While Paul Kupperberg is mostly known from his work at DC Comics (where he's written almost every character they have to offer, including some of his own creations), he did so some work "across the street" at Marvel, almost entirely in their black and white magazine line.
I've interviewed Paul a number of times before, for both my Aquaman Shrine and I Am The Phantom Stranger blogs, so when I saw his name in issues of Crazy and Savage Sword of Conan, I couldn't resist pestering him again for an All In Black & White For 75 Cents interview. Paul, gracious as ever, agreed:
All In Black and White: How did you end up writing pieces for Crazy?
Paul Kupperberg: That was a case of guilt by association, i.e. with my brother, Alan. He'd been drawing for Crazy for a while, for editor Paul Laikin who, if memory serves me, had been a stand-up comedian and writer for Mad in the 1950s. This was 1977, the summer of Star Wars...or should I say "Star Warts" and, for reasons which elude me now, Alan got me the gig writing the movie parody thereof, which appeared in the December 1977 issue (#32), which means it had been published in September or October, with the parody itself dated 7-7-77. I don't remember why Alan didn't write it. He's pretty funny himself, but, whatever the reason, he got me into Crazy to write the script.
That wasn't my first published work in Crazy, though, just the first with my name on it! A couple of years before, I had co-written with my friends Duffy Vohland, whose gig it actually was, and Roger Klorese, the letters page for the 1975 Crazy Super Special. It was full of stuff like "Dear Sirs, Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he had turned into a giant bug. Sincerely, F. Kafka," followed by a rejection notice from the editor.
B/W: How much research did you/could you do for the movie parodies? Would you actually go to the effort of seeing the movie first, so you could be more familiar with the material?
PK: Absolutely. I had to see the movies...nobody was giving Crazy Magazine advanced screenings or scripts. I had to wait until a movie hit the theaters, than Larry and I would talk about what was out there that had legs, that would still be on the reader's mind three or four months down the road when, the movie was out of the theaters. This was in the early days of VCRs, so movies didn't find an immediate second life on mass produced DVDs, or even on cable TV, which wasn't so widespread, way back then. I would go into the theater with a pad and pen and tale extensive notes, as much dialog as I could scrawl in the dark along with the plot and names, etc., and then take it all home and try to make something funny happen.
There were some wacky experiences with that. Again, we're predating multiplexes, and some films didn't play that wide, or we got to them late in their runs. One movie like that was Kubrick's The Shining. Now, I'm no Stephen King fan to begin with, so I wasn't thrilled with the choice of movie, but it was mitigated by this being a Kubrick film. What tipped the balance against this for me, now and forever, was that I saw it in the Chicago Theater in downtown Chicago, by then current city of residence. This was somewhat before the Chicago was rehabbed and returned to the movie palace splendor it enjoys today. Back then, it was a shithole, complete with rats that ran back and forth across your feet.
Sometimes we made a bad call and knew it early enough to catch it before the script was drawn. Pennies From Heaven, which was a brilliant fantasy noir British TV miniseries by writer Dennis Potter, was made into an American film, starring Steve Martin. The story integrates 1930s period pop music in a dark murder mystery and is, in fact, not so bad a movie, although nowhere near as good as the original miniseries, starring Bob Hoskins. Anyway, I wrote the script, complete with parodies of several of the 1930s songs before we realized the movie was going to tank, so I scrambled and wrote a second script to replace it. I don't recall what the replacement movie was or if it did any better at the box office than Pennies From Heaven would have.
B/W: Would you write every single gag (of which there are dozens per page) in the Crazy material, or were the artists free to throw stuff in?
PK: The artists were free and welcome to throw in sight gags galore. Bob Camp, who drew a lot of my movie parodies, was great at that. I did write full scripts, complete with some sight gags, but mostly I was responsible for the main action in the panel and, of course, the dialog.
And we had a fairly strong model that we were working off of for all these stories. Crazy's parodies were straight-up riffs on the Mad Magazine model, based mostly on what Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker were then currently doing. I'd been reading Mad Magazine literally all my life, the magazine and the Ballantine paperback reprints of the comic book Mad published just a few years before my time, and I was infused with that stuff. Kurtzman, Elder, Wood, Drucker were my first comedy gods, and being a mid-20th century middle-class Brooklyn, New York Jew, I was exposed to all the chicken fat comedy that they represented, from the 78 RPM recordings of "Cohen on the Telephone" to Mickey Katz (Joel Gray's father, a Yiddish-song parodist) to Alan Sherman and the whole troop of Borscht Belt comedians.
PK: Nope, Superman II just happened to be the next movie to come along needing parodying. What is funny about it is, that on top of being a DC writer writing a Superman parody for a Marvel comic, I was also, at the time, on staff at DC Comics, working as the company's publicity director. I'd been given a special dispensation to continue writing for Crazy on the technicality that Crazy didn't directly compete with any DC publication, so my writing for them was "overlooked." At better than twice my regular page rate at DC in those days, I needed to hang on to that particular gig.
