‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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!

The History of Comics

- Prologue

The history of comics has been divided, over the years, into ages. The platinum, gold, silver, bronze and now the modern age. And while we can clearly see that certain books or certain events belong definitively to certain periods, determining the exact dividing point of those periods is a much murkier proposition.

We all know that reality doesn’t really work that way. Publishers didn’t come into the office one morning and announce that the golden age was over and that starting this month we’re going to be publishing comics in the silver age. It doesn’t work that way (Marvel’s current Heroic Age promotion notwithstanding). These divisions are decided on long after the fact by historians looking back over how things have changed.

In coming columns we’re going to be taking an in-depth look at the history of modern comics, beginning with the silver age. We’ll be looking not just at what happened in the four color world, but why it happened and in what historical context. Some columns, like the one coming in two weeks, may cover a span of a few years. Most will concentrate on a single year. But before we get there, I thought we should take a few moments to glance over what came before, so that the context is clear.

What follows is a checklist of sorts, covering important events both in and out of the comics of the golden age. After this, we’ll be back every two weeks with an in depth look at the world of the silver age and up. But first, what we can all agree on….

March 1937 – Detective Comics # 1, an anthology book is published by what would soon become National Periodical Publications and eventually DC Comics. Detective originally featured several recurring pulp characters, including Slam Bradley, a detective created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

June 1938 – Action Comics # 1, featuring the debut of Superman, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Published by DC, although, like Detective before it, Action Comics began as an anthology book, it was the creation of Superman, the first super powered hero, that makes the book truly noteworthy.

May 1939 – Detective Comics # 27 is published by DC and introduces us to DC’s second staple, The Batman. Created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Batman isn’t a superhero in the same sense as Superman, he’s more of a traditional pulp hero, similar in many ways to The Shadow.

Oct 1939 – Marvel Comics # 1, published by Timely Comics, the company that would eventually become Marvel, it features they debut of the original Human Torch by Carl Burgos and The Sub-Mariner by Bill Everett.

1939 – Stan Lee, actually Stanley Leiber, starts working for Timely Comics at the age of 16. He starts as an “assistant”. By 1941 he’s writing back up features in several comics.

Jan 1940 – Flash Comics # 1, published by All-American Publications. First appearance of the original Flash, by Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert. Also featured the first appearance of Hawkman by Gardner Fox and Dennis Neville.

Feb. 1940 – Whiz Comics # 2, published by Fawcett Comics. The first appearance of Captain Marvel by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker.

July 1940 – All American Comics # 16, published by All American Publications. First appearance of the original Green Lantern by Martin Nodell and Bill Finger.

Oct 1940 – All American Comics # 19, published by All American Publications. First appearance of the original Atom by Ben Flinton and Bill O’Connor.

Winter 1940 – All Star Comics # 3, published by All American Publications. First meeting of the Justice Society of America, DC’s first super hero team.

March 1941 – Captain America Comics # 1, published by Timley Comics, featuring the first appearance of, you guessed it, Captain America, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

December 1941 – The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. America enters World War II.

December 1941 – All Star Comics # 8, published by DC. First appearance of Wonder Woman, created by Dr. William Moulton Marston. She quickly moved to her own starring title, Sensation Comics, starting the very next month.

1944 – Julius Schwartz becomes an editor at All American Comics, two years before the company merges with DC.

1944 – EC Comics is formed. The company’s titles include Mad, Tales From The Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, along with war and crime comics.

April 1945 – Adolph Hitler committed suicide.

August 1945 – The United States drops two atomic bombs on Japan, effectively ending World War II.

Fall 1946 – All Winner’s Squad # 19, from Timely, featuring Marvel’s first super hero team, led by none other than Captain America. The team would appear in only two issues.

1947 – House Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy set up investigations in Hollywood to blackball communist sympathizers.

Feb 1950 – Captain America Comics # 75 – Timely publishes the last issue of its last super-hero comic. Marvel Mystery Comics and Sub-Mariner comics had both ended the year before.

Nov 1951 – Timely Comics becomes Atlas Comics. The company’s line was mostly western, war and horror books, although they unsuccessfully tried to revive the super-hero genre in 1953 with Young Men Comics.

