One afternoon, the genial bearded Master of Marvel Merchandising Production, Nel Yomtov, sauntered into my office. Nel never walked, he sauntered – almost floated. He sized me up, winced and said what every staffer wanted to hear, “You want some overtime?”
It is not widely known here in America that Marvel Comics sold a huge number of their old comics in other countries. My favorite example of this was some clever publisher in Mexico started printing The Amazing Spider-Man from ish #1 on – some time in the 1970s. They took the black and white art, in the form of proof roll stats, shoe-horned in the Spanish version of Peter Parker’s wise-cracking and every month, out came a new one.
I mention “proof rolls” every once in a while but it’s been long time since I explained what they are. Here’s the low-down. The film that is used to make the printing plates that make the comics is copied. The large piece of film is made up of four pages ordered just so. The entire piece of film is copied onto a piece of eggshell-thin junk paper that has photographic emulsion on one side. The film is a negative and the paper is a normal photographic print—that is, it prints a negative of what is exposed. In this case, the paper is placed on the film and an exact copy of the film is made. But now the image is conventional black line art on white paper.
Just what those paper versions of the art—now at the same size as it will be printed – were used for in the olden golden days is unclear. During my time at Marvel they were used to check that the pages were in the right order. A very tricky process. To me, it seems a lot of infrastructure is involved to be able to do that. The paper print of the negative could have been used to make color guides. It was thin, but rather nice paper. Guides back then were done at the separators. That use is just a guess.
Back to the urr—present which is some time in late 1979. Nel has whispered the magic words in my ear and I ran out to buy candy bars in order to survive in the office. You see, this was a Thursday night and the order needed to be complete by Monday morn…
The order? Merely all of Stan’s The Silver Surfer. 18 issues and three copies each. Covers and editorial stuff too. About 1800 stats.
Oh yeah, photostat paper copies… And yours truly, John Henry facing the Inkie Poo… which was my PosOne stat camera. This paper was top-notch stuff. It was thick and dense; perfect for any secondary market use. The emulsion had a very fine “tooth” that took everything from White-Out, tempera, India Ink, water colors—you name it, it all went down like an archangel did it.
Speaking of archangels! Here’s Eliot swaying gently in the breeze. About to gather his wits, stats and proof rolls for the long march over to Nel’s office. Nel had a very nice office with a view of Madison Avenue. Nel was practically an executive. Still wasn’t as nice as the corner office, which was Stan’s. There were often hints of air in Nel’s office. If you look over my steaming stat camera, the view out my window is a brick wall. Grey, tannish with bird poop. Years of it.
But seriously, folks! This was a bit of a slog. For the record, I had to change my chemistry four times! We were creaking into winter! The heat would come up for only a part of Saturday. No self-respecting Madison Avenue executive suite dweller would come in on a Sunday.
What’s not obvious is that the things that my arms are in is an actual part of the stat camera. The interior of the light safe box had one iffy solution to the problem of putting your arms inside of it. The round openings are really sort’a ripped up sheets of rubber. They do not form a light tight seal. Not at all. But they seem to prevent enough light from getting in. They also prevent my arms from getting in.
A brief description of myself might include the phrase, “–a lot of arm hair.” Gorilla-oid in fact. I have often waved hello to gorillas in the zoo and they waved back as to a friend. The technical rep’s suggestion that I use talcum powder is a strange one to me, as any dust inside the camera’s light path is a bad thing. So I just cut them open a little wider. Some people consider me pretty smart. It took several hundred stat’s worth of ripping my arm hairs off before I thought of that.
I brought in some old pants and a too-small shirt and shredded them for this bit of early cosplay. Broken stat camera parts littered the back area that we haunted. And the show went on.
I was lucky in that young Jack Morelli, by now a full-fledged letterer of the Bullpen, he who would quickly become a best friend, found me early in the morning. I set up the shot and handed him the camera. I use it here with his permission!
I am happy to say that I shambled all the way over to Nel’s office and placed the boxes on the floor, made some rather believable zombie noises and shambled out. I was gratified to hear his laughter. It was a good day.
As I prepared the scans of this page, I spotted a blurry accidental exposure just before the above. It caught a corner of the box full of proof rolls that I had neatly organized. Thus I present it here to give you an idea of some of the living hell I endured that weekend!
