Welcome back to an Interview from Behind The Universe by Nicholas Brown!
There has been a slight delay in the schedule but we’re making up for it with a big one!
You have often seen his name dropped and sometimes glimpsed him in Eliot’s pictures: Today we have Eliot’s frequent partner in mischief and mayhem, Jack “Squid” Morelli!
Letterer, writer, gym enthusiast, and all around wonderful guy, Jack is an old family friend who made his name at Marvel and a few other posts before wrangling a job at the one and only Archie Comics Publications where he works to this day.
And as you’ll see soon, he’s one of the few with the physique to pull off the legendary Spider-Man outfit they used for the photo covers.
Q: What did you do before working at Marvel Comics and do you think that helped prepare you for the job?
Jack: I started at Marvel in 1978 when I was just 16, but I had been working summers and weekends as a deckhand on fishing boats in my hometown of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn since I was 13. That exposed me to quite a collection of characters, though very different from the ones I would later meet at Marvel. It also made me not only comfortable but actively appreciative of being the “kid” among all older co-workers.
That being said, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for entering anywhere so uniquely and bizarrely wonderful as the Marvel Bullpen of the 70s-80s.
[This is Jack, sooo long ago, he was still called “John.” At the 575 Madison offices around early 1979. He is really spattered in fish guts. Despite the glazed look in his eyes from riding the subway into midtown Manhattan from Sheepshead Bay, he was always ready to thrill and amaze with “fish tales.” – Eliot]
Q: What has life been like after Marvel?
Jack: Yipe! I worked for Marvel on staff and later, on contract for 20 years, and now it’s been 22 years since. Hard to sum up, or even get my head around. When I first was let go from Marvel during what’s become known as “Marvelcution!” when MANY of us who’d been there for a long time were unceremoniously ousted and freelance contracts ended, I found enough work at DC Comics to stay afloat. But when DC brought the majority of their lettering in-house, there just wasn’t enough.
I’d moved to upstate NY and was geographically cut off from returning to a staff job. I found local work doing construction and roofing. I drove a tow truck part-time as well. When a job came up as a maintenance man at the local high school I jumped at the chance for a regular check and benefits, but it was VERY hard ( as it has been for so many ) adjusting to life after having been a part of the creatively crazy camaraderie of the Merry Marvel Bullpen.
[Jack in his more muscular “Squid” phase, around 1981. Shot during a long Marvel Universe weekend. Jack filled some of the wee AM hours doing some light paste up. On the floor, the original board for the all-assembled version of the MU covers—so designed that the finished product will be looping and spiraling around side-to-side and top-to-bottom. Note Squid’s bicep. – Eliot]
We really were a family whose home felt torn apart. But just when I thought my life in comics was over, something incredible happened. Victor Gorelick, the legendary editor-in-Chief at Archie Comics called one day. He was looking for a hand letterer to help carry the workload with long-time Archie stalwart Bill Yoshida.
I eventually got enough work to leave the school job and devote myself fully to working in comics once more. It still amazes me that I won the Harvey Award for best letterer of 2015, years after I was completely convinced I’d never work in the biz again. What’s more, Archie is still a family owned company with a tight core of really great people like those of the old-school Marvel Bullpen.
Improbable as it seems, after wandering the work wilderness, I’ve found myself welcomed into another family.
Q: Do you have any stories from the Bullpen that you’d like to tell? Perhaps something Eliot has overlooked in his writings or that you’d like to add to?
Jack: Well, Eliot has done such a phenomenal job telling tales of Marvel mayhem, I could never compete. The “Laff-Riot Beagle-Puss”-wearing Barry Shapiro birthday party saw me laughing as hard as any time in my life. Then when Mark Rogan left to take a job in advertising, instead of a going away party we held a funeral for him (he was “dead to us” for quitting Marvel) complete with look-alike mannequin in a coffin which somehow ended up somehow floating down the East River, Viking funeral style.
There were many wild Dreaded Deadline Doom all-nighters back when you could stay in the Bullpen 24 hours. Then the after-hours office-wide rubber dart gun battles with all the lights out. Also sleeping at the office all weekend through blizzards and blackouts figuring ways to keep working and get the books out. Mark Gruenwald’s hysterically creepy Michele Marsh Day festivities, and later turning his office into a bouncy house made from crumpled up comic book covers.
