say, “God, this is awful.” It took me a whole year working practically every night and every weekend. There were also some things going on at the studio where I was working that I was not happy about, so this was a very, very attractive alternative.

JA: Did you show the samples to John?

SB: Oh, sure. The first few samples I did which I thought were okay, he ripped them to shreds. He said, “You’re going to be competing with guys that can put this stuff to shame.

You’ve got to be as good as they are.” He criticized them over the phone, and essentially what he said was, “Your drawing is okay.

Everything is okay, but you need to become 150% more dynamic. The stuff’s just got to fly off the page. You have to be much more powerful. What you’re doing is too passive and too quiet.” That was the kind of thing Stan wanted from all of his guys. The first time I talked to Stan he went through that same spiel. He told me he wanted everything to be powerful. “Once you draw it and you think it’s good enough, redo it and make it even better.” In other words, John was relating to me what Stan had related to him.

So I went back to work some more. He saw things that I was not able to see at the time.

Once I got into the business, then I realized what he was talking about. Once I got the hang of it I made up those six sample pages of pencils — just pencils, which I regret, because I wanted to be an inker. [laughter] I didn’t want to pencil. My first few jobs for Marvel were inking jobs, but I did those while working for Design Center. I wanted to work full-time for Marvel, so it was out of necessity that I penciled.

JA: What did Stan Lee think?

SB: He loved them. He asked me to come on up to New York, which I did, and I went through the most fantastic interview I’ve ever had in my life. [laughs] Stan was leaping on his chair and his desk, just to relate to me physically what he wanted on a comic book page. It was fascinating and it was charming all at the same time. He made the sound effects, the whole nine yards. I thought the guy was going to leap out the window. He demonstrated every other way you could possibly demonstrate what he wanted on those pages — the dynamics and so on.

JA: Did you have to go home and do more samples?

SB: No, they started me on The Avengers, which was a nightmare because it was a group book, and those are the most difficult to do. I believe Sam Grainger was the inker.

18

JA: And Roy Thomas wrote that script. How much of a plot did he give you?

SB: It was a very complete plot. But he didn’t break down the pages, he didn’t tell me what he wanted in each panel — that was the Marvel way at the time. That was Stan’s brainstorm: Leave the pictorial storytelling to the artists.

JA: Did you talk to Roy before you drew it?

SB: I don’t have a specific recollection of that, but I’m sure we did. There was a certain amount of intimidation there, because I’d never done anything like that before. It was my first job, and obviously I wanted to make a good impression. I worked my buns off. I think I did some things that they were very happy with, and some things they weren’t happy with. Overall, I would say that the job was a reasonable success. I think it’s fair to say that I solidified my position with them. I think they figured that they had a guy who at the very least had potential.

JA: Was there any criticism of the pages when you turned them in?

SB: Not that I recall. They did make a couple of changes to the villain. They didn’t like some of the things that I did, and they made him look a little more authentic. Again, I’d never done anything like that. I’d never created a character like that before.

JA: You were just flying by the seat of your pants, just going on instinct, weren’t you?

SB: Yes, exactly. When I look at the book now I almost laugh. If I was a fan, I would have said, “Sal, become a plumber.” [laughter] JA: The feedback you got from that first job, was that from Stan or Roy? SB: Primarily from Roy. After that first interview, I actually had very little contact with Stan.

JA: What were your impressions of Stan?

SB: I had some preconceived ideas going in, because John knew him pretty well having worked for him for quite a few years. I just thought Stan was a very dynamic guy and maybe a little intimidating. He made a huge impression on me. I remember when we were finished with the interview, he walked out of his office, and Roy and Sol Brodsky walked into the office to talk to me about something.

We were there talking, and Stan walked in

and said, “Okay, can I have my office back?” and he said it in a somewhat irritated way.

Roy and Sol turned around quickly and walked out, and I was right behind them. [laughter] This was a guy that was definitely in charge. Stan was the boss and everybody knew it. But my overall impression of him was very positive. I liked him right off the bat.

JA: What were your initial impressions of Roy? SB: I thought Roy was a really nice guy.

Obviously, he was not the boss, but very intelligent, very articulate, and a guy I enjoyed working with. I liked Roy. JA: When you did your first issue of Avengers, were you given the book or was it a trial issue?

19

(above) Page 11 of Avengers #68, Sal’s first issue as penciler. Sal says that Ultron was touched up a bit by the bullpen to get him more on model. Inks by Sam Grainger.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ULTRON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

20

SB: No, I was given the book. That was my understanding, but I think they realized that it was a little unfair to start somebody who had very little or no experience in comic books, especially super-hero comic books, with a difficult book like that. The group books are unbelievably difficult to do. You’re not just worried about one character, you’re worried about a whole bunch of characters, and they’re usually fighting a whole bunch of bad guys. I think they realized after a few issues that they had to let me get my feet wet on something that was a little bit easier for me to do. I think the next book I did was Sub-Mariner.

JA: Since Sam Grainger was inking you on Avengers, I imagine your pencils were pretty complete.

SB: Very tight, very tight pencils. I didn’t like his inks over my work, but that’s not a disparagement of Sam. I like very few inkers over my work. I was just as bad as my brother John in that respect. [Jim laughs] That’s why I wanted to ink my own stuff, because I thought that was the only time it looked the way I wanted it to look.

JA: It wasn’t Sam’s ability, it was just your preference.

SB: Exactly.

JA: When you’re figuring out how to tell a story, and now you’ve got a group book, you had to think of things like if you’ve got four

people fighting four other people, you can’t show all eight in every panel. How did you work out those dynamics for yourself?

SB: I had the greatest teachers in the world. I had Jack Kirby, I had Gene Colan, I had John Buscema and John Romita. John Romita was one of the most underrated guys in the business. I thought he was a tremendous talent. I think most people in the business would agree. So I would see what they did. I would open up a Kirby comic book and say, “This guy is so good! He’s unbelievable!

He’s a genius!” And that would inspire me to do whatever it was I was doing. I didn’t even come close to what he was doing, but at least it helped me. This is the nature of our business. We never stop learning. When you stop learning, you stop growing, and the only alternative to growth is death. You have to continue to grow, otherwise you’re done for as an artist. I’ve always believed that, and I always will.

JA: Super-heroes are drawn eight to ten heads high, generally, and normal people are about seven-and-a-half heads high. When you were drawing ordinary people in scenes with super-heroes, how conscious were you of the fact that you needed to make a dichotomy between one type or another?

SB: Honestly, unless a character was specifically smallish, I would probably draw everybody in the same mode. If I’m drawing Captain America and he’s talking to a young 21

(above) In this panel from Avengers #78, inked by Tom Palmer, you can see how difficult it can be to fit all the characters of a group into a single panel. It also appears that the Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch figures were redrawn and pasted over the original drawings.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Avengers #71, page 19, with inks

by Sam Grainger. Sal may not have cared for Grainger’s inking job, but this is still a very dramatic page.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: You were having to learn things like when to do an establishing shot, and when not to.

Did that come easy to you once you broke in?

SB: No. It was very difficult. I will confess that, for the first five years I was in this business, every day was a struggle. After about five years, there came a point where all of a sudden everything seemed to come together. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but it just started coming so much easier.

Everything just sort of culminated in better storytelling, better drawing, more dynamic pages, more powerful panels, and I thought, “Wow, I think maybe I have finally arrived.”

JA: You took the storytelling template these guys had, and filtered it into your own perception.

SB: Right. I was influenced by all of them, and I don’t mind saying that at all. I don’t know about a lot of the newer guys today, because I’m not familiar with them, but the guys of my era and the guys just after me, if any of them say they were not influenced by Jack Kirby, they’re either blind or liars.

Everybody was influenced by Jack Kirby.

(above) The Avengers stand side by side as they are confronted by Kang, the Conqueror.

Avengers #128, page 32.

Inks by Joe Staton.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Most of Sal’s notes have been trimmed away, but this shows the type of notes he would typically make.

Sub-Mariner #33, page 4.

Inks by Jim Mooney.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

guy, unless there are some specifics about the guy I have to follow, I would make the guy maybe a hair smaller than Captain America.

But to say I was really conscious of it, no, not at all. It was just something that came naturally. I just did whatever the script called for in terms of the characters.

JA: If you had Captain America standing side by side with Iron Man and Thor, how much thought were you giving to their relative shapes and sizes?

SB: Iron Man, in his costume, would be over six feet tall, obviously. So is Cap. He’s supposed to be 6' 2", 6' 3", and Thor, when you put his wings on, would be taller, or taller looking anyhow. Physically, they’d all be very, very similar.

22

JA: You said you were struggling in learning how to tell a story. Did it bother you that when you drew the characters talking that you didn’t know what they were going to be saying?

SB: Yes, but we kind of knew what they were going to be saying. As a matter of fact, those were the days when we would write down notes for each panel. I did it extensively. Well, I didn’t overdo it, let’s put it that way. There were some guys that would write a book under each panel. I was not like that. I would make pertinent points. But it didn’t bother me. Of all the elements that go into making a comic book, storytelling, initially, for me, was the one thing I felt most comfortable with. Even though my storytelling was not what it should have been back then — and as I grew I realized that — I really didn’t have a problem with it.

JA: Did you ever find your pacing was off and have to shoehorn something in because you were getting near the end of the book?

SB: That happened to me a few times in the beginning. Maybe I would leave too much room at the end or not enough room at the end, and I had to do some really big panels or crowd things in to finish telling the story.

23

[chuckles] Sure. I think that happened to pretty much everybody at one point or another. (below) Sal never redrew pages, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t make corrections. Here the figures of the Living Laser and Power Man have been pasted up onto the board, perhaps due to mistakes in the costume, perhaps to make them more dynamic. Avengers #78, page 20. Inks by Tom Palmer.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: But if you got to that point, you wouldn’t go back and redraw a page to make things fit, would you?

SB: No, I can’t recall ever doing that. And the reason for that is very simple. I did most of my work before I touched pencil to paper. I would sit sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes just thinking about what I wanted to do on a page. I had the whole thing visualized before I even picked up a pencil. No thumbnails. I can honestly say that maybe once or twice — and this is going on 50 years — can I remember throwing a page aside and redoing it. Usually what I envisioned I was able to transfer to the paper. I never had much of a problem doing that.

JA: Did you do much underdrawing — blocking out shapes before you finished the pencils?

SB: Oh, sure. Doesn’t everybody? I saw what Kirby did. It was almost like a broken line that he would draw, and he would rough in the figure that way, then start drawing right on top of it. That was very understandable when you look at Jack’s work, because although a lot of people said he couldn’t draw, Jack was a fabulous draughtsman. He was the greatest communicator in comics history, but his figures were not human. Anatomically, they were all out of whack, but it worked brilliantly. I’m not sure very many others could do that.

JA: Did movies ever influence your storytelling?

SB: No, I never much connected the two. I did only in the sense where I would think, “Gee, isn’t that a beautiful shot?” I can’t really think of a specific instance where I did that, but I remember thinking upon occasion “Boy, that would work real well for this panel,” or whatever.

JA: How much reference did you use in the early days?

SB: I used it whenever I needed to. But with comics, a lot of times you don’t need to do that, especially back then. I mean, look at Kirby’s buildings. Buildings like that don’t exist. But they were beautiful. There was a period of time where I was drawing my buildings like Jack Kirby drew them, so in that sense I suppose I didn’t use reference a lot — only when the occasion called for it.

JA: It’s more fun to draw from your gut.

SB: That, too. That’s why comics is the most fantastic way in the world to earn a living. It really is. I describe it to people when I tell them what I do for a living, I tell them, “Yeah, I just sit around all day drawing silly pictures, and I get paid for it.”

JA: When you were drawing action scenes, did you ever hear the sound effects in your head?

SB: All the time. I’d be making them sometimes, too. My poor wife would come in sometimes — she was sweet enough to come in and bring me a cup of coffee — and I’d be in there making noises, and I’d have a snarl on my face. [laughter] She’d say, “Oh, my God. What’s going on now?” It’s amazing she stayed married to me all these years.

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JA: So if you drew a character sneering, you’d be sneering.

SB: Oh, absolutely. And everybody does that.

I remember John doing that all the time. The few times I did work with John, I would look up sometimes, and he’d have a real snarl on his face.

JA: Were you identifying yourself with those characters? Were you putting yourself in those scenes?

SB: Not really. I tried to feel what was happening. If somebody lunges at somebody else, you’ve got to feel it. You want to feel the impact of the blow. You want to feel the fist going past the guy’s jaw. You’ve got to feel that inside you before you start drawing it.

JA: Jack Kirby told me once that sometimes if he was angry about something, that anger would come out on the page. Did you ever feel that way?

SB: I didn’t let what was happening to me personally effect what I was doing on the page. But when you’re working on the page, you’re living the moment of the page. You’ve got to, otherwise it won’t work.

JA: How did you develop your concept of character design and costume design?

SB: I don’t know if I ever had it. [laughter] People don’t think that’s one of my strong points. Later on, into the ’80s and ’90s, I got fairly good at it. I don’t think I ever created any characters that were very prominent.

I’m not sure I ever had a great feeling for it.

Creating characters and costumes was not one of my strong suits. One of the ones that lasted for a while was the Falcon. John Romita drew the initial costume, but they wanted to jazz it up a little, which I did in a Captain America story. I redesigned his costume, and they loved it. I thought, “Oh, my God. It’s just awful.” They thought it was great. What do I know?

JA: In the early days of you working for Marvel, how often did you go to the offices?

SB: I would probably go up there three or four times a year. Every two or three months or so.

JA: What were your impressions of Sol Brodsky?

SB: Sol was the nicest guy in the world, a great human being. I loved working for him,

and I think everybody else did, too. If you did something he didn’t like, he would yell at you on the phone. “Come on, Sal. Get with the program,” or something like that. But he was a terrific guy.

I remember one thing specifically. It was the first Silver Surfer book that I inked over John’s pencils — the one with Thor [issue #4].

There was a one-panel close-up of Loki, who was supposed to be in a spirit form, so the holding figure lines had to be very, very light to make it seem like he's not flesh and bone.

Sol called me and said, “Sal, this is weak. It’s not such and such and so and so.” “Sol, this is what the story calls for.” There was a pause and he said, “Well, okay, but this is what I want you to do with it.” He sent it back to me, and I had to redo a few things on the head. I think it was because Sol didn’t want to admit that he was wrong. [laughter] I won’t accuse him of that, really, because he was a great guy to work for, and I got very, very few calls from Sol about anything like that.

JA: Did you spend any time with John Romita?

SB: One specific time was when they asked me to do a Spider-Man story. I believe they were considering giving me Amazing Spider-Man, which I think John was working on at the 25

(above) Cap may be avoiding the issue, but he’s right. Sal was told to jazz up Jazzy John’s recent costume update for the Falcon, and the wings Sal added had the additional purpose of enabling our hero to fly.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

CAPTAIN AMERICA, FALCON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: As you were learning in those early days, were you fast or slow?

SB: At first I was very slow. If I knocked out six or eight pages a week I was happy. Then I started getting a little bit better, and I could probably do a couple pages a day. But once I hit that five-year transitional period, I was like a machine. I could grind the stuff out. What was amazing about it, to me anyway — and there might be people who disagree with me — was I was doing the best work of my career. It was just an amazing process. Everything just fell into place, and all of a sudden I found it very easy to do. And it was a lot more fun.

JA: How long did it take you to get comfortable with the concept of super-heroes and super-villains? It was such a change for you.

SB: I was never uncomfortable with it. I thought it was a blast. I had a lot of fun.

JA: John was always saying how he hated these characters, but you didn’t feel that way yourself.

SB: No, I did not. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a great way to make a buck. [laughter]

(above) Sal inked John Romita on this cover to Amazing Spider-Man #95.

He also inked Romita’s loose breakdowns for the interiors of this issue.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

time. Because this was the number one book for Marvel, Stan wanted to talk to me in person about it. I had to go up to New York, and talk with Stan and John. They were both telling me things I needed to know about the character and so on, and then John and I went out to lunch. We had a real nice lunch together, and John was relating to me how he approached doing comics, and we talked about personal stuff — family and such. It was a very pleasant lunch. And I don’t think I ever got to do the Spider-Man book, and I can’t remember why. Maybe they just thought I wasn’t ready. Shortly thereafter John did very loose breakdowns on a SpiderMan book that they wanted me to do the finishes for. That was one of the few Amazing Spider-Man books that I worked on.

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JA: Do you think John really hated superheroes as much as he said he did?

SB: You know, Jim, there’s a dichotomy here.

John did not enjoy drawing Spider-Man. John enjoyed drawing people. When you’re doing a character like Spider-Man, you’ve got to draw buildings and cars, you’ve got to draw all the junk that goes on around these guys — the interiors of rooms, and so on and so forth. That’s what John did not enjoy. He loved to draw. Drawing was his life. If this man was for some reason unable to draw, he would’ve died not when he did, but years and years earlier. He ate, slept and breathed drawing. This was the reason he did not enjoy comic books that much. Now, I’m not sure the [chuckles] hatred that he professed was as intense as he made it sound. For example, he loved drawing Conan, because Conan was pure fantasy. He didn’t have to draw skyscrapers. He would draw these neat, little historical towns that really did not exist. He could create anything he wanted. He really enjoyed that part of it. That’s where the dichotomy exists. John loved to draw, but there were some things he hated drawing, and unfortunately in comic books you have to draw all this other stuff.

To a great degree, I’m like that, too.

That’s why I didn’t enjoy penciling so much.

How long did I draw Spectacular SpiderMan? I did Spider-Man for twelve years, and I enjoyed a lot of it, but there was a lot of it I did not enjoy.

JA: What led you to start inking for Marvel?

SB: I wrote Sol Brodsky a letter. I wanted to find out who to talk to about getting inking work, and my brother said, “Talk to Sol.” So I wrote this very nice letter and told him all about myself, and that I could do anything with a brush or pen, and that I was also very disciplined and a very dependable individual.

I told him there was nothing more that I would like to do than ink work for Marvel. He called me and said, “Sal, we don’t have anything right now, but hang loose and I’ll try to come up with something for you.” I called him a couple of times just to bug him a little bit

and let him know that I was still alive, and eventually the first job came through. It was a rush job. I knocked myself out to get it back to him real fast. It was a Western. I believe the character was called Gunhawk. He had two guns, and for some reason he grabbed the left gun with his right hand and the right gun with his left hand. I don’t know how that’s physically possible [laughter], but that’s what he did. I don’t remember who the penciler was, but I worked my fanny off on that to do as good a job as I could possibly do.

JA: The reason I’m asking is that I have “Gunhawk” [Western Gunfighters #1] down as 1970, but Silver Surfer came out in ’69.

SB: It can’t be 1970, because that was the first job I did for Marvel, and I remember the month. It was June of 1968.

JA: Maybe it didn’t get printed right away.

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(below) This early ’70s ad was obviously done for a comic convention program book — most likely one of the New York Comic Art Convention shows. Sal’s first inking assignment for Marvel was a “Gunhawk” story, but by the time of this ad the Western hero had picked up a partner.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

THE CAT, GUN HAWKS, MANTHING, SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC. DOC SAVAGE ™ AND ©2010 ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS, INC. D/B/A CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS.

would definitely put a lot of myself into it, and change whatever I felt needed to be changed.

(above) Sal took over inking John’s pencils with Silver Surfer #4. John’s response to that first job: “I thought the feathering was sloppy.”

There is plenty of feathering in this panel from page 10 of Silver Surfer #4, so you be the judge.

SILVER SURFER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) A dramatic page from Silver Surfer #7, Sal’s last issue as inker.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SILVER SURFER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

SB: That I don’t know, but I do remember doing that job in June of 1968, because it was my very first job for Marvel Comics.

JA: Here you were working over somebody else’s work, but you’d always done your own work. What was that experience like for you initially?

SB: It was great. It was fun, because I had tremendous confidence in my inking ability, even though I did not have great confidence in my penciling ability. As far as inking was concerned, I could ink anybody, any way they wanted, and that was the truth. I felt that way then, and I feel that way now.

JA: So even early on, if you felt the need to change something, you didn’t mind changing it?

SB: Well, as I recall, Jim, I probably would not have changed anything in that particular case, because I did not want to be that presumptuous. If they had approved the pencils as they were, then I was going to ink them as they were. Years later they would ask me to change things on certain pencilers. I remember the short time I worked for DC, they were giving me all of these young guys that could hardly hold a pencil in their hands, and asking me to “tweak it.” In cases like that, I 28

JA: How did you get the job of inking your brother?

SB: As you’ll recall, Joe Sinnott inked the first three Silver Surfer books. John was not happy with the inking Joe was doing on that. Joe is a phenomenal inker. I think he’s one the greatest of all time. But he did not ink John well. The reason he didn’t ink John well was simply because he lost some of John’s drawing. John would go crazy, because Joe’s style of inking was somewhat overpowering, and at the end it looked like Joe Sinnott. It didn’t look like John Buscema anymore. John did not like that, because he was knocking himself out on this character, because this was a very important project that Stan had come up with. I mean, they were double-sized issues. John told him, “I don’t want Joe inking my work. He’s losing my penciling. Why am I knocking myself out doing these tight pencils when by the very nature of his line and his technique and his style, he’s changing things.” Stan was very reluctant, but he said, “Okay, who do you want?” He said, “I want my brother,” and that’s how I got it. John knew he didn’t have the time to ink it, because it was a double-sized issue. There was no way he would have been able to make the deadline, but he knew that I knew how to ink his work. He was a little spotty on my first issue, but after that he was absolutely delighted with what I did.

