TwoMorrows Publishing             Raleigh, North Carolina

Comprising the First Volume of Rascally Roy’s Autobiography

Comprising the First Volume of Rascally Roy’s Autobiography
by Roy Thomas
Design & Layout by Jon B. Cooke • Published by John Morrow
Cover Art by Jerry Ordway • Cover Coloring by Glen Whitmore
Roy Thomas: A Life in Four Colors 1940–1966 ©2026 Roy Thomas.
All-Star Comics, All Star Western, Aquaman, Atom, Batman & Robin, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Bulletman, Doll Man, Doll Girl, Doom Patrol, The Flash, Flash Comics, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Justice Society of America, Leading Comics, Lois Lane, Metal Men, Plastic Man, Seven Soldiers of Victory, Shazam heroes & associated characters, Showcase, Son of Vulcan, Spectre, Superman, Wonder Woman, World’s Finest Comics TM & © DC Comics. Adventures into the Unknown TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holder. Ant-Man, The Avengers, Black Bolt, Black Knight, Black Panther, Captain America, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Human Torch, Iron Man, Marvel Mystery Comics, Millie the Model, Sgt. Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D., Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner,Thor, X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Conan TM & © Heroic Signatures, LLC. Bulls Eye, Fighting American TM & © Estates of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby. Mad TM & © E.C. Publications. Pogo TM & © OGPI. Tarzan & associated characters TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Tor TM & © Estate of Joe Kubert. Weird Science-Fantasy TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.
Some photos have been enhanced by image software.
First Printing April 2026
Printed in China.
ISBN: XXX-X-XXXXX-XXX-X
TwoMorrows Publishing
10407 Bedfordtown Road
Raleigh, North Carolina 27614
www.twomorrows.com

Roy the Reader
Our background image is a circa 1965 photo of Roy Thomas which initially accompanied his article, “The Orther Side of the Mask,” in Alter Ego #9 (May–August 1965). Squint and you can see Biljo White’s cover art for A/E #7 on the wall. Photo by Bud Tindall.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author’s Introduction
“So—What Do We Have To Do To Hire You Away From National?”
7
Part I: “Up, Up, And Away!”
The Grade School Years (1940s–1954)
10
Part II: “Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt!”
The High School Years (1954–1958)
47
Part III: “The Mightiest Heroes Of Our Time…”
College & Comics Fandom (1958–1961)
64
Part IV: “Comic Heroes of the Past, Present, & Future”
Teaching & Alter Ego – Not Necessarily In That Order (1961–1965)
88
Part V: “You Don’t Scare Me, SUPER-FINK!”
Two Weeks—Or Was It Two Years?—With Mort Weisinger
(late June–early July 1965)
130
Part VI: “Whom Can I Turn To?”
Marvel Comics (July to December 1965)
152
Part VII: “A Day of Thunder”
Marvel Comics (January to August 1966)
201
Cover Story: The Way They Were
A Colorful Key To The Characters On Our Cataclysmic Cover
248

Dedications

This initial volume is gratefully dedicated
to the following indispensable people:
To my wife Dann,
without whose love and support
nothing is possible—
or at least worth doing
To my friend John Cimino,
whose encouragement was
essential and,
shall we say, unrelenting
And, in loving memory of:
Julius Schwartz,
whose oft-irascible communications
opened up a new world to me
Gardner Fox,
an inspiration as creator and
as generous correspondent
& the irreplaceable
Jerry G. Bails,
who to me was a bit like
Ben Franklin, Max Perkins,
and Johnny Appleseed
all rolled into one
with a special thank-you to
Cliff Biggers

Rough Stuff
Jerry Ordway’s cover art rough. The artist explained, “My process is to edit and move stuff on the image to refine it, then convert to a blueline, printed on decent paper, then ink it.”

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
“So—What Do We Have To Do  To Hire You Away From National?”

he above question—voiced in a deliberately offhand manner by 42-year-old Stan Lee as he stood on the far side of his large desk, facing away from me, ostensibly staring down at Manhattan’s Madison Avenue several stories below—was a turning point in my checkered life.
The date was Friday, July 9, 1965… while most of New York City was busy scarfing a hasty lunch.
I can pretty much date things in my life by whether they occurred before or after that moment.
Then why, you might well ask, do I spend something like the first half of this book getting to that critical point in time?
After all, let’s be honest: The sole reason anyone might conceivably want to read about the life of Roy Thomas, boy comicbook writer/editor, is because of what happened after (no SPOILER ALERT needed, I presume) I responded to Stan that day with my modest requirements for leaving my new job at National Periodicals Publications, a.k.a. DC Comics, and casting my lot with him and the then much smaller Marvel Comics.
True that. All the same, the lead-up to that instant—my first nearly 25 years on this crazy planet—is what set the table for that moment, and for what would come after.
Besides, this is my story—everybody else in it is a supporting player, just as I would be in their autobiographies—so I get to tell it the way I feel I should.
And that’s the reason this book, despite its relative girth as bios of comics people tend to go, runs circa 250 pages (even if with fewer photos and illos than I had originally hoped), yet ends with me just coming up on my 26th birthday—with another fourteen years to go before my first go-round at Marvel came to an abrupt end. That nigh-decade-and-a-half will be covered in the second volume—while still leaving four-plus decades of my life and career at DC, Marvel, independent publishers, movie studios, ghosting the Spider-Man comic strip for Stan, et al., to come (which I’d like to think I’ll be around long enough to chronicle in the third and final volume).
First, though, about the overall title of this tome:
Why A Life in Four Colors?
And why are comicbooks (and comic strips) of the 20th century so often referred to in conjunction with the above two-word end-phrase? What four freakin’ colors?
Here’s the skinny: Beginning well over a century ago, Sunday newspaper comic strips were printed via what was called a “four-color” process… with sheets of white newsprint being run through the printing press no fewer than four times. The first trip through, the black line art was printed, the result being a black-&-white image identical to that in the then-uncolored daily strips. (Note that, while black is counted as a color in this process, white is not… or else I’d be writing about a life in five colors.)
After that, the sheet of newsprint was run through the press three more times, and each time a different primary color was added over the black-&-white line art: blue (“cyan”), red (“magenta”), and yellow (“yellow”). All the remaining colors of the spectrum—green, purple, orange, and varying gradations thereof, including brown, etc.—were formed by the combination of the three primaries, one superimposed over the other. The use of patterns of dots instead of solid areas of color produced more subtle grades—e.g., the nigh-ubiquitous Caucasian “skin tone” was usually achieved by printing red dots over a background left white; what the eye saw from a few inches away was a shade of pink/light red, which passed for “white” people’s pale skin.
When the sheet of paper had been run through the press the requisite four times, you had your Sunday color-comics section.
Beginning in the late 1920s and picking up speed in the mid-’30s, this method was adapted to a new magazine  phenomenon called “comicbooks” (which, in deference to my longtime mentor Stan Lee as well as my own tastes, I prefer to spell as one word). Four-color printing in comicbooks has largely been superseded in recent years by improved technology… but it was “four-color comics”  that I read growing up, and later mostly wrote for…  hence this series’ title.
If you want to know more about the “four-color process”—well, there’s always the encyclopedia.
Picking up from where I left off before the above “four-color” diversion:
I’ve never envisioned this autobio as being just about “my life in the comicbook industry”… or else it would indeed be considerably shorter and begin in 1965, when I was already 24. I’m hoping readers will feel they’ve gained from it a sense of what it was like for a young Midwesterner, in the middle decades of the 20th century, to be both borne along and rudely buffeted by various pop-culture waves, currents, and riptides. Not just by comicbooks, but also by the films, popular music, literature, classic radio, comic strips, television, and whatever else helped form the 5'4" middle-brow Missourian who later channeled those influences into his particular corner of the U.S. comics field, and especially of Marvel Comics, eventually the most prominent signpost in that field. Of course, while there are numerous digressions into other areas besides comics—well, since this is the tale of my life and work, you can pretty much rest assured that in reading it you’ll never be more than a page or three away from some reference to comics.
I also wanted the book’s readers to learn about the colorful, talented people I encountered in and around comics, and about  the strange little world we all co- inhabited. While necessarily holding back some things about myself and my contemporaries (because we all hold some things back when we tell our stories, don’t we?), I’ve strived to present a picture of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gary Friedrich, John Romita, Bill Everett, Denny O’Neil, Mort Weisinger, and numerous others as I saw them… not a full panoramic portrait, or even detailed biographical sketches, but the fleeting glimpses, the extended observations, and the occasionally blurry snapshots that my mind’s-eye recorded as we all hurtled along together toward a future of which we had no fore-knowledge—in an industry that most of the world hardly knew (or cared) existed.
But we cared, and that made all the difference to us. And eventually to them.
One thing I won’t be spending a whole lot of time on in these pages is defending the so-called “Marvel method” developed by Stan and the artists and writers who worked for/with him in the 1960s and beyond. Based on personal observation and experience from mid-1965 on, I’ve long since discounted the ignorant and often downright vicious attacks on that approach to comics creation, and particularly on Stan (and occasionally upon myself and others) as practitioners of the writing side of it, on social media and in other refuges of the unenlightened and the terminally hostile. The sheer fact that Marvel Comics rose to prominence during the ’60s, and to industry dominance by the early ’70s—at a time when nearly all its stories were written and drawn using that approach—proves that it worked. Spectacularly. And not just when supreme masters like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko happened to be the artist/co-plotters, indispensable as those two super-talents initially were to the process. Since that system was primarily the (admittedly ad hoc) brainchild of the equally indispensable writer and editor Stan Lee, I think any reasonably intelligent observer will take the success and basic pop-culture genius of what we ourselves usually called the “Marvel style” pretty much as a given.
Naturally, it’s my hope that my personal perspective on my past 80-plus years in and around one oddball corner of popular culture can serve future aficionados and pop-historians alike as one honest and basically accurate account of what it was like first to observe and later to play a reasonably integral part in the story of the comicbook business, and in particular of Marvel, during some of the crucial years when it was slowly edging its way toward what it would become in the first quarter of the 21st century: one of the most towering and influential edifices to arise from the oft-careless spontaneity that is popular culture.
Since I’m only human, there may well be a few errors of fact in this book… though, I hope and trust, not too many, and mostly minor ones.
The one thing I can promise you up front is that there are no lies herein—either promulgated by me, or originated by others and passed on knowingly by yours truly. Not one.
Clearly, I’ve been determined from the start to tell my story my way—with sufficient detail (and ample photos and artwork, within the stringent limits of “fair use” laws and the economic exigencies of small-press book publishing).
I hope this brief introduction, wherein I admit I’ll be making relatively few concessions to the way a third party might prefer me to tell my tale, has prepared you for what follows in this volume: my early life and influences from childhood through the grade school, high school, and college years… then the period from 1961 to mid-1965 that I spent primarily engrossed in quasi-organized “comics fandom” as a sort of hectic halfway house on the road to winding up as a professional in the comics field… and finally my first year-plus as a novice scripter and nascent editor in the comicbook industry, working for and with one of its most important editors and writers ever, and alongside as talented and imaginative an amalgamation of graphic artists and storytellers as I could ever, in my wildest dreams, have hoped to become associated with.
If you can accept my idiosyncratic approach, I’d be honored and delighted to have you along for the ride.
But please remember—
I never promised you a steering wheel.
—Roy Thomas, 2026
P.S.: Because I couldn’t find the right spot to squeeze it in above, I’d like to take this postscriptual opportunity to thank my esteemed 1980s colleague and collaborator Jerry Ordway for coming through with a truly mind-shattering cover image. In fact, when I told him that, lacking permission to depict any Marvel and/or DC characters thereon, I’d like to feature the likenesses of a couple of dozen comicbook heroes who were important to me in the 1940s and ‘50s (pre-Showcase #4)—a number of whom influenced my later work—it was Jerry who suggested that perhaps an image harking back to the early-’70s Kree-Skrull War might be a good way to go. So there I am, standing in for Rick Jones, with all those Golden Age gladiators exploding not from my head (as in Avengers #97) but rather from the pages of Alter Ego, “Volume 1.” Thanks, Jer.

Never “’Nuff Said”
Stan Lee and Roy Thomas together for the final time—after literally hundreds of encounters  of one kind or another—on November 10, 2018, at the former’s Hollywood home, less than  two days before his passing at age 95. Photo courtesy of John Cimino, with special thanks to  Jon Bolerjack.

Yellow

Magenta

Cyan

The Primaries
A diagram of the four-color process. Just add black and stir.  Printing press not included.

Let The Heroes Go Forth!
Two early-’70s Avengers panels were the precise inspiration for Jerry Ordway’s superlative cover for this book:
(Above:) In #92, Rick Jones recalls old comicbooks starring Marvel’s 1940s “Big Three” plus Cat-Man, Fighting Yank, The Heap, Green Lama, and Fantom of the Fair (with the panel colored monochromatically to obscure the characters). Art by Sal Buscema & George Roussos. Courtesy of Barry Pearl.
(Below right:) In #97, manifestations of “old comics heroes” burst from Rick’s head to battle interstellar foes—but this time RT called for “Marvels only.” Art by John Buscema & Tom  Palmer. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., and other trademark & copyright holders.]

Part I
“Up, Up, And Away!”
The Grade School Years (1940s–1954)

1.
“What’s that?”
Or maybe it was:
“I want that!”
Whatever. Something in that vein, my mother always insisted, was what I vocalized around age four, when I first spotted shelves displaying a multitude of colorful comicbooks at Jones Drug store in my hometown of Jackson, Missouri.
My loving parent indulged me by buying me one that day. Probably only one, since spare dimes weren’t all that easy to come by in the Thomas household in 1944/early ’45. I strongly suspect it was a comic that featured Superman and/or Batman, or at least some costumed hero (they weren’t called “super-heroes” back then), that had grabbed the attention of the small, blond-haired Roy William Thomas, Jr.
Although my parents also bought me numerous actual “children’s books” during my formative years, they didn’t differentiate all that much between typeset books and picture-books and comicbooks. Both Mother and Dad had come of age during the Depression. She had had an eighth-grade education in a one-room schoolhouse not far from Jackson; he had attended a rural high school only briefly before quitting to find a job. They were just happy to see me eagerly reading, whatever the medium. That’s an attitude much of the world has belatedly come around to, after years of librarians railing at me and my misunderstood ilk if we wandered into their sacred precincts with a comicbook in fist or back pocket.
Actually, even before that fateful day at Jones Drug, I had already discovered the newspaper “funny pages”—both the black-&-white comic strips in the Southeast Missourian published six days a week in nearby Cape Girardeau (the largest municipality in Cape Girardeau County, though Jackson was and still is the county seat), and the color strips in whichever of the two main St. Louis newspapers Dad might pick up on a given Sunday.
In the beginning, Mother had to read my comicbooks to me. Batman and Robin initially confused me. They wore masks; so to my four-year-old mind that meant they must be criminals. Thus, for a short time, I mentally transmuted their names into “Badman and Robber.” (As it happened, that duo would actually make it into a couple of professional comicbooks in 1966.)
As for other costumed comics heroes: The word “super” wasn’t nearly so omnipresent then as now, so at first I assumed the “Soup-erman” she was reading about to me got his strength from imbibing soup.
Ere long, I also became aware of the original (we old-timers refer to him as “the real”) Captain Marvel. Because soldier images were ubiquitous in late World War II America, I knew “Captain” was a military title, but I had no clue what a “Marvel” was. I figured the guy in the long red underwear was made out of marble, which must be why bullets bounced off him. (I remember reveling in the penultimate chapter of the “Monster Society of Evil” serial, featuring Mr. Mind, an evil-genius alien worm. And I recall, in a barbershop around age five, finding an issue of Captain Marvel Adventures wherein the hero was trapped in an anthill; a quarter of a century later, its memory would inspire a story I’d write for Marvel’s Avengers.)
I was crazy about Captain Marvel Jr., too, not least because we sort of both had the same last name. In my case, that also became my de facto first name. Most people I knew growing up in Jackson, adults and kids alike, called me “Junior Thomas” all the way through high school—some still do—but I never minded it much. A name’s just  a name.
Incidentally, despite the mention of it a couple of paragraphs back, I should point out that—my pro comicbook output to the contrary notwithstanding—I have no conscious memory of World War II going on during my early childhood. Except—I do recall playing on the floor while my parents pored over a newspaper and discussed a headline about an “atomic bomb” being dropped on someplace far away. It meant little or nothing to me, of course.
2.
In the beginning, it was the sheer look of the comicbook heroes that drew my attention to them:
Superman’s blue-and-red garb, with that wonderful Art Deco “S” on his chest (could TV’s later Sesame Street have possibly impressed any letter of the alphabet more indelibly on a kid’s mind’s-eye?)…
The batlike trappings of the future Dark Knight (forget Robin; who cared about a kid sidekick?)…
The patriotic red-white-and-blue of Captain America…
The blazing-hot red and yellow of the flaming Human Torch…
The pointy ears, triangular head, and winged feet of the Sub-Mariner…
Hawkman’s dramatic beak-and-wings motif…
…and, of course, that fabulous stylized lightning on Captain Marvel’s torso, echoing the thunderbolt that transformed young Billy Batson into an invulnerable adult hero when he yelled “Shazam!” (Which, not having seen the 1941 Captain Marvel movie serial, I pronounced with an accent on the first syllable until long after his comic was canceled in 1953. Like many another kid, I called Prince Namor the “Sub-MaREENer,” too.)
As to why I was attracted from a very early age, and ever since, more to the concept and incarnations of super- heroes than to other comicbook genres such as cowboys or humor or jungle or even science-fiction… well, I couldn’t truly say. Does anyone really know why he/she prefers chocolate to vanilla, or rocky road to either? Another four-year-old, accompanying a parent to Jones Drug in the mid-’40s, might have chosen one of the other types of comics genres listed above. Or they might’ve started off loving super-hero comics, then gravitated to horror, SF, or crime as those genres emerged in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Still another kid might’ve turned up his nose at the colorful rows of comicbooks and gravitated instead toward some other kind of magazine entirely… or a toy… or, alien as it seems to me, a garden tool.
We each come into this life, it seems, with certain wired-in possibilities and predilections that manifest themselves over time… in some people in a relatively straight line (that would be me), in others with fitful starts and stops and wild diversions and changes of interest and emphasis.
My inclination, as it happened, was the strange and wondrous things known as comicbooks… especially the ones with colorfully costumed super-beings in them.
3.
So what, I get asked from time to time, is the very first comicbook issue I can definitely remember?
Well, that would have to be Green Lantern #16 (Spring 1945), which I recall poring over in the back seat of my parents’ used Chevy, parked diagonally in front of Jones Drug across the street from the concrete bandstand on the county courthouse lawn, while the municipal band gave its weekly evening concert. You can’t get much more “small-town America” than that!
Very soon afterward, I discovered All-Star Comics and its resident Justice Society of America. That title, which instantly became and remains my all-time favorite comicbook concept, opened up a whole new world of imagination to me. For, therein, seven costumed characters joined forces against the bad-guys: Green Lantern (whose magic ring formed emerald rays that shaped themselves into anything he could think of)… Hawkman (my winged Golden Age favorite, especially when drawn by Joe Kubert)… The Atom (whom I liked because he was short, like me—but strong, not like me)… The Flash (fastest man alive!)… Dr. Mid-Nite (but why did they misspell his name, I soon wondered)… Johnny Thunder (no costume, just a green suit and yellow bowtie, but he did control his own personified pink Thunderbolt)… and Wonder Woman (the only girl in the bunch—I guess they had to let one of them in). These guys, each the star of a solo feature in another mag, actually knew each other and fought crime as a team—and that made their world 1000% more real to me. I didn’t know the term “crossover” back then—maybe it hadn’t even been coined yet— but I instinctively recognized the concept and responded to it.
The exciting pictures in the comics swiftly filled me with a desire to know what those black-on-white squiggles were that floated like balloons above the characters’ heads; and so, like many another child, I soon learned to read, both comicbooks and the aforementioned children’s books. Thank God for the latter, too—otherwise, who knows how long before I’d have been able to read anything that wasn’t written in all-capitals?
4.
My parents had been married in 1940. Earlier, Mother had moved from tiny Pocahontas to the larger town of Jackson and had become a live-in maid at a quasi-mansion—by coincidence, located  on the far side of the same block on which our family would later dwell for decades. Dad had grown up in even tinier Old Appleton and had had a number of jobs since eighth grade, including briefly trying his hand (fist) at being a boxer; what he mostly got out of that effort, the story goes, was a bad back. Leona and Roy reportedly met at a dance. I was born that November 22.
By summer of ’44, we had moved from our half of the modest duplex where I’d been born (hospitals were expensive!) to a house that was up the hill and a few houses around the corner from it—but still on the very same block as both duplex and the aforementioned quasi-mansion. Our new abode was on Greensferry Road, near the start of that street which ran for several miles before sputtering out somewhere outside town. I never did find out what or where the mysterious Mr. Green’s “ferry” was, since I never saw so much as a tiny stream in that vicinity.
My sister Kathryn Mary (Katy) was born that August 21. I remember, a bit earlier, being with Dad and expectant Mother when the three (in a sense, four) of us first sat in the kitchen of the house at 307 Greensferry that we’d soon rent for what was originally $10 per month.
It was a modest wooden domicile, but large enough for us, and I would live there until I was pushing 21: Two small bedrooms on the main floor, one of which was really just an open area. An iron stove in the front (not “living”) room. A fair-sized yard. A long garden running down the sloping hill out back, where we later grew corn and tomatoes and whatnot. Front and back porches, with an icebox originally on the latter and a two-person swing soon erected on the former. An indoor toilet in the lone bathroom. A concrete basement, essential during Missouri’s tornado season, complete with coal bin, hand-operated washing machine, and shelving for the preserves Mother put up every year. Plus an upper story (read: attic) with two “rooms” which, while far too hot during the summer for anyone to last long up there before an electric window-fan was installed, did give us a bit of storage space…
…including for my growing collection of comics, which I kept there in a big cardboard box or two I’d often visit (hurriedly, during the long hot humid summers) to retrieve a mag for reading in chairs, in bed, or even at the supper table. My parents indulged me in the latter activity, surely hoping that reading and education would be my ticket out of the relatively hard-scrabble life to which birth and circumstances had bound them.
My father, who’d been classified “4F,” ineligible for the draft because of severely flat feet, spent World War II working at the local shoe factory. In those days, Mother was primarily a housekeeper and child-rearer. It was a division of labor neither of them ever questioned. Both had come from farm-related backgrounds to Jackson (whose 1950 census population would be 3694, according to a sign at the city limits). As someone sang waggishly over the radio at some point during my youth: “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm—after they’ve seen the farm?”
Mom and Dad probably didn’t consciously think much about it, but clearly they were determined to escape their families’ history.
5.
History.
Ever since I was a youngster, I’ve been interested in a number of its various permutations: American history… world history… Biblical history… literary history… the history of movies, popular music, chess, radio, comic strips, comicbooks…
But, the history of my own family? Not so much.
Luckily for me, several decades ago, a sadly anonymous elderly relative on my mother’s side put together a two-page “family history.” From it I learned that my great-great-grandfather Zacharias Koenig and his wife Mariane had come to America in 1865 from the little town of Merane, in the Sachse-Altenberg province of Germany, settling in the probably even smaller town of… Altenburg, Missouri. They purchased a small farm adjacent to nearby Pocahontas, and both were eventually buried there.
Their son Gustav (b. 1867) and his wife Marie likewise lived out their lives in “Pokey,” as residents tended to call it, with Gustav operating a harness shop for years.
Their son, Herman Adolph Koenig (b. 1893)—my maternal grandfather—grew up to marry Flora Henritte Petsoldt (we pronounced it “pet-zel”) of nearby New Wells. Over his lifetime, Adolph often worked at a sawmill, on occasion as a farm hand. I remember him as a medium-height, balding, mostly friendly, but occasionally argumentative presence at family events, and as an outspoken (Robert) Taft Republican in 1952 when most of America liked Ike better… while my parents were basically apolitical Democrats, I suspect. Flora was plump and genial, content to cook and bear children—eight in all, only the final one male. My mother, née Leona Dora Koenig, was the third-born of that brood, which consisted in descending order of Olga, Rosie, Leona, Melba, Nelda, Esther, Olivia, and Paul.
One of my earliest memories, about the time I turned three, is of sitting with my parents and “Mom and Pop” Koenig outside the latter’s tiny house near Pocahontas (and just off the two-lane Highway 61 between Jackson and St. Louis) and hearing Mother and Dad telling my grandparents about a Tarzan movie they planned to take me to see at Jackson’s Palace Theatre. I recall Mother saying they had decided I was “old enough” to see it. Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, starring Johnny Weissmuller, proved predictably exciting to me—and ultimately terrifying, when, at its climax, the ape-man’s adopted son Boy got caught in the web of a gigantic spider. That lumbering hairy black prosthetic looks pretty pathetic on-screen today, but it sure scared the hell out of me at the turn of 1944. (Was that early cinematic encounter the source of my lifelong touch of arachnophobia? If so, that would be kind of ironic for a guy who became not only the second person ever to scribe Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man comicbook, but also Stan Lee’s ghost-writer for 18½ years on the Spider-Man newspaper strip!)
In my youth, there were many family gatherings at Mom and Pop Koenig’s various homes in Pocahontas and New Wells, and I got along well with my numerous cousins. I can recall, on one such occasion, reading the quasi-horror yarn “Seeds of Jupiter” in EC Comics’ Weird Science #8 (1951); it closely anticipated the chest-burster scene in the 1979 film Alien. The comic probably belonged to my uncle Paul, who was only a few years older than me.
Once, when I was maybe ten, Uncle Paul took me hunting. At his urging, I took a hasty, unaimed shot at a hawk sweeping by overhead—and, wonder of wonders, I hit it. Wounded, it fell to Earth somewhere in the brush nearby, and we searched for it unsuccessfully, hoping to put it out of its misery. I’ve never gone hunting since.
Grandparents Adolph and Flora dwelt during their later lives in the Lutheran Home, a nursing facility in Cape Girardeau. They were good, sturdy, industrious Americans. As were my dad’s folks, the Thomases.
6.
For what little knowledge of the Thomas family history I possess, I’m grateful mostly to my cousin Agnes Thomas Wachter, daughter of my dad’s older brother Oswald… and to a few DNA charts harvested by my wife Dann. According to records, my paternal great-grandparents came to the U.S. from Germany circa 1854: Ernst Gottlieb Wilhelm Thomas and his wife, née Sophia Paesler. They lived in Millheim, Missouri, likewise between Jackson and St. Louis. It often seemed to me as if my entire family tree had put down roots somewhere on the highway between those two disparate municipalities.
When I was growing up, my grandparents Emanuel and Maria Katharina Thomas (née Berkbiegler) lived in a sizable two-story farmhouse near Old Appleton, Missouri, also set back from Highway 61, a few miles north of Pocahontas. Grandpa Emanuel had been born in 1864, while Missouri was a “border state” during the Civil War. My grandmother, who was born Catholic in 1876, had been disowned by her parents when she’d married Emanuel, who like the Koenigs was a member of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. (My sister Kathryn Mary was named for her, but with the two names inverted and respelled by my mother.)
By the latter ’40s, my paternal grandparents were sharing their farm and its labors with my uncle Oswald, possibly the most responsible of numerous sons and daughters… of which my father, Roy William Thomas, was the youngest. (My father’s other siblings were Oscar, Cora, Dora, Herbert, Lydia, Edwin, and Adolph, though the latter-named three had died either in infancy or childhood.) Stolid, good-natured Oswald and his affable wife Rose had their own smaller house on the far side of a long vegetable garden that separated the two homes.
Sunday visits to spot-in-the-road Old Appleton (and no, there wasn’t a “New Appleton” lurking on the far side of its ancient covered bridge) were full of wonder for me as a kid: sitting astride a working Missouri mule as a toddler… Mother and Dad having my grandparents’ German shepherd Hager lick my fingers on occasion because dog saliva was supposed to be “good” for my outbreaks of eczema… acres of wooded land to race around, home-made raygun in hand… the sinister mysteries of hog-slaughtering day, when the adults wouldn’t let me anywhere near the sheds… the old cistern outside the main house, the sole source of drinking water, deliciously, life-affirmingly cold… the wooden outhouse, with its Sears-Roebuck catalogs for reading and other purposes… the player piano that fascinated me (they originally told me it was being played by a ghost)… smatterings of spoken German, though apparently little of that tongue had been voiced aloud there since the First World War… a few sips of home-made wine that knocked me on my eight-year-old ass…
…and again, perhaps inevitably in my case, a handful of old comicbooks—“old” in this case meaning left over from the early ’40s, so maybe five or six years earlier.
I marveled to note that the comics I stumbled across there were even thicker than the 52-pagers I was buying new. My far-and-away favorite of the small trove was a copy of Superman #19 from 1942. One of its four yarns dealt with the early-’40s Superman animated theatrical cartoons, of which I was then totally ignorant; another featured the evil Funnyface, who brought newspaper comic-strip villains to life. (I would re-tell the latter tale four decades later in DC Comics’ All-Star Squadron, with several other super-heroes standing in for the retroactively non-existent Superman in a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths world.)
Ah, but the house ads in that old Superman comic… they’re what I relished most of all! They showcased a whole horde of covers I’d never seen before. Especially impacting on me was that of All-Star Comics #13, which depicted eight of the nine cover-named then-members of my beloved Justice Society being “Shanghaied into Space.” I recognized seven of them, but had no idea if the ghostly-white figure with the green cowl and cape was the one referred to as “Spectre” or “Dr. Fate.” Also, where was the ninth JSAer? (Years later, I would learn Dr. Fate had skipped that meeting.) And where, I wondered, were Green Lantern and The Flash?
Equally mesmerizing was the advertised cover for Leading Comics #4—the first inkling I ever had that a second DC super-hero group had once existed, composed of seven stalwarts (“The Law’s Legionnaires,” said a blurb, so I figured that was their joint name) attacking a sinister giant green face within a huge transparent cylinder. From comics still being published in the latter ’40s, I recognized Green Arrow and Speedy… the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy… Vigilante… The Shining Knight… but not the guy in a virtually all-red outfit. It would be a decade or so before I’d learn he was called The Crimson Avenger.
My grandparents—or was it Uncle Oswald?—gave me that comic, and I treasured it for literal decades.
The frailty of the human condition grabbed my attention for the first time in those years. When I was ten or so, Grandpa Thomas had to have first one leg, then the other, amputated at the knee… perhaps because of diabetes… and he died a year or so later. Grandma Thomas stuck around a bit longer. They were warm-hearted, hard-working people who never asked for anything from anybody… the sort of folks the term “salt of the Earth” had been coined to describe.
Such is my lineage, my heritage. I couldn’t be prouder of my ancestors on both sides if they had all come over together on the Mayflower—or even if they’d been there garbed in feathers to meet the boat.
7.
There may have been a kindergarten somewhere in Jackson in the mid-1940s, but it wasn’t anything I was aware of, let alone attended.
I entered first grade at St. Paul Lutheran School in September 1946. It was financially supported by the congregation of Jackson’s St. Paul Lutheran Church, to which we belonged. My parents’ decision to send me there, rather than to the public school up the hill, was made in part because the latter required that an enrolling child be six years old by early fall of the school year. Since I wouldn’t turn six till November, I’d have had to wait another full year to start there. The Lutheran school, however, allowed a kid to enter first grade as long as he/she would be six by year’s end. The hour a day of religious and Bible instruction I’d receive was probably a contributing factor, too; but I suspect my late birthday was the deciding one.
School seemed like a maximum-security prison to some kids, then as now. I was truly shocked, that very first day, when one fellow first-grader had to be dragged kicking and screaming—and I mean literally kicking and screaming!—to school by his parents, who handed him over on the playground to a teacher and quickly drove off before he could break free and race after them.
Myself, I took to school from the start. And, hopefully not only because, maybe partly due to my head start from reading comics, I was at or near the top of my class in all subjects. The principal (who also taught grades 6-8) was Mr. Palisch. As it happened, during his first year as a teacher, he had taught my mother, in a one-room country schoolhouse near Pocahontas. His son Ted and I together formed one-sixth of our first grade and were good friends throughout our grade school years. (Ted would later also become a Lutheran school teacher.)
Grades 1 and 2 were taught by young Mr. Schwark in one big room; there were three classrooms for eight grades in the sizable brick school building, presided over by a trio of teachers—with the church’s Pastor Keisker dropping by to provide religious instruction several afternoons a week. The playground out front was spacious enough to be used as a softball diamond… and hey, there was even a several-lane bowling alley in the basement, for when we got a  bit older!
I had very few problems adjusting to school discipline, once I was clear on the rules. But, one early first-grade day, I brought to school a bunch of figures of The Human Torch and Sub-Mariner that I had probably cut out from an issue of Marvel Mystery Comics. I quietly passed them back and forth in our vertical desk row with a classmate, until he abruptly refused to pass them back, at which point I self-righteously complained to Mr. Schwark. He calmly but sternly explained to me that such things shouldn’t be brought to school, and he confiscated my cut-outs. So I never did anything like that again.
Cutting out figures from some of my comics was standard operating procedure when I was maybe five to seven. I’d carefully snip images of the heroes and villains, slicing inventively to give them complete arms and legs not drawn by the artist because of panel borders. Then I’d lay several poses of each character out on floor or bed and make up my own stories with them. Especially targeted by my scissors, alas, were my 1946-47 copies of All-Star Comics.
Of course, that meant I’d have to try to wrangle a dime from Mother to buy a second copy to replace the All-Star I had cut up. I distinctly recall, once when I was six, walking the several blocks to the uptown area—Jackson was a very safe town!—and actually buying a third copy of All-Star #35, “The Day That Dropped Out of Time.” On my way back, I stopped a block from home and sat on a concrete wall to re-read the story, just in case Mother noticed I’d bought a comic I’d already purchased twice and relieved me of it. But if she did notice, she didn’t say anything.
During my progress through the eight grades of St. Paul Lutheran School (which moved to a spanking-new building directly across the street while I was in grade six), comics interwove themselves ever more firmly into the warp and woof of my life, and pretty much everybody around me knew it, whether teacher or student… or pastor.
8.
I had several regular haunts for buying comics in those days. A block from Jones Drug and just a few doors down from the Palace Theatre was Fulenweider Drugs. I divided my time equally between the two local drugstores, hitting both in my weekly excursions. By the early ’50s, Cox’s, a five-and-dime across from the movie house, would carry comics, too—but only Fawcett’s; and, oddly, by that time it would be the only store in Jackson that still carried that company’s line, which included the once-dominant Captain Marvel Adventures. After Fawcett discontinued its comics line in ’53, Cox’s would switch to carrying only the Archie titles.
Much bigger Cape Girardeau, a college town ten miles away, was my other comics stomping ground. Most Saturday evenings in the latter ’40s and early ’50s, Mom and Dad drove with Katy and me over to Cape so they could shop (mostly window-shop) on its Main Street. Mostly they patronized J.C. Penney and the two five-and-dimes that were next-door-but-one to each other: Woolworth and Newberry. Of course, I scoured the comics shelves at both “dime stores.” Newberry’s comics display started at floor level; I couldn’t reach the higher shelves. Woolworth’s shelves were on a counter a yard-plus off the floor, making it likewise hard for me to reach many of the comics. Once, at the latter store, I recall stretching on tiptoe to find out what it was I’d spied tucked behind several copies of All-Star Comics #38, which I had already bought some weeks before—and, to my surprise, I discovered a bunch of copies of #39! I guess the store hoped to unload the last of #38 before we kids got a peak at the new issue.
The main shopping zone on Cape’s Main Street consisted of four blocks—two on each side of the street. Once, when I was only five or so, I somehow became separated from my parents in the press of people walking up and down the sidewalks. I decided it was best to just stand on the corner in front of Woolworth’s, reading my copy of Flash Comics, till they eventually found me. Mother would often laugh about that episode, as if it pretty much summed me up. She may have been right.
When I got a couple of years older, I discovered that  Osterloh’s Bookstore, at the far end of the next block up, also carried comics in addition to regular books, so I added it to my rounds. Walgreen Drugs, across Main, would also carry a few comics in the 1950s.
Main Street was only a hundred feet or so from the Mississippi, which was nearly a mile wide where it flowed past Cape Girardeau. In the’40s, the occasional flood would wreak a certain amount of havoc on Main. Curiously, the lengthy Woolworth store, which stretched a full block from Main back to the next street, seems to have been built at a slight slant. Thus, when the Big Muddy overflowed, shopping might be impossible in the store’s front half, which was under an inch or more of water… but the wooden floor in its back half was dry and open for business. Happily, the comics shelves were located in that half. I can recall sitting, at least one afternoon, on piled sandbags outside Woolworth’s rear entrance, contentedly reading a comic until it was time to go home. It was all kind of exciting to a kid.
A few years later, some spoilsports built a river wall to tame the Mississippi at that point, and Main hasn’t been flooded since. Woolworth, Newberry, Osterloh’s, and Walgreen are all long gone. They might as well have been washed away by Old Man River.
9.
After the first-grade episode with the confiscated cut-outs, I never again brought any comics to school. But I did soon start producing my own. At home, of course.
Though I had begun drawing at four or so, mostly pictures of World War II aircraft, I wrote and illustrated my first “comicbook” at the age of seven. How do I know that? Because my ever-supportive mother carefully preserved all 50 pages of it. (I guess a 50-page comic was fairly ambitious  for a “first work.”) It was a multi- feature “anthology,” which, being small for my age—I was the smallest male in my class, all the way through high school and probably college—I titled All Giant Comics.
All Giant consisted of half a dozen stories, each starring one of several over-size characters I’d created, with the first and last spots devoted to “Elephant Giant,” a size-changing hero in Tarzan-style leopard-skin. Two of the feature heroes—“Black Giant” and “Goliath”—were visually based on drawings of the villains “Attila the Hun” and “Goliath” from the JSA yarn “History’s Crime Wave” in All-Star Comics #38, which had come out in fall of ’47. I turned out All Giant Comics not long after purchasing that issue. The other two feature-heroes were Giant Caveman (whom I gave a Flash-style helmet) and King O’Mighty, attired with sword and armor.
Other such primitive efforts followed over the next few years.
Another 50-page anthology, Variety Comics, a year or two after the first and of moderately better quality, starred, among others, “Catman,” a.k.a. “Zoo-Man,” a jungle super-hero who was a combination of Batman and Tarzan… and “Phantom Man,” visually inspired by Nedor/Standard’s hero Black Terror. Phantom Man lived in an alternate dimension inhabited by Casper-style spirits with names like Hugo the Horror and Gypsy Ghost Lee. I’d heard the stripper-turned-comedienne Gypsy Rose Lee trading quips with Bob Hope, et al., on the radio, years before somebody based the hit musical Gypsy on her early life. My Gypsy Ghost Lee, though, was a male, his last two names a pun on the word “ghostly”; I was already starting to use bits of wordplay in my self-produced comics.
The one time I composed a “Justice Society of America” yarn of my own was a mostly-prose affair… a multi-page tale written in longhand with a color illustration every few pages. I guess I felt it would be presumptuous to draw an All-Star Comics myself!
When I was maybe ten, I produced two 50-page issues of Buck Zzit, Spaceman, a star-hopping hero (with a spaceship and crew) inspired by the Buck Rogers strip, which I occasionally saw in comicbook reprints. The “Zzit” name I lifted from a “zzit gun” in Toby Press’ 1950 Captain Tootsie #1, of all places. (Captain Tootsie was the super- hero star of paid ads in the comics, which promoted Tootsie Roll candy—so Toby Press decided to try to build an actual comicbook around him. It lasted only two issues.)
In the very early ’50s, I wrote and drew the 72-page All-American Comics #1, appropriating the name of the defunct DC title. It starred a JSA-style group I christened “The Liberty Legion”—composed of Phantom Man, Catman, Buck Zzit,  Acrobat (a cape-less Batman type), Green Lantern (borrowed wholesale from DC, which I figured didn’t need him anymore once All-Star Comics was canceled), Tornado (the original-costumed Atom with a new name), The Specter (visually DC’s  Spectre, but wielding a Statue-of-Liberty-style torch), Flame Man (a caped hero who, when ablaze, resembled The Human Torch), The Black Beetle (“inspired” by Fox’s Blue Beetle)… and Sir Ollie. The latter was a comedy- relief Arthurian knight, an amalgam of comic strip stars Alley Oop (the time-traveling caveman) and the humorous comic strip/comicbook knight Sir Oakey Doaks.
Along the way, I also devised a few allegedly humorous comicbooks.
For a couple of years, one of my major interests was sewing hand-puppets and even making an occasional marionette. I’d fallen in love with early TV kids’ series like Howdy Doody and Kukla, Fran and Ollie that I occasionally got to see when visiting cousins near St. Louis. In an homage to the latter program, I made hand puppets of a Kukla-like clown and an Oliver J. Dragon-like reptile, starring them in a 50-pager as Kookoo LaFran and Ozzo. (I made no attempt to duplicate Fran Allison, the real-life actress who supplied the middle name of the TV series.) Ozzo was a blue-with-white-dots sock-puppet brontosaurus, all head and long neck; I also used him in school when I put on a puppet version of John Ruskin’s story King of the Golden River. (Another influence on Ozzo was Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent in the delightful Dell comics licensed from Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany TV puppet series, years before the animated version. I never saw the puppet show, but I loved the comics—whose early issues, creator Clampett told me when we got to know each other in 1980s Los Angeles, were adapted from the original TV scripts.)
And then there was Wizardo, Ace Sorcerer. That 50-pager was the result of my infatuation with the 1951 Fawcett comic Pinhead and Foodini, about an eccentric sorcerer and his dim-bulb apprentice—licensed TV hand puppets I’ve never yet seen on any screen.
Around that same time, I also produced a (50-page, what else?) King Kat and Prince Purr, about a funny-animal royal family and their retinue… the first half drawn in imitation of O. Soglow’s classic strip The Little King… the second half, in a more standard animation style. In both versions, King Kat and Prince Purr (an adult lion and a young tiger, however that worked) had a trumpet-blowing herald, a Tenniel- inspired rabbit named Blooey. Obviously, I was reading childhood classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, et al., at the same time I was devouring tons of comicbooks.
When 3-D comics briefly became a fad in 1953, I even produced one or two of those, by drawing one image in red pencil, then drawing a similar, overlapping figure in blue or green with slight changes that would supposedly make a drawing leap out at the startled reader when the proper “glasses” were donned. The results were perhaps a little better than what you might expect… but not much.
10.
Of course, I wouldn’t want anybody to think I produced nothing but crude amateur comicbooks during those years. I also produced crude amateur fantasy-oriented prose fiction.
One example was Finn and Fish, stories about a sort of underwater Peter Pan who chummed around with sea creatures. (I had read Peter and Wendy, the book version of Barrie’s play Peter Pan, and had been profoundly moved by the ending in which a still-young Peter revisits a grown-up Wendy. See 1968’s Sub-Mariner #8 for the long-term result of that encounter.) I produced Finn’s sub-sea adventures on a toy typewriter on which you spun a rotating dial—rather than striking keys—to indicate which letter you wanted to type. Capitals only. An odd little device, but if I didn’t want to write everything out longhand, it would have to suffice until I got a real typewriter someday. Those things cost money!
Around that same time, I also began a “novel” I called Between Two Worlds, in which military spacecraft from rival planets Mars and Venus appeared in Earth’s skies, in an alternating pattern of occupying vessels, directly above our world’s great cities. Our hapless sphere was caught in the middle between the two warring alien races. (Interesting to recall… not least because I’ve always happily credited Raymond C. Jones’ 1955 novel This Island Earth for inspiring the “Kree-Skrull War” story arc I conceived for Marvel’s Avengers in the early ’70s; yet I scribbled this earlier “between- two-worlds-at-war” concoction a year or two before that novel was published. Most likely, I launched mine after seeing the 1953 George Pal film of War of the Worlds, and just multiplied the number of invading planets times two.)
Also, in the early ’50s, after reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and collecting a dozen or so of its sequels sold at Osterloh’s (along with hardcovers of the Tarzan and Bomba the Jungle Boy series, Pogo paperbacks, and various books on wild animals), I wrote several tales set in the Land of Mo, a neighboring kingdom introduced in L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. (It didn’t occur to me that “Mo” was also the postal abbreviation for Missouri.) I didn’t get to see the classic MGM film till I was a teenager, but I recall viewing a trailer for it when I was ten or so and Wizard was to be shown on New Year’s Eve at the Palace; that, however, was way too late for me to stay up. You can bet that was the most miserable New Year’s Eve of my young life… knowing that Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion were cavorting on the screen just a ten-minute walk away and I couldn’t be there!
Then there was 20,000 Miles under the Earth, my own answer to Jules Verne’s (and doubtless Disney’s) 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, with a drill-nosed Mechanical Mole in place of the Nautilus. That one was mostly written out longhand during study time at school, and 8th-grade teacher Palisch checked out my progress from time to time. He said I should keep at it, this writing thing.
11.
At the same time, and especially in grades 6 through 8, which received Lutheran Catechism instruction from Pastor Keisker for an hour most afternoons, I found I had both interest and aptitude for memorizing Bible verses. I developed a love for the beauty of the King James translation, then in nigh-universal use among Protestants—for memorizing the religious tenets of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod—and for drawing lots of comics-style artwork in my copy of the Lutheran Catechism, particularly Hawkman heads based on the 1946 mask by Joe Kubert.
I was quite devout at that time, and once even wrote a short history of the early days of Earth that attempted to reconcile the Biblical Creation with dinosaurs by positing that the big reptiles had ruled for a time, then were wiped out by the Flood so God could start the world all over again with Adam and Eve. I would later learn I was far from the first person to attempt such harmonizing of scripture and science.
One of the highlights at our church year was the “children’s services”—a pair of them each Christmas Eve, to accommodate parishoners who wanted to see their own kids (and maybe other people’s) recite memorized Bible verses. I particularly relished the little sack of goodies the church folks always gave us… the only time all year I saw a tangerine! The fact that I’d return home from church to find presents under our Christmas tree just made that night all the more special. I was startled, later, to learn that many kids didn’t get to open their presents till Christmas morning.
Despite my devoutness, or perhaps because of it, I did drive Pastor Keisker up the wall on occasion. Once, when he explained to grades 6-8 how it was essential for a person to be baptized with water, I innocently inquired whether, if a minister and his wife were crossing the desert with their very sick baby and they wanted to baptize it before it died, it would be acceptable to do so with orange juice instead of water. The pastor, thinking I was mocking him, got a bit hot under the collar. After that, I tried to keep most of my religious inquiries to myself, and Pastor Keisker and I mostly got along fine. (I should have argued that there was plenty of water in orange juice, but I wasn’t quick-witted enough.)
“The Reverend Keisker,” as he was generally called, was a kind, intelligent man, and I very much enjoyed his Sunday sermons, which he delivered with an oratorical flourish and a strong, rich voice that I found sadly lacking on occasions when friends talked me into attending a local Methodist or Presbyterian gathering. Or other towns’ Lutheran services, come to that.
Despite my appreciation then and now of the education I received at St. Paul Lutheran, my twin interests in writing and drawing led me to become a bit frustrated at school in those areas. Drawing got short-changed in “art class” in favor of what were called “crafts”—mostly making baskets and artificial flowers and the like instead of studying drawing, which is what I wanted to do. For instance, in grade 8, when we were assigned to do Christmas-related projects, everybody else did some “artsy-craftsy” thing; I stubbornly drew an ornate illustration/cartoon of Santa Claus snoring away in a chair in his long underwear on Christmas Eve, with elves and reindeer afraid to wake him up to begin his rounds.
Still, my teachers encouraged such slight writing and drawing skill as I displayed. When our class was studying elections (maybe in 1952?), I was tasked with illustrating the process. I wrote and drew a series of daily-style comic strips of funny animals holding an election in a swamp or forest, a crude homage to Walt Kelly’s Pogo.
12.
Mention of Pogo, which by the end of the 1940s had become both a newspaper comic strip and a Dell/Western full comicbook, underscores the necessity of bringing the reader up to date on the comics I read and collected during my grade school years.
And let’s be clear up front: I did collect them. I never simply read them and then tossed them away, the way many kids (or else their parents) did. From the beginning, I held onto them until they literally fell apart; I even saved what remained of many of the ones I had cut up with scissors at a younger age.
Mostly it was the costumed heroes—the ones I’ve mentioned before, plus a number of others who lasted into the second half of the 1940s (many of whom are beautifully depicted by my 1980s artist colleague Jerry Ordway on the cover of the very book you hold in your halcyon hands—and explored further on pp. 248–254 of this book):
Black Terror (with that wonderful skull-and-crossbones chest symbol, a walking talking human pirate flag)…
Fighting Yank (George Washington transmogrified into a super-hero)…
Cat-Man and Kitten (who proved that the only thing sillier than a masked hero running around with a little boy sidekick was one who ran around with a little girl sidekick)…
Black Owl (a costumed dad who had second billing to his kids, the masked twins Yank and Doodle)…
The original Daredevil (with the dramatic costume split between red and blue—plus a spiked belt for good measure)…
Stuntman (by the bylined team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, who always produced exciting stuff)…
Dynamic Man (with a cool cape that was attached to only one shoulder—I would swipe that bit two decades later when I drew the original sketch of Hyperion for Marvel)…
The Shield (a bargain-basement Captain America, by now reduced to a backup in comics starring Archie Andrews)…
Fawcett’s more super-heroic version of radio’s Captain Midnight…
…and so on and on. But, every month or so, it seemed as if there were slightly fewer masked heroes to choose between. It seemed that way… because it was that way.
Like many kids did back then, I would trade comics, to obtain ones I’d missed without having to spend a new dime on them. My most regular trading partner was Joyce Glueck, a fellow Lutheran-schooler who lived on our block. But I never traded away a copy of All-Star Comics—or of Flash Comics, my second-favorite title because it featured solo exploits of Hawkman, The Flash, Johnny Thunder, and The Atom… over half of the current Justice Society, in monthly doses.
13.
As for All-Star Comics: Well, this is probably as good a spot as any to insert a few paragraphs about my all-time most beloved comicbook title, bar none. Without understanding my love for that series and the influence it’s had on me over the past three quarters of a century and counting, a lot of what I later did in comics (at Marvel in the ‘60s, ’70s, and ’90s, and even more so at DC during the ’80s) simply isn’t comprehensible. To you or to me.
As I said back on p. 12, I was smitten with All-Star from the moment I first encountered it at age four, already 25 issues into its run, with its feature-length tales of the Justice Society of America soon battling big-domed Brain Wave, who temporarily drove the JSAers insane with their own dreams. (That story, in issue #30, is the one in which Dr. Mid-Nite is made to believe he’s a “germ.” When I asked my parents what a “germ” was, they said it was “like a booger.” And every kid in the world knows what a booger is.) A lot of the art in All-Star in the mid-’40s was not DC’s best, partly because many of the better artists hadn’t yet re-emerged from the armed services; but the concept and characters and stories drew me in.
I was pushing seven when, at a female friend’s house, I first saw All-Star #33, in which the JSAers battled a gaunt, white-skinned monster called Solomon Grundy. I quickly recognized from both the more exciting story and artwork (Irwin Hasen’s first-ever All-Star cover and a wonderfully drawn Hawkman chapter by Kubert) that a corner of some kind had been turned.
Over the next year and a half, the JSA tackled a sinister magician called The Wizard… fought a time-altering Napoleon type named Per Degaton (pronounced “De-gay-ton”? “Deg-a-ton”? I still have no idea—nor did the story’s writer, John Broome, when I got my one shot at asking him about it in San Diego in 1998)… shared a surprisingly mundane adventure with honorary members Superman and Batman… tangled with an “Injustice Society” composed of six of their previous opponents, with The Wizard as head honcho… were apparently murdered by villainous historical figures, but restored to life by Wonder Woman with some help from a new heroine, Black Canary… defended the Earth from an “Invasion from Fairyland”… saved some youngsters from the scourge of juvenile delinquency… and, guess what, tangled with a second Injustice Society, made up this time of The Wizard and four different former foes.
After the above run of outstanding issues (#33-41) in 1947-48, there was another sea change in All-Star, this one definitely not for the better. I was ushered into it when I accompanied Dad (and Mother and probably Katy) on a work-trip, since Dad’s restaurant selling-and-delivery rounds included southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois, and the far-western corners of Tennessee and even occasionally Kentucky. (Fun fact: Missouri borders more states than any other in the Union.) At a store in Illinois I spotted All-Star Comics #42 on sale and eagerly snapped it up.
But there was something a little… off… about this issue. It was the altered look of Hawkman and The Atom, my two favorite members. Instead of that magnificent beaked helmet adorned with flaring wings, Hawkman’s mask had abruptly become a simple yellow cowl emblazoned with a cartoony red silhouette of a hawk. A distinct comedown. The Atom’s new look might actually have been an improvement, since his altered outfit boasted an atomic symbol and more primary colors. Still, I felt he’d been just fine as he was. Probably this was DC’s way of acknowledging the Mighty Mite’s newfound “atomic strength”… but that didn’t explain the simplification of Hawkman.
I instantly concluded—with what I felt was irrefutable logic—that the costume changes meant that, obviously, the state of Illinois was shipped a slightly different version of All-Star than Missouri received. I confidently expected that, when I returned to the far side of the Mississippi, I’d encounter copies of #42 wherein Hawkman and Atom were garbed exactly as they should be.
But that didn’t happen, of course, so I learned to live with the “new look.”
Anyway, after #42, the JSA stories got a bit more lackluster, not to mention several pages shorter. No longer did each male hero have a separate chapter to solo around in; now, all seven JSAers tended to fight in teams of two or occasionally even three. Even so, All-Star remained my favorite comic, because there was literally nothing quite like it on the stands: The Marvel Family all wore matching outfits and had identical powers… and the seven Blackhawks were just a bunch of flyboys with different foreign accents.
Around this time, at the home of a fellow Cub Scout, I ran across a coverless copy of All-Star #21, from 1944, which to my delight featured the same nine JSAers I’d first seen on the cover of #13 in that house ad in Superman #19. The story was a good one: Six of the heroes journey back in time to turning points in the life of a dying man, so his soul can be cleansed of past misdeeds and he can die with a clear conscience.
I remember well how thrilled I was when, in 1947’s All-Star #37, DC revived an old idea I had previously known nothing about: the Junior Justice Society of America. A full-page ad invited us to send in 10¢ to receive a metal membership badge, a paper certificate signed by secretary Wonder Woman herself, and a secret code chart to decipher messages concerning upcoming issues. I eventually scraped up a dime and sent it off. (I still have that membership certificate, signed by Diana Prince and myself—to which, over the years, I’ve been able to add copies of the quite different 1941 and 1945 versions; they’re all framed on my wall.)
If I thought the JJSA announcement marked an upsurge in the comic’s fortunes, however, I was sorely mistaken. During 1948 and ’49, I took concerned notice as the solo features starring the various JSAers began to vanish from DC’s other titles. Dr. Mid-Nite was the first to find himself with no berth besides All-Star, when All-American Comics became All-American Western in ’48. All-Flash disappeared around the same time, though the Fastest Man Alive still dashed about in both Flash Comics and All-Star. It wasn’t until Green Lantern and Flash Comics both suddenly went belly-up in early ’49, the latter taking with it the last individual berths of Flash, Hawkman, Atom, and Black Canary, that the alarm bells really went off in my head. Wonder Woman still starred in her own mag and in Sensation Comics. I figured she must have an in with somebody at DC; it certainly never occurred to me that her comics could be selling better than All-Star! But the rest of the JSA suddenly looked like an endangered species… just like costumed heroes were becoming in other companies’ comics.
Even so, I reasoned, surely DC would never cancel All-Star, since it was now the only mag in which six of the JSAers appeared. And indeed, All-Star did coast along for nearly two more years—which is a long time in a kid’s life.
Admittedly, too, there were a handful of exceptionally good JSA stories during that period. In the best of the later issues, #55, the All-Stars went space-hopping in “The Man Who Conquered the Solar System.”
And I’m still impressed by 1950’s All-Star #53, “The Gun That Dropped through Time,” wherein an unknown killer tosses his murder weapon into an experimental “Time Chute” so that it tumbles backward, ever backward, through past ages—only coming to a halt very briefly on a series of “time ledges” that give the heroes fleeting opportunities to try to retrieve the handgun in time to save an innocent man from execution. Years later, I inquired of the editor and writer of that story, both lifelong science-fiction fans, if they had derived the “time ledge” idea from some pre-existing work by Asimov or whomever… but they couldn’t recall. Nor has any SF fan or pro I’ve questioned since ever been able to shed any light on the subject; so maybe the concept of “time ledges” was a rare comicbook original!
Around this time, our school’s library acquired the 1950 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia… and I was elated to find, in Volume “C’s” entry on “Comics” (which spent most of its wordage and illustrations on comic strips) a favorable reference to All-Star Comics #27. That postwar issue had dealt with handicapped people, including a serviceman who returned home from World War II with an arm missing. The JSA story hoped to raise awareness of the problems of disabled people, and I was quietly proud to see it mentioned in an encyclopedia. (I’ve been on the lookout for a copy of that volume “C” ever since.)
When I purchased All-Star #56 in the fall of 1950, my spirits were raised by a full-page house ad announcing that one could now subscribe to twelve issues of any DC comic (that was two years’ worth if it was a bimonthly like All-Star) for a mere $1, instead of the usual $1.20. I scraped up a buck somehow and mailed it off pronto. To me, this was proof positive that DC wasn’t planning to discontinue All-Star.  The company surely wouldn’t offer a sub to a comic it was about to cancel, right? Right?
A couple of months later, I received in the mail my sub copy of All-Star #57… folded twice, with two permanent creases down its length, but at least a week or so before it went on sale at the drugstore and I could buy a second, pristine copy. The title of that story was “The Mystery of the Vanishing Detectives!” Maybe I should have taken that as an omen.
For, a few weeks later, I was chagrined to run across a full-page ad in a DC mag for a new comicbook titled All Star Western. It would spotlight “The Trigger Twins,” “The Roving Ranger,” “Strong Bow,” and “Don Caballero.” The words “All Star” on the cover image in the ad were identical in appearance to the logo of my favorite comic, only smaller. Remembering how All-American Comics had metamorphed overnight into All-American Western, I got a queasy feeling in my stomach on seeing that ad, but I still dared hope that DC had room in its lineup for both All Star Western and All-Star Comics.
A week or two more went by, and another folded-up subscription comic arrived in the day’s mail. Anxiously, I tore open the wrapper, and beheld the cover of the mag inside.
It was… All Star Western #58.
And I cried, all ten years’ worth of me.
The world of my imagination would never again be quite the same. In the 1960s, DC would bring back the Justice Society in various Justice League of America/JSA crossovers… All-Star Comics itself would be briefly revived (beginning with a “#58”) in the mid-’70s… and I myself would write more than 100 comicbook issues featuring an “All-Star Squadron” (and its “Young All-Stars” offshoot) that would incorporate the JSAers as part of a much larger WWII-era strike force… while, at the turn of the 21st century, a partly reconstituted JSA would even become a very popular DC title for several years (though not in my house).
For me, though, something flew away forever the day I opened that mail packet and laid eyes on the cover of All Star Western #58… and in some ways I suppose I’ve spent much of my life since then seeking a road back to that lost sense of wonderment.
14.
With All-Star Comics now gone—forever, as far as I could tell—I clung to what was left of the super-hero comics universe, continuing to collect the surviving titles with as much fervor as I could muster. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr., between them, still appeared in several titles. I continued to buy comics starring Wonder Woman, too, though I’d always been a bit ambivalent about her: Being a boy, was I supposed to identify with her or with her wimpy boyfriend Steve Trevor, whom she was constantly having to rescue?
Although their contents hadn’t generally been quite up to DC and Fawcett standards, I had also liked the “Marvel Comic Group”—as Timely Comics briefly styled itself in the late ’40s, thereby fixing that phrase forever in my mind—and its heroes Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America. But, even before they all abruptly vanished in ’49, I seem to have missed the two 1946-47 issues of All Winners Comics wherein those three teamed up in book-length stories as the All Winners Squad. It would’ve blown my young mind to have seen those heroes, plus a few others, together in a JSA-type group! In the 1970s, I would make up for missing those issues by re-constituting Timely’s “Big Three” retroactively as a WWII-era group I christened The Invaders; and I would give the All Winners Squad itself a belated postwar origin story in a comic I dreamed up titled What If…? I would even include Squad members Miss America and The Whizzer in a second “wartime” cabal I named “The Liberty Legion,” after my two earlier amateur creations. (Yes, two. Read on.)
The list of comics I grabbed whenever I could scrape up a spare dime in the early ’50s was still fairly long: Plastic Man (one of the most inventive hero-features ever, thanks to creator Jack Cole), Doll Man (another little guy, like me, and thus another favorite), Blackhawk, Airboy (with the inhuman, swamp-derived Heap as a creepy back-up), Boys Comics’ Crimebuster (now just called “C.B.” for some reason), plus a few other super-heroes who were clearly falling into disfavor and getting harder or soon impossible to find. Already long gone were the off-brand stalwarts who’d popped up in the latter mid-’40s for an issue or three—Green Lama, The Mad Hatter, Golden Boy, Atoman—only to disappear down a rabbit hole, apparently for good.
I owned at least one comic, usually more than one, featuring each of the above. By the end of 1953, Captain Marvel—who, I’d learn later, had for a time in the mid-’40s eclipsed even Superman in sales by one measure—and the rest of the Fawcett crew would also disappear; as would all the others named in the preceding paragraph except Plastic Man and Blackhawk. And the comics world would become an even lonelier place for me.
15.
Along the way, though, both because of my own expanding tastes and because there were now fewer super-hero comics to spend my allowance on, I wound up buying an increasing number of other genres. The conventional wisdom among comics publishers, I’d later learn, held that, by age twelve or so, most kids quit reading comics, substituting for them other interests, including in the opposite sex (or in the same sex, though most folks didn’t admit that then). For my part, sure, I widened my tastes in various real-life areas; but until around the turn of the 21st century, there was probably never a given month in my life that I didn’t buy at least a few comicbooks off the shelves.
I also loved newspaper strips, mostly the handful I got to read regularly in the Southeast Missourian… like Alley Oop, Li’l Abner, Wash Tubbs, and, for a couple of years beginning in late 1951, an unjustly forgotten science-fiction strip titled Chris Welkin, Planeteer by writer Russ Winterbotham and artist Art Sansom.
I adored Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Jack Kent’s King Aroo whenever I got to see them in St. Louis Sunday newspapers—likewise the beautifully drawn Prince Valiant by Hal Foster, of course. I followed numerous other strips whenever I could as well, with varying degrees of enthusiasm: Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Smilin’ Jack, Red Ryder, even Brick Bradford. The only time I got to see Mac Raboy’s version of Flash Gordon (besides in comicbook reprints) in those days was in black-&-white form in Grit, a weekly tabloid that contained stories, articles, comic strips—a little bit of everything for everybody. That family “newspaper” was peddled door to door by young lads who sold it for a dime. I can still hear Mother, if she had to run out on a Saturday morning errand, reminding me before she left that “There’s a dime on the radio for the Grit boy.”
But, segueing nimbly back to comicbooks: During my pre-teen years, funny animals were a mild interest, both Disney and Looney Tunes and similar Hollywood-licensed titles, plus a few originals like DC’s “The Dodo and the Frog” and “The Fox and the Crow.” (The latter was actually derived from a movie-cartoon series that was so obscure it hardly counted; DC’s comics were far better.) Also, while he lasted, I preferred Fawcett’s Hoppy the Marvel Bunny to Timely’s Super Rabbit or the one-note Mighty Mouse. At some gut level, I recognized that the Disney comics, especially Donald Duck and newbie Uncle Scrooge, were the best-written of the pack—excluding, in my mind, Pogo.
As for the aforementioned possum: I fell in love with that bashful marsupial, and far more so with his cigar-smoking co-star, Albert the Alligator, when Dell spotlighted them in the all-new Pogo Possum #1 (Oct.-Dec. 1949). I recall reading that one in bed at age eight, and laughing so uproariously that my parents checked in to see what was the matter, when the mud-encrusted turtle Churchy LaFemme went slogging through the swamp-waters on wobbly stilts while calling out plaintively for “PoooooGoooooo”—and a terrified Albert gulped in fear, thinking this apparition was “a voodoo giant—clumberin’ through the swamp—hollerin’ for lost souls!” Walt Kelly was a true master of both writing and art.
That same year, Pogo became the star of a national newspaper strip, even if I rarely got to see him in that setting. Thankfully, by the time I was ten, Simon & Schuster began collecting Pogo strips regularly in softcover books for a $1 price tag. But I confess I liked the comicbooks even better, with their color and their longer stories that didn’t have to be told in three-panel installments. (There was a King Aroo collection from Simon & Schuster, too… but alas, only one.)
16.
Other comicbook genres also competed for shards of my attention.
Westerns: There were the authorized comics starring Saturday-matinee screen stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, plus lesser lights Rocky Lane and Monte Hale and Lash LaRue and an underrated personal film fave, Tim Holt (whose comicbook persona was soon submerged in a masked identity, Red Mask, probably to avoid paying royalties). Fawcett, which next perhaps to Dell/Western had the largest stable of cowboy comics, even published one starring Tom Mix, who I eventually learned had actually died shortly before I was born, not that that stopped him from appearing both in comics and in his own radio series for another decade! There were also a few totally fictional Western characters worth my 10¢, like The Lone Ranger (carried over from radio)… Durango Kid (the only true secret-identity cowboy at the Saturday matinees)… Straight Arrow (another radio license: a Comanche adopted by white people, who later “disguised” himself as an Indian to fight crime; it was all enough to make a young lad’s head hurt!)… Red Ryder (with his kid Indian sidekick Little Beaver, based on the comic strip)… plus Westerns not based on other media, such as “Johnny Thunder” (a DC secret-identity cowboy who’d inherited the name of the late JSAer, incomparably drawn by Alex Toth) and, not long after a certain wonderfully eerie song came lilting spookily over the radio, The Ghost Rider, an all-in-white masked horseman who used carefully contrived tricks to make owlhoots think he was a true phantom. (Stan Lee liked it, too; a few years later, because of it, he hired its artist, Dick Ayers, at Timely/Marvel.)
Science-Fiction: I never purchased either of EC’s quasi- horrific SF titles, Weird Science or Weird Fantasy, though I’d often skim briefly through copies in the stores and a decade later would recall some stories well enough to seek them out when I ran into someone with an EC collection. The first EC science-fiction comic I ever bought was the 1954 merged Weird Science-Fantasy special about true-life flying saucer reports. In the latter 1940s, there’d been little SF on comics shelves besides the space-operatic Planet Comics. I’d been fond of its ongoing series “The Lost World,” wherein the archer Hunt Bowman fought to free a future Earth from the alien Volta-men; in the early ’70s it would inspire me to conceive the “War of the Worlds” feature for Marvel, with its Hunt Bowman-esque hero whom scripter Gerry Conway would christen Killraven. However, when SF got more of a toehold in comics during the early ’50s, I often purchased the non-horror specimens, such as Fawcett’s TV-licensed Captain Video and Avon’s Captain Science and Timely/Atlas’ Space Squadron… as well as DC’s twin titles Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. I picked up the latter two mostly when they starred continuing characters, especially “Captain Comet,” the first-ever comicbook mutant hero, who debuted only a few months after DC dropped half of its remaining super-heroes by canceling All-Star Comics.
Teenage Humor: I bought a modicum of Archie stuff starting around ’47 or so. And from time to time I picked up various Archie imitators from other companies. By far the best of those, to me, was the American Comics Group’s The Kilroys.
Newspaper Reprint Comics: I purchased one now and then, but there was never enough Buck Rogers or Tarzan material in them to satisfy me, and they were often filled out with nondescript humor strips I figured I got enough of in the newspapers themselves.
Jungle Comics: Even before Dell/Western launched its Tarzan title in the late ’40s, I was wild about Fiction House’s monthly Jungle Comics, which showcased a whole spectrum of jungle-genre tropes: jungle king, jungle queen, jungle boy, jungle wizard, jungle lion, even the jungle equivalent of the French Foreign Legion. On occasion, I’d pick up Fiction House’s other titles to ogle jungle heroines “Sheena” or “Tiger Girl.” The jungle mags’ built-in racism, such as it was, neither fascinated nor repelled me at the time, perhaps because I never really conflated the backward “natives” in Jungle Comics with the handful of blacks (“colored people,” they were often termed then) who lived in Jackson in that era. Far as I could see from National Geographic and elsewhere, some Africans actually did still live in tribes and huts—though I knew they had no need of imitation Tarzans to protect them from white, black, bestial, or supernatural menaces. The Tarzan comic itself, though drawn a bit stiffly for my young tastes in the Jesse Marsh era, possessed a scriptwise and artistic integrity that drew me in. I enjoyed a few lesser jungle series, too, like Fox’s Rulah and Jo-Jo Congo King, but those were clearly a notch or two (or three) down from Jungle and “Sheena.”
Horror: I actually did pick up a couple of the late-’40s early entries in that genre, like the one-shot Eerie and the initial few issues of the first regularly published horror title, ACG’s Adventures into the Unknown, until it dropped its continuing series “The Spirit of Frankenstein.” When EC came out with its Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear, though, I just flipped through them occasionally on the stands as I did with its science-fiction. I could tell that those comics, like EC’s SF, were superior in writing and art to many other mags around; yet, somehow, I had this nagging suspicion that, if I read stuff like that, its horrific images would stick with me and become the stuff of nightmares, so I instinctively avoided them. I did relish the Prize group’s Frankenstein by Dick Briefer, especially the humorous version of the mid- to late ’40s; still, when it morphed in the early ’50s into a horror comic starring the Monster, I kept on picking it up, partly because it still starred a continuing character. (In addition, I’ve spent decades trying to track down one of the earliest horror comics I ever saw. All I can recall of it is a two-panel sequence in which a Dracula-style vampire, prowling by night, encounters a startled Huckleberry Finn-style youngster, fishing-pole slung over his shoulder, on a country road—with the following panel showing someone discovering the boy’s lifeless body the next morning. That may well have been the first time the idea entered my head that children could actually die.)
Crime (a.k.a. “True Crime”): No interest whatever. I occasionally paged through issues of Biro and Wood’s Crime Does Not Pay, but was never seriously tempted to buy one.
Classics Illustrated: That’s really a series title rather than a genre, but as one who loved to read, I acquired a fair number of these—not just Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but also The Odyssey, The Jungle Book, The Three Musketeers, and anything that seemed even moderately interesting. CI introduced me to The Iliad, which in turn led me to a “young readers” version of the tale, and soon to Homer’s actual epic (in translation, of course), which over time became my favorite work of literature, bar none. Nor was there ever a better adaptation, not even by Orson Welles or George Pal or Steven Spielberg, of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds than the one done in Classics Illustrated.
Real-Life and/or Sports Comics: Little interest, except on the rare occasion when they’d feature someone like St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial. I did buy Fawcett’s Jackie Robinson Comics, and I was happy when I got to see the first “Negro” Major Laguer play live in St. Louis one Sunday  in 1952.
War Comics: They barely existed as a genre till the Korean War started in mid-1950. I don’t think I ever bought a war comic.
Romance: Are you kidding me?
And then there was Mad.
17.
Since I recognized the EC (“Entertaining Comics”) symbol as the one emblazoned on the covers of horror, war, crime, and scary science-fiction mags I never bought, I was only mildly intrigued when one day in 1952 I spotted a cover that seemed to walk the tightrope between horror and—humor. “Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD,” it proclaimed. Was that supposed to be a good thing? The text running down the left side of the cover made no more sense to my eleven-year-old self: “Humor in a Jugular Vein.” And that cover artwork! In a simple, very cartoony drawing, a menacing shadow looms before a pint-size kid and his cringing, terrified parents in a darkened house.
“That thing! That slithering blob coming toward us!” gasps Dad.
“What is it?” gulps Mom.
“It’s Melvin!” explains the kid.
Sure, I paged through it. Its first story was indeed a haunted house yarn, again with art and story poised between horror and humor. But that story title: “Hoohah!” What was that all about? I flipped to the ending: The house’s aged caretaker walks away holding his severed head under his arm. So, I figured, maybe it was a horror comic, after all. The other stories, in a similar off-kilter way, covered the genres of SF, crime, and Western. Each of the protagonists perished at the stories’ end.
I didn’t get it. I put Mad #1 back on the shelf and thought no more about it.
Two months later, Mad #2 sported a baseball cover, with a green-faced witch giving a player the “evil eye” from the bleachers. The mag’s second story, though, called “Melvin!” (that name again!), made fun of a more definite subject: Tarzan, whom I loved in movies, novels, comicbooks, even on radio. Still, that wasn’t enough for me. No sale.
With Mad #3, being a fan of Jack Webb’s hit series Dragnet on radio (we didn’t yet have a TV), I was grabbed by the lead story, “Dragged Net!” And the issue ended with “Lone Stranger!,” clearly a parody (I understood that concept, whether or not I knew that word yet) of The Lone Ranger. Still, back it went onto the shelf.
Mad #4 nearly had me. Opening the cover, I found myself face to face with—“Superduperman!” Instantly, I was both attracted and repelled: This “Wood”-drawn story poked vicious fun at the most popular super-hero of all, just as it had of icons Tarzan, Lone Ranger, et al. Even more startling was the sudden appearance on page 5 of “Captain Marbles,” a blond-haired spoof of the World’s Mightiest Mortal. We comics readers had long daydreamed of a grudge match between Superman and Captain Marvel, to find out which was stronger—vaguely aware it was unlikely to happen because the two heroes were published by different companies, and with no inkling that, in fact, a bitter lawsuit between DC and Fawcett was winding its way through the courts over the Big Red Cheese’s alleged “trademark infringement” of the Man of Steel. All I saw in early 1953 was that this color comic was ridiculing not one but two of my favorite heroes.
And so, despite additional spoofs in that issue of Robin Hood and The Shadow (whom I also knew from radio and comics), I returned Mad #4 to its place among the unpurchased magazines. But that issue stayed on my mind more than the other three had.
And two months later came the one that finally turned the trick.
Paging through the just-out Mad #5, following a spoof of the creepy radio show Inner Sanctum that even incorporated an apparent takeoff on the comics’ Heap, I ran smack-dab into—the “Black and Blue Hawks!”
The madcap lampoon of the Blackhawk comic abruptly brought it home to me: Mad was dedicated to making fun of… everything! Clearly, nothing was sacred. Blackhawk, while a popular Quality title, was hardly in a class with Superman, Tarzan, etc., in terms of being a household name. Yet there it all was: the ethnic- stereotype aviators from all over the world (though the diminutive Chinese, Chop Chop Chop, spoke with an upper-class English accent!)… the crude, irresistible-to-kids quip after airman Robespierre dies in a crash (“Cover ’im over afore he stinks, boys!”)… and the unbelievably sexy blonde-bombshell leader of a mysterious revolution.
I laid down my dime and hurried home to devour Mad #5. I finally “got it.” I was now a devout Mad fan.
To my great joy, at another store a day or two later I ran across a copy of Mad #4 that hadn’t yet been taken off sale, and I scooped it up. This time through, I was mesmerized by what the letters stood for in Captain Marbles’ “magic word” that transformed him from “Billy Spafon, boy reporter” (see art spot on following page).
On the rebound, I reveled in reading “Superduperman!” over and over, with, I’d like to think, at least the beginnings of a realization that it was what I (and many others) now consider that story to be: one of the best comicbook yarns ever written and drawn, from the mid-1930s till the day after tomorrow.
Of course, in the early 1950s I had no idea that Wally Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin, et al., didn’t also write the stories they drew in their distinctive styles. After all, I wrote all the stories I drew, didn’t I? And this despite various now-vanished dual credits I recalled from 1940s DC comics such as “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” on “Superman,” or “Gardner F. Fox & E.E. Hibbard” on “The Flash.” Only years later would I learn that the real genius behind Mad (and I use that over-employed word for only a bare handful of people who ever worked in the field) was a writer/artist/editor named Harvey Kurtzman, one of the most important and talented creators in the history of comics.
Some time after my conversion, Mad offered back issues #1-3 for sale through the mail for a quarter apiece, and I quickly scraped up the dough to order them. I was an avid reader from then till the end of the color Mad in 1955, after 23 issues. (I bought the first few black-&-white magazine issues religiously, too, but soon realized the larger 25¢ version was rapidly losing its cutting edge, and I lost much of my enthusiasm for it.)
Over those first three years, Kurtzman developed in Mad an entire species of tropes that made all us readers feel we were members of some subversive club that adults and other squares couldn’t understand, like humorous signs and objects in the backgrounds of the panels—what we later learned Mad artist Will Elder called “chicken fat.” The secret-handshake-style vocabulary roped us in, too: “Melvin”… “furshlugginer”…“potrzebie”… and, for me as a smalltown Midwesterner in 1953, the references to something called a “pizza pie.” Was that just slang for a piece of pie? “Pizza” wasn’t a word I’d ever seen anywhere else.
In the months after my conversion, I even wrote and drew my first amateur comic story influenced by Mad. Inspired by “Black and Blue Hawks,” I produced a parody of my all-time favorite “Justice Society of America.” I don’t recall what lampoon title I gave it, but I do recall the group was lorded over by Mean Lantern, who ruled the roost not unlike Boss Hawk had in Mad #5. This was a harbinger of a spoof I’d do of the later Justice League of America, eight years afterward. Somewhere along the line I did a “Marvel” parody, too; one of its stars was The Fumin’ Scorch. When I entered the comics industry a decade after Mad converted to magazine format, I became primarily a writer of heroic pop fiction. Even so, there were few post-All Star comics that ever made a greater impact on my life and attitudes than Pogo Possum and Mad #1–23.
Well, at least not until 1956 and 1961.
18.
Comicbooks and comic strips together formed one  pop-culture “pillar” of my fantasy world.
Obviously, another one was the movies of the latter ’40s and onward. Why else would I remember so clearly the circumstances around my seeing Tarzan’s Desert Mystery at age three?
One of the recurring rhythms in my young life during that period was the Saturday Western “matinee.” Actually, at the Palace Theatre, “matinees” commenced at 2:00 in the afternoon and lasted till around 4:00. The featured film was usually a Western, alternating a fabled handful of horseback heroes, some of them mentioned a few pages back via their comicbook licenses: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy (some of his movies may have been 1930s reissues, but we didn’t know or care about that), Allan “Rocky” Lane, Monte Hale, Tim Holt, The Durango Kid, Red Ryder (usually and best played by “Wild Bill” Elliott), Lash LaRue, and the last of the B-movie cowboy stars, Rex Allen, “the Arizona Cowboy.” In comicbook ads for products like Royal Crown Cola I’d also see plugs for films starring other B- or C-movie range-riders like Tex Ritter, Whip Wilson, Jimmy Wakely, Sunset Carson, and Johnny Mack Brown; but we in Jackson rarely got to see their movies, which emanated from lesser studios like Monogram and Mascot. Most of the pics we saw were released by Republic Pictures, behind its familiar eagle logo.
The features, generally about an hour long, were preceded by a whole separate program: animated 7-minute cartoons (usually two, occasionally three)—a short subject (“The Three Stooges” was by far our first choice, naturally)—trailers for movies coming up over the next seven days to the Palace, whose bill changed three or four times a week (we called the trailers “previews,” since they were introduced by an on-screen image that referred to them  as “Prevues of Coming Attractions”)—plus a few locally- coordinated ads.
Oh, but I can’t forget the serials! My pre- and early teen years witnessed the final winding-down of those chapter- a-week offerings. I have memories of Westerns (Cody of the Pony Express, Roar of the Iron Horse); science-fiction heroes (Brick Bradford, Captain Video, The Lost Planet, even raygun-wielding bad-guys from Mercury shoehorned into an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island); crime and spies (Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders, Trader Tom of the China Seas), jungle (Congo Bill and Captain Africa)—you name it.
Making by far the greatest impact on me (and on many another youngster) were the two Superman serials in 1948 and 1950, and to a lesser extent the 1949 Batman and Robin with Robert Lowery… all three from Columbia rather than Republic.
I can’t begin to describe the excitement I felt the day in ’48 that I saw in a Cape Girardeau theatre, unexpectedly, an actual trailer for the first Superman serial a week before it opened; it would make its way to Jackson a few weeks later (I never saw a trailer for any other serial in those days): A train is speeding toward a lethal rendezvous with a dislodged rail—when suddenly, Superman (played by Kirk Alyn), in glorious shades of gray, races onto the scene and swiftly straightens the iron rail so the locomotive can roll safely onward. In 1950’s sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman, veteran actor Lyle Talbot made a great Luthor—back when he was an evil scientist, as he should always have remained. The only real disappointment in the Superman serials was the flying scenes, done from a distance with crude animation. But I got used to them.
Batman and Robin had some major flaws, too: e.g., no Batmobile, just playboy Bruce Wayne’s black convertible with the top up! And, soon afterward, Blackhawk, also starring the ruggedly heroic Kirk Alyn, reduced the comicbook aviators to tooling around in black sedans and the occasional cargo plane with alleged “hidden jets.” Still, I loved them all, in varying degrees. My main frustration was that I never once managed to see all 12 to 15 of a serial’s weekly 15-minute chapters: I invariably came down with some minor kid’s illness at some point, forcing me to miss at least one Saturday showing.
By the early 1950s, the ubiquity of Westerns on the upstart medium television led to the Saturday “matinees” petering out, but I probably attended right up to the end, as much for the serials as anything.
Other movie series that particularly appealed to me in my first decade and a half included the Tarzan movies, of course, first with Johnny Weissmuller and later with the more civilized but still acceptable Lex Barker, whose photos began to grace the Dell comic covers. Weissmuller soon resurfaced as Jungle Jim, in a series that took its name, but little else, from the Alex Raymond comic strip; it was  basically Tarzan with his shirt on. Jim even had his own  pet chimpanzee.
Even Johnny Sheffield, who’d played “Boy” in eight  Tarzan flicks, starred in a dozen no-budget features based on the Bomba the Jungle Boy imitation-Tarzan novels of the ’20s and ’30s. The Bomba pics never made it to Jackson,  but occasionally I’d get a chance to see one at the  Orpheum Theatre, the most downscale of the four  movie houses in Cape.
I was a sucker for anything set in the jungle. I had loved Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales, so a reissue of 1942’s live-action The Jungle Book starring Sabu drove me ecstatic! (It was 1000 times better than the horrible 1960s animated Disney version, which I loathed the day I first saw it—and still do—although Jon Favreau’s 2016 remake for Disney was considerably better.)
Since in those days there was no film rating system, or much of a need for one, I was allowed by age eight to go to even nighttime movies on my own. Well, not to the occasional Halloween late-night revivals of the Universal horror films like Frankenstein and Dracula. But in 1948 Mother did take me to see the brand-new Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and while it scared the pants off me, I loved it—the first Universal monster pic I ever saw, and still one of my favorite movies. That same year, Mighty Joe Young became a favorite, too; it was basically a “dog story” starring a giant gorilla, several years before I even heard of King Kong. The first time I glimpsed Mighty Joe’s more famous forebear was in a trailer for its early-’50s revival. Kong has remained another of my favorite films ever since. It inspired giant- beastie imitations in the mid-’50s and after, from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to It Came from beneath the Sea to Them!  to Tarantula. I would see each and every one during my  teen years!
Except on weekends, there were seldom daytime movie showings in Jackson, or even in nearby Cape, where my parents occasionally dropped me off to see a movie a week or so before, under the then-current distribution system, it could legally play in a smaller market like Jackson.
In our hometown, the biggest movie crowds I can recall—times when the theater’s 500+ seats were all filled —were for the first few Ma and Pa Kettle films. Oh, and for a 1948 pic called Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! about a boy and his two mules, which was so popular that the Palace, for the only time I can recall, actually brought it back for a second run. (Well, Missouri was “the Mule state” before it was the “Show Me state,” after all.)
I liked any kind of movie that excited me in any way. There were crime flicks, from Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (a criminal played by Boris Karloff, who inspired me in the late ’60s to name an X-Men foe “Grotesk”) to more sophisticated gangster opuses. Grown-up Westerns with John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas… Gary Cooper in High Noon, Alan Ladd as Shane. The Crimson Pirate, starring Lancaster in a half-humorous coda to the classic pirate pics… Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, Stewart Grainger in King Solomon’s Mines. Comedies starring the same people I loved on radio: Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis, Danny Kaye, Judy Canova, Red Skelton… even Lucille Ball, not yet a household name. I dearly loved musicals, especially Annie Get Your Gun and Singin’ in the Rain—and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, whose athletic dance sequences thrilled me even more than Gene Kelly’s and Fred Astaire’s.
And one day in 1952, I saw a trailer—not the whole movie, just the trailer!—that spotlighted some skinny guy singing a few bars of “All of me/Why not take all of me?” His voice grabbed my attention, like, forever. If I had to choose just one singing voice to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be Frank Sinatra.
Hard as it may be for anyone born in the 21st century to believe, there were virtually no full-length super-hero movies in those days; but at least a few science-fiction films began to emerge from the cinematic woodwork.
In 1951 I badgered my poor mother into driving me (and, because she had no babysitter, 7-year-old Katy) to Cape to see The Thing from Another World—mostly because I figured that new movie was related to the recent hilarious Phil Harris hit record “The Thing,” about a guy who finds an indescribable “thing” (represented on vinyl by the sound bump-bump-bump) in a box on the beach and can’t get anybody to take it off his hands. Once the film began, it didn’t take me long to realize that the Thing movie was a frightening concoction with no link to the novelty record. And when some soldiers opened a metal door and a hulking, clawed alien loomed there snarling like a Frankenstein Monster from space, I frantically begged Mother to take me home—right now! She responded firmly that she’d driven all the way there, so we were staying to the end. But at least I talked her into the three of us moving to the last row of the new Esquire Theatre, so nothing could sneak up on me from behind. For months afterward, I was uneasy anytime I was about to open a closed door.
Even so, later that year, when The Day the Earth Stood Still opened with creepy music, I was sitting in the Broadway Theatre, catty-corner across the street from the Esquire—alone, this time—prepared to be scared out of my minuscule wits all over again. But, while intense in places, the story of the space visitor Klaatu and the giant robot Gort turned out to be merely one of the most intelligent SF films ever made. “Klatuu barada nikto!”
Unfortunately, few science-fiction movies even a fraction as good followed over the next few years. Many of the lesser first-run features played at the Rialto Theatre, a few blocks further down Broadway. The only other really impressive SF film I can recall from my grade school days is George Pal’s War of the Worlds (in 1953), which sported the most visually imaginative alien craft of any movie, before or after; they looked like brightly colored manta rays.
I would see as many as I could manage of the several movies a week that played the Palace (and there were still a few double-features as well). Any kind of action or comedy picture… but by the early ’50s I began to appreciate more serious drama as well. Loved Marlon Brando, especially as a leather-jacketed motorcycle ganger in 1953’s The Wild One.
One night in 1951, Aunt Olivia and her future husband Bob took me to Cape’s low-rent Orpheum see a brand new feature called Superman and the Mole Men. Excited by it, I dared hope I might soon be viewing full-length movies starring the remaining costumed heroes like Batman, Captain Marvel, even Plastic Man. Little did I realize that that movie, which introduced George Reeves as the Man of Steel (I still prefer Kirk Alyn), was really just a tryout for the Superman TV series that would soon replace the radio show I’d been listening to for years. As soon as the former was launched, the latter was canceled. They call it progress.
19.
And that brings me to radio, the third leg of the movies/ comics/radio “triple pillar of the world” that formed the foundation of my pop-cultural universe through the mid-1950s. There was the big console radio in our living room… and, in my bedroom area (where Katy and I had twin beds), there was the little white Airline-brand radio whose reception wasn’t nearly as good, especially when there was inclement weather, but which I could listen to even after the lights were turned out… at least till maybe 9:00.
The long-running late-’40s radio version of Superman, naturally, was an early favorite, with its lead-in that was far better than its adapted successor on TV: “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! Look—up in the sky! It’s a bird—it’s a plane—it’s SUPERMAN!”
Of course, I was doubly thrilled on the rare occasions when Batman and Robin guest-starred on Adventures of Superman. I always wanted them to get their own radio show, but they never did.
Not realizing that dramatic-style radio was entering its planned obsolescence now that the war was over, and that the networks were using it mostly to finance conversion to the new medium of television, I reveled in a wild spectrum of great radio shows, both kids’ and general, as if they’d never go out of style: Captain Midnight… Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy… Bob Hope… Bing Crosby… Jack Benny… The Lux Radio Theatre… Amos and Andy… Lum and Abner… Archie (the wonderfully whiny Arnold Stang played Jughead)… Fibber McGee and Molly… The Great Gildersleeve… The Life of Riley (I especially liked Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker—and Riley’s pet expression “Wotta revoltin’ development this is!”)… Smilin’ Ed’s Gang (with the marvelous Froggy the Gremlin puppet)… Dragnet… the sheer wonderfulness of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy… Richard Diamond (successor to Sam Spade, which went off the air soon after I started listening to it—turns out Sam’s creator was a “Red” or something)… Tom Mix (played posthumously by a gent named Curly Bradley, whom I was fortunate enough to meet years later in Hollywood)… The Shadow (who on radio had become basically an invisible super-hero; I had no awareness of him as a pulp-magazine vigilante with twin 45s)… Space Patrol… Tarzan… The Green Hornet (to me, he was Batman in a trenchcoat)… The Lone Ranger (with the greatest music and the second-greatest spoken intro ever)… and a personal fave, the short-lived Family Skeleton (whereon deep-voiced Mercedes McCambridge searched desperately, night after night, for her mysteriously vanished bridegroom “Garth,” a name I would later attach to Marvel’s Zombie). I could go on and on…
….but I’d still have to slow down long enough to sing the praises of I Love a Mystery, starring the private-detective trio Jack, Doc, and Reggie. Nothing in movies or comics ever creeped me out any more thoroughly than its serialized storyline titled “Bury Your Dead, Arizona” (believe it or not, that was the name of a town). Creator/writer Carlton E. Morse, in between hokey back-and-forth dialogue, was the absolute master of suggesting darkness over the radio… and I was this kid lying in bed at night, lights out, only the glow from the bedside radio visible. One scene early in that story arc takes place in a darkened railroad boxcar by night, with the ride-hitching heroes carrying on an uneasy conversation with the boxcar’s somber-voiced other occupant… who of course is entirely invisible to them in the total blackness. Later came the sequence in which one of the gumshoe trio is digging at midnight, hunting for something in a half-excavated grave, when he (and we) hear ominous scratching sounds coming from just above him. Could it be the alleged werewolf who’s been terrorizing this oddly-named municipality?
With records (and record-players) being relatively expensive items, I got most of my music in those days over the radio. Bing Crosby was a favorite; Sinatra had relatively little presence in the medium just then.
Since my parents liked country (we called it “hillbilly”) music, I heard a lot of that, too, though I was never more than lukewarm toward most of it. I did get a kick out of a short-statured performer called Little Jimmy Dickens, whom my folks and I saw at a couple of movie-theatre personal appearances. I was thrilled to see cowboy singer and movie star Tex Ritter in person at the Broadway Theatre, even talked to him and got his autograph outside after the show. (Tarzan’s chimpanzee Cheeta made a live appearance at the Broadway, too, but he/she didn’t sign anything.) I was particularly taken by the songs and singing of Hank Williams, and I was startled when, at age eight, I heard over the radio that he’d died... at thirty. Was there ever a sadder, more beautiful song than “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”? But I’ll confess, at the time I was more enamored of “Hey, Good-Lookin’” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
At the other end of the pop spectrum, I became a staunch fan of the operatic Mario Lanza after his mega-hit record “Be My Love.” He had a weekly radio show for a time. His recordings, and his starring role in the film The Great Caruso, awoke in me a mild interest in grand opera. That music form’s appeal for me was hampered mainly by the fact that I couldn’t understand the foreign-language lyrics… and, as a bathtub singer who didn’t play an instrument, I always wanted to understand song lyrics.
By 1953 or so, very few of the classic radio shows were still standing. One of the last detective-style series starred an insurance investigator named Johnny Dollar (“the man with the action-packed expense account”). The great Stan Freberg, who had beautifully satirized Dragnet on a two-sided 45 r.p.m. record, briefly had a comedy show, but it didn’t take. Radio drama and comedy were doomed to an early death—by strangulation.
Nor was there any lack of clues as to whose fingerprints were all over the murder weapon.
Like I said: Television.
20.
My parents experienced the usual marital problems many couples had, and others that fewer couples had. Dad was far from an angel, alas… and while Mother may have seemed at least a bit more of one to Katy and me, she had her shortcomings just like we all do.
At least Dad always did whatever was necessary to “put food on the table,” as the cliché goes. Technically he was a salesman, but he also served as deliveryman for the end product. By the latter ’40s, he peddled Bonnee Buttered Beef Steaks to restaurants in the four-state area by panel truck. Bonnees were (still are, I think) thin hamburger-style patties served only in cafes, diners, truck stops. They tasted great smothered in mustard and pickles, and as a kid I happily devoured tons of them between slices of bread. I presume we got them at a discount. For his job, Dad had to drive all over and convince the owners of such eateries to order Bonnees; then he had to drop off their order the next time through and hopefully generate a new one. Since he was born with the gift of gab, he was good at his job, and he worked long hours.
One accouterment of his work was the company’s white panel truck, often parked in our yard, since there was no sidewalk on the alley side of the house. On the van’s sides were appealing images of a leggy lass in a short skirt carrying a piping-hot platter of Bonnee Buttered Beef Steaks, presumably to some watery-mouthed customer. Whether the guy’s mouth was watering for the burger or the girl, I was much too young to say.
That panel truck and its successors were the closest our family got, most of the time, to a new car. Largely, I remember second-hand Chevys, swapped out every few years. Once in the late ’40s or so, Dad splurged and came home with a brand new Nash. But I don’t seem to recall our having it for long. Maybe it went back to the dealer in favor of another used Chevy.
After a few years, Dad switched to doing the same kind of sales-and-delivery job for a restaurant-coffee company called Ronnoco, which was the owner’s name (O’Connor) spelled backward. When Dad occasionally took me along, I reveled in sitting in the back amid all those aromatic coffee packets. Later, he switched for a couple of years to Ronnoco’s main rival, Star Coffee. (Just in case it sounds familiar: In the 1970s Ronnoco became the name of a Hyborian Age city in Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian.)
While employed by Bonnee, Dad had worked under a middle-aged Jewish man who lived in Cape Girardeau. He and his wife were the only Jewish people I’m aware of knowing during my childhood. Except for Mr. and Mrs. Weil, “Jew” was just a word in the Bible as far as I was concerned. For my birthdays or Christmas (yes, Christmas!), they bought me books on animals, since they knew I was interested in wildlife. I first learned about writer Don Marquis’ delightful “Archy and Mehitabel” (a typewriting cockroach and his stuck-up feline friend) from an anthology they gave me; for that alone I can never thank them enough.
After reading the above, you won’t be surprised to learn that my first real-life idol was not a fireman or cowboy, but Frank Buck, the celebrated big-game hunter who captured beasts and birds for zoos. His motto (and the title of his first, doubtless ghost-written book and of the 1930s film made from it) was then world-famous: “Bring ’Em Back Alive!” Our family’s forays to the St. Louis Zoo underscored my childhood wish to one day enter the same profession as Mr. Buck. I can still remember riding on the back of an elephant there, while singing the new country & Western song “Don’t Fence Me In.” (Co-written, as it happens, by Cole Porter.)
Fact is, I was apparently always singing, from my pre-school days. I can recall sitting on the checkout counter back then at the Jackson A&P grocery uptown and being coaxed (and not just by my mother) into singing something. Probably “Don’t Fence Me In.” That was around the time Mother was buying boxes of Wheaties so I could acquire the miniature Flash Comics and Captain Marvel mags that came with them; actually, though, I preferred Wheaties’ upstart rival, Kellogg’s Pep, which sponsored the Superman radio show.
Taking a cue from Dad, I also enjoyed listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio, fueled by the excited blandishments of announcer Harry Caray, with his trademark shout: “It might be! It could be! It is—a home run!” In those days, the Cardinals were the furthest-west professional baseball team in the majors. I have a vivid memory of the climactic moment of the first pro game I ever attended, with my parents, at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis: the Cards against the Philadelphia Phillies, a contest decided in the bottom of the tenth when lead-off batter Stan “The Man” Musial (who else?) hit his second homer of the day. Nearly seven decades later, comics researcher Art Lortie did me the favor of tracking down what must have been the precise date: Sunday, June 17, 1951. I was ten, and there was never a day more golden.
Still, perhaps a little of its sheen was dimmed the next year, when, in my second pro game, the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Cards handily. I can take solace in the fact that the Bums’ batting lineup that day included Duke Snider, PeeWee Reese, Gil Hodges, and the already legendary Jackie Robinson, whom I’d read about in Fawcett’s baseball comics. I don’t think I got a chance to attend another major-league game before the ’60s.
While I took part in other sports at school and at friends’ homes, baseball is the only team sport I’ve ever been interested in watching. As for sports I played at that age when I didn’t have to, that was mostly just softball (I was enthusiastic but not very good). That, and swimming. I could be found as many days as possible during the summer at the local public pool. When I’d been a little kid splashing around the shallow end, I had often pretended to be the Sub-Mariner—but never Aquaman. You’d think I’d have had a higher opinion of a guy who could converse with fish and sea lions.
21.
I was reasonably active physically for my age and size, surely more so than the average child today glued from nigh-infancy to hand-held screens with parents either totally absent or else helicoptering overhead. I climbed the trees in our yard to heights that must have given Mom and Dad the willies (when they knew about it), so I could see if there were any eggs in the birds’ nest at the tip-tip of the one in our front yard. Occasionally I scrambled from the much bigger backyard tree onto the roof of our garage. We had a fair-size yard, and I used every inch of it, often pulling my younger sister Katy along in games and adventures I would concoct. Our lawn on one side was level enough that our whole family would play croquet from time to time
All the same, I generally preferred reading. Dad did take me fishing a couple of times… mostly, it amounted to our sitting beside some creek with a worm on a hook dangling in the water, largely in search of carp or small catfish. Once, I overheard him say of me to a friend: “I took him fishing, and all he did was sit on the bank and read a damn book.” In point of fact, he was better off when I didn’t get too near any fish. On one occasion, when he and a friend had caught several fish, he gave them to me to carry on a line. As we were crossing a stream, I somehow managed to drop them into the water and the swift current carried them away, not to be recovered. That got added to the ledger. Dad was no great athlete himself, though he occasionally played a bit of sandlot baseball; still, I always felt that in some ways I was probably a disappointment to him as a son. At least until my name—which was also his name—started appearing in nationally distributed comics.
Be that as it may, my parents got me a library card at an early age, and I became an avid customer. Jackson had a fairly good little library—which for several years was basically subterranean. The town built its concrete basement first, and housed the books and its librarian there for a few years, until the rest of it could be erected overhead. Its underground nature made it all the more mysterious and special to me. By the time I was ten, the librarian, a round little old lady that everyone called “Miss Bess,” allowed me to check out any book in the library, not just from the children’s section. Of course, I’m sure there was no Lady Chatterly’s Lover on its shelves that I might have accidentally stumbled across.
At a young age, I went through all the library’s “animal books,” starting with Peter Rabbit and his anthropomorphic ilk, then moving on to more realistic fare like Bring ’Em Back Alive and Wild Animals I Have Known and Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure, with its still-celebrated zebra-striped cover, the tale of a celebrity couple who filmed wild animals and indigenous people in Africa and the Pacific islands in the ’20s and ’30s. (For the past couple of decades, I’ve been an honorary board member of the award-winning Martin & Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute, Kansas.) I devoured Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon, too, though I think that’s a book I purchased at Osterloh’s.
I also discovered early on that the Jackson Public Library possessed a nearly complete collection of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan and, as I soon learned, of intriguing science-fantasy as well. These were all hardcover first editions, long before that material became available in the 1960s in paperbacks, or “pocket books,” as we called them. I was fascinated by how many Tarzan novels the library had, and I read them all… plus ERB’s books featuring John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, and numerous others. And I was ecstatic to find even a crossover novel—Tarzan at the Earth’s Core.
For some reason, though, the one significant ERB novel missing from the library’s collection was Tarzan of the Apes. Grossett & Dunlap didn’t publish that one, either, when they started issuing their hardcover Tarzan reprints around 1950, so I had to wait till I was in my twenties before I got to read the book that had started it all back in 1912.
Before long I ran across the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Besides concocting a Marvel “War of the Worlds” series as a sequel to the former work, as mentioned a few pages back, in 1999 I would scribe a graphic novel titled Superman: War of the Worlds which is one of my proudest moments at DC. In 2024 I would even have Tarzan meet Wells’ Time Traveller in one of the online strips I currently script for the website of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. When I like something, I like to explore it from various angles.
“Miss Bess” liked me, but she did give me what-for once when I walked into her domain carrying a comicbook. Back then, librarians were, by and large, the inveterate enemies of comics. After that, I made it a point not to have one of them on me when I visited the library.
22.
The first writer named Tom Wolfe (collect them all!) said that you can’t go home again. But, in some ways, my life in Jackson was so vivid that I never totally left.
Some things I remember that made a lifelong impression on me:
Our neighbors on Greensferry Road were mostly an agreeable lot, although there were occasional squabbles because we were on a “party line,” which meant there was always the possibility that one of the old ladies across the way was listening in on your conversation. Back then, you had to make a call through human operators, so maybe they were eavesdropping, too. I still recall our original phone number: 261M. Sounds like a robot in a comicbook.
A local banker, who lived across the street, was enthusiastic when he learned I played chess. I taught myself the rules in the eighth grade by reading the entry in the school’s World Book Encyclopedia. Mostly I studied games recorded in books I found in the library. I taught one or two other Lutheran school kids to play, but they never got even as good as I was, so that got boring fast. Thus, I was thrilled when this adult wanted to play chess with me, and one late afternoon we went at it on our front porch. However, as fate would have it, playing Black, he made the only two opening moves—out of zillions—that will allow White to checkmate in three. So I won that game in less than a minute, and I could never get him to play me again. I’m sure he thought I was some sort of chess prodigy, which I most definitely was not.
But I did love the royal game, and soon began collecting books on its play and history. Indeed, my personal interpretation of the philosophy inherent in one of them (My System, by Aaron Nimzovich, championing what that grandmaster called “position play,” moving your pieces into advantageous spots on the board with the idea that your opportunity to use them productively will naturally arise later) has influenced my attitudes and life behavior to this day. Although I never became much of a chessplayer, at least that wonderful game pointed the way toward The Grandmaster in The Avengers #69-71, and to a plum role for Jeff Goldblum in Thor: Ragnarok, even if not a chessboard was in sight in the film. (But, come to think of it, there weren’t any in the comics, either—just living chessmen like The Avengers and the Squadron Sinister.)
Then there was the Crader family, two doors down. Terry Crader, a year younger than me, became a friend and playmate, though when we essayed “Batman and Robin” we always argued because I thought I should be Batman since I was older and he thought he should be Batman because he was slightly taller than me.
Some of our closest neighbors, geographically speaking, were a black family or two who lived in small houses—shacks, really—down the hill on the then-unpaved street/alley that ran beside our house. I remember playing with one boy who lived there, but my parents soon put a stop to that. They didn’t indulge in name-calling or give me any real reason; it just wasn’t done, that’s all. I suspect that family soon moved away, because I don’t recall seeing that lad around much.
Mostly, our neighbors were longtime Jackson residents, even “natives.” But when I was ten or so, a family from out of state moved into the larger house across the alley/street. One day the father in that household asked me out of the blue where I had originally come from. I said I’d been born on that very block. Looking a bit puzzled, he responded, “You sure don’t talk like you’re from around here.” One or two other adults said similar things during my younger years. Eventually I came to suspect that all my listening to radio drama and comedy and devouring so many movies had led to my acquiring a slightly different accent from most Jacksonians (and maybe Missourians), including my own family. And I suspect maybe my vocabulary was above the local average.
At some stage, Katy and I were moved upstairs, each getting our own “room” on opposite sides of the top of the stairs, though there was no door between them and we had to share a closet. Her space was larger than mine, but our parents explained to me that, as a boy, I didn’t need as much room as Katy did. The only problem with the attic space, now that an electric fan in a back window cooled it in the summer, was that we were right under the roof, which slanted upward at a 45˚ angle from two sides to meet not far above our heads. As a result, we could only stand upright in a small area in the middle of our rooms. Mine had a chimney passing through it, further reducing standing area.
Still, each of us had our own space now. We were growing up.
At some point after we’d been moved upstairs, my parents sprang for a cheap upright piano to fill the space where the twin beds had been. Since neither of them could play, the obvious purpose was to expose my sister and me to music and see if it took. But, though at some point in my teens I took a total of eight piano lessons from Mrs. Luetje a few houses away, I soon got my parents’ permission to cease and desist. I was interested in singing, not playing. Katy kept at it, though, so the investment wasn’t totally wasted. As I look back, I can see more and more instances where my parents sacrificed for us—staying together was just one example—to try to give their offspring a leg up in the world. I have to love them for that.
In the ’40s and early ’50s, the other Thomas “family members” were mostly cats, most of whom eventually got run over. Greensferry Road wasn’t a particular busy street, but it was rough on felines. Only once or twice in those days did we own a dog, even briefly, so I was pretty much a “cat person” until Stan Lee changed that in 1970.
23.
When I was “confirmed” in the Lutheran faith near the end of the eighth grade—a big deal in the church, after which one can take Communion and is considered an adult member of the congregation—my parents and Uncle Oswald and Aunt Rose chipped in and bought me a wonderful Confirmation present: a Smith-Corona portable typewriter!
Naturally, I was thrilled beyond words. Using the instruction book, I quickly taught myself to type and was soon banging away at 50 or more words a minute. The only drawback was having to go to my parents so often to buy me a new ribbon!
Around the same time, by coincidence, I gained my first shards of knowledge about the drawing and writing of comicbooks. My favorite comic artist, Joe Kubert, and a fellow artist named Norman Maurer had become editors (whatever that meant) as well as illustrators and writers for a small company called St. John. Well, now that Hawkman was no more, I wanted to follow whatever Kubert was up to elsewhere. By 1953 that was a marvelous comic first titled 1,000,000 Years Ago! and later Tor; two of its six issues were even published in 3-D. It featured a heroic wanderer in a prehistoric age that mixed cavemen and dinosaurs—something even Alley Oop knew was unscientific. For my part, at that time I was still pretty much a teenage Fundamentalist and hadn’t quite worked out in my mind how cave-dwellers and/or T-Rex dovetailed with Adam and Eve… but these were just comicbook stories, right? I still consider Tor the epitome of Kubert’s art over his long career; as I’d learn later, he was then in his late twenties.
Intriguing me greatly, Kubert and Maurer wrote and drew pages in the comics they produced—such as Tor and The Three Stooges—on which likenesses of the two creators talked directly to us readers. Once they discussed the popular interest in prehistoric life; another time, they defended comics (at least, their own “good, clean comics”) from the medium’s attackers; on one occasion they even briefly weighed the arguments for evolution vs. creationism, probably in response to letters they’d received from kids and/or parents. Those sequences rocked my little world, not just because of the personal touch of respected comics artists speaking to me—“straight from the shoulder,” as the illustrated Joe said—but also because they showed me what a comicbook creator’s studio presumably looked like: lots of books, real books, on shelves… comic art pinned up on the wall from stories I hadn’t yet seen… small dinosaur models on a table… a half-completed Tor or Stooges page on a slanted drawing board. Now there was a job worth having—a life worth living!
But Kubert and Maurer had ambitions beyond writing and drawing comics… and those spoke to me, too!
In Tor #4, in mid-’54, I came upon a page emblazoned with huge lettering:  “DRAW for COMIC BOOKS.” Thereon images of Joe and Norm (as they called each other) told me I could learn to draw both adventure and humorous comics, just as they had learned to do “during the 30 [combined] years we’ve been in the comic book business!” I quickly mailed the requisite dollar bill to the “Scholart Institute” in Beverly Hills, California—
And, not too many weeks later, I received in the mail the tabloid-sized, 16-page Comic Book Illustrators Instruction Course – Lesson One. Thin as it was, and devoted only to the drawing of the human head and face (well, you had to start somewhere!), it was a revelation to me. For one thing, though the publication’s title referred only to drawing, the text made it clear that future lessons would teach about writing comics as well. In fact, Lesson One featured several examples of panel descriptions alongside Tor and Three Stooges panels that had been drawn according to the scripts’ specifications.
I doubt if I’d read Lesson One more than five or ten times, or had drawn more than a hundred heads using the directions therein, before I had also typed out (as opposed to just writing and drawing as I went along, as I had in my earlier ventures) my very first comic script ever: a 24-page “All-Star Comics #58.” That story adapted the plot of a recent 10-page “Wonder Woman” yarn called “The War That Never Happened!” into a “Justice Society of America” adventure, adjusted to the fact that by 1953 most comics contained only about two dozen pages of story, not the 32 of All-Star #57. I never did illustrate my “JSA” story; I had by then all but given up drawing amateur comics, despite my rabid interest in the Kubert/Maurer instruction course.
If you had any lingering doubts, the above should underscore the fact that, even while many changes were occurring in my life (including in my gawky adolescent frame), I never quit reading comicbooks the way most kids did around the time they reached pubescence and began turning their minds to other areas.
24.
In fact, if anything, I’d become more enthusiastic about comics of late, since in autumn of ’53 the company once known as “Marvel” and now as “Atlas” abruptly revived its three greatest super-heroes from the 1940s: The Human Torch, Captain America, and Sub-Mariner. Oddly, the comic I spotted that day on the floor-level shelving at Osterloh’s Bookstore bore the awkward title Young Men #24. (That mag’s earlier issues had contained war stories and hot-rod action.)
This unexpected treasure spotlighted solid super-hero stories and art by folks whose names would become by-words (and who in one or two instances would even become friends) to me in the future. The superb but unsigned Human Torch work in that issue, I’d learn years later, was by a combination of Carl Burgos, the hero’s creator, and a superb draftsman named Russ Heath. The exciting work on the “Captain America” tale was by an artist whose work I recognized from earlier (signed) Atlas comics: John Romita. And the “Sub-Mariner” entry had the look of the best-drawn Namor exploits from the late ’40s; the signature, however, was so artsy-fartsy I couldn’t make it out—the closest I could come was “Bill Enereh.” This time around, the “big three” were fighting Soviet spies instead of bank robbers. The Commies were the bad guys in a lot of movies then, too. They’d taken the place of the Nazis in U.S. popular culture—and rightly so, far as I’m concerned.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why these three Marvel/Atlas heroes had returned, a scant four years (though to me it had seemed an eternity!) after their cancellation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves had proven such a hit on TV over the past couple of years that comics publishers had naturally begun wondering if maybe they couldn’t make some coin off their own old secret-identity characters, and Atlas was one of the first to give it a try.
It was followed in short order by other super-heroes, old and new.
A small outfit called “Ajax,” though with inferior art and story, came out during 1954 with no fewer than five super-hero series: Black Cobra, The Flame, Samson, Wonder Boy, and Phantom Lady. Except for the latter, I’d never before heard of any of them, though it turned out they were all revivals of 1940s characters. In fact, after seeing three of the above titles, I sent a letter to Ajax suggesting they put out a comic starring a hero called “Wonder Boy.” Somebody at the company (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was publisher/editor Robert Farrell himself) actually wrote back to me saying that was a great idea and, by an amazing coincidence, they already had a comic with that very title in the works! That comic did indeed appear just a few weeks later.
I became so enamored of the idea of five heroes from a single company that I wrote Ajax a follow-up letter (this one unanswered) proposing that the costumed quintet form a team called The Champions of Justice, borrowing a phrase from the Black Cobra covers. I even typed out for myself a half-dozen or more synopses for such JSA-style stories. Alas, none of the Ajax stalwarts lasted more than three or four issues, hardly long enough for them to have formed a Mutual Admiration Society. But other super-hero comics were also coming out during that period.
I bought the premier issue of a revival of Fox’s “Blue Beetle” (in a Charlton comic with the incongruous title Space Adventures) at Fulenweider Drugs one night in ’54, while on my way to see a movie: Phil Silvers in the film version of his hit Broadway musical Top Banana. The new “Blue Beetle” stories Charlton came up with featured good art, but half his stories were reprints of horrendous 1940s Fox/Holyoke material. The team of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, whose joint byline had spelled excitement to me since the latter-’40s Stuntman, generated for Harvey Comics a great new super-hero: Fighting American. Sure, he was an obvious copy of Captain America, but at the time I had no idea S&K had created Cap himself in 1940 and were out to show the Atlas guys (whose editor and publisher they didn’t like all that much) how it should be done. Me, I was just the happy beneficiary of that rivalry. Captain A. and Fighting A.… Romita and “Enereh” and Burgos and Simon & Kirby… they were all aces with me!
Magazine Enterprises, publisher of better-than-average Westerns like Ghost Rider, came out with The Avenger, a brand new costumed hero whose anti-Soviet fervor rivaled even that of the Atlas guys. He was drawn first by Ghost Rider artist Dick Ayers (who by then was also drawing Atlas’ “Human Torch”), then by Bob Powell, whose art I recognized from earlier “Spirit of 76” and “Shadow” yarns. Powell also drew ME’s equally new Strongman, who ran around in a leopard skin with a shoulder strap but otherwise acted like a Red-battling super-hero.
At the tail end of this fleeting era, a tiny new company called Sterling launched a promising new super-hero called Captain Flash, who lasted four issues—and lackluster Charlton came out with a weather-controlling one called Nature Boy. I liked the art on both of them—by the unidentified Mike Sekowsky and the bylined John Buscema,  respectively.
Alas, the super-hero revival of the mid-’50s turned out to be a four-color “false spring.” Young readers clearly weren’t clamoring, at least in sufficient numbers, for the return of costumed characters. Apparently Superman on TV and in comics was enough for them, if not for me. Within two or three years, each of the revived and/or newly created super-heroes had lapsed into oblivion. I began to think I was going to have nothing left in that genre to read for the rest of my natural life except Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, Blackhawk, and back-up heroes Aquaman and Green Arrow. Even Captain Comet was gradually fading away.
25.
But it wasn’t really the small remaining coterie of super-hero comics that was upsetting the self-appointed crusaders who had mounted a country-wide campaign against comicbooks, especially “crime” comics. To do-gooders like Dr. Frederic Wertham, psychologist author of anti-comics magazine articles, “crime comics” also included horror comics, super-hero comics, romance comics (for arousing “prurient interest”), Westerns, science-fiction, jungle—probably even funny animals, if they ever got a glimpse of the Beagle Boys in Uncle Scrooge. My parents never paid much attention to all the furor, maybe because I never brought home any of the stronger crime and horror comics, and they saw no harm in Batman or Captain Marvel Adventures. After all, my mother had read that type of comic to me a decade earlier, and she couldn’t see where they had hurt me any.
Still, public pressure mounted steadily, and somewhere during all the tsuris of 1954, I was walking down the sidewalk near the Lutheran church, carrying the latest issue of the color Mad, when I ran into Pastor Keisker. Since this was the Age of Wertham with all its attendant bad publicity re the evils of comicbooks, the Reverend expressed dismay that I was reading what he called “a horror comic”! I tried to explain to him that Mad contained humor, not horror. Seeking a ferinstance, I blissfully opened the mag to a page that, as it happened, featured a house ad for the EC Fan-Addict Club that sported the Wally Wood illustration seen on this very page. The pastor disdainfully pointed a bony forefinger at the image: “That’s horror!” Not willing to give an inch, I responded: “No, that’s humor!” We soon went our separate ways, neither of us having convinced the other. But at least he hadn’t tried to grab the offending periodical away from me and tear it up.!
It was sometime in 1953 or ’54 that St. Paul Lutheran and some other local groups decided to hold a comicbook-burning.
I’m not sure if it was comics alone that were targeted that day, or if other objectionable magazines were involved as well; but comics were definitely slated to be the main kindling that would stoke that particular society-cleansing blaze. Lutherans of the Missouri Synod were generally a rather stand-apart lot, who didn’t go in much for ecumenical activities involving other denominations. “We have our own church” was the expression I heard more than once from Pastor Keisker. However, in this case, the Lutherans had decided to cooperate with other Jackson religious, parental, and “concerned” groups, and so the sprawling playground in front of the large building that had once been our grade school and was now our church’s “Parish Hall” was selected as the perfect place to stage a big bonfire in the middle of the day.
In the build-up to the looming conflagration, peer pressure finally got to my parents, at least to some extent. They told me I’d have to sacrifice a few of my many comics to the coming flames. I was allowed to fill a not-too-large cardboard box with ones of my own choice. The bundle may have included old severely cut-up All-Stars I’d never gotten around to tossing out… and I’m sure I gave up comics I’d much rather have kept. But then, hell, left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have surrendered a single page to what I felt then (as I do now) was a cataclysmically stupid cause.
You want proof I’m not just being retroactively defiant? Here it is: On June 28, 1954, I mailed a letter to the Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Delinquency that had been very publicly and loudly investigating comicbooks across the nation, with the self-righteous Doc Wertham as its star witness. A recent bulletin sent out by EC Comics’ EC Fan-Addict Club (yeah, the same group that had gotten me in hot water with the Reverend) had asked us members, if we agreed with their view that comics were harmless fun and not contributors to juvenile delinquency, to write letters to that investigatory body. So I did. It isn’t much of a letter, as I read it over now, but I did proudly admit to being EC Fan-Addict No. 19214, and I argued that if the Sub-Committee started out by outlawing horror and crime comics, the next step would be to get rid of Western comics (because of the owlhoots and six-guns), then science-fiction (with its evil aliens and rayguns), but eventually teenage humor, too, until “[f]inally, Little Lulu and her animal friends go.” Basically, it was a “slippery-slope” argument, and I’m not sure if it was I or EC that came up with it. Oh, and I added a P.S.: “I think my parents share this point of view.” Not that I recall asking them… nor do I remember if they even knew I was sending off that letter. (See facing page.)
(By the way, the only reason I have access to my 1954 missive is that librarian, comics-researcher, and author Carol Tilley sent me a scan of it a few years ago when she ran across it in the Sub-Committee’s records. I have no conscious memory of having written it, but clearly I did.)
Anyway, on the appointed day of the funnybook auto-da-fé, I showed up outside the grade school/Parish Hall with my sacrificial lamb—pardon me, I mean, my little box of comics. There was already a tall cone-shaped pile of periodicals atop a grass-free area of pebbles and dirt. Adults and kids alike were milling about, waiting for the show to start. I’m surprised they weren’t selling popcorn. Sullenly, I dumped my meager offering onto the growing heap and was already turning so I could get far away from the coming immolation… when suddenly something caught my eye.
There, tucked down near the bottom of the pile, off to one side, were two comics I hadn’t ever seen before. Both sported painted covers, rather than line drawings. One was titled Space Busters (#1, as it turned out)… the other, either Wild Boy or Wild Boy of the Congo, two titles that series held at different times. Science-fiction and jungle. Two of my favorite four-color food groups, following super-heroes.
On impulse… and I don’t recall precisely how I pulled it off… somehow I furtively eased those two comics out of the pile, hid them under my shirt or jacket, and edged away. I’m not even sure I stuck around long enough to witness the lighting of the bonfire. As it turned out, the painted covers were by far the best thing about the two comics I’d snatched. Even so, I held onto them for years… as trophies of war, if nothing else.
There were quite a few comic-burnings in the Land of the Free during that era, including a nationally publicized one in Cape Girardeau (as early as 1949!) that I don’t recall hearing about at the time. Untold thousands of comics went up in smoke, and lots of do-gooders felt all righteous about themselves for the next few days. And not a few kids probably cried themselves to sleep over the comics they’d been forced to give up.
Still, I’m quietly proud to be the only kid I know who ever came home from a comicbook burning with comics somebody else had brought to the fire.
And just think: All those bonfires, coming on top of the paper drives of World War II and general attrition, simply made the comicbooks that weren’t burned up all the more valuable, a few decades down the line. I’d like to think  that none of those nutballs who torched our comics  profited from that later boom in any way. They sure  didn’t deserve to!
26.
In May of ’54, our dozen-strong St. Paul Lutheran eighth grade would graduate and be all set to become part of a hundred-student freshman class at Jackson High School, diagonally across the street and up a grass-covered hill. As if by common consent, all the schools in town except the Catholic grade school were located on blocks adjacent to each other like squares on a checkerboard. At the apex of the aforementioned hill, a couple of hundred feet up from ours, was the larger public school, housing grades 1 through 8. Next to that, cattycorner between it and us Lutherans, was the high school, which with the aforementioned grassy knoll occupied its own sizable block (the JHS sports stadium was across the street from it, and even closer to our school). At the bottom of the hill was St. Paul Lutheran. Oh, and behind us, down a rise and across the street from our playground, was the “colored” school for grades 1 through 8.
New situations and challenges lay ahead for me… and not just academic ones.
1954 was the year of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a judgment intended to end racial segregation in America’s public schools. I hadn’t heard or thought a great deal about the matter up to that year, but as soon as I did, I definitely agreed that school integration was the right way to go, though I was aware that lots of people, including quite a few locals, felt otherwise. The “colored” grade school had probably been designed to be kind of tucked away down there, like a neglected stepchild; at that time, Jackson had, far as I can remember, only a dozen or so black inhabitants among its roughly 4000 to 5000 souls. Still, reading about Brown vs. Topeka in our civics period and in newspapers, it seemed clear to me that black children deserved every bit as good a public school as white kids had, and our Lutheran teachers at least said nothing to the contrary. In addition, there wasn’t any school in town that “Negroes” (as the proper term then was) could attend beyond the eighth grade.
At least one of my fellow Lutheran eighth-graders disagreed with my assessment; and, one very-late-spring day, out of the blue, she picked a bitter argument with me about it. “Do you wanna go to high school with a bunch of n*****s?” she snarled at me. I didn’t specifically challenge the racial slur, and maybe I should have… but, when I made it clear to her that I was untroubled by the prospect of attending high school alongside “Negroes,” she stomped off in a huff.
Around this same time, my parents apparently decided it was time I worked for a living.
Up to this point I’d had, I’ve realized since, way too pampered an upbringing. Oh, I had a few tasks to do around the house, mostly keeping my own area neat (relatively) and occasionally drying the dishes, that sort of thing… but I never had regular chores to do like, say, mowing the lawn. Maybe my parents figured I wouldn’t have been much good at it. Dad generally pushed the manual lawn-mower on his days off. And naturally, I wasn’t about to argue with them and go, like, “Hey, I really wanna mow the yard!” But I suspect it might’ve done me good if I had.
Anyway, one day soon after graduation, my parents informed me they had arranged for me to begin a job “ushering” at the Palace Theatre uptown. I’m not sure how they managed that, since they weren’t personal friends of the owners of the town’s movie house. But by the time I learned about the job, it was already a done deal. Actually, it was fine by me. If I was to have a part-time job, what possibly better one than at a theatre—a place where I liked to spend as much time as possible anyway?
High school looming ahead in the fall—a job starting even sooner—
The last half of 1954 and beyond were beckoning brightly.