1954 – Seduction of The Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham is published. It’s a book that rails against the evils of comic books, with Wertham actually testifying in front of a senate sub-committee on juvenile offenses. This book can be directly linked to the fall of EC Comics and the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

And that sets the table for exactly where our story shall begin in two weeks. Join us next time, as we cover Julius Schwartz and his kick starting of the Silver Age.

Until next time,

K. Patrick Glover

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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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 Sixteenth

In Which We Visit the Aardvarkian Age

From December of 1977 until March of 2004 Dave Sim wrote and drew 300 issues of Cerebus.

Think about that for a minute. 300 issues. 6,000 pages. Sim has referred to it as “the longest sustained narrative in human history.”

At the height of its popularity, Cerebus was a dominating force in the direct market. Entirely self-published, the book served as an inspiration to a generation of creators and Sim was (and is) an outspoken advocate for creators rights.

He’s also one of the most controversial figures in the industry.

You see, Sim did something that few creators do. He used his book to explore his thoughts on philosophy and religion, not just on a surface level, but in depth. And some of his thoughts weren’t very popular, especially his thoughts on feminism.

But right or wrong, the man didn’t hide himself. He bared his soul for all to see.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Cerebus is a book about an aardvark.

Conceived as a parody book and inspired in part by Steve Gerber’s work on Howard The Duck, Cerebus begins as a parody of Conan The Barbarian. We get parodies of Red Sonja and Moorcock’s Elric, but Sim was never content to coast on the obvious and even the early issues of the book quickly deliver the unexpected.

Artemis appears early on and he is used throughout the series as a general poke at the super-hero industry and often a specific poke at various marketing strategies used by Marvel Comics. He is the Cockroach, Captain Cockroach, The Moon Roach, Punisher Roach, Wolveroach and many more.

Lord Julius makes his first appearance in issue 14. He is the unabashed ruler of the city state of Palnu. He is also, in every way that matters, Groucho Marx. Transported in both appearance and personality, he is only one of the many public and historical figures that find their way into the world of Cerebus.

It is a storytelling technique that provides us with instant context for the character(s), but Sim never uses it solely as shorthand. These characters live and breathe in ways that astonish and while they hold true to their real life doppelgangers, they expand our understanding of the figures they represent.

Oscar Wilde, Mick Jagger, Adam Weisshaupt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway and even Margaret Thatcher appear on page and every one of them has something interesting to say.

By issue twenty Sim had obviously tired of simple parody and turned his attention to philosophy, introducing the Cirinists and Suenteus Po, founder of the Illusionists. While the Cirinists represent Sim’s impressions of what a matriarchal society would have been, Po is largely an author surrogate, allowing his to express his thoughts directly to the audience. It’s a role later filled by other characters like the Judge, Rick and Viktor.

Issue 26 saw the beginning of a drastic change in format. Instead of single issue stories, Cerebus became a book of great story arcs like ‘High Society’ (issues 26-50) and ‘Church & State’ (issues 52-111). As the plots became more and more complex, so to did Sim’s explorations of politics and philosophy.

Which, inevitably, leads us to the controversies.

Cerebus ran for twenty-seven years. Dave Sim was all of twenty-one when he began. He was forty-eight when he finished. People change, and the more people think about things like philosophy and religion, the larger those changes are likely to be.

Over the course of those twenty-seven years, Sim was married and divorced. He had battles with both alcohol and drugs. He lived with a lot of anger. He began as an atheist and ended the book a devoutly religious man.

He did all of it very publicly. His thoughts, however tenuous, we’re right there in black and white.

The thoughts that got him into the most trouble were on the subject of what he called anti-feminism and what many of his readers referred to as outright misogyny. It created a rift between him and the public (along with others in the business) and Sim, instead of doing what everyone seemed to expect (apologizing) dug in his heels and fought it out.

I’m not sure if the Sim who found religion in the late nineties agrees on all points with the Sim who railed against feminism in the early nineties, and I’m not sure I care. I’m not a friend of Dave Sim’s. I’ve never met the man and I couldn’t care less what he believes.

But, and this is the key, Cerebus was a reflection of a character’s life, along with the lives of those he met. It takes place over a long period of time and all of the changes that Sim went through reflect themselves in the narrative in a very natural and very honest way. It presents a cohesive whole in ways that few stories (much less comics) ever do.

