An Interview With Joe Barney - From the Crusty Bunkers to the Goon Squad
/Written by Bryan Stroud
Joseph John Barney.
Joseph John Barney (born in 1956) is an American artist best known for his work in comic books and graphic art. Joe began his career at age 19 as an illustrator at Continuity Associates in New York working with Neal Adams. He also worked on Madison Avenue, turning out hundreds of storyboards and 'animatics' for TV commercials. He free-lanced as a comic book penciler as well, working on such famous Marvel characters as The Hulk, Thor, War Machine, Silver Surfer, and the Fantastic Four.
In the nineties Joe moved west to work in the burgeoning multimedia arena. Some of his projects have included: character design for Broderbund software's Carmen Sandeigo nemesis Chase Devineaux; animation artwork for the CD-ROM games Mysterious Island and Marty the Mouse for Elliot-Portwood Productions; a web adventure comic series for Eplay, an educational children's web site; production paintings and storyboards for the CGI 'cinematics' of Crystal Dynamic's Akuji the Heartless Playstation game; and a 'film noir' comic book for the I.T. consulting firm Xpedior.
His current project (with writer Cary Bates), Saurheads, is an original animated film property featuring dark humor with dinosaurs.
Another Continuity member in good standing is the great Joe Barney, who had a number of interesting stories and observations while toiling away at Continuity all those years ago.
This interview originally took place over the phone on March 3, 2012.
Marvel Super Special (1977) #37 pg1, penciled by Joe Barney & Larry Hama and inked by Tom Palmer.
Bryan D. Stroud: If my information is correct, you began at Continuity at the age of 19?
Joseph Barney: Yes, I was hired in March of 1975. I was at the School of Visual Arts at the time, but my credits didn’t transfer from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where I’d studied for a year, majoring in art. So because SVA, for some reason wouldn’t recognize my credits, I was forced to repeat all the foundation year courses about color theory, etcetera, all over again, and I began to get bored and impatient. I was there because I wanted to learn to draw comics, and SVA was supposed to be the comics school, founded by Burne Hogarth, with instructors like Will Eisner. But there were a lot of teachers there who had zero respect for comics, or even illustration. It was the times I suppose, and in the 70’s avant-garde was the order of the day -- illustration and comics weren’t real art. “Art School Confidential” had it nailed with that John Malkovich teacher character –“I was the first to do triangles”. I had a few teachers like that there. I did get to sit in once on one of Will Eisner’s classes, a second year course. I was smuggled in by an older student, and I wasn’t supposed to be there, but he looked at my portfolio anyway, and was really encouraging to a dumb kid who barely knew who he was. I got the impression he was a very kind man, and really enjoyed imparting his wisdom to a new generation.
I was renting an apartment with two schoolmates in what was basically a classic tenement building on East 92nd Street. One of my roommates from school had a friend, who took his portfolio up to Neal Adams, which we figured was kind of crazy, given his portfolio. But then he came back and said, surprisingly, that Neal was very nice to him, gave him coffee and even had his secretary call up Marvel, to get him an appointment to show his stuff. And the amazing thing was, the guy’s drawings were just horrible, childish. I thought, “If he can get that kind of reception, what have I got to lose?” So I grabbed my portfolio and went to Continuity to see Neal Adams.
Of course I was pretty nervous. I got the same routine I saw lots of other artists get, including Frank Miller, Marshall Rogers and others. He flipped through my portfolio, giving about a second or two to each page (chuckle) while I stood there sweating. Finally, he just said, “What would you say if I said you don’t draw enough?” “I’d say you’re probably right.” “Mm-hmm… Would you like to do a little work while you’re here?” I said, “Sure.” “Well, here, trace off this macaroni package we’re doing for this commercial job.” So I’m tracing macaroni in one of this little reference library room, where they had this lightbox desk, and about 20 minutes later he comes back and says, “listen, I’m kind of looking for assistants right now, and I thought maybe we’d give you a try, and if it turns out to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, maybe we’ll make it an ongoing thing.”
Marvel Fanfare (1982) #7, cover by Joe Barney.
So I was in the right place at the right time, really. I was pretty much the first of what I think of as a second wave of young blood there, being at the tail end of the Crusty Bunkers. The Crusty Bunkers, I think, had sort of served as a test run, intentional or not, that proved that a group effort inking late books under Neal’s supervision could be a profitable thing for all involved, and keep the work flowing for the young up-and-comers. But it consisted of a lot of independent artists, not Continuity renters, just guys who would come up and occupy a desk for the duration of a particular inking job. There were a bunch of young guys who were hired on, or rented space after me in the following year or two. After me there was Joe Brozowski, Carl Potts, Michael Netzer, Lynn Varley (not a guy), and Bruce Patterson; I think Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek had already been working for Dick Giordano, and started formally renting a space soon after I arrived. Ralph Reese and Larry Hama were already renting in one of the back rooms, and had been doing the freelance thing there for Neal, as well as their own stuff, for a couple years already. They both had sort of apprenticed with Wally Wood in the years before that. It was quite a time--and place--for young artists.