JA: Knowing how demanding your brother was, did you feel any hesitancy of any kind?

SB: No, only that I wanted to do as good a job as I knew how to do, because I knew John would have beaten me up if I didn’t. [laughter] Nah, he wasn’t edgy. He was a pro. I knew what I was doing. I knew what John wanted. I knew how to ink his work. I knew how to be very faithful to his drawings.

JA: How critical was he of you inking him on Silver Surfer?

SB: When the book was finally published, Joan and I went up to New York to spend the weekend with John and his family. I asked, “Well, what did you think?” Do you know what his comment was? “I thought the feathering was sloppy.” I said, “That’s it? My feathering was sloppy?” But that was John. That’s just the way he was. That was his comment. If

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it was anything more than that I probably would have been very disappointed. I probably would’ve thought he didn’t like what I did.

But when he said my feathering was sloppy, I figured, in John’s way that’s a compliment.

Generally speaking, he liked what I did. So I tightened up my feathering a little bit more, and the next issue he was very happy with.

(below) Long before Sal took over as penciler for a long run on Captain America, he inked his brother, John, for two issues. Captain America #114, page 11 (left), and Captain America #115, page 5 (right).

BUCKY, CAPTAIN AMERICA, RED SKULL, SHARON CARTER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: You said earlier that he was never happy with anybody’s inks, even yours.

SB: To an extent, but if push came to shove, if John needed somebody else to ink him, I was the guy he would’ve picked. In other words, I was the lesser of all the other evils out there. [laughter] There was one other that he was very, very happy with, and he inked some of the later Silver Surfer books: Dan Adkins. Dan did an absolutely beautiful job on John’s pencils. I remember John calling me, “Did you see the latest issue of the Surfer?” “Yeah, and it looks great.” “Man, what an inker! He did a great job!” He was

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just raving about the guy. That was the only time I recall John raving about somebody’s inking. He never even raved about mine. But I was his brother, so he couldn’t give me too big a head. [laughter] It’s just the way he was. He was kind of a gruff guy, you know?

He said what he thought.

JA: After the Surfer, I have you in 1969 inking a little Captain America. This was before your penciling stint.

SB: That was on a trip I took to New York.

John had done a Captain America book, I think it was with the Red Skull. They asked me to ink it, so I took the pages home with me.

I went up for another reason, and maybe they gave it to me because I was there, [laughs] I don’t know. I also had to completely redo a figure in one panel. It wasn’t because John did it wrong, but it didn’t conform to the way the story was supposed to be. There were a couple of other minor changes in a couple of different panels, too.

JA: How fast of an inker were you in the early to mid-’70s? How long did it take you to develop speed as an inker?

SB: I think I was always fairly fast. Not as fast an inker as I was a penciler. I think I was reasonably fast. I could probably ink three pages a day comfortably. If I had to do more than that, I could.

JA: When you inked a penciler for the first time, would you look at all the pages and think about what approach to take, or would you just start in? What would go through your head?

SB: I would probably look at the whole job first. Working with the brush, for me, is such an automatic thing, it’s almost an extension of my fingers. I just put the brush to the paper, and I start working. I have to warm up a little bit, especially today. I have arthritis in my hand. Not seriously, but enough to make me have to warm up a little bit to loosen up my hand. Back then I didn’t have to worry about things like that, so I would just look at the page and start to get a feel for how I should approach it. Then I would dip the brush into the bottle and go to work.

JA: When did you switch to a pen?

SB: Here’s a funny story. Unfortunately, the industry got to a point sometime back in the ’80s — I used to use Winsor & Newton brushes, because they were far and away the best in the business. I used a #3 and I used a #4, too, which was a pretty good size. But they all come to the same point. They had snap; they came to a beautiful point. You could do anything with them, and they lasted forever, even using India ink, which is very destructive to brushes. Then they went to pot. I’ve heard several theories about it, that the company was sold and started using different manufacturing techniques, whatever. Anyway, the brushes stunk, and you couldn’t find good brushes anymore. It drove me nuts. I decided, “The hell with it. Let me go to a pen.”

This is one of the ways I have enjoyed growing as an artist. I was a big, big fan of Bill Sienkiewicz, and I always liked to do things a little differently from time to time just to keep me refreshed. I liked to have a fresh approach to what I was doing, instead of doing it the same old way over and over again. That’s kind of how I kept my interest alive. So I thought, “Let me try something new.” I started working

with a pen, and I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun, because it was a totally different feel. I make no bones about it, either. I readily admit that I was trying to emulate what Bill Sienkiewicz was doing, because he was a very hot guy at the time. I thought, “The look of this stuff! How does he do this? How does he do that? This is beautiful stuff. This guy’s got talent coming out of his ears.” So I emulated him, and this is how I’ve always grown as an artist, by looking at other people. Everybody grows that way. You can’t be an island. You have to look at other people, and see how they do things. They not only help you grow, but they’re also an inspiration to you. At least, that’s the way it’s always been with me.

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(above) This 1988 cover of Spectacular Spider-Man #134 kicked off Sal’s second run on the series with a bang. Sal shows his admiration for Bill Sienkiewicz’s work in his inking. Ironically, the previous month’s cover had been penciled and inked by Sienkiewicz.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SIN-EATER, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Back when you were more of a brush man, what would you use a pen for? Would you use it for texture or small faces?

SB: No, when I was using a brush, I was using a brush, period. That’s it. When I went to pen, I used pen except for putting in big, solid blacks.

You didn’t need a quality brush to do that.

(below) Take Roy Thomas’ advice and squint just right at this page from Avengers #68 and maybe you’ll see a little John Buscema, too.

Inks by Sam Grainger.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE

AUCTIONS

AVENGERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Speaking of influences, there is a touch of your brother in your earlier work, and some people did compare you with your brother.

How did it feel to be compared with him?

SB: It didn’t bother me a bit. If you’re going to compare me, who could you be compared to that’s better? There’s no question in my mind, and not because he’s my brother, but being as objective as I can be, he was one of the most gifted artists I have ever known. When it comes to drawing ability, he’s equalled by

maybe two or three guys I can think of, and even that is questionable. Joe Kubert would be one. Joe Kubert is a phenomenal draughtsman. I would give John the edge, but Joe Kubert is tremendous. John was a lot more dedicated than I, and overall he was a lot more gifted than I am. I had no problem being compared to him, and I would readily admit he was a better artist. So were a lot of other guys.

JA: Unless you’re Michaelangelo, there’s always someone better.

SB: Exactly. But it was a fact of life, and he was my brother. There was no jealousy between us. It didn’t exist.

JA: Roy Thomas said something funny. When he was writing Avengers, Stan kept calling John away to do another project, and you filled in. Roy said, “You know, Sal was very good. He followed John’s lead somewhat, and I followed Stan’s lead. If you squinted at the books just right, you’d think that we were Stan and John.” [laughter] SB He has a point there. It’s funny, and it’s true to a great degree. But the simple fact of the matter is I was just getting started. I had no problem looking at what other people did, and John was one of the guys that I looked at all the time. And it definitely showed in the work.

JA: And because you were influenced by him, and you were also a Hal Foster and Alex Raymond fan, that’s why I think your work looks more illustrative than someone like Kirby, who was out of the Milton Caniff school to some extent.

SB: I guess. I don’t know if we can put Jack into that kind of a pigeon-hole.

JA: Jack himself said he was heavily influenced by Caniff.

SB: And I have no doubt about it, but when he departed from that style, he became very unique. I don’t even see that influence anymore. Certainly not in Jack’s later work, because I think it suffered somewhat. I had the privilege one time I was visiting Marvel of seeing some of Jack’s finished pencils, and I was amazed. It was just so beautiful. And he made it look so easy. There was a young lady that worked up there, and she called it “the magic pencil.” [laughs] It was a good way to describe it. I never inked him, and I’m telling you I would have done anything to ink Jack Kirby.

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Chapter Three

How to Break in the Marvel Way

JA: You worked on Sub-Mariner for a while, again with Roy. How did you feel about drawing underwater environments?

SB: It was fun. It was better than drawing buildings. [laughter] JA: As you continued to work with Roy, did he still give you the same amount of plot?

SB: Roy was very consistent. He gave you a plot, which means there was no dialogue, and he wasn’t telling you specifically what to draw.

He wrote a plot that was very complete, but yet gave me tremendous freedom to do what I wanted to do. He may have called me and talked about certain aspects of the story for clarification purposes, but other than that, he would send me a plot and I would go to work.

JA: What were your thoughts on the SubMariner’s personality?

SB: I enjoyed the character primarily because he was off-beat. Also, because he was not of this world. He was of the undersea world — a rebellious type of character with enormous power. He could do everything, he could fly. He had the one weakness: If he was out of the water too long, he lost his strength.

It was fun, too, in the sense that I didn’t have to draw conventional backgrounds. I had to draw all these wonderful undersea scenes.

JA: You left around the time you started inking Conan. I wondered if maybe that was the reason.

SB: Maybe. You probably know this better than I do, Jim. That was when Barry Smith was doing Conan. I remember doing some work over Herb Trimpe on The Hulk.

JA: What did you think of Herb’s pencils?

SB: I hate to say this, but Herb was not a good draughtsman. I think he would be the first one to admit that. But Herb was a wonderful storyteller. His work was very graphic, which is one of the reasons Stan loved Herb’s storytelling. I think Herb wzs a very talented guy. Drawing was not his strength, but storytelling was. I think he did a terrific job on The Hulk, and I think I’m the only guy who drew The Hulk longer than Herb.

He did it for about seven years, and I did it close to ten, I think.

JA: If you got a penciler whose sensibilities were different than yours, how would you meld yourself to be part of a team? Joe Sinnott, like you said, when he inks someone, he always shows through. The same was true of you, but to a lesser extent.

JA: Did you feel like it was a challenge to make a regal man out of a guy just wearing swimming trunks?

SB: No, it was very easy with him. I didn’t have any problem with that. I love the way John did it. John made him an almost godlike figure.

JA: How did you feel about his arrogance?

SB: That’s just one of the aspects that makes him a fascinating character. And he had a lot to be arrogant about. [laughter] JA: Why was your stay on Sub-Mariner so short? I think you were only there for a year or so.

SB: I think they asked me to do something else.

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(below) They say that clothes make the man, but in Namor’s case it’s all about the attitude.

Here Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, in all his regality, prepares for a royal wedding. This panel comes from page 19 of Sub-Mariner #36. Inks by Bernie Wrightson.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SUB-MARINER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Detailed pencils, indeed! It’s no wonder it took Sal a long time to ink Barry Smith’s Conan pages. And that’s all brushwork, too! On the left is page 7 of Conan #9. On the right is a panel from the final page of Conan #6.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

CONAN ™ AND ©2010 CONAN PROPERTIES INTERNATIONAL, LLC

SB: It’s simply because of my approach. I believe, having also been primarily a penciler for most of my career, it’s up to the inker to be as true to the penciler as possible, unless you get the word from the powers that be. I’ll give you an example. When Barry WindsorSmith started doing Conan, he was a kid with a tremendous amount of potential, but his drawing left a lot to be desired. I think he would admit that he was not a particularly good draughtsman yet. He was a wonderful storyteller, and I tried to be as true to him as I possibly could, because that’s my approach to inking: Be true to the penciler.

He sort of dropped off the scene for a while, and when I saw the work he was doing years later I said, “My God, this guy’s improved 500%!” He was terrific. But back

then Roy would call me and ask me to correct a face or an ear or some detail. In one instance, Conan was taking a swing at somebody and Roy was not pleased with it. It just didn’t work, and he asked me to fix it. In those cases, yes, I would definitely do it, but only when I was asked to. I’ve always believed that if the client, whether it’s Marvel or DC or whoever, is happy with what the penciler did, then it is up to the inker to be true to the penciler.

That’s how I want guys to ink me. If I’m penciling something and I’m doing finished penciling, I want them to be true to my penciling. Unfortunately, a lot of times guys were not. This is why I was so dissatisfied with so many of the inkers I had.

JA: You inked several issues of Conan, and you got to see Barry improve during that time, but it always seemed like he was more of a designer than a draughtsman.

SB: It took me an eternity to ink his stuff. If you want to see tight pencils... they could have shot from the pencils. When I would finish inking his work, I’d have pencil on my hand, my arm, and every other part of my body. [laughter] He was amazingly tight.

JA: In 1970, after Neal Adams left X-Men, you penciled one issue which Sam Grainger inked. It turned out that was the last issue of X-Men before they went to reprints, and then a later revitalization. Do you have any memory of why you did that one story?

SB: It was probably just a fill-in job they asked me to do. Maybe nobody else wanted to do it. [laughter] I never asked. They’d just

34

call me up and say, “Sal, can you do such and such?” I’d say, “Yeah, sure. Send it. Don’t worry about it.” It was work, and work meant a paycheck. That’s what it’s all about. We’re in this business because, yeah, we like what we’re doing, but I do it for the money, too, because I love to eat. [laughter] JA: Were you the type to ever request a book?

“Hey, I want to ink this,” or, “I want to draw that book.”

SB: I can’t say that I was. I don’t ever recall doing that. I was just so blessed and so fortunate in that I would get calls from Marvel, and they would say, “Sal, we’d like you to do so-and-so. Would you like to do it?” And I’d say, “Yeah, sure. I’d love to do it.” With few exceptions, to me, doing one book was like doing any other, doing one character was like doing any other. It’s all some guy in spandex running around saving the world every month. I hate to oversimplify it, but essentially that’s what it was to me. So I never had any problems doing different characters.

The one exception was The Incredible Hulk.

I loved the character. It was totally different, and it was an absolute joy for me to do. I just loved working on that character because he was so different. I mean, you’re talking Dr. Jeckyl/ Mr. Hyde. You’re talking Frankenstein’s monster. You’re talking about a whole bunch of classic characters all wrapped up into one. It was such a unique idea, this unbelievably powerful being with the mind of a six-year-old. The possibilities are endless, and the character’s so wonderful to draw. You talk about venting your anger, what better character to do that with than the Incredible Hulk? [laughter] My big criticism with the Hulk was that he was too good-looking.

JA: You drew “The Defenders” in Marvel Feature starting with their second appearance. This was a much smaller cast than The Avengers.

SB: Thank God. [laughter] JA: What did you think about the Defenders group when you started it?

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(above) For all the books Sal penciled and/or inked for Marvel, he rarely worked in the X-Men’s corner of the universe.

Perhaps it’s fitting then that the Hulk — a character Sal would draw for nearly ten years — would be the co-star of X-Men #66. This issue marks the first time Sal penciled the Hulk, and he surely did not try to make the Hulk goodlooking. In fact, in the second panel of page 7 (right) the Hulk looks gorilla-like, and his dark eyes throughout the issue give him a rather sinister appearance. Inks

by Sam Grainger.

ART COURTESY OF RAIMON FONSECA

HULK, X-MEN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(right) In this panel from Sub-Mariner #35 is the prototype Defenders team dreamed up by Roy Thomas. Inks by Jim Mooney.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

HULK, SILVER SURFER, SUBMARINER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) As this page from Defenders #1 shows, the team didn’t exactly get along with each other.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART DEFENDERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

SB: It was something Roy and I had discussed sometime earlier. I remember a phone conversation with Roy. That was the way he liked to work, and I had no problem with that at all, because I enjoyed the communication. It kind of put us all on the same page. Roy came up with the idea of a group of guys who were very reluctant to be in a group. He was thinking about Dr. Strange, and maybe the Incredible Hulk and the Sub-Mariner, and they’d be drawn together by circumstances.

It sounded like an intriguing idea. As a matter of fact, they were kicking around names back and forth, and he and I had come up with a name — it may have been Roy, because I’m not really very good at that — The Titans. That was originally the idea, and he asked, “Would you be interested in doing a book like that?” And I said, “Yeah, sure. It sounds like fun.” Especially when the Hulk was going to be a part of it.

JA: At that point you hadn’t really drawn the Hulk.

SB: No, I guess I hadn’t. I think I’d inked him a couple of times. He was in a panel in Silver Surfer #4.

JA: And while you were doing the SubMariner with Roy, you had a two-issue storyline with the Silver Surfer, the Hulk, and Sub-Mariner. “The Defenders” was almost a spin-off from that. Roy told me that Stan didn’t want him to use the Silver Surfer, because Stan didn’t want anyone else writing the Silver Surfer but him. That’s the reason Roy substituted Dr. Strange. So you did the prototype of The Defenders in Sub-Mariner.

36

(left) Being able to draw the Hulk was a big part of the reason Sal enjoyed working on Defenders. In this page from Defenders #1, the Hulk gets the worst of it. You can almost feel the knife plunging into the Hulk’s chest at the climax of this dynamic, powerfully-drawn battle.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

DEFENDERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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(right) Valkyrie reaffirms her decision to join the Defenders in this panel from Defenders #5 inked

by Frank McLaughlin.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART DEFENDERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) It may well have been decided that the Defenders book needed a woman’s touch, and why not? Valkyrie, the subject of this ’70s commission piece, made an interesting addition to the non-team.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART DEFENDERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

SB: That must have been when he and I were talking about this possibility of a new book. I thought it was fun. The whole premise of the book is that these are very reluctant heroes.

Sub-Mariner certainly didn’t want to join a

group. The Hulk didn’t want it; he just wanted to be left alone. Dr. Strange was trying to hold them together with his leadership qualities in order for them to accomplish whatever goals they had. It was a very interesting idea, and I enjoyed it.

JA: Team books are hard to do because you have so many characters to move around. You had fewer characters to deal with here, and from the tone of your voice it sounds like you liked The Defenders more than The Avengers.

SB: Yes, I did, primarily because I liked the characters better. My guy [the Hulk] was in there. Sub-Mariner was kind of an off-speed character, and I enjoyed doing him. The same with Dr. Strange. That’s why I liked it better than The Avengers. There were also fewer of them, so it was not quite as difficult a book to do as The Avengers. The Avengers was a really tough book.

JA: Do you remember the thinking behind introducing the Valkyrie? Was it because they felt it was time to have a female member?

SB: I think that was probably the case. “Let’s get a beautiful girl in there.”

JA: How much input did you have on plots with Steve Englehart?

SB: That’s something I never really got too involved with, Jim. I left the writing and the plotting to the writers and the editorial staff.

I can recall a few instances where I may have been consulted or asked a question. I don’t remember any specifics, though. It was something I didn’t get involved in that much. I had all I could handle with penciling the book.

38

JA: Yes, but since you were contributing to the plotting with your storytelling, didn’t you ever feel like you were a co-writer?

SB: No. This is not one of my gifts. I’m not a writer. I do not have a gift for writing. I’m not a great idea man, although there were times I came up with ideas. There were times when I made suggestions like, “Hey, I think we should try doing this instead of that.”

I would get the plot, and I would interpret that plot, or translate it, into 20 pages of pictures. The joy of doing that — and, here again, this is thanks to Stan Lee and his brainstorm [the “Marvel Method”] — was left up to the artists. He specifically wanted the plots to not be that tight. Even though Roy wrote a tight plot, there still was enough wiggle room in there for me to be able to inject a lot of myself into it. In other words, if a guy is punching another guy, there was a time in comics where the writer would say, “Have him hitting him in the jaw with his left hand, knocking him up against a wall.” We didn’t have to mess with that kind of stuff. If somebody was in a fight, I created the fight. If the writer had somebody walking into a building, I determined how he was walking into the building. I determined what kind of a building it was, whether it was dark or light. That was left up to me, and that was the joy of working at Marvel. This was not the case at DC, where they had full scripts with tight plots. I understand that’s the way they work at Marvel now, and we all know where the business is going. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. [laughter] JA: So you wouldn’t tell a writer, “I’d like to draw this kind of scene,” or contribute ideas like that?

SB: No, I wouldn’t say that. Len Wein and I had a great working relationship on The Hulk. Len was always late with the plots, so in order to expedite things he would call me and give me plots over the phone. Sometimes he wouldn’t have a certain detail worked out and we’d talk about it. “I’m not sure how to do this, Sal.” I’d say, “We could do this, this, and this,” and he’d say, “Oh, that’s fine.

That’s terrific.” I was not just a lump on a log drawing pictures. I did contribute, but my contributions, I have to admit, were relatively minor.

He was the first writer I worked with on The Incredible Hulk when I took over the

book. There was a chemistry that existed between us. I don’t know if he feels this way, but I certainly do. It was almost like I had an insight into what Len wanted, and Len had a good idea about what I did well, and he would write accordingly. Whenever sequences like that occurred where there might be a gap in the story, when we finally arrived at something and I penciled it, he’d call me up and say, “Sal, that is exactly what I wanted. It was perfect.” It was just a really good writer/penciler relationship. It was the chemistry between us that worked out so well. He knew what I was thinking, and I knew what he was thinking. It has been rare in my career. I’ve had it with a few guys, but with Len especially it worked beautifully.

