Graphic NYC

Getting Scary, Cheery and Chatty with Jill Thompson

2012-01-30T14:07:00.000-05:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

“It’s nice that there are nice people in my industry,” Jill Thompson notes. “I like to think I’m one of them, and treat anyone who comes up to me as a friend. If you’re nice enough to come up and like my work, how could I ever possibly be anything but gracious?”

Jill’s appreciation likely stems from the helping hands she’s had through her career in the comics, the other artists and writers who have pushed her to evolve from artist to full-blown creator. P. Craig Russell, whose fantasy-based comic book art has been a presence in comics since the 1970s, and whose guidance helped mold Jill into one of the most successful and diverse cartoonists dealing in fantasy today.

“I used to pose for Craig Russell all the time when I lived in Ohio,” Jill says of her college days. “I’m a ham, and two I have been in improv troupes before, so I had no problem doing that. Craig would have a lot of friends model for him, but when he needed a villainess, he’d call me because I’d really overact and be expressive. For his Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story ‘Hothouse,’ I was this evil doctor, or someone who was manipulating Poison Ivy. Then my friend Jeff, who was one of my improv mates, was also in it as my hired muscle. We came over one day and Craig really loved the fact that we were really over the top with it, and he got stuff he didn’t get before, from people who weren’t always that comfortable.

“He used me for operas and other things, like Brunhilda and Ring of the Nibelung saga; that was so funny, because he had me in this goofy makeshift costume. It wasn’t like he had actual chainmail, so he got a t-shirt that he cut up in pieces and just drew chainmail on so he’d know where to put the bulge, and he had a ratty blonde Halloween wig, and someone had a Thor helmet with wings on the side of it.

“So, first he dressed me up in these weird rags and put a wig on me (he had to shove my hair up under it, and my hair was a lot bigger and longer than it is now), and then he jammed the helmet on my head on top of that. Then they put me on a horse to get some other photos. I think I had a sword. Our friend Jay had a farm and had a horse. ‘Who would be willing to put all this crap on and sit on a horse for ten hours while I take pictures? I’ll call Jill, she’ll do it!’

While Thompson is most known for her hyper-expressive work on creator-owned books and top fantasy, she cut her teeth on superheroes, drawing Wonder Woman for a year, hot on the heels of artist George Perez.

“Out of all the artists who’ve drawn Wonder Woman in the past, I’m perhaps one of the few who is comfortable saying ‘I have worn a bustier and know how it works.’ I’m just saying ‘I don’t know about any of those guys,” Jill jokes. “I like drawing the human figure: Steve Rude, Craig Russell, and Paul Smith are some of my greatest influences. Steve Rude introduced me to Andrew Loomis. I love Dan DeCarlo. There was a beautiful body language where, even if something was cartoony, it was realistic to me because people stood with their weight on one leg. Things were natural and they made expressions; they acted well, and it wasn’t a standard look for shock or anger. There were subtleties that were going on in that work that made reading comics a lot more emotional for me.

“John Byrne is one of my favorite artists and X-Men was my first superhero obsession. People say they don’t see any of these influences in my work, but these are people I went crazy over and studied, and couldn’t get enough of anything they did. I wanted to bring that type of sensibility to a heroic character. George Perez drew heroic comics and I loved his work. I was a huge Teen Titans fan.”

Wonder Woman is a character who’s had just as many bad artists on her as good, and Thompson’s work ranks amongst the best.

“It can be the sexiest and most revealing costume possible, but to me it has to look like real clothes and not just be lines drawn on a figure,” Jill notes. “Right now my brain is buzzing with people who offend me as an artist and as a woman, too. I don’t mind a super-sexy costume. I think that’s sexy, and what looks sexy on a woman doesn’t look sexy on a man. I look at every costume and go ‘You have to fight in that and be able to run in that.’ While I can run in high heels, it’s really not so practical. But I wanted there to be some realism in their body language and be heroic.”

The 1990s was a pivotal decade for comics, both good and bad, as the breaking of boundaries in the 1980s was giving way to series aimed at a mature audience and only sold directly through comic book stores. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman had been critical and commercial successes for DC Comics, and the decision was made to include them in a mature readers imprint: Vertigo Comics.

While working on Wonder Woman, Jill was unaware that she would soon play a part in Vertigo’s history, something she owes to a thoughtful editor.

“I had an editor named Dan Dordlin at the time, and he was editing the last bunch of Wonder Woman that I did,” she remembers. “Apparently, Neil had been interested in my work for a while and he had wanted me to illustrate the ‘Brief Lives’ storyline. At the time, I guess he had thought it would be a three-issue story. I was under an exclusive contract for Wonder Woman at the time, and my previous editor had kept saying ‘No, she’s under contract. She has to do these issues.’

“Then the editorial staff changed and Dan looked at my work, and had talked to me plenty of times on the phone. He was extremely familiar with Sandman, and he told me ‘You know Neil Gaiman has been calling here wondering if you were done with Wonder Woman? He wants you to draw this Sandman story that he’s got.’ I was a huge fan of Sandman.

“He went ‘I think you’re better suited for that book than for this one. Your art’s great, but the way you make people act, and the stuff you really like to do, is much better for that comic. I’m going to see if we can’t somehow get the last part of this contract switched over, or end it differently so we can get you over on that.’ We ended up doing a Wonder Woman/Deathstroke special that somehow played into finishing my contract for Wonder Woman, and then I jumped right into Sandman.”

Well into the fourth year of Sandman, author Neil Gaiman defined his own mythology with the godly characters The Endless and their fantasy world, imbuing the gods with relatable human qualities against a backdrop that combined mythology with modern literary techniques. He worked with a different artist every story arc, something only made possible by his thoughtfulness as a collaborator.

“Neil is one of the most excellent writers that an artist can work with,” Jill beams. “One of the first things he does when he starts on a book is ask you what you like to draw, and what you don’t like to draw. I said ‘I can draw anything. I enjoy drawing acting, the human figure, and I like to do facial expressions and silent things, like that subtle beat between two statements. The thing that I hate to draw is cars.’

“He goes ‘All right, well there won’t be any cars.’ In a superhero comic, at some point if you do it right, they’ll hit somebody upside the head with a car or throw thing at them—which means you might have to draw the worst part, which is the underside of the car. I cheat it out all the time by making it black.

“I like drawing scenes and architecture, and I like drawing backgrounds, setting the stage, and doing establishing shots. I don’t want to scrimp on that, it’s just that I wanted to draw something that dealt more with human interaction. I was working on ‘The Parliament of Rooks,’ [Sandman #40] which was our tryout together, where he was going to see how I interpreted a script that he wrote and what he would have to write for me after that. It was an extremely easy process to work with him, and even less than halfway through it, he would fax me scripts—or sometimes it wouldn’t be a full script and I’d get a page a day because he was travelling and not able to finish an entire script. I would be done with what he’d given me and then fax him and go ‘I need more script.’ He would show up at a hotel after a signing and there’d be a fax from me already going ‘I need more pages.’ He would send me faxes back saying ‘This is exactly what I saw in my head when I was writing it.’ It was the highest compliment I could be paid.”

Jill’s storyline, “Brief Lives,” set the siblings Dream (the eponymous title character) and his sister Delirium on a road trip to find their brother, the black sheep Destruction. Delirium, a confused god who resembled a teenage girl with insane tendencies, was a perfect match for Thompson’s gestural and expressive art style.

“By the time I was drawing her, Neil had established that her look was based on Tori Amos,” Jill says. “That was easy to follow up on as far as the shape of her face and eyes. I really understood when he would write that character that she was so vulnerable. It was (pardon the pun) a dream to be able to work with that character because she was all about body language…

“She was all about body language and Sandman was all about body language in the fact that he was so reserved. He was the perfect straight man for any comedy that there could be, because he was so uptight.”

The first issue of “Brief Lives” was the first to carry the Vertigo imprint and ran from issues #41 to #49. It was originally intended to only be three issues, but Neil and Jill got carried away.

“When that was over, I did not want to stop drawing that comic, ever. I begged him to let me keep drawing it, and he said ‘No, we have other artists,’” Jill remembers, imitating Gaiman’s English accent. “I said ‘I don’t care about them, just do Sandman with me!’ It was the easiest job I’ve had in my entire life.

“I loved those characters. It was a chore to get things done at some point, because of certain deadlines, but I didn’t have to struggle to figure out what to draw. I’ve worked on comics where, no matter what the people have written on the script, you sit there and look at the paper and go ‘Oh, I don’t know where to go with this. How do I make this interesting?’ Sandman was not like that.”

Jill stuck with the Sandman cast for several other projects, including a series of one-shots for Vertigo starring Sandman characters. Ironically, the issue after “Brief Lives” wrapped was “Ramadan,” drawn by her mentor, P. Craig Russell.

While in Niles, Ohio (where she had posed for Russell while dressed in absurd outfits) Jill met up with writer Will Pfeifer, then a student at the local university. The absurdity of the town and university relationship led the two to create the mini-series Finals, a black comedy that deconstructs the college experience.

“I was a townie—I’m from Chicago but was living there a few years—and he was a student, and we’d always talk about the weird relationship between the town and the university, how they needed each other but both hated each other,” Jill remembers. “Not being a lifelong resident there, you can only take so much homecoming this-and-that, or fratboys coming over and peeing on your bushes because they’re loaded and think they own the town. It’s like anyone that lives near Wrigley Field: out of control Cubs fan come over there and are all drunk, and you see signs in front of peoples’ duplexes saying ‘Do not Urinate on my front lawn or in my gangway. We will call the police if we find you vomiting, urinating, or drinking, or having sex in my gangway.’ You know, it’s like ‘How rude!’ You should be able to electrify things around there so that if they’re peeing they’ll kill themselves.

Jill pauses awkwardly from her rant. “Anyways!”

“It’s a crazy tangent to get on while talking about Finals, but Will and I both lived in that college town for a while. He was a journalism student. We used to get together all the time and talk about comics. He was doing a mini-comic at the time called Silent Man, which I loved and contributed a cover to. I thought he was so super-talented. I was working on Sandman when I lived there, and he went to Rockford, Illinois to work at the Rockford Register-Star and I moved back home to Chicago.”

Jill and Will got back together in 1993, right after Jill had returned to the States from a Vertigo tour to learn of the shocking incidents with the cult in Waco, Texas, where dozens of cultists were burned to death while barricaded in their compound.

“We were talking about the way society was going,” Jill says. “We had talked at one time how, when he graduated senior projects were these enormous things that you’d see thesis papers that student would write that would be inches thick, and you know that professors in each class would have hundreds of students and many classes, and they don’t just have to teach the class but get all of these projects. I went ‘How do they ever read these things? You kill yourself for a grade, but does anyone actually look at it and what do you have to do to get someone interested enough to read it? What if there’s some really interesting information in there? What if you cured cancer and, because the professor has 700 of these, he flips through, gives it a grade but passes it on because he never reads it?’ We eventually came up with the idea of you having to do something that might almost kill you to stand out and graduate.

“He also said ‘You should see how people live to get this stuff done. You’re drinking pots of coffee and taking technically over the counter speed, anything you can get to stay awake and cram.’ That was not something I had done; I went to art school and while, yes, you stay awake at nights to get projects done, I don’t remember ever abusing myself to that extent.

“We wound up sitting around a whole afternoon throwing ideas back and forth with one another, and came up with this great idea for Finals. The great thing about Will is that he went back to his apartment, and this is what he did when he wasn’t working his regular job, came up with a pitch that created characters around the fictional college town. Not only did he come up with these exceptional characters, but intertwined their stories together, but he also included every idea we talked about. There wasn’t an idea I said off-the-cuff that he didn’t include. He was able to make every single thing work. He’s so funny, and he’s so smart, and it was really a pleasure to work on things.”

Finals is a 1999 dark comedy that looks at a group of college seniors, their final projects including everything from time machines and paradoxes to crazed cults and staged documentary film-making. Oh, and also the de-evolution of one student to becoming a savage. Thompson, because of her former hometown connection, considers it her most personal work.

“There’s so much of the university town in there,” she reflects. “Will’s dorm is in there, and buildings and places we used to go to. It has a lot of memories. Some of the cast are people that I know (not people from there).”

“The way I presented it is the only way that I’ve wanted to tell it—a story that I would enjoy, but just for kids,” Jill says of Scary Godmother, her first 100% Jill Thompson project. “In fact, there are very few comics for kids nowadays, but there should be more comics for kids. There should be comics that are just G rated.’ I don’t think G rated is a bad thing. Maybe what it’s become has been a pandering toy commercial. I think that any old black and white movie you find could be considered G rated, but they can make you cry, and people can die. There can be suspense and horror, and all kinds of stuff. It just isn’t done in a gratuitous and pornographic way. I think that’s perfectly fine. I want people who read my comics to laugh, to cry and to think. There wasn’t much out then that represented that, and I wanted to be one of the people who spends the time to make sure that we have another generation of comic book readers.”

Scary Godmother came about during the hard times of the post-bust 1990s comic book industry.

“Scary Godmother was one of those perfect storm situations,” Jill remembers. “It was right after the big comic implosion in the mid ‘90s. I had been happily jumping from story arc to story arc, because that’s how writers liked to work with artists. No one was exclusive to anything and people weren’t signing big contracts for projects. I think Sandman set the precedent where writers went ‘I want to work with so-and-so because I have a three issue story I think they would be perfect for, and I also want to work with this person and that person.’ I know some of my friends were like ‘I was offered a contract on this title permanently, but right now I’m having too much fun working on a lot of things.’ I was the same way and, because I had work, I knew what would come afterwards.

“Then the big bust happened, and it was scary. There weren’t as many titles, and comic book stores and publishers were going out of business. Anybody that had been offered a regular title called that editor and said ‘Is that offer still good?’ Everybody jumped on it. I finished what I was working on, and went to look for more work and couldn’t find any. There was a period of time where I was scrambling and doing advertising work, gaming cards, a pin-up here and there, but nothing really steady.

“So I had time to draw for fun, and it was also the time that my sister-in-law was pregnant and I was going to become an auntie for the first time. I loved the idea of becoming a godmother. I didn’t realize that godmother was a religious thing, and thought it was just a guardian, so if there was a terrible and horrible accident, you’d be in charge of taking care of the child. I thought that was an amazing honor. I was lobbying very hard to become the godmother of what would become my first niece, Hannah, but at the time I was still dressing in all black. I was never a Goth by any huge stretch of the imagination, but a redhead looks pretty good wearing all-black all the time, and I love a motorcycle jacket and have been wearing one of those since I was sixteen years old, and had this giant hair. I was thinking to myself, standing in the back of the Catholic Church, with my giant big shoes, and my black motorcycle jacket and big hair, that I was a scary godmother.

“Literally, when I said those two words together, the proverbial light bulb went off. I saw this picture in my head of a witch with little bat wings, a black tutu, and little black eyes. And she was teeny tiny, like a Tinkerbell. I immediately sketched her out, and once I sketched her, I said ‘Oh, cool, I’ll make a book for the baby when the baby’s born! I’ll paint it and staple the pages together, and it’ll be a Halloween book, and a personal picture book for the baby.’”

That little sketch of this Scary Godmother soon took on a life—and a world—of her own.

“When I started writing it, Scary Godmother had friends right away, and things started writing themselves. I went ‘This is the story, the things I haven’t had for so long. People have been telling me to do my own thing, well this is my own thing.’ I’d actually gotten more than just a sketch and I decided that, instead of making a book by hand for the baby, I’d try to get the real book made and went looking for a publisher. It was more difficult than I thought. I went outside the comic book community and it was very difficult to get seen if you were without an agent. I’m very impatient and did not want to go through this process all over again.”

Scary Godmother soon made the rounds of comic book publishers, as Jill was anxious to find a home for her pet project.

“I submitted it to pretty much everyone I’d worked for, but they didn’t know what to do with it. I got rejection letters and calls. Robb Horan from Sirius Entertainment had seen me at conventions and asked me what this thing was that I’d had around. I showed it to him, and he’s the only person who immediately said ‘I’ll publish that.’

“I was like ‘Really?’

“‘Yeah, what do you want to do with it?’

“‘I really want it to be a hardcover book, like a children’s book, but also like a comic.’”

The first Scary Godmother story follows alittle girl, Hannah, on an adventurous Halloween spent with her conniving older cousin Jimmy, where she’s tricked into entering an apparently haunted house alone.

It just turns out that the monsters who live in this house, including Hannah’s Scary Godmother (who just happens to look like Jill Thompson, distinctive red hair and all), help Hannah turn the tables on her mean cousin.

Scary Godmother is a hybrid of a storybook and comic book, told in lavishly painted illustrations. Jill continued to make Scary Godmother in both storybook and comic book form, even picking up two computer-generated television Halloween specials and a stage play. During the development stages of the first special, Jill gained some valuable encouragement from a fellow Chicago-ian, painter Alex Ross.

“When I was working on the Scary Godmother cartoon, for some reason I was trying to sculpt maquettes for them,” Jill says. “They’d sent me maquettes and they weren’t right; I’m one of those people who will go ‘Okay, go off and do this thing, but if you ask me to be involved, I will give you as much involvement as you want.’ They had sent me this maquette, and I went ‘Hannah’s not right, and they’re off. The face looks goofy, and no one understands the planes of a face. It’s a really cartoony drawing, so it should be super easy.’

“Then Alex goes ‘Just sculpt it for them…It’s easy, you can do it. You went to the same school. I didn’t know how to sculpt until I sculpted that bust of my father [from Alex’s comic book Kingdom Come]. They needed something because the sculptor was having a problem, so I went out and got some clay and just sculpted it for them. Then they ended up using that one.’

“‘So you just went out that first day, and got some clay, and sculpted it?’

“‘Yeah, it was no big deal. You’ll be able to do it.’

“Part of me was going ‘Thanks for believing that I can,’” Jill says. “I went out and got some stuff, and I ended up doing it. I sculpted it and got what I wanted—the hair did fall off in transit—but it gave them a better idea of what I was looking for. Of course, mine wasn’t realistic, but three-dimensional based on my own drawing. I loved that he believed I could do that, with no doubt in his mind. I guess he knows if there’s something he needs to do, he can probably do it himself. There’s no one else to interpret it and get it out for people to see, so he just does it, perfect every time.”

“I love watercolor. Now it’s much quicker for me, and is also a way for me to control everything. If I paint it, I control the mood and I don’t hand my pencils off to somebody else…Watercolor is a way for me to fully bring to you what I see in my head.”

Jill’s distinctive watercolor style is on show with Beasts of Burden, her latest collaboration with writer Evan Dorkin. Burden follows the adventures of a group of dogs (plus one cat) as they defend their hometown from supernatural menaces of all shapes and sizes. It marries the cuteness of Thompson’s watercolor animals with Dorkin’s often frightening and emotionally jarring scripts.

“I know that there are things in there that are brutal for him to write, and it’s not like it doesn’t affect him,” Jill says of Evan. “He’s written things and then gone ‘I have to go hug my daughter, because I wrote every parent’s fear into this issue.’

“There have been times, while working on that book, specifically the story ‘A Dog and his Boy.’ I wept openly while illustrating that book. There was one scene that I asked to have extra pages to make longer, because I thought that it was so intense, and so much to me what the whole issue is about. I said ‘I need to make people cry, and I can. I just need a little more.’”

Beasts of Burden even enjoyed a one-shot with Mike Mignola’s monstrous monster fighter, Hellboy, further testimony to Dorkin’s thoughtfulness as a writer—tied into his background as a cartoonist.

“Evan understood that at the time, and he knows, because I mentioned that having taller dogs talking to smaller animals, you have to understand if you have lots of guys in the panel it gets a little tricky. Evan’s an artist, too, and I think all artists write what they can draw. I don’t think there’s anything Evan’s written for me that he wouldn’t be able to accomplish for himself.”

See more of Jill Thompson, as well as 50 other top creators in Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, coming in May from powerHouse Books and available for pre-order now.

Irving & Kushner's LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS: The Origins of American Comics coming May 2012

2012-01-24T13:02:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

powerHouse Books is pleased to announce the May 2012 release of

LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS:

The Origins of American Comics

Photographs by Seth Kushner

Text and interviews by Christopher Irving

Design by Eric Skillman

Some are mild mannered geeks, others mad geniuses or street-smart city dwellers driven to action. These are the men and women behind the masks and tights of America's most beloved superheroes. But these aren't the stories of the heroes' hidden alter egos or secret identities...these are the stories of their creators! Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics gives you the truth about the history of the American comic book—straight from the revolutionary artists and writers behind them.

From the founders of the popular comics website Graphic NYC—writer Christopher Irving and photographer Seth Kushner—comes the firsthand accounts of the comic book's story, from its birth in the late 1930s to its current renaissance on movie screens and digital readers everywhere. Kushner's evocative photography captures the subjects that Irving profiles in a hard-hitting narrative style derived from personal interviews with the legends of the art, all of which is accompanied by examples of their work in the form of original art, sketches, and final panels and covers. The creators profiled include Captain America creator Joe Simon, Marvel guru Stan Lee, Mad magazine's fold-out artist Al Jaffee, visionary illustrator Neal Adams (Batman), underground paragon Art Spiegelman (Maus), X-Men writer Chris Claremont, artist/writer/director Frank Miller (Sin City, 300), comic analyst Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), American Splendor's Harvey Pekar, painter Alex Ross (Kingdom Come), multitalented artist and designer Chris Ware (Acme Novelty Library), artist Jill Thompson (Sandman), and more.

Leaping Tall Buildings, like comics themselves, uses both words and images to tell the true story of the comic's birth and evolution in America. It is a comprehensive look at the medium unlike any other ever compiled covering high and low art, mass market work and niche innovations. It is the story of an art form and an insider's look at the creative process of the artists who bring our heroes to life.

For a preview of the book please visit: http://www.powerHouseBooks.com/leapingtallbuildingspreview.pdf

Christopher Irving is a pop culture historian with a concentration in the American comic book. A veteran of comics history and journalism magazines like Comics Buyers Guide and multiple Eisner Award-winning Comic Book Artist (where he served as Associate Editor), Irving combines new journalism with comics history to create personality essays on comic book creators. Leaping Tall Buildings is Irving's fifth book on comic books. Irving currently edits digital comics magazine The Drawn Word. www.thedrawnword.com

Seth Kushner's portrait photography has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, L'Uomo Vogue, The New Yorker and others. He was chosen by Photo District News magazine as one of their 30 under 30 in 1999 and is a two-time winner of their Photo Annual Competition. Seth's first book, The Brooklynites, (with Anthony LaSala) was published by powerHouse Books in 2007. Currently, Seth is working on CulturePOP Photocomix, and profiling real-life characters on ACT-I-VATE.com and WelcomeToTripCity.com. Seth resides in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York with his wife, son and way too many cameras and comics. www.SethKushner.com

Eric Skillman is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer, art director, and writer best known for his work with The Criterion Collection and his design blog Cozy Lummox. ericskillman.blogspot.com

Comics / Graphic Arts / Non-Fiction
Hardcover, 8 x 10 inches, 240 pages, 50 full-color photographs and 80 comic panels
ISBN: 978-1-57687-591-9, $35.00Diamond Item# DEC111299 LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS HC

For a preview of the book please visit:
http://www.powerHouseBooks.com/leapingtallbuildingspreview.pdf

High-res scans to your specification are available upon request; scanning from the book or lifting images from the mechanical file are strictly prohibited. Mandatory credit line: From Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics photographs by Seth Kushner, text and interviews by Christopher Irving, published by powerHouse Books.

For more information, please contact Nina Ventura, Publicist

powerHouse Books, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tel: 212-604-9074 x118, Fax: 212-366-5247, email: nina@powerHouseBooks.com

Irving to launch The Drawn Word in March!

2012-01-21T21:44:00.002-05:00

Coming out in March 2012 through Graphicly is The Drawn Word, Christopher Irving's new quarterly digital comics magazine. With contributions from past GNYC writers Jared Gniewek and Ben Granoff, DW also features some new faces, in the magazine Irving's been jonesing to do for about a decade.

While the 100 page magazine doesn't go on sale for another couple of months, you can check out a preview at the new site here.

Paul Levitz: The History of the Past and Future

2012-01-04T14:13:00.000-05:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

“Look, I had one of the great jobs on the planet, and I enjoyed it thoroughly,” Paul Levitz leans back in an armchair. His office’s view of New York is panoramic behind him. “I wish all well to the people who have taken over the different pieces of the responsibility. I hope they have as much fun as I did, last as long if not longer. Try to leave the thing in a better shape then when you find it, and that’s what I tried to do. I generally think I pulled it off.”

Levitz has had an eventful and unique career: starting in the ‘70s as a fan-turned-professional, he rose in the ranks of DC Comics from Assistant Editor to President & Publisher, heralding and championing formats such as the graphic novel, pushing for creator’s rights while simultaneously going to bat for the founding contributors to DC’s history, and working to further an awareness of both DC Comics and the comic book industry itself.

Levitz hasn’t just seen the history, but also lived it.

Just recently, he authored the fine coffee table art book by publisher Taschen: 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking. Clocking in at an impressive fourteen pounds, 75 Years is proof that history is pretty heavy stuff—literally and figuratively. 75 Years is the definitive history of DC, as told by Levitz in a combination of informative essays, massive fold-out timelines (that also include the high points of cultural and world events, providing even more context to the history), and large art reproductions. A copy sits on the coffee table in his office, taking up most of the surface.

Despite his youthful appearance, even more so after shaving off his trademark moustache (Levitz jokes that it left him to go to college), Levitz has seen half of that history first-hand. But after near forty years at DC, he’s earned the chance to step down from his responsibilities as Publisher and return to his roots as a writer. Levitz is proof that you can go home again, as he returns as writer of Legion of Super-Heroes and the newly-reinstated Adventure Comics, once more directing some of the characters that defined his writing career.

“Parts of it are absolutely wonderful,” Paul says of his return to a writing career. “It’s great to have a good portion of the audience really welcoming me back into the game and not saying [puts on silly voice] ‘That’s nice, it’s the old timers’ day! Now can we see the real players?’ There’s a lot of adjustment to the lifestyle and transition in my life, so I’m still getting used to all of that and still thinking about the other kinds of things I want to write besides the comics, as those opportunities start opening up. The reception to the Taschen book was wonderful, and a terrific way to start my career. It’s fun to be back with the Legion of Super-Heroes and writing my old friends.”

