Which may be how Alfredo Alcala, seen here some decades ago, might have felt he spent much of his life in comics: ’twixt his 1963 Viking creation Voltar and Marvel’s 1970s90s incarnation of Conan the Cimmerian Seen above left is his wraparound cover for Alcala Fight Komix #3 (Aug. 6, 1963), one of Voltar’s earliest appearances, with text in the Tagalog language (scan courtesy of Alfredo Alcala, Jr.)—
INTERVIEWER’S INTRODUCTION: Alfredo Alcala was born August 23, 1925, and died on April 4, 2000 [the Internet says 4-8-2000]. He was born in the Philippines, where he worked in local comics from 1948 through at least the early 1970s. There, in 1963, he created “Voltar,” a series starring a Viking warrior, seven years before Conan was developed into a sword-&-sorcery comicbook character in the U.S.—and three years before the Cimmerian’s debut in Lancer paperbacks.
In 1971 Alfredo joined the many Filipino artists recruited for DC Comics by editors Carmine Infantino and Joe Orlando through Tony DeZuñiga. His first U.S. stories appeared in 1972. His first work for Marvel, largely as an inker, was in 1974 over John Buscema’s pencils for the black-&-white title The Savage Sword of Conan. During this period, Alcala continued to work for DC as well... in 1975 co-creating the caveman series Kong the Untamed for them.
In 1977 he began doing stories for Warren Publications, including a brand-new Voltar graphic novel serialized in The Rook Magazine He also did a risqué serial called “Terra O’Hara,” written by Don Glut, for the men’s magazine Adam. In the early 1980s he drew the Star Wars and Conan newspaper strips, while also inking, penciling, or doing both on such titles as Batman, Swamp Thing, Hulk, Hawkman, Arak/ Son of Thunder, Freddy Kruger’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Destroyer Duck, The Shadow, Hellblazer, Firestorm, Scooby-Doo, and numerous others.
When comics work began to dry up in the mid-to-latter 1980s, he worked in animation for Ruby-Spears and Hanna-Barbera, alongside Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber, among others. His last comics work appeared in 1996 in one of DC’s Big Book series.
This first interview with Alfredo Alcala’ s son, Alfredo Alcala, Jr., a.k.a. Alfred Alcala, who lives in Manila, took place on August 19 & 25, 2020, via a series of international video conferences….
I . Alfredo Alcala, Jr .
RICHARD ARNDT: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. First, when was your father born?
ALFRED ALCALA: I’m happy to talk about my father. He was born on August 23, 1925, and he died on April 4, 2000.
RA: I know his first work for American comics began appearing in 1972, but he had a long career both drawing and publishing comics in the Philippines before that date. Do you know where he got his art training?
ALCALA: My father was self-taught. He was drawing in grade school. He would leave school and draw on the riverbanks. He graduated from elementary school, but being out of school too often meant that he never graduated from high school, nor was he able to go to an art school, so he was entirely self-taught.
RA: Are there other people in your family who have artistic talent, or was he an anomaly?
ALCALA: My son, who is fourteen years old, draws. I am an architect, which, of course, involves a great deal of drawing.
RA: By the dates we’re talking about, your father would have been sixteen, or thereabouts, when the Japanese invaded and occupied the Philippines, from 1941-1945. Can you tell me about what he did during those years?
ALCALA: By that time, he was out of school. He didn’t finish elementary school. During the Japanese occupation, he was actually a spy for the Filipino resistance. He had a real artist’s memory. He could see something and then draw it without having it right in front of him. During the war he would bicycle pass Japanese outposts and camps. He would observe Japanese pillboxes,
equipment, watch where the soldiers were stationed and how their camps were organized, and then draw all that from memory when he’d get back home. He’d give the drawings to the underground resistance groups. If he’d been caught, he’d have been executed immediately. His day job during the war years was as a bootblack.
After the war he did designs for reconstruction work at an ironworker’s shop. A lot of things in office buildings and churches had been destroyed during the war, and he would do design sketches for wrought-iron pieces, furniture, chandeliers, church pulpits, doors…things like that. He also worked as a carpenter and a sign painter. His first artwork for books was as an illustrator for the Philippines` Boy Scouts’ handbooks.
