Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Monday, March 31, 2008
Danny Fingeroth, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH, author, comics editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
Return to Part 1!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Babar, Batman, Byron Preiss, Captain Britain, Danny Fingeroth, Dark Knight, Disguised as Clark Kent, Dr. Frederic Wertham, Huckleberry Hound, Jews, Larry Lieber, manga, Marvel Comics, Maus, Spandex, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, superheroes, Thor, vigilante, Watchmen, Wonder Woman
¶ 10:32 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
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 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
THURSDAY, FEB. 21 LIVE on Mr. MEDIA!
THURSDAY: FEB. 21, 1 p.m. EST
STEPHEN CHAO, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur and former president of FOX TV
Call in and ask Stephen Chao about his newly launched web site, WonderHowTo.com or about the early days of the FOX TV network, when he was responsible for bring "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted" to network television on the next episode of Mr. MEDIA LIVE on BlogTalkRadio.com.
The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and LIVE Mr. Media interviews:
2/26/2008, 1 PM EST - Danny Fingeroth, Disguised As Clark Kent, author and former Spider-Man group editor at Marvel Comics: A large number of the creators of the most famous superheroes were of Jewish background, secular, religious, or both. DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, by Danny Fingeroth, explores how the Jewish consciousness of these individuals impacted the content of the comics and contributed to making characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman the most familiar popular-culture icons of all time. A former group editor of Marvel Comics' SPIDER-MAN line, Fingeroth is currently the creator and editor of WRITE NOW magazine.
THURSDAY: FEB. 21, 1 p.m. EST
STEPHEN CHAO, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur and former president of FOX TV
Call in and ask Stephen Chao about his newly launched web site, WonderHowTo.com or about the early days of the FOX TV network, when he was responsible for bring "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted" to network television on the next episode of Mr. MEDIA LIVE on BlogTalkRadio.com.
The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and LIVE Mr. Media interviews:
2/26/2008, 1 PM EST - Danny Fingeroth, Disguised As Clark Kent, author and former Spider-Man group editor at Marvel Comics: A large number of the creators of the most famous superheroes were of Jewish background, secular, religious, or both. DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, by Danny Fingeroth, explores how the Jewish consciousness of these individuals impacted the content of the comics and contributed to making characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman the most familiar popular-culture icons of all time. A former group editor of Marvel Comics' SPIDER-MAN line, Fingeroth is currently the creator and editor of WRITE NOW magazine.
Labels: America's Most Wanted, Cops, Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, Fox TV, Jewish authors, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, Stephen Chao, WonderHowTo.com
¶ 11:33 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Thursday, February 14, 2008
THURSDAY, FEB. 21 LIVE on Mr. MEDIA!
THURSDAY: FEB. 21, 1 p.m. EST
STEPHEN CHAO, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur and former president of FOX TV
Call in and ask Stephen Chao about his newly launched web site, WonderHowTo.com or about the early days of the FOX TV network, when he was responsible for bring "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted" to network television on the next episode of Mr. MEDIA LIVE on BlogTalkRadio.com.
The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and LIVE Mr. Media interviews:
2/26/2008, 1 PM EST - Danny Fingeroth, Disguised As Clark Kent, author and former Spider-Man group editor at Marvel Comics: A large number of the creators of the most famous superheroes were of Jewish background, secular, religious, or both. DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, by Danny Fingeroth, explores how the Jewish consciousness of these individuals impacted the content of the comics and contributed to making characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman the most familiar popular-culture icons of all time. A former group editor of Marvel Comics' SPIDER-MAN line, Fingeroth is currently the creator and editor of WRITE NOW magazine.
THURSDAY: FEB. 21, 1 p.m. EST
STEPHEN CHAO, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur and former president of FOX TV
Call in and ask Stephen Chao about his newly launched web site, WonderHowTo.com or about the early days of the FOX TV network, when he was responsible for bring "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted" to network television on the next episode of Mr. MEDIA LIVE on BlogTalkRadio.com.
The number is 646-595-3135.
Don't miss these other upcoming, exclusive and LIVE Mr. Media interviews:
2/26/2008, 1 PM EST - Danny Fingeroth, Disguised As Clark Kent, author and former Spider-Man group editor at Marvel Comics: A large number of the creators of the most famous superheroes were of Jewish background, secular, religious, or both. DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, by Danny Fingeroth, explores how the Jewish consciousness of these individuals impacted the content of the comics and contributed to making characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman the most familiar popular-culture icons of all time. A former group editor of Marvel Comics' SPIDER-MAN line, Fingeroth is currently the creator and editor of WRITE NOW magazine.
Labels: Alberto Ibargüen, Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, Fox Television, Fox TV Network, Gen Y, Jewish, journalism, Knight Foundation, Marvel Comics, Monk, Rupert Murdoch, Sara Zarr, Spider-Man, Spiderman, Stephen Chao, Story of a Girl, Sweethearts, WonderHowTo.com
¶ 11:37 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Friday, September 14, 2007
Jim Lee, "Heroes Reborn" comic book artist: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally Published September 23, 1996
Jim Lee is sitting on a time bomb. The most second-guessed man in comic books today — and perhaps the most popular creator in the industry — just engineered the death of the Fantastic Four, the longest-running characters in the Marvel Comics Universe.
Killing a comic book character isn't easy. Remember "The Death of Superman" hype a few years ago? Oh, he died all right. Which means he must be in Hell, because the Man of Steel is getting married in a matter of weeks.
Don't shed many tears for the Fantastic Four, or the Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man, all of whom died this summer at the hands of supervillain Onslaught. The four are "Heroes Reborn" via the magic of Lee and his partner, Rob Liefield. Under the terms of a one-year contract with Marvel, they were charged with breathing new life — and sales — into the quartet of titles.
The mere thought of killing a Marvel character and bringing him or her back to life beyond the Marvel Universe is considered a treasonous offense by fans, who were promised by the father of these characters, Stan Lee, that relativity between all Marvel characters and their adventures is the Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not screw with Marvel continuity." At least that was the way it once worked.
But Lee questions whether the old rules should still be upheld. The adult characters in the Fantastic Four first appeared in 1961, making Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl/Woman, The Thing and the Human Torch now old enough to join the American Associated of Retired Persons.
"In the original Fantastic Four, Reed Richards fought in World War II! So how old is he now?" Lee wonders. "Should Peter Parker (Spider-Man) reach 40 and develop a beer gut? These characters shouldn't be like Archie characters who are timeless and never age."
Marvel tried updating Spider-Man over the last few years. Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider back in 1962, was married and an expectant father when a convoluted clone story put another man in the webslinger suit. "That was horrible," Lee says. "It invalidated years of stories." Fans agreed, noisily rebeling against the changes. That's why, in a few weeks, Parker will be back in the blue-and-red Spandex for good.
They're wonderful. Great stories, strong characterizations and beautifully drawn. And coming from Mr. Media, an early skeptic of the whole concept who read his first Fantastic Four in 1965, that's the equivalent of a standing ovation.
"People feared we would make these characters unrecognizable," Lee says. But in reality, other creators had already done that. Daredevil in a yellow costume? Daredevil in armor? Captain America a traitor? Tony Stark/Iron Man as a teen-ager? As Lee puts it, "They were moving away from what made these characters unique."
Lee says that the new world of the FF, Avengers, Iron Man and Captain America isn't really separate from the universe they once inhabited alongside Spidey and the X-Men. He refers to it as a "pocket universe" and says plainly these characters will be reunited with the rest of Marvel's cast. But first, he and Liefield will have some fun.
