Report on Big Apple Comic Con 2008 Part 5

First Posted Nov. 18, 2008

As I’m leaving the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel, I ask a guy I’m walking next to, “did you find Chris Claremont?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m going over that way, I’ll show you.” So my guide walked me through the maze that was the convention and showed me where Claremont was hiding in plain sight. Or to be more specific, he showed me where there was a sign that said Chris Claremont. Below the sign was a table with some Sharpie’s and a pad on it and there was a chair with a coat and briefcase next to the table. I asked the guy at the next table. “Is that Claremont’s stuff?”

“Yes,” he said, “He’ll be right back, nature called.” So I waited for a few minutes. Near Claremont’s table sat Jim Salicrup who was basically doing stylized stick figure drawings for $5. Finally Chris Claremont came back and he signed Marvel Team-Up 63, 64, 100 and Uncanny X-men 200 for me.






Then since no one else was waiting in line to see him, I attempted conversation. I said in Marvel Team-Up 100 there’s a back-up story with Storm and the Black Panther that you wrote. “Did you ever think the two of them would get married?”

He said something like, “I never really thought about it.” Then he started looking at the story from back to front, but he didn’t say anything about it. I felt like all the air had left the room because I was so uncomfortable that he wasn’t saying anything, but I was determined so I tried again. “You wrote the X-men for 20 years, do you think someone will ever be able to match that? I don’t.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You never can tell, can you?”

Then I asked him how he kept having fresh ideas and he said that he just did. By then I was so uncomfortable, that I wanted to get the hell out of there, I stuck my right hand out to shake his, but he shook it oddly with his left hand. When I left Claremont still had no one on his line. I don’t know why our interaction was so awkward. I really still want to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was the end of the day, I was standing there waiting for him, maybe he didn’t like that. Anyone else ever meet Claremont?

After my experience with Claremont I wandered around again still looking for Walt Simonson and Peter David. Suddenly I saw a sign that said “Peter David” and a guy was sitting under it. So I put my bag on the ground, squatted down, and searched for the Peter David issues I had (the two Spectacular Spider-man issues Buckler had signed earlier). But when I looked up and took a good look at the guy, I realized it wasn’t Peter David. It was just some guy sitting in David’s seat sketching pictures because David never showed. And it was on that note that I left the convention.

However, as I walked to the escalator Peter Mayhew walked past me and I thought “Jim Shooter is tall, but maybe not that tall.” Then as I was riding down the escalator, I looked over and Gloria Hendry was riding up the other escalator. We looked at each other and she smiled at me. Damn! She looks even better now then she did in that movie.

And that’s the story of the convention.

P.S.- Just because I forgot to post them before. Here are a couple of pictures of a bizarre photo shoot that was going on at the convention; obviously something to do with Marvel Zombies, Arthur Suydam the Marvel Zombies artist was the “Guest of Honor.”

Report on Big Apple Comic Con 2008 Part 4

First Posted Nov. 18, 2008

The Jack Kirby Tribute Panel was composed of Mark Evanier, Roy Thomas, Joe Sinnott, and Stan Goldberg (Marvel Colorist). Again Dick Ayers was invited, but did not attend.

Evanier was there before anyone else and he spoke casually to the audience before the panel began. He told a story about calling up his and Kirby’s friend Sergio Aragonés and apologizing that no picture of him was included in “Kirby: King of Comics.” Apparently there was supposed to be, but somehow it didn’t make it. Anyway Sergio bet Evanier $25 thousand dollars that there was a picture of him in the book and apparently in one picture there’s a tiny picture of Sergio hanging on the wall in the background.

Evanier also talked about why he does these tribute panels for Kirby. He said that even though Kirby has been gone for 14 years he is still so popular that people come up to him and say, “Can I shake your hand because you shook Jack’s?” And he says that when you get an audience together for a Jack Kirby tribute, he knows that it’s a group of the smartest and coolest people at the convention.



When everyone else got there Evanier started off the panel by asking Roy Thomas (Pictured above) if he ever saw Stan Lee jump on his desk and pose in heroic poses for Kirby?