“I Want That!”
Roy, around age 7, sporting a Captain Marvel sweater—juxtaposed with the Superman/Batman/Robin cover of World’s Finest Comics #17 (Spring 1945), which would’ve been on sale around the time he spotted his first comicbook at age four. Cover by Jack Burnley (penciler) & Charles Paris (inker); courtesy of the Grand Comics Database. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Sneaking A Peek
Three-year-old Roy stealing a glance at a Sunday comics section over a stranger’s shoulder in Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, in summer of 1944, during the family’s annual trip to the city’s world-class zoo.

Marvel Ants
(Left:) This super-hero-in-an-anthill yarn by writer Otto Binder and artists C.C. Beck & Pete Costanza, from Captain Marvel Adventures #47 (July 1945), inspired, more than two decades later—
(Right:) —Roy’s tale in The Avengers #46 (Nov. 1967); cover art by John Buscema. Courtesy of P.C. Hamerlinck & the GCD, respectively. [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics; Avengers cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Music Of The Ear & Eye
Paul Reinman’s cover for Green Lantern #16 (Summer 1945)—and the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse in Jackson, Missouri, near which Roy first pored over that issue. The municipal bandstand (and Jones Drug) are just beyond the photo’s left border; the fountain is a later addition. Courtesy of Carla Jordan & the Cape Girardeau County Historical Association. [Cover TM & © DC Comics.]

All The Stars  There Are In Heaven
The first issue Roy recalls ever seeing of his all-time favorite comicbook series, All-Star Comics, is #25 (Summer 1945). Cover by Joe Gallagher & Martin Naydel. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Homes Sweet Homes
(Clockwise from left:) Roy in 2019, in front of the small Jackson duplex in whose right half he was born, nearly eight decades earlier. Photo by John Cimino.
307 Greensferry during a Missouri winter. Courtesy of sisters Katy Kirn & Tara Thomas.
The growing Thomas family (Roy Sr., Leona, Roy Jr., & Katy), circa late 1944, outside the newly rented house at 307 Greensferry Road. Courtesy of childhood friend Janet Schuett, whose mother Verna Myers took  the photo.

Ancestors & Arachnids
(Left:) Roy’s maternal grandparents, Mom & Pop Koenig, in their later years (c. early 1970s)—with their great-grand-nieces (Katy’s daughters, l. to r.) Natalie, Nicole, & Jodi. Courtesy of Katy Kirn & Nicole Bolda.
(Right:) The late-1943 film Tarzan’s Desert Mystery starred Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, Johnny Sheffield as Boy, and Nancy Kelly (the Tarzan movies were between “Janes” at the moment). Alas, we couldn’t find any good shots of the flick’s giant spider—probably because there weren’t any. Thanks to Henry Franke III. [Tarzan & Boy TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

Old Folks At Home
Grandpa & Grandma Thomas in Old Appleton—and, alas, old age. Courtesy of Agnes Wachter, daughter of Oswald & Rose Thomas.

Unburied Treasures
1942’s Superman #19 contained, among other treasures, intriguing house ads for All-Star Comics #13 & Leading Comics #4, with cover art by Jack Burnley & Mort Meskin, respectively. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

A Modest Education
For years, this building housed all eight grades of St. Paul Lutheran School in Jackson—in three top- floor rooms (with collapsible walls). After a new school was built across the street in 1951, it became the church’s Parish Hall. The comicbook bonfire referred to on pp. 43–44 took place off left, not far from the sliding board. Both photos courtesy of Carla Jordan & the Cape Girardeau County Historical Association. (Right:) W.T. Palisch, Principal of St. Paul Lutheran School, 1943-1973—and, in the late 1930s, the teacher (in Pocahontas) of Roy’s mother.

Jones Drug
A 1960 aerial view of Jones Drug (center of photo), where Roy’s mother bought him his first comicbooks. (It hadn’t changed much since the ’40s.) The building partly off-panel at far right is the Cape County Jail, long since relocated. Courtesy of Carla Jordan & the Cape Girardeau County Historical Association.

Fire & Water
It was probably from an issue of Marvel Mystery Comics like #77 (Oct. 1946) that first-grader Roy cut out the figures of The Human Torch and Sub-Mariner that were confiscated by his teacher. Art by Syd Shores. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

River, Stay Away  From My Door!
(Far left:) Although this May 1943 photo was taken a few years before Roy’s memories of a flooded Woolworth store (just past J.C. Penney, on right), it shows the effects of the rising Mississippi on downtown Cape Girardeau before a floodwall was erected. Courtesy of Carla Jordan & the Cape Girardeau County Historical Association.
(Left:) Flash Comics #73 (July 1946), with its masterful Joe Kubert cover, might well be the very one the lad was reading while waiting for his parents to find him one Saturday night on Cape’s Main Street—or maybe while he sat on sandbags. [TM & © DC Comics.]

All Giant Comics
Seven-year-old Roy wrote and drew its 50 pages in 1948, his first effort at doing a comicbook. This “Elephant Giant” splash page led off the issue, following the contents page. [© Roy Thomas.]

It’s A Phantom, Man!
Phantom Man’s costume owed a lot to Nedor/Standard’s Black Terror, but his adventures took place in an alternate dimension of ghosts and goblins. [© Roy Thomas.]

A JSA Cliffhanger
(Above:) Circa 1949-50, Roy wrote out a prose adventure of his beloved JSA—peppering it with color illustrations (repro’d here, necessarily, in black-&-white). [Justice Society of America TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Liberty Legion”—Take 1
(Above:) Behind the cover of Roy’s early-’50s All-American Comics #1 was this splash for a 70-page tale of “The Liberty Legion,” showcasing Tornado, Flame Man, Catman, and Sir Ollie—less than half of its membership. [© Roy Thomas.]

Letting The  Catechism Out  Of The Bag
(Left:) The 50-page comic Roy produced starring his hand-made puppets Kookoo LaFran and Ozzo has gone AWOL; but, somewhere between the sixth and eighth grades, he drew this hasty sketch of them in his Lutheran Catechism.
(Below:) One of RT’s numerous early-’50s Catechismal takes on Hawkman’s circa-1946 mask. Roy added a hawk symbol on the hero’s chest harness—at least seven years before National/DC got around to it! [Hawkman TM & © DC Comics; other art © Roy Thomas.]

The Reverend  Walter Keisker
The longtime pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church provided religious instruction at the parochial grade school. He would live to the age of 101. Courtesy of Carla Jordan & the Cape Girardeau County Historical Assocation.

An All-Star Cast
Two Irwin Hasen covers more or less bookend for Roy the best issues of All-Star Comics: #33, with Solomon Grundy; and #42, which altered the look of Hawkman and The Atom. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…?
If the “10 years” is correct, Roy seems to have received his Junior Justice Society of America membership certificate (and the badge and decoder chart that came with it) only around the time All-Star Comics was being discontinued. But he thinks he joined a year or two earlier. [Characters TM & © DC Comics.]

Over The Ledge
Dr. Mid-Nite explains to his fellow JSAers the oddball theory of “time ledges,” in All-Star Comics #53 (June-July 1950).  Script by John Broome; pencils by Arthur Peddy; inks by Bernard Sachs—and editing by Julius Schwartz.  From Roy’s personal collection.  [TM & © DC Comics.]

Under Western Stars
Receiving All Star Western #58 (April-May 1951) in the mail spelled the end of the Golden Age for 10-year-old Roy. Cover art by Gil Kane (pencils) & Frank Giacoia (inks). [TM & © DC Comics.]

I Go Pogo!
Sequences like this turned 8-year-old Roy into a lifelong Pogo fan. From Dell/Western’s Pogo Possum #1 (Oct.-Dec. 1949). Art & story by Walt Kelly. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © OGPI.]

Flying Saucers, Anyone?
Editor/artist Al Feldstein’s cover for Weird Science-Fantasy #26 (Dec. 1954). Courtesy of the GDC. [TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.]

The Sub-Sahara & The Supernatural
(Left:) Jungle Comics #132 (Dec. 1950) was a typical issue of Fiction House’s Tarzanic title. Cover by Maurice Whitman & the Iger Shop.
(Right:) The American Comic Group’s Adventures into the Unknown was the first regularly published horror comic. Cover of #1 (Fall 1948) by Edvard Moritz. Both scans courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“It’s Melvin!”
Editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman’s classic cover for Mad #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1952). Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © E.C. Publications.]

Tales Calculated To Drive You…
(Above:) It was the “Black and Blue Hawks” in Mad #5 (June-July 1953) that finally persuaded 12-year-old Roy to part with his hard-earned dime for a copy of the parody comic.
(Below:) A few days later, he took a second look at Superduperman meeting Captain Marbles in Mad #4 (April-May ’53)—and a light bulb suddenly went on over his head. Scripts & layouts by Harvey Kurtzman; art by Wally Wood. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © E.C. Publications.]

We Kid You Not!
The Durango Kid was the only secret-identity character in movie Westerns in the late ’40s/early ’50s—but is the man behind the mask actor Charles Starrett, or a stunt man? Durango starred in comics, too. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Well, It’s Certainly Not A Bird… Or A Plane!
Kirk Alyn (as Superman) faces Lyle Talbot (an equally excellent Luthor and Atom Man) in the 1950 Columbia movie serial Atom Man vs. Superman. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Top O’ The World, Ma!
(Left:) The main cast of the 1948 Universal comedy classic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: Bud and Lou, plus the Frankenstein Monster (Glenn Strange), Dracula (Bela Lugosi), and the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.). What more could any discriminating movie-goer ask?
(Right:) The 1933 King Kong may just be Roy’s all-time favorite movie. ’Nuff said? [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

To Be Perfectly Frank…
Frank Sinatra is singing “How Deep Is the Ocean?” rather than “All of Me” in this scene from the 1952 movie musical Meet Danny Wilson—but Sinatra is Sinatra is Sinatra. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Clockwise From The Cosmos
Believe it or not, that’s James Arness—the future Marshal Matt Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke—in that alien-monster get-up in 1951’s The Thing from  Another World.
Michael Rennie as Klaatu and the alien robot Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still. In a 1973 issue of  Marvel’s Worlds Unknown, Roy would adapt the  Harry Bates short story on which that 1951 film  classic was based.
George Pal’s 1953 movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds had the Martian warships levitating instead of snaking about on three legs—but what incomparable design! The novel would inspire Roy to conceive a Marvel hero series in the early ’70s. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Look! Up On The Marquee!
A poster for the 1951 feature Superman and the Mole Men, which introduced George Reeves as the Man of Steel. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Bring Back My Bonnee To Me
Roy’s dad beside the panel truck he drove for Bonnee Buttered Beef Steaks in the late 1940s—and a packet of those hamburger-style patties, emblazoned with the same young miss who enlivened the truck. Thanks to Katy Kirn. [Bonnee TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“Bring ’Em Back Alive!”
Big-game hunter Frank Buck briefly starred in a Charlton comics series (seen here is its first issue, a.k.a. #70, May 1950). Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.

“Stan The Man”
In his younger days, when Roy heard the above phrase, it was always an allusion to St. Louis Cardinals baseball great Stan Musial.

Tarzan Lives!
An early illustration by J. Allen St. John, featuring the ape-man and La of Opar, from The Return of Tarzan. [TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

Full Of Sound & Fury—Signifying Something
(Counter-clockwise from above:) In comics they produced for Archer St. John, creators Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer talked directly to the reader…. Joe Kubert’s cover for St. John Publishing’s Tor #3 (May 1954), one of Roy’s favorites of all time…. Ere long, the pair offered a course to teach readers how to draw (and write) comicbooks. Most if not all art by Kubert. Thanks to the GCD & Michael T. Gilbert. [Tor cover TM & © Estate of Joe Kubert; other art TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The All-Star Comics That Never Happened
Circa 2008, Australian artist Shane Foley drew and lettered this “splash page” for a faux  “All-Star Comics #58,” with Roy approximating what he wrote in 1954—which, in turn, had been adapted from the Robert Kanigher- written “Wonder Woman” story young RT was turning into a “JSA” saga. [Justice Society of America TM & © DC Comics.]

A Call To The Colors
(Left:) Carl Burgos’ cover for Timely/Atlas’ Young Men #24 (Dec. 1953), which revived The Human Torch, Captain America, and Sub-Mariner after four years in limbo. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
(Right:) The other brightest spot in that short-lived “super-hero revival” was Joe Simon & Jack Kirby’s Fighting American, from the Prize group. This is #1 (April-May ’54).Both scans courtesy of the GDC.  [TM & © Estates of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.]

Call Me Captain!
Mike Sekowsky’s cover for Sterling’s Captain Flash #1 (Nov. 1954); inker unknown.  [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“You, Too, Can Meet New Friends!”
(Right:) Wally Wood illustrated this house ad for the EC Fan-Addict Club in 1954. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © EC Publications, Inc.]

The Doctor Is In(sane)!
Psychologist Frederic Wertham lambasts comics at a 1954 meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

You’ve Heard Of “Rescue Pets”?  These Were “Rescue Comics”!
Ziff-Davis’ Space Busters #1 (Spring 1954) and St. John’s Wild Boy of the Congo #9, (Oct. 1953). Roy saved a copy of the former and some issue of the latter series from a Jackson, Missouri, bonfire, circa ’54. Space Busters cover by Norman Saunders. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Public Speaks
Roy’s 1954 letter to the aforementioned Senate subcommittee. Courtesy of Carol Tilley.

Part II
“Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt!”
The High School Years (1954–1958)

1.
Four years of high school streaked by like a four-color comet—yet, at the same time, that period often seemed to me like a permanent, self- contained universe that,  happily, would never end.
The latter 1950s was the era, as some pop sociologists measure these things, when teenagers finally emerged as a separate species of human being. That evolution had been in the works at least since Booth Tarkington’s early 20th-century tales of young Penrod. In 1937 Andy Hardy, played to iconic perfection by Mickey Rooney, had brought the emerging genre of adolescent hijinx to movies; and in ’39 The Aldrich Family had successfully transferred the formula to radio. Both Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich were surely seminal influences on Archie Andrews, who debuted posturing on the hood of a jalopy in a 1942 issue of Pep Comics.
But the teenage image portrayed in popular culture would take a sudden hard  turn in 1955.
’Cause that’s the year teen juvenile delinquency and rock’n’roll got fused together forever in the film adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel The Blackboard Jungle—and the year James Dean blazed across the big screen like a meteor in Rebel without a Cause, his second starring role.
Once we who came of age in the 1950s had seen those two movies, we—and all the adolescents who followed us—would henceforth instinctively view ourselves as lonely, sensitive, inarticulate… doomed forever to strive in vain to be understood and loved. First, in March of ’55, a rock’n’roll soundtrack transformed background music into foreground matter in Jungle, as inner-city j.d.’s trashed a teacher’s prized collection of 78-r.p.m. jazz records to the beat of “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock!”—then Jamie Stark, the tormented high-schooler played by Dean, redefined forever what it meant to be “‘twixt twelve and twenty”—even though Dean himself was 24 at the time.
James Dean’s death in a fiery car crash on September 30, 1955, just weeks before the release of Rebel, locked in his agonized image for all time, as far as we were concerned.
“Rock around the Clock,” wailed by Bill Haley and His Comets, leaped from Blackboard Jungle onto the top of the record charts—six months later came the stylized teenage angst of Rebel without a Cause—a pair of pop-epochal events swiftly followed by Elvis Presley, who hit the national pop-music charts and the national consciousness like a duck-assed tornado in January 1956: just turned 21, but the flawed and flawless embodiment of James Dean-defined youth, which was now wedded for good (and ill) to rock’n’roll music and its heirs.
The three biggest teenage pop-culture events of the 1950s… and they all occurred over a period of less than a year. It was a seismic shock from which the wider culture would never recover.
2.
That triad of cataclysmic convergence, however, still loomed unguessed in the near future on the day in  September of ’54 that I first walked through the doors of the three-story brick (plus cement-basement/cafeteria) Jackson High School.
From an 8th-grade class of a dozen Lutheran kids, I suddenly found myself tossed into the deep end of a pool ten times as deep, funneled in from the local public, Catholic, and Lutheran grade schools. Clearly, there’d be a lot more competition from here on, and naturally I wondered how I’d shape up. Academically, socially, whatever.
Happily, while I was as usual the smallest male in what was now a much larger wildebeest herd, I was soon relieved to find I could carve out a niche for myself by being at least one of the top students in every academic class. I particularly took to English, history, and the social sciences. In math and science, two areas where my once-keen grade-school interest had mostly evaporated by this point, I also did well; but there were a handful of guys in the entering class who were definitely my considerable superiors in those departments—including pudgy, sarcastic Jim Powell and red-headed, good-humored Philadelphia emigré John Schuch, who became two of my closest friends for the four-year duration. (John had also spent some time in Fresno, California, which made him borderline exotic to us native Missourians.)
By this point, I’d foresworn any vague thoughts I’d ever had of becoming an artist of any kind, so I never took a high school art class. More curiously, given my penchant for writing, I never joined the staff of—or scrawled a single line for—either the weekly school newspaper (The Squaw-ler) or the yearbook (The Silver Arrow). I was interested in writing… but not in journalism.
Since I was no athlete—you probably figured that out back in Part I—I contented myself with cheering our (usually losing) JHS Indians sports teams from the pep-squad sidelines and with such “extracurricular activities” as debate and the History Club.
I got along passably well with most of the freshman females, but I didn’t exactly make any of their hearts flutter. Only one or two of them did anything for me, either.
One of my first public forays in high school occurred when I was lucky enough to land the lead role in the freshman class play, Life Begins at Sixteen—which was every bit as sophisticated as the title suggests—and to wind up with the class “drama” award.
In the next year’s sophomore play, which had titularly (if not in other ways) progressed to Seventeen Is Terrific, I had a major role as a teenager who wins a musical talent contest. Surely the playwright had intended that part for someone who played an instrument, preferably well. But there I was, with nothing but eight piano lessons (and one despised year of “boys’ chorus”) under my belt; so I wound up with no choice but to energetically sing along onstage, at two separate points in the play, to the recorded Bill Haley hits “See You Later, Alligator” and “Thirteen Women.” The latter was the flip side of “Rock around the Clock,” which for some reason I didn’t feel confident enough to perform, even with the actual Comets backing me up.
My vocalizings in that play were apparently the first time any true rock’n’roll songs were performed live at any JHS event; but for the moment I was just happy the audience didn’t throw things at me. Actually, the applause was fairly enthusiastic… precisely the wrong way to discourage me.
As noted, the 1954-55 school year was the first one of integration at Jackson High, though only a small number of blacks dwelt in our town. I never heard of any racial conflicts at the school. Once, early on, two black students got into a fistfight on school grounds, in the course of which they hurled at each other racial insults most white kids couldn’t even have thought of… but that scuffle was quickly over. And Bob Mitchell, one of the newbies, became a stand-out football player, a situation that contributed its own little bit to normalizing integration at JHS.
One other change seems to have occurred during my high school years. I entered as a freshman with a sincere fundamentalist faith, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod variety. Although I encountered Darwin and his ilk in JHS science classes, I’m not aware of any overt pushback by teachers against my received belief system. Yet, somehow, by my junior year, I had shed virtually all religious feeling like an old jacket I had carelessly left at a friend’s house. There are days I wish I could find it again. But I can’t.  So I go on.
3.
Comicbooks remained a part of my life, of course, though less so during high school than during any other part of it. Nor did I have any desire to stress that interest to my classmates. After all, comics were for kids, and we were high school students now!
Besides, as the super-hero comicbook “Indian summer” petered out, there was less and less on drugstore shelves to greatly interest me. Dell’s Pogo Possum had been discontinued while I was still in the 8th grade, and Mad’s final color issue (#23) came out during my freshman year. Even as the black-&-white Mad became a major mid-century publishing phenomenon, I lost most of my interest in it, though I still purchased copies when I ran across them.
The only person I knew at Jackson High who still had any comics lying around at home—though, unlike me, he wasn’t buying new ones—was another friend, John Short (not to be confused with the aforementioned J. Schuch). I once purchased a coverless, incomplete copy of All-Star Comics #52 from him for 25¢; it had been stashed for years with other old comics in a wooden hamper in a bathroom. I treasured that truncated comic for at least a decade, since my own 1950 copy was apparently gone with the wind.
But don’t ask me what happened to most of my old comics! Far as I know, except for what I sacrificed to that book-burning, neither my parents nor I ever tossed any out; yet many of them somehow vanished over the years, perhaps simply read to shreds. Thus, while I continued to buy Superman, Batman, and a few others, I never brought any comics to high school… and my comicbook carbon footprint was small enough during those four years that I imagined that few of my classmates really knew about  my “habit.”
Decades later, at reunions and the like, I discovered I’d been wrong about that. Even just glancing through one JHS yearbook, I run into a note scribbled by John Schuch: “Stop buying comic books and start concentrating on chess a little more.” (He was a worthy opponent at the latter; I seem to recall we split our games roughly 50-50. His memory may vary.)
Chess actually became a major interest of mine during my high school years. I even subscribed to the slick magazine Chess Review, in one of whose mid-’50s issues I first encountered the 12-year-old Bobby Fischer, already winning multiple games against a roomful of seasoned players. I also co-founded an after-school chess club. My debate partner Cordell Crouch and I were the most dependable of its handful of members. I even took up playing by mail, using pre-printed postcards. I was never going to be any great shakes at the royal game, but I reveled in it.
4.
Before I gave up the ghost on producing my own amateur comics, around the turn of ’55 I wrote, drew, and even colored two-thirds of a digest-sized, 24-page package that I titled (believe it or don’t) Marvel Comics #1. Recycling the name of the quite different grouping I’d dreamed up several years earlier, I christened this super-hero squad “The Liberty Legion.” The concept was the outgrowth of various letters I’d written over the years to DC and other companies, urging them to “team up” their various  super-heroes in a cross-company JSA-style group comic and split the (I assumed enormous) profits.
The avengers I assembled in Marvel Comics #1-and-only comprised virtually every costumed crusader then being published in his/her own title, by any company. From National Comics (as DC had become known a few years earlier, in a corporate name change) I included Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. From Quality: Plastic Man and Blackhawk. The Atlas revivals of Human Torch and Captain America had recently fizzled, but for some unguessed reason the Sub-Mariner was still slicing the waters in his eponymous mag, so I reeled him in. And Blue Beetle was still scuttling along in his first Charlton incarnation. For good measure, I roped in teenager Chuck Chandler, the former Crimebuster/C.B. from Lev Gleason’s Boy Comics, now costume-bereft and attending college under his civilian name—and, as mascot, Slugger of The Little Wise Guys, the kid gang that had elbowed the costumed hero Daredevil out of his own Gleason mag a few years before.
After typing out the script to Marvel Comics #1 in my best Kubert-and-Maurer/Lesson One style, I wound up drawing (and even coloring) the first and final thirds of the story, plus the cover, but never got around to illustrating the middle section. In any event, within the year, all but the National/DC heroes (which by then included Blackhawk, purchased at a Quality fire sale) had flown off into oblivion.
5.
High school activities were taking up more and more of my time… and interest.
So was my new job at the 550-seat Palace Theatre.
I was an “usher,” a position that barely exists in today’s movie business. Flashlight in hand, I guided patrons to seats once the house had gone dark. It was also my job to shush unruly customers, though that didn’t always work out as well as it was supposed to. Sometimes I also popped the popcorn.
My original boss was Mr. Wilson, a gruff but grandfatherly white-mustachioed older man, rarely without a cigar between his lips; he and his two daughters owned the Palace (as well as the weekly Missouri Cash-Book newspaper). However, not long after I started there, all three of them perished in a rainy-night car crash while returning from a film-buying trip to St. Louis. Suddenly the next generation of Wilsons—grade-schooler Jimmy (after whom no fewer than two comicbook characters would eventually  be named: Crunch Wilson in the Charlton feature “The Sentinels” and Jim Wilson in The Incredible Hulk), high-schooler Kent, and their married sister Marilyn— became the Palace’s new owners. Marilyn’s husband,  the 20-something Marv Proffer, became the manager  and our new de facto boss.
Marv was bursting with ideas, some of them probably good. The Palace soon added a soda machine, where I’d often stand turning handles that combined sickeningly thick syrup and carbonated water into a fizzy soft drink, while also hawking candy bars. The ushering job gradually withered away; let the customers find their own stupid seats in the dark. Over the six years I worked at the Palace, from 1954–60, I sometimes also had to collect tickets at the door or even sell them in the booth out front.
The one thing I never allowed myself to consider was learning to run the film projector, which would’ve meant being stuck in a dark little booth at the highest point in the building and having to change film reels every seven minutes. Besides the fact that that would’ve taken all the mystery and magic out of the movies for me, I’m so manually undexterous that in no time I’d have put on reels out of order and had both management and customers baying for my blood.
Mostly, I liked working at the Palace. I was elated years later when I learned that Stan Lee had been an usher at a big NYC movie house in the late ’30s and had got to escort First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt down a dark aisle—even though he said he’d tripped and fallen flat on his face while doing so. Above all else, I loved snatching glimpses of whatever movies were playing, whenever I could. And, on the nights I wasn’t working, I got in free—a distinct plus, since wages weren’t exactly princely. I’d often see films multiple times, subconsciously storing up their best scenes and dialogue in my memory.
I became friends with most of the JHS guys who  worked at the Palace. There were no female staffers in those days—except for Bertha, the raspy-voiced, middle- aged ticket-seller.
The co-worker I became closest to in the early days was Bill Heyde, who was two years ahead of me at JHS. The hyper-intelligent son of Mrs. Bernice Heyde, an able and warm-hearted teacher of English and French, Bill was the first person I ever looked up to as a mentor. Being well-read by Jackson standards, he influenced my budding tastes in literature. I don’t recall ever discussing comicbooks with him; he would’ve scorned the very idea. (He eventually became a Ph.D’d English teacher in Ladue, an upscale school district in St. Louis County, and had a long, distinguished career there.)
One of my less golden memories of the Palace is of the “colored section” still in effect when I started work there. It consisted of 15-20 seats, far up in a back corner of the balcony. Ever since the Palace had opened decades earlier, that section been reserved for “Negroes”—and when that clearly delineated bloc of seats was filled, black would-be patrons were turned away, no matter how many other seats elsewhere in the theatre might remain empty. I’d love to be able to say I objected vocally to that policy; but back then, I accepted it as “the way things were.” And so, I submit, would have 99% of the people now reading this and thinking smugly how they would’ve been outside waving protest signs if they’d been around then. Sure they would.
Although the “colored section” didn’t automatically vanish after Brown vs. Topeka (which had said nothing about movie-house seating), it became an increasingly embarrassing anachronism. Happily, within a couple of years, black customers were allowed to sit anywhere in the theatre. Nor do I recall a single race-related incident after its demise.
6.
When the Thomas family purchased our first TV set circa ’55, we could receive only one (CBS) channel, which signed off by 10:30 P.M. or so. Television weaned me away from the ever-diminishing remnant of radio dramatic and comedy series, but I preferred the movies… which is probably why, when one of the century’s most legendary entertainers first appeared on the “boob tube,” I had to learn about him over the radio:
One day after school in early ’56, Bill Heyde and I happened to be sitting in Kerstner’s Drugstore, a “soda shoppe” of the classic Archie variety: malteds and  Cokes (in glasses, with ice chips), consumed at small  marble-topped tables. Bill, who knew I liked rock’n’roll of the Bill Haley and “Sh-boom” stripe even if he himself didn’t, asked me if I’d seen or heard this awful new singer who was creating a sensation on TV and records. He  informed me that this no-talent sported greasy sideburns,  a guitar, and cowboy boots. I told him no, I’d never heard of the guy, but he did sound pretty hokey.
Minutes later, as we sipped our drinks, a loud, plaintive voice suddenly came wailing out over the Cape radio  station that was piped in as a substitute for a jukebox:
Well, since my baby left me, I’ve found a new place to dwell…
“That’s him!” Bill hissed. The singer seemed to be howling in the middle of some kind of echo chamber. The song had a weird beat… too fast to slow-dance to, and too slow for a “fast fox trot,” as rock’n’roll was still referred to on record labels. I listened, as Bill frowned. When the two-minute number finally ended…
…I’ll be so lonely I could die.
…Bill said, with a grimace: “Wasn’t that horrible?”
My response was instantaneous:
“I think that’s the greatest thing I ever heard!”
Chances are Bill and I never discussed Elvis Presley again. But from that day forward I became a fervent fan of the Memphis rockabilly singer, who I learned had recently appeared several times on a Friday night TV variety series. However, I didn’t spend my Friday evenings in front of the idiot box, so I encountered “Heartbreak Hotel” a bit later than many of my JHS contemporaries. And I didn’t see so much as a photo of him till some days after that. He looked like Marlon Brando crossed with the late James Dean—which was just how all us guys wanted to look and virtually none of us did, right?
7.
Except for my growing enthusiasm for rock’n’roll, especially after Elvis hijacked it wearing blue suede shoes (not cowboy boots), my sophomore year flew by fairly uneventfully. We had added a new member of the Thomas family: my sister Tara Jean, born January 4, 1956 (named after Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation in Gone with the Wind, long before that name became fashionable for female children). Midway between Tara and Katy, there’d been a younger brother, Robert Lynn, but he was born prematurely and died after just a few days.
Also in 1956, I was persuaded by a teacher to enter a statewide writing contest and submitted—of all things—a poem, apparently titled “The Lonely Fawn.” Crom only knows what that was like! I was one of two recipients of “honorable mention” behind the first-place winner. Our three mini-masterpieces were immortalized in the magazine Missouri Youth Writes. It was the first example of my writing ever to be published. Hopefully it is lost and buried forever.
With so few comics coming out to excite me, I doubled down on movies. James Dean was dead, but I saw his third and final film, the 3-hours-and-20-minute Giant, so often that I knew most of “Jett Rink’s” lines by heart—as I did “Jamie Stark’s” in Rebel without a Cause. Presley starred in a trio of promising movies following the lackluster Love Me Tender, but then he got drafted, so no more flicks for a while. The only truly imaginative science-fiction film of the period was the 1956 Forbidden Planet, which bore a prophetic resemblance to a TV series called Star Trek that would come along a decade later.
Forbidden Planet may have implanted in the back of my mind the name “Morbius” (that’s the cognomen of the scientist Walter Pidgeon played therein), from which perhaps I retrieved it for the name of a super-villainous Marvel vampire in 1971… although on a conscious level I came to the moniker by a totally different route. And there are those who’ve suggested I also got the word “Adamantium” from that film; but it’s frankly hard to tell whether the phrase voiced in a climactic scene is “adamantium steel” or “adamantine steel” or something else entirely. In the ’80s I acquired a copy of the film’s shooting script, and the Pidgeon/Morbius line of dialogue containing that term isn’t in there, so it may have been added on the set. At any rate, as I’ll detail in Volume 2, I coined the word “Adamantium” (for the hardest, strongest metal conceivable) based on a wholly different source, unrelated to the film.
8.
In school, I had good teachers by and large—mostly women, as it happened—including the attractive and personable Mrs. Cracraft, who once blithely told the class she was always happy when I missed a question on a test, since that meant she could look forward to hearing my impassioned argument about how my answer was better than the one she was looking for (not that I won many of those arguments)… Mrs. Wagner, a highly capable history teacher, wife of the town’s baker… and Mrs. Heyde, who’s responsible for what little French I still remember. The author I liked best of those we read during four years of English was this guy Shakespeare. We tackled Julius Caesar one year, Macbeth another. Unlike most high school grads, I would later have ample opportunity to put that exposure to practical use, when writing dialogue for comicbook incarnations of the Norse thunder god Thor (counter-intuitive as that may seem) and the Graeco-Roman hero Hercules (ditto).
Mrs. Harbison was respected by all who took her social studies-related classes. She once did me a favor by drafting me to read and report to the class on a novel—a rare thing in our civics class. That then-new work of (thinly disguised) political fiction was Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, whose title introduced a phrase that still lives on, voiced nowadays by people who’ve never heard of the book or seen the Spencer Tracy movie based on it.
Young Miss K. (I’ll spare you her last name), my world history teacher, was at the other end of the spectrum from the above fine educators. When I volunteered to bring in information to correct the outdated textbook with regard to its paragraph on the Piltdown Man, which had been exposed as a hoax a couple of years earlier, she just stared at me icily and said no, don’t bother, we’d just go by whatever was “in the book”… including the misinformation that Pilty was a type of human that lived 500,000 years ago. That turned out to be only the first, and far from the worst, of her flaws and failings as a teacher and human being. ’Nuff said.
9.
Summer of ’56 arrived, and my high school years were half over.
Although I wasn’t devoting much thought to comics then, because the publishers clearly weren’t devoting any thought to me, I did send one letter to National during this period, asking about the possibility of my either purchasing old comics from them, or else obtaining the names of readers who might want to trade with me through the mail. I received back a postcard telling me, sorry, but National didn’t stock back issues… and they couldn’t encourage the trading of comics through the mail because doing so “might spread disease.” So help me Hippocrates!
Then, one day in early July, I strolled uptown and into Fulenweider’s drugstore to buy some firecrackers, and I spotted on the comics shelves something that was to have a profound effect on the course of my life, even if it would take a few years to totally unspool.
There amongst the other color-splashed titles were several copies of Showcase #4.
I was familiar with Showcase. National had launched that bimonthly title earlier that year to explore a different adventure genre every issue, in an attempt to find some untapped subject matter readers might like, without having to publish several issues of an ongoing series that might prove a sales bomb from the get-go. Showcase’s first three issues had cover-featured, respectively: fire-fighters, “Kings of the Wild” (nature stories, mostly with kid protagonists), and frogmen (the kind in scuba gear, not Love- craftian monsters). Money- losers all, apparently.
But issue #4 instantly grabbed me by the eyeballs.
For, there on the cover, bursting out of a multi- imaged filmstrip beneath a secondary logo bearing his name, was—The Flash!
No, not the previous decade’s JSA stalwart with winged helmet and sandals, but a far more streamlined-looking hero, garbed in bright crimson trimmed with lightning-shaped yellow, the symbolic wings now erupting from calf-high golden boots and the ear-cups on his face-mask.
It took but a moment’s skimming to learn this wasn’t Jay Garrick, the original Flash, in an updated costume, but a newcomer who’d taken over his name and super-speed motif 5½ years after All-Star Comics had followed Flash Comics into limbo. Surprisingly, in a link to the older comic, this new guy—his name was Barry Allen, and he was a police scientist like Garrick had been—was actually shown reading an old copy of Flash Comics just before he got struck by lightning, a heaven-sent thunderbolt that interacted with an unknown mixture of splattering lab chemicals to give him the unsought gift of incredible velocity.
To top it all off, though there were no bylines on story or art, the latter—or at least the inking—looked to me like the work of the great Joe Kubert, who’d drawn a few “Flash” yarns in the latter ’40s.
Not since Young Men #24 had I plopped down my dime more quickly and eagerly onto the store counter.
I probably also remembered to buy a few firecrackers.
The publication of Showcase #4 in mid-1956 is now universally recognized as the beginning of the Silver Age of Comicbooks (as opposed to the Superman-spawned Golden Age launched in 1938). Of course, the beginnings of most things—even wars and plagues—are not always instantly recognized when they arrive. Comics historian and Batman multi-movie-producer Michael Uslan says the origin of the term “Silver Age of comics” occurred in a letters page in Justice League of America #50, which, in the summer of ’56, was still ten years in the future.
Unfortunately (from my perspective), the powers-that-were at National didn’t follow up Showcase #4 at once with a second “Flash” outing. Two months later brought another new and uninspired try-out: “Manhunters of the World,” just another crime comic of the limp variety allowed under the Comics Code.
10.
Oh yeah—guess I’d better back up and tell you about the Comics Code Authority. This may be my autobiography, but that eldritch entity plays its own sizable supporting (in the broadest sense of the word) role in it.
In 1954, as I wrote earlier, the spit had really hit the fandango with regard to negative publicity about crime and horror comicbooks, with even a Senatorial sub-committee on juvenile delinquency zeroing in on them. Its key witness, the aforementioned Dr. Frederic Wertham, had just published a best-selling anti-comics book titled Seduction of the Innocent (the latter noun was us, I guess) which missed no opportunity to equate comics-reading with young people’s emotional problems—and criminal records.
The already-nervous comics publishers didn’t need Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse to fall on their pointy-hatted heads. Or maybe they did, since they waited till it was crystal-clear that either they’d better make some kind of very fast, very public show of bringing their offending industry to heel, or else a sanctimonious government cartel would do the job for them and probably run them entirely out of business in the process. Finally, at the turn of ’55, nearly all comics publishers except squeaky-clean Dell/Western and the we’re-not-really-comicbooks Classics Illustrated joined forces to form the Comics Magazine Association of America. The CMAA concocted a “Comics Code” for the industry, modeled after the Hays Office code in place in the movie industry since the mid-1930s, dictating what henceforth could and could not be written or drawn in one of members’ publications:
No vampires or werewolves, or violent crime… just a mandated respect for police and all elected officials, who were never to be shown doing anything disreputable (like taking bribes or biting people in the neck).
No ample bosoms or cleavage or lustful romance scenes… just family values like true love and traditional marriage, preferably with underdeveloped females.
You know… stuff like that.
Every comic published by CMAA members had to pass through the Comics Code Authority, where in the early days a hanging-judge type named Charles Murphy and a gaggle of ex-lady schoolteachers pored over every page of original art and story. They had to give their official approval before a yarn could be printed in a magazine with the big white “Comics Code Authority” stamp in the upper right corner, alleged proof positive that the content within was suitably child-friendly. The idea that some comicbooks might be published for adults, or even for people in their middle or upper teens, didn’t enter any Comics Code heads. But, to be fair, it didn’t enter many publishers’ or editors’ noggins, either. Or mine, come to that.
Oddly enough, while this move wound up devastating EC and numerous other comics companies, it actually led to my becoming, for the first time ever, a regular reader of EC titles besides Mad, its in-house imitator Panic, and a recent addition called Piracy. After canceling its “New Trend” horror and crime titles overnight, that company’s personnel applied their considerable talents to less scurrilous subject matter and came up with a diverse line of comics like Valor (tales from the oft-swashbuckling past), Aces High (World War I aerial fare), Extra! (featuring a hotshot reporter), Incredible Science Fiction (SF without the horror element of EC’s earlier mags), M.D. (generic yarns about doctors), Psychoanalysis (so help me God—three shrink sessions in every issue!), and Impact, which was devoted to O. Henry/Saki-style short stories with surprise endings. Impact #1 featured “Master Race,” which dealt with two men from a World War II concentration camp encountering each other on a NYC subway ten years later; the story by writer/ editor Al Feldstein was powerful, and the artwork by  Bernard Krigstein so experimental and cinematic—15 panels on its climatic page!—that I read and re-read it. However, EC’s self-styled “New Direction” failed to attract enough readers, and by the end of 1955 only Mad was still being published, and it had metamorphosed from a color comic into the aforementioned black-&-white magazine, at least partly to escape the torturous strictures of the Code.
The coming of the CMAA and its rules had left even National, which had never really published any strong crime or horror content, scrambling to find new genres to replace the ones they now had to steer totally clear of.
Hence: Showcase.
And hence the relatively insipid firemen, wild  animals, frogmen, manhunters—yes, even the  new Flash—who dipped their toes into the water in its early issues, checking  to see if the water was  fine for swimming (or,  in The Flash’s case, skimming across the surface tension of).
Four months after the latter’s debut, at least some of the promise of Showcase was realized again, with the “Challengers of the Unknown.” I’d have preferred a second “Flash” issue; but, even unsigned, the dynamic concept and art of “Challengers,” clearly by the Simon & Kirby team (or maybe just Simon? or just Kirby? who outside the comics industry knew or cared?), made Showcase #6 one of the most exciting comics in a while, only a year after the bylined S&K super-hero Fighting American had waved his last star-spangled banner. The Challengers were merely a quartet of male adventurers, not true super-heroes, but they wore distinctive uniforms and fought for good against (oft-supernatural) evil, so I was in for as long as the stories and artwork held at that level.
I was a bit taken aback when the Challengers also commandeered Showcase #7 two months later. But, wonder of wonders, when Showcase #8 finally reared its head—eight excruciatingly long months after #4!—there, back for a return match with evil-doers, was the Scarlet Speedster (as The Flash was often called; National’s writers loved alliteration, as did I). Maybe this new Crimson Comet might soon earn his own ongoing comic title, after all!
Sure, super-heroes and their ilk were still kiddie fare, and I knew I was years older than the comics’ target audience (plus I was aging fast!). Still, there was a corner of my mind that would always be ready, willing, and able to become inwardly ten years old again, just long enough to relish the illustrated spectacle of a masked man outracing a jet plane and then slugging a criminal garbed in an equally outlandish outfit.
What more could we ever hope for from super-hero comics?
11.
By the time the new Flash made his second Showcase appearance, though, I was in the second half of my junior year, and it would’ve taken more than a single comicbook to hold my attention for long.
For one thing, I finally got my driver’s license. Back then, that rite of teenage passage usually followed the day after a Missouri youth turned sixteen. However, I hadn’t yet fully learned to drive; so my parents enrolled me for after-school lessons from the high school’s driver’s-ed teacher. They insisted I learn on a manual-transmission (“stick-shift”) auto, reasoning that handling our automatic-transmission 1952 Chevrolet would then be a cinch. And so it was, except that, somehow, perversely, I wound up driving our family car, too, utilizing both feet, rather than shifting the right foot back and forth between pedals the way 99.99% of drivers do. By the time I realized I was an anomaly, it was too late to change. And why bother? It’s worked just as well for the past nigh-seven decades.
Having access to a car changed my life. Since Dad was on the road at least five days a week and had a company vehicle he could drive around even when home, I managed to finagle use of the family car far more often than I deserved. Even so, after my sister Katy hit sweet sixteen, I never noticed her social life suffering any. She later became the Silver Arrow (yearbook) queen at one school dance… and even in her freshman year had been crowned the first-ever “Junior High Football Queen” at JHS… proof positive of a kind of popularity and congeniality her big brother was never likely to achieve.
My having a car (at least informally) made me popular with some slightly younger kids with whom I took up around this time. Part of my reason for that was the influx of younger staffers at the Palace to replace those who, like Bill Heyde, had gone away to college…
…especially a kid named Gary Friedrich.
(SPOILER ALERT: Not to keep anybody in suspense—yes, this is the same Gary Friedrich who would write for Marvel Comics in the late 1960s and early ’70s, co-creating the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider and Son of Satan, as well as scripting off-beat Sgt. Fury war stories, Not Brand Echh parodies, and a fair number of straight super-hero yarns.)
Gary was thirteen and in the seventh grade when he started working at the Palace in late 1956 or so; that means I was a sophomore and roughly sixteen. Despite our age difference, we quickly became staunch friends, partly because we both liked rock’n’roll (including but far from limited to Elvis) and a lot of the same movies (Giant, A Face in the Crowd, The World of Suzie Wong, et al.) and riding around as late at night as our respective families would let us get away with. Gary had read comics as a kid, even late issues of Captain Marvel Adventures; but, like most youngsters of the day, he’d given them up around the time he hit puberty. In that department I was definitely the outlier.
During that period, I also starting hanging out with a number of guys who were just two grades behind me. And much of the reason for that was a girl.
See? Surely you must’ve been expecting that even a socially awkward nerd like me would get around to girls eventually… even if I didn’t given up comics for them.
Linda Rahm was the lively, attractive, 15-year-old daughter of one of the main druggists at Jones Drug, though rumor had it that toys like that huge white ’57 DeSoto with those enormous tailfins came from playing the stock market, not from dispensing aspirin. Linda was witty and shapely and almost alarmingly intelligent, and I found it hard to believe no other guy had latched onto her before I managed to do so, during the summer of ’57. She and I were a couple—mostly “going steady,” as the expression and custom then was—for the next six years. There’d be more about Linda in this book than there is, because she was one of the three major romances in my life… but her life story would be mostly for her to tell, not me. (And she’s always been an excellent writer.) So I’ll restrict myself to pasting her into the narrative here and there when it would be all but impossible to leave her out, and hope that she and her husband Tom Crites (a personable and equally brilliant JHS classmate of hers who became a scientist) won’t mind.
Anyway, dating Linda—and I never had any real interest in any other girl during the half-dozen years we were an item—led to my chumming around with several of her then-sophomore classmates. The names Albert “Bud” Tindall and Pal (short for “Palmer”) Hacker, in particular, will pop up from time to time in these pages.
12.
Pal and Bud were both part of our riding-around group, which also consisted of Gary and several others who came and went. Somewhere early on, we gave ourselves a semiofficial name—“the Gaberlunzies”—which one of the guys stumbled across in an unabridged dictionary. Several centuries ago, it had meant “a wandering beggar.” And that was us, all right, pooling our quarters to buy a buck or so worth of gas. (Incidentally, the “a” in “Gaberlunzies” is short, with the main accent on the first syllable.)
While naturally we imagined ourselves as hell-raisers like James Dean in Rebel and Brando in The Wild One and Elvis in Jailhouse Rock, all we really were was a bunch of teenage slackers looking for something, anything to do in a small town that almost literally rolled up the sidewalks after dark. Lucky for us, we weren’t into theft or property damage, though we did have one or two (very minor) scrapes with the police; thankfully, none of those led to our being incarcerated… though they easily could have.
Our faithful companion on our “midnight rides” was AM radio… which to us meant some station out of St. Louis, not Cape Girardeau. And, like I said, it wasn’t all Elvis with us, not by a long shot. When Jerry Lee Lewis busted loose with “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” we were right there; we even liked Pat Boone. The primo black rock’n’rollers were hitting their stride, too; thankfully, the days when skin color made a difference as to whether a record got played over mainstream radio had mostly come to an end. Nobody who heard Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” and “School Days” could doubt he was one of the great rock’n’rollers… with Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles not that far behind.
Because Gary and I were also fans of the late-’50s heirs to the swing era, we did part company with some of our fellow Gaberlunzies in that area. He and I had no doubt whatever that Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were the best there was at what they did, so we turned a joint deaf ear to backseat complaints when one of their recordings came wafting over the radio. Gary, who played drums in the JHS marching band, had been turned on to big-band music by his father.
Many of our night rides took place after seeing some movie, most likely in Cape. The Orpheum was defunct by then, but the three theatres along Broadway were all going strong. Either with Linda or with Gary and maybe another buddy or three, I made it my mission to see just about every movie that came along.
13.
In the summer before my junior year, I was selected to go to Boys’ State, held on some dusty college campus in upstate Missouri, where young lads got a chance for a bit of hands-on practice at how government works. Can’t say I was impressed by the experience.
Right after I got back in mid-June, the “Mr. Jones” of Jones Drug Store hired me to operate his July 4th fireworks stand. It was located next to Highway 61, just outside the city limits, in a vacant lot next to Wib’s, the barbecue joint that was the most popular watering-hole for JHS students after dark.
Things went well for several days, as I faithfully obeyed Mr. Jones’ strictures to make certain no patrons set off fireworks within a certain distance of the stand. And, indeed, when one friend lit a “flying saucer” he had just purchased, he actually was a bit beyond the proscribed line. However, the ground where he stood had a considerable slant, and I suddenly looked up from behind the counter to behold a  fiery comet headed straight at me. I ducked, and the flaming missile landed amid the Roman candles, Vesuvius rockets, and cherry bombs on the shelves directly behind me.
For an instant, I considered trying to stop the erupting arcs of fire from landing amid the rest of that potentially deadly inventory. Then, realizing that was already impossible, I decided discretion was decidedly less risky than valor and I scrambled for safety. Wib’s building was basically a concrete block, so it served as a safe vantage point from behind which I watched the fireworks stand go up in noise-augmented flames for twenty or thirty minutes. Cars passing by would slow down to see what was going on, then speed up to get out of the vicinity as quickly as possible. I wished I could join them.
Mr. Jones was much nicer to me than I deserved. He told me—probably not truthfully—that the fireworks stand had been “insured,” and he insisted on paying me the full amount we had agreed on. Maybe he just wanted to make certain I kept buying comicbooks at his drugstore.
14.
I’m frankly at a loss to remember much about my last couple of high school years, apart from riding around with the Gaberlunzies and dating Linda.
In my senior year, two sun-revolutions after I’d sung along with Bill Haley and company in the sophomore play, rock’n’roll still had virtually zero presence at Jackson High. The closest any live band ever came to playing it at a JHS dance was “Dance with Me, Henry” or, believe it or not, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” None of those groups ever sported a guitar, just sax, piano, drums, maybe a trombone or trumpet. Gary and I helped change at least some of that in early ’58. When Bill Heyde’s younger brother Tom, a junior (who also, need it be said, worked at the Palace), decided to run to become the following year’s student body president, a bunch of us—both my senior-class buddies and the Gaberlunzies—were all in for him.
There’d be a full-school assembly just prior to the election, where each candidate would be promoted by a skit put on by his supporters.
Several of us seniors were gathered one night at the Tindalls’ home (Bud’s sharp-as-a-tack sister Carole was in my class) when we came up with the idea of doing a skit that depicted George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge… only instead of starving and freezing, we’d show them having a high old time, playing ping-pong and I forget what else. John Schuch suggested I sing a Presley number in the skit, even though I hadn’t sung in public in the past two years and had never performed an Elvis song. The idea would be that Elvis and his Jordanaires backup group— or, as I christened us, “Evitz Pretzel and the Trans- Jordanaires”—were a USO troupe come to Valley Forge  to entertain the soldiers.
I enlisted Gary (drums) and Pal (piano) to back me up. I blacked in some fake sideburns, wore a shiny shirt, and rigged a fake guitar (actually a toy ukulele) to fall to pieces when I started gyrating and banging on it. Naturally, I removed my glasses, which I’d started wearing a year or so earlier. We did two numbers, opening with “Let’s Have a Party” from the 1957 Presley movie Loving You. To our surprise, we created a mild sensation when we did a couple of rock songs in that culture-starved environment.
Oh, and our buddy Tom won the election!
A night or so later, for the school dance held to celebrate the election, Gary, Pal, and I were asked to perform two more songs. And, surprisingly, the fallout from our Elvis shtick didn’t end there, as we had expected it to. Over the next several months, we got invited to perform at a few events outside school, including a big dance for employees of the local hosiery mill. Gary and I for some reason chose to alter a movie rock’n’roll song titled “You Ain’t Gonna Make No Cotton-Picker Out of Me” into “You Ain’t Gonna Make No Hosiery Knitter Out of Me,” which of course annoyed the higher-ups who’d invited us. Not really the smartest thing to do, since my mother was then working at that hosiery mill. (As to why she was doing so—more about that in a little bit.)
In some ways, the highlight of our musical trio came shortly afterward, when Gary, Pal, and I “played the Palace,” which hadn’t had a live performer on its stage since B-movie cowboy Sunset Carson had passed through town one Saturday afternoon a year or three before. Sharing the bill with us that night was our buddy John Short, who both sang and played a pumpin’ piano and was a big rockabilly fan, especially of Jerry Lee Lewis.
Palace manager Marv Proffer—who was also Gary’s  and my boss—had offered our foursome a little folding money to play an hour-long set in front of the Cinema- Scope screen following some obscure mid-week movie that otherwise wouldn’t have drawn flies. We couldn’t hoist John’s piano (somehow transported to the theatre) onto the stage, so while Gary and I performed from up there, patrons had to stand up to see him or Pal tickling the ivories. Worse yet, contrary to what I once assumed and wrote elsewhere, we didn’t have microphones, so we just played and sang as loud as we could. Still, we sold out the Palace’s 550 seats, and the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves.
That was nearly the penultimate appearance of “Evitz Pretzel and the Trans-Jordanaires.” But we’d do a pair of farewell performances near the end of that summer….
15.
Far more important were events that occurred in the Thomas family during the last couple of my high school years.
In addition to whatever else he got up to while on the road for Ronnoco Coffee, Dad at some point started playing in some relatively high-stakes poker games. Whether the games were honest or fixed, he lost enough money, as I overheard him admit to Mother, to have purchased a new car. So, although Tara was still an infant, Mother had to get a job at the hosiery mill to help alleviate that debt, surrendering my youngest sister to babysitters instead of staying home to take care of her. The whole incident came close to tearing our family apart, and it took years for the breach between Mom and Dad to heal. In some ways I suppose it never did.
Somehow, though, our little family unit scraped by. In my personal life, I squeaked by on my Palace wages, which paid for movies, dates, comics, a few records, and the occasional burger and malted, and that was just about it.
I did try other jobs once or twice, very briefly. One night (count ’em, one) I worked at Wib’s Barbecue—but washing dishes, not serving food. Once I actually quit the Palace for a couple of weeks and went to work at the new Jackson Drive-In Theatre, just beyond the city limits. Its owner, a very masculine woman called Gwen, decided I would also put in time at her other business: a golf driving range, located on the nether side of the drive-in screen. I knew nothing about golf and cared less, but she said all I had to do was take the customers’ money, hand them a club, and later walk the range and pick up all the balls they’d hit. I thought I’d handled that end okay, until, not long after I’d completed my ball-gathering, Gwen came by and hopped into her riding lawnmower to cut the grass. As she tooled down the line, first one unretrieved golfball, then another, then another, went flying high into the air, sliced into two or more pieces. With each skyward-hurtling golf ball, Gwen let out a storm of obscene invective. By the time her ride was over, so was my stint at the driving range, although she didn’t fire me from the drive-in. Even so, I decided I had preferred my old job at the Palace, and I was lucky enough to get it back.
One offbeat oddity occurred in ’58 when Gary, four other guys, and I made our own “movie.” It was only a 12-minute affair, shot in black-&-white entirely inside John Short’s family domicile on his new home-movie camera, with him as director. The short film, which I scripted and titled Les Ghouls (after a recent film comedy, Les Girls), was an homage to/ripoff of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, with John playing a Karloffian monster with a fake eyeball; it fell out in one scene—but we didn’t do re-shoots! Besides doing a few drawings as insert backgrounds and visual effects, I played a werewolf, foaming at the mouth (i.e., dribbling out a gobful of milk). Gary and another friend played the Bud & Lou parts, though Gary’s “Abbott” take owed a lot to Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys. It was a truly primitive endeavor. In recent years, it wound up on YouTube, wonder of wonders. Maybe we should have destroyed all the copies.
16.
Aside from the musical interludes, my final year of high school wasn’t particularly eventful… except perhaps for my interactions with my English teacher.
She had given me the English III Award the previous year, yet relations between Miss Sarah Jenkins and her top student were strangely troubled—and I have to admit that that was mostly down to me. As some others did, I found her prissy and off-putting; and I couldn’t resist tweaking her whenever I could, in ways I’d never have even wanted to try with my other teachers.
For instance, after our class read James Thurber’s “Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” we had to write stories utilizing onomatopoeia. My effort, mostly because I knew she’d disapprove of the subject matter when I read it aloud but would have to give me a good grade if it was well-written, dealt with pinball machines (which teachers tended to hate as a bad influence on “young people”) and was replete with KWA-PING-A-PING-A-PINGs and SLAP-SLAP-SLAPPPs—she winced at every one, I swear—
—but my teenage-slacker piece de resistance was my oral book report on Grace Metalious’ trashy 1956 bestseller Peyton Place, that raunchy tale of sexual skeletons rattling fleshily in the outwardly tidy closets of a New England town—our generation’s God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, with an Our Town veneer. Somehow, Miss Jenkins had missed the scandalous buzz about Peyton Place, so she approved my choice, and my oral report was so oblique that she was probably the only person in the room who didn’t know exactly what kind of book I was reviewing.
Less than a decade later, Stan Lee would publicly christen me “Rascally Roy”—but if I ever had anything remotely resembling a “rascally” period, it occurred during high school, not in the halls of Marvel Comics, where I was busy working for a living.
My last, and vaguely career-related, run-in with La Jenkins occurred when, one day that spring, while uptown during lunch hour (I never ate at the school cafeteria but always dashed out for a hamburger or such), I spotted in a drugstore the premier issue of a magazine whose cover photo depicted a buxom blonde next to a guy wearing a green Frankenstein mask. The mag had a catchy title: Famous Monsters of Filmland. It contained grainy movie stills and lots of info related to horror flicks new and old, accompanied by sophomoric puns. Intrigued, I bought a copy. (Unlike in the case of current comicbooks, I was precisely this magazine’s target audience.)
English IV came right after lunch, so I had to stow the magazine under my desk. But Miss Jenkins’ eagle eye spotted its lurid cover, and she admonished me for bringing such a trashy publication into her classroom. Figuring I couldn’t defend the mag itself, I explained I hadn’t had time to take it to my locker. I was desperate that she not confiscate it like my first-grade teacher had my Human Torch and Sub-Mariner cut-outs. Luckily, my mealy-mouthed response mollified her.
While Famous Monsters never became the inspiration to me that it allegedly was to later youngsters with names like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, I did become a reader for years. Little did I dream that, two-plus decades later, I’d be in a position to propose to Marvel publisher Stan Lee that we launch our own Famous Monsters-type magazine, which I christened Monsters of the Movies.
It’s amazing to me that Miss Jenkins still gave me the English IV award that year. She was clearly a fair-minded person. I probably should have treated her better. But she was just so prissy.
17.
Far as my tastes were concerned, there was only one memorable comics-related development during my senior year. That spring, ten months after Showcase #8, National used issue #13 to shine its spotlight for a third time on the new Flash. And, only two months later, he was featured for a second issue in a row. I dared hope more appearances might be in store for the new Fastest Man Alive.
With the coming of spring, my high school days neared their end. As John Schuch quipped at the time: “The two first signs of spring are Judy Meyers riding around in some boy’s convertible and Norman Gribbler with his shoes off.” If I need to explain the foregoing, you obviously never went to high school in rural Missouri.
During these months, it gradually began to sink in on me that I had made no preparations, none at all, for college.
This was the generation when more and more high school graduates were going to college. I’d be the first on either American-born side of my family to attend. It was assumed by both my parents and myself that I’d go to Southeast Missouri State College—alternately referred to as “Cape State” or “SEMO”—in nearby Cape Girardeau, and that I’d study to become a high school teacher, one of the main products of that institution. It wasn’t that I especially wanted to be a teacher; I just couldn’t think of anything else to do related to the reading and writing that were my chief interests. (The notion that I might become a professional writer—of any kind—was a million miles from my unfocused thoughts.) Mother would’ve preferred I become an accountant, but that profession held even less appeal for me than teaching. She seemed satisfied with my getting a teaching degree: “something to fall back on,” as the expression went. And probably still does.
Actually, and surprisingly in retrospect, even to me, I had toyed off and on with the idea of studying engineering in college; but that was mostly because I knew that after graduation my friends John Schuch and Jim Powell would be attending the Rolla School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla, Missouri. I had nothing like their special aptitude for or liking of math and/or science, but an engineering career might not have been entirely out of reach, if I’d had the drive to apply myself all through high school.
Entered in evidence: In either our junior or senior year, our class all took some sort of standardized national test—I forget its name. Rather than spewing out an IQ score, it purported to assess, in four departmentalized academic areas, what percentage of U.S. high school students in your age group you would “do better than” in each of those subjects. In “English” and “social sciences” (which included history), I scored 99+, which indicated I would “do better than” the other 99 out of 100 (of which I myself would be the 100th)… possibly even better than 199 out of 200, or whatever, on down the line until somebody topped my score. That was gratifying to know. In “math” and “science,” I came in at 98 and 95 (I forget which was which), both quite good scores, but not as outstanding.
Even so, at an earlier stage in my high school career, while I was still thinking vaguely about the engineering thing—God knows where’d I’d have gotten the money to attend Rolla even if I could’ve got in!—Mr. Lamont abruptly weighed in.
18.
W.E. Lamont was the stern-faced principal of JHS. Actually, despite my good grades and various student activities, I’d never had much contact with him all the way through high school, and I figured I was pretty much under his radar. Which was just how James Dean or Elvis would’ve wanted it, right?
So I’d been startled when, one day at the very start of my junior year, he’d abruptly called me into his office and asked me pointblank why the hell I’d signed up for trigonometry. While I struggled to come up with a coherent answer, he provided one for me: “You’re just taking it because your friends John and Jim are. But they’re going to be engineers. Are you going to be an engineer?”
I hemmed and hawed, indicating I was maybe sort of thinking about it a little.
Mr. Lamont then brusquely informed me that he was pulling me out of trig and putting me into Mrs. Heyde’s French class: “It’ll do you a lot more good.” And that was that.
He was right, of course. Not that I ever got around to telling him that.
And now, late in my senior year, here he suddenly was a second time, hauling me down to a table in the abandoned lunchroom and informing me out of the blue that he had arranged for me to receive a scholarship from the Missouri Parent-Teachers Association. It was a small grant, which mostly just paid for the entrance fees and textbooks I’d have to buy at Cape State, but it would take an economic burden off my parents and me. I muttered a sincere  thank-you.
I figured Lamont was done with me, but he had another observation to make before he’d let me go. I was startled to hear him saying he’d been happy to see me doing that singing stint around school and town. “Before that,” he went on, “you were satisfied just to buy friends by driving around a bunch of boys who didn’t have their own licenses yet. But with the singing you did something really on your own, and that was good to see.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted. While most of the younger guys who’d earlier ridden around in my car now had their own licenses and we still hung out together as much as before, he was otherwise basically right… again… though I’d never thought about the situation until that moment. I thanked him again for his help with the scholarship—a few stumbling words, woefully inadequate to cover the circumstances—and I went back  to class.
I’m not sure I ever had another conversation with W.E. Lamont, but he’s loomed large in my memory ever since… a benevolent figure, silently watching over me (and over quite a few other rootless, unmotivated kids, I have no doubt) from behind the counter in the principal’s office. It’s good to finally be able to thank him in print.
I should’ve named a super-hero’s secret identity after him. Who knows? Maybe I still will.
19.
Graduation night 1958 is mostly a blur. The ceremony was held in the high school gym—the same gym where I had spent four years of physical-education classes trying to avoid being trampled by hordes of larger boys while playing what was called “country boy basketball,” which simplified that sport by eliminating the cumbersome rule that you had to dribble the ball, and which allowed players to run up into the bleachers and hurl the ball down hard at the head of anybody who clambered after them.
I was class valedictorian, but thankfully at JHS that didn’t come with a mandatory speech, or at most only a few mumbled remarks. I forget which.
I’m sure I attended some kind of graduation party that night with Linda and various classmates… and that it was most definitely a pretty tame affair. After it ended, things probably followed the usual pattern: I’d take Linda home and spend as much time with her as I could, till she had to throw me out… then I’d meet Gary (and maybe one or two others) at a laundromat just over the hill and we’d take off for a bit of meaningless carousing. That pattern would continue into my college years, since I’d be commuting daily from my parents’ house to Cape State. Have I mentioned that I didn’t have much ambition or direction?
20.
A couple of weeks later, about 60 or so out of our graduating class of 100 spent our final time together as a group—on our senior trip, financed by various class activities over the previous four years. A pair of school buses, presided over by drivers plus Mr. Lamont and two or three other chaperons, departed for the East Coast. We stopped by Washington, DC, long enough to yawn our way through the Capitol and for a few of us to climb the Washington Monument’s seemingly endless number of steps (half-dead, we meekly took the elevator when we came back down)… we had a brief stroll around Mount Vernon, now that George Washington had moved out… then it was on to New York City.
Manhattan was a revelation to me. I had seen it in a million movies (even if it was often represented by fake Hollywood sets), and I had often imagined what it’d be like to live in such a populous, exciting place. We were in New York City for two days, two nights. On one of the latter, I took a subway with some fellow grads to the Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn, and even rode (white-knuckled) the big roller-coaster there.
The next night, though, I decided to go off on my own. I wandered around the Broadway and 42nd Street area, which was filled with both movie and live-drama theatres. Looking back, my foray was a relatively gutsy thing for a short, thin, and often timid guy like me to do, but I wanted to get the feel of the heart of the city… the fabled Great White Way. I was fascinated by everything I saw—not least by the fact that the whole Times Square area was obviously doomed, since nearly every store I passed sported a “Going Out of Business!” or “Last Days of Sale!” sign that made me think I’d better buy that six-inch replica of the Statue of Liberty fast before they were all gone forever!
After we returned to Jackson, my mind kept going back to New York City, which had won my heart and mind with its sheer scope and audacity. But I knew that a far more limited future lay in store for me: several years of college, then teaching high school in Missouri for at least four years. Chances were that if I ever saw Manhattan again, I would just be on another vacation, gawking up at the tall buildings. My basic destiny seemed set more or less in stone.
In short, my mental crystal ball was just as clouded over as ever.
21.
Even so, there was one last hurrah (see? I had already learned when to use that new cliché), only days before I was to begin college classes.
At the tail end of every summer, the main streets in Jackson were taken over for six days—still are, actually—by a hired carnival the locals called Homecoming, or Homecomers. Each Monday to Saturday night amid the festivities, back then, an amateur talent contest was held on a makeshift stage on the steps of the County Courthouse. Gary, Pal, and I entered it in ’58, our unofficial farewell performance as “Evitz Pretzel and the Trans-Jordanaires.” From somewhere, I borrowed a real guitar to use this time, though of course I couldn’t play it. We came in third one weeknight, so we’d be competing in the Saturday night finals for the big money—which wasn’t all that big, but it sure would’ve been to us.
(Not that all the entries were as strictly amateur as they were supposed to be: The winner one of the five weeknights was Narvell Felts, a young rockabilly singer from way down near the Arkansas border… a nice guy with a long career in country music since, but hardly an amateur even then; by summer of ’58, he’d already been recording professionally (big-label contract and all!) for two years. Another weeknight winner was a group of 8-10 teenage girls who danced the hula; they weren’t locals, either, and had recently been a paid, featured floor show at a big St. Louis hotel, so some people felt they shouldn’t have been eligible. But hula-dancers are always a crowd-pleaser—and, that year, a judge-pleaser.)
Knowing we weren’t likely to win, we decided we might as well have some fun in the Saturday night finals. Gary and I knew this obscure song “Hawaiian Rock,” as recorded by Tommy Sands, who’d had a huge hit with “Teenage Crush.” On Saturday, before our second and last number, I mumbled something into the mic about how we wanted to keep up with the latest popular trend—then the three of us suddenly whipped out some grass skirts and performed “Hawaiian Rock,” shaking our grass-skirted tails all over the stage. Gary and Pal did their best to approximate the hula standing up while they played. The audience of several hundred on the courthouse lawn ate it up, but we could see the judges glaring daggers at us. Any thought that we might win, place, or show that evening went right out the window. Probably just more bad taste on our part, like at the Hosiery Mill gig, but I don’t recall any of us ever regretting it.
Actually, I got a nice if unintended compliment that night from someone in the crowd. Linda  and her mother were in the audience, and Mrs. Rahm told me later that one person near her scoffed at my singing, saying to his buddy that the only reason I sounded any good was that I was really just lip-synching to a record! (Which of course I wasn’t.)
We may not have wound up in the money that evening, but I thought it wasn’t a bad send-off, just before I entered college and started getting serious about my future.
Yeah, right.

Purveyors Of (Cascading) Culture
(Top to bottom:) Lobby card for the game-changing 1955 film Blackboard Jungle—
Bill Haley and His Comets, whose recording of “Rock around the Clock” was played prominently in that movie—
—and James Dean (in white shirt) in a knife fight at Griffith Observatory in Hollywood, in that same year’s Rebel without a Cause. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

School Daze
(Top:) JHS classmates Jim Powell and (right:) John Schuch, and the grounds of Jackson High School, in photos from the 1958 Silver Arrow yearbook.

Let The Game Begin!
Marvel’s Grandmaster was still nowhere in sight (or in Roy’s head), but the JHS student was an avid chessplayer after classes let out for the day. Thanks to his sister Katy Kirn.

Will Marvels Never Cease? (Or: “The Liberty Legion”—Take 2)
Roy’s cover and a late interior page from his never-completed 1955 Marvel Comics #1, whose “Liberty Legion” featured the surviving heroes of solo titles published by National/DC, Timely/Atlas, Quality, Charlton, and Lev Gleason. All the Legionnaires except Wonder Woman appear on one or the other of these two pages. [Superman, Batman, Blue Beetle, Blackhawk, & Plastic Man TM & © DC Comics; Sub-Mariner TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; others TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Playing The Palace
A 1954 kids’ matinee at the Palace Theatre in Jackson. The Frank Sinatra film Suddenly (which dealt with an attempted Presidential assassination) was definitely not playing that afternoon. Thanks to Kent Wilson. [© the respective copyright holders.]

“Down At The End Of Lonely Street”
(Left:) Kerstner’s Drugstore was straight out of a vintage Archie comic. Thanks to Carla Jordan & the Cape  Girardeau County Historical Association for this late-’50s pic.
(Top right:) After Elvis Presley’s single Heartbreak Hotel became a monster hit in early 1956, RCA Victor soon issued an EP (“extended-play”) 45 r.p.m. album containing three additional songs. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Bill Heyde
Roy’s high school friend and mentor. From the 1956 Silver Arrow.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cracraft

Mrs. Esther Wagner

Mrs. Bernice Heyde

Mrs. Marie  Harbison

Morbius R Us
(Far left:) Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and Robbie the Robot in a black-&-white publicity photo for the 1956 20th-Century Fox color film Forbidden Planet. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]
(Near left:) Dr. Michael Morbius, a.k.a. The Living Vampire, made his Marvel Comics debut in Amazing Spider-Man #101, courtesy of writer Roy T., penciler Gil Kane, & inker Frank Giacoia—with a bit of prodding from editor Stan Lee. These panels are from #102 (Feb. 1972). Courtesy of Barry Pearl, F.F.F. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A Real Showcase!
Showcase #4 (Sept.-Oct. 1956) is now universally acknowledged as having ushered in the Silver Age of Comics. Art by Carmine Infantino & Joe Kubert, from a design by writer Robert Kanigher—under editor Julius Schwartz. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Clamping Down
(Left:) Dr. Frederic Wertham’s 1954 screed Seduction of the Innocent. Even as a teenager, Roy referred to it as “Seduction of the Indolent.”
(Right:) By the turn of 1955, every comicbook published by a member of the Comic Magazine Association of America had to display the Comics Code symbol prominently in the upper right corner.

Tales Designed To Carry An… Impact
Retroactively, one of the most celebrated stories in comics history is “Master Race” by editor/scripter Al Feldstein & especially artist Bernard Krigstein in EC’s Impact #1 (March-April 1955). Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.]

Going It Alone— With A Foursome
Jack Kirby’s cover for Showcase #6 (Jan.-Feb. 1957), which introduced the Challengers of the Unknown, heralded the Silver Age rise of one of its most important creators—even if, at the time, most readers had no idea if the artist was Kirby, or Joe Simon, or both. Inker uncertain. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Gary Friedrich
(Marvel’s future “Groovy Gary”), from the 1957 JHS yearbook, around the time he went to work at Jackson’s Palace Theatre. Also seen: the cover of Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug. 1972), which launched his concept of a modern- day Ghost Rider. Art by Michael Ploog. Courtesy of the GDC. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Moon Over Missouri
Roy and Linda Rahm in his parents’ living room, sometime during the six-plus years they dated (1957 to 1963). Photo by Leona Thomas.

“Evitz Pretzel & The Trans-Jordanaires”
Roy in his senior year (early 1958) as “Evitz Pretzel” at a JHS dance, singing a couple of Elvis numbers to the accompaniment of piano-player Pal Hacker and (not seen, alas) drummer Gary Friedrich.

Rock’n’Roll Stage Show
Sharing the bill with Roy’s classmate John Short (at left), who played (and sang) a mean Jerry Lee Lewis piano-rock, Roy, Gary, and Pal put on a one-night-only stage show at the Palace Theatre in July of ’58. Even if the local newspaper ad did misspell “Evitz.”!

Lon Chaney Jr.,  Watch Out!
Roy reached the zenith of his “acting” career in the 1958 short film he made with Gary Friedrich and four other pals, titled Les Ghouls—in which he played a [milk-]slavering werewolf. It was a comedy, folks! Screen capture by Nile Scala & John Cimino. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Miss Sarah Jenkins
Roy’s junior and senior English teacher, who probably deserved better from her star pupil than she got.

A Ghoul & His Girl
The cover of 1958’s premier issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, published by James Warren and edited by Forrest J Ackerman. That’s Jim in the green Frankenstein get-up. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

W.E. Lamont
Jackson High School’s principal had a major effect on Roy’s young life—twice—even though the two of them had very few encounters during the lad’s high school career. From the 1958 Silver Arrow.

Times Square—Squared!
It wasn’t raining in Times Square the night 17-year-old Roy T. wandered around it, unsuspectingly foreshadowing a second life that would commence seven years later—but otherwise this is the way he remembers it.

We’re Ready For Our Closeup, Colonel Parker!
(Above:) The view from (slightly above) the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse stage in Jackson, as amateur-show contestants would’ve seen it during the Homecomers street carnival in August 1958.
(Left:) Display ad promoting the earlier Palace Theatre gig from Missouri Cash-Book newspaper of July 10, 1958.
(Below:) Gary Friedrich on drums, Pal Hacker on piano, and Roy T. with a guitar he couldn’t begin to play… practicing for that year’s Homecomers amateur contest. Clipping also from the same Missouri Cash-Book newspaper; thanks to JHS friend Beverly Hahs. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Part III
“The Mightiest Heroes Of Our Time…”
College & Comics Fandom (1958–1961)

