TOM DeFALCO & RON FRENZ onbSPIDER-MAN’s lack costume!
Volume 1, Number 12
October 2005
Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, and Today!
EDITOR
Michael Eury
PUBLISHER John Morrow
DESIGNER/COVER COLORIST
ASSOCIATE DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks
PROOFREADERS
John Morrow and Eric Nolen-Weathington
COVER ARTISTS
Ron Frenz and Josef Rubenstein
SPECIAL
Jim
Murphy
Terry
Jeff
Malcolm
Jerry
Michael
Mike
John
Gary
Mike
Steve
Dave
Grand
David
Heritage
Mark
The Jack
Dan
Phil
David
Andy
Kelvin
Yoram
FLASHBACK: THE MAKEOVER OF STEEL
Behind the scenes of the new Superman of the ’70s, with Denny O’Neil and friends and Curt Swan
and
collaboration was gunned down by newspapers ROUGH STUFF 22
Batman: Year One, Daredevil, Elektra, Spidey, and more in pencil by Gibbons, Larsen, Mazzucchelli, Miller, Ordway, Paul Smith, Vess, and Weeks
STEVE GERBER INTERVIEW:
The writer/artist team reveals the story behind Spider-Man’s black costume PRO2PRO PLUS: DANNY FINGEROTH INTERVIEW 55
Spider-Man’s former editor on the web-slinger’s ’80s makeover
GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: JOHN BYRNE’S S SH H A Z A M M! !
57
Why lightning didn’t strike for this Captain Marvel relaunch, with previously unpublished art
BEYOND CAPES: ARCH HEROES: W WAATTC C H HM M E N AND THE BIRTH OF THE POSTMODERN SUPER-HERO
A fascinating journey through a super-hero transformation, with Kurt Busiek, Gary Carlson, Michael Chabon, Dave Gibbons, and Bill Morrison, and rare Gibbons art
BACK IN PRINT
Wein & Wrightson and Wolfman & Colan are together again in Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror, plus Crossfire, Skywald Horror-Mood, and Charlton Spotlight
COMICS ON DVD
The latest DVD releases of interest to the ’70s/’80s comics fan
BACK TALK
Reader feedback on issue #10 plus the Shadow by Alex Toth!
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BACK ISSUE™ is published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614
(right top) A 1994 Curt Swan pencil recreation of his cover to Superman #201 (1967), an issue produced in the waning years of the Weisinger editorial era Courtesy of Heritage Comics.
As 1970 dawned, post-Great Society America found itself in the throes of change. The Moon seemed not so far away since mankind took a giant leap to press his footprints onto its surface Discrimination based on race, gender, or age grates against America’s collective conscience (although you still couldn’t trust anyone over 30) The Beatles broke up, as did part of Apollo 13, while the Ford Motor Company unleashed the Pinto on the nation’s highways
And while not as earth-shattering to the world at large, National Periodical Publications’ (now DC Comics ) principal icon marked the end of an era with the retirement of Mort Weisinger after 30 years of service to the company
After The Adventures of Superman television show ran its five-year course in 1958, joining I Love Lucy in eternal syndication, DC editor Whitney Ellsworth remained in Hollywood This left his longtime assistant, Mort Weisinger, behind at DC where he took over full editorial control of the Superman family of magazines (Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superboy, and eventually World’s Finest Comics, as well as launching spin-off books for Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane)
b y Brian K. Morris
At this point, Weisinger wanted to raise the Supertitles above the standard hero-meets-then-beats-villain fare of the day. For that, Superman needed a more diverse pallet of potential plot elements to work with, something the Man of Steel might never find on Earth With that, Mort Weisinger decided to give the World’s Greatest Hero his own mythology
“I Am Superman and I Can Do
Anything . . . ”
The fact that some stories didn’t fit into the mythos, each clearly labeled as “Imaginary,” became a selling point (but as a wise man once said, “Aren’t they all?”). The former last son of the planet Krypton now became chief among a plethora of fellow survivors: a dog, monkey, numerous villains, and two cities one inside a bottle while he and his friends all had robot doubles Superman’s younger self and his first cousin each took a monthly break from their own adventures to travel forward in time, hanging out with the Legion of Super-Heroes, an intergalactic Boys and Girls Club And where kryptonite once came only in green, now it could produce a number of different effects and more colors than could be found in a bag of M&Ms
And the fans just ate it all up According to novelist and comics historian Will Murray, “the fact of the TV show in the ’50s (and still in syndication) may have helped, that is beside the point Mort’s ability to make that character sell in large numbers was just amazing ” Weisinger would take copies of his comics to the children in his neighborhood, pre-teens who he considered Superman’s prime demographic, and conducted his own informal marketing sessions. He noted what they liked, what turned them off, and what they wanted to see. In turn, the editor fed their ideas to his writers. Murray continues, “Whether it was research or whatever, [Weisinger] was very in-tuned to his core audience ”
But as Will Murray noted in his contacts with Weisinger, as pleasant the man could be to some, “I think Mort was threatened by editors who could outshine him He was very insecure ” He controlled Superman with a grip of steel, even with other editors Only the publisher’s override allowed Julie Schwartz to prominently feature Superman in the Justice League of America
Just as Leo Marguiles treated Weisinger with a shortage of people skills [see sidebar], Weisinger continued the cycle of abuse with his freelancers Weisinger regularly shot down ideas from one writer, only to pass those same plot nuggets to another while taking credit for many of the innovations under his editorial reign Legend has it that writer Don Cameron once angrily attempted to toss the 300-pound Weisinger
from his office window Roy Thomas began his employment at Marvel jumping ship from DC after two weeks of Weisinger’s intolerable attitude But without a pervasive reporting presence in fandom at the time, few outside of the comics industry knew about Weisinger’s abrasive ways
(below) Swan’s super cover to Amazing World of DC Comics #7 (1975)
Weisinger and Schwartz in 1975
From Amazing World of DC Comics #7
Curt Swan penciled and inked this late-1970 DC house ad signaling the upcoming changes in the Superman family of titles.
