skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Welcome to another interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents!
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.
After that, I did a parodies of TV show, What's Happening? ("Waats Happening?", #33), M*A*S*H ("M*U*S*H", #35), and Eight Is Enough ("Eight? Enough! Enough!", #45), also for Laikin, and that was all I wrote, until #63, after Larry Hama took over as editor, when I parodied Apocalypse Now ("Apocrypha Nowland"). After that, I was in for the long haul and continued writing for them almost to the bitter end, with the E.T. parody ("E.Z.", #93) in the penultimate issue. I also wrote the "Crazy Looks At" feature, which was the centerspread in most, if not all issues between #63 and #84, drawn by Ned Sonntag. "Crazy Looks at Assembly"...or Lunch Period, or Sandlot Baseball, or the Super Bowl, whatever, with about twelve or fifteen gags spread across it.
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.
We also trashed the script for a combo-parody of Warren Beatty's Reds and Ghost Story. We also took a shot at Whose Life Is It Anyway?, as a coming attraction. Not a winning combo, we decided.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.
With my strong preference for the older material, the first 23 issues in the comic book format (to this day, I own it in reprint form in at least seven different formats), I naturally started to gravitate to the more schmaltzy humor, culminating in an embarrassment of borderline plagiarism, or what we in publishing like to call an "homage", with the parody of American Gigolo ("American Giggler", #68). I was lifting characters and schtick right out of my favorite old Kurtzman stories, like the parody he did with Elder of Dragnet...Gary Hallgren was the artist and he went the whole nine yards with me, including his own "homage" to Elder's caricature of Dragnet's Joe Friday, as the cop chasing the Richard Gere character (complete with Elder's brass band tooting the Dragnet theme song)! It was shameless and I wouldn't change a panel...but I did pull back a little after that.B/W: Your parody of Superman II in Crazy #81 seems almost like a meta joke: a DC writer writing a Superman parody for a Marvel comic. Did this have anything to do with you getting that particular assignment?
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.B/W: How did you come to write the "The Face of God" story for Savage Sword of Conan?
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.B/W: "The Face of God" seems to fit squarely in the tradition of writing about contemporary-and-controversial issues (in this case, religion) but "hiding" it behind a layer of fantasy or science fiction. Did you feel the need to address the topic this way since you couldn't--or it would be a lot dicier, at least--if you were writing characters in modern day?
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!
Welcome to another interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents!
After far too long since the last one, today we have another interview, this time with longtime comics pro and Savage Tales major domo Larry Hama.
I remember buying Savage Tales #1 at a newsstand in August 1985, while we were on family vacation in the Poconos. I was still fairly young, and the cover to that first issue (by Michael Golden) clearly indicated it was not the kind of material I normally bought--which of course made me want to buy it all the more.
While I was working on this new week of posts, I realized once I had decided to look back at an issue of Savage Tales, it would be great to wrap up the week with an interview with Larry. I contacted him, and he was generous enough to talk with me for the blog:
All In Black and White: How did the idea for a new Savage Tales come about?
Larry Hama: It was an already existing title. I think it started out as a vehicle for Ka-Zar stories in black and white. Have no recollection at all of how it came about. Reviving the title probably wasn't my idea. The content was.
B/W: This second Savage Tales series was definitely going for a more adult, non-traditional Marvel feel. Was that the plan from the beginning or did it evolve into that?
LH: We were shooting for the Savage Sword of Conan market, which was definitely not your usual "long-underwear" market.
B/W: You have a very definitive, in-your-face editorial hand in the book, right from the first couple of pages of the first issue. It feels a bit like early Stan Lee, but with an obviously more adult bent. The series feels very much like it could be called "Larry Hama's Savage Tales." Was this very-present editorial style intentional? LH: The main reason for that editorial was that we were short a page and I needed to fill it right quick. That's why the type is so big! There was no strategic planning. We were just putting out a book of stuff we liked.
