Over the last several weeks, in preparation for this roundtable, I’ve been rereading the Locas material I have in my library. This is volumes 1 through 11 of the original Complete Love and Rockets trade paperback series. It covers the first dozen or so years of Jaime Hernandez’s career, beginning with the early “Mechanics” efforts and culminating with “Wigwam Bam.” For those familiar with the current publishing plan for the work, these are the stories in Maggie the Mechanic, The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., and nearly the first half of Perla la Loca. Because of the recent attention given to the stories “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers,” I’ve sat down with them as well. Here are some thoughts and observations.

I’m still in awe of Hernandez’s draftsmanship, design sense, and all-but-unsurpassed skills as a visual dramatist. And I again found myself impatient with the bulk of his stories, which are invariably slight and undeveloped. Most never get beyond the level of sketches, and the longer they are, the more meandering they tend to be. (“The Death of Speedy Ortiz” and “Wigwam Bam,” the most ambitious of the extended pieces, are inchoate sprawls.) In general, Hernandez doesn’t tell stories so much as play voyeur on his characters. His work often feels like the comics equivalent of a reality TV show, albeit one shot by a world-class cinematographer.

But this is perhaps what gives Maggie, Hopey, and the others the quality that makes his fans see the characters as real as people in their own lives. (The elegant visuals also provide a basis for aesthetic appreciation that isn’t available for viewers of The Real World or Jon & Kate + 8.) In most narratives, characters are in service to the larger effect of the story, which leads to aspects of their personalities being heightened for the story’s purpose. Since Hernandez’s narratives aren’t generally conceived in terms of overall effect, the heightening is absent, and the result for some is that the characters become a source of relaxation in the manner of hanging out with one’s friends. For my part, I can’t enjoy characters and narratives in this way. I tend to see characters in stories as a means to an end, not the end in themselves.

I don’t think all of Hernandez’s stories are negligible. There are times when he demonstrates the narrative chops of a good prose-fiction writer, particularly with the short character studies he produced between “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” and “Wig Wam Bam.” The smartly constructed “Tear It Up, Terry Downe” makes deft, varied use of irony and reversal, and it has a good sense of humor besides. “Spring 1982” is beyond smart; it’s fairly masterful. Here, irony and reversals are used at least as effectively for dramatic purposes as they were for comic ones in “Terry Downe.” Hernandez takes the reader inside the Doyle Blackburn character, his propensity for violence, and his accompanying feelings of self-disgust. One sees the character’s violence from all sides: how it allows him to make his way in the world, how it defines and disrupts his relationships, and how it stands in the way of his finding any lasting fulfillment. The running-water motif is brilliantly used to organize and pace the narrative. This piece and “Terry Downe” can easily hold their own with most contemporary fiction.

“Flies on the Ceiling” is generally cited as the most accomplished of the stories from this period. At its best, one certainly agrees. It’s about the efforts of the Isabel Reubens character to flee her sense of guilt, and how this has resulted in that guilt defining her. With this story, Hernandez has moments of artistry more dazzling than he has ever shown elsewhere. Montage is used in a brilliant variety of ways: to condense the passage of time, to dramatize multiple perspectives, and to render the central character’s internal conflicts. Dream sequences are stunningly used to escalate the narrative tension. The command of pace and rhythm at times is nothing short of astonishing: in particular, the shifts between condensed-time single-moment montages to standard multi-panel scenes feel as natural as can be.

However, it’s maddening when Hernandez undermines this largely tour de force effort midway through. The two-page dialogue between Isabel and the devil (who personifies the guilt she can’t escape) is exasperating. The sources of her guilt are made thuddingly, redundantly explicit. Worse, the scene degenerates into a comic taunting match, which disrupts the carefully wrought tone that comes before and afterward. The rest of the story moves up and down the scale of portent, and this scene completely throws one out of that. Hernandez regains his footing once he moves on, but the wrongheadedness still leaves one wanting to punch the wall.

I’m also put off by Hernandez’s insistence on building effects out of one’s knowledge of Isabel from other stories. A minor example is the gang-member tattoo she sports on her shoulder. The tattoo is an ideal trope for being unable to escape the past, and Hernandez certainly calls attention to it. But he doesn’t make any other reference to her gang experiences. If one doesn’t know or recall the earlier material, it comes across as an ostensibly relevant but conspicuously undeveloped detail—in short, a lapse. The story’s ending is similarly problematic, although on a much greater scale. The devil tells Isabel, “I may turn up as flies on your ceiling.” Now for those who have read “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” and recognize the reference to Isabel’s dissociative episodes, this means quite a bit. The guilt that has haunted her is going to return in bouts of madness. The phrase “flies on your ceiling” is a fairly chilling trope. But if one hasn’t read the earlier story or doesn’t remember it, how is one supposed to take this? In light of the devil’s immediately preceding statements to Isabel, especially “You’re not afraid anymore,” one is apt to think the devil, having lost his hold on her, is exiting in a moment of empty bravado. It comes across as a hollow taunt. That’s exactly the opposite of what’s intended! Hernandez tries to build the ending out of an Easter egg for his long-term readership, and he ends up with the yolk all over his face.

Hernandez’s Easter-egg storytelling tactics were present even before “Flies on the Ceiling.” If the more recent stories “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers” are any indication, they have become an increasingly integral aspect of his material. Hernandez’s admirers don’t see this as solipsistic or undisciplined, though. Rather, it’s indicative of how the Locas stories are “a wonderfully cohesive and organic work.” One can expect the comparisons to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy to follow. But unlike Hernandez, Proust and Updike didn’t take reckless chances on confusing the reader. The narrative plan of Proust’s work is in place from the start, and Updike took care to design the individual Rabbit books as reasonably autonomous units. Proust’s framing scene and his “Swann in Love” novella notwithstanding, the two authors also develop their narratives chronologically. Hernandez, by contrast, just seems to be making it up as he goes. The stories superficially appear to be autonomous pieces, but they’re not. They also jump back and forth across the timeline of Hernandez’s narrative world, but they require that one read them in the order they were created to be properly understood. “Flies on the Ceiling,” for example, takes place before the Maggie-and-Hopey narrative that grounds the series, but one has to read “The Death of Speedy Ortiz,” which was created first but takes place much later, for it to have its full intended effect.

Getting back to Proust and Updike, one also notes that their narratives were strongly realized from the very first page. The dozens of pages prior to “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (generally seen as the beginning of Hernandez’s more ambitious work) are thinly conceived banality, and a good deal of what follows isn’t much of a step up. However, one still has to wade through it all to fully grasp the more accomplished pieces. The Locas stories have their moments, but overall, they’re an erratic, haphazardly conceived mess.

Hernandez doesn’t really remind one of Proust or Updike; the most analogous figure is a contemporary, Cerebus creator Dave Sim. The two cartoonists—both technical virtuosos—came along when open-ended serials were the norm for comics, but they weren’t very far into their careers before literary fiction began to assert itself as a new model. Caught in a transitional period (one they admittedly helped bring about), they tried to create work that combined the values of both approaches.

Hernandez’s Easter-egg aesthetic is a conspicuous reflection of this; it’s the transplanting of highbrow literary effects into a serial-fiction structure. The applause this has earned from certain circles of comics fandom isn’t surprising; as anyone who’s been around a Trekkie knows, fannish types place particular value on details and resonances that casual audiences either miss or don’t understand. It’s sad that Hernandez, with all his talent, undercuts his work by catering to this proclivity at a larger readership’s expense.

That said, I do think Hernandez’s work is somewhat better than Sim’s. It’s far less of a thematic free-for-all, and unlike Sim, Hernandez smartly ditched the pulp and children’s-entertainment aspects of his material before they became incongruous with his ambitions. But he and Sim both ended up with very similar things: artistic projects that are unwieldy leviathans, intermittently brilliant, but ultimately accessible to only a devoted cult audience. One wishes it were otherwise, but Hernandez’s material is what it is, and one can only accept or reject it. In my case, it’s the latter.
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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

Cover illustration for The East Village Other (1968)

The work of Robert Crumb has its challenges for critics and scholars. He’s been both a restless and prolific artist, and a fairly consistent one in terms of quality. He has rarely committed himself to large projects; his work is mostly short pieces. It’s also unusual for any of those efforts to stand out from one another. Conceptually, he works from impulse, which leads to him maintaining a largely even keel in terms of the strength of his ideas. (It’s all equally strong or equally shallow, depending on one’s general view.) Crumb maintains an even keel in terms of execution as well: the drawing is invariably first-rate, and he never strays outside a certain range with his approach to emphasis and pacing. However, for all that, there’s a fair amount of diversity to his material; one can’t say that if one has read one Crumb strip, one has read them all. Even pieces in the same thematic vein have enough differences to defy efforts to treat one as representative of the whole. A responsibility of critics and scholars, it seems to me, is to distill an artist’s oeuvre down to something more manageable for a prospective audience. Walt Whitman, for instance, published nearly 400 poems in his career compendium Leaves of Grass, but knowledgeable critics can generally limit the number of particularly worthwhile ones down to at most a dozen consensus choices. With Crumb, though, next to no one can agree on which strips to single out, and it’s rare for one to be especially committed to the efforts one picks over others. Designating what constitutes Crumb’s most representative work can create a quandary for anyone who tries.

As such, I certainly understand the inclination to say, as Jeet Heer does, that “the whole of Crumb should be seen as a single project.” If the choices are that difficult to make, then why make them? Isn’t it best to just say there are no short cuts to understanding Crumb’s work? If one wants to engage with his material, one must engage with all of it.

I understand, but I can’t agree. I think it’s an abrogation of critical responsibility. Besides giving new readers a starting point (and highlighting for others what they may have missed), a critic has an obligation to explain what an artist’s work is about and the contribution it makes. This demands highlighting specific efforts (as well as their most accomplished aspects) to make those arguments. Claiming that it’s all one project–and, implicitly, of equal significance—allows the critic to sidestep this duty. If one doesn’t make choices and argue for them, I’m not sure one can be said to be engaging with Crumb’s work very deeply at all. Breaking down his career into more manageable pieces is necessary.

When editing the results of the Best Comics Poll last year, I hit upon the idea of categorizing Crumb’s work by period. This is the strategy art historians use when dealing with figures such as Picasso, and I think it’s also applicable to Crumb. When it comes to getting a handle on Crumb’s career, this probably offers the best way to go about it. One can characterize the material in terms of the various periods—I believe the groupings are easier to agree on than the relative merit of individual pieces—and then highlight the efforts one feels best reflects Crumb’s work at the time in question. With the poll, I designated two of Crumb’s periods as the Counterculture Era and the Weirdo Era. I’d like to expand on that with a list of six distinct periods covering his entire career: Tyro, Early Counterculture, Later Counterculture, Post-Counterculture, Weirdo, and Illustration. The categories aren’t perfect; there’s certainly overlap between them, and I’m sure someone can probably find better names for them. But I think they sum up Crumb pretty well. The following are my thoughts on the periods and what one will find in them. I would have liked to have been specific about additional individual efforts, but this essay is intended as more of a starting point than a definitive discussion.

From Crumb’s Harlem series (1965)

The Tyro period begins with Crumb’s amateur strips and fanzines from his adolescence. It includes his career as an aspiring commercial artist, and ends in 1966. For the most part, what one sees here is Crumb developing his craft as a draftsman and cartoonist. The highlights include Crumb’s greeting-card work, the Harlem and Bulgaria illustrations he produced for Help! magazine, and the 1960s adventures of Fritz the Cat. (The Fritz stories weren’t published until 1968 and 1969, but Crumb drew them in 1964 and 1965.) If one has a set of Fantagraphics Books’ The Complete Crumb Comics handy, this is the material in the first three volumes. The highlights all appear in the third book.

The work of the Early Counterculture period is the material that earned Crumb his fame, and I firmly believe it is far and away his most important contribution. These are the comics from 1967 and 1968, and they include the strips in Zap Comix #0 and 1, the Cheap Thrills album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the various contributions to underground newspapers such as Yarrowstalks and The East Village Other. (These strips are featured in The Complete Crumb Comics Volumes 4 and 5, as well as in the Head Comix collection.) With this work, Crumb introduced the thinking of the Beats (and their Surrealist forebears) to comics. The work rejected the sanitized, conformist, and commercialized modes that defined the field. Instead, it embraced an improvisatory spirit, complete freedom of imagination, and a sardonic, gritty view of the surrounding world.

From Zap Comix #1 (1967)

Conceptually, the work also reflected–even anticipated–a major development in the world of fine art. The dominant mode of painting in the 1950s had been abstract expressionism, which had taken existentialist improvisation to its extreme end: content was gone; all that mattered was evoking impulse, feeling, and mood in stroke, line, and color. Pop Art, the movement that followed, was the opposite: it favored dissonance over direct emotion, and it embraced the totems of the commercial culture that abstract expressionists were rejecting through their move away from representationalist thinking. The late 1960s brought a synthesis: the imagery and styles of popular culture were imbued with the abstract expressionists’ existential intensity. The key figure in painting was Philip Guston, a former abstract expressionist who used cartoon Klansmen and Cyclopses to dramatize feelings of doubt, anxiety, and self-loathing. Crumb, whose Early Counterculture work preceded the Guston paintings by a couple of years (Guston’s first cartoon paintings were done in 1969) was working in the same stylistic space: the imagery of commercial art–particularly that of the Depression era–was made to serve his every expressive impulse and narrative whim. The Early Counterculture work not only defined Crumb as a major figure in the world of comics; it’s earned him a spot in the history of 20th century visual art as well.

The Later Counterculture period, which encompasses 1969 through 1976 (Volumes 5 through 11 of The Complete Crumb Comics), may very well feature Crumb’s most controversial work. Jeet Heer, for one, has identified this as the period when Crumb became Crumb. As Heer notes, Crumb came under the influence of S. Clay Wilson: “Wilson was the artist who unchained Crumb’s unconscious, who gave the final push for Crumb to shove aside his internal censor and be utterly honest…” Heer and others feel this work is when Crumb came into his own as an artist, but others, including myself, see it as when his work turned a nasty corner. Conceptually, it degenerated into a very ugly solipsism. It’s marked by a fascination with taboo: racism, violent misogyny, incest, sexualized children—all rendered from the mindset of a pornographer. A harsh—though intellectually shallow—anger towards society emerges as well. Crumb did some of his most popular work during this period—Home Grown, by some accounts, is his best-selling publication—but others may find the material boorish and fundamentally uninteresting.

Cover to American Splendor #4 (1979)

I have to say that the most impressive material from the Post-Counterculture period—published between 1976 and 1979 and featured in The Complete Crumb Comics, Volumes 12 and 13—are among my favorites of Crumb’s work. It was during this period that Harvey Pekar began publishing his memoir-comics series American Splendor. Crumb was one of the cartoonists Pekar enlisted to illustrate the stories, and serving another creator’s material got Crumb’s thinking out of the misanthropic box in which it had become so distastefully trapped. Pekar’s scripts, though gritty, didn’t reflect the same kinds of attitudes. The material was humane, it valued naturalism, and it relied on quiet ironies for its effects. The demands of illustrating it seemed to awaken something in Crumb. He developed an impressive command of dramatic nuance while working on the stories. I’m not alone in thinking these collaborations are among the best comic-book comics of the pre-graphic-novel era.

“A Short History of America” (1979; expanded 1988)

The American Splendor comics aren’t even the best work Crumb did during this time. That honor goes to 1979’s “A Short History of America,” a 12-panel strip (expanded to 15 panels in 1988) that was first published in the CoEvolution Quarterly. At the time, Crumb had been doing some environmentally themed editorial cartoons for the publication, but this piece certainly ranks all of them. It focuses on a single expanse of land from decades past, and, in each succeeding panel, shows how that land evolved with the times up to the present day. It’s poetic; Crumb defines and redefines the image so that the changes to it become the piece’s content. And for once, Crumb is understated with his social critique, and the dispassionate tone makes the point—namely the corruptions of the land brought about by technological development—all the more powerful. It’s a devastatingly effective piece of work.

However, as strong as the best of the material from the Post-Counterculture period is, a good deal of it is among the worst of Crumb’s career. Apart from the work with Pekar and the CoEvolutionioary Quarterly, Crumb was more acidly misanthropic than ever. As R. Fiore wrote in 1988, “As the ‘70s wore on Crumb wore down. Crumb’s stories got to be like a continuing saga entitled Four Pages of Bitching.” Fiore also notes that things got to the point where he gave on entirely on Crumb’s work for a time. He’s not kidding about the distastefulness; the material is extremely repetitive and tiresome.

Many think that the work from the Weirdo period, from 1980 to 1993 (and largely collected in Volumes 14 through 17 of The Complete Crumb Comics) constitutes Crumb’s best work. If one is of the opinion that the Late Counterculture work is better than that from the Early Counterculture period, I can understand how one comes by that judgment. However, it’s not one I share. Crumb is still stuck in the same box. The major difference is that the dramatic skills he developed while working with Pekar allow the material to breathe a bit more. Also, his CoEvolutionary Quarterly work sparked a greater interest in rendering technique, and the art gains a superficial gravitas. But conceptually, it’s not much different than the bulk of the material he produced during the 1970s. The efforts at satire are shrill and shallow, and often devolve into rants. He tries his hand at Pekar-style verité pieces, but these tend to be tiresomely self-pitying on the one hand, or outright obnoxious on the other. (The nadir of the latter is probably “Memories Are Made of This,” in which he recounts his date-rape of an acquaintance.) Again, the highlights come when Crumb has to engage with another creator and get out of his own head. His collaborations with wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb have a pleasant breeziness, and he does well with a few of the adaptation pieces (such as of Boswell or Kraft-Ebbing). Crumb fans will certainly find the period of interest. One can easily see his development from what came before, as well as the seeds for what comes next.

From the Vues de Sauve portfolio (1991)

After the Weirdo period, Crumb entered what I call the Illustration period, which is where he is now. He doesn’t appear terribly interested in producing comics anymore; his efforts for the past two decades have been largely given over to producing single-image illustrations. It’s a logical progression from his work in the 1980s. As noted, he developed a greater interest in rendering technique, and his most striking efforts during that time are probably the intensively cross-hatched cover drawings he produced for Weirdo magazine. When one looks at his best work from the Illustration period, namely the two Art & Beauty issues, or the Vues de Sauve portfolio pieces, one sees an artist who just wants to enjoy his ability to make handsome pictures. Introducing Kafka and The Book of Genesis, the two major comics projects, seem in retrospect efforts to find a halfway point between comics and illustration, but the stale dramatizations in the latter demonstrate that comics no longer much engage Crumb’s interest. If one approaches Genesis as a collection of single-image illustrations of the Biblical verses, it seems a more successful effort. I’m starting to view the project as a coda to his career; it’s certainly more that than the magnum opus it was hyped as. Illustration may be the place Crumb has chosen to retire.

In closing, this is one comics critic’s analysis and judgments of Crumb’s career. I hope it’s of more interest than a pronouncement that his work is a single big project and one should just read all of it. Breaking his work down into distinct periods does, I think, help one to get a better handle on Crumb, no matter what one’s opinion of this or that individual effort. I certainly don’t think this essay is the last word. With Crumb, no essay ever is.

After finishing Hadji Murád, Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, I was reminded of a quote from him in Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy: “Heroes—that’s a lie and invention; there are simply people, people, and nothing else.” Tolstoy said that in 1901, while he was working on a draft of the book. (He completed it in 1904, and it was published posthumously in 1912.) Hadji Murád contradicts the first part of that sentence. The book is a fictionalized account of the last months of the title figure, a Caucasian chieftain who was ultimately caught between sides in the ongoing war between his people and the Russian Empire. It’s hard to imagine a more idealized or admirable character, in Tolstoy’s fiction or elsewhere. However, the second part of the sentence—“there are simply people, people, and nothing else”—is very true of the novel. Tolstoy more or less presents the events leading up to Hadji Murád’s death in 1851 as a series of character studies, a cross-section of people involved with or tangential to his circumstances. Nearly all of the depictions create contrasts that enhance one’s appreciation of Hadji Murád’s best qualities. The book may be best understood as an intellectual next step from that quote: There are simply people, people, and some are indeed heroic.

The real-life Hadji Murád was born in the 1790s. A member of the Avar tribe in the Caucasus mountains, he was a leader in the Caucasian War, which was essentially the tribal resistance against the Russian Empire’s efforts to conquer the region. However, in response to the rise of Muridism among the Caucasus Muslims, he allied himself with the Russians, but that ended when a rival defamed him to the Russian leaders. He then joined forces with Imam Shamil, who ruled the Northern Caucasian peoples. Hadji Murád developed a fearsome reputation among both the Russians and the Caucasians for his military prowess, but a dispute with Shamil over succession led Shamil to order his death. He escaped, but Shamil took his family captive.

Tolstoy begins the story shortly after this. Hadji Murád and a lieutenant are shown arriving in a Caucasian village, where he learns of the bounty Shamil has put on his head. He immediately decides to surrender to the Russians, who have an outpost a few miles away. He does not seek their protection, though. He is interested in an alliance, although only to the extent that it will allow him to either negotiate or force the release of his family. The Russian officers take him and his men in, and he becomes an honored guest while the Russians decide on a course of action.

From the start, Tolstoy emphasizes that Hadji Murád is a remarkably personable, well-mannered, and disciplined individual. In his initial scene, he answers his host’s family’s greetings with ones of his own, all of which are specially suited to the person he is addressing. He respects their reticence when faced with his questions. Although he has not eaten for a day, he eats the food they offer sparingly. It would never do to appear like a glutton, and his lieutenant sees his example and follows it. In accordance with patriarchal custom, he does not talk about matters of import in the presence of women; he keeps the conversation light until they leave. (Things are certainly different now, but in the time and place of the story, discussing business in the presence of women was considered unseemly behavior.) When he asks for his host’s help in contacting the Russians, he offers generous compensation without being asked. Poltorátsky, the Russian officer who meets Hadji Murád at the surrender, is astonished by his manner and bearing:

Hadji Murád gave him smile for smile, and that smile struck Poltorátsky by its childlike kindliness. Poltorátsky had never expected to see the terrible mountain chief look like that. He expected to see a morose, hard-featured man; and here was a vivacious person, whose smile was so kindly that Poltorátsky felt as if he were an old acquaintance. He had but one peculiarity: his eyes, set wide apart, gazed from under their black brows attentively, penetratingly and calmly into the eyes of others.

Hadji Murád is finely tuned, and as Tolstoy shows over the course of the story, this extends to him as a man of action as well. He sleeps warily; no matter how long he has been without rest, the slightest indication of danger—even a creak in the floor—has him at the ready. A group of Shamil loyalists try to impede his departure from the Chechen village, and he knows the best way to scatter them is simply to face them down. While in the Russians’ custody he disarms a man who tries to assassinate him without the slightest hesitation; Tolstoy compares his grace and speed to a cat’s. But he has no fear of death; as he says at one point, “Well, if he kills me it will prove that such is Allah’s will. He lives up to the warrior ideal: his motive is honor, not personal petty concerns, and it frees him from trepidation when he acts. He retains his dignity even in death.

Tolstoy never overplays his idealizing view of Hadji Murád; he heightens the reader’s sense of his protagonist through implicit comparisons with the story’s supporting cast. Almost all of them are vain, small-minded, and incontinent personalities. The Russian soldiers are slobs even while on duty; they litter the landscape with food waste, cigarette butts, and liquor bottles. Their conversations veer from self-pity to gossip about the officers at their outpost. The officers are at least as bad; they’re all but exclusively preoccupied with drinking, gambling, and opportunities for wenching, regardless of whether the women are married or not. The commanding officers are ridiculously status-conscious; the outpost commandant frets over the relative luxury of his accommodations, and he gets into a ridiculous argument with his superior over who should have had the privilege of accepting Hadji Murád’s surrender. The ministers and royal courtiers are fixated on positioning themselves politically regardless of considerations for both practicality and justice. Tolstoy even treats the peasants with contempt. A farmer—the father of a dead Russian conscript—remembers his son as “skillful, observant, strong, enduring, and above all, industrious.” The description is completely fatuous; the son in actuality was a slothful whiner who was flogged for stealing money to buy liquor. The conscript’s brother is of lower character; their father describes the difference between them as that of a cuckoo and an eagle. The conscript’s widow is even worse. She’s glad of her husband’s death. She can now marry the man who fathered one child by her and has her pregnant with another.

However, the most despicable character by far, is Tsar Nicholas I. Tolstoy depicts him as a buffoonish, egomaniacal monster. He’s an obese, illiterate fop who spends Mass trying to decide whether he prefers his regular mistress to the 20-year-old he tumbled the night before. His narcissism is nothing short of dumbfounding:

Continual brazen flattery from everybody around him, in the teeth of obvious facts, had brought him to such a state that he no longer saw his own inconsistencies or measured his actions and words by reality, logic, or even by simple common sense; but was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and mutually contradictory they might be, became reasonable, just, and mutually accordant simply because he gave them.

One laughs when one reads that passage, but Tsar Nicholas’ unworthiness to rule ultimately isn’t funny; his callous viciousness makes him an obscenity. He orders that a student who assaulted a professor in a bout of exam nerves be made to “run the gauntlet of a thousand men twelve times,” knowing full well the student will be dead by injuries from the switches before the punishment is halfway done. (The student is a Catholic Pole, and the evil of those rascals must be dealt with.) In response to Hadji Murád’s surrender, he orders that the Chechen landscape and villages be completely leveled to put the people in their place once and for all. Tolstoy does not spare the reader the devastation, and it is horrific. The depiction of Tsar Nicholas all but explains why some societies have dealt with certain deposed leaders with guillotines and firing squads.

It may seem that Hadji Murád is depicted as not so much a man among men as a man among vermin. This is not entirely accurate. The character of Imam Shamil, Hadji Murád’s nemesis, is portrayed as somewhere in between Tsar Nicholas and Hadji Murád’s, and it is far closer to that of the latter. He’s a ruthless man with an appetitive side—his desire for his youngest wife parallels Nicholas’ lust for the 20-year-old—but he is also a disciplined personality, and he governs his people with a just, if harsh, hand. And the elder Prince Vorontsóv, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, is in many ways as idealized as the book’s protagonist. He’s an aristocrat whose aristocratic nature extends to every aspect of his being. Like Hadji Murád, he is a cordial, magnanimous individual. His mind may be somewhat keener. His assessment of Hadji Murád could not be more accurate, and his strategic recommendations to Tsar Nicholas are as sensible as can be. The initial meeting between him and Hadji Murád is one of the most quietly powerful confrontation scenes I’ve read. They look into each other eyes, and recognize each other as enemies to the core. Tolstoy makes it immediately clear that they are profoundly opposed men who are nevertheless all but equal in every other regard. A reader may be grateful that the facts of Hadji Murád’s life do not allow for a battle between the two. It would only diminish the remarkable tensions Tolstoy so exquisitely renders in their meeting.

A major theme of Hadji Murád appears to be that the hierarchies of people’s character are not reflected by the strata of society. The tsar, the lowliest conscripts, and members of all classes in between can be slothful, petty, and incontinent personalities. Judging from the book, in Tolstoy’s view most of them are. But people of high character exist at all levels, too. The Chechen family that hosts Hadji Murád at the beginning of the book (and through whose eyes we see Tsar Nicholas’ devastation of the Caucasus) are never less than admirable. The same is almost true of Imam Shamil, despite his ruthlessness. And with the elder Vorontsóv and Hadji Murád, Tolstoy shows that the aristocratic soul can be found at the pinnacle of high society as well as in an unsophisticated mountain tribe. There are only people, but there are natural leaders and heroes, too. Tolstoy spoke of the latter notion with disdain, but as Hadji Murád shows, he could not let go of it in his art.

In general, I’m not sympathetic to the auteurist film aesthetic. I think films tend to be better when the director treats the screenplay as a foundation instead of a springboard. But when a director with an auteurist sensibility is at the top of his or her game, as Jean-Luc Godard was in much of his nouvelle vague period, I admit the films can be as impressive as they come. Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Band of Outsiders, among others, are great movies, and part of that greatness comes from one’s awareness of a richness to the final pictures that is far removed from the stories Godard started with. Breathless, for example, would seem on paper to be just a banal little tale of a hood on the run from the police. Godard, of course, transformed it into a portrait of contemporary life among young people in early-‘60s Paris. The movie has a freshness and immediacy that remain striking over 50 years after it was made. Godard’s best nouvelle vague films are the visions of a director, not the visions of a scenarist that the director is helping to realize.

With Alphaville (1965), Godard’s ninth feature, one wishes he had been able to find and realize a directorial vision to the same degree. If there was ever a story that needed to be transformed by the filmmaking process, the banal science-fiction pulp of Alphaville is it. I don’t mean to suggest that Godard’s handling of the material is at odds with the auteurist aesthetic; there’s considerable directorial imagination on display in every scene. But it never rises above the decorative; Godard still seems shackled to pulp narrative conventions throughout.

What may have undermined Godard the most was the decision to build the film around the character Lemmy Caution, a secret agent/private detective featured in a series of ’50s and ’60s French B-movies. The problems were further compounded by the casting of Eddie Constantine, the actor who portrayed Caution in those films, in the role. I haven’t seen the other Lemmy Caution pictures, but in Alphaville, Constantine plays the character as the embodiment of the noir tough-guy private-detective cliché. When one watches Jean-Paul Belmondo’s hoodlum in Breathless, or Anna Karina’s femme fatale in Pierrot le fou, one doesn’t identify them with their antecedents in Hollywood films except, perhaps, as a joke. The characters are thoroughly informed by the actors’ personalities, and Godard shapes the scenes to best take advantage of this. However, Constantine’s Lemmy Caution never comes across as anything but a predetermined stock character. Godard doesn’t play this clichéd figure for irony, and the novelty of seeing such a character as the hero in a science-fiction thriller wears off very quickly. He’s still the taciturn man-of-action on a mission into an alien, dehumanized society, where he falls in love with a girl whom he rescues and escapes with after the mission’s completion. In other words, he’s a trite protagonist in a trite story, and Godard is so weighed down by him that the film can’t rise above its pulp foundation.

Constantine’s age works against the film as well. He was 47 when the film was shot, and the decision to pair his character romantically with a heroine played by the 24-year-old Anna Karina just does not come off. In Breathless and Band of Outsiders, Godard showed a tremendous affinity for romance among younger characters. He’s charmed by it, and he extends his delight in what he’s showing to the audience. When he depicts the relationships of somewhat older people, as in Contempt and Une Femme mariée, he’s cold and judgmental, but he manages to be fairly incisive. With the May-December romance of Alphaville, he’s neither enchanting nor perceptive. The relationship here is a writer’s conceit, and it’s unconvincing onscreen. There is no rapport or tension between Constantine and Karina. Karina tries–she makes a game use of the bashful, looking-for-approval mannerisms that were so effective in Band of Outsiders–but Constantine does nothing to play off her. The scenes between the two come across like a stern father lecturing his unsophisticated daughter.

The material that’s center stage in Alphaville is hopelessly inadequate, but one can’t help but admire Godard’s work around the edges. There was no budget for elaborate sets or special effects, so Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard had to make locations in contemporary Paris seem futuristic and otherworldly. The camera is frequently angled upward to show the ceilings and emphasize the pervasiveness of fluorescent lights. Reflections in glass and on the walls are common in many of the interior shots. Characters are often shown walking up and down conspicuously modernist stairwells, and Godard makes effective use of power-plant locations in several key scenes. I was especially struck by his use of a recording studio for the parts in which Constantine’s character is interrogated by the computer that rules Alphaville. Constantine sits in the recording space with suspended microphones moving around him and lights shining and blinking through the control-room glass. The film’s visual schemes are ingeniously eerie.

Godard has some inspired narrative and staging ideas as well. After Constantine’s character destroys the city’s ruling computer—I won’t spoil the clever way he does it—the minds of the city residents are short-circuited: they flail around and embrace the walls with their arms. Sex is depersonalized in the film’s world, and thus useless as a trope for love’s consummation, so Godard has the Constantine and Karina characters consummate their feelings poetically. Their love scene is a montage of their faces against minimal backgrounds while Karina reads a passage by poet Paul Éluard in voiceover. Conceptually, Godard’s treatment captures the passionate feelings and eternity-in-a-moment quality of such scenes perfectly; one can almost forget that Constantine and Karina aren’t believable as a couple. The most brilliant bit is Godard’s depiction of the public executions of those who have violated the city’s ban on emotion. They are made to stand on a diving board at a swimming pool while they are strafed with machine-gun fire. When they fall into the water, a group of women make a choreographed series of dives into the pool. The women then swim over to the condemned person and hold him underwater until he has drowned. As a piece of absurdist satiric spectacle, this is unsurpassed by anything Godard has done elsewhere. The film is worthwhile on the basis of these scenes alone.

