Potrzebie
Friday, May 11, 2012
Stan Lee
.
In 1968, Ted White and I visited Stan Lee, and the result was this Castle of Frankenstein #12 interview (in which Lee discussed his working relationship with Jack Kirby). My paste-up was interrupted when Marvel suddenly phoned publisher Cal Beck and told him to wait for the new dynamic photo of Stan they were sending to replace the dull squaresville photo of Stan we were about to use.
In 1968, Ted White and I visited Stan Lee, and the result was this Castle of Frankenstein #12 interview (in which Lee discussed his working relationship with Jack Kirby). My paste-up was interrupted when Marvel suddenly phoned publisher Cal Beck and told him to wait for the new dynamic photo of Stan they were sending to replace the dull squaresville photo of Stan we were about to use.
Labels: marvel, stan lee, ted white
¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas
.
Here's part two of my 1979 interview with Stephen King as it appeared in the February 1980 issue of Heavy Metal. Rereading, I recall the surrounding events, fore and aft. In retrospect, it's a peculiar narrative of close encounters with some friendly and a few unfriendly people. To read part one of the interview, go here and scroll down.
When I was teaching Boston art students in the 1970s, I would sometimes be broke during the summer months and seek out freelance work, which would usually come through at the end of the summer just when it was time to teach again.
In the summer of 1979, I was dining from the vending machines in the Harvard Architectural Center. The building was cool, and I'd stop there as I walked through the heat from Somerville to Harvard Square. One day someone phoned and told me that Stephen King was soon due to arrive in Boston on a publicity tour promoting The Dead Zone. Around this time, Publishers Weekly was running an ad touting King as "the bestselling author in the world".
I phoned the Viking Press publicist, got on the list and later that week I interviewed King at the Ritz across from the Boston Public Garden. Back in Somerville, I phoned the arts editor of The Boston Globe and told her that I had taped an interview with Stephen King. She said, "Who's that?" I said, "Er... I think he's like the bestselling author in the world." She said, "Perhaps you should speak to our book editor."
She transferred the call, and I spoke to the Globe book editor, described what I had, and he replied in a somewhat condescending manner: "Oh, we don't do author interviews." I hung up, contemplating the next move. I phoned American Film and spoke to film critic-editor Hollis Alpert (1916-2007), who asked, "Has he been involved in the filming of The Shining?" I said, "He went to England, and they showed him around the set." Alpert said, "In that case, we'll have one of our people write something." That was it. Three strikes, and I was out. It sure seemed incredible. I had an interview with the world's bestselling author, yet no one was interested. I put the tapes aside, planning another tasty stopover at the vending machines.
A few days later, Heavy Metal editor Ted White phoned, said he wanted me to do a monthly film column for the magazine, gave me a two-week deadline and asked what I was going to write. "How about Stephen King?" I said. I sat at the IBM Selectric and immediately began transcribing the tapes in order to generate 2,000 words for the January 1980 issue. No more vending machines. Even Harlan Ellison once wrote that Heavy Metal paid better than his other markets. The rate was 25¢ a word. This meant if I typed "a", "of", "to" and "the", I had already made one dollar.
For the second column installment, I had a bit more time, so I added another interview by phoning art director Jim Plumeri at Signet. I decided I needed to give Heavy Metal a photo of a topiary to illustrate the column's discussion of topiaries and mazes. Disney World had a topiary, so I phoned the Disney World publicist. He said, yes, a topiary was there, and yes, he had a photo, but no, he would not send it to me. I phoned the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and spoke to a woman who said, "Yes, we have several topiary photos." I said, "I'll be right over."
I arrived across from Symphony Hall at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue where the Massachusetts Horticultural Society turned out to be nothing more than a single room of filing cabinets staffed by an attractive young woman, the only person there. She opened a file drawer and showed me a file folder with topiary photos. I said, "Wow! These are just what I was hoping for. Would it be possible to get copies?" She said, "You can have them. Take them." A refreshing attitude, I thought, but why? Was she getting her little bit of revenge for her Kafkaesque job situation, surrounded by filing cabinets and trapped alone in a room where few entered? Or was she simply leaving the job the next week? Or maybe she determined that 20 years might pass before anyone else would want a topiary photo. Whatever, it certainly counterbalanced the irritating refusal of the Disney publicist.
When I mailed in the second interview installment, Julie Simmons-Lynch read it and said to Ted White, "What's this? He only writes about Stephen King?"
After all that I went through to acquire a topiary picture, I was disappointed to see that Heavy Metal had reduced the photo, cropped it and covered it with a screen so dark that the image was obscured. A curious case where the photo credit is more visible than the photo, as you can see below.
Here's part two of my 1979 interview with Stephen King as it appeared in the February 1980 issue of Heavy Metal. Rereading, I recall the surrounding events, fore and aft. In retrospect, it's a peculiar narrative of close encounters with some friendly and a few unfriendly people. To read part one of the interview, go here and scroll down.
