A Bronze Age Deep Dive With Mike Gold Pt 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, Welcome back time for word Balloon the Comic
Book Conversation show. John Senttress here Mike Gold. Great conversation
that Mike and I had back in twenty twenty at
the very beginning of COVID, which was a bummer, but
you know, we were all kind of shut in and
it was a good chance to really get expansive with
Mike and have a really long conversation about his years

(00:24):
through the Bronze Age, not only that, but even in
his early political years as well, his years in Chicago Radio,
then joining DC in the publicity department at a very
key point, including the Ali Superman comic book. He saw
the DC explosion and the you know, more titles than

(00:45):
ever before, and the DC implusion. In fact, he is
the editor of the infamous Comics Cavalcade Canceled Comics Cavalcade.
We talk about all that. We talk about the birth
of First Comics in Evanston, Illinois, where Northwestern University is,
and the how next door to where I grew up,
which is crazy and as I said, it was kind
of ironic. I was at Illinois State as First Comics

(01:08):
was getting born. But you're gonna have a lot of
great stories about creators and the great books of the
Bronze Age as I talked to Michael. This is part
one of a two part conversation today on word Bloon.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
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Speaker 1 (01:51):
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word Balloon Listeners. All right, let's get into it now,
really nice, easy conversation. I get out of the way
and I let Mike tell his stories because they're a
lot of fun, especially being a guy that grew up
in Chicago as Mike did, and some good Chicago memories.

(02:55):
And man, you want to know about the beginnings of
FM radio. You might be rolling your eyes when you
hear that, but FM, as we say in the conversation,
was incredibly experimental from a programming standpoint, I would dare
say as much as podcasting is today. Because for years,

(03:15):
as we say in the conversation, the owners of FM
stations didn't know what to do with FM, and thank
god the hippie generation kind of came in and really
did a lot of experimental stuff, and that's Mike was
a part of that group. I mean, hell memories of
the sixty eight Democratic Convention and the riots that happened.
Then I'm gonna have to get into that with another

(03:37):
conversation down the road, because we wanted to get into
the comic book stuff. But really a very freewheeling, fun
conversation with Mike Gold, great Bronze age comic book memories
and more on today's Word Balloon. Mike Gold, Welcome back
to Word Balloon. Man. It's been a long time since
you've been on the podcast, but certainly we've seen each

(03:57):
other a few times over the years recently, so good
to talk you man.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh, that's great talking with you. I of course would prefer,
you know, being in Chicago. I'm always prefer being in
Chicago when I'm when I'm talking with you. But you know,
I can't go out there right now and find of
fact and say, if I leave the house, I understand,
my daughter will shoot me.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
So I think that's good. I think that's wise, and
I you know, but you're getting you know, uh, you're
getting supplies. You're you're you're okay, and you know.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
We're fine.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Everything.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Everything is cool on here, and uh, you know, it's
really windy outside, so maybe it's okay that I shouldn't
be out.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
There, understood. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Well, Mike, I don't think
we've ever had the full origin of Mike gold story.
And I know that prior to comics. And one of
the reasons why we're friends is because you spent a
good portion of time not only in Chicago, but in
Chicago radio. And we've we've got friends, we've got mutual

(04:59):
friends and and various things. So tell us about your
pre comics work.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Well, I started out really as a political activist, which
I maintained to this day. In point of fact, I
kind of maintain all of the threads of my life
because I have a very short attention span. I started
as a political activist in the school I.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
Worked from the Chicago Seed.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
I joined that operation at the very end of nineteen
sixty eight, which was a couple of months after the
Democratic National Convention in Chica, which was a swell party
where the police beat the pool out of me.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, really, really were you demonstrating and then you got
your head cracked by the police.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Actually it was my lower back.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Yeah, that was fun. And I've taken that seriously ever since.
So have they, but most of them have retired now
and I'm still on there, so okay, I will. So
I joined up with the Seed because my self image
then and now is still that of being a writer

(06:14):
first and foremost. I love everything else that I think
of myself as writer. And I had the luxury of
working with a wonderful editor named Dave Peck who went
on to write for Rolling Stone and be an editor there,
and he's teaching at Northwestern. He's now retired, but abe

(06:36):
I learned a lot from him and had a great
time doing it. Somehow that led to radio. A woman
named Stephanie Clark over what became w GLD asked me
onto her show and we became friends, and I started

(06:57):
hanging out at WGLD, and one thing led to another.
I really I was on the staff of the Conspiracy
Trails just Chicago seven trial, which was discounted from Chicago Waite,
and you know, I needed something on weekends or something
just to get my brain out of that because because
it was it was literally a twenty four to seven job.

(07:18):
I didn't sleep for at least eight months.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
So I started, you know, hanging out doing overnights and
things like that. And you know, they changed the call
letters to w GILD and I called them up and
I thanked them for that, And that's why I realized
that they made a dreadful mistake. The old Saunderling operation

(07:42):
on at the oak Park Arms Hotel, which is and
was then a retirement home.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, and but.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
In nineteen sixty nine they really did not need all
those hippies on the top floor. It really bothered them,
particularly since they only had one elevator and it was
the flowest elevator on earth. So I suspect we shortened
some some people's lives. But no, I had this great opportunity.

(08:17):
I mean, I worked with Scorpio and I worked with
you know, the original guys and men and women alike
who who created FM radio. I mean, nobody made a
penny off of FM radio until US hippies came along,
and then when we showed them that they could make money,

(08:37):
they got rid of all of us. So I went
on to wa w FM, which was I think it's
w j Ona.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Okay, sure that they were a foreign they were a
foreign language station, yes, now.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
Now, oh for quite some time, for maybe four.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Years, Okay, Yeah, I wasn't sure if your time, if
it was foreign language or not.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, it wasn't when I was there.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
But describe FM radio for a second, because honestly, people
take for granted what it is now, and you know,
really it it really changed radio, which was predominantly AM
and in a lot of ways when they did, I
mean f M goes back to the late right late forties,
I think when they developed at them the frequency. Actually.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
The funny thing about that is Zenith in Chicago at
three thirty three North Michigan, which was the most powerful
building was at the time. I mean a lot of
Daly was there and all this other stuff. Yeah, they
had created FM radio and they sold their sets with

(09:46):
the FM dial built in. And RCA decided they were
losing business manufacturing business to Zenith, so they petitioned the
FCC might have been the FRC back then, to change
the frequency band so that all of the Zenith radios

(10:07):
wouldn't work. And they got they got away with that. Wow,
and nobody made a penny off of FM for a
couple of decades. Most of it was simulcast, if anything,
you know, some I'm sure some people just forgot they
owned one. They bought the frequencies because they didn't want

(10:31):
anybody else to and they were cheap at the time.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
Sure, so.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
By nineteen sixty nine, nineteen sixty seven, even when all
this really began to start, FM radio was literally a
vast wasteland in the sense that there was nothing there.
So US hippies came in and took it over and
played free form radio, which which is a euphemism for
we played whatever the hell we wanted. And the record companies,

(11:02):
who were beginning to completely lose their grip on reality
this is assuming they had much before then, thought that
this was terrific because they could sell their records that
they don't understand by using us.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yes, and again, this is when albums really became even
more significant, right during the Summer of Love and the
hippie movement, as you say, and this is when like
Grateful Dead and you know, Jefferson Airplane and you know,
I'm going to embarrass myself and leave it at that,
but I mean, you know, I know you know, I
know you can come up with better names than the world.

