Tag Archives: Marvel Comics

Giving it away

Jim Amash: How did copyrighting CAPTAIN AMERICA occur to you?

Joe Simon: “At 24 years old, I was just trying to make a living. I was a product of the times… it was the Depression and I was just happy to make a living. We all were. All of us were like homeless people, happy for anything we got. People say, “Well the Shusters and the Siegels, and the Simons and the Kirbys were stupid. They gave away everything.” But we never even thought about it that way.

Timely’s chief accountant was Maurice Coyne, a guy who promoted that for me; he didn’t like them very much… It was his idea that we arrange some kind of a 25% royalty for me. I gave Kirby part of it, but it was hardly anything. Maurice took me aside on day and told me they were putting all the office expenses, all the salaries and everything, on Captain America.”

-Alter Ego #76

Too Organized

From 1957 to 1965, John Romita worked for DC Comics. Although he dreamed of working on any of their more recognizable adventure titles, he found himself stuck in DC’s romance comic department. Years later, of course, he would become the architect of the “Marvel style” and go on to have some 35 successful years, working on characters like Daredevil and Spider-Man.

Editors at DC were very territorial. They had their own stable of creators whom they never shared with other editors. A freelancer could lose their job if their editor found out they were working with someone else.

Freelancers who needed more money, or who wanted to work on different types of books, took to using fake names to avoid the backlash. A lot of these, like Romita, were artists languishing in DC’s romance department. They all began to quietly seek work from Stan Lee.

Says writer and former Marvel Comics EIC, Roy Thomas:

“Gil Kane was “Scott Edward,” and Werner Roth was “Jay Gavin,” both named for their kids. “Mickey Demeo” was Mike Esposito, and Frank Giacoia was “Frankie Ray.” Stan [Lee] and I would chuckle about how DC had had all these great hero artists buried in their romance department. It wasn’t that DC was disorganized. It’s more like they were too organized to utilize their artists well.”

Joe Maneely

“[My first story for Stan Lee] had some weaknesses, especially in the inking – Stan calls up [Timely artist] Joe Maneely and tells him, “I’m going to send this guy out to spend a day with you. Give him as many pointers as possible.” And the next day, I think, I went out to Flushing, probably from 10:30 in the morning until about 4:30 in the afternoon. I watched Maneely; and while he’s talking to me, giving me pointers, he turned out like two or three pages, one double-spread with an entire pioneer fort in Indian country with Indians attacking from the outside, and guys shooting from the inside.

“He didn’t need reference, he didn’t need anything. He just sat there, and between 10:30 and, say, 12:30, he had penciled this double-spread in, very roughly. After lunch – I think I just went out and got a hot dog – I come back and he’s starting to ink it, and he finished the damn double-spread before we finished the afternoon session! He was just a staggering talent!

“[He] died when he was 38 years old, I think. I jokingly said once that, if Joe Maneely had lived, half of us would have been out of work!”

-John Romita
from an interview with Roy Thomas

Making The Cut

“Stan [Lee]’s secretary would call me. She’d tell me that things weren’t going well and ask me if I’d take a $3 rate cut. Well, what could you say? I needed the work because I was raising a family. And the other companies weren’t doing much better. Places like EC had folded up.
“About three months later, she’d call again and ask if I’d accept another cut … I was up to $46 a page for pencils and inks and that was a good rate for 1956, when the decline started. I was down to $21 a page when Timely stopped hiring me. And they expected the same quality of work.

[Later on, in 1959 …]

“I got a call from Vinnie Colletta, who wanted to know if I was interested in penciling romance stories for [Charlton Publications]. I must have done hundreds of stories for Charlton. I could really knock them out … I got paid $8 a page, and then it went to $7 a page, which was like a dollar a panel.”

– Joe Sinnott
from and interview with Jim Amash
Alter Ego fanzine #26

Joe Sinnott

One of my all-time favorite comic book artists gives an overview of his career.

Interview with comics legend Joe Sinnott, Part 1 from The Comic Archive on Vimeo.

Interview with comics legend Joe Sinnott, Part 2 from The Comic Archive on Vimeo.

A couple years ago, I had the great pleasure of hiring Joe to ink this variant cover, penciled by Sal Buscema, another comics legend himself, for “The Life and Times of Savior 28” issue # 1, the series I co-created with J.M. DeMatteis. Colors by Andrew Covalt.

John Romita on Speed

A while back, I was posting quotes from interviews with comic book artists on my Livejournal blog. A lot of these are just comments that I found interesting in regards to my own experiences at the drawing table. Sometimes when you’re dwelling on the vast gulf between yourself and some creative giant, it’s interesting to also note the few small similarities and/or other details of interest. I’m going to transfer some of these to this new blog.

First up, “John Romita on speed”…

“Every time [Gene Colan] came in, we always got on the subject of speed and lack of speed, because Gene used to work until three in the morning, every morning.
“I said, “You know what? You’re asking the wrong guy because I have trouble, too. The reason I’m working 9-to-5 is because I can’t turn out enough pages in five days to pay my bills.” I could not deliver work on time. I could do five pages in one day, and then it would take me the next five days to do the next page. I could never tell. In fact, if an editor said, “Can you get this 10-page story done by next Wednesday?,” I couldn’t guarantee it to him. I used to say, “The truth of the matter is, I don’t know. I could get it done in two days or it could take me three weeks. I have no idea how long this is going to take me, because I have no regular flow that I can count on.”

John Romita
from a 2006 interview with Jim Amash