1.
For this future chronicler of Earth-Two and of the Marvel and Hyborian Ages, college was not unlike high school… but generally a lot less fun.
Things might have rolled out rather differently if I’d been heading off to the University of Missouri, in the center of the state, or maybe even if I’d just had the dough to afford a room at one of Cape State’s student dorms, ten miles or so from home. Still, even if the money had dropped like manna from heaven, I’m not sure I’d have opted for either of those choices. Being at that time a contented resident of an Ambition-Free Zone, all I really cared about was hanging out with my buddies, reading (comics, but far from only comics), going to movies, listening to music, and dating Linda… definitely not in that order. So sue me.
It wasn’t actually a bad life, albeit one that seemed to offer scant opportunities for advancement.
If quite a few events from my grade school and high school sojourns remain vivid in my memory, remembrances of my college years tend to run together in my mind—at least till I reach the start of my involvement in comics fandom, even as those days were dwindling down to a precious few. Doubtless that’s partly because, not only was I still living “at home,” but from the outset I was determined to attend summer semesters in ’59, ’60, and ’61 so I could graduate from college in three years rather than four. Our family’s finances being what they were, I felt that one year less of a gaping young mouth to feed, a spindly young body to clothe, would be to everybody’s benefit.
Besides, even after graduation, I wouldn’t really be going that far away, at least not for a while. The not-so-fine print of my PTA mini-scholarship required that, for each year I accepted it, I was obligated to teach for one year in a Missouri high school. Even if I raced through college in three years, my period of “indentured servitude” would still last four, so I’d be hanging around the Show-Me State till at least 1965. (Actually, by the time I received my B.S. in Education, the nice folks at the PTA had, unsolicited, reduced my years of obligation from four to two; even so, by sheer dint of circumstances, I would wind up teaching in my home state for exactly four years.)
2.
Southeast Missouri State College (today University) was still on the quarterly rather than semester system when I started there in September 1958. At the outset, I rode back and forth between Jackson and Cape with a former neighbor. Eventually, my parents decided our ’52 Chevy (zero to 60 in about as many seconds!) could be my mode of commuting.
One of the few things that stand out in my memory of my college-freshman year is John C. Bierck’s advanced English class. Bierck was just starting out in academia after playing football at SEMO. He—with help from Herman Melville, of course—instilled in me a love for Moby-Dick; and I’m in his debt for that. (Decades later, when I adapted that novel for the Marvel Illustrated series, I mailed him an inscribed copy. He immediately if politely pointed out one or two areas where I might have done better. He was probably right. He’s the scholar; I was just the adapter.)
Since during my college years I never had more than a few weeks off in a row (basically August), those three years tend to blur into one another; so I’ve treated them that way here. Even so, those “thousand days” no doubt made more of an impact on me than I consciously recall.
A few minor milestones/millstones along the way:
Far as I can recall, I only had one comics-related incident in all my time at college… in a General Science class, no less. When our first test was returned, I found I had scored one more point on it than was possible. My puzzlement was alleviated when the instructor asked if anyone in class had ever heard of a lungfish. I raised my hand… the only person who did. In a test question that asked which classes of animals possessed lungs, I had checked all the expected boxes—and had also scribbled in “some fish.” My instructor seemed impressed, and I did not yield to the temptation to tell her I had learned about lungfish from “Aquaman” stories in Adventure Comics.
During my freshman year, I was invited to pledge a fraternity. That particular frat—which shall remain Greek-letter-less here—was having trouble keeping its grade-point average up to snuff, and my straight-A marks would’ve been a definite plus for it.
Actually, I doubt I’d have stuck around long enough to become a dues-paying member. I strongly suspect that the first time some frat-rat had ordered me to break a date with Linda so I could wash his car, I’d have hurled the bucket of soapy water at him and that would’ve been that. Still, I planned to give it what they used to call “the old college try.”
But it was not to be. It turned out the frat had jumped the gun and had “pledged” us (or whatever the hell it was) a week earlier than was permitted, so it lost its pledging privileges for that period. Coming belatedly to my senses, I let those who had invited me down easy when pledging time came around again. If the brothers wanted the frat’s collective grade level to rise, they’d just have to spend a bit more time cracking the books.
In retrospect, most of my college classes tend to fade into one another. I started out an English major, with minors in history and social science—plus of course the obligatory, mostly useless minor in “education”—but somehow I never got around to taking one or two required English courses, so I wound up with majors in history and social science and a sizable minor in English. A distinction without much of a difference.
Except for essay tests, the occasional paper, and winning a college-wide essay contest at one point, just about the only writing I did in college was for a couple of creative writing courses I took in my second and third years. I’m not sure how much I got out of them. Perhaps intimidated by all the “serious” fiction-writing going on around me in those classes, I tended to retreat into strange byroads, mostly comedic ones. I had become enamored of Max Schulman, the author of stories about teenager Dobie Gillis (who’d been adapted as a recent TV sitcom) and scribe of a farcical novel about college life, Barefoot Boy with Cheek. Although I aced both writing courses, everything I scribbled for them is mercifully lost, except for one Schulmanesque yarn. An amiable classmate, Lavonna Smith, liked that story and asked to borrow the manuscript. I told her she could keep it forever, if she wanted. Nearly six decades later, she ran across my contact info and graciously returned it to me… which gave me a chance to re-read it and be reminded why I never seriously entertained the thought back then that I could be a professional writer.
Naturally, I saw little of former JHS classmates John Schuch and Jim Powell after they went off to study engineering. Even so, when Jim came home for Christmas in ’58, he invited me to his parents’ home and insisted I  listen to a new long-playing album that, it turned out, would impact my sense of humor for the rest of my life. Its title: The Sick Humor of  Lenny Bruce.
3.
Meanwhile, amid my collegiate forced-march, events were in play that would renew my enthusiasm re comicbooks… and would impact the remainder of my life while I was busy making other plans, to paraphrase a rock singer/songwriter who was then launching his own career in Liverpool, England.
For one thing: At the end of 1958, when I was still a burgeoning freshman, National/DC bit the bullet and, after four spotty Showcase try-outs over two-plus years, finally launched a new ongoing series, called—The Flash.
Oddly, although there’d never been a comicbook with that precise title featuring the 1940s speedster (he had starred in Flash Comics and All-Flash), National decided to continue the numbering from the point where the former publication had been canceled and begin The Flash with “No. 105.” The publishers, I’d learn later, were worried that a comic with a “No. 1” emblazoned on its cover might seem off-putting, even intimidating to a young reader, while sporting a “No. 105” would hopefully make it seem as if buying that mag was just like picking up the latest edition of the long-running Superman or Detective Comics, both of which were up to more than 250 issues by then.
I didn’t say publishers were always smart, did I?
But it wasn’t only National’s Flash that pulled me hook, line, and sinker back into comics’ orbit. In fact, surprisingly, it was the Archie Comics group that gave me hope that perhaps The Flash wouldn’t be the only super-hero series worth my attention in the future.
For, one day in spring of ’59, I picked up the first issue of The Double Life of Private Strong. The title logo read like it belonged on some weirdo war comic, but I recognized the costumed character on the cover: none other than the old 1940s MLJ/Archie red-white-and-blue super-hero The Shield! What’s more, the dynamic if unsigned artwork was clearly that of Joe Simon and/or Jack Kirby—who, far as I could tell, was/were also drawing the brand-new Challengers of the Unknown title for National. (This incarnation of The Shield would last only two issues, however; National/DC declared his enhanced super-powers an infringement on its Superman—that canard again!—and pressured Archie to put him back on the shelf for a while.)
Two intriguing pages inside Private Strong #1 were devoted to introducing a second Simon-and/or-Kirby hero, a total newbie called The Fly. His costume was what Bruce Wayne would’ve worn if he’d decided that a housefly would frighten superstitious criminals more than a bat. And indeed, The Adventures of The Fly #1 soon followed, with an “August 1959” cover date. (Of course, this being the nutty comics industry, it actually went on sale circa June; August was when the dealer was supposed to take it off the shelves, hopefully replacing it with a new issue of the same title.)
It would be a little while before I’d learn that the new Shield and Fly both were and were not a product of the legendary “Simon & Kirby” team I had admired for more than a decade. The latter pair had officially split up a few years earlier, following an industry downturn and the collapse of a joint publishing venture, and Jack Kirby was now drawing Challengers, which was reportedly based on a leftover S&K concept. Meanwhile, Joe Simon had been hired as editor of the new “Archie Adventure Comics” group. No fool he, the first thing he did was to hire his ex-partner to pencil both titles he’d dreamed up. Those of us not previously in the know would gradually come to realize it was Kirby who’d been the major artistic powerhouse of the original team—though Simon, too, was a talented artist and writer, even if his skills were better utilized as editor and packager. Archie’s new super-hero line was off to an explosive start… although first Jack, then Joe, would soon walk away from it and leave it in lesser hands.
4.
However, National wasn’t quite done with calendar year 1959. No sooner had they launched a full-fledged Flash comic than they decided to  revive the second-most popular of their 1940s heroes who had been sidelined at that decade’s end.
Things were pretty quiet that summer weeknight at the Palace Theatre. The feature movie had begun, the ticket booth had closed, and it was unlikely any more paying customers would show up; so I told Gary Friedrich (we were the only lobby employees on duty) that I was going to trot a few doors down—past two ever-busy bars called Blick’s and Breezy’s—to Fulenweider Drugs, to see what new comics had come in. Gary shrugged; he’d hold the fort till I got back.
And there, on the same shelves where three years earlier I had stumbled upon Showcase #4, I now beheld Showcase #22, its cover emblazoned with the name and image of a new version of the 1940s DC hero called “Green Lantern”!
This time around, he wore capeless, form-fitting garb of green and black, far less of a “church window” costume (that’s what I call super-hero outfits that contain so many colors and elements that I find them hard to focus on, like stained-glass window images)… and his hair was brown instead of blond… but he was shooting a verdant ray of light out of a ring on one of his fingers, at a missile streaking towards Manhattan. That finger was on his right hand, instead of his left as in the ’40s, but naturally I didn’t notice that right off the bat.
Scooping up a copy, I hurried back to the theatre and soon was explaining to Gary how this Green Lantern was an update of a 1940s character. Gary was a bit too young to remember the old GL (or Flash), but the new one mildly intrigued him. Partly influenced by my own enthusiasm, Gary soon became a fairly avid reader of the new super-heroes, though his interest in them was never anything like as consuming as my own.
But I didn’t need Gary or anyone else to stoke my enthusiasm. In that area, I was a self-starter. The whole rest of the adult world I was poised to enter might be ignorant of, indifferent to, even hostile to the comicbook super-hero revival I now saw beginning to take shape, month by month. I could’ve cared less. I had a new interest… nay, a new obsession.
A new Flash title—a new Shield—The Fly—and now a new Green Lantern.
Even before that 1959 night was over, I had began to wonder: With two of the 1940s JSA members back in action, albeit in modernized form—and with old-time JSAers Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman still alive and kicking—could it just possibly be that, the next time National might be looking to expand its line of super-heroes, they might actually bring back a new version of—
—the Justice Society of America?
5.
National/DC tried something different with “Green Lantern,” dedicating three bimonthly Showcase issues in a row to his adventures… the first time that had occurred. I suspect the company’s reasoning, by this point—a reversal of the motives which had led to the launching of Showcase—was that there was every likelihood the new incarnation of the so-called Emerald Gladiator would be a hit like “The Flash” and “Challengers” had been; and, if so, then the sooner a regular Green Lantern comic could follow hard on the jade heels of the try-out issues, the better for the company’s bottom line. That would mean less time for the casual reader (and publishers back then assumed we were all “casual readers”) to forget about the new hero in between appearances.
Then, one day in late 1959, I picked up some National comic or other and was both surprised and not surprised to discover therein a full-page house ad for an upcoming issue of an established title called The Brave and the Bold, which had previously spotlighted swashbuckling features like “The Viking Prince” and “The Silent Knight.” The ad featured a sizable image of the cover of the mag’s upcoming 28th issue, plus the headlined phrase: “Introducing… the  JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA.”
No, not the Justice Society of America, reviving the name of the 1940-51 grouping from All-Star Comics, but the Justice League of America. Clearly, someone at National had decided that the more streamlined word “League” sounds more dynamic than “Society.” Well, they were probably right about that.
But what truly grabbed me was the roll call of the heroes set to appear in the new series: Superman and Batman headed the list, of course—though I noticed that neither of them was depicted on the reproduced cover, whereon five other DC stalwarts were shown battling a giant starfish referred to as “Starro the Conqueror.” Also on the roll call (and cover) were the new Flash and Green Lantern (the latter then just completing his Showcase trial run)—plus Wonder Woman and Aquaman, both of whom had been around uninterrupted since 1941, but not Green Arrow, who’d been on the scene as long as Aquaman and longer than the Amazon. Instead, the list ended with—“John Jones, Manhunter from Mars!”
I knew who John Jones was: the star of a backup series with the above-quoted title in Detective Comics. In 1955, a massive-browed, green-skinned, bald-pated, super-powered  Martian named J’onn J’onzz had accidentally been teleported to Earth; he’d gotten by on our planet for the past four years by assuming the guise of a human police detective named—John Jones. The alien’s existence on our world had been undetected until the past few issues, when a second Martian—a criminal, this time—had showed up, forcing J’onn J’onzz to reveal his true nature to humankind in the course of using his powers to bring his paisan to justice.
Well, Green Arrow or green Martian, I couldn’t have cared less. I couldn’t wait for The Brave and the Bold to begin its Showcase-style presentation of “Justice League of America” for what I hoped would be, as in the case of “Green Lantern,” a three-issue trial run. And it was.
6.
Almost as an afterthought, at around the same time, yet another of this new wavelet of super-heroes erupted, ever so quietly, onto the comics shelves.
Charlton was this low-budget publisher based (printing press and all) in Derby, Connecticut, with a fair-sized but mostly forgettable presence on the comics stands. But suddenly, with a March 1960 cover date, the 33rd issue of its science-fiction title Space Adventures (the same mag whose 9th issue, six years earlier, had reintroduced The Blue Beetle) heralded a star-darting super-hero on its cover. His name was “Captain Atom”—and his well-designed chainmail outfit boasted an atomic chest-symbol within a cartoony burst, a near-duplication of the one sported by DC’s Atom a decade earlier. In reality he was Captain Adam, a U.S. military man who gained super-powers when he got caught in a nuclear explosion in space. I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming!
The character had lots of potential, though his stories were repetitive. The artwork was arresting, reminding me a bit of that of my favorite artist, Joe Kubert. The visual storytelling was clear, lucid… and exciting.
It wouldn’t be till the next bimonthly issue of Space Adventures that I’d learn the artist’s last name was “Ditko.”
This “Captain Atom” series wouldn’t even last out the 1960 calendar year, but it was destined to leave a far bigger cosmic trail than one would have thought.
7.
In the meantime, my personal and social lives didn’t really change all that much from what they’d been during high school, which probably isn’t the greatest thing I could say about myself. I continued working at the Palace until mid-1960, when I got into a snit about something my boss Marv Proffer did and impulsively quit. I announced my resignation by doing a (rather nimble, actually) handstand on a bullet-shaped trashcan in the theatre’s lobby, since that was something he had previously forbidden me to do. Gary and a couple of other staffers who knew I was coming in to resign were hovering nearby trying not to bust a gut… so I guess I was grandstanding as well as handstanding.
Quitting that job definitely wasn’t the smartest move I ever made, though, since it left me with even less spending money (not to mention, no more free movies at the Palace!). I got by that last year of college via handouts from my parents and a few odd jobs around the college. For instance, in ’60–’61 I checked daily attendance for this big freshman lecture course. I was diligent in my roll-checking, noting that Linda Rahm and our mutual pal Bud Tindall were always miraculously present for the lectures, even if their seats might have occasionally appeared vacant to the untrained eye. I guess my motto was: “With great responsibility there must also come great power.”
To appease the appetite of the butterflies bivouacing in my wallet, I also typed a SEMO history teacher’s Ph.D. dissertation, which dealt with a politician of the late 19th-century “New South.” Typing for long stretches played hell with my bad back—once in 1960 I collapsed in my slant-ceilinged bedroom after a marathon at the Smith-Corona—but afterward I paced myself so that I had no painful relapses and finished all the typing. The near-future Dr. Thomas Davis was a gracious Southern gentleman who appreciated my efforts. I was saddened when he passed away in early middle age, only a few years afterward.
When I look back on that final college year, I’m damned if I can figure out how I managed to continue leading an active social life. Fortunately, though Linda was nearer to Veronica than to Betty on an Archie-based social scale, she never minded that I didn’t have much money to spend on her. But our dating did become a bit trickier when, in fall of ’60, having graduated from JHS, she moved into a dorm room at SEMO for her first two college years. That meant even more driving, by me, back and forth between towns.
8.
Something else happened to me around the middle of 1960, and I still can’t be 100% certain exactly what it was.
For some reason, what seems like almost overnight, I lost nearly all interest in my classes—or, at least, in studying for them. Oh, I still did the minimally necessary reading and I participated in class, but I no longer felt like making any extra effort. My grades, straight A’s for the first two years, declined to an A-minus to high-B average my final two or three semesters. (Cape State had by now changed from a quarterly to a semester system.)
It certainly wasn’t extracurricular college activities that caused this decline. Partly because I commuted, I took part in very few of those. I attended the occasional sports event, but most of the time I couldn’t have told you who won. I had briefly joined the college debate squad, but had quickly realized I’d lost all interest in arguing on alternating sides of the same question, so I’d dropped out. That just wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time any longer.
I was happy to wind up with a small speaking role in a production of the play Inherit the Wind, the fictionalized re-telling of the Scopes “monkey trial” of the 1920s. That happened only because Linda persuaded me to accompany her to open try-outs. And, while she became one of a group of children running around singing “That Old-Time Religion,” I somehow got cast as a radio sound-man with two or three lines of dialogue, the most memorable of which was “You’re not supposed to say ‘hell’ on the radio.” Not much more than a walk-on, really. But it was nice to be treading the boards again.
Still, I might as well admit it. At the denouement of King Kong, when a bystander remarks that the airplanes had shot the big ape off the Empire State Building, Carl Denham responds, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
And I suppose I must own up to the fact that it was basically the return of super-hero comicbooks—and related matters that soon grew out of that phenomenon—that brought my grades down just enough that, in July of ’61, I would graduate magna cum laude instead of summa, as I should have… to my eternal embarrassment, even six decades later.
The “related matters,” though it wouldn’t be fair to blame them for my own shortcomings, are the debut of the Justice League of America—and my first contact with the man who conceived the comics-history magazine called Alter Ego.
9.
Very soon after the introduction of the Justice League in The Brave and the Bold #28, around the turn of 1960, I did something I hadn’t done in a while.
I wrote a letter to a comicbook.
Well, letters to three of them, actually. I sent a trio of typed missives to: (a) “the editor” of The Flash (whoever he/she might be); (b) the editor of the current Showcase issues (or maybe I took a leap of faith and wrote “Green Lantern” on the envelope)… and (c) the editor of The Brave and the Bold (or else of “Justice League of America”). Much of the content of those three letters was identical: I wrote that I had “learned to read” on the old All-Star and Flash Comics, and that, although I was “well past what is normally considered the ‘comic book age,’” I still read a number of comics, including World’s Finest Comics (with the Superman-Batman team) and now Flash and “Green Lantern.” I tailored the remaining paragraphs in each letter to the most recent issue of the specific series it was addressed to.
And I mailed all three, on the same day, to the 575 Lexington Avenue, New York City, NY, address that was in all three mags’ indicia.
Why was I suddenly choosing this moment to write again to a comicbook company, after I hadn’t done so in years?
One reason: The Flash #105 had contained a new feature—a letters column!
What I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize, since  I’d never bothered to read the entirety of the indicia, was that all three of my letters would wind up on the desk of the same man, who was “the editor” of The Flash, the Showcase “Green Lantern,” and the “JLA” issues of The Brave  and the Bold.
10.
Roughly a week later, I received a letter on official  National Periodical Publications stationery from one  Julius Schwartz.
In one fell swoop, I learned that my three then-favorite current comicbook series all had the same editor—who, I was even more startled to be informed, had also been an editor of All-Star Comics and related hero titles from 1944 till their demises between ’48 and ’51. Julie (as he soon invited me to call him, as his friends and associates did) clearly appreciated having a few of us older readers coming on board in addition to the younger ones at whom his comics were actually aimed. He would print most of my first fan letter to “Green Lantern” in the second-series Green Lantern #1, cover-dated July-August 1960… followed by his response, credited simply to “Editor.” That would become the first comments of mine ever to appear in a comicbook.
Over the ensuing months, I exchanged a number of letters with Julie. Each of mine contained comments on the latest stories, but some also asked that he print the names of their writers and artists. Due to such requests by me (and, as I’d learn, a number of others), he soon began naming those names in the letters columns, though it took a little longer before bylines appeared on the stories themselves. He also, from the beginning, listed the full monikers and addresses of all letter-writers who had their missives printed, despite his superiors frowning on that practice. He did so largely because, during the 1930s, he’d been an avid science-fiction fan, and such identification had been standard in SF pulp magazines like Astounding, Thrilling Wonder Stories, et al.
One of his editorial messages that particularly shook my world came when one of my notes was printed in Justice League of America #1 (Oct.-Nov. 1960), just three months after my GL #1 debut. Besides stating that Green Arrow and the interstellar adventurer Adam Strange from Mystery in Space might soon make guest appearances in JLA, though not as full members as my letter had suggested, “the Editor” announced that “we are seriously thinking of reviving and guest-starring such former JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA heroes as Hawkman, Dr. Mid-Nite, Black Canary, and the Atom.”
This, of course, was a news-bulletin thunderbolt to readers like me, who had been assuming that the only way any 1940s JSAer would ever henceforth resurface would be in a renovated form, à la the current Flash and Green Lantern.
11.
But, one key question I had been asking myself all along: Are there any other “readers like me”—people old enough to have read at least the later All-Star Comics and to remember (let alone want to see new stories about) the original Hawkman, Atom, et al.?
After all, comicbooks, as we were reminded over and over again, were “kid stuff”… and by late 1960 anyone old enough to have purchased even the final “JSA” issue off the stands would be at least in his mid-teens. Chances were that the books they’d now be toting would be the textbooks of the cute blonde who sat in front of them in biology, not comics with gaudy super-heroes battling atomic missiles and alien starfish.
Still, I could tell from other letters printed in Flash and Green Lantern (and now JLA) that there must be at least a few readers in their late teens and beyond, even if Julie was probably consciously culling the missives he printed from a tiny minority of adult responders.
I suddenly learned a whole lot more about those other “readers like me” when, that November, I mailed off my latest letter to Schwartz.
Perhaps because I’d made sure he knew up front that I was a bona fide College Student rather than just another moppet, he’d taken enough of an interest in me that before long we were exchanging letters every couple of months, even though he had no assistant to help handle his mail. Clearly, he felt my opinions and ideas had potential value to him as editor, even if he had to sift them through his nearly two decades’ experience as a comics pro. For instance, The Flash #116 (on sale in summer of ’60) had printed a letter of mine that suggested bringing back the Three Dimwits, a Three Stooges-inspired grouping that had provided mild comedy relief in many ’40s yarns of the Scarlet Speedster. “The Editor” replied that he would consider it—and, to my considerable shock, the very next Flash issue had contained the tale “The Madcap Inventors of Central City!,” which propelled the so-called Dimwits—Winky, Blinky, and Noddy—into the domain of the new Flash.
That story found scant favor with most of the readership, however, so the Three Dimwits never appeared again. Thus, the very first suggestion of mine on which Julie had definitely acted—since I’ve never seen any indication that anyone else ever suggested their return—had turned out to be a resounding flop. I’m lucky he didn’t have a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy! On the contrary, I became one of the very first beneficiaries of his new policy of handing out original comics artwork to the writers of particularly interesting letters; he mailed all 13 pages of the Carmine Infantino/Joe Giella art for “Madcap” to me. National contended that it, not the artists or writers, owned the original art; thus it was theirs to dispose of as they chose. And, at the time, who was I to disagree?
In my November 1960 letter, I must have mentioned to Julie, perhaps for the first time, my desire to complete my very scattershot collection of All-Star Comics. He responded that he couldn’t help me with that (though not long afterward, out of the blue, he did mail me a “spare” copy of All-Star #27 that he’d run across somewhere), but that I might enjoy writing directly to the man who had scripted the earliest “JSA” stories beginning in 1940: Gardner F. Fox, who was also the scribe of all “Justice League of America” stories to date, and of that doomed Three Dimwits foray.
I already knew the name “Gardner F. Fox.” For several years, it had appeared, in a joint byline with artist E.E. Hibbard, on solo stories of the 1940s Flash. Now Julie was informing me that Fox had also authored much of the original run of “Justice Society of America,” my favorite series of all time! His letter included Fox’s home address in Yonkers, a Westchester County suburb just north of New York City—a town I had previously heard of only when it had been mentioned in passing in a 1949 Cary Grant film comedy, I Was a Male War Bride. I presume Julie had obtained Fox’s permission to give me his address.
I immediately wrote Fox, repeating my status as a college-age English and history major and a reader of Schwartz’s super-hero titles. I also gushed sincerely about my respect for his current work on JLA and about my love of All-Star Comics from 1945 on. And I expressed a hope that, if he happened to have any spare copies of the old All-Stars moldering in his attic, he might consider selling them to me.
“Gar,” as he tended to sign himself, wrote back that, like me, he was a history buff, who liked to include tidbits of knowledge in his stories. Alas for my request, he told me that, some months earlier, he had sold all his privately bound copies of the All-Stars he had written (he said “through issue #24,” although it would soon be documented that he had actually scripted the title through #34) to one Dr. Jerry G. Bails of Detroit, Michigan, with whom he’d been corresponding for several years. However, he felt that, since Jerry and I were clearly two of the most fervent JSA fans on the planet, we might enjoy getting in touch with each other… so he sent me Bails’ home address. Almost certainly without checking with Bails first.
12.
Naturally, I fired off a letter to Jerry Bails within 24 hours of receiving what today we would call his “contact info.” In it I explained how I’d acquired his address and that, though currently a college senior, I was a “fellow devotee” of the 1940s All-Star Comics. My letter was written and posted on November 21… the day before my twentieth birthday.
The following Saturday morning, November 26, I received a manila package that bore Bails’ return address. Eagerly opening it, I was amazed to find not just a letter, but three vintage issues of All-Star: a coverless and incomplete #4 (the first full-fledged JSA adventure); a complete #5 in good condition; and a coverless/incomplete #6. None of which I had ever seen before, not even a cover in an old house ad.
His accompanying letter began:
Dear Roy,
I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am to find another All-Star enthusiast after all these years. I’ve been a fan since the first Justice Society adventure appeared in All-Star Comics #3 (Winter 1941). In 1945, I began my campaign to collect all the back issues of this magazine, and in 1951, when the JSA was dropped, I began my campaign for a revival of this old favorite. Just last year, as you know, my efforts finally paid off. Now, I’m off on a new campaign—to make the Justice League of America more popular than Superman. First, I want to see the JLA published monthly, then I want to see it published in a giant edition. I hope you will join me in working for these goals.
He added that he had sent me, as a gift, a trio of triplicates from his collection, even if two of them were incomplete. He said he also owned spare copies of issues #2–8, #10, and #18–24 (because he had purchased Fox’s bound volumes) but had just offered them, through Julie, to National, whose own office files were lacking in some areas.
To my surprise, Jerry added that we had other things in common besides our interest in the JSA and JLA. Roughly seven years older than me, he, too, was a Missourian, having done most of his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Kansas City. After obtaining his Ph.D., he had moved to Detroit just the preceding July to become Assistant Professor of Natural Science at Wayne State University. (I never did totally parse out exactly what “Natural Science” was/is.) Back in 1947, he would tell me later, he had actually written a letter to DC Comics that had been printed—in Real Fact Comics #9, one of the rare DC comics with a letters page—although the editor had mis-rendered his last name there as “Balk.” Jerry closed by saying he hoped we could get together sometime, perhaps when he returned to Kansas City to visit friends and relatives.
This exchange, underscored by his generosity in sending me three vintage All-Stars, marked what Bogart calls in Casablanca “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—or, as I characterized it to Jerry at the time, my “greatest birthday present ever,” even though he hadn’t intended it as such. It was also the commencement of a voluminous two-way correspondence, which in less than five months added up to more than 100 pages. (The foregoing page count is mentioned just in case you—or I—happened to still be wondering what I was doing while my grades took something of a downward dip during my last two or three college semesters. Even if I didn’t realize it yet, I was in the process of discovering my true life’s calling; so how could I be distracted by such irrelevant things as college classes? Of course, at the time, I would never have admitted such a thing to myself—let alone to my parents, who were supporting me while I studied for my teaching degree.)
Among other things, I mentioned to Jerry in my return letter that I hoped to convince National to bring back the Newsboy Legion, the kid gang who’d palled around with the costumed Guardian in the 1940s Star Spangled Comics, either teaming them up with the Martian Manhunter or with a revived version of another old favorite, Robotman.
He responded that, besides seconding that motion, he’d had an idea of his own, one that he had already suggested in a letter sent to Gardner Fox three months earlier:
I also think that DC should revive the Atom as a character like the old Dollman. Do you remember him?
Did I!? I was immediately seized with the conviction that a new Atom, tailored to Jerry’s specifications, should become the fourth JSA hero to be revived—since a revamped Hawkman, the third Schwartz solo hero, was due to go on sale any day in The Brave and the Bold #34. (Re the latter: Both Jerry and I, in the weeks right before we “met,” had been invited by Schwartz, along with two other older fans, to read advance silver prints of that origin issue prior to publication, so our comments could be printed in a letters section in Hawkman’s second outing. By another in a series of coincidences, Hawkman was the favorite JSAer of both Jerry and myself—and the revival’s illustrator, Joe Kubert, was the favorite comic artist of both of us as well. It was also around this time that I learned Hawkman, like The Flash, had been co-created in 1939 by the guy who had “introduced” us: Gardner Fox. Like Jerry said: We had a lot in common.)
He soon sent me a copy of his August 29, 1960, letter to Gardner, in which he had playfully pretended that it was several neighborhood children (“my little friends”) who had suggested to him that The Atom be revived as a “real small” hero, which Jerry told Fox had “reminded me of the Dollman,” adding to the pro writer, “You might pass this idea along to the editors, for what it’s worth.”
I understood at once what he had suggested to Fox re The Atom: Instead of reviving the so-called Mighty Mite as the short-statured but super-strong hero he’d been in the latter 1940s, Jerry felt he should become basically a reincarnation of Doll Man (the indicia spelling of the character’s name). The super-hero Doll Man had been published from 1939 to 1953 by the Quality Comics Group, which had gone out of business in 1956. He had been able to shrink down to a height of what looked like roughly eight inches, while retaining the strength he’d had as an athletic six-footer. Jerry, however, suggested the new Atom be six inches tall, not eight. Since National/DC had carried on the publication of at least two of Quality’s titles (Blackhawk and G.I. Combat), Jerry assumed Julie could give The Atom the attributes of Doll Man without running afoul of charges of copyright infringement à la Captain Marvel re Superman.
After I fired off a letter of my own to Schwartz in support of this version of The Atom, Jerry and I began batting around ideas for the little guy. “What I really wish,” Jerry wrote on December 13, “is that I had the time to write an occasional Atom script for Showcase. Maybe you and I could collaborate in some way and submit a script and cover panel to Julie. How about it?”
Thus, the first “collaboration” ever broached between Jerry Bails and myself was nothing less than a full-scale comicbook script. Jerry certainly had more confidence than I could have mustered at that point that, together or separately, we could have produced scripts National would’ve deemed worthy of printing!
I did concur with the desire to try, though. I was buoyed up by the fact that he had meanwhile mailed me his other duplicate early All-Stars so I could at least read them over Christmas vacation. It was, needless to say, the first time I had ever read issue #3, which had introduced the Justice Society, albeit merely as dinner companions swapping stories of recent cases. Meanwhile, I typed out my own two-page proposal for an origin for the new Atom, which I sent off to him (and Julie) on December 17. I gave the diminutive hero a pet parrot named Copernicus to ride around on. To the letter I sent to Jerry, I added, as an afterthought, a paragraph that foreshadowed far-reaching repercussions so far as my own leisure time for the next couple of years was concerned:
Oh, by the way, also during the January lay-off, I begin work on a project long dear to my heart—a Mad-type take-off on the JLA called the Bestest League of America, and starring Green Trashcan, Wondrous Woman, Cash, Aquariuman, and S’amm S’mithh, the Martian Manhandler, and featuring Superham, Wombatman, and Aukman. If you wish, I’ll let you see it when I finish it in February  or March.
Sort of makes me wonder, in retrospect, exactly when I imagined I was going to get any work done for my classes during the spring and summer 1961 semesters, before I was due to graduate and sally forth into the workaday world.
Jerry responded favorably to my Bestest League idea, and in December I did a color concept drawing of its now-six major members (I added “Lean Arrow,” since Green Arrow had recently been inducted into the JLA), which I mailed to him while I began working on the twice-up art for the parody’s five-page introductory chapter.
Mostly, though, we concentrated on exchanging ideas related to the new, improved Atom. Letters were bouncing furiously back and forth between us when Jerry received a January 6, 1961, letter from Julie Schwartz. The editor thanked him for his “ideas on the Atom revival,” but mentioned that “by a fantastic coincidence I had already had some similar ideas on the same subject; even went so far as to have artist Gil Kane do some sketches.” Apparently not only would the new Atom have the power to shrink, as Jerry had suggested, but Gardner Fox would write the stories.
Jerry immediately passed that information on to me, adding: “In view of this news. I suggest we abandon our plan for the Atom…. I recommend to you that you get to work immediately on your Dr. Fate script.”
13.
So that was that.
Then I started thinking about it. Julie was claiming that he had independently come up with the very same concept of a miniaturized Atom that Jerry had birthed the previous August—a notion nothing like any rendition of the Tiny Titan that DC had ever published. My immediate thought: If Julie had had that inspiration before Gardner showed him Jerry’s letter (i.e., no later than early September), why were we just hearing about it in January? Fond of Julie as I was by long distance, I was then—and I remain today—highly skeptical of his official narrative. What swiftly occurred to me was that, while Julie himself might not have minded giving Jerry credit for the idea of a six-inch Atom, he felt a need to cover his rear end... and National’s… because his superiors would surely have taken a bleak view of one of their editors acknowledging in print, or even in a letter, that the new and quite different concept for a revived Atom had first been suggested by a reader—who might later ask for economic recompense for his inventiveness.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering: That Julie had indeed read Jerry’s late-August letter to Gardner is proven by the fact that that missive wound up being printed in Justice League of America #3 (Feb.-March 1961), word for word—except that Jerry’s salutation was changed from “Dear Gar” to “Dear Editor,” and the short paragraph in it that referred to The Atom and “Dollman” had been dropped. Since this would be the first time in four revivals that a 1940s DC hero would be brought back with powers substantially different from those of his original incarnation, I regrettably retain a jaundiced view of Julie’s alleged “fantastic coincidence.”
That said, I was destined to be very surprised, some years later, when the 1961 Atom’s first penciler, Gil Kane, who was already the Silver Age Green Lantern artist (and by 1970 a friend of mine), claimed in print that it was he who’d had the idea for a six-inch Atom, independent of Julie and Gardner, let alone of anyone else. He maintained that he had come up with the notion totally on his own, had drawn several concept sketches, and had had them colored independently by a National production man… over the Christmas 1960 season, if I recall a-right from my own conversations with him. I’ve never had reason to doubt that Gil was relating what he considered a true account; even so, it seems very unlikely to me that his Atom-ic inspiration occurred before both Fox and Schwartz had read Jerry Bails’ “Atom” letter late the preceding summer.
(In 1999, I dedicated ten pages of Alter Ego, Vol. 3, #2, to a full and unfettered account and analysis of all statements, letters, and other documents related to the “Atom controversy.” I still stand by the conclusions I reached in that article, even though I’m sympathetic to what I presume was Julie’s fear that to have confirmed Jerry’s contribution in writing might have opened up National to legal claims, and himself to unemployment. Jerry himself was always graciously willing to accept the possibility that Julie and/or Gil might well have come up with that same approach to The Atom on their own, independently of his letter… and although I’ve never concurred with that view, I myself had never been much more than a cheerleader for the concept; so, like Jerry, I moved on to other things.)
With The Atom now off our plate, I figured I’d heed Jerry’s suggestion that I flesh out a notion I’d recently mentioned to him: a revival of the 1940s Gardner Fox hero Doctor Fate. My version would have been visually identical to the original (that costume couldn’t really be improved on, especially that full helmet!); but my reworking of his origin reflected the science-fiction approach that was part and parcel of all Julie’s new hero titles, replacing the magic that had been the essence of the first Dr. Fate in the old More Fun Comics and All-Star with science-fictional trappings. In my proposal, his helmet gave him telekinetic powers, his cloak the ability to levitate, and his amulet the capability of understanding and speaking all human languages. Yes, I’d get right to work on that!
However, it was another project of Jerry’s, not one of my own, that soon popped up and carried all before it, launching a phenomenon that still echoes today….
14.
In one of his earliest letters to me, Jerry had briefly mentioned yet another of the apparent cornucopia of concepts he’d been toying with up there in Detroit. He said he wanted to publish and distribute a “JLA newsletter” to any and all Justice League of America fans he could contact, both through the comics’ letters pages and via other means. This project sounded worthwhile, but since he provided no details, I didn’t think much more about it.
Then, on January 26 of the New Year, I got a letter from Jerry informing me that he had just received an invitation from Adelphi College on Long Island, NY, to lecture there only two or three weeks hence. Despite the short notice, he had accepted, and he and his wife Sondra planned to make that trip the excuse for a long-desired Eastern vacation. And of course, while in the New York City area, Jerry said he definitely intended to “drop in” at the National/DC offices, adding:
I am going to suggest my plan for a JLA newsletter and see if I can get their support for it. I also hope to see the drawings of the Atom and other projects in the works.  If you have any ideas for the newsletter, let me know by return mail.
I didn’t have any ideas relevant to the newsletter notion, but I did suggest he propose to Schwartz that National launch a Junior Justice League of America fan club, akin to the Junior Justice Society of America of the 1940s with its shiny metal badge and membership certificate and coded messages in All-Star Comics. Jerry, who had belonged to the JJSA half a dozen years before I did, responded (not to my great surprise) that was something he’d already been pondering and would definitely pitch verbally to the editor.
While he prepped for his trip, I worked on my “Bestest League” story and briefly considered firming up my Doctor Fate proposal for Julie. However, for various reasons, I settled instead on National’s other vintage supernatural costumed hero—The Spectre, whom by now I had seen in several early All-Stars. Once again, I switched out the supernatural aspects of the character’s origin for SF touches more likely to find favor with Julie. I postulated that, through exposure to a mystic gem in India (which might have turned out to be a fallen meteorite or some such non-magical thing), Jim Corrigan got split, for brief periods, into two separate super-powered entities: The Spectre represented good; the other being, whom I dubbed The Shade, was pure evil.
No sooner had my truncated notion reached Jerry than he took a moment from his travel preparations to offer what I felt were improvements: Rather than “good” and “evil,” he said, I should consider using the Freudian terms “super-ego” and “id.” Probably because, unknown to me at the time, The Flash had battled a villain called The Shade in early-’40s stories, he added: “May I suggest the name ‘Count Dis’ for [The Spectre’s] evil counterpart. (I chose ‘Dis’ rather than the Greek ‘Pluto,’ because the latter has so many other connotations for comics readers.)” Checking one of my books on mythology, I discovered that “Dis” was another name for Pluto or Hades, so “Count Dis” it was, though Jerry never explained why the bad-guy should have a noble title when The Spectre didn’t. And I discreetly refrained from pointing out that “Pluto” was the Roman, not Greek, name for the god of the underworld.
In the same letter, he added:
My thoughts for a newsletter are still pretty muddy. I can have the thing hectographed for nothing, but I would prefer to at least have it mimeographed, but that costs money. So does postage, if the number of copies is very great. I don’t want to charge for it, because that involves all sorts of complications and DC might not give their approval, and their approval is essential if I am to get the kind of advance info I need for a good start.
Right now I think I’ll send The JLA Subscriber (as I might call it) only to adult readers who write in to one of Julie’s magazines. This audience would supply many new ideas and help to boost the JLA with the younger set. They would also be interested in gossip about the old JSA stories and other DC Comics, and might want to trade old mags, just as we have.
The number of JLA fans over 18 shouldn’t be so great that I couldn’t afford the postage myself, and perhaps different issues of the newsletter could originate from different fans. In other words, any one at any time might get a newsletter off to other fans. However, only subscribers to the JLA would receive the code chart when they send me the address label from the brown mailing wrapper. What do you think? I think that each editor might include an editorial. I have one I want to write on the good and bad effects of the Comics Code. And I’m sure you could write many interesting features.
I probably received the above missive around the time Jerry was departing for New York. Oh, and about the 1960s technology Jerry refers to in the above letter: It would make the reader’s head hurt (mine, too) if I were to try to give a detailed explanation of what hectograph and mimeograph machines were. Suffice it to say, both were duplicator devices used in those pre-photocopier days to run off multiple copies of something typed (or drawn) on a “master” sheet. Trust me—you don’t need or want to know any more. Except that mimeos were by far the superior of the two devices.
15.
A couple of weeks later, having just returned to Detroit, he sent me a letter detailing—well, virtually nothing about his lecture at Adelphi College, but plenty about his side trip to Manhattan. Up front, I was fascinated to learn he and Sondra had taken in two Broadway shows I lusted from afar to see: Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot, starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews—and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, an improvisational presentation by two of the most talented comedians ever to occupy the planet. I already owned the cast albums of both shows and played them endlessly, when I wasn’t listening to My Fair Lady. Still, since I was destined never to personally witness either of those Broadway events, it was the rest of Jerry’s letter that affected me the most:
First of all, let me say that my five-hour visit to the DC offices, my luncheon with Julie and Gar, my private conversations with writers and artists, and my perusal of the AA [All-American] classics, gives me more than I could relate in a half dozen king-sized letters; and besides, I don’t want to steal all my own thunder, because I know now (for sure) that I want to bring out a “fanzine” devoted to the Great Revival of the costumed heroes.
I have what I consider to be a brilliant title and format. It will be called Alter-ego and each contributor will sign his article with the name of the hero he wishes to see revived, or created. It seems natural for me to choose the Atom to start, while you, who (I hope) will serve as co-editor, could use either your Dr. Fate or Spectre or both.
I have enough background info, promise of advance previews, support in Julie’s letter columns, and hope for fresh ideas from a guy named Thomas to make this fanzine go, go, go, as Snapper might say.
“Snapper,” for those unfamiliar with the early Justice League of America, refers to Snapper Carr, a jive-talking teenager who served as an unofficial mascot to the group for its first few years.
Jerry’s letter also included inside information on The Atom: That character’s debut had reportedly been temporarily delayed by National, which feared, he’d been told, “flooding the market with super-heroes.” (However, as it turned out, the first “Atom” issue of Showcase, #34, would still go on sale the following summer; so any freeze must have been very quickly rescinded—and this despite the relatively lackluster sales of the three-issue “Hawkman” revival in early ’61. More about that in a little bit.)
Jerry went on to say he had seen one of Gil Kane’s sketches of The Atom, which depicted him astride a dog… though he had no idea if the canine was intended to be a part of the comic’s actual cast. (It wasn’t, even though Doll Man had for a time ridden around on a hound named Elmo.) He concluded:
Now, get to work and supply me with material for the first issue of Alter-ego. I would like [it] to run about a dozen pages, including your Bestest League of America in serial form. Hold it to four 8x11 pages per chapter if you can. Send me your shaded pencil drawings and I’ll do my best to reproduce them in Ben Day tones. I suggest you use typewriter characters in balloons and legends.
So that’s how Jerry Gwin Bails, Ph.D., by dint of flattery and downright preemption, pulled me into becoming titular “co-editor” of the first issue of his “fanzine.” But—I was already asking myself before I finished reading his letter—what the hell was a “fanzine,” anyway? I had never before heard that word—if actual word it was!—and, as I’d soon realize, neither had 99.99% of the rest of the world.
It was Julius Schwartz, in the course of the several hours Jerry spent with him, who had introduced him to the previously unsuspected (by us) phenomenon that was science-fiction fandom. As far back as the 1920s and ’30s, many SF fans had been as unwilling to be simply readers of the genre they loved as Jerry and I were with regard to comicbooks. Some of the most respected professionals in the comics field in 1961 had been, several decades earlier, science-fiction fans with an urge to publish… first as fans, later as full-fledged fiction writers, editors, or artists. That had included Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger (both now DC editors)… and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the co-creators of Superman himself. The latter pair’s very first character called Superman, in fact, had been a Luthor-style villain—in a fanzine.
The word “fanzine,” of course, had an obvious derivation: “fan” + the back half of “magazine” = “fanzine.”  A magazine produced by science-fiction fans for science- fiction fans, either sold for a pittance or else given away or traded for “letters of comment” that would help fill out future issues. The word “fanzine” today is used regularly in mainstream publications that have no idea of its derivation. (Another word coined by vintage SF fans that has made it into the modern media’s vocabulary in an even bigger way is “prequel.”)
As for Jerry’s introduction to fanzines: When he had brought up his idea for The JLA Subscriber to Julie Schwartz, the DC editor had immediately pulled from a desk drawer the first three issues of a single very recent SF fanzine.
Its name was Xero.
16.
Xero, an imposing-looking word that actually just means “dry” in ancient Greek and was merely a last-minute, irrelevant, but visually attractive replacement for another proposed title that had turned out to be already in use by another fanzine, was the brainchild of a young NYC professional couple named Richard and Pat Lupoff. Dick was a young executive for IBM. Xero was intended merely to be his and his bride’s modest addition to the landscape of SF fanzines, but it ultimately proved to be quite a bit more than that. They had prepared the first mimeographed issue in time to distribute it (i.e., hand it out for free) at the World Science Fiction Convention, held over the 1960 Labor Day weekend in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
To fill out their publication, Dick had scribed something that differed from the usual subjects covered in SF fanzines: namely, a mainly nostalgic yet vaguely historical article about Fawcett’s once-popular comicbook star Captain Marvel, which he titled “The Big Red Cheese” (after an insulting nickname given the hero by his arch-enemy, Dr. Sivana). Hoping that other science-fiction fans might deign to write similar articles about their own childhood comics favorites for future issues, he labeled his piece the first installment of a series he christened “And All in Color for a Dime.” It was a brilliant phrase, the imaginary conclusion of a huckster’s nonexistent sentence that extolled all the graphic wonders supposedly found within a comicbook. (The “And” was soon dropped.) In addition, the Lupoffs attended the “Pittcon’s” traditional masquerade garbed as Captain Marvel and his super-powered sister Mary Marvel, wearing home-made costumes, and attracted considerable attention.
Between September 1960 and Jerry’s visit to the National offices the following February, the Lupoffs had published two additional issues of Xero, each thicker than the one before it. Both were heavy on material related to science-fiction and like matters, with a growing roster of professional and semi-professional contributors. Each also sported an installment of “All in Color for a Dime”: #2, an overview by Ted White of the history of National/DC Comics and its colorful characters; #3, a lively article by Jim Harmon about DC’s 1940s super-hero group, the Justice Society of America.
Jerry sparked at once to the trio of issues, which Julie promptly loaned him so he could peruse them further after returning to Detroit. The fact that the JSA and its heroes were a prominent part of two of the three “AICFAD” chapters probably heightened their impact on him; but he didn’t need that incentive to begin to wonder if something more than a mere “JLA newsletter” might be worth doing. As soon as he had digested their contents, he mailed the three fanzines on to me so I could share his new source of inspiration.
(When, in 1964, I wrote a rough-draft history of “The Alter Ego Story,” I said in all sincerity that Xero was unlikely to have had any major influence on Jerry; but I soon came to realize I’d been wrong about that. If Julie hadn’t shown Jerry Xero #1–3 in February of ’61, the chances are my new friend would’ve simply forged ahead with a JLA Subscriber newsletter. Thus, if Jerry has often been heralded, with only mild exaggeration, as “the father of comics fandom,” Julius Schwartz and/or Dick Lupoff were definitely its grandfathers—or godfathers—or something.)
17.
Jerry’s ambitions for his new Alter-Ego project (he had swiftly decided to capitalize the “e” in “ego,” though the hyphen remained throughout his tenure) were purposely less sophisticated than the more adult, SF-centered sensibilities of Xero. Even so, Alter-Ego would become an actual fanzine, with articles and illustrations in addition to straight “news” gleaned from Julie and any other willing comics editors he could contact.
For my own part, though Jerry generously listed us both as “editors” in the first issue of A/E (as I shall henceforth abbreviate it, in keeping with a practice initiated in 1998 by Jon B. Cooke), I didn’t alter a single word or image in it. Jerry did all the editing. I was less a co-editor than a co-contributor, since I did at least give him a number of pages that helped fill out that premier issue.
First, as per his request, came the “Bestest League of America.” Its first chapter—which I’d already written and drawn on over-size poster paper—ran to five pages rather than four, but he was fine with that. My little parody wasn’t going to give the legacy of Harvey Kurtzman’s color Mad any competition, but it was imbued with as much of that irreverent spirit as I could muster at the time. I had to redraw all five pages of the chapter onto typing paper and mail them to Jerry by early March. He, in turn, traced them onto a master for his hectograph (a.k.a. spirit duplicator, a.k.a. ditto machine). That cumbersome instrument could churn out up to 150 copies from a standard “ditto master” that reproduced lines in purple, but only around 100 from the masters that repro’d black lines. Jerry chose to trace my “BLA” pages onto black masters for visual clarity… which, sadly, meant the final 50 copies of his initial purple-master run had to be mailed out minus the “BLA” segment.
At Jerry’s suggestion, I also wrote (and provided an illustration for) my “Reincarnation of The Spectre” prose synopsis. While my concept, I believe, compared not wholly unfavorably with the other origins for Julie’s hero revivals, it was definitely conceived at a juvenile level; but then, so were all of Julie’s comics, by design… and I had no burning mission to elevate their sophistication at that point.
Jerry surprised me by asking me, very late in the day, to also provide a Bestest League drawing he could turn into the issue’s cover. So I hurriedly knocked out a parody of the cover of The Brave and the Bold #29, on which the JLA had battled a giant robot. He traced my crude artwork onto a purple master this time, making a few changes (as he had to the “BLA” chapter inside)—then added color to the cover by also employing red, blue, green, and even yellow “ditto masters” to it.
One nice and, as it turned out, iconic touch on that cover was Jerry’s original rendering of the Alter-Ego logo he’d conceived. It was based on Green Lantern’s mask, with the word “Alter-Ego” in all-caps directly above it. Over the following six-plus decades, the magazine’s logo has undergone only two re-dos: one by second A/E editor/publisher Ronn Foss in 1963, and a third and final one circa 1969 by pro Marvel letterer Sam Rosen—but it would remain recognizable from 1961 to the present, a tribute to Jerry’s original vision.
The final ingredients of the first issue’s 22 pages were:
Cover (by RT, traced & edited by JGB) – 1 page
Contents page (by JGB) – 1 page
“It’s a Matter of Policy” – JGB’s editorial statement & welcome – 1 page
“On the Drawing Board” – advance news received from Julius Schwartz, augmented by a couple of secret code messages from JGB – 3 pages
Secret Origins – a full-page tracing by JGB of a Photostat of the cover of National’s upcoming Secret Origins special, which would reprint key backstories of various DC heroes – 1 page
“The Wiles of the Wizard” – JGB’s look at that villain’s three appearances in 1940s All-Star Comics, plus a JGB illo based on an Irwin Hasen drawing – 2 pages
“The Reincarnation of The Spectre” – RT’s origin synopsis & illustration – 3 pages
“‘Merciful Minerva’ – The Story of Wonder Woman” – JGB’s capsule history of the Amazon – 4 pages (the last half-page was made up of ads offering to sell or trade comicbooks, from JGB and “Bobby Lindsay,” a pseudonym he occasionally used on fan letters)
“Bestest League of America” (Part 1) – comicbook-style parody by RT – 5 pages
Return mailing address and mention of the fanzine’s 3rd-class mail status – 1 page
Alter-Ego #1 reads today—and did back then, truth be told—as a relatively juvenile (or at least sophomoric) exercise, both in concept and execution. Nor did Jerry really intend it to be any more than that. Interestingly, it would’ve hit a rather more mature watermark from the outset if a pair of pieces originally planned for inclusion had materialized. But Jerry decided against writing an article on the Comics Code (which he had already contentiously titled “A Code That Needs Breaking”), because, upon reflection, he feared alienating National and other companies who were members of the CMAA if he criticized the regulations they had set in place in 1954 to protect themselves from government censorship. Also, in New York in February, Jerry had met Bill Finger, the original scripter of both Batman and the first Green Lantern, who had promised to send him an autobiographical/career article. However, Finger had a reputation among pros as being undependable as regarded deadlines, and the bio never materialized. (If it had, since it would most likely have strongly resembled the long letter titled “A Finger in Every Plot” that the writer would send to Batmania fanzine publisher Biljo White a few years later, and to which official “Batman” creator Bob Kane took violent verbal exception—well, A/E #1 would indeed have made considerable and controversial waves in the comics industry from the very beginning—for better, and perhaps for ill!)
Even so, the fanzine was off to a promising start; and it showed the 150 oft-unsuspecting souls who received it (or the second printing of 100 or so that Jerry soon churned out) that they were not alone, that there were others like them… like us. Hitting the mails in the last few days of March 1961, it was not the first comicbook-oriented fanzine—there’d been a few related to EC Comics back in the 1950s—but it was the first dedicated to super-hero and adventure comics (new or old) ever to be distributed via the U.S. mails.
18.
All the same, it had an instant and worthy rival, of sorts, for preeminence.
Another pair of science-fiction fans who also fondly remembered comicbooks and their ilk (such folks then dubbed themselves “double-fans”) were Don Thompson and Maggie Curtis of Cleveland, Ohio, who would be married in mid-1962. Don was a newspaper reporter, Maggie the talented daughter of a professional SF writer. Attending the Labor Day 1960 Pittcon, they had met the Lupoffs, acquired a copy of Xero #1, and quickly decided to publish their own fanzine. In January ’61, in a newsletter titled Harbinger #1, they had announced that they were going to put together a fanzine devoted to comics (rather than SF). Don and Maggie’s Comic Art #1—produced on a mimeograph at Oberlin College, which Maggie was attending—wound up going out in the U.S. mails in early April ’61, only days after Alter Ego #1.
Among its many other pluses, it was quite likely in Comic Art #1 that the term “Golden Age of Comic Books” was first used—fittingly, in an article titled “Rebirth” by Xero co-editor Richard Lupoff. Although the term “Golden Age of Comics” had been utilized earlier, it had always previously referred to the alleged creative apex of comic strips in the 1930s and ’40s.
Influenced strongly by Xero and the milieu of science- fiction fandom, Comic Art was more sophisticated than A/E and, in addition, dealt both with any and all comicbooks (not just hero/adventure)—and with newspaper comic strips. Like Xero, it was produced via mimeograph, which allowed for a larger print run than did a hectograph; but, like the Lupoffs, the Thompsons preferred to keep their circulation fairly low, since they lost money on every issue they mailed out. Well, actually, so did Jerry; but he didn’t mind, as long as A/E seemed to be stimulating interest in super-hero comics and, not so incidentally, also generating sales and trades for his own ever-growing comics collection.
Between them, Xero, Alter-Ego, and Comic Art constituted the initial trinity of fanzines out of which “organized” comics fandom swiftly began to grow. But, because of Jerry Bails’ particular fervor and vision—and sheer energy—it was Alter-Ego that had the most enduring influence.
19.
By this time, I myself was whole-hog into buying old comicbooks, whenever I could scrape up the money to do so. Luckily, most of them then sold for not more than a few bucks. In addition, some of us loaned comics to each other through the mail. Of course, my paramount interest from Day One was All-Star Comics and the bare handful of 1940s comics series that had emulated the super-hero group format of its “Justice Society” stories. Oddly, although All-Star had been a popular DC title, not many other companies had followed suit with team comics of their own. Blackhawk was about an international gaggle of aviators; and The Marvel Family, which was really just one character split into three or more incarnations, hadn’t even existed as a title till 1945, probably because of paper quotas set by the government during World War II. The once and future Marvel Comics Group, despite its groundbreaking early Torch-vs.-Namor battles, hadn’t put its “Big Three” (which included the even more popular Captain America) together in real adventures until 1946; and in ’61 Jerry and I thought for a time that its All Winner Squad had only appeared once, in All Winners Comics #21. Oh, I had heard vaguely of that company’s Young Allies, starring hero sidekicks Bucky and Toro and several non-costumed kids, but that was of considerably less interest to me. It was courtesy of Lupoff that I would first see the story in Prize Comics #24 (1942) in which artist/writer Dick Briefer’s version of the Frankenstein Monster battled for eight whole pages with the mag’s other heroes: Yank and Doodle, The Black Owl, Dr. Frost, Green Lama, and a pair of comedy-relief soldiers. But there had been no follow-up to that contest.
So, of course, I was thrilled when I finally began to gain access to early-1940s issues of Leading Comics that had featured DC’s second super-team, about which I had first learned years earlier via that house ad in Superman #19. I discovered that assemblage had officially been named “The Seven Soldiers of Victory.” I quickly acquired a copy of Leading #10, the best of its 14 hero issues. But, as I complained to Jerry in mid-April: “Shining Knight’s the only real super-hero in the bunch, which is one reason [Leading] might not have had the popularity of the JSA. They should have added characters like Robotman, Johnny Quick, and Aquaman to spice it up.” (This is the earliest foreshadowing of my later concocting for DC what became my favorite series of all time to write: 1981’s All-Star Squadron. Did that concept really take only twenty years to come to fruition? Seems like it was forever!)
The group idea really did obsess me in those days. In that same 1-10-61 letter to Jerry, I mentioned an idea I’d sent to Julie Schwartz: an “emergency Justice League” composed of “the best [National] heroes of different places and ages, brought together by Rip Hunter’s time-sphere. Roll call was Hunter, Adam Strange, Snapper Carr, Super- Chief, Tomahawk, Tommy Tomorrow, Johnny Thunder, and Space Ranger.” (I would finally pull something like that off in a late issue of All-Star Squadron—and younger writer Gerry Conway would do something similar a bit earlier in Justice League of America. Then, in the early  1980s, Gerry and I would actually sell that basic concept  to a major movie studio—a sort of time-travel version of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven—only to have a studio exec insist, “You have to ditch the idea of time travel.  The American public will never grasp the concept of  time travel well enough for it to sell a movie.” Wrong  again, Tinseltown!)
20.
While all this was happening, I was also involved in a sideshow that was going on—though, to some of us older fans, it often seemed a center-ring event. Beginning with The Brave and the Bold #34 (on sale in ’60), Julie had launched a fourth revival—pre-“Atom”: a trio of issues starring a new version of Hawkman, the most prominent of DC’s 1940s super-heroes who’d never starred in his own solo title (reportedly due to wartime paper quotas). Hawkman, often with his partner Hawkgirl, had alternated with the Fastest Man Alive on the covers of Flash Comics and had been by far the longest-running chairman of the Justice Society. From 1945 through the solo feature’s demise in  ’49, the series’ most frequent artist had been Joe Kubert. Julie had re-assembled the Fox/Kubert team to produce  the new Winged Wonders, who were reimagined as law officers from the distant planet Thanagar; in the 1940s  they had been reincarnations of ancient Egyptians. The look of this Hawkman and Hawkgirl was far closer to their 1940s renditions than were the re-designs of Flash and Green Lantern.
Jerry and I (and a number of other twenty-something-or-older fans with similar tastes) believed Hawkman would swiftly follow Flash, GL, and the JLA into a book of his own—one shared with Hawkgirl, who in the ’60s was the hero’s wife rather than merely his ladyfriend. I was thrilled when Julie sent me the original art to one of the stories in B&B #35 and for the cover of #36, a classic Kubert illustration that depicted Hawkman battling “The Shadow Thief of Midway City.” (The latter would become one of the images utilized when the U.S. Postal Service issued a series of DC stamps a couple of decades back.)
But, to our surprise and horror, “Hawkman” became the first of the four Schwartz revival concepts to date that did not graduate to its own magazine immediately following its trial run. It would take a second three-issue Brave and Bold run, in 1962, to earn Hawkman his “wings,” so to speak. In the early ’60s, the future status of Hawkman became a cause célèbre, almost a casus belli, in comics fandom. From first to last, Jerry and I were in perfect concord in rallying letters and support for the Feathered Furies’ cause—except that he preferred the hero’s beaked mask the way it was drawn in B&B #34–36, while I was equally convinced the world would be a better place if the large flaring wings that had once jutted from Hawkman’s mask, directly above his ears, were restored. I won that fight, with the second “Hawkman” try-out series. Kubert, however, bowed out as artist after those six mags, his place taken by veteran science-fiction artist Murphy Anderson.
Despite our teaming up to promote super-heroes in general and comics in particular, Jerry and I rarely discussed much personal stuff in our numerous letters. One of the few times we really disagreed was when he suddenly wrote to me, pretty much out of the blue, that if the U.S. and the USSR got into a war and the Soviet Union dropped hydrogen bombs on America, we shouldn’t respond in kind, because to do so might doom the planet. My own view was and is that to have that attitude would make such a strike all but certain… and that if we got bombed, all bets should be off. Later, Jerry didn’t seem to recall he had ever written that opinion, so maybe it was just a passing fancy. And, far as I can recall, we never discussed international politics (or any kind of politics) again. One of the things Jerry was proudest of in his life was having helped to racially integrate the swimming pools of Kansas City back in the ’50s… and we were of one mind on the value of things like that.
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, my young buddy Gary Friedrich was continuing (unencouraged by me) my old sport of baiting JHS teacher Sarah Jenkins. At one point he brazenly hauled the newest issue of Justice League into her English class and sat there boldly reading it. When she called him out, he threw her off balance by asking if Roy Thomas (he may have added the “Junior”) had been in her classes a few years earlier. She responded, as Gary relayed it to me, “Yes, he was one of my best students.” At which point Gary show-and-told her that a letter of mine was printed in the very comicbook he was reading, so it couldn’t be too bad. I forget exactly how that altercation wound up, but I suspect Gary was happier about it than she was. (At some point, Gary also wrote a defense of comicbooks for the school newspaper; he told me Miss Jenkins tried unsuccessfully to have him booted out of school over that!)
21.
Amid all this tsuris, my grades had come in for the fall 1960 and spring 1961 semesters… and their B+ average, compared to the almost unbroken A’s of earlier days, filled me with a certain amount of chagrin.
Not nearly enough chagrin, mind you, to make me actually spend more time poring over textbooks and less time perusing comicbooks and writing and drawing for fanzines.
It was almost as if I knew in 1960-61 which of those two things—academic achievement or comics-related activity— would be in my best interest over the long haul. But I didn’t, of course. I was simply obeying the dictum that  mythologist Joseph Campbell, unknownst to me, had already put into a succinct credo: “Follow your bliss.”
One of the main focuses of my attention during the early summer of ’61, amid my final semester as an undergraduate, occurred with the publication of The Flash #123—
—and the birth of Earth-Two.
Jerry and I, and surely our fellow oldsters among super-hero readers, had once abandoned all hope of ever seeing the 1940s super-heroes again in their original form—and frankly, we were mostly okay with that. One day soon, the new Hawkman would inevitably join a JLA that already contained Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman and would soon add a newly conceived Atom, and we figured we’d be about as close to a 1960s version of the Justice Society of America as we were ever gonna get.
Then, early in the year, Julie sent Jerry word that The Flash #123, on sale in June, would see the return of Jay Garrick, the original Mercury-helmeted Flash—treated as an inhabitant of a parallel Earth, christened “Earth-Two” by Julie and writer Gardner Fox. There, the JSAers were a couple of decades older than their current (henceforth “Earth-One”) counterparts and had hung up their capes ten years ago.
While, on one level, “Flash of Two Worlds” was written for the ten-year-olds whom National (and Julie) rightly considered the then-mainstay of the comics industry, there was another, quite different level to that story as well. Without being so cutesy or obscure as to confuse the kiddies, the script and art contained plenty of touches—today’s movie audience would call them “Easter Eggs”—clearly designed to be recognized and appreciated by the relative handful of us older readers. The Barry Allen Flash crosses a dimensional barrier and finds himself not in his familiar Central City, but in Keystone City—officially the original Flash’s home city (though I don’t personally recall ever reading that name in any 1940s story). He soon locates Jay Garrick, now middle-aged but still physically fit and long married to his former girlfriend Joan Williams, and astonishes them by relating a flashback of Garrick’s “hard water” origin in Flash Comics #1. Allen explains to his amazed elder:
You were once well-known on my world—as a fictional character appearing in a magazine called Flash Comics! When I was a youngster, you were my favorite hero! A writer named Gardner Fox wrote about your adventures—which he claimed came to him in dreams!
Obviously, when Fox was asleep, his mind was “tuned in” on your vibratory Earth! That explains how he “dreamed up” The Flash! The magazine was discontinued in 1949.
Garrick, startled, says that’s the very year he retired! (Clearly, Schwartz and Fox figured it would be a four-color bridge too far at that point to mention that the JSA—and Flash as a member of it—had actually stuck around till the end of ’50.) Jay explains to Barry that he’s been forced to make a costumed comeback because three of his 1940s foes have returned and begun a crime spree. Naturally, the two Crimson Comets swiftly (how else?) corral the super- criminals. After vibrating back to what is now and forever “Earth-One,” Allen/Flash muses that he plans to “look up Gardner Fox who wrote the original Flash stories and tell [this adventure] to him! He could write the whole thing up—in a comic book!”
22.
In the meantime, knowing I couldn’t hurry a second two-Flashes story along simply by wishing it, I just sighed and went back to work on Alter-Ego #2, which Jerry wanted in the mails by early summer, on what amounted to a casually quarterly schedule. He got an “official” okay from Julie for me to write a second tale of the revived Spectre. My Spec/Count Dis re-match climaxed with a giant serpent coiled around the Empire State Building, as if it were searching for King Kong. Jerry had me draw that scene as the issue’s cover. I utilized a Wayne Boring Superman figure as a template for my amateurish version of Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily’s astral avenger. JGB traced and colored that image using purple, green, and blue masters.
I also turned out a second, six-page installment of “Bestest League,” this one detailing a trio of two-hero team-ups as the middle of my three-part parody. I even tossed in a cameo of “Aukman.” Anything to help the cause!
At Jerry’s behest, I likewise wrote an overview of a coverless comic I’d recently purchased by mail: Timely/Marvel’s All Winners Comics #21 (Winter 1946-47), which, at the time, we believed might be the only comicbook starring a true Justice Society-style super-hero group ever published by that company; we didn’t yet know there’d been a similar story earlier, in #19. The JSA-format adventure of the All Winners Squad starred Captain America and Bucky, Human Torch and Toro, Sub-Mariner, Miss America (a sort of female Cap), and The Whizzer (a subsonic Flash type). Sadly, my copy of #21 was missing the final page of the Namor chapter, leading me to end the piece with a temporarily unanswerable question: “I wonder how the hell Sub-Mariner stopped that tital wave….?” (I had actually written “tidal,” but Jerry twice mistyped that word as  “tital.” Well, nobody’s perfect, not even an associate  professor of natural science.)
Alter-Ego #2 contained 38 pages, up considerably from the page count of #1, with your humble servant contributing fifteen of those, plus a few “Where Are They Now?” gags scattered throughout. The indicia again listed Jerry and me as “editors.” By now, he was beginning to receive prospective contributions from other fans as well. He also inaugurated a letters section containing comments from, among others, several readers of A/E #1 who would become well-known in comics fandom over the next few years: Don Thompson (a plug for his and Maggie’s fanzine Comic Art, probably written at Jerry’s suggestion); Ted White (author of the “All in Color for a Dime” segment in Xero #2 and soon to be a professional SF writer and editor)—and Steve Gerber, a high school student from University City, Missouri (who a decade-plus later would be celebrated as the major creator of Marvel’s “Howard the Duck”). In his letter, Steve praised The Spectre and Count Dis; indeed, when writing for DC in the 1980s, he would ask for and receive my blessing to use the latter in a Spectre comic he was going to scribe… although soon afterward he quarreled with DC and left the series, never writing that story.
A/E #2 likewise contained code messages, a Julius Schwartz-related crossword puzzle, an increased number of sale-and-trade ads from an expanding group of readers and back-issue dealers, plus the usual advance news. The latter was still mostly from Julie, but this time we also learned Archie would be launching a new super-hero comic titled The Jaguar and adding a Fly Girl to The Fly. Jerry also presented a two-page index (with publication dates, etc.) of every 1940s comic in which JSA members had appeared; this was perhaps the first public blossoming of his interest in data collection, which would soon become his chief preoccupation in the comics arena. Bowing to the perhaps- inevitable, he also announced that issues of A/E were now available for 30¢ apiece “in coin or stamps,” although he would still trade for another fanzine or for an article or  ad that he accepted for publication.   Comics fandom  was branching out, just like the comicbook companies themselves.
And, in my own way, so was I.
23.
For one thing, I applied for a full-time job for the first time in my life.
Cape State, one of whose main missions was to turn out teachers, sponsored a job-interview day on campus. My JHS classmate John Schuch’s very tall older brother Tony, whom I knew mostly from summer softball a few years earlier, was a high school art instructor in Sullivan, Missouri, a small town west of St. Louis. At his suggestion I interviewed sometime in spring of ’61 for a position there teaching English come September, rather than anything related to my history/social science majors. I’d heard many high schools were eager to hire male English teachers because they felt there was then a preponderance of female ones… and maybe I heard right, ’cause I got the job. The starting salary was a towering $4000 a year (that’s about $40,000 in 2026 dollars).
I was neither elated nor remorseful. After all, I had accepted a scholarship aimed at producing high school teachers… I’d studied to be one… so now I was actually going to become one. Hardly my dream job, but I knew I’d much prefer being a teacher to, say, working in retail sales (let alone digging ditches).
I’d get by, I told myself. After all, I’d be only a couple of hours away from Jackson and could drive home nearly every weekend. Living in Sullivan wouldn’t stop me from indulging myself in my fantasy life, both as a comics reader and as a contributor to Alter-Ego and perhaps to the other fanzines that were beginning to sprout like mushrooms.
24.
In addition, while graduation loomed at the end of July, something a bit more pleasant than a teaching job reared its head.
In May of ’61 (a date I’m sure of only because I mentioned it at once in a letter to Jerry Bails), my buddy Gary Friedrich decided to launch an actual rock’n’roll band… only this one would be aimed at making money, not playing high school and Rotary Club gatherings. Gary, as leader and drummer, had already lined up two young men from the Cape area to play lead and rhythm guitar by the time he invited me to be the group’s singer. He had even named the band already: the Gaberlunzies, after our old riding-around gang. I told him I was definitely on board, as long as our gigs were all on weekends, since, as he knew, I’d be in Sullivan five days a week. He seemed to think it would all work out.
Soon, I met the other two band members. Frank Tripp, a student at Cape State though maybe not from Cape County, was a quiet, amiable guy. The lead guitar, though, was a bit of a shock. Gary had recently met Charles “Rocky” Bierschwal, who was roughly Gary’s age (17 or so), just after he’d been released following a stint in reform school… for what, I’ll admit I never got around to asking. Rocky had gone to grade school, maybe some high school, in Cape Girardeau; years later, I’d learn from one of his then- classmates that in the eighth grade he’d been known to bring brass knuckles to homeroom. Gary and I figured (hoped) that he’d mellowed since getting out of reform school. He looked and wore his hair a lot like a younger Elvis Presley, but had far more of a j.d. vibe. Although he didn’t have a weightlifter build, he was strong as hell. On one occasion he picked up a carrying-case containing two or three of Gary’s drums and held them over his head with one hand. It would’ve taken both Gary and me just to lift that case. Rock played a good lead guitar, and naturally the girls loved him. If he had wanted to be the band’s singer, they sure as hell wouldn’t have needed me!
It was that summer, while I was still slouching toward graduation, that we started playing our first—and really, only—regular gig: Saturday nights (not Fridays, as I wrote somewhere) at the Jackson roller-skating rink, the Roll-O-Fun, where we took over after the skating had ended for the evening. We generally played from 9:00 to 11:30. The proprietors, Woody and Jean Seabaugh, were nice people, and though the money was never much, it wasn’t because they had heavy hands on the till. If we Gaberlunzies made $10-$15 apiece a night, we were ecstatic—but then, those sums would have to be magnified ten times to approximate today’s equivalencies.
25.
We were just getting started in this new rock’n’roll phase when, at the end of July, my college days concluded with a whimper, not a bang. I graduated from SEMO—magna cum laude, at least. It could’ve been worse, given my shift in interests.
Meanwhile, following graduation, I’d have the entire month of August to combine leisure activities and preparing for what I fatalistically presumed would be my life’s work.
Actually, though I didn’t have so much as an inkling of it at that time, preparing for  “my life’s work” had already begun on a front quite different from teaching or singing… and that preparation was subtly nudged along only days after graduation, roughly a week into August 1961, when I walked into Metro News on Broadway, a Cape establishment where I’d often pick up the week’s comics in between college classes.
Metro News stocked mostly newspapers and magazines. It was my kind of store, where the published words and pictures were the main event, not just something relegated to a few shelves off to one side. Even so, as usual, I made straight for the comics shelves.
There may well have been a Julie Schwartz title or two on sale that day… maybe a new issue of The Fly was buzzing about… or even The Jaguar. I don’t remember. All I recall is the sight of a comicbook whose cover didn’t contain an identifying company symbol like the National/DC circle or the Archie Adventure box, although I knew it was from the line that had at various times in the past been called Timely, Marvel, or Atlas.
The periodical’s upper-and-lower-case, red-lettered title logo read: The Fantastic Four.
I recognized the style, even the artist, more or less, of the cover art. It was the Simon-and/or-Kirby artist(s), though doing considerably less polished work than in Challengers of the Unknown or The Fly, let alone in Captain 3-D or Fighting American. At first glance, this new comic seemed to be just one more in a long line that the vestigial rump of that comics company had been churning out for the past few years. Its mags’ covers invariably featured some Kong- or even Godzilla-size monster stomping through a city (occasionally a swamp), with people running around terrified shouting about how nothing could stop that creature! Nothing! The monstrosities themselves either had meaningless names like Zzak or Groot or Googam, Son of Goom, or else generic monikers like Hulk or Thing or Magneto.
Once in a while, I’d page through one of those giant- monster comics. The lead stories always fit a quickly boring pattern: Either an alien monster came to Earth, or else a scientist had created it in a lab. Either way, said scientist (less often a mere “civilian”) spent the next bunch of pages seeking a way to destroy the creature while it ravaged the countryside (or, more usually, the cityside)—and in the end he (never “she”) was always successful. As a curiosity, some of the shorter backup tales in those comics were clearly drawn by the same “Ditko” who’d done “Captain Atom” for Charlton.
I never bought any of those ex-Marvel/Atlas giant- monster comics. Not one.
But this Fantastic Four mag looked… different, somehow, from the usual monster fare. For one thing, it bore the name (admittedly, the rather corny, circus-sounding name)  of a group of people rather than simply proclaiming the stories inside were “amazing” or full of “suspense” or “mystery” or would “astonish” you. Although that word “Fantastic” up there amounted to pretty much the same thing, didn’t it?
The second aspect that grabbed me was the art. Yes, there was this Kong-size monster ripping its way up through a metropolitan street while onlookers, including a policeman, gasped—but this particular giant menace was not unchallenged. A flaming manlike figure was flying around it, clearly concerned about a woman in its grasp. The female seemed to be turning invisible, or at least transparent. In the lower right, a man with white temples was bending his arms like a human pretzel to free himself from restraining ropes so he could join the fray.
But the really intriguing element was the final figure on the cover. He—it?—was somewhat humanoid, but lumpy, as if composed of a pile of orange mud and sand. He/it was scrunching the front end of an automobile out of his way with his big left hand, to clear his path to the Kongster.
What’s more, there was plenty of cover copy besides the title. Each of the four smaller “hero” figures had his/her own dialogue balloon. In addition, there was a box at the middle right that identified the “Fantastic Four”:
FEATURING:
“THE THING!”
“MR. FANTASTIC!”
“HUMAN TORCH!”
“INVISIBLE GIRL!”
TOGETHER
FOR THE FIRST TIME
IN ONE MIGHTY
MAGAZINE!
Naturally, my eyes focused at once on the words “Human Torch”; obviously, that had to be the vaguely manlike mass of flying flames, although he didn’t look anything like as heroic (or even as human) as the character I’d known in the’40s and mid-’50s. The rubbery-armed man—well, he’d reminded me of Plastic Man (even of the new Flash supporting character Elongated Man) right off the bat. The half-visible girl, clearly, wasn’t going to escape her endangered state by becoming unseeable; Kid Kong could still squash the invisible life’s-blood out of her. The one who must be The Thing was clearly supposed to be a good guy, too, which at least was a first for comics of the day.
So what the hell—I skimmed through the comic, just to make sure the contents at least vaguely fulfilled the promise of the cover. They did, so I bought a copy. In fact, I bought two copies, unlike my usual practice. Since Jerry Bails hadn’t written me that such a magazine was coming out, it crossed my mind that he might miss it up in Detroit, and if he did, I could send him my spare.
When I read the comic, almost at once, I discovered it was, in many ways—a mess. Inconsistent clothing from page to page, with the so-called Thing doffing and abandoning a big overcoat that he wore to obscure his ugliness, only to don another one a few pages later; God know where he got it. The Human Torch didn’t look any more appetizing in the interior than on the cover, and he turned out to be just a teenage hot-rod enthusiast, to boot. The group’s origin, crammed into five pages in mid-issue, was yet another version of the accident-in-space shtick I’d seen with Captain Atom—and in some ways in the origin of the new Green Lantern—or even in DC’s first “Challengers of the Unknown” story, if a crashing airplane could stand in for a rocket. Although this quartet wore space suits when they were zapped in the stratosphere by cosmic rays, they donned unappealing work-clothes when they plunged beneath the Earth to confront the issue’s villain, a grotesque little guy called the Moleman. (Moley was kind of interesting, though, if only because he was a bit more sympathetic than the usual National/DC bad-guy; normal men and women had scorned him for his short stature and unprepossessing looks, leading him to seek shelter with the equally unappetizing denizens of the underworld, whom he had soon organized into an army of gargoyles.)
For all its flaws, the story gripped me at least as much as the crude but exciting artwork. The Fantastic Four seemed more like real people than did, say, the members of the Justice League—less interchangeable, more individualistic, down to their speech patterns. They even called each other by their real names more often than they used the “code names” like Mr. Fantastic, et al. Susan (“Invisible Girl”) and Johnny (“Human Torch”) Storm were even siblings. And, in some weird way, The Thing (pilot Ben Grimm) seemed the most realistic, the most human of them all, even though his own vocabulary evolved erratically over the course of that first issue, from stylistically formal and bombastic early on (“Bah! Everywhere it is the same! I live in a world too small for me!”) to slangy braggadocio when he later bests a sizable subterranean critter (“What did you expect? I’m The Thing, ain’t I?”). Nor was the foursome all buddy-buddy like the JLA; The Thing held the scientist Mr. Fantastic responsible for causing his monstrous mutation and at one point tried to strangle him.
That afternoon, I dropped by the car dealership then operated by Gary Friedrich’s father. Gary was watching the lot for him, business was slow, and he got a kick out of reading my spare copy. He agreed that this was something a bit different from the DC mags.
26.
For my own part, I got inspired, after a fashion. Within the next 24 hours, I typed out a two-page “review” of Fantastic Four #1, which I hoped might fit into the third issue of Alter-Ego, for which Jerry and I were then prepping material. Titled “Four of a Kind,” it postulated that this new comics title might soon be “well worth any super-hero fan’s dime.” I had eventually noticed the splash-page credits for “Stan Lee & Jack Kirby,” so at least that solved the problem of whether Joe Simon was involved in this one. He wasn’t. The name of the (I assumed) writer, Stan Lee, I recalled first seeing in the 1950s comicbook version of the radio comedy show My Friend Irma, but since Lee’s name had been the only one gracing those yarns, I hadn’t known then if he had scripted those stories, or drawn them, or both. When, a bit later, he and artist Joe Maneely had shared credits in the first issue of the Arthurian-era adventure comic Black Knight, I had figured Lee must be the guy who wrote the scripts.
I particularly lauded The Thing as the standout among the comic’s cast, hailing him as the modern successor to The Heap in the old Airboy Comics.
But I found faults in the issue, as well: The Invisible Girl’s powers, “unsupplemented by the ability to walk through walls, etc.,” made her a weak fourth spoke in the wheel; even Mr. Fantastic’s (excuse me, Reed Richards’) stretching abilities were minimal compared to those of Plastic Man; and “worst of all, the drawing of this third version of the HUMAN TORCH is almost pathetic in many panels, crying for a return to something like the old [Carl] Burgos version.” I also suggested, on a whim, that the group add a fifth member, “such as the Sub-Mariner or someone like the old Purple Claw.” (Re that final character reference: just forget I said anything, okay?)
Anyway, I mailed the article off to Jerry.
I needn’t have worried, of course, that my Detroit correspondent had missed a new super-hero comic, so I hung onto my spare copy. (But not for long. When the back-issue value of FF #1 swiftly went up to a full 50¢, I sold my extra for a 500% profit. Pretty smart move, huh?) Enthusiastic about FF #1 himself, Jerry wanted to publish my “review,” but felt that by the time A/E #3 was printed, it would be old news. So he plopped my little essay into a brand new hectographed fanzine of his that I hadn’t even known was in the works: The Comicollector. Its first issue contained my piece on the new comic… and was in the mails during that same month of August, only two or three weeks after Fantastic Four #1 itself had gone on sale.
Jerry’s second regular publication was fandom’s first so-called “adzine,” designed both to avoid having to squeeze too many ads into Alter-Ego, and so that paid ads wouldn’t sit around growing out-dated between A/E issues. Jerry included just enough non-ad content to keep the ads from bumping into each other. The new publication proved so popular that, by its second issue, he would make it a bimonthly. Hopefully, the adzine would also provide a burbling revenue stream to help him grow his own comics collection.
I myself never had any connection with The Comicollector, other than contributing (unintentionally) that single review and, later, a few gag cartoons. I would content myself with writing or drawing for Alter-Ego, maybe for one or two other fanzines. Jerry was the guy who liked to edit and publish stuff, not me. I couldn’t see myself ever wanting to get bogged down with purple fingers from messy hectographs, retyping other people’s material, keeping track of umpty-leven mailing addresses, mailing out hundreds of fanzines, etc., etc., etc.
Besides, whatever joy I might be gleaning from being an eyewitness to the expanding super-hero comics revival at National, Archie, and now the former-Marvel/former- Atlas company-without-a-name…
…the time had come for me to, as they say, enter the Real World.
I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to it.

Higher Learning
In 1958, the Academic Hall at Southeast Missouri State College in Cape Girardeau, MO, contained administration, lecture halls, and classrooms. Today it’s given over entirely to the former.

John C. Bierck & Friend
Roy’s advanced-English instructor at SEMO made a big impact on the freshman, particularly his teaching of Moby-Dick. Decades later, Roy adapted Melville’s classic for the Marvel Illustrated series. Art by Pascal Alixe. Photo of JCB at SEMO taken by and courtesy of Ken Steinhoff. [TM & © Marvel Chars., Inc.]

The Sick Humor  Of Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce’s classic first album made a great impression on Roy—and on the world of comedy. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Lung & Short Of It
One of several Golden Age “Aquaman” stories that featured a lungfish—and later gave Roy a general-science quiz answer. From “The Sea Circus,” written by Joe Samachson & drawn by John Daly, in Adventure Comics #128 (May 1948). Courtesy of John Schwirian. [TM & © DC Comics.]

No Flash In The Pan
The cover of The Flash #105 (Feb.-March 1959), after four Showcase issues. Pencils by Carmine Infantino; inks by Joe Giella. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Simon & Kirby Strike Again (Sort Of)!
In 1959, the Archie Comic Group debuted two super-hero mags from the quasi-reunited team of (editor) Joe Simon and (artist) Jack Kirby: The Double Life of Private Strong #1 (June) and Adventures of The Fly #1 (August). Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Archie Comics Group.]

“Green Lantern’s Light”
Gil Kane’s cover for Showcase #22 (Sept.-Oct. 1959) introduced the Silver Age Green Lantern. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Together Again For The First Time!
This house ad for the imminent debut of “Justice League of America” in The Brave and the Bold #28 (Feb.-March 1960) was the fulfillment of the dreams of fans like Roy T. But, in far more important ways, it was only the beginning! Pencils by Mike Sekowsky; inks by Murphy Anderson. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Captain… O My Captain!
Charlton’s Space Adventures #33 (March 1960) introduced “Captain Atom,” written by Joe Gill & drawn by Steve Ditko, although neither was credited therein. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Julius Schwartz
The most forward-thinking National/DC editor of the late ’50s and early ’60s was also, ironically, its most backward-looking one, reincarnating Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Atom, and other heroes of comics’ Golden Age into new four-color careers whose life span often greatly exceeded that of the originals. Circa 1960s photo courtesy of Julie.

Gardner F. Fox
Writer/co-creator of the Golden Age Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and JSA—and of the Silver Age Hawkman, Atom, & JLA—and the gent who, by mail, introduced Roy to Dr. Jerry G. Bails. Courtesy of Comic Vine website.

Maybe There Were Four Dimwits
Roy’s suggestion to revive the Three Dimwits from the Golden Age “Flash” feature didn’t meet with favor from most readers of The Flash #117 (Dec. 1960)… but Julie didn’t hold it against him. Script by Gardner Fox, pencils by Carmine Infantino, inks by Joe Giella. Courtesy of William Colisimo. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Dr. Jerry G. Bails
as a newly minted Ph.D. in Natural Science in Kansas City, Missouri; 1960 photo courtesy of Jean Bails. The near-future “father of comics fandom.”

A Pair Of Mighty Mites
(Left:) By All-Star Comics #56 (Dec. 1950–Jan. 1951), the re-costumed Golden Age Atom had gained “atomic strength.” Script by John Broome; pencils by Arthur Peddy; inks by Bernard Sachs. [TM & © DC Comics.]
(Above:) Jerry suggested to Gardner Fox and Julie Schwartz that they “revive” The Atom in the image of a diminutive Quality Comics hero of 1939-53. Seen is Reed Crandall’s cover for Doll Man #40 (June ’52). Courtesy of the GCD. [Doll Man & Doll Girl TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Bestest Band  What Am…”
Roy’s initial concept illo for the Bestest League of America, December 1960. [© Roy Thomas.]

Big Things Come In Small Packages
The Silver Age Atom took his first bow in Showcase #34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961). Cover and interior art penciled by Gil Kane and inked by Murphy Anderson, under editor Julius Schwartz. [TM & © DC Comics.]

3… 2… 1… Xero!
Dick & Pat Lupoff as Captain and Mary Marvel at the 1960 science-fiction world convention in Pittsburgh—plus the interior “And All in Color for a Dime” cover, spotlighting “The Big Red Cheese,” from the first issue of their mimeographed SF & comics fanzine Xero, which was distributed at that con. C.C. Beck-derived art by the anonymous “A. Thief.” [Shazam hero TM & © DC Comics.]

The Altered Ego
For the cover of Alter-Ego #1 (Spring 1961), Jerry Bails traced Roy’s parody of the cover of The Brave and the Bold #29 (April-May ’60) onto a spirit-duplicator master sheet, then painstakingly colored it using additional masters… after making a few  art alterations. Printed copies were mailed out at the end of March 1961.[© Roy Thomas.]

Comic Art #1
(Left:) Don Thompson and Maggie Curtis in spring of 1962, shortly before their marriage—and the launching of Comic Art. Photo courtesy of Maggie Thompson.
(Right:) Maggie’s cover for the first issue of her and Don’s comicbook & comic strip fanzine, which debuted in April 1961. [©Maggie Thompson.]

The Winged Wonder Returns
Preceding the new Atom’s advent by months was the revival of Hawkman in The Brave and the Bold #34 (Feb.-March 1961), with art by Joe Kubert and scripts by Gardner Fox… under Julie Schwartz, of course. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

“Flash Of Two Worlds”
The birth of Earth-Two—and of parallel worlds in Silver Age comicbooks—came in The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961), behind a cover by Carmine Infantino & Murphy Anderson. The plotting powerhouses behind the concept were writer Gardner Fox and editor Julius Schwartz. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

A Spectre Is Haunting Fandom
Roy Thomas provided the cover of Alter-Ego #2 (Summer 1961), drawing the resurrected Spectre and his new nemesis, Count Dis. Once again, Jerry Bails traced the cover onto the ditto master. [Spectre TM & © DC Comics; other art © Roy Thomas.]

Meet The Gaberlunzies
The four-member rock’n’roll group, formed in Cape Girardeau County in spring of 1961, consisted of (left to right) Gary Friedrich, Roy Thomas, Frank Tripp, and Charles “Rocky” Bierschwal. The latter photo was provided by Rocky’s kin Danny & Carol B.; the others, from the 1961 SEMO yearbook, are courtesy of Tyler M. Koenig.

“Together For The First Time In  One Mighty Magazine!”
The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961) went on sale in early August of that year, with a cover penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by George Klein. The editor and writer (including of the cover copy) was Stan Lee. It was the beginning of what Stan would christen in 1963 “The Marvel Age of Comics.” [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Just One Of Those Things
From his first appearance in Fantastic Four #1, Ben Grimm—a.k.a. The Thing—became and has remained Roy’s favorite of all Marvel heroes. Script by Stan Lee; pencils by Jack Kirby; inks by George Klein. Courtesy of Jim Kealy. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Four Of A Kind”
The first issue of Jerry Bails’ adzine The Comicollector, published in August ’61, included Roy’s two-page review of Fantastic Four #1. [© Roy Thomas.]

Part IV
“Comic Heroes of the Past, Present, & Future”
Teaching & Alter Ego – Not Necessarily In That Order (1961–1965)

