Tom Orzechowski Career Interview Part 2: Spawn Letterer

Alex Grand, Bill Field, and Jim Thompson interview legendary Marvel, Image and Darkhorse Comics Letterer, Tom Orzechowski discussing the history of Comic Books alongside his personal and professional involvement in comics, in part 2 starting with why he left Marvel Comics and started working with Todd McFarlane on Spawn, as well as his heavy involvement with Manga, and the change from manual to digital lettering. Alex asks Tom about Jim Shooter’s editorial involvement in the X-Men, and more fun specifics about his professional involvement with Chris Claremont. Jim asks more about Tom’s Silver Age influences, which artist Tom wishes he could have worked with, and who Tom feels was the very best letterer of all time. Edited & Produced by Alex Grand.  ©Comic Book Historians, Spawn ©McFarlane/Image Comics, Dirty Pair ©Dark Horse, The Advance Team ©Tor Books, No Sense Remix - Standard License. Support us at https://www.patreon.com/comicbookhistorians

Podcast and Audio ©℗ 2019 Comic Book Historians

Transcript

Alex Grand: Why did you leave Marvel for Image?

Tom Orzechowski: When Chris left, if I’d had any actual ethics of my own, I would’ve left at the same time in solidarity. But I figured, “Well, I need the gig,” and so I did about five or six more months with Fabian on the one book and Scott on the other one. And with all props to those two guys who are professionals, they’re both still at it, they weren’t my X-Men anymore. Which sounds kind of childish in a way, because the Justice League changed writer/artist and everything does after a while.

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Tom Orzechowski: Those guys were taking things in other directions and then Scott’s relationship with White Queen began, some such thing like this, and just … Also, it occurred to me, I was signing books at conventions for kids who weren’t as old as my tenure on the X-Men, and I’m thinking, “Okay, if he wasn’t even born when I started X-Men, I’ve been here for long enough.” And so I gave Bob Harras a call, “With all respect, I’ve done as many of these as I really care to, good luck, good luck,” and the next year came out without a break of course, so as if my departure changed the publication schedule. I figured, “Well, what am I gonna do now?” I was already lettering a ton of Manga every month, which is its own interview I guess.

Bill Field: And who are you doing that for?

Tom Orzechowski: Directly, it was for an operation called Studio Proteus, which was a sole proprietorship, and they were packaging for Eclipse and Innovation, and then Dark Horse. It was a two person operation, it was Dana Lewis who lived in Japan. In fact, she was the Newsweek bureau chief for Japan translating like crazy for the wire services. She was translating their speeches which gives you a sense of her place in the echelon. She was born in Ann Arbor, she was an American stationed over there. She and Toren Smith, the late Toren Smith, who were a couple of Anime and Manga fans like crazy, happened to meet at a translators club meeting in Tokyo one day when Toren was over there looking for properties for Biz Communications. And their eyes met, they shook hands, they created this operation called Studio Proteus. And I did BizComics in 1989 which I let him because I knew Toren. Through Eclipse, Dirty Pair, Appleseed, Dominion, Black Magick, so many things. Ghost in the Shell, later on through Dark Horse, I was involved with all theses things.

Bill Field: How do you like Manga yourself? I’m just curious Tom.

Tom Orzechowski: I liked working on the stuff. I’ve never followed it beyond the books we were producing. But it’s kind of like what I was saying about Rick Lee and Arthur Adams and these guys getting X-men books. The energy was just undeniable. It was incredible. Fun and giddy silliness was allowable in the Manga and the Anime both. Was churning out Manga in unbelievable amounts for a number of years. So when I quit the X-men it was as if I had … I was destitute. But I didn’t know any other editors at Marvel because I’d been the X-men guy non-stop. And especially once I left New York, I’d never made the acquaintance of anybody. And so if I’d had any brains I would have just called the switch board and said, “Can I talk to whoever the Avengers editor was?” Or you know, Gruenwald or Larry Hama or somebody, and maybe gotten three books that day. They were people I didn’t even know.

