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Booster Gold • Kang • Karate Kid • X-Men: Days of Future Past and more With Dan Jurgens • Bob Wayne & Lewis Shiner and an exclusive P. Craig Russell interview

THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!

Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comicsbased media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!

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“Liberated Ladies” eyeing female characters that broke barriers in the Bronze Age: Big Barda, Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel, Phoenix, Savage She-Hulk, and the sword-wielding Starfire. Plus a “Pro2Pro” interview with JILL THOMPSON, GAIL SIMONE, and BARBARA KESEL, art and commentary by JOHN BYRNE, GEORGE PEREZ, JACK KIRBY, MIKE VOSBURG, and more, with a new cover by BRUCE TIMM!

“Licensed Comics”! Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Man from Atlantis, DC’s Edgar Rice Burroughs backups (John Carter, Pellucidar, Carson of Venus), Marvel’s Warlord of Mars, and an interview with CAROL SERLING, wife of ROD SERLING. With art and commentary from ANDERSON, BYRNE, CLAREMONT, DORMAN, DUURSEMA, KALUTA, MILLER, OSTRANDER, and more. Cover by BRIAN KOSCHACK.

“Avengers Assemble!” Writer ROGER STERN’S acclaimed 1980s Avengers run, West Coast Avengers, early Avengers toys, and histories of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Wonder Man, with art and commentary from JOHN and SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, BRETT BREEDING, TOM DeFALCO, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, TOM MORGAN, TOM PALMER, JOE SINNOTT, and more. PÉREZ cover!

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JENETTE KAHN interviewed by ROBERT GREENBERGER, DC’s Dollar Comics and unrealized kids’ line (featuring an aborted Sugar and Spike revival), the Wonder Woman Foundation, and the early days of the Vertigo imprint. Exploring the talents of ROSS ANDRU, KAREN BERGER, STEVE BISSETTE, JIM ENGEL, GARTH ENNIS, NEIL GAIMAN, SHELLY MAYER, ALAN MOORE, GRANT MORRISON, and more!

“JLA in the Bronze Age”! The “Satellite Years” of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, with BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, PÉREZ, and WEIN, salute to DICK DILLIN, the Justice League “Detroit” team, with CONWAY, PATTON, McDONNELL, plus CONWAY and GEOFF JOHNS go “Pro2Pro” on writing the JLA, unofficial JLA/Avengers crossovers, and Marvel’s JLA, the Squadron Supreme. Cover by McDONNELL and BILL WRAY!

“Toon Comics!” History of Space Ghost in comics, Comico’s Jonny Quest and Star Blazers, Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera line and Dennis the Menace, behind the scenes at Marvel Productions, Ltd., and a look at the unpublished Plastic Man comic strip. Art/comments by EVANIER, FOGLIO, HEMPEL and WHEATLEY, MARRS, RUDE, TOTH, WILDEY, and more. All-new painted Space Ghost cover by STEVE RUDE!

“Halloween Heroes and Villains”! JEPH LOEB and TIM SALE’s chiller Batman: The Long Halloween, the Scarecrow (both the DC and Marvel versions), Solomon Grundy, Man-Wolf, Lord Pumpkin, Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween parades, and… the Korvac Saga’s Dead Avengers! With commentary from and/or art by CONWAY, GIL KANE, LOPRESTI, MOENCH, PÉREZ, DAVE WENZEL, and more. Cover by TIM SALE!

“Tabloids and Treasuries,” spotlighting every all-new tabloid from the 1970s. Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, The Bible, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, The Wizard of Oz, even the PAUL DINI/ALEX ROSS World’s Greatest Super-Heroes editions! Commentary and art by ADAMS, GARCIA-LOPEZ, GRELL, KIRBY, KUBERT, MAYER, ROMITA SR., TOTH, and more. Wraparound cover by ALEX ROSS!

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“Superman in the Bronze Age”! JULIUS SCHWARTZ, CURT SWAN, Superman Family, World of Krypton miniseries, and ALAN MOORE’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”, art & comments by ADAMS, ANDERSON, CARDY, CHAYKIN, PAUL KUPPERBERG, OKSNER, O’NEIL, PASKO, ROZAKIS, SAVIUK, and more. Cover by GARCÍA-LÓPEZ and SCOTT WILLIAMS! Edited by MICHAEL EURY.

“British Invasion” issue! History of Marvel UK, Beatles in comics, DC’s ‘80s British talent pool, V for Vendetta, Excalibur, Marshal Law, Doctor Who, “Pro2Pro” interview with PETER MILLIGAN & BRENDAN McCARTHY, plus BERGER, BOLLAND, DAVIS, GIBBONS, STAN LEE, LLOYD, MOORE, DEZ SKINN, and others. Fold-out triptych cover by RON WILSON and DAVE HUNT of Marvel UK’s rare 1970s “Quadra-Poster”!

“Bronze Age Backup Series”! Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Metamorpho, GOODWIN and SIMONSON’s Manhunter, PASKO and GIFFEN’s Dr. Fate, “Whatever Happened To…?”, Nemesis, Rose and the Thorn, Seven Soldiers of Victory, art and commentary by CARY BURKETT, JOHN CALNAN, DICK GIORDANO, MIKE GRELL, ELLIOT S! MAGGIN, DAN SPIEGLE, cover by GRELL and JOE RUBINSTEIN.

“Bronze Age B-Teams”! Defenders issue-byissue overview, Champions, Guardians of the Galaxy, Inhumans, PETER DAVID’s X-Factor, Teen Titans West, Legion of Substitute Heroes, an all-star chatfest of Doom Patrol interviews, plus art and commentary by ROSS ANDRU, SAL BUSCEMA, KEITH GIFFEN, TONY ISABELLA, PAUL KUPPERBERG, ERIK LARSEN, GEORGE PÉREZ, BOB ROZAKIS, cover by KEVIN NOWLAN.

“Bronze Age Team-Ups”! Marvel Team-Up and Two-in-One, Super-Villain Team-Up, CLAREMONT and SIMONSON’s X-Men/New Teen Titans, DC Comics Presents, SuperTeam Family, HANEY and APARO’s Batman of Earth-B(&B), Superman/Captain Marvel smackdowns, plus art and commentary by BUCKLER, ENGLEHART, GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, GIFFEN, LEVITZ, WEIN, and a classic GIL KANE cover inked anew by TERRY AUSTIN.

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Volume 1, Number 67 September 2013 Celebrating the Best Comics of the '70s, '80s, '90s, and Beyond!

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Mike Mignola (a 1989 illustration) COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek

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BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 INTERVIEW: Batman: Gotham by Gaslight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Brian Augustyn, Mike Mignola, Mark Waid, and John Workman revisit this Victorian-era “Tale of the Batman” INTERVIEW: P. Craig Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Exploring the early (and later) career of one of comics’ modern masters FLASHBACK: Karate Kid: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 The Legion of Super-Heroes member gets his kicks in the 1970s FLASHBACK: X-Men: Days of Future Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 The landmark X-tale by Chris Claremont and John Byrne that inspired a movie FLASHBACK: The Asgardian Wars: The New Mutants 1985 Summer Vacation . . . . . . . . .38 Arthur Adams discusses this well-remembered junior X-Men project BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Kang: The Villain Who Folded Himself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 A thorough examination of the head-scratching continuity of Marvel’s time-hopping hellion FLASHBACK: Booster Gold: Celebrity Hero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Dan Jurgens’ first Man of Tomorrow—with rare developmental artwork PRO2PRO: Bob Wayne and Lewis Shiner (with Art Thibert): Time Masters . . . . . . . . . . .64 The writers and artist of Rip Hunter and company’s time-fest revisit the series with their editor, Bob Greenberger BEYOND CAPES: Bill & Ted & Evan’s Excellent Adventure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 For a guy who never saw the original movie, Evan Dorkin produced a most excellent comics adaptation BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 Letters about our Tabloids and Treasuries issue, BI #61 BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard US, $85 Canada, $107 Surface International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Mike Mignola. Batman: Gotham By Gaslight TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2013 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

www.twomorrows.com Heroes Out of Time Issue

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From Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. TM & © DC Comics.