(11:40):
Those are pretty good, but yeah, you know that, Hey,
we're gonna play the entire album, sid, We're gona play
the whole album. Stuff like that, which was unheard of
back then when it was when when singles, when when
songs had to be three minutes and even something like
and forgive Me for the Tangent the Righteous Brothers you
lost that love and feeling was more than three minutes long,
but the forty five label, as I know, you know,

(12:02):
said three minutes, so that stations would be fooled into
playing it and everything, but go on, I'm sorry. It
was it was the doors that caused okay.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
See more than anybody else, because somebody on FM somewhere
in America. I'm sure Casan and San Francisco takes credit
for it, and they may have. They played a long version,
they played the seven and a half minute version.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
And of light My Fire, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
And they kept on doing that, and other people caught
on because radio's radio, and if somebody's making it doing
something over there, then you're going to do it over here.
And that opened up the field. So I think there,
I mean there are plenty of you know, I'm a
big believer in multiple causation, but there are there. There

(12:51):
are plenty of musicians and acts that could not have
ever gotten am play that were brilliant. So we had
the right music at the right length, at the right time,
and we had this vast wasteland to infest, which is
exactly what we did. I had the privilege of working

(13:12):
with Well I worked, I did a little workover case
and Bob Rudnick I worked with when he was still
in Detroit. He came to Chicago to w GLD with
his Cocaine Karma show. That didn't last real long because
the Bible wasn't even more political than me, so, which
is hard to believe. So Bob and Elliott wauld who

(13:35):
was with the Seed at the time, and a few
other people and myself started this thing called Radio for
Chicago and we broke her time. We bought the time
on EAWFM, and they didn't know what to make of us.
But the studio was out in Evanston and we weren't
knowing anybody. It was overlooking the Chicago River. It was

(13:59):
in the middle of nowhere, so nobody got really upset
by seeing this, and we weren't upset because nobody had
guns or anything. So we were fine. We were fine,
And you know, I learned the craft really from them,
really from from from Bob Rudnick, who was brilliant, had

(14:23):
a wonderful voice, which, of course, it turns out you
really didn't need to have a wonderful voice on FM
because it was a music accountant.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Sure, sure, we.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Could play anything in those days, you know, as long
as the FCC was cool with it. And unlike Doctor Demento,
I actually got away with playing screaming Jay Hawkins Constipation
Blues on three different stations in Chicago at about three
in the morning. And the funniest part about that for

(14:56):
me is that about a year ago, a little over
a year ago, I was doing on comic book convention
in New Jersey and Doctor Demental was a guest, and
during stead up, he and I had a long, long conversation.
Uh before he became Doctor Demento, he was producing these

(15:19):
records for uh Warner Brothers, for Warner Reprise. Okay, there
were samplers and they cost a buck they advertised in
the seed, so I was happy with them, and they
were wonderful samplers. I mean they did one for Zappa,
which was the only one that that Demento did not produce.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
He produced all of the others.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
Uh, turned people onto some wonderful music across all of
the Warner and Atlantic labels.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
Were they multiple multiple bands on an EP? Yeah, because
he's not an LP. I was on an LP because honestly,
into at least the eighties and maybe in the early nineties.
I know, in both college radio and professional radio, we
used to get Warner samplers all the time, both both

(16:08):
you know, Vinyl and Cassette go on forgive me.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Yeah, So we were talking. I came up to him
and I first of all, I called him by his name,
which always freaks him out, Barry. I really loved those samplers,
and he smiled and he says, Oh, it's nice somebody
remembered and stuff. Yeah, he turned me out to some
great music. We talked and I said, but I did
something you were never able to and he looks at

(16:32):
me again, hate in his eyes. What what could you do?

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Then? I couldn't do.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
I played Screaming Jay Hawkins Constipation Blues on three major
market channels, and he sat back and I swear I
saw envy was the nature of the time you could
get away with that.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Was he fined for trying to play it? No?

Speaker 3 (16:58):
No, he was syndicated, so he he was protecting his ass.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Right right, right, sure, sure. By the way, I've never
heard it. I'm hoping it's on YouTube because that seems
to be the place to find obscure music. I love
Sucream and Jayson Hawkins I put a spell on you
as his big get kids if you know that song, so,
but yeah, I would love to hear constipation.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Everybody's covered it. There's a couple of different versions. If
you can't find the right one, let me know when
I'll point you in the right direction.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
All right, thank you.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
But it's a wonderful, wonderful song. And you know, if
you got a little filler time at the end of
this you can run it.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
That might happen at the end of this conversation, absolutely
like you're killing me. That's fantastic.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
But listen to it first. Well, that happened to me
at weaw that literally happens to me. I was playing
a lot of fire siding together because I guess go
on and it was nineteen like seventy one, so of
course I couldn't right, and the guy from Columbia said,

(18:02):
you know, my god, I'm getting airplay.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Here.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
He rushed me a copy of their third record. You know,
it was a test pressing of the third record. He say, here,
you can play it.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
And I said, okay, is it okay for me to play?
And he said, oh, yeah, sure, no problem. H Well,
there was a little problem there. There were a couple
of four letter words that were in the in the
record and they were hilarious, but they were pretty blatant.
They did a parody of Let's make a Deal where

(18:36):
somebody traded their child for a bag of shit, and yeah,
but really great shit. And you know, so I'm listening
to go out over the air live and I'm thinking
I should be looking for another radio station. And they
wanted to fire me. Aw wanted to fire me. They
called me into the owner's office, which was in downtown Evanston,

(19:02):
still the largest building I think in or Dotown Skokie.
I'm sorry, and he said why did you play this?
And I said, well, I was told it was cleaned.
I told him the truth and he says, well, you
shut up, predated it and I said, well, you know
the guy when the guy from Colombia record says it's
claim and so it wasn't. And I said, well okay.

(19:26):
He said, well we're going to figure out what to
do with you, which I thought was weird. It's like
usually they inspire your ass, but I was making the money,
which is something they never saw before.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
On we A w f M.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
By the way, E A W stood for Edward A
Edwin A. Wheeler, who is the guy I was talking to.
And his chair in his office was not positioned so
you'd see him. You would see his gun collection with
a cannon facing me. So I figured, okay, well let's

(20:03):
give it a try. I leave his office with my
fate up in the air, and I call up the
guy from Colombia and I told him what happens, and
he says, oh, I'm really sorry. He's apologizing all over
the place, and I said, well, I just wanted you
to know. He says, no, no, no, we will take
care of this. He calls up Wheeler and he says, gee, look,

(20:25):
the whole thing's my fault, it's not his. Don't mess
with him as well. He should have known better, and
the guy says, yeah, well maybe, but you know, if
he's not there, there's no reason for me to advertise
on your station. So I was with the aw for
another couple of years.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
That's awesome, And I want to point out that Philip
Proctor at Fire Said Theater has been on the show twice.
I have a massive fan. Again, this is why we're friends, Mike.
We continue to discover things that we both love and
it's like, oh, yeah, it makes sense, of course Michael
likes that, so go on.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
Oh yeah, sure. Actually I think it was I think
it was WGLD where I was turned on to the program.
The program director of this guy named Steve Stafford. Nice
but and he loved Fire Sign Theater. I had no
idea how he fell across them, but that's where I
got turned onto it. So and that was the type

(21:20):
of radio that people were doing in those days.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Yes, well that's I was going to say, like I
missed that, and truly, again, being a decade behind you
when I was in school, I'm like, oh, man, I
want to do radio sketch comedy because of people like
Fire Sign Theater and the Committee and the credibility gap
we in Chicago. Do you remember the usual suspects that
used to be on w XRT. Well, sure, of course, there, okay,

(21:45):
there you go. And again I mean I worked at
XRT and missed them by about five years or so,
but yeah, go on continue.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
The Conception Corporation was a spinoff group from Second City,
one of about twelve thousand spinoff groups from Seconds City,
and they Ira Miller was one of the guys in
the Conception Corporation. He went on to have bit parts
in almost all of the Millbrooks movies.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Interesting. Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
Really talented group of people, and I would play their
stuff on the air in Chicago, and it turned out
I was like the only guy at COGO do that wow,
and or at least at first, you know. I gave
him a platform and they got on the show and
they did a lot ad libbing for me and stuff,
and it was great. But I had John Belushi and

(22:37):
the Second City guys at that time doing radio commercials
for me, sure, because they weren't making any money in
Second City in those Saturday night lives. Yep, and uh
del Close was I took. I took improv classes from
Dell Close Wow back at that time because I thought

(22:58):
it would improve my race radio work. I think it did.
But working with Dell Clothes improved in my life in
every way, shape and form, except that you know, I
haven't been imprisoned for it, which is always a likelihood.
So that was magnificent. But I had these unbelievable people

(23:20):
doing my commercials for me are with me actually, and
it was just a wonderful time. But that's how I
made my bones in nineteen seventy six with the staff
of DC Comics, because I joined DC in nineteen seventy six,
I was you'll forgive the phrase between radio jobs.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
I know, the feeling go on.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
There's something about radio and job security that are incompatible.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
Oh yeah, you never know your last show. You never
know when you're doing a last show.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
It's a weird feeling. Man, you're killing me. That's fantastic going.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
But dot Con who had just become publisher and I
knew her from her days. It's scholastic and it offered
me no at DC fanboy than I am. And we
had just on our very first Chicago Comic Con in
nineteen seventy six at the Playboy Hotel and Jeanette was
a guest along with the Harvey Kirschman and his family.