RA: Do you know what his first professional jobs as a comics artist were? I’m assuming that this would have been comics done for the Philippine comics industry.
ALCALA: My father’s first work for comics appeared in October 1948. The actual title of that comic was Bituin Komiks, which translated into English as Star Comics. Within a month he was also working for Ace Publications, at the time the biggest publisher in the country. He also worked for other publishers.
RA: Do you know what kind of comic that first one was? Adventure? Romance? Anything like that?
ALCALA: In the Philippines, they didn’t have specific genres. There weren’t books like Superman, about a specific character. Each comic would have five or six short stories or serial installments in them, of many different types, most only four pages long. The comics were published every two weeks. Each would have a mix of adventure, romance, sometimes adaptations of classics, as well as some reprinted comic strips. My father not only showed that he was very good at drawing comics, but he was also very fast. That let him
Alfredo Alcala, Jr.—a.k.a. Alfred Alcala stands before a framed but unfinished oil painting titled “Acapulco,” which his father began in 1975. Courtesy of Alfred Alcala.
work for a lot of publishers.
RA: 1948 would mean your dad became a comics professional at age 23. The only title I’m aware of that he was doing in the Philippines was his own creation, “Voltar.” When did he start drawing that character?
ALCALA: He started “Voltar” in Alcala Fight Komix, which came out two times a month beginning with a date of July 1963. Voltar was a Viking character my father created. My father did everything on the character—writing, pencils, inks, lettering, and publishing. In fact, he never used assistants. They weren’t as fast as he was, and he thought it diluted his work—that it wasn’t completely his any longer.
RA: That July 1963 date means Voltar debuted almost exactly seven years before Conan first appeared in a U.S. comicbook, although Conan had been in print in prose magazines since 1932. You say that was a self-published comic?
ALCALA: It was a company started by a group of artists who were famous at the time for their comic art. Besides my father, the people involved were Antonio (also known as Tony or Anton)
Alfredo In 1947
One of the earliest known photos of the artist, taken in the Santa Ana district of Manila, not long before he started his comics career—with his painting of American movie star Tyrone Power. Below left is one of his earliest splash pages, from Tagalog Klasiks #12 (1949)—while directly below is his cover for Bisaya Komix #10 (Feb. 16, 1953), for Ace Publications, which his son Alfred describes as the biggest comics publisher in the Philippines at that time. Thanks to
I’m overjoyed to add to an Alfredo Alcala tribute. Afredo has long been due more attention and praise. I’ve long loved his work.
Alfredo’s first Swampy was #30, “A Halo of Flies,” on my pencils, and he was specifically chosen for that job at John Totleben’s suggestion. John correctly cited that both he and Alfredo were of the then very-narrow Franklin Booth-inspired school of linework in American comics.
It was very odd working “with” him, though, or rather, turning in pencils that Alfredo inked—we had no contact during the process and no interest in having any contact was expressed or reciprocated. My longest phone conversation with Alfredo
concerned the original art for SOTST [Saga of the Swamp Thing] #30. At the time, DC returned original art pages favoring the penciler (me) in larger quantities, with fewer going to the inker.
Since I saw the inker as an equal partner in our endeavors, John Totleben and I would divvy up the pages between us equally each issue, alternating who went first with first pick. This way, we both ended up with pages we favored and neither had “claim” on those he preferred above the other artist.
I called Alfredo to propose the same notion, but Alfredo simply couldn’t grasp what I was saying. My seeing him as an equal partner, deserving the same number of pages I would end up with, made no sense to him. He didn’t laugh at me—he seemed pretty humorless throughout the conversation—but it was clear he thought it foolish of me to even be suggesting I give him any consideration of any kind. “It’s just a job,” he said at one point, “another job, but this one was more work.”
In fact, he made it clear that he’d prefer that I had all the pages, and that I buy them from him, plus more from other DC titles he’d inked. Since I had no money (DC paid the lowest page rates of their outfit on Swamp Thing), I couldn’t take him up on the strange offer, and we rather awkwardly ended the conversation.