However, it’s a shame Godard can’t make Alphaville more than the sum of its better moments. When he’s used pulp scenarios in other films, he can usually be relied on to transcend them either in whole or in part. What seems necessary is for him to give the story and characters he discovers while shooting the film precedence over what he’s conceived beforehand. Godard the director should be in charge. Alphaville fails because he didn’t realize the material in that way; the auteur of Alphaville is unfortunately Godard the scenarist. For a filmmaker like him, that’s deadly.

Robert Stanley Martin’s reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:

• Band of Outsiders
• Breathless
• Les Carabiniers
• Contempt (Le Mépris)
• Une Femme mariée (A Married Woman)
• First Name: Carmen
• Made in U. S. A.
• Le Petit soldat
• Vivre sa vie
• Weekend
• A Woman Is a Woman

Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature, Made in U. S. A. (1966), had its North American premiere at the 1967 New York Film Festival. It wasn’t available for viewing again in the United States until 2009. The film is ostensibly an adaptation of the crime novel The Jugger, written by Donald E. Westlake under his pseudonym Richard Stark. However, Godard and producer Georges de Beauregard failed to properly secure the rights, and Westlake got an injunction that barred U. S. distribution of the film until after his death in 2008. As such, the film was long an object of curiosity among American film scholars, critics, and other cinephiles. Curiosity has now been sated, and it wasn’t worth the wait.

Made in U. S. A. embodies the meaning of the term “Godardian” when used as an insult. It’s self-indulgent, overly cerebral, and aggressively incoherent. Godard lards it up with in-jokes and other trite allusions. His obsession with Hollywood crime movies is very much on display, but only insofar as he can rub the viewer’s nose in the emptiness of their conventions.

The story’s main character, played by Anna Karina, is named Paula Nelson. It’s not clear if she’s a detective, a reporter, or a spy. She’s come to “Atlantic-Cité” to investigate the death of an old boyfriend, who may have been a deputy to a Communist local mayor who was killed in a mysterious explosion. The boyfriend allegedly died of heart failure, but the Karina character refuses to believe it. As near as I can tell, her investigation manages to get her on the wrong side of a corrupt political conspiracy that’s somehow tied up with societal revolutionary efforts, but don’t quote me on it. Godard keeps it deliberately opaque. As Karina’s character says at one point, “This affair had to remain murky for everyone.”

And oh, how Godard murks it up. There are repeated dialogues that portentously refer to sinister goings-on, but the viewer is never told what those goings-on are. Here’s a typical exchange:

“Now tell me things I don’t know”

“You know it’s a secret.”

“What secret?”

“Come on. Don’t start that again.”

Other dialogues veer into absurdist non sequiturs, such as when a writer the Karina character meets starts talking about how rarely he gets to see his girlfriend—every day at breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and a movie or play in the evening. There are times when Godard doesn’t let the viewer hear the dialogue at all. In one scene, the Karina character questions a woman at gunpoint; Godard drops all the sound, and one never finds out what was said. And things are conspicuously introduced that never lead to anything. In a barroom scene, Marianne Faithfull appears as a patron, and apropos of nothing begins singing a song while the Karina character and the film’s two heavies (played by Laszló Szábó and Jean-Pierre Léaud) cast furtive glances at each other. Later on, the Karina and Szábó characters listen to a tape that supposedly tells them something, but it’s nothing but gibberish about colonialism, fascism, and revolution. And on and on. I suppose there’s a similarity in some of this to the techniques of Samuel Beckett, but Beckett’s work reflects a philosophical worldview. Godard isn’t connecting to anything that’s profound in the least; he’s just screwing around for the hell of it.

It can be argued that Made in U. S. A. is to the crime/detective genre what Godard’s (infinitely superior) A Woman Is a Woman is to the Hollywood musical. That is, Godard is rendering the idea of a film in the genre, rather than making a film in the genre per se. The initial strategies of the films seem the same: Godard introduces the tropes of the genre, but never follows through with them. With A Woman Is a Woman, this meant tantalizing the viewer with the prospect of singing and dancing while never actually providing any. Made in U. S. A. has hard-boiled dialogue, confrontations at gunpoint, and hints of a deeper conspiracy, but they never really connect to an overarching plot. That last aspect may be the key difference between the two pictures: for all its red herrings, A Woman Is a Woman has a reasonably easy-to-follow story. One doesn’t watch it feeling lost most of the time. And most of what it provided in the place of the genre follow-through was energetic and funny. Made in U. S. A., in contrast, just lays there. The only suspense is in wondering what bewildering absurdist nothing is going to happen next.

Another key difference between the films is how they use Anna Karina in the starring role. In A Woman Is a Woman, Godard shaped the character around Karina’s personality and talent. He made enchanting use of her free-spirited charm and her astonishingly fluid expressiveness. The Anna Karina of A Woman Is a Woman is a star. In Made in U. S. A., Godard turns her into a stoic blank. The role is obviously a take-off on the taciturn Hammett-Chandler detective cliché, probably best embodied by Humphrey Bogart, but Bogart made those characters work through suggestions of anger, impatience, and disgust—he made you feel the character has earned his world-weary cynicism. The woefully miscast Karina doesn’t make the viewer feel anything; she just sullenly goes through the motions. She changes outfits more often than she changes expressions. The most that can be said for her is that she looks trés chic in those colorful dresses and white trenchcoat.

Made in U. S. A. is such a stultifying mess that it manages to undercut even the good things it has in common with Godard’s better films. Godard and his great cinematographer Raoul Coutard shot the picture in color, and it has the same bold, Pop look as Contempt and Pierrot le fou. But the film’s striking visual quality, which might initially seem a redeeming aesthetic feature, very quickly comes to feel empty and mannered. Those gorgeously crisp images set a terrific stage for substantial material in the earlier films. Godard and Coutard got the viewer looking, and they made good on the implicit promise to give the viewer something worth looking at. Here, with nothing to offer but pretense that quickly becomes insipid, those visuals feel like a bait-and-switch. Godard turns them into décor, and it’s hard not to feel cheated.

The heart of what goes wrong with the film may be that Godard no longer had any emotional or romantic connection with what he was showing on the screen. The crime genre is a set of conventions he knows, but he’s so apathetic to them here that he can’t even give them an effective razzing. There is no longer any rapport with Karina as a performer; it’s no surprise the two never again worked together on a feature-length project. No matter what, Godard cannot seem to imagine this material in terms of any known or felt experience; that may be why so much of the picture is preoccupied with irrelevant in-jokes and word games. If one wants to see what artistic decadence looks like, one doesn’t need to go any further than Made in U. S. A.

Robert Stanley Martin’s reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:

• Alphaville
• Band of Outsiders
• Breathless
• Les Carabiniers
• Contempt (Le Mépris)
• Une Femme mariée (A Married Woman)
• First Name: Carmen
• Le Petit soldat
• Vivre sa vie
• Weekend
• A Woman Is a Woman

Readers of my comics criticism know that I’m a strong advocate for thinking outside the box of the comics subculture. I ask for comics to be examined from a more culturally rounded perspective, and I do my best to live up to that standard in my own work. I have a polemical bent, and calling out others for being locked into subcultural attitudes has been par for the course. Over the last few months, I’ve felt compelled to extend this to historical and business issues within the field. The most recent examples have been my comments on the summary judgment against the Joe Shuster heirs in their efforts to reclaim a portion of the Superman copyrights from DC Comics.

The verdict was issued on October 17, 2012. Two days later, tcj.com co-editor Dan Nadel linked to Tom Spurgeon’s commentary at The Comics Reporter. (Click here.) Nadel called Spurgeon’s post (click here) “the most cogent analysis” of the decision. I’d read the piece earlier that morning. It was hardly an analysis, and “cogent” was probably the last adjective I’d use to describe it. It featured a rhetorical broadside against DC Comics that misrepresented the company’s dealings with the Shuster heirs in the most inflammatory and Manichean terms. (The key sentence: “It’s darkly, stab-both-your-eyes-out ironic that Warner/DC’s parsimony in forcing an elderly woman to haggle for a 23-year-old’s income with everything she had at her disposal is actually benefitting the company down the line.”) The verdict and the exhibits that provided the history of DC’s dealings with the Shusters were both available online. Spurgeon clearly hadn’t read either. (DC hadn’t forced anybody to do anything, there was no haggling, and at the time she didn’t have anything to legally bargain with.) Worse, Spurgeon hadn’t even paid much attention to the news report he linked to in his opening paragraph; he wrote the piece from the erroneous impression that DC had been dealing with Shuster’s widow rather than his sister. (Spurgeon corrected his references to her after complaints.) In short, the post was ignorant and prejudiced about the case.

Spurgeon obviously buys into the fan-community myth that Joe Shuster and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel were hapless victims of the greed and villainy of DC Comics. After reviewing the compensation history, one may come away with a different impression. The two earned the 2012 equivalent of at least $5 million from Superman during the character’s first decade. They would have earned a great deal more if they hadn’t filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to regain the property in 1947. (I’ve read the court filings and the preceding contracts. Almost all of the non-speculative grievances were over things they clearly had no claim to, such as money from Batman. The speculative grievances—namely being shorted for monies owed—were determined groundless.) The cumulative income of Siegel, Shuster, and their heirs from a 1975 pension agreement with DC has been the 2012 equivalent of over $6 million. That’s altogether more than $11 million between the two parties in today’s dollars, and the Shusters alone would have stood to make at least an additional $2 million had they not chosen to pursue the partial copyright termination that resulted in the most recent verdict.

If that kind of compensation is what it means to be victimized by DC Comics, please let me know where to sign up. Siegel and Shuster sold Superman outright in 1938. There is no evidence of bad faith in the transaction. For the equivalent today of about $2,500, DC bought a comics feature that no other publisher was interested in. When the commercial potential of the property became apparent, the company voluntarily increased its contractual obligations to the creators. Siegel and Shuster were allowed to participate in the expanded publishing opportunities, and they were given a percentage of the non-publishing licensing revenue. They were extremely well paid before they burned their bridges with a largely senseless lawsuit in 1947 and 1948. They were able to negotiate a new settlement in 1975, and they enjoyed a handsome pension afterward. Their heirs have been treated generously. The two suffered economically during the time between the lawsuit’s end and the 1975 settlement deal, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they were akin to the lottery jackpot winners who quickly end up in bankruptcy court. Judging from the paper trail of exhibits in the various cases, as well as Larry Tye’s recent book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, they were financially irresponsible people who squandered a truly enviable amount of money. (Shuster in particular was quite the spendthrift.) I just don’t see how that’s DC’s fault.

However imperfectly, DC has made a pretty consistent effort to equitably deal with Siegel, Shuster, and their heirs. The company has negotiated settlement after settlement after settlement with them in an effort to resolve matters. That’s why I was especially struck by the end of Spurgeon’s post, where he wrote:

[…] it’s hard for me to see this as a best outcome. I think it’s okay to want best outcomes.

Well, that raises the question of what he would think a best outcome is. Spurgeon doesn’t allow comments on his site, so I sent an email asking on October 19. He posted it with a reply on October 29. (Click here.)

It’s very clear that Spurgeon and I take a very different view of intellectual-property ownership. He obviously feels there is something inherently illegitimate about anyone but the original creator owning a copyright or patent or whatnot. Apart from public-domain laws, I personally see little difference between a copyright and a piece of tangible property such as a car or a house. It’s something that can be sold from one party to another, and the sale should be governed by the basic rule of transactions: If both parties are competent, uncoerced, and acting in good faith, the transaction is inviolable. If the purchaser proves better able to exploit the goods or property than the seller, then good for the purchaser. I think any reasonable adult recognizes this is a possibility in selling anything. If I sell a developer a piece of real estate for $20 per square foot, and the developer, for whatever reason, is later able to sell it for $100 per square foot, the developer is entitled to the money. I have no claim on it, and there’s no reason I should.

I’d be very curious to read the ethical reasoning why the sale of Superman in 1938 should not be binding on Siegel and Shuster. Or why their 1948 decision to give up all remaining financial interest in the property for a cash lump sum was not something they should have to treat with respect. Or why they (and now their heirs) should not be expected to honor the multitude of settlements DC has made in its truly quixotic efforts to find a permanently satisfactory common ground with them. Is it because authors and their heirs should be considered the same as minor children, and therefore not competent to enter into contracts? Or is it because they enjoy some sort of exalted status by which the rules that everyone else has to follow in every other circumstance should not apply to them? Or is there something else?

My guess is that the “exalted status” view of authors is what is guiding this. A related view has managed to find expression in our copyright laws. In tandem with the incessant extensions of copyright protection over the past century or so, a truly astonishing innovation has been introduced: legally mandated time-limited ownership for purchasers, with the original seller having the rights of termination and reclamation. If an author sells his or her copyright to a publisher, the author or the author’s heirs now have the right to invalidate the transaction after a certain period of time. The justification is that the author couldn’t have known the future value of what he or she had sold, so he or she should have a certain amount of time to exploit that at the current owner’s expense. Just imagine if we expanded this to other kinds of transactions. General Motors could legally repossess my prized Camaro without compensating me. After all, to paraphrase Spurgeon, I’ve had it a long time. Why shouldn’t I give it back? GM couldn’t have possibly foreseen that the car would have collector value, so it’s only fair that they be allowed to take advantage of this. By the same token, DC Comics could reclaim all extant copies of Action Comics #1. The company sold them for pennies back in 1938; they couldn’t possibly have predicted that copies would eventually change hands for up to a million dollars apiece. Or should the Siegel and Shuster heirs have the right to reclaim those, too?

This idiotic do-gooder revision to the copyright law is what opened the door to the present litigation from the Siegel and Shuster heirs. And DC is of course fighting this for the same reason I would fight to retain ownership of my Camaro. The property was bought fair and square, and a good deal of time, labor, and money has been spent on its upkeep; it’s wrong that the original seller should be allowed to take it back.

Actually, DC is fighting this a lot harder than I would (or could) for my Camaro, and for a very good reason. I’m not answerable to anyone but myself with regard to that car. DC, though, has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of Time-Warner to protect the company’s assets. They cannot pursue any solution to the Siegel and Shuster imbroglio that does not take the best interests of the company shareholders into account. We’re talking hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people. This is why none of Spurgeon’s proposed “best outcomes” can ever happen. Any one of them would likely result in a class-action shareholder lawsuit that would, just for starters, prompt the removal of the DC and Time-Warner executives responsible for pursuing any of those “best outcomes.” Those same executives could very well be facing litigation themselves for the rest of their lives if one of those “best outcomes” went forward. There would certainly be litigation seeking to have any of the pursued “best outcomes” set aside.

This is partly why I think “equitable and fair” is preferable to “best outcome.” Any proposed solution has to be reasonably acceptable for Time-Warner’s shareholders. Spurgeon is right to characterize my shift in terminology as “an almost willful renunciation of what [he is] talking about.” Approaching a problem in terms of “best outcomes” allows one to indulge in absurd fantasies. Looking at it in terms of what’s “equitable and fair” requires one to engage with the real world.

Let me end by shifting gears away from the Superman case. We need to try to understand issues relative to all perspectives at play in them. It should be imperative to know where both sides are coming from before reaching a conclusion. Uninformed, knee-jerk partisanship should be avoided. Sometimes parties we sympathize with are in the wrong, and sometimes parties we see as antagonists are in the right. A fuller view of a situation may lead one to decide that one’s initial sympathies are misplaced. As writers and readers about the field, that fuller view should be our main goal. Achieving it the real best outcome, at least for us.

Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is an extremely enjoyable addition to the warts-and-all, behind-the-scenes genre of pop historical writing. It’s not an academic-style history; although heavily researched, it lacks that kind of rigor and perspective. The most apt comparison is probably to the unauthorized biographies of celebrities and political figures by Kitty Kelley. Howe’s guiding principle appears to be the same as Kelley’s, which is “moving an icon out of the moonlight and into the sunlight.” And like her, he has an excellent feeling for incident, a strong sense of narrative momentum, and a terrific eye for (frequently sensationalist) detail. The book is a treat for those interested in the comics industry in particular, or the publishing business in general. Howe also does justice to what a rich collection of personalities the comics field has always been. He manages the large ensemble of creators, editors, and businesspeople with remarkable skill; the people are so well particularized that they never once start blurring into each other. One can easily see the book engaging someone with little prior interest in Marvel or the business in general. One doesn’t need to know comics to appreciate Howe’s book any more than one needs to know the advertising field to enjoy Mad Men.

The first part of the book, titled “Creations and Myths” and covering 100 of the book’s 432-page text, is probably the most valuable from a historical standpoint. It’s also the best realized in terms of narrative. Howe covers a lot of territory here–he begins with founding publisher Martin Goodman’s birth in 1908, and ends with the departure of Jack Kirby, the company’s most important cartoonist, in March 1970–but his handling is clear, detailed, and well paced. He provides a succinct account of Martin Goodman’s rise from poverty to successful magazine publisher, as well as Goodman’s 1939 entry into the comic-book field with the adventures of the Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, and, in 1940, Captain America. The brief time Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were with the company in those days is effectively recounted. The travails of editor, head scriptwriter, and eventual company figurehead Stan Lee during the 1940s and ‘50s are as well. The so-called Marvel Age of comics, which began in the early ‘60s with the introduction of Lee and Kirby’s The Fantastic Four, Lee and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man, and other features, begins on page 36. Howe portrays the ‘60s as a whirlwind period for the company, characterized by one successful new feature after another, desperate efforts to find new artists and scriptwriters to handle the workload, and tensions over appropriate credit and compensation.

Stan Lee is treated as the central player at Marvel in the 1960s. He is depicted as having a hand in virtually everything to do with the comics being published. There is considerable controversy over whether Lee or the cartoonists such as Kirby and Ditko deserve the most credit for the features they collaborated on, but Howe doesn’t take sides. He fully acknowledges the extent of the cartoonists’ contributions due to the “Marvel method” of story creation. (Essentially, Lee and an artist would brainstorm ideas in a meeting or over the phone, the artist would then draw the story, and Lee would write the final captions and dialogue.) But Howe also makes clear that Lee was completely responsible for the editorial direction the company took. Lee is also portrayed as at least as much a workaholic as any of the cartoonists working for him. He put in seven-day workweeks, and didn’t even stop to listen to the news reports when President Kennedy was assassinated. And Howe notes that Martin Goodman didn’t treat Lee any better business-wise than the cartoonists. Kirby and Ditko are both portrayed as resentful over the lack of royalties, but Lee wasn’t happy about it, either. Goodman’s attitude was that since he had taken all the financial risk, he should enjoy all the financial benefit. Howe does a capable juggling act; his account pretty much makes the case for both Lee’s supporters and detractors, but he offers no judgment himself.

The rest of the book is probably best characterized as a juicily entertaining sprawl. One may look at the fact that sixty-odd pages are given to the key 1960s period, while over 200 are devoted to the much less significant ‘70s and ‘80s, and wonder if Howe is giving the ‘60s period short shrift. He really isn’t; the ‘60s section is just more focused and better crafted. The later sections of the book are a roughly chronological collection of company high points, entertaining anecdotes, behind-the-scenes conflicts, and creator profiles. They’re a lot of fun to read, but many feel more like draft material than things that necessarily belong in the final manuscript.

Howe is also apparently a fan of several 1970s and early ‘80s Marvel titles, such as Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu and Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, and he loses all perspective when it comes to them. His discussion of the events leading up to the 1982 cancellation of Master of Kung Fu is the low point of the book: poorly researched, manipulatively written, and borderline libelous. (The passive-aggressive effort to blame Marvel for the death of artist Gene Day is repugnant.) The amount of attention given to Howard the Duck co-creator Steve Gerber is excessive, to say the least. And ironically, the most historically significant aspect of Gerber’s relationship with the company–his 1981 lawsuit to regain ownership of Howard–is only referred to a few times in passing. A reasonably detailed account would seem essential.

The lack of attention given to other things is striking as well. Conan the Barbarian, arguably Marvel’s most noteworthy success during the first half of the 1970s, barely rates a mention. G.I. Joe, perhaps Marvel’s biggest-selling ongoing series during the ’80s, is completely ignored. So is Doug Murray’s The ‘Nam, which received more mainstream press attention than any Marvel title that decade. The efforts under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter to diversify the company’s offerings, such as the Epic titles, the graphic-novel line, and Bernie Wrightson’s The Illustrated Frankenstein, are given little to no acknowledgement. Howe even downplays notable controversies, such as the problems that erupted over the ’70s change in the copyright law, as well as the conflict over the return of Jack Kirby’s original art. He did so little research on the latter that he gets the facts of its conclusion almost completely wrong.

Reservations aside, though, the post-‘60s material is a lot of fun, and in some ways just as worthwhile as the book’s opening section. The antics of the younger ‘70s-era creators, several of them recreational drug users, are fairly hilarious. There are plenty of nutty stories, such as the time an irate fan, distressed by the apparent death of Howard the Duck, mailed a duck carcass to the Marvel offices. The accounts of the office conflicts are pretty ripe, too. (My favorite was the incident in which then editor-in-chief Len Wein had to be restrained from punching out Al Landau, the company’s president during the mid-‘70s.) The terrific anecdotes and personnel profiles continue all the way up to the present day.

To sum up, Howe has put together a solid treatment of Marvel’s early period, including the key 1960s era. For the times that followed, he has gathered great raw material. As I state above, this book isn’t a rigorous academic-style history of Marvel. But it isn’t too far off, and it’s probably a lot more entertaining than that hypothetical effort. It’s a treasure trove for comics aficionados and scholars, and an engaging read for everyone else. I have my quibbles with Howe’s take on certain things, but when it comes to reading history, quibbles are part of the fun.

[Jim Shooter] does the best job he can, takes great pride in his work, and is genuinely dedicated to publishing the highest-quality Marvel Comics ever.

–Gary Groth, The Comics Journal 60, p. 56

Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics between 1978 and 1987, is one of the key figures in North American comics publishing of the last forty years. He may also be the most disparaged. Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael, in their 2004 book Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, describe Marvel under his tenure as “a wasteland of formulaic self-imitation” (p. 204). Shooter himself is characterized as “the most reviled figure in comics” and “a pariah in the comics industry to this day” (also p. 204). Several creators and staffers who worked at Marvel during his tenure routinely denounce him in blogs, interviews, and message boards. Gary Groth, the publisher of The Comics Journal, is probably Shooter’s harshest detractor. At various times, he has compared Shooter to an antebellum slaveowner (TCJ 115, p. 98) and a Nazi collaborator in the concentration camps (TCJ Library: Jack Kirby, p. 114). His most well known broadside against the former Marvel editor is probably the 1994 essay “Jim Shooter, Our Nixon” (TCJ 174, p. 17-21; click here), in which he compared Shooter to the disgraced U. S. President. Among other things, Shooter is described as “the human face, such as it was, of corporate thuggishness and intractability” and “the enemy of creators” (p. 17). The Journal, which keeps almost all back-issue material behind a subscription wall, posted the piece online for all readers in 2011. Most recently, Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, although fairer to Shooter than most, has presented a negatively skewed and at times factually inaccurate portrait of him and Marvel under his tenure.

A close examination of the historical record shows much of the criticism of Jim Shooter to be grossly misplaced. A good deal of it crosses the line into defamation. From an aesthetic standpoint, the Shooter era at Marvel is easily the most vibrant time in the company’s history apart from the heyday of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko back in the 1960s. And unlike that seminal 1960s period, the creative harvest wasn’t an accident; it was very carefully cultivated. In terms of business dealings with creators, Shooter engineered the most favorable environment the company has offered before or since. Shooter’s openhandedness also extended beyond Marvel’s editorial operations and internal business arrangements. There’s a history of support for outside creators and even small publishers. Additionally, there’s considerable anecdotal evidence of his generosity with up-and-coming talent. Veteran adventure cartoonist Jim Starlin recently told me, “As editor-in-chief Jim rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Because of this he has been unfairly uncredited with all the benefits he had a hand in gaining for artists while he was at the helm. He did a lot more good than ill while he was the boss.” Or, as X-Men scriptwriter Chris Claremont put it after Marvel let Shooter go in 1987, “Things that were better [at Marvel] were better for him” (TCJ 116, p. 14).

Jim Shooter had been working off and on in comics for several years when he became Marvel’s editor-in-chief in January 1978. His career as a comic-book scriptwriter began in 1966, when DC editor Mort Weisinger started commissioning scripts from him for the company’s Superman titles. He was 14 years old. Shooter was a regular scriptwriter for Weisinger until after graduating high school in 1969. After a brief stint as a Marvel editorial assistant that fall, he left the field for a few years, and then reemerged as a scriptwriter for DC in early 1975. He became the associate editor at Marvel in January 1976. The editor-in-chief who hired him was Marv Wolfman, and Shooter continued in the position under Wolfman’s successors Gerry Conway and Archie Goodwin. When Goodwin resigned in late 1977, Shooter was promoted to editor-in-chief.

By all accounts, Marvel’s editorial operations were an organizational disaster area when Shooter took over. The line had exploded over the previous decade. With the titles cover-dated 1966, at the height of the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, the company, under Lee’s editorship, put out 216 publications. In 1972, Lee became publisher, and Roy Thomas became editor-in-chief. During 1973—Thomas’ first full year in the job—the company turned out 563 publications, and stayed at roughly that number through 1977. However, for all the company’s growth, the size and structure of the editorial staff hadn’t changed much. There was an editor-in-chief and an associate editor (or their equivalent), along with a few editorial assistants who handled proofreading and other minor duties. There had been some efforts over the years to relieve the increasing strain on the two-person editorial set-up. One was the creation in 1974 of a separate editor for the black-and-white magazine line. The other was the establishment in 1974 of the writer-editor position for outgoing editors-in-chief and a couple of others. (The writer-editors were responsible for the editorial work on the titles they scripted.) But it wasn’t anywhere near enough. There was next to no oversight on the line. In mostly bad ways, a laissez-faire editorial atmosphere reigned. While some of the material was strikingly imaginative, much of it was poorly crafted. With a number of titles, the stories had become inaccessible due to convoluted storylines and flashy though opaque art. Production demands, though, meant not much could be done, and material was being sent to the printer almost immediately after arriving in the office. Worse, printing deadlines were being missed left and right, at considerable expense. The comics themselves had been losing money for years. Had it not been for the success of the Star Wars movie adaptation and a licensed comic featuring the band KISS, the comics publishing operation might very well have been shuttered by the end of 1977. The pressures of the editor-in-chief position were overwhelming, and it had become a revolving door. When Shooter began in the job in 1978, he was the sixth editor-in-chief in less than four years.

Shooter conquered the logistical, editorial, and economic challenges. By the end of 1978, Marvel, for the first time ever, was on schedule with its printer. During his first three years, Shooter gradually overhauled the structure of the comics editorial operations. The writer-editor position had always been a bad idea—it’s a maxim of the publishing world that no one should be their own editor—and by the end of 1980, it was history. In early 1981, Shooter had the structure he wanted fully in place. Instead of an editor-in-chief, an associate editor, and a handful of editorial assistants, the traditional comics line was managed by five group editors—each with an assistant editor—who worked under Shooter’s supervision. At the time, each of the group editors oversaw approximately 75 new comics a year. It was a far more manageable number, and it allowed them to take a greater interest in the creative direction and execution of the titles they supervised. Scripts and art were given far more scrutiny. There was a much greater emphasis given to crafting individual issues into satisfying reads. Distracting visual flash was discouraged in favor of clear narrative cartooning. Shooter took it upon himself to train new writers and artists in the principles of comics storytelling. The “Little Miss Muffet” nursery rhyme was his favorite tool for explicating story structure, and his preferred text for demonstrating the basics of visual storytelling was a 1963 Human Torch story drawn by Jack Kirby. The company’s output became considerably more accessible, and sales turned around. By 1981, no newsstand-distributed title sold below 100,000 copies per issue, and several had sell-through rates in excess of 50 percent. (Traditional newsstand distribution is done on a returnable basis, and 30 percent sell-through is generally required to break even.) Under Shooter, the company was enjoying the best sales it had seen since the 1960s.

Shooter also took it upon himself to improve the compensation of creators. His attitude was probably best summed up by these statements at the 1981 San Diego Comicon:

I feel that you don’t pay artists and writers, you invest money; and the more you invest, the happier people are, the more secure they are, and the more able they are to devote themselves entirely to [their work] […] in my position I can go and I can fight and I can get money for them. So that’s what I’m going to do. (TCJ 68, p.63)

It has not been reported by exactly how much, but it’s accepted that shortly after he took over Shooter substantially increased page rates for creators. He stated under oath in 1986 that up-front scriptwriting rates at Marvel had tripled during his tenure (TCJ 115, p. 81). In August of 1979, he instituted a bonus system based on the number of consecutive issues completed on a series assignment (click here). Later that year, he instituted a character-creation plan that gave creators an ongoing financial interest in any new character or property they created for the company (TCJ 54, p. 13). In December of 1981, Shooter established a royalty bonus plan for scriptwriters, pencilers, and inkers for comics issues selling in excess of 100,000 copies (TCJ 70, pp. 10-12). Since all newsstand series titles were then selling in those numbers, every one of these creators at Marvel would see royalties for their work. Daredevil was Marvel’s top-selling title for the first month of the program, and writer-penciler Frank Miller received a $6000 royalty for that month’s issue. A sliding scale was later introduced, and under it, John Byrne received a $30,000 bonus for writing, penciling, and inking the first issue of Alpha Flight in 1983. Several Marvel-based creators began enjoying affluent income levels. Shooter testified under oath in 1986 that scriptwriters Chris Claremont and Bill Mantlo respectively earned $230,000 and $120,000 from Marvel in 1985 (TCJ 115, p. 104). Long-time comics artist Bernie Wrightson summed up the improved business situation in a 1982 interview: “[Marvel has] gotten a hell of a lot more reasonable in recent years. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve heard about the new contracts that Marvel is offering, but these things are just dreamy” (TCJ 76, p. 109).

Several of Shooter’s detractors note that character-creation and sales royalty plans had already been established at DC Comics before Marvel instituted them. This is accurate, but to denigrate Shooter’s achievements in setting up these policies displays an obtuse ignorance of business realities. Gary Groth, for one, has acknowledged that in 1980 Marvel’s sales were as much as every other U. S. comics publisher combined (TCJ 60, p. 63). No business in that position is going to play follow the leader with a competitor unless it is already inclined to institute the policy. With the sales royalty plan, it was put in place one month after DC’s. Shooter claimed that he had designed it and gotten it approved in principle shortly after becoming editor-in-chief in 1978 (TCJ 70, p. 10). There’s every reason to believe him. Such a policy could easily cost Marvel hundreds of thousands if not millions a year up front. At the time, Marvel was a division of a publicly traded company, and there is no way a policy of that sort could be designed and approved within a month in that environment. I again note that every Marvel newsstand title had high enough sales for creators to be eligible for the royalty plan. Less than a quarter of DC’s line was eligible for theirs, and people at Marvel knew it. This was going to have a far greater impact on Marvel’s short-term bottom line than it would on DC’s. It seems a miracle that Shooter was ever able to put it in place.

[Added 1/23/2013: Click here for additional information about the history of Marvel's sales royalty policies with regard to publications featuring company-owned properties. While DC was the first to include the traditional periodicals under such a policy, it was only after Marvel instituted sales royalties with the Euro-style graphic novels featuring company-owned characters.]

Shooter also took advantage of changes in the publishing environment to diversify Marvel’s output.

In 1978, revisions to the copyright law took effect that made creator ownership of publishing properties a more workable option. The copyright law had previously contained what was known as the indivisibility doctrine. It held that all rights inherent in copyright were indivisible and could not be individually assigned to a publisher to either license or protect from infringement. Only the copyright owner could authorize individual licenses to, for example, foreign publishers, film producers, or toy manufacturers. Diversified licensing programs had always been a key part of comics publishing. With the most successful properties it was where most of the money was made, and it has traditionally allowed for comics to even be published at a loss. As such, it is undesirable (and in many instances untenable) for a publisher not to acquire the licensing rights to a property. Before 1978, the only way to do this was for the publisher to own the property outright. The new copyright law, though, allowed the author or authors to retain the copyright while assigning the licensing rights to the publisher. Shooter and Marvel immediately took advantage of the change to develop and publish Epic Illustrated magazine, which debuted in 1980. It was a slick, high-production-value anthology that was all but entirely made up of author-owned material. And it was just the first step in this direction.