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(above) The final page of Incredible Hulk #197. Len Wein was Sal’s writer on the series up through issue #221. Sal only did breakdowns on Hulk until issue #241, when he began inking himself.

For this issue — and much of Sal’s early run doing breakdowns — Joe Staton, who says he was thinking of Bernie Wrightson when inking Sal on Incredibly Hulk, provided the finishes.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

COLLECTOR, HULK, MAN-THING ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(above) Bruce Banner changes into the Hulk in practically every issue.

Here are two examples of Sal showing the metamorphosis in different ways, trying to keep it fresh for the readers.

On the left is a scene from Incredible Hulk #219, with finishes by Ernie Chan over Sal’s breakdowns. On the right is a panel from Incredible Hulk #250 penciled and inked by Sal. ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS (LEFT) AND EELCO VELDHUIZEN (RIGHT) HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: So there was give and take there. Some people, like Jack Kirby, were more involved with the plots than you were.

SB: Absolutely. From everything I’ve heard about Jack, he definitely was one of those people who was very involved in plotting. And look at what happened years later. I mean, he wrote a lot of his own stuff. I wasn’t that crazy about it. A lot of people in the industry weren’t that crazy about it. I think Jack’s strong suit was his fantastic imagination and his wonderful storytelling.

JA: I think the problem with Kirby was more in terms of his dialogue than his plots.

SB: Yes, that’s probably true. I didn’t care for his dialogue.

JA: When you got onto the Hulk book, you’d already drawn him in The Defenders. You didn’t have any problems with making him brutish, but was there still a directive to not make him too scary or too ugly?

SB: They left it up to me, and I had my feeling about what the character should look like.

When I submitted it, I never heard anything about it, so I assume that they were happy with it.

(facing page) What’s not to like when Sal inks his own work, as with this page from Incredible Hulk #261?

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: When Bruce Banner would become the Hulk or vice-versa, there are only so many ways to draw that transition. Did you ever say to yourself, “I’ve got to find another way to show that”?

SB: I don’t know. I always tried different things — different angles, making it a run of panels, just showing a part of the body ripping out of the shirt, and so on. You always try to find different ways. After a while you’re 40

going to run out and get a little repetitive, especially when you do it for ten years.

JA: One of your Hulk inkers was Mike Esposito. What did you think of Mike’s inks?

SB: Mike was a good inker, but I just didn’t like the way he inked me. I didn’t like the quality of the line. Yet I saw him ink other people and it looked better. Maybe it was just my penciling.

JA: What did you think of Joe Staton’s inks?

SB: I didn’t like it at all. Now, in fairness to Joe, he was inking over breakdowns.

Although my breakdowns were very tight.

Everything was there except the black areas.

There was no guesswork on the part of the inker. All he had to do was spot the blacks, and I just didn’t like what he did with my penciling. His style was so different from mine.

JA: Did you have the same problem with Ernie Chan?

SB: Yes. I thought Ernie Chan’s inking was very ponderous, very heavy-handed.

JA: Roy loved his inks over your brother.

SB: Oh, God. He was awful over my brother.

You talk about destroying his drawing. I would have conversations with John and bring that up, and John didn’t even want to talk about it.

That’s how upset he was with it. It got to a point after a while where it really didn’t bother him that much. I mean, you can only beat your head against the wall for so long. After a while... John would call them up and say, “I want to ink my stuff myself.” Then he would ink a few and say, “I’m not making any money inking, so I want to get somebody else to ink it.”

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42

JA: Was he even happy with his own inks?

SB: Oh, yes, because he inked the way he penciled. His inking was beautiful, and it was perfect for him.

JA: When you inked yourself, how happy were you with the finished product?

SB: For the most part I was very happy and liked what I did. I would improve my drawing, because I draw better with a brush than I do with a pencil. You have the flexibility with a brush that you don’t have with a pencil. Pencils are very rigid, and there are things I can do with a brush I can’t do with a pencil.

JA: One of the guys who inked you on The Hulk also inked you later on Alpha Flight: Gerry Talaoc.

SB: He did a terrific job. He made me look good. I never met him. He was one of that group of Filipino artists that Marvel used for quite a while, and, boy, some of them were really talented.

JA: Did you ever talk to your inkers?

SB: I can think of one time I talked to Mike Esposito on the phone. I can’t remember what the occasion was, but during the course of the conversation he asked me about inking my work, and asked if I could put in a good word for him. I said, “Mike, I don’t have that kind of leverage.” I think somebody at Marvel had called me about something, and then Mike got on the phone and we talked about something else. That’s the only inker I ever talked to.

However, just recently Joe Sinnott and I collaborated on a cover for a West Coast company. I penciled and he inked. We had some phone conversations that were more about reminiscing than business. I enjoyed that. Joe is a great guy.

JA: You never thought about talking to an inker about the way they were going to ink you?

SB: No, I didn’t, simply because a guy does what he does. I’m not going to call somebody up and say, “I don’t like what you’re doing here. I don’t like what you’re doing there.”

I’m sure he’s a professional and that he’s doing the very best job he knows how to do.

I’m not going to cut his legs out from under him and tell him I don’t like what he’s doing.

JA: Getting back to Gerry Talaoc, his style had a little bit of him in it. So why do you feel he worked so well over your pencils where some other people who had their own style didn’t? What was the difference between him and some of the others?

SB: Number one, I was doing breakdowns.

Secondly, this guy could draw. He was a better draughtsman than I am. My drawing is fine for comics, and I draw fine from life or from photographs. I used to go to a life drawing class every Friday night. There’s a school in Alexandria, and they had a class where you paid ten bucks, and drew from a live model for three hours.

When it comes to that I can draw very well, because I’ve got a model in front of me. Drawing from memory, my drawing leaves something to be desired. I’m being very honest and upfront.

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(above) Gerry Talaoc provides the ethereal finishes for this page from Incredible Hulk #308.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) In early 2009, Sal teamed up with inker Joe Sinnott for this cover of J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Cavallaro’s The Life and Times of Savior 28 #1B for IDW Publishing.

ART COURTESY OF JOE AND MARK SINNOTT

SAVIOR 28 ™ AND ©2010 J.M. DEMATTEIS AND MARK CAVALLARO

was much more stylized, so Joe’s inking over my work was much better suited.

JA: You were very sympathetic to the Hulk, not just in an artistic way, but in the whole conception of the character. The Hulk had a childlike innocence in a sense— SB: [laughs] I identified with him. Do you know what I like about the Hulk? Look at the world of super-heroes. You have these almost god-like people. You have Thor and Captain America and the like. And then you have the super-heroines — Wonder Woman, the Scarlet Witch, the Valkyrie — they’re all gorgeous. The men are all Adonises, the women are all Venuses. Spider-Man is a departure from that, obviously, which is one of the reasons I think the character became so unbelievably popular. You could almost see Dustin Hoffman in the character.

(above) Misunderstood, indeed! The Hulk can’t even wait for a friend quietly without S.W.A.T. teams and riot squads giving him a hard time.

Incredible Hulk #206, page 22. Inks by Joe Staton.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) And not a victim, either! From Incredible Hulk #255, penciled and inked by Sal.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: You would know better than anybody.

SB: Well, I feel like I’m an authority on the subject. [laughter] But Gerry Talaoc was a terrific draughtsman, and, as I said, he drew better than I did. He probably still does. [laughs] And the look of the book was great. I loved what he did. To me the final product was what counted. That’s what we’re supposed to be about. We’re professionals, and it’s the final product that’s supposed to be good. I have nothing but glowing words to say about him.

JA: How did you feel about Joe Sinnott’s inks over your work?

SB: I loved him over my penciling. My drawing was not as realistic as John’s. My drawing 44

JA: He’s a Humphrey Bogart, feet-of-clay type of character.

SB: Exactly. And the Hulk doesn’t fit any category at all. He's totally unique. He’s monstrous, lumbering, huge, unbelievably strong, and he gets even stronger when he gets angry.

He has the mentality of a child. It’s so completely different from anything that you’ve drawn before. Is there another character as unique? Maybe Man-Thing, I don’t know.

He’s an anti-hero, and yet because of his unbelievable power... look at all the fantastic things he’s capable of doing and usually does.

That was the fun and the constant stimulation that I had with this character. I hated leaving the book, and always regretted it. I hoped one day that I could get back onto it, but now, of course, it’s a moot point.

JA: He’s not the same character you drew.

SB: No, he’s not.

JA: Because General Ross or somebody was always after him, did you perceive the Hulk more as a victim?

SB: Certainly misunderstood, but a victim... no. How could somebody with that kind of power be a victim? I did not look at him as a victim. He was definitely misunderstood. I mean, the size of him is enough to terrify anybody. When I was drawing him, he was seven feet tall and weighed a thousand pounds. Definitely not a victim. Definitely misunderstood.

45

(below) Falcon takes on the retconned Cap and Bucky of the 1950s.

Somebody had to be running around in the suit if the real Cap was frozen in a block of ice during that time, right?

Too bad they were a couple of bigots. Captain America and The Falcon #154, page 3. Inks by John Verpoorten.

BUCKY, CAPTAIN AMERICA, FALCON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: With his strength he could have easily killed somebody, but he never did.

SB: No, because he was not bad. He did have that much control, which is one of the things they wrote into the story. They cleverly worked out the circumstances so that he never killed anybody, because then the people that misunderstood him would be justified in feeling the way they did.

JA: Did you have any sympathy for his alter ego, Dr. Banner?

SB: Of course. Who wouldn’t? Put yourself in a situation like that. He’s a very sympathetic character. He’s trying desperately to undo this damage that was done to him. He’s spending his whole life trying to do that, and nothing seems to work. And I’m glad, too, because if it did work, then we wouldn’t have the character anymore.

JA: It was not long after you took over the art on Captain America that Steve Englehart started writing some really terrific stories.

SB: I had a lot of fun working with Steve.

The one that I really enjoyed was the story — and I think Roy had something to do with it — bringing the old Captain America [of the 1950s] into the picture. That was just so bizarre and really off the wall, that I really got a big kick out of doing that. I kind of hated what they did to the old Cap. I mean, they made him out as kind of a bigot, you know? I don’t think the old Cap was a bigot, but there had to be a contrast between the two Captain Americas. Essentially, one of them had to turn out to be a bad guy, and it worked. We got a lot of great comments about that series. Everybody I’ve talked to at conventions brings that up.

Steve was great. I enjoyed working with him tremendously. He would call me with the plots most of the time, and we’d kick them around. I’d ask him questions like, “What are you doing here? What are you doing there?” It was very much like the relationship I had with Len Wein. The chemistry wasn’t quite the same, but I did work very well with Steve, and I hope he felt the same way, because we did produce some good stories.

As an aside, I was told at the time that for some reason Cap did not sell well. It was always at the bottom of the barrel, no matter who did it — whether Jack Kirby did it, or my brother, or Gene Colan, John Romita... no matter what. When Steve and I got on the book — and I give Steve as much credit as anybody; he certainly deserves it, because he came up with some great ideas, some great stories — if I remember correctly, the book hit #5 in sales. It really shot up the charts.

That was very, very gratifying. Here again, it was not me and it was not Steve; it was a combination of the two of us. In any successful marriage in comics the writer and the artist have to gel, and if they do and the chemistry is right, the book is going to be a success.

JA: I thought it was some of Englehart’s best writing, and I think it was some of your most inspired art, to be honest with you.

SB: Well, it was because we enjoyed what we were doing.

JA: The only thing I didn’t like was Vince Colletta’s inks.

46

SB: Well... yeah. [laughter] We touched upon this earlier. I did complain, not about Vinny Colletta, but just in general if I was unhappy with an inker, I would voice my opinion from time to time. Not vociferously, because I’m affecting a guy’s livelihood, and I don’t want to do that. I wouldn’t want anybody doing it to me, and I don’t want to do it to anybody else.

This is a very competitive business, and if a guy has work to do he’s collecting a regular paycheck. I’m not going to be the guy, because of my own creative ego, to say, “I don’t want this guy on my book. I don’t like what he’s doing.” I just can’t do that. I’m not built that way. It’s not that important. For me, the priority is that the man is earning a living, I’m sure he’s doing the best that he can do, that’s fine. Let’s leave it alone.

JA: Did you feel like you were a company man?

SB: Yes, I think I would categorize myself as a company man. I was interested in selling books. I consider the comic book business a business first. We were in the business of selling comics. Now, within that you have to be very creative. It is a very creative business, but our primary function is to sell books.

That’s what we’re doing this for, and in that respect I tried to do the best job that I could do for the company, and I very definitely considered myself a company man. Probably not as much as I should have been, but I definitely leaned in that direction.

I probably could have paid more visits to the office and could have gotten to know the writers and editors better on a personal basis, generally making the company more aware of me, and letting them know I was there to do whatever I could do to help sell comic books.

You think about these things and you think, “Gee, I could have done this, or I could have done that,” but generally speaking, I was a company man. I’m still working for Marvel 40 years later, and except for that little hiatus in the late ’90s, I’ve been here my whole career.

JA: Englehart wrote a great storyline in Captain America called “The Secret Empire.”

Even though the story was a take-off on the happenings of Watergate, did you know where the storyline was going from the start?

SB: I had a feeling about it, but not at the start, no. As we got into it I began to see what was going on. I had real mixed emotions about it, because it was a very effective storyline, but then again I thought we were getting political, and I don’t think comic books are a place for politics. That’s just my feeling. Comic books are an entertainment medium, and you can interject politics into entertainment — comedians do it all the time — but, at the time, we were dealing with kids, and kids are very impressionable.

JA: At the end of that story where the villain’s identity is revealed, although he’s kept offscreen to the reader, we have to infer that he’s 47

(above) The mystery villain is revealed... sort of.

You never see his face, but it is made pretty obvious that the villain in question is none other than President Richard Nixon. Panels from the final page of Captain America and The Falcon #175. Inks by Vince Colletta.

CAPTAIN AMERICA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) As a direct of the result of the “Secret Empire” storyline, a disillusioned Cap forsakes his name and costume and becomes The Nomad. Not a bad costume, but it’s just not the same as the classic, star-spangled longjohns he’d made famous. Captain America and The Falcon #180, page 11. Inks by Vince Colletta.

CAPTAIN AMERICA, NOMAD ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

Richard Nixon. Was that a conscious effort on Englehart’s part or your part to not reveal who he was?

SB: I think that’s the way Steve wanted it, and I agreed with it 100%. I didn’t think that we had to be that obvious about it. You know, it’s fairly obvious anyway. Saying, “Oh, my God! It’s Richard Nixon!” is about the only thing we didn’t do. [laughter] JA: And that led into the Nomad storyline where Steve Rogers quits being Captain America. Did you have any feelings on that part of the storyline?

SB: I just wish they hadn’t done it. [laughter] I kept wondering, “What is the point?” I didn’t understand the purpose of it. “Okay, if this is what you guys want to do, let’s go ahead

and do it.” Frankly, I thought it was silly. He was Captain America, for God’s sake. He knows that there’s good and evil. That was the part I objected to, painting Richard Nixon as a totally irredeemable character, which was not the case. He was a politician.

Look at the crap that goes on today in and out of the President’s office. It happens all the time. Was Watergate bad? Yes, it was bad.

Nixon was not directly responsible for Watergate, but he was definitely responsible for the cover-up. He made a huge, huge blunder, and he paid for it as he should have paid for it. But that was the part I objected to.

JA: You hit on something important, and that’s the psychology of Captain America, a character who’s been through World War II. If anybody in the Marvel universe would have his head together, I would imagine it would be Captain America.

SB: Absolutely. All of a sudden he’s so terribly disillusioned. Give me a break. This is so unreal. But it gave them a direction to go in.

Whether it worked or not, personally speaking, I don’t think it did. It wasn’t Captain America anymore. You give him a different costume. Okay, fine, he’s not Captain America. Captain America and the costume are one. If you change that it’s no longer Captain America.

JA: Steve Rogers is almost a cipher at times, because that Captain America costume is so powerful for the statement it makes.

SB: Exactly. I wonder what they’re going to do with that in the movie. You know how they change things in movies sometimes. You can’t change that costume. It is so gaudy, yet it is so wonderful because it is so unique. As I said, the character and the costume are one. You can’t separate one from the other.

JA: You drew some Marvel Team-Ups starring Spider-Man and other characters. How did you feel about doing a book like that?

SB: I was happy to be working on any book.

That’s kind of a blanket statement. If Marvel called me up — whether it was John Verpoorten or Stan or Roy — and they said, “Sal, would you like to do such-and-such?” I’d always say, “I would love to,” because it was work. I’m a very pragmatic individual, and I like that regular paycheck coming in. And back then, before the contractual thing came into

48

vogue, you were a freelancer, and you earned your check by the amount of work that you did.

That was your livelihood. And if you were one of those fortunate guys, which I thank God constantly that I was, who had work all the time, that was just a joy. And that’s one of the reasons I consider myself a company man. It’s not a totally selfless thing. There’s a certain amount self-interest there, because I want to make sure that I’m working on a daily basis.

I’m kind of beating around the bush here.

Did I enjoy doing that book? Yes, I did. First of all, because there was a new character to deal with every month, which made it kind of interesting. But primarily because it was work. This is my feeling — I don’t know if other people feel this way. I’ve heard guys say, “Oh, I really want to work on this character.” After a while, when you’ve done a dozen super-heroes, they’re all pretty much the same. They’re all a bunch of guys in spandex running around saving the world every month. The only difference was the Incredible Hulk. Spider-Man was a different

type of character, the Sub-Mariner was different, Man-Thing... those were the characters that I loved to do, because they weren’t cut from the same cookie cutter.

When you ask, “How did you feel about this book? How did you feel about that book?” — pretty much the same way. It was work. I enjoyed working. I loved doing what I was doing, and I sure enjoyed it when that paycheck came.

JA: You did some Marvel Two-in-One stories with the Thing as the main character. The Thing, of course, has a different personality than Spider-Man. SB: And he’s a great character that I should have mentioned, too. I love that character.

He’s tough to draw, though. He’s very difficult to draw. His personality is very difficult to capture.

JA: How did you handle the iconography of the character? Did you think of his skin as plates or rocks?

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(above left) Spider-Man was, indeed, a different type of character, as was his team-up partner in Marvel Team-Up #45, Killraven. Inks by Mike Esposito over Sal’s breakdowns.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

KILLRAVEN, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(above right) The X-Men for all their mutant angst were still essentially your garden variety super-heroes.

Marvel Team-Up Annual #1, page 1. Inks by Mike Esposito over Sal’s breakdowns.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN, X-MEN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Spotting blacks on the Thing can be a tricky business. Sal took the same approach as the man who designed the Thing, Jack Kirby, and went with what looked good from a design sense more than what a light source would dictate. Marvel Two-in-One Annual #3, page 19. Inks by Frank Giacoia.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

NOVA, THING ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

SB: Rocklike. I modeled my Thing after Jack Kirby’s, because I don’t think anybody drew him any better than Kirby did — there may have been a couple of guys. I love the way John drew him, but Jack’s Thing was definitive, and I loved the way he spotted the blacks on the rocks. He didn’t have a formula. There was no formula.

He did whatever he felt, and that’s what I like about it, and what I modeled mine after.

JA: When you spotted blacks on that particular type of character, you would think more in terms of design than light source. Would that be fair to say?

SB: Yes, I think that’s a very fair statement.

JA: Would you say that was your approach in general?

SB: It depends on the panel. It depends on what I’m trying to get across. If I wanted something very moody and sinister looking, then I would definitely use a light source. But there were times when I needed to spot some black on a panel or on a page, and I’d think, “Okay, here’s a good place to put it. I think it needs more black, and it needs some balance on this side, so let me make this black,” and so on and so forth. You incorporate both.

It was not easy. [laughs] For some guys, I guess it was. I look at Jack Kirby’s work, and he made it look easy. From what I was told, it was easy for him. He was just a natural. But for me, it never was. It was always a struggle.

It got better as time went on and I got more experience, but it was never easy.

JA: You did a few issues of Ms. Marvel, which I was not crazy about. Did you have much empathy towards this character?

SB: No. It was just something they asked me to do, and I never turned down work. I wasn’t crazy about it. I didn’t think the costume was that great. It was the kind of book where you looked at the characters, you read the stories and think, “So what?” I think a lot of people felt that way, which is why the character never went anywhere.

JA: You also did the last few issues of Skull, the Slayer. That was another character that didn’t really seem to go anywhere.

SB: How many characters are there like that, Jim? The comic book industry is filled with characters that didn’t go anywhere. Like most artists, I’ve had my share of successes, and I’ve certainly had my share of bombs. [laughter] JA: If you were on a book you really disliked, would you try to get off that book?