1.
Sullivan, Missouri, probably should have reminded me a lot of Jackson, Missouri.
Unfortunately, it didn’t.
In many ways, the two towns weren’t all that dissimilar. Sullivan lay sixty miles west of St. Louis on the then- celebrated Route 66… Jackson, roughly 120 miles south of the Gateway City on Highway 61. Both were still factory towns, at least to some extent, in 1961: Jackson’s shoe factory had closed by then, but its hosiery mill was still going strong… while a shoe factory was still a major employer in Sullivan. The latter had a 1960 census population of around 4000; my hometown had reached that size by 1950 but wasn’t all that much larger a decade later. Each had a single indoor movie theatre, though Sullivan’s was really just a converted Nissan hut left over from the World War II years. The only film I ever saw there was Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, a fact I recall only because I found it surprisingly good. Small wonder: the screenplay was written by SF great Richard Matheson.
(Counterbalancing Fun Fact: Not far down the road from Sullivan was a very small town called Japan—pronounced “jay-p’n” by the locals—which at that time was almost certainly home to virtually zero actual Asian-Americans. The way I heard the tale: During the Second World War, U.S. government officials had suggested to the town that, what with Pearl Harbor and all, they might want to consider changing that name. “Why?” they asked, incredulous. “Our town’s name is Jay-p’n.” And that was that.)
I mostly patronized Sullivan’s businesses only for fresh groceries and new comicbooks. Still, sometime that year, at a hole-in-the-wall store that, among other things, sold old magazines, I stumbled across a coverless copy of Uncle Scrooge #6 from 1954. Its lead story, centered around a lost land called “Tralla La,” was an economics-themed retelling of the tale of Shangri-La—a modern “myth” that had actually originated in a novel, as popularized by a 1937 movie. I didn’t recall having read the duck-tale version as a kid, though I’d bought quite a few Disney-franchise comics; but, when I wrote her inquiring about “Tralla La,” Comic Art co-editor Maggie Thompson informed me that yarn was considered by some aficionados to be one of the best comicbook stories ever published. I could see what she meant. It was quite possibly from Maggie, at that time, that I first learned the name of its incomparable writer/artist: one Carl Barks. Before comicbook fans learned his name, many of them had spontaneously referred to him as “the good Duck artist.” Me, I would’ve called him “the good Duck writer.”
Mostly, when I wasn’t teaching English at Sullivan High a few blocks away across the railroad tracks, I was holed up in my “apartment”—my refuge for that whole school year. It consisted of the entire third floor of a small mansion: a large living room plus dining area, kitchen, bath, and bedroom… all furnished, for $40 a month. My elderly land- lady lived on the first floor; since the other two stories had a separate back entrance, I rarely saw her, and we got along fine. The only drawback to the place was that, when a train came rolling by—as one often did, including in the dead of night—the deafening roar sounded as if the iron horse were thundering up the stairs at full throttle, instead of locomotioning past a hundred feet distant. I didn’t feel solvent enough to buy a TV, so I got by for that nine-month prison sentence with just a radio and a record-player.
Them… and Bob Hopkins.
2.
“Hopkins,” as Tony Schuch and I invariably called him, lived on the mansion’s second floor. He was a slightly fleshy Korean War vet who taught junior and senior English, while I herded freshmen and sophomores. A droll, intelligent guy with two master’s degrees from the University of Missouri under his belt, he seemed robust enough; but he was receiving a monthly disability pension because he’d nearly lost his legs in the freezing cold of Heartbreak Ridge. We didn’t talk about that so-called “police action” much.
One pair of topics Hopkins most definitely did want to talk about, though—once he learned of my own avocational interests—turned out to be old comicbooks and Big Little Books.
He proved a fountain of information on the former, relying solely on childhood memories. It was from him, for instance, that I first learned about the Centaur Comics Group, which circa 1940 had boasted the weirdest roster of super- heroes that ever was: The Eye, a huge eyeball that flew around dissolving criminals with its optic ray… The Fantom of the Fair, a mysterious costumed figure who lived underneath the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40, only venturing forth to smash hoodlums or the occasional runaway robot… and Speed Centaur, who fought skullduggery on four legs and hooves but would’ve had a real problem maintaining a secret identity.
Also, at a time when most of us fans were just beginning to learn bits and pieces of the history of the Timely/ Marvel/Atlas line, which was then less widely collected than DC and Fawcett, Hopkins could verbally conjure  up the early-’40s days when The Human Torch and  Sub-Mariner had battled it out in the skies over Manhattan. It was he, too, who finally set me straight that the name of my favorite “Sub-Mariner” artist was “Bill Everett,” not “Bill Enereh” (as I had misread his highly stylized signature), and that Everett was the creator of that hero, who had originally been a real hell-raiser out to destroy the surface world. I made a mental note to learn more about Marvel Mystery Comics and related titles. Clearly, they had been far more interesting in the early ’40s than later in that decade when I was reading them.
Hopkins also knew of a couple of second-hand bookstores in St. Louis that sold old magazines, comics, et al., and we soon took a trip there on a Saturday. Later, I would make the same journey several times on my own.
But, though he recalled a lot about old comics—and their predecessors, pulp  magazines—Bob Hopkins’ real passion and guilty pleasure turned out to be…  Big Little Books.
These were odd publications from Whitman Publications, first printed in 1932, that combined text and illustrations. Typeset prose related the story on left-hand pages, with a complementary black-&-white picture on each right-hand one. Both storyline and images were often taken from published newspaper comic strips, though a few were originals. Oh, and did I mention that BLB pages were roughly just 3½" by 4½", with anywhere from 200 to 400 pages between hard cardboard color covers? I’d bought a fair number of BLBs as a kid, but to me they’d never been any competition for comicbooks or real books.
Hopkins, it turned out, was a Big Little Books fanatic who’d just been waiting for someone to come along and turn his switch to the “on” position. Once I showed him the dealer ads running in Jerry’s Comicollector, a few of which offered “BLBs” for sale, he was off and running. By the time we both left Sullivan for good the following May, he had already amassed a collection of more than 100 of them, and he was only getting started.
Besides Hopkins, the only other person I hung out with much while hunkering down in Sullivan was Tony Schuch, the guy who’d suggested I apply for a position there. Tony was a devoted art teacher, whose mantra was that most if not all children are born with at least a modicum of artistic talent; it’s parents, other adults, and even art teachers who knock that interest out of them early, by telling them their drawings aren’t “good enough” or “don’t look like what they’re supposed to be.” I’ve always kicked myself that I didn’t talk him into selling me one of the beautiful art collages he created.
He, Hopkins, and I often had dinner together, frequently at a local diner. It was at their suggestion that I first ate something I’d never before tried in my going-on-21 years: a cheeseburger. Somehow, the thought of combining meat and cheese had always repulsed me. For the same “reason,” for a time in the late ’50s I had resisted this new food called a pizza when specimens had begun popping up in Southeast Missouri; my own first bite of one had been at a Dairy Queen, of all places! Well, at least I’d finally learned what Mad had meant in the early 1950s by all those references to a “pizza pie.”
You guessed it: Cheeseburgers and pizza are now two of my favorite food groups.
Although there weren’t many eateries in Sullivan, there was a restaurant/bar not far down Route 66 called… The Green Lantern. Naturally, I had to eat there at least once. I doubt even Doiby Dickles would’ve done so twice.
3.
About teaching in Sullivan, the less said the better. I tried to earn my meager salary, and I like to think some of the working-class students actually did learn something from me. But what I really lived for, from Monday to Friday, was comicbooks and “fan-ac” (fan activity), which included banging out a lot of letters on my little Smith-Corona  electric portable typewriter at the table off the kitchen.
I was keeping up with whatever new heroic comics were coming out: e.g., a three-issue run of the six-inch “Atom” in Showcase, successful enough that he was quickly awarded his own title… Adventures of The Jaguar (although the Archie Adventure series wasn’t that well-conceived: why should a guy with “jaguar powers” wear a bright red costume and a jetpack?—also, when he switched identities, why did his Gable-style mustache disappear?)… plus an ever-growing fascination with The Fantastic Four.
Actually, early on, I had a weird history just finding issues of that mag, even though that nameless group’s comics were distributed by Independent News, which was owned by National/DC. My first-ever glimpse of FF #2 came in that St. Louis used-book store Hopkins had introduced me to. I scored a number of super-cheap vintage comics there, including a copy of 1950’s All-Star Comics #55, in the early days before word got around; but why a copy of FF #2 should’ve been on that pile in fall of 1961, five minutes after its on-sale date, I’ll never know. Somebody must’ve bought it and instantly hated it. I snapped it up for a nickel and had my first encounter with the Skrulls.
Issue #3 I ran across in St. Louie’s downtown Greyhound station, when I’d taken a bus to the city (and its used-book stores) instead of driving. The comic’s new 12¢ price, which had just become the industry standard, was over-pasted by a “15¢” sticker so the bus station didn’t have to mess with pennies. In answer to my and others’ perfervid requests, the foursome now sported costumes—well, uniforms—although the Thing startled us by ripping off his own “monkey suit” at the first hint of battle. Also, The Human Torch was now being drawn much like “the old Burgos version” I had called for in my Comicollector review (a demand others had echoed). Immodestly, with this issue The Fantastic Four began to bill itself as “The Greatest Comic Magazine in the World!!” And I had to agree that, already, it was definitely in the running.
To assure my steady supply of FF, I broke down and subscribed. My first by-mail copy arrived (permanently creased, of course) at my Sullivan address in late winter of ’62. It fulfilled another of my review’s requests: the return of Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, treated in FF #4 as a sympathetic villain enamored of Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl—and drawn so solidly by Jack Kirby that, from that day to this, I’ve always considered him Namor’s second-best artist ever.
In that issue, little blurbs ran along the bottom of various story pages, proclaiming: “THE HULK IS COMING!” Was the Thing about to have a little competition in the  gargoyle-as-super-hero department? What would be next—Fin Fang Foom wearing a cape?
4.
In the meantime, the third issue of Alter-Ego hit the U.S. mails in fall of ’61. As a prospective cover, I had drawn a Bestest League parody of the “Slave Ship of Space” cover for Justice League of America #3. However, since A/E #3’s main topic was the old and new Green Lanterns, Jerry decided (rightly, I think) to work up a composite cover himself, tracing vintage art to show the 1940s GL facing off against several of his foes. He also wrote an article about the first Emerald Gladiator and asked me to scribe one on the new GL’s first two years.
I likewise provided the final chapter of “Bestest League of America,” tossing in Superham, Wombatman, Adamn Stranger, and The IPOM (“Infinitesimal Particle Of Matter”). The story’s climax even saw the unleashing from limbo of the original Bestest Society, with Dr. Fat, The Spectacle, et al.—in a mildly humorous foreshadowing of an event soon destined to occur in the actual comics. I bookended this finale with my JLA #3 cover spoof and an “Aukman” ad.
But, although Jerry listed himself as “Publishing Editor” and me as “Contributing Editor,” the two of us accounted for a slightly smaller percentage of the page count this time around. A fan named George Paul wrote a summary of the 1940 GL’s origin; SF/movie/comics buff Ron Haydock synopsized the 1944 Captain America movie serial; and my gifted girlfriend Linda Rahm served up a clever satirical letter from a gal named “Angela” to her boyfriend “Ersel” explaining why she was breaking up with him over his obsession with comicbooks. (Hmm. Maybe I should’ve read that piece as an omen.)
In addition, #3’s letters section featured mostly long, informative letters from new and future BNFs—“Big Name Fans,” another expression comics fandom had lifted from its SF forebear—including Frederick Norwood (later the publisher of the long-running comic-strip reprint magazine Comics Revue) and Larry Ivie, a young would-be pro artist living in New York City.
The letter from Larry, one of the most knowledgeable comics fans of that era, related the story behind an illustration he’d drawn of the early-1940s Atom, slightly updated for the modern age; it had recently seen print in the Lupoffs’ Xero #5. Circa ’59, Larry had actually had an opportunity to show that art and his accompanying proposal for a revival of The Atom—as a short-statured astronaut who gains atomic powers—to DC editor Julius Schwartz. He’d also shown Julie art and story samples for his projected revivals of Hawkman, Sandman, even the Justice Society. Larry’s “in” with Schwartz: At art school, he’d recently met veteran cartoonist Sheldon Mayer, who as the original editor of the All-American Comics line (before its absorption by National/DC) had hired Schwartz as his story editor in ’44. Mayer had suggested Larry show his concepts and samples to his successor. But Julie had made no move either to hire him or to act on his ideas.
Well… except maybe on one: Since Larry had shown Julie his proposal for a revival of the JSA, to which he had given the slightly altered name “Justice League of America,” it’s quite possible Julie had remembered that less laconic name, if only subconsciously, when he’d prepped The Brave and the Bold #28 not long afterward. On the other hand, Julie was a baseball fan, so maybe he didn’t need any prompting to come up with the word “league.” As it happened, Larry’s “JLA” concept actually consisted of the sons and daughters of several of the original JSAers taking over their parents’ vintage costumes and super-hero monikers.
(Sometime in the early ’60s, through Jerry Bails, I saw copies of Ivie’s “Hawkman,” “Sandman,” and “JLA” splash samples; but, though I admired the artwork, I paid scant attention to the captions… so I was surprised when, decades later, I finally read the “JLA” one carefully for the first time and realized that Larry had, 20+ years earlier, suggested to Julie an idea similar to the notion that my wife Dann and I would come up with for DC Comics in 1981 and ultimately christen Infinity, Inc.)
It’s a small world, after all—not that much bigger than an Atom, really.
5.
What I didn’t realize—and maybe neither did Jerry, when he mailed out A/E #3 in autumn of ’61—was that the fanzine’s fourth issue wouldn’t be published till nearly a year later. He was preparing to move up from hectograph to “photo-offset,” a process that would allow printing an infinite number of copies and would let artwork and photos be reproduced directly from comics, original art, or wherever, rather than having to be traced or redrawn freehand.
Since I was really only an honorary “editor” of Alter-Ego, Jerry didn’t particularly keep me abreast of his plans. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that his bimonthly Comicollector was coming out like clockwork, while the informal quarterly schedule of A/E had gone entirely by the boards after #1–3.
In fact, in October of ’61, he introduced a third separate publication: On the Drawing Board, in which he printed all the advance news he’d gathered from Schwartz and others. In a sense, OTDB was his original “JLA newsletter” idea revisited. By the following March, he would change the new zine’s title to The Comic Reader. Under that name, and soon from other hands than Jerry’s, TCR would endure for decades.
Jerry Bails was truly the “Johnny Appleseed” of comics fandom.
One positive contribution I made to fandom during that time (in a letter dated 10-29-61) was suggesting to Jerry an idea that, surprisingly, for once, he hadn’t already thought of: a series of awards to be nominated by “prominent collectors” and fanzine editors concerning the preceding year’s best professional work; the final awards would then be voted on by fandom at large. I already had a name for it: “The Alter-Ego Award,” which I suggested be nicknamed an “Alley” after both Alter-Ego and the comic strip caveman Alley Oop, who, living in prehistoric times, could be considered the earliest adventure hero. I even listed suggestions for eight pro- and one fan-award categories. Jerry took those ideas, and a few others I proposed in that missive, and ran with them—and I was happy to let him do so. It was he, not I, who christened the new organization “The Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences,” after its motion picture predecessor. I felt that was an overly ambitious name, since ours were more like today’s People’s Choice Awards than like the Oscars. Jerry opted for calling the prizes “the Alley Awards” pure and simple, which was definitely an improvement.
Around this time, I also began corresponding with a wider group of comics fans, particularly a trio of aspiring artists. Foremost among these was Ronn Foss, who was roughly my own age but drew himself looking so urbane (even smoking a pipe!) that I briefly thought he must be five or ten years older than I, as Jerry was. The second was Ronn’s buddy Richard “Grass” Green, one of the few African-Americans then active in what we grandiosely called “organized fandom”; he could write and draw both humorous and melodramatic comics material in a Kirby-influenced style. A third correspondent was Bill J. (“Biljo”) White, a fireman in Columbia, Missouri; his art style was most obviously influenced by Bob Kane and C.C. Beck. This trio of amateur artists would figure prominently in my life—and I in theirs—over the next few years.
If I needed further distraction from my day job, by early ’62 I also had The Incredible Hulk #1. Neither Jerry nor I initially viewed this new gray monster-hero as much more than a self-knockoff by Lee and Kirby of the Thing in Fantastic Four—as we wrote separately in letters to writer/editor Stan. Jerry, through his news-gathering, had established something of a pen-pal relationship with Lee, sending him copies of his fanzines just as he did to the National and Archie editors. When Stan favorably mentioned my FF #1 review —and even my name!—in a September ’61 letter to Jerry, I just about swooned. I was already getting friendly nods in Julie’s comics, and now a second company’s editor knew my moniker as well. It just couldn’t get any better than that!
Though Hawkman finally gained escape velocity with his second Brave and Bold run, and Aquaman high-dived from Showcase try-out issues straight into his own mag, perhaps the biggest bang from National around that time was made by “The Metal Men,” a series from writer/editor Robert Kanigher, drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. It was obviously heavily influenced by The Fantastic Four, with a human Dr. Magnus ramrodding six foible-filled heroes who were composed of living metal. Gold, Platinum, Mercury, Lead, Iron, and Tin each had his/her own personality, plus physical powers and characteristics related to his/her particular element. The group’s first Showcase issue sold well enough that it was quickly awarded its own magazine.
In addition, Gold Key—the new comics company that Western Publishing had founded after ending its two- decade relationship with former distributor Dell—came  up with its own atomic-powered hero (collect them all!):  Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom.
Clearly, the super-hero revival was gaining steam!
6.
Circa spring of ’62, while I was waiting for A/E #4 to finally come out, Jerry suddenly wrote me that not only had he decided to publish no further issues himself after that one, but that he would be turning the fanzine lock, stock, and logo over to Ronn Foss, along with The Comicollector, although he was retaining The Comic Reader… at least for a little while. Jerry said he wanted to devote more time to collecting comics and to other projects, including, as he put it, “collecting data on artists and writers, and all costumed-hero comics published before 1948.” Why the 1948 cutoff date, I can’t even begin to guess, since our mutual favorite, All-Star Comics, had lasted till the end of 1950; but it would turn out to be via his data-collecting and processing that Jerry would make what was arguably an even more valuable a contribution to modern comics fandom than launching its first fanzine.
Apparently, Jerry never considered asking me if I’d like to take over Alter-Ego. He told me later that he’d felt I wouldn’t want to dedicate so much time and money (neither of which I had in abundance) to editing and publishing and printing and mailing. And he was probably right about that… though it would’ve been nice to be asked.
Well, even with no further Alter-Ego responsibilities, I still had plenty to occupy me.
7.
One year in Sullivan had been more than enough for me. Among other things, I preferred to be nearer St. Louis, so I got a job teaching freshman and sophomore English at Fox High School in Arnold, Missouri, just south of the St. Louis County line… on Highway 61, where else? Arnold was another working-class community, basically a suburb of the suburbs.
That summer, in between school years, I took several undergraduate classes at SEMO. Since I got no additional credit for them, I suspect I signed up mostly to have an excuse not to have to look for a summer job. That also left  me ample time for a social life—and for the singing gig with the Gaberlunzies. (So actually I did have a summer job, after all!)
Gary, Rocky, Frank, and I mostly performed covers of recent and current rock’n’roll songs, with a predilection for tunes made famous by guys like Elvis, Bobby Darin, and Chuck Berry. The closest we ever came to writing our own material was when I’d start out singing “Old Shep,” a soulful ballad about a boy and his dog—then after one verse we’d suddenly lurch into a raucous version of “Hound Dog.” That always got the crowd jumping. At least, I guess it did. I never could see the kids all that clearly, since I refused to wear glasses when I sang. Rock’n’roll singers didn’t wear glasses—except for the late Buddy Holly, and I’d never cared much for anything he recorded except “That’ll Be the Day,” back when he and his group just went by the name “The Crickets.”
For our opening theme song, Gary and I had chosen “C’mon, Everybody,” which had been a hit for Elvis imitator Eddie Cochran. The band played only a handful of instrumentals, such as “Sleepwalk” and “Tequila,” so I only got to dance with Linda a few times a night.
My sister Katy was on hand with friends or dates for a number of those gigs. And I recall being proud the time or two Dad brought my youngest sister Tara (then 6 or 7) to see part of our show. Tara loved it when I’d sing Elvis’ 1961 hit “Little Sister.” (With time’s inexorable flow, she grew up to become a super-competent CPA, and she and husband Dave Leichnauer eventually made a fine life for themselves in Des Moines, Iowa—where, until recently, my semi-retired kid sister still lent an able hand to her old firm during the months before April 15 rolled around.)
The Gaberlunzies, for their part, had the usual rock-band problems, paramount among which was getting Rocky to show up for practice sessions. And occasionally, when he’d get in a bad mood, he’d turn around and sit on his amp, his back to the dancing teens while he played, and nothing Gary could say would make him face front. But he played a pretty fair lead guitar… and I guess he knew it.
8.
At Fox High, my latest equivalent of Elba, quite a few classes were held in small, one-room “temporary” buildings out back of the main school; years later, long after I had moved on, those “temporary” buildings were still very much in evidence.
A fellow JHS graduate, Lloyd Whitledge, also began teaching (in his case, science) at Fox that year. He’d been three grades ahead of me, so I had barely known him previously. But we hit it off and decided to rent a place together. Lloyd owned a small TV, so this year I had access to things like the early Steve Allen version of The Tonight Show.
Actually, three of us wound up sharing the upper floor of a family home in Arnold, though it wasn’t nearly as large as the place I’d had all to myself in Sullivan. Our flatmate was a likable first-year math teacher, Richard Strong.
We all got along well enough, even if they rolled their eyes at my comics-related interests. Once I mentioned to them, at least half seriously, that, if I hauled along my 57-issue run of All-Star Comics, I could drive from coast to coast and never have to pay for a motel room, because some fan, eager to peruse the mags, would happily put me up for a night. Strong just looked at me sardonically and quipped, “And here we know you, and we don’t give a s**t.” I nearly choked laughing at that remark.
For the first couple of years teaching at Fox, I got along fairly well with both faculty and administrators. Oh, I got disillusioned with a few of my fellow teachers from their commentary in the lounge during free periods: One female junior-high English instructor went on a rant one day against J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; and a male shop teacher was given to racially crude remarks, at a time when there were no non-white students at Fox. That was my introduction to the realization that teachers weren’t always the embodiments of enlightened viewpoints that I’d imagined they would be. Sometimes I probably felt a bit like Holden Caulfield myself, but maybe that was just confirmation bias.
There was no Fox/Arnold equivalent of the after-school hang-out with fellow teachers at a diner, so I took most of my evening meals on my own, either TV dinners, home-made sandwiches, or inexpensive eateries. When I drove 15 or 20 miles south most Tuesday evenings to purchase the new comics at a drugstore in Crystal City on Highway 61, I’d have two (more likely three) cheeseburgers, fries, and a chocolate malted at a great, decades-old burger joint called the Stoplight Café… my idea of a balanced meal. Other burger nights, when I was reasonably flush (by my own low-bar standards), I was likely to wind up at Steak ’n’ Shake, my favorite burger chain; when I was running low on funds, I opted for McDonalds. The first McDonalds I’d ever encountered had been the previous year, during my first trip to Columbia to visit Biljo White. I’d never heard of the chain before, but their big sign out front claimed there had already been “over 2 [or was it 3?] billion served.” Clearly, I was way behind and would have to catch up.
With my diet way too reliant on junk food, it was only my own peculiar youthful metabolism that kept me around 120 pounds for all those years. If I ate like that today, I’d weigh on the shady side of 200 pounds—if I was still alive at all.
9.
I still pretty much existed for the weekends. In Jackson, I would stay at my parents’ house (and yes, get my laundry done; I was that much of a cliché) and spend most of my time with Linda and/or Gary and the band. I didn’t find much to complain about, but neither was I making any real progress in my life. I suppose it didn’t occur to me that there was that much progress to be made.
Linda was a good sport, usually tagging along for our Saturday night stints at the Roll-O-Fun, which was just down the hill from her home. She’d often bring along a thermos of hot tea to soothe my throat between sets. Rocky refused to believe she actually had tea in there. Once, when she was handing it to me, he grabbed it and took a fast swig. He spat it out immediately. “It’s f***in’ tea!” he grunted as he thrust it back at me.
Our band also landed occasional other paying jobs, mostly in Cape County. One took us a bit further afield, down near the Arkansas border, where we had to crash overnight at a sleazy motel because we’d all had too much to drink for any of us to drive home. (I knew there weren’t supposed to be two center lines in the road.) So much  for our profits! That was pretty much the extent of our “touring.”
The Gaberlunzies did play a couple of gigs at a rough venue called the Country Schoolhouse—because, decades earlier, it had actually been one. It catered to a fairly unruly crowd, by rural Missouri standards; and since these were adults, not kids, alcohol was (legally) served, even if Gary, Rocky, and Frank couldn’t (legally) drink there. One night, our band was walking through the boisterous crowd toward the performing area when a burly lowlife at one of the tables made an off-color remark about Rocky’s then-girlfriend, who happened to be with him. Rocky halted, looked down at him, and said, very softly, “You shouldn’t be sayin’ things like that.” The guy smirked where he sat and asked Rock what he was gonna do about it. Without another word, Rock laid him out with one swift punch. We never had any trouble with anybody else in that hole. Without Rocky, I doubt Gary, Frank, and I would’ve ventured into that place without an armed guard.
About a year into our band’s existence, Gary decided he needed to alter its name. Nobody we dealt with could either remember or pronounce, let alone spell, the name “Gaberlunzies,” so he changed it to the far more pedestrian “Galaxies.” Yech. But I didn’t get a vote.
Somewhere in there, Linda and I—and even Rocky—talked till we were blue in the face trying to convince Gary not to get married. The teenage object of his affections had recently asked him to give her drum lessons, and even before he gave her her first one, he announced to us that he intended to marry her. We had nothing particular against the girl, whose name I can’t even recall at this juncture; but it seemed way too hasty. They soon got wed and had a child together, but the marriage didn’t last long. It was the first of what turned out to be five for Gary.
Mostly we four band members got along, despite Rocky’s lackadaisical attitude toward rehearsing. Frank Tripp was an especially easy-going guy. The only time I can recall Gary really getting angry with me during that period had to do with “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the big Ray Charles hit. Bobby Darin had written a popular knockoff of it titled “You’re the Reason I’m Living.” The only problem was that once—well, more than once—I’d start out singing the Ray Charles song; then, when we got to the bridge, I’d accidentally segue off into the very similar one by Darin. The teenagers dancing to that “belly-rubber,” as we called slow tunes, never noticed, but Gary would just get furious. The second or maybe third time I did that, the first I even realized I’d done it was when I heard this big CRASH behind me, then saw one of his drumsticks go flying past me out onto the roller-rink dance floor. He’d slammed it down so hard on the rim of the drum, it had flown out of his hand! But he quickly got over it.
Gary handled Rocky pretty well—except once, when we were setting up at the Roll-O-Fun before the kids were let in for dancing, and he and Rock got in some minor dispute. Gary made a nasty crack and started to stomp off, as if that ended it. Rocky slammed him to the floor and started beating up on him, while Frank and I stood around trying to talk him out of it—which was about the most we could’ve managed. Well, he wasn’t really beating Gary up, as we quickly realized—he just pummeled him for a minute to “teach him a lesson,” as he said to me half-sheepishly right afterward. Gary was just shaken and stirred, but not hurt, as he well knew he would’ve been, had Rocky meant for him to be. Mostly he and Rock got along great. So did Rocky and I, though the two of us were even more different than he and Gary were.
Our main “competition” in the area at that time—though they probably didn’t consider us that—was a larger- ensemble rock’n’roll band called the Runaways. Author Jerry Ford, in his 2012 book Dreamers: Entertainers from Small Town to Big Time, writes that the Runaways were “the most popular Top 40 rock’n’roll band in and around Cape Girardeau from 1961 through 1993”—meaning they started around the same time the Gaberlunzies did, but lasted a helluva lot longer and left a much bigger carbon/guitar footprint. Their most common venue then was a glorified honky-tonk called the Starlite, a mile outside Jackson. Our band dropped by there to socialize once in a while, and one or more of us would wind up sitting in with them for a number or two.
Once, probably around  the turn of ’63, Rocky did  something or other—I forget what, but it didn’t amount  to much—that landed him for several days in the county jail in Jackson, which was then located right around the corner from Jones Drug. Rocky got bored and asked  Gary and me for something to read, so we bought a few comics and handed them to him through the bars. He knew a little about Norse mythology and especially liked “Thor.” Luckily, he was released in time that we didn’t  miss any playdates.
10.
Oh, and about “Thor”: That was one of the new features from the Lee & Kirby team that had earlier introduced The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk. Jerry Bails and I had learned in advance (from his correspondence with Lee) that two new series called “Thor” and “Ant-Man” would debut in the summer of ’62. So I was on the lookout that day, in between classes, when I walked into Metro News. There on the shelves was Journey into Mystery #83, transformed overnight from a giant-monster mag into a super-hero-starring title, featuring a costumed version of the Norse thunder god battling Stone Men from Saturn. And right next to it was Amazing Fantasy #15, with its new cover star…
…Spider Man?
My steel-trap brain instantly figured things out: Editor/writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby (who had drawn the covers of both the new mags) had decided that a spider was a more saleable bug than an ant, so they had switched invertebrates in mid-stream. “Thor” was a more standard super-doer than any of the company’s other recent heroes… although his alter ego, Dr. Donald Blake, was at least scrawny and walked the Norwegian hills with a limp and a cane before he stumbled across the magic hammer that transferred him into a Superman with long blond locks, a cape, and a glorious winged helmet that reminded me of Hawkman’s.
But the “Spider-Man” story was an 11-page stunner that instantly turned much of what we “knew” about the super-hero genre on its head, every bit as much as FF had. The tale inside was drawn by Charlton “Captain Atom” alumnus Steve Ditko, rather than the otherwise ubiquitous Kirby, but it didn’t suffer for that. In a caption on the first interior page, writer Lee informed us:
Like costume heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as “long underwear characters”! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our SPIDERMAN just a wee bit… different!
You noticed, right? On the cover the character’s name was written as two words, in big letters—and as one word in the above splash-page caption. But there was even a third spelling of the hero’s name on just those two initial pages. In a dialogue balloon on the cover, it comes out as “Spider-Man.” The one-word “Spiderman” rendering prevailed throughout the actual story this time, but it would be the hyphenated version that would quickly become the official one. Talk about “feeling your way”….
The variations in spelling, though, were the least memorable thing about the comic’s lead yarn. After that wry caption, which gave me a chuckle and made me feel as if Lee were writing to me, not just to some pimply kid with a dime and two pennies, things got weird fast. A teenage nerd (who wears glasses and actually needs them, unlike Clark Kent) gets bitten by a radioactive spider—yes, a radioactive spider!—in a transparent send-up of the spate of recent super-hero origins in Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Dr. Solar, and even “Captain Atom.” Unlike Bruce Wayne or Barry Allen or Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan, teenager Peter Parker immediately sets out to try to profit from his newfound super-powers, when even the FF had joined hands and pledged to protect humanity. But, even wearing a spiffy costume he designs with a full face-mask (which hides the fact that he’s only a high school student), he finds it a lot harder to monetize his arachnid powers than he’d imagined. When he does get a check for his services, it’s made out to “Spiderman”—so he can’t cash it!
And, riffing on Batman’s origin but going far beyond it, at one point Spiderman refuses to even try to stop a runaway criminal (since nobody’s paying him to do so)… only to have that same hoodlum murder his Uncle Ben, with whom he lives, not long afterward. Okay, so the coincidence quota gets a bit heavy here; but this is melodrama, and in a comicbook to boot. But something had to justify that now-oft-quoted line in the tale’s final caption: “With great power there must also come great responsibility.” And in that context, it was powerful stuff that augured well for the future of the spider-themed feature.
Except that, far as we fans could tell, it didn’t have a future. Two months later, there was no Amazing Fantasy #16. Although “Thor” and Fantastic Four and even Hulk (at least for a few more issues) would roll right along, the skeptical publisher had canceled the “Spiderman”-starring title, based both on the sales of previous non-hero issues, which had contained Twilight Zone-style short stories, and, as I’d learn three years later, on the fact that he hated everything about “Spiderman”! In 1965 Stan would tell me that, when he’d first presented that concept to his publisher, Martin Goodman had loftily informed him that (a) “people don’t like spiders” and (b) “a teenager can only be a sidekick, not a lead hero” and (c) “nobody wants to read about heroes with personal problems.” Of course, the growing success of FF all by itself very much belied his third premise… and National had been publishing a popular Superboy comic since ’49… but hey, he was the publisher. He didn’t have to be logically consistent.
Oh, but just so you know: The very next week after I  ran across the “Spider-Man” and “Thor” debuts, I dropped by Metro News again—and there bold as brass was “Ant-Man,” on the cover of the company’s Tales to  Astonish comic. So Stan Lee hadn’t merely changed bugs; he’d gone for two different ones.
As a querulous Bruce Banner would succinctly put it on the movie screen, nearly six decades later: “There’s an Ant-Man and a Spider-Man?”
The ex-Timely/ex-Marvel/ex-Atlas comics line was clearly on a roll… even though it was still “the company with no name,” as far as readers were concerned.
11.
At the same time I was putting together fanzine material for Jerry, I’d gotten another assignment, one I relished. Dick Lupoff had invited me to contribute to the “All in Color for a Dime” series in Xero! I’d felt honored to get a chance to join the serried ranks of Lupoff himself, Ted White, Jim Harmon, Don Thompson, Richard Kyle (whose “The Education of Victor Fox” was the best of the series), and others who’d scribed installments of the first ongoing series of articles related to Golden Age comicbooks. The subject Dick suggested for my entry was the non-Marvel Family heroes published by 1940s Fawcett, which included Bulletman, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, Ibis the Invincible, Minute Man, Mr. Scarlet and Pinky, and several lesser lights. I had read stories featuring all those characters, but I owned very few old Fawcett comics; so Dick mailed me, on loan, a cardboard box full of the couple of dozen that he had. I borrowed a few others on my own (probably from Jerry and/or Biljo White) and set to work.
In between attending summer classes, dating, and band gigs, though, I found it slow slogging. I quickly did all the “research,” writing copious notes, but I just couldn’t seem to get started on the article itself. And this in spite of the fact that Dick had already not only suggested a title—“Captain Billy’s Whiz-Gang,” echoing the name of the risqué post-World War I gag-mag Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang that had launched the Fawcett magazine empire—but had actually written two or three paragraphs that he thought might suggest a way for me to begin my piece. I wound up using them virtually word for word, though he later refused my attempt to add his byline to them.
As the summer wore on and his deadline for mimeographing Xero #9 drew ever nearer, I began getting  admonitory postcards from Dick… their tone understandably growing gradually more strident. I answered one or two with apologies and promises to finish the thing very soon; but basically I had gotten writer’s block with regard to that article. I had such respect and awe for the Lupoffs’ fanzine, and for the “AICFAD” series, that everything I mentally composed seemed not good enough to commit to paper. And so I wrote nothing.
Then, one day I got a truly angry postcard from Dick, saying that if he didn’t have my article in the next week, Xero #9 (scheduled to be the second-from-last issue of the fanzine) would have to be printed minus an “AICFAD” piece.
So what the hell, all of a sudden I just gritted my teeth, kicked a hole in that writer’s block, and wrote the damn article—several thousand words, it wound up—in one or two very long and back-paining days. I even did a couple of freehand redrawings that depicted many of the secondary Fawcett heroes. And I mailed the whole megilleh off to Dick via Air Mail/Special Delivery. (Remember “Air Mail” and “Special Delivery”?)
A day or so after I sent off the article, I received the most vitriolic of Dick’s postcards. It had obviously crossed in the mail with my own package. It railed again about his non-receipt of the article, and ended, quote:
“You have given me a royal screwing!”
I took a deep breath and felt it best not to respond to that one. Another few days went by… and then I got another postcard from Lupoff:
Article arrived. Everything is fine.
Thanks,
Dick
I felt like a real foul-up, but at least I had come through at the eleven-and-a-halfth hour. I was a part of Xero, and of “All in Color for a Dime.” And, far as I could tell later, readers mostly liked my article.
12.
Come that fall, Jerry finally published his fourth and final issue of Alter-Ego, which was a photo-offset revelation of sorts among comics fanzines to date. Totaling 34 pages, double-stapled at the side, its cover boasted a drawing by Ronn Foss and Grass Green of the fan-Academy “Alley Award” as designed by Ronn (and of course V.T. Hamlin)… plus head shots of The Human Torch, The Fly, and five National/DC heroes, pretty much reflecting the proportional realities of the field at the time. There was some nice gold-embossing on the cover… the only color in the issue. (But so unsophisticated in certain areas was even Jerry at that time that the Alley Oop image and name were used without his seeking permission from the NEA newspaper syndicate; nor was there any trademark or copyright recognition for Oop anywhere in the issue. He could’a  got sued!)
The most prominent articles in the issue were Howard Keltner’s illustrated piece about the 1940s MLJ heroes (The Shield, Hangman, et al.), from the company whose name had since been changed to the Archie Comics Group, after its by far most successful character… and my own “report” (as “secretary”) on the 1961 Alley Awards as voted on by the Academy of Comic-Book Arts and Sciences.
As might have been expected at that point, Julie Schwartz’s titles took all the awards, with The Flash #123’s “Flash of Two Worlds” winning for “Best Cover,” “Best Single Issue of a Comic-Book,” and “Best Story.” Carmine Infantino got the “best artist” nod; there was no writing award yet, because of the sparse credits in most comics. The Spectre was voted “Hero or Heroine Most Worthy  of Revival” (I like to think my work in A/E #1 & 2 had a little to do with that), while Wonder Woman (by Kanigher, Andru, & Esposito) “won” for “Worst Comic-Book  Currently Published.” As I pointed out in my accompanying essay, undoubtedly one reason The Fantastic Four had garnered no awards was the fact that only the first issue had been technically eligible.
And just who were the members of the Academy of Comic-Book Arts and Sciences? If I recall a-right, Jerry had basically just appointed the initial membership, as a sort of super-committee who would nominate for the various awards; the final voting, however, had been open to anyone who cared to respond to notices in various fanzines (Jerry reported in #4 that there were already six others besides A/E). There were twenty of us Academy members, half of whose names have been previously mentioned in this chapter. All were male, with Don Thompson of Comic Art being invited but somehow not his wife/co-editor Maggie. It was not an omission Maggie and others kept silent about, nor should they have. But there are growing pains and mistakes made with every new endeavor.
At least there were actual Alley Awards to be given out. Ronn Foss took it upon himself to design a  mold for a three-dimensional, gold- colored, plaster of Paris statuette of Alley Oop that was mailed out to the various winners. Unfortunately, they tended to arrive at the recipients’ homes snapped in two at the cartoon caveman’s Popeye-thin thighs. I glued mine back together and still have it atop a bookshelf.
At some point, I noticed that, for the first time, I wasn’t listed as an “editor” or anything else in the indicia of A/E #4. Years later, Jerry assured me that was simply an oversight, and I’ve no reason to believe it was anything other than that. I had never really deserved an editorial credit anyway.
The issue was another sterling triumph for Jerry, and I was proud just to be associated with it. Still, probably out of uncertainty as to possible objections from the pro companies, this first photo-offset issue made precious little use of its potential for reproducing photos and actual comicbook artwork. Ronn and a couple of other fan-artists contributed drawings of Batman and Robin, the MLJ heroes, etc. Sadly, Jerry didn’t deign to publish any of the many LOCs he had doubtless received on #3. (“LOC,” another term from SF fandom, stood for “letter of comment.”)
BUT—there was one totally undeniable landmark within the pages of A/E #4. Two of them, actually. However, while it was rewarding to read therein a few (vaguely worded and unillustrated) reminiscences by 1940s “Green Lantern” artist Paul Reinman, the real stunner came on page 30:
An original pencil drawing of the Thing, by Jack Kirby himself, done especially for the magazine!
If anyone doubted the latter fact, it was made clear by the sign Ben Grimm was holding up, which read: “READ ALTER-EGO—OR ELSE!”
Jerry had inked the pencil art (rather well, too) for best reproduction.
Despite the fact that comics drawn by National/DC artists had won all the Alley Awards listed in #4, it was the man whom Stan Lee would soon brazenly dub “The King” who drew the very first illo by a comics professional ever to be printed in one of the new breed of comics fanzines. That’s what I call starting off at the top!
13.
One major change in my life and schedule in September ’62 was that Linda, who would later spend several years as a college professor of English literature, switched schools from SEMO to the far bigger and ritzier Washington University, in St. Louis, for her last two undergraduate years. She roomed in an “honors” dorm, composed of young women with high academic records. That made our seeing each other possible during the week and even on Friday nights, but I had to drive south to Jackson on Saturday for our band’s roller-rink gig, then head back north early enough on Sunday to see her again.
Sometime during that school year, I found another, if minor and unpaid, outlet for my love of singing. Roomie Richard Strong stumbled upon a reasonably upscale cocktail lounge, about ten miles from Arnold, on the southern edge of St. Louis County, which boasted a rather good jazz organist. From time to time, Dick informed me, some of the patrons would grab a handy microphone and sing a popular song to the organist’s accompaniment. This was, of course, long before the “joys” of karaoke. One night, Dick and I stopped by that lounge. The jazz organist’s name was Joe Murphy—heavy-set, personable, and black—“black Irish,” he’d joke. After working up my courage by inhaling a screwdriver, I tried my own vocal hand at “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” Joe seemed to like the result; after that, if he saw me in the lounge, even when I wasn’t sitting on the several stools directly around the organ, he’d usually invite me to sit in for a song or two. At least it spared his tonsils for a few minutes. “Birth of the Blues” was a favorite of mine, and Joe’s, and apparently of at least some of the paying customers. One patron bought me a drink after one song and said my singing reminded him of Mel Torme. (But then, he, too, had a drink in his hand.)
I nurtured no illusions that I was any threat to Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr., but I enjoyed those interludes immensely. Probably I needed them.
My most amusing experience in that lounge occurred one night when, just after I’d finished a number, one of the young waitresses came up to me, stifling laughter. She informed me that, when I’d started singing, one mid-30s woman sitting at a side table with her friends had suddenly ducked down basically under the table, trying hard to keep out of sight. She had gasped to the waitress, “That guy’s a teacher at my kid’s school!” Like if I wasn’t worried about being seen in that place, she should have been?
14.
One strangely missing memory, for which I can’t really account, is any special sense of danger or fear during the week in October 1962 when John F. Kennedy’s (and my, and maybe your, depending on your age) America was basically facing down Khrushchev’s USSR over the little matter of ICBMs in Castro’s Cuba. The chilling prospect of nuclear war hung like a menacing shroud over the U.S., over the world, for several days… and, although I prided myself with keeping up with current events, I somehow never felt the terror and dread that so many people quite reasonably experienced. Did I just blithely assume that somehow our leaders (the Soviets’, as well as our own) would find a way to step back from the atomic abyss without devastating the planet? I’ll be charitable to myself and assume that was the case.
I’ve considerably dialed back my admiration for JFK over the years, as various revelations have come to light. But my reading has convinced me that he (admittedly counseled by able advisors) handled the Cuban Missile Crisis in a manner that made up for his having earlier made a debacle of the Bay of Pigs “invasion”… and that he, as much as any human being on Earth, deserves credit for averting a thermonuclear holocaust that would have made everything else covered in this history (and in most others) totally irrelevant and probably non-existent.
End of glum sidebar. Now back to our regularly scheduled pop-culture account.
15.
Sometime around the turn of 1963, Linda and I drove from St. Louis to Columbia, Missouri, 150 miles west of the Gateway City (whose now-iconic Gateway Arch was then under construction). The purpose: so I could meet Jerry Bails in person for the first time.
I had already driven once or twice before to the Columbia home of Biljo and Ruth White, and spent time in the small concrete-block “White House of Comics” in the amiable fireman’s backyard. Bill himself—no one ever actually called him “Biljo” except in print—was a tall, likable redhead who’d never stopped loving comics or drawing his own. In his bunker he stored at least semi-complete early runs of many titles starring Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, etc., etc., etc.—but, since his All-Star Comics collection was less nearly complete or important to him than some others, he’d been willing to sell me several very early issues I needed. I’ll admit that I (wrongly) thought he’d overcharged me for them—I’d paid as much as $5 or $10 apiece!—but I never said that to him. I liked Billy Joe/Biljo.
This time, though, I was heading there because Jerry and Sondra Bails were dropping by to see him, probably following a visit to their former Kansas City environs. In the vernacular of that era which regularly alluded to “summits” between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and of the Sinatra-led Rat Pack that played Las Vegas while filming Ocean’s Eleven, I thought of our confab as an informal “Alter-Ego summit”—even though Jerry and I no longer had any formal connection to the fanzine, the new A/E editor/publisher Ronn Foss wasn’t present, and Biljo’s first art for A/E was just coming out. (By coincidence, Ronn had visited Biljo a few days earlier, passing through on a drive east from California, and then had slept on the couch in our apartment in Arnold. Fans were starting to get together across greater distances.)
Jerry, Biljo, and I had a great good time discussing comics or whatever else came to mind (well, okay… so mostly comics). The ladies got along well enough. Nothing particularly memorable even by fannish standards came out of that day-and-a-half get-together, beyond Biljo taking brief home movies of the bunch of us throwing snowballs at each other.
But I was walking on air after finally meeting Jerry, following more than two years of corresponding and collaborating. And I still treasure that little bit of film footage of two of my best friends from comics fandom, now long vanished in the mists of time. Tears well up whenever I view it.
16.
Not long afterward, as emblazoned on the cover of the first issue of its new war comic titled Sgt. Fury, the company that published Fantastic Four finally gave itself a name:
“The Marvel Comics Group.”
Now, that may have been a revelation to some, but to fans my age, this was the third go-round since the late ’40s for the word “Marvel” as the name of the line. Maybe this time it would finally stick?
Around then, too, The Incredible Hulk sputtered out after six issues. The now-green-skinned monster’s place on the company’s publishing schedule was taken, researchers figured out later, by the briefly orphaned hero of Amazing Fantasy #15, who was now awarded his own bimonthly mag: The Amazing Spider-Man.
A couple of other Marvel characters first saw the light of day during that period as well, namely Iron Man (written by Stan Lee and his younger brother Larry Lieber and illustrated by Don Heck, evidently with design and perhaps other creative input from Jack Kirby) in Tales of Suspense—and a Lee-scripted, Ditko-conceived-plotted-and-drawn sorcerer called Doctor Strange, originally a minor backup magical character named after the monthly in which he appeared: Strange Tales.
17.
Ronn Foss got off to a fast start as the editor/publisher of Bails’ flagship fanzine.
Originally, he had been merely the first among equals in a threesome that had dubbed themselves “Triad” and had planned to handle Alter-Ego as a team. The other two legs of the publishing tripod were to have been Ronn’s wife Myra and his best pal Richard “Grass” Green. Ronn had written to Jerry that they were planning to launch a new fanzine and had been shocked when Jerry wrote back suggesting they take over Alter-Ego instead. They had swiftly accepted the opportunity and challenge.
However, before things went much further, Ronn and his wife split up, and Grass quickly realized that what he really wanted to do was write and draw comics material, not help put out a magazine about comics. So that left Ronn as both captain and crew. And, despite the fact that he, too, was far more an artist than a writer or editor type, he did a fine and in many ways groundbreaking job with A/E.
He began by designing a new and improved logo to replace the simpler one done by Jerry. He changed the hyphenated word Alter-Ego to two distinct words—Alter Ego—which was technically more correct. He re-did the title lettering in upper and lower case, and had it overlap the less clunky-looking logo mask he drew. In addition, he added a cover motto that would be used for the next five issues by two different editors: “Featuring: Comic Heroes of the Past, Present, and Future!” For some esoteric reason, he had that 36-page issue—and only that issue—printed on sheets that were the odd size of 8½" x 14". Those sheets were then machine-folded in the middle and saddle--stitched, to wind up with page dimensions of 7" by 8½"… compared with the 8½" x 11" of Jerry’s A/E #4.
“Inspired” by my take on The Spectre, Ronn had intended to write and draw his own DC hero revival, Dr. Mid-Nite this time… only to be informed by Julie Schwartz that National wouldn’t okay any more amateur “revivals,” by him, me, or anybody else, since a wholesale return of the JSA was imminent in the pages of its own comics. So Ronn re-designed the character’s costume and, voila, “The Eclipse” was born. He made his new hero the cover star of A/E #5 and drew a 10-page origin story, from a script by fellow fan Drury Moroz. Ronn’s artistic style wasn’t as polished as it would need to be for him to become a full-fledged professional, but it partook of some of the flair of Infantino and Kubert and became a new benchmark toward which fan-artists would strive for the next couple of years. Quite a few of us were convinced it was only a matter of time and a lucky break before we’d see Ronn Foss artwork in pro comics alongside that of Infantino, Kirby, et al.
While there was still a lot of fan art inside—by Foss himself, by future pro artists Mike Vosburg and Alan Weiss, and by Biljo White (his first illo for the fanzine with which he’d be closely associated for the next two years)—Ronn was also able to print a letter and artwork from Alley-winning pro Carmine Infantino: an inked head-sketch of Flash, Kid Flash, and spaceman Adam Strange.
Ronn made far better use of photos than Jerry had, including pics of several of us contributors, plus a frame from the serial King of the Rocket Men, a snapshot of Dick and Pat Lupoff as Captain and Mary Marvel at the 1960 Pittcon—and one of “Joy Holiday.” The latter character was a Christmas-time 1962 creation of Ronn’s, a masked young woman in a red-and-green costume with dark tights and a cape, intended to be a visual mascot of his various publications. By this time, a couple of his drawings of her had appeared in The Comicollector, and I’d gotten the inspiration to concoct a live version. So I’d cajoled Linda into posing for several photos as Joy, wearing a makeshift outfit composed partly of a red shirt of mine turned backwards. The photo Ronn printed in A/E #5 was reproduced way too small to do justice to it or to her, but he’d do better next time.
As for me—other than snapping that pic, my sole contribution to Ronn’s debut issue was a gag pin-up of the Bestest League that I sketched out on the kitchen table at our apartment. The fact that he decided to utilize it as a full page in #5 means that, some 200 issues later, I can say that something of mine has appeared in every single issue of Alter Ego, with or without the hyphen. Issue #5 was my personal equivalent of one of those bad-hop singles that had helped keep Joe DiMaggio’s record hitting streak going back in the summer of 1941.
18.
1963 would be a big year in my life, for better and for worse.
At the start of that summer, Linda and I finally broke up, though we parted on reasonably good terms. As Jack Lemmon said in the then-recent film The Apartment, “That’s how it crumbles, cookie-wise.” But the break-up naturally left me feeling even more rudderless than before.
I even had a spot of difficulty with my sainted mother that summer. I planned to take three newly offered graduate courses (in history) at SEMO, with a view toward eventually getting a master’s degree and teaching at a college; and I’d decided to room in Cape with a new friend, Bob Barney, who was also taking classes. When I broke the news to my mother that I wouldn’t be staying “at home” that summer, she wouldn’t so much as speak to me for a few days. But we soon made up. Breaking up is hard to do, in all areas of life.
The graduate history courses weren’t particularly noteworthy, except when one female professor—a very good teacher, whom I liked—all but accused me of plagiarism because she decided that a longish introductory sentence or two in a paper I wrote on Charles Beard’s controversial tome The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy were too polished to be original, and that I had failed to give credit to their ultimate source. I managed to convince her that I was just a reasonably decent writer, and I suppose in a way I should’ve been flattered. Well, at least I was back to making A’s, not B’s. I could still do it when I tried.
A couple of things that helped fill the void I was feeling that summer were a role in a college play—and a bowling tournament. Yet the juxtaposition of those two activities nearly added up to a head-on collision!
Although a grad student, I landed a spot in a summer SEMO production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The role was that of a traveling pedant who pretends to be the father of a far more important character, Lucretio. It’s not a major part, but, on his first entrance, the pedant has a nice little soliloquy, alone on the stage. I learned my lines, no problem.
No, the problem was that the Galaxies band had impetuously entered a Wednesday-night bowling tournament at a Cape Girardeau alley. For our fifth man, Gary roped in our old JHS buddy C.L. Slinkard (full name: Cleman Lafayette Slinkard III), who was a helluva bowler. I was the poorest player on the team, though I had my moments.
But there was, shall we call it, a scheduling conflict between the bowling tournament and play rehearsals, come Wednesday nights… and I invariably opted in favor of the former. The play’s director, Cape State’s drama instructor, grew understandably and increasingly livid over my once-a-week absences, threatening to replace me if I missed one more rehearsal. Unfortunately, the very next one fell on the same Wednesday night as our tournament finals—and I couldn’t let my teammates down, could I? Matter of fact, I got inspired and bowled better than usual that evening, and we wound up winning the top spot. The trophy I got  for my part in that tournament is the only sports award I ever won.
The very next night came the play’s sole dress rehearsal, the last chance to pull things together—so was the director going to take a chance on a guy he’d only seen speak his lines onstage a time or two previously? He decided to risk it, perhaps because the bowling tournament was finally over—and, for my part, I tried to reward his (desperate) faith in me by giving it my best shot. On a whim, though, I delivered my lines that evening for the first time with a heavy mock-Southern accent. (Maybe I decided the “pedant” was from southern Italy?).
When I finished my mini-soliloquy and shuffled offstage, I didn’t know what to expect. I had to walk past the director, and I felt it best to look down and not catch his eye. As I passed by him, he muttered just audibly, “You son of a bitch!” I sensed that was his way of telling me he was both surprised and pleased with my performance. I certainly deserved no better comment. After that, getting through the two performances before live audiences was a cakewalk… still with the bogus Southern accent, of course.
All that, and a bowling trophy, too.
For all of 1963, the Gaberlunzies—excuse me, the Galaxies—continued to pick and play, mostly at the Roll-O-Fun. I think by this time we all realized we were basically spinning our wheels and weren’t really going anywhere… but, what the hell, where was there to go, anyway? Maybe rhythm guitar Frank had a grand plan for his future; I’m damn sure the other three of us didn’t. But we did enjoy playing, at least most of the time. We’d make at most $10-$20 a night, though of course that was a lot more then than it is now. (Even the more successful Runaways evidently considered such sums a decent night’s work back then.) And we were just as likely, after we knocked off at 11:30, to blow much of our pay on six-packs of beer that we drank while sitting under the moon by some creek bank. Good times.
19.
The big comicbook events from National during that summer were the “Crisis on Earth-One!” and “Crisis on Earth-Two!”
In the second two-Flashes story, in The Flash #137, out that past spring, Julie, Gar, and penciler Carmine Infantino had had the Scarlet Speedsters rescue six retired members of Earth-Two’s Justice Society from an 1940s enemy, Vandal Savage. At story’s end, the seven JSAers agreed that they should come out of retirement.
And, only two months later, in Justice League of America #21 (Aug. 1963), a group of seven JSAers held a meeting in their “modernized headquarters.” Surprisingly, two of that septet, Doctor Fate and Hourman, hadn’t appeared in a comic since the mid-’40s! Ominous events on both alternate Earths led the JLA and JSA to join forces to battle a conclave made up of foes of both groups. After which, League and Society agreed to meet regularly to counter such inter-dimensional emergencies. And, indeed, annual “JLA-JSA team-ups” would be a regular feature in Justice League through the mid-1980s, when a Crisis of a whole new type would arise.
Fans like Jerry and yours truly were ecstatic. Just 2½ years before, we’d imagined the new JLA was the closest we’d ever get to seeing our childhood heroes, the JSA, in new action. And now we were to have regular appearances by the stalwarts of the All-Star Comics that had been the favorite comicbook of both of us, and of a number of other twenty- and thirty-something fans as well.
Marvel, for its part in summer of ’63, alongside a much-anticipated invasion of the surface world by the Sub-Mariner’s Atlantean forces in the first Fantastic Four Annual, debuted two “group comics” that would soon help FF challenge the primacy of JLA—and of National/DC in general. The Avengers #1 and The X-Men #1, both executed by the unstoppable duo of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, went on sale on the same day. The Avengers was a stand-out hit from the beginning. (How could it be anything else, being composed of Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp—every Marvel super-hero except loners Spider-Man and Dr. Strange and The Fantastic Four, who were already a group?) For its part, The X-Men, more in the FF mold, was an instant super-hero-team-in-a-box: five teenage mutants, each with a different super-power, and led by a slightly older mutant, the wheelchair-bound Professor X. (But it would take well over a decade, a major realignment after a cancellation, and a writer named Chris Claremont, for The X-Men to achieve its ultimate prominence in the field.)
Oddly, National had one other, very slightly earlier entry in the group category: “The Doom Patrol,” from writer Arnold Drake with art by Bruno Premiani. It, too, featured a wheelchair-bound leader (“The Chief”); he masterminded a trio of mismatched super-powered stalwarts that included a revamped version of the 1940s/50s hero Robotman, plus Elasti-Girl (who didn’t actually stretch but instead grew to gigantic size) and Negative Man (a sort of electrical-energy equivalent of The Human Torch). Drake, to the end of his life, insisted on believing that Stan Lee must’ve been tipped off by a spying freelancer about his upcoming series and rushed out The X-Men to compete with it. While no one can prove that wasn’t true, and I wasn’t on the scene at the time any more than you were, the idea of Lee and Kirby at that stage being concerned about a projected National series seems, to say the least, farfetched. And of course it ignores the fact that “Doom Patrol” itself had been clearly influenced by The Fantastic Four.
All the above activity shows that, by this time, National and Marvel were getting increasingly competitive in the super-hero sweepstakes, even if Marvel was still by far the smaller company—which, as I’ve said, even relied on a National-owned firm for distribution!  Whatever the inter-company motivations and skullduggery, heroic- comics fans were the undisputed winners—and none more so than Jerry Bails and yours truly, who had been pushing for this kind of comicbook milieu in public since Alter-Ego #1.
20.
When summer grad classes ended, I took my first trip outside the continental USA—and my first ever by plane—flying with recent roomie Bob Barney and another pal of his to Puerto Rico. Bob’s father was a high-ranking career military officer whose first wife had hailed from that U.S. island territory. The Colonel (as Bob always referred to him) had been in command of “Air Weather” coordination for the first-ever hydrogen bomb test, at Eniwetok atoll in 1952.
(Digression: Some weeks before our trip, Bob had taken me to visit his father, then in command of a USAF base in Illinois. The first thing I saw when we walked into his spacious living room was a four-foot-square, vivid color photograph of the aforementioned 1952 H-bomb explosion, exquisitely framed above a massive fireplace. The Colonel was clearly quite proud of his role in that undertaking. When, several years later, I had artist Herb Trimpe draw a same-size, framed H-bomb photo above the fireplace of General “Thunderbolt” Ross in Incredible Hulk #124, a skeptical reader or two wrote in to sniff loftily that nobody, not even a super-militarist like Ross, would ever hang such a picture in such a spot. I set them straight in a letters column. Sometimes truth is just as unlikely as fiction.)
Anyway, Bob, his buddy, and I stayed for three freeloading weeks with Bob’s gracious grandmother in Aguadilla, a town on the island’s western coast (not far from a U.S. base). We ate mostly rice and beans, the national dish, washed down by Cuba libres and daiquiris when we visited an endless supply of family friends. I also happily acquired a few Mexican reprints of U.S. comics, including that of Amazing Spider-Man #1. Oddly, I’ve no memory of how the Galaxies handled my absence as vocalist during the two or three weekends I was away… but at least they welcomed me back when I returned!
Sometime that fall, while back in Cape County for the weekend, I stopped by the apartment of Bob’s friend, whose name, alas, has long since gone AWOL in my mind. As we sat around gabbing, he insisted on playing a pair of albums by a new female singer he’d fallen in love with. I’d rarely been over-enthusiastic about any “songstress” except Ella Fitzgerald, so I paid zero conscious attention as we conversed. The albums were just so much white noise.
However, the singer had obviously gotten to me on a subliminal level… because, a day or so later, I walked into Shivelbine’s Music Store on Broadway (where Gary had worked for a time), listened more carefully to those albums (you could do that back then, in private booths), and promptly purchased them both with my scant funds. The performer’s name was Barbra Streisand. I was now enamored of two female vocalists.
21.
I returned to Fox High that September, for the second of what would eventually be three years there.
The only class I really looked forward to teaching, ever, was one I taught that school year. It was made up of “advanced” sophomores. I saw them as being on a college track, so I tried to elevate the curriculum a bit to prepare them for literature they might encounter in higher education. I talked the administration into having them purchase paperback copies of Edith Hamilton’s well-known work Mythology, which would give them a leg up on literary references and the like, both Graeco-Roman and Norse.
I forget most of whatever else I presented to that class, except that I also hectographed copies for them of William Butler Yeats’ one-act play On Baile’s Strand, which I feel contains some of the most beautiful language this side of Shakespeare. I’m not sure I made any converts with Yeats’ take on the Irish hero Cuchulain, or with a few other items I came up with, but the students responded well to Mythology. Matter of fact, the word kind of got out, and two of the very brightest senior girls soon arranged (with their study hall teacher’s consent) to sit in on my sophomore class so they could be exposed to the same material prior to college. But the principal, exercising the time-honored wisdom of so many administrators, got wind of the girls’ brazen attempt to do something a bit off the grid and, naturally, forced them to return to yawning through study hall for the remainder of the year.
(I might as well mention here, before I go any further: Perhaps my best student ever, in my several years of teaching, was a perky blonde sophomore who was in that advanced class. Her name was Jean Maxey. Not that we always had the best teacher/student relationship. Once, when angry with me about something or other, she snapped at me that “The other kids are right! You do look like a hamster!” But she was both intelligent and funny. You’ll read a bit more about her in Volume Two, if you’re so disposed.)
Footnote: The weird thing is, when I would try teaching basically the same material to a similarly-IQ’d group of sophomores the following school year, the whole thing would go over like the proverbial lead balloon. All that did was draw a line under the one bright spot in my four (later five) years of teaching high school.
But that’s getting, and not for the first time, a bit ahead of myself….
Besides comics, films, pop music, and the like, I also spent as much time reading as I could manage. When I thought about it, I realized I was reading far less fiction than I formerly had... a trend that has only accelerated up to the present. I veered between things like John Steinbeck’s popular road-memoir Travels with Charley, and reissued pulp material such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and ancient classics (especially translations of Greek epics and tragedy and a lyrical translation of the Wagnerian opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung). One fictional exception was the book that became my all-time favorite novel, Joseph Heller’s explosively popular Catch-22. Many admirers focused on the latter’s anti-war attitude, but I was only moderately sympathetic to that side of it; mostly I viewed the book as a surrealistic satire that mercilessly skewered bureaucracy, and as such it grabbed my heart as well as my funnybone.
22.
On Friday, November 22, all Fox High classes were interrupted by the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. I’d been too young to vote for or against him in 1960, though I’d become moderately enthusiastic about him since. He had seemed so vital after the grandfatherly mutterings of Eisenhower—a view I’ve somewhat revised over the intervening years. Like the rest of the nation, I mourned the gunning down of our nation’s President, whether by a lone assassin or by half the CIA.
That night, anxious to escape our apartment’s four walls, I drove up to the cocktail lounge to listen to Joe Murphy’s jazz organ, and probably sing a song or two. But it was a joyless occasion.
And not merely because November 22 also happened to be my 23rd birthday.
Fox High’s long-scheduled PTA carnival was held the very next evening. By an odd coincidence, the school’s music teacher—David Butler, also JHS, class of ’58—and I had arranged to sing an odd little duet at that event. Taking the parts of President Kennedy and Soviet premier Khrushchev, we’d be doing a light-hearted send-up of the previous year’s Cuban Missile Crisis. I forget which of us was to be JFK, and which Nikita K.… but the song would be Irving Berlin’s “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” from the classic musical Annie Get Your Gun, with new lyrics I had written, including:
I can shoot a missile faster than a pistol…
I can shoot a rocket, put it in your pocket…
And of course the escalating back-and-forths of:
No you can’t!
Yes I can!
No you can’t!
Yes I can!
NO YOU CAN’T!
YES I CAN! YES I CAN! YES I CANNN!
David and I had practiced the number a time or two, and I expect it would’ve come off as moderately amusing. But of course, we never performed it. The PTA carnival that year was a somber affair for all concerned.
23.
Either shortly before or after the events in Dealey Plaza, I had purchased train tickets to Detroit for the following week, accepting an invitation to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with Jerry and Sondra Bails. While a general pall hung over everything—the shooting of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24 had just made things gloomier, if that was possible—we still managed to enjoy socializing for a couple of days. They took me out for dinner one night to a restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, my first (very brief) “visit” to Canada.
While I was their guest, Jerry showed me a new fanzine he’d received: the self-styled “Texas Trio’s” Star-Studded Comics #4, featuring a full-length comics story starring a newly minted super-hero group dubbed “The Liberty Legion.” It was composed of a half-dozen heroes previously created by those three and other talented fans, in a format based on 1940s “Justice Society” yarns and featuring individual hero chapters illustrated by Foss, Green, and White, among others. The issue was a minor landmark of its time. There was, of course, no way its originators could’ve known that, in the previous decade, I had written and drawn no fewer than two “Liberty Legions” for my own amusement. (That’s why I’d have no qualms, come 1975, about using that name for a cadre of World War II heroes I assembled in Marvel’s The Invaders. I knew I had been there first.)
Jerry owned a growing collection of comicbooks, original comic art, and other treasures I’d never seen, and I perused as many of them as I could before hopping a train back to the St. Louis area. The real eye-opener, though, was a lone piece of paper he impishly thrust at me, to gauge my reaction. He referred to it as a “script” of Stan Lee’s that the Marvel editor had recently sent him.
It was just a single typed sheet headed “PLOT SYNOPSIS FOR FANTASTIC FOUR #8 ‘Prisoners of Puppet Master!’” and consisting of three longish paragraphs telling penciler Jack Kirby what to draw on the story’s initial 13 pages. The paragraphs summarized the motivations and actions in a fair amount of detail, but provided no precise panel descriptions or pacing, let alone any dialogue or captions. This, Jerry said, was a carbon copy of what Lee had handed Kirby as the basis for penciling the first part of Fantastic Four #8 (Nov. 1962), and was evidently the way most if not all Marvel comics were produced at that time.
Having previously seen full comicbook scripts by  Gardner Fox, with their screenplay-like detail, I was frankly gobsmacked. After reading that page, my response to Jerry was:
“That’s a helluva way to write a comicbook!”
Clearly, the Marvel method of handling the comics- scripting process was quite different from how things were run at industry leader National. Still, I had read and enjoyed FF #8. Perhaps the proof, as a hungry cliché-maker once said, was in the pudding. I filed the information about that Marvel “script” away in my mind as mildly interesting, though nothing that was ever likely to make any difference to me, one way or the other. Jerry, for his part, soon retyped that page verbatim onto a ditto master and published it, giving the outside world its first glimpse ever of the “Marvel style” of doing comics.
24.
Near year’s end, Ronn Foss published his second (and, as it turned out, final) Alter Ego: issue #6. This one ran 40 pages, with standard 1960s comicbook dimensions of 7" by 9". Its cover depicted most of one of my all-time favorite comics covers: Tor, Vol. 1, #3 (St. John, 1953), printed from the black-&-white original Joe Kubert art. In the lower corner was a photo of Kubert at his drawing board. The issue also featured a several-page postcard exchange between Ronn and Kubert, the first pro interview ever printed in A/E, if not in all of fandom.
Additional highlights included an article (plus photos)  by one Fred Patten about a group of SF/comics “double- fans,” himself included, who’d attended the costume masquerade at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle attired as members of the Justice Society. In addition, a fan-writer whose name was likewise new to me—Tom Fagan—contributed a wonderful, indescribable one-page piece of fantasy-fiction titled “Warlock.” The Alley Awards for 1962 were annotated by Jerry himself this go-round, with Fantastic Four winning “best comic-book” and Spider-Man’s origin “best short story,” but with Schwartz, Fox, Infantino, and (inker) Murphy Anderson taking individual-award honors. Fan awards had been added this time, with Alter-Ego #1–4 taking top place… even though #1–3 had come out in ’61, not ’62. My own Fawcett- heroes piece in Xero #9 placed fourth in the “articles” category, while “Bestest League of America” came in first in the amateur “strips” division, and my “Reincarnation of The Spectre” placed first in the “fiction” category. (Both the latter, of course, had actually come out in 1961.)
I made up for my lone pinup in A/E #5 with two entries in the sixth issue. One, a nod to my off-and-on academic side, was a 3-page parody of literary/archaeological scholarship titled “Schwartzian Epic,” purporting to be a professorial paper published in 5263 A.D. examining one of the few literary artifacts that remained from the 20th century: a single issue of Justice League of America. Linda Rahm had contributed to it before our breakup and was duly credited.
But my major effort for #6 was a 10-page comics story titled “Bestest League of America Meets Da Frantic Four.”
In Ronn’s Comicollector #7, Grass Green had scripted and drawn a hectographed takeoff on The Fantastic Four. “Da Frantic Four” had been a funny-as-hell response to “Bestest League,” only better illustrated, arguably better written. With Grass’ blessing, I scribed and mostly drew, twice-up in pencil and ink, an encounter between the two groups; I then turned the pages over to Grass, who contributed the art for the Frantic Four part of the yarn and also rewrote (and improved) some of the dialogue I’d concocted for his co-creations. The yarn was no masterpiece, but I’ve always been fairly proud of that ten-pager. It seemed like a good time for me to retire the Bestest League. Henceforth, there would be no more “BLA” stories from me, only a gag cartoon now and again.
That issue’s letters section was headed by a larger snapshot of Linda as Joy Holiday, from our earlier photo session… as well as new illustrations sent by Steve Ditko (Spider-Man and Doctor Strange), Curt Swan (Superman), and Russ Manning (of his new Gold Key co-creation Magnus, Robot Fighter). And there was a letter from Stan Lee, too, expressing his appreciation for Spider-Man’s origin winning a 1962 award.
Alter Ego #6 was, by and large, a true accomplishment, topping off an ever-improving parade of issues over the past two-plus years.
25.
But for Ronn, enough was enough. Like Grass earlier, he’d decided he wanted to concentrate on his artwork rather than on editing and publishing. Feeling, as Jerry had, that A/E should go on, he worked out an arrangement for a new editor/publisher:
Biljo White.
Bill (okay, Biljo) had already published several ditto’d fanzines of his own, to spotlight amateur creations of his such as The Eye, a crimefighter whose helmet/mask was a big eye-shaped orb. He decided he’d be able to handle editing and publishing fandom’s most prominent fanzine—if I would agree to assist him, as I had Jerry. Since I was already working on an A/E article about Fawcett’s Marvel Family, doing research at the White House of Comics on a trip or two to Columbia, I readily agreed. Biljo himself began working on a 7-page comic story introducing a new pair of heroes: “Alter and Captain Ego,” which embodied the fanzine’s title in a teenage boy and an alien super-hero whose symbiotic relationship suggested, while not aping, the one between Billy Batson and Captain Marvel.
To introduce the two of us as the new editorial team to the prospective readership, Biljo wrote, illustrated, ran off, and mailed out a several-paged hectographed news release. It showed a costumed and aviator-helmeted caricature of himself that he’d been using for a while in fanzines: “Captain Biljo.” This time he drew me as the loyal “Corporal Roy.” With that mailing, we were off and running…
…only to stumble, right out of the gate. Within weeks, Biljo suddenly had an epiphany not unlike those of Grass and Ronn before him: While he scripted his own amateur comics, he was primarily an artist, not a writer or editor… so, to my surprise, he soon contacted me out of the blue and asked if I would become A/E’s editor/publisher. He volunteered to help me by supplying art as needed. I thought about it for a day or two. It would be a big investment of time and money (I still hadn’t nearly as much as I wanted of either). But in the end I bit the bullet and agreed to take over Alter Ego starting with #7, which I figured I’d get out sometime in 1964.
Third time lucky: After the fanzine had gone through two previous editors, the prospective #3 would be its original co-“editor.”
Now all I had to do was put the damn thing together and get it printed, paid for, and mailed out.
(Another fun footnote/collect them all: Biljo was the designated editor/publisher of Alter Ego for such a short time that, in later years, he totally forgot he had ever planned to become so, and in fact he occasionally denied such an intention altogether. I’m not sure that even my showing him his ditto’d announcement from “Captain Biljo and Corporal Roy” totally convinced him otherwise.)
26.
The weeks after the JFK assassination had been filled in the media with excited mentions of a new rock’n’roll group in England called the Beatles, whose music was beginning to flood the U.S. radio airwaves. I recall a few girls (including the aforementioned Jean Maxey) bouncing through Fox High’s halls singing “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” at the top of their teenage voices. They didn’t make the group or its music sound all that appetizing. For some reason, I hadn’t yet heard the group on the radio.
I was aware, though, that my sister Katy, who was attending Deaconess Nursing School at a big St. Louis hospital, really liked these mop-headed Brits; so I decided I’d buy her their just-released album Meet the Beatles for Christmas. Naturally, just to see what all the fuss was about, I first played it for myself. I detested (and still detest) the lead song, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” But it was followed by a raucous number titled “I Saw Her Standing There.” That one really got to me, as did the track that led off the flip side: “Don’t Bother Me.” One song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; one by George Harrison.
I wound up playing that LP so often over the next few days that in the end I kept that copy for myself and bought Katy a new one. (Incidentally, she herself quit nursing school a couple of years later, just short of earning her cap, to marry her longtime beau and former JHS classmate Tony Kirn, who soon became an executive at Caterpillar. They’ve enjoyed a wonderful marriage and raised three fine daughters—Jodi, Natalie, and my godchild Nicole—with a number of grand-nieces and grand-nephews along the way. I couldn’t have been blessed with a nicer crew of relatives if I’d sent out to central casting.)
Anyway, while I never became a Beatles fan to the same degree that I was of Elvis, it was the most enthusiastic I’d been about any musical act in years, as American rock’n’roll had mostly settled down into a becalmed ocean of Frankie Avalons and guys named Bobby, and as Presley’s increasingly formulized movies contained fewer and fewer songs worth listening to twice. Or even once.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the Beatles helped spell the end for our Galaxies band. The Liverpudians’ harmonizing, in particular, was something we couldn’t really approximate, since of the four of us only I sang (although occasionally Gary and I would do a novelty-song duet like “Hey Paula” or “Speedy Gonzales”). Our band sputtered to a halt early in ’64. Well, after nearly three years of getting nowhere on roller skates, we would probably have broken up before long anyway.
Still, despite all its problems and frustrations, I look back on my time with the Gaberlunzies/Galaxies as one of the peak experiences of my life, bar none. If somebody held a six-gun to my head and demanded to know which I’d rather have been for the rest of my life—a comicbook writer or a rock’n’roll singer—my answer would probably be the same one John (“Chance”) Wayne gave in the 1959 Western Rio Bravo, when asked which of his two deputies—Dean (“Dude”) Martin or Ricky (“Colorado”) Nelson—was faster on the draw:
“I wouldn’t want to have to live on the difference.”
A few years later, I’m told, our ex-guitarist Rocky acted for a while as a sort of “enforcer,” beating up people for local crime figures… so I guess he hadn’t really “mellowed” after reform school as much as Gary and I had hoped. He eventually spent time in prison, and at some point after our band split up he was actually arrested briefly for murder, a case covered in detail in one of those lurid national true-crime magazines; apparently, though, he turned out to be 100% innocent, and the real killer was soon arrested. In his later years, he finally did calm down and, when he died in 2018, the same year as Gary, it was noted in his obituary that he had often played his guitar—and even sung—in his local church. I couldn’t help wondering what his singing voice sounded like, since I’d never heard him warble a single note. Not bad, I’ll bet. Thanks, Rock, for holding back in the early ’60s and giving another guy a chance to have fun. I’m glad you found some peace in your later time on this Earth, and I only wish the four of us had all been able to get back together just once more for our own “last hurrah.”
We’d probably have done “Johnny B. Goode.”
27.
One non-musical, non-comics-related interest that occupied my time by late ’63 had to do with, of all things… Egyptology.
Fact is, I came within a few thousand bucks of studying to be an Egyptologist… spiritual heir to Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tut’s tomb, and to Carter Hall, the 1940s Hawkman, who was a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian prince.
I was one of a handful of people who showed up for a pre-advertised lecture on Egyptian hieroglyphics given by a retired Washington U. professor in his St. Louis apartment. The elderly academic, whose name I think was Kessler (but I can’t be 100% certain after six decades), wasn’t himself an Egyptologist or even an archaeologist, but a man of the physical sciences. Over the decades, though, he’d become intrigued by the written language of ancient Egypt and had taught himself to read it. Having always been mesmerized by the images I saw of same, whether in histories or movies or comics, after the lecture I made arrangements for him to give me private instruction in hieroglyphics, once a week, for a smallish sum.
I took those lessons very seriously, driving in from the “suburbs” and investing in a weighty and expensive copy (which I had to special-order) of Alan Gardiner’s huge 1927 book Egyptian Grammar. At one point, my “homework” assignment was to drive to the St. Louis Museum of Art, in the middle of Forest Park, and copy all the many hieroglyphics inscribed on the sarcophagus of its resident mummy. The Prof was too frail to expend that effort himself. So I stood mummy-side, for an hour or more at a time, carefully copying each owl, each cartouche, each squiggle, incorporating them into an over-all illustration of the sarcophagus itself. When my instructor translated it, it was, as expected, just a variation on the usual “Book of the Dead” incantations found on many another mummy case. But I was proud of having done it, and have held onto the end product ever since.
One evening, I drove him to a lecture being given by John A. Wilson of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the foremost U.S. center for the study of Egyptology. Wilson was the author of a major ancient-Egyptian  history. Afterward, my instructor introduced me to him—though I doubt he himself had ever met Dr. Wilson before. He mentioned my budding interest in Egyptology, and Wilson suggested casually that perhaps I should apply to the Oriental Institute for admission as a graduate student. I also made a small donation to the reason for the night’s event: moving the enormous temple of the Pharaoh Ramses II (“Ozymandias”) at Abu Simbel a distance of several miles, so it wouldn’t wind up underwater when the Egyptians (with Soviet financing) completed their gigantic Aswan Dam… which they would do in 1970.
While I possessed in 1963-64 (or at any other time in my life) scant knowledge of Egyptian history or archaeology, only a budding interest, my instructor encouraged me to submit an application to the Oriental Institute, and wrote his own follow-up letter of recommendation to Dr. Wilson. The early result, to my shock, was a letter admitting me to study at the Oriental Institute in the Windy City. They must not have been exactly inundated with fully qualified applicants!
Very swiftly, however, reality set in. Clearly, there’d be no scholarship money to help pay for my future schooling, or for eating while I was doing so. I had no savings, and my parents certainly couldn’t have helped out even if I’d asked them to. So, after a bit of reflection, I wrote to the Institute thanking them sincerely but declining the invitation.
Thus ended my brief flirtation with becoming an  Egyptologist. Just as well. The end result would probably have been less like an Indiana Jones film than like a remake of Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
28.
Sometime in ’63, I finally completed a project I’d first mentioned to Jerry Bails in a letter back in August ’62. Using as a model the handful of National/DC scripts I’d seen, I wrote “on spec” (= speculation) a script for Justice League of America—the only unsolicited comicbook script I ever wrote in my entire adult life. As bait that I hoped might intrigue Julius Schwartz, I used in it a character he and Fox had co-created. In JLA #16 (Dec. 1962), a major plot point had been that that issue’s first two chapters had actually been a “JLA” comicbook story written and illustrated by “one of [the JLA’s] greatest fans—Jerry Thomas!”
Naturally, Jerry and I had been thrilled that Gar, with Julie’s blessing, had clearly named a character (albeit an offstage one) after the two of us, taking his first name and my last. At the time I figured that was probably the closest I’d ever get to being in the comicbook business.
Now, though, I had written my own “JLA” script. It turned “Jerry Thomas” into an on-stage teenage fan who had scribed and drawn a second “JLA” tale—this one guest-starring my parody Bestest League—only this time, because Jerry T. had accidentally stumbled upon this weird pen that had popped up from another dimension, anything he drew as happening to the BLA actually happened to the JLA! Thus, when he drew the Bestest Leaguers getting tripped up and humiliated by their foes, the same calamities befell the Justice Leaguers. I mailed the story in to Julie, saying that if he liked it he could use it, for whatever pittance he wanted to pay—maybe just pages of original art. (It didn’t occur to me that, by submitting such a script, I was actually vying to compete with Gardner Fox, since if Julie bought my yarn, it might well have meant one fewer JLA script Gar would get paid for. Ah, the arrogance and indifference of youth!)
I don’t think Julie ever got around to sending me even a brief, vague rejection letter, let alone returning my script. And I’d been too dumb to keep a carbon copy, in those  pre-photocopier days.
Still, Julie must’ve liked something he saw in it, because, late that year, I received a package and letter from Gardner, relaying a message from Julie to me. Gar informed me that Elongated Man, the Plastic Man-influenced supporting hero from The Flash, was to receive his own solo feature in Detective Comics, behind “Batman.” Fox had already written the first “Elongated Man” entry (which would debut in Detective #327, cover-dated May ’64). He said his schedule was currently too full for him to scribe the 10-page feature every month, so Julie had authorized him to invite me to take a crack at it. Fox enclosed the carbon copy of his own script. It was a good one, in which the elastic Ralph Dibny expects to be lionized, since he’s become the first of National/DC’s masked heroes to reveal his secret identity to the world; but the world clearly has more important things on its mind, and no one recognizes him or even his name. My favorite sequence occurs when Ralph elongates his ear so that it stretches down a chimney into a cabin to eavesdrop on several holed-up crooks. One of them spots it and exclaims: “An ear—in the fireplace!” (As splendidly drawn by Carmine Infantino, that was a moment worthy of Jack Cole’s rubbery creation of the ’40s.)
I set to work at once. Since I knew Julie definitely wanted to put the “detective” back in Detective Comics, as he was doing with his “New Look Batman,” I had the criminal mastermind in my tale plan a heist consciously inspired by a Sherlock Holmes story I loved, “The Case of the Red-Headed League.” (I was probably influenced by the fact that Dibny had red hair.) I titled the script “The Curious Case of the Carrot-Top Club.” I ended it with an in-joke: The curator of the museum whose convoluted robbery Ralph prevents is none other than Carter Hall, who is secretly Hawkman. I finished the script in a couple of days and shipped it off to Julie.
Then… silence. Weeks went by, and I didn’t hear back. Eventually, I asked Gardner what, if anything, he could tell me. Gar simply replied that Julie had told him my script “wasn’t quite what he had had in mind,” and that was all I ever learned.
Well, maybe the writing wasn’t quite up to snuff—I was a rank beginner, after all, and had expected Julie to edit the hell out of my script, as he often did with Fox’s. But I felt it was reasonably inventive. Perhaps, because I’d based it overtly on an Arthur Conan Doyle yarn, Julie may have worried there’d be legal problems over that borrowing; and maybe there would have been. The point is, I never learned what I might’ve done wrong—or right. (Years later, when I spent a fair amount of time with Julie at conventions and even over dinner, I should have asked him if he recalled anything about that story… but to tell the truth, on those occasions, thoughts about Elongated Man or the Carrot-Top Club never even occurred to me.)
29.
At least, as 1964 got moving, things were looking up a bit in my social life.
I began dating an attractive and super-smart young woman who roomed in the same Washington U. honors dorm as Linda: Marlene Jahss, a 5' brunette from Rockford, Illinois. In fact, we were set up on a blind date by Linda’s high-spirited roommate Mimi Kay. Mar, as I called her, was studying “European intellectual history,” whatever that was/is. By coincidence, both she and Linda would earn Woodrow Wilson fellowships to carry them through faraway graduate schools. I was definitely the academic under-achiever in that little non-triangle.
A bit earlier, a handful of Linda’s and Mar’s fellow  honors-dorm dwellers had read one of the Marvel comics I happened to have with me one night, and asked if I had any more comics they could read in their spare time, just for relaxation. Next trip, I brought along (and actually loaned them for a few days!) several of my Marvels. When they returned those and asked me for still more comics, I was fresh out of new Marvels so I dropped off a handful of DC mags (Justice League and the like). When they returned those, the young women told me they hadn’t enjoyed those comics nearly as much as the earlier batches, and could I possibly bring some more of those next time?
I think that may have been when the difference between Marvel’s titles and the rest of the pack really began to sink in on me in a major way. The other comics, as far as those brainy young women were concerned, were strictly “kid stuff”; the Marvels weren’t.
Mar and I were a couple through her graduation that spring, but we both knew that soon afterward she planned to leave St. Louis for good. That was just the way it was. On a whim, we decided to take a trip together that summer before going our separate ways, and she suggested we spend a month driving around Mexico. I had already arranged to take more graduate classes, this time at the University of Missouri in Columbia—but hell, that could wait a year, right? Mexico it was! Both of us skimmed Berlitz books to acquire a smidgin of Spanish.
That July, after stopovers in Natchez (Mississippi) and New Orleans, we drove into Mexico via Laredo, Texas, with permits for a one-month stay. Credit cards were not yet ubiquitous, and neither of us had one; with my teacher’s salary of circa $5000 a year, I doubt I’d have qualified had I applied. So we were on our own with whatever cash we’d brought along, translated into pesos.
In addition, being a somewhat finicky eater, I had never in my life tasted a single bite of Mexican food; I don’t even recall ever having seen a Mexican restaurant in St. Louis back then, forget about in Cape Girardeau County. And I certainly didn’t have enough money to “eat American” for a month south of the border. As it happened, my very first taste of Mexican cuisine occurred in Monterrey, in the mountains a day’s drive inside Mexico. I don’t recall what I had that evening—but I loved it! I quickly added Mexican food in general to cheeseburgers and pizza as among my culinary favorites. And I quickly developed a real taste for jalapeños. Eventually, none of those three foods would seem quite complete without them.
Because of my twin interests in history and mythology, I was enthusiastic about the spots Mar particularly wanted to visit: first Tula, the Mesoamerican site with its giant statues of Toltec warriors… then the Pyramid of the Sun, whose 248 rough stone steps we climbed to stand on its flat upper level (the two of us got into some banal argument atop it, and didn’t speak to each other as we inched our way back down)… the floating gardens of Xochimilco… and finally, Cholula, the now-subterranean pyramid larger than any in Egypt, so huge that a Catholic church actually occupies the hill directly above its apex and is dwarfed by comparison in any schematic illustration.
The most interesting non-archeological site we happened on came early on, near Tamazunchale, still north of Mexico City. In that smallish town, we encountered a resident American ex-serviceman who had stopped there overnight a decade earlier and had never left. (He, like other English-speakers, invariably referred to the town as “Thomas-and-Charley.”) On a sizable parcel of land outside it, he showed us several indifferent locals at work, allegedly but oh so slowly fixing up the palatial hacienda and stone-waterfall-laden gardens of a wealthy man who had died a few years before, leaving behind a will that provided money for their restoration and preservation. The residents of Tamazunchale were hopeful that, when renovations were complete, the place might become a tourist location. On the other hand, as long as the reconstruction remained a work in progress, it furnished ongoing employment for the locals. I found myself wondering if, given those circumstances, the restoration would ever be completed. (I still don’t know the answer to that.)
Much of the time, I’ll admit—at least while I was driving around, with the Mexican petrol causing my 1960 Chevy to sputter and lurch like a Stutz Bearcat on its last legs—I had Alter Ego on my mind. I wanted #7 and its contents to be eligible for the 1964 Alley Awards, which meant copies had to be in the U.S. mails by a certain date that autumn. And I was painfully aware that I had yet to begin any of the hard work of retyping articles, let alone pasting them up—nothing beyond commissioning a few pieces, assembling my notes on Fawcett’s Marvel Family, and knowing Biljo’s “Alter and Captain Ego” comic story would take up seven of its pages.
Partly because of my preoccupation, Mar and I wound up sitting through a movie whose title translated as Santo vs. the Vampire Women. Santo was a real-life but masked Mexican wrestler who, besides also starring in potboiler films, had his own (weekly!) comicbook done via fumetti: photos doctored by additional drawing. Indeed, he was a virtual one-man industry down there. The film, screened in a concrete-block movie house filled to the gills with locals of all ages, consisted mostly (so far as we could tell, with our smidgen of Spanish) of Santo having to defeat vampires in battle, then hustle back to the ring for his latest match. In the climax, Santo’s final wrestling opponent is a vampire, and he’s in for the fight of his life. Nice touch.
I managed to pick up a handful of Mexican comics during the trip, both originals and reprints of U.S. material. However, even though the very first Conan-featuring comicbook of all time, anywhere—La Reina de la Costa Negra (Queen of the Black Coast)—was launched in Mexico that same year, I didn’t stumble across any copies of it.  Not that, at that time, I had any idea who Conan the  Cimmerian was.
Around the end of August, Mar and I returned to the States. We had missed the Republican convention, which had nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President—likewise the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that would basically usher America into the Vietnam War. One of the first songs I heard on the car radio after re-crossing the border into New Mexico was “Where Did Our Love Go?,” a catchy new recording by a previously unknown girl trio called The Supremes. (Little did I imagine that, a few years later, I’d be watching them perform in New York’s famed Copacabana nightclub.) Also, at the first U.S. convenience store we stopped at, I bought a copy of Justice League of America #30, the finale of the “Crisis on Earth-Three” two-parter that introduced a third parallel dimension, this one inhabited by criminal equivalents of the JLAers.
I was back in my own world again.
30.
A couple of days after we reached Jackson, Mar continued by bus to her parents’ home in northern Illinois—and, fond as we were of each other at our parting, I’m sure we’d both have scoffed in  disbelief if anyone had told  us we’d ever run into each other again.
One of the ways I’d arranged to restore my personal finances, which I’d known would be sorely depleted by my half of our Mexican trip expenses, was to sell many of the old comics I had collected; I suspect that’s when I sold even my recently completed run of All-Star. I had put ads in a few fanzines. There was this naïve philosophy going around in fandom at that time: If you sold your collection, you owed it to your fellow fans to keep your prices as low as possible, so the vintage comics could be spread around and thus reach many different fans. My always indulgent mother had volunteered to handle the sales and mailing for me while I was away. When I got back six weeks later, I learned that most of my comics had been scooped up right off the bat by just one buyer: Howard Rogofsky, a dealer noted in fandom at the time for charging the highest prices around. I learned a basic economic lesson: If you charge too little for something, someone will simply vacuum it up to re-sell it at a higher profit. But I had no quarrel with Rogofsky. I was the one who had acted stupidly.
As soon as I got back to Jackson, I also looked up Gary Friedrich, who had become assistant editor of the town’s new weekly newspaper The Jackson Pioneer, and his editor/boss Tom Stites, who’d previously worked for the respected Kansas City Star. I ended up writing two articles about my trip for the paper, though I changed Marlene to “Barney” therein to avoid scandalizing my hometown. I started out with an account of that curious day in Thomas-and- Charlie… excuse me, Tamazunchale. Gary informed me later that Stites told him my “Memos from Mexico” were the pieces he was proudest of publishing in the course of his career thus far, which was nice to hear. Even though I got paid little (or maybe nothing) for them, that had me floating on Cloud 9. Praise from a professional news- paper editor!
Ere long, Stites split for greener pastures, and Gary became by his own account the youngest (and most poorly paid) newspaper editor in the state of Missouri. But he relished the job, even though he had raised a minor tempest, earlier that year, by scribing an anti-Beatles editorial, partly perhaps out of loyalty to Elvis; it had garnered him hate mail—shortly before he became an avid Beatles fan himself, of course. Gary also reveled in printing articles and editorials that outraged the city fathers. In some ways, his being editor of the Pioneer wasn’t that far removed from the night we had all donned grass skirts and wiggled our butts in front of the judges of that Homecomers talent contest.
Meanwhile, though, that 80-hours-a-week job gave Gary a lot of writing experience. It would come in handy a couple of years down the road.
31.
I had my own first real “comicbook windfall” around the start of the ’64-’65 school year as well. On our first day back, a fellow teacher told me he’d attended an auction down in Cape Girardeau a few weeks earlier. Up for bid was a laundry-canister filled with approximately one hundred 1940s comics someone had stumbled across. My friend bid a few bucks on it, figuring I would probably later buy them from him… but an older gent outbid him and gave the bin-full of comics to his junior-high-age grandson. My teacher pal was alert enough to get the boy’s name and address, though, and he turned it over to me.
I wrote the boy and, after getting some idea of the kind of comics that were in the cylinder, I said I’d like to buy the lot from him. He said he couldn’t sell them, since they were a gift from his grandfather. I swallowed hard and offered him $100 for the contents of the canister, sight unseen. Suddenly the lad decided he could sell them to me after all, since his grandsire had told him they were his to do whatever he wanted with. So, next weekend, I drove down to Cape and we made the deal. He was ecstatic, and I was hoping I hadn’t fleeced myself.
Inside I discovered roughly a half-dozen early-’40s issues of All-Star Comics, plus more DC and other-company comics, mostly super-heroes. I needed the All-Stars to begin to restock my collection of that title, since I’d decided I had made a grave mistake parting with them. The other comics in the canister I mostly sold, and wound up with a reasonable profit. That turned out to be the only sizable 1940s-comics buy I ever made, but it was a good one.
32.
Naturally, as soon as Mar had split for home, I had also gotten to work on Alter Ego #7, first in Jackson and soon in my new one-bedroom furnished apartment in Lemay, a suburb at the southern tip of St. Louis County and just fifteen minutes from Fox High. My new apartment-mate was my old friend Albert “Bud” Tindall from JHS, class of ’60. Bud already had plans to go on to law school, but for some forgotten reason he was first going to teach high school for a year. At that time he drove a wine-dark 1957 Thunderbird hardtop convertible… the last year of the legendary two-seaters. To me it was a thing of sublime beauty. Its only drawback: Not long before his osteopath father had acquired it as a graduation gift for him, it had been in a major collision. It had been totally and beautifully rebuilt… but its T-bird motor had been replaced with that of a Volkswagen, so it had no more pickup than my parents’ former ’52 Chevy. Even so, it was glorious to behold—and to ride around in.
It was a good life—except for the teaching, of course.
For the school year had barely started when Bud and I proceeded to get into a bit of politics-related hot water.
Neither of us was rabidly “political,” but both of us favored President Lyndon B. Johnson in the election coming up in November of ’64, because we figured Arizona right-winger Goldwater might well get us into a war over in Asia and LBJ was obviously way too smart to do anything like that. One night in Jackson, just before the school year began, we playfully co-wrote a humorous parody starring the super-hero “Goldwater-Man”—nothing particularly vicious even by that era’s standards. It was published in the surviving Jackson weekly paper soon afterward, and we thought no more about it.
Surprisingly, on one of the first days of the new school year, we were both summoned up the hill to the office of Fox’s Superintendent. Someone in Jackson had mailed him a clipping of our “Goldwater-Man” piece with an accompanying note that pointedly asked: “Did you know two of your teachers are indulging in political activity?”
Far from being apologetic, Bud and I defended ourselves vigorously. Freedom of speech and all that—all the more so since that piece had been published in our hometown, 100 miles away, not in Arnold where some locals might possibly give a good damn whether their kids’ teachers planned to vote for Johnson or Goldwater. All we would say to mollify the Super was that we had no current plans to do anything else politics-wise between then and the election—though we made no promises. He dismissed us with a frown and a few words of vague admonition.
Still, he must’ve shown us the envelope in which the article had arrived, since otherwise how would I have learned the name of the man who’d sent him that clipping? He turned out to be a prominent Jackson member of the ultra- right John Birch Society. Come the very next weekend, I knocked on the guy’s door, and when he answered the two of us had a few words… mostly mine. He was taken aback at having been outed and confronted in person, instead of remaining safe behind the anonymity of a poison pen letter (the 1964 equivalent of the Internet). Anyway, having said my piece so he’d know I wasn’t cowed by his tactics, I took my leave. And that was the end of that.
That may well be around the time Bud decided that, law school or no, he was outta Fox at year’s end. Me, I needed another push.
So naturally I got one. But it took its own sweet time in arriving.
33.
Meanwhile, I was really pouring my heart and soul into Alter Ego #7. I assembled its layout pages at our kitchen table in Lemay… typing out all the articles, and even counting the number of letters in each line so I could “justify” the right-hand margins, like in a Real Magazine. I also had to paste up every piece of art and type on poster paper, two columns to each page. It was a slow, painstaking process; but hey, otherwise I’d have been grading students’ tests! Biljo drew his spot illos to fit on original pages of the same size as in Ronn’s #6, since I had no facilities for making enlarged or reduced copies of anything. I decided on an issue length of 40 pages. (And somehow all those student papers did get graded, somewhere along the line. I wasn’t totally irresponsible.)
I’d titled my lead article about Fawcett’s Marvel Family “One Man’s Family,” after a vintage radio series. Biljo did several fine drawings for that piece, closely following the style of the Fawcett comics. We fanzine editors still weren’t sure we wouldn’t get sued by the companies if we reproduced any actual comics pages; we didn’t yet know from “fair use,” and no one in the industry had seen fit to enlighten us.
I had Biljo draw a front cover that depicted Cap, Mary, and Junior flying at Black Adam, the ancient Egyptian “evil Marvel” from 1945’s Marvel Family #1. It was a great illo—only the second time Black Adam ever appeared in print anywhere, and his first time on a cover of any magazine, pro or fan. Biljo did four-color overlays for the cover, the only hues in the issue. However, because I was still too ignorant to suggest it, he didn’t employ red-dot Zip-A-Tone to give Caucasian “flesh” tones to its four characters, so their skin was left stark white. I listed Biljo as “art editor,” partly because he had originally been slated to be the zine’s full editor.
Because I was in a rush to complete the mag, there’s more Roy Thomas in #7 than I’d wanted. I also wrote and illustrated an essay on the “first great days” of the original Human Torch, mutating my ex-roommate’s name to “Rick Strong” so mine wouldn’t appear on two articles in the same issue. Also, aping the style of Playboy cartoonist Shel Silverstein, I created three pages of gag cartoons that poked fun at the current comics industry: “Shel Silverfish Looks at the Gilded Age of Comics.” They contained lackluster caricatures of Julie Schwartz, Stan Lee, and other professionals I’d never met (or in some cases even seen photos of), but some of the jokes weren’t half bad. In one, I drew “Stan Lee” standing dramatically on one leg atop a table, a hammer in his hand and a bucket on his head, to show a pair of artists how to draw Thor in action; my doing that makes me wonder if perhaps I’d already heard through the grapevine of Stan’s habit of acting out stories for his artists. Another cartoon lampooned Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as a would-be super-hero, with his last name spelled out in elements and molecules on his chest: “AuH20.” (A visual realization of Bud’s and my “Goldwater-Man” article, I suppose.)
The issue was filled out with Biljo’s “Alter and Captain Ego” comic story—and an article on JSA/Green Lantern foe Solomon Grundy by Richard Kyle. I also included an essay on the theme of “The Tragic Monster” in myth and comics; it was written (and illustrated) by E. Nelson Bridwell, an Oklahoma fan with whom I otherwise had had no contact. I would meet him in person less than a year later, under decidedly awkward circumstances.
I was especially proud of #7’s letters section. With my encouragement, longtime “Captain Marvel” and then-current “Superman” scripter Otto Binder had written a 2000-word memoir of his days at Fawcett, complete with a vintage photo; the piece was a treasure-trove of information, despite a few errors. At its end, I announced to readers that, utilizing materials he had sent me, A/E #8 would feature “an illustrated version of [the] last, previously unpublished Marvel Family story.” (That cheery paragraph was would quickly get me in a whole mess of potential legal trouble!) There were also shorter letters from Gardner Fox and artist Sid Greene, who was then inking The Atom.
(So exuberant was I as Alter Ego #7 took shape that I even advertised therein a second publication: Alter Ego Comics, which was to showcase new ama-comics [amateur comics] by the likes of Biljo, myself, et al., featuring our creations. But it didn’t take me long to realize that Ronn Foss and others who had promised me material were far too over- committed to be depended on to deliver on anything like a workable schedule, so I soon shelved that notion for good.)
The letters column and inside front cover were headed by photos of “Joy Holiday”—portrayed this time not by Linda (I didn’t feel free to use any remaining pics of her), but by Pauline Copeman, another attractive young woman from Jackson. I barely knew her, but Gary arranged things and took several photos, earning a credit in that issue as “Special Photographic Assistant.”
That would be Gary’s only official contribution to the early Alter Ego, but he did perform one additional and even more important task. It was he who arranged for #7 to be printed by Cash-Book Printing in Jackson. The print run was around 1000 copies, which severely strained my financial resources. The guy who did the actual printing (a superlative job) was pressman Leroy Beatty. A few weeks later, though, Gary told me that when he congratulated him on the quality of the work, Leroy just shook his head and grunted, “The best printing job I ever did, and it was for a goddam comicbook!”
I managed to get the issue out into the mails (including copies to as many pros as I had addresses for) in time to make its contents eligible for the 1964 Alley Awards. Apparently, I worked out a deal with my mother—and with my eight-year-old sister Tara—to mail many of the copies for me from Jackson. Tara tells me: “You paid me by the envelope I addressed (maybe 6¢ or something like that). I recall that the printer had messed up, and a lot of pages in some copies were blank, so Mom had to pull the staples out of those and try to combine the pages from multiple copies to make complete copies. Then she used the same staples to put the good copies back together. I think she used a flat-head screwdriver.” Problems with the printing sounds like something I mentally associate with A/E #9 rather than with #7, but it hardly matters. My other sister Katy was off in St. Louis studying to be a nurse, but everybody at the Thomas homestead in Jackson suddenly found themselves in my miserly “employ,” it seems—except Dad, who had his own job to keep him busy. (But then, actually, so did Mother, who was still working at the hosiery mill.) Luckily, sales of A/E #7 were brisk enough that ample money kept coming in to keep the wheels of commerce greased. I think I more or less broke even on the issue.
One thing that helped that dough roll in: When he’d learned I was now editing and publishing Alter Ego, Julie had invited me to write a letter that could be printed in Justice League to plug the fanzine. That longish missive, printed in JLA #33 (out in the fall of ’64), brought in quite a few orders. Julie would say later that he considered Jerry Bails and me the modern-day comicbook equivalents of himself and Mort Weisinger back in the 1930s, when they had launched one of the very first science-fiction fanzines. See why I think of him as one of the “godfathers” of Alter Ego, Volume 1?
34.
1964 was a year in which occurred some of the first true sizable comics-fan get-togethers. Due to teaching duties, I hadn’t been able to attend the “Alley Tally” held at Jerry Bails’ home in March to count ballots re the 1963 fan awards. (1964 was also the year of the first, one-day comics convention ever held—in New York City, of course—but there was never any hope of my attending it, either.)
However, come Christmas, despite lingering patches of snow on the roads, I drove from St. Louis to Chicago to join a sizable group of fans at a confab. Jerry and Sondra had come from Detroit. It was in the Windy City that I first met, among others, Comic Art editors/publishers Don and Maggie Thompson—and Don Glut, an outgoing guy about my age who was putting out an ambitious fanzine called Shazam! I also met an appealing Illinois college co-ed named Coreen Casey, and we dated for a little while. (A few years later, she married Ronn Foss and they started a family together, though they eventually divorced.)
And all through this period, having completed A/E #7, I was getting to work on the eighth issue.
35.
Alter Ego #8 was published in and for “Winter 1965,” around the beginning of that year. The cover star was Blackhawk, from 1941-1955 a hero of the Quality Comics Group who had then been purchased and continued by National. Biljo did another sterling color cover, featuring the Golden Age aviator. The lead article was written by fan Derrill Rothermich, with additional material provided by your humble servant.
My old Sullivan friend Bob Hopkins, now teaching at a technical college in Linn, Missouri, contributed an article about the pulp-magazine days of Doc Savage—coincidentally, at roughly the same time Bantam started reprinting his vintage exploits in paperback books.
Ronn Foss produced a second “Eclipse” story—while a new pen pal, Fred Patten (who’d portrayed The Flash in the JSA masquerade group at that 1962 SF con mentioned earlier), accepted my invite to launch a several-part series on Mexican super-hero comics, which he collected. Glen Johnson, a teacher of Navajo children in New Mexico, did a study of two issues of All-Star (#22 & #24) that dealt with historical subjects. And, along with a Bestest League cartoon, I scripted several “Famous Blast Words” comic strips lampooning various heroes; they were ably illustrated by an aspiring young artist, Jay Kinney. (He would soon be prominent among the early “underground comix” artists who would take the comicbook format into the emerging counterculture.)
I donated one page of the issue to the Academy of  Comic-Book Fans and Collectors (as the fan-group jump-started by Jerry Bails had been rebranded) for a message from its new “executive editor,” a Connecticut teenager named Paul Gambaccini. A few years later, Paul would move to London and eventually become a well-known commentator—primarily concerning classical music—on BBC radio. We wouldn’t meet in person until the mid-1980s, however.
As usual, the letters section held some of the issue’s most enduring features. I renamed it “re:” to indicate I wanted all missives to be about something; I stuck the colon on right after the “re” despite the fact that, in actual usage, the colon follows not the “re” but rather the considered subject matter, as in the construction “re Batman:”—though that was no big deal to anyone but me. Besides juxtaposing one of Gary’s “Joy Holiday” photos with Biljo’s drawing of an amorous alien called Herko (see p. 122 for the reason why), and printing Ronn’s notes and illos related to his abortive attempt to revamp Dr. Mid-Nite, it featured welcome comments on A/E #7 from pros Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, artist Kurt Schaffenberger—and, prophetically, from Mort Weisinger, editor of National’s“Superman” titles.
But the high point of the letters column was the cartoon done especially for me by Steve Ditko, in which he delineated five of the characters he was currently handling for Marvel to thank me for sending him A/E #7. It was a wonderful, inventive piece of work—and one of the dumbest decisions I ever made was to let someone trade me out of it not long afterward.  What was I thinking?
The low point of the “re:” section, for me personally, was related to something I had announced in the previous issue: my plan to print Otto Binder’s final “Marvel Family” synopsis, with new illustrations by Biljo. Unfortunately, no sooner had #7 hit the mails than Fawcett—which was still in the magazine business, if no longer doing comics—had gotten wind of my intentions, and I had received a letter from its vice president, Ralph Daigh, informing me I must “cease and desist” from such plans, due to Fawcett’s 1953 agreement with National/DC. In fact, the missive even demanded that I totally cease selling A/E #7 and destroy all unsold copies! Luckily for my sanity, a quick exchange of letters with Otto assured me that he knew Daigh and was reasonably certain that, if I just informed him I had dropped all plans to do anything further with the Marvel Family, Fawcett would leave me alone. They simply had to cover their ass so as not to unsettle their legal bargain with National/DC. I quickly did as Otto suggested, the whole thing went away, and I (eventually) breathed a sigh of relief in the letters section of A/E #8. (Four decades later, DC president Paul Levitz would graciously allow me to finally print that “Marvel Family” synopsis, along with a few related materials, in the revived Alter Ego #46 [2005].)
Oh, and the issue’s back cover sported a color drawing by Biljo of #7’s Alter and Captain Ego. Therein, we had announced a contest for the best color scheme suggested for the new hero’s costume. It was won by one Sheldon Lettich of Beverly Hills, California; his prize was one of my pages of original Justice League of America artwork by Mike Sekowsky (which today would be worth several thousand dollars). Lettich’s green-and-yellow scheme is still basically used when Captain Ego appears as one of the “maskots” of Alter Ego, Volume 3—except that I insist on covering up the bare legs the fan- colorist had given him.
For reasons of convenience, I chose a nearby St. Louis printer to produce this issue.
A/E #8 made a bit less of an impact than #7 had—mostly because the Marvel Family had more pizzazz than Blackhawk—but was well-received. And I was already getting started on #9, scheduled to come out by summer of ’65. (I had no way of knowing how far from St. Louis I’d be by the time my third issue hit the mails.)
While a period of several months elapsed between publication of issues #7 and 8, I thought it best to deal with them in close proximity above, because meanwhile things were beginning to cascade almost out of control in the rest of my life….
36.
It started with more tsuris in the high school arena.
While I was still annoyed at the Fox Schools superintendent re that “Goldwater-Man” nonsense, I hoped to avoid future problems. So I kept a low profile when an administration memo informed all Fox High teachers that we should give certain letter-grades to pre-determined percentages of students in our classes—e.g., 15% or so should receive “A’s,” 25% should get “B’s,” whatever. That made no sense to me: What if only 10% of my students had earned “A’s,” or if 30% had, or if zero % had? Few teachers could have tossed that wadded-up memo into the wastebasket any faster than I did, but I didn’t advertise that fact; I basically just ignored the directive, and so, I soon learned, did most of my fellow teachers. I’m not aware of any administrative follow-through on the matter. Maybe they thought better of their stupid idea and were too embarrassed to admit it.
Then, early in the New Year, another edict came down from on high, directing all teachers not to schedule any tests for the day after the upcoming Parent-Teacher Night. The administration didn’t want any kids staying home to study for a test instead of being able to accompany their parents to that dreaded once-a-year event. Though disagreeing with the ban, I adhered to its letter, and the day of the event I gave my students more than ample time in class to silently read the story assigned for discussion the next day.
Come the morrow, though, I threw a pop quiz on that story in all my classes, even if surely it only came as a real surprise to the first one or two. Not a very difficult quiz; anybody should’ve passed if they’d merely read the assignment in class the day before. Naturally, a couple of the kids loudly protested; they knew about the administration’s edict and played their victimhood to the hilt. I explained my reasoning and told them to get back to work on the quiz.
Within a day, I was summoned before the Superintendent again. To the parental complaints (and his own) that he relayed to me, I responded that not one single youngster could’ve possibly felt the need to stay home to study on PTA night, but I had to keep them on their toes, didn’t I? The Super vehemently disagreed; and, this time, he ended what was essentially a short diatribe by saying that perhaps it would be better for all concerned if Fox High and I parted company at the  end of the school year. I was both surprised and a bit disappointed by his ludicrous over-reaction to this minor provocation (he generally seemed nice enough for an older guy—he must’ve been 40 if he was a day), but I suspect he’d been nursing a grudge ever since the “Goldwater-Man” incident. Anyway, I responded that I was definitely amenable to leaving Fox at that time.
Still, as I told roomie Bud about the incident that evening, that did leave me in a bit of a quandry. I had no particular desire to leave Fox, any more than I had any special desire to stay there. Actually, a bit earlier, I’d been accepted into a program that recruited teachers for high schools at U.S. military bases abroad; I’d even received a firm offer to teach in Guam for a year. Whoop-de-do! But I had ultimately turned down that offer... before things came to a head with the Super.
As soon as he learned what had happened, Bud came through for me like a champ. Among his other accomplishments, he was at the time, as he’d mentioned to me, “the youngest 32nd-degree Mason in the state.” I had only a foggy notion of what that meant—still do—but I understood that this gave him more than the usual status with his fellow Masons, and he wanted to use that to help me. He informed me that the Scottish Rite Lodge in St. Louis had a graduate fellowship that was virtually never awarded; it just “sat around” most years because so few people ever knew about it to apply for it. He said that if I’d just drive into St. Louis and talk to one particular gent, it could probably be mine. Oh, and I should mention: It was a graduate fellowship to George Washington University in Washington, DC, for the study of “foreign relations.”
Now, I didn’t know from “foreign relations.” My idea of same at that time would’ve been a date with Brigitte Bardot. But I was cognizant that a fellowship to GWU would probably lead either to a career in diplomacy, or, more likely in my case, as a college professor. I figured I’d almost certainly like that better than teaching high-schoolers; so I thanked Bud and said go for it.
A few days later, after a pleasant 15-minute meeting somewhere in St. Louis, sure enough, I had the fellowship. I wasn’t certain how I would support myself in our nation’s capital for those two or more years. The fellowship would pay my tuition; also, when I left teaching, I’d have around $1000 coming to me from a “teacher retirement” fund. But that was it: no savings, no parental help. I don’t remember even having heard in those days about the possibility of a student loan. I would surely have to work part-time to put myself through grad school. But I was ready to do whatever was necessary to start a new life.
When I wrote Julie Schwartz about the fellowship, he responded cheerfully that he had relatives in the District of Columbia and we’d have to get together there sometime when he was visiting them. That would be an additional, if minor, plus.
37.
Very soon afterward, another pair of positive events occurred—and damned if I’m certain which came first! Not that it really matters. Both were related to comics and to the rest of my life, yet they were unrelated to each other… except that both came about because of my being editor/publisher of Alter Ego, bless its photo-offset little heart.
I’ll relate the Charlton connection first, because I think it happened earlier—and because, in the end, it was of no real importance to me… though more so, indirectly, to a few other people.
An artist named Pat Masulli had become the editor of the low-budget comics division of the bottom-rung Charlton publishing company in Derby, Connecticut. I’d also seen his name listed as writer on the origin of “Son of Vulcan,” that line’s crudely drawn answer to Marvel’s “Thor.” At the same time, Charlton had revived both Captain Atom (again drawn by Steve Ditko, in between his Spider-Man and “Doctor Strange” work at Marvel) and Blue Beetle, the 1940s Fox Comics hero who had somehow wound up in Charlton’s hands since 1954, drawn this time by Bill Fracchio and Tony Tallarico. All three of these super-hero titles were currently being written by veteran Joe Gill, who scribed many—and I mean many—of Charlton’s comics.
Masulli, however, had become intrigued by fanzines as a potential source of new blood for the comics industry. So in winter of ’65 he sent out a form letter to various fanzine editors, inviting us to spread the word that Charlton was looking for fledgling super-hero scribes. The challenge he laid down was to write a script for Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, or Son of Vulcan. If he liked it, he’d buy it!
Now, with regard to what I did next, I suppose I could hide behind the fact that Alter Ego came out at most twice a year; its next issue wouldn’t be ready for a while, so I had no quick way to publicize Masulli’s message, at least not in print.
But nah… really, I just figured, “Why let anybody else in on this? I’ll just write a script myself!”
So that’s what I did, over the very next weekend. Since I reasoned that the longer-established Captain Atom and Blue Beetle would be more likely to attract other budding scribblers, I typed up a script for Son of Vulcan. I’ve never been the fastest writer, but over that couple of days I managed to bang out a 20-page story I titled “The Second Trojan War.” (Like I said, The Iliad is my favorite work of literature.) In it, Son of Vulcan uses his Roman-god-given super-powers to protect a Hollywood crew that’s filming a Troy-themed movie from Dr. Kong, an evil scientist introduced in an earlier issue. Just for fun, I gave Kong a robot assistant named Adam Klink, a takeoff on Adam Link, the human-emotioned robot created by Otto Binder for pulp magazines back when he’d been a science-fiction writer. Come Monday morning, I mailed it in.
Within a week, I received another letter from Masulli—this one addressed to just me—offering to buy my script. Charlton’s page rate, I learned, was only $4 a page, rather less than I’d imagined; but hey, working over a Saturday and Sunday, I’d nearly doubled what I’d made that week as a teacher—and I had enjoyed myself in the process. I wouldn’t mind doing that every week! I accepted his offer.
In fact, I accepted a second one as well. In that same note Masulli asked if I wanted to try writing a Blue Beetle script. I said yes, and within a week (I had to wait for the next weekend, didn’t I?), that, too, was winging its way to Connecticut. “The Eye of Horus” owed quite a bit to my recent flirtation with Egyptology: The mythological Eye of Horus, which in legend had flown around devastating the Nile countryside, was at it again. Masulli bought that one, too, and said he’d like more from me in the near future, though he told me he now had a bit of inventory and he asked me to wait a few weeks before submitting again; otherwise I’d have been hammering away at my new electric portable Smith-Corona the next weekend.
I had made a sale! No, two sales! I was now—or at least soon would be—a published professional writer! Okay, so it would be as a comicbook writer, an occupation I knew wasn’t likely to garner me much respect from the waking world. But what did I care about the rest of the planet? If I could get a steady gig writing stories for Charlton, I’d increase both my income and my self-esteem—and maybe it could even become a way to finance my graduate education.
As my old humor-writing idol Max Schulman had written in one of his novels:
“Sleep till noon and screw ’em all!”
38.
Around this same time—I think it was very shortly after I wrote the two Charlton scripts—I received a second letter from Mort Weisinger. One quite different from the two-paragraph LOC I had printed in A/E #8.
By early 1965 Weisinger had spent years as the editor of all Superman-starring titles at National/DC: Superman; Action Comics; Superboy; Adventure Comics; Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen; Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane; even World’s Finest Comics, which co-starred Superman and Batman. He was currently the most important and powerful of National’s line editors.
As for me, I had certainly loved the Man of Steel when I was a kid. Childhood Christmases, I had lusted after Superman costumes in Sears-Roebuck (or was it Spiegel’s?) mail-order catalogs, but my parents could never afford to buy me one. I’d listened raptly for years to the Adventures of Superman radio show—devoured both Superman movie serials, then the Superman and the Mole Men movie, later the few episodes of the TV series I got a chance to see. Even so, the Kryptonian had long since been eclipsed in my heart and mind by other comics heroes, most particularly the revivals edited by Julius Schwartz—and lately the emanations of Marvel Comics.
By the 1960s, I bought “Superman” comics only when nothing much else hit the stands that week, or when a particular cover caught my eye. Like “The Monster That Loved Lois Lane!”
In late ’64 I had purchased Lois Lane #54, with the above-named cover story. It appealed to me mostly because both situation and art seemed a throwback to the long-defunct Captain Marvel. (I didn’t realize at the time that said art was by Kurt Schaffenberger, who’d drawn many a “Captain Marvel” and “Marvel Family” yarn in those series’ later years.) This tale, scripted by SF writer Edmond Hamilton (as I’d learn years later), dealt with an alien creature named Herko who became enamored of the “girl reporter,” with Superman confused as to what to do about his new other-dimensional “rival.” I not only bought the comic: I even sent off a laudatory letter, perhaps the only one I ever wrote to any Weisinger mag. Not long before, of course, I had also mailed Weisinger, as well as other National editors and creators, complimentary copies of Alter Ego #7, and early in ’65 I would be doing the same with #8.
As I knew, Mort and Julie had been friends since their 1930s days in science-fiction fandom. Back then, they had produced several of the very earliest SF fanzines together and had even briefly co-run an agency for SF writers, till Weisinger got a job co-editing the Thrilling line of gaudy space-opera pulps. In 1941 he’d changed fields again—this time for the increasingly more lucrative comicbook field, where he became a staff writer and editor. (Julie had entered the comics game in early ’44, though, surprisingly, Mort apparently had nothing to do with his old pal winding up at a lesser branch of what was soon one big company.)
Out of the blue one day in early 1965, as Julie later informed me, Mort had asked him, “What do you think of this guy Roy Thomas?” Julie said he had told him I was a teacher and wrote a good letter and “I like him a lot.” Mort had replied that he was thinking of offering me a job.
And so, sometime circa late winter, out of the cerulean blue, I received this letter from Weisinger informing me that he was looking to replace his current editorial assistant, beginning that summer, and offering me a two-month trial period in that position, with a starting salary of $110 a week.
I was stunned.
Naturally, I shared the news at once with Bud. He could see I was extremely interested in the offer, but was understandably surprised I would even consider it, with the GWU fellowship already arranged.
However, that wasn’t really a problem at this point. The National job was a two-month tryout commencing in maybe June or July. If it didn’t work out after a few weeks—either in Weisinger’s eyes or in mine—I’d probably still have time to arrange to attend GWU, as if the comics offer had never happened!
Mort wanted an immediate answer. So I paced and/or sat around the apartment for maybe a half-hour, going over the pros and cons in my head… pondering, weighing, fantasizing, considering. And then I announced to Bud:
“I’m going to take the job.”
In the course of my eight-plus decades of life, sometimes I’ve made the right decision… sometimes I’ve made the wrong one. But I’ve usually been able to make a decision… and without pondering too long over it.
I sent Mort Weisinger a letter of acceptance the next day.
Come summer, I would be leaving for Manhattan.
The rousing pop song “New York, New York” wouldn’t come along till 1977. But to somebody like me, who’d been raised on Hollywood movies set in Manhattan, its sentiments if not its precise lyrics were already in my head:
“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere…”
39.
I had a couple of additional exchanges with Weisinger over the next few weeks. In a second letter he asked me to write a proposal for an 8-page story for the Jimmy Olsen comic. I promptly posited one in which the young reporter infiltrates a biker gang of youthful criminals, only to discover that Robin the Boy Wonder has already done the same thing. When I sent Mort the plot, I told him I felt the story needed a few more pages than the allotted eight. He responded that eight pages was the outer limit. In addition, he said there were a few things in the synopsis that would need to be changed when I went to script, but that could wait till I got to New York. Meanwhile, as an advance on the $80 I would get for the completed story, he would get National to advance me $50 toward my (one-way) airfare.
Mort even phoned me once at Fox High in the middle of the day, which of course the principal wasn’t wild about; but at that point I could’ve cared less. That may be when Mort and I agreed on the precise date I would arrive in Manhattan to begin work: Monday, June 28. I began to make my plans.
Meanwhile, painfully aware I was only peripherally familiar with the immense amount of “Superman mythology” that had sprung up over the past half-decade or so under Mort’s editorship—Supergirl, Bizarro, the bottle world of Kandor, various shades of Kryptonite, Imaginary Tales, etc., etc., etc.—I was grateful when Biljo White volunteered to mail me a big box containing dozens of late-’50s and early-’60s Superman-related comics on loan. Bud and I holed up in the St. Louis apartment of an absent friend of his over an early-June weekend to get away from distractions. Bud had some reading he wanted to do, probably with an eye toward law school coming up that fall, and I spent my days perusing comicbooks and taking notes. When I reached New York, I would hardly be an expert on what the Man of Steel had been up to since his TV series had been canceled, which had allowed Weisinger to develop lots of legend-expanding ideas that would’ve been anathema to the small-minded, tiny-budgeted TV folks; but at least I’d be conversant with the general gist of Superman’s past  few years.
40.
Meanwhile, a bit ahead of schedule, I had met my first-ever comicbook professional in the flesh!
One spring day I received a letter from Wendell Crowley.
From 1944 through 1953, he had been the editor of Captain Marvel Adventures and several other major Fawcett titles, including during the years when CMA’s covers had boasted that it had the “Largest Circulation of Any Comic Magazine.” When Fawcett discontinued its comicbook line in ’53 after losing the Superman/Captain Marvel lawsuit, Wendell, as I knew from letters either from him or from Otto Binder, had reluctantly gone into the family lumber business… which he found lucrative, but nothing he really enjoyed. As it happened, he was going to be in St. Louis on lumber-company business a few days hence, and he wondered if I’d be interested in our having lunch.
Would I? On the appointed morning, I coughed out a phone message to the principal’s secretary about how I was at death’s door (or at least just a couple of blocks down the street from it) and couldn’t come in that day. By noon, I was sitting in my all-time favorite pizza place, Rinaldi’s, somewhere north of Forest Park, nearly an hour’s drive from Lemay and hopefully from anyone related to the Fox school system. Rinaldi’s had a distinct type of pizza I adored: heavy on the cheese and tomato sauce, topped with sizable, round, raised meatballs. Since I always scarfed my pizzas while they were hot (I can’t stand cold pizza), that meant I invariably burned the roof of my mouth at least once or twice on said meatballs every time I visited Rinaldi’s. But it was just as invariably worth it. (Sadly, that area of St. Louis was in decline even then; a couple of years later when I came back through, Rinaldi’s was gone.)
Before arriving, I hadn’t been prepared for how tall Wendell Crowley was: at least 6½ feet (some Fawcett folks claimed seven!), lanky, with a voice deep enough to drown sharks. With my 5'4" stature, we surely made an odd couple. But I was thrilled to be conversing with a guy who’d worked in the comics field during its Golden Age—on the best-selling mag in the industry and one of the best in terms of quality as well.
I churned out questions about Captain Marvel and Fawcett and some of the other talents that worked there, and I remember Wendell telling me that, while he didn’t know Mort Weisinger personally, his top “CM” scripter Otto Binder, who was now writing “Superman” stories for Mort, had said he could be quite… difficult.
Then he looked at me a moment, quizzically: “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
He laughed—deeply and loudly: “You’re an old man! We were all teenagers when we started!”
The lunch went by way too fast, of course. Wendell had that family business to tend to, even though it was clear to me that he’d have preferred to be sitting in his old office at Fawcett Publications, waiting for Binder or Beck to show up with their latest “Captain Marvel” opus. Still, he was happy and proud of what he’d done in his near-decade in the field.
Sadly, although we exchanged a couple of additional letters later, I only ran into Wendell Crowley in person once more, at one of the big New York City cons of the late 1960s. He passed away a few years afterward. But he’s always loomed even larger than seven feet tall in my memory. One of the industry’s truly nice guys.
41.
Later that spring, around the time Fox’s teachers were receiving their contracts for the 1966 school year, I was summoned back up the hill by the Superintendent for a final command performance. What had I done now, I wondered.
Actually, he told me, since I hadn’t yet formally submitted a letter saying I’d be leaving Fox High at school year’s end, he just wanted to be certain that was still my intention, since in any event I wouldn’t be offered a contract for the following one.
I responded that I’d had no idea I was expected to write such a letter, but since I definitely had other plans, perhaps he could just consider this conversation its oral equivalent. (I didn’t feel like wasting any more time on the man.)
Then, as if he suddenly felt a desire to be (or at least to appear to be) magnanimous, he volunteered that, if I needed a letter of recommendation from him for a new teaching position, he would be happy to provide one.
I’ll admit, that kind of floored me. He didn’t want me to remain in his school system—purely because of a minor case of what he might’ve termed “insubordination”—but he would nonetheless cheerfully write a letter foisting me off to become some other school district’s problem? My answer was immediate and simple, and this is pretty much a quote, except that I’ve omitted his last name:
“Mr. ------, I appreciate your offer, but I can’t imagine any future situation in which a recommendation from you would mean anything whatever to me.”
And I left. Happily, we never saw each other again.
42.
One of the things I absolutely had to do before I left for New York was to complete the body of Alter Ego #9 and deliver it to my St. Louis printer… this time listing the publisher as “Peter Pan Press” rather than just using my own name. This issue’s page count would jump from 40 to 48. Biljo’s wraparound color cover showcased an octet of original Mexican comics heroes: Santo (the very real masked wrestler I mentioned earlier)—a strictly-in-comicbooks imitator of his called Neutron (whose fumetti adventures I actually found more imaginative)—Blue Demon (yet another real-life masked wrestler, albeit with a name rendered in English, for some reason)—Relampago (“Lightning,” a visual clone of the 1940s Quality hero The Ray)—Super-Charro, which basically means “Super- Fancy-Cowboy,” riding Criollo, the Invincible Horse (the Captain Marvel-like comic co-starring this pair was actually named for the horse!)—Tawa (a minor-league Tarzan)—El Piloto Phantasma (a mysterious figure who flew around in a WWI-vintage aircraft that outstripped jet planes)—and El Hombre Invisible (self-explanatory). This heralded the second installment of “¡Supermen South!,” the series on Mexican comics heroes from Fred Patten.
In addition, a fan named Shel Kagan wrote a piece comparing the 1960s Green Lantern Corps with the classic, if clunkily written, 1930s-40s Lensmen science-fiction pulp series by E.E. (“Doc”) Smith, since the latter seemed so obviously—to both him and me—to have been influenced by the former, even if SF fan Julie Schwartz denied any conscious connection. So eager was I to include a good Green Lantern illo to go with the article that I actually scissored out a Mike Sekowsky GL figure from a page of original Justice League of America artwork Julie had sent me; I still have that page framed in our foyer, with a big figure-shaped hole in it, a reminder of my youthful folly!
Glen Johnson wrote that issue’s JSA-related fare. I myself wrote one short feature on the original Robotman and another that pulled together various recent references to comics heroes made in the mainstream media—including quotations from a recent edition of Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missourian by a young reporter named “Dennis O’Neal” [sic], of whom more just a few pages from now. I also scribed and illustrated “A Treasury of Mortal Verses,” consisting of comicbook-related parodies of poetry by Sandburg, cummings, Coleridge, Browning, Frost, Blake, Poe, Edward Arlington Robinson—and, interestingly, considering the final page of Marvel’s The Avengers #57 that I would cobble together in 1968, the sonnet “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I also published two Captain Ego drawings sent to me unsolicited by Sam Grainger, a commercial artist in North Carolina. Since Biljo didn’t care to draw any more “Alter and Captain Ego” yarns, Sam and I planned to do one together. (We never got around to it; but, as it worked out, a year or so later, I would instead help Sam crash the pro comics field, first at Charlton, later as an inker for Marvel.)
But, once again, one of the “stars” of #9 was the man I thought of as Alter Ego’s third “godfather,” after Julie Schwartz and Gardner Fox, the pair who’d helped Jerry jump-start the zine four years earlier. Otto Binder sent me a number of 1940s photos of Fawcett personnel at work and play, including himself, his artist brother Jack, Wendell Crowley, C.C. Beck, Kurt Schaffenberger, and several others. I called the section “Otto in Binderland.” It was a comics-fanzine first of sorts. I only wish the printer had been able to make some of the photos bigger.
In addition, Otto had sent me the original artwork for a week or more of continuity for each of three separate unsold comic strips that he and “Captain Marvel” artist Beck had developed “on spec” after Fawcett folded its comics line. The real treasure among these was six dailies for a Mr. Tawny strip that starred the talking tiger who’d been a major supporting character in late-’40s “Captain Marvel” tales. Fawcett had given Binder and Beck permission to utilize Tawny in a newspaper comic strip; maybe that had been the company’s way of giving National/DC a parting if subtle middle finger when they dropped their comics line. Fawcett might’ve had to vow never again to publish (or allow to be published) “Captain Marvel”—but there was no reason one of Cap’s non-Shazamic buddies couldn’t strike out on his own. Unfortunately, the Mr. Tawny strip hadn’t sold, either. In order to get the best reproduction from the dailies in those pre-Xerox days, I had to leave all six of them with my St. Louis printer.
Things were capped off, in the letters section, by a report from a teenage fan named John Fahey who had recently visited Julie Schwartz in his office, and had—along with his verbal report—sent me photos of Julie and artist Sid Greene in the former’s office.
Just before I left for New York, because that printer, whose office was not far from my Lemay apartment, had done such a good job on A/E #8 and because we’d gotten to know each other a bit over the past few months, I paid him the full printing costs for #9—in advance. The understanding was that the issue would be printed by late summer and would be sent to my parents’ address in Jackson. After that, I’d figure out how best to get it into the mails.
Yes, you read it right: I paid the printer in advance. And I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from here. For my naïve trust, I would get what I deserved—and then some.
43.
Backing up just a bit: In those last few months of teaching, I also had a handful of encounters, close and not so close, with the mainstream press and “media,” pretty much the first times such a thing had happened to me.
Re the first of these, I was really just a witness, but I was particularly interested because it involved my fannish mentor Jerry Bails. Around the turn of the year, a reporter from Newsweek magazine had talked with him and several other Detroit-area fans, as well as with Brooklyn-based comics dealer (and high school teacher) Phil Seuling and a few of his associates. The resulting article, “Superfans and Batmaniacs,” appeared in the “Life and Leisure” section of that then-popular weekly magazine for February 15, 1965.
It came out just about as unflattering to fandom as we should have expected. Naturally, it started out by gosh-wowing about how a copy of the 1938 Action Comics #1, which had introduced Superman, was now selling for as much as $100 a copy. The rest of the piece was a shallow look at 1940s super-heroes and at what the writer called “comic-book cultists.” The only fanzine mentioned in the piece was Biljo White’s Batmania, a year before the Batman TV series. There was a passing mention of “[a] new hero called Spider-Man [who] is a long-haired teenager”—wrong, of course. The article ended as facetiously as it had begun: “As Billy Batson used to say, ‘H-Holy M-Moley!’” Of course, Billy didn’t stutter; the reporter probably just misread one of the many dialogue balloons in which the lad got conked over the head halfway through saying his magic word “Shazam!” and misinterpreted his interrupted shout as a stammer. Apparently, reading for content was not a requirement for employment at Newsweek.
Reactions of comics fans were decidedly mixed. Jerry, Phil, and the rest had hoped for a more serious appraisal; but, to closely paraphrase a cogent comment at the time from Maggie Thompson: “What did you think they were gonna write? ‘Comics fandom sounds wonderful—where do I go to sign up?’”
Though glad to see comics, and Jerry, get a bit of publicity in a major news magazine, I lampooned the article mercilessly (and deservedly) in a parody I titled “Newsweek Meets Alter Ego” for the Thompsons’ fanzine Comic Art. The actual Newsweek essay, because it quoted Jerry copiously, would lead to Jerry’s becoming, for several years, the “go-to” guy for national news media looking for fast, facile quotes about comics-collecting.
44.
My own first “close encounter of the reportorial kind” came shortly afterward.
My favorite columnist in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time was one Jack Rice, whose musings on popular culture I often found clever and insightful. So I was flattered when (perhaps via Jerry Bails) he contacted me requesting an interview. The photo accompanying that piece was taken in a Fox High classroom, so he probably talked to me there. Rice was friendly and seemed genuinely interested in the subject matter he had chosen, which was basically comics fandom, Alter Ego included.
However, when his column came out, it was brim-full of snide sniping designed more to show off his own verbal cleverness than to shed light on even such a minor subject. He wrote smugly, for instance, that:
[T]he game has ground rules. Publications such as Alter Ego are called “fanzines.” The object of their veneration, the comic book, in these magazines invariably is hyphenated as “comic-book.” This is the mark of the purist. I cannot learn to be one. The principal points of orthodoxy among collectors are these: There is only one Superman and Buck Rogers was his prophet, with an assist from Flash Gordon; the true super-hero exists only in comic book form and really is out of his element in newspaper comic strips; and it is no sillier to collect old comic books than old stamps, old coins, or old corsets.
A warped recounting of what I’d actually said, of course. Thus did I learn firsthand a valuable lesson (though I should have learned it long-distance from the Newsweek episode), not long before I was to embark on a potential career in a mass medium: Be wary of reporters. Likely as not, they’re just looking for a convenient clothesline on which to hang their own deathless and oh-so-superior thoughts.
Rice’s column, I suspect, led to my “television debut,” when a St. Louis afternoon talk show invited me on for a 10-minute spot. It went innocuously enough. After it ended, a couple of the other guests, who represented a railroad union, approached me about the possibility of my producing a comicbook about the union. We chatted for a few minutes, but when I inquired about the union’s well- publicized support for featherbedding, they wandered off and I never heard from them again.
45.
One additional interaction with a journalist not long afterward, however, went rather better, both for the participants and eventually for the comics field.
On Saturday, May 15, 1965, my mother opened her copy of The Southeast Missourian to discover a full back-page article on the current revival of comicbook super-heroes, with the byline “Dennis O’Neal.” It was basically a “children’s page, which ran on Saturdays,” as the author said years later in an A/E interview. He had discovered that comics seemed to be attracting a new and enthusiastic audience. He found that phenomenon mildly interesting and, since he had to write something to fill that space in the paper, he scribed an article about comics. Apparently, he even did a bit of telephonic legwork, speaking long-distance with DC editor Jack Schiff and Gold Key editor Matt Murphy. The article was neither a glorification of comics nor a putdown of them, just a casual examination with a bit of humor and some thoughtful speculation… and, far as I could tell, aimed at the general reader rather than at “children” per se.
My mother probably showed it to me that same weekend (assuming I came “home”). The following Saturday featured a second Dennis O’Neil article, this one dealing mostly with the anti-comics furor of the mid-1950s—this time with the journalist’s last name spelled correctly. After detailing the dire doings of Doc Wertham and crew, he also cited studies that had found comics often helpful concerning youngsters’ reading habits and abilities. And he seems to have phoned New York again:
Stan Lee, editor of Marvel Comics, and perhaps the most prolific writer in the medium, expressed most of the teachers’ opinion when he told the Missourian: “Parents should ration comic reading just as they should ration other activity—judiciously….”
(Somehow, I neglected to ever ask Denny about this, but if he actually did call Stan Lee rather than just picking up that quote from one of the handful of other mainstream pieces written about comics at the time, that means he spoke with Stan several weeks before I did!)
Intrigued and impressed by the first piece (and probably not yet having seen the second), I dropped a line to this “Dennis O’Neal.” Since he was a St. Louisan who frequently traveled back and forth between there and Cape, I invited him to drop by our Lemay apartment sometime.
He took me up on that just a couple of days later—he said it was a Sunday, so I must have remained in Lemay that weekend—with his girlfriend Ann in tow. While not unfriendly, she made no attempt to feign even a passing interest in our conversation over the next hour, soon curling up and going to sleep on the sofa. Denny, lean and soft- spoken, was about a year older than I was, and had already led a far more eventful life. He’d grown up in what he called “a blue-collar neighborhood” in northern St. Louis, and had attended a military high school, then St. Louis University, where he’d majored in English and minored in creative writing and philosophy. From there, surprisingly, he had joined the U.S. Navy—just in time to wind up a reluctant participant in the tense Cuban Blockade of 1962. But he had gotten a bit of journalistic experience in the Navy, so after leaving the service he answered an ad that led to his becoming a “beat reporter” for Cape Girardeau’s daily newspaper.
Although he didn’t tell me about it the day we met, he had soon pulled a prank at the paper that had “alienated everybody that I depended on to do my job.” Since he and Ann had been peripherally involved with the peace and civil rights movements, he mischievously concocted a fake Associated Press news story and stuck it up on the clipboard at the Missourian: “Martin Luther King Jr. is coming to Cape Girardeau to stage a rally.” The ruse caused a flurry of excitement before it was quickly exposed as a hoax, and his superiors (and the rest of the staff) didn’t take kindly to the prank, mild though it was. He managed to keep his job, but was taken off the police beat and wound up writing in other, lesser capacities for the newspaper… which, as it happened, led directly to his comics-related self-assignment, and thus in a roundabout way to his personal rendezvous with four-colored destiny, which probably wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
In the course of our talk, Denny said he’d like to do a third comics article for the Missourian, this one about me, my fan activities, and my projected career as a comics professional. I was happy to cooperate (though that hadn’t been my intention when I’d contacted him), as long as he didn’t mention in print my upcoming job at National, as Weisinger had asked me to keep that under wraps; perhaps he hadn’t yet told his current assistant that he was being replaced. Denny was free, though, to report on my having recently sold “Son of Vulcan” and “Blue Beetle” scripts to Charlton—which came out as “Carlton” in the paper. Wanting to hint at my future prospects without betraying my confidence, he stated in the article that “Since publication of the Vulcan story, Mr. Thomas has been approached by other publishers. If his plans become realities, he will soon move to the East Coast to write comics full time.” Well, close enough… although my two Charlton stories wouldn’t actually go on sale until that fall.
Denny also reported that I referred to the comicbook super-hero as a “modern mythology” and “as much an American legend as Huckleberry Finn”—the kind of phrases that would become a pervasive mantra in comics- related media coverage for years to come. He also indirect- quoted me as saying that “Stan Lee writes and edits a line of super-hero comics regarded by true fans as the best on the current market” and as “cit[ing] examples of Mr. Lee’s clever plotting, and particularly, his satirization.” If I really said those words or anything close to them—and I probably did—they weren’t something I’d have wanted Mort Weisinger to see in print right before I showed up to work on his Superman comics! My bad… but fortunately, I guess National didn’t subscribe to a press clipping service that monitored the Southeast Missourian.
When the impromptu interview in my apartment had concluded, Denny had awakened his ladyfriend and they had departed. All in all, his article, when it came out on Saturday, May 29—just two weeks after the first one—was a quite positive one, like the two that had preceded it.
Over the next few weeks, before I left for New York, I visited Denny once or twice in the small house in Cape Girardeau that he and Ann were renting. To my surprise, it was located right behind the local police station—which itself was temporarily quartered in what had until recently been a church; its stained-glass windows were still colorfully intact. Denny and I enjoyed each other’s company well enough, though we hadn’t either time or perhaps enough in common to become close friends.
To both of us, our encounters had been merely a mutually beneficial interlude. But they would eventually have an impact of sorts on me—and, far more so, on Denny O’Neil and the comics industry.
46.
Once school was out, I bade farewell to the handful of friends I’d made at Fox High, including ex-roomies Lloyd Whitledge (who soon married a fellow Fox teacher and later became the principal of Jackson High) and Richard Strong (he and I would get together one last time later). And, though I couldn’t have guessed it then, one of my former Fox students would loom large in my life, two or three years down the line.
Just before we abandoned our St. Louis digs for good, Bud Tindall decided I needed a good suit for my New York debut, so he escorted me to a St. Louis clothier and helped me pick out the nicest one I could afford, complete with vest. He was a true friend.
There was one more summer-of-’65 event that is emblazoned on my memory, child of popular culture that I was and remain. St. Louis was hardly New York City; still, over the preceding three years, I had tried to take advantage of the live entertainment that came its way, which was not inconsiderable. I’d attended a few classical-music symphonies and Shakespearean productions at Washington University and had patronized the city’s “Municipal Opera” in Forest Park, which mostly showcased Broadway-type fare such as West Side Story. I had also reveled in live appearances by a number of favored performers: Bobby Darin with Count Basie… Ray Charles… the Kingston Trio… Nat “King” Cole… Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, et al. (the most wildly inventive comedy ’twixt Lenny Bruce and Monty Python)… road companies of such Broadway fare as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?....
…and The Summit.
On Sunday, June 20th, just eight days before I was due to split for Manhattan, the three biggies of show business’ fabled Rat Pack—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr.—appeared together at St. Louis’ Kiel Opera House for a huge charity event to benefit the Father Dismas Clark “Halfway House,” an institution that provided temporary shelter and support for ex-convicts trying to go straight. (In 1961 its namesake and founder had been the subject of a movie titled The Hoodlum Priest.) I scraped up the money for a pair of tickets for the live super-event. After all, when again was I ever likely to see three of my all-time favorite pop singers together? Alas, the Rat Pack’s pet comedian and intended MC, Joey Bishop, couldn’t make it to the west bank of the Mississippi, so we had to be content with a last-minute substitute: some guy named Johnny Carson, who had his own little late-night show.
In some ways, attending that once-in-a-lifetime event so near to my departure date drew a symbolic line for me under my past three years in St. Louis. Much as I was looking forward to first-run films and Broadway shows in the Big Apple, I would never see any performers that impacted me any more than the trio that Milton Berle, in Las Vegas, had once called “The Summit.”
47.
Naturally, I spent that last week in Jackson getting ready for my pilgrimage East.
One event scheduled for late July in Manhattan that I was really looking forward to: a two-day comics convention, or “comic-con” as Ronn Foss had dubbed them in print a year or two before there was such a thing. It would be only the second one ever held. I’d sent in my admission fee; I didn’t want to assume I’d get in free just because I’d be working for National.
Since the con would have a masquerade contest, I paid my aunt Olivia to sew a costume I could wear to it. I’d go as Plastic Man, one of my favorite characters of all time, and one who didn’t need to have bulging muscles. I didn’t particularly want to sport the bare legs Plas had in the comics (in addition, he wore no shoes and had toeless, plastoid feet!), nor did I want my aunt to have to sew lacing to connect the left and right sides of the “shirt” across an expanse of pale bare chest; so she used “flesh”-colored leggings and similar material over part of my alleged torso. Too lazy to scrape up goggles to match the ones Plas wore, I would simply don a pair of dark glasses and hope that would suffice. After all, I wasn’t trying to win any prizes. The job in New York City—and to some extent New York City itself—they were the prize.
In the final few days before leaving my hometown, I said my goodbyes to several Jackson friends, Gary in particular, saying I’d be back for Christmas, if possible. Of course, that was half a year away. Anything could happen in that time. I might even be permanently back by then, my tail between my legs… or, if I blew the NYC job in time, I’d be heading off to George Washington U. and probably a lifetime career in academia.
By now, alas, Gary’s newspaper job (indeed, that entire newspaper) had collapsed, and he was scrounging about for work. Maybe that’s when he attended Cape State for a few weeks, just long enough for his photo to appear in its next yearbook. I couldn’t help but worry a bit about my best friend, without either rock’n’roll band or editor’s job to challenge him. Gary had taken up with some new lowlife pals (IMHO, anyway), who I didn’t think were doing him any good in any department, including his drinking. Still, his life was his life, and mine was mine. For all I knew, our paths would never converge again in any meaningful way. That happens with most high school and college friends, right?
Then, in the wee small hours of the morning of Monday, June 28, 1965, my ever-supportive if somewhat dubious parents drove me the 144 miles to Lambert Airport on the northwest side of St. Louis—and soon I was lifting off on only my second trip by airplane, ever.
This one would prove to be a bit more momentous than my three weeks in Puerto Rico.

Dollars & Ducks
Writer/artist Carl Barks gives a lesson in supply and demand in Dell/Western’s brilliant Uncle Scrooge #6 (1954). [TM & © Disney.]

Bob Hopkins
was a fountain of information about the Golden Age of Comicbooks in 1961-62—but his real passion was Whitman’s Big Little Books, like this one starring The Phantom. [Artwork TM & © King Features, Inc.]

Tony Schuch
and a lush painting of undersea life from his later years. Courtesy of Annette Schuch.

Two Touches Of Silver
Archie Comics’ Adventures of The Jaguar #3 (May 1961), cover by John Rosenberger… and Timely’s Fantastic Four #4 (May ’62), penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Sol Brodsky. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Archie Comic Group & Marvel Characters, Inc., respectively.]

“Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might…”
Jerry Bails’ cover for Alter-Ego #3 (Fall 1962) spotlighted the original Green Lantern and his foes, tracing art by Mart Nodell, Irwin Hasen, Martin Naydel, and Alex Toth. Special thanks to Aaron Caplan. [All characters TM & © DC Comics.]

Larry Ivie
conceived an origin for a revival of The Atom circa 1960, months before the quite different Silver Age version was conceived. His concept illo saw print in Xero #5 in ’61—sporting an ironic “motto” Dick and Pat Lupoff had given their fanzine, quoting a snarky complaint from an over- serious SF fan. Don’t ask. Photo courtesy of Sandy Plunkett. [Atom TM & © DC Comics.]

Terrific Trio
(Left:) These three 1960s fans were also artists and writers who produced some of the best amateur work to come out of early comics fandom.

Ronn Foss

Richard  “Grass” Green

Biljo White

Two More For ’62
Two more hero series that premiered in early 1962: Timely’s The Incredible Hulk #1 (May ’62; cover by Jack Kirby & Paul Reinman) and DC’s Showcase #37 (March-April ’62; art by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito). But that year’s debuts were barely getting started! Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., & DC Comics, respectively.]

All In The Family
A rare 1960s photo of the Thomas family together: Roy & Leona… Roy Jr., Katy (far left), & Tara. Courtesy of Katy Kirn.

Fox & Friends, 1962-64
(L. & r.:) Lloyd Whitledge & Richard Strong, Roy’s apartment-mates 1962-64.
(Above:) Fox High School, a long building set back from Highway 61 (off left) in Arnold, Missouri. FHS is viewed here from atop the hill where grades 1-8 and the superintendent were located. Roy would find himself climbing that slope on a couple of unpleasant occasions during the 1964-65 school year. From the Fox Ha-ko yearbooks.

A.k.a. The Roll-O-Fun
The Jackson roller rink where the Gaberlunzies/Galaxies played the great majority of their 1961-64 gigs. Illo from the 2020 “Treasures of Jackson” calendar, used by permission of artist Jeanie Eddleman. [© the respective copyright holders.]

The Day When Lightning Struck—Twice!
Two winners that went on sale the same early-summer day in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, both dated Aug. 1962: Journey into Mystery #83 & Amazing Fantasy #15. Both covers penciled by Jack Kirby; inks by Joe Sinnott & Steve Ditko, respectively. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Getting Antsy
The return of scientist Henry Pym from an earlier issue—now transmuted into “Ant-Man” in Tales to Astonish #35 (Sept. 1962). Pencils by Kirby; inks by Dick Ayers. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet, Man!
Roy’s freehand-drawn cover for his “All in Color for a Dime” installment in the Lupoffs’ Xero #9 (1962). It dealt with the non-Marvel Family heroes of Fawcett Publications. [Bulletman TM & © DC Comics.

All That Glitters…
Ronn Foss and Grass Green teamed up to draw this gilded cover for Alter-Ego #4 (Fall 1962)—the first photo-offset issue, and Jerry Bails’ last issue, period. [Human Torch TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.; The Fly TM & © Archie Comic Group; Alley Oop TM & © Andrews McMeel Syndication or successors in interest; other heroes TM & © DC Comics.]

“Read Alter-Ego---Or Else!”
Jack Kirby drew (and lettered) this Thing illo especially for Alter-Ego #4. It was reportedly inked by Jerry Bails. [Thing TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The 1963 Alter-Ego  “Summit”
in the living room of Biljo & Ruth White in Columbia, Missouri. (L. to r.:) Biljo White, Jerry Bails, Sondra Bails, Linda Rahm, Roy Thomas. Photo by Ruth White.

Need More Iron  In Your Diet?
Jack Kirby cover for Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963). Inks by Don Heck, who drew the “Iron Man” origin story within. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Total Eclipse
New editor/publisher Ronn Foss illustrated the cover of the newly de-hyphenated Alter Ego #5 (Winter 1962-63), featuring the hero created by himself and writer Drury Moroz. [Art © Estate of Ronn Foss.]

Coming Up
Two young fan-artists who had work printed in A/E #5, and who would become pro comics artists a few years later, were Mike Vosburg (above) and Alan Weiss (below). [Heroes TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Well, The New Yorker Has  That Knickerbocker Guy…
(Far left:) A drawing by Ronn Foss of his character, fan-mag mascot Joy Holiday, from 1964’s Alter Ego #7. [Art © Estate of Ronn Foss.]
(Left:) Linda Rahm garbed as Joy Holiday; her pics appeared in Foss’ A/E issues #5 & 6. Photo by Roy T.

High Society
The Justice Society of America returned (right after a cameo in The Flash #137) in Justice League of America #21 (Aug. 1963)—beginning an annual tradition of “JLA-JSA team-ups” that lasted until 1985 and the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Pencils by Mike Sekowsky; inks by Murphy Anderson. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Two Teams That Came To Play
The first issues of both The Avengers and The X-Men hit the stands in summer of ’63, dated September. Both covers penciled by Kirby. Avengers inks by Dick Ayers; X-Men inks by Sol Brodsky & Frank Giacoia. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Doomed!
National/DC writer Arnold Drake conceived and scripted “The Doom Patrol,” launched in My Greatest Adventure #80 (June 1963)—three months before The X-Men also sported a leader in a wheelchair. There were, however, few other similarities. Art by Bruno Premiani. Courtesy of the GDC. [Cover TM & © DC Comics.]

By The H-Bomb’s Early Light
This Herb Trimpe/Sal Buscema panel from The Incredible Hulk #124 (Feb. 1970) was planned by writer Roy T. to echo the living room of the USAF base commander father of his friend Bob Barney in 1963. Some readers understandably found such a framed photo far-fetched, even for “Thunderbolt” Ross—but it was strictly true to life. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Spiders In Spanish
The June 30, 1963, edition of El Sorprendente Hombre Araña [#1] had only recently come on sale when Roy and two friends visited Puerto Rico for three weeks in the summer of 1963—so naturally he came home with a copy. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Hit Or Mythology
(Left:) The cover of the 1960s paperback edition of Mythology by Edith Hamilton. [© the respective copyright holders.]
(Right:) One of the brightest lights in Roy’s 1963-64 English class was Jean Maxey. Neither of them dreamed their paths would cross again, later in the decade. From the 1965 Fox HS yearbook.

SYNOPSIS for FANTASTIC FOUR #8 “Prisoners of Puppet Master!”
(5 pages): Thing enters headquarters. Mr. F working on something in lab which he doesn’t want Thing to see-- tells Torch to keep Thing out. Torch tosses up wall of flame between them. Thing gets angry-- feels they are keeping secrets from him. Says he’s thru-- storms out. I.G. runs after him-- to cool him off. Becomes invisible so as not to attract attention to herself in her uniform-- people stare at invisible gal talking to Thing. They suddenly see a guy about to jump off a bridge. I.G. shoots flare over guy’s head. Mr. F sees it-- tries to reach out of window to grab guy-- too far to reach-- Torch flies toward guy and saves him. Guy is in a daze-- doesn’t know why he did it-- is a congressman. Across town the villain has observed what happened through binoculars-- angry-- FF frustrated him. He has a small model of bridge and a small model of congressman on table-- he made congressman walk off bridge by manipulating the small puppet of him. Now Puppet Master will make puppets of FF and destroy them! He has blind daughter-- pretty. (He plans to demonstrate his powers to the world, and then sell his services to nation which is the highest bidder.)
(5 pages): Puppet Master figures easiest thing to do is let FF destroy themselves-- he makes only one puppet-- the Thing. He will let the Thing who is strongest destroy the others. He moves puppet to a model of his own apartment so that Thing will come to him. In street, Thing suddenly gets in to a daze, and heads for Puppet Master’s apt., followed by I.G. Thing, under PM’s spell, reveals I.G.’s presence, some interesting scenes showing how PM tries to capture her, and he finally succeeds, helped by blind daughter who can sense things unseen. PM commands Thing to return and slay Mr. F and Torch-- he also tells his daughter to go WITH Thing, dressed in I.G.’s costume, to throw them off-guard. Then, PM makes puppet of warden of state prison-- gonna get him to realize all the hundreds of dangerous prisoners, to prove his power. IG strains to escape bonds and stop him.
(3 pages): Thing enters FF headquarters with Blind gal. Starts to fight Mr. F-- knocks out Torch before Torch can burst into flame. Mr. F runs into lab-- Thing follows-- gets exposed to artificial rays-- becomes human-- but only for as long as he is under rays-- Mr. F tells him the rays are what he was working on earlier-- to make Thing human-- but didn’t want Thing to know until they were perfected-- because didn’t want Thing to be disappointed. Not perfected yet-- still has to find a way to make results more lasting. Blind gal can’t understand-- tells Thing she thinks he is handsome-- his voice-- his character-- etc.-- while in human form the Puppet Master’s spell is broken-- he is now ashamed of himself. Mr. F realizes blind gal is not I.G.-- wonders where I.G. is-- we switch to Puppet Master-- he has opened prison gates (thru control of warden) and now is making a doll to finish off I.G.

“Prisoners Of The Puppet Master”
(Left:) The single-page synopsis written by Stan Lee for the first part of Fantastic Four #8, as retyped by Jerry Bails for his fanzines—and more recently by Jon B. Cooke.
(Right:) The first printed page of FF #8 (Nov. 1962), like most of the early sequences in that story, closely follows Stan’s synopsis. Script by Lee; pencils by Jack Kirby; inks by Dick Ayers. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Cavemen & Cut-ups
(Above:) The cover of Ronn Foss’ Alter Ego #6 (Winter 1963-64) featured a photo of artist Joe Kubert and a black-&-white image of part of his powerful cover for Tor #3 (1954). [Tor art TM & © Estate of Joe Kubert.]
(Left:) In that issue, Roy T. and Grass Green teamed up to illustrate “The Bestest League of America Meets Da Frantic Four,” combining parody groups the two of them had handled separately at an earlier date. [© Roy Thomas & Estate of Grass Green.]

“The Biggest Surprise In Fandom History”?
The first of the three spirit-duplicator pages prepared by Biljo White, announcing that “Captain Biljo,” with help from “Corporal Roy,” would be taking over Alter Ego with #7. [Art © Estate of Biljo White.]

It’s Not Greek To Me—It’s Egyptian!
A penciled sample of some of Roy’s “homework” for the informal lessons he took in 1964 from a retired Washington University professor.

“The Curious Case Of The Carrot-Top Club”
For Alter Ego #100 in 2011, fan-artist Lawrence Guidry penciled the 10-page “Elongated Man” script Roy had written in 1964 at the behest of Schwartz and Fox. Since all names and costumes had to be changed, even for that limited printing, Lawrence suggested the title hero be re-christened “LongArm of the Law”—a perfect monicker. Inks by Shane Foley; colors by Randy Sargent. [Script © Roy Thomas; art © Lawrence Guidry & Shane Foley.]

