Todd Klein's Blog, page 158

JOHN WORKMAN & TODD KLEIN Part 2

Todd Klein, Robert Greenberger and John Workman at our panel.

What follows is the second part of the transcription of a panel that John and I did at the 2017 Baltimore Comic-Con moderated by our friend and former co-worker at DC, Bob Greenberger. I recorded it on my phone and transcribed it later. The panel was held on Sept. 23rd. Both John and I have edited our comments to make them clearer and more correct and complete. (As John puts it, “to make sense of my incoherencies.”) This picks up about a quarter of the way through the slide show I put together for the panel. For these posts, I’ve reformatted the images to fit better here, and in some cases have links to larger versions. All images are © the respective companies and copyright holders.

HEAVY METAL staff, 1981, by Workman.

Todd Klein: This is a piece by John of the HEAVY METAL staff, and I thought this was interesting not only because John drew and lettered it, but also because of how small the staff is. They were putting out a monthly magazine?

John Workman: A monthly and specials. Also, I worked a lot for NATIONAL LAMPOON at the same time.

Bob Greenberger: Put out by the same company.

JW: Yeah.

TK: A lot of material for that size staff.

BG: The publisher Len Mogul who we talked about earlier is the top left head.

From NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1978.

TK: And here’s a picture of John in a NATIONAL LAMPOON humor article, which I enjoyed.

JW: We did occasional modeling for different articles, so I was a policeman in one thing, and a protester protesting nothing in another one, and this guy, and various other things. Fun stuff to do.

From NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1978.

TK: Here’s one of John’s efforts in a Foto Funnies for NATIONAL LAMPOON. You want to talk about that?

JW: This is a lesson for anyone who wants to be creative in any way and it also talks about a particular weakness of mine. I have to tell you, my wife is involved a lot in this particular thing. She was working for one of the Wall Street firms, and one of the guys she worked with was a fellow named John Badalamente, who was a very nice guy, had a very interesting life, and weighed about 450 pounds…a big fellow. One Saturday morning, Cathy and I were going to a grocery store. On the way, we started kidding about how John was not really John Badalamente…he was Elvis Presley, and he had faked his death and was now living in Brooklyn. As we kidded about this, we realized that we had what could be a possible Foto Funny for Lampoon, so when we got back from the store, I sat down and, in 15 minutes, I drew up a Foto Funny in comics form. I took it into the office on Monday figuring I’d show it to the Lampoon people, but I made the mistake of first showing it to one of my compatriots, I won’t tell you who, and that person said, “I don’t really think Lampoon would be interested in it.” So, discouraged, I tossed it into my desk drawer and went about my work. But my wife, bless her, kept bugging me about it. She would call at the end of the day and say, “Did you show that to Lampoon?”

Finally, to get Cathy off my back, I thought, “I’ll go down to the Lampoon offices, show my Foto Funny to the editor, and he can say, ‘thanks but no thanks,’ and that’ll be it.” I took the Foto Funny downstairs to P.J. O’Rourke’s office, and P.J. was not in. So, I left it on his desk with a little note. By the time I got back up to my office the phone was ringing, and it was P.J., and he said, “Yeah! Do this!” So, I got together with a photographer, and Cathy and I talked John Badalamente into playing Elvis. I directed the thing in Central Park, and I was feeling like the poor man’s Harvey Kurtzman because he used to do the same sort of photo stories for HELP and for PLAYBOY, and here I was following in his footsteps. The Elvis Foto Funny was printed, and it went through the roof. Everyone loved it. It sold to different countries, and I got extra money for that. The head of the company, Matty Simmons, loved it so much that he wanted to use it on one of the phonograph albums that Lampoon did. Try as hard as they might, they couldn’t translate the visual part of that into just sound, so it didn’t appear there.

But Let this be a lesson to you. If you come up with an idea that you think is good, stick to it. You may be wrong, but if somebody says “No, no, no,” don’t listen to them. Stick to your guns.

TK: I agree with that.

Illostratos by Klein, 1974. A larger image is HERE.

TK: This is something I did for a literary magazine in 1974 when I was doing fanzine art and later on when John was at HEAVY METAL, he asked, “Do you have anything I could use?” I thought of this and I showed it to him, and he said, “Yeah, I can use that,” so he did. And I actually got paid quite a bit for this thing that I’d done for free. (laughter)

BG: In other words, don’t throw anything out.

TK: Right!

June 2483 by Klein & Murphy Anderson, Sept. 1983.

TK: This is another thing that John was instrumental in, he had a series called “June 2050” because of his birthday.

JW: Yeah, I was born on June 20th of 1950, but the little stories in this series are set in June of the year 2050 … which seemed a long way off in the early 1980s.

TK: He was commissioning various people to do one-pagers for this series, it was all one-pagers I think.

JW: Yeah. Jack Harris [in the audience] wrote several of them.

TK: John said, “Do you have any ideas?” And I said, “Yeah, if I can find a good artist.” Fortunately, Murphy Anderson, who was a very good artist agreed to do this with us, and it was perfect for him because he was a big Buck Rogers fan, so this is he and his wife pretending to be Buck and [Buck’s partner] Wilma, and we all enjoyed that one.

JW: And, of course, Murphy had drawn Buck.

TK: Yes, he had been an artist on Buck Rogers comics and newspaper strips.

B.J. Butterfly by Workman, 1981.

TK: John, do you want to talk about B.J. Butterfly?

JW: Yeah, this is a slightly different version of it than what appeared in HEAVY METAL. She was unclothed in the original, and it was in black and white. There’s a bit of a story here, I’ll quickly tell it. I saw a movie years ago that I thought I would hate, but that turned out to be wonderful. It was called “Red Sky at Morning,” and was based on a novel by Richard Bradford, if I remember correctly. When it ran on network TV, it was censored as I expected, but also they dropped really stupid, insipid narration into this beautifully done movie that was set in the 1940s. When it appeared on TV in the 1970s, every mid-70s cliché was in this dumb narration. The movie has never been released to any kind of home video, so you can only see the NBC version. I wrote this little story about a girl from another dimension who comes into our world to watch old movies that she’s wild about, and she and the cat there have little talks about singers from the 1950s. It’s an unusual one. I did two of them, but in this one, I wanted to say something about how dumb those NBC people were.

STARSTRUCK by Michael Wm. Kaluta and Elaine Lee, 1981. Larger version HERE.

TK: And here’s me on an early page from STARSTRUCK where I got to use a lot of different styles, as I was saying. There’s a few in this one already but there were pages that had a lot more than this. Mike and Elaine would look at what I had done and think of other things I could do that were even more difficult, so it just kept growing and growing, sort of like SANDMAN. I should add that I did not do the handwritten letter on this page, that’s all Kaluta.

BATMAN # 404, Feb. 1987, cover and interior page.

TK: This is my first high-profile story for DC, “Batman: Year One”  by Miller and Mazzucchelli, which at the time was just four issues of the regular BATMAN comic because there were no special series then. If you had a Batman story it ran in BATMAN or DETECTIVE, that was all they had. It’s still in print. I think it’s the oldest thing I’ve done that’s been continuously in print. I also designed the logo from a thumbnail by Frank Miller.