Meanwhile, like many writers of the pulp era who w
“respectable” venues, Mort Weisinger sold radio scripts as well as articles to magazines like Collier’s, Parade Magazine (where he was a regular contributor), The Journal of the AMA, Reader’s Digest, and The Saturday Evening Post. His book 1,001 Things You Can Get For Free, first published in 1955, saw over 40 printings. He plotted and coordinated the ghost writing of The Contest, for which he sold the movie rights for $125,000 and, according to Will Murray, pinned the check to the bulletin board in his DC office for a week “so that everybody would see how much money he was making It was an insane thing to do because what if someone stole the check?” But who would dare steal that check and risk his abuse?
“It’s Not Easy To Be Me . . . ”
Despite his accomplishments, when people outside of comic books asked Weisinger about his occupation, he’d discuss his writing, not his contribution to the ongoing Superman legend After developing an ulcer, Weisinger discovered through psychiatry that his denial was because, as Weisinger told The Amazing World of DC Comics #7 (July 1975), “subconsciously, if I said I was involved with Superman, I was a big man but shining in Superman’s reflected glory, I was his satellite Secretly, I was jealous of Superman just as Clark Kent is ” Weisinger realized he had to leave Superman “I wanted to get into a world where I was my own boss, where I was truly responsible for my own work I wasn’t dealing with something of my own ” But there were other unstated pressures weighing on Weisinger.
the issues of the day, leaving Weisinger stuck for an answer As Will Murray obser ves, “The audience outgrew [Mort] and he just wasn’t in touch any more He had to adjust and I think he adjusted to the point where he could adjust no further.”
Frank Gruber, a pulp contemporary and good friend of Weisinger’s, died around this time. Weisinger considered this a wake-up call, that even in his mid-fifties, there was so much more to still accomplish without having to share the glory with anyone, fictional or otherwise Even though Superman’s sales reflected a growing irrelevance to the comics-buying public, Weisinger couldn’t just walk away from his greatest success.
Mort Weisinger made a regular ritual of going into publisher Jack Lebowitz’s office, sharing his observation that freelance writing could prove more lucrative than editing comics Weisinger always left the office with more financial incentives to stay, making him one of DC’s most prosperous editors. But when Weisinger went into his publisher’s office in 1970, this time he left with wishes for a happy retirement.
W h i l e S u p e r m a n b e c a m e more godlike by the late ’60s under Weisinger’s control, the comic-book audience changed Marvel Comics’ emphasis on c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n a n d e a s i l y identifiable personal problems drew accolades and sales from an older and better-educated audience than DC had previously catered to Now, a more sophisticated readership asked w h y S u p e r m a n d i d n ’t t a c k l e
Old-time radio and pulp expert Anthony Tollin worked for DC for 20 years as a proofreader and colorist on books like Justice League of America, Superman, and his favorite hero, Green Lantern From his insider’s perspective, he noted that “Mort’s star had gone down quite a bit . . . I don’t know what it was, there was something that soured his friendship with Jack Lebowitz. It wasn’t necessarily that Jack wanted to get rid of him, but Jack didn’t want to keep him ”
Had something changed their friendship toward the worst? Tollin recently asked Jack Adler, DC’s innovative colorist and former production chief about the Weisinger/ Lebowitz relationship and reports, “Jack had no recollection of any particular trouble between Weisinger and Lebowitz, but also says he wouldn’t be surprised if such existed, considering the type of person Weisinger was ”
When Weisinger was shown the door, it was a moment of liberation At last, he was free to return to his freelance writing and to travel the lecture circuit, which he did until his passing in 1978. But most of all, he was out from under Superman’s shadow.
Regardless of Weisinger’s treatment of his creative personnel, no one could deny how solidly he’d built the Superman mythology With the image of the nearly omnipotent Man of Steel imbedded in the world’s collective consciousness, Mort Weisinger could walk into the new phase of his life, secure both financially and in the knowledge of his place in the history of one of America’s most enduring icons
You can’t mention Tony DeZuniga’s name without someone bringing up the name of Jonah Hex After writer John Albano thought up the character of Jonah Hex, a bounty hunter whose path you didn’t want to cross, DeZuniga took Albano’s tight, cartoon script and put pencil to paper and created the look that made Jonah Hex so popular Jonah Hex first appeared in All-Star Western #10 (Feb –Mar 1972), made his second appearance in DC Comics’ All-Star Western #11 (Apr –May 1972), and was responsible for the comic’s title changing to Weird Western Tales with issue #12 (June–July 1972). He completely took over
the book, running the other Western heroes out of Weird Western with issue #18, and graduated to his own title after issue #38 Jonah Hex lasted 92 issues before he was sent to the Mad Max-like, post-apocalyptic future in a book simply called Hex [which BACK ISSUE will spotlight in #14] That lasted for only 18 issues
Jonah Hex was resurrected for three 1990s Vertigo series written by Joe R Lansdale and drawn by Tim Truman and Sam Glanzman
But it was those original Jonah Hex tales in All-Star Western and Weird Western Tales that forever changed the comic-book Western. Michael Browning
A Tony DeZuniga-drawn Jonah Hex portfolio plate; original art courtesy of Heritage Comics.
