An Interview With Clem Robins - Bronze Age Letterer Extraordinaire
/Written by Bryan Stroud
Clem Robins
Clem Robins (born 1955) is an American comic book letterer who has worked for just about every big comic publisher in the country at one time or another. He is best known for his work on series like Preacher, Black Orchid, and 100 Bullets for DC's Vertigo imprint and his extensive work in the Mignola-verse for Dark Horse Comics on titles such as Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and B.P.R.D.
From 1998 through 2007 he taught figure drawing and human anatomy at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Mr. Robins' book The Art of Figure Drawing was published in 2003 by North Light Books, and has since been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese.
Clem currently runs a website (which can be found at ClemRobins.com) where he has a blog and showcases his paintings.
August Concert, painted by Clem Robins.
Clem Robins was actually instrumental in getting me going on this gig. He'd posted something on a website about knowing the identity of Mockingbird from the Secret Six series, so I sent him an e-mail asking if he'd share and wondering how he knew. "Oh, I spoke to the writer, E. Nelson Bridwell. I'm a professional letterer." He later asked where my article was going to appear and he said he liked what I was doing, but it would be a lot better if I included some interviews with the talent. "Well, sure it would, but how would I pull that off?" "I can put you in touch with Gaspar Saladino and a few others." I was stunned and it led to some wonderful things. Clem has been working steadily all these years, doing a lot of work on Hellboy and of course 100 Bullets. He recently lettered Neal Adams' latest run on Deadman, too, and Clem is a great guy.
This interview originally took place over the phone on November 17, 2008.
Bryan Stroud: You began your professional career about 30 years ago, is that correct?
Clem Robins: The first job was in January of 1977, so it would be 31 years ago, going on 32.
Stroud: Who hired you for that first job?
CR: A man named Paul Kuhn at Gold Key. I showed my samples all around town. I’d moved back to New York City from Nebraska in August of ’76 and I made up some samples and showed them all around town. I went to Gold Key, I went to Marvel, I went to DC and they all liked them, but there was no room for anybody, so I got little jobs around town. I worked as a paste-up artist and I ate starvation meals. Then in January Paul Kuhn at Gold Key expressed some interest so I came in and he gave me a Dudley Doright story to letter. I think the rate, and obviously this was the new person’s rate, but the page rate was I believe $4.00 a page, which seemed like a lot of money to me. So I did the story and brought it in. There was another editor there named Al Weiss and Al looked at it and said, “Beautiful it’s not, but I think we can use you.”
Definitely it was not beautiful. I get weak in the knees when I look at some of the stuff I did back then. But they gave me another story. The second one I think was the one Arnold Drake wrote. It was a Heckle and Jeckle story. It was very funny. I didn’t know it was Arnold because there were no credits on these things, but I lettered that and I asked the editor who wrote this and it was Arnold Drake. I guess Arnold was pretty much blacklisted out at DC ever since he tried to unionize the writers and artists there. Arnold went to his grave wanting to do that. He still believed that was something that needed to be done. Those guys make a fortune if they’re any good. So that’s how the whole thing started.
100 Bullets (1999) #50 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: How exactly did you settle on the specialty of lettering? I presume you took some art training at some point.
CR: I was going to the Art Student’s League and here is what I thought: I thought I didn’t want to spend my life in comics. I wanted to be a serious painter. I still do. And I thought if I did something like penciling it would exact such a huge claim on my energy and time and sense of aesthetics that I would just end up being nothing but a penciler and I’d never do any good painting. So, lettering seemed like an easier way to go. What I didn’t know at the time is that it takes about 15 years to become a decent letterer.
Certainly, it takes at least 5 years. It’s not something small, it’s not something easy, it has its own sense of aesthetics and they’re not easily learned. You know what I was? I was somebody that appreciated and loved the goofiness of the known letterers like Gaspar Saladino, and what I didn’t understand at the time was the sheer discipline that underlay all that goofiness. I’m going far afield of your question. You asked me why I got into lettering. I got into lettering because I thought it wouldn’t exert so huge a drain on my legendary creative resources. (Chuckle.) As I got into it I just thought it was a hoot. Gold Key got rid of me after about two months when I refused to letter a story for them which I thought was in very questionable taste, considering the book was intended for very young children. I wonder sometimes if I should have just kept my mouth shut. But a week later DC finally called me and gave me work. It was a World’s Finest story. It was drawn by Trevor Von Eeden. Do you remember him?
Stroud: I’ve heard the name but I’m not super familiar with his work.
CR: He’s a young guy. Younger than I am. At that time very young. I think he was in high school and also black. I think he was from the West Indies and for his age he was very, very good. It was a Black Canary/Green Arrow story written by Gerry Conway and penciled by Trevor and I forget who inked it, but I was in a figure drawing and human anatomy class at the Art Student’s League at the time so I got these 10 pages and I brought them in and showed all my classmates. My teacher, who was an exquisitely well-mannered Boston patrician and probably the best artistic anatomy teacher this country has ever had (until I started teaching it, of course) he took the page and he used it in his lecture and he pointed out the gluteus medius and the tensor of the fascia lata. It was a real hoot seeing the stuff and bringing it in.
I remember there was one sequence in that story where Black Canary…boy, I wouldn’t mind seeing this again as long as I didn’t have to look at the lettering; I think it was in this — no, it was a Spider Woman story a couple of years later, that’s it. But Trevor drew it; Spider Woman is going undercover. She’s trying to find something from a criminal element, and although it’s not spelled out, she’s clearly dressed like a whore, including the hot pants and the fishnet stockings, and the way Trevor drew the story, instead of using spiraling lines to indicate the fishnet stockings going over Spider Woman’s thighs, he just wrote the word “sex” over and over again. Very subliminal. I don’t know if you remember this but there were these books that were floating around at that time about subliminal messages and erotic pictures put into ice cubes in Scotch ads and stuff like that. Have you ever read any of these things?
Aliens_ Wraith (1998) #1 pg.05, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: Sure.
CR: Subliminal seduction. I guess this was Trevor trying his hand at it, but the inker — Mike Esposito, I think — didn’t waste his time with that. He turned those things into spiraling lines. I can’t believe I remember all this. In that first story, the Black Canary thing, Trevor used some kind of a gummy, non-repro blue pencil on that story and it repelled the ink and so it made my stuff look even worse than it would have otherwise. To think they gave me work. They put up with a lot, bless their hearts. Bob Rozakis, who I think you interviewed, didn’t you?
Stroud: I did.
CR: He parceled out the lettering projects at DC. Jack Adler was, I guess, the head of production.
Stroud: You told me once that the scripts you typically see are not necessarily the ones that say the pencil and ink team would see. Something to the effect that what you see is sometimes just the tip of the iceberg.
CR: Hmmm. Well, back then it was much more like an assembly line job. If it was full script the writer would write it in such a way to tell the artist what he wanted and give it to him and in some cases, once the penciler had done his job the writer, particularly if he was on staff, like Bob Rozakis was, might look over the pencils and re-write his script to suit. Now today it’s very different. Today, because lettering is digital, if they want to change something; instead of having people on staff to re-letter it, they feel free to re-write everything after it’s been lettered, and except in very rare cases, the letterer has to re-letter it. At times it’s been a nightmare in that regard, but it’s certainly added to the quality of the writing in comic books. You can’t get around that. Anyway, you do Silver Age, but all that’s fresh in my mind is what I’m doing today. I do a comic called 100 Bullets. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it.
Stroud: Not yet. I’ve seen it but haven’t picked it up.
CR: It wins a gazillion awards. The artist doesn’t speak much English. He lives in Argentina. He’s very good. You look at these scripts for it and the art direction is so minimal it’s ridiculous. The writer has been very generous with all of us, letting us just do our thing. So, the artist will often completely bypass the art direction of the script, but you’d really have to see it to understand what I’m talking about. Now with Marvel method scripts, it was what you see is what you get. That was mostly what I was doing. When I started at DC I seemed to be the catch basin for everything Gerry Conway wrote. He was very facile, he was very fast. I’m guessing, but I’d say it probably took a day for him to write a script.
