Comics Interview — Issue #022

Hembeck discusses the long, troubled history of Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe, which was completed but then blocked by Jim Shooter and Jim Galton over the ending's allusion to Mort Weisinger; Hembeck refused to change it. He recounts a personal "curse" surrounding the book — his mother died, a close friend (cartoonist Raoul Vezina) died unexpectedly, and several other near-disasters struck while he worked on it. He also reflects on his career trajectory from fanzine parody strips to Marvel projects, his sitcom-driven sense of comic timing (citing Jack Benny, Sgt. Bilko, and Mary Tyler Moore as key influences), and his desire to eventually do situation-comedy-style comics without superheroes, praising Love and Rockets and American Flagg as models.

Mushynsky, whose full Ukrainian name is Andreas Vasylovych Muszyskyj, traces an unusual path to comics inking: born in a Displaced Persons Camp in postwar Germany, he later worked in avant-garde theatre, tenant-rights activism, and publishing before gravitating toward inking through a studio he shared with DC inker Bob Smith. He discusses his tools and techniques (Sable #3 brush, Hunt #102 crowquill pen), the differences between inking the detail-heavy G.I. Joe versus the more open superhero forms in The Vision and Scarlet Witch, and his admiration for artists like John Byrne and Bill Sienkiewicz who can "turn on" creative flow without self-censorship. He expresses frustration at being overlooked while working on G.I. Joe despite its strong sales, and aspires to eventually move into pencilling.

In an unconventional interview conducted at Gordon's home in Northern California (where Yeates had originally planned to interview Gordon and Macklin), Yeates discusses his artistic philosophy — preferring illustrative, story-driven picture-making in the tradition of Hal Foster, Roy Krenkel, and Al Williamson over the cinematic violence he associates with Frank Miller. He recounts his training at the Kubert School's inaugural class alongside Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben, his early work assisting Al Williamson on Secret Agent X-9, and his year drawing Saga of the Swamp Thing — which he found grueling and philosophically incompatible with writer Marty Pasko's scripts. He discusses Timespirits as a labor of love for indigenous cultures and hints at wanting to write future issues himself, while expressing broader anxieties about violence in media and whether comics can be a meaningful positive force.

Britain's premier horror author, interviewed in Liverpool, discusses his discovery of EC Comics through late-1960s Ballantine paperbacks rather than as a contemporary reader, and his admiration for Bernie Wrightson (particularly Frankenstein and the early Swamp Thing), Bruce Jones's Twisted Tales, and the EC tradition's blend of humor and horror. He praises the quality of current horror comics while cautioning against escalating gratuitousness. A substantial portion of the interview addresses the British "video nasties" censorship crisis of the mid-1980s, in which films like The Evil Dead, The Burning, and Wolfen were being seized and declared obscene under new Parliamentary pressure, which Campbell condemns as dangerous paternalism. He also discusses his own fiction — including The Face That Must Die (drawn from his schizophrenic mother's experience) and his forthcoming novel For the Rest of Their Lives — and his view that comics, far from being something readers should outgrow, deserve a permanent place alongside prose literature.

In lieu of DAK's usual editorial, Hembeck writes a first-person column explaining the situation with Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe: completed on time but pulled by Marvel editorial at the last minute over objections to the ending, leaving him in comic limbo as the scheduled April 1985 release came and went with no word on publication.