Creator Conversations - Retro

In the time between January 2007 and June 2015, journalist Bryan Stroud had the opportunity to interview several members of the Old Guard of the comic book community. These are the people who worked in the bullpens, creating characters that are still loved today and crafting the visual style of graphic storytelling for generations to come. Some of these industry pros were happy to tell stories while others chose short, to-the-point answers - but all of them were generous with their time. Watch this page for weekly Wednesday updates.

March 21, 2018

An Interview With Creig Flessel - Early Sandman Artist and Creator of The Shining Knight

March 21, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Creig Flessel sitting at his drawing table.

Creig Valentine Flessel (born February 2, 1912) was an American comic book artist, illustrator, and cartoonist for magazines ranging from Boys' Life to Playboy. One of the earliest comic book illustrators, he broke into comics after answering an ad in the New York Times by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (whose National Allied Publications would eventually become DC Comics) and began freelancing there. During his time at DC, Creig would help to shape the aesthetic of the fledgling publisher by providing early cover art for More Fun Comics, Adventure Comics (before Superman), and Detective Comics (before Batman). He drew the very first cover appearance of Sandman (on Adventure Comics #40) and created the Shining Knight (Adventure Comics #66). Starting in 1960, Mr. Flessel began drawing comic strips for newspapers and magazines, though he still did an occasional job for DC Comics as well. In 2006 he was nominated for induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. He passed away on July 17, 2008 after suffering complications from a stroke.

Creig Flessel was another living legend when I took the opportunity to speak with him. For heaven's sake, he was doing work on covers before the debut of Superman or Batman on the Detective Comics line. We had a too brief but interesting chat about some of the things that he'd done over an incredibly long career and I'm fortunate that he spared a little time for me.

This interview originally took place over the phone on January 19, 2008.

The pulps: an illustration from the October 1939 issue of Detective Yarns. Art by Creig Flessel. — The pulps: an illustration from the **October 1939** issue of **Detective Yarns**. Art by Creig Flessel.

The pulps: an illustration from the December 1941 issue of Super Sports. Art by Creig Flessel. — The pulps: an illustration from the **December 1941** issue of **Super Sports**. Art by Creig Flessel.

The pulps: an illustration from the July 1940 issue of The Shadow. Art by Creig Flessel. — The pulps: an illustration from the **July 1940** issue of **The Shadow**. Art by Creig Flessel.

Bryan Stroud: Please tell me about your involvement with the National Cartoonist’s Society.

Creig Flessel: I started the Berndt Toast Gang with Walter Berndt.

Stroud: Yeah, in fact Frank Springer told me he thought you were the one that named it.

CF: Yes. I named it. I did, along with Lee Ames. He and Frank…Frank did the design and I will take credit for naming it. It was a natural.

Stroud: Okay, and you’ve been actively involved for all those years, right?

CF: Oh, yeah. We started way back during the war. We used to go to the hospitals, Veteran’s hospitals, and do a stand-up show or do drawings of the wounded G.I.’s, and that was how the Berndt Toast really started. That was our social work.

Stroud: That’s wonderful. I know when I’ve talked with some of the other creators, like Al Plastino, they got involved in some of those trips and events both locally and overseas like what you’ve just described.

CF: Al?

Stroud: Al Plastino, who did Superman for many years.

CF: Oh, yeah. You’re going way back.

Stroud: Yes. And of course, Irwin Hasen and Lew Sayre Schwartz.

CF: Yeah. Well, the Berndt Toast basically went around Long Island, New York, Queens, New Jersey, and New York State hospitals.

Stroud: Oh, fantastic. That must have been satisfying work to do.

CF: Yeah. We had a good time.

Stroud: Good for you. Now back when you started, Mr. Flessel, what sort of training did you have in art?

CF: Well, I got a couple of years of art school. Grand Central. I studied with Harvey Dunn, Charles DeFao. That was during the Depression times. 1930.

Stroud: You actually started your career before anybody heard of Superman or Batman.

CF: I started in the comics in ’35. So, if you can top that, well, that’s it.

Stroud: Can’t beat it. It can’t be done.

CF: No, that’s true.

Stroud: They assembled the comic books very differently back then, didn’t they?

CF: Well, yeah, you did the whole thing. There was no production line. It was the Henry Fords of the business and we didn’t think it was going anywhere. It was just a chance to make a few bucks.

Stroud: Did you have to do your own lettering at that time?

CF: My own lettering, penciling, inking, color guides, the whole schmear.

Stroud: Holy cow. That must have been quite an interesting jump into the deep end of the pool.

CF: Well, it was five dollars a page. That was a lot of money.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) So, you were able to keep body and soul together.

CF: Yeah.

A Sandman commission by Creig Flesel, done in 2006.

Stroud: I read where you did a lot of work on Sandman and that you actually created The Shining Knight. Is that true?

CF: That’s true. Yeah, that’s way back.

Stroud: What sort of characters did you like working on the best do you think?

CF: Well, I really didn’t think too much about it. I like semi-comic, but any chance to draw a picture, you know at that time, was welcome. And the fact that I could do most everything made me invaluable. In fact, just the other day I met Major Nicholson’s grandson. He was out here in California. The Major, you know, he was the one who started the whole business.

Stroud: He sure did. Did you know him very well?

CF: Well, (chuckle) as well as you can know a man who was being chased by process servers and who didn’t have any money. You know, he was running all the time.

Stroud: He tried to stay low profile, huh?

CF: Yeah.

The first appearance of the Shining Knight, by Creig Flessel - from Adventure Comics #66. — The first appearance of the Shining Knight, by Creig Flessel - from Adventure Comics #66.

Stroud: I can well imagine. Do you know Ramona Fradon?

CF: She’s a Silver Age artist. I know her work, but I don’t know her personally. I was just there in the beginning and that’s when I got out. I got into advertising and had a checkered career. I did this and I did that. But I had a good time and here I am.

Stroud: And you did very well. The thing I was going to mention about Ramona, just in case you didn’t know it, when I talked to her she said the first comic book assignment she ever had was doing a Shining Knight story.

CF: Is that right?

Stroud: Yeah. I didn’t know if you knew that or not.

CF: No, I never knew that.

Stroud: I see where you did a little writing for a while. Did you like doing that or did you prefer doing the art?

CF: Well, the writing was non-essential. It was just something to hold the story, the thing together. They were pretty bad. I didn’t take much time with my writing. I didn’t think about it. I just wanted a chance to draw a picture.

Stroud: Did you have a favorite writer that you worked from?

CF: Well, you can go back to Joseph Conrad and all the others on Adventure Comics. I came out of the pulps, you know. So I probably had the best of writers and the worst of writers as I went along. But I really didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning. It was just a place to sit down and draw.

Stroud: Everybody was learning at that point, so you’re a pioneer of the whole genre.

CF: That’s right. I try to tell them I was a pioneer, but they bring up other guys and a lot of other guys get the credit.

Stroud: That doesn’t make any sense to me. Do you remember which editors you worked with?

CF: Sullivan and Whitney Ellsworth were the only two I worked with, really.

Stroud: Did you work pretty well with them?

CF: Oh, yeah. They were no problem. I wasn’t a problem. That was before we had problems. Everybody loved everybody and you’d do your job and shut up and go home. You’d take your five dollars and blow it. Buy a hamburger or whatever.

Stroud: Yep. Just pull together and get it done. Which other artist’s work did you like at the time?

CF: I didn’t really have any of the other old-timer’s work to judge by. I was there in the beginning, and what I did was my own. So really, except for the old masters like Howard Pyle. The illustrators, there was nothing to base it on, so I was on the cutting edge. Matt Clark was there, of course, but who did I have to look at?

Stroud: That’s true. You were out there creating it on your own.

CF: Well, yeah. As much as I could.

Stroud: You did a whole lot of covers on the old comic books. Did you like doing those better than the interiors or did it make any difference to you?

CF: Well, there again, you know, I was there, they said to me, “We need the cover,” and I did the cover. It wasn’t a case of likes or dislikes. Just sit down and do it and shut up.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Did they pay more for a cover at that time?

CF: They paid ten dollars.

Stroud: Okay, so I guess in some ways it was a little better.

CF: Yeah, ten dollars is better than five.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Did you know Fred Guardineer?

CF: Yeah, very well. Freddie was a great draftsman, but there again he realized he couldn’t make a good living at it, so he became a mailman. He ended up with the post office department.

Stroud: I’ll be darned. I guess it offered a better benefit package anyway.

CF: (Chuckle.) Yeah. He retired out here in San Ramon. Well, it was nice talking to you.

Stroud: Well Mr. Flessel, I certainly appreciate your time and I wanted to wish you an early happy birthday and to congratulate you on the exhibit they’re doing on your work and career.

CF: Thank you. I hope to see it.

Stroud: I’m sure you will.

The pulps: an illustration from the Fall 1942 issue of Sports Fiction. Art by Creig Flessel. — The pulps: an illustration from the **Fall 1942** issue of **Sports Fiction**. Art by Creig Flessel.

As with the Joe Simon interview from last week, we felt that the conversation with Creig was a little short - and so we are including a gallery of some of the many cover illustrations & newspaper strips that Mr. Flessel helped to create.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #15, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #16, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #17, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #18, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #19, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #20, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #21, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #22, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #23, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #24, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #25, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #26, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #27, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #28, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #29, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #30, cover by Creig Flessel.

New Adventure Comics (1937) #31, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #32, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #33, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #37, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #40, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #42, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #44, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #46, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #47, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #51, cover by Creig Flessel.

Adventure Comics (1938) #60, cover by Creig Flessel.

Boys' Life (August 1957), cover by Creig Flessel.

A full-color Sunday edition of David Crane (June 10, 1961) by Creig Flessel. — A full-color Sunday edition of **David Crane** (June 10, 1961) by Creig Flessel.

A B&W weekday edition of David Crane (April 22, 1962) by Creig Flessel. — A B&W weekday edition of **David Crane** (April 22, 1962) by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #2, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #3, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #4, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #5, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #6, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #7, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #8, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #9, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #10, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #11, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #12, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #13, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #14, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #15, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #16, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #17, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #18, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #19, cover by Creig Flessel.

Detective Comics (1937) #34, cover by Creig Flessel.

Heart Throbs (1949) #132, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #30, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #31, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #36, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #37, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #38, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #39, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #40, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #41, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #42, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #43, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #4, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #45, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #46, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #48, cover by Creig Flessel.

More Fun Comics (1936) #49, cover by Creig Flessel.

Sunday Pictorial Review for October 09, 1951, cover by Creig Flessel.

Sunday Pictorial Review for July 27, 1958, cover by Creig Flessel.

An unpublished test strip for Sweet Adeline done by Creig Flessel. — An unpublished test strip for Sweet Adeline done by Creig Flessel.

Young Love (1949) #106, cover by Creig Flessel.

Young Love (1949) #108, cover by Creig Flessel.

Young Love (1949) #109, cover by Creig Flessel.

Young Love (1949) #110, cover by Creig Flessel.

March 14, 2018

An Interview With Joe Simon - Co-Creator of Captain America

March 14, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Joe Simon (with a Captain America ducky).

Joseph Henry "Joe" Simon (born Hymie Simon on October 11, 1913) was an American comic book writer, artist, editor, and publisher. He created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s–1940s (the Golden Age) and served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics.

Joe Simon with his career partner, Jack Kirby.

With his partner (artist Jack Kirby) he co-created Captain America, one of comics' most enduring superheroes. The team worked extensively on such features at DC Comics as the 1940s Sandman and Sandy the Golden Boy, and co-created the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, and Manhunter. Simon and Kirby creations for other comics publishers include Boys' Ranch, Fighting American and the Fly. In the late 1940s, the duo created the field of romance comics, and were among the earliest pioneers of horror comics. Joe, who went on to work in advertising and commercial art, also founded the satirical magazine Sick in 1960 - remaining with it for a decade. Mr. Simon was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1999.

He died in New York City on December 14, 2011, at the age of 98.

It may have been the fact that Jerry Robinson mentioned Joe Simon that I decided to try and contact him. I struggled a little with things to ask because my interests lie with DC Comics and while Joe did a little for them, it was precious little. I even got the two issues of Brother Power the Geek to try and get a feel for his DC work, but honestly it left me kind of cold. Still, if you can get another founder on the phone (even though he always insisted on referring to their partnership as SIMON and Kirby) you should do it, even if the results weren't quite what you were hoping.

A faulty tape recorder prevented the transcription of the very beginning of the discussion.

This interview originally took place over the phone on June 11, 2007.

Joe Simon: A big part of the culture now. Dick and I did The Fly and The Shield for Archie Comics.

Stroud: Yeah, one of their few adventure stories.

A Fighting American cover recreation done by Joe Simon.

JS: Yeah, uh-huh. And I think the Fighting American. Were they the Silver Age? That was about 1962 I think, wasn’t it?

Stroud: That would have been right in there.

JS: That’s about my experience with the Silver Age.

Stroud: Well, you did a little tiny bit later with Brother Power, The Geek.

JS: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was about ’73 I think, wasn’t it?

Stroud: ’69, I think.

JS: ’69. Okay. Oh, yeah, that was with Carmine.

Stroud: Exactly.

JS: Yeah, we did some very nice things there. The Prez. I loved that one.

Stroud: The Green Team.

JS: But, that whole period there was not financially successful for practically anybody in the business.

Stroud: No, sadly enough.

JS: And that wasn’t very encouraging. That’s about my whole experience in the Silver Age. It was quite a bit, I guess.

Stroud: Well, yeah, you were right in there. Of course, the bulk of your work was beforehand and some afterward.

JS: Yeah.

Stroud: You know one thing I was kind of surprised about when I was researching some of your work in the Grand Comic Book Database, they have all of the work you and Jack did on the early Adventure Comics with Manhunter and Sandman and so forth…

JS: Yeah, is that Harry Mandrake’s site?

Stroud: No, I don’t think so. When you tap it in you just go to comics.org. They’re trying to index every single comic book ever published.

JS: Great.

Stroud: Anyway, it kind of amused me. It had Jack down on scripts and pencils on a lot of them and then had your name with a question mark behind it for inks. Apparently they can’t confirm that you inked a lot of those. I presume you did.

JS: I’m not going to worry about that now.

Stroud: I understand. You don’t have anything to prove at this point. (Chuckle.)

JS: They didn’t ask me. Of course, I inked most all of it.

The Fly and the Spider - a painting by Joe Simon.

Stroud: I kind of figured. I didn’t realize how you had worn nearly every single hat, Mr. Simon, from editor, to scripter to letterer to penciler. You did it all.

JS: (coughing.) Too many cigars.

Stroud: Would it be easier if I e-mailed my questions?

JS: I think so, but so many questions come up over and over and over again. I’ll do my best. I respect your efforts. You said you spoke to Carmine recently?

Stroud: I sure did.

JS: How’s he doing?

Stroud: He sounded good. Of course, he just turned 82.

JS: 82?

Stroud: Yeah. Still kind of a youngster to you, I suppose.

JS: (Chuckle.) I’m 93.

Stroud: You’re doing well, then.

JS: It’s all right. At least it beats the other. (chuckle.)

As this interview was quite short, we are also including a gallery showcasing just a portion of the many comic book covers that Mr. Simon helped to create.

Adventure Comics (1938) #73, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #73, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Comics (1938) #75, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #75, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Comics (1938) #76, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #76, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Comics (1938) #81, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #81, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Comics (1938) #92, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #92, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Comics (1938) #102, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventure Comics (1938) #102, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventure Is My Career (1945) #1, cover by Joe Simon.

Adventures of The Fly (1959) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Adventures of The Fly (1959) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Adventures of The Fly (1959) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Alarming Tales (1957) 3, cover by Joe Simon.

Alarming Tales (1957) #4, cover by Joe Simon.

Black Cat Mystic (1956) #60, cover by Joe Simon.

Black Magic (1950) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Black Magic (1950) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Black Magic (1950) #48, cover by Joe Simon.

Black Magic (1973) #4, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Black Magic (1973) #4, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Blast Off (1965) #1, cover by Joe Simon.

Blue Beetle (1939) #3, cover by Joe Simon.

Boy Commandos (1942) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Boy Commandos (1942) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Boys Ranch (1950) 1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Boys Ranch (1950) 1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Brother Power, The Geek (1968) #1, cover by Joe Simon.

Bulls-Eye (1955) 6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Bulls-Eye (1955) 6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Captain America Comics (1941) #1, cover by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.

Captain America Comics (1941) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Captain America Comics (1941) #10, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty (1998) #2, cover by Joe Simon. — Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty (1998) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Charlie Chan (1948) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Charlie Chan (1948) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Daring Mystery Comics (1941) #6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Daring Mystery Comics (1941) #6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Daring Mystery Comics (1941) #7, cover by Joe Simon.

Double-Dare Adventures (1966) #1, cover by Joe Simon.

Fantastic Comics (1939) #6, cover by Joe Simon.

Green Hornet Comics (1942) #7, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Green Hornet Comics (1942) #7, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Green Mask, The (1940) #9, cover by Joe Simon.

In Love (1955) #5, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — In Love (1955) #5, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Joe Palooka (1945) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Joe Palooka (1945) #3, cover by Joe Simon.

Joe Palooka (1945) #68, cover by Joe Simon.

Justice Traps the Guilty (1947) #6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Justice Traps the Guilty (1947) #6, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Men of Mystery Comics (1999) #17, cover by Joe Simon.

My Date (1947) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — My Date (1947) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Mystery Men Comics (1939) #12, cover by Joe Simon.

Red Raven Comics (1940) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Red Raven Comics (1940) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Science Comics (1940) #4, cover by Joe Simon.

Science Comics (1940) #5, cover by Joe Simon.

Science Comics (1940) #6, cover by Joe Simon.

Silver Streak Comics (1939) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Speed Comics (1941) #17, cover by Joe Simon.

Speed Comics (1941) #21, cover by Joe Simon.

Star Spangled Comics (1941) #8, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Star Spangled Comics (1941) #8, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Star Spangled Comics (1941) #10, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Star Spangled Comics (1941) #10, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Star Spangled Comics (1941) #19, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Star Spangled Comics (1941) #19, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Strange World of Your Dreams, The (1952) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Strange World of Your Dreams, The (1952) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Strange World of Your Dreams, The (1952) #2, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Strange World of Your Dreams, The (1952) #2, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Stuntman Comics (1946) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon. — Stuntman Comics (1946) #1, cover penciled by Jack Kirby & inked by Joe Simon.

Thrill-o-Rama (1965) #1, cover by Joe Simon.

U.S.A. Comics (1941) #2, cover by Joe Simon.

Weird Comics (1940) 3, cover by Joe Simon.

Witches Tales (1951) #15, cover by Joe Simon.

Wonderworld Comics (1939) #14, cover by Joe Simon.

March 07, 2018

An Interview With Jerry Robinson - The Creator of The Joker

March 07, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

How often do you get to talk to a legend? We're talking one of the founders of the medium who went on to ever more important things in his later career. Jerry Robinson was there practically from the beginning and went on to instruct other art students who would make their own mark (and a few were kind enough to speak to me about being his student, including Steve Ditko!), traveled the world to help ensure human rights and aided directly in the quest to get some recognition and much-needed money for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry never slowed down and I may have been one of the last to interview him before his passing for an article on the history of the Scarecrow that I wrote for BACK ISSUE magazine. He was kind and gracious, as you'll soon read.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 29, 2007.

As a preliminary to my interview with Jerry Robinson he faxed me a copy of the Syndicate biography - but in reality, it only begins to describe the myriad things he’s been doing since he was a teenager. Still, it’s a very instructive document, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Note: Here is the webpage that Jerry referred me to with the New York Times.

Jerry Robinson is an accomplished artist, writer, historian and curator. He is President and Editorial Director of CartoonArts International and Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate (CWS), affiliated with the New York Times Feature Service, which syndicates and exhibits the work of 350 leading cartoonists and graphic artists from fifty-five countries.

While a journalism student at Columbia University, Robinson began his cartooning career at age seventeen on the original Batman comic book, for which he created the Joker, comics’ first super villain. He named Batman’s protégé, Robin, and designed his costume, and played a vital role in the creation and development of other characters; among them the Penguin, Catwoman, Alfred, and Two-Face. A cartoon art pioneer, collectors consider his early Batman drawings classics.

Among Robinson’s thirty published works is The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (G.P. Putnam), acclaimed as the definitive study of the genre. In The Comics, Robinson documented the debut of the first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, one year earlier than previously credited. He also created an award-winning series of comics history calendars published by Rizzoli/Universe. His other books include the biography, Skippy and Percy Crosby (Holt), and The 1970s: Best Political Cartoons of the Decade (McGraw-Hill), which introduced many of the world’s leading political cartoonists to America and was the genesis for founding CWS, specializing in representing international creators. He negotiated the first regular use of foreign cartoons in the Russian and Chinese language press.

Robinson has served as President of both the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) and the National Cartoonists Society (NCS), the only person so honored by his peers. He also served as advisor to the Museum Cartoon, Basel, Switzerland and was a guest at museums in Warsaw, Brussels, Angouleme (France) and three in Japan.

Skippy and Percy Crosby by Jerry Robinson.

Robinson has traveled to over forty countries on behalf of CWS as well as serving on international art juries and meeting with major creators for CWS. He has made several tours of Europe, North Africa, Japan and Korea entertaining servicemen.

His award-winning features of social/political satire, Still Life and Life With Robinson, were internationally syndicated daily for thirty-two years. Robinson’s drawings appeared monthly in the Broadway theatre magazine Playbill. His is the co-writer and co-art director of the hour-long animation, Stereotypes, filmed at the Soyuzmult Studios in Moscow and co-author of the book and lyrics for the musical Astra: A Comic Book Opera. It was performed in Washington, DC in 2007. A graphic novel adaptation of Astra was published in Japan and the U.S.

Robinson has served as curator for numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. They include the first show of American comic art at a major fine art gallery, the Graham Gallery in New York (1972), and served as special consultant for the largest exhibition of the cartoon at The Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, and for the landmark show of the cartoon arts at the Whitney Museum, New York City. Exhibitions abroad include the first of American cartoon art in Tokyo, Warsaw, and Moscow; and others in Portugal, Slovenia and Ukraine. At the invitation of the United Nations, Robinson produced the major exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro (Earth Summit), Cairo (Population & Development) and Vienna (Human Rights), the latter co-sponsored by the Austrian Government. In December 2007, he curated the exhibition Sketching Human Rights commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the UN Declarations on Human Rights.

In 2004 Robinson produced the first in-depth exhibition of the genre, The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books 1939 – 1950 at the Breman Museum, Atlanta, which is now on tour throughout the U.S. In 2006, Robinson also curated the exhibition, The Superhero: Good and Evil in American Comics, at the Jewish Museum in New York.

**The 1970s: Best Political Cartoons of the Decade by Jerry Robinson.**

Robinson has led creator rights cases including copyright, trademark, censorship, First Amendment (in U.S.) and human rights (abroad). Examples include: Representing Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, creators of Superman, in their struggle to obtain financial security and restore their creator credits to Superman; obtaining the release of jailed and tortured cartoonists in Uruguay and the Soviet Union; writing briefs on behalf of the AAEC and NCS, one in the trademark litigation brought against editorial cartoonists and the other presented before a U.S. Senate committee on postal laws; and serving on the joint arts committee that negotiated creator protection in the copyright renewal law.

For eighteen years Robinson was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, and The New School and Parsons School of Design, all in New York City. An exhibition of his color photography from seven countries was held at the SVA Galleries. In 2000 Scriptorium Films produced a ninety-minute television documentary on Robinson’s career for Brazilian TV.

Following the biography is a list of Jerry’s awards, including the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement from the National Cartoonists Society; Best Comic Book Artist for Batman; Best Panel Cartoon for still life, and Best Special Feature for Flubs & Fluffs. Other honors from several nations in many categories are listed in addition to the Eisner Hall of Fame and an Inkpot to name just a few.

And believe me; Jerry hasn’t slowed down in the slightest. We had the darndest time getting together for the interview because of his schedule, which included trips to China, England, Toronto, Miami and Washington, DC in the last six months of 2007, but I was patient and persistent (probably to the point of being a pest) and Jerry was gracious and made himself available as soon as he could. I couldn’t have been happier when things finally came together just before the New Year. You can be the judge of the results. With great pleasure I present the legendary Jerry Robinson:

Stroud: As I’ve learned more about the origins of the comic book industry it’s been fascinating to me that so many of the creators and editors were of Jewish descent like Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz, [Jerry] Siegel, [Joe] Schuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger of course, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane…

Jerry Robinson with a Joker sketch in 2010.

Jerry Robinson: And Joe Simon.

Stroud: Exactly. Do you think it’s due to the Jewish tradition that causes such natural talent for visual story telling?

JR: Well that’s a part of it. The Breman exhibition wasn’t entirely about Jewish creators, but they did dominate the genre the first few years, as well as Jewish publishers. But I focused in on the Jewish tradition for another exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York after they saw the Breman. They asked me to do a smaller version. It focused on 15 creators of the Golden Age and 14 of them were Jewish.

Stroud: That’s a remarkable percentage.

JR: The only one that wasn’t Jewish was Fred Ray, who I worked closely with. He did some of the iconic Superman covers, and other features as well. The rest were of Jewish heritage and it is interesting to discover why. My research indicated there were a number of reasons. And it happened in other disciplines with other ethnic groups, so it’s not that surprising. In the case of those who were of Jewish heritage, many of them were first or second-generation Jews who had fled Europe. They were often intellectuals and scientists, including Einstein and others who were so important in the development of the atomic bomb. Anyway, there were many from other countries that were also fleeing persecution and poverty. Among the Jews there were many intellectuals and artists. I think that accounts for part of it. Many of them became teachers in New York. A lot of them taught some of these early pioneers of the comic book industry.

Stroud: That’s true.

JR: They taught at some of the major schools. Stuyvesant High, the New School and Art Students League in New York including DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx where about three or four of the early creators attended …Will Eisner, Bill Finger and Bob Kane.

Stroud: It is fascinating. It seems like especially in the Golden Age you had a tremendous Jewish influence and it continued on through the Silver Age, although of course you’ve got the other ethnic groups that you mentioned such as those that produced Infantino, Plastino, Saladino and Giella.

JR: Right. They were soon joined by all diverse ethnic backgrounds. George Roussos who was hired to be my assistant was from Greece and came over as a kid. Four of my closest collaborators as well as my closest friends were Irish from Boston, the Wood brothers, Bob, Dick and David; Irish Catholics and they were top creators in the field. I worked closely with Charles Biro of Hungarian descent who did Daredevil. All these different ethnic groups found jobs in the new genre. It was a place to get work and to have your work seen.

Stroud: Yeah, and it kind of reinforces the idea that comic books are a unique part of Americana.

JR: They really are, yeah.

Stroud: And they drew very much from the very origins of our immigrant heritage.

JR: Right. The publishers, at least three or four of the major ones, from Timely, that’s now Marvel, DC/National, and MLJ, (three partners), were all Jewish. They were in the printing trade, most of them, before that. They were lithographers and printers and they saw the comics as another client just as if they were printing Good Housekeeping Magazine. (Chuckle) Actually, many were “girlie” magazines. In 1934 they saw the comics as a way to keep the presses busy when comics begin to sell. They were able produce them on a shoestring. They bought up the content from syndicates - reprints of newspaper strips, as you probably know, for very little.

Amazing World of DC Comics (1974) #4, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: Right. Low investment.

JR: Low investment, so it was a very good combination. Then when they began to run out of material about 1936, they turned to buying original work drawn just for their magazines. When Superman came along in 1938 they were actively seeking original material. They had exhausted reprints from the syndicates that were suitable comic book content.

Stroud: Okay. That’s a very interesting evolution. It sounds like back in the early days you did it all. Pencils, inks, colors and even lettering, which is a very specialized skill. What was this crash course in comic books like for you?

JR: (Chuckle.) Well, it was difficult. I had never drawn any. I’d never even thought about it. I was going to Columbia University to be a journalist, a writer. So, I’d never taken art courses. I should say with one exception. When I first started to work for Bob, and I was to start in a few weeks. I figured I should learn something about cartooning. So I enrolled in an art class. I remember the school was in the Flatiron building, which is a famous historic building in downtown New York. They had us copying plaster casts and anatomical figures. And in a couple of days they started to put my work up on the wall as examples. I soon learned I could copy anything. I had good eye/hand coordination. But it was not creative. They had no courses in cartooning. I figured, if they’re putting my work up on the wall as examples, and I knew nothing, I couldn’t learn anything there and I quit. (Chuckle.) That was my art school experience.

Stroud: So, you’re essentially self-taught then.

JR: Yes, and studying what I could see in the comics and working very hard. Drawing over and over again until I learned how to do something that I wanted to do. In a sense it was very intense because we had to meet deadlines, you know. As you said I started lettering, which I knew nothing about either, but I was able to follow the style, generally. And I made a few little innovations, by the way. Wherever there was a caption I would make the first letter a bit decorative; in a circle dropping out the outline.

Stroud: Yeah, I’d seen some of those and that’s very unique.

JR: I don’t know why I did that. I was an avid reader all through my childhood and so I read many illustrated books, one was The Adventures of Robin Hood by N.C. Wyeth. That’s where I drew my inspiration for the name Robin and for his costume. I used that decorative “R” on Robin’s vest as a counter to the bat on Batman’s chest. I soon began penciling and inking complete stories.

Stroud: And it kind of came full circle later when you were illustrating books as well.

JR: Oh, yeah, that’s right. (Chuckle.) I love illustration and I love the great illustrators.

Stroud: Which tasks did you find most satisfying at the time?

JR: Well, I enjoyed most of all doing my complete stories. And that’s what I did. Whenever I penciled, I inked. I didn’t letter later on. That took so much time and I just laid out the lettering where I wanted it. But other than that I penciled and inked complete stories and even, whenever I was able to, I did my own coloring.

Stroud: So, you were kind of a one man shop after all was said and done.

JR: Well, all of the artists were in the beginning. Later, it was more like a factory assembly line. To produce all the work that was required, some strips took to that method. Some artists became very specialized as inkers, as pencilers, as colorists. In fact, when I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts I would deliberately teach how to letter and to emphasize penciling and inking as separate qualities so that they could break into the field. Which many of them did.

Stroud: Do you remember who?

JR: Well, Steve Ditko was a student of mine.

Stroud: Yes, of course. As a matter of fact, I sent Steve a note a few weeks ago in preparation for speaking with you.

JR: Oh, really?

Stroud: Yes, and I asked him his memories of you.

JR: Oh, wow.

Stroud: He had this to say:

“Jerry Robinson was a great teacher for teaching fundamentals in how to tell/show comic book story/art. What one learns, knows from seeing, studying other’s artwork is mostly visual. But what one learns from a teacher like Jerry is how to use one’s mind with solid comic book panel/sequence principles. It is that basic understanding that makes a comic book panel effective, dramatic, [and] visually work for a story/picture integration and continuity creating a whole unique reading/seeing experience.”

So, you obviously left a lasting impression.

JR: Oh, that was a very generous statement. I’ve had no contact with him for generations.

Stroud: Well, you and the rest of the world.

JR: When I’m asked about students I of course always mention him. He was very bright. I knew it right away. In fact, if I recall correctly, I got him a scholarship for the second year, so he was in my class for two years. When I would see students of Steve’s ability I would recommend them to a publisher and that’s probably how he started with Timely. I recommended a lot of my students over the years to Stan [Lee]. In fact, I got to know Stan quite well and we ultimately worked together for almost 10 years.

Stroud: Was that pretty enjoyable?

JR: Oh, yeah. Stan was a very good editor. He didn’t micromanage anything. I guess he saw that I was already fairly well established, obviously, by that time after years of Batman and teaching and doing other features as well. I was still doing comics while I was teaching. I taught from 5:00 to 10:00 in the evening after a day’s comic book work. (Chuckle.) But I was very young and foolish at the time. (Mutual laughter.)

Batman (1940) #37, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: It doesn’t sound like you were alone. When I was interviewing Dick Giordano, he talked about commuting in from Connecticut each day and working on the train or sleeping as he could. He was burning the candle at both ends as well.

JR: Well, that’s certainly what I was doing. When I was doing my classes at Columbia I started during the day and working at night and then when that became super difficult I started to go to work during the day and then classes at night.

Stroud: Good heavens. Did you like being a teacher?

JR: I enjoyed it very much in the beginning. The last couple of years maybe I was getting exhausted. I guess it was more the fact that my focus was more dispersed. I had other projects like a newspaper strip and book illustration and so…

Stroud: Something had to give.

JR: The teaching years were my art education. Never having studied art and not having any formal training, I made up my own methods, which artists do. How you arrive at a conclusion as to why you did a certain thing. So, it forced me to go back and study why I did certain things. Why I did it and then how, in order to convey it to a student or to anyone else. So, I think the learning is much more intense and I know my own work, I felt, improved tremendously during the years that I was teaching. So, I think it’s a give and take with the students. I was fortunate to have some bright students. Of course, they were a minority like in any class. A few stand out. I had 30 or 40 students at one time. They were big classes. There were several others talented like Steve.

Professor Christopher Couch of the University of Massachusetts is writing up my bio. It’s been sold to Abrams publishing, the Fine Art publisher. I know he’d love to see Steve’s quote... Speaking of my students, another one who did very well was Fred Fredricks who took over Mandrake the Magician written by Lee Falk, who was one of my best friends. I think Fred is still doing it. Also, the talented Stan Lynde who did a strip called Rick O’Shay.

Stroud: I’m not familiar with Rick O’Shay.

JR: You can Google it. Rick O’Shay is a cowboy strip. I’m not sure if it’s still running. I’ve lost track of Stan. He moved out west. He made it pretty early.

Note: I did just that and discovered that Stan Lynde has a webpage and is active as an author in Montana. You can see what he’s up to at his website: www.oldmontana.com. He also responded to my e-mail and had these kind words about his former instructor:

"Jerry's experience with Batman and his thorough knowledge of comics made him an excellent teacher at New York's School of Visual Arts. I give the school a great deal of credit for my syndication with RICK O'SHAY, and I'm delighted to learn of Jerry's new consultant position. He was a fine instructor of what Will Eisner termed Sequential Art and is a noteworthy authority on the comics."

Stroud: You’ve got a living legacy out there.

JR: I hear from them now and then. They’ll write or if they do a book or something they send it to me. I’m always very, very pleased. I’m as excited about that as if I’d sold something of my own.

Stroud: It must be almost like seeing your children mature and do well.

JR: Yeah. Stan Goldberg, another student, is a great professional for Harvey and Archie Comics. Another is Mort Gerberg, a top New Yorker cartoonist. Also, Don Heck. He did a lot of top comic book work. In fact, I haven’t read it yet, but in a recent issue of Alter Ego there is a piece about him. He worked a long time in the comics. I think, sadly, he may not still be with us.

Note: With appropriate thanks to my buddy, Daniel Best, I contacted Stan Goldberg as well. What a fine gentleman he is and he shared a lot about his long and successful cartooning career in addition to some great memories of Jerry. Stan is also on the web at www.stangoldberg.com. He’s still going strong after decades in the business. Here’s a segment from that conversation:

Stan Goldberg: Jerry and I go back a few years (chuckle), that’s for sure and before I go ahead and do this thing just remind me we were at a big International Cartoonist Society event; the big long weekend every year where we give out all the major awards and things like that. Jerry came over to me, I was nominated for one of the awards, and Jerry comes over and he says, “Stan, I’m gonna be the presenter of that award.” I said, “Well, that’s nice. That’s great.” He didn’t tell me then, but later I found out he wrote a piece about more than just him being a presenter and me, one of the nominees, but like everything that you prepare for, I didn’t win the award, and that was just perfectly fine with me, at this stage in my life, but he came over later and he said, “I had this whole speech lined up,” and if I remember now, I think he read it off to me while I was standing with a drink in my hand. “This is what I was gonna say about Goldberg.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

SG: Jerry and his wife, Gro, I’ve known them forever and it’s one of those few guys that are still around that you could touch bases with and…another interesting side bar, many years ago…we go down to Mexico every year to a little town called San Miguel, and the first time we went down there about sixteen years ago. We spend a couple of months there every winter. I met the great Frank Robbins, who lived down there.

Stroud: Oh, wow.

SG: And I grew up on Frank Robbins and we touched base and when we got together down there, he passed away a few months after that, but I had real quality time with him there and he was a sweet, great man and a lot of his contemporaries back home, like Jerry and Irwin Hasen and people like that, they were all close buddies and they thought that Frank just disappeared. They knew he loved Mexico, but they thought he’d passed on because he was not in touch with any of these compatriots, all these guys that he used to hang out with. Jerry told me an interesting story about Frank Robbins. He said Frank Robbins got him, got Jerry, his first job for Look Magazine. Frank couldn’t do this job and this was about 1938 or 1939 and he passed it on to a young Jerry Robinson to do. And that was like Jerry’s first big job for a major magazine.

Stroud: When you took the classes from Jerry what sort of principles did you take away from your time being his pupil?

SG: It’s interesting. That had to be 1950, I think. Just to go back a little bit, I started working for Timely Comics in 1949. I think I just turned 17 or I was still 16 at the time, I don’t remember, and I was one of the staff guys and running the coloring department…not running it at that time, I took it over about two years later, but I was one of the colorists there and then 1950 rolled around and I started coloring some books and figured I’ve got to continue going to school. I enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in the evening classes and one of my instructors was Jerry Robinson. Now Jerry didn’t’ know me from Adam, but when I went into that class I told him who I was and I’d just got through with the day of coloring some of Jerry Robinson’s war stories and some of the books that we were putting out. Jerry was doing a lot of war stories at that time. So that’s how we touched base right away.

Stroud: Oh, fantastic.

SG: And Jerry’s art…he wasn’t one of the ordinary, good artists, he was better than 99% of them, and I especially remember his war stories so well. It was so authentic and so realistic and he was magnificent. People remember him for certain things, but he was a good artist, really a great artist and it was so sad because the coloring we were able to do in those particular books at that time was so poor. So here Jerry was and everything was so authentic looking; the tanks and the uniforms and all that, but those were all colors that half the time you put down on what we used to call silver prints, you had to keep your fingers crossed and hope you got something close to that because it was very difficult getting the browns and the grays. Certain colors that demanded three or four of the major colors and a certain percentage of them to make this great gray uniform or the color of mud or the color of a plane. And half the time Stan [Lee] was telling me, “Look, its difficult getting those colors. I would have no problem if you made the tanks,” I’m exaggerating now, but more or less he said, “if you make the tanks red, you make one guy’s uniform blue and the other guy’s uniform yellow…” And here I was trying to be so authentic. I would go to the library and get the correct color, and I felt bad that Jerry was putting all this work in and I’m sure he realized, and he knew who I was, I was coloring his stuff, because I told him right off the bat that it’s difficult getting it right. In those days when the color of the paper in the comic book was almost a gray color, it wasn’t even white, then some of those colors would come through the pages. And up at Marvel, Timely at that time, it was quite poor. But that was the class and it was quite a kick to have there, as my teacher, was a guy that I was working on his stuff, and I knew of his work even before I came into the business. I was aware of his artwork. It was so distinctive and I loved it.

Detective Comics (1937) 76, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: You mentioned you had aspirations of journalism, did you get opportunities to write, back in the day or was everyone else doing the scripting?

JR: Well, for Batman Bill Finger was the chief writer and really the co-creator of Batman.

Stroud: Right and was unfortunately unsung for that for many, many years.

JR: Yes, unfortunately so. I’m always sure to mention Bill in my interviews as being the co-creator. There wouldn’t have been Batman as we know it without Bill.

Stroud: I’m sure that’s true. In fact, didn’t you found the Bill Finger Award?

JR: Yes, I did.

Stroud: Good for you. And please clarify for me; was Arnold Drake involved in that as well?

JR: No. Arnold, I think the first year, received the Bill Finger Award.

Stroud: Okay. For some reason I had it in my head that he was involved in creating it.

JR: No. Not that he wouldn’t have, I’m sure. He honored Bill as I did, but I didn’t work with Arnold on that. I dealt with people at San Diego Comicon, notably Jackie Estrada, who agreed to make it a part of the Eisner Awards presentation. I wanted to give it a platform where it would be known and where the young writers and cartoonists would learn about Bill; those who were not aware of him or of his contributions.

Stroud: Yeah, because he’s an important part of the heritage.

JR: Oh, definitely, and I contacted Marvel and DC, particularly DC. I called Paul Levitz, DC President, to help finance the first award and have every year since, I believe.

Stroud: I know it’s gone on for several years now and has been presented to some very deserving creators, both living and posthumously.

JR: Well, we decided to make one award for the living and one for those that have passed on, so that we could honor both. I thought that people shouldn’t wait ‘til they die. (mutual laughter.) And they are ones to remember. I thought it was kind of a nice touch that Jerry Siegel won the first Bill Finger Award.

Joe Shuster, Neal Adams, Jerry Siegel, & Jerry Robinson - After the DC/Superman settlement.

Stroud: Yes. Very fitting.

JR: And I think that’s when Arnold won the living one and Jerry Siegel got the other. Jerry and Joe [Shuster] were very good friends of mine.

Stroud: Yes, and you’ve done a tremendous service for them and for their families also.

JR: Yeah, that was later.

Stroud: How did you originally come to work for Bob?

JR: Well, that story has been told so many times. I guess if you’re re-telling something, okay. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I’m sorry. I just thought we should have a little background.

