‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the upcoming webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is being illustrated by Amanda Hayes, and the first chapter of the story is set to appear on the web on December 14th.

‘Four Color Memories’ is a column about the comics of our youth, full of nostalgia for the days when heroes were heroes and villains were villains, before the Avengers were DARK and before the Lanterns were BLACK.

To see a directory of previous installments of the column, please click here!

Installment the Seventh

In Which We Speak With Gerry Conway

This is a special edition of Four Color Memories. This week, I had the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with comic legend Gerry Conway. What follows is a transcript of that conversation.

• You started your career as a teenager in the anthology books at both DC and Marvel. Did you simply send a script in and they liked it and used it or did you have interaction with the artists? How did it work back then?

GERRY CONWAY: Well the way it happened for me, I was a teenager and I was going up to the offices at DC comics during the summer for a weekly tour that they had and during the tour, I and a couple of other people who had been on it frequently would slip off and go accost the different editors, try to get them to buy our stories and like that. That’s pretty much how I met and made a connection with Dick Giordano who was the editor of, I think, The Witching Hour and House of Secrets which were the two books that actually published my first stories. At the time you would work with the editor, you wouldn’t actually work directly with the artist unless you were doing it Marvel style, which was a different technique then they used at DC.

• So you didn’t do Marvel style at all?

GC: Not at that point, no. At that point it was primarily full scripts that were then handed off to the artist and the editor would work directly with the artist, with a handful of exceptions. I wasn’t one of the people that had those exceptions. You know, I think Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams would interact more, but generally speaking there wasn’t that much back and forth with the artist and writers, at least at DC.

• DC gave you your first shot at a super hero of sorts with the Phantom Stranger.

GC: That’s right

• Did it feel like a big break through for you?

GC: Well, it was fairly huge in that it was the first time I was writing a continuity character. I had been writing the interstitial material for House of Secrets featuring Abel the Caretaker, which was kind of a continuing character but it wasn’t an ongoing storyline, so the Phantom Stranger was the first time I had an opportunity to write a character that had his own series, that had his own back history, that was an ongoing project. I only did two stories, but it was a big movement.

• It was your friend Roy Thomas that got your foot in the door at Marvel, right?

GC: Well, Roy wasn’t actually my friend at that point, but we became friends over the years. What happened was, I was working as I say at DC and the environment at that time was rather strange. You had the DC camp and the Marvel camp and I guess the Jim Warren Creepy and Eerie camp. That was professionally, there were different camps, but socially we all sort of knew each other and interacted with each other at various monthly gatherings. There was a continuum of ages going from me, I was the youngest person, 16 or 17 years old at the time, all the way up to, I think Archie Goodwin was in his mid-thirties. We would all sort of meet up and hang out and so on. I met Roy a few times at those events. It was not like I was a friend, but I knew him. And when they started doing these little horror knock offs that were in competition to the DC books like House of Secrets and The Witching Hour, he approached all of us to submit stories. I think I did a couple of stories for those books and he was looking to have somebody come in and be sort of the pinch hitting writer on a couple of the tertiary titles. Iron Man and Sub-Mariner, I think. And he gave me the writing test and thought that I did a good enough job that he pushed for me to come on board.

• Now in a very short time you were writing issues of Ka-Zar, Daredevil, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, The Inhumans. You co-created Werewolf By Night and you’re the guy that brought Dracula into the Marvel Universe.

GC: I was one of the people who worked on it, yeah. Roy was the one who came up with the notion and co-plotted the first story.

• You did all that as a teenager?

GC: I think I did all of that before I turned twenty, yeah. It was a pretty hectic couple of years. I think I started working for Marvel just as I was coming out of high school. And within the two years, this also coincided with Stan stepping down from his position as a writer and as an editor so there were a number of books that were freed up for Roy to write and Roy didn’t want to write some of those so he passed them on to me. I think I happened to be in the right place at the right time and I also had a good sense of voice in me, that was the Marvel voice, although I had my own take on it and Roy felt confidant that I could do the work, so it was kind of a natural situation. When you’re that age your energy level is so high that people keep saying can you do this and you say sure. Can you do this? Sure. You just keep saying sure. And you know, I wasn’t doing anything else. It was pretty much my life, doing all that material.

• Any favorite moment or favorite book from that time period that really stands out in your mind?

