PAT BRODERICK Portrait by Ken Meyer, Jr.
©2026 Ken Meyer, Jr.

About  Our Cover

Pencils by PAT BRODERICK
Inks by  BRUCE D. PATTERSON
Colors by  GLENN WHITMORE

The Spectre TM & © DC Comics

Above: The so-called “Avenging Wrath of God” gets positively Old Testament in Pat Broderick’s tremendously effective cover art, originally composed for The Spectre #31 [Nov. ’89], with inks by Bruce Patterson. The original art for this impressive piece was once owned  by none other than the late, great science fiction author, Harlan Ellison.

Comic Book Creator  is a proud joint production of  Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

March 2026 • The Pat Broderick Issue • Number 42

table of contents

Ye Ed’s Rant: Your humble editor muddles over that one constant in life: change	 2
Comics Chatter
Bonnie’s Lass: Chatting with the creator of Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken, in part one of our interview, talking about her upbringing and entry into the Air Pirates 	3
Once Upon Long Ago: Flash Thompson on his love for Earth-Two’s Justice Society	13
Heroes of the ’70s: Looking at the 1972 Esquire feature with Alan Weiss	14
Ten Questions: John McCrea from Northern Ireland gets quizzed by Darrick Patrick	22
The Radical American: Profiling comix advocate and anthologist Paul Buhle, editor	24
Incoming: Readers on Mary Skrenes, Steve Englehart, and liking the alternative stuff	30
Fighting Lawyer: Fascinating artifact from the 1946 New York Attorney General race	31
Vanishing Watami: South American correspondent Pablo Stadelman on a classic	39
The Willis Legacy: Contemplating the Morty the Dog’s creator status in comics	42
Comics in the Library: Richard J. Arndt on Brenna Thummler’s Sheets trilogy	48
Hembeck’s Dateline: Great Caesar’s ghost! It’s Daily Planet editor Perry White!	49
THE MAIN EVENT
Pat Broderick: Bronze Age Star By pure grit, tenacity, and tremendous talent, Patrick Rodney Broderick broke into the comics industry (courtesy of a note from Carmine Infantino) and the Florida man has been gracing his artistry in American comics ever since. In two revealing interviews,  Pat discusses his start at DC, work at Continuity Associates, breakthroughs with Firestorm and The Micronauts, creations of “Creature Commandos” and Tim “Robin” Drake, and work outside comics, with special emphasis on his current work with  writer Mike Baron on horror-Western Bronze Star and forthcoming Cobalt Blue	52
BACK MATTER
Coming Attractions: Big John Buscema and his Workshop’s Buscema Boys	75
Creators at the Con: Kendall Whitehouse lenses multi-generational Marvel creators	78
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Tom Z. shares José Luis García-López  art .	80
Right: Detail from Pat Broderick’s cover art for The Fury of Firestorm #1 [June ’82], with inks by Dick Giordano.
CORRECTION: Apologies to Christine Vadala for failing to mention costume-maker/photographer Kathy Sanders, who was responsible for the pic and costuming in Christine and Len Wein’s pic last issue, on page 75.

Comic Book Creator™ is published bi-monthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 601, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com.  Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $53 US, $78 International, $19 Digital.  All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2026 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

TM & © DC Comics.

This issue is dedicated to the memories of RICHARD ASHFORD, Guy Lillian III,  TED MANN, DREW STRUZAN, BRUCE SWEENEY, and my pal ART STEIN

™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer
John Morrow Publisher & Consulting Editor
GREG BIGA Associate Editor
PAT BRODERICK &  BRUCE D. PATTERSON Cover Pencils & Inks
GLEN WHITMORE
Cover Colors
RICHARD J. ARNDT
MARC SVENSSON STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors
J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist Emeritus
TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme
RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator
KEN MEYER, JR. CBC Color Portrait Artist
ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader
Greg PRESTON CBC Contributing Photographer
Pablo Stadelman CBC Argentine Correspondent
KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer
RICHARD ARNDT FRED HEMBECK DARRICK PATRICK STEVEN THOMPSON TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists
Contact CBC: jonbcooke@aol.com Jon B. Cooke, P.O. Box 601 West Kingston, RI 02892

Time to Catch Up
Always chasing deadlines and yet still finding time to take stock

The nest has gone empty here at Casa Cooke, at least for now, with our three boys out on their own, living upstate (which, in Rhode Island, means 30–45 minutes away, max). No grandchildren for Beth and I just yet, but we’d love to see the lads settle down, of course. There’s no doubt that time will tell.
For folks married as long as us two — just celebrated our 38th anniversary this past August! — we’re getting along nicely and in good health (knock wood). We could be richer, but we stay warm and fed, so I’m not complaining. I could bitch about the state of the world outside our cozy abode — and I sure do with my chum John Morrow when we get a chance to commiserate — but I try not to despair and do realize the one constant of life is change,  so hope springs eternal.
Speaking of that one constant, some of my longtime readers might suspect change happened to me since the days of Comic Book Artist, if maybe just for keeping to an on-time release schedule. But it really is more foundational than that, though definitely indicative of being a reliable and accountable person. I belong to a tribe (if you will) dedicated to the understanding that, at our core, each one of us is responsible for our behavior no matter the circumstance. There’s more to it than that, and to each his own (so no promotion here!), but suffice to say, with spiritual guidance, I’m a changed man. Just ask my publisher.
That said, I’ll never change into a perfect person — not even the remotest chance — but I do strive to be decent and appreciative… gratitude is the right attitude, after all… and hopefully I remember to take enough time to express my thanks to you folks, my readers, who keep the mag chuggin’ along. Truly, it is you who keeps Comic Book Creator going and it is you who gives me the opportunity to indulge in the crazy history of comics I love down to the marrow. But please write in and tell me if this eclectic approach is making a positive impression or otherwise. Even I have to admit I’m all over the place regarding the different categories of comics we cover, but I try and keep it interesting, covering the right bases.
I’ll be honest though and admit, as much as I continue to hit the comic book shop every Friday (old habit) and try to keep abreast of today’s scene, that I hesitate to cover the contemporary scene in these pages with much depth. Of course, this magazine’s focus is mostly historical and, if I can find a retro angle (as was done with last issue’s “checkered” Ghost Machine comics), I can include modern subjects. But the generation of today’s artists, unless they have a deep appreciation for the great artists in the history of American comics, are not easy to get responses from and, I suspect, despite print being their medium, the notion of being honored in a print magazine is not as appealing as once was.
And, to keep that ego in check, I recognize CBC hasn’t the appeal CBA once had. I like to think my magazines are better than ever but, like the old Woody Allen line from Stardust Memories, where a fan approaches the comedian to lament “I especially like your earlier, funny [jokes],” many seemed to think the first ten or so issues of CBA was the span of its golden age. (Now, what did Rick Nelson sing about everyone  at that Garden party…?)
An old friend who’s now making available a whole bunch of panel discussion audio tapes is Allan Rosenberg who used to be the guest wrangler for the Big Apple Comic Cons for many years. Ye Ed used to attend Allan’s legendary Ramapo conventions, where he had the pleasure of hanging out with Joe Sinnott, chatting with Julius Schwartz, and getting to know Al Williamson! Good times! Allan’s now relocated in Albany, New York. Thanks for your generous help, buddy!
Anyhoo, next year I’m jumping on to finish my insanely detailed history of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, which is turning into a darn interesting foray into that long-running Catholic school comic book. Helping me in the endeavor is Bob Chapman, of Graphitti Designs, likely the biggest fan of that title who ever walked the earth. TC was published in Dayton, Ohio, between 1946–72 and appeared bi-weekly during the regular school year and it was only available through classroom subscription! (Bob even had his complete collection bound between hard covers!) Believe you me, the caliber of the creators who contributed to Treasure Chest is amazing — among them Reed Crandall, Joe Sinnott, and Dick Giordano — and the reader will discover talents previously  unheard of. Publisher to be determined, but I’ll keep ye appraised!
— Ye Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

Pat Broderick by Ronn Sutton

cbc contributors

Mike Baron
Rick Bradford
Pat Broderick
Bruce Chrislip
Shaun Clancy
Tom Fellrath
Linda Fite
Tom Fleming
Shary Flenniken
Jean-Paul  Gabilliet
Clay Geerdes
Larry Hama
John Kelly
Denis Kitchen
David Miller
Patrick  Rosenkranz
Tom Smith
Noah Van Sciver
Alan Weiss
Steve Willis
Becky Wilson
Rob Yeremian

Pat Broderick portrait © 2025 Ronn Sutton.

#42 • March 2026 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

up front

Shary Flenniken photo portrait by Clay Geerdes. Courtesy of David Miller and © the estate of Clay Geerdes. Trots and Bonnie TM & © Shary Flenniken.

Bonnie’s Lass
Part one of our in-depth interview with the creator of Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken

Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[I’ll be upfront and confess, with some degree of contrition (and also relief), that this interview was conducted almost a quarter-century ago, when I was preparing the Comic Book Artist issue devoted to National Lampoon. Besides the fact this was one of my favorite interviews I’ve had the pleasure to conduct, as I found the cartoonist friendly, forthcoming, and funny, I’ll also never forget the fact it took place one year to the day after the events of 9/11, on Sept. 11, 2002. I was certain one day I’d finally have this Q+A published and, with the help of underground cartoonist Becky Wilson, I was able to re-connect with Shary for her to approve the interview, which she kindly did… And that leads us to this, the first portion of that chat! Thanks, Becky and Shary! — Ye Ed.]
Comic Book Creator: Where are you originally from, Shary?
Shary Flenniken: I’m sorry, I wish I had a good answer for that. My dad was in the military. I spent most of my life in Seattle. I came here when I was four.
CBC: Your father was an admiral?
Shary: Well, he was a rear admiral, which means he retired as an admiral, before that he was a captain when he was active.
CBC: Did you move around a lot?
Shary: We lived in Southern California, Alaska, and Panama. My dad’s military career was exciting because the whole family was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. He was an underwater diver, so he did rescue work at Pearl Harbor with submarines, stuff like that. He knew Jacques Cousteau when he was just starting out in his career. He used to drink with Ernest Hemingway down in Key West.
CBC: Wow! I saw in an old Comics Journal interview that he was even a cartoonist…?
Shary: Yeah! He drew cartoons when he was at the Naval Academy pretty much for his buddies, and they’re in the Naval Academy yearbook, which I have. I think I said in there that he had known this cartoonist H.T. Webster’s mother when he was a little boy, and Mrs. Webster encouraged him to be a cartoonist. So when I started drawing, I was looking at all the H.T. Webster books. And my strip, “Trots and Bonnie,” is pretty much drawn in that style. I liked the style but, coincidentally, it was an influence on my dad, too.
CBC: Who was H.T. Webster? What did he do?
Shary: He was a cartoonist who was syndicated in the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, and he did a single-panel ongoing series of gags. And what he would do is give them titles. He did comic strips, as well, but he didn’t spend as long a period of time doing them. He was best known for “Caspar Milquetoast, the Timid Soul.” And then he did a series on golf and “Life’s Darkest Moments.” He drew a lot of really neat kids’ jokes and real funky kind of Midwestern-average people, which is, I think, what attracted me to the look of it. You know, real suburban neighborhoods, big lawns…
CBC: So Webster was obviously collected and your father kept the collections…?
Shary: Yeah, uh-huh! He had a lot of the collections around here and I’ve accumulated more of them.
CBC: “Trots and Bonnie,” as you just said, is something of a homage to Webster. Is there a sentimental thing because your father had this connection, or did you just get into the art and the ambiance of it?
Shary: Hmmm. That’s a good question. Part of this was what you would call my training. It was informal, but it was with the Air Pirates. I was working for an underground newspaper, and my style… I was looking at things like the Chicago Seed and the artwork in there…
CBC: The Chicago what?
Shary: It was an underground paper called Chicago Seed. And, among underground paper aficionados, it was the most avant-garde, I guess, of the undergrounds, in terms of their layouts and their art. I don’t know who was doing it, but they had these beautiful, big color spreads in their paper. I mean, most underground papers were being done by revolutionary nuts, with no talent whatsoever, and here was this really gorgeous artwork in the paper. So I was looking at that and loving it and really wanting to be like that when I was working for underground papers. So, if you go back and look at my artwork, you would see a lot of things, a lot of parallel linework I liked — it’s not quite crosshatching, more like using almost a grid pattern in the art for shading. That was something that I added to the underground paper design. It was the only way you could get color variation in your artwork.
CBC: We’re certainly getting ahead with the chronology here, but there’s this classic look to the work of Bobby London, of you, and certainly of Dan O’Neill, as well as Gary Hallgren and Ted Richards, that really harkens back to the early days, of Herriman, and, as you say, H.T. Webster… It’s interesting that in this really radical, anti-establishment, underground comics movement, you guys pushed the envelope with this really wonderful old style that really was all but dead at the time.
Shary: Oh, absolutely, and it was intentional, and not just the art, but also most of the writing. Looking back at Carl Barks’ writing in Uncle Scrooge comics and really paying attention to it. There was a lot of looking at the old masters. And it was also because people like Walt Kelly, who worked for Disney and had his own irreverent comic strips, politically,
we looked at what he did in terms of — I’m trying to think of a good word for it — being revolutionary at a time when he was fighting the establishment. When they were telling him that he couldn’t put belly buttons on his characters, he went and put belly buttons on all his characters, including the chairs and the trees, to rebel against it. And we were looking at those because we all went into that group respecting the power of comics and cartoons.
CBC: And that was certainly atypical for the time, as the radical youth was rejecting virtually everything that came before. It’s almost epitomized by the first issue of the National Lampoon, when it was basically this ugly magazine to look at. It didn’t know what it was doing. It was trying too hard to be smart and hip and funny, and it was trying too hard to be like a poor R. Crumb style visually…
Shary: Now you’re talking about the days before [NatLamp art director] Michael Gross.
CBC: Yes, exactly.
Shary: Michael came in and, all of a sudden, it became a great thing. It shows you that one person can really make a change.
CBC: Obviously, there was this great talent within Ted Richards and within Bobby London and within yourself. Is it really, profoundly, the influence of Dan O’Neill as someone who held up the torch, so to speak, or was it just the combining of like minds?
Shary: I want to make it clear: I am totally loyal to Dan. I love the way his brain works, and I think that, more than anything, he provided the vortex of energy for the community, and you can’t discount the importance of that. It was the most important thing that was going on. He provided the ideology, I think. And everyone brought with it their own like-mindedness. You know, where we all thought comics were really important. We had all experienced a lot of difficulty and rejection by everyone we worked with. So it wasn’t just the establishment press that was giving us a hard time or not letting us in, or, in Dan’s case, firing him about talking about LSD. But Bobby and Ted and I had experienced this rejection by the alternative press, by the underground press, where… Oh, gosh, I don’t know. The thing that I always remember about the Weathermen was they made me burn my Christmas tree, because it was a symbol of bourgeois economic domination. It was awful!
CBC: In today’s environment, it’s almost beyond the pale for a lot of people to relate to those days and how extreme it seemed, how polarized the times truly got. [Hah! — Ye Ed.]
Shary: It is, but it was because of the Vietnam War. And it was because we were, like, in high school… not Dan… but the rest of us were basically in high school, and we were seeing our friends die. It was totally traumatic. They died for basically no reason. It was a huge traumatic thing that was impelling us to find something to do about it.
CBC: How do you look at it now? Do you look at it with somewhat bemusement, did you go “too far,” and were you taking things to extremes perhaps on a personal level… Certainly, just as a personal aside — I’m talking way too much here — but, like after 9/11, it made me think a lot. I mean, I grew up as a radical kid, and I was on marches with my mom during the October moratoriums, and even though I was 11 years old, I vividly remember when Kent State happened and the repercussions of that. And yet, 9/11 certainly made me stop and think about that, and think about my relationship to my country, and things like that. And I’m just wondering if there’s any retrospection in you now…
Shary: Having to do with 9/11?
CBC: No. Just now, with time passed…
Shary: Actually, 9/11 made me really conscious of where, you know, how much sacrifice we all made in the late ’60s, early ’70s, that we were really sacrificing for our country, that’s how it made me feel. It reminded me of what a big deal it was. Because, in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, careerism turned everything inward. But we were always caring very much about what our country was doing. We were all very patriotic at that time, even though we were going against the government. The “why do they hate us?” question, that’s so popular today…? Well, I’ve got a whole bunch of answers to that, and a lot of people do have answers for that. That’s not a vague notion. There’s a real reason about the way we’ve been running things and people have been lying to the American public, and stuff like that. And I think 9/11 kind of regressed our minds and consciousness of how that happened, and made me remember how serious it is.
CBC: I recall, and perhaps I’m wrong, Kent State being the moment where either you’re “with us or ag’in’ us” in the way that the left either really moderated, “Oh my God, they’re gonna kill me if I keep doing this,” or they said, with the advent of the Weathermen, “No, this is war. This is war against the establishment.” Were the times that polarized? Did you feel like…
Shary: I did, personally. The thing that I look back on that I regret, my only regret, is thinking that I was not going to live. Not planning ahead for my life. [chuckles] My one big regret is just assuming that I was going to die somewhere in the melee there…
CBC: What? That [J. Edgar] Hoover would get you or the National Guard would get you, in that way?
Shary: I made an actual decision that, back when I was going through my teenage angst, that rather than killing myself, because I had a lot of stuff going on — my dad was dying of cancer, and we were very polarized, my father and I, with the military and all — and I just was feeling really suicidal and I decided that, and I’ve done this every time I’ve gotten really depressed and suicidal, I just decide, before I kill myself, I’m going to fight for some cause. It’s like, if I get AIDS, I’ll to go to Idaho and sleep with a lot of Nazis! [laughter]
CBC: You’re gonna take some of them with you!
Shary: Yeah! It seems like you should live a useful life with purpose no matter what. That is my philosophy. So that was my purpose, to devote my life to the cause. I’m usually way more kind of serious about this stuff than other people are, because I talked to the guys in the Air Pirates — and they would hate me for saying this — and it’s in writing, they’d say, “Well, I hooked up with Dan O’Neill because I thought it would be good for my career. I thought this whole thing was a good thing for our careers.” And I wasn’t there for that. I was, like, I’ll join any team that’s fighting a battle, put my life on the line. I did lots of wild stuff like that.
CBC: Was it pretty much a white-bread suburban upbringing that you had in Seattle?
Shary: Totally! And I was so totally not a part of that, and I really don’t know why. I don’t know whether it was some kind of pure rejection of my father and his values… Because, even when I was little, I did not fit in or agree with people or whatever. I got in trouble at school. I was publishing, when I was 10 years old, a little newspaper for my fourth-grade class, which I would hand-write every night and make five copies of it and give that to people at school. And, of course, I got in trouble for it and they made me stop. And it was, like, “What did I do wrong?” And I was constantly doing things, getting in trouble, and going, “What did I do wrong?”
CBC: Did you have creative support at all at school or
was it always adversarial? Did you have that one teacher  or two teachers who said, “That’s an interesting point of  view, Shary…”?
Shary: Yeah. You get those little windows…
CBC: Yeah, right. That can change everything for some people.
Shary: Yeah! It can. Which is why I like to teach now. I feel that’s really effective. Especially with the bad kids, they’re my favorites.
CBC: The ones who need it the most.
Shary: Yeah! The ones that you can really swing around…
CBC: Did you gravitate toward particular comic books? Did you read them a lot?
Shary: Yes. I read a lot of comics when I was little. It never occurred to me that genuine human beings drew them. I didn’t identify that way. They were just good stories. And I read a lot of Superman, a lot of science fiction. And I went right from… well, from Daffy Duck I remember… Whenever they were good stories, I read them.
CBC: Correct me if I’m wrong, you were too young to get into EC, like Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, and that stuff…?
Shary: I never even saw those, although when I was eight, in 1958, my father took my MAD magazine and ripped it up. I had loved it.
CBC: Was your father pretty reactionary?
Shary: My father burned my underground papers. I  think he burned a lot of my comics. Well, he bought me comics, though, too, because some of them were innocent. Anything that he deemed liberal was bad… My parents wouldn’t let me sing, “If I Had a Hammer,” because it was  a Communist song.
CBC: [Laughs] So your father voted for Goldwater?
Shary: I have Goldwater campaign buttons. The way they do that in Washington State, they do these little caucuses, so my dad was deep into the Republican Party. I still get calls from them.
CBC: Now, did you get along, or were you always adversarial? Did you argue a lot or…?
Shary: We started arguing when I learned to say, “Sh*t.” Then the arguments started. Then the beatings started. [laughs]
CBC: So you haven’t really been able to put a thumb on where your iconoclasm comes from? You were writing your little tracts when you were 10 years old…
Shary: I don’t know where it came from, but I sure got used to it. And I am sure used to being an oddball. And I don’t like feeling like I’m crazy, but I’m so used to it that it’s sort of like, “Okay, move on. I’m nuts, move on.”
CBC: I was born in ‘59, but from what I know of the ‘50s, it was exceedingly conventional, but stupefying for some people, the conventionality was just deadening.
Shary: It was not quite totally stupefying, because it bred Lenny Bruce, it birthed the beatniks. And my sister is eight years older than me, and she really fell into that beatnik group, was a folk singer… So I think there was probably a lot of trickle down from her culture, because she turned me on to my first Cosmopolitan magazine. Before it became like a babe magazine, it was kind of a beatnik thing, kind of a hip culture magazine for a few years. And those are the ones that I remember seeing. And they were funny, they had really funny things in them.
CBC: This was under Helen Gurley Brown?
Shary: No, this was before her. So, yeah, there were a couple of them around, so my sister brought in that influence. She was trying to teach me how to play the guitar, and introduced me to Bob Dylan and all that sort of radical culture. All that was sort of brewing at that time. I was a kid, I was little. You figure kids don’t really start forming a personality until they’re about 13 years old.
CBC: Your older sister passed away?
Shary: No, that was a different one, that happened early on, in 1945. My older sister is fabulous. She’s a scuba diver and she works internationally. She goes all over the world installing these mooring buoys, which save coral reefs from anchor damage.
CBC: What’s her name?
Shary: Her name is Judy Halas and her company is Environmental Moorings International, and her husband invented the system to do this. It’s amazing what they’re doing.
CBC: Did you draw at an early age? When did you get interested in art?
Shary: My perception is that all kids draw at an early age. I dropped out of Sunday school when they stopped letting us draw pictures of heaven. The art was just something I could do that nobody said, “You can’t do that.” And it was easy to do, so I just kept drawing.
CBC: During the ‘60s,  did you have any interest in comic books or did you pretty much discard them before adolescence?
Shary: Well, the ‘60s is from when I was 10 to when I was 20, so, when I was 10, I was avidly reading comics like “J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars” and Superman and all the related things. I wasn’t into “The Legion of Super-Heroes,” I was not into MAD, I was not into a lot of things… But Superman and, I must admit, I just loved “Mary Jane and Sniffles”!
CBC: What was that?
Shary: There was this little girl, Mary Jane, with a mouse named Sniffles, and when she ate a cookie, she could become really small and then she would have these adventures. And I had that whole fixation all through when I was a kid… I think all kids have these kinds of things… I used to play with little dolls and little horses and set up little worlds. If I had the time, I would do that now, I would have an incredible dollhouse now… That miniature world that you have control over. It’s such a great fantasy. And it was basically that kind of thing that projected what the world would be like if you were made really small… I was fascinated by The Borrowers, that was so great. Anything like that.
CBC: When I was a little kid, my favorite character was Ant-Man, because he was really small. I was always a really short guy anyway, so… [chuckles]
Shary: Really? I don’t know that one!
CBC: That was an early Marvel comic.
Shary: I’m going to look that up!
CBC: It had to do with my self-esteem, I think. [chuckles]
Shary: It must be… maybe when you’re a kid, maybe you do want to encounter things that are more your size…
CBC: And there’s certainly toy trains, and for boys, Matchbox cars, and things like that. I think it’s a pretty common thing. Maybe having control of your own world while you have no control over the real world.
Shary: Absolutely.
CBC: Did you remain creative during your teen years?
Shary: Oh, yeah. I would say so, yeah! That was the only thing I could do in school - creative stuff. I wasn’t really great with math or anything. I did a lot of writing, did a lot of self- publishing, in a sense. Little things. I’m not even sure Xerox copiers were readily available at that point. If you wanted to do something, you had to mimeo it.
CBC: Oh, yeah. That’s how everyone started, right?
Shary: Yeah! And I painted, and I did line art in pen-and-ink. And I ended up in art school, a commercial art school. Basically, my parents kind of pushed me in that direction. My dad had to figure out something to do with me. They thought maybe I could qualify for that. But my feeling was… like everything else, I took a ballet class and I thought, “So what?” I just wanted to put on a tutu and shoes and dance. I never wanted to do the academic part. I wanted to have fun. “Oh, I can draw.”
CBC: Would they be strips or illustrations or… ?
Shary: What did I do?
CBC: Yeah, were they sequential stories, were they comic stories or comic strips?
Shary: Some, yes. I would make comic characters, except that I didn’t have any sense of the format. Like, when I teach classes now, I think the kids are shocked, because it’s not just drawing comics, it’s how to make a panel and how to line them up and how to plan a page, because that’s all the stuff that anyone really needs to know to make it work.
CBC: Right, learn the foundation and the fundamentals.
Shary: Well, yeah! Because your writing and that stuff, that’s all going to come out of your gut, your brains, your talent. But the other stuff is the craft of putting it together so that somebody can read it and get what you’re trying to say. You just have to be trained to do that. All kids do a lot of copying. My thing was taking pictures in Life magazine and making line art out of photographs.
CBC: You literally traced them, or just be looking at them?
Shary: I would just look at them. And I don’t even remember if I did a pencil before I went in with the pen and ink. I liked the pen and ink. I was learning techniques in high school, I had a good art teacher who taught us stuff like “ink-resists,” which is fun. You take rubber cement and put it everywhere you don’t want your picture to be. You paint the rubber cement on and then you put India ink over that. Lift up all the rubber cement, and only your picture is left. It’s a simple thing you can do at home. I loved doing that. It makes your art look instantly professional, like a wood cut.
CBC: Did drugs enter the scene at all while you were in high school? I don’t know what the culture in Seattle was like at the time…
Shary: [Chuckles] Boeing, the airplane company, supported the drug culture in Seattle. Just a lot of pot smokers. My older friends with jobs at the Boeing plant would go down to Mexico and some farmer would pull a plant up out of the dirt and sell it to them. And they’d bring it back up here. When I was in high school, my sense of humor was to take a lot of… What did I use? I think it was corn starch… I would put corn starch in baggies and put it in people’s lockers at school. And catnip. We’d put catnip in baggies and see if we could get it over the Canadian border. And we would smoke catnip. We would go downtown, and we would sit there and we would roll joints out of catnip. We got really good at rolling joints — and it was catnip! — and we’d practically sit in the middle of downtown and roll catnip. And then some guy would walk by and go, “Yeahhh, I used to do a lot of that stuff when I was in the Merchant Marines…“ [laughter] I’ve never been a big druggie type. I just don’t… personally, I just don’t respond well to drugs and alcohol. I’m too much of a control freak, is the reality of it. Nobody was going to be around to catch me if I slipped. But I just thought that was so humorous,  fake drugs.
CBC: Did you have any early experience, before your art career, with the underground comix? With R. Crumb and ZAP?
Shary: Not at all! It was when I got into the underground newspaper that I got turned on to that. I did a crash course in undergrounds, where I would go to parties where people owned a lot of underground comix, and I would read everything that they had. I would just sit down at a table and read their comic collection during the party. While everybody else was smoking pot and doing drugs, I was reading the comics.
CBC: Was it a revelation?
Shary: I’ll tell you, it was primarily a feeling of, “Hey, I can do this.” No, there was no awestruck kind of feeling, but I was very interested in what people were doing in the counterculture/revolutionary sense, and I really wanted to absorb everything that I could find that was anything… writing, drawing comics, newspapers, books, posters… the revolution, you know? I just was hungry for that kind of stuff… Because having come from this really right-wing, conservative, military background, really white-bread neighborhood, to me it was like discovering the world you were actually meant to live in. It was like being welcomed with open arms. I thought that, anyway. It was a great feeling of acceptance.
CBC: Now, did you encounter this alternative world while you were in art school?
Shary: No. Politics and revolution had no place in a commercial art school. But… well… there was a certain amount when I was in… I was just distressed in high school. Totally, totally distressed, totally unhappy. Lost. Distressed about the war, I should say. And then I ran away from home and went up into Canada. This was with my boyfriend. We were in a blue Volkswagen bus, crossed the border to Canada, and we stayed in Middlebury, Vermont, at a fraternity house for a while. And I also stayed in Adam’s House, at Harvard, which was one of the Harvard dorms. And went down to Washington, D.C. But it was mainly in Middlebury — oh, and in Montreal, as well, we met people… We went to a great Fugs concert. Not a concert, but a little show in a pub. Do you remember the Fugs?
CBC: Yeah…
Shary: And it was during that trip that I really… People sat me down and informed me about what was going on with the quote-unquote “revolution.” And that’s when I became aware of that. And they said, “Okay, if you get these motorcycle boots, you want to get these steel-toed boots because if you’re in a riot you won’t get your feet stepped on so badly.” I mean, people were just giving me real solid advice like that. So that was my entrée to that. So then I did some things and I ended up in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell. Just goofing off and going to some classes, and stuff like that. And there they had like a super-intense movement group, who later came out here to Seattle. So that was another big learning experience, hanging out with them.
CBC: So when did you discover the Air Pirates? Or, you know, the guys?
Shary: Because, when I was in art school, it was logical for a local anarchist group to ask me to do some work for their underground paper. I worked for the underground paper, and they sent me and this other guy to a rock festival, which had sort of a political base. It was an 11-day festival with people camping out. And we were supposed to produce a newspaper, printed on a Gestetner in the back of a pick-up. I met Bobby and I met Ted there, and, through them, I met Dan. Basically my feeling was that I was recruiting Bobby and Ted to work on my underground newspaper. Which worked — they both came up here to Seattle and lived up here and worked on the paper until the Weathermen took it over.
CBC: So was this concert out West?
Shary: Very near the Columbia River. Washougal, near the Oregon/Washington border.
CBC: Did any bands of note play or was it a local thing?
Shary: It was called the Sky River Rock Festival. It was like maybe the fourth or fifth annual festival. And this was right after the spring of Kent State, so the early ones were sort of hippie/drug oriented. This one was more politically oriented (at least on some people’s part) and more controversial. There’s actually a website about it. Bands…? I really have no memory of the bands. [laughter]
CBC: That wasn’t the point. [laughs]
Shary: I know there were bands playing, I have some snapshot memories of some of the stuff that went on, but the music was…
CBC: Secondary. What was the content of the newspaper? Was it a broadsheet? How big was it?
Shary: I think it was like a little 8½" x 11" newsletter. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember how many we put out. I don’t remember much of that…
CBC: Did you draw for it? It’s who you met there, I guess.
Shary: Yeah… I have a vague memory of attempting to produce our newsletter. But, by the time I got up there and met these cartoonists, what we did do was a thing called Sky River Funnies, which was not put out by my newspaper on that Gestetner. I don’t think I was there to do much work. I was there to socialize, probably. But we did do this really great little thing that was a tabloid, I guess, it was a big sheet, like 18" x 24"” or something… whatever it was, it would fold down to that smaller 8" x 10" size in quarters, and we filled up that sheet pretty nicely. That is the effort of Bobby and Ted and another guy that was working on the Berkeley Tribe at that time. We had that commercially printed. We all marched off to a real printer someplace and brought it back to the site. And I contributed one joke to it. I didn’t even draw in it. But it was a neat little publication.
CBC: Was it a giveaway?
Shary: Yeah. I don’t know, it might have had a price on it, I don’t remember getting any money for it.
CBC: Have you ever seen it around?
Shary: I sold a copy. I probably sold my last copy here recently. It’s a collector’s item.
CBC: And it’s quite a rarity, I would think.
Shary: You can probably find it listed on the internet somewhere.
CBC: And that was your first collaboration with these guys?
Shary: Oh yeah.
CBC: What was Bobby like?
Shary: Aww, man… Bobby impressed me so much. He was soft-spoken, intellectual, someone who was very serious about his work, very well-spoken, very articulate about what, you could say, we were doing with comics, the role of humor. Very intellectual, academic… which I loved, because it really put into words things that were really a gut-level thing to me. And he’s had all this incredible… Educated in the New York area, which, by that time, I’d begun to appreciate people were getting a more interesting education back East than we did out here. And he’d been corresponding with Stan Laurel for years, and I had the impression he was really close to him, and it was a really meaningful correspondence. So he felt that he had been handed this legacy by this early humorist. And the thing is, he could analyze, he knew all the Laurel and Hardy movies by heart and would analyze the plot and what happened in them and made it relevant to what we were doing at the time. Updated the reasoning in the movie plot, which was really great. And Ted, I thought, was a yuppie, whatever the corresponding term would have been. It turned out that he was kind of a military brat, too…
CBC: He did “Dopin’ Dan,” right?
Shary: Yeah…
CBC: Was he kind of like a Jerry Rubin type?
Shary: No, not at all. I thought that he had come from… preppy, I guess, would be the word. I thought that he had come from this sort of upper-class prep school background. And it was just the impression that I got of him first off. So the rest of the time was learning that, no, that wasn’t where he’d come from. His dad was, like, a sergeant. The Dopin’ Dan’s Dad or whatever was a sergeant in the Dopin’ Dan comic, that’s Ted’s dad. You can quote me, but I may not be right. [chuckles] So he had had a lot more of a funky, middle- class background than I realized at first. Which was fine, but it was funny finding that out. And the thing about Ted is that I have learned more about the mechanics of writing, basically writing, from Ted… He has a great ability to analyze things and break it down see how it was structured, and always did. And, at that point, he was doing it with Carl Barks’ work.
CBC: When did Dan come in the picture?
Shary: Dan was there, naked, in a river. [laughter]
CBC: That’s a picture!  Dan was older than you  guys, right?
Shary: Yeah. Dan was, I think, my sister’s age, about seven, eight years older than me. He, to me… I’m not sure what he represented to these other guys, but he was part of the establishment. Here was this guy who had been a syndicated cartoonist. And, number one, I thought he was rich. Which, unfortunately, was not true.
CBC: So you were a little wary of him?
Shary: No, no. Not really. I just didn’t know him that well. I got to know him later. I had a lot of illusions about these guys that were proved wrong over time. But Dan had a vision. That was the most important thing about him: he had a vision. He still has it.
CBC: Can you articulate that?
Shary: Well, he believed in cartooning as a powerful voice in the world — politics, culture — and he is coming from… that’s the legacy of Mark Twain. Everything that  Mark Twain said is something that… Dan wouldn’t ape it, but Mark Twain is in his soul. He’s living in Nevada City, up there in Twain country.
CBC: Do you stay in touch with him at all?
Shary: Yeah, I talk to him all the time, at least once  a week.
CBC: Really, one of the things that the real cartooning that I really got into, that I really started copying, was [O’Neill’s] “Odd Bodkins.”
Shary: I’m so happy to hear that!
CBC: I even made my own swipe of the characters, it was called “Harold’s Onion.” I’ve never told any professional that before! But, anyway, it was like, I’ll never forget getting Dan’s book [Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking, ’69]. And it just blew my mind, because it was so surreal to me. But it had that attraction, like R. Crumb’s work… immediately when I saw R. Crumb, because he had that classic style, something that as truly a throwback to Carl Barks and beyond that to the early Disney stuff, it was immediately comfortable. I guess the word is “traditional.” But the content of it was just outrageous. So it blew my mind, but it felt like it was okay, because it was really so well done.
Shary: Which is exactly, I think, the point. It’s great to hear that.
CBC: It did corrupt me. [laughs]
Shary: Dan’s going to be very happy to hear that.
CBC: Did you look at Dan’s stuff and start digging it immediately?
Shary: Yeah, very much so. [chuckles] In a nutshell, sure.
CBC: Did you feel challenged by these guys? All these guys had good technique, right?
Shary: No. Talent.
CBC: In a positive, competitive way.
Shary: I was doing parodies of what they were doing up here before we even got together with Dan. I did a parody of “Dopin’ Dan.”
CBC: Do you remember what it was called?
Shary: I still have that somewhere. I’ll let you know if I think of where it is. But I was kinda mad. I was ticked off at Ted at the time, and I really wanted to get him. And I was ticked off that, y’know, these guys had an attitude. This is the thing: they had this real… In terms of cooking, it’s like, women cook. Women have cooked since the beginning of time, right? But men are chefs. Where is that at? You really have to question what that means! I mean, there is Julia Child and everything, and it’s not that women don’t become chefs, but it’s, like, when men do something, it elevates the activity just because they do it. And I’m certainly not the first person who’s said that. But, if men were primarily secretaries, secretaries would be paid more and would be revered as a profession. You know what I mean? You take anything that is done in the world and, if men do it, it’s more important. Well, I understood this from the git-go. And I really resented it.
CBC: Was this attitude coming from Ted?
Shary: No, this is the world! This was everything. This was Marvel Comics, this was the comics page, this was the history of cartooning, this is writing, this is painting. This is ubiquitous, this repeated pattern. That if men do something, it’s important. If only women do something, it’s totally demeaning. Or if they did it, it’s not even important that they did it. Women painters, not even important that they existed.
CBC: You know, that’s an attitude I’ve never really have understood. And obviously, as a male, I haven’t really encountered it that much or let’s say realized it…
Shary: Because you haven’t been hurt by it.
CBC: Right, well of course, as a matter of fact. But if it’s good, it’s good. What does it matter what gender it comes from?
Shary: That has nothing to do with it.
CBC: Then that reflects more upon the people who were…
Shary: It’s not like women were doing poor cooking or poor painting or poor sculpture or whatever, it was that when… There’s a whole very fascinating book about men assuming the practice of medicine. And that’s what happened. Witch trials swept Europe, and women were burned for practicing midwifery, because men took over the practice of medicine and started making money. And took it away from people who did it to keep their friends alive and turned it into a monetary thing, so they just killed the competition. And this is just something that men have kept the upper hand in, and sometimes very violently. It’s real, this oppression of women.
CBC: And its roots are really just in misogyny, it’s just in this…
Shary: I guess. I’m not really a scholar, I try to absorb as much as I can because I believe that if you’re going to put stuff in the world in the form of creative writing that you need to feed your opinions. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. You’ve got to assimilate information in order to excrete it. So this is the information I’m getting a lot of. I certainly see that happening all over. And you really need to go back to your basics… I love hearing stuff about how men have become what they are because of what they needed to do, back when we were first — almost like animals — surviving in the wild, and men were out hunting, and women were working around the campfire. Men have this sort of domination thing that, I guess, take your caveman mentality, and their survival instinct is to dominate, women’s survival instinct is to cooperate. And you’ll see that everywhere you go. Men are one-upping each other, women are forming groups, because they really need to depend on each other to survive. Men tend to dominate each other and establish a pecking order to survive. And we still live with that, to the point where you wonder how much of that you can really change. I mean, this is evolution we’re talking about. You can’t change it in one or two generations, but there’s no harm in recognizing it.
CBC: And I guess what was startling, because I read your Comics Journal interview, and what was startling that you got that reaction from some of these guys, is that isn’t this, ostensibly, liberal, underground, mind-expanding, this is opening up… and yet you’re bumping into this conventional… I don’t know how you characterize it, not misogyny, I don’t know…
Shary: That would not come as a surprise to any woman who was alive during that time, because I think that was enlightening to women that even, here they have this little Maoist political collective, and men were still acting like cavemen! Women were becoming, “Whoa! Let’s become lesbians and just get the hell out of here, because we’re not going to be able to fix these guys, no matter what kind of ideology.”
CBC: [Laughs] Those guys are totally f*cked!
Shary: Yeah! And they did that. I didn’t happen to do that. I kind of liked men. I was used to being around cantankerous, difficult people, from my dad. So no big whoop. I just fight with them. And then, after, “I’ll go home with you!” [Jon laughs] More importantly, I think was just that attitude of, which I have praised in Dan, where he is saying the power and the importance of cartooning. Boy, were they just steeped in that! That was just oozing from everybody’s pores! And what I chose to do was just to absorb that. I’m like, “I can do that, too. I can draw just like you. I can write. I have the same facility that you do. I’m next to you on the front lines, and I’ll join your battle, and be with you.”
I was not a part of those Disney books. I was only in one with my own characters. So I had my own opinions about drawing like the Walt Disney artists. And I wasn’t completely signed on to that, but I was certainly signed on to the principle of using comics to promote my little political agenda and tell my little stories.
CBC: What do you feel about that? I was contemplating that this morning about the whole Air Pirates, the whole philosophy that was behind it, was taking what was Disney’s and basically putting a mirror right up to them. But appropriating the cartooning style, appropriating the character, taking the characters themselves, as a revolutionary act.
Shary: Well, I understood what they were doing, intellectually. I understood the history of where they were coming from… To me, personally, I had no personal thing with Disney. I guess I thought there were more important targets in the world, for me personally. I mean, we’re talking about… I’ve found, Bobby said that he had nothing against Disney, because he’s trying to keep the hope that he can stay out of trouble for doing that. I don’t. And he says, “Oh, it had nothing to do with Disney.” And I have this wonderful snapshot of Bobby’s childhood bed and his bedroom, with Minnie Mouse sitting right above it. The kid fantasized about Minnie Mouse before he went to sleep at night. And these guys were really obsessed with Disney. But I wasn’t, I was reading other stuff. I guess I would have been equally mad at any other establishment group, at that point. I had no specific thing for Disney. And the Air Pirates were already doing it when I arrived. I was just doing my own drawings…
CBC: Were you starting to do your own characters… was there a point when you started doing your own strips?
Shary: You mean when I was with the Air Pirates?
CBC: Yeah.
Shary: Well, because they instructed me. I had to spend a lot of time just proving that I could do that kind of thing. And I started a comic strip that was more Disney-looking about a little land of little women with big feet, and they were doing some kind of revolutionary thing. It was way more the Disney style than what I was usually drawing. And I never finished it, but a lot of the reason for that was because I did not know how to end a strip. I literally did not know how to end it. Which I teach now, because it’s a skill. So I did other stuff and other stories.
CBC: You jammed with the guys on other stuff?
Shary: I jammed with them, I still have some of  those jams, but a lot of our jams were just illustrating  a nursery rhyme just to get the hang of how to get a  beginning, middle, and an end. We did activities that  were learning activities.
CBC: These were exercises.
Shary: Yeah, exercises! We did Felix the Cat, at one point, and you would take these characters and then you would just write a story… But you’re drawing these characters that everybody should be able to draw. Like, “You and I should be able to draw Felix the Cat, so I’ll do the first panel, and you do the second panel, and then I do the third panel,” and we exercised this improvisational theater, “exercised where you and I have to cooperate in order to continue the script, to get to the end, and have it work out.” You can’t just kill the character in the second panel because you’re mad at the guy who did the first one… do you know what I mean?
CBC: Was it instructional?
Shary: Oh, it weeded out the weak ones. One of my favorite phrases is, “Weed out the weak ones.” Those exercises and almost any improvisational theater game that you play, even if it’s not in art, will weed out the people that have ego problems really fast, because they cannot do it. You’ll see them become angry and they’ll walk away from it. Improvisational theater breaks down the ego so quickly that it breaks through all those barriers of people who have problems, that, in my opinion, they have too many problems to do that. You know, you could say they are the people who want to do their own things and don’t want to work with other people.
CBC: Which is traditionally the way cartooning is done: as a very solitary, individual act.
Shary: Isn’t that funny? I don’t think that at all. I don’t think that at all. It’s not.
CBC: You don’t think traditionally it’s been that?
Shary: Well, if you think about it… The whole Disney organization, so you have a Marvel organization, you have all these comic organizations that have been successful. If you’re working at a newspaper syndicate, early on. Comics have always been interactive. And they’ve always been dependent upon reaction. They’ve always been cooperative because you draw it, somebody prints it, unless you’re printing your own.
CBC: But the creative act itself… what you’re saying to me, it just sounds revolutionary, it sounds just wonderful actually, because… Generally speaking, obviously, I’ve talked to probably hundreds of comic book artists, comic strip artists. And, generally speaking, to them it’s a very solitary, lonely thing. So I try to focus on the anecdotes a lot of times. They’re able to tell me stories of anecdotes that involve those rare social events that take place in their lives. Like, the early ‘70s was enormous because they all got together to try to create a union, for instance. They didn’t get out much, y’know? And you guys were —
Shary: Who were the people you were talking to? [laughs]
CBC: These were the mainstream comic book, almost nine-to-five comic guys. Obviously, we can talk about…
Shary: I mean, these were people penciling, inking, and writing their own stories?
CBC: There’s not too many of those. They would receive a script and do their job in the assembly line process.
Shary: That’s collaborative, whether or not circumstantially you’re sitting at a desk next to the collaborator or not.
CBC: I guess I’m talking about the human contact of it, the human collaboration. So often the artists received a script, they never even talk to the writer, they never even deal with the writer…
Shary: Well, I think that comes out in the material. It’s kind of an apples and oranges thing. It’s probably just my attitude, it’s probably that female cooperative attitude that I have. Although I really tend to… I’m on instant messaging with Ted Richards, so I can talk with somebody who understands me, and talking to Dan, and we really still have a sense of community, which is really feeding us. And, when I got into comics, I had no idea that I would have to undergo that solitary thing that you’re talking about. I was totally resistant to that. I mean, for years, I was married to Bobby. And Bobby and I were in adjacent rooms, anyway. We were totally collaborative, and I didn’t know whether I could actually function without him. When we got divorced, it was an astounding moment to learn that I could do a comic strip completely on my own. And even now, I bounce my work off whoever’s around.
CBC: It sounds like a healthy process. That’s why my eyebrows went up when you talked about doing this jam together, of doing this Felix the Cat story together, it must have been quite a cool thing to do.
Shary: It’s absolutely cool! It’s the best thing… No, the best thing in the world is the cosmic giggle. It’s like the second best thing, it’s a feeling of community…
CBC: What’s the “cosmic giggle”?
Shary: This is a Ted Richards term. This is how important Ted is. The cosmic giggle is when you write something and you make yourself laugh in a way that you know you’ve done something really important, really different. You’ve said something that really needs to be said, and you know it’s good right away. And you get it. You’ll know it when you have it if you hadn’t had it already. It’s amazing.
CBC: Yeah, I know that feeling… When I hang up the phone sometimes from a really, really good interview, when somebody says something, you know, some revelation comes out, just turning me around and making me think a different way, things like that.
Shary: Exactly. It’s a great feeling.
TO BE CONCLUDED

Above: Shary Flenniken in a photo by Clay Geerdes taken at the Berkeley Comic Con. Below: Shary’s signature characters.

Comic Book Creator • March 2026 • #42

Above: Shary Flenniken in 1960, hand-and-paw alongside pooch Bonnie and, in her lap, Mr. Bones.
Below: In her formative years, Shary was hugely influenced by one of her father’s favorite cartoonists, H.T. Webster [1885–1952], who was said to have produced 16,000 single panel cartoons, including this one from 1916. Note the similarity of the girl’s appearance here to “Trots and Bonnie” co-star (and oft-antagonist) Pepsi.

Photo courtesy of Shary Flenniken. Webster cartoon courtesy of John Kelly.

All courtesy of Shary Flenniken.

Above: In the 1932 U.S. Naval Academy yearbook, Shary’s father, James Alexander Flenniken [1910–74] drew this cartoon.
Inset left: Cadet Flenniken’s senior portrait and entry for that same annual.
Below: Shary’s illustration titled “Stonecutters.” She notes the piece was produced to “Practice my pen and ink chops — age 15, 1965.”

Above: Shary strumming her  guitar at her home on Abbey Street, in San Francisco, in 1972.
Below: One of her favorite comic books was Mary Jane and Sniffles. This issue is Four Color #474 [June ’53]. Inset right: Another “small person” concept that fascinated Shary was The Borrowers [’52], illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush.  Bottom: Her sister Judy, Shary, their mom, and Aunt FloMarie, at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1975.

Mary Jane and Sniffles, The Borrowers TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Photos courtesy of Shary Flenniken.

Items courtesy of Shary Flenniken,

Above: Shary shared a pic of this art pad page, composed when she was at the Burnley School of Commercial Art, in Seattle, Washington, in spring 1970. She said, “I was bored in life drawing class, and wanted to join the revolution, not join the capitalists.”
Below: Shary describes this as:  “A page from my notebook. Seattle, Capitol Hill, Summer 1970, shortly before I met the Air Pirates at the Sky River Rock Festival.”

Above: Shary contributed but a single joke to this tabloid produced during the event where she met Air Pirates Dan O’Neill, Ted Richards, and future (ex-) husband Bobby London, in 1970. Inset right: Before the Labor Day weekend (plus:11 days total!) Sky River concert, Shary had joined up with the short-lived Seattle underground paper, Sabot. This is the cover of the all-women issue,  #5 [Oct. 14, ’70]. Below: In that same ish, Shary contributed this strip, drawn before she adopted a more  H.T. Webster inspired style.

Sky River Funnies, Sabot TM & © the respective copyright holders. Sky River Funnies cover courtesy of John Kelly. “Hitchin’ Hints” © Shary Flenniken.

Mickey Mouse TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc. Air Pirates, all other characters TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Above: Shary was part of the ill-fated Air Pirates collective, though neither issue of Air Pirates contained her work (which made her exempt from the resulting lawsuit filed by Disney). This is Bobby London’s cover for #1 [July ’71], which was a virtual line-for-line appropriation of the cover art for the 1933 Big Little Book, Mickey Mouse in The Mail Pilot.
Below: To gather support for their legal defense, the Air Pirates would solicit funds at comic cons drawing sketches for donations. Shary, Bobby London, Gary Hallgren, and Dan O’Neill drew this con poster.

All photos © the estate of Clay Geerdes. Courtesy of David Miller.

Jam piece courtesy of Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Mickey Mouse TM & © Disney Enterprises, Inc. Dummy TM & © John Kelly. Photo © the estate of Clay Geerdes and courtesy of David Miller. Trots and Bonnie TM & © Shary Flenniken. Air Pirates tabloid page courtesy of John Kelly.

Above: The Air Pirates produced this jam piece at the 1974 New York Comic Art Convention. Below: A thoroughly entertaining account of the Air Pirates saga is found in John Kelly’s Dummy ’zine [#2, Sum. ’25]. Visit www.dummyzine.com.

Inset left: Back page by Shary of the Air Pirates tabloid that appeared in ’72. Previous page: Top is Shary, ’77. Bottom is (from left) Hallgren, O’Neill, Shary, and Richards. Below: Bobby London, ’71. All photos by Clay Geerdes.

Above: Shary and Dan O’Neill jammed on this color piece together, which is dated 1977 and features his “Odd Bodkins” characters, Hugh and Fred Bird, along with Shary’s Trots and Bonnie. Below: Shary’s signature characters regularly appeared in National Lampoon between1972–90, and she served as an editor from 1979–81. This is her cover for  the October ’78 “Entertainment” ish. CBC’s next issue will include her memories of those NatLamp days.

Odd Bodkins TM & © Dan O’Neill. Trots and Bonnie TM & © Shary Flenniken. National Lampoon TM & © the National Lampoon Company LLC.

once upon a long ago

The Justice Society & Me
Flash Thompson of Earth Prime recalls his introduction to the Multiple Earths of DC Comics

Justice League of America, Justice Society of America TM & © DC Comics.

by Steven Thompson
During the heady days of Batmania, National Periodical Publications (a.k.a. DC Comics) wisely chose to put Batman on or in every comic book where they could squeeze him. This led to odd crossovers such as the infamous team-up with Jerry Lewis or the issue of Bob Hope’s comic where the Caped Crusader was set to marry Nancy… as in Nancy and Sluggo!
Thankfully, it also led to the Dark Knight Detective being front and center on the cover of every single issue of Justice League of America. This, in turn, led to my buying my first-ever issue of JLA, # 45, in the spring of 1966.
The cover featured this giant, hirsute fella smacking Batman and the Flash together like they were elementary school chalkboard erasers. On the ground, unconscious in front of them, lay some guy I did not know in a green Robin Hood outfit and a teeny tiny little fella wearing blue and red. I was intrigued enough to buy the issue. Nothing that special, really. It was the following issue that would really grab my attention.
I was seven years old and out shopping at one of those new-fangled shopping centers out on the edge of town with my parents one Sunday afternoon in 1966. They were excited because, up until recently, stores around here weren’t even allowed to be open on Sundays! So we wandered through nearly every store up and down the mall, eventually going in to a dime store called Ben Franklin’s. I never knew why it was called Ben Franklin’s. In fact, I never knew why it was called a dime store as nearly everything there cost more than 10¢.
The dime stores downtown carried a whole rack of comic books. I was disappointed to see this store did not. I was tired, cranky, and bored — never a good combination for a kid. Then, as we were going through the aisle to pay for whatever my mother was buying, I spotted two beautiful comic books in a small impulse magazine rack and I begged my mother to buy them for me. She said no, so I resorted to the classic childhood method of negotiation and threw a tantrum, right there in the dime store. Surprisingly, even to me, it worked quickly and we exited the store with me flipping through Action Comics #340 (my fourth issue of that title), and Justice League of America #46.
The latter featured Batman, having been socked by some creepy little white-faced dude, landing on some fella in a gas mask while what seemed to be another Batman, only with no cape or bat symbol, having just been punched by what almost appeared to be the Incredible Hulk, with skin miscolored to make him look Caucasian.
That turned out to be the Blockbuster, of course, a then-recent addition to Batman’s rogue’s gallery. The other guy was named Solomon Grundy, after a rhyme I had never heard. Inside, I also met, for the first time, Doctor Mid-Nite, Sandman, Wildcat (the “other Batman”), Doctor Fate, Black Canary, and, most significantly, The Spectre,  all from Earth-Two.
The story was continued the following issue, with the Anti-Matter Man, in what was my very first “cosmic” comics story. Even at such a young age, I had no trouble understanding Gardner Fox’s concepts of multiple Earths. My problem turned out to be that I thought these Justice Society  heroes were much more interesting than their  Earth-One counterparts!
Luckily, as I was to soon learn, the JLA featured an annual two-part team-up between these older heroes and the new. Over the next few crossovers, I would be introduced to Hourman, Mr. Terrific, the adult Robin, Starman, the Red Tornado, the original versions of Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, the Flash, and even Superman. I began to look forward to the annual JLA-JSA get-togethers the way some kids look forward to the summer opening of the public pools.
I turned my action figures into JSA members. When I could afford Golden Age comics, I bought All-Star issues. I got all the All-Stars when scanned comic books were briefly released for Microfiche readers. When Gerry Conway finally gave the JSA its own title again, I bought some original art pages from it.
Then came Roy Thomas, the ultimate JSA fan, with his wonderful All-Star Squadron. I quit buying JLA entirely. Despite the fact that Justice Society continuity has now gotten about as convoluted as DC’s regular continuity, the characters, old and new, remain favorites to this day… all because I was bored one Sunday, once upon a long ago.