JR: No, that’s okay. It’s an improbable story, so I know why they always ask it. When I graduated high school at seventeen, I intended to be a journalist, so I applied to Columbia, Syracuse and Penn. All were in the Northeast and I grew up in New Jersey, so that was within the realm of reason for me at that time. So, lo and behold I was accepted at all three and decided to go to Syracuse only because I was brought up in Trenton, which is only a few miles from Princeton University. So, I knew the Princeton campus and played tennis there and in fact one of my brothers moved to Princeton so that was how I knew the college town. And so that’s what I visualized going to college in Syracuse was like. And certainly Columbia, when I found it was in the heart of Manhattan, and Penn in downtown Philadelphia didn’t sound like bona fide college towns, so I picked Syracuse. When I graduated high school, I sold ice cream all summer to earn money for the first semester. In those days it was sold from a cart on the back of a bicycle. So being the new man getting this ice cream franchise, I was given the territory on the suburbs of town. I had to pedal for half an hour in the hot sun just to get to the place where I could sell. At the time I was only 98 pounds on the track team and on the tennis team. Tennis was kind of my passion. So by the end of the summer I was down to something like 89 pounds or whatever. So, my mother was afraid that I wouldn’t survive the first semester in college. So, she persuaded me to take $25.00 of that hard-earned money and go to the country to fatten up. So, I did, reluctantly, because I was hardly able to eat a popsicle myself and lose the royalty.

Stroud: Eating into the profits. (Chuckle.)

JR: Right and I had to save enough for the first semester and so I think I managed to make about $17.00 a week at that time, which, you know, this was 1939.

Stroud: That was still significant.

JR: Something, yeah. I wasn’t sure I could quite live on it in New York. It wouldn’t go a long way. So, I went to this mountain resort for the purpose my mother had in mind and the first day out I ran out to the tennis court. And I put on a jacket that was a fad in high school at the time. It was just an ordinary white painter’s jacket that you bought in a paint store. A short jacket with pockets all over it, you know, for brushes and supplies for painting. So, it was a fad to decorate them with drawings and the equivalent of graffiti in that day. We picked that up from Princeton. It was a college fad, so we wanted to look like college kids when we were in high school. So I decorated mine with cartoons. I had been a cartoonist for the high school paper. I don’t know how I got into that because, again, I didn’t take any art courses there, but I guess I had an affinity for drawing cartoons.

And so, I ran out to the court to find a partner and I used it as a warm-up jacket. I felt a tap on my shoulder and a voice said, “Who did those drawings?” I thought I was going to be arrested or something. I turned around and meekly said, “I did.” “Well, they’re not too bad.” He introduced himself and it was Bob Kane. That was the serendipitous start of my career.

Batman (1940) #1, Cover penciled by Bob Kane & inked by Jerry Robinson.

We got to know each other. He was like seven years older, I was 17 and he was 24. So, close enough that we could converse and hang out together.

He showed me the first issue of Batman (Detective #27), which had just come out and to his chagrin I wasn’t terribly impressed. I liked the good stuff like Terry and the Pirates and Hal Foster in the newspapers. When he found out I was going to Syracuse, he said, “That’s too bad. If you were going to New York we need somebody on the Batman team. There’s just two of us.” I don’t know if he even mentioned Bill Finger at that point, come to think of it, but I soon found out that was all the “team” consisted of. He said, “If you come to New York I could offer you a job for $25.00 a week.” I didn’t realize that much afterward. (Chuckle) I thought, “Well, gee, that’s great, I was making $17.00 a week selling ice cream.” It sounded like a lot easier to do, just draw some pictures.

So, I called the admissions office at Columbia and asked if my acceptance was still good. Luckily it was. Of course, I’d already decided to go to Syracuse and I called there and told them I’m not coming, and I called my folks at home and I said I’ve got a job in New York and I went right from the mountains to New York. I didn’t even go home. So that was the start of my career.

Stroud: That is quite a story of being in the right place at the right time.

JR: Yeah, I owe it to that jacket. Bob didn’t play tennis and I think he was just wandering around that day and spotted the jacket.

Stroud: I’ll be darned. Serendipitous indeed.

JR: I wish I had that jacket. I’ve been asked about it many times.

Stroud: Yeah, that would be Smithsonian material.

JR: But I handed it on to…I had three nephews of my oldest brother who became like my own sons and they were at that time maybe 10, 7 and 5. So I gave it to the oldest one, and when he outgrew it, he handed it on to his next oldest brother. By the time it got to the third brother it must have been in shreds.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) I’ve got two younger brothers myself, so I’m sure you’re exactly right. Things just reach tatter stage after awhile.

JR: Another thing while I’m talking about my nephews, one just happened to visit and spend the day with me yesterday. When he was about six, my brother was still living in Trenton. He was a dentist. I visited them one day. I was out in the back yard. It was in the summer and I was drawing pictures for them. So, all the kids in the neighborhood gathered around watching me drawing; probably Batman and other characters for them. I heard one of the kids whisper to my nephew, the youngest, “Who is that man?” My nephew answered, “Oh, that’s Uncle Jerry. He’s a friend of ours.” I always treasured that.

Stroud: Oh, absolutely. It sounds almost worthy of your old “Flubs and Fluffs” feature although it was neither of those. Did you ever know any of the other ‘ghosts,’ like Dick Sprang, for example?

True Classroom Flubs & Fluffs by Jerry Robinson.

JR: You want to hear a funny anecdote about Dick Sprang?

Stroud: Please.

JR: It might have been in ’89 or ’90, we were both invited to the San Diego Comic Con and they presented me with the Inkpot Award, I believe. Anyway, that was why I was there that year. And there were some comics fans who had a society there and were throwing a party for a few of us at one of their homes. They had a very nice home with a big lawn in the back and there were lines of chairs set up out on the lawn for this event. To my surprise the other two guests were Dick Sprang and Charlie Paris. I don’t know if you know the name Charlie Paris.

Stroud: I sure do.

JR: I hadn’t seen either one of them since the 40’s when I left Batman. When I first saw Dick, we fell into each other’s arms and hugged each other. Then suddenly, almost instantaneously, we both took a step back and looked at each other and realized we had never met or even seen each other before.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JR: But we knew each other through our work, and so somehow it seemed like we both felt that we knew each other. It was a strange sensation and that’s exactly what happened. Now Charlie and I also embraced. Charlie Paris, I did know very well. He worked in the DC bullpen when I was there.

Stroud: Right, quite an accomplished inker.

JR: They were both exceptionally nice guys. I admired them very much. Charlie, I knew had moved out West up in the mountains and was living in a trailer and became an excellent Western painter. So, we had that wonderful reunion at that time.

Stroud: Neat. That’s a great memory. When I talked to Lew [Sayre Schwartz] a few months ago he told me that he really loved working on Bill Finger’s scripts because he said Bill had a gift for very visual writing. Was that your experience, too?

JR: That’s exactly right. He was a visual writer. He would have been a great Hollywood writer for film. We always thought that’s what we were doing…. producing films in story book form. In what proved to be graphic novels of today.

Stroud: I think I read somewhere that he did some television work.

JR: Oh, yes, Bill did some television. He never really became a top TV writer. He could have been. He should have been. I think at that time he was already having a lot of personal problems that held him back. But I think if he had got into TV earlier he would have been very successful. I’m convinced of it. Because, as you said, he was a visual writer. That’s what made the scripts so good and that’s why it was great to collaborate with him. He knew what the artist could do, what he couldn’t do, what he needed, and how it would be visualized. I’ve mentioned this many times; he would often attach all kinds of research to the script that he was using himself in developing the story.

Stroud: So, you had an automatic reference there for some of the things to work off.

JR: Exactly. Whatever he had he would attach.

Stroud: Marvelous, I’m sure it made the job that much easier.

JR: Yeah, in many cases it made things work. If he decided to have a sequence on a ship, a luxury liner or a cargo ship he would get a cutaway of the ship and when he had the action on the boat, you’d see that it worked. I’ve worked with scriptwriters who didn’t do that research or didn’t visualize it and it was a nightmare. I had to re-write the script. I won’t say who. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: And I won’t ask. (Laughter.)

JR: At times I spent half my time re-writing the script before I could draw it.

Stroud: That had to be frustrating, especially when you’re under the gun to reach a deadline.

JR: That’s right.

Detective Comics (1937) #71, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Detective Comics (1937) #71, original cover art by Jerry Robinson.

Batman (1940) #16, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: I noticed on some of your covers and other work over the years there were things like an oversized villain contrasted with the heroes. I’m thinking particularly of that cover with the massive Joker tearing the sheets off a calendar.

JR: It was a cover, yeah.

Stroud: It seems like that was a favorite technique there for a while. Was that one that you developed as far as having the huge villain and the smaller heroes in the front or was that something Bill came up with?

JR: I don’t know who really started that. I did my own cover ideas. Bill certainly used the big props in some of his splash pages. I loved to do symbolic covers, so that size contrast was almost automatic when you do something symbolic. That may not be the oversize thing necessarily, but it proved to be perfect for the Joker to have him looming over the small Batman and Robin. That particular cover, like many, I would usually interpret the lead story of that issue in a symbolic way. Not the actual splash from the story. That particular story was called “Crime a Day.” The Joker challenged Batman that he was going to commit a crime a day and “Try and stop me!” So, it portrayed him smothering Batman and Robin with the calendar pages.

Stroud: The symbolism on that cover is very powerful.

JR: And it made a good design. I was very design and composition conscious. I wanted to have flat areas when possible.

Stroud: It was extremely visually effective and of course at the end of the day the idea is to get someone’s attention enough to want to drop a dime.

Batman (1940) #10, cover by Jerry Robinson.

JR: Exactly. We were fighting for display space and trying to have people notice them on the newsstands with all the other books. There were hundreds of them, and I tried to have Batman and Detective stand out.

Stroud: It seems like you kind of pioneered the use of blacks and chiaroscuro. I’m sorry; I always stumble over that word.

JR: That’s okay; I didn’t know it right away, either. I didn’t know I was doing it. (Laughter.)

Stroud: Was it something just kind of instinctive?

JR: Well, in the beginning Batman was dark and to heighten the drama you use cast shadows. Bill and I were influenced by the German expressionists in films, so that’s the way to get the effect.

Stroud: It makes good sense. I have a friend who is an artist and letterer, Clem Robins, who thought that your work may have been influenced by Fritz Lang and perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright.

JR: I don’t know about Frank Lloyd Wright. I don’t think I knew about him at that time, but Fritz Lang, yes.

Note: Clem Robins offered his observations on the lasting influence of Jerry Robinson:

"Jerry Robinson was one of the first guys in comics to master the architecture of the page. He hit his early stride in the late 1940s, when he drew the Batman syndicated Sunday strips. DC reprinted a lot of them when I was a kid, and they were the first examples I ever saw of Batman drawn really, really well. Robinson invented Gotham City at night, forty years before Anton Furst mimicked the look in his design of the first Batman movie. Chiaroschuro, underlighting, crazy camera angles: Robinson made it all work on the comic page. Furst should have shared the Academy Award he won with Robinson, for turning the latter’s ideas into film.

In his twenties, Robinson also laid the foundation for the art of comic book inking. The hatchings, the spotting of black areas, the use of heavy brush lines to describe down planes -- all were Robinson trademarks, which have since become the vocabulary of the modern inker. Untrained, he learned the way most Golden Age artists, by drawing the best he could. His early work was crude, but he learned quickly. Superman had to wait until the 1950s for a really first-rate artist to bring him to life, but Batman had Robinson almost from the beginning, and the two of them blossomed alongside each other. It’s hard to imagine one without the other. Without Robinson it is doubtful Batman would have survived the end of the Second World War.

Practically every great comic book artist has taken his turn at the Batman: Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Carmine Infantino, Frank Robbins, Dick Sprang, and many others. All of them have learned at Robinson’s feet – some literally so, in his classes at the School of Visual Arts, others taking to his ideas simply because those ideas became in essence the way we all see Batman. If Batman has become an icon, Robinson is largely responsible."

Stroud: You’ve got some lasting credits to your name. You created the Joker and weren’t you involved also with Robin’s creation?

Robin Hood (1917) by Paul Creswick & NC Wyeth

JR: Well, Robin was an idea of Bill’s, working with Bob. Bill came up with the idea of adding a boy to expand the parameters of the strip and story potential and also gave younger kids a role model that they could identify with. The older kids identified with Batman. In the discussion stage, we’d usually get together and kick around ideas for the strip. Names are very important, and Bill had a whole list of names written out for the boy that he suggested and none of them really clicked with all of us. Usually when you get something you know is right everybody jumps on it right away and says, “Yeah, great,” like they did with the Joker. Everybody knew that was a good character in the beginning. And so, we couldn’t settle on a name for the kid. Several names gave an inference of super powers, I can’t remember them right now, but I was thinking of something more like an ordinary boy to keep to the concept of the strip. Superman, of course, was created with super powers and Batman deliberately, did not, and we felt that was the strength of Batman. And so, with that sensibility about the name, I suggested Robin. That came from Robin Hood. It was from a book that I was given as a kid of about ten. It was The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I treasured and I still have in my library. It was an oversized book for the time. This goes back to the 30’s. It was illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. I loved his illustrations and I pored over them. I knew every one of them and I could visualize them in my mind. So, in the discussion I suggested Robin and we kicked it around. Not everybody jumped in the air at first because we all had our favorites, but they were finally convinced that would be the best of what we had and I think it proved to be a good choice. I immediately thought of the drawings of N.C. Wyeth and sketched out for Bob the costume that N.C. Wyeth had drawn in the Robin Hood illustrations; the little tunic and so forth. So that’s how that came about. I was able to play a creative role in the development of other major Batman characters including Penguin, Alfred, Catwoman, Two Face and others.

Stroud: Wonderful! I understand that after awhile you and Bill both ended up going to work directly for DC. Was that a breath of fresh air?

JR: (Laughter.) Well, I wouldn’t call going to work down in Manhattan a breath of fresh air. But yes, in a sense it was. I had much more freedom. Neither one of us worked for Bob after that. Anyway, both Bill and I decided to leave. We’d been getting other offers from other publishers. They wanted anybody connected with the success of Batman. So, Bill and I were both about to leave when DC heard about it they made us an offer to stay with Batman, but to work directly with them. So, I think that was good for both of us. We were on our own and part of the arrangement was that I was able to do my own stories as well as finish Bob’s work, which I did until he stopped. I did my own covers and complete stories. It was a difficult choice. I had some very good offers. One by Busy Arnold who offered me editorship of all his books and I could do a lead feature of my choosing. I still felt connected to Batman, though. It was my first strip and it was still growing. It was so exciting to create for it and we introduced a lot of characters, so Bill and I stayed with DC.

Stroud: And you’ve kind of come full circle because I was reading where you were recently hired on as a creative consultant for DC.

JR: That’s right. I was very pleased about that.

Stroud: What are your duties?

JR: To be a creative consultant. (Laughter.) I said to Paul [Levitz] that this is like my alma mater and I was coming back for a class reunion.

Stroud: Yes. Well, I know they’ve been relying on you heavily for the Dark Knight movie.

Jerry Robinson talks with Christian Bale.

JR: I did get over to the set in London, which was fun to do. An interesting bit was that they had been filming a lot of it in Chicago and I was on a mission in China at the time, so I didn’t get back to see some of the sets in Chicago. In China I gave a talk to a big congress of animators and comics people in Giyang, a city of a million people that nobody ever heard of. (Chuckle.) My son and I flew to Beijing and then went to Giyang for a week and it was great. I gave a speech for about 800 people. I sent it over in advance and they translated my remarks into Chinese although a lot of the audience spoke English. They also published a retrospective of my work. It was an interesting adventure, but that’s why I wasn’t in Chicago. But one of the scenes they shot in Chicago showed the Joker pushing the gal out of a window of one of the high rises, and on the set in London they shot the scene where [Batman] catches her before she hits the ground. So she was thrown out of a window in Chicago and landed in a studio in London. (Mutual laughter.) That’s movie making.

Stroud: The magic of the cinema.

JR: Yeah, they had to reconstruct the whole facade of the building, several stories high. It’s amazing what they do.

Stroud: Do you approve of the way they’re handling the character?

JR: Well so far. You never know until you see the whole thing put together. I’m very enthusiastic and they’re doing a great job. I’ve met the people, the actors and they’re all first rate. As is the director.

Stroud: It’s certainly a far cry from Adam West.

JR: Oh, yes.

Stroud: Carmine Infantino told me when the TV series came out of course it caused the sales of Batman stuff at DC to just explode, but personally, even though Adam West, believe it or not, kind of hailed from my home town in Washington State, I just couldn’t stand that series. (Chuckle.) I don’t know how you felt about it, but the camp just didn’t do a darn thing for me.

JR: The thing is they were exploiting it, and I knew it wouldn’t last that way. You can’t camp something like that and have it continue for any length of time. If they did that with Batman in the books, it wouldn’t have lasted. Think of James Bond. If they camped that it wouldn’t have lasted all these years.

A poster for the Human Rights exhibition curated by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: Yeah, it’s just not what the character is all about.

JR: There was an exhibition you may not have heard about at the U.N.

Stroud: You mentioned that. I was going to ask you about it.

JR: It went off very well. We had the opening a couple of weeks ago and the Deputy Secretary General, the second highest officer at the U.N., opened the exhibit; a woman from Nigeria and also the High Commissioner of Human Rights. I also said a few words. They’d mounted the exhibition beautifully, every piece matted and framed. I had put together almost 70 works of graphic art and cartoons on human rights from around the world from 50 countries. That was the fourth show I curated for the U.N. One of them was on Human Rights in Vienna, 1993, for the big Human Rights Conference. All the heads of state were there. This was the fifteenth anniversary and 2008 is the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. The first show I curated for the U.N., which was exciting, was for the Earth Summit in Rio in ’92 and then another one in Cairo in ’94 on Population & Development. So those were worthwhile projects.

Stroud: Oh, absolutely. It’s got to be tremendously gratifying to be involved in such long-lasting and great impact projects.

JR: It really has been.

Stroud: It seems like back in the day comic strips got quite a bit more respect than comic books. It seemed that everyone wanted to do a syndicated strip, but comic books were looked down upon. Do you have any thoughts on that?

JR: Comics being looked down on was true of comic strips as well as comic books. But among the comic artists themselves they thought maybe the comic strips were at a higher level and they earned much more at the time, so that enhanced their prestige, but comic art has long been looked down on. It’s only in recent years that it’s been accepted as an art form. I kind of signed on early on in that fight. I curated the first show of American comic strip and comic art at the Graham Gallery in New York, one of the best fine art galleries. We took over the whole gallery, several floors and did the first major comics show. That was in about 1972.

It was at a time when they had a big show at the Louvre in Paris on comic art and I went over to see it. I would say it was at least 50 per cent American art that was translated abroad and many thought they were their indigenous cartoons. So, the French were the first to appreciate American comics and the comic art as a real art form. So that was gratifying. I know that was true in Europe because my wife is Norwegian and she grew up on a strip called Knoll Og Tott and when she came here, where of course she got to know the comics through me, she realized the Knoll Og Tott was the Katzenjammer Kids.

Stroud: Just as a side note, for those of us who aspire to something similar, to what do you attribute over 50 years of successful marriage?

JR: (Laughter.) Gosh. Being in love. (Chuckle.) That helps.

Stroud: Very good. Well, I’ve got 21 years under my belt, so I’ll catch you sooner or later.

JR: You’ve got a way to catch up.

Stroud: I look forward to it.

JR: All the best.

Stroud: Thank you.

JR: We’ll actually be celebrating our 51st on New Year’s Eve.

Stroud: Oh, and isn’t New Year’s Day your birthday?

JR: That’s right. The next day is my birthday.

Batman (1940) #11, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Detective Comics (1937) 66, cover by Jerry Robinson.

Stroud: Well, Batman isn’t quite as old as you are, but he’ll be 70 years old here pretty soon.

JR: That’s right.

Stroud: Does his longevity surprise you at all?

JR: Oh, yes, actually it does. Even my own surprises me. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Do you think there will always be a Batman? Is he that entrenched in our popular culture at this point?

JR: Oh, I think so. I think it’s going to go in cycles as it has done over its history. I think in general it’s been cyclical; the comic strips as well. So, there will probably be barren years and then they’ll revive it again and think of some other new take on it, but yeah, I think it will survive. It has all the elements. Enough different artists have given their own take on it and so I think it will inspire other generations.

Stroud: Do you think the fact that he’s a non-super powered costumed hero has anything to do with a better ability for people to relate to?

JR: Well, yeah, that’s some of it, but then again there’s Superman and Spider-Man and they haven’t done too badly. Everybody doesn’t have the same affinity for fantasy. Some are aficionados of science fiction and some don’t like it at all.

Stroud: It does depend on individual tastes. The recent postage stamp that recreated the cover of Batman #1, was any of the art on that yours?

JR: I probably inked it, but I’m pretty sure it was Bob’s pencils. I know it wasn’t mine entirely.

Stroud: It’s interesting just how far Batman has permeated popular culture in many ways. You’ve got the comic strips and the comic books and animation and postage and on and on and on. It’s almost surreal how far he’s come from back in the late 30’s and 40s when you were working on him.

JR: Yeah. Well, I think Superman has done that as well. The newspapers in the early days had perhaps even a greater impact. It was the only medium. There was no television, no comic books. The newspaper strips were the breeding ground for all the great cartoon talents and that, I think, gave comic books the tradition of storytelling and character development. They had a tremendous grip on the public.

Stroud: It’s just amazing how well the character, Batman in particular, has held up over the years. Obviously, your art was a major contribution to that, so it’s pretty fascinating to me.

**The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art by Jerry Robinson.**

JR: Well, I don’t know if you ever saw the book I did on the comic strip; “The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art?”

Stroud: Yes, I recently picked up a copy. I’ve only got a few pages into it, but it looks like you did a tremendous compendium.

JR: So, you have the one published by Putnam?

Stroud: Yes. It’s the hardcover edition. I got it through a used dealer on Amazon as a matter of fact.

JR: Dark Horse is going to republish it. I’m supposed to be rewriting it as we speak. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: It’s going into a reprint, huh? An updated version?

JR: Yeah. I’m just going to add a last chapter to review what happened in the field since I wrote the book and add a lot of new color art.

Stroud: I’ll look forward to that. It should be great. As a matter of fact, I recently got to use it as a reference. My brother had called me from Oregon and he said, “Do you know anything about Foxy Grandpa?” I said, “No, but I bet I know who does.” So I went to your index and found some stuff.

JR: Well, I’m glad it was of use. I spent three years on that book. That was in the dark ages. (Note: The copyright date on my copy is 1974.) There were no computers and no internet. We had to do many drafts because every time we shifted around, you needed a new draft. After awhile the pages began to look like a patchwork quilt. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: So, you spent a lot of time in dusty libraries.

JR: A lot of time. Today, I guess, if I just concentrated on the writing, and just did that; I was doing a daily strip and a humor page at that same time, instead of three years it would be a year. That would be the difference with a computer to help.

Stroud: Very much so. It’s a tremendous tool. My wife is an avid genealogist, so I’ve seen it done both ways. The internet helps a whole lot. I was looking at this tremendous list of recognitions and awards you’ve received. Which ones mean the most to you?

JR: Hmmm. Well, I guess one thrill was getting the Eisner Hall of Fame Award. Most meaningful of all was that Will, an old, dear friend, presented the award himself. And sadly, that was the last award he ever gave.

Stroud: That would be tremendously, well, meaningful. There’s just no better word for it. How do you hope to be remembered?

JR: I don’t even want to think about it. (Chuckle.) I think I should leave it up to others to decide. I won’t really have any voice in it.

Stroud: I understand. You’ve just had such a long and diverse career and you’ve influenced so many people. That was one of the things Clem especially wanted me to mention. He said, “Please tell him he’s been a hero to a lot of us in the industry.”

JR: Oh, gee. That’s kind to say. Thank him for me very much.

Stroud: I’ll be happy to. When is your biography coming out?

JR: They’re just getting the art scanned now and the book goes through several stages. Originally it was for fall of 2008, but I don’t think we’re going to make that. I think more likely it will be spring of 2009. At least that’s what they’re shooting for.

Stroud: I’ll be on the lookout and I’m sure many others will as well.

Detective Comics (1937) #38, cover penciled by Bob Kane & inked by Jerry Robinson.

Detective Comics (1937) #67, cover by Jerry Robinson.

February 28, 2018

An Interview With Frank Springer - Silver Age Illustrator for Dell, DC, & Marvel

February 28, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Frank Springer in 2008, at the 62nd Annual Reuben Awards.

Frank Springer (born on December 6, 1929) – April 2, 2009) was an American comic book and comic strip artist best known for Marvel Comics' Dazzler and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.. In collaboration with writer Michael O'Donoghue, Springer created one of the first adult-oriented comics features on American newsstands: "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist" in the magazine Evergreen Review. A multiple winner of the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award, Springer was a president of the Society and a founding member of the Berndt Toast Gang, its Long Island chapter. Mr. Springer passed away on April 2, 2009 due to complications caused by prostate cancer.

Frank Springer was a joy to speak with. He had an excellent sense of humor and just made things a pleasure through and through. Frank's career was a little different from your average cartoonist, between his Phoebe Zeitgeist work and his long association with the National Cartoonists Society.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 1, 2007.

Bryan Stroud: Frank, what was your first illustration project?

Frank Springer: The first thing I did for money, you mean?

Stroud: Yeah.

Springer: I was in the Army and a buddy of mine told me about a drawing I could do and that I could get five bucks for it. I think it appeared in some small, pocket magazine and I think it was a scantily clad gal, but I really forget the exact subject matter. But I got five bucks for it. That was the first one and it was probably in 1953. I was in the Army from ’52 to ’54 and it was probably the first commercial job I’d ever done. It wasn’t much, I’ll tell you.

Stroud: It started something, though. What led you to comic books?

Springer: Desperate for money, I guess.

Brain Boy (1962) #5, original art for interior page 1 - drawn by Frank Springer.

Ghost Stories (1962) #18, cover by Frank Springer.

Ghost Stories (1962) #18, original cover art by Frank Springer.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Springer: I’d been assisting on Terry and the Pirates with George Wunder and I knew all along that when you’re somebody’s assistant you can never really go anywhere. You know they’re not really looking for innovation. They’re looking for an extension of themselves and I was becoming an extension of George Wunder and he was sort of an extension of Milton Caniff. So, I left there and really didn’t have anything to do and learned through a friend of mine that Dell comics was looking for guys to do comics so I showed up there and Lenny Cole was behind the desk and he had a whole stack of scripts, and he took one off the top and gave it to me and said “When you’re finished with the pencils come back here and we’ll give you a check and when you’re finished with the inks come back here and we’ll give you another check.” And then he reached into his pocket and he said, “If you’re short, right now I can help you out.” And I said, “No, no problem,” and I was desperate, but don’t let them know it, you know? So that’s where it started. I look at the work now and I think, “What was I thinking?” The title was Brain Boy and I did several issues of that. Gil Kane had done the first issue, which I found out later on. It was issue #2 that I worked on and I did stuff for Dell from 1961 until about 1967. Six years, I guess. I did all sorts of titles for them and I enjoyed it very much. They didn’t pay a lot, but I was glad to get the work. I had a lot of fun there.

Stroud: Well, if nothing else I’m sure it was an excellent training ground for some of your future efforts.

Springer: Yeah, well, we learn or we’re supposed to learn as we go along in this business. And that really led to everything else. I guess I started with DC and Marvel in the late 60’s. 1967 or 1968. Maybe a little bit earlier. By 1967 Dell was just about closing up shop. Too bad. I did some movie adaptations for Dell and they were a lot of fun. You got a whole bunch of 8 x 10 glossy photographs from the particular movie you were supposed to do and it was just great reference for likenesses and the horses and the castles and the costumes and so on. It was a lot of fun. I wish it had paid more, but it was fun.

The Raven (1963) #1, interior art was done by Frank Springer.

Stroud: It sounds like it. Do you remember which titles you did?

Springer: I did “The War Wagon” with Kirk Douglas and John Wayne and a cast of thousands. “Cheyenne Autumn” with Richard Widmark and Edward G. Robinson and Victor Jory and a cast of thousands. I also did “The Raven,” a movie with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff and the wife of Don Taylor. He’d played in “Battleground,” and he was the groom in “Father of the Bride” with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. Anyway, he was married to this gal who had a huge set of boobs and she was fun to draw. (Mutual laughter.) As a matter of fact, Ann Taylor Fleming, who was a TV commentator and so on; I believe she’s the daughter of Don Taylor. Anyway, that was one of the movies. There were a number of others. “Twice Told Tales.” A lot of these movies employed actors who were on the way down. I think it was Harvey Korman who was doing a lot of these horror movies in the 60’s and as a matter of fact one of the actors in “The Raven” was Jack Nicholson.

Stroud: Oh, really?

Springer: Yeah. He looked like he was about 15. And he had almost nothing to say. He was just there.

Stroud: Stood there brooding, huh?

Springer: Yeah. It came out in ’63, I believe and Nicholson is 70 now, so he was born in about 1937 or so, so he was about 25 or so when they made that movie. So I drew Jack Nicholson when nobody knew who the hell he was.

Stroud: (Laughter.) That’s a great anecdote.

Springer: At that time Grove Press got in touch with me. I did a couple of ads for the magazine “Evergreen Review” that Michael O’Donoghue wrote and I illustrated and that was before we had met. We finally met each other in an elevator one time at the offices of Grove Press in downtown New York and right about that time started “The Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist,” which he wrote and I illustrated. That began around ’65, I think or ’66 and then later they put it into a book in the spring of ’68. Michael eventually moved on to the staff of National Lampoon in the early 70’s and through that connection I did a bunch of stuff for them in the 70’s and 80’s.

Phoebe Zeit-Geist softcover, art by Frank Springer.

Stroud: So, he was obviously impressed with your work.

Springer: Well, we got along well. We were totally different. He was sort of a beatnik. A disheveled looking writer. Huge talent. I mean the guy just had enormous talent. He had a beard and dressed in dungarees in the city, which was really avant garde, while I always showed up in a shirt and tie and a suit.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Both ends of the spectrum.

Springer: We were just 10 years apart and came from different backgrounds. He was divorced and by that time I think I’d been married about 10 years, but we got along very well and turned out, I think, some pretty terrific stuff. Because of his writing I had a great interest in illustrating that stuff.

Stroud: Legend has it that his scripts were extremely detailed. Did that make it easier or more difficult for your job?

Springer: No, easier. I think the more detailed the thing is, the better. That reminds me. When he first started writing so-called continuity I talked to him and I said, “You know, you don’t have to say such and such. We can show they’re at the airport, so you don’t have to say, ‘They’re at the airport.’ You don’t have to say such and such because I show that in the picture.” And he caught on immediately. And from then on it was though he’d written continuity for years and our relationship was such that I could say, “Look, instead of saying this, why don’t we say such and such.” In other words, he didn’t have the huge ego to dismiss any suggestions and so on. In the mean time he told me how he wanted this pictured and how he wanted that pictured. It was a good relationship as opposed to just having a writer that is on the west coast and you just get a script and do what they say.

An interior page from Phoebe Zeit-Geist.

Stroud: So you had a much more collaborative relationship and it sounds like it was extremely successful, too, judging if nothing else just by the results.

Springer: Well, I thought so and I think he thought so, too. We got along well.

Stroud: I’m far from an expert on Mr. O’Donoghue, but it sounds like he was a little on the eccentric side and perhaps not the easiest guy to work with.

Springer: Well, he had a temper, but then so do I. I never really…I mean some people got on the outs with him and that was that. I guess he’d never talk to them again. But I must say that never happened with us. We had our differences, but it never got personal and it never affected anything else. It never went anywhere.

Stroud: Marvelous. Nothing insurmountable, obviously.

Springer: No, no and Michael may have looked like a beatnik, but he was in favor of making money and he did later on. He did movie scripts and he did very well and I think politically we got closer together in the end. I don’t want to characterize his political beliefs, but I think as he got more successful I think he moved more toward the center.

Stroud: Moderated a little bit. Some of us mature despite ourselves. (Chuckle.)

Springer: There’s nothing like a big fat paycheck and to see the taxes they take out to say, “Gee, I’ve been in favor of Socialism and here we are, already.” Actually, that’s how P.J. O’Rourke put it. The first time he got a job and a decent salary and then realized what they were taking out his salary. P.J. was one of the writers on the Lampoon at that time. They had some great ones. Doug Kinney, who was killed in a hiking accident in Hawaii. Henry Beard, who was a very funny guy and one of the founders of National Lampoon along with Doug Kinney. Brian McConnachie, who was just terrific. I did “Attack of the Sizeable Beasts,” with Brian. They were big squirrels. Not giant squirrels, but rather big squirrels. (Mutual laughter.) God, he was fun. Terrific. I understand he’s been in a couple of Woody Allen movies.

Stroud: I didn’t realize that.

Springer: I didn’t know that either. I talked to somebody recently who said he was in a couple of his movies.

Stroud: It sounds like you’re dispelling something I was told. I was told by someone that back in the day that National Lampoon was not a happy place to work, but it sounds like your freelance career there was doing just fine.

Springer: No, the other way around, I think. The guys there were, I guess 10 years younger than I was and maybe more than that. By this time, in the 60’s I was in my 30’s, and a lot of those guys were in their 20’s. Not much of a difference, but I’d already been married and had kids and was an ordinary guy living in the suburbs and everything else and here these guys were, most of them single and that 10 or 12 years or so I guess made a difference as to your attitude on things and so on. It was the 60’s rather than the 40’s or 50’s where I grew up. That was the difference. But, as a freelancer you show up there on a Tuesday and talk about the script and what you have to do and when you have to do it and so on and chat with these guys and then leave. So I don’t know what went on there hour by hour and day by day. The impression that I got was that it was fine.

It's Jackie Drake! from the National Lampoon (Oct. 1984) - by Frank Springer & Ron Hauge.

Stroud: Okay.

Springer: Different from the impression I got some other spots, but…

Stroud: I was gonna say, I think you’ve just about covered the gamut as far as the various publishing houses and so forth. You mentioned Dell and I understand you did work for Gold Key and Marvel and DC. Was any particular company a better fit for you?

Springer: I liked Marvel. Marvel seemed looser than DC. A more fun outfit. I had the impression that DC was kind of like there was some kind of intrigue under the surface which nobody dared to speak of. I got that impression. I may be totally wrong. So it seemed. People were afraid to speak out or something. Marvel was more of a looser, “What the hell? Hey, let’s try this,” attitude.

Stroud: Throw it up on the wall and see if it sticks.

Springer: Yeah, and I think that DC was trying to do what Marvel did, whereas Marvel did what it felt like doing. Marvel at that time was Stan Lee. If Stan Lee thought it was a good idea to do such and such then that was a good idea. So I think that Marvel seemed to set the pace at that time. This was in the 60’s and 70’s. I don’t know about now. Do you think that’s the case?

Stroud: I don’t keep up a whole lot with the modern titles, but those that I’ve spoken to tell me that the pendulum swings back and forth and once again many are predicting the death of the medium and who knows? I’m hopelessly locked in a time warp as far as my interests, quite obviously. It’s interesting. When I was talking to Gaspar Saladino a few months ago…

Springer: Oh, Gaspar. Good man.

Stroud: Oh, isn’t he? Wonderful guy.

Springer: Oh, fabulous.

Stroud: He was saying that Marvel was whipping DC currently, but I’m not sure what he based that on exactly.

Springer: Well, you know I had the impression at that time that DC was larger than Marvel, but it was the other way around. Marvel was selling more than DC by quite a margin.

Stroud: I didn’t realize that.

Springer: I’m talking about the late 60’s and through the 70’s and into the 80’s. In the mean time I hooked onto doing freelance for the Daily News in their editorial, doing editorial cartoons.

"Let's Get To Volume Two" - an editorial cartoon for Saturday July 3, 1971. Drawn by Frank Springer.

Stroud: How was that?

Springer: That was great. I would show up on Fridays and look through the wire copy and look through the newspapers to try to anticipate what the editor would choose as a topic for the cartoon for the next day; Saturday, in my case. Then we’d go into the editorial conference where the editorial writer would give his ideas and the editor would say, “Well, let’s lead with Mayor Lindsey’s latest such and such.” Mayor Lindsey was the mayor at the time. The Tower of Jelly. (Mutual laughter.) And then we’ll go with such and such and then we’ll wind up with the opening of the baseball season, a paragraph there pointing out that the Daily News has the best sports coverage of any paper not only in the city, but in the nation. Something like that. Meanwhile, I and the other editorial artists would be sketching away on various things relating to what these guys were talking about. And we’d submit them and the other freelancer was there to do Monday’s cartoon, which was not based on current news. You know, because who knows what’s going to happen in two days? It was more of a generic kind of thing. Mine was more of a current kind of thing. And you’d get your idea OK’d and we’d go into the bullpen section of that floor and do the cartoon and go back to the editor, get it OK’d and take off.

Stroud: Nice. Not a bad gig at all.

Springer: And of course, get a check. I enjoyed that. I did it for about 5 years. I did some sports cartoons also at that time. Something that I had thought when I was younger to be a great thing to do for a living. But two things happened. Number one, there are almost no sports cartoonist’s anymore and number two there are some sports that I just had no interest in at all and you would have to cover those and try to feign interest in something you couldn’t care less about. Hockey and basketball come to mind. They’re great sports, but it’s not something that I was ever remotely interested in. As far as I’m concerned, I’m dormant until the baseball season opens in the spring. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: You and my grandfather would have been famous friends. He absolutely adored baseball and used to take me to the farm league games when I was a kid. I see where you were a special guest at the Boston Comic Convention this last July. How was that?

Springer: That was fine. I sold some stuff, did some sketches. It was fun.

Stroud: Do you do many conventions or was that a rarity?

Springer: Well, I was a guest out in San Diego about 4 years ago in 2004. That was a lot of fun. What a zoo! Holy mackerel, that huge building and they had a hundred and some odd thousand people come there that weekend, so you could barely move.

Stroud: Yeah, Jim Mooney was telling me he used to go to that and he said it was a ball, but you had to plan going to the bathroom. (Chuckle.) According to my notes they gave you an Inkpot that year.

Springer: Yes. That’s right. You got an Inkpot Award for showing up.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Springer: I was very happy to be there and it doesn’t happen very often, but when you’re asked to talk about yourself; well that’s a subject you know everything about.

Stroud: Yeah. The undisputed master.

Springer: So, how tough is that? If I had to get up in front of people and talk about just anything in general then that would be something else again. As a matter of fact, I recently got some publicity up here. You know when the Spider-Man movie came out?

Stroud: Yeah.

Springer: I don’t know how they got my name, but anyway I’m probably the only guy in Maine who ever touched Spider-Man. They suddenly realized, “Gee, we’ve got a guy who lives in Maine who actually drew Spider-Man on occasion.” So the local newspaper and the local TV and so on came out. It was a lot of fun.

Transformers (1984) #32, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: Oh, I bet. Has there been any similar interest since the Transformers movie came out?

Springer: No.

Stroud: Okay, that’s not as well known that you worked on that.

Springer: No, and I hated that.

Stroud: Really?

Springer: Yeah. Because, well, I thought that I could draw girls pretty good. I was pretty good at humans and these weren’t humans, and they certainly weren’t females, and you just went crazy when you’re drawing these things as to what kind of feet this one had as opposed to what kind of feet that one had. What kind of a design this one had on the top of his head and so on. I did a bunch of issues…and it shows you what we do for money.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Springer: Just about anything is the answer. (Chuckle.) But I thought, “This is stupid. I can draw people and they’ve got me on this thing. Why not get people who are weak on people to draw these machines?” You know some guys can draw cars and trains much better than they can draw people. Put them on it. But they didn’t. I wasn’t running the show, they were.

Stroud: That sounds similar to what Carmine Infantino told me about doing Star Wars. It about drove him crazy. He said, “R2-D2; I never want to see that again.”

Springer: I didn’t even like the [Star Wars] movie. For one thing the hero; the guy flying that machine. He sort of had that turned up nose, I’m pushing my nose up, so it kind of looked like rabbit teeth, just that kind of a face and the gal that he was rescuing should have been a really good looking gal instead of…Princess Leia, was that Eddie Fischer’s daughter?

Stroud: Yes.

Springer: Well, get some gal that really looks good, okay? I mean, her mother’s a doll. I loved Debbie Reynolds, but the daughter I think had too much of Fischer in her and not enough of Reynolds. Not the kind of movie that I liked, although you know I inked some Star Wars issues, I think. I say, “I think,” because at this point I’ve forgotten half of the things I’ve done. I mean they just slip my mind. So many comics.

Stroud: Well, yeah, you’ve got a huge body of work and it looks like you did horror titles and adventure and jungle and war and…

Springer: I know.

Stroud: Was any format preferable for you?

Springer: I liked doing few pages for a lot of money as opposed to a lot of pages for a little money.

Star Wars Weekly (UK - 1978) #49, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Springer: I ended up doing a feature for Sports Illustrated for Kids where I was doing at minimum two pages, and maximum four or five pages per month for a really hefty per page rate. And I enjoyed that and again the writer and I had a very good relationship. I could call him up and say, “Why not do it this way instead of that way?” And they were a good group to work for and of course they made money and they paid a lot.

Stroud: That wouldn’t be hard to take at all.

Springer: I was never a speed demon at this stuff. So, the more money you got per page the better off you were. Some guys were phenomenal in their speed.

Stroud: Yeah, Al Plastino, of course, used to work with your successor on Secret Six, Jack Sparling and he said he was just incredibly fast and said it kind of influenced his speed a little bit.

Springer: Jack Sparling was one of the guys I met while doing stuff for Dell. He was doing stuff for Dell then also. And when we started at Dell I was doing the comic pages on one half of a Strathmore sheet. You know, they were huge. I think the Strathmore sheet was 29" by 27" or something like that and I’d cut one of them in half. It was a gigantic page. And at one point Jack Sparling said, “No, I do mine 9 inches wide.” Just up a third. You know ordinary comic book art is 6 inches wide in printed form. He did it 9 inches wide. Just tiny. And you can cover a page in a much shorter time. So that was one of his secrets of speed. So I started doing that and my work was sort of sloppy and so on because you’re trying to rip through the thing and everything, but it got by, I guess. But it’s not really the way to do it. You really shouldn’t do something just to get by; you should do the best you can no matter what you’re being paid.