RA: I don’t think the second U.S. “Voltar” story has ever been collected, although it should be. It was really top-notch, both art and story. Put both “Voltar” stories together, along with some commentary about the earlier, Filipino tales by your dad and you’d have a nice volume.
ALCALA: There is a European collection of Voltar, of those two stories. It’s a black-&-white collection with a color pin-up, only a couple of years old. It’s in Spanish so I can’t read it, but it is my dad’s artwork and it’s reproduced quite well. This book, which came out in Spain last year, shows some of his watercolor and acrylic pieces. Maybe more acrylic than watercolor, I guess.
RA: I have some French and Spanish language sets myself. Dossier Nebro, L’Echo des Savanes USA Special, Vampus, the Spanish Creepy, etc. I can’t read them, either, but the art is nice and sometimes I make up stories to go along with the artwork. If the artwork is done by a good storyteller, that’s not that hard to do.
You mentioned that you were an artist as well?
ALCALA: I’m an architect. I think I had the ability to be an artist, but I knew I couldn’t do the same kind of artwork as my father. I just don’t think I was as good as him. As an architect, I could follow my own path. He started out drawing designs for various things— gates, windows, and so on, and in that way I guess I am following him, at least in a way.
RA: If the comics field fell apart in the Philippines as you say, it’s probably a good thing that you didn’t follow directly in his footsteps. You’re at least making a living as an architect.
ALCALA: Not as much as you think. It’s actually a lot of headaches, dealing with the suppliers, the laborers. Every person has an attitude that you have to deal with, all at the same job sites.
RA: I see some of your dad’s humor work beside you. I know he did work for DC’s Plop! and I’ve seen a lot of his humor work, which seems to feature chimps quite regularly.
ALCALA: He did a lot of humor comics here in the Philippines. I think he may have been the only serious artist from here who also did a lot of humor stories. A lot of artists, if they did funny stuff, did funny stuff only all their lives. Same for serious artists. My dad, though, did both.
RA: In Plop!, at least, he shared company with artists who were usually quite good at both funny stuff and drama. Sergio Aragonés was mostly known for humor, but Wallace Wood, Bernie Wrightson, Steve Ditko were good at both types of comics. I’ve seen private work by Alex Nino that was in a humorous vein, though it wasn’t meant for publication; it was sketchbook humor. I should point out though, that some of Nino’s serious work verged on a parody approach in the artwork.
ALCALA: Something we’ve only touched on a bit is the large
When he had his stroke, in 1991 or 1992, he switched hands from his right to his left. The work done on Ultraman and Scooby-Doo was mostly done after his stroke. He was still doing commissions right up to the end of his life, but you’ll notice a difference in the artwork. In the style of the artwork.
My father didn’t die of a stroke, however, but of cancer in his bone marrow. He had also been complaining about his stomach a lot at the time. He didn’t really eat on a regular schedule. He never did. If he had a deadline, he would ignore hunger until he finished the work. He thought the stomach problem was a part of that, but it was actually a manifestation of his cancer.
RA: One of the problems with doing a really good retrospective on your dad is that he was extremely prolific for a very long time and the work was split between two countries. His career spanned 42 years and covered an astounding number of characters and titles. Just doing a complete checklist would take up half of an average book. I’d like to thank you for taking so much time to do this interview with me.
ALCALA: I’m happy to talk about my dad.
ALCALA: I wish I had a copy of everything my dad worked on, but so much of it was just discarded or has been damaged by time, weather, insects, rodents, or just by people using it for other purposes than reading. Comics were never intended to be a permanent thing—just something to be used and discarded.
Before the war, my dad was already collecting American comics. They were easy to come by because of the American bases here in the Philippines. To save them during the war, he dug a hole in the back yard, but after the war, when he dug them back up, they had just turned into a mass of pulp. There was no plastic to put around them back then. Just metal boxes, which weren’t water tight, and so they didn’t keep out the rot. It’s very humid here and that’s very bad for paper. Especially cheap paper like that used in comics or newspapers. It discolors them and they get spots on them like age spots.