One time when everyone else was going to San Diego Con but we (Assistant Editors) couldn’t get away, we papered our entire office with tinfoil, brought in heat lamps and worked in bathing suits while wearing sunglasses and with sunblock on our noses so as not to feel left out.
I always enjoyed taking time off from my duties in the Bullpen or later in Editorial to wear the Spidey suit when a tour of particularly little kids would come through. Sometimes Assistant Editor Adam Blaustien would wear the Green Goblin costume and we’d put on a battle to the delight of the tykes.
I guess one very small story I won’t leave to Eliot was the time we had a loud and angry “argument” in the Bullpen to the astonishment of all because we were such close friends. It culminated with Eliot violently smashing the glass Coke bottle he’d been drinking from over my head, knocking me dead unconscious and causing everyone to gasp and leap up from their drafting tables. Of course the whole ridiculous thing was staged, and the bottle was a movie prop made of sugar glass that he’d bought at a theatrical shop on Broadway. [One detail I’d like to throw in, because Jack was face down on his drafting board, was that the entire rest of the Bullpen looked up and just gawked in silence. That reaction was unnerving and I started doing a war whoop, yelling that, I’d do it again. Then everyone looked down at their work—oh, Eliot’s killed Jack—Then I hustled Jack up and we ran like thieves—Eliot]
But these really are the tiny tip of an immense iceberg of stories. It would be a daunting task to even organize them in my head to BEGIN telling it all. Your Dad is doing a bang-up job with his blog, and what’s incredible is he has all of his terrific photographs to boot!
Q: What got you to get into the comic industry in the first place?
Jack: Like your Dad several years before me, I attended The High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. I didn’t take cartooning, though. I was an advertising major. There was no show “Mad Men” back then–so I thought I was going to be the next Darrin Stevens.
One day I learned of the Executive Internship Program, where if chosen, instead of attending class you went to work in an office and learned the ropes for a semester. But as usual, I was late to the party and all of the advertising companies had already made their choices. The director of the program informed me that the last two places still looking were Marvel Comics and Neil Adams studio Continuity, and asked if I knew anything about comics. My brother Frank was a bigger superhero fan than me, but I had read them and particularly loved horror comics like Mike Ploog’s “The Monster of Frankenstein” and Bernie Wrightson’s “Swamp Thing.” So I did a few drawings and went on the interviews with a mob of cartooning majors. Unbelievably, I got both jobs.
The Marvel offices, then on the corner of 57th street and Madison Ave. just exuded a kind of magical energy and the lady conducting the interviews and making the selection struck me as a singularly wonderful person. I’m a pretty fair foul-up at times, but I sure nailed it that time. It was the great Marie Severin. I went to Marvel. I often joked with Marie right up until the time of her passing at 89, that she had been for me like “The Claw” from Toy Story. She’d reached into that mob of kids and picked me and changed my life in a great and wonderful way forever.
Q: What was your first impression of Eliot?
Jack: I was immediately intrigued by Eliot because he was such an outsized character among characters. He was the stat machine operator then and had this dark little office way in the very back of the building, down a long hallway. But whether he was bounding into the Bullpen dropping off a stat with some bombastic pronouncement, or darting in and out of editorial offices imparting some bit of eclectically esoteric knowledge and leavin’ ‘em laughin’, it was obvious that everyone enjoyed Eliot and that he enjoyed them. It became equally obvious that he was a force of nature and knowledge that people turned to for input on many subjects technical and otherwise. I’ll admit his delivery could at times be intimidating. He could adopt an imperiousness, and wielded a creatively caustic sarcasm that could be at once both hysterical and withering, delivered bone dry. He seemed to be a Nikola Tesla-W.C. Fields mash-up in a John Cleese package. But always behind bright, kind eyes.
So, I toddled off down the long back hallway one morning early in my Marvel days to beard this unique lion in his dark den. Although the office had a free coffee machine outside the editorial room, Eliot of course preferred his own concoction of carefully–scientifically–brewed joe, and so maintained a set-up for such in his lair. He offered me a cup and a chair. Remember, I was just the “new kid”. 40+ years later, having coffee with Eliot is still one of my most favorite pastimes. He is without question one of the smartest, talented, most capable, genuine, generous and yes– goofiest men to ever call this crazy, spinning mudball home.
Q: What was the most fun you had working on a project at Marvel?