(24:27):
It's a wonderful show.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
And Jeanette offered me John and I'm thinking, well, you know,
I'm not going to make that my living, but it
would be fun to move to New York and work
for DC for a while. You know, that would be great.
I'm a comic span it would be wonderful. And it
turned out.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
To be wonderful.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
The third day I was there, the auditorious staff took
me out, took the new guy out for lunch, dinner,
actually dinner, and we're at this restaurant that was near
Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
From the editors. If you don't, I'd like to hear
some names in this dinner.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
This would be well, Paul Levitt's and Lenn and Marty Pasco.
They were about half a dozen. I'm trying to remember
who else was there? Jack Harris I think was there?

Speaker 1 (25:15):
Okay, who was after Jack?

Speaker 3 (25:20):
Jackson Harris is.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course absolutely.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
I got to put in that middle initial wor else?

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Oh I see okay, hey, list and then.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
I see him once a year at the Baltimore conn
and you know, wife sent him. So they said, okay,
we have one big table for you, and the people
who are there are about to leave, so if you
could just wait for a moment, we can get you
off at that table, it said fine. The people who
got up and left were the writing and some of

(25:52):
the on air crew of Saturday and I Live, including
John Belushi, who was the last to get out and
get a star there because Chevy Chase wasn't there and
nobody really liked Chevy anyway. Michael o'donahue was there, which
gets us back to comics because he did vob Zeitgeist
over at the over at Evergreen Magazine and then co

(26:14):
created National lampoone. So he files out, and last guy
is John, and all my DC my new DC friends
are around me, and John just turns to me, says
hey Mike and walks out, and their jaws dropped. Their
jaws dropped. And if I needed any sort of means

(26:38):
to access a friendship from people I had only known
for a couple of days, that was the way to
do it. So the radio stuff, everything in my life
ties in. So we went from from my politics to
the seed to radio to comics. So you know, I mean,

(27:02):
that's for me, it's been a linear experience. But when
when I explain to some people, their eyes roll in
their head. And I mean some of them, people who
have done their homework, you know, the younger folk who
might interview me, and they they do a google on
me and they said, well, we're.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Really gonna have time to finish.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Its beautiful. That was a beautiful moment.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
You know.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
I couldn't have arranged for that better. I couldn't better
for that.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
And this I mean, and again we're only twenty minutes
into this conversation, but I can tell you right now,
I think in the next conversation, we're going to go
back and examine that pre comics period a little closer,
like your involvement with the Chicago eight and what was
going on, and certainly even your experiences during the Convention
of sixty eight. And yeah, so I mean, no, there's

(27:55):
a there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff
to mine there. But now we are, we are in
You're at DC, You're in the publicity department. I'm like, correct,
I am.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
The entire marketing staff is the entire marketing staff, which
they didn't have before. And my job essentially, I mean
I did a lot of different stuff a lot of
media stuff, But my job essentially was to improve their
sales in the direct sales market, which had only been

(28:23):
a few years old, right, And both Jeanette and Paul Levitce,
who at the time was not in an advanced executive
position other than within an editoriald they saw that as
the future of comics. As it turned out to be true,
I'm not sure that they had the alternative we had, uh,

(28:45):
you know, loostand distribution was dying at that by that point,
and it's converse now. But nonetheless, over the two years
that I was there, we quadrupled the sales in the
direct market. Part of that is because the market expanded,
but part of that is because we help the market expand.

(29:05):
So that was very good in terms of opening a
door to the future in a small way. I'm proud
of that accomplishment. However, I hasten to point out to
the younger folk in the comics business that it really
was never anybody's intention to have direct sales be the

(29:27):
only means you can buy comics, because then you have
an ever tightening circle of fans, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
And distribution and availability and all of that. Yeah, you know, no,
why would you, why would you limit your markets. You'd
want to want to expand. But as you said, the
news the newstand market was dying, and you know, even
in the mid seventies and stuff, and like you said,
God damn. I can count on my one hand the
amount of newstands in downtown Chicago that still operated, and

(29:59):
it blows my mind. They're there purely for tourists.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
I've yeah, I mean, I remember going downtown. I remember
which which newsstands got their comics from Indiana and wrecked
them early, earlier than Charles Levy wrecked the stands in
the rest of the city. So I was down there
by my comics early because it was before the direct

(30:23):
sales thing happened. Sure, yeah, I'm that much of a fanbly,
But the newsstand operations started to deteriorate very seriously.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
In the early fifties, early go on.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yeah, everybody blamed it on television because it's an easy out.
But the fact of the matter is you can't make
any money doing comic books for ten cents. Sure, but
the publishers were frightened of raising the price because of
all of the comics caused juvenile delinquency thing, and the

(30:58):
keef Offer, could hear rings and Frederick Wortham and all that.
They were frightened, And they were genuinely frightened. I didn't
know how genuine that was until I met some of
those guys, but they were genuinely concerned. They just didn't
have the guts to do it. Finally, in around nineteen
sixty one or two, they raised the price to twelve cents. Yes, which,

(31:22):
to quote Grace Slick doesn't mean shit to a tree.
And I hope you're not gonna have to go back and.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Beleeve all this. Oh no, no, you could. You could swear freely, Mike,
don't worry absolutely, man, No, no FCC on the internet.
We're all good man.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Oh great, great, Well I can tell you I'm just
I'm coming in from Canada or something that that I'll
help you. But what was happening was the marketing was shifting.
The marketplace was shifting. Mom and pop stores were going
out of business because the mom and pops were dying

(31:57):
and their kids didn't want to run a candy store.
They didn't run a little newstand, you know. They wanted
to make money, yeah, and have children and stuff. Okay, fine,
you want to be like a human great, so it
all you know, the you know, the Walgreens and places
like that started taking over the drug store market newstands

(32:21):
in the city.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
They were making their.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Money off of newspapers, and they were having the same
problem with newspapers and now and TV did interfere with that.
That's what put the afternoon papers out of business. Uh so,
so they were they were having a real hard time
with that. And again, nobody was making enough money to
care about all the hassle of stocking the comics and

(32:48):
you know, pulling the policing the racks and all of that.
And you know, all these kids who are you know,
messing up things? And I get that. But then when
the shopping strips and then the shopping malls took over,
one of the first shopping strips in America was Lincoln
Village on the northwest side, which is yeah, yeah, And

(33:12):
they had a Woolworths there that had a small comics rack.
And even as a kid, I realized that that rack
was getting smaller. Yes, And I learned from that, and
I knew people from Charlesboby and I talked, you know,
from my days with the Seed and uh you know,
I talked with them about it. So I had some

(33:33):
idea of what was going on. It's what what wasn't
going on that changed the nature of the comics business.
What happened was in order to get into the malls,
and the early shopping malls enclosed malls did have drug
stores in them and the supermarkets. They still do in Canada.
And yet the rent is determined in part by your

(33:58):
profit per square foot of space, okay, And that's why
the comics industry started building these these nammoth spinnerecks. Because
they would only occupy a square foot of space or
to maybe you know, in the in the store ten
cents or twelve cents multiplied by all the different comics

(34:22):
you could put in there, it still wasn't enough to
make it worthwhile for shopping malls. And as the entire
marketing of America starting and starting in you know, the
collar suburbs, the color communities around the big cities, as
they all shifted to shopping strips and shopping malls, you know,

(34:46):
comics got the short ends of the stick. The only
thing you could sell for that price point was TV
Guide and that was fifteen cents and it required no
maintenance because the guide. I bought the space.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
At the checkout. Wow, okay, sure, yes.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
So comics was doomed and Direct Saless and Phil Selling
figured out, well, this is a good idea. Let's try this.
Let's try buying comics on a non returnable basis, and
you know, selling to comic book clubs in quantities of
twenty five. Well, turn out there were very few comic

(35:26):
book clubs big enough to order twenty five non returnable copies.
DC was their first customer. Marvel came in slowly, and
then the others. So Phil moved that to selling to
comic book shops. A couple of comic book shops jumps
in very early on. I strongly encouraged a couple of

(35:50):
my friends in Chicago, Larry Share who had the Larry's
Comic book Shop on Devon and Sheridan Yes, and the
great Joe Sarno who had his Seperation on the Northwest Side,
uh to to to try it, you know, non retournable. Yeah,