[I was wrong about this. UNTOLD LEGEND OF THE BATMAN was a 1980 three-issue series by Len Wein, John Byrne and Jim Aparo, but what had much more impact was Frank Miller’s BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS from 1986, a four-issue square-bound series, the year before “Year One.” Mini-series featuring DC’s main characters was still a new idea at the time, though. That would soon change.]

TIME TWISTERS #12, 1986 by Workman.

TK: TIME TWISTERS, John?

BG: Oh, that was a fun one.

JW: It’s one of my favorite pieces of my own art because it all just flowed right out. Usually I have to fight that piece of paper to make everything work, but this one was so easy, and I loved drawing all the monsters. There’s a little tip of the hat to Wally Wood down near her feet there, that character with the big eyes, and then off to the left the orange guy is sort of my hello to Moebius. It was great fun. It was printed in eight different countries in eight different languages and I never saw the other seven. But I wrote and drew several covers for the company. There was another one with a lot of dialogue on it, it looked like an early ‘50s EC in that respect, and they got so mad at me because they had to translate it and reletter it in seven languages. That was the last one I did for them. (laughter)

THOR #364, Feb. 1986 by Walt Simonson and Workman.

TK: One of John’s big hits early on.

JW: The Thor frog, yeah.

TK: You did talk about Walter a little bit.

JW: Yeah, yeah.

TK: It’s one of my favorite pages, and I love the sound effect, too.

From THOR #400, at top pencils/lettering by Workman, bottom inked by Sinnott.

TK: This is one people may not have seen before, a pin-up you did for THOR.

JW: For the 400th issue of THOR I did a drawing of Sif, Thor’s lady friend, and I asked before I even started on it if Joe Sinnott could ink it, and they said yes, and I was so thrilled. I did tighter pencils than I should have. I found out later that Joe likes to work with loose pencils, but he did a beautiful job on the inks, and he did things I never would have thought of, the background elements and all. Clouds are hard to do. I don’t know if you can see mine, they’re kind of “eh,” but Joe did them beautifully.

TK: Those boots remind me of the Wicked Witch of the West.

BG: That’s right, yeah, especially with the stripes.

OMEGA MEN #26 cover, OMEGA MEN #27 interior art by Shawn McManus, 1985.

TK: This was a series I wrote and lettered. It was kind of cool to have my name on the cover, because that was something DC was just starting with then, giving cover credits to the creators. I also designed the logo.

BG: I got to DC in ’84 and OMEGA MEN was floating along there. Then Todd came in with Shawn McManus. It was one of the under-appreciated runs on a book from that era because everyone was focused on the bigger, shinier stuff, but this was solid science fiction at a time when there wasn’t a lot of science fiction being done in comics, and I have to give Todd a lot of props for making that work. (applause)

TK: Thanks.

BG: Uncollected and worth a find in the dollar bins.

TK: Yeah, they’re not too expensive, you can get ‘em cheap. I really loved Shawn’s artwork and especially his covers, which were wonderful.

Interior art from SANDMAN #1, 1989 and SANDMAN #63, 1994.

TK: And then SANDMAN came along. This is the tile page of the first issue and just a random page from later in the run. I guess I’ve talked about that a lot of times, but it was really fun all along, and in the beginning, nobody was paying attention so we could do what we wanted, which was nice. If we wanted to do something weird, nobody had any problems with it. As it got further along it became more difficult for Neil [Gaiman] because he knew everybody was watching and paying attention, so he felt like he had to keep topping himself. That’s finally, I think, what did it in because he ran out of things that could top what he’d done before.

Interior art from DOOM PATROL #62, Dec. 1992.

TK: John did DOOM PATROL around the same time. Want to talk about that at all?

JW: It was so strange. (To Greenberger) Well, you edited…

BG: Yeah. DOOM PATROL #19 we brought in a new creative team and I stripped it down so that everybody was new, and I picked John because I knew I wanted a distinct, atmospheric look to the lettering to match Grant Morrison’s scripts and Richard Case’s pencil art. You just ran with it and stuck with the run of the book, right?

JW: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Richard, I’m sure, did the title on that and I just inked it, but the one thing I remember about that whole run, I got the pencils to have a go at my lettering on them, and there was one drawing of the little girl…

BG: Yeah, Dorothy.

JW: …and it was so beautiful. And I thought, “Now this is going to be inked, and it’s going to change the character of the whole thing. It will still be nice, but it won’t be that penciled panel.” So, I went over to an ad agency near where I live and I had them make a screened shot of the panel that I liked so much. I had even figured out the number of dots per inch after the reduction, what I would need…

BG: His production experience came in handy.

JW: …and I gave DC their choice of going with the inked version or the penciled version, and they went with the penciled version. Was it Danny Vozzo who colored it?

BG: Yes.

JW: It looked like a painting, he really did a great job.

BG: DOOM PATROL’s one of the books DC decided was weird enough that, when they started doing in-house coloring, we could play with that and let the coloring help keep the book atmospheric and different. He played a lot with the skin tones so Dorothy was really pale, and some of the others were different, so it all worked together.

ROMA by Workman.

TK: Another piece by John, this is something you’ve done a lot of versions of, right?

JW: Yeah, this goes back to 1963. I saw an episode of “The Outer Limits,” and somewhere Alan Moore was watching the same episode of “The Outer Limits.” It was about these scientists trying to fool people into stopping their fighting by presenting them with a fake villain that was supposedly going to come after them. He turned that idea into WATCHMEN, and I turned it into ROMA. Somewhere along in there I also read a book called “The 27th Day,” and then I saw the Gene Barry movie later on. It was the same sort thing, these aliens…well, I won’t go into it, but it was, “How do you get people to stop their fighting?” I did ROMA starting in earnest around 1980 or 81. It was supposed to go into HEAVY METAL. It didn’t. It wound up being serialized in DARK HORSE PRESENTS. This particular incarnation of it is part of the most recent printing where I reformatted the whole thing, added some new stuff and published it as a graphic novel.

TOM STRONG #3 front cover, PROMETHEA #1 interior page, 1999.

TK: I had worked with Alan Moore even in his early days at DC. I lettered a couple of SWAMP THINGs, and when I was writing OMEGA MEN, Alan was briefly my backup writer. He wrote backup stories in the first few. That was kind of interesting! I just loved his writing. I did work with him again on a series called SUPREME for Image, and then when that fell apart, we put together the America’s Best Comics universe with various titles that I lettered most of, and I did all the design work for the covers, and a lot of the interior design. I was kind of the art director for it, unofficially. That was a lot of fun, it was a great project. Unfortunately, it spoiled me for later design work because, every other design job I’ve had since you had to please a whole bunch of different people, which was not as much fun. All I had to please with this one was myself and Alan. (laughter)

ARCHIE story written, pencilled and lettered by Workman, 2003.

TK (To John): This is your Archie story.

JW: Oh, yeah. I had always wanted to do the writing and artwork on an Archie story and the writing and artwork on a Batman story. I still have to do Batman. I did this in 2003. It was one of the earliest things I did for Archie’s publishers. I didn’t want to ink it, I was hoping they’d give it to Bob Smith to ink, but they gave it to John D’Agostino. He did a fine job overall. He did one odd thing. This story is taking place on a beach on a bright, sunshiny day. In the middle panel on the second page at the top John put solid black in the background, I never could quite figure that one out. Anyway, it was fun. writing and drawing and lettering it. I’ve written other stuff for Archie and they reprint them a lot, which is nice. I finally got my wish to do Archie.