It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Sim. The author (and artist)’s life is irrelevant. It’s about the work and the work on Cerebus is astounding. It lives, it breathes, it makes you laugh and it pisses you off.

Isn’t that what art is all about?

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

The comic world had been a buzz with last week’s announcement about the new head honchos at DC. I leave all the commenting, both good and bad, to others and simply wish the five gentlemen the best of luck. It’s a tough job and they’re going to need it. (For the record, I think they’ll do just fine. But what do I know?)

Also, as usual, a plug for my ongoing webcomic, illustrated by the amazing Amanda Hayes. If you haven’t done so yet (and shame on you), then head on over to http://theinvisibleskein.com

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

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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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 Fifteenth

In Which Worlds Will Die and Heads Will Hurt

If you haven’t read last week’s column (and, really, the one before that) then you might want to take a few minutes and go back. Otherwise, this might not make a lot of sense. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

All caught up? Good, let’s move forward.

Crisis On Infinite Earths, by Marv Wolfman and George Perez arrived in 1985. It was both a gorgeous and ambitious book. Featuring virtually every character in the DC Multiverse in a grand, cosmic crossover, it also functions as a broom, sweeping up the muddled continuity of the past 50 years.

This book had destruction on a level that Roland Emmerich could only dream of. World after world and universe after universe are destroyed, eventually leaving us with just one universe. But we can’t wipe out all of those other cool characters, so many of the multiple Earths are merged.

Suddenly the Justice Society and the Justice League exist on the same world. So do the Freedom Fighters and the Captain Marvel Family and the old Charlton heroes. To simplify things (and man, I think somebody needs a refresher course on the definition of the word simplify) history is rewritten to remove inconsistencies.

The Big Three (Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman) are removed from Justice Society history. The Earth 2 versions of the characters no longer existed and the Earth 1 versions were declared the real deal, starting the characters’ history with the Justice League days.

No, wait, that would be too easy.

Batman’s history starts with the Justice League days. Superman and Wonder Woman, on the other hand, begin anew after Crisis. As if they never existed. Just, oops, let’s start again. An interesting decision to say the least.

So let’s look at how this works out for a few characters. Wonder Girl still exists over in the Teen Titans book, except now she’s not really connected to Wonder Woman because Wonder Woman doesn’t exist yet. Superboy never existed, because in his new origin Clark Kent doesn’t put on the cape until he’s an adult. Since the whole history of the Legion of Super-Heroes is tied into Superboy’s history, that pretty much calls everything about them into question.

The Huntress is supposed to be the daughter of Earth 2’s Batman, but now Earth 2 Batman never existed. Yet here she is. Same story with Power Girl, who is supposed to be the cousin of Earth 2’s Superman.

I don’t even want to get started on Hawkman because it just makes my head hurt.

Now, remember folks, Marv Wolfman is a wonderful and talented writer. ‘Crisis’ is a fantastic read, in and of itself, and that’s really the important thing. And I’m sure that the vast majority of the cluster fuck aspect of this comes from the inevitable editorial edicts and corporate decisions that have to get handed down from on high when you’re playing with that many valuable properties.

But for something that attempts to simplify continuity, Crisis manages to be the starting point for a universe that is so complicated that even the creators couldn’t keep track of the who, what, where and whys.

Which of course led to various and sundry attempts to clarify individual character histories, attempts that would often get contradicted or replaced by other versions later on.

All of which eventually led to a series of other Crises, from Infinite to Final, which finally took us back to a multiverse with various versions of Earth, just not the same ones we started with.

It is, at this point, entirely plausible that the editorial decisions at DC are being made by a monkey with a dartboard.

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

Don’t forget that my webcomic The Invisible Skein, launched on 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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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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 Fourteenth

In Which a Crisis is Brewing

What we’re going to do today is take a look at DC’s history. We’ll look at how multiple earths led to a Crisis of epic proportions, how Marv Wolfman and George Perez put all the pieces back together again, and maybe wonder a little bit about why DC is mucking it all up.

Our story starts, long before I was born, in 1938, with the first appearance of Superman in a book called Action Comics #1. He was wildly successful, of course, and the editors at DC (then called, I believe, National Allied Publications) knew a good thing when they saw it, and decided to bring us some other super-heroes.

Characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow – they all appeared in forms very familiar to us today; but we also had the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom – these characters were very different from what became their Silver Age counterparts. For example, Green Lantern used magic, not some gift from a dying alien, and Hawkman was human, not an alien himself.

The fans longed to see these characters interacting, and DC was happy to oblige, eventually bringing them, and others, together as the Justice Society of America. It was a solid concept, well executed and it even served as a morale booster in the darkest days of World War II. But, like all trends, the age of heroes came to pass.

All Star Comics (home of the aforementioned Justice Society) eventually became All Star Western, and many of the other super-hero books faded from view. DC still published adventures of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, but the rest of its heroes just seemed to slip away.

At least until 1956, when DC re-introduced The Flash in the 4th issue of Showcase. The problem was, it wasn’t the same Flash. This one had a different costume, a different personality, and even a different name. Gone was Jay Garrick, in was Barry Allen. In fact, the original Flash is mentioned in the book as a comic book character that Barry had read about!

The new Flash was shortly followed by a new Green Lantern and a new Hawkman, both very different from their original counterparts. A special issue of The Flash (‘The Flash of Two Worlds’) attempted to sort this out. It posited two worlds existing on different vibrational frequencies, occupying the same space. Each world was similar, but different. The newly created characters occupied one world, the original, Golden Age characters occupied another. Eventually we would call the world of the current characters ‘Earth 1‘, and that of the oldies but goodies would be ‘Earth 2‘.

See, unlike Flash and Green Lantern, some characters like Superman and Batman had been published continuously since the 30s. In their older appearances they could interact with the ‘Earth 2′ characters, now they interacted with the ‘Earth 1′ characters. The fix, if you could call it that, was to say that there was a Superman and a Batman (and a Wonder Woman) on each Earth, and to simply take an arbitrary point in the characters’ series and call it the demarcation point. Everything that happened before this issue happened to the ‘Earth 2′ version, everything that happened after that issue happened on ‘Earth 1′.

Got that?

Everything would probably have been fine if DC had just left well enough alone. We all know the odds of that happening, right?

So they started letting the characters from each Earth meet up on a regular basis. They had an annual tradition of a Justice Society / Justice League (‘the Earth 1′ incarnation of the Society) team-up, where one team crossed to the others’ world to help them with an unprecedented Crisis. (See, there’s that word popping up already).

Then they started creating more Earths.

It started innocently enough. They wanted a world with an evil version of the League, so, let’s just make another Earth. Oh, and they bought the rights to Fawcett’s old super-hero line. Can’t just blend them in and say they’ve been there all along, let’s make another Earth for them.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

And by the early 80s everything was such a clusterfuck that nobody really knew what was going on. Sitting on the rack at the comic shop you could pick up Justice League or New Teen Titans (both ‘Earth 1′ books), or sitting right next to them, with no warning label or anything, All Star Squadron or Infinity Inc. (both ‘Earth 2′ books). Sometimes the books had variations of the same characters!

How was a poor kid supposed to make sense of it without a class or something?

So one day Marv Wolfman walks into editorial at DC and says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. I can fix it. All of it.”

Unfortunately, we’re about out of time for the week. So be back here next time and I’ll let you know just what Marv did, and what the repercussions were.

Oh, yes, there were repercussions….

K. Patrick Glover

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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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 Twelfth

In Which We Say Hello to Another Universe

I found the characters intriguing, but distinctly different in tone from those in the Marvel Universe. Batman in particular caught my attention, which is why I ended up with that copy of Brave and The Bold by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo. (And isn’t it odd that my entry points into both Marvel and DC were team-up books? There’s probably a whole column in that somewhere.)

I slowly began to get individual issues of several DC titles. More Brave and The Bold, Batman, Detective Comics, Justice League. There was a big difference between DC and Marvel titles. Where Marvel’s tight continuity left me compelled to collect each issue, DC was much looser. The stories were very much a villain of the month sort of affair with little plot or sub-plot carrying over from issue to issue (with the exception of the occasional multi part story). I had no desire to get every issue of a DC title, I simply grabbed what looked interesting.

I remember very few stories from that period. There was a great four part story in Batman about several villains taking credit for Batman’s supposed death (this was later re-done as an episode of Batman: The Animated Series). There was the Englehart / Rogers run on Detective Comics. I remember Superman fighting Captain Marvel (Shazam!) in the Justice League. And I remember some Superman issues featuring Metallo and the Parasite, but honestly, I remember the covers more than the stories themselves.