BPRD: Plague of Frogs (2004) #1 pg.12, lettered by Clem Robins.
That’s the thing about the Marvel method. Although Stan Lee made all kinds of claims of it being uniquely creative, it was really something done to save time so that a small number of writers could write a large number of comic books. So Gerry was very copy heavy and because of that and because I was the new guy on the block and I wasn’t very good I seemed to end up with all his stories and they were publishing a gazillion books at the time. Some of them you really wish hadn’t been published.
They were putting out all this stuff around 1977 and then they had the big DC implosion in 1978 and everything fell apart. Bob Rozakis called me to tell me the bad news that I was losing all my books and I said, “That’s okay, I just moved to Marvel anyway.” (Chuckle.)
Stroud: When the implosion happened was it just simply a matter of too much crap thrown up on the wall and nothing was sticking, or a business decision or do you have any insight into it?
CR: I have no insight into it, but I’m sure if you contacted Bob Rozakis again he could tell you all about it. If sales were not awful, I don’t know why they weren’t. A lot of this stuff was just dreadful. I think it was just a terrible time in the history of the medium. The same sort of thing actually happened in 1968 and 1969. They introduced a whole bunch of books, gave them a lot of fanfare and none of them really sold very well. The Hawk and the Dove, The Creeper, Angel and the Ape. Do you remember that?
Stroud: Yeah, that’s right. Some of Bridwell’s stuff.
CR: Yeah, Secret Six. They all got canceled within a short time. I think it was like that here only more so. And they were in the process I think of losing their audience. I don’t know why that happened. I’ve seen in some of these other interviews you do people speculating on why the kids are not reading comics.
Stroud: There seems to be no lack of conjecture, but not a lot of consensus overall. I’ve heard everything blamed from video games to cell phones to all of the above to just flat-out lousy product, or as you said, just losing the audience. I think one of the things you stressed to me more than once was that you felt that writers were given undue clout over editors.
CR: Let me put it another way for you: You’re about my age. I’m 52 and you’re 45?
Captain America (1968) #242 pg.09, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: 46.
CR: So, you weren’t reading these things in the 60’s, but I guess you’ve made up for that. You read a lot of the 60’s comics.
Stroud: Very much so.
CR: In general, at least at DC; I don’t know what Stan was like at Marvel, but at DC, editors were tyrants. Now they could be nice tyrants, like Julie Schwartz, or…I can’t think of any other nice tyrants. Editors were tyrants, and they had a lot of clout, and they knew what they wanted, and they got it. Today editors are certainly not tyrants. With very few exceptions, most of them are extraordinarily nice people, especially at DC. They’re nice people and you want to treat them nicely, and so the nature of the relationship between the writer and the editor I think has changed. And you can’t argue with the fact that the writing is better now, at least as an adult looking at these things. It’s better, but what the hell do I know? I don’t read comics. I work on them, but the books that I do for Vertigo, DC and Dark Horse; the Hellboy books, the writing is very good for the most part. Very craftsman-like. They’re not afraid to leave you asking questions. They’re not afraid to really challenge the hell out of you. But these are comics for adults. If my kids were school age, they’re all grown up now, but if I had kids I couldn’t imagine them reading 100 Bullets or Black Orchid or Preacher or any of these other things. Another thing is that the Comics Code really has become a joke.
Stroud: I was going to ask you about that. It seems to me that if I’m picking up on what you were trying to convey that in its own perverse way it had a major impact on how well the stories used to be written back in the day.
CR: If you had somebody real smart, who knew how to imply stuff, then it really did. Did you ever read Doom Patrol? Particularly in its later issues after Rita and Steve got married?
Stroud: Yes.
CR: Even when I was 11 years old reading that, there was no question in my mind that there was a very sexual relationship between these two people. It was there. You just didn’t see it, but it was there. You saw it in the way that they looked at each other. You saw it in the subtext of the things they’d say to each other, and this was while they were battling alien monsters and stuff like that. It was just good. I doubt if Arnold Drake appreciated the constraints he had to work under, but I think they sharpened him and disciplined him.
Stroud: You mentioned that both he and John Broome really stood out as writers in your mind…
DC Comics Presents (1978) #2 pg.08, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: In my opinion, yeah. Drake more than Broome, but Broome…well, you look at some of those old things he wrote. It was great craft in the way he would shape a sentence. That story you tore apart, “Hate of the Hooded Hangman?”
Stroud: (Chuckle.) Oh, yeah…
CR: Read that sucker again. It was one of the most perfectly written and drawn comic book stories I’ve ever seen. Beautifully, beautifully done. Broome was very good and I’m sorry I never got to work on any of his stuff. He either left the business by the time I got in or I just wasn’t getting his books. Or was he fired along with everyone else in 1968?
Stroud: I know that he kind of went on that sabbatical abroad. If I may shift gears a little bit, you told me once that Gil Kane was a lot of the reason you became an artist and became involved in comics ultimately. I was wondering if you’d elaborate on that.
CR: DC is reissuing a lot of the old stories in black and white.
Stroud: Yeah. The Showcase Presents series.
CR: Yeah. I’ve looked at some of those. Now there are holes in Gil’s draftsmanship, especially when he inked his own pencils. Gaping holes in it. He was self-taught, and the stuff ain’t perfect, but I like what Stephen Grant wrote in his eulogy for Gil. I believe he said that the comic page could not contain his designs. It was just too huge. Arabesques. Just great diagonal movement. Some of this stuff is just beyond freaking belief. I think he was just fabulous. Stan Lee has called John Buscema the Michelangelo of comics. That’s overselling him a bit, but if you want to talk in those terms, then Gil was the Rubens of comics. He composed in such a fashion that he kicked you through the story. He was irresistible. I would have to say the all around best comic book artist who ever drew breath is Joe Kubert, or maybe Alex Toth, but below that you’ve got some marvelous, marvelous people. When I started studying anatomy, I saw some of the things that Gil had been doing with the human body and respected him so much more. Just for fun, take a look at the rib cages on any of his super hero characters. There was an incredible sense of volume in them. People think anatomy is about muscles, but the great draughtsmen are much more passionate about bones. They learn the bones from every possible angle. They’re the basis of any kind of construction of the figure.
Look at those damn rib cages. Look at the knees. Look at those fantastic hands. Look at the heads. A lot of times, modern comic artists make people’s heads look like action figures, or even like balloons. When Gil drew the human head, it was clear that he understood the structure of the human skull, from any possible angle. I teach figure drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and the biggest reason I make my students learn anatomy is that it tells you, in advance, where the surface of the body is hard or soft. You draw a line differently if it is describing a surface underlaid with bone, or with muscle, or with fat. And you see all that stuff in Gil’s work, especially when he inked his own pencils. He was an interesting guy. It was impossible for Gil to be neutral about anybody. He either liked you or hated you from the day he met you, for no apparent reason, either. But he liked me and you would know if Gil liked you. Gil would have liked you, too, if he were still in the picture. You would know if Gil liked you, because he would never call you by your name. He’d call you, “My boy,” or “Sonny-boy.”
El Diablo (2001) #1 pg.14, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: That’s charming.
CR: I’d call Gil every once in awhile, because I worked on a book for him at Malibu. I got his phone number and it was like talking to God, for me. He’d keep you on the phone for two hours just talking about everything. A fascinating conversationalist. He was great. There was a period of time in the late 60’s where I believe he was trying to get out from under a marriage and so he was trying to pull together a fierce amount of money just to get rid of his wife and he was drawing too damn much at that point. It became very formulaic, but then he really got his mojo back in the 80’s and 90’s and did marvelous work. I was very proud of him. Somebody else who really got to me was Carmine Infantino. A great designer and a marvelous story-teller. Look again at “The Hate of the Hooded Hangman.” There’s a scene early on in that where the Hangman character has just won a wrestling match or is in a wrestling match and the crowd is jeering him. Does that ring a bell for you?
Stroud: It sure does.
