AMAZING HEROES
Groth: When we moved to Connecticut, Mike would come up from Manhattan on weekends and help with the Journal. He still retained his share in the company after he moved to New York and took the P.R. position with DC. Sometime around the time we moved into the mansion, he moved to Connecticut and at some point started working full time back at Fantagraphics. At least I think so. I’m not sure how the idea for Amazing Heroes came up — it was either Mike or Kim or maybe both who brainstormed it — but Mike started editing it with the first issue.
Thompson: Mike returned to put together Amazing Heroes. Amazing Heroes came about because we realized we needed to publish something else to make ends meet. We had the infrastructure there so we decided to do a magazine that would cover the mainstream in a more fannish manner.
Catron: Amazing Heroes came about after the Direct Market formed. When The Comics Journal started out it was mail order. That was the only way we had to sell it. Now we’re in Connecticut, and we were talking to Phil Seuling — and I might be completely wrong about this — but Phil was a big booster of the idea of us doing a magazine that would carry superhero-type news that he would carry. He wanted stuff besides DC and Marvel, and wanted to expand his offerings as a distributor. It was a chance for us to expand our offering as a publisher.
Thompson: If you want to look at it cynically, we set out to steal The Comic Reader’s cheese. Which we did. That worked quite well. It lasted 203 issues plus all the special editions.
Catron: I went back to Connecticut and typed up a fairly long proposal — “Hero Histories” and other stuff I thought fans would be interested in. I took it to Phil, and he said, “This is great.” He got on the phone with Bud Plant and said, “I want you to take this many.”
Thompson: You have to bear in mind that’s when John Byrne was really hot. The Perez/Wolfman Teen Titans was popular. Frank Miller was doing Daredevil. If you look at the first six issues you have a Teen Titans cover, a Byrne Fantastic Four, Miller doing Daredevil — there was excitement there, too. That was right before the companies like First Comics hit their stride. There was no magazine to embrace all of that stuff. Amazing Heroes had a nostalgic aspect, but it was much more fixated on the present.
Catron: A funny thing about Amazing Heroes is that one of the most popular features is a piece of art Peppy pulled out of the slush piles, which became Silly Covers. Despite all my planning, it was something that was just stuck in there last second, a piece of fan art that was wacky and that Peppy liked. I figured I’d give the art director a page, and we ended up doing that a long time.
Thompson: We found writers. The standards weren’t necessarily Olympian, but there were a lot of fans that loved that material and were willing to write for Amazing Heroes.
Catron: We had some great covers. I talked John Byrne into redoing the Fantastic Four #1 cover, which was topical as he was taking over that title. We had Frank Miller, George Perez, we had Joe Staton, Bill Sienkiewicz on Moon Knight. That was a really good time. I don’t know if we paid them — if we did, it wasn’t real money.
Thompson: Another aspect of it was that as the Journal became more focused on independent and more challenging work, we could have a magazine that covered the more fannish aspects of comics. Amazing Heroes wasn’t too far away from the earliest Comics Journals.
Catron: It took some pressure off The Comics Journal because it was stuff they then didn’t have to cover. They could go further into art comics, the comics-as-art direction. Which is where Gary always wanted to go anyway. He wanted serious criticism, and we weren’t looking for serious critics at Amazing Heroes.
Groth: If Amazing Heroes could keep us afloat and help us pay Mike’s and Peppy’s salaries, I had no problems with it. But I had nothing to do with it. I don’t think I made a single editorial suggestion in the 10 years it ran. I mostly ignored it.
Thompson: Amazing Heroes was 68 to 84 pages, with a goodly amount of ads, and a section of newspaper-strip reprints, Star Wars and Star Hawks. A lot of it assembled itself. We had a news reporter to put together the news. About six to eight pages were lists of coming comics. Then we had a group of good, regular writers. Peter Sanderson was particularly good. I don’t remember it being difficult. It was fun. It was more fun than The Comics Journal, because it was more frivolous. If you ran a bad review or a goofy interview it seemed less of a crime than if it were in the Journal. And cartoonists were very willing to do covers for us to promote their work, so we got pretty much every major and semi-major cartoonist from that period.