Stroud: I expect. Did you have a particular specialty? It seemed like for the most part that a lot of the Crusty Bunker work was strictly inking during those frenzied overnight turnaround jobs.
Barney: Well, the Crusty Bunkers was basically inking jams, whereas we all pretty much did a little of everything—whatever was called for—penciling, coloring, paste-ups, whatever. By the time I was around, because it was basically a new group, and guys like Berni Wrightson and Alan Weiss were busier with their own work, the Crusty Bunkers were basically no more, so we needed a new name. Somebody dubbed us The Goon Squad, and that sort of stuck for a couple years. Neal had gotten an account with Charlton Comics to do these black & white, magazine-sized comic book adaptations of three TV shows, The Six Million Dollar Man, Space 1999 and Emergency! (which was the most boring one of the three for us to draw). Do you remember that show?
Stroud: Oh, yes. I used to watch it when I was a kid. My Dad was very much into cop shows and anything related to them so I saw ‘em all. The FBI, Dragnet, Police Story, Police Woman, The Rookies, Adam 12…
Marvel Super Heroes (1990) #15 pg 66, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Jeff Albrecht.
Barney: Yeah, and I think Emergency was sort of a spin-off of Adam 12. I think they had the same producers. Of course we all wanted to draw super-heroes, but those books were actually a good thing for all us young artists to cut our teeth on. It’s a lot more of a challenge to make comics about paramedics exciting than it is super-heroes.
Neal had a process where he would review our layouts, our incompetent, 19-year olds layouts, and he would go over them with a Pentel and correct our drawing, and if necessary, the compositions. It was amazing what he could do with a Pentel and a tiny little space of paper. Everything he put down was structurally correct: anatomy, perspective, folds in clothing, cars, buildings… his knowledge was just amazing.
I don’t know if you know his technique, how he would do his own layouts. He’d take an 8-1/2” x 11” sheet of paper and fold it in four, and make four pages of the story out of it, so each quarter was a complete page. And they were incredibly tight, precise little things. He would then stick the layout into an Artograph, which was this huge overhead projector sort of device. You’d stick the layout sketch in the projector, and it projected it onto the drawing table. You would then raise and lower it to enlarge or reduce the image to the size you needed on the final page, and trace it off, enhancing it as you went.
So we would basically use the same technique for the Charlton TV stuff. We’d take the layouts that Neal had edited, then go into the Artograph room, turn off the lights, and follow the process. There were two desks in the room, each with one of these big, unwieldy projectors, and there would often be someone else working at the other Artograph to keep you company. We also used a lot of photos, which the TV people provided for us, that we’d also use the Artograph for. Wally Wood had a famous credo that was passed on to us through Larry and Ralph: “Never draw what you can copy; never copy what you can trace; and never trace what you can cut out and paste in.”
So anyway, then Neal would review the finished penciled page one last time, and then “Diverse Hands” (that later became a pseudonym Marvel used for group deadline saves) would do the inking. On the Charlton TV books, besides Neal, who did primarily figure work and faces, there was Gray Morrow, Vicente Alcazar, Ed Davis, Sal Amendola… I think Russ Heath did some work, Bruce Patterson, Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek, and of course Dick Giordano -- and the rest of us ‘kid pencilers’ all pitched in on the backgrounds. So it was one big group effort. The end result could be kind of a mish-mash -- some pages would turn out better than others -- but they still came out better than most of what Charlton published, and it was a really great learning experience for all us young guys.
What If (1989) #70 pg1, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Don Hudson.
Stroud: I know more than one of your colleagues has said they learned a tremendous amount there even though they said Neal was not exactly a teacher.
Barney: That’s true, for the most part -- he wasn’t specific about any tips, per se, other than generalities like “thinking about what you were doing”. (Which is of course, a good idea for most things). He also emphasized the need for using reference photos, instead of just drawing, say a car, out of your head. A large part of his incredible store of knowledge of how to draw things, and people in particular, came from his years doing Ben Casey, where he used Polaroid’s he’d shoot for each scene, using himself, family & friends as models. I remember he also had specific ideas about the proper way to hold a pencil or pen. I tried to change my grip to the way Neal held it, but I just couldn’t get used to it, and control the pencil as easily. Later on, I asked Berni Wrightson about that, and he said Frazetta told him you should just hold it in whatever way came naturally... Recently though, I saw a close-up photo of Frazetta holding a pencil -- and he had the same grip as Neal’s.
You mostly learned by observing what he did, and by what he corrected in your work. Looking back on it, Neal was really a generous guy to take on this unruly mob of dysfunctional kids. It probably didn’t make him much money for the bother.