Above: Penciler Mike Sekowsky and inker Joe Giella’s cover of Justice League of America #46 [Aug. ’66], which introduced young Steven Thompson to the JSA. Inset left and bottom: If Flash had been born 20 years prior, he could’ve well become a member of the Junior Justice Society, the super-team’s fan club. Here’s a 1942 badge and ’45 certificate.

esquiring artists

Heroes of the Seventies
In 1972, upscale men’s magazine Esquire asked comics’ young Turks to create new characters

Above: Splash from “Superwoman,” drawn by Herb Trimpe, the first of three pages in the October 1971 issue of Esquire. Trimpe would later consult for the magazine, suggesting freelance artists for the comics section in the March ’72 edition. Below: The cover of that very same Esquire issue.

by Jon B. Cooke
The comic book nerd of 1972 who paid attention to news-stand offerings other than funnybooks was rewarded if the fanboy happened to crack open Esquire cover-dated March of that year. Therein, the men’s magazine pages contained a feature titled “In the Absence of Heroes for the Seventies,” a comics section which featured the work of future members of The Studio — Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, and Barry Windsor Smith — along with young Turks Ralph Reese and Alan Weiss, and a 30-something then-newbie to mainstream comics, Mike Ploog, each conjuring up a new super-hero to represent that rollicking decade.
Boomer acceptance of comics as no longer simply kid’s stuff was an outtasight development in those swingin’ days and with such prestigious periodicals as the one dubbed “The Magazine for Men,” the form found itself embraced as previously never before. The “Backstage with Esquire” page in that ish shared insight into their thinking: “Some months ago, the editors of this magazine became concerned about the poverty of our current age in heroes of either [the Tragic or the Promethean]… and appealed to the world of the comics, that fertile breeding ground of heroes, to see if any objects of unusual stature might be looming on the pulp horizon.”
Esquire continued, “Associate editor Aaron Latham asked relatively old-hand comics artist Herb Trimpe (he is 32 and has drawn The Incredible Hulk for three years) to search among the young artists in the field for people who have talent, like to draw, and have ideas about contemporary heroism.” The fact Latham turned to Trimpe for help isn’t surprising, as the incredible Herb had been recruited earlier by Latham to illustrate “Superwoman,”* a humorous comics depiction of feminist icon Gloria Steinem as super-hero, a three-pager appearing in Esquire’s October ’71 issue. (After departing that mag, Latham did eventually marry 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl and became a Hollywood screenwriter of such movies as Urban Cowboy, Perfect, and The Program. The writer passed away in 2022.)
You’ll find the sextet’s efforts on the following pages but, all the same, your humble correspondent reached out to Alan Weiss to inquire about that freelance gig of 53 years ago. “I wouldn’t have remembered the Herb Trimpe connection,” he shared, “but it makes sense… I think the world of him. He was just the most solid, nice guy.”
Of the Esquire assignment, Weiss said, “All I remember is getting the gig and doing it. Wrightson and I were rooming together at that time. Kaluta had been in the same building, too, and Jeff and Weezy Jones lived downstairs. Kaluta was on the sixth floor, we were on eight. Kaluta and Wrightson had lived together for… I don’t know… at least a year,  maybe more, before I showed up. So I was the new kid,  in that respect.”
In that 135 West 79th Street apartment building in Manhattan, the roomies worked on their respective Esquire pages in late 1971. “Bernie and I were doing them at the same time, at different sides of the room. It was like a big kind of a studio apartment, one big room, and then a couple other little rooms outside, like a gallery thing.”
Of his entry, “The Incredible Phizgink,” Weiss revealed, “Look, I know who’s working on this project. One of the guys is in the same room with me, so Bernie’s doing ‘Red-Neck.’ I knew that Jones was doing… I didn’t know what everybody was doing, but I knew the guys. So I thought, ‘I want to do something that’s more strange, wilder, farther out — something with a bit of a Dada/surrealist absurdity angle — than where any of the other guys would go. Blasting the archetypes, if I could. And I wasn’t thinking about practicality. I certainly wasn’t thinking about this being an ongoing character, but it made sense to me what Jones did, a kind of an astral travel-type character. Smith doing a robotic soldier made perfect sense… Ralph doing ‘Comrade Brother’…
“What had happened in the later ’60s/earliest ’70s, the hippies were dissipating. It was becoming commercialized, but the rock music wasn’t slowing down. It was increasing. It was getting farther out, more operatic, right? More glam rock, etc. The politics were crazy. The war was still going on. So there was creativity and there was stress. There was the whole psychoanalytic movement that had taken hold in the ’50s, though now you add Eastern thought and actual psychedelics and other drugs to the whole equation. And I’m thinking, ‘Are there any super-heroes that exhibit this?’… So I said to myself, ‘Well, what if I take a character with a kind of mental/emotional manifestation that could affect people’s lives and save them, and it’d be nonviolent’?’ Now, that’s the straight, serious side of it. But the actual look-and-feel of it was parody… I wanted a weird idea of a hero, and I wanted to see if there was a way to do a hero that saves people in a nonviolent way… So I thought this was a good exhibition of all of those things put together.
“I’ll tell you the truth: I’m a little surprised I had the guts to actually do that thing for Esquire. I guess I just never thought that there was any chance of any these concepts becoming ongoing characters or else I would’ve done something that had that potential. I wasn’t, as usual, thinking about anything practical. But I thought, to make a statement, if this guy could do it, this guy would do it. It’s like, this is the hero we really need. It’s nice if you have a guy that’s going to go and catch the crooks over there on the other side of town or fight aliens in case any show up, but I need a guy to make me feel a little better, man. I’d like somebody that could make us, help us, to be a little more peaceful, a little more understanding, a little more compassionate.”
By then, the Esquire gig was Weiss’s most-seen job outside regular comics. “It was great exposure,” he admitted, “but it didn’t mean anything. It came and went. Well, I got a couple of gigs from Esquire and maybe a gig or two from National Lampoon… But, other than that, ‘The Super-Heroes of the ’70s’ came and went, and nothing happened, though you think you are going to be [noticed]… Look, I’ll give you an example at a much lower level, okay?
“At the time, we figured, if we do comics that are going to get noticed… I mean, a lot of people read comics. And so Bernie did a cover for Tower of Shadows [#9, Jan. ’71]. Now, two blocks away from us was upper Broadway… where there was this big newsstand, and that’s where we’d walk over and look at their comics and magazines and whatever else. So we had this plan. He drew a cover for Tower of Shadows and had this monster coming up out of the sewer, coming out of the manhole (Bernie wrote my initials into the manhole cover). I think it was a Marie Severn layout.
“Among the astonished crowd, we drew ourselves in clothing we actually owned. So I drew my own self-portrait and he inked the whole thing. Here’s the two of us standing together looking astonished with this monster coming out. So, when the book came out, we put on those same clothes, walked over to this newsstand, and made a scene, and I pick up the comic book, waving it around to just whoever’s at  the newsstand.
“I shouted, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe this! Doesn’t this look like him? And doesn’t this look like me? And look, it’s the same pants! They got the stripes’… and this and that… But New Yorkers didn’t give a damn. They didn’t take a second to look at it. They just didn’t want to hear of it. That’s when reality impedes your iconic and idealistic idea of what it’s like to be some sort of artist… Reactions like that knock you right down to ground level again.”

*Today, Trimpe’s then-partner Linda Fite, back in the day herself a writer and staffer at the House of Ideas, has zero recollection of the “Absence of Heroes” feature, but had this to say about “Superwoman”: “I have no memory of anything interesting around that job Herb did, except that he was enthusiastic about the assignment, did quite a lot of research, and I think he said that he liked working with Aaron Latham (I actually remembered that name!), though he didn’t like some of the snarkier writing (he himself had nothing whatsoever against Ms. Steinem, of course), but hey! Esquire paid well (especially compared to Marvel, of course), and he liked the national exposure. I think he did a good job, don’t you?”

Esquire TM & © Heart Communications, Inc.

Esquire TM & © Heart Communications, Inc. Dragon Slayer © the estate of Catherine Jeffrey Jones. “Escape,” Werewolf by Night, Tower of Shadows TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Swamp Thing, El Diablo TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Opening page to the comics section in Esquire. Inset left and bottom: Alan Weiss relates an anecdote about Bernie Wrightson and himself having a bit of fun when Tower of Shadows #9 [Jan. ’71], featuring caricatures of the two artists on the cover, hit the stands around Halloween, in 1970. Below is Marie Severin’s rough sketch for that same ish’s cover.

TM & © the respective copyright holder.

darrick patrick’s ten questions

Once Sporty, Now Sappy
Behind the ultra-violence in his comics artwork, John McCrea is a decidedly domestic fella

This spread: Above is cover of the first Dead Eyes collection [’20]; cover art for Hitman #1 [Apr. ’96]; cover detail, 2000 AD #2361 [Dec. 4 ’23]; photo of the artist’s profile; and art from John Constantine: Hellblazer — Vol. 18 [’18].  All artwork by John McCrea.

by DARRICK PATRICK
[Born in Northern Ireland, John McCrea is an Eisner Award-winning artist who has contributed his talents to titles such as Hitman, The Demon, 2000 AD, Superboy, Dicks, The Boys: Herogasm, Mythic, Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, Crisis, and more. Along with writer Gerry Duggan, he recently kicked off the newest arc of the duo’s Image Comics project, Dead Eyes. — Darrick.]
Darrick Patrick: What was the path that led you to working professionally within comic books?
John McCrea: I was always drawing from a young  age. When I was four or five, my mum and dad bought me a copy of The Avengers from the local newsagent as they thought it might inspire my drawing. I looked through this British reprint and was completely smitten. I decided, on the spot, that this was what I wanted to do with myself when I grew up. Of course, I also got obsessed with reading and collecting comics, much to the dismay of my folks. Especially when I entered my teens and found schoolwork to be extremely boring.
I was consistently drawing daft comic versions of my favorite Marvels like the Incredible Bulk and the Red Eagle. I did art at school, but the teachers were dismissive of comics and wanted me to draw typewriters and still life stuff, which bored me senseless. I tried to lever comics into my artwork as much as possible. I copied a Conan drawing by John Buscema for an end-of-year project which got me a 90% because the teacher didn’t realize it was copied from a comic.
As I neared the finish of school, I realized that I needed to do something about trying to break into comics. I decided to send three to four pages of artwork to a different publisher each week. I continued doing that with few breaks until I was 21 and got my first gig from a small outfit called London Editions drawing “The Centurions.” There was one big convention each year in the U.K. and I attended that show with my slowly improving portfolio. I also would visit the 2000 AD and British Marvel offices to pester them for work. Eventually, 2000 AD gave me a short “Future Shock” and then British Marvel followed shortly after with two short stories for G.I. Joe. At the same time, I was also running Belfast’s first comic shop with my friend, Fred Collier, and one of our customers was a fellow called Garth Ennis. He knew I was drawing comics and had some work published. He had an idea for a story about the troubles in Northern Ireland which he wanted to pitch to Crisis magazine. He sent in a synopsis with me attached as artist, and the editor, Steve MacManus, went for it. The rest is history.
Darrick: Who are some of the people that greatly influenced you while growing up?
John: I think the most important person in my life as far as drawing went was a fella called Cedric Wilson, who was a friend of the family. He was originally a sign painter and fine artist, and he encouraged my drawing a great deal. Sometimes, during the long 1970s’ summers, my brothers and I would go and stay with him and his wife, Eva, at their house in Ballyhalbert (a small coastal town an hour away from Belfast), and Flea (his nickname) and I would draw comics together. I also remember we designed a board game based on the old black-&-white film, The Blob, which we had watched on television and I was smitten by. Flea would make up bedtime stories in the evenings featuring Artie Bell, who was a kind of magical teenager. Very much a Harry Potter precursor. Flea’s imagination certainly inspired me and I still share my comic work with him, to this day.
Darrick: Do you have any words of advice for other individuals looking to make a career with their artistic abilities?
John: I would imagine anyone reading this who was hoping to break into comics would be in their teens or 20s. I would think they already know to draw all the time, draw from life, look at other art outside of comics, etc. So I think my advice would be to understand how a freelancer’s life and the financial side of things work. My main advice when you start earning is to always put 20–25% of your income (or whatever is applicable in your country) into a separate tax account so that, at the end of the year, you have your money ready to pay the evil taxman. I know so many people who have not done this and then ended up in trouble… myself included. I do so now and it makes life much less stressful. Less stress = bueno!
Darrick: How do you spend time on a typical workday?
John: Before kids, I used to start work when my wife left for work. When she came home, I would stop. Occasionally, I would work later in the evening. When time pressures were tight, I used to do the occasional all-nighter.
Since having kids, however, I work whenever I get  the chance! I work from home, so my day is constantly broken up by ferrying kids to and from school… and dealing with any number of problems involving young folks and animals. If I am lucky, I get four to five hours a day at the drawing board.
I got long Covid three or four years ago and was bedridden for six months, sleeping 19 hours a day. Since then, I’ve been slowly building up my strength and ability to work again, to the point where I can finally do a full day. The time of all-nighters — or even working after 10.30 in the evening — is long past.
Darrick: For new readers who may not be familiar with your work, what are some projects of yours that you would recommend to begin with?
John: I am most well-known for Hitman, written by Garth and published by DC. There is a brand-new omnibus out with a second due later this year, which is quite exciting. Also, my run with Garth on The Demon is a barrel of laughs, so I would recommend that, too. We also did a Hulk Smash! mini-series and a Spider-Man: Tangled Web three-parter which were pretty good. Both for Marvel, for the uninitiated! I’ve done some pretty good “Judge Dredd” stories recently for 2000 AD, as well. For Image, Mythic, with Phil Hester, and Dead Eyes, with Gerry Duggan, are two standouts. The new arc of Dead Eyes started in September 2024, and Gerry and I are both quite proud of it. I did a number of covers for 2000 AD and DC recently, which I am quite pleased with.
Darrick: Who are a few of the people in the comics industry that you hold a high deal of respect for?
John: There are so many people in the comics industry whose work I admire, the list would be endless. However, I think Sean Phillips and Charlie Adlard are the two folks that I know who I admire the most due to their incredible work ethic. Both produce monthly books and I am not aware of them ever missing a deadline. Amazing!
Darrick: Outside of creating artwork, what are your  other interests?
John: I used to be quite sporty. I lifted weights, swam, and snowboarded. However, the dreaded kids came along and most of that fell by the wayside. I enjoy reading,  watching the occasional TV show, and walking the dog.  I am a suburban dad.
Darrick: What is your oldest memory?
John: I think it is walking down Kincora Avenue to my nursery school, taking off my wellies and coat, and playing with a train set. I suppose I was three years old. I had a great childhood, living in Northern Ireland, in the ’70s.
Darrick: Tell us something about you that most people don’t know.
John: Despite drawing extremely violent comics, I am a sentimental fool and will cry at the drop of a hat.
Darrick: What comic book character do you relate  to most?
John: Early Steve Ditko Peter Parker. He was a nerd and an outcast, which is how I felt. Stan and Steve were canny and knew their market!

Dead Eyes TM & © Gerry Duggan and John McCrea. Hitman TM & © DC Comics.

Hitman, Batman TM & © DC Comics. Judge Dredd, 2000 AD TM & © Christopher Kingsley & Jason Kingsley.

comix for a democratic society

The Radical American
A visit with graphic novel champion and early underground comix advocate Paul Buhle

Inset right: Keep in mind that Buhle’s Radical America Komiks [V3 #1, Dec. ’68] appeared within a  year of ZAP Comix #1 [Feb. ’68] first hitting the streets of San Francisco!

Above: SDS button.  Below: Buhle posing with two of his productions, including  Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World [’05].

by Jon B. Cooke
To tell the truth, I can’t recall precisely how I came to know Paul Merlyn Buhle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he emailed first after the Providence Journal published a feature on me in late 2003. Buhle, with whom I shared a keen interest in underground comix and graphic novels, was a senior lecturer at Brown University, our state’s Ivy League school. Phone calls ensued and we’d always make vague commitments to have lunch together that invariably went unscheduled, but we’d remain friendly and finally pressed flesh when he invited me up to meet the great Harvey Pekar in 2007.
Buhle is an interesting cat: a historian of the U.S. labor movement, avowed Democratic Socialist, and founder of the SDS journal, Radical America, of which he entirely remade the Vol. 3, #1 [Nov.–Dec. ’68] edition as an underground comic book, Radical America Komiks, which was packaged and edited by Gilbert Shelton. He’s also authored and/or edited a boatload of graphic novels and anthologies over the decades, so I thought I’d pay him a visit and find out what made this academic gent so enamored with comix.
Buhle described the town of his 1944 birth and upbringing — Champaign, Illinois — as situated in “a rock-ribbed Republican county, but with a major university town and university bookstore where I discovered, in my mid-teens, books about the Beat Generation, Jules Feiffer’s Sick, Sick, Sick paperback, and Shaft, a college humor magazine that was slightly daring. Occasionally, there’d be a book of poems by Diane de Prima or Allen Ginsberg. In other words, even though it was a very Republican town, there was a little hint of something else.”
A major development came at 16. “One day, in 1960, I was walking around downtown with no intent whatsoever, and there was a civil rights picket line across the street from a local department store, which had refused to hire anybody Black, except as an elevator operator. And, boy, it didn’t take me even one thought to join that picket line. It was the happiest day since I pitched a no-hitter in Little League, and I knew it within five minutes. Suddenly, I was there with these people who I admired.”
Also making an impact was science fiction and comics. “There was a fairly good-sized drugstore in the deepest Champaign, where not only was there Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Listen, Yankee by C. Wright Mills, but also a twirling rack of sci-fi novels, and some of them were socially involved sci-fi novels.” And then there was MAD.
Good Days and MAD
“That same store had the four or five volumes of reprinted MAD comics,” Buhle said. “I didn’t know there was an original comic book! I just looked openly as this little MAD Reader… I think I read those four paperbacks a hundred times, because they literally explained modern life and modern America to me through a critique of not only commercial culture, but militarism… and everything, everything, everything was in there.”
(Still, it was only after he picked up Russ Cochran’s oversize MAD reprints in the ’80s, when Buhle discovered there were items omitted from the ’50s paperbacks. “There’s so many things that were left out, but it probably didn’t make sense to include the ‘Special Art Issue’ [#22, Apr. ’55] about Willy [Elder], all of which seems to be a critique of abstract expressionism, among other things.”)
Regarding the MAD creator, Buhle said, “In 1980 or ’81, I got money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to run a two-year program called the ‘Oral History of the American Left.’ So I could spend a fair amount of time out of Providence, in New York, in the labor library at the Tamiment Library at NYU. So I got Harvey Kurtzman to come, and we had a nice interview about which somebody later said that Harvey had been interviewed a hundred times, but nobody else ever asked him about politics. And I think that, literally, is true. Not that he had anything so didactic to say, but that at least he could talk about his mother reading The Daily Worker over supper and the kind of leftist Jewish milieu in the Bronx that was among the origins of his anti-racism and his satires on capitalism, and so forth.”
At this point, Buhle jumps from his chronology to make sure he shared an anecdote about Kurtzman. “I think I’ve told this story so many times, but I don’t want to fail to tell it to you. Radical America Komiks is published and I’m in touch with [Kitchen Sink publisher] Denis Kitchen, mainly because we’re so close to each other [in Wisconsin]… So this is 1969, and Denis said, ‘We could send a copy of this to Harvey Kurtzman’… and then he reported to me that Harvey found it very interesting. So I wrote Harvey a note — such a presumptuous note! — him being my childhood hero, he and Willie Mays being my first two childhood heroes, and asked him why he was involved with ‘Little Annie Fanny,’ which was so degrading to women. (Those were the days!) And he wrote back, ‘I had to make a living. All these other magazines failed and I had to make a living.’ He didn’t say it was a good, he didn’t say, ‘I’m proud of it.’ He just said, ‘I had to make a living.’”
THE Making of a Radical
“So there I was,” Buhle related, “hating high school and starting college at the University of Illinois, in the spring of 1962, when I was 17 years old. And, within a year, after I’ve been going to concerts of the Folk Song Club with a young woman, Mari Jo Kupski, along with many other people, going to where all the bohemians hung out on campus… she and I and a bunch of people all decided we would go to San Francisco, in 1963, to find the Beat Generation, who were already gone. But City Lights Bookstore was definitely still there and wonderful to visit. So we got together and have been married for 60 years.
“Here’s a story for you: there was no phone in this apartment and my parents got very worried about me. They hadn’t heard from me in 10 days or so and didn’t know what else to do. So they called the City Lights Bookstore and said to the person on duty, ‘We’re very worried about our boy.’ Whoever it was said, ‘I just saw Paul Buhle the other day and he’s just fine.’” Buhle added with a chuckle, “That’s probably the same thing they told 1,000 other parents!”
By the time JFK was assassinated, Buhle had joined the Socialist Labor Party. “It had a real cerebral appeal. After all, the long-dead — since1914 — [SLP leader] Daniel De Leon had only left behind a body of work, but it was a body of work that was the central philosophical idea of the [Industrial Workers of the World], which was that political government would be dissolved, replaced by these workers’ councils making all their own decisions. And it’s true that the SLP had no activity except to run candidates and pass out leaflets but, for a cerebral kid like myself, that was appealing. If we had managed to remain in California and go to Berkeley, Mari Jo and I, I’m sure I would’ve been part of a much more exciting crowd by the following year.”
Instead, the couple moved back to the Land of Lincoln, where he pursued his bachelor’s degree. “So I probably stayed in the SLP long enough to get signatures to get the party on the ballot in Illinois, in 1964. And, by that time, that seemed terribly silly. And the anti-war movement was coming in just a few months.” Still, becoming a socialist guided his decisions in higher ed. Along with studying De Leon, “My more general idea that I developed, when I was 20, was to write a history of socialism in the United States — a dissertation finally accepted in 1975 — which plunged me into happy decades of archival work and gathering the life stories of living people. I founded the Oral History of the American Left archive, as I got grant money to travel around and interview people, overwhelmingly left-wing octogenarians eager to talk.” Many of those interview subjects spoke Yiddish and were “incredibly fascinating and loving people.”
Buhle admitted, “That was a happy time. How all this connects with comics is a good question and a good mystery. I don’t know the answer… the other thing I would say is I asked Kurtzman how he came up with that ‘Special Art Issue’ of MAD, and he said, ‘When you have blank pages, you could come up with a lot of ideas.’ So I thought, ‘How many times did I think that as the editor of Radical America?’”
RAK TIME
Comics came into play when Buhle received a copy of Gilbert Shelton’s self-published effort Feds ’n’ Heads in the summer of 1968. “A smallish comic with hippies, cops, and middle Americans altering their minds and lives through the power of LSD,” Buhle wrote in his introduction to a 2018 reprinting  of Radical America Komiks.  “It was amazingly innocent  and charming.”
The previous year, upon Mari Jo and his move to Madison, Wisconsin, Buhle had launched Radical America, a Students for a Democratic Society journal dedicated to examining the history of the American left. After Shelton mailed a review copy to the address listed in RA, Buhle’s apartment, the editor had already been puzzling over how to widen RA’s readership. “I was trying to think of what could I produce that people would actually want to buy, beyond a few graduate students. When Gilbert sent me Feds ’n’ Heads from Texas, I saw what that could be. I was just, like, wow!”
As it happened, RA had received a $2,000 grant, as Buhle replied to Shelton asking for copies of Feds ’n’ Heads to show to comrades and sell at UW-Madison. “Then I said to Gilbert, ‘I just got this grant. How about if I give this to you and you produce a Radical America comic as an issue of RA?’ Gilbert was about to leave Austin to drive to California. So he agreed and that money was used to form Rip Off Press.”
In that RAK reprint intro, Buhle wrote of Shelton and himself, “We were both entirely trusting, and neither of us was going to make any money. The cash went straight in the production of RAK, which appeared as the Jan.–Feb., 1969, special issue, and as one of the first productions of the soon totemic Rip Off Press.”
Today, the equivalent of $2,000 in 1968 dollars is over $18,500, and Shelton made good use of the grant money, purchasing the work of fellow Austin cartoonist (and Rip Off co-founder) Jack “Jaxon” Jackson; Chicago comix artists Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch; future ZAP collective members Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and Victor Moscoso;as well as Rory Hayes and Frank Stack, and he had 30,000 copies* run off on the newly acquired Rip Off printing press.
Undoubtedly, the finest material in that one-shot was the comics by its editor, with over half the book featuring Shelton’s work, stories that included a brutal satire of war comics, “Smiling Sergeant Death and His Merciless Mayhem Patrol,” which guest-starred his Wonder Wart-Hog, and a “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” eight-pager. Buhle said, “Other than Shelton, his RAK wasn’t much. The rest of it was filler, but his stories are very strong, very, very strong.”
One reader of the day’s reaction was shared by Jay Kinney. “I first read RAK shortly after it came out in 1969, when I was an 18-year-old college freshman… I found RAK just as mind-blowing as the other underground comix coming out, including Feds ’n’ Heads, early ZAP Comix, Yellow Dog, and Gothic Blimp Works. I was familiar with SDS, though not with Radical America magazine, and I recall thinking, ‘Cool! SDS and underground comix are linking up!”
As Kinney also relates in that RAK reprint foreword, mere months after the comix was distributed (in part as a fundraiser for the organization), SDS splintered in spectacular fashion, with the most extreme faction morphing into the Weather Underground. “Small wonder that there was never a second issue of RAK,” Kinney wrote. “Buhle discussed the possibility with Denis Kitchen, founder of Kitchen Sink Comics… but a second RAK never panned out.”
Publisher Kitchen shared, “I do recall the possibility and taking it seriously enough to commission a cover by Dave Sheridan — a gorgeous cover of world powers playing chess, I believe — but then, when I reached out to possible contributors, I could not find any of the prospective artists at the time interested in doing overtly political comics.”
In the conclusion of his foreword, Kinney opined, “The bottom line is that Radical America Komiks was one of the earliest manifestations of underground comix lunacy and, by making the comic possible, Buhle played an unsung role in both helping underground comix gain momentum and in expanding the limits of the left’s interaction with popular culture. That is no small achievement.”
The New Comics
Radical America published as a bi-monthly journal for most of its 30-plus year run, ending in 1999, but Buhle had left as editor in 1973, though, just after his departure,there was another all-comics issue. This one — vol. 7, #3 [May–June ’73] — was subtitled Underhanded History of the USA, a 64-pager by Nick Thorkelson and Jim O’Brien. “That eventually was reprinted and sold like 10,000 copies,” Buhle explained. “It was the first comics radical history of the United States.” (The black-&-white contents could be said to resemble Larry Gonick’s multitude of cartoon histories to come.)
Before he departed RA, word had gotten around academia that Buhle had delved into the underground comix realm and he was asked by the editors of TriQuarterly, a literary magazine out of Northwestern University, to scribe an article to be collected in Literature in Revolution [1972]. The result was a learned 44-page essay titled, “The New Comics and American Culture,” a survey of the emerging genre as viewed through a political lens, with special emphasis on Robert Crumb, Shelton, and Chicago’s Bijou Funnies boys — Lynch and Williamson — plus giving a nice overview of the scene to date, particularly overtly radical material like Spain Rodriguez’s “Trashman” and Trina Robbins’ It Ain’t Me Babe.
Buhle’s exploration of underground comix continued in a new journal he co-founded, Cultural Correspondence, which was launched in August ’75 out of his Providence digs. A sort of Journal of Popular Culture as observed through the prism of radical politics, the publication’s fifth issue [Summer/Fall ’77] was devoted not only to polka music, drag racing, and women in country and western music, but mainly to “Underground Cartoonists: Ten Years Later.”
Sporting a cover by Justin Green, the spotlight feature included an introduction* by Daniel Czitrom, who concluded, “Comics art is the most natural and plausible avenue for pursuing that critical alliance of political and aesthetic radicalism urgent to our times.”  But the main course was Buhle’s comprehensive mail Q+A with top comix creators Bill Griffith, Justin Green, Jay Kinney, and R. Crumb. Today, the editor states, “I was just launching the ‘Oral History of the American Left,’ at NYU, and I suppose I was in an interviewing mood in those years.”
There’s a curious emphasis in the interviews on surrealism and the avant-garde, which Buhle conceded was, in part, to accommodate surrealists Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, who handled CC production (with Franklin editing an issue and writing for numerous.) “You could say it was mainly an agreement with the Rosemonts,” Buhle explained. “They did the layout, arranged the typesetting, etc., and, in return, got quite a few pages… They had something to offer, which is to say Franklin had a lot to offer, in his view of U.S. popular culture, mainstream comics in particular.” (Franklin would zero in on childhood favorites, writing about Scrooge McDuck and Powerhouse Pepper, to name but two.)
Perhaps to counteract the exclusively male comix artists showcased in #5, Cultural Correspondence #9 [Spr. ’79], behind its cover by Jay Kinney, featured a section devoted to “Women’s Humor,” which included interviews with eight female underground cartoonists, among them Trina, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Melinda Gebbie, with informed questions posed by CC co-editor Marcia Blair.
(Other comics-related material in the journal was the #10–11 [Fall ’79] “Surrealism in Comics” essay by Franklin Rosemont and, in #12–14 [Summer ’81], the last ish of CC’s original run, which included a lengthy letter by Crumb with excerpts from his sketchbook.)
Cultural Correspondence was resurrected a few years later, lasting three issues, a run linked to the Political Art Documentation/Distribution organization. “It is interesting that my CC ends and another is born,” Buhle said. “First of all with the Radical Humor Festival and accompanying ‘pretend catalogue,’ and then two more issues of the new group, around PAD/D, in New York City, with Seth Tobocman as the key artist. I had hardly heard of the WW3 crowd.” (Buhle refers to Big Apple-based World War 3 Illustrated,* a still ongoing annual and politically radical comics anthology, and its co-founder Tobocman.)
BACK IN THE GAME
By his own admission, Buhle had dropped out of the comix scene for an extended time, as other projects demanded his attention. “By 1981, I had received the first of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to interview [socialist] old timers, travel, etc., a consuming task.” He said. “Though I was also writing somewhat for The Nation and Village Voice, I seem to have dropped out of comics in some way, for a little while, resuming in the 1990s, after spending time with Ben Katchor, who lived in Providence part-time in 1990.”
Back in the ’60s a frequent comics fanzine contributor, Ben Katchor had evolved to become among the most celebrated of comic book cartoonists, renowned for Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer and his contributions to RAW, Art Spiegelman and FranÇoise Mouly’s edgy comix anthology. New Yorker Katchor also was tangentially involved in the formation of WW3 Illustrated, a publication among whose editors and artists Buhle virtually plundered for his various comics projects beginning with his 2004 anthology edited with WW3’s Nicole Schulman, Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World.
In essence, seeing Radical America Komiks as a return to his boyhood love of MAD comics, Buhle considered his Wobblies as “absolutely, totally” a similar homecoming to a form for which he is so passionate. That revival was aided by an impending retirement as senior lecturer at Brown University and, thereafter, he’s been spending his senior years devoting considerable attention to packaging an impressive number of graphic novels (mostly non-fiction, to be precise) and anthologies.
Ups and Downs
Curiously, Buhle’s return was initiated at the suggestion of a pot entrepreneur. “If that erstwhile marijuana dealer had not approached me in 2003 and said the Wobblies centenary was coming up [on June 27, 2005], I wouldn’t have thought of it.” But the well-heeled dope salesman was willing to invested $5,000. “I just resumed my normal Radical America /Cultural Correspondence-style role, only this time with artists instead of writers. I was already in touch with World War 3, which gave me Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman, Sabrina Jones, and others, and Nicole Schulman, who I enrolled as co-editor. At the same time, I got back in touch with the survivors of underground comix still drawing and were known as lefties — Trina, Sharon Rudahl, and Spain. There wasn’t anybody else that I thought of as being actively on the left.”
“Within a five-year period,” Buhle said of his comics work of the mid- to late ’00s, “I was able to publish the Wobblies book, Emma Goldman biography, SDS, The Beats, the [Howard] Zinn comic, Yiddishkeit, and one or two others — bang! bang! bang!” Though it only sold in the neighborhood of 10,000 copies, Wobblies was critically well-received, with the other books greeted in mixed fashion.
Amid this tremendously prolific period, Buhle found time to co-author The Art of Harvey Kurtzman [’09], with long-time buddy Denis Kitchen, and also to put together the charming Comics in Wisconsin [’09], a trade paperback about (you guessed it) the surprisingly involved history of funnybooks in the Badger State, and Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form [’08], a heavily illustrated collection of Buhle essays.
PARTNERING WITH PEKAR
Among Buhle’s most frequent associates in comics work of later years was Harvey Pekar, autobiographical writer of American Splendor, the fabled curmudgeon’s long-running comics magazine series. The two had first connected when Buhle and his wife, Mari Jo, were preparing the Encyclopedia of the American Left and enlisted Pekar to participate. “We are talking 1987, maybe,” Buhle shared. “I knew Harvey was a serious guy, a left-wing guy of sorts, who was interested in various parts of U.S. leftist history and happy to write about them. He had two lit-history assignments and did them well. By 1990, either in the Village Voice or The Nation, I began to write about him.”
Buhle continued, “Everything changed with Wobblies and my comics. Harvey wanted work that paid, and I was eager to get his collaboration. From 2005 until the week he died, we were more or less in touch. He got the money and paid the artists (who mainly gained from working with him) across the scope of SDS, The Beats, Studs Terkel’s Working, and Yiddishkeit, plus several minor projects, including FDR For Beginners and the three-volume Jews and American Popular Culture (he co-authored the intro and maybe was an advisor). Using what little prerogative that I possessed at Brown University and elsewhere, I invited him to speak several times… With all his quirkiness, and partly because of it, he meant the world to me. Yiddishkeit, doubtless because it was published by Abrams (and with an editor who had a Yiddish-singing uncle…) is the most beautiful of my books and destined to remain pretty much my favorite, a very tough choice.”
Comics Missionary
Since Pekar’s demise in 2010, Buhle has continued his comics forays, notably working with Noah Van Sciver,* Sharon Rudahl, Anne Timmons, Milton Knight, Nick Thorkelson, Sabrina Jones, and others, each book emanating a distinctly progressive point of view, all indicating the editor continues to fight the good fight. In one of our numerous conversations, the academic expressed a hope regarding his comics.
“Ben Katchor once told me of a scary possibility, which is that teenagers are now [preoccupied with] video games and, therefore, the average age of the typical graphic novel buyer and reader has edged upward. Ben thinks it’s 30; I would say it’s between 25 and 30. The implication is that these are now ‘art books,’ which happen to be ‘comic art books.’ That would be the publisher’s label. So mine is a line of ‘art books’ and, because of the generational changes, they’re ‘comic art books’ as opposed to being just comics. Whatever they want to call it is fine.
“That said, I’d like to think that future 16-year-olds, even if they’re given the books I’ve packaged by their grandparents, will find things in the books that will be meaningful to them. That’s my working assumption. It has to be! What am I going to do if I don’t think that? That’s the only thing that churns me on. I ain’t making the money from this; it’s just the wish that somebody will discover it. Maybe like when I discovered the  Ballantine MAD paperbacks and  was blown away by Kurtzman.”
COMING IN THE NEAR FUTURE!
The impressive list of Paul Buhle’s published comics productions and their contributors is way too lengthy to adequately cover here, as each deserve commentary by the editor/anthologist,  so please look for proper coverage in a soon-to-come issue of Comic Book Creator.