That all changed in 1980. I had picked up a copy of DC Comics Presents #26 (yet another team-up book) starring Superman and Green Lantern. I wasn’t a huge fan of either character, but the art was by Jim Starlin and I was a big fan of his after his work on Captain Marvel (the Kree version) and Warlock over at Marvel.

DC was trying a new experiment at the time. They would do eight page preview stories of upcoming titles and insert them into ongoing series, to introduce the book to an existing audience. This issue of DC Comics Presents (what a title) had one of those previews, for an upcoming title called The New Teen Titans. With a story by Marv Wolfman and art by George Perez (both favorites of mine from their days at Marvel, Marv from Amazing Spider-Man and George from The Avengers) the preview was fascinating and left me with a definite taste for more.

In concept, you wouldn’t think the book would have caused the stir that it did. The Titans certainly weren’t new, the team had been around since the sixties. The set-up was simply junior Justice League, sidekicks on parade, so to speak. Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Changeling, plus a few new characters like Raven, Cyborg and Starfire.

But the execution was certainly something new to DC and the series caught fire. The Titans quickly shot up the charts and became the kind of sensation that the X-Men had become over at Marvel. Perez was meticulous in the artwork and Wolfman brought a firm sense of continuity into the book, with plot threads that continued over several years and kept you always coming back.

In 1983, Wolfman spun a new series out of the Titans, a book called Vigilante, about a former D.A. who had worked with the Titans until his family was killed and he became, well, a vigilante. The spin-off book had a more adult tone and was the start of a coming trend at DC.

The following year saw Alan Moore taking over Saga of The Swamp Thing and when I read his first issue I knew things would never be the same again. Moore had a different way of looking at the DC Universe and he explored the darker corners of what had been a brightly lit world. Even the Justice League seemed somewhat disturbing in his hands.

Then came the Crisis. Which is a story for next week.

See you then,

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

Don’t forget that my webcomic The Invisible Skein, launched on 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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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is illustrated by Amanda Hayes.

‘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 Eleventh

In Which We Take a Look Around and Ponder Where We Are

I can tell you that I never thought of comics as “kid stuff”, at least no more than I thought of film or television as kid stuff. I mean TV was filled with cartoons, but it also had lots of adult programs. The same could be said of film. For every Who Framed Roger Rabbit we have an A Room With A View.

See, that’s the common vantage point among the mediums. Not only are they all visual storytelling, they all lend themselves to a wide range of stories for a wide range of audiences. So, yes, Richie Rich and Casper are “kid stuff”. No argument from me.

The material the big two (Marvel and DC) put out when I was younger was usually all ages, but not strictly kid stuff. Some of it skewed adult when they wanted to make some social point (often stories about drug abuse) but just in general, the storytelling in Spider-Man was more sophisticated than anything you’d read in Archie.

Interestingly, from my eyes, the medium seemed to grow as I did. As I grew into my teens and a comic shop sprung up down the road, I began to find titles like Cerebus and American Flagg and Jon Sable. I was no longer limited to just Marvel and DC, companies like First, Eclipse, Pacific, Aardvark-Vanaheim, Vortex and Warp all chimed in to help feed my imagination and I started to realize that there simply wasn’t anything you couldn’t do in comics.

In what seemed like a response to my expanding palette of taste, Marvel and DC grew even more complex. Marvel gave us the X-Men, recreated in a bold new way, a firm parable against intolerance of every stripe. John Byrne brought grand adventure back to The Fantastic Four, and Frank Miller led Daredevil to some very dark places. Howard The Duck battled existentialism and Tony Stark battled a demon in a bottle.

I used to show my older friends that run of Daredevil books and say, “Look! See! It’s not kid stuff!” Some of them got it. A few. The others just shook their heads.

It was a process I went through over and over back then. It felt, at times, almost evangelical, as I attempted to preach my four color gospel to any who would listen. I didn’t exactly knock on doors and hand out issues of the X-Men, but show any interest and you’d be hearing from me, in great detail.

The conversion process, as I liked to call it back then, became a lot easier when a gent named Alan Moore brought his unique point of view across the pond and turned Swamp Thing from a silly monster book at DC into one of the creepiest and most poetic things I had ever read.