SPECIAL THANKS Arthur Adams David Mazzucchelli Ceasar Alvarez David Michelinie Val Armorr Mike Mignola Richard Arndt Michael Netzer Brian Augustyn Fabian Nicieza Michael Aushenker Bob Rozakis Mike W. Barr P. Craig Russell Kurt Busiek Jason Shayer Dewey Cassell Lewis Shiner Chris Claremont Joe Staton DC Comics Roger Stern Evan Dorkin Bryan D. Stroud Mike Flynn Art Thibert Stephan Friedt Roy Thomas Carl Gafford Mark Waid Grand Comic-Book Bob Wayne Database John Wells Mike Grell John Workman Bob Greenberger Heritage Comics Auctions Paul Levitz Andy Mangels

ON MY NIGHTSTAND Actually, I do time travel with great regularity, from my research of local history to watching old TV shows to reading comics from (and before) my childhood. Most of my reading is done in bed, where I’m often smacked in the face by books when I nod off (I stopped reading super-sized volumes like DC Absolute Editions in bed for fear of a bloody nose). But I just acquired a delicious collection of vintage comics stories that is keeping me awake at night. Titan Books has recently added to its Simon & Kirby Library imprint a Science Fiction volume. This smartly

designed, full-color hardcover edited by Steve Saffel weighs in at 352 pages (enough to pack a wallop should I fall asleep—which, fortunately, these wild and wonky tales won’t allow me to do) and gathers dozens of space-, time-, and imagination-spanning adventures produced by or under the watch of luminaries Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Launched by a Dave Gibbons introduction (with chapter intros by Peter Sanderson), this edition blasts off with rare Simon & Kirby material from the ’40s then warp-drives into the mid- to late-’50s with Atomic Age short stories. A ’60s chapter collects tales from Harvey Comics anthologies edited by Simon, and includes contributions by Archie Goodwin, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood. Concluding the book are a gallery of covers and some offbeat proposals by Jack and Joe (the latter teaming with Jerry Grandenetti). The stories are colored anew by Harry Mendryk, who’s also responsible for their art restoration. Truly a gorgeous edition, well worth the $49.99 price! A Bronze Age-connected gem in the volume is the Jack Kirby-writtenand-drawn “The Last Enemy!” from Alarming Tales #1 (Sept. 1957), where a time traveler’s trip to the year 2514 introduces him to a world of human-sized, sentient, talking tigers, rats, bears, and dogs, showing that Kirby was batting around such concepts before Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. You don’t have to be a Simon & Kirby fan to appreciate the unbridled creativity and historical significance of the tales in this collection.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES BACK ISSUE is on the lookout for the following comics-related material from the 1970s through the 1990s: • • • • • • •

Unpublished artwork and covers Commissions (color or B&W) and professional-quality specialty drawings 1970s–1990s creator and convention photographs Character designs and model sheets Original art: covers and significant interior pages Little-seen fanzine material Other rarities

If you have any of the above materials, please query the editor via email prior to submission. Art contributors will be acknowledged in print and receive a complimentary copy of the issue.

Since BI is a full-color publication, preference is given to color artwork. Random convention sketches and “quick sketches” that do not reflect an artist’s best work and were not intended for print will no longer be considered for publication. BACK ISSUE does not read or consider unsolicited manuscripts. However, we routinely welcome new writers to our magazine, and have done so since day one! If you’re interested in writing for BI, please request a copy of the BACK ISSUE Writer’s Style Guide by emailing the editor at euryman@gmail.com. Contact BI at: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE Concord, NC 28025

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the Estate of Jack Kirby.

If you could time travel, would you venture into the past or the future? While I’m fascinated by the past and intrigued by the future, if time travel were a possibility I’d stay put in the present. At least here I can learn from yesteryear and hopefully leave a footprint that will, in some small measure, make a better tomorrow. At one time or another, each of us has felt like we’re in a place that’s unfamiliar, where we don’t quite belong, and that is our theme this issue: Heroes Out of Time. It explores time-hopping and reality-altering comics, including Dan Jurgens’ Booster Gold (for those looking for the “Blue and Gold” team of Booster and Blue Beetle, see BACK ISSUE #22). I don’t like to play favorites, but as a ’70s comics junkie I’m particularly fond of John Wells’ article about displaced Legionnaire Karate Kid’s solo series (priming you for next issue’s “Legion of Super-Heroes in the Bronze Age” theme, which includes a Time Trapper history originally intended for this issue). Our cover feature transplants Batman into the Victorian era, where he actually seems right at home thanks to writer Brian Augustyn, artists Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell, and editor Mark Waid. So park your souped-up DeLorean in the garage, lock the door on your TARDIS, and let the pages that follow do your time traveling for you.

Michael Eury

“In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places—some that have existed, or might have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The result is stories that make characters that are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.” Those words, coined by Denny O’Neil, are the charter for the Elseworlds imprint that was the direct descendant of the old “Imaginary Stories” that were staples in the Silver Age of DC Comics. Where did it all begin? Why, with “A Tale of the Batman” printed in prestige format in 1989 before the term “Elseworlds” had actually been conceived. It was called Gotham by Gaslight, and it was a groundbreaker with a terrific stable of talent guiding it.

ALTERNATE ORIGINS

Bryan D.

Writer Brian Augustyn recollects how the project began: “It was actually accidental. We were both editors, [Mark] Waid and I, at the time; and thinking about the process, he was the editor of Secret Origins and Stroud he’d been given his first summer Annual. This was back before they told us what our [Annuals’] themes would be. We got to actually be creative by ourselves. Mark’s big problem was that he had just finished doing Secret Origins for quite a number of big characters—the Batman cast, and I think he’d recently done something with the Superman family. In other words, all the stuff he might want to hang onto if he knew an Annual was coming. “Being the budding, creative genius that he was, he had a sense that his Annual should be something brian augustyn special, something big. But again, how do you follow it when your recent issues have covered all the major characters? So he had in mind, I think, that he might do something like ‘Alternate Origins,’ for lack of a better way of putting it. Not just untold stories, but something along the order of how would these characters be different if they were placed in a different time or a different reality or whatever. He was having trouble, I think, articulating that and I think I said something like, ‘What if Batman was in the Victorian era?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay.’ So then I said, ‘And he fought, um … Jack the Ripper.’ This was just top-of-the-head stuff. We were spitballing. So he kept talking for a moment and then went back and said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. Batman in the Victorian era?’ I said, ‘Sure, because he’s a very gothic character and fits into the Victorian era in a way. Jack the Ripper fits historically.’ “So we talked about it back and forth for a few minutes,” Augustyn continues, “and he said something along the lines of, ‘We should see if we can come up with a story to go with that.’ So I said, ‘Sure, we should. For the Annual.’ So by morning, I had it in, I think, a four-page presentation. I don’t think it was

“What If Batman Was in the Victorian Era?” A 1989 Mike Mignola commission featuring his Gotham by Gaslight version of Batman. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.

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Versus Jack the Ripper (below) Original promo art by Mignola. Courtesy of Heritage. (above) Mignola’s moody cover for Gotham by Gaslight. TM & © DC Comics.

an official proposal, but it was the story as I envisioned it. He liked it a lot and said, ‘Okay, this is what we’re doing.’ He also went off and started thinking about doing a one-off alternate Batman story and a one-off alternate Superman story, which as far as I can tell didn’t come to be at that point because very quickly, as I said, this was an accident, we sort of tossed the idea down the hill and watched it turn into an avalanche. It just sort of took on a life of its own.” What a life it was, too, beginning with an inspired foreword by none other than Robert Bloch, highly esteemed science-fiction writer and the author of Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. Mark Waid’s memories of the evolution include a few additional anecdotes about how an idea comes to full fruition: “Here’s how it went from a notion to a fully approved project in 18 hours: In 1988, I was the editor of DC’s monthly Secret Origins anthology, and with an 80-Page Annual coming up on the schedule, I was idly pondering ideas for contents—which DC hero would be big enough to star in it, how I was ever going to get that much work out of one artist, etc. I was on the bus ride home that night when it suddenly occurred to me—why not do four ‘imaginary stories’? Four alternate-history, could-have-been tales, one each for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Flash? What if Superman’s rocket had landed in Russia instead of Smallville? What if … what if … okay, I couldn’t come up with any other ones right off, but ‘What if Superman’s rocket had landed in Russia?’ That was a winner. Surely three others would come just as easily! “The moment I set foot in my apartmark waid ment, I called up Brian Augustyn, fellow editor and best friend, and hit him with the idea so he could tell me if I’d lost my mind,” Waid says. “Fortunately, he was not only in my corner, but he immediately tossed out the suggestion ‘What if Batman had fought Jack the Ripper?’ and we seized on it and began building on it. It was a brief conversation … but the very next morning, Brian came in with the entire pitch for the story, pretty much full-blown, as I recall, and I was electrified. Forget burying this thing in an anthology Annual, I said—I’ll just line up something else. We both sensed that this should be its own project, but how to sell it to the powers-that-be…? “Easy. Mike Mignola was around that morning, delivering pages of something or another to Mike Carlin, and suspecting Mig might be intrigued, Brian and I—still tweaking from enthusiasm—screamed the pitch at poor Mike like it was written in ALL CAPS, but we weren’t even halfway through before he signed on. By the luckiest of breaks, we’d caught him between projects.”