(36:11):
but maybe you'll get people in every week to buy
their new comics. Wow, that worked, That worked out. I'm
not saying that I gave them the idea. I just
pushed them. I helped push them in that direction because
I wanted my comics. So I learned from that and
then so I was able to take all of that

(36:32):
over to d C, including whatever media experience I had
acquired by then, and you know, quadruple their sales in
those two years. And it's that meant I was working
very closely with editorial. I even ghosted it to a
couple of books for UH, primarily for Ross Andrews was

(36:54):
a wonderful guy, but there were one or two projects
he had that he just didn't understand and I helped
the interesting but they were taking sort of take taking
advice in terms of well, this is what the market likes.
And I would take them to conventions and meet different
editors and that's are different sales store owners, that sort

(37:16):
of thing, and that's what's what started that end of
the business. I think we're able to expand creatively by
doing that. However, it was still we're still doing you know,
superhero comics, creative fantasy. When I was twenty three, I

(37:36):
was in Montreal for New Years and I was hanging
out at oddly enough, at Canadian Woolworths. They had a
comics section, but they had graphic novels and they were
all in French, you know, Jue, oh beautiful owerwork. And
I've seen some stuff about this, I read some stuff

(37:58):
about it, but here there was, you know, one hundred
different graphic novels, and I'm looking through it and the
artwork is fantastic. And I said, well, why can't we.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
Do this stuff.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
We should be able to do this stuff in English
so that you know, normal people, period. And I felt
a little frustrated in DC. I didn't have hands on
on editorial, nor was I asking to, because I hadn't
made the commitment to stay in New York forever like

(38:28):
I did later. And I went back to Chicago and
we started First Comics, and First Comics got me a
lot closer to that end of the of the field
of expanding it so that we could do We're still
doing heroic fantasy, but we weren't necessarily doing capes. Nothing

(38:53):
wrong with capes, you know. I just wanted to do
something more than that. And my buddy Mike girl From
and Howard Chaiken and you know, all these remarkable people
I was able to bring in new talent. I raided
the Uchanic Theater and UH other theater groups for people

(39:19):
like John Ostrander and.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Quotes and and.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
You know, we we we moved the needle creatively for
comics and a part of the time when other independent
publishers and the word independent in this case only means
independent from Marvel and DC, right, which she was considered
an independent, as was Disney interesting, which well today it's ironic. Yeah,

(39:50):
at the time, it's like, what do you mean Disney's independent? Yeah,
it was great, and of course Disney had just destroyed
the careers and some very you good friends of mine,
the Underground Air Pirates Gies.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Yes, that's an amazing underground comic. Absolutely, yes, yeah, so
I still have a spur up my butt from that one.

Speaker 4 (40:13):
And you know, I mean, but nonetheless, we're able to
draw the business into an art form and had always
been an art form.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
It never got the recognition for that until you know,
about started right around the time Jack Herbie died.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
So early eighties or mid eighties, No excuse me, he
made it to the nineties, didn't he.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
I don't recall off the top of my head.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
All right, I'm gonna look that up. But wait a minute,
because the late eighties, okay, when when what year did
you guys you know start first comics.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
That was nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
Okay, there's I am curious because, as you say, you
were there at a key time at DC and involving
the direct market. You were there too for both the
DC Explosion and implosion. Am I correct?

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yes? I called I named it the the explosion. D you
see explosion.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Because describe that for people because they may not know.
And I remember seeing those ads, and let me tell you,
it was great to see beyond superhero stuff, the different
experimentation that was going on at DC. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Well, Janette had this idea, and I thought it was
an interesting idea.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
It was an experiment. Really.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
The comics were seventeen page stories, thirty five cents, yep.
And she said, well, let's go up to fifty cents,
add a half signature, which is eight pages, and we'll
do these eight page back ups. And then she pointed, said,
you know, we can do some of this stuff that

(42:05):
you know, we couldn't do, or at least we couldn't
start off doing as a regular book, some of which
never made it to prints, some of it wound up
and canceled Cavalcade, but stated co created this thing called
the odd Man, which was brilliant, and Jim Starlin did
his take on OMEC, which I think was never published, Wow,

(42:29):
I think, and a lots of stuff like that, and
they were really interesting ideas, and they I think they
would have actually driven DC into what we wound up
being able to do in like nineteen eighty five eighty six,
a hell of a lot faster. But it didn't work

(42:50):
because of the snow.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
The snow, the snow.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
In January and February of mynineteen Wow, seventy eight, I'm
dustling off my brain. In nineteen seventy eight, there were
these huge mammoth blizzards that covered about at one time

(43:17):
or another covered about two thirds of the United States.
Rights never got out of the independent warehouses, out of
the local community warehouses. Wow. After a while, after a while,
they didn't even get into those warehouses. So those that
didn't get into the warehouses were sent back. They're called

(43:38):
prematures in those days. You know, they were sent back
without ever getting to the newstand. And the books that
were in the warehouse got sent back once they got
rid of the snow, which took them a month because
then it was constantly snowing. Yes, so all of a sudden,

(43:58):
Marvel and DC's sales crashed. I mean just it's like today,
I mean today, you.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Know literally what we're going through right now. And I'm
really glad we're talking about this continue.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
Yeah, and uh, it just it ripped the pooh out
of out of everybody's sales. And DC was run by
Warner Publishing in those days, which is part of Warner Communications, right,
Jack Leebelwitz, who was the guy one of the along
with with Harry Downfield, who who got DC comics from

(44:40):
Major Wheeler Nicholson. Yes, will we can talk about the
mom and stuff later if you like, we're just getting
Have you had Nikki?

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Oh yeah, In fact, it's so funny you mentioned the major.
Nicky's great and yeah it's before the virus. I'm like,
oh yeah, Nikki should come back on. Man, we'll do
a new talk and everything. And actually we've been planning
to probably see each other at Terrifica in Connecticut. So yeah, yeah, no,
NICKI is terrific. We'll see if that happens. Yeah, I
hear you, buddy, I know, I know, I believe he

(45:14):
Mitch is listening to and going, yeah, man, he's rubbing
he's rubbing his worry beads. I understand, and I understand that.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
I totally understand that that's a frightening thing for me
if they cancel a convention here or there. And oddly enough,
I haven't gone on terrifica and I live in Connecticut.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
But yeah, man, it scares me.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
There's too many people there. That scares me. Anyway, I've wandered.
I've wandered quite quite a far here.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
All good, buddy, go on, this is fantastic.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
She uh Liva was still was still there. He was
one of the three presidents of Warner Communications, and they
all reported the chairman of the board uh Leva, which
hadn't been downstairs GC Comics pretty much since they bought

(46:04):
the place. It's one brought DC, Yeah, DC, which is
like ten years earlier, eleven years earlier. He had never
looked at the sales because he never had any costs
to and I'm quite frankly, he'd spent so many years
of his life doing so. I'm sure it was a
relief not to so. He didn't realize that at a
point in time when comics would be canceled if they

(46:26):
sold through a sell through, meaning the percentage of the
books you print as opposed to the percentage that you
actually sell. Print one hundred thousand copies, sell sixty thousand copies,
you have a sixty percent sell through.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
Right.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Well, by this point in time, nineteen seventy eight, even
before this nightmare, the snow comics are selling about thirty
five percent of the of their print run.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
Wow, that low go.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
On, which was I mean a horror financially. Being kind
of this political guy, I also thought it was a
horror to chop down all these trees for no good reason.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
Really really, while we were beginning to get concerned about that, well,
some of us were back in nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
So.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
The rug got pulled out from underneath the DC explosion.
They did not want to risk this thing. It lasted
three months. It was actually dead before the first one
was released, because our lead times were much longer in
those days, and you know, we had to go back
and swiftly reformat all of these books back down to

(47:41):
thirty two pages, which wasn't that hard. We would just
we would just pull out the backup features, right, which
is why we did Kentle Camelky, because we wanted to
keep copyright on those stories so that eventually they could
be printed off, and some of them were.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
So those are two issues that never actually saw the market.
But again we're created to maintain the copyrights on the material,
and they're pretty infamous from a historic standpoint because of
the features that are in them.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
And nonetheless, that's my first editorial credit at DC.

Speaker 5 (48:20):
I know, I've lived my whole life this way. It's
just a miracle. I look back nowadays. I look back
and go like.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
I got away with that?

