Potrzebie
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Wroten on the Wind
.
For Alex Jay's blog on creating logos and lettering, go here.
I wrote the article below about the Wroten Lettering studio and its important contribution to EC Comics for Russ Cochran's hardcover reprint of EC's M.D. (1988). Here it is with a few minor changes. Margaret Wroten's quote in the next-to-last paragraph was a surprising revelation, since until then no one had ever mentioned the existence of a Manhattan studio where EC freelancers could do work.
Wroten on the Wind
EC Comics used Leroy lettering by the husband-and-wife team of Jim and Margaret Wroten. On the Al Feldstein-edited titles the artists received pages minus layouts but with the Wrotens’ inked lettering already down on the boards.
Leroy lettering requires a collection of templates and a small handheld instrument, the scriber. An inked letter is produced by the penholder on one side of the scriber as the metal stylus on the other side follows the grooves in the template positioned an inch below.
EC’s extensive use of Leroy lettering, one suspects, derives as much from Bill Gaines‘ compulsion for neatness as it did from the reasons he offered in The Comics Journal #81 (May 1983): “My father, when he did Wonder Woman, and I have no idea why, used Leroy lettering… The older Wonder Womans were Leroy lettered by Jimmy Wroten, who started out as a salesman for Keuffel & Esser, who made, among other things, my slide rule. They were the big company for slide rules, for templates, for Leroy lettering. Leroy lettering mostly was used for lettering charts, engineering charts and so on, which it is beautiful for. How the hell it got involved in comics I don’t know, but it suited us very well because Al was a script-oriented person. Although he is an artist, and a pretty good one, when he started writing, he was more interested in the script than the art… Because Al used so many words, we found we could do it more clearly with Leroy lettering. If we had wanted a hand-letterer to work that small, to get all that copy in, it would have been very difficult for him. You’ll notice Kurtzman’s stuff has very light copy. He never liked Leroy lettering; he wanted the feel of the hand-lettering, so we used Ben Oda, a fine Japanese hand-letterer, who still works for DC and occasionally does something for us.”
While scripting directly on the boards used for the finished art, Feldstein penciled in the copy in a system advantageous for Wroten, as Gaines explained: “He would take his six, seven or eight sheets of paper, because we had a formula—it was either an eight, seven or six-page story. He’d take a ruler, rule out the panels, he’d letter right into the panels, he’d hold his lettering three lines down so the letterer could read what he was lettering, because he used Leroy lettering with templates, and he had to leave room for the template.”
Since all Feldstein-edited books, over a period of years, featured Leroy lettering, readers assumed Feldstein chose to use Leroy lettering as the ideal adjunct to his clean, crisp art technique, but in 1975, he told interviewer Ed Spiegel (Fanfare #1, Spring 1977) that this choice was not his preference: “I inherited that. When I joined Bill, they were already using it. I think it was a mistake. Harvey didn’t want any part of Leroy. But the fellow who did it for us, Jim Wroten, had this whole family arrangement, and we didn’t have the heart to take it away from them. Jim and his wife did it. We published all those years with it, and I think it made the books appear a bit static. But there’s another angle to examine, and that’s whether the heavy captions I did would have been harder to read without it. It’s not easy to sustain good lettering over a whole paragraph.”
Jim and Margaret Wroten’s studio, Wroten Lettering, remained in operation for decades until Jim Wroten’s death in 1980. The couple, who first met in elementary school, grew up together in Baltimore. When I interviewed Margaret Wroten in 1986, she talked about the mid-1930s when Jim’s uncle helped him land a job at Keuffel & Esser in Morristown, New Jersey, leaving her in Baltimore. A year later, in 1937, they married. “Remember, it was the pit of the Depression,” she recalled. “You couldn’t get jobs. I had worked for the gas and electric company when he worked for Keuffel & Esser. I was just a housewife. He had been with them for about 18 months when we were married. Jim was about the best Leroy letterer around. He taught me how to do it. He demonstrated for Keuffel & Esser at different trade shows; that’s how he started doing it.”
He continued as a Keuffel & Esser salesman during World War II, exempt from military service because of his “confidential work for the government,” as she put it. Wroten Lettering began at the end of WWII when the couple, in 1945, joined William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) and others on the Wonder Woman team at 331 Madison Avenue.