SB: Probably, but honestly speaking I can’t recall that ever happening. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was in a rut. There was a long period of time where Marvel depended upon me — as I’m sure they depended upon a lot of other guys — because I had achieved that very fleeting thing called speed. They knew that if they were in trouble with a book where deadlines were concerned, they could come to me and I could do it for them, and do a quality job, and do it quickly.

A lot of times it would be breakdowns, but it would be a good, quality job. I never left any-

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thing out. I never gave them anything less than my best under the circumstances. If you’re asked to do a job in two days, something is going to suffer somewhere. I did the best I could in the time they gave me to do it.

And I never turned anything down unless it was physically impossible for me to do. I can remember a couple of instances where that happened, where I would get a call from an editor, and they’d say, “Sal, I’ve got this book. Can you handle it for me?” My first question was, “When do you need it?” They’d give me a date, and I’d have to tell them, “I can’t do it. I’ve got these three issues I have to do.” There was a time when I was doing a ton of work for Marvel. One month I think I broke down five books for them.

JA: You were making good money, but did you feel like you were losing something creatively when you were in that situation?

SB: No. Honestly not, because, again, I consider this a business. My business was to satisfy my client, to do the best job I could do for my client, because I was a freelancer. Marvel was the client, and they thought enough of me to keep me busy all the time.

JA: Did you have a 401-K or health insurance through them?

SB: That came later when they started signing everyone to contracts. I think it was around the mid-’70s somewhere. I heard that they had John under contract, and I don’t remember if Stan called me or if I called Stan, but I had a conversation with him and the subject of a contract came up, and I told him that I’d love to have one. And it was great. It was wonderful, because for all intents and purposes, you were an employee of Marvel Comics, and it came with all the perks, but you were still a freelancer. The way we worked it was that you would draw your paycheck against the amount of work that you did. I was always working, so I never overdrew, and I got all the perks. I got vacation pay, holidays, a 401-K... it was a great thing for as long as it lasted.

JA: So you sort of had a page quota.

SB: Yes. You had to make sure that you did enough work to cover the draw that you got.

If you went over, they would send you a check for that. I don’t remember exactly how it was set up, but you got paid for everything that you did.

JA: Nova felt like an attempt to do a modernday Spider-Man character. Did you feel that way?

SB: I don’t know. I didn’t like the character.

I didn’t care for the design. I didn’t know what the character was all about.

JA: You also did a few issues of Luke Cage.

Do you like that character?

SB: Yes, I thought he was kind of a neat character. There was something a little different about him. He wasn’t a typical super-hero.

JA: You took over Tarzan when your brother left. Did you model your Tarzan on your brother’s, or any of the other Tarzan artists?

SB: I loved John’s drawing on the book. He loved doing books like that. There, again, is the pragmatism coming into play. I’m thinking, “This book is reasonably successful.”

This happened several times in my career, where I took over for a high-profile guy. Thor was another one. I knew from previous experience, and from conversations I had with Roy and a few very minor conversations with Stan, that the fans didn’t like dramatic changes.

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(above) Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. Opening splash page for Tarzan #24. Inks by Bob Hall.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

TARZAN ™ AND ©2010 ERB, INC.

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When they were comfortable with a book, they wanted to see that book like that every month.

So whenever I took over a book that was even a reasonable success — and I think Tarzan for a period of time was a reasonable success — I tried to stick as close to the guy that I was taking over for as possible. After a while there would be a gradual transition and I would become more myself. I did that deliberately, and that’s probably one of the reasons I got the reputation as being a chameleon.

But it was so much fun. It was a total departure from the regular super-hero characters. Then they took him back to the city for some unknown reason, which drove me crazy. [laughter] I said, “Wait! I’ve got Tarzan, and he’s supposed to be in the jungle, and here I am drawing him on an ocean liner.” Then he was in the city for a period of time. Good grief, I can’t win. [laughter] JA: You drew a KISS comic, too.

SB: I have a copy of that somewhere. My oldest son is a KISS fan. He used to enjoy their costumes and their characters, and the fact that they were so bizarre. He really got a big kick out of them.

JA: What did you think about that assignment?

SB: I’m glad it was just one issue. [laughter] JA: How hard did you work on the likenesses? Did you have much reference?

SB: As I recall, there was certainly enough for me to go by. Look at the make-up on these guys. All you had to do was do the make-up reasonably close, and just barely capture their features, and you had the characters down pat. It really wasn’t terribly difficult.

JA: Would a job like that slow you down as opposed to drawing Captain America or The Hulk?

SB: Not really. It might have a little bit, just because essentially you’re doing a group book with four characters. That may have taken a little more time, but I don’t think it was a difficult matter.

SB: Yes, because, frankly speaking, I like John’s Thor better than Kirby’s. He’s supposed to be a god, and who could draw a more godlike figure than John? That was the difference between his character and Kirby’s character. He was just more godlike, more lofty.

What Jack did with Thor was wonderful, but it was different from John’s interpretation, and I preferred John’s. And don’t forget, you look at John’s Thor and there’s a lot of Kirby in there, too. We discussed this before. Everyone was influenced by Kirby to one degree or another.

JA: You spent some time on the Thor comic, which I know you enjoyed. Sometimes you inked it, other times you were the penciler. It looked like you used your brother’s model for Thor rather than Kirby’s.

JA: When you drew Asgardian architecture, it looked like, again, that you were following John’s sense of architecture.

SB: I thought his architecture was a lot like Kirby’s.

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(above) It may not have looked much like Sal’s work by the time Rudy Nebres got done inking it, but this page from Tarzan #21 is still a beauty to look at.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

TARZAN ™ AND ©2010 ERB, INC.

(facing page) Tarzan in the jungle, where he belongs. Tarzan Annual #2, page 17.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

TARZAN ™ AND ©2010 ERB, INC.

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JA: It was, but John’s was subtly different. It was slightly more organic.

SB: I suppose so. What Jack did was so “him.”

I see what you’re driving at, but I may very well have referred to a lot of Jack’s architecture when I was doing it. I’m just not sure.

JA: What was your feeling about Thor’s personality?

SB: He is godlike, very haughty. There is a nobility beyond belief, integrity above reproach. You have to incorporate all of those qualities into the character as you’re drawing him. It’s not easy to capture all of that. You say so much of that with body language. In the case of Thor, it’s not really terribly difficult to do because of the costuming, and because you’re talking about an Adonis type of character. He’s more of an Adonis than Steve Rogers. You just have to try to capture all of that in the character. And this is one of the reasons that I liked John’s Thor a little bit better than Jack’s. I just thought he captured more of that than Jack did.

JA: How successful do you think you were at capturing Thor?

SB: I don’t know. I’ll have to leave that for other people to say. [laughs] JA: We know how you felt about the Hulk, and Captain America was noble, but a noble human. Thor is not human. And here again, it goes back to body language.

SB: Obviously the body language of a character like Thor was somewhat different than the body language of a Steve Rogers, because we’re talking about a human and a god.

There are two different planes there. Now, what the difference is I don’t know, because as human beings, we don’t really understand what that’s all about. So it’s your concept of what being godlike is all about. What is he like? How do you capture him? You bring that out from inside. You have to feel it inside. I’m kind of an amateur actor. I’ve done a lot of community theater, and that has helped me an awful lot in doing my comics. It’s been a tremendous help to me to be kind of a ham, because you’re able to feel these things as you do on the stage when you’re performing.

JA: If you had Thor and Captain America standing side by side, their postures would be different?

SB: Well, their postures might not be that different. It’s hard to say. It depends on the situation. You would have to give me a circumstance, then I could sit down and draw it, and hopefully solve the problem. It’s difficult to put it into words, because so much of it is what you feel about the characters.

JA: It gets back to the fact that you were a very instinctive artist.

SB: Exactly. Yes. I’m instinctive about most things, usually. Throughout my whole life, whenever I have trusted my instincts I’ve usually done fairly well. Whenever I have not, I usually have fallen on my face. [laughs] JA: You spent quite a long time on Rom, which was based on a toy.

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(above) Thor — with his new beard — faces off against Judge Dredd stand-in, Justice Peace.

Thor #372, page 3. Inks

by Al Williamson and Bret Blevins.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) A troll in the halls of Asgard?! A page from 1991’s Marvel Holiday Special, with full art by Sal.

THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

SB: Yes. It was produced by Parker Brothers, the people who are famous for Monopoly. The toy was a total bomb. It didn’t do a thing.

I was on the book for four or five years. My understanding was that nobody wanted to do it. [laughs] Parker Brothers went to Marvel and said, “Look, we’ve got this toy, and we want to do whatever we can to promote it.

What we would like you to do is create a story for this character and produce a comic book.” Marvel agreed to it, and the word went out. Nobody wanted to do it. They called him “Toaster Head” or something. I still have the toy in a box someplace. I will probably hold onto it for the rest of my life. It’s just a neat thing to have, because of the fact that I did the book for so many years.

Anyway, as luck would have it, they called me and asked me if I wanted to do it, and you know what my answer was. “Send it along. I’d be happy to do it.” And it was a reasonably successful book. It sold well for quite a few years. I understand that once I dropped it, the book kind of died.

approached Marvel to do a comic based on a toy that had not even been introduced to the market yet, in that respect, I think it was a first for Marvel. That may well be why Marvel took it on, because they considered it kind of a challenge.

In any case, the toy bombed after one year.

It didn’t do a thing, but the book lasted about five or six years before they canceled it.

JA: Did you have any empathy for Rom? SB: Yes. I liked the character. And I liked what they did with it. I thought the concept was quite good. It was unique. It made it attractive to do. I almost hate to say this, but it was pretty easy to draw, too. It was very simple. And that made life simpler for me.

But the stories they built around him were quite good.

JA: It amazes me that it never occurred to you to say, “I’m valuable to this company. I need to be on higher profile books.” A lot of people thought that way then and think that way today, but you never did.

SB: It never even entered my mind. I was just happy that Marvel wanted to keep me constantly busy and were always after me to do work. That was what counted to me. I was ready to do whatever they asked me to do, unless it was just physically impossible.

JA: Was the toy the only reference you had?

There was nothing but that one figure, right?

SB: The figure had a weapon and a couple of small, incidental things. They had taken care of everything at the editorial level.

They came up with the background, they humanized him, they gave him an origin, and we just took it from there. By the time I was on the book, all of that was already written out.

JA: Some licensed books have to go through approvals. Did you have to deal with that sort of thing?

SB: Not as far as I was concerned, no. I’m sure Parker Brothers had final say on it since they asked us to do the book. When they 57

(facing page) Enter Rom, Spaceknight, in dramatic fashion — even if he did have a toaster for a head! Sal did the full art chores for the first 17 issues of the series before moving to only breakdowns. Rom #1, page 2.

ROM ™ AND ©2010 PARKER BROTHERS

(below) Starting with Rom #20, Joe Sinnott took over the finishing chores over Sal’s breakdowns.

ART COURTESY OF JOE AND MARK SINNOTT

ROM ™ AND ©2010 PARKER BROTHERS

(below) Sal did pencils for the first nine issues of the Eternals twelveissue mini-series and had a variety of inkers. But for three of the issues, including issue #6 — a page of which is shown here — he inked himself.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ETERNALS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Would a good plot lift you up, get you excited about drawing the story?

SB: You know, I think the bottom line is that I’m kind of a workhorse. Whatever I got, whether I thought the plot was good — and I can recall reading some plots and thinking, “Oh, my God. This is a dog,” and with some it was, “Wow! This is really excellent,” and everything in between.

That’s just the nature of the business.

You’re not going to get winners all the time, you’re not going to get losers all the time.

In my capacity as a professional, my thought was, “I’ve got to do the best that I can do with this, and work under these circumstances.” And that’s the way I approached it.

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JA: You never got a storyline that was so bad that you said, “I can’t do this”?

SB: There was one time I was doing a maxiseries with the Eternals. They asked me to do this twelve-issue maxi-series. I did the first one, and I thought it was fine. I liked what was happening in it. As it went on, I began to get this feeling that I had no idea where the thing was going. If I’m not mistaken, Ralph Macchio was the editor. I got about halfway through the series, and I called him and said, “Ralph, where is this thing going? It’s just rambling back and forth. I have no idea what is happening. What is going on? What is the writer doing?” I did another issue after that, then I called Ralph and said, “Ralph, look, I’m just not enjoying this. I think you should probably get somebody else to finish it up, because I have no idea what’s happening. I have no idea where this is going. It’s a rambling story that doesn’t seem to have any point to it, and I really don’t want to work on it anymore.” And Ralph understood. If I recall correctly, I think Ralph agreed with me.

They called Walt Simonson and asked him to finish it out, because obviously it had to be finished. We had done the first four or five issues. Walt took over the writing with issue #10, and, being the monumental talent that he is, I’m sure he did a first-rate job on it and made it make sense. As far as I can recall, that’s the only time I ever did anything like that. I may have dropped books for other reasons, but that was the only time I dropped a book because I thought the plotting was just going nowhere.

Chapter Four

The Workhorse Hits His Stride

JA: Was there ever a case where an assignment came along that you liked better than what you were doing, and you asked to switch books?

SB: No. JA: I thought your work sometimes suffered from doing breakdowns because of who did the finishes. Would you be more forgiving with someone finishing your breakdowns than with someone inking your full pencils?

SB: You had to be, because you’re not giving them as much to work with. Under the circumstances, it was a necessity. During that period when I was doing pretty much nothing but breakdowns for Marvel, it was because that’s what they asked me to do. They wanted

to get more work out of me, and the only way I could give them more work was by doing breakdowns. Everything was there except the blacks. I did not spot the blacks. I didn’t mess around with textures that much. I would do a texture or design on a shirt or tie.

JA: But you wouldn’t do rock textures.

SB: No, no. Everything was done in line. All the details were there. There was nothing vague. The only thing the inker had to do was spot his own blacks.

JA: How many pages of breakdowns could you do in a day versus full pencils?

SB: On a good day I could breakdown four or five pages. That was a comfortable day. With

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(below) Breakdowns for What If? #44, featuring Captain America versus his ’50s counterpart, which was inked by Dave Simons.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

CAPTAIN AMERICA, WATCHER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Incredible Hulk #269, page 7, written by Bill Mantlo with full art from Sal. HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) The opening splash page of Incredible Hulk #219, with finishes

by Ernie Chan over Sal’s breakdowns. Chan was an excellent artist in his own right, but when inking others he tended to overpower their work.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

full pencils, probably two-and-a-half to three a day. Once I got to that five-year point I mentioned earlier, I got comfortable enough with it that I gained speed, because I had a lot of confidence in what I was doing.

JA: On books you did breakdowns on, they didn’t always put the best person over you.

Do you feel that hurt your reputation at all?

SB: I think so, but there again it was a necessity on both sides. I was doing what Marvel was asking me to do, and I had no problems with it because, monetarily, it was wonderful.

I was making a lot of money. You know, I wasn’t terribly worried about my reputation side of it, because I never was a big fan-favorite anyway — so that side of it didn’t bother me.

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After a while, I think I got the reputation of being a hack. That didn’t sit very well. I heard that from a couple of different sources.

But I said, “Well, I’m doing what the company is asking me to do. If I rebel against that, then maybe I’m no longer a company man.”

I don’t have that big an ego, Jim. That’s the thing. Everybody has an ego, and I certainly have one, but I think the key word here is that I’m a very practical individual. I did what I thought was necessary. Then it got to a point where that was no longer necessary, and, unfortunately, nobody told me about it. [laughs] I found out about it sort of sideways.

I think it was during a conversation I had with Bill Mantlo when I was working with him. We were talking about one thing and another, and how this came up I don’t remember, but Bill said, “You’re getting the reputation of a guy who just bangs the work out.” I said, “Well, I don’t bang it out. I’m just doing what Marvel asks me to do.” He said, “Well, they’re not doing that kind of thing now.”

Here is the classic case of the terrible lack of communication, and it was my fault because I didn’t go up there often enough.

The reason for that impression of me was simply because this was what was expected of me for a long period of time. They were constantly asking me, “Sal, can you do this?” because I was one of the few guys they had who was fast enough to do fill-in issues and my regular work at the same time. I was being depended upon to do this, and I was more than happy to do it. Obviously, the money was great, but I also felt like, “These people really need me.”

I felt like I was a really important part of the operation. I considered Marvel a client — my only client. I was going to do everything within my power with whatever ability I had to keep them as happy as possible.

Then, all of a sudden, Jim Shooter becomes editor-in-chief, and the whole policy changes.

He said, “We’re not going to do things this way anymore. I want the very best quality that we can get. I want people to spend a lot more time on the books. I don’t want guys turning out four and five books a month. I want guys to do one book a month, and to put all that they’ve got into that one book.” There was one problem with that: Nobody ever told me about it.

When I found out about it, I called Jim Shooter immediately. I said, “Jim, this is what I’ve heard. What’s going on?” and Jim very

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candidly explained the whole situation to me.

I said, “Well, Jim, it would have been nice if somebody had told me this. I live in Virginia, you know? Why didn’t somebody call and say, ‘Sal, here’s the new company policy’?

Because of what’s been expected of me, I’ve been doing breakdowns, and, yeah, the work suffers. There’s no question about it, because some of the guys who ink me don’t know what to do with it. How can I correct this?” Jim began to tell me what he was expecting of me, and I said, “Great. Look, I want to come up to New York. Maybe we can go out and have lunch together and talk about it.”

And that’s exactly what happened. I got to meet Jim on a face-to-face basis, and he was nine feet tall. [laughter] He was a big guy.

But we had a very pleasant time together. We ate lunch, and came to a great understanding.

I told him, “I’m so glad to get this information. You’re the guy in charge now. You’re the client, and I want to keep you happy.” I didn’t use those exact words, obviously; I’m just paraphrasing.

I changed my approach and began doing two books a month: Rom and The Hulk. I inked them for a while, but then I stopped inking, I stopped doing breakdowns, and went to just doing finished pencils.

JA: You had a disagreement with Bill Mantlo while on The Hulk. Do you mind talking about what happened?

SB: The best I can remember I was doing this one story, and I thought the way to open the book would be with a very dramatic two-page spread. Bill Mantlo did not like it. I’m not sure exactly what transpired, but I believe he had a discussion with Ralph Macchio, who was the editor at the time. He called me and told me about it. I told him that I was sorry that he didn’t like it, because I liked it an awful lot. “But if you’re not happy with it, I’ll see what I can do for you. Let me try to change it.” Bill said, “Sal, I want something very specific.” And he began to literally lay the thing out for me verbally over the phone. He said, “I want this over here. I want this over there.”

What he was asking for was not good. I didn’t care for it at all, and I have to trust my judgment, because I’m the artist and he’s not.

I hate to be this blunt about it, but the fact of the matter is that in many cases where Bill described what he wanted he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was not an artist,

because he had no concept — and I do not mean this derogatorily, but simply as a statement of fact — of the relationship of one object to another in a given space. He would ask me to draw things that were impossible to draw.

But I tried to make them work. Obviously, they were not what Bill wanted, because if I had drawn what he wanted, people would have been calling me up and saying, “Sal, what’s happening? Are you losing it, or what?”

The mistake that I made was that I didn’t call Bill and discuss this with him. I probably should have done that, and this is why it came to a head. When he began to tell me exactly what he wanted me to do, and began to lay out panel for panel on every page, I just lost it. I said, “No, Bill, please. You write the book. Let me illustrate the book.” The conversation got 63

(above) After nearly three years of penciling and inking Incredible Hulk, Sal switched to doing pencils only and Joe Sinnott came on board as inker. Page 1 of Incredible Hulk #284.

ART COURTESY OF JOE AND MARK SINNOTT

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Sal did full art chores on Incredible Hulk #241-273 (except for issue #248). Page 13 of Incredible Hulk #270.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(above) Hulk and this alien Puffball Collective weren’t the only ones having trouble communicating. Sal and his longtime collaborator Bill Mantlo had a falling out in 1985 while working on Incredible Hulk, after which Sal left the book.

This panel is from Sal’s penultimate issue, #308, with inks by one of Sal’s favorites, Gerry Talaoc.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Hulk remembers the good times and the bad times — mostly the bad — in Incredible Hulk #309, Sal’s final issue. Sal’s memories of the book, thankfully, are much more pleasant than the Hulk’s.

ART COURTESY OF RAIMON FONSECA

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

very heated, and he hung up on me. I was upset. I didn’t want this to happen. I enjoyed working with Bill. I thought he was a pretty good writer, but he had these problems that I’ve been describing. I may have told him that, too, which probably didn’t sit very well with him. But the simple fact of the matter is if you don’t have that concept, then forget it. No matter what people tell you, you say, “No, no, no.

I can do this.” But Bill couldn’t, and he just didn’t understand what I was talking about.

Anyway, the way it wound up was that I called Ralph, and said that I just didn’t want to work with Mantlo anymore, that I didn’t enjoy it, that whatever chemistry that had existed between us was gone. And that was when I stopped doing The Hulk.

