Before you read this, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4…
This chapter is about Chuck Cuidera. As mentioned back in Part 1, Cuidera was there at the beginning of Blackhawk, sometimes as an artist and sometimes as the inker who inked the work of another artist. He was involved in the feature's creation but I'm not prepared to say exactly how. Will Eisner, best known as the creator of The Spirit, was the boss then and he too was involved, as was artist Bob Powell. All three men have been cited as the strip's creator.
As mentioned in Part 3, Blackhawk underwent a major overhaul in 1967 as Carmine Infantino, newly installed in the editorial division of DC Comics, began making changes — some sweeping — in almost every comic they published. One of the major alterations he made was to break down the old system where each DC editor had a small group of freelancers who worked almost exclusively for that editor. He began moving freelancers around like chess pieces, discarding a few and moving others to different books with different editors. Ross Andru, for example, had drawn almost exclusively for comics edited by Robert Kanigher. Under the new system, Andru was routinely assigned to comics edited by Mort Weisinger or Julius Schwartz or anyone in the office.
Comics he penciled had almost always been inked by Mike Esposito. Comics penciled by Dick Dillin (like Blackhawk) were usually inked by Chuck Cuidera. Carmine decided to experiment by having inkers ink pencilers they had not inked in the past. Dillin soon proved to be quite valuable penciling super-hero comics, especially when not inked by Cuidera. So what to do with Chuck?
He inked a few other comics here and there and they weren't happy with him here or there. Then he penciled and inked a four-page war story that was published in Our Army at War #198. It looked like the art had been heavily retouched by Joe Kubert, who had taken over as editor of the war titles from Kanigher. Then Mr. Cuidera disappeared from comics…or at least any comics that I purchased.
I've always been interested in the men and women who create comic books. Honestly, I'm more interested in them than in the characters they write and/or draw…and I think some of them are more remarkable than the super-heroes they bring us. I was curious why a guy like Chuck Cuidera, who'd been working in comic books since 1940, suddenly vanished from the industry around 1969. I'd never met Chuck and really knew nothing about him except which books he'd worked on.
But I wondered: If a man specializes in one career for almost three decades, where does he then go to start a new career? Cuidera, I later learned, broke into comics around 1939 and was primarily an inker for most of those decades. Where did he go when he broke out (or was shoved out) of the business at the age of 53?
Visiting the DC offices in June of 1970, I got to talking with Nelson Bridwell, who was an assistant editor up there and the office's foremost Guy Who Knew Everything. We were discussing all the changes and hirings and firings that had occurred there in the previous year or three. When I asked about Cuidera, Nelson told me the following story. I am here reporting what he said then. I am not saying this is what actually happened.
He said Chuck was given a few assignments inking other artists and Carmine didn't like the results. (One of those he inked was Carmine.) So they gave Chuck some short war stories to draw and he did them and Carmine didn't like those results, either. He directed Kubert to do serious art corrections on at least one (the one that was published) and Nelson thought the others were discarded. Then they tried to figure out what else to try him on.
Before anyone came up with a thought, Chuck visited the office and happened to see the "corrected" pages. He blew up, stormed into Kubert's office and yelled at him and said he never wanted to work for that #@&*%@!!! company again. Fill in the curse words of your choice. Then he stormed out…out of the office and out of DC Comics forever.
This is what Nelson told me had happened, not long before…but Nelson had not witnessed any of this. It's what he'd been told so, he said, "That may not be exactly what happened." But it is true that Cuidera never worked for DC (or any publisher of comic books again) and only one of those war stories he'd drawn was ever printed.
Ten, maybe fifteen years later, I got to know Joe Kubert pretty well and we spent an evening or two at a comic book convention dining and hanging out. Joe loved to talk about comics and the people he'd worked with and when I asked him about Cuidera, he said something like, "We gave Chuck some war stories to draw and it didn't work out. Maybe he was rusty, all those years of inking and not penciling. He was unhappy having his work corrected. So were a lot of guys."
Joe went on to say that during the period in question, he thought the DC editorial division was too "handsy" with the artwork by freelancers, too eager to look at a page and say, "Oh, we need to fix this." He thought it was the proper move at times but it was done too often and sometimes too gratuitously as a kind of Power Move. As we all know, Jack Kirby's work during this period for DC was often heavily revised by folks in the office.