TK: I love those balloon tails, they’re so cool.

FABLES #1 cover and interior page, 2002.

TK: In 2002, I started working on FABLES, which turned out to be my longest-running and largest franchise. 150 issue of FABLES, 50 issues of JACK OF FABLES and lots of other miniseries and spinoffs.

BG: You do ‘em all?

TK: I did ‘em all, yes.

BG: Wow.

TK: Every Fables page has been lettered by me. That was a huge amount of work, and when it was over I was really tired. (laughter)

TK: An interesting thing about FABLES, in the beginning there was no set artist, it was going to be like SANDMAN where they would change artists regularly, have different artists do different arcs. Lan Medina did the initial arc and Mark Buckingham did the second arc, and they were both working at the same time. Bucky (Mark) just loved it so much he said, “I want to be the regular artist.” He muscled his way in there and was the regular artist for most of the rest of the series.

Neil Gaiman and Todd Klein, 2007, photo by Jose Villarrubia.

TK: Me and Neil, 2007, just to get a photo in there. This is at Alan Moore’s wedding.

John Workman and Frank Thorne, 2010, photo by Klein.

TK: And here’s John and artist Frank Thorne at John’s 60th birthday party.

JW: We combined it with Frank’s 80th birthday.

TK: Ah, I wasn’t sure why you were both in front of the birthday sign, but now I know.

BG: That’s cool!

TK: It’s a nice picture of you both, I think.

JW: Ah, yeah.

SANDMAN OVERTURE #2 interior page, May 2014.

TK: I came back to SANDMAN in 2014, and of course Neil didn’t want to do the same thing he’d done before, so we went way overboard on the lettering on this one. Then J.H. Williams III went way overboard on the art, and it turned out pretty good.

RAGNARÖK #12, 2016, by Walt Simonson and Workman, pencils and finished art.

TK: And John is doing RAGNARÖK.

JW: Yup. On the boards, on the actual artwork.

TK: Above is a page of Walt’s art, lettered. That’s what he gets from Simonson. Not much there, very sketchy. It’s kind of like a Joe Kubert layout.

JW: Oh, yeah.

TK: And below is the finished page. When you’re the writer, the penciler and the inker you can go pretty loose on the pencils I think.

BATMAN #16, April 2017.

TK: This is a recent BATMAN story that John lettered. Anything to say about that?

JW: Yeah. They restarted BATMAN for the third time, I guess…

TK: Probably more than three. (laughter)

JW: Tom King is the writer and David Finch the artist on that. I loved the artwork and Tom’s writing is very good. That first one was an especially difficult page because of all the jumping around of viewpoint and time on those first three panels.

BG: I really like those vertical oval shapes on a number of the panels to fit the words in without obscuring the art. That is a creative touch.

JW: That is the most fun as far as doing this stuff on the computer. Again, this is hand-lettered into the computer, but where I have my real fun is in the placement of the balloons. I move things around a lot, trying to make everything work. I did three versions of an Archie page recently just to make one that worked.

BG: Wow.

TK: Unfortunately, choices give you things that take more time sometimes.

JW: Right.

BATMAN: WHITE KNIGHT #1, Oct. 2017.

TK: And this is a new Batman series that I’m lettering that has not come out yet, but it will be starting in October I believe. Sean Murphy is writing and doing all the art and I’m lettering it. It’s a pretty cool series. It’s called BATMAN: WHITE KNIGHT. There might be a bit of reference to BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT, I don’t know…and that’s it for the slides. (applause)

BG: Before I open this up to questions, we always talk about influences and all and even though both of you got into the field not necessarily wanting to be letterers, this is what you’re best known for. Once you started doing the lettering, did you go back and look at the comics you read growing up and pay more attention to the lettering and figure out which letterers were really impressive to you?

TK: I got into comics history more and more as I got older, especially when I started doing my blog because I wanted material to write about. I started researching the guys I grew up with like Ira Schnapp and Gaspar Saladino, who was a friend and role-model. Yeah, I did start looking a lot more at that stuff and thinking about what they did and how they did it. It’s a great subject to explore.

BG: Todd’s blog talks about the things he’s read, talks about things he’s done, about the birds he watches and the work he’s currently doing, but the history stuff, the deep drill down into these early letterers and the people who gave DC its unique look early on, Gaspar and others… he did a multi-part on the DC offices in its different buildings complete with floor plans where we could reconstruct them. Just amazing stuff if you like any of that history.

How about you, John? Influences.

JW: Moebius was a huge influence. Very early on, when I realized that my lettering was awful, I thought, “Well, I’m gonna steal.” And I looked at John Costanza and Ben Oda and Gaspar especially and tried to do what they were doing. I took a 1946 issue of COMIC CAVALCADE, and I liked the lettering on, I think, the Green Lantern story, so I looked at the A’s and I made a million A’s, and the B’s and made a million B’s and such, and that helped. As I said, I don’t think I hit any sort of truly professional level until I was up at DC and actually cranking out the stuff there…the first BATMAN book that I lettered was one that Mike Grell drew, and I thought, “Oh, Grell’s gonna kill me, I’m destroying his artwork.” I still think I did a lousy job, but they kept giving things to me. I hope I’m learning to this day. You learn by doing.

TK: And one influence I left out was you, John Workman, because when I started at DC, you were one of the guys who I was looking at and admiring their work, and you helped me get started with techniques and tools and all that. You were one of my mentors.

Lettering legend Tom Orzechowski with Todd at his table, Baltimore Comic-Con.

BG: There are a lot of letterers these days, but early on there weren’t that many. It was a little fraternity, you all talked to each other and shared tips and… (to Tom Orzechowski in the audience, shaking his head) …no?

TO: I was in San Francisco, I didn’t talk to anybody.

BG: You talked to Lois [Buhalis]!

TO: She came later, she was an apprentice of mine.

BG: Okay, my impression was, unlike any of the other disciplines, you guys spent more time together.

TK: Except for Tom. (laughter)

BG: Got a few minutes for questions, anything you want to know about these gentlemen, their careers, their lettering, their—Mr. Orzechowski?

TO: For John, I heard you say you’re lettering with a tablet, are you lettering with a Cintique directly on the art, or on a tablet looking at a monitor?

JW: On a tablet. I like that, I can move my hand and look…the drawings I’ve done recently have all been done that way. People look at it and say, “How do you do that?” but, it’s no problem.

TK: Practice. (laughter)

Audience member: In the situation like with SANDMAN where you have a character assigned a certain typeface, what role does the sound of the voice play? Obviously, it’s a medium without sound, but do you have a voice of Lucifer in your head, do you have a voice of Dream?

TK: Yeah, with any character, any situation like that, the lettering is like the soundtrack, so you have to have a visual representation of what you think the voice might sound like. That’s part of how you come up with a style.

JW: One quick thing, I did a run of THOR books several years ago and I stole from you (meaning Todd).

TK: I stole from you on the new DOOM PATROL, by the way.