Radical America Komiks TM & © the respective copyright holder. Photo by JBC.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman © Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle. The MAD Reader TM & © E.C. Publications, Inc.

Top: Buhle joined with Denis Kitchen, longtime art agent for Harvey Kurtzman, to produce a biography published in 2009.  Above: Starting in 1954,  Ballantine published a series  of paperbacks reprinting MAD comics. Below: Paul and Mari Jo Buhle in a photo dated Dec. 1969.

Above: That’s Paul Buhle under the bowler hat posing with Aline Kominsky-Crumb and her chilled husband, Robert Crumb, at their Winters, California, abode before the famed couple moved to France.
Inset right: Gilbert Shelton’s brutally satiric “Smiling Sergeant Death and His Merciless Mayhem Patrol” was the opening feature in Radical America Komiks [Jan. ’69].
Below: If not for Shelton’s chance sending a copy of his self-published comic book, Feds ’n’ Heads [’68], it’s quite possible that a comix edition of Radical America would never have occurred.

*Technically, according to Jay Kinney in the RAK reprint, Rip Off printed the covers, while either Waller or Quinn, Bay Area web printers, printed the newsprint guts of RAK. Later on in 1969 there was a second RAK printing (by Print Mint) of 15,000 copies, which made Radical America, Vol. 3, #1, far and away the best-selling issue in the journal’s history, dwarfing their next top-seller by a multiple of five.

Feds ’n’ Heads, “Smiling Sergeant Death and His Merciless Mayhem Patrol” TM & © Gilbert Shelton.

Jay Kinney self-caricature © Jay Kinney. Cultural Correspondence © the respective copyright holders.

*Czitrom’s piece was concerned primarily with Arcade, the Comics Revue, editors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith’s newsstand comix anthology about to take its last after producing seven remarkable issues. The commentary did reveal that the quarterly was planned to become an annual, which never transpired. In the interview that followed, Griffith was optimistic about the anthology’s future: “At this time, Arcade’s future looks bright — we have firm offers to come out annually, in paperback format, or to go twice-yearly, also in paperback.”

Above: A lengthy essay by Buhle on underground comix, nicely illustrated by the discussed cartoonists, appeared in the book, Literature in Revolution [’72]. Inset left: Jay Kinney depicted his lonesome in this illustration that graced Cultural Correspondence #5 [Summer/Fall ’77]. Below: That same issue’s cover, rendered by Justin Green, features Buhle with microphone in hand and copy of his journal in his back pocket.

Above: Cultural Correspondence, in its three-issue second run, became connected with the Radical Humor Festival. This poster from 1982 promoting the annual event was drawn by none other than the late, great Howard Cruse.
Next page: Caricature of Buhle by Steve Chappell, and photos of the legendary Harvey Pekar with Buhle and with Ye Ed, taken at a SDS symposium held at Brown University, in April, 2007.
Below: Buhle’s reentry into the comics sphere was Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World [’05].

*Not to boast too much, Ye Ed. is, with the help of founding editors Tobocman and Peter Kuper slowly compiling a book on the nearly 50-year history of WW3.

All © the respective copyright holders.

Paul Buhle caricature by Steve Chappell.

* Van Sciver said, “Mr. Buhle is the most generous collaborator I’ve ever worked with. He’s very knowledgeable, patient, and kind. He has taught me a lot and it’s been an honor working with him.”

Paul Buhle Comics Bibliography

Buhle is the editor/co-editor of following comics. Artist listed only in single-artist books.
Wobblies! A Graphic History of the IWW [’05]
A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography  of Emma Goldman [’05] Sharon Rudahl
Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography [’07] Sabrina Jones
Che: A Graphic Biography [’08] Spain Rodriguez
Students for a Democratic Society:  A Graphic History (with Harvey Pekar) [’08]
The Beats: A Graphic History [’08]
A People’s History of American Empire:  A Graphic Adaptation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States [’09]  Mike Konopacki
Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation (co-edited by Harvey Pekar) [’10]
Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land [’11] (co-edited by Harvey Pekar)
Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw & Forest Hero [’12]
Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith [’12)
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal  for Beginners [’14], Sabrina Jones
Abraham Lincoln for Beginners [’15],  Sharon Rudahl
The Young CLR James: A Graphic Novelette [’16] (pamphlet) Milton Knight
A Full Life: James Connolly, the Irish Rebel [’15],  (pamphlet) Tom Keough
Bohemians: A Graphic History  (co-edited by David Berger) [’14]
Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of  Rosa Luxemburg [’16] Kate Evans
Leonard: A Lawyer in History [’15]  (co-edited by Michael S. Smith) Seth Tobocman
Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography  of Paul Robeson [’20] Sharon Rudahl
Johnny Appleseed: Green Dreamer of the American Frontier [’18], Noah Van Sciver
Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography [’19]  Noah Van Sciver
Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia [’19] Nick Thorkelson
Brigadistas! [’22] Anne Timmons
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk:  A  Graphic Interpretation [’23]
The Bund: Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance (with Sharon Rudahl) [’23]  Michael Kluckner
Black Coal and Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars  (with Raymond Tyler) [’24] Summer McClinton
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous History of  the United States: A Graphic Adaptation [’24] Paul Peart-Smith
Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance (co-edited by Raymond Tyler) [’25]
Democratic Socialists of America:  A Graphic History (with Raymond Tyler) [’24] Noah Van Sciver
Forthcoming:
Grace Lee Boggs (from Wayne State Univ. Press)
Malcolm X (from Rutgers University Press)
CLR James (from Rutgers University Press)
William Morris (from Pluto Press) Nick Thorkelson
“With” Credit
Marcus Rediker/Dave Lester series:
Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay [’20]
Under the Banner of King Death [’22]
Revolution by Fire: New York’s  Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741 [’24]
Slave Uprisings on Shipboard [forthcoming]
Scholarly comics or collections
Jews and American Comics. [’09]
The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius  of Comics (co-edited by Denis Kitchen) [’11]
Comics in Wisconsin [’18]

incoming

About Skrenes & ‘Funnyboox’™
Plus another of Joe Frank’s always-appreciated, ever-dependable LOCs gets trimmed by Ye Ed

This page: In 2016, superstar comics artist Neal Adams had his own “Variant Cover” series, which primarily included pastiches of the man’s own iconic DC covers from his early years. Below is the legend’s Strange Adventures #207 [Dec. ’67], where he used the likenesses of many DC staffers of that era. His Deathstroke #15  [Apr. ’16]  cover, above, features  DC folk from the last 50 years.

[Ulp! My bad for being extremely late in including Dennis Summers’ missive, which follows… Ye Ed.]
Dennis  Summers
I just wanted to drop you a quick note about the Mary Skrenes interview [CBC #33]. I only pick up fanzines occasionally when there’s something pretty compelling. I’m an old guy who doesn’t spend too much time with comics any longer. But Steve Gerber got my attention (I also sort of knew him, as I was very involved with Detroit monthly cons in the late ’70s/early ’80s that were held by Stu Shapiro — who went on to fame and misfortune — and who brought Gerber to town a couple/few times). But that’s clearly not why I’m writing.
The Skrenes interview just knocked my socks off. It was so refreshing to get, not just a woman’s perspective, but an outsider’s/insider’s perspective on that very interesting time in comics. And her life is just so different than most typical interviewees. (And, by the way, I too can remember exactly where I was when I heard the first Pretenders album.)
[Glad you dug it! At the suggestion of Skrenes pal Alan Weiss, no stranger to smart, interesting women he — hell, he married one… hi, Pauline! — plans are in the works for interviews with a few other femmes who were among the Young Turks in the ’70s, including Lark Russell and Heather DeWitte. It’s vital to get diverse perspectives that adds dimension to CBC. — Y.E.]
Jeff Goodman
Just to let you know: it’s your forays into underground and alt comix (and National Lampoon, etc.) that I look forward to the most, and usually the reason I buy an issue of Comic Book Creator. The Michael Dowers article [CBC #38] was the main reason I bought the latest issue! Thanks for all you do in illuminating those aspects of “funnyboox”! [Signed] A fan since Comic Book Artist #1!
[Because you inserted no TM or © beside it, I am totally stealing your clever portmanteau, “funnyboox,” Jeff! You’ll have to sue me! And thanks very muchly for sharing your kind words. It’s gratifying to be recognized for adding some non-mainstream content, the inclusion of which gives me a tremendous boost of enthusiasm, keeping my mojo going at full throttle! — Y.E.]
Joe Frank
Steve Englehart’s interview [CBC #37] had so many interesting tangents. One was when to stay and work through contention  or hit the road and keep one’s self-respect intact. Being bounc- ed off a long-running Marvel assignment, by the new editor du jour or being promised a certain page rate at DC, and retroactively informed, after the assignment was done, no, the company’s editor shouldn’t have quoted quite so high a rate are good examples. Some things, minor in nature, you can compromise on or ignore. Other things you can’t. It’s up to the talent where to draw the line.
Another was to use research and imagination in getting into the mindset of the characters. He noted studying elements of mysticism for Doctor Strange. Yet it’s his talent for capturing the various distinct character elements or “voice” that make them stand out. The writer may not be an extraterrestrial, super- villain, or Celestial Madonna, but should know how to write them. I mean, Steve Gerber wasn’t a duck.
Also, Englehart was open to different challenges and experiences. He started with aspirations of being an artist. Yet he had the talent for writing and, eventually, the opportunity. It was reinforced with increasingly better assignments and superior results. But it didn’t stop there. He wrote novels and got into gaming. So, not limited to one thing…
It was touching how Neal Adams took him on, in a mentoring role, at the start of his career. and gave him credit for his efforts. A foot in the door and name value. Steve seemed very appreciative still. But he had a comment which threw me: “Neal was just the best guy ever in those days and I’m fully aware that he changed over time.” At some later date, was he not the best guy ever? The only negative thing I’ve read was how he could be lax or late with deadlines.
Though acknowledged as covered earlier, in a separate article [CBA Collection V. 3], my favorite of Steve’s work was his Detective Comics stories with Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin. I’m admittedly not a big Batman fan, but those I loved.
I really appreciated the Jack Miller article. I remember hearing the name in the context of being a DC editor when I was a kid, but honestly knew next to nothing about him. (Or Barbara Friedlander, for that matter.) Rarely do we hear about such contrasting virtues and vices of one man.
The finale of your Arnold Drake conversation wasn’t exactly a testimonial dinner for DC’s editors and publisher. Drake, too, knew when to leave; after an assured rate increase failed to be honored. What I thought most intriguing was Drake could do more than write. He could analyze company problems and inspire solutions. Or offer options…
(P.S.: Besides Jack Miller, did Neal Adams include other co-workers on his faces-in-the-background covers of Strange Adventures #207 and Green Lantern #86?)
[Can’t say I know about the noggins on GL #86, but as pointed out in our Jay Scott Pike feature last issue, Adams did incorporate the bald visage of romance/pin-up artist extraordinaire JSP on SA #207. So there’s one, Joe! — Y.E.]

All TM & © DC Comics.

Pages 31–38: Other than it obviously being produced as promotion for the re-election of New York Attorney General Nathan L. Goldstein in his 1946 campaign, we know nothing else about this terrific, well-drawn eight-page comic book story discovered by Ye Ed. pal Rob Yeremian, proprietor of The Time Capsule store in Rhode Island. Thanks, R.Y.!

from down argentine way

The Vanishing Watami
A brief look at Misterix’s Western comics classic from Argentina by Oesterheld and Moliterni

by PABLO STADELMAN
“Watami” is the story of an American Indian warrior from the Cheyenne tribe, set in a historical context where whites had not yet begun the “conquest” of the West, and where the buffalo is king of the prairies, supplying the indigenous people with food and shelter. Published in 1962 in the magazine Super Misterix, published by Editorial Yago, “Watami” gave prominence to a native American character, a type in comics usually consigned to a secondary role.
With scripts by Héctor German Oesterheld, and the art of Jorge Moliterni, the story is situated within the historical revisionist realm where the writer had already made of different periods of North American Native history, as is the case of his “Ticonderoga,” with drawings by Hugo Pratt, where the story focuses on first contact with whites by the indigenous people, where the latter was dominant in most of America. The other work would be “Sargento Kirk,” also with art by Pratt (along with other artists), about a deserter from the U.S. Army fleeing into the desert, in conflict with his peers over their treatment of Indians.
Only 12 “Watami” stories were published in Super Misterix, which managed to attract public attention, but it disappeared shortly after without any reason given. This acceptance by readers was due to the artistic contribution of Moliterni, who began his career at Hora Cero, published by Editorial Frontera, where he demonstrated his drawing ability to reveal the expressiveness of the characters in an almost photographic manner.
From this period, Moliterni’s work on the series “Leonero Brent” is well known, a humorous Western featuring a bounty hunter as the main character. For Hora Cero Semanal, he would also work on “Lord Crack,” about a group of commandos during World War II. He was also Pratt’s successor on “Sargento Kirk,” where he imposed his own style and gave his own physiognomy to the characters.
In this way, “Watami” offers his most valuable work, where, through light and shadow, he defines the contours of the characters and recreates landscapes of Early America.
Oesterheld’s plots are other highlights of the series, where he imbues characters with an appealing charisma, setting aside the stereotypical perspectives usually given in other stories, where the Indians are traitors and stupid, showing them with little humanity or intelligence.
In “Watami,” the indigenous people are regarded as individuals, emphasizing respect for their laws and code of honor, which is present throughout each story. The stories propose a reinterpretation of Native American culture,  where the characters persevere over uncomfortable situations within the surrounding landscape of the prairie and the mountains.
Furthermore, they maintain a dignity through their actions in a world prior to white domination, where the Native Americans established justice in their own way. The story Oesterheld proposes does not qualify these actions; it only names and highlights them.
The only compilation of the “Watami” stories is the one published by Ediciones Record, in 1976, which contains the first seven episodes, which feature the title character gathering the survivors of his tribe in order to take revenge on the Kiowas, the rival tribe in the series, for their actions against his population.
Along with four young warriors and an old man, they travel across uninhabited America in search of allies. During the chapters, Watami and his companions will have several confrontations with the Kiowa village, and his relationship with the women of the Arapaho tribe will be shown, in  addition to depicting the customs of the indigenous community and their experiences in the American territory at that time.

Above: Cover art by Jorge Moliterni for the Watami collection published by Ediciones Record in 1976. Below: Cover of Super Misterix #762 [Dec. ’63]. Bottom: Panels from Moliterni’s evocative artistry on “Watami.”

