Dear friends, I am not really going to ramble on forever, though it might feel like it. If this is ever turned into a book, there will be a huge autobiography filled with falsehoods. For now, just the facts.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1954. Moved to Manhattan just about 1960. My mom was a poor but honest, hard-working single mom. She has a more colorful childhood, but suffice it to say the reform school work/study program resulted in her being able to get a job in magazine production. When we moved to NYC, she got work at Parade Magazine! We lived on 45th St. between Third and Lexington and it was astonishingly close to where the Parade offices were. Parade is still being published to this day, her contributions all but forgotten. I think the whiff of gossip lingers on from her desk. But that’s about all.
We lived across the street form E. J. Korvettes which was a strictly local “department store.” A very strange playground for this kid. But I loved it. Over on Lexington was a Woolworth Store! I still have my Doc Savage paperback, Fear Cay—whose cover of Doc machine-gunning vampire killer bats still thrills.
What does that have to do with Marvel? More of an indication that my tastes ran to the fantastic. My 25-cent allowance would encompass two comics. Alas, I was misled by rowdy youngsters and I was a DC customer. I soon discovered the Marvel side of the tracks and was hooked.
Then something strange happened. Mom got a line on a real nice job at a small advertising agency. Careful readers of this blog have heard me rattle on about Kalish, Quigley & Rosen. The did a bunch of stuff but the big thing was placing ads in all of Marvel Comics. So we got “checking copies.” Maybe you don’t understand… unlike comics, loose in the world, those were straight from the end of the printing presses, stuffed in a box that would normally go to a filthy, scummy, louse-ridden newspaper stand, where it was opened, spat upon and sold to unsuspecting toddlers like me. But unlike me, in this case that sterile box would arrive at my Mom’s desk, where she would dutifully hand me several of each title.
“A little something for you to buy yourself some friends, Little Eliot,” she would wisely intone. I would chirp my sincere thanks and scamper home to hide them from all of those so-called friends. I knew better and these were mine!
Alas, the Beginning of the End came in the form of a life-changing family move to Los Angeles. For reasons still under legal seal, I found myself stripped down to the basics for survival on a cross-country trip. That did not include any of my comics. I had my own little trail of tears over the Rockies. Yes, I may have been in a 747, but I was recalling tossing all of those FF #1s right into the garbage cans. My fabulous in-flight meal of roasted chicken in mini-onions was as bitter gall on my tongue… multiple copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 were being tossed into a pile of ripe banana peels… over and over. Goodbye Hulk #1s and hello, Long Beach, California.
“I Wish They All Could Be California Girls” – let me tell ya’ – I didn’t see a bathing suit the entire time I was there. I may have been 12 but I knew I was robbed.
My passion was science fiction and eventually photography. I liked to draw some but I was kind’a stiff and liked buildings and table-tops. Alas, “California Dreamin’” became a nightmare. A short, short 6 months later, I was back in midtown Manhattan facing down all the chumps and suckers I’d bid farewell to, having called them that as I left. A life lesson there…
Long story just a bit more—I wound up at the High School of Art & Design. There, I learned old-school photography (I can still tray develop!) and devoted myself to Architecture. I took to perspective and did okay at architectural rendering—which is showing what a project will look like when it’s finished.
Here’s a project by my oldest pal, Emmy Award Winner James Sanders, did in College— and that I did a rendering for. He and a chum had plans to spiff up Columbia College’s student general area thingie.
This drawing is a straight shot to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. In the meantime I had worked at a Madison Avenue Ad Agency, whose name is withheld to satisfy the DOJ, but where I learned how to use a photostat camera.
After a short stint cooling my heels…
[All three images above reveal much of how I learned to be a more effective Editor. I played Oberon, King of the Fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream, I learned to get an elephant to work for peanuts and trained to crack a whip really well in The Bacchae of Euripedes. I know, more hair than reasonable.]
…nepotism finally paid off. Marvel needed a stat man.
In I went, October, 1978.
Good times…
Bad times…
I came in pretty well trained in print production from that ad agency, knowing how to use a stat camera was gravy. It was the gravy I supped at for three years.
During that time I tried to demonstrate my abilities as a renderer. As history tells it, Mark Gruenwald liked what he saw in my early efforts and I managed to put some hard lines into comics.
This was taken at my first Marvel Christmas Party, some 9 weeks into my employment there (taken Jan, 1979). I was so green I wore a shirt to the party.]
In spite of there being no “short” to the “long and short of it,” I eventually turned my knowledge of using a typesetting computer (that ad agency again) into a job change and became Marvel’s typesetter. Since this was during the time of OHOTMU, it came in handy as that is a typeset book with a few illos in it.
I exploited my photographic efforts to shoot some “photo” covers. I took a lot of pictures of the office. Why, everyone kept asking… well, I had grown up reading of the exploits of the photographers who worked at Magnum Photos. The line between art and journalism was blurred by these photographers. The same was said for the National Geographic Magazine. I had the art and science of those men and women firmly in my mind as I marched through Marvel’s offices, camera in hand…
Well, okay, that’s Jack shooting this one—
Yes, this is him too. But I pre-set everything for him. One up, I’m wearing a “Big Mike” lumberjack shirt that was a gift from Jack. I think that’s Lance Took’s head just cut off.
Me and Marvel—I already had two best friends from as far back as elementary school– I mentioned James but there’s also Paul Turgeon. They alone survived the cut after crisscrossing the continent. When I joined up with Marvel, I had no idea I’d find a third and fourth, maybe a whole office-full of them. Gruenwald and Carlin, Jack who is the brother I always wanted, Rick Parker is another—if I ever wanted a Southern Gentleman for a brother…
It’s hard to describe what working at Marvel was—and for all I know—is like. The shared unique labors, the specialized language, the recurring gentlefolk as well as the scalliwags (Tom). The freelance life. My brother-in-law summed it up perfectly, “You draw pictures and make money… hunnh…”
Good days…
Bad days…
On the Best Day, you might get a caricature of yourself by one of the most talented people in the industry if not the world. Like this, done by Marie Severin on the announcement of myself being yanked out of Production and kicked into DeFalco’s clutches…
