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SUNDAY, FEB. 25, 2 PM

I was sitting in Room 1E16 of the Javits Center, waiting for the start of the last panel I would attend at this year’s New York Comic-Con, “Dave Cockrum Remembered.” Cockrum is best known as a fan favorite artist on DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes in the 1970s, and as the co-creator of the “new” X-Men, who debuted in Giant-Size X-Men #1 back in 1975. For that landmark issue, Cockrum and writer Len Wein jointly created three of the X-Men’s most prominent members, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Storm, all of whom were derived from drawings in Cockrum’s legendarily voluminous sketchbooks. Cockrum, whom I interviewed decades ago for Fantagraphics’ X-Men Companion, was one of the foremost superhero comics artists of the 1970s and early 1980s. But a new generation of readers and editors seemed oblivious to his considerable talents. Worse, Cockrum became seriously ill with pneumonia and diabetes, and he finally passed away last November.

There were four speakers on the panel. First was the moderator, Clifford Meth, Cockrum’s longtime friend. In 2004 Meth edited a tribute book, filled with contributions from other comics artists and writers, to raise money to pay for Cockrum’s medical care. Aardwolf Publishing has just republished the book in hardcover form as The Uncanny Dave Cockrum, with additional artwork by Cockrum and other comics professionals. During Cockrum’s lifetime Meth also successfully negotiated a deal with Marvel whereby Cockrum would receive royalties for the members of the X-Men he co-created.

Also on the panel were three of Cockrum’s collaborators on X-Men: writer Chris Claremont, editor Louise Simonson, and inker Joe Rubinstein. Present as well was Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, who is also renowned for his work on the Legion of Super-Heroes. (During the panel Levitz pointed out that his run on the Legion followed Cockrum’s, but that they did collaborate on a short story in Legion #300.)

Following his appearance at last year’s New York Comic-Con, Claremont had health problems of his own, and had vanished from public view for months. However, he looked hale, hearty, and energetic as a participant on the Cockrum panel.

Starting the panel, Meth said he would “open with a joke,” which proved to be a grim one. He recalled visiting Cockrum in the hospital three years ago. Cockrum had tubes in his throat and arms, in such a bad state that he was being fed through his rectum. On this occasion, Meth said, Cockrum felt “antsy” and told the nurse he “needs a cup of coffee.” The nurse warned Cockrum about it, but Cockrum said, “I don’t care.” So the nurse poured some coffee through the aforementioned orifice, and Cockrum screamed. “Was it too hot?” asked the nurse. Cockrum replied, “Too sweet.”

And that said a lot about Cockrum’s personality. Meth then told the audience that Cockrum had been released from the hospital, but that “we lost Dave” at the end of November. Meth brought up the tribute book and said that there “wasn’t a single person in the industry who didn’t want to participate in the tribute while Dave was alive.”

Louise Simonson praised Cockrum as “really good-natured.” With her taste for the concise, she explained simply that he was “a really good guy. That’s it.”

Claremont reminisced that when “You sat down” with Cockrum and “started talking ideas, you never knew where they would lead you,” or “where he would inspire you to go with it.”

In the “early days, working on X-Men“ in the 1970s, Claremont said, “We wanted to do aliens.” X-Men was a book about mutants, but “Why not? If we could imagine it, let’s do it. Suddenly he would come in with design sketches for spaceships based on bugs” and “beetles,” referring to the Shi’ar spacecraft that you can see in X-Men (first series) #97 (1976) and subsequent issues. Then Claremont recalled the “race of evolved dinosaurs” they had come up with for “two issues of Ms. Marvel“ (#20 and 21 in 1978) and expressed his “frustration” that they could “never take” the idea further because the “book got canceled.”

“With Dave it was a never-ending delight,” Claremont said, “every time you explored imagination with him.” You “left wishing other people could see with those eyes,” and there could be “more books, more opportunity” to work with him. But, Claremont added, sounding a recurring theme for this panel, “how transitory the creative turned out to be.” He was talking about how his periods of collaboration with Cockrum inevitably came to an end, for one reason or another, but one could not help but think of the end of a creative artist’s life, as well.

Paul Levitz told the audience that it was “important to put it in context,” and that the “time when Chris did his X-Men work with Dave” and “when Dave did his Legion work” was a “period when the heart of the comic industry was set up” so that people would “not to do more than necessary to get your paycheck”: there were “no royalties” and “no shares” in the profits for freelancers. Levitz recalled an old joke: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”

Then Levitz stated that “from his first moment as an artist in the field” Cockrum was “not only generous in spirit but had a generosity of creativity to his readers.” Cockrum “would labor for hours recostuming a Legionnaire,” and designed “modern costumes for each Legionnaire,” most of whom had been created twenty years earlier. If it was decided “let’s do aliens,” Levitz said, Cockrum would “come back with an entire universe of aliens sketched out.” According to Levitz, the “old pros of the period” wouldn’t do such a thing, and would say, “they’re not paying me to do this,” while the “young pros breaking in generally didn’t have the skill yet.” Cockrum, Levitz continued, was “one of the first” whose attitude was “Screw the deal. I’ve got to give this everything I’ve got.”

Joking that the panel’s unanimity of opinion might be getting “monotonous,” Joe Rubinstein agreed that “Dave was a really nice guy.” But Rubinstein found his own variation on the theme, telling us that “Dave was childlike.” with regard to working in comics, “he loved it, he loved it. If you paid him he’d like it better.” If Cockrum hadn’t been employed in the comics industry, Rubinstein contended, “he would’ve worked in a shoe store [or] a bookstore, and go home and draw the Blackhawks.” Rubinstein summed up, “His work was filled with joy.”

Thanks to the way the comics industry ran in the 1970s, Cockrum did not receive a cut of the money Marvel made from characters he had co-created.
The panel turned to the subject of the settlement that Meth negotiated with Marvel for Cockrum. “Without the money,” Meth asserted, Cockrum “wouldn’t get out of the hospital.” However, Cockrum was “happy” with the settlement he finally received, and was “absolutely thrilled” that on of his artistic heroes, “Will Eisner contributed” to the benefit tribute book. “He was always a fan. He created things he wanted to look at.”

Claremont stated that Cockrum had “a tremendous work ethic. When you ask for a character to be designed now, and to an extent then,” he continued, you will “get a sketch, maybe two sketches.” But there is no time to do more, “you take what you can get,” because the “book’s got to go to press.” In contrast, Claremont told the audience, “When Dave and I say down and decided we were going to redesign Phoenix”–by which Claremont probably meant devising the Phoenix identity and costume for X-Men cast member Jean Grey– “he did 50 designs”: there were “a couple of dozen specific visualizations,” and the rest were variations on those. Claremont praised Cockrum for “a wealth of creativity, a wealth of commitment, a wealth of craft.”

Claremont worked with Cockrum on X-Men in the initial years of its revival in the 1970s, then John Byrne came in as penciler and co-plotter, and Cockrum returned in the early 1980s after Byrne departed the series. Claremont declared that the “X-Men‘s success” lay in the fact that for the revival’s “first eight years” it was the “product of two men” (along with himself): Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. Claremont asserted that this was “a commitment of creativity that very few books, especially today, have.” Again, he told us that you “don’t realize how wonderful an experience” it is “until it’s not there.”

Cockrum left X-Men the second time to try his hand at writing and drawing his own creator-owned project, The Futurians. It’s “not a bad thing to try to make something that you own,” observed Louise Simonson. But The Futurians wasn’t as commercially successful as he might have hoped.

Claremont revealed that “one of the things that knocked me over as a reader, reading Legion of Super-Heroes, was the marriage of Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy.” Claremont continued, “Way back then we were used to seeing the superheroes in costume or they wore an [everyday] suit. There was very rarely a sense of individuality” to what a character wore out of costume “that extended beyond being a superhero.” But for this 30th century wedding in Legion, “Dave designed the clothes for everybody and they were different.” In other words, each character’s clothes expressed his or her individual personality. “It wasn’t like they all went to the same futuristic tuxedo shop. They [the clothes] were consistent with character, culture and the future. And they were cool.”

Similarly, “In X-Men if Storm was going out to the opera, she wore a gown that was unique to an African in America.” Claremont didn’t mention this, but it was Cockrum who not only designed Wolverine’s highly distinctive unmasked face, but also his characteristic Western style of dressing when he is out of costume. “The costuming, the look of characters defined by. . .who they were as people,” Claremont said, was not only a “revolutionary. . .concept” but “It became an inspiration.” According to Claremont, Cockrum’s attitude was “I love the characters; let’s just have fun.”

Paul Levitz recalled that in the 1970s Cockrum and his friends “were frustrated with the comics industry of the time.” Returning to the subject of the Legion wedding, Levitz again established a context: “This was the last. . . year or two before original art began being returned to the artist.” The highlight of the wedding story was a “double-page spread.” Levitz said that “Dave put his heart and soul into this scene” and “must have done an army of sketches.” Cockrum even drew the scene on the larger sized pages that had been used in the 1960s so that he “could pour the detail in.” Moreover, Cockrum spent his own money on photostats in that pre-computer era, and “probably paid half his page rate”–which was low by today’s standards–“just to do the page right.” In exchange, Cockrum “thought he’d get to keep the page,” but, of course, the “company wouldn’t let him.” That was “one of the reasons he left Legion and went to Marvel to do X-Men.” That was “right at the cusp moment,” Levitz commented, when there was a sense “boiling up in the community” that artists had a right to get their original art back. And indeed Cockrum did finally get that double-page spread back years later.

Rubinstein reminisced about inking Cockrum’s second run of X-Men and his Nightcrawler miniseries in the 1980s. “Dave wasn’t a penciler or writer,” Rubinstein asserted; “he was a comic book creator.” Nightcrawler was Cockrum’s personal favorite of the X-Men, and he turned him into an updated version of the swashbuckler heroes of another era. “Nightcrawler turned into Errol Flynn for a while,” remarked Rubinstein.

That reminded Claremont of another highlight of Cockrum’s career, “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” in Uncanny X-Men #153 (1982), in which the series’ familiar characters took on new guises, like Kitty Pryde as what Claremont called “a runaway pirate,” and Wolverine resembled Looney Tunes‘ Tasmanian Devil. Claremont described Cockrum’s work on the story thus: “Each page is “˜Can you top this?’”

Claremont continued, “With Dave there was a sense there was nothing you couldn’t ask for, and he’d make you plotz with delight.” For example, “You ask for a starship that’s fifty miles long, and he gives you one that’s made of a fish, and it works!” (This is a reference to the Acanti, the “˜space whales” introduced in Uncanny X-Men #156 in 1982.)

Claremont revealed that he felt obliged to get his script “up to that level,” to match Cockrum’s creative achievement, and then the following month “he’d top you again.” Claremont explained that “You want to be on his level,” as Cockrum kept “raising the bar.” Claremont then confessed that “It was so much fun that you didn’t notice” how special this collaboration was “until it was gone.” and Cockrum had left the series. Then, Claremont said, “There’s this hole in your page.”

But then why is it that a man of such great talent as Dave Cockrum had trouble getting work in the comics industry after the 1980s, and fell into obscurity in the current comics marketplace?

“All of us see it, particularly these days” Louise Simonson said carefully, presumably referring to veteran comics professionals of the 1970s and 1980s like Cockrum and herself. She explained, “Editorial people have forces that drive them,” one of which is “market forces.” Hence, “they’re looking for the bright new thing.” From their point of view, “Dave was an old, tarnished object, not a bright, shiny one,” and he “faded into obscurity.”

Clifford Meth noted that “for twelve years ” Cockrum “could only get work from small publishing companies.” (One of these was Claypool Comics, for which Cockrum drew Soulsearchers & Company for nearly three years, in what appears to have been his last regular assignment. Claypool editor Richard Howell was not asked to speak on the panel, but you can find his tribute to Cockrum on the inside back cover of Soulsearchers #82, its final issue, currently on sale. So for a time Soulsearchers was written by Peter David, drawn by Dave Cockrum, and had covers drawn by Amanda Conner, all acclaimed comics professionals, and yet it was still ignored by most of the comics industry and readership!)

Meth said that Cockrum would look for work by making phone calls to editors. One highly placed person at one of these companies “hurt” Cockrum by telling him, “Your work is just too stodgy.” Meth said that “He felt largely ignored at that point in his career.” He “would get work but not regular work.”

Louise Simonson noted that “Dave was also very slow.” He could do “zillions of sketches,” but when it came to doing “actual comics pages,” he was “not fast.”

But his creativity remained high. Meth said that one day Cockrum sent him “five redesigns” of Marvel’s character Quicksilver; he ended up “putting them on eBay.”

So why didn’t someone at a comics company realize how valuable it would be to have Cockrum regularly designing costumes and characters and starships and such for them? On the panel Louise Simonson suggested that Cockrum should have been doing character designs for animation, but Meth responded that Cockrum “was too sweet a guy to work in that environment,” implying it was dog-eat-dog.

Claremont again extolled Cockrum’s talents, stating that “as a writer toy could present anything” to Cockrum, “whether it was a castle in Scotland full of leprechauns”–this is actually a reference to the Banshee’s leprechaun-infested castle in Ireland in X-Men (first series) #102–“or an alien invasion, and he would do it. . .and find a way to make it work and make it better. That is rare in any era of the industry.”

Cockrum “made the characters” into the readers’ “friends,” Claremont said, “people the readers wanted to see every four weeks,” whose lives they relate to.

So, apparently, did Cockrum: Meth told the audience that when Cockrum saw the X-Men movie, “he cried” because he was so “happy to see his characters on film.”

Claremont recalled that when the “new” X-Men began, Jean Grey and other members of the original team left the series. But then Claremont and Cockrum brought her back for a guest appearance, and when Claremont saw how Cockrum drew her this time, he said “She’s hot! Why did we write her out of the book? Can we bring her back, please?” And thus, Claremont asserted, began the road that “led to Phoenix and Dark Phoenix.”

As for another character in the series, Meth told us that “Dave often commented that Nightcrawler was his alter ego.” And it seems it was Nightcrawler who prevailed in Meth’s negotiations with Marvel. The Marvel lawyers maintained that Nightcrawler had been created under a work-for-hire agreement. But then, Meth told us, he revealed that Cockrum had published the “exact” design he used for Nightcrawler in a fanzine before Giant-Size X-Men #1! Now wouldn’t you like to have seen the Marvel lawyers’ faces when they first heard that? In what Meth called the “unprecedented deal” that was worked out, Cockrum’s widow Paty will continue to receive royalties for Nightcrawler and other Cockrum co-creations for the rest of her life.