Tom Orzechowski: And about a week or two, Tom McFarland gave me a call and he said he and the lads were forming this new thing called Image. And he had this property called Spawn that he’d been kind of developing quietly for a while. Would I be interested in working with him? Well, yeah, that sounds good to me.





Bill Field: A lot of people probably don’t realize that your wife and partner as it is, is also a letterer in her own right. Why don’t you say a little bit about her real quick.

Tom Orzechowski: Lois and I go way back, about 1983. I had a way of having apprentices. When I was 25 I needed my first apprentice because my workload was getting to the point that it was and I would make sure that people who worked with me had a basis in calligraphy, which I guess I’d have to teach them in some cases. Kind of familiar with my graphics books so they could keep up with me. People who worked with me could get in their own gigs and then moving on, I guess I taught them quite well. And so I needed someone and then a mutual friend introduced me to Lois because she’d been doing signage for science fiction conventions and things so she was familiar with the alphabet and with calligraphy. And so I put her to work. And she learned real quickly and when I dropped New Mutants around issue 40 maybe, because I was just over burdened, she took that over.

Tom Orzechowski: I had a small studio called Task Force X and there was Kevin Cunningham who later worked for Marc Silvestri. Kevin was on staff for him. There was Tomiko Saito who was a Studio Proteus letterer who … very good illustrator. And I’d get three or four of us together in a room and we’d do an issue of X-men in a day. I’d do the copy placements. Different of us would do the body copy, the script lettering. I’d do the sound effects, I’d do the balloons. We’d grind the thing out rather quickly. And it looked more or less like I did so it was fairly seamless. But if you would have checked any of the indexes for Task Force X … there’s a fair number of issues. Lois and I sometimes did X-men in tandem. I’d break it down, she’d do the dialogue and I’d do the frilly bits on the side. She did a few things on her own with Trina Robbins.

Tom Orzechowski: Kind of dropped away from comics. It’s awfully demanding, it’s always been awfully demanding. Not everyone’s got the nerves for it. That’s why things went digital in the middle 90s. Because deadlines became so utterly out of control.

Jim Thompson: Talking about Trina Robbins. I just want to intrude for a second and talk about Dope, which I thought was one of your most unique and interesting lettering jobs. I’m a big fan of that one.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, that was fun. That was for Eclipse monthly, later 80s. Trina always had this really clean, affectionate, graphic approach to things. A little 40s influence because she was a big fan of Planet comics and these things in the 40s and they really warmed up to the Marvel look. Fortunately, 80s there were so many publishers on the scene, trying to distinguish themselves from the Marvel approach altogether, Trina was a natural. And Sax Rohmer, the creator of Fu Man Chu, they do a novel called Dope which is just sensationalistic nonsense about the high ups … the higher level British semi-royalty … the Britty Wooster level people I guess. Atmospheric as heck, foggy nights, and dope dens. It ran for maybe a dozen chapters and it’s finally been collected now, 25 or 30 years later.

Tom Orzechowski: And I got to do slightly atmospheric lettering, 20s based things, something I was always fascinated by anyway. And it was a really good time because at that time, Lois and I were living in San Francisco in a building that Trina and Steve Leialoha were on the upper flat. We were on the lower flat … three flats. She’d just come downstairs with pages and pencils and I’d letter this and I’d walk up the stairs and drop them off and she’d date them.

Tom Orzechowski: I worked with her on a number of things at that time for Playboy and maybe High Times magazine and I forget where all. Kurt Busiek wrote a four part Wonder Woman series at that time that Trina had drew and Lois lettered. They’d canceled the Wonder Woman book in order to keep the copyright away from the Marston family. Otherwise, it would have reverted to them. And then George Perez’s first issue came out after Trina’s fourth issue. So Trina did as if the final Golden Age Wonder Woman story.

Alex Grand: Yeah, I remember that well. That’s a standout because of the art.

Bill Field: Completely historic because it’s the first time that a woman actually drew Wonder Woman. Which amazes me because … I’m surprised Ramona Fradon never got a chance.