RISK-TAKING Waid recalls, “As soon as Mike said ‘yes,’ I barreled into executive editor Dick Giordano’s office and pitched him. (Dick was always great to me; he loved my energy and, as someone who was a celebrated risk-taker, he likewise got a routine kick out of my inability to self-differentiate between fearlessness and stupidity. Dick told me more than once that he loved watching me get behind something because—as he had been himself—I was always willing to walk way, way further out on the tightrope than any of the other editors my age.) I literally acted the whole thing out for Dick. It was a performance. I was jumping on furniture, I was gesturing, I was on fire. And Dick could barely contain his laughter, but I didn’t mind because he wasn’t laughing at me, he was excited for me. The

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second I wrapped, he signed off on the spot and we went to work—all less than 24 hours after the initial idea hit Brian. “Brian and I, at the time, were kind of two men sharing one brain, always kicking ideas back and forth and enjoying any and all collaborations. That said, Brian did all the smart thinking and heavy lifting. I no longer remember what suggestions I may have added into the mix, but trust me when I say that this was Brian’s baby and anything you like about it was his and anything you wince at was probably mine. The most active hand I remember taking editorially came late in production; Brian was a better plotter, but at the time I had a slightly better ear for dialogue, so I fussed with some of the balloons and captions, probably too much so. I do specifically remember two edits I made. The first was on the top of story page 23, where I was looking for some transition between the previous mike mignola scene and this one, where Gordon was sifting through clues. And for some idiot reason, I thought cutting to one of Gordon’s thought balloons would do the job fairly seamlessly—not taking into account the fact that the art didn’t show Gordon, just an establishing shot of Police Headquarters—which is why, to my eternal shame, we ended up with a half-page shot of a building thinking, ‘Now the postcards.’ Live and learn. “I also remember being amused some time later when a Comics Journal reviewer went on at great length about how the fact that Gordon’s secretary was named ‘Bonnie’ was a smart callback to social-class matters of the 1890s and how Irish girls traditionally ended up in those sorts of administrative roles back in the day and blah blah blah and how much research we must have done to be so clever about that, and I didn’t have the heart to write the guy and tell him, ‘The reason I named her Bonnie was because that was her name on the Adam West [Batman] TV show.’” Brian Augustyn’s memories of landing Mike Mignola for the artwork indicates a major coup: “What we needed for that to work for Mr. Giordano was we needed a solid, A-level artist. At that point Mike Mignola had come up to deliver his last pages of Cosmic Odyssey, and that made him right up there at the edge of the A-list because it was still very early in his career. We knew him from seeing him around the office. We took him to lunch or sat him down in our office and we put the hard-pressed push on him from both guns, Mark and I, and Mike kept saying, ‘I’m way too busy, I’m way too busy. I couldn’t possibly do this. I’ve already agreed to do a Wolverine project and that deadline is going to come and go before I

Who He Is and How He Came to Be (below) The Victorian Batman’s origin, as told on page 2 of Gotham by Gaslight. (above) From page 11, the grimy Gotham of this era is a murderer’s dream. TM & © DC Comics.

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The Man Behind the Red Hood Of course, Mr. Mignola can draw the Dark Knight (and the Boy Wonder) in any era… Original art to the variant cover for Batman #700 (Aug. 2010). Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © DC Comics.

accents or something like that. “In the case here, the idea was that I sought and created a voice for the era that involved a little bit of jargon from the time and maybe a slightly more formal way,” Augustyn says. “In my head, people would speak more formally, [with] fewer contractions and slang of a different era rather than modern slang. “Nothing will grab you out of a story from the past quicker than a turn of phrase that you know isn’t in the setting. Somebody in a Western movie says, ‘Been there, done that,’ and forget it—I’m out of that storyline. Even at that, there can be some surprising lapses, and I’m sure we made some, too, but my idea was simply to let the dialogue speak for the characters, throw in some period slang or wording, and just be a little more consciously formal in the way that the words were used, getting into the characters’ head with specific quirks.”

It should be noted that a nice tip of the hat was given to the enduring popularity of Gotham by Gaslight when the unique cloaked costume of the Batman made an appearance in the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode titled “Trials of the Demon,” which also had a storyline where Batman traveled back in time. While it has yet to come to fruition, work began on a Gotham by Gaslight video game in the recent past. This story has been cited as the first Elseworlds tale, and while Mark Waid was happy to be involved in the project, he maintains a healthy perspective about his role in the resulting genre as a whole: “I have mixed emotions. On the one hand, it’s nice to feel like your career has a few legacy moments. On the other hand, I will never, ever forget walking into a Toys ‘R’ Us with Brian about eight years later and the looks on our faces when we saw the action-figure aisle pegs stocked with an entire line of ‘Batman Elseworlds’ toys. Pirate Batman, Cowboy Batman, Ninja Batman, Caveman Batman, Sneeze-Guard Batman, Color-Blind Batman. Too much. TOO MUCH. We were simultaneously chuffed and horrified. “Elseworlds became, like any good idea, really easy to run into the ground after a while,” Waid believes. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were quite a few good ones: Holy Terror was the last one I’d brought in, from my friend Alan Brennert, and I can’t throw stones at a sub-imprint that allowed us to do Kingdom Come. But by about 1993 or so, it seems like two-thirds of all the pitches coming into DC were for Elseworlds stories, so much so that I remember seeing a list of works-inprogress that was two pages long, and I always said that when you finally got down to ‘What if the Flash had lived during the Crimean War?’ you’d taken the whole thing too far. Eventually, exec editor Mike Carlin just had to issue a blanket ‘No More Elseworlds’ edict, and that was probably wise.” Gotham by Gaslight is, at its core, a detective story, one that spans the Atlantic between London and Gotham and written, coincidentally, roughly a century after the infamous and still-unsolved Whitechapel murders. The canvas of the Darknight Detective must, of a necessity, include his equally dark and menacing, yet beloved Gotham City. An unstated but undeniable part of the Batman’s mission statement is to protect this place from those who would do it and its citizens within any harm. It is one of the prime elements that makes this tale work so well. The efforts of the Guardian of Gotham are as real and vital in the Victorian Era as they have been throughout the other decades the boots of our hero have trod. Mark Waid offers a fitting coda for what makes the Batman and this story timeless in nature: “I think at heart it’s his mission, not his detective essence, that makes him timeless. The themes of loss and anger and vengeance he embodies are eternal.” BRYAN STROUD is a longtime fan of DC Comics, particularly the Silver and Bronze Ages, and has been contributing to the website of his lifelong best friend, Ron Daudt, for over a decade, doing reviews and interviews with creators of the books he loves. He has been fortunate enough to conduct over 80 to date at www.thesilverlantern.com. Bryan recently co-authored Nick Cardy: Wit-Lash.

10 • BACK ISSUE • Heroes Out of Time Issue

Richard Arndt conducted on May 20, 2012

Wonderfully Wicked Detail from the cover of the book The Art of P. Craig Russell (Desperado Publishing Company, Inc., 2007). © P. Craig Russell.