MICHAEL BROWNING: Let’s talk about Jonah Hex and the impact he had on Westerns then and now Do you think he changed the face of Western comics and brought more reality to them, made them more like the spaghetti Westerns?
TONY DeZUNIGA: Definitely Most definitely That was a time when Clint Eastwood was making those anti-hero, spaghetti westerns. John Albano, when we talked together, he was telling me, “Hey, Tony, let’s get away from like the Rawhide Kid and all those Western super-heroes because, you know, they’re shooting the guns out of the hands of the bad guys a n d a l l t h a t . ” I s a i d , “ I a g r e e . ” To a n s w e r y o u r question: I think it’s a far cry from the typical Western heroes. Those remind me of the Roy Rogers Western hero, only in comic-book form you know, they always had a beautiful horse
BROWNING: So, you wanted Jonah Hex to be dirtier than the Western heroes who had come before him?
DeZUNIGA: Jonah Hex is an anti-hero, like John was telling me Even the towns in those days, they weren’t all asphalt roads They were dirt roads The cowboys really dressed really, really rugged I would say filthy and dirty and I liked doing it that way.
BROWNING: When you look at the comics of that time period, there was a lot of diversity. The 1960s had been primarily super-heroes. But along comes the 1970s and things started to change. Jonah Hex was a big part of that Can you tell me what the atmosphere was like then? Comics were becoming “weird ”
DeZUNIGA: I felt good about it Any change is good for me You’re right, there were a lot of books that came out during those years that I really liked I liked what happened Even doing characters today, I think it’s a takeoff of that period, even the science-fiction characters It has an effect on the stories today and how they create the characters today. I may be wrong, but that’s how I feel. You know, like Star Trek is a far cry from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
Beginnings:
Girls’ Love Stories #153 (1970) (inks over Ric Estrada’s pencils)
Milestones:
Dr. Thirteen in The Phantom Stranger / Jonah Hex / Black Orchid in Adventure Comics / Conan the Barbarian / X-Men / Star Wars / Incredible Hulk / The Punisher
Works in Progress:
Enjoying retirement but occasionally illustrating covers
Cyberspace: www.dezunigaart.com
BROWNING: There was a lot of realism in your work on Jonah Hex. Did you have to reference old photos and articles to get such graphic realism?
DeZUNIGA: When I was really young, we used to copy a lot of swipes from photographs. What happened was, later on, it paid off, because I used to light the lighting from my head because I had copied so many photographs when I was younger and practicing how to draw Everybody thinks that I was copying photographs Maybe now and then, but not all the time We had learned how to place the shadows because we had copied photographs That’s why it looks real
BROWNING: What was [then-DC publisher] Carmine Infantino’s reaction to Jonah Hex? Did he like your version or did he ask for changes?
DeZUNIGA: Carmine is a great guy and a great artist. He wanted [Jonah Hex] real bulky. Remember, in the very first issues of “Jonah Hex” [in All-Star
From the collection of Michael Browning, writer
John Albano’s script rough for the very first appearance of Jonah Hex in All-Star Western #10, and Tony DeZuniga’s gritty interpretation of same.
by David
“Hambone” Hamilton (and friends)
A rare example of Frank Miller’s rough pencil work here, from his Elektra miniseries (1984) This Miller-created character first seen in Marvel’s Daredevil was the basis for a 2005 motion picture And now, we’re in the afterglow of Frank’s second creation to go to the big screen: Sin City (a Dark Horse publication)
From the (terribly) underrated Lee Weeks’ run on Daredevil doing what may seem like triple duty here for Ol’ Hornhead’s 288th cover: namely, first producing a rough layout design (done with various pens and markers), then forming his (totally) finished pencils from the pen/marker piece, and then, of course, completing the cover by inking it (not shown). He does it all and with a rare degree of professionalism!
Altered Drakes
Jack Kirby’s pencils for an alternate, unpublished version of page 1 of Destroyer Duck #2 (1983). The pencils for the published version appear on page 36
Courtesy of The Jack Kirby Collector (TJKC), with special thanks to John Morrow
Wa n t t o t a l k e x t r e m e m a k e -
o v e r s ? I n t h e g r a n d s c h e m e o f things, new costumes and rebooted
o r i g i n s d o n ’t h o l d a c a n d l e t o
J o h n s o n c o n d u c t e d o n A p r i l 2 8 , 2 0 0 5
D a n
b y
i n t e r v i e w
t h e r a d i c a l c h a n g e s t h a t t o o k
p l a c e b e h i n d t h e s c e n e s o f t h e
c o m i c s i n d u s t r y i n t h e l a t e
1 9 7 0 s a n d t h e e a r l y 1 9 8 0 s .
T h i s w a s a time when writers and artists were f i n a l l y t a k i n g a
s t a n d t o p r o t e c t their rights, both to safeguard their financial interests and the destinies o f
t h e i r c r e a t i o n s I t t o o k a w h i l e , and the road they traveled wasn’t a n e a s y o n e , b u t t h e a c t i o n s
o f a f e w b r a v e s o u l s b a c k t h e n
a l t e r e d the way the business is run today, ensuring that creators were finally g i v e n t h e i r
f a i r s h a r e f o r t h e i r h
S t e v
suit against Mar vel Comics over his creation, Howard the Duck, brought this issue to the forefront. Gerber’s c a
t o h e l p h i m g
o u g h i t , including a certain web-footed firecracker that was tired of the little guy getting the dirty end of the stick. This is the story of that feathered friend to the oppressed, Destroyer Duck. Dan Johnson
DAN JOHNSON: Most everyone is aware that Destroyer Duck came about to finance your lawsuit with Marvel over Howard the Duck. Whose idea was it to publish the comic?