And that book made things so easy. “You think comics are for kids, huh? Here, read this. It’s called ‘The Anatomy Lesson’. And sorry in advance, for any problems you might have sleeping tonight…”

There wasn’t one turning point, there were many. Or maybe I should say that many bricks were laid upon the wall. Whatever turn of phrase you please, the result is the same. The medium matured. It has grown up alongside me, maybe no more eagerly than I have, but grown up it has.

It still has a fascination for the guys in tight suits, doing amazing things. Morality plays have always been one of the things the medium does well, and that’ll never change. And like me, the medium does seem to be struggling to find its way. It’s one of the tenants of growing up, there’s no blueprint to follow. We all have to find our own path.

Just as that’s true for me and for you, I think that it’s true of the comic medium. And just as I’m sure that we’ll both find our way, dear reader, so do I think the medium will. The path is there, just ahead, and the underbrush may be a bit thick, but I think I see a clearing ahead.

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

Don’t forget that my webcomic The Invisible Skein, launched on Dec 14th at http://www.theinvisibleskein.com, and we’ve now got 14 pages live!

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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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the 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 Tenth

In Which We Talk a Walk Down Baker Street

(This is the first of four pieces I’ll be writing this week about Sherlock Holmes. The second, a review of some other more recent Holmes comics, will appear here in a day or two. The third and fourth pieces will appear later this week on my blog, (Parenthetically Speaking). I hope you enjoy each of them.)

Sherlock Holmes has had a wide and varied career in comics. Indeed, long before I was born he was appearing in books by Dell and Classics Illustrated as well as all sorts of comic strips and editorial cartoons. Caricatures of Holmes appeared in many cartoons and even children’s books were written about the Great Detective (and the mouse that shared his residence at Baker Street).

My first experience with Holmes in the comic medium was a one shot put out by DC in 1975. Simply called Sherlock Holmes, it featured an adaptation of the short stories The Final Problem and The Empty House, written by the great Denny O’Neal and illustrated by Philippine comic artist E.R. Cruz.

The following year saw Marvel’s adaptation of The Hound of The Baskervilles in two issues of their black and white anthology, Marvel Preview. The story was penned by Doug Moench and drawn with great flair by the talented Val Mayerik.

In 1986, Renegade Press, the company that broke away from Aardvark-Vanaheim when Dave Sim split with his wife, Deni, began publishing a series called The Cases of Sherlock Holmes. Not quite a comic, these black and white books usually featured the original text of Doyle stories, beautifully illustrated by Dan and David Day. (I say usually, because one issue did feature an original short story by Gordon Derry).

DC put out an oddity in 1987, an issue of Detective Comics (#572) that featured a lost Sherlock Holmes tale as it’s center piece and a meeting between Batman and an elderly Holmes in the overall story. The center piece, called “The Adventure of The Red Leech”, was once again drawn by E.R. Cruz and almost looks like an unpublished tale from what would have been the 1975 series.

1987 also saw the first of several Holmes stories by Martin Powell and Seppo Makinen, Scarlet In Gaslight, an original black and white mini series that pitted Holmes against Dracula. Published by Eternity Comics, it has been reprinted several times, most recently by Moonstone.

Eternity also published the follow up tale by Powell and Makinen, 1989’s A Case of Blind Fear in which the Great Detective grapples with the Invisible Man, along with several series and trades reprinting various Sherlock Holmes newspaper strips that had accumulated over the years.

(My research also shows a listing for a mini series called The Case of The Missing Martian that Eternity apparently printed in 1990. This one slid completely under my radar, and if anyone has copies they’d like to part with, please get in touch with me.)

Innovation put out a graphic novel adapting the very first of the Holmes’ stories, A Study In Scarlet in 1989. (Adapted by James Stenstrum. Art by Noly Panaligan. – and that information comes straight from a website offering the book for sale. This is another one that I’ve never actually managed to get my hands on.)

1996 saw a one shot adaptation of The Sussex Vampire put out by Caliber Press. Written by Warren Ellis with art by Craig Gilmore, this is one of the few adaptations that outshines the source material, as The Sussex Vampire was one of Doyle’s least impressive stories.

Caliber is also notable for their earlier series Baker Street, which, while it didn’t actually feature Holmes, was sort of inspired by Doyle’s world, albeit set in an alternate history present day and riffing heavily off of punk culture.