P. Craig Russell began his career in the early 1970s as an assistant to Dan Adkins. His first published credit was for a werewolf story in Marvel’s Chamber of Chills #1 (Nov. 1972). Since then he’s worked as a penciler and/or inker on Ant-Man, Conan, Master of Kung Fu, Morbius, Killraven, Dr. Strange, Batman, Robin, Sandman, Fables, and many other features. Other notable works include Michael Moorcock’s fantasy character Elric, his own adaptations of opera, and adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde and Neil Gaiman, as well as inking Mike Mignola on this issue’s cover feature, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. – Richard Arndt RICHARD ARNDT: Can you give us a little information about your background and how you got into comics? P. CRAIG RUSSELL: Well, I’m from Ohio—Wellsville, Ohio, a little town on the Ohio River. I got involved in comics professionally through Dan Adkins. Dan was an inker at Marvel Comics and had also been Wally Wood’s assistant for a number of years. He was living back in Ohio, in a town called East Liverpool, which was only about two miles from my hometown. I was going to the University of Cincinnati at the time and I went to meet him my sophomore year. I would have been about 19 years old, I guess. He told me if I would

work with him for six months he could get me into Marvel Comics. After a couple more semesters of college, that’s what I did. I worked for him for six months and got my foot in the door. ARNDT: The first credit I found for you was a little six-page werewolf tale in the first issue of Chamber of Chills. RUSSELL: That was the very first published work that I had. Dan would have laid that out—I mean, he designed the storytelling. It was a six-page story that he inked and, frankly, I couldn’t have had a better introduction to comics because his inks were so solid. He really worked me through it. Made me redraw stuff. Said, “This isn’t good enough. Try it this way.” Even so, I was already having my own ideas about storytelling. The werewolf from the story does his transformation on the last page and Dan had this happening in three panels and I changed it into six, so I was already starting to meddle around with the layout of the page, which has always been my biggest interest. ARNDT: You also worked on a Conan the Barbarian very early on. From Barry Smith layouts, if I remember right. RUSSELL: Right! They were having a hard time meeting deadlines on that book. Dan was the inker and he was very slow to begin with, and then Barry put a tremendous amount of work into each issue’s pencils. So they did one issue where Barry did [just] the layouts and Dan’s studio— Heroes Out of Time Issue

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Have Sword, Will Travel Courtesy of Heritage, original cover art by Russell for the hardcover collection of his miniseries adapting Conan and the Jewels of Gwahlur. (inset) Cover to the third issue of the 2005 miniseries. Conan TM & © Conan Properties.

ARNDT: Yes! I only noticed these two stories because I happened to be reading both Dark Horse Presents and Negative Burn at roughly the same time. One version of the story was illustrated by Mike Perkins, a pretty decent English artist, and the other was done by Peter Snejberg, an excellent Danish artist. Both are very good artists. But the script was the exact same script, the exact same length, and they both appeared within a couple of months of each other. It was a sidebar story taken from The Lords of Misrule, a Dark Horse series which Snejberg actually drew. I wrote a letter to DHP’s editor at that time, and he wrote back saying he hadn’t been aware of it until I brought it to his attention and he wasn’t too thrilled about it. RUSSELL: Ha! Amazing! Well, you know, I did an adaptation of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” for the last Star*Reach publication [Within Our Reach, 1991] and at the exact same time I was finishing up my artwork, Classic Illustrated came out with a new version of that story. You know I wasn’t the first person to adapt the Ring of the Nibelung. Gil Kane had his version out before mine.

22 • BACK ISSUE • Heroes Out of Time Issue

ARNDT: Gil actually started the Mowgli stories that you completed, didn’t he? RUSSELL: Yeah, he did the first four and I inked those. Then I did three more, so there’s still one that hasn’t been adapted yet. The fifth one. He did one through four and I did six, seven, and eight. Now I’m doing Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which is basically The Jungle Book set in a graveyard. ARNDT: Oh, cool. I’ll be sure to get that when it comes out. I’m a big fan of Gaiman, and your version of Coraline is great. It does very well with students at my middle school library. RUSSELL: Great, that’s good to know. I’m trying to get Barry Windsor-Smith to do a chapter on it. I sent him an email the other day to see if he wanted to do the last chapter. It would be about 16 pages with a yearlong deadline, but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I thought I would ask. Neil Gaiman mentioned to me today in an email— “Nobody draws trees like Barry Windsor-Smith.” ARNDT: That’s true, he’s got that drawing of the floating ghost in front of that batch of trees and your attention isn’t even really focused on the ghost. Your eye keeps going past it to all those damn beautiful trees. I hope you get him. You’ve got nothing to lose by asking. RUSSELL: That’s right. I’m doing the script and layouts and it will run 352 pages. Kevin Nowlan’s doing one. Scott Hampton. Jill Thompson. Tony Harris. We’ve got a bunch of good guys working on this book. Tony was one of the first people I asked. In fact, I was just working on his chapter earlier today. He’s doing “The Hounds of God” and it’s 46 pages that I’m laying out right now. I’m doing it the Harvey Kurtzman way—ruling the panel borders, lettering everything, drawing in the word balloons, and then sketching in the layouts, designing the page, sounding out the basic body language and expressions and stuff so that each artist knows what goes where. They’ll then do the finished B&W artwork. I’ll do one of the stories myself. I think I’m going to do the second chapter of the book. If Barry decides against it, I might do the last chapter myself as well. ARNDT: Well, I hope you get him, because that would be really cool, but if not, it will still be a great book. RUSSELL: Scott Hampton’s going to be doing the secondto-last chapter, the longest one, about 100 pages, and to follow that up with Windsor-Smith would be sweet. ARNDT: I love Scott Hampton’s stuff, too. I remember the first story of his I ever saw. It was in Alien Worlds [#3, July 1983], and was written by Bruce Jones, called “The Inheritors.” It was a beautiful story with simply stunning art. Later I went back and caught his debut in a Warren magazine, Vampirella, I think. It was a little three-pager, but it was very cool, too. RUSSELL: I couldn’t be happier to have Scott in the book. After The Graveyard Book, I’m planning on adapting Lois Lowry’s The Giver. That one will run 178 pages. ARNDT: That’s a great book! Another one to look forward to! Well, it’s running late and I know you’re got to go. I really appreciate you doing this interview. RUSSELL: And thank you. Bye!

John Wells

Calendar Man Karate Kid and the Legion vs. Toyman, by penciler James Sherman and inker Jack Abel, from the 1978 DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters. Courtesy of John Wells. TM & © DC Comics.

Amidst teenagers who could fly and project bolts of force, Karate Kid seemed like an odd fit in the Legion of Super-Heroes. And that was, creator Jim Shooter declared, the point. “Karate Kid was my solution to the Legion’s most glaring problem,” the writer said in Karate Kid #2 (May–June 1976), “lack of action. Too many Legionnaires simply pointed their fingers to use their power. Karate Kid meant action.” In that first story from 1966 (Adventure Comics #346, inset above), the Legionnaires were frankly dubious that any martial artist— even one using steel-shattering “super-karate”—could survive in their midst, but Karate Kid called out Superboy himself to prove otherwise. Truthfully, the scrappy teenager wasn’t that powerful, but he made an impressive showing and earned a spot on the team alongside three other newcomers. There was a wariness about the martial artist, though, that led to fears that he was an agent of the Khunds in issue #347’s sequel before fellow newbie Nemesis Kid revealed himself as the true spy in the Legion’s midst. The two-parter helped make Karate Kid a favorite of future Legion writer Paul Levitz. “I really enjoyed his intro story by Jim,” he tells BACK ISSUE. “The suspicion of him, the courage he showed taking on Superboy … just an interesting personality, with his self-developed

powers among the Legionnaires.” “KK was what we in the biz call an ‘effort character,’” writer Mike W. Barr observes, “a guy who had to earn his powers, rather than having them given to him by fortuitous pseudo-science. Batman is an effort character. Superman is not. The means of origin is almost never the most important factor in a character’s appeal, but it can be used to establish personality and worldview.” With the betrayal of Nemesis Kid and the early death of Ferro Lad, Adventure #346’s new recruits were reduced to a duo: Karate Kid and Princess Projectra, an illusion-caster from the medieval planet Orando who was literal royalty. When the LSH visited her homeworld in Adventure #362, the Kid kissed the young woman but immediately seemed to get cold feet. “I wanted to bring in all the royalty shtick, where she wasn’t allowed to fool around with these commoners, and have a hostility there,” Shooter explained in The Legion Outpost #8 (Summer 1974). Editor Mort Weisinger rejected the sequence, but the young writer kept the budding romance simmering in later stories. “I was sowing seeds there for future things between the Princess and Karate Kid,” Shooter continued, “getting her parents and everybody interested in what was going on.” Heroes Out of Time Issue

