Back Issue #23 by TwoMorrows Publishing

BONUS ADAM HUGHES COLOR ART GALLERY!

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HA PPY 2 0 , SP IDEY & MJ ! TOP SPIDER-MAN FF CREATORS SOUND O ON PETER PARKER’S LOVE LIFE!

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st a t r e kr a writers’ roundtable... & WRITE NOW! crossover!

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MARY JANE TM & © MARVEL. SECRETS OF ISIS TM & © 1976 ENTERTAINMENT RIGHTS PLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FLASH TM & © 2007 DC COMICS. MICKEY MOUSE TM & © DISNEY. STAR TREK TM & © PARAMOUNT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

T H IS IS S U E : C O M IC S G O H O L L Y WO O D !

Volume 1, Number 23 August 2007 Celebrating the Best Com ics of the '70s, '80s, and Today!

The Ultimate Comics Experience!

EDITOR Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

COVER ARTIST Adam Hughes COVER DESIGNER Robert Clark CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Bob Brodsky, Cookiesoup Periodical Distribution, LLC PROOFREADERS John Morrow and Christopher Irving Dan Johnson Bob Kline Jim Alexander Jon B. Knutson Jim Amash Arnold Kunert Mark Arnold Henry Lange, Jr. Roger Ash Erik Larsen Joanna Pang Atkins Gary Leach Michael Aushenker Stan Lee Mike W. Barr David Levine Cary Bates Ronalda Douglas Russell Bates Lompardo BCI Eclipse John Lustig Patrick Bennett Andy Mangels Danny Bilson Scott Martin Geoffrey Blum Marvel Comics Fletch Bowling Yoram Matzkin Jerry Boyd Andy McKinney Bob Burns Bob McLeod Sal Buscema Darrell McNeil John Clark David Michelinie Gerry Conway John Francis Moore Raymond A. Cuthbert Richard Morgan Brian Cutler Dean Munday Susan Daigle-Leach Paramount Pictures Peter David Martin Pasko Darren G. Davis John Romita, Sr. Fred L. deBoom Don Rosa Tom DeFalco Bob Rozakis Paul DeMeo Rose Rummel-Eury Shelton Drum Paul Ryan David Dworski Jim Salicrup Juan Epstein’s Mother Todd Sawvelle Byron Erickson Lou Scheimer Mark Evanier John Wesley Shipp Lisa Everetts Jim Shooter Danny Fingeroth Steve Skeates Michael Jan Friedman Anthony Snyder Grand Comic-Book Allison Sohn Database Steve Stanley Glenn Greenberg Tom Stewart Bob Greenberger Laurie Sutton David M. Gutierrez William Van Horn P.C. Hamerlinck J. C. Vaughn Dustin Harbin Mike Vosburg Jack C. Harris Walt Disney Productions Ray Harryhausen Heritage Auction Galleries Warner Bros. John Watson Gail Hickman Dean Webb Jim Hoff Len Wein Benjamin Holcomb Howard Weinstein Jim Hollifield Todd Wethington Adam Hughes David Whittaker Tony Isabella Marv Wolfman Daan Jippes Eddy Zeno

SPECIAL THANKS

BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 PRO2PRO ROUNDTABLE: Twenty Years of Webbed Bliss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 An all-star assemblage of Spider-Man creators—including Stan Lee, Sal Buscema, John Romita, Sr., and Jim Shooter—discuss Peter Parker’s marriage and love life WHEN TITANS … WED?! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 The super-heroes who tied the knot before Spidey and Mary Jane BACKSTAGE PASS: Lift Me Now So I Can Fly: The Secrets of Isis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Hollywood historian Andy Mangels goes behind the scenes of the ’70s Saturday morning television series FLASHBACK: The Mighty Isis in Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Comics historian/Captain Marvel authority P.C. Hamerlinck looks back at the short-lived DC comic book based on the TV show BEYOND CAPES: A Gander at Gladstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Disney comics in the 1980s, with art and quotes from Daan Jippes, Don Rosa, William Van Horn, and other creators BACKSTAGE PASS: The Flash: Racing for Ratings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42 Star John Wesley Shipp and other contributors recall the one-season Flash TV series ART GALLERY: Adam Hughes Goes Hollywood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Eight jaw-dropping pinups of media stars by one of comics’ most popular artists PRO2PRO ROUNDTABLE: Star Trek Writers’ Roundtable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 A crossover with Write Now! #16! Bob Greenberger beams up Barr, David, Friedman, Greenberg, Mangels, Pasko, Sutton, Wein, and Weinstein for Part One of a discussion FLASHBACK: The Christopher Reeve Superman Movie Adaptations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 Cary Bates and Bob Rozakis remember DC’s Super-movie comics BACKSTAGE PASS: Superman vs. Cyclops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77 Another find from Bob Burns’ Basement: photos of the 1964 NY World’s Fair exhibit BACK IN PRINT: Ray Harryhausen Presents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 An exclusive interview with the movie stop-motion master on the new line of comics based upon his screen properties WHAT THE--?!: Welcome Back, Kotter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82 “Comics Savant” Tom Stewart hits the books with his report on this utterly odd “DC TV Comic” OFF MY CHEST: A Boy and His “Unca” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85 Animator Darrell McNeil’s recollection of his relationship with the late Alex Toth BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 Reader feedback on issue #21 FREE PREVIEW of WRITE NOW #16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 When you pick-up the second part of our Star Trek Writers’ Roundtable, you’ll also find the complete version of this Todd McFarlane interview! BACK ISSUE™ is published bimonthly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor, 5060A Foothills Dr., Lake Oswego, OR 97034. Email: euryman@msn.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $40 Standard US, $54 First Class US, $66 Canada, $90 Surface International, $108 Airmail International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Adam Hughes. Mary Jane Watson TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Secrets of Isis © 1976 Entertainment Rights plc. The Flash TM & © DC Comics; Flash TV images © Warner Bros. Star Trek TM & © Paramount Pictures. Mickey Mouse TM & © Disney. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2007 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

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Just look at those new releases: Fantastic Four, SpiderMan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 300, Ghost Rider, Smallville, and Legion of Super-Heroes. And coming soon: Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Incredible Hulk, and Watchmen. Wait a minute—are we in the comics shop or the video store? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. My former boss Mike Richardson, president of Dark Horse Comics, is fond of saying that everyone in Hollywood wants to be in comics, and everyone in comics wants to be in Hollywood. How true! Not only are screenwriters scripting titles for comics publishers, but comic-book properties continue to be snatched up by filmmakers. This comic book/Hollywood kinship is nothing new. Back during the Golden Age, numerous comics characters were brought to life on the big screen in movie serials and animated shorts, while comic books starring movie celebrities—and later, TV series—dotted the racks. While it’s unlikely in today’s market that Larry the Cable Guy could “git-’r-done” in 124 issues of his own DC Comics title like Jerry Lewis did for 20 years, many familiar properties from TV and film, like The Simpsons and A Nightmare on Elm Street, are series now playing at a comics shop near you—and further blurring the “dividing” line between comics and Hollywood is Warner Bros.’ new line of direct-to-DVD animated adaptations of comic books. Three years ago, BACK ISSUE #5 explored the handin-hand relationship between the two media, and we’re at again this issue … and we celebrate the 20th wedding anniversary (yes, you are getting old—but you’re among aging friends!) of the blockbuster Spider-Man 3’s canoodling couple, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. A quick word about our cover by Adam Hughes: Some of you might have seen this dazzling Mary Jane illo before. Adam produced it back in 2002 for HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina (you are aware that HeroesCon is one of the best conventions around, aren’t you?). When our plans to feature a JoAnna Cameron-as-Isis cover didn’t materialize due to circumstances beyond our control, Adam’s MJ art seemed the perfect substitute. A BIG thank you to Adam, Allison Sohn, Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find’s Shelton Drum, and Dustin Harbin for rallying to BACK ISSUE’s aid in providing this art—and to Robert Clark for his eye-catching cover design. Face it, tiger … you truly have hit the jackpot! And since we can’t get enough of Mr. and Mrs. Spider-Man, feast your eyes on this astounding painting of the Parkers (and Venom) by John Watson (no relation to MJ). You can see this in color—as well as many of Mr. Watson’s other illustrations and cover art—on the artist’s site at www.johnwatsonart.com.