Stroud: Sure. Your style is quite a bit more illustrative in many cases; do you think that had any kind of effect on the assignments you received?

Springer: I hope so, but it didn’t have any effect on the Transformers. The way comics used to work I think was this way: If the pencils were lousy they’d give it to a real good inker figuring that he could draw with his pen and fix up the crummy pencils, or if the pencils were great, they’d give it to some lousy inker, figuring, “How bad could this guy screw up these terrific pencils?” So, it was always this not great, but just good enough to get by kind of an attitude, I thought. But that’s the nature of the business. In commercial art, you were always turning out work that was perhaps 85% or 90% of what you could do if you had more time, and if that drives you crazy, then don’t go into commercial art.

Stroud: You’re in the wrong business.

Springer: Yeah, and the key is, of course, if your 85% is better than the other guy’s 85%, well you’re okay. If it’s lousier than the other guy, well, you’re not going to get the assignment. But you’re always churning out work that was a little short. And this would go for Saturday Evening Post covers or anything. All this stuff is churned out under deadline, and so you’re never, or you’re rarely turning out anything that’s absolutely perfect. And if that drives you crazy then get out of the business. I read N.C. Wyeth’s biography a couple of years ago. It’s a great one, by the way, written by a guy named Michaelis, the one that wrote the new one on Charlie Schulz. Anyway, N.C. Wyeth was always unhappy that he was “just an illustrator.” He featured himself as a fine artist. And the thing was, his fine art…it was just beautiful paintings, but it was kind of dull. Well, a farmer leaning against the post; a guy with a scythe; somebody else pitching hay. I mean big deal. Whereas his illustrations were exciting. You know, these cutthroat pirates marching across the sand with shovels and muskets and sabers with mean looks on their faces. Guys that you wouldn’t want to meet in a million years in any situation. That was great stuff, to me anyway.

Dazzler (1981) #10, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: Well, sure, there’s a dynamism in that which would be missing from what you described before.

Springer: Yeah. But he was unhappy doing illustration and he was probably one of the greatest illustrators that ever lived. Of course, Norman Rockwell was more or less satisfied with his career and his painting although he suffered from depression as did N.C. Wyeth. But Rockwell was more on an even keel I think and figured, “Hey, this is a good life,’ being probably the greatest commercial artist that ever lived.

Stroud: You penciled and inked a lot of your own work. Was that a conscious choice or just the luck of the draw?

Springer: Yeah, the luck of the draw, I guess. The stuff at National Lampoon was more individual because you were a freestanding feature rather than issue #500 in a Superman book. All those I penciled and inked and the Sports Illustrated for Kids I penciled and inked and all of these ones for magazines other than comic books I penciled and inked. And I penciled and inked all that stuff at Dell. I wouldn’t want to go look at them with a fine-toothed comb right now. I think I’m better than that right now. At Marvel and DC mostly, it was a case of, “You know we’ve got these pencils that have to be inked. “Call Frank” or “We’ve got this story to be penciled. Call Frank.” I think that was just the case. It was just a case of it was my turn, I guess.

Stroud: Sure. Probably glad to have it, too.

Springer: Yeah. It was good to have a stack of well-penciled sheets to work on. Sometimes it saved me from having to go to a file every few minutes to find out what a locomotive looks like or an airplane or something like that. I think it was tougher to pencil than to ink, but I enjoyed both. I think one advantage of doing one or the other on occasion is that once I’d penciled a 22-page book, I was tired of it and I was glad that somebody else was going to ink it. I wouldn’t want to go back and take the same ground again. So it was better. Whereas with an individual feature, a stand-alone feature, I wanted to see the whole thing to its conclusion because that was my stuff, not somebody else’s characters not somebody else’s creation. It was totally mine. At any rate, I was lucky. I didn’t starve, raised the kids, paid for the house.

Stroud: You can’t ask a whole lot more.

Springer: No.

Stroud: You were commenting that Marvel was a little bit more enjoyable to work for. Was the Marvel Method part of the calculus there, or did that make much difference?

Springer: Yeah, I think so. I think writers, with the huge exception of Michael O’Donoghue, writers writing continuity kind of get carried away sometimes with things. They’re not thinking visually, whereas with Marvel where you got an outline of the story; just a synopsis, it was tougher to go through and thumbnail the thing and decide what gets emphasis and just how you would do this and so on. The finished product was done by somebody who was visually oriented and knew how to emphasize this and minimize that in the course of telling the story rather than, “In this panel, this guy says this and then that guy says that. Second panel, such and such.” So, I think you’re better off having the artist decide just how the story should be featured. Just like doing the movie, a director will decide just how to shoot this scene that the writer has written. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve heard that on a movie set, where they’re filming a movie, the last guy they want there is the guy who wrote the story in the first place. (Chuckle.) They want to do what they feel like doing and they don’t want him hanging over there saying, “Hey, that’s not what this guy should say.” “Hey, get lost, buddy. We bought the script. You got your money, now take off.”

Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1968) #8, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: Yeah. It’s my interpretation now.

Springer: Yeah. And a good director should know how to picture the scene and how to set the scene and the mood and the lighting and all of that. Well, that’s what the artist does in comics. It’s the same as acting. In fact, I got into amateur theatrics down on Long Island when we lived there for many years in the 70’s and did that for 18 or 20 years. Sing, dance, act and it is exactly like cartooning. The same thing. You are given a line to say and it’s up to you and the director to dope out what kind of body language and expression to use when delivering that line and that’s just exactly what you’re doing when you’re sitting at a drawing board deciding what kind of body language this guy would use in talking to this girl and what kind of body language she would use and what kind of expression and so on.

Stroud: That is a very exact parallel. I’d never considered that.

Springer: I didn’t consider it either until the first time I got on stage with one line to say and realized how many ways that you could deliver that line and just how to turn your body and how to milk it, in effect. (Mutual laughter.) Who was that, was that Frank? I don’t know, I couldn’t tell. He was on for such a short time. Anyway, one thing is that when you’re on stage, you can’t erase.

Stroud: No, you’re committed.

Springer: You’re live and there’s an audience out there and there are always screw-ups in the play and you have to get through that some way without the entire play falling apart, whereas on the drawing board you can say, “Well, that’s not the right expression or that leg is too long. I can fix that.” You’re sunk when you forget…there was a time I forgot the name of the other actor I was supposed to be talking to. I mean his stage name, and I knew I couldn’t call him Bob. That would be stupid. What the hell? You get these blocks. I don’t think the audience knew. I got through it okay and then backstage this guy says, “What the hell happened to you, Frank?” I said, “Hey, I forgot your name.” (Chuckle.) Judd Fry in Oklahoma!, and I was supposed to go across and say, “Hey, Judd, look at this.” It was about a one-minute crossover there and I could not think of the name Judd and I just knew I couldn’t call him Bob. (Mutual laughter.) Anyway, we had fun.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. When you were at DC in particular did you have a favorite scripter? Someone who could give you that visual?

Springer: At DC? You know I can’t think of anything. I did several titles there, but none of them very memorable I don’t think.

Stroud: Okay, then Marvel perhaps?

Springer: At Marvel I liked Nick Fury, because when I drew him he didn’t wear a costume or anything. He was just a guy in a pair of slacks and a dress shirt, open at the collar with the sleeves rolled up of course, and I liked that better than some guy in some fancy uniform with all sorts of dopey pockets. So I enjoyed Nick Fury and what else did I do for Marvel? The Avengers and some other related things that Frank Robbins penciled. I inked that series and that was a lot of fun. Frank Robbins was just a fabulous artist and his pencils were just terrific. Everything’s there and I just loved jumping into that. I think that was the favorite thing I did for Marvel. Perhaps the easiest.

Stroud: So, his pencils were very tight then, huh?

Springer: Yeah. And black - I mean like he used a 9B pencil. But everything was there. All the shadows. All the muscles. All the fingers and toes and so on. It was really good.

Stroud: You only did the first two issues, I believe, on Secret Six. Were you in transition at that time or do you remember why you left that project?

Springer: I don’t remember. I wouldn’t have known that I did just two. I really don’t recall.

Stroud: Well, the whole series only went seven issues, but you did something really unusual, at least for the time, maybe they’ve done it since then, on issue #1 where the cover was actually the first page of the story.

The Secret Six (1968) #1, cover by Frank Springer.

Springer: That’s right.

Stroud: So, in essence it was the splash as well. Was that your idea?

Springer: That was their idea. They actually got the idea from an illustration I did. I guess it was actually the cover of Phoebe Zeitgeist where they had the car crashing over a cliff or something and they liked that idea, so they asked me to incorporate that into the thing, but the idea of putting the splash on the cover, that was their idea and I guess that was good. I guess I got paid for the cover when we got more money than for the inside of the books.

Stroud: Exactly, and I know you did some covers in addition to interiors. Did you have a preference?

Springer: I did some covers on Nick Fury and I did some covers on The Dazzler and I did a number of covers for Dell on Ghost Story. Oh, boy what a weird job, but you know it was all drawing and I loved that. It was great. I look back on that and as flawed as the drawing was back then and everything else, I look back on that as a fun time in my life even though we were worried about bills, we had little kids and expenses and everything else and all the things that go with being a young guy with a lot of responsibility and everything else like that I guess you look back on those times when you were younger as great times.

Stroud: Yeah, just struggling through and making it.

Springer: Yeah. That’s right. Times long ago seem like simpler times, although at that time you don’t think they’re simpler, you thought the times earlier were simpler.

Stroud: Yeah, exactly true. The lens of nostalgia, I guess.

Springer: That’s right. Gasoline then was .28 or .30 a gallon in the 50’s and 60’s.

Stroud: Is it true that you worked at Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios for awhile?

Springer: Yeah. I did some work there. I forget what it was. It was very little work there. I did work on Space Ghost. That was a Saturday morning cartoon in the 60’s. That was for Hanna-Barbera. They sent us the thumbnail for the continuity and on animation boards we did the key action. It wasn’t real animation, but it was the key drawings, like drawings 1, 5, 7, 15, 20 and then somebody would do the in-between stuff out on the west coast. Bill Lignante and I did Space Ghost. We turned out I think one six-minute adventure in a week and three other guys working at Bill’s house actually at that time, that summer, did “Dino Boy,” which was a caveman thing and it involved more characters, so as things fell into place those three guys turned out that adventure in a week and Bill and I did a Space Ghost adventure in a week. Next week you’d get another set of thumbnails and another set of thumbnails and so on and it lasted all summer in either ’65 or ’66. I’ve forgotten. It was part time stuff, but that was enjoyable. It was a different phase of cartooning.

Stroud: Yeah, that had to be a breath of fresh air or a change of pace, whatever you care to call it.

Springer: Yeah. And you know who sent us the model drawings or who did the model drawings sent from Hanna-Barbera? It was Alex Toth.

Stroud: Oh, that’s right.

Springer: He did the model drawings and it was just…what a sensational artist. Those beautiful lines! The Space Ghost character was about 6’5” with shoulders like condor wings and there were two teenagers, a gal and a guy in this thing, and a monkey and a giant insect that looked like a Praying Mantis. That was another character in the thing. The name might have been Zorack or something. I’ve got some Xeroxes of the model drawings. They’re great.

House of Mystery (1951) #172, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: I’d forgotten Alex had done that work. He did quite a bit of animation there for awhile out west, I think.

Springer: I think he did mostly the character design. I don’t know how much actual animation he did. He might have done what we did, I suppose, the key drawings. He was too good to do the day to day animation. I think he probably did the key drawings.

Stroud: I read where you’ve been heavily involved in the National Cartoonists Society for years and years. You’ve obviously enjoyed that.

Springer: Oh, yes. We’re professional and fraternal and that’s it. In the early days we would meet once a month in New York and drink and eat and have fun and swap stories and so on. Incidentally, we’d learn about what’s going on in the business and who needs what help and so on. I joined in the spring of ’65, so that’s 43 years this spring.

Stroud: That’s a good long association.

Springer: A lot of fun. You know Jack Sparling, who was a member, took me to the first N.C.S. meeting and I guess that would have been in ’63 and - God - there was Milton Caniff and Bob Dunn and all the great idols from my childhood there. It was tremendous.

Stroud: Oh, it had to be wonderful. Did you interact with Jerry Robinson?

Springer: Oh yes, yes. Jerry’s still around. I saw him last year and I’ll see him this year I guess when we get together for our yearly bash. A lot of the old-timers are gone now. I just got a newsletter the other day and I learned that Red Wexler passed away. He was a terrific illustrator. He was 85 or so and he did comics, he did illustration, he did just about everything. In fact, he did a soccer column. He illustrated a soccer column which I guess he quit at one point and I continued the thing for about two years after that, so I can say I followed Red Wexler. I had a lot of fun with that. That’s one of the sports I don’t care about at all, and argued for not doing it, but they convinced me to do it. I said, “I don’t like soccer.” They said, “We don’t care.” I said, “I think it’s the dullest thing.” They said, “We don’t care about that, we just want you.” I would get the scrap, good scrap photographs from which I would do the illustration on the column. I lettered it myself. They’d send me the type; the script and it was just a lot of fun. Penciling in these figures and then inking them and turning it out, it was great. I guess I did a week at a time. One day a week, something like that. No, I did a month at a time. It was three or four a week, so they’d send me about 12 or 15 things at once and I would turn that batch out in maybe a day or two and then turn it around. A lot of fun. Bodies in action, again. The sport was stupid, but I had the photographs of these bodies in action and I got to draw the bodies in action.

Stroud: Wonderful. I see where you contributed to “How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains.” What was that like?

Springer: It was fun. I got paid for it. It was a little difficult in that I had to think about “How would I do this?” How would I show somebody else how I would do this? But it was a one-shot thing. Along that line I would enjoy teaching figure drawing or something like that if it were something where I was nearby and it didn’t take too much time.

Stroud: Yeah, I was gonna say you’re out of the commuting area of most of the art schools.

Springer: Yeah, that’s right, but all those teachers that you had, some of those thoughts are still rattling around in your head as you draw. “Get those planes in there, Francis, get those planes in there.” (Chuckle.) Those ideas, the good ones, don’t leave you or shouldn’t leave you. You still refer to them.

Stroud: Absolutely. It seems like I saw where you were on a roster for the Berndt Toast Gang. Do you still do anything with them?

Springer: Yes, well I’m still a member there even though I’m up here in Maine. I’m still on their roster. In fact, we have this house for sale. We intend to move back to Long Island at some point when this place sells. I hope it will be this spring and then I’ll be able to go to their meetings every week and be back in the swing of things. I miss hob-nobbing with artists every once in awhile.

Black Lightning (1972) #2. Pencils by Rich Buckler, inks by Frank Springer.

Stroud: It seems like it’s a very well organized and dynamic organization. Joe Giella was telling me he never misses a luncheon if he can help it.

Springer: The thing is there are so many artists on Long Island and they’re so concentrated that it’s not difficult to get to the luncheons. You know that began really with that Space Ghost stuff. The five of us that worked on that back in ’63, ’64, ’65, the five of us who worked on Space Ghost would go out to lunch. Then when the Space Ghost stuff ended, every once in awhile we’d call each other up and say, “You know, it’s been awhile since we’ve been out to lunch,” and we would go to lunch and then a sixth guy or a seventh guy would show up and that really began the Berndt Toast.

Stroud: So you’re actually a founder.

Springer: Yeah, and one of the guys that would show up was Walter Berndt who did Smitty, that feature, for 50-some years. He was still doing it at that time and eventually instead of five or six or seven, it would be twelve or fourteen and then even more than that. Walter Berndt died in 1981, I think and we went to his wake, went to his funeral and came back to our usual meeting place, this restaurant in Huntington and somebody said, “Well, you know, we ought to drink a toast to Walter every meeting from now on and I think it was Creig Flessel that said, “Ah, Berndt Toast.” Ba-boomp-boomp. So we’ve been the Berndt Toast Gang ever since. It’s one of the most active chapters in the Cartoonist’s Society. But there’s no format. Bill Kresse plays the harmonica sometimes and Al Skaduto - the late Al Skaduto, who did “They’ll Do It Every Time,” died just recently, a great talent - he would sing a song, but like most of these things, it’s more of a free-wheeling kind of thing.

Stroud: Well, when you get creative types together that’s what you get.

Springer: Yeah. A lot of fun.

Stroud: We were talking a little about lettering earlier and of course with the readily available fonts on computer software and so forth that work seems to be drying up somewhat.

Springer: That’s right. Well that’s what Gaspar told me the last time I talked to him, which was not long ago. This past year at some point. “Nah, I’m retired. Nah, to hell with it.” He was great. He did the lettering for me on “The Virtue of Vera Valiant,” the strip I did with Stan Lee for a year and he’s terrific. What a swell guy.

Stroud: One of the very best. I loved getting acquainted with him.

Springer: He’s great. At one point we presented Mort Walker with the Golden T-Square. We have a Silver T-Square award for outstanding service to the Cartoonist’s Society. It’s not something you’re paid for. It’s not something you’re elected to. It’s just doing a lot of work for the Society. We have a silver T-square, but in this case we awarded him with a golden T-square and it had a commemorative sentence on it. Something about for outstanding service and commitment and love and so on for the National Cartoonists Society and I called up Gaspar. I said, “Gaspar, I want you to letter this. You’re the guy that can letter this so the people at the foundry can etch it into the T-square.” “Nah, I don’t want to do that. You do it.” I said, “Look, charge the Society for it.” “Nah, I’m not going to do that.” Anyway, he did the line and he did not send a bill and so the golden T-square that Mort has hanging in his studio has the lettering on it of Gaspar Saladino.

Dazzler (1981) #22, cover by Frank Springer.

Stroud: Oh, fantastic.

Springer: Of course, there was Ben Oda years ago.

Stroud: Yeah, Gaspar told me in his typical unpretentious way that Ben Oda was the real genius.

Springer: Ben Oda lettered Phoebe Zeitgeist. He lettered the whole thing.

Stroud: There was plenty to do, too.

Springer: Yeah, and he lettered for everybody. He lettered for George Wunder when I worked on Terry and the Pirates. He would show up with this portfolio that weighed a ton. It was this huge portfolio just jammed with strips and he worked for Stan Drake, he worked for Leonard Starr, he worked for Hal Foster, he worked for George Wunder, he worked for Milton Caniff, he worked for this, he worked for that…

Stroud: Wow, he really ran the gamut.

Springer: He was in the studios of all these people and we thought if Ben ever wrote a book about what he saw in some of these studios, everybody would have to leave town. (Mutual laughter.) He was just terrific. A World War II veteran. He saw combat in Italy with the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans unit there while his family was interred in Wyoming.

Stroud: Oh, goodness. And another one that was taken from us too soon.

Springer: Yeah, a great guy.

Stroud: I understand you’re still doing commission work these days, Frank.

Springer: I did one recently, yeah. It was a cover format. I did the pencils and Joe Rubinstein did the inks.

The Invaders (1975) #13, interior page #1. Pencils by Frank Robbins, inks by Frank Springer.

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1976) #24, cover by Frank Springer.

February 21, 2018

An Interview With Russ Heath - Drawing Men of War, From Toy Soldiers to Easy Company

February 21, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Russ Heath signing for the Hero Initiative in 2017.

Russell "Russ" Heath, Jr. (born September 29, 1926) is an American artist best known for his comic book work, particularly his war stories for DC Comics and his 1960s art for Playboy magazine's "Little Annie Fanny" feature. He has also produced commercial art, two pieces of which (depicting Roman and Revolutionary War battle scenes for toy soldier sets) became familiar pieces of Americana after gracing the back covers of countless comic books from the early 1960s to early 1970s.

Heath's drawings of fighter jets from DC Comics' All-American Men of War (1952) #89 were used by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein in his oil paintings Blam and Brattata.

Mr. Heath was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2009.

It was a privilege to spend time interviewing Russ Heath, one of the true greats of the medium. His superlative work on the war books alone assures him a place in comic book history and how many of those of us of a particular generation saw his Roman Soldiers artwork on the back cover of many a book? I'm glad Russ is still with us.

This interview originally took place over the phone on December 31, 2007.

From the cover of Comic Art News and Reviews (Oct. 1973) — From the cover of **Comic Art News and Reviews** (Oct. 1973)

Bryan Stroud: According to some of the research I did it looks like you began your art career at the tender age of 16. Does that sound about right?

Russ Heath: Yes.

Stroud: What were you doing then?

Heath: Going to high school.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Heath: It was during a summer vacation my father said I should be doing something. He arranged an appointment. From his commuting he knew some people at Holyoke publishing house, so I went over there and they gave me an assignment. I did it and then they gave me another one. Then I went back to school for the winter and the next summer I did it again, etc., etc.

Stroud: Okay. You got the ball rolling pretty quickly.

Heath: Yes. I must say that comics in those days were much cruder.

Stroud: Yeah, a very simplistic styling at the time. They didn’t get very illustrative until many years later, I guess.

Heath: Yeah. Well, if you remember the original Superman, that first issue, it was very sketchy stuff.

Stroud: Absolutely and of course people were just creating the medium at the time. Not very sophisticated.

Heath: Right. Well, a lot of them weren’t artists. They may have started in the rag business in a brownstone. To make a little more money, for about six grand you could put out your own comic book so a lot of them started drawing themselves in their off time and they weren’t even in the business. So it was some pretty radical stuff and they might take them home and have their kids color them. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Well, it’s a uniquely American creation and it’s interesting how far it’s gone from there. It’s funny to imagine that Superman’s going to be 70 years old next year.

Heath: Hmm. Well, I’ve got him beat.

Jungle Tales (1954) #5, cover by Russ Heath.

Spellbound (1952) #3, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: (Laughter.) And good for you. You’re probably best known for your work on the war and adventure titles, but you’ve done quite a bit more, I see: Mystery, western, jungle tales, horror, romance…

Heath: I’ve done it all.

Stroud: MAD magazine, National Lampoon…

Heath: Right.

Stroud: And even a little bit with Batman and Mr. Miracle, so you even got into the superhero titles a little.

Batman: Legends Of The Dark Knight (1989) #47, cover by Russ Heath.

Heath: Right, right. The Batman stuff I think I failed at. It was called “Legends of the Dark Knight.” I did about 5 books, but what I didn’t get, because I’d never done superheroes and so on…not that he’s a superhero, but he’s a costumed hero, and I’m so much of a realist that… You’ve got to get the mood, the intent of the original to make Batman have character. When I drew him, he looks like somebody standing there ready to go to a costume party. You know what I mean? He hasn’t THE BATMAN FLAVOR! Missing that flavor, I think it kind of fell on its face. Then I had some bad coloring as well, which didn’t help.

Stroud: You’ve got no control over that.

Heath: Very little. Now and then I did, but they didn’t want me to because they want me to do another story.

Stroud: How do you think it is that you became the war and adventure guy first and foremost along with Joe Kubert?

Heath: Well, there weren’t a lot of war comics out. It began to get into the era of Vietnam and there was a huge anti-war movement. I’ve had kids…I went to show some kids my books and they’d draw back. What’s the matter?” They’d say, “I don’t want to touch a war book.” “I’m trying to show you the artwork, not the content.” But that’s the way it was. So, you’d go in and give them your story and they’d give you a check and they give you another story. And as long as they keep giving you the same thing that’s probably where you go unless you express a desire to do something else. One of the things that I liked was Westerns. My father was a cowboy for awhile and that was very appealing to me as a little kid. All the kids used to play cowboys and Indians. But I felt my father was a little bit sissified because he’d never killed an Indian.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Heath: Nevertheless, one of the things that’s nice about Westerns or war or scuba, the stuff underwater, is that there’s no straight lines. I think the very worst has got to be Batman in the city with all the windows that have to be ruled. In the west they hacked everything out with axes so the lines shouldn’t be straight. From their lumber to…how do you draw rubble wrong? And underwater you can fade it away in the background and all the better for it.

Stroud: I never thought of that. That does give you all kinds of options that somebody doing a cityscape can’t enjoy.

Heath: I’ve looked at some of the stuff that Alex Ross does and I figure, “My God, he must have a team of helpers.” He must work 90 hours a week and I understand that’s pretty close to it. He must photograph everything. There’s nothing he draws without photographing it, and that in itself is tremendously time consuming, but I was glad to see somebody doing full paintings.

Stroud: Yeah, I’ve been extremely impressed with his work. Of course, everybody has.

Heath: Obviously they’re paying him enough so he can sit down and draw a thousand windows in a splash page.

Stroud: Yeah, and it doesn’t seem to be quite the assembly line as it used to be. I know when he did the recent Justice series they were actually late a couple of times and they just worked around his schedule more or less.

Heath: Right. Scheduling has gone back and forth through the years. In the beginning a guy would get late from…maybe his wife was sick for a week or something so he took care of her and he was late and this was a disaster. And it always falls on the last guy in the line, not the writer. It’s up to the last guy. So then they got this bright idea finally to get stuff on inventory so they’d have it and then tell the artist a false deadline; give him one sooner than they really needed so they’re protected more or less. They can give him more time at the last minute. I had some fights with some of them. I said, “Hey, I don’t want to risk my life going without sleep for 4 days or something to finish if it’s going to lay on your desk for 4 more days. Be honest with me and tell me when you have to have it.” I’ve done things, too, like letter something. They’d say, “Hey, this is gonna really be late because it takes a day for you to send it to us and it takes a day for us to send it to the lettering man and it takes him a day to do it and it takes a day to send it back to us.” I said, “I tell you what: Throw in the price of the lettering and I’ll take an extra half day and send you the thing ready to go.”

Mr. Miracle (1971) #25, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: Oh, so you lettered, too?

Heath: Don’t tell everybody that. I don’t want to get into lettering, really, but as an emergency thing it saved the day a couple of times.

Stroud: Absolutely. That would be a wonderful buffer to be able to have. I didn’t realize you had that skill as well, Mr. Heath.

Heath: Yeah, I did quite a bit when I was doing the syndicated Lone Ranger strip. That was the worst deadline of all, because the newspaper comes out every day of the year. There are no holidays and if you get behind, you’re behind until you make it up. It’s a mess and it’s also a mess because depending on whether you have a Sunday story that’s complete in itself or whether it continues in the daily strip, that’s an art in itself, to be able to write, because a lot of people only take the Sunday paper or only take the daily paper. So it’s got to make sense either way. What you do basically is you advance the story line on the weekends and you have little side stories that have nothing to do with the story line really during the week.

Stroud: Oh, so kind of like a double continuity.

Heath: Yeah. I always like the same story going on in both, but if they’re turned in like two months different it’s quite a job to keep it straight. “Let’s see, let’s go back to that Sunday and see what we were doing.”

Stroud: That does present an entirely new set of problems.

Heath: Well during the 60’s when the world was changing completely…I mean before that no boy had a hair touch his ear and then they started breaking all the rules. You don’t have to wear a necktie, you don’t have to cut your hair, etc., etc. and they started assassinating everybody and having these riots, the Watts riots and all this stuff and I was out there in the middle of it in Chicago and of course back east everything just plodded ahead. I got caught up in it. I was out every night in the middle of it. I got a rep on coming in late. So, to try to make up for being late I would try to do something brand new that had never been done before each week. Some special effects or something. Do a job that would startle them. Then when they got it maybe they wouldn’t remember how late it was.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Go for a little dazzle there. I bet it worked well.

Heath: Kubert was my editor at that time and he’d be on the phone and I’d be coming up with some ridiculous excuse. One time he got angry and he said, “If I had you here, I’d punch you right in the mouth!” (Laughter.) I don’t think he would have, but I certainly understood his point of view because he was frustrated as hell. In fact, he reached a point where he said he’d never give my any more work. He came to that conclusion, but I never got the word, so I didn’t even know, because I started doing National Lampoon stuff and I didn’t realize I was cut off.

Stroud: So, you didn’t even really notice.

Heath: No and that probably still bothers him even today.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Heath: We’re good friends personally. Every chance I get in an interview I say, “Yeah, I was late during the 60’s.” It was implied that I’m never late now and of course everybody’s late some time. What you want to do is try to keep aware of exactly where you’re at.

Stroud: Yeah, that’s consistent with what Joe Giella was telling me. He’s still doing the Mary Worth strip and was having some family matters to deal with and got behind and he said the syndicate hit him with a $1200.00 fine. That gets your attention.

Heath: Yeah, they did that with me, too. What it is, they get charged overtime or time and a half by the engravers if you miss a deadline, so it’s not just a fine to wake you up, it’s their cost. If they have that every week the strip had better make a lot of money or they’re going to drop it. I thought the Lone Ranger was kind of a silly job to do in the 80’s. Imagine this guy in a mask I mean what motel is going to let him stay over? But I thought, “What the hell?” If they get enough papers and if I could make $1,500.00 a week then that would be cool for awhile. They didn’t get any of the bigger papers. All they had was the little towns that you never heard of and of course then they don’t pay much for it. I think 40 papers was about all we had. 60 would have been about the minimum that you’d need. So we both, the syndicate and I came to the conclusion that it was over.

A Lone Ranger Sunday strip, drawn by Russ Heath. — A **Lone Ranger** Sunday strip, drawn by Russ Heath.

Stroud: How long did it go?

Heath: I did it for 2-1/2 or 3 years, I’m not certain. I was too busy working. Sometimes it took as much as 90 hours a week and never less than 70. You’d get the thing off in the FedEx and then you turned around and got going on the next page.

Stroud: That’s pretty unrelenting pressure it sounds like.

Heath: Yes, it is. Especially if you’re doing an illustrative type strip. You know, doing things like having the Lone Ranger ride by some huge rock formation and a streams reflection, it’s all repeated. The mirror image of him and the rocks and stuff, and you have to watch your line work, too. If you do cross-hatching with the lines too close together, it will turn totally black on you when it’s reduced. The same thing is true in reverse. If your lines are too thin they’ll drop out. Al Williamson had a lot of trouble with some of his stuff because of very fine lines. I noticed in some of the paper copies that I got that a lot of the panels had dropped out to the point that you couldn’t see what was going on. From the time I started comics I ran down as soon as they hit the stands to see how my lines were standing up, you know, if they should be thicker or what would a minimum line be.

Stroud: Sure. It sounds like a good reference for your future efforts. You both pencil and ink. How long did it usually take you to produce a finished page?

Heath: Well, a lot less than it takes to have two guys do it separately, because the penciller then has to indicate all the shadows for the inker, and how does he do that? We finally came to the technique of putting X’s in the areas, but then where does that area end if it’s just fading off or something? See if I’m penciling a face, a half-inch, I don’t put the features in. It’s just an oval. I’ll put the face in when I’m inking it. So it saves a lot of time in stuff you don’t have to draw. You don’t have to put the shading in. You do have to remember what you were going to do, though. “How was I gonna light this?” But usually, you know, you keep it in your head.

Stroud: Ah. All these things you don’t think about when all you have to do is enjoy the finished product.

Heath: Yeah, your wife doesn’t think about it. When I had so many kids, the house I built with a special studio, I lost that, having to turn it into another bedroom. So I ended up working in the dining room, and your wife goes through and goes upstairs and then she hollers down the stairs, “Honey, I forgot to bring the “something” upstairs, it’ll only take you a second, could you throw it up to me?” And she’s right, it only takes a few seconds, but you sit down and you say, “Where the hell was I? What was I doing?” It would take 10 or 12 minutes just to get back where you were.

Russ Heath models for his own photo reference - to be used in the story "Give and Take". — Russ Heath models for his own photo reference - to be used in the story "**Give and Take**".

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Heath: I worked all different ways. I worked on the premises, I worked at home. I’d do two years of this until I couldn’t stand it and then I’d do it two years of another way and so on.

Stroud: Did you ever spend any time in the bullpen or did you avoid that?

Heath: Yes, I did in the beginning, especially when Stan Lee hired me. After a couple of months, he came in and said, “You know, you don’t have to come in every day. You can come in once a week and bring it in.” Once they get to trust you.

Stroud: Right. See what you’re capable of.

Heath: Once they can tell what they’re gonna get and when they’re gonna get it.

Stroud: Has anyone else ever inked over you or were you pretty much a one man show?

Heath: Most of my career it’s been very, very little stuff where either I inked somebody else or vice versa. Most of the things I remember is me inking somebody else. I think that happened on Mr. Miracle. That other guy penciled it and I inked it and, adding some sex along with it, or adding sex to the ladies. I inked a couple of things Neal Adams did and I said, “This is ridiculous. You could just make a Xerox and use that as the ink.” You could make it from the pencil because all I was doing was inking exactly his sketchy pencil lines, because I thought that was the way it should be and the way he did it when he does his own stuff. The same thing when I was doing a Kubert job. There’s only one person that should ink Kubert’s work and that’s Kubert. But my opinion doesn’t go very far. A lot of these decisions are made on the spur of the moment. What they need that day or what they think they need.

Stroud: It seems like you were one of the few, and Joe was another one of course, you actually managed to sign your work when that wasn’t a common practice back then. How did you manage that?

Heath: I don’t recall. We all started signing at the same time. About 1950, I’m guessing.

Sea Devils (1961) #1, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: You were right in the thick of things when the Silver Age kicked off and did work on the first several issues of The Brave and the Bold when it was a pure adventure title and then Showcase #2 and the entire issue for #3 including the cover. Did that Frogmen title turn into the Sea Devils and if it did how come it took four years?

Heath: I have no idea. When I first started in for Stan Lee at Atlas…you know I get kids today who ask, “Remember when #78, blah, blah, blah and the title…” I say, “When we did our jobs in those days we didn’t even know what book they were going to put it in.” So how do I know what number, for God’s sake? After you’ve done 3500 pages.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Of course. I just thought it was interesting that Showcase was used as the try out title and they did the Frogmen back in the earlier part and then it just disappeared until…

Heath: I think it was just one of those schemes to keep the editors from getting bored. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. You go after what you’re trying to read or follow no matter what title it is.

Stroud: It just struck me funny that after a few years they come up with the Sea Devils and it seems to be the same concept.

Heath: I only did about 10 issues of that, I think. No. I did 10 covers and quite a bit more on the inside. The thing that bothered me about that was there were too many characters. That was what was good about Sgt Rock and some of these other ones. They would specialize. They might pull somebody out of the group and have that story be mostly about him, so that it wasn’t too many characters. When you’ve got 4 people in skin-suits you’ve got to have space for balloons, you’ve got to have space for the adversaries. I mean, you can’t draw four people in every panel. And sticking their foot in the scene to indicate they’re around is kind of stupid. So, I didn’t like it because I felt there were too many people to tell a decent story. I think the whole concept of superheroes is idiotic, because who do you pit against them? Then you’ve got invincible heroes and the public and the background people all have to step aside for these people to do their show. That makes a break with the reader and their connection with the hero.

Stroud: You got to do much more human type stories.

Heath: Well I think as they say I was trying hard to do great stuff that would get some attention. I did one called “Easy’s first Tiger.” I had a big splash page of this Tiger tank and when they opened that up, when the package came in, I remember Wolfman, he opened the package and he said, “Oh, my God!” And he ran down the hall to show all the guys and they’d sit and say, “What has that crazy bastard Heath done now?”

The original art for "Easy's First Tiger", from Our Army At War #244. Drawn by Russ Heath.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Just your usual excellent work, obviously.

Heath: That was one that I did as a collector’s item because the detail of that tank and the size of it took me an extra day and a half and you’re supposed to be doing 2 to 3 pages a day so that cost me some money. I did another one, a war story for Warren and I did all the tone work. I painted the chemicals on. I did about two months of research in buying the stuff and costumes and stuff before I even put pencil to paper, so that cost me dearly. Again, I was trying to do a collector’s item out of it, and that’s what it became. I ran across one artist when I was trying to hire somebody to help me when I broke my wrist. I called this girl and when I called I said, “This is Russ Heath and you probably don’t know who I am.” It just turned out she was carrying that story on her person at all times. (Chuckle.) You wonder, how about some of the other crazy ones that are out there. Then you find that you’re known…you go to Europe and you go way out in the boonies in the countryside and go to a little teeny town that you don’t even know within hundreds of miles of where you are and you find a little comic book store and you go in and they know who you are! I did that in the Normandy section of France. In Paris, in the cities, you expect that, but apparently there must be thousands and thousands of people who know who I am. England and Germany. I get guys right now calling for commissions from Germany and Brussels and you name it.

Stroud: Oh, wow, so you’re still doing commission work?

Heath: Yeah. I’m still trying to catch up. I had a system and I did a bunch of these big things and I decided to hang them all up on the bulletin board to get an idea of where I was and I forgot to make some connection with the letter and the check and then I thought, “What goes with what?” So there’s a lot of people sitting out there thinking I’m a bad guy. They’re wanting their money back and wondering about the art. But if I live long enough I may get it sorted out. I’ll have to call each one individually and ask them if I owe them anything.

Stroud: And then you’ve got guys like me wasting your time with interviews. (Chuckle.)

Heath: Well that goes with it. Any publicity is good publicity. I was just supposed to be in the T.V. show called Numbers. I spent two days when they were filming that and they built all this stuff. It was supposed to be a comic book convention. It had a big banner made up with “Russ Heath – Legendary War Artist” on it and they blew up some of my art work to put behind my chair and all that and I looked at the damned thing and everything goes by so fast that I couldn’t see me anywhere. Somebody said they saw the banner and the art work, but it goes by so fast that it’s not gonna get the attention. No one’s going to say, “Hey, look, there’s Russ Heath’s name!” It’s just too fast. Boom, boom, boom, boom. They get in 55 pictures per second or something.

Stroud: Pretty hard to focus on any one thing.

Heath: Yeah, but it was fun, though. Very hard. I had to get up at 5:00 to get over to downtown L.A. and find the studio and then you wait and you wait and you wait and they re-shoot and they re-shoot and you’ve got to be silent. Then at 10:00 at night they said you could go. Then they were going to shoot an imaginary comic book sale and they’d put us up front. I don’t know whatever happened to that. Apparently, it didn’t show much. When I left the studio I immediately got lost, so I went back. One of the director ladies said, “I’ll ride with you a few blocks to get you back on the map and I can walk back.” I thought, “It’s pitch black out there.” You’ll be found out in the gutter somewhere. They’ll say, “She was last seen in Russ Heath’s car.” But she made it.

Stroud: It sounds like a long day no matter what.

Heath: Yeah, my God, that’s for four seconds worth of stuff. It’s amazing how much goes into it. It looks like hundreds of thousands of dollars to do an episode.

All-American Men Of War (1952) #96, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: I can only guess. It seems like for years you were destined to work with Bob Kanigher. Was he a good fit as far as a writer and editor?

Heath: Well, originally before I came to comic books I read comic strips in newspapers, and of course somebody like Milton Caniff on Terry and the Pirates makes up the thing and sends it in and they put it in the paper. You didn’t need an editor. All you needed was somebody to open the package and to see that the stuff got to where it was going. So, the whole thing that they developed sitting around with the editor thinking up what to write about, it was foreign to me. I understood that you had to satisfy the editor in the beginning. You won’t know what he wants, so there’ll be some changes, but I once told them, I said, “You know, after two years, if I don’t give you just what you want, either you are not very good at describing what you want, or I’m pretty stupid that I can’t figure out what it is that you want.” If it’s to work, it’s supposed to work. So I never got into it with the editor too much on any of it as far as content. Kanigher, we’d go in, maybe two guys come in the morning, deliver our stuff, get our check and go out and take it to the bank and go have lunch. When we’d come back from lunch, Kanigher had written my story. So, I don’t understand why today you can wait a month and a half because the writer hasn’t done his thing. I thought, “How the hell long?” It took Kanigher lunch time. I think it’s because they came to one point. Instead of just teaching young guys from the older guys they just lowered the boom and said, “Nobody over 40.” Then all the people under 40 didn’t know how to do it. I’ve never seen, in the last number of years, a script that had any form. Every writer makes up his own form. They don’t even know how to make a simple outline. It’s incredible to try to figure a lot of it out. They don’t know the way it’s done and they just do it however they can. It’s unworkable. One time I had this door and they didn’t want any sound effects, but they wanted the door to be slammed. If you don’t write “SLAM!” on there, it’s just a door. It won’t work.

Stroud: That’s right. How else do you convey it?

Heath: You know, not figuring this out, it just makes it look bad. You’ve got to put “SLAM!” on it. I think what it is, they don’t want them to look like old comic books any more, so that’s why they try to get rid of the lettering and any extra space in a balloon is taken away and some of the balloons are like the small nail of your hand. I always figured that the balloons are part of the composition and the artist’s job is to lead the eyes through the story. Right now, they sprinkle them on.

Stroud: Just very haphazard and no thought about the finished product.

Heath: And they’ll use two balloons where one would work and they put them in very unattractive places. It’s hard to follow. “Oh, I’ve got one over here and then I’m supposed to go to the one over there and read that one.” It’s not even clear how to read it. That’s why I’m fighting now for control on this one job they just sent me. They sent me another continued story and they break it up with different artists and this other artist did total painted stuff. So, I’m gonna call them Monday and say, “That’s fine. I want to do that, too.” I use lighting a lot in my stories as part of my technique. All of this computer stuff looks like it’s in a dark fog. There is no light as far as light source or very little lighting. Or if it is it’s completely faked. There’s no reason for it. And again, it’s like they don’t want anybody to have too much control, because they might be not be expendable. (Chuckle.) They like to think everybody’s expendable.

Stroud: Since you were working mostly in war titles, did you have trouble working around the Comics Code at the time since it was so restrictive?

Heath: Well, in the beginning it was pretty bad. If people were drawing a baseball game they didn’t want sweat on the guy’s forehead. That was too violent.