When I was teaching Boston art students in the 1970s, I would sometimes be broke during the summer months and seek out freelance work, which would usually come through at the end of the summer just when it was time to teach again.
In the summer of 1979, I was dining from the vending machines in the Harvard Architectural Center. The building was cool, and I'd stop there as I walked through the heat from Somerville to Harvard Square. One day someone phoned and told me that Stephen King was soon due to arrive in Boston on a publicity tour promoting The Dead Zone. Around this time, Publishers Weekly was running an ad touting King as "the bestselling author in the world".
I phoned the Viking Press publicist, got on the list and later that week I interviewed King at the Ritz across from the Boston Public Garden. Back in Somerville, I phoned the arts editor of The Boston Globe and told her that I had taped an interview with Stephen King. She said, "Who's that?" I said, "Er... I think he's like the bestselling author in the world." She said, "Perhaps you should speak to our book editor."
She transferred the call, and I spoke to the Globe book editor, described what I had, and he replied in a somewhat condescending manner: "Oh, we don't do author interviews." I hung up, contemplating the next move. I phoned American Film and spoke to film critic-editor Hollis Alpert (1916-2007), who asked, "Has he been involved in the filming of The Shining?" I said, "He went to England, and they showed him around the set." Alpert said, "In that case, we'll have one of our people write something." That was it. Three strikes, and I was out. It sure seemed incredible. I had an interview with the world's bestselling author, yet no one was interested. I put the tapes aside, planning another tasty stopover at the vending machines.
A few days later, Heavy Metal editor Ted White phoned, said he wanted me to do a monthly film column for the magazine, gave me a two-week deadline and asked what I was going to write. "How about Stephen King?" I said. I sat at the IBM Selectric and immediately began transcribing the tapes in order to generate 2,000 words for the January 1980 issue. No more vending machines. Even Harlan Ellison once wrote that Heavy Metal paid better than his other markets. The rate was 25¢ a word. This meant if I typed "a", "of", "to" and "the", I had already made one dollar.
For the second column installment, I had a bit more time, so I added another interview by phoning art director Jim Plumeri at Signet. I decided I needed to give Heavy Metal a photo of a topiary to illustrate the column's discussion of topiaries and mazes. Disney World had a topiary, so I phoned the Disney World publicist. He said, yes, a topiary was there, and yes, he had a photo, but no, he would not send it to me. I phoned the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and spoke to a woman who said, "Yes, we have several topiary photos." I said, "I'll be right over."
I arrived across from Symphony Hall at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue where the Massachusetts Horticultural Society turned out to be nothing more than a single room of filing cabinets staffed by an attractive young woman, the only person there. She opened a file drawer and showed me a file folder with topiary photos. I said, "Wow! These are just what I was hoping for. Would it be possible to get copies?" She said, "You can have them. Take them." A refreshing attitude, I thought, but why? Was she getting her little bit of revenge for her Kafkaesque job situation, surrounded by filing cabinets and trapped alone in a room where few entered? Or was she simply leaving the job the next week? Or maybe she determined that 20 years might pass before anyone else would want a topiary photo. Whatever, it certainly counterbalanced the irritating refusal of the Disney publicist.
When I mailed in the second interview installment, Julie Simmons-Lynch read it and said to Ted White, "What's this? He only writes about Stephen King?"
After all that I went through to acquire a topiary picture, I was disappointed to see that Heavy Metal had reduced the photo, cropped it and covered it with a screen so dark that the image was obscured. A curious case where the photo credit is more visible than the photo, as you can see below.
Labels: heavy metal, stephen king, ted white
¶ 10:40 PM 0 comments
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Under the Sea
In the summer of 1979, I signed on as the film columnist for Heavy Metal, then edited by Ted White. Ted wanted to use an unusual title on the column, something different from the familiar words associated with films and filming. After some thought, I coined the word Flix, which I had never seen in print anywhere. Ted introduced the magazine's new quartet of columns (on music, film, sf, underground comics) in the January 1980 issue.
The column installment below, based on my interview with the Disney artist Nino Carbe (1909-1993), was published in the April 1980 issue. As you'll see if you read it, I chose an enigma-wrapped-in-a-riddle approach with more than a few convoluted Cornell Woolrich-styled twists. As the deadline neared, just when I completed that column, an envelope arrived from Carbe with a color transparency of his beautiful 1944 Little Mermaid painting. (As noted on the DVD of Disney's The Little Mermaid, Disney first began pre-production art on this in the late 1930s.)
I passed the transparency on to John Workman, the Heavy Metal art director. When I received the printed magazine, I was stunned to see that Workman had destroyed Carbe's magnificent painting by chopping it in half and running it on two facing pages. If anyone wanted to clip it, they could not. It could have looked spectacular if displayed large on a single page. Using Photoshop, I've joined the two halves together so it can at last be seen correctly and at a large size.