But I wouldn’t say he accepted just anybody. I was sitting next to Neal when Frank Miller came in. Much like me, he was this nervous kid from the sticks -- here in the big city with the famous Neal Adams looking at your work. Neal gave him pretty much the same routine I got, where he just thumbed through his work and concluded, “It’s not good enough.” Obviously it didn’t discourage Frank. He worked up more pages and came back and went through it again, I think two or three times. It was the same with Marshall Rogers. I think he told Marshall he was too old. He may have been 5 or 6 years older than we were.
Stroud: Oh, that’s funny.
Barney: (Chuckle.) I guess that was the test. If you really wanted to be a comic book artist, and Neal Adams gave you the bum’s rush, you needed to come back and keep trying.
Marvel Fanfare (1982) #7 pg 15, original art penciled by Joe Barney & inked by George Freeman.
Stroud: Your earlier recollection reminded me of Bob McLeod’s story that his artwork wasn’t really up to snuff but Neal realized he needed a gig, so he made that magic phone call to Marvel and got him a job as a letterer.
Barney: Sure, he would recommend you to the companies, and vouch for you if an editor asked. The first comics job I worked on was a Wonder Woman job that Dick Giordano had, and he didn’t have time to do, and Neal offered the penciling to me, as a sort of “ghost artist”. So that was the first actual comics penciling I did; this was before Neal got the Charlton TV adaptations. It was in my first few months there, pretty much before any other “Goon Squad” members were hired on. So actually, this was my first experience with the Neal Adams Method of penciling a comic book page. Again, I would do the layouts on 8X 11 paper-- in this case from Marty Pasko’s full script--and Neal would then review them and correct them with his Pentel. Then I’d Artograph them onto the final page, polishing them until they were acceptable enough for he and Dick to ink. I think Dick did most of the inking on that story, with Neal most of the close-ups of faces, and maybe Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek doing backgrounds, as they were exclusively Dick’s assistants at the time.
That was pretty cool, to be 19 and doing published work with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, even if it was uncredited; looking back, I think it was basically a gift from Neal, to give me a shot so early on.
Stroud: I’m sure the thrill was immeasurable and probably a good confidence boost, too.
Barney: Oh sure. Then, about a year later, around the time we were finishing the run of the Charlton books, Cary Bates came up looking for artists to work on an idea for a spinoff book he had. Cary had been coming around the studio to visit, and I think he also became a renter soon after that period. This would have been early ’76. He had an idea for a spinoff of The Flash, which he was writing then, featuring Gorilla City and starring Grodd the Super-Gorilla, and he was looking for artists to do some samples to pitch a series to DC.
Stroud: I remember the character well.
An unpublished page from Grodd of Gorilla City, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Terry Austin.
Barney: I’m not exactly sure how it came about that there were two pencilers involved, but Carl Potts, another new Continuity recruit, got brought in on the project, and Terry and Bob, who were kind of a team then, were assigned to the inking. So there were two pencilers and two inkers on the book, as well as two writers, Cary and Elliot Maggin. But Cary and Elliot had already been a team for many years, on several DC books, with Elliot more the dialogue guy, and Cary more the plot guy. If you go to my website you can see the double-page spread for Gorilla City, inked by Terry, who did a great job on it. I spent about a week just on those two pages, because they set the scene, and the design style of the city for the story -- and they helped to sell the idea to DC.
So at one point in 1976, Carl and I had to go up to meet with Carmine [Infantino] with our sample pages, to get the green-light on the book, which was sort of like going before the Mafia Boss. (Chuckle.) Pretty nerve-wracking. He had been the publisher since about 1970, I think…
Stroud: That sounds about right. (Note: Carmine’s wonderful autobiography, “The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino,” has the timeline listed as 1967 for his ascension to Editorial Director and then Publisher and President in 1971.) And of course not only was Carmine the big boss, but also the original Silver Age Flash artist, which must have added an additional burden to your pitch.
Barney: Exactly! (Chuckle) We were trying to outdo his own, established version of Gorilla City I guess, which for the most part was standard ‘50s futuristic architecture. But he did green-light the thing, and we finished it, it was lettered, and were all paid… but then there was a big shakeup at DC, with Carmine leaving and Jenette Kahn coming in. So it just sat on the shelf for a year, until they finally stamped it with that infamous stamp, and gave the artwork back to us. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but basically it was, “This is not going to be published." Like I said, the final product was a bit of a hodge-podge, so it was understandable. Everyone did a good job, but the style varied drastically from page to page, and it just didn’t gel.
Someone else recently did an interview with me about Gorilla City, under the title “Greatest Stories Never Told”. It would have actually been a very commercial idea, I think. Sort of a Planet of the Apes meets Howard the Duck satirical kind of thing.
Stroud: Why not? It worked for Kamandi. Did you have anyone at Continuity that you hung out with or was there any time for socializing?
Another unpublished page from Grodd of Gorilla City, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Terry Austin.