“Jim quit Keuffel & Esser when we got our studio; he thought it would be a nice little business for the two of us to do together. Our studio was Doc Marston’s office. We were on the 12th floor. The art studio where Harry G. Peter worked was upstairs, right over us on the 13th floor. They had another artist, a girl named Arlene, who did backgrounds for him. Harry G. Peter was a nice old gentleman; he was just a nice person. We went out to Doc’s home several times, but after Doc died we never kept in touch with the rest of the family. He had an assistant who helped him write stories; her name was Joye Hummel. She married, and I think she’s down in Florida someplace.
“That’s how we started. We got started doing Wonder Woman, and through that we met Mr. Gaines [Max Gaines] and did work for him—because Doc Marston and Mr. Gaines were good friends. For Mr. Gaines we did Picture Stories from Science, the books on history and the story of The Bible. We worked on all of those.”
Wroten Lettering’s list of clients boomed in the post-WWII years. “We worked on EC Comics. We worked on Hillman Comics. And Victor Fox—we worked on some of his too. We did charts, and we did lettering on some romance magazines at 500 Fifth. At one time we had some help, but mostly it was just my husband and myself. I liked working with him, and I happened to like Leroy lettering. I think it’s a very fine kind of lettering."
In addition to the comic books, the Wrotens also lettered for comic strips—Bert Whitman’s syndicated Debbie Dean (1942-48) and Stan MacGovern’s antic angle on human behavior, Silly Milly (1939-50), which had little syndication but appeared in the featured slot at the top of the New York Post’s comics page. In Sinclair Lewis’ novel Bethel Merriday (1940) a character leaving New York remarks that they won’t miss the city except for Silly Milly. Once toasted in a “Stan MacGovern Night” at Leon & Eddie’s nightclub, the talented MacGovern became one of the more curiously neglected cartoonists of the 20th Century because his popular Silly Milly was never seen nationally. He abandoned cartooning in the 1950s, opened an unsuccessful East Rockaway, Long Island gift shop, and then worked at a Long Island furniture store. He was 72 when he committed suicide in 1975.
With the advent of EC’s New Trend, the Wrotens often worked evenings and weekends to keep pace with the ever-increasing number of words per page. “When we went into the horror comics, heck, the lettering on the horror comics practically took up half the panels. All you were getting was heads, a lot of heads. When we first got into the business, a survey was taken that said the concentration span of a child was very limited—and they said 35 to 40 words a page. Those you could turn out in 15 or 20 minutes. Bill Gaines was paying $2.50 a page. I’d count the words sometimes and find 400 to 500 words on a page. That’s a lot of words. The average way it used to be when comics were first done was with 35, 40 or 50 words a page, and you could do a page in 15 to 25 minutes or half an hour, depending on the words.; 400 to 500 words a page would take an hour or so. When it got so terribly heavy, I think we just reduced the size of the template. We had to go down to a #140 template, I think, because you couldn’t use a #175 with all those words on a page.
“We got it done. We always got it done. We worked night and day on those things. Many nights we stayed until nine o’clock to get something out that they needed the next day. We delivered and picked up our own work. This way we knew it got there; I don’t believe in that messenger stuff. Whenever they would finish the stories, they would give us a call; we would come down, pick up the work, do the lettering and take it back to them when it was done. We tried to proof everything before we sent it down. If Bill found a mistake or made a change, he would mark it off in blue in the margin, and then we would just correct it. Sometimes when there would be changes or he would want to do something else, we would put them on little strips, cut them to fit and put them on with rubber cement.” (This created a problem for reprints many years later when the rubber cement dried, and the tiny strips fell off.)
This exchange of pick-ups and deliveries kept the Wrotens actively involved with EC, since the procedure often necessitated traveling downtown to EC’s office three or four times a week. The Wrotens saw the EC artists not only at the annual EC Christmas parties but also in the course of their work, since the deadline pace occasionally required the artists to go to 331 Madison. “We just had one big room. It was a small office, but it was large enough for three boards. If they didn’t finish something, or if they wanted to make a last-minute correction, they could do that. Once in a while they would stop in and pick up work from us. If they needed to make a correction, we had pens and ink they could use. This didn’t go on all the time. This was just if they wanted to to do something quick or change something. Lots of time they would even bring up the work. Jack Davis used to come in, and Wood came in. We always had an extra drawing board, and they could sit down and do whatever they wanted to do.
“Bill had very good artists. We always got comic books. I had loads and loads of them. I gave them away. I shouldn’t have, should I? The last comic books we did were for EC, and then Jimmy just got out of it. He went into doing charts, badge cards, formulas for chemical houses and floor plans for trade shows all over the country. We sublet part of the studio during the 1960s. I gave up the studio after he passed on six years ago.”