And there is still more work by Dave Cockrum still to be seen; Joe Rubinstein announced on the panel that he is inking an unpublished Futurians story that Cockrum did.

Towards the end of the panel, Chris Claremont delivered a thought-provoking eulogy to Cockrum. “You always keep thinking that there’s more time,” he told us, saying that he assumed he would work with Dave Cockrum again. “The reality is we are finite, as much as we like to imagine ourselves being like our characters, who are not.” Cockrum’s passing, he stated, was “a reminder to cherish people and talents while they exist,” and “not to be in a position of talking about what should have been but [what] was.” Dave Cockrum created “what may not be as large a body of work as others’,” Claremont declared, but it “will last and bring credit to him long after many of us have moved on.”

Concluding the panel, Paul Levitz commended the Hero Initiative, the organization that offers financial aid and medical care to veteran comics creators in need. Levitz then told the audience that there was “something else” that was within “your power” to do, and that was to help in what he called the “emotional protection of the old creators.” He told us that if you see any of them at a convention, you “don’t have to commission a sketch,” but you should at least “spend a minute with them, [and] tell them how much you like their work.” Levitz noted that many of the older creators worked in anonymity and “frankly didn’t know anyone gave a damn.” Hence, he continued, meeting their fans at conventions has provided “some of the best moments of their lives” and that “in most cases that’s more important than economic health.”

Then Levitz observed that “comics people generally not smart about their economic health” whereupon Claremont burst into loud laughter at the truth of this observation. (Why, it was as if they were talking about me!) Levitz joked that “I’m the last guy Hero Initiative has to worry about. I’ve gone over to the Dark Side.” But he made the point that comics fans should show their appreciation not just to the Golden and Silver Age pros, but also to younger comics writers and artists who, for whatever reason, are, in his words, “not the flavor of the month.” Though he did not say so, obviously Dave Cockrum would have been in that category.

As if to exemplify what Paul Levitz had said about the elders of the comics profession, shortly after the convention ended, Arnold Drake, the co-creator of Deadman and Doom Patrol, passed away. Drake was one of the people whom I had been scheduled to interview on the convention’s “Classic Age of Comics” panel. That assignment fell through, and now I would never have my chance to interview him.

SUNDAY, FEB. 25, 3 PM:

Following the Cockrum panel I made a last stop on the main convention floor, which has seemed pleasantly, relatively quiet on Sunday morning but was again jam packed in the afternoon. High overhead still floated the malevolent elder god Cthulhu in his guise as a balloon of Pikachu, draining America’s youth of their life energies and taste in cartoon art. Then, below him, I saw a horrifying sight: a small, child-size Pikachu standing on the floor beneath him (her?), posing for passers-by. To adapt W. B. Yeats’ celebrated line, what rough beast slouches towards the Javits Center to be born? It’s Pikachu, Jr., that’s who. It was time for me to escape, and spend the evening at home writing up convention reports for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.

And so ends my coverage of this year’s New York Comic-Con, but not my discussion of the issues raised by the Cockrum memorial panel. The way that significant creative artists fall victim to the changing tides of taste and fashion and the marketplace deserves further examination. The Dave Cockrum panel reminds me of another panel discussion I recently heard about another important comics artist of the mid-1970s who passed away in the month following the convention. This was Marshall Rogers, whom I mentioned last week, whose work ranged from Don McGregor’s Detectives, Inc. to Chris Claremont’s Daughters of the Dragon to his many collaborations with Steve Englehart, including Batman, Silver Surfer, Mister Miracle, and his alternative strips for the early independent comics publisher Eclipse, Captain Quick and a Foozle, Coyote, and Scorpio Rose.

In Comic Zone’s Internet radio tribute to Marshall Rogers, his contemporary, inker Terry Austin, talked about how when they were breaking into the comics business, certain unnamed people in authority at DC Comics would castigate both them and their work. According to these people in power. Marshall and Terry were doing their art all wrong. The Comic Zone interviewer sounds clearly astonished by this. How could anyone not recognize the talents of Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin?

That’s the fate of innovators. There is an Old Guard who rejects the new, perhaps because the Old Guard’s tastes are different, perhaps because they are overly set in their ways, perhaps their artistic vision is too limited to see the potential of the new work that is right before their eyes. Once the innovators have made their mark, the Old Guard’s attitude looks ridiculous.

And so, once Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin’s collaboration on Batman appeared in Detective Comics in the mid-1970s, discerning members of the comics readership hailed it as an instant classic. I should know; I was one of them. Their Batman work was so influential that it served as an inspiration for the Batman movie that producer Michael Uslan was developing for Warner Brothers.

But a decade later it was Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns that was considered the most influential treatment of Batman. As I pointed out last week, it took over a quarter of a century for DC Comics to reunite the Englehart, Rogers and Austin team for Batman: Dark Detective. Uslan briefly, loyally mentions the Englehart-Rogers Batman on the special edition DVD of the 1989 Batman movie, but otherwise the DVD’s special features ignore it.

Neither Rogers not Austin were as much in demand recently as they had been in the late 1970s and 1980s. Peter Gillis observes in his blog’s tribute to Rogers that “deserved the fame he got and didn’t deserve the waning of that fame.” (Look further down on Gillis’s blog, and you will find his moving tribute to Cockrum.) Yet both the original Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman and the new Dark Detective remain great, and will surely be recognized as classics ten, twenty or fifty years hence.

There’s the period when a creator hasn’t yet become fashionable, then he has his time in the spotlight, which may seem as if it will be permanent, but then the fashions change, and he may fall from favor, even though the quality of his work may not have changed. This is what happened to Cockrum.

It happens to others as well. Lately I’ve been reading Walt Disney and Europe, written by Robert Allan, and published in 1999 by the Indiana University Press. I picked up a remaindered copy at the New York Is Book Country street fair some years back, and I’ve never seen a copy anywhere else. That’s too bad, because this is an excellent study of how Walt Disney and his artists were influenced by European art, literature and music in creating their animated films. This book is the obvious basis for much of the “Once upon a Time” Disney art exhibition that is currently in Montreal (see “Comics in Context” #161).

In this book Allan writes about Kay Nielsen, a Danish artist whom Disney appointed as art director for the “Night on Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria” sequences in Fantasia (1940). (The only important film I saw at Lincoln Center’s 2005 festival of musical cartoons that I haven’t yet written about was Fantasia. Maybe someday!) According to Allan, “after the second world war Nielsen returned to Denmark, endeavoring to obtain work again as book illustrator or stage designer, but without success; his style was too rigidly locked into the precise art mould which had originally brought him fame. It was too soon for a revival of interest. He returned to California where he died destitute in 1957. His wife Ulla died a year later. Forty years later his original artwork was fetching tens of thousands of dollars at auction.” (Walt Disney and Europe p. 163).

Here’s the pattern again: Nielsen became famous for his work, but fashions changed, and his work did not change with it, and he died in poverty. But consider Allan’s brief line: “It was too soon for a revival of interest.” If art has enduring value, then the “revival of interest” will come. Art which lasts transcends fashion and becomes classic.

Nielsen and his wife were unlucky in that they did not live to see this happen to his work. Their fate reminds me of the famous case of Vincent Van Gogh, who was recognized as a brilliant artist during his lifetime by fellow artistic giants such as Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec. Even so, it is said that Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime (and used the paintings to pay the rent or other bills).

Jack Kirby was lionized by comics fans in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, as I’ve said before, I’d hear comics pros refer to him as “Jack the Hack.” But his skill as an artist hadn’t changed, and luckily for him, the pendulum swung back quickly, and he was hailed by comics pros and fans alike as a living icon in the 1980s. Had Kirby lived twelve years longer he would have seen his artwork hang in museums as part of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition.

Time is a determining factor of greatness. Work that conforms to the passing fashions of the day may achieve great popularity in its time, but unless it rises above fashion, it will be forgotten as the decades pass. Great work may fall from fashion for a time, but its lasting merits will be rediscovered by new generations. Great work speaks not just to its own time, but to all time, as I shall attempt to illustrate in next week’s column.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I have just written a review of Fantagraphics’ collection The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger, a pioneering early 20th century cartoonist, for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. Ad you may be interested in seeing what my Comics Week editor says about “Comics in Context” over at the Beat.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 4:16 PM
There I was in Room 1E12/13 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, waiting for the next panel at the New York Comic-Con to start: “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 60s Marvel Bullpen.” The panel was supposed to have begun at 4 PM, but for fifteen minutes I’ve been watching people milling about on the right side of the hall.

Finally, at 4:16 PM Stan Lee himself, Marvel’s editor in chief and head writer in the 1960s, took charge and commanded that the panel begin.

Moderator Adam McGovern of TwoMorrows Publishing introduced what he called a “very distinguished panel” comprised of members of the Marvel “Bullpen” of the 1960s, “a critical mass that changed comics history.”

First McGovern introduced Marvel senior editor Ralph Macchio, whom he called a “link from the first Marvel Age to the present.” Well, that was actually a bit of a stretch. Ralph started at Marvel in 1976, when Stan Lee was still based in the New York offices, but in the role of publisher, having ceded the post of editor in chief back in 1972. So Ralph wasn’t part of Marvel’s Silver Age revolution of the 1960s; during that decade he was a fan reading Marvel comics just like other Boomers who later became comics pros. He was one of the first Boomers to join Marvel editorial, and now he’s virtually their Last Boomer standing.

Next McGovern introduced the great inker of Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four art, Joe Sinnott. Stan pointed to Sinnott, and the audience applauded. Then McGovern presented Gene Colan, the Silver Age artist of Daredevil, Iron Man, Sub-Mariner and more, sitting down at the end of the table, and there was tumultuous applause. McGovern praised Colan as “the painterly genius” and “master of moods.” McGovern then turned to Stan’s secretary in the Sixties, “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg, who endures at Marvel as a part-time proofreader. Stan, sitting between Flo and Joe, pointed to her and applause burst forth once more.

Finally, McGovern said, there was “a man who needs no introduction.”

“They always say that!” exclaimed Stan the Showman, enacting his comedic public persona. “For once just give me an introduction!”

After complying with Mr. Lee’s request, McGovern attempted to open a discussion about working at Marvel in the 1960s, and noted that Colan had come to the company “from other places.”

“Makes you sound very mysterious, Gene,” commented Lee. “‘Came from other places,’” Stan repeated ominously.

But Colan’s ability to respond was handicapped by his lack of a microphone down at his end of the long table. Ever practical, Stan solved the dilemma by giving Ms. Steinberg’s microphone to Colan. “You have nothing to say anyway,” Stan assured Flo. Then Mr. Lee advised the audience to pay attention to Colan: “When this guy talks, the world listens.”

Colan explained to the audience that he thought comics would be a “great place to be,” and that he was “very influenced by film” in drawing comics. “I don’t know where I’d be if not for Stan,” Colan said.

“Probably rich and famous,” speculated Mr. Lee.

Stan wasn’t being serious, but Colan was. “Other people couldn’t see what I could do,” Colan continued. “Stan could,” he told us, and “gave me my break.” The audience was very still, intently listening to Colan’s quiet voice.

“See,” Stan commented, “the big thing is, we got “˜im because he worked cheap.”

Taking this in stride, Colan told us, “Stan always reminded me of Jack Lemmon.”

“He always compares me to dead people!” Stan exclaimed in mock protest.

“I told him that when he”–meaning Lemmon–“was alive,” Colan informed the audience, explaining that Stan had the same “energy” that one sees in Lemmon’s performances.

As if waving Colan’s compliments aside, Lee declared, “Joe Sinnott’s dying here,” thinking that “they’ll never get to me.” But then Lee went on to extol the cinematic aspect of Colan’s artwork. “Every strip he drew was a storyboard,” Lee said, meaning that it looked like a shot-by-shot breakdown for a film. “He viewed all of his artwork as if it was a movie.”

But Stan did not stay serious for long. “Joe Sinnott, on the other hand,” he continued, is “a man of little talent and great charm.” Lest anyone take that at face value, Lee quickly added that Sinnott was a “great inker” and “also a great penciler,” but, shifting back into facetiousness, “we didn’t tell anyone because Kirby would get jealous.”

Sinnott also made his gratitude to Lee plain, telling the audience “I’ve been working for Stan for fifty-three years.” (It would be more precise to say that Sinnott has worked for Marvel all those years, but Stan Lee was either editor or publisher for most of that time.) Sinnott told us that he once worked in the cement industry and “if not for Stan, I’d still be there.”

Once again, Lee resorted to what seems to be one of his favorite lines: “What they don’t realize is these people worked cheap.”

“Don’t believe that,” Sinnott instructed the audience. Then Sinnott began, “You could almost expect when Stan was going to give you a raise. . . .”

Before Sinnott could expose him as a generous man, Stan hurriedly changed the subject and turned to Ralph. “We’ve got a Johnny-come-lately” on the panel, Stan said, claiming that Ralph was just “out of his teens” and yet had ended up “on an old-timers’ panel.”

Ralph told Stan he had actually started at Marvel in the 1970s, taking Mr. Lee somewhat aback. Then Ralph started reminiscing about the days when Lee was still based in Marvel’s New York offices, and took obvious pleasure in recounting a time when he heard Lee sharply criticizing a certain Marvel writer/editor of that time.

“This is great for me,” Stan said happily, “because I have no memory!” He told us “I’m learning” things about his own past just by being there.

Then Ralph too voiced his gratitude to Stan, recalling how Lee “would call me into the office, and since I was the new kid. . . He would sit down on the couch with me like there was no one else in the world and for twenty minutes he’d show me” how to do “word balloon placement.” Macchio summed up, “There was energy there working with Stan that you couldn’t deny.”

“He was the only guy who would listen,” explained Stan. “He was the new kid.”

Then Mr. Lee turned to Ms. Steinberg. “It’s Flo’s turn. I have no idea what she’s doing here.” Then, referring to times past, he added, “I don’t know what you were doing there.”

Flo, however, can see right through Stan’s act. “Working at Marvel was SUPER,” she told the audience, audibly putting the word in capital letters. As for Stan, she assured us, “He was a joker, too.”