B/W: Will Jungkuntz, who had material in the first few issues of Savage Tales, died just as he was really "breaking" into mainstream comics. What was he like to work with?
LH: Will was a really nice guy and a major developing talent. I needed people to do continuing series with strong characters, but I didn't want to ask people to sign over their own creations to Marvel in the work-for-hire-contract.
As a salaried editor, everything I came up with already belonged to Marvel (unless otherwise contractually stipulated) so I just came up with stuff and had folks just fill in the blanks. I think all I gave Will was the title, "Blood and Gutz" and a sentence or two of description let him take it from there. His death was a real shock to all of us.
B/W: Savage Tales debuted just as comic books went from mostly newsstand distribution to almost entirely comic book stores. Did Marvel have any sort of plan to get this series in front of its target audience, which was presumably not mid-teen superhero fans?
LH: Marvel marketing and distribution had no idea what to do with Savage Tales. It should have been on racks next to Outlaw Biker and Guns and Ammo.
B/W: Savage Tales had material from an amazing roster of talent, many of them who were famous for working in superhero comics (Archie Goodwin, Herb Trimpe, etc.). Was it difficult to get writers and artists to do material for the series, or did they jump at the chance to do this kind of work?
LH: I had to beat creators off with a stick. All I had to say was "no sissy stuff here, just lock-and-load and let it rip on rock and roll."
B/W: Was Savage Tales successful from the beginning and then slowly fade, or did it struggle from the beginning? When it was canceled, was there a lot of material left unpublished?
LH: Great product, but a marketing and sales department with no clue about that particular genre or an understanding of who the readers were.I believe we used up most of it [the material]. It wasn't like we ever had a big inventory. In previous generations of editors, (when writers were allowed to be their own editors) there had been serious abuse of inventory, with some titles having years worth of material stockpiled and growing obsolete.
B/W: I've read in other interviews with editors of anthology books that its an extremely difficult, time-consuming process, at least compared to non-anthology series. Was this your experience as Savage Tales' editor?
LH: Savage Tales was the easiest book I ever edited. Look at the quality of the contributors. Archie Goodwin, John Severin, Michael Golden, Joe Jusko, Pepe Moreno, Bob Larkin, Gray Morrow, Herb Trimpe--total pros who were totally into it.
Even the "new" guys like Chuck Dixon, Bob Camp, Vince Waller and Will Jungkuntz were so good that they needed little direction or correction. I also had Pat Redding as my assistant editor on the book, which was a big plus because all the guys wanted to come into the office and hang out with her!
B/W: Of all the stories published in Savage Tales, do you have any particular favorites?
LH: That's like asking "which of your kids do you like the best?"
As interesting as it is to talk and learn about the big successes in any given field, I find it just as informative and interesting to talk about those projects that never quite made it, like Savage Tales.
There's a lot of great material in those handful of issues, and its a real shame that Marvel didn't really know what to do with the magazine. I really appreciate Larry Hama taking time out to talk to me about Savage Tales. Thanks Larry!
I thought this was a great way to wrap up our latest week of new posts--thanks to everyone who likes this blog enough to follow its (very)erratic posting schedule. I wish I could put more stuff up here on a regular basis, but for now these occasionaly weekly updates will have to suffice.
But don't despair, All in Black & White For 75 Cents will be back before you know it!
Welcome to another interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents!
Last summer, I was lucky enough to get the chance to talk to writer/edtior Nick Cuti for my blog Digest Comics, about his time as editor of DC's last surviving digest title. Nick was friendly to talk to and generous with his time, so of course I bugged him for a second interview, this time about his time as a writer and editor for Warren and Charlton's b/w magazines! Nick was just as generous this time around, too:
All In Black and White: What writers did you read growing up that inspired you to want to write yourself?
Nick Cuti: My favorites were Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells and my all time favorite was...Ray Bradbury. I became a writer because I was such a voracious reader. I read anything which caught my imagination, both fiction and non-fiction, and then one day, while serving in the Air Force, I was reading a Creepy comic book and I said to myself, I can write stories like this.