For Alex Jay's blog on creating logos and lettering, go here.
I wrote the article below about the Wroten Lettering studio and its important contribution to EC Comics for Russ Cochran's hardcover reprint of EC's M.D. (1988). Here it is with a few minor changes. Margaret Wroten's quote in the next-to-last paragraph was a surprising revelation, since until then no one had ever mentioned the existence of a Manhattan studio where EC freelancers could do work.
Wroten on the Wind
EC Comics used Leroy lettering by the husband-and-wife team of Jim and Margaret Wroten. On the Al Feldstein-edited titles the artists received pages minus layouts but with the Wrotens’ inked lettering already down on the boards.
Leroy lettering requires a collection of templates and a small handheld instrument, the scriber. An inked letter is produced by the penholder on one side of the scriber as the metal stylus on the other side follows the grooves in the template positioned an inch below.
While scripting directly on the boards used for the finished art, Feldstein penciled in the copy in a system advantageous for Wroten, as Gaines explained: “He would take his six, seven or eight sheets of paper, because we had a formula—it was either an eight, seven or six-page story. He’d take a ruler, rule out the panels, he’d letter right into the panels, he’d hold his lettering three lines down so the letterer could read what he was lettering, because he used Leroy lettering with templates, and he had to leave room for the template.”
Since all Feldstein-edited books, over a period of years, featured Leroy lettering, readers assumed Feldstein chose to use Leroy lettering as the ideal adjunct to his clean, crisp art technique, but in 1975, he told interviewer Ed Spiegel (Fanfare #1, Spring 1977) that this choice was not his preference: “I inherited that. When I joined Bill, they were already using it. I think it was a mistake. Harvey didn’t want any part of Leroy. But the fellow who did it for us, Jim Wroten, had this whole family arrangement, and we didn’t have the heart to take it away from them. Jim and his wife did it. We published all those years with it, and I think it made the books appear a bit static. But there’s another angle to examine, and that’s whether the heavy captions I did would have been harder to read without it. It’s not easy to sustain good lettering over a whole paragraph.”
M.D. #1: Joe Orlando art with Wroten lettering.
He continued as a Keuffel & Esser salesman during World War II, exempt from military service because of his “confidential work for the government,” as she put it. Wroten Lettering began at the end of WWII when the couple, in 1945, joined William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) and others on the Wonder Woman team at 331 Madison Avenue.
“Jim quit Keuffel & Esser when we got our studio; he thought it would be a nice little business for the two of us to do together. Our studio was Doc Marston’s office. We were on the 12th floor. The art studio where Harry G. Peter worked was upstairs, right over us on the 13th floor. They had another artist, a girl named Arlene, who did backgrounds for him. Harry G. Peter was a nice old gentleman; he was just a nice person. We went out to Doc’s home several times, but after Doc died we never kept in touch with the rest of the family. He had an assistant who helped him write stories; her name was Joye Hummel. She married, and I think she’s down in Florida someplace.
Incredible Science Fiction #31: Wally Wood
Wroten Lettering’s list of clients boomed in the post-WWII years. “We worked on EC Comics. We worked on Hillman Comics. And Victor Fox—we worked on some of his too. We did charts, and we did lettering on some romance magazines at 500 Fifth. At one time we had some help, but mostly it was just my husband and myself. I liked working with him, and I happened to like Leroy lettering. I think it’s a very fine kind of lettering."
In addition to the comic books, the Wrotens also lettered for comic strips—Bert Whitman’s syndicated Debbie Dean (1942-48) and Stan MacGovern’s antic angle on human behavior, Silly Milly (1939-50), which had little syndication but appeared in the featured slot at the top of the New York Post’s comics page. In Sinclair Lewis’ novel Bethel Merriday (1940) a character leaving New York remarks that they won’t miss the city except for Silly Milly. Once toasted in a “Stan MacGovern Night” at Leon & Eddie’s nightclub, the talented MacGovern became one of the more curiously neglected cartoonists of the 20th Century because his popular Silly Milly was never seen nationally. He abandoned cartooning in the 1950s, opened an unsuccessful East Rockaway, Long Island gift shop, and then worked at a Long Island furniture store. He was 72 when he committed suicide in 1975.