“She means the villain,” noted Stan.

As for the differences between Marvel Then and Marvel Now, Flo wisely observed that in the 1960s Marvel “wasn’t the corporate place it is now,” and that it “had a greater sense d’estime,” slipping into French.

“She was Fabulous Flo,” Lee said. “What were you, Ralph?”

“Reliable Ralph,” Macchio responded.

“We could’ve gotten you something better than that,” Stan responded.

Turning back to the subject of Flo, Lee told us that “we thought at first Flo was putting on an act.” He recalled that once she was all upset, and it turned out that it was because the office had run out of staples. “You can’t find anyone like that! She cared!”

Joe Sinnott added that it was a pleasure dealing with Flo over the phone: she “had the sweetest voice when she called.”

“You were never mean,” Lee told Flo onstage, setting her up for another gag. “You were wrong often, but never mean.”

On the other hand, Stan claimed “I was scared of Gene.” More precisely, “If I wanted to make a correction, I was scared to criticize Gene, because he took it so seriously:  ‘Do you mean a hand has to have five fingers?’”

Commenting on the way the panelists were interacting, moderator McGovern remarked, “It was a family then and a family today.”

Shortly afterwards, Flo mentioned “little MMMS,” the company’s in-house fan club in the 1960s, the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

“Small MMMS!?” retorted Stan, as if insulted. Referring to the club’s theme music, he maintained, “It was a great song.”

“Every morning before work we’d sing,” Flo told the audience, being something of a joker herself.

“You think we forgot?” asked Stan, who then, as he had on his panel the previous day, launched into singing the Merry Marvel Marching Society anthem. The audience clapped along, merrily and marvelously. Then, when Stan finished, he apologized, “Excuse me, I should have stood up when I sung it.”

Then Lee was asked about the time that the great Italian film director Federico Fellini (8 1/2, La Dolce Vita) dropped by the Marvel offices in the 1960s. According to Stan, his receptionist told him, “Stan, there’s a Fred Felony to see you.”

“Nobody ever visited me,” Lee told us. “I’d see anybody.”

When Lee saw Fellini, “All of a sudden I recognized him.” Fellini wasn’t alone: “he had four other associates with him,” Stan said. Moreover, “They were in descending order of height,” with Fellini, in the lead, as the “tallest.” Stan continued, “And they were all in black raincoats.” Fellini had his over his shoulder. Though Lee did not say so, this was clearly a Felliniesque sight. “I have no idea what he wanted. He had a thick accent,” explained Lee. “But apparently he was a fan. I wanted to talk about him, but there was no way I could communicate with him!”

The moderator asked Lee, “Didn’t you work with famous film directors?’

“Oh, yes,” joked Lee. “They wouldn’t make a movie without me.”

Actually, Lee did work with one famous foreign filmmaker back then: Alain Resnais, a member of the French New Wave, and the director of Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). If you’ve seen either film you will find it hard to believe that Lee and Resnais have much in common aesthetically. But, as Lee told us, “Alain Resnais wanted me to write his first English language movie.” Moreover, “He said he had read Spider-Man for years.” Lee explained, “I wasn’t going to say no. It was very flattering.”

So Stan, who was then inexperienced in movies, wrote a screenplay, and, he told us, “it wasn’t very good”: “it was 120 pages filled with dialogue.” Still, a producer was interested, but wanted the dialogue pruned down. Stan said he would have been willing to do it, but “My idiot friend Alain said, “˜Stan will not cut a word of it.’”

And so Lee and Resnais never sold the project. “If that nut had let me cut it, I might be someone famous!” lamented Lee.

Then the moderator inquired how the comics business had changed since the old days. “The most gratifying thing,” Ralph Macchio responded, “is to see it [Marvel] penetrate popular culture.” He explained, “The things we enjoyed when we were kids are now billion-dollar franchises, and that’s due to Stan.”

As he had done at his Friday panel, Lee again shared credit with the artists he worked with. “Believe me, Marvel is not a one-man show.” Then he added, “Oh, maybe I was the greatest.”

In that sweet voice Joe Sinnott had so commended, Flo Steinberg quietly observed, “Stan was always very modest.”

Then Lee praised two of those 1960s artists who were right there with him, Colan and Sinnott. “They have style,” Lee said. “That’s not easy to achieve. You may not like it when you see it, but you recognize it.”

Lee continued, “Flo, on the other hand, doesn’t write, doesn’t draw. What is it you’re doing here?” But soon thereafter, with a touch of hyperbole, Stan acknowledged Flo’s secretarial prowess: “She practically ran the company!”

Flo, who is indeed a modest, self-deprecating person, said she felt “humble.”

“A quality I will never understand,” commented Stan.

Called upon to reminisce, Flo said she would “try to think of a funny story.”

“You’ve never thought of one all these years,” Stan replied. “Why start now?”

So Ralph told a story that demonstrated what Flo meant to comics fans in the 1960s. He recalled that as a kid he was puzzled over Thor’s inability to smash a goblet with his hammer in a Tales of Asgard story. “I was determined to find the answer. So I called up Marvel and talked to Flo, who told me that in Asgard, everything was enchanted,” so that’s why Thor’s enchanted hammer couldn’t smash the enchanted goblet. “I was totally satisfied,” declared Ralph, who was easily pleased back then.

Having listened to all this, Stan the Man pronounced his judgment: “Ralph is obviously a survivor. The thing is, nobody knows what he does.” On these two points, Stan Lee, Marvel’s All-Knowing All-Father, is absolutely correct.

On numerous occasions other comics pros have asked me about just these subjects. What does Ralph do? I have no idea. Why is Ralph still at Marvel? Beats the heck out of me. And yet he survives and prospers, invulnerable to all the upheavals and downsizings that claimed so many of his contemporaries. It’s like the way that Inspector Clouseau escapes all those assassination attempts through seeming strokes of sheer luck. Maybe it’s because he and Stan share the same birthday.

Years ago Ralph used to be nicknamed “K. D.” for “Kiss of Death,” inasmuch as during his long, seemingly interminable apprenticeship as an assistant editor, every one of the editors he worked for got canned. Then Ralph finally got promoted to editor, and since then, virtually everyone of his generation at Marvel got canned. It’s as if he’s safe at the eye of the hurricane, which wipes out everyone around him. It reminds me of I, Claudius. (I don’t have time or space to explain the reference to those of you whose idea of serious literature extends no further than The Dark Tower; look it up.) All we have to do to end the war on terror is to get Ralph a job with Osama bin Laden, maybe as editor of Ultimate Jihad. Within a few years, Ralph would be the only person left in Al Qaeda.

Inspired by Ralph’s anecdote about Thor’s hammer, Stan commenced a brief lecture. “People don’t realize how scientific Marvel is,” he began.

“Superman has no visible means of propulsion,” Stan pointed out. “Even a bird flaps his wings.” So how does Superman manage to fly?

In contrast, Stan continued, at Marvel “we want to be scientifically accurate.” He wanted Thor to be able to fly, so “We gave him the enchanted hammer Mjolnir,” Stan said, pronouncing the name carefully.

Stan instructed us to observe how “authentic and scientific” Marvel was in explaining how Thor could fly. Thor’s hammer, he pointed out, has a strap that fits around the thunder god’s wrist. So “Thor whips the hammer” around above his head, building up momentum, and then hurls it into the air. And because the strap is attached to Thor’s wrist, the hammer pulls Thor up into the air as well.

“Nobody can say that isn’t scientifically sound,” proclaimed Mr. Lee. And then, quietly, he added, “That’s just a small example of the difference between DC and Marvel.”

This was Stan the Showman with the audience in the palm of his hand. Of course Stan’ explanation of how Thor can actually fly is utter nonsense. We know it, but Stan also knows it, he knows we know it, and we know he knows we know it! As he said on Friday, part of Marvel’s appeal was that it was like an inside joke that we all shared. And Stan’s explanation, scientifically unsound though it may be, still has more surface credibility than Superman just going “Up, up and away!”

And Stan basically won the war with DC Comics decades ago, and DC adopted the innovations Stan had pioneered at Marvel. But the good-humored pleasure that Stan takes in poking fun at DC the way he used to back in the Sixties is infectious, and the audience just ate it up.

When the moderator asked for questions from the audience, the first questioner surely spoke for everyone there. Referring to another groundbreaking team of the 1960s, he said, “We’re not going to get a chance to meet the Beatles”–not all of them, anyway–“or thank them.” So then he thanked the people on stage for their contributions to comics.

There was a little boy in the question line who asked that classic fan question, “Who’s stronger–Thor or the Hulk?” I suspect this lad had been prompted by an adult Marvel fan.

Stan turned the question over to Gene Colan, “and he’s not going to give you a hastily considered answer.”

Colan responded rather philosophically, “Whoever thinks he’s stronger is stronger.”

Impressed, Stan commented, “You know, Sophocles couldn’t have given a better answer.” I think Stan meant Socrates, but at least here’s proof that Frank Miller isn’t the only comics pro who knows classic Greek literature. (Oh, all right, there’s Roy Thomas and Eric Shanower, too.)

Nonetheless, Stan delivered his own judgment in favor of Thor, because “Thor’s a god.”

Then the small boy asked if he could have Stan autograph his T-shirt. The Man assented, and the boy went up on stage. “And he’ll remember this moment for at least another hour,” Stan noted.

Signing away, Stan worried aloud that “I’ll ruin your short, your mother’s going to kill me, and I’ll give you my lawyer’s address.” There you have it: the Master had turned the signing of a T-shirt into a three-act drama, with suspense, symbolic death and rebirth, and a happy ending.

The tyke’s less than fifteen minutes of stardom completed, Stan sent the lad on his way, bidding him, “Don’t let the fame go to your head!”

And the panel turned to another question, about how to “revitalize characters.”

Stan passed the buck to Joe Sinnott: “Joe is so desperate to answer that question.”

“I wasn’t even listening,” replied Sinnott.

“That’s what he used to say when I gave him instructions,” commented Stan. And so the Bullpen panel memorably went.

SATURDAY, FEB. 23, 5:30 PM

Originally I was supposed to do a signing for Marvel Encyclopedia and X-Men: The Ultimate Guide at the DK Publishing booth at mid-afternoon on Saturday, and moderate a Golden and Silver Age panel at 5 PM. Then, on Friday, I was asked to moderate the “80s Superhero Renaissance” panel at 2 PM instead. So, with the blessings of the good people at DK, I rearranged my schedule. And if you’ve been reading my con reports you know that I ended up being the only panel member on stage for a half hour because the organizers forgot to tell the other panelists to show up!

So now I was doing my DK signing at an off-peak time, from 5:30 to 7 PM Saturday evening, when presumably people are heading out to dinner. Not only that, but the convention had assigned DK a space towards the back of the hall, away from the main routes of customer traffic. Still, I was kept busy enough when I started this signing session.

I’ve found I quite enjoy doing signings: not only do I get to feel like a minor celebrity for a little while, but it’s also relaxing in comparison to moderating panels, reporting or them, or just trying to get through a crowded convention floor.

I also enjoy the company at the DK booths, which, apart from a gent or two, are invariably entirely staffed by friendly, charming and attractive ladies. It’s sort of like John Byrne’s LexCorp in his Superman books, but benign.

When you’re sitting at a booth, the rest of the convention tends to pass by before you. So, for example, former Marvelites Glenn Herdling (see “Comics in Context” #150) and Steve Geiger stopped by, and we got to chat about that perennial topic, Marvel Then and Marvel Now.

Despite the wintry temperatures outdoors, the convention floor had been so crowded all afternoon that it was getting downright hot. This, however, was a perfect temperature for Princess Leia, who walked past wearing her slave girl costume from Return of the Jedi, brightening my day. Soon afterwards a spectacular Dark Phoenix wandered past in the opposite direction. It’s as if I was seated at the crossroads of the multiverse.

Speaking of the Princess, you may recall that last summer at the DK booth in San Diego, I discovered that I was sitting right behind Carrie Fisher, who was in the next booth. This time in New York when I turned around, it was animator Bill Plympton who was sitting in the booth behind me.

When my allotted time at the DK booth ended at 7 PM, I stopped by Artist’s Aerie (so dubbed by the Beat due to its lofty location) once more, but not getting enough sleep the last few nights was catching up with me, so I decided against trying to enlist any dinner companions. After all, I had one more day of the convention to go.

SUNDAY, FEB. 25, 11 AM

And there I was, back at the DK booth on Sunday morning for another scheduled signing. It was another off-peak time, and the convention floor was relatively and rewardingly uncrowded. Nonetheless I signed and sold the last remaining copy of Marvel Encyclopedia at the DK booth during this morning session. I also got to see a resplendently costumed Darth Vader stride menacingly by: it’s a good thing he showed up on a different day than Princess Leia.

By the way, when I’m signing books I try to make sure that the ink has sufficiently dried before I close the book. I wouldn’t want the recipient to get the book home and discover the signature has smudged.

SUNDAY FEB. 25, 12 PM

Ascending the escalator on my way up to Artists’ Aerie, I look around myself at the interior architecture of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Just being in the San Diego Convention Center lifts my spirits: it is a marvel of postmodern architecture, designed by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson to evoke the ships in the nearby harbor, with the building’s triangular fiberglass “sails,” and enormous circular windows resembling portholes. Even on the main convention floor, despite the lack of windows, the hall somehow seems open and bright. In sharp contrast, the Javits Center’s network of crisscrossing steel beams seems to me grim, dark, unlovely and oppressive.

Last year the New York Comic-Con took place during the controversy over the Danish cartoonists who had drawn cartoons about the prophet Muhammed. A vocal supporter of the embattled Danish cartoonists, writer and artist Colleen Doran, who was attending the Con, offered to give one of her sketches to anyone who brought her something having to do with Denmark, and to donate a dollar per person to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. So I brought her a Danish pastry (see “Comics in Context” #123). This year when I stopped by her table in Artists’ Aerie, she offered me some delicious Danish cookies. I had the feeling of a circle being completed.

I also went over to say hello to artist Amanda Conner and Claypool Comics editor Richard Howell. Amanda drew all the covers for the Claypool series Soulsearchers and Company (see “Comics in Context” #38), but she and Richard had not seen each other for many years, corresponding instead by telephone. But now, just before the final issue of Soulsearchers was to come out, Amanda and Richard found themselves sitting alongside each other in Artist’s Aerie. I picked up a copy of Amanda Conner’s Book of $#!* You May Have Never Seen! #1, a showcase of the wit, sexiness, and visual charm of Amanda’s art.