Michael Eury

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Marriage isn’t an institution for the timid, especially in today’s world. Most husbands and wives are under terrific stress as they strive to have it all while balancing their careers and their home life. But can you imagine what it must be like to also have to deal with the likes of the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, and the Kingpin on top of everything else? No doubt about it, it’s not easy being Mr. and Mrs. Parker, but Peter and Mary Jane have been making a go of it for an incredible 20 years since tying the knot in 1987 in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21. In honor of their anniversary, BACK ISSUE gathered together some of Spider-Man’s most famous creators— Stan Lee, Sal Buscema, Gerry Conway, Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Erik Larsen, David Michelinie, John Romita, Sr., Paul Ryan, Jim Salicrup, Jim Shooter, and Marv Wolfman—to examine:

Dan Johnson

DAN JOHNSON: Stan, as the creator of both Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, I was wondering what it was in 1987 that made you realize it was time for these two kids to finally tie the knot. STAN LEE (Spider-Man cocreator): I had always wanted the Spider-Man series to be as realistic as possible. After a few years of Peter and MJ having a romance, their marriage just seemed like the most natural event. It had to happen. JOHNSON: Jim Shooter, what were your first thoughts when you found out that Stan wanted to have Peter and Mary Jane get married? JIM SHOOTER (Marvel editor-in-chief at the time of the wedding storyline): First of all, that’s not the way it happened. It was my decision. The way that came about is this: Both Stan and I were guests at the Chicago Con the summer before the wedding, 1986 (I think). Stan was supposed to do a one-man panel Q&A, but at the last minute, he asked me if I’d come up onstage with him because he knew that most, if not all, of the questions would be about things going on in the comics, with which he was very out of touch. I was happy to help. We worked pretty well as a team in such situations, with me handling the comics questions and Stan adding color commentary, anecdotes, reminiscences; essentially doing snappy patter and being entertaining, as only he can. Starting in 1979 or 1980, Stan was based at the animation studio in L.A. I don’t remember what his title was, but his job was more or less just being Stan. He served as a creative advisor to the animation people and our face to Hollywood, trying to get film people interested in Marvel properties. Who wouldn’t take Stan’s call? He also wrote the Spider-Man strip, of course. Other than that, he wasn’t in charge of anything. I don’t think anyone reported to him except his secretary. I was EIC [editor-in-chief] and VP of Marvel then, head of creative for everything but the animation studio. I reported to the president, Jim Galton, and on some business affairs and other matters to publisher Mike Hobson, who was mainly in charge of Marvel Books, the children’s book line. As Stan used to say, I was Marvel’s “entire editor.” I used to say I had Stan’s old job. I did, actually, and I was the only one besides Stan ever to hold that lofty position. No one else, before or since, has had exactly the same job with the same authority and clout.

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Technically, even the Spider-Man strip fell under my authority because the “Special Projects” department reported to me. That said, I didn’t mess with the strip at all, ever. Sometimes, when he had a little spare time, Stan would call me up and ask for work! Talk about surreal. I recall an Erik Larsen job that he scripted on one of those occasions. This is not meant to diminish Stan in any way. It’s just that, at that point in his career, he was just not involved in the governance of the properties and uninvolved with publishing except as a writer of the strip, and occasionally a comic book. Technically, the wedding was my call, and Stan respected that, because that’s the kind of guy he is. That said, all technicalities aside, he was still Stan Lee, my mentor, the resident legend/genius, and I would have deferred to him about almost anything. So there we were on this panel and someone asked whether Spider-Man and Mary Jane were ever going to get married. Stan said that it was up to me but that he thought they should. He turned to face me and asked me, extra politely, if they could get married. The audience was screaming. Trapped! Nah. Actually, if Stan thought it was a good idea, I sure didn’t have a problem with it. TOM DeFALCO (former Amazing Spider-Man writer): I guess you could blame the whole marriage thing on Ron Frenz and me. When we were on The Amazing Spider-Man, we proposed a storyline where Peter asks Mary Jane to marry him, she accepts but eventually— in true Spider-Man fashion—leaves him at the altar. Jim Owsley was our editor and took the idea to Jim Shooter, who mentioned it to Stan … who thought the couple really should get married. Shooter agreed and went ahead with the idea after Ron and I were taken off Amazing. At the time, I thought it was a veryyyyyy bad idea. History has proven me wrong. I now think Mary Jane and Peter really work well as a couple and their relationship is one of the cornerstones of my Spider-Girl series. SHOOTER: Tom is mistaken. I never asked Stan about his proposed story. It happened exactly as I said. There were no preliminaries. JOHNSON: It’s still pretty interesting though to hear about what might have been with the Peter and Mary Jane relationship. What else can you tell us about this idea? RON FRENZ (former Amazing Spider-Man penciler): One way to look at it is the best way to write a Spider-Man story is to make a list of all the sh*ttiest things that can happen to a human being, then you eliminate all the things that other writers have already done, and what is left are some story ideas. Certainly being left at the altar is the hugely sh*ttiest thing that can happen to a human being.

First Loves No one is as dear to Peter Parker’s heart than his Aunt May; here she’s terrorized by the Green Goblin in a Ron Wilson/Mike Esposito illo for a 1975 British reprint. And Peter’s first crush, Betty Brant, tied the knot in Amazing Spider-Man #156 (May 1976); cover art by John Romita, Sr. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Get Me to the Church on Time The splash page to Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987). Note the tribute to dress designer Willi Smith below the story credits. Original art scan courtesy of Richard Morgan, whose collection of Spider-Wedding art and memorabilia is simply astounding! © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Tom and I made Pete and Mary Jane best friends, and we kind of left it at that, and then a lot of the other writers started taking that into the romantic realm. We had talked about the idea that now that they were romantically involved, they would get engaged, and we would get to the point of the marriage. Spider-Man would then be off battling the Sinister Six or something like that, and be completely out of contact for several days, and Mary Jane would get the opportunity to reconcile with her sister who she was estranged from. Then Mary Jane would use that as an excuse to bug out because she’s been having second thoughts. She would try to get a hold of Pete, but he’s fighting for his life up to the last minute. [In the end,] Pete would race to his apartment, throw on his tuxedo, and web-swing to the church where Harry would be waiting for him out in front. There would be a silent sequence where they talk for a couple of minutes, Harry would hand Pete the ring and then he would walk away. Pete would be standing in front of the church, and we would pull back and the ring would drop to the ground, and there is the end of your sequence. Where this would then go is: Pete would have moved back in with Aunt May and take over the attic and turn that into an apartment. Then we would experiment with shifting their relationship a little bit as Pete would be moving back in to take care of Aunt May. We had an idea for a cool scene where occasionally the phone would ring, and Aunt May would answer it and it would be Mary Jane calling Pete. She would beg to speak to Pete, and May’s response would be, “There is no one here who wants to speak to you, young lady!” Then Peter would come down the stairs and ask who was on the phone, and Aunt May would tell him, “No one you need to concern yourself with, dear.” JOHNSON: Jim, the continuity of the comic strip and the Spider-Man comic books have always been kept fairly separate. Was there ever any thought about having Peter and Mary Jane tie the knot in the strip and not in the comic books? If there were, what finally made you decide that they would get married? SHOOTER: Regarding the wedding, for once we actually tried to coordinate the strip with the comics. But then, the PR people got involved, things started to get complicated—“too many cooks”—and we botched it up some. I was on my way out then, barely paying attention to what was going on, so I wasn’t quite the firm hand on the helm I might have been otherwise. MARV WOLFMAN (former Amazing Spider-Man writer): I never thought Spidey and MJ getting married was a good idea, but I also always thought the Spidey newspaper strip was a very different entity from the comic and had to appeal to a very different audience where that kind of soap opera was fine. I just think for the comics Peter should have stayed single and still be struggling.

FRENZ: I didn’t like it either. I had a lot of the same concerns that fandom in general seemed to have had in response to that whole everyman-being-married-to-asupermodel thing. I’m still a big proponent of comics being wish fulfillment for your adolescence, or arrested adolescence, and I don’t think marriage is a part of that. I feel comics should still be done the way Stan did them in that they are very, very palatable for adults, and written for adults, but kids should still enjoy them. Let’s put it this way: There is a 15-year-old in all of us, and I don’t think any 15-year-old’s wish fulfillment is accomplished by marriage. There was also an element of the stewardship of the character to me. I understand the illusion of change—as a storyteller we do it all the time— but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to have a major change like that in a character. Every decision you make about a character should be about the stories it C o m i c s

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Lift Me Now So I Can Fly

to Hapsethsut, “Oh my Queen,” said the royal sorcerer ts are endowed by “with this amulet you and your descendan ls and the elements. the goddess Isis with the powers of anima with the speed of You will soar as the falcon soars, run sky and the earth.” gazelles, and command the elements of the teacher dug up Three thousand years later, a young science the secrets of Isis. this lost treasure and found she was heir to , Rick Mason And so, unknown to even her closest friends : Andrea Thomas, and Cindy Lee, she became a dual person ender of the weak, teacher, and Isis, dedicated foe of evil, def champion of truth and justice.