I read some things by Bill Mantlo in some comic-related magazine that I was very, very sorry to see. He said very, very derogatory things about me. He said that the only thing I was interested in was collecting a paycheck, and that I could care less about the work. I may have said something like that in passing to him in a joking way, but it’s not true. I could not have lasted as long as I have lasted if I had that attitude. And besides, it was a very ugly thing to say about me. He used me as an example when he said, “We’ve got guys in the business who do this kind of thing, and Sal Buscema is one of those guys.”

I wouldn’t say it was hurtful, though.

When people say things like that about me, I think it’s more their problem than mine.

What I tried tactfully to get across to Bill is that, “I’ve been reasonably successful at what I’m doing, and I was this successful for a lot of years before you even started doing comic books. Now all of a sudden you’re telling me how to do comic books. I’m sorry, I cannot accept that. I did not achieve this level of suc64

cess by doing what you want me to do. I did it by doing what I thought should be done.”

Sometimes it’s difficult, I guess, because of ego or whatever success they achieve, for a writer to accept that fact.

I read this stuff years after the fact. As a matter of fact, it was years after Bill’s accident, which I was terribly sorry to hear about. I understand he was terribly injured, and that it really affected his life.

JA: He’s still in a coma. He’s been in a coma for many years.

SB: Oh, my gosh. I wasn’t aware of that. The last I heard was that he’d had some very severe head injuries. That’s just awful. I hate to see that happen to anybody.

We worked on a lot of different things together. I enjoyed working with Bill. I don’t think he was a great writer, but I thought he had talent. I had no problems working with him up until that point, and then I started noticing his dissatisfaction with what I was doing. I wanted to correct that, but I’m not going to be dictated to. I never told Bill how to write stories. I would never be that presumptuous. I would never tell anyone how to write stories, because I’m not a writer. By the same token, I don’t want a writer to tell me how to illustrate a story.

JA: Did you talk with him often?

SB: Not often, but occasionally we did talk.

The relationship to that point was fine.

JA: In a situation like that, the editor would usually try to work things out. You seemed to work very well with Ralph. He seemed to listen to you.

SB: I never had any problems with Ralph. He was a delight to work with, too. Ralph is just

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SB: Of course it did. One of the problems with working away from the establishment is communication. You may say things over the phone that can be construed in a completely different way than what you intended. As I said before, I regret not paying more visits to Marvel so that they could know me better as a person, rather than as just a voice on the phone. You can have people saying things about you that you don’t even know about.

Then you find out some time later, and how do you defend yourself against something like that? It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do.

(above) Sal obviously had fun drawing the Hulk. It shows in every page. Incredible Hulk #245, page 22.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) A page from one of Sal’s stories for Savage Sword of Conan.

ART COURTESY OF RAIMON FONSECA

CONAN ™ AND ©2010 CONAN PROPERTIES INTERNATIONAL, LLC

one of those guys who seems to be able to handle situations. I think I just called him, and said, “Ralph, this is just not working. I don’t want to do the book anymore.” And I really regret doing that, because I enjoyed The Hulk. It was one of the books that I had a lot of fun with.

I thought it was funny, too, it was shortly after that incident that I found out I had the reputation of being very difficult to work with. And I had never, never had that problem before. Or since, for that matter.

Evidently there was some bad-mouthing going on at the time.

JA: You rose above it, but it had to bother you to hear that.

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JA: It’s also a testament to your work, because for a lot of people, not being around the office is career suicide.

SB: Exactly. John, for instance, lived in Long Island, and he didn’t go up to Marvel very often, but he sure went up a heck of a lot more than I did. With me it was an all-day affair. I had to lose a whole day’s work, which I hated doing because they kept me so busy. I had to catch a train very early in the morning. I didn’t want to fly up, because the trip from the airport to New York was horrible. You literally made better time with the train, because you got off right there in the heart of the city.

You’d grab a cab, and be at the office in five or ten minutes. It was a two-hour ride from the airport into the city. It was a hassle for me. I did it at first, I made a few trips up there, but then after a while I didn’t feel any great necessity. I spoke to people on the phone, and it worked fine for many years.

But it was a lack of my knowing enough about human relations, and this is where I kind of lost it a little bit. That’s why I should have gone up there more often, so they could get to know me, the person, rather than just my voice on the phone.

JA: You did some Conan covers and one story.

SB: I think I did a few of the black-and-white magazine stories, too.

JA: I assume you referred to your brother’s work. We talked before about how John preferred Conan to super-heroes. Did you have the same feelings?

SB: Absolutely. I loved the character. Conan was a great character. And sword-andsorcery just reeks of fun for the illustrator.

It was so much fun. It really whetted the creative juices.

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(above) It appears Sal got the feel for drawing Spider-Man pretty quickly, as evidenced by this panel from Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #3. Inks by Mike Esposito.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Spidey doesn’t get much more spidery-looking than in this illustration for the Spider-Man: Round Robin trade paperback collection.

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Speaking of sorcery, you did a little Dr. Strange, too, outside of The Defenders. I was wondering how you felt about that character.

SB: I thought Dr. Strange was one of those characters that was quite unique. Anything a little off-beat, a little off the wall, was what I enjoyed doing. Dr. Strange was definitely in that category.

JA: You had a long run on Spectacular Spider-Man in the 1980s to early ’90s.

Considering the status of that character, did you feel an added responsibility that you might not have felt on a fill-in title or lesser title?

SB: I approached every book the same way. I tried to give it my best under whatever circumstances I was working. I never got a book and thought, “Ah, this is an unimportant book. I’ll just bang this out,” or, “This is a really important character, so I’ll really do my best.” I tried to be even-handed with everything that I got, because I wanted to maintain whatever success I had achieved at Marvel.

JA: When Steve Ditko drew Spider-Man, he put him in strange poses. He made him more spider-like.

SB: Nobody draws like Steve Ditko. He had such a unique body language he’d give to his characters. Nobody could capture that.

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I thought of Spider-Man as a spider.

That’s all you can do. [laughs] I did things myself in my studio trying to capture certain positions. How can you make a human body look like a spider? I would literally try to assume those positions myself, and that would give me a basis from which to work.

With him and the Hulk especially, when I had them do their thing — when I had Spidey swinging through the city, when I had the Hulk leaping from one place to another — I always tried to exaggerate what they were doing. Because of the nature of those characters — especially Spider-Man — Stan, as I recall, wanted him to be off the wall and offbeat. He loved that Ditko approach to the character. Of course, when John Romita took it over, being such a good draughtsman, he gave it a completely different flavor.

I tried to do my own thing with the character, especially when I started the Spectacular Spider-Man series. That was something I got excited about, because I had never been asked to launch a new series before. And, of course, launching a SpiderMan book is kind of a feather in your cap, so I got really excited about that. I think I did the first 20 or 25 issues. I gave it my all.

JA: The initial idea of that series was to focus a little more on Peter Parker, and the supporting characters than Amazing Spider-Man did, but it didn’t seem like they worried about that too much once they got into the series.

SB: I never really got that feeling, either. To me, it just turned into another Spider-Man book, which was fine. I had no problems with that. If you don’t want the book to fail, you have to concentrate on the character. They don’t buy the book for Aunt May and Mary Jane. They buy the book for Spider-Man. That’s where you have to go.

Witness the success of the character in the movies. They’re treating the movies, as far as I’m concerned, exactly the way the character was treated in the comic books. It’s the singular most successful character in the comic book industry, as far as I know. The only one that rivals it may be Batman. X-Men at one time was the number one bestselling book, but that was a group of characters. But Spider-Man sold phenomenally well, and the supporting cast had a lot to do with it. There was a realism about that series that was unique in the comic book industry.

(right) A gloatingly happy J. Jonah Jameson — Sal’s favorite of Spidey’s supporting cast to draw. Panel from Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #19. Inks by David Hunt.

J. JONAH JAMESON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Spider-Girl’s costume is every bit as, if not more, complicated to draw than her dad’s.

Spider-Girl #72, page 17.

Pencils by Ron Frenz.

SPIDER-GIRL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Would you say that was the key to the character’s success?

SB: Certainly one of the keys. Also the fact that he was a youngster, the fact that he had problems... that whole scenario is what made the character so popular, because the kids could identify with this guy. He was one of

them. He had problems with girls, he had acne, he was a nerd and was bullied in school.

All of a sudden he gets these unbelievable powers, and he goes out and fights crime, and takes care of the city. I could just imagine how the kids buying this book felt about this character. “This is fantastic! This is me!” It must have been wonderful for them. It wasn’t that great to draw. [laughter] JA: It is a time-consuming costume to draw.

SB: Not once you figure it out. It’s not that bad. I’m inking Spider-Girl now, and it’s the same, basically. It is a little time-consuming, but it’s not a big deal.

JA: Did you have any favorites among Spider-Man’s supporting cast?

SB: Oh, Mary Jane was a great character. I loved drawing Aunt May. But my favorite supporting character was J. Jonah Jameson.

He’s just a great character. He’s so much fun to draw, because he’s such a grouch. You could really have a lot of fun with him, and I did.

JA: Did you ever give any thought to the fact that he had a Hitler-like mustache?

SB: Well, yeah. I guess everybody did. He certainly wasn’t a Hitler-like character, but that might have been the intent originally. On that character, I thought it was kind of funny.

JA: You had to think about his body language, too, because he was high-strung and very animated.

SB: Which is why he was so much fun to draw. I just did what I wanted to do with him.

Again, I had been dabbling in community theater for many years. I drew upon whatever ability I have in that area. It was a great help to me whenever I was doing character studies, because essentially what you do is immerse yourself. Just like creating a character on a stage, I’m creating a character on a piece of

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paper. You immerse yourself into that character, and try to become that character and draw accordingly.

JA: When you would draw a sad, dramatic scene, like one of Peter and Mary Jane’s break-ups, would that reflect in your mood as you drew it, or were you able to divorce yourself from that emotionally?

SB: Let me tell you a quick story. When Harry Osborn died in Spectacular SpiderMan #200, I was working with a terrific writer, J.M. DeMatteis. We worked together for a couple of years and I had a great time working with him, because I thought he was an outstanding writer. He came up with some really good storylines. He is one of the most talented writers I have ever had the pleasure to work with. I had a conversation with him on the phone about this story, and what he was trying to get across. He wanted it to be very, very powerful.

It was a very well plotted story. I just loved it. Harry wants to kill Spider-Man, but Mary

Jane talks him out of it, and he ends up saving Spider-Man at the end. When I got to the last two pages, I got so involved in the moment. Spider-Man is there with Harry as he lays there in an ambulance dying. When Harry finally expires, Spider-Man comes out of the ambulance and Mary Jane is there with Harry’s young son. I got so emotional drawing those two pages. I can’t recall that ever happening to me before or since. I must have just poured all of that emotion into those two pages.

I look at them now, and I hate the drawings that I did. I don’t care for the figures that much, and some of the shots... However, when Marc saw the two pages, he was very moved by them, and he thought they were so well done, he said, “These don’t even need any dialogue.” That was the most emotional moment I have ever had with a comic book. I almost brought myself to tears drawing this thing, and I guess it worked because Marc just loved what I did with the book, and especially with those last two pages.

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(above) Many collectors during the speculator boom of the early to mid-’90s bought Spectacular Spider-Man #200 for its shiny foil cover, but what made the issue truly special was the story inside masterfully told by J.M. DeMatteis and Sal Buscema.

DeMatteis wisely chose to let the art do the talking for the powerful last two pages of the story, shown here. Full art by Sal.

GREEN GOBLIN, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Balder the Brave #3, page 14, with full art by Sal. The Balder the Brave four-issue mini-series was one of Sal’s favorite jobs.

BALDER, UTGARD-LOKI ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Loki has a bit of a tantrum, while giving a recap of his Norse mythology heritage. Thor #375, page 2.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

LOKI, THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: There was a point in the mid-’80s where you started inking your own work, and you made a change in your work. It became a little less slick, a little more gritty. It evolved.

SB: I’m always fooling around with different ways and different approaches, if for no other reason than to maintain a freshness. And also to maintain my sanity, because if you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, you’re going to get stale. So I always tried to change. If I saw something that somebody did that I liked, I’d say, “Gee, I wonder how he does this?” and I would try to do that, too. This is how I grew. You can’t rest on your laurels when you’re an artist. It’s a never-ending learning process.

JA: Let me use this as an example. You did

Thor in the 1970s, but then when Walt Simonson needed a fill-in, you took over penciling Thor in the 1980s.

SB: And I tried to do it like Walt Simonson. It was a lot of fun, because I’m a huge Walt Simonson fan. I think he’s just a tremendous talent. When he asked me to take over the book, I was more than happy to, and I tried to capture the same flavor that Walt had in his book. The reason for that is continuity, and it’s also fun to do. Walt has a unique style, and it was very stimulating to try and emulate that, while still maintaining my own character.

JA: How much referencing of his work did you have to do?

SB: Just to the point where I felt comfortable with it. Once I got comfortable with it, once I figured out how Walt went about doing what he did, then there was no problem. And there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to be able to emulate him exactly. It would be like trying to imitate Kirby. A lot of guys tried, and 99% of them fell flat on their faces.

And John Workman added so much to a book with his lettering. He was just outstanding.

JA: How complete were Walt’s plots? What did you think of his writing?

SB: I think Walt is just a tremendous talent, period. Artistically, writing-wise, he’s just an outstanding talent, and I enjoyed working with him tremendously. This was one situation where I did have a personal relationship with a writer, because Walt and I would have these long phone conversations. He’d tell me what ideas he had, and I may have contributed once or twice. When I got a plot from him, I found it very stimulating. It was a pleasure working on his plots, because they were a lot of fun to illustrate. He had a lot of great ideas, and he took Thor in a totally new direction. I mean, he really explored Norse mythology, and that was something different that you could really grab onto as an artist.

I enjoyed the Balder series tremendously, and I still have the artwork for that. I penciled and inked it, and Walt brought out the best in me. He was a joy to work with.

JA: When I saw your work on Thor and the Balder mini-series, I thought it was a step up for you, because you were breaking the mold a little bit. How conscious were you of that at the time?

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SB: I was always conscious of that, Jim, because, as I mentioned, this was how I grew as an artist. When you look at other people’s work, some of it stimulates you, some of it inspires you, some of it doesn’t. Obviously, you’re going to be drawn to those people that inspire you. This is the process I used to grow as an illustrator, because I’m primarily self-taught. I did go art school, but really nobody can teach you how to be an artist. All they can do is give you guidance.

You have to learn on your own. And I grew through looking at the guys I admired, trying to figure out how they went about doing what they did. After a while it always became my own, but it also helped me to improve. When I look at the stuff I did in the latter part of my career, and compare it to the stuff from early in my career, there’s no comparison. I improved a lot.

JA: You carried this evolution of your work over to Spider-Man, too.

SB: No matter what I’m doing, it’s going to have a profound effect on what I do, in every phase of the creative process. You don’t change just one thing. You try to grow in every area, and hopefully I did. I think I did.

JA: It sounds like you got more involved with Walt on Thor than you did with most of the writers you worked with.

SB: Walt called me constantly. Walt gets so wrapped up in anything that he’s doing. We would have rather lengthy discussions, not only about the book, but about the industry

and things in general. Walt was very definite about what he wanted to do with the book.

He’s such an outstanding talent, and on top of that he had a lot of confidence in what he did, both writing and illustrating — except for one thing: He always inked his work with a pen. I asked him, “Why don’t you use a brush?” He said, “Oh, no. I can’t use a brush. I hate brushes.” Walt and Weezie both are delightful people. They really are.

(above) The New Mutants took flight with Louise Simonson at the helm. New Mutants #16, page 4. Inks by Tom Mandrake.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

NEW MUTANTS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: You worked with her, too, didn’t you?

SB: Yes, I did. She was my editor on New Mutants, and later on she wrote the issues of X-Factor I illustrated. She was a delight to work with. We always got along very well. We had a great relationship, and it continued as I continued to work with Walt. When I’d call Walt, sometimes she would answer the phone, and we’d talk for a couple of minutes.

JA: You only did pencils on New Mutants.

What did you think about that series? Did you enjoy it?

SB: Honestly, no, not that much. Here again, it was a group book, and I was not a big fan of group books. They’re very difficult to do. On a scale of one to ten, The Hulk being a ten, I would probably give New Mutants a four or five.

Louise made it a little more enjoyable. She was a delight to work with just because of her personality. She knew how to make you feel comfortable. But it was a spin-off. It was okay, I just didn’t think it was anything unique.

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(facing page) A demon disguised as Spider-Man torments Flash Thompson in dynamic fashion reminiscent of Sal’s work on Thor. Page 20 of Spectacular Spider-Man.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/

ART

FLASH THOMPSON, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Cover art for Marvel’s Greatest Comic #36.

ART COURTESY OF JERRY BOYD

(below) During a sixissue run from Fantastic Four #297-302, Sal provided finishes over his brother John’s breakdowns. The relationship between the Thing and the Yancy Street Gang, as shown in this scene from Fantastic Four #300, was just one more detail that made the Thing such an interesting character.

FANTASTIC FOUR, THING ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: I would imagine that you had more interest in the characters you were familiar with.

SB: No, I think doing new characters was kind of fun, especially if there was something unique about the character. I had no problem working on new stuff, like Rom. I had a lot of fun with Rom. JA: Inking John on Fantastic Four had to be different than inking John on Silver Surfer.

SB: As I recall, he was only doing breakdowns. It was a lot of fun. I wish I could say more about it. I just loved inking John’s pencils, whether it was finished pencils or breakdowns. Obviously, if it’s breakdowns, there’s going to be a lot more of me in it.

JA: Were his breakdowns about the same level of detail that yours were?

SB: Yes. Everything was pretty much there except for the blacks.

JA: Did you like the Fantastic Four?

SB: Yes. That was a fun group to do. They had one of the most unique characters in the Marvel universe: The Thing.

JA: When you started at Marvel, Stan was still editor-in-chief. Then there was Roy. Then there was Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Archie Goodwin. Then there was Jim Shooter, then Tom DeFalco, and it goes on. Did the different regimes effect you very much in what you did in the way you worked? Did you ever notice any differences when regimes changed?

SB: No, not really. There was a dramatic change when Shooter became editor-in-chief.

The whole industry knows what that story is all about.

JA: I read in Back Issue magazine where you and he had a difference of opinion on the wedding of Spider-Man. SB: As a matter of fact, we did. I got along very well with Jim. This is after I started making a few more trips, because of the fact that I had that very nice, very informative conversation with him not too long after he took over as editor-in-chief. Everything was fine, and the relationship was great up until the time he asked me to do the marriage of Spider-Man. Jim asked me if I would be willing to do the story. I said, “Sure. Fantastic.” I’m thinking, “Wow, this is going to be a biggie,” and we were getting royalties at the time. “I’m going to make a fortune.” There’s always the money side. I didn’t do comic books strictly for the love of comic books. I did it because I wanted to make a buck, too. If somebody were to say, “I know you really love to do this stuff, but we’re not going to pay you to do it. Would you do it anyway?” Anybody who says they would say yes is either a fool or a liar.

Anyway, I had heard these horror stories about Secret Wars. Mike Zeck was a very good artist; I liked his work. And I found out third-hand, so it may be wrong, that Mike almost had a nervous breakdown because of what Jim had put him through. That got me a little bit leery.

But that wasn’t the big problem. When I got the script from Jim, he had all kinds of parameters he had painted for me, all sorts of

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(facing page) A page from the back-up story from 1996’s Spider-Man Unlimited #11. Notice that Spidey shoots his web and hits the bad guy all in the same panel. Of course, Jim Shooter was long gone from Marvel by this point, and it’s not as though Sal ever needed drawing instructions from him at any point in his career — particularly instructions that could potentially hinder the storytelling.

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

restrictions. “Don’t do this. I want the panels done this way. I want the panels done that way. I want them laid out this way.”

Essentially, the next step would have been for him to hold my hand and push the pencil around on the paper. I read the note that came along with the script and thought, “I can’t work this way. I just cannot give it my best.”

And that’s essentially what I wrote in a letter to Jim — more a long note than a letter. I thanked him very much for asking me to do it.

I told him that under the circumstances, what he was asking was more than I could give him.

That I could not do my best work working under these circumstances. That he was just giving me too many parameters, and sort of painting me into a corner or putting me in a box, and I just could not work that way. I asked him to please understand, because I’d been used to working for so many years in this manner, and all of a sudden he was asking me do something diametrically opposed to the way I’d been working. “I can’t do my best work for you. Thank you for the opportunity.” I thought it was a very pleasant and tactful letter. I said, “I’m sure you can find somebody else who can give you what you want, and thereby do a much better job than I would be able to do for you under these circumstances.”

It was a few days later that I got a letter back from Jim that just ripped me up one side and down the other. He told me they were paying me the big bucks to do what I was told. The letter was longer than that, and it was abusive.

I didn’t appreciate it one bit, because the letter I had sent to him was very tactful and very, very friendly. I certainly didn’t get that in return, and that’s the way it ended. As far as I was concerned the case was closed. It was over with. I didn’t appreciate the letter, but there was nothing I could do about that.

JA: From what I understand, he was going into such detail that he was telling you what the houses were supposed to look like, what the people were supposed to be wearing — that level of minutiae.