She also inscribed something on the cover of the copy she gave me, but once I had transported it home in an enormous Dark Horse bag I had found, it had smudged so much as to be indecipherable. Damn! I fell into the very trap I usually try to avoid!

Towards 2 PM I ventured back to the lower level with the meeting rooms to attend my final panel of the convention, a tribute to the recently deceased comics artist Dave Cockrum.

Exactly a month after the convention weekend, another major comics artist who first made his mark in the 1970s, Marshall Rogers, passed away on Saturday, March 24.

If I were asked to select my favorite run of issues from the entire comic book history of Batman, it would be the six issues of Detective Comics, #471-476, from 1977 and 1978, written by Steve Englehart, drawn by Rogers, and inked by Terry Austin (see “Comics in Context” #84). Although they were recognized as instant classics by discerning comics aficionados of the time, it was not until nearly thirty years later that DC Comics commissioned Englehart, Rogers and Austin to create a sequel. I hoped that their new stories would live up to the high standards set by their original run on Detective, but was that hoping too much? No: the 2005 Batman: Dark Detective miniseries was another triumph (see “Comics in Context” #84, 87-88, 90, 93, 104). Englehart and Rogers already had a further sequel in mind, and I was enthusiastically looking forward to it. And now it won’t happen.

With the mainstream media’s new, more welcoming attitude towards comics as an artform, obituaries for Rogers have been appearing in numerous newspapers, including the March 29 New York Times. I am becoming annoyed by the fact that there have been so many important figures in American comic book history–not just Cockrum and Rogers, but even Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and Alex Toth–of whom the Times took no notice until after they were dead. The Times, the “newspaper of record,” has a great deal to catch up on in covering the comics artform and its history.

I did not know Marshall Rogers well, but I spoke with him in person or by telephone several times over the decades, including conducting an interview with him, Englehart and Austin at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art two years ago. Marshall was always friendly, and always a pleasure to speak to.

It has often been said that Marshall’s Joker was something of a self-portrait, but in person Marshall’s smile was always warm and benevolent.

You should all read Fred Hembeck’s affecting tribute to Marshall in the March 27 entry on his blog, and listen to Englehart, Austin, writer Roger Stern and inker Joe Rubinstein reminisce about Rogers on the March 28 “Comic Zone” Internet radio show. Then write to Marvel Comics to ask them to collect the Roger Stern/Marshall Rogers run on Doctor Strange, long overdue for reprinting, into a new trade paperback.

It is sad when any person dies at a relatively young age. But when a creative artist dies, all of the potential work that he or she could have created perishes as well. I will return to this subject next week, when I wind up my convention coverage with my report on “Dave Cockrum Remembered.”

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I shouldn’t do a column about Stan Lee’s appearance at the New York Comic-Con without again recommending that you all go see the survey of his career which I co-curated, “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” now running at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan’s SoHo.

As I’ve mentioned in the past (see “Comics in Context” #58), comics–and even the graphic novel–were invented not in America but by a Swiss scholar, artist and satirist named Rodolphe Topffer in the early 18th century. You can read my article about the first English language compilation of his work, Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips, in the latest edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 3 PM

The 2007 New York Comic-Con reportedly received 40,000 attendees over three days; San Diego’s Comic-Con International declares that last year it had ” 114,000 individual attendees. . . (not counting the 9,000 or so exhibitors and their staff!)”. The New York con now seems to be acknowledged as being the nation’s second biggest comics convention, yet look at the gap in attendance.

I wonder what percentage of the San Diego attendees come not for the comics but for the movie and television preview presentations, and the chance to see their starts in person. In contrast, the New York Comic-Con, despite ventures into anime and gaming, remains almost entirely a comic book convention. I expect that there will be a greater Hollywood presence in years to come, especially since when the New York con moves to April next year, it will present such an obvious opportunity to promote summer blockbuster movies. (But still, I was surprised that there was no promotion for the 300 movie at the New York con, even though it opened merely two weeks later, whereas San Francisco’s WonderCon, the week after the New York con, got its own preview screening.)

But New York-based producer Michael Uslan has beaten most of the rest of Hollywood to the New York Comic-Con. He hosted the panel previewing the forthcoming film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which is being written and will be directed by comics great Frank Miller.

Opening the presentation, Uslan told the audience that “If you’ve ever been to San Diego,” meaning the Comic-Con, “One of the headlines” the con gets “is “˜Hollywood Invades San Diego.’” This panel, he told us, “is the case of “˜New York Invades New York.’” Uslan explained that Spirit co-producer F. J. DeSanto, who was also on the panel, was from Manhattan, two of their associates on the film were from Long Island and Westchester County, respectively, and Miller himself was a Manhattanite. “Me, I’m a Jersey boy,” Uslan informed us. “We are based here.”

Moreover, Uslan continued, “This con is special to me.” He told us that he had gone to the “New York Comicon” back in July, 1964, that was indeed the “first comic-con” This is long before I ever attended a comics convention in New York City. Uslan recalled that this first convention was in a “fleabag hotel” called the “Broadway Central” that had “drunks in the hallway,” and that the hotel “collapsed a year later.”

At this point Uslan noticed a member of comic books’ generation of founding fathers in the audience. “One of the all-time great legends in the comics industry has graced us with his presence,” Uslan said, introducing Jerry Robinson, who worked with artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger on Batman #1 (see “Comics in Context” #141). Considering Robinson’s efforts to get Finger recognition as co-creator of Batman (see “Comics in Context” #94), it was appropriate that Uslan then reminisced that at this first comics con, when “I was thirteen,” “I met Bill Finger.” Another great comics writer, Otto Binder, was a “friend of mine,” Uslan explained, and he had “a beer with him and Bill Finger.” I don’t know that I approve of these Golden Age giants allowing a thirteen-year-old to drink alcohol, but otherwise this is an enviable experience for anyone with an appreciation of American comic book history.

As fir their present project, Uslan said that “ten or eleven years ago Ben Melniker and I got the [movie] rights to The Spirit.” Uslan told us “I promised and swore to Will Eisner that nobody was going to touch this project if they didn’t get it, if we couldn’t do it the right way. And I’ve held to that promise.”

Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, lots of people in the movie business didn’t get what The Spirit is about. “It’s painful,” Uslan said, telling us that “We have had many lucrative deals put in front of us that we’ve turned down over the years.” That’s because “We have dealt with people in Hollywood who have said, “˜Great, you want to do a Spirit movie?’” but then added, “Let’s get him out of his suit and tie” and put him in a costume and give him “super-powers.” They would even propose “make him die” so that he could “come back as a ghost,” whereupon Uslan said he replied “That’s a great idea and we can call it The Spectre or Deadman,” referring to two established DC superheroes who really are ghosts.

Meanwhile, Uslan continued, over the years he would consult with Eisner about The Spirit. “Thank God I had an opportunity over those years to spend a lot of time with Will to ask him questions, to get him involved, so that we know what he had in mind, we know what he was thinking about this, what his preferences were or weren’t.”

Then Uslan introduced the other panelists. “One of the important members of the team,” he said, was Denis Kitchen, who was “Will’s friend,” publisher and agent. Next Uslan introduced co-producer F. J. DeSanto, who in turn read an e-mail from Frank Miller, who had been scheduled to appear on the panel.

Miller’s e-mail began with a bit of philosophy: “Sometimes life really sucks.” Miller explained that “I slipped on a patch of black ice on a Manhattan sidewalk, smashed my left hip to bits and have spent the last bunch of weeks undergoing medical procedures and losing out on all these chances to tell everybody how much fun I’m having writing Will Eisner’s The Spirit.” MIller then cautioned, “Don’t go expecting a nostalgic tongue-in-cheek romp here. Remember. . .how scary Eisner got whenever he chose to. Remember, remember how he broke your heart with the story of Sand Serif,” whom Miller has credited as his inspiration for Elektra in Daredevil. “So expect some hairpin turns, some dead end, back alley madness of the wet kind. Get set, we’re on our way to some dark places.”

(As terrible as this injury sounds, Miller was nonetheless able to attend the premiere of the 300 movie in Los Angeles (at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, no less) less than two weeks later, though he was using a cane. See the photo here.

Then the panelists showed the “teaser poster” that Miller had created for The Spirit movie, showing Eisner’s character, looking formidable and grim, his sleeves rolled up, standing amidst darkness. The whole poster was in black and white, with the Spirit’s suit rendered as black and white lines, except for the brilliant red of his tie and of the logo “Will Eisner’s The Spirit.” In short, it looked like a melding of Eisner’s Spirit with Miller’s Sin City. Across the top were two lines in quotation marks: “Down these mean streets a man must come. A hero born, murdered, and born again.” That reminds me of the title of Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again storyline (1986), with its Christian imagery, as well as the title of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Raymond Chandler’s description of the fictional detective in his 1945 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler). The emphasis on the Spirit’s figurative death and resurrection reminds me of my debate with Dr. Peter Coogan, author of Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, as to whether or not the Spirit is a superhero (see “Comics in Context” #163 and 165).

Uslan said that he and Miller “ran into each other again” at Will Eisner’s memorial service in New York City. (Regular readers will recall that I was there, too, and reported on Uslan’s speech. In fact, Uslan said there that whenever he saw a film by “Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Orson Welles, and now Frank Miller, I’ll think of Will Eisner.” See “Comics in Context” #80-81.) Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s movie “Sin City had come out a week or two before that, and I said, “˜You know, Frank. . .I’m trying to make comic books into movies and what you’ve done is you’ve made a movie into a comic book.” Uslan had long been planning to do a Spirit movie, but he said at the memorial he told Miller, “For the first time I can really. . .see The Spirit being done, using this Sin City technology.” Uslan told the audience he asked Miller to write and direct The Spirit movie, but at first Miller didn’t think he could do justice to Eisner’s work.

Uslan continued, “But after thinking about this for some time he came back and said, “˜I can’t let anyone else do it. I’ve got to do it.’” Uslan assured the audience that “the Spirit is safe with Frank,” and that even now “Frank is very busy writing the final draft of the movie.”

Denis Kitchen observed that “The Spirit movie is something I don’t think Will ever expected to really happen, because over the years, many people optioned it, and for may reasons, [it] wasn’t an easy thing to translate. Many people had it and it just never got done right.”

Moreover, Kitchen said, “Will also, unlike many other people in the world, did not want to direct and wasn’t particularly intrigued by the idea of comics becoming movies, because most of them he felt didn’t do justice to the original source. If you read Will’s serious works, you know he felt that comics should be an art in its own right and he didn’t like the implied superiority of film, because it was a more lucrative field to be in.” You, like myself, may wonder, then, why he even bothered to sell movie rights to The Spirit. Later during the panel Kitchen recalled Eisner’s comment on a notoriously dreadful TV-movie version of The Spirit: “It made my toes curl.”

However, Kitchen stated, referring to Miller, that “Will would be very pleased to know that his friend and someone he respected is going to take this and mold it into another medium.” Kitchen voiced his approval of the Sin City movie and added, “I knew Frank was thinking right when he told me he was clipping out panels of Will’s Spirit and taping them on his wall and doing in-betweening.”

What Kitchen was describing was Miller’s method of storyboarding the movie. Walt Disney and his animation studio pioneered storyboarding, which means plotting out a movie as if it were a long comics story. “in-betweening” is also an animation term, meaning filling in the movement between two separate poses of the character.

DeSanto explained MIller’s process: “When we first started talking about the movie and ideas started to pour out of Frank’s head, he would xerox Will’s graphic novels”–presumably DeSanto actually meant Eisner’s Spirit stories, perhaps as collected in DC’s Archives editions–“and start cutting and pasting them into some sort of order. That’s how he mapped out the initial film. I was having lunch with him about six months ago and all of a sudden he had a pile of papers on his lap and he said, “˜Okay, here’s the movie.’”

Later during the panel, Uslan put it this way: “The storyboards are by Will Eisner with an assist by Frank Miller.” While the film’s story is “not a specific story we’ve seen” in Eisner’s Spirit canon, Uslan explained, “you will recognize sequences” from classic Eisner Spirit stories in the film.

Recently I have been having a discussion via e-mail with comics writer Peter Gillis as to whether “decompressed” storytelling in contemporary comics is more “cinematic” than Eisner’s Spirit; he votes for the former, while I vote for the latter. (As Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics, time works differently in comics and movies, and I feel that “decompressed” storytelling in Western-style comics moves at a deadening pace.) Miller’s comics storytelling is closer to the Eisner mode, and the Sin City movie testifies to the cinematic nature of Miller’s comics work. I certainly hope that these Spirit storyboards will be published if someday there will be an “art of The Spirit movie” book.

So what will the story of the movie be like? DeSanto said “It’s not an origin story. When you meet the Spirit, he is the Spirit.” And how much will the film look as if Will Eisner drew it? For one thing, DeSanto said that “We’ll be incorporating the logo into the background,” thus imitating Eisner’s trademark technique in his Spirit splash pages. “With the technology they made Sin City and 300 with, we’re at a really neat point in filmmaking where we can make that world as Eisneresque as possible.”

Will there be familiar Eisner characters aside from the Spirit himself in the movie? DeSanto said that “we’re going to see some of the femme fatales.”

Then Uslan cautioned that “We’re not going to do the whimsical Spirit stories [in the movie]. We’re not going to do Rat-Tat the Machine Gun or Gerhard Shnobble” (see “Comics in Context” #68). Uslan continued, “However, that doesn’t mean that when we move to some animation projects that we won’t necessarily cover that then.” It seemed Uslan had revealed something he had not intended, for he quickly added, “But that’s a story I’m not allowed to talk about now.”

But as for characters who will be in the movie, Uslan said, “We’ve got Commissioner Dolan, and believe me, you’ll understand why he is so different from Commissioner Gordon [in Batman]. Ellen Dolan will be there. Sand Saref and that magnificent romantic triangle will be there.” Later on during the panel Uslan advised the audience to “check out some of the Octopus stories” as preparation for seeing the movie, so it would seem that the Spirit’s archenemy is also in the film.

