Interview Part 2 T. Casey Brennan - Interview by Dave Sim The Interview Part 2 * * * Sim: Do you think comic books have remained the same over the last thirty years with just new characters added from time to time? TCB: Oh, no. I think the field has changed again and again. When comic books started off, there was just primarily funny work. They were just comic book versions of the comic strips. You had the super-hero age lasting through the 1940s. You had the early fifties with the emphasis on horror; even Captain Marvel had a horror story every issue with "Captain Marvel and the Vampires" and such. After (Dr. Fredric) Wertham, you had a very insipid era where you had DC with stories that usually involved some kind of a thing from another planet and very little danger or excitement or action - "Jimmy Olsen, Turtleman" or something like that. Then you had Atlas at the same time where every month you had "I Met Oog, the Thing That Lived!" It was the same story over and over again. There were two endings. In one, it turned out that the creature was actually bad and somebody conquered it. In the other, it was actually good and we rip ourselves off by killing it. Those were the two standard endings. Then the 1960s began moving toward the trend of revitalising the super-hero with Jack Kirby's work. Then in the late sixties we have Denny O'Neil stepping into the scene and he took the idea one step farther because his heroes were not only human, but they were involved in real life problems like pollution and drugs and racism and such. Sim: Are colour comic books going to die out, leaving magazine-size comic books in black and white only? TCB: I think you're going to have magazine-size comic books with colour eventually. I don't see much of a future for the twenty and twenty-five cent comic because the prices keep going up and up and kids can't afford to buy them now in many cases. I think it will be the older readers that will buy our magazines. The Warren magazines cost seventy-five cents each and I can't believe that it's mostly the eleven and twelve year olds who are buying them. I think you must have a lot of college age and older people buying them. Maybe not the majority, but certainly a lot of college age and older people buying them, and I think of myself as an intelligent educated person. I bough Creepy from the very first issue for years and years. Comic books are for kids; the Warren magazines are aiming for adults. A lot of people who would buy our magazines wouldn't buy a comic book because they're not ashamed to walk out of the store with our magazines. Actually, it's mostly the younger guys, the guys seventeen or eighteen years old, that are ashamed to buy comic books. The older fans, it doesn't occur to the older fans that they're doing anything silly by buying a comic book, but the younger fans don't know that they have perfect right to do it. It's just the guys in that age group that seem to feel silly about it. I know I never do. When I was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, I remember that I bought the Warren magazines quite regularly but I did feel rather silly buying the comic books. Sim: Do you think there is a possibility of a competitor rising up to match Warren's success with the black and white magazine-size comic books? TCB: I don't think anybody's smart enough. From what I've seen, Marvel has tried it, DC has tried it, a host of little companies have tried it. You had Ripley's Weird Tales, Fantastic Monsters, the Charlton Monster books, Cracked's For Monsters Only and Web of Horror and a multitude of others. So many people have tried it. A few of them were good products, but the trouble is that they weren't salable products for the most part and they just couldn't make it ion the stands the way we can. At this point I really don't think anybody is going to beat us or even match us at our own game. Sim: The things that seem to be the most successful these days are Mad and National Lampoon, which are satires on social conditions. Is there going to be something to fill the gap between satire and the super-hero? TCB: Barbarella would be a perfect example. Mad and National Lampoon are doing very well. Again, that is what I was talking about earlier, that adults will buy Mad and National Lampoon in spite of the fact that they are partly comic book. It's all right to buy them in spite of that fact because they're satirical. It's not all right to a lot of hung-up adults to buy one of our magazines despite the fact that our magazines, in many cases, are just as adult. Because they're serious, they figure they're for kids. Sim: What do you think of the lack of censorship in the underground comic books? TCB: I've seen this trend growing in the underground comics where it started out as a good idea. They were going to bring out underground comic books which were to be sold to adults, not under the supervision of the comics code, not even under the hassle of a distributor since they would all be handled by an underground distributor. So they figured they could do what they wanted. They violated all the taboos. They put in sex, they put in violence, they put in dope, they put in everything they were'nt supposed to put in a regular comic. It was just done to symbolize the new freedom you could find there. Unfortunately, they go stuck in that rut and they've been there ever since, where they're not doing real underground material. They're doing, for the most part, little eight-page dirty comic book material. What I'd like to know is where are the real issues that the underground newspapers are dealing with? There are very few underground comics and underground writers and artists that I am impressed with, that I think are really dealing with the issues. Slow Death has done it with ecology, not terribly well in every case, but at least they are dealing with a genuine issue. Most of Trina's work is relevant. It's dealing with women's liberation and I think that is very important, with Girl Fight Comics, All Girl Thrills. Comics like that I'm impressed with. I'm not too impressed with these comics that strictly revolve around sex. I am in favour of Justin Green's work; I think he portrays neuroses so incredibly well that I can't help but be impressed with the things he's doing. Sim: A lot of the undergrounds seem to be lampooning some very "wholesome" titles, don't you think? TCB: Yeah, well, Trina's new book is called Girl Fight Comics and the "Fight" is the same logo that appeared on the old Fiction House Fight Comics. I thought that was kind of cute. The underground comics have taken up where the comics of the forties and early fifties left off. They've captured a lot of the forties and, in some cases, fifties style. The