Thomas said that must have been before his time, but that he was present for the infamous Herald Tribune argument, which he called “the nails in the coffin of their relationship”

Thomas also said that he remembers Stan Lee calling him into his office and saying, “Look at this crazy character Kirby put in this Galactus story,” the character was of course the Silver Surfer.

Thomas went on the record as saying his favorite artists are Gene Colan, John Buscema and Jack Kirby.

Thomas also said that Stan Lee was a great teacher, but that he didn’t know why he had clicked with Lee and ended up becoming a sort of heir to the throne at Marvel that it just happened that way. Thomas also said that he didn’t think Kirby was interested in teaching other artists because he didn’t want to teach them to be Jack Kirby; he wanted them to find their own way.

Evanier explained that Jack Kirby didn’t think like most people, “He had a mind that instead of going from A to B to C would go from A to Z to R to S to B.” He said that Stan and Jack would talk about the Fantastic Four and that Jack would go home and draw an issue of Thor. He said that when you asked either of them they would both inevitably say that they had each done 90% of the work on any given issue.



It was fascinating to hear Joe Sinnott (pictured above) talking about his work because Evanier asked him if he was ever late turning in issues. (This is especially relevant today when inkers are being blamed for the current FF comics being several months late.) Sinnott replied that he was never late with an issue and that one time he had to work on Christmas day in order to not be late on a Steranko Captain America issue. (I wish Marvel still had that work ethic today!)

Sinnott said that he was always in awe of Kirby’s work and that he couldn’t wait to see the new pages of the FF each month and that his excitement never waned. He also recalls seeing Fantastic Four # 5 and thinking to himself “Gee, there’s something special here.” Sinnott dropped the bombshell revelation that he never read an issue of the Fantastic Four, “Jack told everything with pictures,” he said.

Sinnott mentioned again that Kirby and him never talked while they were working on the Fantastic Four

Sinnott said that at first he’d want to correct certain details in Kirby’s work like strange looking ears, or muscles that didn’t exist in real life, but that he realized that if he did that it just wasn’t Kirby anymore. (I couldn’t help but think of Cap’s feet on the cover of Avenger 4)

Sinnott said that when he worked with a brush inking that he could do 3 pages a day. Sinnott explained that you always ink from the bottom of the page up so that you don’t smear any ink. He said that he’d start with page 2 because he wanted to get into the story and that he’d do the splash page last. He also said that he thought Kirby’s splash pages were better than his covers.

Evanier talked about how Kirby liked doing covers least of all because he couldn’t do them before he drew the story because he wasn’t sure what it was about yet and he couldn’t draw it in the middle when he’d figured out what the story was about because it broke up his concentration and he didn’t like to do the cover when he was done with the story because he wanted to move on to the next thing. He also said that if Kirby worked on something in the morning he might not even remember it in the afternoon. He said that Kirby was actually happy when other artists did the covers for issues he penciled.

Evanier also explained that the way Kirby’s mind worked he always saw the completed panel in his head before he drew it so he never used his eraser to change the way an arm was posed or something, he only used an eraser to change a panel in it’s entirety. He said that this was a problem at DC comics because they started asking for rough cover drafts for approval first. Evanier said Kirby would draw the actually cover first and then do the rough cover second.

“This is the man who decided to make the Hulk green.” Evanier said when he introduced Stan Goldberg, longtime Marvel colorist.

Goldberg said that he though Kirby’s comic about growing up in New York featured in one of Evanier’s books was breathtaking and better than any history book.

Goldberg said that his friend even after all these years still don’t understand what he did, they’ll ask him, “Are you still drawing Joke books?”

When asked about the Hulk’s coloring changing to green after the first issue he said that colors like gray or brown just aren’t dynamic for the lead character in a comic. He said, “That’s the color of most of the backgrounds.” When asked if there were similar reasons for the changes in Ironman’s look he quipped, “Have you ever seen a yellow piece of iron?” Goldberg said that when he was working he could color two books in one day. He also said that part of the reason why there are coloring errors from time to time is that they only ever received proofs of the covers before printing not the interior pages.

