Bill Schelly, MAN OF ROCK: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOE KUBERT author: Mr. Media Interview

Cover via AmazonArtist Joe Kubert’s lines are among the most distinctive in the comic book profession, not in the least because there are so many of them!

Kubert’s work is intensely detailed and stylized, whether he’s drawing "Sgt. Rock" from World War II or "Tor" from One Million Years B.C. Fans can spot his product from ten paces the same way that Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Jim Lee or Frank Miller stand out like quality beacons from the newsstand shelves.

In his new, richly researched book, Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert, author Bill Schelly takes a long overdue look at the life and career of one of the comic book industry’s most enduring, successful and beloved icons.

You can LISTEN to this interview with BILL SCHELLY, author of MAN OF ROCK: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOE KUBERT, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

Blake Bell, STRANGE & STRANGER: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO, author: Mr. Media Interview

Steve Ditko is a mystery. And in view of the cosmic and ethereal manner of his comic book art style, from Spider-Man and Dr. Strange to the lesser-known Mr. A, that may be appropriate.

Blake Bell, whose interest as a fan of Ditko earns him the right to be called a “Ditko scholar,” isn’t buying the mystery. In his new book, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko -- just published by Fantagraphics -- Bell digs deeper and more thoroughly into the enigma that is Ditko and shares all that he has learned about the artist and the man.

In this beautifully illustrated coffee table book, Bell lays out his case for Ditko as a comics legend. And he does his best to get behind the myth and the man.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with BLAKE BELL by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Danny Fingeroth, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH, author, comics editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Danny Fingeroth spends a whole lot of time thinking about superheroes.

For several years, he did it as the editor of the Spider-Man group of titles at Marvel Comics. Today, he’s the editor of Write Now! magazine and author of two books that go behind the four-color glory of men in tights.

Already the author of Superman on the Couch, Fingeroth’s latest examination of comics, Disguised as Clark Kent, explores why so many of the enduring characters of the golden and silver ages of comics can trace their heritage back to young American Jewish artists and writers such as Will Eisner, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee.

His next book, Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, will be released by Penguin in 2008. Click to open separate window

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, let’s jump right in. Tell the truth here: Jews aren’t really responsible for the comic book industry, but because we control the media, we can say whatever we want, right?

DANNY FINGEROTH: Well, Mr. Media would know that better than anybody. “Mr. Media” is translated from the Hebrew, I think. Isn’t it in the Bible, I think? Early in Genesis, there’s a mention of the “he who controls all media.”

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Well, it’s true. And Nostradamus predicted the coming of me also, yes. Quite true. What inspired you to write Disguised as Clark Kent? And before you answer that, I have to say that is a great title.

FINGEROTH: Oh, thank you. We went through about 10 different titles, and when we hit on that, it was one of those things that stares you in the face. You hear that preamble to the “Superman” TV show from the time. You’re pretty literate, basically, just hearing that from the TV show, and I think it was even the preamble to the radio show and just suddenly it popped out, yeah, Disguised as Clark Kent. So the book, it became a very personal thing for me, or it started out as a personal thing and became even more so, which made it, in many ways, more difficult to write than my previous book, Superman on the Couch. And I’ll talk about that if you want later. But the inspiration was really, as you know as Will Eisner’s biographer, when you’re a Jewish guy of a certain age growing up in the New York area as I did, you suddenly realize that the people who created the superheroes, Siegel and Shuster and Lee and Kirby and Irwin Hayes and Arnold Drake, all those guys, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, could’ve been my uncles or my father. They were from that same generation and from similar backgrounds in the Bronx and the other boroughs. So on a personal level, I found it fascinating that these comics and these characters that I had loved since I was a child were, in many ways, very much connected to my own personal background.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: It’s funny. And by the way, I’ll make the plugs here. Thank you for mentioning the Eisner biography.

FINGEROTH: Oh, you’re welcome.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: But it’s funny you say that because I actually felt that way. I spent about two and a half years with Will working on the book, and I couldn’t help shaking that he seemed very much like one of my uncles.

FINGEROTH: Right.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’m from New York/New Jersey myself. And the way he spoke, his point of reference, it was all very familiar. So, yeah, I get that entirely. Were you at all influenced in the timing of this by Michael Chabon’s novel, The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay?

FINGEROTH: Well, when you say the timing, I’m not sure…

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Well, that had to come out first.

FINGEROTH: Alright. Well, it certainly was an interesting take on it. So I’d say that was always in my mind, but even though there, I think, are some quotes or interviews that he did with Stan Lee and Gil Kane, that was a work of fiction. And ultimately, while I love that book, I think while much of it is set against the backdrop of the comic book industry, it’s ultimately about a lot of other things. He’s that kind of novelist. He’s got this imagination that just reaches all over the place.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And I hate him for it, personally.