With the advent of EC’s New Trend, the Wrotens often worked evenings and weekends to keep pace with the ever-increasing number of words per page. “When we went into the horror comics, heck, the lettering on the horror comics practically took up half the panels. All you were getting was heads, a lot of heads. When we first got into the business, a survey was taken that said the concentration span of a child was very limited—and they said 35 to 40 words a page. Those you could turn out in 15 or 20 minutes. Bill Gaines was paying $2.50 a page. I’d count the words sometimes and find 400 to 500 words on a page. That’s a lot of words. The average way it used to be when comics were first done was with 35, 40 or 50 words a page, and you could do a page in 15 to 25 minutes or half an hour, depending on the words.; 400 to 500 words a page would take an hour or so. When it got so terribly heavy, I think we just reduced the size of the template. We had to go down to a #140 template, I think, because you couldn’t use a #175 with all those words on a page.
“We got it done. We always got it done. We worked night and day on those things. Many nights we stayed until nine o’clock to get something out that they needed the next day. We delivered and picked up our own work. This way we knew it got there; I don’t believe in that messenger stuff. Whenever they would finish the stories, they would give us a call; we would come down, pick up the work, do the lettering and take it back to them when it was done. We tried to proof everything before we sent it down. If Bill found a mistake or made a change, he would mark it off in blue in the margin, and then we would just correct it. Sometimes when there would be changes or he would want to do something else, we would put them on little strips, cut them to fit and put them on with rubber cement.” (This created a problem for reprints many years later when the rubber cement dried, and the tiny strips fell off.)
This exchange of pick-ups and deliveries kept the Wrotens actively involved with EC, since the procedure often necessitated traveling downtown to EC’s office three or four times a week. The Wrotens saw the EC artists not only at the annual EC Christmas parties but also in the course of their work, since the deadline pace occasionally required the artists to go to 331 Madison. “We just had one big room. It was a small office, but it was large enough for three boards. If they didn’t finish something, or if they wanted to make a last-minute correction, they could do that. Once in a while they would stop in and pick up work from us. If they needed to make a correction, we had pens and ink they could use. This didn’t go on all the time. This was just if they wanted to to do something quick or change something. Lots of time they would even bring up the work. Jack Davis used to come in, and Wood came in. We always had an extra drawing board, and they could sit down and do whatever they wanted to do.
“Bill had very good artists. We always got comic books. I had loads and loads of them. I gave them away. I shouldn’t have, should I? The last comic books we did were for EC, and then Jimmy just got out of it. He went into doing charts, badge cards, formulas for chemical houses and floor plans for trade shows all over the country. We sublet part of the studio during the 1960s. I gave up the studio after he passed on six years ago.”
Labels: ec, feldstein, gaines, joe orlando, wroten
¶ 10:49 AM 3 comments
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Now, some 23 years later, one can follow him on Twitter by going to Dave Gibbons, where he recently announced, "I'm currently halfway through my first all digital story. Will post teaser soon."
Parts two and five of six-part demo.
Labels: alan moore, cintiq, gibbons, joe orlando, rorschach, wacom, watchmen
¶ 3:02 PM 2 comments
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The EC gang
Mad #8 (December 1953)
EC staffers as drawn by Jack Davis
Note how Special USA rearranged elements in the "Bat Boy and Rubin!" splash
Mad #8 (December 1953)
EC staffers as drawn by Joe Orlando (Panic #1, February 1954)
Wally Wood, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman in photo by E.B. Boatner from Squa Tront
Labels: ec, joe orlando, wood
¶ 9:53 AM 2 comments
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Here are three drawings I did in 1962 for the third issue of Castle of Frankenstein. I remember it was freezing cold the first time I went out to North Bergen, New Jersey to work on Calvin Beck's magazine in late December 1962. Issue #3 was partially completed, and my job was to finish the paste-ups. I suggested cartoon department headings and did these later when I was back at my apartment on West 10th Street. The originals are long lost, so I've attempted a clean-up restoration from the printed magazine pages. The word "movie" was done with white press-type, while "noose reel" is an imitation of the distinctive display lettering Ben Oda and Joe Orlando created for comic book story titles.
Labels: beck, ben oda, castle of frankenstein, joe orlando, matt fox
¶ 4:05 PM 2 comments
Sunday, December 21, 2008
EC Comics: From Here to Nudity #2
The story "A Rottin' Trick!", illustrated by Joe Orlando, was published in EC's Tales from the Crypt 29 (April-May 1952). When the story was reprinted in hardcover in 1979, the larger page size and b/w reproduction on quality paper revealed the artwork in greater detail than was evident in the original comic books on newsprint.