This spread here every ish

the willis legacy

Morty Maker Makes Mark
Two associates, Bruce Chrislip and Tom Fellrath, talk about cartoonist Steve Willis’s impact

by JON B. COOKE
[In CBC #39 and 41, readers got to hear from the prolific (if modest) mini comics maven himself, so we thought, to get a fitting assessment, we’d reach out to a pair of his appreciative friends, and throw in some our own findings and thoughts to wrap up our three-issue celebration of the great Steve Willis. Bruce Chrislip is the author of the (just reprinted!) exhaustive history, The Minicomix Revolution 1969–1989, and Tom Fellrath has been collecting Willis’s Cranium Frenzy in four volumes and just collected Willis’s masterpiece, The Tragedy of Morty, under his Phoenix Productions imprint. — JBC]
That Steve Willis isn’t exalted with the highest of appreciation in the world of comics is ridiculous, says I, but a degree of solace can be found in the fact the cartoonist has graced us with his presence at all, though there’s only a limited number of souls who — select, as of now — recognize his brilliance. Among such lucky folk is Bruce Chrislip, who blogger Nik Dirga has called “one of the foundational members of the small press ‘scene’ of the 1970s and ’80s.”
(Chrislip’s connection with mini comics does, indeed, stretch back to the form’s early years, with his City Limits Gazette fanzine, a nexus for mini comics creators to connect and check out one another’s work (and a publication that Willis himself helmed years after Chrislip gave it up). He was also cover and centerspread model for the Peter Bagge/Helena G. Harvilicz-edited I Like Comics [’93], which labeled him a “longtime Seattle cartoonist, fan, and scene-maker.”)
When I inquired about Willis’s standing in the comics pantheon, Chrislip, without hesitation, praised the man’s importance. “He’s the guy who has had the greatest impact in the mini comics world and, not just in the small press, but he’s had some impact in comics in general. For some, he’s under the radar screen, but he’s still an influence… It’s like Robert Crumb with underground comix or Elvis with rock ’n’ roll. I mean, he’s the guy, the main man.”
Asked what made that so, Chrislip offered, “Well, he’s an original. That’s one thing. I mean, that’s what he has in common with Elvis and Crumb. They came out of the blue and they’re doing something nobody else was doing. And also, Steve’s very inventive… He went to Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, and he was up there with Matt Groening and Lynda Barry, and they had lots of classes in writing. I think that’s the big part of it. The writing is so inventive and so clever. And the art and the writing work well together.”
As to whether Willis ever permeated out into the greater comics world, Chrislip points out Morty the Dog making a cameo in a “Munden’s Bar” episode, in Grimjack, and a reprint of an issue of Morty Comix (and other Willis material) that’s included in Eclipse’s Giant-Size Mini-Comics [1986–87]. And, as noted in an earlier CBC segment, publisher Michael Dowers attempted to break into the direct market with Starhead Presents starring the pooch (to lackluster success).
Morty the Dog is, of course, Willis’s signature character,  a cranky, cigar-chompin’ canine who its creator has killed and resurrected time and again. Chrislip described the curmudgeonly critter as “an anthropomorphic, misanthropic wiseguy talking mutt,” adding, “He’s a career cynic and pessimist often to be found hounding his erstwhile friend and drinking partner, Arnie Wormwood, down at a seedy dive called The Glass Crutch.”
In 1987, after being knocked off yet again by its creator (“This time for good!” declared Willis), Morty was celebrated by its cartoonist fans with a 52-page mini comic, Heir of the Dog, an “affectionate tribute/roast/eulogy,” which included the character meeting the famed signature character that R. Crumb kept buried, Fritz the Cat, in a yarn by David Tosh.
In Newave: The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s [2010], Willis confessed to Rick Bradford that Morty* just might live forever. “He is not dead. In spite of my efforts. My fellow Newave cartoonist Jim Ryan once suggested Morty was not an individual, but a race. Such as: a Collie, a Golden Lab, and a Morty Dog. Hence, there is more than one. Eliminating just one Morty will not wipe out the whole goddamn lot of those miserable curs!!! *Ahem.* Obviously I still have a few issues to work out.”
Prince Morty
Whatever his mixed feelings about Morty, Willis utilized the hound as titular star of what many call the cartoonist’s magnum opus. In the exhaustive “Newave Comics Survey,” serialized in The Comics Journal in the mid-’80s, associate editor Dale Luciano described the artist’s masterwork. “Among the most unpredictable of cartoonists, Willis combines cartoon humor and metaphysical preoccupations. It’s altogether fitting that his latest project is adapting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in comix form, using Morty the Dog as the central character and making each act of the play a separate comic. It’s entitled The Tragedy of Morty — Prince of Denmarke, and in January 1985, Willis completed the last of the five installments. By self-publishing standards, it is a rather epic achievement. Willis’s lampooning tribute to Shakespeare is, I think, a genuine newave landmark.”
Besides the effort’s “generous share of gags, puns, expletives, and anachronisms, all designed to debunk the Bard,” Luciano writes, “Yet in The Tragedy of Morty, there is undeniably an intelligence in control which is fully appreciative of the play’s complexities and nuances, yet not at all intimidated by them. Willis embarks on this project in a playful mood of parody, lampooning the play (and our familiarity with it) while respecting the basic integrity of the play’s characters, structure, and thematic design. The marvelous thing about Willis’s adaptation is that the simplicity of his cartoony renderings, like Spiegelman’s in Maus, enhance the effort. Willis doesn’t hem the play in. His quick, quirky style opens it up, leaving us free to enjoy both the intent and achievement of Shakespeare’s original, as well as the spoof and tomfoolery of Morty. In its own cheerfully demented way, The Tragedy of Morty — Prince of Denmarke is the best comic book adaptation of Shakespeare I have ever seen.”
In that “Newave Comics Survey” entry on Willis, Luciano made note that the cartoonist had begun a new volume of Morty Comix, another run of original one-offs he’d send out individually, with each including a single line from Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Recently asked if he actually completed that endeavor, Willis replied, “I grew tired of it and probably didn’t get beyond 50 ‘issues.’”
Orphaned offspring
In my chat with Chrislip, he brought up how, despite the many cartoonists who jumped into mini comics in the 1980s, mainstream fandom kept the upstart category and its aging progenitor at arm’s length. “When Krause Publications took over the Comics Buyer’s Guide,” he explained, “the editors were a little leery of giving much space to undergrounds or underground-inspired mini comics.” But the exact thing that mini comics were being criticized for — the difficulty to catalogue and categorize the genre — was its strength, that this wasn’t about the collecting, it wasn’t about the value, but just about the comics themselves. “As far as collectability, you not only had Steve Willis doing his one-of-a-kind hand-drawn Morty Comix, but also you had Matt Feazell, who started a series called Not Available Comics, meaning, ‘You’re probably not going to see these after I go through my 100-copy print run.’”
Chrislip continued, “The mini comics were absolute freedom in publishing anything you wanted to do. And a lot of them were tweaking their nose at the collector, so nobody had control of these things. I think that’s dangerous, just all this creativity being unleashed.” And Willis was the embodiment of that freedom, exerting his efforts not to follow any norm or meet anyone’s expectations.
“Steve flirted with doing comics cartooning professionally, when Jay Kennedy approached him, Lynda Barry, and Matt Groening about doing the work for Esquire. But he had a day job, and he just got into other things and just didn’t want to pursue it. I think actually his work benefited from not being in the comics business, not having deadlines. He was able to draw when he wanted to. And, in that time period, the mid-’80s, he was really, really motivated. He was knocking ’em out, he was just really prolific. I think that was just it. After a while, he took a good hard look at it and said, ‘Why put up with the deadlines?’”
Chrislip continued, “One other thing I should say about Steve is that he turned cartooning into a more social thing. It’s the cliché of the comic book artist, the cartoonist, just sitting in a room somewhere, for long periods of time, alone for hours and hours and hours. They’re not seeing anybody. They’re like a hermit. And Steve just started doing comics jams with all kind of people. I mean, this goes back to the ’80s. He’s doing comics jams with people, so he turned into more of a social thing, opening things up a little bit. (You’ve heard Wally Wood’s description of what it is to be a comic book artist…? I’m paraphrasing, but it’s doing manual labor in solitary confinement for minimum wage.)”
Back when the mini comics world was exploding, Chrislip admitted, “You could see there were a lot of things happening. It was a real artist movement… I knew it was something important, something of value. So that’s why I had this fanzine that was covering this field, and I was hoping for a breakthrough back then. It didn’t quite happen the way I thought, but now, with these comics festivals and things, it did happen. That’s where comics are now. So many people are self-publishing or getting together with their friends and publishing. And again, nobody has control of that.”
Phoenix Rising
Among those gatherings is the Short Run Comix Festival, held in Seattle this past November, where Willis was invited as a guest and was interviewed on a panel by Chrislip, as well as situated at Phoenix Productions publisher Thomas Fellrath’s table.
Back in the mid-’80s, Fellrath first encountered the mini comics phenomenon through another fanzine devoted to the category, Small Press Comics Explosion. In those days, he remembered encountering Willis’s work. “Steve was always one of the highest regarded cartoonists in the small press sphere,” he said, “and it didn’t hurt [SPCE publisher] Tim Corrigan really thought highly of him… and a few others. Steve was always one of the big names.”
But higher education, then domestic life and the workaday world took Fellrath away from the scene for numerous decades. “I’ve kept my mini comics over the years, just in boxes in the basement, but I rediscovered it all through Steve Keeter and the late Larned Justin’s Talking Small Press Comics video channel on YouTube. And they were big fans of Willis and [his mini comics series] Cranium Frenzy. Steve and I, we were not particularly close. Back when I was a teenager, he ran in his Seattle circle, I ran in Eastern circles, more or less, so we didn’t cross paths. I had many of his mini comics, which I’m discovering means that I actually have something that’s worth something on eBay… And I’m not kidding! Have you seen the prices on his stuff?”
So, after Keeter and Justin rekindled his interest, Fellrath found Willis’s contact information in the channel’s comments section and reached out. The two swapped zines and, Fellrath explained, “Steve unloaded pretty much every copy that he had of Cranium Frenzy, everything in stock, he sent it along. So I sat and batch-read the thing in a day-and-a-half and was just blown away.”
He continued, “Steve’s comics are often abstract, often funny, often interesting or informative in it had this unique style to it that I was not seeing anywhere else in comics… So he and I had struck up a pen-pal relationship in sharing zines back and forth with each other. And we started discovering that we kind of knew each other in a Kevin Bacon degrees of separation kind of way. So we ran in similar circles but not overlapping once. I was really appreciative of his work, and I suggested, ‘Steve, you’re sending me these photocopy zines and they’re great. What are you doing to preserve this stuff? What are you doing to make sure that larger masses can see this?’ And he kind of put me off, and I’ve since discovered Steve’s nature is that he doesn’t think creatively in retrospect; he’s always thinking forward about the next project. So, after he puts a project to bed, he’s pretty much happy with it, and he’ll move on to the next thing.”
After badgering Willis with questions about having  his work collected and printed by other publishers for posterity, the exasperated cartoonist replied (according to Fellrath), “If you’re so interested in doing this and you make zines of your own, why don’t you just do it, Tom?”
Taking up the gauntlet, Fellrath became determined to collect the full run of Willis’s mini comics title that had been recently revived. “Within about 10 days [of Willis agreeing], Fellrath shared, “I had the masters for all 40 issues of Cranium Frenzy in two packages on my doorstep. And that was Thanksgiving weekend, 2024, and we were off to the races.”
In March 2024, months before initiating the Cranium Frenzy collections, house husband Fellrath had started his own YouTube channel, FANzine Live, where he reviews zines and promotes his own “cottage zine-slash-comic label,” Phoenix Productions.
(Full disclosure: yours truly, having been pulled into the orbit of Willis World, was asked by Fellrath to write a foreword for the second volume of The Collected Cranium Frenzy (the cartoonist has been engaged in a mail interview with me since around 2022, and we sometimes text one another, so I guess that ranks me a Steve Willis “expert” — hah!), plus Tom and I have swapped ads and the Phoenix Productions bossman has kindly sent me comp copies of the series and his other Willis offerings, one to be discussed anon.)
THE WAY OF ALL THINGS
Certainly, Willis’s most curious (some would say maddening!) predilection is to produce one-of-a-kind issues of Morty Comix, all dated and numbered, which he typically sends out in his monthly mini comics mailings. (The latest issue I have is #12,394, dated Sept. 4, 2025, drawn on chipboard  likely provided by one of his numerous patrons — i.e., folks who send him postage stamps and/or material to draw upon.) Luciano wrote of this odd habit back in 1985: “In one year, [Willis] produced 1,000 four-page, hand-drawn original minis entitled Morty Comics, one copy each of which he would send out with each piece of correspondence. (Explains Willis, ‘I did it to loosen up, give each correspondent a bit of original art and drive completist collectors nuts.’)”
The cartoonist has since become a tiny bit more pragmatic, as Morty Comix are now mostly one-off illustrations with a word balloon that are mailed off, but some have become decidedly more dadaist (if that’s the term; I ain’t too intellectual, y’know), given the positively ethereal nature of some issues. Fellrath’s mini zine, With the Tide: A Collection of Temporary Morty Comix, includes photos and descriptions of issues drawn on the beach, fogged-up bathroom mirrors, trailer home windows, and even the southpaw artist’s right hand. Plus, as Willis fan Buzz Buzzizyk noted last ish, the weirdo cartoonist is known to have hidden copies of Morty Comix all over creation during his travels, whether in a Pittsburgh electrical breaker box or somewhere still-to-be-found in the Columbus, Ohio, home of Buzz’s daughter!
POSTERITY
It’s strange, perhaps, for a comix creator who produces such impermanent “issues” of Morty Comix as those drawn in sand or on looking glasses to yet be so dedicated to having the art form preserved in the Washington State University special collections repository. The impressive “Comic Art and Culture Collection,” which includes the core collection Willis first began donating in the mid-’80s, contains innumerable items. He explained, “In my three-plus decades of librarianship, the WSU comix collection was my happiest project. It was the first academic collection of its kind in the Pacific States. Randy Scott, a librarian who managed the Michigan State University comix collection, was a real help.”
Over the years, Willis encouraged his fellow mini comics creators to donate their collections to WSU and, to this day, he continues to send work he’s received to join the library’s archives. In the TCJ “New Wave Comix Survey,” Luciano spoke of the collection’s origin: “Willis has begun organizing and cataloging an extensive collection of ‘folkomix’ — his term for ‘newave’ or self-published comics — at the Washington State University Library. Willis became interested in initiating the collection when he discovered some 200 ‘classic and extremely rare’ underground comix — the gift of a professor from the San Francisco Bay Area — languishing in the archives. He began cataloging the material, and decided to include ‘self-published’ or ‘small press’ comix (‘basically, comix drawn as a labor of love’) in the collection.” Of the cataloging, Willis explained, “I created three printed author/title indexes for the initial collection up to 1986.”
In his Minicomix Revolution, Chrislip observed about the WSU collection: “Newspapers throughout North America ran stories about the collection. Interested people from all walks of life came to Pullman, Washington, to view it. There were the well-dressed academic researchers and journalists who came to check out the work of R. Crumb and others. But Steve laughingly told me that the librarians were sometimes shocked when a long-haired motorcycle gang member would stop by to check out the collection, too.”
So, despite his antics frustrating collectors, Willis, who is experiencing a renewed interest amongst the comix  crowd (thanks to Chrislip and Fellrath, among others),  might have his work, just like his Morty, live forever!

The Collected Cranium Frenzy Reader by Steve Willis © Steve Willis.

This spread: Above pic of cartoonist Steve Willis emulating his self-caricature was used to promote his appearance at the Short Run Comix Festival, where he was a guest at the Nov. 1, 2025, event. Appearing with the man was Bruce Chrislip (moderator of a panel with Willis) and Tom Fellrath, Phoenix Productions publisher, host of Willis at his booth, where debuted Willis’s The Collected Cranium Frenzy Reader (below) and The Tragedy of Morty — Prince of Denmarke (next page).

*Of Morty, Willis told Bradford, “My creation had eclipsed me. After awhile, Morty the Dog was more real to me than I was to myself. He was the only character I created who became a tulpa.”

Morty the Dog TM & © Steve Willis.

Inset left: Morty: The Dog That Walks like a Man [’87]. Below: Heir of the Dog [’87]. Bottom:  Pic of Bruce Chrislip (left) and  Steve Willis, December 22,1985.

Above: Bruce Chrislip’s exhaustive 472-page history, The Minicomix Revolution 1969–1989, is as definitive (and insider) look at the mini comics scene in its formative years to be found, which includes a boatload of coverage on one Steve Willis. Seek out Chrislip on Facebook to order a copy. Inset right: Chrislip wrote and essay about Morty’s master in The Comics Journal #219 [Jan. ’00]. Below: Tom Fellrath’s enthusiastic mini comic/zine Heroic, with an emphasis on super-heroes, was first published in 1987, lasting for seven issues, and it was a member of the United Fanzine Organization network.

The Minicomix Revolution © Bruce Chrislip. Heroic TM & ©Thomas Fellrath. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TM & © Viacom International, Inc.. The Comics Journal TM & © Fantagraphics.

All © Steve Willis.

Top: Rare (misprinted) Morty mini. Inset left: A recent soon-vanished ish of Morty Comix. Above: Brad Foster tried his best in 1984.

Above: In a photo snapped just before this issue was sent to press, Steve Willis, flanked by Tom Fellrath (left) and Bruce Chrislip, poses during the Short Run Comix Festival, held this past November 1, in Seattle, Washington, where Phoenix Productions debuted  the final Collected Cranium Frenzy volume, as well as the first all-in-one collection of Willis’s masterpiece, The Tragedy of Morty — Prince of Denmarke. Visit linktr.ee/phoenixprods to order books.

Photo courtesy of Tom Fellrath..

comics in the library

Brenna Thummler’s Sheets
Our resident librarian on the Sheets trilogy about Marjorie Glatt and her ghostly neighbors

by RICHARD J. ARNDT
Today we taking a look at one of the best graphic novel trilogies I’ve read in quite a while. Brenna Thummler is a new comics creator to me, but she’s certainly one I’ll keep an eye out for new work from now on. Her Sheets trilogy is just marvelous reading and perfectly pitched in both language and art to appeal to my middle-school readers. The first volume, entitled Sheets, revolves around one Marjorie Glatt, a 13-year-old whose mother has died a year before the story opens in a swimming accident. Her father, overcome with grief, has largely retreated to his bedroom, leaving middle-schooler Marjorie in charge of not only the house and her younger brother, but also the family business — Glatt’s Laundry — while continuing to go to school, participate in swimming lessons, survive the school’s “mean girls,” experience her first boy crush, evading Mr. Saubertuck, a nasty fellow who intends to purchase the laundromat by hook or by crook (emphasis on “crook”) — and figure out what all those children in white bedsheets, with eye-holes cut out, are gearing up for in town just before Halloween. (This may well be the most convoluted single-plot synopsis sentence that I’ve ever written.) In a panoramic view of the town, we see nearly 40 such characters wandering though Marjorie’s hometown’s streets, lawns, doorways, and pools.
Just to ease your mind, the little kids (and some adults) are all real ghosts who really don’t want to board the ghost train which steams through town each night or haven’t figured out how to get on board. They’ve been congregating in Marjorie’s laundromat to tell each other the lore about ghost history. We gradually learn they actually need the white sheets with cut-out eye holes to see one another.
In short order, Marjorie discovers that Mr. Saubertuck is attempting to destroy her family’s business, in order to buy it for a very low price, by spreading vicious lies about the quality and care of Marjorie’s clothes cleaning. She also discovers that Wendell, the little ghost boy she discovers in her thoroughly disheveled laundromat, is behind much of the problems that the establishment has actually been having. And that he’s just one of the many ghosts in town who have lost the ability to find their way to the ghost train and the Land of Ghosts, the proper hereafter awaiting them.
Wendell’s arrest by two cop ghosts for allowing a living human to see and hear him, apparently places all ghosts in danger of being pursued or stalked by the living who consider the ghosts monsters. Wendell convinces the ghostly judge and jury that helping Marjorie against Mr. Saubertuck’s dastardly deeds may actually erase any danger of humans getting any idea whatsoever that actual ghosts are wandering all over their town.
In short order, Marjorie and Wendell expose Mr. Saubertuck as a grifter, Marjorie gets a date with the beau she wants, deals with the mean girls, and the ghosts began regular employment cleaning the laundromat and washing clothes, and Marjorie gets a real, solid friend who’s an unsolid ghost.
This first volume moves at a fast pace, has quite beautiful artwork in places (good as Thummler is with people and ghosts, she’s even better at drawing the town where everyone lives). Her artwork really captures a viable and quite lovely small locale.
This first volume also includes ‘“A Sheets Story” bonus that revolves around Marjorie, her grandmother, and Wendell’s sheet (with eyes cut out!) and how Wendell becomes “tattooed.” It’s a rather sweet tale.
Book two is titled Delicates and it tells the story of Marjorie gaining a new friend (this time, a living human) named Eliza, who is aiming to make a name for herself by capturing a photo of an actual ghost. Although it’s nowhere mentioned in the text, Eliza is apparently a high functioning autistic child. Her anti-social difficulties with classmates, somewhat off-putting intense focus on her photography, relentless search for the ghosts she is (correctly) convinced are in her hometown, and actual ability to see said ghosts (although the only pictures she gets of them are in their bed-sheeted (with eyes cut out!) bodies, all point towards that.
There’s a bit more humor in this volume than the first — I like that the film titles the local theater feature on a double-bill: The Ghost Wears Prada and What a Girl Haunts — humor courtesy of nearly everybody, although the teen-age drama is still prominent throughout.
Yes, the “mean girls” from the first novel are still meaner than they need to be, but they are learning how to be genuinely supportive. Wendell gets worried that Marjorie will stop being his friend now that Eliza and Marjorie are getting closer, even though Wendell quite likes Eliza (who, at this point in the story, thinks that he is just a weird little kid).
Marjorie and Eliza’s friendship is put to the test when the “still-mean-girls-but-not-as-mean,” the cute boys, and Marjorie’s own concerns about how a friendship with the decidedly weird acting (by normal standards, anyway) Eliza will affect Marjorie’s standing with the more mainstream kids, not to mention Wendell’s growing jealously about Marjorie having any friends but him make for a somewhat chaotic middle of this volume.
The laundromat work ghosts begin thinking that perhaps Marjorie is not such a good friend for Wendell to have and threaten a work stoppage if Marjorie doesn’t start treating Wendel better.
Eventually Eliza and Wendell start to edge towards friendship themselves. Wendell starts delivering hints about how he died (an event he really doesn’t quite remember). Eliza tries on a bed-sheet costume modeled after Wendell’s, after he tells her how he feels like a ghost (without actually telling her that he is an actual ghost) because he’s scared of the same lake that Marjorie’s mom died in. After another round of bulling by the Mean Girls, a dishearten Eliza wears her own bedsheet costume for a walkabout around town.
More next issue.

Sheets TM & © Brenna Thummler

All characters TM & © their respective copyright holders. Dateline Hembeck TM & © Fred Hembeck. COLORS BY: GLENN WHITMORE

Two Interviews with

Below: Photo of Patrick Rodney Broderick at the 2024 Indiana Comic Con. Inset bottom: Pat and his two brothers, all decked out in the chic Western wear of 1950s’ American boyhood. The comic book artist is in the middle here.

What follows is a thoughtful and honest interview I conducted with Pat Broderick, which was recorded at the hotel the artist was staying at during the 2022 Colorado Springs Comic Con, held in August of that year. We conversed in the hotel courtyard that Saturday afternoon and, despite the wedding party music that was excessively loud, I clearly heard him share a candid story of a
savvy professional who has toiled in the comics biz for five decades. — G.B.