Marlene Jahss
and furry friend going for a ride. Photo courtesy of Marlene Jahss LeGates.

Santo Vs. The Vampire Women
While driving around Mexico in ’64, Roy and Mar caught a movie starring a masked wrestler who also had his own weekly fumetti comicbook. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Albert “Bud” Tindall
Roy’s good friend and 1964-65 roommate. Photo from Fox HS yearbook.
Also seen is the “Goldwater-Man” figure from a cartoon Roy drew for Alter Ego #7—a follow-up to his and Bud’s earlier newspaper spoof. [© Roy Thomas]

Madam, I’m Black Adam
Biljo White’s cover for Alter Ego #7 (Fall 1964), the first time the Marvel Family’s 1945 foe Black Adam appeared on any magazine cover—and only his second outing ever. [Shazam heroes & Black Adam TM & © DC Comics.]

“The Gilded Age” Meets “The Marvel Age”
For A/E #7, Roy drew this cartoon to suggest how Marvel editor/writer Stan Lee might try to inspire his artists. Turns out he wasn’t that far off! [© Roy Thomas.]

“Hawkaaaaa!”
(Above:) Blackhawk, originally a Quality Comics hero but later published by DC, was featured on the cover of Alter Ego #8 (Winter 1965). Art by Biljo White. [Blackhawk TM & © DC Comics.]
(Right:) JHS grad Pauline Copeman takes a turn as Joy Holiday in A/E #8—and gets courted by an alien called Herko. (For the reason why, see p. 122.) Photo by Gary Friedrich.

“Sincerely,  Steve Ditko”
After receiving Alter Ego #7, “Spider-Man”/“Dr. Strange” artist Steve Ditko sent Roy this clever cartoon, which he published in #8. [All characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

And God Created Brigitte
Roy says his idea of “foreign relations” in 1965 would’ve been a date with Brigitte Bardot. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Models Of Decorum
Roy in spring of 1965, with Aurora models of The Phantom and Superman that he had customized into Blue Beetle and Son of Vulcan, after selling scripts starring those heroes to Charlton. Photo by Bud Tindall.

Ain’t Love Grand?
Kurt Schaffenberger’s cover for Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #54 (Jan. 1965), whose cover story featuring the alien called Herko inspired Roy’s one and only fan letter ever to a Superman-related comicbook. Little did he realize how fateful that missive might prove to be! Cover courtesy of the GDC. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Wendell Crowley
The 1944-53 editor of Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel Adventures, among other comics—and the first comicbook pro Roy T. ever met in person. Photo courtesy of P.C. Hamerlinck.

“¡Supermen South!”
Biljo White’s final cover for Alter Ego was an inventive wraparound depicting Mexico’s comicbook super-heroes, who were examined within. [Art © Estate of Biljo White.]

It Ain’t The Rolling Stone, But…
(Above:) The first time Roy’s picture appeared in a big-city newspaper: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for May 17, 1965.
(Right:) Jack Rice, Roy’s favorite newspaper columnist… until the above article ran on May 17, 1965. [Article and photos © the respective copyright holders.]

Denny O’Neil
This photo was taken in the early ’70s, but Denny hadn’t changed much from a few years earlier, when he and Roy had first met. Courtesy of Sam Maronie.

Come Fly With Me
Just a couple of weeks after attending a legendary performance by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., Roy departed for the Big Apple via St. Louis’ Lambert Airport (below; it hadn’t changed much since this 1956 photo was taken.). [DVD cover photo TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Part V
“You Don’t Scare Me, SUPER-FINK!”
Two Weeks—Or Was It Two Years?—With Mort Weisinger
(late June–early July 1965)

1.
I’ll be damned if I can tell you how I got from the airport to mid-town Manhattan that morning!
The only thing I’m sure of is, I got there—though whether our plane landed at LaGuardia Airport or the larger, recently renamed John F. Kennedy International (both are in the borough called Queens), I couldn’t say.
Maybe there was a shuttle that transported passengers to some central point in Manhattan, around 50th Street or so—possibly to the famous Pan-Am Building, which has long outlasted the airline it was named for. I had planned on splurging for a cab ride from the airport to National Periodicals’ offices at 575 Lexington Avenue, some blocks north… but the smirking fates decreed there was a taxicab strike in progress the day I arrived. (I’d soon learn that some union or other was almost always on strike in the City That Doesn’t Sleep.)
The first thing I definitely remember about my 1965 experience of the island whose residents usually refer to it either as “the city” or just “New York”—totally ignoring the other four boroughs and the rest of the state—is walking up Lexington Av, suitcase in hand, looking for National’s digs. Actually, since I’d also brought my electric Smith- Corona portable typewriter, I had both hands full.
At one point, I recall abruptly glancing up at the numbers on the buildings—and realizing I had walked a block or two past the address I wanted, so I had to backtrack, my twin burdens ever weightier. Suitcases didn’t come with wheels in those antediluvian days.
On the eighth floor of what was heralded over the street entrance as the Standard Brands Building, I finally entered the relatively plush digs of National Periodical Publications. I was quickly escorted to the tidy but not overly large office of Mort Weisinger. It was situated two-thirds of the way down one side of an inner hallway from which the various offices on “editors’ row” opened onto the large, open, and well-staffed production department opposite them.
Though I don’t recall having previously seen photos of him, Mort looked pretty much as I’d heard him described: reasonably tall, a corpulent 300 pounds (well, maybe a bit less), with a smile that was both rare and meaningless… not unlike a more sinister Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. When I needed to characterize his physical aspect a few years later, the phrase “a malevolent toad” sprang unbidden to my typewriter; by the mid-1980s, I had a ready film reference to hand: Jabba the Hut in Return of the Jedi. But hey, I was 5'4" and skinny and kind of gawky-looking, so I was one to talk? Neither of us would be working with the other because we liked their looks! Besides, among other things, I knew that, as a fledgling DC writer and editor in 1941, Mort had co-created Aquaman, Green Arrow, Johnny Quick, and Vigilante—and that bought him an additional layer of automatic respect from me.
He wasn’t surprised to see me, of course, because we had previously agreed on the precise date I would arrive. Even so, he immediately informed me that I couldn’t officially begin work (i.e., start getting paid) till the following Monday, but that I should hang around the office the rest of that week to learn the ropes. This surprised me, since he’d never said a word about my having to put in my first week’s labor for free.
Before I could question him on that point, he abruptly referred to my being on a “two-week trial period.” This threw me for a second loop, since his original letter had specified two months, not two weeks. (Bonus question: Was this unpaid week perhaps one of the latter?)
While I was still off-balance from those unwelcome revelations, he lobbed a third verbal grenade my way: that my starting salary would be $100 a week. Now, that was just too much to let pass unchallenged. I reminded him politely that his offer in his initial letter had been $110 a week. He stared at me as if I had just conjured that figure out of thin ether and grumped self-righteously, “I can’t pay you more than I’m paying that idiot!” On the final two words, he nodded gruffly in the general direction of what I would soon learn was his assistant’s deskspace a few doors down the hall. His response didn’t really answer my question, but I had been thrown too off-kilter to argue at the moment.
He finally struck a positive note (fourth time lucky!) when he mentioned that Julie Schwartz had expressed an interest in having me write scripts for him at some future date. Actually, I found that news a bit surprising, since I’d heard National’s editors were a very turf-protecting lot, and that anyone who wrote or drew for one editor was generally considered off-limits to others, even if he/she was technically a freelancer. Since Mort had already had me plot one “Jimmy Olsen” story for his line, I found myself wondering whether I’d be permitted to write scripts for both him and Schwartz. Well, I guess I’d see, wouldn’t I?
Mort next asked if I had arranged living accommodations in advance. When I said no, he made a quick phone call to the George Washington Hotel on Lexington between 23rd and 24th Streets, more than two dozen blocks to the south. He then told me I should report back the next morning, ready to go to work… but before I departed, he introduced me to a few other editors in their offices (I forget precisely which ones). Oddly, I don’t recall if Julius Schwartz was one of them or not. I guess I was really feeling discombobulated.
Early on, we reached the office that Mort’s current assistant shared with the romance-comics editor and his assistant. Editor Jack Miller wasn’t around; if I ever met him, I’ve no memory of it. But I was introduced to his assistant, an attractive young woman in her early twenties, who smiled, said hello, then promptly returned to whatever she’d been doing, probably advice columns or letters pages for the love mags.
I was startled to meet the assistant editor I would be replacing. This is the first time I was aware that he was none other than E. Nelson Bridwell, the fleshy, soft-spoken 34-year-old Oklahoman who had contributed the “Tragic Monster” article to Alter Ego #7 the year before. It was an awkward situation, because Nelson was fully aware I was to be his replacement, and that because of me (or if not me, then someone else) he was about to be tossed out into the world as that lowliest of things, a freelancer. Still, he was friendly and polite, as were we all, for the few minutes we shared that day. I couldn’t help but notice the disdain with which Mort treated Nelson, though. Was this brusque treatment what I had awaiting me? (Short answer: yes.)
Afterward, Mort escorted me into the bustling production area and introduced me to one or two of the main production people, including Ed Eisenberg, a wiry but friendly fellow. I don’t recall whom else I may have met that day, alas. I don’t think I ever met the chief production head, Sol Harrison, during that period.
Before long, I departed, suitcase and typewriter in hand(s). Someone had clued me in to take the Lexington Avenue subway line, which would let me out not far from my hotel. I considered myself lucky the subways weren’t on strike, too.
The George Washington Hotel had seen better days; reportedly, poet W.H. Auden and novelist Christopher Isherwood had resided there back in the 1930s. The room I was given was small but clean, though it lacked a desk of any kind… nor was there, to my recollection, a telephone. To type, I had to park my Smith-Corona on the room’s single wooden chair and lean forward while perching on the edge of the creaking bed. That position was definitely not good for my back, so I kept my typing sessions short… though I did drop lines right away to my parents and to Jerry Bails, telling them I was in New York and all set to conquer the comicbook field. As if.
That first evening back in New York City, I wandered some blocks uptown to the Times Square area, to see what it was like seven years after I’d first trod those streets on the JHS senior trip. Chances are I also took in a movie, because that’s what I did in those days. And, wonder of wonder, most of those very same stores in Times Square were still having “going out of business” sales. They probably still are.
2.
This isn’t quite in chronological  order, but:
One of my first few days in Manhattan, I had an odd and unsettling experience as I walked toward the stairs that led down into the subway station nearest the National offices. An attractive young Hispanic woman came erupting up from below, not looking where she was going, and banged into me—hard. Before I could say anything, she spewed a mouthful of epithets at me in rapid-fire Spanish—I didn’t understand any of them except the spat-out word “gringo,” which was probably the mildest of them—and she then stalked angrily off up Lexington Avenue.
Welcome to New York!
3.
My orientation at National during the remainder of that first week is a bit of a blur, six decades on.
I would show up each morning wearing my new suit (yes, vest and all, even in the hot and humid Manhattan summer). I may have also worn it on the plane trip on Monday, since folks dressed far more formally for air travel back in the day, before the garb of the typical passenger on a U.S. flight resembled that of the untouchables clinging to the tops of railroad boxcars bound from Mumbai to Delhi.
I divided my hours between sitting with Mort in his office, and letting Nelson bring me up to speed a few doors down. Nelson was always extremely professional and helpful. We didn’t discuss anything about our relative situations. What would’ve been the use?
Just to get everything out in the open, I had informed Mort about the two scripts I’d recently written for Charlton. He immediately informed me that, of course, being now on staff at National, I couldn’t do any further work for Charlton, and I certainly accepted that.
Mort naturally started giving me things to proofread—comics stories and letters columns. Proofing completed pages of comic art, I swiftly found, was trickier than proofing regular text, because one had to watch for both verbal and artistic errors simultaneously, as well as for mistakes related to the interface between those two areas. Luckily, I turned out to have a natural affinity for proofing comics pages, even if I was far from perfect.
Not that Mort didn’t try to make me comfortable in his own gruff way. One day that first week, he took me to lunch; we were joined by writer Otto Binder. Naturally, I was pleased to meet in person the creator of the “Adam Link, Robot” SF series and the scripter of so many of the best stories of “Captain Marvel” and “The Marvel Family,” as well as many other Golden and Silver Age tales (and currently of numerous Superman-related yarns). His nostalgic/historical letter printed in Alter Ego #7 had been a highlight of that issue—although I would learn later that Mort had taken him severely to task for contrasting the “humor, fantasy, and ‘whimsy’” of vintage “Captain Marvel” stories with “the dead-serious grimness and plodding ‘consistency’ of Superman.” Mort sprung for a high-end eatery called The Summit (I took that as an omen) not far from National. Over the course of the lunch, Otto invited me to his home in Engelwood, New Jersey, on a near-future weekend, and I happily accepted. After all, in one missive to me, he had referred to it as “The House That Captain Marvel Built”—indeed, he’d said that the World’s Mightiest Mortal had “paid for it many times over”—so how could I not want to stay under that roof, especially with a host as affable at Otto (“Eando”) Binder? (That’s why you’ll see his photo near the end of this chapter, instead of here.)
It was one of those first-week mornings when Mort exposed me to a weird little ritual which, I’d soon learn, he inflicted on virtually everyone who ever worked for him, and some who didn’t: He whipped out and waved before my eyes a $1000 check he said he had just received from the Sunday-newspaper-supplement magazine Parade as payment for a certain period’s worth of the “Bonanza, USA” column he regularly wrote for it. That feature was an outgrowth of his earlier popular book titled 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free. It was obvious that Mort wanted to make sure his underlings immediately understood that he himself was an author of such magnitude and success as they could only longingly aspire to. Well, I’ve gotta admit: I was impressed. To date, I had written two entire comicbooks and one synopsis, and my total receipts were a  mere $210.
One day during that week, Mort and I were walking down the hall together when we encountered Irwin Donenfeld, son of DC Comics founder Harry Donenfeld, and also National’s current co-publisher (I never did meet his fellow publisher, one-time DC accountant Jack Liebowitz). I noticed that, when Mort introduced me to Donenfeld the Younger, he made a point of saying of me that “He comes from the fanzines”… an odd phrasing, as if I had somehow descended from outer space. I made a mental note to mention that wording to Jerry, first chance I got. It showed that we fans were making inroads with the pros in more ways than one.
Tellingly, certain subjects never arose during my interactions with Mort: the “Jimmy Olsen” synopsis I was scheduled to revise and then turn into a script… precisely when the clock would begin ticking on my now-two-week trial period… and the $10 difference between his original salary offer and what it had devolved into upon my arrival. But I figured that would all be settled in due course.
Strangely, I don’t recall anything at all concerning any early interactions with Julius Schwartz, the editor whose National comics meant by far the most to me—my quasi-regular correspondent, who had given me access to Gardner Fox, Jerry Bails, and to some extent even Mort Weisinger. My suspicion is that Julie felt it best to let things settle in between Mort and me before he injected himself into the equation. Smart choice. I met writer Gardner Fox in Julie’s office at some time during this early period; but strangely, I draw a similar blank on meeting the original writer of my beloved “Justice Society of America” and “Hawkman.”
And, speaking of JSA writers:
4.
On what was maybe my second or third day at DC, somehow I found myself standing in the big production area with two artists whose work I admired: Gil Kane (currently drawing Green Lantern and The Atom) and my favorite comics artist, Joe Kubert. I have no memory of the specific conversation, and I’m sure I was contributing relatively little that was worthwhile to it…
…when suddenly I beheld a stern-looking middle-aged man with a grim expression and fire in his eyes stalking toward me from the direction of the editorial offices. I heard someone utter the name “Kanigher,” as in Robert K., editor of National’s war comics and writer/editor of both Metal Men and Wonder Woman. Far more important to me: I knew he had scripted two, perhaps three, key issues of All-Star Comics in the latter ’40s. Somehow, I hadn’t been introduced to him earlier by Mort, but he was about to correct that omission with a vengeance.
Apparently, someone had pointed me out to Kanigher, saying I was a fanzine editor who was now working for Weisinger. He strode up to me, barked a few rapid-fire words I didn’t catch, then began to proclaim loudly and irrelevantly to the entire production area that comics fan Paul Gambaccini had slandered him by describing him in some fanzine or other as wearing a sports jacket and a yellow bowtie when the youngster had interviewed him. Raising his voice another decibel, he offered $50 to anyone in the room who would swear to having ever seen him wearing a bowtie! There were no takers. (I suspect neither Kubert nor Kane ventured a word during this one-sided “exchange.”) I responded defensively that I knew nothing about any of that, though I admitted I did correspond off and on with Gambaccini. At that point, Kanigher switched to a short rant about how, unlike other comics writers, who were just a bunch of hacks, he had sought inspiration by going to the Sistine Chapel and the like. After a minute, he stomped off back to his office. Thankfully, I never saw him again during my tenure at National.
I had liked him better in All-Star.
With first Weisinger, and now Kanigher, I had met the two National editors who were almost universally considered the most unreasonable and sadistic of a generally officious lot.
I never had anything more than a nodding acquaintance with Gil Kane during those days, so chances are he soon departed… but Kubert (who at the time was doing most of his work for Kanigher) stuck around. He remembered me from my letters re the “Hawkman” revival, as well as from Alter Ego, since I had sent him both issues I’d published so far. After a bit of small talk, mostly me gushing over how I’d been a fan of his since age four, he began to feel me out about the possibility of my helping him with a pet project of his. He told me he planned to soon put out, independent of National, an over-sized periodical composed of comics material by himself and several others. His own creative contribution to the as-yet-unnamed magazine would be a revival of “Tor,” his prehistoric hero from early-’50s days at St. John Publishing. I naturally replied that I’d do whatever I could to help. Joe said he’d love to have access to Alter Ego’s mailing list, something I assured him I’d be happy to share with him. (As it turned out, it would actually be twelve more years before his projected publication finally emerged, with the title Sojourn. It did indeed contain some memorable “Tor” material, as well as work by John Severin, Lee Elias, and others, but its tabloid size proved hard to market and, alas, it would last only two issues.)
One of those early afternoons, I recall hanging around the office after 5:00 because artist Murphy Anderson was there, inking one of his “Hawkman” pages at a production- area drawing-board. Murphy was friendly, deep-voiced, avuncular, and easy to talk to… not nearly as intimidating to me as Kubert, my idol. Never having seen a professional inking his own rough pencils (or anybody else’s) before, I was fascinated to watch Murphy finishing realistic, detailed figures over unfinished layouts. It really did seem almost as if he started inking at the top corner of the page, and just kept going as his brush-wielding hand descended diagonally. It reminded me of those opening sequences in the 1950s Disney True Life Adventures nature films, where a giant hand wielding an art-brush splashed paint on the screen and the paint flowed downward, magically creating images of skies and mountains and rivers and trees as it descended.
I really needed the boost that meeting icons like Binder, Schwartz, Fox, Kane, Kubert, and Anderson gave me, because it was already clear that Mort was an editor who persistently browbeat and downright bullied the people under him. Apparently that included writers and artists as well (the great “Batman”/World’s Finest artist Dick Sprang is virtually the only person who ever had a good word to say about his relationship with Weisinger, and Sprang mostly lived out West and rarely had to encounter him face to face)… so of course an editorial assistant just a few doors down from him five days a week was the fairest of game. Nelson, who’d been hired sometime in ’64, seemed to accept being treated like a human punching-bag… until now the final indignity had come: he was to be let go and he had to train his replacement.
I wasn’t sure I’d last long under such conditions, but what the hell—I was here, working at a company whose comics I’d loved since I was four, and maybe things would look up when I was actually being paid to do all the things I was currently doing for free. Besides, I still had that graduate fellowship to George Washington U. in my metaphorical hip pocket, and from time to time I would remind myself that it was still there.
5.
It was either during that first week, or else definitely the second, that I met Len Brown—not to mention Wally Wood and the artists of his studio.
Len, a dark- and curly-haired Brooklynite a year my junior, was a young executive at Topps Chewing Gum, one of the country’s major purveyors not only of bubble gum but also of sports cards and other types of trading cards. The two of us had exchanged one or two letters over the past year; indeed, he was one of those who’d tried to purchase my comics by mail the previous summer while Mar and I were motoring about Mexico, only to discover that every mag he wanted had already been snapped up by the all-devouring maw that was Howard Rogofsky.
Len and I met up one evening, and we quickly discovered we had interests in common besides comics. Unsurprisingly, he was also a rock’n’roll fan, though with an even greater love for country music, which generally left me cold—except where the two collided in “rockabilly” such as the early days of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the like. Len had—probably still has—one of the largest rockabilly collections in the world. To my astonishment, he was also a budding comicbook writer, having scribed a story for the imminently-on-sale first issue of a new title called T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, for new publisher Tower Comics, under the artistic aegis of the legendary Wally Wood.
Len had driven in from Brooklyn—perhaps in a Mustang, since he tended to trade for a new one of that breed every couple of years during that era—so, that evening, he took me to Wood’s Manhattan studio. I knew that Wood, whom I admired primarily for his 1950s EC art, both science-fiction and particularly such Mad parodies as “Superduperman” and “Batboy and Rubin,” had been doing a bang-up job drawing and even redesigning Marvel’s fledgling Daredevil comic, whose hero was a blind lawyer whose other senses had achieved preternatural levels after an accident involving (what else?) radioactive materials. Wood and Stan Lee together had swiftly made Daredevil a must-read mag, something it hadn’t been for its first few issues.
But, Len informed me, Wood had very recently quit Daredevil and had a twin hatred for (a) the name “Wally” (he preferred to be called “Woody”) and (b) Stan Lee. While I don’t recall Len’s venturing any opinion that night on the reason for Wood’s loathing of Lee, he repeated an anecdote he’d heard from Wood about Stan giving out staffers’ paychecks by tossing them into the air and forcing the guys to scramble for them, which I agreed sounded mildly offensive, if true. (Since I never heard confirmation of that story from others, I soon came to suspect that, if Stan had ever done that as a ham-handed gag, it had probably occurred rarely, and probably in Stan’s brash youth, when he was the teenage editor of an entire company. I doubt Wood was speaking from personal experience.) More to the point, Wood and crew were launching T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents as a title that combined elements of super-heroes and James Bond—or, more accurately, TV’s Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Len had known Wood for some time, since the artist had worked on various trading-card projects for Topps, including the legendary 1962 Mars Attacks series that had been partly Len’s brainchild. Wood had invited Len to write the very first story of the chief T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent, who was originally slated to be called Thunderbolt, and Len had done so. At the eleventh hour, however, Wood renamed that hero Dynamo, utilizing the name of the villain Len had written for the lead story in issue #2—while said villain was rechristened “Dynavac.” As a surprise tribute to the scripter, Wood gave Dynamo the civilian identity of “Len Brown.” Len told me he was too busy with his job at Topps to write any more for Tower at present, however.
I was startled when Len pulled over onto a street between the wider avenues that ran north and south in Manhattan —and promptly double-parked. There was still room for another car to squeeze by; but I wondered out loud if  Len was in danger of getting his car towed, in a town as automobile-infested as this. Len shrugged it off and we headed into a brownstone and up some stairs to Wood’s studio.
It was mostly a big open space, where Wood and several young artist-assistants were putting together the art and story for the second issue of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and I got a birds-eye view of an alternate way in which comics were made… something closer to the old “shop” or “studio” system that had flourished especially in the 1940s, when Lloyd Jacquet, Jerry Iger, Harry “A” Chesler, et al., had lorded it over groups of artists and writers who produced finished comics material for publishers who wanted to avoid hiring in-house staffs of their own. This shop, however, was a bit more intimate. Everyone there deferred to Wally Wood, the master, who was both their boss and a singular talent, clearly revered by all.
I’m not sure which other young artists I met in the short time we were there—they may have included Ralph Reese—but one of them was definitely Dan Adkins, with whom I would later do a fair amount of work. He had come to Wood from science-fiction fandom, after doing illustrations for a pro SF magazine or two. Most readers naturally assumed, when they learned Adkins and Wood had teamed up on a “Dynamo” or other “T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents” yarn, that the veteran Wood had penciled and the newbie Adkins had inked; but actually the opposite was generally true. Wood felt his inking style would overpower that of most pencilers and make the finished product look like Wally Wood’s work, pure and simple—and it usually did.
Len mentioned to Wood that I was newly working in the field, but since I was employed by National and not by the hated Stan Lee, I suspect Wood mostly ignored me after we had been introduced. He had a comicbook to turn out, after all.
The most amazing thing about the evening to me, though, was the fact that, when Len and I emerged from the building after a half-hour or so, his car was still double- parked exactly where he’d left it. No ticket, no nothing. I hopped in with my new friend and he drove off.
6.
Meanwhile, I did one other little thing during my first week in New York, most likely on Friday, July 2nd. Because of my admiration for his scripting and editing that had obviously played a large part in putting Marvel Comics on the map since 1961—as well as for a more personal reason—I wrote a letter to Stan Lee and mailed it to his office at 625 Madison Avenue.
The “more personal reason” was that earlier, somehow, during my Mexican sojourn, I had missed picking up a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #4, which had introduced Marvel’s villainous Sandman. Soon after returning, I had dropped a letter to Stan asking if I could perhaps buy a copy directly from the company. He had responded by mailing me one, gratis, accompanied by a short note that amounted to: “We’ll forgive you for missing this one issue, but don’t ever do it again!” My first direct communiqué from Stan Lee.
Thus, my July ’65 note to him, besides reintroducing myself (in case he’d forgotten me and Alter Ego and my 1961 review of Fantastic Four #1), informed him that I was now living in Manhattan and working for National. I added that, out of gratitude for the Spider-Man comic and because of my admiration for his writing for Marvel Comics, I would really like to buy him a drink some evening after work.
Most others in my situation, I suppose, would have let their fingers do the walking in a phone directory and simply given the Marvel offices a call. But, after nearly five years in mail-reliant comics fandom, and being somewhat shyer than later acquaintances might imagine, my natural inclination was to write a letter, even to a place less than an hour’s walk from my hotel.
Anyway, I deposited my missive in a mailbox and went off to… Poughkeepsie, New York.
7.
Besides the one to Len Brown, in the week before I left Missouri I had mailed a couple of letters to other people I hoped to meet once I got to Manhattan. One of those had gone to Dick and Pat Lupoff, who had edited the now-retired Xero. They currently lived up in Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson River Valley, an hour and a half train ride north of Manhattan, where Dick was a 30-year-old executive for IBM. In my letter I had suggested having dinner sometime if they were ever back in “the city” these days. Dick and Pat, instead, invited me to come spend the July 4th weekend at their home, an invitation I gratefully accepted. Mort Weisinger was already getting to me, and I knew I could use a change of scenery, even after less than a week in New York City.
The three of us spent much of Sunday, the 4th, at a beach; otherwise, we had meals and pleasant conversations about comicbooks, science-fiction, and the world in general. Ever the generous host, never once did Dick bring up the hassle I had caused by my “All in Color for a Dime” brainfreeze three years earlier. He was especially enthusiastic about his forthcoming book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, the first-ever serious study of the life and work of the man who had created Tarzan and John Carter of Mars and had thereby influenced American popular culture ever since—including many creators who might be totally unaware of John Carter, Carson of Venus, Pellucidar, and their ilk. (No English-speaker in the 20th century could be unaware of Tarzan.)
Dick had, in the early ’60s, become the editor of Canaveral Books’ unauthorized hardcover reprints of much of the ERB canon, due to the publishers’ apparently erroneous belief that many of that author’s most important novels had fallen into the public domain; the ERB estate eventually won an ensuing lawsuit. Meanwhile, Dick had arranged for new editions of the work of Tarzan’s creator to be illustrated by the likes of Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall, Roy Krenkel, and newcomer Larry Ivie (who may well have been his conduit to the other four). The experience had heightened Lupoff’s interest in Burroughs’ life and had led to the completed career biography, which would be Dick’s first published book. (Numerous others would follow, primarily in the area of science-fiction.)
Dick was also bullish on the possibility of one day reprinting all the “AICFAD” pieces in book form, including my “Captain Billy’s Whiz-Gang.” The following April, he would gift me with a hot-off-the-press copy of his ERB bio, inscribed: “To Roy Thomas—with a wish that you enjoy it, and in anticipation of another volume of which we will be co-authors (along with another half-dozen guys)… if we ever get it done!” The hardcover version of All in Color for a Dime would eventually be published in 1970.
But that still lay in the future on the holiday weekend when I enjoyed (and appreciated, more than they could possibly have known) the Lupoffs’ hospitality at this difficult juncture in my life. In fact, as we luxuriated at the beach (with me mostly striving to keep out of the sun; as Woody Allen has said: “I don’t tan; I stroke”), my mind was tormented by the thought of actually going to work for Weisinger on a five-days-a-week basis. I shared a few of those concerns with Dick and Pat, but not their full extent. Nobody loves a cry-baby… least of all one who’s on the verge of starting what he’d always considered a “dream job.”
As I was about to head back to the city on the holiday Monday, though, a misunderstanding occurred that has haunted me to this day. I lacked a full set of the ten issues of Xero, because Julie Schwartz’s copies of #1-3, which had been loaned to me by Jerry Bails, had somehow gone lost in the U.S. mails when I’d posted them back to the DC editor. Julie didn’t mind all that much, but I came to realize later that that had been just the opening salvo in what became at least a mild “Xero curse,” as far as I’m concerned.
Just before we left for the train station on Monday, Dick handed me a complete bound set of Xero, in two thick volumes, with the first few issues of the Thompsons’ Comic Art in the back. These were, he told me, his and Pat’s spare copies, and they thought having them might cheer me up during this trying period. Unfortunately, either because of Dick’s phrasing or my own roiling state of mind or some combination thereof, I managed to interpret his words to mean that Dick and Pat were gifting me those volumes, pure and simple.
It would be more than three decades before I would realize that the Lupoffs had considered the fanzines a loan, not a gift. However, when I failed to return them in due course, they never even hinted of that fact on the rare occasions our paths crossed. Thus, my notion that the Xeros were mine to keep remained rock-solid until my fandom- historian friend Bill Schelly—whom I met only in the ’90s—told me that Dick had mentioned to him that years earlier he had loaned his spare set of Xeros to an  unnamed “someone” who had never returned them.  I realized with a start that that “someone” must be me!  I quickly contacted Dick with a mea culpa explanation  and apology. After he politely turned down my offer to  purchase the volumes, I photocopied their contents and  returned the originals to him. We never again discussed the matter, but I always felt that that misunderstanding hung about like a haunting spectre over our relationship until his passing in 2020.
8.
Warning: The remainder of this chapter may be a bit tricky to follow, mostly because I jump back and forth between events connected to National/DC—all of which occurred from Tuesday, July 6th, through the end of that four-day work-week on Friday, the 9th, though I’m not always certain which things happened on which particular day—and events related to Marvel Comics and its editor/writer. Except that, in the latter case, I definitely know exactly on which day things occurred.
Tuesday, National: Maybe that day dawned bright and sunny in Manhattan, but in my head and heart the skies were overcast. I had experienced enough anxiety in the preceding week to be more apprehensive than enthusiastic about starting work for Mort Weisinger.
All the same, I made every effort to look on the bright side: It was a job in comics, something I had probably aspired to even when I hadn’t realized it—and I was employed by the biggest and most successful comics company in the world: the “Tiffany’s of comicbooks,” as its higher- ups were known to refer to it. I was also living in New York City, which had excited my imagination in countless movies from childhood on.
Additional plus: I was not teaching high school.
So I walked into 575 Lex ready to start the day… and the rest of my life.
Actually, that week at National was a lot like the preceding one, except that now I was on the clock, and on Friday I would receive a check (for a five-day week, making up for at least one of the unpaid days of the preceding week); so the pressure was on me to prove I had earned it.
Nelson Bridwell, before he’d left “for good” the previous Friday, must have brought all the Superman comics’ letters pages up to date in terms of editorial responses, since I don’t recall Weisinger ever getting around to having me write answers for any of those. Mostly, that week, I proofread comic art pages, writers’ scripts, and a few galleys of letters pages in my one-third of the small office down the hall from his. I suppose Mort and/or Nelson had given me pointers as to how to do most of that. And I suspect I consulted a few old galleys lying around as my guide re standard proofreading symbols and the like, with which I was not previously familiar. I guess Mort assumed I’d figure it out, if I had it in me… and, for the most part, I did.
However, I certainly wasn’t perfect… as Mort clearly expected me to be, right off the bat. For instance, one of the first stories in original-art form that I proofed for him—a “Jimmy Olsen” or “Lois Lane”—took place in a fictional country with a multi-syllabled name. As it turned out, the letterer had accidentally reversed two of the approximately dozen letters in one of the two or three places in the yarn where it appeared… and I managed to miss that. I certainly couldn’t object to Mort pointing that out and telling me I needed to take more care in that department; but, as usual, he managed to do so in a most demeaning way. He never actually yelled at me—if he had, I would’ve been out of there like a shot and pondering when was the next train to Washington, DC—but he told me scathingly that mistakes like this one were the reason he had fired “that idiot.” (I don’t recall ever hearing him refer to Nelson by name except when he had introduced us.)
Tuesday, Marvel (well, via telephone): I arrived back at my hotel around 5:30 p.m., to be informed by the front desk that there had been a phone call for me a bit earlier… from a Mr. Stan Lee. He had left his office number.
Naturally, I returned the call right away—from the front desk, underscoring my memory that there was no phone in my room. Stan himself answered; chances are, the handful of other Marvel staffers had all left for the day. He was gregarious and friendly and said he appreciated my offer to buy him a drink, but since he lived out on Long Island, he didn’t usually hang around even this long after 5:00. It just so happened that, on this particular day, he had lingered at the office a half-hour longer than usual—or else I’d have missed him.
After a modicum of chitchat, he got around to saying what had probably been on his mind all along: He told me that Marvel had this “little writer’s test,” since he was looking for new scripters to take off him some of the burden of scribing nearly all the company’s comics. (Who knew? We fans mostly figured he loved writing eight super-hero comics a month. After all, we would have.) He asked if I’d be interested in taking that test. I replied, naturally, that I already had a job; still, it was impossible to turn down such an invitation—and challenge, of a sort—from the man I considered the best and most important writer then working in comics. So I said yes. It was agreed that the next day, over my lunch hour, I’d drop by the Marvel offices, which were 10 minutes or so from National’s, pick up the test, and return it when I had “completed” it. Stan must have given me some indication of what the “writer’s test” would consist of, since I’m positive no one else did later.
The entire conversation lasted fifteen minutes, tops. But it left me feeling a bit better about my New York sojourn to date: working for one company’s senior editor on its most important titles… and getting a phone call from the editor and main writer of another.
9.
Wednesday, National: I think this may well be the day I found what I felt was a storytelling weakness in a “Jimmy Olsen” story. The young reporter is searching for an evil scientist’s hidden laboratory out in the countryside. When he touches a certain boulder, it rolls aside to reveal a rocky corridor within, adorned with a pointing arrow shape that reads: “To Secret Lab.” I showed that panel to Mort and told him that an “evil scientist” wouldn’t put such a sign there. He already knew there was a secret lab behind that boulder, and he certainly wouldn’t want to point it out to anyone else.
“Chickens**t,” grumbled Mort. “When I was in the Army”—which he had been, during World War II—“we  had a name for stuff like this: ‘chickens**t.’”
In other words, two letters reversed in a lengthy made-up nation’s name was a big deal, but a dumb sign that no one in his right mind would hang up was “chickens**t.”
I returned to my desk,  crestfallen. Clearly, I wasn’t on Mort’s wavelength, and maybe I never would be.
A couple of hours later, though, he called me in again—and showed me that he’d had the panel altered. Now, when the rock slid aside, you could see the secret lab within—instead of an arrow or sign. He didn’t acknowledge that I had found an error worth fixing, mind. Nor did he bother to explain why a mistake he had referred to as “chickens**t” merited the time and expense it took to have a production artist make that change.
Whenever Mort wanted me to come to his office, he pressed a button on his desk and a buzzer rang on mine. Within a day or so, that sound, suddenly erupting into the silence of my little portion of National, would instantly produce in me a positively Pavlovian response. I would immediately tense up, my pulse would race a bit—then I would take a deep breath and stride down the hall to Mort’s office, probably to receive another upbraiding for something or other.
Not that it was all just harping and criticism, of course. Some of it was more positive: Mort showing me the way he did things, so I could learn what he wanted. Once, he even gave me a “stock tip” of sorts: He mentioned to me that, in a few months, a live-action Batman television series was due to debut in prime time, and he half-hinted I might want to buy a few shares of NPP (National Periodical Publications) stock. Maybe acting on Mort’s little tip would’ve been counted as insider trading, maybe not.
Wednesday, Marvel: Come lunchtime, I felt more than a little furtive as I walked out of the Standard Brands Building and, after reaching the next street up, headed west past Park Avenue to Madison, then turned north for a block or three. As I strode along, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was whisper-singing a line from a song on Sinatra’s late-’50s album Come Fly with Me, in which he sings about how foreign babes “just don’t have/what the models have/on Madison Av.” That album was a favorite of mine.
My heart was momentarily light, because nothing was at stake. I wasn’t applying for a job, I told myself… just picking up a few pieces of paper.
When I reached the proper floor at 625 Madison (fourth? fifth? something like that), I was surprised not to see the name “Marvel Comics Group” on the closed door that led to the inner offices. The sign thereon said simply: “Magazine Management.” Never heard of it. Still, this must be the place, according to the address Stan had given me, so I gave my name to the receptionist and took a seat in the small waiting room.
I was both anxious and eager. After all, I figured, I’m about to meet Stan Lee, the writer of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, et al., even if we’re not going to wind up bending elbows at some bar.
However, a minute later, it was not Lee but an attractive, dark-haired 20-something young woman with a winning smile who emerged from within. I tried to hide my disappointment as she introduced herself. I would quickly have identified her, in any event, as the “Flo Steinberg” on the 33 1/3 r.p.m. recording I’d received months earlier as a near-charter member of the new Merry Marvel Marching Society fan club, because she had a charming, musical voice… which in addition was so high-pitched that it topped out just a little below a range that only Lassie could hear.
The two of us exchanged a few pleasantries; then she handed me a packet, smiled again, and disappeared back into the sanctum sanctorum of—Magazine Management. I took a moment to open the envelope and make certain its insides matched what Stan had led me to expect: four typewriter-paper sheets on which were reproduced, in black-&-white, four pages of a sequence in which The Fantastic Four are battling their arch-foe Dr. Doom. All word balloons and captions had been totally eliminated, leaving only the Jack Kirby/Chic Stone figures and a minimum of backgrounds, plus a few words handwritten in ink outside the margins beside each panel to clarify what was happening therein, although they were mostly unneeded. I returned the pages to the packet and departed.
The walk and handover hadn’t taken all that long, so I still had time to stop at a Nedick’s on the way back for a quick hot dog and soda. Fast food on the sidewalks of New York was something I was already growing accustomed to… and fond of. Too fond.
Back in my little hole at National, I stuck the envelope into a desk drawer, ready for me to surreptitiously take it with me when I left at day’s end.
Wednesday, Noctural Interlude: That very night, in the insufficient glow of the light bulb or two in my hotel room, I plopped my plugged-in typewriter down on the wooden chair and laid the four Fantastic Four sheets on the bed, because there was no other place to put them, unless it was on the floor. Then I sat down on the side of the bed and, glancing back and forth between Photostats and Smith- Corona, started typing.
Though I didn’t specifically think about it at the time, the four sheets were excerpted from pages 19–22 of “The Final Victory of Dr. Doom!” in Fantastic Four Annual #2. They constitute a fairly straightforward fight scene, so any character-revealing or clever lines I was going to put into the mouths of heroes or villain would have to come while they were engaged in combat. The FF have returned to the Baxter Building when they suddenly come face to face with none other than the armored Victor Von Doom. When the Thing’s frontal assault fails to pierce Doom’s force field, Reed Richards thrusts some sort of device into the hands of The Human Torch, who flies with it up into the sky outside to gather energy to overcome their enemy… sort of like a lightning rod, I reasoned. Doom is knocked down by the resultant blast of some kind, but Johnny Storm loses consciousness and plummets earthward. Reed stretches out his arms and catches him. As he and Johnny strive to recover, aided by a very visible Sue Storm, the furious Thing again tangles with Doom, who now has no force field to shield him. Even so, he sends Ben Grimm reeling backward (courtesy of some tiny apparatus he then reveals in his iron-gloved fist)—but suddenly the good Doctor finds himself growing invisible from the waist down, making him a bit unsteady on his feet, due to the power of the Invisible Girl. End of sequence.
I doubt if I put any captions into my script, but I wrote at least one word balloon, often more, for each of the 26 panels on those four pages. I also, as per instructions, drew the desired word-balloon shapes and locations directly on the sheets, complete with pointers toward the character speaking those lines. I found that the act of having to “place” the dialogue balloons affected the order in which I could have the characters speak in a given panel: It generally worked better to have the person on the left speak before the one on the right, though that could be gotten around by placing the right-hand speaker’s balloon at the very top of the panel, with the other guy’s balloon under it. As I had begun to realize ’way back in November of 1963 when Jerry Bails had shown me Stan Lee’s synopsis for the first part of FF #8, this was indeed “a helluva way to write a comic script.”
By the time I was on the third page, my back had begun to seriously ache from having to lean forward to type, since the typewriter (positioned on the chair) was far lower than it would have been if there’d been a desk in the room. I worried about my back, since when it had collapsed on me a few years earlier, I’d been left hobbling around for several days. If that happened there in the hotel, there’d be no parents around to phone a doctor. But I persevered. It was only four pages, after all… three down… one to go. And it was a test. I had usually arisen to the challenge of a test.
Finally, finished in more senses than one, I collapsed on the bed, hoping that stretching out would soon ease the pain. It did. But there would be no rewrites, no second draft, no retyping. I’m not even sure I proofread my typed sheets for typos. Stan Lee would get what he’d get.
After all, there was nothing much at stake. I already had a job.
At least for another couple of days, right?
10.
Thursday, National: At some point that week, and Thursday seems as likely a day as any, Mort handed me a typed comic script and asked me to go over it to see if everything was kosher. Its first story panel called for Daily Planet editor Perry White to be lying in bed in a hospital, with Clark, Lois, and Jimmy standing nearby, having been summoned to receive his instructions on how to keep the newspaper running smoothly during his absence. I mentioned to Mort that this sequence made it seem as if the daily had only three reporters, one of them a virtual “cub.” He harrumphed and said nothing that revealed his own opinion. But later he showed me that he had altered a dialogue balloon to explain why only those three had been called to Perry’s bedside. Score one for the kid.
I realize even as I type these half-ass anecdotes that I probably come off like some 21st-century snowflake, triggered to high anxiety by the slightest criticism. But it’s not like I’d been exempted from fault-finding during my four-year teaching career (as witness my run-ins with the superintendent of Fox Schools), and none of it had ever upset me anything like the way Weisinger’s nigh-constant browbeating did. His relentless complaints and belittlements were exactly the opposite of what was needed to motivate me to try to do a good job, of course; but maybe, with him, that wasn’t the point. I quickly came to believe he was mostly exercising a desire to lord it over “inferiors”—meaning anybody who was unlucky enough to work for him. I know for a fact that, during that era, he treated writers Otto Binder and Jerry Siegel (both of them old friends of his from the 1930s, eminent comicbook scripters for two or three decades, and the latter the co-creator of Superman, the character without whom Weisinger’s job would not even have existed) as badly as he treated Bridwell or me. He was famous for having asked one of those two major writers (I forget which, and doesn’t really matter) if he could take that scribe’s latest script with him when he went to the bathroom, so he could wipe his “bottom” with it. Only he didn’t say “bottom.” Nice guy.
During those four days, I felt truly alone, because none of the other editors or production people were likely even to pop their heads into our office to say hello to me, lest Mort accuse them of preventing his assistant from working. That’s probably what the love-comics assistant, whom I saw mostly from behind at a 45-degree angle, felt as well. Certainly, if she said a single word to me from Tuesday through Friday afternoon, I must have missed it—and I was too unsure of my own situation to speak to her.
Once, around this time, Mort called me into his office and immediately thrust the color proof of the cover for Action Comics #329 (with a cover-date of October 1965) in my face. It depicted the Man of Steel brandishing a sword and shield against an unseen foe in the middle of Metropolis, while a policeman holds back an anxious crowd. Mort was clearly awaiting some sort of reaction from me. It was a test, and I desperately wanted to pass it, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what might be special or unusual about that cover—until I read the large lettering that led off the blurb/caption: “IT’S KILL OR BE KILLED!” That was quite a departure for Superman, strong wording for any DC cover in 1965.
It took me a few seconds to realize why Mort was so proud of that text. It was obviously a response to the challenge from Marvel Comics, whose covers often screamed “life or death,” while DC’s mostly did not. (Though that would soon change, and how!)
Surrounding that passing moment, there was the usual browbeating, nitpicking, and scowling from my new boss.
Oh, and something else:
It may have been this day, or at most a day or so earlier, that Mort suddenly waved a typed comic script in front of me. He informed me that this excellent scenario had just come in, via the U.S. mails, from a “young kid” who was going to be his newest writer. His name, which I think I was told at the time or else saw on the script, was Jim Shooter.  Mort clearly didn’t know the scribe’s exact age at that moment, though he had figured out he was fairly young. (In truth, Jim was still a couple of months shy of turning fourteen—more than ten years younger than myself.)
Great, I thought. So here I am, still uncertain as to whether this was the first or second week of a two-week trial period at my job—with no discussion yet about when or whether I should start rewriting my “Jimmy Olsen” synopsis so I could actually make even the $30 I would still have coming from that eight-page yarn—and Weisinger is announcing to me that he’s signing up a brilliant new writer, a junior-high-schooler who just sent him a script over the transom!
Well, there was nothing else I could say, so I just congratulated him on finding a new scripter and returned to my cubbyhole to wait for the next Pavlovian summons.
(One truly weird thing about that initial script from young Jim Shooter of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, is that I saw and was told about it no later than Friday, July 9th… and yet, according to Jim in various interviews, Mort didn’t actually buy anything from him until the following February—seven months afterward! Strange were the ways of Weisinger.)
Thursday, Marvel: I felt a bit more relaxed this lunchtime, heading from 575 Lex to 625 Mad (smack in the middle of what, due to the AMC cable-TV network, would be termed by 2010 or so the era of Mad Men, named after Madison Avenue with its surfeit of advertising firms). Maybe today it would be Stan Lee, rather than Flo Steinberg, who would venture forth from Magazine Management’s innards to accept the returned writer’s test. He’d have to be impressed that I did it overnight despite having a full-time day job, right?
However, it was neither Lee nor his “girl Friday” who ventured out to the waiting room this time. Rather, it was a middle-aged man with curly black hair and a pleasant smile all his own. Certainly I couldn’t complain about the facial expressions that were greeting me at Marvel Comics or Magazine Management or whatever. I don’t think he gave his name, but he received my package in a friendly manner, then asked casually, “How did it go?” In the same offhand manner, I responded, “Okay, I guess.” Then he was gone.
And I was back at National a short time later, lunch gulped, ready to take the afternoon’s abuse… and  figuring I might well have had my last contact ever  with Marvel Comics.
11.
Noctural Interlude: A necessary aside, that might as well come here as anywhere. Whenever it was during that first week in New York City that I was introduced to Gardner Fox in Julie’s office, I had been thrilled to meet one of the most important comicbook writers, both to me personally and to super-hero comics: the co-creator of The Flash, Hawkman (twice), Doctor Fate, the Justice Society of America, Skyman, The Face, The Atom (the 1961 six-incher), the Justice League of America, and several other beloved comics series. He immediately invited me to come to dinner one night at his home an hour or so north of Manhattan, just beyond the Bronx.
I accepted, naturally, and on the appointed evening—probably sometime during week two—I took a subway (which became an elevated train after it left Manhattan) to Yonkers, where Gardner met me and drove me to their home. I don’t think I met his grown children that night, but he and his wife Lynda were gracious hosts, and it was good to have a home-cooked meal. I was still in too much of a daze to commit to memory much of what was said that evening, nor do I recall if Gardner retained many of his 1940s comics after having sold his bound All-Star volumes to Jerry Bails several years earlier. I probably gave away little concerning the problems I was having with Weisinger, not least because I didn’t want to chance my discontent getting back to Mort. But I consider it a personal failing of mine that I never found an occasion to take Gardner and Lynda Fox out to dinner in return. In my defense, I was aware that, for me to do so, they would’ve had to inconvenience themselves by coming all the way into Manhattan for an evening.
I may not recall much about that night… but all the same, it emits a golden glow in my memory for the sheer fact that it happened at all.
A far less pleasant recollection, and one forever emblazoned on my mind, is that of tears welling up unbidden in my eyes one night during that week while I sat in my hotel room, after a day in which it seemed to me that Weisinger had managed to find grievous fault with virtually everything I’d done. At that moment I was seriously wondering if my dreams of becoming a comics professional might well go up in smoke forever at the end of some two-week trial period whose starting date I still did not even know.
12.
Friday, National (morning): My fourth day of official employment in the comicbook industry. At some time during the day, I was handed my check for $100 for the week—whether by Mort or someone else, I’ve no recollection. So the MIA $10 a week was destined to stay missing. Oh, well. I settled in for another day’s work, another  day’s abuse. Both, I suspect, were promptly forthcoming.
At some fairly early point in the morning, though, I was proofreading a Jim Mooney-drawn “Supergirl” story—the Maid of Steel was then a backup feature in Action Comics—when my desk telephone rang. The only time it rang over the course of those four days.
It occurred to me for an instant that it might portend a family emergency, for who else besides my parents might be phoning me at National Periodical Publications? With some trepidation, I picked up the receiver and said hello with a questioning tone.
“Hello, Roy,” came the high-pitched female voice from the other end of the line.
“Hello, Flo.” I would’ve recognized that voice in a wind tunnel.
“I’m being a spy this morning,” she quickly went on. “Stan was wondering if perhaps you could come over and see him on your lunch hour.”
“Uh, sure.” I didn’t want to say anything more, since the romance assistant was working away just a few feet away. It occurred to me belatedly that I should be glad she wasn’t likely to know who “Flo” was.
“That’ll be great. ’Bye.”
I returned to proofing “Supergirl,” but found it harder to concentrate. I tried not to let my mind start considering the various reasons why Stan Lee might want to see me, after his having made certain up to this point that he had not.
13.
In writing this, I suddenly find myself wondering: On the morning of July 9, 1965, what did I know—or think I knew—about Stan Lee?
When in August of ’61 I had written my short review of Fantastic Four #1, “Stan Lee” was just a name I’d seen on a number of comics in the 1950s and occasionally since. In particular, as I mentioned before: In the very early ’50s I’d been a regular buyer of My Friend Irma, a comicbook based on a radio comedy show (also a pioneer TV series, but I never saw episodes of that—still haven’t). And, plastered on most “Irma” splash pages was the name “Stan Lee,” in a stylized non-cursive “signature” that might mean he was the artist of the feature, or the writer, or both. For some reason, there was no credit for the artist, who I’d learn later was the talented Dan DeCarlo. Stan’s name had also shared billing with artist Joe Maneely in the first issue of 1955’s excellent Black Knight series; from that, I had reasoned he was probably the stories’ writer. (The concept of “editor” meant little or nothing to me at that time, except maybe “boss.”) I suppose I saw his name on some of the turn-of-the-’60s giant-monster yarns I never purchased, too, but to me it was mostly about My Friend Irma and  Black Knight.
When I saw his moniker paired on FF #1 with that of Jack Kirby, that underscored the notion that he was the comic’s writer—seemingly the main scribe at the nameless company that at various times I had known growing up as Marvel and Atlas (but never Timely). It was Jerry Bails’ footnote to my review in Comicollector #1 that had spelled out that Stan Lee was also and had long been an editor… and was almost certainly both in the case of FF #1.
Over the next four years, as comics fandom gradually grew a bit more sophisticated and a bunch of researching fans dug up tidbits of info, we learned, I think, that he’d been the editor of the Timely/Marvel/Atlas line since  the early 1940s. Perhaps by 1965 I even knew that Joe Simon had been the original Timely editor (in 1940),  and that Stan had soon succeeded him and been at the  job ever since (I doubt if I knew then about his 2+ years  in the armed services during World War II—although  his name appeared prominently in various comics even  during that period.)
So that was Stan Lee: He’d been the company’s editor (and sometimes a writer as well) during much of the first super-hero era, the 1940s—during the epoch of crime, romance, Western, jungle, war, humor, and horror comics that followed that—during the too-brief revival of Timely’s “Big Three” super-heroes from 1953-55—and of the rump company and its giant-monster and other “mystery” comics, et al., during the latter ’50s and since. More to the point: Over the past four years, he had written some of the best and liveliest comicbook stories I had ever read, and had clearly co-created such fabulous heroes as The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Ant-Man/Giant-Man, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, and Nick Fury, both as a WWII Army “commando” and as the present-day director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
In other words, Stan Lee had been already almost a quarter of a century into his career as editor of and writer for a major comics company when he and I had spoken over the phone the preceding Tuesday.
Well, today was the day (in spite of a somewhat fuzzy photo in 1964’s Marvel Tales Annual #2) that I would, hopefully, finally replace the image in my mind with a less fuzzy face….
14.
Friday, noon (Marvel): As I headed out the office door to lunch, I found myself momentarily walking beside production sub-chief Ed Eisenberg. After seeming to hesitate for a second, he smiled and said to me, “Hang in there!”—which I took as coded encouragement not to give up in the face of what he (and, I take it, others) knew I was going through with Mort. I said something friendly and noncommittal in return, suddenly feeling a bit guilty about my secret  lunchtime mission, but still I proceeded on my way to  625 Madison Av.
Flo soon ushered me into the interior of Magazine Management, then knocked on a second, inner-office door past the inside portion of the receptionist’s area. When she opened it, striding toward me to shake my hand was a tall (6'1"), lean, semi-bald, beaming personage I recognized instantly from the aforementioned 1964 photo as Stan Lee.
“Hiya, Roy,” he said buoyantly, like we were old friends who simply hadn’t run into each other in a few days.
“Hello, Stan,” I responded. Somehow, it never occurred to me for an instant to call him “Mr. Lee,” the way I had called everyone at National “Mr. So-and-So,” until invited to use their first name. That was the way I’d been brought up back in Missouri. But, in this case, I instantly felt I had made the right call.
I have only vague impressions of what Stan’s office looked like in early July 1965, since there would be a couple of different permutations of it at other locations up and down Madison Av between then and 1976 when I left Manhattan for good. But I did notice right away that this office was considerably larger than Weisinger’s, which seemed odd to me, since National was by far the larger company at the time. Off to my left of a fair-size desk that sat in front of a spacious window overlooking the models-strewn avenue below was a drawing board, set at a height that required its user to be standing, not sitting. There were a couple of reasonably comfortable chairs facing Stan’s desk and, against the opposite wall well over a dozen feet away, a sofa that could seat two or three comfortably. Somewhere in the room was a wall-full of color cover proofs pinned up in several rows.
Stan quickly put me at ease, asking me a few questions about how I liked New York, yadda, yadda. I was also peppered with a few questions about comics fandom, and there was a passing mention of the quality of my issues of Alter Ego, though with no specifics that would indicate he’d done more than flip through them. He seemed interested especially in my opinion of Marvel as a young adult reader, and I could truthfully reply that I thought its comics were the best things on the market at the time. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on Stan that, even as I said that, I was employed by Marvel’s most prominent competition.
Something else I noticed as the conversation rolled along for 15 minutes or so was that there was no reference at any time to the “writer’s test” I had handed in the day before. Forget about whether I had “passed” it or not… there wasn’t even any mention it had existed!
The only other question I specifically recall from our back-and-forth was one of my own. Recently, Marvel had begun ending many of its stories, both full-lengthers and half-book features like “Iron Man,” with cliffhangers. I  was aware that these were highly controversial in fan circles, and I asked him what the general, larger body of readers thought of what we in fandom referred to as  “continued stories.”
“They hate ’em,” Stan came back, without hesitation. But, he went on, he intended to keep on doing them for the foreseeable future, because he was writing so many “books” (the term almost invariably used around the office instead of “comics” or “magazines”) that being able to pick up one story at the point where the previous one had left off helped him considerably with the plotting and direction  of the “strips” (the phrase most pros then used for comicbook features).
Then, after a quarter hour, maybe twenty minutes, Stan abruptly rose from his chair and turned, to stand looking out the window and down at Madison Avenue several stories below. He drew a deep breath, and, without turning back toward me, said:
“So—what do we have to do to hire you away  from National?”
Despite the past few minutes having seemed not unlike a (very informal) job interview, I still found myself somewhat taken aback when asked that direct question. After all, though I had taken and returned the writer’s test, I had never really applied for a job at Marvel.
Even so, I found myself responding: “Just offer me a job. I’m not very happy there.”
That was probably the first time I had voiced the latter feelings aloud.
Feeling a bit emboldened, I quickly went on to volunteer that I had been offered $110 a week at National while back in St. Louis, only to find the salary reduced by $10 a week when I arrived. I guess that implied I would quit my National job if offered $110 a week. But if I was kidding anybody, it sure wasn’t myself: I was so miserable working for Weisinger that I could’ve been had for the $100 he  was paying me.
Stan agreed at once to the $110 salary and said that my job description would be “staff writer.” I would sit in the production office from 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, and type out scripts. I said that sounded good to me.
We shook hands again. A deal had been struck.
He asked how soon I could start. I told him that, despite my feelings about my “Superman” boss, I felt I couldn’t leave him in the lurch. I needed to give him at least two weeks’ notice… perhaps more, if he needed time to find a replacement. Stan frowned slightly at that, but said he understood—though if I got a chance to come to work at Marvel sooner, he would much prefer that.
We talked a bit more, at least partly about my enthusiasm for the new fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society—the MMMS—that the company had launched months back. I learned that had been something Stan had really pushed for; his publisher hadn’t been enthusiastic about the idea, but Stan had ultimately convinced him it would be a great way to promote the comics and even sell Marvel-related merchandise, which many of the fans’ letters were crying for.
I don’t remember what else we discussed during that hour-plus. My head was spinning.
15.
Friday, National (afternoon): With just a few minutes to snatch lunch (Nedicks? a slice of pizza?), I arrived back at 575 Lex roughly ninety minutes after I’d left. I half expected a scowling, volcanic Mort Weisinger to be waiting at the outer door for me, but as it was I simply returned quietly to my desk and resumed work on whatever I’d been doing right before my “lunch hour” had begun. The romance assistant was already hard at work again and said not a word.
It wasn’t more than a few minutes before the Pavlov buzzer sounded. Taking a deep breath, I strode toward Mort’s office. This time, though, I felt a bit less uneasy than usual, since this time it would be I, not Mort, who would be delivering an unwanted proclamation.
Even so, he caught me off-guard as I entered and sat down. He began to speak in a somewhat distracted way about how “several people” around the office had told him they thought he “might” be being a bit “hard” on me as a newcomer. He immediately let himself off the hook by saying that comics were a high-pressure business, but at the same time he indicated he was going to attempt to be a bit more easy-going.
As he paused for breath, I figured there was nothing to be gained by holding back any longer.
“I appreciate that, Mort,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s all kind of academic now… because I’ve accepted a job offer from Stan Lee.”
All softness vanished instantly from Weisinger’s face, as if it had never dwelt there. Anxious to get it all over with, I quickly rattled on that I felt he and I just weren’t compatible, but that, because of my gratitude for his offering me the job, I would stay on as his assistant for as long as he needed to find a replacement—and I tossed in a verbal P.S. that I felt he’d be wise to restore Nelson Bridwell at the post.
I paused for breath. Mort filled the void with a growl:
“You’re a spy for Stan Lee!  Get out!”
And that was that.
With another muttered word about how sorry I was that it had ended like this, I retreated to the office down the hall and began to pack up the (very) few personal effects on my desk into the art briefcase I had purchased in order to fit in as a young New York white-collar worker.
The romance assistant turned and looked at me, curious: “What are you doing?”
I told her I was leaving to go to work for Stan Lee at Marvel Comics.
That was the day I learned it was not always a cartoon-gag exaggeration to say that someone’s “jaw dropped.” Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but there definitely was a look of wordless surprise. And small wonder: The fledgling assistant to the most powerful editor at National was quitting after just a few days to go to work for a much smaller comics company? Such a thing was unheard-of!
Either she or I could have said more, I suppose, but we didn’t. After all, we had never exchanged anything more than casual “good mornings” since the day we’d met, so there was no point in pretending we were anything more than ships that had passed in the night… or at least in  the morning.
In retrospect, I regret I didn’t get to know that young woman better during that brief time. Before too long, Barbara Friedlander (later Barbara Bloomfield) would be writing not only romance-comics stories but would also become the co-creator of a National/DC teenage humor series called Swing with Scooter that has always had its admirers. She and I have even encountered each other a time or two since then, exchanging more words on each such occasion than we did in those two awkward weeks in June and July of 1965. In 2023 she would receive the Bill Finger Award at the San Diego Comic-Con, an honor given to comicbook writers who labored in relative obscurity in the comics industry some decades back. Way to go, Barbara!
That day in 1965, however, I was out the door just a few minutes later. I shook off a passing urge to look up Ed Eisenberg and thank him for his encouraging words—or even to bid a quick farewell to Julie. To be honest, I didn’t want to risk encountering 300 pounds of glowering Mort Weisinger in the hallway. So I just silently vacated National, not to darken its doors for some years. (Incidentally, Mort did soon re-hire Nelson Bridwell as his editorial assistant, not that I flatter myself that my recommendation had much to do with it.)
While I’m tidying up the details of my departure, I might as well mention: The “Jimmy Olsen” proposal I’d done for Mort while still in St. Louis would soon get revised and turned into “The Dragon Delinquent,” the cover story of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #91, which would go on sale around the turn of ’66, with Mort and veteran scripter Leo Dorfman adding a fake-hunchback main villain—an idea I’m proud not to have thought of. The printed yarn would clock in at nearly 11 pages, instead of the eight that Mort had assured me (when I’d asked about making the tale a bit longer) was the maximum length it could possibly run.
Mort would later accuse me (to others, not to my face or even in my mailbox) of never repaying National the $50 it had advanced me for the “Olsen” outline. I can’t recall if I did or didn’t, but frankly I never lost any sleep over it: They did utilize my basic storyline, after all, so I had something coming. And there were also the little matters of my first work-week, for which I wasn’t paid… and that lopped-off $10 a week as well.
I’m glad they did use my idea, actually. After all, it’s the closest thing I have to physical “proof” that I ever worked for National/DC in 1965.
16.
Friday afternoon, Marvel: Not too many minutes after ankling National, and probably less than an hour since I last had been there, I was standing again in Stan Lee’s inner office, and he was telling me how delighted he was that Weisinger had kicked out me out. He called in his production manager, Sol Brodsky, who turned out to be the curly-haired gent who had accepted my writers’ test—was it really only the day before?
Sol brought in with him a stack of twice-up pages of original artwork. (“Twice-up” means the drawn images on it were double the size they would be when reproduced in the printed comic; that was the basic standard in the comicbook field till around 1967.) They were the “pencils” (penciled art) for the main story in the next-scheduled issue of a comicbook titled Modeling with Millie. The latter was yet another example of the company’s output that I’d never paid any attention to (or money for). Since the latter 1940s, it had published the exploits of a character called Millie the Model, a blonde fashion beauty; at first the stories had been strictly humorous, in a more or less “Archie” vein. In recent years, they had evolved into lightweight romantic tales.
Somehow, through this change in genre, Millie had remained popular enough that, even in 1965, with all of Marvel’s comics converted to super-hero lead features except for Sgt. Fury, a trio of Westerns, and three other mags—two of the latter were named Millie the Model and Modeling with Millie. The contents of those two titles were interchangeable, except that the first was monthly, the latter more or less bimonthly. By sheer chance, I was being started off on the “lesser” Millie book.
This issue’s story had already been plotted and penciled. My assignment, should I decide to accept it—and boy, was I going to accept it!—was to type out dialogue for the yarn over the coming weekend and bring it back in on Monday, all ready to be mailed out to the letterer, and thence to the inker. I believe my page rate for this work would be $10 a page—the same as I’d been promised for my “Jimmy Olsen” effort, and a lot better than Charlton’s $4 per.
I spent the remaining two or three hours that Friday afternoon hanging around the office, mostly observing, with Stan taking care of his usual business but occasionally deciding there was some information or instruction he wanted to impart to me. While I felt I was definitely the lucky one in the situation, he acted a bit like a kid with a new puppy, showering me with attention and inside lowdown. He clearly enjoyed having a fresh and receptive audience to whom he could explain and expound upon his theories of how to do Marvel Comics.
Sol, rather than Stan himself, soon introduced me to the only other three Marvel staffers besides Flo and himself; that trio occupied a smaller office right across the hall. I was surprised to meet one young man who I figured was a year or three younger than myself. His name was Steve Skeates, and he seemed a general sort of editorial assistant. (More about him in a little bit. We didn’t talk much that Friday.)
Sitting at a drawing board in that room was a mid-30s, slightly stout, and friendly-seeming woman. Marie Severin’s job was to handle production fixes, including paste-ups and corrective artwork (which she was quite good at) and lettering corrections (at which she was somewhat less skilled but adequate). When I inquired whether she was related to the comic artist John Severin, she proudly informed me he was her big brother. (That was less a surprise than it might otherwise have been, since John S., an early Mad artist who had even earlier drawn an Amerindian feature I’d liked called “American Eagle,” had recently inked a few episodes of the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” feature in Strange Tales. I didn’t yet know that Marie had, in the early ’50s, been the primary colorist for the entire EC Comics line, including my beloved Mad #1–23.)
The third occupant of that office was also female, and seemed 35 or so. I don’t recall her name, but she was in charge of a new area Marvel Comics was experimenting with: commercial comics, to be produced for paying clients, and not featuring any Marvel characters.
Naturally, I can’t always be sure at this remove whether I learned certain things about Marvel during the remainder of that fateful Friday, or during the ensuing few weeks… but there can’t have been too many new experiences to absorb that day before 5:00 arrived. One thing I was happy to learn was that Stan did not generally expect staffers (or himself) to hang around after that hour unless there was a major emergency, as opposed to the usual this-book-is-late emergencies that occurred every few days… so, by a little after 5:00 I was on my way back to the GW Hotel with the art for Modeling with Millie #44 in my artcase. And I was in a far more upbeat mood than the one I’d felt when I had left the hotel that morning, with Mort Weisinger and a day of insistent, hostile buzzers to look forward to.
I was now working—not, in my own mind, for Marvel Comics— but for Stan Lee.
And I couldn’t have been happier about it.

Two Bites Of The Big Apple
Two massive features of New York City in the mid-1960s—the Manhattan skyline, and DC Superman editor Mort Weisinger—only one of which (you guess which one!) Roy Thomas had grown fond of after a short time in town.

E. Nelson Bridwell
at a New York comics convention. He was a fountain of comics- history information.

George Didn’t Actually Sleep Here, But…
The George Washington Hotel between 23rd & 24th Streets in Manhattan, as depicted on a vintage postcard.

Irwin Donenfeld
Son of DC Comics founder Harry Donenfeld, and in 1965 the co-publisher (with Jack Liebowitz) of National/DC.

Robert Kanigher
One of the most talented—and reputedly cruelest to staffers—of National’s 1960s editors.
Earlier, RK had scripted at least two full issues of Roy’s beloved All-Star Comics, the second being #38 (Dec. 1947-Jan. 1948). Two of its historical villains had visually inspired characters in Roy’s first comicbook effort, All Giant Comics. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Joe Kubert
and one of the black-&-white “Tor” pages that would eventually see print (in 1977) in his short-lived tabloid Sojourn, a dozen years after he spoke to Roy of plans for such a publication. [Tor page TM & © Estate of Joe Kubert.]

Murphy Anderson
was inking one of his own Hawkman pages when Roy met him at National… hence this page from issue #12 (Feb.–Mar. 1966), from a Showcase book reprint. Script by Gardner Fox. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Three Agents of T.H.U.N.D.E.R.
(From left:) Young Topps Chewing Gum exec Len Brown, though he didn’t have a mustache in ’65 (photo courtesy of Abby Demel Brown)… artists Dan Adkins & Wally Wood, in the mid-’60s… and the splash page of the “Dynamo” story Brown scripted for Tower’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2 (Jan. 1966), for a hero originally called Thunderbolt and a bad-guy Len had christened Dynamo. Art by Wally Wood & Dan Adkins, with Richard Bassford. Page & artists’ photo (by Colin Cameron) courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [Page TM & © John Carbonaro.]

Fantasy Art At Its Finest
One of a number of covers (for both hardcovers and paperbacks) featuring the creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs that were produced in the 1960s by former comicbook artist Frank Frazetta was this one for Canaveral Press’ edition of Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. [TM & © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.]

“This Way To The Secret Lab”
This panel from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #89 (Dec. 1965) reflects a change made by editor Mort Weisinger at a suggestion from new editorial assistant Roy Thomas—as detailed in the accompanying text. Courtesy of Bob Bailey. [TM & © DC Comics.]

This Is A Test!
This sheet is the only one of four in the so-called “Marvel writer’s test” that Roy took on July 7, 1965, of which he still has a copy. Art by Jack Kirby & Chic Stone. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Kill Or Be Killed!”
Weisinger showed Roy the cover of Action Comics (#329, Oct. 1965) to demonstrate that National was responding to the Marvel challenge. Art by Curt Swan & Sheldon Moldoff. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Jim Shooter
The Pittsburgh Press newspaper of May 9, 1966, included this photo of 14-year-old Jim Shooter, during the same time he was writing for Mort Weisinger.

Sol Brodsky
Although Roy doesn’t believe he introduced himself that day, it was production manager (and artist) Sol Brodsky who emerged from the Marvel innards on Thursday, July 8, 1965, to collect RT’s “writer’s test.” This photo appeared in the 1969 Fantastic Four Annual. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Foxes
Gardner and Lynda Fox at the wedding of their daughter  Lynda (date uncertain, but after 1965). Courtesy of Jennifer Ross.

“Stan Lee” Who?
Before 1961’s Fantastic Four #1, Roy’s familiarity with the name “Stan Lee” had been limited to My Friend Irma and the first issue of Black Knight (May 1955). The “Irma” splash panel is from issue #24 (Oct. 1952); art by Dan DeCarlo. “Black Knight” art by Joe Maneely. Both scans courtesy of Dr. Michael J. Vassallo. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan Lee! That’s Who!
Writer and editor Danny Fingeroth ran across this mid- 1960s photo of Smilin’ Stan among The Man’s archives at the University of Wyoming when he and Roy were co-editing the TwoMorrows volume The Stan Lee Universe in 2011. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Talk About “Cliffhangers”!
Final two panels of the “Hulk” 10-pager in Tales to Astonish #67 (May 1965). Script by Stan Lee; art by Steve Ditko & Frank Giacoia. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Barbara Friedlander
Joe Orlando cartoon celebrating Roy’s brief office-mate Barbara Friedlander, later Barbara Bloomfield, when she was made a full-fledged editor in the later 1960s. This piece was gifted to the young lady at an office party held in her honor. Courtesy of Barbara & Richard Arndt. [© Estate of Joe Orlando.]

Roy Thomas’ Pal, Mort Weisinger
After Roy departed National for Marvel, the tale he had earlier outlined for Mort Weisinger became the basis of the lead story in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #91 (March 1966), written by Leo Dorfman. Cover art by Curt Swan & George Klein. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Millie The Marvel
Stan Goldberg’s cover for Modeling with Millie #44 (Dec. ’65). Since covers were done last at Marvel, the issue was already penciled when Roy was given its interior story to dialogue on July 9, 1965. Inker uncertain, but Stan G. colored it… and Stan Lee wrote the cover copy. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The “Kids” Across The Hall
(Left:) Writer Steve Skeates, at a latter-1960s comics convention. Courtesy of Jon B. Cooke.
(Right:) Marie Severin—star artist John Severin’s little sister, who proved to be a talented cartoonist in her own right—at a con in 1971. Courtesy of Mike Zeck via Pedro Angosto.

Two Not-So-Strange Interludes
(July 1965)

17.
So okay, my new job was set to start on Monday—only, sometime before it did, a couple of important personal events intervened, during the preceding week… even if I’m a bit unsure as to the precise dates.
Event #1: One of the handful of people in the NYC area to whom I’d written while still in Missouri, hoping we could meet in person after I arrived, was Phil Seuling, who’d had a letter published in Alter Ego #8. Phil was a Brooklyn high school teacher, a few years my senior, who moonlighted as a back-issue comicbook dealer (and would soon move into the latter field full-time).
My missive to him had been sent with a bit more trepidation than the one I’d mailed to Len Brown. The reason? I was aware that, perhaps partly because of resentment over not being quoted as an expert source in Newsweek’s article on comics earlier that year while Jerry Bails most definitely had been, Phil had developed something of a long-distance dislike of my Detroit friend and mentor. He had more than once, in the days since the piece appeared, found an excuse to disparage Jerry for coining the academic term “panelology” for the study of comicbooks, pointing out scornfully that the college prof had created that word by combining Greek and Latin roots, apparently a cardinal sin. I had no dog in that fight, but in my eyes Phil’s comments had seemed needlessly argumentative, if not downright hostile. Naturally, I wondered if that animus would carry over to me. If so—who needed it?
Still, Phil had responded to my note by inviting me to dinner at his home. He and his family lived in a high-rise apartment complex at the very end of the subway line in Brooklyn, near the world-famous Coney Island amusement park I had visited in ’58. So, one evening, probably either the Friday or Saturday right after I quit National—I boarded that Coney-Island-bound train for the second time in my 24+ years.
Phil turned out to be a strident and opinionated (no surprise there) but very gracious host. Even friendlier, and softer-voiced, though equally outspoken in her own way, was his wife Carole, also a teacher… and a good cook to boot. Beneath those tough Brooklyn exteriors, they were both fiercely intelligent and would take a back seat to nobody. And both, as far as I’m concerned, had hearts of pure gold if they liked you. They also had two lively young daughters, Gwen  and Heather.
There was one other dinner guest: a young market research worker, perhaps a few years older than myself, named David Kaler, who was just a fortnight away from hosting the second-ever true comics convention—what fandom historiographer Bill Schelly would later christen the first “full-service” con, because it would run for two days instead of one and would feature a far longer pro guest list than the first one had.
(The first true comics convention, of which I was then only vaguely aware, had been a one-day affair in the summer of the preceding year, cobbled together by teenagers Bernie Bubnis, Ron Fradkin, and a few friends. Its only Marvel pro attendees had been a summer intern named Dave Twedt, who had since moved on and seems lost to comics history—Stan’s “corresponding secretary,” Flo Steinberg—and, to everyone’s shock, artist Steve Ditko. This had turned out to be the only comics convention the artist/co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange would ever attend. All the same, that con had happened, and that in and of itself had been a major achievement in 1964.)
Over dinner at the Seulings’, Dave reminded me that he and I had been briefly in touch nearly a year before. Soon after my publication of Alter Ego #7, he had sent Biljo White and me a letter pointing out that BJW’s 7-page “Alter and Captain Ego” story therein was similar in certain ways to a script entitled “The Gypsy” that Dave had written and sent Biljo a year or so earlier, with the hope that the Missouri fireman would illustrate it for his fanzine Komix Illustrated. Biljo graciously admitted that he might have been subconsciously influenced by it, if only in terms of the heroes’ origins. Dave had accepted the lack of any ill intent, and the matter had been considered settled, with due notice of same made in my editorial for A/E #9—which in July ’65 was still a few weeks from being printed back in St. Louis. Dave didn’t  bring it up that night at the Seulings’ in order to rub salt in old wounds, but simply to show our prior connection. I, as Dave knew, had never seen his “Gypsy” script, and he seemed to hold no grudge against Biljo.
Dinner that evening was pleasant, with much talk about the upcoming con, which Phil and Carole would be attending as dealers. I offered to give Dave a bit of help on it if I could; he requested mainly that I make a stab at getting Stan and/or others from Marvel to attend, and I said I would, though as the new kid on the block I knew I was unlikely to have much sway. I hadn’t even met most of the already-fabled “Marvel Bullpen” yet.
Phil showed me the small room in the Seuling apartment that was devoted to his Golden Age comics for sale: four walls of floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with boxes of neatly alphabetized comicbook runs. Since most were from the 1940s, he was lucky I didn’t salivate all over them. I also gawked at the art on a few spots on the walls, which included a breathtaking vintage original Will Eisner Spirit splash page, plus as-yet-never-printed full-size illos of Wonder Woman by H.G. Peter and Mary Marvel by Jack Binder, among other treasures; the latter two were Carole’s pride and joy.
The effusive Mr. Seuling also informed me that he hosted a poker game at their apartment most Friday nights and invited me to join in if I was interested. Despite the heartbreak my father’s poker losses had cost our family a decade earlier, I accepted. I had never seen any evidence that I had inherited the worst aspects of my father’s gambling addiction, so, as I hadn’t yet lined up any real social life in New York City, I might as well start one over hands of seven-card stud (in those pre-Hold-’Em days).
Another bonus from that evening: Later, while he and  I shared an hour-long subway ride back to Manhattan,  Dave, knowing I’d been living in a hotel for the past two weeks, offered to let me crash at his apartment on the Lower East Side till I could find a place of my own. In fact, if I decided I liked the situation, I could move in with him and share the rent. I agreed, sight unseen, and we made arrangements for me to vacate the GW Hotel ASAP.
18.
Event #2: During my first week in Manhattan, as I mentioned earlier, DC writer Otto Binder had invited me to be his and his wife Ione’s guest overnight at “The House That Captain Marvel Built” about a week later.
Whatever particular weekend night it was—maybe the Saturday after I quit National—I took a train down to Englewood, New Jersey, and was soon enjoying their hospitality. The talk, spurred on by my questions, mostly consisted of Otto’s fond reminiscences of his days at Fawcett, although back in the ’40s he had written comics for just about every outfit in the business except National/DC, which he’d had to forgo because of the long-running Superman-vs.-Captain Marvel lawsuit. As soon as that case had been settled in DC’s favor in 1953, however, Mort Weisinger had phoned him and offered him work scripting “Superman” stories. Otto had been doing that ever since, except for a brief (and sadly failed) stint as editor/publisher of a space-science-oriented magazine in the early post-Sputnik days. Otto, though, nurtured no illusions about Mort, who treated him with roughly the same contempt he showed to virtually everyone who worked for him.
When I mentioned the $1000 check Weisinger had waved in my face, Otto smiled and became the first person (of several) to inform me that was a rite of passage for almost everyone he encountered at National. “Mort’s really just a frustrated fiction writer,” Otto opined. He explained that Mort had never had any success in the prose fiction arena, though he had been an able pulp editor for Thrilling Wonder Stories before comics had beckoned with higher pay, and had proved a capable comics scripter on the first- ever stories of Green Arrow, et al.—so he attempted to intimidate people with the size of his paychecks from Parade: “You see? I’m a real writer, making real money!”
It was from Otto, too, that I first learned of another infamous trait of Mort’s: to disparage one writer’s story idea as being a worthless, asinine notion—then to turn around soon afterward and assign that very concept to a second writer to script as if it were an inspired concept that Mort himself had come up with. I wondered if that would be the fate of my “Jimmy Olsen” juvenile-delinquent proposal. Otto figured probably so… and that seems to be what happened. (See p.147.)
Also flitting around the edges of things that weekend was Otto and Ione’s young daughter Mary, a lovely, winsome girl with whom I exchanged just a few words. Only a few years later, they would lose her forever in a freakish auto accident at her high school, a tragedy from which neither parent would ever fully recover.
Most everybody wants to be able to see the future—but unless we could also change it, perhaps it’s a blessing that we can’t.
Otto worked very hard that day to make me feel good about quitting Mort to go to work for Stan (for whom Otto had also written a bit, back in the ’40s), and his encouragement really did help me make a first attempt at achieving a bit of perspective. He said he suspected I would get along much better with Stan than I ever would have with his old SF fandom friend.
I sure as hell hoped so.

That Dinner At  The Coney Island Stop
(Counter-clockwise from above:) Phil and Carole Seuling—the latter courtesy of daughter Heather Antonelli—and Dave Kaler who, besides Roy, was the  Seulings’ other dinner guest. We’ll learn more about Kaler in the following chapter.

The Wonder Years
This sterling illustration by original “Wonder Woman” artist H.G. Peter was one of Carole Seuling’s proudest possessions.  In 2003 it was utilized (in color) as the cover of the revived Alter Ego #23.  [Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.]

Alter and Captain Ego
Biljo White’s comics feature had debuted in 1964’s Alter Ego #7. Soon afterward, Bill concurred that some elements of the characters’ origin might have been subconsciously inspired by a script submitted to him by Dave Kaler starring a hero called “The Gypsy.” [TM & © Roy Thomas & Estate of Bill Schelly.]

Otto & Ione Binder
circa 1950. Also seen: their longtime domicile, “The House That Captain Marvel Built,” on Voorhees Avenue in Englewood, New Jersey. Courtesy of P.C. Hamerlinck and the late Bill Schelly.

Part VI
“Whom Can I Turn To?”
Marvel Comics (July to December 1965)