Speaker 1 (48:32):
Shit? What how did that happen beyond the physical format?
Am I right? Wasn't the implosion also part of like
expanding the mystery line and you know that's when you
guys are doing or No, I guess maybe it was earlier,
but I was thinking that was around the time that
you know, the Shadow and things like that. But I
guess that was a little bit earlier than the explosion,
wasn't it?

Speaker 3 (48:52):
That stuff was indeed earlier? Okay, SMA thing and yeah,
a lot, but none of don't really really work. None
of it held on. I think they all would have
if we had the direct sales markets to develop just
five years earlier. I think that those books would have

(49:15):
been huge successes because they would have sold through in
the comic book stores.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
Absolutely. Yeah, But.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
During the implosion we'd launched some like reprint titles of
war comics and mystery comics and stuff, and we also
we also had those those one hundred page comics and.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
The dollar comics that Jeannett brought it correct.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yes, absolutely so it did create a bigger field for
non superhero comics and able to develop that a little
bit until the plug got pulled. And then after that,
like the all DC could do is just sort of
hold on for dear life while they could slowly but

(50:04):
surely reconstruct behalf of their line, the fifty percent of
their line that remained at one point in time. And
this is something I'm proud of. Oddly, that's something Paul
Levitch reminds me of all the time we were told
what the point was to start canceling books. We were

(50:26):
no longer published by monthly books, only monthlies, and they
had to have been selling you know, over whatever hundred
thousand on the in total, and they canceled detective comedies.
And Paul comes into my office and says, we just

(50:47):
canceled detective comicies, And I said things that even I
won't say on the air right now in this venue,
and I said a lot of that, and I said, well,
wait a moment, Man Family is still on the list.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
This is it.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
And I said, well, let's publish Batman Family. We'll call
it Detective Comics, and we'll put the name Detective Comics
up over the Batman Family logo, keep the number and
let it evolve back into Detective Comics over time, but
it would still be Batman Batman Family. And that's what happened. Yeah,

(51:26):
he called made that happen in about five minutes. It
was beautiful. But that's because like me, like you, he's fan. Sure, Yes,
he wasn't publisher in those days, and he was able
to get that through right away. So DC, which many

(51:48):
people believe stands for Detective Comics, one can argue that
it really stood for Dune Unfield Comics, yes, which made
it not redundant because of DC stood through Detective Comics
and DC Comics was Detective Comics Comics. Keep that one,

(52:08):
so at least we kept we kept the flagship title.
Al Marvel at the same time reacted to this in
a totally different fashion.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
They were going to do this.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
Sort of expanded thing or whatever. They were waiting as
they had always done, to see whether DC's latest attempt
at a new format were to work. And and Stan
was up front he said that in those very words.
But when the plug got pulled over there, they canceled
their titles slowly over the course of a body hear,

(52:42):
they wound up canceling as many titles. You can always
tell when Marvel's trying to flood the market back then,
because they would start up like Cold once again or
Doctor Strange is one of my favorite characters, but you know,
never really sold well. But they needed they wanted to
eat up based on the racks, so equally true in

(53:03):
direct sales. So they did it more slowly. They were
able to burn off their inventory. Mind you, at that time,
Caden's Industries was.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
You know, the Marvel.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
Was the tail that that wagoned Cadence Industries. So they
had they needed to stay alive, and they needed to
watch over their cash cloths a little bit more carefully
than Warner Communications did. Okay, So they canceled you know,
almost as many titles, maybe as many, one doesn't know,

(53:37):
because they did it slowly over time and amortized off
their expenses and also didn't causes you know, sudden train
wreck in the comic book distribution business no matter where
you were distributed. Marvel did it better, I think, although
DC had no choice but to do it the way
they did. Again, they were so small that DC was

(54:04):
rarely more than a footnote in Warner Communications any more.
Report So, just before the movies and all that, although
we did have the Superman movie that we were very
excited about coming out at the end of nineteen seventy eight,
none of thought it would be as transformative for the
industry as it wound up being. And even that was

(54:27):
a slow walk because you know, the Batman movie didn't
happen for another ten years.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Yeah, so it really was. The movie really did jumpstart
the compoic industry because again, looking at today and the
success of Walking Dead and some of the other you know,
television and film properties doesn't seem to have you know,
translated into comic book money.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
No, everybody was hoping for another nineteen sixties Batman thing, right.
It was clear to those of us who paid attention.
It's a remarkably small percentage that the Hulk TV show
and the Wonder Woman TV show, which is happening at
the same time. Spider Man TV show had no effect
whatsoever on sales. It had some effect in terms of

(55:15):
getting comics into places that previously had them, and we
got Bax back in, but that was minor, it was
very short lived. So in that case, the dog became
the media, became TV and became after Superman became movies,
and even that didn't just bust out all over the

(55:38):
place until really until Iron Man. Sure, yes, but after
Superman the movie, which I worked on, it was great fun.
After Superman the movie, comics started getting some respect. Now
this is also because the kids that were in college
and buying Marvel comics in the nineteen six and watching

(56:01):
stan Lee Hawk those comics on The Cabot's Show and
other shows. Yeah, it all came together around nineteen seventy nine,
nineteen eighty. So that just to go back to a
point I made earlier. When Jack died, I was watching
the news on ABC and they did a tribute to him.

(56:23):
They did a story about Jack Kirby, which was completely
right to do. It was a good piece and it
never happened in comics before. Barely Some people might have
gotten kind of a note if they were like a
newspaper guy mostly, but the comic books. That's when we
started getting respect. I was, and I remain completely concerned

(56:50):
about the fact that respect and comics are incompatible. We
were not there tod It's like rock and roll, and
it's a lot like.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Rock out and outlaw medium.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
Absolutely law medium, that's right. And it's much more fun
and much more interesting to be involved without law media.
And I'm not talking about just as a creator. It's
much more fun as a reader, or is it. You know,
you go to the movies and you see something weird,
it's like Iron Man and it's you know, fun or whatever.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
That's outlaw media.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
And now it's how people pay their rent, how the
movie studios stay in existence. Yeah, and how streaming television,
and we'll expand that to related media, to related projects
like Star Trek and all of that, which have you know,
the same type of fan base. That's really what's running

(57:50):
our media these days, or at least it was until
the plague hit, and I think that much of it
will continue.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
I had the.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Privilege I can't comment about this, but I had the
privilege of seeing the first three episodes of Stargirl, which
I thought was great fun and that's all I'm going
to say.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
To see the first three episodes of what I'm sorry
Stargirl goes up on Oh yeah, Jeff's Jeff's show. Sure
on DC Universe, Yes.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Very much show. That's probably why I like it. It
is so much Jeff's show.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
That's excellent.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, the third episode will kill you.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
But I can't exciting. I'm actually this is a good
chance to well, if everything works. I mean I reached
out to Jeff and hopefully we're talking next Friday. Oh good,
as we're recording this, so.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Well, give him my best and tell him I'm really impressed.
I was pissed when when the book got canceled. Yeah,
but but I have it now on television and it's
really fun. So I would like to say more, but
I can't.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
I understand, No, but I appreciate that little mention absolutely. Man. No,
I think a lot of us are very curious to
see Stargirl on DC Universe when it when it of debuts. Yeah,
and the University c w both, it's going to be both. Wow.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
It was my impression that it was going to start
on d CU and then like a week or two
later go up to uh c W. But now with
with the schedule problems that they have, because you know,
they lost the last few episodes of all of their shows,
not just right d they're they're playing with that. So

(59:30):
I think it's going to be the day after it
goes up, not not like a week or two after.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
Okay, interesting, Okay, you know.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
That's that's that's my my belief at least. And but
but we'll find out. We don't know. Yeah, yeah, I'm
not sure they know, but nobody no, Look, it's it's media.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
You know.

Speaker 3 (59:51):
Media business is not for normal people.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
You don't have to tell me, buddy, I understand. Thirty
years in Chicago radio, has you know shown that to me? Definitely?
They they bring in normal people.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
This is a terrible, I'm terrible, terrible, terrible story because
it ends with a good person's death and there's nothing
funny about that. So let me go make some drinks.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
I was working with this Classics International Entertainment thing, and
we had this warehouse full of comics and now I
was there for pretty much for the publishing side of that.
But you know, as an executive, I had to sort
of keep my finger and things. And this guy they
brought him, this guy to do to develop software to
inventory people's comic book backstock so that it can be

(01:00:43):
rotated around a large group of stores. And we bring
this guy out to this warehouse and he's looking at
all this stuff and he's undaunted, and he says, Oh, yeah,
this is we can do this. This isn't the problem.
This is just like greeting cards. And we said, no, no, no,
it's not because really Green Carters don't have like seventeen

(01:01:06):
different Spider Man titles. You know, we don't have like
one hundred different X Men titles, twenty different Batman titles.
I didn't even mention Richie rich that would have when
he got to Richie Richard's tax shelters. I think he

(01:01:28):
I said, not a problem, not a problem at all.
And four days later he died of a heart attack. Wow, yeah,
I know. And that is the story I tell whenever
somebody brings in somebody from the real world into comics.