I sent in a story: "GRUB" and it was accepted for which I was paid the incredible sum of $25. Tom Sutton illustrated it and after I saw it in print, I was hooked. While still in the service I contacted Jim Warren and began writing more stories. I preferred the limitations of a comic book script to the free style of a short story or novel. Even today I prefer writing screenplays to novels.
B/W: How did it work, writing for Warren? Were you asked to come up with a story or did you write stuff on your own and submit it?
NC: It was both. Most of the time I just submitted a story but occasionally I was given a photograph of a cover, which a painter had submitted, and asked to write a story around it. On a few occasions, when a painting was particularly striking, Jim would have several writers write a story based on the painting and feature all of the stories in one issue.
B/W: Did you write stories with a specific artist in mind? ("Ooh, Tom Sutton would really go to town on this", etc?)
NC: Of course. While I was writing a story I would imagine how a particular artist would illustrate it and when I submitted the story I would ask for that artist. If they could accommodate me they would but very often the artist I requested was busy with their own assignments while other artists were available.
My biggest and most pleasant surprise came when Russ Heath chose my story "Dime Novel Hero" out of fifteen scripts he had been sent. It was set in the old west and featured an unexpected appearance of "The Lone Ranger" which Russ had been drawing for the newspaper strip. I guess that's why he had chosen it. The results were incredible and that became one of ten favorite stories.
B/W: Was writing an enjoyable process for you? To some it seems to come easily, others its torture getting every word.
NC: That depends. If I need to write a story and there is no inspiration then each word is agonizing. I try to avoid "writer's block" by always writing in my head. This gives me the opportunity to develop a story from a raw idea and then when I need to pen something for a deadline I just pull one of these tales out of my head and the story practically writes itself. If the characters are strong enough, they'll write the story for me.
B/W: If Warren had done an "Best of Nick Cuti" issue, which stories of yours would you have picked?
NC: Let's see. "Dime Novel Hero" about a werewolf hired by cattle ranchers to eat up the sheep herders' sheep, "The Saga of Honeydew Melons" about a android stripper who became so excited by applause that when her clothes are gone she begins to strip off her plastic skin and then her metal parts. Then there's "Cilia" about a beautiful sea creature who rescues a sea captain from drowning and marries him...with tragic results.
"Brother Hawk" told the tale of two pre-Columbian Native American brothers in search of their totem animals only to turn on one another when they find them and in "Closer Than Sisters" a woman travels back in time to protect herself from being murdered by her aunt and uncle. "Little Guy" is about a carnival midget who gets revenge on the magician who cut his wife in half. "The Microbe Patrol" where the crew of a microscopic ship hunt for the answer to the disappearance of other patrols and "The Vorpal Sword" where a knight possesses a sword which becomes a beautiful woman by evening.
"Thinking of You" where a pilot and his fighter plane are in mental rapport with one another all the way until death and lastly "The Tale of The Fox" where a Chinese Empress escapes execution by using her ability to change into a fox. These are my own favorites because upon re-reading them they work for me. Other stories were better in concept than in the telling.
B/W: There's that famous unrealized project, Pow!, that you were going to do with Wally Wood for Warren and you were going to be the editor of. Were you going to write for it, as well? Were there topics or stories you thought would work for Pow! that wouldn't for Warren's other magazines?
NC: Pow! was intended to be a magazine of adult stories which would rely on adult tribulations rather than gimicky plots. Unfortunately, Jim Warren and Wally Wood (who was to be the editor in chief of Pow!) could not see eye to eye on concepts. Woody agreed to do the magazine only if I were the editor and since I was his assistant at the time he knew he could rely on me to follow his ideals. Jim agreed and then went off to Europe.
While he was away Woody and I wrote stories and brought them to various artists. When Jim returned he said he would be the editor in chief and I would just be assistant editor. I became furious and offered to return the editor's salary which I later recanted since I had done the work. In turn Jim refused to pay me for stories I had written and I sued Jim and won the case. About a year later Jim and I met at a convention and settled our feud. He even offered me work and came through when I needed him. I was very glad we didn't remain enemies. He was the man who had given me my first break.