Most of these stories are of course long out of print, although it should be noted that Moonstone released two trade paperbacks called Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, featuring the stories by Powell and Makinen. The first volume reprints Scarlet By Gaslight and A Case of Blind Fear while the second reprints a later mini called Return of The Devil and an apparently all-new tale called The Loch Ness Horror.

It should also be mentioned that these are not the only places to find such crossover tales. Holmes has crossed Dracula’s path in several novels, such as Loren Estelman’s Sherlock Homes vs. Dracula and Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes/Dracula File. He’s also dealt with the Loch Ness Monster on a previous occasion in the brilliant Billy Wilder film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

(And, yes, I have been listening to Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street while I wrote this. Why do you ask?) [ED NOTE: Oh God!]

Till next time,
K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

Don’t forget that my webcomic The Invisible Skein, launched on Dec 14th at http://www.theinvisibleskein.com, and we’ve now got 11 pages live!

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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‘Four Color Memories’

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the 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 Ninth

In Which Who is Most Definitely Not on First

I remember my first experience with Doctor Who.

It was 1975. My cousin David was visiting and we were staying up late to watch the late night Creature Feature movie on channel 20. It starred Peter Cushing as a crazy old scientist who had invented a time machine that looked like a blue phone booth (at seven years old, I had no idea what a police call box was).

He traveled in this incredible machine, with his companions, not just in time but in space, ending up on a strange planet populated by alien robots called Daleks. The movie was vivid and exciting and neither of us had any idea that it was loosely based on a TV series.

Flash forward two years. I’m visiting my cousin David in West Virginia. He drags me down the steps, asking me if I remember that movie we watched with The Doctor and The Daleks. He turns on the TV and I’m immediately sucked into ‘The Ark In Space’ (the second appearance of Tom Baker as The Doctor). [ED note = Tom Baker was the BEST]

(For the benefit of the uninitiated: The Doctor is a member of an alien race known as the Time Lords. They travel through time and space in a machine called a TARDIS, which can disguise itself as damn near anything. Except The Doctor’s TARDIS is broken and therefore stuck in the shape of a 1960’s London Police call box. Time Lords are all but immortal, but their bodies can be damaged. When this happens, they regenerate into a new body, with a slightly altered personality to go with their new appearance. Hence the wide variety of actors to have played The Doctor. Tom Baker was number four. The current Doctor, David Tennant, is number ten, and he’s about to be replaced next year.)

I am now hooked for life.

Jump forward again. It’s 1980. I’m at the local comic store (which is brand new) and I find, sitting on the rack, a copy of Marvel Premiere #58, featuring none other than Doctor Who (the Tom Baker incarnation, no less). This, of course, goes home with me.

A careful read of this wonderful find reveals that these are reprints of a comic strip that appears in the British Doctor Who Weekly. A call back to the shop and I discover that not only can they get me this wonderful magazine, but they have several back issues available right there.

The magazine turned out to be far more than just the comic strip. It featured reviews, articles on various aliens, spotlights on individual stories and even interviews with various creators. (sounds a lot like this site when described that way, doesn’t it?) While it started as a weekly publication in 1979, it became monthly with issue #44 and is still being published today. (I think the latest issue in my pile is #415 or #416)

In fact, in many ways it outlasted the series. Doctor Who debuted in 1963 (a week after John Kennedy was assassinated) and ran for 26 seasons, coming to an end in 1989. The magazine continued on and Virgin Books began publishing a series of ‘New Adventure’ novels. Then came the 1996 TV movie, co-produced by Fox TV in America. It was, in most respects, a failure (although Paul McGann made an engaging Doctor, the eighth).

In 1999, Big Finish Productions began a series of original audio dramas, featuring Doctors five through eight and starring the original actors. Released monthly to CD, these sets continue today and provide top notch entertainment for fans of the classic series.

I say classic series, because just a few years ago, to much fanfare, Russell T. Davies revived the Doctor in a brand new TV series, first starring Christopher Eccelston as The ninth Doctor and then Tennant as the tenth.

Which leads us back to the realm of comics, because now IDW is producing some wonderful comics featuring Doctor number 10, but also reprinting the classic stories from the Doctor Who Magazine, all newly and beautifully colored. They’re also issuing trade paperbacks of stories, both old and new.