Comic Book Creator: Obviously we can’t start off without going to the beginning. Were you born and raised in Tampa?
Pat Broderick: I was born in Brandon, Florida, which is a small community about 17 miles outside of Tampa, and lived there until maybe 11, then moved into the Tampa/Seminole Heights area, going into sixth grade, and I went to junior high and high school there. Bob McLeod and I went to the same high school. We were, I think, one or two years apart and graduated from there. I went on to various jobs — auto parts store delivery driver and a counterman. Then I worked in a glass factory, and also a little bit of construction, and then into a small-scale advertising art department. They did Yellow Pages [ads] with mostly clip art. This was before computers, when everything had to be pasted-up for the [stat] camera.
CBC: Growing up, where you were at? Was there any kind of art in your life? How did that start to grab hold of you?
Pat: It caught a hold in, I think, 1963, after Fantastic Four #1 and 2. Then also there was “Thor,” and the birth of Marvel super-heroes. And I was out in Brandon, at the time, the youngest of three brothers — actually there’s five of my family, but three were living with us altogether. Our mother raised us by herself, a single mom, and so I had some time on my hands. I did a lot of just copying the stuff that was in the comics and get kicked outside to play. But comics held my interest, drawing-wise, sketching-wise, and you’d probably find Spider-Man, Ant Man, and Hulk drawings on my test papers instead of doing the work that I was supposed to be doing. I’ve been drawing comic book characters since, I’d have to say (good Lord!), seven or eight.
CBC: So your entrance into the art itself was through that narrative illustration in comic books?
Pat: I liked all the pictures individually and some struck me more excitedly than others, especially when they came out, there was a specific panel of them racing and they were all in the same scene, and that was one of ‘em that I copied and showed Mom and she’d tell me to go outside and play.
continued on page after next
CBC: At any point in time, did you ever want to pursue anything other than doing the cartooning aspect?
Pat: No.
CBC: Obviously, advertising can pop up in comic book people’s lives… but, at that age, were you like, “It’s comics for me”?
Pat: Well, it was drawing for me, which developed through my time in the libraries during my elementary school years, and then, in junior high, I was introduced to art department courses. So there was that. And the teacher saw my interest in drawing and, once again, I was down in the library copying paintings of the Roman conquest and Byzantine conquest, and spent my time doing that during my junior high school years. Then I got to high school and the art department was a little more diverse.
When I was out of high school, working at the small ad agency, I ran across an ad in one of — I think it was by Russ Heath — “Sgt. Rock” [Our Army At War #258, July ’73]  from DC Comics, and they were announcing their “Junior Bullpen” contest and explaining it. So I decided I wanted to go try out for that. I was 17 and that would’ve been the summer of ’73. It was at Phil Seuing’s July 4th comic con at the Commodore Hotel. It was there where we got in line, in the ballroom, where they were doing the portfolio reviews and we waited in this long line. We saw a short stout man and a very tall bald-headed man, who had a cigar in his mouth, but wasn’t smoking it. I thought, “That’s Carmine.” And I heard Carmine say “Sol,” and I went, “That’s Carmine and Sol from DC Comics, who will be reviewing our portfolios.”
CBC: So that was Carmine Infantino and Sol Harrison?
Pat: Yes, and they had taken a break and were in a minor anteroom on the side of a larger ballroom. And I just told the guy I was in line with, “Would you hold my place in line if I walk away for a minute?” And I walked over and stood about 10 feet away, and Sol looked at me and said, “What do you want, kid?” I said, “I’d like for you guys to look over my work if you got a moment.” And Sol got a little irritated with me, scolded me, but Carmine said, “Sol, let the kid show his portfolio.” I didn’t know it was going to happen and I laid it down, on the floor, opened it up, and spread my pieces out in front of him and Carmine, an artist whose work I had seen and liked, and I told him that. I also said I liked Wrightson and the new guys who had broken in, and the work of Russ Heath, Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, and Neal Adams. I liked their work more than the Marvel stuff, I said.
He said, “Kid, this is DC Comics,” and he handed me his card. He wrote something on the back of it, handed it to me, and told me to see Joe Orlando when I got inside the [portfolio review] room and the time came and got inside the room. I handed Joe the card, and Joe read it, and said, “You’re the kid Carmine told me about.” Joe said that Carmine wanted me in the program, that I’d been selected. So I was kind of stunned and said, “Great!” They gave me paperwork to sign and I had to give my address and ID and all, and told them how to get a hold of me.
Joe told me it would be starting — I think he said October — after summer was over. So I went back to Tampa and told everybody that I had won and nobody believed me, and I showed them the paperwork I’d signed and then it started to sink in, and then my brothers were like, “Oh, you’ll be back in two weeks!” The typical childhood competition amongst brothers, the usual jives and stuff, and I gave notice to the art director at the company I was working for. I think he was shocked and happy at the same time. So he was happy for me and shocked that I’d won, and I closed out my job there, gathered as much money as I could save (which was not much). So I did pieces of art for friends around town and went up to New York. I flew up.
While I was at the show, at the July 4th convention, I ran into Bob McLeod in the lobby, and since Bob had recognized me from Tampa, he came up and started talking to me about Hillsborough, about art classes. He was a year ahead of me in high school, and he was there to enter the contest, too.  He was staying in Brooklyn at the YMCA. He had been up there for, I think, about three or four months, on his own dime. And he was running out of money, and so, after I won, I said, “When I get up there, I’ll come up to the same Y where you’re at. We’ll get together, pool our funds, and get an apartment, get out of there and see how it plays out.”  We did that.
I went to work at DC in the bullpen. I met Neal Adams and the people at Continuity, and I’d been up for going up there for, I think, about two weeks. And I told Bob he also needed to go up there and meet Neal, who could help him get work, which Neal did. Neal got him work at Marvel in the production department. So things were going good, though I wasn’t making any money at DC. I was doing table of contents pages and stuff for the [100 Page Super-Spectacular and Treasury-size] books.
It was [Batman #256, June ’74] that has me hanging out the window and it’s dated 1973. That was the first piece I did for him. And I was young and my ego was blowing up in my mind. I mean, I was working in comics, but then, about two months later, things got kind of iffy around the office. I was getting plenty of work there, but things were going on outside. I was being introduced to the politics in comics that were playing out at that time. Neal was like DC’s golden boy, but he was also battling with DC about the return of artwork and stuff at that time. Sol Harrison had found out that I had been going over to Continuity, and he told me that I wasn’t allowed to go over there, and I took that as any Southern boy who wasn’t educated about power struggles like that. So I told him, “I don’t understand how you could tell me where I go after work.” And he said, “Well, I can and I am.” Word got back to him that I had been up there again and I went to work one day, and he told me to clean out my desk. He had found out and I was terminated, so I cleaned up my desk, said goodbye to [assistant production manager] Jack [Adler] and the guys in the photography department and to some of the editors, and I had to get out of there. So I went over to Neal’s studio and Neal looked at my work, and he gave me a brutal but honest evaluation of my skills.
CBC: Oh my gosh. Of which he was famous for.
Pat: Yeah, but I respected the man’s talent, and I knew that what he was going to tell me was the truth. Because he told me so. And I’ve heard him be brutal to other people around me and after me. And he was right in every respect, every time. He said to us, basically, that it can be very brutal out there in the advertising world, getting enough work and all. And he said, “You have to be tough.” And that I had to basically forget everything I had learned. I was self-taught, trying to copy the styles [of others] and stuff from comics when I needed to understand more of the basics of design and illustration and the process, because I wasn’t trained in the process. So he taught me systems of how to draw, the tools to use, and how they’re applied and how you use ‘em. And, from then, I started understanding comics more and started studying comics and specific artists. I’d always been in love with the old EC Comics guys — Wally Wood and the others — so I was well versed in his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and stuff, and his early Marvel work and then his MAD work, of course. Then I got over to Continuity and I started getting illustration work at Marvel for their black-&-white monster line.
CBC: Was that the Curtis line?
Pat: Yeah. And that was fun to do, but there was only so much of that type of work at Marvel, and Marvel wasn’t ready to give me a script. So I was doing work, coloring, and whatnot for Neal’s storyboards at the time and developing my samples for both Marvel and DC. Later on, Marvel bought my Conan samples… and then I heard about new company starting up, and I learned that it was Atlas Comics and that it was a spin-off. The guys behind it were former owners from Marvel.
CBC: That was Martin Goodman…
Pat: And Jeff Rovin was the editor-in-chief and Steve Mitchell, who had worked with me over at DC Comics, was there, and a few of the people that I’d known who had been up at Neal’s studio. So they were handing out comic [assignments], and I went over and talked to ‘em. Larry Hama had already gotten Wulf. I think Jack Abel was already working on one of their projects as an inker. Neal had already started doing cover work for him on Ironjaw, and I think Dick had done one or two things for him at the time. Ernie Cólon was getting a lot of work for him.
CBC: Ernie really blossomed when he got there.
Pat: Yeah, he did! And Ditko and Wood were working together on The Destructor. So there was some nice stuff coming out of there, and I got excited and I got ahead of my guns, and I ran up there and I got Planet of the Vampires, and I came back, all excited, and told everybody I’d picked it up and they said, “No, no. What’d you do, Pat?” And I said, “I got a book!” I did everything they taught me. I used the cameras, had everybody pose for my layouts, my thumbnails, and drew the first book. Larry was scripting it, and I had been modeling for Larry for both Wulf and for Iron Fist. He was working on that. So we all used the same system and worked it out.
I think I had just finished the second issue and I decided to move back to Tampa. I had their work to do and I had picked up some work from Marvel — actually, it was the “Iron Fist” stuff [Marvel Premiere #23–24, Aug.–Sept. ’75], because Larry couldn’t handle the deadline on Wulf and produce the work at Marvel. But suddenly there was an editorial change at Atlas and they wanted everything to look like Jack Kirby, and it didn’t work for me.
CBC: They didn’t realize that, at that point in time, everyone was copying Neal, so why make it look like Jack…?
Pat: I think they got Russ Heath to do the final [Planet of Vampires] third issue. And then, after that, [Atlas] had gone over to the Kirby style and, not long after that, the line started folding.
CBC: Who was inking you on Vampires?
Pat: Frank McLaughlin. And Terry Austin was doing backgrounds.
CBC: What other books were you working on while you were there?
Pat: Well, they had a title called [Blazing Battle Tales, #1, July ’75], a war book, and I did an issue of that. Jack Sparling inked me and he did a really good job. I was very impressed. [chuckles] And I did a back-up feature in Phoenix [#3, June ’75] called “The Dark Avenger,” and Terry Austin inked that. And then I was doing “Iron Fist” and, on my third issue in, I choked on the title. I couldn’t visualize it at all, at all, though Chris Claremont was an excellent writer. By blowing that deadline, Marvel, of course, pulled the title from me. So, after that, it took me about, I’d say, a year before Archie Goodwin was in play [as editor-in-chief] at Marvel, and he asked me if I would do a fill in on Captain Marvel [#55, Mar. ’78] and I jumped at the chance. I loved the character. I loved everything Starlin had done on the book until then.
In the meantime, I was back working at the agency that I had left. My best friend had been promoted up to art director, so I was in good when I came back and I told Archie I could do it, and the book was great because it was a bi-monthly schedule, so I was able to keep both jobs and work on the book and keep the job back at the L.M. Berry Company. I think it was maybe the third issue I was on, Doug Moench came on as writer/scripter, and then we  had run, I would say probably about 14 issues on a bi-monthly schedule.
Then the book got canceled, but it was doing well, so they used the remaining issues that we had done and launched Marvel Spotlight with those issues [#1–3, July–Nov. ’79]. Then Doug and I went on to other projects together, so I was very happy at the time. I was getting steady monthly work working from Tampa, which was my goal because I liked New York, but I didn’t like New York. So it went from Captain Marvel to fill-in issues, a few issues of “Weirdworld” [Marvel Fanfare #24–26, Jan.–May ’86], and then I was offered Micronauts.
CBC: Before we jump into that, just because you mentioned one guy already: Archie Goodwin. What was it like getting to have Archie tap you on the shoulder and say, “I believe in you”?
Pat: Well, it was great, but then keep in mind, Archie had left his position, I think, three months into that, and Jim Shooter took over. So Archie and I, and the people at Continuity, we all had, I felt… a very great biting, stabbing… but we’re all friends, teasing each other, and scolding each other, and criticizing each other, but we’re all family. But nobody messed with Archie at all. Nobody messed with Walter [Simonson]. There’s a lot of people nobody messed with because they were doing such brilliant work when they came in, showing it around. And Archie was legend by that time.
So I was back in Florida when there were a lot of management changes going on, so I reaped the benefits of it. Because Weezy [Louise Simonson] became the editor on Micronauts when I came on. So it had a great run during that time and, surprisingly, it got quite popular again.
CBC: One of the things I’ve seen just in Facebook posts that you put up is that, very frequently, people are asking you for Micronauts commissions or autographs. And I don’t know if Mike Golden gets the same love for doing Micronauts as you do.
Pat: Oh, well, I don’t know if he does.
CBC: What do you think is the reason fans still find Micronauts so resonating?
Pat: Well, I was a fan of Micronauts when it first came out but, before that, I was a fan of Mike Golden’s work when he first came out. So, even though I was working in the industry, I was down in Tampa and out of their circles. So it was easy to be working in the industry, yet maintain the fanboy geek-ness. I mean, literally, every time I’d see my artwork published, it would blow me away what they were doing. So I had a love for Micronauts as a series.
So, when I got the chance to come on board, I wasn’t aware that Golden had left with the 12th issue [Dec. ’79], as they were working ahead. That was when I became aware of Howard Chaykin and Al Milgrom’s six-issue run. So I’d started with #19 [July ’80] and just threw caution to the wind, because it was just fun doing it, and there was some really good work done. There was strong fan following with the book. I just felt, if I concentrated on it, drew all the toys that they sent me, stuck to the script, did the best I could do that I would ride it out. And it became quite popular.
CBC: I think there’s a lot of people who have forgotten that Micronauts was a toy property.
Pat: Yeah! Microman was, I think, what it was called over in Japan. So it’s stubbornly been around through all the different publishers. I wish it had been more successful, but I guess the market has probably grown beyond it. But I’m constantly asked about ‘em. I constantly draw ‘em, knowing that I’m gonna sell them. There’s always a market out there. People love ’em. And I’m very familiar with the characters, so I like drawing them  the way I remember them. But then the good times died.
CBC: Anytime the name Shooter comes up, that always ends with “then the good times died.”
Pat: Well, I was really hard on that when it happened, and I’d like to wish that the internet wasn’t the internet and the interviews weren’t the interviews, because [the comments] still follow me. But Shooter had his vision of the type of storytelling and artwork he liked to see, and he made it clear that I wasn’t filling that vision in his eyes. So he also made it clear that, financially, I had capped out at Marvel unless I changed my style. So I had no choice but to move over to DC Comics because I became painfully aware of the volume of corrections that became requested after that happened that was squeezing me off the book.
CBC: I’ve had individuals who will defend Shooter and more people who have condemned him. When talking with Doug, he said he could not fathom the… I think you called it the “imbicilary of Shooter.”
Pat: It drove you mad. [long pause] But a lot of things are riding on the line. Things are important to Doug and for everybody who was involved in the field. And, for me, I knew that I just wasn’t going to be able to work at Marvel any longer while Shooter was there. But how many editors-in-chief had I seen during that time? There was Stan, Roy, Archie, Marv, Len, Gerry, and then Archie again, before Jim. Jim’s made a mark in the industry, so I’ve got to get him kudos for that. But everybody on both sides of the fence plays that game. They’re just… I’d like to say “vindictive,” but it’s kind of a harsh word, but it’s just the way it is.
How long was it that Kirby couldn’t get work at DC until Carmine was president of DC? And it was the same with me when I left DC to go back to Marvel. The doors at DC were closed to me, but there’s certain personalities… And, being in Tampa, I wasn’t able to argue more effectively that I would’ve been able to if I could have gone into the offices more often. So I had a very good run with Doug over at DC Comics, but when they were shutting Dick out of the company, basically his retiring and moving him out and changing the creative lineup there, it was told to me that I wasn’t going to be protected at DC anymore. And it proved to be quite true. So I went over to Marvel and got to do some really fine work again at Marvel, as Jim Shooter was no longer there. [laughs] I worked at eight years, nine years at both companies. So it spanned a period of time and, even after I’d left, I was tinkling on all that they would allow me to tinkle on. I guess that’s metaphorical. I’m going to leave it at that…
CBC: There’s no pissing on anything. So, when you break away from Shooter, after he limited your prospects and you head over to DC, was the big Justice League book your first real work there, Justice League of America #200 [Mar. ’82]?
Pat: I think it was either that or the “Firestorm” back-up that was in The Flash [#303–304, Nov.–Dec. ’81]. They quickly got me onto The Legion of Super-Heroes [#284, Feb. ’82]. I was doing The Legion when they had decided that they were going to launch Firestorm in his own book.
CBC: Man! So you walk in the door and they do this? [chuckles]
Pat: They did.
CBC: So they do the thing they are very famous for doing: “Okay, let’s put ‘em on a team book and see how he does”?
Pat: Yeah, they put me right on a big team book from the start. [Greg laughs] But then I told them I was really looking for a single character-type book to do, or at least limited to, say, five instead of The Legion.
CBC: Instead of 30.
Pat: What, would they have 12 in the Justice League or whatnot…?
CBC: So you’re working that book, and then Gerry [Conway], bless his heart, was over at Marvel and now he’s over at DC. I mean, everyone jumped the fence and went back and forth.
Pat: Yeah, it was commonly done. So Gerry and I had a very good run on Fury of Firestorm. His writing was refreshing because he wrote a lot of comedy into his scripts with Firestorm. So it was fun to relax and play the comical side of things the same way I was able to do it with Bug and whatnot in The Micronauts. So I had a good comical character that I was able to play with again, and we had a real good run with it. Rodin Rodriguez was the inker on it and, lord, I think we did 28 issues…?
CBC: I was going to say you had a pretty long stretch.
Pat: I’ve done a lot of Firestorm commission requests over the years, and I’m real happy for Gerry and Al Milgrom for the success of the character… So it was great to see that happen with [the character]. He’s an easy character to draw, to get inside his head. And I got to do Green Lantern for about 18 issues.
CBC: Who did you follow on that book? Was that Dave Gibbons or…?
Pat: Yeah, I think it was Gibbons. Staton was already doing some of ‘em. Gibbons was doing some. Gil Kane was doing some. And I also did “Batman” with Doug Moench for a year for Detective Comics. We did some very nice issues there. That was, I guess, right when Denny O’Neil came back and took over editorial. So that’s when the creative team and everybody changed. And Karen Berger had me do a couple of fill-ins with The Legion again, and also do some work with Steve Bissette on a Swamp Thing Annual with Batman.
CBC: Now, at this point, you had your own character (though obviously not one you created). So, after the early struggles and fisticuffs that you probably wanted to have with some folks, what was it like having established yourself as a commodity? To really have your feet firmly in place?
Pat: It felt secure and the effect of seeing these cycles… I would say management was flipping over about every two to three years at the companies and people were going back and forth that everything looked like I would not have to struggle to find work. And it was that way for eight, nine years, right up until the mid-’90s.
I got to do a six-issue [Lords of the Ultra Realm, June–Nov. ’86] mini-series with Doug again at DC, where we got to create all our own characters, and it was a run of books of sci-fi fantasy, and so I enjoyed that period, when I also was doing the Green Lantern stories. The problems began was over conflicts with editors and, basically, DC would overwork an artist at a time. They would get into emergencies where they would have to have books done under really crushing deadlines. And they started doing that with me, and I produced the work, but there was a lot of hollering over the phone back and forth. I mean, when you’re working 20 hours a day for a month, seven days a week, to meet the deadlines, it wears on you and you’d reach a point of having conflicts.
Conflicts in my history are like roadkill behind me with editors. It happens and it always will happen, but it got so difficult to work with a certain editor I was with at the time that I decided that I could just leave the book, leave the troubles behind, leave the editor behind, and just go over to Marvel Comics again.
CBC: Before you make that break, you got the opportunity to co-create “Creature Commandos.” Who was your co-creator?
Pat: J.M. DeMatteis, I believe it was. That was in Weird War Tales [#93, Nov. ’80], and it was a weird goofy story
CBC: Goofy as hell. No doubt about it!
Pat: I’m surprised that they actually got to do an animated series for a little while.
CBC: Walter and Weezy did the script for it. And, when you were playing in the Batman sandbox, you co-create Tim Drake, a new Robin, one of the more popular characters in that canon.
Pat: Yup. I did create Tim Drake and did get credit for it, but I’m doing more exciting work now, basically.
CBC: And we’ll get to what you and Mike Baron are working on…
Pat: I’ve got completed six issues of Shatter with Peter Gillis that has been ready to go to the press. But, because of the pandemic, production was slowed down… a lot of properties have gotten shelved until people are able to get stuff back up and running again. And it led into doing this work now with Mike.
CBC: So you go back to Marvel and Shooter’s gone, and a whole new group is there. They started their 2099 series…
Pat: I was invited to join the 2099 family and was offered Doom. And [writer] John Francis Moore had a beautifully devised first year, and we did a really nice run with it.
CBC: Being a guy who grew up reading Fantastic Four, which was your entrance into comic art, how special was it to take on the Doom character?
Pat: For me, it would’ve been actually scarier if it was just him and his old costume, but the fact that it was him in his old costume, but going through a change in his life made it… I didn’t feel like it would be graded “against,” as graded as “an extension of.” So it was a wonderful book to do. It’s always fun to do the book from the point of view of the villain. It really is, especially megalomaniacs. They bring you back to your childhood when you’re dealing with bullies and stuff. So it was a good run. We got close to two years out of Doom 2099. But that brings us up to the crash of comics.
CBC: So what do you do when it crashes? I mean, everybody had their own way of with it. How did you manage that timeframe?
Pat: I lost my mind. It was terrible. During that time period, I went full-time into advertising, in Tampa, doing storyboard work for all the agencies there and was able to make an okay living. But it was very difficult collecting funds from some agencies. So it was not regular though, at times, you could get a large check, but it did allow me to network with art directors who got picked up by other agencies nationwide. So I ended up going from Tampa doing storyboards to Dallas, Texas, and working for Tracy Locke and Partnership. I lived in Dallas and ran an in-house art department for him, which was computer art. We did package design and pitches for new clients and promotional campaigns. So we had Pizza Hut, Hasbro, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, and I handled storyboards package design, end-aisle design displays, and redesign of fountains and drive-throughs. And I did that for two years, close to three.
And then my oldest boy was getting ready to get married, so my wife wanted to move back to Tampa to watch Jim start a new life. And that’s when I started a career as an adjunct, started teaching at college, teaching storyboarding, drawing, perspective, and advertising.
CBC: Which college were you teaching at?
Pat: The first college was in the IADT network of schools, the Academy of Art and Design. And the second one was the Art Institute of Tampa. So I worked for both colleges and it was really a boon, because I was hired on life experience by that time. I even had Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, under my belt. I picked up that job while I was in Dallas and did some design work for him — prop designs and concept designs for parks and themes and rides — and started becoming a college teacher and started getting into that. But, during the time, they offered me a chance to get my BFA. So even though I was teaching the classes, I was also a student during the evening. So I got my BFA in animation and in advertising. It turned me back to what Neal had taught me: I learned the foundations, learned the basics, so I revisited the fundamentals again. I already had a lot of experience in storyboarding and doing cinematic storyboarding, so it changed how I was doing comics completely.
I ran into Mike [Baron] at Alamo Comic-Con about, I guess, maybe five years ago, maybe six. And we just became very quick friends, and I told him I’d always loved his work. He’s a wonderful writer. He always writes very proficiently. I was a huge, huge fan of Nexus and Badger, and he said that we should do a project together one day. So that leads to this being now that “one day,” because it reached the point of being able to draw Social Security, and started going to conventions and started saying that there was an interest in my work again, and picked up a job with Peter Gillis doing Shatter 2.0. And that led from, seeing those pages, picked up work with Mike doing Bronze Star. So now, I’m having the time of my life, I haven’t drawn one super-hero at all. It’s no cars, no car chases, no buildings, no urban skylines… it’s all beautiful nature. So it’s just having a wonderful time with it.
CBC: Was doing a Western something that you had in your back pocket? Or was it just because it was the material?
Pat: Well, I done a couple of just… let’s say, “art samples,” to see if the pieces could be sold on spec. And I did a Two-Gun Kid and Rawhide Kid and they got a really good response. And the thing was, I really enjoyed doing those two pieces. So I mentioned that to Mike about what a great time I had. He actually called me after seeing one of the pieces I’d put up on the wall in Facebook, and I told him, I said, “Yeah, it’d be great to do a Western. I’d love to do a Western!” He said, “I’ll have a script for you Monday, Pat.” And I said, “Oh, come on.” Then I didn’t think anything about it.
So Monday came and Mike was true to his word, and I had a 48-page story in my mailbox. I read it and loved it. I called him up and said, “You had this already written! There’s no way you had this, that you just banged this out.” [Greg laughs] And he laughed about it, and he probably had this idea kicking around beforehand and he did a wonderful job. So I started drawing the script and just was having a great time with it. I knew how I wanted it to look, because I just wanted to do an authentic Sergio Leone-style Western.  Something that would appeal not only here, in the American market, but might have an appeal in the European market. And I decided I was going to put a lot of work into it, and Mike’s been real happy with what I’ve turned out so far.
CBC: It looks great. Mike Baron is over the moon with it…when I spoke with him, he got to the topic of Bronze Star, he just paused and then gave you, in my opinion, the best compliment anybody could get. Which was stating that, when it comes to this type of work, you are literally the heir to John Severin doing Westerns, and I can’t think of a higher compliment.
Pat: Yeah, it’s a big compliment, but Mike’s such a good writer, and he is so prolific. He’s been a crowdfunding monster-machine, and I was looking for another project to do to keep busy with, and I told him, “Mike, I’d be more than happy to do this. I’d love to do this. I call it my Social Security book, since I’m drawing a check every month, and it gives me something to draw and just able to lay back and get into it instead of chasing a monthly deadline.”
The best part about it was the fact that I’m working without editorial control, like I said — and I’ve got the understanding that editorial control has a job to do; they’ve got to get that book out, so somebody’s barking at them, they’re going to bark at somebody to get it done. So tell all the editors I’ve offended over my career: it sucks! [laughs] What can I say? It sucks! I understand it. It is what it is.
I’ve reached a point in my life now, where I look at this story as giving the kind of inspiration that I once got when I picked up Micronauts to do as a series, but this is ours. It’s not doing it for Marvel, not doing it for DC; we’re doing this for us, and I’ve already got people interested in it in Portugal. So the problem is me. I have to reach that page number where the project’s completed, and I’m like… ahh… about 20-something pages away from it. I’m closing in on the 48-page first story concept that he sent me, but we have a 15-page back-up, I believe he wrote, which we’ll add to it to round it out to a decent trade paperback-size, and then we have another project to do after it, Cobalt Blue, and then I get to go back to Bronze Star again.
CBC: So you are working with him on the Cobalt book?
Pat: Yes. So I told him I wasn’t… and this is not a slight to the character or the material… I was just expecting to do another Western right after this, just roll right into the second one because he’s already sent me the script, and it’s a wonderful script. I’ve already done a concept piece for it that I suggested we use for a cover, but we may decide to do another cover before it manifests itself. Who knows…? It’s a nice idea and, if I can keep a Western on the supernatural track, there’s a lot of legends, a lot of lore, and we ought to be able to get at least three trades out of this. But who knows how far it can go…?
I’m not getting any younger, so I’d rather concentrate on stuff that is exciting to draw again, and I may become just as excited doing Cobalt Blue for a stretch, but do I foresee going back into super-heroes…? No, I’d rather do something else. I really would.
CBC: Is this something you might have held onto for the last 40 years to take a run at?
Pat: I don’t know. I like working with a writer with a good creative mind. I’m better as a duo than a solo. So, as long as I continue with Mike — and, as far right as Mike is, I’m as far left — but nobody should ever penalize anyone and say we can’t work together because of our politics. Keep politics and real life out of comics, because comics are escapism. You should be able to suspend reality and get into a comic and get into a story. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or whether you’re following current social trends for certain social groups. Don’t be bothered by that at all. Just tell a good damn story, draw a good story, and have fun doing it.
I’m sure that a lot of artists working in the industry right now feel that because they’re working in comics [they’ve made it], but even though you’re the flavor of the week, they spit you out next week and that happens. So I’m getting ready to celebrate my 50th year in this industry next month. So I’ve got some years under my belt.
CBC: Right now, the artwork is all you: you’re penciling and inking… you’re doing the whole thing. Is it all on the board or are you doing it blue line on [a drawing tablet]? Or are you doing it all on paper?
Pat: All on paper, all traditional. Of course, I scan it and turn it into digital files, and then it follows the digital route at that point on. But I had the debate with my department heads at school when they wanted me to teach digital drawing and digital inking, and I told ‘em, I said, “You’re pushing this because it’s a new tool. We’re teaching these kids how to draw first, so they have to understand drawing first. They have to understand the techniques and the rhythm of animation first before you throw ’em in with a new tool that they have to concentrate on learning on top of all this other stuff.” So I didn’t teach it for ‘em, and I asked the students, “Look, have you seen how much the originals are going for at these auctions? Now they’re going for some serious money. So, if you only do digital inking and digital penciling, how, pray tell, can you sell an original at an auction? It’ll never be the same as an original. It doesn’t matter if it’s created digitally or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s traded digitally or not. A digital file can become corrupted and one day your investment money won’t be seen, won’t be viewed. It’ll be half the shot, half the painting, whatever I said, if you do it traditionally, if you get a virus, you go to bed, you wake up, you go to work, you still go to work, you still have a deadline to meet. To me, it was never an excuse to say, my computer crashed. Well, show me your drawings”…
As a teacher, it’s very frustrating to have students turn in a project that they should have spent at least 15 hours at home working on the project itself and giving them a checklist sheet of the points it has to hit, and then look at it and know that they probably spent maybe an hour, hour-and-a-half on it, total. But I ask them, “Before you sit down, what’d you do this weekend?” “I had a marathon playing a multiplayer game.” “How many hours were you playing?” “Thirty-eight hours, just straight game time.” And then look at the project. “How many hours did you spend on it?” “Oh, I spent 10 hours on it, Mr. Broderick.” “No, you didn’t. You spent 38 hours playing a video game. Come on, there isn’t that many hours in a day. And this is the grade you get”…
Then to hear ‘em say, “If I could only draw an issue of X-Men or an issue of Spider-Man, I’d be set for life,” and sit there and look at them. And I go, “Do you understand this is my third career? I’ve done comics, I’ve done advertising, and I’ve worked in movies a little bit, and now I’m teaching.” [laughs] Everybody ends up being a teacher!
This has led me to an understanding in life that I must have missed in civics class: the structure of Social Security and how they grade the payments you receive. It is the last 10 years of your working life they base it on, not on the mega-bucks you were making at Marvel. No, that paid somebody else’s Social Security check. “We base it on the last 10 years of your life, so you better go out at the top of your game when you retire or you end up drawing Social Security off of an adjunct salary for the last 10 years that you spent teaching.”
CBC: A couple of years back, Graham Nolan shared with me the trajectory of a career in comics: it starts with “Who’s Graham Nolan?” then “Get me Graham Nolan,” then “Get me someone like Graham Nolan,” and then, “Who’s Graham Nolan?” And that’s the route of a career, no matter who you are.
Pat: When you’re suddenly being called a legend in comics, you’re done, even though you’re not done. They’re done with you. And you get to sit in the artist alley section where they put all the legends together. And I looked at my wife and I said, “We’ve suddenly become Marty and Carrie Nodel. We’ve become the grandparents of the shows now.” Because, unfortunately, there’s been a lot of deaths in the industry lately. And, through attrition, we’ve been bumped up… [Conversation turns to recent deaths.]
I love Neal [Adams]. I called him “Papa” every time I saw him because, I told him, “You’re the father of my career. You gave me the tools that I could do something with”…
CBC: You’ve got colleagues in a brotherhood of these folks who are, unfortunately, passing  just as you are now suddenly moving up the ranks from colleague to legend to grand old man of comics…
Pat: My mentors are now all gone. Dick is now gone. Neal’s now gone. Russ Heath was working at Continuity at the time; he’s now gone. Jack Abel’s now gone. Larry Hama, myself, Ralph Reese, I think we’re all that’s left of the original Crusty Bunkers. And I wasn’t even a member of the original crew! They existed before I joined, but they’re gone… though Joe Rubinstein, I have to include him on that. He’s not gone. Joe’s very much alive.
CBC: Well, he’s a teenager at Continuity, right?
Pat: Yeah. But he was still a Crusty Bunker. The old guard’s gone pretty much. One day I’ll be gone. But their work still lives on. And that’s one of the things that every comic book artist thinks about: the work will still survive in somebody’s collection somewhere. Now, though, the industry has changed a great deal. The books themselves are feeding the movies and the movies need to be fed, so the industry has changed a bit. We have now, being the old guard, we’ve adapted to that change. And I guess we’re pushing the GoFundMe projects and those efforts now, like seeing what Mike has done and the books he’s got out… Have he read Florida Man?
CBC: Oh, the one that Mike says, “The whole point of it is to make milk spit out your nose”?
Pat: Yeah! And every bit of is true. I lived down there, I know ‘em all. I’ve drank with half of them. [Greg laughs] I mean I’m probably related to some of these people where he’s pulled these stories from, quite literally! People are always wanting to move to Florida, but I don’t understand why. You can be eaten by a gator if you aren’t smart enough to go out there at night and not see how many eyes are looking back at you. If there’s any eyes looking back at you, you have a gator in your pond and be aware of that during the day, because they want to eat! [chuckles] Your dog barking at a fish may not be your dog anymore. It happens  frequently and it has always happened. But now we hear about it quicker…
CBC: As a summation between where you started as the kid who loved Fantastic Four, to the guy who’s drawing Westerns, where was the joy for you? Was it a continuous?
Pat: Yeah. Art is… I tell the students, it’s a curse. If you’re an artist, you’re always an artist. If you deny that monster, you’re going to be a grumpy, mean, miserable person. So, obviously, it’s very important to your own psyche. And it’s my first love. I’ve had many loves. I’m married now, 38 years, to the love of my life, but art’s been there since I was six years old. And it will be there a day after I’m gone. It’s hard. If you’re a creative person, be happy in the creativity as you’re doing it, because that’s half your learning. If you can get that happiness while you’re creating it, then you’re also learning. And then look at it, judge it by a standard, but hit that moment where you’re really happy with what you’re doing. Because then nine times out of 10, you’re dead mark, you’re dead on. If you’re really happy, follow the rules, don’t forget your training, your schooling. You’ve produced a professional piece of work and everybody will see it. They’ll stand back and go, “Ooh and ahh! How did you do that?” They think it’s magic. And you go, ‘No, it’s 50 years of training.”
CBC: Fifty years of  hard work.
Pat: Time is a human construct. How do you measure time? Is it life lost while you’re spending years doing nothing but art? Or you did a good amount of art? A lot of people can’t do it. People ask me, “How is it you’re still getting better?” A lot of people get stuck with a style or whatnot, and that’s what they do. And it’s like, “Well, if you’re not learning every day, what are you doing?” Always seek to improve your art. Always be self-critical. Don’t be self-loathing, just be self-critical. Like, if you’ve done something well, be proud of it. Also, it’s like this graphic novel is probably one of the best pieces of work I’ve done in my career, but my ego prevents me from bragging about it. I don’t do that. The Shatter series is also, at the time, is probably some of the best work I’ve done of my career. And then I do this damn thing…
One of these years, all these things are going to be out, and I’m going to rule that year. Maybe I’ll get out of the legends section and be sitting next to Bill Tucci or somebody, but I’ll have my year. It’ll be a good year. My rates will go up. Of my original pages, I’ve sold nothing at all. My wife’s got a stack this high. I said, “If anything ever happens to me, there’s a couple people you talk to, you tell ‘em, ‘Pat told me to talk to you at Heritage Auctions. I have full series, years worth of work,’ and see what they can do.” I said, “That’ll take care of you for the rest of your life but, if the market changes, then these pieces will be worth a hundred dollars apiece instead of what they’re giving now.
I fill out like a 9" x 12" book and I work on [custom art] on the side. It’s my originals I take with me after I’ve built up 20 pieces to sell…
If you keep [original art pages] off the market, when they go on the market, they’re going to be hot. And I’ve seen my work… my cover for The Fury of Firestone #1 is a good example. I probably sold that thing for $100. I believe it was just sold on Heritage Auctions for a little over $20,000.* Now, am I bitter? No. I needed that 100 bucks. Do I feel I deserve any of that $20 grand? No, because that’s what happens with something like a classic car…
CBC: When you sold it, you don’t have any rights to it anymore.
Pat: Right, and it may be worth $100 at one point in life. And then you keep it, make it pristine, slab it… whatever. And, one day, it may be worth $150,000. You don’t know. A collector come along, he wants it, you find out what it’s worth and you sell it. Maybe you’ve gone through two divorces, keeping that car, but that’s why you’ve got it. And it’s the same thing with the artwork. Now, seeing what the stuff’s pulling, now I know that it’s calculating my age, expected genetic design. I won’t live to be 122, but there’s a period in there where we could be quite comfortable if we just keep doing really, really good work, that’ll pull a really good sale at an auction somewhere. So that’s my focus right now. If I’m putting pen to paper, it better be the best damn thing I’ve done. And that’s the way I approach every page. My “Social Security book,” I’m already getting paid. And so it’s, like, you’re not being chased. The deadline is Mike and we want to get these things out, but we want it to be good. So, once it’s done, it’s done. And everybody will be happy. And I’ll move on to the next project, which we’re working on together. And those that are frustrated will be frustrated. It’ll be the same thing. It’ll be the…
CBC: Exact same thing.
Pat: Yeah! But it’ll be done and everybody will be happy. That’s where we’re at.
CBC: Awesome. Is there anything that I have missed that you’ve been thinking about since we’ve been talking? Or anything that you’re like to get across that we haven’t yet?
Pat: I can’t think of anything. I just know it seems like there’s a stretch there where there hasn’t been a lot of my work that’s finished, except through commissions and doing conventions and whatnot. But there’s a lot of work that’s ready to get out there. It’s been done. And I know everybody’s going to love Shatter. It’s not the original computer- generated Shatter. It’s totally different. It’s Shatter 2.0. If you’re a traditionalist, you’re going to like it. And if you ever like Peter Gillis’s writing, you’re going to love it. He’s got baboons with axes and knives and guns… It’s a crazy story. It’s really… it’s Peter at his best. He threw in everything but the kitchen sink. And I think I threw that in.
CBC: You threw it in anyway?
Pat: Yeah, I did. I did. I gave him everything. Plus, so that’s going to be a good series. And Bronze Star will be out before then. So I’m going to have a year of some really good work of good stuff in people’s hands. And I expect to be signing a lot of books down the line and then one day I’ll be putting stuff up for sale again. But time’s different. Now we see what’s going on, so I will be satisfied with the sales. There won’t be any sour grapes over stuff.
CBC: And that’s one good thing about crowdfunding  is you know what the numbers look like up front.
Pat: Oh yeah! They will.