FINGEROTH: You have to hate a guy like that. Like I said, I think maybe it made me aware that there was an audience that might be interested in the topic because, if it was just a personal memoir, then I would just keep it in my diary or, I guess, these days in a blog. It’d just be between me and 2 million of my closest friends. But I think it was an interesting parallel history to the well-known histories of comics, and yet I saw all these nuggets in there that certainly were not there intentionally in the stories. But from our vantage point of the 21st century, we can sort of look back and interpret certain things in the work.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know, in my case, in reading Kavalier & Clay, and the reason I thought of it was, even working with Will, I hadn’t really thought so much about how predominant Jewish voices were in the comics, and that kind of brought it to a head because even though it’s fiction, there’s a big nugget of truth in the history that’s presented in that book. I was kind of curious along that line.

FINGEROTH: I think having worked in the business for so long -- I started working at Marvel in 1977. On the one hand, the industry certainly has that classic kind of Godfather movie, New York ethnic, early 20th century immigrant mix of Jews, Italian, and Irish-descended people, but certainly in the comics, everybody of every race and background was represented, but still it clearly seemed that most of the companies and much of the staff in those early days were from Eastern European/Jewish backgrounds.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the theories that you put forth is that Jews wound up there because, and all kidding aside about controlling the media, they couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.

FINGEROTH: Well, I think there were a couple of houses that were known as Jewish houses, but mostly, publishing was pretty much closed off to Jews as was advertising. Again, from a vantage point of the present day, it seems almost like an alternate dimension or something. Although it’s close in history and although a lot of the early creators are still with us and many of them still active, it still is just a quantum distance in terms of what social boundaries people couldn’t cross.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And I’m going to try very hard to make this my last Will Eisner reference.

FINGEROTH: Let’s talk about Eisner the whole time.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: No, no, no, no. That would be pushing the line, I think. But one of the things that he had said to me, and I think he said it to other people in talking about that time was that, yes, Jewish writers and artists could get work in comics, but today, we hold it in some esteem cause it’s more of an adult medium than it was then, but then, as he put it, it was “just one step below pornographers,” working in it.

FINGEROTH: Even today, if you go to a movie or watch a TV show and they want to indicate that somebody is socially maladjusted or just an idiot, what do they do? They have them reading a comic book, or -- I’ve noticed this a lot in TV dramas lately -- very often the killer in a “CSI” or something or in a “Law and Order” will be a comic creator, and either he’s really the killer or he’s suspected of being the killer because he’s so screwed up because he’s a comics creator. So I think even though…

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: But those guys are never Jewish.

FINGEROTH: There’s sort of that TV kind of could-be-anything-looking and name. But even today, that stigma of comics is still there. So even with Maus and all of Will’s later work and Persepolis and all those things that have allegedly brought respect to comics, it’s still short-hand with somebody either being stupid or crazy in most other media. And that’s how we like it.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Well, you know. Did you find when you were at Marvel that it was still profession-dominated in some ways by Jews, or did that change by the late ‘70s and ‘80s?

FINGEROTH: I think the ownership was still -- whether by chance or I think more by chance -- a traditional kind of Jewish media executive. But I’d say in the rank and file of the writers and editors, it had become the kind of thing where people would travel to New York the way people would go to Hollywood to be in the movies, whereas in Eisner’s day and the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, it was really a local phenomenon. I think it was probably 90 percent of the people in the business were from New York or were living in New York when they got into it Whereas, I think, starting in the ‘70s with the advent of the fan turning pro, I think people would come to New York from the Midwest and from the South and from other countries to pursue a career in comics just the way they might come to pursue a career in fashion or in finance. I think it started to change in that era, which is also when things like advertising and publishing had, by that point, become much more open to Jews to get into.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the things that you picked up on, which I found fascinating over the last few years, is that a lot of these early comics guys all went to the same high school, DeWitt Clinton. Being from that area, did you know anything about that going into this, and what did you learn about that school?