For example, there are incredible Hulks running around both universes, an issue that must be resolved. "Our Hulk is enormous and he's a walking furnace," Lee says. "When other characters touch him, they get radiation burns." Dr. Strange, who travels the astral plane, will be first to discover the "pocket" universe, followed by the Watcher, Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Then there's the issue of Franklin Richards, who was left an orphan when his parents, Sue and Reed Richards, were killed.
"Sue Storm (nee Richards) will hear a voice in the Baxter Building and, in a 'Shining' moment, see a boy standing there," Lee reveals. "She doesn't know she has a kid. At first she thinks it's a dream. We're not saying that the 400 previous issues of the Fantastic Four didn't happen."
Slowly but surely, the "Heroes Reborn" characters will encounter the rest of the Marvel Universe and experience deja vu, sensing they've shared adventures before. But Lee won't say when, exactly, the two universes will become one again, only that it will occur, hence the famed Marvel continuity will remain intact.
But don't look for Lee's name under the Homage imprint any time soon.
"I've got a few more slugfests before I get to that point," he says, laughing. "Besides, if I did do work under the Homage label, it would be page after page of a guy sitting around the house, thinking."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Originally Published September 23, 1996
Jim Lee is sitting on a time bomb. The most second-guessed man in comic books today — and perhaps the most popular creator in the industry — just engineered the death of the Fantastic Four, the longest-running characters in the Marvel Comics Universe.
Killing a comic book character isn't easy. Remember "The Death of Superman" hype a few years ago? Oh, he died all right. Which means he must be in Hell, because the Man of Steel is getting married in a matter of weeks.
Don't shed many tears for the Fantastic Four, or the Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man, all of whom died this summer at the hands of supervillain Onslaught. The four are "Heroes Reborn" via the magic of Lee and his partner, Rob Liefield. Under the terms of a one-year contract with Marvel, they were charged with breathing new life — and sales — into the quartet of titles.
The mere thought of killing a Marvel character and bringing him or her back to life beyond the Marvel Universe is considered a treasonous offense by fans, who were promised by the father of these characters, Stan Lee, that relativity between all Marvel characters and their adventures is the Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not screw with Marvel continuity." At least that was the way it once worked.
But Lee questions whether the old rules should still be upheld. The adult characters in the Fantastic Four first appeared in 1961, making Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl/Woman, The Thing and the Human Torch now old enough to join the American Associated of Retired Persons.
"In the original Fantastic Four, Reed Richards fought in World War II! So how old is he now?" Lee wonders. "Should Peter Parker (Spider-Man) reach 40 and develop a beer gut? These characters shouldn't be like Archie characters who are timeless and never age."
Marvel tried updating Spider-Man over the last few years. Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider back in 1962, was married and an expectant father when a convoluted clone story put another man in the webslinger suit. "That was horrible," Lee says. "It invalidated years of stories." Fans agreed, noisily rebeling against the changes. That's why, in a few weeks, Parker will be back in the blue-and-red Spandex for good.
They're wonderful. Great stories, strong characterizations and beautifully drawn. And coming from Mr. Media, an early skeptic of the whole concept who read his first Fantastic Four in 1965, that's the equivalent of a standing ovation.
"People feared we would make these characters unrecognizable," Lee says. But in reality, other creators had already done that. Daredevil in a yellow costume? Daredevil in armor? Captain America a traitor? Tony Stark/Iron Man as a teen-ager? As Lee puts it, "They were moving away from what made these characters unique."
Lee says that the new world of the FF, Avengers, Iron Man and Captain America isn't really separate from the universe they once inhabited alongside Spidey and the X-Men. He refers to it as a "pocket universe" and says plainly these characters will be reunited with the rest of Marvel's cast. But first, he and Liefield will have some fun.
For example, there are incredible Hulks running around both universes, an issue that must be resolved. "Our Hulk is enormous and he's a walking furnace," Lee says. "When other characters touch him, they get radiation burns." Dr. Strange, who travels the astral plane, will be first to discover the "pocket" universe, followed by the Watcher, Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Then there's the issue of Franklin Richards, who was left an orphan when his parents, Sue and Reed Richards, were killed.
"Sue Storm (nee Richards) will hear a voice in the Baxter Building and, in a 'Shining' moment, see a boy standing there," Lee reveals. "She doesn't know she has a kid. At first she thinks it's a dream. We're not saying that the 400 previous issues of the Fantastic Four didn't happen."
Slowly but surely, the "Heroes Reborn" characters will encounter the rest of the Marvel Universe and experience deja vu, sensing they've shared adventures before. But Lee won't say when, exactly, the two universes will become one again, only that it will occur, hence the famed Marvel continuity will remain intact.
But don't look for Lee's name under the Homage imprint any time soon.
"I've got a few more slugfests before I get to that point," he says, laughing. "Besides, if I did do work under the Homage label, it would be page after page of a guy sitting around the house, thinking."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Avengers, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Heroes Reborn, Hulk, Iron Man, Jim Lee, Marvel Comics, Onslaught, Rob Liefield, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Wizard, X-Men
¶ 3:12 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Joe Sinnott, "Spider-Man" "Fantastic Four" comic book artist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.
You have to be pretty damn good at what you do for someone to name you Joltin’. The name stuck to Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, of course, and is also part of the eternal legend of Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.
Unless you’re a comic book fan, you may not know Sinnott. But if you recognize the names of Stan “The Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby, Joltin’ Joe will be forever connected to their accomplishments. Lee wrote the stories, Kirby drew them, and Sinnott inked them, starting with the fifth issue of the Fantastic Four in 1961 on through the first appearance of the Silver Surfer and beyond. He’s also contributed his talents to Thor, The Hulk, and Captain America, to name just a few.
You can see Sinnott's work on three new Marvel Super Hero postage stamps - two Silver Surfers and a Thing -- that were released in late July by the United State Post Office.
Sinnott is the subject of a new oral history called Brush Strokes With Greatness, compiled and written by Tim Lasiuta. It’s packed with illustrations from his fifty- plus year career, starting with a Timely Comics story called “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” on through the development of the legendary Marvel universe.
Read the Joe Sinnott interview in Spanish here.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s start with a general point of information. What on earth does a comic book inker actually do, and how do you explain your career to the layman?
JOE SINNOTT: Well, actually, it’s all I ever did. I drew from the time I was three years old, I can remember, and it’s the only thing I knew. All my brothers could build houses, they could do all that. I couldn’t drive a nail, but I could draw, and I drew all the time. I drew on paper bags, whatever I had. Things were tough growing up in the thirties, but we made the best of it, and it paid off in the long run, I guess.
ANDELMAN: What is the difference, for someone who doesn’t know, between someone who does pencils and someone who does inking?
SINNOTT: Well, there’s all types of penciling, Bob. Years ago, most of the artists used to pencil thoroughly and complete pencils, put the blacks in and everything, and it progressed down to the point where a lot of the artists would pencil very loosely like a thumbnail sketch, and the inker, if he was capable, was required to finish the art. So he really was a finisher. Not all artists can do this, but some can, and fortunately, I was able to. Of course, the first 12, 13 years I was with Marvel, I did my own pencils and inks, and that’s the way I used to like it. But that was a different world back then.
ANDELMAN: When did it change for you? When did you stop focusing on penciling?
SINNOTT: Well, I started at Marvel in 1950 with Stan Lee. It was Timely Comics back in those days. And around 1961, Jack Kirby didn’t do his own inking, and he asked me if I could fill in and do a Jack Kirby. He couldn’t find anyone to ink it, and so I inked it, and Stan liked it quite a bit. He liked the combination. So it progressed from there, and Stan just kept sending me more Jack Kirby stuff, and I felt I could make as much inking as I could penciling, so I proceeded to ink primarily for Stan. Of course, I had other accounts, Treasure Chest and Dell and whatever, and there I did my own pencils and inks.