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The X-Men were dead. The year was 1970 and, for all intents and purposes, the X-Men died. Issue #66 (Mar. 1970) marked the last original story in X-Men. The comic book continued with reprints from better days and members of the X-Men made guest appearances in other comics, but they had essentially ceased to be a team and a regular part of the Marvel Universe, largely languishing in obscurity over the next five years— —until August 1975, when writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum breathed new life into the misspent mutants. Issue #94 of X-Men marked a new chapter, with the introduction of a new team. (Technically, the new team was introduced the month before in Giant-Size X-Men #1, written by Len Wein.) Cyclops was the only original member of the X-Men remaining, the rest of the team consisting of new recruits from across the globe, including a certain Canadian with claws who had first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #181. The “All New, All Different” X-Men were a hit. Cockrum remained on X-Men until issue #107 (Oct. 1977), when he was succeeded by artist John Byrne. While Wein, Claremont, and Cockrum gave birth to the new X-Men, Byrne helped give depth and breadth to the characters and further expanded the mutant Marvel universe. Claremont and Byrne were a powerful combination and the X-Men flourished under their combined creative talents. Chris Claremont comments on the strength of their collaboration: “When you’re working with someone like John, there’s no point in doing full scripts. It’s an inhibition to his creativity, to his imagination, and to his own ability to contribute to the story. That’s why a significant number of those issues labeled us as ‘co-plotters.’ The whole point was that we were a collaborative team, very much as Dave and I were before and were once again, when he came back following John’s departure. If I wrote out a plot, it was for the penciler so he’d have a reference of how the story was structured, but it was also for my benefit as well, because the notes I put in the plot were as much for me to write the script as it was for John or Dave to draw it. If you’re working with a brilliant collaborator, a brilliant partner, why shortchange his contribution in any way at all? You want to give him every chance he can to tell the story as powerfully and evocatively as he knows how. And that, in turn, hopefully, will give me more visual inspiration to finish the job with words as effectively or more so.”

TRADING PLACES So, having taken the X-Men to new heights, introducing new characters like Kitty Pryde and storylines like the Hellfire Club and the Phoenix Saga, what did Claremont and Byrne do? They killed the X-Men. [Spoiler alert: If you have not read the X-Men story “Days of Future Past,” you owe it to yourself to do so. Stop now, and pick up a copy of the trade paperback or back issues before proceeding.]

No Mutants’ Land Detail from the startling cover to X-Men #141 (Jan. 1981), part one of “Days of Future Past.” Art by John Byrne and Terry Austin; colors by Glynis Wein. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

34 • BACK ISSUE • Heroes Out of Time Issue

Dewey Cassell

Grave Matters (top) Dead-hero headstones, from page 4, X-Men #141. (bottom) The death of Franklin Richards. Original Byrne/Austin art to page 19 of issue #141, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In issue #141 (Jan. 1981), the X-Men began a two-part story called “Days of Future Past,” which told of how the consciousness of an adult Kate Pryde was sent back in time to trade places with her younger self, so that she might persuade the X-Men to prevent the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly by the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Mystique. History noted that the murder of Senator Kelly led to the reactivation of the Sentinel program. (Sentinels were giant robots used to hunt mutants, first created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in issue #14 of X-Men.) The Sentinels determined that the best way to protect the country was to take it over. They classified people into one of three categories— human (and therefore allowed to have children), anomalous (possessing mutant potential and therefore not allowed to have children), and mutant (hunted down and killed or interred and forced to wear collars that inhibited their mutant abilities). The mutant internment centers were reminiscent of World War II, reminding the reader at best of the Japanese internment camps in the US and at worst of the Nazi concentration camps. One of the most chilling images from the story was of Kate walking through the mutant internment center and passing by a graveyard filled with tombstones marking the final resting place of some of the greatest heroes of the Marvel Universe— Professor X, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Thing, Human Torch, Iceman, Angel, Beast, and others. The Sentinels took the lives of countless heroes and villains, not all of whom were mutant, and they buried them in a place the survivors would see every day. The story is told with great sensitivity and compassion, not dwelling on the precise means by which Kate is able to make the “timeswitch,” but rather on its implications for the people at both ends of the spectrum. The transference is accomplished with the aid of a mutant Rachel, who is a telepath, later revealed (though not in this story) to be the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey. When Kate regains consciousness in the body of Kitty Pryde, she tells her story with earnest to the X-Men, persuading them of her sincerity and reacting emotionally at seeing old friends alive again. While Kate is accompanying the X-Men to Washington, D.C., to try to stop the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the friends she left behind in the future are trying to prevent Armageddon. The Sentinels are on the threshhold of expanding their dominance beyond North America, at which point the other nations of the world have vowed to retaliate with nuclear force. Wolverine, who has been helping the Canadian resistance, has freed the remaining members of the X-Men from their Bronx internment center, including Storm and Colossus (carrying the body of Kate, his wife, who remained unconscious while possessing the mind of Kitty), as well as Franklin Richards (son of Reed and Sue Richards) and Rachel. Magneto, confined to a wheelchair (in a twist of irony), remains behind to create a diversion, though it will mean his death. This motley mutant crew makes their way toward the Baxter Building, headquarters of the Sentinels, to attempt to destroy it. In the end, they are not successful. They manage to destroy a number of Sentinels along the way, but at a high price. As the story draws to a close, only Rachel and an unconscious Kate remain, hiding outside the Baxter Building. One of the most shocking images in the closing pages of the story is of Wolverine being vaporized by a Sentinel, leaving behind only his adamantium-laced skeleton.

Heroes Out of Time Issue

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The New Mutants Special Edition #1 (1985) could well be THE comic book that captures the essence of the 1980s. With writing and trademark characterization by legendary X-Men scribe Chris Claremont and lavish, detailed art by up-and-comer Arthur Adams, this 64-page special edition was an experience no comic-book fan could forget. “Chris and I collaborated in the regular Marvel style,” explains Art Adams. “He gave me his normal plot which had a lot of stuff in it, and the way I draw, I added my own things in there. The next time Chris and I worked together, he was aware of that and kept adding in more and more things for me to draw. It was a lot of fun.” Together, Claremont and Adams captured the look and feel of Asgard through its landscape and characters, relying heavily on Thor visionary Walter Simonson’s revamp of this iconic setting. While the location made an interesting background, Claremont broke the New Mutants down to their core beings, challenged them, and changed them. This issue propelled Arthur Adams into the realm of superstar artists of the 1980s. His rich and detailed penciled art was breathtaking, and Adams put his own unique and memorable take on these teen heroes. The veteran inking of Terry Austin gave Adams’ penciled art much more depth and definition, creating some of comics’ best art of the 1980s. “I had spent time with Chris Claremont at various conventions,” says Adams, “and he knew that I was wrapping up the Longshot limited series with Ann Nocenti, who was the editor on The Uncanny X-Men and The New Mutants at the time, and they both thought that this might be a fun project for me to do.” Of Adams’ versatile art style, Claremont stated in the introduction to Modern Masters vol. 6: “He can give his writers the most majestic arthur adams and outrageous of wide-screen spectacles, be they in space or the realms of fabled Asgard. And yet focus in on moments so individual and personal, they can’t help but win your heart, or break it.” Along with Uncanny X-Men Annual #9 (1985), this two-issue story was the 1985 summer crossover event later called “The Asgardian Wars.” It was Claremont’s clever idea to throw the New Mutants into Walt Simonson’s Asgard. Underneath that epic fantasy storyline was genuine character growth and development and teen mutant angst. And Asgard provided a strange and fertile setting to foster that character development. Claremont was all about characters, and his characterization took center stage in this epic story. “I had a good idea of who the New Mutants were before I started,” recalls Adams. “Even though I was working the West Coast, I visited Marvel Comics semi-regularly in those days, so I was in the office at the beginning of the New Mutants. No one had been overly crazy about the name ‘New Mutants,’ but at that time, they didn’t want another book called ‘The X-Men.’ Little did they know what the future held? Eventually, they’re not new anymore.”