The Legion premiered in the pages of Adventure Comics in 1958, back when the title starred Superboy, as the Boy of Steel’s time-traveling pals from the future. They eventually took Adventure over, and were shepherded by talents such as a young Jim Shooter and Cary Bates. Levitz first took the creative reins of the future superhero team for a brief stint from 1976 to 1978, and soon returned to writing them for most of the 1980s. Legion benefits from a devout fan base but, due to the constant rebooting of DC Comics continuity, has been restarted itself on a handful of occasions to better mesh with the new “present” of the DC books.

“The blessing and the curse of the book is the fact that you’re in the future and you can do so many different things,” Levitz reveals. “That’s part of what makes it magic, because you have the ability to create and destroy whole worlds. It also creates a wonderful temptation to create and destroy whole worlds and go off in different directions.

“The complexity and history, even before all of the reboots, was always one of the things that scared some of the readers off. I guess, along the way, there were significant efforts to find a more ‘modern way’ of treating it. There was some fun stuff done along the way, and some stuff that made me shudder, but that’s the way it is with everything.”

Levitz’s current stint on Legion and Adventure combines the look and old continuity of the classic versions of the characters with the quicker pacing of a 21^st century superhero comic. It has that rare success in superhero comics today, where each issue works as individual and accessible yet also functions as part of a greater whole.

“I certainly try to set a balance between taking advantage of the serial form and dynamic of that, and hopefully having it make sense when it’s all collected. The audience is entirely different, obviously, both in size, age, and personality from when I last did the series.”

Levitz notes continuity as one of the expected challenges in long-running contemporary comics; luckily, it’s one that he’s old hat at juggling. With its future setting and large cast, Legion of Super-Heroes is historically one of the more continuity-laden superhero comics.

“When I started editing Batman in the late ‘70s, I sat down and reread the run of all the Batman books to make my notes and figure out what I was going to do,” Paul recalls. “It was several days or weeks’ worth of work, but it was doable and your head didn’t explode. I don’t think it’s physically possible now, with another three decades of material that have accumulated, and the amount of publications that have come up in between.

“Comics benefit from these rich loads of mythology that are built up around each of these characters, but you have to make choices about how you’re going to manage that process. Each editor, each writer, and each line have made different choices over time, but it’s very hard to create a successful comic book universe from scratch today, because they don’t feel deep enough by comparison. It’s equally hard to manage these mother lodes of history without making it something that’s challenging to get yourself into.”

Paul Levitz came into comics as part of the wave of fandom entering the industry’s ranks from around the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s. An entire generation of professionals, such as Marvel editor/writer Roy Thomas, writer and Editor E. Nelson Bridwell, and writer Marv Wolfman, rose from their modest fan magazine origins to stake their positions as the next breed of comics professionals. Levitz was no exception, entering at age 14 with his and friend Paul Kupperberg’s fan magazine Etcetera in 1971; Levitz also inherited the first comic book news fanzine, The Comic Reader (as well as its existing subscription base), and was soon making the circuit as a newshound for the comic book industry. It provided his entry point into DC Comics.

“I came in with that and got to know everyone in the field,” Paul remembers. “Then Joe Orlando invited me to do his letters pages, and that was my first professional work. I also did some of the DC Bullpen pages at the time—Direct Currents and Amazing World of DC Comics.

“I started as Joe’s assistant editor for the summer, and the guy I was filling in for never came back (I was not responsible),” he adds on, jokingly. “After a while of doing it, I said ‘Okay, I’m beginning to understand things from doing rewrite work and copyediting work, as well as watching Joe do it. I think I can do this.’

“I started to do a few mystery stories, some Aquaman for Adventure Comics, several issues of Phantom Stranger, and an original series, Stalker, with Steve Ditko and Wally Wood. I was outrageously lucky to work with them at that young age with my limited talent.”

By the 1970s, artist Steve Ditko had created Spider-Man with Stan Lee, and also contributed heavily to smaller publisher Charlton, where he’d developed superheroes like Captain Atom and the Blue Beetle. Wood was a legend from the EC Comics days, having mostly drawn for publisher William Gaines’s science-fiction line, but also spearheading short-lived superhero book T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower, and establishing the Daredevil comic book for Marvel. The young Levitz was in illustrious company early on in the game, in 1975—only three years into his blossoming career in comic books.

While Stalker only lasted four issues, it married Ditko’s elongated and expressive figures with Wood’s fine inking; the looseness of the pencils were polished in by Wood’s trademark sense of visual precision. It was far from the last time that Levitz would collaborate with the legendary creator.

“I did about twenty stories with Steve over the years—the Stalker series, ‘Starman,’ a project for Mike Friedrich’s Imagine in the early independent world—and we always played well together,” Levitz says of his old collaborator. “He’s a great storyteller, very crisp and clean, and extraordinarily professional. He prefers to let his work do the talking, so he’s not much of an interview subject. He’s a very nice man.”

“The whole world of comics was very small,” Levitz says of the tumultuous decade of the ‘70s. “There were about two hundred people in the United States making comics, and they were almost all here in New York. Everybody knew everybody and everybody played cards with everybody, or volleyball or whatever your thing was. It was a very closed world. There was no glamor; there was no money in it, and the older generation was literally fading out as we watched.

“[Howard] Chaykin has a great line: we came in at the end of the beginning. We got to know the people who had created the business, but we had a lot of room to create change because the seats were becoming open so rapidly.”

Levitz learned from some of the best, while not only working alongside them in an editorial capacity, but also continuing to grow as a writer while playing in the sandbox of the DCU. His writing skills were honed on nothing less than writing Justice Society of America—DC’s original superhero team from the 1940s, who then lived on a parallel Earth—and creating Batman and Catwoman’s daughter, The Huntress, in 1977. Two years later, Levitz killed off the Golden Age Batman, and wrote in the 1950s disappearance of the JSA, blaming it on a McCarthy-like Senator’s vendetta against the masked heroes. That latter plot point would remain a firm part of the characters’ history, through all iterations of the DC Comics—from the revamped version of the JSA in the 1980s, to creator Darwyn Cooke’s magnum opus comic book DC: The New Frontier in 2004.

In short, Levitz was able to write his childhood heroes while working alongside many of his creative ones at DC.

Comics had survived the censorship witch hunts of the 1950s and a downsizing of what was once a much larger industry. The 1940s generation of cartoonists were slowly giving way to this next generation, the fans who communicated through mimeographed magazines and letter columns, who studied Superman as intensely as a Rhodes Scholar would Shakespeare, and who were ready to make their own mark on their beloved comic books. But there were still people in the business who viewed comics as a stepping stone to lead them to other things.

“Nobody could be sure that it would be around that long,” Levitz admits. “It was very fragile: the newsstand was not a healthy system by that point, and that had the good effect that you could take some chances and play around and not worry too much, because it wasn’t going to sell that well no matter what you did. It had the disadvantage that most of the really good creative people had their eye on the door and said ‘I’m going to do this just as long as I can use it as a launching pad to go on with what my real life’s going to be. I’m going to write Laugh-In, or something like that.’ Some friends of mine aspired to it.”

Where the creative were seen as “interchangeable” in those days, it was more than made up for with some of the more legendary and outstanding editors in comics history. Artist Carmine Infantino had ascended to Art Director in 1965, and then Editorial Director shortly after. Carmine pushed for artists to draw at 150% of page size, instead of 200%, which was a cost-saving measure that also turned into a new mode of visual experimentation. At that time, DC also started to bring in artists as editors, such as Dick Giordano from Charlton Comics, Orlando, and DC mainstay Joe Kubert. Infantino also started editors on freelance, such as Mike Sekowsky. Creator credits even started to appear inside of the DC Comics in 1965; it was one of the ways writers and artists started to go from being “interchangeable” to becoming appreciated.

“You might have an individual editor who either worked really well with creative people because of his natural respect for them—a guy like Julie Schwartz is certainly the paradigm of that—and developed a following around that,” Levitz elaborates. “He worked with the same creators month in and month out, because those were his guys and did the kind of stories he liked.

“Or you might have an editor who was a creator, like Joe Orlando or Dick Giordano who, as artists and creative people had passion for the media, and even if it didn’t necessarily matter for the bottom line, they wanted to do the best job they could. I’m using examples from DC because those are the people I worked with as a kid, but there are certainly people with the same feelings at many of the other handful of companies that existed.

“The basic business structure was not very creator-friendly: pay was low, the working conditions were mediocre, and it was really a question of a creator’s relationship with a specific editor or assistant that enabled them to be able to do good work.”

It was Infantino who gave DC more of a fighting chance against Marvel Comics, pushing for a visual sophistication across the company lines. He brought Jack Kirby in from Marvel Comics to create the ambitious Fourth World books, the first ever inter-connected comic book titles. He encouraged and brought in diverse new talent such as Walter Simonson to give DC a youthful shot in the arm, and encouraged talent to meet in the DC Coffee Room, which became the hang-out of up-and-coming creators. Infantino rose even further to Publisher in 1971, and then President shortly after.

“When Carmine became a part of DC management—initially as Art Director responsible for the covers, and then Editorial Director and Publisher and President, eventually—the company had been very static for a very long time, and had been losing ground for four or five years in the marketplace,” Levitz says. “So he was encouraged to change things and he brought in a lot of talent that was very unlike DC culturally, at that point, editors like Joe Kubert who was sitting behind an editor’s desk for the first time and Mike Sekowsky was given a shot editing his own work. The whole idea of artists as editors was a pretty radical idea for DC at that moment. The earliest DC editors included some wonderfully talented cartoonists, but it had been a long time since artists were driving any of the DC book. It was more of a writers’ house at that point.

“He launched a lot of new projects, and a lot of strange and experimental forms with things like Anthro. He went off in a lot of odd directions with that. The business model at the time was fairly broken, so few of those things were triumphant successes. Probably the most commercial success he had was building the mystery comics with Joe, Dick, and Murray Boltinoff (the three editors who drove those). That line became the most commercially important stuff during his run; as the superheroes softened, those became a larger part of DC’s business model.

“He did a number of things that helped talent and was in charge when DC started to return original art to artists; he was the first to start paying reprint fees in the business. That was a major issue, because so many things were being reprinted and artists and writers were afraid that publishers were just going to switch to just all reprint material as a cost-saving thing. They weren’t great or easy years to run a comic company.”

Amongst the uncertain terrain of the 1970s comic book industry, Carmine Infantino made an indelible mark on the company, and was the spark that ignited further change beyond his departure in 1976. Carmine was replaced with production man Sol Harrison as President, while a bold choice was made for the new Publisher of DC Comics: 28 year old Jenette Kahn, who put things in motion that would even further improve conditions for creators at DC Comics and reach out to affect the entire industry.

“Jenette, not just for DC but for the whole industry, was one of the first outsiders to land in the field, along with Jim Galton, who’d landed at Marvel at about the same time,” Levitz observes. “Both of them were in very different ways, breathes of fresh air. The thing that was the most radical about Jenette is that she was a fundamental believer in creativity. She had created magazines, fought with publishers over her deal for creating those magazines, she had hung with people like Andy Warhol in the artistic community, and she had a great belief that the essence of any creative business is its creativity.”

Kahn came in from a youth magazine background, and is responsible for officially changing National Periodical Publications to DC Comics. She also tapped legendary designer Milton Glaser for the new DC logo: a slanted “DC” set in a circle bordered with stars, known as the “DC Bullet;” it would remain the company brand for almost three decades.

“As soon as she got there she saw the shape our field was in, which was not our glory days, and she wanted to find ways to change that, both by taking more creative chances with the material itself and the form, and creating a better set of economic deals with the talent that would give them more incentive to do the work for comics. The comic book business, at that point, had declined a bit more towards that classic Russian joke: ‘If they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,’ and you had many creators in the field who had drawn little compromised boxes around their lives: ‘Well, I’ll write the character, but I won’t add any new villains, because I’m not making enough money to make that worthwhile.’

“She wanted to find ways around that, and a lot of the work we did over the next batch of years was to create things like the first written contracts for the field for all the contributors, the first royalty plan, and things that would hopefully align the creative talent with the publishing business better, and let everyone live together.”

Jenette Kahn came to DC at an ideal time: Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, had started a crusade to regain credit and compensation from DC Comics and their parent company, Warner Communications, before the release of the big-budget Superman movie. Jerry was working as an underpaid postal clerk in California, while Joe was practically destitute, his vision having failed him years before. In a settlement that came about from a combination of industry support for Jerry and Joe, as well as media attention, Warner established a policy of regularly crediting the pair as Superman's creators, and also granted them $20,000 a year for life pensions.

“I can’t speak for the whole company,” Levitz states. “There were many different reactions to that. Certainly there were a lot of people who were sympathetic to the fact that these were the creators of one of the great properties, and they weren’t living well. Regardless of what the legal situation was, I don’t think anyone felt that was the way the story should end. A lot of people were very happy when it did work out.”

Jerry was a guest of honor at a special DC Comics convention held from February 27 to 29, 1976. Paul was in charge of the panels, and apparently put on a hell of a show: other guests included Batman co-creator Bob Kane, Scribbly cartoonist and legendary editor Shelly Mayer, and editor Jack Schiff.

“Both were very nice old men. Jerry was more talkative and Joe was very quiet by that point,” Levitz recalls. “We had many, many years of friendship.”

Levitz would remain a trusted friend to both men until Joe’s death in 1992 and Jerry’s death four years later. The various Superman maquettes assembled over his uncluttered and orderly office desk aren’t just testimony to his love of Superman—but to his love for the Man of Steel’s beloved creators themselves.

“In 1978, we were coming to one of those inflection points where it was a question of costs being up and sales were mediocre. What was going to be the next price point for comics?” Levitz says. The direct market of comic book specialty stores was still growing, and comics were primarily still dependent on newsstand sales, which involved returns of unsold books. “DC decided that the right next move would be, instead of going from 35 cents to 40 cents for the standard 32-pager, let’s jump up to 50 cents for a 40-page comic. We figured out how to do that on the presses, which were fairly radical for that moment, and then add eight pages of content, very much like the stuff recently done with the $3.99 books. We got those books out.

“There were a bunch of new books coming out in that period, and then the sales figures began to dribble in from the previous winter and they were hideous. It was one of the worst winters the U.S. had had for a while. Newsstands took a long time to report and direct sales were small enough to be largely irrelevant at that point and the budgets went to hell. Management was looking at the numbers and said ‘Look, you’re bleeding all over the place. What’s the least risky way you can run DC?’

“We ran around in circles and figured out how many titles should be cut, and the 40 cent 32-page book was slightly less risky than the 50 cent one, and the line got trimmed dramatically. Because the increased pages had been marketed as the ‘DC Explosion,’ the in-joke became that it was the DC Implosion. [It was] not a very fun summer.”

The DC Implosion was yet another sign of the growing pains felt by the comic book industry of the ‘70s, as the newsstand was failing as a distribution system. It took the vision of Phil Seuling, a comic book fan and dealer, to approach DC Comics directly with a new distribution model—via his own Seagate Distributing, he would purchase comics directly from DC at a discount for resell to comic book stores. This direct market approach came without the option of returning unsold stock, and reduced the sales risk to the publishers. Unfortunately for the DC Implosion, though, the approach that would boost the industry was still in its infancy. However, three years after the Implosion, in 1981, DC experienced their first growth since ’77, thanks to the direct market and increase of comic book stores.

“We would have disappeared if we had relied on the newsstand, with my best math having the industry end around ’84 if the comic shop world hadn’t evolved,” Levitz notes. “There might have been a residual reprint business, but there wouldn’t have been any meaningful business after that. It provided a need to find a new solution, and mercifully the comic shops existed and with some encouragement and support, were able to grow into that solution for the next generation of the field.”

1982 saw one of the high points of Levitz’s run on Legion of Super-Heroes. His “Great Darkness Saga” ran through five issues (#290-#294) and pitted the Legion against an unknown and all-powerful foe. When the revelation of Jack Kirby villain Darkseid is made in the penultimate issue, it instantly folds Legion into the bigger picture of the DC Universe’s history. “Great Darkness” made the very clear statement that the Legion of Super-Heroes were not only part of the same world as Jack Kirby’s operatic Fourth World books, but in defeating Darkseid, the heroes were on par with the present day DC Comics heroes. It also underscored the importance of the New Gods characters, providing more gravity to the prophecies regarding Darkseid’s fate as foretold in The New Gods. Two years later, Kirby would attempt at the final word on The New Gods with his Hunger Dogs graphic novel.

It was clear that Levitz’s Legion was as woven into the tapestry of the DC Universe as much as the other titles, with another link to the continuity’s relative past beyond the inclusion of time-travelling heroes Superboy or Supergirl on the team roster. “Great Darkness” was a precursor to the multi-part story arcs that have been the norm in monthly comics for over a decade, with each issue leading into one another in an organic fashion. In many ways, it was to Legion of Super-Heroes that “The Dark Phoenix Saga” was to X-Men; like the X-Men story, it was the first time its publisher produced an extra-length issue simply because a story required it for its conclusion.

“By the time I was writing the Legion the second time, in the ‘80s and the direct sales market was beginning to emerge, I was making the assumption that a lot of my audience was a bit older and more sophisticated and could follow a storyline that went on,” Levitz reflects. “So many of the storylines continued over a significant period of time and they weren’t structured to come out as trade paperbacks, because we didn’t have any trade paperbacks in those days. It’s a little weird to read ‘Great Darkness’ now in a collected edition, and ‘the surprises ain’t surprises.’

“I think it’s good to balance both elements: you want to give a good solid bite every time someone comes to the sandwich, and you want it to add up to something that’s more than the sum of parts when it comes together.”

“The Great Darkness Saga” was recently reissued in a deluxe hardcover and, despite Levitz’s view of it as a weird experience; it reads more fluidly than most early ‘80s comic books, with less expository dialogue or heavy captions that ran so prevalent back then, a trend that would continue with the launching of the 1984 series. The new Legion title was aimed at the Direct Market (with the original redubbed Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes for the newsstand), at a higher price point and with higher quality paper stock. Levitz’s aforementioned assumption towards a more mature audience is reflected in his storytelling, with less captioning and punchier dialogue; the cast seemed smaller, as well, allowing Levitz to focus on fewer Legionnaires with more energy spent towards characterization. The Legion, thanks to the direct market, seems to have grown up a bit more.

“The DC Universe had the advantage of being at the beginning, when there hadn’t been anything done before, so that you could create something that wasn’t designed as a universe but just became a rich world that slowly got knitted together. Some very talented people have tried to do that from scratch: it ain’t so easy.”

The landscape of the DC Universe was changing as much as that of the industry: DC celebrated their fiftieth anniversary by publishing Crisis on Infinite Earths, a twelve-issue “maxi series” that resulted in a complete reboot of DC continuity. From 1986 on, the mainstream DC superheroes long continuity, with alternate Earths and decades of backstory, was streamlined for a new audience.

Meanwhile, the rest of DC continued to change, thanks in part to the direct market’s allowance for more mature comic books, the new regime’s opportunities for creators to maintain ownership of their work and to receive better royalties, and Kahn and Levitz’s embracing new formats. An unpublished World of Krypton storyline from an Implosion-killed Showcase comic book became the first miniseries, modeled after successful TV event Roots, in 1979; Levitz followed it up with The Untold Legend of the Batman, a retelling of Batman’s origin that featured the first DC work for artist John Byrne and was conceived for the new miniseries format. 1981 saw a Madame Xanadu one-shot comic book by writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers, published without the Comics Code and sold to the direct market.

Kahn’s ultimate creative coup was in luring cartoonist Frank Miller over from Marvel Comics, where he’d made a mark with his noted run on Daredevil, to produce his own creation, Ronin, in 1983. He followed that up with the post-modernist Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1986, a noir tale on an aging Batman’s return to crimefighting in a hypothetical future. Dark Knight (soon redubbed The Dark Knight Returns) also became DC’s first success as a collected trade paperback, a harbinger of formats to come.

Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons pitched a finite series to then-Managing Editor Dick Giordano, titled Who Killed the Peacemaker?, placing a group of superheroes DC had just inherited from the defunct comic book company Charlton. Giordano, Levitz, and Kahn prompted the British creators to do their own archetypal characters, and the pivotal Watchmen was born—grabbing a coveted Hugo award and becoming a successful trade paperback for years to come.

“The better opportunity for it seemed to be in doing it as an original, because that way the characters could wrap at the end of it, which is what Alan and Dave wanted to do,” Levitz recalls. “They could also get a better financial deal because they’d be dealing with something that was a more original piece of property.”

Both Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns brought newfound media attention to comics, and inspired a movement towards more adult-themed superhero comics. Those two books alone have been noted for changing the course of the superhero, sparking a post-modernist slant on the tiring men and women in tights genre. It was no longer taken for granted that superheroes could do no wrong, as they were seen struggling with their inner demons as much as any supervillians.

“They came out at a first moment when, effectively, the creative community was waking up and these were two of the first great projects,” Levitz says of Watchmen and Dark Knight. “Now you sit there and you can rack this year’s graphic novels and find ten things people did that take wonderful chances going into different directions to choose between. We had a long period where there weren’t many people taking chances.

“These were clearly brilliant talents in our field at the right moments in their career. To steal from your title, they decided to ‘leap the tall building.’ The ambition of the work, the level of energy and skill they put in it set it apart, not just from what was being done that year, but also from what was being done in the previous twenty.”

By the time Levitz concluded his stint on Legion of Super-Heroes with #63 in 1989 (with artist and co-plotter Keith Giffen), he had spent seven consecutive years crafting DC’s future, and around twelve total. Levitz’s final issue featured a universe on the edge of chaos, a chaos that would manifest itself in succeeding team Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum’s “Five Years Later” arc. The future of their run was no longer a bright and optimistic place, but a dark one torn by the ravages of war; it was like tonally jumping from Star Trek to The Empire Strikes Back.

Paul Levitz left to spend more time with his family, and would only sporadically write comics for the next two decades. Legion would be rebooted twice in the time he was away, but would be returned back to the original continuity in time for his 2009 return to his beloved characters.

The back cover of that issue of Levitz’s final 20^th century issue of Legion was another sign of things yet to come: an advertisement for the long in development Tim Burton’s upcoming Batman film, a runaway blockbuster success, partially inspired by Miller’s take on the character, that not only brought more eyes to DC Comics, but to the comic book industry in general. It was lightning in a bottle, delivering an unexpectedly dark take on a character that had been thought of in terms of the ‘60s camp version played by Adam West.

“I think there was a hope that it would do some good, but nothing like what ultimately happened,” Levitz admits. “The business about doubled as a result. It was a combination of things: the movie was such a radical departure from what had been done adapting comics; there was little merchandising going into it, because the movie had been going into development for so long that the usual partners we had got tired of hearing ‘We’ve got a Batman movie coming out.’

“If somebody saw the movie and saw it and went ‘I didn’t realize comics were like that, or that even Batman was like that,’ they had to go to a comic shop. That had a terrific power that we’ve never seen equaled from any of the comic book films by any of the publishers.”

’89 also marked the Time/Warner merger, which garnered Jenette Kahn with a promotion to President and Editor-in-Chief, and earned Levitz the title Executive Vice-President and Publisher. DC continued to issue experimental books, from the Mature Readers Vertigo line to non-superhero imprint Paradox Press. When Levitz inherited the President title from Kahn upon her departure in 2002, he was in charge of a company drastically changed from the one he entered as a teenager, one that he helped craft through creator relationships, experimental formats, and a willingness to try new things.

In 2001, rival publisher Marvel Comics opted out of the Comics Code Association and employed their own rating system, which they maintain to this day. According to Levitz, the CMAA was more than a mere stamp emblem on every approved comic book, but did have its advantages:

“I don’t think the Code was enormously important to the field past whenever you want to count the recovery from the witch hunt of the 1950s, but it still had utility. The two things that the Code organization did, and that mattered (and utterly invisible to the reader), is that it was a legally effective way of sharing the costs of getting out all those wonderful spinner racks and waterfall racks. If you didn’t have the CMAA, it would have been extremely difficult or unlikely to continue the retail presence comics had in the newsstand all those years. That was very meaningful to the health of the business for a very long time. Another benefit that the Code seal itself had was that the guy who’s running the newsstand doesn’t know what he’s selling—he can’t know what he’s selling—so it provided a very simple form of saying ‘Here, this is okay to sell to a kid.’ Over the years we had talked about going to other forms of the rating system within the CMAA as far back as the mid-1980s, and argued it back and forth. Overall, it was always my feeling that we were better off in having more publishers working together to get comics out there than to have comics splintered.”

The complaints against the CMAA have traditionally been regarding any censorship within the comics themselves. According to Levitz, it was mostly in the early days of the Code that it was a major issue.

“There was really very little censorship (or however you want to describe it) out of the Code by when Len Darvin retired (maybe in the mid-‘70s),” Levitz notes. “He’s the last Code administrator who was empowered to do anything other than what the editorial teams of the different companies really want done. It was a very convenient form for the editorial and business teams of the publishing companies to say ‘This is going to be the standard of what we want to have as our boundaries of what we’re putting out there,’ but it’s not like there was any outside authority putting any pressure on the companies. It was just whatever could be agreed upon between the publishing companies.”

In January of this year, DC Comics and Archie both announced their departure from the Comics Code, part of the Comics and Magazine Association of America (CMAA). When asked his views on DC’s departure, Levitz answers with a smile: “Not my problem.”

Paul Levitz has seen the ups and downs of the comic book world for forty years, from both creative and marketing perspectives. While doom and gloom is a common forecast every time sales dip by a percentage, or cover prices go up a buck, Levitz doesn’t seem worried. Maybe it’s from his ground-level experience, or the optimism of the Legion of Super-Heroes’ future sticking with him past his keyboard—or maybe it’s a combination of both.

“People will want to tell stories using this medium. What form will they be published in, whether it’s digital, as books, or as periodicals? Who the hell knows? That’s going to continue to evolve and change and the form it’s in will continue to change in the kinds of stories you tell. It’s one of the world’s great forms of creativity. You think about it and there are so many pools of great creativity in the world that keep using this in one form or another.

“It will go on long past our time.”

RIP: Jerry Robinson

2011-12-08T07:31:00.001-05:00

Just got word from Batman movie producer Michael Uslan on Facebook that the great Batman artist and editorial cartoonist Jerry Robinson just passed away.

