Monday, March 31, 2008
Danny Fingeroth, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH, author, comics editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 3
Return to Part 2!
Return to Part 1!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: A few minutes ago when we were talking about Marvel in the early ‘70s. Just before we went on the air, I was reminded of something. I would say it would be about ’76 or ’77, and I was at the Marvel offices as a 15-, 16-year-old teen boy, fanboy, I admit, thinking I had just died and gone to heaven. It was just like, “Oh. My. God. This place really does exist. Look, that must be what the bullpen is that they’re always talking about. That’s just…Look at that…Wow!”
DANNY FINGEROTH: Oh, yeah. That’s a feeling that you never really lose. My first day there I remember, especially, John Romita, but Archie Goodwin. It wasn’t even my first day. It was just I’d come up just on a tour. I was able to get in there for just to sort of get a tour and see if there might be any work available. Everybody there to a person was nicer to me than they had any reason to be. They had jobs to do and lives, but I say I especially remember John Romita, Sr., just being especially welcoming.
FINGEROTH: It was both because it was a job. You had responsibilities and obligations, but there was a large element of play to it. What was interesting is that people who worked there, I think because of the fact that people would gravitate to a comic book company -- and especially a superhero comic book company -- often saw things in very kind of heroic terms. Everything has its heroic aspect and who was the hero and who was the villain so that could make for some intense times as you would imagine. For all I know, it’s like that in everybody’s office. I’ve been a freelancer now for a number of years so that was really my primary office experience. It was not without what you’d expect in any office – office politics, office romance. But you still would have to pinch yourself and go I’m working at Marvel comics.
The weirdest thing would be to call up somebody you idolized as a child and go, “Where’s the work?” And you go, I can’t believe I’m browbeating like my childhood idol. “Buddy, you can get the work in.” And especially when you kind of looked back on a body of work over a career, and you go wow! For some 12-year-old, that was always my aim in comics was to try to create some memorable thing for some 10 or 12-year-old because people will come up to me. There’s stuff I’m proud of and stuff that I just sort of did for the deadline like everybody else. But very often, something you just did for the deadline, someone will come up and go, “It changed my life,” and you go, “You’re kidding. Really? It paid my rent.”
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Yeah, right. Keep everything in context.
FINGEROTH: You could take it for granted, but I did try to remain aware that, although it was, of course, a workplace and ultimately was about business issues, there was a special relationship to the world that somebody working at Marvel comics had. And, again, especially when you research a book like Disguised as Clark Kent or Superman on the Couch, you sort of see some of the less pleasant parts of the past, or when you talk to the old-timers. I think with anybody who works in any creative business there’s that glorious moment and experience of creating and making something that thousands or millions of people see, and then there’s the not-so-glamorous side of “Who gets credit for this? Who gets paid for this?” But I always did try to sort of take a step back and go huh, look at that, John Romita. I was just like going over a sketch with John Romita, and he actually listened to my opinion as if it counted for something. It was always just like pretty wild.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I don’t have that quite experience, and I know I promised not to mention Eisner again, but there were two things that reminded me of that. One is being at his desk when he was working on The Plot, which was his final book, and being one of the first people to see the roughs. And I think I actually said you know what? Because the original title was like I don’t know, a hundred words, and I remember saying to him, “I know I’m nobody here telling you this, but this title just doesn’t work. It’s just way too long.” And that was just somebody who didn’t know better just telling him out loud, and it turned out it was okay.
But the other thing was I remember him, it was like what you were saying about Romita, the calling people who were your idols. At one point, I was asking about who can I call, and he said, “Look, I don’t have time to call these people so here’s my address book. You just call anybody you want and tell them I said it was okay.” And so suddenly in front of me there’s Neal Adams, and so I’m calling Neal Adams and saying, “Could you write an introduction for my book?” “Who the hell are you?” “Will said I should call.” “Oh, in that case…”
FINGEROTH: You’re right. I did see Sandy Koufax on TV the other day. I felt like I was nine years old again. He’s now at the Mets training camp.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I saw that. He was helping out one of the relievers, I think.
FINGEROTH: Right.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Worked on his curveball, I think?
FINGEROTH: I think so, yes.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We both make that connection. Sandy Koufax and then okay, Hank Greenberg and then I don’t know. I can’t think of anybody else off the top of my head.
FINGEROTH: Well, both basketball and boxing, I believe, in their early days were quite Jewish. They were sports that were new, and you didn’t need a whole lot of equipment to box and basketball, literally, you needed a basket. Those sports actually had a lot of Jewish stars and Jewish owners and so on.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Of course, I’d say it was in the ‘30s or ‘40s, Jewish kids found themselves rooting for a black boxer, Joe Louis, to beat Max Schmeling, right?
FINGEROTH: Right, true.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Strange bedfellows society creates, I guess. You’ve got the Rough Guide to Graphic Novels coming out. That’s in the fall, I think. Is that an instructional book?