G.I. Combat (1952) #172, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

Heath: That was pretty much a pain in the ass, but later on it lightened up. So, when you’d come in for the week you’d get, “Oh, did you hear the new edict?” I’d say, “No, what is it?” “They said they want stubble beards on all the G.I.’s.” So, I went back and I ignored it. I put stubble beards where I wanted and so on. Then they’d come in and “Did you hear the new edict?” “No, what’s the new edict?” “No more stubble beards.” (Chuckle.) I’d put them where I wanted them. Nobody ever said ‘boo.’ In fact, in a lot of Kanigher’s scripts he had these certain things that kept recurring in each story. Not in every story, but things that he typically used here and there like concealing ack-ack guns in haystacks and having Stuka dive-bombers coming down at them and throwing a grenade down the muzzle of a tank. In reality, it would have no affect whatsoever on the muzzle of a tank, I’m sure. Several things that he’d just stick in and if it didn’t advance the story, and I was always looking for more space to draw more; you know, the bigger you can work, the more impressive your scene. So, I would just cross out maybe two pages out of a story and add that space, because you couldn’t change the length of a story because the ads and stuff were all figured out in advance. I got in trouble when I didn’t understand that the first time. We had to cut somebody else’s work up to get enough space, so I had to do it by having the same number of pages, taking out some of the writing that was there. And Kanigher, I think he might have blown a gasket if he’d found out, but I don’t think he ever knew the difference. I never heard ‘boo’ about it.

Stroud: He doesn’t sound to me like he was the most bashful guy.

Heath: No, he was very, very hard to work for. Really a very strange guy. He needed a lot of psychiatric help which he never got.

Stroud: That’s a shame.

Heath: A lot of people just quit and walked out of the office, I think Alex Toth being one of them. John Severin being another one. They just couldn’t put up with it. What I did was I figured he was always hunting for something about each person that’s exploitable and then he’d exploit the hell out of it and make them miserable. So, I thought, “He’s not going to find out what my weak spots are.” Several times he actually hit on my weak spot, but I didn’t react, so he went right on to try to find another one.

Stroud: So you found a way to resist that. Good for you.

Heath: What he used to do at Christmas time, you’d go in and a check for fifty bucks would be waiting for you and he said, “Why don’t you just endorse that over for Christmas Eve?” And I would just smile and break up like he made a joke and walk out with it. And then I found out that some of the other guys were giving him checks for Christmas. He’d go out every January after Christmas and go down to the clothing store and buy about six suits. And I thought, “Holy shit.” When Infantino got in charge and he found out about it and raised a storm and said, “We don’t give gifts around here of more than $2.00.” So liquor was out.

Stroud: That’s only right. Wow. Amazing. It’s kind of funny that you mentioned ad space since a couple of items you did ended up on all kinds of comic books; the Roman solider and Revolutionary solider ads.

Heath: Yeah, I’d like to have a nickel for every one. I got fifty bucks for those two separate pages.

Revolutionary War Soldiers Ad, drawn by Russ Heath.

Stroud: Oh, with all that detail?

Heath: With all the detail. So, as I said, if I had five cents for every one of them, I’d be in Florence or somewhere.

Stroud: Yeah. I mean they were printed everywhere.

Heath: A lot of people didn’t know I did them because they didn’t want them signed. I did have a small “HEATH” on the lower left-hand corner of the Revolutionary soldiers and I don’t remember about the Roman soldiers. The kids would blame me, I’d never seen the actual damned things, because they’re like a bas relief or whatever they call it. They’re not fully formed, not three dimensional. It would be flat things that were shaped a little and the kids felt gypped and they figured that it was my fault.

Stroud: How long did it take you to do those jobs, do you recall?

Heath: I would just consider it a more complicated page. Some pages would have a couple of heads on them and you can see them up there. The landing in Sicily was the landing with a million guys and half of them are speaking in balloons and it takes you three times as long. So, you average it all together. And of course, how detailed your images are makes a difference. Some guys don’t give a crap. They just want the check and other people like to see if they can impress somebody. Do something worthwhile. I’ve had some small satisfactions here and there. Some company called up and said, “We heard you’re an expert in Western stuff and we want some very high class Western stuff. Name your price. Price is no object.” So, I gave them a price and they said, “Oh, my God, that’s terrible. Never mind. We’ll get somebody else.” I said, “No, you won’t. There’s only one other guy that can do what you describe that you want and that’s John Severin and I happen to know his calendar is full up, so have fun looking.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Did they come back?

Heath: No. I assume they went ahead with the project. I don’t know.

Stroud: Of all the scripters that you worked with, did you have anybody who was a particular favorite?

Heath: Oh, yeah. By far and away, Archie Goodwin. He started as, I think, an editor at Warren magazines on the black and white stuff and he did some of my stories. I remember he once sent an extra sheet of paper with little thumbnails about an inch and a half high with little stick figures. He said, “I’m just sending you this to show you what I visualize that scene to be, but do what you want. If it’s a help, okay, and if it’s not, just throw it away.” So, I didn’t want to be influenced by his visualizations, so I thought, “I’m gonna set them aside and do the same thing myself and then I’ll compare the two of them and where I think he told the story better, I’ll use his and where I told it better, I’ll use mine.” There were 40 shots and only ONE was different. I thought, “My God is that guy great.” For a writer to be able to visualize that well; it just seemed mathematically impossible.

Apache Kid (1950) #11, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: That’s eerie. Obviously, you were on the same wavelength.

Heath: Yeah, the writing suggested so well what should be there.

Stroud: That’s pretty gifted, I’d say.

Heath: Oh, yeah. He was top-notch.

Stroud: And taken from us too soon.

Heath: He wrote a very nice biography for one of the magazines about me. Apparently, it was about some of that package opening stuff, because that line of “What did that crazy bastard Heath do now?” was his line from that thing about me. “What’s he gonna do next?” And he said, “It doesn’t really matter, he could do Mickey Mouse or anything.”

(Chuckle.) Well, one of the things I tried to do…some people draw everything as if it’s made out of the same thing, like modeling clay or something and my thing is skin is supposed to be skin, cloth is cloth, steel tanks are metal and try to see if you can make it appear to be the way it is. They were always talking about all the nuts and bolts. Kubert once said something very nice to his classes at his art school. He was talking about getting photographic reference to do stuff to get it right. “The one exception to that is that you can use Russ Heath’s art work. It is right.”

Stroud: That’s pretty high praise.

Heath: Yes, I thought so.

Stroud: And Joe would know. Now as near as I’ve been able to determine you’ve worked for just about everybody; Marvel, Dell, DC and Warren. Which one was your favorite?

Heath: I only did one story for EC, and that was done so far back that it was pretty crappy looking stuff, I thought. Other things were small, cartoony things here and there added into something and of course I worked on Annie Fannie for Harvey Kurtzman for Playboy magazine.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, right.

Heath: But he said, “Did you get to go to the Chicago mansion?” I said, “Yeah, I lived at the Playboy mansion for over six months, when you put it all together, back and forth, until I finally moved to Chicago. I’d teach scuba diving to some of the bunnies in the pool. “Yeah, that strap goes right through here.”

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Sounds like a rough detail.

Heath: You play your cards very, very close to the vest. It’s like trying to do girls in a dormitory. Once the word’s out that you’ve got loose lips, you’re dead. Dead in the water. They won’t touch you with a 10-foot pole. After all, it’s nobody else’s business.

Stroud: That reminds me that I saw in that DC Special, The Joe Kubert issue, when Joe drew himself in the first few panels there seemed to be some sort of an inside joke where he called you at the Playboy mansion. Did you ever see that?

Heath: Yeah.

Stroud: What was that about?

Heath: One of his frustrations was my lateness, so he put me just having fun, you know. “Yeah, yeah, I haven’t slept in days,” and he had me as partying. I thought it was humorous as all get out, but maybe he was drawing me exactly as he thought I was doing.

Battlefield (1952) #2, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: It looked humorous to me. Now, there’s a little confusion. I see where there’s a credit where you may or may not have done Captain America. Do you remember if you did?

Heath: I don’t remember. I would guess that I never did, but I’ve done that before. I said I never did any of the Human Torch and then they come up with a story that’s signed by me and obviously by me and I just had forgotten completely that I ever did it.

Stroud: Okay. I saw where you socialized with Ross Andru a bit.

Heath: We became quite good friends, having lunch together about once a week. Sometimes his wife would come out with him or a couple of other guys or I’d have whatever current girlfriend at the time. We’d hunt down Chinese restaurants, which were a favorite.

Stroud: What was Ross like?

Heath: A real nice guy. Very nice. I got along great with him. When I went on vacation from Chicago I called him and said I’m bringing my girlfriend with me and we’re driving to New York, then we’re going to catch a plane down to the island in the Caribbean and I’d need a place to leave my car when I get to New York, so I parked on his side yard, (Chuckle.) Nine weeks.

Stroud: That’s a true friend there.

Heath: Yeah. He had a neat little sports car. It was an Austin-Healey. I later had an Austin-Healey Sprite. That’s the one with the bug headlights. ’59 was the only year they had those headlights on the hood like that.

Stroud: That must have been a fun little way to get around.

Heath: Yeah, it was really a lot of fun. People would go by and ask, “Do you get in that or do you go belly-whopping on it?”

Stroud: (Laughter.) You spent quite a bit of time in Chicago. When I talked to Jim Mooney he said he loved being able to work remotely from New York. Was that the same experience for you?

Heath: Well, so much was happening in the town and in the country at the time. My children were always thinking I was in danger or something. I said, “No, no.” I’d seen some of the broken windows, but I wasn’t there in any of the action. I wasn’t in school sitting down and all of that stuff. But I was out there at night, chasing girls in my tie-dyed bell-bottoms. Then one of my daughters came out with her boyfriend and stayed awhile with and then got their own apartment. In fact, she’s still in Chicago. Many, many years ago now. My daughter grew up and now I’ve got great-grandchildren. Not that I’ve been able to spend much time with them. I think I’ve seen them once. The one of my other grandchildren made me a great-grandfather again.

Stroud: It seems like back in the day, the daily work; the strip work like on The Lone Ranger and so forth carried more legitimacy than comic books and was a real coveted career path. Did you ever try to pursue that on a permanent basis?

House Of Mystery (1951) #203, cover by Russ Heath.

Heath: You mean have my own syndicated strip?

Stroud: Yes.

Heath: No, because syndicated strips, illustrative continued stories went out the window because everybody came to the conclusion that people’s time is such that they have a moment or two on the subway and they don’t need to remember back to where the story was yesterday, they just want a one-shot chuckle for the day and the only stuff the reproduced worth a damn was stuff like Pogo or Peanuts or something. The illustrative strips just…I don’t think Milton Caniff, if he were alive, could start an illustrative strip today. They’re not popular any more. Some of them hang on, but you wonder why.

Stroud: That was another thing Joe Giella was telling me. He said, “I learned one thing over all these years of doing Mary Worth. The fan base out there is very, very particular. Heaven forbid you should change anything, because it’s tradition, first and foremost.

Heath: Well they had an illustrative story about this girl in showbiz…I can’t remember the name of it. Anyway, he was a great illustrator. I was cutting out his strips, in fact, and it turns out the next thing I know he’s doing Little Orphan Annie. (Chuckle.) God, what a fate for an illustrative type guy, you know? And I think there was more than that. Somebody else, some illustrator was doing something like Blondie or something. Several really good artists end up doing these silly cartoons.

Stroud: Simple line work type stuff.

Heath: I mean, Little Orphan Annie, for God’s sake. I figured the way the original artist did all the bushes; he stuffed a brush in his ass and wiggled it.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Oh, that’s great.

Heath: You can use that. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I understand you’ve done commercial art, advertising and a little bit of animation.

Heath: When I was going broke working in New York City, I was working out of Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates Studios, and it just wasn’t paying off, so Gray Morrow asked me to come with him on vacation to California and unbeknownst to me set up appointments with the different studios of animation. So we took our stuff and showed it and the guy made me an offer and it was too good to turn down, so I said “Well, I’ll go home and just stick everything I’ve got into storage, ‘cause I have no idea where I want to live out in L.A., so that’s what I did. The stuff was in storage for 35 years. (Chuckle.) I’d like to have that money back. But everything is here. It came through it. Temperature controlled storage, so my leather couch is fine. Everything came through okay.

The Punisher (1987) #27, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: Good deal. Which animation did you work on?

Heath: Well I started out with Godzilla and then I ended up working on The Lone Ranger for another house and I worked on the American Pop movie, an animated movie that…I forget the guy that did it. He’s the one that did Fritz the Cat, an X-rated one.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, I heard about that one once.

Heath: So, I worked for most of the animation houses sooner or later.

Stroud: I saw an interesting credit listed for you along with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano and Alan Weiss calling you The Crusty Bunkers for something for Marvel in 1974 for Savage Sword of Conan.

Heath: Well, I remember working on one thing which was this blonde guy from the jungle. I can’t remember his name. Big, long blonde hair and he had a big black panther as his associate or assistant or whatever. But I can’t recall the name of the character. But we’d just all work on it. One guy would ink some of the panels, I inked some of the panels, and five other people, you know. We did several jobs. One job was mostly just myself and Neal and the other one was a whole bunch of people. It got so late that Marvel came and took it back and ran down the hall passing out brushes to secretaries and stuff to get it finished, so it’s the worst looking thing you ever saw.

Stroud: (Laughter.) You get 24 hours, here’s what you do with it. He just took too much on, huh?

Heath: Yeah. He would never turn anything down and the smart people knowing that you’re going to get a bad rep, you don’t take on what you can’t do. He got me one client that was a pretty good job. He was writing it because my writer screwed me over and so Neal was gonna fill in and I said, “We’ve got to get that thing written, because they called again.” They wanted it every month in their magazine and he says, “Well, tell them we’ve got it done, but it’s late in the day, we’ll bring it over first thing in the morning. And if they say they have to have it in the morning, we can stay up all night and do it.” So, I said, “Okay,” and so I told them, I lied to them and said we’d bring it over. And then when 5 o’clock comes he walks out of the place with his date for the evening. My jaw fell off my neck.

Stroud: Oh, no.

Heath: That’s not kosher.

Stroud: No, not at all. I think I’d have been furious.

Heath: Yeah. Everybody’s got their complicated side as well as their good side.

Stroud: Sure. Have you seen those new Showcase Presents reprints of your Haunted Tank and House of Mystery and so forth?

Heath: I noticed that it’s only about 4% of my work compared with Joe [Kubert]. Joe’s work is about 98% of those books, or at least the ones I’ve seen, anyway. And of course, I think he kept doing Sgt Rock for a long time after I left, so it eventually wound up that I had done the longest amount of anybody at that time, but when I left I’m sure he did so many more after that and then they put that guy that did the Navy stuff. You know, the story about the destroyer?

Stroud: Was that Captain Storm?

Heath: No, it was the one about the destroyer. Very technical type stuff for a couple of pages or a short story, but mostly it was all his research from being in it, on the destroyer. Anyway, he went on and took on Sgt Rock and ended up doing even more than I had done. They handed him all my pages as reference originally.

Stroud: Rightly so, since you started it all.

Heath: Well, I was there at the beginning. I don’t actually quite remember. I think Joe did a few of the stories and then I was supposed to take over and the first issues I didn’t want people saying, “Whoa! Look at the change here. Look at the difference.” Because they don’t always associate change to be equal or better than or worse than, so you try to cover the change so that they don’t particularly notice and then you can go back more into your own way of doing it, which was what I did. We have a different approach on art. His is very sketchy and loose with things and I’m very tight with everything. All the little details and all the stuff, you know? So, we don’t really deal too well together. Again, if I was inking his stuff, I would probably ink it very close to his drawings instead of any of my own personality in it.

Showcase (1956) #45, cover by Russ Heath.

Adventures Into Terror (1950) #11, cover by Russ Heath.

Gunsmoke Western (1955) #33, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: Sure, as any good inker would, I imagine. You were talking earlier about how the computer work has changed things quite a bit. Do you think it’s still making comic work a viable field or is it changing it too radically?

Heath: Well, it’s hard for me to believe these books sell, because the storyline is almost gone. It’s like a series of beautifully painted posters. There seems to be no premise in the story, or very little story. But that’s just maybe one of the stages they’re going through. I know when you make a black and white photograph of that computer stuff and print it in black and white there’s hardly any whites or any blacks. It’s all about medium gray. So, values of the colors they’re using are all about the same. For some reason they don’t leave white. It could be a thing about computers not leaving white. Maybe they need something to print. Some light tone or something. I don’t know the technicalities of it. And blacks, it used to be that spotting the blacks was a big deal in the old way, in the old comics. You’d be known for how well your blacks were put and where they were put and so on.

Stroud: Yeah, totally different now, it seems.

Heath: Yeah. I can’t believe how it works. You take real artists and real artists don’t work in concert. One guy makes a painting. Dali or Van Gogh. You wouldn’t go out and get Jack Kirby to sketch your wife’s portrait and then call Norman Rockwell to paint it. I mean they just don’t go together.

Stroud: No, not at all.

Heath: You can’t do art work in concert, as far as I’m concerned. You lose control and of course this color thing. The few jobs that I’ve done have been…some of them have been much more acceptable than others, but the ones that were bad were so bad that it was just worthless to use me to do it.

Stroud: That’s a shame. I hate to sound like a Luddite, because I use computers all the time. Not in an artistic sense.

Heath: I think some of the computer guys are very good at using a computer, but I don’t think a lot of them started out to be artists. You take Norman Rockwell. He’d go study drawing in Germany and color in Paris and you study for about 9 years and then you do covers for the Saturday Evening Post as a starter. People learned their craft. Like being a doctor, it takes about 9 years and comics made it too easy. You go home, bring some stuff in and show it to them and go back and change some stuff and they’ll give you a script. And if it’s good enough or if it can be fixed, they’ll eventually use it, and you say, “My God, I’m a pro.” They kind of learn it as they go, and of course a lot of them in the beginning did not go into the muscles and the bones and…

Journey Into Mystery (1952) #1, cover by Russ Heath.

Stroud: Anatomy.

Heath: Anatomy, yeah. I’d always be pleased when somebody would say, “You know your work looks like there’s somebody in the clothes when you draw it.”

Stroud: That says a lot.

Heath: It’s what I try for.

Stroud: Did you ever spend any time teaching at Joe’s school or get involved with that at all?

Heath: No. I’ve kind of been anti-teaching. One of the things that happened with Joe; that happened even much more with Neal Adams is that suddenly there were a whole bunch of guys that were Neal Adams. And I said, “I don’t need the competition.” If you want Russ Heath, you’ve got to come to me. I’m the best Russ Heath around.

Stroud: (Laughter.) That makes a lot of sense. You don’t need a lot of clones.

Heath: Right, right. Teaching. I’ve been anti-teacher…I hated the teaching mentality that regular school teachers have. That’s the way my damn landlord is. People don’t know how to deal with him and I said, “It’s simple. Think of him as a teacher and we’re all his pupils and that’s why he doesn’t allow us to tell him anything.” A teacher wouldn’t listen to his pupil. He’ll take an idea that you have and three years later, he’ll do it. But then it seems like his idea.

Stroud: Is there anything you hope to be remembered for as a legacy?

Heath: It’s great to be known for where you’re trying to do something that is meaningful and somebody realizes it. That’s always nice. That beats the boredom of just turning it out and turning it in. Especially now that I’m too old to marry rich. (Chuckle.)

A short comic about being ripped off by Roy Lichtenstein. By Russ Heath & Darwyn Cooke. — A short comic about being ripped off by **Roy Lichtenstein. By Russ Heath & Darwyn Cooke.**

February 14, 2018

An Interview With Jim Mooney - A Gentleman Artist From Supergirl To Spider-Man

February 14, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

James Noel Mooney (born August 13, 1919) was an American comics artist best known for his long tenure at DC Comics and as the signature artist of Supergirl, as well as a Marvel Comics inker and Spider-Man artist, all during the Silver Age of comics. As a young man Jim was friends with Forrest J. Ackerman, and in 1938 he drew the cover for the first issue of Imagination, an Ackerman fanzine that included Ray Bradbury's first published story, "Hollerbochen's Dilemma". He would later go on to enjoy a long carrer as an artist for DC and then Marvel Comics. Mr. Mooney passed away on March 30th, 2008.

They didn't call him Gentleman Jim Mooney for nothing. Jim was an absolute pleasure to speak with and while I learned a lot about his career (for instance that he's sort of an unhailed ghost on the old Batman strip) there were several familiar stories that I'd seen in other interviews. I wouldn't have missed it, though. As an old fan of his Dial H for Hero series in the House of Mystery title, it was a thrill to get to speak to him. I'd even arranged to get a commission from him, but shortly afterward his health went into decline and he passed away before it could happen. Fortunately, I was able to get something very near to what I had in mind for a private sale a little later, but Jim Mooney was unforgettable and I'm glad to have a memento of his work in my collection.

This interview originally took place over the phone on November 21, 2007.

House of Mystery (1951) #156, cover by Jim Mooney.

Bryan Stroud: For starters I looked you up on the Grand Comic Book database and it listed over 1200 credits for you just as a penciller, and of course a few of those were reprints, but does that surprise you at all that you have such a large body of work?

Jim Mooney: No, actually it doesn’t. You see, I started in I think ’40 or ’41, I guess it was ’41 and I just took anything that came along (chuckle). Some of it I enjoyed more than others, of course, but that was my source of livelihood for all those years. Just whatever came down the pike, I thought as long as it wasn’t distasteful, I’ll take it.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JM: Of course, some of the things I enjoyed. I enjoyed doing Man-Thing and Omega and there were some of the offbeat titles that a lot of people are not too familiar with that I really did enjoy. Dial H for Hero was kind of fun, although it was an awful lot of work. New superheroes for each issue

Stroud: That particular task had to be really difficult because, I’ve got nearly that entire set, I always loved it, and it seemed like you had to crank out a minimum of 3 heroes and usually a new villain every darned issue.

JM: It was quite demanding, to say the least, but it was kind of fun. After awhile, I don’t know what it was. I got into a few other things. Other work and other projects, but for the time I spent on it, it was enjoyable.

Stroud: It was such a creative storyline. I can’t think of a kid anywhere that wouldn’t have loved to find that dial (chuckle) and be able to transform himself. It was just a wonderful idea.

JM: You know, I have a friend; he’s a Professor of Philosophy. He’s in Austria now. We talk quite often, and that was one of his favorites when he was a kid. He mentioned that when he was first starting in comics Dial H for Hero was it. I found that kind of a revelation, I mean certainly Jeff, I’m speaking of the Professor, Jeff is hardly stuffy in any way. We talk quite often on many, many subjects, but that sort of intrigued me.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. It makes you wonder how it may have influenced him in later life. The earliest credit I could find for you was, in fact, in 1940. Something called Mystery Men Comics by Fox Publishing. Does that ring any bells at all?

JM: Yeah, I’m trying to think. What was it? Mystery Men? That was just the characters that I did or did they have a particular name other than Mystery Men?

A page from Wildfire by Jim Mooney and Robert Turner.

Stroud: That was all I saw was that particular title for the magazine itself.

JM: One of the earlier strips that I did back in that period of time was for E. M. Arnold who did Quality Comics. I created a character called Wildfire, and I had hoped that Wildfire would be a sensation and take off, but it really didn’t make much of a splash. It wasn’t as popular as I thought it might be. I worked on that with a writer that did a lot of pulp magazines at the time, and I figured with somebody else writing it and with me doing it, doing the best I could, that it would probably be quite popular, but it just unfortunately didn’t quite make the grade. That was Bob Turner, by the way. Bob Turner did a lot of movie work and a lot of comic book work before that.

Stroud: Okay, was that a hero title? I’d never heard of that one.

JM: Unfortunately, neither did many others. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: When you were first getting started in your art career, which people inspired you, do you think?

JM: You mean what other artists?

Stroud: Yes.

JM: Well, you may have heard of Lou Fine?

Stroud: Oh yes, yes. The Ray and so forth.

JM: I thought Lou was…well he was just a fantastic artist. He drew beautifully and early on most of us were just learning. We were trying to sharpen our abilities, but Lou had it very early on and I worked with him for a short time with Eisner and Iger’s studio.

Stroud: That must have been a terrific training ground.

JM: It was. It was very challenging and at that time I was so young that I really felt that I wasn’t quite ready for it, so I took off and I figured, look, get a little bit more experience before you compete with some of these…well, another one of the professionals that was there early on was George Tuska. George and I, you know, go through the years and we weren’t that friendly, but we worked together at Fiction House, too.

Stroud: Oh, I didn’t know that.

JM: Nick Cardy was there and did you ever hear of Reuben Moreira?

Stroud: Oh, yeah, I got to talk to Al Plastino a few weeks ago and he made particular mention of Reuben.

JM: Reuben was a fantastically good artist and a heck of a nice guy. We were probably closer than most of the other comic book artists at that time. Reuben was a Puerto Rican, and he finally went back to Puerto Rico and evidently, I think he was doing some commercial work there, too, although he was still doing work for DC.

Super Mystery Comics #5 (Dec. 1940): Jim Mooney's first professional cover art

Stroud: Just mailing it in then, huh?

JM: Yeah.

Stroud: Dick Giordano was telling me that Jim Aparo did that for quite awhile. He just didn’t want to leave Connecticut, so the mails became his lifeline.

JM: You know I did something very similar. I moved to Hollywood in the 50’s, and I got permission to go out there from DC. I was working on Batman at the time, and I stretched that out for almost 10 years. I made a couple of trips back, of course, to see Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff and some of the guys in the bullpen, but I had my own studio out there then. I had established an art service. So consequently, I was not quite as dependent on the comics for a source of income as I had been before. I was doing work for some of the studios and other commercial work so I wasn’t just in a position where I had to take and do what they said when they said it. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: That makes it nice. That was something else Al was telling me, he said “I always had at least two accounts going, so that I had a bit more freedom and flexibility.” Were you doing animation, too?

JM: I did some limited animation. Very, very limited. I had somebody else working with me. I did an awful lot of commercial work, just general work that came to me. I had my studio right on Hollywood Boulevard.

Stroud: Okay, so advertising and that sort of thing.

JM: Yeah. I had quite a bit of work and I still kept the comics, too, because it gave me a certain feeling of security to have something like that that I really knew, and knew that it would probably last for awhile. It lasted for awhile, didn’t it?

Stroud: Oh, sure and of course at the time, I don’t know what your experiences were, but it seems like comic book work wasn’t really considered legitimate at the time, I mean it was kind of looked down upon.

JM: Oh, God, yes. There were times when you’d say you did almost anything rather than admit you did comics. (Chuckle.) There was a great deal of bad feeling about comics at that time. I’m trying to think of who it was that got the ball rolling. Comics were supposed to be very evil; they were a bad influence on children.

Stroud: Oh yes, Dr. Wertham and his infamous book, and then I think it even got picked up by Congress at one point if I’m not mistaken.

JM: Well you know for awhile there we had a pretty strong censorship on as far as our mystery and horror books. It took the life…it just emasculated it totally. At one time they were pretty gruesome and they were kind of fun. They were exciting. They were gruesome. They had a lot going for them and I guess it was what they wanted to read, but when we censored ourselves it was namby-pamby.

Stroud: Right. The Comics Code was instituted and then that self-policing came along and I remember reading that EC comics virtually went under at that point because that was their bread and butter was the horror titles.

JM: Well nobody really particularly wanted to buy them. When you had something really interesting and exciting in the horror and mystery stuff, you buy it, but when you had something that had been emasculated to the extent that they were later, why it was like buying something castrated.

Stroud: (laughter.) No appeal whatsoever. It looks like, as near as I can tell, with the exception of the war titles you’ve done a little bit of everything. Is that about accurate?

JM: Yeah, I took almost anything that was dropped in my lap if I wanted it. I didn’t do much war stuff because it really was not my forte. It wasn’t that I was anti-war; I was, I mean I still am, but it wasn’t that I had any real objection to doing war comics, I just didn’t feel that I had the feeling, the forte to do them well.

Stroud: Well, sure and I suppose that it had to be just, well, not having an artistic molecule in my body I can’t really relate, but I suppose when you had people like Joe Kubert and Russ Heath cranking out their stuff, I would find that intimidating.

JM: Oh, they were great. That was really heavy competition. They were really damn good draftsmen then and they are now, of course. I guess Joe is still alive, isn’t he or did he die recently?

Mooney's cover for the 1938 fanzine Imagination, containing Ray Bradbury's first published story. — Mooney's cover for the 1938 fanzine **Imagination**, containing Ray Bradbury's first published story.

Stroud: No, he’s still around, still running his art school up there in New Jersey and seems to be cranking along pretty nicely.

JM: He’s done very well for himself.

Stroud: Very much so. Still very much a presence out there I guess would be the correct word.

JM: Indeed. You know I never met Joe. I always admired his work very, very much and of course I never worked with him or close to him, so we really had no contact except that I saw his stuff in the comic books and that was about it. I never met him at a convention or anything like that.

Stroud: It was certainly hard to miss. He really left a swath there whether it was the war titles or Hawkman or any of that other good stuff that he did so well.

JM: A very, very accomplished person.

Stroud: Do you remember what the page rates were for you over the years?

JM: They varied so very, very much. I know when I first started doing comics five or six dollars a page was about the going rate for pencil and ink believe it or not, so you weren’t living really exactly high off the hog with that kind of an income. Later on when I latched onto doing Batman for DC I got at that time, which was considered a pretty decent rate, that was, I believe in the 50’s, I was getting $50.00 - $55.00 a page, which was a little bit closer to a livable income.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, absolutely and as one of the few both pencillers and inkers that I’m aware of, that was nothing to sneeze at. How long did it usually take you to produce a page?

JM: Well, I was never as fast as a lot of them, but I could usually do a page a day, pencil and ink.

Stroud: That’s respectable.

JM: Yeah. A lot of the guys, the real fast artists could turn out more and they did, and they turned out some pretty decent stuff, too, as well as being fast, but that was not my trump card. (Chuckle.) I could get it out and I could make my deadlines and so on, but I never could really get much beyond that page a day. Once in awhile it would be a page and a half a day if the deadline was real tight or they needed it in much of a hurry.

Stroud: Well, that’s still quite a respectable pace as far as I’m concerned. Did you prefer pencils to inks or did it make any difference to you?

JM: I preferred penciling and inking my own stuff. I did an awful lot of inking as well, over somebody else’s, which was fine. I enjoyed that. I never really enjoyed just doing penciling, as much as I did penciling and inking and inking for others. I found that unless I was teamed up with a really fine inker, like say Frank Giacoia, who you may have heard of.

Stroud: Yes. Carmine Infantino told me that was his favorite inker.

JM: Yeah, well he was good. He was erratic. He didn’t always meet his deadlines, but he turned in a very respectable, nice looking job.

Stroud: That was one of the things I was going to ask was who you preferred inking after your work. When you were doing your own inks did you pencil pretty tightly or did you leave them kind of loose?

JM: It varied. What I would usually do is make the characters pretty tight because I wanted to make sure that people could recognize them. With the inking and the background sometimes, I’d ad lib a little bit. In other words, I didn’t put quite as much work on the backgrounds as I did on the actual characters; the superhero that I was drawing.

Stroud: You mentioned Batman, of course and at that time…let’s see, I think I’ve read different things. Perhaps you can clarify for me. Obviously, Bob’s [Kane] contract was quite the ironclad beast to where he got credit for everything no matter who worked on it and he employed all kinds of ghosts. Were you working for him or were you working on the DC side?

JM: I worked for DC. I never worked for Bob, luckily. Bob and I met a couple of times and we just didn’t hit it off at all. Bob was not an easy guy to like, and certainly not to work for.

Stroud: That’s the consistent story I’ve heard. His fan club is very small. (Chuckle.)

JM: I imagine. One of the guys at that time, a writer that I thought was extremely talented and I loved to work with him was Bill Finger.

Stroud: Oh, you did know Bill.

JM: Oh, yeah.

Stroud: Tell me a little about him, please.

JM: Bill and I used to have a couple of drinks together. He was a very, very likeable guy. I think probably maybe he had a little bit too much of an alcoholic problem. I understand when he passed away he didn’t leave much of an estate.

Stroud: No. Every account I’ve heard from those who knew him and written accounts, he was virtually bankrupt at the end there and unfortunately prior to that as well.

JM: You know, the stories were great. Whenever I’d get a script I’d say, “Oh, God, it’s Bill Finger, thank God.” (Chuckle.) I knew it was going to be fun to do.

Stroud: Lew Sayre Schwartz, when I talked to him, he described Bill’s scripts as very visual and so he said from an artistic standpoint they were a pleasure to interpret.

JM: Yeah. Bill had that sense of the actual feeling of things and of gimmicks and large against small, and all the variations of contrast, and it was a real pleasure to do his stuff. I shouldn’t say, “do his stuff,” but work with his script.

Stroud: You’ve also interpreted Jerry Siegel if I’m not mistaken. What was his scripting like?

JM: He was okay. I wasn’t mad about it, but he wrote well and I think I wouldn’t say, “Gee, it was exceptional,” but I enjoyed the few that I did with him.

Stroud: Okay. It was remarkable to me to discover just how many notable people you’d worked with over the years. When you worked with the different editors, were there any you preferred over others?

JM: Well, of course I didn’t like Mort’s personality, but I liked working with Mort, Mort Weisinger. And of course, my favorite was Stan Lee. Stan and I started out together in the early days before Stan made his fortune. We’re very close friends. He used to come up and visit me at my place in Woodstock. I’d stay at his apartment in New York when I’d go to visit or have to drop something off. While he was in the east we used to get together quite often. His wife had an antique shop and my wife was into antiques, too, at the time.

Stroud: Oh, perfect.

JM: So, they’d come out and visit me in Stanford, Connecticut where I lived and where we had the antique shop and the girls would go here and go there and of course Stan would just beat his brow. “This is terrible. Oh, I can’t stand this. No more antiques.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JM: The funny part of it is, we’d go to these beat-up antique malls and so on and thrift shops and we’d drive up in Stan’s Rolls. (Chuckle.) Talk about a contrast, it really was.

Stroud: I can just see it. Fabulous story. Did you ever do any strip work or dailies?

JM: Yeah, I did a few of the Spider-Man strips. Not the dailies, I did a few of the Sundays when they were on a spot there, I ghosted a few of them.

Stroud: That was one of the things that surprised me when I talked to Al Plastino. I didn’t realize he’d ever done the Batman daily strip and he said, “Oh, yeah, for 8 years.” I always try to remember to ask that question because I end up learning something.

JM: Well, I understand that was pretty decent. I understand they paid quite well for that, too, so he probably did pretty well.

Stroud: Yeah. It sounded like what you said earlier. A good, secure income stream. It seems like they didn’t call on you to do too many covers. As near as I can tell, the only ones that you did were the early Batman…

JM: The covers? Well, you see for so much of the time I was living in Hollywood and they liked to have a face to face conference on the covers, and then later I negotiated a contract with DC to receive a bi-monthly salary and to go to live wherever I wanted, so I moved to Florida. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Not bad.

JM: So consequently, although I got all the work I wanted, they preferred somebody to come into the office and discuss the covers, so I never really was involved with the covers for that reason.

Stroud: That makes sense.

JM: They were in New York. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: It’s interesting; Carmine was telling me that…I think the different editors worked differently as near as I can tell. He said that quite often he would design the cover and then they would do the story around it, and Al was telling me that wasn’t the way he worked on the Superman titles for Weisinger, so do you happen to know how it went on the things you worked on?

JM: I would imagine it would be a totally different thing, because Weisinger was a very hard taskmaster. He was a very difficult guy to get along with, and it had to be Mort’s way or it didn’t go any way. You know Mort and I had quite a few bad times. We got along pretty well socially. When he came to visit Hollywood, I took him out to the nightclubs and so on and he had a pretty good time. So socially, we got along okay, but as far as the professional end of it at times, if it didn’t go Mort’s way, Mort was as tempestuous and difficult to get along with as a spoiled child, and I think you’ve probably already seen that on one of my bios. I had gone into the office to bring Mort my Supergirl, and he was busy and waved me out. So, I went into the other office and I was talking to Jack Schiff and Murray Boltinoff and the whole gang in there, and Mort came steaming in and, “When you come in here, you come to see me first and show me these Supergirls!” And I said, “Mort, I’ve got news for you. I’m not drawing your Supergirl any more.” (Chuckle.) I quit right then and there and everyone in the office was aghast. Well, two weeks later I come into the office and Mort walks up to me as if nothing had ever happened and said, “Here’s your Supergirl script.”

House of Mystery (1951) #35, cover by Jim Mooney.

The Brave and the Bold (1955) #63, cover by Jim Mooney.

World's Finest Comics (1941) #127, cover by Jim Mooney.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

JM: Which I thought was amusing as hell.

Stroud: Yeah, and that’s another consistent story I’ve heard. It seems like if people would stand up to him the bully façade went away.

JM: He was a very talented guy. He did a lot of writing for The Saturday Evening Post, for the big magazines and so on and I will not put Mort down, he was a very good writer, and a damn good editor as far as knowing what he wanted and the script he was editing.

Stroud: Just no social skills.

JM: A taskmaster.

Stroud: Understood. It’s interesting. I see where the very first Supergirl was designed and drawn by Al, but then it was immediately turned over to you. Do you know why that was?

JM: Yeah. So that I would never be called the creator on it.

Stroud: Oh.

JM: So in other words I would have no legal means to sue or to say, “You owe me more money,” or “I created it, so I should get more money.” That was a very slick thing on their part.

Stroud: Oh, that’s dirty.

JM: Consequently...it is, it’s very…to this day; I’m the one that worked on Supergirl, right to the very end, except for that one issue, but that was undoubtedly done by the legal department.

Stroud: Well, I’m sorry if I brought up a sore point.

JM: It was many years ago, but I no longer keep a Band-Aid on that one. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: And you’re absolutely right, when anyone thinks of Supergirl, you’re the one that leaps to mind, because you did it all.

JM: I did so many, yeah.

Stroud: Incredible. That never would have crossed my mind.

JM: You know to this day, despite Supergirl having been out of the limelight for so long, I get commission requests for Supergirl. In fact, I just did one. A lot of the guys want something a little bit racy. Not necessarily pornographic, I didn’t mean that, but as racy and as revealing as possible. They come in all the time. I don’t handle that many. I’m just not capable of doing that many commissions any more, but I would say at least one to two a month want something like that. In fact, I just did Supergirl with a spider costume on. (Chuckle.) A webbed costume on.

Stroud: Oh, goodness. Did it surprise you, or bother you or were you oblivious when they killed her off in the Crisis series?

JM: I had mixed feelings about it. You know I drew her for a long while, but I never got really attached to her where I would have said, “Gee, you know, I miss drawing her.” Let’s put it this way: Every other month it was pretty much the same thing. It was over and over again. Sure, they’d put her in a jungle somewhere on Venus or they’d have an offbeat story, but you could pretty much predict after every 12 issues there’s going to be a repeat of pretty much the same thing over and over again.

Stroud: Okay, so it got pretty repetitive and dull after awhile.

JM: It was repetitive and it was monotonous. I can’t say I was madly in love with the strip. It was just a nice, reliable source of income while it lasted.

Stroud: It seemed like there was sort of a house style that had to be adhered to, or at least that’s the legend. Any truth to that?

JM: On Supergirl?

Stroud: Yeah.

JM: Not necessarily. My Supergirl was not truly, as I remember it, a house style. It was pretty much my own. In other words, I drew her pretty much the way I wanted to and I would say that Supergirl looked more like my work than anything else, because I just didn’t try to imitate anybody else or follow any other style.

Stroud: Your style is pretty easily discernible. Very clean.

JM: Yeah. Well, I had pretty much the same thing. The big eyes and the way of drawing her. It was just pretty predictable. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: And there’s nothing wrong with that. Reliable is good. Am I correct in saying that you introduced the world to Streaky, the Super Cat?

JM: That was my own creation.

Stroud: Wonderful!

JM: Superhorse, somebody else created and all the others, but Streaky I put in on my own, in fact I love cats anyway. Right now I have seven of them.

Supergirl with Streaky the Cat drawn by Jim Mooney.

Stroud: I’m supporting five myself. (Chuckle.)

JM: You know what it’s like. Yeah, I’ve got one that came to me as a kitten and he looks to some extent like Streaky, except that he doesn’t have the lightning strike on his side. (Chuckle.) Or the lightning pattern, rather.

Stroud: It seems like you were the super pet artist there for quite awhile. Al was telling me that that was the one character he kind of had difficulty with was Krypto. He said a flying dog is not a natural thing to draw, so it gave him fits sometimes. Did you experience anything like that?

JM: I didn’t do him that often. I had the super horse quite often. That was Comet, wasn’t it?

Stroud: Yes.

JM: That was one of the reasons I stayed away from Westerns. I wasn’t that adept at drawing horses, or at least it didn’t come that easily to me. (Chuckle.) I didn’t go around soliciting any western strips.

Stroud: You did some work at Marvel on Spider-Man. Did you get to know any of the creators over there?

JM: I knew John Romita, because he was there all the time, but some of the other people, I very seldom saw them, because we just came into the office at different times.

Stroud: Okay, so you weren’t really in the bullpen much at all.

JM: No, no. The only time I worked in the bullpen was when I worked at Fiction House and I was under contract there.

Stroud: That sounds right. I guess it was just my own ignorance, but I think it was Carmine who told me that the only ones on staff were the editors and the production department and that was it. Everyone else was just working at will, you might say.

JM: Yeah, I think at that time most of us were freelancing. Nobody really wanted to work in the office. I think there was one guy that did Superboy, I can’t think of his name now, (George Papp) that worked in the office for awhile, but most of us tried to avoid it. Who the hell wants to get up in the morning, keep regular hours, take a train in, take a train home again?