STEVE GERBER: I’m not sure. The idea may have originated with Dean Mullaney at Eclipse [Comics], or Mark Evanier, or maybe with me. At some point, though, one of us came up with the idea of a “benefit” comic to help keep my attorney and my case afloat. At one point, I know I toyed with the idea of printing only 250 copies and selling them for $100 00 each as collector’s items We decided to go with a more standard publication, though
JOHNSON: You also had a living legend of the industry, Jack Kirby, working on Destroyer Duck. How did Kirby come to be involved?
GERBER: That’s a really funny story At the time, I had known Jack for maybe a year. He was working at Ruby-Spears doing designs for shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, and we had gotten to know each other a little When the idea of this book came up, Kirby seemed like the natural person to draw it Jack, of course, had a huge beef with Marvel, so his drawing the book would
Beginnings:
Incredible Hulk #157, Marvel Comics (1972) (script over Roy Thomas plot)
Milestones:
Man-Thing / Defenders / creation of Howard the Duck / co-creation with Mary Skrenes of Omega the Unknown (the version you can get as an illegal Internet download, not to be confused with Marvel’s current reanimation of the corpse) / Phantom Zone miniseries / creation of Thundarr the Barbarian / creation of Nevada / creation of Hard Time
Works in Progress: Hard Time, DC Comics
make a major statement Also, at that time, it was still Jack’s work that defined the Marvel style To this day, it remains the guiding dynamic behind almost everything Marvel does, but in the mid-1980s the connection was closer and clearer in readers’ minds.
I frankly didn’t have the nerve to approach Kirby alone, so I asked Mark to come out to Jack’s house with me to lend some moral support. I knew I could not do that alone I mean, asking the King of the Comics to draw a comic book for free, as a favor, was the height of presumption Mark and I drove out to Jack and Roz’s home in Thousand Oaks and we sat down with Jack and we then explained the whole thing to him. We probably jabbered on for about half an hour, going into detail about the lawsuit with Marvel, the rights situation for creators, the rationale behind doing a new duck character, and on and on Finally, one of us popped the question and asked if Jack would consider drawing the book Jack just kind of sat back and said, “Sure Sounds like fun.” I was stunned.
Cyberspace:
SteveGerblog, my almost-daily online journal (www.stevegerber.com/sgblog)
SteveGerber com, my website (www stevegerber com), currently undergoing a major overhaul
From Destroyer Duck #1 (1982), a graphite glimpse of Kirby’s art, with the artist’s personal touch, the GodCorp motto
Courtesy of TJKC
W h o is the Calculator?
Is he:
•The top information broker for super-villains in the DC Universe?
•A disgruntled Golden Age sidekick?
•The leader of a criminal organization plotting against Robin?
•A friend of best-selling author Brad Meltzer?
•Wizard magazine’s “Mort of the Month”?
•DC’s second-most-popular villain of 1978?
Or . . . is he all of the above?
The Calculator has one of the more unusual histories of a DC supervillain He’s gone one-on-one with many of DC’s greatest heroes all in the same book He’s been rendered by some of DC’s most popular artists before they were well-known He’s been outfitted in one of comic s’ strangest costumes, and now wears no costume at all And, until recent ly, he’s been one of the few villains to have almost all his adventures script ed by the same writer his creator, Bob Rozakis
Rozakis is a true veteran of DC comics, having written many of th company’s major characters, and created such books as ’Mazing Man an Hero Hotline He’s also served as the longtime head of DC’s productio department and as the DC “Answer Man,” helping resolve questio about DC’s sometimes-messy continuity.
N o w o n e o f h i s f i r s t c
reintroduced as part of DC’s best-selling crossover Identity Crisis and pois to become an important figure in the DC Universe.
But before all this . . . who was that masked man with the keypad on his chest?
For the answer, you’ll have to go back to Bob Rozakis, and legendary DC editor Julius Schwartz.
“It started with the idea of a villain who would battle the various backup heroes in Detective Comics, ” Rozakis explains “His gimmick was that he would steal things when they were most valuable For example, he would steal the instruments from a rock group moments before their big concert was about to start and sell them back for a high price ”
It was Schwartz who wound up giving the character his name “When I was explaining this to Julie Schwartz, I said something like, ‘He calculates the precise moment when something is worth the most,’” Rozakis says
“Julie responded with, ‘So you have to call him The Calculator ’ Using the keypad on his chest to generate almost anything with it evolved from there ”
The Calculator’s look was designed by a young Mike Grell Grell based the design on the description in Rozakis’ script, and Rozakis was pleased with the result. “It was pretty close to how I’d envisioned him,” Rozakis says. “He looked like many villains of the period, where you’d come up with a gimmick and it was up to the artist to realize it.”
With the Calculator’s look in place, it was time for his reign of terror to begin.
Black Canary encountered the Calculator in chapter two Art by Grell and Austin, with the original art courtesy of Terry Austin.