Barney: Well, we were all together pretty much 24/7—or at least, 16/7-- so I was friends with pretty much everyone there, I guess. Marshall Rogers was a good friend. As was Larry Hama, Ralph Reese, Michael Netzer, Bruce Patterson, Joe Brozowski, Mike Hinge, Bobby London… Carl Potts and I were sort of partners for about a year, freelancing onsite at an ad agency Continuity farmed us out to.
Continuity was this long railroad kind of layout, basically a long hall with a series of rooms off to one side. I started out in the front room, sitting to there right of Neal for the first year or so. I was on salary that first year, and I forget exactly how everything happened, but at some point I changed over to working freelance, billing by the job, with storyboards or animatics work broken down into penciling, inking and coloring. There was the front room, and then the next room back was the ArtOGraph room, which was next to the reception area/office, by the elevator, then down the hall was Jack Abel’s space-- a room with two or three desks in it. Next to that was Terry and Bob’s room, then the small reference library/lightbox room, which was later rented by Greg Theakston; then Ralph and Larry’s room, and in the back was what became Marshall’s space, which he shared with Bobby London for a time, and later his writing partner Chris Goldberg. The rest of the back area was storage, which was eventually cleared out and became the space I was renting for my last couple years there. Each space consisted of a drawing table and a tabaret. In the in-between years, I was Jack Abel’s roommate for about a year or two, during the period I was doing the Gorilla City project. Jack was one of the old-timers who had been around for a while. Of course, I was a big fan of all the 60’s Marvel stuff, that’s really why I got into comics, and I didn’t fully connect at first that Jack was the guy who inked Iron Man over Gene Colan, in “Tales of Suspense”, because he had used the pseudonym “Gary Michaels” on those books. In the 60’s, artists often didn’t want to take the chance of burning bridges at either Marvel or DC by crossing between companies, so they sometimes used pseudonyms to keep the rival company from finding out you were working for the enemy. Anyway, we would listen to the Bob and Ray Show every noon hour -- they still had a daily show on AM radio, with their hilarious comedy skits, in the 70’s. Bob and Terry were in the next room, and they were fans too, so we would all listen to Bob & Ray together while we worked. Fun times.
Finally, for whatever reason, I ended up in the very back room, a former storage area where the air conditioning unit was. My roommate there was science fiction illustrator Mike Hinge, who was from New Zealand, and was primarily a cover artist for science fiction novels and magazines. He specialized in covers for digest books like Analog and Astounding. He’d also done a couple of covers for Time Magazine in the early 70’s, including the famous Nixon cover, “The Push to Impeach”. He was a very imaginative guy with a unique style – his work inspired a lot of Steranko’s psychedelic graphics that he inserted into stuff like his Shield books in the late 60’s. Steranko even published “The Mike Hinge Experience”-- a large sized sort of portfolio book -- through his SUPERGRAPHICS company.
Marvel Super Heroes (1990) #15, cover penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Larry Mahlstedt.
Mike had kind of fallen on hard times, and had lost his lease on the loft he’d lived in for years, and he was in dire need of a place to work, so Neal let him stay in the back room. It became his living/work space. It was pretty rough going for him -- he was probably in his early 50’s at the time, and had to shower at friends’ apartments. I think it, understandably, made him a bit cranky, though he was a basically a good-natured guy (unless you were a publisher) -- a little eccentric, but then most of us renters there had our quirks… He had this incredible record collection -- it was his prime focus, his main obsession, next to science fiction. He hated the term "sci-fi", and would jump down the throat of anybody who used it; he considered it a vulgarization of the term for what he considered a legitimate art form. He liked to listen to whatever the latest was in music, the more avant-garde the better. Many was the night we'd stay up working – often all night-- at Continuity, with separate headphones, taking turns introducing each other to whatever was “the latest”: Ultravox, XTC, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and scores more … but my favorite band name from the Hinge collection was this early Industrial group, with the hilarious name "Throbbing Gristle"…THEY were OUT there. But then, so was Mike… We were studio mates, there in the backroom, for two or three years. He passed away a few years ago.
Stroud: Ah, yes. I think it was Greg Theakston telling me about Mike Hinge and his affection for using “Gehman Mahkers.”
Barney: Yeah, I was reading about that on Greg’s blog… it’s true, I can still hear him saying that, with that thick New Zealand accent...
Sometimes I wish I’d stuck with the comic book work. I tended to be a little too perfectionistic with it, and the advertising work was a big diversion, a detour from comics and illustration. There were good and bad aspects to doing the advertising stuff. The good part was that it paid at least three times as well as comics, and kept us struggling young artists alive, with maybe even a little money in the bank left over. But the bad part was that it kind of sucked you in and diverted a lot of energy from doing work that might actually be published. With the advertising stuff, the work that was only seen by a few clients of the ad agencies, and ultimately just ended up in the circular file, or if you were able to get the art back, in your portfolio. But comics pay was just dirt cheap back then. Starting rates of something like $25.00 a page for pencils and inks. Neal was able to shift easily between the advertising & comics stuff, but for some of us, it was hard to do both.
