Comic Book Historians

Tom DeFalco: Consummate Professional Part 1 with Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

March 01, 2020 Comic Book Historians Season 1 Episode 60
Comic Book Historians
Tom DeFalco: Consummate Professional Part 1 with Alex Grand & Jim Thompson
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Show Notes Transcript

Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview former Marvel Editor in Chief, Tom DeFalco from his early days reading comics, his comic strip work in college, his meetings with John Goldwater, Louis Silberkleit working at Archie Comics, creating the Archie Digests in 1973, his work at DC with E. Nelson Bridwell including Jimmy Olsen, Superman Family, Starfire, his initial meetings with Denny O'Neil, Marvel Two-In-One at Marvel Comics, Avengers and creating Dazzler with John Romita Jr. Edited & Produced by Alex Grand. Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders, CBH Podcast ©Comic Book Historians. Thumbnail Artwork ©Comic Book Historians. Support us at https://www.patreon.com/comicbookhistorians

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Alex Grand:         Okay. All right. So welcome to Comic Book Historians. Today we have a special guest, Tom DeFalco, former editor and writer of Marvel Comics, currently editing and writing various works, especially stuff with Archie Comics. I’m Alex Grand with my co-host, Jim Thompson. Tom, thanks so much for joining us today.

Tom DeFalco:        It’s my pleasure.

Jim Thompson:       Tom, what we usually like to do is to start at the very beginning, where you were born, a little bit of background on your family, your parents and then into how you started being interested in comics as a kid. So you were born in Queens?

Tom DeFalco:        I was born in Queens many years ago, way too many years ago. I am the oldest of seven children. My father was a butcher who eventually owned a small supermarket and I pretty much grew up up working in the supermarket and understanding how you make little little bits of profit that add up to a paycheck at the end of the week.

Jim Thompson:       So you had a sense, as a small business owner, your father, you had a sense of business practicality and common sense. Would that be fair to say?

Tom DeFalco:        I’d say that was hammered in to me, yeah. You know, little things where people would bring in a ten cent off coupon and I realized, at that time, if you were a store owner and they brought in the ten cents coupon, you would make an additional two cents by mailing it into the company. And I realized at the end of the month, all these little coupons added up. It actually served me well when I first started working for Archie Comics, because I forget if it was John Goldwater or Louis Silberkleit, one of them said to me, “This is a business of pennies, but if you watch the pennies, eventually they turn into dollars.”

Alex Grand:         Wow.

Jim Thompson:       That’s really interesting. So let’s talk about comics a little bit. When did you start? Were you were a comic reader as a kid?

Tom DeFalco:        I started reading newspaper strips, The Phantom, Mandrake The Magician, Pogo Possum, On Stage by Leonard Starr, and very occasionally Prince Valiant because my father didn’t pick up that paper, Dick Tracy, all of the basic comic strips. I got into comic strips very early and I used to cut them out of the newspaper. I was hoping my timing was right and I would cut them out of the paper after my father had read them, not before. And somewhere along the line, I think it was at some family party and one of my cousins, my cousin Johnny, he was a few years older than me, handed me a Batman comic. It was either a Batman comic or a detective comic. And I remembered looking at this creature Batman and it scared the heck out of me, but I really liked this thing called comic books, and I started searching around and I discovered that they were on sale pretty well everywhere and from then on I was kind of hooked.

Alex Grand:         What year do you think was that when you started reading the comic books?

Tom DeFalco:        I’m going to guess 1956-57, somewhere around there.

Alex Grand:         Oh, okay. So kind of like that Jack Schiff era of Batman and then so this was before the Marvel stuff was coming out, okay.

Tom DeFalco:        Sure.

Jim Thompson:       Were you reading any EC stuff or just mainly more kid superhero things?

Tom DeFalco:        It was the kids’ comic books, the Harvey Comics, the DC superhero things, the occasional Marvel monster book, plenty of westerns. I loved westerns as a teen.

Jim Thompson:       I’ve read elsewhere where Walt Kelly was actually a pretty big influence or at least one of the ones that really, really grabbed you early on. Is that right?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, I mentioned earlier, Pogo Possum.

Alex Grand:         Pogo Possum, yeah.





Tom DeFalco:        That was his strip and Kelly’s, his artwork, his way of dealing with characters, it just just really hooked me. One of my trips to the library, I saw this book. I think it was called “Jes’ Fine” Says Bug, which was a collection of Pogo strips, and I must have taken that book out a hundred times from the library, just studying it and just enjoying it.

Jim Thompson:       Oh, that’s great.

Alex Grand:         So do you feel that Walt Kelly’s Pogo had better characterization than, let’s say, the DC Batman stuff or did you feel that you liked the DC Batman characterization as well?

Tom DeFalco:        Well, like I said, Batman scared me. I stuck more with the Superman line of comic books.

Alex Grand:         Oh, I see.

Tom DeFalco:        I loved Jimmy Olsen because Jimmy Olsen kind of reminded me of me. They were five or six-page stories and for the first four or five pages, he’d just screw up, screw up, screw up and then he’d hit his signal watch and Superman would come and rescue him. I just kind of thought of Superman kind of as a father figure and thought, hey, you know, whenever we get into trouble, Superman will rescue us.

Alex Grand:         Oh, interesting.

Tom DeFalco:        But in terms of the Walt Kelly stuff, you know, they both had different appeals to me.