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Andy Mangels

By the 1970s, in the fever of women’s liberation, superheroines had still not made a splash on television. Batgirl was a memory in the live-action Batman reruns, and a 1974 Wonder Woman telefilm with the very blonde Cathy Lee Crosby in the title role had been critically lambasted. Although some animated heroines showed up on Saturday morning—say hello to Super Friends’ Wonder Woman—it wasn’t until September 1975 that kids and adults alike could embrace a live-action Saturday morning superheroine of their own in The Secrets of Isis. Dressed in a white sleeveless top and short tennis skirt with Egyptian-themed accoutrements, Isis flew alongside Captain Marvel into both television and superpowered history.

THE ORIGINS OF ISIS Filmation Studios had begun doing live-action television—a complement to their thriving animated side—in 1974 with Shazam!, a spin-off from the 1940s Captain Marvel character from Fawcett that G o

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Pang remembers the first day of shooting— July 8th, 1975, on an episode called “Fool’s Dare.” “I remember that episode really well. I had to ride a bike, and I hadn’t ridden a bike for years and years, but they say that that’s something you never forget how to do, and luckily for me, I still could ride a bike. I was on my bike with two boys—two boys that were cast to play my friends—and we had to go to this junkyard, and I had to climb this fence and jump into the junkyard, and I just kept thinking, ‘Oh, it’s good I have a dance background, because you have to be sort of athletic to do this part.’” Despite being a super-hero series, the budget meant that many of the threats to cast members were non-action-oriented threats that didn’t require expensive special effects or stuntpeople. “We all did our own stunts,” Cutler recalls. “I know that Joanna Pang had to run through smashed cars and jump over chain link fences and stuff like that. I didn’t normally have to do that. I did some running, I did some horseback riding, I powered a boat, I drove a bus, which was a lot better to drive than that darn Thing [a specific, and rather boxy, style of 1970s-era Volkswagen], because that Thing has about as much legroom in it as one of those little cars, you know, at Tinkertown, where you get in the little teeny car, and you’re all scrunched in, and your knees are up in your face. Getting in and out of that Thing, you’ll notice that there are an awful lot of times where I’m jumping in or jumping out of that jeep, and I had more bruises on my knees and on my shins from that wonderful car than I care to think about.” One exception to the lack of special effects was the fact that in every episode, JoAnna Cameron’s Isis flew. “We spent a day flying her on wires,” recalls Lange. “Now, you’d do it against green screen, but then, we had a different process, because it was the infancy of video, and being able to matte in stuff. But we flew her on wires for a day, so all those flying shots in various versions were, were her with the wind machine blowing, and her on wires. And then, when she would rise up, we would either put her on a crane or a camera dolly, and we would just raise that up in the show, and use smoke behind her for the transition, when she changed, and would zoom in on the amulet that the civilian wore, then pull back, and it would become Isis’ amulet.”

THE SECOND SEASON OF ISIS The Secrets of Isis debuted on September 6, 1975 as part of The Shazam!/Isis Hour. With the exception of press materials, the full title of the show wasn’t used (and wouldn’t be for two more years), and it was generally known just as Isis. Interestingly enough, some early press still referred to the criminology elements of the show. A Los Angeles Times article (excerpted from Newsday) noted, “Isis has a public identity as Prof. Andrea Thomas of the Department of Criminology and a secret identity as a female Superman, or Wonder Woman type with inordinate powers.”

The LA Times wasn’t the only thing that got it wrong, though: Ads that ran in DC comics that fall showed Isis in an illustration by Neal Adams, but, oddly, the Isis costume was colored strangely, as if the heroine were rainbow-powered. Still, ratings were high. “It really roared,” says Lou Scheimer. “It was an incredibly successful show.” The first season of 15 episodes of the series had already been shot by the time CBS knew they had a hit series on their hands. “We shot them all that summer,” says Lange, “and then they didn’t go on air until September, so it wasn’t until after we finished the first season that we realized, really, what a fan base there was.” “Isis was a really popular show. In fact, I heard that Isis was actually rated number one in the nation,” says Pang. “I honestly didn’t realize how popular the show was. I did get recognized sometimes, and people would yell, ‘Oh, it’s Cindy Lee!’ It was fun! Nobody was really intrusive, they would ask for autographs, and it was really nice. I just had no idea how popular it was until I started making some personal appearances.” Reviewers at the time often commented that fathers must be watching the show with their kids due to Isis’ short skirt and long legs, but whatever the reason, Isis was soon in line for a second season. But for reasons lost to time—no one including producer Scheimer recalls why the change was made—the role of Cindy Lee was replaced. “A lot of people have asked me over the years what happened during the second season, and what happened to the character of Cindy Lee, and honestly, I don’t have a really good answer for that,” Pang recalls. “I know that the first season was very well received, and from all the personal appearances, and people that I met, I know that the character of Cindy Lee was also really well received. When we finished the first season, of course we had a period of time off. It was time to get ready to go back for the second season, and I was back living in New York, and I kept waiting for a call. It was getting close to the time where we would actually be filming, and I called my agent in California, and I said, ‘What’s going on with Isis? I thought we were going into a second season.’ And he didn’t have any answers, either, and he said, ‘Let me call, let me make some inquiries, and I’ll get back to you.’ It took him a couple of days to finally get some answers, which were really not answers. It’s kind of the standard answer that you’ll always hear: ‘We’re not going to use the character of Cindy Lee this year, we’re going in a different direction.’ That’s kind of a standard phrase people use when they want to make changes, and don’t really have a great reason to make the changes. And yes, I was disappointed; of course, I had loved doing the show, but you know, being in show business, you go from job to job, and Isis was one of many really great jobs that I’ve had, and I’ve really had a wonderful career, all throughout. I started performing when I was five years old, and I’ve had wonderful jobs, and Isis was one of many.”

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Behind the Scenes From Joanna Pang’s personal scrapbook, photos from the Isis set. Courtesy of Joanna Pang Atkins. I s s u e

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So, what final memories do the stars of The Secrets of Isis have to share? And where are they now? Brian Cutler is married and now owns and teaches acting at the Actors Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. He also is producing films with his wife, Jill. “The legacy of Isis, I would say, is the depth, the moral issues, the strength that it gave people to go on with their lives…. There are so many people over the years that have emailed me about how Isis changed their life. I get this from people… every walk of life, every ethnicity, every background. I don’t know that people have a lot of heroes to look toward anymore, and maybe [the DVD of Isis] will give people maybe a little hope, maybe a little inspiration, maybe a new message said in an old way that they hadn’t thought about before, but will allow them to look at life a little differently, and with more enlightenment.” Joanna Pang Atkins is married to Dick Atkins, has a son who just graduated college, and today teaches dance and performing arts in New Jersey. “I think the series holds up just as well now as it did then. And, hopefully, all the people who used to watch the series a long time ago will buy it for their children, and I think that their children will enjoy it just as much. The series is uplifting, and positive, and it always has a great message, and I think that’s important. I said before, I work with a lot of children now, and one of the schools I’m at now, they talk about character education all the time, and even in some of the high schools, they’re talking about character education. It’s respect, and citizenship, and just having a good character. And I think that the Isis series instills that.” Ronalda Douglas Lombardo is also married, to Michael Lombardo. These days she sings a lot more than she did in the final two Isis episodes, performing regularly at cathedrals in Southern California and singing mass for teens at a local detention center. “I was a little girl born in the swamps of Louisiana, and I never dreamed that in my life, I would do some of the things that I’ve done. And Filmation was very, very instrumental in opening doors for me. I am so thrilled that The Secrets of Isis is going to find a new audience. The stories that were told were for all times, for all generations, and I’m excited. I never dreamed this

(left to right) Brian Cutler, Joanna Pang, and Ronalda Douglas, as seen in their interviews from BCI Eclipse’s The Secrets of Isis DVD set (pictured below). The Secrets of Isis © 1976 Entertainment Rights plc.