Evanier talked about how Kirby in the 70s was having trouble with the “Marvel method” because he wanted to write and draw. When asked about Kirby’s style changing over the years Evanier said that Kirby thought his style was always the same, but he admitted that Kirby started to have eye problems in the 70’s that interfered with his work.

The panel also talked about the change from 12” by 18” size page flats to 10” by 15” so that the printers could do 4 pages at once instead of two and save money. Evanier said that this change, which occurred in 1968, could best be seen in ASM Annual 5 in which the first half used the old size and the second half the new size.

“When he went to the small pages,” said Sinnott, “It ruined some of his style. I felt like his work was never the same.”

Someone in the audience asked if Kirby ever said anything about Darth Vader being so similar to both Doctor Doom and Darkseid. Evanier said that he remembers Kiby felt like “I found gold and someone else exploited it.” However, he said that Kirby wasn’t angry and that he liked the movie. “It’s not the artist that really gets upset when something like that happens it’s the artist’s wives.”

Report on Big Apple Comic Con 2008 Part 3

First Posted Nov. 18, 2008

Warning: This article is of a serious nature.



After this first panel I left to get some lunch so I missed most of Neal Adam’s panel (Adams is pictured above), but I did catch the end of it. Adams was talking about a cause he supports. Dina Gottliebova Babbitt was a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In exchange for her own life and her mother’s life she drew a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that the Jewish children looked at right before they were murdered. Dr. Josef Mengele wanted the children to be calm. Mengele also forced Babbitt to paint portraits of various victims because he believed photographs didn’t show the “inferior skin tones of the Jews, that proved they were subhuman.” She even did portraits of Mengele himself.

Today, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum refuses to give Babbitt back her work. They argue that if they open the door to this kind of thing they will lose their whole museum right down to the gate, which they say will be taken by the man who originally made it.

Neal Adams believes that the man who made the gates was paid for his work and that Babbitt was forced by pain of death to make these paintings and “They belong to her you fuc$ing idiot!”

He told this story because Marvel and Darkhorse are getting involved and printing a special comic to help her cause. He said that in the Marvel one there will be a story about fictional Auschwitz survivor Magneto. (I couldn’t help but wonder with Marvel’s constantly sliding timescale how Magneto could still be a Holocaust survivor, while I think now Ben Grimm and Reed Richards are now Vietnam vets when they used to be Korean War vets, or WWII vets, but that’s a detail for another time.)

Here is a link to a NY Times article about this controversy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/arts/design/09comi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In this article there is a link to the online version of the 6 page comic about Babbit penciled by Neal Adams, inked by Joe Kubert and supposedly containing an introduction by Stan Lee.

Part 4 returns to happier subjects. I’ll report on a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel.

Report on Big Apple comic Con 2008 Part 2

First Posted Nov. 17, 2008

Then I went to the first Panel… Now, They added and changed panels around in the last few weeks. I logged onto the site two nights ago to printout the schedule and found that they just added a Neal Adams panel, but they also changed it all around the day of. So at 1pm I saw “A Day in the Life of the Marvel Bullpen” with Roy Thomas, Joe Sinnott, Rich Buckler, and John Romita. Dick Ayers was invited, but didn’t attend.

I don’t know how much of this stuff is news to some of you guys, but I’ll tell you all the things I found interesting:





Romita (in above photo) said Stan conned him into doing Daredevil. He just wanted to ink, but Stan asked him to “Fill In” on Daredevil. Stan gave him no script, he just said “You’ll know what to do. Romita said he thinks Daredevil is Marvel’s greatest character and that he regrets not ever being able to go back and do some more Daredevils (Hey Marvel, are you listening?) Romita said he worked at Marvel for 30 years on a handshake with no contract and that he lived month-to-month and script-to-script and that it was “exhilarating and exhausting.”

Romita also talked about Stan asking him to fill in on one of Ditko’s books. “I thought he was coming back,” he said

But Romita said the proudest moment of his life was when they did a study that found that the “Spidey-Super Stories” he’d worked on for five years had “Triggered the reading habits of an entire generation.” (I know I grew up with them).