CR: Look at how he drew that crowd. You can almost smell their sweat, and their cigars. Look at how he designed that page. And then when I got into the business and I’ve lettered four or five of Infantino’s stories; you wouldn’t believe what those pencils look like. It’s just a mare’s nest of scribbles. How anybody could possibly pull an image out of that I don’t know, but this is the way he worked and why there was such an energy and flow to his stuff. I guess when you interviewed him he said that Frank Giacoia was his favorite inker?
Stroud: Yeah. That was the one he specified.
CR: I think Joe Giella was a better match, but that’s my opinion. Can you imagine that? Drawing something in pencil and not only surrendering it to somebody else who would do the actual reproduced drawing, but not having a choice as to who that person is going to be?
Stroud: I never thought of it that way. That would have to be frustrating in large measure for some of these guys. Carmine never came out and said so to me, but I was under the impression that he didn’t like the way Murphy Anderson inked him.
CR: I would have to agree with him on that. Murphy made Carmine’s stuff behave. It was like breaking a horse. He filtered the energy out of it. Murphy Anderson is a great craftsman. You can’t get around that. I believe it was Monet who said it’s very difficult to do even a bad painting. Anybody who has been a penciler or an inker has paid a huge price for what he does. That stuff is not easy. And it’s time consuming, and it’s brutal. The deadlines. All of that. So I don’t badmouth anybody.
Stroud: One last thing on Gil before we move on. You mentioned you had the opportunity to paint his portrait once. How did that come about?
Flinch (1999) #1 pg.20, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: I believe it was in the Comics Journal that there was a two-part interview with Gil and I heard a rumor they were going to take that and make a book out of it and so I called Gil and said, “Can I paint your picture to use as the cover for this thing?” So, he sent me a photograph. The photograph was taken in the 70’s. Gil looked nothing like that at that time. He’d lost his hair, probably due to the chemotherapy, but this photograph of him taken 30 years ago was what I used for a watercolor painting, and I sent it to Gil and I was very nervous. I mean, I’m sending artwork to Gil Kane. I had a good friend at the time who was a pretty hot penciler and inker at DC and I asked Gil what he thought and Gil said, “This guy’s the worst artist I’ve ever seen in all my life.” So Gil was pretty forthcoming in his opinions. So anyway, he called me back when I sent this, and his hat was in his hand. He said, “Is there any way, sonny-boy, I can have this once it’s used for the cover of the book?” What the hell am I going to say to Gil Kane?
Stroud: Oh, sure.
CR: And he sent me a piece of original art with some western strip or something like that. So, yeah, I painted his portrait and was proud to do it.
Stroud: You didn’t keep any kind of a copy I don’t suppose?
CR: No, I didn’t particularly like it. I didn’t like it because I didn’t like the photograph I worked from. I hate working from photographs.
Stroud: I imagine it makes it kind of hard.
CR: Well, if you’re talking about serious painting it is very difficult to work from a photograph. The things a painter looks for are not the things that the camera sees, and I’m talking about a realistic painter. The things that make a painting work are not the same things that make a photograph work. So you have to guess about a lot of things working from photographs. And this print wasn’t really that great an image of him, but it was a stock photo that was used for years. So yeah, I painted Gil’s portrait. It was nice.
Stroud: What in your opinion makes a good letterer?
CR: I know it when I see it. The great ones, and the good ones…Tom Orzechowski is a great letterer. Ben Oda was a great letterer. Todd Klein is a great letterer. Sam Rosen was a great letterer.
Stroud: What’s his name? Saladino? (Chuckle.)
CR: Gaspar is the best there ever was. I’ll quote Orzechowski, from a post he wrote on a letterer’s blog only yesterday: “Gaspar Saladino was the best we will ever see. Top of the stack. He. Got. It. Absolutely.”
The great ones had a sense of style to what they were doing. But the great ones and the good ones; good ones being guys like me, Milt Snappin, Irving Watanabe; the ones that were good and the ones that were great all had a sense of cleanness about what they were doing. The same thing that happened when he designed type. If you look at a block of text, if it’s in a good typeface, or if it’s well lettered and if you look at that block of text from a distance, it will fuse into a kind of gray, and it won’t be a spotty gray, it will be an even gray. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Stroud: I think so.
CR: If it’s spotty, then it’s calling attention to itself. It’s kind of a hard thing to describe. There’s a Vermeer painting called “Allegory of the Faith.” Have you ever seen it?
Allegory of the Faith (c.1671), painted by Johannes Vermeer.
Stroud: It doesn’t ring any bells.
CR: Go to Google and look it up. It’s a very lovely picture. Vermeer was in many ways the greatest painter who ever drew breath. In the picture this woman is in ecstasy over something she’s just read in the New Testament, and there’s this copy of the New Testament on a pedestal next to her and its open so there’s a huge amount of text on it. Vermeer managed to just suggest all that text with a patch of gray. The picture is at the Metropolitan museum. I’ve looked at it many times. It’s just gray. But it’s such a good gray. It’s such an appropriate gray for the place in the image that you totally buy into it. You accept it as text. Same kind of thing coming from the opposite direction.
Anyway, what makes a good letterer is that cleanness. It’s very, very hard to achieve and takes a whole lot of time. Other good letterers were Danny Crespi at Marvel. He was a very good letterer. Morrie Koramoto at Marvel was also very good. I think John Costanza was a great letterer. Willie Schubert is a great letterer. Some are very cool and they stand back and they try hard not to draw attention to themselves. That’s where you get a Ben Oda or certainly Artie Simek and to a lesser extent Sam Rosen. But for one it was just party time and that was Gaspar. It was a party, but it was a very elegant little party. And the other thing about how they used to make comics but don’t any more; not at Marvel, where the script wasn’t written until the pictures had been drawn, but at DC where for the most part artists worked from a script where everything was laid out for them to do, if there was a title, or a sound effect, or even the balloon shapes, the artists were expected to rough those in for you.
So, when you worked on a DC book, and you did sound effects, quite often those sound effects had been penciled in by the artist. Going back to Gaspar Saladino, if you look at his work on…who are the great designers? You’ve got Carmine. You’ve got Gil Kane. You’ve got Joe Kubert. I think Gaspar lettered one issue of Doom Patrol for Bruno Premiani, and these are all just great, great illustrators. If you look at the sound effects in those different guy’s stuff or you look at the balloon shapes, or the titles; yeah, Gaspar did them, but Gaspar took his cues from these great designers. That’s why titles looked different in Green Lantern than they did in Flash or differently than they did in the Kubert war books, or anything like that. So, it was very nice. It was a nice relationship between letterer and artist. They were more subservient, but in a very healthy way. It was very nice. The lettering and especially the sound effects just had a more organic relationship with the artwork.
Ghost Rider (1973) #39 pg.12, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: Was the lettering one of the final phases in the production?
CR: The classic way of doing it at DC was script and pencils, then lettering, then inks. In the 80’s and especially the 90’s I saw more and more of my own work that was practically never getting original art to letter on. It was all done on overlays and this was done because the pencilers were always late. So if the penciler was two weeks late getting the story in, then rather than send his art to me, they Xeroxed it and got the artwork to the inker immediately so the inker could save the penciler’s butt like they always seemed to end up doing. So in the meantime I would letter on vellum overlays over Xeroxes and then they’d have these poor coolies in the production department who would have to paste up the lettering on to the artwork. But that was then. Today almost all of it is computerized, although Tom Orzechowski is getting to do some hand-lettering. So that’s the way it was done then. Today, sometimes I’ll have to letter pencils, sometimes I letter over fully inked artwork.
Stroud: I was thinking of what was, to my mind, for the era, the most unique thing when Carmine Infantino would have those gesturing hands on each of his caption boxes. I thought, “Okay, how does this all fit together?”
CR: Well that’s an example of what I was talking about before. The letterers did what the artists wanted them to. So if Carmine would scribble in those hands, they’d be indecipherable to anyone except the inker. Those hands would emerge from a caption box and the letterer would undoubtedly rule the caption box, but then the inker would ink the hand coming out of it. So when you would see that, one letter writer would call that “Helpful Hands.” When you saw “Helpful Hands” in an Infantino book it was lettered by Gaspar, but Gaspar did not ink those hands. That was the responsibility of the inker.