Jerry was not only a gentleman, but also tough as nails when called for: he advocated for creator's rights throughout the years, either in his work as head of his own cartoon syndicate, or in the interest of his friends Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

And that's only the start of Jerry's accomplishments, the tip of the iceberg when considering his contributions as a creator and historian.

You will be missed, Jerry.

Alex Ross: Making the Old Guard New

2011-11-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

Words: Christopher Irving
Pictures: Seth Kushner

“The best thing I love about making comics is that even when I complain about working for DC and Marvel, most of the things I do for them is what I’ve seen in my mind’s eye,” Alex Ross says. “I’ve been able to use their characters and make them match my own crude interpretations… and obviously much more important things that were absolute freedom in my eyes. My creative instincts and concepts have largely been honored by the deals I’ve gotten in comics, and independent publishers offer even more freedom. There’s absolute artistic fulfillment that I get from comic books. This is what I’ve wanted to do since I was four, and I don’t have regrets on the career path that I took.”

Ross is sitting in Miller’s Pub in his home city of Chicago. After getting over what a tall man Ross is, his impeccable politeness shines through, betraying his Mid-Western roots. Ross bears the distinction of being perhaps the first painter in comics to openly celebrate the superhero in his work, treating the long underwear set with the same attention as a Norman Rockwell. Because of that, Ross is unprecedented in an industry whose finer artists ignored the superhero, primarily for other genres.

“[There was] all the work Bill Sienkiewicz did, or all the work Jon Muth was doing,” Ross remembered his inspirations. “His twelve issues of Moonshadow were hitting around when I was a teenager. I was thinking I should paint comics like these guys did; it would be great!’ I didn’t have it as a firm direction so much as knowing that I just wanted to do comics. I wasn’t purely focused on being a painter early on. I was just an artist.

“When I was finishing art school, Dave McKean’s work hit me hardest of all. McKean was more relatable to me than Bill’s work was, because Bill was a little bit more avant-garde and Bill Peak exaggerated. McKean would make a thing like a thing, and a person look like the reference did. Black Orchid, in particular, made me think ‘Oh, my God, I want to make comics that look like that.’”

At nineteen, Ross landed his first comics gig, Terminator: Burning Earth for small publisher Now Comics in 1990. Now was one of the many publishers who cropped up as a result of the ‘90s boom that went burst a few years later. Burning Earth featured a female Terminator, and was a tie-in to the James Cameron movie from almost a decade earlier. For Ross, it was a case of biting off more than he could chew.

“When you think of Burning Earth, it was a year later (or within the same year) that Black Orchid was published,” Ross points out. “It was when I got my first job painting comics, then realizing ‘It’s not so easy to make your stuff look like Dave McKean.’ It was largely because of time constraints: I didn’t just have that comic job at the time.

“I had thankfully gotten a full-time job in advertising, so I was downtown with the Leo Burnett ad agency, doing storyboards. It was heaven for any illustrator to have a nine-to-five job. It’s unheard of these days, definitely. All I was doing is drawing every day. That’s like being asked to drive a horse and buggy, or something of that equivalent. Because of the nine-to-five thing, I was coming home after work every day and doing this book, which was the equivalent of twenty-two pages plus the cover a month. It didn’t sound like a lot to me at the outset, because I was nineteen and didn’t know better. I didn’t realize how that would bleed me dry, or that there was no time for all the delusions of wanting to take photo reference with models, and I didn’t have a photo file. I It would take years and years of accumulation of pictures to have something to fall back on.

“It was largely a standard comic book drawn out of the artist’s mind from his best understanding of life drawing. The painting part gave way to the materials I was using in storyboarding, like colored pencils and markers on paper, as well as switching in the second issue to working on entirely black paper to cut down on the amount of darkened rendering to render this dystopian future. Everything was all dark, so I was using colored pencil on black paper, and it was a far cry from whatever my greatest pretentions were in art school. The next three to four years of my career were to try and make up for the first thing I did.”

Like several of the smaller companies that sprouted up during the speculators’ craze of the late ‘80s through early ‘90s, Now left some of their talent high and dry, including Ross. Just like Terminator: Burning Earth was to Ross’s career, Now Comics was just a footnote to the history of comics. Terminator did serve its purpose, however, in indirectly taking Ross down a defining path for his painted artwork.

“I had spent my years in college trying to convince myself that I cared less about superheroes and more about art,” Alex admits. “I loved the comics art form (and I was not divorcing myself from that), but was trying to not be about the men in capes. It was sort of like ‘Hide your love away,’ to quote the song. I had produced a lot of artwork for class assignments that was trying to embrace different types of iconography; everything from religious iconography to knights and whatever kind of medieval influences.

“While working on the Terminator series, I did the trade paperback cover, which I claim to be inspired by the dream James Cameron had that he said gave him the entire movie’s premise, where he saw a metal skeleton emerging from flame. That’s what I painted, or color penciled on black paper, but while I was working I thought ‘I can render flame realistically, or at least more realistically than I’m used to seeing in comics.’ If you apply that to the Human Torch, it could really be something. I was inspired, like lots of old-time fans, in the original guy from when he was the lead hero of the entire company. I thought ‘If I can bring that to life, there’s a project there. Bringing him to life so he looks believable would be mind-blowing to the modern audience.’”

In its early days, Marvel Comics was known by a league of different names, but most popularly Timely Comics throughout the 1940s. Their first hero was The Human Torch, a human-like android whose body burst entirely into flame. He was reinvented in the 1960s as the brash teenage member of the Fantastic Four, but would spark Ross’ premiere comics work within a few short years.

“The real irony of my career, juxtaposed to the other comics painters that preceded me, is that (aside from some painted paperback covers from the ‘70s) they were largely not embracing the main entertainment in the art form,” Alex notes. “And I would help fulfill the most obvious commercial focus after all of the more avant-garde stuff was done first. Comics thrive through superheroes, but aside from painted covers of the Hulk, it was not where the artists were going when they did painted projects like Moonshadow or even Elektra: Assassin, who’s not really a superhero. The Daredevil graphic novel Love and War barely had him in it. It was this vacuum of the most obvious thing to focus in on, but there was also this unspoken ‘We don’t think it’s going to work’ feeling…

“There was this immense prejudice that was overwhelming both within the comics field towards realism in comics, as well as outside. Of course, now we live in a time that’s past that, and you see most all the covers published by Marvel have more realistic depictions of the characters. Times change, but back then I was one of those , probably one of millions, who thought ‘I’d like to see this more believable.’ And at least I was able to directly push through and make something happen.”

At the time, Marvel was using painted artwork on a licensed Hellraiser comic book with horror filmmaker Clive Barker. Ross didn’t see the point in spending all that energy and talent on someone else’s characters, and deemed to aim it at Marvel’s own superhero population. Wanting to go back to the roots of Marvel, Ross planned on revision Marvel Comics #1, which introduced the Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner in October, 1939. The pitch manifested itself as a 1990 twelve-page retelling of the Torch’s birth, fully painted and written by Ross. He pitched it the next year to his editorial contact, Kurt Busiek, at Marvel.

“He hired me to do a story for a comic that got cancelled before printing the story I was commissioned to do could get printed,” Alex recalls. “I thought of Kurt as being my Marvel contact, but he had gone freelance right after I worked for him. With his help, though, I got my samples over to Eclipse Comics, and in ’91, I did a short story for Eclipse for a Miracleman tie-in. It’s so weird: because Eclipse was publishing stuff with Clive Barker, they showed him my samples to try to engage him in getting me on one of the Books of Blood adaptations. Clive Barker called me up out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, I’d like you to work on this Hellraiser thing over at Marvel. I’m going to pass your samples on to the Marvel editor of that book,’ and that led that editor into saying ‘Hey, these “Marvel” samples: did we publish this?’ It led to the project, and I brought Kurt in again.

“So, basically, each year had a separate development for Marvels; it’s almost as if from the ages of 20 to 24, I was working on this project one way or another. I was doing artwork for it in 1990, a bit more in 1991, and between ’91 and ’92 was when we were working on the final pitch via notes from Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco. I quit my job mid-’92 to go full-time into comics. Each year I had a gig in comics, of one kind or another, so I am a 21-year veteran now.”

“Again, a feat nobody cares about,” Ross adds self-deprecatingly and with a laugh. “Everyone I know has been in the business a long damn time.”

With Busiek on board as the writer of the newly christened four-issue painted series Marvels, Ross painted the everyman’s view of the superhuman population of the Marvel Universe. The books started with the advent of the Human Torch through to the second World War and all of its accompanying heroes. In photographer Phil Sheldon, Busiek and Ross created an accessible, fallible, and believable proxy hero for the audience—an everyman who struggles with the constantly threatened and ever-changing world populated by god-like beings. Sheldon is there from the beginning, and Busiek and Ross pulled events straight from the Marvel comics themselves. Sheldon’s own skepticism and love-hate relationship with the Marvels, combined with Ross’s photorealistic art, keeps Marvels balanced on the fine line between accessibility and reverence. It was, perhaps, the most sincere and least pretentious post-modernist superhero comic.

In that first issue, Ross’ figures looked like they came straight out of an Edward Hopper painting—stiff and somewhat alien in places, but even more realistic in other. There seemed something almost posed about them, a quality that gave way to a naturalistic and softer look by the second issue, where he starts to look like the Alex Ross we know today, combining real people with iconic and classic versions of superheroes.

I want to be the guy that pushes us back to what that first thought was, because often that thought was superior to what it evolved into. As I say something like this, and it even applies to John Romita (who I adore) making Peter Parker a very handsome kid: but if he’s such a good-looking young man, what’s his problem? Where does his standard self-pitying behavior that defined him apply, when he looks as pretty as the popular kids who previously rejected him?

Ross grew up reading the comics of the ‘70s and 1980s, developing an affinity for superhero artist George Perez, whose trademark is in drawing crowd scenes with dozens (sometimes over one hundred) characters. In 1985, DC Comics published their first massive crossover comic book, where practically every character in their history appeared alongside one another. Titled Crisis on Infinite Earths, it set the stage for company-wide crossovers…good and bad.

“The Crisis on Infinite Earth series is one of my favorite books,” Alex says after noting his love of Perez’s art. “If there’s any one thing or period of my life where I loved comics the most, it was when I was fifteen and that series (along with the DC Who’s Who series) came out….You’re introduced to all of these great characters, but it was also a giant pea soup that included everything in their history to that point. That was an infectious thing that made artists like me want to live up to that goal. Of course, you can’t expect them to hand you that project: you have to craft it.”

Ross began crafting his “pea soup” project while working on Marvels, an epic story that featured all of DC Comics’ biggest characters. Prompted by a friend to set his new story in a hypothetical future, Ross instantly felt freed up to pursue the story he’d wanted to.

“The desire was to put it all into an environment where I was completely in charge of it, and where I could have any of the designs go where I wanted, because I didn’t want to deal with any of the contemporary stuff. If I was doing a contemporary crossover, I would’ve had a long-haired Superman, and God knows who was whatever character at the time.”

His redesigns of classic characters for the future intentionally revealed his classic roots, and his love for the original versions of the characters, as opposed to later iterations. Growing up in the boom of books about comics’ past, and during DC Comics’ reprinting of older material from the ‘40s, Ross had always had a soft spot for the first versions.

“These things really inspired me to think ‘Wow, look at how cool the old stuff is!’” Alex says. “It was like seeing the cave painting versions of how these comics started. When I saw the first appearances of iconic characters, there’s something so raw, crude, and true to their look that it inspired me to think ‘If I’m coming to it now, can I capture something that was there at the outset that’s maybe gotten lost or overlooked in the past decades gone by?’ It’s always a fun search-and-find in terms of trying to find something that someone has brushed away. Character designs, all the time, get revised so easily.

“If I do it, and I inspire someone else, they might not know the history, but they’re taking the work that I do and seeing a version of how it began. It wipes away some of the homogeny. After a fashion, artists are just going to draw handsome people doing handsome things. They’re not going to think about the wide varieties of people and bodies and faces—they’re just drawing up prototypical character A with the plain handsome face. They’re picking up on none of the idiosyncrasies.”

Kingdom Come came out in 1996, during the period where DC Comics gave Superman long hair (he came back from the dead with a tragic hockey haircut that took a few years to go away), Batman had at one point been replaced, Green Lantern became a villain and was replaced, and Wonder Woman had donned a new costume. It was a time of apparent change at DC: some argued it was meant just to boost sales, while others saw it as the illusion of change. Even though Kingdom Come was set in the future, Ross and writer Mark Waid were determined to keep the versions of the characters as classic as possible, temporary continuity be damned.

“Even though Kingdom Come is, itself, idiosyncratically designed it’s off in its own direction that people could forgive if they didn’t like the designs because they could see that it steps outside the comfort zone of the now,” Ross notes. “It was a fight to get that done, too. I know how long it took me to get projects through, but even the alteration of Superman’s chest symbol and short hair was fighting the head editorship of Mike Carlin, who protected his stewardship of Superman, leading to the long-haired look being an absolute, not to be budged. But it was, luckily, and even some initial resistance to changing the chest logo gave way. Initially though, their Elseworlds versions of Superman, before Kingdom Come, had the same damn long hair. They didn’t want to break from that, but they’re not going to change sixty years of history in a day.”

Kingdom Come’s future is one rife with urban warfare between factions of misguided superheroes, a world where collateral damage in America is as every day as a third world country. A disillusioned pastor, Norman McKay, serves the proxy hero role as he is borne witness to the events of the book, invisible alongside his guide the Spectre. After Superman goes into a self-imposed banishment, other heroes follow, allowing the grim and gritty new breed to take over and push the world into chaos. The turning point of Kingdom Come is when Superman’s return inspires the original superheroes to follow, determined to set the current generation down a correct path. By dressing them in costumes similar to their original versions, Ross makes the commentary that the originals are always the better version, with prototypical design elements running element in everyone from Superman to the most obscure classic DC character. It’s not surprising, considering Mark Waid’s celebration of the superhero in his work.

“Where I was coming from with that project was transparent for anyone who knows those characters, making my real agenda clear for anyone to see. The Flash looks like Mercury, which is the basis for the original Flash; Superman has a red and black emblem that is reminiscent of the Fleischer cartoons, and even the gray temples in the hair make you think of the Earth-2 Superman (which is the original from the ‘30s); the Batman armored suit I designed is nothing more than a three-dimensional interpretation of the two-dimensional art style of Bob Kane. All of these extrapolations were based on the original concepts for these characters. You don’t have to pick my brain terribly much to see the pattern of why they looked as they did. If you see me slap a new coat of paint on it, in such a way that people don’t look at it as being old, then they’ll get sucked into those old details and go ‘Wow, how cool and new!’ It’s not new. I believe, if you spin it the right way, you can resurrect the old and have it be just as effective for a new audience.”

While Marvels was an unassuming post-modernist take on the superhero, Kingdom Come felt like a post-modernist commentary on post-modernist comics: the “good guys” could only really function when returned to their visual roots, and the “bad guy” superheroes were based off of the “grim and gritty” superheroes running rampant in 1990s comics. If anything, Kingdom Come is proof enough that the separation of superheroes from mankind is what turns them from superheroes to detached gods. The book was successful enough for DC to start frothing for a prequel, tentatively titled The Kingdom by Waid and Ross as writers, and with art by Gene Ha.

“From what I had heard, Mark wasn’t really into doing this prequel, and DC was pressuring him, more or less saying, ‘You’ve got to write this for us. This is a huge deal and would be a big success,’” Alex surmises. “He had many other things he was interested in doing, and I believe this was not one of them, at least not when I was involved with it. The artist I brought in on the project, Gene Ha, and I were very enthusiastic about it. We were throwing out ideas that Mark wasn’t receptive to, and I had hit a breaking point where I went ‘I’ve had it’ and walked. I made a big thing about it by tendering a resignation letter about it to Levitz and then getting a polite reply. I was hoping he would go to the editor’s office and say ‘How the hell did you lose the guy who brought us this whole thing in the first place?’ That didn’t happen.”

Ultimately, Ha left the project a year after Ross, and Waid did write The Kingdom as a 1999 mini-series. Ross would get his opportunity years later to finally introduce his own return to Kingdom Come but, in the meantime, collaborated with writer Steve Darnall on the experimental Uncle Sam comic book and launched a series of oversized painted annuals with Batman cartoon writer Paul Dini.

“I had this thought of creating faux all-ages storybooks that are a comic you could present to every person on Earth that they would have no problem reading,” Ross says. “It was not going to have the standard compression of so many panels per page and word balloons—things that people who don’t read comics don’t have a affinity for. And many readers of comics don’t understand how different that sensibility is.”

Each annual story first focused on an individual superhero—Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, or Captain Marvel—in a self-contained story printed at an oversized tabloid format, each cover bearing a large logo and portrait of the character. The stories were told in no more than two to four panels per page, with narrative captions instead of word balloons, a hybrid comic and storybook. He and Dini wrapped it up with two Justice League one-shots, one of which was a straight comic book adventure story.

“There is also the motivation where I didn’t want to do ultraviolent material that couldn’t be handed down to kids,” Ross reflects. “Overall for the line of tabloid books, the problem isn’t that I wanted to do them a certain way, but that I thought, ‘I should do it five times!’ That wasn’t necessary; I think doing it once would have been nice, and maybe doing a nice punch ‘em up one later. I was doing this format that I thought would be attention-getting, but it also would’ve been better suited to something more over-the-top. That’s one of those things where maybe I was right to do exactly what I did, but I wish I wasn’t the only one doing it. I wish that it would have gotten more people to work in that format, and maybe even doing a more popular approach than I’d done…I don’t think the numbers on that were strong enough to greenlight more, and they pretty much let it die out with me…”

One of the goals of the tabloid stories was to penetrate the mainstream book market, beyond the established direct market of comic book stores. Unfortunately, the direct market wasn’t as hip to the idea as Ross had hoped, a common occurrence when cartoonists and publishers try to break out of the usual format and try something new with the medium:

“I was also looking at the fact that those books would be appearing on bookstore stands at the exact same times as they were in comic stores. That was unique, because trade paperbacks wouldn’t (they would have to be collected from single issues that had already appeared in comic stores). Here’s a sixty- page book that is getting out there to whatever different audience we could reach, that we’re not normally reaching in comic stores. There was this big face and name on the cover, and you can’t miss it. It has to be put up on the top of the rack. The pushback from retailers was so negative on this: ‘I don’t like it because you can’t put it in a bag.’

“They sell special bags! What are you talking about?

“‘It doesn’t fit on my shelf or in my comic boxes. How do I store it?’ Are you kidding me? Seriously. I was trying to do something to reach out, but was running into this wall. I realized I’m in a whole different way of seeing this medium than the majority of the people selling it or buying it. I’ve got my own weird thing that to me is logical, but to others is a waste of time.”

Ross did something few people in the comic book field had done: he broke out into mainstream media. In 2002, he was tapped to paint the poster for the Academy Awards. Two years later, his work made it onto actual movie screens as he painted opening credit cards for Spider-Man 2, images that recaptured key scenes from the first movie a few years earlier. He calls the whole experience “a very weird thing and not organic,” and just had two months to turn them around.

“As big as working on the movie’s titles would seem to be, ask me how many jobs I got because of a movie that was seen by hundreds of millions of people,” Alex says. “Not a single job. The only offer that relates to it that came up afterwards was the third movie, when they called me up for that one, too. I thought ‘I don’t like these movies.’ I didn’t mention that, but I said I would be unavailable. They can never take away from me that I got to work on the second one, plus the third one turned out to be the one that everybody identified as being a stinker (as opposed to the previous two, which I’m in the minority opinion of not liking much).”

At the end of the day, they were just interesting side gigs that can’t compete with making comics.

“Because these things are so commercial and have so many other hands judging, no concept that is inherently mine is going to be the one they pick,” he points out. “They’re going to give me very constrictive directions, and ultimately I’m just a wrist to them. I’m going to be like any other designer working for Hollywood at that point and, frankly, the jobs that I’ve had and what I’ve seen of others working for Hollywood—you can be well paid, and if you pursue it there is a lot of advertising work, but I don’t think there’s any real individual name recognition or creativity that you have the freedom for.

“The only advantage to these outside projects is that it might be additional visibility, but (like I mentioned with Spider-Man not leading to new jobs) it often just turns out to be work that you can put on your resume. Guess what? This says I can get work outside of comics, but the truth is that I don’t want work outside of comics. I desperately want this medium to survive and continue to employ me, because I want to keep doing this until I’m done working.”

Ross went back and forth between DC and Marvel, shepherding projects like Earth X, where he worked with creative teams to bring his alternate future takes on the Marvel characters to life, providing covers and plot. After three of those series, he did the same for DC with Justice, twelve issues of his take on the iconic Justice League story, written with Jim Krueger with Ross painting over Doug Braithwaite’s pencils. Disregarding the past continuity for many of the characters, Ross took a snapshot of his favorite characters and ran with it.

“As a fan, I’ve always thought ‘Can’t we get back to the core simplicity of these things?’” Ross points out. “At the end of the day, comic book publishing is so much smaller than the overall of these characters being timeless versions of themselves. You can’t change what the timeless version is; it just is a certain thing. You may want to put your own certain stamp on it, which I have done, and you don’t have to do it to a great effect. For the most part, I want Hal Jordan to be Green Lantern and look like Gil Kane designed him. In terms of what is truly timeless, though, Barry Allen (Flash) and Hal Jordan are the improvements over the Golden Age originals, so in this and other cases the Silver Age versions define the concepts more fully.”

In Justice, the Justice League’s worst villains find out their secret identities, all while apparently boosting the human race through philanthropic means. At around the same time as Justice’s development, and unrelated, DC was planning a mini-series called Identity Crisis, where the Justice League’s worst villains figure out their secret identities. The difference between the two is in tone: Identity not only featured the murder of a superhero’s wife, but also the revelation that she had been raped earlier by the villainous Doctor Light.

"There’s a lag between when I did the last of my big books and the Justice series,” Alex says. “I was called up by Brad Meltzer to illustrate Identity Crisis and he told me what it was about, and I was horrified. Part of what I was horrified is that I don’t like the misuse of murder in comics because I always feel like it’s so cheap to kill off a character we know and love. He told me it was Paul Levitz who recommended Sue Dibny as the character to get killed and spark off this mystery (there was apparently a list of possible sacrificial lambs). I took it as a personal offense because my close friends that I’ve known for twenty-something years, Steve Darnall (author of Uncle Sam) and his wife, Meg Guttman, were my basis for Ralph (Elongated Man) and Sue Dibny. I did a piece of them once as Ralph and Sue, and Steve had a costume made up for Halloween as Elongated Man in the white outfit with the big EM on it. I’d already drawn his wife a long time back as Sue, and she was definitely Sue in Justice. Anyways, when I’d heard about it I went ‘That really stinks. I don’t want to see my friend murdered.’ I also didn’t know until the second issue came out that they’d go ‘Oh, and by the way, she also got raped in the past, too.’ I really detest the misuse of rape against anybody, but it particularly seems like a misogynist ploy. It’s very thoughtless in its use in comic books. It seems like you can’t represent that easily or well, so I wouldn’t go there.”

One of the downsides of doing a project as painstaking as Justice is in the time required to produce it, as well as the inadvertent parallels that may spring up between comics produced within that window.

“A thing that sucked about a project like Justice is that it took so long to develop it, that all the things I thought of as original ideas would be beaten to print by other books and media,” Alex admits. “For example, staging a big drama with the Justice League versus their greatest villains like on the Challenge of the SuperFriends cartoon (no one had done it since): Turns out that’s what they were doing on the Justice League cartoon show. I think it was Dwayne McDuffie who was heading that; he certainly wasn’t aware of what I was doing, and I wasn’t aware of what he was doing. It’s the zeitgeist moment happening, and it’s not even because we were the same age. There’s something about the zeitgeist of the moment that catches you and it’s great to have control of it in some ways, and you can be an avatar of sorts, but I’ve been on the bad end of it, where the moment you get your ideas out there, the exact moment you publish it is when something of completely unrelated symmetry is occurring at the same time.

“All of those elements I thought were unique, like Sinestro having his own yellow power battery (and more than one power ring) coincides with the moment Geoff [Johns] created an entire Sinestro Corps with a giant yellow battery. It’s not people stealing from one another, but the zeitgeist is a bitch,” Alex laughs.

“DC has always been, and no matter who’s in charge, has always seemed to be this area of hesitation in getting concepts off of the ground. Think about how much they fought Neal Adams forty years ago about creating their first black superhero. They gave him a hard time about John Stewart in Green Lantern/Green Arrow. That was ridiculous! Marvel had already shown that they could sell a black superhero and no one would boycott the comics. There’s always been this hesitation in that company of ‘Well, we can’t let this happen,’ and always waiting for someone else to break that ground. On occasion, they’ll break the ground that Marvel’s not working on and people will go ‘Oh, my God, look at Watchmen!’ But more often, they’ll stand back and wait. It seems to be the ethic that is passed down, over the last seventy years, through whoever’s in charge.”

Ross had been anxious to contribute to the mainstay DC books for some time, and got his chance when he came on as co-writer with Geoff Johns on JSA, a team book composed of characters from the ‘40s and their offspring. Alex designed some new members, painted covers, and did occasional interior panels in paint. After ten years, Ross was allowed the chance to revisit his Kingdom Come story, through the catapulting of the Kingdom Come Superman in the timeline of the JSA.

“It was largely disillusioning, but I don’t mean to make that sound like ‘It was the worst experience ever,’ because I’ve had some of those, too,” Alex says casually. “I felt like it could’ve just not happened and was not an important storyline when conveyed. We were being urged to wrap up our long dragged-out Kingdom Come storyline. By the time Superman shows up, it was like ‘Well, you’re on the clock now.’ It felt rushed, like there wasn’t any real respect for this project, compared to so many of the other extended storylines I saw DC do. People have been pushing me to revisit Kingdom Come for ten years, so why don’t you want this to be something that can last as long as it can?’

“These companies normally drag out so many stupid storylines, but I felt this is one that could have some weight to it. But that doesn’t matter if the person you’re ultimately answering to doesn’t like your thing. I found out when I’d been on JSA for two years that ‘The Editor-in-Chief, he hates that book.’ It had nothing to do with me, but he just doesn’t like that book.”