FINGEROTH: It’s funny. I went to Bronx Science, which was like the next subway stop after DeWitt Clinton. Clinton was an all-boys’ school so there were no girls around to distract the guys, and I think if you lived in the Bronx, you lived above whatever street, that was pretty much where you went. Now I can’t figure out if in the era when Stan Lee and Will Eisner and Bob Kane went there if you had to take some kind of a test to get in. I never thought you did, but then things I’ve read indicate that maybe there was. But, in any case, the Bronx was the next stop after the Lower East Side. If you had developed a little bit of savings and a little bit of upward mobility as an immigrant or as the children of immigrants, you would take the subway up to the wide open spaces of the Grand Concourse and then in other less luxurious neighborhoods in the Bronx. These guys went to that school, I think, just by chance. It was really just the local high school. It’s phenomenal, not just comics guys but Lerner and Lowe and Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dan Schorr from NPR. If you go to their alumni page, it’s phenomenal who went there.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: As you were saying that, I was just trying to look up in the back of the Eisner book the list that I had. The guy who wrote “Singin’ in the Rain” went there, and yeah, it’s phenomenal. I wish that I could say that my high school in New Jersey turned out anything like that. Oh, here, I found the list. I’m just gonna bore people with this for a second – James Baldwin, Avery Fisher, Ralph Lauren, Burt Lancaster, Richard Rodgers, Neil Simon, A.M. Rosenthal from The New York Times, Paddy Chayefsky, Daniel Schorr, Fats Waller, Jen Murray, Avery Corman, David Archibald, Judd Hirsch from “Taxi,” Stubby Kaye, there’s a lost name, Don Adams from Get Smart, Martin Balsam, Arthur Gelb, also from The New York Times, Gary Marshall, the producer, father of Penny Marshall.

FINGEROTH: No, no, it’s father or brother? I think brother.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Is it brother?

FINGEROTH: Yeah.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Alright, brother. Bernard Kalb, the journalist, Bruce Jay Friedman, novelist and father of Drew Friedman, cartoonist, and of course, Stan Lee. It’s just a phenomenal thing.

FINGEROTH: There must’ve been something about the school, I imagine, that encouraged creative activity as well. That would be something that you or I or somebody would maybe need to do research or see if, compared to other high schools in the city, they were receptive. I know Eisner and Kane, I think, were on, I forget if it was the school paper or the yearbook. I’ve heard different reports of that, but certainly, there were avenues for them to utilize their creative abilities of painting backdrops for plays and so on.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And the reality was they were all just doing it to get closer to girls.

FINGEROTH: At DeWitt Clinton? Oh, doing the creative stuff? Yes, that’s true, of course.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: That was a boys’ school.

FINGEROTH: That goes without saying.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: But, no, it was all an outlet. Obviously, there were no girls.

FINGEROTH: Well, there was a sister school called Walton High School. I’ve never seen the alumni roster there, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a fairly impressive list of women who went there.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: See, at those same-sex schools, you create all that sexual frustration.

FINGEROTH: Right, exactly!

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: It pours out in different ways. Danny, tell us a little bit about how you came to the theories that you did. Just the title, Disguised as Clark Kent. And for folks who haven’t seen the cover, it’s very cool. You have this immigrant family, and then you’ve drawn -- I don’t think it’s officially Superman, but clearly…

FINGEROTH: It is not. It is definitely not Superman. It is a…

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: A Supermanish character.

FINGEROTH: Yes. It’s the same character that was on the cover of Superman on the Couch but with a different chest insignia.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell us a little bit about how you kind of came to the theories that you did for this book in connecting the superhero to these very mild-mannered, young, Jewish/Eastern European immigrants.

FINGEROTH: Well, it has to do with what Jules Feiffer has written about and other people - the idea that if you come to another country as an immigrant, you live at least a dual identity. You have your life at home where you speak possibly a foreign language that your parents may have mostly spoken, and then there’s that life with your family and your culture from the old country. And then there’s this desire to fit into the American melting pot and to really become part of the mainstream.

As Chabon says in Kavalier & Clay, who else but a Jew would come up with the name “Clark Kent”? It’s such a purposely bland kind of name. So you have your life at home, your life in school with the idea being that you feel like you have all this secret knowledge and secret power, and yet you don’t want to excel. There’s the immigrant urge to excel, and yet the fear of being singled out and being discriminated against because of excelling. It’s the whole secret identity where everybody thinks, “If only people knew why I seem like a jerk, they’d understand,” or, “If only people knew the secret power that I’m just too responsible to unleash on them.” So it plays to fantasies that are specifically immigrant but then have become universal, and it also has to do with the ability of an immigrant and especially, I think, the Jewish immigrants in the ‘30s and ‘40s to look at a culture they come into and kind of reflect back to it, its image of itself. That’s sort of the whole Jewish thing with being prominent in entertainment. I think it’s traditionally immigrant groups in general that bring a new, fresh idea for entertainment cause they can reflect the dominant culture back to itself.

ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Boy, I’m tempted to ask you; I don’t know if I want to. We have this whole discussion these days about immigrants and their place in the United States. As you look back on all this and all that these immigrants brought, how do you feel about the current debate?

FINGEROTH: I think it’s the same thing repeats itself. America, with all its flaws, is still pretty much regarded as the best place on the planet, and people want to come here. And then people who are already here want to close the door after themselves.