1.
I can be 100% certain I moved into Dave Kaler’s cavernous apartment over my second weekend in New York—because my poor back would never have stood the strain of “dialoguing” the 18 story pages of Modeling with Millie #44 if I’d been perched on the edge of my hotel bed, my typewriter precariously balanced on a wooden chair. (Not that I ever heard the term “dialoguing” used to denote writing a comics yarn’s word balloons and captions until some years later. Back then, we just said one was “writing.”)
Dave, a personable 30ish guy with a ready and distinctive laugh, lived (as, come to think of it, so did I, now) on Second Street between Avenues A and B, in the downscale Lower East Side—a sector of Manhattan that would-be trend-setters and greedy landlords had begun trying to upgrade by referring to it as “the East Village,” striving for a tenuous linguistic connection to the more colorful Greenwich Village that one could reach by walking westward through the truly down-at-heels Bowery area. Had Dave’s apartment not been located on the ground floor, it might’ve earned itself the much-desired designation of “loft”; the latter was a term favored by New Yorkers for upper-story, large-open-area living spaces cheaply available in less desirable sectors of Manhattan. Such as Soho (“South of Houston Street”) then was, believe it or don’t.
Dave’s apartment was basically one big room, maybe 30 feet by 15. The minimal furniture included a mattress or two on the floor for visitors/crashers. One of those would be my bed for the next few months, though I didn’t generally mention that fact to my new colleagues at Marvel. Off and on before year’s end, there’d be no fewer than four Missouri-born once and future comicbook writers sleeping on those mattresses, though never more than three at the same time. Spartan—but livable!
As part of our verbal “rental agreement,” Dave understood that I had to commandeer the apartment’s lone desk regularly to write, spreading out my Smith-Corona, typing paper, and pages of original art. But I had to do most of my scripting during daytime or early evening, since there was no way to screen off either lamplight or the klik-klak of typing from anyone trying to sleep. Thus over that weekend did I script the “Millie” tale, using the system Stan must have demonstrated to me on Friday:
First I taped a large transparent sheet (Flo had given me a bunch of these “overlays”) on top of each art page. Then, in pencil, I would indicate thereon precisely where the captions and balloons were to be lettered in ink. On the first (splash) page of each story, Stan always wrote out in pencil every word of his script, including the title, in order to get a feel for spacing, so I did the same.
Before I could begin, I had to read a few recent issues of Millie the Model and Modeling with Millie I’d been given as reference.
The new story had been penciled (and mostly plotted) by artist Stan Goldberg, whose official byline was “Stan G.,” to rhyme in the credit box with that of recent scripter “Stan Lee.” It dealt with models Millie (blonde), Chili (her red-headed rival), and Toni (Millie’s dark brunette BFF) attending a big Paris fashion show, with various mild amusements and non-torrid romantic episodes ensuing. I christened a prominent Parisian fashion designer “Jacques D’Eau,” to subtly suggest the American expression “John Doe,” as in “unidentified corpse hauled out of the East River.” (“Eau” is French for “water.” Thank you, Mrs. Heyde!)
Also along for the trans-Atlantic ride was Millie’s boring photographer boyfriend Clicker. (Fun fact: Clicker’s original name, years earlier, had been “Flicker”; but since comics were hand-lettered in all-capitals, someone had soon realized there could be an embarrassing problem if the “L” and “I” in “FLICKER” got lettered too close together, so his moniker had been altered to “Clicker.” Because there’s no such word as “CUCKER.”)
I titled the story “Whom Can I Turn To?” after the popular song by Anthony Newley… only I changed the “Who” to the grammatically correct “Whom.” Old habits die hard.
2.
Come Monday morning, July 12th, with finished script and original “Millie” artwork tucked in my big black artcase, I reported for duty. There was a subway station not far from Dave’s pad, whose train let me out at 59th and Lexington, a short walk across extra-wide Park Avenue to the Marvel offices at 625 Madison Av.
Sol and Flo were friendly and welcoming from the get-go. Sol assigned me at once to a spot just inside the doorway of the office I’d be sharing with the two of them. I was to sit at a flat, flimsy, corrugated-metal table, churning out scripts for comics stories either from scratch or over art already penciled, on a big, ancient manual Underwood.
(An inevitable aside: In recounting my first couple of years at Marvel, I’ll sometimes resort to the expression “Stan or Sol,” because I truly can’t be certain which of those two gents imparted a given piece of information; often, it depended on which one I was speaking with at the time, but I never got even a hint of any daylight between their twin versions of events. Occasionally I probably got the exact same info from both. Sol could be absolutely depended on to tell me anything Stan wanted me to know—and to not tell me anything Stan didn’t want me to know. I accepted that limitation from the start. Sol was a good man, and I have nothing but fond memories of him.)
Stan, however, clearly had other things in mind for me besides slaving over a hot typewriter eight hours a day, though I doubt he had thought of many of them before he hired me.
Foremost of those, I discovered that first morning, was to stand on his left, with Sol on his right, while Stan stood before the big, chair-less drawing board in his office and held forth on everything he wanted to impart about the material he’d written and/or proofread over the previous night or weekend, so Sol could have them all taken care of. (As I’ve mentioned, a big manual typewriter sat on a side attachment to Stan’s desk; but, to the best of my knowledge, he never wrote a single word of comics dialogue at the office, though from time to time he probably tossed off a letters section or “Bullpen Bulletins” page behind closed doors.)
The morning’s business might include emphasizing a particular feel that Stan wanted to make certain letterer Artie Simek or Sam Rosen achieved for a sound effect (each of which Stan had carefully penciled right onto the original art in a flamboyant style, which Artie generally interpreted rather more excitingly than Sam did)… or it might be a change he wanted made to the art (maybe a redrawn arm—or a wide-open mouth to indicate a passer- by was angry or frightened, rather than just observing something in stoic silence)… or it might be an entire panel or page he wanted redrawn to depict a totally new scene to reflect dialogue he’d already written… or it might be a letters page, which at that point consisted of the fans’ original letters, with Stan’s answers typed on a separate sheet. I suppose Flo typed the whole thing up as a unit before it was typeset by an outside firm, but I don’t recall ever seeing her doing that.
One major order of business on my initial morning at work was my “Millie” script. As we stood there at his drawing board, Stan rewrote at least a few dozen words—probably more—as he went over it, page by excruciating (to Sol as well as to me) page. Still, he seemed to find a lot of what I’d written not bad for a first effort, and he had no quarrel with my title.
(Amusingly, it would only be when printed copies of Modeling with Millie #44 arrived in the office weeks later that Stan would realize he’d been so busy editing my text that he hadn’t noticed that I’d failed to script any credits for any of us—because I had mistakenly assumed that was the letterer’s job. And so the first Roy Thomas-scripted comicbook ever to go on sale appeared with no byline, for me or Stan or anybody else. I’d like to say that nothing like that ever happened again—except that my first and last issues of Millie the Model [#134 & #137] also lack editor/writer/artist credits, and I’m at a total loss as to how that happened.)
Despite that minor mishap, I had learned that morning that Stan Lee was, in his own way, as hands-on an editor as Mort Weisinger or anyone else at National/DC.
This surprised me somewhat, since I’d known coming in that Stan didn’t write “full scripts” in advance. Using what was then called “Marvel style” (far more often than “the Marvel method”), a system that had evolved during the early 1960s to suit both his and the artists’ needs, he either typed out a synopsis or talked over the story’s plot with an artist before the latter began drawing it. Dialogue and captions were added by Stan or another scripter after the pages had been penciled. That bass-ackward way of doing things—or so I had viewed it over Thanksgiving holiday in 1963—had led me to assume Stan was doing little more than what amounted to “adding sound to a silent movie,” as artist Gil Kane once referred to the process. But it was actually quite a bit more than that.
The “Marvel style” had evolved over the past few years, Stan soon explained to me, because, as the writer of most of Marvel’s comics, he felt a responsibility to keep all the company’s artists busy, even if they were officially “freelancers,” not staffers. If he was writing a 20-page script for Jack Kirby, that would mean a day or two when he couldn’t be scripting anything for Steve Ditko or Don Heck or anyone else, and those artists might be left sitting on their hands, earning no money. So, as the demands on his time had grown, especially with the success of The Fantastic Four, he had increasingly taken to writing synopses for the artists, instead of full scripts. He could toss off a full-issue plot in relatively short order, and then Kirby could be penciling that yarn while Stan typed out other synopses for Ditko, Heck, or whomever. Since Stan’s strong preference was always to hire artists who could tell a good story—not merely illustrate one written by somebody else—the pencilers could be depended upon to flesh out the tales with action, rather than merely draw people standing around talking (e.g., a villain explaining how some weird machine worked, as often occurred in the current DC comics). Since the artists (usually) did a good job of “telling the story,” Stan found he didn’t have to fill panels with expository dialogue but could concentrate on character development, oft-humorous commentary, etc.—which gave Marvel’s comics more humanity than other companies’ counterparts provided.
The happy result, especially with the super-hero comics, had been the swiftly growing popularity of what was now the Marvel Comics Group. Stan had, quite accidentally (as he was the first to admit), stumbled upon a winning formula—and, although his brother Larry had felt more comfortable scribing his earlier stories via the traditional “script-in-advance” method, Stan saw no reason why I, and others, shouldn’t learn to use the plot-pencils-script system as well.
I quickly learned that scripting “Marvel style” enabled, even required the writer to surround the entire process and to guide it at every stage: first, with the plot, before any pictures were drawn… then, after the panels were penciled (when he typed the dialogue, et al.)… and finally, after the whole megillah was lettered and inked, since Stan (or, soon, both Stan and I) would also function as editors, the guys who proofread and passed final judgment on all interior pages before they were sent to the Comics Code Authority and thence to the printer. The process was the same with the covers, except those had to also pass muster with publisher Martin Goodman, a seldom-seen figure whose office was at the far end of the long hallway that began at Stan’s door; but “Mr. Goodman,” as everyone (even Stan, at that time) referred to him, rarely commented on interior pages.
Standing next to Stan on those many occasions over the next several months, even years, was an education for me. Literally: because, with my arrival, he consciously added a new step to the ritual he and Sol had been following for the past couple of years. Previously, Stan had simply told his production manager what he wanted done. Henceforth, Stan would also take pains—especially in the early months—to explain to me the why of whatever he’d marked up, to give me a better idea of what he was trying to do—and thus what I should try to do. This lengthened the whole morning process, but Sol accepted the new routine with his usual stoic patience. Me, I was receiving “Education 101” in “writing and editing comics Marvel style”… which was ironic, since I, who’d been a high school teacher for four years, rather disliked teaching, while Stan, who had only a high school education, proved to be an excellent and (mostly) patient teacher.
Sidenote: One day not too many weeks in, Stan stopped short in the middle of going over the artwork on his drawing board, looked from one of us to the other, then observed aloud that clearly Sol was his “right-hand man”—which, he opined, made me his “left-hand man.” And so we remained for the next several years, till Sol temporarily left the company in 1970.
3.
Suddenly immersing myself in the daily routine at Marvel was like a plunge into bracing water—cold and exhilarating, though also a bit of a shock. In terms of the comics themselves, I was abruptly leapfrogging from the published issues I had read a few weeks earlier back in Missouri, to seeing two or even three as-yet-unpublished issues in various stages of progress at the offices.
In the comics I’d purchased back in Missouri through late June, Vince Colletta had inked The Fantastic Four as they battled the Frightful Four, including Medusa of the long red serpentine tresses. Now, in Marvel’s Manhattan offices, in original art I first glimpsed either past Stan’s left forearm or at my own tinny desk, Colletta had been superseded by Joe Sinnott—the earlier lackluster “Thor” artist who, I learned, was the same guy who had so beautifully inked 1962’s FF #5, which had introduced Dr. Doom! The contrast between Sinnott and all previous inkers of “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” was like night and day, as far as I was concerned. In particular, I had been no fan of Chic Stone’s heavy-handed “embellishing,” which reminded me of a coloring book (though I realized that Stone, a talented guy, was inking that way because Stan liked it)… and Colletta’s feathery lines, though an improvement, had proved better suited to the noble Thor than to the craggy Thing.
A strong new storyline was beginning, which I first beheld in the “make-ready” of FF #44. (A “make-ready” was the going term for a printed copy of an issue’s 32 interior color pages, sent coverless to the office just two or three weeks before the finished comic would go on sale—far too late to make any corrections, so I never understood why we received them at all, except as a technicality.) The new arc introduced a grim, bearded figure with satyr-like lower body and hooves: “The Gentleman’s Name Is Gorgon!” Also passing through the office in original-art form at that time was the follow-up issue, which brought Gorgon and Medusa together with several additional new hero/villains: “Among Us Hide… The Inhumans!” I was intrigued by this fledgling super-group, composed also of the unspeaking Black Bolt, karate-chopping Karnak, the lovely if vaguely defined Crystal, and the green-scaled, amphibious Triton; but I had no premonition of the fannish earthquake that would be unleashed when FF #45 went on sale a couple of months later.
Another Marvel mag in creative ferment—that’s a polite term for it!—was Daredevil.
Wally Wood, whom by coincidence I’d already met, was an artist whose work, particularly his inking, Stan absolutely adored. He had even stuck Wood’s name on the cover of one Avengers issue (#20) that Wood had merely inked—a perk Stan had not yet accorded to Kirby, Ditko, or himself! As you may recall, Wood definitely did not love Stan back, because he disliked having to do much of the plotting on DD without being credited for same or (in his eyes) paid what he deserved… as which of us has? For a time, Wood had delayed his day of decision re Marvel by arranging, with Stan’s approval, for veteran Bob Powell to do (alternately) either layouts or finished penciling for the comic, which Wood would then ink. Powell, a veteran of such Golden Age features as “The Shadow” and “Sheena” and even a couple of recent Marvel stories, was an extremely skilled stylist in his own right, and Stan was fine with the Powell/Wood combination, as long as the finished comic looked like the latter’s work, which it basically did. Sales of the title since Wood had come aboard with #5 and had redesigned the hero’s costume in #7 had been steadily climbing.
Stan had long since accepted that he and Wood had little if any rapport—and he had been driven to distraction by the artist’s dropping cigarette ashes on his office rug while they were conferring. (Flo said she’d had to keep watch and sometimes swoop in with an ashtray just in time to intercept a plummeting length of ash.) In his efforts to mollify Wood, he had even allowed him to write the dialogue for DD #10, so he could make additional money. However, Stan hadn’t been particularly happy with the result, so he’d taken back the scripting reins with #11, the completed art to which was bouncing around the office when I came on board. A splash-page blurb by Stan that issue was meant to read as light-hearted, but its barely disguised condescension might well have annoyed Wood further:
Wally Wood wrote PART ONE of this two-parter last ish, just for a lark! But, now it’s up to sly ol’ STAN to put all the pieces together and make it come out okay in the end! Can he DO it? See for yourself!
Whatever the precise straw that broke the chain-smoking camel’s back, the upshot was that, not long before I arrived, Wood had announced he was quitting Daredevil, effective yesterday. By then, he had already contracted with a new comics company, Tower, to oversee and draw for its upcoming T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents title, which had been at least partly his concept. He didn’t even deign to do a cover for Daredevil #11, leaving Sol and crew to cobble together one made up of Photostats of the interior art.
Just to add some much-needed pressure on Stan, the mag’s rising sales had convinced publisher Goodman that #11 was the moment to change DD’s status from bimonthly to monthly!
When I arrived, Stan had Sgt. Fury penciler Dick Ayers drawing up sample pages to show how he would handle Daredevil; but, despite Dick’s undoubted abilities, he wasn’t likely to bring to the feature the fan-pleasing (and Stan-pleasing) magic that Wood had. Meanwhile, the clock was relentlessly ticking—and not a single page of art had been begun for #12, which was now due to come out just a month  after #11.
Long story short: Daredevil was in a state of crisis. Stay tuned.
Marvel’s only remaining bimonthly hero title, The X-Men, had always been one of its lagging sellers, along with Strange Tales and the pre-Wood Daredevil. Its “evil mutant of the month” formula had quickly worn thin with readers. But the latest issues going through the pipeline, I saw, were a distinct improvement: Jack Kirby’s layouts and co-plotting (however much or little Stan may have contributed to the latter—and we’ll probably never know whose basic idea the new storyline was) were front and center in the intriguing serial that starred the Sentinels, an army of over-sized androids created for the express purpose of rounding up all mutants for incarceration and perhaps eventual execution. Ironically, these personality-devoid, cookie-cutter robots would prove far more interesting to readers than The Vanisher, The Blob, or Unus the Untouchable.
As pages of the two-feature monthlies flitted through the office in various stages, Stan, artist “Adam Austin,” and the Sub-Mariner were nearing the climax of a beautifully drawn if perhaps overlong sub-sea quest in Tales to Astonish… while the back half of the mag was proving that the once-canceled but still-incredible Hulk could hold readers’ interest in an ongoing series. Over in Tales of Suspense, Iron Man was taking on Titanium Man and the Mad Thinker’s Awesome Android, drawn by co-creator Don Heck… while back-up star Captain America had finally discontinued retelling his World War II exploits as the huge, leftover Nazi robot called the Sleeper awoke in 1965. In Strange Tales, the present-day, eye-patch-sporting Colonel (formerly Sgt.) Nick Fury and his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were battling Hydra for what seemed like the hundredth issue in a row… and Steve Ditko was definitely hitting his artistic stride in “Doctor Strange” with his most awe-inspiring other- dimensional vistas ever, the debut of the awesome entity called Eternity, and the start of a truly memorable match-up between Strange, Baron Mordo, and the Dread Dormammu—illustrations and storytelling so striking that I was actually tempted to read the stories for a change instead of just skimming the pictures, as was my wont.
Journey into Mystery, now become an all-Thor show, had thankfully abandoned villainous losers like The Cobra and Mr. Hyde (who weren’t much more interesting as a team than they had been separately) in favor of a saga of far greater scope that involved a cosmically enhanced Absorbing Man. The story currently being prepped launched one of my favorite all-time concepts in the series: a camera-carrying TV reporter being transported to Asgard, where he’s all but driven mad by the grandeur and warfare of the Norse gods. (I would remember that hapless journalist and his mission, and would return to both a decade-plus later, in the Thor story arc I most enjoyed writing.)
The Avengers was a bit of a sore spot with me personally, though I didn’t stress that to Stan. While he informed me that sales had actually gone up after, in #16, he and Kirby kicked Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, and the Wasp out of the group (as an aid to over-all continuity and realism), leaving Captain America in charge of a trio of recently reformed bad-guys, I was definitely not one of those who had applauded the change. To me, The Avengers should’ve remained composed of Marvel’s top otherwise-unaffiliated heroes—and, sorry, but I didn’t consider Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and/or Quicksilver to be in that class. The new team’s two-issue tussle with the dully colored Power Man hadn’t lived up to the one with his predecessor, the dead-in-one Wonder Man—though at least the in-progress #23, bringing back the time-traveling Kang the Conqueror, was a step in the right direction. Even so, I considered Avengers to be just treading water compared to its early days.
The Amazing Spider-Man, surprisingly, was in the midst of a storyline of no particular brilliance, with no stand-out villains. Even so, Ditko’s ever-improving artwork and Stan’s supreme mastery of which words to put with his pictures still made the mag a must-read, whether finalized between covers or lying flat in black-&-white over-sized art on my metallic desk.
As for Sgt. Fury and the trio of Westerns—well, they came and went through the office, and while I liked Stan’s scripting and Ayers’ art on the former, I would’ve been happier to see them all replaced with additional super- hero titles.
4.
So that’s what was happening in the current crop of Marvel pages being prepared, which readers wouldn’t see for some weeks to come, while I was concentrating on typing away at my desk—
—except for when I wasn’t.
For one thing, the morning ritual involving Stan, Sol, and me in his office would typically take up half an hour, maybe more, on the days Stan was “in.” (By mid-1965, he had arranged with the publisher that he could “work at home” two days a week, usually Tuesdays and Thursdays; those days, plus evenings and weekends, were when he did his scripting, which both he and Goodman deemed essential to the company’s burgeoning success. In addition to his editorial duties, after all, Stan was then scribing between eight and nine super-hero comics a month, plus Sgt. Fury, plus—until recently—1½ “Millies” and the bimonthly Patsy and Hedy. He had only lately turned over the scripting in Kid Colt Outlaw and Two-Gun Kid to his younger brother Larry Lieber, who was also ably writing as well as penciling Rawhide Kid. Even Stan had to sleep sometime. And Larry, for his part, was much happier working on the Westerns than he had been scripting “Iron Man,” et al.)
I quickly reconciled myself to the fact that the time spent in the “morning ritual,” whatever its undeniable virtues, meant that a sizable chunk of three days a week would be eaten up before I even got around to thinking about turning out any script pages.
But, as far as interruptions and interventions went, that was just the beginning.
Stan also decided almost immediately that, though he proofread virtually everything that passed through the office—comics pages, letters pages, whatever—he now wanted me to backstop all of that. I continually had to halt my scripting to pore over each and every story and text page before it was sent out, checking to see that corrections to art and lettering had been done—and to point out any other errors I might find. Henceforth, Sol would be able to spend less time having to check out lettering fixes and could concentrate on art-related ones. After all, they had an ex-English teacher to do the former now! Naturally, this back-up duty cut even further into my “staff writer” time and concentration.
But wait, there’s more:
I also found I was likely to be interrupted at any given moment by Stan suddenly appearing in the doorway to ask me for some crucial piece of information, like: “Do you remember where Dr. Doom last appeared?” I was, I unblushingly admit, a veritable human fountain of that type of information. But hey, back in 1965, that wasn’t much of an accomplishment, since Stan was never inquiring about any material that went back further than Fantastic Four #1, just four years earlier, and I had read all those super-hero comics multiple times and had already asked my parents to mail me my complete Marvel collection, with other comics and effects soon to follow. All the same, Stan seemed amazed at my memory and began to rely on it. (He was deservedly derisive of his own, to the point that he constantly carried around 3" by 5" notecards in his shirt pocket so he could scribble on them things he feared he’d otherwise forget. And there were two words that he consistently misspelled if he didn’t check them each time in the dictionary; ironically, they were “scholarly” and “sagacious.”) In that sense, I was a new resource he hadn’t had before when backed up by Sol, Flo, Marie, and apparently even Steve Skeates.
Oh, and I should mention there were also phones ringing constantly in that office—did I really only share it with two people?—with Flo mostly answering and putting calls through to Sol or Stan… or with Sol asking Flo to call the printer, the engraver, the whoever, for him. Stan, too, would occasionally emerge from behind closed doors to ask her to phone someone on his behalf. You’d think Marvel Comics would’ve had an office intercom by then, but they didn’t. Maybe one was added later, but if so I don’t recall it. I found it impossible to shut out phone or other conversations going on just a few feet away.
In addition, Sol often asked me, rather than Flo, to schlep a piece of artwork across the hall to the other production room. I quickly accepted that, while I technically worked for Stan, anytime Sol asked me in his soft and polite way, “Could you do me a favor?,” he was de facto speaking for Stan—so I never refused those requests. I knew Sol didn’t call on me lightly; he was up to his eyeballs in work, too.
Doubtless some people would be quite capable of writing a story with continuity under all the above circumstances, picking up the train of their creative thought a minute, ten minutes, or maybe an hour after it had been derailed. But I swiftly came to realize I wasn’t one of them.
5.
My little cross-corridor jaunts at least had the virtue of putting me into regular contact with Marie Severin and Steve Skeates—and, for a few weeks, the mostly forgotten commercial-comics lady.
Marie was friendly and outgoing, though I’d soon  learn she could quickly turn snarky if she felt disrespected in any way. Our relationship would grow easier and more relaxed over time, until in the end I would come to consider it one of the most rewarding to come out of my Marvel experience. In the early days, of course, I had only the faintest idea of her formidable talent, though it was clear from the start that she was an eminently competent production worker.
At that time, before she was drawing actual stories, she was mostly noted in the office for her cartoons, which featured caricatures of her fellow Marvel denizens. She was particularly adept at drawing cartoons that depicted a harried Flo Steinberg at work… but she would branch out over the years to come.
Only a few weeks into my Marvel employment, I expressed to her in passing an interest in coloring, at which point she enthusiastically decided she would teach me all about that activity. However, Stan spotted us together in the midst of her first “lesson,” and he swiftly put an end to that. “I didn’t hire you to be a colorist!” he told me firmly. (In my eyes, Stan never properly appreciated colorists and coloring—which is surprising, since some of the best ideas for coloring, particularly covers, came from him rather than from Marie, Stan Goldberg, et al.)
As for Steve, a laid-back guy who was two years younger than I was, I couldn’t figure out at first why I had been hired as “staff writer” when he seemed a logical candidate for that job and had already been on the scene for two or three weeks when I was hired. I soon learned that, nearing college graduation the previous spring and having become a latter-day comics reader (especially of Marvel), he had sent Stan a job application written in the form of a comic strip with himself as the main character. Impressed by his creativity, Stan had hired him, just like that. (Did he ever take Stan’s vaunted writer’s test? I very much doubt it: I suspect Stan had hired him on sheer impulse.)
So why wasn’t Steve banging away at a typewriter next to a pile of penciled art? I think he was doing some work on letters pages and the like; and Stan had already had him add credited “additional dialogue” (i.e., rewriting) to one “Kid Colt” story scripted by Larry, for whatever reasons. But, as Steve himself said later, he had turned out to have little aptitude for proofreading comics, which involves a delicate balancing act of “reading” both words and pictures and the relationship between the two, with an eye for artistic detail. Thus, I suspect Stan was probably debating what to do about him when my writer’s test wafted over his transom. Even so, Stan had made it clear to me that he’d been in the market for two fledgling writers, not just one, now that Larry, who had scripted the earliest tales of “Thor,” “Ant-Man,” and “Iron Man” from Stan’s plots, was devoting full time to the surviving Westerns. Well, at least, soon after I was piped aboard, Steve was assigned by Stan to plot and dialogue (from scratch, this time) a full-length “Two-Gun Kid” adventure.
You’d think Steve and I would have quickly become either good friends or deadly rivals—but in fact, we never became either. We were always on friendly terms, but I don’t recall our ever socializing, even once, after office hours. I suspect it was some by unspoken mutual agreement, arrived at by unconscious human radar. If I ever felt any sense of competition with him, it was only of the slightest degree… and soon over. But I always rather liked him.
6.
And exactly what was I doing those first few weeks, when I actually got a chance to work away at the precise material that fit my “staff writer” designation?
Well, the first story Stan gave me to dialogue in the office was a just-arrived 12-page “Iron Man” installment, back in those days when Tony Stark’s armored alter ego and Captain America divided the monthly anthology Tales of Suspense between them.
To my surprise, when he showed me the “Iron Man” pencils for issue #73, I saw they were not by Don Heck, who’d been drawing the feature most of the time since its origin in #39. These pages had been done by “Sub-Mariner” solo-series artist “Adam Austin,” whose distinctive style, in pencils even more than when inked by Colletta, suggested nigh-photographic realism despite often exaggerated human figures. On the splash page, a huge central image of Iron Man was striding dramatically down a hospital corridor, while astonished doctors, nurses, and newspaper photographers reacted in amazement. The metal-clad hero’s arms were outstretched stiffly from his sides, almost as if he were pushing the bystanders away. A powerful, cinematic scene.
Stan explained he’d wanted to try “Adam Austin” out on “Iron Man.” He revealed to me that the artist’s real name was Gene Colan; he was using a pseudonym because he regularly drew romance comics for National and feared his editor there might be hostile to the idea of his also working for Marvel, even though he was technically a freelancer. Apparently, things were slowing down saleswise in the love-comics genre (Marvel itself no longer had anything closer to it than Patsy and Hedy and the Millie books); so, while Marvel’s page rates were lower than National’s, Colan and other artists were popping up looking for supplemental work. And Stan was only too happy to hire the ones he wanted, as Marvel slowly expanded. Gene, Stan said, had been on staff at Marvel back in the late 1940s and ’50s, when it was called Timely and/or Atlas. (He didn’t bother mentioning why Colan had left Timely. It would be a little while longer before I learned that particular tidbit of history.)
I don’t recall if I had Stan’s short written synopsis to go on, or if I had to rely on the notes Colan had scribbled in the margins of the original art, repeating and expanding on what Stan had given him. The yarn picked up where the preceding one had left off—calling to mind Stan’s earlier statement that continued stories made scriptwriting easier for him—with Tony Stark’s aide Happy Hogan in critical condition in the hospital following an encounter with an android. After checking on Happy, Iron Man had pages left over to partake in the “fight of the issue,” battling the pre-established Black Knight (on his winged stallion) high above a castle transplanted stone by stone to the East Coast countryside. But when the Knight plummeted to his apparent death on p. 12, little did I realize that it would be I, two years later, who would decide that fall had indeed been fatal, rather than simply providing an opportunity for yet another apparently deceased bad-guy to “return from the dead,” and that his demise would provide the impetus for my development of a new heroic Black Knight.
At the time, I was content simply to provide dialogue and captions for this particular story. Since I couldn’t get much done during the 9-to-5 grind, I’d linger for an hour, maybe two, after everyone else had left, writing and rewriting on those transparent overlays—and maybe doing still more work back at the apartment. I had to finish the job two or three days, so I did the best I could.
Unfortunately, when Stan went over it cold, with me on his left and Sol on his right, it didn’t fare nearly as well as my “Millie” effort, where far less had been at stake. He liked some of my dialogue, but felt I had missed opportunities on the splash page, for instance, to place enough dialogue and/or thought balloons, since there were no fewer than four startled bystanders, to each of whom he gave at least one dialogue or thought balloon. All this on top of Iron Man’s own thought bubble, revealing his concern for Hogan. I had written something along those lines, but by the time Stan was finished, the splash page sported a total of eight balloons and captions—and that didn’t count the credits, of which more in a minute.
Stan felt I hadn’t injected enough raw human emotion into the early pages, particularly in an exchange between Iron Man and a plainclothes detective. He was happier, I recall, with the thought balloons I gave Shellhead on page 5, as he stalked down a castle corridor flanked by two suits of armor, where I had him ruminating on the difference between himself and those empty medieval metal tuxedos. I was pleased that Stan didn’t veto my use of the word “phantasmagorical” in one caption; he knew, as I did, that it would be unfamiliar to many readers, particularly younger ones, but he agreed that didn’t matter much. Kids would skip right over it and glean its meaning from the rest of the caption—or else they’d ignore it. And if someone did know or guess the meaning of “phantasmagorial,” it simply made that reader feel Marvel wasn’t “writing down” to him/her.
By the time he’d finished, Stan had, right on the overlays, rewritten roughly half of my script—including giving the yarn a new title, “My Life for Yours!” (I’ve no idea what I’d called it). At that point he turned back to page 1 and rewrote the credits I had scribbled, which had identified Stan as editor, myself as writer, Adam Austin as penciler, with “(Names to be added)” as inker and letterer. He turned it into one longish and far more indefinite paragraph:
This oughta set SOME kind of record! ALL these Bullpen buddies had a hand in THIS one: Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Adam Austin, Gary Michaels, Sol Brodsky, Flo Steinberg, and Merrie Old Marie Severin! (Whew!)
The funny thing about that paragraph is that it was, in its own way, totally accurate: Stan had plotted and heavily rewritten the story as editor… I had done the basic dialogue and captions, however altered many of them were now… “Adam Austin” (Gene Colan) had penciled it… “Gary Michaels” (pen name for another National moonlighter, Jack Abel) had inked it… Sol Brodsky was overseeing production… Flo would be mailing it out to the letterer.… and Marie Severin would color the proofs that guided the company called Chemical Color in making the four-color overlays for the actual printing.
In the end, I was both unhappy that roughly half my script had been rewritten… and elated that 50% of it had been retained. I was thrilled to obtain from Marie the coloring guides she’d done, and I held onto them for several years, though they slipped through my fingers somewhere along the way, during my many moves.
Another thing that slipped through my digits, alas, was any chance that Stan might have immediately given me an immediate regular assignment as scripter of “Iron Man.” Partly because he was so enamored of Gene Colan’s artwork, and no doubt partly because he felt I wasn’t quite ready for what was basically the lead feature of Suspense, Stan took back the writing of that feature with #74. Clearly, I would have to keep striving to prove myself worthy of a regular super-hero gig.
On another unhappy note, I learned from Stan and/or Sol that I couldn’t voucher my $10-per-page “Millie” rate for the “Iron Man” script; the latter was considered part of my “staff writer” duties. Well, that made sense, even if I had actually scripted most of it after-hours.
But there was an up side. I was doing so much more now than just “staff writing” during the day that, around that time, Stan decided I would continue writing some super-hero material on staff, but would now be the regular scripter of both Millie books, plus Patsy and Hedy, the sole surviving title starring the once-popular Timely teen heroine Patsy Walker. Those three mags I could write outside office hours as “freelance” and voucher that scripting for added income; that had long been the Magazine Management/Timely/Marvel way of hanging on to talent while paying less than stellar salaries.
With Millie the Model a monthly and the other two “girls’ books” more or less bimonthlies, I quickly calculated that I would now be earning $360-$400 a month in addition to my guaranteed $110 a week. That meant, even though I’d only entered the comics field at mid-year, a projected income of $10,000 for 1965. (Actually, with additional freelance soon popping up, I’d wind up raking in $13,000 in ’65 via combined teaching and comics-related work, up from $5500 the previous year as a full-time pedant. The former sum would translate into something like $130,000 in 2025 terms… although, in New York City, things were considerably more expensive than back in Missouri. But, an added plus: I actually liked my new job. All that considerably softened the blow of “losing” the “Iron Man” strip.)
One other minor sour note, which was struck during the first few days I worked for Marvel, involved my connection with comics fandom. Since arriving in New York, I had sent a piece or two to CAPA-Alpha, the apa (= amateur press association) magazine Jerry Bails had launched the preceding year, and I was hoping to utilize such articles as a sort of journal of my new professional life. However, Stan quickly made it clear to me that he didn’t want me to reveal future storylines, characters, artists, or much of anything else Marvel-related to fandom; he intended in the future to control all that through the comics themselves and the MMMS. Realizing that I’d be tiptoeing through a minefield every time I tried writing an essay for my ongoing “journal,” I immediately dropped all fan activity except my vague plans to publish Alter Ego #10 as soon as I could. I suppose I could have kept scribbling notes and information in private for future publication, but that wasn’t my way… and so perished my initial plan to document my career virtually day-by-day, in a sort of diary. Too bad… it sure would’ve made putting this book together a whole lot easier!
7.
My orientation continued, both formally and in-, over the next few weeks.
Very early on, Sol invited me to join him for lunch one day. I accepted readily, both for his company and in order to learn some spots to eat besides Nedick’s and stand-up pizza pits. This worked out to the satisfaction of both of us, and afterward we lunched together most days when neither Sol nor I had something else we needed to do. Mostly we had sandwiches or scallops or the like; I was content to let Sol choose the restaurant. (Stan usually either ate something in his office, or had an appointment—or an errand he had to run for his wife Joan.)
I went along with Sol one lunch break when he had to drop by a nearby bank and stand in line for ten minutes to check the Brodsky account balance, because his wife Selma had discovered a $1 or $2 discrepancy between her own computations and the figures on a recent bank statement. (In NYC, one stood “on line” rather than “in line” as in most of the country; the former was an expression, I was sure, I wouldn’t encounter often in my life.) Selma Brodsky, in her own way, was as sweet as Sol, and they invited me to dinner in their Brooklyn home one evening in those early weeks. I probably met their kids Gary and Janice at that time; both would later work in comics.
Having lunch most days with Sol turned out to be a godsend to me, because it gave him a chance to clue me in on various office-related things I needed to know, and it gave me a chance to pick his brain for any info I figured Stan wouldn’t mind him divulging.
I’m sure, for instance, that it was from Sol that I learned, during my first couple of days at Marvel, that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were no longer on speaking terms.
Naturally, this verbal tidbit startled me. What did Sol mean—the writer/editor and the artist/plotter of Amazing Spider-Man and “Doctor Strange” weren’t talking to each other? Since when? And—why?
The short answer, Sol version (and soon backed up by Stan when I brought up the matter with him), was that Stan and Steve had been arguing so much over precise storylines that “they” had decided it was best that Ditko —whom I hadn’t yet met by the time I learned of this anomaly—simply plot and pencil the yarns; then Stan would add the dialogue and do whatever else he felt he needed to do editor-wise. It didn’t take me long to realize that this non-communication arrangement must be a fairly recent thing, because it was only on the Spider-Man issue dated “June 1965” that the artist had first been given credit for “dream[ing] up the plot of this tantalizing tale,” with a more formalized “plotted and drawn” credit for Ditko appearing the following month. The June issue had been on sale by March or April, and must have been sent to the printer early in the year, so clearly this was a development that had occurred roughly six months earlier.
Sol made it sound as if it had been a mutual agreement between Stan and Steve, but I quickly figured out it had to have been Stan’s decision, since he was the editor. An artist couldn’t just suddenly decide not to speak to his editor! (Later, Ditko’s writings would confirm this version of things. I’m less convinced by some of Steve’s other recorded remembrances of events and attitudes in the 1960s, since human memory is fallible, but this one is almost undeniable.)
I didn’t learn any more about the Lee/Ditko situation for some time. Stan expanded on it slightly to me over the coming weeks, recounting that Steve had argued that, when the time finally came to unmask Spidey’s nemesis The Green Goblin, he should turn out to be some person the readers had never seen before. Stan had let Steve do that earlier with a baddie called The Crime-Master, but he hadn’t been satisfied with the result from a dramatic standpoint, and he didn’t intend to repeat it with the Goblin. Stan also told me Ditko had wanted one of the supporting characters to be struck and killed by a random automobile while crossing a city street. That was certainly something that was statistically possible; but Stan felt it lacked dramatic impact and had firmly nixed the idea. (On that one, at least, I wonder if Steve might’ve had a point. What a shock it would’ve been for Betty Brant or someone similar to have died in an auto accident totally unrelated to anything happening in the main storyline. It would’ve injected a totally unexpected dose of realism into the carefully structured world of comics. Still, Stan was right in his way, too… and ultimately it was his responsibility.)
There had been other miscommunications as well. Stan told me that one day Steve had walked into his office with a copy of a paperback book titled You Can Trust the Communists in his hip pocket. Stan’s immediate reaction had been to ask Steve if he was a communist, to which the artist answered with an offended “Of course not!” In actuality, that notorious 1960 tome by Fred Schwartz was a decidedly anti-Bolshevik book, whose full title—with the last three words rather smaller on the cover—was You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists). I never heard that Stan and Steve had any type of real discussion regarding politics—or the work of logical positivist and novelist Ayn Rand, of which the artist was apparently a devotee at that time.
At any rate, the no-contact news Stan and Sol had given me naturally assured that, when I first met Steve Ditko in passing at the office, no doubt during my premier week or so, when he picked up or dropped off some work, I never mentioned the words “Stan” or “Lee” in his presence. Of course, I did tell him how much I’d admired his “Captain Atom” work at Charlton six years earlier, and how much I was enjoying Spider-Man… but I didn’t mention that I almost never read “Doctor Strange,” only glanced at the pictures, because I was put off by magician heroes; I felt I never knew exactly what their powers were, because they were constantly dragging some magic spell out of a hat, symbolic or other, to resolve their dilemmas. In any event, Steve probably just said a relatively few (but friendly) words in reply and went on his way.
Over the course of early lunches, I also learned from Sol that he had designed the Fantastic Four and Avengers cover logos, although I believe it was Artie Simek who had lettered the finished versions of both. I’m not sure how long it was before Sol mentioned that he had inked FF #3 & 4, nor did I ever have the presence of mind to ask him (I suspect he probably knew) who had embellished Kirby’s pencils on the first two issues.
And one day, early on, after he had got a sense of my interest in comics of what we fans called “the Golden Age,” he almost shyly asked me if I remembered The Red Cross, a medically-oriented costumed hero from the 1940s Holyoke title Captain Aero Comics. When I replied that I had seen and enjoyed one or two of what must have been the last stories in that series (the character had run from ’42 through ’46, when I was five), he seemed pleased, and mentioned that it was one he had co-created. (With “Blue Beetle” co-creator Charles Nicholas, I would later learn.)
Yes, some of my most pleasant memories of my first few years at Marvel were my lunches with Sol Brodsky.
8.
For some reason, I don’t recall precisely when I was introduced to Jack Kirby, either. You’d think I would, since he was Marvel’s most important artist and one whose work I had followed since I was at least seven… but I don’t.
Still, it’s likely we met on the Friday of my first full week at Marvel, since that was the day of the week he usually came into “the city” from his and wife Roz’s home on Long Island. He often arrived in mid-morning, so he and Stan could go to lunch together and talk over an upcoming story or two.
On meeting Jack, of course, I once again couldn’t resist playing fanboy (an expression that didn’t exist then and which I’ve always hated) by mentioning my affection for his work, both at Marvel and earlier with Joe Simon. I had learned only a few years previously that the Simon & Kirby team had created and produced the first ten issues of Captain America Comics in 1940-41. But from the latter ’40s on, I’d been a big admirer of Stuntman, Captain 3-D, Bulls Eye, and several things in between—of their brief 1959 reunion of sorts on Archie’s The Double Life of Private Strong and The Fly—and most of all of their mid-’50s Fighting American comic for Prize. Jack seemed pleased that I remembered specifics about the latter, such as Red-baiting villain monikers like Poison Ivan and Hotsky Trotsky. (Who could have forgotten names like that?) And he came right back at me, mentioning the malodorous Russian baddie named Super-Khakalovitch, whom I also fondly recalled—except that Jack that day stuck an extra syllable into the name, pronouncing it “Super-Khaka-locka-vitch.” I didn’t correct him; in fact, I like that version of the name even better than the printed one.
It really wasn’t that much more of a conversation than I’d had with Ditko, really. But he was never less than gracious to me when we encountered each other.
Apparently, I made something of an impression on him, too—for good and for ill.
It can’t have been too many weeks afterward that Jack co-plotted and penciled layouts for the 12 pages of “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” in Strange Tales #144. Mark Evanier, who would work as Kirby’s teenage assistant in the early ’70s, has said that Jack told him he based S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jasper Sitwell, who debuted in that issue, at least partly on me. I had no inkling of that till Mark revealed it decades later, and I was both flattered and chagrined to learn it. After all, Sitwell was a loquacious (well, Jack got that right), if not downright prissy and supercilious character, whose major accomplishment when he first meets Fury at the end of #144 is to cause the S.H.I.E.L.D. director to beat a hurried exit. Of course, Stan, who may or may not have proposed adding Sitwell to the cast, scribed the precise dialogue for that sequence, and I’ve no reason to believe he perceived any particular connection between Jasper and me. Though he might have… who knows?
Some of us have to take immortality where we can find it.
9.
During those early days I met most of the other Marvel artists at least in passing as well.
Don Heck, polite and reserved, was riding high at the moment with his Avengers stint, and had the reputation among fans and pros alike of drawing the prettiest women then in the Marvel mags. Not that that was the apex of achievement, since portraying feminine pulchritude had never been the specialty of either Ditko or Kirby (the early “Blue Bolt” villainess Green Sorceress being an exception).
I told Sgt. Fury penciler Dick Ayers how much I had enjoyed his stint on the 1953-54 “Human Torch” revival, as well as Magazine Enterprises’ Western Ghost Rider comic in the early ’50s. When I mentioned his work on the first issue of ME’s costumed hero The Avenger at the turn of ’55, though, his recollections of that one were tinged with bitterness: He told me that, while he was finishing the interior art for issue #1, fellow artist Bob Powell had undercut him with publisher Vin Sullivan by offering to draw the feature for a lower page rate. Powell had wound up drawing the remaining three issues—and even the cover of the first!
Also in and out of the office was new X-Men co-penciler Werner Roth, an older-looking and slightly stocky gent who had drawn Venus and much else for Atlas in the ’50s. But somehow, though he and I were destined to work together ere long, I recall almost nothing about him personally except that he was friendly and soft-spoken. He’s also one of the few early Bullpenners of whom I’ve never been able to locate a single photograph—even though I met his son Gavin at one comics convention a few years later.
I also hoped to meet Joe Sinnott, the new Fantastic Four inker, but I was informed he virtually never came into the office but mailed in his work from Saugerties, in upstate New York. As I recall, it wound up being a contiguous spell of eight years (which may have begun with the wonderfully inked FF #5) between Joe’s trips into the Bullpen. When he did show up, he turned out to be as warm and gracious as I could have wanted him to be.
Equally easy to get along with was the gentle Stan Goldberg, penciler of the “Millie” comics and colorist of most of the early Marvel comics, although he was starting to do less of the latter work, with Marie picking up the slack. He was distinctive among Marvel personnel for his dapper moustache. He was delighted that, where Stan Lee had left most of the recent “Millie” plotting up to him, I was committed to either giving him a synopsis or working out the plots with him, settling on something we both felt good about.
After only my second or third “Millie” script, Stan Lee decreed I would henceforth be the “unofficial Millie editor,” which mostly meant that he himself would spend little time on those titles (or on Patsy and Hedy, which was included in his edict) except for the covers—and I could now indicate balloons and captions directly on the original art. I know Stan G. enjoyed drawing the American Beatles-style rock band we dreamed up together and I christened The Gears, which we (and my successor as scripter) utilized in several “Millie” yarns. His drawing style on “Millie” was influenced by earlier Timely/Atlas illustrator Dan DeCarlo, who had since become the primo artist of Archie Andrews at that character’s company. As it happened, over the next year or so, the two Millie titles would be discontinued in favor of adding more super-hero titles, and Stan G. would move on to Archie as well, where he would succeed DeCarlo as the primo delineator of the “Archie style.”
I don’t recall precisely when I first met Al Hartley, the humor/romance artist with whom I worked on two issues of Patsy and Hedy, but I had a reasonable amount of fun doing them. Stan had decided the comic had become too much of a “weeper” of late and instructed me to turn it into to a good-time book. He revived an earlier unofficial cover logo: Patsy and Hedy – Career Girls. My first effort, titled “No More Tears!,” ended, in the style of many a 1950s rock’n’roll movie, with teenagers and parents alike dancing away to the “new music.” (I playfully named one character in that story Virginia Wolfe, as in Who’s Afraid of…?; and one member of the Zipatones [!] band I concocted was named Chuck Chandler IV, after the real name of the Golden Age hero Crimebuster in Charlie Biro’s Boy Comics.) The next issue I named two characters Al Tindall and Rick Strong, after two of my St. Louis roomies. Those two yarns were my only brush with Patsy Walker, who had been around since the early 1940s and would later morph into the fierce Hellcat in The Avengers. Writing Patsy and Hedy made such a minimal impression on me that, for years, I recalled myself as scripting only one issue and thought the mag had been canceled immediately afterward!
I’m sure I met Gene Colan and various inkers (Jack Abel, Vince Colletta, et al.) during those first few weeks, too—also letterer Artie Simek—but I recall zero details about those run-ins.
10.
One artist with whom I definitely came into closer  contact than most in those early days was Frank Giacoia, who currently inked for Marvel under the pen name “Frankie Ray.”
Frank was undeniably one of the best inkers in the business. He’d have given Sinnott a run for his money as the favorite embellisher of fans and pencilers alike on some Marvel series or other; but alas, he was nearly as undependable as Joe Sinnott was reliable. His pseudonym existed, as per usual, because at the time he was doing the bulk of his work for DC. However, on numerous occasions, as soon as he was given an assignment (and occasionally had wheedled an advance payment) from one company, he would hop over to the other to acquire another assignment—with both companies getting shorted with regard to their deadlines. He got away with it, at least up to a point, because he was so damn good—and reasonably amiable, to boot!
Production manager Sol, no slouch as an inker himself, was long since onto Frank’s ping-pong antics. And so, just a few days into my new tenure, I found an extra drawing board being squeezed into the office shared by Sol, Flo, and me… and minutes later in walked Frank, who’d been tapped to ink the latest “Millie” story I was working on with Goldberg.
Sol had explained the situation to me just before Frank’s arrival: He’d had so many problems getting Frank to deliver previous assignments on time or anything close to it that he had given him this particular “Millie” to ink only on the condition that he would come into the Marvel offices every weekday to work on it there until it was done. Frank had no choice but to comply; so, on that day and for several thereafter, he and the drawing board that Sol had dredged up from somewhere became the center of a spatial wheel whose roughly equidistant spoke-ends were Sol, Flo, and myself. His and my backs were to each other, a few  feet apart.
He worked diligently away—for a little while. But it wasn’t long into that first morning before he abruptly turned my way (which of course meant he had to stop inking) and asked my spinal column, “Did you ever see Gunga Din?”
I knew vaguely that Gunga Din was a classic 1930s movie starring Cary Grant and set in the Indian Raj, and that it was based very loosely on a long narrative poem by  Rudyard Kipling. But I truthfully answered that I had never seen it.
Frank smiled and drew himself up in his chair: “I’ve seen it fifty times!”
He followed that up with a running description concerning the plot and the action and the grandness of it all, with an enthusiasm that made me want to see Gunga Din the next time it came on late-night TV. I mostly responded to him with brief muttered comments, since I had little to add to the conversation. After a few minutes, Sol interrupted Frank to inquire how the inking was coming. Frank said “Great!” and turned back to his work.
Later, when Frank wasn’t around, Sol explained to me that I’d have to make sure I didn’t get drawn into such confabs. “Because,” he explained in his avuncular way, “Frank doesn’t want to work. He’ll do anything to keep from  working. That’s why he starts these conversations.” From then on, I was on my guard. When Frank mentioned another film a day or two later, I replied with just a few noncommittal words, hopefully sounding friendly and yet discouraging any attempt to extend the exchange. It worked, more or less.
That little hiccup aside, I couldn’t help liking Frank  Giacoia. What was not to like? He was an outgoing Italian- American; even Sol liked him, I think. It’s probably lucky for me that I was somehow unaware at that time that Frank had penciled some “JSA” chapters in the last few issues of my beloved All-Star Comics. Otherwise, I might have been the one importuning him, till Sol broke us up!
11.
Meanwhile, I was busy enough with my “Millie” and “Patsy” scripting that I had little time for the moment to seek out female companionship. I’d been mostly at loose ends since the ends of the romances with first Linda, then Marlene, except for the brief one with Coreen Casey. Like other guys around at the time, evidently including Steve Ditko, I was rather attracted to Flo; still, asking her out didn’t seem like a good idea. I met few young women in the course of my work at mostly-male Marvel, of course; there were a few of the fair sex laboring down the hall on the “men’s-sweat,” romance, and movie mags, but I rarely encountered them. And I had never been one for warming a bar stool of a night in the hopes of meeting young ladies—although Len and I did occasionally make the rounds of the singles bars on a Friday night. He later met his first wife at some mixing event we went to. (Later, he wished he’d been sick that night.)
Well, there’d be time for romance soon enough, I told myself. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: two years after the break-up, I was carrying a torch over my high school/ college romance.
At least Dave Kaler introduced me to several of his friends, so I had additional guys to hang out with. One was Mark Hanerfeld, a rotund, bearded, friendly, and knowledgeable comics fan. Like others, I was struck by his resemblance to famous jazz/pop trumpeter Al Hirt, whom I’d seen perform up close a couple of times in his New Orleans nightclub. Another pal of Dave’s was Bobby Van, a young black man whose name I had no trouble remembering because he shared it with a featured dancer in several films I’d seen (e.g., Kiss Me Kate). Both Mark and Bobby were assisting Dave with the upcoming comics convention.
I myself quickly became far too busy, between my 40 hours a week at the office and the scripting I did after hours, to do much in the way of helping Dave with that con, but I did fulfill the odd task here and there.
And, even before the con came off, I decided to see if I could help Dave land a job in comics.
I had a standing invite to get in touch with Charlton Comics’ editor, Pat Masulli, after I arrived in New York City. I’d hoped to meet the man who’d sent me my first two checks for writing comics scripts, as long as it didn’t mean having to take a train up to Derby, Connecticut, where Charlton (and its printing press) were located. However,  I soon learned that Masulli had been kicked upstairs to head the company’s magazine division, and the new comics editor was an artist with whose name I was unfamiliar: Dick Giordano.
Dick, it turned out, had arranged with Charlton that he would take the train down to Manhattan once a month to meet with freelancers who lived in that vicinity. Sometime in my first few weeks in town, the two of us utilized one such occasion to share a lunch. I had to inform him I couldn’t do any further work for Charlton due to my staff job at Marvel—he seemed mildly disappointed—however, I told him my roommate Dave Kaler had some writing talent, and I wondered if he could be given a stab at doing one of the stories Masulli had invited me to script. Being a bit more of a known quantity at that point, I offered to look over Dave’s work before it was given to Charlton. Dick was agreeable.
Dave quickly wrote a Son of Vulcan script that was accepted but never published because that series got canceled; my as-yet-unpublished issue would turn out to be its last. However, Dick then invited him to write a script for Captain Atom, who’d been revived in his own title. Dave would be working with Ditko, who (in between his better-paying Marvel work) was again drawing—or at least penciling—the super-hero he had co-created in ’59. Dave devised for that strip a few memorable new characters, including a heroine named Nightshade and villains The Ghost and Dr. Spectro. He also wrote some “mystery” stories and the like. I was pleased to have been able to give him a timely boost, but Dave’s success in comics was his own achievement.
12.
Then, only five weeks after I arrived in town, and around the time he began his work for Charlton, came what Dave preferred to call the “Academy Con,” because it was officially sanctioned by the Academy of Comic Book Fans and Collectors that had grown out of the organization Jerry and I had dreamed up several years earlier.
Regretfully, I couldn’t convince Stan or anyone else from Marvel (except Flo) to join me in attending Dave’s convention, which was held on Saturday, July 31, and Sunday, August 1—so the actually fairly sizable pro guest list would wind up top-heavy with National/DC folks, plus a smattering of others.
One special attraction for me re the con was that Jerry and Sondra Bails would be attending. I was looking forward to seeing Jerry for a third time. Because I knew they wanted to take in at least one Broadway show, I bought the three of us tickets to see Sammy Davis, Jr., in the hit musical Golden Boy. I had already seen it during my first days in Manhattan, but I was more than willing to repeat the experience.
The night before the con, Dave and I went with Jerry to meet Bill Finger, whom I hadn’t run into during my brief layover at National. Jerry, still disappointed that Finger had never come through with the biographical article he’d promised back in February of ’61, had written the comics scribe a week or two earlier and gotten himself (and his entourage) invited to Finger’s apartment in or near Greenwich Village. And now here we were.
I wish I could say I remembered much about the hour or so we spent in the company of the man who was, after all, the co-creator of both Batman and Green Lantern (not to mention Wildcat)… and was considered one of the best Golden Age scripters, still making a living in the field. It was really Jerry’s and Bill’s night, though. Its highlight was Finger showing us a sheet of paper on which, back in 1940, he had handwritten prospective names for the kid sidekick he and Bob Kane had decided to give Batman. “Robin” was there… but so were “Tiger” and several other names. That sheet (since reproduced in various places, I think) was a real sliver of history, and it should’ve meant much more to me at the time; but my mind was preoccupied with my new job at Marvel, and I’m afraid the comics-historian in me mostly took the night (indeed, the next two or three decades) off.
If I had known at the time that, after the con, I would encounter Bill Finger only once more in my life or his—a fleeting hello in the doorway of the Marvel offices several years later—I’m sure I’d have paid a lot more attention. But we always think we have more time than we really have, don’t we? With everything.
13.
The comics convention itself was a singular event—in more ways than one.
First of all, it was held in a hotel that was on the verge of falling down. The Broadway Central at 673 Broadway, lauded at its opening in 1870 as the Grand Central Hotel and “The Largest Hotel in America,” had been a luxurious place to stay for some decades… despite the murder there in 1872 of prominent financier James Fisk. By 1965, however, it was in a state of disrepair that would cause its façade to actually collapse eight years later, killing four residents; soon afterward, it would finally be demolished.
Many who attended the ’65 convention would, in retrospect, consider themselves lucky the hotel held together as long as it did. Carole Seuling has told of hearing (and feeling) an ominous creaking and sagging when she and her young daughters started to climb the main staircase to the second floor. They proceeded upward while keeping as close to the wall as possible so they wouldn’t put much weight on the center of the stairs.
Of course, as executive secretary (i.e., effective head) of the ACBF&C, Dave had had distinctly limited choices in renting a venue, given the Academy’s limited economic resources. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually covered some of the costs himself, in his enthusiasm for the medium and for what would be its first two-day con.
It opened on Saturday morning on the hotel’s fourth floor. All told, there would be approximately 200 attendees, including such then-prominent fans as Jerry and the Seulings (all as dealers); prominent fanzine writers Rick Weingroff (Slam-Bang) and Tom Fagan (for Alter Ego and Biljo White’s Batmania); prominent back-issue dealers Bill Thailing and Ed Aprill; early cosplayer (before the term was invented) Larry Raybourne; Don Foote (a double-fan who “arrived with suitcases filled with comics for trade”); Michael Uslan (destined by the late ’80s to be the original co-producer of the epoch-transforming Batman movies); and Jim Steranko (as a dealer; he’d make his own considerable mark in the comicbook field, but not till the following year). Also present, along with Bobby Van and Mark Hanerfeld, were a lively pair of New York-area fans who had also helped Dave with the con far more than I had: Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, who would become two of the best comics writers of the 1970s and ’80s. According to reports, I escorted Flo Steinberg to the con.
The first item on the agenda was a panel—and, surprisingly, given the medium being celebrated, it was a panel composed entirely of writers rather than artists. Jerry presided over a group composed of Gardner Fox, Otto Binder, and Bill Finger—except that Finger was as tardy that day as he often was in delivering scripts, so they had to start without him. Since, to my shock, my “old” boss Mort Weisinger happened to be in the audience, Jerry invited him to join the panel. Besides having scripted comics in the 1940s, Mort could hopefully deliver perspective on the interaction between writers and editors. When he rose to join the panel, Otto gave me a wink where I sat near the front in the audience and called out “Hey, Roy!” in a stage whisper that Weisinger didn’t acknowledge, if indeed he heard it. (There may have been a few other current professionals in the audience besides Flo and me, but, for whatever reason, far more pros would show up for the Sunday session.)
Oddly, Mort’s main contribution to the panel—besides his somewhat inhibiting presence, since after all he was Otto’s employer and potentially Gardner’s—was to try to paint Marvel as the guilty party in a “Who steals from whom?” National-vs.-Marvel controversy he pulled out of thin air. The other two panelists contented themselves with telling oft-humorous stories about the early days of comics. Bill Finger arrived halfway through the 90-minute panel and joined the other four, adding some amusing anecdotes of his own. Fox related how, in the early ’40s, when he perused the illustrations for a particular story of his, he spotted one panel therein where an archer—who appeared in that panel and in that panel only—was depicted standing on a rooftop, firing an arrow downward toward the street. The writer checked and discovered that incongruity had occurred because he (Gardner) had typed a movie-style direction in his panel description for that scene: “Shoot from the roof.” Bill countered by telling of how he’d written in one script that a fan was supposed to send Batman “a stuffed bat.” Amazingly, the artist had depicted (God knows why!) a stuffed baseball bat. “You have to tell an artist what to draw,” Finger explained, “or else, you know, he’ll just draw.”
Happily, Hanerfeld tape-recorded that panel and the next day’s, of which I was able to print transcripts in a revived Alter Ego, a third of a century later.
That first panel, by the way, was attended by nearly all that day’s con attendees—because it was held in the big open area that would soon double as the dealers’ room. By Dave’s decree, the dealers could not set up till the panel ended, to avoid any competition for audience!
Afterward, the transformation of the big room into what Dave styled a “Comic Mart” was swiftly accomplished by his small staff and the eager dealers. He helped Flo cut a huge “Comicon Cake” to open the buy-and-sell festivities. The attendees swarmed about enthusiastically, despite the fact that New York City was then in a grip of what fandom-historian Bill Schelly later called “a record-setting heat wave,” and if there was anything resembling air-conditioning in the Broadway Central, it eluded our notice.
Drawing the attention of many of the con-goers were a female reporter and a camera crew sent over by a local TV affiliate. In the time-honored way of media people the world over, they proceeded to act as if the “comicon” had been put on purely to give them something to film. As Tom Fagan wrote afterward: “CBS-TV camera crews threaded their way through the throng, interviewing here and there and barking orders to fans of ‘Get out of the way of the camera, sonny,’ or ‘Hey, bud, watch out for that cord!’” Near day’s end, either Jerry or Phil Seuling (accounts  differ) served as master of ceremonies at a comicbook auction—“and then,” Schelly wrote, “had to re-enact part of it at the request of the TV folks.” Fagan maintained that the TV crew insisted on some of the prices being “jacked up” to make for better television, and so that the reporter could act all agog at the fact that Batman #1 was selling for $60. (Frankly, so was I. I wouldn’t have paid anything like that much!)
One of the people the TV folks interviewed that afternoon, wandering about the floor in a Fantastic Four T-shirt (a piece of Merry Marvel Marching Society merchandising that had only recently arrived at the Marvel offices), was a thin, 5'4" blond male who explained solemnly to the reporter that he was there as a fan of Marvel Comics, which published the best comicbooks in the world, of which The Fantastic Four was a primo example.
Yeah, that was yours truly, masquerading as a comics fan—which, come to think of it, wasn’t really a disguise. Apparently nothing from the day’s filming ever made it onto TV, but I’d done what I could. Happily, a few minutes of amateur silent film footage exists from Day One of that con, taken by a fan named Joe Azzato.
That evening at 7:30 came the “Costume Party/ Masquerade,” whose highlights included Dave as Dr. Strange, Marv Wolfman as Herbie the Fat Fury (the ACG parody super-hero), “femme-fan” Margaret Gemignani as Timely’s costumed Miss America, and no fewer than two Weather Wizards (from The Flash). I took part, festooned in the Plastic Man outfit Aunt Olivia had made for me. Phil and Carole Seuling were Captain and Mary Marvel (shades of Dick and Pat Lupoff in 1960—except that Phil sported a short beard). Fans were thrilled when Otto Binder posed proudly with the two Shazamers, whose exploits he had scripted in the ’40s and ’50s; matter of fact, he had also been the original writer of “Miss America.”
Afterwards, because not all the fans wanted to return to their homes (or their dingy hotel rooms) right away, there were full showings of the vintage Captain Marvel and Captain America movie serials. When I finally left, it was back to what Tom Fagan christened “Kaler’s Cave,” not a room in the Broadway Central!
14.
The Sunday session commenced with a noon showing of an abridged version of the serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Later that day the Alleys for 1964 were given out, with DC and Marvel dividing fandom’s awards, while Alter Ego #7 won “Best Fanzine.” I couldn’t have been prouder if I had received that award for writing a professional story!
As both a longtime fan and the closest thing (besides Flo, if she returned on Day Two) to an official Marvel rep at that day’s assemblage, I wound up on a “Comics & Fandom: Where Do We Go from Here?” panel alongside Creepy/Eerie/Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher James Warren, recently resigned Gold Key editor Bill Harris, Hawkman artist Murphy Anderson, and fan-writer Rick Weingroff. In the audience were restored Superman assistant editor E. Nelson Bridwell, neo-pro artist/writer Larry Ivie, his fellow T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents scripter Len Brown, Little Annie Fanny co-artist Will Elder, Topps Chewing Gum executive Woody Gelman (once writer of DC’s “The Dodo and the Frog” and “Nutsy Squirrel”), Len Darvin (attorney for the Comics Code Authority)—and Green Lantern/Atom artist Gil Kane, who participated so heatedly in the discussion from the front row that within minutes he was called up to join us on the panel. Despite the tape-recording I mentioned earlier, the only thing I actually recall about my part in it is that, at some point, I made a comment with which Warren, sitting next to me, disagreed, and he did a theatrical imitation of sticking a knife in my back. It was the foreshadowing of an often friendly, occasionally contentious relationship with a publisher for whom I never wrote a single story.
After the convention ended around 9:00 p.m., Dave and I made the rounds of several bars in nearby Greenwich Village in the delightful company of vintage Mad artist Will Elder. He regaled us with tales of his days at EC and with Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman—but like I said, we were pub-crawling, and I wasn’t exactly writing anything down. I can’t remember a thing he said—and, sadly, I don’t believe I ever ran into him again.
By most lights, Dave’s 1965 comic convention would have to be considered a rousing success, given the events it showcased and the number of professionals in attendance. But after it ended, Dave had told one and all that he himself never intended to handle another one!
15.
Meanwhile, work and private life proceeded apace… the former swiftly, the latter slowly.
During this time, at Stan and Sol’s direction, I wrote, as part of my staff job, a several-page comicbook for the tiny “commercial-comics” department that consisted of that one woman whose name I can’t recall. The only thing I recall about the comic itself is that it pushed a soft drink called Hojo Cola, a Coke wannabe that was slated to be sold at the nationwide chain of Howard Johnson Hotels. Within a few weeks of my arrival, however, the commercial-comics lady was gone, and so was the whole notion of Marvel “commercial comics,” for a long time.
Shortly after my abortive stab at “Iron Man,” I got another shot at writing a super-hero—of sorts. This time it was the monthly “Doctor Strange” yarn plotted and drawn by Ditko.
Again, Stan one day simply handed me the full-size original art to an entire ten-page tale for what would be the back half of Strange Tales #143 (which would have a cover date of April ’66). I was to script it “on staff”—i.e., no extra pay. I was pleased to get the assignment, despite my lack of fervor generally for “magician strips.” Steve’s pencil drawings were little more than a professional’s version of stick figures, with little in the way of even vague shapes thrown in to suggest buildings and the like—but they told the story, and very well.
Instead of scribbling notes in the margins of the original art, however, as per the stories I had dialogued thus far by Goldberg, Hartley, and Colan, Steve preferred to write his (very sparse but adequate) notes on separate sheets of typing paper, which he divided into a rough grid of panel shapes. I presume he did the same with Amazing Spider-Man for Stan to work from. So, with Ditko’s notes on my left and his original art on my right, I banged away at the dialogue—again using transparent overlays—mostly after hours in the office or on Second Street. Still, I knew I’d be proud to see my word balloons floating above the heads of characters drawn by the supremely talented Steve Ditko.
The story began on a quasi-cliffhanger, with Strange fleeing mystic foes, his head enclosed in an eyeless helmet. Though blinded, he was able to send his astral body out of his physical one to guide the latter in eluding his foes while seeking a way to free himself. This episode ended with their defeat, and in the final panel the physically restored Doc flew off to “turn [his] undivided attention to… THE DREAD DORMAMMU!” (That’s all the info Steve had given me about #144’s yarn.)
This time, when he proofed my script (alongside the art) before it was sent out to be lettered, Stan found more to like than on “Iron Man.” Even so, he did a fair amount of rewriting, including of what became the published credits:
Edited and rehashed by….. STAN LEE
Written and rewritten by… ROY THOMAS
Plotted and drawn by…….. STEVE DITKO
Lettered and blotted by….. ARTIE SIMEK
Once again, I can’t argue with the accuracy of the above bylines. But this time Stan informed me that until further notice I would be the regular scripter of “Doctor Strange,” though Ditko would continue to plot as well as illustrate it. I was making progress!
Probably the main thing most readers would notice about the credits would be that it was the first time in a while that anyone but Stan had scripted “Doctor Strange.” Fans by now were used to the informal, oft-humorous bylines Stan supplied—often with the letterer becoming the butt of some continuing “joke” in the credits. Artie Simek was becoming well-known among readers solely because he lettered more stories than did Sam Rosen in those early years, and thus his byline often became the “punchline” of the credits gag. Besides, he had the “funnier” name.
It was about this time that Stan, Sol, and I had the only lunch together I can remember that consisted of just the three of us. Afterward, Stan, who was (SPOILER ALERT!) given to theatrical gestures, impulsively purchased some small, plastic-tipped cigarillos at a tobacco shop. In a spirit of camaraderie, Sol and I picked up some for ourselves. That “fad” didn’t last long, though… not least because none of us was really a smoker. I did finish off my cigarillos over the next little bit, but never bought any more. And I was careful not to inhale; my one or two experiences doing that with cigarettes during my high school years had not ended happily.
One day during that same period, Sol and I likewise yielded to a joint lunchtime impulse and each purchased one of the black Russian fur hats that briefly became a fad in NYC. Actually, they seemed a lot more sensible than American hats, whose brims could easily catch the wind and blow off. For another thing, they could keep the ears warm! But Sol didn’t follow my lead when I purchased a pair of alligator shoes; I ditched them ere long, though, even before they’d become the well-publicized footwear of choice of local pimps.
Sol also helped me in one personal area. Somehow, I’d never learned to tie a man’s necktie properly. Years earlier, my father had tied one for me—and I had lazily just kept slipping it on and off over my head so I wouldn’t ever have to tie it myself; at other times during high school and college, I had depended on hideous clip-on ties and bowties. Sol gave me a few minutes’ tutorial, and that parental omission was remedied forever.
16.
Meanwhile, I was starting to get into—well, if not really much of a social life, except for forays with Dave and/or Len Brown (the two of them had become friends after I introduced them), at least certain aspects of the Manhattan night life. Never one who made friends easily or had a surfeit of skill at chatting up prospective romantic partners, I doubled down on the cultural (especially pop-cultural) aspects of city life during my early months there.
I’ll admit, I’ve never been much of a fine-art aficionado. Oh, on occasion I could lose myself in an art museum—but it would always have to be someone else who suggested the expedition. Spending a day at an art museum (other than the inverted Babylonian ziggurat that was the Guggenheim, but far more for its architecture seen from outside than for its art, I fear) would simply never have occurred to me, though I had rather more interest in a museum devoted to archaeology or natural history.
Movies, of course: Despite the fact that every freelance penny had to be earned at night or over the weekend, I managed to see most new mainstream American films and a reasonable smattering of foreign ones—either in Times Square (which had not yet descended into the cesspool it would become by the latter ’70s and the ’80s) or in Greenwich Village or on the West Side or in the East 80s. In my first foray up to the thoroughfare of E. 86th Street (where I would later live), to see The Heroes of Telemark starring Kirk Douglas, someone thrust into my hands a pamphlet trumpeting “white supremacy,” which reminded me that “Yorkville,” as that neighborhood was called, had once been mostly populated by folks of German descent (though that was changing) and had been the area where a gaggle of Nazi spies had been arrested in the 1930s.
I tried to see a Broadway play most weeks, too. Besides buying tickets a few days or weeks in advance at the theatres themselves, I frequented the several hole-in-the-wall agencies around 42nd Street where you could often pick up a stray ticket for that very evening’s performance of, potentially, even a hit show. Since tickets tended to be purchased in pairs, there would inevitably arise situations where one member of a couple became indisposed just a day or even a few hours before the performance, and their other half wanted to recoup his/her money by having an agency re-sell the spare ticket. Hitting those agencies around 5:30, I could often find one ticket on short notice, where obtaining two would’ve been virtually impossible. Thus was I able to enjoy Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl no less than twice in those first few months, before she left Broadway forever in favor of TV and movies—the second time from a very nice balcony box seat, where I was probably sitting next to the gent who’d turned in the ticket I’d bought. (And everyone in the audience, myself included, was dressed nicely, too—not like in recent decades, where the Broadway theatrical onlookers are mostly garbed like unkempt children who just ran in from the playground.)
That fall I also saw the original run of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney, before the latter had a nervous breakdown and had to leave the show. The next year would bring an avalanche of Cabaret, Mame, Pickwick, Sweet Charity, and of course It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, as well as the off-Broadway smash Man of La Mancha. I saw them all, and quite a few more… dramas as well as comedies and musicals.
New York City was a dream come true for a wide-eyed kid from small-town Missouri.
17.
Then there were the poker games most Friday nights at the Seulings’ apartment near Coney Island. I soon established a regular ritual: Sometime after leaving work, I would catch the subway to Coney Island, where I would buy a hot dog and a lobster roll at Nathan’s Famous (an eatery I’d never heard of till arriving in NYC), devour both while walking a short distance to a Carvell’s to buy a chocolate malted, which I would finish by the time I had reached the Seulings’ place a couple of blocks away.
The regulars in the game were Phil, Brooklyn comics dealer Ruby Auerbach, the latter’s employee Chester Grabowski (who’d later serve as the visual model for a murderous hireling drawn by Gray Morrow in the “Man-Thing” origin in Marvel’s Savage Tales #1), myself—and, before long, at my invitation, veteran comics inker Mike Esposito. It wasn’t a high-stakes game—I think a quarter was the highest amount you could bet or raise at a time (though that was equivalent to roughly $2.50 today)—but, since the games went on from 7:00 in the evening until 1:00 A.M. or later, it was easy to win or lose $100 or so in a night… again, the equivalent of quite a bit more nowadays. At various times I came out on both the winning and losing ends of those evenings, but since I was making a good salary and had no one but myself to support, my only worry was to make sure I never followed in my father’s footsteps and gambled myself into a severe hole… something that never even came close to happening. Unlike him, I knew when to quit—not always in an individual hand (where I tended to be a bit over-optimistic), but in the overall game.
Actually, Phil hosted another poker night some mid-weeks—a “teachers’ game,” he called it, consisting mostly of fellow teachers, with lower stakes: a nickel or dime (I forget which) instead of a quarter. Mike and I played in a few of those, but we soon found ourselves bored by the too-low stakes; they made it too tempting never to drop out. When the boredom reached a certain threshold, Mike (a gregarious guy who also loved playing the horses) and I would sometimes make side bets with each other over which of the two of us had the better hand; but that understandably annoyed our fellow players, so I think that eventually we both dropped out of the teachers’ games.
Actually, those poker games rarely resulted in my walking away with many dollars in my wallet. If I won, before I left I would often wander back into Phil’s “comicbook room,” which housed the inventory for his old-comics business, and I’d buy 1940s titles with my winnings. I remember acquiring a nice run of early Golden Age Green Lanterns in the wee small hours of one morning. On occasion, when they decided I was too exhausted to ride the subway home that night, Phil and Carole would insist I sleep on a cot in that room, surrounded by old pulp paper and original art by Eisner, et al. I suspect I had some interesting dreams on such occasions, though sadly I don’t remember them.
18.
Meanwhile, things didn’t exactly stand still at Marvel, either.
For one thing, a middle-aged Japanese-American man showed up one day early in my tenure, called in by Sol to do some in-office lettering. His name was Morrie Kuramoto. He was no Artie Simek or Sam Rosen in the lettering department, but he was good enough to do corrections—when he concentrated on his job, which wasn’t as often as it could have been. I could soon usually spot a Morrie correction on a finished page, since his lettering was usually not quite as good as that around it.
Still, Morrie was competent enough—he’d been in and around the comics field for years—and he was likable enough, too. We went out to dinner a few times after work, and he showed me a couple of nice Chinese restaurants, though I never cared much for Chinese food till Sechwuan reared its head in the city some time later. He and I got along well, though I wished he had a bit more commitment to his work. But then, I asked myself—what kind of “commitment” would I have had to a job like comicbook lettering? It was just the same 26 letters, over and over again!
19.
And then, approximately two weeks after Stan hired me, he made another acquisition of which he was proud at the time—and forever after.
I was working away at my corrugated desk—more likely on proofreading than on writing—when I glanced up to see Sol Brodsky and another, slightly fleshier gent. Sol said he wanted me to meet someone who used to work for Marvel and was going to be starting up with “us” again.
And he introduced me to John Romita.
This was nearly as big a thrill to me as meeting Ditko or Kirby—and, naturally, much more of a surprise. As I rose to shake his hand, I told him it was an honor to meet the man who had drawn “those wonderful ‘Captain America’ stories in the 1950s.”
John, a good-looking guy about ten years older than me, did a virtual double-take. He told me, some time later and surely with some exaggeration, that he had “nearly fainted” when I’d said that, because he couldn’t believe anybody would remember that work from more than a decade earlier. I informed him I had a complete collection of that 1953-55 Timely/Atlas “super-hero revival” of Cap, the Torch, and Sub-Mariner. But I also knew him from other work during that period, including Western Kid, wherein he’d drawn a gunslinger who rode the range with a German shepherd as his sidekick. I hadn’t been a big cowboy-comics fan, but I could tell good artwork when I saw it, and his signature had been on those stories as well.
John, as I soon learned, had worked for Timely from 1949 to 1957, when the company had suffered a severe “implosion” (not that anyone used that word then) that had led to its near-annihilation, and he’d been forced to seek work elsewhere. Luckily, his talent had made him a Godsend to National’s romance comics, and he had been fairly contentedly drawing same ever since, becoming one of that line’s most valued artists. No one drew a more gorgeous female than John Romita… and at that time, gorgeous females were only in demand in romance comics, not in the super-hero material.
After Marvel had begun to expand in the early ’60s, Stan had on several occasions tried to lure him back, but National paid better than Martin Goodman ever had; so, although he preferred drawing adventure material, he felt he had to stay at the larger company for his family’s sake. By 1965, however, it was clear to John as it was to others that love comics were no longer a growth industry, and he had considered himself fortunate when a neighbor arranged a new job for him at one of the country’s largest ad agencies—I think it was BBD&O. By sheer coincidence, Stan had phoned him yet again, the previous week—with John due to start the new job the following Monday. Sizing up the situation, Stan had insisted on taking John out to lunch, where he asked him why he would want to be “a little fish in a big pond” at the ad agency, as opposed to “a big fish in a little pond” at Marvel Comics, where he would immediately be considered one of the company’s most valued artists.
Well, because the money was better at the ad agency, for one thing.
Somehow, though, Stan had sweet-talked John into throwing over the ad agency job at the very last minute; and now, on a bright Monday morning, here was John Romita, whose 1953-54 run of “Captain America” stories in Young Men, Men’s Adventures, and his own magazine—even if that entire output had added up to part of just nine comicbooks all told—I had felt was much better than anything Cap-related I had encountered in the mags of the late ’40s, and held its own with the Kirby rendition re-introduced in 1964’s Avengers #4. To this day, that ’50s “Captain America,” not “Spider-Man” or “Daredevil” or anything else, is to me the apex of John Romita’s comic art… the perfect marriage of the influences of Jack Kirby and Terry and the Pirates/Steve Canyon’s Milt Caniff.
And he turned out to be a really nice guy, too, which is always a plus.
I can’t recall if John immediately occupied a spot in the room across the hall, or if he had to squeeze in with Sol, Flo, and me for a (very) short time until the commercial- comics lady was off to seek her fortune elsewhere.
Actually, John’s verbal deal with Stan, I soon learned, was that he would be inking only, not penciling, because, he’d told Stan, he was going through a bit of an “artist’s block” about drawing actual stories. Sure, sure, Stan had said… come on over and we’ll keep you busy just inking. No penciling.
Whether Stan had ever had any intention of honoring that promise, I have no idea.
Almost immediately, he had John ink Kirby’s cover for The Avengers #23, which would be cover-dated Dec. 1965 and come out circa September. John immediately got a rush education in the state of comicbook super-hero censorship, when the Comics Code watchdogs decided that the clutching right hand of the giant-size Kang the Conqueror on that cover was too frightening for youngsters, so that it had to be—are you ready for this?—lowered considerably on the artwork, leaving an unusually wide expanse of star-studded black sky above Kang’s head. Stan fumed at the ridiculous change, though he had no choice but to have it made.  Romita inked Don Heck’s pencils inside that issue as well.
However, Stan had this knotty—and increasingly  urgent—problem with Daredevil. Dick Ayers’ pencil samples for that series were certainly competent, but Stan feared losing the upward momentum of the mag’s sales spurred  by the artwork of Wally Wood. So, despite his verbal agreement with Romita, Stan quickly asked his newest recruit  if he could help out with that emergency by penciling Daredevil #12. John was doubtless taken aback, but like a trooper he penciled the first several pages from the plot Stan had worked out.
Alas, and probably to his own surprise, Stan was less than enchanted with those pencils.
The draftsmanship, of course, was second to none, but Stan felt the layouts were too… static… for his tastes. He remembered the Romita of the 1950s adventure comics as well as I did. So he swiftly got on the phone with his go-to artist, Jack Kirby, and gave him the plot verbally, asking him to tell the story in rough pencil layouts John could finish and ink. Kirby, as usual, came through—except that his splash page layout (because he was working from the same plot elements as John had been) was still too quiet for Stan: Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer in dark glasses, standing amid a bustling Manhattan street, looking back over his shoulder toward where his former partner Foggy Nelson and secretary Karen Page stood at a second-story window. At the end of the preceding issue, Matt had dramatically quit the Nelson-Murdock law firm and now was departing—“perhaps forever.” Dramatic, yes. Visually exciting, no. So Stan, when he scripted the story (over Jack’s layouts, before Romita touched pencil to them), splashed a big blurb over much of Matt’s upper torso:
SPECIAL BULLPEN BULLETIN!!!
This illustration was designed to
lull you into a false sense of
security! It may seem like the
start of a TV soap opera… but
just wait’ll you get to
PAGE THREE!
Since John’s original pencils for the start of DD #12 probably no longer exist, it’s impossible to compare approaches directly, but on page 2 Jack tossed in at least a symbolic shot of Daredevil—and on page 3 “the King” drew as dramatic a series of panels of Murdock changing into DD and leaping into action as Stan could have wished for. John’s storytelling of basically the same actions had doubtless been far quieter, reflecting eight years of drawing nothing but romance stories. (I had frankly been startled when I had realized that, while Romita had been working full-time for National, they had never let him touch comics like Justice League of America—or, for that matter, The Doom Patrol, which had been illustrated by another erstwhile love-comics artist, Bruno Premiani, who had none of  Romita’s super-hero chops. Of course, as long as romance had remained a top-selling genre, that had made commercial sense, even though John later told me he’d been champing at the bit to draw some super-hero stories for National. But even as the super-hero wave began to crest, DC’s editorial staff never realized what a resource they’d squandered—until he was gone. This was also the case, to some extent, with Gene Colan.)
John’s finished penciling and inking on Daredevil #12, which added Kirby-Romita dynamics to a look that was only slightly less illustrative-looking than the Powell/Wood approach. For issue #13, Stan would keep the Kirby/Romita team intact. By #14, Romita would take over full penciling so that the always-amazing but over-extended Kirby could return to his other assignments… and I don’t recall hearing any more about John’s 1965 “artist’s block” with regard to storytelling.
Romita was back where he belonged—and Stan pretty much ceased lamenting the loss of Wally Wood.
20.
Only a few months after I started at Marvel, there was a major personnel change at the Comics Code Authority. Ever since “Hanging Judge” Charles Murphy had resigned as Code administrator a few years after its enactment at the end of ’54, the censorship body’s head had been a society lady named Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock—a name that always seemed to me almost singularly designed for such a position. In late ’65 or so, she in turn stepped down, to be succeeded by Len Darvin, who had been the Code Authority’s resident attorney virtually since the beginning. Marvel offered Mrs. Trulock a complimentary subscription to any single comic, and she chose Thor (which was just changing its name from Journey into Mystery) because, she said, she liked its flowery Shakespearian language.
Overall, we found Leonard Darvin easier to deal with than Mrs. Trulock. Even so, the Code administration and an envelope-pushing comics company like Marvel were, in a sense, natural enemies—and the relationship remained one that was always a bit uneasy.
21.
My friendship with Len Brown blossomed, even though after the first two “Dynamo” (nee “Thunderbolt”) stories he had ceased any writing on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents because he was so busy with his job at Topps Chewing Gum, where he helped his boss Woody Gelman ride herd on the  Brooklyn company’s various sports- and other trading- card endeavors. These employed many a comicbook artist such as Wood and Powell… and talented magazine-cover painters like Norman Saunders.
I remember well my first visit to Len’s Brooklyn apartment, mainly because it was the first time I had ever seen anything remotely resembling a collection of EC comics—and Len’s collection was complete in everything that really mattered. He seemed a bit puzzled that I had virtually never purchased any of them besides Mad, Panic, Incredible Science Fiction, and the doomed latter-day “New Direction” titles. And he was even more surprised when I asked him if I could take a look at certain issues I had never owned: “Do you have the story that’s a takeoff on Kukla, Fran and Ollie except that the reptile puppet, Ally Gator, turns out to be an other-world alien who takes over the Earth?” and “Do you have the one which has roughly the same plot as the movie The Thing from Another World except with the  thawed-out Frankenstein Monster instead of an alien  from a flying saucer?”
Len questioned how I remembered those issues from more than a decade before if I’d never owned them—or even read them all the way through. “Oh, I just skimmed them at the drugstore for a few seconds,” I informed him, “before I put them back on the shelf.”
He also owned a nearly complete collection of Playboy magazine going all the way back to 1953… except for the first issue. He told me he’d run across copies of the latter for sale, but he was waiting for the price to come down. I had to chuckle at that… and, after a second, so did he. The price at that time for the first issue was about $100… and we both knew it wasn’t coming down anytime soon.
He also showed me a couple of truly beautiful Sunday- style comics pages, for a strip called Danny Dreams, that had been drawn by the great EC artist Al Williamson from Len’s script. But alas, it had failed to sell to the syndicates… while dozens of dull, mediocre Sunday and daily strips were increasingly filling the nation’s newspapers.
There’s no accounting for taste… especially bad taste.
22.
Sometime in late summer, I received a letter (phone calls being expensive in those days) from, of all people, Steve Gerber, the younger fan from University City with whom I had socialized a bit back in Missouri. He had graduated from high school that spring and his parents had offered to stake him for a week’s trip to New York City before he started college. Steve asked if I could put him up for a  few days—and, with Dave’s permission, I responded in  the affirmative.
My memories re Steve’s stay are a bit vague; after all, he was roughly half a dozen years younger than I, and such disparities loom larger in one’s youth. Mostly he just wandered around the city on his own for the week, seeing whatever he wanted to see, while I was working. But I do recall that he really, really, really wanted to meet Stan Lee, since he felt, as I did, that Stan was then the premier writer and editor in the business, however much we admired Julius Schwartz and his stable. (Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to wangle Steve an invite up to National/DC just then, assuming he’d wanted one.)
I talked Stan into letting Steve drop by one day to say hello—“just for a couple of minutes.” I introduced the two of them and returned to my desk to deal with the usual mini-emergencies. As it happened, Stan was so taken by Steve that their conversation went on for a half hour or more. I’ve no idea what was said between them, yet that visit turned out to be a precursor, in its way, to Steve  Gerber becoming a Marvel writer seven years later.
After a week, Steve flew back to Missouri. For all I knew, neither I nor the comicbook industry would ever see him again.
23.
Around that time, or maybe a bit before, the other Steve then in my life—Steve Skeates, boy Marvel staffer—asked me for help plotting the “Kid Colt” story Stan had assigned him to do. In a spirit of collegiality, I agreed. He generously insisted on giving me a co-plotting credit; I had no part in writing the dialogue.
Only days afterward, Stan decided to relieve Steve of his staff job. As Steve prepared to depart, I offered to put him in touch with editor Dick Giordano at Charlton if he wanted; but Steve instead found his way initially to the Tower/T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents operation and did a bit of work for Wally Wood. Soon afterward, on his own, he did contact Dick and wound up also writing for Charlton. When Dick, a year or so later, would be offered an editorial position at National, Steve was one of the two Charlton writers he was allowed to bring with him to the larger company—so Steve, nice guy (and talented one) that he was, landed on his feet.
Thus Steve was long (but not too long) gone by the time that 17-page yarn, “Iron Mask and the Circus of Crime,” came back all lettered and inked. Stan, who hadn’t bothered to peruse any part of it previously, got his first editorial peek at it with Sol and me in attendance, and immediately erupted in anger. The splash panel depicted two of the Kid’s old enemies—Dr. Danger and The Fat Man—bumping shoulders as they both tried to enter a saloon at the same time. Stan berated that splash as dull, dull, dull. Who cared about a couple of non-costumed lowlifes colliding in some saloon’s swinging doors?
Since Steve was the primary writer, Stan reserved his verbal scorn for the absent scripter as he paged through the tale, finding additional things he didn’t like. At one stage, feeling Stan was trying a bit too hard with one of the points he was heatedly making, I volunteered a sentence in mild defense of that aspect of the yarn. In response, Stan snapped his head my way, his eyes burning into me with an intensity that Cyclops of The X-Men would have envied, and said coldly:
“And the less you say at this point, the better!”
I clammed up.
In the end, Stan contented himself with the fact that it was “just a Western” and made minimal changes before having that issue sent to the Comics Code and the printer. But I had learned, a very few weeks into the job, that  Smilin’ Stan Lee didn’t smile all the time. Well, who does?
I myself never felt any lingering repercussions for my part in that story, though I felt guilty about anything I might possibly have suggested to Steve that had contributed to Stan’s fury. But, as Edward Albee once said, that was all blood under the bridge now.
All the same, I look at Kid Colt Outlaw #127 (March 1966) even now and I think: “It really ain’t half bad.” But it could’ve used a snappier splash page.
It was around this time that I was working late alone at the office when the phone rang in the office now shared temporarily only by Marie and John Romita. I figured I might as well answer it: “Marvel Comics.” (A few months before, I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d ever answer the phone with those words… or “DC Comics,” either.) An excited male voice on the other end asked to speak to Stan Lee. I told him sorry, but I was the only person there, I didn’t give him my name, which he wouldn’t have recognized anyway.
Denied access to Stan, he began to pepper me with questions about the way Stan and Ditko worked together on their secondary strip, mainly: “Do you know what  drugs they take when they do ‘Doctor Strange’?”
I explained that I didn’t know Stan or Steve very well, but from what little I knew, I very much doubted that  drugs of any kind were involved.
The caller wasn’t having any. “No,” he insisted, “they’ve gotta be on something. I just wanted to know what—because my buddy and I had a fight with magic spells just like the one Doctor Strange had with Dormammu, when we were high on mushrooms in Mexico City!”
I extricated myself from that phone call somehow… wondering, maybe just a little, what I had gotten  myself into.
24.
Steve Skeates was barely out the door when Stan directed me to help find a replacement—one whose writing and proofreading skills would hopefully find more favor with him. At this stage, though, the precise job description would’ve been “editorial assistant” rather than the earlier “staff writer.” Sol handed me copies of the four-page writer’s test I had taken, saying I could send it to more than one person, if I liked.
Sol informed me at that time that, not long before Steve and then I had come along, Stan had had him place an ad in The New York Times inviting people interested in writing for comics to call a certain phone number (doubtless reaching Flo); responders had been sent copies of that test. Sol told me that at least a hundred people had wound up taking it, but Stan hadn’t found anybody he liked from all those submissions. That made me feel even better about having “passed” it. But now the hunt was beginning anew.
With Dave Kaler ensconced at Charlton (and frankly,  I had doubts his scripting style was what Stan was looking for), I immediately sent writer’s tests to a pair of  out-of-towners.
One was Tom Fagan, the fanzine writer in Rutland, Vermont, who had impressed me (and comics fandom) with various works, especially his short prose piece “Warlock” in Ronn Foss’ Alter Ego #6. He was eight years older than I. I had spent a bit of time with him over the comic-con weekend and knew he was a sharp guy, and one I wouldn’t mind having around.
The other recipient, who also fit both those categories, was Dennis J. O’Neil, still working for the Southeast Missourian back on the far banks of the Mississippi.
Both men, I knew, could write. But I had never seen either try Marvel comicbook dialogue, so I was curious myself how things would turn out.
The packages containing the doctored pages from FF Annual #2 reached them with no advance warning, just a letter inside from me instructing them on what was required if they wanted to give it a try, giving them minimal instructions re scripting and balloon placement, and  advising them that, if they were interested, time was of  the essence.
When both tests were promptly returned with new dialogue, Stan went over them alone in his office, then congratulated me, saying he’d found something to like in both submissions. However, he was especially impressed by Denny’s, so I contacted him—by phone? letter? I don’t recall—and asked him when he could start.
Right away, as it turned out.
When Denny had typed out his dialogue for the test, he’d done it mostly for a lark. After all, like me when I’d taken it, he already had a job. Almost immediately afterward, however, things in his life had gone decidedly south. His girlfriend Ann had gone off to Boston University on a scholarship; only, when she’d arrived for the fall semester, as Denny related in a 2014 interview in Alter Ego, there had been some kind of “snafu,” and “her money wasn’t there”—so she was getting by on “what she could scrounge,” while Denny was stuck in the Midwest. Then, as if by magic lightning, he learned from me that he had a job offer from Marvel Comics in NYC—just a couple of hours’ train ride from Boston.
So, with the help of a female reporter friend (who, he said, “gave me a pint of whiskey, sat me down and said, ‘Wait,’ and forty minutes later she was back with my car, which she had packed”), he reluctantly resigned from the newspaper with just a note to his editor and left “in the middle of the night.” He still felt a bit ashamed of that, even years later.
After that, events proceeded to unspool as if he were starring in a singularly cliché-ridden movie: “Somewhere in Ohio the car spewed transmission fluid onto the highway, and I hitchhiked to Boston.” He rendezvoused with Ann, only for the two of them to promptly be thrown out by her landlady (“No men allowed!”). Oh, and did I mention this happened in the middle of a rainstorm? Looking for a place to spend the night, they wound up in a bus station—encountered a “Good Samaritan” who put them up—and by morning, Ann had decided to squeeze by in Boston till her scholarship money came in, and Denny “moved on to New York.”
He arrived at the Marvel offices bright and early the very next morning, to find them—closed. And so was everything else on Madison Avenue, from what he could see. He couldn’t phone me—if Dave Kaler even had a phone, I hadn’t given that number to Denny—but he recalled reading the name “Flo Steinberg” in the comics, so he looked her up in the Manhattan phone directory. She explained to him that everything was closed because it was “a Jewish holiday” (probably either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, since I’m fairly sure Denny came East in September).
By later that day, he had found his way to Dave and me in the “East Village” and quickly became the latest temporary renter of a mattress in “Kaler’s Cave.” The next morning he started work at Marvel. As he said in 2014:
I thought that maybe I’ll do this [i.e., work at Marvel] for a year. It was a chance to live in New York, a chance to have some experiences. That was almost fifty years ago.
Within a few weeks, Denny rented his own apartment practically next door to Dave’s. Soon afterward, Ann gave up on both Boston and its University and moved in with him. She became pregnant and they got married, as they had intended all along. This added responsibility, however, quite understandably weighed heavily on Denny, and probably prevented his giving his all to the job as Stan (and I—and he) had expected him to do. But I knew Denny had talent, so I figured it would all work out. One of the first strips he inherited, to my delight, was the scripting of what became the final five issues of Patsy and Hedy. That left me free to concentrate on 1½ “Millie the Model” epics per month. Whoop-de-doo!
25.
During the New York comic-con that summer, the aforementioned Batman fan and Rutland, Vermont, resident Tom Fagan had told Dave and me about some festivities that were held at the end of each October in that second- largest city in the Green Mountain State. For several years it had boasted a Halloween parade, and Tom had taken part in recent ones clad as the Caped Crusader; these were the last few of Earth’s turns around the sun before that masked hero would become (by dint of the 1966-68 Batman TV series) every bit as well-known as Superman. Since Tom now had semi-official status in the parade, he invited Dave and me to attend and even be a part of it, garbed in the costumes we’d sported at the con’s masquerade event. Sounded like fun to us—and my first chance ever to see New England in the autumn. Or any other time.
So it was that Batman, Dr. Strange, and Plastic Man waved jauntily from one of the streamer-strewn floats in the 1965 Rutland Halloween parade, amid the seasonally nippy weather. I got a kick when someone in the crowd actually recognized Plas and called out his name. “Doc,” on the other hand, was mostly just hailed as “the magician” in that day and age. Afterward, there was a big party held somewhere in town for anyone who cared to attend, which we definitely did. All I can recall of it is the recorded music that played over and over while we raised our glasses; it seemed to me that every  second or third tune was  Barry McGuire’s gloomy protest anthem with its two most  memorable lines:
Look at all the hate there is in Red China…
…If you don’t believe/we’re on the Eve of Destruction!
At the time, Rutland was just a parade and a party: two newly minted comics pros hobnobbing with Tom Fagan, who himself had earlier sold Charlton a super-hero story for either Son of Vulcan or Blue Beetle soon after I did, though his was never published. Happily, he didn’t hold it against me that Stan had chosen Denny, rather than himself, for the current Marvel staff job. (As it happened, he’d have another shot at a later date.)
Also, a few years down the road, Rutland, Vermont, was destined to loom larger in Silver Age comicbook history than many a burg many times its size.
26.
Meanwhile, I had staff-scripted a second Ditko-plotted and -penciled “Doctor Strange” 10-pager. I was gaining somewhat in experience and confidence, and Stan did considerably less rewriting this time around. I wrote perhaps a bit too much text, an eternal tendency of mine—I guess I just had a bit too much fun scripting and didn’t really think about cutting it down, since Stan didn’t ask me to—but the only thing I distinctly recall from that story for Strange Tales #44 involved the splash page. In his rough pencils, which depicted Doc standing amid one of those patented Ditko alien dimensions, Steve had indicated some sort of brazier floating in mid-air, directly behind the Master of the Mystic Arts. When I placed a pair of thought balloons directly above and below it, one of which interrupted the trail of smoke wafting upward from it, Steve decided to eliminate the brazier entirely, leaving an excess of empty space on the right side of the page. He never said a word to me about it, but somehow I felt I could sense his aesthetic disapproval. Sorry about that, Steve… honest.
I was enjoying working on “Strange,” even if I would’ve preferred to have had a hand in plotting the stories. But my page rate was the same as if I had plotted them, whatever sum Marvel might have been paying Ditko by that time, so I didn’t complain. That’s clearly the way Stan and Steve both wanted it. (Steve had probably been doing most, though surely not quite all, the plotting of “Strange” from the very beginning, so by that time he would have had to logically accept that his page rate covered plot as well as art. That was the way Stan saw it, too. At least now Steve was being bylined for both, and he had clearly accepted those terms of employment.)
A few weeks after Denny signed on, Stan decided he’d like to see how the new kid in town would handle “Doctor Strange”; and so, as it would happen, my colleague from Missouri would wind up dialoguing Ditko’s final two sorcerous outings at Marvel. More on that a bit further on. Needless to say, I would’ve preferred to continue doing that strip, but Stan didn’t ask for my opinion, and I still had plenty of work to keep me occupied.
In the meantime, I had scripted (and co-plotted, usually in office confabs with Stan Goldberg) several more “Millies”: Millie the Model #134 (“The Return of Scarlet!,” wherein a red-haired rival—not Chili, this time—makes a play for the apparently irresistible Clicker)… #135 (“What’s Happening, Baby?,” introducing the U.S. rock band the Gears, for which I got to scribble some fake song lyrics)… #136 (“Where the Action Is!,” set in a skiing locale)… and #136 (“You for Me, Babe!,” in which Millie had a brief singing career with the Gears)… and, somewhere in between those, Modeling with Millie #45 (“Millie à Go Go!,” in which our heroine briefly became a TV celebrity, with unhappy romantic consequences, of course). Maybe not super-exciting stuff, but I was getting practice writing comics and getting paid $10 a page for the privilege, with my second “Doctor Strange” becoming the third and final yarn I had to script as part of my (basically defunct) “staff writer” job. From now on, Stan decreed, I could cease writing scripts on staff time and I’d be allowed to voucher any story I wrote as “freelance.”
Even in those early days, I liked to insert bits and pieces into my “Millie” stories purely to amuse myself. For instance, one of the Gears’ songs was “Eight Arms to Hold You”; I had read somewhere that that had been the title of a Beatles song they never got around to composing—or maybe even the prospective title of one of their two real movies. And I had one young woman in the story say the Gears were “the most fabulous thing I’ve seen since I first saw Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show!”
There was one other writer of sorts on the “Millie” material: none other than Fabulous Flo, who, per Stan’s decree, added short captions next to some of the various fashions on display in both stories and pin-up pages. Those blurbs contained the names and city-addresses of readers (mostly but not exclusively young girls) who had sent in their own scribbled concepts for dresses, sweaters, and the like, which Millie and her model pals could be drawn wearing. Flo would simply label some item of clothing with that reader’s name; the outfit rarely if ever bore any resemblance to anything she/he had actually mailed in. From time to time, though, Flo was pleased to open a letter to “Millie” that would say, “Oh, thank you so much for making the dress I drew look so pretty!”
On occasion, just for the hell of it, Flo would ask me for names of some female acquaintance of mine for use in a caption. Thus, in Modeling #45, one fur-lined outfit was credited to “Mimi Kay, Newton, Mass.”—St. Louis friend of my former-girlfriends Linda and Mar. “Marlene Jahss” was credited in another issue. “Tara Jean Thomas of Jackson, Mo.” rated a caption, too. If I’d thought of it, I’d probably have sneaked in a plug for “Julie Schwartz”!
As was my wont, I did tend to write a bit more dialogue in the “Millies” than Stan had. That fall, Flo showed me a newly arrived letter from a young girl saying how much she liked the “Scarlet” issue: “I started reading it several days ago and I’m half done with it!”
27.
Sometime that autumn, after at least one Millie comic of mine had gone on sale, Charlton’s Son of Vulcan, “Vol. 2, No. 50,” finally came out, featuring the first comics story I’d ever sold. The only copies I had of it were ones I bought off the stands; Charlton didn’t send out freebies. I was pleasantly surprised to spot a cover burst that proclaimed: “ATTENTION, FANZINE READERS!!! CHARLTON’s challenge has been answered… The story in this issue was written by one of YOU!!! DON’T MISS IT!”
Aware that 99% of the comic’s buyers would have no notion of what a “fanzine” was, I flipped open the cover and saw my splash page scene: Son of Vulcan leaping toward a giant wooden horse that has come to life, beneath the title “The Second Trojan War.” The artwork by veteran pros Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico looked crude compared to Kirby, Infantino, et al., but it was serviceable, and I reminded myself of my old-time love for C.C. Beck’s rendering of Captain Marvel.
But I was brought up short by the  credits. Actually, I’d had no guarantee  I would even have a byline on the tale,  so I was initially thrilled to spy a box placed prominently high on the page, near the title:
Written by
R. THOMAS
***
Pencils by
B. FRACCIO
***
Inks by
T. TALLARICO
All the same, I couldn’t help being both amused and annoyed. Charlton’s editor (still Pat Massulli when the issue had gone to print) had proudly trumpeted the comics-fandom connection on the mag’s cover—and then, inside, couldn’t wangle enough space to spell out a name with just nine letters!? “R. Thomas,” indeed! Oh, well, at least I was working in the comics field, from the very first in considerably less anonymity than, say, Gardner Fox had done in the 1940s, when his name never appeared on a single one of the numerous “Hawkman” and “Justice Society of America” sagas that had been the two favorite comics features of my childhood.
Next day, I proudly handed a copy of the comic to Stan to peruse, since he knew I had scripted a pair of stories for Charlton ere going to work for National. He disappeared with it into his office, to emerge a few minutes later. He plopped the comic onto my desk and said with a wry smile, “It’s a good thing I hired you before I saw this!” And promptly vanished back behind his closed door.
I’ve never been 100% certain he was just kidding.
My Blue Beetle (Vol. 3, No. 54) came out a few weeks later. I didn’t show it to Stan.
Both Charlton comics became—by sheer coincidence, I prefer to think—the final issues of those series.
28.
Stan continued fanning the flames of fans’ enthusiasm by means of features he added to Marvel’s comics. First, however much he begrudged the time he had to spend on them (since he had no one else around whom he yet trusted to do them the way he wanted them done), he had given up on his short-lived attempt to have the letters section in Fantastic Four be the only place where any mail comments received would be printed—and, beginning with issues cover-dated circa November of 1964, each and every Marvel super-hero title abruptly sported an LP, as we called letters pages. This pushed out one of the full-page house ads that plugged forthcoming comics—and replaced the lowly two-page “text stories” the post office had required. A definite improvement, since we all knew that virtually no one read those straight-prose yarns, while nearly everyone read the letters pages—as well as Stan’s next innovation:
With issues cover-dated either November or December 1965 (there was an overlap), he added a second new feature: the aforementioned “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins,” a different page each month carried in each comics series, combining one-paragraph “news items” (a mixture of flat-out plugs and allegedly tantalizing tidbits of information about staffers and freelancers)—plus a checklist of “Some of the Marvel-ous Mags on Sale Right Now”—plus smaller ads for MMMS merch for sale—plus, for a time, the names and hometowns of a couple of dozen MMMS members in each issue, so they could ogle their names in print.
The very first “Bullpen Bulletins” page contained a bit of name-dropping re Don Heck, Jack Kirby, and “Adam Austin,” plus a mention that “production chief” Sol Brodsky was a talented artist in his own right (no details, such as the fact that he had inked FF #3–4)… and a particularly memorable announcement that “Fabulous FLO STEINBERG, our Gal Friday,” was “winning popularity contests in colleges all over the country! But they can’t have her! We saw her first!” There was even a mention of “our peerless publisher, MARTIN GOODMAN” as being “one of the nation’s top amateur golfers,” a factoid I never heard anywhere else. The only mention Stan made of himself that month was his quip that it wasn’t true that he caddied for his boss on his days off.
A month later, Stan used part of his second Bullpen Bulletins page to admit a mistake he’d made on issues cover- dated August through November of ’65—and try to turn it into a plus:
“WE GOOFED AGAIN! DEPARTMENT”—Remember how we tried to change our name to Marvel Pop-Art Productions? Well, although some of you went along with us, we never realized how many thousands were intensely loyal to the name Marvel Comics! Your mail, phone calls, and telegrams bowled us over! So, once again we fell on our faces—and from now on, we’re the MARVEL COMICS GROUP once more—SO BE IT!
Stan had briefly tried to link Marvel to the Pop Art movement that was making cultural waves beginning in the early 1960s, due to the notoriety of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and their ilk. Since both artists swiped comics images for some of their work, Stan’s notion was actually quite logical; personally, I prefer Jack Kirby’s visions of Galactus and The Silver Surfer to anything done by either “pop artist.” However, although Stan wasn’t willing to abandon continued stories due to “reader demand,” he was quite content to revert to the use of the term comicbook”—which, incidentally, he always preferred to spell as one word. (In 2017, on the occasion of his 95th birthday, I gave him the public “birthday present” of announcing in Alter Ego that henceforth “comicbook” would be spelled therein as one word; I agreed with him in principle, though I personally would have opted for “comic-book.” I like hyphens.)
To my great surprise, the third Bullpen Bulletins page, a month afterward, contained the first-ever Marvel reference to yours truly, not counting a comicbook credit box or three:
HOW ABOUT THAT! DEPARTMENT: You’ll see the name ROY THOMAS popping up here and there in our ever-lovin’ editions. Roy’s a fan who’s made it! Although employed as a school teacher in St. Louis (his subject was English!), Roy never lost his love for comic mags—Marvels, to be exact! So, after a lot of correspondence back and forth, we decided it would be cheaper to hire him for the bullpen than to keep shelling out money for those air-mail stamps! Now that Roy’s aboard, we’re betting our syntax will be sensational, and there won’t be a split infinitive for miles around!
(Naturally, the account of my hiring didn’t mention that I had actually come over from National. Nor, actually, did I have anything against a split infinitive now and then, when it made logical sense to actually use one.)
Stan consciously tried to rotate personal mentions in the Bullpen Bulletins so that, over the course of a few months, just about everybody received at least one shout-out. He poked good-natured fun at Jack Kirby’s alleged absent-mindedness—and mentioned that all he had to do with “Jack ‘King’ Kirby or dazzling Don Heck” was to “give them the germ of an idea [for a story], and they make up all the details as they go along” (which should be proof positive, for all but the deliberately ill-informed, that Stan tended in the early days to credit his artistic compeers with what amounted to co-plotting the tales)—shoehorned in the names of college newspapers and radio D.J.s that were “spreading the word about Marvel”—and so on and so forth. Sure, it was calculated huckstering to promote the company’s comics, but he also seemed to really enjoy doing it. And it was clear from the start that the readers were fascinated by that combination of information and boosterism. It made them feel they were hopping onto a bandwagon worth jumping onto.
I was still looking for my first super-hero assignment that would endure more than two outings when, in the spring-1964 Bulletins, Stan tossed in this squib, based on a brief conversation we’d had a few days earlier:
ROY THOMAS, our newest Marvel maniac, is probably the only editorial-staffer who can read hieroglyphics! (Although it’s been so long since he tried, that he now claims he can just barely remember the diff between an owl and an ibis!) Next week we’re gonna try him on Sanskrit! (Although who could tell if he did it right or not?)
Got to admit, I got a charge out of seeing both blurbs about me, printed in several million comicbooks. And, if I’d still been “just” a reader, I’d have gotten a kick out of seeing such info written about someone else. Stan was  making it exciting in a whole new way to be a comics  fan. Julie Schwartz had started it off… but now Stan was kicking things up to a whole new level, and I was feeling proud and happy and, above all, lucky to be just a minuscule part of it.
29.
Tuesday, November 9, 1965: Just another afternoon in the Big City. At a little after 5:00, Denny and I walked out of the office together to share a Lexington Avenue line subway ride down to the vicinity of our East Village abodes. At 5:27, we were on the train as it rumbled southward underground, our car not particularly crowded that afternoon, since we both had seats, which wasn’t always the case—
—when suddenly the lights flickered—
—then failed—
—and the train came to a sudden, jolting stop!
Within seconds, the emergency lights came on, so we weren’t in total darkness for long.
But then—nothing.
For minute after stressful minute, the train just sat there amid the darkness of the tracks and tunnel outside the windows. No movement… no message from anyone in charge, either on the subway or from above. Naturally, Denny and I, like others in the car, couldn’t help speculating on what might be wrong. Was this just an underground electrical malfunction—or was something more going on over our heads? Our minds ping-ponged from consideration of the most mundane potential causes (mostly unstated) to the possibility of a surprise attack by the Soviet Union (definitely unstated). We just waited.
It may have been ten tense minutes later… no less, and I suspect a bit more… that an announcement came over the train’s speaker system: There had been a massive power failure—no reason given at this stage—and the entire city above was blacked out.
Later, we would learn that things were both better and worse than that. Due to what Wikipedia (take that for what it’s worth) refers to as a failure of “the protective relay on one of the transmission lines from the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Power Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario, near Niagara Falls,” during a period of peak demand as electric lights were being turned on in both the U.S. and Canada, an area that included New York state, New England, New Jersey, and the entire province of Ontario, Canada, was suddenly rendered bereft of all electrical power from its vast, interconnected grid. Certain municipalities, including Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, were spared because alert operators managed to disconnect their generating stations from the two-nation grid before the overload became too great… but most of a huge area of the East Coast was in nigh-total darkness.
So Denny and I were stranded in a subway car beneath the streets of Manhattan—we weren’t quite sure precisely where. We and our fellow passengers waited, uneasily, for either the emergency lights to fail (fortunately, they didn’t) or for someone to come and fetch us to the surface world.
Happily, after at least two excruciating hours, a man with a lantern entered the car, having walked for some distance over the de-powered tracks. All of us passengers—there were quite a few, given the train’s numerous cars, and doubtless such scenes were being re-enacted all over (or rather under) the city—were led along the tracks toward the nearest station, which in our case was in the East 20s, two-thirds of the way between 625 Madison and our apartments on East Second Street. As we shuffled along in semi-darkness, there were a few uneasy “jokes” about avoiding the “third rail”—whatever and wherever the hell that was—just in case the power suddenly came back on while we happened to be touching it. When we reached the station, we were helped up onto the platform, which was basically at a level with our heads.
Outside, as Denny and I trod southward, the city was wondrously dark… and unusually quiet. A few cars crept along the streets, only a tiny fraction of the usual traffic. We witnessed nothing unruly, no violence or looting as we walked past unlit, unguarded display windows. We may have peered about a bit more warily whenever we briefly found ourselves the only two people in sight, shuffling along with whatever we were carrying, guided only by the light of the occasional passing auto or the glow of a thankfully full and unclouded moon.
After some time, we reached our respective neighboring domiciles.
I was scheduled to finish a comic script that night (for Modeling with Millie #46), but neither desklamp nor electric portable typewriter was likely to begin functioning anytime soon. Dave had already reached home, so he and I—and one or two other people, though I can’t recall if Denny and Ann were among them—went out to a nearby restaurant called The Red Lantern and sat around for a couple of hours talking, nursing drinks, and having a bit to eat by candle-light. I recall having rice pudding, which didn’t need heating. The whole scene became, after a little while, sort of a lark… a chance for an impromptu “night off”… an idyll in the dark, as it were. New York City even became a decidedly friendlier place for that one night.
By dawn, lights and power were coming back on in  Manhattan, reportedly with full restoration by around  7:00. I don’t recall how I got to work that morning: by  subway? by hailing a very early cab? or by walking sixty blocks in the brisk autumn air? Probably the latter, but the reason I’m uncertain is because, only a month later, on New Year’s Eve—but no, I’ll keep you in suspense a bit longer about that.
At any rate, by 9:00 A.M. or thereabouts, the whole office Bullpen—Stan, Sol. Flo, Denny, Marie, and I—were all present and accounted for. I’m not sure if John Romita made it in from Queens or not. We were all feeling a bit shell-shocked; but, following a bit of nervous laughter all around, we were ready for a day’s work, almost as if nothing had happened.
When Stan gave his “morning briefing” with Sol, Denny, and me in attendance, he startled us all by pulling out the original art for an entire comicbook—Denny always said it was a Daredevil—fully marked up with penciled balloons and captions, plus the typed script to go with it. Stan said that, after he finally got home, he and wife Joan had set  up a “candle brigade,” and, by its light, in his usual two- fingered style, he had typed out the 20-page scenario. When he paused to take a breath after telling us that, the thudding noise he heard was the sound of three collective jaws dropping simultaneously. Nothing stopped this guy!
Well, maybe the blackout had slowed him down, just a little. Stan had also been scheduled to dialogue all or at least part of Sgt. Fury #29, but he apologized to Sol for not having had a chance to do it. Sol smiled. Nick and the Howlers would just have to wait one more day.
Stan, however, said he didn’t want to slow down production, since surely that day some new material would doubtless arrive that would need his attention come evening. So he turned to me:
“You are now the Sgt. Fury writer.”
And he handed me all twenty pages of original penciled art.
To facilitate my getting started on it, he further  announced that Denny would henceforth take over both  Millie titles. I mentioned that I was halfway through dialoguing the latest of those. “Denny can finish it,” Stan said. And that was that. We moved on to going over any art changes needed on the Daredevil.
And that’s how I inherited the first non-girls’-book series I was destined to hang onto for more than two episodes. If I thought about it at all, I had just lost the freelance income from one-half “book” a month, since I was relinquishing both Millies for the monthly Sgt. Fury; but I didn’t worry about that. (I would re-jiggle the already-scripted credits on Modeling #46 so that they read: “Written by: ROY T. & O’NEIL, D.” In future issues, my successor signed himself “DENNY-O.”)
I had never been much of a Sgt. Fury fan; I hadn’t even bought every issue of the WWII-set war comic, though I’d picked up each and every Marvel super-hero title before moving to New York. Still, it was an adventure strip, a “super- hero” book in spirit if not in precise subject matter: it had been created by Lee and Kirby in the style of The Fantastic Four—Stan had scripted its initial 28 issues—the penciling chores had passed after #7 from Kirby to Dick Ayers, longtime “Human Torch” artist in Strange Tales—and, by the next issue, I’d surely be handling the plots as well.
There may have been an overnight blackout for the East Coast… but Wednesday, November 10th, was the dawn of a new day for a very eager Rascally Roy Thomas.
30.
STRANGE INTERLUDE: Oh, and about the above alliterative Marvel epithet that Stan would soon coin for me if he hadn’t already—the one that has followed me like a stray dog since the age of 25:
By the time I came along, Stan had established the mildly humorous (and often alliterative) splash-page credits that would hold sway for the next few years—with his most important artist/collaborator, Jack Kirby, decreasingly referred to as “Jolly Jack” in favor of “King Kirby,” a phrase Stan had dreamed up. While few if any Marvel creators were referred to by the same nickname every time Stan mentioned him/her in a Bullpen Bulletin (except maybe Fabulous Flo), Don Heck was more often “Dashing” than anything else, Dick Ayers was usually “Darlin’,” Marie Severin was generally “Mirthful,” etc., etc., etc. Stan was most often “Smilin’ Stan” before he became the non-alliterative but rhyming “Stan the Man”—although, whenever I read that phrase, I always thought simultaneously of Stan “The Man” Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals, who’d hit that tenth-inning homer in the first baseball game I ever saw.
The other prime exception to the “alliterative epithet” rule was the recalcitrant Steve Ditko. Though Stan had earlier referred to him as “Sturdy Steve” and the like, Steve had told Stan he didn’t like being referred to by such sobriquets, any more than he liked Stan’s beloved sound effects cluttering up his art. So Stan had reluctantly cut back considerably on utilizing either in Amazing Spider-Man, where the credits for Ditko’s final seven web-spinning sagas would be yawn- inducing variations on the likes of: “Written and edited by STAN LEE… Plotted and drawn by STEVE DITKO.” In that mag and in “Doctor Strange,” only the lowly, last-man-in-line letterer gave Stan a chance to add a muted punchline without risking offending Mr. D. And so, “Lettered, unfettered by ARTIE SIMEK” and such-like it became.
My own Marvel moniker of preference (Stan’s, anyway) took a little while to congeal. Stan threw in a “Rollickin’ Roy” or two, maybe something else, but ere long he’d pretty much settled on “Rascally Roy.” I didn’t mind; I knew what he was attempting to do with such credits, and I approved both as long-time Marvel reader and as newly minted comics pro. But the plain fact is, I wasn’t particularly “rascally,” not even as much as I had been during my high school days when I’d used my grade-point average to get away with minor mischief. But, as a Marvel staffer? Most of the time I’m afraid I was serious as the C-word. Much as I loved working in comics, it was a job, and one I took very seriously, because I sure as hell didn’t want to go back to being a high school teacher—or even a grad student!
Still, the “Rascally Roy” name stuck—and nowadays I just smile whenever I hear it.
As for my later Marvel nickname, “Roy the Boy”: well, after “Stan the Man” and even “Marie the She” (for Ms. Severin) had been entered in evidence, I made that one  up myself.
At least I didn’t have to share it with a Hall of Fame baseball star!
31.
Back to something within at least spitting distance of chronological time flow:
So, four months into my gig at Marvel Comics, I’d finally been given what would be, unless I managed to blow it, my first continuing adventure strip—and it was a full book, too, not just a half-book feature like “Iron Man” or “Doctor Strange.” Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos (though only the first two words comprised its official indicia title) had been a hit series from the get-go, coming out the same month Goodman’s company started calling itself the  “Marvel Comics Group.” Over ensuing issues, Stan had lured super-hero fans to Fury by guest-starring Captain America’s foe Baron Zemo, and even Cap himself, during its first dozen issues. More startlingly, in an early story,  Stan and Jack had killed off one of the Howlers (Junior Juniper)—and had left him dead!
That still hadn’t been enough to cajole me out of many dimes-and-two-pennies after the first few issues, except for the Captain America crossover. Even so, each time a new issue appeared, I was at least tempted to buy it. I had, even then, an interest in the Second World War (the setting of Fury), though not in war comics set during it. I didn’t even buy the DC ones drawn by Joe Kubert, my favorite artist… let alone one limned by Kirby or Ayers.
When Stan handed me that Ayers artwork, I was just completing my collection of Sgt. Fury issues, now that I had a job at Marvel. Since #29 was the conclusion of a two-parter, Sol dug up proofs of the not-yet-printed #28. Having backup-proofed it earlier, I knew it dealt with Fury’s Nazi nemesis, Baron Strucker, being ordered by Hitler to either capture all the “underground” fighters in the Occupied French village of Cherbeaux (a name doubtless derived from “Cherbourg”) or else execute everyone in  the town.
Sgt. Fury #29 opened with a dramatic close-up of the Sarge and Strucker, snarling at each other face to face—Strucker’s hand on a lever that would blow up all Cherbeaux, the American’s on a device that would blast the building they were in, allowing me to have Fury growl: “If you pull that switch, you won’t be around to march in any victory parades!”
The rest of that issue consisted of a running battle between the pair through the war-ravaged town; it ends as well as it could, I suppose, including for Yours Truly. Stan rewrote maybe a hundred words or so over the course of its twenty pages, but he liked it well enough that I stayed on as Fury scripter. Sol probably wept silently at all the changes Stan made after the story had been fully lettered in ink. Since I see little evidence of awkwardly lettered corrections in the printed issue, I can only assume that either original letterer Sam Rosen was called in to do them (unlikely), or else there was time for the pages to be overnighted to the Brooklyn house where he lettered alongside a couple of talented brothers (including Joe Rosen, who was then lettering for Harvey Comics but would later take Sam’s place at Marvel).
Over the next few months, I gradually found my footing on the war title. When regular penciler Dick Ayers and I first conferred in the office about issue #30 and the future direction of Sgt. Fury, he surprised me by saying he’d like the next story to be set in Italy, and that he already had a rough plot in mind. I had planned to do something quite different, but I wanted to be agreeable; so he and I verbally fleshed out his notion and he went home to draw. He didn’t ask for a co-plotting credit on Sgt. Fury #30; after a previous experience in that regard with Stan re the “nun” story in #23, he may have reasoned (correctly) that, if he pushed for such a credit, I would simply have insisted on writing my own plot instead, as I had no intention of sharing my $10 page rate or the writing byline. Each of us had his assigned task: Mine was to scribe the story, and his was to draw it, which at Marvel included fleshing out my synopsis. If Dick wanted to do a bit more than that for personal reasons, and I chose to let him do so, that was strictly between us… as long as Stan was pleased with the end product. (If he hadn’t liked that Italian yarn, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to deflect criticism by saying that it had all been Dick’s idea!)
After #30, in order to forestall future problems, I would scribe several-page synopses for Dick without any up-front input from him, the way Stan still did for Gene Colan on “Sub-Mariner” and “Iron Man.” (I don’t recall how he and Don Heck worked on The Avengers at that stage.) I was quietly determined that, much as I respected Dick’s talent, I would handle the direction of any series I wrote.
32.
The winding-up months of 1965 were full of events, but I can’t always remember their precise order, so I’ll just recount them as I think of them.
Some of the most exciting things, to me, were watching the twin teams of Lee-Kirby and Lee-Ditko hit their strides with some of their greatest collaborations passing through the office, two or more months before they’d be seen by Marveldom Assembled, as Stan liked to call it.
The most important pages going through the Marvel offices late in the year were those of Fantastic Four #48-50—well, actually, the last half of the first, all of the second, and the first part of the last, really just two issues’ worth of material—but what issues! Stan and Jack, between them, had come up with the idea of “God” as a super-villain… or, to put it in comicbook terms, they conceived the notion of a truly gigantic alien, eventually named Galactus,  who would come to Earth with the avowed invention of sucking up all of our planet’s energy, leaving it a barren, lifeless husk. Already pretty heady stuff for a lowly comicbook, and far more cosmic than anything either Lee or Kirby had attempted before, together or separately.  They were clearly sparking off each other, and the result would be a upgrading even in “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”
But an additional shocker came when Jack delivered the penciled pages of FF #48. Soon after the artist headed back to Long Island, Stan called Sol and me—and maybe Denny—into his office and began to lovingly go over those pages with us. He was even more impressed than usual with Jack’s storytelling inventiveness, even coming hard on the heels of the superlative saga introducing The Inhumans, who appeared in the early pages of this new effort. Then, as the FF fled the Great Refuge, we reached the start of what was clearly a new storyline. And there, in the bottom panel of the seventh page, was… the image.
A bald human figure, marked with zero clothing lines, astride what looked like—yes, it was a surfboard!—in the far reaches of outer space.
“Look at this great character Jack added to the story!” Stan exclaimed, making no attempt whatever to claim that this new entity had been inherent or implicit in whatever conversation they’ d had about the “God story.” Jack’s margin notes on the original art, I remember, called him only “the Surfer”—and since these were pencils, this new entity could have wound up any color, or combination of colors, when Stan scripted the story over the coming weekend.
What emerged in the end, of course, was a startling new potential super-hero called The Silver Surfer—Stan’s precise name and color choice. He was surely one of the most revolutionary comics creations to come along since—well, I don’t know since when. He could easily have become The Scarlet Surfer—or even something non- alliterative. Most interesting to me is that surely Stan must have resisted the temptation to not use the decidedly earthbound word “Surfer” as part of his name. The alien creature could just as easily become, say, “The Sentinel” or “The Herald.”
Even though he served as the advance-man of the approaching, all-devouring Galactus, the Surfer seemed not evil, but rather beyond good and evil. If you serve a real “God”—not just one of the Norse or Greek lower-case affairs, but a being who represents more than merely one fragment of humanity’s religious beliefs—such terms as “good” and “evil” may not apply.
The reader-christened “Galactus trilogy” of issues #48-50 marked a new—and, as it would turn out, enduring—high point of the Marvel Age of Comics, and of super-hero comics as a genre. Nothing that came afterward in comics, either at Marvel or elsewhere, ever quite eclipsed it, or made us forget it.
33.
Meanwhile, Steve Ditko had just produced, in Amazing Spider-Man #33 (February ’66), the most singular and best-remembered sequence in the long and storied history of the Wall-Crawler… with the possible exception of his origin and the future death of Gwen Stacy. Trapped at  the end of issue #32 under “tons of fallen steel” as leak- induced waters rose relentlessly in “the underwater dome” of quintessential Spidey foe Dr. Octopus, our hero spent the first four pages of #33 in a combination of soliloquizing and straining in vain to lift the oppressive weight off him before it was too late. (After all, not only Peter Parker’s life was at stake—there was also the vital serum that needed to be delivered posthaste to his perhaps-dying Aunt May!)
Stan, using speech balloons probably because thought balloons might have seemed more distancing even if more realistic, put the pinned-down web-spinner through mental torture, as the image of May Parker flitted through his mind—along with that of his Uncle Ben, whose death he himself had caused at the very outset of his career by means of his selfishness. On the third and fourth pages, he began to get his back into his escape attempt in earnest—a do-or-die effort—
And, on page 5, in a full-page panel, he managed to lift and hurl the massive machinery off and behind him—the climax of a sequence which was a true Ditko tour de force, ably augmented by Stan’s slowly building determination.
Ditko’s fellow artist (and eventual successor on Spider- Man) Gil Kane would later call that page/panel “one of  the most satisfying moments in comics”—and for once,  that loquacious autodidact may have been given to  understatement.
34.
During this period, I could sense—as could many readers, when the issues appeared on newsstands and drugstore shelves—that Marvel was really on a roll. “The Galactus Trilogy” was an instantly recognized classic even before fans got around to imposing that literary-sounding moniker on it. Ditto the so-dubbed “lifting scene” in Amazing Spider-Man #33. In addition, Stan and Jack were propelling the Journey into Mystery/Thor title to new heights with a multi-issue storyline that involved a three-way contest between the thunder god, the recently introduced Hercules, and the Graeco-Roman netherworld god Pluto—a story arc I have considered, from that day to this, the best-ever in the storied career of Marvel’s Norse deity—while, over in Tales of Suspense, the same team were about to pit Cap against the Red Skull for the first time in a current setting, simultaneously introducing the Cosmic Cube, a phenomenon that would cast a long shadow all the way to 2012’s first Avengers film. Gene Colan’s art (accompanied by Stan’s dialogue and plotting contributions) was propelling both “Iron Man” and “Sub-Mariner” to new heights. In the sleeper “Doctor Strange” series, Ditko was producing ever more cosmic artwork and turning Stephen’s battles with the Dread Dormammu into the absolute highlight of that series. Even The X-Men was showing new potential, with the several-issue Sentinels saga, the best the series had had to offer to date.
Sure, I was still reading, and even enjoying, Julius Schwartz’s (and a few other) National/DC titles, but I was of ever-firmer conviction that the trio of Stan, Jack, and Steve, in particular, were increasingly leaving the company of Superman, Batman, and the Justice League in the creative dust. The three top Marvel collaborators, in their various combinations, were serving up pop-culture masterpieces deserving of attention by more than children, and more successfully than any of them had ever achieved separately or working with other partners—and, as far as I’m concerned, that even counts Simon & Kirby.
In my mind, “The Marvel Age of Comics,” which had seemed to me to be mostly a publicity gimmick of a slogan when Stan had announced it at the turn of 1963, had become a reality—and while at this point I wasn’t contributing anything noteworthy to it, I could sense I was part of something on a par with a handful of previous high points in comics: EC’s groundbreaking “New Trend” titles in the first half of the 1950s (including of course the first 23 issues of Mad)… Charles Biro’s more adult-oriented series Crime Does Not Pay, Boy Comics, and the original Daredevil… Carl Barks’ masterful Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics… the whole run of Walt Kelly’s Pogo Possum for Dell/Western… the quiet wonder of John Stanley’s Little Lulu… and, point of personal privilege here, the artistic and conceptual high point of latter-’40s “Justice Society” adventures in All-Star Comics #33-41, when graced with art by Kubert, Toth, Hasen, Elias, and Infantino.
Marvel was going places… and I was just hoping to hang on long enough to be able to contribute something worthwhile.
35.
Stan increasingly used brief items on the Bullpen Bulletins page to hype the various print and radio reporters who interviewed him, as well as radio D.J.’s who plugged the comics, and national or college-based magazines that  did “write-ups about the merry Marvel craze which is sweeping fandom.”
Early in the year, he used a Bulletin to complain about “the way Brands X, Y, and Z have been knocking themselves out trying to imitate the now-famous Marvel style.” The term “Brand X” was then in use in numerous  TV commercials; it always referred to the otherwise  unidentified product brand that invariably proved woefully inferior to that of the company paying for said commercial. He jokingly offered to send the competition a few of “our old scripts” to help them out—but in truth, he didn’t find their copycat ways particularly amusing.
Soon afterward, he coined the term “Brand Echh” for the several then-current comicbook lines that had adopted formats and surface sheen that attempted to ape various aspects of Marvel, as he saw it. Stan kept a sense of humor about his newly made-up term, which probably also owed something to the oft-use of the expression “Ecch!” in Mad magazine. When a Marvel fan wrote in to correct his spelling, however, saying the word should have two “c’s,” not two “h’s,” Stan would have none of it and said so in print. “Brand Echh” the phrase boldly remained.
What did Stan mean by “Brand Echh”? Well, it varied. Some readers assumed, especially at first, that he was referencing DC Comics in general, especially since the debut of the Fantastic Four-influenced series Metal Men and Doom Patrol. But, while Marvel was clearly having an effect by this point even on DC editors such as Julie Schwartz (and I couldn’t forget that “Kill or Be Killed!” Superman cover Mort had shoved in my face), DC was clearly not a company generally deserving of the “Echh” label.
No, Stan was referring primarily, though not solely, to the Archie Comics sub-imprint that had begun in early ’65, when an issue of Fly Man (the partly renamed Fly) saw that insectoid hero and his paramour Fly Girl join forces with a trio of abruptly resurrected characters (The Shield, Black Hood, and a visually re-designed Comet) from the company’s 1940s super-hero past when it had been called “MLJ” to form a new group dubbed The Mighty Crusaders. The “Crusaders” art was by former Marvel “mystery”-story artist (and Incredible Hulk #1 and recent X-Men inker) Paul Reinman. Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was the new group’s chief writer, but his attempts at hip dialogue were off-putting both to Stan and, thankfully, to the mass of Marvel fans. Still, the slavish attempt at imitation by Archie made the former’s “Mighty Crusaders” just a wee bit too close to “The Mighty Avengers” and the oft-used phrase “mighty Marvel” for Stan’s comfort. And, when the entire Archie hero line soon branded itself “The Mighty Comics Group,” the gloves came off for Stan… and for the rest of us.
In fact, I proudly helped Stan bolster his case against Marvel’s mimics by dropping in his inbox a poem by the early-20th-century Irish bard William Butler Yeats. He proudly quoted it in a Bullpen Bulletins item:
“To a Poet, Who Would Have Me
Praise Certain Bad Poets,
Imitators of His and Mine”
You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another’s said or sung,
’Twere politic to do the same to these;
But was there ever dog who praised his fleas?
All the more reason to play up the characters and excitement that the Archie guys—and even DC, at that moment in time—couldn’t duplicate.
(When, a few months later, a few readers wrote letters taking him—and thus Marvel—to task for being less than “tolerant of our competition,” Stan wrote a double-length Bulletin reply, worthy of the “Stan’s Soapbox” days to come, in which he insisted that Marvel didn’t resent “competition,” just “shabby, carelessly-produced, badly-written and -drawn IMITATIONS of our Marvel mags.” He promised grandiosely that, “no matter how rocky the  road ahead, your staff here at the Marvel bullpen will  never compromise with quality!” Who could ask for more than that?)
When, on November 5th, “the world-famous movie writer/director FEDERICO FELLINI dropped in to visit the gang at the Bullpen,” you can bet your bottom dollar that Stan made a big deal about it on the very next Bulletins page, as per the preceding quote. He himself wasn’t much of a movie-goer by that time (he once told me the only film he’s seen in the past several years was one James Bond), and he’d probably had only a vague idea of who Fellini was. The celebrated Italian filmmaker knew about Marvel Comics, though, which is why he swooped in, all but unannounced, wearing either a short cape or a coat that fluttered like one, complete with a small entourage, to closet himself with Stan for a time—while Stan most likely faked his way through the meet-and-greet without admitting that he (I’d bet money) hadn’t seen La Strada or La Dolce Vita or 8½. I’d seen them all, though I’d liked only the first one.
Denny and I—he was a far bigger Fellini fan than I was—had hoped to meet the illustrious director, but Stan didn’t introduce any of the rest of us “gang at the Bullpen” to him, either before or after the “wonderful couple of hours” they spent “swapping stories.” I always wondered if at least part of the reason for that omission might’ve been that Stan was afraid he’d forget Fellini’s name… but that’s probably just me being uncharacteristically uncharitable toward my esteemed mentor. After all, why should he have introduced Denny, me, or anybody else to this celebrity who was there specifically to meet him?
(As it happened, Fellini was in New York to promote his new film Juliet of the Spirits, starring his actress wife Giulietta Masini. It’s probably a good thing he visited Marvel before it premiered and instantly received devastatingly bad reviews. It took several years for his reputation to recover from what is still considered one of his worst efforts.)
Also, around year’s end, we had another famous visitor: Peter Asher, of the then-popular British singing duo Peter and Gordon, who in 1964 had had a #1 hit in both the UK and US with “A World without Love,” with a few more to follow. Stan naturally made a big deal in the comics about how Asher had told him that even the Beatles, whom he knew personally (after all, his sister was then dating Paul McCartney), were Marvel fans. I don’t recall getting to meet Peter-minus-Gordon, either, not that I cared that much. Now, if it’s been McCartney…!
Still, Stan more than made up for those minor omissions in one fell swoop, as far as I was concerned. One day as I was proofing the finished pages of X-Men #17, which would go on sale before year’s end, I suddenly spotted a huge verbal sound effect. It occurred in a panel set in the hospital where the young mutants had been treated after their violent brush with The Sentinels in the preceding issues. Spewing from a public-address system in that panel’s foreground, in big open letters: “DR. THOMAS REPORT TO…” One of the two doctors hearing the call was evidently the Dr. [John] Thomas referenced… but I immediately recognized that this was Stan’s playful way of acknowledging his promising young recruit, and I appreciated it more than I could have said.
36.
Even Marie Severin began to emerge from the anonymity of the minuscule production department, when she penciled, inked, and even scripted the initial version of a full-page Marvel merchandise ad that featured two panels of Dr. Doom conversing with the Hulk. Stan decided her Victor von Doom was acceptable, but he had two Kirby/Esposito poses of Ol’ Greenskin pasted over her Hulk figures. That’s a bit ironic, considering that ere long one of her first story-penciling assignments would be as the artist of the “Incredible Hulk” feature. But Marie would soon burst forth on her own, without any real encouragement from Stan.
About this time, publisher Goodman decided to take advantage of what seemed a loyal fan base to launch a few reprint magazines. One was the extra-thick but clumsily named Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics, which re-presented early tales of the FF, Spider-Man, and the like that hadn’t been previously gathered  in annuals.
A bit more inventive was the regular-sized Fantasy Masterpieces, which for its first two issues re-packaged various Code-approved “mystery” stories drawn by Kirby, Ditko, Heck, et al.—an attempt to see if a penny or twelve could be made off those artists’ (and Stan’s) previous non-hero product, now that they were known to readers as the purveyors of Marvel’s super-heroes. The inside front cover of FM #1 sported a full-size photo of a smiling Stan, perched casually on a stool and wearing a Sinatra-ish Pal Joey-style hat that made him look a bit rakish, as his typeset dialogue balloons introduced the issue’s stories. It was a fine photo… perhaps taken by Vince Colletta, who, besides inking Thor, et al., and packaging comics material for Charlton, had his own photography studio not too many blocks away and was, more than most comics people, something of a personal friend of Stan’s.
After a couple of issues, when early sales reports made it clear that it was their super-hero work the fans wanted, not Kirby, Ditko, and/or Lee per se, Fantasy Masterpieces would abruptly become a plus-paged comic devoted to reprinting Timely/Atlas hero yarns from the 1940s, starting with “Captain America” by the original Golden Age team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby—though with the duo’s byline conspicuously excised. Since Marvel had no black-&-white proofs from which to reproduce those hoary classics, we had to Photostat pages from actual old comics (some apparently borrowed from Jack himself), wash the color out of them (usually along with some of the black linework, alas), then touch up and re-color the art to approximate the originals. The results were decidedly mediocre, but they perhaps had an added virtue, in Goodman’s eyes, one I’ll tell you about in a little while.
Another factor in Goodman’s instructions to Stan to begin reprinting Golden Age super-hero stories in Fantasy Masterpieces may have been cartoonist Jules Feiffer.
Feiffer, then known primarily for his eponymous syndicated weekly comic strip, had earlier been an assistant to Will Eisner on the latter’s much- acclaimed feature The Spirit, which ran from 1940–52 in a Sunday-supplement comicbook distributed as a part of numerous newspapers. Near the end of 1965, after a lengthy excerpt had seen print in an issue of Playboy, Dial Press published Feiffer’s book The Great Comic Book Heroes, which consisted of nearly fifty pages of nostalgic/historical text about the comics industry and the four-color super-doers of the 1939-45 era—plus reprinted stories of “Superman,” “Batman,” “Captain America,” “Human Torch,” “Sub-Mariner,” “Plastic Man,” “The Spirit,” and five other vintage (mostly DC) characters, plus a single page of “Captain Marvel” (which was apparently all that National/DC would allow to be reprinted).
The book was popular enough with the general public, but it caused a real stir in the pro comics field. For the first time ever, longtime editors and writers and artists saw their vintage work collected in a hardcover volume, with commentary and context by a respected cartoonist (and playwright). As if the Playboy excerpt hadn’t caused excitement enough! Even most jaded freelancers couldn’t quite pull off an air of being totally unimpressed by this publication. Coming on the heels of the coverage of Golden Age comics nearly a year earlier in Newsweek, Feiffer’s tome showed that there might just be a bit of life (and coin) left in the old crime-busters yet!
Stan, for his part, kept his enthusiasm for the project in check. After all, it was the current comics—the current Marvel comics—he wanted to see applauded and celebrated and eventually bound between hard covers, not the hoary anti-Hitler hordes from the World War II era!
37.
Sometime that November, Gary Friedrich joined me in Manhattan.
I had kept in sporadic contact with my Missouri buddy since my move, and I was chagrined by what I was learning. Besides carousing and drinking with a vaguely disreputable crowd, he had briefly worked in a factory in Cape Girardeau, “putting the heating element in waffle irons,” whatever that means. Certainly a waste of his abilities after the Jackson Pioneer newspaper fell apart.
I don’t recall what job (if any) he was holding down when, on an impulse, I phoned and told him that, if he wanted to come to New York for a spell, I could put him up—at what was really Dave Kaler’s place, of course—and I’d see if I could help him get some work writing comics.
Gary quickly hopped a Greyhound to the Big Apple and was soon dwelling with Dave and me, with his very own floor mattress. There was no current opening at Marvel, since Denny and I were filling the two staff positions available; and, for whatever reason, I didn’t get a chance to huddle with Dick Giordano right away. Gary wound up working in Queens for a few weeks at a record store (remember them?), but that was only a stopgap.
Meanwhile, the two of us took in the various sights and sounds of Manhattan. Gary wasn’t nearly as keen on Broadway shows as I was, but we saw nearly every new movie that was released—or escaped. It put a bit of a strain on me, since I already had what amounted to a 50- or 60-hour workweek; but I felt a lot less lonely in the big city now that my best friend had joined me.
Inevitably, the two of us soon decided to lease an apartment together, as opposed to continuing to sub-let space at Kaler’s. In addition, Dave and I had been having minor tensions between us—nothing too serious, but they influenced me enough that I kept putting off telling him that Gary and I were looking for other digs; and, when we found a place, we wound up having to move out one day while he was at work, and I simply left him an apologetic and explanatory note. Not my finest hour, but we’d have soon left, one way or another. At least my rent was paid up for the month.
Our new sparsely furnished pad was a second-floor walkup in Greenwich Village. The address: 177A Bleecker Street, between McDougal and Sullivan Streets. It was what’s called a “shotgun” apartment. You know the bit: If you stood in the living room and fired a shotgun, the discharge would plow straight through every one of its (however many) rooms and out the back. In firing order, they were: a living room with a lumpy sofa that served as a second bed… a ramshackle but adequate kitchen area… a narrow bedroom… then the tiny bathroom in back.
Our rooms were directly above a weird sort of “art space” that definitely belonged to the latter 1960s: the 177 Bleecker storefront (minus the “A”), replete with whirling metal devices that resembled cotton-candy machines at a carnival. While they spun various colors of paint around via centrifugal force, customers walked in, paid a fee, and, dipping their bare hands into the whirligigs, splattered the various shades of paint on provided canvases, creating “art.” I don’t think that venue lasted all that long, but it did a colorful business the half-year we dwelt directly over it.
In addition, almost every night, what seemed like a zillion motorcycles pulled up beneath our street-front window and revved away like a scene out of The Wild One. It wasn’t easy to get to sleep. Also, in the middle of one night only a few days after we’d moved in, some loud-mouthed maniac came thundering up the stairs and began banging heavily on our door, calling out a woman’s name and demanding we “Open the goddam door!” Gary and I kept mum and he soon went away. We figured he must’ve known a female who’d once lived in that apartment and had been trying to re-establish, shall we say, contact.
Our rental terms at 177A were a bit puzzling to us. The scowling, middle-aged, but physically fit landlord was charging us $120 a month, and insisted on payment in cash. That didn’t sound quite kosher to us, but we wanted the place, so we acquiesced. What did a couple of Missouri hayseeds know? Gary had scant funds at that point, so I took care of a month’s rent, plus another month’s deposit. I was prepared to carry him for a few months, knowing he’d pick up the slack when he could.
That first evening after we’d moved in, I remember the two of us wandering around Greenwich Village, enjoying the bohemian sights and reveling at our good fortune, after some lean years, of living in the world’s greatest city.
Our domicile was in an interesting neighborhood. For my part, I was…
…delighted there was a good, authentic Mexican restaurant just up the street (they weren’t nearly as common  then as now, and I had developed a taste for South-of-the-Border cuisine the previous year)…
…thrilled to learn that an expatriate Russian grand- master ran a chess studio a couple of blocks away (though in the end I’d only manage to visit it a couple of times)…
…and impressed to realize we were right across Bleecker Street from the studio of a professional sculptor, Anthony Cipriano by name, who, as it happened, gave clay-sculpting lessons on Saturday mornings.
Wanting to immerse myself in this community of beatniks and espresso and other artsy-fartsy doings, I naturally signed up immediately. However, one morning of trying to transform a lump of clay into a vague resemblance of a Rubinesque nude model cured me of those artistic predilections, and I quickly became an art school drop-out.
The following Monday, I casually mentioned my “sculpting lesson” to Marie Severin. A few minutes later, she walked across the hall, plopped a hastily drawn cartoon onto my desk, and returned silently to her drawing-board. Looking at the cartoon, I realized she had captured me completely. (The version of it seen below, alas, is not that simple, sketchy original, which got lost amid my various moves across town and country, but rather a replacement she rendered rather more ornately for me years later when I importuned her to duplicate it. This one has hung prominently in my home ever since.)
Gary and I had scant room for entertaining, but we did have a few people over that December. Len Brown dropped by from time to time (double-parking, of course), and he and Gary quickly became good friends.
One weekend day just before Christmas, we invited Denny, Ann, and Flo to drop by… and, with no desire to get any presents in return (I just felt so good about being in New York and in comics that I had to do something), I handed out a few inexpensive gifts. Denny’s was a copy of the recent Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited. I was definitely not a fan of most of Dylan’s folk-style music, such of it as I had heard. But a month or so earlier, when Denny and I had been walking down a street in the Village—I’m not positive it was 4th Street, but it might’ve been—he had pointed out Dylan to me in the flesh, walking along with a friend, his tousled head bent forward into the breeze like on a famous LP cover. Denny was an admirer. In my usual fashion, I’d felt a need to play the record before giving it to him, just to check it out. I immediately fell in love with the song “Like a Rolling Stone”—a romance that has never quite abated—and I wound up keeping that copy and buying Denny another one.
Denny and Ann had a somewhat bantering relationship. While we were all having a bit of wine I had purchased for the occasion, I recall Denny making a passing reference to holding one’s liquor, to which Ann shot back: “I can drink you under the table, O’Neil!” Nobody present felt like arguing with her.
Anyway, with our dwelling- place now supposedly secured by a one-year lease, I could concentrate on my Marvel job that paid for all these goodies.
38.
Sometime near the end of the year, after numerous pointed queries from me, my St. Louis printer finally finished printing Alter Ego #9, which I had left with him months earlier. Whether it was because the extra pages had made this issue a bit unwieldly, or just because I had paid him in advance so that he had no incentive to do a truly good job, the printing of this issue was inferior to what he had done on #8. Far worse, despite several letters and even a phone call or two, I was never able to retrieve any of my original materials—including the six Mr. Tawny originals, which probably wound up in a St. Louis trashcan. Served me right for being so trusting, I suppose.
For decades, I wondered how I had got 1000 or slightly more copies of A/E #9 mailed out, since I was pretty certain I never had them all mailed to New York. Dave Kaler wouldn’t have wanted them cluttering up his apartment, and our new place in the Village wasn’t all that roomy, either. Probably I had them mailed to my parents’ place in Jackson, and paid Mother to mail them out. (Maybe Tara was again pressed into paid service as well, though she doesn’t specifically recall working on #9.)
Anyhoo, I still had it in mind that I’d be working very soon on Alter Ego #10, and had already announced a full list of that issue’s potential contents. Little did I dream that, in truth, it would be several years—a totally new set of contents—and a new if fleeting set of partners—before the fanzine that had done so much to bring me into the comics field would again see the light of day.
Gary and I both flew back to Jackson for Christmas. I recall almost nothing about my visit there, except trying to explain to my parents how quitting the “Superman” job I went to New York to take in favor of one with a far smaller company had been a smart move. To some extent, my horror stories about Mort Weisinger helped justify my decision… and anyway, they accepted that it was my business. Roy and Leona Thomas had never had the option of being helicopter parents. They’d raised me to the best of their ability; now I was on my own.
39.
Also occurring in late ’65 was an ominous landmark event that would contribute considerably to the unease Jack Kirby had apparently already been feeling about his place at Marvel Comics—although its real impact wouldn’t be felt until some days into the New Year.
One Friday in December, Nat Freedland, a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, conducted a fateful interview with Stan in his office. I’ve no way of knowing, nor does anyone else, if Stan suggested the interview be conducted on a Friday because that was the day of the week Jack often came in to confer with him, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In which case, that move was probably made in what turned out to be an ill-considered attempt to let Jack garner a bit of much-deserved media attention.
While Stan has been criticized for hogging the limelight when it came to comics-related publicity, the focus of attention on him in that day and age usually occurred because reporters tended to seek him out, not because he went in pursuit of them. It is, after all, usually the editor or publisher of a magazine line whom journalists seek out when they want a story about its success, not its writers or artists or production staff. And, in this case, Stan just happened to be both editor and chief writer, while Martin Goodman generally eschewed giving interviews. Of course, that’s not to deny that Stan enjoyed being the center of attention, besides seeing himself as uniquely positioned for (and capable of) the generation of publicity for the comics field in general and Marvel in particular, while many other comics creators preferred to be left alone to make a living. And, admittedly, Stan’s generosity with credit-sharing that winter’s day did not extend to John Romita or others in the office—not even to yours truly, who was merely introduced to Freedland as a staffer, brought in about halfway through the conference in Stan’s office. Stan wouldn’t have figured it served any purpose to tell the journalist I was also writing Sgt. Fury, et al. Certainly no  one addressed any meaningful comments to me.
Naturally, I’ve no direct knowledge of what went on between Stan, Jack, and Freedland behind closed doors before Stan called me in, mostly I suppose as a sort of witness to the final portion of a mostly-bogus plotting session between him and Jack. I retain only the general impression of Stan being as loquacious, Marvel-boosterish, and physically boisterous as he tended to be when talking to an artist or writer about a storyline… while Jack simply sat there in his chair, saying little and looking a bit ill at ease, the more so since this was not really an authentic plot conference, only an after-the-fact simulation for a reporter… something apparently everyone present (except the Herald Trib guy) realized.
When the interview (and faux plot conference) ended, the reporter took his leave, and there seemed a spirit of good will in Stan’s office. It all seemed to have gone well, and it was to surely lead to a feature article in the Trib’s Sunday supplement magazine, New York.
In truth, however, unbeknownst to all, a ticking time bomb had just been activated.
It would detonate nine days into the New Year.
40.
Now, related to the third leg of the original Marvel tripod:
Near the end of ’65, everyone at Marvel was walking on eggs when it came to Steve Ditko. Even though Sol never knew far (if at all) in advance exactly when Steve would turn up at the office to pick up or drop off pages, Stan seemed to have some kind of Daredevil-like radar sense regarding his Spider-Man collaborator. Not once during my time did he and Steve ever bump into each other, even casually in a hallway, even though Stan was generally as unpredictable about stepping out of his office as Steve was about popping in to Marvel. Never in all my life did I ever see the two men at the same time. For all I could prove, they might’ve been one and the same person, leading some kind of bizarre double life!
My own exchanges with Steve remained mostly cursory nods and an exchanged hello/goodbye. Once, though, as he prepared to exit past my corrugated desk, he grinned down at me and said something about heading home to work on “another one.” I instinctively smiled back, quipping lamely, “Oh, so there’s gonna be another one?” Next moment, he was gone.
Almost at once, Sol called me over and advised me, sotto voce, that I should be careful what I said to Steve. Puzzled, I asked what he meant. Closely paraphrasing Sol: “Well, you know—a guy like that…! You ask him if there’s gonna be a ‘next time,’ and he’s liable to be on the subway heading back to his office when he suddenly thinks, ‘What did he mean by that? Does he know something I don’t?’” I felt Sol was probably overreacting, but I said I’d be careful… and I was. Not that I saw much of Steve after that day.
In my mind, nothing illustrates the 1965 disconnect between Lee and Ditko as vividly as an incident involving a single panel in Amazing Spider-Man #31 (cover-dated May 1966, but actually produced in the last months of ’65 for sale circa February).
It was a minor Spidey yarn, really, involving as it did an antagonist named Norton G. Fester, who got doused in a gas emitted by a meteorite he’d stumbled upon, which, this being a Marvel comic, inevitably turned him into a super- villain. He promptly rechristened himself The Looter. A fairly straightforward story, uninspired compared with some  of Steve’s previous efforts, and quite likely reflecting his growing alienation from his Marvel work. Still, it would’ve passed muster as a potboiler of an issue, with good-enough Ditko art and storytelling…
…except for what happened on page 13.
One day very late in the year, Stan called Sol and me into his office and began to rant to us about the finished (lettered and inked) artwork on that page of the issue, which had been delivered by Ditko shortly before. When Sol and I didn’t instantly spot the problem, Stan explained, in between snarls. Its final panel depicted The Looter poised on the ledge of a building, right outside a window—but, when Stan instructed us to read the pair of word balloons floating over his head, we immediately realized they contained dialogue intended to be spoken by Spider-Man!
As Stan noted, Steve’s rough pencils for that story had, as usual, consisted of little more than stick figures fleshed out by a few ovals representing head, torso, etc. Since both The Looter and Spidey wore skintight costumes and full-face masks, their figures in any given panel could only be told apart by either the flow of the story and/or by handwritten indications from the artist as to which of the pair a particular figure was intended to be.
For the previous two or three pages, Wall-Crawler and super-crook had been battling their way through a space exhibit, till The Looter made his escape by endangering the crowd and forcing Spidey to break off the fight to save lives.
The page’s final panel, as sketchily penciled, had depicted a stick-and-ovals figure poised dramatically on a ledge outside a window. The un-labeled figure might have been intended to be The Looter, pausing for a moment and musing, “Hey, I think I got away!”—or it might’ve represented Spider-Man, trying to figure out which way his quarry  had fled.
Uncertain which possibility Steve had had in mind,  Stan had written the figure as Spidey, emoting that he had “lost The Looter,” who could have “run off in any direction.” After lettering, that group of pages had been sent  on to Ditko.
When Ditko dropped off the completed issue, Stan began going over it in his office, and, when he got to page 13, he saw that the stick figure on the ledge had been completed and inked as—The Looter.
And he hit the roof!
“That son of a bitch!” he stormed to Sol and me. “I couldn’t tell which character that was, so I made it Spider- Man. I know Ditko reads the stories when he inks them, so he knew I’d written him to be Spider-Man. But he made it The Looter anyway, just because that’s who he’d meant it to be!” Neither Sol nor I tried to argue with Stan, because (a) we both realized that his logic was unassailable, and (b) he was really mad.
Stan, of course, was now faced with a choice: either re-write his two dialogue balloons in panel 5 and have them re-lettered… or have an artist change The Looter to Spider- Man. Sol and I were hardly surprised when he chose the latter. No reason why he shouldn’t have. He was the magazine’s editor… and if something was to be changed, he was the guy hired to decide what that was. It wasn’t a case of right vs. wrong; just a matter of ultimate authority.
Enter Carl Hubbell, a comics veteran who was currently inking Jack Keller’s Kid Colt Outlaw, and who just happened to fall by the office that afternoon to pick up or deliver pages.
Sol importuned Carl, for a token fee, to immediately alter the Looter figure to Spider-Man in that single panel. Carl shrugged and agreed. It being near 5:00, he stayed in the office to make that change, which took perhaps an hour. (He had never inked Spidey before, but Sol had made it clear that the hero’s webbing needed to match the Ditko version.) When everyone else left, I stayed behind with Hubbell, since it was an excuse to talk to him about some of his earlier work, in particular stories he’d drawn for Lev Gleason’s/Charlie Biro’s comics in the 1950s.
Later (I believe he lived not far from me), I recall the two of us walking through Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park while he regaled me with a few final old-timers’ tales. All in all, I myself was rather pleased the Looter/Spidey thing had happened…
…but I don’t think there’s another anecdote from those days that demonstrates even half as clearly that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were increasingly on different wavelengths during the latter days of Steve’s tenure at Marvel.
Then, what can have been no more than a very few weeks later—after the fateful Herald Trib interview, but before its newspaper publication—Steve Ditko walked into the Marvel offices and strode by me over to Sol’s desk. He may or may not have said hello on the way past. The two spoke quietly for a few seconds, then Steve departed. He was barely out the door when Sol bustled into Stan’s office without a word to Flo or me.
A few minutes later, he returned and told us Steve had informed him that he planned to finish the “Spider-Man” and “Doctor Strange” stories he was currently handling, and then would be doing no more work for Marvel. He had given no reasons, although they weren’t hard to guess… or maybe they were.
Sol told me later that, by coincidence, there was at that very moment a memo from Stan on his desk directing him to inform Steve he was getting a $5-per-page raise, effective immediately, which would have amounted to nearly $50 per page in today’s money. Whether Sol had ever got around to telling Steve about the raise, he didn’t say. Probably not, under the circumstances.
41.
Stan, far as I could tell, had decidedly mixed feelings about Ditko’s departure. Mostly, of course, he would have preferred Steve had stuck around, despite their troubled relationship on Amazing Spider-Man. Although I don’t recall his ever speculating to me about the possibility of Ditko leaving before he actually did, Stan must’ve been contemplating that possibility for most of 1965, when their unequal partnership was skating on paper-thin ice.
Perhaps he’d only been waiting for the other webbed boot to drop. After all, a couple of months earlier, John  Romita had been poised to begin doing full pencils on only his fifth issue of Daredevil when Stan hit him with a broadside: DD #16 & 17 (May & June ’66) would guest-star  Spider-Man. John later told me that he suspected, even then, that Stan was prepping him for possibly being plugged into the dike if Ditko walked, but naturally he did as directed—and turned in what was, by almost any standards, an exemplary job. Since he preferred drawing Daredevil, however, he hoped Steve would remain on  Spidey forever.
As it happened, Amazing Spider-Man #38 (July ’66) was Ditko’s last—and it would go on sale just one short month after DD #17.
The result was that John barely had time to take a deep breath following the finale of the DD/Spidey two-parter before Stan informed him that he was to be the new Spider-Man artist. I doubt John made much of a protest, since he knew it would be hopeless. Besides, he later said he was convinced Steve would soon change his mind and return; after all, artists rarely walked away from top-selling mags, even in those days before royalties and “incentive payments.” Clearly, John didn’t yet realize to how different a drumbeat Ditko was marching! (Stan’s choice of Romita made irrefutable sense, of course, since around this time sales figures on Romita’s Daredevil were coming in, and already that title had risen to being, in percentage terms, Marvel’s best-selling series. Of course, DD had a considerably lower print run than the company’s #1 and #2 sellers at that time, Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man—probably lower than a few other Marvel titles as well—yet Romita’s run was impressive all the same, building on and going beyond the rising sales of the Wood issues.)
But Daredevil was now on John’s rear-view radar screen; Spider-Man was his future.
It was on the occasion of the very first Spidey conference between Stan and John (for issue #39) that I was called into Stan’s office to observe and take notes. Whatever his regrets about Ditko’s departure, Stan was clearly energized by both the challenge and the opportunity to once again take over the direction of the comic, with perhaps the ideal artistic collaborator to carry out his vision… whatever it was.
Among other things, Stan was aware that the moment had been drawing ever nearer when the full face and form of Mary Jane Watson should be revealed. Over recent issues, Ditko as plotter and artist had introduced the character as a shapely niece of Aunt May’s neighbor, her face always obscured in some way—though Stan had already committed, in dialogue, to her being gorgeous… nor have I ever heard that Steve had intended anything different. Stan knew that DC romance emigree Romita could top anything in that department that Ditko could have delivered… and, with all due respect to Steve Ditko from one who was then already his longtime admirer, Stan was definitely right about that.
But first, Stan felt, he needed a strong storyline to pick up the pace a bit after Ditko’s final three outings had centered on (a) the relatively lackluster Looter, (b) a personality-less and nameless robot, and (c) “Just a Guy Named Joe”—the title says it all. So Stan decided the next two issues would be a battle royal between Spidey and one of his major foes, The Green Goblin, ending with the revelation of the latter’s secret identity (businessman Norman Osborne, the father of Peter Parker’s BFF) and his supposed death. In the end, though, Stan would pull back from the idea of actually killing the Goblin off and settle for a case of supposedly permanent amnesia—which, as all Marvel readers must’ve suspected by then, would be no more “permanent” than the reported demises of most other Marvel bad-guys. During the confab in his office, Stan gushered forth possibilities for where Spidey—and of course Peter—might wind up several months down the line in terms of growth, schooling, romantic relationships, et al. Some of those ideas were destined to be utilized; others were discarded. John soon got into the spirit of things and began tossing in notions of his own; he was a good idea man from the start. I may have tossed in a notion or two, but mostly I was just taking notes.
At one point, Stan abruptly addressed me, having detected something odd in the expression on my face: “Why are you looking like that?”
I responded that I was simply amazed at how he and Romita were hashing out things that might happen half a year, even more, down the line, because that wasn’t the way I usually thought of comicbooks as being produced. I had always envisioned it as more an issue-by-issue sort of thing. (And so did Stan, most of the time… but this occasion was different.)
The conference ended, I quickly typed up my notes for John, who made good use of them. After that, he had gained enough confidence in his own memory and note-taking that I was never again called in to witness a Spider-Man plotting session. I’d have loved to do so, but Stan generally preferred that I keep busy with what he considered more important tasks. So things were moving right along at Mighty Marvel.
Even so, if you combine Ditko’s abrupt late-year exodus with the afore-hinted ticking time-bomb of the Freedland/Lee/Kirby interview, the closing days of 1965 could be seen as marking the end of the first phase of what Stan had christened “the Marvel Age of Comics”—
—at least as regards the fantastically successful teamings between the initial triumvirate of creators who had been responsible for the company’s top titles and its growing success.
One down… one, alas, to go.