Jack: Again, nearly impossible to choose! But one stand-out does of course involve your pater familias. It was shooting the photo cover for Marvel Team-Up #128 on the office roof. I donned the Spidey tights, and painter extraordinaire Joltin’ Joe Jusko wore the Captain America costume. Your Dad took the photos and editor Two-Fisted Tom DeFalco oversaw the entire expedition some 15 stories above the bustling Manhattan sidewalks.
Your Dad tells the full story better than I could on his blog, but one funny thing I’ll always remember took place at the very end of the day. I was dancing along the ledge of the building in the Spidey suit to the horror of Tom. What he couldn’t see was that there was a good sized ledge between me and the honking traffic far below. I pretended to fall off and hid behind the knee wall at the edge of the roof. Tom bellowed and roared and rushed to see what sized stain I was on the street below.
When he leaned over the edge and found us nose-to-nose instead, he bellowed and roared twice as loud as before, dragged me back onto the roof and began aggressively wringing my neck. Flash-forward nearly 40 years, I saw Tom at Stan Lee’s memorial last October, where he told the story to a group gathered at Madame Tussauds, finishing off with a thorough wringing of my neck every bit as enthusiastic as the day it first happened. To this day I’m sure all he was really worried about was that I had damaged a taxi roof on Marvel’s dime.
Q: Do you have any good embarrassing or funny stories about my father?
Jack: Oh, good God! Well, since I don’t have my quick-guide desktop reference to legal statutes of limitations handy, I guess I’ll tell this one. One day someone in the Bullpen called out to a passing Jim Shooter that wasn’t it his (30th?) birthday at the end of the week, and we should do something big. Jim jokingly replied “Yeah, real BIG! Fireworks, giant cake with showgirls jumping out–everything!” and continued on to his office.
Well, as you’ve gathered by now you couldn’t joke like that. Construction on an enormous several tiered cardboard cake began immediately. When Jim’s big day arrived he was summoned to the Bullpen where to the strains of “Happy Birthday” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, the great counterfeit confection was wheeled out on a dolly borrowed from the mailroom.
When the singing stopped, ‘twas no mere bathing beauty who erupted from its summit–but blushing, bouncing BROWN!! Bare save for a big, overstuffed brassiere and his tighty-whities, it required a second look (no easy feat) to be sure he wasn’t also in a gorilla suit. A wig fashioned from the office mop, three days worth of his signature wire brush facial stubble and heavy-duty black industrial impact-resistant prescription spectacles rounded out the visual. Your Pop then planted a great big smooch on the stunned Chief and took off running down the hall flapping his arms and hooting like Daffy Duck.
Q: You and Eliot worked on a project called Spitfire and the Troubleshooters together, can you tell us a bit about that story and what it was like in the making?
Jack: We really only worked together on the overall concept, characters and plot for the first issue together. After that I bowed out for personal reasons, your father soldiered on.
I will tell one story that has not much to do with the book, but took place during the development stage. Eliot and I used to sit for hours-long Spitfire skull sessions at an ice cream parlor around the corner from his apartment on east 66th street called Swenson’s. It’s where Jenny Swenson, aka: Spitfire’s name came from.
One crowded night, quarts of Choco-crispy Crunch Sundaes and gallons of coffee into the plot, a creaking sound came from the ornate metal ceiling. We looked up just as one of the tiny tin squares above the table of a large group of young women behind us bend open and a big, beautiful NYC RAT did a belly dive right into a red-head’s banana split. KER-SPLATT! Not only the girls, but the entire restaurant leapt up shrieking wildly and racing for the door all at once, as the equally shocked rodent scrambled wildly in the gooey slop and overturned malteds.
Your dad said later that there couldn’t have been more pandemonium if a bus had crashed through the front window and he was right! Everyone ran away without paying and the place was empty except for the two of us, drinking our coffee and talking comics. The staff locked the door and went to work immediately with mops and brooms cleaning the mess and righting the overturned tables and chairs from the stampede. The manager brought out a ladder and bent back the tile on the ceiling.
Once the place was back to normal, they opened the door and new customers began filling it up again. We had been filling up again too, and after another hour or so got up to waddle out with Spitfire #1 notes in hand. Eliot chuckled to the lady handling the cash register how that had been one unforgettable scene earlier. “What scene?” she almost whispered. “Uhhhh… the rat?” Eliot offered, pointing upward. ”RAT?! There’s no rats here,” she snapped back.
