This episode’s guest, Bob Budiansky, is a old Marvel Bullpen pal — but our relationship goes back much further than that. We met when we both attended the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked together on the student newspaper The Spectrum. I wrote news and feature stories, while he illustrated many of the articles which appeared in the paper, sometimes as many as three per issue, including, occasionally, mine.

Later, when I was working at mid-’70s Marvel Comics and decided I no longer wanted to edit their line of British reprint books, I got yet another SUNY Buffalo student and newspaper coworker, Jay Boyar, to take my place, and then when he moved on, he recommended Bob. And that serendipity is how his 20-year career at Marvel Comics was born.

Bob’s led a multifaceted comics career as a writer, artist, and editor. He’s written (among other things) The Avengers and all 33 issues of Sleepwalker, a character he co-created, plus most of Marvel’s run of The Transformers, for which he came up with the names of most of the original Transformers, including Megatron. In fact, his contributions to that franchise were so great that in 2010 he was inducted into the Transformers Hall of Fame.

As an artist, not only did he draw Ghost Rider and Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, but more importantly (to me, anyway), a Falcon story I wrote which appeared as a back-up in an issue of Captain America. As an editor, he was at times responsible for the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Spider-Man.

We had dinner at The Helmand, a Baltimore restaurant which has been serving Afghan cuisine since 1989. I learned about the place from former guest of the podcast Fran Wilde, who introduced it to me during a long-ago Balticon.

We discussed the vast differences between the hoops we each had to jump through to get hired back then, why the Skrulls were responsible for him liking DC better than Marvel as an early comics fan, the serendipitous day he attended a wedding and learned the origin of the Golden Age Green Lantern from its creator, why he stopped reading comics in high school … and how Conan the Barbarian got him started again, which Marvel Bullpen staffer saw his art portfolio and suggested he consider a different career, what it was like to witness the creation of Captain Britain, how got his first regular gig drawing covers for Ghost Rider, his five-year relationship developing 250 Transformers characters for Hasbro, and much more.

Here’s how you can take a seat at the table with us — (more…)