The mystery started in June 1976, with Detective Comics #463’s six-page backup feature entitled “Crimes by Calculation,” written by Rozakis with art by Grell and inks by Terry Austin In it, the Calculator invaded Ivy Town to steal an earthquake-preventing device invented by a friend of one Ray Palmer, aka the Atom With his chest-keypad, the Calculator was able to create solid objects projected from the LCD screen on his head to battle the Atom, and even
succeeded in getting Atom’s friend swallowed by a fissure
A furious Atom managed to defeat the Calculator, but later, in a cell, the Calculator gloated that next on his list would be Black Canary
would return to fight
character starring
As promised, the Calculator next fought Black Canary in Detective Comics # 4 6 4 ’s “
Tonight” (by Rozakis, Grell, and Austin co-written by Roazakis’ wife Laurie)
After the Black Canary story, Grell dropped out as artist to focus on his
guest editorial by mike friedrich
ansformative elements were in the publications of Star*Reach in the 1970s Of course, it’s for the historians to answer that question, as I can only write about what I intended to do and what I strived for; however, there are now so many years between then and now, I can somewhat look at that time distantly
First, I started out as a super-hero reader in my teens, and then became a super-hero writer through college and beyond Initially I didn’t pay much attention to comics that weren’t about super-heroes But then around 1972 I was exposed to the principal underground publishers in the Bay Area: Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, and Print Mint What I noticed was that it was pretty much the artists themselves who decided what stories to tell; there was little editorial direction like the way super-hero comics were produced in New York Meanwhile, I tended to hang out with Marvel writers and artists in New ork who chaffed a bit at the restrictions he company put on them. There was ways the feeling that to get something interesting to adults into a Marvel story, the talent had to sneak it in
Lastly, I’d seen Jim Steranko leave Marvel and set
published were not comics, nonetheless his action was an inspiration to go out on my own as well. The combination of these strands led me to think
that maybe I could publish Marvel artists who would be interested in drawing stories that didn’t have the Marvel restrictions So when I started soliciting material I w e n t t o p
former roommate Jim Starlin and a friend I’d hang out with at Neal Adams’ studio, Howard Chaykin They in turn brought in a then-brand-new artist, Walt Simonson In subsequent issues I went to Dick Giordano, Frank Brunner, Mike Vosburg, Len Wein, Craig Russell, Steve Leialoha, and Paul Levitz (who brought along Steve Ditko).
What I discovered was the tradeoff one engages i n w h e n t h e
Unfortunately, for the most part the material maintained professional craftsmanship, but not a lot of interesting stories. There’s an exception or two; a wonderful piece comes to mind by Steve Englehart and Mike Vosburg entitled “Skywalker.”
I think it’s significant that the only material from t h a t
adaptation works of Craig Russell, which were and are truly unique
In contrast to the stories I solicited, the more memorable material came from artists who submitted their stories to me: Robert Gould’s version of “Elric,” Michael Gilbert, Ken Steacy, pre-Cerebus Dave Sim, and last but not least, Lee Marrs
In hindsight, I think my initial impulse failed in one sense and succeeded in another I failed to create an alternative creative space for Marvel artists, but succeeded in providing that alternative for artists disinterested in super-heroes.
It wasn’t until the emergence of Image Comics over a decade later that Marvel artists published their
Star*Reach laid the groundwork for that event
Mike Friedrich, circa 1976.
Photo courtesy of Mike Friedrich Howard Chaykin’s
The second transformation I brought from underground c o m i c s i n t o t h e a l t e r n
p
t h e c o p y
i g h townership model Unlike super-hero publishers (or Archie Comics for that matter), the artist owned the material. As publisher I controlled the rights that I specifically contracted and paid for, but nothing else I followed traditional book publishing and paid royalties for each copy sold (the “page rate” became an advance payment of those royalties) W h i l e S t a
The first two changes I’ve discussed were quite conscious on my part. The third transformation turned out to be the most significant, yet it developed organically This was marketing my comics primarily toward the then-new comic-book stores At the time, these stores had new and back-issue Marvels as their mainstay, but I knew there was demand in them for stories for older readers that Marvel wasn’t recognizing It was these readers that Star*Reach artists appealed to.
W h e n S
marketing and sales experience I’d gained in the comic store market and bring that to Marvel, where I set up their so-called “direct sales” department This channel of d i s t r i b u t i o n b y
u
magazine-based channel to become the dominant form of comics distribution to this day.
Comics publisher Friedrich in a mid-1970s Bay-area newspaper spotlight
Star*Reach Productions
Photo courtesy of Mike Friedrich
Black and White and Read All Over:
T h e S p i d e r - M a n E x t r e m e M a k e o v e r i n t e r v i e w
W h e n M a r v e
Wa
in 1984, the comic-book miniseries originally conceived as a tie-in to Mattel’s Secret Wars toy line promised sweeping changes for some of the company’s most popular charac-
t e r s T
was Spider-Man’s new costume, a little black-and-white number that would become a major wardrobe malfunction for the wall-crawler. In time, the new costume was revealed to be an
a
b
Spider-Man and His Amazing Frenz
The splash page to the groundbreaking Amazing Spider-Man #252 (May 1984), penciled by Ron Frenz and inked by Brett Breeding. Original art scan courtesy of Dante Gallo.