I once wondered if Disney executives in the 1980s were prompted to locate the long-ago forgotten 1930s project after seeing Carbe's painting in the April 1980 issue of Heavy Metal. The official story is that after The Little Mermaid went into production in 1985, the Disney staff accidentally found Kay Nielsen's visual development materials for the earlier proposed film.
The huge success in 1989 of The Little Mermaid may have saved Disney from going bankrupt. The thought persists that Nino Carbe's Little Mermaid bubbled to the surface just when Disney was sinking. Something to ponder. Note that Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) began when an executive remembered reading the 1940s Classics Illustrated adaptation and brought a copy of the comic book into a meeting.
To see Carbe's paintings, illustrations and costume designs, go to Nino Carbe.
Carbe also did backgrounds for Clair de Lune, the segment which was deleted from Fantasia (1940). It was re-edited and re-scored as the Blue Bayou segment in Make Mine Music (1946). When a workprint of the original Clair de Lune was discovered, it was restored and released as a Disney short subject (1996).
©2010 Nino Carbe
The column installment below, based on my interview with the Disney artist Nino Carbe (1909-1993), was published in the April 1980 issue. As you'll see if you read it, I chose an enigma-wrapped-in-a-riddle approach with more than a few convoluted Cornell Woolrich-styled twists. As the deadline neared, just when I completed that column, an envelope arrived from Carbe with a color transparency of his beautiful 1944 Little Mermaid painting. (As noted on the DVD of Disney's The Little Mermaid, Disney first began pre-production art on this in the late 1930s.)
I passed the transparency on to John Workman, the Heavy Metal art director. When I received the printed magazine, I was stunned to see that Workman had destroyed Carbe's magnificent painting by chopping it in half and running it on two facing pages. If anyone wanted to clip it, they could not. It could have looked spectacular if displayed large on a single page. Using Photoshop, I've joined the two halves together so it can at last be seen correctly and at a large size.
I once wondered if Disney executives in the 1980s were prompted to locate the long-ago forgotten 1930s project after seeing Carbe's painting in the April 1980 issue of Heavy Metal. The official story is that after The Little Mermaid went into production in 1985, the Disney staff accidentally found Kay Nielsen's visual development materials for the earlier proposed film.
The huge success in 1989 of The Little Mermaid may have saved Disney from going bankrupt. The thought persists that Nino Carbe's Little Mermaid bubbled to the surface just when Disney was sinking. Something to ponder. Note that Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) began when an executive remembered reading the 1940s Classics Illustrated adaptation and brought a copy of the comic book into a meeting.
To see Carbe's paintings, illustrations and costume designs, go to Nino Carbe.
Carbe also did backgrounds for Clair de Lune, the segment which was deleted from Fantasia (1940). It was re-edited and re-scored as the Blue Bayou segment in Make Mine Music (1946). When a workprint of the original Clair de Lune was discovered, it was restored and released as a Disney short subject (1996).
Labels: disney, heavy metal, nino carbe, ted white
¶ 5:51 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
My first cartoon for Paul Krassner's The Realist was in issue #26 (May 1961), and I continued as a contributor over the next few years. In the fall of 1961, Ted White's wife, Sylvia, told me about how she had been amused by someone's routine about a comic strip, and she felt I should meet him. Not long after that, probably at Ted's office and mimeograph service on West 10th Street, I did encounter Ken Seagle, and after listening to him deliver a sort of rambling but entertaining monolog, I agreed to put it into pictures.
There were two problems, however. Ken would never put anything on paper, so I had to listen to him talk, prompt him, ask questions, take notes and do the script myself. That doesn't diminish his role as the true writer; it's my memory of the way we collaborated. It seemed he had never thought of it as a genuine comic strip; it was just a sort of premise he liked to rap about. I had hoped to get a stack of scripts so I could work well ahead, but that never happened. Since he was much more interested in the young woman who was living with me than sitting down to plan panels, he would soon become entranced by her and lose any focus on the scripts in progress.
Leaping these hurdles, I drew the first J.C. in 1961. The title was a specific reference to Johnny Hart's B.C. which began February 1958. (Curiously, around 1984-85, B.C. introduced religious themes, including some controversial strips yanked by newspaper editors.) In The Realist #30 (December 1961), J.C. began running as a series. In that same issue, Sylvia had two contributions, both satirizing folk music, under her maiden name byline, Sylvia Dees.
In Texas the following year, Frank Stack circulated among his friends a 14-page Xerox, The Adventures of Jesus (1962), which some call the first underground comic. For a unique slide show of Frank Stack talking about his paintings, Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, go here. Also see The Realist Archive Project.
The above J.C. installment appeared in issue #47 (February 1964). The character with the black beard is Judas. Click with cross-hair cursor for full enlargement.
Labels: b.c., frank stack, j.c., johnny hart, krassner, memoir, seagle, sylvia dees white, ted white, the adventures of jesus, the realist
¶ 1:54 PM 1 comments