One advantage that, say, the European immigrants in general and the Jewish immigrants in particular had was they may have had certain ethnic, physical characteristics, but essentially, they looked like Americans. They could generally pass, as the saying goes, whereas people whose ancestors came here as slaves or Native Americans or anybody with a different skin color had to deal with that whole other element of racial prejudice. And I think that goes on today where America is totally schizophrenic about that. We’re founded on this immigrant ethic, but everybody who’s here wants to close the door after them and not let the next group in. But the next group always has something to contribute. If you go to comics conventions now, the teenage kids who are bursting with talent bring you around their portfolios, many of them Asian, many of them Mexican, just from all different groups. I think that still the contribution of the immigrant is still alive, and the debate over it will never die because I think it’s human nature. You get to a place, and then you go, “Okay, close the door now, I’m here, so tough luck everybody else.” It’s that constant struggle.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Joe Sinnott, "Spider-Man" "Fantastic Four" comic book artist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.

You have to be pretty damn good at what you do for someone to name you Joltin’. The name stuck to Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, of course, and is also part of the eternal legend of Joltin’ Joe Sinnott.

Unless you’re a comic book fan, you may not know Sinnott. But if you recognize the names of Stan “The Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby, Joltin’ Joe will be forever connected to their accomplishments. Lee wrote the stories, Kirby drew them, and Sinnott inked them, starting with the fifth issue of the Fantastic Four in 1961 on through the first appearance of the Silver Surfer and beyond. He’s also contributed his talents to Thor, The Hulk, and Captain America, to name just a few.

You can see Sinnott's work on three new Marvel Super Hero postage stamps - two Silver Surfers and a Thing -- that were released in late July by the United State Post Office.


Sinnott is the subject of a new oral history called Brush Strokes With Greatness, compiled and written by Tim Lasiuta. It’s packed with illustrations from his fifty- plus year career, starting with a Timely Comics story called “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” on through the development of the legendary Marvel universe.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s start with a general point of information. What on earth does a comic book inker actually do, and how do you explain your career to the layman?

JOE SINNOTT: Well, actually, it’s all I ever did. I drew from the time I was three years old, I can remember, and it’s the only thing I knew. All my brothers could build houses, they could do all that. I couldn’t drive a nail, but I could draw, and I drew all the time. I drew on paper bags, whatever I had. Things were tough growing up in the thirties, but we made the best of it, and it paid off in the long run, I guess.

ANDELMAN: What is the difference, for someone who doesn’t know, between someone who does pencils and someone who does inking?

SINNOTT: Well, there’s all types of penciling, Bob. Years ago, most of the artists used to pencil thoroughly and complete pencils, put the blacks in and everything, and it progressed down to the point where a lot of the artists would pencil very loosely like a thumbnail sketch, and the inker, if he was capable, was required to finish the art. So he really was a finisher. Not all artists can do this, but some can, and fortunately, I was able to. Of course, the first 12, 13 years I was with Marvel, I did my own pencils and inks, and that’s the way I used to like it. But that was a different world back then.







ANDELMAN: When did it change for you? When did you stop focusing on penciling?

SINNOTT: Well, I started at Marvel in 1950 with Stan Lee. It was Timely Comics back in those days. And around 1961, Jack Kirby didn’t do his own inking, and he asked me if I could fill in and do a Jack Kirby. He couldn’t find anyone to ink it, and so I inked it, and Stan liked it quite a bit. He liked the combination. So it progressed from there, and Stan just kept sending me more Jack Kirby stuff, and I felt I could make as much inking as I could penciling, so I proceeded to ink primarily for Stan. Of course, I had other accounts, Treasure Chest and Dell and whatever, and there I did my own pencils and inks.

ANDELMAN: I wondered if you could actually make as much inking as penciling. I would have guessed not, but from what you say, I guess you could.

SINNOTT: It seemed like I could, maybe because I was a faster inker than I was a penciler. A lot of times with penciling you had to research and do things like that that used up a little of your time, but it never seemed to be a problem with me. The inking came very easily.

ANDELMAN: How different is one man’s inks from another's? Again, if we’re describing this for people who really aren’t that familiar with it, some people would just think oh, inking, you’re just taking an ink pen and going over someone’s pencils, but it’s more than that, right?

SINNOTT: Don’t I wish! No, I felt down through the years I’ve added a lot to whoever I was working on, and I’m sure a lot of my friends would tell you the same thing. Some inkers, I must say, do, so to speak, ink over the lines that the penciler has put down, and other inkers have to do a lot of what we call finished art. We have to finish the art. Some pencilers don’t put any blacks in whatsoever or details, and the inker has to do that. He’s primarily, like I said, finishing the art. He’s completing it. He’s adding to it. He’s an embellisher.

ANDELMAN: What do you think is the difference between the art you were inking in the early '60s, the start of the real Marvel Age, and today? Has it changed?