Some noticed unusual human figures cavorting in the fabric design on the drapery in the background of page three. Covered by murky. dark purple ink in the original comic book, these drawings went unseen by both editors and readers in 1952. Given the censorship climate of the 1950s, the discovery then of this single panel could have been devastating for EC publisher Bill Gaines.
Eventually, during the 1980s, someone brought the page to the attention of Gaines, who sent a photocopy to Orlando and demanded an explanation. Orlando responded by writing a letter to Gaines about the artwork on February 29, 1988. The closing sentence about "your brother Rex" is a joke, a reference to a funny hoax Gaines pulled in the 1950s, when he had the Mad office boy convinced that he had an identical twin brother, the evil Rex Gaines, who sometimes visited the Mad office.
This was not the only time a prank was slipped into an EC story. In Frontline Combat 4, the story "Bomb Run," illustrated by John Severin and Bill Elder, has an unusual last panel. It shows a copy of Homer's Odyssey, but the drama of the story is diminished because words from the familiar Ajax Cleanser singing commercial were lettered onto the page of the open book by prankster Elder: "Ajax the foaming cleanser Buh Buh Buh Buh Buh Soaps the dirt right down the drain". Perhaps he assumed that the lettering would reduce and become illegible or that it would be deleted before publication. (The full lyrics went something like this: "Use Ajax (boom boom), the foaming cleanser... (boom bub boom buh boom boom boom) soaps the dirt right down the drain... you'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax! So remember... use Ajax, the foaming cleanser, soaps the dirt right down the drain. bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-boom!") In this case, after EC received a stack of letters from puzzled readers, they apologized in Frontline Combat 6 for their "clumsy oversight".
For the earlier installment on this subject, describing some of the EC art pranks which did not get published, click here.
.
The story "A Rottin' Trick!", illustrated by Joe Orlando, was published in EC's Tales from the Crypt 29 (April-May 1952). When the story was reprinted in hardcover in 1979, the larger page size and b/w reproduction on quality paper revealed the artwork in greater detail than was evident in the original comic books on newsprint.
©2008 WMG
Some noticed unusual human figures cavorting in the fabric design on the drapery in the background of page three. Covered by murky. dark purple ink in the original comic book, these drawings went unseen by both editors and readers in 1952. Given the censorship climate of the 1950s, the discovery then of this single panel could have been devastating for EC publisher Bill Gaines.
Eventually, during the 1980s, someone brought the page to the attention of Gaines, who sent a photocopy to Orlando and demanded an explanation. Orlando responded by writing a letter to Gaines about the artwork on February 29, 1988. The closing sentence about "your brother Rex" is a joke, a reference to a funny hoax Gaines pulled in the 1950s, when he had the Mad office boy convinced that he had an identical twin brother, the evil Rex Gaines, who sometimes visited the Mad office.
This was not the only time a prank was slipped into an EC story. In Frontline Combat 4, the story "Bomb Run," illustrated by John Severin and Bill Elder, has an unusual last panel. It shows a copy of Homer's Odyssey, but the drama of the story is diminished because words from the familiar Ajax Cleanser singing commercial were lettered onto the page of the open book by prankster Elder: "Ajax the foaming cleanser Buh Buh Buh Buh Buh Soaps the dirt right down the drain". Perhaps he assumed that the lettering would reduce and become illegible or that it would be deleted before publication. (The full lyrics went something like this: "Use Ajax (boom boom), the foaming cleanser... (boom bub boom buh boom boom boom) soaps the dirt right down the drain... you'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax! So remember... use Ajax, the foaming cleanser, soaps the dirt right down the drain. bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-boom!") In this case, after EC received a stack of letters from puzzled readers, they apologized in Frontline Combat 6 for their "clumsy oversight".
For the earlier installment on this subject, describing some of the EC art pranks which did not get published, click here.
Labels: ajax, crypt, dc comics, ec, elder, frontline combat, gaines, joe orlando, nudity, prank, severin
¶ 6:15 PM 2 comments
Sunday, December 23, 2007
What, Me Merry?
Click on title above for Diana Krall's Christmas Songs (2005). (Use right click or Control key to open Diana Krall music in a new window for continuous play while you read below.)
People are always asking me to write more memoir posts, so here's a look back at the 1990s, when I worked at DC Comics in a department headed by the artist Joe Orlando (1927-1998) and shared an office with the writer-editor Daryl Edelman. (See his story in Sex and Guts.)