Photos courtesy of Pat Broderick.

the Comics Creator

Broderick brothers photo courtesy of Pat Broderick.  Bronze Star TM & © Mike Baron and Pat Broderick..

I first encountered Pat back in 2003, when I visited the Future Comics offices, when we shared a smoke outside and I immediately related to his working-class, pragmatic sensibility. (Plus, I’ve enjoyed his art for a half-century!) So, a mere 20 years later, at the 2024 Heroes Con, I asked if he’d care to be a cover-featured creator and he answered in the affirmative! The following, intended to supplement Greg Biga’s chat, was conducted by phone in January 2025. — Ye Ed.

Comic Book Creator: Three years ago, you did an interview with Greg Biga, who’s my associate editor. It’s a fine talk, but it was an hour-and-a-half, and I’d like to fill in some spots. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to jump around a little bit to flesh that interview out, okay?
Pat Broderick: Okay, Jon.
CBC: We didn’t spend a lot of time on childhood. What kind of household did you come from? Was it working class?
Pat: Yeah, lower working class. Single mom, family, dad left, three boys. I was the youngest.
CBC: That’s a rough and rowdy household, right?
Pat: Well, yeah. If you really want to know the horrific  side of it, she was a public-school lunchroom worker, and that was the sole income. In the ’60s, that was, like, $1,500 a year.
CBC: Oh, that’s brutal. I’ve got the same background, too. My mother was a house cleaner. But did that give you some freedom, having a mom who worked outside the home?
Pat: Yeah, until she came home. She was a great mom, who ruled with a very strong hand. She had to, and we were very… lemme see… one word would be “conditioned,” the other one would be “raised correctly,” and we’d be getting our chores done before she came through the door. You know what I mean?
CBC: The scramble!
Pat: Yeah!
CBC: You had two older brothers.
Pat: Yes, I did. I was youngest of three.
CBC: Was there a big age difference or was it pretty close?
Pat: Pretty close. My oldest brother is four years older than me, and my middle brother is two years older, but he’s no longer with us right now.
CBC: I’m sorry. Were you guys close as kids? Was it highly competitive?
Pat: It was like… well, let me see: Eddie Haskell was my older brother’s treatment of me. You understand what I’m saying?
CBC: Insincere?
Pat: Insincere and brutal. But it was just brother stuff, kid stuff. I was the baby of the family, so therefore, he had just gotten over the middle child being added. He wasn’t keen on having another one. Well, tough toenails!
continued on page 65
continued from page 53
CBC: Were either of them creative at all or…?
Pat: My older brother found his creativity later on in his life. He really never drew at all (that I’m aware of) until about, I think,
12 years ago and he took up painting, and he’s done a lot of Indian, landscape stuff. He did a lot of traveling, so he saw a lot of mountains, and he loves painting.
CBC: So what do you  think made you creative? Where did that come from, do you think?
Pat: Well, my next-older brother, Michael, was also creative. He drew and did some painting and had similar interests of sci-fi and introduced me to Frazetta’s Ace paperback covers. I’d say this was pre-high school, when they came out. He did his own thing and was pretty good at it, but strictly self-taught all the way through.
CBC: Did he introduce you to comics?
Pat: No, it was in a barbershop, in Brandon, Florida, in 1963, when I was getting my once-every-six-weeks crew cut. [chuckles] The barber had magazines on the table and, flipping through them, there had been Dell and Tarzan, but that month there were Marvel comics there. So I picked them up and started reading ’em, and the guy let me take a couple of ‘em home with me. I don’t know if this was the book, but that was when Marvel came out with X-Men #1 and Fantastic Four, and all that, back in ’63. It could have been Tales to Astonish with a monster in it, but that’s what got me aware of the different company styles and products they offered.
CBC: Was it Kirby?
Pat: Yeah! My memory, it was Kirby’s X-Men #1, because that was the first comic that I copied a panel out of.
CBC: Did you do your own comics when you were a kid?
Pat: Oh, no, but I did my own drawings with Spider-Man. I was a huge Steve Ditko fan during the early years, all through elementary school right into junior high. And so I would do scenes with Spider-Man in Steve’s style, battling Green Goblin or Sandman, just as sketches while I’m sitting around in class, not doing what I should be doing.
CBC: So you encountered Steve Ditko on your own. Was there any consensus at home? Did your brother say, “Hey, look at this guy’s stuff”? I mean, he did mention Frazetta.
Pat: No. That was much later on. I had discovered Ditko in’63. Kennedy was about to get assassinated, so I was second grade going into, well, third grade, I believe.
CBC: Cool. It’s like being a free-range kid without the peer influences, you discovering Ditko on your own.
Pat: Yeah, well, I discovered everybody that worked for Marvel at that time. I loved Don Heck’s stuff, too, I really did. And then I was a huge Kirby fan, because he was doing 90% of Marvel’s line, and occasionally I would pick up a DC.
CBC: So you didn’t necessarily see Joe Kubert’s stuff or some of the quality stuff that was going on at DC…?
Pat: That was about the only stuff I would see. I would run across Our Army at War, and the art style attracted me. And though I didn’t realize at the time, I was also attracted to anything by Murphy Anderson and by Gil Kane.
CBC: Did you encounter fanzine culture at all? Did you know what fanzines were?
Pat: Well, I did after Warren Publishing started and picked up on the fact that other magazines spoke about fanzines (though that wasn’t a thing that was talked about in Marvel’s letters pages). And then suddenly there was Woody’s witzend, and the whole underground movement started right before that and through that. So, for me, I was around 14 at that time, and still living in Tampa.
CBC: So you caught word in the Warren magazines?
Pat: Oh, yeah, via their fan art page where they would post drawings that fans sent in. That’s where I first saw a piece by Bernie Wrightson.
CBC: Did you mail in any work?
Pat: I did, yeah.
CBC: Any stuff get printed?
Pat: It did.
CBC: Wow! Where did it appear? Do you remember?
Pat: I don’t remember. I sent in two pieces, both barbarian subject matter, and the art director at the time was Billy Graham. That’s all I can remember.
CBC: That must’ve been a charge for you!
Pat: Oh, it was! Because I’m a kid running around, playing in the river and stuff with my friends.
CBC: Cool. Did you show off to your friends? Did you go, “Hey, look! This is me!”
Pat: Come on, Jon, of course I did! [laughter] As a kid, leading into adulthood, everything’s self-gratification. Anytime a kid can do something so they can’t say, “Nah, that’s bullsh*t,” you do it! So, of course I did!
CBC: Well, I’m still that way! [laughs]
Pat: Well, me too! You know me! God, I can’t wait to put a piece up on the wall on Facebook.
CBC: Cool! So were you known as an artist in school?
Pat: Yeah.
CBC: Did you do work for the yearbook or for…
Pat: The only thing through the school that I did was I got to repaint their mascot outside the boys’ gym. It was looking worn, and they went to the art teacher and asked, “Who could we get to do this for free?” That’s business! “Hey, kid! Here’s your chance!” [laughter]
CBC: How was your art instruction in grade school and in high school?
Pat: Well, in high school, I had art teachers who were very sincere, but I learned about teaching and education later on, when I got into the system, so I was much kinder on ‘em in retrospect, after getting into teaching, and I realized they did the best that they could. This is a public education system down here. Our expertise is producing morons, and they directed me into things that I wouldn’t have normally had, like after-school art classes that I could go to. And that was a great help. Those were my first figure drawing classes. Actually, all through high school, my training was basically anything visually that I ran across in the general sci-fi and Roy Krenkel covers, Frazetta covers, and then the Warren books, because they hired all the then-working EC Comics illustrators. So that introduced me to that and led me to EC later on.
CBC: Did your older brothers face the draft?
Pat: Oh, yes, they both did. I did, too, but they were winding the draft down when I got my number, and they weren’t calling in the 300s at the time. I think, within a year, they had wound it down to nothing. I mean, they ended it.
CBC: Did your brothers have to serve?
Pat: Both of ‘em were in the Air Force, yeah.
CBC: So what was your art education outside high school?
Pat: It began when I won the Junior Bullpen Contest.
CBC: So you were entirely self-taught by the time you became a professional?
Pat: Yeah.
CBC: It’s interesting that you ended up having a career as an art instructor.
Pat: Well, yeah. Later on, of course. I’ve told so many people that, going back to the foundations, which meant educational art, which meant the textbooks, which meant pick it up and reread it again and do it, and it changed everything. Jon, I’d gotten into the labor trap that comics gets you in because, well, life does. I was married, had children and all, had the need to provide because I had a growing family. And then work-wise, because the company is very bullish and making you accept work beyond your capacity to produce quality work. So my art instruction began when I was hired at Continuity Associates by Neal, because, prior to that, I was working Junior Bullpen in DC, but with no hands-on direction from anyone.
CBC: How do you view that time at DC? That is, there were some big egos there under Carmine Infantino’s reign and you were hit with an ultimatum and were pushed out. I imagine it certainly was eye-opening for you, the office politics, and you had grown up without a father. How were you able to deal with Sol, Neal, and Carmine, these real masculine ball-busters…
Pat: At that time, I was a very naive young man. I was, like, 18, going on 19. I felt that there was justice in the world, and someone couldn’t [demand Pat not visit Continuity on his off-hours]. So I was very naive because business is not written in the Constitution. You know what I’m saying? So I since learned a business is hierarchal and I learned quickly during that period it was hostile environment every day at DC, and I didn’t really understand why that was… [Discussion continues about DC in the early ’70s] Everyone was constantly trying to keep Carmine happy and walked around in fear of him, especially when he was out walking the halls. So it was that kind of work environment. But that wasn’t the only time I was exposed to that kind of a management control. You know what I’m saying?
CBC: I do. You had time in advertising. I’ve certainly had my own career in advertising, and there can be a lot of assholes and a bullying, fearful environment. Do you see your careers in comics and in advertising as corollary, or do you see them as separate? Which one was tougher?
Pat: Oh, advertising was by far more destructive for me. It was far more competitive. I worked on site at the agency, Tracy Locke and Partnership, in Dallas, Texas. And the competitiveness was structured into their organizational tier: the associate art directors all competed to please the art director, and the art directors all competed to please the group director, and the group directors all competed to please the chief creative officer. So you get a lot of people in a very competitive environment. When they come to you to do their product pitches, you get caught up in a lot of backbiting and favoritism… I became the storyboard artist for the agency , which would never say no to the creative director. They asked me, “Why don’t you push back? We’ve all worked on our pitches, and he calls you in and asks you if you can do it. Why don’t you say no?” And I told them, “He’s the God of the agency. You don’t say no to God” [laughs]…
And I’m also capitalist. I know how much money is needed for me and my family. So it’s like, “Yeah, I can do it.” Then I’d go home. I’ve told my wife, who has supported me through this insane life that, “I’m not going to sleep for the next three days and you’re going to bring me sandwiches and stuff, and you go to bed, and if you find me asleep when you wake up, you wake me up.” And that was my life as a freelancer, and it was bad. It was wrong. [chuckles] You suffer for it and so does your family. It was far more destructive than comics.
CBC: When did you start a family? What’s the progression there? You’re a single guy in New York, right…?
Pat: No, when I went to New York, I was already married. When I was there for a year-and-a-half, I brought my wife and son up and then we moved back to Tampa.
CBC: You were young when you got married.
Pat: Yeah, I was. I was 17.
CBC: That’s not easy! I mean, you’re a child having a child, right?
Pat: Oh, yeah, Jon! Absolutely!
CBC: So you were married when you graduated high school and became a father very young. So you had to find work, it was existential.
Pat: I was working immediately at an auto parts store, driving a delivery truck, and also at the counter reading the [parts catalogs] and getting them their parts.
CBC: But you also had an ambition. Why comics? Was it just in your blood? And did you look to be a comic artist while you were young?
Pat: No, I had no idea that I could break in because I lived in Tampa. I had no idea that actually I could go up there and knock on the doors and show work to anyone. It was only when I read about their Junior Bullpen Program advertisement in that Our Army at War issue when I realized I could pay for a plane ticket up there and it didn’t cost a lot to get into shows back then, so I could cover it. I could afford my plane ticket and meals. (Though I did not know how expensive food was in New York!)…  I didn’t start [at DC] until, I would say, October. [My wife] did eventually move back in with her mom and dad while I was up there… So, when I went up to New York, I hooked up with Bob [McLeod] and also stayed at the YMCA, and then we both got an apartment together, in Brooklyn.
CBC: How many kids did you end up having?
Pat: Pat is my third wife, and we’ve been married 40 years, and she had two of her own before we got married, so I ended up having four total.
CBC: Comparing the environment from DC to Continuity. Was it night and day or were there shades of difference?
Pat: Oh, good lord. It was quite a change. It was like going from a taskmaster who didn’t care about art into an environment where they all cared about art, and everybody was willing to make suggestions to help you improve your art or care about what you were doing to help you and what you were working on. So it was totally different. No one ran around paranoid. So, yeah, huge difference.
CBC: How were you taking criticism for your art?
Pat: Well, when I asked Neal if he could help me, and he said that I was welcome to join the studio, he told me that the hardest thing I was going to have to do was forget everything I had learned and he was right. So I’d always been open to criticism — always have — because I’ve always wanted to improve my art. Even to this day, I’m still working to improve my art, Jon.
I feel like my work on both Shatter 2.0 and Bronze Star is the best work that I’ve ever had published. And Shatter hasn’t been published yet (and I’m angry about that, but it is what it is for the moment). But my work has constantly improved and people have complimented me on it, and I’ve appreciated the compliments.
CBC: Besides being impressed with your table of contents pages on the DC 100 Page Super-Spectaculars, I recall being knocked out with “The Dark Avenger,” where you showed enormous promise, and you lived up to it, too. Your fannish enthusiasm shined through.
Pat: Yeah. Well, I’ve always been a fan all my life. I’m just jaded now in my old age but, at the time, I was! What you saw in “The Dark Avenger” was the effect of instructional training at Neal’s studio. I did thumbnails for everything, and then I took photos of every pose. I mean, Terry Austin was one of the main characters in that, and I used those thumbnails to draw from. I would never have done that here in Tampa. I would’ve never thought about doing that here in Tampa if I hadn’t gotten the benefit of somebody who had professional training. And that was the best thing about working at Neal’s studio, having the benefit of the knowledge of Dick Giordano and Russ Heath and Neal Adams guiding us, and Ralph Reese and Larry Hama working there. That’s where the formal training affected my art.
CBC: And what a wealth of talent that was there at the time! You really stepped into a wonderful place. Can you remember when you heard about Atlas/Seaboard? Was it by the grapevine or…?
Pat: I was sitting at my desk in Continuity and heard about it starting. Now, this would probably… say it was a Monday, so by Tuesday people were coming in saying that they had picked up this title or that title from ‘em that they had spoken to Jeff Rovin, and it’s an open house, and they’re serious about it. And, I would say, by late Wednesday afternoon, I had already gone down to see Jeff, and I picked up the title, [chuckles] and I come back and told the guys at Continuity that I’d picked up Planet of Vampires. And I don’t think they had a writer for at the time — that was before, I believe Larry had signed on to writer, but he was already doing Wulf for them — so it was, like, in my mind, this company’s handing out titles left and right, and I want one. “I’m an ambitious young man! I want one!”
CBC: Planet of Vampires was a great concept, I always thought…
Pat: I enjoyed it. But it was also, unfortunately, doomed to failure as all the Atlas titles were shortly gone.
CBC: To what do you attribute that to?
Pat: Poor business management. They went after a distributor who wasn’t as good as the one Marvel had, for whatever reason, that prevented them from using the same distributor.
CBC: Did you know [Atlas/Seaboard publisher] Chip Goodman at all?
Pat: No. I’ve never met him.
CBC: And then Jeff was out and Larry Lieber came in.
Pat: And I was down in Tampa by that time.
CBC: What was the decision to go back home?
Pat: Well, I had a secure assignment [from Atlas] and I had the instructions of how to produce it and had the training at that time, and I felt that I could handle it and went to Tampa. Everything was signed, then got the notification that they were going out of business. So I picked up “Iron Fist” from Marvel. Well, I picked up black-&-white work from Marvel, and then I insist that I was already down in Tampa, scrambling for work, because I had not expected that to happen.
CBC: How did you hear about it? Did they call you?
Pat: God, I am thinking I had heard via phone call, but not from them first, just from somebody at Continuity, I believe.
CBC: Kind of naive, right? To put so much faith in a new startup?
Pat: Well, yeah. Also naive and thinking that… well, we’ll cover that later on.
CBC: You said to Greg that you got ahead of your guns. That means because you moved down to Tampa and put more faith into the job than it proved to be worth?
Pat: Yeah, exactly.
CBC: Do you have any of the unpublished work of your Atlas/Seaboard work?
Pat: No, I don’t. They were sending me pages that Larry Lieber laid out and I think I did, like, four, and I mailed them in, and I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, because it was extremely Jack Kirby, I mean, all of the work. And I loved Kirby, but I couldn’t do it.
CBC: There’s enough Kirby clones out there… How was Jeff to work for?
Pat: He was great. I would love to have worked with him again. It was disappointing that he wasn’t active in the industry after that. As far as an editor at one of the companies, yeah, I think he would’ve done very well. But, after doing 14 years at each company individually, I could understand if he saw how they were and… you know what I’m saying?
CBC: Yes. I cover comics though I would never work for them. If there’s any wisdom that’s been imparted on me, it’s, no, I’m not going to work with them.
Pat: Jon, it still just feeds the fan base… while I was teaching, students that came in knew who I was, and the very first question they asked me, “Why are you working here?” And I would tell ‘em this because I need the job. It’s a good paying job, and it’s education and it’s beneficial. And I asked them, “Why are you here?” And they’d say, “Well, if I could just do one issue of Spider-Man or X-Men, I’d be set for life.” And I look at him and I go, this is my third career. You don’t understand. I’m not here to teach you to draw The X-Men or Spider-Man. I’m here to teach you to draw. It so disheartening. But I was that kid once myself, I guess…
CBC: You mentioned working at L.M. Berry. That was advertising work?
Pat: Well, yes, putting together ads for the Yellow Pages.
CBC: Oh, that’s right. Was that monotonous work?
Pat: It was production work. So within our studio, we all were friends and we enjoyed each other’s company, and we competed to see who could turn out the most number of ads in a day, that type of work. Well, you’re also sabotaging your opponent, that type of [fun].
CBC: Were you the only family man amongst the younger generation working in comics? Did you have any others you could relate to, people your age?
Pat: Well, not of my peer group from Tampa, but of my peer group in comics, I don’t know. I have no idea. I hung out mostly with Larry and Ralph and the people from Continuity at the time.
CBC: Did you do any work for National Lampoon?
Pat: I did. I did some spot illustration work for them. Jack Abel inked ’em. They were great. Loved him.
CBC: What makes for a good editor in comics, Pat?
Pat: One who is supportive of their creative team and will back them up. It’s hard for me to say because I’ve had a few really, really good editors that I’ve loved working with.
CBC: Who were they?
Pat: Oh, good lord. Well, Joey Cavalieri, Weezy Simonson at Marvel, and Denny O’Neil at Marvel and DC.
CBC: Did you work for Archie Goodwin, at all?
Pat: Yes, I did. I worked for Archie at Marvel, when he hired me to do Captain Marvel, but then I think it was within three or four months, Shooter was promoted to that position. So Archie was no longer there. I didn’t work for him at DC, but the Superman editor, I loved working for him…
CBC: Julie Schwartz?
Pat: Yeah, Julie Schwartz! Working for Julie was just a pleasure. I worked on his science fiction graphic novel line for him, and it was a pleasure. It really was. It was Sandkings [Science Fiction Graphic Novel #7, May ’87] by George R.R. Martin.
CBC: Cool. Very good. I remember how proud Julie was of that line of graphic novels when I saw him at a Boston science fiction convention in the ’80s. He had, obviously, really hoped that they would be far more successful than they ended up being. When I interviewed you at Future Comics, you said you wouldn’t mind trying your hand at being an editor. Did you ever get that chance?
Pat: No, I had not, but that was one job I could see me being good at a time in my career… I would’ve liked to have been an editor, but I believe every creative team would’ve hated me because, in advertising, I worked my department to death. [laughs] I said, “You guys don’t know what a freelancer’s life is like! We’re staying here until the job is done, and I’m staying here, too, because I got storyboards to do, and you get paid a salary plus benefits!”
CBC: But no overtime!
Pat: No, but I gave them raises and they got bonus checks, but yeah, they bitched and some left. [laughter]
CBC: When did you move to Dallas?
Pat: About 1997, right after the fall of comics. Right after Tekno Comix actually folded, because that was the last comics work I was doing at the time.
CBC: You were at Tracy  Locke for a couple of years?
Pat: Yes. I was there right into the spring of 2000.
CBC: Do you have any memory of being a co-creator of “Creature Commandos”?
Pat: Yeah, I do recall it. I’m as surprised as J.M. [DeMatteis] is. He continued to do stories for the series. For me, it was among a variety of one-shots DC was giving me to keep me busy until they could find me a series. So I did that. I did a Time Warp, I did a “G.I. Robot”… I did a succession of those during that time. Never had any clue at all that “Creature Commandos” would become something later on. It seems to have become a phenomenon for the fan base. Many of the comments I’m reading [the animated series] have been good. I’ve read some that are not been so supporting of it but, by and large, the majority of the people who responded have had good things to say. And it doesn’t hurt to have my name up there every week. It would be nice to know that there would be a creator’s royalty and a royalty for the Frankenstein character somewhere down the road. So I’m waiting on that. But DC has never been quick.
CBC: So you haven’t seen anything from the success yet?
Pat: Oh, no. Other than I’ve, of course had enough forethought to do originals for my 9" x 12" book to take with me to shows. And every one of ‘em has sold as soon as they’ve been spotted at the shows. But it took me probably eight years to get anything from DC substantial that they had owed me for quite some time. So we’ll see what happens.
CBC: With the success of Creature Commandos, have people contacted you to get quotes?
Pat: Well, of course they’ve called wanting to know if I still have any of the original artwork. And, also, there’s been a lot of interviews requests. [chuckles] It was amazing to see that it was the number one-selling book, like four weeks back, from comic shops. So it was blowing off the shelves, after being so long in the dollar bin.
CBC: Yeah, the vagaries of comics.
Pat: But the last six months, I’ve had two acts of God* to deal with, totally blowing a hole in my schedule for what I had to produce this year and then discovering the loss, Jon, of things that I thought had minimal value and then discovering that, oh my God, I should have checked [their condition in storage], as I would’ve stacked that on top of the beds had I known that there was going to be a flood! We live in an X-zone area where there’s never any flooding, so it’s been rather surprising.
CBC: Wow, that sounds catastrophic!
Pat: Well, it could have been worse, but it was still catastrophic. I produced Batman lithographs for Home Shopping Network about 30 years ago and they were endorsed by DC Comics. There were only three of ‘em that were up for sale. I think there were only 250 printed of each. And they sold like mad on Home Shopping Network — great, great, great — and then, after the hurricanes, I discovered that they were going for a minimum of $800 up to $2,200. And these aren’t the originals; these are the lithograph prints.
CBC: Just lithographs…
Pat: Jon, I had a stack of primo prints and a case under the bed. The case was sealed, so nothing should get into it… except water. [sighs]
CBC: That sucks. I’m sorry, man.
Pat: And all the copies of the “Creature Commandos”… they’re gone. [laughs bitterly] Look, I was wise enough to leave this house with all the Shatter 2.0 and Bronze Star artwork to protect them. But when you live in an X-zone,  the only thing you worry about is wind damage, and  that’s it. So I wasn’t concerned that I’d get six inches of  water on the floor.
CBC: Until you did… Did you know Gil Kane?
Pat: Yes, I did. I loved the man. He is a tremendous influence artistically for my art and the work that I studied through the years. He was an incredibly charming man, extremely entertaining at conventions, and just a master at his craft. Very few of us could ever hope to reach his level of understanding both anatomy and dynamics, and his storytelling was always perfect. I shared a few drinks at shows together with him. He was a great guy, he really was.
CBC: “My boy”!
Pat: Yeah, I know! [laughter] I’m in my 30s and he calls me “my boy”!
CBC: I was in my 40s, Pat! And I was very happy to be his boy. I thought I was his only boy, but apparently Gil had a lot of boys.
Pat: Well, yeah! Of course, Gil always brought it down to a personal endearment, so it was great.
CBC: Very warm. I used to speak to him on Saturday mornings. That was just great. You mentioned Jimmy Neutron  Boy Genius. What did you do on that property?
Pat: I was a member of their design team. My area of concern was props, which was environment, things that would be in the environment, and I had to sketch them out in a cartoonish style for the 3D animators,
CBC: Was this in Florida?
Pat: Oh, no, this was in Texas? I was doing that in between working at Tracy Locke and then getting my job teaching. I had just finished my work on Jimmy Neutron and had that credit to my resume when there was a job opening at a technical art college here [in Florida]. And they just opened up an animation program and I sent them my resume because my family wanted to return to Tampa and an interview was set up, but I was hired before the interview, and that year  I started the fall session. That’s where it went from there  to here.
The thing about Jimmy Neutron was I loved the job, Jon. I ended up working myself out of the job because I finished everything that they had for me to pencil and design two months early than what they had projected it should take. So they told me, “Thank you.” And I’m like, “What’s next?” And they said, “Well, we didn’t expect you to be done. There’s nothing ‘next.’” And I left there disappointed and also thinking, “You lazy animators!” They had their own little group. I was an outsider. I just sat there and worked. I wasn’t even invited to lunch with those guys. So it’s, like, “Well, I just get my work done and impress ‘em by how quickly I can do this.” They were so impressed, I was out of a job!
CBC: You worked on American Flagg…  How’d you get that gig?
Pat: Actually, Mike Gold called me up and said that he knew that I was looking for work. He knew that I would be available and that I was working in Milwaukee, which was right across the lake from him. He asked me if I’d be interested in American Flagg, and I said, “Sure, I’d love to.” And that was the one fill-in that I did for him. My other experience with First Comics was later on, with Shatter 2.0.
CBC: What were you doing in Milwaukee?
Pat: Was sharing a studio with Jerry Ordway and Mike Machlan and Al Vey, and I was doing Firestorm and Sun Runners at the time.
CBC: So did you bring your family up there?
Pat: No, I was divorced from my second wife and was single. I was “mingling.”
CBC: Making up for lost time, eh?
Pat: Yeah. The second marriage lasted eight years. So two failed marriages and I wasn’t looking to get married again. And then, irony being the twisted sister of fate, my present wife was put in my way. I’ve been married to her for going on 40 years. She’s a wonderful woman.
CBC: Topps Comics: did you know Jim Salicrup?
Pat: It was through Renee [Witterstaetter]. I worked for Renee at Marvel, doing a Spider Woman feature for the Christmas issue of one of the Spider-Man books. And then, when Jim went over [to Topps], I believe Renee went with him, if I’m not mistaken, and I got to do a couple of at least one piece for their Jurassic Park book. I would’ve liked to have done more, but they were more interested in… well, they had a short line, too. So what can you say…?
CBC: What was T-Rex?
Pat: While I was teaching, I had decided to go ahead and do some concepts I had in my head, and one was a post-apocalyptic Army Ranger who was the son of a militant survivalist growing up. And, in the Rangers, he was assigned a dog to work infantry with. Keep in mind, this was 20 years ago probably. Anyway, the dog carried a camera that he broadcast what he could see and had an earpiece to receive verbal commands from his trainer. And it was used for infiltration, with the dog being ahead of the soldier behind enemy lines to find the danger spots, the enemy agents. And, if it was feasible, he could give a command to the dog to attack… So, after the war, he and the dog were basically bounty hunters, so it became Mad Max.
Now, Jon, I love watching shows about military tech. You won’t believe what I saw: for the Army, they now have their dogs set up with cameras en masse that they strap on their heads and headphones so they can hear commands so that they can do what I drew and wrote about 20 years prior!
CBC: Prescient!
Pat: Well, yeah! It wasn’t hard to see that they could be done. So it’s like, why haven’t you guys done this already?
CBC: Was that entirely your creation?
Pat: Yes…
CBC: What was Peacekeeper?
Pat: That was at Future Comics. I can’t give you  the year…
CBC: What happened with that?
Pat: It was too little too late for Future Comics. Basically, [publisher] Bob [Layton]’s sales were on a prolonged nosedive, and there was nothing he was willing to do at the time that would alter that direction. So it is what it is. I mean, I got to illustrate it, Terry Austin got to ink it, and it will, like quite a few other projects, never see publication.
CBC: Do you have any of that art?
Pat: No. Bob offered it to me after the company closed and, for reasons that were personal, I told him I didn’t want anything from Future Comics.
CBC: I talked to you in April of 2002, when I visited, Bob was there, and I went out to lunch with Dick Giordano and Pat Bastienne. Dick’s an old friend. Things seemed optimistic. What happened overall? Was it just sales? Was it management? You now seem to be kind of down on the experience but you were up then.
Pat: Well, yes, it was sales because, as I said, the sales were going in one direction only, which was not up. Bob would not listen and take advice, even if it was coming from Dick Giordano. So that made it a frustrating place to work at. He wouldn’t take advice from me… My advice to him was that, if I could tell you anything, it would be this: from my experience in advertising, you need to rebrand your product up, change the name, change your lineup, change the way you’ve structured it, because he only wanted to do his ideas. I said, “You’ve got to hire people to come in with some fresh ideas and promote that you have changed everything, that you’ve hired all these people, you’re expanding, and that there’s a new face on Future Comics…
CBC: Oddly enough for a line that’s called Future Comics, it seemed to be a throwback. They looked like 1975 comics.
Pat: Yeah. Death Mask was the only thing that I thought was unique that Dick was doing and David [Michelinie] was writing, out of the entire lineup… Basically, what I did while I was there, I penciled a lot of covers for Bob, and also did that one issue of Peacekeeper and worked the Future table at Heroes Con and that was about it.
CBC: But you could commute to the job.
Pat: Yeah, I lived in Tampa and they were in Brandon. I could commute to the job, yes.
CBC: Around that time, you had another comic book company in town, CrossGen… Did you go over there at all?
Pat: I did. I wasn’t offered anything at the time… I believe what was going on was [founder/owner Mark Alessi] was assessing how well his launch went, the money he had spent and what he could afford to do, which was basically hold tight with the titles he had going and not expand any further. [Acquaintances at CrossGen] all felt that I would be hired and were surprised that I wasn’t, but I told ‘em not to worry about it because it is what it is, that they were doing great work. Butch Guice was turning out some gorgeous stuff for ‘em… [discussion turns to financial status] I’m not doing comics for the bucks. I’m not chasing comics because they’ve closed all the doors to me. There’s nothing to chase, so I’m just going to do the kind of work that I like to do, instead of knocking out three books a month, penciling. It was a grueling work schedule.
So I’m able to ink my own stuff now, and I used to have to do two pages a day, at a minimum, every day of the week, and I felt guilty when I wasn’t working Sunday. I can spend three days on a page now, Jon, and I don’t let it go until I’m happy with it. You’ve seen the Bronze Star work, right?
CBC: I have, yeah. Beautiful.
Pat: It is the same thing with the Shatter work. It’s because I didn’t have to do it for a subsistence living. The bare minimum [of expenses], that’s all covered now. So many people at the shows have asked me, “Pat, what’s happened with you? You keep improving your art.” I’m sitting there thinking, “Aren’t we supposed to?”…
CBC: I think it speaks to your creativity, that it still invigorates you, that you still get a charge out of doing the work.
Pat: Yeah, I do. I tried to not draw comics for a few years while I was doing advertising and the first couple of years of teaching, and then I was not happy. I was not happy when I lost my career in comics. I was not happy throughout the time that I was doing advertising. Even though I was making real good money, I was not a happy person. And I felt betrayed by the industry and, of course, by extension, spread [blame] to editors when it really wasn’t their fault.
CBC: How do you feel about it now? Ultimately, you’ve matured beyond all the office politics, beyond Jim Shooter, beyond all of that has gone in your life. Would you have it any other way? Do you wish you never got into comics?
Pat: No. Well, I was on a panel with some toy designers from Hasbro. Those guys told us they started at, like, $40,000 a year, and had health insurance. And it’s like, “You get what?” [laughter] There were times, had I been willing to investigate other mediums, I may have made a change but, being a comics fan, I would’ve always wanted to draw comics. So I think I probably would’ve been very happy working at Hasbro with a family, instead of being a freelance comic book artist making $35 a page with no health insurance.
CBC: Why don’t you tell me about Bronze Star?
Pat: Well, I had done a couple of Western illustrations and put ‘em on Facebook, and within 48 hours, I was getting a call from Mike Baron and he said, “Pat, what would you like to do? We got to do something together… But Westerns don’t sell in the American market, so it’s got to be a supernatural Western, something along that lines.” He said, “Okay, I’ll have a script for you to read on Monday.” And this was Friday. I love him but I know he set me up because he had a 64-page graphic novel, fully scripted in my [e-mail] Monday, and it was Bronze Star… And that’s how it started. And I loved every damn panel in that book and told people that I don’t ever want to draw another spandex [super-hero] story again. This has been such a breath of fresh air… I only want to do the kind of work I love. And right now, I’m in love with doing this Western for Mike…
CBC: What is Shatter 2.0?
Pat: Shatter is a relaunching of the original Shatter comic series, which had its notoriety at that time of being the first computer illustrated comic book. And it was written by Peter Gillis, and I was approached by Peter and by [1First Comics art director] Alex Wald. It was two weeks after my son had died, but about a year before covid, which was five years ago now. So it’s a continuation of the Shatter storyline with new characters, and Peter wrote some brilliant stories. I mean, he broke my brain trying to illustrate some of the stuff he wrote, and they wanted to know how can we continue the computerization of this comic book path? And I said, “Alex, everything about comics is computer generated now. Are you wanting to go back in technology and get that [dot matrix] look?” And I asked, “Why? I mean, comics have caught up to technology, and now everything about comics is computer generated.” (Though I don’t use the drawing [software] because I’m old school, as I want to have an original piece to sell.)
It’s the same setting in Chicago, just further along in the storyline. And, unfortunately, if not for covid, this would’ve been printed, published, and I would already be signing copies of it by now. I completed six issues, with #6 a double-size, 48-page story, and it’s also colored by Rob Epps, who colored Bronze Star. As you know, Peter was a brilliant writer and the sad thing is Peter passed away before this could be published, the last comics work that he produced, and I am hounding the people at First to get it out there, at least to honor Peter’s memory as his last comic work now. So, hopefully, it will be out [soon].