SINNOTT: Oh, a great deal. Of course, being off in the old school, I prefer the old method. I feel things are too technical today and too slick, and they don’t look like a comic book should look. That’s my feeling. Of course, in the old days, everyone did this same type of art. Reproductions were basically the same, but it looked like a comic book. It had the classic look. I prefer the Kirby, the Buscemas, the Colan, the Romitas. It was just great. It was stylized, but it was realistic art, whereas today, it’s hard to say what the new method would be called. We’re influenced a lot by the Japanese today, as you know. Not my preference.

ANDELMAN: Have the changes had anything to do with improvements in printing technology? You get a finer printing today than obviously you did 40 years ago.

SINNOTT: I’m sure there has been a great change in printing obviously. Of course, we have better paper, but then again, here we go, the old comics had that old comic book feel to it. A lot of people that I know, especially people my age, certainly prefer the old classic comic style and reproduction.

ANDELMAN: I guess one of the things that I think of when I think of your work in the sixties is, particularly working with Kirby, was that it was a heavier line, it seemed like a thicker, heavier line in those books than maybe we would see today or maybe even in some other books. Is that a mistake?

SINNOTT: I think you’re correct in that regard. I know, looking back, when I worked on Kirby in particular, I used an awful lot of brush, and certainly with a brush, you’re going to get a heavier line. But Jack’s work, it almost demanded a brush because he had big, bold pencil strokes, and usually four, five at the most panels on a page. And you could really do big drawings, and you could get in there with a brush and let yourself go. It’s not like today when I’m inking the Sunday "Spider-Man" page for Stan and the King Features. I use an awful lot of pen. The drawings are so small, and they’re reproduced so small that you have to use a lot of pen because brush is just too big, and the lines would be too heavy.

ANDELMAN: You had worked in comics for ten or eleven years by the time that first issue of Fantastic Four came your way. You had seen the superheroes go away, Westerns come on, things like that. When the Fantastic Four came to you, what did you think? Did you think it was another monster comic? Was it a big deal at the time, or was it just another assignment?

SINNOTT: It was no big deal at all. When the Fantastic Four came to me at number five, I had never heard of the book. But as soon as I saw the characters, I said, gee, what great characters. Of course, in those days as you know, through the fifties and sixties, we were always looking for a new trend. We had the Korean War, then we had the horror comics, we had romance, we had science fiction, and then we had the monster books in the late fifties and early sixties. And then when Stan came out with a few superheroes, we didn’t think anything more of it. We thought, even Spider-Man, we just thought that was another character, that it would soon fade, and we’d be doing something else. Certainly, as you know, it caught on and took off.

ANDELMAN: I think I need to correct myself on something from something you just said. You actually came on Fantastic Four with the fifth issue not the first issue.

SINNOTT: That’s right. The introduction of Doctor Doom.

ANDELMAN: How did the whole perception of the industry you were working on start to change in the early '60s as these comics took on a life of their own that they had not had?

SINNOTT: It was pretty obvious. Most of the comic houses -- we were dropping houses at that time -- really concentrated on the superheroes. DC, of course, with their Justice League and Batman and Superman and whatever. They brought them all back. The same with Marvel, only Marvel created more characters. Of course, we did have Captain America and a few like that, but basically, we had all new superheroes. I think Stan was surprised that they were so popular.







ANDELMAN: And Stan created kind of a culture personality around everyone who worked on those books, didn’t he?

SINNOTT: Yeah, he certainly did.

ANDELMAN: How was that different than the way the industry had operated a decade earlier?

SINNOTT: Well, that’s pretty hard to ascertain, Bob. I really wouldn’t know how to put a finger on it, to tell the truth.

ANDELMAN: Stan nicknamed you "Joltin’" Joe Sinnott, but there was a nickname before that, right?

SINNOTT: Yeah. He had called me "Jovial" Joe.

ANDELMAN: Were you surprised the first time that popped up?

SINNOTT: No, not really. I don’t know where he got it from, but Joltin’ Joe, I could understand that because I’m sure he was influenced by Joe DiMaggio. And I used to talk a lot about baseball with a friend of mine that worked in the office down there, Jack Abel, a very talented individual.

ANDELMAN: In the late '60s and early '70s, comics developed a cult of personality. It was a changing time. People actually knew your name, they knew what you did, they knew other people. It wasn’t just a matter of buying their favorite comic, they were looking for people’s names, and they were recognizing people, right?

SINNOTT: Oh, I think so. I often hear from people that said, "I rooted for you," so to speak, and "I looked for your work way back in the beginning of the superhero age, back in the early '60s, '61, '62. I remember many years ago the first fan mail I ever got was back in 1953, I think it was, and this kid from Connecticut wrote me and said how much he loved my character, Arrowhead. He was an Indian renegade. The law was always after him, but he was always helping out those who were in trouble. The book ran for quite a few issues, and I really enjoyed it. This kid wrote to me and said how much he loved Arrowhead. They finally made a movie, and Charlton Heston played a character called Arrowhead, and here again, he was an Indian. It was a fairly successful book for the '50s, and I kept his letter all these years.