i n t r o d u c e S p i d e y ’s n e w t h r e a d s , there i s n o d e n y i n g t h e f a c t t h a t t h e
v a s t m a j o r i t y w e r e i n f a v o r o f t h e
c r e a t i v e t e a m t h a t a r r i v e d o n T h e
A m a z i n g Spider-Man at the same time the black costume first made the scene. During their run, writer Tom DeFalco and artist R o n
F r e n z , t h r o u g h t h e i r b r i l l i a n t e x p l o r a t i o n o f Spider-Man and his supporting characters, quickly
r e m i n d e d S p i d e r - f a n s t h a t i t i s n ’t t h e c l o t h e
m a k e t h e m a n , o r i n S p i d e
D a n J o h n s o n
DAN JOHNSON: Spider-Man’s costume change coincided with you two coming on board The Amazing Spider-Man. How did you each come to be involved with the book? T O M D e FA L C O : B y d e f a u l t I h a d b e e n e d i t i n g t h e
Spider-Man titles for a while, and I was working with Roger Stern and John Romita, Jr on Amazing Spider-Man Marvel promoted me to executive editor, and shifted my
duties, so I had to give up the Spider-Man books
RON FRENZ: Then Danny Fingeroth coerced you into doing fill-in scripting
DeFALCO: He really didn’t coerce me At one point Danny came into my office and said, “Roger Stern has been offered The Avengers, so he is going to leave Spider-Man. I need someone to write Amazing Spider-Man, do you have any suggestions?” I got out a list of creative people, and went down the list, trying to give Danny the names of people that I thought could do a good job. He got this goofy grin on his face and was looking at me I asked him, “Aren’t you going to take any notes?” He goes, “Nah, I don’t need any notes. I already have somebody in mind for the job ” Me, always being the master of diplomacy, I say to him, “So why the hell are you wasting my time!?!”
Danny says, “I want to get someone who knows the character very well and has experience with Spider-Man I was thinking of you writing the book ” My first reaction was, “I can’t write Spider-Man!” Spider-Man needed a certain kind of personality, a witticism that only Roger Stern could capture I wasn’t sure I could do it Danny, who really should have been a used-car salesman, convinced me to take a shot at it
Ron, speak of how you became the artist FRENZ: At that point, I was just going from freelance project to freelance project I had been the “regular” artist on Marvel Team-Up for, like, three or four issues, none of which ran concurrently, so it really didn’t look that way, under Tom DeFalco as editor DeFALCO: That’s “the Legendary” Tom DeFalco FRENZ: Sorry. “The Legendary” Tom DeFalco was taking over his duties as executive editor, and was handing Spider-Man off to Danny This was around Amazing Spider-Man #248 The first part of that was a wrap-up story with Thunderball, and the second part was “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man ” I got “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man,” then they called and said they needed some fill-in issues on the book for six issues. [Then-regular Amazing Spider-Man artist] John Romita, Jr was going to go do X-Men, and the original plan was he would get that book on schedule and come back to Amazing Spider-Man in about six months time Basically, Amazing Spider-Man #252 was done by a fill-in artist, because I came in with #251 and did #252, and Rick Leonardi did issues #253
Beginnings: Miscellaneous Archie Comics gags and stories (circa 1972–73)
Milestones: Thor / Thunderstrike / Amazing Spider-Man / Fantastic Four / Spider-Girl / former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief
Works in Progress:
Spider-Girl / Last Hero Standing / Khan: The Legend of Genghis Khan (Moonstone) / Fantastic Four: The World’s Greatest Guide (DK) / Comic Creators on Fantastic Four (Titan)
Cyberspace: Spider-Girl Message Board at Comicboards com
Beginnings:
Ka-Zar the Savage #16–17 (1983)
Milestones:
Ka-Zar the Savage / Star Wars / Marvel Team-Up / Thor / Amazing Spider-Man / Superman
Works in Progress: Spider-Girl
Cyberspace: www.catskillcomics.com
Back in the Golden Age of Comics, the original Captain Marvel was so popular that his comics even outsold Superman’s So it is little wonder that Superman’s owners, National Periodical Publications (now DC Comics), took Cap’s publishers, Fawcett Publications, to court, alleging that the Big Red Cheese was merely a plagiarized version of the Man of Steel. Captain Marvel vanished into legal oblivion for two decades.
But in the 1970s, DC itself revived the character under the series title Shazam! The first issue explained that Cap and most of his supporting cast had been trapped in suspended animation all that time.
And that, indeed, was the problem: Captain Marvel had not evolved with the times, as had characters that had been published continuously over the decades, like his old rival Superman Despite the Captain’s exalted place in comics history, none of the attempts at reviving him for a modern audience have lasted for long How could Captain Marvel ever catch up with Superman’s sales now?
Perhaps it would be by entrusting the Captain to the writer/artist who was most responsible for revamping the Man of Steel for a new generation Toward the end of the 1980s, John Byrne tried his hand at reworking Shazam! for a modern audience
Byrne recalls that “Jonathan Peterson, who was going to be the editor, was looking around for something for me to do He got put in charge of [the Shazam! property] and he asked me if I’d like to do it And I thought about it
“I’d never had much interest in Captain Marvel, because he seemed like a watered-down Superman,” Byrne says He had not read many Captain Marvel stories before this “The most I had read was the new stuff that had come out in the ’70s when the character was brought back ” Drawn by Cap’s co-creator C.C. Beck, and another of his Golden Age artists, Kurt Schaffenberger, these stories were more like the 1940s Captain Marvel stories in look and tone than the later versions of Shazam! As for the Captain’s actual Golden Age stories, Byrne had read “just a little bit here and there.
”But a lot of different ideas suddenly popped into my head, especially in the way everything was having to be done grim and gritty back then. Well, how can I do a grim and gritty Captain Marvel without completely betraying everything that the character is all about? And when I came up with the way to do that I thought, ‘Y’know, this could be a fun series ’ So I agreed to do it
“When I figured out how to handle the character, that was when I really started exploring who Captain Marvel himself was,” Byrne says He did more research into the Captain’s past stories: “I was doing reading as I was getting into it ”
The Big Red Cheese
The John Byrne Captain Marvel that never was Art courtesy of Byrne Robotics (www.byrne robotics com)
Byrne asserts that “One of the hurdles that I was looking at when I was thinking about this character [was that] the world has definitely changed since he was created; the world has changed since the last time we saw him ” Characters such as Captain Mar vel and his sister Mar y Mar vel were created at a time when comic books were more innocent Why not make the contrast between that innocence and the grimness of late 1980s comics into the point of the new series?