SB: He even went into panel layout. He said, “For instance, if Spider-Man is shooting his web at somebody, I don’t want to see him shooting the web in one panel and the web hitting the guy in the next panel. I want that to be happening in one panel.” I’m thinking, “If the circumstances call for it, if the design of the book calls for it, you can’t work that way.” How are 78

you supposed to work at your creative best when somebody is damn near hanging over your shoulder telling you how to draw everything that you’re supposed to draw. I can’t work that way. I’m not sure anybody could.

And I wasn’t about to get a nervous breakdown the way Mike Zeck did, so I decided — and I hated to do it, believe me, because I knew I was giving up a lot of money — to write that letter.

JA: Did this affect your standing at the company?

SB: I have no idea. It may very well have.

JA: Did your assignments change? Did you get less work?

SB: No. Whatever I was working on at the time continued.

JA: I asked you earlier if you ever asked to do higher profile books. Royalties started kicking in, but that didn’t change the way you saw yourself at the company. You didn’t go after a book just because it paid higher royalties.

SB: No. I don’t recall ever going after a book.

I had my preferences, and I would think, “Gee, I would love to do this book sometime,” but I never called anybody up and said, “Hey, can I do this sometime?” I never did that.

JA: I find that fascinating, because even though you say you’re mercenary, you don’t seem to have been concerned about that.

SB: It would have been nice, but I wasn’t going to beg anybody for a book. I was making a good living. I was busy all the time. The only time I wasn’t working was when I decided I wasn’t going to work, like if I went on a vacation or something. When I told people what I did for a living, and that I worked at home and saw my neighbors commute to work on snowy streets while I walked 50 feet from my kitchen to my studio, they would just look at me with their mouths gaping wide, because it’s a fantastic situation.

How many fathers have the opportunity to see their children take their first steps or say their first word? I was there all the time. I’m so blessed, and I have been my entire life and my entire career. It’s almost like living a dream. Money was important, but it certainly wasn’t the primary consideration. I’m not a promoter anyway. I didn’t promote myself. I let my work do the talking for me.

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(below) Sal hard at work in his studio circa 1969. This photo is taken from the back cover of an issue of Fantastic Fanzine.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JEFF BELL

JA: When you were doing three, sometimes four books a month, how did you balance home life and work life?

SB: I’m a pretty disciplined person. I worked a regular day. I tried to make it as much nineto-five as possible for the sake of my family, because I wanted to have that time with my family. I’d start around ten o’clock in the morning, and I’d work ’til five or six.

There were times I worked at night. There were times I worked on weekends, when the situation called for it, but I tried to keep it as regular as possible. My family dictated that. I wanted to keep it as normal and regular as possible, and I determined that the best way to do that was to be as disciplined as I could possibly be. And there were a lot of other factors, too. I wanted to be able to turn out a good amount of work for Marvel. That certainly paid off, because they knew that I was very dependable. I think, if anything, I achieved that reputation. When I told them I could do a job in a certain amount of time, I kept my word. To me, that’s just part of being a professional. The word “professional” is very, very important to me. I know there are a lot of individuals in this industry who are very, very gifted. I don’t think all of them are terribly professional.

But, again, my first consideration was my family. I wanted to be able to keep that family life as normal as possible. The best way to do that was to discipline myself with that nine-to-five attitude, and for the most part I did succeed.

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JA: Would the kids come in while you worked?

SB: Oh, sure, there were interruptions. [laughs] There was one horrendous situation.

I don’t even know if I should mention this, because Mike, my youngest son, will probably get really mad at me, but he was only five at the time. It was actually a very tough time family-wise for us, because my wife’s father was dying. He was in a hospital, and Joan and her mom, Laura, went to see him. They were going to be there a while, because he was not doing well at all. I was working. Mike was five, so Tony would have been seven, and Joe would have been nine. At the time we lived in a very big house on two acres of land. We had an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard.

It was a beautiful area. We lived there for 23 years, and I even designed the house, which was fun.

That day I was taking care of the kids.

They were down in our finished basement where they had a playroom. While I’m upstairs working, I hear this horrendous noise. I mean, a bang. The house literally jumped. I’m not exaggerating. Then I heard a blood-curdling scream. It was just horrible.

Obviously, it was one of the kids. I leapt out of my chair, ran downstairs, and saw my son, Mike, on the floor with his hand on his head.

He had banged his head just above the hairline into a support beam, and he had a gash in his head that was probably three, threeand-a-half inches long. I could see skull. It was horrendous. So I grabbed towels and called our pediatrician. He said, “Bring him right over.”

We had a wonderful pediatrician. He was a Cuban who had escaped from the island when Castro took over. He was a very prominent doctor there, but when he got here he had to change his practice to pediatrics in order to avoid having to go through another internship. He was in his 40s, and he didn’t want to go through that. He loved children, so he went into pediatrics.

Anyway, I drove him there while my oldest son, Joe, held a cloth on Mike’s head to try to stop the bleeding, and the doctor stitched him up. The terrible thing about it was that my wife and mother-in-law got home before I did, and when they came in they ran into a trail of blood. [laughter] They freaked out.

It was a nasty gash, but they stitched him up, and he was fine. But my poor wife and

mother-in-law almost fainted when they came into the house. I got home just a few minutes after they did, thank God, or they probably would have been out on the road looking for us. [laughter] JA: Were any of your kids interested in drawing because they saw you drawing?

SB: They all displayed ability; all three of them did. To an extent they still do, but did they have an interest to do that as a career?

No. It’s funny, they were not even big comic book fans. It’s kind of like the cobbler’s kids running around without shoes. [laughter] They knew their dad had a certain amount of notoriety. They’d tell me funny stories about school where kids would be talking about what their parents did and would ask them, “Hey, Joe, Tony, Mike, what does your dad do?” “Oh, well my father works for Marvel Comics.” “Oh, yeah, sure.” And they’d just say, “Okay, fine.” [laughter] Then, once the kids were convinced, they’d freak out, and my kids would be the big guys on campus. I still get a kick out of those stories. We still talk about it today, and those stories are fun to hear again. We’re a very, very close family, and we try to spend as much time with each other as we possibly can.

JA: When you’re working from home... at times you’re home, but you’re not home, because you’re working.

SB: Yes, that’s true.

JA: Sometimes extra responsibility falls on the spouse if you’re having to work late to make deadlines. It takes a special person to live with a comic book artist.

SB: No question about it. This is going to sound clichéd in a way, but it is the absolute truth. Joan has been totally supportive of my career. I remember like it was yesterday the night I told her that I wanted to leave a very secure job with all the benefits and perks that came with it, to do comics. She said, “Okay, fine. Go ahead,” and that was the end of that.

“If that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it.” She’s just been totally supportive.

JA: For a brief while in 1992 you did the Spider-Man newspaper strip.

SB: That was only when they got into a couple of deadline problems. I think I did a couple of Sunday strips and also some of the dailies.

Stan at one time asked me to do it on a regular basis. I can’t remember if it was the daily or the Sunday. He told me what they paid for it, and when I did the numbers based upon what I made per page and considering the royalties on top of that, I thought, “Gosh, if I do this on a regular basis, I’m going to be losing money.” I called Stan, and said, “Stan, I can’t do it for any less than this amount.” He said, “Sal, I really can’t pay any more than this.” It was a nice conversation; it was just a simple matter of numbers. He had to split it three ways between himself, the artist, and the syndicate. There just wasn’t that much 81

(above) No, it’s not an afterschool special. It’s the December 13, 1992 Spider-Man Sunday newspaper strip — one of a handful of Spider-Man strips Sal penciled when the strip was falling behind deadline. Inks by Joe Sinnott.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(right) Larry King makes an appearance in this September 1, 1996 Spider-Man Sunday newspaper strip. Inks by Joe Sinnott.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Sal not only became friendly with a teenaged Gary Groth and his family, but he also provided this cover illustration of Dr. Strange as well as a short interview for a 1969 issue of Groth’s Fantastic Fanzine.

money in it. It just wasn’t worth it on a monetary basis to do it permanently. I was happy to do it as a fill-in anytime, as a favor to Stan.

ART COURTESY OF JEFF BELL

DR. STRANGE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Between the ’70s up until 1996 when Marvel went bankrupt, how often did you go to conventions?

SB: Not a whole lot. There was a young man, a teenager at the time, that I met who was a big comic book fan, and I got kind of friendly with him and his parents. His name was Gary Groth. The first convention I went to was one he put together. I wanted to help him out, because it was his first venture. I think he was only about 16 or 17 years old at the time. He might have been younger. His mom and dad helped him out, too.

I did not do a lot of shows. John and I would have conversations about this. After doing a few conventions here and there, we decided, “This is a money-making operation for the people who run these conventions.

This is not a charity. They don’t do it for the love of the industry or the love of the fans.

They do it to make money.” Every convention that I’ve ever been to has been like that.

JA: That’s not always true, but more often than not, yes. I used to put on conventions, and as long as we broke even we were happy.

SB: If there’s somebody out there who’s a little more altruistic, I don’t think I’ve ever come in contact with them. I think you will admit that San Diego doesn’t do it to be altruistic. San Diego does it because it’s a big business.

JA: I’ve known a couple of exceptions, but for the most part you’re right about that.

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SB: There are exceptions to every rule.

Anyway, John and I decided that we were not going to do these things for nothing.

Whenever I talk to people they say, “You can make money by charging for sketches.” I just tell them, “Look, I’m not going to charge a nine-year-old kid $25 for a drawing. I would rather charge you a fee, and then you can advertise the fact that Sal Buscema is going to be there doing free head sketches of any character that they want.” A lot of them bought that. They thought that was a great idea.

There were also a lot of times when people would call me about a convention, and as soon as I said, “This is my fee,” there would be this pause, and then they would say, “Oh, we don’t pay. We only cover your expenses.”

“Sorry, I don’t work for nothing, and I consider this work. If I’m going to work for you for nothing, I’d just as soon stay home, and do my own work and make money.”

When you’re talking about the bigger conventions — New York, Philadelphia, whatever — it’s a money-making operation. But I think it’s because of my policy that I have not been invited to that many conventions.

JA: You’re not the only person who’s charged for an appearance.

SB: No, I’m sure I’m not. As a matter of fact, the prices I charged were probably a lot more reasonable than most of these guys.

JA: Do you enjoy conventions?

SB: I enjoy meeting the fans if I’m at a table just signing autographs and doing quick head sketches and that type of thing. I get a kick out of that. I’m not too crazy about the panels, though. John and I only did one convention together, and that was years ago in New York. We were together for maybe an hour at a table doing sketches, then he had to go his way, and I had to go mine.

But the simple fact of the matter is that it’s a business. It kind of ticked me off when people would ask me to come to their convention and I’d tell them, “My fee is such and such,” and then they’d say, “Well, we don’t pay.” “Wait a minute. You want me there, you want my brother there, you want a whole bunch of other people there, because we are the people that are going to be drawing fans into your convention, and hopefully making you a potful of money, and yet you don’t want to pay for the work that we’re going to be doing.” It just annoyed me.

On the other side — I want to be fair about this — a lot of times people would call and ask me to do a convention. I’d say, “Is it a weekend, a day, or what?” They’d tell me, I’d say, “Okay, my fee is this in addition to expenses,” and they’d say, “Okay, that’s fine.” They wouldn’t even bat an eye, and I appreciated that because they handled it in a very professional manner. I’m not sure about this, but John and I may have been the first ones to do this. I can’t think of anyone else that was charging before us. John said, “You know what’s going to happen. Nobody’s going to invite us to conventions.” I said, “Well, that’s okay, because I can think of other things that I’d rather do on a weekend.”

I was invited to Barcelona, Spain, to do a convention there. It’s a huge convention.

Believe it or not, it actually dwarfs the one in San Diego. I believe they told me that they get 90,000 people there. It’s held in an old train station that is no longer in service, and they used the entire space. It was mammoth. I got to meet the legendary Will Eisner and his wife there. What a delightful man he was, and his wife was just a sweetheart. My wife and I just 83

(above) A 1994 convention head sketch of your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(right) Frank Robbins followed Sal as penciler on Captain America, disappointing many fans, to say the least. Sal is a big fan of Robbins’ work on the long-running Johnny Hazard newspaper strip, though, and who can blame him. Just take a gander at this August 7, 1952 daily.

JOHNNY HAZARD ™ AND ©2010 KING FEATURES SYNDICATE, INC.

(below) Another 1994 convention head sketch, this time of Venom.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

VENOM ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

enjoyed meeting and conversing with them so much. That was a big treat.

One of the sponsors is one of the big publishers in Spain. They took us out to lunch this one time, and my wife and I were fortunate enough to sit at the table — I don’t know if it was by design or not — with one of the big wheels of the company. He was a young guy — very dynamic. We were talking comic books,

and he said something that really floored me.

He said, “Sal, at our offices, when we think of Marvel Comics” — they hold the license to reprint Marvel comics in Spain, I believe — “we think of you.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You were everywhere.

Every place we looked, there was Sal Buscema’s work. You were a huge part of Marvel Comics.” I was just floored when I heard that. I never believed that a multi-million dollar company would be thinking about Sal Buscema. It’s something that I’ve never gotten used to. I never will get used to it. It was very gratifying. I was kidding him saying, “I know you’re exaggerating,” and he said, “No, I am not.”

JA: I think anybody between the age of, say, 30 and 45 would agree with that. Look at the volume of work that you did. When you left Captain America and Frank Robbins took over, there was a lot of outrage.

SB: I was a huge Frank Robbins fan when he was doing Johnny Hazard. He was obviously influenced by Milton Caniff, but he had a style all his own, and I loved what he did.

Frank was not a super-hero comic book artist. He could not do super-heroes the way they were supposed to be done. He made them look awkward; he didn’t make them look heroic. It wasn’t his bag. Give the guy a mystery story to do or something with a detective or anything like that and he was great, but super-heroes were not his forte.

JA: The Marvel Age is Stan and Kirby and Ditko. Then it became Stan and Roy, John, you, John Romita, and Joe Sinnott. The four of you do become the Marvel look. When John got locked into Conan, he wasn’t doing as many super-hero books, and you were so prolific you became as much the house look as anybody.

SB: I thank you for that. I’m very objective about it. I’ve always felt that John should

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have done loftier things. John always said he was not crazy about comics, but he enjoyed making the money he made in comics.

Unfortunately, sometimes we become a slave to that, because the rewards were very handsome for many, many years. To a degree, they still are. But what I wanted from him, and what he wanted also, was for John to do paintings and for them to be seen in galleries.

He got into comics and enjoyed them. He did not hate them as he told so many people. Deep down he got a kick out of them. But he did not enjoy the super-hero stuff that much. When he latched onto Conan, that was his joy. He loved doing Conan. And he was made to order for that character. If somebody had designed a character specifically for John, they couldn’t have done better than Conan. I’m sorry the syndicated strip didn’t work out.

Myself, I am the quintessential commercial artist. John was not. He was a gigantic talent. I don’t know anyone, and I’ve come

into contact with a lot of people in this business over the 150 years I’ve been in it — not just comics, but commercial art, in general — that could draw from memory the way John did. From models, yes, they could draw as well as he did. But from memory, he was uncanny. He developed a skill there that, to me, is unrivaled. And there are some tremendous draughtsmen. Joe Kubert is a tremendous draughtsman — brilliant. John Romita, Sr. — tremendous draughtsman, but not in John’s class. He was in a class by himself. And his best work was always on the back of the page, because he loved to draw.

That was his life. That was the thing that kept his heart pumping. When he got tired of doing comics, which happened a lot with him, he’d turn the page over and draw just for his own pleasure. It was not work to him.

It was a labor of love. He’d get an inspiration, and he’d have to sit down and draw it.

That was the difference between the two of 85

(above) Sal drew this piece for the ACBA Portfolio in the early ’70s, showing that — like his brother John — when given a choice, he would rather draw fantasy than super-heroes.

ART COURTESY OF JERRY BOYD

ARTWORK ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

(below) One of John Buscema’s many “back of the board” sketches.

Whenever John needed a break from his comic book work, or when he was simply struck by an inspiration, he would flip over whatever page he happened to be working on and sketch away.

These sketches were famous around the Marvel office, and were often photocopied by the artists there.

ARTWORK ™ AND ©2010 JOHN BUSCEMA

us. To me it was a business. John had it in his blood. I was a little more practical about it.

People often ask me, “Do you think comic books are great art?” and I don’t think they are. Comic book art is not great art, it’s not great writing, because it’s a commercial product. We have deadlines we have to meet. You have to do the best you can within the parameters you’re given. There’s nothing I would like better than to be able to spend one entire week on one page. But who can do that?

Practically speaking, it’s impossible to do that. You would not survive.

I would compare comic books to soap operas on television. It requires a tremendous amount of talent to produce a good soap opera. You have to have good actors, good directors, good writers, producers. It’s a good

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comparison, because a comic book is not the product of one individual; it’s the product of several individuals. Using that analogy, I hardly think that anyone would say that soap operas are Shakespeare. It’s not great theater. It’s not Eugene O’Neill, it’s not Shakespeare, but it requires a tremendous amount of talent to do it. It’s the same with comic books.

I used to have lunch with a bunch of my peers — commercial artists — who lived in the Washington, DC area, many of whom I worked with for years before I got into comics. We used to get together once a week for lunch. One of them got a commission from a client of his. He wanted him to do a comic book on the life of Pope John Paul. He said, “Sal, I know you do comics. I’ve never done a comic book. Can you help me out a little bit?

Could you bring me a few books and maybe give me some pointers on storytelling?” I said, “Yeah, sure. I’d be happy to.”

To make a long story short, I showed him some of the books that I’d done. I said, “This is how you go about it. This is how you start, this is the middle, and this is how you end.”

He went home, and two or three weeks later he came back and said, “I had to turn the job down.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how you do this stuff. I don’t know how you sit down day after day drawing panel after panel after panel, page after page after page. I didn’t know where to begin. Everything I did was awful. It was pathetic.” And this was a very talented artist, but he was not a comic book guy. Comic books were just totally alien to him.

They used to joke around about the fact that I did comic books. Then all of a sudden there was a certain amount of respect that crept into the lunches we had. That was very gratifying, because I could look at them and say, “They’re not that easy, are they?” He said, “No. They are monumentally difficult to do.”

Chapter Five

A New Start with a Different Company

JA: You were doing a lot of inking for Marvel up to the time they went bankrupt. A lot of editors lost their jobs. A lot of books were cut.

SB: In the space of two or three months, Marvel got rid of two or three hundred people. It was a bloodbath. I lost all of my work.

JA: What were your thoughts on the company going public?

SB: I thought it was a good sign. I had no idea that the company was going to get into any kind of financial trouble. I’m a capitalist through and through, and I thought it was a good idea. I even floated the idea of buying some stock. I’m glad I didn’t. [laughter]

advance. I’m always looking five or ten years down the road, and I had plans for essentially doing what I’m doing now. My thoughts were that I would like to go to issue #350 on Spectacular Spider-Man and that would have been right around the time I could retire.

Then all I wanted to do was ink one book a month — that’s all — just to maintain a presence in the industry, and to do something that I really enjoyed doing. Well, that’s essentially

JA: How did you get the news in ’96?

SB: I knew what was happening. I anticipated it. I was only doing Spectacular Spider-Man at the time, and I got a call from Ralph Macchio telling me that all the sales were down and they were going to have to make changes.

I said, “That means I’m not doing the book anymore,” and he said, “Right.” I said, “Am I doing anything else?” He said, “ Well, I don’t have anything for you, Sal. I don’t know about any of the other editors.” I said, “Essentially, the answer is no.” It was a nice conversation, because Ralph and I always got along well, but that was the end of it.

I was under contract to Marvel at the time, and the contract stated that as long as I was under contract I couldn’t work for anybody else. So I had to call Bob Harras, who had recently taken over as editor-in-chief, and tell him I was terminating my contract. The contract was almost silly, because either party could terminate it any time they wanted to. In this case, I terminated it because I had to earn a living, and to do that I had to get work from other people. He said, “Fine, Sal. We hope things will turn around. We’ll be in touch.”

And then I went to DC, and happily they started giving me work.

This is very important. I was near the end of my career. I was 60 years old, so I wasn’t far from retirement. It bugged me a little bit, because I’m a guy who likes to plan way in 87

(below) Sal’s run on Spectacular Spider-Man ended earlier than he would have preferred, with issue #238. Inks by John Stanisci over Sal’s breakdowns.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

DRAGON MAN, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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what’s happened to me now, so in that respect I have been very, very blessed. But the big thing — and this is the point I want to make — there were so many guys with families they needed to support, and these were the people I really felt for. My career was essentially behind me. I had to squeeze out a few more years the best that I could, but there were so many guys in their 30s and 40s that still had years to work, and all of a sudden the whole industry went to pot, and all these people were out of work. It was just a terrible, terrible time. And I’m not saying this to sound noble or anything like that. Believe me, I was very, very upset. I’d been working for Marvel for over 30 years, and here I was just shoved aside. But it happened to so many other people, and they were the ones I really felt for.