Stroud: Okay. I was wondering about that because it’s almost like there’s an overlap there in responsibility and I wondered, “Okay, who trumps here?” (Chuckle.)
CR: I didn’t understand or appreciate, because nobody explained it to me, how important this was; this taking cues from the penciler. There was a war book I did in, I think, 1978 that Jerry Grandenetti penciled and then inked it. I lettered it and I saw all these sound effects and the shapes that Jerry had indicated and I thought, “These are stupid. I’ll do it my way.” The damn thing had to be re-lettered, and I never got work off that editor again…until he became President of DC comics. (Mutual laughter.)
Stroud: It seems to me you made a comment once that Julie Schwartz was somewhat underwhelmed with the first job you did for him.
Hellboy In Mexico (2016) #1 pg.28, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: Well, the first job I did for him was also the last job I did for him. I just didn’t understand. I thought Julie, of all people, should love me because I’m pretending to be Gaspar. But Julie didn’t buy work from Gaspar because it was crazy, he bought work from Gaspar because Gaspar was so damn good he could get away with anything. So I was a libertine without the discipline, and I didn’t understand it at the time. So, yeah, it was when Julie was editing Superman or one of the Superman books, and Curt Swan drew it. It was very, very well drawn and Julie didn’t like it and I didn’t blame him one bit. If there was anything that I could change about my relationship with DC when I started out, it’s that I wish I had been mature enough to ask more questions and get more feedback, and I wish that they had been more proactive in training me, but for some reason certain people liked my work and assumed it was okay, and then didn’t monitor me until I had made some bonehead mistakes. I can’t believe I’ve survived. (Chuckle.) A particular Wonder Woman story I did, because Gerry Conway had written it, and as I mentioned before I was the catch basin for everything Gerry wrote. He’s one of the producers now on one of those Law and Order shows.
Stroud: I think I remember you telling me that once. That was an interesting transition, although it seems like he’s not the first writer to make the leap into television. I think Cary Bates has done some of that as well.
CR: Has he? Brian Vaughn, who was a very big Marvel writer, and of course he wrote a book for Vertigo called “Y The Last Man.”
Stroud: Oh, yeah, quite the legendary tome, although I’ve not read it.
CR: He’s one of the producers on a show called “Lost,” which, if you’ve never seen it, you and I are the only ones.
Stroud: (Laughter.) I did watch it for a little bit and lost interest after awhile.
CR: Anyway, I did this Wonder Woman story; I did a bunch of Wonder Woman stories, but in this case, I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I was thinking that it would be real cool if all my horizontal strokes became diagonal. And when I started doing it I thought, “Wow! I’m a genius!” So, the letter “E” has got one vertical stroke and three horizontal strokes; well those horizontal strokes weren’t horizontal any more. I made them diagonal and thought, “Wow! This is really, really cool looking!” So, I lettered this issue of Wonder Woman that way and the damn thing was published and Jack [Adler] called me up and he sounded sick. He said, “This issue of Wonder Woman cannot be read.” This was an important book because I think the T.V. show was on at the time. So, youth. They shouldn’t hire 20-year old guys to letter their comic books. That’s the moral of the story. Now it’s all done on a computer so anyone can letter a comic book. Now this is sacrilegious, but I think I’m a better letterer on the computer than I was as a hand-letterer. If you letter on a computer…well, my sound effects were probably better as a hand-letterer, but nine tenths of it is designing type. Designing type is a fascinating procedure anyway. But all the goofiness and fun, and at the same time rigidity and discipline that a comic book needs to have, that has to be built into the way you design type, and it takes quite awhile to learn how to do it. I’ve got some bells and whistles in my operation over here…well, in a block of copy; just a paragraph, what letter is going to appear most often?
Incognegro (2008) #1 pg.16, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: Hmmm. S?
CR: E is the most common letter of the alphabet. So when I started doing this stuff on computer it began to drive me crazy that in one speech there might be fifteen identical “e’s.” So, I cooked up a way to defeat that. I’m very proud of this and it’s not entirely finished yet, but I can send you a block of copy where no two “e’s” are identical, and I don’t have to do anything to make it happen, it’s all in the design of the type. Anyway, I look at this stuff and I think my stuff is better now. I was cleaning up the studio yesterday; I try to do that once every fifteen years, and I ran across this issue of Preacher from 1999 done by hand, and I looked at it and looked at the stuff I do now, and I’d have to say my computerized stuff looks better than my hand lettering did.
Stroud: Well, I know I was sure impressed with your work on the Hellboy issue I got on Free Comic Book Day that I’d told you about, and it looked to me like it was hand drawn.
CR: Bless your heart. That’s what I try for. Thank you very much.
Stroud: I don’t have the most discerning eye, but I was genuinely surprised when you told me it was done on the computer.
CR: Mike Mignola is a very interesting guy to work for. He wants things done a certain way, and if you’re smart, you don’t argue with him. He’s got his own sense of aesthetics. A lot of things he likes I thought were idiotic, but the customer is always right, so I started doing things his way, and in many ways I think it’s made up for my stupidity when I was starting out at DC and ignored the layouts provided to me by the pencilers. He’s got a good design sense and I’ve tried to accommodate him. He’s very challenging to work for, but it’s even harder for the colorists. Dave Stewart has won all kinds of awards for his coloring on Hellboy. He deserves every bit of it.
Stroud: (Chuckle.) Not an easy task, huh?
CR: Mike is a very nice guy. I like him very much. That was not a slur against him. If you work for David Selznick, you do things David Selznick’s way. If you work for Barack Obama, you do things the Barack Obama way. If you work for Mike Mignola, you do it Mike’s way, and he seems to know what he’s doing.
Stroud: The character is going strong. No question about it. Back when you were still doing things by hand what were your favorite tools of the trade?
Jonah Hex (1977) #10 pg.05, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: I used a Speedball B-6 point sharpened a certain way that I learned when I was on staff at Marvel comics. At Marvel at that time John Costanza was the hot letterer and some of the things you needed to know how to do if you worked in their bullpen was how to correct John’s lettering and have it look more or less like John did it. So, Danny Crespi, who ran the production department, a wonderful guy, he showed me how John Costanza sharpened a pen point and how he held it and I liked the effect very much and pretty much adopted it for my own. The Speedball B-6, sharpened a certain way, can be used for regular words and bold-faced words. You just rotate it. So I used that and had a bunch of other points for different thicknesses, for sound effects; screaming, stuff like that.
Stroud: You told me kind of a humorous story about the FB-6 which was Gaspar’s favorite and you couldn’t get it to work, was that right?
CR: Yeah, I couldn’t, and at the same time Gaspar’s art supplier didn’t sell them any more and he was hearing rumors that the point was being discontinued, so I went to my art store. I was living in Boise at the time and I bought every FB-6 in the place and sent them to him. He was very grateful. He said he was almost going to have to retire.
Stroud: So, you kept him going there. That’s cool.
CR: I guess. He was already being eased out. I guess his last book for DC was Flash, wasn’t it?
Stroud: I’m not sure. I know a whole lot of hoopla was made over the Arkham Asylum book, but I don’t know where that was chronologically.
CR: Was that in the 90’s? I think it was the early 90’s.
Stroud: I’m thinking so. Of course, obviously that was a one shot deal rather than a regular gig, but I almost have it in my head for some reason that was one of the last big production jobs that he did and they’ve really praised that one to the rooftops for all the different designs and unique takes he took on things, especially incorporating…as he seems to be a master in doing, incorporating it into the character. The mad, chaotic nature of the Joker.
CR: At the same time, though, if you look at it, look at the discipline in it. It’s all legible and clean. The guy was wonderful. I took over Hellblazer at Vertigo from Gaspar and I heard a story which I confirmed later with Gaspar. When Jamie Delano was writing Hellblazer it was very, very copy heavy, and I don’t know if it was one of Jamie’s scripts, but there was a lot of text in one place and Gaspar just left about half of it out. Karen Berger called him up and asked, “Why did you do this?” “Ah, it didn’t need all those words.”
Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth (1972) #55 pg.04, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: What do you want? He’s Gaspar. He can do that. (Chuckle.) At Marvel…I don’t know if this is still true, but one of the differences between the Marvel books and the DC books, going way back to the 60’s, is that at Marvel, balloons had to be one shape. They could be an oval, or they could be kind of a rounded oblong. But at DC, if you needed to do it to fit it in, a balloon could be a combination of two or four or seven different curves. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Stroud: Yes.
CR: Okay, that’s called scalloping. At DC you could do that. At Marvel, it was absolutely verboten. So, when I started doing work for Marvel I couldn’t scallop my balloons any more and I really missed it because scalloping was something Gaspar did so well and I was still pretending to be Gaspar, but I was a good little boy and I did my balloons the way they wanted me to and then I saw this book that Costanza lettered and there were scalloped balloons all over the place. “How come Costanza gets to do that?” Danny Crespi said, “Because he’s Costanza.” Danny Crespi, has anyone talked to you about him?
Stroud: Not at all.
CR: Delightful, sweet guy. One of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and that’s going some. There are a lot of very good people in this racket. But he was sort of the godfather of lettering at Marvel. He was a first-rate letterer himself and he trained people. Just a terrific guy.
Stroud: Has most of your time been on staff or as a freelancer over the years?
CR: Very little of it was on staff. I’d been on staff at DC and Marvel both, but just as a temp. In both cases it was working in the production department, usually making corrections on people’s work. I think I worked for maybe three weeks at DC. There was a time at Marvel when I figured if I just took one of their desks there and did my freelance lettering there that I’d be very available for fill-ins on staff and I’d be able to pester them for work. I worked for a few months in the bullpen at Marvel. Marvel was a much more fun place to work than DC. I don’t know if it still is or not, but Marvel was a party. Marvel was goofy. DC was very stolid and uptight. No fun at all.
Stroud: Sounds like something I read that Alan Kupperberg wrote at his website. Something to the effect that at DC, “This is serious business. Here we wear neckties when we make comic books!”
The Losers (2003) #16 pg.18, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: They all did wear neckties. I wore a t-shirt and blue jeans. Probably just one t-shirt and one pair of jeans. I was pretty poor at the time. I didn’t get paid very much. They didn’t pay very much at Marvel either. But Marvel was a really fun place to work. Everybody should work there. I don’t know what it’s like now. This was when Shooter was running the place. Shooter, who I’ve come to respect much more than I did at the time. He was cold, he was distant, but he was brilliant and very smart. All the funny things happened at Marvel. There was a comic called ROM. I think it was one of those comics based on a toy.
So, they were going to do a ROM comic book. There was an artist, a Palestinian, I believe, and his name was Mike Nasser. First rate draftsman. Really a draftsman. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Mike was drawing an issue of Marvel Team-Up. It was Spider-Man teaming up with Nightcrawler, and Joe Rubinstein was inking it and I was lettering it. Michael was very slow, because he was just a great craftsman. I got the first eight pages and lettered them, and this ROM comic book is being brought into being and Mike Nasser really wanted to draw it, and so he submitted a cover design for it. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it was outrageously bad, or there was something wrong with it. Anyway, he brought the cover design in and gave it to the editor, who I think was Jo Duffy, and I guess Jo shook her head and said, “This is terrible. We can’t use this.” So Mike writes on the back of it in broken English, “You no like my pictures, I no work for you no more,” and he takes this note and rips it into a gazillion pieces, heads out the door, gets into a cab, heads out to JFK, I guess on his way to Palestine. He has no money and he tries to get on the plane. They won’t let him on the plane, and Nasser just disappeared from off the face of the earth. Maybe they just took him somewhere for a well-deserved rest.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: Meanwhile, there’s an issue of Marvel Team-Up that needs to be drawn, and I’d lettered eight pages (I was freelancing, so if I didn’t get work, I didn’t eat, so I was getting pretty desperate), and I walk into the office one day and there’s Mike Nasser sitting at a desk drawing pages of Marvel Team-Up, and I said, “Hey, isn’t that Mike Nasser?” And Al Millgrom grabbed me and steered me as far away as he could and said, “Don’t say anything to him. He’s here. Leave him alone.” Mike managed to draw four or five more pages of it and then disappeared again, so Rich Buckler finished the story. Nasser was looney, but most of the people I’ve dealt with are not. Most are just plain nice people. Professionals, at least in my experience.
Stroud: It seems like the creative gene makes people a little bit more amicable. I always think back to that comment Shelly Moldoff made to me: “Comic book people are usually good people.” I think I’ve managed to corroborate that with the vast majority of the people I’ve been in touch with.
CR: There’s a humility about people who draw if they’re any good. And I think the reason for it is if you’re going to draw, and draw realistically, you’ve got to cultivate a real respect for nature. A great respect for the creation itself. You see this among painters. They may be a pain in the ass, but most of them that I’ve known are very humble people, and I’ve known some of the best. I do this Tuesday night figure drawing group with one of the hottest portrait artists in the country. A brilliant and psychotic still life painter and a beautiful woman who is a sculptor. Top drawer people, one and all.
Marvel Team-Up (1972) #87 pg.15, lettered by Clem Robins.
New Gods (1995) #1 pg.17, lettered by Clem Robins.
Orbiter (2003) TPB pg.67, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: You were mentioning Jim Shooter a few minutes ago, and of course you read the interview, but he made an interesting comment. He said that once text gets to be about 40 words in one panel that you were in trouble. Is that a good rule of thumb?
CR: 40 words? I don’t know. I guess I can out myself as a nerd here. At the time that I was doing about 300 pages a month in the early 90’s I felt I had to find a way to keep track of my time so that if nothing else I’d be in a better position to make and keep promises about deadlines. So, I started counting words. There’s a very simple and quick way to do it. When I counted the words and counted the number of characters, then I could estimate to within a half an hour how long it would take me to letter a comic book, and without boring you with the details, I ended up with…boy, you’re going to think I’m the biggest nerd on the planet. I ended up with a database of character counts per page and I found across the board…I was lettering all kinds of projects for all kinds of different writers. The average number of characters on a page, including spaces is about 500. So, you said 40 words in a panel?
Stroud: Yeah, that was what he was suggesting.
Preacher (1995) #50 pg.18, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: So, if we divide 500 by six panels to a page you get 83 characters per panel and the average word is, shall we say, five letters, and by golly, it looks like you’re right. Some of these guys really pushed it. Roy Thomas really stuffed the words. So did Bob Kanigher. So did Gardner Fox. John Broome could, but John was a nice lean writer. Anyway, I’d never run across that figure. You say 40 words per panel?
Stroud: Yeah. He just made that offhand comment that once the text gets to about 40 words in a panel you’re probably in trouble as far as obscuring the background and so forth.
CR: Well consider that Jim, if he’s talking about his experience at Marvel, they weren’t using full scripts, or at least very seldom did. Sometimes they did. So that would make sense because the artist would have to draw his pictures leaving a certain amount of dead space for the copy to go. It sounds good to me. 40 words? All right. I think they had a rule of thumb at Marvel that one quarter of the area in a panel should be reserved for text.
Stroud: I’d just never heard somebody come up with something like that and I didn’t know if it rang true from your perspective.
CR: Things have changed, too. When it was done by hand, if you’ve got a copy heavy writer like Roy Thomas or Don McGregor or Gerry Conway or Gardner Fox or Bob Kanigher or any of these people, that translated directly into an enormous amount of time, whereas if you got something fun without a whole lot of words then you could play around a little bit more. Now on a computer that is a less onerous task. You can copy and paste into Illustrator and it doesn’t take as long to do, although it’s still pretty difficult.
Stroud: Has the advent of computerized production improved or made things worse for your line of work?