B/W: You did work for some Charlton magazines, too, like Space: 1999 and Six Million-Dollar Man. Did you pursue these assignments or did Charlton come to you?
NC: I was on staff at Charlton at the time as assistant editor and staff writer so when Charlton got the rights to these shows Joe Gill and I wrote a lot of the stories. Later other writers joined in.
B/W: Some of your Space: 1999 stories are very ambitious in their scope, much more elaborate than the show ever got to be. Did they have any input on what you did or were you allowed mostly creative carte blanche?
NC: They had the right of final acceptance but I don't ever recall them turning down a story line or requesting changes. They did censor some of Gray Morrow's art because Gray, a great lover of the female form sometimes showed a little too much anatomy for their tastes.
B/W: Did you enjoy writing for the b/w magazines any more/less than the regular color comics? Was there a huge difference as a writer when coming up with stories?
NC: I tried to come up with more mature ideas for the magazines since they were intended for college students and older who might be reluctant to be seen reading a comic book in public.
Nick was at so many important moments in what I like to think of as the "Golden Age" of the b/w magazine format (1960-1980 or so, I'd say) that it was so fun for me getting to talk to him--again--about his fine work and his experiences at Warren and Charlton. Thanks Nick!
In tribute to Nick, we'll be talking about Warrens all this week, each of them featuring one of the stories Nick mentioned above! Be here, it'll be good!
Welcome to our newest interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents! As I've said before, one of the most fun things doing these blogs is getting the chance to talk to the people who were personally involved with these great comics and magazines.
And one of the nicest people I've "met" online is Angelique Trouvere, who as most of you will remember was famous for her amazing self-made costumes(and her even-more amazing ability to fill them out) and become real-life versions of characters like Vampirella(left), Satana, and Red Sonja.
Even though Angelique had just finished an exhaustively wide-ranging interview with Richard Ardnt over at enjolrasworld, she generously agreed to talk to me:
All In Black and White: Had you seen many comic books before discovering Vampirella?
Angelique Trouvere: As a kid, I read Superman, Superboy, Lois Lane, some Disney & Classics Illustrated. Later, I found EC's, Mad, Conan the Barbarian and underground comics of the late '60's like Cheech Wizard, R. Crumb, Zap, & my fav: the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers--it was funny and had a very cool cat named Fat Freddy's Cat in it.
B/W: What was it like, discovering Vampirella and Warrens for the first time and then being in them so soon afterwards?
AT: Nothing prepared me for my first encounter with Vampirella! The overall look of the comic magazine was breathtaking as well and the stories intriguing but it was Vampi herself(drawn by Jose Gonzales) that captured my imagination and heart.
I started collecting everything I could find on her(I still have 3 of the original Warren 6-foot posters of her). I was into costumes and once I discovered comicCons and their masquerades, I decided to recreate her costume. In my interview at enjolrasworld, I go into detail about my whole Vampi experience and how it brought me to the attention of Warren writers, Gerry Boudreau & Anthony Tollin as well as editor, Bill DuBay. It was so incredibly exciting to be included in the article that Gerry was writing about the 1973 Seuling ComicCon that I appeared at as Vampirella. When I saw it in Vampi #29 I was beside myself with joy!
B/W: Warren Publications was clearly supportive of your efforts, running pics of you in their magazines. Did Marvel ever talk to you, or show you that same kind of interest?
AT: James Warren did not care for me at all and did not support me in any way as far as promoting me in his magazines. It was the efforts of Boudreau & DuBay that allowed me to share in the article in Vampi #29.