Stroud: Absolutely. Not much appeal in that. (Laughter.)

JM: That’s not the type of life I think most of us really envisioned.

Stroud: Was there any favorite character that you liked dealing with?

JM: I would say probably Man-Thing. I loved working with Steve Gerber and Omega to a certain extent, too, but Man-Thing was one of my very favorites.

Stroud: Why do you think that was?

JM: I don’t know. It just appealed to me. For one thing I liked the writing. The very fact that Steve could tell a story and I would find it interesting instead of saying, “Well, okay, I know pretty much what’s going to happen. This is going to happen, that’s going to happen.” With Steve I was never totally sure what might happen in a script. (Chuckle.) It was a never-never land that we were in there some of the time and some of the things that we covered were, to say the least, offbeat.

ThunderCats (1985) #1, cover by Jim Mooney.

Stroud: Okay, so you got to exercise the imagination a little more. I can see where that would be appealing. Now on the flipside, were there any characters you really didn’t like dealing with?

JM: Well, Legion of Super-Heroes because there were so many. I enjoyed them, but it was really a task. And of course, the other one was Dial H for Hero, because we had so many heroes and villains to come out with every issue. I enjoyed the strip, but it was a task, and it took me much longer.

Stroud: It just had to be daunting, I just can’t think of any other word. That was something Carmine told me. He said, “I was so glad I never had to do the Justice League. How Sekowsky ever did that was beyond me.” For the same reasons you’re talking about. Just too many characters and trying to keep it all coordinated and together.

JM: You know, it’s been fun through these years and I’ve enjoyed an awful lot of it and in many ways, I’ve had the freedom as an example, living under a contract. Here I’ve been in Florida, paid to do this stuff and at that time I was still in pretty good shape and I used to like to do a lot of surfing and I’d go swimming a lot. We’d go scuba diving and I did a lot of things I enjoyed while I was still able to do it. Right now, unfortunately, I’m not physically capable of doing any of that. I have a lot of physical infirmities, which I suppose are par for the course when you get older. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Well, yeah, I was gonna say, if my information is correct, you’re 88 years of age.

JM: Yeah.

Stroud: Wow. When was your birthday?

JM: August 13th. I’ve got a little while to go to still be 88. (Chuckle.) One of those things. I’m not complaining. There are a lot of pluses, but you see at this age, I’m not driving. All things considered, I must say that the Golden Years aren’t always the greatest. (Chuckle.) They’re somewhat limiting, to say the least.

Stroud: I heard someone say once, “The Golden Years are filled with Lead.”

JM: (chuckle.) I’ll have to remember that.

Stroud: Do you get to the conventions much any more, Mr. Mooney?

JM: I did for awhile when my wife was alive. My wife died a couple of years ago…

Stroud: Oh, I’m so sorry.

JM: We did them all, in fact. We did the ones around here. Orlando. We did San Diego several times and Seattle. We did them all. Annie loved that. She was great because she’d take over and give me a breather when I had too many fans or too many people coming around the table. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: I imagine that does get a little intimidating. I haven’t been to one yet, but I’d love to one of these days.

JM: They’re fascinating. The one I’ll tell you that you don’t want to miss, even though it’s an ordeal, is San Diego.

Stroud: That’s what I hear. That’s the silver tuna.

JM: Wow, wow, wow. The last one I went to two years ago I was pretty much confined to a scooter and a wheelchair, but I went with a friend of mine and there were 110,000 people at that one.

Spider-Man, Firestar, and Iceman at the Dallas Ballet - Nutcracker (1983) #1, cover by Jim Mooney.

Stroud: Holy cow!

JM: To get from your table to the bathroom or to a particular speaking engagement, whew! It was exhausting.

Stroud: You had to plan ahead, it sounds like. Now the recent series of superhero stamps, was that your Supergirl on the postage stamp?

JM: I haven’t seen it, but I don’t think so. I think it probably was Curt Swan’s. Somebody told me about it and they said, “Is it yours?” and I think I asked somebody else they said, “Oh, no, Jim, that’s not yours,” somebody knowledgeable on comics and they said, “It looks more like Curt Swan’s.” I wish it had been mine.

Stroud: When you did your work with Marvel, obviously you and Stan were good friends. Did you feel like you had more creative freedom there as opposed to DC?

JM: Yeah, of course I loved working with Stan. Sometimes when he’d give you a script he gave you just the basic outline of the script and you’d finish it up and bring it to completion. Stan and I have been good friends for, my God, decades. (Chuckle.) You know I still talk to Stan a couple of times a month and the thing that amazes me is he’s only a few years younger than I am, but my God he’s still going strong. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: It’s impressive. It really is.

JM: I think he’s probably created more in comics than anybody else. Well, I don’t think, I know. And the very fact that he’s got that, “So You Want to be a Superhero” on. The last time I met Stan, the last time I was out there, my God it’s got to be over 10 years ago, I stayed at his place in Beverly Hills for awhile and even then it was go, go go.

Stroud: And the cameos in the movies.

JM: I watch for those. It’s so strange, because I look at Stan and I think, “My God, you’re still going, but you look almost as old as…” Of course, I let him know that each time I talk to him. (Laughter.)

Stroud: When you worked for Marvel, did you use the aliases like some of your fellow artists did or did you bother with that?

JM: No, not really. I didn’t use any of that stuff at all. Some of the guys who were under contract to DC and worked for Marvel on a freelance basis did use pseudonyms because they didn’t want DC to know they were working for Marvel.

Stroud: Oh, so that was the difference. Okay.

JM: In other words, when I went to Marvel, I went to Marvel primarily because things were getting a little bit rugged at DC. I wasn’t getting along too well with a few people there and I approached Stan. I said, “You know, if anything comes up, let me know.” He said, “Well, great I need someone to help John Romita out on Spider-Man.” So I latched onto that.

Stroud: It worked out very well. So you were right there after [Steve] Ditko left, then.

JM: Yeah, after Romita took over, yeah.

Stroud: Did that intimidate you at all or did you give it a second thought?

JM: You know I never met Ditko. Evidently Ditko was kind of an odd person, as I understand it a very difficult person to get to know.

Stroud: He seems to march to the beat of his own drummer.

JM: And it was a strange and singular beat, I understand.

Stroud: (chuckle.) I like that. I think I’ll use that one, if you don’t mind.

Marvel Team-Up (1972) #8, cover by Jim Mooney.

Spider-Man vs. Green Goblin by Jim Mooney.

Spider-Woman (1978) #25, cover by Jim Mooney.

JM: You’re welcome to it. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Was there ever a title you wish you’d had a shot at and didn’t get to do?

JM: I can’t really recall anything that I didn’t get that I wanted. Almost everything that came down the pike I liked, but I don’t remember coveting one particular thing and never getting it. There were so damn many I don’t think there was anything I didn’t do. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah, I saw where you even did some brief stints on Aquaman and the Flash. You really covered the gamut and worked on all the big ones, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man. I couldn’t think of much you hadn’t had a shot at.

JM: That’s for sure.

Stroud: When exactly did you retire, or do you consider yourself retired?

JM: Well, my contract was up with Marvel when I was 65. That was when I was getting the regular bi-monthly salary. So, I freelanced after that and I’ve been freelancing ever since. The period of time that I mentioned that I was under contract was really only a period of I guess about 10 years. Maybe a little less, I don’t know. But that was the main reason I moved to Florida. That way I just felt that I didn’t have to go into the office and beat the bushes for work. The work was going to come in as long as they were paying me so much every couple of times a month. They were going to try to provide the work to make me work for the money they were giving me. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Not bad. Not bad at all. You mentioned your commission business. That’s pretty steady, I guess.

JM: Not as good as it once was. Right now I’m doing a Gwen Stacy in a Santa Claus costume. He wanted a Gwen Stacy in a Santa costume.

Stroud: (chuckle.) More cheesecake.

JM: More cheesecake. God knows I’ve done enough of it. You know I did a strip called Pussycat for many years. I’m sure you’ve seen that.

Stroud: Actually, I have not.

JM: Yeah, that was in the male magazines. In fact, the first one that I ever did Stan Lee wrote. In one of their male magazines, I can’t tell you the title now, but I did quite a few of those and later his brother Larry wrote it.

Stroud: Larry Lieber. I’ve heard of him. So, you’ve really ranged far and wide in your career.

JM: Well, I’ve had a lot of time to range and a lot of space to get wide in. (Chuckle.)

Pussycat (1972), page 1 interior by Jim Mooney.

Elvira (1993) #14 interior by Jim Mooney.

Supergirl in Wonder Woman's outfit. A commission done by Jim Mooney.

February 07, 2018

An Interview With Al Plastino - A Less Boring Take On Golden Age Superman

February 07, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Al Plastino at his drawing table, working on a Batman sketch.

Alfred John Plastino (born December 15, 1921) was an American comics artist best known as one of the most prolific Superman artists of the 1950s (along with his colleague Wayne Boring). Over the years, Plastino also worked as a comics writer, editor, letterer, and colorist. With writer Otto Binder, he co-created the DC characters Supergirl and Brainiac, as well as the teenage team the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Plastino drew the syndicated Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder comic strip from March 17, 1968 to January 1, 1972 and was the uncredited ghost artist on the Superman strip from 1960 to 1966. In 1970, he took over the syndicated strip Ferd'nand, which he drew until his retirement in 1989. In 1996, Plastino was one of the many artists who contributed to the Superman: The Wedding Album one-shot wherein the title character married Lois Lane.

After a battle with both prostate cancer and Guillain–Barré syndrome, Mr. Plastino passed away on November 25, 2013.

Al Plastino: Last Superman Standing - by Eddy Zeno — **Al Plastino: Last Superman Standing** - by Eddy Zeno

Al Plastino was a special guy and I had no idea of my good fortune when I first contacted him. Larger than life and always with a hearty laugh, the man was still going to the gym and golfing into his 90s! He was so very kind to me and I have several examples, from art gifted to me from when he worked on the Ferd'nand strip and Abbie and Slats, to photocopiers of various pencil drawings he'd done as commissions or other samples of his work from his long, long career or to little things he'd send in the mail, like the article about he and Joe Giella in the newspaper and even some flies when I mentioned it had been a long time since I'd been fishing. I absolutely loved the guy and miss him something terrible. He was the last surviving Golden Age Superman artist, but as you'll see, he was so much more. I can also highly recommend Eddy Zeno's biography of Al, "Last Superman Standing."

This interview originally took place over the phone on September 20, 2007.

Al Plastino: Did you see that article before I sent it to you?

Bryan Stroud: I never had and I wanted to start off by saying thank you. I learned quite a bit from the information you so kindly sent to me.

AP: It’s been so long ago. I did Supergirl and I also did the Legion of Super-Heroes. It was by Mort Weisinger. I believe he thought up the idea to have this group of young people band together. As far as it goes, I did the drawing. I’d pretty much forgotten all about it.

Stroud: Well, it has been awhile ago. (Laughter.)

AP: I guess so. And what I can remember is that I designed the costumes. And then I did the Supergirl. What else can I tell you?

Stroud: You know one of the things that surprised me when you sent me the information; I didn’t realize you’d ever done anything on Batman. Now was that the daily strip?

AP: Oh, yes. Oh, I did a lot of Batman. I did it for 8 years for the newspaper with [Whitney] Ellsworth.

Stroud: Okay, now was that before or after Joe Giella?

AP: Gee, I think it was after. I think I was the last guy to do it.

Stroud: Oh, so you actually got to sign it then.

AP: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Ellsworth and Plastino are on all the proofs.

Stroud: Ah, now that was a big change.

AP: Bob Kane was on there, too, but he didn’t do a damn thing.

The Batman syndicated strip fro 12/6/1968, signed by Bob Kane in the first panel and Plastino & Ellsworth in the last. — The Batman syndicated strip fro 12/6/1968, signed by **Bob Kane** in the first panel and **Plastino** & **Ellsworth** in the last.

The Batman syndicated strip fro 2/18/1969, signed by Bob Kane in the first panel and Plastino & Ellsworth in the last. — The Batman syndicated strip fro 2/18/1969, signed by **Bob Kane** in the first panel and **Plastino** & **Ellsworth** in the last.

Stroud: Yeah, that’s one of the things Joe Giella was telling me was that while he was doing the strip he always had to sign it “Bob Kane.”

AP: Yeah, well I didn’t. The letterer put Bob Kane on it, on the first panel by the title and then the third or fourth panel was Plastino and Ellsworth.

Stroud: Okay, yeah. He’d told me his successor was able to put his own name on there, but he didn’t name you, so I didn’t realize that you had taken over.

AP: Yeah, it was me. I did so many things. And commercial art, I did a lot of covers, love story covers. I could keep you here all day talking about the stuff I did.

Stroud: Oh, I don’t mind at all, sir. Now, Mr. Plastino, I notice that you’re one of the very few; I can think of only maybe one or two, like Joe Kubert and Russ Heath who actually inked their own work consistently.

AP: I did my own work. One name was on it: Al Plastino.

Stroud: Was that by choice?

AP: I demanded it. I said, “I’m not going to New York to have some guy ink and then I have to wait for it.” No, no, no. That was the understanding that made me take the strip in the first place. If I can’t handle it alone, I don’t want it. I saw the rat race that was going on years ago when I was a young man and I worked for Chesler. Harry Chesler.

Stroud: Yeah, a lot of people got their start with his shop. I think Joe Kubert did, too.

AP: I wouldn’t doubt it. And I saw what happened and I said, “Oh, geez, this is crazy, I’m not gonna do this.” We had everybody in the studio. I still inked my own stuff, but we weren’t allowed to do the lettering.

Stroud: So you worked in the bullpen, then?

AP: For awhile, yeah. I did everything. You name it, I did it. Then I got away from it and went into commercial art.

Stroud: That paid better, didn’t it?

AP: Well, that was a rat race. I was with Jack Sparling, who was a cartoonist.

Stroud: Yes.

AP: You remember his name?

Stroud: I do. In fact, I think he did some work on Secret Six and some other stuff. I’ve seen his work. He’s very good.

AP: Yeah, and he did a strip for the PM newspaper called “Claire Voyant.” And he was fast, I mean really fast.

Stroud: Faster than Sekowsky?

AP: Much faster than anybody. He wrote it, drew it and inked it. He did six dailies in one day.

Stroud: That is fast.

AP: Because the fella that delivered it to the newspaper lost it. He was fast.

Stroud: Oh, that’s amazing. How long did it usually take you to do a completed page?

AP: Me? Oh, I averaged about 2 pages a day. Not truly completed, but I had to pencil, too. That was my schedule. And I always had two accounts. When I was doing Superman I was doing Batman. I was doing Superman AND Batman. I had maybe two weeks to do a story, so it didn’t interfere too much, but of course with Batman there were six dailies and a Sunday.

Stroud: That’s full-time employment.

AP: I was working like a dog. My kids were little. Anyway, I got pretty fast watching Jack. He was a great help to me. We had a studio on 40th Street and Lexington Avenue. A third-floor walk-up. (chuckle) And another fella worked there. Daryl Walling did a strip for Herald Tribune called Skeates. He only did the Sunday page. So the three of us had a studio. We shared it. So I learned a lot from Jack.

Action Comics (1938) #134, cover by Al Plastino.

Action Comics (1938) #140, cover by Al Plastino.

Action Comics (1938) #208, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: A lot of short-cuts and stuff?

AP: Well, the kind of work.

Stroud: Style?

AP: No. I never copied his style.

Stroud: I guess what I meant were techniques.

AP: Well, when you’re around people that work fast, it gets into your blood. It’s like, “I’m not working hard enough, and I’m not doing it fast enough.”

Stroud: Okay, it kind of sets the bar for you.

AP: I think so. And during World War II I worked for the Pentagon. I invented a plane, believe it or not. I know it sounds crazy. I’m an avid builder of model airplanes and I always loved aviation and I got an idea for a plane. It looks like the space shuttle of today. It was 1941 when the jets weren’t around. No jets. Anyway, maybe I’ll send you a picture of it some time.

Stroud: I wish you would. I’d love to see it.

AP: Anyway, so they got me at the Pentagon and they didn’t know what the hell to do with me, so I started drawing posters for the building. I’m drawing posters and then an Army General spotted me downstairs and says, “What the hell is this guy doing here? Get him upstairs. We need him upstairs.” So I was assigned to the art department in the Pentagon, the A.G.O. department and I learned a lot there, too. Man, I learned a lot.

Stroud: I’ll be that was a wonderful training ground.

AP: We had the best art directors you can name. And from there, they decided to place me in New York with Steinberg [Studios] to do the art work there because he was doing most of the art work. So I worked with Steinberg when he approached me, and said, “Al, they’re looking for a guy to do Superman.” I said, “Hell, no.” He said, “They’re paying $55.00 a page.” I say, “What?” Anyway I did a sample and I went to see Jack Schiff and we talked and he says, “Okay, we’ll give you $35.00 a page.” I say, “Good-bye.” “What’s the matter?” I say, “Oh, no, no, no. Wayne Boring is getting $55.00 a page.” “But, he’s been here 10 years.” So we settled for $50.00.

Stroud: Not bad.

AP: So I remained at $50.00. And I said, “Okay, great. I’ll do it.”

Stroud: Good negotiating on your part.

AP: Well, you see, when you have other income, you can do that. I was interviewed in an article where the headline is, “He’s not my boss, he’s my editor.” And from there I explained why I was the way I was. I always had something else on the side. If you don’t have something; and in my business, the comic business, they’ll step all over you. So I just said, “No way! No way, good-bye.” And I was able to do that because I had other work and that’s how that came about. And I did that most of my life anyway, when I had an account like when Mikkelsen said about Ferd’nand when he was retiring, he was giving me $100.00 a week for just finishing up little things. Oh, another guy I worked for was Ray Van Buren on Abbie and Slats. I worked with him and I used to finish up his work and he gave me $100.00 a week. I was getting $100.00 all different places. (chuckle.) He would write on the original, “Al, finish up this; Al do this; Al put that in,” and that was it. I always had something going. I never was satisfied with one thing. And I was able to draw different characters. That’s the thing that amazed me. Just by looking at it I was able to copy it. They’re all different styles you know.

Stroud: I was looking through some of your old work the other night and I saw the most beautiful rendition of the front of maybe a ’58 Chrysler and I thought, “Man, that looks like a photograph.”

AP: Was that a Batman strip? I used the Mercedes, was it Mercedes? I forget now, but that was the only time I’ll use photographs for a material thing like that.

Stroud: I’ve got an artist friend of mine and he had a question he wanted me to ask and it says, “Ask him how tight his pencils were…”

AP: Not very tight. (chuckle.)

Stroud: He says, “His work always looked like they were drawn with a brush over very, very simple roughs.”

AP: Right, right. That’s what I did. I did that purposely because they asked me from time to time to do pencil drawings and I said, “Look, if I’m going to pencil tight, I might as well ink it.” I mean, come on. So I always used a No. 3 Winsor-Newton brush, come to a fine point, and to this day I don’t know how the hell I did it. My eyes are not that great any more.

Stroud: That took some skill.

AP: That’s when you’re young. You don’t need glasses. I started reading glasses. I was doing Topps bubble gum cards. I did the Tarzan series and they were 3” x 4” and you’d have 60 on a page. So when I was ready to ink them I was backing up my head and I said, “What the hell’s going on?” Then I realized I needed reading glasses. I did that for awhile for Topps bubble gum. I did that guy with all the animals. Dr. Doolittle from the movie strips. I did so many things. God, when I think about it, I wonder how the hell did I do it. I never turned anything down.

Stroud: A very full career. Well, when you’re supporting a family, you do what you’ve gotta do.

AP: Yeah, they’re all big now. And I’m 86 years old. I go to the gym twice a week. (chuckle.)

Stroud: You’re a young man.

AP: Well, people think I’m young. I think that way, anyway.

Stroud: That’s excellent. Now, I’m told there was kind of a house style at the time. Did you have to kind of imitate Boring’s style?

AP: Yes, at the beginning, yes and I hated it, oh, God, I hated it. I had to imitate his style and then there was an article where it said, “Al broke away to his own style,” after I was there awhile. The guy wasn’t bad, he just had a style that was kind of, you know, rigid, and, you know we’re going back to 1947. (Laughter.)

Stroud: Yes, and I’m glad you said that because, you know, I don’t want to criticize anyone, but when I look at Wayne’s work, he doesn’t seem capable of drawing a smile. Everybody looks like they’re angry.

AP: Well, that’s the same with Neal Adams. Every time you look at his stuff a guy’s got his mouth open yelling. He’s a great artist, don’t get me wrong.

Stroud: Yeah, I got to talk to Neal awhile back…

AP: He’s a great artist. I remember him from Superman.

Stroud: Yeah, and he did some wonderful work. It sounds to me like you two have one thing in common, too. He told me that he was able to tame the wild beast that was Weisinger and Kanigher.

AP: Oh, yeah, oh, God, Weisinger was a mess. Murray Boltinoff, I also disliked. That’s how I got into drawing Batman for Ellsworth.

Stroud: Oh, yeah?

AP: I don’t know if I should tell you this. But anyway, I got into an argument with Murray Boltinoff. They wanted me to work with him drawing Superboy and I couldn’t stand the man. They got this attitude that they think who the hell they are. Later, when I was interviewed for an article, I said, “You’re not my boss, you’re my editor.” So I never took no…baloney. I have to watch my language; my wife doesn’t like it.

Stroud: (Laughter.)

AP: So when Ellsworth came in, Ellsworth saved his life. I swear, I was really angry and I said, “I wouldn’t work with you.” And he heard me, he said, “Look, Al, what’s the matter?” I said, “Blah, blah, blah.” He said, “Never mind. You work with me on Batman. You want to do Batman?” I said, “Yeah, rather than do work with this…banana head.” Now Weisinger, I got along with him because I straightened him out a long time ago.”

Stroud: That seems to be what it took with him.

AP: Because when [Joe] Shuster was in, when the poor bums that created Superman, was in his office one time and doing some writing for him, and he talked to them like they were dirt. So when they left, I just said, “Mort, if that was me, and you spoke to me the way you spoke to [Joe] Shuster and [Jerry] Siegel,” I don’t know who wrote it, I think Siegel wrote it and Shuster drew it, I’m not sure. He worked for a post office! “How the hell do you get the nerve to talk to him that way? Who the hell do you think you are?” Oh, I wasn’t afraid. My wife used to yell at me. “Don’t talk to them that way.” I said, “What are you worried about him for? I’m not worried about him.” So anyway, I laced into him. I said, “If it was me, I would have not only punched you in the jaw,” and I’m not a big man, but when I get angry, I don’t care how big the guy is, I get angry. Anyway, we got along fine after that.

Adventure Comics (1938) #129, cover by Al Plastino.

Adventure Comics (1938) #148, cover by Al Plastino.

Adventure Comics (1938) #151, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: That does seem to be what it takes.

AP: Neal Adams has a lot of talent. He’s a terrific artist, don’t get me wrong, but the thing that upset me with his work was that if you look at it, you get nervous, ‘cause there’s always somebody yelling, running, jumping. In fact I just saw [Paul] Levitz this past summer. I went to see him and he showed me around. You can’t believe the place they have now and I was talking to him about it and he says, “You know, Al, I have to agree with you.” I said, “The new stuff that comes out now, you’ve got a letterer, you’ve got a penciller, you’ve got an inker, you’ve got a background man, you’ve got a colorist. There’s five or six names on this thing.” Now everybody’s trying to outdo the other guy. (chuckle.) The background man tries to put in…I mean, it gets confusing. Cars, buildings, ‘cause that’s all he’s worried about is the background. The other guy’s worried about the figures. I mean, come on. Back then it was simple. We told the story, and everybody could understand it. Not the best artwork in the world, but it told the story. It was clean cut. And he agreed with me. I don’t hold back any opinions. Do you remember when we did the wedding story where Superman got married?

Stroud: Yes.

AP: I had two pages on that, and everybody had two pages. So my villain was a young boy. It called for a young thug, maybe fifteen, sixteen or seventeen [years old] in my series. The next two pages the guy aged about 20 years. (chuckle.) So when I went in to see Levitz, I said, “Paul, who the hell’s the editor that checked this out before it was printed?” There was about five guys in the room. So the one guy was quiet. He said, “It was me.” I said, “How the hell…” “It was one of those things, Al.” “How the hell could you mistake my character, ‘cause I did the pages first, and he was supposed to pick up on mine?” The guy became an old guy. I don’t know if anybody caught it when they see the story. The poor guy was standing in the doorway. I said, “You’re the guy who did this?” I said, “How the hell did you do that?” “Well, it happens.”

Stroud: (Laughter.) Too many cooks.

AP: Well, you know, even at United Features, five guys have to check a copy and there’s still mistakes. A guy overlooks a word, a word looks like something it’s supposed to be. So, it’s gonna happen. But it was funny. It was a funny day.

Stroud: When you were doing the Superman titles, Carmine was telling me that typically they’d do a cover first and then build the story around it.

AP: No, no, no. The cover came later. I did 48 covers. I’ve got a book with all my covers. Sometimes they’d copy from the splash, the opening page, but the covers; where the hell did they get that idea? How could you do a cover from a story that’s not even done yet?

Stroud: Well, the way Carmine was explaining it to me, he and Julie Schwartz would get together and they’d cook up a cover and then give it to a writer…

AP: Not for Superman.

Stroud: No, not for Superman.

AP: Okay. Maybe they worked different.

Superman (1939) #58, cover by Al Plastino.

Superman (1939) #63, cover by Al Plastino.

Superman (1939) #65, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: I didn’t know if they did that for the Superman titles, because as I was looking through I got to thinking about one of the Action comics that you illustrated with the Parasite, do you recall that one?

AP: Parasite.

Stroud: Yeah, a purple guy that absorbed the powers from Superman. Anyway, Curt Swan had done the cover, but you had done the interiors, so I wondered which one came first.

AP: No, the cover never came first.

Stroud: So in essence you helped create the Parasite then.

AP: Probably. When Mort would call me in to do a cover for a story that I’d already done, like Luthor… I did so many covers, I mean, my God. The imp and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you name it. It doesn’t make sense. Unless you worked with the editor and the artist who was doing the story, like Carmine, who’s a hell of a nice guy, by the way. I got along great with him. He’s a good guy. But I’m positive we didn’t do the cover first. Why would you do a cover and then do a story? They got the best part of the artwork. See, what happened later on, I guess Curt Swan, poor guy, I didn’t mean to say that, but I felt sorry for him.

Stroud: Oh yeah?

AP: Well, all he did was pencil.

Stroud: Oh, okay.

AP: You’re an artist, but just do pencils and you have to make them exact, because anybody could ink them. Anybody could ink Curt’s stuff. Anybody. And I think Murphy Anderson used to ink most of his stuff. And Murphy is a great inker.

Stroud: I know he did a lot of it.

AP: Yeah, because you just follow his lines. You just give it a little snap with the brush, but you’re still following the man’s lines. He puts the blacks in, he puts everything in. I think I did only one story with Reuben Moreira, I think it was Ruby who penciled and it drove me crazy because I couldn’t conceive his heads. So I insisted on doing Superman, I said, “You don’t do Superman, you do all the other characters.” You can see the difference. It’s a story I did a long time ago.

Stroud: That reminds me there’s another legend I was going to ask you about. When Jack Kirby took over Superman they had you re-do the heads? Is that correct?

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen (1954) #133, cover by Jack Kirby with faces redone by Al Plastino. — Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen (1954) #133, cover by **Jack Kirby** with faces redone by **Al Plastino**.

AP: Yes, yes. That’s a pain in the neck. I had to paste in the heads.

Stroud: Okay, so you just pasted them right over the top.

AP: Yeah, well you just put it on very thin paper. You draw it and you put rubber cement and cut it as close as you can and put some outside lines to lead into it so it looks kosher, you know. It looks like it hasn’t been touched up. Which is a job in itself.

Stroud: Oh, I bet. Did that bother Jack at all?

AP: I don’t think so. He didn’t say anything to me.

Stroud: Okay. You hear different stories and you’re never sure what the truth is.

AP: I know I did paste those. Mort would call me in and Mort would talk like…I’d better not imitate him, forget it.

Stroud: (Chuckle.)

AP: One good thing I have to say about the man. He had these crazy ideas, which I thought were crazy at the time, like Superdog and Supercat and all this junk, but it sold books!

Stroud: So those were his ideas.

AP: Yeah, Supercat? What the hell are you guys talking about? I did Superdog in many stories.

Stroud: It was a running character there for quite some time.

AP: Yeah. The imp. I had changed him to my way. I didn’t care for what he looked like and they mentioned that in an article once.

Stroud: Yeah, that you had redesigned the costume.

AP: Yeah, everything. The guy’s hands. Everything. So long ago, my God.

Stroud: Have you seen the new paper back reprints they’re doing of the old Silver Age stuff?

AP: Yeah, I get them. They mail me three or four or five copies at a time. One good thing came out of all this: Royalty checks. I get great royalty checks. (chuckle.) Every time they reprint something I get…last year I made $10,000.00 on royalty, because I have so many stories. In one book there’s twelve stories, the soft cover and another one had fourteen of my stories and covers. Foreign covers aren’t so good. I was interviewed by a Canadian broadcaster a couple of weeks ago, so it gets out and gets to Canada.

Now Batman, I don’t get a damn thing for that. I didn’t do too many comic books I just did it for the syndicate and the syndicate went broke. So I don’t get anything from there, just Superman and Superboy.

Stroud: Did you have a favorite person who was a scripter for you who was easier to work with?

AP: Jack Schiff was the early editor at Superman. I don’t know if he’s still alive. He was very nice. And Jack Adler was the colorist. I got along with him all right. And Harris I think his name was. He used to color, too and he was the one who went to bat for us to get our name on it and the royalty. He fought for it for the artists. I get royalties for the early work I did and the reprints. They make money on those reprints; my God do they make money. I get a full list of the sales they make and what they pay for pencils and inks. That’s why I make so much because I get paid for pencil and inks.

Stroud: You were the one man show.

AP: Yeah, in fact I had to correct them a few times. They’d say, “Oh, no, you didn’t pencil it.” I said, “What do you mean, I didn’t pencil it?” Here’s what happened. The girls, when I worked for Ray Van Buren, who did beautiful women, beautiful women with pen and ink, by working with him, melded into making my drawing of women. So the women didn’t look different in Superman for awhile there, toward the end and they thought Reuben Moreira was drawing them. I said, “Are you crazy? I’m drawing my own stuff.” I worked for Ray Van Buren who did beautiful work. The guy was an illustrator one time and I worked with him for quite awhile. So I got to look at his way of drawing women and it was great. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from everybody, I think. Ernie Bushmill’s stuff, Little Nancy was the toughest strip to draw. The toughest.

Al Plastino with the original art for his President Kennedy story in Superman (1939) #170.

Stroud: Really? Why is that?

AP: Because he was a real German draftsman. And every line meant something. He drew simply, but clean, crisp lines of a certain thickness. No less, no more. No brush. In fact, I had to use a fountain pen for his stuff.

Stroud: Oh.

AP: I used to dip it in the ink and I got a consistent line with the fountain pen. It didn’t spread. It held its consistency.

Stroud: Oh that’s a very different way to work.

AP: Oh, my God it was tough to do, believe me. When they finally gave this other guy the strip in California it lasted less than a year. He murdered it. He murdered the strip. And eventually just dropped out. They said I was too old to continue. I think I was 65 then. Too old. Why, you bunch of boobs.

Stroud: (Chuckle.) Yeah, I don’t know how they can put an age on talent.

AP: Yeah, well see at United Features, 65 and you’re out. Not the artists, but the people that work on staff. After 65, boom! Out. No matter how much talent you’ve got. But anyway it worked out all right. I wasn’t too concerned about it after it happened. I decided to quit and said “Let me retire, I think I’ve had about everything.”

Stroud: So how many years altogether were you in the business?

AP: Let’s see, my God. I started in ’47. I ended in ’81.

Stroud: That’s a good, long run.

AP: That’s a long run. Even younger than that. I mean I was in high school when I got my first job. There was a magazine called “Youth Today,” in high school. We’d get it once a month and they had a contest. If you win, you get $50.00 and they put your drawing on the cover. So I won that twice. Then I won second prize, third time. So Mr. Cooden, I’ll never forget his name, the art director, he says, “Look, Al, we’d like to hire you because we can’t afford to keep giving you prizes.”

Stroud: (Laughter.)

AP: You know the format was like The Reader’s Digest.

Stroud: Oh, yes.

AP: That’s what I was doing for him. So I would read the copy and make some sketches and show him and he would approve them or disapprove them, but most of the time he approved them and I would ink them. I read the article in the paper. Chesler said, “Black and white artist wanted.” So I said, “Let me go and see this.” It was comics. And he said, “Hey, kid. Throw that stuff away. You work for me. Make money.” He always had a cigar in his mouth. When I went to him I think I was about 18 years old. I was also copying paintings in the Metropolitan when I was a kid of 13 or 14. A Renoir I did, right there they’d set you up and you could paint from the original. Then I got a few commissions. I did a couple of Rembrandt’s, Sargent’s. You name it, I did it.

Stroud: You’ve always been interested in art, obviously.

AP: Since I was a kid as far back as I can remember. And I was encouraged by my brother, my oldest brother, who was a good artist and I used to watch him as a kid, drawing. I’d also watch him making model airplanes, which got me interested in it. So I had a pretty active life. (chuckle.)

Stroud: I guess so. Did you ever think you’d be able to make a living at it?

AP: No. My Dad was the one who encouraged me. In fact, he’s in Who’s Who of Italian Americans who made it. He was THE hatter of Manhattan. He made all the hats for all the president’s. He made La Guardia’s hats when La Guardia was Mayor of New York. He made the Governor’s hats. He made LBJ’s and the last hats he made were for President Kennedy and his wife. Then my dad went into hunt caps, so he made him a top hat, a felt hat and a riding hat and he gave his wife, Jacqueline a top hat and a riding hat for jumping horses. And then Kennedy never wore a hat, right? And the hat business took a nose dive. It went right down the tubes. The hat business just died. He never wore a hat. Truman wore a hat, LBJ wore a hat. Everybody wore hats, but he didn’t wear a hat. In fact they say if he had a hat on in that car, he might be alive today.

Superboy (1949) #8, cover by Al Plastino.

Superboy (1949) #10, cover by Al Plastino.

Superboy (1949) #59, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: I hadn’t heard that before.

AP: When you’re aiming at something and you’ve got a little distraction…his head was large. That’s why he didn’t wear a hat. I thought he looked good in the felt hat. So my father was THE hatter. Luckily he went into the equestrian hats and he survived and my brother survived with it and now my nephew runs the company. My dad lived to be 96.

Stroud: Ah, so you’ve got some good genes.

AP: Yeah, my grandfather died in his sleep at 98 I think it was. My aunts were in their 90’s. (chuckle) Great genes I guess. Golf. I’m an avid golfer. I love golf. I used to play with Jackie Gleason at Shawnee. I met Gleason because his group would come out following our group, the cartoonist’s and I got to know him real well. I played with him for six years at Shawnee.

Stroud: Oh, fantastic.

AP: Ah, it doesn’t mean anything. He was a nice guy. I liked him. He was an all right guy.

Stroud: It had to be pretty fun.

AP: Well, he was a pretty serious guy when it came to golf. I don’t know why I’m rambling on, you’re bringing back memories.

Stroud: I don’t mind at all. I’m enjoying every minute.

AP: My Dad would drop me off at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d go Saturday and he’d pick me up at night. And then I tried working in the factory and I was burning the candle at both ends and he said, “Look. Go back to art school.” “I’m not sure I can make a living at it.” “If you keep up, you’ll do fine.” And that’s what kept me away from the business. My two brothers went into the business. I stayed with the art.

Stroud: Did you know any of the other creators very well? Jerry Siegel, for instance?

AP: Jerry? I think I met him once at Shawnee for the cartoonist’s golf outings. I met a lot of guys there. Gus Edson, The Gump’s. These guys were characters. You talk about characters. (Chuckle.) They were half-bombed half the time. Yet they could do their work! Otto Soglow did The Little King and the guy I never liked, even though he was the greatest artist, Hal Foster. He was so obnoxious. The guy was a great artist, I mean great and I looked up to him. I met him at Shawnee. Big, tall guy. And he knew he was great and he boasted about it. And I said to myself, “You’re not supposed to do that, are you?” But he was a great artist. My God, when he did Tarzan, oh, God that was gorgeous work. Gorgeous.

Stroud: Yeah, it seems like he and Milt Caniff were the ones that inspired everybody.

AP: Milt, now there was a nice guy. Milt was a great man. I met him just twice. Just before he died I think I met him at the castle in Connecticut. The cartoonist’s castle. They show all the work there. Some of my work is there. And I met him there. I think he was about 91 then. He was a great guy. He was such a pleasant man to talk to. There were some good guys. Nice people. Pleasant. Answered questions nicely. Wouldn’t think you were a jerk, you know. ‘Cause I always thought I was a jerk. “How do you do that? Well, what time do you do it?” You know crazy questions that I used to think about.

By the way, I still do recreations for cancer funds. I just came from an outing yesterday and I did Superman and Luthor in an action scene and they auctioned it. I don’t know what they got for it, but the one I did, who I can’t stand, is Tiger Woods, ‘cause I’m an avid golfer. I can’t stand this man. But I did one that got $1,100.00. I don’t know if you ever watch golf, but they lifted what they call the loose impediment and about 10 guys lift this rock up so Tiger can hit the shot without hitting the rock. So I got Superman lifting a tremendous boulder, tremendous boulder. So, Tiger Woods and his caddy are coming over the horizon where the ball is and the caddy says, “Superman!” And dopey says, “Wow!” Tiger Woods. (chuckle.) They got $1,100.00 for it at the auction.

Action Comics (1938) #217, cover by Al Plastino.

Action Comics (1938) #224, cover by Al Plastino.

Action Comics (1938) #252, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: Wonderful.

AP: Most of it went for Jerry’s Kids for Muscular Dystrophy research and some of it goes to churches and I don’t get a dime. It’s all donated.

Stroud: Good for you.

AP: I’ve been doing that for over 20 years.

Stroud: Do you do commission work that you sell?

AP: Yes. I make covers for different people and commissioned them, but you know what happens? There’s always something that’s not in the original. Like a fold. These guys count the folds! One guy says, “Al, you’ve only got three folds. The original has four folds.” I said, “Hey! (laughter.) What do you want me to do? It’s still my work. I’m trying to copy it as best as I can for you.” What? Are you guys kidding me? Another guy said to me, “Al. Something is wrong with Superman.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “One hand has nails and the other hand doesn’t have the long nails.” It’s a cover of him on a different planet, and he’s got a beard, and his nails got long.

Stroud: Okay, like an exile thing.

AP: Yeah, you only see one finger, but, “I don’t see the long nail.” I said, (chuckle) “Hey, fella, do me a favor.” (Laughter.) So I stopped doing that. I said I’m not doing that, to heck with it. I got paid well, but it’s a lot of work. You gotta get the lettering right, you’ve gotta color it.

Stroud: Right, all that stuff you’re not used to doing.

AP: And then I never send frames with them. I wouldn’t do that. I sent them matted. And so I did a nice job. In fact I have some of them here, because before I send them out I make a copy of it. There’s a machine at the library and I make a copy of it in color, so I’ve got copies of all my stuff. Just in case it gets lost. (chuckle.) That’s happened, too.

Stroud: That would be heart-breaking.

AP: Does Jack Binder sound familiar to you?

Stroud: I think so. I wonder why?

AP: He worked for Chesler. And he said, “Hey, kid! You want to help me out with these…” He was doing pulp magazines and he let me lay out a whole page in pencil, and then ink it and he’d give me $5.00. And it was a big deal; he’d give me $5.00. “You learn anything, kid?” I said, “Yeah, I’m learning.” Which I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it because I was anxious to do anything. When you’re young, you’ll do anything.

Stroud: Sure and you’re kind of in an apprentice status.

AP: Yeah, and his brother’s still alive. He does writing for Superman. I’m trying to remember his first name. Otto. Otto Binder. He’s a nice guy. But the thing that got me is they try to take advantage of you, right? And I was still a little uppity in those days, so I did a story for him, a six-page story, and he had a reputation that he was very tough on paying. So I went to his apartment and I took him the story. He says, “Very nice, Al, I like it. I’ll see you later in the office and I’ll pay you.” I said, “No, no, no, no. You pay me now.” “What do you mean now?” “Now.” One thing led to another and this is a true story. I went into the corner of the room and I held the six pages open in a tearing position. I said, “If you don’t pay me now I’m going to tear these.” “Oh, no, no, no, no, don’t tear the pages!” They were paying $9.00 a page. (chuckle.)

Stroud: You got your point across.

AP: Oh, I was going to do it, too. He said, “Okay, okay.” I’d heard he had a bad reputation and one time I got paid 10 cents on the dollar. The company I worked for, a couple of guys, went broke. So I learned my lesson. No more. I want the money now. So, I got it.

Stroud: No kidding. You didn’t need any broken promises.

AP: We became good friends. He said, “Al, I don’t know.” I said, “Look. I’ve heard stories; I witnessed some of this stuff myself personally. People, who are going to pay you later, sometimes don’t pay you.” What are you supposed to do? Get a gun and shoot ‘em? I don’t want to shoot anybody. (Laughter.)

Stroud: And you can’t eat a promise, either.

AP: Right. So that’s the end of my stories now. You got enough material there?

Stroud: You were very generous.

AP: But I did meet a lot of nice people, believe it or not.

Stroud: Who were your favorites?