Concurrently, the comics-store fan market, which offered non-returnable distribution terms, had grown to the point where sales in it alone could be enough to make a publication profitable. With the losses from returns out of the equation, the sales threshold for profitability was significantly lowered, and Shooter and Marvel took advantage of this on many fronts. There was considerable experimentation with non-traditional publications, including ones with higher production values, author-owned material, and unusual creative directions. Creatively idiosyncratic company-owned titles that were losing money in the newsstand market were moved to exclusive comics-store distribution. A graphic-novel line, modeled on the European comics-album format, was launched in 1981. It was divided evenly between company- and author-owned titles. Handsomely produced serialized reprints of the company’s high points from the 1960s and ‘70s began publication in 1982. That year also saw the debut of the Epic Comics line, which focused on author-owned comics series. The Epic contracts were perhaps the most author-friendly in the field during the 1980s. Among other things, they were fixed-term agreements, rather than, for lack of a better description, the conditional-perpetuity ones used by Fantagraphics and others. (A fixed-term contract is one in which the publishing license exists for a predetermined amount of time. A conditional-perpetuity contract is one in which the publisher keeps the license for as long as the material remains in print or otherwise generates income.) There was an effort to start a high-quality illustrated book line in 1983. In 1984, Shooter and Marvel became the first to collect and reprint popular comics storylines as stand-alone trade paperbacks with X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga and Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle. The practice is now the foundation of comics publishing in North America. (Material from comic-book series had of course been collected in book format before this, but only as anthologies that either compiled the series from the beginning or featured arbitrarily selected material. Book collections of distinct storylines had no precedent.) Marvel under Shooter exploited the opportunities the non-returnable marketplace offered to its fullest, and the result was one of the most striking diversifications of a publishing line ever seen.

Jim Shooter set the stage, and the results were impressive. Six projects–Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War, Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again, Bernie Wrightson’s The Illustrated Frankenstein, J. M. DeMatteis and Jon J Muth’s Moonshadow, and a graphic-novel series collecting the work of the French cartoonist Moebius–were the most impressive the company had published since Kirby and Ditko’s peak efforts with Stan Lee in the 1960s. There are over a dozen other offerings that can easily hold their own with the best of everything else from the ‘60s and ‘70s. These efforts, in roughly chronological order, include Miller and Klaus Janson’s Daredevil, Sienkiewicz and Doug Moench’s Moon Knight, John Byrne’s The Fantastic Four, Bruce Jones and Brent Anderson’s Ka-Zar, Miller and Chris Claremont’s Wolverine, Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar, Walt Simonson’s Thor, Rick Veitch’s Heartburst, Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s Starstruck, Louise Simonson and June Brigman’s Power Pack, Claremont and Sienkiewicz’s The New Mutants, Sergio Aragonés’ Groo the Wanderer, Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest, Claremont and John Bolton’s “Vignettes” series in Classic X-Men, and Doug Murray and Michael Golden’s The ‘Nam. Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men run is technically a carryover from Archie Goodwin’s tenure, but it belongs on this list as well. This is all “a wasteland of formulaic self-imitation”? Please.

Shooter’s publishing achievements at Marvel were considerable, but that doesn’t stop his detractors from attempting to belittle them. The diversification of Marvel’s publishing line is disparaged by highlighting that other publishers broke the ground for the new formats before Marvel. Epic Illustrated was simply following the lead of National Lampoon’s Heavy Metal. Eclipse Comics was the first U. S. publisher to produce European-style albums. Pacific Comics was the first post-1978 publisher to offer full-color author-owned adventure-comics series. The response to this, again, is to remember that Marvel’s market share was at least as much as all its competitors put together. Again, they were not going to play follow the leader with any competitor unless they were inclined to do these things regardless. And none of these efforts from other publishers were successful enough to prompt copycat efforts as a matter of course. Just look at DC, by far Marvel’s biggest rival. There was no attempt to do anything comparable to Epic Illustrated. The company’s ventures into European-style comics albums were half-hearted at best. Their alleged efforts with author-owned comics projects were a sham.

Sean Howe, in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, effectively states that the Epic Comics imprint was started in response to DC Comics’ acquisition of Frank Miller’s Ronin, which was announced in February of 1982:

But Frank Miller’s deal with DC had made waves. At Marvel’s monthly press conference in May [of 1982], Jim Shooter announced that a newly formed division of the company, called Epic Comics, would allow for artists and writers to retain not just a percentage of the sales, but also ownership of their creations. Jim Starlin, who hadn’t drawn a regular series since Warlock, was the first to sign up. (p. 248)

I like Howe’s book overall, but one flaw is his weakness for glib “after this, therefore because of this” narrative constructions. This description of the creation of the Epic Comics line is not accurate. Ronin did play a role in the creation of the Epic line, but not in the way Howe presents it. According to Shooter (click here), the idea for the Epic imprint came when Starlin, Miller, and Walt Simonson came to him as a group and proposed that each do an author-owned comic-book series for Marvel. Starlin would do Dreadstar, Miller would do Ronin, and Simonson would do Star Slammers. Starlin told me Epic Illustrated editor Archie Goodwin “was a major force in those discussions.” And though Starlin doesn’t recall Miller and Ronin being part of the talks, Miller was definitely in negotiations to do Ronin through Epic. As Miller said in a 1985 interview, Ronin “almost accompanied Dreadstar as one of the first Epic comics” (TCJ 101, p. 71). It’s just that before negotiations were completed, DC publisher Jenette Kahn apparently offered a more lucrative advance, thereby convincing him to bring it to DC.

Howe also constructs that paragraph in a way that suggests Marvel acquired the Dreadstar series after announcing the new imprint. Epic wasn’t like DC’s Piranha Press, where the imprint was announced and projects to be published through it were sought afterward. Not only was Epic set up in part to specifically publish Dreadstar, Starlin actually signed with Marvel before the May press conference. The Dreadstar acquisition and the establishment of the Epic imprint were announced at the same time (TCJ 74, p. 14).

More importantly, the Ronin deal was significantly different than the ones for author-owned titles at Epic. Creators at Epic retained far more rights. The late Dick Giordano was at the time DC’s executive editor, which was roughly the equivalent of Shooter’s editor-in-chief position. In 1987, he publicly discussed the specifics of the Ronin contract (TCJ 119, p. 84). Judging from his statements, it wasn’t, like at Epic, a fixed-term agreement. It wasn’t even a conditional-perpetuity agreement. There is no reversion clause in the Ronin contract, although Miller may have been offered one retroactively. (Giordano believed Miller chose not to sign it.) Miller technically owns the copyright, but that’s it. As Giordano said, “No, the copyright [for Ronin] doesn’t mean anything […] it’s 100% cosmetic.” DC has the rights to Ronin in perpetuity. The company is even able to employ other creators to produce spin-off comics if Miller isn’t interested. At Epic, the creators were free to take the property elsewhere after the publishing term expired. (The one for Dreadstar was at most four years.) The contracts also did not allow Epic to do Before Watchmen-type projects over those creators’ objections. For all practical purposes, DC Comics owns Ronin. Miller’s copyright is just a fig leaf. With Starlin and the other creators of author-copyrighted material at Epic, their ownership was the real thing.

Gary Groth has argued against the publishing achievement of the best projects Marvel put out under Shooter:

One way of measuring a publisher’s commitment to furthering comics as art—and his parallel commitment to the dignity and intelligence of his constituency—is to determine roughly what percentage of his publishing activity reflects such a commitment versus the percentage that reflects his need to satisfy his accountant […] One would have to be particularly naïve to see a couple—or a handful—of titles buried under a standard of mediocrity as representing anything other than sheer dumb luck. (TCJ 117, p. 6)

Figuring percentages may be a “way of measuring” career achievements in the arts, but it’s not a method that carries much weight–nor should it. Artists, authors, and publishers are ultimately judged by the quality of their best efforts, not by the ratio of good work to bad or mediocre. As an example, let me point to none other than Gary Groth himself. Personally, I think Fantagraphics, which Groth co-owns, has a pretty fair claim to being the best comics publisher in North America over the last thirty years. This is despite the fact that a substantial portion of Fantagraphics’ output has been the money-grubbing pornographic sludge published through its Eros imprint. Fantagraphics even operated partnered with a phone-sex service under the Eros brand. On top of that, there’s the considerable volume of amateurish to mediocre material Fantagraphics has published outside of Eros. Does all this discredit Fantagraphics’ achievement in publishing work by Charles Schulz, Chris Ware, Jacques Tardi, Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, and so many other accomplished cartoonists? Hardly. It’s beside the point. Fantagraphics is considered a good publisher on the basis of the good work it has published, not the ratio of good work to bad.

Groth also overlooks that Shooter was functioning in a preexisting situation, and one prone by its nature to complacency and preserving the status quo. Marvel was (and is) a corporate entity where the people with the most authority tend to have little or no time for aesthetic considerations, and, as it was part of a publicly traded company, bottom-line considerations were an overriding factor as a matter of course. Shooter did not have the ability to unilaterally authorize an acquisition or cancellation; the final decisions were made by Marvel president James Galton and, later on, vice-president in charge of publishing Michael Hobson. At its core, Marvel is a publisher of pulp-adventure comics, and that’s not going to change no matter who is at its editorial helm.

What matters in such a situation is the editor-in-chief’s capacity to successfully deviate from the path of least resistance. To determine that, one should consider how Shooter’s tenure compares to those of the editors-in-chief who preceded and followed him. Consider the list of material above. Marvel under Shooter was not only more vital aesthetically than it was under any other editor-in-chief from Roy Thomas through Axel Alonso, it was probably more vital than under all those editors-in-chief combined. However, if Groth (or anyone else) wants to argue that Marvel was a more impressive publisher under, say, Marv Wolfman or Bob Harras, I’ll be more than happy to hear the case made.

As for the “sheer dumb luck” claim, I note that unlike, say, the Lee, Kirby, and Ditko collaborations at Marvel in the ‘60s, the very best material under Shooter by and large isn’t stuff that just happened to show up in a decades-old newsprint line. Five of the six best projects named above were the result of contracts and publishing formats that were set up for the purpose of cultivating and supporting that sort of work. The projects couldn’t have been published otherwise.

Moving on to Jim Shooter’s individual generosity with creators and smaller publishers, here are a few examples:

–For a token fee, Shooter granted Gary Groth and Fantagraphics a license to print as much material as they wanted from the X-Men comic-book series for use in a two-volume interview collection called The X-Men Companion. Shooter also directed Marvel’s production staff to shoot all the photostats from the comics that Fantagraphics requested. These were provided free of charge. It was no small amount of art, either. About half the space in the two 100+ page books was taken up with reprinted panels. It was way beyond what would be permitted under fair use.

–Shooter also hired Groth and Fantagraphics to typeset the complete Mary Shelley text for Bernie Wrightson’s The Illustrated Frankenstein. This was despite Fantagraphics having no experience with typesetting projects for other companies, as well as the fact that Marvel was perfectly capable of doing the job in-house.

–Howard Cruse had contributed a series of Barefootz stories to Marvel’s short-lived Comix Book magazine in the mid-1970s. Marvel, though, had kept the copyrights. According to Cruse, Shooter “cleared the way for me to regain the rights to the stories I had drawn.” (Click here.) Thanks to Shooter, Cruse was able to publish the stories through Renegade Press in 1986. Shooter even granted the use of Marvel’s trademarked Comix Book logo for the cover.

–Shooter did a similar favor for Chris Claremont and John Bolton with Marada the She-Wolf. Their initial story originally featured the Red Sonja character, but when a rights question arose with the Robert E. Howard licensor, they came up with Marada, a new character, to replace her. The story was done as work-made-for-hire, and Marvel owned all rights. Shooter allowed the two to buy back the story, and he gave them the rights to the Marada character along with it. Claremont publicly thanked Shooter for, in the words of The Comics Journal’s reporter, his “fair-mindedness and magnanimity” (TCJ 67, p. 17). It was the first comics character in which Claremont had an ownership stake. Claremont and Bolton went on to publish a series of Marada stories in Epic Illustrated. These were later collected in a Marvel Graphic Novel edition.

–Shooter was occasionally able to grant greater rights retroactively with the company-owned characters writers and artists had created. To pick one example, John Byrne had created the Alpha Flight characters before Marvel’s character-creation participation plan was introduced. In 1983, in conjunction with the debut of a monthly Alpha Flight series, Shooter arranged for the Alpha Flight characters to be retroactively covered by the plan. Byrne retains a financial interest in Alpha Flight to this day.

–When Marvel’s Epic imprint published Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest, Shooter agreed to let the license be for specific material and not the property as a whole. The Pinis were allowed to concurrently publish a competing Elfquest series, Siege at Blue Mountain, through Apple Comics. Further, they were allowed to promote the competing series in the pages of the Epic title.

–After Marvel’s lawyers sent cartoonist/publisher Dave Sim a cease-and-desist letter for cover-featuring a Wolverine parody on three successive Cerebus issues, Shooter arranged to license the character to Sim for one dollar. This cleared the way for Sim to reprint the issues as part of the Church & State, Volume One Cerebus collection. Shooter also helped promote Cerebus by authorizing a series of new, full-color Cerebus stories by Sim and his collaborator Gerhard in Epic Illustrated.

Shooter is well known for being generous with his time when it comes to novice creators. Frank Miller had this to say about his dealings with Shooter when starting out:

Because [Shooter] liked my work, he spent hours with me, on job after job, never bending his point of view an inch. It was, for me, the first time I had ever heard the word “storytelling” used to mean the use of words and pictures to convey information. Until then, I had heard it used primarily to describe visual tricks […] from this I gained a firm grasp of certain essentials of story structure and storytelling. It gave me a logical base from which I was able to build and develop less traditional works […] his contribution to my work is undeniable […] (TCJ 101, p. 70)

Chester Brown, the celebrated author of the graphic novels I Never Liked You and Louis Riel, was a wannabe adventure-comics artist in the late 1970s. In 1990, he gave this account of his 1979 experience with Shooter:

I went back down [to New York a second time], and this time the Marvel method had changed of looking at portfolios. I left my portfolio there and I figured it was going to be the same thing again — you left your portfolio overnight. Only the next day, when I went in, they didn’t hand it back and say, “No.” Jim Shooter came out with the portfolio and went through the portfolio with me, telling me what he thought of the different things […] He was at that point editor-in-chief. So the top guy in the company came out and spent his time with some unknown artist who had just come in. That kind of surprised me and impressed me. He was very nice. (TCJ #135, pp. 75-76)

Both accounts are typical of what one hears about Shooter from aspiring talent or established creators describing their tyro experiences.

To review, Jim Shooter vastly improved the business situation for creators who worked on Marvel’s company-owned properties. He set up publishing venues at Marvel for author-owned material, and the contracts for those were the most author-friendly in the field. Formats with higher production values were introduced, which helped expand the range of what creators could do. He did business favors for creators regardless of whether they worked for Marvel or not. He also did favors for smaller publishers. And he has a history of going out of his way to help beginning talent with learning their craft. Shooter was far from “the enemy of creators.” He did more positive things for them than any other editor or publisher of the time. Those efforts paved the way for some of the most accomplished material put out by a North American comics publisher during his tenure. His status as an industry pariah seems deeply unjust.

In Part Two: Shooter’s conflicts with individual creators and Marvel staffers, as well as a discussion of his testimony in the Fleisher v. Ellison case.

In Part Three: The Jack Kirby original-art controversy.

The talk of many in the comics community this past week has been Eddie Campbell’s essay “The Literaries,” which was posted at tcj.com on February 6. The main target was Ng Suat Tong and his essay criticizing the EC Comics line, but most have taken it–and I think correctly–as an attack on the perceived values of The Hooded Utilitarian and its contributors. (Calling us “The Literaries” is a step up for Eddie; he used to refer to us as “jackals.”) His arguments are nothing new. He combines an angry defense of comics-cultist insularity with a broadside against those who look at comics through the prism of a broader interest in the arts. It’s the sort of thing that used to be directed at The Comics Journal by superhero fans during the magazine’s first two decades. I suppose it’s only poetic justice that the publication is happily promoting such a screed now. Things have come full circle, and TCJ has undoubtedly become what it once beheld, although I don’t think even the most obtuse superhero fan stooped to claim that good stories were irrelevant to good comics. Arguing with comics-cultist solipsism is something I’ve done a lot of, and I know from experience that it’s a quixotic undertaking. However, Eddie’s essay does offer the opportunity to clarify a few things. Given some of the commentary it has sparked, I’d say taking that opportunity is the best move.

Eddie’s opening paragraph is a masterpiece of misconceptions. I’m actually impressed at how many comics-cultist fallacies he managed to pack into just over a hundred words:

In the wake of the comics medium’s forty-year hike to serious acceptance, the chances are that now a person won’t get laughed out the room for putting them on a par with Literature. The flipside of the medium having gained this kind of recognition is that it has also acquired a new species of critic who demands that comics be held to the standards of LITERATURE. Since the invasion of these literaries, I have been observing a tendency to ask the question: if this weren’t a comic would it stand up? Would the story be any good if it were prose and in competition with the rest of the world’s prose? If we take away all these damn pictures, would the stuff that is left be worth a hoot?

Eddie appears in the grip of the same delusion that afflicts a number of comics cultists. They assume because a handful of contemporary comics efforts have received the respect of the larger culture, that means the comics medium as a whole is now viewed with the same respect. I’m sorry, but no. Claims that comics are now on a par with literature still deserve to get one laughed out of the room. The opinion that comics can begin to measure up to just the last century of literature is utterly absurd, and deserves to be treated as such by any moderately erudite and discriminating reader. To the extent anything has changed, an outside reader might be more inclined to give a comics effort the benefit of the doubt now. That’s all, and it’s not much.

Comics have also not acquired a new breed of highfalutin critic as a result of any “recognition.” I can only speak for myself, but I suspect my circumstances are similar to Suat’s and Noah Berlatsky’s and most other critics whom Eddie would likely include among “The Literaries.” I’m a long-time comics reader who also has an abiding interest in other fields, in my case fiction, poetry, fine art, and film. I’ve continued to follow comics because there are comics creators, such as Eddie, who produce work I find worthwhile. I enjoy thinking and writing about what I read, and that extends to comics. I don’t bring the “standards of LITERATURE” or any other snooty metric by which to judge material. All I ask is that I be reasonably entertained, and my tastes are pretty eclectic. I don’t care whether something is a superhero comic, young-adult adventure fiction, or a Clint Eastwood western, or, for that matter, a Tolstoy novel, a Jean-Luc Godard film, or lyric poetry from 13th-century Italy. If I find it reasonably engaging and I choose to write about it, I’ll treat it favorably. The flip side is that if I don’t like something, and I choose to write about it, I’ll treat it unfavorably. Again, I can’t speak for Suat, Noah, or other critics Eddie may have in mind with his essay, but I suspect their motives are about the same.

One aspect of being a critic with diverse interests who writes about comics is that you easily can find yourself at odds with the old breed of highfalutin comics critics. These are the ignorant (or insensible) blowhard cultists who liken Jack Kirby to Homer or identify Jaime Hernandez with Marcel Proust and roman-fleuve fiction. They’re essentially name-droppers, and one of their favorite platitudes is that comics are the equal of other artistic fields. Their fellow comics cultists don’t get after them for this nonsense for at least two reasons. One is that this cohort doesn’t know much of anything about, say, Homer or Proust, or work in other media in general. As such, they’re not in a position to argue. The other is that this foolishness flatters their tastes, which is the only interest critical writing really has for them. But if one is familiar with the outside artists in question, or is willing to ask the logical question that if comics are the equal of other fields, then how do its best works compare, it is hard not to call out this sort of thing. However, one is not going to endear oneself to the comics-cultist cohort by doing so. Their tastes are extremely bound up with their self-esteem. As such, they take arguments that Kirby or whomever should be treated with a more discriminating perspective as a personal attack. Worse, they often act as if the silliness you’re calling out never happened, which leads them to erroneously take you to task for making pompous, pretentious comparisons.

One can see this at work in Eddie’s essay. The question that Suat is implicitly starting with in his EC piece is that if this material is among the best this medium-that-is-the-equal-of-all-others has to offer, then how does it stack up when considered against the best work outside comics? He begins with the Harvey Kurtzman-edited Mad, generally considered the peak book of the EC line and arguably the field’s greatest humor effort, and he observes that compared to the most accomplished comedy material from other fields—work ranging from Aristophanes to Monty Python—the achievement of the individual Mad pieces is relatively modest. This is not to say that Suat does not respect Kurtzman and Mad. If he didn’t, would he have included this sentence in his article?

Harvey Kurtzman was undeniably a master of the form and the influence of Mad on American and European artists is inestimable.

That seems pretty laudatory to me. Eddie, though, only sees Suat’s call for perspective, and he interprets it as a dismissal of Kurtzman and Mad altogether. He mischaracterizes Suat’s position with this rhetorical question: “Since we already have Aristophanes, who needs Kurtzman?” He then goes on to sneer at Suat as a haughtily pretentious snob, one who “while[s] away his lunch hour with the immortals on Parnassus.” He seems entirely oblivious to the fact that the claptrap he appears to have unquestioningly swallowed–that comics are “on a par with Literature”–is what Suat was actually criticizing, at least relative to the EC comics line.

Moving back to the more general aspects of Eddie’s argument, he claims that we “Literaries” are demanding that comics be evaluated in a way that excludes consideration of their pictorial content. All we’re interested in are the words. Um, wow. That’s a straw man if there ever was one. (Sorry, Heidi, but it is what it is.) If Eddie or anyone else can point to a critic in our cohort who has argued that the pictures in a comic aren’t at least as important a textual element as the verbal matter, I welcome the link.

However, Eddie doesn’t really develop that line of attack. (Which is probably for the best, as it’s completely ridiculous.) He just shifts gears to claim that we “Literaries” have an inappropriate preoccupation with evaluating comics as stories. We’re applying “irrelevant criteria” by doing so. In Eddie’s view, the proper criteria are those that celebrate isolated flourishes without regard to the greater whole. And he provides examples: the sophisticated temporal construction of a single-image sex gag by Harvey Kurtzman; the energetic design of a costumed-character fight sequence by Jack Kirby; the gritty detail of a Jack Davis panel depicting a dead soldier slumped over his machine gun. For Eddie, the strength or weakness of the larger narratives these incidental bits contribute to is not germane. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Eddie feels the only purpose of the larger narratives is to give the cartoonists an excuse for showing some flash.

That’s right, folks. If you’re reading a comic for the overarching story, and judge it by how effectively it tells that story, or even to what extent that story is worth telling at all, then in the view of Eddie Campbell (and Dan Nadel and Kim Thompson and Jeet Heer and Tom Spurgeon and Heidi MacDonald and numerous others), you’re reading and judging it wrong.

Part of me just wants to point to Eddie’s article and its reception among the comics-cultist crowd as Exhibit A as to why none of these people should be taken the least bit seriously as critics ever again. They’re of course entitled to their enjoyments, but they are so preoccupied with their abstruse little fixations that they seem completely divorced from the impulse that guides people to becoming audiences for cartoonists and other storytellers in the first place. The reason I can’t entirely dismiss the essay is because I’ve seen similar arguments in a field outside of comics, where they’ve been around for six decades and don’t appear to be going away. They can be found in film criticism, where they are a key part of the auteur theory.

For those not familiar with it, the auteur theory has its roots in the criticism François Truffaut wrote before he became a filmmaker himself. Andrew Sarris popularized the aesthetic in the United States during the 1960s. It is frequently misunderstood as an argument that the director should always be considered the author of the film. What Truffaut and Sarris were actually arguing was more or less the opposite. In their view, the director is not always the author of the film. With some films the screenwriter should be considered the author, or an actor should be considered the author, and so on. The best films, though, are directors’ films, which are films where the directors do not subordinate themselves to the screenplays. They instead use the screenplay as a taking off point for their own vision. In practice, as Pauline Kael noted, this amounted to “shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots” (I Lost It at the Movies, p. 303). From the standpoint of an auteur critic, writer-directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Billy Wilder, and Stanley Kubrick (until Barry Lyndon) were second-rate filmmakers. They were concerned with realizing their screenplays as best they could, rather than using the scripts as a starting point for something else. A first-rate film director was someone such as John Ford or Howard Hawks, for whom the screenplays, at least in the eyes of the auteur critics, were beside the point. (Contemporary auteur-critic favorites include Joe Wright, Clint Eastwood, and Andrew Dominik.)

Sarris trumpeted the rise of the auteur theory as the burgeoning triumph of visual aesthetic values over literary ones. In a laudatory 1963 review of the Otto Preminger film The Cardinal, he declared:

The primarily visual critics will hail it and the primarily literary critics will deplore it. […] If I side with the visual critics on Preminger, it is because we are in the midst of a visual revolution which the literary establishment is apparently ignoring if not actively resisting (Confessions of a Cultist, p. 111).

Sarris’s contemporary Dwight Macdonald, who had no use for the auteur theory, didn’t think much of The Cardinal. In his view, it was “stupid,” “in dubious taste,” and “trashy” (On Movies, pp. 155-156). His rejoinder to Sarris’s declaration above was especially memorable:

I promise to cease my resistance to the Visual Revolution, turn in my membership card in the Literary Establishment, and consider all future works of Mr. Preminger entirely in ocular terms–20/20 critical vision–as soon as he gives us a movie without plot or dialogue (p. 157).

With that, Macdonald pretty much sums up my feelings about the critical attitudes of Eddie and his fellow travelers. When a cartoonist gives us a comic without a story–Andrei Molotiu’s work is a good example–I’ll be happy to discuss it entirely in terms of its visuals. But if, like Kirby or Kurtzman or even Eddie Campbell, the cartoonist is presenting us with a story, I’m going to treat the visuals as part of a means to an end which happens to be that story’s realization. And one of the first questions I’m going to ask is how well it has rewarded my engagement relative to other comics, and work in other media as well. If Eddie considers that “inappropriate criteria,” that’s his problem, not mine.

There is a certain irony about Eddie’s piece. I cannot think of another English-language cartoonist who has done more to translate literary form and technique into comics terms. With “Graffiti Kitchen,” he did a superb job of realizing the comics equivalent of the personal essay à la Henry Miller; the interplay of exposition, absurdist commentary, and the evolving tropes that unify the material are nothing less than masterful. The Fate of the Artist, to pick another example, just as brilliantly incorporates strategies derived from postmodern literary theory. From Hell, “The Birth Caul,” and “Snakes and Ladders,” his collaborations with Alan Moore, certainly appear to be trying to compete with literary work on literary work’s terms. “The Literaries,” as Eddie calls us, would seem the natural audience for his comics, and several contributors here at The Hooded Utilitarian, including myself, consider his material, both on his own and with Alan Moore, among their favorite comics of all. One would think we’d be the last critics he would attack.

In closing, I suppose Eddie is like François Truffaut, whose efforts at filmmaking were often far removed from his critical attitudes. In films such as The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and The Wild Child, he didn’t treat the story material as a springboard for something else; he engaged with his content and realized it with an extraordinary richness. Dwight Macdonald, thinking of the chasm between Truffaut’s criticism and his better films, once wrote, “I prefer him as a director” (On Movies, p. 305). My attitude towards Eddie is much the same: I prefer him as a cartoonist.

Pauline Kael

Andrew Sarris

In the recent discussions of issues raised by the Eddie Campbell essay “The Literaries,” the subject of the auteur theory of film has come up. I thought it would be of interest for people to hear what Pauline Kael (1919-2001), arguably the United States’ most prominent film critic, had to say about it.

In the Spring 1963 issue of Film Quarterly, Kael published a lengthy, detailed attack on auteurism and its proponents titled “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris.” The essay was primarily a rebuttal of the Andrew Sarris article “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” which had appeared in the Winter 1962 issue of Film Culture. Kael also took on a number of other peers who reflected Sarris’ thinking and articulated her views on criticism in general. The essay was reprinted in her 1965 collection I Lost It at the Movies. Truncated versions of the piece have also been published in a number of film-criticism anthologies. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in film criticism, and I personally think it’s one of the key pieces of English-language arts criticism of the last century.

Unfortunately, the full essay is not particularly easy to come by these days. I Lost It at the Movies has long been out of print in the United States. (A British edition is occasionally available, although usually at a premium. [Note: The British publisher, Marion Boyars, went out of business in 2009, but not before their backlist inventory was purchased for distribution. Copies, for a time, are more or less in print in the U. S. right now. See comments.]) The article was not included in either of the two career anthologies to date of Kael’s work, For Keeps (1994) and The Age of Movies (2011). It may have been omitted out of deference to Sarris. Kael didn’t meet him until a few years after the essay was published. She found that he carried a grudge over it and didn’t want anything to do with her personally. They were able to come together on some professional matters–among other things, they helped co-found the National Society of Film Critics in 1966–but they never reconciled. This reportedly bothered Kael a good deal. When asked about him in interviews, her practice became to say that while they had different tastes and disagreed about many things, she enjoyed his writing and greatly respected his passion and perceptions. She also chose not to reprint the essay in the For Keeps collection. Whether the editor of The Age of Movies left it out to respect her wishes, I do not know.

The audiofile below, which runs almost 55 minutes, is a recording of a lecture Kael gave at San Fernando Valley State College in 1963. After some introductory statements, the speech is a reading of the complete “Circles and Squares” essay.

Pauline Kael on the Auteur Theory (mp3)

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First off, my apologies for the long delay since the first part of this series on Jim Shooter’s tenure as Marvel editor-in-chief.

For those interested in reading the first part, click here.

We’re going to be rolling out the rest of the series piecemeal. The second part is proving so lengthy that it will be published in multiple installments as they’re completed. To give an idea of just how big the second part of the series will be, this first installment, which covers Shooter’s time at Marvel before he became editor-in-chief, runs approximately 7000 words.

I expect to get these out on a much more frequent basis than the gap between this post and the initial one would suggest. Wish me luck.

The first part of the series discussed Shooter’s tenure in terms of its publishing history and its general business policies with regard to the creative personnel. I would hope it was a resounding rebuttal to the characterization of Shooter’s tenure as “a wasteland of formulaic self-imitation” (Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, p. 204). I would also hope that it largely refuted the general characterization of Shooter himself as “the enemy of creators” (Gary Groth, The Comics Journal #174, p. 17).

The series’ remaining sections will discuss the specifics of the latter.

I begin by noting that Groth’s characterization, which many have echoed, has nothing to do with Shooter’s extraordinarily progressive strides with regard to publishing opportunities and compensation practices at Marvel. It primarily has to do with anecdotal conflicts Shooter or Marvel had with individual creators and staffers.

The reason I state “or Marvel” is to highlight that in some instances the conflicts were not with Shooter himself. Rather, many were with company policies such as the mandatory signing of a blanket work-made-for-hire contract in order to work on company-owned properties. Others were with decisions made by Marvel personnel such as president James Galton. One example is the company’s dealings with Jack Kirby during the controversy over the return of Kirby’s 1960s original art. However, as Shooter was the face of the company to the comics community, Shooter ended up shouldering the responsibility for these conflicts in the community’s eyes.

There are also the several creators who left Marvel without conflict during Shooter’s tenure. However, by accident or design, commentators have included their departures in discussions of the people who actually did leave because of problems with Shooter. In these instances, Shooter is made the villain in situations where there was no villain to be had.

Additionally, as can be seen in the current post, certain individuals left Marvel because of conflicts with editorial staffers other than Shooter, but these conflicts were erroneously attributed to Shooter later on.

With the people who did leave because of conflicts with Shooter, they tend to fall into three categories. The biggest group is made up of creators who resented editorial supervision of their work on company-owned properties. The second group is staffers who resented policy changes that accompanied Shooter’s restructuring of the editorial department’s operations during his first three years as company editor-in-chief. And, of course, there are others who left for reasons that were unique to their personal circumstances. Shooter ran Marvel’s editorial operations for over nine years, and was an editor there for two years before that. In his last year at the company, the office staff numbered over 60, and the freelancer pool included over 300. It’s inconceivable that any supervisor wouldn’t have had at least some conflicts given the amount of time and number of people involved.