As for Marvel, Tony Isabella told me during our talks for the interview that he did try to get Marvel to do some sort of pictorial of me as Satana but no dice. As far as I know, the only coverage I ever got from Marvel was either in the letters column of one of their Conan magazines when they used a picture of me as Satana & my friend, Kris Lundy as the 1st appearance of Red Sonja, or in The Savage Sword of Conan #29(?) that carried the whole "Red Sonja & the Wizard Show" drawn by Frank Thorne and had added mini bios & pics of each of the Sonjas.
B/W: Judging by most of your costumes, you seemed drawn to the tougher comic book heroines, like Vampi and Red Sonja, as opposed to, say, Supergirl or the Invisible Girl--more "traditional"(and passive) female comic book characters. Was that how you saw yourself?
AT: Definitely! I also preferred more challenging costumes to recreate. When I met artist, George Perez at a masquerade, he told me that a friend had told him that I refused to recreate the Scarlet Witch--which he was drawing at the time--because her costume was too simple.
Perez said that upon hearing that he decided that one day he would create a challenging costume that I would have to make and he did! It was Princess Kori (aka: Starfire) of the Teen Titans and I had that costume on my "to do" list but my life got side tracked and I sadly never got to do it.
B/W: How were you able to successfully fend off what had to be hordes of...er, overly-excited comic book fanboys at conventions?
AT: Really never had any problems with fanboys--maybe it was the sword...?
B/W: Have you always been comfortable performing, or was it something you slowly got used to?
AT: Always :) I've been a ham since I was a baby!
B/W: What did you enjoy more, the making of the costumes or the performing in them?
AT: While I enjoy the challenge of making a costume, performing is a lot easier.
B/W: I'm sure constructing costumes yourself took an enormous amount of patience and concentration. Did you enjoy that process, or was it just a means to getting to perform in them, which was the fun part?
AT: It's hard to say. Sometimes a costume would develop a glitch that would cause no end of headaches to complete. Others were great fun because I was making them with a friend. Sometimes I would be very focused on the project and found it very exciting when I completed a section. Blackadder & Queenie were like that because I had never attempted to do such a complex historically accurate pair of costumes before. I was always amazed to see each part was working out and the better it looked, the more excited I got.
As for the performing part, many times, I wasn't sure what exactly I would do until I was in costume and ready to head down to the masquerade. Although I had a general idea of what I'd like to do--it depended on the character of course.
Red Sonja was a sword-wielding warrioress and Daggit was so cute, all I had to do was walk out(on all fours), sit & twirl those ears to entertain the audience. When I became part of Kris Curling's "Doctors in the House" comedy group, then performance became more emphasized.
In fact, Kris & his co authors wrote a special piece just for me as the daggit. It was based on the early Wild Kingdom TV show and featured some hysterical slapstick between a very frustrated Jim Fowler and a wild "Bush Daggit". In one scene I was pulled across stage riding a skateboard to escape Jim! (It was called "Hunting the Wild Bush Daggit")
B/W: If you were still making and dressing up in costumes today, are there any contemporary heroines you'd try? Lara Croft, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spider-Woman?
AT: Most of the current heroines are not that interesting costume-wise. I think I've gotten a bit burned out. But that doesn't mean I can't be inspired again someday. One of the last ones I did some years back was Elvira because she's fun to do.
B/W: Have you kept up with many of the people you met in comics?
AT: Thanks to both the internet and my interview, I have been in touch a lot more of my old comic con friends.
B/W: What's a Library Technician? Do the people you work with have any idea there are pictures of you (almost)dressed as Vampirella and Red Sonja around, in print? :)
AT: "Librarians: the original search engine." :) A Library Technician is another word for Library Assistant or Associate--which means that I can do many of the specialized services that librarians can offer like catalogue books, locate books & articles, request same from other libraries, etc. But I don't have a Masters degree in Library Science which expands the abilities of the librarian.
As for my coworkers knowing about my other life: only the really cool ones know.
It was soooo much fun talking to Angelique, her enthusiasm for the comics and her love for what she was doing is contagious, even all these years later. I thank her very much for taking the time to talk to me, she's a real sweetheart. Thanks Angelique!