Alex Grand:         Right.

Tom DeFalco:        I loved them both and I also loved a lot of the Harvey stuff, Hot Stuff, The Little Devil and Spooky. They’re all great characters. I enjoyed all that stuff. Of course, I read the Archie comics too.

Jim Thompson:       So did you recognize Spooky as like being a fellow New Yorker? Was there like-

Tom DeFalco:        I don’t think I was thinking in terms of New Yorkers because, as far as I was concerned, it was all New York. I didn’t know there were other states of the union-

Alex Grand:         Right. That’s true.

Tom DeFalco:        … or that people were not like … Yeah, I didn’t know that there were places in this country where you can’t get a decent slice of pizza. When I found that out, it broke my heart.

Alex Grand:         Empathy. That shows a lot of empathy actually. Looking back as an editor, do you feel that Mort Weisinger was a good editor of those Superman comics you were reading as a kid?





Tom DeFalco:        This is a question no one has ever asked me and I’ve never really analyzed it. I think Mort produced the kind of material that was needed at the time because, at that time, comic books I think were aimed for six to ten-year-olds and that material was perfect for when you’re six, seven, eight years old, certainly the Jimmy Olsen stuff where he’d turn into a giant turtle or a werewolf or what have you. It was really fun nonsense.

Alex Grand:         I got you.

Tom DeFalco:        One little step above the Harvey stuff. I look at that stuff today with a lot of fondness. I know Mort was a rough editor. I’ve heard the stories from people who worked with him, but the material that he was producing, it really had an effect on people.

Tom DeFalco:        You see his influence today from so many writers who are trying to make sense of these characters like Mxyzptlk or whatever you call them, trying to figure out ways of getting that into continuity. For me, if I were them, I’d just forget that stuff and create new stuff.

Alex Grand:         Right.

Jim Thompson:       All right. Talk about your education a little bit. Where did you go to school?

Tom DeFalco:        Well, I went to … high school or college?

Jim Thompson:       Well, let’s go straight to college.

Tom DeFalco:        College, I went to a small college called Le Moyne College. Somewhere early on in my life, I discovered that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I wasn’t convinced that you could actually make a living as a writer. So my plan going to college was I was going to become a teacher and write on the weekends. It’s kind of ironic because I became a writer who had to work every goddamn weekend. I ended up having an elective in my freshman year, which you’re not supposed to have. I figured, you know, might as well take an education course and I ended up taking this course called Philosophy of Education. I was a freshman. I was in a room full of seniors who had gone through all four years of the education course, and it was my first philosophy course.

Tom DeFalco:        So I go into this course and they’re discussing the philosophy of education and they would ask questions and no one really knew the answers. They were just discussing things. Now, because I had never taken a philosophy course before, I didn’t realize this is how philosophy works. You ask the questions and then you discuss them. There are no actual answers. But I was sitting there as a freshman thinking, man, these guys went through four years of the education course, they don’t know what education is? This must be a lousy course. So I immediately dropped out of the education department, thought I better start writing because I don’t have any other plan.

Alex Grand:         Yeah, survival.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. So a very lucky guy, I did some short stories and very lucky and actually managed to sell them. There was a local newspaper and I started working for the local newspaper doing reviews and writing whatever the heck they assigned me to do. At some point, I applied to work in the college public relations department writing press releases and that sort of thing. So I was building up a portfolio. I also-

Jim Thompson:       Had you worked in high school for your like high school paper or anything or was this your first published work?

Tom DeFalco:        Oh no, no. In high school, I worked for the school newspaper, the school literary magazine, all of that stuff.

Tom DeFalco:        I keep trying to figure out, now what was my first professional work. It was either 1969 or 1970. I think it was ’69 was when I sold my first couple of short stories. Yeah, I just kept writing. In college, I teamed up with an artist and we actually did a weekly comic strip for the school newspaper.

Jim Thompson:       What was it about?

Tom DeFalco:        Oh, it was called The Crimson Crackpot. I look at it now and it was really terrible. It was really terrible. We thought it was very funny at the time but, oh man, we just made fun of people in the college and things that were happening on the campus at that time.

Jim Thompson:       Now, what kind of short stories? Were you writing like genre fiction? Were they horror, science fiction or was it-

Tom DeFalco:        They were I guess mainly fantasy kind of stories. I learned early on that I didn’t have the technical expertise to do science fiction. I was once working on a science fiction story and I had to work out a math problem, and it took me four or five hours to work out the math so that I knew the science actually worked, and that became one sentence in the story.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s funny.

Tom DeFalco:        So I thought later on, yes, science fiction not for me. So it was that and then, later on, I eventually graduated to mystery stories and things like that.

Jim Thompson:       Were comics at all in your mind that that might be a direction you would go in in terms of like comic book writing?

Tom DeFalco:        I didn’t really think of aiming for comic book writing when I was in college and stuff. I was thinking more about trying to be the next Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I was a kid, I discovered the Marvel comics when I was about 10 or 11 years old, Fantastic Four, Three and Four, I bought them both up together and became a Marvel fan from that day on.

Alex Grand:         Oh cool.