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would come back so many years later. I am very proud of the work we did, I am very proud of the fact that we reached the kids; they got it, they got the messages, they got the morals of every story.” Lou Scheimer is still married, still a father, and is enjoying the renaissance of Filmation’s work as it reappears for new generations. He’s also working on his autobiography with the author of this article, which is being planned for a mid-2008 release from TwoMorrows. “I really like to think about what [these shows] means to the fans, and what the fans mean to us, the people who produced that show, the people who were in that show, the actors who to the day remember that as a wonderful experience. And I want to thank those people, because as parents, and as adults, and with their enthusiasm, it just makes all of us who worked on them feel very, very good.” In the long run, then, the legacy of The Secrets of Isis has been shaped not only by the work of the actors and production personnel who created it, but by the fans themselves, who pretended that they, too, could one day find a magical amulet and gain super-powers … or recite the familiar poem enough times that they could rise into the sky, to fly next to Isis. Transcription for most interviews by Jon B. Knutson. Special thanks to Lou Scheimer; stars Brian Cutler, Joanna Pang Atkins, and Ronalda Douglas Lombardo; writers Russell Bates and David Dworski; designer Bob Kline; and assistant director Henry J. Lange, Jr. for interviews. You can see more of these (and other Isis creative personnel) interviews in two hours of Special Features footage on the Secrets of Isis DVD set. Gratitude also goes to David Whittaker, Andy McKinney, Jim Hoff, P.C. Hamerlinck, Patrick Bennett, and Lisa Everetts for their assistance, materials, and support. Extra Special Thanks to BCI Eclipse and David Levine for allowing use of some interview quotes and photos. ANDY MANGELS is a best-selling author, award-winning DVD Special Features producer, and past comicbook writer. He is working with Lou Scheimer on his autobiography, and on another book for TwoMorrows about comicdom’s most famous super-heroine. At the age of eight, he used to write Isis’ incantations on a big piece of butcher paper so he could recite them later. Visit him at www.andymangels.com and www.wonderwomanmuseum.com.

Photo by Darryl Ballini

The Supporting Cast Today

P. C . H a m e r l i n c k

Even with a jump-start from Captain Marvel, zephyr winds still couldn’t whisk Isis away from cancellation doom. Like the TV series it was based on, the comic book soon became a relic of ’70s pop culture.

TV TO COMICS Hoping to repeat the success of the live-action Shazam! TV show, Filmation developed a similar program that could tie in with Shazam!—but instead feature a female lead character to captivate young girls (and adolescent boys as well, just as teen idol Michael Gray had attracted adolescent girls to Shazam!). Filmation created Isis (perhaps inadvertently) as a hybrid between Captain Marvel and another magical Fawcett hero from the Golden Age of comics: Ibis the Invincible. But other than playing back-to-back with Cap on The Shazam!/Isis Hour and appearing in a few crossover episodes, her connection to the World’s Mightiest Mortal was fairly sparse. High school teacher Andrea Thomas gained her Isis powers from an amulet necklace that once belonged to the lone female Pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, and which was made by an ancient Egyptian wizard (it was only hinted that the wizard was Shazam). Isis, portrayed on TV by JoAnna Cameron, who donned a costume in what the actress herself once described to me as a “very nonEgyptian, white miniskirted tennis outfit,” had soon captured even a greater audience than Shazam! (While Cameron expressed absolutely no admiration for Filmation executives, she still “loved playing the role of a super-hero.”) Meanwhile, back at DC, the struggling Shazam! comic book had already succumbed to an all-reprint status and quarterly frequency. When Carmine

Woman of Steel Original cover art to Isis’ first DC appearance, Shazam! #25 (Sept.–Oct. 1976), signed by a terrific trio: its artist, Kurt Schaffenberger; “Isis” herself, JoAnna Cameron; and TV Captain Marvel Jackson Bostwick. From the collection of Fred L. deBoom. The Secrets of Isis © 1976 Entertainment Rights plc. All Rights Reserved. Shazam! © 2007 DC Comics.

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The Many Faces of Isis

The tryout title Image Introduces… unveils Legend of Isis in 2002.

Entertainment Rights plc.

The Legend of ISIS TM & © Darren G. Davis.

The mystery tale “The Mirror of Isis” appeared in Avon’s Eerie #3 (Oct.–Nov. 1951). Art by Joe Kubert.

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The Legend of ISIS TM & © Darren G. Davis.

In 2002, DC Comics reintroduced its own Isis-asgoddess in Wonder Woman, where she was dressed in modern attire. More recently, DC rebooted Isis-assuper-hero in issue #12 of its 52 series, where an enslaved Egyptian woman named Adrianna Tomaz (a homage to the Andrea Thomas character from the ’70s TV series) was brought to Black Adam, who had just retrieved the magical amulet of Isis (once belonging to Queen Hatshepsut) from the tomb of his wife and children. He requested that Captain Marvel bestow its power on Adrianna, and upon holding the amulet and speaking “I am Isis,” Adrianna was transformed and instilled with the powers of the goddess … giving her powers similar to Black Adam, as well as healing abilities and control over nature. She and Adam then traveled the Middle East, freeing enslaved children and hoping to find Isis’ kidnapped brother. In week 16 of the series, Adam proposed to Isis and the two

The Legend of ISIS TM & © Darren G. Davis.

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The 2005 The Legend of Isis collected edition, gathering the Alias and Image material.

were wed by Captain Marvel, with the entire Marvel Family (even including the talking tiger Tawky Tawny) present at the wedding. Adam’s wedded bliss was short-lived: That incarnation of Isis died in 52 #44. Still, there’s an entire generation who will always remember a certain high school teacher who called upon a hero with the familiar incanation, “Oh Mighty Isis!” P.C. HAMERLINCK—seen here in a July 18, 1966 photo snapped during his fourth birthday party (“Years before I became Mr. P.C. Shazamerlinck, in ’73,” he says)—is the editor of FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), which appears in the pages of our sister publication, Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego magazine.

Roger Ash

By 1985, Disney comics had been missing from American comic racks for six years. Their publisher, Western/Whitman, gave up the Disney license. No longer was there an inexpensive way for fans of Disney comics to read adventures of their favorite characters, such as Donald Duck stories by the legendary Duck Man, Carl Barks. Barks created Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose, Flintheart Glomgold, and many others, and established the basis for the Disney Duck universe that is still in place to this day. Enter Gladstone Comics. Gladstone was the brainchild of Bruce Hamilton. “Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran’s first Disney license was for The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck, a lavish coffee-table book that featured all of Carl Barks’ Disney-themed oil paintings that had been produced up to that time (1980),” says John Clark, associate editor at Gladstone and current editorin-chief of Gemstone’s Disney comics. “Disney was so impressed with that book that Hamilton and Cochran were able to get a license to produce a series of lithographs based upon oil paintings newly commissioned from Barks.” Their company, called Another Rainbow, also published The Carl Barks Library, a set of 30 oversized hardcovers in ten slipcases that featured the complete Disney stories by Carl Barks, along with essays on Barks and the comics themselves. It was from the people at Another Rainbow that Hamilton brought together the team for Gladstone, including editorin-chief Byron Erickson and associate editors John Clark and Geoffrey Blum. “On a visit to Disney in Burbank, Bruce Hamilton found out that Western Publishing (who had licensed the rights to publish Disney comics for almost 50 years) was giving up their license—their comics weren’t profitable anymore,” relates Erickson. “Bruce figured that a small company with a low overhead could succeed where Western had failed, so he immediately started putting together

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D av id G u t ie rre z

On September 20, 1990, the “Fastest Man Alive” hit the airwaves, introducing millions of viewers to DC Comics’ Scarlet Speedster, the Flash. Brought to life by producers Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, CBS-TV’s The Flash broke new ground in special effects and became one the earliest in a wave of series based on comic-book heroes that took its four-color roots seriously.

