OFFICE DECORUM IS FOR SQUARES
Groth: Looking back on it, I realize how little decorum there was in our office. I mean, there was no decorum! Office decorum was for squares, corporations, drones in their little cubicles. We rejected all that instinctively. We probably broke a hundred labor laws every week. I don’t think Kim and I saw ourselves, at that time, as business owners or “management” or bosses. All the people we hired were about our age. There was almost no distinction between employee and employer. We were on a mission and the only reason we even had a business is because we couldn’t accomplish what we were doing without one.
Thompson: We all got along great. We’d work together for eight or 10 hours a day and then hang out all evening, go bowling or to movies or whatever. Things would kind of go sour years later in California, but in Connecticut it really was like one big happy family that worked together and played together. The employee/friend thing is really tough to manage: It resulted in a lot of long-lasting relationships that endure to this day, but also a number of ugly blowups.
Ringgenberg: The office atmosphere was kind of chaotic, lots of gibes and jests.
Groth: We hadn’t planned it, but the company grew. Hiring Peppy was one thing, but we had no experience dealing with real employees. One girl we hired quit after I went into a swearing tear over something. I was amiably pissed off about something and I just cursed, loudly, for five minutes straight. She got up, walked out and called later to tell me she wouldn’t even come back for her paycheck.
Thompson: We hired a typesetter, a poor Christian woman, and she fled into the night after one day, virtually in tears. She couldn’t take it. Later hires were made of sturdier stock.
Groth: We hired a woman named Laura and I still don’t know what the hell she did.
Thompson: Laura was an office manager.
Groth: Laura was a few years older than us and about 30 years more mature. She was short and Jewish and a real fireball. We hired her part-time. I honestly don’t remember what she did. She probably did a variety of things like proofreading. Things were so chaotic I don’t remember what people did.
Thompson: And then we started hiring typesetters.
Groth: We had typesetters, but they didn’t stay for very long. Others did. Tom Mason and Dave Olbrich started in Connecticut, and they both moved to L.A. with us.
Heintjes: Tom Mason worked there when I came aboard. Tom had a quick wit and was a funny guy. He used humor as a way to keep people from getting too close to him, I think.
Thompson: Tom Mason was exactly like Chandler Bing from Friends.
Marschall: When Peppy White left Nemo as Art Director, Tom Mason was assigned. He seemed always determined to be a prick, but in a passive-aggressive manner. He forever would quote, ad hominem, one of Gary’s patented imprecations, half-smile, look at Gary if he were in the vicinity but out of earshot, yet somehow begging for approval, and then look back at me.
Ringgenberg: I remember Tom Mason as very competent at art direction but personally a smug little weasel.
Heintjes: Dave Olbrich is a super guy, a Midwesterner, a really warm and generous and selfless guy. He was the employee who had the closest thing to a normal life. He had a girlfriend he later married.
Thompson: Dave was the good-natured acme of stolid Midwesternness.
Heintjes: I had a birthday when I first got up there, and Dave and [his wife] Lori made me a birthday cake and sang "Happy Birthday" to me. They made me feel less like some kid on his first job.
Thompson: We hired Dwight Decker, an old friend of Gary’s, to edit Amazing Heroes. He was a mainstreamy guy. He seemed a natural for it. The second biggest natural next to Mark Waid.
Decker: Amazing Heroes might have been the better fit from the start [than The Comics Journal], but it was Mike Catron’s magazine to begin with, though I don’t recall when Kim took it over.
Thompson: While he was on his way, Gary and I had one of our periodic ridiculous squabbles, and decided we couldn’t work with each other. By the time Dwight got there the only thing that made sense was for Dwight to work on The Comics Journal and I would work on Amazing Heroes. I think I adapted more easily than he did. He only lasted a year or so before fleeing back to a career outside comics. His sensibilities did not match Gary’s.
Groth: Dwight was a fan friend of mine from when I published fanzines as a teenager, and I remember he wrote very intelligent articles for a whole slew of fanzines, mine included. The problem was that he basically wanted to continue writing and publishing those same kinds of fannish articles. That’s not what I was looking for, so we clashed. We also clashed temperamentally. Dwight was a pretty high-strung, uptight, buttoned-downed guy who needed an incredibly structured environment. And ours was anything but. And we never stopped. I’d wake up, walk downstairs and work until 2 in the morning. He couldn’t handle the anarchic working environment.
Marschall: I discovered at this time that Dwight was as conservative politically as he was socially; and that we had both been members of Young Americans for Freedom, the society of campus troglodytes founded by William F. Buckley.