FINGEROTH: No, I think you may be mixing up two different things I do. They started out putting out hipster travel guides, sort of off-beat travel guides to different countries and cities, and then they branch into pop culture. So this is the graphic novel book. It’s a learn while you earn experience because my background is mostly in superheroes, but they asked me to do this, and I said, “You’re crazy.” And they said, “We want you to do it.” I said okay. I always had a background in Harvey Pekar and Spiegelman and Crumb, and I certainly always knew the basics of the literary and underground comics, but there’s a lot of stuff, Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware and Allison Bechtel and Marjane Satrapi, that whole world that I’m learning more about. And so this book is a guide to those literary graphic novels.
I think the fact that I’m somewhat ignorant in that area is actually good cause it means I can actually write a guide that asks the questions that someone who maybe isn’t familiar with them wants to have answered as opposed to writing it from a complete, super-duper expert point of view the way I would do with superheroes. With the literary graphic novels, it’s different.
I also edit a magazine for TwoMorrows Publishing who, if anybody knows Alter Ego or the Jack Kirby Collector or Draw magazine. I put out a magazine called Write Now! It’s like Writer’s Digest for comics and animation. So coming out this spring, actually, will be The Best of Write Now!, which is what it sounds like. The magazine’s been coming out for 16 years, and it features Will Eisner and Stan Lee and a lot of the more current writers, Geoff Johns, Jeff Loeb.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And your next issue is a celebration of Stan Lee’s 85th birthday.
FINGEROTH: Which is in December, so I’m hoping to have it out before he turns 86, but it’s also coming out in the spring. And it’s a tribute to Stan Lee and because it’s a writing magazine, I decided to take the angle of Stan as writer, editor, and teacher and sort of really drill down with people from throughout his career about what was it like? When he came into his office, where did he have a pile of scripts? How much WiteOut was there on the script? All that technical stuff. That may be more than a lot of people want to know, but I figure for a writer’s magazine, it’s appropriate. And I’ve spoken to people in their 80s to new guys and people. Before Stan became the Hollywood guy, he was still in the office everyday, and I talked to people who, literally, were hands-on trained by him – editors and writers, Gary Frederich and Roy Thomas. I have this unbelievable array because at first I was, “Oh, my God, I’m not gonna have enough,” and now, of course, I have enough for three issues. So that should be out. I’m sure you know the feeling with your work, the same kind of thing. So that should be out also in the spring, and that’s Write Now! magazine.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Alright. That’s Write.
FINGEROTH: Now. Not the cleverest name in the world, but it does work.
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Return to Part 1!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: A few minutes ago when we were talking about Marvel in the early ‘70s. Just before we went on the air, I was reminded of something. I would say it would be about ’76 or ’77, and I was at the Marvel offices as a 15-, 16-year-old teen boy, fanboy, I admit, thinking I had just died and gone to heaven. It was just like, “Oh. My. God. This place really does exist. Look, that must be what the bullpen is that they’re always talking about. That’s just…Look at that…Wow!”
DANNY FINGEROTH: Oh, yeah. That’s a feeling that you never really lose. My first day there I remember, especially, John Romita, but Archie Goodwin. It wasn’t even my first day. It was just I’d come up just on a tour. I was able to get in there for just to sort of get a tour and see if there might be any work available. Everybody there to a person was nicer to me than they had any reason to be. They had jobs to do and lives, but I say I especially remember John Romita, Sr., just being especially welcoming.
FINGEROTH: It was both because it was a job. You had responsibilities and obligations, but there was a large element of play to it. What was interesting is that people who worked there, I think because of the fact that people would gravitate to a comic book company -- and especially a superhero comic book company -- often saw things in very kind of heroic terms. Everything has its heroic aspect and who was the hero and who was the villain so that could make for some intense times as you would imagine. For all I know, it’s like that in everybody’s office. I’ve been a freelancer now for a number of years so that was really my primary office experience. It was not without what you’d expect in any office – office politics, office romance. But you still would have to pinch yourself and go I’m working at Marvel comics.
The weirdest thing would be to call up somebody you idolized as a child and go, “Where’s the work?” And you go, I can’t believe I’m browbeating like my childhood idol. “Buddy, you can get the work in.” And especially when you kind of looked back on a body of work over a career, and you go wow! For some 12-year-old, that was always my aim in comics was to try to create some memorable thing for some 10 or 12-year-old because people will come up to me. There’s stuff I’m proud of and stuff that I just sort of did for the deadline like everybody else. But very often, something you just did for the deadline, someone will come up and go, “It changed my life,” and you go, “You’re kidding. Really? It paid my rent.”
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Yeah, right. Keep everything in context.
