New Book By Comics Vet Paul Kupperberg Features Interviews with Bronze Age DC Comics Creators


Veteran comics writer Paul Kupperberg is offering a new book via Kickstarter. More info here.

Details:

Where were you in 1975?

I was twenty and in my first year as a comic book professional. After a lifetime of reading comics and an adolescence devoted to collecting them and participating in comics fandom and fanzines, I realized my ambition of breaking into the comic book business. The way some kids wanted to grow up to be actors or baseball players or architects, I dreamt of writing for DC Comics.

And I wasn’t alone.

Between May and August of 2022, I sat down for a series of conversations with ten of my old friends and DC Comics colleagues, many of whom shared my childhood four-color obsession, about their own journeys from fans and readers to professionals during that pivotal time in comics history for DIRECT CONVERSATIONS: TALKS WITH FELLOW DC COMICS BRONZE AGE CREATORS:

  • Howard V. Chaykin
  • Jack C. Harris
  • Tony Isabella
  • Paul Levitz
  • Steve Mitchell
  • Bob Rozakis
  • Joe Staton
  • Anthony Tollin
  • Bob Toomey
  • Michael Uslan

Comics was changing. The audience was getting older, readers demanding more sophisticated storytelling and art, and, very soon, the industry’s entire business model would be upended as distribution shifted from newsstands to comics specialty shops. Even the old guard like DC vice president and production manager Sol Harrison, who had been working in the business since comics began in 1935, recognized that the new generation of readers called for a new generation of creators, ones closer to their ages and interests than the 20-, 30-, 40-year veterans than responsible for most of the current output.

At least half the people I spoke with for DIRECT CONVERSATIONS had been hired under the general umbrella of Sol Harrison’s search for young talent, including Michael Uslan, later the producer of the Batman film franchise, inker, production artist, and later documentary filmmaker Steve Mitchell, colorist and production artist Anthony Tollin, writer and production manager Bob Rozakis, and editor and writer Jack C. Harris. Paul Levitz, my cohort in publishing the early-70s fanzines that led to his being temporarily hired in 1972 as legendary artist and editor Joe Orlando’s assistant for a summer, ending in his retirement as DC’s president and publisher in 2009. Tony Isabella took an unusual route, coming to DC after a stint writing and editing for Marvel, while Howard Chaykin, Joe Staton, Bob Toomey, and myself were freelancers who took slightly different routes.

In DIRECT CONVERSATIONS my DC Comics Bronze Age peers and I talk about the good (and some not so good) old days, in the years when comics was still a small enough world where everybody knew everybody else, and where we found ourselves rubbing shoulders with and being mentored by the giants who had created the business over its first 40 years.

Why focus on DC Comics? Because that’s the place I knew. I discovered comics before the Marvel Comics we know today even existed, and characters like Superman and Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter were indelibly stamped on my psyche as I learned to read from their stories. I got my first glimpse of the world inside the business on one of DC’s weekly office tours in 1968. When I started pitching stories to publishers, I took a couple of practice swings at Gold Key (strike out!) and Charlton (home run!), but once I landed at DC I never looked back. My creative heart, and most of my friends, were at DC.

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