[inspiring music] ♪ [inspiring music continues] ♪ [inspiring music continues] ♪ [inspiring music continues] ♪ - Hello and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

It's time for another dive through the Comic Culture archives, looking back at some unaired interviews from our early days.

The first guest is from our fourth ever show.

And back then we weren't quite ready for prime time, although my guest was.

The late Denny O'Neil reinvented Batman and created dozens of unforgettable villains.

I asked him why villains are so important to heroes.

- The bad guy is as important as the good guy because the bad guy kind of activates the good guy.

It is silly to write stories about Superman catching pickpockets.

Ideally, the bad guy has to present a challenge, a huge challenge to the good guy so that when the good guy ultimately triumphs, not only are our values, which he presumably embodies, validated, but we have the satisfaction that is basic to this kind of fiction of seeing the good triumph.

And it makes more important than any of that, as a storyteller, I tell more interesting stories if my hero has some real serious problems to solve, that was my problem writing Superman.

He's God, I mean, what, who do you put against him without violating the logic of your own premises?

I mean, if this, this, and this have been established about the character, you can't, I think, legitimately suddenly bring in a new power, though they did that a lot in the early days, to solve this plot problem.

So, and the bad guys are, should be interesting in and of themselves, in Milton, who do you think is more interesting, the angels or Satan?

I think there's a whole complicated Jungian psychological dynamic about villains, and it's part that we project the rotten parts of ourselves onto them.

And our, I think more than one psychologist said that's part of the way that kids particularly confront things that make them uneasy about themselves.

- Well, it's true.

I'm sorry.

If you go to a convention when you see cosplayers, the majority of them are dressed up as their favorite villains.

I mean, you can't seem to go to a convention without running into a half a dozen Harley Quinns or Jokers.

- Yeah, and as good as Christian Bale was as Batman, what made that second movie work was Heath Ledger's Joker, an absolutely brilliant, I think the best portrayal of a trickster figure in all of literature.

Not just comic books, but widen the scope as much as you like.

And Two-Face was really good in the third one.

They were the really interesting part.

You may have been rooting for Batman, but you wanted to watch the bad guys.

- Right.

Sometimes you just wanna watch something burn, as Michael Caine said.

Now, in your career you worked with many amazing artists, Jim Aparo, Dick Giordano, Irv Novak, Denys Cowan.

But your work is most closely associated with Neal Adams.

How did that collaboration work?

- Well, it really wasn't a collaboration.

I have not collaborated with, in the normal sense of that word, with anyone but Frank Miller in that, Frank and I, on the stuff we worked on together, sat down at lunch a couple of times a week and talked out the story virtually panel for panel.

But back when I was doing Batman and Green Lantern with Neal, the procedure was the writer confers with the editor about the story he's going to tell and goes home and does something that very closely resembles a TV script, and that is given to the artist.

And x months later you have the proof of a comic book in your hand.

Neal and I, on the two stories that involved drug use, spent some time talking to drug rehab people in Manhattan.

And we saw each other socially all the time.

It was a very small world back then, the comic world, you probably knew everybody or almost everybody.

But we seldom if ever talked about story beats or plots.

I did my job, he did his.

- Would that be the difference between the Marvel method and the DC method, that DC is more of a full script, and Marvel is- - Well, these days everybody's full script because it is the most efficient way to do this work.

But even working Marvel style, and I did a lot of that in the early years, you talk over the plot with the editor or communicate with the editor somehow.

And then when I was working that way, a plot was three paragraphs, a page maybe.

That's given to the artist.

And then x weeks later, the editor gives you the artist's work.

In the early days, we actually got the boards.

I was schlepping valuable artwork on the subway.

And you write the script from that.

You add the balloons, the writer adds the balloons with a blue pencil that won't photograph.

Later, Xerox machines were invented and the process got a lot simpler.

But even then you didn't necessarily have anything to do personally with the artist.

I loved working with Jim Aparo and I worked with him for years before I was ever in the same room with him.

- Denny spoke about taking a staff job as an editor instead of staying as a freelancer.

- I think it's the best thing I do.

I was one of the lucky ones, But one of the reasons I stopped being a freelancer and took a job as an editor at Marvel was the realization that I have a kid, and I'm pushing 40, surely medical expenses are in my future.

And one good heart attack and your savings are wiped out.

So one of the things I wanted to do by getting on a staff somewhere was get medical benefits.

And I did.

But a lot of freelancers are not that lucky.

The jobs aren't available when they need them.

- I think a lot of people aren't aware.

Curt Swan, who was the definitive Superman artist of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, when he passed away, he wasn't a wealthy man because he was just working month to month, you know, however many pages he was doing, that was what the salary was and there was no pension there.