Stroud: It seems like Ralph Reese was telling me that the advertising paid a lot better, but the payment would be 90 days down the road or so.
Marvel Super Heroes (1990) #15 pg 27, penciled by Joe Barney.
Barney: Very true. The bigger agencies would hold onto your pay longer, I think because they made sizable interest on the money, due to the volume of people they employed. Ralph and I and Joe D’Esposito were partners in our own commercial art studio for about 6 years, called Studio 23, after we left Continuity.
Oh, so speaking of comics, and to rewind a bit… Jim Steranko was the first professional to ever look at my work. It was at the Detroit Triple Fan Fair Convention in 1971. It was my first convention. I was 16, a kid from small town Wisconsin and totally clueless, and I thought, “Well, if I get a chance to show my work, I have to have a real portfolio, like the professionals.” So I used my little sister’s doll clothes case, a sort of attaché case, because it had a plastic fake leather veneer. (Mutual laughter) Years later I heard that Steranko himself claimed real pros didn’t use fancy leather portfolios, but tended to carry their samples in folded cardboard bound with a string. I didn’t expect that I’d necessarily get to show my work to Steranko, but figured I might get to show it to somebody, so I should be prepared and have a portfolio that looked “professional”.
At the convention, I befriended Keith Pollard, who lived in Detroit, and was also aspiring to break into comics. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Detroit Triple Fan Fare was run by future Continuity renters Greg Theakston and Michael Nasser (now Netzer). I have some pictures from those conventions, and years later, was looking at them and it was, “Hey, that’s Mike Nasser.”
Stroud: Yeah, in fact, I think Mike told me he picked Neal up at the airport to drive him there one year.
Barney: Somewhere I have this iconic photo I took there of Neal doing a Pentel sketch of Deadman, which has since become a sort of famous Adams piece of art -- it was even used in a portfolio around ’75 for Christopher Enterprises, one of the early comics portfolio publishers. And of course, now I can’t find it. It’s around here somewhere … (Chuckle) It was just so odd because here I was, just this kid at this convention, in the presence of greatness, watching one of my idols… And I could never have imagined that just two years later I’d be working for the guy at his studio in midtown Manhattan, sitting right at “the right hand of the father”.
Anyway, Keith Pollard was also trying to break into comics, and told me about this clandestine, top secret 10 o’clock meeting Steranko was going to hold that night with a small group of aspiring artists. He was planning on publishing a magazine of some kind featuring up-and-coming young talent. I don’t think it ever got off the ground. Anyway, Keith kind of smuggled me in, and when Steranko showed up, he eyed me up and down and said, “Who’s this?” I was the party crasher, and all eyes were suddenly on me. I timidly explained I was just looking for an opportunity to show my portfolio. I was just a fifteen year old kid. So, even though I was an uninvited outsider, I remember he actually said “OK. Lay it on me”. Groovy, man! (Chuckle.)
What If (1989) #70 pg5, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Don Hudson.
Now you have to understand, Steranko was a superstar, at the height of his fame at the time, and he played the part to the hilt. Again, it was like you were in the presence of one of the gods, and Steranko was the God of Cool. He looked like a cross between James Dean and James West, wearing this all-white, sort of Saturday Night Fever suit. Very intimidating to a kid, especially after drooling all over his Nick Fury, and other originals, all day in the art room. They were the first actual original comics pages I ever saw. So anyway, he looked at my work and asked, “Ever been to New York?” I said, “No.” I guess I was supposed to ask him something beyond that, because the conversation just sort of died there. (Chuckle.) But I took it as a note of encouragement anyway, that he would suggest I was good enough to go to New York and try my luck.
So that was my first convention experience. Vaughn Bode and Jeff Jones were there, too. I didn’t know who Vaughn was at the time, and I only knew Jeff’s work a little from fanzines. They would later become two of my all-time favorite artists. This was just before their monthly strips in the National Lampoon. Russ Heath was also there, whom I also didn’t know of at the time: he was another one I would also later work with at Continuity on commercial stuff. I think the next year was the convention Neal attended, along with Barry Windsor-Smith and Michael Kaluta. I was actually living across the hall from Mike during my first year at Continuity, in a tiny studio apartment on West 92nd Street. There was a guy who was the sole assistant to Neal on commercial work when I arrived, named Steve Harper. Steve was a primarily a fine art-style painter, who lived in the apartment across from Kaluta when I first arrived at Continuity. He was a friend of Mike’s from Virginia, and I guess Mike got him the gig with Neal. He’d been there for a year or so as Neal’s assistant, doing mostly storyboard coloring, and I don’t think he had any aspirations to do comics, or especially, advertising, so he decided to go back to Virginia and do his painting. So luckily, I was in the right place at the right time, and took over his desk. In fact, I also took his apartment. (Chuckle.)
That was a really magical year for me. Mike had just completed his run on The Shadow the year before, and he did his first portfolio, oil paintings illustrating Dante’s “Inferno”, while I was there. He had this small two-room apartment stuffed with all these very cool antique books and knick-knacks.
