This time around, I dream of Action Comics #1, consider how the death of Sal Buscema has me thinking of Vinnie Colletta, decide Jim Salicrup will outlive us all, regret my near-miss with Jim Mooney during my honeymoon, remember the time Mike Friedrich threatened to punch me in the nose, and more.

You can eavesdrop on all those memories via the embed below or download them at the site of your choice.

Here are a few images related to a couple of the topics I mention this episode —

What I looked like the honeymoon weekend
I failed to meet Jim Mooney

Jim Mooney’s splash page for Omega the Unknown #7 (March 1997)

Gerry Conway’s thoughts on our first meeting
with art by Alan Weiss

Don Heck draws my Supergirl
from Superman Family #194 (April 1979)

While watching the second episode of the documentary series Mr. Scorsese, I spotted two Joes hiding in a photograph of Martin Scorsese directing Robert De Niro during one of Taxi Driver‘s most intense scenes.

In case you can’t see them, I’ll flip over the relevant detail to make it easier for you.

(more…)

Rummaging though a stack of mid-’70s memos has me remembering the time I attempted to convince Stan Lee to adapt Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened, who was responsible for mutilating the contents of Marvel’s 1975 line of Giant-Size Annuals, how I repurposed a Winnie Winkle comic strip to resign from my staff job in the Bullpen, the day comic book fans ran a Baskin-Robbins out of ice cream, the meeting in which Stan Lee had a problem with Iron Man’s nose, Gerry Conway’s complaint to the Comics Code Authority about an Inhumans innuendo, and much more.

You can eavesdrop on my memories of my time at Marvel via the embed below or download at the site of your choice.

Here are are a few memos which I reference during the episode —

My Marvel Comics resignation memo

Stan Lee’s Marvel Triple Action advice

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that whenever a comic book appears on screen in a movie or TV show set in the past, I’m immediately thrown out of the plot as I attempt to calculate whether the set decorator managed to get chronologically accurate comics.

That happened again tonight with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. The comics appear in a scene taking place February 8, 1969, which we know because we’re told that earlier in the day when we see Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in Musso & Frank.

Later that same day, we get a quick upside down glimpse of a couple of comic books in the trailer of stuntman Cliff Booth (that’s Brad Pitt’s character). By freezing the frame, I was able to identify them as Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes #66 and Kid Colt Outlaw #134.

Kid Colt Outlaw #134 is dated May 1967, and went on sale February 2, 1967, two years earlier. So … possible. But Sgt. Fury #66 is dated May 1969, and went on-sale May 4, 1969, about 3-1/2 weeks after the scene. Probably not possible — but this pedant declares it a good attempt.

I’m not 100% sure the Kid Colt comic would have survived two years in a trailer with that ginormous pit bull — or that Cliff Booth would have hung onto a comic book that long even if it had. But I’ll allow it. (I did say I’m a pedant when it comes to these things, remember?)

If Marvel claimed Blaze the Wonder Collie was “America’s most respected comic magazine” of 1949, who am I to disagree?

(published in Lawbreakers Always Lose #10, October 1949.)

Vanity publishing scams have always been with us …

… as shown by this warning on the inside front cover of Invisible Scarlet O’Neil #2 (February 1951).

Getting hired to work on staff at mid-’70s Marvel Comics was a dream come true. And having the chance to write comics both for them, and after I went freelance, for DC Comics as well, and being able to play with such characters as Captain Marvel, Supergirl, Spider-Man, The Vision, and others was a joy.

So why, when I applied to the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in 1979, did I beg them to let me in so I could turn my back on comics?

Over the years, I’ve offered up two reasons —

The first is that during my years in the field, my fiction output dwindled severely. Before turning from comics fan to comics pro, I was writing short stories endlessly. Sometimes one a week. Sometimes even more frequently than that, because in an essay for one of the Clarion anthologies, Harlan Ellison explained (or perhaps someone else told of his week teaching there) how he asked students to write a story a day during his stint. I can’t remember the purpose of such an exercise, but whatever its reason, I lasted three days.

But those stories continued to pour out of me … until I went to work in comics. It’s a difficult thing to bring yourself to work on a story which might take years to sell, when every word I could write in comics and hand in one week — from letter columns to splash pages for the British reprint books to ad copy — would earn me a check the following week. Sometimes that payment only took days. Which is why when I encountered the following George Bernard Shaw quote, it resonated mightily: “If you want to be a writer, you must have money, otherwise people will throw money at your head to buy your talent to use it and distort it for their own frivolous purpose.” I knew that if I didn’t wean myself from the comics income, I might never return to working on my fiction in earnest.

More importantly, though, I found my time in comics was damaging my actual ability to write the fiction I wanted. My time at Marvel was spent aping Stan Lee. So facile was I at that task I even wrote the Bullpen Bulletins copy for a while. (Don’t worry — Stan always wrote those Soapboxes himself.) But what I found was that because I was young and immature — I started on staff at Marvel at only 19 — I was unable to maintain a wall between the style of writing I did for myself and the one I used for comics. My short stories were beginning to sound like Stan, filled with bombast and alliteration. I realized that if I didn’t leave comics, I might never find my own voice.

So I broke away, working a series of non-creative jobs which protected that part of myself. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that I’d matured enough to allow myself a creative staff job — creating and editing Science Fiction Age magazine — knowing I no longer had to fear the loss of my voice.

My journey into and then out of the comics industry is much more complicated than that, with many twists and turns, and when asked how I could walk away from such a magical field, I’ve often expounded on all of the above in greater detail. But just the other day, I stumbled across a poem by Robert Graves titled “Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist” which explains my quandary far more succinctly than I ever could —

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
The formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

I consider myself lucky to have gotten away in time, before those tragic habits became unchangeable.