BURTON PAVES THE WAY In 1989, the planet shook when Batman made silverscreen history. Finally leaving behind its kitschy reputation from the Adam West Batman TV series of the ’60s, director Tim Burton’s Batman was a comic movie done right. Hollywood realized that comics were readymade franchises and greenlit a handful of shows based on comic properties. Among those was The Flash. Having adapted The Rocketeer for Disney, Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo wrote an original pilot for CBS called Unlimited Powers (detailed in BACK ISSUE #19), which featured an aged Flash forced into retirement. Considered by Bilson to be the best thing he and DeMeo have ever written, it never came to be—but it did give CBS an inkling of what could be. The production pair took great care to keep The Flash close to its comic-book roots. Firstly, they wanted to keep the Flash’s alter ego and origin identical to the Silver Age version of the super-hero. At the time of production, the speedster mantle in comics was assumed by one-time Kid Flash Wally West, the third man to wear the lightning and first sidekick to take the role of his mentor. Bilson and DeMeo wanted to keep things classic and decided to use as the Flash police scientist Barry Allen, the Silver Age version of the character that premiered in Showcase #4 (Sept.–Oct. 1956). “We thought that [Golden Age Flash] Jay Garrick and his costume wouldn’t work too well on television in 1990,” explains Bilson. “The [character’s] helmet, the shirt, and exposed face would have been difficult. And we would have had to have set it in the ’40s.” According to DeMeo, “We had to use a Flash that, at least visually, was the most familiar to our current audience, whether it was Barry or Wally.” Another key characteristic of Allen’s was his police background. The series’ creators decided it was an element they could capitalize upon to open up story possibilities. Allen’s scientific know-how would play a key role in the pilot and in later episodes. The police department, Allen’s lab assistant, his parents, and his brother were all created and fleshed out by Bilson, DeMeo, and the writing staff. Iris West, Allen’s longtime girlfriend—and later, wife—made it to the pilot, albeit in a very different form. Iris’ reporting background was jettisoned in favor of an artistic one. Bilson attributes the shift to wanting to make her different from another famous reporter: “I think we wanted to get away from another Lois Lane. We didn’t need another franchise to drive crime stories.” West’s character would never move

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Meet the Fastest Man Alive Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, debuted in Showcase #4 (Sept.–Oct. 1956). Although dead in DC Comics’ continuity by the time The Flash was developed for television in 1990, Allen was “resurrected” and wonderfully portrayed by John Wesley Shipp on CBS. The Flash and Showcase TM & © 2007 DC Comics.

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(above) Part of the Central City exterior sets, on the Warner Bros. lot in Hollywood. (right) John Wesley Shipp, star of The Flash. All photos in this article are courtesy of Andy Mangels. © 2007 Warner Bros. Television.

beyond the pilot in order to keep Barry available for other possible love interests, namely another scientist. Not to be left out, some of Wally West’s Flash comicbook elements would make it into the television series— most noticeably, the main female role of Tina McGee of S.T.A.R. Labs. Linda Park, Wally West’s own reporter girlfriend and future wife, made a cameo appearance. Luckily, what set West’s early comic-book adventures apart from his forebears made it to the series: “We took his eating [large amounts of food] to regenerate his energy,” notes DeMeo. “We thought it would fun to play with that.” They also chose to include the powered-down abilities from writer Mike Baron’s Flash issues, keeping the speedster maxing out at breaking the sound barrier. DC Comics, which owns the Flash, had a very good relationship with the show. “[DC] certainly had a say in how [the Flash] looked and was protective of its property,” says DeMeo. “They wanted the same things Danny and I did, to make a reasonably faithful version of the character that wasn’t treated condescendingly like other super-hero shows had done. We came from a place of love and affection. We wanted to do this right, not some slapdash, cheap-o version.” Bilson adds, “They were very supportive all the time, very helpful, and never had any problems with anything.” The comic company never mandated any storylines. “We did our own stories. It was better that way,” remembers DeMeo. “We did our own versions of things. Certainly, [DC] had done the Rogues’ Gallery villains before, but we never took any stories [directly from the comics].” DC Comics set itself apart from other comic-book companies early on by making the cities protected by its heroes characters in their own right. The Flash show would take the same stance. Barry Allen’s home of Central City evolved into a patchwork of eras. Men in suits and hats from pre-World War II were seen alongside the colorful (and now odd) fashions of the 1990s. A reporter using an old radio microphone would

compete alongside a reporter with a video camera. Old gangsters would convene in neon bars with sci-fi-armed hitmen. Central City was one of a kind. Partly influenced by Anton Furst’s design work in Batman, the city of the Flash included avenues familiarly named Garrick, Fox, and Broome, and even a hotel named after Silver Age Flash artist Carmine Infantino.

BRINGING THE FLASH TO LIFE Cameras rolled in the summer of 1990. The Flash was made flesh by up-and-coming actor John Wesley Shipp. “I didn’t know anything about comic books and very little about super-heroes when I took the role of the Flash,” reminisces Shipp. “I just looked at it as a character. You have Barry Allen with a difficult relationship with his father—the unblessed child syndrome— who suddenly has super-human powers that he can’t tell anybody about.” Like other actors who have assumed iconic roles, Shipp described feeling “fear and trepidation” over accepting the part. He explains, “Because of [super-hero adaptations] done before—the send-ups, spoofs, the cheap productions—I was afraid of the baggage that might come along with it.” Still, Shipp was won over with the script. “I loved the whole thing about the superpowers, when it started happening, how it freaked [the Flash] out. Of course, I loved the comic elements. The fact that underneath that it’s not ‘Hugh Hollywood Hero’ who discovers he has this wonderful thing and he’s going to go about saving the world. He says, ‘I want to get rid of these

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It was really disheartening because we were all working so hard.” The show closed with the “Trial of the Trickster,” written by Chaykin and Moore and directed by Bilson. In an episode that pulled out all the stops, the Flash had put the Trickster away at Arkham Asylum after being brainwashed to do the Trickster’s bidding. Hickman remembers the show fondly: “I think the triumph of The Flash is that we really did do a terrific show that stands on its own and is successful even now. It really is a tribute to Danny and Paul that they got the show on the air and they did it their way. It was a unique show that was unlike anything else that was on the air. It was their vision and they did it well. Yes, they made compromises—writing, artistic, and creative compromises—but it’s still very much their show.” Shipp has since embraced his portrayal of the iconic speedster. “People have been very kind,” says Shipp. “These [comic] conventions have been awesome. You do a role, then you move on. But at the point at which there’s a Flash movie or another Flash TV show, somebody else takes it. But the fact that for 16 years, I’ve been the only guy to play the Flash—reading what people have written about [the Flash] on the Internet, it’s been amazing to me. It’s really uplifting. I can look at it now and be very proud that I was a part of it. I’m

Keith Partridge goes bad! One-time teen heartthrob David Cassidy as the Mirror Master, looking nothing like the comics version of the Flash rogue. © 2007 Warner Bros. Television. Mirror Master © 2007 DC Comics.

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proud of it as an actor and the quality of how it’s held up. I’m really digging interacting with people who dug the show and the work and appreciated what were were trying to do.” As for what could have been, Bilson and DeMeo had planned to open season two with a two-part episode pitting the Flash against the combined forces of the Trickster, the Mirror Master, and Captain Cold. Later, other Rogues would have been showcased. “We were going to do the Weather Wizard,” recounts DeMeo. “He would have been a particularly tough one because of the special effects. He would have been next up. I remember [show producer] Don Kurt telling us we should get someone like Wallace Shawn to play him as a nerdy guy who was powerful. And Gorilla Grodd. We would have done him. We threw him out [in one episode’s dialogue] as a gag: ‘Gorilla Grodd is running numbers in Chinatown.’” Bilson and DeMeo adapted The Human Target for television for six episodes before making a return to their favorite speedster for a nine-issue arc of DC Comics’ The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive. The Flash made its DVD debut in January of 2006. Sadly, no special features or additional content were included. However, a new generation of comic fans can enjoy one of the most entertaining and innovative comic-book shows of all time. Bilson and DeMeo made available a free downloadable commentary on the show’s finale on iTunes on their Petfly Podcasts.