_________________________________________________________
So with this interview with the awesome Angelique, we're ending what I'll oh-so-trendily call "Season One" of All In Black & White For 75 Cents. When I first started the blog, I had a few hundred b/w mags and I knew over time I'd go through them all. I've bought some more over time, as well(and had some sent to me) but I knew I wanted to hit a pause at some point, and that's where we're at now.
I'm going to take a two-week break from posting here, but when we come back on Monday, December 10, we'll kick off a two-week extravaganza where we'll be talking about nothing but first issues and/or magazines that have never been discussed before here on the blog. I've got some cool stuff, some long overdue stuff, and some just plain weird stuff on tap and it oughta be a lot of fun. (I also want to work on the format a little bit--a few more graphics, and maybe a little more in-depth examinations of certain important issues.)
So thanks for checking out my humble little blog, and please stay tuned, the best is yet to come. See you December 10!
Welcome to our second interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents, this time with artist Joe Jusko!
As anyone who takes interest in this blog already knows, Joe Jusko provided many, many covers for Marvel's b/w magazine line, most famously for Savage Sword of Conan. His muscled, bluntly realistic Conan is permanently etched in this particular fanboy's mind, to say nothing of his grotesque monsters and impossibly sexy women. For me, Joe Jusko rangs alongside John Buscema whose rendition of the character comes to mind when I think of "Conan the Barbarian."
Joe left me a comment on the blog a few days ago, when I talked about an issue of SSOC that he did the cover for. I quickly pestered him for an interview, which he just as quickly agreed to:
All In Black and White: What did you read growing up? Comics, I assume, but did you read lots of sci-fi, fantasy?
Joe Jusko: I read just about everything! I was a voracious reader, actually. I was doing book reports in 6th grade on stuff like "A Portrait of T.E. Lawrence" and "Gulliver's Travels". I loved to read. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be any time anymore to read as I used to. Life takes up a lot of time! LOL
B/W: Were there painters or other artists you admired, that made you want to be an artist?
JJ: John Buscema was God to me as a child! I discovered his work when I bought a couple of secondhand copies of Avengers #'s 57 and 58 from a kid in a playground when I was about 8 years old. I had only sporadically bought comics up until then, but bought everything after! LOL I was consumed by the desire to draw comics. I did nothing else from that day on. My father would sit with his friends at the bar and send me across the street with $5 to buy whatever comics were out. Comics were 12 cents at the time, so five bucks went a long way! I would sit in a booth and draw while my father talked to his buddies.
Buscema is still the most influential comic artist on my work. I miss seeing new Big John work terribly.
I didn't paint until the summer I graduated from The High School of Art & Design in NYC. I realized that as much as I loved comics, I just wasn't fast enough to produce a monthly book. That, and a really short attention span led to the transition to painted work. I had more time, and I wasn't drawing the same thing over and over, page after page. Although I was painting Conan, for example, on a regular basis, each cover was a totally different idea and challenge.
My influences at the time were the guys who were doing what I was doing; Boris, Larkin, Frazetta. The usual influences one has when starting in this field. In the 30 years since, my influences have changed on an almost weekly basis. Wildlife artists, 60's paperback art, movie poster artists. The list is endless, really. It's how you grow, and how you stay versatile, which in turn leads to career longevity.
B/W: You ended up doing, like, a thousand Savage Sword of Conan covers. How did you get that gig?
JJ: It really does seem like that many, doesn't it? LOL Oddly enough, I got that gig through the back door. I was 18 years old when I got my first cover job at Marvel (Starlord, Marvel Preview #15). It's a ghastly painting! Marie Severin did a really nice color sketch for me, and I foolishly redrew the Starlord figure in a much weaker pose and really ruined the composition. I did not know how to paint at all. I was teaching myself as I went along. I got the job, I guess, because I had sold the very first painting I had ever done to Heavy Metal magazine, which at the time (1977) was the hot magazine.