GC: Well, from the period before I took over Thor, which was the first big Marvel title that I worked on, I think my favorite time was working on Daredevil. In particular the sequence in which I sent Daredevil to San Francisco and developed a relationship between him and The Black Widow. These kind of offbeat, noirish stories set there.

• I remember that, that was a really wonderful run. Who was your artist on that?

GC: That was Gene Colon. Gene was terrific, obviously. I think he really became inspired by my moving it to a new location with different visual dynamics for him to play around with.

• Okay, now the big one, Spider-Man. Your run on that title, to put it lightly, was definitive for the time. You created a whole slew of villains that are still being used today, some bigger, some smaller, most notably the Punisher and you were the first one, I believe, to write a really significant death in comic books with Gwen Stacy. I mean, I suppose you could make a case for Captain Stacy, but he was a much smaller character at the time.

GC: And don’t forget Uncle Ben, [laughter].Well, I was given the opportunity to work on that book and I don’t think it was that anyone had a sense that anything needed to be done, we were just doing a monthly title. Obviously it was the flagship, one that I was a huge fan of, so I had a lot invested in it and John Romita, who was the lead collaborator on the book when I started it and doing that particular story that we’re talking about, The Death of Gwen Stacy was simply an attempt to mix thing up and it also was an attempt… I think the reason it became a significant death is that it was of a fairly prominent, main level character. And the thing that fans tend not to remember is that she wasn’t in the strip from the beginning, she came into it, I think, three or four years into the run and we were only another four or five years past that, so it was within the first ten years of the strip and while she was a significant character, she wasn’t as significant in his history as say, Aunt May. What made her significant is the fact that we killed her off. [laughter] She could have vanished from the book through the natural progression of things and no one would really have noticed. She didn’t bring that much to the book. She wasn’t as vital to the chemistry of the series as say, Mary Jane became or as Aunt May obviously was. Even J. Jonah Jameson. We didn’t kill off those guys because all of them, with the exception of Mary Jane, but we didn’t kill off Jonah for example or Aunt May because they were crucial elements of the dynamic. Gwen wasn’t. She became important because she got killed.

• You also killed, at the same time, Norman Osborn. And that took, for a long, long, long time.

GC: It really did. Most of these things don’t. I think one of the more amazing things is that Gwen has actually stayed dead. You know, Stan actually desperately wanted us to bring her back, which is why we did the clone story, but we did it in such a way that there was no way she was going to be part of the series

• And there was that little Evolutionary War thing.

GC: Yeah, which was another footnote, for all intents and purposes. She could never be an ongoing member of the series because she and more importantly Peter, knew she wasn’t the real Gwen. There could never be that sense of, she’s back in my life. It would be more like, there’s this person, sort of like her twin sister kind of thing. And even she couldn’t deal with the idea of being what she was.

• You did the original clone story, that ran up until about #149, I think. How does it feel, knowing what they eventually did to that story?

GC: Well it was kind of weird. When I heard about it, when the notion was that we had been dealing with the clone all those years, which I guess at one point that was the interpretation, I thought, from a solipsistic point of view, that was great, because it meant the book ended when I left it. [laughter] Cause I mean, yeah, Spider-Man left the book. It was no longer about him, so basically the book ended when I left it. But obviously I thought that was a silly notion. I think ultimately they thought so, too and obviously it’s sort of been written out of the Marvel history to a large degree. I would never have done it, I thought it was dumb. But I thought a lot of things they did with the character in the 80’s and 90’s were dumb. You know, the black costume thing, I thought that was dumb. It was done for a short term dramatic effect, right? Something like the clone story, that’s a major change. If you’re sincere about it, that basically is a like a complete upheaval. It’s like the last season of Dynasty when it turns out that so and so wasn’t dead, it was all a dream. It’s like, what?

• So Gwen Stacy stepped out of the shower at some point?

GC: [laughter] Yeah, right. Or alternately, another bad idea that I think they got themselves into was marrying him off, which they’ve tried to now unravel, in a way. So I have this sort of, this is a theoretical conversation in a way, I have a very strong set of feelings about how you handle iconic characters. And one of the ways you handle iconic characters is by not damaging the iconography of the character. [laughter] By changing it.

• That seems to be a pretty common thing to do these days.