Tom DeFalco:        There were two really good writers when I was growing up. It was Bob Kanigher and Stan Lee. I figured if you weren’t Bob or Stan, there was no future for you. By the time I got into college, Roy had come on the scene, Denny O’Neil had come. So many other guys had come on the scene so I saw it as a possibility but I didn’t really think too much about comics, you know, until I graduated. And when I graduated, I started looking for a job because I was programmed. You had to have a job, you had to have a paycheck. I sent out resumes to all the companies, including Archie, and I heard back from Archie. They invited me up and gave me an interview. I met Victor Gorelick who, you know, taught me everything I know, but not everything he knows and I’m still hawking him for that stuff.

Alex Grand:         That’s cool.

Tom DeFalco:        And I started at Archie.

Jim Thompson:       What year was this?

Tom DeFalco:        What year?

Jim Thompson:       Yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        1972.

Alex Grand:         And you met John Goldwater, you mentioned earlier?





Tom DeFalco:        I eventually met John Goldwater. At that time, there was John Goldwater who is the president of the company, Louis Silberkleit who I think it was co-president. I’m not exactly sure what their titles were. Richard Goldwater was the editor and Michael Silberkleit, the son of Louis, was the guy in charge of the business aspects of it.

Alex Grand:         Oh cool.

Tom DeFalco:        So I think Michael had seen my resume and thought, “Let’s give this idiot a chance.”

Alex Grand:         How were those guys interpersonally? I think a lot of people are curious about that because I think they see the names but they don’t know how they were on a personal level.

Tom DeFalco:        Well, it was a small family company and they were used to doing things as a small family company, you know, running it like that. But between John Goldwater and Louis Silberkleit, these guys kind of created the comic book industry and forgot more about comics than most people ever learned. Any time Goldwater would come into the room, I would open my ears to hear whatever I could learn and try to ask them a bunch of questions. A lot of times he would brush me off because I was asking very basic questions.

Tom DeFalco:        But he and Louis and Michael and Richard, they all understood the business so intimately that a five-minute conversation would be like taking a six-month course anywhere else. I sometimes look back and think about all the greats that I got to ask questions on and work with and learn from because I learned from the Silberkleits, the Goldwaters, Victor Gorelick who I think he joined Archie maybe when he was about 16 years old and he’s still there well into his seventies or maybe even his eighties at this stage of the game. These guys understand comics on a really basic, intimate level. The knowledge they have or had, it just takes my breath away.

Alex Grand:         Wow.

Jim Thompson:       When you went to work at Archie, when you were a reader, were you reading Archie as a kid?

Tom DeFalco:        I had read a bunch of the Archies. I enjoyed the Archie comics and especially the Jughead comic book.

Jim Thompson:       I noticed when you went back to Archie after Marvel and The Man from Riverdale series, you brought back one of the Little Archie characters, Doctor Doom, which I was really glad because that was my favorite when I was reading Archie as a small kid was definitely Little Archie. I thought those were the best.

Tom DeFalco:        And they still hold up today, those Little Archie stories by Bob Boiling and later Dexter Taylor, especially the Bob Boiling stuff. I have them in a box near my desk and every once in a while when I want to feel inspired, I pick up one of those things. Bob just had a magic of weaving a story and they had such emotional content for little kid material. It was just terrific.

Jim Thompson:       Was he gone by the time you started in ’72?

Tom DeFalco:        Who? Bob Boiling?

Jim Thompson:       Yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        No. Actually Bob … When I started, I started in the editorial department working on various editorial projects, learning the industry from the ground up, paste ups, how to color covers, how to make art corrections, how to make spelling corrections, all of that stuff.

Tom DeFalco:        I started to write one-page gags for Archie and eventually started to sell those and then eventually took my shot at doing the five-page stories. It took me a while to actually crack Richard Goldwater, but I finally cracked him.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s awesome.

Tom DeFalco:        And I sold my first five-page story and they assigned Bob Boiling to draw it.

Jim Thompson:       Oh wow.

Tom DeFalco:        I couldn’t believe it. I was in heaven.

Alex Grand:         Yeah.

Jim Thompson:       Oh, that’s super.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. Archie had some real masters of the craft, you know, Bob Boiling, Harry Lucey. We used to call him Juicy Lucey because, man, those girls were fabulous when he drew them.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s awesome.

Tom DeFalco:        Samm Schwartz.

Jim Thompson:       He was great.

Tom DeFalco:        Oh-

Jim Thompson:       His Jughead especially, just so good.

Tom DeFalco:        I loved Samm. I loved his work. Sometimes I didn’t love working with Samm, but I loved his work and I’ll tell you why-

Alex Grand:         Was he abrasive? Yeah, tell me about that.

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Tom DeFalco:        No, no. He was a great guy, a fabulous storyteller, but a lot of times he worked late at night. He’d put his kids to bed and would work through the night. One night about two o’clock in the morning, I get a phone call, wakes me up out of a sound sleep and it’s Samm. He wants to discuss a joke on page two or three of a story that he’s doing.

Alex Grand:         Oh, okay.

Tom DeFalco:        And I’m thinking, I say, “Are you kidding me, Samm?” And I hung up on him and I remember thinking is this for real? I took the phone and I laid the phone on the floor because I thought, hey, if I wake up in the morning and the phone is where it should be, then I know this was a dream, but if it’s on the floor, I’m going to call Samm up and give him a piece of my mind.

Alex Grand:         That’s funny.

Jim Thompson:       So how long did you stay at Archie all together?

Tom DeFalco:        I was there about I’m going to say close to eight, six or eight years, somewhere in between.