AP: Other than the editors I already mentioned I dealt with the other guys. I tolerated them. Nobody got along with Mort. Nobody. Everybody had something to say about him, but I put it in print. (Laughter.) He’s gone now, but it was a cut-throat business in those days. Cut-throat. Here was the approach they’d take: “Hey, Al.” This is Mort. “Hey, Al, you know there’s a guy here wants to do Superman for $20.00 less than you get.” My answer was, “Give it to him.” And that was the end of that conversation. They always kept trying to keep you below them. I don’t care what it was. “You’re below me.” But I’d tell them, “I’m above you. I’m the artist. You’re an editor.” I made that clear. In a nice way. I wasn’t always belligerent, but they got to me sometimes. They really got to me.

Stroud: Well, you can only take so much of that after awhile.

AP: I’m of Italian descent, and proud of it!

Stroud: Yes.

AP: First generation. And Jackie used to call me… I don’t know if I should say it. You know, the word. He’d say, “The little skinny G can sure play golf!”

Stroud: Oh, yeah, yeah.

AP: And I didn’t mind. I got a kick out of it. He said this little skinny guy can hit a ball. See they started Jackie Gleason with woods, all woods. I don’t know if you play golf. You’ve got to have woods and irons.

Stroud: Right.

AP: And Ed Sullivan talked them into all woods and Fred Waring. So we got to this one hole, quick story, we got to this one hole, a par 3. So I take a 7 iron, bang it on the green and it was all water around this green. All water surrounding the green at Shawnee. So he gets up with his woods and knocks one in the water. He knocks two in the water. He knocks one over. He’s going crazy. So he picks up the bag, a leather bag. In those days $300.00 a pop, today probably much more. A big leather bag, he throws everything in the water. He said, “If I can’t play and hit the ball like Al, I’m not gonna play this game any more.” Jackie Gleason and I became good friends and played golf together for the next six years. Getting back to my story about Boltinoff in the art room… We were all in the art room. I don’t know if Neal was there. A lot of guys were there. We’d come in with our artwork and we’d talk and maybe we’d have corrections to do. Murray Boltinoff comes out of his office and yells, “Hey, you!” To me, he says, “You, you, you! What the hell is your name? Come with me!” Well, I put the pencil down, and I excused myself with the guys, I went into his office, closed the door and got him by the collar, and I said, “You obnoxious, insecure, nasty person! If you ever yell at me again I’ll… You call me Mr. Plastino or else! I wouldn’t work with you on Superboy if I had to starve to death!” So when Ellsworth heard the commotion, Ellsworth came in and he said, “Al, what are you doing? Come on; come on, what’s happening?” I said, “I’m not working with this…” You know what I said. ”I’m not working with him. And I refuse to work, I’m gonna quit.” “No, no, no, no, Al, don’t quit. Work with me. You want to draw Batman?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll do Batman.” And that’s how I got the assignment.

AP: And the two guys that were responsible for my having a lot of articles done were two fellas, one from England, named Jim Kealy and one from Tennessee, named Eddy Zeno.

Superman (1939) #67, cover by Al Plastino.

Superman (1939) #110, cover by Al Plastino.

Superman (1939) #114, cover by Al Plastino.

Stroud: Tennessee.

AP: Yeah, the names are on the article. And they were very good to me. Very good. They bought some of my work in the beginning and now I just send them stuff. Every time I’ve got something new I send it to them. And they were really nice, they sound like you, a nice guy. You sound like a nice guy.

Stroud: Oh, thank you. I do my best, Al. I’ve been having so much fun talking to the old creators this year and everyone has been very, very kind. Just like yourself.

AP: I know someday, the articles I’ve been interviewed for; I’m on tape, on cable, cable out here. They showed my work and how I do it. I did Batman demonstrations; I did some talking to this man. I don’t get paid. Nobody pays me anything, but it’s nice to have for my grandchildren some day to look at. “Grandpa was a pretty big guy.” And I’m a pretty good looking guy, you know. (chuckle.)

Stroud: Yeah, I saw that drawing of you. Did you do that drawing of yourself?

AP: Yeah, oh sure. I draw portraits of myself. That I worked from a photograph. You know, when you’re a kid, there’s nobody around, right? (chuckle) So you look in the mirror and say, “Ah, what the hell? I’ll draw myself.” Hands, you know, and there’s a mirror in front of my desk. A big mirror. And you want to get an expression on a face; you look in the mirror, and draw.

Stroud: Sure. You’ve got to have a model.

AP: With a hand, you put your hand in the mirror, toward the mirror, and you handle a gun, or a guy going like this, it’s there, right in front of you. The action is right in front of you. So I believe in that. Anyway, that’s it.

Stroud: Were there any characters that you really didn’t like drawing?

AP: Superdog. (Laughter.) I can’t see a dog flying through the air with a cape. I never did Supercat, though. And a dog is tough to draw, you know, even though I owned a couple of dogs at one time. Flying. You know, it’s crazy, what do you do with that?

Stroud: You’re right. You bring up an excellent point. That’s an unnatural position.

AP: The dog’s flying. (Laughter.) It’s like a dog jumping. Four legs, all apart. It’s all right. One time I had to draw him in multiple action scenes. That takes time.

Stroud: That had to be just maddening after awhile.

AP: Yeah, but I enjoyed everything. I still paint. I exhibit at the galleries. Watercolors. Oils. I sold one of my wife sleeping in a chair. It’s called “Noon Nap.” Oh, she’s gorgeous, my wife. When she was 18, I was 35.

The Christmas inscription, from Al Plastino.

Stroud: Well, a good looking guy like you, why not? (chuckle.)

AP: And her sister is Millie Perkins, the actress that played in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” by George Stevens, who directed the movie. She was a fashion model, and picked for the part from 10,000 girls. This stuff, just one thing leads to another as I talk. (chuckle.) But my wife is still a beautiful woman and I was doing Love Story covers when I met her and I was living with my sister in Jersey, in Fairlawn, and I was going to New York on a date and I stopped for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, just enough for the road. When I walked in I saw this beautiful young girl and her girlfriend and two guys sitting at a table and I was looking at her and I was doing Leading Love Stories covers. If I saw a pretty girl, I would ask her to pose. I would take a photograph of her, naturally. Anyway, I was going back out to the car and I caught her eye again. I said, “Al, if you don’t go back in there and speak to that girl, you’ll never see her again.” So I went back in again. Being a shy guy, you know. (chuckle.) I went back in again and told her my story, and the two guys didn’t say a word. When I tell you who the two guys were, you’re gonna drop. And she says, “You’ll have to ask my mother.” And I says, “Fine, I’ll call Mrs. Perkins any time.” The two guys at the table were Tom Lasorda and Rob Pomenowski, the pitcher. They weren’t anything then, they were young guys.

Stroud: Oh, holy cow.

AP: Yeah, yeah, how about that for a story? And they didn’t say a word. Not a word. Rob Pomenowski was a big guy. He was the pitcher for the Dodgers and Lasorda was a short, stocky guy, but he was a young kid. A young guy. We were all young. I was 35; they must have been 18 or 19. What could they have been? Anyway, so a week later I call her mother. A gorgeous woman, beautiful woman, and she said “Okay, Mr. Plastino.” I said, “Call me Al.” She said, “Okay, Al.” Or Alfred, call me Alfred. And she said “I trust you.” I said, “Mrs. Perkins, believe me, she’ll be fine.” So I took a photograph of her, and we started dating. We dated for a year. And I’ve still got the cover I did. I’ve got her and I’ve got me in a Lieutenant’s outfit, kissing. We’re kissing. What the hell, I might as well put myself in it, right? (chuckle.)

Stroud: You bet.

AP: And it was the only cover accepted in watercolor! Because in those days, pulp covers were cheap reproductions, and if you did it in oil, which I did, you’ve got to exaggerate the colors. A yellow’s got to be YELLOW! A red’s got to be BRIGHT RED! And different colors have to be exaggerated. That’s why those paintings never amounted to anything ‘cause they were over done color-wise. So when it came to the reproduction, it would come out great.

Stroud: But then the original didn’t look good.

AP: Right. ‘Cause the process was very, very poor. So when I did mine on watercolor on a board, the guy says, “Gee, I don’t know if we can do a watercolor.” I says, “Well, let me test it.” So he calls me up, he says, “Great, Al, it turned out great.” I said, “Good.” And it was all speculation. Believe it or not I got $150.00 for a cover. That’s way back, though.

Stroud: Not a bad fee at all.

AP: Yeah, well, at that time it sounded good. As I’m talking, I’m thinking of other things I did. I don’t want to talk any more. You know, another thing. One more thing.

Stroud: Please.

AP: I don’t go to conventions any more. I was there one time at the hotel near the Madison Square Garden. They set you, blah, blah, blah, so it was supposed to be a 3-day thing. So the first day I’m there, I’m sitting at a desk and guys come up to me for my autograph. So I’m signing them. Drawing a little picture. But I’m not getting any money. I didn’t think I was supposed to get any money. There’s a guy next to me getting $25.00 a shot. So I says, “Hey, what the hell’s going on here?” He says, “Aren’t you getting paid?” I said, “No. They seem like nice kids.” In fact, we never signed our work in those days, remember?”

Stroud: Right.

AP: So I said to this one kid, “How do you know it’s my work?” “Oh, we know your work, Mr. Plastino. The way you draw folds. The way you draw this or that.” They go by the way you draw things. I said, “But we never signed it.” We used to sneak in our initials once in awhile. On the covers I’d sneak my initials in some corner there. But I said, “What am I doing here? I’m not gonna stay here.” So I got up and went home. And they called me up and said, “Mr. Plastino, where the hell are you?” I said, “I’m home.” And I told them the story. They said, “Well, why didn’t you ask?” “I’m gonna ask for money? What am I, a beggar?” If it’s a thing that’s supposed to be done, have a sign: “All autographs and illustrations, $25.00.” Or whatever. So I said, “I’m not going any more.” They call me up from time to time, “Oh, come on.” No, no, no, no, no. They’ve got that big one going in San Diego. I said, “No, I’m not coming. I’m not gonna go.” “Why, Mr. Plastino? We’ll pay your fare.” What the hell does that mean? You’re paying my plane? What about the room and food? No, I just don’t do those any more.

An interior page from Superman (1939) #170, drawn by Al Plastino.

January 31, 2018

An Interview With Lew Sayre Schwartz - A Golden Age Ghost For Batman

January 31, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Lewis Sayre Schwartz (born on July 24, 1926) was an American comic book artist, advertising creator and filmmaker. He is credited as a ghost artist for Bob Kane on Batman, and as co-creator of the villain Deadshot. He also did ghost art for Brick Bradford and Agent X-9. After he had left his career in comics, he was cofounder of Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz in 1961 (a film company whose work includes the credits to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove). Lew was a teacher at the School of Visual Arts during the early 1960s. He produced a film about Milton Caniff in 1981. He was the recipient of an Inkpot Award in 2002, and four Emmy Awards. Mr. Schwartz passed away on June 18, 2011 at the age of 84 as the result of a head injury he sustained during a fall.

I felt it a privilege to speak with both another Golden Age artist who was also another Bob Kane ghost. Lew became a phone friend and we enjoyed several wonderful conversations and he was the gentleman who produced my very first commission. It was a sad day when he took a fall and it ended up taking his life. He'd lived quite an interesting life and comics were but one facet of it.

This interview originally took place over the phone on August 19, 2007.

Batman & Robin - a commission done by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Bryan Stroud: When did you first become interested in art?

Lew Sayre Schwartz: I’m told when I was about five years old.

Stroud: Ah, crayons? (chuckle)

LSS: No. I recall a lot of excitement, very, very early and then I’d say the buds began to show at eleven or twelve. Like most kids, I think, I used to run for the Sunday funnies and I would copy them - and the copies I did, I still have some of those, by the way, they were remarkable for what they were. I loved to draw. Since I was…I thought I was fat, let’s put it that way. I wasn’t good at any spectator sports. I didn’t play ball or any of that stuff, so I would sit home and draw. I think the story repeats itself with a lot of my colleagues over the years, but one way to get attention or achieve any status more than likely would be if you could draw, so that’s what I did.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. That makes sense to me. When I talked to Denny O’Neil a few weeks ago he said the same thing as far as what led him to writing. He said, “I wasn’t much on sports.”

LSS: Yeah, and it happens that way and then when I got into high school I contributed to the school paper for four years. I was extremely lucky, and this sometimes happens, because there was a young fellow, about a year younger than myself who was also very interested in art and he truly had talent and when I thought Chic Young was a great illustrator and looking at Milton Caniff, well, we became very close friends and there was a mediocre art school in New Bedford where we both went and we’d go to Saturday morning classes there and compare things and I must say that thanks to him I began to see things that developed a case for people like Milton and Alex Raymond, some of the bluebloods, the masters, very early on. Initially I thought Blondie was a great comic. I still do, as a matter of fact, interestingly enough. It’s surprising how that has lasted out it’s time.

Stroud: Did you ever imagine this would become a career for you?

LSS: I think that in the back of my mind I had hoped that it would, but I don’t know. As you probably know I worked with Bob Kane from 1946 until about mid-1953, but in the middle of ’53 I had drawn the last Batman that I wanted to draw. I had put pages side by side to try and balance the design, page to page, anything to prevent boredom, but it set in very strongly. I was doing a tremendous amount of work for Bob and his contract called for I think 12 stories that would amount to 12 pages to a story, so that’s 144 pages and I always did, in the years I worked for him, on average, I would turn out 20 stories.

Stroud: Oh, wow.

LSS: And I had a job in New York working for King Features, but in ’53 I just got bored stiff and with my wife’s acquiescence joined a cartoonist’s junket to Korea, so I spent 90 days with the 10th Army, which I will never forget as long as I live.

The Brick Bradford comic strip from 5-18-1952, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: I’ll bet that was a tremendous experience.

LSS: The best way for me to describe it, or the way I did describe it is that I spent 2-1/2 years in the Navy during World War II, but the bulk of that had to do with airplanes. I was an aerial gunner. I flew the greater part of that time, not as a pilot but as a radar operator and aerial gunner and so you’re very apart from reality, sitting up in an airplane, unless you get shot at, and getting on the ground in Seoul, and you’ve seen pictures of this modern city. When I was in Seoul, there was not a paved street. They’d all been blown away. There was no glass in any of the major buildings in the city and it’s beyond comprehension in terms of what you see today.

Stroud: I can only guess.

LSS: I was in London in 1947 and London didn’t look much better. (chuckle)

Stroud: No, I’m sure it didn’t.

LSS: Well, there were all kinds of things that happened. There’s a wonderful little guy, you probably see his name from time to time, Irwin Hasen?

Stroud: Yes.

LSS: We’re dear friends. Irwin was on that trip with me and we had incredible experiences. We were with a communications group and we went over, the cartoonists that volunteered to do this, usually there’d be twelve guys. The oldest they’d leave in Japan and then eight of us went into Korea. Four, they sent down south to where the prison camps were and the other four lucky ones - namely Irwin, myself and two other guys - went up with the 8th Army. But being on the ground with people shooting at you is pretty wild.

Stroud: How did you happen to get acquainted with Bob Kane?

LSS: A funny story. I was discharged from the Navy in April and I had family in Florida at that time, my sister and her husband were living there and I went to Miami after I was discharged before going back home to New Bedford and there was a very pretty lady that caught my eye and there was this obnoxious guy that was trying to hit on her at the same time and I suddenly discovered one day that this obnoxious guy was Bob Kane.

Stroud: (Laughter)

LSS: Anyway, the girl was nice and said that I was an amateur artist and for whatever reason he asked to see my work and when he looked at it he asked me if I’d be interested in working for him. And lo and behold he said he would call me in the fall and he did and I started to do some things for him. Interestingly enough, very recently, the period of time that I worked with Bob is being archived by DC. I don’t know whether you’ve seen them or not, but they have a Batman archive from the beginning.

Batman (1940) #59, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Batman (1940) #59 interior, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Batman (1940) #52 interior, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: Yes, I have one of those copies.

LSS: They have now reached number six, which just started I think to have one of my stories, and when I say one of my stories, I penciled for Bob and of course you’re probably aware that this is sort of a factory operation the way DC operated. There’d be a writer. In many cases that would be Bill Finger, who worked with Bob from the beginning, and not so incidentally, the best scripts that I ever got to work on were Bill Finger’s. Most imaginative. I think, in a way, the most successful because they were so damn visual. He was brilliant and he got no credit.

Stroud: Totally criminal, the treatment he received.

LSS: That’s a good word for it. That’s exactly it, which I’ll give you a little anecdote. Archive number seven is being put together right now. In number seven I have three out of the, I think it’s seven stories in that one, and the bio on number six and anything else that I’ve done where there’s been credit on it, the bio apparently was written by Bob for them, because it describes how he broke me in, to the extent that I used to do backgrounds. (chuckle) I never did a background for him in my life, and in fact when he first hired me it was to work on a joint venture that he said he and Will Eisner were doing. This goes back to ’46 when he first hired me and I was doing pencils and inks on that one. So it just galled me because the way the portrait was painted was demeaning.

Stroud: Yeah and unfortunately, what I’ve learned from talking to some of your other colleagues and so forth that’s very consistent with the way Bob operated.

LSS: Oh, yeah. I’ll put it in a very specific framework, and this is the last time that I talked to him that I can recall. It was around ’93 and he had been trying to hawk his biography for 20 years and couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Publish it. “Batman and Me”?

Stroud: Yes.

LSS: And I heard that it was finally published and I called him and I said, “Congratulations, Bob.” I said, “Why don’t you send me a signed copy?” And there’s dead silence. And I said, “What’s up?” He said, “Well, you’re not in it.” And I said, “Well, that makes perfect sense. I worked for you for seven years and apparently that wasn’t sufficient cause to mention it.” (chuckle) “Isn’t it lucky for me, Bob, I went on to have another career?” Which is exactly what happened to me. I got out of…first of all the only comic book work I ever did was Batman and I got out of that in ’55, went into an advertising agency and if you’ve read anything that our good friend Will Eisner wrote about sequential art, it trained me for the film business.

Stroud: I understand you were tremendously successful in those efforts, too.

LSS: Well, I got the recognition that I never got in the comics, and so in ’02 when I was an invited guest to San Diego and got handed an Ink Pot Award by Will Eisner and I must tell you it was a shock. I never expected that. But I had a good 40 some odd years in the film business and it did well by me and I got all the recognition that I didn’t get in the comic business. So strange, you know, what goes around comes around.

Batman (1940) #63, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: Yeah, and cream always rises.

LSS: And you know, it’s amazing to me, every week, well not every week, but I mean every month, certainly, I’ve got at least one or two e-mails from somebody (the last one from Germany) wanting commission drawings and it’s a hoot.

Stroud: It’s wonderful. So, you still do commissions on occasion?

LSS: Yeah, oh yeah.

Stroud: Good. And you get to sign them. (chuckle)

LSS: Yeah. You know DC, bless their hearts, I guess they started giving royalties to everybody that did either the pencils or the inking or the writing or the coloring. Even the letterers.

Stroud: It’s high time.

LSS: Yeah, well they started doing that back in the 70’s. I got a phone call, and this is a funny story, I got a phone call from a guy in Michigan, I think, and he said, “Did you work for Bob Kane?” and I said, “Yeah, many years ago.” He said, “My name is so and so,” and he said DC had hired him to begin to try and get a record of who’s who. Well during the course of all of this he suggested that I get in touch with a guy who was sending out the royalty checks and I was in New York for one reason or another and went up there to see him and my God they took me around that place for about an hour. Every editor knew who I was. I mean it was just like the strangest experience because by that time I was very committed to the television business and the film business and this is all coming out of nowhere. (chuckle)

Stroud: I imagine it was a little surreal.

LSS: Oh, it was, absolutely. And then at the end of the tour, he said, “Wait here.” It was a fun day. I was with a guy who was handling art for Sotheby auctions for comic art and we waited in the anteroom and he walks out and hands me a check for $6,500 bucks (chuckle), which is very nice.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. That’ll make your day.

LSS: It’s interesting. At that time, they were paying 32 bucks a page for pencils, but that same page after 10 years was paying $2.40 a page. It dropped considerably. But the point is I’m not even sure that Marvel pays any royalties. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t.

Stroud: The last time I knew anything, I had the pleasure of talking to Neal Adams about a month ago and of course he did a lot of crusading for artist’s rights and so forth, and on his webpage, it shows him receiving a residual royalty check from DC and he was castigating Marvel for not following the example. So, I don’t think that’s changed unless it has very recently.

LSS: That’s amazing, isn’t it? Some of these guys got real money and he’s always in there with a big smile and getting credit is Stan Lee. (chuckle)

Detective Comics (1937) #169 interior, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz. — Detective Comics (1937) #169 interior, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. Carmine Infantino had a few stories to share about Stan with me, too. He definitely knows how to market himself. (chuckle)

LSS: Well, there were those guys who were very proficient in that. I remember when I left, I had a staff job at King Features from ’47 or ’48 to ’55, I think and I went into an advertising agency called J. Walter Thompson, which at that particular time was a big gun in the ad business. They hired me primarily because I had drawn Batman and I had, without realizing it, I had been churning out a tremendous amount of product. I’d never thought about it.

Stroud: It adds up quick, doesn’t it?

LSS: Well, in the course of events, over the last few years, I discovered, I didn’t even know this myself, but I did about 115 of the Golden Age stories. That’s quite a body of work.

Stroud: Yes, it is. It’s an impressive amount, especially over a relatively short period of time.

LSS: Six or seven years.

Stroud: You were quite productive.

LSS: Well on top of that I rode the train three hours a day. An hour and a half from Connecticut and an hour and a half home and freelanced other stuff. (chuckle)

Stroud: What did you freelance on?

LSS: Oh, I did some magazine illustrations and I did illustrations for a number of newspapers, a newspaper feature called “Disturbia,” for about a year. One of the Sunday sections. I did a lot of stuff. The major thing was Batman, of course. He always complained about it, but he paid me pretty well.

Stroud: I guess so. When I got a note from Shelly Moldoff he said he was just happy to be working.

LSS: That’s exactly about the size of it. We were happy to have the work. We weren’t very proud of the fact that... Listen, my mentor, as a kid, was Caniff, and this guy was a giant in the business and probably one of the most influential cartoonists that ever lived. Prolific, the amount of work he turned out. Unbelievable. But I would never in a million years tell Milt that I was drawing Batman. That was very demeaning. I remember sitting…where I lived in Connecticut I lived close to a lot of artists, in Westport, all the great illustrators were living in that area. One of my neighbors was a guy named Robert Fawcett. Do you know that name at all?

Stroud: It’s not coming to me.

LSS: Do you remember the famous Artist’s school with Norman Rockwell? Twelve famous illustrators, one of whom was Robert Fawcett. Brilliant. He did all the P.G. Wodehouse stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. All the Sherlock Holmes. Possibly, aside from (Noel) Sickles, probably the most prolific craftsman and just breathtaking art work. I’m fortunate enough to be able to look up on my wall and I’ve got a couple of his pieces that are just breathtaking. I look at them all the time. Anyway, I was going to tell you a little story. We became, my wife and I, became friendly with Fawcett and his wife and they came to dinner one night. He had just signed a contract with the Saturday Evening Post and he said, “It’s amazing. I have seven million people that see my work every month.” Now, that’s a pretty good showing, except that I was drawing Batman and there were 20 million. I would have never dared make any comment like that. (chuckle) And so it goes. But can you imagine what a put down that would be? The newspaper strips always had a status, which is again part of my story. When I was going to the Art Student’s League in New York, my best friend was Murphy Anderson, and we both lived at the YMCA on East 63rd Street for a buck a night. Worked during the day. Murphy went into comic book work and I shunned that and I went and became an errand boy for an illustrator’s studio and I would always look down the end of my nose at what Murphy was doing and of course you know with the books he became a super star.

Detective Comics (1937) #168, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. I saw one of his old Hawkman covers recently sell for I think it was the low to mid-5-figures. I was just dumbfounded.

LSS: Well that day that I was at DC, Jerry Weitz, the guy handling comic auctions at Sotheby’s and my splash with the Red Hood, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that story.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, I’ve got a reprint of it in my collection.

LSS: Well that splash, which I didn’t think much of, but that sold, and I didn’t own it, somebody sold it, at the Sotheby auction for $7,500.00 at that time.

Stroud: Wow.

LSS: So, it’s insane.

Stroud: Quite a following for those. I noticed you followed some of what Jerry Robinson and others have done with the oversized villain on there. Whose idea was that?

LSS: The oversized villain?

Stroud: Yeah, that Red Hood splash where it showed of course the Red Hood in the background and then a smaller Batman and Robin swinging in.

LSS: Yeah, you know what, I think that those are instinctive things that you just do. For example, if the medium begs for anything that will make it attention-getting…take the gorilla cover, for example. The Gorilla Boss, do you remember that one?

Stroud: Yes, I sure do.

LSS: Well, the contrast between the small figures and the giant ape just adds to the drama. But we live in a world of contrasts, don’t we? (chuckle)

Stroud: We surely do, and you’re right. Ultimately that’s part of the marketing. You want someone to be curious enough to plunk down their dime or twelve cents.

LSS: Yeah. Exactly right.

Stroud: Did you ever actually meet Bill Finger or know him at all?

LSS: You know, to my regret, I never did. I didn’t know any of the guys at DC with the exception of Jerry Robinson because Jerry was very active in the cartoonist’s society, so I got to know Jerry early on and of course Jerry had worked directly for Bob just before Bob hired me. I’m told that Jerry kept, among the few of us, a lot of that old stuff that he got back.

Stroud: Yeah, that’s what I understand. I think I’ve seen photos of an old Joker splash page that he did and of course I haven’t had the pleasure to talk to him yet, but it seems to me I read somewhere that he claims creation of the Joker and of course Bob does, but of course Bob claims creation of everything.

LSS: Well, let me put it to you on this basis. At one point I owned page #4 of the first Joker story and that page was the first appearance of the Joker. I finally succumbed to an offer for it (chuckle) because it looked like an awful lot of money. But Bob, you could always tell Bob’s work because Bob very rarely drew an arm coming out of an arm pit. Arms would come out of the waist. (chuckle) If you look carefully at his work, and I’m sure you know the difference, the timeframe, if you look, you see arms that have fingers spread and the elbow seems to be attached to the waist. Just below the line of committal where the border ends, but the arm would never have come from the arm pit.

Batman (1940) #75, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Batman (1940) #75 interior, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: (chuckle) I think I know what you’re talking about. As I think back, I think I understand exactly what you’re saying.

LSS: That’s exactly right. Bob…let me put it on this basis. When I was a kid, long before I knew him, I was a Batman fan and I loved the work. And I liked Bob’s work and was drawn to it because it was comic, as opposed to a Neal Adams or any of those guys.

Stroud: Right, not quite as realistic.

LSS: Getting even further into the blood with Frank Miller, and what a wonderful craftsman Miller is, but, you know, come on. (chuckle) These were the comics, not medical charts. They became so dark and I relate back to one of my influences, who was a guy named Roy Crane. Are you familiar with Roy Crane?

Stroud: No, I’m sorry, I’m not.

LSS: Well, if you want to learn about the comic business, this is the guy who invented the adventure strip. A book came out three or four years ago giving that credit to Hal Foster, but neither Tarzan nor Prince Valiant were ever comic strips if you think about it. They were illustrated adventures of specific characters and the figures…there was nothing comic about it. Roy Crane, in 1924, invented a comic strip called Wash Tubbs. Roy Crane was the father of “Pop!”, “Sock!”, and “Slam!” Roy invented it. He was the first one to take sound and put it on a flat surface. He created pop art, unbeknownst to him, but he was that unique combination of an incredible craftsman…he was the first guy to come along and use that chemical Ben Day on his stuff. Roy Crane was the godfather of the comics. You will see the most…well, when I was a kid I wouldn’t miss one of those for all the world. The most inventive, exciting, beautifully drawn adventures of this little sawed-off guy, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy. They were great stuff. Caniff was the disciple and Crane was one of Caniff’s favorite artists.

Stroud: And he went on to make his own mark, so that says a lot.

LSS: Well, Crane told me that Hal Foster told him that he used to use his composition, pictorial composition, in Prince Valiant. Even though it was like apples and oranges, Crane always was the comic. Do you remember a strip called Buzz Sawyer?

Stroud: Yes.

LSS: Well, that’s Roy Crane. If you look back to the development of the adventure comic, that’s Roy Crane. These guys were just such masters, they’re just great. I twice started a book on Crane and have never gotten a publisher, but there’s just nobody better.

Stroud: He sounds like a most worthwhile study.

LSS: What had happened was I visited with Crane and I asked about the pop sounds. He was a very shy Texan and I visited with him in ’79 just before he died and he said, “Well, I could show people what was happening, but I wanted them to hear it.” (chuckle) Isn’t that great?

Stroud: I love it. So, a true pioneer.

LSS: A true pioneer. A brilliant, brilliant artist. And character and story-telling? None better. If you can find them, get them. There were a whole series of reprints done by Kitchen Sink years ago, as a matter of fact. One other thing. Do you have any of the books on the comics?

Batman (1940) #65, cover by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

Stroud: I’ve got a few.

LSS: Do you have Jerry Robinson’s book?

Stroud: I do not.

LSS: Oh, okay. Because there’s plenty on Crane in that one.

Stroud: I’ve still got a few gaps in my collection and even though I will always and forever appreciate what Bob Kane did, I haven’t quite gotten around to buying his autobiography yet. (laughter)

LSS: You want to know what? Neither have I. (chuckle)

Stroud: Now I do have Julie Schwartz’s and that was interesting reading. You’re not related to him, are you?

LSS: No and not only that, you know, it’s funny, he was one of the few guys that for some reason…I was at a con, maybe five or six years ago and I introduced myself. He was not friendly. For whatever reason, I don’t know.

Stroud: Oh, how strange.

LSS: Anyway, I got that feeling and I dropped it, which doesn’t mean, that since we didn’t know each other, it should have any meaning at all.

Stroud: Yeah, he might have been having a bad day or something, but that’s very strange. Now what about Alvin Schwartz? Was there any connection with him?

LSS: That has always been a curiosity to me, because in 1953 or ’54, my wife and I built a Tech-built house, which was an MIT design that was very fascinating and advertised at ultimately half of what it wound up costing, but it was an appealing design and one of the people who came to visit us, we had people from all over. We put the first one up in Connecticut and you’d get up in the morning and go downstairs and there would be people on your terrace looking in. (chuckle) But one of the people who came to look at that house was a guy named Alvin Schwartz who was, I thought, the writer, and wrote children’s books and I always wondered whether it was the same guy. I have no way of knowing. It’s funny, though, the one I knew, it was a very superficial relationship.

Stroud: Okay, so you didn’t know him well at all.

LSS: No, but I always wondered when I looked at the products and a lot of the Batman or Catwoman books, you know that have come along since, his name is there a lot, yet I never knew whether it was the same guy.

Stroud: Yeah, that’s a good question and as I understand it primarily his work was on the strips rather than the comics themselves.

LSS: Oh, really?

Stroud: That’s what I understand.

LSS: But he was strictly a writer, wasn’t he?

Stroud: I think, but I’m honestly not certain. I tried sending him an e-mail once and never heard back from him. Perhaps I should try again.

LSS: I can’t help you there.

Detective Comics (1937) #193 interior 1, art by Lew Sayre Schwartz.

January 24, 2018

An Interview With Irwin Hasen - Golden Age Creator of The Wildcat and "Dondi"

January 24, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Irwin Hasen (seated at his drawing table) and Gus Edson (standing) discuss Dondi.

Irwin Hasen (born on July 8, 1918) was an American cartoonist, best known for his work at DC Comics and as the creator of the Dondi comic strip. He began his comics carrer in 1940 contributing to The Green Hornet, The Fox, Secret Agent Z-2, Bob Preston, Explorer, Cat-Man and The Flash. Irwin worked for DC off-and-on through the '40s - creating the character Wildcat for the company. In 1954 Hasen (along with Gus Edson) created the newspaper comic strip Dondi.

After devoting 32 years to Dondi, Hasen went on to join the faculty of the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning where he taught until 2007.

In 2009 Irwin released his autobiography, Lover Boy, chronicling his life as a cartoonist and a lover of women. A dedicated ladies’ man throughout his life, Hasen decorated the walls of his bachelor apartment with drawings of past girlfriends. In a 2011 NYT profile he was quoted as saying, “I didn’t want much. I just wanted to be loved by everyone.” We like to think that it was a goal he easily achieved. Irwin Hasen passed away on March 13, 2015.

I'm not sure when I thought I'd try to land a Golden-Ager, but I was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Irwin Hasen - who did a lot of Golden Age work for DC, but of course ultimately achieved what most cartoonists would consider the brass ring by landing the Dondi newspaper syndicated strip. He worked on that strip for many years with great success and he couldn't have been a sweeter guy to chat with.

This interview originally took place over the phone on August 23, 2007.

Wildcat, Created by Irwin Hasen & Bill Finger.

Bryan Stroud: Which characters did you create over the years?

Irwin Hasen: The Wildcat and also a comic strip called Dondi.

Stroud: You and Bill Finger did that one didn’t you?

Hasen: That’s right.

Stroud: How did you come up with that one?

Hasen: I was in the fight business. I used to be a cartoonist for the fight business, which you wouldn’t know since you were a child.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Yes, sir.

Hasen: This was in the early 40’s, late 30’s and I was a cartoonist, a freelance cartoonist for a magazine in the fight business; a trade paper and I illustrated the drawings.

Stroud: So it was just a natural thing to do a boxer.

Hasen: That’s right. That’s how they decided to put me on Wildcat that I created with Bill Finger.

Stroud: When a writer and artist create a character like that how much collaboration is there?

A Dondi sketch done by Irwin Hasen in 2007.

Hasen: Not too much. They’d just send me the scripts.

Stroud: So you did the design and took it from there.

Hasen: Yeah.

Stroud: What was Bill like to work with?

Hasen: A great guy. Very, very ill-fated man, personally. Ill-fated.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, every story I’ve heard just breaks your heart.

Hasen: He was a loser, yep. And when I use the word ‘loser,’ I do it affectionately.

Stroud: Yes, as in someone who was just on the wrong end of things.

Hasen: That’s right. Always late with his work. Never had money.

Stroud: I’ve heard before he was always tardy with scripts. What’s your take as far as why he was usually late?

Hasen: It was something that some people have, and he was ill-fated, right from the beginning of his career. And that’s the sad thing because he was so talented. He created Batman. He wrote Batman, rather.

Stroud: Yes, and Green Lantern.

Hasen: Yeah, he wrote all those wonderful comic books.

Stroud: And continued to right up to the end as I understand it.

Hasen: That’s right. It’s a very sad story, but let’s not dwell about sad things.

All-American Comics (1939) #35, cover by Irwin Hasen.

All-Star Comics (1940) #33, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Stroud: Tell me a little bit about when you started at All American, please.

Hasen: Well, I started by just showing samples to the editors and they liked my work and I got to do work for them and when I was in the Army in 1942, I used to come in on the weekends and sit in my uniform at the offices and I would do the covers for Green Lantern, The Flash. Most of the work I did was covers.

Stroud: Did you like that?

Hasen: Yeah. I couldn’t compete with my fellow cartoonists. Brilliant cartoonists. Joe Kubert and a few others, but I could do a cover and I gave great covers.

Stroud: Do you know how many you did?

Hasen: About 150. 80 Wonder Woman covers. I would say 100 covers. I do recreations of all those covers I did for clients.

Stroud: I bet there’s quite a demand for that.

Hasen: Yes. They call or they write to me and they know exactly which cover they want and I let them know what I’m going to charge them, etc., etc.

Wonder Woman (1942) #50, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Stroud: It’s nice that you’re getting that kind of recognition.

Hasen: Thank you.

Stroud: When you received an assignment, what were the deadlines like?

Hasen: I never had problems. I had a week to 10 days to complete an assignment.

Stroud: Were you doing strictly pencils?

Hasen: I did the whole thing.

Stroud: The lettering, too?

Hasen: No. Somebody else did that.

Stroud: Okay, I never was quite sure when lettering became a specialty.

Hasen: It was always a specialty.

Stroud: Comic strips back in the day seemed to carry more legitimacy than comic books. Why do you think that was?

Hasen: Comic strips? There was magnificence about them. They were something that was so completely apart from the comic books. The comic books were kind of looked down on, but yet they were some of the greatest art work, by great artists who worked in comic books. Comic strips were sort of the elegant part of our business.

Stroud: I understand you worked with some of the greats back then, can you tell me a little about a few people? How about Irv Novick?

Hasen: He was a close friend. We worked together and we socialized. Alex Toth was my best friend. I met him when he was sixteen and I was twenty-four or twenty-five. He liked my work and I could never understand why. I really mean it, I’m not being modest. But for some reason or another he was attracted to my work. He had a sad ending.

Stroud: Really?

Hasen: He had a sad life. He had personal problems with his wives and also he got heavy. He put on a lot of weight and he smoked like a chimney. Unfortunately in the later part of his life his personality changed and soured. It soured on the world, which is not too difficult to do in these days. He had a sad ending of his life.

Irwin Hasen shows Daily News cartoonists how he did what he did. From the left: Irwin Hasen, Alfred Andriola; Bill Holman, and Don Figlozzi and (rear) Leonard Starr.

Stroud: That’s a shame. Especially after the great body of work he left behind.

Hasen: He was the master. Roy Crane and Alex Toth were my heroes.

Stroud: Everyone I’ve spoken to, whether it was Gaspar Saladino or…

Hasen: Oh, Gaspar? You spoke to him?

Stroud: Yeah and what a wonderful guy.

Hasen: He was my letterer on Dondi.

Stroud: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Hasen: First one. He and I were very, very close.

Stroud: How about Julie Schwartz, did you work with him much?

Hasen: Yeah, he was my editor. He was a grand old guy. A pain in the ass. He was a very strange guy. He was involved with himself so much. But he was a damn good editor.

Stroud: That’s what I hear. He was one of the best.

Hasen: Yeah. I didn’t mean to get personal about him. He and I were close in a strange way. We had a love…there was never hate. We just had a strange relationship.

Stroud: I hear he was kind of demanding.

Hasen: Demanding is the word. But on his own terms.

Stroud: Carmine was telling me the only person he didn’t edit extensively was John Broome.

Hasen: Yeah, he was a great guy. There was a difference between he and Julie and they were very close. Very close. He was a gentle, 6 foot 4 guy.

Stroud: Did you know Shelly Moldoff very well?

Hasen: Very much. I saw him last year. He’s a low key guy. Did a lot of good work. All these guys were from the old days. Sheldon Moldoff. They were all part of the stable.

Stroud: Did you guys work there in the bullpen or did you work at home?

Hasen: No, we worked at home.

Stroud: I know you’ve done some teaching at Joe Kubert’s art school.

Hasen: I just retired this year. Thirty-one years.

Stroud: Wow. Was that an enjoyable task?

Hasen: Yeah. I needed it at the time. It was fine. I enjoyed it. This year I just decided that’s it. I even retired before I got ill.

Green Lantern (1941) #10, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Sensation Comics (1942) #96, cover by Irwin Hasen.

Green Lantern (1941) #26, cover by Irwin Hasen.

January 17, 2018

An Interview With Denny O'Neil - The Author Behind DC's Socially Conscious 70's

January 17, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Dennis J. "Denny" O'Neil (born May 3, 1939) is an American comic book writer and editor (for everyone from Charlton to DC to Marvel) from the 1960s through the 1990s, and Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement.

His best-known works include Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman with Neal Adams, The Shadow with Michael Kaluta, and The Question with Denys Cowan - all of which were hailed for sophisticated that expanded the artistic potential of the mainstream portion of the medium. As an editor, he is principally known for editing the various Batman titles.

At last, I got to speak to a writer! And none other than one of the masters of the genre, going clear back to his days at Charlton comics and teaming with Neal Adams on the socially conscious material in the '70s at DC. Later, of course, Denny became the in-house Batman expert and editor and, well, just read for yourself.

This interview originally took place over the phone on June 22, 2007.

Bryan Stroud: Historically, comic books have been aimed squarely at children and early teens and yet you seemed to write for a very different and older audience. Why did you decide to pursue that avenue?

Denny O’Neil: Oh I think that “children’s literature” thing has always been somewhat incorrect. I mean comic books come from comic strips and if you look at the history of comic strips they’re clearly aimed at adults. I think it was the preconception of the publishers and the guys in the business offices rather than the creators who believed that comics were for kids and that the audience changed every three years, which was the conventional wisdom when I came in. And society at large, particularly after the early 1950’s thought that comics were literature for the illiterate. If you didn’t believe the editorialists who said they were causing juvenile delinquency and everything else from falling arches to a bad economy, (chuckles) then you believe that they were for dummies, and even if you liked them, you didn’t want to admit that you were a dummy.

Stroud: Guilt by association.

DO: Yeah. The truth is, my wife is a teacher, so I have run into a lot of teachers over the years and every one of them said that traditionally it’s the bright kids in the class who are the comic’s readers. It’s always been that way. Looking at some writing that’s been done by a guy named Jonathan Letham (who is rapidly becoming my favorite mainstream writer) and just talking to some kids who are children of friends of mine, it seems like the hip kids - maybe not the kids who got the best grades, maybe not the teacher’s favorites - but the kids who like comics were smart and literate and they like to read. As in the case of (chuckle) so many of us, they may not have been much on the athletic field, either.

Stroud: (laughter) I can certainly relate.

DO: I think Joe [Shuster] and Jerry [Siegel] set the archetype and we’ve been judiciously following it ever since. We had a fair number of taboos. Things that it was understood you could not do, but I never too much worried about the audience. I guess every writer has his own approach to that, but most of us think, “Well, my audience is the idealized reader, it’s the idealized me.” You don’t exactly write for yourself because people that do that write very private things that don’t communicate very well.

Denny O'Neil at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival.