One should also consider the emotional maturity of a number of the staffers and freelancers as well. The late Kim Thompson, who actively covered the business during the period as an editor and reporter for The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes, characterized the professional comics community of the time as “shambolic and inbred and full of resentments and unprofessionalism of every stripe” (click here). Gerry Conway, one of Shooter’s predecessors as Marvel editor-in-chief, has characterized the company environment as “a cesspool of politics and personality issues” (Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, p. 185), and “like the worst high school dysfunctional mishegoss” (Untold Story, p. 187). Shooter, in a comment on his website, wrote, “The comics business in general, and especially Marvel, was Romper Room on crystal meth.” It’s hard to imagine how an editor-in-chief at Marvel could be an effective manager and administrator without having occasional conflicts.

For my part, I generally don’t have much sympathy for creators who resent or otherwise disregard editorial supervision on company-owned material. With a creator-owned project, the creator should of course be the final arbiter of what’s appropriate to it. All the editor and publisher have are the rights to offer input, and then to publish or not publish. But with company-owned projects, the company and its editorial representatives have every right to order changes or demand that material be produced within specified content and style parameters. A creator in that instance is hired to do a job. He or she has an obligation to accept and adhere to supervisory direction as a condition of the assignment. This is perhaps the first rule of professional conduct. If the creator on a company-owned project does not follow such direction, the creator is in the wrong. As much as it may rankle the creator’s fans, this is true regardless of any assessment of the aesthetic strength of the creator’s efforts. It’s a matter of ethics.

When it comes to the staffers who resented the policy changes that accompanied Shooter’s editorial reorganization, some hostile reaction is to be expected in any such situation. I’ve been through workplace restructurings a few times myself. There were always people who were comfortable under the previous set-up and objected to the changes. Some objected so much that they ended up leaving, and they insisted on demonizing the supervisor responsible for the changes afterward. The changes at Marvel editorial in the late 1970s were Shooter’s prerogative, and there was nothing unusual about the reaction from some of the staff. Incidentally, Marvel has more or less maintained the structure he put in place ever since.

Apart from an obtuse claim from Gerry Conway (discussed below), and a highly dubious one from John Byrne (to be discussed in a later installment), I have not been able to find a single instance of a creator who has ever accused Jim Shooter of cheating him or her monetarily or otherwise ripping them off in business dealings.

That said, let’s begin a chronological survey of the creators and staffers at Marvel who have been identified to one extent or another, rightly or wrongly, as victims of Jim Shooter.

Tony Isabella

Note: Tony Isabella and Marv Wolfman were asked to comment on an early draft of the following account. Isabella and Wolfman, who each have long-time grudges against Shooter, were both hostile in their responses. That hostility appeared largely motivated by the favorable tone of my article about Shooter this past January. Wolfman seems to believe these articles are being written in collaboration with Jim Shooter, which is not the case. As for the matter at hand, Isabella called the draft of the account “inaccurate” but did not provide any specifics. Wolfman initially discussed things in detail before writing back with the demand that I not use his response. He did not want to be seen as participating in the article. As such, I will paraphrase rather than quote his statements to me. If Wolfman asks for the quotes to be published, I will be happy to do so.

Tony Isabella

Jim Shooter joined Marvel’s staff as associate editor in January 1976. Almost immediately after starting, he flagged a Ghost Rider story Isabella had scripted. It was the culmination of a two-year storyline in which a bearded “friend” had repeatedly saved the motorcycle-riding demon-hero in his battles with Satan. In the climactic episode, Isabella intended to explicitly reveal the “friend” as Jesus Christ. Shooter, in a 2011 comment on his blog (click here), recalled that Isabella’s story granted Ghost Rider “the continuation of his powers, thereafter Divine, not demonic.” Isabella says (click here) Ghost Rider “accepted Jesus as his savior and freed himself from Satan’s power forever.” Shooter ended up rescripting the episode, and artist Frank Robbins drew several new pages in accord with the rewrite. In the revised version, the Jesus figure was revealed as an illusion cast by the devil and written out of the series. Isabella then quit the feature and left Marvel. He considers the revisions among “the most arrogant and wrongheaded actions I’ve ever seen from an editor.”

According to Isabella (click here), Marv Wolfman, Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief (and Shooter’s supervisor) had approved the storyline. He is quite skeptical of any claim that Wolfman authorized the revisions. He says, “[U]ntil Marv himself tells me otherwise, Shooter gets the blame for undoing a two-year storyline in another writer’s book.”

Shooter and Wolfman both addressed the incident under oath in November 1999 at the trial in Wolfman v. Marvel Characters, Inc. (This was Wolfman’s suit against Marvel claiming ownership of Blade and other company characters he was involved with creating.) Here is Shooter’s account of what happened:

Tony had introduced some religious references into the story that I thought were inappropriate. He had Jesus Christ appearing as a character. I didn’t think that was a good idea. So, as was my usual custom, I called Tony and I tried to work it out with him. You know, it’s always better if you can get the writer to make his own corrections. He was adamant. He just absolutely refused to be cooperative about making any changes. And so it was a big enough deal that I went to Marv and I asked him, you know, what he thought should be done. And he asked me, was I, did I have time and could I make the changes? And I said, yes, I could. […] And I changed the course of the story so that it no longer had the religious references. The reason that was significant is because I think Tony Isabella quit over that, actually.

In his trial testimony, Wolfman repeatedly identified Shooter as an assistant editor during this time period. When Marvel attorney David Fleischer asked Wolfman if an assistant editor would be assigned to supervise a scriptwriter in lieu of himself, he replied:

No, the assistant editors didn’t serve in that capacity at that particular time […] They would have, if it was a major problem or something they would have come to me […] their job was to find if there were any errors, correct small things, syntax, correct minor problems. (TCJ #236, p. 79)

Shortly after this, Wolfman specifically discussed the Ghost Rider incident:

FLEISCHER: Do you recall Mr. Shooter ever coming to you and telling you that he thought some religious content that he read in one of the stories that he was responsible for editing was inappropriate?

WOLFMAN: Well, again, editing would be the wrong word. He wasn’t an editor. He was an assistant editor, which meant he assisted the editor. No, I don’t recall it.

FLEISCHER: Do you recall that in the Ghost Writer [sic], Mr. Shooter called to your attention that there was a reference to Jesus Christ?

WOLFMAN: No, I don’t recall it.

FLEISCHER: Who wrote Ghost Writer [sic]?

WOLFMAN: Dozens of people at one time period.

FLEISCHER: Was Tony Isabella one of the writers?

WOLFMAN: Yes, Tony was a writer that did Ghost Writer [sic].

FLEISCHER: And hearing Mr. Isabella’s name, does that refresh your recollection about this incident?

WOLFMAN: No, it’s really a minor thing.

FLEISCHER: Do you recall that Mr. Shooter came to you and told you that he discussed with Mr. Isabella the fact that he thought the reference to Jesus Christ in the book was inappropriate and that Mr. Isabella refused to change it?

WOLFMAN: I don’t remember the incident at all. As I say, this is a very minor type of thing.

FLEISCHER: It’s very minor, but you don’t remember it?

WOLFMAN: It’s very minor, therefore I don’t remember it.

FLEISCHER: Would you regard as minor a situation where the editor in chief has to dictate to a writer against the writer’s will the content of a book?

WOLFMAN: If the case is the words of Jesus Christ, that is not dictating the contents, that’s dictating a possible standard or a possible other problem. It’s a very very incredibly minor thing that I would have made a decision in about an eighth of a second or gone to Stan [Marvel publisher Stan Lee] if it was a problem like the other one [a situation with Doug Moench]. It’s not something I would ever remember. (TCJ #236, p. 79)

When Fleischer asked Wolfman about three other instances where Shooter allegedly came to him with concerns, he responded, “No, I don’t remember. Mr. Shooter was a major complainer so it could have been.” (TCJ #236, p. 80)

In Wolfman’s correspondence with me, he contradicted his sworn testimony. He said that Shooter had the authority to order the changes without consulting him. He also stated that he thought he didn’t remember the incident because Shooter didn’t come to him about it. Essentially, he denied all responsibility for what happened.

Shooter wrote the following in the aforementioned 2011 blog comment (click here):

At that time I had no authority to make massive changes like that to a book unless the EIC commanded that it be done.

Isabella does not appear to have ever discussed the matter with Wolfman. However, the responsibility for that, at least at the time, seems to be Wolfman’s. He has said he had a policy as editor-in-chief of systematically calling everyone who worked for Marvel at least once every month (Untold Story, p. 181). It would appear there was no such call made to Isabella after the incident. And Wolfman was all but certainly aware that Isabella had quit the feature, as Wolfman scripted the following issue.

For my part, I think Shooter averted a potential disaster that had been enabled by the laissez-faire editorial environment that existed under Wolfman and his predecessors Len Wein and Roy Thomas. Any media depiction of Jesus Christ is potentially controversial, and one that is not a straightforward adaptation of New Testament narratives is all but certain to be so. Portraying Jesus as a fictional character in a contemporary setting, as well as giving sanction to the actions of another fictional character, is theologically suspect and astonishingly presumptuous. It is especially so when one considers that the character receiving sanction is a violent adventure hero. This could be viewed quite reasonably as irreverent and even blasphemous. The blowback to Marvel could have been enormous. As such, Isabella’s storyline should have never made it through the editorial process without the knowledge and approval of Marvel publisher Stan Lee and company president James Galton. It’s not clear that even Wolfman knew about it.

Writer Tony Isabella presumes to create a fictional Jesus–to team up with Ghost Rider! From Ghost Rider #9 (December 1974). Penciled by Jim Mooney and inked by Sal Trapani.

As for what happened after Shooter flagged the story, I believe him when he says he brought his concerns to Wolfman, and that Wolfman authorized the changes. It is highly unlikely that a newly hired editor with next to no prior experience would have the authority or even the job confidence to order new pages drawn without supervisor approval.

Additionally, I note Shooter apparently was not shy about raising concerns. Wolfman’s characterization of Shooter as a “major complainer” during this time refers to his experience as editor-in-chief with Shooter. That was less than three months.

In short, I believe the sworn court testimony given by both Wolfman and Shooter on the matter, which is not at odds.

Shortly after the Ghost Rider dust-up, Tony Isabella began writing for DC Comics, where he co-created the original Black Lightning series with artist Trevor von Eeden. He left DC in 1978. During Shooter’s tenure as editor-in-chief, he returned to Marvel, scripting some fill-in stories for various titles in 1979 and 1983-1984. There were no reported conflicts with Shooter or any other Marvel editor during that time. His highest-profile assignment in the field since then was probably as the regular scriptwriter for DC’s Hawkman character in the mid-1980s. He has done occasional scriptwriting work for DC and other publishers since then.

Steve Englehart

Born in 1947, Steve Englehart broke into the comics business in late 1970. He had graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1969 and served for a time in the U. S. Army. He started as a freelance artist for various publishers, but quickly shifted to scriptwriting. Long runs on Marvel’s Captain America and The Avengers titles made him one of the field’s most admired scriptwriters before he left for DC in 1976.

Before getting into the specific circumstances of Englehart’s departure from Marvel, I would like to discuss at length how Englehart’s situation has been exploited to attack Jim Shooter. It’s a good study in the tactics Gary Groth, Shooter’s most conspicuous detractor, has used in efforts to defame him.

Given the prominent role Groth and The Comics Journal have in shaping perceptions of comics history, his portrayal of Shooter’s dealings with various comics personnel will be discussed in each instance.

In Groth’s 1987 editorial about Jim Shooter’s termination as Marvel editor-in-chief, he included Englehart in a list of “the vast number of creators fired or otherwise driven to leave Marvel by Shooter” (TCJ #117, p. 6). This reference should have struck a discordant note with any knowledgeable reader.

The most immediate reason was that, at the time of Shooter’s firing in April 1987, Englehart was working for Marvel. He was the regular scriptwriter on three ongoing company-owned titles: Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and West Coast Avengers. He’d been writing at least two titles a month for the company’s various imprints for the previous two years. He began regularly publishing new work through Marvel again in December of 1982, when the first issue of his creator-owned series Coyote shipped to retailers.

Jim Shooter and Steve Englehart, at the 1982 San Diego Comicon

Beyond that, it was well known in comics circles that Englehart quit Marvel in 1976 because of conflicts with Gerry Conway, who was then the company’s editor-in-chief. One reason it was known was an interview with Englehart in The Comics Journal #63 that Groth helped conduct. Englehart discussed his problems with Conway at length. His statements gained additional notoriety when Conway responded with a letter, published in The Comics Journal #68, that may well be the single most intemperate, vituperative, and outright nasty piece of writing the magazine has ever published.

However, Groth and the Journal never printed a correction of the reference in the editorial.

Groth, though, apparently recognized the statement was erroneous at some point. In his 1994 anti-Shooter screed, “Jim Shooter, Our Nixon” (reprinted at tcj.com in 2011), he changed his tune somewhat on Englehart’s departure. However, the reader is still presented with an inaccurate view of the situation; Groth just didn’t shoehorn Englehart into his attack to the same degree. Englehart is described in the essay as a creator “who also left under Shooter’s regime at Marvel” (TCJ #174, p. 18).

Now by itself, that reference may seem pretty benign. But it’s a very slick bit of rhetorical spin. In the context of the essay, it’s very effective in falsely casting Englehart in the role of one of Shooter’s alleged victims.

First, note the falsehood of the word “regime.” An honest observer in command of the facts would say that Englehart left during Gerry Conway’s “regime,” not Shooter’s. Shooter was Marvel’s associate editor and Conway’s subordinate. However, characterizing this period of Shooter’s employment as part of his “regime at Marvel” leads the reader to assume that Groth is speaking of Shooter’s tenure as editor-in-chief even though that isn’t the case. This completely deflects attention from Conway and his exclusive role in Englehart’s departure.

Second, note the presence of the word “also.” This falsely identifies Englehart with the creators and staffers whom Groth describes at various points in the essay as “fired, driven off, fucked over, or otherwise insulted by Shooter”; whom Shooter “was routinely violating the professional dignity of” and “imprudently alienating”; whom “Marvel lost […] often because of an unresolvable dispute between the creator and Shooter”; and who “occasionally went on the record stating his unequivocal disdain for Shooter’s ethics and professionalism.” (TCJ #174, pp. 17 and 18)

What Groth is doing here is what I call “plausible deniability” writing. It’s a sleazy, manipulative rhetorical method that eschews direct statement in favor of juxtaposition and other forms of associative construction to make its points. In short, it implies its smears rather than states them. (Richard Nixon was fond of this rhetorical technique when it came to attacking his political opponents. Groth’s “Our Nixon” title seems quite ironic.) One benefit of “plausible deniability” writing is the protection it would likely give Groth if, say, Shooter had sued him for libel over the essay. In this instance (and it’s just one of the piece’s numerous misrepresentations), Groth’s lawyer would probably just point out that Groth never directly said Englehart left Marvel because of Shooter’s allegedly shabby treatment. All he specifically wrote was that Englehart left Marvel “under Shooter’s regime.” Everything else was ambiguous at most. If readers wrongly inferred that Englehart left Marvel because of conflicts with Shooter, well, that’s the stupid readers’ fault, not Groth’s. He would probably say he is not responsible for erroneous interpretations of ambiguous statements or context. And that claim, in a court of law, is likely correct. He would likely prevail in a libel case because the individual statements technically aren’t false for the most part, and where they are false, they’re not specifically defamatory. Keep in mind that I’m not an attorney, but from what I know, this is what I’d expect.

Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but in the “Our Nixon” essay, Groth again made no mention of the fact that Englehart was working for Marvel at the time of Shooter’s termination, much less that he’d been regularly publishing new work through Marvel for the previous 4½ years.

Note: Steve Englehart was sent a draft of the account that follows. He wrote back to say he had no corrections, and that he stands by what he has said over the years. Gerry Conway could not be reached.

With Shooter’s dealings with Englehart during his time as associate editor, two minor disputes are known.

The first was with the origin of The Shroud character that was published in Super-Villain Team-Up #7. Englehart deliberately appropriated the origin of Batman for the character. In Shooter’s testimony in the Marv Wolfman v. Marvel trial (click here), he recounted what came next:

It was plagiarism. And I thought that was a very bad idea. Steve Englehart was a very important writer. So I called him, and I said, “Steve, you seem to be doing the origin of Batman here.” And he said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “You can’t do that.” And he said, “Yes, I can.” That conversation was getting nowhere. I thought, let me talk to Marv about this. I went to Marv and I showed it to him. And he asked me to change it as little as possible because we wanted to not offend Steve any more than absolutely necessary but to make it so it wasn’t plagiarism. So I did the best I could to alter it to, you know, to meet that standard.

As near as I can determine, Englehart has never publicly complained about the revisions to the story.

The origin of Batman.. or The Shroud? From Super-Villain Team-Up #7. Script by Steve Englehart (with unspecified revisions by Jim Shooter). Penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked by Pablo Marcos.

The second dispute occurred after Gerry Conway replaced Marv Wolfman as editor-in-chief. It related to the erroneous flagging of a story inconsistency in Super-Villain Team-Up #8. Judging from Conway and Englehart’s accounts, the dispute appears to have been far more with Conway than Shooter. However, in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, author Sean Howe characterized it as a “blow-up” solely between Shooter and Englehart (p. 185). The incident is used as the principal support for a narrative that effectively blames Shooter for turning the editorial environment of Conway’s tenure “inescapably toxic.” Apparently towards that goal, Howe omits Conway from the dispute. (Howe also drags in the Tony Isabella Ghost Rider situation, making it appear as if it occurred during Conway’s tenure and not Wolfman’s.) The source or sources for Howe’s treatment are not included in the book’s endnotes, but it appears to be derived from Englehart’s interview in The Comics Journal #63 and Conway’s letter responding in TCJ #68.

Here’s what Englehart said happened:

Conway and Shooter—his Assistant Editor, or the right-hand man—called me up and said, “We really don’t like the Super-Villain Team-Up you just wrote because you said the Sub-Mariner’s father did or didn’t do something.” It’s on page two of issue six or seven or something. I don’t even know what it is now. But they said, “You did this.” I said, “No, I really didn’t.” And they said, “We know you did, because we were told by whoever proofread that you did it.” I said, “I’ve got the script right here, and I didn’t say that.” And it was like, “Yes, you did, and you’re gonna pay for it. You’re really in trouble for doing this kind of stuff.” So I took my Xerox copy of the script and I Xeroxed off the page and I sent it to them.

The second week I got a call from Conway saying, “We’re really sorry. We were misinformed. I see your script, you’re right. I went back and looked at it, everything you said was true, hey look, no hard feelings, huh, I’m just getting started and I don’t really know how to do all this shit and let’s just let bygones be bygones.” (TCJ #63, p. 270)

Here’s what Conway had to say in his response:

He [Englehart] states rightly, that I called him up concerned about an error in his script—not a minor error as he asserts, but a major continuity error. He told me it wasn’t his doing; on the information I had, I thought he was lying. (This may come as a shock to those of you fresh from the egg, but yes, Steve has been known to bend the truth just a tad now and then.) He did indeed send me a Xerox of his script, though of course this proved nothing since scripts can be retyped; but I checked it out, found out I was wrong, and as Steve tells you in his interview—I called him and apologized, admitting my mistake. (TCJ #68, pp. 23-25)

As can be seen, in Englehart’s statements, which were part of a larger attack on Conway, he says the specific dispute was with both Conway and Shooter. Conway, in his response, depicts the dispute as with him alone. Shooter isn’t mentioned.

Sean Howe, though, erroneously portrays the dispute as if it was only with Shooter.

It should also be noted that, unlike with Conway, Englehart has not indicated any larger grudge towards Shooter on the basis of this or any other incident before he quit Marvel a week or so later.

As for Englehart’s departure from Marvel, he left after Conway took away a scripting assignment for The Avengers. Englehart said that Conway removed him from the series, and further claimed Conway said he wanted the assignment for himself (TCJ #63, p. 270). Conway said the removal was just for the story in that year’s The Avengers Annual, not the monthly series. The reason was because of Englehart’s missed deadlines, and not because he wanted to take over as the series’ scriptwriter. (TCJ 68, p. 23). Jim Shooter, in a 2011 blog comment (click here), more or less confirmed Conway’s account.

Englehart immediately moved over to DC, where his most notable effort was a Batman run in Detective Comics with artist Marshall Rogers. He worked there on various titles before quitting over a payment dispute in late 1978 or early 1979. He left the field for three years, reemerging in 1982 with his creator-owned feature Coyote. It was originally published by Eclipse, and Englehart took it to Marvel’s Epic imprint a few months later. He resumed working on company-owned titles for both Marvel and DC in 1985. He stayed at DC through 1987, and was removed from his Marvel assignments in 1989 after conflicts with Tom DeFalco, Jim Shooter’s successor as editor-in-chief. In 1992, he worked on the X-O Manowar and Shadowman titles under Shooter at Valiant, but left after a few months due to differences with Shooter about editorial direction. Englehart says the parting was amicable (click here). Shooter says otherwise (click here), although he still holds Englehart’s ability in high regard (click here). Englehart spent the next several years doing scriptwriting work for various publishers, including Marvel and DC. He left the comics field for good in 2006.

Gerry Conway

Note: As stated above, Gerry Conway could not be reached for comment.

Gerry Conway

Conway had been working regularly for Marvel for a year when Shooter was let go, so, as with Steve Englehart, knowledgeable readers would have again looked askance at Gary Groth’s inclusion of Conway in his 1987 editorial’s list of “the vast number of creators fired or otherwise driven to leave Marvel by Shooter” (TCJ #117, p. 6). As with Steve Englehart, Groth made no mention of Conway’s employment at Marvel at the time of Shooter’s firing.

Another reason readers might have looked askance was because when Conway left Marvel in 1976, the editor-in-chief was his immediate successor, Archie Goodwin. Shooter was still the company’s associate editor at the time. And Conway didn’t report to either Goodwin or Shooter. The writer-editor contract specified that he reported directly to Marvel publisher Stan Lee.

There was no correction printed with regard to that editorial, and in the 1994 “Our Nixon” essay, Groth also included Conway in the specific list of people whom Groth stated “under Shooter Marvel lost […] often because of an unresolvable dispute between the creator and Shooter”, and who “occasionally went on the record stating his unequivocal disdain for Shooter’s ethics and professionalism” (TCJ #174, p.18). Groth again made no mention that, when Shooter left Marvel, Conway was regularly working for the company.

As he did with Steve Englehart, Groth misleadingly extends the Marvel-under-Shooter description to mean when Shooter was associate editor as well as editor-in-chief. As for the basis for Conway’s inclusion, it appears to be the following statement from the 1981 feature-length interview with Conway in The Comics Journal #69.

Jim [Shooter] was my assistant at Marvel for about a month, and that’s really been the extent of our relationship. When I worked there as a writer-editor, I really didn’t have anything to do with Jim. When I left, however, Archie Goodwin was on vacation during the week that I left Marvel. It wasn’t my intention to make a sudden break, one day I’d be working for Marvel, the next day I wouldn’t. It was my intention to give them the option of letting me segue out over a period of a month, to complete the work that I’d already been assigned and paid for on the basis of an advance loan. But Jim, who was Archie’s assistant and the person in charge of the office at the time, had Stan’s ear and said to Stan, “Well, gee, Stan, do we really want to have a writer who’s already decided to leave us working for us over the next few weeks possibly turning out work on an inferior level because he’s so disinterested? Let’s get that work away from him.” That cost me almost $4000. […] Now I wouldn’t want to say Jim did that out of maliciousness or a feeling of ambition, but I do know that several of the stories that were taken away from me were later written by Jim. (TCJ #69, p. 82)

However, even if one takes this at face value, it does not support Groth’s claim that Conway “was fired or otherwise driven to leave Marvel by Shooter.” Although Conway does not specify his reasons for his decision to leave Marvel, it’s clear that problems with Shooter weren’t among them. As he said, “When I worked there as a writer-editor, I really didn’t have anything to do with Jim.” All Conway is alleging is that, after he announced his departure, Shooter took steps that hastened that exit. It’s far from the same thing. Groth again appears to be playing fast and loose with what allegedly happened.

Getting back to Conway, there is nothing indicating his account of Shooter’s conduct is anything but speculation, and very reckless speculation at that. How did Conway know what Shooter said or didn’t say to Lee? And isn’t Lee responsible for his own actions? He’d been a publishing professional for over 35 years at this point. It’s hard to imagine him being influenced in this way by a junior staffer.

If I had to guess what’s going on here, I would say that Conway was looking to absolve Lee of responsibility for Lee’s treatment of him. Further, he was looking to blame another person—here, Shooter–for Lee’s actions, and then treat that person, not Lee, as the enemy.

This appears to be a pattern of behavior on Conway’s part. When Conway was passed over for the editor-in-chief position in favor of Len Wein in 1974, and again passed over for it in 1975 when Marv Wolfman replaced Wein, he has said it “cluttered up my relationship with Marv and Len, when they were put in over me” (TCJ #69, p. 72). The implication of this was that he blamed them for Lee’s decision to hire them, rather than Lee himself. In a 2011 blog post (click here), Shooter says Conway told him, presumably when Conway was editor-in-chief, that “Marv and Len had lobbied against his being hired and prevailed.” Shooter also told Sean Howe that Conway said he intended to drive Len Wein to quit because “[t]he bastard screwed me, and I want rid of him. [emphasis in the original] (Untold Story, p. 184). As can be seen, there’s first the shifting of responsibility away from Lee, and then the demonization of the person blamed instead.

Roy Thomas, who was perhaps Conway’s closest friend in the comics field, as well as the Marvel veteran who knew Lee best, said in 1980 that he considered Lee specifically responsible for what happened.

Marvel has had a tendency in recent years to be very vindictive toward people who leave it to work for the competition. They go far beyond any kind of professional reaction. Stan generally has reasonably good and humane instincts, but once in a while he’ll just decide that if somebody does something, he’s never going to work for Marvel again. He did this with Len, and with Gerry […] (TCJ #61, p. 85)

It appears Lee, at least in practice, had a policy when it came to the scriptwriters who had served as editor-in-chief and, upon stepping down, were granted writer-editor contracts. If they quit to work for DC, Lee did not want them working for Marvel from that moment forward. The first person to be confronted with this was Len Wein. In 1976, Wein left Marvel for DC. According to Kim Thompson, in a news report he wrote for The Comics Journal, Wein told him “Lee angrily assured him [Wein] that he would never work for the company again” (TCJ #56, p. 12). When Marv Wolfman announced he was leaving Marvel for DC in 1979, Lee ordered that Wolfman’s outstanding contractual assignments be rescinded, and that Wolfman was to receive his remaining vacation and sick pay in their place (TCJ #52, p. 8). Conway appears to have been treated the same as Wein and Wolfman, and for the the same reason.

Beyond that, it’s my view that Stan Lee had plenty of reason to be angry over Conway’s decision to leave for DC. Conway was hired for the editor-in-chief position after lobbying for it through Roy Thomas, who then recommended Conway for the job (Untold Story, p.183). Lee took a sizable chance on hiring a largely untested 23-year-old, and Conway essentially threw the opportunity back in Lee’s face: he resigned from the job after less than a month. He then immediately played on Lee’s goodwill again and negotiated an astonishingly expansive writer-editor contract. It required Marvel to give him eight ongoing scriptwriting assignments, twice as much as that of any other writer at the company. Now, five of those assignments weren’t a problem. Conway took over two titles that were left open by Englehart’s departure, one from Tony Isabella’s, one that Archie Goodwin left when Goodwin succeeded Conway as editor-in-chief, and one that Marv Wolfman had vacated to take over another series. However, Steve Gerber, one of the company’s most valued scriptwriters, had to be removed from one of his books to accommodate Conway, and the company also had to launch two new titles to fill out the balance of Conway’s quota. The contract was for three years. After Lee had gone to these lengths on Conway’s behalf, including potentially alienating Gerber, Conway threw it all back in Lee’s face again. He decided after about six months to break the contract and return to DC. If I had been Stan Lee, I probably would have been scooting Conway out the door as quickly as I could, too.

I also note that Shooter has stated he did not have a positive working relationship with Lee until the two began collaborating on the writing of the Spider-Man newspaper strip (click here). This would have been in 1977, after Conway left the company. If what Shooter says is accurate, he did not seem to have “Stan’s ear” at the time.

Conway observes that, after he left, Shooter took over some of his scriptwriting assignments. That’s correct, as did Goodwin, Roger Slifer, David Anthony Kraft, Bill Mantlo, and Chris Claremont. Goodwin was the editor-in-chief, Slifer and Kraft were both editorial staffers, Mantlo was possibly still on staff at this time, and Claremont was known to regularly hang out in the Marvel offices. Perhaps it wasn’t just Shooter who might have influenced Lee to give Conway the early boot. It could have been a conspiracy the entire office was in on.

Now let’s discuss the money that Shooter’s alleged influencing of Lee cost Conway.

In the 1981 quote, Conway describes this as “an advance loan” for assigned work. Conway was actually benefitting from a secret, massive (and benevolently intended) pre-payment accounting scam being run by Marvel production manager John Verpoorten. (Sean Howe describes the scam on page 201 of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.) According to Shooter (click here), when Conway went over to DC, he informed them that he owed Marvel the money. DC cut Marvel a check for the amount and arranged an internal payment plan with Conway to cover the balance. If this is accurate, Conway just ended up repaying the money in a different manner than he intended. If he lost money, it was because he wasn’t able to repay the money by working for Marvel and DC simultaneously, and there’s no indication that Marvel would have ever allowed him to do that.

What Shooter says happened next doesn’t really reflect on Conway, but I’d like to include it, just to give an idea of how disorganized things were at Marvel at the time:

DC’s check was delivered to Marvel’s accounting department. [Marvel chief financial officer] Barry Kaplan had no clue, at that point (before the scam came to light) what it was for, assumed it was a mistake and sent it back! DC then sent the check to John Verpoorten, probably at Gerry’s suggestion. The five figure [sic] check was found in Verpoorten’s drawer after he died.

Gerry Conway continued to work for Marvel after Shooter’s departure. His efforts included extended runs as scriptwriter for Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, and Conan the Barbarian. He also did occasional work for DC during this time. He left the field in the early 1990s to work as a writer and producer in series television. He returned to work for DC in 2009 and 2010.

In the next installment: Shooter takes over as editor-in-chief.

The small Vancouver publisher Arsenal Pulp Press had a happy surprise this spring. At the Frankfurt International Book Fair last October, they finalized the contract to publish the English translation of Blue Is the Warmest Color, the 2010 début effort of Belgium-based cartoonist Julie Maroh. The acquisition may not have seemed like much; the book’s biggest distinction was having won the Audience Award at the 2011 International Comics Fair in Angoulême. A film adaptation was in production, but it’s not clear the people at Arsenal Pulp were even aware of it, and it certainly didn’t influence their decision to take on the book. The company specializes in LGBT-oriented work, and Maroh’s coming-of-age romance between a high-school student and a twentysomething artist—both women—was a good fit. But when the film premiered at Cannes in May, it was an immediate sensation. Director Abdellatif Kechiche and stars Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux shared the Golden Palm, the festival’s top prize. Arsenal Pulp, in response to the interest the film generated, stepped up their edition’s publication to coincide with its North American release. The first printing immediately sold out, and the publisher may be on its way to the biggest commercial success in its history.

The buzz surrounding the film, which I have yet to see, inspired me to seek out the book. One never knows what to expect in these situations. Film adaptations of good books miss far more than they hit, and the reverse is often the case as well. A good movie (or at least a well-reviewed one) doesn’t mean the source material is especially worthwhile. It’s as true of comics adaptations as prose ones. For every American Splendor and Ghost World that’s worth checking out, there’s a Road to Perdition or A History of Violence where the book doesn’t rate much interest. With Blue Is the Warmest Color, it’s been widely reported that the film took a lot of liberties with its source. Most of this focus has been on Abdellatif Kechiche’s handling of the story’s sex scenes, which Julie Maroh denounced as pornographic. But I gather Kechiche also gave the story a completely different final act, and he even changed the protagonist’s first name from Clementine to Adèle, so it matched that of Adèle Exarchopoulos, the actress who plays her. Kechiche’s title for the film (and the one used for its release in France) is La Vie d’Adèle—Chapitrés 1 & 2 (The Life of Adèle—Chapters 1 and 2). He was clearly looking to put as much distance between Maroh’s book and his film as he could. Whatever the case, movie or no movie, Maroh’s handling of her story needs to stand on its own.

Her cartooning is impressive. Maroh is an extremely capable draftsman and dramatist. She does a fine, detailed job of evoking the Lille, France locations. Her handling of the characters is even better; she shows a remarkable command of dramatic nuance, and the story’s naturalistic tone feels effortless. Jaime Hernandez, probably the strongest draftsman among the contemporary English-language cartoonists, couldn’t have provided a more skilled visual treatment. I actually prefer Maroh’s drawings to his; she has a looser, jazzier line, and the relaxed feel to the art gives the story an admirable fluidity.