Will the movie be set back in the 1940s, when most of Eisner’s Spirit stories were first published? Uslan recounted that he asked Eisner, “‘Should this be set in the 40s? Should this be set in the 50s? Should this be set today?’ He was kind of shocked at my question and said, “˜I never wrote The Spirit in a nostalgic sense. Whenever I write it and drew it, I was always doing something that was relevant at the time. He was in the 40s in the 40s. When I was doing it in the 50s it was the 50s. When I did it in the 60s, it was the 60s. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be contemporary or at least timeless.’”

Hence, Uslan continued, “That’s what Frank is going to go for here. There’s going to be a timeless feel to this, The only thing I can throw back to you is what Tim Burton did in our first Batman picture, where a lot of people, if you asked them, weren’t absolutely sure if that movie took place in the past, present or future, or some kind of mix thereof.” For example, in that 1989 film, reporter Alexander Knox, in his fedora (the Spirit wears one, too) and trench coat, looks as if he were from the 1940s, whereas Vicki Vale wears a minidress in one sequence.

Although Uslan and company are based in New York, they have partnered with a Hollywood company, Odd Lot Productions, to produce The Spirit movie. Uslan assured the audience that Odd Lot understood and appreciated The Spirit and the comics medium. He said that when he told Deborah Del Prete, one of the heads of Odd Lot, that he was attempting to make a movie of “the greatest comic in seventy years,” she exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s The Spirit!” Not only is Del Prete a “comics fan,” Uslan told us, she is a “Legion [of Super-Heroes] completist.” (Well, that certainly makes her One of Us, perhaps more so than many of Us!) Uslan made the point that the film is being “independently financed,” perhaps in order to assure us that there would be no creative interference from a major studio.

Then Uslan started taking questions from the audience. The first questioner started out by saying that writer/artist Darwyn Cooke’s new Spirit comic book series for DC “is my first experience of The Spirit.” That surprised me, but on reflection, I realized it shouldn’t have. I read my first Spirit story decades ago, but in recent years The Spirit had only been in print in DC’s hardcover Archives volumes. I would have assigned Spirit stories to attendees of my lectures, but I didn’t want to compel them to buy a fifty dollar book. Last year DC finally published a Best of the Spirit paperback collection, which should be good news for anyone teaching a course in the history of comics.

This new Spirit fan pointed out that the tone of Cooke’s Spirit stories is considerably lighter than that of Miller’s Sin City. DeSanto responded that the “basis of the film is the very early Eisner work.” The story of Sand Saref, he said, provides “the tone” of the movie. It “will have that noir feel.”

The next question was about the “ideal cast” for The Spirit movie. Denis Kitchen repeated the well known information that years ago, when the actor was closer to the right age, Eisner had “wanted James Garner to play the Spirit.” Kitchen said that Eisner had “really no more” casting suggestions “since then.” At another point during the panel we had been told that Miller already has some casting ideas in mind.

Uslan said that the actor who portrays the Spirit “has to be a little scary. . . have a sense of humor. . .be able to win all these femme fatales,” and “take a lot of punishment.”

Adapting the celebrated line of Eisner’s foremost femme fatale, P’Gell, Uslan told us, “I think if Frank was here, he’d say, “˜My name is Frank and this is not a movie for little boys.’”

(I just saw the Sin City movie again recently. Please, Frank, don’t have the Spirit castrate anybody onscreen!)

Moving to a bigger topic, Uslan declared, “I believe we are now in a Golden Age of comic book moviemaking.” He told us he had been in the movie business for thirty years, but in recent years there has been a “sea change” in how Hollywood regards comics.

First, Uslan stated that years ago many people in Hollywood had no respect for comics. But now, he asserted, there were people in positions of power who grew up reading the comics of Stan Lee and DC editor Julie Schwartz.

Second, he continued, people in Hollywood “finally understood” that comic books are not just about superheroes, that the interest in comics “is not [just] a trend,” and that “comics are an ongoing source of great stories and characters.”

Third, Uslan declared, if you “look at successful comics-based movies” and “take out those based on sixty-year-old franchises”– like Batman and Superman, and he should have also mentioned those based on fortysomething -year-old franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men–then you see that they were based on comics that sold only “ten thousand” copies like Men in Black and Road to Perdition. In other words, even obscure comics properties can give rise to successful movies.

Uslan declared that he and his colleagues were producing The Spirit movie “independently.” This, it seems, gives them the creative freedom to be faithful to the source material. He continued, “So we’ll never ignore sixty years of the history of a character just to create something out of whole cloth.” Uslan maintained, “We get to respect the creators, the characters, and the material.” Would that every producer of a comics-based movie would take that pledge and mean it!

Uslan then mentioned one other important new “element” in making comic book-based movies: “the technology,” meaning CGI, which he said now allows moviemakers to do the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern onscreen. “This also makes this the Golden Age of comic book movies,” he concluded.

Uslan then said his “guess” was that The Spirit movie would go into production before Sin City 2. “We’re moving like lightning. We really are.” (On the other hand, Frank Miller subsequently announced that he and Sin City 2 co-director Robert Rodriguez “intend to go into prep sometime in the next six weeks, and we’re hoping on shooting by June.”

Then Uslan did something one doesn’t often hear from a movie producer: with obvious heartfelt sincerity, he voiced his sheer happiness in realizing his boyhood dream he had as One of Us. “I am so lucky in life,” he told us. “I’m working with what I loved since I was three years old,” meaning comics, and on his “favorite characters.” Moreover, he continued, he got to work with “geniuses” like Frank Miller, Sam Raimi (director of the Spider-Man movies), and Chris Nolan (director of Batman Begins).

Raimi? The person I missed seeing last summer in San Diego? What’s this about?

But first the panelists answered another question as to whether a familiar member of Eisner’s Spirit cast would turn up in the movie: the Spirit’s young African-American sidekick Ebony, who notoriously looks and speaks like a racist stereotype, something even Eisner acknowledged in his introduction to his last graphic novel, Fagin the Jew (see “Comics in Context” #25).

“No Ebony,” declared DeSanto. Uslan added that “It was Frank’s choice,” repeating Miller’s line that “Creatively everyone has a bad day. That was Will’s bad day.”

Uslan went on that he believed Miller’s main reason for not using Ebony “was less about the controversial nature of the character than it was the story doesn’t lend itself to a little kid being involved in the action.” Miller, he said, had created “too dark and violent and adult [a] world” to be “endangering a child.” (But what about the boy Dick Grayson in Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin? Well, I suppose Grayson is already a trained athlete, whereas Eisner’s Ebony is not.)

Yet another fan in the question-and-answer line revealed that he had been introduced to The Spirit through Darwyn Cooke’s new comic, and that he was “not very acquainted with Eisner’s Spirit.” I wonder just how many readers are like this. It’s a good thing that DC is finally publishing Spirit stories, new and old, in easily affordable formats. This is when Uslan recommended that he “check out” some of the Octopus stories as preparation for seeing the movie.

The next question was whether The Spirit movie will get “a hard R [rating] like Sin City.” Uslan said “I can’t say” but “guesses” it will get “a hard PG-13.” (I guess that means no onscreen castration, thank God.) Here Uslan made the point that Miller “knows it’s Eisner’s stuff, so Eisner’s sense of humor is going to be there.”

I hope so. With all of the panel’s emphasis on how The Spirit movie will be dark and frightening, and devoid of “whimsy,” and with the examples of the Sin City and 300 movies to consider, and even All-Star Batman and Robin (see “Comics in Context” #119, which was titled “Bats and Spats” before IGN changed it), I worry that Miller’s interpretation of The Spirit will be too one-sided, emphasizing the dark film noir aspect of Eisner’s creation but omitting its humor, essential optimism, and humane, ah, spirit.

The panel drew to a close with news about subjects other than The Spirit movie. For example, Denis Kitchen assured us that “Virtually everything Will did will be back in print if it isn’t already” from a number of different publishers.

Uslan told the audience that he was “making great progress” with developing a Shazam movie, about the original Captain Marvel, at New Line Cinema, where, he said, “everybody gets it.” Not only did Uslan know Otto Binder, the Captain’s principal writer in the Golden Age, but he also had a “correspondence as a kid with C. C. Beck,” the artist who co-created the character.

Uslan reminded us that the “first gig I got writing comic books” was on The Shadow for DC. “I knew Walter Gibson,” the principal author of The Shadow pulp novels, Uslan told us, and “talked with him at length.” (Obviously knowing Michael Uslan would do wonders in playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation!) Now Uslan is developing a Shadow movie that Sam Raimi will direct. (Aha!) The “story’s been cracked,” Uslan reported, adding that they had found its “tone.” Interestingly, Uslan would not answer whether the movie is set in the 1930s or the 1940s, when the Shadow pulp novels and radio series were originally done. (It’s also interesting that another Shadow movie is in the works so soon after the 1994 version bombed. Could it be that Raimi and Uslan are changing the time period to make their film different from the last one?)

Finally, Uslan announced that the Montclair Art Museum, in Montclair, New Jersey, would be holding an exhibit on superhero comics that will open on July 14. Indeed, there was a full-page ad for the show, “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes,” on page 11 of the New York Comic-Con program book.

Uslan emphasized that the Montclair museum show would be an exhibit of “comic book art.” I interpreted this as a possible veiled reference to the “Masters of American Comics” museum exhibition, half of which showcased comic strip artwork (see “Comics in Context” #151-156).

Uslan said that he is “really involved” in the Montclair show. Indeed, according to an interview with Uslan in the Asbury Park Press, it will draw from his own collection of comic books and original comics art.

Uslan stated that the Montclair show will examine superhero comics “from three points of view”: First, that “comic books are a true American artform,” second, that comic books present a “modern mythology,” with superheroes as contemporary counterparts of the gods, and third, that comic books reflect changes in American culture.

Uslan also stressed that Montclair was only a “half-hour train ride” from Manhattan. You may recall that one reason that Art Spiegelman pulled his artwork out of the New York area version of “Masters” was that he disapproved of the fact that the show was divided between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. As he pointed out, it is exceedingly difficult to persuade New Yorkers to trek out to the wilds of New Jersey, and my long, complicated trip out to the Newark Museum and back demonstrated why.

Well, good luck to the Montclair Art Museum in attracting visitors from Manhattan. Luckily, I’ve got a friend who lives near Montclair and is willing to put me up overnight, so I will be reporting on this show after it opens.

SATURDAY FEB. 24, 4 PM

Although I was told that the New York Comic-Con cleared each meeting room following each panel, this is not actually true, and I kept my seat in Room 1E12/13 after The Spirit movie panel in order to see the next event in the same room: “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 60s Marvel Bullpen.”

Unlike at the San Diego Con, with its mammoth crowds, it is easier to encounter friends and acquaintances at the New York Comic-Con. So it was that while I was sitting in Room 1E12/13 I got to chat with Tom McLean, who writes the “Bags and Boards“ blog on comics for Variety and my old friend Scott Lobdell, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers of the 1990s, who asked me to assure my readers that he was “still alive.”

This panel was supposed to start at four, but it didn’t commence at 4, or 4:05 or even 4:10 PM. It’s not that no one had told the panelists to show up, as with my panel earlier in the day. There, over to the right of the meeting room, Jerry Robinson was clapping Stan Lee on the shoulder. And then I saw Stan Lee talking with “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg, his legendary secretary from the 1960s, and bussing her on the cheek.

Flo was here!? Very friendly but also very modest by nature, Flo always downplays the importance of her role at Marvel during its Silver Age, almost ever gives interviews, and never accepts invitations to be a guest at comics conventions. For her to show up here is highly unusual. Could it be that she’s on the panel, too?

It was now 4:15 PM and the panel still hasn’t started. And in the present, I’ve run out of space for this week’s column. You’ll have to wait till next time to learn about the onstage reunion of Stan, Flo, and the great Silver Age artists Gene Colan and Joe Sinnott.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Editor Ken Plume has advised me that he’s finally making progress in transferring the columns that I did for IGN over to the “Comics in Context” archive page here at Quick Stop. There’s also a new, simpler way to access my archive page: just go to asitecalledfred.com/comicsincontext/.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 10 AM

Pleased at the success of the opening reception for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, I remained there until the party finally broke up around 1:30 in the morning. That meant that eight hours later I was trudging from Penn Station to the Javits Center for the second day of this year’s New York Comic-Con. I’d already been keeping late hours that week putting finishing touches on the wall texts for the exhibit, and now I was definitely falling well into sleep debt.

Still, I was better off than the folks standing out in the February chill in the long, long line waiting to get in. It was about 10:10 AM when I arrived, and the con had been officially open for ten minutes, and yet the line was so lengthy that I could not see where it ended. Lucky for me I had my all-powerful press badge, so I could walk right in. Inside the Special Events Hall, the panel “Slayer Tales with Xander, Kendra and Drusilla” was already in progress. The auditorium seemed half empty, not surprisingly, with so many people still stuck outside on line.

“Slayer Tales” marked the tenth anniversary of the debut of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, and there was even a birthday cake. Ten years already!? But the panel’s title turned out to be a misnomer: Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander, one of the leading characters, didn’t make it, either because he was stuck in traffic, or due to illness, according to different reports. (Brendon did show up to sign autographs later, and reportedly was clearly somewhat ill.) The other actors who showed up were all minor players on the series, including Bianca Lawson, who portrayed the short-lived African slayer Kendra, Larry Bagby, Dennis Christopher, James Leary, and Jonathan Woodward.

The exception was Juliet Landau, who memorably portrayed the recurring vampiress villainess Drusilla. Wearing large glasses, with her hair pulled back, and speaking in an open, friendly American accent, Landau was unrecognizable as the half-mad, British Dru. She recalled that once she was doing a “press thing in England” and the interviewer was “floored” to discover “I was American.”

Of all the panelists Landau made the most interesting comments. When a fan inquired about whether the actors could improvise dialogue, Landau explained that they could not change the dialogue, but they had considerable freedom of interpretation. “If I feel like dancing on the table” or “rolling on the floor,” she said, she could do it. Landau said that early on she had a “creative meeting” in which she was confused by the seeming contradictions in Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s description of Drusilla as both “childlike” and “sexual” and as both “sweet” and “innocent” yet “diabolical,” but that she eventually got a handle on playing these dualities in the character. “It was really collaborative,” Landau said, “but the words were strictly the words.” The “growls” and “giggles” that she put in, she added, were “not scripted.”