GC: Yes. Well, it was more common in the late 80’s and 90’s. I think people started feeling like they couldn’t do the stories without changing the character, which is why you got things like all the different Green Lanterns that popped up at DC or changing Spider-Man dramatically by having him graduate college. All these things that, while they make sense for the writer, because the wrier or editor or art team is bored doing the same story, it makes no sense for the character. You know, the character is who the character is, you change that and you’re changing the character. I mean you’re rolling the dice by changing something that’s fundamental to the character and to the appeal of the character. I’m not conservative in any other area of my life but this, [laughter] this I would argue strenuously that when you’re dealing with mythic characters you don’t change them.

• I think I quite agree with you. I’m still a little disturbed by the extended run of Bucky as Captain America.

GC: Yeah, I mean, what’s the point of that? We all know that eventually they’re going to bring Steve Rogers back. You can’t do it any other way. I don’t know. Readers buy into it and what happens is you get a short term uptick in sales and so that convinces the publisher that this is the way to go and then the long downward trend of the sales follows that as the novelty wears off and what you’re left with is this damaged icon.

• Time to start over with a new number 1.

GC: That’s right. Pretend that you didn’t make any of those mistakes and, you know, two or three years, you make them all over again. It’s because people don’t learn their lessons. There’s a reason that for decades, DC was very careful about how they handled Superman. And they managed to keep that a million copy a month selling character for 40 years and then they turned it over to Julie Schwartz, who’s an otherwise intelligent man, and Julie and Denny O’Neal, within a span of like two or three years reduced it to a three hundred thousand copy a month magazine. And they did that by changing all the things that made the character iconic. [laughter] You just don’t do that. Of course they grew bored with it, neither one of them wanted to do it, they were forced into doing the character and neither one of them had any instinct for it.

• Let me ask you about one other old character of yours from the Spider-Man days, because he has become so big…

GC: The Punisher?

• Yeah. Did you foresee any of this? And what do you think of what they’ve done with the character?

GC: Well, that’s another iconic question, right? I didn’t obviously create the character thinking he was going to be as big as he became. He was not even the main villain of that issue, he was supposed to be, in my original conception, basically a henchman to the main villain, who was the Jackal. And I, in the writing of it, found that I liked the character quite a bit and I liked what was being done visually with him by Ross [Andru] and John Romita, using a rough sketch that I had come up with and I just, in the process of writing it, found him to be more interesting than it had seemed in the conception. So as it turns out, we realized first that we had an interesting character, but the fans were the ones who really told us. The response to those issues and to his subsequent appearances was huge. And as time went on he became bigger and bigger and bigger. My feeling about the character today, I don’t actually know anything about how he’s being portrayed now. I know there was a period in the 90’s and early 2000’s where the iconographic elements were removed, writers and artists and editors felt that they couldn’t tell those stories [laughter] and you know, that was reasonably successful, but it wasn’t as successful as the book had been when it was in it’s iconic form. I don’t know why, when they made the second movie, the one with Thomas Jane, that they used that version, because that was the least successful version. But it was the one they could relate to, even though it wasn’t the iconic version. It’s weird, I’ve never understood the reluctance to stick with what made you like the character in the first place. You know? It’s just weird to me.

• They might have chosen that version because it was one of the first versions that separated him from the Marvel Universe. Let’s you tell a stand alone story without having to worry about…

GC: Yeah, but you could have still told the Punisher story without fitting it into the Marvel Universe. They managed to do that with Daredevil, for example. Not well, but they still did it. So you can do it. I think they just chose not to because they felt that this was more “realistic”. That kind of behavior by that kind of person could be anybody and the idiot thing to me is they get him wearing the Punisher t-shirt, right, which he gets because some kid, I think this is how they did it in the movie, I didn’t really see the movie, I just sort of skimmed through it, they get the t-shirt because some kid is wearing the t-shirt, right? Or something like that. Well, the t-shirt is based on the comic book character, so in effect, you are stepping one step away from the character while still trying to embrace the character. What’s the point of that? I don’t get the point, and obviously the viewers didn’t get the point either because the movie was a big flop. And when they went back to it, they tried to make it more the iconic version and just the fact that it wasn’t a particularly well done movie probably hampered that.

• You stepped in, in the mid 70’s, as editor-in-chief of Marvel, for a very short period of time. And that seemed to be followed by a rather abrupt departure from the company.