“The way to do that was to keep Cap and Mary exactly as they were, but make Fawcett City the nastiest place on Earth,” Byrne says “The line I came up with for the cover copy, the way I wanted it described, was, ‘In the city of ultimate darkness, there is a new light.’ And that was going to be my Captain Marvel.”
Byrne’s concept was actually true to the very first Captain Marvel story, which, after all, was written and drawn during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Billy Batson, the young boy who will be transformed by the wizard Shazam into the adult Captain Marvel, starts out as an impoverished, orphaned newsboy, and the unnamed city in which he lives (now called Fawcett City, after his original publisher) was a dark, ominous place
Byrne’s reworking of the Captain Marvel legend would have made some surprising departures from the original saga “So we’re going to mess around with some of the basic principles,” Byrne asserts
For example, in the Golden Age, it was a few years before Billy was reunited with his twin sister Mary, who also gained super-powers. In Byrne’s version, “Mary and Cap were going to be together right from the start.” Billy and Mary were still orphans. “What I‘d fiddled around with is they are in a street gang. They’re sort of the good kids in an otherwise bad street gang that is run by a somewhat older kid by the name of Adam Black Get it?”
In case you don’t, Adam Black is Byrne’s reimagined
things, and Shazam goes, ‘Oh! Guess he wasn’t the one ’”
So Shazam then “finds Billy, and gives Billy the powers,” whereupon Billy becomes the adult Captain Marvel Later, “Captain Marvel gets in trouble, and eventually Mary gets the powers,” to rescue her brother
Now, obviously, Shazam was not the best judge of character in either version of Black Adam’s origin, bestowing such immense power on someone so unworthy of them Byrne’s version in particular doesn’t make Shazam look too smart, giving super-powers to the first person who happens to find him
“Well, I never thought he was that smart, quite frankly,” Byrne remarks “I always got the impression that Shazam was vaguely sort of doddery, that he was thousands of years old and sort of losing it a little bit.”
v
original Golden Age continuity, Black Adam was an adult Egyptian whom Shazam had endowed with super-powers in ancient times, but who proved to be evil Byrne’s version, however, was thoroughly contemporary
Byrne kept the eerie underground tunnel from the original story through which Billy traveled to meet Shazam But in Byrne’s retelling, it is Adam Black who first makes this journey “He goes down the tunnel first And Shazam greets him and gives him powers, and he runs off and starts doing bad
Not only would Billy become an adult as Captain Marvel, but, in contrast with the original stories, so would Mary when she turned into Mary Marvel. “One of the things I was looking forward to exploring was that whole notion of, if you’re a kid and you can turn into a grownup, why would you ever turn back?” Byrne says “And I was going to explore that mostly through Mary, who was going to really enjoy getting boobs [laughs] and that kind of stuff ” Byrne says he would have had Mary “putting on inappropriate makeup and inappropriate clothing because she still thinks like a teenager ‘I’m a grownup now ’ Not really, no ” Byrne says that Mary’s situation would be “very much” like that of Jennifer Garner’s character in the recent movie 13 Going on 30, “which was quite a good movie, by the way,” he adds “Most people were dismissing [13 Going on 30] as Big in drag,” Byrne continues, “but it isn’t. And what makes the difference is that in Big, Tom Hanks becomes a grownup overnight, but without any grownup sensibilities. So he’s still a kid, he’s just in a grownup body. In 13 Going on 30, Jennifer Garner’s character skips 17 years of her life, so it’s suddenly 17 years later, and those 17 years have happened, but she wasn’t there for them They’ve happened to her character, and her character was there, but she wasn’t inhabiting her character at the time She’s turned into somebody other than who she knows herself to be So there’s a lot of dealing with ‘Oh, look at the nasty person I’ve become,’ at least by this kid’s standard So that was kind of interesting, I thought It made it not Big ” Of course, Byrne was starting work on Shazam! a decade and a half before 13 Going on 30 came out So how would Mary and Billy have decided they didn’t want to be adults all the time? “Unfortunately, I never got that far!” he replies, laughing
A deathly serious illustration of the Comedian, by Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons Courtesy of the artist.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something red-yellow-and-blue comics have always been an orphan artform adept at using whatever’s at hand and arriving at significant concepts and contributions against all odds. Invented by Jews, a refugee people expert at adopting the culture around them while traveling into unknown territory, the medium’s two most signature characters drew on as many precedents as they set: Superman took a little of the Moses myth, some trappings of the Flash Gordon future, and no small amount of both Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator and the pulp hero Doc Savage to fashion Siegel and Shuster’s still wholly original interplanetary messiah; Batman took the literally moonlighting vigilante aristocrat model of Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel mixed with the costumery of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Bat and the grim night-phantom persona of the pulps’ Shadow to end up with Kane and Finger’s definitive urban avenger Comics have thus been a hybrid artform from their earliest days, as referential as they are revolutionary, though it wasn’t ’til a half-century into their history that they would start becoming a medium whose creators wanted you to be as aware of their sources as they were
Growing Up, Up, and Away
The turning point came in 1986 with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. That was the same year as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, another miniseries considered equally groundbreaking. It was with these two books that the super-hero was seen as coming of age. At the time, both books’ gloomy exposure of super-heroes’ flaws was seen as the major departure. But the “grim ’n’ gritty” sensibility these books are credited with introducing and that would dominate comics for a decade or two afterward was older than the medium itself (remember the Shadow), and frankly, flawed heroes were as old as the early-’60s Marvel Age
Masterworks like Miller’s Dark Knight (as well as his and David Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again) can be seen more as the culmination of such tendencies and the grand finale of the Silver Age stars as we knew them Watchmen marked what would take their place
Days of Future Past
Throughout comics history we’ve heard of arch-villains, arch-foes, and arch-fiends; the type of character Watchmen pioneered could be called “arch heroes” for their clever selfconsciousness their knowing pastiches and remixes of classic comics conventions, which honor and add to that history while commenting on and even criticizing it.