Sinnott said that in the early days he’s go down and turn his pages in at the Marvel office in person. He said his wife would come with him and she’d go to Macy’s or somewhere and he’d say I’ll meet you there in a few hours. One day he came in and Stan Lee gave him so much work to do that he was hours late getting back to his wife, so from then on he mailed his pages in. “They didn’t see me for 25 years,” he said.

He said that the next time anyone saw him in person was at a 1975 convention, a bunch of comic guys were on a panel and Stan was one of them, he came up to Sinnott and said “Jack Keller how have you been?” Joe thought Stan must have been joking, but Stan apologized profusely later when he realized who Joe was.

Sinnott said that Jack Kirby and him didn’t speak to each other once the entire time they were producing the FF together. Mark Evanier said on a later panel when this was brought up again that he’d asked Kirby about that and he’d said, “I don’t have to tell Joe anything, he does everything right.”

When asked about regrets, Sinnott said he wanted to work with Gene Colan on Captain America more, but said Colan wanted a different sort of inker. He also said he wanted to do more Surfers with John Buscema, but that Buscema wanted his brother to ink them. He also said he wished he’d worked with John Severin, that he really liked his stuff.

Roy Thomas said that his favorite things that he’s done were in order of preference: All Star Squadron, Conan, the Avengers and the Justice League. He didn’t let anyone else do Conan because, “they might have found out someone else could write it,” he said. And he told a story about Harlan Ellison wanted to write Conan 100, but he told him “You can do 101 or something, but I did the first 99 and I want to do number 100 myself.”

Roy Thomas talked about being Editor-in-Chief at Marvel and said it was the sort of job you thought you wanted but then didn’t.




Rich Buckler (in above photo) said that he didn’t stay at one comic for long because he always wanted to try something new. I liked to keep things fresh, he said. “I just had all these characters in my mind and they seemed like real people to me.”

Buckler said that his favorite work was with Donald McGregor on the Black Panther (Jungle Action). He said that they were good stories about real issues. He said that McGregor would give him the stories in pieces a page here a page there to keep him is suspense. Another of his favorite experiences was working on Deathlok (Astonishing Tales). He commented that he didn’t think anyone has appreciated the complexities of the Deathlok character since the original run.


Part 3 tomorrow is about Neal Adam’s role as an activist.

Report on Big Apple Comic Con 2008 Part 1

First Posted Nov. 17, 2008

(Here’s the beginning of my narrative on the convention. I’ll be posting more as I have time.)

I went to the Big Apple Comic Book, Art, Toy, and Sci-fi Expo, or as they call it on their program, “The National.”

I saw lots of big names, you guys saw the list here weeks ago: Roy Thomas, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Chris Claremont, John Romita Sr. and so on.

I was at a small convention in Albany last month, but this was my first big convention and let me tell you it was amazing. I don’t have a lot of money right now so I didn’t look much in the bins for deals, but there were hundreds and hundreds of vendors.

The place was like a huge maze. They had most of the artists and writers in one place on the second floor, but they were spread out in different rows. There was no directory so for the entire day I was walking around asking people: “Have you found Chris Claremont? Have you found Jim Shooter?” I wasn’t the only one either because lots of people would ask me the same questions. To make matters more confusing lots of the “big names” were in another spot downstairs and Neal Adams was in an area in the lobby because he brought all kinds of merchandise like hardcover collections and painted models. His stuff took up about three tables. Anyway you can picture me walking around like an idiot back and forth between all the different areas.

In the end I had much success. My first stop was Dick Ayers, he signed the cover of my Fantastic Four Masterworks vol. 2. He signed under where Stan and Jack’s name was printed. It was great to see him; he’s 76 and still going strong.






Then I got online to have Joe Sinnott sign some things and while I’m waiting John Romita Sr. comes and sits right next to Sinnott and so I’m practically first in line. Now I’m gonna get major groans especially from collectors like Punk Funk, but I didn’t have much for him to sign. He signed a reprint of ASM 50, so now I have the grandest reprint ever. I also got him to sign his story in ASM 365 and Romita actually said as he was signing it that that splash page with MJ combing her hair is his favorite out of anything he’s ever done.