Maroh’s style is cinematic, but in the opening sections she gets away from the overly literal storytelling that stunts the work of so many cartoonists. These early scenes deal with Clementine (the teen protagonist)’s conflicts over getting involved with Thomas, a popular boy at school. The complication is her attraction to Emma, an artist she’s seen walking around town. The drama is complemented with poetic effects. The story is told in flashback, and after a full-color framing sequence, the watercolor rendering is in gray hues. A shift of this sort is a movie cliché, but Maroh employs it as part of a larger strategy. The grays highlight the selective use of blue, which Maroh uses as a trope for Clementine’s desires and anxieties. It first appears when Clementine and Thomas see each other for the first time, and Maroh uses it to render Thomas’s shirt. As the story progresses, it’s used to render other things as well, including Emma’s hair, a balloon Clementine sees, and a condom package. The color and the objects it portrays are used to evoke an impressive range of meanings: Clementine’s curiosity about Emma and Thomas, how her attraction to Thomas is borne of insecurity and a desire to conform, her self-loathing over her emotional resistance to sleeping with him, and the intensely sexual nature of her interest in Emma. Maroh’s handling of the last is especially striking. Clementine dreams of being in bed with Emma, and Emma’s hands and forearms turn blue as her caresses become more intimate. The storytelling’s poetic element makes for an admirably fresh treatment of a teenager’s world being turned upside down by discoveries about her sexual identity. The first act creates high expectations for the rest of the book.

And that turns out to be a major letdown. The sequence in which Clementine breaks up with Thomas ends on page 24, and Maroh all but abandons her poetic effects for the rest of the book’s 156 pages. Blue is used as a trope in only one other scene. Clementine gets off the phone with Emma, and she’s giddy that the two are going to see each other the next day. The blue flows over the wall Clementine is sitting against, and it colors the sky the following morning. Beyond that, though, Maroh just uses the blue decoratively, specifically for the coloring of Emma’s hair. The storytelling lapses entirely into the literal. Maroh doesn’t even use the blue as a poetic element in the splashy scene in which Clementine and Emma first have sex. The book doesn’t completely lose visual interest. Maroh’s considerable drawing ability never falters, and her cartooning has some bravura moments. The most conspicuous is the wordless four-page sequence in which Clementine’s parents kick her out of the house upon discovering she and Emma are involved. But after the opening sections, Maroh’s visual choices never challenge the reader, or enrich the story’s moments with new meanings. She relies entirely on plotting, dialogue, and character soliloquies to carry the story, and her script isn’t up to the task.

The story is ultimately melodrama, and hackneyed melodrama at that. Most of the book after the first act is a series of scenes in which Clementine and Emma gradually come closer before pulling away. They’re both afraid of the commitments being in love demands, and Maroh lays on the angst with a trowel. There are plenty of other tired elements. Clementine discovers her parents are homophobic. Clementine’s lesbianism results in her being ostracized at school. Emma’s ex-lover Sabine angrily confronts Clementine after their break-up. Clementine even has a gay male best friend who is the story’s voice of wisdom. The story ends with Clementine and Emma forever parted after one dies from Ali MacGraw Disease. The one who survives looks out on the ocean and muses, “Beyond death, the love that we shared continues to live.” It’s all so stale, and it’s that staleness that makes the story so trite.

The tone is earnest, though, and perhaps Maroh thought that might provide the intensity needed to carry the reader through. I can only speak for myself, but the bulk of the book comes across as a collection of scenes from romantic comedies and melodramas that have long been run into the ground. An earnest rehash is still a rehash. The challenge for any contemporary artist is to, in Ezra Pound’s famous words, “Make it new.” Art is about communication, but the magic of art is communicating what hasn’t been said before, or at least what has in unfamiliar ways. Maroh gives the reader that magic in the visual poetry of the book’s opening scenes. The color blue is made to carry meanings one never expected, and those meanings keep changing. The rest of the book is just communication. Yes, the narrative is clearly presented, and I don’t doubt it’s heartfelt, but when I read, I want magic all the way through. If Julie Maroh hadn’t given up on that after page 24, her work might have been able to hold its own with any worthwhile film adaptation. I don’t yet know if Abdellatif Kechiche has cleared the bar she set for him, but she should have made living up to her work, much less outdoing it, a far greater challenge.

This post contains photocopies of the primary source documents referred to in “All Quacked Up: Steve Gerber, Marvel Comics, and Howard the Duck.” Click here for the main article.

The documents included are:

1. Check (front and back) for $285.00, dated June 1, 1973, from Marvel to Steve Gerber. This check purportedly includes payment for Gerber’s scriptwriting work for the “Man-Thing” episode in Adventure into Fear #19. The story features Howard the Duck’s first appearance. (1 page.)

2. The March 12, 1976 licensing agreement between Marvel and Steve Gerber for the “Vote Howard the Duck in ’76″ pin-back button. (Image + 5 pages.)

3. The March 18, 1977 contract between Marvel and Steve Gerber for scripting the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. (3 pages.)

4. 1977 Howard the Duck redesign art prepared by Disney. (2 pages.)

5. The first page of a Howard the Duck redesign memo, dated June 30, 1977, by Marvel art director John Romita. (1 page.)

6. October 14, 1977 memo regarding the Howard the Duck redesign, by Marvel production artist Marie Severin. (1 page.)

7. The October 7, 1977 contract between Marvel and Steve Gerber, formally employing him as a comic-book scriptwriter and editor of the Howard the Duck comic-book series. (13 pages.)

8. The March 21, 1978 telegram from Steve Gerber’s attorney Joseph D. Peckerman to Marvel president James Galton. The telegram demands written notice of Gerber’s termination as scriptwriter of the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. (2 pages.)

9. The April 5, 1978 letter from Steve Gerber to Marvel president James Galton regarding the termination of Gerber’s contract for writing the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. (2 pages.)

10. The May 2, 1978 letter from Marvel publisher Stan Lee to Steve Gerber terminating Gerber’s employment at Marvel. (1 page.)

11. Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s May 10, 1978 cover letter for the work-made-for-hire contract Marvel issued to its freelance creator pool. (1 page.)

12. Marvel’s 1978 work-made-for-hire contract. (1 page.)

13. The June 30, 1980 cease-and-desist letter to Marvel from Steve Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. regarding the licensing of Howard the Duck. (2 pages.)

14. Court Docket, Stephen Gerber v. Cadence Industries Corp., et al., Case No. 80-3840, U. S. District Court, Central District of California. (8 pages.)

15. The August 29, 1980 complaint filed in U. S. District Court, Central District of California, by attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. on behalf of Steve Gerber against the Cadence Industries Corporation [Marvel Comics' parent company], Marvel Productions, Inc., Stan Lee, Selluloid Productions, Inc., Peter Shanaberg, Morrie Eiseman, and Peter Coffrin. (25 pages.)

16. The defendants’ attorney Donald S. Engel’s November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss and Memorandum of Points. (28 pages.)

17. Steve Gerber’s December 24, 1980 declaration in response to the November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss. (20 pages.)

18. Steve Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr.’s January 7, 1981 reply to the November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss. (9 pages.)

19. The defendants’ official February 2, 1981 answer to Steve Gerber’s lawsuit complaint, written by attorney Donald S. Engel. (13 pages.)

20. The October 27, 1981 minutes order directing the defendants to pay $2,150.00 in attorney’s fees to Steve Gerber’s lawyers. (2 pages.)

21. The December 15, 1981 minutes order directing Steve Gerber to pay $1,200.00 in attorney’s fees to the defendants’ lawyers. (1 page.)

22. Judge David Kenyon’s May 14, 1982 order dismissing the third and fourth of the six claims for relief made by Steve Gerber in his lawsuit complaint. (3 pages.)

23. The November 8, 1982 case dismissal filing in Gerber v. Cadence Industries, et al., and Judge David Kenyon’s accompanying dismissal order. (4 pages.)

24. The April 30, 1985 Marvel letter accepting a submitted Steve Gerber Howard the Duck script. The letter was sent by Michael Hobson, Marvel Vice-President in Charge of Publishing, to Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. (2 pages.)

1. Check (front and back) for $285.00, dated June 1, 1973, from Marvel to Steve Gerber. This check purportedly includes payment for Gerber’s scriptwriting work for the “Man-Thing” episode in Adventure into Fear #19. The story features Howard the Duck’s first appearance. Note the rights acknowledgement legend on the back of the check.

2. The March 12, 1976 licensing agreement between Marvel and Steve Gerber for the “Vote Howard the Duck in ’76″ pin-back button. The button artwork is by Bernie Wrightson. The signatory on Marvel’s behalf is Marvel president James Galton. (5 pages.)

3. The March 18, 1977 contract between Marvel and Steve Gerber for scripting the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. The signatory on Marvel’s behalf is company president James Galton.

4. 1977 Howard the Duck redesign art. Disney apparently regarded the appearance of Howard the Duck as a potential infringement of their trademarks for Donald Duck and other duck characters. Marvel agreed to modify the visual depiction of Howard to placate them. Disney’s art department produced these model sheets to illustrate the approved changes.

Model Sheet 1

Model Sheet 2

5. The first page of a Howard the Duck redesign memo, dated June 30, 1977, by Marvel art director John Romita.

6. An October 14, 1977 memo regarding the Howard the Duck redesign, by Marvel production artist Marie Severin.

7. The October 7, 1977 contract between Marvel and Steve Gerber, formally employing him as a comic-book scriptwriter and editor of the Howard the Duck comic-book series. The signatory on Marvel’s behalf is company president James Galton.

Note: The photocopy for page 3 cuts off the text at the bottom of the page. The omitted text is unknown.

Note: The photocopy for page 8 cuts off the text near the bottom of the page. Based on other Marvel contracts of the time, the omitted portion, at least in part, reads “throughout the world and shall be Marvel’s property for the period of the copyright and any renewals thereof.”

8. The March 21, 1978 telegram from Steve Gerber’s attorney Joseph D. Peckerman to Marvel president James Galton demanding written notice of Gerber’s termination as scriptwriter of the Howard the Duck newspaper strip.

9. The April 5, 1978 letter from Steve Gerber to Marvel president James Galton regarding the termination of Gerber’s contract for writing the Howard the Duck newspaper strip. Galton’s March 27, 1978 letter is unavailable.

10. The May 2, 1978 letter from Marvel publisher Stan Lee to Steve Gerber terminating Gerber’s employment at Marvel.

11. Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s May 10, 1978 cover letter for the work-made-for-hire contract Marvel issued to its freelance creator pool. The contract was in response to the 1976 Copyright Act, which went into effect on January 1, 1978.

12. Marvel’s 1978 work-made-for-hire agreement.

13. The June 30, 1980 cease-and-desist letter to Marvel from Steve Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. regarding the licensing of Howard the Duck. The letter specifically concerns Marvel’s dealings with Selluloid Productions, Inc., the producer of the Howard the Duck syndicated radio serial featuring Jim Belushi. (2 pages.)

14. Court Docket, Stephen Gerber v. Cadence Industries Corp., et al., Case No. 80-3840, U. S. District Court, Central District of California.

15. The August 29, 1980 complaint filed in U. S. District Court, Central District of California, by attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. on behalf of Steve Gerber against the Cadence Industries Corporation [Marvel Comics' parent company], Marvel Productions, Inc., Stan Lee, Selluloid Productions, Inc., Peter Shanaberg, Morrie Eiseman, and Peter Coffrin. This is the formal complaint in Gerber’s lawsuit over ownership of Howard the Duck. It is filing #1 on the court docket.

16. The November 12, 1980 Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss and Memorandum of Points This motion was filed by attorney Donald Engel in an unsuccessful effort to dismiss Steve Gerber’s lawsuit over ownership of Howard the Duck on jurisdictional grounds. This is filing #14 on the court docket.

17. Steve Gerber’s December 24, 1980 declaration in response to the November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss. This is filing #24 on the court docket.

18. Steve Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr.’s January 7, 1981 reply to the November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss. This is filing #27 on the court docket. On January 12, 1981, Judge David Kenyon ruled against the dismissal motion and affirmed that the federal courts had jurisdiction in the suit.

19. The defendants’ official February 2, 1981 answer to Steve Gerber’s lawsuit complaint, written by attorney Donald S. Engel. This is filing #31 on the court docket.

19. The October 27, 1981 minutes order directing the defendants to pay $2,150.00 in attorney’s fees to Steve Gerber’s lawyers. The purpose was to compensate Gerber’s attorneys for fees incurred by unnecessary complications in their efforts to depose Marvel president James Galton and Marvel Executive Vice-President for Business Affairs and Licensing Alice Donenfeld. This is filing #87 on the court docket.

21. The December 15, 1981 minutes order directing Steve Gerber to pay $1,200.00 in attorney’s fees to the defendants’ lawyers. The purpose was to compensate the defendants’ attorneys for fees incurred by Gerber’s failure to appear for a scheduled deposition on two separate occasions. This is filing #101 on the court docket.

22. Judge David Kenyon’s May 14, 1982 order dismissing the third and fourth of the six claims for relief made by Steve Gerber in his lawsuit complaint. This is filing #126 on the court docket.

23. The November 8, 1982 case dismissal filing in Gerber v. Cadence Industries, et al., and Judge David Kenyon’s accompanying dismissal order. This is filing #130 on the court docket. Through his attorney Henry Holmes, Gerber acknowledged in an included September 24, 1982 statement that all work he did for Marvel with regard to Howard the Duck was done on a work-made-for-hire basis. He further acknowledged that Cadence Industries, Marvel’s corporate parent, owned full title to all intellectual property rights related to the character. With these acknowledgements, the issues in the lawsuit were declared resolved by all parties. This agreement was apparently made in tandem with a “consulting agreement” (see Michael Hobson letter below) that was not filed with the court. Gerber subsequently alleged the “consulting agreement” contained a confidentiality clause that prohibited his discussing its contents.

24. The April 30, 1985 Marvel letter accepting a submitted Steve Gerber Howard the Duck script. The letter was sent by Michael Hobson, Marvel Vice-President in Charge of Publishing, to Gerber’s attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. Hobson, Marvel’s de facto publisher, sent this letter along with the edited Gerber script. Gerber withdrew the script rather than accept the edits. The letter also includes references to the terms of Gerber and Marvel’s September 24, 1982 “consulting agreement.”

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Howard the Duck. Art by Brian Bolland.

This article is a history of the editorial and business relationship between Marvel Comics, their representatives, and the late writer Steve Gerber (1947-2008). Its focus is their dealings over Howard the Duck, Gerber’s signature character.

The piece has its origins in a historical series I’ve been intermittently working on called Jim Shooter: A Second Opinion. The series is a reexamination of the frequently maligned tenure of the Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief between 1978 and 1987. The third article, still in progress, is planned to cover Shooter’s alleged conflicts with writers, artists, and editorial staffers in the months that followed his taking the editor-in-chief position. Gerber, the co-creator, writer, and editor of Marvel’s Howard the Duck series, was fired shortly after Shooter took over. An account of his termination seemed in order. Most writers have treated the termination as going hand-in-hand with the 1980 lawsuit Gerber filed over ownership of Howard, so I looked into that as well.

In 2009, Gerber’s close friend Mark Evanier wrote, “The whole matter of Steve’s legal problems with Marvel [...] is a very complicated situation which has never been accurately described in any past reporting.” He’s right. I discovered that the lawsuit in particular had never received anything close to adequate coverage. Lawsuits are a matter of public record, but not one writer appeared to have even read the complaint filing. Upon realizing that no one had done the most basic legwork on this episode, I shifted gears. I set aside the Shooter article, and began researching Gerber in depth instead. Presenting the record with him, rather than arguing it with Shooter, seemed a more urgent undertaking.

The lawsuit’s being public record gave me the opportunity to construct extended parts of the narrative from primary source documents and other court filings. Whenever possible, I have derived my account from contracts, business correspondence, and sworn court declarations. It’s preferable to having to rely on media interviews and earlier writers’ treatments of the matters at hand. With primary source documents, I don’t have to worry to what extent a person’s prejudices and agendas may be skewing their portrayal of a letter or contract; I can just see the document for myself. And while probably no first-person account is entirely free of inaccuracies, people tend to be more rigorous in statements made under oath than when talking to a journalist. In telling the story of the lawsuit, I’ve tried to do so as accurately as possible. In effect, I’ve sought to meet the challenge Mark Evanier’s statement makes. This article is intended as a definitive account.

I note that I am not looking for the imprimatur of, among others, Mark Evanier. He has spent many years working to develop a reputation as a comics historian, and several in the comics community put a good deal of weight on his opinion. I expect that, as Gerber’s friend, he will find the article distasteful. The depiction of Gerber’s various dealings with Marvel is an unvarnished one. I have no interest in providing a necessarily complimentary view of anyone involved. For my part, all I can I say is I’ve done my best to be both skeptical and fair towards Gerber and the others. I believe my presentation is both accurate and thorough. I hope those who would prefer a partisan portrayal favoring Gerber can respect the article as a conscientious effort. For those who think they can do better, I’ve made it as easy as I can for them to improve upon my work.

In addition to the bibliography, there is an accompanying post titled “The Howard the Duck Documents.” (Click here.) It is a trove of primary source materials related to the case. One will find copies of all of Gerber’s 1970s Marvel contracts, every extant piece of correspondence relating to his 1978 termination, and the most significant documents filed with the court. These include the lawsuit complaint, the extended declarations and responses by both sides in the complaint’s wake, and the judge’s final order to dismiss the case. For those curious as to what isn’t included, there is also a copy of the complete case docket, which lists every filing in the suit. Most of this material has never been published or even reported on before. It is all in the public domain, so those interested are free to copy and publish it for their own use.

The complete case records, reportedly two cartons of documents, are in the National Archives at Riverside, California. The staff there was immensely helpful in providing the documents I sought. I believe anyone looking to fill perceived holes in my research will find them just as invaluable. They definitely have my thanks.

Steve Gerber

Steve Gerber was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 20, 1947. He graduated from Saint Louis University in 1969 with a B. A. in communication. In 1972, while working as a copywriter for a St. Louis advertising agency, he contacted Marvel editor Roy Thomas about working for the publisher. Gerber and Thomas had met through Missouri comics-fan circles during the 1960s. Thomas, as he had previously done for fellow Missourians Denny O’Neil and Gary Friedrich, arranged for Gerber to join the company’s staff as an editorial assistant. The primary responsibility was proofreading. His salary would be $125 a week. (Adjusted for inflation, this would be the equivalent of just over $700 today.) Gerber, who was then 24, relocated to New York City, where Marvel was based.

Adventure into Fear #11 (December 1972), Steve Gerber’s solo scripting debut.

All of Gerber’s scriptwriting for Marvel at this time was done on a work-made-for-hire basis. Marvel owned all intellectual-property rights to the work he did. This was before 1978, when the 1976 Copyright Act’s mandate that work-made-for-hire relationships be agreed to in writing at the outset went into effect. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, as elaborated by federal-appeals-court decisions in Yardley v. Houghton-Mifflin (1939) and Brattleboro Publishing v. Winmill Publishing (1965), an independent-contractor relationship was assumed to be work-made-for-hire in the absence of a clear agreement to the contrary. Additionally, Marvel frequently stamped the back of freelancer checks with a legend that had, with the check endorsement, the freelancer acknowledge Marvel’s ownership of the intellectual-property rights to the work. One legend Marvel used reads:

By endorsement of this check, I, the payee, acknowledge full payment for my employment by Magazine Management Company, Inc. [Marvel's 1960s and early 1970s parent company] and for my assignment to it of any copyright, trademark, and any other rights in or related to the material, and including my assignment of any rights to renewal copyright.

This and similar legends have often been portrayed as transfer agreements, but according to the prevailing judicial precedents, the rights had already been transferred by dint of the freelancer relationship with the publisher. In practice, the legend was a redundancy that ensured the freelancer had been notified as to the publisher’s policy, and that the policy covered the work at hand.

There was nothing particularly unusual about Marvel’s conduct. Under the indivisibility doctrine that emerged from the 1909 copyright law, publishers could not, among other things, take action against infringement without ownership of the intellectual-property rights. Freelancer contributions were all but universally assumed to be work-made-for-hire throughout the periodical publishing industry, including newspapers, non-comics magazines, and other comics publishers. Back-of-the-check legends were not uncommon, either, and were used by such top-paying publishers as Mad and Playboy.

The first appearance of Howard the Duck. From Adventure into Fear #19, as reprinted in Essential Man-Thing, Vol. 1.

Gerber gradually created a large supporting cast for the Man-Thing feature, including the teenage sorceress Jennifer Kale, Dakimh the Enchanter, and Korrek the Barbarian. One year into the series, in Adventure into Fear #19, he and artist Val Mayerik introduced what would quickly become his most famous creation: a talking, cigar-smoking duck from another world named Howard. The issue, cover-dated December 1973, would have reached newsstands that September. It was most likely written the previous spring. In a 1976 interview, Gerber described when the initial idea for Howard the Duck came to him:

[Howard was created as] a joke. It was the only sight gag I could think of to top Korrek jumping out of a jar of peanut butter in Fear #19[.] I told Val to have a duck come waddling out of the bushes. (Kraft 10)

Gerber also described Val Mayerik’s contribution:

[T]he cigar was Val Mayerik’s creation. So was Howard’s clothing. I just told Val, “Don’t make him look too much like Donald, and for God’s sake, don’t dress him in a sailor suit. (Kraft 10)

Marvel ostensibly paid for Gerber’s work on the issue with a June 1, 1973 check for $285.00. The back of the check was stamped with the rights acknowledgement legend.

(For a copy of the check, both front and back, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

The Howard character didn’t last long in the feature. Gerber told Jon B. Cooke in 1999 that editor Roy Thomas ordered him to remove Howard from the series “as fast as you can” (Cooke 61). Midway through the subsequent episode, published in The Man-Thing #1 (January 1974), Gerber and Mayerik had Howard fall off a giant stepping-stone bridge into an inter-dimensional void, apparently never to be seen again. The other characters considered him dead.

The assumed death of Howard the Duck. From The Man-Thing #1, as reprinted in Essential Man-Thing, Vol. 1.

But Howard had struck a chord with several readers. According to Gerber in 1975:

People were taken with him immediately. The office was flooded with letters; there was one wacko who sent a duck carcass from Canada […] saying, “Murderers, how dare you kill off this duck?” There was the incident at a San Diego Comics Convention where somebody asked Roy, I believe, who was speaking there, whether Howard would ever be coming back, and the auditorium stood up and applauded. Stan [Marvel publisher Stan Lee] was being asked about it everyplace he went on the college [lecture] circuit. (Kraft 10)

The return of Howard the Duck. From the opening page of the solo Howard story in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May 1975), as reprinted in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1

Marv Wolfman, then the editor of Marvel’s black-and-white magazine line, claims that he approached Gerber about featuring Howard in those titles (Dean 42). However, the decision was made to reintroduce the character in the color comics. Gerber and artist Frank Brunner put together a nine-page story that was published as a back-up feature in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May 1975). The story picked up Howard right where The Man-Thing #1 episode had left him. The opening page showed him falling through the seemingly endless void. The top of the second page had him landing in a vacant lot in Cleveland. Over the course of the story, he befriends a pair of local boys, does battle with an anthropomorphic frog that’s terrorizing the neighborhood, and ends up arrested by the police. Gerber and Brunner did a follow-up story for the next issue of Giant-Size Man-Thing. The response to the stories was favorable, and the go-ahead was given to launch Howard in his own title.

Marvel’s circulation director Ed Shukin didn’t have much faith in the new series. For the first issue, he ordered a print run of 275,000–Marvel’s minimum at the time for a standard-size color newsprint comic. That first issue (cover at left) shipped to newsstands in October of 1975. It promptly sold out. Looking back on the first issue’s sales, Shukin told The New Yorker writer Mark Singer, “I underestimated that duck” (Singer 30). Unfortunately, many of the copies weren’t sold to readers. Comic-book collectible dealers reportedly snapped up every copy they could find through newsstand vendors and distributors. They intended to hoard the books and then sell them at vastly inflated prices. One dealer, Jim Kovacs of Cleveland, claimed to have bought 900 copies the day the issue went on sale. He told the Washington Post he followed the distributor’s truck while it made its deliveries. In 1977, the average price of the issue among back-issue dealers was $12.50, a mark-up of 5,000 percent over the cover price of 25¢. Gerber, reflecting on the situation in 1999, said:

I was angry as hell. I felt as if the book had been sabotaged by the very people who supposedly liked the character […] The sales on [Howard the Duck issue] #2 were respectable. I don’t recall exactly what the sales figures were, but I think it would’ve done a lot better–the series would have done a lot better–had that first issue reached the stands. (Cooke 64).

In the summer of 1976, partly in response to the unmet demand for the first issue, Marvel issued a tabloid-size Treasury Edition (cover at right). Along with a new episode, it reprinted the first issue’s story and all the character’s prior appearances. The material from the initial Man-Thing stories were, apart from one scene, limited to excerpts featuring the sections in which Howard appeared. Gerber and Val Mayerik produced a new splash page introducing the excerpts, and Gerber provided a text dialogue between Howard and a “Voice from on High.” The dialogue filled the half-page above the panels featuring Howard’s initial appearance from Adventure into Fear #19.

Gerber may have felt Howard would have done better had it not been for the speculation frenzy, but sales appear to have been healthy. Ed Shukin told The New Yorker the print-run on a new issue in 1977 was 400,000 copies, a 45% increase over the pressing of Howard #1. Newsstand periodical print orders generally reflect an expected sell-through rate of 50%, so Howard‘s paid circulation was probably about 200,000 copies per issue. Marvel’s confidence in the series’ sales was also reflected by the decision to bump it from bi-monthly to monthly status with the seventh issue.

The feature had strong cult appeal. The character’s alien perspective, combined with the strip’s setting in Marvel Comics’ superficially quotidian fantasy world, provided Gerber with an effective vehicle for satirical social commentary. The setting allowed him to parody comics and other pop-culture material with abandon. The satirical tropes were often clever and layered. Gerber also managed to imbue the character with a forlorn air of existential absurdity. He occasionally hit notes that, for all the series’ juvenile goofiness and adventure-fantasy trappings, were far more characteristic of literary fiction than anything seen up to that point in American comic books. Steve Gerber is widely considered the most accomplished writer of 1970s English-language adventure comics, and Howard the Duck’s better moments are much of the reason why.

Frank Brunner

The Scarface Duck poster (left) and Quack #1, featuring the Duckaneer (right)–artist Frank Brunner’s 1976 attempts to capitalize on Howard the Duck’s success.

Brunner didn’t go off quietly into the sunset. He immediately set himself up in competition with Howard and started doing his own cartoon duck material. His attitude was, “I was filling a void left by slow-moving Marvel [...] which did not immediately see the potential of the fan market–or of the duck” (Howe 182). The first product was a poster print, sold and distributed via mail order, titled Scarface Duck. It depicted a Howard-style duck in 1930s gangster-movie trappings. The second was a new duck-comics feature titled “The Duckaneer,” done in collaboration with inker Steve Leialoha. It debuted in the premiere (July 1976) issue of Quack!, published by Star*Reach for exclusive distribution to the nascent comic-book specialty market. Marvel doesn’t appear to have given either project any mind, but Gerber was not happy. After learning of the poster, he contacted Brunner and demanded a share of the profits. Brunner refused, saying to him, “Which part of the print [...] did you write or draw? What part of the deal did you arrange?” (Howe 183). It’s not known how successful these projects were, but Brunner all but abandoned duck-related efforts after the first Duckaneer story was published. He did a few media-parody duck prints for the poster market in the years that followed, but almost all his subsequent output was devoted to non-duck material.

The “Vote Howard the Duck” pin-back button. Art by Bernie Wrightson.

Steve Gerber had merchandising ideas of his own. On March 12, 1976, he entered into a licensing agreement with Marvel for the manufacture and sale via mail order of “Vote Howard the Duck in ’76” pin-back buttons. Marvel would be paid a royalty of five percent for each one sold.

(For a copy of the March 12, 1976 button licensing contract, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

The licensing contract should have clarified any ambiguity that may have existed at that point with regard to ownership of the character. Section 4 of the agreement, titled “GOOD WILL, ETC.” includes this statement:

Licensee [Gerber] recognizes the great value of the Name and Properties and Subject Mark(s) and of the goodwill associated therewith and acknowledges that the Name and Properties and Subject Mark(s) and all rights therein (including copyright) and goodwill pertaining thereto belong exclusively to Licensor [Marvel].

The contract’s preamble specifically defines the terms used. The term “Name” refers to Howard the Duck’s “name, character, symbol, design, likeness, sounds and visual representation and/or each of the individual components thereof”. The term “Properties” means “copyright in literary and/or artistic materials featuring, containing and/or consisting of the names, characters, symbols, designs, likenesses, sound and visual representations” of Howard the Duck. The “Subject Mark(s)” are defined as “Trademark registration(s) of the Name and/or components thereof”. Gerber acknowledged in the contract that Howard was Marvel’s exclusive property.

Additionally, in Section 5 of the agreement, titled “LICENSOR’S TITLE AND PROTECTION OF LICENSOR’S RIGHTS,” the contract says, “Licensee agrees that it will not during the term of this agreement, or thereafter, attack the title or any of the rights of Licensor or Licensor’s grantors in and to the Name and/or Properties and/or Subject Mark(s) or attack the validity of this license.” In other words, Gerber contractually agreed to never sue over or otherwise challenge Marvel’s exclusive proprietary rights to Howard the Duck.

Gerber hired artist Bernie Wrightson, best known as the co-creator of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing character, to do the artwork for the button. It retailed for one dollar plus a quarter for shipping. Checks were to be made payable to Gerber, who handled the orders through Mad Genius Associates, a cooperative with fellow comics scripters Mary Skrenes, Jim Salicrup, Don McGregor, and David Anthony Kraft. The comic-book series was used to promote the button. It was advertised in the letters column of the fourth issue. A few months later, an episode revolving around the character’s presidential campaign was featured in issue #8 (cover at right). It reached newsstands in October of 1976. (The issue was cover-dated January 1977.) The faux presidential campaign contributed to the buzz around the series, and over the next year or so Gerber was interviewed for articles about the feature in Circus, Playboy, and the Washington Post.

With the ninth issue, Gerber took over as the series editor. Judging from Sean Howe’s account in Marvel: The Untold Story, the expanded authority on the title was intended to mollify Gerber after he’d had his scriptwriting assignment for Marvel’s The Defenders series taken away (Howe 189). Gerry Conway, who had recently vacated Marvel’s editor-in-chief position, had negotiated a large contract with the publisher. It called for him to write and edit eight separate comic-book series. Five of the titles he took over had already been vacated by their regular writers, and two new ones were created to accommodate his quota. Someone, though, was going to have to be stripped of a series assignment for Conway’s benefit, and Gerber was made the sacrificial lamb. The freelance editing fee was a small fraction of what he had made writing The Defenders, but it seems the additional autonomy with Howard made up for the financial hit. And an opportunity for Gerber to make more money from Howard was just around the corner.

The October 16, 1977 Sunday episode of the Howard the Duck newspaper strip.

In early 1977, Marvel and the Tribune & Media Syndicate decided to launch Howard the Duck as a daily newspaper strip. Gerber signed a contract with Marvel to write it on March 17. He would be paid one-third of Marvel’s share of the syndication monies after lettering and coloring expenses were deducted. Gerber was further entitled to one-third of any money Marvel received from licensing Gerber’s newspaper-strip material to other media. According to syndicate president Denny Allen, nearly a hundred newspapers initially subscribed to the feature (Smith 37). It debuted on June 6, 1977. Gene Colan was the strip’s first artist.

(For a copy of Gerber’s March 17, 1977 newspaper-strip contract, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

In the first half of 1977, The Walt Disney Company contacted Marvel out of concern that Howard infringed on their trademarks for Donald Duck and related duck characters. In Marvel’s official account of what happened, published in 1980, Steven Grant wrote:

Disney’s licensees overseas suddenly saw their markets threatened when competitors issued the adventures of Howard The Duck. (In countries where comics are translated into languages other than English, the word “duck” is synonymous with “Donald Duck,” and has been for more than 40 years. Simply by virtue of the word “duck” in his name, Howard became what no comics character had been before: a threat to Donald Duck.) The overseas licensees took their grievances to Disney, who in turn contacted Marvel. (26)

The two companies quickly worked out an agreement, and Disney artists redesigned Howard’s appearance. The character would now have an oval head, proportionately smaller eyes, and a short, fat, upturned bill. He would also have toes, brows, and a rotund body. Most conspicuously, the previously trousers-less Howard would now be wearing pants. On June 30, 1977, Marvel art director John Romita issued a memo detailing the changes, including color codes.