The brunt of the Ross/John JSA is in the threat of the present turning into the future world of Kingdom Come, as Kingdom Come anti-hero Magog is born by the cosmic god Gog. Promising change, Gog walks the world to improve it every step, causing a schism between the superteam. It’s a rampant theme through Ross’s work: the superhuman promising change to humanity—be it the Kingdom Come Superman, the villains in Justice, or even Gog—but it ultimately ending up that humanity must be the architects of their own future. As editorial was pressuring the JSA team to wrap the storyline up, Ross came up with a solution to speed it ahead by doing three one-shot comic books. He wrote and drew a Kingdom: Superman one-shot that showed the final moments of Lois Lane, which had been off-camera in Kingdom Come.

“The way it worked out was that I knew we had a lot of content to get through before we could wrap up this storyline in JSA, and I wanted to make sure that if we would have the opportunity of resurrecting this universe, I would have to resurrect the main character from Kingdom Come,” Alex elaborates. “By that I mean the character I based on my dad Norman McKay. My dad hadn’t been in a comic for some time, and if anyone should write it, it should be me.. I said ‘Let me do this as a one-shot,’ and then they created three one-shots that tied in to the series. One of them was a Magog special that led to his own series, then Geoff wrote the one called The Kingdom, which allowed me to finally take back the title I had originally contributed to the post-Kingdom Come project that I walked away from.

“In a way, there was this lingering thing about the legacy of Kingdom Come, a legacy that was mostly just in my head. I don’t know how much fans even cared. When you go to various events and signings where people say how much this story meant to them and impacted them, you’re caused to believe that it’s so damn important to a readership. What I wound up fulfilling was an obligation more to myself because, if anything, the Kingdom Come being in JSA was a way to wrap up a part of my own history and write the ending for Superman which I wanted to relate, that he has a good life after that story. I had this idea for a long time about answering the question of how Lois really dies in this world, and how he did have a final moment with her.

“Most of it is pen and ink, but where it flashes back to the world of Kingdom Come, I painted in the panels. In the story, he has this moment of ‘My life is really messed up. I left a world that was almost destroyed, and came here where everyone is young. I feel like I might be the bad seed. I might be a cause of destruction. I’m bad news and could end this new world, and bring Kingdom Come here. I’m a virus.’ He wonders about this guy he ran into who quoted scripture about the end of the world and thinks if he’s on this world, he should find him. So he looks him up and goes and finds my father. I basically had this thinly disguised excuse to have my father appear in a comic book and have a sit-down conversation with Superman, talking about life, the universe, and everything. It’s very self-indulgent, and is the only thing I’ve written by myself.”

The Superman one-shot shows a different side of Ross through his pencils and inks (a slicker version of his paints, the figures and details contained within contour lines instead of highlighted and shaded by gouache paint), and a sophistication in his writing.

After a decade, Ross was able to give the satisfying ending to his Kingdom Come world that he’d always wanted, even if there were editorial hurdles to navigate, and even if it all had a bittersweet ending.

“What’s even weirder is how [DC] continued with other Kingdom Come stuff even since I’ve been gone,” he notes when asked about DC’s use of some Kingdom designs. “They’ve given Magog his own series, which didn’t work out. I’m not surprised. He was really just a caricature of Cable, and a caricature of everything we thought was over the top for comics in the mid-‘90s, which meant Rob Liefeld. Rob actually got it, and asked me, ‘That’s supposed to be me, isn’t it?’ We thought that was funny. They’ve taken other characters, like one I came up with when I was sixteen called N-I-L-8. I threw him into Kingdom Come as one of the many—he’s a giant robot creature that a friend of mine designed. I came up with the idea at sixteen, and asked a guy ten years later to help finish it.

“It was a bummer to realize, at the end of the long run I was on, was that I came as a fan reading the JSA book, and then ended saying ‘I don’t care about the characters that much.’ I don’t think, though, I’m beholden to any set of characters I shouldn’t state any particular offense to the JSA book or its heroes, but for as much love as I have for so many characters, I don’t think I’m wired to stay consistently enamored of any group or individual fictional persons forever. What is ultimately best is to give the ideas and passion that you have to offer to the material, when you have a chance to work with it, and to move on when it’s hopefully your preference. I think you can keep your creativity alive better when you move on to new challenges and endeavors. “

Ross has only wandered out of the superhero realm a few times in his twenty-plus year career. He doesn’t dismiss going into other genres, but plans on sticking with what’s fun for him. Even through his reasoning, it’s apparent that superheroes are where his heart is; he talks just as much about his love and thoughts on specific characters and comic books as he does the business end of comics. At the end of the day, he remains an enormous superhero fan.

“I actually just turned down a job which would have been a noir story to illustrate, and I didn’t have to hear anything beyond ‘noir,’ because I realized ‘I don’t want to draw real people doing real things. I see plenty of that,’” Ross admits. “ I’ve got to throw a mask or cape in there somewhere, because otherwise it’s just a bunch of human beings. A staple of my work is to try to humanize things, but I need a touch of the fantastic to keep it interesting. When I did those oversized books for DC, part of the constriction that I put upon myself was that I wanted to have the hero plus the world, but no other fantastic trappings. Even in the case of Batman, there was no plane or car. In my mind, it’s as realistically conveyed as possible; he can’t even have a car, because then people would go ‘Oh, there he is driving off.’ Escaping city traffic’s not that easy.

“Along with the fact that, if part of your thing is that you want to convince the world that you’re this lone vigilante going out and doing stuff on your own, having million-dollar toys is a big giveaway of who you might be, or at least what social class you belong to. Of course, I eventually got away from that idea when I did Justice and said ‘He’s got the car. Here’s my design for the Batmobile.’ I was either giving up on that goal of absolute feasibility or had felt like I’d already made that statement once before. Now I wanted to draw it and put my own stamp on it.

“It’s all very open to negotiation, but in trying to represent the fantastic combined with the human, I had been holding myself back from doing more of the fantastic, because I feel like I’ve had to eat my vegetables before enjoying dessert. Now I feel like ‘You know what? I’ve eaten enough goddamn vegetables. I want all candy.’ I’ve been in more of an all-candy phase,” he laughs.

If superheroes are candy, then his work for independent comic book publisher Dynamite has been the frosting on the cake. For the past few years, Ross has taken a small army of public domain characters and masterminded new stories and redesigns, collectively branded as Project: Super Powers.

“It’s freedom,” Ross states. “It’s also an immediate answer to any issues and how the work is being conducted going through to the advertising. I’ve come to realize how much it matters in how companies are going to push these things. If you don’t push them as strongly as you could, nobody knows about your project and retailers are not going to order it. There’s been a lot of methodic thinking with the two main publishers that when you publish books, you can take any big time talent (if there’s anyone considered big enough, these days) [to sell]. Otherwise, it’s the characters, but you can’t get behind a single character like Spider-Man and get across one impacting project, because they’re selling fifteen other things with that character in it. They’re publishing a hundred titles each at the big two publishers that are all cannibalizing each other.

“When you’re an independent and are pushing a little bit here and there, and you can push that stuff more strongly because you’ve got a focused and dedicated publisher to that purpose, and you can get a lot more visibility. It doesn’t mean that you’ll get the sales of DC and Marvel, but you can get more attention. It’s not just the survivability within the marketplace, but trying to be the tree that falls in the forest that is not unheard. You want all the woodland creatures in the forest to hear the fall,” Ross laughs.

“Sometimes, like in the down market that we have currently, you may not achieve reaching all these people in terms of actual sales, but if they’ve heard of what you’re doing, that’s a sort of victory in itself. It’s all a cumulative thing.”

Ross has more of these smaller victories planned, content and happy to be doing his own thing:

“[I’m painting] covers for Voltron, a new Six Million Dollar Man series, a book I’m also co-plotting with my friend Steve Darnall writing – Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt (the old Charlton Comics character), Flash Gordon, and many more in development, all for Dynamite Entertainment,” Ross reveals. “I still work on Astro City for whenever that’s supposed to come out again. I’ve done five or six covers, and Wildstorm (now just DC West) is piling them up before putting them on the schedule. There are some big things in mind that involve my illustrating whole books. One thing I will say is that Dynamite has a project that we’re working towards, and I may at least draw and paint the start of, and an art book we’ll be doing together. Stuff like that.”

Learn more about Alex Ross at www.alexrossart.com.

Rosalie Lightning

2011-11-19T23:22:00.000-05:00

From Lauren Weinstein's blog-
I am so sad to report that Rosalie Lightning, daughter of Tom Hart and Leela Corman, passed away unexpectedly in her sleep November 17th, 2011. There’s been such an outpouring of love and support for their family. We’ve started a paypal account in honor of her. This fund is to help with everything Tom and Leela are facing in this terrible situation. Just to be clear, this is not an ongoing charitable foundation; it is a bunch of Tom and Leela’s friends passing the cup around to help them surmount the short-term challenges arising from this tragedy.
Rosalie was a wonderful girl. She loved lizards, Miyazaki movies and duck ponds.
If you want any more information about where to send your condolences please email rosalielightningmemorial@gmail.com.

Donations can be made here.

Brian Azzarello on Crime and Superheroes

2011-10-26T15:15:00.000-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving
Pictures: Seth Kushner

“I don’t change my approach to anything, and I approach everything the same way;” Brian Azzarello says. “To come up with a story that, hopefully, is different than what you expect.”

Brian Azzarello is not just a crime writer, or a noir writer, or even a post-modernist superhero writer with deconstructionist tendencies: he doesn’t like to be labeled, and focuses on just telling a good story.

“What makes a good noir story?” Brian posits. “Let me answer that for you: it’s a great mistake.”

But, for a minute and keeping in the damnable crime/noir label, if Azzarello were in the interrogation chair with a light in his face, his short answers would frustrate the most patient cop. It becomes abundantly clear in a short amount of time—Brian Azzarello has thought his work, and the craft of writing, out so much that he’s boiled it down to points.

In short, he ain’t talking much, but what he has to say is brilliant.

When he first pitched 100 Bullets, he left out the cobweb-like relationships between characters and a shadowy organization called the Minute Men, but instead focused on the high concept

“I figured pitching what it really was was not a good idea, because it became a very complicated story,” Brian confesses.

“But pitching the high concept? People can get their minds around that easily! A guy gives you an attaché filled with one hundred bullets, a picture of a guy who did an egregious wrong that ruined your life, and the ability to enact revenge. It’s easy for people to relate, because everybody’s had murder in their heart at some point.”

That’s the basic premise of 100 Bullets, a narrative slow boil that starts whistling loudly within its first year. Random characters are approached with a briefcase by the mysterious Mr. Graves, and they don’t always succeed in getting their man (or woman). Like everything that’s “too good to be true,” there are strings attached and conditions that come back and bit them in the ass. Running from 1999 to 2009, 100 Bullets came in during the crime and noir craze, and redefined Vertigo from being primarily horror and fantasy to include crime and espionage.

Before 100 Bullets, Azzarello struck out with the mini-series Jonny Double, with art by Argentine artist Eduardo Risso. Risso’s thin ink line and liquid shadows give a distinctive noir look that makes 100 Bullets a unique world visually as well as narratively. The artist worked on all 100 issues of the book with a translator on Brian’s scripts and the two have become a rare thing—a long-running creative team.

“Obviously, we get each other, you know?” Brian says. “He knows where I’m coming from and I know where he’s coming from. It’s funny, the way that it was put together—Axel Alonso was the editor of Jonny Double at the time, and we finished the first script and it was approved, so we were looking for an artist. He said ‘I’m going to fax you three guys to choose from.’ The fax machine comes on the pages start coming out. I pick up the phone during the fax transmission, and I still don’t know who the other two guys were. I was like ‘Eduardo’s pages came through. This is the guy.”

“You know what separates Eduardo from a lot of guys working in comics, is the fact that he designs a page,” Brian adds later. “He looks at the whole page, rather than panel to panel.”

Brian’s plan for the issues of 100 Bullets were planned out from the get-go, creating as cohesive a narrative as Risso’s panels come together to create a solid instance of storytelling.

“I think that’s it holds together, because we were working towards a point where we knew where we were going,” he says. “We’d reference these things early on in the series that would come back, and that made it more compelling.”

Q: You’d said you take the same approach to every story, to sit down and tell a story. Does that change with format?

BRIAN: No, it doesn’t change with format. Like I said, I have to find a mistake to find a story about. (Laughs)

Azzarello went into the darker side of superheroes with his mini-series Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, with artist Lee Bermejo in 2005. Superman is presented as a fiery-eyed oppressor while Luthor is a lone man pushing mankind to aim for the future themselves, rather than rely on an alien Man of Steel.

“Personally? I agree with him,” Brian says of the bald-headed villain, who he crafted into an extreme crusader of humanity’s betterment.

In contrast, Azzarello and Bermejo reunited in 2008 for the Joker graphic novel, where the villain was left unsympathetic, a homicidal mobster figure on par with Alan Moore’s portrayal in The Killing Joke. Earlier, Azzarello and Risso had taken a crack at Batman in the storyline “The Broken City.”

“I always treated the cape as a trenchcoat,” Brian states. Making Batman less Dark knight and more Detective created a noir-ish storyline that put the character on par with Mike Hammer or Sam Spade.

They revisited Batman for Wednesday Comics, a weekly comics section put out by DC for twelve installments, taking a more traditional approach than many of the other creative teams in the project and embracing the weekly distribution.

“It was ‘Tell a story once a week, and do one page,’” Brian reveals. “We really did our job, because reading that in installments works better than sitting down and reading it all at once. There’s a time that’s needed in between each one of those pages. When you sit down and read the whole thing, the time’s not there and the story doesn’t work as well.

“Time is designed into that thing. It was like we were doing the Dick Tracy Sunday strip. Usually those Sunday strips recap the week, anyway, and that’s what we were doing. Some of those other stories work a lot better when you sit down and read it all at once.”

Azzarello and Risso reunite this summer for Batman: Knight of Vengeance, a tie-in to DC Comics’ company-wide Flashpoint crossover. Azz rarely does crossovers, but there’s something about this one that compels him.

“I normally don’t get involved with these crossover events...because they hold no interest for me,” Brian laughs. “But this one is different, that’s why I’m involved. I’ve turned down a lot of work because if I can’t find a reason to tell a story, I’m not going to tell it.

“I’d say I’ve been lucky so far that I’ve been able to hold true to that.”

Azzarello and Risso team up again for Spaceman, their next regular series after 100 Bullets.

“What’s the premise? A lot of dire predictions come true in the very near future, and—,” Brian pauses. “I don’t know if I want to tell you what it is.

“I’m just saying that’s the backdrop in which these characters are interacting, and it will still be a small, personal story. I don’t think humanity is going to change. What motivates us right now should motivate us a thousand years from now.”

The approach to Spaceman, a science-fiction book that may have some crime elements, is different from the monthly approach to 100 Bullets:

“The way we’re approaching it now is like seasons, rather than doing a regular ongoing series,” Brian reveals. “Eduardo doesn’t want to do that again. He wants to do eight or nine issues a year, which is how we’re going to approach it. The first year will be nine issues, and then we’ll take off a few months and come back with another one.”

“Somebody’s got to come in and look at it differently than we have been,” Brian says of digital comics. “Just throwing comics on the web is not taking advantage of the medium, and we don’t even know what the medium is yet, because it hasn’t been come up with.

While Brian is a fan of some digital comics, he’s not sure they should be trying to replicate the reading experience of a paper issue, but should become something entirely unique.

“I look at it like maybe what we should be trying to replicate is the experience of a filmstrip,” he notes. “You’re flipping to the next image, but we don’t have to be confined by that horizontal rectangle: we can go vertical, do different things like break panels. I’m probably not the guy to come up with it, either; I have too many things to do.”

Dan Didio: Comics and Controversy

2011-10-10T15:10:00.000-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

“When you’re telling something controversial and everybody embraces it, then you must’ve taken some shortcuts or made some mistakes along the way,” Dan Didio says from the seventh floor lobby of DC Comics, surrounded by Superman-themed props, like a chunk of Kryptonite, a phone booth façade, and a Superman mannequin suspended from the ceiling. “But if you try to expand it out so that you have so much reaction and they can’t wait to see what happens next, then you’ve accomplished your job. The last thing we want in anything we do is apathy, and the last thing we want to see is that nobody cares. That’s the easiest way to lose an audience, and not something we want to do.”

Dan’s talking about Identity Crisis, the 2004 comic book that pitted the long-standing DC Comics superheroes against their worst enemy yet—the moral dilemma that stems from blurring the line between good and evil. Identity Crisis, written by novelist Brad Meltzer and drawn by Rags Morales, started with the violent murder of second-tier hero Elongated Man’s wife Sue by a mysterious assailant close to the heroes. As the superheroes’ loved ones are targeted, it’s revealed that Sue had been earlier raped by a supervillian, resulting in that’s villian’s brainwashing at the hands of a group of superheroes. It injected a dose of post-Watchmen post-modernism back into the DC Universe, and solicited a mixed bag of reactions from fans.

“I love the fact that there were multiple reactions to it,” Dan admits. “If we do one story that feels the same way to everybody, then we probably didn’t tell it well. Given the breadth of our audience, given the diversity of our audience, you’ve got to be able to incite people in different ways. Our goal is to just tell good, strong stories that we can stand by and feel proud of and Identity Crisis is one of those. The fact that people loved it and hated it is exactly the reaction you want from things like that.”

Identity Crisis was Didio’s first big splash as Vice-President of Editorial at DC, a position he took in 2002, during his run as writer of Superboy with friend and neighbor Jimmy Palmiotti. Although a lifelong comic book fan, Didio started in television in the early ‘80s, working on everything from soap operas to animation. Didio is one of the few high-ranking editorial figures in comics who came in from outside the field, and that’s not exactly a bad thing.

The events of Identity Crisis redefined character relationships in time for the next big event, Countdown to Infinite Crisis, a single comic that ended in the death of minor league superhero Blue Beetle and sparked off four mini-series which each worked up to the company-wide crossover Infinite Crisis. Infinite Crisis launched a series called 52, a ground-breaking weekly comic book that featured a cast of lower-level characters who were more easily relatable than icons like Superman or Batman

“One thing that I tried to do when I first came in here was what we used to call the uber-story, or the big story: something that could underlay and bring the cohesiveness of the universe together and then move the entire universe together as a whole,” Didio reveals. “We put out a lot of product, and there are ways to make Superman interesting and Batman interesting, and there are ways to make several of the other character exciting. But, truth be told, if you want to make things exciting, you have to find ways to make those secondary characters sing, to make them feel important, and make them valuable to the over-arching universe. That was one of the things we tried to accomplish.

“[It is] storytelling in the sense of going back to the pure basics. What I saw during my days in soaps is to try and build soap opera aspects—the highs and lows, interlocking characters, and then using them to tell the social sensibilities of the world and being able to use a set of different characters and putting the problems of the world on them, so you could see it through their eyes and get the scope of what people are feeling at the time.”

Bringing the problems of a super-powered world down to street level is a trademark in Didio’s early projects: Identity Crisis dealt with problems on the most human level, creating perhaps the most intimate character crossover in the history of superhero comics; everyman superhero Blue Beetle is the focus of Countdown (making his death that much more controversial and felt by fans); 52 took a small army of second-tier heroes and used them to define the DC Universe on several levels, be it in outer space or the streets of Gotham City.

Didio’s television-inspired mode of storytelling was a natural for the weekly comic, particularly given the vast ensemble cast of a decades-old comic book company.

“When we created the storyline that went from Countdown to Infinite Crisis to Infinite Crisis, we were really building stories month by month, quarter by quarter, and bringing the cohesiveness of the universe together as we were leading to the big event,” he says. “The other thing that we did, that was a big challenge to me and one of my favorite accomplishments, was 52. I looked at the speed of the distribution system, and we delivered comics to stores every week, but we’d never tried to deliver to the speed of our audience in the way they went and purchased comics. What I’d see and what we tried to do in putting 52 together was that we actually took a production methodology used in animation’s building episodic television, and we rolled that into working on 52. We used a staff of writers, so that we had a group of writers working on each issue, so it wasn’t just one person carrying the load of each book; we used storyboard artists so that we could hand the books out to different artists, so in case one guy ran behind, there was consistency in style and look. That was when we first built 52, off of the model of television, and that really worked because it came together well.”

Just as television shows create spin-offs, Infinite Crisis was used as a platform for a handful of new characters to debut in their own titles, particularly a new Blue Beetle and Atom. Unfortunately, both titles were eventually canceled due to low sales: the critically-acclaimed Blue Beetle reached #36 before cancellation (still making it the longest-running title for that character since the 1950s), and The Atom lasted twenty-five issues. Both characters were examples of Didio’s editorial edict to diversity the DC Universe.

“Sometimes we rush new characters out too quickly to support their own series when they weren’t ready,” Didio admits. “Look back to the earlier days when Marvel rolled out Punisher and Wolverine [in the ‘70s]: these aren’t characters that got their books from day one, they spent years developing their characters and building an audience for them, so that when they did come out in their own books, people were excited for them. That’s something we’re doing a little bit more now. We’re taking more time to layer these things in, but also have more ideas on how to expand the scope of the DC Universe. My hope is that everything we do, whether it’s successful or not successful, achieves a goal of good storytelling, and achieves a goal of adding diversity to the whole landscape of the DCU, and we’ve won in that fashion.

“My only regret is in some of those cases when we close out a book, we sometimes eliminate that character or push that character aside to the point where nobody uses it; I think that’s a mistake. We did it right with Jason Rausch [Firestorm], we did it wrong with Ryan Choi [The Atom]. My opinion is that we’re always going to keep trying to broaden the scope of the DC Universe.”

Interestingly enough, Beetle has met with the most commercial success outside of comics, often featured on the cartoon Batman: Brave and the Bold, earning a handful of action figures, and guest-starring in an upcoming episode of the TV show Smallville.

“The first thing we didn’t want to do—and I felt strongly about that character, and still feel very strongly about him—was that even though his book might not have succeeded, it does not mean the character was bad,” Didio says of Beetle. “You cannot go running backwards every chance you get. Our goal right now is to be looking forward and moving the line in a forward direction with a sensibility that matches what’s going on in the world today.”

Since his rise to editorial power at DC, Dan Didio has managed to create a more cohesive comics universe, with intersecting characters and story elements, moving beyond the simple model of the trade paperback-geared monthly comic. His experiments in the weekly comic book format continued over a three-year span—with 52, Countdown, and Trinity—each of which had its own share of criticism and praise. Just this past year, DC went to a bi-weekly format with it’s company-wide book Brightest Day (which, in natural Didio-edited fashion, organically grew out of major crossover Blackest Night) and Justice League: Generation Lost (also spinning out of Blackest, but a bit less so). Both titles feature secondary characters, with Justice League starring the B-listers that populated the title in the 1980s.

“There’s less background to those characters and also more flexibility,” Didio cites as the narrative strength of these secondary characters. “Because we have such a wide variety of characters at DC, we can actually pick and choose the characters we think work best for the type of story we want to tell as we’re doing it. That’s one of the things that’s extraordinarily helpful.”

Love or hate what he does, Dan Didio is changing the format of the regular “floppy” comic book, a format that is on the verge of dying. While he’s more the print guy and Co-Publisher Jim Lee the digital, there’s a high likelihood that the weekly format will find even more success in the ever-expanding digital comic book marketplace.

“When we start anything, we build to make any character a big player in the DC Universe. That’s your hope on every book you put out, to make them feel important.”

The late ‘80s and ‘90s saw a changing of the guard of most of the older superheroes, with The Flash, Green Lantern and Green Arrow all being replaced by younger characters. Come the 21^st century, all three characters were brought back at DC, particularly the long-suffering Green Lantern Hal Jordan.

Jordan had been poorly managed over the past twenty years, in a narratively-tangled nightmare. Writer Geoff Johns brought him back in 2004’s comic book Green Lantern: Rebirth, which then launched him into a new regular series.

“Our primary goal was to explain, with a level of clarity and excitement, why Hal Jordan was the premiere Green Lantern and why we brought him back,” Didio reflects. “After several years of how the character had been used or misused (depending on who you talk to), we wanted to reestablish him as a key character of the DC Universe and explain why he was the best Green Lantern. We did it extremely well. What Geoff was able to do was take that strength of Hal Jordan and build out his world to where it is right now, where it’s just catching a wave.”

Green Lantern was a runaway hit for DC, with Johns rebuilding Jordan from ground-up, all the time reinventing the cast of characters and myth surrounding the Green Lantern comics. For the first time in years, Green Lantern felt important and had an impact at DC Comics.

“The good news about Green Lantern is that he always had the potential to be big. There was a point of time in his history where he was able to support three books and a quarterly book on a regular basis, between the multiple characters playing that role and the different corps going on. We always knew that Green Lantern had potential, and felt that with Hal Jordan coming back and the rebuilding of the Corps (which is probably more important that Hal coming back, in some way, because it shows the breadth of the universe) is what helped make this the hit that it is, because we really saw the full potential. Geoff saw that full potential and was able to exploit it to tell a story that touched some of the readers.”

The book’s success is reflected in the upcoming Green Lantern movie this summer, starring Ryan Reynolds, with story and design elements coming right out of the Geoff Johns run on the comics. It’s a reflection of the evolution of today’s comic book companies into entertainment ones, as an effort for narrative synergy between comic book and film adaptations is finally being made.

In 2009, DC Comics’ parent company Time Warner AOL restructured the comic book company into DC Entertainment, in an attempt to bring digital and film aspects into a cohesive new company. Green Lantern is the first DCE film, and start of the company which Didio had been promoted to Vice President and Co-Publisher of.

“To be perfectly honest, I like to think the books affect DC Entertainment. It’s the other way around, if you want to be straight about it,” Didio smiles.

“Where we stand is that we have eighty titles to put out on a monthly basis, so we have to move stories and characters, and also try different things. Someone who is making a movie or a TV show has a specific goal in mind, and there’s a very specific story that you need to have in mind in order to achieve that goal. With us, we’re moving very quickly so that we can try different things and different characters. If it doesn’t work, we can close things down and try something else over here. We should always keep ourselves flexible and always try to keep ourselves exciting as possible. We’re at the core of the idea, and we want to make sure that we’re constantly refreshing that core with new ideas, so that we’re exploring other areas in the company.”