JA: Who was your first contact at DC? SB: Mike Carlin. The first project they put me on was a doozy. It just blew me away that they would trust me with it. It was a double-sized issue with Batman. And they asked me what writer I would like to work with! I had read some stuff that Chuck Dixon did. He wrote The Punisher when John Romita, Jr. was drawing it, and that was just a fantastic book.

When they asked me who I’d like to work with, I immediately said I’d love to work with Chuck Dixon. The next thing I know, I’m getting a plot for Detective Annual #10.

JA: How closely did you work with Chuck?

SB: It was a good story. It had to do with foreign intrigue and a South American dictator, and I just had a ball with it. But I really didn’t talk with Chuck. I got the plot in the mail, and I dealt with the editor, I sent the pages in, and that was that.

JA: Did you work from a plot or a full script?

SB: I’m pretty sure I worked from a plot. I’ve done a couple of very small penciling jobs for Marvel in the last three or four years — just two or three pages where they wanted an “old-fashioned” style, and they asked me to do it, which really makes me laugh. [laughter] They were full-script, and I hated every minute of it. I despised it.

It was so refreshing when Stan came up with the new concept of having the artists work from plots. It was revolutionary, and I think it was responsible, more than anything else, for the creative explosion in comic

books. I cannot understand why they’ve gone back to full scripts.

JA: How did you feel about drawing Batman?

SB: It was great! I was just flipping out when they asked me to do Batman, because I love the character. And the plot that Chuck came up with was just wonderful. I really had a lot of fun working on that. It was great working with the Batman team, too. They were a bunch of nice guys.

JA: How was the money?

SB: I was getting paid exactly the same as I had been at Marvel. Scott Peterson, the Batman group editor, and his two associate editors took me out to lunch, and the reception that I got from them was just wonderful. It was so gratifying. They seemed really happy to have me. Unfortunately, it didn’t last too long, because the whole industry was falling apart.

But it reenergized me. It was a whole new experience, and I took advantage of the situation in the sense that I did what I did not do when I was with Marvel. I went up there more frequently. Not that much, because I only worked for DC for two or three years, but I made several trips up there to let them know that I was alive and breathing. The short time that I worked for them was great. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and they treated me superbly. I can’t say enough about it.

JA: For the most part, you just wanted to ink at this point. You didn’t want to pencil anymore.

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(above) A moody Batman in these panels from a ten-page story for Batman 80-Page Giant #2. Sal did the full art for this story, a rarity during his time at DC.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

BATMAN, ROBIN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS.

(facing page) A full-page splash from Sal’s first job for DC: Detective Annual #10. Inks by one of Sal’s favorite collaborators, Klaus Janson.

BATMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS.

(right) Sal was a good match with Denys Cowan as shown in this opening splash from Steel #47.

STEEL ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

(below) Too bad Klaus Janson was too busy to take on Batman full-time with Sal as his inker.

BATMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

SB: After working with them a while, I said “I will do whatever work you guys want me to do. You’ve been very kind to me, and I really appreciate it. But what I would prefer to do is just ink.” I was winding down, and, as I told you before, inking is my first love. And they kept me busy inking, and they gave me stuff that was a lot of fun, too. They had a lot of the new, young guys coming in who were struggling and weren’t quite where they should have been. They would ask me to “tweak” the art. As they put it, “Sal, you can tweak this stuff to get it more professional looking.” It was a challenge, and it was also a lot of fun to do. It really was. Some of the new guys were phenomenal.

And I got to ink a lot of different guys.

Denys Cowan, who I inked on Steel, was terrific. I loved inking Klaus Janson on Batman.

As a matter of fact, those books [Batman #553-554] were so well received at DC that they asked Klaus to do it on a permanent basis, with me as his permanent inker. Klaus loved the way I inked his pencils, and I just loved inking his work. The marriage between the two of us was like it was made in heaven.

It was fantastic — pure joy. But Klaus had so much work to do that he couldn’t take it on, which nearly broke my heart. I was hoping he would say yes. Those two books we did together were the zenith of my time at DC. He paid me the greatest compliment that I think I have gotten from anybody. I was talking with one of the editors one day when Klaus happened to be in the office. They had just gotten some of the pages I’d inked and they called to tell me how much they liked them.

Klaus said, and this may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Sal, you inked me better than I ink myself.” And I said, “Yeah, right.” [laughter] But he was very, very happy with what I did. Talk about the right chemistry.

I’m not tooting my own horn, but I feel that my inking abilities are such that I can ink anybody. I may have had trouble with Gene Colan, but after a page or two I started inking Gene the way he’s supposed to be inked.

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(left) Many inkers found Gene Colan’s pencils difficult to ink, as he tended to apply a lot of subtle shading in his work. Sal didn’t ink Colan very often, but he certainly did a fine job on this 1973 romance story for Our Love Story #22.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

OUR LOVE STORY ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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(right) Very often while at DC, Sal was called in to ink new pencilers. He handled many different styles, and it was Sal’s versatility that made him ideal for such situations.

In Batman/Scarecrow 3-D, Sal inked Carl Critchlow, a British artist with a somewhat cartoony style who had worked for 2000 AD, but only did a handful of jobs for DC in the late ’90s.

BATMAN, ROBIN, SCARECROW ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

(below) A page from Batman Chronicles #16’s back-up story, “Harold,” penciled by Chris Renaud, who after working in comics from 1996-2000 left to go into the field of animation.

HAROLD ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

(above) The one title Sal worked on with any consistency for DC was The Creeper. There he inked Shawn Martinbrough’s high-contrast pencils for the entirity of The Creeper’s twelve-issue run.

THE CREEPER ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

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(below) Sal proved to be a good match with Cully Hamner’s stylized pencils on Robin #46.

(below) Inking the lead story in Wonder Woman: Secret Files & Origins #1 must have been a treat for Sal. Not only did he get to work in a fantasy setting, but he inked one of his peers, Dick Giordano.

ROBIN, BATMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

WONDER WOMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

(below) For Detective #733, Sal inked the hyperdetailed pencils of Phil Winslade.

BATMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

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But with Klaus, I couldn’t wait to get the pages, because I enjoyed inking him so much.

It was an absolute blast. I wanted to work on his pencils forever.

He’s a master black-and-white artist.

Black-and-white art is more difficult to do than color. He does things that are just brilliant. In that respect, it was so much fun just to see his pages, because his pencils were pretty tight. He has a very stylized flavor to his drawing. It was almost to the point that I could say, “Gee, I wish I penciled like this.” It was not work, believe me. To use the old cliché, it was a labor of love.

JA: Of the DC characters you worked on, and you worked on a fair amount, which was your favorite?

SB: I would have to say Batman. Batman is a very unique character. He’s very dark and foreboding — not quite over the line.

JA: You penciled Superman: The Man of Steel, too. Did you think of Superman as something special, or was he just another super-hero to you?

SB: Who ever knew that I’d be doing Superman one day? In that sense there was a little bit of excitement there, but once you get into it, it’s just another job.

JA: Why did you leave DC after only three years?

SB: Business started slowing down for them, too. The sales were not good. The Batman editors I had been working with — Scott Peterson and Jordan Gorfinkel and the rest — all left at different times. They had kept me constantly busy, but I guess the editors that took over decided that they didn’t want my services any more. I officially retired when I turned 64. I’m still working, though.

JA: You’ve been working on Spider-Girl for quite some time.

SB: And I hope we’re on it for quite some time to come, too. I have a fantastic relationship with Ron Frenz. Ron is a friend, and Tom DeFalco is a friend.

Tom is not only a terrific writer, he’s also a delightful guy. We had a great working relationship, and we still do, although we’re not in contact as much as we were when he was writing Spectacular Spider-Man for me. I’m

just doing the inking on Spider-Girl. I don’t know anybody who knows more about this business than he does. His storytelling ability is outstanding. This is a guy who really knows how to write. He could probably teach writing; he knows it that well. Ron and I talk about this a lot.

Now, Ron is one of the guys who does contribute an awful lot to plotting and ideas and so on. And Ron has enormous respect for Tom’s ability and talent, simply because the guy just knows what he’s doing. He knows how to tell a story. When I worked with Tom on Spectacular Spider-Man, it was just as smooth as silk. Tom has a talent for stimulating you and really bringing the best out of you.

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(above) Before their longstanding pairing on Spider-Girl for Marvel, Sal inked Ron Frenz on Superman: The Man of Steel #94.

SUPERMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS.

(facing page) One of the many artists Sal inked during his brief tenure at DC was legendary Batman artist Jim Aparo.

Batman #558, page 18.

ART COURTESY OF SPENCER BECK

BATMAN ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS.

(below) Thanks to their long collaboration on Spider-Girl, Sal has inked Ron Frenz more than any other penciler.

Spider-Girl #64, page 17.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

SPIDER-GIRL, VULTURE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: Does Ron do complete pencils or breakdowns?

SB: Ron does pretty much complete pencils — lately, especially. For a while he was doing breakdowns. His breakdowns are very, very tight. So tight that I was actually beginning to feel guilty getting the extra money for working over breakdowns. They felt more like finished pencils than breakdowns. His breakdowns are tighter than some guys’ penciling.

So we ended that. I told him, “Look, Ron, if this is what you’re going to be doing, you should be getting paid for full pencils.” He was very reluctant to do that, but I finally talked him into it. I said, “I just cannot take

the extra money for this. I don’t deserve it.

You’re the one who should be getting it.”

That’s the kind of relationship that we have.

It’s open and honest. My God, we’re on the phone sometimes for an hour-and-a-half at a time. I can’t shut him up. He just talks and talks and talks. [laughter] I say this with affection, you know.

He’s a phenomenal draughtstman, and a fantastic storyteller. And I’m not saying this because I work with him. I think Ron is one of the five or ten best guys in the business today, and it amazes me that he is not working on a major book. It’s probably because he is what the new breed of editors call “old school.” Give me a break. The guy is phenomenal. He’s a fantastic talent. He’s one of the best in the business. I don’t look at comic books that much anymore, but every now and then I’ll pick one up and look at it and I’ll just throw it right back down again, and walk away shaking my head wondering why the heck Ron Frenz is working on a relatively obscure book like Spider-Girl. But that’s just the nature of the beast today.

JA: Did you ever feel you were a victim of agism, which is basically what we’re talking about here?

SB: I don’t feel like a victim. If the work stops tomorrow, I have no problems. There again I’ve been very blessed. I’ve earned an excellent living, and if I did not pencil or ink another page for the rest of my life I would not lack for anything, and would be in wonderful shape. Agism does go on, but it’s only in the eye of the beholder.

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Chapter Six

The Craft of Creating Comic Book Art

JA: We’ve talked some about the craft of creating comics, but let’s really focus on that now. Let’s start with your philosophy regarding working with writers.

SB: The way I enjoyed working was getting the plot from the writer. I wasn’t the type of penciler that would contribute a lot. I always felt that my job was to interpret what they put in their plot and turn that into 22 pages of pictorial storytelling. To me, that was difficult enough.

And the other side of it is I can’t recall anybody ever calling me up and saying, “You know, Sal, this really doesn’t work. You’ve got to redo this.” I’m not throwing accolades at myself, I’m just simply stating a fact. One of the things I heard from so many people was that the reason they enjoyed working with me was because I told the story so well pictorially.

My philosophy was to try to give the writer what he wants, so that when he writes his dialogue it’s going to be as easy for him as it can be. That’s what I always worked towards. So the personal relationships between me and the writers frankly did not exist in many cases. I would do a book, and then I’d get the plot for the next one and I’d sit down and think about it, figure it out, and execute it. Then I’d send the pages in and get the next plot. That’s the way it worked. It was almost machine-like.

JA: As far as the writers you worked with, who was the most helpful to you in terms of the direction they gave you in the scripts?

SB: Len Wein, Tom DeFalco, Marc DeMatteis... guys I worked with for a period of time. So many of the writers I only did a few books with. It’s really hard to get a handle on that. But the guys I mentioned were just consummate professionals, and that in and of itself was a great help to me. They made my job easy.

of panels that my brother did. [laughter] It was on a Captain America book, and it was simply because Stan wasn’t happy with the storytelling. Not the drawing, obviously, because the drawing was fantastic. I had gone to the office for some reason and Sol Brodsky asked me, “Sal, we need this panel changed.

Can you do this and this?” And I said, “I’d be happy to.” As a matter of fact, I was thrilled to, because it was literally the first penciling work that I did for Marvel. It was kind of gratifying that they asked me to change something that John did.

JA: When you were drawing super-heroes, how conscious were you of proportion?

SB: You had to be conscious of it, because you’re drawing heroic people. The proportions have to be there. It’s very difficult to make somebody look heroic if they’re dumpylooking. This is something that Stan required.

He wanted all of the super-heroes and heroines to be very heroic-looking, and that’s the way you do it. They’ve got to be eight, nine heads tall.

It was the same with the villains, because they have to look like a match for the superheroes. The philosophy, at least when I first started with Marvel, was that the heroes always had to look like the underdogs. There always had to be the sense that, “Oh, my gosh, he’s in trouble now!” You wanted to make the super-villains look like formidable

JA: Moving on to penciling, were you ever asked to redraw panels?

SB: Not a whole lot, but, yes, I was. As a matter of fact, one of the first things I ever did for Marvel, believe it or not, was redraw a couple 97

(below) Cap certainly looks heroic in these panels from Captain America #153. Inks by Jim Mooney.

ART COURTESY OF AL BIGLEY

CAPTAIN AMERICA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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opponents, so you had to give them the same proportions. Of course, it depended on who it was, but the reader had to see that the villain posed a real challenge to the super-hero.

If you’re drawing Loki, he’s a god. Even though he’s an evil god, you have to give him that persona, that aura. He has to look majestic. It all depends on what the super-villain is all about and what the hero is all about.

Spider-Man is kind of a departure from that, because Spider-Man is a teen-aged kid. At least, that’s the way he started. He’s smallish.

He’s a departure, and that may be one of the things that made Spider-Man become the number one super-hero in the comic book universe. He was smaller, but look at what he was capable of.

The Vulture was creepy-looking and not heroic-looking at all. The very nature of a

vulture, it’s probably the ugliest bird out there. You had to capture that persona in the character. And the same thing, in a different way, for Doctor Octopus. Where the Vulture could fly, Doc Ock had those mechanical arms. His stature was anything but heroic. He was a short, plump professor type. This is the challenge that every comic-book artist has.

He has to be convincing to the audience with whomever he happens to be drawing, and to do that he has to be versatile.

I did a podcast interview recently, and I was bowled over that anybody would even want to bother with this, but it was celebrating my fortieth year in the industry. They had some surprise guests, and one of them was Stan, which absolutely blew me out of the water. I had no idea that he was going to be on the show, and I was deeply honored because, 99

In the page from Spectacular Spider-Man #163 (facing page), you can see how Sal draws Spidey as slender and wiry. And villains don’t come much creepier than Hobgoblin and Carrion. The panel from Spectacular Spider-Man #210 shows Spidey’s rogues as terrifying, and the reactions of their victims sells that idea. Full art by Sal.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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let’s face it, Stan is a superstar today. As they say, he’s a legend in his own time. But he’s the man who hired me 40 years ago and got this whole thing started. One of the things that Stan said that kind of left me speechless, once we were done kidding around and goodnaturedly insulting each other [laughs], was that they could always depend on me when they were having deadline problems. That so many times I was the guy they would come to to bail them out, because they knew that I was so versatile that I could draw pretty much any character they had. To hear it coming from the man himself was very, very gratifying and very humbling, too.

Looking back, I worked on just about all of their characters. And I wasn’t the only one by any means. A comic book artist, to be successful, has to have that versatility. They have to be able to draw any character, any persona, and capture what that character is all about and get it across to the reader. It’s a very challenging thing.

This is one of the reasons I went to breakdowns after a period of time. I figured, “If we’re going to do this, let me go to breakdowns and they can get whoever they want to ink it and it won’t bother me a bit.” When I did finished penciling, I put a lot of work into it, and I wanted the inkers to be as faithful to my penciling as I was to other pencilers. A lot of times that just didn’t happen, and it’s frustrating. Doing breakdowns was great, because it made me get through the stories faster and then I wasn’t disappointed with what I saw.

JA: Terry Austin inked you on a New Mutants fill-in.

SB: And it really annoyed me. At the time I was doing my breakdowns in blue pencil. The only reason was that it was more comfortable for me. I enjoyed working with a blue pencil.

JA: How tall did you figure Spider-Man to be?

SB: I figured about 5' 8", 5' 9" — somewhere in there. Hardly heroic proportions. About my size, but not quite as heavy as I am. [laughter] I don’t think he weighed 195 pounds.

JA: When you draw a bulky character like the Hulk, how do you go about making him look massive without looking flabby?

SB: You make the body defined. You define the muscles, the tendons, everything. The way they draw him today is beyond anything I ever did or John ever did or anybody. He’s built like a block of concrete, and that’s what you have to keep in mind. I always kept those kinds of things in mind. “What is this character all about?” You think about a character like Thor, you think about a bodybuilder — somebody with the physique of an Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe even a little bit beyond that. Captain America may not be quite as bulging, but certainly a tremendously athletic, built-up body. You had to be conscious of all the characters, because if you weren’t Stan would be all over you screaming bloody murder. [laughter] JA: I’d like to talk about some of your inkers we haven’t mentioned already. Steve Leialoha inked you some on Marvel Two-in-One. SB: Steve Leialoha was a very overpowering inker. It didn’t look like my work anymore.

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(facing page) The Hulk is massive, but there’s not an ounce of body fat to be seen. Page from Incredible Hulk #254.

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(below) Sal doesn’t say whether he liked Terry Austin’s inks or not, but he certainly didn’t like having to pencil in graphite when they worked together on New Mutants #54.

ART COURTESY OF TERRY AUSTIN

NEW MUTANTS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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I can’t remember who the editor was at the time, but he gave me a call and said, “Sal, Terry wants to know if you would mind doing this with regular graphite pencil, because he really has problems inking over blue pencil.”

I said, “What problems? I ink over my blue pencils all the time. Why would he have problems?” “He says the ink doesn’t take.” We went around and around. It kind of ticked me off a little bit, because I’m the penciler.

Accommodate me. If Terry Austin doesn’t like inking over blue pencil, get somebody else to ink it. But eventually I said, “Okay, I’ll do it in graphite.” I’m making it sound like a bigger deal than it was. It was really no big deal.

It was just an annoyance, because I really don’t like working with graphite pencils.

JA: What kind of feeling do you have with blue pencil that you don’t have with graphite?

SB: I wish I could be specific about it, but I just felt more comfortable with a blue pencil. I liked the way it glided over the page better than graphite. I think I drew better with a blue pencil. Why? I have no idea. It was just a quirk.

JA: Jack Abel.

SB: Jack was a terrific inker. I was happy with his work.

JA: Don Perlin.

SB: Don is a good artist. I think he’s very underrated. I think he did a nice job.

JA: Chic Stone inked some Hulk issues.

SB: I wasn’t a big fan of Chic. He had a very heavy line, and I think that was something that Stan liked. Stan would change his mind at times, and if he liked a heavy line, he wanted everybody to use heavy lines. If he liked a guy’s penciling, he wanted everybody to pencil like this guy.

JA: You were really buried on Skull the Slayer. Sonny Trinidad and Steve Gan were two of the inkers there.

SB: The Filipino guys were tremendous artists.

They really were. They were very talented, but their inking overpowered your penciling. I didn’t like what Ernie Chan did on John’s stuff, because he lost a lot of the drawing that John did. It looked like Ernie Chan. It didn’t look like John anymore. This is one of the reasons John went to breakdowns, because he got even more frustrated about it than I did.

JA: Did you feel like it was a lack of respect, or just miscasting?

SB: I don’t think respect had anything to do with it. It was just the nature of the business.

I hate to be this mercenary about it, but while I enjoyed my work very much, you get to a point where you say, “Okay, this is the way things are,” and you’re kind of powerless to change things. A lot of times I would almost insist upon inking my own work, depending on the book I was doing and other factors.

But I got to a point where I said, “This is what they expect of me. This is what I will do, and I just hope they send the check on time.” I was making a very good living, so I didn’t want to complain too much. And these are guys that want to make a living, too. I’m not going to say, “I hate this guy’s inking. Get him off my book and give me somebody else.” I could not bring myself to do that.

For a period of years, all I did was breakdowns because it enabled me to do an awful lot of work for Marvel. Even when I inked myself I would only do breakdowns. I do most of the work in the inks anyway.

(facing page) Jack Abel was, indeed, a terrific inker, as evidenced by his work over Sal’s pencils on this page from Incredible Hulk Annual #5. One can only imagine how much time he spent on the Diablo figure alone. He even mixed in a little dry brush technique to enhance the smoky look of the demon.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: They took advantage of your storytelling talent.

SB: And also my speed. I was knocking out work like gangbusters. When I would tell people how much work I was doing, they would look at me with their mouths hanging open. It was just something I was blessed with, and it didn’t happen overnight. It took me a long time to get to that point. But once I got there, they would come to me and ask me to bail them out on late books. And I was more than happy to do that, because I felt it made me more valuable to the company.