JW: Oh! (laughs) That sounds fun. The writer and editor wanted these aliens to have a definite look to their speech, and that was all the guidance I got. I thought, “Gee, when Todd did Sandman, it was white on black and I could do something like that.” And somebody mentioned the aliens were kind of “oily,” so I fixed up these balloons so they had a white highlight in them that looked oily, and then I had to be very careful to maintain that look. You were my impetus for that.

Audience member: Has the advent of computer lettering meant less work for people in your profession or just different work?

TK: Yes and no. Depends on the person. Some people did not want to get into computers and were eventually pushed out, some people like me embraced computers and wanted to do both and stayed busy.

JW: I’ve found that writers these days are much more likely to say, “Uh, I think we need to change those final three pages,” and there’s a lot of rewriting. I’m working right now on the RIVERDALE comic book based on the TV series, or kind of loosely based on the TV series. The TV people are writing it and I’m finding that there’s a lot of reworking of the dialogue on that. It kind of bothers me.

TK: I just did an article on my blog called “Lettering Tips for Comics Writers,” and one of the points in that was that you should not consider your script for lettering a first draft that you’re going to change later once you see it, because that’s what a lot of the younger writers and editors are doing now. They consider the lettering draft as the first draft, and you end up doing two, three, four more versions later, and you usually are not paid for that.

BG: And time is money.

JW: DC did institute some sort of thing where, if you do more than a certain number of changes per book I think…?

TK: Right, but I think you’re considered kind of a crybaby if you actually bill them for it. (laughter)

BG: We’re about out of time, last question.

Audience member: With creators that you’ve worked with previously, do they still have a chance to surprise you, or do you know what to expect from them?

TK: I would say Neil Gaiman continues to surprise me. He does things that I don’t expect, so his stuff is always the most fun to work on. Alan Moore, on the other hand, has a certain approach to comics such that I can kind of predict where it’s going, so with him it’s not as fresh for me. Still wonderful to work on, though.

JW: For me, Walt Simonson is always surprising. I don’t know how he does it. It’s the same thing with Tommy Lee Edwards. You’d think he’d reached some point where he’s going to stay there for the rest of his life, but he always goes beyond that point. How these guys do that, I do not know.

BG: And with that, thank you for being here, thank you for your questions and your patience as we worked out the tech stuff, we got through all the slides anyway. Appreciate you being here, thanks.  (Applause)

Thanks to Bob and John for helping me put this article together, and for a fun panel! Part 1 and other articles you might enjoy are on the COMICS CREATION page of my blog.

JOHN WORKMAN & TODD KLEIN Part 1

Photo by Ron Jordan in my studio, June 2015.

What follows is a transcription of a panel that John and I did at the 2017 Baltimore Comic-Con moderated by our friend and former co-worker at DC, Bob Greenberger. I recorded it on my phone and transcribed it later. The panel was held on Sept. 23rd. Both John and I have edited our comments to make them clearer and more correct and complete. (As John puts it, “to make sense of my incoherencies.”) I created a slide show to accompany the panel, but technical difficulties between my laptop and the Con’s projector kept us from using it until almost halfway through. It worked out fine, though, we got to all the slides. For these posts, I’ve reformatted the images to fit better here, and in some cases have links to larger versions. I’ve added some additional images in this first of two parts. All images are © the respective companies and copyright holders.

Bob Greenberger: The gentlemen to my left and right have a wealth of material to talk about and Todd created a lovely slide show that should give everybody a better sense of it, so, today we’re talking about lettering. To my left is John Workman, who arrived at DC with Bob Smith hoping to become an artist and somehow became a letterer. He also became an accomplished art director at HEAVY METAL magazine and an artist of not enough work. To my right is Todd Klein who also got started in DC’s Production Department, lettered all sorts of lovely work, wrote some stuff, helped run the Production Dept., saved many an editor’s career, is best known today for his collaborations with Neil Gaiman and the artists on SANDMAN. So, gentlemen! What was it like in the 70s getting started, breaking into the field?

STAR*REACH #2, April 1975. Cover art by Neal Adams.

John Workman: I blundered into DC. Prior to that I’d been doing advertising work out in the state of Washington. I also did a couple of men’s magazine comics with Bob Smith, kind of a poor man’s “Little Annie Fanny.” I also wrote prose stories for them, I was happy to be in there with Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch and people like that, but I really wanted to be working in regular comics, and that didn’t happen on what I considered a professional level until I appeared in STAR*REACH. I did a short story for STAR*REACH, for Mike Friedrich. After that I got in touch with Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, and they said, “Oh yeah, come on out, we’ve got plenty of work for you.” So, Bob Smith and I piled into my old green car and drove 3,000 miles to New York in order to work in comics. We got to New York and got some work immediately from Marvel, but when we went over to DC nothing was happening there, we didn’t get any work. But we made an appointment with Gerry Conway to show him this Plastic Man thing we had in mind. We showed up the day we were supposed to be there, and Gerry was in conference with a writer, so we were waiting in the reception area. We had seen Jack Harris and Bob Rozakis previously; they liked our stuff. Bob Rozakis came by and said, “Oh, you guys are here again. Who are you here to see?” I mumbled, as I tend to do, and said “Conway,” and Bob replied, “Oh, he’s not busy, come on!” We followed him down the hallway past Gerry Conway and I wondered what was going on. I looked at where he was taking us and the sign said, “Carmine Infantino, Publisher.” I thought, “Wait a minute!” He took us on in there and we got jobs immediately…because of my mumbling. So, I advise you to mumble whenever you can. (laughter)

BG: Todd, how did you get mixed up in all this?

Todd Klein: I was working at an air conditioner company making installation manuals but I was a comics fan, and I thought, “Let me try to get a job in comics.” I put together a portfolio and I went to Marvel and DC in New York. Marvel had nothing for me, but I happened to be at DC at just the right time because someone in the Production Department was taking a two-week vacation and they needed a person to fill in. They gave me that, then the guy came back and said he was going to another job, so they offered me a full-time position. This was the biggest lucky break of my life! While I was there I learned all about comics and how they’re made, and lettering was one of the elements. I tried all kinds of things because the job did not pay very much, so everybody in the Production room did some kind of freelance work as well in the evenings or when they could. I tried inking, coloring, writing, I did all kinds of things, but lettering seemed to be the best match for me because I was already interested in calligraphy. That’s how I got started with lettering. For the first ten years of my career I was on staff in the DC Production Department and doing freelance work at home as well. After that I went freelance full time, my workload increased, and I’ve been there ever since.

[After this Todd is busy with the tech guys trying to get the slide show up and running.]

BG: Okay, you each said you fell into lettering…

JW: Because it was easy. (laughter)

BG: But each of you has risen to acclaim, so why don’t you describe what you see as your role as letterer, and then we’ll get into the art side of it.

DETECTIVE COMICS #471, Aug. 1977.

JW: I never liked my own lettering. I would draw what I thought was a decent page, and then I’d ruin it with lousy lettering, so I realized how important the lettering could be. None of this really congealed until I was up at DC. I was fooling around with different types of balloons, I wasn’t happy with what was the traditional balloon at that time. I didn’t make any inroads until I was working with Marshall Rogers on DETECTIVE COMICS, on the Batman stuff. Marshall had an unusual way of drawing. He wanted to be an architect originally, and he brought a lot of that to what he did. I came up with a style of balloon that worked with Marshall, though it didn’t necessarily work with anybody else, and I finally hit my stride when I started working with Walt Simonson on THOR. We decided to just do oval balloons, and I thought that maybe that was too simple, but it really worked. It was fun. If somebody whispered, you’d have a little tiny “ohhh” in the middle of this massive balloon. It became a part of the artwork. After that I realized that I could work off the artwork. I became an extension of the person who had done the original pencils. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. But I finally brought everything together, or I tried to anyway.

