Comics Interview — Issue #014

Shooter discusses the origins and astonishing commercial success of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, which outsells even The X-Men nearly two-to-one and is the best-selling comic series in twenty-five years. He explains how the Beyonder story was designed from the outset with Marvel's entire continuity in mind, with input from writers like Claremont and Byrne, and how the Mattel toy tie-in came about with Marvel refusing to compromise the integrity of the Marvel Universe. He also reveals that a sequel, tentatively called Secret Wars II, is already in the works, and that the ending is known only to himself and editor Tom DeFalco — not even Stan Lee.

Englehart recounts his two-year stint at Atari developing video games (including a Garfield arcade game), which ended when Warner sold the company and his group was let go. Now returning to comics, he is planning a twelve-part Silver Surfer maxi-series for Marvel, a Blue Beetle strip for a proposed DC weekly anthology, and a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents book with Dave Cockrum for a new company, while continuing to write Coyote for Epic. He gives an extended description of Coyote's premise — a Paiute Indian with a shape-changing trickster god's consciousness set loose in Las Vegas — and reflects on his mystical beliefs, including a possible UFO sighting and an encounter he believes was a gnome in Norway.

Wagner, described by Comico colleagues as "the next Frank Miller," discusses Mage, his fifteen-issue series in which the protagonist Kevin is visually modeled on Wagner himself — a deliberate choice to take the comics trend of creators appearing in their own books one step further by making the creator and hero the same person. He explains that Kevin is the embodiment of the Eternal Hero archetype, and describes how Grendel, his six-issue black-and-white assassin series, grew from a desire to do a comic where the villain is the protagonist and where good and evil are deliberately indistinguishable. He cites Frank Miller and Will Eisner as his primary comics influences and reveals he has a Moon Knight back-up story completed but not yet submitted to Marvel.

In a no-holds-barred joint interview at the Fantagraphics offices in Stamford, Connecticut, DAK turns the tables on the Comics Journal publishers. Groth recounts how he and Mike Catron rescued the Journal from its original Texas publishers and rebuilt it from an advertising trade sheet into a critical magazine, with Thompson coming aboard shortly after; the switch to magazine format quadrupled circulation from 2,000 to 8,000. Groth and Thompson defend their reputation for negativism, arguing that their stringent critical standards come from a deep love of the medium's unrealized potential, and that mainstream comics — singling out Secret Wars as an example as infantile as a bad 1940s comic — have failed to evolve artistically in forty years. They discuss plans to expand outside the direct market through album-format reprints such as Popeye, warn that most independent publishers are financially precarious, and discuss the three lawsuits pending against the Journal. Thompson explains the rationale for making Amazing Heroes bi-weekly, and Catron describes his role handling circulation and advertising for the entire Fantagraphics line.

DAK explains why the promised Fred Hembeck "Destroy the Marvel Universe" feature was pulled: Marvel imposed a moratorium on Hembeck's destruction pending the outcome of the Secret Wars storyline. DAK promises the Hembeck piece will run in a future issue and introduces the Jim Shooter spotlight on Secret Wars as a timely substitute.

(int. Lesley Benjamin-Aull) — Advertising manager Lesley Benjamin-Aull interviews Ian Jack, an Australian accountant now living in New Jersey, about comics culture in Australia. Jack describes the enormous cult following of Lee Falk's The Phantom in Australia, where it appears in comic-book format and has been published continuously past issue #600, and discusses how Australian popular culture is heavily shaped by American and British imports, from television to comics.