(01:01:49):
Disney's not the real world. Disney's Disney's its own world.
Not a pretty one, but it's getting better, asked Dan Akroyd.
And I'll let that go for the moment. Yeah, that's
one of those things we'll talk about.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
All right, fair enough. We always have intense conversations and
where in person my galluy, I look forward to it.
Go on.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
Oh yeah, god, we heard Moody's Pub last time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Yes, we were, Man, dude, you you have and seriously,
I'm so glad And this is why I appreciate hanging
it out with you. You take me to places that
absolutely are quintessential old time Chicago in the best ways.
And that's not to date us at all. It's like, no,
that's what I mean. It's just like the great New
York joints that and how many of those are still around,

(01:02:38):
Like Gallagheries used to be in places like that. I mean,
you know, Bert Sugar was my uh New York godfather
that would like, no, this is where we're going. And
it's like, hey, man, you know this town better than
I do. Please retro my ass off and let's have
a ball. And that's how you are when you come
to Chicago. I'm like, yes, by all means, man, I
trust your judgment so well.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Chicago still has a higher percentage per capita of the
old style neighborhood joints, but they're beginning to go.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
To and got it. Who knows how many of these
are going to survive this virus and everything.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
I'm bleeding because every time I go to Chicago, that's it.
I'm eating as much Italian beef as I can shove. Yeah,
it's it's a it's a tough thing. It's a tough thing.
But normality and comics should not go hand in hand.

(01:03:31):
All of these Mark Evan Year is responsible for transformation
in my way of thinking. We're at the book fair
whatever they're calling it these days. You know, read Pop
runs this huge book show, and I think the last
time they were in New York, they they had Mark's

(01:03:55):
book about Jack.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Herby Okay, which is a brilliant book.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
So they're handing out the jackets to uh to Mark's
book about check and damn it, I wanted one.

Speaker 1 (01:04:10):
You know, sure it was beautiful book. I have that
book absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
All they were ruling to give me was the cover.
There was this long line, and I was thrilled to
see a long line for a book about a comics guy.
I've never seen that before. And then I realized that
it wasn't like a bunch of booksellers who were in

(01:04:35):
line ahead of me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
They were librarians.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
They were school librarians by and large, and that was
a real steed change because you know, when I was
eight years old, they grabbed my copy of Adventure Comics,
the one where they premiered Brainiac.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
Yes I am that old uh.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
And and never give it back to me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
Yeah, And that's that's what you're like supposed you were
supposed to do back then. And now it's you know,
Mark's got this wonderful book out there, and there are
all these school librarians who went through this transitional period
where they wouldn't order comic book books, not because they
were comics, but because they got stolen. They got they got,

(01:05:22):
they got swiped from the libraries. They the highest shrinking's
rate of all of their books. But they they stood
in line for that Jack Herbie cover just like I did. Well,
you got to figure, you know, they grew up with it.
They didn't grow up with the Frederick Wortham stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Right. I was.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
I was lucky when I was a very small but
ridiculously precocious child when my sister taught me how to
read by reading me her comic books, and she was
seven years older than me. So that's how I got
into it, uh, and into papers and the whole thing.
So we were, my mother and I were walking down

(01:06:02):
Montrose Avenue. I grew up in Albney Park, and uh,
there was a corner drug store there. You could see
the comics rack from the door, from the doorway because
it was somewhere, and the door was open because there
was no such thing as air conditioning. And I said,
I wanted a comic book, and she said she always

(01:06:24):
encouraged me to read. So she said, fine, let's get
you comic. What call we walk inside. I immediately pull
Tales from the crypt.

Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
Wow, And she.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
Says, no, no, no, I just picked it open. So
I picked up Uncle Scrooge, which is really just as
good a choice from a comic book perspective from a
political perspective, though it changed my life, you know, but

(01:06:58):
comics were very nice, unrespectable, except my mother didn't care.
So fine, great, wonderful, And I did not become a
juvenile delink when I become a political active arguably worse.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
That's awesome, man, to damn funny absolutely man. So so uh,
all right, so should we go back to first comics
and anywhere you want, it's your show. Well, and are
we okay for a time? I because honestly, this is
all fantastic. I'm happy. And also it's just a nice
social thing that we're hanging This is our this is
our meal online. I mean this, And this is what

(01:07:38):
people are doing right now during the virus is hanging
out online and stuff as opposed to getting together.

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
So but that explains why I'm getting hungry.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
Did you have lunch before we started talking? I certainly hope, so,
of course not. Oh geez, And why don't you know?
Are you? Are you okay for time? Are we okay
to continue? I'm fine? No, no, let's go okay. So
so First Comics, which was in Evanston, Northwestern University Territory.
And yeah, what's that? I didn't quite get that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
We weren't far We were across the street from where
they built. While we were there, they built Evanston's first
liquor store.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Yeah, it was a dry town forever and even like
to the most ridiculous levels where when you went to
burger King, you couldn't the people at the counters, as
I'm sure you remember, couldn't bag your your fast food.
You had to do it yourself because it was part
of the packaging laws anti liquor laws that had dictated

(01:08:41):
Evanston law for like one hundred years.

Speaker 3 (01:08:43):
Yeah, that was about nineteen seventy six when they changed that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
It was right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
Well, I first moved to New York, so I remember
that because I had an office there on a different project.
By the time we started First Comics, i'd moved back
to from the York We and I had lived about
a block and a half away from from where we
found First Comics office because I lived there and it

(01:09:10):
was above the Audio Consultants building and I saw the
data fence sign So for me, I had a block
and a half walked to work. And but when we
hired Joe Staton as our art director, Joe actually found
an apartment closer than mine.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
I thought was what was the street address for First.

Speaker 3 (01:09:35):
Okay Avenue, I want to say fifteen, I was, No,
I don't remember. I don't remember, but it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Was it was an Oak and Davis. We're Ron Davis,
Oka and Davis. Okay, great, now, I'm now I can
picture where it wasn't everything that's great, you know, I'm
just gonna have to go in the bins and pick
up a first comic and look at the at the
the indica and find out, you know, the street address
and stuff. But yeah, man, because and I know I've
told you this before, and I've told John this and

(01:10:03):
Grell and the other first comic vets. It's insane you
guys are making comics in the town next to mine.
Because I'm growing up in Walmett at the time, I
might have been by then, I might have started at
is U. I went to Fall of eighty three is
when my college started, so it's about the same time there,
you go. So yeah, like an idiot, I'm leading, well,

(01:10:23):
you know, like an idiot, I'm pursuing higher education instead
of you know, being around being around you guys as
you're creating first comics and everything.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
It was a wonderful place in a wonderful time. And
I'm glad that we were in Evanston because there are
too many distractions in downtown Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
Oh yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
We were also about a half a block away from
the post office, right, Yes, this was right before FedEx,
not quite, but right before FedEx. So we needed that
post office. We needed it nearby. Sure, it was very effective,
of course, we were next to like Benison's Bakery, which

(01:11:03):
is still one of the great bakeries.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
In a Maryland there absolutely, man, one of my favor
vintage vinyl, great record store.

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):
Oh my god. Yes, yes, I loved Evanston. Then I
go back every once in a while and it's a
different place, but I like it. It's just different.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
I hear you, man, no, and I still love going
to Evanston as well. That's so funny.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
Yeah, oh yeah, I loved it. I missed the old
Main Street newsstand because Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
Man's still there. It's still there.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
Well, it did go away for a little period of time,
and it was done by other people. Was brought up
by other people who find the Neon sign. And but
when when when I lived in Evanston, they still had
a huge comics rack. Oh yeah, as well as damn
near every magazine ever published.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
In the world in the world.

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
Yes, sir, and maybe others, and.