Air Pirates comic which featured Mickey Mouse is really hard to tell from early 1950s' Dells. Some of the others look precisely like early fifties, late forties funnies. Others look like 1940s' super-hero. Sim: One of the things that seems to make the early comics popular is not so much the quality but the enthusiasm with which they were created. Perhaps the fact that the overground comics have lost their freshness and the underground comics haven't would indicate that they are following a pattern already set during the late thirties and early forties by saying, "Maybe this isn't the greatest art form in the world, but let's have some fun with it." TCB: What you're saying is a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, maybe that is what made the 1940s so great and what makes the undergrounds so popular - an enthusiasm that is sometimes sorely lacking in the professional comics. This writer was telling me once about this one particular editor who really doesn't seem to like his job too much and his idea of a professional is someone that hates his job. And if you like your work you're obviously an amateur. That's a pretty sad way of looking at things. Sim: If you were deciding to organise your own company and had your choice of any four artists, whom would you choose? TCB: Well, it would depend a great deal on what kind of comics I was putting out - some of my favourites like Jim Steranko, Like Neal Adams, like Esteban Maroto. I like Kirby on super-heroes. I like Charles Schultz on peanuts. I'm very impressed with Jim Steranko's imagination and his talent for understanding the comic book story-telling method so well. He really has it down to a "T." He's explored so many different subtle points as to how to put a story across in comic book form. Maroto has the ability to do these incredibly surrealistic scenes - pure fantasy, very imaginative. I was especially impress with his work on my story "A Stranger in Hell." That is the best work I've seen him do. I would like to see him get an award for that story. Adams does a fantastic job with everything in general but faces in particular. The faces are so full of emotion and force. Those are the ones I would choose. Sim: How about writers, then? Taking Denny O'Neil as an example. TCB: I really like Denny O'Neil's work, but it's a different kind of work than what I'm doing. He's dealing with timely concepts - drugs, war and peace, racism and pollution. These are things that have to be dealt with and I'm very pleased that he is dealing with them and dealing with them so well. However, the things that I am dealing with are concepts of a more timeless nature. I was defining despair in "On the Wings of a Bird." I was discussing man's descent into evil or degradation in "Carrier of the Serpent." I discussed the meaning of suffering in "A Stranger in Hell." So this is the kind of story I will probably be doing most if I were to be publishing. The writer I would want if I could get him would be Harlan Ellison. I think he is probably the best science fiction and fantasy writer in the business. Sim: If Carmine Infantino had offered you the Green Lantern/Green Arrow drug story, how would you have handled it differently from Denny O'Neil? TCB: I really shouldn't take it upon myself to say how great I would've handled them because I did a drug story for Warren called "Mark of the Phoenix" which really wasn't an example of my good work. Of course, it was done a time when the editors were leaning on me to do more established horror work. So, I'm hardly in a position to criticise the way Denny O'Neil handled his work since he certainly did a much better job than I did. Sim: What do you think of Jack Kirby's writing with respect to the super-hero thing? Does he write a good super-hero story? TCB: Yes, I really think he does. He's done so many things; he's brought in so many things that were never tried before. In I think it was Forever People, the Forever People are having a big battle with their enemies and what should happen but the landlady calls the police, which is precisely what you would expect in the real world. But who would think of putting it into a comic book? These things just weren't put into comic books until Kirby decided to use them in like, Fantastic Four. That was a real innovation. Sim: Then you subscribe to the theory that Jack Kirby did write most of the Fantastic Four books and not Stan Lee? TCB: Yes, I do indeed subscribe to that theory. Sim: All the material that Kirby reportedly did with Stan Lee comes out looking very much like Kirby's solo work. TCB: True. True. That would be my opinion. Don't get me sued, okay? Sim: Have you ever wanted to do a kind of "Fourth World" of your own, as Kirby has done, with two or three different books being inter-related? TCB: I did that with Vampirella. In my first Vampirella story, that Norto character was supposed to Ahzid. That first Vampirella story was a sequel to "On the Wings of a Bird." However, the editor took that out without my permission and rewrote it and really took away a lot of the impact, because it really would've started things off with a bang on my Vampirella series. I was so hassled on that Vampirella series that I really wouldn't want to think about doing anything with Vampirella again. I don't think I'll use the "On the Wings of a Bird" character again after the pathetic job that was done rewriting the sequel. Sim: Has anyone ever said to you, "Hey, do a script for me because I'd like to draw it?" TCB: Steranko enjoys my work which is something I was very pleased to hear because I admire this work so much. Steranko and I will be doing some work together, definitely. I can't say what magazine it will be for. It'll have something or other to do with Super-graphics. I will be doing a script for him. It isn't done yet, but I've promised him one. Actually, a number of artists have come up to me like that, but really there's not much I can do unless they have their own publishing company. Warren is using mostly Spanish artists now, so no one has called me up from Spain and said, "I'd like to do some work with you." I don't really choose my own artists. It's the Warren people who do that. Sim: How about an impression of your first convention? TCB: I was really impressed with conventions and organised fans in general. They're a very intelligent lot. I think it's these people that will upgrade the image and the quality of the comic book if anyone will. I try to take in as many conventions as possible and I try to meet as many people as I possibly can. I think it's important to me as a writer to do that. end Special thanks to Sheri Admans for typing all this into the computer for me. 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