Stroud: Yeah, it doesn’t have the broad base of appeal or something everyone can relate to.

DO: Well, it’s like a lot of modern poetry. The symbolism is so private that you can’t read it for pleasure.

Stroud: Yeah, it flies right over the head or…

DO: Or you have to spend lots of time with reference books.

(Laughter.)

DO: When Ezra Pound gives you a line in Greek, well, you know, come on. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: More than correct and I’ve surely spent my share of time laboring through those for college courses and thinking, “Please, please what are you saying?” (Laughter.)

DO: Yeah. I was once an English teacher, but I wonder if literature should be taught; if it should be made a job. I think that kind of sucks the pleasure out of it and you know, writers from Chaucer on…from Homer on have really basically wanted to entertain people, not to make them suffer. (Chuckle.)

Stroud: Precisely, and I’ve often wondered who is this “Grand Council” who decides, “Yes, let’s expose young minds to this?” (Laughter.)

DO: Well, I mean the annals of education are full of screw-ups. Most critics would say that Huckleberry Finn is the seminal American novel and it’s got a long history of being forbidden, and Catcher in the Rye…that kind of approach to education is never value free, so you’re going to get a real different take on what’s acceptable in Kansas and in, say, Greenwich Village. Again, my wife is a teacher, and she’s teaching very young kids. The people in that school can feel parental pressure. Particularly in a relatively affluent area like this, parents are not reluctant to make their opinions known and those are things that school boards, since they’re elected, pay attention to. But with comics, I just read a whole bunch of Batman comics a couple of weeks ago to prepare for a thing I did and I was mildly surprised to see some things that were absolutely forbidden to us even five or six years ago are now accepted. I think ever since DC did some real marketing surveys twenty or so years ago we’ve realized that comics are not for kids. That’s too bad, but the level of maturity and sophistication now…I mean Marifran used to love to give comic books as prizes for the kids in her classes. It’s very hard for her to do that with mainstream comics any more, because even by our very liberal standards they are certainly not for children.

Stroud: Oh, no, not at all. I’m quite a fan of eBay for obvious reasons, it’s helped me to rebuild a lot of my old collection and to pursue these Silver Age things that I hold in such high esteem and one day one of the people I’d bought some stuff from had included what they called a “bonus fun pack” with some more modern titles and so forth and I had the same reaction you did, I mean I’m far from being innocent, but as I was flipping through these, I thought, “Okay, this is highly violent and thinly veiled porn in some instances, what is this?”

DO: Yeah, and I try not to judge, I’m simply saying that it is different and again, the stuff that when my kid was little and was born in the East Village and grew up in the West Village and in SoHo, he had seen an awful lot, but he was 12 and it was pretty hard to shock him. That was not true of his country cousins. So it becomes a question of…parents really have to get a sense of where their own kid is at and what kind of entertainment is likely to harm that kid in some way. But I think by almost any kind of standards a lot of the superhero stuff now is, for a lot of reasons, not suitable for children. I mean, Marifran had to give out like a hundred comic books, so we called a friend at DC, one of the vice presidents, and she said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to get those for you, but it will take a couple of days to assemble that many Cartoon Network titles" and Marifran said, “Well, what about Superman and Batman?” Our vice president friend said, “No, absolutely not.” When they started sending me comps again after not having done it for five years and looking at the stuff I see, yeah she was right, that would not have been a good thing to give to a first or second grader.

Atom and Hawkman (1962) #45, written by Denny O'Neil.

Bomba the Jungle Boy (1967) #7, written by Denny O'Neil.

Shazam (1973) #2, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: Yeah, the world has changed and especially the comic book world and as you said I certainly don’t mean to cast any judgments, but…not the kind of thing I’d want to pass along to my daughter.

DO: Yeah, and as a writer you ask yourself, “Well, what has this got to do with the story?” In the case of sex, if it’s well done, it will bring the story to a screeching halt, because it’s such a powerful emotion, body/mind thing that the story becomes about that. Is that what you want? Probably not. And if it’s badly done, it just looks silly. Also not what you want for telling a serious story.

Stroud: Dead end either way.

DO: I had a character I worked on for five years and it was very obvious that he did not have a platonic relationship with his girlfriend, but there was never any need to bring that onstage. The mature readers got it and with the other readers it really didn’t harm their understanding of the story.

Stroud: Right, and that’s well-written material. Otherwise you’re looking at salaciousness or…

DO: Yeah. Do you want to stop the story dead in its tracks while some 12-year old checks out the curves on this babe? If that’s what you want to do, fine, more power to you. It’s never been my goal. If it’s not what you want to do then you have to be careful about that stuff.

Stroud: Very much so. Carmine Infantino was telling me that to him a lot of the new stuff isn’t comics any more, it’s lazy scripting and just going for the shock or the least common denominator and obviously to a certain extent you’re trying to market and so forth, but…

DO: It’s partly generational. These kids grew up in a world where it’s very hard to believe in traditional heroes and I understand that. A lot of the movies that are made by 30-somethings, regardless of what their subject matter is, they’re about explosions. It’s a kind of nihilism and many of my son’s friends are very serious artists and as people they’re really nice. They’ll come and help you move for 15 hours and do it just for buying them lunch but their work is so uniformly glum, because that’s their world. It has very little to do with them personally and a lot to do with atomic bombs and mutated viruses and…for the last 30 years it’s been really hard to believe in politicians.

Justice League of America (1960) #75, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: Sadly true. When you were doing some of your work did you have a favorite character or genre that you worked in?

DO: I found out pretty early on that I liked human scaled characters. I never had much fun writing Superman and gave it up after a year and I also walked away from the Justice League and their half dozen god-like entities. Batman was fine: Human scaled, human emotions, human capabilities. In a way, one of the subtexts of Batman is human perfectibility, and making lemonade out of lemons. Again, my interpretation of that character which is not exactly the current one. I had more satisfaction writing The Question than anything else. I liked Batman, obviously. I always liked Green Arrow. His politics bounced all over the line, but there is a kind of correlate that everybody seems to have retained. And the rest of it was just jobs. That sounds almost like a put-down, “It was just my job.” It was a great job, often. At its worst, well, every job has its lousy years, but I can’t imagine anything I might have done, given my limitations and abilities that would have been a more satisfying and interesting job than the one I did.

Stroud: Very good. That’s as good a coda as I can think of. You’re the only writer I’ve had the privilege to speak to and obviously artists have deadlines, but they interpret the scripts or the words given them. Do you think the scripter has the tougher assignment?

DO: It entirely depends on the circumstance. My background is journalism, so I did and do pretty much consider deadlines. Well, at the very least, you’ve given your word that you will do something and unless there’s a really good reason, you should do it. There’s a saying that writing is easy, you just sit in front of a blank piece of paper until you sweat blood. I’ve never found that to be true. If writing were that difficult, that awful, miserable, chalice of suffering that some people describe, I don’t think I’d have kept at it. Very often it has been the most interesting thing in my life and very often an escape. If my private life was going to hell I could escape into my work. One of the ways I know comic book marriages are in trouble is when the creators find reasons to stay in the studio until midnight every night. So it partially depends on who you’re going to work with, if you know who you’re going to work with. For years I have not read published work, because if the artist misunderstands something or second guesses me and the editor doesn’t catch that, something I may have invested a fair amount of emotion in, comes out badly, I would just rather spare myself that kind of suffering. About 19 years ago I took this sweet, innocent Midwestern school teacher and turned her into a raving fan girl and will probably go to hell for that (chuckle) and she reads things and knows my work better than I do, so if I need something for, continuity, say, Marifran can tell me where to find it or she’ll look it up herself. So the point of all that is in the early days, I think like most writers, I pored over published work. Now I think, coming on something that the screenwriter Sam Hamm told me, "when I’m done with it, my involvement is ended. If it ends up to be Citizen Kane, well, that is not necessarily my doing, if it ends up to be the worst garbage ever printed, that’s probably not my fault, either". So as Sam and some other screenwriting people have said, we as writers have the privilege of being the first ones to tell the story, and we have an obligation to the work and to ourselves to do that as well as we can. After that, insofar as it’s possible, you have to kind of distance yourself.

Stroud: It makes good sense; otherwise you’d be perpetually frustrated.

DO: I mean, you don’t want to be an emotional rollercoaster all the time, as I was in my early years.

Stroud: (chuckle.) That’s to be understood. When you were working on Bat Lash with Carmine and so forth he was literally in love with that project by his own testimonial, but sales here stateside were pretty disappointing and you had a great team there as far as script and art and so forth. Why do you think that one went down the tubes?

DO: Well, we never knew in those days why something was canceled because nobody ever saw sales figures; I mean even editors didn’t see them. When I became a full time editor in ’86 or whatever the sales figures were my holy writ, but I can remember other editors telling me they didn’t see them. So you would come in and it would be canceled. Sometimes you knew it couldn’t have been sales, because we didn’t get any kind of reasonable sales figures until something had been on sale three months back in the old pre-direct sales days, and you didn’t get really accurate figures for some months after that. We used to joke that there’s a dart board somewhere. As far as Bat Lash, though, that last 8 or 9 issues. Probably sales figures did exist. My guess is that it was ahead of it’s time. I thought it was all way better than anything that was out there at that time, but if you were coming looking for the Rawhide Kid or Roy Rogers, the typical kid western, you weren’t going to get that. He was a genuine character and I felt I skated on that one because other people did the work. Sergio came up with the plots and I worked off Nick Cardy’s beautiful artwork. I generally don’t like working off artwork, but in that case it was a pleasure to come in and be able to add words to good stories and beautiful drawings.

Bat Lash (1968) #1, Written by Denny O'Neil & Sergio Aragonés.

Bat Lash (1968) #2, Written by Denny O'Neil & Nick Cardy.

Bat Lash (1968) #6, Written by Denny O'Neil & Sergio Aragonés.

Stroud: So that one was almost done more Marvel method then, is that correct?

DO: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Sergio, in the inimitable Sergio style, his writing was to thumbnail the story and then that was given to Nick, who did those beautiful renderings, and finally it came to me and I did the last little 10% of the work and wrote copy.

Stroud: Wow. Did you prefer that method over…

DO: In that case, yeah. Normally I don’t.

Stroud: I was gonna say, that’s pretty backward to what a scriptwriter typically does, I imagine.

DO: Well, it was the rule for years, but now people tell me that it’s very rare, at least at DC; I don’t talk to people at Marvel very much, not about stuff like this, but now it’s almost always script first. But for a long time after Stan Lee became the dominant guy in the entire business, and that was the way he worked, and I think a lot of writers who started as fans really liked to get their hands on artwork. I was never a fan, so my concern was, “How do I get this story told?” Also, I didn’t like being at the mercy of an artist who…you know, if he blows his deadline I might get stuck having to pull an all-nighter, so it got to the point where I wanted to tell my story as clearly and as well as I could, and then go away.

Stroud: It makes perfect sense to still have a life beyond your making a living.

DO: Yeah. Everybody I know that got good at comics had about five years where it absorbed them. My first wife finally passed a rule: You can talk for 30 minutes about comic books in my living room and then somebody has to change the subject. (chuckle.) She wasn’t being snotty because you know if I were with a comic book friend we would talk about it until 3 o’clock in the morning, boring the living hair off of everybody else in the room. But you get past that. As I said, my son’s movie friends are like that. Everybody seems to go through a period where the art form they’re working in just absorbs them the way a blotter absorbs spilled ink, but you find that while it has to have an important place in your life, there has to be room in your life for other things.

Stroud: Yeah, it shouldn’t be all-consuming, that’s for certain. The Creeper was an extremely different character at the time. How was it working with…I know Steve Ditko had made the migration with you and couple of the other Charlton alumni, how was that to work with?

Beware the Creeper (1968) #1, written by Denny O'Neil.

DO: Well, I think Steve was upset, because I wrote it kind of tongue-in-cheek and Steve is not a tongue-in-cheek kind of guy. When I talk about full script vs. Marvel Method, I’ll always make exceptions for a half dozen artists and Steve is one of them. It was always great working off his artwork because, like Kirby and a few others he had a strong sense of visual narrative. He knew that it was about telling the story in pictures. Unfortunately some artists don’t know that. So when the Marvel Method works, the artist will do about half your work for you, figure out the pacing and make sure that there’s room for all the exposition and get all the characters in, things like that, so working off Ditko’s artwork was always great. I think we switched to full script and I’ve never spoken with Steve about this, but I have a sense he was not happy with the way we interpreted the characters. I can’t blame him. Later that same problem arose with The Question. I really felt guilty about that one, though at the time it just seemed to me, “Well, they want me to write this, and I cannot do Ditko’s material, so I have to do something else.” I basically liked the idea of the character. Many years later colleagues asked me, “Why? If you were going to change it that much, why didn’t you just make up a new character?” The lame answer I gave was that it never occurred to me. But he has a point.

Stroud: True. Of course everything we do in life we learn from, whether positively or negatively…we can turn negative things into something positive. That’s why they call it experience.

DO: I have great respect for Steve and there’s probably nobody on the planet that I disagree with more politically and socially. That’s horse racing. I’m not making a judgment, but I can’t do his kind of stuff. That’s not where my head’s at.

Stroud: Understood. Now when you worked on the Wonder Woman title it got taken in an extremely different direction for comic books. An old and established hero[ine] was suddenly made non-super. Was that your idea or a collaborative thing?

Wonder Woman (1942) #180, written by Denny O'Neil.

DO: Talk about spectacularly bad ideas, I think that one wins the prize. (Chuckle.) We’re raking up all my failures. Again, later, Gloria Steinem, bless her, without mentioning my name, wrote an article about that and after the fact I saw her point, absolutely. At the time I thought I was serving the cause of feminism by making this woman self-made and then I immediately undercut that by having her have a male martial arts teacher. Then I compounded that sin by naming the martial arts teacher after one of the five classic books in Chinese culture, thereby kind of making fun of it. I was on a real streak that week. (Laughter.) My heart was pure, but I now see Steinem’s point. To take the one really powerful [female] character in the comics pantheon, and take away her powers was really not serving the cause of feminism.

Stroud: Perhaps not. Carmine was telling me it sold extremely well.

DO: Oh, that’s news to me. It was taken away from me without anyone telling me. I just eventually figured out that I wasn’t doing Wonder Woman any more. (chuckle.)

Stroud: (Laughter.) Just unceremoniously relieved, huh?

DO: Not even that. That was a problem in those days. You often didn’t get the news first hand. That’s a problem in television and in media in general, but I eventually figured out, “Oh, I’m not doing this any more. I’m not editing it and I’m not writing it. It’s somebody else’s project.” You kind of got used to that. As Paul Levitz says, it’s probably good to tell those stories because people can realize how far we have actually come. That would not happen today. It’s not a possible scenario.

Stroud: The industry has certainly evolved. I know Neal [Adams] told me some wonderful stories about his battles in the trenches over artist’s rights and so forth.

DO: He even got chrome yellow added to the color palette because whenever artists asked about it…it was part of Marvel’s arsenal, and I don’t understand this stuff at all, but apparently the addition of that hue/yellow gave you several other colors if you mixed it and it had been told that “it can’t be done,” until Neal actually investigated it and called and the guy on the production end said, “Yeah, there’s no problem with that, it won’t cost any more. We’re happy to do it for you.”

Stroud: (Laughter.) The question just had to be asked, huh?

DO: Yeah, but comics got no respect from a lot of the people who were working in them and I think it was easier just to say, “No. It’s too expensive,” or “We can’t do it,” than to actually investigate.

Stroud: Yeah, I’ve certainly worked with my share of people like that, and they weren’t even creative types, just…entrenched. (Laughter.)

DO: Yeah, they want to get through their 20 or 25 years and they want to be able to leave at 5 o’clock every day and they think it’s important to wear neckties.

Stroud: Let’s not evolve whatever we do. (chuckle.)

DO: Yeah. A friend was in the aircraft industry who had very similar stories to tell. They don’t understand people who are not career oriented. I was discussing this with my kid yesterday regarding movies and other kinds of businesses. There are people who, given a publishing industry, will look at the system and try and figure it out and try and figure out how to benefit from it, and what they’re there for is career advancement, and that’s not necessarily bad. Then there are other people where career advancement isn’t on their radar. They’re asking, “How can I make some really neat books?” Or “How can I solve these problems?” And that’s what they’re interested in. Unfortunately those are the people who generally make the stuff that the other people profit from and I think if you’re a business oriented person you don’t understand the scruffy guy who comes in with torn blue jeans and he needs a haircut and we’re paying him how much?

Stroud: (Laughter.) Doesn’t fit the mold.

In-house ad from DC announcing the winners from the Academy of Comic Book Arts awards. — In-house ad from DC announcing the winners from the **Academy of Comic Book Arts** awards.

DO: When I went and did a ghost-writing job for IBM, IBM being a very strait-laced company, but the guys down in the lab were a lot more casual than the business guys, it seems to almost be a truism. Comic books, every once in awhile, like every five years or so, some business guy would walk through and see all these jokes on the wall and all this bizarre stuff and say, “Oh, that’s ruining the paint job. We can’t have that.” Okay, for a week, we’ll take the stuff down.

Stroud: (Laughter.) We’ll conform, just for now.

DO: Yeah, until the guy goes away and forgets about it and that won’t take long. Creative people kind of need to do that goofy stuff somehow. I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s monumental biography of Einstein, and he said, “Well, I visualized what it would be like to ride a beam of light, or I’d be out sailing and I’d get this idea.” And then later he’d do the math and figure out if in fact it really works, but what we’re taught is you do the math first and you be very conscientious and very methodical and that’s how you achieve things and the reality is that it’s never been that way. The right brain comes up with the idea and then you have to do the left brain work to see if it really works.

Stroud: That puts me in mind of a quote by Stephen King in one of his novels where the character was a writer and I suspect he was channeling himself a little bit. He says, “People always ask me ‘Where do my ideas come from,’” and he says, “How do you describe a series of mental farts?”

DO: (Laughter.) That’s very good.

Stroud: Can you tell me a little bit about when you worked with Mike Sekowsky? I’ve heard a lot of pro and a little bit of con about him. What was your take?

DO: I didn’t work with him. It was one of those situations where I wrote scripts and they left my hands and X months later there was a comic book. I knew Mike almost not at all. I mean I would know him to say hi to him, but as so often in those days I didn’t really work with those guys. I did my job and they did theirs.

Stroud: Okay, so there weren’t little bull sessions?

DO: No. Now it seems like artists want to buy a package, a writer or his package, but I was “working” with Jim Aparo, one of my favorite artists for about a decade before I was in a room with him. The first issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow, I didn’t know Neal was going to do it, in fact I assumed that the regular Green Lantern artist would do it. I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw the job, but the only artist I’ve ever really worked with in that way is Frank Miller, at Marvel, where we had lunch several times a week and we walked around Greenwich Village and we really talked out the story. And that’s a wonderful way to work if you can find somebody who’s on your wavelength.

Stroud: Makes perfect sense. I know when I talked to Gaspar Saladino that was one of the things he said, he said he liked hanging around in the bullpen because he said when you’re there with your artist it becomes more a “we” kind of project and everybody benefits, so that corroborates that very nicely.

DO: Yeah, but those collaborations never last for some reason. You can probably think of the same list that I can. After a few years one partner becomes disillusioned. Gilbert and Sullivan apparently didn’t like each other. Abbott and Costello had big problems and Laurel and Hardy apparently didn’t always get along. It’s a very unstable molecule, the writer/artist collaboration.

Stroud: Yeah. It’s not exactly the same thing, but for a long time there the Everly Brothers couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

DO: Yeah, and we know what happened to the Beatles. (chuckle.)

Stroud: You walked into some pretty big shoes when you did take over Justice League as you were mentioning earlier, from Gardner Fox. Did that intimidate you at all?

DO: No. Thank God I didn’t know I was doing anything special. I was so dense that years later I realized there was a kind of pecking order in the comic book business, that the guy who was doing Spider-Man was higher in that order than the guy who was doing Iron Fist. We didn’t really know why DC had hired us. I put this in print 15 years ago and I asked Paul Levitz about it. Basically in our infinite childish ego Steve [Skeates] and the other Steve [Ditko] and I and a couple of other guys thought that those people at DC are seeing the wonderful work we’re doing at Charlton and they can’t wait to get us into their stable. Well, it was really that they were having a conflict with the old line guys and I’m reasonably certain they wouldn’t have known us if they’d run over us and maybe not even recognized our names. I needed the money. The money was triple what we were getting at Charlton and I was working occasionally for Stan [Lee], but irregularly and I had an infant son and an unworking wife. So I didn’t know I was a scab and I don’t know what I would have done if I had known, but it was years and years and years later before we found out. They had some holes they wanted to fill and they hired Dick [Giordano] and I don’t know if they suggested he bring people with him or if it was his idea, I suspect it was his, and off we went. I remember very clearly I would meet with Dick on Thursday morning in an office that Charlton rented on 5th Avenue and one of those Thursday mornings he said, “How would you like to do exactly what you’re doing now at three times the money?” I said, “Yeah, sure, talk me into it, you eloquent devil.”

Thunderbolt (1960) #60, written by Denny O'Neil.

Worlds Finest Comics (1941) #199, written by Denny O'Neil.

Weird Worlds (1972) #9, written by Denny O'Neil & Howard Chaykin.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Tough decision.

DO: I had never tried to get work at DC. I think a lot of us had the impression that it was a really closed shop, and it may have been up until that time. Marvel had the image, partly illusory, of being this loosey-goosey kind of creative shop and DC was the old line, your father’s comics, and all of a sudden, there we were, working for DC without really having, it was never part of my plan. I talked to Steve Skeates; I don’t think it was ever on his radar either.

Stroud: I had actually read somewhere, Carmine had interviewed somewhere online, allegedly he said that you were the one he was especially interested in recruiting from Charlton along with Skeates and Jim Aparo and referred to you as “a terrific dialogue man.” Had you ever heard that before?

DO: No. I saw Carmine about three years ago at the big Atlanta convention and we had a very pleasant exchange, but I guess I haven’t really talked to him in 20 years. So if that’s true, and it might very well be then I’m wrong and it’s really kind of good news. It’s very flattering. (chuckle.) I hadn’t thought of Carmine as the one who recruited us, but maybe he was.

Stroud: Well, I think he had just been elevated up to publisher at that time or maybe he was on the cusp, I don’t know which, but when we talked there were some memories that were eluding him, but I mean he just turned 82, so he’s entitled. I just found it interesting that you were apparently the crown jewel when he pulled the personnel over from Charlton and of course Dick Giordano told me the same thing. What was the wonderful phrase he used? He said, “Charlton to DC was as a weed to a flower.” He didn’t elaborate, but he said he’d had some disappointments at Charlton.

DO: Well then cancel what I said 5 minutes ago. (Chuckle.) I’ve never heard that before. It’s very nice to hear.

Stroud: Well, I just thought I’d pass it along for what it’s worth.

DO: It is true that some of the old line guys, particularly the writers, were having trouble getting work and there was some conflict. Again, the particulars I thought I knew chapter and verse, but then I had a conversation with Arnold Drake a few months before he died and I realized I don’t know as much about it as I thought I did.

Stroud: Yeah, I sure would have loved to pick his brain a little bit.

DO: Oh, me, too. We were at a little tiny convention in New Jersey. I had seen Arnold Drake. I’d been in a room with him once or twice, but at this convention they set up a thing where he and I just talked in front of an audience and he was a wonderful guy and we made promises to get together again and it never happened, but yeah, a treasury of information about comics’ early days.

Stroud: Yeah, I was very anxious to speak with him, but that was right about the time he got hospitalized and well, that was just one of those things.

DO: He was one of the last of the original group. I was thinking of who might be left. Eisner’s gone, Stan, I guess was around at the beginning.

ALL NEW COLLECTORS EDITION (1978) #C56, written by Denny O'Neil. SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI COVER BY NEAL ADAMS.

ALL NEW COLLECTORS EDITION (1978) #C51, written by Denny O'Neil. COVER BY NEAL ADAMS.

Stroud: Yeah, but other than that, you’re right, I mean Haney’s gone and I was going through them in my mind recently and was coming up dry every which way I turned.

DO: Ditko was not in at the very beginning, but I guess he was early 50’s, and again, Steve seems to have dropped out of sight. I’m delighted to see that his name gets on the Spider-Man movies.

Stroud: Yeah, I paid particular attention to that when I went to see Spider-Man 3. I thought, “Oh, good, good, there he is.”

DO: Yeah, and when I did a “How to write comic book” book some years ago, and there were about three paragraphs that had to do specifically with Stan Lee as to the craft of writing comics and I e-mailed them to him as a courtesy, fact-check thing, and what he wanted me to change was to give Ditko more credit for co-creating Spider-Man, which I thought was very nice of Stan and certainly nothing he had to do.

Stroud: Oh, yeah. That’s a far cry from Bob Kane and Bill Finger.

DO: (Chuckle.) Yeah, eons away. I had lunch or dinner with a guy who goes to Bob Kane’s autobiography some years ago in California and according to him he’s the reason there’s as much Bill Finger in that book as there is. I actually haven’t read Cavalier and Clay, but I know enough about it to know that it doesn’t cover…I mean that’s the great comic book story that has to be told, how people lose their creations. It’s happened again and again and again. Even to me in a small way, and I’m not angry at anyone because I signed that contract. Okay. I was very young and dumb, but I signed it and I was over 21 and nobody had a gun to my head. And the same is true of everybody else who has similar and worse stories to tell. Still, it’s kind of sad and it’s especially sad when people who don’t pay any attention to the characters end up having sizeable fortunes and somebody like Bill Finger will die in poverty.

Stroud: Yeah, there’s a cosmic wrongness to that that’s hard to take.

DO: Yeah, I don’t think it means anything it’s just that to those guys it was product. Bob’s use of ghosts is well-known and Mark Evanier came up with a defense of that that’s pretty good and it’s that what those guys knew were comic strips and with comic strips, since comic books hadn’t existed yet, it was a given that you would use ghosts, so it was a very common practice.

Stroud: Ah, okay. I hadn’t considered that. That’s true.

DO: So to Bob it’s like he wasn’t doing anything wrong and I’ve talked to Shelly Moldoff and he said, “Well, frankly I was glad to get the work.”

Stroud: Yeah, I exchanged a brief call with Shelly and the silence was kind of deafening he said, “I don’t care to discuss Bob Kane.”

DO: He wasn’t on many people’s Christmas card lists.

Stroud: (Laughter.) And Joe Giella was telling me how when Bob had his T.V. show not a lot of people realized that when he would knock out those caricatures of his characters for people he was going over lines Joe had laid down for him.

DO: Yeah, as far as I can tell he really didn’t work on Batman much after 1947 and had used ghosts from very early on. Shelly and Jerry Robinson apparently.

Stroud: Yeah, Lew Sayre Schwartz and many others. It’s quite an interesting story. You were speaking about Green Arrow earlier and you re-defined Oliver Queen, taking away his wealth and eliminating at least part of the old “Batman with a bow” comparison, turning him into an urban hero. What spawned that direction?

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (1989) #1, written by Denny O'Neil.

DO: Well, part of the inspiration came from the fact that Neal, in a story written by Bob Haney, gave him a nifty new look. The first Green Arrow, if you looked up “bland” in the dictionary, there he’d be. He was a really uninteresting looking guy and his kid sidekick, his costume was red instead of green, but apart from that he was pretty uninteresting, so Neal gave him this kind of macho look and mostly I wanted to introduce a kind of blue collar, street element into the stuff and the playboy whose hobby is crime-fighting was a staple of pulp fiction of the 30’s and seemed to me to be I think a pretty stale idea by the time I came along.

Stroud: Pretty cliché, yeah.

DO: And also I got a Justice League story out of his losing his fortune, and then when we decided to do GL/GA, all right, well, Green Arrow was a given and we didn’t mess with his characterization much, but we needed a contrast. If this was going to be a dialogue, we needed to represent the opposite side. Well, Oliver Queen had never had much character. I mean he was one of those superheroes, or a lot of them, in the 40’s who was defined by his powers. He was the one with the bow and arrow. Hawkman was the one with wings. The stories were plot driven, the way a lot of detective fiction at the time, locked-room mystery thing was plot-driven. Perfectly fine, but we were evolving into more characterization, and in this particular case I needed someone to represent the non-establishment point of view. Well, Green Arrow was available, he brought very little baggage, nobody had ever paid a whole lot of attention to him, there was not very much established about him, apart from the loss of fortune, which had been my story. So he was there to use, and a logical enough choice for the use to which we wanted to put him. The same way with Black Canary. She did Judo. Okay, I wonder if the people who made that up knew what Judo was. She certainly wouldn’t have worn those heels if she was in any Judo class I’ve ever taken, but it’s easy to take those kinds of cheap shots. But basically she was available, we thought we needed a female presence in the series and she brought very little baggage with her. She didn’t have a title of her own. There was not a lot of interest in her. Now I’m told she’s one of the most popular characters in the DC universe.

Stroud: Huh. That’s interesting.

DO: I did an introduction to a collection of Green Arrow/Black Canary stories a couple of weeks ago and that’s when I learned that. She’s very popular now, so you never know. Spider-Man started as a 15-pager for Amazing Stories.

Stroud: Yeah, you just never know who’s going to really take off and make a lasting impact.

DO: Yeah, maybe partially because those characters are so malleable that creative people can come along and really do something with them.

Stroud: Yeah, or adapt them to the times.

DO: Yeah, let them reflect what’s outside the window, which is always one of the tricks of doing this kind of work. And the thing that’s most interesting to me about comics is the evolutionary aspect, and when I was editing Batman I came to realize, particularly after the death of Robin stunt, that what we’ve got to do is something that Julie Schwartz knew instinctively: These characters have to change or they’ll become dated. So you keep the essence of the character intact. What made him interesting in the first place? And then let everything else reflect the world outside.

Stroud: Perfect. That would be the way to ensure a degree of immortality.

DO: Mainstream novelists call it magic realism. A long time before anybody made up that term, pulp writers would do it and you had a recognizable New York City, but somebody had a death ray or could turn invisible. One or two elements that are fantasy and everything else is the world.

Stroud: Speaking of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, that got all kinds of attention and won awards and so forth, but ultimately it got canceled 13 issues later. Do you think it was a matter of critical success over commercial failure?

DO: Again, we were told sales, we were always told sales…I don’t know.

Green Lantern (1960) #85, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: A convenient excuse.

DO: Yeah. I once asked Julie Schwartz, “How did you get away with doing continued stories in the Justice League when conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t do continued stories in comics?” What he said in effect was, “I did them, I didn’t bother to ask anybody.” Stan of course made it a policy, but Julie just said, “Well, yeah, once a year I did them.” I think that the big splash that Green Lantern/Green Arrow made probably came as a big surprise to the executives at Time-Warner. The first newspaper article, which was in the Village Voice, which was sort of my community newspaper, didn’t mention Julie, Neal, or I, so I had the impression that the guy who was interviewed didn’t exactly know what to say and so when we did get all that favorable attention and the Mayor of New York, the Honorable John Lindsay commended us, then Neal and I, particularly; Julie less so, but that’s because there’s no justice in the world, began to get attention. Now every company has a public relations department. There was nothing like that back then. It was just individual reporters or university guys seeking us out and it has really put a lot of money in my pocket since, but at the time I got the same page rate as I got for writing Super Friends. It was, on one level, just a job. Neal and I realized after awhile, it was a helluva job, and that we were pushing the envelope, but if someone had said, “Yeah, and in 30 years they’ll bring out a hardcover edition that will cost $75.00,” I’d have said, “Yeah, right. Can I have whatever it is you’re having?” As I said, conventional wisdom was that comic books are forgotten in 3 years and we thought, yeah, they’ll still be remembering this stuff a year or two after we stop doing it, and it’s certainly interesting and fun to be doing it while we’re at it, but such a long afterlife? No.

Stroud: Yeah, just no concept of the legs it would have.

DO: My first wife said that with both with Superman and with that my timing stinks because I did it before royalties. I mean the changes I made in Superman, if that had been done 30 years later, there would have been a major publicity campaign, yadda, yadda, yadda, and at the time, as I said, it was a $15.00 a page job.

Stroud: Yeah, just hacking out a living and going from there.

DO: And trying to work honorably, trying to do the best job you can, because it becomes awfully boring if you don’t.

Stroud: Yes. Now, was it over at Charlton that you were using the alias of Sergius O’Shaughnessy?

DO: Yeah.

Stroud: You know usually when you go to write or something you’re trying to gain some notoriety, what was with the alias?

DO: Well, notoriety and comic book writer were an oxymoron back then.

Stroud: Ah, of course.

DO: The world knew Stan Lee and didn’t know anybody else; I mean most of the DC comics didn’t carry bylines. I think it was okay with Dick if we wanted to sign them, but I was doing a fair amount of straight journalism and I was working first as a reporter or as a feature writer and then as an editor for a business magazine, yeah, hippie me. (chuckle.) Tie-dye Denny.

Stroud: (Laugher.) That is a little hard to feature.

DO: And doing an occasional straight reporting job for a magazine and I just wondered, maybe these business guys would not be comfortable with a comic book writer working for them. I was doing some work for Stan and wondered if he…I don’t think he would have objected, but I didn’t know that at the time, and while I wasn’t doing much work for him, I didn’t want what I was doing to go away.

Stroud: That clears that one up. Speaking of clearing things up, I have wondered forever and a day, would you please tell me how to pronounce, is it “Race” or “Roz” al Ghul, how is that pronounced?

DO: Well, my daughter went to the language department of UCLA about 15 years ago and she was told “Rashe.”

Batman (1940) #232, written by Denny O'Neil.

Batman (1940) #244, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: “Rashe.” Okay.

DO: Yeah. That was Julie’s contribution.

Stroud: Oh. He named it?

DO: Yeah. In effect, he said, “Okay, here’s this name, it means ‘Head of Demon,’ gimme a character to go with it.” That is my memory of how it went. Again, I mean I’m 68 years old and 4 years ago I was subjected to massive jolts of electricity and I wasn’t taking notes anyway. So we tend to have somewhat differing memories of what happened, but I am prepared to say, Julie says pretty much the same thing in his autobiography, he came up with the name, and Neal and I ran with it.

Stroud: Okay, somehow I missed that. I just recently read that within the last few weeks and I must have skipped over that part.

DO: I think it’s only one line somewhere in the middle of the book.

Stroud: At the risk of sounding like a drooling fan boy, you wrote my all-time favorite Batman novel with Knightfall, which in my opinion totally epitomizes the Batman mythos and I’m going on the presumption it followed the earlier efforts that you and Neal took to return him to his dark roots. Is that accurate?

DO: Yeah. That was tied in with a monstrously long comic book continuity and a BBC radio series. It was probably the most interesting mountain I’ve ever climbed and I never want to climb it again.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Once was enough, huh?

DO: Well, after we came up with the stunt, which is Batman dies, Bruce Wayne dies or is disabled, that somebody else takes over as Batman for a year…they decided since the Superman guys were doing something similar, which I didn’t know until we were well into our continuity, that there was going to be some novels and I was the only Batman writer who arguably had a grasp of the entire thing. But I was also a working editor, I had a day job, and they insisted that the novel be at least 100,000 words long. We agonized over it for a little bit and finally Marifran said, “You’ll hate yourself if somebody else does it.” So while we were in the process of creating the comic book continuity, which ended up over 1100 pages long, I was at night subjecting myself to the discipline of, after dinner, close the door, I’d done the arithmetic I know how many words I had to do every day to meet the deadline. I would do that number of words and then stop. In the middle of it, we were going home for Christmas and I had a portable computer with the novel on it in the back seat of a Pontiac which was destroyed when I fell asleep at the wheel and smashed into a barrier doing approximately 65, the car flipped over 3 times, we didn’t know that until later. And we spent Christmas in the intensive care ward.

Fawcett Collectors of America #187, featuring Denny O'Neil (as drawn by Mark Lewis.

Stroud: Oh, yeah, that’s right. You referenced that in the story.

DO: Yeah, that was a little nudge, a little inside joke. The only thing I was worried about was the computer, and I asked the doctor on Christmas morning (chuckle) “Would you please go out to the wreckage of the car and see the computer?” And bless him, he did and he brought it back and it was still working and so I hadn’t lost the novel.

Stroud: A large chunk of your life.

DO: I had some of it saved on disk, but not all, so I lost two weeks, in effect, before I could really reasonably get back to work and we went right down to the wire. The last 3 days…well, we made this arrangement where every Saturday morning Marifran and I would drive out to a big shopping mall at the end of Brooklyn and meet Charlie Kochman there and I would deliver pages to him, so he was editing as he went along. At the end, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Charlie came to our place in Brooklyn and we did the final line by line edit at my desk with Marifran bringing lemonade and cookies every few hours. We finished editing it Monday morning at 11:00 and I think it went to the press at 12:00. It was right down to the wire and a really interesting thing to do. “I don’t have time to worry if this is good or not. The only thing I have to do is get it done somehow.” I had a bestseller out of it, something that most writers don’t ever have a chance to enjoy. So I was really glad to have managed to accept the challenge, but my God that was a seriously work-laden six months. I think we actually did it in five and a half.

Stroud: It sounds like a terribly daunting task, but I mean the results were just absolutely phenomenal. It’s one of the few pieces of pure fiction that I’ve literally…I think I’ve re-read that thing 4 or 5 times, because when I get fed up with reading bad Batman stories, whether it was from the 50’s, anywhere from there forward, I go pick up Knightfall and I think, “Okay, this is how he was meant to be. Somehow Denny O’Neil is in Bruce Wayne’s head and understands all the conflicts and all the subtleties and just what he’s supposed to be and so…”

DO: It all started with “The Secret of the Waiting Graves.” It was just a 15-pager, but there, the assignment was, “Okay, we’ve been doing this camp thing” for however long it had been. The first time I was offered Batman I didn’t want to do it. I ended up doing a fill-in story based on New Orleans jazz, which Julie Schwartz loved. Anyway, it was in the middle of the camp thing and I thought, “I don’t think I’m any good at this.” The second time, it’s, “Well, camp is over, and we’ve got this character and we want to keep publishing it. What do you want to do?” So we came up with “Secret of the Waiting Graves.” I think it evolved from there. The basic thing was to eliminate all the bad comedy and to try and make it intelligent. The question you ask yourself is if this guy existed, how would he have to be? I got part of a cue from an essay that Alfred Bester wrote for the science fiction writer’s house organ(?), which is two novels, particularly the second of the first two, are about obsessed characters and he wrote this essay about how useful it is to writer’s to have an obsessed character and I thought, “Yeah, that’s Batman.” So once you have something like that in place, and you’re trying to be reasonably logical, the rest of it kind of snaps to and eventually you have a character.

Stroud: So I suppose that’s obviously the logical progression that led to when you reintroduced the classical homicidal maniac of The Joker. That was just the next logical step.

Batman (1940) #251, written by Denny O'Neil.

DO: Absolutely. I wondered if the Comics Code would let us get away with that many murders in a story, but again, you could never predict the Comics Code, but we didn’t hear a peep from them. But there’s no point in doing a maniacal clown who isn’t maniacal. Then you’ve just got a clown. Big deal. And the Joker had started out, no matter who had created him; three people have claimed him (chuckle), but it was a great idea for a villain. I think in all of the trickster characters, in all of the literature of the world there is no better one than The Joker, but he had to be homicidal and insane for it to work as a story. So that’s what we did.

Stroud: Yeah, and did a beautiful job. In fact I suspect that on the strength of that reintroduction…to my knowledge that’s the only villain, at least during the time period that got his own title.

DO: Yeah, and now we could do justice to that baby, but at the time, “Okay, you’ve got a homicidal maniac and he has to be the protagonist 12 times a year.” I was never satisfied with the work I did for that. Given the Comics Code there was just no way to make it work. He had to be Hannibal Lecter in order to be consistent and logical and be The Joker, and he couldn’t be that back then. Now with the freedom comics guys have they could probably make it work.

Stroud: I seem to remember reading in the letter column once, I’ve actually got that entire 9-issue series in my collection, that the Code at the time required the villain to be captured and punished at the end of every story, so that really put some limitations on.

DO: Yeah, exactly. It was just impossible. In terms of good writing, good plotting, it couldn’t be done. It was the same problem that the movie guys had. When I teach writing I use the movie, “The Bad Seed” as an example of that; where it was adapted from a Broadway play about this angelic little girl who kills people wantonly any time she doesn’t get her way, and the way the play ended, she’s gonna get away with it. “Oh, my God, she’s going to grow up!” (chuckle.) In the movie, because of that requirement, the last minute she walks to the end of a dock and lightning strikes her dead. So God takes care of it. God handles what the cops couldn’t, and nothing in the story sets that up. It’s not the writer’s fault; I mean they had to do it that way. So that was the problem with The Joker, you couldn’t be logical and consistent and do that character as a protagonist.

Stroud: So was it more the writing difficulties that signaled that one’s demise or was it another…

DO: I have no idea.

Stroud: Sales. (Laughter.) Of course I realize you weren’t involved clear up to the end.

DO: No and I don’t really remember why I stopped being involved, whether it was Julie’s idea or mine, but, well, you know our lives are littered with things that for one reason or another didn’t work. I think the guys in the big offices don’t ever take things like that ever into consideration. “Exactly how is this going to work, dramatically?”

The Joker (1975) #1, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: Yeah, just throw something up on the wall and see if it sticks.

DO: Yeah, or they look at figures. “This issue of Batman featuring this character sold well, so maybe we should do a book about this character,” without realizing, well, no, maybe you shouldn’t. (chuckle.) Maybe it can’t possibly work.

Stroud: The gorilla theory. (Laughter.)

DO: On the other hand, sometimes those kinds of assignments make you rise to the occasion and you figure out a way to make it work. I wish there were rules for doing this work, but there isn’t.