ANDELMAN: I wondered if you could actually make as much inking as penciling. I would have guessed not, but from what you say, I guess you could.
SINNOTT: It seemed like I could, maybe because I was a faster inker than I was a penciler. A lot of times with penciling you had to research and do things like that that used up a little of your time, but it never seemed to be a problem with me. The inking came very easily.
ANDELMAN: How different is one man’s inks from another's? Again, if we’re describing this for people who really aren’t that familiar with it, some people would just think oh, inking, you’re just taking an ink pen and going over someone’s pencils, but it’s more than that, right?
SINNOTT: Don’t I wish! No, I felt down through the years I’ve added a lot to whoever I was working on, and I’m sure a lot of my friends would tell you the same thing. Some inkers, I must say, do, so to speak, ink over the lines that the penciler has put down, and other inkers have to do a lot of what we call finished art. We have to finish the art. Some pencilers don’t put any blacks in whatsoever or details, and the inker has to do that. He’s primarily, like I said, finishing the art. He’s completing it. He’s adding to it. He’s an embellisher.
ANDELMAN: What do you think is the difference between the art you were inking in the early '60s, the start of the real Marvel Age, and today? Has it changed?
SINNOTT: Oh, a great deal. Of course, being off in the old school, I prefer the old method. I feel things are too technical today and too slick, and they don’t look like a comic book should look. That’s my feeling. Of course, in the old days, everyone did this same type of art. Reproductions were basically the same, but it looked like a comic book. It had the classic look. I prefer the Kirby, the Buscemas, the Colan, the Romitas. It was just great. It was stylized, but it was realistic art, whereas today, it’s hard to say what the new method would be called. We’re influenced a lot by the Japanese today, as you know. Not my preference.
ANDELMAN: Have the changes had anything to do with improvements in printing technology? You get a finer printing today than obviously you did 40 years ago.
SINNOTT: I’m sure there has been a great change in printing obviously. Of course, we have better paper, but then again, here we go, the old comics had that old comic book feel to it. A lot of people that I know, especially people my age, certainly prefer the old classic comic style and reproduction.
ANDELMAN: I guess one of the things that I think of when I think of your work in the sixties is, particularly working with Kirby, was that it was a heavier line, it seemed like a thicker, heavier line in those books than maybe we would see today or maybe even in some other books. Is that a mistake?
SINNOTT: I think you’re correct in that regard. I know, looking back, when I worked on Kirby in particular, I used an awful lot of brush, and certainly with a brush, you’re going to get a heavier line. But Jack’s work, it almost demanded a brush because he had big, bold pencil strokes, and usually four, five at the most panels on a page. And you could really do big drawings, and you could get in there with a brush and let yourself go. It’s not like today when I’m inking the Sunday "Spider-Man" page for Stan and the King Features. I use an awful lot of pen. The drawings are so small, and they’re reproduced so small that you have to use a lot of pen because brush is just too big, and the lines would be too heavy.
ANDELMAN: You had worked in comics for ten or eleven years by the time that first issue of Fantastic Four came your way. You had seen the superheroes go away, Westerns come on, things like that. When the Fantastic Four came to you, what did you think? Did you think it was another monster comic? Was it a big deal at the time, or was it just another assignment?
SINNOTT: It was no big deal at all. When the Fantastic Four came to me at number five, I had never heard of the book. But as soon as I saw the characters, I said, gee, what great characters. Of course, in those days as you know, through the fifties and sixties, we were always looking for a new trend. We had the Korean War, then we had the horror comics, we had romance, we had science fiction, and then we had the monster books in the late fifties and early sixties. And then when Stan came out with a few superheroes, we didn’t think anything more of it. We thought, even Spider-Man, we just thought that was another character, that it would soon fade, and we’d be doing something else. Certainly, as you know, it caught on and took off.
ANDELMAN: I think I need to correct myself on something from something you just said. You actually came on Fantastic Four with the fifth issue not the first issue.
SINNOTT: That’s right. The introduction of Doctor Doom.
ANDELMAN: How did the whole perception of the industry you were working on start to change in the early '60s as these comics took on a life of their own that they had not had?
SINNOTT: It was pretty obvious. Most of the comic houses -- we were dropping houses at that time -- really concentrated on the superheroes. DC, of course, with their Justice League and Batman and Superman and whatever. They brought them all back. The same with Marvel, only Marvel created more characters. Of course, we did have Captain America and a few like that, but basically, we had all new superheroes. I think Stan was surprised that they were so popular.
ANDELMAN: And Stan created kind of a culture personality around everyone who worked on those books, didn’t he?
SINNOTT: Yeah, he certainly did.
ANDELMAN: How was that different than the way the industry had operated a decade earlier?
SINNOTT: Well, that’s pretty hard to ascertain, Bob. I really wouldn’t know how to put a finger on it, to tell the truth.
ANDELMAN: Stan nicknamed you "Joltin’" Joe Sinnott, but there was a nickname before that, right?
SINNOTT: Yeah. He had called me "Jovial" Joe.
ANDELMAN: Were you surprised the first time that popped up?
SINNOTT: No, not really. I don’t know where he got it from, but Joltin’ Joe, I could understand that because I’m sure he was influenced by Joe DiMaggio. And I used to talk a lot about baseball with a friend of mine that worked in the office down there, Jack Abel, a very talented individual.
ANDELMAN: In the late '60s and early '70s, comics developed a cult of personality. It was a changing time. People actually knew your name, they knew what you did, they knew other people. It wasn’t just a matter of buying their favorite comic, they were looking for people’s names, and they were recognizing people, right?
SINNOTT: Oh, I think so. I often hear from people that said, "I rooted for you," so to speak, and "I looked for your work way back in the beginning of the superhero age, back in the early '60s, '61, '62. I remember many years ago the first fan mail I ever got was back in 1953, I think it was, and this kid from Connecticut wrote me and said how much he loved my character, Arrowhead. He was an Indian renegade. The law was always after him, but he was always helping out those who were in trouble. The book ran for quite a few issues, and I really enjoyed it. This kid wrote to me and said how much he loved Arrowhead. They finally made a movie, and Charlton Heston played a character called Arrowhead, and here again, he was an Indian. It was a fairly successful book for the '50s, and I kept his letter all these years.
The last letter I heard from him, he said he was going off to Korea. This was during the Korean War. Well, I never heard from him again. It was interesting because I thought maybe something happened to him during the war, and I had lost his address. But anyway, about two years ago, I got a letter from this woman from Connecticut, and she said she was this person’s wife that I had known when he was a kid and that he was very sick. He wasn’t expected to live any more. His illness was terminal so I got together some of the old Arrowhead drawings I had done many years ago, and I sent them off to Roland. Of course, he couldn’t respond to me. He was aware that he got them and everything, and he passed away about a week later. I’m sure I made his last couple days fairly happy because he loved that character.
ANDELMAN: What a wonderful story. What a great story. Now, I wanted to ask you, you’ve had a business relationship with Stan for 57 years. How different was Stan in 1950 from the man who, this year, is hosting a weekly TV show?
SINNOTT: I can’t see one bit of difference.
ANDELMAN: Is that right?
SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Stan was always the life of the party, so to speak. If Stan was in a room with a thousand people, he would stand out. Great sense of humor. His memory is a little bit off now, but even back in those days, he wasn’t known for him memory. Tremendous sense of humor. I wish I could tell you some of the stories because whenever I vouch for my work, Stan sends me a little note back. I’ve kept them all. I have hundreds and hundreds of Stan’s notes and letters. Someday, they’ll make a good book, I think. Really, you can’t believe the sense of humor he had. Always with a smile. If you ever see a picture of Stan, it’s with a great big smile.
Well, he could be tough too, though. He knew what he wanted, and he expected it. He certainly helped me in many, many ways. Right from the start, I remember when I was just a kid out of school, he said, "Joe, whatever you do, exaggerate everything." He said, "I want everything exaggerated." That’s what we lived by.
ANDELMAN: What about Kirby? Obviously, you got pages from him. And I know that while Stan developed this idea of the Marvel bullpen, there were some guys working on staff, but mostly guys worked from home so you didn’t see each other that often.
SINNOTT: No. Most of the guys who did the books worked at home. The staff, of course, involved so many people. Proofreaders, people who did corrections, things like that. Well, Romita, of course, worked there at the office, and there were a few others. Kirby, I worked with Jack, oh gee, must be 18 years, something like that, and I had never met him. Never talked to him on the phone, would you believe that? And so Marvel had a convention in ’72, and I went down and I was introduced to Jack Kirby by Marie Severn. And I didn’t see him again, I didn’t talk to him again until 1975. They had another convention, and I went down and we got together. We had a great three days together. After that, I never spoke to him again, would you believe that?
Of course, Jack moved to California, and he dropped me a note once in a while if he wanted something. For example, if he wanted his characters inked, and he’d ask me that way if I could help him out, and of course, I always did. We never talked about the Fantastic Four. He never told me he liked the way I did this or didn’t like the way I was doing that. We just never talked about what we were working on, which is amazing, I think.
CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.
You have to be pretty damn good at what you do for someone to name you Joltin’. The name stuck to Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, of course, and is also part of the eternal legend of Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.
Unless you’re a comic book fan, you may not know Sinnott. But if you recognize the names of Stan “The Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby, Joltin’ Joe will be forever connected to their accomplishments. Lee wrote the stories, Kirby drew them, and Sinnott inked them, starting with the fifth issue of the Fantastic Four in 1961 on through the first appearance of the Silver Surfer and beyond. He’s also contributed his talents to Thor, The Hulk, and Captain America, to name just a few.
You can see Sinnott's work on three new Marvel Super Hero postage stamps - two Silver Surfers and a Thing -- that were released in late July by the United State Post Office.
Sinnott is the subject of a new oral history called Brush Strokes With Greatness, compiled and written by Tim Lasiuta. It’s packed with illustrations from his fifty- plus year career, starting with a Timely Comics story called “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” on through the development of the legendary Marvel universe.
Read the Joe Sinnott interview in Spanish here.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s start with a general point of information. What on earth does a comic book inker actually do, and how do you explain your career to the layman?
JOE SINNOTT: Well, actually, it’s all I ever did. I drew from the time I was three years old, I can remember, and it’s the only thing I knew. All my brothers could build houses, they could do all that. I couldn’t drive a nail, but I could draw, and I drew all the time. I drew on paper bags, whatever I had. Things were tough growing up in the thirties, but we made the best of it, and it paid off in the long run, I guess.
ANDELMAN: What is the difference, for someone who doesn’t know, between someone who does pencils and someone who does inking?
SINNOTT: Well, there’s all types of penciling, Bob. Years ago, most of the artists used to pencil thoroughly and complete pencils, put the blacks in and everything, and it progressed down to the point where a lot of the artists would pencil very loosely like a thumbnail sketch, and the inker, if he was capable, was required to finish the art. So he really was a finisher. Not all artists can do this, but some can, and fortunately, I was able to. Of course, the first 12, 13 years I was with Marvel, I did my own pencils and inks, and that’s the way I used to like it. But that was a different world back then.
ANDELMAN: When did it change for you? When did you stop focusing on penciling?
SINNOTT: Well, I started at Marvel in 1950 with Stan Lee. It was Timely Comics back in those days. And around 1961, Jack Kirby didn’t do his own inking, and he asked me if I could fill in and do a Jack Kirby. He couldn’t find anyone to ink it, and so I inked it, and Stan liked it quite a bit. He liked the combination. So it progressed from there, and Stan just kept sending me more Jack Kirby stuff, and I felt I could make as much inking as I could penciling, so I proceeded to ink primarily for Stan. Of course, I had other accounts, Treasure Chest and Dell and whatever, and there I did my own pencils and inks.
ANDELMAN: I wondered if you could actually make as much inking as penciling. I would have guessed not, but from what you say, I guess you could.
SINNOTT: It seemed like I could, maybe because I was a faster inker than I was a penciler. A lot of times with penciling you had to research and do things like that that used up a little of your time, but it never seemed to be a problem with me. The inking came very easily.
ANDELMAN: How different is one man’s inks from another's? Again, if we’re describing this for people who really aren’t that familiar with it, some people would just think oh, inking, you’re just taking an ink pen and going over someone’s pencils, but it’s more than that, right?
SINNOTT: Don’t I wish! No, I felt down through the years I’ve added a lot to whoever I was working on, and I’m sure a lot of my friends would tell you the same thing. Some inkers, I must say, do, so to speak, ink over the lines that the penciler has put down, and other inkers have to do a lot of what we call finished art. We have to finish the art. Some pencilers don’t put any blacks in whatsoever or details, and the inker has to do that. He’s primarily, like I said, finishing the art. He’s completing it. He’s adding to it. He’s an embellisher.
ANDELMAN: What do you think is the difference between the art you were inking in the early '60s, the start of the real Marvel Age, and today? Has it changed?
SINNOTT: Oh, a great deal. Of course, being off in the old school, I prefer the old method. I feel things are too technical today and too slick, and they don’t look like a comic book should look. That’s my feeling. Of course, in the old days, everyone did this same type of art. Reproductions were basically the same, but it looked like a comic book. It had the classic look. I prefer the Kirby, the Buscemas, the Colan, the Romitas. It was just great. It was stylized, but it was realistic art, whereas today, it’s hard to say what the new method would be called. We’re influenced a lot by the Japanese today, as you know. Not my preference.
ANDELMAN: Have the changes had anything to do with improvements in printing technology? You get a finer printing today than obviously you did 40 years ago.
SINNOTT: I’m sure there has been a great change in printing obviously. Of course, we have better paper, but then again, here we go, the old comics had that old comic book feel to it. A lot of people that I know, especially people my age, certainly prefer the old classic comic style and reproduction.
ANDELMAN: I guess one of the things that I think of when I think of your work in the sixties is, particularly working with Kirby, was that it was a heavier line, it seemed like a thicker, heavier line in those books than maybe we would see today or maybe even in some other books. Is that a mistake?
SINNOTT: I think you’re correct in that regard. I know, looking back, when I worked on Kirby in particular, I used an awful lot of brush, and certainly with a brush, you’re going to get a heavier line. But Jack’s work, it almost demanded a brush because he had big, bold pencil strokes, and usually four, five at the most panels on a page. And you could really do big drawings, and you could get in there with a brush and let yourself go. It’s not like today when I’m inking the Sunday "Spider-Man" page for Stan and the King Features. I use an awful lot of pen. The drawings are so small, and they’re reproduced so small that you have to use a lot of pen because brush is just too big, and the lines would be too heavy.
ANDELMAN: You had worked in comics for ten or eleven years by the time that first issue of Fantastic Four came your way. You had seen the superheroes go away, Westerns come on, things like that. When the Fantastic Four came to you, what did you think? Did you think it was another monster comic? Was it a big deal at the time, or was it just another assignment?