B/W: How did writing straight-up humor material compare to writing superheroes, or fantasy, or war comics? Was it harder/easier? Could you "force" yourself to write funny on deadline?
PK: I love writing humor. I don't have to force myself to write funny. It's easy for me, especially if that’s the day's assignment. I think funny, as in both "humorously" and "odd." My biggest trouble isn't finding funny things to write or say, it's censoring myself from saying the funny but massively inappropriate things that flash through my head 24/7. There ain't nothing I can't find humor in. I've just learned to keep most of it to myself.
A lot of my comics writing output these days is for humor comics, including stories for Bongo's Bart Simpson Comics, DC's Scooby Doo, and a variety of Archie Comics. In a single work session, I can turn out twice as many pages of humor comics than I can of dramatic stuff. The hardest thing about humor isn't the writing so much as it is the editing. Less is more, and too many words and distractions blunt the funny.
PK: I was desperate for work and pitching everyone I could think of. Due to circumstances that have no relevance to this topic but will play heavily in any interview I ever give should you start a "Scumbags in Comics" blog, I went from several books a month of writing at DC to none, so I called around Marvel and made contact with Mike Rockwitz, who was editing, among other things, Savage Sword of Conan. We talked about the possibility of several superhero projects (I wrote a pitch for a new Luke Cage/Iron Fist series that went nowhere), but the only immediate work he could offer without going through the pitching process was SSOC. I sent him a few story pitches and he chose "The Face of God." It was the only sale I made to him because a few months later, I was back on staff at DC, this time as an editor, a job I held from 1991 to 2006.
PK: I don't have a particular problem addressing any topic head-on. I was agnostic back then so I may have tempered my approach. These days, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and getting more militant and vocal about it the older I get, which is either a case of having the courage of my convictions or once again shooting off my big mouth.
And, frankly, I doubt I was making any big political statement. Most likely I was looking for an angle with which to carve out a story. Since primitive religion plays such an important part in Conan, it was probably just an easy way to throw him into the resultant intrigue and violence.
B/W: It's too bad you only wrote that one Conan piece. I thought it was a great tale--something a little different but still had most of the elements of a classic Conan adventure (fighting, wenching, bucking authority, etc.). I would have loved to have read more Conan from you.
PK: It was mostly the timing, mentioned before. Marvel was always a hard nut for me to crack. Although I never really tried that hard. I was and remain a DC fan at heart. Much as I love those first 15 years or so of Stan and Roy's (editorially speaking) Marvel, I'm a Weisinger-Superman boy, heart and soul! I came to DC young, before I have any memory of not having any memory of comics, via their kinder, gentler and corporately cleaner comics like Sheldon Moldoff's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas Specials and the storybook fairy-tales of Wonder Woman by Kanigher, Andru and Esposito.
But I loved Conan. I'm a 1960s comic book fanboy, so I grew up reading Robert E. Howard before Marvel optioned him, along with the Ace editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the Frazetta covers, and all the sword and sorcery and barbarian imitators.
I'd like to think it's a professional thing. Gimme a genre or character and I should be able to come up with a story for it/them. My experience writing humor before Crazy was practically nil. Post-Crazy, I didn't do much at all until 1999, when I wrote a Flintstone story for Kevin Dooley for The Flintstones & The Jetsons #18. Now, this was an idea I'd pitched at Charlton Comics in 1975 when they had the Flintstones license, for a story about Fred's admiration for the great detective Sherock Stones, but I loved it so much I remembered it twenty-four years later when Kevin asked me to pitch. After that, I wrote a Jetsons story, and all of a sudden, I was on to a bunch of Cartoon Network characters, including Johnny Bravo, I.M. Weasel, Ed, Edd & Eddy, Scooby Doo and others. In 2005, I became a regular contributor to Weekly World News, then its executive editor, and followed that with a humor book, Jew-Jitsu: the Hebrew Hands of Fury.
One of my current clients is Dalmatian Press, for whom I write coloring books, including those based on DreamWorks properties like Penguins of Madagascar and Megamind (their Christmas 2010 picture). When it's time to write a coloring book, I click the 'coloring book' switch and get into that mode. I'm also currently working on a quarterly Captain Action Classified comic, an issue of a Honey West comic, a short story for a second Avenger anthology from Moonstone, miscellaneous short stories for Archie Comics, Bongo Comics, and Scooby Doo, as well as two monthly comics for Archie, Life With Archie: Archie the Married Life, which is a magazine featuring two 24-page stories a month (penciled by fellow DC Comics alumnus, Norm Breyfogle), imaginary stories set in a Melrose Place-soap opera several years in the future of the Archie characters, one in which he's married to Betty, the other to Veronica. Every one of them is very different from the other, but I have rent to pay and groceries to buy. As Hunter S. Thompson said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." In the freelance life, the going is always weird.
Its always fun getting a chance to talk to Paul Kupperberg--he's written so many different characters for so many different companies in so many different formats that his name always seems to pop up, no matter what blog I'm working on. Thanks Paul!
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