After Orion Pictures went bankrupt in 1991, they eventually vacated offices at 1325 Avenue of the Americas, so an odd series of synchronous events resulted in Daryl and I working in a huge CEO-type office once occupied by some top Orion exec. It overlooked both the Sheraton and the Hilton, and the wide ledge with railing just outside the windows provided a covert perch for the Secret Service when Bill Clinton stayed in those hotels.
Each year, Joe's department had to devise the DC Comics Christmas card. One year, the idea was to have Charles Vess draw Swamp Thing as a Christmas tree, and during a meeting in Joe's office, James McCann wrote the clever pun, "Season's Greenings," for the card interior. After Mad publisher Bill Gaines died in 1992, Time-Warner eventually decided that Mad should be under the wing of DC Comics, and Joe was given the position of Associate Publisher of Mad.
For the 1994 DC Comics Christmas card, Joe wanted the long-time Mad cartoonist Mort Drucker to draw Alfred E. Neuman as Superman. I came up with the line, "What, Me Merry?" (see reduction of card interior below). Daryl got on the phone to contact Mort Drucker. Then came some problems. When it was all over and the card was printed, I stared at it in disbelief and said, "Daryl, this is really odd. There's nothing here about Christmas. No tree, no wreath, no Santa cap, nothing. We blew it."
Looking at the card recently for the first time in years, I decided to email Daryl and ask him what he recalled about the creation of that card. Here's his memory of the event:
"Drucker would take no direction, and because he was Drucker, we let him do what he wanted. That's why there's nothing about the holidays in the card. I talked to him for a good half-hour on the phone. You were offering suggestions, and I kept shaking my head that he didn't want to do anything we asked. He said he would draw Alfred in a Superman suit, and that was all. I asked if he would at least draw him in a Santa hat. He wouldn't draw the Daily Planet, and that broken window with the backwards lettering was his compromise. We explained the whole episode to Joe, and when the drawing came in, Joe laughed and laughed. He liked it anyway."
Click on title above for Diana Krall's Christmas Songs (2005). (Use right click or Control key to open Diana Krall music in a new window for continuous play while you read below.)
People are always asking me to write more memoir posts, so here's a look back at the 1990s, when I worked at DC Comics in a department headed by the artist Joe Orlando (1927-1998) and shared an office with the writer-editor Daryl Edelman. (See his story in Sex and Guts.)
After Orion Pictures went bankrupt in 1991, they eventually vacated offices at 1325 Avenue of the Americas, so an odd series of synchronous events resulted in Daryl and I working in a huge CEO-type office once occupied by some top Orion exec. It overlooked both the Sheraton and the Hilton, and the wide ledge with railing just outside the windows provided a covert perch for the Secret Service when Bill Clinton stayed in those hotels.
Each year, Joe's department had to devise the DC Comics Christmas card. One year, the idea was to have Charles Vess draw Swamp Thing as a Christmas tree, and during a meeting in Joe's office, James McCann wrote the clever pun, "Season's Greenings," for the card interior. After Mad publisher Bill Gaines died in 1992, Time-Warner eventually decided that Mad should be under the wing of DC Comics, and Joe was given the position of Associate Publisher of Mad.
For the 1994 DC Comics Christmas card, Joe wanted the long-time Mad cartoonist Mort Drucker to draw Alfred E. Neuman as Superman. I came up with the line, "What, Me Merry?" (see reduction of card interior below). Daryl got on the phone to contact Mort Drucker. Then came some problems. When it was all over and the card was printed, I stared at it in disbelief and said, "Daryl, this is really odd. There's nothing here about Christmas. No tree, no wreath, no Santa cap, nothing. We blew it."
Looking at the card recently for the first time in years, I decided to email Daryl and ask him what he recalled about the creation of that card. Here's his memory of the event:
"Drucker would take no direction, and because he was Drucker, we let him do what he wanted. That's why there's nothing about the holidays in the card. I talked to him for a good half-hour on the phone. You were offering suggestions, and I kept shaking my head that he didn't want to do anything we asked. He said he would draw Alfred in a Superman suit, and that was all. I asked if he would at least draw him in a Santa hat. He wouldn't draw the Daily Planet, and that broken window with the backwards lettering was his compromise. We explained the whole episode to Joe, and when the drawing came in, Joe laughed and laughed. He liked it anyway."
Labels: alfred e. neuman, daryl edelman, dc comics, drucker, joe orlando, krall, mad, orion, superman
¶ 12:11 PM 0 comments