Another fan informed Landau that “my eight-year-old daughter does Drusilla impressions.” “Oh, no!” exclaimed Landau.

Of course, inevitably, Landau was asked to do Drusilla’s voice, and though she cautioned that she hadn’t done it in a long time, Landau shifted with apparent ease into Drusilla’s eerily sing-song British accent, and then shifted back to herself, smiling, as the audience applauded.

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 11 AM

On that morning, outside the Special Events Hall, I saw two celebrities showing off their legs. The first was Hayden Panetierre, who plays the super-powered cheerleader on the NBC series Heroes. She was a vision of beauty with her blonde hair, minidress and boots, as she was escorted past the Special Events Hall by security. (See for yourself. Here’s a photo of Ms. Panetierre talking with comics writer Peter David in the Con’s green room).

Yesterday I had seen a Silent Bob impersonator, but later this morning I saw Quick Stop’s lord and master, Kevin Smith himself, in his trademark long black coat, shorts, and sneakers outside the Special Events Hall. Didn’t he get cold outside? (But I commend Ms. Panetierre’s decision to sacrifice her personal comfort for the sake of aesthetics.)

Between admiring Ms. Panetierre and sighting the Quick Stop’s founder, I made my way over to the Javits Center food court, which opened at 11 Am, and devoured an early lunch, knowing I wouldn’t get another break for eating until 7 PM. At one point I looked up and saw my favorite member of the Flash’s Rogues Gallery, the Mirror Master, walking over to the food court. Well, I’ve never seen him at a comics con before. He passed by a table where Supergirl was having lunch. She didn’t seem to notice the notorious super-villain; well, I guess she was off duty. This was one of three Supergirls I would see this weekend, as if she were Triplicate Girl as well. The mainstream media would have you believe that virtually everyone at a comics con is in costume, and this is far from true. But I rather enjoy seeing a familiar costumed character nonchalantly pass by at these conventions.

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 12 PM

Studying the program book I noticed that tickets were required for the next panel I intended to attend, “MARVEL: Stephen King’s Dark Tower–The Gunslinger Born,” which would start in an hour. But how would I get a ticket? Returning to the lobby area just outside the Special Events Hall, I saw there was already a long line snaking back and forth, waiting to enter for the King panel. I asked one person in line when the con had begun giving out tickets; he replied, somewhat contemptuously, “Eight A. M.” Two hours before the convention opened!? Considering how long the line was to get in shortly after 10 AM, just how long did people have to wait out in the cold to get tickets for the King panel?

I soon located one of the red-shirted volunteers who was in charge of distributing tickets for the King panel, showed him my all-powerful press badge, explained my connection with Publishers Weekly, and after consulting with other parties, he gave me a pass for the panel. Although I joke about the Red Shirts at the New York and San Diego Cons, he was gratifyingly helpful, and explained to me that the meeting rooms were cleared at the conclusion of each panel. The Red Shirt was quite surprised when I told him about the “camping” phenomenon that the San Diego Con encourages in its largest auditorium, the humongous Hall H. Not only are no tickets necessary to attend the movie preview panels in Hall H, but many, many conventioneers settle into Hall H on Saturday morning and never leave till the final panel of the day concludes. That’s why I never got into the Spider-Man 3 panel at last year’s San Diego Con (see “Comics in Context” #146).

I wonder if, as attendance continues to mount at the San Diego Con, whether its organizers will also have to issue tickets for certain Hall H presentations (as they already do for events such as the Masquerade) and clear the hall afterwards. But I expect that if tickets are given out a full two hours before the Con opens for the day, I still won’t be able to get into these panels. (The San Diego Con doesn’t make exceptions for press people trying to get into Hall H.)

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 1 PM

The large audience in the Special Events Hall broke into applause as the creative team for Marvel’s Dark Tower comic walked onto the stage. There was Stephen King’s research assistant Robin Furth, who plots the comic, and who turns out to be an attractive, smiling woman with long blonde hair (as you can see here). There were also the comic’s scripter Peter David, illustrator Jae Lee, colorist Richard Isanove, letterer Chris Eliopolous, and editor Ralph Macchio.

“There’s Joe!” exclaimed a guy who was sitting near me and who was ecstatic at seeing Mr. Quesada, Marvel’s editor in chief. But there was one person still missing, King himself, whom Quesada proceeded to introduce as “one of the greatest authors and creators in the last fifty years, maybe ever!”

Now wait a minute. I haven’t read widely in horror prose fiction, and, for all I know, Clive Barker, for example, may be a superior writer to Stephen King. But I’m very fond of The Shining and The Stand, so I have no trouble accepting the idea that King may be the greatest contemporary writer of horror fiction. But “one of the greatest authors and creators in the last fifty years, maybe ever”? Maybe not.

Where to begin? Well, I could start at the top: is Stephen King in the same league as Shakespeare? Or perhaps I could start listing authors who are greater than King in roughly chronological order: say, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and so on. It’s a lengthy list.

Or I could refer to the celebrated Yale scholar Professor Harold Bloom, who recently listed his “five most important books” in Newsweek: the complete works of Shakespeare, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Homer’s Iliad. Why, how strange that Professor Bloom did not mention Mr. King!

There are all sorts of ways to come at the question of who’s a greater writer than Stephen King. For example, I could refer to the title of last week’s “Comics in Context,” which I took from Walt Whitman: he’s a better writer than King, too.

And I should think that Mr. King would agree that all the people I’ve named are superior to himself. Years ago I saw the British playwright Tom Stoppard being interviewed onstage at Columbia University. The interviewer started comparing Stoppard to Shakespeare, and Stoppard clearly looked embarrassed, presumably because Stoppard, one of the leading contemporary playwrights, surely realized he was still nowhere near being a match for the Bard.

And hey, Quesada referred to King as “one of the greatest authors and creators. . .maybe ever,” so that takes in creators of any form of art. So is Mr. King superior to Ingmar Bergman, or to Leonardo da Vinci, or to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Or to the Creator of the heavens and earth? This is fun.

But, you may be saying, I shouldn’t make too much of Mr. Quesada’s remark as signifying Marvel’s limitations in appreciating literature. Oh, look, here in the second issue of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic is a house ad for the company’s new Marvel Illustrated line, comics adaptation of what the ad calls “literature’s greatest stories.” First up: The Man in the Iron Mask. It’s as if I wasted my time studying James Joyce’s Ulysses in school instead of the oeuvre of Alexandre Dumas. (And shouldn’t Marvel be adapting The Three Musketeers before its sequel?)

“I’ve been saying ad nauseum,” Quesada continued, “that being able to publish The Dark Tower is a coming out party for the comic book industry.” In his six years as editor in chief, Quesada said, his goal has been “reaching out into the mainstream.” Publishing The Dark Tower comic, Quesada declared, demonstrates that “We’re a very serious art form and one to be reckoned with.”

And here I thought that Art Spiegelman’s Maus winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 had proved comics could be a “very serious art form.” Or maybe when Time Magazine named Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen as one of the hundred greatest novels published between 1923 (when Time started publication) and 2005 (when the list was made). (Mr. King isn’t on this list, either.) Or Alison Bechtel’s autobiographical graphic novel (graphic autobiography?) Fun Home being named as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books” of 2006? Or the success of the “Masters of American Comics” traveling museum exhibition (see “Comics in Context” #151-156)? Or the widespread appreciation of comics professionals such as Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Neil Gaiman, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, and Will Eisner in the worlds of academia, museums and the mainstream media in recent years.

Certainly King is now a mainstream writer, and not simply read by a niche audience. But would the literary world consider comics to be a “very serious” artform simply because there is now a comic book based on King’s work? Quesada is probably unaware of the controversy that erupted in the literary world when King received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Awards in 2003. I think that King deserved the award, but it’s important to realize that many people in the literary community did not.

So thus I am reminded once again why I’ve always felt somewhat out of place in the world of comics, whose study I regard as my life’s work, but where I remain on the periphery. I’m a man with three Ivy League degrees in English literature who works in a field in which the major publishers couldn’t care less about my academic background. We just don’t think alike.

The literary world is quickly learning to take comics seriously; the real question is when the comics industry itself will recognize what it truly means to be a serious artform.

And let’s appreciate Stephen King for his genuine achievements in popular culture, without indulging in unfounded hyperbole.

Finally Stephen King came onstage, and the audience gave him a standing ovation, cheering more loudly than the audience did yesterday for Stan Lee. Once again, people crowded down front, flashing their cameras in the panelists’ faces. Quesada told them “Thank you” over and over, as an obvious hint to sit down, but these amateur paparazzi kept on flashing. Unlike yesterday during the Stan Lee panel, this time convention staffers cleared the space in front of the stage.

And you know how I keep joking in my convention reports that the Red Shirts seem like fascist stormtroopers? The con actually stationed people in Star Wars stormtrooper costumes in front of the King panel dais as guards! Over the weekend I would continue to see Star Wars stormtroopers actually acting as Con security. (If they unmasked, would they all turn out to be clones?)

When I saw King at Radio City Music Hall last year (See “Comics in Context” #148), he was giving a performance, acting the role of the scruffy, macabre prankster, who delighted in scaring and grossing out his audience. At the New York Comic-Con he was more serious and subdued, but still in character.

The first question was from an audience member who said he hadn’t read The Dark Tower novels and wondered if the comics contained any “spoilers.”
“Spoilers!” King retorted. “There are no spoilers!” King continued. “You might as well say “˜I’m never watch The Wizard of Oz again because I know how it comes out!” Summing up his opinion of Marvel’s Dark Tower, King declared, “The comic book just kicks ass.”

Another audience member asked if Peter David was “intimidated” by working on a comics adaptation of “a serious book that’s reached this many people.” (Here we go again. What makes Stephen King’s Dark Tower any more or less “serious” than Peter David’s Hulk?) David replied that “What’s intimidating is it’s a book that’s going to one particular person,” indicating King. David said that King “goes over everything.”

Another audience member asked KIng, “If I donate one hundred dollars to your favorite charity, will you autograph my copy of The Dark Tower?”

King quietly replied, “No,” to appreciative audience laughter,

A questioner asked about the theme of the final novel in The Dark Tower series. King explained, “if there’s an overall theme to The Dark Tower, it’s one of evolution. You don’t get what you want immediately. . . .Sometimes you don’t get it right the first time or the second time or the fiftieth time. There has to be an evolutionary process.”

Then, observing that there were Harry Potter fans in the audience, King said that “when you do a long body of work. . . .when you get to the end, you’re going to piss off a lot of fans. They are pissed off because it’s over,” or because it ended differently than “whatever they had built up in their minds.”

Peter David interjected that he “thought the ultimate theme of the books” was the futility of “obsession, and how it turns back on itself.”

After Quesada made another of his respectful references to “Mr. King,” King threatened, “If you keep calling me Mr. King, I’m going to kick your ass.” Peter David suggested “your lordship” as an alternative mode of address. (I see that the New York Comic-Con program book’s biography of King, on page 10, refers to him as “Stephen Edwin King.” Edwin? What kind of novels would you expect from a writer who called himself “Edwin King”? Now there’s an alternate reality to contemplate.)

Another audience member asked if King had planned certain events in The Dark Tower saga in advance, but King said no, explaining that “The story tells itself in a sense, and it’s your job to stand back and let it be what it is.” King compared it to a “hunk of granite,” saying you “know there’s a guy” in there. (Although King did not credit him, this is a paraphrase of a famous statement by Michelangelo about sculpting. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo)

The other panelists were asked what it was like to sit on a convention panel with Stephen King. “His lordship?” asked Quesada, who replied that years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con he was asked “what’s the Holy Grail in comics?” Quesada told us he replied, “To work with Stephen King.”

Then King was asked if he was interested in working on any Marvel characters. “I never say never to anything,” King replied. He observed that he had written his novel Firestarter about a character, Charlie McGee, who could mentally set fires. “I’ve done the Torch, what’s the point?”

Asked about what comics he had read in the past, KIng named Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, and Garth Ennis’s Preacher, as well as Spider-Man.

King then addressed why he had so long refused to permit adaptations of his Dark Tower series of novels. “This is my life’s work,” he explained, stating that he had started it when he was twenty and finished it in his fifties. “So it’s very important to me,” and until recently, he had “said no to everybody” who asked to turn it into a movie.

“But when the chance came to do The Dark Tower as a comic book, I thought this was the best of all possible worlds. This [the characters?] will look the way they’re supposed to look. And when they brought in Jae Lee and Peter David, I just thought, “˜This is as good as it gets.’ If you guys have ever seen some of the movies that have been made from Marvel comic books. . .a lot of times the books are better than the movies.”

Now there may be a Dark Tower movie as well, made by J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindehof, co-creators of the television series Lost. “I trust these guys,” King told us. “And they said, “˜How much do you want for an option?’ And I said, “˜nineteen dollars.’ And that’s what they paid me and that’s where it is.” (The significance of the number nineteen here is as mysterious to me as that of those cursed numbers on Lost.)

Towards the end King was asked if when he was writing a character, he ever imagined he ever imagined the character looked like a specific actor. “I never see them,” he replied, suggesting they were “behind my eyes. Maybe if they looked in a mirror I would see them.” Here King seemed to be moving toward the notion that all of his characters are actually parts of himself.

And, oh yes, King said that just before the panel, he and the panelists had been discussing possibly doing a Marvel adaptation of The Stand!

SATURDAY FEB. 24, 2 PM

Weeks before the New York Comic-Con, I had been asked to moderate a panel titled “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The Classic Age of Comics,” which had a stellar lineup of giants of the Golden and Silver Ages, including Murphy Anderson (Hawkman, The Spectre), Arnold Drake (Deadman, Doom Patrol), Irwin Hasen (Wildcat, Green Lantern), Carmine Infantino (The Flash, Adam Strange, Batman), and Jerry Robinson (Batman). I eagerly accepted, but then, a week before the Con, noticed that its online schedule didn’t list me as moderator, or Anderson, Infantino and Robinson as panelists. I contacted the con organizers, and was told that they had lost my contact information, and had reassigned the role of moderator. (This is especially too bad because I missed my opportunity to interview Arnold Drake, who died shortly after the convention.)