SINNOTT: It was no big deal at all. When the Fantastic Four came to me at number five, I had never heard of the book. But as soon as I saw the characters, I said, gee, what great characters. Of course, in those days as you know, through the fifties and sixties, we were always looking for a new trend. We had the Korean War, then we had the horror comics, we had romance, we had science fiction, and then we had the monster books in the late fifties and early sixties. And then when Stan came out with a few superheroes, we didn’t think anything more of it. We thought, even Spider-Man, we just thought that was another character, that it would soon fade, and we’d be doing something else. Certainly, as you know, it caught on and took off.
ANDELMAN: I think I need to correct myself on something from something you just said. You actually came on Fantastic Four with the fifth issue not the first issue.
SINNOTT: That’s right. The introduction of Doctor Doom.
ANDELMAN: How did the whole perception of the industry you were working on start to change in the early '60s as these comics took on a life of their own that they had not had?
SINNOTT: It was pretty obvious. Most of the comic houses -- we were dropping houses at that time -- really concentrated on the superheroes. DC, of course, with their Justice League and Batman and Superman and whatever. They brought them all back. The same with Marvel, only Marvel created more characters. Of course, we did have Captain America and a few like that, but basically, we had all new superheroes. I think Stan was surprised that they were so popular.
ANDELMAN: And Stan created kind of a culture personality around everyone who worked on those books, didn’t he?
SINNOTT: Yeah, he certainly did.
ANDELMAN: How was that different than the way the industry had operated a decade earlier?
SINNOTT: Well, that’s pretty hard to ascertain, Bob. I really wouldn’t know how to put a finger on it, to tell the truth.
ANDELMAN: Stan nicknamed you "Joltin’" Joe Sinnott, but there was a nickname before that, right?
SINNOTT: Yeah. He had called me "Jovial" Joe.
ANDELMAN: Were you surprised the first time that popped up?
SINNOTT: No, not really. I don’t know where he got it from, but Joltin’ Joe, I could understand that because I’m sure he was influenced by Joe DiMaggio. And I used to talk a lot about baseball with a friend of mine that worked in the office down there, Jack Abel, a very talented individual.
ANDELMAN: In the late '60s and early '70s, comics developed a cult of personality. It was a changing time. People actually knew your name, they knew what you did, they knew other people. It wasn’t just a matter of buying their favorite comic, they were looking for people’s names, and they were recognizing people, right?
SINNOTT: Oh, I think so. I often hear from people that said, "I rooted for you," so to speak, and "I looked for your work way back in the beginning of the superhero age, back in the early '60s, '61, '62. I remember many years ago the first fan mail I ever got was back in 1953, I think it was, and this kid from Connecticut wrote me and said how much he loved my character, Arrowhead. He was an Indian renegade. The law was always after him, but he was always helping out those who were in trouble. The book ran for quite a few issues, and I really enjoyed it. This kid wrote to me and said how much he loved Arrowhead. They finally made a movie, and Charlton Heston played a character called Arrowhead, and here again, he was an Indian. It was a fairly successful book for the '50s, and I kept his letter all these years.
The last letter I heard from him, he said he was going off to Korea. This was during the Korean War. Well, I never heard from him again. It was interesting because I thought maybe something happened to him during the war, and I had lost his address. But anyway, about two years ago, I got a letter from this woman from Connecticut, and she said she was this person’s wife that I had known when he was a kid and that he was very sick. He wasn’t expected to live any more. His illness was terminal so I got together some of the old Arrowhead drawings I had done many years ago, and I sent them off to Roland. Of course, he couldn’t respond to me. He was aware that he got them and everything, and he passed away about a week later. I’m sure I made his last couple days fairly happy because he loved that character.
ANDELMAN: What a wonderful story. What a great story. Now, I wanted to ask you, you’ve had a business relationship with Stan for 57 years. How different was Stan in 1950 from the man who, this year, is hosting a weekly TV show?
SINNOTT: I can’t see one bit of difference.
ANDELMAN: Is that right?
SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Stan was always the life of the party, so to speak. If Stan was in a room with a thousand people, he would stand out. Great sense of humor. His memory is a little bit off now, but even back in those days, he wasn’t known for him memory. Tremendous sense of humor. I wish I could tell you some of the stories because whenever I vouch for my work, Stan sends me a little note back. I’ve kept them all. I have hundreds and hundreds of Stan’s notes and letters. Someday, they’ll make a good book, I think. Really, you can’t believe the sense of humor he had. Always with a smile. If you ever see a picture of Stan, it’s with a great big smile.
Well, he could be tough too, though. He knew what he wanted, and he expected it. He certainly helped me in many, many ways. Right from the start, I remember when I was just a kid out of school, he said, "Joe, whatever you do, exaggerate everything." He said, "I want everything exaggerated." That’s what we lived by.
ANDELMAN: What about Kirby? Obviously, you got pages from him. And I know that while Stan developed this idea of the Marvel bullpen, there were some guys working on staff, but mostly guys worked from home so you didn’t see each other that often.
SINNOTT: No. Most of the guys who did the books worked at home. The staff, of course, involved so many people. Proofreaders, people who did corrections, things like that. Well, Romita, of course, worked there at the office, and there were a few others. Kirby, I worked with Jack, oh gee, must be 18 years, something like that, and I had never met him. Never talked to him on the phone, would you believe that? And so Marvel had a convention in ’72, and I went down and I was introduced to Jack Kirby by Marie Severn. And I didn’t see him again, I didn’t talk to him again until 1975. They had another convention, and I went down and we got together. We had a great three days together. After that, I never spoke to him again, would you believe that?
Of course, Jack moved to California, and he dropped me a note once in a while if he wanted something. For example, if he wanted his characters inked, and he’d ask me that way if I could help him out, and of course, I always did. We never talked about the Fantastic Four. He never told me he liked the way I did this or didn’t like the way I was doing that. We just never talked about what we were working on, which is amazing, I think.
CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Captain America, Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, The Beatles, The Hulk, Tim Lasiuta
¶ 9:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Joe Sinnott, "Spider-Man" "Fantastic Four" comic book artist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
(RETURN TO PART 1)
ANDELMAN: Well, to use the Marvel term, it’s astonishing, really. You guys only met twice in all those years, and yet, your work is so closely tied from that era.
SINNOTT: Never discussed the work. Never.
ANDELMAN: I’m baffled. Really.
SINNOTT: Of course, Jack and Stan used to write notes on the pages for each other. If Stan wanted something changed, or Jack didn’t like a certain way a story was being told or whatever, but when Jack sent the work to me, there was never, ever a note on the border saying Joe, would you do it this way or would you do it that way. And, of course, my son knows all the pages we did together. It astonishes me, Bob, sometimes also.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any guys that you were particularly close to from that era, from Marvel?
SINNOTT: No, no. Actually, it was pretty much the same as Kirby. They sent me the work, and they knew I was gonna do a complete, acceptable job when I returned it.
ANDELMAN: And where were you living at the time?
SINNOTT: I’ve lived in Saugerties all my life.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: Yeah. I was born here in 1926, and I went to the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City for about three years, I guess it was. So I lived down on 74th Street and Broadway. Then I moved back up to Saugerties here when I got a firm account with Stan.
ANDELMAN: And that school you went to later became the School of Visual Arts.
SINNOTT: That’s right. Burne Hogarth was one of the directors there.
ANDELMAN: I think I saw that Silas Rhodes just passed away.
SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Well, I’d say it’s been about two or three years ago now.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: Oh, wait a minute. I thought you meant Burne Hogarth.