Alex Grand:         That’s a good amount of time.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. I originally started full time on staff but, as I started getting more and more freelance, I cut back the staff. I think at the end I was there, I would come in one or two days, you know, two days a week. It was mainly to work on the digest books.

Tom DeFalco:        During the time I was at Archie, I started to do some work for Charlton. Charlton, I got in touch with them. I figured I’ll just do a little extra work and I think they assigned me eight comic books. They were all bimonthlies.

Alex Grand:         Oh wow.

Tom DeFalco:        But I realized I have to write a book a week for Charlton plus the Archie stuff.

Jim Thompson:       Charlton’s always famous for not paying a lot. In terms of them versus Archie, were you making around the same or were they paying less?

Tom DeFalco:        They were paying considerably less.

Alex Grand:         Considerably less.

Tom DeFalco:        At one point I was working, I think Archie was paying either $12 or $15 a page for script and Charlton was paying $5 a page.

Alex Grand:         Right.

Jim Thompson:       Wow.

Alex Grand:         A lot less.

Tom DeFalco:        It was a lot less, but you got to do a lot more goofier things.

Alex Grand:         Yes, because there’s less editorial oversight at Charlton, right?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, yeah.

Jim Thompson:       Yeah. I always assumed that’s why some people like Ditko worked for them was because they got to do what they wanted to.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. I’m going to guess. I never asked … all the years I spoke to Ditko, we almost never discussed comics.

Alex Grand:         Oh really?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah.

Alex Grand:         Tell us about that.

Tom DeFalco:        Well, that comes later on in the history.

Alex Grand:         That’ll come later on. Yeah, you’re right. There is a Ditko section here, you’re right.

Jim Thompson:       So you didn’t work with Ditko on Charlton stuff?

Tom DeFalco:        No, no, no.

Jim Thompson:       That was later with Machine Man and things like that?

Tom DeFalco:        Right. Machine Man was the first time I worked with Ditko.





Alex Grand:         I love how you’re actually anticipating what our script structure is today. See, Tom is actually already editing this podcast which I love. I think that’s great. Go ahead. Go ahead, Jim.

Jim Thompson:       Okay, so let’s go back on Archie just for a minute because you mentioned the digest comics. Talk about that because you had a major role in that, correct?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, I stole the idea. I think it was Gold Key at the time had the Disney licenses-

Jim Thompson:       Right.

Tom DeFalco:        … and they came out with a couple of the digest books and I saw them and I thought, wow, this would be perfect for our material. So John Goldwater came in one day and I said, “Mr. Goldwater, I think we should be doing these sort of books, these digest books.” He looked at me and says, “What are you out of your mind? How do you market them? Where do you sell them? They’re not going to fit on the comic book racks. There’s nothing you can do. Get out of here.” And he just told me to go back to my desk and shut up which he often did. Then, a couple of days later, he comes back and he says, “You know, I’m thinking about those digest books. Go talk to Ben Cooperstock about them.” Ben Cooperstock was our salesperson.

Tom DeFalco:        So I took them to Ben and I said, “If we did our books here because they’d reproduce properly at this size format, do you think you could find a way to sell them?” And he looked, he says, “They’re not going to fit on the comic book racks. There’s no place to sell them. Forget about it. It’s a dumb idea.” So I figured, okay, next time Mr. Goldwater asks me, I’ll tell him Ben said it’s a dumb idea. Then a day or two later, Ben comes in and he says, “You know what? I got a place where we can sell those things. They’ll absolutely fit like the TV Guide racks and stuff like that.” And he said, “You know, I think if we made a deal with some supermarkets, we could probably get them into the supermarkets. I’m going to look into this.”

Tom DeFalco:        Then the next thing I know, Goldwater comes in and he says, “From now on, we’re doing digest books. We have to get two titles out. We have to get them out because we’re buying the real estate now. And I remember Victor turning to me and says, “It was your idea. This is your problem. Deal with it.”

Alex Grand:         Oh wow.

Jim Thompson:       Oh, that’s great. And it’s huge. I mean that was a huge part of Archie comics.

Tom DeFalco:        Oh yeah. It became a major part of the business and they’re still a major part of the business. Actually, they’re the part of the business that is still doing classical Archie stuff.

Alex Grand:         Right. That’s what I grew up on were Archie digests actually.

Tom DeFalco:        I think a lot of people did.

Alex Grand:         Yeah, that’s right.

Tom DeFalco:        It was a great value for the money.

Alex Grand:         Yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        It was trade paperbacks before there were trade paperbacks.

Alex Grand:         That’s right.

Jim Thompson:       Yeah. That’s right. So then where do we get from Archie to your next stop? And was that DC?

Tom DeFalco:        Well, I was working at Charlton and then I met … They used to have this thing called the Academy of Comic Book Arts.

Alex Grand:         Yeah, sure. Neal Adams and Stan Lee kind of started that, right?

Tom DeFalco:        Started that, right. And the Archie people, they would invite us to the annual meeting when it came time to pay the dues. Otherwise, they forgot about us. So I met a couple of the guys there. I met Paul Levitz and Marv Wolfman, a couple of the guys, and they were having another meeting and they invited me too. I went to that meeting and, at a certain point, Paul was working with Joe Orlando and they were doing some custom comics and they asked me if I’d like to do some extra work working on their custom comics. So I started working on custom comics for Joe Orlando and then he was talking to me about maybe doing some humor stuff for DC because they always wanted to do humor stuff and things for the younger markets. I came up with a few proposals. One of them was that … Oh no, no, they approached me with something called Super Juniors.