A New Day Dawns
(Left:) Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a.k.a. “The East Village,” in the latter 1960s.
(Right:) Roy, vest and all, with corresponding secretary Flo Steinberg in the Marvel offices, most likely in late 1965.

From Millie To Betty & Veronica
(Left:) The (uncredited) splash page for Modeling with Millie #44 (Dec. 1965). Pencils (and most of the plotting) by Stan Goldberg (as “Stan G.”); inker uncertain; script by Roy T. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
(Above:) Stan Goldberg, “Millie” penciler. As seen here, he would later become a major artist for the Archie Comic Group.

Like A Bolt From The Black
Black Bolt makes his dramatic entrance in the final panel of Fantastic Four #45 (Dec. 1965), which was winding its way through the Marvel offices when Roy arrived that July. Script by Stan Lee; pencils by Jack Kirby; inks by Joe Sinnott. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Think While You Ink
Wally Wood arranged for veteran artist Bob Powell to pencil Daredevil #11 (Dec. 1965), relying on his own skill as an inker to make the completed product look like “a Wally Wood job.”  And by and large it did! Photo courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Larry Lieber
Stan Lee’s younger brother, who had scripted (from his sibling’s plots) the initial stories of “Thor,” “Ant-Man,” and “Iron Man,” among other tales. By 1965 he had moved over to writing (and penciling) Rawhide Kid.

Flo Vs. The Vultures
Marie Severin’s office cartoon of “gal Friday” Flo Steinberg trying to protect the just-arrived printed issues from greedy staffers. Flo’s caption when this cartoon was published in David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview: “Vultures: Everyone pushing in to get copies of the new Marvels, which I first had to count and package.” [© Estate of Marie Severin.]

My Credit For Yours!
Roy’s first attempt at scripting a Marvel super-hero: the “Iron Man” splash page for Tales of Suspense #73 (Jan. 1966), penciled by Gene Colan and inked by Jack Abel (both under pseudonyms). Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Gene Colan

Keeping Track Of The Plot
Amazing Spider-Man #26 (July 1965) was the first issue wherein Ditko had formally received plotting credit. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Steve Ditko
in his studio, circa 1966.

Jack Kirby
and the Simon-&-Kirby cover for Fighting American #3 (Aug-Sept. 1954). 1966 photo courtesy of the Roz Kirby Estate; provided by Sean Howe. [Fighting American cover TM & © Estates of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.]

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Newest Recruit
Reportedly, Jack Kirby modeled new S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jasper Sitwell partly after his initial impressions of new hire Roy Thomas. From Strange Tales #144 (April 1966)—script by Lee, layouts by Kirby, pencils by Howard Purcell, inks by Mike Esposito. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Three Mainstays  Of The 1965 Marvel Bullpen

Don Heck

Dick Ayers

Al Hartley

Frank Giacoia
“Millie the Model” stories rarely credited their inkers—but, back in the day, Giacoia had contributed full art (also anonymously) to the “Justice Society of America” yarn in All-Star Comics #56 (Dec. 1950-Jan. 1951). [JSA page TM & © DC Comics.]

Birds Of A [Fannish] Feather
Fans Bobby Van (left) and Mark Hanerfeld (right), seen at an early comics convention, were among Roy’s earliest acquaintances in the Big Apple. Between them stands ex-Gold Key and future King Comics editor Bill Harris.

Dick Giordano
In mid-1965, this amiable artist had become the new editor of Charlton Comics. Photo from the Catholic comicbook Treasure Chest, Vol. 18, #11 (Jan. 31, 1963). [TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

Bill Finger
in 1948, from a DC group photo.

Better Days
The Broadway Central Hotel, as depicted in 1908 in a painting by Dwight Goss. 57 years later, it was not in nearly as good shape.

“I Just Want To Say One Word To You: Plastics!”
(Above:) Roy as Plastic Man at the masquerade on the first day of the 1965 con.
(Below:) Second day: Roy (in his brand new Avengers T-shirt) alongside Gil Kane (with whom he had only a vague acquaintance till 1969) talking with prominent fan-writer Rick Weingroff. Courtesy of Jean Bails.

Strange But True
(Left:) Steve Ditko’s typewriter sheet of notes for page 10 of the first “Doctor Strange” story for which Roy wrote dialogue and captions; plot and art by Ditko.
(Right:) That page as it appeared in Strange Tales #143 (April 1966). Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

People… People Who  Love Broadway…
Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand, was just one of a number of major productions on Broadway when Roy moved to NYC. [TM & © the respective copyright holders.]

Mike Esposito

Sweet Dreams!
Occasionally, after Esposito and the other players in Phil Seuling’s Friday night poker games had departed, Roy would “camp out” amid Phil’s inventory of Golden Age comics and such framed original artwork as Will Eisner’s Spirit splash for Dec. 8, 1940. Scan courtesy of Art Lortie. [Spirit page TM & © Estate of Will Eisner.]

Morrie Kuramoto
The Marvel letterer’s photo is courtesy of the Policastro site.

John Romita
in a circa-1975 photo courtesy of David Armstrong—and (below) a splash page from Captain America #78 (Sept. 1954). Romita’s mid-’50s art for the Sentinel of Liberty remains Roy’s favorite of the artist’s work. Script by Don Rico.
(Above right:) Romita inked the Kirby-penciled cover of The Avengers #23 (Dec. 1965) as one of his first assignments back at Marvel. He inked Don Heck’s interior art for that issue, too. Courtesy of Dr. Michael J. Vassallo & the GCD, respectively. [Pages TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Daredevil - & The Men Without Peer
Romita’s finished art over a page of Kirby layouts for Daredevil #12 (May 1966). Script by Lee. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A Changing Of The Guard
Around the turn of 1965-66, Mrs. Guy Percy Trulock (seated at left) resigned as the second administrator of the Comics Code Authority… to be replaced by Leonard Darvin (right), who had long been the attorney for the Comic Magazine Association of America and its Code subsidiary.

Steve Gerber
as depicted in University City (MO) High School’s Dial yearbook for 1965, the year he graduated—and spent a week in New York City with Roy Thomas and Dave Kaler. From a page that singled out a few personalities in that year’s senior class. Special thanks to Jon B. Cooke & Art Lortie.

Watch Those Swingin’ Doors!
Jack Keller’s splash page for the lead story in Kid Colt Outlaw #127 (March 1966), scripted by Steve Skeates (and co-plotted by Roy). Stan found it dull as dishwater. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Magic Mushrooms?!
That’s what the guy Roy spoke to on the phone one 1965 day after-hours believed must have been behind the Dr. Strange vs. Dormammu mystic battle in Strange Tales #127 (Nov. 1964). Script by Stan Lee; plot & art by Steve Ditko. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roomies
(L. to r.:) Temporary apartment-mates Dave Kaler, Denny O’Neil, and Roy Thomas. Photo from a 1965 Newsday article on Kaler and his comics collection; courtesy of Sean Howe. [© the respective copyright holders.]

I Love A Parade!
(Near right:) Tom Fagan, by 1965 already a fixture playing Batman at the Halloween Parade in Rutland, Vermont. Courtesy of Al Bradford.
(Far right:) Dave Kaler as Dr. Strange at the 1965 con; he wore the same garb in the Rutland parade two months later. Courtesy of Jean Bails. And Roy wore his Plas outfit, as seen back on p. 169.

The Case Of The Missing Brazier
Steve Ditko’s “Doctor Strange” splash page for Strange Tales #144 (May 1966), Roy’s second dialoguing job on the feature over a Ditko plot—actually done in late ’65. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Roy’s Career Gets Vulcan-ized
The cover of Charlton’s Son of Vulcan #50 (Jan. 1966), with its fandom-courting blurb (enlarged here) —and the splash (on the facing page, with credits enlarged) of the first professional comics story Roy ever wrote. Pencils by Bill Fraccio; inks by Tony Tallarico. Courtesy of CBP. [Son of Vulcan TM & © DC Comics.]

Blue Beetle, I Saw You Standing Alone…
Splash page of Blue Beetle, Vol. 3, #54 (Feb.-March 1966), the second—and officially last—tale Roy ever scripted for Charlton. Art by Fraccio & Tallarico. Courtesy of CBP. [Blue Beetle TM & © DC Comics.]

“Face Front!”
The first official “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins” page appeared in Fantastic Four #45 (Dec. 1965) and other comics on sale around that time. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Blackout!
The Manhattan skyline after dark on November 9, 1965. It stayed that way till morning.

“Armageddon” Aftermath
Splash page of Sgt. Fury #29 (April 1966)—the issue (and series) Roy inherited the morning after the ’65 Blackout. Pencils by Dick Ayers; inks by John Tartaglione. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Milestones Of The Marvel Age
Two of the most famous Marvel scenes of any era—and they appeared within a few short weeks of each other. Both scans courtesy of Barry Pearl.
(Above:) The adrenally charged arachnid frees himself in Amazing Spider-Man #33 (Feb. 1966). Script by Stan Lee; plotting & art by Steve Ditko.
(Below:) The introduction of The Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #48 (March 1966). Script by Stan Lee; pencils by Jack  Kirby; inks by Joe Sinnott. Stan & Jack had verbally co-plotted the story, but the Surfer—without the word “Silver” attached—was Jack’s addition. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Echh Marks The Spot
When he referred to “Brand Echh,” Stan generally meant not National/DC but several other companies that he felt crudely attempted to imitate Marvel’s style—especially the Archie group’s efforts such as The Mighty Crusaders #4 (April 1966), with its cover by ex-Marvelite Paul Reinman. Courtesy of the GCD.  [TM & © Archie Comic Group.]

Heavenly  Visitors
Among the celebrity drop-bys at the Marvel Bullpen in late 1965/early ’66 were Italian film directo Federico Fellini (far left) and Peter Ascher of the popular singing duo Peter and Gordon.

“DR. THOMAS REPORT TO…”
Roy felt a thrill when Stan gave him a surprise (if one-name) shout-out in The X-Men #17 (Feb. 66). Script by Lee; layouts by Kirby; finished pencils by Werner Roth; inks by John Tartaglione. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Slow, Steady Rise Of Marie The She
(Above:) Marie Severin’s likenesses of both Dr. Doom and the Hulk (along with her dialogue) made it into print in the house ad for the Hulk sweatshirt in Amazing Spider-Man #34 (March ’66)—but her version of Ol’ Greenskin was replaced with a Kirby/Esposito figure in the otherwise identical ad in X-Men #17 (Feb. ’66). Go figure. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Stan Lee Presents
(Left:) Stan had his picture taken especially for the inside front cover of Fantasy Masterpieces #1 (Feb. 1966), introducing the issue’s reprinted mystery stories. [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Great Comic Book Heroes
The cover of Jules Feiffer’s 1965 nostalgia/history book on the Golden Age of Comics. It caused even more of an earthquake among comicbook pros than it did among the general public. [Superman TM & © DC Comics.]

177A Bleecker  Street
(Above:) Marie Severin’s latter-day cartoon that embellished upon a simpler one she had drawn in late 1965: her notion of how Roy spent his first day at sculpting class across the street from 177A Bleecker Street. [© Estate of Marie Severin.]
(Left:) That locale as it looks today: just a door to our right of 177 Bleecker proper, and marked with the exact same number, no “A.” Photo sent to John  Cimino by a reader of the Roy Thomas Appreciation Board on Facebook.

Tawny Tiger & Tara
(Above:) Six dailies produced for a never-sold Tawny Tiger comic strip by Otto Binder (writer) and C.C. Beck (artist) were printed in Alter Ego #9. This is the Saturday. [Art © Estates of Otto Binder & C.C. Beck; Tawny Tiger TM & © DC Comics.]
(Below:) Roy’s kid sister Tara in a Hulk sweatshirt he sent her. She helped their mother mail out copies of at least one mid-’60s issue of Alter Ego. Courtesy of Tara Thomas.

The New York Magazine Fiasco
Its cast, sadly, included Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (seen above at a National Cartoonists Society event in 1965)—and reporter Nat Freedland (below). Former photo courtesy of Barry Pearl.

Who’s On First—I Mean, On The Ledge?
(Left:) The final panel of Amazing Spider-Man #36 (May 1966), p. 13, as it arrived in the Marvel office inked by Steve Ditko in late 1965. The figure has here been rendered into The Looter by Shane Foley to configure the panel exactly as Stan saw it in black-&-white that day. He was not happy.
(Right:) That same panel as it saw print some weeks later, its main figure altered by artist Carl Hubbell from The Looter into Spider-Man, at Stan’s “request.” [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Enter… John Romita!”
Since covers were usually drawn last at Marvel, this symbolic splash page of Daredevil #16 (May 1966) was probably the first illustration John Romita ever drew that featured Spider-Man. It wouldn’t be the last. Script by Stan Lee; pencils by John Romita; inks by Frank Giacoia. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Part VII
“A Day of Thunder”
Marvel Comics (January to August 1966)