The last letter I heard from him, he said he was going off to Korea. This was during the Korean War. Well, I never heard from him again. It was interesting because I thought maybe something happened to him during the war, and I had lost his address. But anyway, about two years ago, I got a letter from this woman from Connecticut, and she said she was this person’s wife that I had known when he was a kid and that he was very sick. He wasn’t expected to live any more. His illness was terminal so I got together some of the old Arrowhead drawings I had done many years ago, and I sent them off to Roland. Of course, he couldn’t respond to me. He was aware that he got them and everything, and he passed away about a week later. I’m sure I made his last couple days fairly happy because he loved that character.

ANDELMAN: What a wonderful story. What a great story. Now, I wanted to ask you, you’ve had a business relationship with Stan for 57 years. How different was Stan in 1950 from the man who, this year, is hosting a weekly TV show?

SINNOTT: I can’t see one bit of difference.

ANDELMAN: Is that right?

SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Stan was always the life of the party, so to speak. If Stan was in a room with a thousand people, he would stand out. Great sense of humor. His memory is a little bit off now, but even back in those days, he wasn’t known for him memory. Tremendous sense of humor. I wish I could tell you some of the stories because whenever I vouch for my work, Stan sends me a little note back. I’ve kept them all. I have hundreds and hundreds of Stan’s notes and letters. Someday, they’ll make a good book, I think. Really, you can’t believe the sense of humor he had. Always with a smile. If you ever see a picture of Stan, it’s with a great big smile.

Well, he could be tough too, though. He knew what he wanted, and he expected it. He certainly helped me in many, many ways. Right from the start, I remember when I was just a kid out of school, he said, "Joe, whatever you do, exaggerate everything." He said, "I want everything exaggerated." That’s what we lived by.

ANDELMAN: What about Kirby? Obviously, you got pages from him. And I know that while Stan developed this idea of the Marvel bullpen, there were some guys working on staff, but mostly guys worked from home so you didn’t see each other that often.







SINNOTT: No. Most of the guys who did the books worked at home. The staff, of course, involved so many people. Proofreaders, people who did corrections, things like that. Well, Romita, of course, worked there at the office, and there were a few others. Kirby, I worked with Jack, oh gee, must be 18 years, something like that, and I had never met him. Never talked to him on the phone, would you believe that? And so Marvel had a convention in ’72, and I went down and I was introduced to Jack Kirby by Marie Severn. And I didn’t see him again, I didn’t talk to him again until 1975. They had another convention, and I went down and we got together. We had a great three days together. After that, I never spoke to him again, would you believe that?

Of course, Jack moved to California, and he dropped me a note once in a while if he wanted something. For example, if he wanted his characters inked, and he’d ask me that way if I could help him out, and of course, I always did. We never talked about the Fantastic Four. He never told me he liked the way I did this or didn’t like the way I was doing that. We just never talked about what we were working on, which is amazing, I think.

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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Joe Sinnott, "Spider-Man" "Fantastic Four" comic book artist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(RETURN TO PART 1)

ANDELMAN: Well, to use the Marvel term, it’s astonishing, really. You guys only met twice in all those years, and yet, your work is so closely tied from that era.

SINNOTT: Never discussed the work. Never.

ANDELMAN: I’m baffled. Really.

SINNOTT: Of course, Jack and Stan used to write notes on the pages for each other. If Stan wanted something changed, or Jack didn’t like a certain way a story was being told or whatever, but when Jack sent the work to me, there was never, ever a note on the border saying Joe, would you do it this way or would you do it that way. And, of course, my son knows all the pages we did together. It astonishes me, Bob, sometimes also.







ANDELMAN: Do you have any guys that you were particularly close to from that era, from Marvel?

SINNOTT: No, no. Actually, it was pretty much the same as Kirby. They sent me the work, and they knew I was gonna do a complete, acceptable job when I returned it.

ANDELMAN: And where were you living at the time?

SINNOTT: I’ve lived in Saugerties all my life.

ANDELMAN: Really?

SINNOTT: Yeah. I was born here in 1926, and I went to the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City for about three years, I guess it was. So I lived down on 74th Street and Broadway. Then I moved back up to Saugerties here when I got a firm account with Stan.

ANDELMAN: And that school you went to later became the School of Visual Arts.

SINNOTT: That’s right. Burne Hogarth was one of the directors there.

ANDELMAN: I think I saw that Silas Rhodes just passed away.

SINNOTT: Oh yeah. Well, I’d say it’s been about two or three years ago now.

ANDELMAN: Really?

SINNOTT: Oh, wait a minute. I thought you meant Burne Hogarth.

ANDELMAN: No, no, no. Silas. I think I just saw…

SINNOTT: I didn’t know that he passed away.

ANDELMAN: I think he was like 92 or something.