Marschall: Gary, Dwight and I went out one late night to a diner in Stamford, and Dwight had a slight coughing spell — maybe it was the “here comes the waitress” bit — but anyway I pretended to think Dwight was choking to death and jumped into what I thought was the Heimlich Maneuver, grabbing and hugging Dwight furiously, knocking everything off the table in the process. Eventually, Dwight straightened his spectacles and assured me he was under no threat to his health — until I threatened it — and Gary was laughing like heck all the time.
Decker: Gary and Kim definitely weren’t happy about my leaving, probably because it came so abruptly and they had gone to some effort to work out something for me on Amazing Heroes. I’m still a little amazed that things eventually smoothed over enough that I later wrote a regular column for Amazing Heroes and did some foreign-comics translation for Critters. These days, I see Kim and Gary at conventions now and then, but we say hi and maybe chat, and that’s about it. Most of my contact with Kim lately has been to go to Denmark, see the artist Freddy Milton and tell him to tell Kim “hi” for me when he sees him the next time, and then Kim goes to Denmark and tells Freddy to say “hi” to me for him in return.
Thompson: I’m friends with Dwight to this day, but I guess Gary drove him over the edge.
Groth: Gary Kwapisz was another orphan who found his way to Fantagraphics. Gary was an exceptionally talented artist who landed on our doorstep one day. I don’t remember the circumstances, but he wound up sleeping on our couch in return for doing various production chores and drawing editorial cartoons for The Comics Journal. He was good-natured about the living conditions and seemed happy to be living in a loose, creative environment. He became part of the family. Naturally, he was nicknamed The Kwap and even signed his drawings with that name. He was an excellent draftsman, more interested in illustration than comics, but actually a good cartoonist. He was an inveterate drawer and did a lot of private drawings about the company and its wacky cast of characters that we’d hang on the walls.
Heintjes: Gary Kwapisz was finishing up when I started.
Groth: Steve Ringgenberg worked for us for a while. He did editorial work on Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal. A very nice guy, perhaps not quite suited to the rough and tumble of the office environment at the time. I remember when he quit. The office was downstairs and there was a staircase in the corner of the house leading to the second floor. People who lived in the house would go upstairs to go to their rooms, and downstairs to go to the office. I think Steve was living there at the time. I was at the bottom of the staircase talking to Kim. I was looking at something Steve had written for Amazing Heroes or something and just casually muttered, “Steve can’t write his way out of a wet paper bag.” Steve must’ve been right at the top of the staircase, where I couldn’t see him, and heard me. He comes roaring down the staircase, red-faced, livid, and screamed at me. He told me that he’d been insulted by better people than me. I don’t know why I remember that, but I remember being puzzled by it.
Ringgenberg: Gary was a bit too acerbic for my taste at the time, but either he’s mellowed in the intervening years or I have, but I appreciate his verbal sharpness more.
Groth: I think I may have half-heartedly apologized, but the next day as a gag I hung a paper bag on the wall and taped a word balloon on it saying, “Help! I can’t write my way out of this.” Poor Steve, he was really a pretty sweet guy, has good taste in comics and was dedicated. I think he quit shortly thereafter.
Thompson: My recollection is that we actually taped a big swath of brown wrapping paper to the doorway to create the illusion that Steve did actually have to break through a huge paper bag, but maybe we just considered it and decided it was too much work.
Heintjes: It was a real close-knit atmosphere, and I knew when I left that I would never have that circumstance again. I felt fortunate enough to have it while I did.
CLUB HOUSE
Heintjes: It was a real boys’ club. It surprised me. I had watched a bunch of artsy-fartsy movies I hated, because I thought, when I moved to Stamford I’d have to have conversations about cinema and foreign films and all this stuff I have no interest in whatsoever. I didn’t want to come across as an ignoramus from the sticks of North Carolina. I was the only Southerner on staff, and afraid I’d come across as a rube. I watched these inaccessible movies and read a bunch of film criticism trying to get up to speed, because I knew everyone up there would be so erudite.
Thompson: We didn’t really network; we hung out. We’d throw parties and people would come. I remember Denny O’Neil, for instance. I know Scott McCloud came to at least one of our parties before he published anything at all. Before Zot! We’d throw parties and invited everyone from Marvel and DC that we know. A number would actually come up.