One of those other areas, and arguably the most important to happen to comics since the graphic novel format, is the digital platform of readers like the iPad. The digital comic shop is on a course to completely change the comic book reading experience; DCE named Jim Lee as Didio’s Co-Publisher for digital.

“Jim is an incredibly smart man and such a visual thinker,” Didio notes. “He is so plugged into the digital world that he’s looking at creating product for digital first, and looking at product that works for those screens and that format, how to change the story so that, even if you change the direction of your iPad and how the art changes. I think that’s one of the great things with that, and that’s something you’ll see coming up ahead.

“I think just creating comics monthly is great right now, but that you have to create comics for the medium and the audience.”

A month after this interview, DC announced the "New 52," their company-wide relaunch; starting with new #1s and many new backstories, the New 52 has had mixed results yet strong initial sales. It hasn't been fully embraced by the readership yet but, for Didio, that's a healthy thing.

Grant Morrison: Of SuperGods and Supermen

2011-09-08T11:03:00.000-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

“I think we were taking it seriously but, at the same time, we weren’t taking it seriously,” Grant Morrison says. The subject is the European comic book crowd of the 1980s. “We saw in superhero stories a vehicle for our ideas about politics, sex and religion but we brought a quite dark sense of humor too. It’s hard to say…

“Back then we brought influences from outside comics, from music and cinema, poetry and theater. American comics had become formulized, but we had grown up loving the stuff [from before] and we just wanted to get our hands on it to apply all the influences that we had—like the punk stuff. American comics were given a little bit of a jolt, because we loved this material and we were able to come up with a different angle on it. We revitalized the scene, for at least a few years. American creators learned from that, and their comics became just as good. Right now, I think comics across the board are better than they’ve ever been, and there are a lot more great writers coming in.”

With a career writing British comic books like Doctor Who and his own Zenith under his belt, Scot-born Grant Morrison first made his mark in American comics with trippy adult-aimed Animal Man in 1988, followed by the freakish Doom Patrol. Writer Alan Moore had been the advance guard for an infusion of British talent, primarily with Watchmen and Swamp Thing, while Neil Gaiman made waves with Black Orchid and his literary fantasy series Sandman. Where Moore celebrated the superhero in the comic book version of the real world and Gaiman focused on other worlds, Morrison’s work balanced between the two—placing unlikely and quirky superheroes in absurdist fantasy versions of the real world.

“Animal Man and Doom Patrol were outside of the superhero books, and were quite easy for me to write. Animal Man was a family man who had a wife and kids, but didn’t quite fit into the DC Universe. He commuted to the DC Universe,” Grant laughs. “People didn’t quite take him seriously, and he didn’t quite fit into his costume so he wore his jacket over it so he could avoid the embarrassment. The Doom Patrol were very much circus freaks, and they weren’t happy. It was easy for me to write, because I was basing them off of people I knew.”

Animal Man featured the everyman hero, Buddy Baker, facing off against big ideas, most notably when he faces his reality-bending arch-nemesis—revealed as none other than Morrison himself.in Animal Man #26, in a surreal adventure where Grant discusses comics in a metatextual vein with Buddy Baker. It was akin to the Looney Tunes shorts where Daffy Duck faces the animator’s vengeful eraser or brush, and further proof that Morrison was not constrained by the conventions of any genre.

In 1989, he and surrealist painter Dave McKean presented Arkham Asylum, a surrealistic and dark graphic novel which pits Batman against the denizens of Gotham’s looney bin for the criminally insane after being taken over from a cross-dressing Joker. While Frank Miller had re-established the Dark Knight’s Darkness, Morrison and McKean pushed it further to question the roots of that darkness, and the state of Batman’s own sanity in this trippy headrush of a graphic novel. Even after starting his mind-bending and oddly autobiographicalVertigo title The Invisibles, Morrison was well-respected as a cutting edge writer of unconventional superhero tales featuring arguably “post-modern” heroes.

When he relaunched Justice League America with artist Howard Porter in 1997, he brought a classic vibe back to the once mediocre superhero team, reuniting DC Comics’ seven most powerful superheroes in a run that smacked of the brightness reminiscent of Mark Waid’s full-on embracing of the superhero in The Flash, but was coupled with Morrison’s unique brand of high concept.

“I always saw it as going to another nation,” Grant reflects. “There are things that have been there before me and will exist long after I’m gone. Working for DC and Marvel, it’s like going to a pre-existing country and having to be with the natives there, and go through certain customs. That’s why I always liked looking at how it was for the superheroes, rather than the ‘80s stuff like Watchmen, where it took the problems of the real world and put them into the comic world.

“It was interesting for a little bit, but ultimately what was more interesting for me is the idea of this continuum that existed and was created by different artisans over the decades, and to be able to play with it. I guess that over the years, writing and going to that place, taught me a greater appreciation,” he laughs. “I’ve learned their ways.

“Animal Man was still a case of trying to do something maybe more realistic and polemical, but then I got the opportunity to write JLA and there I went for an approach that was more expansive and Jungian, like the bible or the Greek myths.”

Morrison took the seven major DC stars—Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman—and treated them as the Greek Gods of the DC Universe. Positioned on the moon in their Olympus-like base The Watchtower, Morrison made JLA the book where big things happen, as opposed to the mediocre title of third-stringers that it had been the years prior, after the brilliant and satirical run by writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis.

“Getting the Justice League was like handling the American Constitution,” Grant admits. “I wanted to do it justice, quite literally, and to not drag it down but to go into that big world that was very mythological. Superman was a pure essence, and Batman was a pure symbol.

“We didn’t have too many problems, but the strangest problem of all was that nobody wanted me to do those seven central characters. ‘This is the Justice League, with the seven most recognizable characters, and they should be in the same comic together.’ That was the thing that there was resistance to most of all. The Justice League had been filled with characters no one had even heard of, and most of the time they were just wandering around whining, or going to the bathroom.

“I’m being serious: there was one issue where someone went to the bathroom,” he laughs. “It was like a sitcom in its tenth season. They were relying on that guy walking in through the door, and it was very exhausted.

“For me, it was about putting the imagination back in. I wasn’t dictated by anything, except to have plot-driven stories that didn’t rely on having Superman weeping,” Grant jokes. “I gave it big ideas and had the characters deal with it.”

Perhaps Morrison’s biggest idea with JLA was DC One Million, a 1998 crossover series that introduced the JLA of the 853^rd Century. The final issue had Superman, in the far future, emerging from the sun as a being of pure energy, reuniting himself with Lois Lane. It was the happy ending for Grant Morrison’s ideal Superman, one that he wouldn’t start for a few more years, when he wrote All-Star Superman in 2005, a twelve-issue series that presents an iconic Superman reminiscent of the 1950s version as he grapples with his imminent death. The All-Star Superman cheats death by living in the Earth’s sun, building a machine to keep it burning.

“In my head, there was always that quintessential Superman,” Grant admits. “I had him restore Lois at the end of time, recreate Krypton and walking about everyone on Krypton and giving them super powers (because Superman’s emitting solar energy). I thought it was a nice ending to what I was doing with All-Star Superman, where you see the moment where he left us all to live in the sun and to save everyone he built an engine in the heart of the sun. I liked the idea of tying it all together.”

When Mort Weisinger took over editing Superman in the ‘50s through ‘60s, he built an entire mythological world around the classic superhero and his supporting cast. Weisinger’s Superman was a misplaced alien, first and foremost, impossibly powerful and tinged with a bittersweetness in being the last of his race. First and foremost, the Weisinger era stories were fun, which Morrison and Quitely embraced.

“The Weisinger stuff, to me, was the best,” Morrison says. “I’d read the entire history of Superman, and those struck me as being the most universal, because they’re all about things that people understand. Superman could become old, or fat, or skinny—he’s constantly changing shape—but the stories were very grounded in human emotions, which I love. Kids could buy into it, because it didn’t talk down to them, and adults could also read those stories as fables or Hans Christian Anderson tales. I went back to that because, honestly, I thought that the most universal version of Superman was where he was the least like us. Because there were so many other costumed superhero characters, to try to separate Superman away from it, you have to go back to something where he represented something a lot bigger and talked to a more mainstream audience. That’s why I chose that era, because that Superman was at his peak there.”

“People are always saying If he’s too powerful, then he’s unrelatable,'” Grant adds later. “In All-Star Superman I wrote the most powerful Superman I could, but tried to show how he could be emotionally wounded and is vulnerable.”

Grant Morrison continued to write superheroes: either changing things up in 2001 with Marvel’s X-Men (a run which earned critical acclaim and gave the book a much-needed shot in the arm, yet was the bane of many die-hard X-Men fans), and even writing the uber-mega-meta-story for DC Comics in Seven Soldiers (a handful of inter-related comic book series starring lower tier character) and Final Crisis, the latter of which quite literally ended and started the DC Universe anew.

When he took the writing reins on Batman in 2006, it was the start of a long run that entailed introducing Bruce Wayne’s illegimate son Damian as the new Robin, apparently killing off the original Batman and replacing him with the first Robin, Dick Grayson, and turning Batman’s bizarre world even more bizarre.

“I kind of have a plan,” Grant admits. “But the plan is always subject to change once you get into it and start to understand the characters more. Usually for me, I have a lot of stuff that I want to do in the first three years, planned out going in. Epic is what it should be, because people are paying a lot of money for these things, and they should be getting something that they can think about, relate to, or get stories that have hidden meanings and other secrets that you can dig out. It gives a mythological slant to this stuff when people talk about it online. That’s a big part of the business now, where you find out what’s not working for readers. I really do like adapting to that.”

From a technical perspective, Morrison’s Batman is a masterpiece in narrative structure: like a stage magician, he’s an expert at misdirecting the reader from story clues that have been there all along; he embraces obscure story elements from the ‘50s and makes them work with the contemporary Batman; and he manages to make the single issues a different reading experience from the eventual trade collections.

“I go with the feel of it—‘Does it feel right?’ I rewrite a story a few times before settling into it, and will wrestle with it for days or weeks until something clicks and it seems right,” he reveals. “I think that every issue should have a different feel from every other issue, and it should be about a specific thing, even when it’s a chapter in a long-running story. It should feel like a unit unto its own self, which is where the structuring comes in.”

Right now, Morrison is gearing up to revisit the Man of Steel, this time reimagining him from the ground up, as part of DC Comics’ relaunch of their entire comics line. Action Comics, with art by Rags Morales, is Grant’s shot at giving us a new classic Superman, starting from day one. They may be new stories, but Morrison still has a keen eye on the character’s past:

“For me, what makes him different from the other pulp fiction characters before him characters is that initial on his chest,” he observes. “The superhero brought the idea of branding and self-promotion. The first time we see him, he’s busting a car, which is a symbol of mechanization; so Superman also represented humanism and the individual in the face of the Great Depression, poverty, and mechanization (where factories were putting people out of work). The superhero is like a pop star.

“Look at everyone now—they’re on their own Facebook page with their own likes and dislikes, where everyone is a rock star who can present themselves as a brand. Superman was the first to do that, which is what has kept him vital for all those years, along with very much emphasizing the individual over society. I’ve also come to recognize him as almost mythical, with basic qualities and story elements that each generation refreshes.”

In Grant’s Action, Superman starts his career in jeans, a t-shirt, and work boots, smacking of the laboring class—a blue collar take similar to his 1938 origins as an activist. The main Superman book will be set five years later than Grant’s, featuring Superman in a modified costume, sans red trunks.

“With Action Comics, I wanted to go back to that original Superman, who can only jump (he can almost fly), he can be hurt by a bursting shell; it’s the basic idea getting back to a Superman who can be hurt, so that he has gets that relatability and humanity back. He doesn't even wear his traditional costume at first. But when I actually give people what they think they want, they freak out. ‘Give him back his [under]pants, please!’ For years, they’ve been asking us to take his [under]pants away, and suddenly we do it, and they go off into a fury.”

Grant thinks in terms of his new Superman mythology with Action, where it all ties together—

“For me, it’s the same guy as twenty years earlier than All-Star Superman,” he reveals. “In my head, I see it as one continuum. It doesn’t quite mesh with John Byrne’s version, but I hope that this Superman will work and can be plugged in to any continuity.”

By embracing the traditional aspects of long-running superhero comics and merging it with the punk rock experimentation and edginess of the British comics culture, Grant Morrison continues to put a new spin on old material. Reading Supergods, his essential manifesto on the superhero genre that combines his observations with history and autobiography, is being taking on a long ramble that is so fluid in imperceptibly shifting from subject to subject. Much like a Grant Morrison comic book, where Batman encounters cavemen, a satanic cult, and alien technology within a handful of issues—it all comes together beautifully in the end.

Perhaps that’s the secret we can pull out of comics’ own narrative alchemist—a way to blend the best of all worlds (no matter how prominent or esoteric) into an unapologetically off-beat masterpiece.

Learn more about Grant Morrison at his official site.

PS Magazine: The Best of Preventive Maintenance Monthly

2011-08-18T17:47:00.000-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving

The truth is, that Will Eisner never really took a break from comics after The Spirit and before A Contract with God. Abrams’ PS Magazine compilation is not only a reminder of that, but a firm kick in the posterior quarters for those of us who forget about the twenty years he spent refining the sequential craft in this preventive maintenance magazine for the Army.

Reprinted between snazzy cloth covers, with an embossed title, PS is packaged unlike any previous printings of Eisner’s graphic novels or Spirit works, but alludes to them on the endpapers—a photo of Eisner’s own bound PS Magazine volumes sandwiched between print editions of the Spirit Archives and his several graphic novels. The illusion of this being an old edition is betrayed by printing it on glossy, rather than matte, paper.

All the Eisner-isms are there in his stories, written to educate Army men and motorists in keeping their equipment up to snuff, from basic engine repair to worst-case scenarios involving neglected carbine rifles. It’s not the educational aspect alone that makes PS interesting (and, in some places, the instructional aspect can get downright boring), it’s Joe Dope, the bumbling but well-meaning G.I., or the heated General Halftrack and, especially, pin-up girl extraordinaire Connie Rodd. Blonde, long-legged, and hour-glass shaped, Connie embodies the Eisner dame to perfection, letting slip with double entendres while leaning over an engine block or unwittingly sending her supporting cast into love struck hysterics.

As a sidenote, my alma mater Virginia Commonwealth University’s Special Collections has acquired a full collection of PS, and have put the entire Eisner run online. If this volume only whets your appetite, they’re the perfect location to track down more from Eisner’s “lost” period.

CulturePOP Photocomix Tribute to "Our Man" Harvey Pekar (RIP)

2011-07-12T14:56:00.000-04:00

CulturePOP Photocomix Tribute to "Our Man" Harvey Pekar (RIP)

by Seth Kushner
Interview by Christopher IrvingEdited by Jeff Newelt & Dean Haspiel
See it--http://activatecomix.com/104-25-1.comic

Seth Kushner's CulturePOP: Photocomix Profiles of Real-Life Characters returns (see info below for previous 24 episodes) to ActivateComix.com on Tuesday, July 12 2011 with a special tribute to Harvey Pekar, on the one-year anniversary of his death.

The 25-page piece, the 25th CulturePOP profile, features photos of the autobio comix pioneer, taken by Kushner just a few months prior to his untimely death, fused with quotes by an interview conducted by Christopher Irving the day of the shoot, to make a "fumetti" / photocomix equivalent to an American Splendor comic.

In addition to the words of Pekar himself, the piece includes photos of, quotes from, and illustrations by some of Pekar's collaborators; Josh Neufeld (artist, American Splendor), Dean Haspiel, (artist, The Quitter + American Splendor), Jeff Newelt (editor, Pekar Project & upcoming Harvey Pekar's Cleveland), Ted Hope (American Splendor film producer), Joseph Remnant (artist, Harvey Pekar's CLEVELAND) Shari Springer-Berman & Robert Pulcini (directors, American Splendor film) and Michael Taylor (script supervisor). Plus, Joyce Brabner, Harvey's widow and collaborator talks about her plan to have a monument erected to Harvey in Cleveland.

"I didn't know Harvey very well at all, not personally at least." Kushner says. "I knew him as many did, through his comics, and the great film, American Splendor. I've worked with Dean & Jeff on this tribute for months and I hope it will stand as a fitting one to a man whose seemingly ordinary, but unique voice, influenced and uplifted so many. Harvey Pekar, a seemingly ordinary guy from Cleveland, a former file clerk, made an indelible mark on comics, influenced several generations of comics creators, and died too soon."

See it--http://activatecomix.com/104-25-1.comic

Chris Claremont on Evolving the X-Men, Part Two

2011-06-22T16:01:00.001-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

In 1982, Claremont teamed up with Frank Miller for the ultimate Wolverine story, a four-issue mini-series that placed the enigmatic X-Man smack in the middle of a war with ninjas and the Yakuza. It had a hard-boiled feel to it that the regular X-Men comics couldn’t allow and was a successful marriage of the creators’ respectable sensibilities. Claremont first came in touch with Miller in 1978, on the artist’s second job for Marvel: John Carter, Warlord of Mars #18.

“The Assistant Editor of the book was Jo Duffy, who brought him in and gave him his first hit, and I gave him his second,” Chris says. “I remember looking at his work and going ‘Holy cow!’

“In a lot of places in the John Carter story, Frank gets overwhelmed by the inker, but overall you see all the hallmarks that you recognize from Frank since then come into play. He sat down and worked out a four-handed fighting style, so he can choreograph the fight scene. The script just said ‘Tars Tarkas fights with guy,’ and I tossed into my suggestions, because this wasn’t a script but a plot. He figured out how it would work, how you could present both the action of the figure and the way the panel was shot, in where you place the camera and set the figures in the background and foreground. How do you make it work? The cool part was watching all the pieces come together and then trying to figure out ‘If he’s going to challenge me this way, then I have to find the way to be the equal of that.’”

Miller hopped on board as artist of Daredevil the next year, eventually taking over as writer.

“Frank turns in his first Daredevil script and Shooter is in his office, being Jim,” Chris tells. “Denny O’Neil walks through the office, basically utters a string of primal profanity, and the script down on Jim’s desk. He says ‘This is Frank’s first script for Daredevil.’

“Jim asks ‘What’s wrong with it?’

“Denny says ‘Nothing! He has no right being this good, this young!’ Denny was outraged because it took him at least a couple of weeks, if not years (in his own mind), to get that good and Frank just nailed it right off of the bat.”

Miller’s Daredevil took a second-tier title and redefined it with heavy crime elements, introducing (and subsequently killing) the assassin Elektra, and pushing the title character to his limits and beyond. It was a commercial and critical success for Marvel, and bolstered Miller to becoming one of the most distinctive and revolutionary cartoonists in 1980s comics. When the two united for Wolverine, it was the blending of Claremont’s brand of character pathos blended with Miller’s own brand of visceral tough guy action.

“Because I was trained to work with people like Dave, Frank, or Walter, why should I write a full script?” Claremont points out. “These guys tell stories better than almost anyone, certainly better than me. Just point them in the right direction, give them all the key emotional and physical elements, and turn them loose.

“The quintessential story I tell was from when Frank and I were doing Wolverine. The pitch meeting was the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles, and getting stuck in a huge tailback because Customs was looking for illegal immigrants, even back then. He was trapped, and I was driving, and I was just telling him the story—what I wanted to do and how I wanted to tell it, and who Wolverine was. I didn’t want to do what we did in the X-Men, because we do that every month and I wanted to go somewhere different with it. When it came to structuring out the story, the first issue I did for him was twenty-two pages of script, single spaced, for a twenty-two page story. The fourth and last issue was something like a twenty minute phone call and a page of notes.

“The point being, by the fourth issue, all the stuff that was in the first plot (i.e.: Who was Wolverine and why was he doing things?). The structural subtext wasn’t necessary, because Frank and I were on the same page, we had the same compatible vision of the character. I didn’t need to tell him over and over again the things he needed to know; all we needed was to figure out the choreography and how we get from point A to point Zed, and then you set him loose. That was the value of getting two people together for a requisite amount of time, is that all the base crap is taken care of early on, and you can focus on what we’re doing that is new, exciting and different, and brings the characters and situation alive for the reader and draws them in. Hopefully it keeps them there.”

Wolverine was what every mini-series should be: an outside of the box view of another facet of an established character, and a chance for readers to see characters outside of their usual element. The story is the main source of the upcoming Wolverine film, The Wolverine, a sequel to the critically-panned Wolverine Origins. Claremont gives his seal of approval, having read the script by The Usual Suspects writer Chris McQuarry.

“[I like it] very much,” Chris says. “That’s all I can say. Chris McQuarry is brilliant.”

“What was the point of the death of Phoenix? She just came back. So then, what do you say to all the readers who were moved by that?” Claremont points out. “I went to a number of signings and conventions and had people in tears, because of that. As a writer, it’s intensely flattering, but at the same time your response is ‘If I’m going to provoke that level of response from a reader, then I have to rise to the occasion and come up with something better next time. But one thing I will not do is cheapen it by saying ‘We were only fooling!’’ Again, these are comics, and one person might try to do something but find themselves trumped by someone else who has a totally different agenda.”

While out on a lunch meeting with editor Ann Nocenti and artist Barry Windsor-Smith, Claremont learned of Shooter’s plan to bring Jean back from the dead for a new X-Men title, X-Factor, which reunited the five original X-Men team members.

“She tells me, and I went outside to call Jim…and I couldn’t remember his direct line and the office was closed,” Chris says. “It wasn’t the smart thing to do, because I would have yelled at him.

“I went in Monday with an alternative. I’d taken this short story I’d done the previous year with Jean and her sister. I said ‘Okay, you want a Grey. How’s this? Sara Grey. What’s her power? Her power is to detect mutants. She knows where they are. She can find them and even manifest their power in advance, so they’ll know who they are. If you’re going to do this with X-Factor, here’s the person. Here’s why: She’s a Grey, okay, but she’s not affiliated with anyone. Suddenly you have the girl at play for all four guys.

“Scott might feel ‘I’m torn. She’s Jean’s sister, but I love Jean and can’t betray Jean. Jean is dead.’

“And Warren? ‘Hey, you’re cool.’

“Bobby? ‘I’m not a kid anymore.’

“Hank? ‘Why not? I’ll get some action.’

“‘Suddenly you have physical and romantic tension that you don’t have with Jean. With Jean it’s reasserting everything that existed. With Sara, you have ‘Do I want to get involved with these guys? If I get involved with these guys and something goes wrong, what happened to Jean could happen to me, or worse. And yet, do I really want to spend my life running around in a skintight suit?’’

“I did a three-page pitch and had developed it all there. Jim read it and said ‘You know, this is pretty good.’

“I said ‘Well?’

“‘But the whole giggle point of X-Factor was the resurrection. If you don’t have that, it looses the Whoomph factor.’

“My attitude, then and now, was ‘Been there done that, let’s come up with something that echoes the trope but takes us in a new direction but also opens up possibilities.’ Sort of like killing Johnny Storm,” he points out, citing the recent death of the Fantastic Four team member. “If you’re going to do it, do it. If you’re going to take the consequence of the moment, then come up with a rational way of what happens next. The other side of the coin (just sitting here and playing off the top of my head) is that you’ve got the FF and something happens to Johnny and he’s dead…

“You can then run the shockwaves through three surviving characters, have them come to a decision, and maybe it’s a temporary or evolutionary decision. It’s letting the shockwave roll through and seeing how the consequences play out. Otherwise, what’s the point? The challenge is in how are you going to play this and where are you going to take it? That, I would submit, is the rationale between any good fictional character: You want to put them in reality and present a little conflict, and then what happens next?

“It’s taking life and putting it in the fiction, and then seeing where it goes from there. Again, the challenge and frustration with comics, especially if you stick around too long, is that you see the tropes playing out along the same tracks over and over and over again. You don’t ever trust that, if it gets twisted off somewhere new, will it last?”

“I’d been doing the book for seventeen years, and had made it the most successful comic in modern comics history,” Chris says of Uncanny X-Men. “We were scoring numbers that were very breathtaking. The only time we weren’t at the top of the heap was when Frank and I were going at it (in a metaphorical sense) toe-to-toe, with him on Daredevil and me on X-Men. I figured that I had earned a level of stature and respect, and I was wrong.”

As 1991 approached, Claremont had been masterminding X-Men for a record run, as the book consistently sold in high numbers. Marvel was then celebrating their new breed of “hot” artists like Amazing Spider-Man’s Todd McFarlane, New Mutants’s Rob Liefeld, and Uncanny X-Men’s Jim Lee. As the trio’s art continued to boost sales in what was a speculator’s market that was glutted with “collector’s issues” such as poly-bagging with trading cards, multiple covers, and special “holographic” or “chromium” covers, Marvel started putting more focus on the artists rather than the writers. McFarlane was given his own adjectiveless Spider-Man title, Liefeld was allowed to reboot New Mutants into X-Force, and Claremont and Lee launched a new adjectiveless X-Men title.

“There were people in the Marvel management pantheon who felt a measure of concern that the book had become so significantly identified with me, and what would happen if I dropped dead or stuck around for twenty to twenty-five years? It would be a difficult thing to shift over,” Chris continues. “They were looking at it from the Gunsmoke model, whereas James Arness stuck around for twenty-four years! But time takes its toll; it’s not like Doctor Who, where you can shuffle in a new guy every few years (which is a model comics would prefer). More importantly, this was the book people wanted to write. You want to be able to offer your premiere title to a new guy. If you want to lure Garth Ennis from DC, you offer him X-Men. But if I’m still there and writing it and producing 500,000 copies an issue, that’s an awkward situation.

“What was also happening was that editors had become substantially more integral to the process of creating comics. Tom Brevoort was building his career, and has moved up the food chain twenty years later. Bob [Harras] was taking over on editing the X-Men, and they’d just brought in Jim Lee. Bob and Jim were very simpatico.”

Amongst the most memorable issues of the Claremont and Lee run was in the author’s handling of Magneto as a tragic and misunderstood heroic figure trying to atone for his past misdeeds, not a static villain.

“The problem was that I had evolved the book and taken it in directions that not everybody was comfortable with: Magneto had started out as the X-Men’s premiere villain, and I was getting to the point in the late ‘80s where my goal was to kill off Charlie (probably around #300) and replace him with Magneto. It would show the evolution.