Then I got back in line for Sinnott and talked too a guy on the line all about the old days and how great comics were in the 60s and I told him to come to Comicboards, so hopefully he will.

Sinnott was doing some great sketches a guy ahead of me got a great looking Thor. The guy right before me had Sinnott sign over 42 comics, most of them FFs. He paid Sinnott about $30 bucks for his trouble, but still I thought it was a bit excessive. I had him sign FF 148, 158, 159. Sinnott was in a great mood and I told him I just saw him up at Albany last month and he said, “Thanks for coming again. Good to see you.”

Then I went downstairs and found my brother because I had his ticket and we saw Stormtroopers and Wookiees outside on the street.








Then I got Neal Adams to sign two Batman tpbs I have and I got Rich Buckler to sign FF 158, 159 and Spectacular Spider-man 103 and 108. Both of them were friendly but not talkative with me anyway.

I saw, Steranko and Infantino, but I didn’t have anything for them to sign.

And I walked past Peter Mayhew aka Chewbacca’s booth, and George Lazenby’s and Bond Girl Gloria Hendry’s too, but I was there for the comic guys!

Then I went downstairs because after walking around and around someone clued me in that there was a “Big names” section down there. That’s where I met Roy Thomas who signed copies of FF 158, 159. Meaning I now had them signed by writer, artist and inker. I thought that was pretty cool.





I also had Thomas sign Avengers 41, and 54. Roy was a really great guy; he was very talkative and enthusiastic. I told him Avengers 54 was one of my favorite Avengers and he kind of paged though it and said he guessed it was pretty good. Then he read a line or two: “You are younger than I expected Black Knight.” “Should I have phoned your mother?” And he said, “I stole that line from a movie, no one noticed though. I did that all the time.”

Than I looked around upstairs and downstairs, that’s the theme of the day. Then my brother asked me who I was still looking for and I said “Chris Claremont, Jim Shooter, Larry Hama…” “Larry Hama, I saw him downstairs, you should have told me who we were looking for.” So we went downstairs, but my brother had only seen Larry Hama’s nameplate which was sitting on an empty table. But while we were downstairs in walks Jim Shooter. My brother spotted him, thank God he was wearing his nametag cause neither of us would have known him from Adam. By the way, as I said, I had just seen Peter Mayhew, Jim Shooter might be just as tall. The man is huge! I had Shooter sign Adventure Comics 346, the first comic he did when he was 13. He didn’t think much of it, “Yeah you could tell how young I was when I did that.” Then he signed Adventure Comics 352 and he said “I was just starting to really get it when I did this one.” He signed Avengers 161 for me next and he said, “ Someone in the business told me the other day this was their favorite Avengers. That made me feel pretty good.” “It’s definitely my favorite too,” I said. Then he signed Avengers 171.





Then I wandered around again and browsed back issues and came back downstairs about ten minutes before the first panel because Roy Thomas had said that he didn’t know where the panel was, but that someone was coming to get him and that I could follow him over. But before the panel I saw that Larry Hama had just arrived. He was drawing a GI- Joe character holding a bow for someone in front of me and he talked at great length about the finer points of Japanese archery, such as how you can hold your next two arrows in-between two of your fingers so you can fire them quicker and that you couldn’t do that with a British bow. “This guys puts Hawkeye to shame,” I thought. I had him sign Avengers 329, 332, 333. (Hawkeye isn’t in any of those) “I forgot I wrote these,” he said. “Actually I really liked 332,” I said. He thumbed through it and said, “Oh, yeah I remember this Doom is in it… They have a big party and Rage brings the cookies.” (yes nitpickers when I looked it up later it was Cupcakes he brought). I didn’t really know who Hama was too well, but he was intelligent and engaging and made me want to pick up a lot more of his stuff. Him and storyteller Roy Thomas were the best guys I met all day.






Part two of the Convention is still to come. I'll report on two panels and post lots more pictures.