SINNOTT: He was. What a dynamic…They both were. Unbelievable. Both characters were dynamic personalities. Of course, Silas had been in the Marine Corps during World War II, and I would hate to have been under him, I’m telling ya. He was a, what do they call, not slave driver, but there’s another word.

ANDELMAN: Do you have a good story about him?

SINNOTT: Well, we used to call him "Rocky" when we were in school. He’d come around everyday, certainly. I’m telling ya, he was a dynamo. He was a strong person, and you could just see him in the Marine Corps. A lot of stories, little stories that he would tell. I remember one time he told me, he said, "Joe, you’re putting on weight. It’s not good. It’s very unhealthy." I’m sure he was a health nut because he looked like he could take on a weightlifter. And like you just said, he lived to be 93, right?

ANDELMAN: Yeah. Yeah.

SINNOTT: It’s funny to think that as many times as I talked to him, that’s the one thing, of course two things, that’s the one thing I remember him saying to me, "Joe, you’re putting on a little weight." I wasn’t aware that I was, but obviously, he could see it.

Another time when I was down at the school to apply for entrance, I had my little pencil and ink scratchings. I was very apprehensive about it cause I thought they weren’t good enough to get into school. So I went to see Silas Rhodes. He called me in, and he looked at my work, and he said, "Joe, this is really good stuff for a beginner. I gotta show these to Burne Hogarth." And I was saying to myself he’s just saying that because they’re having trouble getting people into the school, and they want to make sure I come to the school. So he went in and showed the samples to Burne, and of course, Burne came out and told me, "Joe, these are pretty good for a guy at your stage." I wanted to be an illustrator so I wanted to take the illustrating course. And Burne says, "No, Joe, you’re a natural-born cartoonist. I’ll tell ya, it’s not easy, it’s very hard, very hard work. But your work will lend itself perfectly to a comic strip or comic book cartoonist." So that was the first day I was down at the school. Certainly, both of them impressed me so much at the time.







ANDELMAN: For people who don’t know Burne Hogarth, do you want to explain?

SINNOTT: Yeah. He was the illustrator for the newspaper strip "Tarzan." It appeared in the New York Mirror back in those days. Of course, he was a great draftsman, and we used to love to have him come in and draw on the easel for us. He could draw anything you wanted. A sabertooth tiger or whatever. He was just a dynamic person and a great artist. He really was.






ANDELMAN: For a lot of cartoonists, especially in the action genre/adventure, he’s the gold standard, isn’t he?

SINNOTT: Exactly. Certainly one of them.

ANDELMAN: So when you come in there out of the blue, and Burne Hogarth tells you you’ve got what it takes, that must have been a pretty exciting day.

SINNOTT: Yes it was. Of course, I had come out of the Navy, and I didn’t go to school right away. When I came out, I was playing ball and having a good time, whatever. So then it came time, and I said, "I gotta go to art school." And so when I went down there, we were doing some drawings in ink, and I was using a pen, and he came by me, and he knocked the pen out of my hand. He said, "Joe, in this school, we use a brush." He was a great brush man. Here I was, about 21 years old. I wasn’t even aware that cartoonists used brushes. That’s how naïve I was. In those days, there were no conventions. You had no chance of ever meeting, especially up here in the mountains of the Catskills, I never met a cartoonist and never had the thought that I ever would whereas today, the kids, they see cartoonists all the time at these conventions. They know everything about the field even before they try to break into it. They know what supplies to use and what brushes and what pens and whatever. All I used was a post office pen that they used in the post office. The ones you dip in the inkwell.

ANDELMAN: Right. I did this biography of Will Eisner, and I remember he told me about taking his portfolio up to see Ham Fisher. He did Joe Palooka. And James Montgomery Flagg was there who did the famous Uncle Sam posters. And the big deal for him was he was just so overwhelmed, he didn’t know what to say to the man so he says, "What kind of pen do you use?" And Flagg said, "I use a 290 Gillette." And so Eisner went out and bought nothing but 290 Gillette pens and used them for the rest of his life.

SINNOTT: Isn’t that amazing? Of course, the school used to get a lot of calls from people in the business or whatever. And they got a call from either NBC or ABC, one of the TV stations. There were only three at the time. And they wanted someone to come over on, I forget whose program, but Ham Fisher was the guest over there. And they wanted an art student to come over and talk with Ham Fisher about comic strips. So they used to send me on a lot of these errands, and so they called me up from the class, and they said, "Joe, Ham Fisher wants you to come over and ask you a few questions about school, things like that." And I said, "Oh, I’m afraid not." I thought I was too shy to go on TV. So I passed it up. They chose another friend of mine from the school, and he went over, and he came back, and he said, "You know what? Ham Fisher was showing the people on the easel how to draw Joe Palooka, and it was already drawn. It was in blue pencil, and you couldn’t see it, but he was tracing it." Hey, those guys weren’t taking any chances, either. Another time, Ted Mack, I don’t know whether you remember Ted Mack.