“The in-house perception was that I had sacrificed the concept’s premiere adversary, like if I’d made Doctor Doom a hero. My approach to the X-Men had always been that you could start the book with issue #100, and if you then later picked it up with #200, you’d see some changes. If you come back with #300, you’ll see a lot of changes from #100. Cyclops will be married, and he and his wife will have a kid; as a function of that, he’s going to go back to Alaska with his parents and start a life. He’s going to grow up. They are all going to grow up. New Mutants would evolve to a point where one or two of them might become X-Men, or not. It’s the same way with Kitty: it would be a slow evolution of age, but it would happen.”

Claremont’s direction as writer was more akin to the Gasoline Alley template, where characters aged and moved on through the evolution of the strip.

“If I’d stuck around, and if the book got to #500, it’s conceivable that the only common element might be Wolverine, because he’s functionally immortal. The idea was that things would grow, would change, and would spin-off. We could pass characters over to create Excalibur to try something new. But the driving force was that reality has changed and that we should pay attention to that, if for no other reason (from a practical standpoint) that the core of the series would remain the same, so that long time readers would always have a bedrock structure of characters that they could relate to. Each generation of new readers would have their own new favorites that they can bond with and root for, and invest emotions and concerns and tension, and watch what happens. If they left the comic after that, well, then we’ll bring in some new ones and start again.”

Despite Claremont’s keeping X-Men a long-running success for Marvel, and despite the first storyline of the new X-Men book (recognized for the Guinness World Record for highest comic book sales in 2010), Claremont left the X-Men behind.

“Jim and I did our story with #1, and it blew the lid off of things and created a World Record,” Claremont notes. “I walked because what was happening was Bob and Jim were the point men on getting the book back to basics. They wanted Magneto back as a villain. I think Jim wanted a chance to draw the stuff he’d bonded with as a kid, and I was saying ‘Been there, done that, at least three times. Let’s do something new.’ Bob was bonding with Jim because Jim was the fire that was drawing all the attention. The art was considered the key, not the script, at this point. It got to the point where no one was willing to find a middle ground and everybody went separate ways. I went away and, after a year, Jim and company went away to found Image.

“X-Men went into chaos and then the industry collapsed. The fantasy in ’90 and ’91 was ‘If we could launch with #1 at sales of 8.5 million, wouldn’t it be cool if we could come back with #12 in a year, and were still doing 800,000 or maybe a million? If we hit this high mark and didn’t drop back to the base number, and used it as a way to draw new readers in and expand the base, to bring it to a vaster cross-section of the reading populace….’ That was the hope and ambition. It didn’t quite work that way, and so it collapsed.”

“There’s a significant difference between the world that existed up until I left in ’91, and the world that I came back to six years later.”

X-Men went through a small army of writers in an attempt to tie up any narrative loose ends and impose a status quo on a comic book that had always had a loose one, at best. On top of that, X-Men premiered as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1992, adapting several of Claremont’s stories. Claremont worked for DC for a few years, on his creator-owned title Sovereign Seven. Claremont returned to Marvel a few years later, but it was a much changed company, barely holding on after the collapse of the comic book industry and suffering a bankruptcy caused by their junk bondsman of a former CEO.

“When I came back in ’98 as Editorial Director, it was a shithole. The numbers were falling, every issue. You might have an issue that would hold on a little bit; I know that the eight or nine issues I did in 2000 managed to hold their own. We stopped a measure of a fall, but then after that? It’s depressing…The advantages of my being a mature contributor is that I remember that a book that only sold 75,000 copies got you cancelled without a second thought.

“X-Men is doing in the mid-60s. That’s Uncanny. X-Men Forever’s last issue sold twelve, and maybe not even that. That doesn’t even cover the cost of printing. That’s obscene, and what it says is that we’re clearly not offering work that a significant number of readers (potential or otherwise) are willing to find.”

Another impact felt by Marvel, since ’91 was the loss of a newsstand distribution system, which wound up taking a huge chunk out of sales figures.

“It’s only offered to comic book specialty stores. In the old days, a third of X-Men’s monthly sales were newsstand. The rule of thumb when I was writing Uncanny, was that we made our nut—the cost of the creative freelancers, putting the book together, and printing it—were paid for by the newsstand sales. We were selling 125,000 copies of an issue, which meant all of the direct market sales were gravy. Once they killed the newsstand, that all went away.”

“I love Joss Whedon’s writing. It’s just that when he’s writing my characters, it’s hard, especially when he’s writing my characters that I can’t write because he’s writing them. But, by the same token, that phrase in itself points out the dichotomy of the media, because they’re not my characters, and they never were” Claremont says of one X-Men successor. “It’s foolish to bond with them, even though in most cases one can’t help it, because the company doesn’t give a fuck. They may like you personally as a creator, and respect you tremendously as a contributor to the cannon, but in the structural reality of publishing, they go with the guy that works here and now. They go with the concept that works here and now.”

As the main X-Men books were taken over by A-list writers like Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon, Claremont returned to regularly writing X-Men with spin-off book X-Treme X-Men, launched with artist Salvador Larocca. The creative team lasted for two years, until Larocca was pulled from the book by higher-ups at Marvel—primarily Marvel’s publisher, Bill Jemas. It was not like Claremont’s earlier days in comics, where keeping a creative team together was paramount.

“A lot of times, if you get people in for a long pace, someone steals them,” Chris says. “Salvador Larocca and I had a great thing going, first on the FF, and then on X-Treme X-Men. It was brilliant, until Bill Jemas loved his stuff, and he was suddenly off to work on Sub-Mariner, and that was that. The evolution of things became seeming like I was being used as a farm team to get an artist to a certain level of ‘This guy’s good,’ and then yanking them away.”

Croatian artist Igor Kordey came on board as Larocca’s replacement until the book’s cancellation, and the pair were to go to a new permutation with a new Excalibur title.

“The idea, when X-Treme was cancelled, was that we were going to move over to a new Excalibur, with the original idea that it was going to take place on Genosha. We were trying to build a ruined culture. Igor is a brilliant artist and we never got a chance at Marvel to see much of it before X-Treme, because everything that he had to do was done on a one-week deadline. The problem was that it came back to haunt him, because everyone thought that became the defining element. It was a total shame. The work he did on Excalibur was totally unlike anything being done in American comics. To me, it was done beautifully. The character presentation was top-notch. Superhero action/adventure? No, he wasn’t the second coming of Jack Kirby, but who cares? That shouldn’t be what we need.

“Moving over to Excalibur, it would have been cooler, because the idea was to take all he knew about Croatia and Sarajevo. I have friends who work for NPR and there’s nothing like listening to a gunfight on the street of Sarajevo being broadcast, and knowing ‘Shit, they’re shooting at my best friend!’ Thank God it wasn’t live. We were very simpatico on my wanting to create a very real sense of this ravished city that had been hammered by this giant robot. I honestly couldn’t think of anybody who could convey that as elegantly as Igor, because it would have taken what he knew. I was like ‘Oh, man, this is going to be so cool.’ He was up for it, I was up for it, and he did a half-dozen pages. Then the regimes changed and then he was taken off the project. Then the book got slit up by House of M,” Claremont notes a huge crossover event that affected the entire X-Men line.

“The frustration is that (and I think many writers and artists, perhaps, feel the same way) you come to a point where you want to play on your own turf and follow your own instincts and see what happens. You run headlong against the management structure that looks on it like ‘Well, yeah, but we’re paying for it. That means we need this, and you need to divide that.’ The challenge is finding a way to balance the two, finding the way to get the things you want while giving them the things they want.’ Or, as Frank used to put it, we can do anything we want provided we use a bit of subtlety. I find it very amusing the protestations and announcements of ‘We’ve dropped the Comics Code and can use profanity, and use nudity, and do comics that are more adult.’ I’m sorry, but you can find in the best of ‘30s films moments that are entirely obvious what’s going on. You just have to think a little, and it’s not right in front of you. To me, I find that more fun.”

Since Claremont started in the 1970s, superhero comic books have largely become less accessible and more “adult,” with situations and content that wouldn’t pass muster twenty years ago.

“I freely admit that I’m a greedy sop,” Chris admits. “If I can do a scene that is balanced so that a twelve year old can read it and not get the double entendre, and a thirty year old can read it and totally get the double entendre—the key is that they’re both reading it. Or a twelve year old can read it years later and go ‘Now I get it!’ It increases the fun element and the bonding element of it. I think that’s a legitimate want.

“My conditioning as a mass market troll is that I want as broad an audience that I can get my hands on. I don’t want to be niche. I want to be mainstream. I want to be mass market, and for everyone to read this stuff. I think the joy and value of what we’re creating will entertain. It’s like one can appreciate Comedy Central, but the old days where you can get 68 million people all watching [I Love] Lucy? That could’ve been fun. Why can’t we do it again? But that’s me being greedy and selfish, but there are legitimate rationales.”

Claremont, earlier in the interview, had reflected on what made a great comic in the earlier days, that pre post-modernist, primarily direct market, phase of the 1980s:

“The key is that you want to keep readers coming back for more. You do it by enticement, by creating characters that the readers care about and want to see what happens next, and then putting them headlong into peril. Hopefully the reader will empathize. It’s a challenge but it’s also a helluva lot of fun.

“The frustration is when you don’t see that happening.

“The second frustration, which is more primal, is that you ask yourself ‘Is this because it’s not there? Because I’m of a different generation, I don’t see the mesh of the script and visual in a way that I did when I was twenty, which is a whole other level of realization and insight, or non-insight. There’s no real answer for it. The kinds of prose books that I loved ten years ago, I look at now and go ‘Ewww’. I looked through Neil’s stuff, Jack’s stuff, John’s stuff (Senior or Junior), and I see what I love. I look at modern presentation and the magic isn’t there.

“It becomes, then, an honest question that one has to ask: ‘Is it me or the medium? Have I changed? Have they changed? Have we both changed and drifted apart? Is this a flaw, or do you just move on?’ I don’t know if there’s an answer for it. I think this is the whole sugar idea, where you keep trying until you get it right. Archie’s point was ‘If you fuck up, in three weeks you have another try, and we’ll give a No-Prize.’ The beauty of a periodical is that, as long as you’re in print, you’ll always get a second chance. You just have to figure out how to put the pieces together and turn them loose and avoid clichés.”

“One problem for me, as a reader, that I see in the modern presentation of comics, is the evolution of things to trades. What you have now are five issue bursts. Why? Because everything’s going to go into trade. I find that counter-productive; I want the flexibility and luxury of being able to expand a story by an issue if it’s working well, or cut it by an issue if it’s not. I don’t want to sit there and be locked into a defined format, which would make it awful for me to be a TV writer.”

Since Claremont’s departure in ’91, the industry started to follow more of a trade paperback collection model, treating single comic book issues as part of a greater whole story arc, and radically changing the direction of the periodical comic book. Gone are the days of letting a series organically evolve from issue to issue, as writers must plan ahead several issues in advance. Claremont encountered this while working on X-Men Forever 2, his second series that takes the X-Men characters in a direction he’d wanted years back—Wolverine is killed by Storm and replaced with Sabretooth, Shadowcat takes on more ninja-like qualities, Rogue and Nightcrawler switch powers, and Nick Fury has become an ally of the mutant team. The series’ was unfortunately cancelled due to low sales.

“We sat down last spring and blocked out the next twenty-four issues [of X-Men Forever], and we had it all laid out. The next eight issues would’ve been a helluva lot of fun, leading up to #24, but the plug got pulled,” Chris laments.

According to Claremont, American comic books can learn a thing or two from their cousins across the world:

“The problem, unfortunately, is the diametric difference between the way it’s conceptually approached in the United States as opposed to Europe or Japan,” he says. “Here the industry is defined by corporate ownership—DC’s core characters and Marvel’s core characters—and that’s it. When you had Image, it was based on characters owned by the companies involved, whether it was Wildstorm or Top Cow. You licensed them to guys who would come in and write them and draw them. Whereas, in Europe, there’s much more of an independent creator-owned aesthetic. From that you get a relative degree of variety and creativity that you don’t have over here. The problem is how many times can you reinvent Superman, reinvent Batman, or reinvent Fantastic Four?

“Case in point being, they just killed off Johnny Storm,” he cites of the Fantastic Four character, knocked off the same week of this interview and yet another superhero death inevitably reversed a few years down the line. “So what?”

“The paradox is that if we hadn’t resurrected Jean back in ’85, if we’d killed Jean and she’d stayed dead,” he elaborates. “If we’d kept that going, if we said ‘Someone dies in any book in the Marvel Universe, they stay dead. End of story. We’re not bringing back Captain Marvel, we’re not bringing back so and so.’ Would that have made a difference? When you do a story like this where you take Johnny to the brink and throw him over, when a character makes a decision ‘I must sacrifice my life,’ there is a consequence. There is no get out of jail free card. Would that be better?

“The flipside, as I was saying before, is that it at least opens the door for a new character to be introduced who might do as well, if not better. As you said, like a Gambit, or a Deadpool. Imagine if we did kill off Wolverine and replaced him with Deadpool. That would be an interesting thing to play with.

“Now what you’ve got is ‘Johnny’s dead,’ but the subtext to everybody who reads it and reviews it is ‘Yeah, he’s dead this week.’ Then a year from now, someone will come along and bring him back, or even more amusingly when the new FF film hits, Johnny becomes successful in that and it’s a matter of ‘Oh, shit, we’ve got to match the movie.

“It’s the machinations of the structure are too often on view. You can’t get swallowed by the story’s reality. The thing with the X-Men is that you had some characters who couldn’t fit in the movie, but you could divert attention to them and look at New Mutants or Excalibur instead. How many times has Captain Britain died and been resurrected? Not to mention Betsy, not to mention Jean!

“There again, it’s become the joke now. So they bring Jean back. They brought Kitty back. I was pissed off that she died, but I went ‘Okay, leave her dead, or have her be alive in space and do something with her there. But don’t just magically pop her in the book.’ But they wanted her back, so why is there any meaning in anything that happens. Conan Doyle ran into that with Sherlock Holmes going off of Reichenbach Falls. There needs to be a better way to do it or to approach it that is satisfying to both readers and creators.”

Chris Claremont helped redefine comics through X-Men alone; instead of making the mutants more than just superheroes with static quo personalities and emotions, he crafted human beings with evolving personalities and constantly conflicted emotions. X-Men was very much a victim of the changing marketplace, as long-term storytelling gave way to shorter bursts of decompressed stories.

“Things change, grow and evolve, and you don’t necessarily like them, but that’s what makes it a horse race. Or, you can find a way to do it your way, but better. And then find some idiot publisher,” Chris laughs. “But that’s the nature. The main challenge of mainstream, and the creators in mainstream, is that you have to reinvent yourself every X amount of times. The challenge now is the hope that there’ll be an audience out there to appreciate the work when the latest version takes place.”

So what’s in the future for Claremont? He’s actually dusted off notes from an aborted Marvel ‘70s comic, the one he worked on with Frank Miller:

“You look at things from an evolutionary and structural standpoint. I was just writing a short story for an anthology last week, based on Jon Carter [Warlord of Mars]. The story I sent in was adapted from my original notes for what would’ve been a second year of my run on Warlord of Mars. It was a cool adventure with John Carter, Dejah Thoris and Tars Tarkas in Arizona in 1870, with Tom Jeffers, Cochese, the end of the Apache Wars. ‘The Ghost of the Superstition Mountains’. Good fun.“

Special thanks goes out to Beth Fleisher for setting up our interview with Chris.

Christopher talks to Jerry Robinson!

2011-06-20T14:58:00.001-04:00

He created two pop culture icons in The Joker and Robin. He drew countless comic strips, wrote the definitive book on the history of American newspaper comics, and also stood up for Superman's creators. And that's just the tip of the iceberg that is Jerry Robinson's career.

Christopher will be conducting an interview panel with Jerry on Wednesday, June 29 at the Barnes and Noble on 82nd and Broadway in Manhattan, starting at 7:00. Done in conjunction with our friends and Dark Horse Comics (who have printed a new edition of The Comics and two editions of Robinson's sci-fi masterpiece comic Jet Scott), we'll have an hour to cover as much of Robinson's varied career. In the meantime, check out Mr. Robinson's new website, and tell 'em Graphic NYC sent you.

Chris Claremont on Evolving the X-Men, Part One

2011-06-13T10:27:00.000-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving

Pictures: Seth Kushner

“You may have noticed (as a parenthetical aside),” Chris Claremont says in the middle of a thought. “I talk as I write, which is by the word.”

Sitting in his Brooklyn home, Claremont is affable with a dry sense of humor tinged with a bit of self-deprecation. Claremont is synonymous with his blockbuster comic book work as writer of the X-Men for near two decades, serving as architect to a series that helped keep the comic book industry afloat during its worse days, and increased visibility on the best. But Claremont’s influential career didn’t start with X-Men: it started, innocently enough, with Mad Magazine Fold-In mastermind Al Jaffee.

“He had been good friends with my parents since we moved to Long Island, which was a half-century ago,” Claremont reveals. “Al was, in many respects, the reason I’m working for Marvel. The official story: I went to Bard College and, in those days, Bard had what was called a field period, where they shut down for Christmas break and didn’t open for spring semester until the middle of March. Since upstate was intense in the winter (and we actually had a lot of snow) and Bard was a small college and not well-endowed; I suspect the practical side of things was that it saved on heating.

“The idea was that you were expected to go out and get an internship or job in a field associated with your interests or major, and build up a balance of experience, so that when you actually graduated, you would have some practical knowledge to go with the academics you learned in class. My freshman year, my majors were Political Theory and Acting, and there wasn’t much going on in New York theater in January. I was writing at the time and asked Al if Mad had interns.

“As it turned out, he went to my parents and said ‘There is no way in hell I’m going to recommend your son for an intern—Do you know what we do? Do you know what happens when we get together? You’d never forgive me!’

“He said ‘I’m friends with Stan Lee. Would you be willing to work for Marvel?’ and I said ‘Hell, yes.’”

“So, Al called Stan, Stan called me, and I told him I’d work for free. Stan, and Marvel, were never one to turn down a free lunch in those days, and he said ‘Come in and be a gopher for two months.’”

Claremont’s comic book reading habits were first kicked off when, in junior high, he swung by a newsstand and fell in love with Fantastic Four #48, Kirby’s drawing of the bald and large-headed alien Watcher emblazoned in full color.

“I started flipping through it, and it was Jack in his heyday (in terms of art) and I thought ‘This is really cool.’ So I bought it, and came back a month later and bought #49, then #50. Before I knew it, I was hooked. From FF, that led me to Roy working with John Buscema on The Avengers, and that led me back to Stan and Jack on Thor, and suddenly I was buying comics again. Marvel, to me at the time, was brilliant.”

“When I went out to college, my father threw out my entire collection, because comics were ‘inappropriate’,” he adds. “Fortunately, some of them survived, but among the ones that didn’t was the Action Comics that came out the last of November in 1963, which had Superman meeting John Kennedy! It could have paid for my kids’ college at this point. He had a very English attitude that ‘This is kids’ stuff, and you’re not a kid anymore.’”

The weird thing was, working in the office and seeing (this is back when I was a gopher) Barry’s first pages coming in, it was like ‘Holy shit!’ This was something that you don’t get anymore, that kinetic moment of discovery, where now everything’s posted on Facebook and comes in as electron streams. It isn’t the same as seeing someone crafting out.

The Marvel books were creatively in their heyday in 1968, but still a small company with a small staff of about twenty people. While Ditko had left The Amazing Spider-Man and Romita had taken over on pencils, Lee and Kirby were still going strong on Fantastic Four (and his usual bevy of books), and Thomas and Buscema were on Avengers.

“There was a little reception area, and then a little two-desk spot for people who attended to the reception area (me and a lady who attended to the reception area),” Chris recalls. “Behind us was the bullpen, which in those days was John Romita, Sr., Herb Trimpe, and Marie Severin. Across the little hall was the technical side of things, like the stat room, and when you got to the end of that little hall, the door at the right was Stan’s office (the only one that had a door), and then the office on the left was Roy and Marvel’s business manager and Stan’s secretary (who was at the time Roy’s wife). There was an office for John Verpoorten who was running everything.”

One comic book made it on the scene in January, 1969 and was prophetic towards Claremont’s eventual career as a writer. Neal Adams’s first X-Men artwork came in and Claremont had to deal with the amount of fan mail the next month. In less than a decade, plenty would come in for his run on the book. X-Men would last for ten more issues, with Adams and other artists pitching in, and then turn into a reprint series for a few more years.

Working at Marvel was also a personal vindication for Chris, who was given permission to enjoy digging into comics for work. What started as an innocent catching-up turned into a learning experience, and Claremont’s first test as writer and idea man.

“I was reading through all the back issues, and the latest issue of Sgt. Fury comes in—‘The Trial of Nick Fury,’” Chris recalls. “John Severin was doing brilliant art. I’m looking through it and here’s a priest coming on and saying ‘I knew Nick Fury when he was a young lad, and he and his brother were always running around. His mother would yell out ‘Come home!’ I’m going ‘Uh-oh,’ and I went back and referred to the first year, which was Stan and Jack. Here’s Nick Fury established in issues #3 or #4 as an orphan with no siblings.

“I went ‘Roy, we have a problem, maybe?’ I showed him the two and he went ‘Okay. You found it. You call Stan. Don’t bother me.’ So, I called Stan. I said ‘This is Chris at the office.’

“‘How you doing, True Believer!?’” Chris does a dead-on Stan impersonation.

“He had a Third Avenue apartment at 59^th Street. This was money central. I told him what happened and he said ‘Okay. You found it, you fix it.’ That was Marvel. If you worked for the House, you had to have a brain and do your job.

“I figured Nick was adopted (subsequently), which actually helped out down the line with the [Jim Steranko] Zodiac story, because they weren’t real brothers but the adopted son and the real son. There were limits to what we could do with the Severin pages because they were finished. This was literally two days before going to the printer to go to press, so we didn’t have any leeway. That’s the way you handled it, by seeing the problem and then improvising. I had to take the stats down to Stan to show him, and that was my first encounter with Scientology. They had an office on 59^th Street, between 2^nd and 3^rd. It was weird, but fun.”

Claremont was on board at Marvel right as the second generation was coming into play, with Roy Thomas the advance scout for a new wave of writers who grew up loving comics (much the same way the first comic book writers and artists were fans of science fiction and pulp magazines).

“He was this bundle of intense, focused energy, and he was turning out some absolutely brilliant stuff,” he says of Thomas. “It was like wandering around a pressure cooker. John would be drawing these beautiful pages, Herb would be doing great stuff on Hulk, and Marie would be growling at everybody (because we were all testy boys). Every few days a package would come in from John Buscema, or Sal, or Jack, and it was like ‘Whoa!’ It was absolutely wonderful.

“I went back to college and got my degree, and came down to New York and started auditioning and doing freelance. I found myself eventually back to working for Marvel on staff. Again, it was the last year to year-and-a-half before Stan moved to L.A. I got my chops, cliché as it sounds, working at the feet of the master, sitting down and being yelled at for fucking up, by somebody who knew what he was doing.”

Chris came in as Assistant Editor of the black and white magazines. His boss was Tony Isabella, whose submission Chris rejected in his intern days five years earlier.

“He never let me forget that, either,” Chris smiles. “It was fun. I worked with him and then I worked with Marv. Then I was shifted out of the black and whites and over to the color line. I was Len’s Assistant Editor and then Associate Editor, which is when you get all these cool titles (and no money whatsoever).

“At the end, Len was Editor-in-Chief and he and I ran the line. He made the decisions and I did the dog-spotting. It was just the two of us putting out forty-five books a month.”

It was gearing up to be a hectic time, as Marvel held onto the same editorial structure that had worked for Stan years earlier, but with less titles. Also by that point, Stan’s forcing the Comics Code’s hand on the anti-drug issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, and publishing without the Code’s symbol, sparked a revision of the Code. Now allowing for monsters and horror in Code approved comics, Marvel was publishing horror comics for the first time in twenty years, on top of the healthy superhero line.

“The attitude then—Stan’s attitude and Roy’s—carried over to Len and Marv during their tenure, and was that our job was to find the best possible craftspeople for the job, and then turn them loose,” Claremont notes. “If you’re hiring Gerry Conway, or if you’re hiring someone like Ditko or John, Sr.; if you’ve got guys on that level, there’s no point in telling them what to do. You turn them loose. If there is a problem or a mistake, then you talk to them and fix it. You basically try to establish that it doesn’t happen again, and then you move on. It was a more functionally laissez-faire attitude.

“Occasionally you had some head-banging. Len was writing the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk and Steve Gerber was writing him in The Defenders. Steve and Len would get into huge fistfights (metaphorically speaking) over who was doing the authentic Hulk. Steve would handle him one way in Defenders, and Len would handle him the other way in Hulk.

“It was an eclectic approach. Stan’s attitude was more along the lines of ‘Okay. Just don’t fall on yourselves. Readers will find a way to shuffle them together. If they’re good stories, they’re good stories and will take care of themselves.’ Nine times out of ten, that works. I will freely confess that my own attitude became much less laissez-faire when I got a hold of the X-Men, simply because nobody gets to fuck it up but me. I don’t want any wankers mucking about with my guys.

“That’s just me being a prima donna. We were all, unfortunately, prima donnas.”

But, back to Marvel in the ‘70s: Claremont was an Associate Editor and Marv was still Editor-in-Chief. Marv’s departure would be just one part of the revolving door of Marvel Editors-in-Chief while Claremont would embark on a less predictable freelance career.

“I was Marv’s Associate Editor and finally decided, I’d had enough. Two and a half years was too much for me. I didn’t see any future in editing and figured it was time to move on. Two weeks later, Marv announced he was quitting. [I went] ‘You couldn’t tell me? Then I wouldn’t have quit! Idiot!’” Claremont said jokingly.

“That started the January of ‘Holy shit!’ Literally, they had a twenty-name list on the editor’s door of potential Editor-in-Chief who’d all turned it down. We finally got to Gerry Conway, who took the job for a week and half and decided he couldn’t do it, and left with fifteen titles to write. Archie took over. At the time, Marvel’s financial situation was much what it always is, which was precarious. We had a limit on how many titles we could produce. Len had his quota, Marv had his quota, and Gerry had his monstrously huge quota; that left about six titles for the other dozen and a half writers who needed work, who were committed to the company. Part of Archie’s first year was shuffling the deck to keep us all alive or solvent while, as his way of explaining was: ‘You know who we’re dealing with. You know these three guys, and you know their work schedules. You know their production histories. Hold on for six months, because someone’s bound to blow up!’ Sure enough, Gerry went back to DC and things opened up.