Dripping with Detail Cover to New Mutants Special Edition #1 (1985). Art by Arthur Adams and Terry Austin. Adams photo courtesy of Woolennium/Wikimedia Commons. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

38 • BACK ISSUE • Heroes Out of Time Issue

Jason Shayer

Mean Girls The Enchantress tortures Magik on page 32 of the Special Edition. Words by Claremont, art by Adams and Austin, and colors by Christie Scheele. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

“HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS”: NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION #1 “The New Mutants Special Edition was originally meant to be a New Mutants Annual,” says Adams. “Then Chris handed in a script and I quickly thumbnailed it to figure out how long it was going to be, and talked about it with editor Ann Nocenti. We realized that it was going to be too big for the one Annual.” After a humbling defeat in the X-Men and Alpha Flight miniseries, Loki’s pride demanded revenge, but he was bound by a vow not to harm the X-Men. Loki sidestepped his vow by dispatching the Enchantress to capture the X-Men: “Be inspired, Enchantress. I wish their agonies to be as long-lasting as they are exquisite.” Loki plotted to strike against the X-Men through their leader, Storm, who had recently lost her mutant abilities, and to offer to restore her weather powers: “I wonder what price she would pay to them back … to become a goddess in fact as well as name?” You know the saying, “If you want something done right…” The twist here was that Storm was vacationing with the New Mutants. As the story turned to the New Mutants, they were enjoying a quiet moment on a beach in Greece and lamenting over their place in a world that hated mutants. “It’s too bad we can’t find ourselves another world,” said Doug Ramsey, the New Mutant known as Cypher. As another saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” Cue the Enchantress and her demon warriors, who mistake the New Mutants for the X-Men. They defeated the New Mutants and dragged them back to Asgard. Illyana surprised an arrogant Enchantress and attempted to teleport the team, but the Enchantress disrupted her efforts and scattered the New Mutants throughout the nine realms of Asgard. While their placements were contrived, it was more strategic as Claremont craftily put them into environments that would best test them and allow them to grow. These developed plot points were so successful that they would echoed throughout the history of these characters, in particular with Dani Moonstar and Rahne Sinclair. Adams’ meticulously detailed art, complimented by the fine inking of Terry Austin, shined from the very beginning, particularly on the second page that depicted a contemplative and scheming Loki sitting upon Hlidskjalf, the High Seat of Asgard. “Loki’s costume was based on Jack Kirby’s and John Buscema’s designs,” mentions Adams. “For whatever reason at that time, no one really liked the Enchantress’ costume—I drew a whole bunch of different versions, none of which I was really crazy about. It was fun stuff. I looked into a couple of Viking history and Norse Gods books, and, of course, I had all of Walt Simonson’s Thor at the time and all of the Kirby Thor run.”

KARMA Xi’an Coy Manh, the New Mutant known as Karma, struggled with the after-effects of being mind-controlled by a psychic entity known as the Shadow King, who had left her body severely obese. She found herself in the middle of a desert, which only amplified her desire to end her life. However, her self-loathing was put aside after rescuing a young girl who was also lost in the desert. Xi’an stayed alive to care for the girl, and that selfless act allowed her to regain her confidence and to take responsibility for not only the girl, but for herself. Interestingly, when Xi’an was rescued, the young girl suddenly disappeared, and all Xi’an was left with was a white string, the sign of the three Norns, the fates of Asgard who obviously had their own interests in keeping her alive.

WARLOCK Both Adams and Claremont had a lot of fun playing with Warlock, using his alien abilities to change his shape and interact with the physical world around him in his unique and usually humorous way.

“Warlock was always a lot of fun,” says Adams. “Bill Sienkiewicz, who had co-created Warlock, described to me that Warlock was made of the black-hole material from the old Warner Bros. cartoon. And for some reason what stuck in my head was Warner Bros. cartoon, so I just tried to make him fun and silly and very emotive because he’s supposed to be new to being alive and new to being on Earth; I wanted all his reactions to be big. Warlock was complicated to draw, especially the way that I drew him. His reactions had to be big so that you could see what was going on with him.” [Editor’s note: The cartoon referenced above is “The Hole Idea,” released in 1955.] Warlock found himself in the realm of Hel, and faced with this perilous predicament he transformed himself in Ann Nocenti and Art Adams’ creation, Longshot. “I think that was probably my idea,” admits Adams, “and it’s one I kind of regret as it was a bit too silly, but it did help advertise our book.”

CYPHER The teleportation spell dropped Doug Ramsey near an Asgardian mead hall, and he quickly found that his physical shortcomings were enlarged as the typical Asgardian was super-strong by comparison. “I’ll never be good to them in a fight!” said Doug earlier in the issue, whining over his mutant power to understand and speak languages. Doug struggled with confidence issues as his power was far too passive when compared to those of his teammates. A defeated Doug was forced into a subservient role in the kitchen. Fortunately, Warlock, having escaped from Hel, found Doug and together they set out to find the others. Warlock joined with Doug by taking the form of a techno-organic exoskeleton that allowed Doug to take a more physical role in combat. Of course, that gave Doug a huge boost in confidence, allowing him to stand together with his teammates as one of them, and not from the sidelines. Heroes Out of Time Issue

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JACK KIRBY: WRITER! Examines quirks of Kirby’s wordsmithing, from the FOURTH WORLD to ROMANCE and beyond! Lengthy Kirby interview, MARK EVANIER and other columnists, LARRY LIEBER’s scripting for Jack at 1960s Marvel Comics, RAY ZONE on 3-D work with Kirby, comparing STEVE GERBER’s Destroyer Duck scripts to Jack’s pencils, Kirby’s best promo blurbs, Kirby pencil art gallery, & more!

JOE JUSKO shows how he creates his amazing fantasy art, JAMAR NICHOLAS interviews artist JIMM RUGG (Street Angel, Afrodisiac, The P.L.A.I.N. Janes and Janes in Love, One Model Nation, and The Guild), new regular contributor JERRY ORDWAY on his behind-the-scenes working process, Comic Art Bootcamp with MIKE MANLEY and BRET BLEVINS, reviews of artist materials, and more! Mature readers only.

X-MEN SALUTE! 1963-69 secrets, rare ‘60s BRAZILIAN X-MEN stories, lost ‘60s XMen “character sheet” by STAN LEE, ROY THOMAS on the 1970s revival, art and artifacts by KIRBY, ROTH, ADAMS, HECK, FRIEDRICH, and BUSCEMA—plus the MARVELMANIA fan club story, interview with Golden Age writer ED SILVERMAN, FCA, Mr. Monster, BILL SCHELLY, and JACK KIRBY’s unused X-Men #10 cover!

GOLDEN AGE JUSTICE SOCIETY ISSUE! Features on JOHN B. WENTWORTH (Johnny Thunder), LEN SANSONE (The Atom), and BERNARD SACHS (All-Star Comics inker), art by CARMINE INFANTINO, PAUL REINMAN, MART NODELL, STAN ASCHMEIER, BEN FLINTON, and H.G. PETER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more! Cover homage by SHANE FOLEY to a vintage All-Star image by IRWIN HASEN!

Farewell salute to the COMICS BUYER’S GUIDE! TBG/CBG history and remembrances from ALAN LIGHT, MURRAY BISHOFF, MAGGIE THOMPSON, BRENT FRANKENHOFF, “final” CBG columns by MARK EVANIER, TONY ISABELLA, PETER DAVID, FRED HEMBECK, JOHN LUSTIG, classic art by DON NEWTON, MIKE VOSBURG, JACK KIRBY, MIKE NASSER, plus FCA, Mr. Monster, and more!