(For the redesign model sheets, the first page of the Romita memo, and a subsequent related memo by Marvel production artist Marie Severin, see The Howard the Duck Documents.)

In his public statements of the time, Gerber seemed fairly nonchalant about the redesign. He told the Washington Post that he consequently might “just give Howard a whole new wardrobe, turn him loose in Saks and see what he comes out with” (Turan B2). However, there’s little doubt that privately, Gerber greatly resented what had happened. (His intense dislike of the redesign became publicly known with the release of a 2002 Howard comics project.) Gerber’s anger appears to have quickly found its way into the comic-book series.

From Howard the Duck #21, as reprinted in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1.

Howard‘s 21st issue, pencilled by guest artist Carmine Infantino, reached newsstands in November 1977. (The indicia date was February 1978.) The episode was most likely written in July, shortly after the redesign specs were issued. On the surface, it was a lampoon of anti-pornography and other media-decency activists, with a few jabs taken at anti-gay-rights advocate Anita Bryant. But with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes goings-on, parts of the story take on an additional meaning: Gerber was also expressing his contempt for Marvel’s settlement with Disney. The activists, who call themselves the SOOFI, are urban terrorists. Their leader targets Howard for conversion due to his “youth appeal” and “kind of Saturday morning wholesomeness.” Howard is kidnapped, and when he awakens in the SOOFI’s base of operations, he discovers he has been outfitted in entirely new clothes, including pants. He finds the pants physically uncomfortable and an affront to his dignity. While explaining the wardrobe change, the SOOFI leader remarks on Howard’s formerly bare-bottomed appearance with disgust. The SOOFI leader then attempts to brainwash Howard by subjecting him to a device called the Blanditron, but it has no effect. Howard then punches the SOOFI leader and leaves. The final panel has Howard walking away from the reader. The discarded pants are left lying on the pavement. He says to the SOOFI leader, “[...] you just keep on tryin’–and I’ll just keep on resistin’–an’ we’ll both have a lot of cloudy days ahead.” (Emphases in the original.) Gerber seemed to be saying that although Marvel was willing to give in to Disney (considered by many a “Blanditron” of popular culture), he wasn’t about to capitulate. Howard would not appear in pants for the rest of Gerber’s tenure as writer-editor.

The ending of Howard the Duck #21, as reprinted in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1

Marvel’s editorial and legal operations were in almost complete disarray, which is most likely how Gerber was able to get away with this. The office editorial staff had since the mid-1960s consisted of an editor-in-chief, an associate editor (or their equivalent), and a handful of editorial assistants who handled proofreading. Production manager John Verpoorten was known for grabbing pages for deadline-stressed books out of the assistants’ hands. He’d reportedly tell them, “You’ll read it when it comes out” (Howe 158). With the company publishing between 40 and 50 titles a month, it was all the staff could manage to get books to the printer on time. Titles in which the scriptwriter doubled as the editor, such as Howard, were probably given the least scrutiny as a matter of course. The lawyers working for Marvel and Cadence Industries (Marvel’s corporate parent) appear to have been largely disengaged from the company’s publishing operations. The situation with the legal personnel was so dysfunctional that Marvel was caught completely unprepared for the changes in the copyright law that took effect in January of 1978. It wasn’t until May of that year that the company’s operational protocols were properly in compliance. No one who was supposed to be paying attention was probably aware of what Gerber was doing.

Howard the Duck’s reunion with the Man-Thing cast of characters. From Howard the Duck #22 (March 1978), as reprinted in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1.

By 1977, Gerber’s anger with the back-issue collector market appears to have subsided. He began to include material that would promote that market to new readers. Specifically, Gerber started highlighting the character’s history before the series. The story in Howard the Duck Annual #1, which shipped to newsstands in the summer of 1977, was drawn by the character’s co-creator Val Mayerik. Next to the splash-page credits, Gerber included the following caption: “Reunited at last! The creative team who hatched the wondrous waterfowl back in (gasp!) 1973!” (Emphases in the original.) And in issues 22 and 23 of the regular series, he reunited Howard with the cast of the 1973 Man-Thing stories. Gerber also included captions that noted the relevant back issues. These were congenial moves to the fans and the collector-market dealers. Apart from sparking interest in those early Howard appearances, Gerber flattered the attention of readers who’d been following his work and Howard from the start.

More from Howard’s reunion with the Man-Thing cast.

After Gerber scripted a trio of Mister Miracle episodes for DC Comics, Marvel’s largest competitor, Marvel decided it wanted Gerber working exclusively for them. On October 7, 1977, the publisher sent him an employment contract as a comic-book scriptwriter. It also covered his employment as editor of the Howard the Duck comic-book series. Gerber would no longer be a freelancer. His writing and editing work would be solely for Marvel. The contract would pay him, on a bi-weekly basis, a salary totaling $16,818 annually. (This is approximately $65,577 in 2014 dollars.) This income would be in addition to his share of the money from the Howard newspaper strip. Gerber would be expected to script at least 51 comic-book pages per month (the equivalent of three monthly series) and edit 12 standard-size comic books per year. The salary was based on a scriptwriting page-rate of $26.50, and an editing rate of $50 per book. (Adjusted for inflation, these rates would respectively be approximately $103 and $195 in 2014.) Gerber would be compensated at these rates for any work he did beyond his quota. He would be entitled to two weeks of annual paid vacation, and eligibility for enrollment in Marvel’s health, life, and other insurance plans. The term was for one year, and without written notice to the contrary from either Marvel or Gerber, it would automatically renew on an annual basis.

The contract outlined several privileges with Howard the Duck. Gerber would be given right of first refusal for scripting and/or editing duties on Howard projects beyond the monthly comic-book series. If he chose not to work on these projects, he would be consulted as to the choice of writers and/or editors Marvel would employ in his stead. Marvel would recommend and permit him to work for pay as a consultant on any film or television licensing projects. Marvel would also make any policy change about licensing income for writers and artists applicable to Gerber and Howard the day the change went into effect.

It is unknown whether Gerber ever consulted with an agent or attorney about this contract. The clauses regarding the privileges with Howard are troubling when considered against the contract as a whole. The way the contract is written, it appears Gerber would retain his privileges with Howard only as long as he worked for Marvel as a contract employee. Barring a subsequent agreement, if he or Marvel chose to terminate his employment, the privileges with Howard would be terminated along with it. An experienced agent would have most likely recommended Gerber not sign unless these clauses were revised to protect his interest in Howard in the event his employment ended. An attorney would all but certainly have advised him about the termination pitfalls.

Gerber signed the contract on October 27, 1977. To meet his writing quota, he would, in addition to Howard, take over scriptwriting chores on Marvel’s monthly Captain America series. The balance of his work requirement would be taken up with stories for Marvel’s black-and-white magazine line and fill-in efforts in the color comics.

(For a copy of Gerber’s October 7, 1977 Marvel employment contract, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

James Galton

(For a copy of the March 21, 1977 telegram, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

The cause for Gerber’s removal is disputed. Gerber alleged arguments over payment schedules for the artists. Others close to the situation say it was Gerber’s inability to get his work in on a timely basis.

Gerber told John Cooke in 1999:

Marvel wouldn’t pay [Gene Colan] to draw it. [...] Gene and I were supposed to get a percentage of the syndicate’s take for the strip. The problem was, the money came in 90 days, 120 days, six months–I don’t remember how long, exactly–after the strips were published. So, essentially the artist was working for nothing during that time, and no artist can afford to do that. Particularly on a strip he doesn’t own. […] I had a huge fight with Marvel about getting Gene an advance for his work. I wasn’t even asking them to pay Gene, as such–just advance him regular comic book rates against the income from the syndication […] they wouldn’t hear of it. […] Once the arguments started, they escalated very quickly […] They could’ve advanced Gene standard comic book rates to do the Howard newspaper strips. The whole problem would’ve gone away. (66)

However, Colan’s last daily strip was published on October 9, 1977, and his last Sunday appeared on November 6. (For production reasons, the typical Sunday-strip completion schedule runs approximately four to six weeks ahead of that for the dailies.) Colan had left the strip at least five months before Gerber’s termination. He appears to have had a regular income during the time he was working on the strip. According to a sworn declaration filed in federal court in 2011, Colan had also been producing comic-book art for Marvel under an employment contract. It most likely paid him a fixed bi-weekly salary for his comic-book work.

Gene Colan

[...] the scripts didn’t come often enough. Add this to the fact that I was trying to burn the candle at both ends… I was afraid to let go of Marvel because you never know where these things are going to go. I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket and do nothing but Howard the Duck [the newspaper strip] and let everything else go. I just couldn’t do both. I actually tried, you know. [...] So, I just kept at it burning both ends. Eventually, I just didn’t have the energy to continue with Howard. Gerber was getting awful fussy and wouldn’t deliver the scripts on time. We were getting hell from the syndicate.

Colan does not appear to have ever addressed Gerber’s claim that the payment schedule posed problems for him, or whether Gerber was fighting to get the payment schedule changed on his behalf.

Val Mayerik, Colan’s immediate successor as artist on the strip, has a similar recollection as Colan. In a 2012 interview with James B. Hudnall, he said:

[…] Steve was also doing the Howard the Duck newspaper strip, and Gene Colan was doing that, was drawing that. And Steve, who was just notoriously late–I don’t know if there was ever anybody in the industry who was ever as late as Steve–had gotten himself so bound up in tardiness that Gene just got fed up, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He just couldn’t draw fast enough to keep compensating for Steve not meeting deadlines. So he dropped out, and Archie Goodwin [Marvel's editor-in-chief in 1977] called me and said, “Do you want to take this over?” And I thought, at the time, I didn’t have a whole lot of work. I had just gotten to New York, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” […] And I would call Gene [about reference], but Gene was already getting to be an older guy at that point, and he had his own deadlines to worry about, or he’d be off playing cards with his buddies or something. And I’d be talking to his wife, and she got real, real pissed off with me finally. I think she was just letting it out on me because she really wanted to let it out on Steve. “Leave Gene alone. He’s off this thing now. He’s free of Steve Gerber now. Leave him alone.”

Mayerik did not allege any problems with payment in the interview. He erroneously recalled that he left the strip when it was cancelled. He was actually replaced on it by Alan Kupperberg. Kupperberg began drawing the strip with the February 27, 1978 daily, and his first Sunday was published on March 27.

With regard to Gerber’s termination, Tribune & Media Syndicate president Denny Allen told The Village Voice:

[...] there were many cancellations for one very good reason: late delivery. I normally get a strip in 10 weeks before publication. Gerber’s came in on Thursday before the Monday it was supposed to hit the stands. We could barely get it to the papers in time. I ultimately had to tell Steve there wouldn’t be any Howard [emphasis in the original], unless I got a new team to create him [...] the editors I was dealing with at each publication didn’t like the writing either. I thought [Howard] could become a modern Pogo, but they said the public found him too difficult to understand, and the message didn’t come across. (Smith 37)

Marvel’s position was that Gerber was fired from the strip for lateness. Jim Shooter, Archie Goodwin’s successor as editor-in-chief, spoke about the matter to The Comics Journal shortly afterward. The reporting was published in the article “Marvel Fires Gerber.” This is the relevant excerpt:

Tardiness was also said to be the reason for Gerber’s removal from the Howard the Duck strip. According to Shooter, they were “producing strips within six days of their publication dates,” which had in itself caused several papers to drop the strip. The Syndicate had threatened to cancel the strip if a new writer was not chosen, although, according to Shooter, some of the problems stemmed from the difficulties in getting a regular artist [...] It was finally decided that Gerber would have to go. (7)

Marv Wolfman succeeded Gerber as scriptwriter on the newspaper strip. In a July 22, 1978 interview with Kim Thompson, he described the rush schedule he faced upon taking over:

I was told on Thursday I would take over the thing [...] I come into the office early Friday, because I have to go someplace, and Jim Shooter says, “Come in here.” I go into his office; Alan Kupperberg is sitting there. [Shooter] says, “We need three Sundays by Monday.” This is on Friday afternoon. I hadn’t even–now, you have to understand, you put Sundays around your story–I hadn’t even come up with a story. Alan and I did it, somehow, and it’s obvious that the first story suffered from both the deadline problem and the wrong handle for the strip. (51)

Gerber’s reaction to the termination was hostile. In his attorney’s telegram demanding written notice, the following statement was included:

Please be further advised that under the terms of said agreement [Gerber's newspaper-strip contract], upon the effective date of any such termination, all of your [Marvel's] rights in and to the characters contained in said comic strip shall terminate [...]

On April 5, 1978, Gerber sent a reply to Galton’s termination letter. In it, he reaffirmed the claims in the telegram, adding:

Please regard this as a formal notice that I, and not Marvel, am and shall be the exclusive owner of the comic character “Howard the Duck” and of all other characters, plots, themes, and settings created by me or under my authority which have been included in the comic strip, as well as the copyright(s) therein and thereto and all other incidental and allied rights, including tradenames, trademarks, etc., and any use after April 27, 1978 by Marvel or under its authority of any of said rights without my written consent thereto.

Gerber threatened, in the event of infringement of his alleged rights with Howard, to “exercise all of my rights at law and in equity to restrain the same and recover as may be appropriate all profits and damages arising therefrom.”

(For a copy of Gerber’s April 5, 1978 letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

Gerber’s claims in this correspondence are perplexing. There is no language whatsoever in the newspaper-strip contract regarding transfer or reversion of rights in the event of termination or any other circumstance. Judging from the agreement, Marvel’s ownership would seem absolute. Gerber agreed “Marvel shall have all rights of every kind and nature, in and to the material [...]” Marvel appears to have regarded Gerber’s claims and threats as empty bluster. The company never sent a reply.

All Marvel appeared concerned with at this point was ending their relationship with Gerber. His lateness problems weren’t restricted to the newspaper strip. Since becoming a contract scriptwriter, Gerber had been meeting only approximately two-thirds of his 51-page monthly quota. The terms of the contract meant he was getting paid for work he hadn’t done. A blown deadline on Captain America forced a fill-in issue, and Howard the Duck had to be pushed back to bi-monthly status to accommodate Gerber’s output. Gerber also wasn’t making up the balance with his work for Marvel’s magazine line. Jim Shooter took him off Captain America so he could get caught up on other outstanding assignments. It was then that the folderol over the newspaper strip occurred.

Stan Lee

(For a copy of Stan Lee’s May 2, 1978 letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

In the article “Marvel Fires Gerber,” Jim Shooter said, “I would not say there was nothing else to it [the termination of the comic-book contract for lateness]; I would just say that we found it advantageous to get out of the contract we were in.” On his website on August 15, 2011, Shooter wrote, “[...] he was threatening to sue Marvel. If you’re threatening to sue your employer, they probably aren’t going to keep paying you so you can pay your lawyers. He was fired. I couldn’t have prevented it if I had tried.”

Jim Shooter

(For copies of Marvel’s 1978 work-made-for-hire contract and Jim Shooter’s accompanying cover letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

On May 26, Gerber issued a statement to The Comics Journal about his separation from Marvel. It was published in the preface to a multi-page interview with Gerber by The Comics Journal editor Gary Groth. The statement read in part:

I was dismissed from the HOWARD THE DUCK newspaper strip in a manner which violated the terms of my written agreement. Marvel was advised that I was contemplating legal action which would likely result in my ownership of the HOWARD THE DUCK character and all rights therein. As a consequence of the notice given Marvel by my lawyers, the company chose to terminate my contract on the comics as well. Marvel’s action was not unanticipated, and my only regret is that, for a while at least, the Duck and I will be travelling separate paths. (26)

Gerber did not discuss his legal and business conflicts with Marvel in the interview. As for the statement itself, Gerber has never elaborated on how he was dismissed “in a manner which violated the terms of my written agreement.” From what is known, there doesn’t appear to have been any violation. The only thing that might remotely qualify is Stan Lee’s attempt to terminate the contract over the telephone.

As for what happened next between Gerber and Marvel, there wasn’t much of anything for quite some time. Gerber’s claims and threats were proving empty. The business and legal correspondence related to Howard looked to have ended with the termination of Gerber’s comic-book contract. Things proceeded as they had been, although without Gerber. Marvel continued to produce the newspaper strip with Marv Wolfman and Alan Kupperberg. The comic books also continued. The first two issues sent to press after the termination featured inventory stories plotted by Wolfman and Mark Evanier. Bill Mantlo then took over as the new scriptwriter, with Gene Colan returning as penciller. They did two new issues of the standard-size color comic book series, with the second reaching newsstands in February of 1979. The feature then went on hiatus for about six months.

Later in 1979, a new series was launched as part of the Marvel magazine line, with painted covers, black-and-white interiors, and a larger trim size. The format, which was subject to more relaxed content restrictions than the color comics, was intended to appeal to older readers. The first issue (cover at right) had an October cover date and reached newsstands in August. Mantlo continued as scriptwriter, with Colan pencilling most of the stories.

There is no indication that Steve Gerber ever received any monetary compensation for this or the other publications. He doesn’t appear to have even complained about it.

Sometime in 1978, Disney seems to have taken notice that the most significant element of the Howard redesign was not being followed. The character was still not wearing pants. Negotiations were reopened, and in late 1979, Howard appeared to have been permanently trousered. According to Steven Grant’s article on the redesign, the second agreement codifying the redesign doubled the original’s length from four to eight pages (28). It was signed in 1980.

The non-Gerber Howard the Duck made almost no one happy. In The Village Voice, Gerber called the Wolfman/Kupperberg newspaper strips “downright horrible,” adding that the feature was “lobotomized, devoid of substance, and turned into a simple-minded parody” (Smith 37). According to Wolfman, Marvel publisher Stan Lee told him, “The Duck strip is really the worst thing I’ve ever seen” (Thompson 51). In an August 11, 2011 website post, Jim Shooter confirmed Lee’s low opinion of the Wolfman/Kupperberg material: “Suffice to say he hated it.” Mantlo’s stories weren’t well received, either. In a 1980 interview with Gary Groth, Shooter indicated he was especially put off by Mantlo’s shift from Gerber’s absurdist tone to partisan political polemic. It led him to ultimately remove Mantlo from the feature. Artist Stephen Bissette summed up the general feeling about the non-Gerber material years later when he said, “Howard the Duck has not made any sense without Steve Gerber” (Creators 105). In a contemporaneous essay, he wrote:

Howard the Duck was Steve Gerber, a direct, vital extension of his very self [...] Cut off from his creator, Howard is a meaningless, empty corporate-owned image, only as good as the creators employed to breathe life into him and none of those who followed in Gerber’s footsteps ever came close [emphasis in the original]. (Bissette 67-68)

The character’s commercial appeal was dwindling, too. The newspaper strip lasted just six months without Gerber at the helm; the final episode was published on October 29, 1978. The black-and-white comics magazine ran for only nine issues before it was cancelled. Low sales were presumably the reason. The final issue, cover-dated March 1981, shipped to newsstands that January. Less than three years after the forced separation from his principal creator, Howard the Duck sputtered into publishing oblivion.

As for Gerber, he seemed without direction at first. He wrapped up his obligations to Marvel with a “Lilith” story that was published in Marvel Preview #16 (Fall 1978). In his The Comics Journal interview, he mentioned that he was working on a three-part Dr. Fate story for DC (40-41). However, no story by Gerber featuring Dr. Fate saw print in the late ’70s, and it is unknown if Gerber ever completed it. (In 1982, DC published a four-part Dr. Fate story written by Gerber and Martin Pasko, but there is no indication whether this was the same project or a different one.) Gerber’s close friend Mark Evanier was packaging a line of comics for Marvel featuring the Hanna-Barbera animation characters. Gerber scripted a handful of stories for them under the pseudonym Reg Everbest. Evanier also had contacts in the TV-animation industry, and he got Gerber work at Ruby-Spears Productions.

It was the beginning of a second career. Gerber’s first TV writing assignment was on The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show. Shortly afterward, he successfully pitched the Thundarr the Barbarian series to studio owners Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. The program, featuring design work by the celebrated comic-book cartoonists Alex Toth and Jack Kirby, debuted on the ABC network in the fall of 1980. Gerber wrote the series’ bible, served as the story editor, and was among the credited writers for every episode. The program quickly developed a cult following, and it has sustained interest to this day. Over the next seven years, Gerber worked as a writer and story editor for several animated TV series, including Dungeons & Dragons, G. I. Joe, and Transformers.

Gerber hadn’t entirely turned his back on the comic-book field. In 1980, Eclipse Enterprises published Stewart the Rat, a satirical graphic novel featuring a rodent character in the same vein as Howard. With Gerber’s claims and threats over Howard apparently in the past, Marvel didn’t seem to hold any ill will. Stewart was pencilled by Gene Colan and inked by Tom Palmer, both of whom were under exclusive employment contracts to Marvel. Marvel gave them permission to work on the project. The book was distributed only to comic-book specialty stores, which carried publications on a non-returnable basis. Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney was not able to provide information about sales in time for this article’s publication, but indications are that they were modest and below expectations. There appears to have been only one printing, and Eclipse still had copies available for purchase through mail order over a decade later. Gerber, who fully owned the intellectual-property rights to Stewart, never revisited the character.

As for Howard, he may have become moribund as a publishing property, but there was interest in him elsewhere in the media world. The Los Angeles-based Selluloid Productions took particular notice. Sometime in 1980, Marvel entered into negotiations with Selluloid to license the character for use in film, radio, and television. On September 1, 1980, the two companies signed an agreement giving Selluloid production and distribution rights for a Howard the Duck radio serial. Selluloid was also granted a one-year option for a live-action film featuring the character. Production on the radio serial, which starred Jim Belushi as Howard, began immediately. The show was intended for distribution to FM album-oriented-rock stations. Around this time, Marvel Productions, a Los Angeles-area animation studio owned by Marvel Comics’ corporate parent Cadence Industries, began putting together story and art materials for a Howard the Duck animated TV-series proposal.

From left to right, producer Lee Arnold, actor Jim Belushi, and director Steve Lushbaugh recording the pilot for the Howard the Duck radio serial. Photograph by Alan Penchartsky. From the October 4, 1980 issue of Billboard magazine.

In a December 24, 1980 sworn declaration, Steve Gerber indicated that he learned of the licensing negotiations between Marvel and Selluloid several months before they were finalized. He stated he contacted Marvel about the matter, although whether the contact or contacts were verbal or written was not clear. He asserted in these communications that only he, not Marvel, had the right to license or sell Howard the Duck and Howard the Duck stories. Gerber also said he offered to license Marvel the character and stories, but that Marvel refused to negotiate or agree to anything.

(For a copy of Steve Gerber’s December 24, 1980 declaration, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

It had been more than two years since Marvel publisher Stan Lee had terminated Gerber’s employment at Marvel. Gerber’s claims and threats regarding ownership of Howard the Duck appeared to have ended with Lee’s termination letter. But at this point, with the possibility of film and broadcast-media treatments of Howard on the horizon, Gerber decided to renew the fight.

After Marvel’s latest rebuff, Gerber retained the services of attorney Henry W. Holmes, Jr. and the law firm Davidson & Holmes. (Holmes is probably best known for representing tennis icon Billie Jean King, boxing champion George Foreman, and science-fiction author Harlan Ellison.) On June 30, 1980, Holmes sent a letter on Gerber’s behalf to Marvel Productions. The letter demanded that Marvel Comics cease and desist all licensing negotiations with Selluloid. It was claimed that Gerber had never sold any rights to Marvel with regard to Howard the Duck beyond the rights to publish comic books featuring the character. The letter included the demand that Marvel return to Gerber “all materials and proofs and publications in your possession which depict in whole or in part the character or its name.” Holmes threatened legal action with reference to punitive damages if Marvel did not comply. Marvel does not appear to have responded to the letter.

(For a copy of Henry Holmes’ June 30, 1980 letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

On August 29, 1980, Holmes filed suit on Gerber’s behalf in U. S. District Court, Central District of California. The defendants were the Cadence Industries Corporation, Marvel Productions, Inc., Marvel publisher Stan Lee, Selluloid Productions, Inc., and Selluloid principals Peter Shanaberg, Morrie Eiseman, and Peter Coffrin. The stated cause of action was copyright infringement. There were six claims for relief.

The first claim asserted that any license agreed to between Marvel and Selluloid with regard to Howard the Duck constituted infringement of Gerber’s intellectual-property rights.

The second claim demanded the following: (1) any agreement between Marvel and Selluloid or any other licensee regarding Howard be declared invalid; (2) any profits or benefits derived from those agreements be turned over to Gerber; (3) Marvel was to be required to assign and convey to Gerber “the copyright and all rights and interest” with regard to Howard and the related comic-book stories; and (4) all prior agreements relating to copyright assignment and conveyance between Marvel and Gerber were to be nullified.

The third and fourth claims alleged, respectively, unfair competition and conversion. The fifth accused Marvel of breach of implied contract by seeking to license Howard without Gerber’s consent.

The sixth accused Marvel and Stan Lee of “Breach of Trust and Confidence.” Marvel and Lee were alleged to have deliberately swindled Gerber out of the official copyrights for Howard and the related stories.

The complaint demanded, from each of the defendants, compensatory damages of not less than $250,000, and punitive damages of not less than $2.5 million. It also demanded a jury trial. According to the court docket, all defendants had been served with the complaint by October 16, 1980.

(For copies of the court docket and the lawsuit complaint, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

On November 14, 1980, Donald S. Engel, a Los Angeles attorney representing Lee, Selluloid, and the Selluloid principals Shanaberg, Eiseman, and Coffrin, filed a motion to dismiss the suit on jurisdictional grounds. (The motion is dated November 12.) In the accompanying memorandum of points, Engel argued the suit was not about copyright infringement, which is under federal-court jurisdiction. Rather, Engel wrote, it was “a cause of action to determine contract rights and title in and to a copyright.” Gerber and Marvel were, according to Engel, in disagreement over the interpretation of his contractual relationship with the company. Engel claimed Gerber was effectively petitioning the court to transfer ownership of the Howard copyrights to him, which he argued the court lacked jurisdiction to do. In support of his argument, Engel cited Gerber’s Marvel contracts, numerous court precedents, and the fact that Marvel, not Gerber, held the registered copyrights to the Howard material. Pointing to the letters between Gerber and Marvel concerning Gerber’s contract terminations, Engel wrote, “It is apparent from this correspondence that the dispute between Marvel and Gerber can be stated in one sentence: Who owns the rights to the character Howard?” Numerous exhibits were filed as part of the motion, including Gerber’s Marvel contracts and all but one piece of the termination correspondence.

Engel made no mention of Gerber’s acknowledgement in the 1976 pin-back button licensing agreement that Howard was Marvel’s exclusive property. Nor did he mention that Gerber promised in the contract to never challenge Marvel’s proprietary rights.

(For a copy of Donald S. Engel’s November 12, 1980 Motion to Dismiss and Memorandum of Points, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

Gerber and Holmes filed their respective responses to the motion to dismiss on December 24, 1980. Gerber’s took the form of a sworn declaration that purportedly outlined his view of the dispute. Holmes’ brief countered Engel’s legal arguments regarding jurisdiction.

(For copies of Steve Gerber’s declaration and Henry Holmes’ brief in reply to the motion to dismiss, both dated December 24, 1980, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

Gerber began his declaration by claiming that since he created Howard as an independent contractor, he could not be considered Marvel’s employee when doing so. In an apparent effort to counter the point that Howard was created in the context of a company assignment, he asserted that the Howard who played a supporting role in the two 1973 Man-Thing episodes was not the same character who appeared in the Howard the Duck comic-book series. The Howard of those 1973 stories was a “minor walk on character,” “a mere proto-type” of the one in the Howard series, “killed off,” and “for all purposes ended [...]“. The Howard that began appearing in 1975 was a “new character,” “much more sophisticated,” and “entirely different” from the one that originally appeared in Adventure into Fear #19.

Gerber did not explain how he reconciled this view of the Howard character(s) with his statements in interviews, or the material in the Marvel Treasury Edition, Howard the Duck Annual #1, and, especially, Howard the Duck #22 and 23.

As an exhibit, Donald S. Engel had submitted a copy of the June 1, 1973 check that ostensibly paid Gerber for the scripting of the Adventure into Fear episode introducing Howard. Gerber attempted to discredit it by erroneously claiming that the cover date of December 1973 was when the publication went on sale. Gerber noted the standard lead time of scripting a Marvel color comic was three to four months ahead of publication. As such, this meant the episode could not have been written before June 1. He claimed it would have been written in August or September (the actual on-sale month). Gerber had nothing to say about the back-of-the-check rights acknowledgement.

Gerber then proceeded to directly discuss the copyright and ownership issues. He asserted that with Howard, “Marvel was granted only a limited license to publish, nothing more.” “Marvel Comics,” according to Gerber in the declaration, “did not ask me, nor did I agree, to assign or transfer rights to use or depict Howard or the Howard stories in any other medium, means, or matter. All of such rights were reserved by me.” Gerber wrote that he was told by Stan Lee and Marvel president James Galton “in substance” that his rights and interest in Howard were being protected for him by Marvel. He added that Galton told him, again “in substance,” that this protection made it unnecessary to put the copyrights in Gerber’s name. He also wrote that Lee and Galton told him no outside use of Howard would be made without his consent and participation.

Gerber went on to assert that “Marvel Comics did not even believe it had rights to Howard or the Howard stories, other than publication of comic magazines.” In support of this, he pointed to his newspaper-strip contract, which he said “clearly demonstrated” that “Marvel sought out and obtained his consent” with non-comic-book projects. Gerber went on to assert that that the termination of the newspaper-strip contract meant that the “limited license of rights” that he had granted Marvel was terminated as well. When it came to proof that the “limited license” was terminated, Gerber mentioned only his claims in the termination correspondence, and that the strip was eventually cancelled. As for his comic-book employment contract, he said it “pertained only to new creations” that he wrote during its term. It did not “relate to characters and stories” Gerber had created beforehand.

Gerber did not address how he could make such claims given that (1) the newspaper-strip contract contained no language whatsoever about obtaining his “consent”; (2) the contract characterized Gerber’s involvement with the strip as “services you will perform” and similar terms; and (3) it had Gerber “agree that Marvel shall have all rights of every kind and nature, in and to the Material [...]” He also did not discuss why, if what he said was accurate, the contract included no language of any kind that could be interpreted as referring to any license, “limited” or otherwise, or why there was no provision whatsoever for transfer or reversion of rights or ownership.

Gerber addressed the licensing agreement for the “Vote Howard” pin-back buttons. He started off by claiming it was “irrelevant” to the dispute and “not a grant [...] to Marvel Comics of any right to Howard or the Howard stories.” He effectively claimed he had the right to produce the buttons without Marvel’s permission. In describing the reasons he sought the agreement with Marvel, he wrote:

I felt that lending Marvel Comics’ name to the button [the buttons featured a Marvel copyright notice on the front], using the button design as an element of comic book stories, and obtaining free national advertising from Marvel Comics in its comic magazines would enhance sales of the button.

Gerber went on to say he “was motivated to pay a small royalty partially out of concern over Marvel Comics causing a dispute over use of its corporate name in connection with the button.”

Gerber did not discuss why his signing the licensing agreement should not be seen as acceptance that Howard was already Marvel’s property, particularly since it included a clause in which Gerber “acknowledges” that all intellectual-property rights to Howard “belong exclusively to” Marvel. He also did not discuss his contractual promise to never challenge Marvel’s proprietary rights to the character.

Gerber did not allege, as he had in his 1978 letter to The Comics Journal, that Marvel had removed him from the strip “in a manner which violated the terms of my written agreement.” He suggested that he was planning to terminate the newspaper-strip contract himself when he received James Galton’s March 27, 1978 letter.

On January 12, 1981, Judge David Kenyon denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds. Three weeks later, on February 2, the defendants filed their official answer to the lawsuit complaint. According to the filing, Donald S. Engel and his firm Engel & Engel were now representing Cadence Industries and Marvel Productions as well as the other five defendants.

Apart from some minor factual points (for example, “Defendant Lee is a resident of Los Angeles County”), Engel denied the claims in Gerber’s complaint in every particular. He named eight affirmative defenses.