THOR #345, July 1984.

BG: There was a graphic look to that work where the sound effects were part of the shape and size of the panels. Was that you or Walt’s idea?

JW: Both of us.

BG: Did people start asking for that on other books, or was that just Walt?

JW: I tried to adapt elements of that to other people. I remember when I was lettering FANTASTIC FOUR with John Byrne writing and drawing, I tried to do a traditional Marvel balloon…the sort that Art Simek and Sam Rosen had done, and that was great fun, and it was almost being conservative compared to what Walt was doing, but if there was a chance to do an open-letter “KA-BLANNG” or something like that, as a part of Byrne’s stuff…or anyone else’s…I always went for it.

BG: From there you were getting work at both companies. Were you adapting your work to the penciler, to the character, to an editor’s requests?

La Garage Hermetique by Moebius from METAL HURLANT.

JW: To some degree. By that time, I was up at HEAVY METAL, and what I learned there was incredible. [While lettering English translations of European material] I didn’t try to be Moebius or Druillet, but I tried to simulate what they were doing, and I learned so much from Moebius. Mostly, I worked off of the art. Nobody ever told me I’d gone too far or anything like that, so I kept going farther and farther.

BG: To this day, no one has said, “STOP!”

JW: No…

BG: Well, that’s cool!

JW: Oh, wait a minute, I did something for Titan recently and they told me, “Don’t overdo it,” so I pulled back a little bit for them.

HEAVY METAL, May 1978, cover by Philippe Druillet.

BG: HEAVY METAL. You went over there to be an art director, and you did things like ALIEN with Archie Goodwin and Walt, right? What sort of work was there to do as art director considering most of the stories were just being brought over from Europe to America?

JW: Our publisher…Len Mogel…believed that no American could touch the French guys except for Richard Corben. He loved Corben’s work because he’d first seen it in a French magazine, but he didn’t initially realize that Corben’s from Kansas. (laughter) There was a bit of a block there. Ted White, Julie Simmons-Lynch, and I tried to get more and more American guys into it. For the movie adaptations we did, I had to bring in local guys. There’s a funny story about ALIEN. One of my heroes was Carmine Infantino, and I told you how he hired me. He was freelancing again at that time, and I thought that for ALIEN, I wanted Carmine on the pencils and Walt Simonson on the inks. I called Carmine and his phone was busy, so I thought, “I wonder what Walt would say about the inks,” so I called Walt, and we talked a bit, and by the end of the conversation Walt was doing the entire job. Carmine should have gotten off the phone. (laughter)

ALIEN, THE ILLUSTRATED STORY, 1979.

That worked out so well. Walt brought in Archie Goodwin. I thought that maybe I would write the comics version of ALIEN, or maybe Walt would do it, but Archie was one of the greats as far as being an editor, a writer and an artist. His ideas, the storytelling…it couldn’t have been better. With Walt and Archie, I had sense enough to step back and just let them go, and what they did we printed. We didn’t change a single thing. The only things that I had a hand in were the cover and book design. Even there, Archie was essential. I roughed out a big title ALIEN and a space background for the cover, and the ship was there, floating in space below the logo. Archie looked at it, and in two seconds he said, “Let’s drop tentacles down from the logo and have them encircle the space ship.” 20th Century-Fox got mad because it was better than their poster. (laughter) The book sold really well, and I was happy to see the recent reprint of it.

BG: It’s held up very nicely, hasn’t it?

BG (to Todd, who has been working with an A/V guy trying to get the slide show running): Are we getting any closer?

TK: No. I can talk to you though.

BG: I’ll talk to you, Todd! John’s lettering became part of the art and part of the page, whereas I think your calligraphy background played more of a role in the evolution of your work. How did that evolve?

STARSTRUCK by Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta, 1980?

TK: The first time I was asked to do a lot of styles was STARSTRUCK, which I did directly for Michael Kaluta and Elaine Lee. They were producing it for a Spanish publisher originally, and then it was used in HEAVY METAL. They were asking for all kinds of different styles and that was a stretch for me because I hadn’t done that yet. By working with them, and getting experience with all kinds of different styles, I was able to develop that further for other books at DC and eventually Marvel and so on. SANDMAN came along eight years later or so and I was primed for it because I’d had experience by then doing a lot of styles, so when Neil Gaiman asked for that I could do it.

BG: Was there any pushback from the publishing side about being too out there with the lettering?

TK: No, I don’t think so, I always kept it readable, that was the hardest thing to do.

From SANDMAN #1, 1988.

BG: And I gather your production experience led you to believe you could do the negative balloons for Sandman, so it was white lettering on black?

[I didn’t explain it at the time, but the Sandman lettering was done normally, then the DC Production department made reverse (negative) Photostats of those balloons, cut around the borders, and pasted them over the original lettering.]

TK: Yeah, and I was not in favor of doing that because I knew that Production could screw it up a lot, and they did. (laughter)

BG: But you knew how to fix it.

TK: I knew how to fix it, but I was no longer on staff by then. It worked out okay in the end. When they did the Absolute Editions, I did have to fix a few things that were almost unreadable.

BG: Wow. Over time were there favorite writers you enjoyed lettering?

TK: Yeah, Neil is obviously the first one, I just fell in love with his work right away, I felt like we were kindred spirits. Alan Moore came soon after, again someone I enjoyed working with a great deal.

BG: Despite his wordiness?

TK: Yes, and I was still trying to write comics then, so when I first saw Alan Moore’s scripts I just gave up writing because I said, “There’s no way I can do anything like this.” (laughter)

BG (to Workman): Back over to you for a second, with the arrival of digital lettering in the 1990s, you would letter on-screen, then print it on crack-and-peel paper and then Exacto cut and…

JW: I didn’t really do any of that until around 1999. Something happened that I didn’t expect. I knew that computer lettering was coming in, just as computer coloring had in the late 1980s. What I didn’t expect was that Marvel and DC would decide to do their computer lettering in-house.

BG: That came later, but yeah.

JW: I know John Costanza was doing computer stuff way back when, but it was all kind of primitive. I did a lot of overlay things. I’d letter on a sheet of vellum over a same-size Xerox of the original art, and then I’d scan that in and reduce it and place it on the print-size artwork they’d send me, and it dawned on me…I would look at the lettering blown up huge on the screen, and I’d think, “Oh geez, I could fix that a little,” and what I was doing was taking the humanity out of the lettering. And I had to hold back and stop doing that. I also realized, “Why don’t I just letter it right into the computer?” And that’s what I do mostly now. In doing so, I have to be deliberately messy in order to give it a human look.

BG: Interesting. Deliberately messy.

JW: A little long, a little short, if my hand slips or something…I use a Wacom tablet and pen, and if my hand should slip I think, “Okay,” and I leave it alone. When it’s reduced down it has more of a human feel about it. I also use commercial typefaces that have a hand-lettered look about them if I’m doing something where the payment is low, but for the normal stuff I still hand-letter it into the computer.