However, on Friday I was asked to moderate a Saturday afternoon panel called “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 80s Superhero Renaissance” featuring Brian Bolland (Batman: The Killing Joke), Bill Sienkiewicz (Moon Knight, The New Mutants, Elektra: Assassin), Walter Simonson (Thor), and Rick Veitch (The One). After rearranging my Saturday schedule, I again eagerly accepted.

And so, on Saturday at 2 PM, I took my position behind the lectern in Room 1E14, before a large audience, and waited for the panelists to show up.

After a few minutes I informed the audience that I was simply holding the start of the panel until the artists arrived.

Several more minutes passed. I told the admirably patient audience that I had had experiences at the Big Apple Con when I was supposed to interview a guest who never turned up for the panel, but this was the first time that I had four–count “˜em, four–absentees!

I introduced myself to the audience, giving many of my credits, and was quite surprised when they applauded my mention of co-authoring DK Publishing’s recent Marvel Encyclopedia. At 2:10 PM I asked for, and got, a volunteer to go up to Artists’ Aerie and find the missing artists. Then, having conducted that year-long series of lectures, “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, I improvised a lecture about superhero comics in the 1980s on the spot. I also answered questions from the audience. One person wanted to know what I thought of Marvel’s Civil War, I denounced it, enumerating many of its faults, and a good portion of the audience applauded its approval, again to my surprise.

I succeeded in holding the audience’s attention until, finally, at 2:30 PM, my volunteer arrived with Walter Simonson, who explained that no one had told him that he was supposed to be doing a panel. I subsequently learned that this was not an unusual happenstance at this year’s New York Comic-Con, and, in fact, some panels had to be canceled because the panelists didn’t show up. Keep in mind that it’s not just that these comics pros weren’t told that they were scheduled to do panels; presumably, this means the Con organizers hadn’t even asked them if they would do these panels!

Walter Simonson is a brilliantly entertaining raconteur. I asked him only two questions, and he filled the remaining half hour by himself; all I had to do was sit back and enjoy. Without his realizing it, much of what Walter said confirmed what I had been telling the audience about the comics of the 1980s during the first half hour! In the 1980s Walter, Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller, and James Sherman worked together in a Manhattan studio under the name “the Upstarts.” Walter concluded his talk with a dynamite anecdote about how one day he went to a videogame arcade near the studio, racked up an extraordinarily high score, and turned around to see the other people in the arcade looking at him in awe. And that, I told the audience, concluding the panel, is an example of a real life superhero of the 1980s. Thanks again for coming to my rescue at the Con, Walter!

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 3 PM

Then I headed next door to Room 1E12/13 for “Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT Movie Spotlight.” Last summer at the San Diego Con I had to miss the panel previewing the forthcoming Spirit movie because I was doing signings at the same time. This time I wasn’t about to miss it.

It turned out to be an occasion for nostalgia. The moderator of the panel was Michael Uslan, one of the executive producers of the live action Batman movies, who was also one of the producers of the projected Spirit film. I recall that decades ago I saw Uslan speak at a comics convention in New York City, talking about his intent to make a Batman feature film. This movie, Uslan assured the audience, would treat the character seriously, and he cited as inspirations the Batman comics stories by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, and the six-parter in Detective Comics by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers (see “Comics in Context” #84). Many years later, there was Uslan’s name in the credits of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, an enduring classic that did so much to wipe the stigma of “camp” off Batman in the public imagination.

When I heard Uslan speak at that long-ago New York convention, I hoped that his dream of doing a serious Batman movie would come true, but I doubt that I felt certain that it would happen. In the case of The Spirit movie, I am confident that it will indeed come to pass.

After all, just look at the huge grosses piled up by Warner Brothers’ movie adaptation of the graphic novel 300 in its opening weekend: seventy million dollars, twice what the film industry had expected. In its March 12, 2007 article on 300‘s success (“Surprise! Spartans Assault Box Office”), The New York Times showed that, despite its major recent advances in appreciating comics, it still doesn’t entirely Get It. Reporter Michael Cieply wrote, “The movie defied the odds in that it had no star bigger than the Scottish actor Gerard Butler (The Phantom of the Opera), Mr. [Dan] Fellman [Warners’ president of theatrical distribution] said, it was made by the relatively untested director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead), and it carried the added handicap of an R rating.”

The real “star” of 300 is Frank Miller, the writer and artist of the 300 graphic novel, whose popularity with moviegoers was “tested” and proved by the success of the Sin City movie, which was, like the 300 film, based in story and in visual design on his work in comics (see “Comics in Context” #78, 79, 83). And Miller is the director and writer of this Spirit movie in the works, about which I will say much more next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Prodded by yours truly, former Marvel comics writer Peter B. Gillis, who used to work on Captain America, has posted his reflections on the character’s apparent demise on his blog, under the title “The Assassination of Captain America as an Extreme Downhill Skateboard Race“. In the course of the piece you’ll see his brilliant analysis of the essence of Captain America as a character, which makes him different from other major superheroes. You’ll see some further observations by myself about Cap in the “Comments” section, as well, and I will have more to say on the subject in future installments of this column.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

So I woke up on Wednesday, March 7, and I saw that in addition to Tuesday’s Arctic temperatures, so low that weathermen warned that if you expose any bare flesh outside, you risked getting frostbite, that the sidewalks were buried in snow, and it was still falling. I again thought how lucky the New York Comic-Con organizers were that this didn’t happen during the weekend of the con. I wondered if I’d have trouble getting to a concert in Manhattan that night. Well, I thought, probably nothing worse would happen today.

And then I turned on my computer and learned that Captain America was dead.

The New York Daily News had just broken the story that morning, and not even The Beat or The Comics Reporter had it yet, but there are already pages of outraged posts at the John Byrne Forum, and it had been reported by CNN, among many other mainstream media outlets. Cap was apparently assassinated by a sniper in Captain America #25, which went on sale that very day (March 7).

Now I realize that this could be some elaborate fake-out. The mainstream media, unaware of how death in the superhero genre usually resembles a revolving door, fell hard for DC’s “Death of Superman” over a decade ago, and, of course, DC was not about to keep this iconic character dead.

Just as DC came up with four substitute Supermen to hold the fort until the real Superman returned, there will doubtless be one or more “new” Captain Americas. As Ron Hogan points out over at Galley Cat, this isn’t the first time Marvel has done that, and I can supply the details. Stan Lee (who wrote Cap longer than anyone else has) did it briefly in Tales of Suspense #96 in the 1960s; Steve Englehart had a kid named Roscoe take over as Captain America in the 1970s, and Mark Gruenwald had the “Super-Patriot” (now known as the U. S. Agent) become the new Cap in the 1980s. We’re overdue for another “new Cap” storyline. The difference is that each time in the past, Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, retired voluntarily from his costumed role before inevitably reassuming it later in the storyline.

Significantly, according to the Daily News, “Joe Quesada, 43, Marvel Entertainment’s editor in chief, said he wouldn’t rule out the shield-throwing champion’s eventual return.” In The New York Times (March 8, 2007) George Gene Gustines quotes Marvel publisher Dan Buckley saying about Cap, “He’s very dead right now.” Gustines also quotes some fans who don’t believe that the Captain is dead and terms their reactions “cynical,” but considering these statements from Marvel execs, isn’t their cynicism justified?

It turns out that in another comic currently on sale, Civil War: The Initiative #1, Ms. Marvel claims that Captain America is still alive. An official Marvel statement suggests that she may be mistaken or lying. Or is this an editorial mistake that lets the proverbial cat out of the bag?

On the other hand, ever since the demise of the Silver Age Flash in Crisis on Infinite Earths, readers have been all too aware that the Big Two superhero companies are perfectly willing to kill off superheroes for real and put some new character in as a permanent replacement. (Now it seems that the Silver Age Flash may finally return, but it took over twenty years!)

All of the previous “substitute Cap” stories have had the theme that Steve Rogers is irreplaceable as the true Captain America. My guess is that Marvel will indeed bring Rogers back as Cap. But I hope this isn’t just wishful thinking on my part. Gustines quotes another fan as saying “I’m fairly sure killing Cap with a movie in development (plus a possible Avengers flick on the way as well) would not be very sensible. So, I shall wait and see,” and praises him as “media-savvy.” And do we know for a fact that the Captain America in these movies is the original version from the 1940s?

The aforementioned Marvel official statement declares that “Captain America will continue to be published despite the very real death of Steve Rogers,” and concludes, “So, yes, Captain America, Steve Rogers, is dead.” Considering the miracles that are possible in the superhero genre, Rogers could still be truly “dead” and come back to life. But here Marvel seems to be hinting that they will create a new Captain America, one that they consider more relevant to the 21st century. It’s possible that Marvel might someday resurrect Rogers but not allow him to take back the role of Captain America from this newcomer.

The end of Civil War, in which Captain America decides he is wrong for fighting for the freedom of his fellow superheroes, and an already infamous Civil War: Frontline sequence in which a woman self-righteously denounces the Captain for knowing nothing about America since he doesn’t waste time on YouTube (Say what? I would think Cap keeps himself rather busy continually saving the lives of this woman and other Americans over the course of his career. This woman’s attitude smacks of ageism. This suggests that 21st century Marvel regards the original Captain as a dated character. “”˜He hasn’t been living in the modern world and the world does move,” says Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada.” in the CNN report.

And here I think of Captain America as representing American ideals, which have endured for over two hundred years, just as I believe Lee, Englehart, and Gruenwald did. Just reading the better Captain America stories from the last four decades, such as theirs, demonstrates how the character consistently adapts to changing times. I’d feel better if CNN and the Daily News had quoted Marvel representatives as extolling the greatness of the original Captain America rather than seeing Marvel, in and out of the stories, badmouthing the character as irrelevant to 21st century America.

If Marvel was intent on killing off Captain America, why couldn’t the company have given him a heroic demise, like the one that Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr. gave Captain George Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #90 (1970) or the one that Chris Claremont and John Byrne gave Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #137 (1980). Even Mar-Vell’s demise from cancer in Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel (1982) showed more courage and dignity than the ignominious killing of Captain America, arrested and handcuffed as a criminal for his role in Civil War.

Here are some quotations from the Daily News and CNN reports that struck me as telling.

“”˜What happens with the costume? And what happens to the characters that are friends and enemies of Cap?’ Quesada said with a smile. “˜You’re going to have to read the books to find out.’” (CNN)

“”˜I was shocked. I was not expecting it,’ said Gerry Gladston, co-owner of Midtown Comics in Manhattan. “˜I’d rather they didn’t kill him–but it’s going to mean great sales.’” (Daily News)

And here’s the sad one, from the Daily News: “”˜It’s a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now,’ said co-creator Joe Simon, 93, after being informed of his brainchild’s death.” If this is all a fake-out to boost sales, I hope that somebody told Mr. Simon that’s all it is.

I will have much more to say about Civil War, though not until after finishing my coverage of this year’s New York Comic-Con, and probably my review of the 300 movie. And yes, I will buy and read Captain America #25 (if I still can find a copy at cover price), so Marvel’s sales stunt has worked. But I’m doing it out of a sense of duty as a comics historian. I feel no pleasure at the prospect of seeing Marvel kill off the embodiment of the American spirit, even if his demise proves to be only temporary. Marvel quickly undid the gouging out of Spider-Man’s eye (see “Comics in Context” #113), but that didn’t alter my distaste for that storyline. And if the rumor I heard during the New York Comic-Con proves to be true, even greater horrors await in the Marvel Universe.

It was only a year ago that New York Comic-Con audience, including myself, was happily photographing Joe Simon posing with an attendee dressed as Captain America (see “Comics in Context” #125). What questions might have been raised at panels at this year’s New York Comic-Con had we known what would happen to Captain America less than two weeks later?

For that matter, how has the spirit of Marvel, and of the superhero genre, changed since their Silver Age forty-some years ago? This year’s New York Comic-Con offered attendees the chance to judge for themselves by listening to the man who launched what he called the Marvel Age of Comics. And keep in mind, I record quotations to the best of my ability; I don’t make any of them up.

FRIDAY FEB. 23, 6:30 PM

The panel in the Javits Center’s Special Events Hall was titled “Stan Lee: An American Icon,” and indeed he is. Roy Thomas, Stan’s protégé in the 1960s who succeeded him as editor in chief, was supposed to interview him onstage, but had to cancel his trip to New York at the last minute.

Roy’s replacement introduced himself to the audience: “I’m Joe Quesada of Marvel Comics, and let me say, I’m lucky to have a job.”

Quesada reminisced about how when he was a boy, he didn’t read comics but his father learned about Stan Lee’s groundbreaking anti-drug storyline in Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 (1971). Quesada’s father encouraged him to read these issues and, Quesada told us, “I really got hooked.” Quesada continued, “What my father didn’t realize was that he was starting a whole other addiction,” that he said ultimately cost more than cocaine.

In keeping with the “icon” theme, Quesada placed the Marvel Age’s founding father among some heavy company. “He is Elvis, he is the Beatles, he’s Bill Clinton,” declared Quesada, introducing Stan Lee to the vast audience.

But Stan was not there. To fill time, Quesada started reminiscing about being on stage with Lee and Kevin Smith a while back, and then Stan came down the aisle, waving to the crowd. Everyone stood and applauded, even the little kids seated in front of me, and there was loud cheering. “I wasn’t late!” Stan explained; “I was waiting for them to call me!”

Much as he clearly loves public adulation, perhaps there’s a part of Stan Lee that feels it’s a wee bit excessive. “You mean,” he asked Quesada, “I’ve come over here to answer questions for these people, who know more about us than we do?” Stan turned to the audience, and asked good-naturedly, “Don’t you guys have anything better to do?”

One thing that a lot of these guys were doing was massing in front of the stage, several rows deep, to take flash photographs of Stan the Man. THis is something that the convention organizers should have anticipated, but didn’t. Lee may indeed have been concerned, but he characteristically masked it with humor. “They’ve left us alone!” No security!” with “all these hostile people!” he exclaimed in mock panic. “I’m scared!” The audience laughed, as he surely intended.

“Do you feel the love in the room?” Quesada asked him.

Finally the cavalry arrived, and Stan was relieved. “Oh, security,” he observed, and then warned the audience, “You better watch out. We got a guy in a red shirt here!”

Quesada asked him about his long career at Marvel. “Before I came up with the Fantastic Four,” Lee replied, “the comic book industry was a cultural wasteland.” That’s really not much of an exaggeration, but Lee nonetheless apologized for his characteristic hyperbole. “You have to forgive me. It’s been a tough day. I refuse to be serious.”