Dad was still working, right up to when he passed away.
A/E INTRODUCTION: In the last year of his life, major Golden/Silver Age comics writer Irving Bernard (“John”) Broome wrote and published a brief and idiosyncratic autobiographical book titled My Life in Little Pieces. With the blessing of his daughter Ricky Terry Brisacque, A/E has been serializing that self-described “Offbeat Autobio,” as retyped for us by Brian K. Morris. In this chapter, JB familiarizes younger readers with the concept of the “party line” when it referred to a telephone rather than politics, and moves on into a possible brush with the supernatural about which he had written in places as diverse as The Phantom Stranger comicbook and Weird Tales magazine… all during his and wife Peggy’s post-World War II sojourn in Wingdale, in relatively rural Duchess County, New York….
The few scattered houses around us, plus our own semi-dilapidated new home, were linked in those days by a “party line.” You’d unhook your receiver to get the operator as a preliminary step in making a call, and instead find yourself kerplop tuned in to what could be another one of the parties’ highly private-type conversations. Theoretically, of course, you were supposed to hang up, wait a while, then try again, but truth will out, I’ve always been a snooper—an auditory voyeur, you might say (as well as the straight-out kind, too), and for me our primitive telephone line, in this rustic hill and dale setting, was no less than a gift from Above, often too enticing for me to resist its blandishments with any real hope of success.
As on this occasion. Scarcely had I put the receiver to my ear than I heard our closest neighbor, Mrs. Schatz, she who with her husband, old Schatz himself, inhabited the Teutonically-solid brick dwelling on the rise
above our place, saying (I quote)—
“You have no heart and no soul. I’m putting you on the list with all the others!”
And bang! she hung up and our party-line went dead in my hands, robbing me of what I’d thought for a moment was going to be a snoopfest bonanza, one that I almost certainly would not have been able to resist listening to—let’s face it.
The Schatz house on the hill was not only above us in altitude, it also outdistanced our place a mile in propriety. Everything up there was spic-and-span. A spacious, well-kept lawn that doubled as a pasture for their one milch cow, Vicky, who roamed the greensward at will (they had no children) and with a ponderous dignity. And more than dignity. When some workers did a job on the house and left a pile of bricks standing, very neatly, alongside the house, Vicky kicked it down. When old Schatz rebuilt the pile, Vicky kicked it down again. As near as I could fathom Vicky’s milch-cow weltanschauung, it went something like this: “That ugly pile of bricks on my fine greensward wasn’t there before, so raus mit—”
And after that my mot-collecting wife had a new catchword to dub anyone who hated change like the plague: Vicky the Cow.
Mrs. Heffner. a robust widow-lady who lived alone, succeeded the Schatzes, and Vicky, on the hill, and suffered a grass fire. It wasn’t really dangerous, but maybe it could have been, for tiny Wingdale had not
t the risk of repeating myself from the preceding page: Say, readers! Anyone remember 7 Faces of Dr. Lao—the 1964 movie in which actor Tony Randall played eight different parts? Well, the comicbook equivalent would have to be the spook comics orchestrated by editor/writer Leo Rosenbaum at the American Comics Group. Like Tony, Leo also took on another identity: that of ace ACG editor and writer Richard E. Hughes. (In fact, A/E reader Steven Rowe informs us that, by 1940 or so, the latter became Rosebaum’s legal name, after which it was no longer a pen name.)
As Richard E. Hughes, he wrote stories under dozens of pseudonyms. Better yet, in the late 1950s he began writing absurdly fanciful backstories to some of his nonexistent “authors” in the
letters pages of ACG’s Adventures into the Unknown, Forbidden Worlds, and later, Unknown Worlds
As a kid, reading the ACG letter columns was a fascinating experience. Hughes was notorious for sparring with fans who wrote “crank” letters complaining about the latest issues. This made for lively letters pages, and by printing negative letters, Hughes encouraged his loyal readers to write in defending their favorite stories—most of which were written by Hughes himself under a variety of names. Any given issue would find the readers praising the magnificent stories of “Zev Zimmer,” while excoriating the talentless “Bob Standish.” Hughes must have had a good laugh!