And people are surprised when they hear about Jack Kirby's family trying to get royalties and you see images like I'm wearing a Star Wars shirt, I believe drawn by John Vasima.

I don't know if his family would get any royalties for that.

- Well, it has gotten a bit better in that when I started you got no backend money, no royalties, no nothing.

When you cash the check, you signed a waiver that gave the company full rights to everything that is of dubious legality.

But it has changed in that the comic books that are now being written, you still sign a work for hire contract, but it does guarantee you some kind of benefit from foreign royalties if your stuff gets used in the other media, video ga, I got a royalty check from DC for something of mine, a minor character I created in the seventies, Maxie Zeus, who was used in a video game.

Those things are happening now.

Having said that, there are still no health benefits, no retirement benefits, and a lot of the backend money that people are getting, it is at the behest of the company.

They don't have to give it to you.

- Now, it's interesting because I've watched a lot of films that have come out recently.

Iron Man, the first Iron Man, Jeff Bridges' character was based on a character that you developed, especially the Iron Monger.

- Yeah, that was a real kick because Jeff Bridges is one of my favorite actors and there he was, Obadiah Stain.

- So when you see characters that you've created, certainly in the Batman films, the Iron Man films, when you see those characters on the screen, what's going through your head?

- Well, with Obadiah, I barely remembered him and I didn't know until Mary and I saw a preview of that movie at our local multiplex that my characters had anything to do with it.

Marvel did give me something for that, but it was like, look, I mean, I didn't remember Obadiah apart from the name.

With the Batman stuff, it's a lot more complicated 'cause I carry a lot of baggage into those screenings.

I had problems with all of them up to the Chris Nolan run.

And when I did the novelization for Chris's first Batman movie, time and again reading that script, I thought, "He gets it," and "Why didn't I think of this?"

But on the last one, I went outta my way not to learn anything about the movie, but I did know that Ra's was coming back and Talia was going to be there.

And I did find myself asking questions as I was watching that excellent film like, "Is Catwoman gonna turn out to be Talia?"

And I was kind of taken by surprise because Marion Cotillard did a beautiful job.

But my image of Talia is tall and stately and regal and Cotillard is maybe at the opposite end of female attractiveness from what was in my head.

Whereas Anne Hathaway is pretty close to what I imagined.

So I was delighted with the movie.

I can't entirely enjoy it if that professional head is, "How are they going to solve this plot problem?"

or "Who's going to play this character?"

One thing that did take me completely by surprise in the first one was who Ra's al Ghul turned out to be, because actually the guy that wrote that first movie created the character that Liam Neeson seemed to be playing and it was perfectly logical to that character be in the story.

And they gave us a very credible Ra's in the imposter.

So that one, when I got to that point in the script, "Wow, I wish these guys had been working for me when I was editing this stuff."

- Technology allows Comic Culture to connect with guests across the globe and sometimes the internet connection goes out halfway through an interview as it did with my next guest.

I asked John Morrow about founding TwoMorrows Publishing in the 1990s.

- What we do at TwoMorrows is we publish a wide array of books and magazines about the history of comics and biographies of various cartoonists and comic book artists.

So it sort of stemmed out of, you know, my childhood love of comics, always been a comics fan since the early days of my life.

And never imagined or dreamed I would ever be at all, you know, focused in the comic book field in my career or especially that I'd get to meet and work with a lot of the professionals that I have.

But it just kind of evolved over time and it all kind of stems back to Jack Kirby, who was always my favorite comic book artist.

- And you were telling me before we started that you began publishing around the time that Jack Kirby passed away.

So how have you honored Jack Kirby?

'Cause I know that you do have a, is it Jack Kirby Collector?

- Correct.

That was our first publication.

Jack Kirby Collector number one.

It was a very modest 16 page hand photocopied fanzine, basically, that I produced in September of 1994.

Jack passed away in February '94 and at that point I'd been out of comics for probably six to eight years or so.

the last stuff I really remember reading was Watchmen and The Dark Night.

And I really, really enjoyed those, but kind of felt at that point, like the comics had sort of gone as far as I could take them or at least as far as they would interest me.

So I kind of got outta comics.

We were working on our business, which was a small advertising agency here in North Carolina.

And we got our business off the ground and started having a little more free time.

At that point Jack died in February '94.

A friend of mine sent me a newspaper clipping of his obituary from USA Today.

I hadn't read a comic in like I said, five or six years, but that really, really sparked me to get my old Jack Kirby comics outta storage, read through them all.

And that spring I decided, "Wow, somebody should really be doing a newsletter or fanzine about Jack Kirby.