“Then Jim [Shooter] was hired as Gerry’s assistant. Then Gerry left three weeks later. Jim did the totally honorable thing that he felt, and gave Archie his pro forma notice. Shooter thought Archie would say ‘No, stick around,’ but Archie said ‘Okay.’ Then he called me, and I said ‘Hell, yes! Freelance sucks. I’ll take my job back.’

“My problem was that you actually couldn’t live on staff salary, so I went to Sol Brodsky, who was Marvel’s financial manager. I said ‘Look, if this job is going to be done right, I’ll have to give up most of my freelance, and I will not give up the X-Men. I’ll even give up Iron Fist, which I don’t want to do because I love it. Can we find a salary number that will balance the two out?’

“I gave him the number and Sal looked at me like I was an idiot. We were very parsimonious. We couldn’t agree on a number, and in the meantime, Jim came back and had a heart-to-heart with Archie. Archie, being one of the rare true gentleman in the world (if not the industry), took him back with apologies to me. I wasn’t eager to come back as Associate, but there was a practical coolness and I didn’t feel the need to fight Jim over it. He needed it and wanted it and could have it.

“The things you would’ve/could’ve/should’ve done. Jim stayed on as Associate Editor until Archie moved on to Epic, and then took over,” Chris says. Shooter’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief would be met with both praise and criticism, as he shepherded Marvel into one of the most creatively and financially successful periods in its history.

“When I look over my history, I look at working with Dave, with John Byrne, with John Romita Jr., with Marc Silvestri, and can watch everything grow—the stories grow, the characters grow, which issues are hit-and-miss and which ones are dense. It’s a lot of fun. I think that’s how you get the best and most honestly organic work out of a team, as opposed to the more contemporary approach where you shuffle whoever’s available with whoever is available.”

Claremont was about to make some history of his own as a writer in taking over a revamped version of the X-Men. Roy Thomas, in wanting to capitalize on overseas markets, had the vision of turning X-Men into “mutant Blackhawks,” by recasting the team with international members. In 1975, writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum introduced the “All New, All Different” X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1. In it, original X-Man Cyclops led a new team of the Russian Colossus, Native American Thunderbird, Canadian Wolverine, African Storm, German Nightcrawler, Japanese Sunfire, and Irish Banshee to save the remaining members of the original. The X-Men book returned with #94 (picking up after the reprint issues) by Claremont and Cockrum; Wein would write one more issue before handing over the full creative reins to Claremont and Cockrum. The book became a runaway success, as the team took the mutants into new territory, with the stories’ heavy focus on characterization. Where the focus on the mutants had before been on personality traits, Claremont and Cockrum took a more cerebral approach to the X-Men. Chances are Claremont’s background as an actor morphed into an almost method acting form of conceiving character and writing comics.

“When you commit to your project and your characters, they’re the center of your creative focus and universe,” Chris notes. “Your vision is the right one and you don’t want anyone mucking about with it. Len’s vision, for example, of Logan (including giving him the name Logan) is diametrically opposed to mine and Dave’s. Len came up with the concept, put it in place and turned it loose and then, for better or worse, left the book. Dave and I sat down and figured out how to make this character click as we evolved him down the line.

“By the same token, John Byrne’s visual depiction of what he looks like without the mask is head and shoulders different from what Dave evolved it into in the X-Men. Cockrum has always, as a matter of course, thought outside the box: ‘Why can’t you have a fat guy in a skintight costume? That works!’ You look at it and you think ‘Okay.’ Thank God he was in the Legion of Superheroes and not the X-Men, but there you go. ‘Why not have this tall, gorgeous black character who has a face that looks vaguely like a cat? Looks interesting. Why not have Nightcrawler?’

“Len’s vision of Nightcrawler was a bitter, tormented and anguished soul. Dave’s and my response was partly ‘been there, done that, and seen it too many times.’ But when we sat down and kicked it back and forth, trying to hammer it out is that if you’re walking down the street and get hit by lightning, and it makes you look like that, there’s a rationale. But if you’re born like that, you need to have a tremendously offensive chip on your shoulder your entire life—which is valid—or you go the other direction, which is to have him go ‘I’m cool. You guys have no idea: I can walk up walls, hang upside down, I can fight standing on one leg with my two hands, a foot, and a tail holding a sword. And I’m invisible in the dark.’”

“We thought ‘Why not take the most outrageous looking character on the team, and make him the most rational, human, decent and most empathetic soul?’ Naturally, he and Wolverine would bond because opposites attract. And they work. It was the same with Logan, who we put as much into answering ‘Who is he?’ and ‘Why is he?’ Len originally saw the claws as part of the costume. As Dave and I were doing the character, we thought that made him like Iron Man, and the problem with Iron Man is that anyone can wear the suit, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Tony or Rhodey. What makes him special? What makes him unique?

“‘So the claws are part of you?’

“‘Yup.’

“‘You never told anyone.’

“‘You never asked,’” Chris snaps his fingers. “Then you have, suddenly, this interesting physical difference (i.e. he has claws that pop out of his hands), but the implication that it must hurt every fucking time. That sets up the line in the first movie where Rogue asks him ‘Does it hurt?’ and he says ‘Every time.’ That’s one defining moment, but the other is in ‘You never asked.’ That catalyzed a key moment in Logan’s personality. That’s how you put them together: you take all these little bits and slide them in, and build your edifice one layer at a time. You have a general sense of where you want to go and how you want to get there, but the details of how the pieces fit to evolve this three-dimensional character is very much a matter of organic growth rather than construction, so you just follow the leads.”

And this is where it becomes apparently clear: After thirty years, Chris Claremont is still the X-Men’s biggest fan, often going into asides and talking about the mutant superheroes as if they were real people. For someone who defined them, directed their lives, and lived with them for close to two decades, they are real, each one having their own distinctive voice.

Cockrum left X-Men after #107 and handed the artistic duties off to John Byrne, Claremont’s partner on the Iron Fist comic book. While Cockrum was a New Yorker, the Canadian Byrne lived in Calgary; Claremont views geography as the only major collaborative difference.

“For most of the time leading up to the mid-‘70s, if you wanted to work in comics, you had to live within driving distance of New York, if for no other reason to get your damn paycheck,” Chris points out. “You came in, turned in your work, and got the check. When you went home, you deposited the check and were solvent for a week.

“It wasn’t really until Stan moved out west, and then Jack moved out west, that things began splintering. We did a lot of work with Tony and Marie DeZuniga, and they had this huge studio in the Philippines. They shipped the pages as Air Freight and, if the package got lost (and you’re talking about a fairly impressive box of a few hundred or even a thousand pages a month) you were so fucked. They did get lost, on more than one occasion. But there was no electronic transit! You called them on the phone, trying to calculate the time zone difference, which was fourteen hours tomorrow. It was a much more laissez-faire attitude than we have today. Because everything was still three-dimensional and is all hard copy, you did not make mistakes and couldn’t afford to, because you had to tear up the whole page. The lettering was done on the page and the inking was done on the page. It was solid and physical. You couldn’t take anything for granted. It was an adventure, in the best and worst sense of the word.

“You had to deal with people and, with John out in Calgary, I went out there a few times and would stay with him to figure things out. Whereas with David, we’d get together and just have coffee and sit in Washington Square. That scene we did in X-Men #105, with them battling one of Galactus’s many heralds, Firelord, that was us plotting. The panel Dave drew had him there with Peggy, and I was there with my girlfriend. The inker, Bob Layton, erased Peggy and put himself in,” Chris laughs. “But, that’s life, you know.

“The difference, to a large extent, was that Dave had a much more prevalent sense of humor. We tended to do stuff that was just ‘Hey, bet you can’t do this!’ He once blew up half of JFK, with 747s going this way, a little Lockheed fourjet coming this way; all of the stuff with Lilandra floating through space and telepathically bonding with Charlie; or elves in Ireland, for God’s sake! The idea was ‘This is comics,’ so it was outrageous and dramatic, but we should be able to have a laugh.

“John was more Canadian: it was a more serious approach, a much more—and I’d hate to say mature, but it was. He loved Nightcrawler because of the absurdism he could do and giggles he could get. That’s why Kurt and Ororo were great together, because you could have a moment where she asks ‘Am I pretty?’ and he goes ‘Yeah!’, because she has no idea.

“With John on Iron Fist, Dan was stalwart and cool, and Misty was ‘Wow!’, and that carried over to the X-Men. He bonded with Logan because he was Canadian, and because there was this constant conflict of rage with heroism. And it worked! That was the fun part: you watched the artists go over the characters and the characters go over the artist, and everyone seemed to play to each other’s strengths. It may well be because I’m not a twenty year-old anymore, but I don’t see the fun as much anymore. It seems like nobody’s having fun in comics, other than perhaps Deadpool.”

The high point of the Claremont/Byrne run was the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” a multi-issue story that concluded in 1980’s X-Men #137. X-Man Jean Grey had manifested cosmic powers and became the other-worldly Phoenix during Cockrum’s run, but was corrupted into the Dark Phoenix during Byrne’s. Destroying an entire galaxy, Jean was put to task by the alien Shi’ar for her crimes against the universe. The battle for Jean between the Shi’ar resulted in Jean’s sacrificing herself to keep her power from endangering others in the future. It was not the first death in superhero comics, but arguably the most epic and impactful one. Claremont and Byrne’s original intention was to have Jean stripped of her powers and continuing life as a normal person. Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, however, needed to see Jean pay for her crimes with her life.

“[It was] an adventure—the best of times and worst of times, often in the same moment,” Claremont reflects on working with Shooter. “The resolution of the Phoenix Saga was one of the most frustrating experiences that I think any of us ever had, but I also think it was the right move. The decision, three years later, to undo the Phoenix Saga with the resurrection of Jean was less so, but that’s in my opinion.

“He had a very focused and real sense of what his job and responsibility was as Editor-in-Chief. I think what he really wanted to be was Stan: Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. What he ran into was the evolution of the industry. By the time things came to a head in ’88, Marvel was a totally different animal. There were other ambitions at play, on levels far, far above where we lived. We weren’t just a little publishing company anymore, but were trying to be a media company. The management wanted the biggest paycheck they could get and they didn’t see it as coming from us.”

Be here on next week for Part Two of Chris Claremont's story!

Help Chris Wozniak and Other Tornado Victims

2011-05-23T16:55:00.000-04:00

DC and Marvel comics artist Chris Wozniak just recently lost his home in the Alabama tornado. His niece, Devin Alexis, is organizing a Brooklyn concert and art benefit show on June 3. Check out the Facebook page and clear your calendar!

Ch-Ch-Changebot Show!

2011-05-11T16:59:00.000-04:00

If you're here in NYC, make it out to Jeffrey Brown's Incredible Change-Bots Two art show! Come check out Brown's dysfunctional robot friends chronicled in a "comic book" and on display on Scott Eder's walls.

You know you have to. Resistance is futile.

Jeffrey Brown: The Incredible Changing Artist!

2011-05-10T07:14:00.002-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving
Pictures: Seth Kushner

“At this point, the biggest factor in what I reveal now is in being aware of how many people are reading things,” Jeffrey Brown says from his Chicago home. “My wariness of that is so much more heightened that I don’t have any more ways to trick myself left. Before, I was doing it for myself and then happening to publish it. Now, I can’t get that kind of distance. When I’m drawing it, I’m hyper-aware that at some point someone is going to see it. Especially the first book, the idea of drawing Clumsy in a sketchbook like a diary, and also the idea that when I was first drawing it, I had no idea I would be publishing it. It was this unique art object. It’s one thing to have that art object that people can see and look at, but it isn’t the same as when it’s printed and distributed widely.”

Jeffrey Brown, like the comic counterpart in his autobiographical work, is unassuming and soft-spoken. He’s sitting behind the dining room table of his Chicago home. In the living room sits a Mighty Change-Bots battle royale drawing, perched on a coffee table with color marker color filled in. Brown is deceptively talented: his comics work possesses the charm of a high schooler doodling his life experiences (or robot battles) in a ruled notebook, but he has a strong foundation in the fine arts.

“Yeah,” he says when told he makes his drawing look easy.

“Oh, thanks!” He says after doing a double-take, the compliment registering. Like his work, Brown is also humble and unassuming in nature.

“What it came out of was just being at art school and having all this build-up of everything I’ve learned and everything everyone else was doing—this whole big world was starting to weigh down on the actual making of art. Art wasn’t fun anymore, and the most fun art was from when I was drawing comics as a kid. I was trying to get back to that,” he says of his autobio work.

Brown moved to Chicago to earn an MFA at The School of the Art Institute, with dreams of being a painter. Grad school was a struggle for Jeffrey, the main thrust of his autobiographical novel Funny Misshapen Body, as he tried to pin down what type of art had personal and creative meaning for him as an artist.

“At that point, I’d started reading comics again, but hadn’t connected with the idea of doing them, other than my sketchbooks. I thought I was going to be a fine artist and work my way up to the galleries and display paintings. It wasn’t until the end of my first year that I started doing comics.”

“Some were cartoony, and not very painterly, but more like color versions of sketchbook drawings painted in acrylic,” Jeffrey says of his paintings. “They were only painting, not in the sense of a fine art context, but they happened to be made with paint. Then I also had these surreal abstract expressionist paintings. Motherwell is an example. It was very much not a cohesive body of work: I took this style and this style, and I knew neither one was where I wanted to go. Right before I started doing comics, I’d started doing more realist paintings from photos or sketchbook drawings, more along the lines of Alex Katz, where he simplified. But again, still, it was not very much about the painting so much as paint being what I was making it out of. It’s why I think the bridge to comics made so much sense. When I jumped from doing these paintings of real people from life and then to comics, it was an easy transition. Those paintings were about the subject matter and not the materials, but with comics it became about both.”

With a range of fine arts loves from the Expressionists (both Abstract and German) to Egon Schiele or Francis Bacon, Brown entered comics with a broader sense of art. Like another of his favorite painters, Pierre Bonnard, Brown’s work is very much about relationships within space, painted in a loose manner that can be seen in Brown’s own work.

As Jeffrey moved closer to his Master’s, sketching his comics on his own time, it was an encounter with a specific local cartoonist that pushed him closer to the language of comics.

“When I moved to Chicago, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes were signing for the David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan books, and I met them,” Jeffrey reveals. “I talked with Dan and connected with the fact that he lived in Grand Rapids for a year, which is my hometown. The comic shop he was going to when I lived there was my local shop, so I was probably buying my G.I. Joe comics when he was going there. Chris had also gone to the School of the Art Institute, and I was starting there.

“They were signing at a bookstore in Oak Park, and a week later, they signed at Quimby’s. I went to the Quimby’s signing and showed Chris what I was doing. When I talked last, he mentioned my showing him my work some time, so I brought a sketchbook and showed him at the signing. I stayed in touch with him and sent him a mini-comic that I put together, a collection of stuff from sketchbooks. He sent a letter back with his phone number, so I called him up and invited him to visit my studio. This is when he was doing the weekly comic for The Reader, so he’d go downtown once a week to do the color separations.”

The modest and unassuming Ware, particularly through his work in his own Acme Novelty Library, was redefining comic book storytelling, and striving to develop a more linguistic graphic connection between both words and pictures, creating his own fluency in the language of comics.

“One day he was coming downtown for that and came to my studio, and we went from there. That was a big part of my switching directions,” Jeffrey says. “He was looking at my paintings and looking at my sketchbook, and seeing things in my sketchbook and pointing out things that I was doing (that I knew I was doing) from a different perspective. I think he saw, even though I wasn’t drawing comics per se in my sketchbooks, that there was all that influence there. The things he was responding to in my sketchbook, I realized ‘Oh, that’s the type of stuff I love doing.’”

Brown’s first autobiographical graphic novel, Clumsy, details a former long-distance relationship in snippets and vignettes, while his follow-up, Unlikely, details his first serious relationship. Clumsy has a rambling nature, the art deceptively complex, but drawn directly in ink in his original sketchbook. The originals are literally drawn freehand in small journals, possessing a spontaneity and energy that the most overworked artist can’t achieve.

“The first few stories were in my head and I wrote them as I went,” Brown says. “Then I started scripting the stories. I’d settled on the six-panel-a-page format, and I would write numbers out one through six, and then what was in each panel, and then draw the stories. Then I would do the next set. It was just straight ink, and no penciling or thumbnailing beforehand.”

With Clumsy finished, Brown decided to wave it under some publishers’ noses, and worked to get the graphic novel circulated. But like anything worth achieving, it didn’t come that easily.

“I submitted it to a bunch of places. I think some of those places I submitted it to, it may not have been a complete copy, but bad Xeroxes, straight out of the sketchbook. Then I printed up the Xerox versions and sent those out, too. Fantagraphics got the form letter; a few places I never heard back from; and Top Shelf’s Chris and Brett were both responsive, and said ‘This doesn’t look like something we’ll publish right now, but if you do decide to self-publish, we’ll help you with distribution.’ I don’t think they do it that much anymore, but at the time they filled that role. I think AdHouse now is doing that now, but at that time, I think Alternative was doing it, Top Shelf did, and Fantagraphics to a lesser extent.

“Even though the publishers had all passed on it, the responses that I was getting were encouraging enough to make me think that self-publishing was viable. Chris Ware was also pushing me to do that, saying ‘You should really do this.’ He was the one who put me in touch with Paul Hornschemeier. Working with Paul is what made self-publishing possible, because he knew what to do and did a lot of the work on the book in terms of designing it and putting it together.”

The final product? Clumsy is the size of a thick digest, crammed full of telling bits of Brown’s past relationship. Brown portrays himself as sensitive, anxious for the approval and acceptance of his girlfriend; it’s all sincere, funny, and lacking drama in portraying the drama of a relationship. Brown followed it up with Unlikely or How I Lost My Virginity, which details his first serious relationship. Neither of those, or the third book AEIOU, are told in chronological order, but in scenes short and long from his recollections.

“For the autobiographical comics, like with Clumsy, part of that book is about memory and how we remember a relationship, and the way your mind jumps back and forth from different moments,” Jeffrey says. “You’re constructing in your head the meaning between those things. It’s not a conscious construction: your brain is doing things that you don’t realize. I wanted to trust that. I’m maybe a little more deliberate in how I’m arranging things in the autobiographical work now, especially from the relationship books and Clumsy.

“If I remember a moment that, on the surface seems insignificant, why am I remembering that very specific moment and not something else? If I am remembering it, then there’s some important, even from the context of being in the relationship still, or having been in the relationship. I don’t have the perspective to understand how relevant that moment is, or what it meant. I tried to pick those moments and put them in a context where, when you step back and look at everything, then you can see what the meaning there was, or why that moment is significant.”

Each of his autobio books are drawn directly in sketchbooks. Brown pulls out the final product, and each is an individual art piece of the book as object. Where his mentor Ware produces his comics as a finished gallery piece of a book, Brown works in reverse, making each book as a singular work of art and then reverse-engineering it into a book. Despite his fine art background, it’s jettisoning as much of that as he can to bring himself back to the sincere amateur artist, unknowing his critical training while letting his developmental do the work.

“On the one hand, it’s trying to consciously discard all of those things that I’ve learned,” he says of his comics work. “But on the other hand all that stuff ends up being there in ways that I don’t realize. I feel like, as I make more comics, that there’s a better synergy between those, but at the same time something is lost, where with drawing Clumsy and even Unlikely, I was so much less self-conscious about the actual process. I wasn’t overthinking things, which I do sometimes now.”

Since Clumsy, Brown has enjoyed a publishing relationship with indie publisher Top Shelf. He sees the benefits of that outweighing anything self-publishing has to offer.

“When I do a book with Top Shelf, I just send the files on and don’t have to worry about the design, working with the printer, and a lot of [other] work,” Jeffrey says. “Theoretically, I would still come out ahead by self-publishing, in terms of finances, and there are other advantages. I’m so not interested in doing that work, especially now. I’m mostly a stay-at-home Dad and my time is limited to work, and I don’t want to have to spend the time I do have to work doing the more business side of stuff than I have to already.

“I think about doing a small print-run book, or something more unique that would make sense for a small print run,” he admits to the personal satisfaction behind self-publishing. “I started doing mini-comics here and there again, but not really to sell, but for me, and I’ll give them away until they’re gone.”

Cat Getting Out of A Bag is Jeffrey’s first homage to the felines, followed by Cats Are Weird. Like his autobio work, his cat books are drawn in vignettes, each page or two an anecdote in the life of a housecat. With sparse dialogue, his cat books show Brown’s strength in pacing and in his ability to build in the quiet moments between people/cats and one another or their environment.

“When I pitched the first one to Chronicle, I had already finished thirty or forty pages,” Brown says. “They saw it and got it, and didn’t need to see anything else. With the second book, they didn’t need to see anything, though I did explain to them that it would have two cats and one would be in color. The first book was drawn in a sketchbook; when I draw in sketchbooks like that, it’s drawing on the fronts and backs of pages.

“When I did the second book, I drew it in a larger sketchbook, and each page of the sketchbook had two pages on it, and I only drew on one side. The cat stuff comes easier, in a way, because I don’t have to overthink it. I just know ‘Make cute cats.’ Occasionally, there are stories that are a little deeper, like the relationship between a person and a cat. Mostly, it’s just cats being funny, and the idea that cats in comics have a long history, and trying to put a spin on it where I’m not anthropomorphizing them, and am taking all the human out of the cats as much as possible.”

“One of my favorite toys, of any toy when I was a kid was Windcharger,” Jeffrey says of the Transformer from 1984, a red sportscar that turned into a robot in two steps. “It was really simple and small enough for me to take to church every Sunday. I think I definitely played G.I. Joe more, and overall had more G.I. Joe toys. I just started doing these little sketches in my sketchbook for change-bots, and had enough idea, and friends who had seen the sketches said ‘You should do a book.’ I did the first book and started to really like those characters.

Children of the ‘80s lived in a multi-media world of kitsch and commercialism, with toy lines emulating the Star Wars and G.I. Joe model of toy/cartoon/comic book. Even though a lot of the Transformers comics were crappy, with paper-thin plots and cardboard characters who always said one another’s name in bold print, Jeffrey decided to create his own four-color love letter to Transformers with Incredible Change-Bots, his personal pastiche. Drawn like the Transformers and G.I. Joe comics he and his brother made as a kid, Change-Bots starts as a parody of Transformers, and then veers off into its own absurdist direction. It’s Brown’s big foray into color and, in keeping up with the homemade vibe, he used magic markers.

“It’s hard because there are thirty characters, and the amount of space I have in the book, and focusing on making jokes all the time, character development isn’t so great,” he admits. “I started to have this idea of who these characters are, and they became less parodies of the Transformers. Shootertron became less a parody of Megatron and became more of his own character. Big Rig, from the start, was never so analogous to Optimus Prime. At this point, it’s become fun to work with them and still be able to get at these jokes about Transformers. The second book starts to veer away from the straightforward parallels.”

As Change-Bots kicks in, Brown imbues them with just as much heartbreak and conflict as battles in the desert. He follows it up with Incredible Change-Bots Two, and then a third volume with special guest stars! Sort of…

“I could do a G.I. Joe book, but I decided to fold that into a third Change-Bots book,” Jeffrey reveals. “There are things in the second book that are totally unintentional, that will fit perfectly with it, and let me do more with some of the characters. There will be this epic, third final battle book.”

The color nature of Change-Bots forces Brown to be more exact with his drawing. While coloring his Change-Bots mural, he admits he’ll have to go back over lines with a black pen, and then draw in even further details. For something that looks homemade and primitive, it requires an impressive amount of work.

“I think the only difference is in terms of process, where I’m a little more careful about the compositions and how I’m drawing things,” he says of Change-Bots. “With autobiographical, I try to let a lot come out without intention, to let my subconscious determine things more. The Change-Bots is a lot more controlled. The first book, a lot of it happens in the desert. The second book has that, too, and I think I’ll think about more of that in the third book. Coloring a city scene is a little more labor intensive. The markers I use is part of it.”

Jeffrey Brown’s identity as a freeform cartoonist is a double-edged sword: he can only pull it off because he is good enough to have a strong foundation in drawing, but it’s also tough to maintain as a self-critical artist.

“At first it was easy, because I didn’t really discover mini-comics and ‘zines until I moved to Chicago. That was six months before I started drawing Clumsy, and all that stuff was still new,” he remembers. “In terms of doing comics, it was easy to start over and go from this new place, whereas now, all this baggage has started to climb on from the comics side of things. I’d managed to shove a lot of the fine arts baggage away. Maybe some of the fine art stuff has come back, too, in terms of my doing a second cat book and asking ‘Is that entertainment?’ and drawing the lines between ‘What’s art and what’s my art?’ You start thinking about these issues that can be really distracting from actually getting work done. You start second-guessing yourself towards what something should be—Should this have a deeper philosophical slant to it that should be more important? Is this okay that it’s fluff?

“It’s much harder to set that stuff aside now than when I started doing comics.”

His investment in the book as object, in terms of his original art and presentation of his work, places him counter to comics’ upcoming digital landscape.

“On the one hand, personally I don’t like reading things on a screen very much,” Jeffrey reflects. “But I’m smart enough to acknowledge that in all likelihood, my son in twenty years will read more on a screen than not. There are so many advantages to digital, in terms of access to thing that, at some point outweighs—I definitely don’t think ‘No, digital’s bad!’ It might not be my personal preference, but in the end digital is probably good and inevitable.

“That said, in terms of a reading experience, a physical book is vastly different. Maybe you pick up a Marvel floppy monthly, and they’re all the same format, so the transition from that to digital is maybe not so big. But in terms of prose, and magazine articles, doesn’t seem such a jump to what it is physically to what it is digitally. But when you have books like Chris Ware’s books: reading those books as objects is an entirely different experience. Even with my books, the idea of a book being something personal you can read and close the cover to? There are aspects to a physical book that can make the experience richer. In the end, I think there’s space for that.