So why the subterfuge? Perhaps it was just a fun game that the prolific writer played to amuse himself. Or maybe it was to disguise the fact that ACG was basically a small one-man mom and pop operation.
In the late ‘50s, Hughes took this game one step further when he instituted a series of faux writer biographies in his letter pages. These were often as imaginative and amusing as the stories themselves, especially to those of us who, decades later, were in on the gag. But back in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s, we readers took this secret backstage gossip as gospel.
For our “7 Faces of Leo R.” article, we’ve chosen to mostly limit ourselves to seven of the editor’s ersatz biographical sketches (to go along with our title!). Let’s see how the series was introduced in Hughes’ “Let’s Talk It Over!” section of Adventures into the Unknown.
Take it away, maestro!
(Adventures into the Unknown #105, Feb. 1959:)
“In this issue we’re chalking up a new first for Adventures into the Unknown. A first for us, that is. Beginning as of now, each of our stories will bear the names of both writer and artist. This is in direct response to the request of our fans, who have repeatedly asked that the people responsible for our efforts be identified. In the future, you’ll know just what author was responsible for that yarn you liked so much—or hated, as the case may be. You’ll know who the illustrator was who did that wonderful or horrible job—you pick the description! And you can write in expressing your opinion on the work of people whom you’ll never know. And remember—we want those opinions, because they’ll help us in framing just the sort of magazine which you want! Address your letter to The Editor, Adventures into the Unknown, 347 5th Avenue, New York 16, N.Y. For our part, we’ll try to help you know our staff better. Each month we’ll publish a short profile on someone being published in the current issue.
“This time it’s Greg Olivetti, a brand new writer for us, and the man responsible for ‘Last of the Tree People.’ Greg looks deceptively young, but he’s got quite a career behind him. Taught to fly by a great uncle who was an early ace of World War I, he put his ability to good use over Korea, downing more than his share of enemy planes. After he left the Air Force, he tried many things—from selling insurance to prospecting for uranium. Nothing seemed to go right for him—as he
Brooklyn-born Victor Gorelick always knew he’d be involved with the arts one way or another. His fascination with comics and illustration led him to become a student at the School of Industrial Art (now known as the High School of Art and Design) in New York City. From there he entered the world of comicbooks. He also had a deep love for music, and played the trumpet in jazz bands for many years.
At the age of seventeen, Victor started at Archie Comics in the production department, replacing Dexter Taylor (who left his staff job to become a full-time Little Archie artist). As an art assistant, Victor made corrections when necessary on the original art, e.g., fixing spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors as well as correcting inconsistencies in the clothing of characters. His first job was removing cleavage, adjusting plunging neck lines, and removing navels on “Katy Keene” and the other female characters in that series. Penciling, inking, lettering, and coloring kept Victor very busy in the production department.
He served stateside in the U.S. Navy from 1960 to 1963 at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. He continued working for Archie during this time as a production artist on his days off, in addition to being a freelance colorist. Once his stint in the Navy concluded, Victor was a full-time Archie staffer, and freelance colorist on a variety of books involving the Archie characters as well as super-heroes like The Fly, The Jaguar, and The Mighty Crusaders (credited as “Vic Torr” on some stories). He also worked on the super-hero versions of the Archie characters in the same capacity, as well as lettering various “Archie” stories and The Shadow.
By the mid-’60s, Victor was art-directing under the supervision of co-publisher John Goldwater’s son Richard. He was also involved in trafficking artwork and talking to the artists and the color separators as the production coordinator. Victor told me, “Occasionally, I put my two cents in on a story, but Richard Goldwater really handled that. He bought all the stories and assigned all the artists to the stories. The only time I did any of that was when he was away.” Victor explained his expanding role at the company: “At Archie Comics, a lot of people wear different hats”. By the end of the decade, Victor was doing some editorial work, too.