Speaker 1 (01:11:57):
So do a lot of Earth two publications about their
way at Chicago. And man, you're right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
I mean it was like two thirds of a mile
from my apartment. So yeah, I love the place. I
could walk, I made beautiful walks and just oh I love.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
The elevated trains right there. I mean, no, you're right man,
No Evanston and I mean it's still it's it's stills.
We'll see again post virus how that impacts Chicago transit
lines and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
But well the commuter train is still there, I guess, yeah,
Union Pacific. Now, so that if you have to go
downtown get to your lawyer in a real hurry, which
oddly not happened a few times. You can do that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
It's publishing, but you you know, see it go. You
know again, you had the roster you had, You had
John there, you had doing a grim jack And I
mean I don't want I don't want to tell the story.
You tell the story. Good Lord?

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
About getting John into comments.

Speaker 1 (01:12:53):
Well just well sure we could start with that. Yeah,
how did you get you? Because as you said, John
was that Organic theater right.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
He had written for the Organic Theater. He was on
the Great Stage with Dell and Bill Norris and some
terrific actors doing Christmas Carol every year. He is a
very accomplished actor. He wrote several plays, including Bloody Bess
with with Bill Norris and the Satalie Late Suart Gordon,

(01:13:25):
who Am Missing? Normously, but we became friends. In nineteen
seventy one, I had gone to a party at Bill
Norris's apartment and whoever opened the door said, oh, you're
one of those comic book guys. Here, sit over here,
and there's this couch with like two other to three

(01:13:47):
other comic book nerds.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
It's like, oh, yeah, you'll fit in great, and you'll
stay far from us. Okay, and John the other the
other two guys at that couch, I'm not even sure
they were alive. But John and I got into a
conversation and became fast friends and very close friends. I

(01:14:11):
can't begin to tell you between the two of us,
that's how close we are. And I loved every minute
of it. I read some of his plays. Then of
course Bloody Bess went up and that was phenomenal. And
then there was this one time when it was after

(01:14:32):
Christmas Carol where John filled in for somebody who was
sick at The play opens with this writer being hung
from the yard arm upside down. There's a bucket underneath
his head, and the pirate, played by William J. Norris,
one of the great stage actors of all time. Still

(01:14:57):
with us not working anymore. He was inn Island but
he at the time were roommates and they co wrote
Bloody Bess and they lived on Wayne Street, so of
course they lived in stately Wayne Man. Of course, so
they had to shuffle the cast this one day, and

(01:15:19):
they needed somebody to hang upside down at the beginning
of the play. They chose John. I suspect will Norris
chose John, but I know that. So the play opens
with John, my dear friend, hanging upside down from the
yard with his arms tied behind his back, and the

(01:15:41):
pirate is about to slice his throat, which he would
do with one gesture shoof, and then they'd hit the
you know, the little button, and the blood would start
gushing out from and fall by gravity into the into
the bucket. But the actor's words before the pirate slices

(01:16:03):
his throat is our but by words, my words shall
live on. And Norris would go your words and then
slices staruts. Okay, except for when John was there, and
this is about the seventh time I'd seen the play.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
John was hanging upside out.

Speaker 3 (01:16:25):
All of his friends who were there, and there were
about four or five of us, because you know, we
got the call minutes before. We had our fists in
our in our mouths, because we knew that we left
they would get infectious and it would blow the whole thing.
Because Bill is responding to John's my words, my words

(01:16:46):
shall live forever. And Bill starts sawing at his neck.
He says, your words, your words, you fat turkey, and
it's on slicing. He goes, and then they you know,
seen it, John's dad, and I can take a fist

(01:17:06):
out of my mouth in any event. After that, about
a year after, I think, maybe give or take, I'm
I'm in New York, I'm working at d C. And
as I'm moving to New York, John says, look, would

(01:17:27):
you mind I wrote this Green Lantern script? Would you
give it to Denny? Jenny O'Neil was the Green Lantern
editor in those days. I said, well, sure, I would
not have done it for anybody else. It's hard to
imagine I would have done it for anybody else unless
at gun point. So I go there to d C

(01:17:50):
and I, you know, I wait a couple of days
to get to know Denny, and I hate to impose,
but and I give it to Denny. And I never
heard from anybody However, I've read it and I thought
it was pretty good. So when I came back to
Chicago to do first comics, I thought, let's do a

(01:18:11):
backup story in the first issue of Warp, which was
another Stuart Gordon thing that Dolores was in, and let's
have John write it. So I said, John, you want
to write a comic book? And he was He was speechless,
you know what?

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
Yes, what?

Speaker 3 (01:18:34):
And we're talking, we're talking, and said, yeah, it'll be
like a backup story about one of the characters from Warp.
When we're talking about how to do that, we're doing,
you know, real professional pitch session, and at the end
of it, John says very has time. Hesitatingly, he says,
this isn't going to affect anything, but like, do I
get paid for this? Paid for it? It's you know yeah,

(01:18:59):
and he goes, you can't. I got a novel. But
I'm glad you didn't say that at the beginning of
the conversation. It might have gone a different way. That's
how John got into comics.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
He uh, one of my.

Speaker 3 (01:19:15):
Masterplan, and I had this plan for exactly what we
would release for our first year, or what type of
book we would release. The first one would sort of
as conventional a Marvel style book as we could go
and still take it a step or two.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Further, and that was War.

Speaker 3 (01:19:32):
Then we revived a classic comic book, a Man with
Joe Stayton. And the third one was a book by
a big established a lister but doing something that you'd
never seen him do before. That was John Sable and
Mike Grow and.

Speaker 1 (01:19:52):
You know, we then we didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Then the next one was, Okay, we're going to take
another star guy, a lister, but we're going to bring
him back into the business and and he's going to
do something that's going to interest below everybody's brands olden.
That was American Flag. And the next the next step
in my my my master plan to take over the
comics industry was to take a book that had been around,

(01:20:16):
but put new talent elements. And we took Starslayer and
Mike wrote the first couple of issues and then you know,
they'll just to get it running. Lennon Delsul was the artist,
very very very gifted painter these days and uh still
in Chicago. Great guy, cool, yeah, really great, and I

(01:20:44):
put John on that as his regular first regular assignments.
He did a very very good job. Lenon was having
to being a newcomer, was having serious difficulties.

Speaker 1 (01:20:56):
Hitting deadlines, not unusual.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
He had done some sketches for this new backup that
we're going to do in Star Slayer called grim Jack, and
I loved it. I mean, John's pitch was flawless, one
of the best pitches I ever heard in my life.
And one thing led to another, and Lennon, you know,
decided to move his career in a different direction. We

(01:21:27):
brought in Tim Truman, who I stole from TSR up
in Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 (01:21:34):
Wow, Dungeons and Dragons people, that's where Tim came from.
That's right. Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:21:39):
I didn't even know at the time that Tim. Tim
was a listener to my radio show, to my to
my blues show. Uh wow, aren't you that I on here? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:21:51):
Wow, that's fantastic, man, that's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (01:21:54):
That's really cool. I didn't know that for years. So
Sim was taking over grim Jack and Tim is just insane,
and he's co plotting some of this stuff, and they
do this really bizarre and strange sort of intergalactic movie
Dick's story that Tim Cole plotted with John, and then

(01:22:17):
halfway through quit so that he could do grim Jack
because Lennon was out of the picture having made a
career change. And and John you know, used Lennon's sketches
as the starting point, but after that it was completely
his stuff. And then eventually grim Jack you know, started

(01:22:39):
wagging that particular dog. Yeah, and uh, we can with
a grim Jack number one, and it became one of
our best sellers. It was right up there with Sable
and Flags as our best sellers.

Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
You know, we've done a couple of stories in the
last ten to fifteen years. We will probably do one more,
or at least we want to.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
And.

Speaker 3 (01:23:06):
We have a deal somewhere for something else.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
So that's great man, god, you know, and I of
course we all loved. One of the highlights of grim
Jack was London's Bar, and of course, the the inspiration
for London's Bar was a big i know, first comics hangout.
It was also a big w x RT radio hangout.
And I had the privilege of being there for a

(01:23:30):
couple of the last calls at the inspiration for London's Bar.
And I'll let you talk about that because I know
you love that place too.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
Oh. First of all, I love London's bar. I love Wasteland,
which was not one Mundon's bar. It was London's bar
if somebody dared you to do it. So, you know,
I loved working with Del. We could work with with
anybody we wanted. You know, we had wonderful people. Brian

(01:24:00):
Bond and one of his last stories.