Kubert felt that was wrong and that he himself had done too much retouching on artists' work. Some of that was on the orders of his superiors but some of it was on his own volition. He recalled Cuidera being furious but perhaps not quite as furious as Nelson described. But remember Nelson did not witness the blow-up…if indeed there was one.
I asked Joe if he knew what had become of Chuck. Many of the guys who were fired or who quit when Infantino took over at DC quickly surfaced at Marvel or elsewhere…but Chuck had truly disappeared from the industry. Joe said that comics were a part-time profession for Chuck. He was very much involved with scuba diving, both as a trainer and as someone who sold and even designed equipment. That one published war story over which they almost came to blows was about scuba divers. It's a good bet it was assigned to Chuck for that reason, perhaps even written with him in mind.
Joe recalled hearing something about Chuck getting involved in city planning. "Someone told me he was on the city council or some sort of office in Essex, New Jersey. If you ever find out anything about him, please let me know."
That conversation was around 1985 or so. I heard nothing about Chuck Cuidera but around April or May of 1999, I was having a phone conversation with my friend Dave Siegel. Dave was then a cab driver in Las Vegas with a great interest in old comic books and in the folks who made them. He loved to track down guys who'd worked in comics, especially in the forties, and who had long since disappeared from the field. Dave had been instrumental in getting some of them invited to San Diego Comic-Cons (the annual event now known as Comic-Con International) and he was the main mover behind the annual Golden Age Panel that I moderated until we ran out of folks who qualified to be on it.
That day in '99, he asked me if I had any idea what had become of Chuck Cuidera, the Blackhawk guy. I told him what Kubert had told me and Dave began working the phone. Before the day was out, he called me back and said, "I found Chuck Cuidera! He's alive and well! Do you think we could get him invited as a Guest of Honor at San Diego this year?" It turned out we could. The convention has always been very good about that kind of thing.
In those years, Will Eisner was a regular at the con so naturally, the thought arose of doing a panel with Will and Chuck discussing their work together on Blackhawk and other comics. I called a friend who had dealt recently with Eisner to get Will's current contact info. He gave it to me but cautioned that he sensed there might be some sort of bad blood between Eisner and Cuidera. "You could be opening old wounds," he said. Maybe so but I didn't think it could hurt to ask.
He'd given me Will's fax number so I wrote a note and faxed it his way, mentioning that I'd heard a rumor he didn't get along with Chuck but I was hoping that was not the case. And if it was not the case, would he appear on a panel with Chuck at the con? Then I waited. And waited. Two weeks passed and I was thinking maybe I'd touched some nerve or something and upset the great Will Eisner. That was until I received a fax from Will. I'll let you read it in his own handwriting…
The panel was arranged at a time convenient for all and it went very well and there's a partial transcript of it on this blog. You can read the first part of it here and the second part of it here.
You will notice that when we got to the part about Chuck getting out of comics, I asked him, "Was there a specific event? Were you not getting enough work? Were you tired of it?" I was thinking about the fabled altercation with Joe Kubert and wondering what he'd say. And as you can also notice, he just said he got out because he wasn't making enough money, which in and of itself was almost certainly true. He wasn't getting a lot of work and the work he was getting didn't pay enough to keep your head above water. Which is important in this world even if you aren't a scuba diver.
When we were alone after the panel, I asked him about the Kubert incident and he said it absolutely did not happen. Everything about his exit from DC was cordial and he left just because he wanted to go do something that would pay better. He said that getting out of comics when he did and getting into his new profession was one of the best things that ever happened to him
You can believe that or not. I can certainly believe he was happy with his new profession and income. But given what Nelson Bridwell and Joe Kubert told me, I wonder how voluntary it was.
But hey, maybe that's the way Chuck honestly remembered it. It's a good example of a problem some of us run into trying to record comic book history. In fact, it probably applies to most kinds of history that is preserved only in some memories, not on paper. Often, differing accounts all fit together fairly neatly but sometimes, they don't…as with the question of who created Blackhawk in the first place.
Chuck Cuidera passed away in 2001. I remain grateful to Dave Siegel for locating him and getting him to the 1999 convention so that we could meet Chuck and he could get some applause and an Inkpot Award. I suspect that appearance led to DC Comics sending him some very nice amounts of money for reprints or other services and I believe he was invited to a few other cons.
And I agree with something Will Eisner said on that panel. He said, "Chuck Cuidera made Blackhawk what it was…and he should get the credit." For that, those of us who loved the comic — especially if we worked on it — should all be grateful to both Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera. And I like that Chuck's story seems to have had a happy ending.