During this period, Victor did some freelance gag-cartooning for various publications. For Tower Publications he lettered the first “T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents” story for Wally Wood. “I think it was a four-page lead-in story. I might have lettered some other stuff for him,” he told me in 2003.
In the 1970s, Victor had a hand in nearly everything that had to be done in the office. His editorial duties increased, and some of his production duties were occasionally handled by other staffers, though he continued to be the art director. In addition to the various Archie titles, Victor had a little editorial and art director’s hand in the short-lived Red Circle line in the 1970s. He also provided a bit of editorial assistance when the line was revived in 1983 starring super-heroes such as The Fly, The Comet, both versions of The Shield, Steel Sterling, Black Hood, in Blue Ribbon and Mighty Crusaders
During the 1980s and after, Victor found time to edit custom comics for several companies, including Radio Shack, the F.B.I., and Kraft General Foods. He taught cartooning at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, and was a member of the Board of
Everything’s Archie!
(Above:) From left to right, artists Jon D’Agostino and Jim Amash and editor Victor Gorelick.
A Master Of “Highly Acclaimed, Socially Conscious Work”
by Stephan Friedt
Dennis O‘Neil was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 3, 1939. Even as a child he had a fondness for comicbooks. He graduated from St. Louis University with a degree in English Literature, with emphasis on creative writing and philosophy. He spent time in the U.S. Navy, taking part in the Cuban quarantine during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Upon leaving the Navy, Dennis worked for a newspaper in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. For it, in early 1965, he wrote two pieces on the revival of the comicbook industry; these brought him to the attention of Roy Thomas, and led, later that year, to his taking a “writer’s test” for Stan Lee at Marvel. Denny would start out on such titles as Rawhide Kid, Millie the Model, Patsy and Hedy, and two “Doctor Strange” stories in Strange Tales. His first super-hero work was on a “Captain America” story.
When assignments became scarce for him at Marvel in 1966, editor Dick Giordano gave him work for a year and a half writing for Charlton Comics, where he adopted the pen name “Sergius O’Shaugnessy.” When Giordano made the jump to DC, he included Denny as one of a group of creators he took with him. At DC Dennis would work on Beware The Creeper, make controversial changes to Wonder Woman, and tackle the Justice League of America, which brought him to his highly acclaimed, socially conscious work with Neal Adams on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series.
From there, Dennis would take on “Batman,” co-creating the villain Ra’s al Ghul and his daughter Talia, as he spent a good portion of the 1970s penning memorable issues of Batman and Detective Comics Editor Julius Schwartz brought him over to the Superman line, where he (temporarily) eliminated kryptonite. Dennis would also work with artist C.C. Beck on a revival of the original Captain Marvel under the Shazam! title, and with Michael Wm. Kaluta on a memorable run of The Shadow.
1980 found Denny back at Marvel as an editor, where he also wrote Amazing Spider-Man (1980-1981), Iron Man (1982-1986), and Daredevil (1983-1985).
1986 brought him back to DC as the editor of several Batman titles, where he would stay until 2000. During this time, he would also collaborate with Denys Cowan on The Question and again create or co-create numerous memorable characters and plot lines.
Over the years, Denny would also write several novels, short stories, reviews, and plays. He wrote the Richard Dragon books under the pen name “Jim
David Saunders is the son of the celebrated pulp artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989), whose life and Fawcett-related career will be explored in this issue and the next. Born in New York City in 1954, David graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1975, after which he became a gallery artist in NYC. His work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He taught art at Yale, Oberlin, and RISD. In addition to his art career, David Saunders is also a pulp art historian, and has written hundreds of biographical profiles on artists for his website www.pulpartists.com His two-part study of his artist father’s work for Fawcett Publications—before, during, and after the company’s 1940-1953 comicbook-producing era—provides both a personal and professional look at one of the foremost artists of pulp magazine (and comicbook) covers…. P.C. Hamerlinck.
Norman Saunders
hard at work at Fawcett Publications, in a 1929 photo that was printed in Federal Illustrator, a monthly magazine produced by the Federal Schools art correspondence school. Since Saunders was a graduate of that institution, they proudly featured an article about his art career accomplishments.
