{"id":34537,"date":"2023-11-03T09:21:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T13:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=34537"},"modified":"2023-11-03T09:53:11","modified_gmt":"2023-11-03T13:53:11","slug":"mike-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2023\/11\/03\/mike-gold\/","title":{"rendered":"Binge BBQ with the legendary Mike Gold in Episode 211 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pros who attend Baltimore Comic-Con tend to be so tightly programmed it’s nearly impossible for me to spirit anyone away to chat and chew during the con itself. So I’m extremely pleased I was able to convince the legendary Mike Gold<\/a> to head out for dinner the night before the con began.<\/p>\n

Gold entered the comic industry as DC’s first\u00a0public relations\u00a0manager. But as I was astounded to discover, he did some PR earlier than that — as the media coordinator for the defense at the\u00a0Chicago Conspiracy trial, acting as the intermediary between the press and the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, when he was only a teen.<\/p>\n

After DC, in 1983, he launched\u00a0First Comics, where he edited Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg<\/em>, Mike Baron\u00a0and\u00a0Steve Rude’s\u00a0Nexus<\/em>, Jim Starlin’s\u00a0Dreadstar<\/em>,\u00a0Mike Grell’s\u00a0Jon Sable Freelance<\/em>, and many other classic series. Then after his move back to DC in 1986, he edited\u00a0such titles as Legends<\/em>,\u00a0The Shadow<\/em>,\u00a0The Question<\/em>,\u00a0Action Comics Weekly<\/em>,\u00a0Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters<\/em>,\u00a0Blackhawk<\/em>, and\u00a0others.<\/p>\n

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In 2006, he co-founded ComicMix<\/em>, and in 2011, he received the first Humanitarian Award from the\u00a0Hero Initiative. And \u2014 since he’s five years older than I am \u2014 meaning I would have read Fantastic Four<\/em> #1 at age six, and Mike at eleven, five years counting for a lot back then \u2014 I enjoyed digging into our differing perspectives about the early days of comics.<\/p>\n

We discussed the way his hiring at DC Comics was all Neal Adams’ fault, how the guerrilla marketing he learned from Abbie Hoffman helped him quadruple direct market sales, the Steve Ditko Creeper<\/em> cover which sent a not-so-secret message to publisher Carmine Infantino, why editor Murray Boltinoff compared Marvel Comics to the Beatles (and not in a good way), which staffer was “the most disgusting human being I’d ever met in my life,” how First Comics was born, his secret weapon for getting creators to deliver their work on time, our differing contemporaneous exposure to Fantastic Four<\/em> #1 (and how his related to Merrick Garland), the way an off-hand comment led to a classic John Byrne comic, how the comic book field is like a donut shop, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can join us at Heritage Smokehouse <\/a> — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — or wherever<\/a> you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 210 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

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

3) Or simply use the embed below.<\/p>\n