ANDELMAN: "The Original Amateur Hour."







SINNOTT: Yeah. He’s before your time. But anyway, they called me over. Well, the Amateur Hour used to be "Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour." They could have still called it that. But, in any case, I was sent over there. So I did go over there and was up in the booth with him, and we were watching, I can still remember the Old Gold, the mother and the daughter. They were inside a cigarette pack, and they were both dancing on the stage. Do you remember that commercial?

ANDELMAN: I remember dancing cigarette packs.

SINNOTT: Well, that was Old Gold. So anyway, we watched that, and Ted’s agent was there, and he wanted me to do a caricature of Ted for Variety magazine. And I’ll tell ya, boy, I was nervous. And he said, "Make Ted look like a nice guy cause he’s really nice." And actually, he was a really nice guy, but he looked like somebody from Guys and Dolls. How do you do a caricature of someone who looks like a gangster? I’ll tell ya, I was scared to death, and I kept drawing away. And Ted Mack said to me, "Joe, don’t be nervous. I’d like you to come with me over to one of the big nightclubs." I just couldn’t do it. I said, "Ted, I really can’t." I made up some excuse. I was just too scared. I really was scared. I was just a kid then. It would’ve been interesting. Looking back, I should’ve gone to see whom he would’ve met over there and whatever.

ANDELMAN: Well, to borrow the title of your biography, you had another brush with greatness, although I don’t know if you actually had contact with them. I suspect you didn’t. You did a comic based on The Beatles back in ’64, right?

SINNOTT: Yeah. 1964. They were on their way over to be on Ed Sullivan’s show, and Dell called me. They knew I did good likenesses, and they wanted someone who could do likenesses. So they asked me to do The Beatles book, which was 64 pages long. And I had a month to do it in. That was a lot of work in a short period of time. It came out really good, all things considered. They were very happy with it. Of course, I never did get to meet The Beatles. But the book is fairly unique, and it’s fairly rare, I guess.

ANDELMAN: And that was a project that you did the drawing for. You drew The Beatles for that. That wasn’t an inking job like you were known for much later. You drew The Beatles pages.

SINNOTT: Oh sure. Oh yeah, yeah. The book. A good friend of mine, Dick Giordano, he helped me out on a few pages toward the end. I was running out of time. Of course, Dick and I used to work many years ago together. I would pencil books for General Electric or Radio Shack, and he would ink them. Of course, that was an interesting period.

ANDELMAN: Now, I want to ask you about one more thing cause we’re running out of time. This is the summer, of course, that the Silver Surfer actually comes to life. I wondered if you have seen either of the Fantastic Four movies, and if you have, what you thought.

SINNOTT: Don’t embarrass me. No, I haven’t seen them.

ANDELMAN: Really?

SINNOTT: My family, my son, he’s a big comic fan, and he knows all about the comics. He took his two children to see it. Of course, they wanted me to go with them, but it was the first night, and I really didn’t want to go the first night because they get a lot of young people the first night. They pack the theaters, no question. I did see Spiderman 3 the first night, and it was hectic. The kids, they were quiet and everything, but there were just so many of them. I had to wait in line and all that. So anyway, I didn’t see it, but my son Mark, he’s quite a critic. He loved it. There were a few little things, naturally, he disagreed with, but he thought the Surfer was tremendous.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. It was great. I thought they did a great job with the Surfer. My daughter, who’s the upcoming comic fan in our house, she loved it. She just absolutely loved it.

SINNOTT: John Buscema and I did the first three Surfers. Of course, he continued with his brother for a while. I think they did maybe 17, 18 issues altogether. But I thought what a great character the Surfer was. Of course, John did a beautiful Surfer.

ANDELMAN: I think you have to go see the movie, not just to see what they did with the Silver Surfer, but I think you’ll get a kick out of Stan’s cameo in this particular movie.

SINNOTT: That’s what Mark said. The first couple that he was in, you could barely see him. Don’t blink, otherwise you’ll miss him. But I understand he had a little more…

ANDELMAN: Yeah, you can’t miss him in this one. It’s a very funny moment, especially for someone who’s known him as long as you have.

SINNOTT: He’s something, I’ll tell ya. He just called me about two days ago. And I was away from the "Spider-Man" Sunday comic strip for a while because my wife had passed away, and I was quite sick for a while. I was in the hospital three times.

ANDELMAN: I’m sorry.

SINNOTT: Yeah, over the last five months, so I had to hand over the "Spider-Man" to him, a friend of mine. And he very graciously took care of it while I was laid up. So I went back about, oh maybe a month ago, so Stan had to call me and tell me how great it was to be back working with me.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.