Groth: I can’t remember how many parties we had, but we had several. A lot of people from New York would come up. Paul Levitz and some guys from DC came up to our first one, a lot of folks from mainstream comics. It was about a 45-minute train ride from Manhattan. Don Phelps came up a couple of times. Gil [Kane] was always at the parties. A number of mainstream cartoonists, I don’t quite remember any more — Len Wein, Marv Wolfman. Richard Howell and Carol Kalish came up and stayed with us for the night.
Heintjes: The only real party we had while I was there was the going-away party. That was fun because a lot of comics creators lived in the area or came up from New York. I remember two people — maybe Marv Wolfman and Len Wein — were having a conversation that was frighteningly similar to “Who’s stronger — Hulk or Thor?” And it was like, “Oh my gosh, people really talk about this stuff.”
Groth: We got Art Spiegelman to come up and then refused to let him smoke in the house. The next time we invited him, he said, “I can’t come unless I can smoke.”
And we said, “Sorry.” That was probably the last time Art wasn’t allowed to smoke indoors.
Thompson: We had loud music blasting at all times. If you pick up any book or magazine we did in the mid-’80s, I can guarantee you that Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life was played at least once during its assembly. It was a teenage boy’s dream of a work environment.
Heintjes: There were no women working full-time at that point. We were still on the Compugraphic typesetting equipment, the big things that put out galleys that smelled foul and probably caused brain damage. There was bawdy talk and the usual boys’-club-type stuff. Everybody kept crazy hours. Everybody would sleep in and work until the wee hours. Kim was especially notorious for working into the wee, wee hours and waking at the crack of noon. You could come to work in your bathrobe if you wanted, or the T-shirt you slept in, and everybody was having a great time. Hell, we’re putting out comics!
Thompson: We all used to swear like sailors with Tourette’s. Tony Montana would’ve been offended.
Catron: It was like a college fraternity.
Heintjes: “The Tribunal” was a way of keeping neatness in the household. If someone committed what was deemed an infraction — if they didn’t put their dishes in the sink, if they didn’t pick their clothes off the floor — they convened a tribunal. All the employees got together, considered the infraction and then meted out some punishment, which usually took the form of some chore or onerous task that needed to be done but nobody wanted to do.
You’d be working and you’d hear someone yell, “Tribunal!” and you’d rush to figure out what had happened and who was at fault. Your first thought was always, “Was it me? What did I do?” Once you realized it wasn’t you, it was fun because you got to kick somebody else around.
Groth: When you heard someone scream “Tribunal,” your anus clenched because you thought you could be the guilty one. Luckily, Peppy lived there and it was almost always him.
THE COMICS JOURNAL: TALKING BACK TO THE INDUSTRY
Groth: Things were churning and changing. You had Raw and Weirdo, which came out in ’81. Love and Rockets came out in ’82. I was at least modestly enthusiastic about Cerebus. I was no longer utterly demoralized.
R. Fiore, writer: In the ’60s you had the Kirby/Ditko/Lee Marvel that makes comic books seem creatively exciting again, plus this is The Sixties, which means there’s an ethic of doing things that satisfy yourself creatively rather than going for money and security. So in the second half of the ’60s you have a lot of interesting talent coming in. DC is making its Brand X effort to get in step with Marvel, which is a bit clumsy but actually attracts talent that’s more interesting than Marvel — Neal Adams, Wrightson, Kaluta and like that. This period hangs on into the early ’70s. At the same time, you have the parallel development of the underground comics. By the time I’ve gotten back into reading comics, people are growing up and selling out. Or the creative excitement of the medium is eroded by the way they cheat you out of ownership of your work. The undergrounds had a talent base that didn’t seem to expand and a commercial base that only seemed to shrink.
So anyway, the effect is that by the time I get back to the medium the celebrity artists of the preceding years are pretty much gone. Adams, Wrightson, Kaluta, Barry Smith, Steranko — look those guys up in the Grand Comic Database and you’ll see a hole in their career in the ’70s, then see some of them picking up again in the ’80s when conditions get a little better for the help. The artists who were left ranged from hacks to mediocrities to journeymen with a few veteran craftsmen — Gil Kane, Gene Colan, like that. Romita was gone, Kirby was still around, but doing more “interesting work” than good comics, really. There were some artists that attracted a cult following, Marshall Rogers, Frank Brunner was around for a while, Jim Starlin, Pat Broderick I guess, but, really, by that time, writers were the driving force in mainstream comics — Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Bill Mantlo, Doug Moench. These were people who had grown up with the Kirby-era Marvel and were consciously trying to further that tradition, though they were probably more ambitious than good.