Tom DeFalco:        It was supposed to be a 60-page book that was done tabloid size. I forget what they used to call those tabloid size comics, but it was going to be done for that.

Jim Thompson:       Like the size of their Treasury Editions-

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, Treasury Editions. Like I said, I forgot what they called them, Treasury Editions. So I worked on that and did some proposals for some other humor things. Then Joe at one point said to me, “Hey, have you ever thought about doing straight stuff, the superhero stuff?” I remember saying to him, “Joe, that stuff looks so hard. I read it, I enjoy it, but I don’t know if I could do that stuff.” And he said to me, “Come on, kid, you’ve got to be able to come up with characterization. You do characterization. You’ve got to be able to come up with plot. You do plot.” He said, “But here’s the kicker. It doesn’t have to be funny. They’re paying you the same rate and you’re only doing half the work.”

Tom DeFalco:        I thought about it for a few minutes, thinking, yeah, it doesn’t have to be funny. So you’re doing half the job and they’re paying you the same rate. I said to him, “Okay, I’ll take a shot.” So they assigned me actually to do a romance story. I remember the title, I Won’t Kiss That Evil Way. Denny O’Neil was the editor.

Alex Grand:         Oh cool.

Tom DeFalco:        And Denny said, “I’m going to give you the title and you come in and we’ll talk about it.” So I showed up with three premises, three possible premises for a story with that title. Denny was amazed because he said, “Most of the time, guys don’t show up with anything. We just hash it out ourselves.” And I said to him, “Yeah, I don’t know how to do that.” I said, “I’m sorry, I did it wrong.” He said, “No, no, no. This is …”

Tom DeFalco:        I said, “I’m sorry, I did it wrong.” He said, “No, no, no, this is fine.” And he looked over, and we chose one of them, and I wrote this story, and then he said to me, “Yeah, I’m not going to be doing the romance books anymore, but I’m going to be doing this book called Superman Family, which would you like to do a Jimmy Olsen story?”

Alex Grand:         Nice.

Tom DeFalco:        And I thought, “Hey, yeah.” So I pitched the story to him and he liked the pitch. And I went home, I wrote it, and then I showed up the following week, and I had my script in hand for the deadline, and I show up and I said, “I’m here to see Denny O’Neill, I have a script for him.” And the receptionist got very nervous all of a sudden, and she called, and she started whispering. And a few minutes later, E Nelson Bridwell came out and he said to me, “You’re here to see Denny O’Neill?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, Denny went freelance.” I said, “Denny went freelance?” I said, “Well, he asked me to write a Jimmy Olsen story.” He says, “Well, I’m editing that comic book now.” He says, “And I already have my own writer.”





Alex Grand:         Wow, this is kind of annoying. Yeah, okay.

Tom DeFalco:        And I said, “Well, okay, but DC commissioned me to do this story and I expect to get paid for it.” And Nelson took me into his office and said, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, because I didn’t commission that story.” And I said, “Well, I really don’t care. DC commissioned it. I expect to get paid.”

Alex Grand:         Yeah, I like that you defended yourself. That’s awesome. Good for you.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. you know, I’ve worked for advertising agencies and they ripped me off a couple of times. And Nelson said, “All right, let me read the story.” And Nelson started to read the story, and I’m full of all sorts of piss and vinegar, “Oh, I’m going to get paid. I don’t care what’s going on.”

Alex Grand:         Yeah. That’s great.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. Now, Nelson had some medical issues, which are, you know, it was a shame, but, and he made some strange sounds when he would read. And I’m listening to his sounds, and I’m looking at his face, and he’s got this stern expression on his face. And he’s going through the story page by page, pulls out a pen, knocks some … And as he keeps reading it, I get more and more intimidated, and I’m sitting there thinking, “All right, so I wasted a week writing this story. What am I going to do?”

Tom DeFalco:        And I’m sitting there, he finishes the story, and he kind of rolls it up in his hand, and he looks at me, he says, “You stay right here. I got to go talk to Julie Schwartz.” And he storms out of the room, and he comes back a few minutes later, and he says in, “All right, I talked to Julie, he’s going to take care of my writer. You’re now the writer on Jimmy Olsen.” And I said, “What?” And he says, “Wow.” And he says, “Yeah.” And he said, “So, you know, I’d like you to work on the next thing.” And he said, “And also think about Lois Lane.” And I thought, “Wow.” So I ended up getting two assignments out of it, and I did-

Jim Thompson:       You were there, you worked on that Superman family book for like at least a year or more, didn’t you?

Tom DeFalco:        I guess. I wasn’t really paying attention at the time, you know, how much time. And I also did something called Starfire. Oh, I think I did start Starfire for Denny. I might’ve done that before Jimmy Olsen, and Claw the Unconquered, or Claw the Conquered … Claw the Unconquered, I worked on those things.

Alex Grand:         Did you bring Archie’s sensibility to Jimmy Olsen? Is that something that happened?

Tom DeFalco:        I don’t think so. I think, you know, I hope I-

Alex Grand:         You don’t think?

Tom DeFalco:        I hope I brought a Jimmy Olsen sensibility-

Alex Grand:         Sensibility to Jimmy Olsen, there you go. That’s true. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:       Did you think it was funny that you went from one redhead with freckles to another?