Apparently, Marvel liked it enough to give me more covers to screw up, and I started doing Rampaging Hulk covers as well as other miscellaneous one shots. I did a cover for a proposed "fumetti"(telling a comic story with photos) version of a Japanese Spider-Man TV show(!)
and another Starlord cover that Stan(Lee) hated so much he had Earl Norem repaint it!
That being said, I was learning and I was getting better, through trial and error. Thank God there weren't that many people available to do painted covers or I probably would never have had the opportunity to progress as a painter at Marvel.
Savage Sword was the flagship of Marvel's magazine line, and I was dying to paint some covers for it, but I got the impression that Roy (Thomas) wasn't very fond of my work, because I never got a cover. :-)
Eventually, Roy stepped down and Louise Jones took over as editor. John Bolton had done a full length King Kull story for either Bizarre Adventures or Marvel Preview, can't remember which, that I did the cover for. John decided that he wanted to paint the cover for his own book (rightly so) and the cover I did was then redirected for Savage Sword! I painted out the crown and the scar, added an armband and Weezie (as her friends call her) commissioned a story to go along with the re-slated painting. Both eventually saw print in SSOC #65. >whew!< What that cover did in the meantime, though, was get me in the SSOC door, and Louise started giving me covers. So, while SSOC #63 was my first published cover, #65 was actually my Conan first painting (kinda)!
B/W: How were the covers done? Were you given basic instructions like "It needs to have Conan, a girl, and a monster" or was it more specific?
JJ: That depended on the editor and whether there were actually pages in from the book that I could look at for character reference. The cover to SSOC #64, for example, was painted from the plot, so the monster doesn't look like Buscema's version in the story as his pages weren't in yet. Sometimes I was left to design the cover myself, other times the editor had very specific ideas as to cover content.
Larry Hama was a lot of fun to work with as he's an artist himself and often would draw up thumbnails or sketches to explain what he wanted. I got the point eventually where I would come up to the office with a painting that wasn't ever commissioned and just voucher it. Larry had told me at one point that the issues that had my covers on them sold better than ones that didn't, so I got as many covers as I could handle.
B/W: Was it hard getting other comics work, since the Conan magazines seemed to be its own little corner of the comics world?
JJ: I was pigeon holed for a while, yeah. It's really odd, but you tend to get categorized by what you're most currently working on, and people assume that's all you can do. When I did the SSOC covers, I was the "Conan guy". When I started doing superhero covers (and especially after the 1992 Marvel Masterpieces cards) I was the "superhero guy" who couldn't do anything else. LOL I prided myself on being versatile, so I always tried to move between different genres as much as possible.
B/W: Any particular favorite covers, ones you think were your best?
JJ: Looking back at them some 15-25 years later, I see things in all of them that I would do differently today, but also things I still like.
If I had to pick several that I thought were successful for the time they were done, I'd probably pick issues 69 (though it printed terribly), 74 (a cool vignette, tho' his head's a little small), 96 (I like the color scheme), 99 (a cool composition that I wish had printed better),
104 (tho' I chuckle every time I see the Falconman's zipper! What was I thinking? LOL), 112 (that was a big "look what I can do" painting, but the urns are terrible), 131 (another good composition that I wish could have been painted knowing what I know today), 143 (seems to be my iconic Conan cover) 144 (I love this cover! The veil on the dancing girl's butt was added under duress after I handed the cover in!) and 191 (because I got to paint over a Buscema pencil!)
B/W: Did you ever go to comic cons or get to meet the fans? If so, were they a different audience than the typical comics reader?
JJ: I do a lot of cons, as I love meeting the fans (although now I get "My father's a big fan of your Conan covers!" LOL) They aren't the typical comic fan. Lots of bikers, tattoo artists, bodybuilders, etc. I'm always shocked to see one of my covers tattooed on someone's back!
B/W: Any character you've wanted to work on but haven't had the chance yet?
JJ: That's tough. I'm a big Howard and Burroughs fan, and while I've done a lot of work with both properties, I don't think I've done either of them justice, yet.
B/W: What are you doing now?