FINGEROTH: You could take it for granted, but I did try to remain aware that, although it was, of course, a workplace and ultimately was about business issues, there was a special relationship to the world that somebody working at Marvel comics had. And, again, especially when you research a book like Disguised as Clark Kent or Superman on the Couch, you sort of see some of the less pleasant parts of the past, or when you talk to the old-timers. I think with anybody who works in any creative business there’s that glorious moment and experience of creating and making something that thousands or millions of people see, and then there’s the not-so-glamorous side of “Who gets credit for this? Who gets paid for this?” But I always did try to sort of take a step back and go huh, look at that, John Romita. I was just like going over a sketch with John Romita, and he actually listened to my opinion as if it counted for something. It was always just like pretty wild.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I don’t have that quite experience, and I know I promised not to mention Eisner again, but there were two things that reminded me of that. One is being at his desk when he was working on The Plot, which was his final book, and being one of the first people to see the roughs. And I think I actually said you know what? Because the original title was like I don’t know, a hundred words, and I remember saying to him, “I know I’m nobody here telling you this, but this title just doesn’t work. It’s just way too long.” And that was just somebody who didn’t know better just telling him out loud, and it turned out it was okay.
But the other thing was I remember him, it was like what you were saying about Romita, the calling people who were your idols. At one point, I was asking about who can I call, and he said, “Look, I don’t have time to call these people so here’s my address book. You just call anybody you want and tell them I said it was okay.” And so suddenly in front of me there’s Neal Adams, and so I’m calling Neal Adams and saying, “Could you write an introduction for my book?” “Who the hell are you?” “Will said I should call.” “Oh, in that case…”
FINGEROTH: You’re right. I did see Sandy Koufax on TV the other day. I felt like I was nine years old again. He’s now at the Mets training camp.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I saw that. He was helping out one of the relievers, I think.
FINGEROTH: Right.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Worked on his curveball, I think?
FINGEROTH: I think so, yes.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: We both make that connection. Sandy Koufax and then okay, Hank Greenberg and then I don’t know. I can’t think of anybody else off the top of my head.
FINGEROTH: Well, both basketball and boxing, I believe, in their early days were quite Jewish. They were sports that were new, and you didn’t need a whole lot of equipment to box and basketball, literally, you needed a basket. Those sports actually had a lot of Jewish stars and Jewish owners and so on.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Of course, I’d say it was in the ‘30s or ‘40s, Jewish kids found themselves rooting for a black boxer, Joe Louis, to beat Max Schmeling, right?
FINGEROTH: Right, true.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Strange bedfellows society creates, I guess. You’ve got the Rough Guide to Graphic Novels coming out. That’s in the fall, I think. Is that an instructional book?
FINGEROTH: No, I think you may be mixing up two different things I do. They started out putting out hipster travel guides, sort of off-beat travel guides to different countries and cities, and then they branch into pop culture. So this is the graphic novel book. It’s a learn while you earn experience because my background is mostly in superheroes, but they asked me to do this, and I said, “You’re crazy.” And they said, “We want you to do it.” I said okay. I always had a background in Harvey Pekar and Spiegelman and Crumb, and I certainly always knew the basics of the literary and underground comics, but there’s a lot of stuff, Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware and Allison Bechtel and Marjane Satrapi, that whole world that I’m learning more about. And so this book is a guide to those literary graphic novels.
I think the fact that I’m somewhat ignorant in that area is actually good cause it means I can actually write a guide that asks the questions that someone who maybe isn’t familiar with them wants to have answered as opposed to writing it from a complete, super-duper expert point of view the way I would do with superheroes. With the literary graphic novels, it’s different.
I also edit a magazine for TwoMorrows Publishing who, if anybody knows Alter Ego or the Jack Kirby Collector or Draw magazine. I put out a magazine called Write Now! It’s like Writer’s Digest for comics and animation. So coming out this spring, actually, will be The Best of Write Now!, which is what it sounds like. The magazine’s been coming out for 16 years, and it features Will Eisner and Stan Lee and a lot of the more current writers, Geoff Johns, Jeff Loeb.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And your next issue is a celebration of Stan Lee’s 85th birthday.
FINGEROTH: Which is in December, so I’m hoping to have it out before he turns 86, but it’s also coming out in the spring. And it’s a tribute to Stan Lee and because it’s a writing magazine, I decided to take the angle of Stan as writer, editor, and teacher and sort of really drill down with people from throughout his career about what was it like? When he came into his office, where did he have a pile of scripts? How much WiteOut was there on the script? All that technical stuff. That may be more than a lot of people want to know, but I figure for a writer’s magazine, it’s appropriate. And I’ve spoken to people in their 80s to new guys and people. Before Stan became the Hollywood guy, he was still in the office everyday, and I talked to people who, literally, were hands-on trained by him – editors and writers, Gary Frederich and Roy Thomas. I have this unbelievable array because at first I was, “Oh, my God, I’m not gonna have enough,” and now, of course, I have enough for three issues. So that should be out. I’m sure you know the feeling with your work, the same kind of thing. So that should be out also in the spring, and that’s Write Now! magazine.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Alright. That’s Write.
FINGEROTH: Now. Not the cleverest name in the world, but it does work.
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Adrian Tomine, Alter Ego, Archie Goodwin, Chris Ware, Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, Hank Greenberg, Harvey Pekar, Jewish sports heroes, John Romita, Marjane Satrapi, Marvel Comics, Max Schmeling, Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, Roy Thomas, Sandy Koufax, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Superman on the Couch, TwoMorrows Publishing, Will Eisner, Write Now
¶ 10:14 AM
Seed Newsvine