The first defense stated that, with Gerber’s claims for relief, part of the second, and all of the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth ones were based on common law and California statute. Engel asserted that these claims were preempted by the U. S. Copyright Act of 1976 and should be dismissed.

With the second defense, Engel stated that Gerber was at all relevant times producing material on a work-made-for-hire basis. The third defense stated that Gerber assigned all relevant intellectual-property rights to Marvel. The fourth asserted that the actions of the defendants at issue constituted the proper exercise of their rights in and to the copyrights of the material.

According to the fifth defense, Gerber was barred from seeking relief due to his prior recognition of Marvel’s ownership of the intellectual-property rights to Howard the Duck.

The sixth defense asserted that Gerber was further barred from seeking relief due to the “doctrine of laches.” According to Engel, Gerber “was aware of facts alleged in his complaint and failed to act upon them for a long period of time,” and the defendants took his inaction for granted to their detriment. The seventh defense stated that Gerber’s claims did not comply with the applicable statute of limitations.

According to the eighth defense, Gerber’s claims were not actionable because the purported agreements he alleged they were based on were not in compliance with the applicable Statute of Frauds. (These agreements were presumably the claimed verbal promises made by Stan Lee and Marvel president James Galton.)

Engel closed the brief by stating that the defendants sought dismissal of the complaint, denial of all relief requested by Gerber, reimbursement for legal expenses, and whatever further relief the court deemed appropriate.

(For Donald S. Engel’s February 2, 1981 answer to the lawsuit complaint, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

The Comics Journal‘s ironic coverage of the lawsuit. From The Comics Journal #62 (March 1981).

The March 1981 issue of The Comics Journal opened its news section with a story about the case. It included mention of the denied motion to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds. The accompanying graphic ironically featured panels of the first appearance of the “killed off,” “mere proto-type” Howard the Duck instead of the “entirely different,” “much more sophisticated” Howard character Gerber claimed he was actually suing over. The only sources for the story were Gerber and Henry Holmes. There was no indication the Journal made an effort to contact any of the defendants or their attorney Donald S. Engel. There was also apparently no effort to acquire the lawsuit complaint or other filings from Gerber, Holmes, or the court. Judging from the magazine’s subsequent coverage, it never once attempted to get hold of a single document filed in the suit.

To help cover his legal bills, Gerber decided to produce a benefit comic book. He wanted to do a feature that satirized his conflict with Marvel and the business environment of the comic-book industry. He asked cartoonist Jack Kirby, whom he knew from Ruby-Spears, to draw the strip. Kirby, generally considered the single most important cartoonist in Marvel’s history, had his own grievances with the company. He consented. The two put together Destroyer Duck, and partnered with Eclipse Enterprises to publish it. The first issue (cover at right) reached comic-book stores in mid-1982. Other contributors included Neal Adams, Alfredo Alcala, Sergio Aragonés, Connie Dobbs, Mark Evanier, Shary Flenniken, Gordon Kent, Steve Leialoha, Martin Pasko, Scott Shaw!, Dan Spiegle, and Joe Staton. Everyone involved donated their efforts. All monies received by Eclipse after printing and shipping costs were deducted went to help pay Gerber’s legal expenses. According to an email from Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney, the issue sold 85,000 copies. Eclipse published six more issues over the next two years.

Envelope illustration, by Jack Kirby and Alfredo Alcala, for the 1982 F.O.O.G. (Friends of Old Gerber) benefit art-print portfolio.

Others sought to help Gerber raise money as well. Cerebus cartoonist Dave Sim and his then wife, Deni Loubert, began contacting artists about publishing a benefit art-print portfolio. Gerber told Arthur Byron Cover in 1986 that while he didn’t know of the project beforehand, he gave it his blessing. The F.O.O.G. (Friends of Old Gerber) portfolio, as it came to be titled, featured prints by Sim, Gene Colan (who had left Marvel’s employ in March 1981), Michael Kaluta, Wendy Pini, Marshall Rogers, Frank Thorne, Charles Vess, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson. Jack Kirby and Alfredo Alcala provided a picture of the Destroyer Duck character for the envelope illustration.

With the filing of the defendants’ answer to Gerber’s complaint, the discovery phase of the lawsuit began. Those deposed: Gerber, Stan Lee, Peter Shanaberg, Morrie Eiseman, Peter Coffrin, Marvel Executive Vice-President for Business Affairs and Licensing Alice Donenfeld, Eileen Opatut (believed to be a Marvel or Cadence staffperson), Marvel Productions executive David DePatie, animation writers Gary Greenfield and Barry Marks (misspelled Marx in the docket), artists Val Mayerik and Frank Brunner, and former Marvel editors-in-chief Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman. According to Wolfman, he stated in his deposition that he thought Gerber owned the rights to Howard (Dean 42). The court directed Marvel president James Galton to respond to written interrogatories from Gerber’s attorneys, but no notice of his having done so was ever filed. Gerber also filed notice of his intention to depose Marvel sales managers Ed Shukin and Mike Friedrich (misspelled Freederick in the docket), but no notice of those depositions being taken was ever filed, either.

There was a bit of drama related to the depositions. On October 27, 1981, U. S. Magistrate Ralph Geffen ruled that Gerber and his lawyers had been subjected to needless frustrations in their efforts to depose James Galton and Alice Donenfeld. Geffen allowed the two to be deposed through written interrogatories, and ordered Donenfeld to explain any and all attorney-client privilege and work-product objections to answering questions. The defendants were ordered to pay $2,150 in attorneys’ fees to Gerber’s lawyers. On December 15, 1981, Gerber got his own taste of having to pay the other side’s legal bills. After he twice failed to show up for his second deposition, Geffen ordered him to pay the defendants’ attorneys $1,200. Gerber’s request that the deposition be handled through written interrogatories was denied.

(For copies of the October 27 and December 15, 1981 minutes orders, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

On May 14, 1982, Judge David Kenyon granted part of the defendants’ first affirmative defense. He dismissed Gerber’s third and fourth claims for relief on the basis that they were preempted by the 1976 Copyright Act. These were the claims alleging unfair competition and conversion. He refused to dismiss the fifth claim on the basis of Copyright Act preemption. The defense’s effort to dismiss the sixth claim and part of the second on that basis was not addressed.

(For a copy of the May 14, 1982 claim dismissal ruling, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

Gerber and the defendants reached a settlement agreement on September 24, 1982. The joint motion to dismiss had Gerber, through attorney Henry Holmes, acknowledge to the court that all work he had done on Howard the Duck was under the “terms, conditions and circumstances” of work-made-for-hire as defined by the Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976. Gerber further acknowledged that Marvel corporate parent Cadence Industries owned “all right, title and interest” to Howard the Duck and the Howard material he had produced, “including all copyrights, trademarks, goodwill and the property rights pertaining thereto, including renewals, extensions, and causes of action [...]” On November 5, 1982, Judge David Kenyon approved the motion. He ordered the case dismissed with prejudice.

(For copies of the joint motion to dismiss and the case-dismissal order, see “The Howard the Duck Documents”.)

Judging from the court docket, the lawsuit never got past the discovery phase. No notice was ever filed declaring that discovery was concluded. There were no motions to release Stan Lee, Peter Shanaberg, Morrie Eiseman, and Peter Coffrin from the list of defendants. (As the four’s actions were all as employees of the defendant corporations, they should have had no personal liability for any alleged wrong done to Gerber.) The defendants never filed a motion for summary judgment, which would have been all but certain at the close of discovery. Most significantly, there was never a formal pre-trial conference, and no trial was ever scheduled. In a 1986 interview with Arthur Byron Cover, Gerber said, “We fought it all the way to within two weeks of actually going to court.” What Gerber was “within two weeks of actually going to court” about is unknown, but it wasn’t a trial, at least not in the case of Gerber v. Cadence Industries, et al.

In conjunction with the motion to dismiss, Gerber and Marvel apparently entered into a “consulting agreement” with regard to Howard. The agreement was not filed or even acknowledged with the court, and the full terms are not known. Gerber repeatedly indicated in the years that followed that he was not at liberty to discuss the specifics. A Marvel representative contacted for this article stated that the publisher considers the agreement confidential. However, according to an April 30, 1985 letter sent by Marvel Vice-President in Charge of Publishing Michael Hobson to Gerber’s attorney Henry Holmes, Gerber was granted provisions for credit, royalties, and a “most favored nations” status “relating to compensation.” (The last most likely means no one could be paid a higher scriptwriting rate than Gerber for work on Howard the Duck comics.) Marvel retained “sole and discretionary editorial control” over the character, the authority to choose the artists working on Howard projects, and the option of employing writers other than Gerber on the property.

(For a copy of Michael Hobson’s April 30, 1985 letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents.”)

The letter was made public by former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter in an August 3, 2011 post on his website. Elsewhere in the post, Shooter said the agreement “essentially included Howard the Duck in Marvel’s standard character-creation incentive plan.” (The plan, implemented in the early 1980s, gave the participating writers and artists licensing residuals, a creator credit in certain circumstances, and, with comics title-featuring the character(s) they created, a one-percent share of the cover-price for all sales in excess of 100,000 copies. Other characters and properties covered under the plan are believed to include Alpha Flight, Elektra, Cloak and Dagger, the Hobgoblin, and Power Pack.) If what Shooter said is accurate, Gerber more or less got what he would have eventually received if he hadn’t been fired as a Marvel scriptwriter and editor in 1978. His employment contract stipulated that “any change in Marvel’s policy regarding the rights of artists and writers to income derived from licensing of their creations for commercial exploitation shall be applicable also to Employee [Gerber] and to Howard the Duck from that day forward.”

It is unknown what money, if any, Gerber received as part of the settlement. Steven Grant, who co-edited the comics-freelancer newsletter WAP! with Gerber and Frank Miller in the late 1980s, had this to say in an email:

Steve never discussed the terms of the case with me. He was forbidden by the terms from discussing the terms. If there was a monetary element to the settlement, it wasn’t much, [and] all went to his lawyers. The suit left him with crippling legal bills that dogged him for the rest of his life. From what I gathered–[and], again, this is strictly what I gleaned from off-handed remarks Steve made, so I have no way of judging accuracy–the “settlement” was pretty much Steve throwing in the towel [...]

In the interview with Arthur Byron Cover, Gerber estimated his cumulative legal bills at $140,000. (Assuming Gerber was referring to the amount in 1982 dollars, this is the equivalent of almost $343,000 in 2014.) He said just over 20% of it had been covered by the proceeds from the Destroyer Duck comic book and the F.O.O.G. portfolio.

In October or November, shortly before the dismissal order was filed, Marvel published their first original story starring Howard in nearly three years. It was an eight-page take-off of the film It’s a Wonderful Life, written by Steven Grant and drawn by Paul Smith. The story was featured in Bizarre Adventures #34 (cover-dated February 1983). The issue had most likely been solicited to retailers before the settlement between Gerber and the defendants was reached.

Gerber renewed his publishing relationship with Marvel in 1983 or early 1984. The company had changed a great deal since his departure in 1978. It was now much more than a publisher of cheap newsstand periodicals for children and teenagers. The rise of the comic-book-store marketplace, with the non-returnable distribution system it used, had radically changed the economics of comics publishing. The decreased financial risk promoted experimentation with more lavish formats and increasingly idiosyncratic material. The 1976 changes in the copyright law had made creator-ownership of publishing properties a far more tenable option. Marvel had begun publishing original creator-owned material in 1980 with the full-color anthology magazine Epic Illustrated. In 1981, a “graphic novel” line that aped the European comics-album format was launched. It was divided evenly between company- and author-owned projects. The fall of 1982 saw the publication of the first title under Marvel’s new Epic Comics imprint. These series enjoyed superior production values, and most featured properties wholly owned by their creators. Gerber and artist Val Mayerik proposed a graphic novel and subsequent six-issue Epic Comics series for a creator-owned fantasy-adventure called Void Indigo. Epic Comics editor Archie Goodwin and Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter endorsed the acquisition, and Marvel contracted with Gerber and Mayerik to publish it.

Void Indigo proved a troubled and ultimately unfinished project. This was in part due to the negative reaction to its explicit violence and sexual content. The graphic novel (cover above left) saw print in the summer of 1984. According to a report in the December 21, 1984 issue of The Comics Buyer’s Guide, Canadian customs officials seized shipments “on the grounds that it depicted violence against women.” The first issue of the comic-book series (cover at right), which had a November cover date, was released that September. The content caused a great deal of unrest among retailers and distributors, many of whom, according the Buyer’s Guide, “returned copies and/or drastically reduced their orders for future issues.” The cancellation was announced before the second issue’s release. Carol Kalish, Marvel’s sales manager for the comic-book-store market, told the Buyer’s Guide there were two reasons: “The orders plummeted radically between the first and second issues, and there were persistent problems in maintaining a bi-monthly frequency.”

At some point, Gerber and Marvel began discussing the prospect of his scripting new Howard the Duck comic-book stories. In a news article by Tom Heintjes in The Comics Journal #101 (August 1985), Gerber discussed his efforts to produce new Howard material, up to his decision to withdraw his only finished script after submitting it. According to the article, Gerber held almost all of the material featuring the character after his termination in disdain. It was reported that he felt “it was necessary to jettison much of the continuity [continuing story material] that was established by other writers because such stories were at variance with his conceptions of the book’s elements” (14). Gerber’s initial idea was to treat the material scripted by Bill Mantlo and others as hallucinations the character suffered while being repeatedly punched in the face.

It was not mentioned in the article, but at the time, Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter was struggling to quell a feud that had erupted between cartoonist John Byrne, who wrote and drew the company’s Fantastic Four series, and scriptwriter Chris Claremont, who handled the company’s X-Men titles. They had previously collaborated on the main X-Men series, but in 1980 Byrne had abruptly quit in anger at how Claremont was modifying the stories in the final scripting. Byrne took over Marvel’s Fantastic Four series a few months later, and he occasionally tried to use the assignment as a platform for antagonizing his former collaborator. Fantastic Four readers were intermittently subjected to digs at Claremont’s work on X-Men, such as criticism of his placement of sound-effects lettering, or his handling of a particular villain. (Shooter claimed years later that many other examples were caught and removed before publication.) Claremont complained about Byrne, but Shooter was caught between a rock and a hard place. Byrne and Claremont were both contract employees of Marvel, and they were arguably the two most popular creators among the readership. Shooter couldn’t have Byrne harassing Claremont, but potentially alienating Byrne with disciplinary action wasn’t feasible, either. (Although according to Marvel art director John Romita, he talked Shooter out of removing Byrne from Fantastic Four at one point.) All Shooter could do was monitor Byrne and try to keep further jabs at Claremont from making it into print.

(Byrne eventually found Shooter’s limits. With a 1985 Fantastic Four episode that reintroduced the Jean Grey character from X-Men, Byrne turned in completed story pages that appear to have gone beyond what had been authorized. One scene rewrote the nature of the Phoenix entity that had bonded with Jean as presented in the X-Men stories Claremont had produced with Byrne and other artists. The Claremont material had indicated the entity was morally neutral, but Byrne portrayed it as unambiguously evil and vicious. Byrne’s portrayal would have effectively revised the psychology of Jean’s Dark Phoenix incarnation as depicted in “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” perhaps the most famous story in Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men run. Byrne claimed later that his plot for the episode was approved beforehand, but it’s not known if this particular revision was present in it. It is known that editor Mike Carlin was apparently surprised by the pages Byrne turned in. He told The Comics Journal upon seeing them he anticipated Shooter would object. However, Carlin authorized the pages to be inked and lettered before Shooter could see them. Shooter did object, and when Byrne refused to make changes, Shooter had Claremont rescript the scene for him. Another cartoonist was hired to provide two pages of new art that aped Byrne’s style. The incident helped create a rift between Byrne and Shooter that continues to this day. A full account of this and Byrne’s other conflicts with Shooter will be provided in a future installment of the Jim Shooter: A Second Opinion series.)

Bill Mantlo was also a Marvel contract employee, and Shooter didn’t appear to have any stomach for another version of the Byrne/Claremont feud. According to The Comics Journal news article, after Gerber told Shooter his idea for dealing with the Mantlo material, Shooter rejected it. He reportedly told Gerber that he felt it could be interpreted as an effort to embarrass Mantlo and the other writers who worked on the feature. According to Gerber, Shooter laid down two rules for Gerber’s references to the non-Gerber stories: Gerber could keep anything he liked, but he could not do anything that could be interpreted as disparaging the other writers’ material. In an apparent effort to keep as close an eye on Gerber as possible, Shooter then made himself the editor of Gerber’s new Howard stories.

Michael Hobson

(For a copy of Michael Hobson’s April 30, 1985 letter, see “The Howard the Duck Documents.”)

It is unknown whether, in keeping with Marvel’s standard editorial process, Gerber had previously submitted a synopsis of the story for approval, and if he had, whether the submitted script differed from it.

According to The Comics Journal‘s news article, Gerber was quite unhappy with Shooter’s edits. He characterized them as “revolting” and a “total rewrite” (16). He reportedly sent a letter to Holmes saying that “Shooter’s edits effectively excise the very point of my script (16).” On May 9, Holmes sent Gerber’s reply to Marvel. Gerber discussed his issues with the editing at length. His complaints revolved around Shooter’s handling of Gerber’s treatment of Bill Mantlo’s work on the feature. In response, Gerber told The Comics Journal, “Marvel told me I could ignore continuity [i.e., Mantlo's work], but couldn’t do away with continuity” (16). Gerber claimed he then insisted Shooter be removed from the project, and that he be made editor in Shooter’s place. He said this demand was refused, at which point he withdrew the script.

Steve Gerber eventually made the submitted version of the script available on the Internet. The episode was titled “Howard the Duck’s Secret Crisis II,” a parody reference to such popular line-encompassing character-team-up event series as Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. The script opens with a panicked, trousers-less Howard falling through interdimensional space. It then shifts scenes to Duckworld, Bill Mantlo’s version of Howard’s home planet, which is destroyed by a parody version of Marvel’s world-eating Galactus character. Gerber shows several of the doomed Duckworld residents, including Ronald the Duck, his wife, and two of their children. In Mantlo’s material, these were Howard’s parents and siblings. The scene then shifts again, this time to the planet Krylor, where a filmmaking “techno-artist” named Chirreep is at work. The scenes of Duckworld’s destruction are revealed to be a “techno-fiction” in which Howard is supposed to star. A caption identifies Chirreep’s earlier “techno-fictions” as the stories that appeared in the Howard the Duck black-and-white magazine series and Bizarre Adventures #34. Chirreep is arrested, and at her hearing, she is told by the presiding panel that her use of forbidden substances in the making of her “techno-fictions” has resulted in the creation of a “shadow multiverse” in which her fictions are reality. Further, the “real-life” counterparts of her “characters,” such as Howard, have become displaced in time and space. They are trapped in a “nether cosmos” that divides the “shadow reality” from the one of Gerber’s story. Later, sitting in her jail cell, Chirreep realizes that the creation of the “shadow reality” puts both it and her actual “reality” at risk of destruction. She escapes from prison, embarking on a mission to save “reality” itself.

From there, the scene shifts to “the rift between multiverses,” where Howard ends his fall by slamming into the side of a Winnebago travelling through space. Inside, he finds the Man-Thing cast and a few characters from earlier Howard stories, including two from stories not by Gerber. Howard does not recognize the two from the non-Gerber stories. In the distance from the Winnebago is a giant space “fire hydrant,” in which Dakimh the Enchanter perceives numerous Howard enemies from the comics during and after Gerber’s run. As Howard goes to leave, he opens the door to meet Chirreep, who then enters the vehicle. She starts talking about Duckworld, but he’s never heard of it. He then finds himself wearing pants. The others look outside the window to see the parody Galactus vomiting. The regurgitated matter reconfigures itself as a planet. An enormous office complex can be seen on the planet from space. Parody versions of assorted cosmic entities from Marvel stories meet the villains and Howard and his companions. Both groups end up in separate parts of the office building. Howard wants no part of the impending fight between the two groups and gets up to leave again. After he departs, the Jennifer Kale character observes that he doesn’t seem to realize he’s been lost in the rift for six years. As Howard makes his way through the halls, the pants he’s wearing disappear. Chirreep follows him, and over the course of their conversation, she realizes that Duckworld never existed in Howard’s “reality.” It only existed in the “shadow multiverse” reality created by her movies. She then explains that the two characters from the non-Gerber stories whom Howard didn’t recognize were “fictional creations” come to life. She also explains the origin of his pants. The script closes with Howard and Chirreep confronted by a group of villains.

In the letter Gerber sent to attorney Henry Holmes, The Comics Journal reported that he complained about three specific changes Shooter made. One, in Gerber’s version, Duckworld only existed in the “shadow multiverse” reality of the stories by Mantlo, et al.. After Shooter’s edits, it existed in both the “shadow multiverse” reality and the reality of the Gerber-written comics; only the “shadow multiverse” Duckworld had been destroyed. Two, Shooter eliminated references to the effects Chirreep’s movies had on Howard, specifically his being stranded in the rift for six years. In Shooter’s version, Gerber complained, Howard could have been in the rift for only a day and a half. Three, the Mantlo, et al. characters were not necessarily portrayed as Chirreep’s creations and “fictional” relative to the Gerber Howard’s reality. Gerber apparently devoted a great deal of space to discussing the implications of Shooter’s changes. Judging from the account of the letter, Gerber appears to have spent far more space discussing those implications than the changes themselves. Gerber also complained that Shooter’s changes derailed the story of the subsequent episode, although Shooter was apparently never sent it, and it’s unknown if Gerber ever wrote a treatment.

A comparison of the script against Gerber’s complaints indicates that Michael Hobson’s view of Shooter’s edits as “very minor” was understandable. Shooter apparently did nothing to change the action in the script. (If he did, Gerber doesn’t appear to have objected.) None of Gerber’s complaints related to things that would have required changes in the art descriptions. As far as Gerber’s complaints are concerned, Shooter mainly appears to have modified or excised the dialogue and/or caption material that characterized the non-Gerber material as “fictional.” In keeping with this, Howard’s ignorance of Duckworld in two lines of dialogue was most likely also altered. Additionally, Shooter appears to have excised Jennifer Kale’s reference on page 18 to Howard being in the rift for six years. (The Mantlo magazine stories began appearing six years previously in 1979.) Chirreep’s statement on page 21 that Duckworld only existed in the “shadow multiverse” was most likely removed or modified as well. Overall, Gerber’s complaints appear to refer to changes made to perhaps two captions (one a reference to Howard back issues) and nine lines of dialogue.

How Shooter reacted to the Galactus parody vomiting after it ate Mantlo’s Duckworld is unknown.

From the Jim Shooter-scripted lampoon of Steve Gerber in Secret Wars II #1

At two points in The Comics Journal article, Gerber claimed to take umbrage at Shooter’s edits for reasons that went beyond the alterations of his script.

In March 1985, a month before Gerber submitted the script, Marvel released the first issue of Secret Wars II (cover-dated July) to comic-book stores. The issue was scripted by Shooter, with art by Al Milgrom and Steve Leialoha. One of the supporting characters was a TV animation writer who closely resembled Gerber. The story introduced him with a scene mocking Gerber’s views on media depictions of violence. (In general, Gerber felt non-explicit depictions of violence were a falsification.) The character then gains super powers. In revenge against a TV network for revising his scripts, the character uses his new powers to demolish their Los Angeles headquarters. In The Comics Journal article, Gerber suggested that the lampoon and the script editing demonstrated that Shooter had some sort of vendetta against him. He said, “I felt that if Shooter thought I could take that, than he would be able to take the satire in my script [...] I suppose [this incident] makes it obvious that there was more to it than just a poke in the ribs. What I would have thought was poking fun apparently turned out to be more than that” (16).

Shooter has never addressed the question of whether the Secret Wars II lampoon or his editing of the Howard script reflected any kind of grudge against Gerber. In 2011, in a comment to a post on his website, Shooter wrote, “Steve loved it [the lampoon]. He even sent me a rave fan letter.” However, the letter has not been published. Gerber does not appear to have ever publicly acknowledged that he enjoyed the story, much less sent an admiring letter to Shooter or Marvel.

Gerber also indicated that a double standard was at play in Shooter’s attitude towards Mantlo.

In 1976, Marvel launched The Rampaging Hulk, a black-and-white magazine series featuring the company’s Hulk character. Doug Moench was the title’s primary scriptwriter. The stories for the first nine issues were set, per editorial instructions, during the period between the early 1963 cancellation of the original, failed Incredible Hulk series and the revived, successful Hulk series that began in Tales to Astonish in the summer of 1964. Moench and various artists created a multi-issue storyline featuring the Hulk in battle with the Krylorians, an alien race seeking to conquer the Earth. The Hulk was accompanied throughout by Bereet, a Krylorian “techno-artist” (here, an inventor) who was trying to thwart her fellow Krylorians’ plans. As the episodes were designed as interpolations into the “continuity” of the Hulk character, they did not significantly contradict material in the Hulk color-comics series that began in 1964. Regular readers of the Hulk’s adventures in the color comics were free to ignore the material as one-off chapters of little to no importance in the character’s history.

From The Incredible Hulk #269 (March 1982).

In the March 1982 issue (#269) of The Incredible Hulk color-comics series, scripted by Bill Mantlo with art by Sal Buscema, the Bereet character was reintroduced. The Rampaging Hulk stories were portrayed as fictional movies the Bereet character had created, not actual episodes in the Hulk’s ongoing story. Mantlo and Buscema had effectively removed the material from the “continuity” of the Hulk’s adventures.

In The Comics Journal article, Gerber said his script had taken this idea from Mantlo’s story. In his effort to repudiate the Howard material by Mantlo and others, he was using a story device that Mantlo himself had used. Gerber felt this squared the circle of excising the material in a way that Mantlo couldn’t legitimately find offensive. He suggested that Shooter’s editorial actions were contradictory.

Shooter has never addressed why Mantlo’s treatment of Moench’s work may have been viewed as appropriate while Gerber’s handling of Mantlo’s material was not.

Graphic featuring side-by-side comparisons of a portion of Page 22 of Steve Gerber’s 1985 script for an unpublished Howard the Duck story, before and allegedly after Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s editing. From The Comics Journal #101 (August 1985)

Gerber sent The Comics Journal copies for most of page 22 from both the original and edited versions. These were reprinted as a graphic accompanying the news article. As published, Shooter’s alleged editorial comments are all but illegible. One also can’t get a clear sense of the excisions from the way the pages are placed in the graphic. However, what was deleted on the page is very clear when one checks the image of the edited page against the script’s online publication. This is what Shooter ostensibly cut:

CHIRREEP: –and NO!
CHIRREEP: They BEGAN as fictional creations–but they BECAME REAL–sort of like your PANTS!

HOWARD: I repeat: hah?

CHIRREEP: In my movies, an ANIMAL DECENCY committee got upset because you were waddling half-naked.

[...] Chirreep is too involved with her story; How[ard] is too involved in his continuing skepticism.

CHIRREEP: They gave you a choice between trousers and LYNCHING. You went with the pants.

HOWARD: Who WOULDN’T…?

CHIRREEP: But, Howard, if Andy the Angel and Hemlock Shoals [the Mantlo characters in the Winnebago]–and your pants–have all taken on some kind of reality–

[...]

Behind How[ard] and Chirreep, the door has opened a little more. [...] Chirreep grows progressively more alarmed, Howard progressively more skeptical.

CHIRREEP: –that means –MY VILLAINS COULD HAVE, TOO!

HOWARD: Uh-huh. What were THEY– evil GYM SHORTS, maybe?

It appears Gerber, as he had in Howard the Duck #21, tried to include satirical attacks on Disney, Marvel’s settlement with the company, and the mandated trousering of the Howard character. He even repeated a trope from the earlier story: those responsible for putting Howard in pants were media decency activists upset over his cavorting about bottomless. But this time, those in charge at Marvel, particularly Jim Shooter and Michael Hobson, were paying attention. In 1977′s Howard the Duck #21, Gerber closed his satirical broadside against the settlement with the line, “[...] you just keep on tryin’–and I’ll just keep on resistin’–an’ we’ll both have a lot of cloudy days ahead.” Cloudy days were here. The difference this time was the “resistin’” wasn’t going to succeed.

As Gerber has never addressed Shooter’s Disney-related edits, the only ones Shooter is alleged to have made are the material on the page-comparison The Comics Journal published. However, several other revisions were likely. The artist would all but certainly have been directed to show Howard wearing pants throughout. The two references to Howard’s feet being webbed in the art descriptions would likely have been removed or, as per the settlement, changed to toed. And there was another jab at Disney that probably would have been targeted. About a year before the second Disney settlement, Marvel published a Bill Mantlo Howard story that featured a satirical Disney personification named Wally Sidney. Gerber included a panel that had the character being spanked.

Apart from the page-comparison graphic, there is not a single reference in The Comics Journal article to the Disney settlement or the editing that appears to have been related to it. Given that Gerber doesn’t seem to have been complaining about these edits, at least not publicly, it is unclear why he would have sent these pages to The Comics Journal, or why the magazine would have published them with the article. The edits on that particular page were all but irrelevant to Gerber’s account of why he withdrew the script.

Marvel made a small effort to revive the Howard the Duck series without Gerber’s involvement. After Gerber withdrew his script, Marvel published, eight months apart, two new issues of the color-comics series. The first, cover-dated January 1986, reached comic-book stores in September of 1985. It featured a years-old inventory story scripted by Steven Grant and pencilled by Paul Smith. The second issue, with a September 1986 cover date, reached comics stores the following May. It was co-plotted and illustrated by the character’s co-creator Val Mayerik.

Howard the Duck movie poster

The director of the film was Willard Huyck, who would share the script byline with Gloria Katz, the credited producer. The pair were best known for collaborating with Lucas on the celebrated screenplay for his 1973 film American Graffiti. The film’s stars were Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, and Tim Robbins. Howard would be played a number of dwarfs outfitted in an anthropomorphic duck costume, with the character’s voice provided by Chip Zien. David T. Friendly reported in the Los Angeles Times that the film’s budget, including production, prints, and advertising, was over $46 million. (Adjusted for inflation, this would be approximately $100 million in 2014 dollars.) In a 1986 interview with Dwight Jon Zimmerman for Comics Interview, Gerber said he had been actively consulted with on the script and was on the set for the last day of filming. He told Zimmerman he had a financial interest in the film. He was credited as Howard’s creator in the film’s advertising and opening titles.

It’s almost over, please? The final scene of Howard the Duck (1986)

The film opened on August 1, 1986. The reviews were brutal. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times called much of the picture a “numbing waste.” Her review closed by saying, “the film itself is a pretty base canard.” The header of Jane Galbraith’s write-up in Variety read, “Daffy Duck will be pleased to hear he didn’t miss any career opportunities when he wasn’t chosen to star in ‘Howard the Duck,’ although producers certainly could have benefited from his talents.” Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune film critic and co-host of the popular movie-review television show, Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, began his newspaper piece with the question, “Who was this stupid film made for?” In early 1987, he and his TV partner, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, included it in a special show covering the worst movies of 1986. (The program can be seen here. The discussion of Howard begins at about the eight-minute mark.) In 1987, the film won four Golden Raspberry Awards, including the dubious honor of being named the Worst Film of 1986.

The picture was a box-office failure. According to the film database site Box Office Mojo, it opened on 1,554 screens in North America and grossed just over $8 million its first week. During its second week, receipts fell by nearly 50% to $4.3 million. The week after that, the box-office take was just shy of $1.7 million, a drop of over 60%. Its cumulative North American box office gross was $16,295,774, a little more than a third of its costs. In the Los Angeles Times, David T. Friendly reported that the poor earnings contributed to Universal studio president Frank Price’s decision to resign less than two months after the film opened. Willard Huyck never directed another theatrical feature.

Steve Gerber’s public statements about the film are contradictory. In 1986, prior to the film’s opening, his attitude seemed positive. He told Dwight Jon Zimmerman the picture was “faithful to the spirit of the comic book, and I think you can expect to see the same character, as far as Howard is concerned. They did capture Howard very, very well.” However, in a 2001 interview with Nate Shelton in Diamond Previews Online, he said the character was “treated as little more than a visual gag and a mouthpiece for lame one-liners.” He added that the film, “in a misguided attempt to appeal to a mass audience [...] told a rather simple-minded alien monster story [...]” He indicated he didn’t feel it was true to the comics feature.

In tandem with the film’s release, Marvel published a Marvel Super Special magazine featuring a color-comics adaptation of the film’s story (above right). It was scripted by Danny Fingeroth, with art by Kyle Baker. The adaptation was also serialized in a three-issue series published shortly afterward.