Groth: Mike’s problem was that he was an incredibly meticulous editor and, as a result, incredibly slow. He edited about six issues, several of which were late.
Thompson: Even the first issue was like a month late — we had a huge fight about that. Mike was painstaking, which is to his credit, but of all the things to be painstaking about, Amazing Heroes wasn’t one of them.
White: I was to start on Amazing Heroes right after moving there, but it took Mike six months to get the first issue together. It was never clear why it was taking so long to put out the first issue of what was supposed to be a monthly magazine. Every now and then, we’d have “production meetings” in the kitchen. Well, they’d start out that way, but the focus soon narrowed to just Kim and Mike. Kim would demand an explanation for why the issue was taking so long. Mike would just kind of stare blankly. Minutes would pass. I don’t think we ever got an answer. I felt really uncomfortable sitting there. These guys were supposed to be adults. After months of these “meetings,” Kim finally said, “All right, our new rule is that when we ask you a question, you need to reply. Now, when will blah blah be done?” Long pause. Kim suddenly jumps up and pounds the table screaming, “Rule! Rule!” Despite the fact that this was cruel and brutal, I had to fall out of my chair laughing. At the time, I thought this was just the funniest thing. But, later I realized that that moment actually shattered a kind of strained détente they had between them, and Kim just got more hostile after that.
Catron: We always had problems with deadlines. I was actually proofreading the thing before it went out to the printer. Stuff like that. I remember they said, “If you don’t get it out by such and such date, you don’t get to do the next issue.” I thought I’d missed it, but I did hit the date.
Fred Hembeck, cartoonist: Once Amazing Heroes shrunk down from its original larger size to its more compact format, it began to develop an identity all its own, one that was more than just TCJ-lite. Sure, there was a lot of promoting of books The Comics Journal wouldn’t’ve been caught dead reviewing, much less even acknowledging the mere existence of, but that was OK. For every over-the-top preview of the latest flash in the pan (not to mention the latest Flash in that red suit), there was a lot of well-crafted and enthusiastic writing about the day’s more pedestrian — but clearly crowd-pleasing — titles on the market.
THE FOOTBALL-SHAPED PASTRY
Peter Bagge, cartoonist: It was either late 1983 or early 1984. I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey at the time, and Robert Crumb had just asked me to take over as the managing editor of his Weirdo comic anthology. The only problem was Weirdo’s publisher, Ron Turner of Last Gasp, wasn’t consulted on this decision and wasn’t too keen on letting a total unknown like me take over the magazine. Crumb said he’d keep trying to persuade Turner, but suggested I try to find a new publisher for Weirdo just in case.
This was a daunting task, since up to that point I had no choice but to self-publish most of my work, and thus had no working relationship with any comic-book publisher! But I recalled recently seeing a couple of new comic titles on the stands published by an outfit called “Fantagraphics,” — one of which, Hugo, was written and drawn by an acquaintance of mine named Milton Knight, who gave me their contact info. Up until then, all I knew of Fantagraphics was that they published The Comics Journal, which was quite notorious at the time as the one comic-book “fanzine” that held almost impossibly high standards for the art form, and didn’t mince words as to what they thought of the artists and writers (which was almost everybody) who didn’t meet those standards, and as a result I was a bit nervous about meeting these people.
Fortunately for me, they were great admirers of R. Crumb, and thus were eager to talk to me about publishing Weirdo.
Fantagraphics’ office was located in Stamford, Connecticut at the time, which was (is?) a mostly affluent suburb of New York City. Still, I drove up there expecting them to be operating out of some old downtown office building, and was both surprised and confused when I found myself driving through this well-groomed, middle-class, suburban, postwar neighborhood.
I was all but convinced that I had written down the wrong address when I suddenly came upon that neighborhood’s lone eyesore: A modern split-level that at one time may well have been somebody’s dream home, but whose entire front yard had now been converted into a dirt and gravel parking lot full of beat-up, second-hand Datsuns and Ford Pintos. The bay windows of the house were also almost completely blocked off with sloppily stacked piles of comic books, some of which had been there for so long that the sun had bleached all the red ink out of the covers, turning Spider-Man’s uniform into a garish combination of pale blue and yellow. That’s when I knew I had found the right place.
I was greeted at the door by Kim Thompson, still in his bathrobe at 1 p.m. He was in the middle of grilling his “breakfast,” which consisted of the biggest hamburger I’d ever seen, and the smell of which inspired the rest of the Fantagraphics staff — which at the time was a mere handful of young, hyperactive nerdy white guys with names like “Hiney” and “Peppy” — to cook up similar “breakfasts” for themselves.
Eventually the king of this castle, Gary Groth, arrived with his breakfast: A huge, football-shaped pastry he had just bought at the supermarket, and proceeded to cut it in half, while generously offering me the other half of this huge, hollow oddity. I declined. (Groth has since always insisted that he’s never bought and eaten such a pastry, let alone heard of such a thing, and suggests that I must have been hallucinating. Maybe I was, but that object remains lodged in my memory as clear as a bell to this day!)
What made all of this even more disorienting was that I’d always imagined the people behind The Comics Journal as a bunch of aging, cigar-chomping bald guys, due to their arrogant, know-it-all take on not only comics but pretty much everything else. So imagine my surprise to suddenly find myself in the Little Rascals’ Clubhouse, where they not only all worked but lived together. The only thing missing was a hand-painted sign saying “No Gurlz Allowed” hanging over the front door!
The main reason this meeting remains so vivid, however, is because it also turned out to be the most fortuitous meeting of my career. Not that it got off to a great start, however, since, after discussing taking over Weirdo, Groth decided to pass. As much as he liked Crumb’s work, he didn’t have much patience for a lot of the other insane nonsense he chose to run in the magazine, and wasn’t too happy to learn that I intended to keep on running insane nonsense. Still, he liked very much an eight-page strip I had just completed called “The Reject,” and based on that alone offered to publish a regular comic book of my own work.
This offer was so unexpected that I thought for sure he was joking, but he insisted he was dead serious. For the time being, it was all a moot point, since I was planning to move to Seattle shortly afterwards, and Fantagraphics was about to relocate to the West Coast as well, all of which would leave us incommunicado for a while. It also gave me time to figure out if a solo comic book was even do-able on my end. It wasn’t, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and I was thrilled to learn that Groth hadn’t come to his senses in the meantime and was still willing to give me a shot as well. And the rest, as I’d like to think someone might say, is History.
Groth: My recollection was that Pete was pitching a brand new anthology, a punkish anthology that would be populated by friends of his like John Holmstrom, none of whom impressed me. I can’t imagine rejecting the opportunity to publish Weirdo any more than I can remember eating a football-sized pastry, but if I rejected the offer to publish Weirdo, well, that would’ve been pretty stupid, huh?
Thompson: As I recall one contributing factor was that we were on good terms with Ron Turner and didn’t particularly want to cause bad blood by “stealing“ one of his titles (and his biggest cartoonist in the bargain). But it’s also true that Gary was unenthusiastic about much of the non-Crumb-and-Bagge material in Weirdo, and I was ambivalent myself. It’s easy to forget because the Bagge and Aline issues were such an improvement, but the Crumb issues were pretty spotty.
FINDING NEMO, POPEYE AND PRINCE VALIANT
Groth: I don’t remember when I first met Rick Marschall. He was hired to edit Epic after Archie Goodwin left and was working on staff at Marvel, so I may have met him at Marvel. Rick wasn’t a comic-book person; he was a newspaper-strip person and knew next to nothing about superheroes. He also didn’t fit into an institutional environment and certainly not one as parochial as Marvel. When I visited Marvel or after their press conferences, I’d hang out in his office.
Marschall: Yes, we met at Marvel. And I founded Epic; Archie was brought back onto staff when I was bounced. But I had been hired to edit the magazine line, with vague instructions from Stan to do “some new things.” I was hired precisely because I had been at the syndicates and knew all the strip guys, many of whom I brought in to Marvel, mostly for one-shots or stories in the black-and-whites. But I proposed doing upscale color magazines (frankly, as Heavy Metal was doing, but my models were many of the European comics).
Groth: Once I realized how much Rick knew about newspaper strips, I think I just casually asked him if he’d be interested in editing a magazine, a companion magazine to The Comics Journal of sorts, about newspaper strips. That’s how everything was done back then — casually. I basically said to Rick, “Hey, this would be a good idea. Wanna do it?” And before I knew it, Rick presented me with a proposal for the magazine and we were off and running. There was no real consideration of the larger picture, of practical considerations, of where this would fit into a production schedule, because we essentially didn’t have a production schedule. We just felt that we could squeeze it in somehow. I don’t even remember talking to Kim about it. I suspect I just told him we were going to put out this great magazine about newspaper strips and he said “OK!” and that was it. Rick was, back then, similarly seat of the pants and didn’t bat an eye.
Marschall: When Nemo launched I thought we could arrange a blowout debut party. I was on the Board of the Museum of Cartoon Art, housed in an unbelievable stone and concrete castle in ... Connecticut. Of course. We designed great invitations, bought cases of my favorite German wines. Fantagraphics and I split the costs; the Museum donated its facilities; my wife Nancy made hors d’oeuvres galore. It was a memorable event; hundreds of people attended, from the comic-book industry of course: TCJ’s band of scholars and writers; and strip cartoonists and old-timers from the area. An appropriate launch.
Donald Phelps, writer: I had a couple short pieces on Little Orphan Annie and Thimble Theatre published in a small literary magazine. I think it was Mulch. Those pieces were like impressionistic memories, really. Recollections that I was writing and I decided to get to it because at that time it was connected with my wanting to, my realizing that, I was getting on with life at that time and that I should make myself a writer. So I decided to go back to those pieces, which had gotten some nice, favorable responses from acquaintances of mine, but to do something from the original material, directly. And possibly revising or enlarging on those impressions and that process, and engaging some wonderment or some uncertainty that I experienced at that point. Not in any disapproving sense but in a self-questioning way about comic strips as a medium of expression. So that’s when I started going over to the newspaper annex to recheck all these things, and then I was acquainted with Art Spiegelman, who was teaching at SVA, and through them, I believe I reached [Rick] Marschall. I don’t think my acquaintance with Rick preceded my acquaintance with Art. And so, I met him, and he started to print my stuff in Nemo, He printed several of my things in successive issues. I think there was the Dick Tracy piece, the Major Hoople piece. The Little Orphan Annie piece took me longer to write. That was one of the longest things I’d written at that time, and I wrote more about comic strips than I would have [because Nemo was there], and I had to get the “do re mi.” I was, of course, being hysterically self-indulgent at that time as far as food and especially drink were concerned. But, you know, it was time for everything, and everything was in season. But anyway, it went on and I had a happy relationship with Nemo.
Marschall: Art Spiegelman, who recommended me to inherit his class at the School of Visual Arts in New York (“Language and Structure of the Comics”) was the one who told me about the astonishing, perceptive criticism that Donald Phelps wrote. I met Donald, invited him to submit anything he wanted. We became friends. He sometimes took the train to my house in Connecticut to spend days talking comics, and I occasionally asked him to sub my classes when I traveled.
Groth: Donald eventually began contributing to The Comics Journal and continued to do so for many years. We published his collection of comics criticism, Reading the Funnies, in 2001.
R.C. Harvey, comics historian and writer: There was a sequence reprinting Billy DeBeck’s topper on Barney Google, about this little kid and his falling into the clutches of a hobo-looking character. I had heard of the strip before, but I hadn’t seen it. It was a real treat to see. The more you see, the more you appreciate the visual approach, and the characters, the names like “Hello Swifty.” You have to get pretty deeply into these things to better understand them. I thought Nemo provided that service.
Groth: Rick was devoted to the magazine and to the material. He provided many of the comics used from his personal collection. Peppy was the art director. Toward the tail end of production, Rick would come over to the offices and he and Peppy would pull an all-nighter finishing it off so we could send it to the printer the next day. I remember many times when I’d sit down with Rick at 8 o’clock the next morning — there was so much energy in the air that I’d pull an all-nighter with them working on the Journal or kibitzing about Nemo — and have breakfast before he went home to his long-suffering wife.
Harvey: My recollection is that, when it came to collections, they did Popeye first.
Groth: I became a fan of Segar’s Popeye when I read the Nostalgia Press collection sometime in the early ’70s. It became one of my favorite newspaper strips. This may have played a role in it being the first comic strip we published, beginning the 11-volume series in 1984. I no longer remember who came up with the idea of publishing it in book form. Rick Marschall and I were probably talking about strips one day and I may have mentioned Popeye was a favorite, and he volunteered that he had all the strips at home: My dad had a barn and his dad had a tractor, and, by God, we could publish Popeye books! I secured the American rights and we were, again, off and running. It took us years to put out the entire 11-volume set, but we completed it. We had to print the Sundays in black and white, albeit in an oversized format — 11 by 17 inches, close to the size they were originally printed.
Marschall: After Popeye, we did many other strip anthologies: Red Barry, Dickie Dare, Little Orphan Annie and a loser at the time, but almost a legendary favorite now: The oversized Screwball Comics. One headache I wish I had not commenced with the Popeye series was having a “celebrity” foreword in each of the 11 volumes. After Jules Feiffer, Mort Walker, Dik Browne and Donald Phelps, I started to get desperate.
Harvey: Fantagraphics’ comic-strip books were different than anything that had come before. The Gelman books were showcases, books reprinting key strips. He would take vignettes, a segment of a run. And for the most part I think he chose wisely. The difference is that Fantagraphics undertook to reprint the entire run of something, from beginning to end. They took up Thimble Theatre from the beginning of Popeye to the end of the Segar years.
That approach was an enormous contribution to comics scholarship. For a while, we were forced to make do with the little vignette books, and they were certainly good. But you take something like the development of Popeye’s personality, or Segar’s propensity for ringing every nuance of humor from a circumstance by returning day after day to the central predicament, prolonging the moment until Popeye resorted to his fists and extricated himself and everyone from whatever the dilemma was — you don’t get any sense of that narrative maneuvering unless you see a substantial run of the strip all at once. That kind of thing was an enormous boon to people who studied these things, like me.
Thompson: Prince Valiant sort of fell into our laps. Neither Gary nor I cared particularly about it as a comic strip, and it definitely wouldn’t have been among our top choices to collect, but a Danish publisher was launching a multi-country reprint — we’d share production and printing expenses. They happened to approach us, I think because of Nemo, and we figured, “Why not?” It turned out to be our longest-lived reprint project: We eventually published 50 volumes over 20 years. I still don’t find it particularly interesting to read, but the guy sure could draw.
Harvey: I think the Prince Valiant series shared something with the Popeye books in that one eye was kept on how affordable the collections would be. There was a Manuscript Press Prince Valiant book that came out a bit earlier. It was $100 when it came out; I knew I couldn’t afford the $100. The Fantagraphics books I knew I could afford. Anytime you have an affordable line like with Prince Valiant you broaden the audience of who can read them. And without complete runs, you don’t get a real grip, a real precise understanding of what those comics were really like.
Marschall: I remember also trying like heck to nab the rights to Pogo on Fantagraphics’ behalf. Oh, I wined and dined Selby Kelly, but family politics were too dense then. The same with Peanuts. Sparky Schulz was a good friend — I had been his editor — but in those days Peanuts was too big and Fantagraphics too small for anything to happen despite my efforts.
Groth: Steve Ditko’s Mr. A fell into another category of cartooning we began publishing (in addition to original comics, newspaper-strip reprints and foreign translations); independent work by mainstream artists. I had corresponded with Ditko as far back as 1968 when I was a kid and after we moved to Stamford, I’d visit him not infrequently in his studio in Manhattan. I’d just drop by unannounced and we’d talk for hours. I always found him welcoming and talkative. He was fiercely independent and started writing and drawing his Mr. A strips in the mid-’60s at the same time he was drawing for mainstream publishers like Marvel. On one of my visits, I suggested we collect his Mr. A strips in a book. He embraced the idea, despite the fact that he knew I was diametrically opposed to the philosophical basis of the work, and we published two volumes — more Mr. A strips than had appeared in one place before or since. Steve was pretty easy to work with and even allowed us to re-design his covers to the books.
Thompson: We did rack up a lot of “firsts” in Connecticut. Aside from obvious stuff like Amazing Heroes and our earliest bona fide comics, it was in Stamford that we put out our first classic reprints, we did our first translation of a European comic (Hermann’s Jeremiah, released as The Survivors!) … most of this stuff would take off (or, in the case of color mainstream-ish comics, die) in California or Seattle, but it started in Connecticut.
WESTWARD BOUND
Catron: My leaving Fantagraphics came down to the move to Los Angeles. It’s weird. I wanted to go, but I ended up staying. Kim didn’t want to go but ended up going.
Really, nobody wanted to go to L.A. except Gary. “Gary, why do we have to go to L.A.?” “So we can be closer to the movie industry to get options.” Right. Gary just wanted to move to California.
Groth: Gil Kane was lobbying for me to move to L.A. for a year or two. I’m not sure why he wanted to move to L.A., but there’s that irrational, romantic allure of L.A., that gravitational pull to the West, promises of a new life. The two of us were so tight I don’t think he wanted to move unless I moved. But, we had a sweet deal on the house we were renting and I couldn’t justify it. One day, the owner of the house announced his intention to sell it, which meant we would be out on our asses. We couldn’t conceivably have bought it, of course. So, I told Gil we might as well move to L.A. as to another house in Connecticut, and we both moved to L.A. the same week, Gil and Fantagraphics.
Catron: It came down to it didn’t fit with what I wanted to do at that time. The actual process of my officially leaving the company was kind of vague. At one point, Gary and I went out to lunch and I told him I decided not to go to California.
There definitely was an element of burnout to it. I needed a life. Fantagraphics had more or less been my life since the Expo. I went to DC for a while, but that hadn’t worked out. So I ended up working in New York full time and working at Fantagraphics nights and weekends. I was getting no sleep. There wasn’t any plan. It was the same thing as when we started The Comics Journal. What opportunities do you see? What opportunities present themselves? What’s worth going after?
Thompson: Mike ultimately didn’t come to L.A. because he had roots in Connecticut, but in truth, there had been personal and professional conflicts among the three of us before that, usually between me and Mike with Gary kind of stuck in the middle, so I think it was a relief to everyone, including him, when he opted out.
Ultimately having three people running the company was untenable. The theory is that if two of them disagreed the third could be the tie-breaker, but in fact it more often turned into two people ganging up on one, or at least that’s how the “loser” tended to perceive it. With Gary and me being 50/50 equals we can whale away at each other if we disagree and there’s no issue of shifting loyalties or three-way interpersonal dynamics.
I got along much, much better with Mike as soon as he was out of the company. He’s a genuinely nice guy and I’m sure that without him there wouldn’t be a Fantagraphics.
ON THE ROAD
Groth: We rented four 28-foot Ryder trucks, spent several days filling them to the brim with everything we — and the company — owned, and attached cars to each of them.
Thompson: I remember Gary Kwapisz surveying the trucks as we stowed all our shit in them, shaking his head at how ridiculously we were overloading them — the gas tanks were like an inch from the ground — and muttering, “This may be your Waterloo.” That was our sendoff.
Heintjes: The trip from Connecticut to Los Angeles was unbelievable. We all had to drive a moving van with a car attached to it. The night before we left, the utilities were shut off in the house. There was a sauna next to my room — none of us used it. It was an auxiliary storage room. I was freezing, and I tried to sleep in the sauna with the heat on, and it was too hot there. So I tried to sleep halfway in and halfway out. I slept like shit that night. The next day I started getting drowsy almost immediately. People saw that I had begun to swerve, so we pulled over and someone else took over. It was a wearying trip.
Thompson: The caravan included Gary and me, four current employees — the two Toms [Heintjes and Mason], new art director David “Hambone” Hamilton and my brother — plus Mike Catron, Mario Hernandez (who flew to Connecticut and helped us as a lark) and a friend of Kenneth Smith’s whose name I forget who did it for the experience, I guess. He got more than he bargained for.
Heintjes: We caravanned to not get separated, and we had signals for various things so we would pull over at the same time. Kim Thompson failed to brake in time. I feel this little bump. I was towing my car on the back of this moving truck. I thought, “My car got dinged.”
Groth: The first truck, which I think I was driving, pulled off an exit ramp in New Mexico, and everyone followed, three more trucks each towing a car. Kim didn’t brake in time and demolished Heintjes’ car. It looked like an accordion. Kim gets out of the truck behind us and the first thing he says is “Not my fault!”
Heintjes: Kim hit my car so hard it snapped the towing bar. My car was halfway inside the moving van. He hit it with unbelievable force, just really smashed it. It hadn’t felt that way to me, but that’s what happened.
Thompson: They took off on an exit from the highway, I followed and it came to a stop at the bottom earlier than I expected. I braked for something like 100 feet but the sheer inertia of the truck was just too much to stop in time. By the time I hit Tom’s car, I was only going like three miles an hour, but it was enough to crumple his car. It was like a lesson in physics. Force equals mass times speed. And we had mass.
Thompson: I felt really bad about it. I consoled myself with the fact that the car turned out to be worth a lot more in insurance money than it would ever have had in resale, so in a sense I made Tom some money.
Elaine Kane: They had a black Labrador named Plato. When they drove West, they forgot him [at a stop]. They realized at the next stop he wasn’t there so they drove back and he was waiting for them.
Groth: At one point, Tom Heintjes and I were in the cab of the truck and I took an exit ramp. We had got separated from the rest of the caravan somehow (and cell phones didn’t exist). We were looking for everybody and for some reason thought it was logical that they may have taken this particular exit. I found myself in this sleepy town at 2 in the morning. It was pitch black. There wasn’t a living soul there. I had to turn around to get back to the highway. I was in this big truck with a car in tow. I needed a block to go around or a parking lot to turn around in, but there was just this one long stretch of road, no parking lots, only roads that look like they could lead into the wilderness.
But then I spotted this huge lawn in front of a church. I didn’t see any other alternative, so I decided to make a U-turn on this lawn. There was plenty of space. As I pulled onto it, I started to feel the truck sinking. The ground was soaked, which I didn’t realize when I turned into it, and we’re in this truck with four or five tons of shit in it. We’re literally sinking. Then, as I turn hard left to make a U-turn we start listing. I had this image of us falling over, simply flopping like a whale on our side. The only thing I could think to do is hit the accelerator. I gunned it in an arc as fast as the truck would go. I look to my left and see Tom Heintjes in the passenger seat, who has no idea what’s going on, with fear in his eyes. He’s just clutching the seat and has no idea why I just floored it or the danger we’re in. I make it to the road and look back and notice I left these foot-deep ruts in this church’s lawn. I just destroyed this lawn. I imagined the pastor or the priest arriving the next morning and thinking it was God’s will. Which I guess in a way it was.
Heintjes: You could say that everybody’s nerves were pretty damn frayed by this trip.
Groth: The trip took a full week, longer than we anticipated. Driving those big rigs was exhausting, even trading off with one other person. Mike Catron and I had driven his station wagon cross-country in 51 hours flat a few years earlier, but driving these trucks with cars attached to them was a whole other ball game. Toward the end of the trip, my driving partner was Mario Hernandez. At any rate, neither one of us had slept for 24 hours. I’ll never forget what Mario looked like, hunched over the wheel, white-knuckling it, his eyes never moving from the road, driving like a maniac, literally weaving in and out of traffic with a car swinging from the back of the truck. He had a crazed look in his eyes and I was terrified, and I don’t scare easily in a vehicle. It was just a marathon. I was more tired when I arrived at our house in L.A. than I’d ever been pulling all-nighters on the Journal. Gil and Elaine came over the day we arrived to greet us (he’d flown in a few days earlier — wisely) and he later told me he’d never seen me look like that. I was literally walking into walls. That’s the condition we were in when we arrived.
Thompson: The funny thing is, Gary’s convinced to this day that he was the one with Mario during the L.A. death race, but it was me. Mario can confirm this. Apparently, my descriptions after the fact were so vivid they seared themselves into his brain and became a false memory. I can say I was more scared in a moving vehicle than I’ve ever been in my life. And that includes all the times I’ve been in a car driven by Gary and for that matter the time Mike Catron totaled his car into a tree with me in the back seat.
For the trip from Los Angeles to Seattle five years later, we hired professionals to drive our stuff up in semis. Live and learn.