Tom DeFalco:        To be honest, I never even made the connection.

Alex Grand:         Well, because you read Jimmy Olsen as a kid, so you are more going to that probably, huh?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. That’s what I was thinking of.

Alex Grand:         I gotcha, interesting.

Tom DeFalco:        And Nelson, now Nelson was really a continuity guy. He really loved continuity and controlling, you know, continuity. And he would change the dialogue on Jimmy Olsen so he could add footnotes. And he actually, he taught me a very important thing when you’re a professional writer: When you’re a professional writer, you know, you work on your story and you work on it, and you make it the most precious thing in the world to you until you turn it in, and then you don’t ever look at it again.

Tom DeFalco:        Because looking at the published work can only depress you, because you’ll look at the published work and you’ll either see a mistake you made or a mistake somebody else made, or you’ll see, “Wow, I was so much better then. I’m a bum now.” It can only depress you, looking at the published work. So, you got to just focus on the story that you’re working on. And then once you let it go, it’s gone.

Jim Thompson:       So how much did you have to study up on those characters, on Jimmy and Lois? Did you go back and reread from like early days, or were you just with someone else catching mistakes if there were mistakes made?

Tom DeFalco:        Well, I had Nelson and Nelson knew all the continuity. So if I would pitch something, he would say, “No, no, you can’t do that because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I had a bunch of old Superman comics, and Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, mainly the Jimmy Olsen thing.

Alex Grand:         I see. So it’s kind of up to the editor to maintain the continuity almost sometimes?

Tom DeFalco:        Ah, yeah. The editor is the guardian of the character. The writer … This is why editors and writers don’t belong on the same planet: The editor is the guardian of the character, has to think of what’s good for the character long term. The writer has to come up with a short term story and focus what’s best for that story. And sometimes a short term story and a long term character development don’t mesh.

Alex Grand:         Don’t mix.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. And that’s when the editor has to say, “No, you can’t do this.”

Alex Grand:         I see.

Jim Thompson:       And was it the Kirby aspect of Jimmy Olsen completely taboo at that point, or was that something you could also incorporate that mythos into it?

Tom DeFalco:        Oh, you could incorporate it in. In fact I did. I went back there, the newsboy legion and dealt with some of the Kirby mythos. Because, you know, I’m a Kirby geek and I love that Jimmy Olsen stuff by Kirby.

Jim Thompson:       I do too. It’s so different from what was coming before that, and I enjoyed that too. I mean the Planet of the Capes and that kind of Jimmy Olsen is really fun, but then Kirby takes it in such a different direction. So I was just curious what you were trying to channel when you were doing it.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, I don’t honestly remember. I think I was, you know, just trying to do the best Jimmy Olsen stories I could, and the best Lois Lane, and then eventually the best Superboy stuff. I just, you know, I’d read the pre-Kirby, the Kirby, the post-Kirby, and then tried to do something that honored it all.

Alex Grand:         That’s cool.

Jim Thompson:       So what made you leave? You went from DC to Marvel, is that correct?

Tom DeFalco:        Sort of, kind of. What happened, DC had something called a …

Jim Thompson:       Implosion?

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Tom DeFalco:        The DC Implosion, and I’d been doing a lot of work for DC, and I had a very big check coming. And I showed up on Friday to collect my check, and I needed that check because I was buying my first house the following week. And the checks normally showed up at 10 o’clock in the morning. They weren’t there and it looked like they weren’t coming down. They were going to cancel a lot of books. We’re hearing “The Implosion”, that sort of thing.





Tom DeFalco:        I found out about six o’clock that night, the checks finally came down. I got my check, and I remember talking to Paul Levitz. He said, “We don’t have any work for you now, and maybe in a couple of months we’ll have something for you.” And I thought, “Well, we’ll talk in a couple of months. But I doubt I’ll be, you know … If I haven’t found work in a couple of months, I’ll probably be in a different business.” But you know-

Alex Grand:         Yeah, because now you had a house payment at that point.

Tom DeFalco:        I had house payments to that. I remember, I didn’t spend the whole day at DC. I went back to Archie, and I walked into the Archie offices, and I said to Victor, “Hey, do you have any work? Because, you know, I was doing work for DC but it’s gone now.” And he says, “Well, let me look around and see if I can find something.” And then I called some other guys, it didn’t occur to me to call Marvel, but I called some other people about doing some work here, doing some work there. And everybody said the same thing, “Well, you know, let me look around, I’ll see if I can find something.” And then by about 12:30, one o’clock, everybody came back with assignments.

Alex Grand:         Oh, cool. And this is basically 1978, when Jim Shooter is now editor-in-chief, right?

Tom DeFalco:        Jim Shooter’s now editor-in-chief. I think I had done a sample story for them before this. I had done a sample story, which was a Vision story, which years later Carl Potts used that to test young artists, to see if they could do storytelling.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s awesome.

Tom DeFalco:        And I had scripted a couple of jobs over other people’s plots, and had done like a two-issue Avenger story, and-

Alex Grand:         Right, because you did a Marvel two in one with the thing, and then number 40 in 1978?, and then you did two issues of Avengers, one ’79 and one ’80. And I noticed Black Panther was used in the Marvel two in one and then that Avengers comic, right? Is that what you’re referring to now?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, yeah. I also did a “what if?”, something with the Kree Skrull War. Yeah, and some odds and ends. But, after about three weeks after the Implosion, I went to talk to Shooter and I said, “Hey Jim, I don’t know if you’d noticed, but DC had an implosion that day a couple weeks ago.” And he says, “Yeah, the day it happened, I had a line of guys outside my office.” He says, “I was wondering why you didn’t show up.”