Surely he still has fans out there," even though he hadn't really been actively drawing in comics for about a decade.

So we just kind of on a lark, my wife said, "Sure, it'd be a fun thing to do in your spare time.

Will keep you outta trouble."

So we had our graphic design equipment from our advertising firm and just tried to produce a, you know, a semi-professional, nice little hand photocopy thing.

I photocopied, I fed coins into the Xerox machine at our local drug store and copied 125 copies of the first issue and just sent them out free to people who had written in nice tributes about Jack to Comics Buyer's Guide right after he had passed away.

Sent it out, I figured if it lasts four or five or six issues, it'll be fun, just kinda see what the results would be.

But the response was beyond my wildest imaginings.

We got first a trickle of letters and then we started getting dozens a week.

And to the point where I'm like, "Well, I better copy another 125 copies."

About the ninth printing, I think, of the first issue at 125 copies a time, I was getting really tired of hand feeding those copies.

So, you know, we took 'em at, had someone print them and Xerox 'em for us.

Around issue six, it had grown to the point where we decided to try it in comic book stores and see if there was any interest.

At that point, it really exploded.

The circulation tripled on it.

Comic stores started catching onto it.

We started having color covers and actual offset printing instead of photocopying.

And from there it just kind of snowballed.

Kirby had so many fans that were still interested in him, and honestly were really embracing this publication we were doing.

'Cause it was all about the fans, and fans would send in art from their collections that Jack had done for them or they had purchased somewhere.

People would write articles for it.

And before I knew it, we went from doing six times a year, at one point we were doing six double size issues a year, but right now we're up to issue number, I'm working on issue 73 actually as we speak.

That one is 100 pages and we're printing 'em out about four times a year.

But it's all full color, you know, very slickly printed and it's really, it's just amazing how it's expanded over the years.

- And you took that success and you branched out into other areas of comic fandom and I guess in a way you've sort of become almost a historian.

You are making contact with writers and artists throughout the years of comics and kind of telling their stories or maybe what they were doing during a certain run of a comic or something like that.

So how do you make that jump from the Jack Kirby Collector to being sort of this overall historian of comics?

- Well, it's just been kind of a, sort of a natural progression, a spinoff from Kirby.

I teamed up with a fellow named Jon B. Cooke to do our second publication, which was called Comic Book Artists.

And it was sort of like a Jack Kirby Collector, but for all the other artists out there.

That one really took off on Eisner awards, sold just really, really well and really cemented our place kind of in the comics industry as sort of the defacto publisher of comics history publications.

At that point, you know, it's just sort of a bit of osmosis.

You kind of start absorbing all this information from all the things you publish.

And over time, you know, I used to kind of be a little hesitant to embrace that term "historian."

I'm just a fan, right?

I enjoy Jack Kirby, I enjoy these other artists, but I'm just doing it for the love of it.

It did eventually get to the point where, yeah, I can accept that I'm a historian now, as are the other editors that work on our publications here.

We were in addition to comic artists, we started Alter Ego, which was a fanzine in the sixties.

Roy Thomas came back to basically resurrect that in the nineties.

That's still going strong.

We've got over 150 issues of that out now.

We did Draw!

magazine, which is a how-to magazine by Mike Manley done on a very professional level showing people how the actual art and stories are produced.

But we're, there's so many, there's just so many possibilities and avenues for us to explore comics history and the lives of these artists.

You know, these guys we grew up all enjoying their work, guys and women.

Here we are now, we've been doing this, I've been doing this almost 25 years now.

We're still not running outta material to cover.

There's still so many great stories to tell and so many great creators to cover.

- So you mentioned Alter Ego, which was one of those early fanzines.

How does Roy Thomas approach you and say that he would like you to sort of pick up that mantle and move it forward?

- Well, and I had to have my memory refreshed on how that actually came about.

Roy didn't come to us.

Jon, well, let's see, actually I guess Jon B. Cooke says I went to Roy.

I thought Jon did.

So our memories differ.

But one of us went to Roy and said, "Hey, you wanna restart Alter Ego in the back of Comic Book Artist magazine?

Do a little section there."

And Roy was very excited to do that.

That, you know, he's just a stone cold fan boy at heart.

He always has been, despite all of his great success in the comics industry.

And it was a great chance for him to kinda get back to his roots.

'Cause he did Alter Ego for I think eight of the 10 issues in the 1960s he was directly involved in.

It only ran 10 issues then and then faded away when Roy became a professional.

So, you know, after five issues in the back of Comic Artist, the response was really very favorable.

And I decided, "Hey Roy, do you wanna do this as an ongoing magazine on its own?"

Roy was all for it.

So here we are, 150 issues later and still going strong.