Groth: It was a dichotomous period, where Marvel and DC represented this conventional commercial position that we were inveighing against. There was an emergence of something, but we didn’t know quite what it was. I remember looking at Jaime’s stuff and that was the first glimmer of something I had been waiting for for the last five years. It was the concrete manifestation of my inchoate ideas of what comics could be. There were camps forming. Whether you knew it or not, you were becoming part of a faction.
Carter Scholz, writer: I wanted to do reviews of alternative comics because I was interested in the work coming out then, in the ’80s, and in the independent-publisher model. I particularly liked Raw, Arcade, Love and Rockets. In compensation for me accepting the remarkable pittance of one cent a word, Gary agreed to publish my occasional column on science fiction.
Groth: In that period, the Journal was selling 8,000-9,000, with a little less than 10 percent going to subscriptions. We gave Marvel and DC comps.
White: We all (except Mike) lived and worked in a big three-story house and worked our own hours. That would lead to times where I’d be coming down the stairs to the office as someone was going up to go to bed. “Good night.” “Good morning.” At deadline, Kim would be banging out corrections at the typesetter, galleys draped all over the place. I’d be pasting up and running into the stat room to shoot last-minute halftones. I would box the mechanicals to send to the printer. Kim would laugh at me, as he often did, when I, exhausted, couldn’t avoid getting snarled up in the packing tape. We’d sometimes work 24–36 hours to get the issue done and have Gary race to the airport with the package. It was muckraking, rogue journalism at its best. Or at least its most fun.
Groth: After we arrived in Connecticut, we bought a typesetting machine, a behemoth manufactured by Compugraphics. Desktop computers didn’t exist at the time. This thing was as big as a refrigerator with a built-in keyboard. You had to program it every time you turned it on. You’d type on it, choose the line measure and the font and the point size, and it would print out text on long rolls of repro paper that came out wet, because it used a chemical process to print them, which would have to be hung all over the place to dry.
Heintjes: I was a journalism major, and I really admired the Journal’s approach to comics and covering the industry. This sort of no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners approach. I really loved the approach they took. During my senior year, I wrote Gary Groth. He was a larger-than-life figure to me. He was a very faithful, prompt correspondent. It made me feel like I had a direct pipeline to the mountaintop. He asked me to send him some ideas that I thought would be good to cover in the Journal, which I did.
I graduated in May and within a week I was living in Stamford.
Groth: I think up until then Kim and I were just banging out most of the news stories. Tom was the first aggressive news reporter we hired. I was writing more editorials and reviews for the magazine and conducting a lot of interviews. We were full of fucking juice at that point.
Heintjes: Gary just sort of gave me the keys to the car and let me do things the way I thought they needed to be done.
Groth: Tom was a very good reporter; he had the instincts for it and the skill. We took advantage of being close to New York for a while. I remember Jenette Kahn floating down the hallways on a visit to DC’s offices. At some point, they got sick of us hanging around and kicked us out. At Marvel, Rick Marschall’s office was a refuge. Marvel made the mistake of hiring Rick as an editor; I say that as a compliment to Rick.
Marschall: I always called Gary the H.L. Mencken of the comics business. And I knew I was an “odd duck” at Marvel. I did caricatures of everyone on staff — not many of them complimentary — and my assistant Ralph Macchio and I festooned them all over our office. Ralph and I were pretty good at impressions, too, and we devised a system of calling answering machines of people who popped into the office ... in the voice of someone else. And vice versa, etc. We caused a lot of confusion, and a couple feuds, I think the juiciest between Chris Claremont and Bill Mantlo. One evening after work a couple of the mailroom guys got in a scuffle in a local bar, nothing serious … but Ralph and I heard about it. For a week we called their boss repeatedly as the bar’s manager, the manager’s lawyer, injured customers (there were no injuries) (probably no other customers, either, but what the hell), witnesses demanding hush money and so forth. Sterno — Roger Stern — was a prime target for both drawings and impressions. I really loved all these people. Sort of.
Groth: Marschall was one of few people at Marvel who didn’t hate us. I would go up and talk to people, stick my head in people’s offices and say, “Hi.” And I would avoid the people who hated me.
Roger Stern hated me. Someone told me Roger Stern literally turned his desk over because of something we published. Eliciting that kind of response means you’ve done your job.