Tom DeFalco:        I said, “Oh, it didn’t occur to me,” which is the story of my life. And if we get to the end of my career, I’ll tell you again, something that didn’t occur to me. And I said, “Oh, guys were lined up outside your office?” He says, “Yeah.” He says, “I was surprised you didn’t show up.” “Well, I had other freelance work. I just got around to it,” and I said, “I guess you gave out all the assignments?” He says, “No, I saved the book for you to do.” So he assigned me I think a two in one and a Marvel team up at that stage.

Alex Grand:         Oh, cool. So, then you got along with Jim Shooter, it sounds like, when you joined Marvel?

Tom DeFalco:        Oh yeah. You know, I really liked Jim Shooter. I thought he had a great vision for the industry. I thought he’s still one of the most creative guys I’ve ever run across. You know, a genius, a veritable genius as a plot doctor. Guys would come in and you know, tell a story, a meandering thing that had no beginning, no end, no middle. And Jim would listen to them for around 15, 20 minutes and then he would pull out a gem, a diamond from that thing and said, “Here is the core of your story,” and explained to them how to construct the story. And I’d usually sit there and think, “Man, I fell asleep, you know, 15 minutes ago. But Jim can always zero in on the core of a story.” I still think he’s the best when it comes to that stuff.

Alex Grand:         Wow. That’s great. That’s great to hear that. Yeah. Because I mean, obviously everyone has their own opinion on Jim Shooter. And Ron Wilson, I talked to him once, and he really liked Jim Shooter. It’s cool to hear your analysis, because yours comes from like a writer/editor standpoint. So that’s pretty cool. I’ve never heard that impression of him before.

Tom DeFalco:        Well Jim really understood story and story structure. You know, I’m an anal retentive structurist, so I really appreciate it.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s great. So now, one of the things you did also when you came to Marvel was the five final issues of Machine Man, and Steve Ditko was doing art with that. So tell us about working with Steve Ditko.

Tom DeFalco:        All right, well, the editor of that was Denny O’Neill, who had come over to edit Marvel, and he said, “Hey, you want to write Machine Man for me?” I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” And I knew Ditko had done the last couple of issues with Marv Wolfman. And I said to a Denny, “Is Ditko going to stay on the book?” And Denny said to me, “Well, he wants to read the first plot before he makes a decision.” And I thought two things, I thought, A, “That’s fair. He’s Steve Ditko, he ought to be able to make that decision.” And B, I thought, “There’s no chance in hell he’s going to stay on this book.” Because I didn’t think I was good enough to write plots for Steve Ditko.

Tom DeFalco:        So I turned in my plot, and a couple of days later I get a call, and this voice on the phone says, “What gives you the right to write about heroes?” And I said, “Excuse me, who is this?” And he says, “This is Steve Ditko.” And we ended up having about a two-hour conversation on the nature of heroes. You know, what makes a hero, what do we look for in a hero? All these different things. And the conversation went all over the place for about two hours. At the end of the conversation he said to me, “Well, this was fun. We should do it again some time,” and he hangs up.

Tom DeFalco:        And I thought, “Is he going to stay on the book or not?” And I start working on the next plot, and I turned in the next plot. And Denny says, “Ah, I’ll have artwork for you in a couple of days.” I said, “Yeah, who’s doing the art work?” He says, “Steve Ditko, he said he had a great conversation with you so he’s staying on the book.”

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s great.

Tom DeFalco:        And we stayed on the book together. I had a tendency in those days, and these these days, to write a detailed plot, and Steve would say to me, “You know, you could cut down, you don’t have to put this amount of detail in it. You could really cut down.” I said, “Well, what would you really like to have, Steve?” He says, “I’d like to have a paragraph.”

Alex Grand:         “That’s it, huh? Okay.”

Tom DeFalco:        I said, “I don’t know if I could explain … I don’t know if I’ll be able to put a story together in my own head that I can get down into a paragraph.” And I tried to condense as much as I could. I think the best I ever got was like two and a half pages. But you know, on the one hand we had a ball on that thing, on the other hand we did this crazy style, like a parody of Marvel comics dialogue, with every sentence had like about 50 adjectives in it. And my natural writing style is very, very sparse. So this was totally against everything, my natural writing style. But I’m fighting to come up with all these adjectives and that sort of stuff to do kind of like a super version of Stan Lee kind of thing. Because the book, we knew the book had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. So we were desperate to get any sort of …

Alex Grand:         Content out there.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, that we could.

Alex Grand:         So, were you a fan of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man?

Tom DeFalco:        Oh yeah, yeah. People in my generation, I’m sure there was somebody who wasn’t, but I wouldn’t talk to them anyway. Steve’s work on Spider-Man, on Dr. Strange … Yeah, I’m a writer, I should be able to express how much that stuff meant to me. But you know, I’m a Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby geek. That stuff was just so great, it’s hard to quantify.