Audience member: You don’t have your own John Workman font or anything?

JW: I’ve thought about that. A guy from Spain actually sent me a John Workman typeface that he’d developed, but I’ve never played around with it much. It would still be almost like setting type. I know there’d be two versions of each letter and all that, but when I do stuff where I’m using a commercial font, even there I go in and play with it to make it my own rather than just leave it as it is.

BG: It used to be, back in the dim days of comics, the artist would get the script and he would pencil the page, and he would leave space for the balloons. I remember looking at pages by Curt Swan and some of the others who would actually write in the dialogue, and therefore they made that part of their design and left appropriate space, and that doesn’t happen anymore. So how difficult is it for you to fit everything in and still see artwork?

JW: It’s relatively easy…

BG: Whoa! Success!

JW: …I just sort of look at the art and figure, “Oh, this balloon can go right there,” and I like to do the stuff at the same size I originally did it and then reduce it down, that also helps with the look of it. If I’m off a little bit, I can tinker with it, but it’s not a big problem. The only book I do right now where I’m actually lettering with pens and ink right on the actual artwork is RAGNARÖK by Walt Simonson. He prefers…as do several people…to have the lettering right on the boards.

TK: I think most artists prefer that, but most companies won’t let them do it anymore.

BG: Because of time?

TK: Yeah, well, also it doesn’t fit into their system because they have international clients who want the lettering separate.

BG: So, Todd, would you like to take over for a little bit?

[Twenty-two minutes into our hour-long panel, my slide show was finally ready to be seen.]

TK: Okay, let me get to the slide show here…

From STAR*REACH #2, “Key Club” written and drawn by Workman.

Detail from the above.

TK: This is a piece of art that John did for the small press magazine called STAR*REACH and when I first met John I bought this page from him because I liked his art so much. This is part of the page, not the whole page. (To John) Do you want to say anything about this story?

JW: A quick story: I went to a small convention in Portland, Oregon, and there was this guy there. I was 23, maybe 22, this guy was 17, and I remember he wore a Ray Bradbury white suit, and he could draw like the dickens. Bob Smith and I, we were sweating blood, trying to reach a professional level, and this guy was so good. It was Dave Stevens, who later did THE ROCKETEER. We showed one another our artwork, and he said, “You know, there’s this thing called STAR*REACH, and you oughtta see what you could do with that.” On the way home I came up with a story and I wrote a full script, which I almost never do, and I did the first page and made a copy of it and sent it off to Mike Friedrich, and he put it in the next issue of STAR*REACH. He had called or written back and said, “Go ahead, do it,” and I wondered, why am I in here with Neal Adams and all these people, how did that happen? I found out years later that there was a guy who was supposed to have a story in that issue but he didn’t get it done, so Mike put mine in. The guy was Dave Stevens. (much laughter)

TK: I see a lot of Wrightson in that, in the inking.

JW: Oh yeah, Wrightson was my hero at the time.

Back cover of RBCC #129, 1976 by Klein.

TK: And this is the kind of thing I was doing,  art for small press and fan magazines. This was for a comics fanzine, the back cover of RBCC.

BG: RBCC was one of the fanzines of the time, so to get in there was a bit of a coup.

TK: I was doing a lot of that and getting paid nothing but having a good time, that’s what I was up to before comics.

John Workman, photo by Bob Smith, 1975.

TK: Here’s John. Bob Smith told me this was probably after an all-nighter by John.

Letter column title for SHOWCASE by Workman, first appeared in #94, Aug.-Sept. 1977.

TK: This is the kind of thing that John and I often did while on staff at DC, a title box for a letters page that John drew, inked and lettered, which first appeared in 1977. (To John) Did you do a lot of this sort of thing?

JW: Yeah, more than I can remember.

TK: I did too. Some of it was freelance, some was on staff, I don’t remember which was which now.

From DETECTIVE COMICS #471, Aug. 1977 lettered by Workman.

TK: Here’s John’s lettering on DETECTIVE COMICS with Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, which is where I first got to know John’s lettering work. I was always very impressed by this.

BG: You can see the balloon shapes were very different than what people were accustomed to in 1977.

JW: I thought that was the first time I hit a real professional level with balloons, although I kinda cringe when I see how thick some of the tails are.

BG: Another thing to notice is the sound effect, which is probably larger than was usually done at the time.

TK: I think that was in the pencils, wasn’t it?

JW: Yeah, Marshall drew it, I just inked it.

First two pages of a sample story by Klein, 1977.

TK: This was the sample story that I did when I came to DC to try to get work. I had no professional experience or anything like that. The only comics original art that I had was a page from a romance comic that I bought at a convention. I modeled my lettering after what I saw there, and then later I found out that it wasn’t considered good lettering, but I did what I could. This story has never been printed or seen by anyone, though the first page is on my website.

Todd Klein by Jack Adler, 1978.

TK: Here I am at my desk in 1978, photo by my boss Jack Adler. This is around the time of the first Superman movie I think. There are other pictures with Jack Harris and Christopher Reeve from the same photo shoot.

SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES tabloid comic C-55, 1977, by Klein.

New Gods story, SECRET ORIGINS OF SUPER-HEROES (DC Special Series #10), April 1978.

TK: This is work that I did on staff. Above is the inside front cover of a tabloid comic. I did everything there except the type. Below is one of my early lettering jobs for a New Gods story in 1978.

Goodbye card by Todd Klein for John Workman. A larger version is HERE.

TK: John and I only worked together on staff for a few months because at the end of 1977 he went to HEAVY METAL, and this is a goodbye card that I drew and lettered for him, and then it was signed by pretty much the whole staff of the company.

BG: So, wait, (to Todd), you left, and (to John) you came back to replace Todd?

TK: It wasn’t that close.

JW: I came back in 1988.

TK: I left staff in 1987, so kinda.

BG: Just trying to figure out the timing. So, there’s a keepsake. (To John) It’s framed and hanging on your wall?

JW: Yeah, it’s in the upstairs hallway.

TK: I think I got John’s face pretty good there, actually.

JW: and my dollar shoes, too.

Continued in Part 2. Other articles you might enjoy are on the COMICS CREATION page of my blog.

 

Watching MISTY (1961)

The film version of Marguerite Henry’s much-loved book for children, “Misty of the Chincoteague” is one I believe I saw on TV or in a theater as a child. In all the years since, I thought it was a Disney film, but when I bought a DVD of it in the Chincoteague Museum last weekend, I found out it was not! It’s just as good as many Disney live-action films, and better than some.

Paul and Maureen Beebe have come to live on their grandparents’ farm on Chincoteague Island, Virginia after the death of their parents. Grandpa Beebe has a small herd of ponies bought from the wild herd on Assateague Island, and he raises and sells young horses from it. Paul and Maureen are fascinated by the wild herd on Assateague, and while there decide an independent and swift mare called The Phantom (pictured above) is a horse they want to buy at the next annual sale, a tradition on the island. Usually only recently born and yearling horses are sold, but Paul and Maureen believe they can talk the Fire Company (who own the horses) into selling The Phantom to them. Their grandfather has told them that a pony costs $100 at the sale, and they work very hard through the spring and summer to raise that amount, first by gentling and training Grandpa Beebe’s own newborns, then by doing all kinds of odd jobs. On a visit to Assateague, Paul discovers that The Phantom has had a creamy-white foal which he names Misty. Now Paul and Maureen hope to buy both horses, though where the second hundred dollars will come from they don’t know.