Did I mention any of the names of the writers and artists who did those classic strips for Doctor Who Weekly (and Monthly)? You may recognize some of them: John Wagner, Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, Ian Edginton and many others.

Well worth adding to your collection. Trust me.

Now, onto other matters.

As I’m sure you are aware, Ed has launched a new forum for Hypergeek, and it includes a section for ‘Four Color Memories‘ (and a thread for The Invisible Skein, which I’ll get to in a moment). You can discuss the column there as you like, ask any questions that might pop into your head, and even suggest ideas for future columns. You can also tell me about your fondest four color memories and I just might work them into a future column.

The Invisible Skein (the comic written by yours truly and illustrated by the talented Amanda Hayes) launched on the net this week at http://theinvisibleskein.com . 5 pages up, with updates coming every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We hope you’re enjoying the strip and if you are, drop by the Hypergeek forum and tell us about it.

And finally, as we are upon that time of year, when everyone’s mind is occupied by family gatherings and fat men sliding down chimneys, you, inevitably drift away from the internet to interact with the people in your lives. This is how it should be. However, that would leave me talking to myself for the next two weekends as they fall on Christmas and New Year’s.

[ED note: Don't worry though, I'll still be updating regularly, as I have absolutley no life worth speaking of, and have about as much Christmas spirit as a turnip!]

So ‘Four Color Memories’ is going to take a brief (very brief) hiatus. But fear not, I shall return on Saturday, January 9th, with new tales to tell and memories to rekindle.

Happy Holidays,

K. Patrick Glover

Ancillary matters -

Don’t forget that my webcomic The Invisible Skein, launched on Dec 14th at http://www.theinvisibleskein.com, and we’ve now got 5 pages live!

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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‘Four Color Memories’

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 Eighth

In Which We Briefly Look Forward and Not Back

Well, it’s that time of the week again, suddenly, and here you are, ready to be entertained by my vaguely coherent rambling about the past. Except this week is a little different then most, as my thoughts are largely occupied by the scheduled launch (on Monday, just two days away) of my own online comic, The Invisible Skein.

I thought long and hard about what to do here (almost twelve minutes, to be precise), and came up with two possible choices. I could force my way through a column that I just can’t muster up the interest to write and provide you with a product that, frankly, would bore you to tears (assuming that isn’t your normal reaction to my musings) or I can spend the time telling you a little bit about Skein, where the series will be going in the future and why it exists in the first place.

Can you guess what choice I made?

So, The Invisible Skein is a long form web comic, written by yours truly and illustrated with great panache by the one and only Amanda Hayes. It deals primarily with conspiracy theories and urban legends, but hopefully does it in a way that’s new and interesting. Our goal isn’t to preach, to support or to debunk, it’s to entertain and every choice we make is made in service of that goal.

While the overall series is very much an ongoing concern (in fact the first year and a half of story is already plotted out), the series will be structured much like a standard comic book, with stories broken down into issues. The main reason for this is a simple one, as each story is completed (and they each run thirty six pages), the issue will become available for purchase in an honest to gosh comic book. If you prefer larger chunks, trade paperbacks will also be available at some point.

Why are we doing it this way? Well, we’re online because we want to reach the widest possible audience. We want the work out there, we want you to read it and enjoy it. We also intend to do a few conventions next year, so the single issues satisfy our desire to have a product on the table to help promote the series. They’ll also come in handy when we want to shove our work into the hands of various editors while shouting, “Look what we can do.”

Rather than try to tell you about the plot, I think I’ll let one of the characters speak for herself:

Hi, I’m Ali Leighter, the field agent for agoraphobic genius and counter-culture hero Robert Deveraux, known on the ‘net as the enigmatic Digger. Digger used to be an agent for the FBI, but that was before they tried to kill him when he got too close to the truth.

What truth, you ask? The truth behind all of it, from alien abductions and crop circles to the Illuminati and the JFK assassination, behind all of the myth and all the deceit, Robert caught a glimpse of a single, underlying truth, a tangled web of hidden connections, an invisible skein…

I hope you’ll join us this Monday, December 14th, for the launch of The Invisible Skein. I’ll see you back here next week, with an actual column instead of a sales pitch.

Take care,

K. Patrick Glover

Discuss this on Hypergeek’s forums

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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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