Alex Grand:         Did you feel that the John Romita era was almost like an Archie comic, where you had, you know, the two love interests, Flash Thompson like Reggie … You know, Jim and I were talking about that earlier. Do you think that that was almost more like Archie or did it maintain the spirit of the Steve Ditko stuff?

Tom DeFalco:        It maintained the spirit, it maintained a lot of the spirit. John Romita, I had met John when he was doing Daredevil, and I really liked his kind of thing. His Spider-Man was jarring to me, because it didn’t look like Steve Ditko, but it eventually grew on me. And I don’t know if you guys have ever met John Romita or talked to him, got to be one of the nicest guys in the universe, and a total professional. Just a terrific guy on so many, so many levels, and a fabulous artist.I should mention that.





Alex Grand:         Yes, fabulous artist. Yep.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah. And you know, the basic Archie format, a guy torn between two beautiful women, he can’t make up his mind. That’s the basis of most literature.

Alex Grand:         Yeah, a lot of stories have that anyway. That’s true. So then tell us about launching Dazzler number one in 1981, and John Romita, Jr. was the artist, but a lot of creator names are on that first issue of Dazzler. What was your role in Dazzler?

Tom DeFalco:        I developed the backstory. At one point, I was brought in and there was a record company guy, a movie guy, you know, our licensing person. And the plan was that they were going to launch this character out, you know, do records, do movies, do comics. It was going to be just a coordinated thing, kind of like what they used to do and I guess they still do it in Japan with comics, and animation, and everything else like that. And you know, I remember they said to me, “Hey, we have both Derek and John, John, Derek for the movie. Paul is going to star, John’s going to direct.” They just have a movie before called Tarzan, and I’m a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. I was waiting anxiously for that Tarzan movie. And I said, “Okay,” and she’s going to, you know, be the Dazzler. They showed me the artwork. John had done a publicity piece and they said, “Yeah, her power is she’s so beautiful that she makes people tell the truth.”

Alex Grand:         Which sounds like Wonder Woman’s rope or something.

Tom DeFalco:        It sounds like Wonder Woman’s rope. And I think something must’ve flashed across my face, because the record guy said to me, “What’s the matter? You don’t like that idea?” What’s your idea, wiseguy?” And I said, “Well, you know, it’s just not a very visual power for comics or movies.” He said, “Well, okay wiseguy, what’s your idea?” And I said, “I don’t know. Dazzler, it should have something to do with light.” Yeah. And I always remember the movie guy-

Alex Grand:         So you originated the light power with Dazzler?

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, yeah.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s awesome.

Tom DeFalco:        At the time I said, “Dazzler, light,” and I looked at … The movie guy and the licensing guy looked at each other like, “Oh man, what a stroke of genius.”

Alex Grand:         Genius, yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, yeah. And I’m thinking, “You bring a hundred comic book guys into this room and you say, ‘A character’s named Dazzler. What’s power related to?’ At least 99 of them are going to say light.”

Alex Grand:         That’s true, yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, so I thought, “Yeah, okay. So yeah, I’m a genius. Okay. I believe that one.”

Alex Grand:         So how did that coordinate with her first appearance in X-Men 130 in 1980 then? So, you created her with JR Jr, but her first appearance was in Chris Claremont’s book. So how did that all work out?

Tom DeFalco:        Well, what happened was we ended up doing the backstory, wrote a Bible for the character, came up with the name Alison Blaire.

Alex Grand:         Yeah, which I love that name. Okay, keep going.

Tom DeFalco:        Alison, child of light. Blaire, a loud sound.

Alex Grand:         Oh, that’s so good.

Tom DeFalco:        Oh, so corny, so corny.

Alex Grand:         That’s awesome.

Tom DeFalco:        And no one ever caught me on that. And we did the backstory, we did the Bible. We put together the first issue. It was supposed to be a super special, a full color super special: 40-page, full color, super special. However, before it was going to go out to press, we were just finishing up, before it goes out to press, Tarzan comes out, and Tarzan was not well received. I think that was kind of the end of John Derek as a …

Alex Grand:         As a director?

Tom DeFalco:        As a director, and you know, it hurt Beau’s career for awhile and that sort of thing. So, the movie people dropped out, and then eventually the record people, and then they took the Dazzler and they put it on a shelf. And then you know, time went by and then, I don’t know if the … I’m trying to remember the time sequence when the X-Men came out, the Spider-Man came out. And I think we followed that by about six months or something like that, or-

Alex Grand:         Yeah, that’s right, because it’s cover dated ’81. Yeah.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, they decided to let it be a direct only comic book. They said, “Hey, we have a 40-pagester. We’ll just cut it in half,” except that this story was not constructed that way. So, we had to add material in the front part, the back part. I always look at the first page of the second issue, where Dazzler is sitting there and she’s got like 200 thought balloons explaining everything that happened in the first issue. Because the first issue was sold direct only. The second issue was going to be on the news stands. And I thought, “What if those people picking up Dazzler two have have not had a chance to read Dazzler one? You got to explain it all to them.” And then we were off and running.

Alex Grand:         Oh, cool. And then did Claremont ask you some deep backstory about her before implementing her in the X-Men comic? Was there a conversation about that?

Tom DeFalco:        I don’t think so. I think he just read the Bible. I think he just-

Alex Grand:         He read the Bible that you wrote, yeah. Okay.

Tom DeFalco:        Yeah, I think he just read the Bible because he and Marv both followed the Bible.
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