The big event of the year is the annual Pony Swim, when the entire herd is rounded up and swum from Assateague to the fairgrounds on Chincoteague for the sale. Grandpa and Paul help with this, and Paul even jumps into the water to help a struggling Misty reach the shore. The day before the sale, Paul and Maureen visit the ponies who will be sold and discover that Misty already has a Sold tag! It seems a man from off-island wanted a horse for his young son, and made a pre-sale deal with the Fire Chief. Paul and Maureen’s hopes are dashed!

That’s enough of the plot, which is fairly predictable, but quite enjoyable. The film is beautifully photographed, the score is excellent, and the acting is generally fine, if a bit corny at times. Only six real actors are in it, including David Ladd as Paul, son of Alan Ladd, and later a film executive. Equally good performances are given by Pam Smith as Maureen, Arthur O’Connell as Grandpa Beebe and Anne Seymour as Grandma Beebe. Many small parts are filled by actual Chincoteague residents, who do fine, though their accents are a bit hard to follow.

As an adaptation of the book, this film does quite well. It’s reasonably close in many areas, with some events moved around or somewhat altered, notably a horse race. It also gives a fine portrait of the area, and the publicity from the film helped preserve Assateague and its wild horses. The spirit of the book is captured well, and the horses are damned cute!

Recommended.

Pulled From My Files #66: CHEVAL NOIR Logo

Image © Dark Horse Comics.

I have only a few sketches and no final logo for this assignment from 1989, though my records show I was paid for two different versions of this anthology logo, which of course is “Dark Horse” in French. This version gets pretty fancy with CHEVAL.

I like this sketch, especially the white highlights in the black. It would have left lots of room for cover art. Neither of these were chosen, and I must have done more sketches after talking to Randy Stradley at Dark Horse. I have only one of those, which is not numbered:

This one was chosen, but the word CHEVAL does not match any printed version, and the diamond background shape was not used.

The first issue had this logo. This CHEVAL looks like something I might have done, so perhaps this is one of the final versions.

The underline was used on some issues, #4 being the first. Very effective color scheme on this one.

This logo was used only on issue 7, and again, looks like something I might have done. It’s probably the second one chosen by Dark Horse. I love the Dave Stevens covers shown here, who would even give the logo a second glance compared with them?

And Then I Read: GRAVEYARD SHAKES by Laura Terry

Image © Laura Terry.

Scholastic has been putting out some fine comics in recent years, and this is one of them. Katia and Victoria are sisters who are starting at a new high-class private school. Victoria is anxious to fit in, but finds herself rejected and laughed at by the rich snobs she approaches. Katia is defiantly quirky and refuses to make any effort to fit in, even when she finds a music class and teacher that seem perfect for her piano-playing talent. In a nearby graveyard, or rather beneath it, a mysterious man named Nikola is trying to prolong the tenuous life of his son, Modie. To do so, he must once again steal the life of a child. Modie is against this, but Nikola and his henchman plan to kidnap someone from the school to carry out his plans.

When Katia and Victoria meet for lunch in the graveyard, their different styles clash, and Katia decides to run away from school. Victoria tries to find her and bring her back, but falls into the clutches of Nikola. Katia, with the help of a friendly ghost, is determined to save her sister, but must face the terrors of the world below the graveyard to do it.

The story and art are charming, just a bit scary and with good doses of humor. At 202 pages for $10.77 (or $7.99 Kindle) on Amazon, this is quite a bargain, and should appeal to teenage girls. I read an uncorrected proof given to me at Baltimore Comic-con in which only a few pages were in color, so I’m not sure if all of them are in the final book, but either way, this is well worth a look.

Recommended.

Visiting Chincoteague, VA

This past Saturday we began a three-day visit to Chincoteague, Virginia by taking the Cape May – Lewes Ferry, above, to Lewes Delaware, always a fun trip unless the waves are high, which was not the case that day. From there we drove down through the Delmarva Peninsula to the barrier island of Chincoteague.

 We were visiting my cousin Jody, her husband Allen and their daughter Kate, who have lived there for the past ten years. This is the first time we’ve been to see them, though we did go to Chincoteague once before in 1994. One of Jody’s part-time jobs is driving a tourist trolley that takes visitors around town, and Allen joined Ellen and I for a ride on Jody’s trolley.

Next to Chincoteague Island is Assateague Island, a National Park, where Allen took us to see the Assateague Lighthouse among other things.Here we are in front of it, but we got there too late to go inside. We’d revisit it Monday. Also on Assateague we visited the beach, drove around the Wildlife Loop where there were surprisingly few birds that day, and saw some of the famous wild ponies in the distance. There are two herds of wild ponies on Assateague, one at the north end in Maryland, and one at the south end in Virginia. They are recognized now as a distinct breed of horse, (not really pony) with a diminutive size due to their diet of less-nutritious salt grass probably, similar to the way deer in the Florida Keys have become smaller than normal. More on them later.

Just south of Chincoteague Island is Wallops Island, home of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, currently the site of supply rocket launches to the International Space Station, as well as other government work. Ellen and I had been to the visitor center there in 1994, but Allen works on the site driving staffers and space-camp students in an out, so he was able to take us right into the facility. Here are the four of us in front of some pretty amusing road signs leading to the main launch pad. I’ve put together two photos to get us all in, that’s Jody and Allen on the right.

Another angle showing what we could see of the actual launch site from this spot, as far as we were allowed to go.

This is, I think, a rocket assembly building, much smaller than the one at Cape Canaveral, but the same idea.

There were no signs of life except a few birds and some Ghost Crabs like this one scuttling around on the road for some reason. They blend in perfectly with beach sand, hence their name, but are quite obvious here.

We had the entire beach to ourselves when we got to it, this looks south toward the buildings and launch pads. Employees are allowed to use this beach on weekends, and I’m sure there are more people on it in the summer.

There were some nice whelk and other shells on the beach, and Ellen collected some to bring home. This is about as close as you can get to an undeveloped but still accessible beach on the east coast, I think.

When we got back to Chincoteague, it was lunch time, and we had lunch at Island Creamery, the best home-made ice cream in town. Delicious! We had ours served in fresh-baked waffle bowls.

The most famous resident in Chincoteague’s history is a horse: Misty, whose story was told in this 1947 book by Marguerite Henry and Wesley Dennis. Henry wrote several more books about Misty and her progeny, and Misty’s story was also told in a popular 1961 film starring David Ladd, Arthur O’Connell and Anne Seymour. I remember seeing it as a child, and Ellen and I have both read and enjoyed all of Marguerite Henry’s books. The Assateague ponies and their story have long been a draw to tourists.

Here’s Ellen with the real Misty, stuffed, at the Chincoteague Museum, which has an exhibit about the real horses and their owners, and many other exhibits about the history of and life of the island and its inhabitants. Oyster farming has long been a major source of income, and chicken farming was too, until the chicken farms were wiped out in a 1962 storm that flooded the island. Now tourism has taken the place of that.