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CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL with LEGO builders SEAN and STEPHANIE MAYO (known online as Siercon and Coral), other custom animals models from BrickJournal editor JOE MENO, LEGO DINOSAURS with WILL PUGH, plus more minifigure customization by JARED BURKS, AFOLs by cartoonist GREG HYLAND, stepby-step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, and more!

“1970s and ‘80s Legion of Super-Heroes!” LEVITZ interview, the Legion’s Honored Dead, the Cosmic Boy miniseries, a Time Trapper history, the New Adventures of Superboy, Legion fantasy cover gallery by JOHN WATSON, plus BATES, COCKRUM, CONWAY, COLON, GIFFEN, GRELL, JANES, KUPPERBERG, LaROCQUE, LIGHTLE, SCHAFFENBERGER, SHERMAN, STATON, SWAN, WAID, & more! COCKRUM cover!

TENTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! Revisit the 100th, 200th, 300th, 400th, and 500th issues of ‘70s and ‘80s favorites: Adventure, Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, Batman, Brave & Bold, Casper, Detective, Flash, Green Lantern, Showcase, Superman, Thor, Wonder Woman, and more! With APARO, BARR, ENGLEHART, POLLARD, SEKOWSKY, SIMONSON, STATON, and WOLFMAN. DAN JURGENS and RAY McCARTHY cover.

“Incredible Hulk in the Bronze Age!” Looks into Hulk’s mind, his role as a team player, his TV show and cartoon, merchandising, Hulk newspaper strip, Teen Hulk, villain history of the Abomination, art and artifacts by SAL BUSCEMA, JOHN BYRNE, PETER DAVID, KENNETH JOHNSON, BILL MANTLO, AL MILGROM, EARL NOREM, ROGER STERN, HERB TRIMPE, LEN WEIN, new cover by TRIMPE and GERHARD!

“Tryouts, One-Shots, and One-Hit Wonders”! Marvel Premiere, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Feature, Strange Tales, Showcase, First Issue Special, New Talent Showcase, DC’s Dick Tracy tabloid, Sherlock Holmes, Marvel’s Generic Comic Books, BatSquad, Crusader, and Swashbuckler, with BRUNNER, CARDY, COLAN, FRADON, GRELL, PLOOG, TRIMPE, and an ARTHUR ADAMS “Clea” cover!

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Stephan Friedt

Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion, Kang the Conqueror, Immortus, Nathaniel Richards, Living Pharaoh (?!) … villain or hero … descendant of Reed Richards or Victor von Doom … or another version of Dr. Doom himself. The character we know mostly as “Kang” has had all of those identities. Like Daniel Eakins, the subject of David Gerrold’s 1973 Hugo and Nebula Awards-nominated book, The Man Who Folded Himself, Nathaniel Richards of the 30th Century shifted backward and forward frequently enough with his time machine to “fold himself” and exist in separate identities, sometimes in alternate timelines or realities, often in the same time period. He also became a “catch-all” for Marvel writers. If the character time-traveled, he stood a chance of becoming a part of the Kang history. If you wanted to complicate your plotline or get yourself out of a corner … Kang was somehow connected. Bear in mind that each of these stories is not a long, thought-out novel, nor were the authors afforded the time to equate them to a well-crafted screenplay, building and strengthening the characters until we know them intimately. Instead, these are down-and-dirty adventure stories, often written on the fly and by the seat of the pants … rough … sometimes presenting contradictory actions by the players or containing glaring omissions and errors. But if we study each of his appearances chronologically, look at his motives, weapons, powers, and interactions with other Marvel Universe figures, perhaps we can “unfold” the origami known as Kang. SILVER AGE APPEARANCES FIRST FOLD: As Rama-Tut: Fantastic Four #19 (Oct. 1963) – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “Prisoners of the Pharaoh” The Fantastic Four encounter Rama-Tut in ancient Egypt during a search for a cure for blindness. Motive: Boredom and desire for adventure Weapons: Ultra-diode ray, time machine satellite globe Reprinted in Giant-Size Avengers #2 This read more like Stan and Jack’s attempt to give a Marvel Universe explanation for the origins of the Sphinx. Other than the mention of being a descendant of Doom, there are no hints that Rama-Tut would become a major player. Later writers would add to the backstory and complicated history. As Rama-Tut: Fantastic Four Annual #2 (Sept. 1964) – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “The Final Victory of Doctor Doom” Rama-Tut and Dr. Doom meet and discuss their kinship. Motive: Orbiting Earth and plotting the defeat of the Fantastic Four Weapons: Time machine, attractor ray Reprinted in Fantastic Four Annual #7 A vignette inserted into the middle of a Dr. Doom story, this story solidified Rama-Tut’s connections to Dr. Doom, but muddled the waters by inferring that Doom and Rama might be the same person rather than different members of the same lineage.

He’ll Take ’Em On, Any Time Kang threatening the early Avengers, in a 2000 painting by Alex Horley originally published as a lithograph by Dynamic Forces. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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A Villain Who Gets Around (left) Kang as Rama-Tut in Fantastic Four #19 (Oct. 1963). Cover by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman. (right) And he’s back, as Immortus, in The Avengers #10 (Nov. 1964). Cover by Kirby and Chic Stone. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

SECOND FOLD: As Kang: Avengers #8 (Sept. 1964) – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “Kang, the Conqueror!” Kang encounters the Avengers for the first time. Motive: To conqueror the 20th Century Weapons: Anti-gravity rays, anti-matter screen projector, attractor rays, paralysis rays, radiation, time machine Reprinted in Avengers Annual #5 (Jan. 1972) At this point Stan and Jack are developing him into a major Marvel villain, someone to equal Doom and cross series titles whenever necessary. THIRD FOLD: As Immortus: Avengers #10 (Nov. 1964) – Stan Lee and Don Heck “The Avengers Break Up” The first appearance of “Immortus.” Motive: Defeat the Avengers and conquer our time Weapons: Ability to manipulate people and time Reprinted in Marvel Triple Action #5 (Sept. 1972) It’s pretty obvious that Stan had no intention of tying this character to the Kang persona. There were neither hints, nor any telltale clues, that they were connected, other than their common goal of subjugating our century and their ability to move through time. Later writers would use their commonalities to create this fold. As Kang: Avengers #11 (Dec. 1964) – Stan Lee and Don Heck “The Mighty Avengers meet Spider-Man” Kang attacks the Avengers through the use of an android. Motive: Defeat the Avengers Weapons: Atomo-duplicator, iso-nuclear duplicator, Spider-Man robot, time machine, master control panel Reprinted in Avengers Annual #5 (Jan. 1972) How do you build the Marvel Universe? By having the heroes interact across multiple titles… How do you get heroes to battle heroes? Create a misunderstanding or come up with a contrivance that pits them against each other. This story seemed like filler that Stan came up with at the last minute.

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As Kang: Strange Tales #134 (July 1965) – Stan Lee and Bob Powell “The Challenge of … the Watcher!” The Watcher, concerned by Kang’s meddling with medieval England during King Arthur, sends the Human Torch and the Thing back to make corrections. Motive: To change the events of time to remove the very existence of the FF and the Avengers Weapons: Time machine, armor, energy deflector, power lance, energizer Reprinted in The Essential Human Torch #1 (2003) This was a pretty typical Human Torch/Thing story for their run in Strange Tales, but Thing makes a reference to knowing who Kang is and wanting another shot at him, when to this point they had only encountered him as Rama-Tut. I guess super-teams in New York brief each other on their battles. As Kang: Fantastic Four Annual #3 (Summer 1965) – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “Bedlam at the Baxter Building!” Kang makes two cameo appearances among the many villains and heroes that populate the story of Reed and Sue’s wedding. No new information is revealed. Motive: To disrupt the Richards wedding Weapons: None revealed Reprinted in: Fantastic Four Annual #9 (Dec. 1971) with pages 7 and 8 missing Fantastic Four Annual #10 (Mar. 1973) with the pages returned but page 20 missing (one of Jack Kirby’s photo/ art collages) Marvel Visionaries: Stan Lee (2005) in its entirety A throwaway appearance. As Kang: Avengers #23 (Dec. 1965) – Stan Lee and Don Heck “Once an Avenger” Kang captures part of the Avengers and brings them to his own time. We also learn about Kang’s lost love Princess Ravonna. Motive: Defeat the Avengers and convince Princess Ravonna to be his bride.

Weapons: Time machine/ship, thermo-shocks, magnetic retaining wall, spectrum inverter, master control panel, energy beams, molecule expander, spectro wave This one had everything—tons of different weapons, a villain motivated by love, a defiant princess, and the Avengers trounced every time they fought Kang, which led to… As Kang: Avengers #24 (Jan. 1966) – Stan Lee and Don Heck “From the Ashes of Defeat!” The story continues, and we learn more about Kang’s personality … and Princess Ravonna’s fate. Motive: To make Princess Ravonna his bride Weapons: Trick armor, delta-ray launcher, force screen, time machine Reprinted in Marvel Triple Action #18 (May 1974) This was the second part of the two-part arc introducing Kang’s love, Princess Ravonna. It also established Stan Lee’s character development of Kang as a “villain with honor” and susceptible to love. As Kang: Thor #140 (May 1967) – Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “The Growing Man” We are introduced to one of Kang’s favorite creations, the “stimuloid” known as the Growing Man.

Motive: Setting things in place to conquer his century Weapons: Doom-style armor, time machine, de-energizer ray, stimuloid Reprinted in Marvel Spectacular #11 (Nov. 1974) This story provided Jack Kirby with some great battle panels, pitted Kang solo against Thor, and set up the premise that Kang may have hidden weapons throughout time.

Kang UK (right) Courtesy of Heritage, the original art to the Ron Wilson/ Frank Giacoia cover of Marvel UK’s The Avengers #5, from 1973, recreating the classic US Avengers #8 cover (inset) by Kirby and Dick Ayers. (left) A page from “The Growing Man,” from Thor #140 (May 1967), by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Vince Colletta.

FOURTH FOLD: As the Scarlet Centurion – Avengers Annual #2 (Sept. 1968) – Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth “And Time, the Rushing River” (Part 1), “The Avengers Must Die” (Part 2) A two-part story that takes place in an alternate timeline caused by Kang. Weapons: Super-scientific arsenal Motive: Conquer mankind Reprinted in part in Marvel Super Action #16 (Feb. 1980) Reprinted complete in Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers #6 (2006) With this story, Roy Thomas joins the squad of creators adding to Kang’s history, further cementing the connection between Rama-Tut, Dr. Doom, and Kang … with this added fold of the Scarlet Centurion.

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having your heroes look powerless or inept. That’s what I don’t like about [Kang]. It’s not easy to find ways for the Avengers to defeat him. But, overall, he’s a great villain. I’d say that Kang is to the Avengers as Dr. Doom is the Fantastic Four, or Magneto is to the X-Men. Kurt Busiek would pick up the mantle starting in the late 1990s and carry it even further…

Kang was to appear in the original Justice League/Avengers DC/Marvel crossover of the 1980s. Here’s a penciled page by Pérez featuring our spotlighted villain. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Perhaps we’ll be able to continue our look at Kang and cover those later stories in a future article. Only time will tell… STEPHAN “SHADOW” FRIEDT can be found online at comicspriceguide.com.

Photo by Carla Friedt.

Crossing Over

The other villains who showed up in the first dozen issues—Loki, the Sub-Mariner, the Lava Men, the Mole Man, and rest of the original Masters of Evil— had all originated outside of the Avengers book. Well, okay, there was Immortus, but he didn’t return for years, and when he did finally reappear, it was revealed that he was another incarnation of Kang. So, Kang was the Avengers’ first new, recurring villain powerful enough to take on the whole team by himself. He’s one tough customer. Kang is a conquering warlord who has ruled over whole star systems in several different centuries. He has huge armies and the resources of whole worlds that he can call upon if he needs them. And he can travel through time. Kang can be stymied by the Avengers, go off and lick his wounds, and then return not long after his “defeat” to attack them again … which is more or less what Steve Englehart had him do. That’s a great advantage. That’s what I like about Kang. He’s almost impossible to stop. Being a time traveler, he’s caused so many divergent realities, that—even if you do stop him— another one of him may pop up to fight again. Of course, that can also be a disadvantage to the writer. You can’t go to that well too often, without

KURT BUSIEK comments (via email – Dec. 2012): What I like about Kang is that he’s essentially a romantic. He became what he is because he was bored, in a safe, automated future, and he dreamed of adventure, of daring, of carving out a legend that could rock the galaxies. So he set out to do it, and he did. That’s great. It’s nice and simple and primal. This is a guy who could, if he wanted to, travel back in time and strangle the Avengers in their cribs. But he doesn’t, because what he wants isn’t an easy victory. What he wants is a challenge. He wants to face the Avengers at their strongest, at their most formidable, and beat them anyway, not because he’s sneaky, but because he’s just that much of a badass. Can’t help but like a guy like that. The long-lasting Ravonna storyline, where he fell in love with her and then she sacrificed herself for him, so he kept her in suspended animation until he could find a way to bring her back—that fed into the idea of him as a romantic dreamer, too, as a guy who had the vision and passion to do big, big things, and who was driven by his heart more than his head. Doing Avengers Forever with Carlos Pacheco one of the real treats was that Carlos wanted to make Kang feel like that kind of romantic, grand-scale badass warrior without actually changing his costume. So he set out to imagine a world in which macho, conquering badass warlords wore pinstriped magenta hip boots—and he delivered on it, by making him a kind of SF spin on a Louis IV world—his weapons had insets and filigree, his world was rich and textured and rococo. By creating a visual world in which his costume made sense, Carlos made Kang all the more convincing, all the more emotionally compelling, without actually changing him, just giving him the proper setting.

Christopher Larochelle

People just can’t seem to get enough of celebrities. Magazines and TV shows try to unravel every detail of their lives, and often it’s amazing that we care. From basketball stars toting the latest and greatest cell phone to the actress endorsing the newest beauty product, corporations know that these famous people will motivate others to spend their hard-earned cash. In a world with superheroes, wouldn’t this be the role that the costumed crusaders would be filling? Booster Gold is just that kind of hero. He is a hero who might not always be likable, but he sure knows how to play the game. He has his fingers in every pie he can see, with deals to make everything from movies to cars and sugar-filled breakfast cereals that bear his trademark. Like many celebrities, people seem to love him despite his many publicly revealed faults. There is really only one person who can be credited with creating Booster Gold from the ground up: dan jurgens Dan Jurgens. Prior to breaking out with Booster Gold, Jurgens had just a few credits to his name at DC Comics. He had done some work on Mike Grell’s Warlord before landing a gig on the Sun Devils maxiseries. Jurgens’ work over the course of those 12 issues proved to be an invaluable stepping stone toward the existence of the Booster Gold series. Gerry Conway started the maxiseries as writer with Jurgens penciling, but by Sun Devils’ midpoint, it was entirely Jurgens’ project, writing and art. “After issue #6, I stepped in as writer,” Jurgens says. “That became instrumental in me deciding that I could do this, both write and draw a series.” Booster has gone down in history as the first postCrisis original character in the DC Universe. He certainly made his mark as a fresh and new face among the many characters populating DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths-based relaunch of the mid-1980s. The fact that Booster was introduced at that particular time proved serendipitous for a young creator with his own idea. “The editors were looking for some new ideas and approaches in general,” says Jurgens. “I was a guest at a convention in Dallas, and happened to have a breakfast meeting with [then-DC editorial director] Dick Giordano. We were discussing various books and projects I might move on to at DC. In the course of all this, I mentioned Booster. I said, ‘Look, I have this idea, and here it is. This is how it can work, this is who it is, this is how it fits in with the DC Universe … I can write it and draw it.’ And Dick thought about it and said, ‘Get me something on paper.’ And it was a go!” The first Booster Gold ongoing series was something that went wherever Jurgens wanted it to go. “It was

Booster Buzz This DC house ad from late 1985 pitched a new kind of hero, Booster Gold. Art by Dan Jurgens and Mike DeCarlo. TM & © DC Comics.

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