Before Watchmen, comics fans and pop-culture watchers would speak of knock-offs (Aquaman being “DC’s Sub-Mariner,” etc.); after Watchmen, comics fans and pop-culture scholars would speak seriously of hero “archetypes.” It’s now legendary that Watchmen’s
vividly original cast evolved after Moore was denied use of both the Archie and Charlton Comics heroes to remake into a serious super-novel This has long set observers to speculate on the characters’ sources, and on the surface it’s an easy game: the moral absolutist Rorschach “is” Steve Ditko’s unyielding avenger the Question; the high-tech nocturnal crimestopper Nite Owl “is” Blue Beetle; etc. But it’s really not that easy at all, and this was Moore and Gibbons’ innovation: Rorschach, in addition to being an inspired variation on Ditko’s pioneering practice of basing whole super-heroes around abstract concepts and symbols, was an embodiment of every allor-nothing vigilante that had come before him (and anticipated many that would follow); his creators had elevated him to an archetype The wealthy Nite Owl, in his creature-of-the-dark regalia and paradoxically flashy gadgetry, was the synthesis of dilettante do-gooders as disparate as the gloomy Batman and the gleaming Iron Man, an entirely fresh embodiment of an eternal type
By the 1990s, other Moore series would practically be identifying actual species of super-hero In Moore’s masterful run on the Rob Liefeld-created Superman archetype Supreme, the character encounters a celestial intelligence, clearly identifiable as the spirit of Jack Kirby, who recognizes Supreme as “a Wylie” that is, a scion of the super-heroic strain that stretches back to Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (if not indeed Jesus and Apollo) and runs through Superman, Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, and beyond. By the time this story appeared it would be common for comics fans to consider characters like Supreme, Prime, Mr Majestic, Icon, and others not imitations of Superman but “archetypes,” and to be conscious of a pop history being played out by such characters in a rolling process of innovation and selfreference that could only be called postmodern (and now is, from the ivory tower to the local comic shop)
Long-time comics fans might feel this diminished the medium they love by over-thinking it and declaring it a stand-in for something other than its own straightforward charms. But the “arch heroes” and their fans actually see comics as tied into an evolution of folklore and a continuum of myth that solidifies thei r cultural worth as well as validating their simple fun. The power-postmodernists, their creations, and their critiques help make it more likely that super-heroes will be here to stay because they bolster the argument that super-heroes, in one form or another,
have always been here
Everything Old
True to this creed, Watchmen may have set the standard for postmodern heroes but was hardly the series that got them started
The first stirrings were arguably amongst a group unequivocally out to put an end to super-heroes as we knew them: the Crime Syndicate, an evil alternate-earth Justice League who first appeared in 1964 (Justice League of America vol 1 #29–30) Mere opposites had long been a staple of pulp-culture conflict (evil-genius Moriarty vs benevolentgenius Sherlock Holmes i n t h e 1 8 9 0 s ; w a t e relemental Sub-Mariner vs fire-elemental the Human Torch in the 1930s), but the Crime Syndicate went further by remixing the traits of their opponents into broader types, and types which caused questions about the nature of the o r i g i n a l s (accidents of fate seemed to have turned the Syndicate members bad at crossroads the heroes could have taken too); and they otherwise were wholly separate characters: “Ultraman,” not Superman; “Owlman,” not Batman (the night-creature substitution is salient and the influence on Moore and Gibbons’ Nite Owl is obvious); etc These were oneshot characters (at least until their recent revival by Grant Morrison in another one-shot), but they built toward something more longstanding.
A flashy Rorschach prototype illo by and courtesy of Dave Gibbons.
The next “arch heroes” worth noting deserved the second part of that name, anti-heroes though they might have been: The Doom Patrol (like the Crime Syndicate, a DC creation, debuting in My Greatest Adventure #80, 1963) were a familial team of misfits who clearly referenced
on for a “Pro2Pro” on their ed Swamp Thing collaboration,
al gaze into Marv Wolfman ene Colan’s unforgettable mb of Dracula. ngo Comics has one-upped with this year’s Bart Simpson’s ouse of Horror annual ween special, a flip book Len and Bernie joining forces a Swamp Thing parody called uish Thing,” and Marv and ne lampooning their eloved” bloodsucker in “The b-Basement of Dracula ” And at’s just one half of the book! he other side features a fullength EC Comics parody with hapters by John Severin, Angelo Torres, and the team of Mark Schultz and Al Williamson, and a bookend drawn by regular Simpsons Lloyd “This is an amazing roster of talent, and their work is spectacular!” says Treehouse editor Bill (Radioactive Man) Morrison. “You can tell that these guys had a blast writing and drawing these stories. I still can’t believe that I got to serve as editor for so many of my heroes!”
Bill was kind enough to share with BACK ISSUE sample pages from the Swampy and Dracula parodies enjoy!