ANDELMAN: No, no, no. Silas. I think I just saw…
SINNOTT: I didn’t know that he passed away.
ANDELMAN: I think he was like 92 or something.
SINNOTT: He was. What a dynamic…They both were. Unbelievable. Both characters were dynamic personalities. Of course, Silas had been in the Marine Corps during World War II, and I would hate to have been under him, I’m telling ya. He was a, what do they call, not slave driver, but there’s another word.
ANDELMAN: Do you have a good story about him?
SINNOTT: Well, we used to call him "Rocky" when we were in school. He’d come around everyday, certainly. I’m telling ya, he was a dynamo. He was a strong person, and you could just see him in the Marine Corps. A lot of stories, little stories that he would tell. I remember one time he told me, he said, "Joe, you’re putting on weight. It’s not good. It’s very unhealthy." I’m sure he was a health nut because he looked like he could take on a weightlifter. And like you just said, he lived to be 93, right?
ANDELMAN: Yeah. Yeah.
SINNOTT: It’s funny to think that as many times as I talked to him, that’s the one thing, of course two things, that’s the one thing I remember him saying to me, "Joe, you’re putting on a little weight." I wasn’t aware that I was, but obviously, he could see it.
Another time when I was down at the school to apply for entrance, I had my little pencil and ink scratchings. I was very apprehensive about it cause I thought they weren’t good enough to get into school. So I went to see Silas Rhodes. He called me in, and he looked at my work, and he said, "Joe, this is really good stuff for a beginner. I gotta show these to Burne Hogarth." And I was saying to myself he’s just saying that because they’re having trouble getting people into the school, and they want to make sure I come to the school. So he went in and showed the samples to Burne, and of course, Burne came out and told me, "Joe, these are pretty good for a guy at your stage." I wanted to be an illustrator so I wanted to take the illustrating course. And Burne says, "No, Joe, you’re a natural-born cartoonist. I’ll tell ya, it’s not easy, it’s very hard, very hard work. But your work will lend itself perfectly to a comic strip or comic book cartoonist." So that was the first day I was down at the school. Certainly, both of them impressed me so much at the time.
ANDELMAN: For people who don’t know Burne Hogarth, do you want to explain?
SINNOTT: Yeah. He was the illustrator for the newspaper strip "Tarzan." It appeared in the New York Mirror back in those days. Of course, he was a great draftsman, and we used to love to have him come in and draw on the easel for us. He could draw anything you wanted. A sabertooth tiger or whatever. He was just a dynamic person and a great artist. He really was.
ANDELMAN: For a lot of cartoonists, especially in the action genre/adventure, he’s the gold standard, isn’t he?
SINNOTT: Exactly. Certainly one of them.
ANDELMAN: So when you come in there out of the blue, and Burne Hogarth tells you you’ve got what it takes, that must have been a pretty exciting day.
SINNOTT: Yes it was. Of course, I had come out of the Navy, and I didn’t go to school right away. When I came out, I was playing ball and having a good time, whatever. So then it came time, and I said, "I gotta go to art school." And so when I went down there, we were doing some drawings in ink, and I was using a pen, and he came by me, and he knocked the pen out of my hand. He said, "Joe, in this school, we use a brush." He was a great brush man. Here I was, about 21 years old. I wasn’t even aware that cartoonists used brushes. That’s how naïve I was. In those days, there were no conventions. You had no chance of ever meeting, especially up here in the mountains of the Catskills, I never met a cartoonist and never had the thought that I ever would whereas today, the kids, they see cartoonists all the time at these conventions. They know everything about the field even before they try to break into it. They know what supplies to use and what brushes and what pens and whatever. All I used was a post office pen that they used in the post office. The ones you dip in the inkwell.
ANDELMAN: Right. I did this biography of Will Eisner, and I remember he told me about taking his portfolio up to see Ham Fisher. He did Joe Palooka. And James Montgomery Flagg was there who did the famous Uncle Sam posters. And the big deal for him was he was just so overwhelmed, he didn’t know what to say to the man so he says, "What kind of pen do you use?" And Flagg said, "I use a 290 Gillette." And so Eisner went out and bought nothing but 290 Gillette pens and used them for the rest of his life.
SINNOTT: Isn’t that amazing? Of course, the school used to get a lot of calls from people in the business or whatever. And they got a call from either NBC or ABC, one of the TV stations. There were only three at the time. And they wanted someone to come over on, I forget whose program, but Ham Fisher was the guest over there. And they wanted an art student to come over and talk with Ham Fisher about comic strips. So they used to send me on a lot of these errands, and so they called me up from the class, and they said, "Joe, Ham Fisher wants you to come over and ask you a few questions about school, things like that." And I said, "Oh, I’m afraid not." I thought I was too shy to go on TV. So I passed it up. They chose another friend of mine from the school, and he went over, and he came back, and he said, "You know what? Ham Fisher was showing the people on the easel how to draw Joe Palooka, and it was already drawn. It was in blue pencil, and you couldn’t see it, but he was tracing it." Hey, those guys weren’t taking any chances, either. Another time, Ted Mack, I don’t know whether you remember Ted Mack.
ANDELMAN: "The Original Amateur Hour."
SINNOTT: Yeah. He’s before your time. But anyway, they called me over. Well, the Amateur Hour used to be "Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour." They could have still called it that. But, in any case, I was sent over there. So I did go over there and was up in the booth with him, and we were watching, I can still remember the Old Gold, the mother and the daughter. They were inside a cigarette pack, and they were both dancing on the stage. Do you remember that commercial?
ANDELMAN: I remember dancing cigarette packs.
SINNOTT: Well, that was Old Gold. So anyway, we watched that, and Ted’s agent was there, and he wanted me to do a caricature of Ted for Variety magazine. And I’ll tell ya, boy, I was nervous. And he said, "Make Ted look like a nice guy cause he’s really nice." And actually, he was a really nice guy, but he looked like somebody from Guys and Dolls. How do you do a caricature of someone who looks like a gangster? I’ll tell ya, I was scared to death, and I kept drawing away. And Ted Mack said to me, "Joe, don’t be nervous. I’d like you to come with me over to one of the big nightclubs." I just couldn’t do it. I said, "Ted, I really can’t." I made up some excuse. I was just too scared. I really was scared. I was just a kid then. It would’ve been interesting. Looking back, I should’ve gone to see whom he would’ve met over there and whatever.
ANDELMAN: Well, to borrow the title of your biography, you had another brush with greatness, although I don’t know if you actually had contact with them. I suspect you didn’t. You did a comic based on The Beatles back in ’64, right?
SINNOTT: Yeah. 1964. They were on their way over to be on Ed Sullivan’s show, and Dell called me. They knew I did good likenesses, and they wanted someone who could do likenesses. So they asked me to do The Beatles book, which was 64 pages long. And I had a month to do it in. That was a lot of work in a short period of time. It came out really good, all things considered. They were very happy with it. Of course, I never did get to meet The Beatles. But the book is fairly unique, and it’s fairly rare, I guess.
ANDELMAN: And that was a project that you did the drawing for. You drew The Beatles for that. That wasn’t an inking job like you were known for much later. You drew The Beatles pages.
SINNOTT: Oh sure. Oh yeah, yeah. The book. A good friend of mine, Dick Giordano, he helped me out on a few pages toward the end. I was running out of time. Of course, Dick and I used to work many years ago together. I would pencil books for General Electric or Radio Shack, and he would ink them. Of course, that was an interesting period.
ANDELMAN: Now, I want to ask you about one more thing cause we’re running out of time. This is the summer, of course, that the Silver Surfer actually comes to life. I wondered if you have seen either of the Fantastic Four movies, and if you have, what you thought.
