{"id":25208,"date":"2018-09-07T08:51:37","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T12:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=25208"},"modified":"2018-09-07T08:56:18","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T12:56:18","slug":"share-a-steak-dinner-with-legendary-comics-creator-and-my-70s-marvel-bullpen-pal-don-mcgregor-in-episode-76-of-eating-the-fantastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2018\/09\/07\/share-a-steak-dinner-with-legendary-comics-creator-and-my-70s-marvel-bullpen-pal-don-mcgregor-in-episode-76-of-eating-the-fantastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Share a steak dinner with legendary comics creator (and my ’70s Marvel Bullpen pal) Don McGregor in Episode 76 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The journey to the meal you\u2019re about to share — my dinner with Don McGregor<\/a>, who I worked beside in the Marvel Bullpen of the mid-\u201870s — began a year ago, as I was returning home from Readercon<\/a> and learned from former guest Paul Di Filippo — Episode 62, check it out<\/a> — that Don had moved back to Rhode Island, not very far from the airport out of which I\u2019d be flying. That\u2019s when I started making plans for an episode I hoped I\u2019d be able to pull off on the way home from this<\/em> year\u2019s Readercon.<\/p>\n

I reached out to Dauntless Don — we all had nicknames back them; he was Dauntless, I was Sparkling — and said, hey, how about if when I\u2019m on the way back to the airport at the end of Readercon, I swoop down, take you out for dinner, and we chew over the old times. And that\u2019s exactly what we did, at the Safehouse<\/a> in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, along with Dauntless Don\u2019s wife, the Marvelous Marsha, whose voice you\u2019ll occasionally hear in the background of this episode. <\/p>\n

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Don started out his career in comics by writing some of the best horror stories to appear in the pages of Creepy<\/em> and Eerie<\/em> — and I remember well reading the first of them in the early ’70s. When he moved on to Marvel Comics, he did groundbreaking work with such characters as Black Panther, Killraven, and Luke Cage. In fact, his two-year “Panther’s Rage” arc was ranked as the third most important Marvel Comics storyline of the ’70s by Comics Bulletin<\/a>. In 2015, he was awarded the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing at San Diego Comic-Con International.<\/p>\n

We discussed how meeting Jim Steranko led to him selling his first comics story, why when he was 13 years old, he wanted to be Efrem Zimbalist Jr., what he learned from Naked City<\/em> creator Stirling Silliphant, how his first meeting with future Black Panther<\/em> artist Billy Graham could have been disastrous, why the comics he wrote in the ’70s wouldn’t have been able to exist two years later, the reasons Archie Goodwin was such a great editor, how he convinced Stan Lee to allow the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics, what life lessons he took from Westerns in general and Hopalong Cassidy in particular, why he almost stopped writing Lady Rawhide<\/em>, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can share some sirloin with us—<\/p>\n

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1) Subscribe over at the iTunes store<\/a>, where you’ll also be able to peruse all 75 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen to the episode via the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on any device of your choosing.<\/p>\n

3) Or simple listen using the embed below.<\/p>\n