Below: Detail from the cover of Bronze Star #1. Inset bottom:  Pat is the no good cheatin’ sidewinder in the top hat on the left in this novelty photo taken with his two older brothers.

Above: In Our Army at War #258 [July ’73], Pat read notice of DC’s Junior Bullpen Project. Below: Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired illo rendered by Pat in 1973.

“Behind the Scenes at the DC Comic World” © DC Comics. John Carter TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Illustration courtesy of Tom Fleming.

Batman, illustration TM & © DC Comics.

Above: Pat drew himself sneaking a smoke at work and catching a glimpse of the Caped Crusader in his first published work at DC Comics, the table of contents page in Batman #256 [June ’74], one of the 100 Page Super-Spectacular series. Below: Broderick spot illo from Superman Family #164 [May ’74], another 100-Pager.

Above: Pat’s illo for Monsters Unleashed #7 [Aug. ’74] was inked by fellow newcomer Klaus Janson. Below: Pat’s bizarre contribution for the 1975 Academy of Comic Book Arts sketchbook.

Below: Pat’s illo for a Man-Thing text story by Steve Gerber in Monsters Unleashed #7 [Aug. ’74], with inks by Allen Milgrom.

Werewolf by Night, Man-Thing TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. ACBA art courtesy of Shaun Clancy and © Pat Broderick.

Photo courtesy of Terry Austin. “The Dark Avenger,” Planet of Vampires TM & © the respective copyright holders.

Top: Pennsylvania Railroad, “This Fighter Weighs in at 8 Tons” (1944) Reilly - 011

Above: Pat the pipe-smoker  during his days at Continuity Associates, circa 1975. Previous page: Clockwise from far left is a photo featuring Continuity Associates artists posing for Pat’s “Dark Avenger” story in Atlas/Seaboard’s Phoenix #3 [June ’73] . As relayed in Comic Book Artist #16, where this pic first appeared, “Joe Rubinstein pours rats on Terry Austin while Rich Basile and unknown look on, as the Continuity guys pose for splash page reference.” Also included is the published splash and Planet of Vampires #1 [Feb. ’75] cover by Pat and Neal Adams. Below: Pat’s pencils for the second and third page of that very same super-hero yarn.

Photo courtesy of Pat Broderick. “The Dark Avenger” TM & © the respective copyright holder. Art courtesy of Terry Austin.

Aipotu cover art © Pat Broderick. Courtesy of Shaun Clancy. “The Dark Avenger” TM & © the respective copyright holder. Iron Fist TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Above: Character designs of “The Dark Avenger,” the Batman-esque character at Atlas/Seaboard Pat created with writer John Albano. Inset left: Shaun Clancy related that Pat told him, “A 15-year-old kid named John from Hillsborough High School  was trying to assemble a fanzine called AIPOTU which he never published but Pat contributed cover art by mail hoping to be published and help his future career in comics.

Above: Pat scored the “Iron Fist”  penciling assignment during his stay in New  York City, work that was published in Marvel Premiere #23–24 [Aug.–Sept. ’75], though the artist confessed he “choked” on the gig amid his third issue. This Gil Kane-inspired detail is from #24.

Above: The first issue of Pat’s memorable run on Captain Marvel, #55 [Mar. ’78], which lasted until  #62 [May ’79] and three issues of Marvel Spotlight featuring the character, #1–3 [July–Nov. ’79]. That run was mostly written by Doug Moench, which the House of Idea’s newly installed editor-in-chief Jim Shooter complained in a May 14, 1979, letter (shared by Shaun Clancy)to a reader as “overcomplicated and very difficult to follow.”
Below: Commission by Pat featuring the onetime Kree Warrior.

Captain Marvel TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Commission courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

Micronauts TM & © Hasbro, Inc. Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, S.H.I.E.L.D. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Commissions courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

This page: Pat’s commission work (drawn for Shaun Clancy) featuring Micronauts characters — and a few Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — the above inspired by the story in Micronauts #28 [Apr. ’81], written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by PRB. Below: Bug!

This page: Among the particulars of Pat’s longtime comics career is that he is the co-creator of Creature Commandos, which debuted in Weird War Tales #93 [Nov. ’80] (cover by Joe Kubert above). The team was recently seen in its own animated series on HBO Max. Below is a commission by Pat.

Creature Commandos, Weird War Tales TM & © DC Comics, Inc Commission courtesy of Shaun Clancy..

Doom 2099, Ghost Rider 2099 TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Lords of the Ultra Realm TM & © DC Comics.

Above: A 2016 piece by Pat featuring Doom 2099 and Ghost Rider 2099. Inset left: Poster of Lords of the Ultra Realm, a six-ish mini-series by Moench and Broderick from 1986. Below: Cover by Pat for Doom 2099 #2 [Feb. ’93].

Above: Another DC series associated with Pat was Captain Atom, which he drew for some 28 issues. This here is #1 [Mar. ’87]. Below: Years earlier, Pat had a stint on The Legion of Super-Heroes. This piece was inspired by his cover for #285 [Mar. ’82].

Captain Atom, The Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics. Commission courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

*On September 13, 2020, original art for the cover of The Fury of Firestorm #1 sold for $18,600 at the Heritage Auctions website.

Green Lantern, Firestorm TM & © DC Comics. Commissions courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

This page: Comics fan/researcher/historian Shaun Clancy, an invaluable CBC contributor, has long been a patron for many a veteran comic book artist, having commissioned artwork of fondly recalled characters. Above is Green Lantern and, below, Firestorm, both drawn by Pat Broderick.

Above: This piece is believed to be Pat’s alternative cover artwork for The Fury of Firestorm #1 [June ’82], which was sold by Heritage Auctions in 2011. Below: Neal McPheeters art graces the cover of DC’s Science Fiction Graphic Novel #7 [May ’87], containing a 46-page adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Sandkings, with interior art by Pat .

Fury of Firestorm TM & © DC Comics. Sandkings © George R.R. Martin.

Firestorm, associated characters TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

Above: DC Sampler #1 [Sept. ’83] contained this two-page spread by Pat, which includes the likenesses of the artist and writer Gerry Conway, then the creative team behind The Fury of Firestorm.
Next page: At top is Pat’s re-imaging of his Captain Atom Annual #1 cover featuring a fight between the captain and Major Force. At bottom is Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius, the Nickelodeon character whose titular movie utilized designs by Pat.
Below: Pat engaging with young comic fans at the Capital Comic Convention, in Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1982.

Top: Street view of 1304 Glenwood Road, in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Byron Cary Preiss grew up and the mailing address he used for his early fan efforts.

Inset right: Byron’s senior  portrait taken for the 1969  Midwood High School Yearbook.

Below: Byron is highlighted in this group portrait of the Midwood High School “commissioners,” presumably a student leadership group at the public institution.

Captain Atom TM & © DC Comics. Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius TM & © Viacom International Inc.

Shatter TM & © 1First C omics, Inc. T-Rex, Peacekeeper TM & © the respective copyright holders.Peacekeeper slightly retouched to remove watermark. Courtesy of Tom Smith.

This page: Clockwise from above is a Shatter 2.0 print; Peacekeeper cover art, colored by Tom Smith, an unpublished title from Future Comics; and Pat’s T-Rex, which was pitched unsuccessfully to Image.

Above: Created by Mike Gustovich almost 50 years ago, Cobalt Blue is about the sole surviving member of the Venturians, super-soldiers from another realm. The character debuted in his own title in 1977 and was published by Power Comics, and was resurrected in 1989 for a two-issue series published by Innovation. On his Facebook page, Pat has teased a revival to be scripted by Mike Baron and drawn by himself, set for release in 2026.
Below: The supernatural monster featured in the first Bronze Star series is a werewolf!

Cobalt Blue TM & © the respective copyright holder. Bronze Star TM &  © Mike Baron & Pat Broderick.

*Pat is referring to the devastating impact of two hurricanes to disrupt the Tampa Bay area in 2024, September’s Helene and October’s Milton.

Bronze Star TM & © Mike Baron & Pat Broderick.

Above: The second Bronze Star story arc features this butt-ugly critter! Below: As a gift to fellow Hillsborough High alumnus, Bob McLeod gave this portrait to Pat.

Bronze Star TM & © Mike Baron & Pat Broderick. Commission courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

This spread: Mike Baron’s website describes the series (excerpted on this spread): “Bronze Star is a frightening tale of a Civil War vet who kills a powerful land owner’s spoiled son after catching him cheating in a poker game. An angry posse soon forces him to flee to a remote mining town where he discovers that the town’s sheriff is afflicted with lycanthropy, but this sheriff isn’t the only supernatural danger lurking in this mining town…” Art is by Patrick Rodney Broderick, natch!

All featuring Pat Broderick during his New York City stint, these pix, taken in 1975, depict Continuity Associates members posing in the studio’s back room for artist Larry Hama to serve as reference for a Marvel Premiere “Iron Fist” story he was preparing to draw. At left is a candid featuring (from left) Walter Simonson, Jack Abel, Pat, and Ralph Reese.
Pat also started using photo reference during his Continuity period. The artist told Shaun Clancy, “I picked up using a Polaroid Land camera from Larry Hama. Larry used to like to take a lot of shots for everything he drew. So I picked that up and I decided to make it so that the job flowed easy. The way to do it was to do all your preliminary work first and make sure you got everything covered. I took a lot of shots of posing like Iron Fist fighting and whatnot or talking for the character scenes. We would set things up like that. I did that for a couple books. I had gotten away from that [after] a while. I felt more comfortable in my own skin.”

All photos taken by Larry Hama and courtesy of Shaun Clancy.

Photo courtesy of Pat Broderick. Broderick portrait © Ken Meyer, Jr. Used with permission.

Above: Ken Meyer, Jr..’s
portrait of the Man of the Ish, Pat Broderick.  Inset left: The third time’s the charm! Pat poses with his spouse of some four decades, the lovely Patricia Lovely-Broderick, on New Year’s Eve, 1999.

CHECK OUT PAT…
So you want to stay abreast of Pat Broderick’s creative endeavors? Keep an eye on his Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pat.broderick.75/

coming attractions: flowerin’ cbc #43 come may

The Life and Art of Big John Buscema!

The legend of “Big” John Buscema grabs the spotlight of CBC #43, which features a quintet of vintage interviews with the super-star artist, respectively conducted by Sal Quartuccio & Bob Keenan, JOHN PEEL, Alan R. Woollcombe, LES DANIELS, and JON B. COOKE (the latter Q&A which reveals the moment the Marvel stalwart’s heart was broken — a clue found to the cover image on your left) —  plus Shaun Clancy and Ye Ed. talk with “Buscema’s Boys,” former students of John’s 1975–76 art instruction workshop. Then we examine the tragic fate of prolific ’70s/’80s Marvel scripter Bill Mantlo, co-creator of Rocket Raccoon and Cloak and Dagger. Also included is the fascinating tale of Eastern Color Printing, earliest publisher of American comic books. Along with TED JALBERT‘s interview with IVAN KATZ, son of First Kingdom graphic novelist JACK KATZ, there’s also part two of our lively Shary Flenniken Q+A, creator of Trots ’n’ Bonnie, about her charming cartooning for National Lampoon and stint as editor of the humor mag. And we include Stephen Fears’ chat with versatile and dedicated artist Ric Estrada about his varied career… all this and Hembeck, too!

Thor, Silver Surfer TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Full-color, 84 pages, $10.95

TwoMorrows Ad

creators at the con

Meanwhile in Maryland… Baltimore Con 2024!

Comics creators abound in panel sessions at Charm City’s comics-focused annual gathering.

From left, the “Happy Hour with Comic Book Couples” panel: Louise and Walter Simonson, Robyn and Terry Moore, Emily S. Whitten (moderator), Billy and Deborah Tucci,  and Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.

All photos © Kendall Whitehouse.

Top row: Louise and Walter Simonson, Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.  Bottom row:Robyn and Terry Moore, moderator Emily S. Whitten, Billy and Deborah Tucci

On the “Celebrating Women in Comics” panel, from left: Amy Chu, Sam Maggs, Afua Richardson, Louise Simonson, Amy Reeder, and Martha Thomases.

Amy Chu, Sam Maggs, Afua Richardson, Louise Simonson,  Martha Thomases, and Amy Reeder

Photography by Kendall Whitehouse

a picture is worth a thousand words

from the archives
of Tom Ziuko

All TM & © DC Comics

Strange visitor from another planet? Am I referring to Kal-El — the Man of Steel — the Man of Tomorrow…? No, I’m talking about the artist who drew this — José Luis García-López — because surely such an awesome talent must come from somewhere else. In 1982, I was tapped to color the DC Comics Style Guide he illustrated — and I was fortunate enough to make copies of the pencil art before it left the offices. Only a handful of people have ever seen this art before it was masterfully inked by Dick Giordano — and now you’re one of the lucky ones, as well. Enjoy! — TZ