Roy has still got that same love of comics that he had back in the sixties before he started working professionally.

- And Alter Ego.

I think that was, if I'm not mistaken, that was sort of like an examination of comics, not necessarily comics themselves.

It would be sort of maybe an essay on some storyline or something along those lines.

- The original sixties version?

- [Terence] Yes.

Am I mistaken?

- It was, well it was the original like superhero focused comics fanzine, and each issue had historical retrospectives of things.

He had a few interviews in there and each issue progressively got a little more professional, a little slicker to the point where, you know, you look at the final issues that came out, they were really very professionally produced.

It wasn't just mimeographed fanzines as it started, it was actually being offset printed.

Roy even got Marvel to let him run ads in the Marvel comics in like, it was 1969, for the last issue.

So it had pretty widespread circulation as well.

But the problem was Roy was a professional at that point, Stan Lee's right hand man, just didn't have time to do it anymore.

So it kind of languished for about three decades till we went back to Roy and said, "Hey, let's start this up again."

- You never know what unexpected event will come up when you're interviewing someone.

In this case, my guest was having a new roof installed on his house.

The sound of hammers ruined the second half of my conversation with writer Roger McKenzie.

I asked Roger about teaming up with Frank Miller on Daredevil.

- We did have a regular artist on the book when I took it over with issue 151, Jim Shooter, who had been writing it, but had been promoted to like the assistant editor in chief or some such thing, which took all his time, and he couldn't really keep up, you know, doing all that work all day and then trying to write in the evening and stuff.

Just, he couldn't do it.

So the first one, I dialogued the story that he had plotted and Gil Kane had drawn.

So we went from Gil Kane to Carmine.

I was able to cajole Gene Colan into doing several issues.

But he was basically retired at that point and was just doing, because, you know, he couldn't abandon his character.

He just couldn't, he'd done it, you know, and then "Gene, Gene, just one more issue."

And I met Frank and saw his stuff and we had done a story at DC, it was like a two or a three page story in the Day After Doomsday story and appeared in an issue of Weird War Tales, I forget which one now, but I liked his stuff.

So I started talking to the editors at Marvel and they just kept dragging their feet, you know, finally I said, "Yeah, let's give him a shot," you know, and they did and the rest is history.

So, but you know, you could just tell he had something going even back then when he was still much more influenced by Gil Kane than in later years.

- That's interesting.

I never thought of the Frank Miller Gil Kane connection, but when you say it, you can kind of see a similarity in that the figure, the way that the movement is portrayed.

- And especially early on.

As most great artists do, he moved on to his own style and stuff, you know, over time it happens, but early on it was very much Gil Kane influenced, which was fine by me.

I got no problem.

You know, Gil Kane, he's one of the best.

So, you know, and certainly Frank, you know, made his own way in his own name.

So, you know, it was all good.

- While you were at Marvel, you also worked on the Battlestar Galactica series, and what's it like working on a licensed book?

Because it's not like it's a Marvel property.

This is owned by, I guess at the time, Universal, or maybe just Glen A. Larson.

So you're working on that book.

How much freedom do you have to tell the stories that you want to tell versus what, you know, the owner of the property wants you to tell?

- After we got done with the original adaptation, which was the large format, and then they broke it down into like three, I think the first three issues of the regular comic were that adaptation, which they gave us a working script, you know, and we had to sign the non-disclosure agreements and all that kind of stuff.

It wasn't the final script.

So there were things that were changed.

I think in ours, if memory serves, Baltar was killed, or it might have been the other way around, I don't remember now, but there were like, you know, some major differences that you just kind of scratch your head and go, "Well, why didn't they have us fix that?"

But after we got to do our own stuff, I never heard from 'em.

And I never had an editor say, "Hey, we can't do this because Universal or Glen Larson doesn't like it, we need to do this."

That never happened to me.

The only thing I know that happened was Marvel did not secure the rights to the likenesses of the characters.

And my good friend Walt Simonson was more than once told, "Don't draw them so well, they look too much like the characters and we can't do that."

So that's why, you know, he had to redraw some of the faces.

But other than that we had free reign, as far as I know.

- And I understand that when you concluded the series, you actually had a conclusion to the story and the television show never had that opportunity after they were canceled.

- Well, I had my comedy resolution to it where they finally find Earth and the Battlestar is the only ship survived and it crashed on Earth.

And Adama lost his memory, but became an Earthling and founded the Ponderosa.

[both laugh] That was my, if we had an actual ending, I don't remember what it was now.

I mean, you either find Earth or you don't, I suppose.

- That's all the time we have for this episode of Comic Culture.

I wanna thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you again soon.

[inspiring music] Comic Culture is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

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