GC: A lot of that had to do with personal issues on my part, not so much professional. I originally left Marvel because I had not received the editor-in-chief job. I felt that I had been promised it, that if Roy Thomas left I was the next person in line. And because of a series of miscommunications, I was actually out of town at the time when Roy left, and Stan, in a panic, feeling like he needed to have an editor-in-chief simply went to the next people who were in the office, who were Marv [Wolfman] and Len [Wein], both of whom are very talented guys and could have filled those shoes without any problem, but I felt like I had been passed over in what seemed to me to be the logical progression of things. I had filled in for Roy as editor-in-chief when he was on vacation. I was doing those things and I was also a kid, like in my early 20’s when this all happened and emotionally I think I felt kind of passed over. Well, when I came back, to that job, I came into it after a year at DC working as an editor and I understood what needed to be done from an editorial point of view but I came into a situation that was fairly chaotic and unruly. We had really weird things going on. There was a writer working on a title that I wanted to replace because I didn’t think he was very good. So I told him that I would be taking him off the book and a few hours later one of the people in the production department came in to my office and said, can I have a moment of your time? I say, sure, and he said, listen, you can’t fire so and so off that book and I said, why can’t I and this person said, well, because he’s a member of our coven. See, there was a coven there at Marvel, of witches, and he was one of them. [laughter]

• An actual witches’ coven?

GC: Well, they thought they were.

• [laughter]

GC: You know, this was the 70’s and people were a little strange in their behaviors. So then a couple of other artists and writers who disagreed with my policies tried to get me fired. Some of the people were quitting. It was just a real rat’s nest. A nest of vipers, in a sense. Not a pleasant place for me to be. I wasn’t really, emotionally, in a place to deal with it. So after about a month and a half I said, you know, this is not what I want to do, I want to go back to DC. And Stan told me no, look, we’ll give you a contract, you can stay here, you can write whatever you want, it’ll be great. And so, for the next four or five months we were in the process of negotiating a contract. And I didn’t really want to be there. I wanted to be back at DC where I felt like I was respected and treated well and so on. And when they presented me with a contract that, in my view, negated all of the things that we had agreed to, I just took the opportunity to say bye. I just dropped out. Back over to DC where I stayed very happily for a number of years.

• Now at DC, they pretty much gave you the keys to the kingdom right away. You got to play with all the toys.

GC: Well I was one of those guys, I had a lot of energy.

• You were doing Batman, Superman, The Justice League. Pretty much every big book DC had, you had your fingers in at one point or another.

GC: Yeah.

• Were the characters, being more iconic and, if I’m saying this right, a bit less on the realistic side than the Marvel characters, were they still as much fun to write?

GC: They were fun in a different way. I had been a big fan of both Marvel and DC as a kid growing up, for different reasons, and I loved different aspects. If you were a DC fan, what you loved was what I call the puzzle story. The DC stories were basically, put the hero in a tight spot and let him figure a clever way out of it. I mean whether they were clever actually or not, that was the formula. And I liked that, because it fell into something that I liked to do. Which was to figure out clever situations or interesting twists and so on. At the same time, I liked the characters. I liked Batman and I liked Superman. Less so than Batman, but I still liked him. And it was a tremendous opportunity to write these characters that I had grown up reading and loving as a kid. So it was a different kind of iconic character. I mean Spider-Man was an iconic character and you can’t really say that Spider-Man was more realistic than, say, Batman.

• No, but he had more problems..

GC: Exactly. And the stories were more “down to earth”. The issues were more down to earth, like, am I going to pay my rent this month and that sort of thing. Is this girl going to stay with me or is she going to leave me? I tried to bring some of that into the DC books, too. I mean, certainly with the characters that I created and ran with on my own, like Firestorm. That’s what I tried to do.

• In 1976, the comic book equivalent of the Berlin wall fell. How did it feel to be the guy chosen to write the first big Marvel / DC crossover?

It was a lot of fun. In a certain sense, from a very petty point of view, it was payback, because I had left Marvel, this is when I had left them because I hadn’t been given the editor-in-chief job, in my little snit, you know, [laughter] taking my ball and going and I just happened to luck into a situation where, because of the terms of the agreement between DC and Marvel, DC was going to provide the writer and Marvel was going to provide the artist. And I was the fair-haired boy, I was Carmine Infantino’s latest acquisition, right after [Jack] Kirby, not that I’m on the same level as Kirby, but I had been writing [Marvel’s] top titles, so it was pretty huge in his mind that he had gotten me. So he naturally wanted to flaunt it, you know, and show Stan and Marvel that he had the hot guy and blah, blah. So I just sort of happened to be in the right spot at the right time. It was a tremendously fun thing to do, especially working with Ross. I don’t think I could have had a better collaborator for that kind of project, he knew both sets of characters as well, because he had drawn Superman, too.