Then Lee continued his familiar story of what seems to have been a creative midlife crisis, and the turning point both in his career and the history of comics. Lee said that “The great thing about it”–comics–“was working with the greatest artists and writers.” But, referring to Martin Goodman without naming him, Lee explained that “Unfortunately our publisher thought comics were read by little kids or illiterate adults.” Lee claimed his unnamed publisher even decreed that he could not use words of more than three syllables. Dissatisfied with these restrictions, “Finally I was ready to quit.” Then he added, self-deprecatingly, “I make slow decisions. I was 40 years old when I said that.” (Actually, he was 39, which is close enough.) But “Then I did The Fantastic Four and everything changed.” Lee told us that he even used words of more than three syllables in the comics!

“I think at that point the books said Atlas Publications,” Stan recalled. Actually, Goodman’s line of comics had dropped the title “Atlas,” and if you look at the cover of Fantastic Four #1 or The Incredible Hulk #1, you’ll see no company name listed. But Stan’s real point was that he thought the company needed a catchier, more memorable title, “so I came up with Marvel.” (Though he didn’t mention it, this appropriately came from the title of the company’s first superhero comic, Marvel Comics #1, published in 1939.) This name, Stan pointed out, lent itself to slogans like “Make Mine Marvel!” and “the Marvel Age of Comics.” “You see how corny I am,” he confided to the crowd.

Even though Lee has done work for DC in recent years, it is clear that feelings linger from the old days, when Marvel’s rival so thoroughly dominated the comics market. Stan told the audience that back in the 1960s DC “called itself National Comics.” Observing Marvel’s success since it took on its new name, Lee continued, National “decided to change their name,” too. So, he said, they “hired a professional name change company,” which “labored for weeks” to come up with just the right new name. And, after all this herculean labor, Stan told us, “they came up with DC.” And Stan was and remains unimpressed. “Make Mine DC!? My God!”

Quesada told Lee that “One thing that got me hooked” on Marvel Comics, “besides the great stories was the sense of community,” and Quesada talked about what he called “this magnificent world of artists and writer” that Stan dubbed the Marvel Bullpen. Ah, yes, the sense of community at Marvel. I remember that from my time there in the 1980s and early 1990s, before most of my friends and I all got bounced.

Lee then praised Quesada and “every idea this guy comes up with,” especially Civil War to tumultuous applause. Quesada demurred, saying that Civil War wasn’t his idea. Lee retorted that “The great thing about being editor in chief us you can take credit for everything! I’ve been doing it for years!”

Then, more seriously, Lee said, “I get so much credit,” but that “a lot of it should go to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, John Buscema,” and he added other names from Marvel’s Silver Age as the audience applauded.

Then Lee explained that “You can draw a script in a hundred different ways,” but success in visual storytelling “depends on where you put a closeup, where you put a long shot.” Stan continued, “A guy like Kirby could not draw a dull panel.” Lee said that his artists were “like the finest directors” in movies. “If it wasn’t for these talented artists, I wouldn’t be sitting here getting these nice things said [to me] by Joe Quesada.”

Quesada ventured, “There has to be a ringmaster.”

Knowing a straight line when he heard one, Lee replied, “Of course, it’s all due to me,” and the audience burst into laughter.

The crowd got it. When Stan Lee appears in public, there are actually two Stans on view. One is his over-the-top public persona, and the audience recognized he was doing it ironically, as a self-created comedy character, mocking his own ego, and they loved it. Then, every so often, Stan lets the mask slip, and you see a more serious, generous Stan Lee, as when he graciously praised his many collaborators. And the audience loved this Stan, as well.

As I wrote last week, I missed seeing Stephen Colbert at the con earlier that day. Colbert has created for himself a brilliantly funny public persona, trusting his audience to understand and appreciate his masterful use of irony. And Stan Lee has done much the same thing, and like Colbert, devised a comic persona that has won him a loyal and enthusiastic following.

Quesada asked Lee to explain how he went about collaboration.

“When I first thought of Spider-Man,” Lee began, ” I wanted Jack Kirby to do it.” Stan said he told Kirby, “I wanted a teenager with the power of a spider who can climb up walls. And I said, “˜But, Jack, don’t make him look like Captain America. You know how you like to draw these heroic guys with big muscles. I want him to be just this little, wimpy kid, just like anybody.’” So Kirby drew the character, “and it looked like a young Captain America,” Stan told us. “I thought Steve Ditko had the kind of style that might be better.” So it was Ditko who drew the kind of Spider-Man that Lee was looking for. “That’s how important the art style is.”

With regard to working with Ditko, Stan told us, “With Spider-Man I did the first plot by myself, [and] probably the second plot. Then Steve Ditko made suggestions,” Lee continued. “Probably by the twentieth issue he was doing the plotting.”

This Lee was explaining how the “Marvel method” of creating stories worked, and how he could give a story his personal style even if someone else had plotted it. “When I wrote the copy,” he said, meaning the dialogue and captions, “I could give it the style.” Indeed, Lee revealed that he enjoyed having the artists do plotting: “It made it more fun for me,” he said, because “the pages would be a surprise.” Then “I would change it,” meaning the story, “in the writing.”

In “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the show I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, we have a good example of this. We have a page from Fantastic Four Annual #3, in which, according to the notes he made in the border, Kirby intended that Doctor Doom was raging because the Thing had crushed his hands in a previous story. In his dialogue Lee altered Doom’s motivation, having him instead seethe with fury over his previous defeats by Reed Richards. This more clearly motivates Doom’s attempt in the annual to wreck Richards’ wedding to Susan Storm.

Turning to his work with Kirby, Lee asserted that “I came up with Galactus,” but when Kirby sent him the pages for Fantastic Four #48, “All of a sudden I see a naked nut on a surfboard, and I said “What’s that?’” This was, of course, the character we now know as the Silver Surfer. “Jack said, “˜Well, I figure anybody as powerful as Galactus… he ought to have a herald who goes ahead of him….’” Stan added, “And to Jack it was just a throwaway character.””

Lee perceived, “There was a certain nobility to” the Surfer. “Jack drew him in such a way that he looked like the goodest [sic] person who ever lived, and I tried to write him that way.” Lee confessed, “I sort of fell in love with the character.” Lee said he then had the Surfer appear in further issues, and came to think of him as his character. “I sort of feel the Silver Surfer is mine because Jack just tossed it away.”

Lee declared he was engaged in a “real collaborative process” with such artists and that “I didn’t know what they were going to bring me.” He added, “Because I was doing all the writing, I could keep the style consistent.”

Lee then explained that “you want to write a story in such a way that you’re talking to the reader.” Working on “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” I realized just how important Stan’s narration is. Nowadays, narration and captions have fallen out of favor in superhero comic books, except when a character is narrating his own adventure. But Stan used captions, not in the guise of an anonymous, omniscient narrator, but as the voice of the storyteller, who spoke in Stan’s distinctive manner, reaching out to the readers, creating a bond of community with them.

Returning to the subject of working with Ditko, Stan revealed, “I think Steve made up the idea of Spider-Man shooting webs.” Lee maintained, “I wanted him crawling walls, [and] super-strong. I came up with the web-shooters idea.”

It turns out that Ditko claimed in a 1965 interview that he himself came up with the “web gimmick on wrist.” But in a 1988 interview an artist named Eric Stanton, who shared a studio with Ditko in the 1960s, claimed, “I think I added the business about the webs coming out of his hands“.

Who’s right? In 1962, when Lee and Ditko created Spider-Man, neither of them imagined how successful the character would become. So how likely was either one to remember precisely who came up with what? And now, forty-five years later, memories may have blurred even further. What impresses me is that Stan gave Ditko credit for the idea of Spider-Man shooting webs; who came up with the idea of the actual web-shooter devices seems less important (and, after all, both the Spider-Man movies and comics have now disposed of them as nonessential).

Taken with Lee’s description of how his collaborations worked, Quesada observed, it’s “like [the] jazz composition idea.” “Yeah,” Stan enthusiastically agreed, “like riffs.”

Next Quesada asked who was responsible for the “soap opera quality” and “cliffhangers” in Marvel stories.

Stan replied quietly, “It was me.” Then he explained, with undisguised practicality, “It’s a lot easier to take one plot and keep it going for a lot of issues.” Moreover, “and in those days I was writing all the stories! So it made it easier for me.” Then, in a confidential manner, Stan advised the audience, “I’m going to give you a real philosophical theory you can keep with you the rest of your life. You will find that some of the most creative decisions in life are made because of laziness and selfishness.” The audience laughed, and Quesada commented, “That’s good.”

Next Quesada asked if Lee had had any idea that the characters he co-created would become as successful as they have.

“If someone said you’ll be at a convention talking to people with nothing better to do, at in a million years,” replied Stan. “We were hoping the books would sell, so we wouldn’t lose our jobs and could pay the rent. If someone said you’ll be talking at conventions to people with nothing better to do, and that Tobey Maguire and Nic Cage and Robert Downey Jr. would be starring in movies based on what we were doing. . . .we would’ve said, “˜You’re drunk! No way!’”

“Did you think you’d do better than DC?” Quesada inquired.

“Oh, yes!” answered Stan. “I read DC books. There was no way they could compete with us!” And the audience laughed.

More seriously, Lee explained, “I felt they were in the wrong track. For example, in the Batman books most if the stories were detective stories. There was never any personal problem in Batman’s life. . . .We were concentrating on how can Spider-Man get enough money to pay for Aunt May.”

Lee explained that he and his collaborators “would try to get into the personal life of these characters, and I knew that that was better.”

It seems so obvious how Marvel in the 1960s differed from DC, but by Stan’s account, DC just couldn’t figure it out. Lee said, “We hoped they would never discover” what made Marvel comics sell. He told us that he had sources at DC, just as they did at Marvel, so he heard what they were up to.

“They wondered when our books started to outsell theirs,” Lee said. “They decided it was because you [Marvel] use more dialogue on your covers. I said next month, no dialogue on covers.” And of course, he continued, Marvel still outsold them. “They had another meeting,” Lee recounted, at which they decided “Marvel uses more red on their covers,” so when Stan heard this, he decreed that Marvel wouldn’t use red on the next month’s covers, and Marvel still sold better. This “went on and on,” Stan stated, “and I liked it that way!”

But what would Stan Lee have liked to do if he hadn’t been a success in comics?

Considering Stan’s skill as a public performer, it should not come as a surprise that, as he told us, “When I was young I wanted to be an actor.” In fact, as a teenager during the Great Depression. Lee was a member of the Federal Theatre Project, sponsored by the government’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). “I was on the stage. Orson Welles was a member, too. But he was in another locale.” However, Lee told us, “It didn’t pay anything. Comics paid more.” Stan concluded, “I should’ve stayed in it. I could’ve been Brad Pitt!”

Of course now Stan found himself a stage performing for an audience. He told us, “You don’t know what a good feeling this is. You’re a captive audience. I can say anything! My wife won’t even listen to me.”

Here’s something else that isn’t as surprising as it may first seem: Stan Lee also wanted to work in advertising. “I treated all of Marvel Comics like a big ad campaign,” he told the audience, and mentioned how he came up with “catchphrases” for Marvel like “‘Nuff said!” and “Excelsior!”

But, Stan claimed, if he hadn’t been in comics, “I would’ve starved.” He “wanted to write the Great American Novel,” he wanted to be an actor, and he wanted to be in advertising, but he conceded that each of these “wouldn’t have worked.”

Returning to the subject of comics, Stan spoke about his relationship with Marvel readers at a time when the world did not take comic books seriously: “We had an inside joke that no one else understood.”

So it seemed appropriate that Lee and Quesada started serenading the audience with the theme song for Marvel’s 1960s official fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society, whose very name is a joke. The audience, in the palm of Stan’s hand, applauded enthusiastically. Stan wrote the song, and Quesada complimented him, “Those are darn good lyrics.”

But Stan can do more than write jingles. He then told us that he once write a poem, titled “God Woke.” (In fact, there is a copy of the poem on display in “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” and it will be published later this year in the book Stan Lee: Conversations, from the University Press of Mississippi.) “Someone read it,” Stan continued, and “believe it or not, we’re working on a major motion picture based on “˜God Woke.”’

FRIDAY FEB. 23, 8:30 PM

Stan mentioned this at the opening of “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” later that night, and he seems genuinely astonished and delighted about that “God Woke” may become a movie. Here’s something else that years ago he could never have imagined happening.

The opening was a great success and, I’m happy to say, one of the highlights of my life in comics. All of us present excitedly watched as Stan went through the show, frequently surprised and, it seems, genuinely thrilled at the many original art pages and artifacts we had found from his lengthy career. He was excited when I showed him the copy of “God Woke” in our exhibit. We also had a copy of Esquire from the 1960s that had a feature article about Marvel on display on the bottom shelf of a display case. Stan actually lay down on the floor to get a better look, but we need not have worried, because the Man got back on his feet without difficulty.

Several veterans of 20th century Marvel were present, including Danny Fingeroth, Steve Saffel, Jim Salicrup and myself. It was disappointing that present day Marvel chose not to send a representative to the opening. But I felt the museum was alive and suffused with the true spirit of Marvel Comics on this memorable night.

Would that all of us could live to see the kind of success and appreciation that Stan Lee has deservedly received after his long, groundbreaking career. Perhaps the manga invasion of the last several years still would have happened, but I doubt that there would be an American comics industry today if not for the revolution Stan Lee spearheaded in the 1960s. He is Marvel’s true Captain, still going strong, still an inspiration. His familiar personal motto is “Excelsior!”, a Latin word meaning “higher” or “Ever upward!” and that encapsulates the classic Marvel spirit, something we still need today.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Recently Marvel has sent me two handsome new reprint volumes: a new hardcover edition of Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602, for which I wrote an introduction, and the massive and expensive Daredevil Omnibus Vol. 1, a compilation of Frank Miller’s early work with the character, including an interview that I did with Miller and his collaborator Klaus Janson back in 1981. I also wrote the 1980s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries on the Kingpin (definitely: I remember discussing it with Frank before I wrote it) and Elektra (probably: it reads like my work) that are included in the back of the book!

Of course I also hope any of you passing through New York City between now and July will visit “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org)!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson