Stout on His Early Years

ARCUDI: You were born in Salt Lake City, right?

WILLIAM STOUT: Yep. My dad was Mormon. He had to convert to Catholicism to marry my mom. I was born in Salt Lake City on the way back to L.A. from Idaho, which was where my dad was from.

ARCUDI: You grew up where?

STOUT: In Los Angeles, in a little town called Reseda, the absolute hottest part of the San Fernando Valley. One year Reseda had the record for the highest temperature in the world. I think it was 137 degrees. I remember doing something I'd always heard about on that day: frying eggs on the sidewalk. [pause] They actually wouldn't fry on the sidewalk, but they fried quite well on the hot black asphalt of my street.

ARCUDI: Wow.

STOUT: Yeah, the Valley was really interesting back then. It was rural. There were a lot of wild parts. I was right next to the L.A. River where I could go down and catch crawdads, fish, toads and bullfrogs. There were all kinds of open fields with a huge variety of bird and other wildlife that is now all gone.

ARCUDI: What do you think was the initial inspiration for you to start putting pencil to paper? Do you really have any clear recollection of that?

STOUT: It was the response I got from my mom and dad, the magic that by producing drawings I was able to make them laugh. That spurred me on and gave me a curious comfort. Later on it was the response I got from my schoolmates and some of my teachers -- not all of my teachers, though. I was in an experimental education program for "gifted" kids. I had several teachers in fifth grade. One of them gave me a "D" in art!

ARCUDI: But they were mostly positive experiences you had at school?

STOUT: Absolutely. In fact, my dinosaur book is dedicated to one of my other fifth grade teachers, Mr. Elliot Wittenberg, my favorite teacher in elementary school. I believe he was the one who actually put me on the path to art. One time he caught me drawing in class. He took what could have been a negative and turned it into a positive. Instead of getting angry with me for not paying attention he looked at the drawings and asked if I had any more at home. Gary Best, my best friend at that time, piped up and said, "Oh, man. Yeah. You should see it. He has a whole book full of his monster drawings at home that he's drawing." Which was true. I had a Cub Scout scrapbook full of monster drawings: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman; that kind of stuff. Mr. Wittenberg asked me to bring it in the next day. I bashfully agreed. About five or ten minutes later, I realized that he thought the book was going to be full of dinosaurs -- not movie monsters. So that day I went home and spent the entire rest of the afternoon and evening filling the remainder of the book with dinosaur pictures so that he wouldn't be disappointed. I brought it in the next day. From that moment on he gave me all kinds of extra-curricular artwork to do in class. I really credit him with putting me on the path to being an artist.

ARCUDI: Especially gearing you towards dinosaurs.

STOUT: More so, really, in human anatomy; he knew I wanted to be a doctor, so he had me drawing cross sections of the human eye and ear, the skeletal system, the muscular system...

I still love drawing monsters. Terra Nova Press has published two sketchbooks of mine just on monsters; two more are in the works.

ARCUDI: Now this was from going to monster movies?

STOUT: Going to the movies, having a mom who was a total monster movie freak, having a dad who was a big sci-fi movie fan. When I say we went to the movies a lot, I mean typically three times a week, sometimes more. Sometimes five. That was back when they showed double bills, so that's six to ten movies a week at our local theaters.

My mom loved horror movies and musicals. My dad loved science fiction movies and westerns. I saw everything in all four genres.

ARCUDI: That's a combo: Horror movies and musicals! I'm sure that people have commented how unusual that is, to have a mother interested in horror movies.

STOUT: That was her escape from her tough life when she was a little kid. She didn't have the most idyllic childhood; she'd go to the movies to get away from life and to experience another world on the screen.

ARCUDI: As you got older other outside influences of art began to enter into your life. Who were your earliest art influences?

STOUT: In third grade it was William Scheele, who wrote and illustrated a book on dinosaurs, one based on mammals, and another on cavemen. I used to check his books out of the El Segundo library. For one year, we left Reseda, and I lived in El Segundo. I spent nearly all of my free time, as I did while living in Reseda, at the public library. Bill Scheele's books were wonderful; they were filled with really lively charcoal drawings. I consumed those drawings with my eyes. The first actual artists, though, that I really started to copy and who dramatically affected my art were Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. I was a big silver age D. C. fan; I loved Kane's Atom and Green Lantern, and I loved Infantino's Flash and Adam Strange stories. I thought those guys were the best things going in comics. Really good choices, as it turned out. When I started drawing my own comics, I used to swipe their work a lot. I was in junior high, about 14 at the time.

ARCUDI: Had you conceived of a career in comics at that point? Or was it just for fun?

STOUT: No, I did comics for fun; I was determined to be a doctor. I was a science/math major all the way up until my last year of high school. Actually, that really helped me as an artist. I continued to do all of the drawings of the muscle system, the skeletal system and the circulatory system that I mentioned earlier and got a pretty early introduction to human anatomy when I was a kid.

ARCUDI: I'm curious where the doctor came from. Was this purely your intent, or was this something that your parents had sort of nudged you along in?

STOUT: Nope. My parents were smart enough to never push me in any career direction. It's to their credit that when I switched from medicine to art as a career choice, they didn't totally flip out.

ARCUDI: That begs a question. What changed your mind?

STOUT: It was moving to a new school for my last two years of high school. We moved from Reseda, where I'd spent a year at Reseda High School, a terrific high school with outstanding teachers, to Thousand Oaks High School, which was absolutely abysmal when it came to education. I had a couple decent teachers, but for the most part the teachers seemed to be there only because they were on tenure. They certainly didn't seem to care about teaching the kids. It was an atrocious school system as well. Reseda was in L.A. County and Thousand Oaks was Ventura County. In Thousand Oaks we were forced to have the same teachers all year long instead of breaking up the year into two semesters with a new set of teachers and classes each term like they do in Los Angeles. So if you had a bad teacher, you had a bad teacher for an entire year, and man, I had a lot of bad teachers at T. O. High. That experience really turned me off to the academic learning experience, plus, I felt I wasn't getting taught anything. I thought I'd be at a distinct disadvantage once I got to college, having spent the last two years falling behind at this horrible school. The school authorities used to penalize me for not going to the pep rallies! I had no interest in their sports programs whatsoever, so I would spend that time in the library studying, learning -- and I got detention for that!

I thought, "My god! If college is going to be anything at all like this, then 'Include me out,'" as Jack Warner once said. I thought, "What else is there that I like to do? Well, I like to draw." I started investigating going to art school. There were basically two art schools at the time in L.A In reality there were three at the time but the two that really meant anything were the Chouinard Institute, also known as California Institute of the Arts (CalArts); the other was the Art Center College of Design. My aunt, God bless her, lived nearby. She was both a math teacher and an art teacher. I had her for algebra in junior high; outstanding teacher. She was nice enough to take me on tours of both schools. She kind of nudged me toward Chouinard, which turned out to be a fabulous choice, the perfect choice for me. I think that at that time it was probably the best art school in the country. Chouinard had a completely different approach from Art Center. Art Center was a sort of art factory -- "You must all draw this way!" -- that produced hundreds of versions of the same illustrator; every graduate had the same distinct Art Center style: very competent and commercial. It almost guaranteed you a fairly good income as an illustrator. Whereas at Chouinard, the faculty took a look at what you were doing as an artist on an individual basis and then gave you the tools and showed you the thought process you needed to become better in the direction you were heading. They didn't push any one style on anyone. They were more focused on developing your individual potential as a unique artist. The wisdom at the time was that if you graduated from Chouinard you either became a gas station attendant or world famous.

ARCUDI: That was forward thinking, especially for then. To this day a lot of art schools still follow the other approach.

STOUT: Oh, the old Art Center method is so much easier to teach. Here, don't think -- just draw like this. Another reason I chose to go to Chouinard was that one of my high school art idols went there -- Rick Griffin went there for a short time.

Rick Griffin was one of the original Zap comix guys and the creator of Murphy the Surfer for Surfer magazine. The scene at that time I entered art school was exhilarating. You have to understand this was Los Angeles in the late '60s/early '70s, an unbelievable time to be going to a progressive art school. The music scene alone was so inspiring. I entered Chouinard during the summer of love, 1967. That year saw the release of Sergeant Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles, the first two Jimi Hendrix albums, the first two Doors albums, the first two Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention albums; three albums each from the Mamas and the Papas, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Donovan and Otis Redding; Aretha's first two seminal Atlantic LP's, two albums each by the Hollies, Animals, Spencer Davis, Small Faces and The Kinks; debut albums from Buffalo Springfield, Traffic, Pink Floyd and Big Brother and the Holding Company; Disraeli Gears by Cream, Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane -- and I haven't even touched the slightly more obscure stuff! This all came out in just that one year! The live music scene itself was just as extraordinary. One of the concerts I saw opened with Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, followed by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, followed by the original Steve Miller Band with Boz Scaggs; the headliners were The Who. Each band played two sets each. It was two dollars in advance; three dollars at the door. The place was only half full and I could get as close as I wanted to the stage. It was like that week after week after week. At the school itself, the animation department was being taught by Disney's remaining Nine Old Men. The nine greatest animators who ever lived were teaching animation there. On a drop-in basis, we'd get people like Man Ray and Chuck Jones giving impromptu lectures in our patio. It was vital. To a kid who had grown up in a pretty cloistered, white bread conservative existence it was a taste of heaven. Taste... hell, it was a thousand course banquet, and all you could eat!

ARCUDI: You got a scholarship there, right?

STOUT: Yes, I got a perfect score on my math SAT's and missed one question on my English SAT's. It never felt that way, but in retrospect, my family was desperately poor. The SAT scores and our financial situation qualified me for a full California State Scholarship to the university of my choice. I chose Chouinard. Much to the horror of my classmates, I might add, who said, "You idiot! You could have picked Yale or Harvard!"

ARCUDI: So at this point you're in Chouinard for a semester where you now have perceived of yourself as an artist and you're beginning to conceive of a career in the art world.

STOUT: Only in the vaguest form. At my university I chose to major in illustration. I wanted to become a professional illustrator. I had never done professional illustration so I really didn't know what that entailed other than the fact that I wanted to draw pictures for stories. Fortunately, at Chouinard they had this option within the illustration department. If you got any professional work while you were in school, you could turn that in in lieu of your homework. By my second year there I was getting professional work. By the last two years, nearly everything that I turned in was professional work. It made the transition from the school world to the real world very easy. By my fourth year I was champing at the bit to get out because the school time was taking away from my earning time. I've always had my eye on the buck.

ARCUDI: [Laughs.] O.K. We'll get to that in a second. But I wanted to back track a little here because I wanted to talk about "Those Loveable Peace-Nuts", which is one of the very first underground comics, right?

STOUT: Uh-huh; it was drawn shortly after the summer of 1967, the "Summer of Love". Because of our reputation as an art school, we were visited by a variety of characters from all levels of politics and society, from Man Ray to Chuck Jones; from the first Scientologists to the John Birch Society. One day there was a commotion in the school patio. I said, "What's going on?" Some students said, "Oh, General Hershey Bar's here." I asked, "Who's General Hershey Bar?" I looked across the school patio and saw these two anti-war protest characters dressed up as generals. Instead of epaulets, though, they had little plastic jet planes on their shoulders. It was very absurd street theatre kind of stuff. One guy called himself General Hershey Bar. The other was General Waste-more-land. A friend of mine said, "Hey, they want to meet you; they heard you draw comics." I said, "Sure." On the spot these guys proposed that I draw a comic book of their political views and adventures. They wanted it done in Charles Schulz's Peanuts style. Instead of "Peanuts" they wanted to call it "Peace-Nuts". I thought that might be fun to do; they gave me just one weekend to do the entire book! It's really, really crude stuff. Boy, the shit storm that rained down on me after that book came out was unbelievable!

ARCUDI: At school?

STOUT: I got flack from my academic instructors who were Berkeley radicals for not remaining true to my conservative beliefs; their integrity surprised me. The other problem arose because my father worked in the aerospace industry; he totally blew it. He believed that by my having this comic book published with my name on it that he was going to be investigated and that he would lose any security clearance he had working on government projects and jobs and that he'd be fired. I was like, "Dad -- It's just a comic book!" To me it was just a job. This was my first exposure to the reality that we do not really have a free press in America. This became even clearer when I was living behind the Iron Curtain in Yugoslavia. I learned a really valuable business lesson, too, from this book. When they pitched it to me they said, "We're going to write it and you draw it; we'll divide the profits up by thirds. You'll get a third of all of the profits." Well, they ended up giving away the comic for free! True to their word, I got my third: a third of zero is zero.

ARCUDI: So you were a conservative?

STOUT: Yeah. My father was a hard-core conservative Republican, and I was raised in a fairly conservative area in Reseda. A few years after my parents divorced we moved to Thousand Oaks. The second largest organization (after the Mormons) in Thousand Oaks was the John Birch Society. So I spent all of my early years living in hotbeds of conservatism. I had never really even been exposed to any other kind of ideology or thoughts. And so here I come to art school, and my academic classes are being taught by '60s Berkeley radicals. It's the first time I had ever even heard leftist ideas. I was like, "Whoa! I never knew people even thought this way." I was delighted. I thought it was really fascinating that there were other ways to think. My father was totally offended with a lot of the liberal and radical academic ideas I was bringing home. I used to bring my dad's conservative arguments back to the classroom. It created quite a stir and ruffled a few feathers. I just found it all interesting!

ARCUDI: Perhaps not this "Peace Nuts" experience in particular, but do you think the schooling and being exposed to those ideas are what ended up turning you around and making you the bleeding heart liberal that you are today?

STOUT: I see myself as a ferocious independent. I actually describe myself as a Teddy Roosevelt conservative. Teddy Roosevelt was a huge conservationist, fiscally responsible -- the two are not mutually exclusive despite the rants and disinformation from Big Business -- and a Republican at the same time. Or I might be considered a Goldwater Republican. Goldwater was a free, independent thinker; the logic of having gays in the military and the decriminalization of drugs were no-brainers to him. He didn't always feel compelled to tow the party line and neither do I. Although I'm a registered Republican, I am absolutely apalled by the Old Boy cronyism and absolute lack of morality within our current administration. These are dark times, my friend. I sincerely believe Cheney and the boys are set to destroy this country, our Constitution and what they mean both to us, the world and democracy in general. Within the last year I'm ashamed to say they've been frighteningly successful with their rape and pillage agenda with nary a peep from our deliberately dumb-downed public.

When Ronald Reagan became the governor of California our state had the best educational system and record in the country. By the time he left office, we were third from the bottom. As President he proceeded to do the same for our educational system on a national level.

ARCUDI: Why, do you think?

STOUT: Two main reasons. One, a lot of uneducated people means more fodder for the factories, more disposable, replaceable workers for his buddies, the big corporations. But I think the single biggest reason is that a stupid populace, untrained in critical thought is much easier to manipulate than a smart one. And the wealthy will always find a way to make sure their kids get a good education. Reagan was a guy who publicly railed against Big Government -- yet he quadrupled the size of our federal government while he was in office! Nobody seems to notice this apparent contradiction. Now our current chief moron has expanded government even more with his ridiculous creation of the Office of Homeland Security. Hey! Isn't that what the FBI and the CIA are for? It's a wacky world, my friend, when Clinton, a Democrat, severely reduces the size of our government while the chiefs of my party, the Republicans, are apparently doing their damnedest to bloat it back up in a way that would embarrass a Macy's float. Man, don't get me started...

ARCUDI: You talk about doing a lot of professional work in college for credit. Where did that start and what sort of stuff were you doing?

STOUT: We had a job bulletin board at school. Companies who were looking for artists but didn't have a big budget, or companies that were were just being benevolent and wanted to give students work -- those were the days -- would post job offers on this bulletin board. One afternoon I spotted a really intriguing proposition on the board. This local publishing company was having a contest among artists to do the cover for the first issue of a new magazine called Coven 13, a pulp magazine with short stories about witchcraft, the supernatural, werewolves, mummies, vampires -- that kind of stuff. Fiction. I have to say that now because fundamentalist Christians get on my case and call me a Satanist for doing anything affiliated with something with the name "coven" in its title, or with witches. My first cover had both! When I saw this announcement I thought, "Wow -- That's right up my alley. I love monsters." I submitted three entries and one of them won. The publisher's editorial offices were just a block away from my school so I went up to visit them. I asked to see what kinds of illustrations were going to be inside the magazine. They showed me these incredibly god-awful drawings that their art editor had done. Just horrendous. I said, "How about hiring me to do the interiors as well?" They gave me a couple stories to see what I would do. They liked the work, so I started doing all of the interior illustrations to the magazine as well. I created the covers and interior illustrations for the first four issues. That was my first major professional launch. It was great for me; it was a national magazine distributed all over the country. It proved I could meet deadlines and act like a professional. It was very exciting. To hold that first issue in my hands was an incredible thrill.

ARCUDI: The covers were painted, right?

STOUT: They were oil paintings. My work in oil was really hit and miss back then. I think I really lucked out on that first cover. The deadlines, I remember, could be brutal. For one issue they were so intense I ended up working a whole string of all-nighters. For one story I drew an illustration of a guy in an old-fashioned nightgown and cap holding a candle in a little candleholder, creeping down the stairs, looking all afraid. I was inking it with massive amounts of pen lines. I was so exhausted and so tired and so sleep-deprived that I kept falling asleep in between pen strokes. I'd be inking this thing, nod off and then wake up, keep inking, nod off, wake up, and keep inking. At one point I nodded off and when I woke up I realized that just before I had nodded off for some damn reason I had inked a Superman "S" insignia on the guy's chest. I had had a wild, sleep-deprived hallucination that suddenly made me think I was drawing some Superman illustration.

ARCUDI: I wonder what Freud would say about that -- Superman's insignia! Had you pretty much ruled out working in comics at this time, or were you still thinking about it?

STOUT: Oh, I loved comics. I was still collecting them, still buying them. I thought that was certainly an area where I could make some money.

I was also a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. I contributed illustrations to a magazine called ERB-dom, published by Camille Cazadessus. I'd drawn a whole bunch of pictures for a Burroughs book that had just been published for the first time entitled I Am A Barbarian. It was about Caligula, told from the point of view of Caligula's personal slave. I sent them off to the magazine, they got published, and I got a phone call from Russ Manning asking me if I'd like to assist him on the Tarzan of the Apes Sunday and daily strips. This totally blew my mind -- I was a huge Manning fan. I loved Russ' Magnus Robot Fighter comic. I was a big fan, too, of his adaptations of the Burroughs novels into comic book form. I thought he'd done a great job. I remember when the first one came out I was totally shocked because his Tarzan looked exactly the way I'd envisioned Tarzan when I read the novels. So I started commuting south several times a week to Modjeska Canyon, where he lived. It took me at least an hour and a half to drive there, even driving 95-100 miles per hour. But it was a tremendous learning experience. I inked for Russ and I colored the Sundays as well. He wouldn't let me letter, though --my lettering was too lousy.

ARCUDI: Was the extent of it, at least early on, inking? Or did you do some of the background drawing as well?

STOUT: I never really did any of the drawing for the strip. It was all Russ. I was inking, coloring, learning more about the importance of deadlines and making those frantic Fed-Ex runs. Russ taught me the craftsmanship of inking and he exposed me to my first Japanese prints. They became a huge influence in my art, my color and design. The best thing he taught me, however, was how to be a good dad. He was a tremendous father. He had two kids. I learned a lot from watching how he worked with his kids. It was totally the opposite from how my dad raised me.

ARCUDI: So he worked at home?

STOUT: Yes, he had a home studio in a separate building from his house, just a few feet away.

ARCUDI: I don't want to overstate this, but it sort of seems that Manning had a sort of paternal relationship with you. He seemed to guide you more along the lines of art, and sort of educated you, as you said, to be a good father and stuff. Did he fulfill that role even though you were in your 20s?

STOUT: Yes, my early 20s. I don't want to get too Freudian here, but I think subconsciously, because my father left our family when I was 14, for decades I looked for father figures. I responded to certain types of people, which is dangerous in the film industry. If the wrong people can read that about you, they can really exploit you and hurt you. But I'm the daddy now. I also have to comment that Russ never consciously taught me about parenthood. That was a bonus, a job perk -- something I just observed about him on my own. We were there to work.

ARCUDI: What kind of approach did he take towards the work? Did he take it very seriously?

STOUT: Russ took his work very seriously. He was really proud of what he did. I inked the strip, but he would never let me ink the figures or heads of Tarzan. He always had to be the inker of Tarzan himself. I think he was tremendously underrated as a writer, too. I think he was one of the all-time best writers in comics of that genre.

He partially looked upon the strip as a moral responsibility. He introduced -- in a subtle way, not with a sledgehammer approach -- moral dilemmas and their appropriate solutions in the strip. He also had an enormous respect for the history of comics. He was a big Kurtzman fan, which people don't realize. He had all of the Kurtzman E.C.'s. He of course liked Hogarth's work, but he was a huge Hal Foster fan. He was the one who really turned me on to Harold Foster's work.

ARCUDI: As Foster went on to do Prince Valiant from Tarzan, did Manning have any of his own material, independent of Burroughs, that he wanted to do?

STOUT: Russ went on to Star Wars, which I think he enjoyed even more than Tarzan, because Russ was first and foremost a big science fiction fan. In his high school days his nickname was "Moon Boy." The kids used to ridicule him. "Hey, you think men are going to land on the moon? What a fool, Moon Boy."