1.
Maybe the morning of New Year’s Day was an omen—though an omen of what, I’ve absolutely no idea. For, on January 1, 1966, the entire city woke up to…
…a transit strike. (That’s subways and buses, to you  and me.)
As locals explained it to me at the time, the transit workers’ union always negotiated contracts so they expired, every few years, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. More for maximum impact than for calendrical symmetry, I suspect.
It was dire cold that morning… and every morning for all twelve days until the strike was settled by, guess what, brand new Mayor John V. Lindsay giving the transit union pretty much everything it wanted. Until next time.
In the meantime, wrapped in my heaviest coat, I shambled out each weekday morn around 6:30 and walked west to try to hail an uptown taxi on Sixth Avenue. (Well, technically, the name of that thoroughfare had been changed two decades earlier to “Avenue of the Americas,” but except on formal correspondence or TV news, I never knew a single New Yorker during my time there who ever referred it by that name.) Since a lot of other folks were also in search of an early cab, I think many days I wound up walking the 50-plus blocks north. I don’t recall if it was ever raining. What are the odds it never was?
Manhattanites, I was quickly learning, were a stoic lot. They had to be. They lived on an island that seemed for all practical purposes to be composed of solid concrete topped with brick and brownstone, dotted here and there with what always seemed a week’s worth of piled-up trash waiting to be collected—an even bigger pile if the garbage workers were on strike. Yet, somehow, most of its denizens loved the place… or at least they worked hard to convince others (and themselves) that they did.`
Some of us were reasonably successful at that. By the time 1966 rolled around, I was definitely in love with the idea, if not always the stark, gray reality, of living in New York City.
2.
But, in the Marvel offices overlooking Madison Av:
Remember that ticking time bomb I mentioned last chapter? The one whose fuse was inadvertently lit when Stan and Jack were interviewed for the New York Herald Tribune?
Well, if Stan had intended, as I suspect he did, to give Jack a slightly bigger share of the four-color limelight by having him on hand that day, the whole thing boomeranged on him in a tragic—pathetic, really—fashion. Like they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
According to what he told Sol and me first thing on Monday, January 10, early the previous morning he’d been on the receiving end of a phone call from a very irate Roz and Jack Kirby (I believe in that order), in essence accusing him of using said newspaper interview to sabotage Jack!
Stan, of course, had had no idea what they were talking about, since he hadn’t yet seen the lengthy account printed in that day’s edition of New York, the weekly magazine published in conjunction with Sunday Herald Trib. He eventually calmed the furious Kirbys down, and the three of them agreed to talk again after he’d had a chance to actually read the article in question, instead of just hear about it.
Any misimpressions in the published piece, of course, were totally the interviewer’s responsibility, not Stan’s or Jack’s or anyone else’s. Pursuing his own agenda (whatever that may have been), Nat Freedland painted Stan in a fawningly flattering light, referring to him as an “ultra- Madison Avenue, rangy lookalike of Rex Harrison” and giving him virtually all the credit for Marvel currently selling 35,000,000 comics a year and inspiring 500 fan letters a day. He paid scant attention to Jack, perhaps because the latter said relatively little, and he dismissed Kirby in print as “a middle-aged man with baggy eyes and a baggy Robert Hall-ish suit… sucking a green cigar” who looked like “the assistant foreman in a girdle factory.” (Every time I read those lines, even today, I want to go for that hare-brained reporter’s throat.)
Reading the above, Jack and Roz certainly had reason to be angry; but their rage at Stan was, of course, ill-directed.  All that had happened that Friday at Marvel (and remember, I’d been an eyewitness to at least part of it) was that Stan had been Stan and Jack had been Jack and the eager-to-make-a-name-for-himself journalist had been blissfully ignorant that he was in the presence of two pop-culture geniuses rather than one.
All the same, ever since the day Jack abruptly quit Marvel four-plus years later, I’ve strongly believed that interview drove another (and sizable) nail into the coffin- in-progress of the Lee/Kirby relationship. Later statements from Jack, alas, confirmed that view… even though I think he was wrong, till his dying day, if he continued to blame Stan for what Freedland wrote.
But wait—there’s more! And the second snafu, which involved Stan’s other major collaborator at that time, Steve Ditko, was definitely of Stan’s own making. I’m frankly at a loss, even lo these many years later, to imagine precisely what Stan thought he was accomplishing when he apparently said to Freedland (and I never heard  him dispute the accuracy  of the quote):
“I don’t plot Spider-Man any more. Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Since Spidey got so popular, Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plot lines I told him to start making up his own stories. He won’t let anybody else ink his drawings, either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins, and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he’ll come up with next, but it’s interesting to work that way.”
If Stan had stayed up late nights pondering, I doubt he could’ve chosen any (non-libelous) words more likely than the middle sentences quoted above to have pissed Ditko off… and to no good purpose. As it turned out, Steve  was already basically gone from the hallowed halls of Marvel by the time the interview appeared. If he hadn’t been, Stan’s dismissive tone might well have induced  him to quit.
As for Jack: After this destructive interview/article, the ball was now in his court, where it would bounce around for a few years.
3.
Time out: It belatedly occurs to me that, since I insist on pointing out what I consider Stan Lee’s flaws and foibles as well as those of Kirby, Ditko, and other pros (including my own, I hope), a reader might be tempted to suspect I’ve belatedly decided that Stan possessed the proverbial “feet of clay” we hear so much about—perhaps even that, by the turn of ’66, he had become to me just another employer, up there with the sadistic Weisinger and the petty-tyrant superintendent of Fox Schools.
Here’s a flash: Far as I’ve been able to tell in my 85+ years, damn near everybody on Earth has feet of clay.  Or at least one foot of clay, whatever the other may be composed of.
Despite that fact, my basic feelings about Stan Lee—synonyms for which could be “like,” “respect,” “admire,” even “being in awe of”—were pretty firmly established and primarily positive by this time, and remain so six decades later. I wouldn’t want the anti-Stan dim bulbs of the world to get any mistaken notions on that point.
I saw Stan—still see him—as an extremely talented man who, while surely as awash in insecurities as any sane person must be much of the time in this crazy mixed-up world, had a reasonably firm sense of what he wanted Marvel Comics to be, going forward. No doubt, he hadn’t started out in 1961 with a vision of building a comicbook “universe,” any more than Goodman (or Kirby) had. Originally, he must’ve just been feeling his way along, half of him reacting to whatever his publisher might have instructed him to develop at a particular moment (a JLA-style super-hero group… an echo of National’s pint-size “Atom”… an outright revival of Lev Gleason’s “Daredevil”) and the other half following his own newly awakened muse as to how to write and shape comicbook super-heroes to appeal to older, more sophisticated readers—whether he roused said muse all on his own, or whether it was goosed into wakefulness by 1961 remarks uttered by his wife Joan, as he often recounted to the press.
By the time I came along, Stan had gotten a steadier grip on the way forward, which included the skillful use and guidance of the abilities of the company’s artists, particularly the supremely inventive and then-indispensable Kirby. It hardly mattered any longer that, if later research is correct, Goodman had originally charged Stan with reviving the Charles Biro Daredevil or the Timely jungle hero Ka-Zar, or turning the scientist-hero of the one-shot story “The Man in the Anthill” into an insect-sized super-hero. Stan had done things  his way: By his 1964 debut, Daredevil had morphed from the publisher-decreed, abandoned- trademark resuscitation of Lev Gleason’s two-tone 1940s hero into a brand new blind super-lawyer with radiation-enhanced senses; Ka-Zar had mutated from mere Tarzan clone into sabre-tooth-loving overlord of a sub-Antarctic jungle inhabited by prehistoric species; and when Ant-Man hadn’t managed to pull his weight, Stan added two letters to the front of Henry Pym’s code-name and turned him into Giant-Man.
While not every experiment or characters had been 100% successful, I had found it mildly breathtaking to follow Marvel’s basically upward progress from a couch  in Missouri… and I experienced it as even more fascinating and impressive when viewing it up close and personal  after mid-’65.
I could only breathe a silent “thank you” to Mort Weisinger for being such a sadistic boss that I had felt relatively few qualms about jumping ship from a massive corporate ocean liner onto an ambitious little tugboat  that could.
4.
Ironically, only three days after the Herald Trib debacle struck, Marvel suffered a second body blow of sorts—when, on January 12, 1966, the ABC-TV Batman series made its Dynamic-Duo debut.
Each of us saw it alone or with friends or family—some in color, most of us in black-&-white. But, while Batman was a resounding hit from the get-go, it didn’t evoke much pleasure at Marvel. Stan loathed it with an undisguised passion, not because it was a financial plus for National/DC but because he felt its campy approach to plots and dialogue undercut everything he’d been striving to achieve since 1961. (Whatever “campy” precisely meant: there were numerous definitions floating around, but none of them boded particularly well for the future reputation of comics.)
I myself liked the series a little better than he did—I appreciated the basic look of it, anyway—but I, too, sensed that, while Batman might seem to some like a big step forward for comicbooks, moving from crudely colored pulp-paper pamphlets to fast-moving visual images leaping right into the nation’s living rooms, it was likely to have the undesired (to us, anyway) effect of implanting even more firmly in the public’s mind’s-eye the notion that comicbooks were kiddie stuff, pure and simple, fit only for poking fun at. Holy juvenilia, Batman!
Be things as they might, the hurricane had been unleashed. Although, how hard it would blow for the next year or so, we couldn’t immediately have guessed. All Marvel could do was to keep forging ahead with its own approach, while Batman merchandise swamped the toy stores and imitative TV execs green-lit the likes of Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific, and various comicbook copycats of Marvel (including but not limited to Archie’s “Mighty Crusaders” crew) got campier and campier.
When I look back on it, the thing I’m proudest of concerning Stan and even publisher Goodman is that, so far as I know, neither of them ever, for a second, seriously contemplated jumping on the Batman bandwagon with Marvel’s own version of four-color camp.
5.
Meanwhile, only a few weeks into our Village vigil, Gary and I gained a new tenant at 177A Bleecker.
Once again I was performing some task or other at my corrugated Marvel desk when Sol Brodsky brought someone over to introduce to me, just as he had John Romita a few months earlier. This lean, smiling gent was fairly tall, in his mid-forties, with once-red hair that was turning grey. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a cigarette dangling from his lips or fingers, in those days when smoking indoors was still more or less acceptable.
“Roy, this is Bill Everett. He’s coming back to work here….”
Sol was probably still speaking when I shot up to shake the hand of the creator and best-ever writer/artist of Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. (Yes, I knew he had also co-created Daredevil, but for me it was all about the Sub-Mariner.) Naturally, I told him how much I loved his work, both back in the ’40s and especially in Namor’s mid-’50s revival. Bill shrugged that off with a simple nod that indicated it was no big deal. That was always his way.
I would’ve been happy to gush over the guy a bit longer, but this time Sol had a surprising request to make of me:
“Bill lives up in Newton, Massachusetts, and he needs a place to stay several weeknights when he’s in town. Is there any chance he could stay at your place?”
“Yes, definitely,” I responded without a moment’s thought (including of the fact that, technically, I had an apartment-mate… although I was still covering the full rent at that point).
Bill was coming back to Marvel as a staff artist, his precise duties as yet undetermined. He had been moonlighting from another job—working on greeting-cards, if I remember a-right—when he’d drawn Daredevil #1 in 1963, which was part of the reason he’d needed help (from Ditko, Brodsky, and Kirby) to finish it and had to bow out of illustrating #2. As I learned only years later, that situation had caused Stan and Sol (not to mention Jack) considerable inconvenience when they’d had to hastily come up with The Avengers #1 to fill the delayed DD #1’s slot on the schedule; but Stan had always admired Bill’s talent and doubtless figured a staff position was the best way to make use of it, since that would put him in the office five days a week where Sol could keep an eye on him.
For, as all the above comics veterans (but not I) knew at that juncture, Bill Everett had a bit of a drinking problem. Which had partly given rise, over the years, to problems with regards to his reliability. Perhaps it had contributed to his difficulties with Daredevil #1… perhaps not. Even so, Stan was more than willing to take a chance on him again, and I was only too happy to help in any way I could.
Somewhere in the course of that day, I found an excuse to mention to Bill that I hadn’t been able to read his 1950s signature in the comics, and had long thought his last name was “Enereh.” He admitted that his affectation of signing his last name to resemble an artist’s palette had perhaps gotten a bit out of hand, though he professed not to care that much whether anyone could read it or not. The people who wrote the checks knew his name, he said, and that was enough for him.
At our place early that evening, Gary was surprised when I introduced him to Bill and explained about the new arrangements, but he raised no objections; for one thing, Bill would be contributing to the rent. After a few minutes of chitchat, Gary asked Bill if he’d like to go out for a drink. Bill’s answer was an enthusiastic yes, and off they went. I could’ve accompanied them, but propping up a bar was not a way I generally cared to spend my time. Also, as usual, I had some writing to do overnight. I had my own addiction: I was a registered workaholic.
And so I found myself sharing a pad in the heart of Doctor Strange country with not one but two lovable boozers. I still miss them both, every f***in’ day.
6.
I underwent my own personal crisis during January of ’66—when I received a notice to report for my Army draft physical.
Without thinking much about it, I seem to have sailed blissfully under Uncle Sam’s radar while I was a teacher, during the latter part of which time the crisis over in Vietnam slowly (but noticeably) heated up. As soon as I switched to a job I actually liked, it seems, I became fair game to be drafted for military service.
Well, them was the breaks, I figured gloomily. At the time, I had no strong feelings one way or the other about the war in Asia which, contrary to Bud Tindall’s and my 1964 expectations, LBJ actually had dragged us into. Or maybe he had no choice? Unlike a lot of people at the time (and since), I’ve never felt I had adequate information or experience to fully judge the rightness or wrongness of our involvement in that war. After all, that’s what we elect Presidents and all those Congress types to deal with, right?
All I knew was that I wasn’t eager to join the Army, but that, if drafted, I intended to try to serve to the best of my abilities—most likely winding up as a clerk or something desk-bound, since as a soldier I’d probably have made good cannon fodder. Still, that was for the U.S. government to decide. I’d have considered it dishonorable to burn my draft card or emigrate to Canada or declare myself a conscientious objector; I had little sympathy for any of those viewpoints, then or since.
So on the appointed morning I hied me down (flat feet, bad back, and all) to a famous location called Whitehall in the Wall Street district, where physical examinations for draft purposes were given en masse; and sometime later in the day a few other guys and I were herded over to one side and informed we had been designated “1-Y.” None of us had the slightest idea what that military classification meant. The “Y” part sounded pretty good: second-last letter of the alphabet, as opposed to the top “1-A” classification. On the other hand, there was that “1” to balance it out; not so good… or maybe too good.
After a few excruciating minutes, one of the examiners came over and explained to us that “1-Y” meant we were dismissed for the present, but that Uncle Sam reserved the right to call us up and re-examine (and perhaps re-classify and even draft) us at any time in the future.
There was an immediate feeling of relief, of course. Stan clearly felt it, too, when I told him about the results; he wasn’t going to lose his new protégé and flunkie, at least not right away. Still, a Sword of Damocles hung over my head for the next several years, as the Vietnam War grew—and so, alas, did the body counts. I was never called in again…nor did I ever alter my view that, if called, I’d strive to do whatever I was called on to do, just as a relative or two (not to mention Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) had during World War II.
As it was, however, it turned out that scripting Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos would remain my major contribution to the war effort.
7.
In the meantime, probably largely as fall-out from the Herald Trib fiasco, Stan tried to defuse the situation by offering to change the way his and Jack’s credits were recorded. If Jack was now unhappy with being listed merely as “artist” or “penciler” (though I don’t recall Stan ever mentioning that Jack had previously complained to him about that billing), Stan was willing to accommodate him. After all, he had done so earlier with Steve Ditko—and Jack was far more important to Stan and Marvel than even Ditko could ever have been. And so, commencing with late-dated 1966 issues of Fantastic Four, et al., the bylines on Lee & Kirby collaborations were altered to read simply:
“Produced by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.”
So far as I’ve ever heard, that wording was basically suggested by Jack himself. Perhaps it reminded him (as it did me) of the old “Joe Simon & Jack Kirby” credits that had appeared on countless Golden Age stories. Still, that 1940s/50s credit had actually obscured, not illuminated, each man’s contributions to their collaboration, so what purpose did its late-’60s successor truly serve—beyond erasing Stan’s identification as “writer” of the material. Perhaps that was enough for Jack, at least for the present.
Stan dared hope the new byline would end Jack’s dissatisfaction. And why shouldn’t he have thought that? Far as I know, Jack never again broached the subject of credits with Stan… and Stan certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. What we had here was two great talents—partners in creativity, even if Stan was also operating as Jack’s boss, his de facto employer—who often talked past each other and were each determined to be non-confrontational. But the growing chasm between them had merely been temporarily buried, not eliminated… or even bridged.
My own view is that Stan, at this point in time, the beginning of 1966, may have missed a last opportunity—based on a statement he made during his later years. He said, more than once, after Jack’s departure in 1970, that he had been thinking seriously about making Jack his “partner.” What that might have meant, in terms of the situation at Marvel Comics, he never made clear… though certainly they had seemed like partners in some of the early Fantastic Four stories in which he and Kirby wrote and drew themselves into stories. It’s hard to imagine that Stan had in mind a partnership of equals… I don’t think his mind ran that way, at least not with people who had ever worked for him. Still, perhaps as late at the turn of 1966, in the shadow of the Herald Trib trainwreck, something along those lines might just have been possible, pulling Stan and Jack together in a real way, not just as “co-producers.” But the moment passed… and I doubt another propitious one ever came along.
And, with less and less really meaningful interaction between the two of them, there was nothing left to happen but that, at some uncertain future time, there would be a second and even greater explosion.
But that would take a few years to build… augmented  by geographical as well as philosophical distance  between them.
8.
Meanwhile, contrary to what has been claimed by  blinders-sporting Lee-decriers over the years, Stan was going all out on the new Bullpen Bulletins pages to play up Marvel’s artists and to make stars out of them as well as of himself. On one such page alone around the turn of the year, he managed to sing the praises of “Adam Austin,” John Romita, Joe Sinnott, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, and of course Jack Kirby, exulting that in the case of the latter three “all Stan has to do… is give them the germ of an idea and they make up all the details as they go along. Then, our leader simply takes the finished drawings  and adds all the dialogue and captions!” This Bullpen  Bulletins page appeared at virtually the same time as the  Herald Tribune piece that the Kirbys felt Stan had used to  undercut Jack.
Stan, during the latter ’60s, made numerous references in the Bullpen Bulletins to Jack, in particular, as being heavily involved in the plotting of the Marvel stories they did together. Stan saw his own role as being, first, the collaborative editor who had to okay whatever the two of them decided together to do for a story, or whatever Jack might come up with on his own—and second, he was the scripter who put the precise words onto those pages, which he (and the mass of Marvel’s fans, this one most definitely included ever since 1961) felt was of great importance to Marvel’s burgeoning success.
Stan anguished over the Bullpen Bulletins—not just their phrasing, but their balance. He tried to make sure that, over a period of a few months, he mentioned just about everybody on the team at least once, though naturally he himself (with Kirby solidly in second place) was featured most often. As soon as he could, he let it be known that “Adam Austin” was really Gene Colan and “Frankie Ray” was actually Frank Giacoia. Neither of those names meant much to the average Marvel reader, but now at least Stan felt he could start building up those artists under their own names instead of under pseudonyms.
He was a living embodiment of that old cliché that creation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, or whatever the precise quoted ratio is.
9.
At the same time, in my own backyard, Gary’s future began to sort itself out.
On our return to Manhattan after Christmas, my longtime buddy had been reluctant to return to work at the record store a long subway ride away in Queens. That’s not what I had invited him to New York to do! Fortunately, I was soon able to arrange for him to meet with Charlton editor Dick Giordano. Dick offered Gary work writing super-hero, mystery, humor, and (direly needed) romance stories, for the same $4 a page I’d earned the previous year. To help seal the deal, I promised Dick I’d look over Gary’s scripts at the outset, to make certain they passed muster—but Gary, happily, took to writing comics like a duck to water wings, working in the full-script-in-advance mode common at that time everywhere except at Marvel.
Gary’s work proved solid, lively, inventive—just what Giordano was looking for. He proved particularly adept at turning out offbeat love stories with titles like “Hootenanny Heel,” “Down in the Boondocks,” “Tears in My Malted,” “Too Fat to Frug,” and “Please Don’t Play B-11,” many of which owed their inspiration to pop or country songs. (There was a hit record around that time, for instance, titled “Please Don’t Play A-11.” Gary had a million of ’em  on his mental jukebox!)
He also took over the scripting on a recently begun super-hero parody strip (in Go-Go Comics) titled “Blooperman.” With my blessing, he immediately shoehorned in my childhood concept of “Badman and Robber” as masked crooks. The very next issue, he spotlighted my “Bestest League” gang from early Alter Egos. And the issue after that, he had the BLA meet “the Marvel-ous heroes,” tossing in takeoffs on Julius Schwartz and Stan Lee for good measure. To my delight, and with my encouragement (though I suspect it may well have been his idea), Gary got fan-artist Richard “Grass” Green assigned to pencil the JLA and Marvel-hero parody chapters; the result was not unlike a professionally published follow-up to the “Bestest League of America Meets Da Frantic Four” yarn Grass and I had done for Alter Ego #6, three years earlier.
Gary likewise conceived (for Career Girl Romances, no less) a CIA agent heroine with the evocative name of Tiffany Sinn; and he dialogued the first couple of “Blue Beetle” stories that featured a new, more Batman- like incarnation of that Golden Age hero, plotted and drawn by Steve Ditko, who was now doing most of his pro work for low-paying Charlton.
For a backup series in the “action hero” title Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, Gary and I brainstormed one night, just for the heck of it, and came up with a super-hero trio we named (impetuously and rather foolishly, given recent X-Men storylines) “The Sentinels.” I suggested Sam Grainger—the North Carolina commercial artist who was still tentatively scheduled to draw an “Alter and Captain Ego” story for me for A/E—as illustrator. Giordano approved the choice when Gary suggested Sam to him; Sam would eventually ink numerous stories for Marvel in a Sinnott-like style that came naturally to him.
Actually, I did a little under-the-table project for Charlton on my own about that time, one that would’ve got me in hot water with Stan if he’d learned about it. Acting on an irresistible impulse, I plotted a half-humorous origin story starring an alien super-hero called “The Shape” with Plastic Man-style stretching and reshaping powers; I even sketched out and colored his yellow-and-black costume. I mailed the plot to Grass to pencil; but, when he sent me the art, I saw that he’d gotten carried away and written dialogue for the yarn as well. Since I couldn’t take credit for character or tale anyway, I told Grass to just submit the whole thing as his. Though aware I’d conceived and plotted the story, Giordano went along with the fiction, and the whole 7 pages’ worth of writing and penciling was credited (and paid for) to Grass. It eventually appeared in mid-1967 in a Showcase-type comic called Charlton Premiere. I look back on it rather fondly. (See illustration on p. 245.)
I even had plans to do one other secret project for Charlton: an updated revival of “Son of Vulcan,” the first hero I’d ever scripted professionally. I worked with Biljo White and Sam Grainger on a page or so of a new story, giving the character a more super-heroic outfit, but then thought better of going ahead with things, and no further work was done on it. I had planned on crediting the writing to Gary. (In the 1990s, fan-historian Bill Schelly would give the effort’s splash page its first-ever printing and, with my okay, would reveal the story behind the story. By then, it no longer made any difference.)
It had proved easier to take Roy the Boy out of fandom, I guess, than to take fandom out of the Boy.
10.
Gary and I collaborated in another area, too:
One early-’66 day while walking in Washington Square Park not far from our apartment, we impulsively composed a song we called “Look Out! Here Comes The Spider- Man!” (No relation or resemblance to the identically titled tune that, months later, became the theme song of the first Spider-Man TV animated series; it was just a weird coincidence.) Our ditty was very much in the vein of 1950s rock’n’roll hits of the Coasters—especially “Young Blood” and “Searchin’”—and the Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop.” The notion for the song was born when one of us (Gary, I think) came up with the line:
“Nobody loves you when you crawl along the wall.”
And we were off and running. Within an hour, we had the entire song, lyrics and tune, such as they were. (We’d had plenty of experience during downtime at the Palace Theatre a few years before, when we had extemporized raunchy lyrics to current rock’n’roll ditties.)
Our mutual buddy Len Brown soon volunteered to finance and produce a demo of the “Spider-Man” song. We recorded it in a rented studio in Brooklyn, with me on vocals, Gary on drums and bass-voicing a couple of key lines (including the above one and “When you look like a tarantula, folks don’t think you’re sincere”), a pair of hired musicians on guitars, and a couple of young women singing backup.
It turned out well enough that I wound up asking for, and getting, informal permission from Stan (for what that might or might not have been worth, since Martin Goodman knew nothing of the arrangement) to shop the demo around to record companies. Gary and I wound up getting only a single meeting—at Roulette Records, which had had a string of hit records over the past decade. But the brusque exec there told us that the intentionally late-’50s style of the song was “never gonna come back,” and that was that.
(Years later, Alter Ego interviewer Richard Arndt would point out to me that, even if Roulette had signed us or just purchased the song for others to record, Gary and I would probably have been cheated out of all profits. Roulette was, as he detailed, “notorious for being heavily ‘mobbed up’ and not paying royalties for records they released.” Late-’50s super-star Jimmy Rodgers [“Honeycomb,” etc.] believed that a violent encounter he had with a couple of L.A. cops, which left him with a “severe concussion” and lifelong memory problems, was due to his demanding royalties from Roulette. As Richard would note, “Morris Levy, the president of Roulette, was on his way to prison when he died.”)
Still, far as Gary and I were concerned, it might’ve at least been interesting to have had a shot at being cheated out of royalties by a major record label.
Our little song has actually had a decent shelf life, though. In 2019, my media manager and friend John Cimino and Carla Jordan, head of the Cape Girardeau County Historical Association, between them arranged for a Missouri technician named Darren Burgfeld to clean up the old 45 r.p.m. recording so it could “debut” on Roy Thomas Day in my hometown, and later be played on a podcast, so that it’s now floating around on YouTube—as what isn’t?
Oh, and about that female backup duo mentioned above:
Shortly after we moved to Greenwich Village, Gary, always far more forward with the opposite sex than I was (at 22, he was already divorced from his first wife), had met and begun dating a bright young Jewish woman named Cindy. Wish I could remember her last name! Though roughly his age, being a native New Yorker, she was much more sophisticated than either Gary or myself, and introduced us to such local landmarks as Max’s Kansas City, where we could get a tasty (if not inexpensive) steak. She was also a nice person… and, along with a friend of hers, one of the backup singers on our demo.
Thank Crom for Cindy—as you’ll see before this book winds up.
Meanwhile, I did have one small subtle success in the sartorial department.
From the start, I’d felt it ridiculous to wear a suit and tie (and, simply because I owned one, a vest) in to the office every day… then, on arrival, to promptly remove my suit jacket, roll up my shirtsleeves to the elbow so they wouldn’t pick up too much ink and lead-pencil from the art with which I’d come into contact ’twixt nine and five, and get to work.
One day (maybe during the subway strike?), I ditched the shirt and vest for a white turtleneck sweater under my jacket. I still had to roll up my sleeves when I removed the jacket, but at least I’d lost the tie. Neither Stan nor Sol said anything about my altered attire, so I kept at it, soon adding a few other shades of turtleneck.
That was the first tiny crack in Marvel’s previously stodgy, Mad Men-era staff dress code, which National/DC kept for a few more years. Funny to think about it now; for, over the next couple of years (and I certainly don’t claim I was anything more than a bellwether), the standard garb at Marvel became steadily more informal, with fewer ties, jackets, etc. By decade’s end, Stan was coming to work in blue jeans. As my first wife once put it, by the time she came to work there in 1968, “every day was ‘casual Friday’ at Marvel Comics.”
That’s at least one trail I blazed before Stan.
11.
Before I go any further, I’ve gotta say a few words about Flo Steinberg, one of the two people with whom I shared the main production office in those early days.
Stan, of course, had made a virtual celebrity out of his corresponding secretary by the simple act of christening her “Fabulous Flo” on one of the very first Bullpen Bulletins pages; and he referred to her as such a time or two afterward. Following her departure in 1968, he never did anything like a fraction as much re any of his future “gal Fridays,” as they were often called then. Stan, to the end of his days, would respond enthusiastically whenever anybody at a con would ask him about “Fabulous Flo,” though I suspect it was mostly because he felt fans expected him to.
Now, I couldn’t say exactly why Flo was in a different class from her successors (and one or two short-term predecessors). I just know that she was. In part, I think, it was the force of her bubbly yet intelligent personality, her oft-subtle sensahumor, combined with the Jewish equivalent of what used to be called, for some reason, “the Protestant work ethic.” She was just—Fabulous Flo.
By 1965 she took her orders from production manager Sol Brodsky more often, and usually more directly, than from Stan. For Sol she had to phone and deal with anyone and everyone connected to the comics process: freelancers, engravers, color-separators, printers, the Photostat people, the typesetting shop, the Comics Code Authority. One guy Sol frequently had her call sported the name “Blackie  Seymour,” a moniker that invariably made me chuckle.  Still does. Eventually I even gave that moniker to one of our pot-bellied pigs.
Still, Flo had her quirks. Once, when Sol asked her to phone someone she hadn’t dealt with previously, she emitted (in her nigh-falsetto voice) a mildly pitiful whine: “Oh, Sol, you know I don’t like to call new people!”
In a 1996 interview with Bill Schelly, she said she was newly arrived in Manhattan from her native Boston, where she had recently earned a Liberal Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts, when an employment agency sent her to interview for a “girl Friday” office job at a firm called Magazine Management. She had showed up dressed in the secretarial uniform of the day (including pearls and gloves!), only to learn she’d be working in the company’s comicbook division. Stan had personally interviewed and hired her, she said; she didn’t recall anyone else being present at the time. “Marvel,” she said, “had just one little cubby hole on the floor.”
Early in our lunching days, though, Sol shared his own distinct memories of how Flo had got her job in 1963. He wasn’t yet officially production manager then, but he was already doing production work in the office several days a week. He said that, as per Stan’s instructions, he started to interview her when she showed up; but then he saw  Stan beckoning him over. In private, Stan asked Sol who that attractive young woman was, and Sol told him she was applying for the “corresponding secretary” position. Stan asked if she seemed qualified, and Sol said yes, in fact, she had even mentioned that she’d briefly worked for the phone company, cold-calling people in some capacity. Apparently, according to Sol, that last bit sold Stan. He  told Sol to tell her she was hired, instead of wasting time talking to anyone else. Sol did so, then ushered her over into Stan’s presence.
“Hi, Stan,” Flo effused, in those high-decibiled tones we all got to know and love but which we always secretly suspected could have been channeled to shatter glass.
Sol told me that the look of horror that stole over Stan’s face—which Flo somehow mercifully missed—was priceless. Stan had suddenly realized that he’d just hired this person with a high-register voice—a major part of whose job would be making phone calls and answering the phone—the first sound a member of the general public would hear if he/she called Marvel Comics.
Stan quickly learned to live happily with his impulsive decision… though I’m not sure he ever fully appreciated exactly how much of an asset Flo was to the company in those early years, in terms of relations with both fans  and freelancers.
As I said earlier, I found Flo attractive, but I figured asking her out probably wasn’t a great idea, given that we sat five feet away from each other five days a week. Even so, when, in February of ’66, Bob Dylan took the stage in White Plains, NY, an hour north of the city by train, I splurged for a pair of tickets and invited her to accompany me. We had a great time, even though Dylan sang few of the songs we really wanted to hear. (A Nobel Prize committee would have a similar experience half a century later.) It was a fun date, but it was a one-off, and we remained good friends as long as she lived. At least once every few months, for pretty much the rest of her life, she would phone me out of the blue in South Carolina, just to chat… except when I called her first.
Sometime not long after I arrived, Flo had perhaps her finest moment with Stan.
Having commenced male-pattern baldness at a relatively young age, he had recently purchased a new toupee; but he quickly became rather lackadaisical as to whether or not he wore it into the office on any given day. One morning he’d show up with a full head of second-hand hair; the next he’d waltz in virtually bald. Finally, one day, after a couple of weeks of this back-and-forth, Flo screwed up her courage, strode into his office, and said (I’m quoting from her own account of the incident):
“Stan, we love you… and we don’t care if you have hair or not… but I wish you’d make up your mind, because you’re making me awfully nervous!”
That was the delightful young woman I got to work with from mid-1965 till sometime in 1968.
Sometimes Stan’s nicknames for Marvel people fit them… and sometimes they were merely alliterative.
But Flo really was, from first to last, fabulous.
12.
Somewhere in late ’65 or early ’66, I received a slightly odd gift, courtesy of Stan—via Sol.
One day in the office, out of the blue, Sol told me about four super-hero costumes that had been made especially for Marvel—during a period when the only commercially available Marvel outfit (unknown to me at the time) was the Spider-Man Halloween suit that had been licensed by costume-maker Ben Cooper soon after the Wall-Crawler had made his title-comic debut. (And to which I never in my life heard a single reference around the office.)
Sol informed me that, some months earlier—I’ve never been sure if the following event happened before I arrived or if it was simply that nobody had bothered to tell me about it—Stan had decided he wanted some Marvel characters to march in a city parade. I presume it must have been the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade held each year, since there weren’t all that many parades in Manhattan. At any rate, a professional seamstress was hired to sew costumes representing several Marvel heroes: Spider-Man, the Wasp, the spanking new Medusa (so it couldn’t have been too long ago, right?), and a Fantastic Four uniform that could be worn by either guy or gal, thereby turning the wearer into Johnny Storm, Reed Richards, or Sue Storm Richards. Several “actors” (that’s the word Sol used) were hired to wear the garb in said parade, as a group. I never heard if there was to be a sign identifying them as Marvel characters—and I’m pretty sure Marvel never intended to spring for a float in the parade.
However, as Sol related the tale to me, somebody made the mistake of paying the “actors” in advance—they immediately spent the money on booze and were a no-show at the parade—and now Marvel was left with these four costumes that had likely never been worn by a living human.
Interesting, I thought… but why is Sol telling me this?
Sol went on to say that he and Stan had been planning to just throw the costumes away (for some reason, there seems to have been no thought of holding onto them for some future occasion), but then Stan had had the bright idea that maybe I would like to have them.
And, as soon as Sol showed them to me, spilling them out of a bag, I let him know I’d be happy to take them  off his hands. I figured I’d find use for them, one of these fine days.
And of course I soon did.
13.
Meanwhile, Gary’s and my unofficial roommate, Bill Everett, was welcomed back to the Bullpen, of which he’d been a part intermittently in previous decades. When he’d created the Sub-Mariner in 1939 for Marvel Comics #1, he (like Torch creator Carl Burgos, The Angel’s Paul Gustavson, and others) had not been working directly for Martin Goodman, but for Lloyd Jacquet’s Funnies, Inc., “comics shop” that packaged and supplied entire issues’ worth of work to Timely from a separate studio location. Bill had, however, gone on staff at Timely by the 1950s.
Stan immediately used Bill to plug the gap caused by Steve Ditko’s leaving the “Doctor Strange” feature by assigning the returning and self-styled “ancient mariner” to draw that strip. His hope was that, since Bill had illustrated countless horror and horror-hero stories back in the 1950s in his own patented style, he would be the best possible replacement for the departed Ditko. It didn’t quite work out that way, but Bill had his moments on the strip.
In addition, during our time together at 177A Bleecker and later, he would often regale me with tales of Golden Age days—though, generally, only after I prodded and cajoled him a bit. I was intrigued when he mentioned that his full name was William Blake Everett, and that he  was a descendant of the English poet William Blake of  “Tiger, Tiger” fame.
Bill was inconsistent about what his attitudes toward some events had been back in the day. For instance, once he told me that by the time the revived Sub-Mariner title  was canceled in 1955, he didn’t care because he was busy with other genres; but he also once said, at least mock- seriously, that his response to Namor’s cancellation in 1949 had been, “What—the Sub-Mariner canceled? My baby’s not selling?” He held conflicting postures as a hardened professional who didn’t care what he was writing and drawing as long as the money rolled in… and as a writer/artist with a certain (well-deserved) pride in having created characters like the Sub-Mariner and (for Centaur, around the same time) Amazing-Man.
Mostly, I heard his stories, or parts of stories, in short snatches in one of the two apartments we shared or over dinner or walking down the street or wherever. It was during those early days that I first asked him how it was that the mid-’50s Sub-Mariner mag had lasted a year longer than either Human Torch or Captain America… and he startled me by saying (with little in the way of details at that time) that it was because there’d been a deal in the works for a live-action Sub-Mariner TV series, in response to the success of The Adventures of Superman.
I would ask him whether Namor (a watery hero) and the Torch (representing fire) had been created together by himself and Carl Burgos as co-workers at Funnies, Inc., or which of the two might have come first. I got different responses at different times, and came to believe that he really had no idea. He did clue me in, though, that, while seeking a personal name for the Sub-Mariner, he had tried writing various words backwards. One of those words had been “Roman”… hence, “Namor.” He’d go back and forth as to whether he or someone else had thought up Namora, originally the hero’s cousin; my money’s on Bill. Namora is the kind of name he seems to me likely to have thought of, while others at the time came up with distaff super-heroines with names like Sun Girl and Golden Girl.
He related to me how he and fellow Timely staffers John Severin and Joe Maneely had constituted a chummy trio during the ’50s, and how they had “lost Fridays”—meaning they were likely to go out at midday after receiving their weekly checks and drink their lunch and return to work very late in the day if at all.
Another time, in the office, out of the blue, he castigated me, quite sternly, when he mentioned Golden Age comics writer Ed Herron, and I admitted I didn’t recognize the name. (Actually, at that time, Herron was still scripting features like Tomahawk for National/DC.) Bill lectured me briefly about my ignorance, and his passion made an impression on me. Clearly, despise his oft-pose, he was not entirely indifferent to everything about the comics field except a paycheck.
When I asked him about the circumstances of his leaving Timely for other fields circa 1957 when the company had nearly gone out of business due to Goodman’s making a disastrous distribution deal with American News just before it abruptly abandoned the comics business, he indicated that he was able to get out before the total collapse because he was “tipped off” by somebody at the higher levels of Timely that things were about to head south.
There were other stories, and thankfully I remembered just enough about them to ask him to repeat and expand upon them circa 1969-70 when we stayed at the office after work one afternoon and I tape-recorded a long interview with him for Alter Ego (first series) #11… an interview that, sadly, would not be published until half a decade after his passing in 1973. Even so, I became aware of some serious conflicts between his accounts of the same event in different interviews; he admitted that, on occasion, in interviews, he just “made stuff up.”
14.
To my eternal regret, because I was so caught up in my day-to-day writing and editorial duties, I never really got around to having similarly detailed conversations with the likes of John Romita, Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, and other veteran pros who wandered in and out of the office. Only because Bill and I were unofficial “roomies” for a couple of years did I learn what I did. The comicbook historian in me has always lamented that I didn’t do more for that cause at a time when I had such access to the artists and writers who had bedazzled my childhood (and young adulthood). But life gets in your way while you’re busy living it.
Mike Esposito was, thankfully, the source of an amazing anecdote concerning an event that occurred circa 1965. He mentioned how a National editor had given him a desperately late assignment—“Inkers,” he said, “always get it in the neck when the penciler or somebody else is late”—so that he had to stay up for two whole days and nights finishing it. When it was done, he hopped on a subway from Queens, rushed it triumphantly into the office, and laid it on the editor’s desk. Understandably, he looked a bit disheveled from 48 hours of working minus sleep, shaving, or a bath. The editor told him well done, go home and get some rest. A few hours later, that same editor phoned to say that he had received a complaint about Mike from the higher-ups—presumably co-publishers Donenfeld or Liebowitz—and that Mike was never again to come into the office unless he was wearing a tie.
Any more questions as to why Mike was happy to do  an increasing percentage of his inking for Marvel in the latter ’60s?
Back to Mr. Everett: As I said above, “Wild Bill,” as Stan had instantly nicknamed him, had been tagged at once to take over illustrating the “Doctor Strange” feature in the monthly Strange Tales, as soon as Steve Ditko completed his last ten-pager.
Stan decided to write the first post-Ditko yarn, to set the strip’s new direction. Strange Tales #147 was to be the first tale ever of the Mystic Master in which Ditko would have no input. (Even though Steve was pretty much totally out of Marvel by the end of ’65, the vagueries of comicbook publishing decreed that the date on issue #147 would be “August 1966”—two-thirds of the way through the following year—even though it would actually go on sale in late spring.) But Bill sort of kept Steve’s streak alive for one more month by utilizing a couple of pages of Photostats from earlier stories in a flashback instead of drawing new pictures. Bill took his time about getting back into the old work ethic—and there was always, alas, the drinking, which kept him looking constantly for the quickest way to make a deadline—or to avoid one.
Perhaps because he knew where Bill was living part-time, Stan had him open the 10-pager in Greenwich Village, where the so-called hippie culture was coming into full flower. The vibrant street scene Bill drew for his first “Doctor Strange” splash page bore at least a passing resemblance to what he, Gary, and I saw every day when we stepped out of the door of 177A Bleecker. With the Mystic Master added, of course.
Whether or not Stan really did go away on vacation halfway through scripting that tale, as he wrote in the credits, he turned the last half of the dialoguing over to Denny O’Neil. That made sense, since Denny had scripted the preceding two “Strange” episodes. I envied Denny on that one. I was itching for a chance to work with the guy who had created the Sub-Mariner.
15.
At the same time, Lee and Kirby—and now “Jazzy Johnny” Romita—were plowing ahead with more milestone markers along the Mighty Marvel highway; and I, like multitudes of readers and much of the Bullpen, was constantly, well, marveling at what I witnessed.
Stan and Jack followed the “Galactus Trilogy” with a far more low-key single-issue story. “This Man—This Monster!” related the offbeat saga of a lonely loser (never even named in Fantastic Four #51) who seized his chance to duplicate the physical appearance of (and thus to replace) the Thing in the FF, while dooming the real Ben Grimm to the deadly Negative Zone… but who opted, at the last moment, to sacrifice himself for Ben and thereby atone for “what monstrous things he had done in the past—or, what monstrous plans he had made.” It’s a stand-alone yarn that still makes it onto “best-of-the-FF” lists, and deserves to.
And that’s saying something, because the very next issue introduced yet another landmark Marvel concept: The Black Panther.
Between 1965 and 1980, I never heard a word from Stan or anybody else about supposed early-1965 plans (later documented by author Sean Howe and others) for Marvel to introduce an African (or African-American?) super-hero called The Coal Tiger as half of an anthology title, only to have Goodman’s expansion scheme temporarily vetoed by distributor Independent News—which means, in essence, by National/DC. Judging by the Kirby concept illos of Coal Tiger I’ve seen over the years, it may be just as well that series was aborted; still, in those days, the Lee-Kirby team could make just about anything work, so maybe I’m wrong about that.
All the same, that frustrating experience paved the way for the Black Panther, a year later. The 1966 T’Challa—and this is not to deny whatever strong hand Kirby doubtless had in the character’s creation—was a concept Stan was determined to get right. As editor, he went back and forth as to whether any of the Panther’s face should show, to make certain readers knew he was black. On surviving Photostats of the original cover and of panels from one rejected interior page, the Panther’s mask, as penciled by Jack, clearly reveals his lower face. In the end, Stan opted for having the African prince’s features entirely hidden by a full mask. (He would reverse himself on this a year or so later, when he had me induct T’Challa into The Avengers.)
That two-parter in FF #52–53 wasn’t likely to eclipse recent memories of Galactus and The Silver Surfer, but the concept was still a definite departure. T’Challa was the ruler of a Wakanda, a hidden African nation with a futuristic technology meshed with symbols of ancient African tribalism such as a panther totem and hereditary kingship.
The Panther himself, despite his catlike powers, had not been conceived as the physical equal of the Thing, let alone of the entire FF… yet, by sheer energy and agility, he fought them to a standstill. I suspect the “rejected interior page” referred to above was nixed because it showed Johnny Storm’s Native American college chum Wyatt Wingfoot getting in a telling blow against T’Challa—which I’m sure, in Stan’s mind, de-glamorized the Panther immediately after his introduction. That on-target decision is a testament to any but a willfully “blind” person of the editorial skill Stan occasionally had to enforce over even such an artistic and conceptual genius as Kirby.
Also exceptional was the backstory related in #53, which introduced (a) Klaw, the Master of Sound; (b) T’Challa’s doomed father T’Chaka (named for Shaka, early-19th- century king of the Zulus); and (c) Wakanda’s invaluable resource “vibranium,” a rare metal which deserved a better raison d’être than the one stated by Reed Richards: “Rockets made of vibranium would never go off course due to vibrations!” Thankfully, it’s been applied to a few other, more exciting uses over the decades since.
This sexology—is that the proper word for six issues in a row?—was followed by solid stories, including the returns of Dr. Doom and the Surfer and a deepening of the latter’s efforts to learn how to become human, like some bizarre cross between a star-skimming Academy Award statuette and Walt Disney’s Pinocchio… plus a tale that turned Klaw into a sonically murderous super-villain. The latter issue (#56) has the minor distinction that one page of it actually made me laugh out loud while proofreading it: page 11, on which Reed equips the Thing with a bulky metallic “Counter-Sonic Harness” with which he hopes Ben can bust out of their entrapment by Klaw. When Reed admonishes his friend to “plow thru the door,” Ben’s response (“Plow thru it? I can’t even see it!”), combined with Jack’s artwork, had me nearly sliding to the floor in helpless laughter and causing Sol and Flo to raise distinct eyebrows.
16.
One other FF entry from the first half of ’66 is one that, over the years, various folks both in and out of comics have believed was probably the result of a suggestion I made to Stan; but that was definitely not the case.
Fact is, I was quite startled when I first saw Kirby’s pencils for the 20-page lead story for that year’s Fantastic Four Annual—and right there on the splash page was the original Human Torch, the one who’d blazed through the sky between 1939 and 1954, now battling it out with a flaming Johnny Storm. Even half a decade after Julius Schwartz had brought back National/DC’s Justice Society to interact with its Justice League, I’d never considered the possibility that the first Torch would ever return. Captain America had, yes… rationalized by the retroactive-continuity concept that he’d been frozen in ice since World War II (even if that ignored comics published between 1945 and ’54). So had the Sub-Mariner, no problem… because, being half-human, half-Atlantean, he could be treated as ageing at a glacial pace compared to a “surface man.”
But—the original Carl Burgos Human Torch? Well, okay, he was actually an android, not really a human, so he didn’t age at all… but still, there was already one of him in what fans would soon christen “the Marvel Universe,” and Stan wasn’t one for confusing the readers unnecessarily.
It was a while before I began to ask the question “why?” As far as I could ever tell, Stan wasn’t sentimental with regard to old comicbook heroes, so it wasn’t likely to have been pure nostalgia. Sure, Jack might have suggested the resurrection—but why would he have? He had never  drawn even a single story starring that Torch back in the Golden Age.
Eventually, I realized that the answer almost had to be—Martin Goodman.
According to Sean Howe in his 2012 tome Marvel Comics: The Untold Story: Over the next few years—1967 through ’69—the original 28-year terms of Timely/Marvel’s initial copyrights on material featuring the original Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America were set to expire, although they could be renewed for an additional 28 years; the only question was, apparently, renewed by whom? Howe suggests (and I stress here that I have zero inside info on the matter, either before or since reading his book!) that Goodman may have hoped to pre-empt any legal move by Carl Burgos, who had created the Torch for 1939’s Marvel Comics #1, to try to wrest away rights in the concept. Stan had been happy to have Burgos draw a Johnny Storm/Torch episode a year earlier, but to Goodman, business  was business, copyrights were copyrights, and trademarks were trademarks.
Our volatile publisher was probably unhappy enough with Burgos already. At the turn of ’66, Burgos and schlock publisher Myron Fass had debuted a new comicbook titled Captain Marvel, usurping the name (though nothing else) of the classic Fawcett hero who’d gone on the shelf in ’53… but still impinging, Goodman felt, on his own trademarking of the name “Marvel” for the past three years. Fass and Burgos had surely compounded the offense, in his eyes, by featuring a villain called Dr. Doom. (They also had their CM battling National/DC-derived baddies named Dr. Fate and The Bat, man!) Goodman had no quarrel with the new Captain Marvel as a character—like so many of Burgos’ creations, he was an android, who in this instance could send his fists, feet, and even head flying off like weapons when he shouted “Split!” and could call them back by yelling “Zam!,” the two cries together approximating the hallowed word “Shazam!” —but the use of the “Marvel” name on a cover surely raised a red flag in our publisher’s eyes.
So, even while he contemplated a future legal battle over the name “Marvel,” Goodman may have directed Stan to  bring back the original Human Torch. (Not that Stan ever gave me so much as a hint that his boss had done so, mind. I’m just deducing, here.) A single story like “The Torch That Was!” might, Goodman may have hoped, be sufficient to establish that the 1939-spawned flame-thrower, like the post-1961 edition, was his property and his alone. Maybe that’s why there was never a follow-up second original- Torch story while Stan was day-by-day editor. It was left to me, as departing editor-in-chief in 1974, to suggest same as part of my concept for The Invaders, which was set during the Second World War, the first Torch’s heyday.
In 1966, I was just glad to see the FF Annual story.
Related to the above: Again, it’s just an assumption first made by others, but I suppose it’s not unlikely that the reprinting of Simon & Kirby’s early-’40s “Captain America” stories beginning in Fantasy Masterpieces in early ’66 was Goodman’s way of securing his claim on that hero as well, in anticipation of Joe Simon’s launching of his ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to gain ownership of the character—only, in that case, Goodman got Jack Kirby, who was then his employee (and who had been one-half of the original “Cap” creative team), to take Marvel’s side in the suit, which probably didn’t help Joe much.
That left only one of Timely’s wartime “Big Three” heroes still open to a possible copyright-renewal lawsuit:  the Sub-Mariner. Now, I can’t say for sure, since I never had a peek into the recesses of Martin Goodman’s oft- canny mind, but I do recall learning from Bill Everett that, around that time, Goodman loaned him a bit of money to pay off some debts he had racked up over the previous few years. Without any overt evidence, I suspected, even at the time, that Goodman never expected that loan to be repaid, and that it was basically a one-time payment in return for a tacit agreement on Bill’s part never to sue Marvel over the pointy-eared sea prince. And, true to his own code of honor, Wild Bill never did.
Several years later, I was walking down Marvel’s halls beside then-production chief John Verpoorten when we spied our publisher ambling in our direction. Out of the blue, he greeted us with a cheery non sequitor: “How’s Bill Everett doing?” “He’s making a comeback,” quipped Jumbo John. Goodman chuckled: “Bill’s always making a comeback.” And he walked past us and continued strolling, smiling, down the hall.)
17.
Speaking of Fantasy Masterpieces, I was present for the first of a number of major art-finds in early ’66, when Sol Brodsky made a trip to Magazine Management’s warehouse in search of material for future issues of FM and other potential reprint comics. He invited me along, though I’ve no memory of even what borough the warehouse was in. We weren’t looking for original art, though there may have been some of that around, too. We were seeking giant slick-paper rolls on which black-&-white proofs of every page in a given issue were stored.
Unfortunately, far as I recall, nothing in the place seemed to go back any further than the early 1950s—and things were so disorganized that we found only a fraction of the rolls we thought we might locate, even from the preceding decade and a half. (Many more such rolls were already ensconced in a huge closet at Magazine Management itself, presided over by a very capable woman named Nancy Murphy, but those only went back to the early ’60s.)
Sol was probably a bit disappointed. I think there were whole issues of horror comics there, but in 1966 Marvel had as yet no place to reprint those; that would come a few years later. However, I enthusiastically called his attention to a number of proofs from the first half of the ’50s that I felt might be useful in Fantasy Masterpieces. These were rolls of (some of) the issues that had heralded the return of  Captain America, The Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner in late 1953… and a comic or three featuring Bill Everett’s version of “Marvel Boy” in Astonishing and a larger number of proofs of his horror-oriented “Venus” stories, all from the early ’50s.
In 1966, Stan (probably by decree of Goodman) was content to fill FM with 1940s stories of Cap, Torch, and Namor, which had to be photographed and (quickly and poorly) retouched from original comics—along with occasional reprints of the likes of the Golden Age Black Marvel (for Marvel-trademarking purposes, I recall Stan telling me), The Destroyer (perhaps because he’d been Stan’s most prominent super-hero co-creation prior to The Fantastic Four?), and The Vision (because the green-skinned extra- dimensional’s early art was by Jack Kirby?)—plus early-’60s non-hero “mystery” stories.
I argued to Stan that the 1953-55 revival tales of Timely’s “Big Three” were valuable, well-drawn, and fairly well-written, and that we should drop the non-hero “mystery” stuff in FM in favor of that vintage super-hero work by Everett, Burgos, Romita, Ayers, et al. It would only be months later, when FM’s title was changed to Marvel Super-Heroes, that he allowed me to begin inserting those stories in the rear of the issues. Prior to that, he continued to insist upon backup reprints of “mystery” stories, which our readers clearly didn’t care about. Part of his reluctance to allow the 1950s material in for so long may have been because, though he seemed to have virtually forgotten that super-hero revival, he sensed that some of its stories would contradict the continuity he had established since 1961—in particular, what the hell was Captain America doing fighting Commies in 1954 when The Avengers #4 had established that he’s been suspended in ice between 1945 and ’64?
Those same continuity problems occurred to me, naturally;  ut I felt they could be solved anytime we summoned up the will to do so. (It was finding and eventually reprinting those 1953-54 “Captain America” yarns that paved the way for their integration, in the 1970s, into Marvel continuity—first when I asked writer Steve Englehart to bring the 1950s Cap into new issues of Captain America—which he did, in his own inimitable way—and not long afterward when I wrote What If…? #4 to fill in the blanks between 1945 and ’49.)
Yeah, that was a profitable trip to Marvel’s warehouse. It just took a while to pay off.
One early fall-out from that first warehouse expedition occurred in the Marvel offices when Flo Steinberg showed Denny O’Neil the final b&w panel of the “Captain America” story from the proof-sheets for Young Men #25. Seen elsewhere on this page, it was no surprise to me, since I owned a copy of the actual comic; but Denny and Flo both felt it was the ultimate statement of the Cold War mentality, since it depicted Cap and Bucky standing in the Southwestern Desert viewing an explosion from an atomic cannon, from close enough that, in real life, they’d have been turned into radioactive slag—while commenting how that nuclear blast was “a glorious sight… when it’s on our side in the struggle for world peace!” Flo quickly sent that panel out to be “blown up” in size, with copies made for each of the three of us… albeit a version in which either she or Denny had blackened out its three-word caption. I framed my copy, and it still hangs in my office half a century later… though perhaps a bit less ironically than it hung in theirs.
18.
During this same period, Stan and John Romita got off to a fine running start in Amazing Spider-Man.
At the end of John’s first issue, #39, the pair revealed that Spidey’s nemesis, The Green Goblin, was actually businessman Norman Osborne, the father of Peter Parker’s best friend. Reading this story, I could sense the satisfaction Stan must have felt on prevailing in this matter, since Steve Ditko had reportedly wanted the Goblin to turn out to be some anonymous nonentity.
In ASM #41, John got to co-create his first Spidey super-villain, the rampaging Rhino. If a big bulky wrestler type charging around in a rhinoceros hide was what turned you on, The Rhino was your guy. He turned out to be  a serviceable and durable bad-ass, and in recent years  two different versions of him have appeared in Marvel- related movies.
Issue #42 proved even more of a landmark than the “end” of The Green Goblin. The main story, in which J. Jonah Jameson’s astronaut son temporarily becomes a lunar-affected super-hero/villain, was less impactful than the ending, wherein John Romita accomplished another undoubted improvement over what even the ultra-talented Ditko could’ve delivered. For months, Peter Parker had studiously avoided meeting the niece of his Aunt May’s friend Mrs. Watson; said niece’s face, whenever she was glimpsed in a panel or two, was always obscured in some cutesy way.
However, when John visually introduced Mary Jane Watson in #42’s final panel, her sheer gorgeousness—emphasized by enough radiating art lines to light up an airplane hangar—marked a new era in the Wall-Crawler’s life. One which would, some years down the line, loom even larger than Stan and John had intended it to at the moment. And Stan’s classic line of MJ dialogue, directed at Peter, is the second-most-famous quotation in Spider-Man mythology:
“Face it, tiger… you just hit the jackpot!”
It’s ironic that, despite that buildup, Stan always maintained that it was his intention, while he guided Spidey’s destiny, that Gwen Stacy would be The One in Peter’s life. But who knows? Maybe, even in 1966, some subconscious part of Stan’s psyche sensed what lay ahead for her—and for Mary Jane.
19.
Stan’s third and final “full book” at that time—assuming you counted the “Tales of Asgard” backup feature—was, of course, Thor, drawn and heavily co-plotted by Kirby. While nothing in the first half of ’66, in my mind, equaled the thunder god’s recent epic encounter with Hercules and Pluto, Jack kept the visuals coming at an inspired and breakneck pace. With a two-parter centered on Ego, the Living Planet, Kirby proved he could deliver a quasi- science-fictional Thor epic to rival the mythic fantasy of the preceding arc. Nor was Stan merely an appendage to the series. His mastery of the pseudo-Shakespearian/King Jamesian cadences he put into the Asgardians’ mouths during this period gave Thor a grandeur and nobility  never before—or since—achieved in a comicbook.
Even more successful, in my eyes, was the Lee/Kirby two-issue riff on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau that began in Thor #134. The High Evolutionary (whose name could’ve been abbreviated “H.E.,” basically a stand-in for “God”) and the human/bestial “Knights of Wundagore” did their part to keep Marvel’s then top three titles—Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, and Thor—at or near the peaks they’d reached during the preceding year.
Stan did have one tiny skirmish with the Comics Code over the title of the lead tale in Thor #135. He had christened a mutated wolf the “Man-Beast”—and, while the Code folks let that appellation stand in the yarn itself, they insisted it be changed in the story title to “Super-Beast,” perhaps fearful that the word “Man-Beast” might leave them open to the charge of allowing a Code-forbidden werewolf back into the comicbook cosmos. (Myself, I never cared much for either moniker, so when I was scripting Thor in the ’90s I would change his name to “Karnivor.” Whether subsequent writers had enough sense to keep  that name in any future appearances, I’ve no idea and little interest.)
20.
What’s most surprising during this period, perhaps, is that somehow Stan managed to extract from other artists enough of what he felt Marvel needed—which was, at that stage, mostly the energy and inventiveness of a Jack Kirby, which couldn’t really be cloned but only aspired to—that the other Marvel titles he scripted suffered mostly only by comparison to the “top three.”
Although (as noted earlier) Avengers sales had actually risen a bit when Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, and the Wasp had been replaced by Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch, by now they had leveled off somewhat. Stan read the handwriting on the sales-report wall and decided ’twas time to restore two of the departed “big guns”—who no longer had their own strips anyway. He brought back Giant-Man and Wasp, except that he rebranded (and had Don Heck re-costume) the former as “Goliath.” To my mental ears, that was a distinct improvement; even as a fan, I’d felt “Giant-Man” as a name wasn’t much better than “Elephant Giant” in the pencil-scrawled comic I’d done at age seven… although, granted, Dashin’ Donnie’s Kirbyesque art (like Stan’s scripting) was a bit superior to my 1947 efforts.
With Daredevil #20, Gene Colan became artist of the Man without Fear as Romita graduated to Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Gentleman Gene, as Stan had dubbed him, did an oft-superlative job, though his rendition never sold as well as John’s. But then, few artists had the Jazzy One’s golden touch in those days, except Kirby. Stan loved Gene’s work, which combined dynamic action with what often seemed like photo-realism; but he did get exasperated when Gene would yield to the temptation to waste superlative penciling on what was, in his view, a dull scene. Thus, he was both impressed and unhappy when, on page 5 of DD #20, Gene devoted nearly a whole page to a trio of armed criminals throwing open a door. But at least, with the looser synopses Stan was now giving him, Gene wasn’t running out of room at the end of stories as he had in an “Iron Man” yarn or two! And his renditions of The Owl and Gladiator were definitely crowd-pleasers.
Over in the anthologies:
Perhaps some of the installments were stretched a bit thin in “Sub-Mariner” in Tales to Astonish, but Colan’s majestic artwork covered up minor weaknesses. For instance, a panel on the penultimate Namor page in TTA #77 had shown the giant, red-clawed hand of a monster Stan christened the Behemoth tearing its way up from beneath the ocean floor, clearly meant to foreshadow the next issue’s threat. But as soon as I glimpsed Gene’s pencils for #78, I asked Stan, “Where’s the Behemoth?” “Oh, God, I forgot all about him!” he exclaimed, and he hastily added a  mention of said monstrosity in the installment’s “next- issue” blurb. Meanwhile, in the backside of the book, Stan assigned Everett to finish up Kirby’s “Hulk” layouts, even though he and Wild Bill never quite agreed on how ugly the Hulk should look. Stan favored an almost-human face, not unlike what was later achieved in the Avengers movies with Mark Ruffalo and a heap of CGI, while Bill favored a more monstrous look, with a small, squeezed nose and an exaggerated space ’twixt nose and mouth. Me, I was (secretly) in Bill’s corner.
And, naturally, I was thrilled when one day Stan handed me the “Sub-Mariner” lead tale for Astonish #82 to dialogue. It was basically a 12-page slugfest between Namor and Iron Man, barely begun by Colan before he reportedly came down with the flu and Jack Kirby had to hastily finish the story. It was one of only two times, not counting the 1965 “writer’s test,” that I got to script pages penciled by Kirby, and I was gratified by both Stan’s and the readers’ reactions to what I came up with.
Meanwhile, Stan and Gene were also rocketing along with “Iron Man” in Tales of Suspense, but the real pace-setter of the book was becoming the Kirby-penciled “Captain America,” in which The Red Skull was brought up into the present and for three issues wielded the power of the Cosmic Cube. (And I’ve never totally forgiven anybody associated with the first Avengers movie who refused to let some character, somewhere in its 2 hours and 23 minutes, refer to the Tesseract by its original “comicbook” name, even as a joke.)
In Strange Tales, meantime, Stan was reasonably pleased with Bill’s ongoing art on “Doctor Strange,” scripting of which bounced between himself, Denny O’Neil, and even me. Stan was also searching for someone to take the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” penciling chores entirely off Kirby’s over-burdened shoulders. Veteran artists Howard Purcell, Ogden Whitney, and even Don Heck didn’t prove to be quite what he was looking for. Well, the answer to Stan’s prayers would soon walk in the door.
21.
Meanwhile, since National/DC was still Marvel’s  biggest (and still far larger) competitor, naturally, as both fan and pro, I kept up an interest in what was going on at 575 Lexington.
Despite my nigh-total immersion now in things Marvel, I still bought comics published by the various other companies, though I’m not sure where I bought them. Some hole-in-the-wall store somewhere in Manhattan, I’m sure. I was still a fan of sorts of Julie Schwartz’s mags, as well as of a few other National titles such as Doom Patrol. I remember feeling unhappy (though I tried not to show it) when one day I mentioned Hawkman to Stan in passing, and he coldly retorted that that comic “isn’t selling.” The Winged Wonder was still a sentimental favorite of mine, after all. I picked up the remaining Archie “Mighty Crusaders” material, the Dell/Western heroes, Harvey’s mostly-reprints of Simon & Kirby’s Fighting American and Will Eisner’s The Spirit, et al., though all but the latter two mags were now purchased mostly just to keep my collection going.
(By late 1965, I’d had my parents mail me all the comics I had stored at their rented home in Missouri: the Marvels first, but soon everything else as well. As soon as I located a Manhattan bindery that could do so at a halfway reasonable price, I had all my Marvels and the Julius Schwartz DC revivals bound in hardcover... along with a few Golden Age titles such as my complete run of All-Star Comics, the Dell/Western Animal Comics and Pogo Possum, Mad #1-23, Joe Kubert’s Tor for St. John, and a few others. This was so I could display them conveniently on bookshelves, rather than have to dig through boxes to find them. It worked quite well, except that, years later, I would discover that binding comics severely lowered their economic value. That hadn’t been a factor in 1965–66, but of course every year I probably lost several hundred dollars, if not more, in the overall monetary worth of a comic collection that was growing in value at a much slower rate than if I had left the magazines separate. Oh well, live and learn.)
The most interesting thing to me about National in that era was realizing how little the higher-ups on Lex Av seemed to understand of what was going on on Mad Av—though this info probably came to me in late ’65 rather than in ’66.
I was startled one night at Phil Seuling’s weekly poker game, for instance, to learn from inker Mike Esposito (who worked under his own name for National and as “Mickey Demeo” or later “Joe Gaudioso” for Marvel) that he had recently attended an editorial and staff meeting at National wherein the guys in charge tried to analyze and disparage—at one and the same time—Marvel’s growth, and why its titles were increasingly outselling most of their own, especially in terms of percentages of print runs. Mike was my first source for learning that at least one senior National editor (or else co-publisher Irwin Donenfeld) had ascribed Marvel’s sales success to “bad art”; he’d suggested that the artwork by guys like Kirby, Ditko, Heck, et al., was so amateurish that it allowed the readers to imagine that they could draw as well as the Marvel artists, and that’s why they liked the books; the National editors evidently compared Marvel art to the situation with rock stars: guys who weren’t necessarily able to play a guitar, or even sing, any better than a kid figured he could. Case in point: Early in ’65, Wonder Woman editor/writer Robert Kanigher had forced Mike and his penciler/partner Ross Andru to draw the Amazon’s adventures in a style imitative of the Golden Age work of original WW artist H.G. Peter—only much cruder and stiffer than HGP’s best, early work. The result, of course, had merely been that that title’s already low sales tanked even further. Kanigher should have stuck with Egg Fu and Fireworks Man.
John Romita, who’d also been present at such a meeting (probably the same one), soon confirmed to me that Mike’s story of that National confab was quite accurate.
Actually, the DC brain trust had lost me at the notion of Kirby and Ditko being “amateurish.”
This from a company that had never let Romita draw a single super-hero yarn since the Silver Age had begun… that had assigned a solid but unexciting romance artist like Bruno Premiani to draw “Doom Patrol” while guys like Romita and Colan wandered away from the company because they were no longer being kept busy drawing love stories… and that, half a decade earlier, had allowed one of its editors to blackball Jack Kirby from the entire firm over a matter totally unrelated to either National or comicbooks.
Carmine Infantino was drawing, or at least laying out, an increasing percentage of National’s covers, and his dynamic layouts were a distinct improvement for many of them… but they didn’t make up for interiors that often seemed increasingly uncompelling compared to the excitement Stan was getting out of not just Jack but other artists as well. And the writing at DC? It’s not that it was generally “bad,” since it was mostly done by seasoned professionals—but their stories didn’t reach the young audience the way Stan’s did. Of course, they didn’t have Kirby, Romita, et al., illustrating their tales, either.
22.
For my own part, while I’d quickly wearied of scribing a war comic—even one done in roughly a Marvel super-hero style—I persevered with “the war comic for people who hate war comics.” Mostly, things went fairly smoothly.
Strangely, however, at least from my perspective, one day early in the year, Stan got upset with me—over a plural.
I had titled the story for Sgt. Fury #32 “A Traitor in our Midsts!” Stan had proofed that tale, as usual—yet later, when it was way too late to change it, he suddenly decided “Midsts” was not a proper word and told me I should have written simply “Midst.” One reason I know how strong his feelings were is that by now I’d been moved from that corrugated desk near the doorway of the main production room to a corner next to a window, where I had both a regular desk—with real drawers and everything!—and, behind me, a drawing-board on which I could lay original art at a 45-degree angle for easier proofreading (although, unlike Stan, I preferred to sit while I proofed). To my surprise, I had discovered that, in that corner that abutted Stan’s office, I could often overhear Stan and others talking in there if they raised their voices a bit. I never intentionally eavesdropped, but once or twice I heard things I wasn’t supposed to—like Stan complaining to Sol, for a few strident sentences, about my use of “Midsts” (this is after he’d already berated me about it). Sol just mumbled vague assent; he had no dog in that fight, and anyway, what was done was done. To this day, I can’t figure out what all the fuss was about. But it was real and upsetting enough when it happened.
For Sgt. Fury #34, I got Stan’s permission to devise an origin story for the Howling Commandos. Dick Ayers and I came up with the carrot-topped Red Hargrove as Nick Fury’s buddy during his late civilian days, and had him die in Fury’s arms during the attack on Pearl Harbor—giving extra motivation for Nick’s determination to lead the Howlers into battle for the rest of World War II.
Another rewarding moment re Sgt. Fury concerned a character Stan and Jack had created earlier in the series: a German soldier previously identified only as Eric. Being of Teutonic descent on both sides, it had bothered me to see each and every German in the mag portrayed as a Nazi or at least as a willing subject of the Third Reich. So I gave the hitherto mononymic Eric a patronymic—Koenig, my mother’s maiden name—and soon a new Howling Commando was born.
During this first half-year or so when I was writing Sgt. Fury, Stan decided I should set its 1966 Annual on D-Day, June 6, 1944. I argued that that removed an element of suspense from the series, which had a pre-D-Day feel to it. Thus far, the only Howlers besides Fury definitely known to have survived the war were Dum-Dum Dugan and Gabriel Jones, who were featured in the “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” series. Back in Sgt. Fury #4, Stan and Jack had shocked readers by killing off one of the original Howlers, Junior Juniper—and doing a D-Day story in which all the current crew were alive at the end would block us off forever from the option of killing, say, Reb Ralston or Izzy Cohen (not that I was eager to off either one, mind you). But Stan wanted “D-Day,” so “D-Day” it was! I called the story “A Day of Thunder!”
At least it gave me an excuse to do a bit of extra reading about World War II, a subject that had intrigued me since childhood. In the mid-1970s that interest would lead to my launching the aforementioned title The Invaders at Marvel, to tell WWII-era stories of Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the original Human Torch—and in the ’80s to my All-Star Squadron and several related DC titles, which for a few years would become a virtual RT mini-industry. All-Star Squadron was, and has remained, from 1981 to the present, my favorite among all the comics series I’ve ever written, nudging out even Conan the Barbarian and The Avengers. (Like I’ve said many times: If not for DC’s mid-’80s Crisis on Infinite Earths, I might well have found a way to happily go on scripting All-Star Squadron for several hundred issues since then, and who knows—by now, we might even be up to 1943 in the continuity!)
For the present, though, I was happy to have the Sgt. Fury assignment, even if I would rather have been scribing Avengers or Fantastic Four.
Somewhere around this time, I did finally win a major victory, even if it was one in which I was a purely passive spectator.
While Stan basically approved of my handling of Sgt. Fury, he couldn’t resist calling for changing dozens, at least, of words in each finished story. This usually took place right at his proofreading drawing-board, with Sol and me flanking him. Naturally, most comicbook editors did their rewriting of a script before it was lettered, since it’s both time-consuming and money-consuming to white out inked lettering and replace it with new wordage. More: Since these fixes usually had to be done in the office and in a hurry, they were often executed by the somewhat lackadaisical Morrie Kuramoto rather than by Artie Simek or Sam Rosen… and the results often showed it. But Stan, busy with his own writing and other editorial duties at home several days a week plus some evenings, felt he couldn’t spare the time to go over Denny’s or my (or Larry Lieber’s) scripts before they were sent to the letterer. That was his decision to make.
After a few issues, Stan had eased up on rewriting of my “Millie” and “Patsy and Hedy” stories—and basically I was now the de facto editor of Denny’s entries in the “girls’ books.” They didn’t matter much to Stan at this point; it didn’t take Nostradamus to predict that those titles would probably be gone ere long. But Sgt. Fury and the other hero-strips were a different matter.
Increasingly, as time went by, Sol was, at least mentally, tearing his hair out at Stan’s eleventh-hour rewriting of Sgt. Fury, which he saw—but Stan clearly didn’t—as a waste of time and resources. Even though the rewriting had diminished over time, it still cost hours and moolah. But who was Sol to second-guess Stan’s editorial expertise and decisions, let alone challenge them?
Finally, though, Sol must have girded his loins and broached the matter forcefully to Stan, because one morning, right before he began to proofread the finished pages of my latest collaborative opus, Stan turned to me and said, in so many words:
“Sol’s brought it to my attention that all the rewriting I’ve been doing on your stories is costing us a lot of time and money. And I know you’re basically doing a good job. The problem is, whenever I go over anybody else’s stories, I keep thinking of what I might’ve written. It’s occurred to me that I’m just trying to turn your stories into ones identical to what I’d have done, and that’s causing problems.”
He took a deep breath. Sol probably held his as well. Me, I didn’t know what might be coming next.
“So,” Stan continued, “I’ve told Sol that, from now on, he should just show me the first and last pages of any story you write. If those two pages are all right, I’ll figure what comes in between will be fine, too.”
I suspect we all exhaled at that point. Probably, until it actually happened, Sol hadn’t been 100% convinced Stan would really relinquish what his production manager clearly considered an oft-counterproductive roadblock to getting the books out in a timely manner.
The funny thing is, from then on, while Stan still rewrote an occasional line on future splash pages I’d written, and very occasionally something in their final panels and/or next-issue blurbs, I don’t think he ever again asked to read the middle 18 pages of one of my 20-page yarns in the editing process.
And you know what? Marvel and I and the all-important readers got along just fine for the next decade and a half.
23.
In the midst (“midsts”?) of my Sgt. Fury sojourn, sometime around the turn of ’66 I got another regular assignment… a super-hero series, this time. I had scripted only two or three issues of the war comic when, one day in Stan’s office, he unexpectedly handed me a 20-page-thick stack of original penciled artwork.
“Congratulations!” he said. “You are now the X-Men writer.”
I was stupefied. I looked down and saw a splash page… a twice-up drawing of two clearly criminal types garbed in X-Men uniforms robbing a bank, while a number of bank employees and customers look on, awe-struck.
This was the third issue of The X-Men wholly penciled by artist Werner Roth, who (because, guess what, he was also drawing romance stories for DC) was moonlighting for Marvel under the name “Jay Gavin,” after one or two of his sons.
The first eleven issues of X-Men had been penciled (and doubtless co-plotted) by Jack Kirby. But, although the title sold reasonably well, it was always mired saleswise near the bottom of the Marvel heap. With #12, Stan had switched to having Jack merely lay out the stories in rough pencils to be finished by other artists, thus freeing Jack for work Stan considered more important. He hoped that one of the artists completing the layouts would prove worthy to take over en toto from Jack. So, probably, did Jack.
The first (and worst) idea Stan had had for X-Men “relief pitcher” had been the great stylist Alex Toth, on X-Men #12. But Toth’s strength was his storytelling and layouts; he was ill-suited for simply finishing someone else’s roughs. To make matters even more untenable, Stan had assigned Vince Colletta to ink that issue, and Colletta’s feathery style watered down much of the power Toth might’ve brought to the assignment. Toth was known for his explosive temper (I’d learn a bit more about it a few years later), but I never did learn whether it was he or Stan who’d called the whole thing off after a single issue—which had, nonetheless, managed to kickstart a new mutant villain, Juggernaut. By almost any standard, Kirby/Toth/Colletta had been an artistic marriage made in purgatory. A fast annulment had been the only solution.
Next up finishing Kirby’s pencil layouts had been Werner as “Gavin.” He’d drawn horror, romance, and other comics for Timely/Atlas a decade or so before, including the SF/horror/romance period of Venus. Inked over several issues by Colletta, Sinnott, or Ayers, the Kirby/”Gavin” X-Men had at least retained much of the look of a Kirby art job—only more subdued, minus the coiled-spring tightness and power that one could always sense just beneath the surface in Jack’s work.
So now it was my job to dialogue the story in #20, which Werner had drawn from a plot by Stan. It was an issue of some moment, since it revealed how Professor X had lost the use of his legs.
Remembering how, in that “Iron Man” for Tales of Suspense #93, I hadn’t given every one of the hospital ensemble on the splash page something to say, which had led Stan to add a flurry of word balloons, on this occasion I took the opposite approach. This time, with two disguised evil mutants (The Blob and Unus the Untouchable) and nine “civilians” on the splash, I gave dialogue to each of them except one guy way over near the right edge of the page. It made for a rather talky splash, but Stan liked the result when he saw it on the transparent overlays I was still using at that juncture; I’m not even sure he didn’t add one or two word balloons of his own. Above the five-man credits box, he also added a brief caption announcing “Another Mighty Marvel Bullpen Surprise!”—with an arrow pointing down to my name. I greatly appreciated that vote of confidence.
Despite a bit of rewriting here and there by Stan, I was floating on cloud ninety by the time Sol and I left Stan’s office that day.
As with Dick Ayers on Sgt. Fury, though, there was a  second-issue hiccup of sorts. Somehow, between them, Stan and Werner had agreed that the latter would provide the plots on X-Men for the indefinite future, with me merely supplying the words. As soon as I learned that, I assailed Stan with a complaint that I, not the artist, should be handling the storyline. The readiness with which Stan acceded to my request makes me wonder if the previous plotting arrangement had been Werner’s notion, not his own.
Now I merely had to prove myself on my first ongoing Marvel super-hero assignment. The first chance I got (at my apartment, of course, not at the office—never at the office), I typed out a two- to-four-page single-spaced synopsis for the following issue.
X-Men #21 worked out all right, I guess. But as I look back over those X-Men and Sgt. Fury stories today, I see that, quite early on, I got into the habit of writing a bit too much dialogue. That was partly just my own garrulousness—and partly the fact that both Dick and Werner tended to find reasons to draw all five X-Men and all seven Howlers in many panels when they were together as a group… and, since every hero looked as if he/she was saying something, I often yielded to the temptation to give each, or nearly each, a speech balloon. I don’t think they were generally badly written balloons… but there were probably a few too many of them, even by Marvel’s standards.
Still, Stan never complained about the amount of text I wrote, so I persevered, for better and (probably) for worse.
With #22, Stan tossed a plot “suggestion” to me. He always felt that, if you took several relatively lackluster super-villains and threw them together into a group, they’d be far more impressive that way than as soloists. I tended to agree. He suggested that the mediocre Avengers foe Count Nefaria become leader of a cabal that (by the time the two of us got done with our discussion) consisted of Unicorn, The Eel, Porcupine, Scarecrow, and Plant Man. None of these guys were mutants, as had been most X-Men antagonists thus far—most had originated in “Iron Man” and “Human Torch” stories—but it was worth a shot. And it worked out fairly well over two issues. I used as a secret template one of the “Justice Society of America” stories from my misspent youth, in which an Injustice Gang of crooks tried to take over the U.S. government.
But it was really only with X-Men #24, “The Plague of… The Locust!,” that I began to feel comfortable with Marvel’s merry mutants. I was still loath to return to the “mutant of the month” policy that I felt had eventually become a drag on the mag’s popularity, and The Locust was only a so-so villain with a reasonably good name. Still, he was my concept, and I was happy with the costume Werner gave him and with the story that resulted.
24.
It was around this time that I began to formulate, without noising it about, my attitude toward creating (mostly, co-creating) characters for Marvel—or for National/DC (if I’d stayed there)—and my work on The X-Men was a major early part of that process.
I’ve no idea when I first heard the term “work-for-hire,” though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the 1960s. Still, the policy itself was already very much with us, late and soon, and I had basically accepted it when I’d entered the field, as had we all—at least for the time being. I’d known since my fandom days at least the broad outlines of how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had basically sold their “Superman” creation to DC in 1938 when they accepted a payment of $130 for allowing a 13-page story featuring the Man of Tomorrow to be printed in Action Comics #1. And, far as I knew, the same thing had happened with nearly every other character that debuted in comicbooks back in the Golden Age—and ever since.
Well, I figured, that was the price of admission to the show: The publisher paid for the expensive printing and distribution of the material you submitted—he bore the full risk of profit and loss and didn’t demand back what he’d paid you if no one purchased the comic—you as writer and/or artist were paid a page rate, maybe an occasional bonus if the publisher was feeling munificent—and that was that. The publisher got the right to “print and reprint,” with no obligation to make the writer or artist any additional payment. You either accepted or rejected that arrangement… and I’d decided to accept it. I wanted the gig, warts and all.
As I took to phrasing it jokingly a decade or so ago: I knew I was signing up on a pirate ship when I came aboard, and I felt it would ill behoove me decades later to suddenly claim I’d been shanghaied. Besides, most of the time it was fun associating with these particular “pirates.”
All the same, I knew myself. I had no doubt that, if I made up a character, I would resent it if, later, said character became a toy or a TV show or a movie or something else outside the printed page for which I’d been paid a flat rate and I didn’t receive any extra payment for my original act of conception. Of course, I wanted the co-creating artist to be paid as well. (I hadn’t thought much yet about payment for the reprinting of my work, but that would follow soon enough.)
It wasn’t that I necessarily felt I had to outright own or co-own the character, as long as the above rights were guaranteed. Only they weren’t.
More than once during my first year or two in the industry, a puzzled Manhattan bank teller would squint at that lonnnng paragraph stamped on the back of my paycheck and ask, “What’s this? I’ve never seen anything like it before.” I would usually quip that it merely stipulated that my first-born child belonged to Marvel Comics. That usually got a chuckle from the person on the other side of the bars.
Very quickly, to satisfy both Marvel and myself, I came up with my own personal secret agenda. I would do as good a job as I could writing my stories, making them as original and exciting and thought-provoking as possible… but I would avoid making up totally new super-heroes, so far as possible.
Of course, I knew I’d have to make a number of mental exceptions to my plan. For one thing, I accepted that I’d have to devise new villains. I couldn’t have The X-Men battle Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants every issue. Hence the likes of Dominus and The Locust, with more (and thankfully better) to come. I was fully aware that a number of Marvel characters who’d premiered as villains, including half the current Avengers lineup, had now conveniently reformed and were doing active duty as heroes; but that was a “risk” I willingly took, and I accepted that it was the publisher’s and editor’s decision what they did with my villainous output. The foregoing philosophy would be my mindset over the ensuing decade-plus as I came up with Banshee, Ultron, Tiger Shark, Cobalt Man, Orka the Human Killer Whale, Red Guardian, Llyra, Commander Kraken, The Valkyrie, Sunfire, Death’s-Head, Arkon the Magnificent, Thundra, etc., etc., etc.
As for heroes:
Well, whenever possible my first time around at Marvel (1965-1980), I tried to arrange it so that a “new” super- hero I co-created was at least partially an old super-hero, re-imagined to have the look and feel of a new one. Thus there would later be a Roy Thomas-conceived Black Knight, but he would echo both the mid-1950s Arthurian warrior concocted by Stan Lee and Joe Maneely and the dastardly, winged-stallion-riding Black Knight introduced by Lee and Ayers in a 1964 “Giant-Man.” Stan and Jack’s golden-hued “Him” from Fantastic Four would be transmogrified into Adam Warlock, the sole super-hero on Counter- Earth, when I could just as easily have dreamed up a brand new character from scratch, for all the difference the FF entity’s previous appearances made to the storyline (well, I did keep his cocoon). Thus likewise John Buscema’s and my Vision, who owed name and basic look to a 1940s Kirby (or Simon-&-Kirby?) other-dimensional alien, when all Stan would stipulate in 1968 was that the new Avenger I was to develop be an “android.”
Not that the “old heroes” I would ransack for Marvel Comics were invariably of Timely/Atlas/Marvel lineage. I cast a wider net than that. The Yellowjacket identity once assumed by an amnesiac Hank Pym was a name and insect motif I lifted from a minor 1940s Charlton hero. The Grim Reaper, probably the second-best-known villain I came up with for The Avengers, had been the name of a lackluster backup hero at Pines/Standard, who hadn’t even had a scythe to call his own. The Glob (in the very first Incredible Hulk yarn I ever plotted) was more of a monstrous villain than hero, but the point here is that he/it was a virtual clone of The Heap from Hillman’s Airboy Comics and appeared before either Marvel’s Man-Thing or DC’s Swamp Thing shambled out of any marsh. Morbius the Living Vampire and Werewolf by Night would be my permutations of movie themes I’d liked as a high-schooler (1957’s The Vampire and 1958’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, respectively). Even Starr the Slayer was an amalgamation of Conan the Cimmerian, Thongor of Lemuria, Brak the Barbarian, and other sword-and-sorcery heroes I had encountered in recent paperback books.
Well, why not? Like they say, there’s nothing—or at least, damn little—genuinely new under that lucky ol’ sun. I could point out similar but unacknowledged antecedents of many another hero “created” in the Silver and Bronze Ages by others than myself… but, as Herman Melville’s famous scrivener once quipped, I would prefer not to.
Obviously, since a foolish consistency is the Green Goblin of little minds, I would sometimes overrule the mutation-not-creation maxim in my head. Hence a handful of original heroes I conceived, from 1967’s Stingray (a good guy from the get-go, even though he was created to fight the Sub-Mariner) through 1970’s Red Wolf and 1971’s Doc Samson (who owed a name-inspiration to Doc Savage and a costume-adaptation from the 1940s ad-pages’ candy-swigging super-hero Captain Tootsie, but was still basically an original) to 1974’s Wolverine (because I felt Canadians needed super-hero love, too). In the first and last of the preceding instances, I simply decided I needed a character for a certain situation and went not to the cardboard-box-full of old comicbooks in the attic of my mind but rather to memories of the animal nature-books and St. Louis Zoo catalogs of my childhood, back when my greatest desire had been to become the next Frank Buck.
Which digression, believe it or don’t, brings us back to The X-Men.
25.
Only a few issues into scripting that title, certainly no later than around the time of the Locust tale, I went in to Stan with an idea for, believe it or not—a new super-hero. And, already violating my own inviolate rule, it was neither a regurgitation nor a transmutation of an old one.
I told Stan I wanted to introduce a new mutant and member of The X-Men…
…and I wanted him to be Japanese, or at least Japanese- American.
Exactly why and how I came up with this notion is a bit tricky to say, even for me.
On the one hand, there was the general sense among Marvel readers back then, never overtly stated in the comic, that the five teenage X-Men were the offspring of people who’d been associated two decades earlier with the World War II Manhattan Project. And the first two operational atomic bombs, as everyone knew, had been dropped on cities in Imperial Japan.
In addition—and I’ll admit this possibility only occurred to me as I wrote this section of the book—there was Morrie Koramoto. While Morrie had lived on the East Coast and hadn’t been subjected to the disgraceful, even unconstitutional indignities of the WWII “Japanese” internment centers in California, et al., that were the result of the hysteria of portions of the American public and a moral failure on the part of the mostly estimable President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Japanese-American letterer had numerous friends and relatives who had been relocated and held for months, if not years, in them. And from time to time, adding to what little I already knew about those desert-girded places of forced detention, he’d talk about them and about other WWII-related aspects of Japanese-Americans. (It would be because of Morrie, for instance, that before long in Sgt. Fury I would introduce a Nisei [first-generation Japanese-American] U.S. combat group, echoing one that had actually existed in the 1940s.)
Whatever combination of inspirations motivated me, I told Stan I’d like to add a sixth young X-Man, of Japanese descent. I hadn’t yet thought further ahead than that; no use expending additional energy till I had the go-ahead. I doubt if I already had in mind a name or precise mutant power for the newcomer.
Anyway, Stan listened to my heartfelt one-sentence pitch and then said… no.
I was incredulous. But I didn’t immediately take no for an answer. I launched into several arguments as to why it would be a good idea.
He stopped me short with what he assured me was his sole reason for turning me down:
“I don’t know if our artists could make an Oriental look sympathetic.”
Got to admit, that stopped me cold. And not because of his use of the word “Oriental,” which is today avoided by one and all as a “politically incorrect” term for a person of Asian heritage; that connotation didn’t exist in most circles in 1966, and judging its use then by today’s oh-so-awakened standards is a signal not of innate virtue but of lack of historical perspective.
I knew Stan wasn’t talking specifically about Werner Roth; he was referring to most if not necessarily all Marvel artists. I was certain then, and still am, that his statement wasn’t a manifestation of racial prejudice on his part; to him, it was purely a matter of practicality. Even so, I was startled to hear such a judgment from the man who the previous decade had presided over the Yellow Claw comic, with its oft-realistic and, yes, sympathetic representations of Chinese men and women, both heroes and villains, by the likes of Joe Maneely, John Severin, and Jack Kirby.
All the same, I knew I wasn’t going to win that argument that day. Stan’s mind was made up, at least for the moment. So I left his office and secretly nursed my notion for four years, without ever mentioning it again—until the day would come when we needed a fill-in issue of X-Men and Stan had largely exempted me from having to get his okay in advance in order to introduce new themes or characters.
And then, finally, the Japanese mutant called Sunfire would live, co-designed by artist Don Heck and myself, in the pages of 1969’s X-Men #64.
Better late than never.
26.
In the meantime, minus a Japanese or Japanese- American mutant, I went back to performing “the art of the possible” in X-Men… coming as close as I could manage to Stan’s writing (and thinking) style, while presumably Werner Roth was doing the same thing with regard to Jack Kirby.
The next antagonist for the mutants was Kukulkan, based on Mesoamerican myth. Alas, that storyline came way too late for me to deduct expenses from my 1964 trip to Mexico from my 1966 taxes; but I enjoyed doing it anyway, even if it was no landmark of the Marvel Age. The high point, in my eyes, was Stan’s having Kirby pencil the cover of #25.
After that two-parter, I got Stan’s permission to bring back in X-Men #27… The Mimic.
I had fallen in love (or at least “in like”) with Calvin Rankin, whose mutant power was the ability to duplicate the powers of any other mutant(s) with whom he came into contact. In some ways, The Mimic for me became a substitute for the Japanese-ancestried mutant I had wanted to introduce a few months earlier. I had it in mind that Rankin would become the sixth teenage X-Man, and that’s what I intended to set up over the course of #27 (dated Dec. 1966, but due to come out that autumn).
But then, something happened. Much as I enjoyed writing The Mimic, the more panels I scribed featuring him, the more I decided it would be just too much—a mutant overload—to bring him permanently into Prof. X’s little skiffle group. Sure, he’d be fun to play around with for a few issues, but in the end, I decided, he made the other X-Men… superfluous. They’d be in danger of becoming little more than walking batteries to supply The Mimic with power. So, reluctantly, I dropped my plan to insinuate The Mimic into The X-Men.
I was learning a stone-hard lesson of comicbooks, as of other storytelling media:
You can make up a character, or dragoon one, for your own purposes… but, in the end, that character him/herself will tell you what is right for him or her.
Like many another scribe, I’ve spent the rest of my four- color career absorbing, over and over again, that ineffable lesson.
Well, anyway, the proto-Sunfire non-starter notwithstanding, things seemed to be going fairly well for me with X-Men… and Sgt. Fury… and my staff job, with its various proofreading and other quasi-editorial duties. Both comics I scripted seemed to be selling reasonably well if not spectacularly, and I had long since laid to rest any last, lingering doubts that I might have erred in throwing over the job at National/DC to take up with Stan Lee and his Merry Marvel Marchers.
27.
Denny O’Neil, unfortunately, was another story… and one I’m hesitant to relate. But it’s Marvel history and it’s comics history… and, to a certain extent, it’s my history as well as Denny’s. So, the more so since it reflects no dishonor on my late fellow Missourian, here goes:
I’ll confess I was, for a time, blissfully unaware of Stan’s growing dissatisfaction with the young writer/editorial assistant I’d found him. A complicating factor was that, since Denny was now married and a father (his son being born around the turn of the year), he and I fraternized even less than before and rarely swapped notes on how things were going, workwise.
F’rinstance, I never learned till years after the fact that some irresponsible Magazine Management editor down the hall tried to enlist him in a scheme to slip Stan a cube of LSD to see what might transpire. Denny wisely declined to be a part of that little plot.
Early on, I attended a party on an invitation I got second-hand from Denny. It had originally been for major Magazine Management editor (and emerging “black humor” novelist) Bruce J. Friedman. For some reason, Friedman passed the invite on to Denny, who in turn handed it off to me. I figured, why not go? The party turned out to have a few interesting aspects: (1) By coincidence, it was held in the very same apartment complex on East 86th Street where I would wind up living from 1968 to ’76; and (2) also present that evening was poet Allen Ginsberg, though I never actually met the Great Man; I was merely part, at one point, of a small clatch of guests listening as he held court. Oh, and (3) one young advertising exec I talked to was very full of himself because a slogan he’d recently coined for a brand of local pizza sold by the slice had become mildly notorious across the city, including in huge ads on the sides of city buses. His celebrated catch phrase: “Had any lately?” Of such inspirations, it seemed, were advertising careers in Manhattan made.
Denny, as it turned out, soon had more than his share of contacts down the hall where they published the “men’s sweat” mags and the like. The Magazine Management people found occasional uses for us lowly comics folks. In early ’66 Denny was persuaded to pose for a photo that was used to illustrate a supposedly fact-based article on gay night life (then still illegal), with Denny photographed outside a disreputable-looking bar. He was assured by the editor that no one would recognize him when it was printed—but one day soon afterward I was walking down that same hallway, glanced through the big window of the magazines’ production room, and instantly recognized Denny in that photo—even though it was several feet away—and upside down. I recall Denny being not too happy about that.
(Aside: In another gratis photo shoot for the Real Magazine People down the hall, Bill Everett was identified as a “back-alley abortionist.” When my turn came, I was given several spare pegs to try to fit into round holes on some sort of psychological test for an article that supposedly exposed a major scandal in that area of testing. I heard later that those “men’s mags” finally discontinued having various staffers pose for photos when pics of two of them got printed under the heading “Wanted Dead or Alive,” and everybody belatedly became terrified that someone might shoot the pair on sight for the alleged reward. And these were the people who looked down on the comics!)
By and large, Denny and I pursued separate duties, in separate offices across the corridor from each other; he was in with Marie Severin, John Romita, and Morrie Koramoto. I had “seniority” of a vague sort, but I never gave him any instructions unless I was passing them along from Stan or Sol. We got along very well, if not chummily. I was as immersed in making good at my still-relatively-new job as he was at providing for what was now a family of three, dwelling for the moment in a low-rent part of Manhattan.
One of the few times I recall the two of us ever being together in conference with Stan came when Stan decided he wanted to kick around a few plot notions with us. One, I believe, involved a notion of Stan’s that had just occurred to him: “What if The Red Skull kidnapped the Red Chinese delegate to the United Nations?”
Denny and I exchanged puzzled looks. Then Denny informed him that there was no “Red Chinese” rep in the UN. In 1966, the Chinese seats on both Security Council and General Assembly were still the bailiwick of the Nationalist Chinese on the island of Taiwan, ever since they’d fled there after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. (That arrangement at the UN was destined to last till 1971.) Stan just looked at us blankly. Denny and I had both assumed that anyone living or working in New York City, where the UN was located (if not particularly beloved of the inhabitants, since its delegates tended to park anywhere they damn well pleased), would be aware of that fact. Stan, though an intelligent man and sophisticated in his own way, simply had no interest I could ever detect in politics, either national or international.
28.
One very sudden indication that all was not quite kosher between Stan and Denny occurred around the start of the year. Denny happened to be sitting momentarily near the door in the production room I shared with Sol and Flo, when Stan walked in to confer with one or more of us. He was in mid-sentence when he glanced down and spied a metal button pinned to Denny’s shirt.
I forget what specific phrase adorned said button, but it basically amounted to: “LEGALIZE POT.”
Stan instantly saw red, grabbed hold of the button, and pulled it off Denny’s shirt. I’d be surprised if he hadn’t ripped the shirt. We were all too shocked to do more than drop our collective jaws. Stan spat out a couple of sentences about how that kind of message wasn’t something Marvel or anybody working for it could be associated with. Then he threw the button into a wastebasket and stalked out of the room.
Denny retreated to the opposite office a few seconds after Stan left. He didn’t retrieve the button. Sol, Flo, and I thought it best to just go back to whatever we’d been doing pre-incident, as if it had never occurred.
Added to that minor happenstance, Stan seems to have begun to become disenchanted with Denny’s work, including but not limited to his scripting. I really didn’t see that coming, since I knew Denny was a good writer, in a more or less objective sense. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that he and Stan might simply be on wildly varying wavelengths, just as Stan and Ditko had been.
I certainly hadn’t gotten any hint Stan was unhappy with how Denny completed that Everett-drawn “Doctor Strange” story he’d inherited in mid-spell. After all, Stan had him fully script the next two episodes solo. And, at roughly the same time, he tapped Denny to supply dialogue for the final two-thirds of Daredevil #18, which introduced The Gladiator. As Stan put it in that issue’s credits, “Smiley just had time to write the first seven pages before dashing south for his first vacation in years!” (Maybe this is the same “vacation” he referred to in Strange Tales #147?) I don’t remember sensing any dissatisfaction on Stan’s part with Denny’s scripting in that case, either.
(And, as witness the episode with Steve Skeates the previous summer, Stan could be quite vocal about scripting he didn’t like. At the same time as DD #18, he had Kirby dialogue the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” story Jack had co-plotted and penciled for Strange Tales #148. When Stan returned and proofread the completed product, he groused to Sol and me about how unhappy he was with the end result. Kirby, he felt, was truly wonderful at drawing and at dreaming up yarns and gimmicks—in his eyes, there was no one better!—but he didn’t like the dialogue and captions Jack wrote. I doubt there was time for Stan to rewrite much of that 12-pager… but Jack didn’t script any more hero stories for the company for several years.)
Back to Denny. Alas, my fellow Show-Me-stater was about to have a major “S.H.I.E.L.D.”-related crisis all his own.
Stan was increasingly looking to Denny and me to take more of the writing load off his shoulders. He had never wanted, on top of his considerable editing duties, to have to spend so many extra hours writing eight or nine comics a month—it was simply that, in the first few years of the Marvel Age, he hadn’t found what he was looking for in stories scripted by Robert Bernstein, Ernie Hart, Jerry Siegel, Al Hartley, Don Rico, Leon Lazarus, Larry Ivie, and/or Wally Wood (though he’d found a bit more favor in those by his brother Larry Lieber); and, as Marvel slowly expanded, Stan very much wanted to reduce the number of comics he scripted to a mere handful. By now, I was regularly writing both Sgt. Fury and X-Men on top of 40 hours a week in the office, so Stan considered me “full up” for the moment. But, while Denny was handling the so-called “girls’ books,” they weren’t really what Stan had hired him to do, and “Doctor Strange” relieved Stan of only ten pages a month. Accordingly, after Kirby had laid out the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” story for Strange Tales #149, Stan handed it to Denny to script. Surely, if things had worked out, “S.H.I.E.L.D.” would have become Denny’s regular assignment, relieving Stan of any scripting duties related to Strange Tales.
Alas, things didn’t work out—for Denny, or even for me.
For some reason, Stan decided to peruse Denny’s script for that story before it was mailed to the Brooklyn house Sam Rosen shared with his mother and a couple of (fellow-letterer) brothers. I don’t recall any specifics, but Stan told me he was unhappy with much of the dialogue and captions, and he “asked” me to do a major rewriting job. Sensing he didn’t want me to bring Denny into the equation, I did the reworking at home overnight. The finished script on that “S.H.I.E.L.D.” tale is still mostly Denny’s, though with probably a couple of hundred words or so of mine scattered throughout. I neither sought nor received any credit or payment on the yarn as published; it was all part of my staff job.
I said nothing about any of this to Denny, because I felt it was basically between him and Stan. Maybe I hoped that, since most of the script was still Denny’s work, he wouldn’t notice or at least care about the changes I’d made. And so I pretty much forgot the whole incident for some time.
It was two or three years later, actually, as new young writers began to drift into Marvel, that one of them— Gerry Conway—asked me one day rather tentatively about that “S.H.I.E.L.D.” story, which he was clearly aware I had heavily rewritten. Figuring it no longer made any difference, I told him what I recalled of the incident and queried why he’d asked. He said Denny had told him that he felt I had sabotaged him with Stan by rewriting that tale and making it seem as if he’d done a poor job that needed to be overhauled.
Naturally, I was stunned to hear this. It had never occurred to me that Denny would imagine I had volunteered to do that rewrite, let alone that I might even have taken it upon myself to do so without Stan’s ordering it. I felt an urge to phone Denny and tell him what had really happened; but it was way in the past now, and in the end, I never did. Maybe I should have.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure Denny did himself any favors around this time by dropping a note into the “suggestion box” Stan had placed on Flo’s desk as an incentive for any of us to propose potential Bullpen Bulletin items. As a result of Denny’s humorously worded card (quoted below), Stan inserted the following paragraph onto a Bullpen page for comics that came out during the summer:
ITEM! How about Dandy Denny O’Neil? Our poor, distraught bullpen buddy has been feeling so neglected because his name isn’t mentioned often enough in these bulletins (to suit HIM, that is!) that he left the following newspaper item on our desk: WRITER MAKES HOME IN TRASH CAN. Dennis O’Neil, young writer, today moved into an east side garbage can. Mr. O’Neil told reporters that he doesn’t feel he should associate with human company. “After all, I’m not worthy to be in the Bullpen Bulletin,” he explained, “so I’m obviously not worthy to live with folks.” Denny boy, give up the garbage can and come home to us again! We love ya—honest!
29.
Ironically, soon after the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” incident and Denny’s “suggestion box” note—it must’ve been March or very early April—Stan called me into his office and revealed to me for the first time that he was unhappy with Denny’s staff work: “I see him all the time walking up and down the hall, smoking on his pipe… and I’m damn sure he’s not thinking about Marvel Comics!”
(For some reason, at that inopportune moment, an image from the 1958 movie musical Gigi cascaded through my brain: Louis Jordan sitting in a fancy Parisian night club with his mistress, who’s being especially vivacious this evening, as he thinks/sings in voice-over: “So disarming/Soft and charming/She is not thinking of me!”)
Then or very soon afterward, Stan hit me with a verbal sledgehammer: He had decided to dismiss Denny from his staff job, though he would let him keep the “girls’ comics” as freelance income (while they lasted)—and, even worse, he instructed me that I was to tell him that he was fired from staff. I left the room stunned.
Shortly, in turmoil, I had a whispered confab with Sol, informing him what Stan had directed me to do. I accepted that it was Stan’s business who worked at Marvel, even if I didn’t agree with this particular decision, but I certainly didn’t feel I should be the one to tell Denny he was off staff. “I didn’t hire him,” I complained to Sol. “Stan did. So if he’s going to be fired, he should be the one to do it.” Sol could sense, I’m sure, that I was debating in my mind whether I should march back into to Stan’s office and tell him precisely that.
Sol paused a moment. Sighed. Then he said quietly, “Don’t worry about it. You’re right. You shouldn’t have to do it.” Another pause. “I’ll do it.”
He didn’t say it like one indifferent to being the bearer of bad tidings. The way Sol saw it, it came with the territory of being production manager. Sometimes you had to do the hard thing.
I didn’t try to talk him out of his offer. I just thanked him, most sincerely.
For decades, I assumed Sol carried the unwelcome message to Denny. Yet, in an interview years later, Denny reportedly said that one morning he “was called into Stan Lee’s office and he fired me, then and there, for no reason I am able to articulate. So I was with a non-working wife and a two-month-old baby and no money and without a job.” (Quoted in Abraham Reisman’s 2021 hatchet job True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.) Assuming Denny was correctly quoted in that book—which several prominent professionals have assured me they were not—I’ve no way of knowing if Denny misremembered precisely who delivered the bad news, or if perhaps Sol informed Stan he had volunteered to do the dirty deed and Stan had manfully decided, belatedly, that he would do it himself. In the end, it really doesn’t matter much.
I saw Denny later that day, after Sol or Stan or whoever had dropped the proverbial bomb. Denny was clearly despondent. I told him how sorry I felt about the whole thing. I added that I was pretty sure Dick Giordano at Charlton was still looking for new writers, despite having taken on Dave Kaler and Gary Friedrich over the past year, and I gave him Dick’s phone number.
One thing Denny mentioned later to people I knew was that, when he was let go, there was a newspaper strike going on in New York City. (Have I mentioned there was almost always a strike going somewhere on in NYC in those days?) By sheer coincidence, Stan had dismissed him at the very moment when it was most difficult for him to look for a job in his previously chosen field: journalism. Of course, for the (as it turned out, short-term) present, he still had the “girls’ books” to write, so Stan hadn’t actually tossed him out on the street with zero income. Still, it must have seemed that way to him at the time.
I’m pleased to say he quickly took my advice and contacted Giordano, and Dick was delighted to get him. Some months later, Dick would leave Charlton for an editorial job at National/DC, and Denny would be one of a couple of writers he would “take with him” to his new employer. There, Denny would forge out a major career for himself as both writer and, eventually, editor. And, most of the time, in spite of the unpleasant way it ended, he would graciously credit Stan and that half-year gig at Marvel with getting him started as a comics writer and would often say how much he felt he had learned from Stan. Good for him.
As for me: I made a mental note that, one of these days, when the time was right, I’d find a way to get Denny back doing some work for Marvel.
And I did, although it took me a few years.
Stan, for his part, soon managed to forget the circumstances of Denny’s departure. Years later, in an introduction to a book Denny had penned on comics scripting, Stan wrote: “I guess he figured DC Comics needed him more than we did…. Our loss was most definitely DC’s gain…. We should never have let Denny get away.” True that.
Happily, Denny would thrive, first at Charlton, then at National/DC, eventually even back at Marvel. And, while a couple of unpleasant issues arose between him and me over the next three decades, I’m glad to say we became genuinely friendly toward each other over the last few years of his life, as perhaps only old colleagues-in-arms can be. When he passed away in 2020, after three years of severe disheartenment over the death of his second wife Marifan, I felt I had lost—if not a friend, at least someone who should have been a friend, if we hadn’t both let other things get in the way.
30.
As it turned out, I quickly had an additional reason to regret Denny’s departure.
His name was Ron Whyte.
Never heard of him? No surprise. Read on.
After attending Yale Drama School, the young Montanan seems to have gotten his Marvel staff job by sometime in late spring of ’66, by writing Stan a letter. All I recall Stan telling me when he hired him was that a play he’d written  while at university had won an award of some kind. I doubt if Stan even bothered to submit his new discovery to the rigors of a “writer’s test.”
Ron was assigned (was it to Denny’s former spot?) in the office alongside Marie and John Romita. I recall Marie saying somewhere that she liked his sense of humor; Stan would express similar sentiments in a Bullpen Bulletin. I don’t remember Ron and myself interacting all that much, so I never got many yoks out of him. I was never 100% certain what his exact role was at Marvel, except that, besides doing backup proofreading and minor editorial-assistant chores, he apparently helped Stan with various PR types of writing—maybe a speech he was to give at a college, that kind of thing. Hey, better him than me!
In fact, due to my own workload (and no doubt to a certain obliviousness of attitude on my part—I can be like that), I even managed to remain unaware of the full extent of Ron’s physical handicaps. Clearly, one arm and hand of his were somewhat disfigured, which of course didn’t disqualify him in any way from writing and/or editing comics. But I’m sure I was ignorant of the fact that, not too long before, due to their congenital deformity from birth, he’d had both his legs amputated below the knees. He walked with crutches, but (perhaps he wore some sort of prosthetics?) I assumed he still possessed both legs, merely that they didn’t function. Far as I know, nobody, Ron included, ever told me any different. If anything, his physical problems made me more sympathetic to him. Anyone who overcomes such handicaps to lead a reasonably normal life deserves points of respect simply for managing to do so; none of us who have eluded those particular trials can ever be certain what we would do in such a situation.
I also suspected, though not through any overt actions, that Ron was gay. But again, that made scant difference to me. I counted at least one or two “homosexuals” (as the going term then still was) among the friends I’d made since arriving in New York. They swung one way, I swung another—so what?
Things rolled along that way for several months. I never got any early sense that Stan was displeased with whatever it was Ron was doing—even if I myself was never quite sure precisely what that was.
Ron’s presence in Marvel’s comics was negligible. He later wrote (in an unpublished personal journal) that he’d been tasked by Stan with writing up (and/or fleshing out) story ideas that Stan—or maybe he and Stan together—had come up with; he also claimed to have submitted ideas for super-hero stories that Stan utilized. I’ve no way either to verify or dispute any of this, except to suspect that, if so, Stan most likely rewrote or heavily edited anything so submitted, as was his wont. One area in which Ron may have been utilized, at least briefly, was in doing synopses for the Sub-Mariner episodes of the Grantray-Lawrence semi- animated Marvel Super-Heroes TV series that would debut that September (see below); it needed more material featuring Namor than was available from the past few years’ comics. Even I worked on at least one Sub-Mariner TV plot.
In terms of published Marvel stories, Ron scripted only half a dozen, all Westerns running nine pages or fewer. Since we were somewhat backlogged with sagebrush sagas written by Denny and a couple of others (I’d done a couple myself), Ron’s Westerns wound up mostly published with 1967 cover dates; one sat on the shelf till ’73.
At least once during that period, Stan evidently asked me to critique some sample dialogue Ron had written for a tale that involved the FF and X-Men. I’ve no memory of doing so—it was doubtless just an hour’s effort on my part, sandwiched ’twixt other duties—but I’ve seen a page of notes re Ron’s dialogue that are clearly my handwriting. Apparently I was only about half-favorably disposed toward his attempt… which may have led him to feel some animosity toward me. But I called ’em the way I saw ’em, which was what Stan had tasked me to do.
One of the few things I definitely recall about Ron Whyte’s tenure at Marvel is Stan’s calling me in near its end, after several months—to tell me he was going to fire him. He didn’t go into detail as to why, except for referring to some dialogue in a particular story (a Western? some super-hero sample? I dunno) as being “effeminate.” Well, at least—hallelujah!—Stan wasn’t asking me to be the one to fire a new staffer this time. Although, with Ron, I could’ve steeled myself to do it.
Ron was soon gone from Marvel, after a stint of several months… and, unlike in Denny’s case, I thought no more about him.
He, evidently, had further thoughts about me, though… and Stan as well.
A decade or so ago, a writer of comic histories sent me photocopies, on condition I didn’t publish them, of several pages of notes by Whyte for a book he had belatedly planned to write about his brief time in the field. By the time I saw those notes, previously unknown to me, Ron had passed away (in 1989). In them, he’d written character sketches of most of the Marvel staffers. The one about me was particularly vicious, but since I don’t have permission to quote from it, I’ll let it go at that. Ron was welcome to his opinion; I certainly had no use for it.
Then, surprisingly, in 2024 I was approached by a writer for a major magazine that was considering publishing an article about how Ron Whyte, way back in 1966, had overcome his physical handicaps and then-current attitudes toward gays to become an important if basically secret player at Marvel. Naturally, I did a mental double-take when I learned this, since, to the best of my knowledge, Ron’s carbon-copy footprint at Marvel had been little-toe-deep at best. For all I knew, after Stan fired him, he might’ve gone on to fame and fortune as a playwright or novelist and his work had simply escaped my notice, and if so, more power to him. But—major Marvel output? No freakin’ way, I told the magazine folks!
So, imagine my surprise when they showed me scans of another Whyte-written personal journal (date uncertain), an allegedly contemporary record of how, in ’66, he was actually writing full plots and even full dialogue for entire issues of Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Thor, Sgt. Fury (a title I was then scripting, not Stan)—even The X-Men (including #27—the issue that reintroduced The Mimic, a tale of which I knew for a fact that I had written every plot twist and syllable, since I loved that character)! Oh, and he’d claimed he’d ghosted 10-page “Sub-Mariner” and “Doctor Strange” yarns for Stan as well.
There was little I could say to the magazine folks regarding those claims except that, while naturally I hadn’t been peering over Stan’s shoulder while he was home on Long Island four days a week presumably writing some of the best comicbook super-hero scripts in the history of the field, I had trouble picturing Ron Whyte surreptitiously scribing those stories without me (or anybody else in the office) ever getting so much as a whiff of it. My response to those who’d sent me the journal scans was that I felt that, when he wrote those entries, Ron was indulging in some sort of rich but delusional fantasy life. If he’d written a mere fraction of what he claimed to have scribed in ’66, Stan wouldn’t have fired him—he’d have given him a raise!
(This second time around, I also had an “opportunity” to read Ron’s account of various alleged verbal sparrings he’d had with me—in one case, with his using, inexplicably, a homophobic remark aimed at me. Needless to say, none of these conversations ever actually occurred except inside his head, the only place where they would have remained safe from a verbal response of my own that not only I but the whole Marvel staff would have recalled years later. I likewise finally had the opportunity to read for the first time some of the vile comments he wrote about Stan as well, once the bloom was off that rose. On perusing those remarks, I felt a lot better; I was clearly in good company, and Whyte’s evaluations of personality looked more off- kilter than ever.)
The major-magazine article about Whyte’s “contributions” to Marvel Comics never happened; but a junior version of the piece finally popped up on the Internet—with a shared byline for the author of the equally scurrilous earlier-mentioned book True Believer. The print mag, I suspect, had come to concur with my reluctant thesis that one can have a then-problematical sexual orientation and can overcome considerable physical handicaps… and still be a prevaricator and/or a fabulist. The author of True Believer was far more willing to stifle what meager critical faculties he may ever have possessed in the interest of further besmirching Stan’s accomplishments. And thus was a decidedly minor player at Marvel elevated, at least in one little-read online article, to a position he never came close to deserving in real life.
And, hopefully, that’s all I will ever have to say or write about Ron Whyte.
31.
Somewhere along the way, I decided it was time for me to quit being a “Four-Eyes” and get myself fitted with a pair of contact lenses. But these, unfortunately, were the older, thick variety as opposed to today’s thin, ultra-flexible models. I rarely if ever wore them to the office; and, whenever Gary or Len and I planned an “evening on the town,” it would take me so long to get them in—I had an abhorrence of sticking things in my eyes—that my friends were liable to be annoyed with me by the time I was ready to depart. Over the new year, I eventually gave up on contact lenses for good.
It didn’t help that, one night after a bit of having a drink or two too many at a party, I fell asleep in our Greenwich Village apartment with my contacts still in place, which was a definite no-no—and awoke the next morning with my eyes feeling as if a herd of elephants was sticking ice picks in them. Gary wandered in from a night at Cindy’s to find me down on my knees at the kitchen table, trying both to deal with the pain and to get those damn contacts out of my eyes.
Working backward, I wonder if that rare bout of excessive alcohol intake on my part perhaps occurred the night Gary and I went to Dave Kaler’s housewarming party.
Dave had recently moved to the Upper West Side and wanted his friends to see his new digs. Gary and I were happy to be invited, since it meant that Dave was largely over his snit about our moving out on him. It was a fun evening, and one of three things I particularly recall from it is Flo Steinberg, Gary, Denny, and me harmonizing unharmoniously on the old gospel/hillbilly song “This Little Light of Mine.”
The second thing I definitely remember is that I somehow wound up at one point sitting on a couch next to Steve Ditko (who was the penciler on the new “Captain Atom” stories Dave was writing, remember) and decided, on a whim, to risk asking him why he had quit Marvel. I swore to him that, if he didn’t want me to, I wouldn’t repeat to Stan anything he told me (maybe I’d have been able to keep that promise, maybe not), but that, as a fan of his since the 1960 “Captain Atom,” I’d sure like to know what went wrong, since I was so sorry to see him go.
To my surprise, instead of totally blowing me off, Steve began an explanation, which consisted of, and I quote: “Well, you know, when a guy’s working against you—”
But then his voice abruptly trailed off, never to finish his sentence… nor did I deign to repeat my query. Maybe I hadn’t had quite enough to drink yet to do that.
The third thing I remember—well, that would be the “morning after” described above, assuming I’m right about that.
32.
A couple of subjects back, I could have mentioned that, amid Stan’s long search for an artist who could take over the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” series and free Kirby for other work, a former Bullpenner named John Buscema was assigned to finish Jack’s pencils for the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” yarn in Strange Tales #150. But I didn’t, because that would’ve been a rather backhanded and inadequate way to introduce into this book the artist who became, following Kirby’s 1970 departure from Marvel, one of the two illustrators (John Romita being the other) who was most important to the style and artistic content of Marvel comics for the next decade.
Certainly, Stan had bigger things in mind for “Big John” Buscema from the get-go than simply the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” series. Our fearless leader had simply (a) needed somebody to complete those Kirby layouts, and (b) wanted the new artist to get a taste of Kirby storytelling, since it was definitely the Marvel gold standard.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, since I’m not actually certain which of two Marvel stories dated “November 1966” John drew first. I suspect his first second-time-around penciling assignment for Marvel was the 10-page “Hulk” story in Tales to Astonish #85. Stan scripted that one, but was disappointed with John’s art. Sure, the people and scenery were well-delineated, but there was something lacking in the Hulk figures and the action. That was understandable, since John had never drawn super-heroes—except, in the mid-’50s, the short-lived, lackluster “Nature Boy” for downscale Charlton. Instead of violently smashing through walls and buildings on the splash page, for instance, John had drawn the Hulk basically just flexing his muscles— with his left elbow inadvertently chipping out a chunk  of a Greek-style pillar among “the concrete caverns of  New York.”
If I were a betting man (and I occasionally am), I’d wager that’s when—and why—Stan assigned John to finish the penciling, over Kirby’s layouts, on that “S.H.I.E.L.D.” entry. He admonished John to glean everything he could from Jack’s dynamic way of telling a story. (I could be wrong and John did the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” first, but I doubt it.)
Either way, John Buscema proved an apt pupil, who quickly caught on to what Stan now wanted and needed in a comicbook artist. By the time he penciled his second  “Hulk,” for Astonish #86, the figures of not only Ol’ Green-skin but also of his opponent, the muscle-bound Humanoid, looked and moved much more the way they would have if Jack had been doing the honors, except that the Buscema-drawn bystanders tended to have a more realistic aspect. Stan kept John on “Hulk” for a third story—
—before he assigned him to The Avengers, a few months down the line, thereby handing me my all-time favorite comicbook collaborator.
As for when I myself first met John B.: I have a vague memory of being introduced to this tall, burly middle-aged man with a deep voice, probably on the occasion when he first came into Marvel (as opposed to Timely). I learned that, like Romita, this towering Italian-American had first drawn for Goodman’s comics company in the late 1940s, most notably on “true crime/real-life” titles such as Lawbreakers Always Lose and Man Comics, but also on Western, romance, and horror/mystery tales. In the mid-1950s he had also worked for the American Comic Group and for Dell/Western (I soon learned he’d drawn for the latter the adaptation of the 1956 film Helen of Troy, which I had particularly liked). When Timely experienced a disastrous downturn in the late ’50s, he departed for the commercial art field (i.e., advertising), where he labored for the next eight years. He earned good money and learned a lot of valuable art techniques during that era, but he came to dislike advertising because the agencies were forever dragging him into the city for conferences and various kinds of “fixes.” He preferred to spend more time at home with his family, just drawing. While he was often outspoken about disliking the comicbook field, it provided him with both a good living and a chance to spend his whole day drawing—so he would stick with comics till his passing in 2002.
Whether it was he or Stan who had contacted the other about his returning to Marvel in ’66—
John Buscema was back.
And, by now, he had become what he was to remain for the rest of his life and career: one of the best, if not the best, artist, in sheer technical and anatomical terms, ever to work in the industry.
33.
During 1966, Stan continued to develop the style of the Bullpen Bulletins pages and the letters sections. He wrote all of the letters sections related to the super-heroes except for those for the titles I (and maybe Denny) scripted, for which he soon had us take over responsibility.
He was especially proud of his idea for “no-prizes.” Originally he would just verbally “award” them to readers in his answers on the letters pages, assuming they’d realize it was all a joke and there really was no such thing as a “no-prize.” But then he began getting missives from those he’d “given” the awards to, complaining that they hadn’t yet received their “no-prizes.” Eventually, he had a bunch of envelopes printed up, with Marvel’s return address and a statement thereon that this envelope contained the addressee’s “no-prize.” Alas, that didn’t work with all recipients, some of whom wrote back grousing that they had eagerly torn open the envelopes when they’d arrived—and they’d been empty! At this juncture, Stan gave up; they’d have to figure things out for themselves.
He persevered in playing up the various Bullpenners. When Stan Goldberg provided the Millie-style art for a huge soft-drink billboard ad above Times Square, Stan sang his praises—and of course plugged Millie the Model at the same time. He pointed out that Mickey Spillane, who during the 1950s had been one of the bestselling authors in the world with his Mike Hammer detective novels, used to “scribble scripts” for Marvel during World War II. He lauded Bill Everett as “the Golden Age great who created SUB-MARINER” and as one with as distinctive a style as Steve Ditko.
As usual, he found a way to bring Jack Kirby prominently into the mix, with this Bulletin paragraph, albeit writing it as if it had been jotted down by an anonymous Bullpen observer:
ITEM! We just had to tell you this! It broke us up the other day! We were sitting around the bullpen, engaged in our usual activity of taking a coffee break and watching the clock, when King Kirby walked in, after having finished an hour-long story conference with Stan. By way of an exit line, Jack was heard to mutter: “Well, we just polished off a few holocausts, and a catastrophe or two! Now, I’ll go out and relax by dreaming up a few simple disasters!” Sometimes there’s more truth than poetry to that sentiment. Ever wonder what it’s like to illustrate galactic wars, battles between gods, and cosmic adventures day after day? If a simple thing like an earthquake took place across the street, Jack probably wouldn’t even hear it!
A month or so later, when Jack inked Captain America fighting a villain on the cover of the reprint comic Fantasy Masterpieces #4, Stan used a Bulletin to bring it to the attention of readers, a few of whom had asked to see what Kirby’s inking looked like. Stan rarely let more than a month or two go by without finding a way to sing Jack’s praises on the Bullpen page—probably the more so after he’d had to deal with the Kirbys’ unhappiness over the Herald Trib piece. He was trying to paper over his troubles with Jack… and I believe he mostly fooled himself into thinking he had succeeded. Well, Jack never really let him know otherwise… till it was too late.
More than once, in the mid-’60s, Stan cited various disc jockeys across the country who were “full-fledged Marvelites.” Another month, he wrote of how “more than a hundred newspapers from coast to coast” had featured articles on Marvel’s mags, and he reeled off the names of a dozen or so of them. Such things duly impressed Beatles fans and the comics’ older readers.
And, of course, when paperback-book collections of Marvel stories first began to be issued—when a record album utilized a Marvel hero on its cover—when “model hobby kits” and “board games” and “action dolls” featuring Marvel characters were first licensed—Stan was quick to let the waiting world know, even if the licensees didn’t feel it worthwhile to purchase paid ads in the magazines.
He played up the international appeal of Marvel’s comics by noting that in Mexico the Hulk was known as “La Mole” (he didn’t point out that the latter word was pronounced “moh-lay,” not like the English word “mole”) and Daredevil as “El Dynamo”—not missing a chance to mention that Cuba’s Castro had banned all U.S. comics as “subversive literature. That’s probably the nicest compliment we’ve had all year!”  Mentions of “Irving Forbush” began to pop up in Bulletins and letters pages, too. That unseen unofficial Marvel mascot had briefly been, back in the 1950s, the company’s answer to Mad’s Alfred E. Newman, when Stan had written and edited a couple of issues of a Mad imitation called Snafu. He decided Irv would do double duty in the Marvel Age, and Forbush soon eclipsed letterer Artie Simek as the butt of the largest number of credit-box gags each month.
When the time came to announce the departure of “sturdy STEVE DITKO” on a Bullpen page dated mid-year, Stan vaguely wished him well with his “future endeavors” (though he didn’t bother, in this instance, to resist calling him by one of the alliterative epithets the artist had always hated), and reminded the reader there’d still be “numerous reprints” of Ditko’s work “in our king-size issues.” And naturally he predicted that he and “Jazzy JOHNNY ROMITA” would “lift Spidey to still greater heights of Marvel magnificence!” (I’ve always wondered if, here, he was just whistling in the dark—or if he had a crystal ball squirreled away in his office, since that’s exactly what happened.)
34.
Also at mid-year, Marveldom Assembled (as Stan would occasionally call it) was shaken to learn that Marvel’s characters were soon to be on—wait for it—television.
Like the rest of the country, Robert Lawrence, a partner in Grantray-Lawrence Animation, had noticed when Batman became one of the most popular shows on TV, soon broadcast two nights a week instead of one. Doubtless intuiting that National/DC just then was not about to give his own company a bargain deal to produce animated cartoons about the likes of Superman or the Justice League, he approached Martin Goodman. Marvel’s esteemed publisher seems always to have looked on any outside licensing offer (be it for a Captain America serial in 1944 or a TV cartoon series in ’66) as “found money.” Thus, Lawrence quickly obtained what he later described as “an unbelievable contract” with the publisher, setting G-L up to produce a five-nights-a-week animated series that alternated between adventures of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, and the Sub-Mariner.
Now, when I say “animated” above,  I’m using the term loosely. Grantray- Lawrence’s animation style wasn’t going to give even the limited-animation approach of Hanna-Barbera much to worry about. Basically, the new show consisted of Photo- statted figures and backgrounds from actual Marvel comicbooks, with a minimal amount of actual animation of mouths, eyes, and the occasional arm or leg. Yet, strange to say, there was a plus side to that: At least the stories were closely adapted (both writing and art) from the comics themselves, instead of being TV network executives’ puerile ideas of what Cap and company (like Batman) were all about. Thus, the show, titled Marvel Super-Heroes, was almost a Marvel comicbook story come to life—or at least to some half- animated approximation of same.
One drawback, mentioned earlier, was that there weren’t enough 1960s “Captain America” and “Sub-Mariner” tales to fill the number of half-hour slots Grantray-Lawrence needed. I suggested to Stan that they could make use of the excellent artwork by Romita and Everett for the mid-1950s revivals; but Stan didn’t want those yarns utilized, because they didn’t dovetail with what he’d been writing since 1961. The Cap problem was solved by adapting one or more Avengers issues. A similar finessing was accomplished with the Sub-Mariner by adapting X-Men #6 and even the first Fantastic Four Annual (minus the F.F.), both of which had guest-starred Namor. But still more tales of that worthy were needed—and that’s when, as mentioned earlier, a few of us had to come up with plots for new episodes starring the prince of Atlantis.
And when the series aired in syndication later that year, Monday through Thursday from September through December?
The audience—which surely included far more eyes, mostly kids’, than had read copies of the actual comics—really went for it, even though some of us jaded pros winced at the crudity of the animation. At least in a certain sense, we were wrong—not for the first (or last) time.
Meanwhile, it wouldn’t be long before Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four would get their own shots at TV cartoons—but be careful what you wish for! Ironically, while the animation of those would be far superior to that on Marvel Super-Heroes, the networks’ strictly-for-kiddies limitations on the storylines soon made Stan long for the more faithful Grantray-Lawrence product. Network TV’s unrelentingly juvenile approach would be the bane of Stan’s existence for many years, including after he’d moved to Los Angeles partly to guide the characters’ small-screen fortunes.
35.
Meanwhile, during the first half or so of ’66, there was enough going on in the Bullpen to keep us hopping, so that I had scant time to pay attention to what the Grantray- Lawrence folks were up to.
For one thing—at some point, we moved! Virtually overnight, the man Stan referred to (in print, at least) as “Merry Marty Goodman” had his entire Magazine Management operation, lock, stock, and Marvel Comics, pick up stakes and decamp several blocks further up Mad Av, from 625 to one whose precise digits I forget—and which hardly matter. The joke going around the offices (and it would persist through yet another move a few more years down the line) was that our esteemed publisher relocated the company’s quarters a few blocks either direction up and down Madison Avenue depending on how much walking his doctor advised him to do for exercise.
Not that the mags’ readers knew about the move! Perhaps to keep overly avid fans from clogging up the elevators and waiting room (or maybe the company kept also some presence at the former address), the comics’ indicia continued to give our locale as “625 Madison Avenue” through the whole of ’67. (I’ll admit, I was totally unaware of this mistake or subterfuge or whatever the hell it was until comics historian Sean Howe drew attention to it in his 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. We were way too busy to read the indicia in comicbooks!)
At this point, I’m not always clear at which set of offices this or that particular event may have occurred—let alone the precise layout of the new location. It was, I’m sure, fairly similar to the previous one, with Stan having a nice big corner office and the rest of us clustered around him in a handful of offices on two sides of the hallway. In the ’66 move, Marvel procured at least one extra room, where freelance artists could work when they dropped by and needed to finish something. Otherwise, things were not unlike they’d been at 625.
36.
Somewhere around this time, I did have a rather unfortunate set-to with the not-always-mirthful Marie Severin, one I’ve always regretted. And which I guess, technically, was my fault.
A bit of necessary background: Back in one of the class plays I was in at Jackson High, there was a line of dialogue that for some unknown reason cracked me up. One girl character asks another one, sarcastically, “Is your trousseau packed yet?” That quasi-nonsensical line had somehow stuck in the trawling net of my mind, and ever since then I would occasionally toss the not-quite-yet-archaic word “trousseau” into my casual conversation, for no particular reason—more often addressed to a guy than to a gal. Just a lame crack, signifying nothing.
So, one day, when I made the cross-corridor jaunt from our office to Marie’s desk with a page of artwork Sol had asked me to give her to do a correction on, as I dropped it in her workspace, I said with no special forethought: “Here’s something for your trousseau.” (At least, I think that must be what I said, because nothing else I can think of makes much sense. Read on.)
A few minutes later, I was laboring away when a scowling Marie came stalking into our office, flung the page down on my desk in a decidedly hostile manner, said something to the effect that in the future I should keep my snarky comments to myself, then stomped back out. I sat there confused for a minute, having no idea of what I might possibly have said to upset her. Then I hurried across the hall and, even though there were a couple of other people around, I asked her what I’d said that had angered her. Her only reply was a snarled “You know what you said!” But I didn’t, and I said so. I told her I very much wanted to apologize for whatever I might have thoughtlessly said that had angered her, but I couldn’t get any more information—or indeed response—out of her.
Returning to my desk, I pondered for a while, and at some stage (though not necessarily that same day) it occurred to me that I might have used my go-to word “trousseau” in some offhand remark to her—and that, being a single woman of less than blooming youth, she might have taken offense, thinking I meant it as a personal insult. But of course I couldn’t be certain that was what had happened, and I decided that walking back across the hall and asking her if I had used the “t-word” might only make it worse.
I tried a couple more times over the next few days to apologize in private, without getting specific, but Marie refused to discuss the matter, or to speak to me unless she absolutely had to in the course of work. Eventually I decided the only thing to do was to act as if the whole thing had never happened, and hope that sooner or later it would all blow over.
Which it did. After a while, Marie resumed speaking to me again as if nothing had occurred; and, after walking on verbal eggs for a little while longer, I finally gratefully felt that she had accepted that it was just some stupid comment I had made and not worth holding a grudge over.
As far as I can recall, during the ensuing five-plus decades up to her passing in 2018, during which period I was in touch with her from time to time long after our days together at Marvel had come to an end, there was never another thoughtless or unfriendly word passed between us—in either direction.
Marie Severin remains one of my (almost) unfailingly good memories of Marvel Comics.
37.
A few words about meals in mid-’60s Manhattan—because a guy had to eat, right? Even one with as undisciplined a diet as I had.
As I’ve said, I took many of my weekday lunches with Sol; and we were occasionally joined by others, sometimes Stan Goldberg, occasionally John Romita. Once in a great while Jack and/or Stan would join a small group of us, at which times we were likely to dine at some slightly more upscale restaurant like Schrafft’s, famous for its ice cream. When he was there, Stan usually picked up the check… probably on Marvel’s tab.
The conversation on such days was mostly “shop talk,” though it might also veer into sports, movies, vacation spots, or whatever. The main things I remember from any of them that don’t involve Stan or Jack have to with a pair of Italian-Americans: John Romita and Frank Giacoia. John once expressed frustration with me because, with my weight then around 120, I would eat whatever I felt like eating, be it meat, veggies, or whatever, then shove the plate away and not touch it again. “I can’t do that!” he would exclaim plaintively, waving his hands in the air. “My parents made me eat every bite on my plate—and now I can’t push a plate away till I’ve finished everything on it!” I explained that my parents were less strict with me, so I guess I grew up with bad habits. He said no, because now he struggled with his weight—while my metabolism at 25 or so burned up calories like Johnny Storm. (Wish it still did!)
If John happened to be sitting to my right that day, inker Frank Giacoia might well be on my left. He, too, had noticed that I often tended to leave a fair amount of perfectly good food uneaten… so he would make sure to sit next to me and, when I looked like I was ready to do some plate-pushing, he would ask, “Are you going to eat that?” By the time I had responded “No,” he was beginning the process of unloading it onto his own dish. That was fine with me. I didn’t like to see food wasted; I just wasn’t necessarily going to eat all of it myself.
On one particular day, when Jack was with us but Stan was not, I recall Jack discussing his dissatisfaction with the Comic Code Authority as regards his and Joe Simon’s Western feature Bulls Eye, which the two of them had launched for their own doomed imprint Mainline—but, when the comics business imploded severely after the imposition of the Code, they wound up doing the mag’s final issues for low-paying Charlton. Jack’s complaint—which he apparently voiced in similar words at John Benson’s comics convention during that same period—was that the Code “kept taking the tomahawks out of the Indians’ hands  and leaving me with a bunch of smiling Indians.” I loved that phrasing.
That same day, I remember someone—I think it was Romita—asking Jack what he thought the next big thing in comics would be. Jack said he didn’t know, but: “I’ll tell you one thing: It won’t come from Jack Kirby, and it won’t come from Stan Lee. It’ll come from two guys somewhere in a garage.” I often thought of that prophecy two or three decades later when Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had, for a time, become the hottest thing in the comics industry.
Dinner with others of the Marvel Comics crew might never have been confused by anyone with the famed Algonquin Round Table, but I look back with fondness on those happy-go-lucky lunches.
38.
On days Sol had something else to attend to, I sometimes strolled over to Central Park, which was just a couple of blocks from Marvel. Its small zoo, later celebrated in song by Simon and Garfunkel, was stocked with penguins, seals, bears… there was even a sadly bored gorilla. I’d buy a hot dog from one of the vendors on the fringe of the park and enjoy the animal sights, if not necessarily the odors.
Other days, during lunch or after work, I might wander into the Doubleday Book Store on Fifth Avenue; I rarely left it empty-handed. During that period I developed a particular admiration for the work of Tom Wolfe, whose first book collection of articles, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, demonstrated that good journalism could be as exciting as works of fiction. He’d continue proving it for another several decades.
Even more of a haunt than Doubleday’s was a bookstore or two on Second Avenue in the upper 50s, good for picking up the latest paperbacks. Back then, I particularly collected history and science-fiction. I’d been living in Missouri when the reissuing of works by Edgar Rice Burroughs (and his imitators) had begun. Since then, the pace had picked up considerably, and now there was a growing fantasy boom, for certain, including Tolkien, Moorcock—and Robert E. Howard.
I had basically never heard of Howard (I had picked up his interplanetary novel Almuric in St. Louis but hadn’t yet read it and didn’t recognize the name of the author) before I spotted a copy of Conan the Adventurer on a rack. Well, to be more precise, I spotted Frank Frazetta’s cover for same, which reeled me in like a ravenous guppy. How could I resist that image of a grim, brawny barbarian leaning on his sword atop a mountain of skulls, while a beautiful, ill-clad young lady clings to his leg? Already familiar with Frazetta’s work not just from his ERB covers but from his White Indian, Thun’da, and other comics in the 1950s, I probably recognized his signature style before I saw his stylized signature. At any rate, I bought the book—the more enthusiastically after reading on its back cover a reference to “Atlantis,” which made me believe I was purchasing a book in the John Carter of Mars vein.
Instead, that night, I was surprised to find that Adventurer was not a novel but a collection of short stories, fronted by a novella titled “People of the Black Circle.” When I started reading the latter, I quickly found it wasn’t the Burroughsian fantasy I was expecting. Instead, I encountered a swarthy “Cimmerian” who kidnapped an (obviously East Indian) princess in order to trade her for some of his imprisoned henchmen. The purple-prose style was eminently readable… but still I put the story down, unfinished. Over the next few years, I would continue to buy the Conan and (soon) Conan-imitative paperbacks that came out, a number of which sported their own Frazetta covers… but it was some time before I read one of these so-called “sword-and-sorcery” books all the way through… and when I did, it wasn’t a Conan title.
Howard’s work dovetailed with another trend I followed —the reprinting (with vivid, modern covers) of heroic material from other 1930s pulp magazines such as Doc Savage and The Shadow. But I discovered, after reading the first Doc Savage (Man of Bronze) that I was congenitally able to read only one more in the series (The Monsters) before I found  the prose style so stiff and off-putting that from then on  I just bought the books, sighed, and stuck them on a shelf… perhaps to be read sometime when I was snowbound  and desperate.
39.
I also decided, around this time, to join the Playboy Club. I was one of the “young urban males” targeted by its parent magazine—and, at least equally important, the club was conveniently located between upper-50s Madison Av and Central Park. It wasn’t an ideal place to spend a short lunch hour, but the scenery was nice, and I make no apologies for quietly enjoying it. I was more likely to drop in at night, because that particular club didn’t yet have its cabaret license, so I could have a decent steak at an affordable price without paying extra for a floor show in which I had little interest. After a year or two, the club got its cabaret license, and my visits greatly decreased.
In the meantime, though, I remember particularly one dinner there with Gary, Bill Everett, and Bill’s college-age daughter Wendy. The four of us were squeezed into seats along a wall, without much room to move our elbows, Gary and I seated across from Wild Bill and Wendy. Still, how much room do you need to eat a small, well-done steak and accoutrements? Things were going well until I made a stabbing gesture with my left hand. Trying not to reach out too wide and annoy someone sitting to my left, I made whatever verbal point I was making by bringing the heel of my hand down on—what turned out to be the handle of my steak knife. It promptly flew straight up, like a prop in an acrobatic stunt, and cut my chin, more or less in the middle. Then, by happenstance, it somehow fell back neatly into place again. Bill and Gary noticed that my chin was bleeding slightly and asked me what the hell I’d done. I said, “Nothing. I just made a gesture like—” and, to demonstrate, I brought the heel of my left hand down again, as fate would have it, exactly in the same spot on the steak-knife handle. It flew up again—and made another cut right next to the first. I didn’t demonstrate anything else for them that evening, just wiped my bloody chin with my napkin and went back to eating my steak… very slowly.
There were, of course, plenty of places to eat near our Greenwich Village apartment. Besides the regularly visited Mexican Village, there were coffee shops, sandwich nooks, espresso houses, steak houses, whatever. I had long since learned that NYC wasn’t “hamburger heaven” for me, because burgers there were always served with ketchup, and I’m a mustard guy. I’d also quickly discovered I didn’t care much for the standard Italian-style pizza served in the Big Apple, either, so I actually wound up eating considerably less pizza than when I’d lived in St. Louis.
Rather than spend an inordinate proportion of my money eating out, mostly on my lonesome in the evening, you’d think I’d have taught myself how to cook, at least a little. But I never did—and this was before microwave ovens. Mine was not a particularly wholesome diet, as you could probably tell already; but I still remained fairly healthy, though subject to headaches, backaches, and allergies. Manhattan is a great place for walking, and I certainly did enough of that to keep the poundage down and a spring in my step. I loved living in Greenwich Village.
40.
I’ll confess, though, I didn’t have much of a social life in New York City for the first few months. For one thing, I didn’t have a lot of spare time, working forty hours a week in the office and spending another ten or twenty doing freelance scripting—added to my determination to see all the movies and Broadway plays I could.
Besides, as I admitted some pages back, I was never great guns at “chatting up the birds,” as the current English expression went. I ventured out some Friday nights with Gary or Len to singles bars, many of them located up and down Second Avenue, with names like Thank God It’s Friday. But I wasn’t exactly a physical Adonis, and my pickup lines wouldn’t have worked on a truck. Oh, once or twice I may have dated someone I met over drinks, but if so, I don’t recall the experience.
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me. When I’d had rewarding relationships with young ladies back in Missouri, my income (first at the Palace Theatre, then as a teacher plus a pittance from rock’n’roll gigs) had never allowed me to squire them about town the way I wanted to. And now that I was doing rather better (my $18,000 take-home pay for ’66 would equal roughly ten times that today), I wasn’t running into much of anyone I cared to spend it on—or who wanted me to spend it on them.
But hey, I’ve gotta stop sounding like I’m feeling sorry for myself! I wasn’t really at loose ends in Manhattan for all that long. Because, sometime during late winter or so of ’66—Mar suddenly re-entered my life.
Yes, that Mar—Marlene Jahss—the good-looking, five-foot brunette Woodrow Wilson scholar with whom I’d driven around Mexico in mid-’64, and whom I’d last seen that August when I’d put her on a Greyhound bound for Rockford, Illinois.
Mar was now attending grad school at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut. If I recall a-right, she learned from our mutual Washington U. friend Mimi Kay, with whom we both kept in touch, that I was currently living in New York City. Mar contacted me, and I invited her down for the weekend. We quickly re-kindled our romance, even if it was never a super-serious thing for either of us. She was brilliant and funny and great company, and we began trading visits: one time she’d take a two-hour train down to Manhattan… a couple of weeks later, I’d hop a Friday afternoon train for New Haven… a fortnight afterward, she’d be back in Greenwich Village, etc.
Of course, this new development meant I often needed to cram a lot more of my freelance writing into four weeknights… but a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.
41.
Somewhere around the turn of summer, though,  Gary and I decided it was time to bid adieu to 177A Bleecker Street.
Well, actually, it’s more like the matter was decided  for us.
We were two or three months into our lease of that  second-floor walkup when one day’s mail brought us a notice from the New York City rent commission. It informed us that, by law, the designated tariff for our shotgun apartment was $95 a month… which took us a bit aback, since we’d been paying our surly landlord $120 per (in cold hard cash).
At that time, I’d never thought much about rent control and had no fixed opinion on the economic wisdom of it. Nowadays, I’m sure there is none. In 1966, however, all Gary and I “knew,” all of a sudden, was that our rent had just gone down by 20%.
So we duly informed our landlord that, while we weren’t asking for a refund for overpayment in months past, we would henceforth be paying the legally mandated $95 every month instead of $120. This news made him even surlier… perhaps the better word would be “hostile.” He snarlingly informed us: “I know what I have to charge for that place.” Gary and I, however, stood our ground, implying that if he tried to refuse our $95 payment, we’d have to take our complaint to the rent commission.
That’s when we started getting anonymous late-night phone calls laced with brief but ominous threats. One that I picked up ended, “They’re gonna find you two in a garbage can!” It didn’t sound like the caller was kidding.
These unfriendly predictions naturally unnerved us—especially me, since I was often there alone, as Gary was spending most of his time at his girlfriend Cindy’s. One day I managed to speak with the landlord’s wife while he wasn’t around, but she just advised me to pay the $120, because her husband “went a little crazy sometimes,” supposedly because of something that had happened to him in “the war.” (She wasn’t clear about which war.)
That conversation caused me to go out and purchase a .22 rifle, so that if he tried to break in while I was there, I could fire at the door and hopefully scare him away. But that was hardly a long-term solution.
That’s when Cindy came riding to our rescue.
Luckily for us, despite her youth, she had an interesting job… a responsible position with the Vera Institute of Justice, a prominent non-profit organization that worked with the police for the furtherance of justice, fair play, and all that good stuff. In that capacity, she had friendly contacts in the NYPD, and she got one of those cops to phone our landlord and read him the riot act. The representative of New York’s Finest gruffly informed him that, if anything bad happened to “those boys,” he’d be hauled into the nearest police station so fast it would make his head spin.
After that, the landlord left us alone; in fact, he gave us a wide berth. The one time afterward that I encountered him in the hallway, he just frowned, averted his eyes to the floor, and stalked on by.
Even so, Gary and I agreed that our Greenwich Village idyll had pretty much run its course. We soon made arrangements to rent what’s called a “studio apartment” on East 87th Street, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: one sizable main room, a bathroom, and a small kitchen.
A couple of weeks later, since we had virtually no furniture to drag with us, the three of us moved out of 177A Bleecker in the dead of night.
And no, we didn’t get our deposit back.
42.
At some point during this period, a phenomenon of sorts manifested itself at Marvel Comics.
Its name was Jim Steranko… and, although his presence on this Earth had been thus far unknown to most comics readers, he’d been around since late ’38, a couple of years longer than I had.
By his own account, by the time he showed up at the Marvel offices in ’66 he had already had careers as a rock’n’roll guitarist, a stage magician, and an auto thief. I’ve no doubt he was great at all three. In one telling, he’d also been “turned away” by Marvel as a potential artist sometime in ’65, though I’ve never learned anything more about that reputed occasion. I’m pretty certain it didn’t happen in the latter half of the year, when I was on-site virtually every weekday.
By ’66, he had decided to make a move to become a comicbook artist and writer in earnest. His initial approach was to Joe Simon. That legendary comics creator was preparing to launch a new line of super-hero comics (primarily to compete with Marvel’s) for well-heeled Harvey Comics, which was then known mostly for Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Jim sold Joe three scripted concepts, “Spyman,” “Magicmaster,” and “Gleaming Gladiator,” but Simon felt that the young man from Reading, Pennsylvania, wasn’t yet experienced enough to draw them professionally, only to write a script or two.
Jim didn’t concur with that judgment; so one afternoon, not too long before closing time, he showed up at Marvel and announced he was there to see Stan.
From this point on, accounts of what happened next tend to vary. But, since I was present that day and played a crucial part in the proceedings, I feel it incumbent upon  me to recount what I recall about that occasion—which I used to assume must have occurred around the time of  one of the two comics conventions held in Manhattan that year, since those would’ve been likely occasions for Jim to  have been in the city. In actuality, however, it’s now clear that he showed up some weeks earlier than the first of  those comic-cons. Well, why not? It’s only a train ride from Pennsylvania… and isn’t “Reading” one of the railroads in Monopoly?
Sometimes when I’ve heard or read someone’s account of that event, Jim had phoned ahead and made an appointment to see Stan; in other recountings, he simply showed up unheralded. I don’t claim to know which one it actually was.
The first I knew about any of this was when production manager Sol Brodsky, on Stan’s behalf, asked me to “do him a favor” and go out to the waiting room and tell the guy there that (appointment or no appointment—and Sol didn’t mention which it was) Stan was super-busy that afternoon and wouldn’t have time to see him. I’d met Jim in passing at the previous year’s comic convention,  but that was about it. He’d been there as a dealer, no more, no less, and I don’t remember seeing any artwork by him up to this point.
That was about to change.
I ventured out to the antechamber, not all that happy about being the one designated to turn away a prospective talent whom I had met—but it went with the job. He and I exchanged a couple of pleasantries, and I repeated my proscribed mantra, that Stan was too busy to see him that day.
Jim, of course, was considerably less than happy with that response. And, since he had an artcase bulging with comic art, he suggested I look at it, and I figured I might  as well. Maybe I could say an encouraging word or two.  No harm in looking.
What I saw, though, blew me away. The pages I recall  featured a shiny-leather-clad quasi-super-hero called  “Super-Agent X” (and sporting a large “X” symbol), in at least a panel or two astride a gleaming motorcycle; the artwork reminded me a bit of a “Captain America” story in an early-’40s issue by Simon & Kirby, or the cover of the first issue of their 1954 Fighting American. In fact, what my eyes mostly registered when perusing the work was the clear influence of Jack’s style, with sleek inking that suggested to me maybe a hint of Wally Wood. There was lots of action—and the figures were dynamic and exciting.
On an impulse, I told Jim to wait right there… and  scurried back inside.
I can’t recall if it was Sol, or Stan himself, that I informed that I thought this guy Steranko was pretty good and that Stan really should look at his samples. Either way, the upshot was that, a minute later, someone—Sol? Flo? me?—breezily ushered Jim into Stan’s office. (But, contrary to another re-telling of the incident I’ve heard, there was absolutely no strong-arming of Flo on Jim’s part to gain entrance to Stan’s sanctum sanctorum. He was peacefully escorted in.)
Now, once Jim was in Stan’s office, behind closed doors, neither I nor anyone else but the two of them was privy to what was said. Clearly—and unsurprisingly—Stan was instantly impressed by Jim’s work. I had thought, and hoped, he would be. Jim says Stan offered him his choice of drawing “any” Marvel series he wanted… and that’s the kind of thing Stan might have done, on impulse. Of course, if Jim had said he’d like to draw Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, I would bet my bound volumes of 1961–62 Marvels that anything he was assigned would have been at most a fill-in issue. Stan wasn’t about to kick Jack Kirby off FF after 60-plus issues, or John Romita off the company’s best-selling solo-hero title, for a newcomer, no matter how flashy his work. Still, Stan definitely was given to grandiloquent gestures and pronouncements.
At any rate, by the time Jim left Stan’s (and Marvel’s) environs, he had become the artist on the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” 12-pager scheduled for Strange Tales #151 (which would have a cover date of Dec. ’66). His first assignment—as had been the case with various other artists—was to finish-pencil and then ink the layouts provided by Jack, to a story scripted by Stan.
I felt good—still do—about the part I’d played in what happened that day. Not that I’d ever claim to have launched Jim Steranko’s stellar career in comics; I merely expedited it slightly. Given his singular talent and matchless drive, either he’d have made another appointment to see Stan and his debut at Marvel would’ve been delayed at most by a few weeks… or else Joe Simon would’ve wised up and realized that the kid from Reading had more to offer than the mostly tired veterans he was hiring to draw Harvey’s new crop of heroes.
Thanks to the way things played out that day, Jim Steranko was now the newest member of the mighty Marvel Bullpen. If Stan liked his work on the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” story—and I figured he probably would—he was likely to be around for a while.
43.
1966 was a curious year in the early history of comics conventions, because that summer, as noted above, saw no fewer than two cons held in Manhattan over the course of less than a month—in a year when very few other comic- cons were held anywhere. And, naturally, I attended both of these still-uncommon events.
The first was the two-day New York Comicon, put on by science-fiction and (mostly EC) comics fan John Benson. He had decided to host a convention after Dave Kaler, exhausted by his experience the previous July, had publicly announced that he was never going to oversee another one!
Amid that vacuum, the 25-year-old Benson scheduled his own con for July 23 & 24 of ’66, partly because, as he put it later, “not much was happening in July in New York in those days.” With first choices Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner unavailable, he arranged for Jack Kirby to be Guest of Honor. Jack was then, of course, at the height of his popularity due to the phenomenal success of Fantastic Four, Thor, and indeed most of the Marvel lineup. I’d bet my bottom dollar that most current comics fans that year would rather have celebrated Jack than either Kurtzman or Eisner, anyway.
In the midst of his preparations, Benson abruptly learned that Kaler had changed his mind and would after all be throwing an official “Academy Con” that summer… although he pushed it back to mid-August in deference to John’s event. The inevitable question was whether there were enough potential attendees to justify a pair of comics conventions within a period of roughly three weeks. As it turned out, there were.
Held at the upscale Park Sheraton Hotel, Benson’s convention boasted two suites’ worth of comics dealers. It was somewhat more adult-oriented than the ’65 “Kaler Con,” many of its patrons having been around since the days of EC in the first half of the 1950s. And there, newly prominent among the dealers, was Jim Steranko of Reading, PA, working away, amid the hustle and bustle of the con, on his first “S.H.I.E.L.D.” yarn over Kirby breakdowns.
One of the main features of the first day (Saturday) was a mid-morning debate between recently appointed Comics Code head Len Darvin and Don Thompson, prominent  “double-fan” who straddled comics and science-fiction fandom and had a day job as a Cleveland, Ohio, newspaper reporter. Things got a bit heated when SF neo-writer Ted White, from the audience, accused the Comics Code Authority of intentionally striving to put EC out of business, something Darvin strenuously denied. The latter wound up getting roasted by White and Thompson—and to some extent by Paul Krassner, publisher of the counterculture magazine The Realist. Darvin’s most ill-considered statement, which aroused their joint fury, was to maintain that erstwhile EC publisher Bill Gaines should be grateful to the Code because of “the great success [he made] out of Mad magazine when it was eliminated as a comic and became a satire magazine.” Seated in the audience, I felt a bit sorry for Len, whom I rather liked personally… but, unlike Daniel in the Biblical tale, he had stepped willingly into this particular lion’s den.
After lunch, I was pleased to have been asked by Benson to introduce keynote speaker Kirby, having been a fan of his work (as part of “Simon & Kirby”) since at least 1947. Jack was gracious and funny in his first-ever speech before a comics convention audience. (I had also, at John’s behest, written a two-page bio of Kirby’s work for the con’s program booklet, whose cover featured penciled panels from that previously mentioned rejected Black Panther page drawn by Jack for FF #52.)
The day’s final symposium dealt with “The Forgotten  ’50s” and consisted of Ted White, Creepy and Eerie editor/writer Archie Goodwin, and Bhob Stewart, editor of Castle of Frankenstein and movie editor for TV Guide. Naturally, it was centered primarily on pre-Code EC Comics, of which all three were inveterate fans; both Goodwin and Stewart had been involved with EC fanzines a decade earlier.
One amusing aspect of the con was that since, whenever a panel began, many fans would leave the dealers’ rooms to attend them, Benson became the target of multiple complaints from dealers (and their spouses) that the panels were hurting their business and should be shorter, if not canceled outright. John patiently explained to them that the panels were the reason he was hosting the con in the first place: “You don’t think I’m putting this on for the dealers, do you?” Apparently quite a few of them did. (This was, remember, six decades ago. Today there would be little question about which tail is wagging what dog.)
The second day of the con saw a “Fabulous ’40s” comics panel made up of ubiquitous scripter Otto Binder, artist Klaus Nordling (his only con appearance ever, I think), and comics historian (and budding artist) Larry Ivie… plus a self-explanatory “Comics Today” panel featuring artist  Gil Kane, Bill Harris (then editing King Features’ new comicbook line), Charlton editor/artist Dick Giordano, and myself.
After it ended, John Benson, like the rest of us, justly considered his con a success… but he never hosted  another one.
44.
Dave Kaler’s second con, only three weeks later over the weekend of Friday to Sunday, August 12-14, was a considerable improvement on the ’65 one, from the venue (a hotel not visibly and audibly in danger of imminent collapse) to even greater attendance by both fans and pros. This time, I’d managed to talk Stan into showing up—his first comics convention appearance ever. He hadn’t been eager to do so, since come 5:00 on Fridays he liked to scoot off immediately for Hewlett Harbor; but somehow I had convinced him (or more likely he’d decided on his own) that it was potentially good publicity, so he made the sacrifice. According to others’ accounts, he and I entered the big room together at 7:40, so it’s not unlikely that we (and probably a few other Bullpenners) had dinner together in the intervening period. Stan made sure I sat down up front so he could use me as a convenient foil anytime things dragged a bit. I was that evening’s Artie Simek.
His short keynote speech, as recounted in a fanzine by attendee Al Russell, played up Marvel as the underdog to National/DC; he then turned the floor over to questions. (In near-future appearances, he would drop the “speech” part entirely and just answer queries.) At one point, he stated that his various “apprentices” were working to capacity, then turned his gaze directly on me: “You are working to capacity, aren’t you? You’d just better not be holding out on us!” Oddly, Russell also reports Stan as mentioning Denny O’Neil—which surprises me, since by then I suspect Denny was mostly freelancing for Charlton, though he may have still been scripting the “Millie” books.
Stan naturally found excuses to praise the soon-to-be-published work of Jim Steranko, and to announce Bill  Everett’s take-over as artist of his 1939 creation, the Sub-Mariner. This was even early enough in fandom history that he revealed to the rapt audience that “Stan Lee” wasn’t his real name—and he “promised to admit his last name at next year’s con.”
Sometime after 9:00, he concluded, and the con closed for the night.
The next morning at 10:00 a.m., a “Marvel Bullpen” panel was composed (according to Russell) of “Dennis O’Neil, Bill Everett, John Romita, Roy Thomas, Flo Steinberg, and Jim Steranko.” I presume that, as in ’65, Kaler allowed the dealers’ room to open only after panels were concluded. Jack Kirby was in attendance at this con, too; even Mort Weisinger reportedly dropped by, but thankfully I never ran into him.
Later came a showing of several episodes of the new Marvel Super-Heroes TV series, which the audience deemed at least “better than Batman.” Sometime that weekend, at a scheduled meeting of “Batmanians,” 90% of the attendees voted in favor of the cancellation of the Batman TV show, “since it continuously abuses the dignity of this legendary character.”
Al Russell reported that, that evening, he, fellow fan Rick Weingroff, and I took in a movie together. “The choice of the film,” he wrote, “was amusingly difficult, because Roy had seen almost every film playing in Manhattan, including  Arabesque, the one we finally selected.” Luckily for them,  I didn’t object to looking at Sophia Loren for an additional hour and a half.
Sunday featured a “National” panel made up of  Murphy Anderson, Julius Schwartz, E. Nelson Bridwell, Bill Finger, and Gil Kane—“plus the number one  Batman fan in attendance, Tom Fagan”… with Gardner Fox and editor Murray Boltinoff monitoring the patter from the audience.
The afternoon’s costume contest, preceded by slides of the imminent Green Hornet TV series, which looked like Batman with karate chops thrown in, featured roughly two dozen colorful entries. Though I’d declared myself ineligible for a prize, I enjoyed taking part, since it gave me an excuse to try out the Spider-Man costume Stan and Sol had recently bestowed upon me. (This would be the last time I’d participate in a con costume event.) Others taking part  in the masquerade included near-future pros Marv Wolfman and Len Wein as Tower’s NoMan and Nedor’s Black Terror, their friend Pat Yanchus as Hawkgirl, a young fan named David Armstrong as Captain America (complete with a gorgeous, professional-looking shield), and other fans as Superman, Green Lantern, Robin, The Flash, Spectre, Hourman, Catwoman, various X-Men—you name it!
There was supposed to be a panel of “newspaper [comic strip] pros” that evening, but apparently those worthies for some reason decided not to show up, so the convention kind of sputtered out. By this time, though, Dave Kaler had already announced that the next “Academy Con”—his third—would be held the following year on July 14th through the 16th. He wasn’t going to be aced out of the month of July again! The very first “summer of two  comicons” had been a conspicuous success, except in one area: As far as I can recall, not a single mainstream newspaper or TV station had sent a reporter to check out the con. Or, if they had, nothing their representatives saw or learned made it into the larger mediasphere.
To them, despite Marvel Comics, and either despite  (or maybe because of) the TV Batman, comics were still  kid stuff.
At least those of us wandering around the dealers’ room after dinner were, as Russell put it, “gratified by the late appearance [= arrival] of Richard ‘Grass’ Green,” bearing with him some of the art he was currently doing for  Charlton. He had blown in from Indiana earlier in the day but hadn’t been able to find the convention hall till quite late. I don’t think he and I had ever met before, face to face. He hadn’t reserved a hotel room in advance, so when the con closed down around 10:00 p.m., I invited him to stay at my new digs on E. 87th rather than seek shelter at the YMCA.
45.
When Grass and I reached my apartment, Gary was  off at Cindy’s, as per usual, and Wild Bill may have gone back to the family home in Massachusetts for the rest of the weekend.
Grass was excited about getting his shot in pro comics, and was full of gratitude to Gary and me for recommending him to Giordano. For my part, I was eager to see the Charlton work he’d brought with him. Bill Schelly’s years-later Alter Ego article on that con says that cache consisted of “a weird story and a strip for Go-Go”—whatever they may have been. Grass drew eighteen yarns for Charlton over a period of a year or so, most of them four-pagers written by Gary or Steve Skeates. Plus the Blooperman/Bestest League/Marvel-ous heroes spoofs—and that origin tale for “The Shape” from my concept and plot.
If we could have glimpsed the future, we’d have seen that Grass’ time at Charlton wouldn’t long outlast Dick Giordano’s 1967 move to National; still, he savored his taste of pro-dom, after several years of producing quality work in the fanzine vineyards. In the 1970s and ’80s and beyond, he would produce work for Rip Off Press (one of the top underground comix outfits), Slave Labor Graphics, Wally Wood’s witzend, et al.—including Miller Publishing, for whom he produced his exuberant super-hero parody series “Wildman and Rubberoy.” He often used his experiences as a black American to skillfully skewer racism and bigotry—always with a sense of humor that made it palatable to a wider audience—before his way-too-young passing  in 2002.
That night, though, the two of us just had a high old time reminiscing about our overlapping days in fandom, including our collaboration in Alter Ego #6, and how we couldn’t believe our current good fortune, with both of us now churning out comics for pro companies… even collaborating again directly and indirectly. And I told him that, when I got the chance and the project was right, I’d try to get him a crack at doing something for Marvel.
And I did… even if it wouldn’t quite work out the way  I hoped.
For my own part, that night, I could look back at the preceding year-plus and feel I was building something resembling a career in a field I’d always wanted to be in—even if I hadn’t always realized it. Over that period, I had graduated from first contributing to, then editing and publishing Alter Ego, the first and foremost hero-comics fanzine—to scribing a pair of long-distance stories for Charlton—to being briefly ensconced in a staff editorial capacity on the vaunted “Superman” titles at National/DC—to being Stan Lee’s de facto protégé, on whom he was gradually coming to rely, a bit more, day by day. I had no idea, and don’t recall ever spending even a moment wondering, how long this Dream Come True might last, or whether it would eventually lead to anything beyond being Stan’s editorial “good left arm” forever (as I said—not a bad gig, in  my mind).
46.
Come Monday, of course, it was back to comicbooks as a 9-to-5 (plus after-hours freelance), 5-days-a-week (plus more freelance over the weekend) job for me. And, right just then, I really didn’t want it any other way.
I couldn’t tell you exactly what day or week it was, but sometime during that summer, Stan tossed me another unexpected but welcome grenade.
Already, I was the regular scripter each month of both Sgt. Fury and X-Men. And, one bright morning, in the same way I had inherited those features, Stan abruptly handed me all twenty twice-up-size pages of unscripted pencils for The Avengers #35, which was due to come out that fall with a cover date of December 1966. The art was by Don Heck, who’d drawn the majority of Avengers issues to date, and, like my first Sgt. Fury assignment, it picked up in the middle of a two-part story, with a cliffhanger carrying over from #34: Captain America and Hawkeye caught amid perpendicular walls of slowly constricting “lethal laser rays”—as they’d been dubbed by the super-villain who had trapped them, a newbie who styled himself The Living Laser.
Stan and Don had come up with the plot for #35, of course. I don’t recall being given a written synopsis to consult while scripting, so it’s likely the two of them had conferred by phone, with Don taking notes and then adding incidents to the general storyline as he penciled it. I would work from Don’s notes written in the margins, and from the clear storytelling of the tale itself.
I probably had to dialogue the yarn over the next two  or more evenings, feeding pages each weekday morning to Sol Brodsky so he could log it in, then hand it to Flo to mail to the letterer, who would send it on to Heck out on Long Island, since he was scheduled to ink that particular issue as well.
It meant a helluva lot to me to be to be given The Avengers as a probable regular assignment, certainly more than Sgt. Fury, more even than The X-Men. Avengers had been a favorite Marvel title of mine from the get-go in 1963, because it had originally headlined cover stars Thor, Iron Man, Giant- Man, and (briefly) the Hulk. It had moved up a notch further in my estimation when Captain America had joined in issue #4, with Stan and Jack’s ingenious maneuver to keep that Golden Age hero “forever young” by postulating that he’d been frozen in ice since near the end of World War II. When the Hulk went his own way after the first few issues, I didn’t much miss him, and never really thought of him as an Avenger again until the first Marvel Studios film about the team came out in 2012.
Admittedly, however, after issue #16, wherein Stan had decided to write out Thor, Iron Man, Giant-Man, and the Wasp and replace them with Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch, the book had taken a sizable hit in my eyes. I accepted Stan’s statement that sales on the series had actually gone up a bit—probably, he felt, because of the sheer audacity of the casting move—but I knew when I accepted the assignment that I’d be working to bring Goldilocks and Shellhead back into the ranks on a permanent basis, the first chance I got. (The Wasp and Giant-Man, now re-dubbed Goliath, had recently returned, but they were far from enough for me. It was Thor, Iron Man, and Cap I saw as the central lights of The Avengers.)
So I had a double reason for hoping I could script  Avengers well enough, in Stan’s eyes, to hang onto the title on a continuing basis—not just because it was a more important title to Marvel than Sgt. Fury or X-Men, but because I wanted to find a way to restore it to its former position as the true Marvel equivalent of Justice League of America—or, for that matter, of my all-time favorite series, All-Star Comics’ “Justice Society of America.”
Even thus, I suppose, does every new generation strive hard for the plaudits of the older one—while at the same time wanting to prove that it can equal, even surpass, what has gone before. I had no grandiose dreams of surpassing Stan as a comics writer; he was the apex, as far as I was (am) concerned… but maybe one day I could run him a close second (or third).
Maybe a little bit of that secret longing was running through my mind the day, around that same time, when Stan and I were walking down the Marvel hallway and I mentioned, for some unremembered reason, that my mother had been born in 1922, the same year as himself.
He suddenly stopped short, looked down at me, and with a mock-dramatic solemnity, pronounced:
“You know—I could have been your father!”
In some ways, Stan… you damn near were.
Coming in our second volume: The rest of the  Marvel Years (Round 1) – 1967-1980

Sandwiched On The Subway
NYC Mayor John Lindsay takes a photo-opportunity ride on the city subway—though probably not during the first twelve days of 1966.

Marvel’s Original “Terrific Trio”
(Above:) Stan and Jack were depicted and written as partners in creation in such early comics as Fantastic Four #10 (Jan. 1963). Script by Lee; pencils by Kirby; inks by Dick Ayers.
(Below:) Writer Lee and artist Ditko (though unnamed) were shown in silhouette in a Twilight Zone-type tale in Amazing Adult Fantasy #12 (May 1962). Both scans courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Dynamic Duo
Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin in the Batman TV series that debuted in January of ’66. [Batman & Robin TM & © DC Comics.]

Wild Bill Everett
and the work that Roy T. associated him with circa the turn of 1966: the two-year “Sub-Mariner” revival that had begun in Young Men #24 (Dec. 1953). Script & art by Everett. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. Photo courtesy of Ger Apeldoorn. [Splash TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Daredevil-May-Care!
The cover of Daredevil #1 (April 1964) is the work of Jack Kirby (penciler) and Bill Everett (inker), with Kirby/Ayers figures in one side-panel. With this issue, Marvel completed its original round of “Marvel Age” titles. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Klaw-ing Their Way To A Compromise
Fantastic Four #56 (Nov. 1966) was the first issue in which Lee and Kirby were listed as having co-produced the material, rather than listing Stan as writer and Jack as artist or penciler. It was a milestone—which may be the reason nobody in the office noticed that inker Joe Sinnott’s last name is missing a “T.” Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

A Pair Of Derby Contenders
(Above:) Working with fan-artist-turning-pro Bill Dubay, Gary Friedrich shoehorned Roy’s Badman & Robber and Bestest League of America into the “Blooperman” story in Go-Go #5 (Feb. 1967) for Charlton, which was based in Derby, Connecticut.
(Below:) Gary and Roy brainstormed “The Sentinels” as a back-up feature to begin in Charlton’s Thunderbolt, Vol. 3, #54 (Oct. 1966); but Gary did all the actual scripting. Art by Sam Grainger. Both scans courtesy of CBP. [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

“Look Out! Here Comes The Spider-Man!”
When Gary and Roy co-wrote their above-titled rock song at the turn of ’67, the first Spider-Man TV cartoon series (on ABC) and its totally different theme song with the same name were still months away. This ad ran as a two-page spread in Marvel issues dated Nov. ’67, which also plugged the first Fantastic Four animated show. Courtesy of Michael T. Gilbert. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc., & other trademark & copyright holders.]

“Fabulous Flo”
circa 1965. ’Nuff said!

Just Take A Walk Down Bleecker Street
Bill Everett’s first outing as “Doctor Strange” artist came in Strange Tales #146 (July 1966); script by Stan Lee & Denny O’Neil. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Black Panther
The arrival of T’Challa in Fantastic Four #52 & 53 (July & Aug. 1966) was an epochal event in U.S. comics history. This panel is from the latter, by Lee, Kirby, & Sinnott. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

LOL
These Lee & Kirby panels from the encounter with Klaw in FF #56 (Nov. 1966)—their particular mixture of script and art—made Roy laugh out loud at his corrugated-metal proofreading table as he was checking it over. Inks by Sinnott. Courtesy of John Morrow [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“The Torch That Was!”
(Left:) In 1966’s Fantastic Four Annual #4, Stan and Jack had Johnny Storm battle the original Human Torch, who had first been written and illustrated by Carl Burgos for Marvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939). Inks by Sinnott. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]
(Above:) The three men responsible for lighting the fire under the first Torch. (L. to r.:) Creator Carl Burgos; publisher Martin Goodman; and Lloyd Jacquet, head of Funnies, Inc., the comic shop that provided all interior art and story for Marvel Comics #1. Courtesy of Wendy Everett.

“A Glorious Sight… When It’s On Our Side”
This final panel from the John Romita-drawn “Captain America” yarn in Young Men #25 (Feb. 1954)—from proofs found in the “Marvel warehouse” in 1965-66—was Photostatted to a larger size at Flo’s direction as a “pop-art” masterwork, though with a short caption at the upper left blacked out. Script attributed to Don Rico. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“Face It, Tiger…”
The most famous individual panel that John Romita and Stan Lee ever produced together—from the end of Amazing Spider-Man #42 (Nov. 1966). Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Slugfest By Stand-Ins
The first time (of only two) that Roy got a chance to write dialogue for a Kirby-drawn yarn—in this case, for Tales to Astonish #82 (Aug. 1966). A rush job for both of them, probably mostly plotted by Jack from a few lines over the phone by Stan. Inks by Dick Ayers. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Amazon Prime?
Ross Andru & Mike Esposito’s cover for Wonder Woman #162 (May 1965). Even counting it as an homage to (and not a parody of) the style of original “WW” artist H.G. Peter, the question remains: Why? Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © DC Comics.]

Alex Toth
(Above:) A true master of comic art—but badly miscast in X-Men #12.

Going For The Juggernaut
(Above:) The splash page of The X-Men #17 (Feb. 1966) was laid out by Jack Kirby, finish-penciled by Alex Toth, and inked by Vince Colletta. It was not an artistic marriage made in heaven. Script by Stan Lee. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

This Time, “X” Marks The Spot
The splash page of The X-Men #20 (May 1966), plotted by Stan, then scripted by Roy. Pencils by Werner Roth (as “Jay Gavin”); inks by Dick Ayers. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Boys Who Cried “Wolverine”
The cover of The Incredible Hulk #181 (Nov. 1974), the first full presentation ofthe mutant Wolverine, was drawn by Herb Trimpe with a few touch-ups by John Romita; the pair were visual co-creators of the short, ill-tempered Canadian hero first conceived by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas and fleshed out inside by scripter Len Wein. Courtesy of the GCD. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Sunfire Seeds
If Stan had given Roy the okay, Sunfire—or another Japanese (or Japanese-American) mutant very much like him—would have debuted in 1966 or so, instead of in The X-Men #64 (Jan. 1970). Script by RT; art by Don Heck & Tom Palmer. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

We A.I.M. To Please, But…
Denny O’Neil (in the late ’60s or so) and the “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” splash page for Strange Tales #149 (Oct. 1966). Co-plotting/editing by Lee; co-plotting/layouts by Kirby, script by O’Neil, and finished art by Ogden Whitney—with some reluctant rewriting by Roy. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

“A Charlton Classic”
Happily, after losing his staff job at Marvel, the adroit Denny quickly landed on his feet, working for Charlton editor Dick Giordano. He’s particularly noted there for the full-length story in Charlton Premiere #2 (Nov. 1967)—albeit under his sometime pen name “Sergius O’Shaugnessy.” Art by Pat Boyette. [© the respective copyright holders.]

Ron Whyte

Sunken Treasures
Ron Whyte, like several others in the 1966-67 Marvel Bullpen, may  have contributed a synopsis or two to Sub-Mariner episodes of the quasi-animated Marvel Super-Heroes TV series. Veteran pro Mel Keefer provided the above art specimen for it. Courtesy of Anthony Snyder.  [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

John Buscema
Some of his first new work for Marvel consisted of penciling over Kirby’s “S.H.I.E.L.D.” layouts for Strange Tales #150 (Nov. 1966), to be inked by Frank Giacoia. Script by Lee. John’s photo was colorized for the Famous Cartoonists trading card series. [Photo © the respective copyright holders; page TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Hulking Out
Buscema’s first layout-and-pencil work the second time around came in Tales to Astonish #85 (Nov. 1966), with inks by John Tartaglione. Script by Stan Lee. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Marvel No-Prize
When a fan received this eagerly awaited envelope in the mail, there was nothing inside… but lots of people tore it apart looking for their “prize”! [Hulk TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Marvel Super-Heroes
A scene from one of the Thor episodes of the semi-animated TV series. The art was taken from a Kirby-drawn story… even though they accidentally gave him bare legs in this cel. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Kirby, The Code, & The Cowboys
Not to mention the “smiling,” tomahawk-deprived Indians. The one in Bulls Eye’s right hand had been whited out, too. From Charlton’s Bulls Eye, Western Scout #6 (June 1955). Courtesy of John Morrow. [TM & © Estates of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby.]

“Hither Came Conan…”
Frank Frazetta’s iconic (and we don’t use that word lightly)  cover for the first edition of Lancer Books’ Conan the Adventurer. Although tales of Robert E. Howard’s Cimmerian hero had first seen print in 1932, it was this paperback series a third of a century later that would lead to the comicbooks and films that would make him a household name. [Art © the respective copyright holders; Conan TM Heroic Signatures, LLC.]

You Can’t Go Home Again— ’Cause They’ve  Changed The Address!
After Roy, Gary, and Wild Bill left 177A Bleecker Street circa summer of ’66, virtually the next time RT stood in its doorway (long bereft of its “A”) was in 2003, when he and wife Dann were filmed for the Discovery/Travel Channel TV documentary Marvel Super-Heroes’ Guide to New York City. Photo by Karen Kraft, the doc’s major producer and guiding light.

Giving Steranko A Hand
While Jim Steranko created and wrote the title feature for Harvey’s Spyman #1 (Sept. 1966), editor Joe Simon would utilize his artwork only in the schematic drawing of the hero’s artificially augmented hand in the bottom left corner of its cover. Other art by George Tuska. Courtesy of the GCD.  [TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Jim Steranko
in a 1966 newspaper photo, with concept art from his creation Super-Agent X.
Also depicted: The lead splash page from Strange Tales #151 (Dec. 1966), which he finish-penciled and inked over Kirby layouts. Script by Lee. With that issue, Stan knew he’d finally found the artist to take over “S.H.I.E.L.D.,” freeing Jack from having to break it down. Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [Marvel Characters, Inc.]

John Benson
—not at his own 1966 con, but at the SCARP-Con co-hosted by Phil Seuling two years later.
(Right:) The BensonCon’s program book utilized part of an unused Kirby-penciled page from Fantastic Four #52, on which The Black Panther still sported less than a full-face mask. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Boy & The King
Nearly the only photo ever of Roy Thomas and Jack Kirby together—reportedly taken at John Benson’s comic-con. This very low-rez photo (attributed to Jack C. Harris) appears to have Jack sporting a beard, which certainly was not the case. Image retrieved from Internet by John Cimino.

Stan’s First Con
Stan Lee at the podium, with host Dave Kaler, at the 1966 Academy Con. Courtesy of Scott Edelman.

“Who Was That Masked Man?”
For the 1966 Academy Con masquerade, Roy donned the Spider-Man costume given him by Stan and Sol Brodsky. Also seen are a pair of unidentified fans as X-Men.

What’s Green And Read All Over?
(At top:) Richard “Grass” Green, of course—who both penciled and dialogued “The Shape” for Charlton Premiere #1 (Sept. 1967), from a necessarily anonymous synopsis by Roy T. The inking was by Grass with Frank McLaughlin. The multi-talented Grass is seen above on TV’s Amateur Hour series in 1964. [Shape page © the respective copyright holders.]

“Avengers Assemble!”
As usual, Roy began his run on a feature by providing dialogue to a story Stan Lee had co-plotted with an artist… in this case, Don Heck, for The Avengers #35 (Dec. 1966). Courtesy of Barry Pearl. [TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

The Sincerest Form Of Fantasy
Roy (at age 6 or 7) in a Superman sweater—and the April  1968 cover of The X-Men (#43), which a grown-up RT had John Buscema pencil and ink as an homage to that of All-Star Comics #25 (1945), seen way back on p. 12. The latter comic had probably been Roy’s first-ever encounter with the Justice Society of America—and he hadn’t forgotten it. Courtesy of the GCD.  [Cover TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Cover Story
The Way They Were
Golden Age Comicbook Heroes In Roy’s Early Life

s detailed in this book, I arrived late on the scene in the celebrated Golden Age of Comics, which had begun by most accounts in 1938 when Superman flipped his first flivver on the cover of Action Comics #1. It was probably 1944 when my mother bought me (at my insistence, she always maintained) my first comicbook, whatever it may have been.
After the end of World War II, the colorfully costumed heroes who had often fought so patriotically for Uncle Sam increasingly seemed out of step with the tastes of American youth; and, as related in Part I of the foregoing text, such stalwarts were a slowly vanishing breed between 1945 and the turn of 1951, when All-Star Comics bit the dust—even though the DC triumvirate of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman and a few others such as Fawcett’s Marvel Family; Quality’s Plastic Man, Doll Man, and aviator Blackhawk; Hillman’s Airboy and The Heap; and Lev Gleason’s Crimebuster stuck around for a bit longer.
Then, between late 1953 and 1955, there was a brief and limited resurgence of super-heroes, both revived oldies-but-goodies and a few newbies. But it nothing really jelled, until DC haltingly brought out a “new and improved” Flash, starting in the summer of 1956.
When I realized that this book’s cover was going to have to feature public-domain heroes from the years 1945-55 who were not the property of Marvel or DC (and the latter now includes several vintage Fawcett, Quality, and even Fox heroes), I quickly got enthusiastic about the idea.
And once my better 2/3, Dann, mentioned the name “Jerry Ordway,” I got really enthusiastic about it.
Though even that feeling was restrained compared to how I felt after I saw Jerry’s gorgeous finished cover, which spotlights 24 comic characters (not counting Crimebuster’s monkey Squeeks and the Mexican heroes shown on Biljo White’s cover for the 1965 Alter Ego [Vol. 1] #9)!
Jerry had literally never so much as heard of at least half the creations pictured on the scans of covers and splash pages with which I bombarded him… but if you judged just by the excitement he rendered in that illustration, you’d think he and I had handled them every issue during the two or three years we worked together on the 1980s DC title All-Star Squadron.
Still, although I’d mentioned and said a little about  each of those four-color heroes in the first chapter or two of this first volume of my autobiography, I mourned the lack of space for actual Golden Age art depicting them in the body of the book.
Then along came layout lord Jon B. Cooke, editor of Comic Book Creator—the guy who talked me, 25 years ago, into reviving my fanzine Alter Ego as a fellow TwoMorrows Publications magazine. He managed to squeeze all my other text and art spots into slightly fewer pages than we had expected—and suggested there was room enough left over to provide a visual “key” to the guys on the cover.
Sometimes things just work out even better than you dared hope.
Thanks, Jon—thanks, Dann—thanks, Jerry—and thanks, John Morrow, for being a publisher with whom I’ve enjoyed this quarter-century romp through comicbook history during what Sinatra sang about as “the golden warm  September of my years.”
Bestest,

Cover Character Identification Key

1. The Flame
2. Cat-Man & Kitten
3. Dynamic Man
4. Captain Midnight
5. Captain Flash
6. Fighting Yank
7. Black Terror
8. Daredevil
9. Green Lama
10.  Atoman
11.  Black Owl, Yank & Doodle
12.  Yellowjacket
13.  Grim Reaper
14. The Heap
15.  Rulah
16.  Captain Tootsie
17.  Frankenstein
18.  Hunt Bowman & Lyssa
19.  Crimebuster & Squeeks
20.  Straight Arrow

1

6

8

2

9

13

14

20

7

15

16

3

4

5

10

11

12

17

18

19

The Flame

Though I’d never so much as heard of him before, the Flame who popped up in 1954 was actually a revival of sorts of a long-canceled early-’40s Fox Comics hero, originally drawn by the great Lou Fine. He lasted just three Ajax/Farrell issues before vanishing again—this time perhaps forever.
Cover of The Flame #3 (May 1955); artist unidentified.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Cat-Man & Kitten

Even I knew, as a kid, that Cat-Man & Kitten were copies of Batman and  Robin. I must have seen  issues like Holyoke’s Cat-Man Comics #31 (June 1946) before I wrote and drew my own early amateur jungle hero called Catman; maybe that’s why I gave him the alternate name “Zoo-Man.”
The cover artist is the singular L.B. Cole, who specialized in exciting upfront images.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Dynamic Man

Although his adventures were well-drawn, the only thing I could ever really remember about Chesler’s Dynamic Man was that he wore a cape that was attached only to one shoulder, not both. But that led me to give the same visual gimmick to Hyperion of the Squadron Sinister/Supreme when I drew the first-ever sketch of him at the time of Avengers #69 in 1969.
Cover of Dynamic Comics #20 (Oct. 1946) by Paul Gattuso
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Captain Midnight

Fawcett’s licensed comicbook Cap was more of a super-hero than the one on the radio—but I loved his symbol: a winged clock with its hands at 12:00 midnight! My wife Dann once sewed that symbol onto a leather jacket for me. It looked so nice that two young hoodlums broke my car window and stole it while I was at lunch!
The cover artist of CM #43 (Aug. 1946) is unidentified.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Captain Flash

He was one of the few  super-heroes created new for the super-hero “false spring” of 1953-55. With his radioactive origin, he was in a way a precursor of the 1960s Marvel heroes—while his last name “Flash” and his artist, Mike Sekowsky, would soon be linked with National/DC.
The inker of Mike’s cover for  CF #4 (July 1955) is unidentified.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Fighting Yank

I got a kick out of the Yank, who had a Revolutionary War ancestor and combined that era’s look (hat, shoes, and all) with super-hero garb. At Marvel in the  ’70s, I borrowed his look for The Spirit of 76 in  The Invaders.
Cover of Standard’s Fighting Yank #25 (July 1948) by Alex Schomburg, who’d drawn a ton of WWII Timely covers!
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Black Terror

The Terror sported one of my favorite all-time costumes. At age 9-10 I swiped a lot of it when I dreamed up a hero called Phantom Man; and in the 1980s, at DC, he inspired my initial sketch of Mr. Bones for Infinity, Inc.—except that I moved the “skull” part of his look up to become his actual head!
Cover of Standard’s Black Terror #16 (Oct. 1946)—another Schomburg triumph.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Daredevil

It wasn’t till long after I went to work for Marvel that I learned of the connection between its Daredevil and the one published by Lev Gleason. But I consider the original DD’s red-and-blue split costume one of the best ever—and I never quite forgave the Little Wise Guys for taking over his comic circa 1950 and kicking him out!
DD #32 (Sept. 1945) cover by Charles Biro.
[Daredevil is now a trademark of Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Green Lama

I had no idea the Green Lama had started life as a pulp-magazine hero in a robe and hoodie, but I couldn’t get enough of the costumed version of him that Mac Raboy drew for Spark Comics in the mid-’40s. Well, actually, I guess I could—because as a comicbook super-hero, he only lasted eight issues!
Above is Raboy’s cover for Green Lama #6 (Aug. 1945).
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Atoman

He exploded onto the scene right after the atomic bomb did—sporting a dazzling costume designed by artist Jerry Robinson. Years later, I made it the basis of my 1969 re-design of Marvel’s first Captain Marvel. When Gil Kane joined me as artist, it evolved into something quite a bit different—but Sparks Comics’ Atoman was the launch-point!
Cover of #1 (Feb. 1946).
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Yank & Doodle,
with The Black Owl

As a kid, I didn’t know there’d been an earlier Black Owl in the Prize group’s flagship title. By then, he’d retired, and the father of the crimefighting twins Yank and Doodle took over his secret identity. Guess that’s why Pop had second billing to his  sons—something that puzzled  me back then.
Cover of Prize Comics #51 (Mar. 1945) by John Giunta.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

Yellowjacket

Charlton’s Yellowjacket  mostly just ordered wasps around. Still, in my early  teens, I made up a Yellowjacket who was basically Lev Gleason’s Crimebuster wearing a (you guessed it) yellow jacket… and in 1968 I made a new Yellowjacket the alter ego of an amnesiac Hank Pym. Guess you could say I liked the name!
Cover of Yellowjacket Comics #6 (Jan. 1946); art by Ken Battefield.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Grim Reaper

Even by the time he was laid to rest when I was seven, I knew Standard’s Grim Reaper wasn’t a great character, and didn’t deserve such a fine name. But of course he’d just taken his moniker from an old folktale, so later I appropriated it for the name of a  key Avengers villain.
This splash page is from  Wonder Comics #16 (Feb. 1948); artist uncertain.
[TM & © the respective trademark & copyright holders.]

The Heap

Though I’d seen The Heap’s final tussle with the aviator Sky Wolf, his creepy later solo stories intrigued me. He was both a monster—and a hero. So the first time I plotted a Hulk issue, I had Ol’ Greenskin fight The Glob… who was really just The Heap with a new name. And this is before either Man-Thing or Swamp Thing!
Cover of Hillman’s Airboy Comics #100 (June 1952) by  Ernest Schroeder.
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Rulah, Jungle Goddess

If Sheena, Tiger Girl, and Camilla in Fiction House’s Jungle Comics weren’t enough feminine pulchritude for you, there was Rulah, over at Fox Features. Since the other three ladies had laid claim to leopard-, tiger-, and zebra-skin, she had to be content with a leftover  giraffe hide.
Still, she looked good on the cover of Rulah #21 (Dec. 1948), as drawn by Jack Kamen.
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Captain Tootsie

He started out as a blond Captain Marvel lookalike hawking Tootsie Rolls in one-page comics-format ads; and Toby Press starred him (minus the candy) in his own title for two issues. Later, artist Herb Trimpe and I used aspects of his costume when we co-created Doc Samson in The Incredible Hulk.
The artist of the cover for  Captain Tootsie #1 (Oct. 1950) is, alas, unidentified.
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Dick Briefer’s
Frankenstein!

In the latter ’40s, writer/artist Dick Briefer’s version of Frankenstein (the monster, that is) was a humor comic—though by the early ’50s it reverted to the horror feature it had been earlier in Prize Comics. Frankenstein became one of my few “horror” buys, mostly because it starred a continuing character, a  “super-hero” of a grotesque sort.
Seen is the cover of #31 (June-July 1954).
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Hunt Bowman & Lyssa

This regular feature in Fiction House’s Planet Comics starred Hunt Bowman and his ladyfriend Lyssa battling the Volta-men who had conquered the Earth. In 1973 I utilized elements of “The Lost World” in a Marvel series I concocted as an ongoing sequel to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds—but I left the writing to others.
Pictured is the cover of Planet #45 (Nov. 1946), by Lily Renée.
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Crimebuster & Squeeks

After his dad was  murdered, young Chuck Chandler became Crimebuster… a name shortened to C.B. when crime comics came under attack. Ditching first his costume, then even his pet monkey Squeeks, in his Lev Gleason mag, he eventually went back to college—as Chuck Chandler. In the ’70s I borrowed that name for my 1950s-set Marvel hero 3-D Man.
Cover of Boy Comics #30  (Oct. 1946) by Charles Biro.
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Straight Arrow

Originating on radio, he was a Comanche raised by whites who “disguised” himself as a Comanche (!) to fight crime in the Old West. He lasted only three years on the airwaves, but six years in Magazine Enterprises’ comic… and was featured on “Injun-uity” cards in packages of Shredded Wheat cereal!
The great (and young) Frank Frazetta drew the cover of SA #3 (June-July 1950).
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