Thompson: Roger Stern offered to copy-edit an interview we did with his old friend John Byrne and when he turned in his edit we discovered he’d edited out all of the juiciest stuff from Byrne, who was a loose cannon even then: ragging on his former X-Men writer Chris Claremont, mocking other cartoonists, etc. We put it back in and Stern had a desk-toppling tantrum when he found out. Amusingly, Byrne didn’t give a shit.
Groth: Ted White somehow became the editor of Heavy Metal and I enjoyed hanging out with him at their offices. Ted was an old pal from Virginia. I got to know the publisher’s daughter; she was there a lot. John Workman was a good guy; he worked there at the same time as the magazine’s art director. I didn’t go to the syndicates too much, occasionally up to King Features with whom we had an arrangement to publish Popeye and Prince Valiant. I never went to Archie.
Scholz: I was terribly concerned with holding my own work in fiction to a high standard, and that carried over into an area where, one could argue, it was less appropriate. But my point of view at the time was this: Anyone putting out creative work — especially under an “alternative” aegis — is ipso facto an artist, and needs to be judged as such.
Carter Scholz, “Watchmen review,” The Comics Journal #119, January 1988:
It doesn’t work because it’s all too self-referring. Moore does real lapidary work here — there are many levels of carefully designed subtleties throughout Watchmen — but most of them turn to point directly at the deficiencies of superhero comics of the past, while maintaining as well as possible all the beloved old nonsense.
Scholz: I certainly wasn’t the only one with standards; R. Fiore comes to mind.
Fiore: In the Journal, I come into the picture due to Weirdworld, a pathetic and dreary piece of pseudo-Tolkien fantasy. It’s a measure of how desperate we were at the time for any expansion of the medium outside of superheroes that the Journal gave it a huge build-up. I wrote a review that basically tore the thing to shreds, and Gary Groth decided I was just the sort of writer he wanted for his magazine. By this time, the era of writer-driven experiment and weirdness had given way to the Chris Claremont X-Men era. The focus shifted to creating imaginary communities that the readers could identify with, massive interlocking storylines that crossed over from title to title, and the development of the internally consistent “Universe” as the main focus of the whole line.
R. Fiore, “Funnybook Roulette,” The Comics Journal #89, March 1984:
This is a column about crap.
Scholz: It was a good way to stretch into criticism and non-fiction, but after a while it stopped being fun. I was getting dozens of comics for review every month, and most of them were junk. There wasn’t enough, you know, Crumb, Pekar and Spiegelman to sustain me. And I couldn’t justify the time it took for the, ahem, return.
R. Fiore, “Funnybook Roulette” The Comics Journal #89, March 1984:
There are many points of view to take toward reviewing popular culture, but three tend to dominate the review and letters pages of this magazine. First, there is the argument that all value judgments are subjective and therefore of equal worth, thus making gross popularity the only true measure of value. This we might characterize as the stupid point of view.
Frank Brunner, “Farewell to Comics,” The Comics Journal #51, November 1979:
I now offer the unabridged history of my involvement with a medium that returns no love and very little money. I certainly don’t want to cry on anyone’s shoulder, since my situation is shared by many others, especially those artists who give their all to comics.
Frank Brunner, cartoonist: I was hoping to raise fan awareness of the situation we were facing … which was: We were the only group of working artists without any negotiation power or a health plan! It was a draconian contract Marvel was offering. It was all-inclusive and retroactive in its scope! I also was becoming painfully aware that many artists I thought were aboard for the “good fight” … were in fact selling out and I was trying to shame them a bit … (None of whom speak to me to this day!) Truth hurts, I guess.
Frank Brunner, “Farewell to Comics” The Comics Journal #51, November 1979:
This is just a sampling of the horror stories and stupid things that happen in this business, just some of my experiences …
Brunner: I thought someone had to say something … but I was wrong! I’ve since realized that artists and writers have no special camaraderie or common sense in particular, and it’s every man jack of them for himself! Even if it means cutting your own nose off to spite your own face! Especially down the road! I have very few artist friends, as a group I found them very disappointing!
Groth: Essays like Brunner’s were pretty rare. It took a lot of balls to sit down and write an essay like that at that time and most artists would prefer to bellyache in an interview, so a lot of our strongest points we continued to make in interviews.
Joe Staton, “From E-Man to Batman: Joe Staton Interview,” The Comics Journal #45, March 1979:
You hear a lot that comics are no good because they’re done on an assembly line. Well, that’s basically not true. They’re no good because they’re done by committee, and there’s an awful lot more integrity on an assembly line than there is in a committee. Doing comics by committee, it’s every idiot along the line second-guessing every idiot before him.
(continued on next page)