I can tell you as a fan, at that time, and in ‘76 I would have been 8, getting that book was a real highlight, really special.

GC: Oh, yeah, sure. It was so big in so many ways. I think from a format point of view it was just wonderful. I wish they would do things like that today.

• You jumped back and forth from Marvel to DC quite a bit over the next few years. Sometimes even having books coming out the same month from both companies.

GC: Actually, the only period where I jumped back and forth was ‘75 and ‘76, I think. I was at Marvel from about ‘70 until ’75, then I went to DC for a year, then I came back to Marvel for about 6 months. Then I went back to DC and I was at DC for the next ten years. So really it was just that one period in between…

• So maybe scripts were overlapping a little bit?

GC: Yeah, yeah, because I had done some stories that were still in the pipeline when I left and others that were going to be coming out, so there, in effect, stories that were coming out while I was still working at Marvel and some Marvel stories that were published when I was then again at DC, but I wasn’t actually bouncing back and forth.

• It seemed to me that Firestorm and Ms. Marvel debuted at almost the same time.

GC: I think they debuted about a year apart. Ms. Marvel came out, I did the first two issues of Ms. Marvel near the end of my time at Marvel and the first issue of Firestorm was ‘77 , I think.

• Was that the first issue or the first story, because you were running him as a back up in The Flash for awhile?

GC: Oh, no, no, no, the first issue, there’s two different runs of Firestorm. The original run of Firestorm, which was 1977, for about 6 issues, with Al Milgrom. Then it went away for a couple of years. Then I think we did a Justice League or Superman story with him, then brought him into The Justice League and then put him in The Flash. Something like that. I’m not really clear on the exact date, but that would have been a year or two later. But it all blurs together. [laughter]

• You ended up coming back to Marvel later and when you did, you got another lengthy run on Spider-Man. I think both ‘Spectacular’ and Web of Spider-Man.

GC: Yeah, I did that a couple of years. That was actually because my time had run out at DC. I was actually burning out as a writer and again, personal life issues were causing some upheaval and I had been writing far too much material at DC. For most of that ten year period, I was writing something like five to six titles a month. These days, I think if a writer does three titles a month he’s considered a hot writer, but I was writing so much material that I don’t even remember half of what I’ve written. People tell me about runs that they liked and I’m like, I did that? Somebody was telling me recently that they really liked my run on Wonder Woman and I was like, I wrote Wonder Woman? [laughter] I had no idea. I was writing so much that I was really not able to give all of it the attention it deserved. And I was also burning out, big time, from an emotional point of view. And this was my mid-thirties or so. And I pretty much had a major writer’s block that coincided with the collapse of my relationship with DC. And for about six or eight months I was not writing much of anything until I got some work at Marvel. And Don Daley gave me Thundercats to do and one thing led to another and Jim Salicrup brought me on to Web and to Spectacular.

• Was coming back to Spider-Man your choice or something that Marvel asked you to do?

GC: I would have written anything that they asked me to write, I was in a very grateful frame of mind at that point, coming back into and rediscovering my love of writing comics, because as I said, I burned out and I don’t think that I campaigned for it, but I know that I was very happy and eager to do it. Although I knew that I wasn’t going to be the lead writer, I knew that was [David] Michelinie, my thought was well, is there someway that I can make this interesting for me and for the readers and I wanted to do something similar to what I had done with the Batman series when I was working on Batman and Detective, which was treat it as a bi-weekly series, where the story would start in Batman and finish in Detective. And back to Batman and there would be this sense of this kind of ongoing series.

• That was a spectacular run of books, so many great characters.

GC: Yeah, I was really fortunate, I worked with two terrific artists and a great editor, you know, we had Gene Colon and Don Newton and Dick Giordano was our editor. It was great stuff.

• For several years, those were the two books I most looked forward to when I got to the comic store.

GC: Well that was what I tried to do with Web and Spectacular, tried to get that same sense of an ongoing story. And I knew I couldn’t, because Michelinie was going to be controlling the destiny of Peter and Mary Jane and Aunt May and the main level characters. I sort of made a deal with the editor that would allow me to focus my attention on the second tier characters like Robbie Robertson and Mary Jane’s sister or niece [laughter] and various other ancillary characters, like Gloria Grant, and I had a lot of fun with that, so it was a good opportunity. I had to relearn a lot of the things I liked about doing that book.