(Below left:) Saunders’ first cover illustration for Fawcett appeared on Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang 1930 Winter Annual.
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Part I
Capt. Billy & Modern Mechanics
Norman Saunders was a sensational pulp artist. He also painted covers for comicbooks, paperbacks, men’sadventure magazines, and bubblegum trading cards. But before working his way to the top in each of these fields of popularculture publishing, his first training as a professional illustrator began in Minnesota in 1926, when he was hired at the age of eighteen, at Fawcett Publications, a company that was still in its formative years.
The Fawcett brothers, William, Roscoe, and Roger, had the luck to strike a popular nerve in Prohibition America with a saucy joke book called Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang. This digest-sized monthly magazine featured 80 pages of silly jokes about sex, booze, flappers, and farmers. Each issue of Whiz Bang was packed with gags, singlepanel cartoons, ribald poems, ethnic humor, and “barnyard bunk,” with a central leaf of naughty “Postcards from Paris.” This novel idea to bind the magazine with a bonus centerfold of pin-ups was the forerunner of the famed Playboy “centerfold.”
The company’s founder, Wilford “Billy” Hamilton Fawcett (1883-1940), was a real live wire. He ran away from home when he was sixteen to join the Army and fight in the Spanish-American War. After his discharge, he wrote the police report for The Minneapolis Journal. During the First World War he re-enlisted and served overseas, where he wrote for Stars and Stripes, a weekly eight-page newsletter circulated for free to servicemen. Although it carried news and editorials, Captain Fawcett noticed that most soldiers were only interested in the off-color jokes and cartoons. That gave him the idea to print his own joke book. Eleven months after the armistice in 1918, Fawcett was back in Minneapolis publishing Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang. The title came from the doughboys’ nickname for a German artillery shell that whizzed overhead and landed with a bang.
Captain Billy personally circulated Whiz Bang to local newsstands and hotels. He then gave his leftover copies to hospitalized veterans. This generous act not only saved him the cost of storing old issues; it was also good publicity for his patriotism, which he boasted about in his advertising. Within one year Whiz Bang was selling 90,000 monthly copies.
ALTER EGO #172
One New York City publisher, Harry Donenfeld (1893-1965), was so impressed with the success of that he started his own line of knock-offs, which included La Paree, Gay Parisienne, Broadway Nights, Ginger Stories, Saucy Stories, and Spicy Stories. The competition was fierce because the profits were huge. Compounding those profits was the fact that our nationwide trucking system, which handled all magazine distribution to newsstands, train stations, candy counters, and drug stores, was also shipping Prohibition booze for organized crime. Along with rum-running, distributors also handled other contraband, such as pornography, gambling tip-sheets, cure-alls, and contraceptives, all of which were advertised in the back-pages of magazines.
ALFREDO ALCALA is celebrated for his dreamscape work on Savage Sword of Conan and other work for Marvel, DC, and Warren, as well as his own barbarian creation Voltar, as RICH ARNDT interviews his sons Alfred and Christian! Also: FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, PETER NORMANTON’s horror history From The Tomb, JOHN BROOME, and more!
“MEN—Save 80%! Buy your Latex Sundries, Specialties, Supplies, Novelties, etc. All personal items are mailed postpaid by us in plain sealed package. We have everything. Send for FREE illustrated mail order catalog.” Donenfeld made so much money from sales of contraceptives he named one of his publishing companies “Trojan.”
Donenfeld considered his girlie magazines much classier than Whiz Bang. His editor Frank Armer (1895-1965) once described the type of stories they wanted as, “Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl strip down to her underwear, or transparent negligee or nightgown, or the thin, torn shreds of her garments, but while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity. A nude female corpse is allowable, of course.” But while Donenfeld was constantly hounded by the vice-squad for peddling smut, Fawcett never crossed the line for indecency in the U.S. Postal Code. Donenfeld’s big-city magazines were sexier than the “hayseed humor” and “pedigreed bull” that Captain Billy published out in Minnesota,