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Gold Key boldly went nowhere any comics publisher had gone before when they debuted their comic-book adaptation of Star Trek in the summer of 1967, right after the science-fiction series completed its first season on NBC. Ever since, with varying degrees of fidelity and commercial success, Star Trek has usually been found on the racks. Star Trek has remained a viable license for Gold Key, Marvel, Malibu, DC, WildStorm, and now IDW because it has a devoted following among fans who also read comic books. When Marvel Comics acquired the license timed to the first feature film’s release in 1979, they were hampered by restrictions limiting them to only what was seen in the movie and little else. Additionally, they never had a stable creative team, making the title feel inconsistent. DC, at Marv Wolfman’s urging, took the plunge in 1983, based on the box-office success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. They published the title for many years, and that run saw the first hardcover graphic novel, Debt of Honor, and the beginning of trade collections of the best storylines. After DC lost the license, Trek moved to WildStorm, then back to Marvel for a much more successful and satisfying second round, and then it faded away. Even though there is no current television series called Star Trek on the air, interest remains high. Checker Books has been reprinting the Gold Key run while Titan Books has been repackaging the early DC Comics material. IDW, in January 2007, began new adventures and on Christmas Day 2008, a new feature film, rebooting the franchise, is expected from Paramount Pictures. To acknowledge the past and present, BACK ISSUE and WRITE NOW! decided to query a handful of the comic-book scribes who have handled the property. The roundtable discussion was conducted entirely by email between October and December 2006 and proved lively and engaging. —Robert Greenberger

Robe rt G re e n be rge r

Feed me, Seymour! You’ll find nary a phaser, uniform insignia, or celebrity likeness to I.D. painter George Wilson’s otherwise fabulously rendered image as a Star Trek cover, but it is indeed just that, from Gold Key’s Star Trek #29 (Mar. 1975). The action depicts the Enterprise crew’s struggles on “The Planet of No Return” (interior story title), in a reprinting of the very first ST comic-book tale from issue #1 (July 1967). Original cover painting courtesy of Heritage Auctions (www.ha.com); unless otherwise noted, all art in this article comes from Heritage. Star Trek TM & © 2007 Paramount Pictures.

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a back issue you might have missed

for the most inexplicable reasons. One story had an extended Kirk fight scene that took place entirely off panel; Arnold claimed that it was “too violent” (as if Kirk’s 15-minute fight scene with Finnegan in “Shore Leave” was a walk in the park). I had Kirk involved in an extended romance with a character I’d created, R. J. Blaise, only to be informed that the story had to be aborted because “Kirk is no longer interested in women.” That kind of thing. Fortunately, Arnold is long gone and modern-day comic-book writers need only deal with the far more reasonable people at Paramount who are in charge. LEN WEIN: Keeping true to the voices and the character personalities. These are characters who are so well-defined in the common gestalt that, if you’re off-model, so to speak, everyone reading the book instantly knows. SUTTON: Len is so right. Getting the cadence of the actors’ voices right is probably one of the most difficult challenges. I was fortunate enough to have actual shooting scripts from Voyager while writing that title for Marvel. That provided an invaluable bridge between interpreting the dialogue as it was written on the page and then as it was spoken once the actors delivered their lines. PASKO: On the other hand, there can be a temptation to overuse comic-book stylistic conventions in trying to nail the speech patterns. I kept. Having to resist the … temptation … to. Use … punctuation. To simulate Shatner’s strange, halting. Delivery. I will, however, admit inventing some phonetic spellings to approximate Walter Koenig’s bogus Russian dialect, and feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. But then other writers picked up stuff like “Keptin,” so I didn’t feel so bad. ANDY MANGELS: I only half joke that actually getting the job is the toughest part. It doesn’t matter how many credits you have behind you, or what kind of fan base, you still have to get—and hold—the editor’s attention. And there are a lot of Trek fans in the writer’s world who think they can do the job better—and cheaper—than you. But in regard to specifically adapting, I have to agree with Glenn; coming up with adventures we haven’t seen before is tough. Thankfully, this “issue” is

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ameliorated somewhat by the serialized nature of both the shows themselves and the comic-book medium. Since the characters learned and grew on their respective TV series, and alluded to other adventures in dialogue, one could often come up with stories based on a comment, a memory, or a personality trait, and then expand it into something larger and more allegorical. Star Trek was all about allegory, so if you could choose something small and personal and blow it up larger, all the better for readers. DAVID: I encountered that same difficulty, developing stories that had a sense of freshness but, at the same time, were original. It’s one of the reasons that I came up with soap opera-esque storylines: so we could have continued story threads from one “episode” to the next, something that Trek series at the time simply weren’t doing. But developing plots could be problematic. I remember once I had written an overview for a multi-part time-travel story, and the story was rejected by Paramount with the following self-contradicting criticism: “This story reads like several previous Star Trek episodes strung together; it’s not remotely ‘Star Trek.’” MIKE FRIEDMAN: I was working on the ST: TNG [Star Trek: The Next Generation] comic, so the biggest challenge was hitting a moving target. It wasn’t unusual for me to come up with a plot that contradicted something in development at Paramount. When that happened, I didn’t always know what part of the plot I’d concocted was in contradiction, because the show runners didn’t want to let out what they were doing. So it was a constant guessing game. In one case, I thought I was home free. I had plotted a four-issue miniseries about Worf’s brother, and it had been approved. But partway through the writing process, my editor learned that the show people had begun developing an episode about Worf’s brother. Rather than just go ahead with the project as is, I tweaked it so as to try to make it fit with the episode. GREENBERGER: For those who have done this, what’s the difference between writing a Star Trek novel versus a comic book? Howie, what about the difference between an animated episode and a comic? And Mike Barr, compare writing for the manga and the mainstream comic. SUTTON: May I ask if it’s a matter of pacing? Sometimes an author must expand a scene to introduce character background info, etc. What’s a writer to do? Teleplays, comics, and novels all have their demands, and none of them are mutual! GREENBERG: Well, I’ve been writing Star Trek e-books lately, which are a little shorter than a standard Star Trek novel—but it’s still Star Trek in written form, so it’s basically the same as a novel. And the main difference between writing a book and writing a comic is that when I’m writing a book, I’m fully responsible for providing the “pictures” for the readers. Those pictures will exist only in the readers’ minds. So I have to be very clear and thorough and descriptive and visual-minded when describing the settings, the scenery, the actions of the characters, what the characters are wearing, what the characters look like, and so forth. I don’t have an artist to fall back on. Also, when writing a book, you have a lot more room to really delve into and flesh out the story and the characters. You can get into the characters’ heads, describe what they’re feeling—whether it’s agony or rage or love or heartbreak.

Since comics are such a visual medium, there really has to be interesting things happening on every page. You can’t—or at least you shouldn’t— just have characters standing around spouting off dialogue for page after page, no matter how witty or crisp the dialogue is. In a comic, the story has to move. Comics are a marriage of words and pictures, so the pictures should help tell the story and move the story along. In a book, you can do an extended scene on the bridge where there’s a lot of banter and interactions between the various crewmembers. In a 22-page comic book, a scene like that could take up nearly half the issue! So the pacing is very different between the two mediums. WEINSTEIN: Within reason (and contractual requirements), novels can be as long as you want them to be. But comics and TV episodes are limited in length by production requirements—I couldn’t go to an editor and say, “Gee, can we make this issue 26 pages?” if the limit is 22. My education in writing episodic TV scripts prepared me for that. You just have to learn how to make scenes short and sweet, keep dialogue trimmed, and not linger once the scene has served its purpose. Before CGI, live-action TV shows had tight budget limits on sets, makeup, special effects, and location shooting. This was especially tough on a sciencefiction show like Star Trek, with stories taking place on other worlds, in space, and involving exotic aliens. The last few Star Trek series, on the other hand, have been able to include movie-like visual effects thanks to computers. One major difference between live-action and animated Star Trek was the freedom to create any visuals you wanted in animation. So comics are more like animation in the way both invite imagination unlimited by budget. Novels and comics both allow you to get inside characters’ heads and know what they’re thinking internally, whereas TV and movies are really limited to what we can see characters do and say out loud. BARR: The greater length of a novel tempts writers to greatly expand scenes, rather than keeping them as short and punchy as possible. Oddly, the shorter length of a comic book forces writers to move the story along more quickly, more like filmed Trek. It’s easier to be more self-indulgent with prose Trek, but self-indulgence always works to the detriment of the story. But with novels it’s easier to write a convincing interior monologue for a character, simply by making him the viewpoint character of a scene. In comics this requires either thought balloons or Logs, both of which are convincing in the inverse proportion to which they are used. Regarding the difference in writing Trek between mainstream comics and manga (of course, in Japan, manga is mainstream), manga relies more on captions or dialogue to tell the story, and less on actual storytelling and visual pacing. In manga, cool pictures often trump story. DAVID: I don’t know that I’d say greater length is “self-indulgent.” In comic books, writers can rely on visuals to set the scene and convey information. Also, a talented artist can provide lots of visual prompts. You don’t have to go out of your way to describe what a character is thinking or what he looks like or what the environment is like or how he’s moving around if the artist is doing all that. In a novel, the writer is on his own in terms of setting scenes, moods, and conveying all the necessary information so that the reader can “see” the scene for himself. It may sound odd to say, but there’s