SINNOTT: Don’t embarrass me. No, I haven’t seen them.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: My family, my son, he’s a big comic fan, and he knows all about the comics. He took his two children to see it. Of course, they wanted me to go with them, but it was the first night, and I really didn’t want to go the first night because they get a lot of young people the first night. They pack the theaters, no question. I did see Spiderman 3 the first night, and it was hectic. The kids, they were quiet and everything, but there were just so many of them. I had to wait in line and all that. So anyway, I didn’t see it, but my son Mark, he’s quite a critic. He loved it. There were a few little things, naturally, he disagreed with, but he thought the Surfer was tremendous.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. It was great. I thought they did a great job with the Surfer. My daughter, who’s the upcoming comic fan in our house, she loved it. She just absolutely loved it.
SINNOTT: John Buscema and I did the first three Surfers. Of course, he continued with his brother for a while. I think they did maybe 17, 18 issues altogether. But I thought what a great character the Surfer was. Of course, John did a beautiful Surfer.
ANDELMAN: I think you have to go see the movie, not just to see what they did with the Silver Surfer, but I think you’ll get a kick out of Stan’s cameo in this particular movie.
SINNOTT: That’s what Mark said. The first couple that he was in, you could barely see him. Don’t blink, otherwise you’ll miss him. But I understand he had a little more…
ANDELMAN: Yeah, you can’t miss him in this one. It’s a very funny moment, especially for someone who’s known him as long as you have.
SINNOTT: He’s something, I’ll tell ya. He just called me about two days ago. And I was away from the "Spider-Man" Sunday comic strip for a while because my wife had passed away, and I was quite sick for a while. I was in the hospital three times.
ANDELMAN: I’m sorry.
SINNOTT: Yeah, over the last five months, so I had to hand over the "Spider-Man" to him, a friend of mine. And he very graciously took care of it while I was laid up. So I went back about, oh maybe a month ago, so Stan had to call me and tell me how great it was to be back working with me.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
(RETURN TO PART 1)
ANDELMAN: Well, to use the Marvel term, it’s astonishing, really. You guys only met twice in all those years, and yet, your work is so closely tied from that era.
SINNOTT: Never discussed the work. Never.
ANDELMAN: I’m baffled. Really.
SINNOTT: Of course, Jack and Stan used to write notes on the pages for each other. If Stan wanted something changed, or Jack didn’t like a certain way a story was being told or whatever, but when Jack sent the work to me, there was never, ever a note on the border saying Joe, would you do it this way or would you do it that way. And, of course, my son knows all the pages we did together. It astonishes me, Bob, sometimes also.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any guys that you were particularly close to from that era, from Marvel?
SINNOTT: No, no. Actually, it was pretty much the same as Kirby. They sent me the work, and they knew I was gonna do a complete, acceptable job when I returned it.
ANDELMAN: And where were you living at the time?
SINNOTT: I’ve lived in Saugerties all my life.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: Yeah. I was born here in 1926, and I went to the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City for about three years, I guess it was. So I lived down on 74th Street and Broadway. Then I moved back up to Saugerties here when I got a firm account with Stan.
ANDELMAN: And that school you went to later became the School of Visual Arts.
SINNOTT: That’s right. Burne Hogarth was one of the directors there.
ANDELMAN: I think I saw that Silas Rhodes just passed away.
SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Well, I’d say it’s been about two or three years ago now.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: Oh, wait a minute. I thought you meant Burne Hogarth.
ANDELMAN: No, no, no. Silas. I think I just saw…
SINNOTT: I didn’t know that he passed away.
ANDELMAN: I think he was like 92 or something.
SINNOTT: He was. What a dynamic…They both were. Unbelievable. Both characters were dynamic personalities. Of course, Silas had been in the Marine Corps during World War II, and I would hate to have been under him, I’m telling ya. He was a, what do they call, not slave driver, but there’s another word.
ANDELMAN: Do you have a good story about him?
SINNOTT: Well, we used to call him "Rocky" when we were in school. He’d come around everyday, certainly. I’m telling ya, he was a dynamo. He was a strong person, and you could just see him in the Marine Corps. A lot of stories, little stories that he would tell. I remember one time he told me, he said, "Joe, you’re putting on weight. It’s not good. It’s very unhealthy." I’m sure he was a health nut because he looked like he could take on a weightlifter. And like you just said, he lived to be 93, right?
ANDELMAN: Yeah. Yeah.
SINNOTT: It’s funny to think that as many times as I talked to him, that’s the one thing, of course two things, that’s the one thing I remember him saying to me, "Joe, you’re putting on a little weight." I wasn’t aware that I was, but obviously, he could see it.
Another time when I was down at the school to apply for entrance, I had my little pencil and ink scratchings. I was very apprehensive about it cause I thought they weren’t good enough to get into school. So I went to see Silas Rhodes. He called me in, and he looked at my work, and he said, "Joe, this is really good stuff for a beginner. I gotta show these to Burne Hogarth." And I was saying to myself he’s just saying that because they’re having trouble getting people into the school, and they want to make sure I come to the school. So he went in and showed the samples to Burne, and of course, Burne came out and told me, "Joe, these are pretty good for a guy at your stage." I wanted to be an illustrator so I wanted to take the illustrating course. And Burne says, "No, Joe, you’re a natural-born cartoonist. I’ll tell ya, it’s not easy, it’s very hard, very hard work. But your work will lend itself perfectly to a comic strip or comic book cartoonist." So that was the first day I was down at the school. Certainly, both of them impressed me so much at the time.
ANDELMAN: For people who don’t know Burne Hogarth, do you want to explain?
SINNOTT: Yeah. He was the illustrator for the newspaper strip "Tarzan." It appeared in the New York Mirror back in those days. Of course, he was a great draftsman, and we used to love to have him come in and draw on the easel for us. He could draw anything you wanted. A sabertooth tiger or whatever. He was just a dynamic person and a great artist. He really was.
ANDELMAN: For a lot of cartoonists, especially in the action genre/adventure, he’s the gold standard, isn’t he?
SINNOTT: Exactly. Certainly one of them.
ANDELMAN: So when you come in there out of the blue, and Burne Hogarth tells you you’ve got what it takes, that must have been a pretty exciting day.
SINNOTT: Yes it was. Of course, I had come out of the Navy, and I didn’t go to school right away. When I came out, I was playing ball and having a good time, whatever. So then it came time, and I said, "I gotta go to art school." And so when I went down there, we were doing some drawings in ink, and I was using a pen, and he came by me, and he knocked the pen out of my hand. He said, "Joe, in this school, we use a brush." He was a great brush man. Here I was, about 21 years old. I wasn’t even aware that cartoonists used brushes. That’s how naïve I was. In those days, there were no conventions. You had no chance of ever meeting, especially up here in the mountains of the Catskills, I never met a cartoonist and never had the thought that I ever would whereas today, the kids, they see cartoonists all the time at these conventions. They know everything about the field even before they try to break into it. They know what supplies to use and what brushes and what pens and whatever. All I used was a post office pen that they used in the post office. The ones you dip in the inkwell.
ANDELMAN: Right. I did this biography of Will Eisner, and I remember he told me about taking his portfolio up to see Ham Fisher. He did Joe Palooka. And James Montgomery Flagg was there who did the famous Uncle Sam posters. And the big deal for him was he was just so overwhelmed, he didn’t know what to say to the man so he says, "What kind of pen do you use?" And Flagg said, "I use a 290 Gillette." And so Eisner went out and bought nothing but 290 Gillette pens and used them for the rest of his life.