CR: It’s made it worse. In many ways it’s made comics better, but it’s made my line of work worse. We are expected to make corrections where they used to have staffs in production doing. The rates have been lowered. All of the rates have been lowered. The dirty little secret of the comic book industry for years was that if you wanted to be creative you could be a penciler or an inker or a writer, but if you wanted to make lots and lots of money, be a letterer or a colorist, because once you learn how to do it, it was like having a license to print money. That all changed, but what the hell? That’s technology. I have no objection to that. In the 1700’s when somebody built a machine that made stockings and the 1600 or so women in England who, as a stay at home job made stockings, they and their husbands wanted to start riots, they wanted to break the machine, they wanted to hang the guy who built the machine, they said, “This is going to destroy our industry,” you’ve heard this before?
Rune (1994) #7 pg.01, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: It sounds similar to the old buggy whip analogy.
CR: Well, within 10 years, instead of 1600 people in England making stockings, there were something like 100,000 people in England making stockings, and everybody could now afford stockings. You could say hand made stockings are better, but they’re not better if you can’t own them.
Stroud: That’s right.
CR: Computer lettering usually looks awful. I kind of like how mine looks and how Todd Klein’s looks and a few other people; like Rob Lee at DC does it pretty well. Jared Fletcher at DC does it pretty well. There are others, but for the most part it’s dead looking, but on the other hand anybody can get a comic book lettered. Badly, but it can be done. There was a wonderful band out of Los Angeles in the 80’s called Wednesday Week. I was a DJ at the time and played the album a lot. I thought it was terrific. I got to be friends with the lead singer of the band, and one of the things that bugs her a lot is that now with computers anybody, absolutely anybody, can make a CD. She feels that it dilutes the specialness of actually being able to make an album, and maybe she’s right, but I think these things always work out for the best. Technology always enriches life in the long run. Maybe in the transitional times people suffer, but in the long run, it’s better.
Stroud: I would tend to agree. Moveable type certainly created a sea change back in the day.
CR: It certainly did. Are we better or worse for having books? I would cheerfully submit that we’re better.
Stroud: Yes, indeed.
CR: Calligraphers can’t make a living any more.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: That’s why God made McDonald’s, so they’d have jobs to do.
Stroud: Well, in looking back over 3 decades worth, is there anything that you’d have liked to have done that you haven’t had a chance to do yet? Did you ever have a desire to write or pencil?
Secret Defenders (1993) #5 pg.08, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: Well, I wrote a book, but that’s a how to book on drawing the human figure. No, I think I made the right call. I wish I had trained harder as a painter. I’m working very hard at that now. I’m doing some good work, but I wish I’d done it when I was in my 30’s or my 20’s. As far as doing things differently as a letterer, I wish I had been more coachable, and I wish I had listened or sought out the advice of other people. Todd Klein did. One of the reasons Todd’s stuff is so good is because he was on staff at DC for two or three or five years and he paid attention to what people needed and to what they wanted, and he found ways to give it to them.
When Todd started out he wasn’t all that hot, and then in 1979 or 1980 Todd could do Gaspar better than Gaspar could. If you look at that Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans thing you can see it. Todd was playing Gaspar. That’s what he was doing. It was funny to see it, because he went beyond that shortly thereafter, but he’s been able to do these things. For one thing he’s a very talented guy, but for another thing he had a great deal of respect for the industry, for the artists, and he wanted badly to find a way to get them the best work he could. What would I have done differently? I think I’d have tried to be more like Todd. But I have no complaints. The funny book industry has been very, very nice to me. Very nice.
Stroud: It seems to continue on. You’re still finding work quite obviously.
CR: Yeah. It’s good work. The wacky thing about this is that it really has nothing to do with who you are, but if you get on a book that’s respected then you’re sort of associated with it. Preacher, for example, had a very bizarre ending which I, as an extremely devoted Christian found very hard to take, but it was still one of the best-read comic books ever done. Very, very well drawn. It was just brilliantly done. So, I lettered all the issues of Preacher and Transmetropolitan or Hellboy or Fly or 100 Bullets. Some of these things are just very well done. It’s a pleasure to be associated with them. And some less so. I’ve known some people that were a pain in the neck and I think inkers are way underappreciated. I’ve seen some pencilers routinely…not many, but it seems some, the pencilers who were the most irresponsible, the ones who month after month the inker saved his or her ass, by covering for the fact that the penciler couldn’t meet a deadline. It’s those pencilers that always seemed to me to be least appreciative of what those inkers were doing for them.
Stroud: The Vinnie Colletta’s of the industry.
CR: I don’t think Vinnie is a good example. Joe Giella, I think is a good example. Stan Woch is a good example. Rodney Ramos is a good example. Jose Marzon, who inked “Y, The Last Man,” is a good example. A lot of times these guys had to fix the artist’s drawing mistakes. I’ve done it. I inked a comic book in 1990 I think it was and we drew a lot of stuff. You had to, because the perspective was wrong or the eyes were placed in the wrong place or something like that. I think they’re way underappreciated, and underpaid, too. I’m a letterer. It takes me anywhere from a day to two days to do a comic book. If you’re an inker, particularly with the level of detail and craft that they demand of inkers these days, which is very high, if you’ve got a monthly, you’re married to that monthly. It’s not unusual for it to be 10-hour days, 7 days a week.
Transmetropolitan (1997) #10 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: Brutal.
CR: Some guys can pace themselves really well and it’s just like a job, but a lot of times with penciling and inking, you’re married to that thing. So if you’re the inker on a book, and it lasts 60 issues and then the series ends, unless you’ve been pretty aggressive about marketing yourself, you’re suddenly unemployed. And I’ve seen that happen to inkers more than anybody else. That’s tragic to me.
Stroud: Poor payment for what they accomplish.
CR: Yeah.
Stroud: What can you tell me about sound effects?
CR: They’re different based on what’s going on. The good letterers were able to pick up on that. Batman might get hit on the head and it might say “Bonk!” Or Jerry Lewis might get hit on the head and it might say “Bonk!” But they’re not the same “Bonk!” They all require a different kind of a “Bonk!” That’s true of sound effects and it’s also true of the lettering itself. There’s a personality response on the part of the letterer to what he’s doing. This is the part of lettering that a computer is blind to, and the only way you can make headway in being responsive is in designing type. It’s very difficult to do. It takes forever, but I love it. Designing type is the thing I like the most.
Stroud: You said you had a story about inking.
CR: I inked a book in 1990. I was supposed to ink a mini-series for a small company and found I could have been pretty good at it if I’d stuck with it, but in the time it took me to ink the book I could have made four times as much money lettering, so I got out from under that.
Stroud: That dovetails with what you said earlier about how colorists and letterers, at least back in the day, did very well comparatively speaking.
CR: I’ve also done courtroom drawing for television off and on since 1982. It’s a lot of fun. I started doing that when…I left school kind of abruptly and went to Boise, Idaho, just on kind of a whim and I didn’t have much money and thought I could get a job doing paste-up or something. There was no work doing that, so I thought maybe the local T.V. stations might need someone to do graphics or layout for them, so the first one I called I got the news director. He said, “No, we don’t need anyone to do that, but we’re looking for someone to cover a trial and make pictures for us. Can you do that?” When you’re asked a question like that…well, to begin with I’d wanted to do that all my life. I thought it would be one of the coolest jobs imaginable. So, I said, “Sure, I can do that. I’ll bring in my samples.” So, we set up an appointment and I had practically no money, so I bought a pack of typing paper and a fountain pen and on the way to the meeting with this guy I sat in a coffee shop and drew pictures of the other people at the coffee shop and those were my samples. Have you ever seen the movie “The Falcon and the Snowman?”
Unknown Soldier (2008) #3 pg.04, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: I think I have, but it’s been ages.