JA: Were there any inkers that you felt were more sympathetic to your pencils?

SB: Dick Giordano did a nice job. Frank Giacoia was a fantastic inker — one of the best that’s ever existed. Anything this guy inked was great. He made everybody look good. He did not lose the penciler. He was, for my money, one of the two or three all-time best inkers in the business. Klaus Janson is one of the greatest inkers of all time. It was an honor to be inked by Klaus. There were some inkers that made me look better than I am, and he was one of them.

Tom Palmer was another one of those guys.

He was a fabulous inker. He had a tendency to 103

(following two pages) Sal thinks longtime DC artist Dick Giordano did a fine job over his pencils. Here is a page of Sal’s breakdowns from Spider-Man Team-Up #7, with finishes by Giordano to prove his point.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART

ATLAS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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overpower your stuff, but he still made you look good, and, again, he was working over my breakdowns. Rudy Nebres was a fantastic artist. He was brilliant. There again, when Rudy did it, it looked like Rudy, but that didn’t bother me, because I loved his work.

(below) With Captain America #148, John Romita turned the table and inked Sal, as Cap faced off against his archnemesis, the Red Skull.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ ART CAPTAIN AMERICA, RED SKULL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

JA: What did you think of the inking team of Ian Aiken and Brian Garvey?

SB: That was on Rom. I hated everything they did. I hate to be cruel, but I’m being honest.

JA: On Eternals, Al Gordon and Danny Bulanadi did some inking.

SB: They did a pretty creditable job, as I recall. I remember being somewhat pleased.

JA: On Superboy you had John Stanisci.

SB: He also inked my last few issues of Spectacular Spider-Man. He had problems inking me at first, but he started to get the hang of it after a while.

JA: You inked some of John Romita’s work, and he inked some of yours.

SB: I hadn’t been working for Marvel for a terribly long time, and they wanted me to do a Captain America. Stan was going on vacation, and they were really up against the deadline.

John did very, very loose breakdowns, which I inked. That was the job that got me in solid with Marvel. I was knocking myself out trying to get steady work from them, but they weren’t sold on me yet. Sol Brodsky called me up and said, “Sal, we need this job back in three days.” It was a 20-page book, and I was working full-time still. I said, “I’ll do it for you.”

And I did a good job, if I do say so myself. I lost a lot of sleep. [laughter] I don’t think I had five hours sleep during those three days, because I was working all day at the art studio, coming home, having dinner, and going down to my studio and inking these pages.

Admittedly, John really simplified things in the pencils because the job was so late. Because of that I was able to do it faster. Still, turning out 20 pages in three days is a lot of work. One of those nights, I literally worked up until the time I had to get ready to go to work. But it was worth it, because from that point on Sol Brodsky knew not only that he could get a good, professional job from me, but he knew I was dependable. That sold me to them.

JA: Let’s move on to pencilers you inked. You inked Will Rosado on Green Arrow.

SB: It was kind of fun inking his stuff, because he was very stylized. It was very easy to ink.

JA: Ron Garney.

SB: I inked a bunch of Ron Garney’s stuff.

Ron is terrific — very talented. A good draughtsman, a good storyteller. He’s one of the guys that has it all.

I talked with him on the phone frequently.

I met him at a convention in Chicago years ago. I didn’t know him at the time. He was doing Captain America then. We were staying at the same hotel, and he called me up and asked me if I’d like to have dinner with him. I said, “Sure, why not?” After dinner he asked me to come back to his room so he could show me some of his work. I looked at it, and you

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could tell he was a real comer. He was really good, and he seemed like a nice guy.

Tom Breevort asked me if I’d like to ink Ron on The Hulk. “Sure! I’d love to do anything on The Hulk.” All I wanted to do at the time was inking, and I knew Ron’s work, so that was fantastic. When I turned the first book in, Ron called me up and just raved about what I was doing. I was very gratified.

I told him I was delighted that he was happy and that I hoped it was the beginning of a nice, long professional relationship. Over the phone we got to be pretty good friends. When I first met Ron in person at the Chicago convention, I thought he was a really nice guy, and I haven’t changed my mind.

Artists are sometimes quirky people. I have my own quirks. Several issues later Ron would call me up and question some of the things that I was doing. To my mind, if I have nothing else, I have consistency. I said, “Ron, I’m doing the same thing now that I was doing on the first issue, and you seemed to be very happy with that. Now you seem to be unhappy.” What I found out was that Ron had a habit of doing that. He would love an inker at first, and then as time went on he would start finding faults. I guess that’s what happened to me. There were no problems with the relationship. We had a very good professional relationship. I loved inking his stuff.

Personally, I thought I did a good job on his work. I think what was happening was that Ron was having problems with Marvel over a contract. The next thing I knew, he was not doing The Hulk anymore, which meant that I was off the book and he went to work for DC. I hadn’t heard from Ron for years until not too long ago at a Pittsburgh convention.

He was there, and he came up and we had a nice conversation together. It was good seeing him again.

JA: We talked about you inking Ron Frenz on Spider-Girl, but Pat Olliffe penciled some issues, too.

SB: Pat’s a tremendous artist. He’s a guy that I really enjoy inking. He’s a very good draughtsman. He’s a good storyteller. I enjoyed inking him very much. I have to admit — I’m being very candid here, so please Pat, don’t get mad at me for saying this — I enjoy inking Ron’s work more. We are so compatible. We’re just on the same page; we really are.

JA: Earlier you said you felt like you could ink anybody. What is it about your talent that makes you versatile enough to have the confidence to feel that way?

SB: I can draw. Why was Frank Giacoia such a good inker? Frank Giacoia was an excellent draughtsman. He could draw. When you get really outstanding pencilers, guys that can really draw, this is where a lot of inkers fall down. A lot of inkers are not good draughtsmen. This is part of the reason why they’re inkers. This is why if every line and every black and every little detail is not exactly the way it is supposed to be — in other words, if the penciling is not really, really tight — they’re lost. They don’t know what to do. I do. Any inker that draws well knows what to do. That’s why Frank Giacoia was so good.

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(above) Besides inking the stylized pencils of Will Rosado on Green Arrow, Sal also inked his work for this Green Lantern/Green Arrow ten-page story for DCU Holiday Bash II.

GREEN ARROW ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS.

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That’s why Joe Sinnott was so good. That’s why I think I am a good inker — because I can draw. It’s as simple as that. The better your drawing ability, the better an inker you’re going to be.

JA: You have a very organic line. It wasn’t soft, but it wasn’t hard-edged, either. You would do thick and thin with your outlines.

How much of that do you think was conscious and how much was subconscious?

SB: It’s probably both. One of the things I was very conscious of, and it may sound like a bit of a contradiction, is that the line has to be spontaneous. This is what I love about inking. The line says0 so much. It has to be alive.

It has to have an energy of its own. If it doesn’t it looks dead and lifeless. You have to get that spontaneity and capture that energy. I can’t explain how you do that. It’s something that comes from inside. You have to feel it.

But there’s also a consciousness about it, because if I don’t accomplish that, if I put down a line that’s no good, intellectually I realize that. That’s why I say it’s both a conscious and an unconscious thing.

JA: What did you do to adapt textures into your inking style?

SB: You just have to feel the texture that you’re attempting to do. Wood is different from stone, so you adapt accordingly. It’s something that comes from inside. If the feeling is good you will execute it properly. And the instrument isn’t that important, it’s what the hand does with it. I don’t care if you do it standing on your head with a billy club. It’s the result that counts. How you get there is irrelevant. If it works for somebody to do it with a pen, that’s great. If they feel more comfortable with a brush, that’s great. It’s irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.

JA: I’ve seen artists draw with just their wrists and others from the elbow down. What about you?

SB: It depends on what I’m doing. I use both.

You have to have that flexibility. Sometimes it’s just the wrist. Sometimes it’s the whole arm.

JA: Is it the same if you’re penciling rather than inking?

SB: To me there’s no difference. The only difference is that you’re using a different

instrument. I draw with the brush the same way I draw with a pencil.

JA: When you’re inking someone else’s work, how much do you learn from that?

SB: It depends on who I’m inking. There were some guys I inked that I didn’t learn anything from. There were other guys, my brother for instance, that I learned a tremendous amount from. To be successful at inking, you have to work very hard. There are no shortcuts. There haven’t been for me. I’m still learning, and I hope to continue to grow.

(above) A recent photo of Sal working at his drawing board.

PHOTO ™ AND ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

JA: With Spider-Girl ending, what are you going to do?

SB: It’s not really ending. They’re coming out with a new book called Spider-Man Family, and Spider-Girl will appear there. It’s going to be a rather large book, and Tom, Ron, and I will be doing the “Spider-Girl” portion. We might not have as many pages, but it will be in the book.

JA: So you’re not ready to hang it up yet.

SB: No. I have a very simple attitude about that. As long as people continue to want what I’m doing, I will do it, as long as it’s inking. I don’t want to pencil anymore. I’m one of those rare people who believes that work is good for you. As a matter of fact, I think work is absolutely necessary. If I don’t do comics, I’ll be doing something else — maybe painting.

(facing page) Pat Olliffe took a turn at penciling Spider-Girl in Spider-Girl Annual #1, inked, as usual,

by Sal. ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-GIRL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

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Art Gallery

(above) We begin the gallery with images of Sal’s favorite character: The Hulk. And what better place to start than with this illustration done for Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975 — obviously, this was December’s image. As it happens, December 1975 was the cover date for Sal’s first issue as penciler of Incredible Hulk, and the start of his nearly ten-year run.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) A commission illustration of Ol’ Greenskin.

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

110

111

(left) Illustration for a custom comic featuring the Hulk versus the Abomination.

ABOMINATION, HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) This commission piece is Sal’s version of the cover for Incredible Hulk #197 originally drawn by Bernie Wrightson. Inks

by Joe Staton, who inked Sal’s pencils for the interiors of that issue.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

112

113

Incredible Hulk #248, page 2, cover dated June 1980.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

THE GARDENER, HULK, JARELLA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

114

Cover art for Incredible Hulk Annual #14, cover dated December 1985. Inks by John Byrne, who also wrote the issue.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

115

Like many other comic book artists, Sal would occassionally sketch on the back of whatever board he happened to be working on — either to work out a problem or simply to take a break and have a little fun drawing something different. The drawings on these two pages come from the backs of two such boards.

HULK ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

116

117

For several years, Sal attended Friday night life drawing sessions at his local college. This and the following ten pages are examples of his graphite drawings from those sessions. ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

102

Oil painting, 1957

©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

129

Gouache paintings ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

130

131

Self-portrait in gouache. ©2010 SAL BUSCEMA

132

From left to right: Ron Frenz, Sal Buscema, and Tom DeFalco — the creative team behind Spider-Girl. This photo was taken at the 2008 Pittsburgh Comicon.

A recent photo of Sal inking at his drawing board.

133

Sal’s first cover pencils for Marvel Comics, and what a doozy! Avengers #67, cover dated August 1969. Inks by Sam Grainger.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

AVENGERS, ULTRON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

134

Without question, one of Sal’s most memorable covers. Avengers #89, cover dated June 1971.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

AVENGERS, CAPTAIN MARVEL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

135

Captain America and The Falcon #156, cover dated December 1972. Inks by Dave Cockrum.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

BUCKY, CAPTAIN AMERICA, FALCON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

136

This issue of Captain America was chosen by Power Records as one of four Marvel superhero comics to be adapted to audio as part of their “Book & Record” series in 1974 (see inset). It was likely chosen due in large part to the fact that it was one of the few true standalone issues of the series at that time. But, hey, it was also a fun story. Captain America and the Falcon #168, cover dated December 1973. Inks by John Verpoorten.

CAPTAIN AMERICA, FALCON, PHOENIX ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

137

(above) Daredevil #79, cover dated August 1971.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

DAREDEVIL, MAN-BULL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Sal was the regular penciler for the first 41 issues of The Defenders, and this is the second of two covers he drew for the series. The Defenders #14, cover dated July 1974.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

DEFENDERS, NEBULON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

138

139

(above) President Barack Obama wasn’t the first U.S. President to show up on a comic book cover. President Richard Nixon beat him to it by nearly four decades. Fantastic Four #123, cover dated June 1972.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

FANTASTIC FOUR, GALACTUS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) This issue kicked off a six-issue run of Sal inking his brother, John. Fantastic Four #297, cover dated December 1986.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

140

141

Despite a nearly ten-year run on the title, Sal only penciled two covers for Incredible Hulk — and they were for back-to-back issues. Incredible Hulk #278, cover dated December 1982. Inks by Al Milgrom.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

Iron Man #99, cover dated June 1977. Inks by Al Milgrom.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

IRON MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

142

143

Sal drew several covers for Marvel’s many reprint titles of the '70s, which meant he was able to show his interpretation of some of the key moments from Marvel’s history, including the coming of Galactus. Marvel’s Greatest Comics #36, cover dated July 1972.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

FANTASTIC FOUR, GALACTUS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

144

Iron Man #34, cover dated February 1971.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

IRON MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

145

Avengers #91, cover dated August 1971.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

146

A 2003 recreation of the cover of Avengers #71. The original cover image was inked by Sam Grainger, but this time Sal inked himself.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

AVENGERS, INVADERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

147

Don’t worry, we’re pretty sure there’s a happy ending. Our Love Story #17, cover dated June 1972. Inks by John Verpoorten.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

OUR LOVE STORY ™ MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Romance on — or rather under — the high seas. Sub-Mariner #32, page 8, cover dated December 1970. Inks by Jim Mooney.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

148

149

(right) Sal got to have a little fun in this humorous double-page pin-up of the Defenders.

ART COURTESY OF WWW.ANTHONY SNYDER.COM/ART

DEFENDERS, HULK, SUB-MARINER, VALKYRIE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(following two pages) The Defenders square off against Nebulon and the Headmen in this commission piece.

ART COURTESY OF JEFF BELL

DEFENDERS, THE HEADMEN, NEBULON ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

150

151

152

153

This commission piece is Sal’s version of the cover for Defenders #18. Inks by Dan Green, who inked Sal’s pencils for the interiors of that issue.

ART COURTESY OF EELCO VELDHUIZEN

DEFENDERS, WRECKING CREW ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

154

155

Pages from the issue that was adapted for audio by Power Records. The dialogue may come off a bit campy in the actors’ readings, but the actionpacked storytelling of Sal’s pencils rank this among his best work. Captain America and the Falcon #168, pages 26 and 31, cover dated December 1973. Inks by John Tartaglione.

ART COURTESY OF AL BIGLEY (ABOVE) AND WWW.ANTHONYSNYDER.COM/ART (FACING PAGE)

CAPTAIN AMERICA, FALCON, THE PHOENIX ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

156

157

(above) Marvel gave Nova every chance to succeed as a title. Created and written by Marv Wolfman, Nova was first drawn by John Buscema. Sal picked up the penciling chores with issue #3 and continued on through issue #14, after which he was succeeded by Carmine Infantino. All three pencilers did breakdowns for the series, but had excellent inkers finish their art. This issue, for instance was inked by Frank Giacoia, one of Sal’s favorite embellishers. Nova #6, page 30, cover dated February 1977.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

CONDOR, DIAMONDHEAD, NOVA, POWERHOUSE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Sal didn’t work with Daredevil very often, so this issue, inked by Klaus Janson, was a rare treat. Daredevil #140, page 16, cover dated December 1976.

ART COURTESY OF RAIMON FONSECA

DAREDEVIL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

158

159

(above) The Spectacular Spider-Man #146, cover dated January 1989.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

HARRY OSBORN, HOBGOBLIN, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(left) This rather morbid pin-up of the Undertaker appeared in Untold Tales of Spider-Man ’96.

THE UNDERTAKER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Will the real Spider-Man please stand up? The Spectacular Spider-Man #217, page 6, cover dated October 1994.

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

160

161

A page from “The Night Before X-Mas,” part of 1994’s Marvel Holiday Special.

X-MEN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

162

Superboy #43, page 21, cover dated September 1997. Inks by John Stanisci.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS SUPERBOY ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

163

One of Sal’s few jobs for DC where he was able to do full art chores was this 10-page story for Batman 80-Page Giant #2, cover dated October 1999. Shown here are pages 1 and 9 of that story.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

164

165

(above) Artwork done for Universal’s Islands of Adventure themepark’s Marvel Super Hero Island, which opened in 1999. These and three other pieces are on display in the park as large, full-color standees. Inks by Tim Townsend.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Sal has inked the work of Ron Frenz more than any other artist, thanks in large part to their longtime collaboration on the various incarnations of Spider-Girl. Spider-Girl #79, page 17, cover dated December 2004. Pencils by Ron Frenz.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

QUEEN OF THE GOBLINS, SPIDER-GIRL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

166

167

This Hostess® Twinkies ad featuring Captain America ran in Gold Key comics the month of December 1977.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

CAPTAIN AMERICA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

168

This Hostess® ad featuring your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man ran in Gold Key comics the month of January 1978.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

169

(above) This Hostess® ad featuring Daredevil ran in Western Publications comics in April of 1978.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

DAREDEVIL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) This Hostess® ad featuring Captain Marvel ran in comics during the month of October of 1978. Inks by Joe Sinnott.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

CAPTAIN MARVEL ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

170

171

(above) This Hostess® ad ran in Western Publications comics in November of 1978. Inks by Joe Sinnott.

ART COURTESY OF HERITAGE AUCTIONS

THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) And we end the gallery as we began it, with the Hulk. 1982’s Fantastic Four Roast, written by the ever-humorous Fred Hembeck, featured a variety of artists, including one page penciled and inked by Sal. Appropriately, Sal drew the Hulk’s routine.

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

172

173

Marvel’s Greatest Comics #38, cover dated October 1972.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

FANTASTIC FOUR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

I

Marvel Tales #37, cover dated October 1972. Inks possibly by Frank Giacoia.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

II

Marvel Super-Heroes #32, cover dated September 1972.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK,

HULK, SUB-MARINER ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

III

Marvel Triple Action #6, cover dated October 1972.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

AVENGERS, MOLE MAN, RED GHOST ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

(facing page) Even though Sal penciled Rom for its first 58 issues, he only drew this one cover for the series. Rom #36, cover dated November 1982. Inks by Al Milgrom.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

ROM ™ AND ©2010 PARKER BROTHERS

IV

V

While Sal penciled the interiors for most of the first 20 issues of the series, this cover for the title’s premiere would be the only one he would draw until he came back as the regular penciler and cover artist with issue #134. Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #1, cover dated December 1976.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

SPIDER-MAN, TARANTULA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

When Sal returned as penciler on the series with issue #134, Peter Parker was dropped from the title. It was a bit of a homecoming with the return of The Tarantula, as well. The Spectacular Spider-Man #137, cover dated April 1988.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

SPIDER-MAN, TARANTULA ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

VI

VII

This issue featured the origin of Spidey villain Tombstone. The Spectacular Spider-Man #139, cover dated June 1988.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

SPIDER-MAN, TOMBSTONE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

Harry Osborn loses it and the result is another classic showdown between Spidey and his arch-nemesis the Green Goblin. The Spectacular Spider-Man #180, cover dated September 1991.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

GREEN GOBLIN, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

VIII

IX

After the return of the Green Goblin, many classic villains from Spidey’s rogues’ gallery soon followed, such as the Vulture...

The Spectacular Spider-Man #188, cover dated May 1992.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

SPIDER-MAN, VULTURE ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

...And the Rhino. The Spectacular Spider-Man #190, cover dated July 1992.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

RHINO, SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

X

XI

The Spectacular Spider-Man #195, cover dated December 1992.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

SPIDER-MAN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

XII

Sal left the series with issue #36, but not before finishing this last cover. Sub-Mariner #37, cover dated May 1971.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

ALL CHARACTERS ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

XIII

During Sal’s stint with DC in the late ’90s he only drew one cover for them: Superboy #44, cover dated October 1997. Inks by John Stanisci.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

SUPERBOY ™ AND ©2010 DC COMICS

(facing page) When Sal took over the penciling chores on Thor, Walt Simonson remained as both writer and cover artist. But Sal did get this one shot as the cover artist. Thor #372, cover dated October 1986.

COURTESY OF FOUNDATION’S EDGE

THOR ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

XIV

XV

Sal didn’t venture into the X-Men’s corner of the Marvel universe very often, but he did provide art for this one cover — at least most of it. It is possible that Dave Cockrum penciled and inked the figure of Storm. X-Men #96, cover dated December 1975. Inks by Al Milgrom.

COURTESY OF SAM NEWKIRK

X-MEN ™ AND ©2010 MARVEL CHARACTERS, INC.

XVI

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Hulk, Abomination, Captain America TM & ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

In 1968, Sal Buscema joined the ranks of Marvel Comics and quickly became one of their most recognizable and dependable artists. Following in the footsteps of his big brother, John Buscema, Sal penciled some of Marvel’s most memorable storylines, such as the “Avengers/Defenders War,” and “The Secret Empire Saga.”

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