In 1988, about a year after Jim Shooter’s departure from Marvel, Steve Gerber resumed freelance scriptwriting for the company. His first project was a 12-part Man-Thing storyline, illustrated by Tom Sutton, for the bi-weekly anthology title Marvel Comics Presents. In 1990, he became the regular scriptwriter for the company’s Avengers Spotlight series and the She-Hulk humor title. Howard the Duck guest-starred in four of the She-Hulk episodes, and judging from the covers, Gerber was again able to defy the Disney mandate that Howard wear pants. He continued to regularly write for Marvel into 1991. Other notable Marvel projects during this time include a Foolkiller limited series pencilled by J. J. Birch (a pseudonym for Joe Brozowski), and a Poison serial in Marvel Comics Presents with artist Cindy Martin. It is unknown if Gerber ever attempted to resubmit his withdrawn 1985 Howard the Duck script.

Gerber spent the next few years scripting comics for the California-based publishers Malibu and Image.

In 1996, Marvel editor-in-chief Bob Harras asked Spider-Man Team-Up editor Tom Brevoort to guest-star Howard in the title. In a 2007 interview with Brian Michael Bendis, Brevoort recalled that he eventually approached Gerber about scripting the story. Gerber replied with a proposal that they do an unofficial crossover with The Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck #1, a one-off team-up title he was working on with Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen and penciller Chris Marrinan. According to Brevoort, Gerber said:

I want to do an unofficial crossover where we’ll do these two stories–the one in that book and the one in your Marvel book and we’ll set them in the same location, but the characters won’t really run into one another. They’ll just kind of run back and forth across the same landscape, but if you have the two books together you can kind of see that it’s this larger tapestry.

Brevoort described his response:

The part that worries me about this, Steve, is that I don’t know what’s going to be on those other pages. I know exactly what’s going to be on the Marvel pages, but I have no idea what you’re going to do over there.

Gerber then assured Brevoort that he wasn’t going to do anything that would get Brevoort into trouble.

While working on the Spider-Man Team-Up episode, Gerber became aware of Marvel’s plans to simultaneously re-introduce Howard in the publisher’s Generation X title. Howard would also appear in the Ghost Rider series. Brevoort characterized Gerber’s reaction as “upset,” and that he felt he had been unwittingly manipulated into participating in a coordinated revival of the character. Gerber’s lawyer Harris Miller even called Marvel to complain. Gerber was then told there would be no acrimony if he bowed out of the Spider-Man Team-Up story. Gerber responded that he would see it through.

The unofficial crossover in Spider-Man Team-Up consisted of only a few overlapping panels, with the Savage Dragon and Destroyer Duck characters indicated by close-ups of hands and half-seen features in the shadows. At a crucial moment, Howard the Duck and Howard supporting character Beverly Switzler find themselves in a warehouse amid a gaggle of clones. Over in the The Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck book, the titular heroes grab Howard and Beverly to bring them to safety. The Dragon notes that the danger appears to be past and suggests taking them back. But Destroyer Duck, the character ostensibly created to help Gerber reclaim Howard through the courts, will have none of it. He says, “They haven’t got any friends over there! They’re comin’ with us! Anyhow, one of the clones ran out that way. They’ll never know the difference!” [Emphases in the original.]

In other words, Howard the Duck and Beverly Switzler had just been rescued from Marvel Comics. They were now residents of the creator-owned world of Savage Dragon and Destroyer Duck. The Howard who would be appearing in Marvel titles from that point on was a clone and an impostor.

The Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck story then finds Howard and Beverly at police headquarters with the heroes. Beverly, previously a redhead, is now a brunette. Howard’s feathers are dyed a dark mallard green. They are set to enter the Witness Protection Program, with Beverly taking the name Rhoda Martini, and Howard now calling himself Leonard. The two would be relocating to Buffalo, New York.

Tom Brevoort was outraged. Gerber, whom he’d idolized, had tricked him, and he was worried the stunt would cost him his job. Brevoort told Bendis, “he [Gerber] decided that me and my life and my family, we’re perfectly acceptable collateral damage to the larger point that he wanted to make.” Brevoort said that when he tried to discuss it with Gerber later on, Gerber told him words to the effect of, “Well, I’m really sorry that I had to do that to you, but you were in the way of the gunfire.” Brevoort’s position at Marvel turned out to be secure, but he was adamant about never working with Gerber again. He considered having done so the worst mistake of his career.

In a January 17, 2007 post on his website, Gerber all but completely confirmed the account Tom Brevoort gave Brian Michael Bendis. He wrote the unspecified bits he took issue with were attributable to different points of view and “understandable.” He closed the post by saying, “Tom, I am genuinely sorry for having put a very talented editor and a very nice guy–i.e., you–in a very difficult position.”

The comics field had entered an extended commercial slump in the mid-1990s. For the rest of the decade, Gerber divided his efforts between it and the TV-animation field. His writing work for the comics field was primarily for DC Comics. Most of his animation credits were for Superman and Batman TV projects. His work on the Batman: The New Adventures television series led to his being named one of the recipients of the show’s 1998 Emmy for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program.

In 2002, Gerber scripted a six-issue Howard the Duck limited series for Marvel, with art by Phil Winslade and Glenn Fabry. Both Gerber and Marvel had appeared to put the Savage Dragon/Destroyer Duck incident behind them. The series was released through the company’s MAX imprint, which allowed for harsher language and more explicit sexual and violent content. Gerber’s antipathy to the Disney redesign of Howard, which hadn’t been enforced in over a dozen years, became the starting point for the story’s central visual conceit: Howard was transformed into an anthropomorphic brown mouse for the bulk of the narrative. Veteran comics critic R. Fiore praised the series in The Comics Journal. He wrote:

Steve Gerber has pulled the neat trick and rare feat of hopping onto an old warhorse after 20-odd years’ absence and riding it with much of the élan of the first time around. (43)

The series was released in a trade paperback collection (cover at left) in the fall of 2002. It proved to be Gerber’s swan song on the character.

A live-action Man-Thing film debuted on the cable-TV Sci Fi Channel in 2005. The picture was given a theatrical release outside North America. It was directed by Brett Leonard from a screenplay credited to Hans Rodionoff. The story was substantially derived from the Gerber-scripted Man-Thing episode “Cry of the Native!” from Adventure into Fear #16 (September 1973). A supporting character was named after Gerber. It is unknown if he ever received any compensation from the movie.

In 2007, Marvel released a new four-issue Howard the Duck limited series. It was written by Ty Templeton and pencilled by Juan Bobillo. Howard appeared in his duck incarnation. The series was collected in 2008 as a trade paperback titled Howard the Duck: Media Duckling. It is, to date, the last project starring the character to be released.

Steve Gerber passed away in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 10, 2008. According to his obituary in the New York Times, the reported cause was complications from pulmonary fibrosis. He was 60 years old.

Gerber’s last project to be published by Marvel was The Infernal Man-Thing, done in collaboration with artist Kevin Nowlan. It was released as a three-issue limited series and trade paperback collection in 2012.

In Sean Howe’s 2012 history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Gerber’s fellow comics and animation writer Mary Skrenes offered this remembrance of him:

There were some people who could only write, that’s all they could do. [...] Steve, unfortunately, was one. And people should know comics are a place to start and then move on. But he didn’t like animation, and he didn’t like television. He liked comic books. (428)

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Gerber, Steve, Carmine Infantino, Klaus Janson, and I[rv] Watanabe. “If You Knew Soofi…” Howard the Duck, February 1978: 1+. Rpt. in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1. Ed. Matty Ryan. New York: Marvel, 2001. [492-508?]

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Gerber, Steve, Val Mayerik, Sal Trapani, and Art Simek. “Cry of the Native!” Adventure into Fear, September 1973: 1+. Rpt. in Essential Man-Thing, Vol. 1. Ed. Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel, 2006. [172-190?]

—. “The Enchanter’s Apprentice.” Adventure into Fear, December 1973: 1+. Rpt. in Essential Man-Thing. Vol. 1. Ed. Mark D. Beazley. New York: Marvel, 2006. [212-230?]

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Gerber, Steve, Val Mayerik, William Wray, and John Costanza. “May the Farce Be With You!” Howard the Duck, March 1978: 1+. Rpt. in Essential Howard the Duck, Vol. 1. Ed. Matty Ryan. New York: Marvel, 2001. [510-526?]

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—. “How Howard Got His Pants.” Howard the Duck, November 1980: 24-28.

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—. “Pushing Marvel into the ’80s: An Interview With Jim Shooter.” The Comics Journal, November 1980: 56+.

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This is the 14th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This installment includes, in one instance, a use of the website Mike’s Amazing World of Comics for publication-date information. I do not endorse the site as a primary reference. Mike Voiles, the site editor, bases much of his information on conjecture. Source citations, to the extent the site provides them, are presented in an Easter egg format for those familiar with the site’s design idiosyncrasies.

I strongly disagree with Voiles’ approach to reporting on-sale information. He does consider the Copyright Office data, but he gives precedence to advertising and other promotional material. For example, he treats identical information appearing in house ads and press releases as corroboration of each other. The fallacy here is that he doesn’t understand the difference between corroboration and repetition. Company advertising and company press releases are not independent sources of information. They are different venues for the same information. Beyond that, promotional material reflects anticipated on-sale dates. With newsstand comics, they could very well reflect the expected date that late-receiving markets would begin retailing the publications. (The quickest way to alienate customers is to release promised material behind schedule; there’s little to no downside for it being early.) The copyright filings are post-publication reports of when the material first went on sale. As the filings are government documents, the publishers have particular incentive to get the information right. If they are discovered reporting false information, they face fines and other penalties. My view is that the Copyright Office information isn’t perfect, but barring obvious absurdity, it deserves privilege over other sources.

In general, I will only use Voiles as a reference when no copyright filing was made, and even then, it will only be after testing his claim against other available information about the publisher’s offerings.

This 14th post covers May 1946 to August 1946.

Captain Marvel Adventures #61.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 10, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter 1: The World’s Mightiest Immortal,” by Otto Binder & Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Louisville: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 7, 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #21.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 14, 1946. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes the Pogo story “Albert and Pogo and the Fountain of Youth,” by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June-July 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #55.

Published on May 14, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Bughuman Plague,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter, with Joye Hummel Murchison. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: J. R. [DC]. Cover/indicia date: July 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 6, No. 9 [#69].

Published on May 14, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Biceps Blues,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #56.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 17, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Overworked Genie,” by Jack Cole, with Andre Le Blanc. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: July 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #62.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 24, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter 2: The Arena of Horror,” by Otto Binder & Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Louisville: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 7, 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Story Book #1.

Published on May 24, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “On the Planet Pazzoo” and “The Fiendish Four,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: 1946. Cover price: 15¢.

The Marvel Family #2.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 7, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Marvel Family story “The Marvel Family and Aunty Anti-Marvel,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. The Captain Marvel story “Captain Marvel and the Miracle Worker,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, is also featured. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #16.

Published on June 12, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Battle of Desires,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Everett Hibbard. New York: Gainlee [DC]. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1946. Cover price: 15¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #63.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 14, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The World’s Greatest Stunt Man,” “The Camera Fiend,” and “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter 3: The Arena of Horror,” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: July 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Fairy Tale Parade.

Published on June 14, 1946. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes the story “Goblin Glen,” by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Arthur E. Jameson. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: July 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #114.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 6, No. 10 [#70].

Published on June 14, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Smugsnorkle Squattie,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: July 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #56.

Published on June 17, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Anti-Atomic Metal,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: J. R. [DC]. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #57.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 19, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Mars–Keep Away,” by Jack Cole, with John Spranger. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on June 28, 1946. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Little Lulu Fights Back With a Club,” “Little Lulu Brings Some Friends Home to Dinner,” “Little Lulu Tells a Tall Tale,” “A Problem in Box Tops,” and “The Haunted House,” all by John Stanley. Cover illustration by John Stanley. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #115.

Jingle Jangle Comics #21.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Double-Rich Banker and the Well-Watered Hat-Tree,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Ben Levin. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: June 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Captain Marvel Adventures #64.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 12, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter 4: Flame of the Magic Fiddle,” “The Missing Millions,” and “His Press Agent,” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #22.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 16, 1946. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Pogo story by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 6, No. 11 [#71].

Published on July 16, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Swimming Swindlers,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #58.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 17, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Green Terror,” by Jack Cole, with Alex Kotsky. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: September 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #5.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 19, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the stories “They Called Him Weapons,” by Jack Cole, and “The Mysterious Being Called Hate,” by Jack Cole & Alex Kotsky. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Autumn 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #65.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on August 9, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The Invasion from Outer Space,” “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter 5: Slaves of the Sea,” and “The Sword in the Stone,” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: September 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #17.

Published on August 12, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Valkyries’ Prey,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Everett Hibbard. New York: Gainlee [DC]. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1946. Cover price: 15¢.

The Marvel Family #4.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on August 14, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Captain Marvel story “Captain Marvel and Sivana’s Vampire,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Cover/indicia date: Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: September 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: No copyright registration appears to have been filed for the issue. The source for the publication date is Mike’s Amazing World of Comics. (See the post introduction.) That site’s information appears reasonably accurate in this instance. The range of reported publication dates for Fawcett releases with a September 1946 cover date is August 7 to September 4.

Sensation Comics #58.

Published on August 14, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Bog Trap,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: J. R. [DC]. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my earlier research indicated William Moulton Marston was not involved with this issue.

Police Comics #59.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on August 16, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Menace of Mr. Happiness,” by Jack Cole & Joe Millard, with Andre LeBlanc. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 6, No. 12 [#72].

Published on August 16, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Playin’ Hookey,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: September 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on August 30, 1946. The comic includes the stories “Tuba Trouble,” “Indian Uprising,” “Newspaper Business,” and “Little Lulu and the Seven Dwarfs,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #120.

Jingle Jangle Comics #22.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Straight-Shooting Princess and the Filigree Pond-Lily,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: August 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Next: September 1946 to December 1946.

This is the 15th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 15th post covers September 1946 to December 1946.

Captain Marvel Adventures #66.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 6, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The Atomic War,” and “The Cult of the Curse, Chapter Six: The Battle of the Century,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #23.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 10, 1946. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert and Pogo story by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 1 [#73].

Published on September 10, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Gold-Finder,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #60.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 18, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Man Who Built Himself a Body,” by Jack Cole, with Andre LeBlanc. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: November 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #67.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 4, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “Captain Marvel Gets a Secretary,” and “The Key of Crime,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: November 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 2 [#74].

Published on October 15, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Tax-Collectors,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: November 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #60.

Published on October 16, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Ordeal of Queen Boadicea,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: J. R. [DC]. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Police Comics #61.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 18, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “A Bundle of Trouble,” by Jack Cole, with Andre LeBlanc. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #6.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 23, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “The Moon Wizard” and “The Crimes of Mother Goose,” both by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen; and “The Zwili Cat” and “The Grasshopper,” both by Jack Cole, Gwen Hansen, and Alex Kotzky. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. New York: Quality. Cover/indicia date: Winter 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Jingle Jangle Comics #23.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Musical Whifflesnort and the Red-Hot Music Roll,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: October 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Captain Marvel Adventures #68.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 6, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The Scenes Out of the Past,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, and “The Missing Red Suit,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #24.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 12, 1946. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic ncludes an untitled Albert and Pogo story by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1946-January 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 3 [#75].

Published on November 14, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Turkey Trouble,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #62.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 15, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Cupid’s Bow Murder,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: January 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #61.

Published on November 18, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Million Dollar Tennis Game,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: J. R. [DC]. Cover/indicia date: January 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Wonder Woman #21.

Published on November 25, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the story “The Adventure of the Atom Universe,” by Joye Hummel Murchison & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: Wonder Woman [DC]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note (9/21/2015): Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story exclusively to Joye Hummel Murchison. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research attributed it to William Moulton Marston. I’ve changed the listing to reflect Lepore’s research.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on November 29, 1946. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Little Lulu Is Taken for a Ride,” “One Man Dog,” and “Little Lulu and the Three Bears,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #131.

Comic Cavalcade #19.

Published on December 11, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Battle for Eternal Youth,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Everett Hibbard. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1947. Cover price: 15¢.

Police Comics #63.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 13, 1946. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Crab,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: February 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 4 [#76].

Published on December 17, 1946. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Cantankerous Cat,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #62.

Published on December 18, 1946. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Mysterious Prisoners of Anglonia,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: February 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Jingle Jangle Comics #24.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Pint-Size King and the Three Jelly Beans,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: December 1946. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Next: January 1947 to April 1947.

This is the 16th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 16th post covers January 1947 to April 1947.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 5 [#77].

Published on January 14, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Going Buggy,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: February 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #25.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 15, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert and Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The primary cover illustration is by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #64.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 15, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Sweets to the Swindlers!” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: March 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #7.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 17, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “One-Way Voyage of Villainy,” by Jack Cole, Joe Millard, and Alex Kotzky; “Prof. Rudge’s Mind-Training School,” by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen; and “The Billboard’s Tale,” by Jack Cole & Joe Millard. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Spring 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #63.

Published on January 20, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Wall of Doom,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: March 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in this story to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Wonder Woman #22.

Published on January 27, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the stories “The Color Thief,” “The Island of Evil,” and “Jealousy Visits the Winged Women of Venus,” all by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: March-April 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in these stories to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on January 28, 1947. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “The Hooky Team,” “The Big Snow Fight,” and “Lulu and the Bean Soup,” all by John Stanley. Cover illustration by John Stanley. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: March 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #139.

Captain Marvel Adventures #71.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 31, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “The Adventure in Time,” and “The End of the World,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #10.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on February 7, 1946. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Marvel Family story “The Sivana Family Strikes at the Marvel Family,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza, Jack Binder, and Bud Thompson. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck & Pete Costanza. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #20.

Published on February 12, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Buddha Wishing Ring,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Martin Naydel. St. Louis: DC. Cover/indicia date: April-May 1947. Cover price: 15¢.

Police Comics #65.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on February 14, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Apartment of Dr. Phobia,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 6 [#78].

Published on February 14, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Jam Robbers,” by Carl Barks. The cover illustrator is believed to be either Walt Kelly or Carl Buettner. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: March 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Jingle Jangle Comics #25.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Rocketeering Doodlebug and the Self-Winding Horse-Fly,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: February 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Animal Comics #26.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on March 14, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert & Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The primary cover illustration is by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: April-May 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #66.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on March 14, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Beauteous Bessie,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 7 [#79].

Published on March 14, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Picnic Tricks,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Wonder Woman #23.

Published on March 26, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the stories “Siege of the Savage War Maidens,” “The Vanishing Mummy,” and “Wonder Woman and the Coming of the Kangas,” all by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This entry was added on September 21, 2015. Jill Lepore’s 2014 The Secret History of Wonder Woman attributes the scriptwriting in these stories to William Moulton Marston. The Grand Comics Database listing at the time of my original research did not credit him.

Captain Marvel Adventures #73.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on March 28, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “Captain Marvel Meets Billy Batson,” and “Captain Marvel Gets a Hobby,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on April 1, 1947. The comic includes the stories “The Kid Who Came to Dinner,” “Sunday Afternoon,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “Rainy Day,” and “Crybaby,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #146.

Comic Cavalcade #21.

Published on April 9, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Siege of the Flying Mermaids,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Everett E. Hibbard. St. Louis: DC. Cover/indicia date: June-July 1947. Cover price: 15¢.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck in Volcano Valley.

Published on April 10, 1947. Edited by Eleanor Packer, Alice Nielsen [Cobb], and Tom McKimson. The comic includes the story “Volcano Valley,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Buettner. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #147.

Albert the Alligator and Pogo Possum.

Published on April 15, 1947. The comic includes the stories “The Great Sam Widge Test,” “Rainy Daze,” “The Catfish Pirates,” “Mr. Owl and the Atomic Bomb,” and “East Lint with Albert and Pogo and an All-Star Cast in Person,” all by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #108.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 8 [#80].

Published on April 15, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Donald’s Posy Patch,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #8.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 18, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the stories “The Hot Rod” and “Concerto for Murder,” by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Summer 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #66.

Published on April 21, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Prisoners of Cops and Robbers,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: DC. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #67.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 23, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Gag Man,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Jingle Jangle Comics #26.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Bargain-Plated Dummy and the Non-Skid Dicky” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #3.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from cartoonist Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: April 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: To those who click to read the online scan, please be aware the strip features offensive racial caricatures. This is the first issue of the series. The numbering takes over from the publisher’s Boy Explorers Comics. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Next: May 1947 to July 1947.

This is the 17th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 17th post covers May 1947 to July 1947.

Animal Comics #27.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 16, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert and Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The main cover illustration is by Dan Noonan. The footer panels are by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June-July 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 9 [#81].

Published on May 16, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Donald Mines His Own Business,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #67.

Published on May 19, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Secret of the Bar-L Ranch,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: July 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #68.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 21, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Plastic Man Goes to Hollywood,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: July 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Wonder Woman #24.

Published on May 26, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the stories “Tutine, the Tutor of Destruction,” “The Challenge of the Mask,” and “The Curse of Montezuma,” all by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #22.

Published on June 11, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Captives of Saturnette,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Martin Naydel. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1947. Cover price: 15¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 10 [#82].

Published on June 16, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Magical Misery,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: July 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #69.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 18, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Stretcho, the Indian Rubber Man,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #68.

Published on June 18, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Secret of the Menacing Octopus,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Jingle Jangle Comics #27.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “Aladdin-Ike and His Brass-Buttoned Lamp Post,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Dave Tendlar. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #4.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from cartoonist Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: June 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on July 1, 1947. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Little Lulu for President,” “Takes the Cake,” “Just a Gigolo,” and “Lulu’s Lamp,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #158.

Donald Duck in the Ghost of the Grotto.

Published on July 2, 1947. Edited by Eleanor Packer, Alice Nielsen [Cobb], and Tom McKimson. The comic includes the stories “Donald Duck and the Ghost of the Grotto,” and “Adventure Down Under,” both by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Buettner. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #159.

Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics Featuring Walt Disney’s Donald Duck.

Published on July 14, 1947. The comic includes the story “Maharajah Donald,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. Racine, WI: Western. Cover/indicia date: 1947. Cover price: Free. Notes: Also known as March of Comics #4. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Animal Comics #28.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 15, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert and Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The main cover illustration is by Dan Noonan. The footer panels are by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 11 [#83].

Published on July 15, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Vacation Time,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Young Romance, Vol. 1, No. 1.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 15, 1947. Edited by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby. The comic includes stories by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, with others by Bill Draut. The title is considered the first romance-story anthology comic-book series. New York: Prize. Cover/indicia date: September-October 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #70.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 16, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. Includes the Plastic Man story “It’s an Ill Wind That Blows the Hat,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: September 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #69.

Published on July 16, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Mystery Behind A, B, C,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: September 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #15.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 18, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Captain Marvel story “Condemned to Die!” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by Pete Costanza & Marc Swayze. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: September 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #9.

Published on July 18, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “The King of Zing!” by Jack Cole & Joe Millard; “Case of the Counterfeit Counterfeit,” by Jack Cole & Joe Millard, with John Spranger; and “Feud State,” and Cauldron,” both by Jack Cole & Alex Kotzky. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Autumn 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Next: August 1947 to December 1947.

This is the 18th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 18th post covers August 1947 to December 1947.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 7, No. 12 [#84].

Published on August 15, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Waltz King,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: September 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #71.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on August 15, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “East Is East and West Is West,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Sensation Comics #70.

Published on August 20, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “The Unconquerable Woman of Cocha Bamba,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. St. Louis: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu.

Published on August 29, 1947. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “The Case of the Purloined Popover,” “Alvin’s Solo Flight,” and “Never Again,” all by John Stanley. Cover illustration by John Stanley. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #165.

Jingle Jangle Comics #28.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “Skip Van Wrinkle the High-Hatted Hunter,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #5.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: August 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Police Comics #72.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 12, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Curse of Mr. Cat,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffao: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: November 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Animal Comics #29.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 16, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert & Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The main cover illustration is by Dan Noonan. The footer panels are by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 1 [#85].

Published on September 16, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Masters of Melody,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #79.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 26, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “The Talking Tiger,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. The story is the first appearance of Mr. Tawky Tawny. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #24.

Published on October 13, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Empress of the Sea Brigands,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Irwin Hasen (The Flash and Green Lantern panels) & Harry G. Peter (Wonder Woman panel). New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: December 1947-January 1948. Cover price: 15¢.

Police Comics #73.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 15, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Man Called Remember,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 2 [#86].

Published on October 16, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Fireman Donald,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: November 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #10.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 17, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “The Sands of Crime,” and “The Ballet Caper,” both by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen; “Gangster’s Vacation,” by Jack Cole, with Alex Kotzky; and “A Shock to the System,” by Jack Cole, with John Spranger. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Winter 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #80.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 29, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Liebseron, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “Captain Marvel in the Land of Surrealism,” by C. C. Beck, Otto Binder, and Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: January 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Back Home, Bill Mauldin.

Published on October 31, 1947. This is a 315-page hardcover memoir that features several of Bill Mauldin’s postwar “Willie & Joe” cartoons. It’s the second civilian-press book collection of the “Willie & Joe” material. New York: William Sloane. Cover/indicia date: 1947. Cover price: $3.50.

Jingle Jangle Comics #29.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “Alla Bama and His Forty Fleas,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Larz Bourne. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #6.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily-newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: October 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Animal Comics #30.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 14, 1947. Edited by Oskar Lebeck. The comic includes an untitled Albert & Pogo story by Walt Kelly. The main cover illustration is by Dan Noonan. The footer panels are by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1947-January 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Note: This is the final issue of the series.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Christmas on Bear Mountain.

Published on November 14, 1947. Edited by Eleanor Packer, Alice Nielsen [Cobb], and Tom McKimson. The comic includes “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” by Carl Barks. The story is the first appearance of Uncle Scrooge. Cover illustration by Dan Gormley. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #178.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 3 [#87].

Published on November 14, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Terrible Turkey,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #74.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 19, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Diabolical Dr. Dimwit,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: January 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Wonder Woman #27.

Published on November 27, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the stories “The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust” and “The Mystical Power of Idea-Forms,” both by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #1.

Published on November 28, 1947. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Mountain Climbing,” “Bam! Bam!”, and “The Lost Hat,” all by John Stanley & Charles Hedinger with Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by Charles Hedinger & Irving Tripp. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #25.

Published on December 10, 1947. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comics includes the Wonder Woman story “The Hatred of Badra,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Bob Oksner. New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: January-March 1948. Cover price: 15¢.

Dick Tracy Monthly #1.

Published on December 16, 1947. The comic features color versions of stories from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. The cover illustrator is unknown. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 4 [#88].

Published on December 16, 1947. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Wintertime Wager,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #75.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 17, 1947. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Case of the Ancient Clues,” by Jack Cole & William Woolfolk. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #20.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 19, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Captain Marvel story “The Mistake of Father Time,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. The cover illustrator is unknown. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #82.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 31, 1947. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “The Return of Mr. Tawny,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: March 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Li’l Abner Comics #61.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: This is the first issue of the series. The series it continues its numbering from is unknown. The exact publication date is also unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the United Feature Syndicate, no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Jingle Jangle Comics #30.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Yule-Tide Bull-Fiddler and the Highly Enchanted Snow-Flake,” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Ray Willner. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #7.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: December 1947. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Next: January 1948 to April 1948.

This is the 19th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 19th post covers January 1948 to April 1948.

Dick Tracy Monthly #2.

Published on January 13, 1948. The comic features color versions of stories from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. The cover illustrator is unknown. There is no credited editor for the issue. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 5 [#89].

Published on January 13, 1948. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Watching the Watchman,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #76.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 14, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. Includes the Plastic Man story “The Melancholy Dr. Morbid,” by Jack Cole & Joe Millard. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: March 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #11.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 16, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “Bubble Gum,” by Jack Cole, with John Spranger; and “Stand-In for Cullen Sark,” by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: Spring 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #21.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 21, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Marvel Family story “The Trio of Terror,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by Jack Binder & Pete Costanza. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: March 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Wonder Woman #28.

Published on January 26, 1948. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic features the story “Villainy Incorporated,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter, with Joye Hummel Murchison. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: March-April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #2.

Published on January 27, 1948. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Lulu’s Conscience,” “A Good Time at the Movies,” “Lulu’s Heartthrob,” “Luluhaha,” and “The Report Card,” all by John Stanley. Cover illustration by John Stanley. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: March-April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #83.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on January 30, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “Captain Marvel and Billy Batson Split,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #77.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on February 13, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Eloc, Maker of Mischief,” by Jack Cole & William Woolfolk. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Monthly #3.

Published on February 13, 1948. The comic features color versions of stories from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. The cover illustrator is unknown. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: March 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 6 [#90].

Published on February 13, 1948. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Wired,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: March 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #84.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on February 27, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “Billy Batson’s Phobias,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: May 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Jingle Jangle Comics #31.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “Sleepy Yollo the Bedless Norseman” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Allen Ulmer. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Note: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed.

Li’l Abner Comics #62.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the United Feature Syndicate, no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Steve Canyon Comics #1.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #8.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: February 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Police Comics #78.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on March 12, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “The Dictator of Dreams,” by Jack Cole. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: May 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Monthly #4.

Published on March 16, 1948. The comic features color versions of stories from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. The cover illustrator is unknown. There is no credited editor for the issue. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 7 [#91].

Published on March 16, 1948. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Going Ape,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Boys and Girls March of Comics Featuring Donald Duck.

Published on March 23, 1948. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the story “Darkest Africa,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover price: Free. Note: Also known as March of Comics #20.

Wonder Woman #29.

Published on March 24, 1948. Edited by Whitney Ellsworth. The comic includes the story “Tale of the Tigers,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Harry G. Peter. New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: May-June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #3.

Published on March 30, 1948. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “In the Doghouse,” “Babes in the Wood,” “Alvin Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Piece of Cake,” all by John Stanley. Cover illustration by John Stanley. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May-June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #85.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on March 31, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the story “The Freedom Train,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Police Comics #79.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 9, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes the Plastic Man story “Eaglebeak,” by Jack Cole & Gwen Hansen, with Alex Kotzky. Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Comic Cavalcade #27.

Published on April 12, 1948. Edited by Sheldon Mayer. The comic includes the Wonder Woman story “Anti-Electric,” by William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter. Cover illustration by Alex Toth & Harry Lampert. New York: National [DC]. Cover/indicia date: June-July 1948. Cover price: 15¢.

Dick Tracy Monthly #5.

Published on April 13, 1948. The comic features color versions of stories from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. The cover illustrator is unknown. There is no credited editor for the issue. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 8, No. 8 [#92].

Published on April 13, 1948. Edited by Alice Nielsen [Cobb]. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Spoil the Rod,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: May 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #24.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 21, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the Mary Marvel story “Mary Marvel Visits Valhalla,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by Pete Costanza. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Plastic Man #12.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 21, 1948. Edited by George E. Brenner. The comic includes these stories: “Spadehead,” by Jack Cole & William Woolfolk, with John Spranger; and “Riverman,” by Jack Cole & William Woolfolk, with Andre LeBlanc.Cover illustration by Jack Cole. Buffalo: Comic Magazines [Quality]. Cover/indicia date: July [Summer] 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #86.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on April 30, 1948. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Will Lieberson, and Ralph Daigh. The comic includes the stories “Mr. Tawny’s Problem,” and “Captain Marvel Unites a Split Personality,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: June 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck in The Old Castle’s Secret.

Published on April 30, 1948. Edited by Eleanor Packer, Alice Nielsen [Cobb], and Tom McKimson. The comic includes the story “The Old Castle’s Secret,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #189.

Jingle Jangle Comics #32.

To read the issue online, click here.

The comic includes the Jingle Jangle Tales story “The Hickory-Hatted Duke and the Spooked-Up Tower” and an untitled episode of “The Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg,” both by George Carlson. Cover illustration by Ray Willner. New York: Famous Funnies [Eastern Color]. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. A copyright registration does not appear to have been filed. There is no credited editor for the issue.

Li’l Abner Comics #63.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the United Feature Syndicate, no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Steve Canyon Comics #2.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢.

Terry and the Pirates Comics #9.

To read the issue online, click here.

Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features color versions of stories from Milton Caniff’s run on the Terry and the Pirates daily newpaper strip. Cover illustration by Milton Caniff. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: April 1948. Cover price: 10¢. Notes: Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures. The exact publication date is unknown. While the strips are under copyright to the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services), no copyright registration was filed for this publication.

Next: May 1948 to August 1948.