CR: Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. I think it came out in 1981, but it was about a traitor; a guy who sold some secrets to the Soviets named Christopher Boyce. He was convicted and then he escaped from jail and did the most intelligent thing you can imagine. He started robbing banks with his friends. This while under a life sentence for treason. He was finally caught in Boise and it was a very high-profile trial and that was what they needed me to cover. They actually had another courtroom artist, but this news director’s hobby was firing people. He just loved to fire people, and so he wanted to get rid of this woman who was doing the pictures for him and that was why they hired me. I was happy as a clam. After being in Boise for three days not having work and running out of money and all of a sudden, I was going into the courtroom and my name was on television every night. That was great. I don’t know if it’s still true, but at that time Idaho was rather well known for its white separatist movement in the upper panhandle of the state. A lot of these goons would get caught and their trials would be very highly publicized and they’d send me in for those. So, I got to know all these Neo-Nazis.
Stroud: (Chuckle.) Friend of the famous and the infamous.
CR: Yeah, and I got curious because I don’t trust the media, even though I’ve been a part of it for all of my professional life. I decided to find out what these people have to say for themselves. I’m pals with everybody. So, I met the head of one of the more prominent groups. It was called Aryan Nations and I said, “Look, I’d like to hear what you have to say. I’m open to hear anybody’s story. Can I interview you some time?” He said, “Sure.” So, we made arrangements for me to visit their headquarters. Idaho is a huge, huge state. This was about 20 years ago. I think it was fall of 1988. So, we made arrangements for me to go and visit this guy. It was about 450 miles north of Boise, not far from the Canadian border. I drove up there and discovered that the panhandle of Idaho is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. It’s just breathtaking, especially in the fall. I got up there and stayed in a motel and I called the next morning and asked if the appointment was still on. He said, “Sure,” and he gives me really good directions to get there. It was about 15 miles outside of Coeur d’Alene.
So, I pull up there. I don’t know what to expect. I come to the entrance to their property to an unmanned guard tower with two signs on it. One said, “Whites Only,” and the other one says, “Welcome Aryan Warriors.” Now I’m pretty sure for reasons that will become obvious that I wasn’t Aryan, but I’m reasonably white, so I figured that’s okay. I came in and found the head office of the Aryan Nations, which proved to be a double-wide trailer and went in. The man’s secretary was also his wife and told me to have a seat. The waiting room was walled with books that you could purchase for your home study. I came in a bit early, so I looked at some of the books and saw some about Jews being evicted from every country in Europe and why and books about this and that. But the best one, and I actually ended up buying a copy, was a book called, “The Hitler We Loved.” It was a picture book of sentimental photographs of Hitler doing various things. Playing with children, visiting troops at the front, his romance with Eva Braun and all these books had very indignantly written captions on them, like, “This is the man they call a monster,” while he’s pinching a little child’s cheek or something. (Chuckle.)
Vigilante (2005) #1 pg.06, lettered by Clem Robins.
Apparently, he was this really swell guy, but then it’s time for my appointment. This guy’s name was Reverend Richard Butler. As far as I know he’s still alive. He sits me down and I’m all set to ask him some questions, but he just wanted to talk, and I think he was touched that someone working in television actually was willing to listen to him. But once he got going, you couldn’t stop him. He explained to me their belief system. He said they had no violent desires to hurt anybody and I knew that wasn’t true because I’d seen secretly video-taped coverage of him at a Klan meeting urging the death of various groups of people. Then he got into religion and he explained to me the forming and creating of man in Genesis 1 applied only to the Aryan race and that all other races were not descendants of Adam. So, I asked who they were descended from. He explained that the other races are what they call mud people. Have you ever heard this before?
Stroud: I think I did on a talk show once.
CR: It’s an accurate term as far as this being the way they talk. I was writing a book at the time which I never finished, but it was going to be a cheap, trashy detective thriller, and this is really why I wanted to interview this guy, because it was going to be set in Idaho and I wanted to use white separatists as a red herring to distract the reader from realizing who the real villain was. But when I tried to write dialogue to put into these white separatist’s mouths they all sounded like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: So more than anything else, I wanted to hear how these people talked and what they wanted and why they wanted it. I just wanted to hear their story. So he tells me their story all right. So supposedly there are real human beings who are the Teutonic people, the Aryans. There are mud people, who are all the other races; Orientals, African-Americans and so forth and then there’s one other group, and that’s the Jews. I guess I should give you my mea culpa here. I’m Jewish. So, this is very interesting to me. The Jews, he explained to me, are the direct descendants of Satan himself. As he’s explaining this to me I tried to ask him questions, but he wasn’t too interested in questions. He wanted to talk, but I realized…if you’ve ever read the 8th chapter of the Gospel of John, there’s a very heated dialogue between Jesus Christ and the group of Pharisees who later on would be responsible for his torture and execution. Jesus told this group of people, “Ye are of your father, the devil.” And that must have been where he got this thing. He was extrapolating that to all Jews.
Stroud: Incredible.
CR: This is why, I guess, according to these people; and I don’t know what this has to do with comic books, but I guess this is why they had such an animus toward Jews. So, I’m sitting there and he’s pouring out the secrets of his heart to me and he doesn’t realize he’s talking to anti-Christ.
War Dancer (1994) #1 pg.03, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: But it was all very interesting and entertaining. I wish he’d let me ask him questions. But after about an hour and a half it started to get pretty tedious and there was no end in sight. It didn’t seem like there was a waiting list of people who had appointments with him and he could have gone on all day. So, I began to get a little bit tired of it and I wanted to find some polite way to excuse myself, so I said, “Sir, could you give me a tour of your property? I’d like to see it.” He said, “Sure, great idea.” So we get up and he tells his wife to hold his calls and he puts on his overcoat and we for the door. As we head to the door, there’s a group of fellas, part of the group getting ready to go out hunting Elk, which is kind of a manhood ritual in that part of the country.
Stroud: I grew up in Eastern Washington, so that rings true.
CR: So, we chatted with them for a little while and then he takes me on the tour. He shows me his house, he showed me the guard tower, he showed me the other guard tower which vandals had blown up; he showed me the church where he preaches. He shows me all this stuff and then he has one more thing he wants to show me. He leads me to the woods. There’s a path into the woods and we walk on this path and it’s an October morning. It’s beautiful. The sky is clear and there’s a bracing coolness in the air and Douglas Firs and Ponderosa Pines are rising up around us and the birds are chirping and it’s just breathtaking and I don’t know where the hell he’s taking me. We walk a couple hundred feet down this path and it opens up into a clearing, and in the clearing the grass is neatly trimmed and what are there in the center of that clearing, but a bunch of picnic tables. He gets really quiet. He just looks at this beautiful scene and whatever’s on his mind, this is serious shit to Reverend Butler. “This is our sanctuary, son. This is where we come when we want to visit with each other. We’ll have a picnic with our families and talk about the challenges we face in the ministry. Do you know why this is our sanctuary, son?” I said, “No. Why?” “Because this is the only place left in America where no Jew has ever set foot.”
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: Now ask me the question.
Stroud: Did you say anything at that point?
CR: No. I got my ass the %$# out of there and I’ve never been back.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
X-Men_ Phoenix Endsong (2005) #3 pg.06, lettered by Clem Robins.
CR: Now you know why the white separatist movement in America has never gotten very far. It’s because I defiled their sanctuary. A lot of mud people and anti-Christ’s owe me.
Stroud: (Laughter.) The irony is flowing across the floor.
CR: So that court sketching is really a lot of fun. It really is. Especially arraignments, which last about 15 seconds on average. You’ve got to be really clever to cover an arraignment. I’ve ridden down in elevators with suspects just to try to memorize their features. I did a trial of some abortion clinic bomber a couple of years ago who was caught in Cincinnati and I covered it for a local station and then CNN bought the drawings after that, so I made a lot of money for practically nothing except having fun.
Stroud: Nice. Who would have thought of that as a sideline?
CR: It’s great. The people that do it full time…I don’t know if there are any of them left, but I know one woman who did it for NBC who probably made as much money as I did when lettering was at its highest. It’s a good gig. I’d do it and pretend I was Domier. It’s the same kind of drawing style, except he was much better at it.
Stroud: I know of the one book you’ve published, but have you done any other writing?
CR: Nothing that’s been published. I like to write. I’m probably better at that than anything else, but I haven’t proven it by making any money. My sister is a writer, or did I already tell you that?