There was one especially memorable series of incidents there in that building… I guess I was about 6 months into my Continuity employment, and Mike had asked me to watch his apartment while he went home to Virginia for a vacation. Of course I couldn’t be there in the daytime, so when I came back from work and checked on his place one night, I found that his skylight had been broken, and somebody had obviously been in the apartment. I guess they’d gotten a portable TV and not much else, but I had to call him in Virginia and tell him the bad news. After he came back from vacation about a few days later, while I was at work, he heard some rustling in my one-room studio apartment, and went over to check it out. This time the guy had broken in through my own small skylight. (Chuckle.)
But Mike actually caught this guy, basically made a citizen’s arrest. Our apartments were on the fifth floor, the top floor of the building, so he went and got this CO2 pellet pistol, which I think was actually still considered an illegal firearm in New York City, and he very bravely went up to the roof and nabbed this guy at (pellet) gunpoint, saying “You’re coming with me, kid.” So he marched the guy downstairs and called the cops, and when they arrived, he was told by the cop doing the report that that it wasn’t entirely legal, so Mike swapped it out for a replica gun that he just happened to have around.
Stroud: For artistic reference, no doubt. (Laughter.)
Barney: No doubt! I was also around during The Studio era in 1976, when Mike joined Bernie, Jeff Jones and Barry Windsor-Smith to share space for a couple years. “The Fab Four”, people called them at the time. It was a grubby old machine shop with high ceilings, and I remember pitching in help to clean it up and convert it to an art studio. That was an amazing thing to witness. They did some fantastic work in that place; they all grew tremendously as artists in the two years they were together.
Stroud: The stuff of legend. I adore Bernie. He’s always been very unassuming when we’ve spoken.
Barney: A very down-to-earth guy. I hung out with him a bit in those days, drinking beer & chasing girls.
Stroud: I was looking over your webpage and I see you list animatics as a specialty. Was that a takeaway from Continuity?
Marvel Fanfare (1982) #7 pg 6, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by George Freeman.
Barney: Yeah, we did a lot of those there. In those days, they actually had exclusive animatics houses where they’d actually shoot them, and add voices, & sometimes music. It was sort of a dry-run rough draft of the commercial to see how it played, before the client actually committed to shoot the actual commercial. Back then, we just did the drawings, and then sent them over to them be filmed in 16 mm for the ad agencies. It was very limited animation, of course. You’d do something for Gillette, for example, of a guy shaving, and the arm was a separate cutout, and they’d just show the arm moving and the shaving cream disappearing on the face, that kind of thing. We had to cut out all these elements and make sure they worked before sending the art over to be filmed. Nowadays, thanks largely to computers, Neal can do everything himself. He’s done some real cutting-edge animatics with computer in the last decade or so, and as you may know, is now applying that expertise to “motion comics”.
I haven’t actually done any animatics for commercial purposes myself for a long time, other than some art for game cinematics. I’ve actually done a few-- I guess you could call them animatics-- for my own projects recently though, using film editing programs. I’ve just finished a proposal in DVD format with Cary Bates, a proposed dinosaur film, a Pixar-style thing.
Stroud: Is that the “Saurheads” I saw on the website?
Barney: Yes. I left Continuity in 1980 a with a couple of the other guys, as I mentioned before, Ralph Reese and Joe D’Esposito, who were also looking to branch out on their own. It wasn’t that we weren’t happy with Neal, but we figured we could maybe make a little more money on our own, and I guess we basically wanted to stretch our wings and make our own way. So we got a studio together on 20th street between 5th and 6th and called it Studio 23. We called it that because 23 was my sort of my ”magic number”, and because it sounded better than “Studio 20”. My wife at the time, Mary, was our rep and studio manager.
We were doing a little bit of animatic work, but mostly storyboards and what they call “comps”, which were marker-drawn pre-visualizations of magazine ads. Alex Jay was our studio mate, too. He rented the room next door. Alex is a top-notch book designer in general, but specializes in logos; he created a lot of iconic Marvel logos, like the one for Walt Simonson’s Thor books. He also did a lot of work for the late Byron Preiss, who published a lot of comics-related stuff at the time… Alex was designing all these different books for Byron with people like Steranko, William Stout, and Moebius, so we’d see these originals come through the studio, this fantastic original art.
Stroud: Oh, wow.
Slomo from Saur Heads by Cary Bates & Joe Barney.
Barney: Anyway, when I was creating SAURHEADS with Cary Bates, Alex shot the photostats for our presentation. Cary and I were both pretty disgruntled with the pay in the comics field, and the prospect of having to live hand–to-mouth for the rest of our lives. We’d seen how much Garfield was making in merchandising at the time, and one of us got the idea to do a dinosaur strip. Of course everyone loves dinosaurs, we figured. It should be good. It should be big. So we whipped this thing together in our spare time, and as I was working on it, this book came in to Alex to design, that William Stout was co-illustrating with a former Disney artist, called “The Little Blue Brontosaurus.” Which was kind of worrisome, since our main character was also blue.