more to a story than just story. It’s how you tell it, and when it comes to the novel, it’s all on the writer. Also, aside from the obvious ease of telling a story in 80,000 words as opposed to 22 pages, again it keys to visuals. If I have an extended briefing room scene in a book, for instance, then I only need to have the dialogue interesting and it can go on for pages. In a comic, that’s not enough. An extended briefing room scene will seem static visually. I either have to find another means of portraying the discussion, or have something else going on to cover the visual. MANGELS: Mike Martin and I have written nine novels and a number of short stories for Pocket Books, and have written Trek comics for Marvel and WildStorm (I wrote a commissioned-but-unpublished story for DC years prior). One of the chief differences is in length. If we want to tell an immense story, with a “B” story and 14 character-oriented subplots, we can do it in a novel. In a comic book, you have to do an “A” story, and if you’ve got several issues, you can add a “B” story, and you try to throw in character bits along the way. But comics are very much shorthand compared to novels. On the other hand, the place where you can have economy of words in comics is in descriptions. If your artist is good, he can describe the wondrous or shocking event/alien/anomaly/Treknobabble in one or C o m i c s

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In the Mighty Marvel Manner Star Trek: The Motion Picture was adapted by the House of Ideas in the magazine-sized Marvel Comics Super Special #15 (Dec. 1979), featuring a Bob Larkin cover. The adaptation was serialized in the first three issues of Marvel’s monthly ST (starting with issue #1, coverdated Apr. 1980). © 2007 Paramount.

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Eddy Z e n o

DC Comics’ adaptations of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies began not with the first film, 1978’s Superman: The Movie, but with the third and fourth films. Superman and Superman II instead appeared as large-format, tabloid-sized “Collectors’ Editions,” All-New Collectors’ Edition #C-62 and DC Special Series #25. Both stated on their covers that articles would focus on the “stars, costumes, set designs, and special effects.” They appeared in 1979 and in 1981, priced at $2.50 and $2.95, respectively. Actual movie photos, along with preproduction and production sketches and paintings, were used. In both specials, comic-book artist Ric Estrada provided pen-and-ink drawings of the director and camera crew filming on-location. And to further denote the comics connection, past comic-book panels were juxtaposed next to similar movie scenes throughout. Bob Rozakis was listed as a contributor to the first movie special and by the time of the second, he’d become the production manager at DC. Rozakis doesn’t remember what his specific roles were in the movie editions, but does recall that “I had a lot to do with the second movie contest, which had readers answering a variety of questions. I got to meet Christopher Reeve when he came to the DC office to pick the winning postcards. I also was the one who ‘smuggled’ him out of the building via the freight elevator, when crowds started forming in our lobby and in the main lobby of the building.” When asked why the actual screenplays of the first two movies weren’t made into comics, Bob responds, “As far as the policy on doing the adaptations of the movies, I believe there was something in the contract with [Superman screenwriter] Mario Puzo that would have required DC making a substantial payment to him for adapting his script and they weren’t willing to do that. The deals for Superman III and IV were different.”

Superman: The Movie Comic Our fantasy cover for a DC adaptation that didn’t happen. Special thanks to artist Steve Stanley (you must check out his site at www.stanleyart.com!!) for his dead-on interpretation of Christopher Reeve as Superman, and to designer Rich Fowlks for cobbling this together. Superman TM & © 2007 DC Comics. Superman: The Movie © 1978 Warner Bros.

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SUPERMAN III A friend in London called the Superman III and IV movies “rubbish.” My brother asked why I’d write about two films that so many people hate. With less respect for scientific principles than the comic books would have dared, the suspension of disbelief in both was certainly pushed beyond its limits. Superman III (1983) was remembered for its camp and attempts to be funny; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), for its reduced budget and bad special effects. By choice, I had not seen the films since they were first released and, though determined to find the good in them, I knew there would be some drudgery upon their re-viewing. I also knew that discussing the adaptations would be more pleasant in that, at least, both contained artwork by Curt Swan. In terms of the writing, though difficult to add anything to the adaptations that wasn’t in the films, I trusted that, upon rereading, the capable writers of both had the skill to do so. Longtime Superman and The Flash comic-book scribe Cary Bates scripted the third movie/comic tie-in and Bob Rozakis penned the fourth. One way Cary was able to improve III was by showing what Clark/Superman was thinking. Bates’ well-placed thought balloons allowed some of the scenes to make more sense. There was another way Bates made the comic book more logical and consistent. In the film, when Superman and Clark split into separate beings and were doing battle, Kent kept alternating between seeming mortal in some scenes, yet as powerful as his alter ego in others. One minute he was easily kayoed, rolling toward a metal shredder on a conveyor belt. Then, after crying out while supposedly being crushed in the junkyard where the fight took place, he suddenly appeared unscathed and fought back with super-powers. In the adaptation, Cary showed the same scene but there was no groaning with faux pain, no histrionics to milk the audience for sympathy; we knew Clark

And Da Winna Is…

wouldn’t die. Instead, the dramatic effect came from seeing the shredder implode into dust due to Clark’s invulnerability. Bates simply had two evenly matched beings super-duke it out. Cary Bates discusses how it felt to capture the essence of something from another medium compared to creating his own tales from scratch: “On balance it’s actually kind of a drag, since by definition you’re so firmly locked in to the screenplay. The main problem is usually figuring out where to cut, since a two-hour movie must be considerably compressed to fit in a 22–30 page comic book.” [Bates actually had 48 pages for the retelling of Superman III.] Cary added that his editor, the late Julius (Julie) Schwartz, “...probably felt a bit constricted creatively, too, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.” In the Superman III comic, at times artist Curt Swan worked to capture Christopher Reeve’s and Robert Vaughn’s looks, but he didn’t appear to try for Richard Pryor’s likeness in the Gus Gorman character. When asked whether there might have been a legal reason for this, Bates doesn’t remember. He notes, however, that “considering what a gifted artist Curt was, I’m sure he would’ve drawn a more accurate likeness had he been legally permitted to do so.” Director Richard Donner was fired during the making of the second film, and many viewers felt that Richard Lester’s directorial vision in III did not live up to the quality of the first two. Thanks to two actors, there were a couple of things to like in the third film that could not translate to the comic: Annette O’Toole is a self-professed lifetime fan of the Man of Steel, which showed in the honesty of her performance as III’s Lana Lang, and it is still evident through her portrayal as young Clark’s mother in the Smallville television series. And though Chris Reeve got to play Clark as the comic buffoon a fair amount and shine in some warm scenes with Lana and her son, his Superman was under-utilized in Superman III. An exception was when Superman became malevolent due to artificial kryptonite. In the few lines he uttered during those scenes, Superman’s underlying desperation was briefly evocative of actor Jimmy Stewart’s performance in the film It’s a Wonderful Life. C o m i c s

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Christopher Reeve pulls the winning postcard for the 1978 “Great Superman Movie Contest,” observed by Bob Rozakis (left) and thenDC president Sol Harrison. Photo courtesy of Bob Rozakis.

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If you were to poll comics professionals on their influences outside of comic books, you’d find Ray Harryhausen’s name topping many lists. If you spoke with these pros personally, you’d see their eyes twinkle as they recalled Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation in the fantasy films to which they devoted countless childhood Saturday afternoons. That twinkle might fade to awe for the artists among the lot, since Harryhausen’s meticulously crafted models (especially the monsters!) torch-lit their own attention to detail which today guides their pencil, brush, or mouse. Like those artists who drew inspiration from this stop-motion master, Harryhausen himself found a muse in Willis O’Brien, the trailblazer effects wizard behind the animated title star (among other creatures) of King Kong (1933). Harryhausen’s fingerprints—as a visual effects director, producer, and even writer—can be found on a range of inventive movies released throughout the second half of the 20th century, including Mighty Joe Young (1949), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Valley of Gwangi (1969),

Michael Eury

Ray Harryhausen Presents: Wrath of the Titans Four issues, May through Aug. 2007 Writers: Darren G. Davis and Scott Davis Penciler: Nadir Balan Colorist: Joey Campos

Ray Harryhausen Presents: 20 Million Miles More Four issues, June through Sept. 2007 Writer: Scott Davis Penciler: Alex Garcia Colorist: Joey Campos

Ray Harryhausen Presents: Sinbad: Rogue of Mars Five issues, Sept. 2007 through Jan. 2008 Writer: Greg Thompson Artist: Jeff Cruz

Ray Harryhausen and some of his creations. Photo courtesy of Arnold Kunert.