There were some interesting things that came about while I was working for Russ. At one point he offered me a Brothers of the Spear Sunday strip. I did a sample Sunday page of that. It didn't go anywhere. Russ was disappointed that it didn't look just like his stuff; I was determined that it wouldn't. Russ was editor for a while for Edgar Rice Burroughs when they were publishing their own comics. I didn't do any art for those, except for some ghost inking for some friends who were having deadline problems. But I did some writing which I was paid for.

ARCUDI: That was your first writing experience?

STOUT: That was the first time I got paid for it.

ARCUDI: Around the same time came Cycle-Toons.

STOUT: When I was working for Russ, sometimes I'd remark, "What I'd really like to do is..." then I'd tell him about some comics project. He'd say, "Either do it or don't talk about it. Otherwise I don't want to hear about it." He made me a little angry at first. Then I thought, "He's right. Talk is cheap. Until you've done it, it's all bullshit." At a certain month at that time in my life I was financially down. I really needed some kind of work -- any kind of work. I knew that Petersen Publishing was in Los Angeles. They and Gold Key were about the only two companies that published comics in L.A. I knew I wasn't going to get any work from Gold Key. They were too... well, you know. My God, they had Russ Manning, Dan Spiegle, Alex Toth, guys like that. Why in the hell would they want to hire me? I looked at the Petersen cartoon books and thought, "Well, I could probably do this stuff. It's black and white; I don't have to worry about the color. I'll go down and see if I can meet the editor and get some work." Well, I tried to do it through the proper channels, which was a huge mistake. I went through their employment office, their personnel department. They had me filling in lots of forms and stuff -- nothing that had anything to do with whether or not I could write or draw comics. I'm thinking, man, I just want to do comics. I want to talk to the guy who publishes or edits the comics and get right to work. But there I was, filling out past work history, describing my jobs in restaurants and sandpits and all that other stuff. At the same time, I was tripping on LSD. I hadn't intended to be on acid for the job interview. The week before I had made my appointment to see the head of personnel. The day before the appointment, I had taken some acid for recreational purposes. It turned out to be pretty intense stuff; I woke up the next day and I was still tripping! I had this job interview at ten in the morning. I thought, "Wow, this is going to be interesting. The absurdity of me filling out all of these forms when I just wanted to draw comics was not lost on me during this particular mind state. Finally at a certain point in the process in this interview I said, "Look. All I want to do is draw some cartoons. I'm not looking to become an employee here. I'm not looking for medical. I'm not looking for any of that kind of stuff -- paid vacations, nothing. I just want to draw some comics." I think about that time, or maybe a little sooner, she realized I was not their normal applicant.

ARCUDI: Maybe because your eyes were spinning around in your head?

STOUT: Yeah. I probably had pupils the size of hubcaps. She said, "I think I know just the person you need to see." She gave me Dennis Ellefson's phone number. Dennis was the editor for Cycle-Toons. I don't think I went over that day, because I was in no condition to drive; I had walked to the interview. But I saw Dennis the next day and brought my portfolio. He had just been turned on to underground comics, and he really responded to a portfolio sample that was in a Crumb-like in style. He gave me a four-pager to do on the spot. I was really stoked. I did it and brought it in. It was completely not in the Crumb style that he liked; he was a little miffed by that. But he gave me some more work. I wanted to write my own stuff. The first stuff that I did either he wrote or other writers wrote. I kept submitting scripts. I learned a lot from Dennis about editing; he was really able to see where I had padded my stories. He was always able to cut out the fat and get right to the heart of the story. Generally back then if I submitted a six-page story it would be cut down to three or four pages. And it would be much better for that. Dennis' editing was a great way for me to learn what was needed in storytelling in the comics medium and what was not. Dennis was really great for me in that he also let me experiment. I tried all different kinds of art styles when I was working for him. I didn't have to stick to one style, which I would have if I had been working for, say, Marvel or D.C. It allowed me to grow as an artist and find out what I liked doing and what I didn't like doing. One of the ironies of working for Cycle-Toons, though, was the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about motorcycles. I couldn't ride a motorcycle and I had never actually drawn one in my life. I certainly didn't own one. The couple times I've been on motorcycles I've crashed them. Dennis suggested that I go to the toy store and buy a model kit and draw from that, which I did. I ended up being one of the main artists in the book! Because I knew nothing about motorcycles, of course, the stories I wrote generally had very little do with motorcycles. Motorcycles were a sort of a necessary afterthought for me. But it was fun, really fun. I think I was making $90 a page: script, pencils, inks, lettering.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special Edition.]

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