JJ: Right now among other things, I'm doing covers for Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Vampirella, and several other series, I'm producing a series of "Jungle Lord" lithographs for The Forest Primeval.com, a lot of private commissions and a retrospective hardcover Art of Joe Jusko book to be published by Desperado Press. I'm also determined to get my website finished. It's languished half-operational for way too long now.
Joe was extremely friendly and generous with his time, and I was thrilled to get to talk to someone whose work made such an impression on me growing up. Thanks Joe!
Welcome to our first interview at All In Black & White For 75 Cents! I've been doing them for a while over at The Aquaman Shrine and Treasury Comics.com, and getting to talk to people whose work I really admire is one of the greatest thrills of doing these blogs, if not my life!
So after I discovered the wonder that is--was(*sniff*) IDW's Doomed, I quickly went and found the previous two issues I had missed and by the end of the week I had read all three. I was thrilled that somebody out there had the idea and the drive(and the money!) to do a 21st century take on the classic Warren-type b/w horror magazine.
I was very sad to hear that Doomed was, in fact, doomed, sales-wise, and ended with its fourth issue, with host Ms.Doomed bidding us a not-so-fond adieu. Not too long afterwards, I emailed IDW's Chris Ryall--who not only is the editor-in-chief, but also wrote a lot of material in Doomed--and pleaded for an interview. Chris treated me better than Ms.Doomed would, and agreed to answer my questions:
All In Black and White: Did you grow up reading the Warrens and Marvel's b/w line?
Chris Ryall: I did, yeah. I didn't buy any of those mags every week, since I was a bit young and had to sneak them (Fantastic Four and X-Men were okay in my house, but Savage Sword of Conan and Eerie were harder sells on my parents). But whenever I did, I really loved reading them, even if I had to hide them inside Mad magazines to do so.
B/W: I love the idea of Mad being the magazine used to hide something else! Whose idea was Doomed?
CR: It started with Ted Adams, IDW's co-owner and President. He'd been trying to make a deal for the old Warren material for a while, and it just never came together. He and I both loved those mags before, so we worked on developing our own take on it as a tribute to that material.
B/W: Did retailers or Diamond have any concerns about it being in the magazine format?
CR: Any time there's a non-standard format, yeah, it can throw people a bit. But if we were going to do this, we wanted to make sure we did it right and not a watered-down (or sized down) version.
B/W: I think Doomed would've sold well at bookstores, indy record stores, and the like. Is it difficult to get comics and related publications into places like that?
CR: It really is, yeah. Difficult and expensive. And one thing we ran into when looking at that, which we really wanted, was the fact that we would've had to polybag the magazines for the newstands due to the adult content. For a new magazine like this, polybagging it would've been death. It needed the "flip-through" factor for people to see what we were doing.
B/W: Did you have any long range plans for Doomed, like certain creators or famous stories you wanted to go after?
CR: We intended to do the first four with the writers we had (David Schow, F. Paul Wilson, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch), but beyond that, yeah, I had a long list of other names I would've loved to work with on this.
B/W: Would Doomed's failure(sales-wise only!) keep IDW from trying the format again? Can you tell how much was the format, how much was the material?
CR: From what we heard, the format and the b&w thing made it difficult for some retailers to justify ordering. We're doing Transformers material in magazines right now(in full color), so we're definitely not put off of using the format. And we may yet try it again with Doomed, too. Ms. Doomed is hard to keep quiet forever.
B/W: Overall, how proud are you of Doomed?
CR: Honestly, it's one of the best things I ever worked on here. Makes me proud to have done a magazine like this that hopefully exposed people to some great short horror writing (I had no idea Robert Bloch was so diverse and amazing a writer before this, for example). It also got me my only Eisner nomination for "Best Short Story," too, so that's an added honor.
But in a market that pushes for so much similar material, I think we're all most proud of trying our best to produce something different and worthwhile. We'll keep doing that and see what happens with the next effort.
Doomed certainly was different and worthwhile. Thanks Chris!