“For me, personally, I can see myself getting an iPad at some point, and starting to read digitally, but there are other things I’ll prefer to get a physical book and read. Like the stuff I really love? I’ll love to have something I can interact with not just visually, but also physically.”

Jeffrey Brown will be on hand Friday May 13 for the opening of his Incredible Change-Bots Two art show at the Scott Eder Gallery in DUMBO Brooklyn. The show will feature all the art work from the latest Change-Bots book, as well as a host of large drawings he's been working on since last fall - large character portraits, Electronocybercircuitron, a giant battle scene and more. There'll also be a special Change-Bots print for sale. And, Saturday night, May 14, he'll be at Desert Island in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a signing.

Seth Kushner teams up with Chris Miskiewicz for SPIDERS EVERYWHERE!!

2011-05-08T13:37:00.001-04:00

CulturePOP Photocomix may be done for the moment, but GNYC's Seth Kushner still doing Photocomix. He's collaborated with writer Chris Miskiewicz on his EVERYWHERE Anthology. The piece, SPIDERS EVERYWHERE, is an homage to B-movies of yesterday and features a young woman being terrorized by thousands of creepy, crawly SPIDERS!

SPIDERS EVERYWHERE is Written by Chris Miskiewicz, Photocomix by Seth Kushner, edited by Dean Haspiel and starring Cat Cabral, David Blatt and Gerry Perrer.

See it here - http://activatecomix.com/120-5-1.comic

The premise for, EVERYWHERE created by Chris Miskiewicz, is simple: You wake up to find that millions of animals have appeared EVERYWHERE around the world at the same moment. What happened and what does it mean when the natural world has gone horribly wrong? Every month Chris teams up with a different artist to illustrated his latest tale. Past contributors have included; Andrew Wendel, Rick Parker, Bobby Timony and Nathan Schreiber.

"Working on SPIDERS was a unique challenge for me", says Seth. "Aside from shooting it in a style similar to that of a dramatized film, I had to create literally thousands of spiders! Chris proved to be an ideal collaborator by writing a well-paced script, casting actors and providing egg and cheese sandwiches on the day of the shoot."

Chris Named Publicity Director of Hermes Press

2011-04-25T10:14:00.000-04:00

Hermes Press has just named Graphic NYC’s writer and co-editor Christopher Irving as Publicity Director of the company. Hermes Press publishes a growing line of original graphic novels that start with Lions, Tigers, and Bears, as well as archive-quality reprints of classic comic strips The Phantom, Buck Rogers, Brenda Starr, and Dark Shadows.

“What can I say? I’m thrilled to pitch in and help Dan Herman and Louise Geer with their ever-growing company,” Irving says. “I’ve known them for a few years and have seen Hermes Press grow up very quickly, and that’s not even counting what they have planned for the next year. The way things are going, they’ve become just as much a pop culture house as a publishing one.”

Irving entered the comic book field in 1999 as a features writer for Comics Buyer’s Guide, before becoming a contributor and Associate Editor of the multiple Eisner Award-winning Comic Book Artist magazine in 2002. After writing two books on comic book history and journalism, Irving and photographer Seth Kushner started work on the Graphic NYC online project in 2008, which will see print as Leaping Tall Buildings in Spring 2012 from powerHouse Books. 2010 saw the publication of Graphic NYC Presents Dean Haspiel: The Early Years from IDW Publishing, while 2011 sees the publication of his history of comic book based movie serials, tentatively titled The First Movie Superheroes, by Hermes Press. Irving will continue to juggle GNYC with his Hermes Press responsibilities.

The new blog, hermespress.tumblr.com, launched recently in a beta form, and officially launches today. It will be Hermes Press’ hub for information on upcoming and current releases, as well as Irving’s writing on the pop culture celebrated at Hermes. It is part of a new initiative by Hermes to create a greater online and digital presence.

Seth Kushner's CulturePOP Photocomix book at MoCCA Fest

2011-04-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

GNYC's own Seth Kushner has self-published a book of his CulturePOP Photocomix webcomic seen on ACT-I-VATE.com. They are a limited edition of 400, 36-pages, and are full-color. The dimensions are 5.5" x 8.5" horizontal format. The book collects four remastered versions of his profiles on; Sucklord, Baron Ambrosia, Lisa Natoli and Carlos 'Mare 139' Rodriguez.

Seth will debut it at the MoCCA Arts Fest this coming weekend on April 9 & 10, at the Lexington Avenue Armory. He'll be at the ACT-I-VATE/Undie Press table I1, on the south side of the Armory (the side with EXIT) sitting with Tim Hall, Chris Miskiewicz and Kevin Kobasic.

Please stop by if you plan to be at the show.

Stan "The Man" Lee: 'Nuff Said!

2011-04-05T11:25:00.001-04:00

Words: Christopher Irving
Pictures: Seth Kushner

“I was ready to be a media star when I was twelve years old,” Stan Lee says with his usual gusto. “It just took all this time for the world to discover me.”

A month before, Stan Lee was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a first for a comic book personality. It was just the tip of the iceberg for the personification of the footloose and fancy free comic book creator and all-around media personality, a comics pioneer who put a new spin on the threadbare and static genre of the superhero and made comic books—dare we say it—hip and cool?

But Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber, is more than just a comic book visionary, the first self-made man of the comic book industry whose chutzpah sometimes eclipses his earlier struggles in the unforgiving comics world of the 1950s, then an industry hanging on by its fingernails as distributors went belly-up and crusading Senators sparked company-wide censorship.

Now in his late 80s, Stan exists as a cross between an ambassador for the medium, his distinctive moustache and glasses spotted in Marvel Comics superhero movies everywhere. It’s not just that Stan may have helped save the struggling comic book in the 1960s, with the Marvel line of troubled superheroes forged by him and a group of artists that earned him a star—it’s his clever use of cementing himself as a personality that has kept him on the collective radar. In an industry overpopulated by introverts, of his contemporaries who were often ashamed to work in comic books, Stan’s rise to a fame borne out of kitsch and hero worship is to be just as admired as his distinctive and catchphrases.

The comic book industry of 1940 was a much larger place than today, as dozens of so-called publishers hired everyone from high schoolers to washed-up advertising artists to draw their comic books, with a firm belief in quantity and not quality. There were exceptions, of course, amongst many of the cartoonists themselves—Simon and Kirby, Superman creators Siegel and Shuster, Will Eisner—but most of the publishers were just out to make a quick buck. One of the younger of these publishers was Martin Goodman, who operated his nameless publishing house out of the Empire State Building, publishing everything from men’s magazines to lurid pulps to, of course, comic books.

Goodman was also savvy in that, after buying comics through packaging outfit Funnies, Inc., he took cartoonist Joe Simon up on his patriotic superhero Captain America. Timely had gained a small group of heroes that were too freakish to be boring, yet too anti-heroic to be as marketable as Superman—specifically disgruntled half-Atlantean prince Namor, the Frankenstein monster-like Human Torch, or the dapper yet boring Angel. Rather than introducing Captain America in the back pages of an anthology title, like his Marvel Comics, Goodman saw the Superman-like sales potential in the character and offered to debut the patriot in his own title. Bringing on both Simon and his partner Jack Kirby as editor and art director (respectively), Goodman promised them a solid 15% of sales on Captain America Comics, and Timely went from the minor leagues to majors.

At age 18 and fresh out of high school, Stanley Lieber went in to work for Timely Comics (the name that stuck) as their office boy. A DeWitt Clinton High School graduate (the school that boasted most of the comic book pioneers), Stan had been everything from an usher to an obituary writer for a press service.

“The reason I took the job was I heard there was an opening,” Stan recalls. “Martin was married to a cousin of mine, and I heard through the cousin that there was an opening and I went up there. He also published regular magazines—movie magazines, men’s magazines, pulp magazines—I didn’t know the opening was for the comic book department, which only consisted of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. They were the only two guys there. I had never said to myself ‘I want to do comics.’ I wanted to be a regular writer, but I somehow got into that.”

It started with a text piece for an issue of Captain America Comics #3 in May, 1941, a short filler to get the post office’s magazine rate. Stanley, with more literary aspirations in mind, used the pseudonym “Stan Lee”. He would get his first comic book script two issues later and, six issues from that, the editor position fell in his lap after Simon and Kirby left Timely over royalty disputes on Captain America.

“There really was no one to teach me,” Stan says of the early days. “I had to pick up everything by myself. What I would do (and it was the most natural thing to do) was to find out what books were the best-selling, and I would try to read those books and try to figure out ‘Why are kids (because it was mostly kids in those days) buying these books and not different books?’ I’d try to figure out what the appeal was and then try to use that appeal in my own stories.

“There really wasn’t too much to learn, because none of the books were too good in those days,” he admits.

Stan was, literally, learning on the job and working to keep Timely’s comic book machine rolling.

“When I started in comics, he was like God,” Lee says of Goodman. “He owned the company and made all the major decisions on what we published and how we would publish them.

“I learned never to say no to him, because he didn’t like that. The one thing I did learn from him is that he was great at cover design. He knew how to do a cover, or how to have his artist do a cover that would stand out on the newsstand. In those days, there weren’t fans like there are today. Today, someone would go to a comic book store and say ‘Did Spider-Man number so-and-so come in today? I want to buy it.’ In those days the books were on sale at regular newsstands and were impulse buys: a kid would walk by and buy whatever cover attracted him the most. Covers were incredibly important. Martin, while he couldn’t draw himself, knew what type of drawings would attract a kid, what color schemes would make a book stand out the most, and what type of blurb would be the best. He taught me all of that. The one thing I learned from him is how to do a cover that would catch the eye.”

Timely continued to hold on through the War and post-War years, in spite of Stan’s service in the Signal Corps, publishing Westerns, crime, and horror along with a dying superhero line. They even changed their name to Atlas at one point and, when Namor was being optioned for an Adventures of Superman-like TV show, tried to revive their three main superheroes—Captain America, Namor, and Human Torch. The Cold War versions were put back on ice, and Stan was back to editing the usual fare. Marvel/Timely/Atlas had even lost their distributor in the ‘50s, and were at the mercy of DC/National Comics, their new distributor. At one point in the ‘50s, Stan had to lay off his staff and only publish from the inventory drawer, not an enviable position for an obvious extrovert like Lee.

Comics had become a dying, dead-end industry, and Stan was stuck in a dead-end job.

Had Stan wanted to work in comics, producing everything from superhero to grisly horror books through his twenties, writing under every pseudonym under the sun to make Timely look like a well-staffed operation?

“Not particularly, no,” Stan admits. But even though he was using the “Stan Lee” moniker back then, he was yet to grow into Stan “The Man” Lee, the spokesperson for comics, and every comic reader’s pal. That would change when Goodman, inspired by DC’s success with super-team Justice League of America, prompted Stan to create their own superhero team.

It was 1961, and it was time for Stan to make lemons out of lemonade.

“The launch of the Fantastic Four was when I finally did a book the way I wanted to, Stan reveals. “Up until then, Martin was totally convinced that comic books were read by very young children or semi-literate adults. He didn’t want me to use too much dialogue; he didn’t want me to use words of more than two or three syllables; he wanted to stress the action and forget about characterization and personality; just get a lot of fighting and running around in the panels. It was a job, and I wanted to keep my job, so I did what he said. It was with the Fantastic Four that I decided to do books the way I thought they ought to be done.”

Jack Kirby, twenty years after the Captain America falling out with Goodman, was back with Marvel, drawing stories for Stan in every genre at a breakneck pace, all stamped with Kirby’s trademark gusto and violence. When Lee collaborated with him on FF, the duo produced the first superhero team as rife with infighting as with combatting monsters and villains. They were a weird team—a brilliant scientist with flexible Plastic Man-like powers; a beautiful blonde who could turn invisible; a teenage version of The Human Torch; and a grumbling, sauntering rock-like man-monster—and they didn’t initially fight in costume. What Lee and Kirby did was throw every comic book genre save Western, and every comic book archetype, into a blender to produce a quirky and sometimes morose dysfunctional family of a super-team.

“The only stories I can tell was that it was an absolute pleasure [and] delight to be working with him,” Lee says of Kirby. “He was so great at his artwork; whatever he drew was wonderful, but more than that, I would tell him what I wanted in a story.”

Exactly a year later, Stan and Steve Ditko plugged a teenage superhero into the cover and pages of a dying anthology title called Amazing Fantasy’s last issue. Martin Goodman may not have been a fan of the idea, but what was the harm in sticking him on the comics equivalent of the Hindenburg?

Spider-Man was a success, marrying Lee’s conversational narration with Ditko’s weird figures, contorted to fit his masterful sense of design. Where most superhero strips were colorful, Spider-Man managed to be both colorful yet wrapped in inky blacks; even the theme of the story—“with great power comes great responsibility”—is driven in with the grimness of the main character’s loving Uncle, killed by a burglar he’d prevented stopping.

More heroes came out of the woodwork of Lee’s hyperactive and busy mind and the hands of his co-creators and artists. Iron Man, a munitions manufacturer turned knight in mechanical armor was trapped in the armor chestplate that kept his heart beating; Daredevil, an attorney with impeccable radar sense, gained his powers at the cost of his sight; the X-Men, a group of naturally super-powered “Mutants”; and Thor, the Norse God of thunder brought to flesh in today’s world, but was trapped in the body of a crippled doctor. Every Marvel hero had a tinge of the anti-hero, and a heavy dose of pathos. All of them were designed by his freelancers like Kirby (who did art duties on several of the Marvel books), Ditko on Spider-Man, Don Heck on Iron Man, and Joe Sinnott or Jack Kirby on Thor.

With so many books penned by him, on top of his editorial obligations, Lee took as many shortcuts as he could for his characters, even down to giving all his characters alliterative first and last names, like Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, Sue Storm, and Reed Richards.

“If I could remember one name I would know the other name began with the same letter,” Stan admits. “I remember, when I did The Hulk, his name was Bruce Banner. There was a guy named Bob Banner, who was a big man in television. I used to read his name all the time. Every once in a while, instead of writing Bruce Banner, I’d write Bob Banner. I’d get letters from the readers going ‘Don’t you know the name of your own character?’ Of course, I’d answer the letter and I copped out the easy way: I’d just say ‘Well, his name is Robert Bruce Banner.’”

According to Stan, the heavy workload was work as usual:

“We would decide we needed a new character,” Stan says. “In those days, I would work for a publisher, and he would say to me ‘Stan, I’d like to put out a new book, would you come up with a new character?’ So, I’d go home and dream up a new character. I never got inspiration; I’d never wake up in the middle of the night and say ‘Wow, this is a great idea!’ Or I’d never work for weeks or months or years trying to make something right. I was a real ‘hack’ writer, if something was needed, I’d go home and I write it.”

Stan wrote most all of them, working in what’s come to be known as the “Marvel Method” of storytelling, an utmost collaboration of writer and artist. The results were successful only because of Lee’s ability to work with and around his artists, as well as each artist’s impeccable sense of visual storytelling and character.

“I never wrote a script, sometimes I would write a page outline, but most of the time we just discussed it,” Stan recalls working specifically with Kirby. “[The artist] would go home and he would draw his twenty or twenty-two pages based on what we had talked about. He would send the pages in, and inevitably, there were things that Jack would have added that we never discussed, which were all wonderful. I had the fun of putting in the dialogue and captions; it was so easy to write the copy for anything Jack drew, because you just would look at his drawing and it would inspire me to write some good dialogue because the characters looked as though they were saying things that mattered. It’s hard to explain, but it was just such a pleasure to write stories based on the artwork that Jack had done.”

While the competition kept churning out superhero comics for kids, Stan and company at Marvel were producing more high-brow superhero books, featuring characters with believable faults, foibles, and hang-ups. It also helped that Stan employed a narrative voice that spoke directly to the readers, one that managed to inject Stan’s personality in all his stories. He also coined Marvel terms like “True Believer,” “Marvel Zombie,” and the always exclamative farewell greeting “Excelsior!” and gave the Marvel artists nicknames like Jack “The King” Kirby, “Jazzy” John Romita, or “Joltin’” Joe Sinnott. In the world of Marvel’s printed pages, you were instantly made a member of the club populated by the cool kids.

“Believe it or not, when I was a kid, there were some hardcover books that were fifty cents,” Stan reveals. “They were a series like Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Don Sturdy, or Bomba the Jungle Boy. There was one series called Jerry Todd. Nobody ever heard of it except me, now. I loved those books. They were adventure stories, but there was humor in them also. At the end of the book (and this was something I had never seen in a book. They had it in magazines, but not in a book), there were a few pages where the author would print some letters he claimed he had gotten from readers and would answer them. He would talk to the reader of the book in his answers. I felt he was talking to me, and I felt that I got to know the guy. When I started doing the books (the Fantastic Four, and so forth) I decided I would put in letters pages and would talk to the reader the way that writer, Leo Edwards, would talk to me.”

Leo Edwards, in one of his “Our Chatter-Box” columns in a Jerry Todd book, referred to it as “a corking good idea. Edwards went back and forth, talking directly to his readers. He even announced the “Jerry Todd Freckled Goldfish Club” where kids could get a secret club book, which are “more or less secret.” Stan would launch a similar fan club with the Merry Marvel Marching Society, and talked directly to his fans in Stan’s Soapbox, a column in every month’s Marvel comic book. Like Edwards, Stan wrote to the readers as old pals, not as customers. This personal touch is what separated a Marvel comic from a more stodgy DC one, and went beyond the normal kiddie clientele of the spinner racks.

An unexpected audience for the Marvel books was the college kids, a market only penetrated before by Mad Magazine. They latched on to the Marvel books and gave them cult credibility that, arguably, kept superheroes alive beyond the growing-up of the kids reading comics. While the DC books were old as in, written by your dad (case in point: the “hip” dialogue of Bob Haney’s entertaining Teen Titans), the Marvel books employed a pseudo-intellectualism, with characters spouting off fake Shakespearean in Thor, or wanna-be Lovecraftian magic in Dr. Strange. Strange itself is a psychedelically odd book, with Lee’s dialogue working with Ditko’s bizarre and almost surrealistic artwork; the hippies thought they were reading work from two of their own, not realizing the conservative Ditko and flamboyant Lee were around their 40s.

“When I’d lecture at a college the students would inevitably say ‘We’ve been researching Dr. Strange and his expressions like The Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth and Cyttorak and things, and we’ve discovered that you based them on the ancient writings of the Druids,’ I laughed because I made them up,” Stan beams, while still refusing to name favorites.

“But, anyway, I loved doing that. I liked writing Daredevil, because he was kind of a realistic character. I loved doing Sergeant Fury, because I was very proud of the fact that I think I was able to make Sgt. Fury and his men sound like real combat soldiers, and they talked the way real combat soldiers talked without using any four letter words. I think it still sounded authentic, and I was proud of that.

“I [also] liked Iron Man because it was fun to take a character who was a munitions maker, and an industrialist, and a millionaire, and make him popular with young people who hated industrialists and munitions makers at a time when there was so many hippies [and] everybody hated the establishment. So, I took a guy who represented the establishment and I tried to make him popular with the fans, which was an interesting challenge. “I really enjoyed everything I wrote.”

The Marvel Method would come back to haunt Stan Lee in later years, as it blurred the line between writer and artist, and became a point of contention in deciding who created what characters. Claiming character creation was different for Lee, who claimed sole credit for Spider-Man and other characters for years, than from his artist partners like Ditko and Kirby, who felt a co-creator credit for their visual development of the characters and stories. As time went by, Lee started sharing credit with his former partners, and all Marvel movies have credited creation to both Lee and the respective artist.

Steve Ditko had been given co-plotter credit on The Amazing Spider-Man, and left in a dispute with Lee over the identity of master supervillian Green Goblin: Ditko wanted Goblin an anonymous crook, while Lee wanted to give the narrative pay-off of established character Norman Osborn. Ditko walked out after #33, causing Lee to replace him with the more classic John Romita. Kirby would also leave Marvel, wanting more creative control over his comics, jumping ship to DC Comics to produce his New Gods comics.

The ‘70s brought another decade of change to Marvel. In 1971, Stan (at the request of United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) wrote an anti-drug storyline in The Amazing Spider-Man, much to the protests of the Comics Code Association. Lee published the issues without the Comics Code Seal of Approval, and unprecedented move by a comics publisher that took the wind out of the Code’s sails. Later that year, the Code was revised to allow horror, opening the door for the genre to return to comics.

By 1972, after having sold Marvel, Goodman relinquished the Publisher role to Lee, with Lee’s protégé Roy Thomas taking over as Editor-in-Chief. Stan remained the face of Marvel and continued to chime in with his monthly “Stan’s Soapbox” columns.

Stan moved out to California in 1981, serving as producer on film and television projects for Marvel. According to Lee, though, it wasn’t exactly for the work:

“It was because of the weather. Believe it or not, that’s all it was,” he admits. “I came out here on business once. It was the middle of winter, and people were out here in their shirtsleeves driving their convertibles with the tops down. I said ‘These people are living in heaven!’ We moved out.”

After moving to California, Stan truly began cementing himself as a media personality, narrating Saturday morning Marvel cartoons like The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man. He came in and out of writing comics while still writing the Spider-Man daily comic strip, continuing to serve as producer on Marvel films and television projects. In 1989, he had a cameo role as a courtroom judge in the Trial of the Incredible Hulk TV movie, his bench up-ended by Lou Ferrigno’s green-skinned Hulk. It was the start of Stan’s Alfred Hitchcock-like appearances in Marvel films.

His first feature role, however, was in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s 1995 comedy Mallrats, playing himself.

“I had heard that [George Carlin] had wanted to play the role,” Stan said in 1998. “Years ago I had been on a talk show as a guest, I think it was the Mike Douglas show, and George Carlin was also a guest on the show. Every time Douglas started to interview me, Carlin would interrupt. He was very funny, but he never gave me a chance to tell my story!

“Years later, I had heard that George Carlin had wanted to play this role in Mallrats, but somehow or rather they picked me. And I figured that twenty years later, I got my revenge,” Stan laughed.

“They picked me because [Kevin Smith] had written it into the script, he wanted a character who was supposed to be popular with the fans. They were going to make up a fictitious character, and somebody said ‘Stan Lee is sort of a ham, why not ask him? He might want to do it.’

“So, they called me, and I jumped at the chance.”

Stan’s cameos continued: he’s a hot dog vendor in X-Men, he saves a girl from falling debris in Spider-Man, he pops up in Daredevil, both Hulk movies, dresses like Hugh Hefner in Iron Man, and (in the only inspired moment the whole film) plays the Fantastic Four’s mailman Willie Lumpkin. While the Marvel movies have introduced new non-comic book reading audiences to their characters, they’ve also introduced Stan to a new generation of fans and made him comics’ true ambassador.

“I didn’t think they’d even get started in the ‘50s or ‘60s, let alone be long-lasting,” Stan admits of the superheroes. “The point is that they certainly can be long-lasting, as much as anything else. Superheroes are like Sherlock Holmes: there have been a million Sherlock Holmes movies. Who knows how many Dracula type movies there have been. Anything that’s even a little bit bigger than life, with a lot of exciting scenes, special effects, and action—it can last forever, if the stories are written well enough.”

Meanwhile, Stan had left Marvel to pursue his own comic book productions, many of them trying to adapt to the changing technology of the internet and digital age. His new venture Stan Lee Media, launched stanlee.net in 1998, with Flash videos of original internet-based characters. It even garnered a 3-D theme park ride, but fell apart after a loss of funds and indictment of Stan’s co-founder in embezzling funds.

It didn’t keep Lee down, though. He could have easily retired from comics, but he returned with the Just Imagine comic books for DC Comics, where he reimagined their line of superheroes with an army of legendary and popular artists. Then, he popped up everywhere, returning to Marvel for a special series of team-ups between Stan and the heroes he co-created, hosting reality TV game show Who Wants to be a Superhero?, hosting the documentary show Stan Lee’s Superhumans on History Channel, and, of course, continuing his movie cameos. Comic book publisher Boom! Launched a trio of titles with characters created by Stan (that are, for the most part, really enjoyable reads)—Soldier Zero, The Traveler, and Starborn.

Stan’s current company, Pow! Entertainment, is using the wave of superhero movie love to produce new animated and live action projects.

“Here at Pow!, we have a number of movies in development,” Stan notes. “We have some TV shows in development. The one show that seems to be turning into a hit is the Stan Lee’s Superheroes on the History Channel. We had our first season and nobody knew it would do anything. They didn’t promote it, but it got great ratings. Now they’re filming the second season, and they’re going to start promoting it. I think it’s gonna be a big show. We’re working on a live-action show, which if you know the Cirque du Soleil, it’ll be like that but bigger. We have a new superhero, whose Chinese, for a movie that we’re working on. We’re also working on a number of graphic novels and comic books. We try to keep busy with everything.”

Recently getting the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was a coup for Lee, who continues to embrace new technologies in comic book storytelling. Like everyone else, he can’t determine exactly where comics are going:

“I’ve no better idea than you or anyone else, but the way the world is going, pretty soon you’ll be able to see everything on your telephone: movies, television shows, comics, and on your TV set and computer screen, of course,” Stan says. “I think there will always be comics. I think there’s something nice about a comic book that you can hold in your hand and share with another fella, and save them and let them pile up on a shelf somewhere, and keep all the editions. But there will also be comics on your computer, and telephone. Everything is coming together now. It doesn’t matter if its comics, or regular books, or magazines. You’ve got them on your Kindles. The world is changing so fast because of computers and technology.”

More on Jeffrey Brown's GOOD AT PLAYING

2011-03-31T11:43:00.001-04:00

Photo by Seth Kushner

When Seth and I were chatting with Jeffrey Brown in his Chicago home, he went into the writing of the GNYC exclusive comic strip, Good at Playing:

"I started trying to write it as an essay, and thought ‘This will be fun.’ Another thing that led me to autobiographical comics, which I forget about sometimes, is a class I had in college on creative non-fiction. It was the first time I’d really encountered writing a piece that wasn’t a narrative, but was writing about things. I liked the idea of writing something in prose again, but the ideas were in my head, and when I tried to put them into words, I had to be too explicit in order to explain them. But something about doing it as a comic lets the reader bridge those parts without my having to explain them too much."

Jeffrey goes even more in-depth at his personal blog. Be sure to pick up Jeffrey's forthcoming Incredible Change-Bots Two, and also check out the Graphic NYC Profile on Jeffrey this May.