Speaker 1 (01:24:03):
Yeah, wait a minute, you're because you're talking about Wasteland,
the d C anthology that that you know, John A.
Dell correct, Tell Yeah, John and I created it in
the rain walking around the lake and we come in drenched,
literally drenched for for dinner into mo To where I
was living in Connecticut, and uh and we were starving's

(01:24:25):
death and totally drenched, and we.

Speaker 3 (01:24:27):
Had this great idea for a comic book. It was
just wonderful. It was very impressive. Monson this that's where
where Brian did his one, like I said, one of
his last stories covers and that that was a coup.
But we had lots of really really good people from

(01:24:49):
you know, thefolio and just unbelievable folks. Uh and and
and everyone was was a joy because it's minded we
can do anything. We can do anything. And later on
when we when we started up wasteland. We decided to

(01:25:12):
have sort of a base four rotating artists, three of
which would appear in any one issue, so the fourth
one would do the cover, and we rotated them along
and after like you know, six months or so, maybe
one will drop out or replace them with somebody else.
So that that was fine. It was a different type
of challenge. But because a story that we ran on

(01:25:33):
the very first issue annoyed Jeanette or publisher offended her.
Actually she didn't cancel the book, which kind of surprised me.
Every issue that came out surprised me. But she no
longer read it. So the only person who I would

(01:25:54):
have looking at the book was my boss, Dick Gierdonoka.
And as wacky as it comes, I mean, I think
was great.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):
You know, he loved this stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:26:06):
The story that Jeanette that bothered Jeanette was a story
called RAB, which stood for retroactive abortion, and it was
a wonderful story. It is a perfect story because it
pissed everybody off. The idea was you could Bill loves
drew it. I should point out.

Speaker 1 (01:26:23):
William message loves drew it. Okay, yeah, you could.

Speaker 3 (01:26:26):
You could having an abortion up to age eight that
was all. So the exparents decide they didn't like the kidneymore.
They chuck them out the window. He drops twelve stories,
lands on his ass and was giggling. Jeanette saw that
as an anti abortion story, the anti abortion people saw

(01:26:51):
that as a pro abortions. Everybody hated it. Well, a
lot of people admired it, and that was a figret
to Wasteland success. And literally I canceled it not DC
after eighteen issues because it was taking John so long

(01:27:14):
to write, you know, one of those eight nine page
stories that we had in Wasteland, as it would for
him to write a full book. So he was starving
to death writing some of the best work in his career.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:27:26):
So every issue, yeah, well I did have this mandate.
Every issue had to be a little more on the
edge than the previous issue because I never thought it
would go past twelve.

Speaker 1 (01:27:38):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:27:39):
So at eighteen it was like John spending twenty four
seven just writing Wasteland and starving to death, and I,
you know, had way too much love and respect for
him and Camille, so we had to put an end
to that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
So wait a minute, Like, how come there isn't an
absolute Wasteland because eighteen issues and man, folks, if you
haven't ever seen Wasteland, it was It's unparalleled. I mean,
it really was extreme in its horror and its suspense.

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:28:11):
The story that I just described shows you how far
they were willing to go, and it only got crazier,
and you had John and Dell close coming up with
some of the weirdest and most interesting I mean, it
was Vertigo before Vertigo, it was well and also it
was vertical on.

Speaker 3 (01:28:29):
I was gonna say on Acid exactly, yeah, which I
should point out John never indulged in.

Speaker 1 (01:28:36):
You know, I'm kicking myself, Mike. I literally yesterday was
talking to Grant Morrison, and I should ask him. I've
never asked him if he read Wasteland, if he was
aware of Wasteland, because I mean, really, that's the closest
and truly, with all due respect to the greatness of
Grant Morrison, Dell and John were on a you know,
they were doing their own thing, and it's so distinct

(01:28:57):
and equally disturbing in its own way. So I mean, yeah,
I mean, and again this is you know, ten years
before Grant was going in those directions.

Speaker 3 (01:29:07):
Yeah, yeah, Well, the beautiful thing about that was it
did have an impact on people. It probably caused a
lot of juvenial deplincolncy.

Speaker 1 (01:29:15):
It may have.

Speaker 3 (01:29:16):
Proven was right, but for this very day. I mean,
I get books to be signed whenever I'm at a convention,
going all the way back to you know, papyrors scrolls,
But Wasteland is a dominating force. I sign a lot
of Wasteland today.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
I'm glad that products still out there. That's good. That's
a good sign.

Speaker 3 (01:29:37):
Oh yeah, I love it. Why it hasn't been reprinted,
there's some non discussion about rights issues. Some rights have
reverted back to John and Sidel and arguably the artists,
but we don't know where that stands, and it's just

(01:29:58):
not worth it to DC to dig through all that stuff. Sure,
and we don't press the point because you know how
some big businesses work. I don't want to say the
media industry because I'd be revealing something that everybody already know,
so why bother. They might decide to redraft that deal

(01:30:20):
if they have to go and write new paperwork. So
we're not pushing the point.

Speaker 1 (01:30:25):
I understood.

Speaker 3 (01:30:27):
And all the players have changed several times anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:30:31):
Oh yeah, when you need, you'd need somebody, you'd need
a publisher, you know. I mean that really loved it
and would want to, like you say, cut through the
red tape and make it happen. And that's yeah, I understand.

Speaker 3 (01:30:45):
At the world premiere of the Suicide Squad movie in
Manhattan and John and I were invited to attend, which
was wonderful. I won't kind of on the movie, but
the event was absolutely wonderful, and the publisher GC Diane

(01:31:05):
was talking about, you know, as the first time I
met her, and we had a long conversation, a wonderful woman,
and I thought, I thought, you know, this is somebody
I could maybe work out this wasteland thing with one
way or another. And unfortunately she moved on uh from

(01:31:28):
DC before well before the AHT and C thing happens.
But I think they're probably getting ready for the sale.
I don't know what corporate politics. It's not like real
world politics in some ways, it's much more disgusting, and
that says a lot. I'm not one of those guys

(01:31:49):
you may have noticed. I'm not one of those guys
who really functions optimumly in that level of bureaucracy. I
conser heard a challenge. Sure, and they love that for
a short period of time, and then they figured they
know how to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
I hear you.

Speaker 3 (01:32:11):
They never do, but everybody in any creative field knows
that firsthand.

Speaker 1 (01:32:17):
Yeah yeah, now I don't. I totally understand, and I
hear what you're saying. Did before we leave First Comics?
Wasn't Tim's Scout at First or no? Oh that was
at Eclipse? Oh excuse me, of course it was shame
on me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's a wonderful book.

(01:32:38):
Oh god, yes, absolutely, Tim's amazing. I haven't had him
on the show yet. I gotta get to him on
I've admired him for decades, so it'd be great to
talk to him about a million things. Okay, we stopped
the conversation here and we'll move on to part two,
where Mike talks about leaving First Comics, coming back to
d C, creating the line of mid eighties comics that

(01:33:01):
had such a huge impact on the books. Again, this
was right in this period of Dark Knight and Watchmen
and real experimentation in the comics, and Mike was the
right guy to shepherd a lot of great creators into
making some of these amazing books, so more great conversation
about that. The Superman Muhammad Ali comic also comes to play,

(01:33:24):
and Mike was, of course things as we said earlier,
the marketing director of DC when all that was happening,
and it tells great stories about the press conferences to
help promote the book back in the late seventies. Really
really interesting conversation. If you liked part one, you're gonna
love part two even more. Mikeeld Part two also available

(01:33:44):
today right here at word Bloon. Thanks a lot for listening.
As always, Man, I'll tell you as you'll hear later
this week, because tomorrow I'm going to be dropping Mike
Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp interview and I think Liam and
all so Brian Bennett said the same thing last week.
Under tough times, sometimes some really interesting creative things happen,

(01:34:07):
and I got to say, I'm really sorry that it
is under these circumstances that word Balloon has been able
to generate some really amazing podcast conversations throughout the month
of March. Throughout what we've had so far in the
last twelve days of April, and moving forward of things
already in the can and also scheduled conversations for this

(01:34:30):
week and beyond. Everyone is really coming to play. They've
got a lot to say, and I'm really happy to
share with you these conversations and other fun things that
we've been doing on Word Balloon as well the trivia games,
the panel discussions, everyone's thinking and everyone's creative and I
think providing some really great entertainment as you go through
your days.

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