Vump from Saur Heads by Cary Bates & Joe Barney.
Stroud: Uh oh.
Barney: As it turns out, that book apparently became the inspiration for the “Land Before Time” series. Alex also designed two more William Stout dinosaur books at that same time, a Ray Bradbury dinosaur book, and Stout’s most famous book, which was called “The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era”. The publisher of these books was Byron Preiss. Alex did a lot of work for Byron. He was both a writer and publisher. Are you familiar with the name?
Stroud: It’s not coming to me.
Barney: He was very well known in the business at the time, mostly as a publisher & editor, but also a writer. He worked with a lot of big name artists, trying to do books outside the comics mainstream, mostly in trade paperback form. He did a lot of projects with Ralph, starting with the long-running One Year Affair in National Lampoon. He also worked with Harvey Kurtzman, Howard Chaykin and many others. Harvey came up a few times to work with Alex on the design of a book called “Nuts,” which was a MAD Magazine kind of thing, only in paperback form. Another very nice, very unpretentious guy, considering his monumental accomplishments in the field.
In the early years, being just an ignorant Marvel-centric kid, I wasn’t fully cognizant of how huge some of these people were. I would see Wally Wood come to Continuity once in a while, to visit Ralph and Larry, his former apprentices. He was a very quiet guy, and gave off this aura like, “Don’t bother me, fanboy.” (Mutual laughter.) I picked up on that, so I left him alone, as did everyone, I think. I mostly only knew his Marvel and Thunder Agent stuff; as I said, I was pretty ignorant at the time.
I mentioned before, our post-Crusty Bunker group was called the Goon Squad. Before that name was concocted, Larry Hama, who was possessed of this pretty acerbic wit, at the time referred to us as “The Seven Dwarves”. (Laughter.) His own version, though: Funky, Scuzzy, Spacey, Dorky… I forget the rest. (Mutual laughter.) He had a name for every one of us.
Stroud: He really does have a wicked sense of humor.
Barney: Yes, he does. Like Wally Wood, his mentor, and Ralph, who also worked with “Woody”. Larry and Ralph were high school friends, and shared this back room at Continuity for a few years, and would sort of riff off each other. Then Ralph left for a while to work at home, and Cary Bates took over his space for a year or so. It was kind of musical chairs at Continuity in those days.
Stroud: Lots of coming and going it sounds like. You were obviously there for a few years.
Barney: 1975 to 1980. Probably about as long as anybody in that period. As I’m sure you’ve heard many times, Continuity was like the coffee shop hangout for artists and writers who came to midtown to do business at Marvel or DC, or some other publisher. It was smack-dab in midtown, 48th street between 5th and Madison avenues, a half block from “30 Rock”. I remember, during my first few months there, Jeff Jones came in, on his way to the Lampoon with a big “Idyll” page, and my eyes just about fell out of my head, it was so beautiful. I was just so amazed by it, and he seemed just kind of blasé about it. He was a very low key, quiet kind of guy in general. One of my art idols, for sure.
I had a Frazetta-inspired Conan painting I was attempting at the time, for The Savage Sword of Conan, I think. It was my one of my first attempts at trying to do oil painting, and Jeff gave me a few pointers, mostly about reflective light and color. Dan Adkins was the editor of the Conan black and white books at that time.
So I had this pretty elaborate scenario in the painting, with Conan fighting off about 20 demons. These Nosferatu-like demons, all coming up from this foggy stairwell, clawing at him, and he’s trying to fend them off, with the obligatory girl being sacrificed on an altar in the background. When it was nearly finished I took it to Adkins at Marvel to see what he thought, and he said, “Well, the painting’s not bad, but we can’t use this. You can’t have Conan beating up on a bunch of little guys.”
Marvel Super Heroes (1990) #15 pg 37, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Frank Turner.
Stroud: (Laughter.)
Barney: I mean, there were about 50 of them, and this girl is about to have this knife plunged into her in the next room. Come on! That was the end of my attempt to paint covers. Different opportunities arose, I think I went on to Gorilla City right after that.
We’d also play volleyball in Central Park. That was another fun aspect of Continuity life at the time (and pretty much our only exercise). In that period, it was very of a loose-knit affair, it was a blend of freelancers and people from Marvel and DC, as opposed to later on when there were clear-cut, permanent Marvel or DC teams. Each week someone was appointed captain, and they’d choose people for their team from whoever showed up. Neal played for a couple games. In addition to the Continuity guys, there was Archie Goodwin, Alan Weiss, Jim Starlin, Sergio Aragones, Walt and Weezie (Simonson), Jo Duffy, Jim Shooter…
Jim was like 8 feet tall, which was kind of unfair to begin with. (Chuckle) He played very competitively, and one time spiked the ball really hard, accidentally hitting this poor girl right in the face -- which, understandably, brought her to tears. He felt terrible about it. He walked away from the game, dramatically, saying, "I've got to go. I'm going to hurt someone." I believe the title of that episode was "Volleyball No More..." (Laughter)
Stroud: I think Steve Mitchell told me he was the only one who had a prayer as far as height on Jim.