• You took a break from comics for quite a few years, you went into television. The show that pops into my mind, most notably, was Father Dowling.

GC: Well, that was the first one I did.

• Funny, fun show. Very enjoyable. How different was it moving from comic books to television?

GC: Surprisingly not that different. A lot of the same dynamics are present in both media. They’re both media in which you’re dealing with characters that are ongoing and are ultimately unchangeable. One of the main things that a writer is supposed to do is create an arc of character development for the character and that’s really not possible in either of those forms. I mean, it’s possible, you can do it, but like I said before, if you do it, you’re changing the iconic character and so it’s a fundamental misuse of the genre. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. I certainly came into the television world with that mindset, so I was not somebody who felt like there was anything wrong with writing a story that had a beginning middle and end, stirred things up and put them back in the end the way they were in the beginning. I understood that, it’s something I sort of knew from writing comics. Also, from a practical point of view, what for a lot of writers is a very strenuous and high pressure environment, turning out story after story after story for 22 episodes in a year was, for me, a cinch. I had been writing six, seven stories a month, this was like relaxation. I was also at a stage in my life personally where I had the free time at that point to devote myself to my writing career in television. Which I needed to be able to do. I mean, television is a field for people who are monomaniacal in their desire to devote themselves to the field. They take advantage of your enthusiasm to put an enormous amount of responsibility and work on you. That’s why they have primarily young people writing television, because young people have the energy and don’t recognize yet that it’s all bullshit [laughter] so they can be beaten into doing whatever the studios and the networks want them to do. So I was great for that, I was perfectly suited for it. And I enjoyed it for a lot of years, even though I hated the stress of not knowing if my career was going to continue year to year. I did actually enjoy most of the work as a creator, especially when I had more authority.

• Just this year you returned to comics, with The Last Days of Animal Man. Was that like coming home again?

GC: It really was, you know. It was very familiar and yet different. I had been away from it long enough that coming back to it was refreshing. It was like a recharging of my creative batteries. I also tried to approach it in a way that I had not approached it back when I was writing for DC before. Because the amount of work I was doing [back then] didn’t allow me time to reflect and to adjust my story, to respond to those reflections. It was basically get it out, get it out, get it out. Get the next one and get it out. So I took much more time writing this one then I had in previous comic book assignments. And that was a pleasure to do, too.

• Is this a one off experiment on your part or are you coming back to comic books?

GC: Well, it’s pretty much up to the publishers and the fans. I’ve pitched a couple of projects that I would be interested in doing to DC and I’m waiting to hear if it’s something they want to pursue. I enjoyed it, you know. I’m actually semi-retired in the sense that I’ve left the film business and have absolutely no desire to go back to it. And don’t, fortunately, at this point in my life, financially need to. So writing comics is a way for me to make some money, which I’m happy to do, but more importantly it’s a way for me to remain creative and involved in things that are of interest to me.

• Well it’s wonderful to have you back

GC: Thank you.

• I’d like to end our conversation today with the questionnaire by Bernard Pivot that’s been popularized by Inside The Actor’s Studio.

GC: Okay.

• What is your favorite word?

GC: Prestidigitation.

• What is your least favorite word?

GC: Cavalier.

• What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

GC: That moment when I’m writing something and I’m not really struggling with it. When it just flows and it feels right. That’s from a creative and professional point of view. When it just is there. From a personal point of view, being with my family and having a pleasant evening. I love when that happens.

• What turns you off?

GC: Political stupidity. Mean-spiritedness and self-centeredness disguised as idealism.

• What is your favorite curse word?

GC: Well, probably crap

• What sound or noise do you love?

GC: A nice piece of music, a favorite piece of music. And don’t ask me what a favorite piece of music would be because it changes form mood to mood.

• What sound or noise do you hate?

GC: Fingernails on a blackboard. I can’t stand that

• What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

GC: Pilot.

• What profession would you not like to do?

GC: Fireman

• If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

GC: We’ve been waiting for you. There’s a woman here who wants a word with you, her name’s Gwen.

[laughter]

• Great ending. Mr. Conway, thank you so much for your time.

GC: Thank you.

Ancillary matters -

We are now less than ten days from the launch of The Invisible Skein The Invisible Skein, which launches Dec 14th at http://www.theinvisibleskein.com

I can be found regularly at my blog, http://kpatrickglover.wordpress.com or on the Twitter thing at http://www.twitter.com/kpatrickglover

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