SINNOTT: Isn’t that amazing? Of course, the school used to get a lot of calls from people in the business or whatever. And they got a call from either NBC or ABC, one of the TV stations. There were only three at the time. And they wanted someone to come over on, I forget whose program, but Ham Fisher was the guest over there. And they wanted an art student to come over and talk with Ham Fisher about comic strips. So they used to send me on a lot of these errands, and so they called me up from the class, and they said, "Joe, Ham Fisher wants you to come over and ask you a few questions about school, things like that." And I said, "Oh, I’m afraid not." I thought I was too shy to go on TV. So I passed it up. They chose another friend of mine from the school, and he went over, and he came back, and he said, "You know what? Ham Fisher was showing the people on the easel how to draw Joe Palooka, and it was already drawn. It was in blue pencil, and you couldn’t see it, but he was tracing it." Hey, those guys weren’t taking any chances, either. Another time, Ted Mack, I don’t know whether you remember Ted Mack.
ANDELMAN: "The Original Amateur Hour."
SINNOTT: Yeah. He’s before your time. But anyway, they called me over. Well, the Amateur Hour used to be "Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour." They could have still called it that. But, in any case, I was sent over there. So I did go over there and was up in the booth with him, and we were watching, I can still remember the Old Gold, the mother and the daughter. They were inside a cigarette pack, and they were both dancing on the stage. Do you remember that commercial?
ANDELMAN: I remember dancing cigarette packs.
SINNOTT: Well, that was Old Gold. So anyway, we watched that, and Ted’s agent was there, and he wanted me to do a caricature of Ted for Variety magazine. And I’ll tell ya, boy, I was nervous. And he said, "Make Ted look like a nice guy cause he’s really nice." And actually, he was a really nice guy, but he looked like somebody from Guys and Dolls. How do you do a caricature of someone who looks like a gangster? I’ll tell ya, I was scared to death, and I kept drawing away. And Ted Mack said to me, "Joe, don’t be nervous. I’d like you to come with me over to one of the big nightclubs." I just couldn’t do it. I said, "Ted, I really can’t." I made up some excuse. I was just too scared. I really was scared. I was just a kid then. It would’ve been interesting. Looking back, I should’ve gone to see whom he would’ve met over there and whatever.
ANDELMAN: Well, to borrow the title of your biography, you had another brush with greatness, although I don’t know if you actually had contact with them. I suspect you didn’t. You did a comic based on The Beatles back in ’64, right?
SINNOTT: Yeah. 1964. They were on their way over to be on Ed Sullivan’s show, and Dell called me. They knew I did good likenesses, and they wanted someone who could do likenesses. So they asked me to do The Beatles book, which was 64 pages long. And I had a month to do it in. That was a lot of work in a short period of time. It came out really good, all things considered. They were very happy with it. Of course, I never did get to meet The Beatles. But the book is fairly unique, and it’s fairly rare, I guess.
ANDELMAN: And that was a project that you did the drawing for. You drew The Beatles for that. That wasn’t an inking job like you were known for much later. You drew The Beatles pages.
SINNOTT: Oh sure. Oh yeah, yeah. The book. A good friend of mine, Dick Giordano, he helped me out on a few pages toward the end. I was running out of time. Of course, Dick and I used to work many years ago together. I would pencil books for General Electric or Radio Shack, and he would ink them. Of course, that was an interesting period.
ANDELMAN: Now, I want to ask you about one more thing cause we’re running out of time. This is the summer, of course, that the Silver Surfer actually comes to life. I wondered if you have seen either of the Fantastic Four movies, and if you have, what you thought.
SINNOTT: Don’t embarrass me. No, I haven’t seen them.
ANDELMAN: Really?
SINNOTT: My family, my son, he’s a big comic fan, and he knows all about the comics. He took his two children to see it. Of course, they wanted me to go with them, but it was the first night, and I really didn’t want to go the first night because they get a lot of young people the first night. They pack the theaters, no question. I did see Spiderman 3 the first night, and it was hectic. The kids, they were quiet and everything, but there were just so many of them. I had to wait in line and all that. So anyway, I didn’t see it, but my son Mark, he’s quite a critic. He loved it. There were a few little things, naturally, he disagreed with, but he thought the Surfer was tremendous.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. It was great. I thought they did a great job with the Surfer. My daughter, who’s the upcoming comic fan in our house, she loved it. She just absolutely loved it.
SINNOTT: John Buscema and I did the first three Surfers. Of course, he continued with his brother for a while. I think they did maybe 17, 18 issues altogether. But I thought what a great character the Surfer was. Of course, John did a beautiful Surfer.
ANDELMAN: I think you have to go see the movie, not just to see what they did with the Silver Surfer, but I think you’ll get a kick out of Stan’s cameo in this particular movie.
SINNOTT: That’s what Mark said. The first couple that he was in, you could barely see him. Don’t blink, otherwise you’ll miss him. But I understand he had a little more…
ANDELMAN: Yeah, you can’t miss him in this one. It’s a very funny moment, especially for someone who’s known him as long as you have.
SINNOTT: He’s something, I’ll tell ya. He just called me about two days ago. And I was away from the "Spider-Man" Sunday comic strip for a while because my wife had passed away, and I was quite sick for a while. I was in the hospital three times.
ANDELMAN: I’m sorry.
SINNOTT: Yeah, over the last five months, so I had to hand over the "Spider-Man" to him, a friend of mine. And he very graciously took care of it while I was laid up. So I went back about, oh maybe a month ago, so Stan had to call me and tell me how great it was to be back working with me.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Captain America, Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, The Beatles, The Hulk, Tim Lasiuta
¶ 9:31 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Friday, April 27, 2007
Cage Match: Spider-Man 3 vs. Ghost Rider 0
"He said that? That Ghost Rider could beat Spider-Man with one look? I don't think that even deserves an answer!"
-- Actor Tobey Maguire, who fills the red-and-black (and then black-and-black) tights of our Friendly Neighborhood Webslinger again this week in Spider-Man 3. He was interviewed by Pat Jankiewicz and responding to a quote in Starlog magazine in which Ghost Rider star Nicolas Cage said, "We all know that Ghost Rider can kick Spider-Man's ass! With one look."
-- Actor Tobey Maguire, who fills the red-and-black (and then black-and-black) tights of our Friendly Neighborhood Webslinger again this week in Spider-Man 3. He was interviewed by Pat Jankiewicz and responding to a quote in Starlog magazine in which Ghost Rider star Nicolas Cage said, "We all know that Ghost Rider can kick Spider-Man's ass! With one look."
Labels: Ghost Rider, Nicolas Cage, Spider-Man, Starlog, Tobey Maguire
¶ 2:45 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Monday, January 22, 2007
The Commies Are Here
The San Antonio Express-News' resident geeks and hosts of the weekly Geek Speak Comic Cast, Chris Quinn, René A. Guzman and Sean M. Wood, have posted their picks for the 2006 Commie Awards, which honor the best and worst in comic books for 2006 in an online podcast accompanied by a video montage of the winning work.
Among the winners:
Best Moment: Spider-Man reveals secret identity, "Civil War" #2
Worst Industry Event: "52"
Best Horror/Gothic Series: "Marvel Zombies"
Among the winners:
Best Moment: Spider-Man reveals secret identity, "Civil War" #2
Worst Industry Event: "52"
Best Horror/Gothic Series: "Marvel Zombies"
Labels: 2006 Commie Awards, 52, Chris Quinn, Civil War, Marvel Zombies, René A. Guzman, San Antonio Express-News, Sean M. Wood, Spider-Man
¶ 8:42 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