The manager was standing behind her and overheard. “Nothing happened here tonight,” he added. He still had chocolate stains on the sleeves of his blue button-down from the cleanup. “Oh, okay,” I said. We paid and left, even leaving a tip. We continued going there because it was convenient and good, but it always bothered me. Not the rat, New Yorkers know they share our space, but that they didn’t just quietly tear up our check because we were such regulars and hadn’t made any fuss.
Q: How has the lettering job itself changed since you started?
Jack: Well, obviously the transition to computer lettering. When I first started at Marvel there was not a single computer in the place. I understand that now there aren’t any drafting tables! I learned to letter from Danny Crespi, Morrie Kuramoto and Michael Higgins. Irv Watanabe pitched in as well.
We made our own pen points then, by cutting and then re-shaping Speedball nibs on fine wet-or-dry sandpaper or a jeweler’s stone. Your father actually helped by setting up a spot for me to sit with a lapboard and practice in his little coffee klatsch area in the back hallway.
One day I was having trouble because the of the rough “tooth” on a particularly bad batch of artboard I was using. No matter how carefully I sanded down my penpoint, it would catch on the paper, or pick up a fiber and drag it and make an inky mess. I just couldn’t get the pen smooth enough. John Romita Sr. was coming down to the stat room for something and looked over my shoulder. I explained the trouble I was having, and he gave me a bit of invaluable advice.
Put a small amount of ink in a little glass jar–a shot glass would be perfect because of the slanted sides–and run the pen in circles around inside. This takes the last of the microscopic burs off of the metal edges of the point. Worked amazingly well! It really took a village to educate yours truly.
When the computer lettering first entered the scene, Jim Starlin, who’d just returned from a convention, was at my house one day and advised me how he’d seen this new thing and I’d better get on board because it would revolutionize how things were done. It wasn’t long afterwards that John Byrne asked if I’d like to work on a font with him, so I lettered up the alphabet and numbers and punctuation and such, spending the day at his house in Connecticut making what was probably one of the first fully-realized computer fonts.
I knew nothing of computers at the time and so John did all the technical work. Now about 80% of my work is on the computer, but I absolutely love the fact that at Archie we still do the Digest stories by hand, and that I get to use the techniques and skills those legends taught me so long ago.
Q: What’s your favorite convention story?
Jack: Several years ago I attended NYCC with Archie Comics and ran into Stan Lee for the first time in a very long time. To be honest, I don’t think he recognized me or knew who I was until I mentioned I was “the Squid” (my old Marvel nickname) and our time at the 575 Madison offices before he left full time for California around the time we moved downtown in ‘81. I hadn’t seen much of Stan since then, but for the times he came to NY and always seemed to be running through the office.
Once, in the early hours of the morning, after a brutal Secret Wars all-nighter, I loudly snored myself awake on the couch in Tom DeFalco’s office to find the room empty except for Stan standing over me shaking his head. Anyway, once we’d made the connection at the Con, Stan put his hand on my back and said “Walk and talk! If I stand still I’ll get mobbed.”
We headed for the exit towards his room where he was going to catch some rest. He asked me about a lot of the old-timers, sadly some who he hadn’t known had passed on. The last thing I said to him was “Thanks.” I told him how it was not just for all the great characters he’d created or stories he’d written. He gets that all the time. It was for his tireless vision and determination, hard work and promotion that saved an industry and built a great, vibrant company that gave an opportunity to a guy like me to make so many great friends and earn a living in such a wonderful way.
How I’d met my wife, colorist Christie Scheele, at Marvel and together we’d bought a house and raised and fed and clothed a family with the money we’d earned working at the place he’d willed into reality. Of course, in typical Stan style he quipped “Make all checks payable to Stan Lee Enterprises!” and started to walk to the door to his suite.
Then he stopped and turned. He walked back to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Sorry, you know me. My default is always to make a joke. But that was very, very touching, and I want to thank you very, very much.”
———–
A Stan Lee cameo for the ages, I must say.
Jack has been around the block more than a few times and I’m very grateful that he shared all of this history with us.
I only wish we had more photos of him fighting The Green Goblin, it is a real tragedy what gets lost to time.
Be seeing you,
-Nicholas Brown