Fatal Five design drawings, 1966
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More Strange Tales – Read ‘em and Weep
It’s Friday. Friday evenings used to mean poker. Or something vaguely resembling poker. As close as we comic book people could approximate it. Unsophisticated, and yet charmingly buffoonish in its utter lack of skill. Thirty-five years ago, almost every Friday evening, a bunch of us would gather at somebody’s place to play poker. Usually, early […]
More Strange Tales – Stan’s Advice RE: the Name Game
Stan asked me to come to his office one day to help him make a big decision. Okay. It was 1979. Marvel was still at 575 Madison Avenue. We comic book people were on the sixth floor. The non-comics magazine people, the bigshots (except for Stan) and business types were on the ninth. Anybody remember […]
Gerber and the Duck – Part 3
Suits and Lawsuits In early 1981, Steve Gerber sued Marvel Comics over ownership of Howard the Duck. I wasn’t at Marvel when the Duck first came to be. Almost all of what was at issue happened before my time, or during the time that I was associate editor, and not involved in a management capacity. […]
Gerber and the Duck – Part 2
Say the Secret Word The secret word is cacoethes. One of the first Steve Gerber scripts I remember editing was Howard the Duck #3, the “Master of Quack-Fu” issue. This would have been in early 1976 when I was brand-new associate editor. The plot for that issue had been done before I started at Marvel. […]
Gerber and the Duck – Part 1
Running a FowlThe first time I met Steve Gerber we had an argument. It was the summer of 1974. I had flown to New York to meet with Roy Thomas and other people at Marvel, looking for writing work. Roy offered me Man-Wolf, which Dave Kraft was giving up for some reason. After meeting briefly […]
More Strange Tales – President’s Day
Galton the Clock-sucker Marvel moved from 575 Madison Avenue to 387 Park Avenue South in June of 1981 (I think. Anyone know for sure?). The Mad Ave offices weren’t great. They were cramped and dingy and not well-suited to our purposes. And quickly becoming too small. We were growing fast. The new offices were custom […]
Not-So-Secret Wars – Guest Post by JayJay
There was a sniper in the sales department of the Marvel Comics office. We were hunkered down behind desks, chairs, filing cabinets but we were slowly getting picked off one by one. It was dark but a little light filtered in from the fluorescent lights of the editorial department behind us and from the windows […]
Storytelling Rant
JayJay here. In response to several comments about the state of storytelling in the business today, Jim wrote the following: RE: Storytelling by artists. Too many artists these days have no understanding of how to convey information — that is, how to do their part of telling the story. Or they think it’s their job […]
More Strange Tales – San Diego Comic-Con Memories
One of the Worst of Times – Slighting Russ Manning I met Russ Manning at the Con in 1979, I think. I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk to him, just long enough to tell him how much I loved his work, how I relentlessly tracked down every issue of Magnus Robot […]