Last August, I was playing around with webcasting. Apart from recording panels for things like Comic-Con@Home, I gave it up. I kinda realized that if there was anything the world didn't need, it was one more guy doing webcasts. Nothing against those of you who have them but you have to admit: There isn't exactly a shortage of you.
But I was glad I gave it a shot and very happy with some of them, especially a 95-minute chat I recorded with my old friend/partner Steve Sherman. As you probably know, Steve passed away a little over a month ago. He was a splendid, creative human being and I'm glad I have that conversation to remind me of that; not that there's any chance I would ever forget.
There was a lot of comic book history in there and for the record, I think I need to correct/clarify a few minor things. For instance, discussing our 1970 trip to New York, Steve said we'd visited the offices of Warren Publishing, which was the company that put out Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and Famous Monsters of Filmland. He did. I didn't. I took one day of the trip to take the train up to Hartford to see my grandparents and Steve went to Warren on that day…I think with Mike Royer, who was then drawing for the company and rooming with us.
In the video, Steve and I talked about our visits to the Marvel offices and somehow left out the person we spent the most time talking with…Marie Severin. What a charming, affable, funny lady. And there was another person working in the office we forgot to mention: Stu Schwartzberg, who ran the photocopy machine and did other production chores. We also should have mentioned how much time John Romita (Sr.) and Herb Trimpe gave us.
I also had a nice, long conversation one of those days with Larry Lieber, who dropped by. I told a funny story about that day here. And I told a story about our time with Stan Lee on that trip on this page.
Steve and I reminisced about our visit to the offices of MAD and I mentioned how on the way in, we passed the great artist Wally Wood coming out and I wondered, "What's he doing here?" Someone wrote in to tell me — like I might not know this — that Mr. Wood was one of the mainstay artists in MAD beginning with issue #1. True, of course. But at the time of that visit, he hadn't worked for MAD for six years. (One last Wood art job — a two-pager — turned up in MAD the following year. I don't know when it was done.)
At the comic convention we attended a few days later, I got to sit and talk with Mr. Wood for about 45 minutes and I found out why he was up at MAD that day. He had a presentation for a magazine he wanted to do…a publication more or less in the format of Creepy or Eerie but with some color inside and several regular strips featuring women without a lot of clothing…or in most cases, any.
He showed me a few pages of it. Everything was, of course, magnificently drawn and I remember wondering why some publisher hadn't grabbed it up yet. If there was anything that was commercial in 1970, it was naked women drawn by Wally Wood. Some of that material did see print in various places but I still find it hard to fathom that the magazine itself never happened.
He had been to MAD to show it to MAD's publisher, Bill Gaines, just in case Gaines was interested in publishing a new magazine. Gaines was not and according to Wood, not because this one was risqué. He quoted Gaines saying, "I'm very happy publishing MAD. I don't need the aggravation of publishing anything else." That seems to have been Gaines' reaction to every chance he had to expand his empire.
Also, we left dozens of names out of the list of comic book writers, artists and editors we met during that trip, either at some publisher's office or at the 1970 New York Comic Art Convention. They include Wood, Gene Colan, Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, Jim Steranko, Bob Brown, Howie Post, Denny O'Neil, Sal Amendola, Byron Preiss, Joe Kubert, Robert Kanigher, Jack Adler, Nelson Bridwell and I'll probably think of ten more after I post this list. It was quite a week for meeting people whose work we'd followed for years.
Steve and I also did a bad job telling the quite-unimportant story of our flight to New York. I'll write a separate post about that soon not because it's important — it couldn't be less so — but because it'll be easier for you to skip it in its entirety if I give it its own post.
And there were probably a few other places where one or both of us misspoke. I know we left out lots of good stories. I'll watch it again in a week or two and see if anything else cries out for correction or amplification.