After the museum we went on to Assateague, and were surprised to find no ponies in sight anywhere. The reason became clear when we got to this new corral. The southern herd is owned by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, and has been since the 1920s. They lease grazing rights on Assateague, and watch over the herd. Several times a year the wild horses are rounded up for doctor visits, and in July they are swum across the channel to Chincoteague so that the year’s new babies can be auctioned off to raise money for the Fire Company. The herd is restricted to 150 animals by the park service, so this is a way to keep that number while raising needed funds. Not all the young ones are sold, some are “buy-backs” which return to the herd to replace horses lost to old age or accident.

As we found out, the Salt Water Cowboys from the Fire Company were rounding the herd up to separate young ones that had been sold in July, but were too young to leave their mothers. This was fascinating to watch, and got us much closer to the animals than we ever expected.

Some pictures of the herd running past us down a chute in the corral. The cowboys were gradually separating the young ones, which wasn’t easy, as the mothers were not in favor of this idea! It took multiple rounds through the chute to get the babies into their own separate corral where they could be loaded on a trailer and taken to Chincoteague.

The origin of these horses is not known for sure. One of the two most popular theories is that they began from horses in a Spanish shipwreck that set them free here. The other theory is that early settlers in the area grazed their horses and cattle on Assateague to avoid taxes. Today’s herd may be a combination of the two.

One of the handsome stallions. The horses were muddy from their round-up in the marshes, but looked healthy and had plenty of spirit. There are several stallions, each with a harem of mares. We really enjoyed this close look at them.

On Monday morning Jody had to go to work at the local school, where she teaches part time, so Ellen and I went back to the Assateague Lighthouse and climbed it. The views were great.

We were able to see many of the places we’d been over the weekend from a new perspective.

Monday afternoon we returned home, taking the ferry back to New Jersey. Despite the storms to the west, there were only a few sprinkles of rain for us over the entire weekend, and we had a great time. Thanks to Jody and Allen for being such fine hosts!

 

Rereading: DOCTOR DOLITTLE’S CIRCUS by Hugh Lofting

Though I have and enjoy reading all the Doctor Dolittle books, this was always one of my least favorites. After rereading it recently, I think I know why. Much of the book deals with the Doctor’s dealings with other people, and his own animal family and other animals often play a lesser role. Written in 1924, it was the fourth book published. Chronologically it takes place after “The Story of Doctor Dolittle” and “Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office,” in about 1821-22. The Doctor, his animal family, and the fabulous two-headed Pushmi-Pullyu from Africa have joined a circus. They need to raise money to help pay for the ship that the Doctor borrowed for his voyage to Africa in the first two books, which was wrecked.

The Doctor and some of his animals locate a small circus run by Alexander Blossom, and he is so impressed with the Pushmi-Pullyu that he not only agrees to let the Doctor exhibit him in the circus’s sideshow, splitting the proceeds, but gives him a fine circus wagon to live in. Matthew, the Cat’s-Meat-Man is along to help out with the Pushmi-Pullyu, and the duck Dab-Dab is there to keep the books, when she can manage to save any money at all. The Doctor is notoriously kind-hearted and generous. As they transition to circus life, the Doctor is very unhappy with the conditions of the other animals in the circus. Of course he talks to them, and they all have complaints from too much confinement to the wrong kinds of food, and so on. When Dolittle tries to help them by going to Blossom, he gets nowhere, and many of the other circus employees are hostile to his ideas.

The worst case is that of an Alaskan seal named Sophie, also being exhibited in the sideshow by her owner. Sophie is terribly worried about her mate, who birds have told her is in trouble at home, and wants desperately to escape the circus and get back to him. The Doctor eventually agrees to help her, and the two of them do manage to escape, but have lots of trouble and close-calls as they try to make their way to the sea. (This takes up about half the book.)

Returning to the circus, the Doctor has an idea for helping one of the old cart horses. He and the horse Beppo put together a talking horse act for the big top, and it draws crowds. Considering that the Doctor and Beppo can speak to each other, it’s not surprising the act is an amazing hit. The circus is suddenly the talk of the area, and is invited to perform at a very large venue. Money is rolling in, and just when the Doctor’s troubles seem over, Mr. Blossom and his wife disappear with all the money! It seems the circus is through, but the animals and the remaining circus performers, all now friends, beg the Doctor to take over the circus on his own terms. Reluctantly, Dolittle agrees, and soon the Dolittle Circus is once again on the road, with everyone sharing in the work and the profits, and all animals treated kindly.

I did enjoy rereading this, and Hugh Lofting’s skill at social commentary, humor and insight into human nature were more appreciated by me now than they were when I read it as a child.

Recommended.

Incoming: NIGHT FORCE and KIRBY, KING OF COMICS

Image © DC Entertainment.

I lettered about half the fourteen issue run of this fine series by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan from 1982-83. It’s mix of Kolchak the Night Stalker, Doctor Strange and Marv’s Dracula, sort of. Excellently written and drawn. I loved working on it, but I’m not too fond of my lettering here, especially when it’s put next to the stellar work of John Costanza, who did the rest. If you like creepy mysteries, give it a try.

Image © Mark Evanier and, I guess Marvel.

This book did not arrive in the mail or by UPS, it was handed to me by the author at Baltimore Comic-Con. It’s a revised and expanded edition of the 2008 hardcover. The format is a hybrid of soft- and hard-covers: glued binding, and cover boards that are thinner than a hardcover but thicker than a trade paperback, and they extend out beyond the pages like a hardcover. This edition has the logo on it that I designed for Mark in 2007 or so, which was rejected at the time. We’re both glad to see it on this edition, which is the one I will be keeping on my own bookshelf. Eventually I will read it, too!

And Then I Read: GREEN LANTERNS #17

Image © DC Entertainment.

This is the second and concluding part of a rather fun Batman crossover, done the way crossovers used to be: characters in the book you’re reading interact/team with characters in ONE other book for an issue or two. This is not only fun but smart marketing. Give your readers a taste of another series and perhaps they will try it. As opposed to the massive crossovers where you have to buy a lot more books to even follow the story, creating ill-will and disgruntled fans. (My humble opinion!)

Batman has asked Simon and Jessica, Earth’s current Green Lanterns, for help with a recent menace in Gotham City that seems to involve the power of the Yellow  Lanterns: random citizens are being overwhelmed with fear…of Batman! Even Alfred is taken over by it, and he’s trying to kill Batman. Behind it is Batman’s fear-mongering foe The Scarecrow. Do Simon and Jessica have the willpower to overcome Scarecrow’s Yellow Lantern-powered fear machines? Nicely done by writer Sam Humphries, artists Eduardo Pansica and Julio Ferreira, colorist Blond and letterer Dave Sharpe.

Recommended.

And Then I Read: THE FLASH #19

Image © DC Entertainment.

Part two of “Sins of the Father” has Flash and Kid Flash in Australia with Captain Boomerang, prisoners of a crime/terrorism gang called The Weavers. Digger (Boomerang) was sent there alone by Amanda Waller of Suicide Squad, and the addition of costumed heroes has made his job harder. Wally (Kid Flash) is trying to find out what happened to his real father, and Digger might have the answers, if they can get out of the mess they’re in. The conversation in this one was as interesting as the action, always a good thing.

Recommended.