Stroud: I thought you’d said she was an editor.
CR: She has been an editor. She’s been all over the place. She was an editor at Acclaim for about three years, but when she was about 19, she’d read enough regency period romance novels that she knew the formula back and forth. So, she figured, “I can write better than this stuff.” So, she wrote a manuscript and it was published and led to contracts and she gave up the regency romances after awhile. She wrote a book that was on the New York Times list of the ten best science fiction books of the year 2001. It was called “The Stone War,” and it did very well. She also cooked up a series of mystery novels starring a woman in Victorian England somewhere around the 1700’s or early 1800’s. She’s a detective, but being a woman, she has very limited access to society to roam freely and to do her investigations, so she had to dress as a man. She wrote three or four books of that character and I’m not sure what she’s up to next. What writing have I had published? I was one of those geeks that wrote to Julie Schwartz’s letter column in the 70’s. I realized how to get these things published; what kind of thing Julie liked and so I wrote them. I found it was so easy that I started writing letters under various names and sending those in, too.
Young Justice (1998) #46 pg.15, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
CR: In at least one issue of something, from like maybe 1971 or 1972 where I had two letters published in the letter column and they expressed different opinions. There used to be a bulletin board at Marvel when I was on staff and it was called the embarrassing fan letter bulletin board. So many people that worked in the bullpen or the freelance pool had written letters to the editor earlier and a lot of them were incredibly stupid, especially my own, and so you had letters on the bulletin board from Klaus Janson or other people. What else can I tell you here? Lettering went all digital, but as we speak I’m preparing to do my first hand-lettering job I’ve had in years.
Stroud: Was it specified as being done by hand?
CR: Yes. Actually, it’s a card for some executive at Time-Warner who’s leaving and it was done up as a comic book page, and unlike real comic book pages it’s not only going to be hand lettered and hand inked, but it’s also going to be colored right on the board. So whoever this guy is, they’re pouring a lot of money into saying goodbye to him.
Stroud: True custom work then. Last time we talked you were also starting to go into effects and how they worked or didn’t work so well in a computer medium.
CR: It’s kind of funny. When you’re hand lettering, you’re trying to make this stuff as neat as possible. You want every letter of the alphabet to look exactly like itself no matter where you see it. Then I got on computers and that lofty goal can be achieved by a chimpanzee. Because of course the nature of computer type is that it’s all uniform. So, I have gone bonkers in the last five years trying to defeat the perfection of computer lettering to make it look funky.
Stroud: Give it some character.
CR: It’s not just giving it some character, it’s giving it some flaws; giving it kind of an organic look. If you’re lettering; if you’ve got a pen in your hand and you are about to letter, say the word “act,” the lower part of the “c” in the word “act,” the letter “c” being a semi-circle, that lower part is going to extend farther to the right than the upper part. You won’t even know you’re doing it. But you’re doing it to compensate for the fact that there’s this hollowed out space on the left side of the “t.” So, you just do that kind of stuff. If you get a master, like Gaspar, and you take a magnifying glass to it, you see that kind of thing all the time. In type that’s referred to as contextual ligatures and it’s really the next big thing in digital type. When I do a book on computer, it’s almost impossible for the same letter “e” to appear more than once in a block of copy. I don’t know if anybody notices this stuff, but I notice it. I work very hard at it. But getting back to sound effects, they have to carry the mood of the story. I think we talked about that.
Zombie World_ Champion of the Worms (1997) #1 pg.02, lettered by Clem Robins.
Stroud: Yeah.
CR: Earlier we were talking a little about the Legion and Jim Shooter’s work on it along with Curt Swan.
Stroud: Yes.
CR: Swan knew how to make characters look like they were thinking and emoting. Everybody became kind of introspective. Edmond Hamilton was writing some of them and you had these marvelous stories. Did you ever review “The Legionnaire Who Killed?”
Stroud: Oh, yeah. Star Boy.
CR: That was one hell of a story. Have you read it? Do you remember it?
Stroud: I sure do. It’s been on the list to do one of these days.
CR: You ought to. There’s only one piece of action in the entire story, and that’s the opening sequence where, in self defense, Star Boy kills this guy. The rest of the entire story is talking heads and it is so compelling and so beautifully paced it’s ridiculous. The Legion was a hell of a book once Swan got on it and he made people appear to be actually thinking and having emotions. Then Shooter walks into this thing and you’d never seen anything like it. It was just so damn good. Even though Swan didn’t draw the first Shooter story, it was…you interviewed him…
Stroud: Shelly Moldoff.
CR: Right. But all these guys, including Swan, who’d been drawing for ages, they were working off Shooter’s layouts because they just worked so damn well.
Stroud: It’s remarkable how gifted the man is and in my opinion the stories are still pretty strong.
CR: He’s a very visual guy and most writers are not. Some of the best stuff I’ve seen in comics, particularly in recent years, has been stuff where there’s been a very close relationship between the artist and the writer. In situations like that the writer doesn’t have to tell the artist very much. The artist knows what the guy is going after. You don’t follow 100 Bullets, but 100 Bullets is a very inscrutable, huge storyline, and very difficult to understand. There are so many characters and they all have their own secret agenda and Brian Azarello is the most inscrutable writer you’ve ever seen. He doesn’t care if you’re going to be confused by something you’ve seen for five years.
Siri's Lettuce Field (2017) oil on linen, painted by Clem Robins.
I’m somebody who should really know what’s going on with 100 Bullets because I see the manuscripts every month. The manuscripts tell you nothing. The visual style on that is 100% Eduardo Risso. That’s been a nice thing. It’s ending. We just finished issue #98. It’s going two more issues. That’s been a nice situation. Brian Azarello really wanted a team of people that he could just trust, and the same people, with the exception of the early issues, which were colored by somebody different than Patricia Mulvahill; Grant Goliash I think, but we’ve been able to really groove together, even though I’ve never met most of them, and he believes he’s safe in our hands and we trust him and it’s been nifty. I’m going to miss it.
Stroud: I bet. That’s really a long-term project. Is it a monthly or a bi-monthly?
CR: It went bi-monthly for a short period of time. At the time we also did that “Broken City” storyline for Batman that was in ’03 or ’04, but short of that it’s been monthly. For awhile when Brian was writing “Loveless,” it was bi-monthly. It’s monthly now. Buy a copy. You won’t understand one word of it. It’s funny. The person responsible for getting it green-lighted was Paul Levitz. The people at Vertigo didn’t want to do the book. The editor did, but the people above him did not. It was Levitz, eventually, who green-lighted it. I don’t think it’s made that much money because sales have been lousy for the last five years, but it gets smashing reviews and they keep wanting to make a movie out of it or a Showtime series.
Stroud: I was going to say, I’ve run across it in a couple of critically acclaimed editorials or some such thing, so obviously it’s getting attention.
CR: It’s received a lot of attention, but all things come to an end.
Stroud: It’s nice that you’re affiliated with it.
Amethyst World (2012), painted by Clem Robins.
CR: Yeah, which with a dime will get you a cup of coffee. It is very hard to stay afloat in this racket these days.
Stroud: Where do you see yourself in the future?
CR: I’d like to do more painting. I’d like to be able to sell more paintings. That’s where I see myself. The industry has been very nice to me. If I’d known when I was 21 when I got into it that I’d still be doing it at age 52 I’d have been very non-plussed, but it’s been very good to me. I’ve been able to support a wife and children. That’s been nice, although my wife now makes more money than I do.
Stroud: (Chuckle.) So, you’re a kept man.
CR: No, no. I make almost as much money as she does. She’s the one who drives around in the BMW. But I’ve got a pretty good life here. I can keep up with my comic work on about 25 hours a week and spend the rest of my time painting. So that’s been nice. I’ve met very few people in the industry that I didn’t like. Very few. Of course, other than the occasional stints on staff I didn’t see people that much. But they’ve shot very straight with me and I’m very happy with what I’ve been able to have.
If you would like to see more from Mr. Robins, you can follow him on Twitter @ClemRobins.