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Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and Clash of the Titans (1981). It might not be entirely accurate, however, to regard Ray Harryhausen as someone from “outside of comic books.” Upon occasion, films featuring Harryhausen’s scaly behemoths and mythological misfits have been adapted into comic-book form. Thanks to BlueWater Productions, three of Harryhausen’s landmark film properties—20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), Sinbad (the star of a franchise of movies), and Clash of the Titans— are the basis for a trio of all-new miniseries, part of a line of Ray Harryhausen Presents titles which launched in May 2007. BlueWater president Darren G. Davis (with whom we spoke in this issue’s Isis in comics article) joins the mastermind himself—Ray Harryhausen—for this exclusive BACK ISSUE interview about these new movie-inspired comic books.

Interviews conducted by email between May 3rd and 8th, 2007.

MICHAEL EURY: Mr. Harryhausen, it’s wonderful to have your characters back in comics again! But why comic books as a medium to continue your film franchises? Why not animation, or computer games, or mobile or online downloads? RAY HARRYHAUSEN: Darren Davis approached me and my producer Arnold Kunert when we were in Bellingham, Washington, as part of my 2006 book tour to promote The Art of Ray Harryhausen. We liked what Darren had to say about doing comic books about the continuing adventures of some of my characters, so we agreed to collaborate. It’s possible that video games and other items may eventually be developed, but not at this time. EURY: Beyond the story conception and develop© 2006 Ray Harryhausen. ment, how involved are you with the actual production of the comic books’ writing and art? HARRYHAUSEN: Darren and his artists are developing the storylines for the comic books. I have final approval on the subject matter. Darren, Arnold, and I have a contract which stipulates that Arnold and I have final artistic control over the comic books’ content. EURY: Ray, tell me about your artwork that’s being reprinted in the comics. HARRYHAUSEN: Darren is reprinting some of my artwork which is already being sold in signed and limited-edition versions by the Every Picture Tells a Story gallery in Santa Monica, California. DARREN DAVIS: We will also be doing a couple of colorized covers by Ray based on some of his original artwork. The one for 20 Million Miles More will be for issue #3. EURY: Is it true that the Ray Harryhausen Presents concepts are also being developed for film and TV? HARRYHAUSEN: We are in the process of discussing possible Ray Harryhausen Presents projects for theatrical and television presentation, but nothing has been finalized at this time. EURY: The 1957 film 20 Million Miles to Earth involved the lizard-like Ymir, who grew to colossal size

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characters, I outranked him. [At one point] he told me that ‘Horshack wouldn’t say that.’ It was a joke (“Your mouth is so big, Evel Knievel wants to jump it”) that I later used in an episode. I think it was a unique situation for Joe.” Work on the TV series was all-consuming for Mark: “I didn’t even have time to do my laundry! I would run out at lunch and buy clothes to wear the next day. When I left [the show] I had 80 pairs of underwear...”

TWICE AS FAR… Kotter turned out to be something of a mistake as a comic, neither attracting new fans to comics nor interesting the increasingly narrowing super-hero comics market. The decision was made to do it more like the DC movie/TV comics of old, with cartoony artwork and line-drawn covers rather than photo covers. (Mark Evanier asked production manager Sol Harrison about the no-Lynda-Carter photocovers: “The readers wouldn’t like it.” I know myself that as a teenage boy I hated seeing photos of Miss Carter in her skimpy costume...) What were the editorial expectations for Welcome Back, Kotter? Here’s Tony again: “DC’s sales were tanking, so the company was trying all sorts of stuff, including media tie-ins like Kotter. The hope—I think characterizing it as ‘editorial expectation’ disguises the company desperation— was that a comic book based on a popular-withkids TV show would sell okay and possibly bring some new readers to other DC titles. Welcome Back, Kotter’s first [TV] season was brilliant. It was very funny and very well acted. In fact, it was an inspiration for Black Lightning in that I had Jeff Pierce return to his old school as a teacher much as Gabe Kotter returned to his.” And the comic book? “As for the comic book, I was pleased with the solo script I wrote, not so pleased with its final publication. The art didn’t live up to my expectations and, as I recall, errors made it into print that should have been caught and corrected by editorial and production.”

…WITH A CHOCOLATE BAR

Et tu, Epstein? Page 20 from Kotter #5, from the collection of Yoram Matzkin.

DC was hoping to attract new readers to the DC family, even creating a new umbrella logo for the line—“A DC TV Comic”—that adorned the current Shazam!, Isis, and Super Friends books (but not Wonder Woman? Lynda Carter herself wondered, “Why no photo covers?”). After two issues with Eliot Maggin scripts, and one from Tony, Joe Orlando offered the assignment to the story editor of the Kotter TV series, comics-writer-made-good Mark Evanier: “I did a couple of issues,” says Evanier, “and one was published as a treasury edition (WBK #4 and Limited Collector’s Edition C-57). But by the time I wrote the second one the decision to cancel the title had been made. I wrote the scripts between working on [the TV] Kotter, even writing on the set.” What was the difference between writing Kotter for comics and TV? “When it came to doing Kotter (the comics), Joe Orlando didn’t realize that when it came to those

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With Mark Evanier too busy with the TV Kotter, Bob Toomey took over the scripting with #5–7, then Scott Edelman finished out the run with #8–10, with Bob Oksner and Ric Estrada on the art. It was cancelled just in time for the fabled DC Implosion, and written off as another failed DC experiment. The stories are fun, but they mostly make you want to scare up old episodes of the TV show. Maybe they should have gone with the M*A*S*H comic after all…. Thanks to Mark Evanier and Tony Isabella!

D arre ll “ Big D ” M c N e il

Editor’s note: Animator and occasional BI “Backstage Pass” columnist Darrell McNeil was a close friend of Alex Toth, and has a few comments about the late, great illustrator that he’d like to get off his chest…

It’s the Ides of March (or close enough, hell, I’m not Latin!) as I write this; it’s been almost a year (and will be a year plus two months when you read this) since an unexpected source called me at 11:39 the night of May 27, 2006 to tell me something I should’ve been (and hadn’t been) told earlier that day. My mentor and best friend of the previous 15 years, Alexander Toth, had died. It wasn’t totally unexpected … and I’ll explain why later in this treatise. But I still had to know. Those who know me know that I travel everywhere by “rancid” transit (you know: “Take the bus and leave the #!?&;?&?#! to them!”). Try to get from South Central to Beautiful Downtown Burbank in the middle of the night. During the day it takes two and a half hours. That night it took almost five (including my walking the last six miles), one way. But I still had to know. And at 5:12 the next morning, through the locked doors of Belmont Village, from the rather befuddled lips of the night person, I found out. An unconventional way to find out. But then, Alex Toth wasn’t a conventional man. Neither am I. And what we had didn’t fit many conventions at all. That’s what made our decadeand-a-half “run” so good. And, to this day, made it so memorable to me. And made it so hard to write about. So why am I putting pencil to paper and scribbling some stories now? Thank Bob McLeod. Why? ’Cause he stood up for Vince Colletta in a recent BACK ISSUE. And that reminded me of a funny incident between myself and Alex in pleasanter times … which I’ll get to at the end of this somewhat scattershot sonata. Forgive me for what is definitely not the linear approach I usually utilize in my yearly incursions into Euryland, but I’ve been bouncing between several different projects over the last year, while taking in the various published tributes to “Unca Alex” over the same period. While most have been well produced and put together, the bulk of the commentaries revealed to me a man who was, for the most part, extremely talented, truly visionary, totally bitter and frustrated, and down on his profession, his worldview, and state of mind in general. Which would make for a

“If you’re going to steal, steal from the best”… …says Darrell McNeil of his creation Rainbow Girl, seen in the inset, striking an iconic pose the artist “borrowed” from this Black Canary illo drawn by his friend and “unca,” Alex Toth. Black Canary TM & © 2007 DC Comics. Rainbow Girl TM & © 2007 Gold Medal Productions.

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