Barney: Steve was pretty tall too. Before I got there, he was hanging around Continuity and they used to call him “Baby Conan”. He had sort of this baby face at the time, I guess. That was the kind of humor they had running around the place – more often than not, at somebody’s expense.
You’ve probably heard the story about the gag the old-timers would play on the newbies. They would take a sheet of acetate and put it over your artwork while you were gone…
Stroud: Oh, the ink blot or spilled ink bottle.
Marvel Super Heroes (1990) #15 pg 33, penciled by Joe Barney & inked by Frank Turner.
Barney: Yeah. So somebody had done that to Neal, but he was wise to it, and just calmly peeled off the acetate and said “Ha, ha.” So one night Mike Nasser, who idolized Neal and could draw just like him, copied this Superman figure that Neal had been working on, sitting there on his drawing board –perfectly -- and then poured ink directly on it (laughter), and switched Neal’s drawing with it. When Neal came in the next morning, he just smiled and tried to peel the acetate—but there was no acetate -- and for a minute he was taken aback that the ink was actually on the drawing. Mike’s impression was so good, it took him a minute to realize it was a forgery. Practical jokes abounded.
We just had so many colorful characters up there at the time, and in retrospect, I really didn’t appreciate at the time just what an amazing group of talented people came through there. Take Russ Heath. I remembered those Sea Devils covers he did for DC I read when I was a kid in the 60’s, done in those wash tones, and how they looked so much more interesting than anything else at DC at the time. (This was before I discovered Marvel.) I knew he was kind of legendary for his DC war books - which I was never terribly interested in as a kid -- but didn’t realize he was the Sea Devils artist until I’d been there a couple years. I did a fair amount of penciling of animatics and storyboards that Russ inked. Like Neal, he could make average-looking pencils look very slick with his superior inking skills.
Russ had a lot of great stories, including the now-famous one about his time working for Harvey Kurtzman at Playboy. He got called out there by Kurtzman to help with a deadline on Little Annie Fanny. They gave him a room in the mansion, free room & board, maid service, the works … and he was working away on that job for a few weeks, finished the assist, and then, since nobody said anything, he just stayed there. He was there for something like, I think, nearly a year! I guess one day Hugh Hefner asked someone, “Hey, who is that guy, anyway?”, and he got the boot. (Mutual laughter.)
Stroud: What led you to the west coast? The Hollywood connection?
Barney: No, I just needed a break from the stresses of the city. It can get to be kind of a grind, and I’d been there for sixteen years. My brother lived in Montana, so I knew the area, so I moved there for a while, doing a few Marvel jobs by mail. I also won a commission to do a line of posters at the time, which were to be the first computer-generated Marvel characters. The first two were to be War Machine and Ghost Rider. I didn’t know 3-D modeling myself, but had a friend who helped me with that, constructing a basic model, while I did the layouts, color schemes and fixed figure proportions in Photoshop. The War Machine poster was almost finished, but right around that time the infamous Ike Perlmutter hostile takeover episode happened at Marvel, and they went actually went bankrupt, and their entire poster line got canceled, as well as most of their titles, for a time. Another hard luck story, I guess. That’s showbiz… (Chuckle)
Garloo from Saur Heads by Cary Bates & Joe Barney.
After a few years in Montana, I met a woman here in California while on vacation, moved out here, and though she’s now gone, I’m still here... Northern California is beautiful, and a nice place to be weather-wise of course, and you’ve got all the dotcom and game companies and that sort of work available. That’s what I’ve been doing for the most part in recent years. Storyboards for the game industry, some illustration, logos, whatever comes up. I’ve recently formed my own company, Communicomics, with the aim of specializing in comics and animation for corporate and other markets. Some of the most lucrative jobs I’ve had out here involved creating comics for “IT consulting” companies who wanted to use the novelty of comics as an attention-grabbing communication tool. One that I did was a Film Noir detective take-off, a murder mystery to find out where the company was going wrong. I think there’s a great future niche for comics like that. Then there are my personal projects, like SAURHEADS, and a sci-fi graphic novel I’m developing called “Eye”. So I’m basically all over the map, career-wise. The “fine precipice living” of freelance life.
Stroud: What a rollercoaster. It sounds like you’ve had some fun along the way, though and are still standing. Is there anything I neglected to ask about that you’d like to discuss?
Barney: Nothing in particular… I’ve been on kind of a nostalgia kick recently, reconnecting with old friends & studio mates on Facebook, so this has been fun, bouncing around a little through time, and some good memories. It’s been enjoyable. Nice talking with you Bryan.