Stroud: (Laughter.) Still very much a crap shoot, it sounds like. Did your background as a reporter…do you think that was a help or a hindrance?

DO: Oh, I would recommend that any professional writer put in time as a reporter because it gives you discipline, it teaches you that your precious little words are not made of diamond.

Stroud: You learn to deal with editors.

DO: Exactly. And it teaches you that you could be wrong. Maybe the editor is right. But mostly I think one of my strengths was I did always regard it as a job, as I said, a splendid job, but my background was, well, this is why you write. There are these two mouths on Second Street in the East Village that need to have food in them. Dick and I once shared one of our secrets; we are both so insecure that we felt, “If I screw this up, I’ll never get another job. So I don’t dare blow this deadline.” And even when we were well-established, and logically you know that’s not true, there’s a part of you that says, “I don’t dare screw up.” Well, it probably interferes with proper digestion, but it does make you a good professional. (chuckle.)

Stroud: (Laugher.) A good sense of discipline. That’s irreplaceable. I’m not sure you can actually inculcate discipline into someone. I think they have to come with it, for the most part.

DO: I have a minor in creative writing. It’s a joke because really what we did for three years was write a thousand words a week. It was the way that writing classes are usually taught, you would read it aloud to the class and get a critique. I don’t know that that was valuable, but the discipline of, you’ve got to have a thousand words, three typed pages, by eleven o’clock on Thursday morning or whatever it was, it was good. Okay, my son, who is obviously of another generation, has a degree in filmmaking and I asked him when I started teaching what he got from his writing classes and he said virtually the same thing. The discipline of having to do a piece a week. If you are looking at screenwriting there are all kinds of craft things you can teach. I’ve published probably close to 50 short stories and I don’t feel qualified to teach short story writing. You get an idea and you develop it. Boy, that doesn’t take a semester to communicate. With comic book writing, with screenwriting, yeah, there’s dramatic structure and all kinds of things. So journalism gives you that kind of discipline and I don’t know if it can be taught, but it can certainly be presented as a desirable thing to achieve. I talked to a couple of editors up at DC a few months ago and said, “What’s your biggest problem?” and it was my biggest problem, too, you can’t get two consecutive issues out of people. It was a problem that Julie Schwartz had in the 40’s, and I think part of it is a kind of culture that grows up that you don’t really have to pay attention to these things. In journalism, the guy down below the editorial room is gonna push that big red button at 10 o’clock and that press is gonna roll, and if your story’s not on it, there’s gonna be this big white space and if that happens three times, you’re fired. I’m often amazed that comic book guys, when they work in television they have no problem with the deadlines. When they work in comics they can’t seem to meet them. So it has to be something about the comics rather than them. And again, television is really unforgiving. They really do need the script for the read-through on Monday morning. No kidding. They really do need it. There’s tens of thousands of dollars an hour being spent, they need the script, really. So, they find a way to get it to them. A friend, Emily, who has been on CSI Miami for five years, worked on West Wing for a season, and she said that very often, having worked on all of those shows, you know Monday is when they have the read-through and they start shooting Monday afternoon, but Tuesday he doesn’t have an idea. Wednesday, he doesn’t have an idea. Thursday he doesn’t have an idea and he’s desperate and maybe I ought to get another writer, maybe we’re going to cancel the series, I don’t know. Thursday night, real late, the germ of an idea. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at the computer. Monday morning they have the script, and obviously that was his process. He needed to put himself in that pressure cooker.

Stroud: Right in the crucible and go from there. Oh, boy…

DO: But the point is that they do get it done.

Stroud: I know that they called upon you for consulting detail for the last Batman movie. Were you involved in any of the prior editions also, or was that a first?

DO: Oh, I always got the scripts, and I always read them, and wrote a memo, and the things that I suggested were all pretty obvious and I’m sure that 50 people wrote similar memos and 40 of them made the same suggestions, so I never had the illusion that anything I said made any difference. Those early movies…I got to know Sam Hamm, who wrote the first one and did the story for the second one fairly well, but I never met Tim Burton. The Ra’s al Ghul one, well they were…except for denying me a screen credit, and I don’t know why they did that, because they’re perfectly willing to acknowledge that I created the character, what I really did was consult on the video game. That was the easiest money I ever made. A very bright, smart 27-year old writer would drive up here a couple of times a month and we’d go to lunch in town and I’d say, “Well, you know, Batman can’t say ‘goddamn.’” “Oh, okay, Batman doesn’t say ‘goddamn.’” That was the extent of my consulting. My name was there for theatrical value. On the other thing I wrote the novel and it was a hellish job getting the script. Again, when you do these novelization things the deadline is unforgiving and I know how fast I can reasonably work and they were not willing to give me a script, so finally I went on the internet and I got a pirated one and started with that. I once interviewed a guy at the State Department. The security was considerably less to get into the State Department than to look at that script, but I kept thinking on my first read-through, “Wow, this is really good, they really get it,” and “Why didn’t I think of this? This is really a good bit.” So I was pleased. It was fun to do the novel. About 40% of it is new material, but again, I was told, “Do what’s appropriate. Give us more background on the villain, and follow the broad beats of the script and take it from there.” I added an ending they didn’t have that they complimented me on. But I didn’t really consult on the movie. I missed a chance to meet with the director. They had the premiere in Hollywood. We were invited, but there was a conflict. We couldn’t get away. So I missed a chance to meet Chris Nolan. Paul Levitz said that he had asked if we could get together. I think it’s one of the best superhero movies ever made, and by a wide margin the best Batman big-screen effort.

Stroud: I perfectly agree. Did you approve of the way they handled Ra’s?

DO: Oh, it wasn’t exactly my Ra’s, but it shouldn’t have been. What they did was perfectly valid on its own terms. If I was going to quibble, I might have wanted a little more gravitas in Liam Neeson’s performance. I have always envisioned Ra’s as this enormously impressive, serious…sort of like Jupiter, the god, or Saturn, but the basic mistake comic book people make is to think that you can make a movie out of a comic book and you can’t. They’re different media, they have different requirements. The example I’ve probably used a thousand times is you have to translate, like translating a Haiku from Japanese to English. If you give a literal translation, you will have gibberish. This is not my idea, it’s Stanley Kaufman’s, you have to re-create the poem in your own language; take the idea of it and realize it in a different way, and that is exactly the problem with adapting something from one medium to another. They weren’t making a comic book, they were making a movie. I could quibble with one other bit of casting, but apart from that, I walked into the screening that we finally went to in New York City, just wondering how I would feel (chuckle) when I walked out of that theater. Because the last Batman screening we went to, poor Marifran, I couldn’t talk for an hour. I was just really, really furious. But in this case, it was a pleasure. I thought, “Yeah, they really brought this off.”

Stroud: Yeah, I was similarly satisfied and I tried to get past my own anal retentive tendencies. I mean, when they were opening the Batcave with the keyboard, I thought, “No, no, no, it’s the grandfather clock!” (Laughter.)

DO: Nowhere near as serious an offense as, “Oh, by the way, Master Bruce, I’ve brought your girlfriend down to the Batcave.” (chuckle.) These guys just didn’t get it at all. I did know that director and he is one of the sweetest men, and one of the nicest people on the face of the Earth. When my kid went out to direct a movie in Hollywood he met him, and the director was not aware of the connection and Larry said he was just helpful and nice, just a new director in town. Give the kid a break. But I don’t think he got it. I keep wondering how the screenwriter continues to get work. He gets a lot of it.

Stroud: It does baffle you when something gets butchered that badly. Oh, well, I guess they don’t consult with me, either. (chuckle.)

DO: Well, and I understood giving that team one movie, but why two?

Stroud: Yeah, two shots at mediocrity.

DO: The director has said that a lot of the problems were that the studio insisted on maximum merchandising and I’m sure that’s true. One of Marifran’s best friends is second in command at the licensing department at DC, so we get a good look into her world and yeah, there had to be a lot of costumes and a lot of gadgets, but when I think about individual shots, the studio heads don’t mandate that. So he was not the right guy for the job. That happens. Bad casting. He told me when we were at some function together, he said, “I’m doing your Batman.” I thought, “Well, that’ll be nice, if it’s true.” (chuckle.)

Stroud: Not quite up to standard. Are you working on any particular projects right now?

DO: I do a weekly column for an online thing called Comic Mix, edited by my old Question editor, Mike Gold, with the terms of the assignment that it can be as little as 500 words a week and “Yes, please get as political as you want.” And no other restrictions about subject matter. So, it’s pleasant enough. I take a walk around the lake near here on Monday afternoon and think about it and I write it on Tuesday. It’s an hour’s work unless my brain has fallen into the pan for some reason. I keep getting asked to do introductions and essays. As far as comic book writing, nothing for years. Julie Schwartz’ memorial Flash was the last thing I did. That’s fine with me. It’s not that I would not take a comic book assignment, but I probably would not be too comfortable doing the current interpretations of the characters. I think I had a pretty good long run of staying contemporary with the audience, partially because I had a kid, who was the audience. A bright teenager. Probably the average comic book audience, or college kid, but, well, a question I asked someone the other day: “Where is the line between allowed and here? How far negative can you go with a character and still call that character a hero?” I really would love to have an answer for that. I don’t. I don’t know. I am not comfortable with the degree of anti-heroism that I sometimes see. That, I have to shout from the rooftops, does not mean it’s wrong. It means I don’t get it.

Stroud: Right. Which, of course, would make your job very difficult.

DO: Yeah. I mean, if they came and said, “Do your Batman for one issue,” yeah, I’d probably take that job. There’s a part of me that still loves the work. I quit four years earlier than I needed to for a lot of reasons. One was 12-hour workdays for years. (chuckle.) But another was I kind of sensed that it was going in a direction I wouldn’t be comfortable with. The business. And I’m sort of like their designated talking head, I’ve done a lot of DVD commentary and that kind of thing, so I get up there once in awhile, and I have a sense that I was right. It’s probably perfectly fine for 30-year olds. I would be very uncomfortable in that situation. The situation I had for about the last 5 years is I was the Grand Old Man after Julie retired and I was fairly bulletproof and given more autonomy than editors usually have. My job was, “Run the Batman franchise.” And any way I wanted to do that was probably okay with them. With “No Man’s Land,” I was surprised when they gave us permission to do it, and then we started it…the idea was Jordan Gorfinkel’s, I had nothing to do with it, he brought in an outline one Monday morning that he’d done by himself over the weekend, and I thought, “Well, okay, this team, the four of us, have worked together successfully for a long time. We can do professional grade comics, and we can be out of here by 5 o’clock when we’re getting a little stale, a little bored.” The way that you cure that is to undertake something you’re not quite sure you can bring off, and “No Man’s Land” was certainly that, but I didn’t think they’d give me permission to do it, and they did, and then we got no support. The sales started coming in and I went up to a retailer’s meeting in Baltimore and Paul Levitz said, “We owe Denny an apology. He was right. “No Man’s Land” is a great idea.”

The Question (1987) #1, written by Denny O'Neil.

Stroud: So you were validated. Very good.

DO: Yeah. I was surprised that it was successful. A lot of people said, “Well, the Government would never abandon a city,” and then came along Katrina and New Orleans and we weren’t terribly far off.

Stroud: Sadly, no. Was being an editor as satisfying as being a creator, or was it just a different kind of a job?

DO: They’re different things. The editor satisfies your need to work with people, which I’m not awfully good at. In college, along about my sophomore year, I sort of had to make a decision. Am I going to work to major in drama or in English and I did one little professional show and I thought, “I don’t like this lifestyle.” It’s too busy, it’s too many people. The nice thing about being a writer, the good and the bad thing, is you close the door behind you for 30 hours a week. There’s no way you can get help during the job. There’s a before and after, but it is a very isolating thing, and if you’re enormously talented, but you can’t live with that, you can’t make a living as a writer.

Stroud: Yeah, it is a very solitary exercise.

DO: On the other hand, there is great satisfaction in working with creative people, and the last editorial team I had, I should have paid them. For about six years it was a pleasure to go into work every day. Those guys were so good and if I had dropped dead, they could have occupied my desk and nobody would have missed a beat. Any one of them was qualified to do my job. Two of them were out here a couple of weeks ago. We have stayed in touch. So there was that real pleasure…and some of the freelancers. I always love talking to Doug Moench. Really interesting guy. But any time there are three people together, on a desert island, two of them are going to unite against the third. Its human nature, and I have no aptitude for politics, and I really dislike it, and as that began to be some…it’s not like it dominates the entire thing, but it was rearing its head. And I thought, “Well, I’ve had a really long run at doing this.” According to Mark Evanier, the longest regularly working writer in the history of the medium. Maybe it’s time to get off the stage and to pass the torch. So I made an arrangement with Paul where for the last year, by that time I’d moved out here, I came in two days a week, I came in one day a week and finally…if that had not happened, I’d be dead now. Literally.

Stroud: Just a good outlet.

DO: No, literally, dying…death…corpse. A year after I retired, September 10th, a year after 9-11, I was having lunch with a friend at a café two towns over and I literally dropped dead on the floor.

Stroud: Oh, golly.

DO: The guy who owns the café is a New Jersey fireman. He knew that the City Hall next door had just gotten a defibrillator, so he ran over, got the defibrillator, on the third try got my heart beating again, by that time the paramedics were there, and from there on…the thing that Western doctors are really good at is, “Let’s cut here and reattach here,” that sort of thing, but if I had been in a New York City office building, there is no way anybody would have gotten the defibrillator or the paramedics…if I’d survived at all, I would have been badly damaged.

Stroud: Oh, gosh. I had no idea. Wow!

DO: In its own way, it’s a miracle and if I had not retired, there’s no scenario that I know of that would have allowed me to survive a major heart attack like that.

Stroud: No, certainly not. Whew! Incredible.

The Shadow (1973) #1, written by Denny O'Neil.

Superman (1939) #233, written by Denny O'Neil.

January 10, 2018

An Interview With Dick Giordano - Artist & Editor, From Charlton To DC

January 10, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Dick Giordano in 1969. Photo by Gary Groth.

Richard Joseph "Dick" Giordano (born July 20, 1932) was an American comics artist and editor whose career included introducing Charlton Comics' Action Heroes stable of superheroes and serving as executive editor of DC Comics. In April of 1955, he married Marie Trapani (sister of fellow comic book artist Sal Trapani). Mr Giordano helped to sculpt the look and feel of DC Comics, working for them from 1967-1971 and again from 1980-1993. His touch on the industry can still be felt to this day. Dick Giordano passed away on March 27, 2010 due to complications of pneumonia.

Dick was one of the great guys of the industry. No one ever had a harsh word to say about the guy and when you read the transcript of the interview, I believe it shows through. A greatly talented artist who rubbed shoulders with some of the titans of the industry over the years, I wish I'd been able to hear more of his stories. To no one's surprise, you may recall that Neal Adams listed Dick as his favorite inker on his DC work. He left us far too soon, but I was certainly grateful for the time he took to answer my questions. For further delving into his remarkable career, I can highly recommend Michael Eury's Dick Giordano, Changing Comics One Day at a Time.

This interview originally took place via email on June 10, 2007.

Dick Giordano, Changing Comics One Day At A Time - by Michael Eury.

Bryan Stroud: I was amazed at the volume of work you did for DC in the Silver Age despite your relatively short time involvement. You inked, edited or penciled on over 25 titles running the gamut from superhero to westerns to romance to mystery. You left your mark, too, as you received an Alley award in 1969 for best editor and a Shazam award in 1970 for Best inker (Dramatic Division.) Was any genre more enjoyable to work on than another?

Dick Giordano: I was young enough to handle a long work day that I thought was fun and which included a 4 hour round trip commute from Connecticut to Manhattan, Monday thru Friday. My normal work routine had me waking at 4am, at my drawing board until 7am, make the 8 o'clock train to Manhattan. On the train, I often napped or edited scripts and/or wrote lettercols (letter columns). I was at my drawing board for some part of every weekend and sometimes for the entire weekend if family and friends were not on the menu.

Favorite genre? Well, I sorta preferred romance. But only because it allowed me to flex creative muscles that were not required for the other genres; design, fashion, storytelling that was often more subtle than the shoot-'em-ups. In the main, though, I reveled in the variety and often yearn today for those halcyon days when each week or two, I could work with a different skill set.

Stroud: Was it more fun to be a creator or an editor?

DG: Neither. It was more fun to be a creator AND an editor! And as a matter of fact, that was required by my employment agreement. The company was not allowed to ask me to give up freelance assignments so long as they were done outside of office hours and on my own premises and didn't interfere with my editorial duties. The agreement did not allow my working freelance for anyone but DC.

Stroud: What’s the difference between an executive editor and a managing editor?

DG: No difference, really. And both are administrative or business titles that were incorrectly applied to me because I didn't like Editor-in Chief. That sounded like a word guy and I saw myself as a picture guy, but EIC is basically what my function was both at Charlton and much later at DC.

Adventure Comics #404, cover by Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano.

Adventure Comics #404 original cover art by Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano.

Adventure Comics #476, cover by Ross Andru & Dick Giordano.

Stroud: What did you consider your best assignment at DC?

DG: During this time period, I think I would have to go with Aquaman. I worked with some very talented people, Steve Skeates, the late Jim Aparo and Neal Adams - and was able to accomplish my editorial goals before leaving DC. After establishing basic parameters, Steve and Jim and I would meet every so often at DCs offices to plot the next round of issues. Jim lived in Connecticut and didn't much like traveling. We did most of the real work by telephone (while I could still hear) and the mails (before FedEx) and everything went smoothly until we admitted that we couldn't figure out where we had sent Mera at the start of the series (we needed to have her out of the story for a while) and how to bring her back. Neal had an idea that worked and he wrote and drew a back-up story for several issues that not only was a cool solution to the Mera problem, but gave Steve and Jim some breathing time on the main story. We had given Aquaman a more Sci-Fi feel and Neal's solution worked well within the concepts we had introduced to the strip.

Stroud: What was your proudest achievement during the '68 to '70 timeframe?

DG: I would find it difficult to pick one. I found joy in everything that I was able to accomplish with DC, particularly after my disappointing experiences at Charlton. Charlton was to DC as a weed is to a flower!

Stroud: Carmine Infantino was very proud of Bat Lash, but lamented it wouldn’t sell stateside. Did you enjoy that brief project?

DG: I loved it! "Stateside" was another word for children. In Europe comics were aimed at mature readers. In the U.S., our audience was thought to be pre-teen children, hence the Comics Code. Carmine was right...but couldn't help wanting to have a little fun with a more mature concept!

Stroud: Neal Adams told me that everyone wanted a crack at Deadman and you edited that title for a while as well. Was it a difficult task?

DG: The Deadman title (actually, Strange Adventures) was under my editorship from, I believe issue #3, until it was discontinued. Perhaps Neal is correct that others wanted a shot at it because it was a cool concept but no one in his right mind approached me. Neal would have been a formidable act to follow. It was a piece-of-cake job for me since Neal was the person who knew the character best and regardless of the credits, Neal either wrote or re-wrote nearly all the scripts as well as drawing them. My major contribution to the strip was as a whip-cracker. Neal was involved in so many projects that meeting deadlines was becoming difficult. I believe the title's cancellation was due more to Neal's problems with getting the material in on time, than to a fall-off in sales. We had to do a non-Deadman reprint issue (a no-no) in the middle of a story line. Publishers then, unlike now, would not ship late. Period!

Space Adventures #3, cover by Dick Giordano.

Attack #55 original cover art by Dick Giordano.

Stroud: In my copy of Secret Six #2 you introduce yourself (with someone depicting your face as well, was that your artwork?) as the new editor and ask for all kinds of feedback on that and the other issues you were working on. Did you feel like you’d jumped into the deep end of the pool with the new titles to edit?

DG: Not at all! I was straining at the bit and couldn't wait to put my plans in operation for the 8 bi-monthly titles assigned to me. All were already being published and two of them (Blackhawk and Bomba) were already headed for the scrap pile after 2 more issues each, when I took over. Joe Orlando drew the caricature of me and I inked it and wrote the copy.

Stroud: There was a gaffe in Secret Six #4 that several readers picked up on when Carlo effectively revealed he was not Mockingbird via a thought balloon suspecting Lili. You did your best at damage control, but it seemed to be too late. Was that a writing or editing error?

DG: There is no such thing as a writing error getting to print. That's what editors are for. I believe Joe Gill wrote it and I missed it completely! I believe there was another thought balloon error that made it to print in a subsequent issue that I also missed. I don't remember what is was, though. If either balloon was spoken aloud, we wouldn't be talking about this now. But there was no way out of it...it was blown. Of course, we could have changed the title to the Secret Four...

Stroud: Did E. Nelson Bridwell tell you who Mockingbird was?

DG: No. I wanted to be surprised like everybody else…if it ever came to that. I believe the revelation would have come only after a decision to cancel were made.

Stroud: You brought some talent with you to DC from Charlton. Was it difficult to persuade Jim Aparo, for example?

DG: Why would it be? Jim's DC page rate would be more than double his Charlton page rate. He would be working for the biggest and arguably the best publisher in the business and working on iconic characters, of which Charlton had none. His working routine would not change, he could still work at home and send the work in by mail and he would be paid weekly. This was also true of everyone who came with me, to one degree or another.

Wonder Woman (1942) #182, cover by Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano. — Wonder Woman (1942) #182, cover by Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano.

Wonder Woman (1942) #182 original cover art by Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano.

Stroud: Joe Giella told me that he had to re-pencil some work by Mike Sekowsky when he was headed into his decline and to his chagrin he delivered the pages when Sekowsky was in the office “…raging at Dick Giordano for not giving him more work.” Do you recall the incident?

DG: No. And it could not have been true for '67 to '70 time period. Mike's work was not in decline at that time. He was writing, drawing and editing the all-new Wonder Women that I was inking (without any re-penciling) and I was working for him, not the other way around. I did not give out much work to others than the artists assigned to my books.

This might have happened after Mike had moved to California (to get into animation) and he would do an occasional job for DC that was definitely not up to his previous standards. I was in charge of editorial at DC at the time and Mike might have been visiting the East Coast (though I don't recall that specifically) and badgering me for some more work. I guess...

Stroud: I’d like to list some names of people you worked with during the Silver Age and ask your impressions: E. Nelson Bridwell.

DG: A brilliant researcher and student of comics with a good sense of humor. A journeyman writer with good ideas. Nelson was unfortunate in that he looked strange, suffered from Tourette's Syndrome and ticked incessantly and those who were crude made Nelson a butt of their jokes. Nelson would just make believe he didn't hear.

Stroud: Julie Schwartz.

DG: My officemate for most of the time I spent at DC this time around. He was very rigid in his work and personal routines but you knew exactly what he wanted from you and where he would be at certain times of the day. His desk was spotless and before leaving for the day everything was put away. By contrast, my desk was piled halfway to the ceiling...always! His stories were not always my cup of tea. Most were plot driven. I preferred character driven stories. BUT he did what he did better than anyone before or since! And many would pay admission to witness a plotting session with Julie and a writer and I was sitting right there. He had his foibles but I respected him immensely!

Stroud: Bob Kanigher.

DG: Other than to say I disliked Mr. Kanigher immensely, no comment.

Superman #237, cover by Neal Adams & Dick Giordano.

Superman #237 original cover art by Neal Adams & Dick Giordano.

The Green Planet (1962) #1, cover by Dick Giordano.

Stroud: Neal Adams.

DG: Good buddy and great artist whose work changed comics for good and all to this day! We partnered and prospered on a lot of things important to both of us and then went our separate ways, I believe, the better for having been together.

Stroud: Denny O’Neil.

DG: A quiet, professional and great writer that I am glad to have had at my side from our Charlton days (Sergius O'Shaughnessy) to our retiring from DC several years ago. His work on Batman as both writer and editor leaves a legacy that will not soon be forgotten or equaled.

Stroud: Carmine Infantino.

DG: The real reason I moved to DC in 1967 was to be able to work with DCs new art director, Carmine. The abrupt changes in management at DC when they were bought out by Kinney National were difficult for me to feel comfortable with, but fans of Carmine's artwork have to line up behind me! He designed and drew the first Deadman story, he designed and drew the first Human Target story (with me inking!!) and I followed as regular artist on the second story, with my meager talents. His pencil and inked version of the Elongated Man back-up stories were my guiding lights when I took over the strip and his cover designs were always striking and eye-catching! Unbeknownst to many fans, Carmine designed most of the covers for DC from his art director days to his abrupt departure years later.

Stroud: Steve Ditko.

DG: Steve and I worked together at Charlton and had a lot of fun. He and I played ping-pong at lunch time, and his humorous cartoons on the walls in the comic department drew people from other departments to share in the fun. When the Ayn Rand philosophy began to take over his interest and crept into his stories (first glimpsed in the Question back-up stories at Charlton), I found communications between Steve and myself becoming increasingly difficult as it was a philosophy that I did not entirely agree with. This led to a creative standoff between Steve and DCs more liberal writers that eventually led to Steve discontinuing his involvement in Beware the Creeper and The Hawk and Dove. I believe that was the last work done by Steve Ditko for DC and I for one wish that were not so.

Space Adventures #58, cover by Dick Giordano.

Flash #302 original cover art by Carmine Infantino & Dick Giordano.

Flash #302, cover by Carmine Infantino & Dick Giordano.

Stroud: Gil Kane.

DG: A well-read and very intellectual man and a great artist, Gil could hold court for hours on just about any subject. He was always ready to try something new that had no known commercial value just because the idea appealed to him. Among his many ground breakers were a paperback sized comic, Blackmark, arguably the first graphic novel ever, His Name Is Savage, a two tier daily comic strip with regular collaborator, Archie Goodwin and with Roy Thomas, The Ring, based on an opera. We became good friends after he moved to the west coast to do animation design and a trip to LA without dinner with the Kane’s was unheard of.

Stroud: Murray Boltinoff.

DG: Strangely, I knew very little of Murray Boltinoff. Freelancers who worked for him enjoyed the experience and he certainly looked like an easy going person but we had very little to do with each other at DC and I never got to know him. My loss.

Stroud: Nick Cardy.

DG: Nick was a favorite artist of mine. Did some truly terrific covers for Teen Titans and Aquaman while I edited those titles. One of the hardest things I had to do in taking over the editorial reins of Aquaman, was to replace Nick with Jim Aparo. This was not a criticism of Nick's work on that title but because when you are to create a new editorial approach in a comic book (in this case, replacing the silly Saturday morning cartoon approach that DC had opted for) it behooves you to call attention to the changes by changing the look of the book. I think it worked but it was a hard change to make.

Nick disappeared from view sometime in the '70s and resurfaced in the '80s by meeting me at a Florida convention that I was attending. I convinced Nick that his fans would welcome him back with open arms if he'd only dip his big toe in the water. Which he did and the fans did. Nick is now a regular attendee at many conventions and the fans crowd his table as he does sketches and chats with them. We still have a ball together.

Nukla (1965) #1, cover by Dick Giordano & Sal Trapani.

Nukla (1965) #1 original cover art by Dick Giordano & Sal Trapani.

Masters of the Universe #1, cover by George Tuska & Dick Giordano.

Stroud: I understand you and Neal are partners on Continuity Studios. Has that been an enjoyable endeavor?

DG: WERE partners. We broke off our partnership with no animosity before 1980 when I moved over to DC. We see each other only at conventions these days. Neal and I are still friends but we are not doing the same things with our lives as we did then.

The partnership was enjoyable but rather hectic. We did a lot of nice stuff together but as the years past, we found that we were not as good a fit as first thought. I was more into a regular schedule. I lived in Connecticut, Continuity was in NY. I got in at 10 am, Neal, much later. I left at 5pm to get home at 7pm for what was left of my family life. Neal almost never left the studio. These things in and of themselves were not a deal breaking problem but the advertising agencies we worked for wanted their work (usually in the morning) that we received at 4 in the afternoon and Neal often worked all night and I wasn't there to help. Patti Bastienne and I handled most of the business end of Continuity but that often led to my being frustrated as I wanted to draw more.

Stroud: You collaborated with Lew Sayre Schwartz, another DC alumnus on a graphic novel adaptation of Moby Dick. What was that like?

DG: Fun. We first met at a Cartoonists Society diner and Lew asked if I would be interested in working with him on Moby Dick. It was to be done for the city of New Bedford in Mass. to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. As is often the case in these sorts of projects, the project was not approved by the city of New Bedford until about a year later and before we were able to start a few more months had past but time was available to do the project properly. Lew supplied excellent story boards instead of a typed script and they made my work easier as I knew just what Lew was after. We finished, did a book signing at the city's whaling museum, treated like royalty and taken to a nice dinner by the city which then bought my original art for the city's whaling museum. Lew and I have talked regularly since then and we've worked on a couple of projects now hunting a publisher.

Wonder Woman (1942) #203, cover by Dick Giordano.

Wonder Woman #203 interior featuring Mr. Grandee, based on Carmine Infantino.

Stroud: Legend has it that in Wonder Woman #203, which credits you as artist that the villain resembled Carmine Infantino. Any truth to that?

DG: Yep! I done that. We had publicity stills of most of us in a file in the production department. I took Carmine's file and drew him as the heavy to increase my having fun in a story that was pretty lackluster.

Stroud: You’re one of the few creators online at www.dickgiordano.com. Is it a good avenue for you to keep in touch with the fans?

DG: I'm having someone create a revised website to encourage more people to produce feedback. It will be more interactive. If you go on my current one, you'll find an email link that so far has only been used for fans to order art. I'd like to keep more in touch with fans.

Dick Giordano at the proclomation of Dick Giordano Day - MegaCon 2007.

Dick Giordano self portrait (with Wonder Woman) 2005

January 03, 2018

An Interview With Bob Rozakis - The Bronze Age Answer Man of DC Comics

January 03, 2018/ Bryan Stroud

Written by Bryan Stroud

Robert "Bob" Rozakis (born April 4, 1951) is an American comic book writer and editor known mainly for his work in the 1970s and 1980s at DC Comics, as the writer of 'Mazing Man and in his capacity as DC's "Answer Man". He was also responsible for the creation of DC characters such as Duela Dent (The Joker's Daughter), Mister E, Bumblebee, and Noah Kuttler. He first made a name for himself as a fan who would write in regularly to the letter columns in DC comics. From there he was able to transition into writing comics for DC.

Despite my fascination with DC's Silver Age, I am actually a Bronze Age baby, having purchased the 100-pagers and .20 and .25 copies off the spinner rack at my favorite stores. While the actual date of the Bronze Age is somewhat speculative, the Bronze Age tome by Paul Levitz pegs it at 1970 and my best friend and I (he being the webmaster at my home base, thesilverlantern.com) happen to agree. So while Bob Rozakis (the old lettercol guy who became one of the first to make the transition to professional at DC comics) is squarely in the Bronze Age, he was able to meet and interact with many of the Silver Age stalwarts - and being the "Answer Man," he seemed like an excellent interview candidate. I was not disappointed.

This interview originally took place via email on June 13, 2007.

Action Comics #562, written by Bob Rozakis.

Adventure Comics #453, written by Bob Rozakis.

Adventure Comics #495, written by Bob Rozakis.

Bryan Stroud: You lived out the dream of many fans, by getting on staff at DC. Were your letters to Julie (Schwartz) written as a means to an end or just for fun?

Bob Rozakis: I was writing the letters just for fun. When I was a senior in college, I went to visit DC and Julie was very cordial, owing to the fact that I had been one of his "lettercol regulars" for so long. It was after the visit that I thought, "Gee, maybe I can get a job here."

Stroud: What's your favorite DC Silver Age story?

Rozakis: "The Death of Superman," hands down.

Stroud: Tell us about your first visit to the DC offices.

Rozakis: Well, it was pretty amusing, actually, because they were treating me like I was a celebrity. (Or they were just amused that "this is one of those guys who writes all the letters, but he almost seems normal.")

Anyway, at the time, I had been doing some crosswords and word find puzzles for a fanzine and brought copies along because I thought Nelson Bridwell would enjoy them. Nelson shared an office with Julie and when Julie saw the puzzles, he grabbed them and ran out of the office. He came back a few minutes later with Sol Harrison, who asked if I could make up puzzles that were specific to Superman and Batman. When I said yes, he said, "Okay, do it and we'll buy them!"

So my visit led to immediate work. That was on a Friday afternoon; on Monday I was back with nine puzzle pages. They were eventually used in the 100-Page Super-Spectaculars and the Limited Collector's Editions.

'Mazing Man Special #1, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: What's your fondest memory of Julie Schwartz?

Rozakis: Julie was a big fan of bean soup. One time when I was in the supermarket, I noticed that they had a bean soup "Cup-o-Soup" and mentioned it to Julie. His response was immediate, "And you didn't buy me any?"

Well, I went back to the store the following weekend and there was no bean soup to be found! It turned out to be some kind of test marketing in limited supply. (It did not come out "officially" for about six months after that.)

But that didn't stop Julie from asking, "Where's my bean soup?"

Finally, my wife Laurie cooked up a pot of homemade bean soup and I brought it in for him. Which resulted in him asking, "When's your wife going to make some more bean soup?"

Stroud: Did E. Nelson Bridwell keep notes on DC's complex continuity or did he just trust his memory?

Rozakis: Nelson didn't need any notes; his memory was incredible. We would be talking about something happening in an old story and he would go to the files, find an issue, and open it to the page and panel.

Hero Hotline #1, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: Let's say you had to look up an obscure bit of continuity from a Golden
Age story, how was this accomplished? Did DC have a "morgue?" (storage for back issues)

Rozakis: DC has a library with copies of virtually everything they have ever published. Over the years, much of the early stuff has been crumbling, so no one is allowed access to it any more. But when I started there, we junior members of the staff were in the library all the time.

I even spent a lot of time indexing the stories on books like Action, Adventure and Detective. Since this was before computers, it was all done on 3x5 cards and it was quite impressive when I finished. Unfortunately, when we moved from 75 Rock to 666 Fifth, someone threw out the entire file drawer of cards!

Stroud: When sales went into a slump at DC what would you attribute it to, or is it simply a cyclical industry?

Rozakis: There were periods when the market was flooded with titles, so sales on individual books suffered. But I think the bigger problem is that the audience for comics has been steadily shrinking. The older "fanboys" have more money to spend than they did as kids, but there are fewer of them.

Julie liked stories that had a beginning, middle and end and yet the modern format seems to rely on endless story arcs. Which do you believe is superior?

I far prefer the self-contained stories. Today's comics seem to follow the pattern of "action scene - talking - action scene - cliffhanger." I find myself flipping through many of them just to see what is on the last page. Too many stories are padded out to fill the eventual trade paperback.

Julie always insisted that your story have a plot with a beginning, middle and end, regardless of how many pages long it was. (And if it was a book-length story, there had better be some sub-plots too!) I look at stories that run for issues and issues these days and say, "Julie would have made me do this whole thing in eight pages!"

Teen Titans #48Hero Hotline #1, written by Bob Rozakis.

Teen Titans #50, written by Bob Rozakis.

Teen Titans #51, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: You wrote for Teen Titans for a while. Have you seen the animated cartoon? If so what’s your impression?

Rozakis: I think I saw the cartoon once, just to see the Bumblebee, a character I created. It was certainly superior to the cartoon like "The Superman-Aquaman Hour" that I grew up watching.

Stroud: You scripted some of the Hostess ads that featured DC characters. Who drew and lettered them? According to Joe Giella those jobs often paid more. Was that your experience?

Rozakis: Curt Swan drew most of the ads, as I recall. It was either Ben Oda or Gaspar Saladino who lettered them. They did, indeed, pay more than regular script pages.

Stroud: Carmine Infantino told me that Julie heavily edited all his writers’ projects. Was that your observation?

Rozakis: Yes, Julie did some pretty heavy editing on virtually all his writers' scripts. Apparently, he did his heaviest work on Gardner Fox's stories, though I never saw one of those scripts first-hand. Of my "generation," the most editing was on Cary Bates' scripts and the least was on Elliot Maggin's. Mine fell somewhere in between.

Stroud: When you were scripting Aquaman your work was interpreted by Jim Aparo and edited by Ross Andru. What were your memories of Jim? Do artists make good editors?

Rozakis: Did Jim really draw some of my Aquaman stories? I don't recall.

I can think of some artists who were good editors and others who were not. (But I can think of some writers-turned-editors who also fall in both categories.) I would say that the artist-editors were more appreciative of page design and how the story looked where their writer-counterparts would be more concerned about the plot and dialogue.

DC Super-Stars #10, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: You were the writer for the Freedom Fighters. Did it occur to you that you were handling one of the characters squarely in Dr. Wertham’s crosshairs, the Phantom Lady?

Rozakis: Never crossed my mind.

Stroud: How was Ramona Fradon to work with on that title?

Rozakis: I don't know that I ever had any interaction with Ramona. I know that I enjoyed working with Dick Ayers on the issues he did. No matter what I asked for or how many characters I would squeeze into a page, Dick would make it work.

Stroud: Joe Giella inked some of your Batman Family work. Did you interact with him much?

Rozakis: I knew Joe because he came in regularly, but Julie's writers didn't have any direct interaction with the artists about the work. You handed in the script, Julie edited it and gave it to the artist. I got to see the pencils and inks when they came in because I worked on staff. But I think most of the writers didn't see the stories until the printed books came out.

Stroud: Is Duela Dent, the Joker’s Daughter, the same character that appears in Kingdom Come?

Rozakis: I'm not sure who Duela Dent is any more. I know that they recently killed her off as a kick-off point in Countdown. For a character that many people at DC spent years deriding, she certainly has had an influence.

One thing I have to laugh about: When we first introduced her, readers (and some of my colleagues) complained about my explanation of "selective aging" that allowed Duela to go from birth to college age in the same period that Dick Grayson went from 12 to 19. Now Dick, who was a teenager when Barbara Gordon was introduced, seems to have caught up to Babs; I guess selective aging works after all.

Freedom Fighters #8, written by Bob Rozakis.

Batman Family #11, written by Bob Rozakis.

Detective Comics #460, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: Why do you think the Famous First Editions didn’t sell well?

Rozakis: There were no direct market or comic book stores back in the early 70s. The books were too large for many of the newsstand outlets to carry.

Stroud: Why did it take so long for the old classics in that format like Action #1 and Detective #29 to be reprinted?

Rozakis: No film negatives existed for the early issues and the technology used at the time involved destroying actual printed copies of the original books. It was a long, tedious process.

Nowadays, all the clean-up is done on a scan of the printed page on a computer monitor. No actual books are harmed in the production of the DC Archives or Marvel Masterworks.

Stroud: You were a production guy and according to Carmine, with the exception of editors, you guys were the only ones on staff. Can you tell me a little about how a book was put together? How were freelancers chosen? How were they lettered, colored, separated and printed?

Rozakis: The editor had control at the start, picking whichever writer he wanted to do a particular story. For the most part, each editor had his own "stable" and kept them busy. Artists were, for the most part, exclusive to one editor or another. (During my first couple of years at DC, Julie and Murray Boltinoff "shared" Dick Dillin.) Letterers and colorists were usually assigned by the production department, though the editors usually had some input about the colorists.

Once all the art and coloring was done, the pages were sent to Chemical Color Plate in Bridgeport, CT, where the color separations were done by painting acetates for each of the 25%, 50% and 100% screens of red, yellow, and blue. (This changed with the advent of computerized coloring and separations.)

Wierd War Tales #53, written by Bob Rozakis.

Secret Society of Super Villains #6, written by Bob Rozakis.

Stroud: You’ve doubtless seen the piecemeal auctioning of the fabled “Jack Adler Collection.” I even have an approval cover I received as a gift. How did he get hold of those? How did they work, exactly? I’ve read the certificate and the article in one of the magazines about it and still don’t quite get it.

Rozakis: From what I know, Jack took the proofs home with his original color guides and now they are being sold off. The proof was created at Chemical using the separations they'd generated. If it was okayed, the film negatives were shipped out to Spartan Printing in Sparta, Illinois, for printing.

Stroud: Neal Adams told me a long and complicated story about the way the comic shops came into being. Can you give me your view?

Rozakis: The "mom and pop" candy stores that were the traditional place for most comic sales were vanishing and newsstand sales of comics were dwindling. Phil Seuling came to DC and Marvel and asked about buying books directly, on a non-returnable basis, for a better price. His Seagate Distribution was the first in a market that is now almost exclusively Diamond's.

Bob Rozakis with his future wife Laurie in front of the DC Comicmobile.

Stroud: How did DC change under the different publishers like Donenfeld, Carmine, Sol Harrison, Jeanette Kahn and Paul Levitz?

Rozakis: I was not at DC until after Donenfeld left, so I cannot say what it was like when he was there. Carmine's reign was rather free-wheeling, but he seemed to spend a lot of time answering to "the people upstairs" (at Warner Publishing), who seemed to watch every nickel and dime that was spent. Carmine used to have Bill Gaines come in as a business advisor.

While Sol had some interesting ideas (the Comicmobile, publishing Amazing World of DC Comics, the Junior Bullpen program), he seemed stifled by trying to achieve immediate, substantial results (again, to gain approval from the bosses at Warner) rather than letting things develop for the long term.

Jenette, initially, had no experience in the comics business, having been brought in by Warner management. She looked to a variety of people for advice; some of them were good, but some used the opportunity to their own advantage.

Paul, to a great extent, is a victim of fanboy mentality. I think the company has spent too much effort focusing on a dwindling market and has not been able to find ways to bring in substantial numbers of new readers.

Stroud: Shelly Moldoff was telling me that logos were the production department’s baby. Who pulled the trigger when it was decided a new logo was needed?

Rozakis: Usually the editor or editorial director. Then one of the letterers would be given the assignment. Gaspar Saladino did a lot of them while I was there. Todd Klein did a number in the later years while Joe Letterese did some in the earlier years of my DC tenure.

Creator Conversations - Retro

Creator Conversations - Retro

Nerd Team 30