Tom Orzechowski: Isn’t that weird. You’d think … of course, DC was always fiefdom driven I guess. Each editorial office was a completely unique entity. Unlike Marvel where it was one big room, the mythical bull pen which never existed, but close enough. So Ramona was drawing Aquaman, I forget the name of the editor now. I would put Ramona on Superboy, instead of George Papp who’d been drawing Green Arrow. Then Kirby would have had Green Arrow. Or else I would have put her on Wonder Woman or else I would have up Mike Sekowski on Wonder Woman instead of Ross Andru who I would have put on Justice League.

Jim Thompson: Yeah. Now, for you and DC, was Sovereign Seven the first thing you did there or the thing that you did there with Claremont?

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, after Chris took six months off from the X-men ordeal, he … DC says, “Well, what do you like?” And Chris creates a new team book. And an artist’s … it really speaks style. I can’t really remember the fellows name now. Beautiful work. Kind of Image looking in a way you can say. Chris came up with this bunch of new characters from elsewhere and I lettered about four or five of those and then my appendix burst.

Jim Thompson: It was Dwayne Turner wasn’t it?

Tom Orzechowski: Dwayne Turner. Thank you very much. And my appendix burst in the middle of an X-men issue as I think about it. I can’t remember why I dropped Sovereign Seven. I’m kind of surprised I did. But it must have been a deadline crunch.

Bill Field: What was the transition like for you when things started going digital as far as lettering goes? Can you … walk us through what the process was and how you got to that point where you decided you would go that route.

Tom Orzechowski: Well, it was the only route in town. It was during Shooters tenure but you can’t really blame Jim because Marvel was just in such a massive expansion mode all the time. I’ve lost track of how many titles they were publishing by then. And which meant a lot of new writers, a lot of new artists. And there was just not the same discipline you got from the Buscema brothers or Romita Gil Kane the previous generation guys. And without pointing out any names in particular, the new guys just weren’t able to match the intensity of Jack Kirby’s old workload. And so things fell behind, and fell behind, and fell behind. From a Marvel sense, and I guess the DC sense, there was really no choice but to find a faster way to go, a more economical way to go.

Tom Orzechowski: No I’d started … doing the Manga was so labor intensive because we’d get photo stats of the Japanese art work that’s filled in all the Japanese dialogue and sound effects on it. Then we were flopping them backwards so they’d read left to right in American style instead of right to left in the Japanese style. And we had to put new sound effects on top of the Japanese sound effects. Either paint them on or paste them on. It was very time consuming. And in order to speed things up, Toren Smith said, “Why don’t you get yourself a font design program and digitize the dialogue at least, so you can spend more time on the sound effects and still make an adequate wage on this thing?”

Tom Orzechowski: And so in 1992 I got my first PC and Publishers Type which was then the font design program. And it did not work with Windows as it existed at that time. And it was about a year … a year and a fraction before I actually had a workable font. So about ’93 I started hiring people to simply produce the digital output of the dialogue for me. So that had to be pasted onto the photo stats. And I think it was around ’95 that Richard decided he liked designing the appearance of the pages … designing the placement of things but didn’t like doing the physical lettering. And so Comicraft was founded. He hired a staff of about a dozen and they could turn a book around before lunch. Give two pages to each person on the staff and boom, it’s all done. Which meant that suddenly the race was on to develop things faster.

Tom Orzechowski: At the same time, between that and … suddenly everyone had a modem. You could deliver the pages digitally. FedEx now, overnight, was too slow. So everything had to be done online, instantly. By year 2000, after only about five years of the Comicraft reality, I don’t think any books were lettered by hand except Spawn which I lettered by hand and that was sole owner, Todd’s sole thing, and Savage Dragon with Erik Larsen. I don’t think any mainstream books were lettered by hand anymore by 2000. I think around 2003 or so I gave in also because publishers deadlines had just gotten too severe. And Spawn also was relatively off schedule because Todd’s always doing way too many things. Designing toys and what have you.

Bill Field: Buying baseballs.

Tom Orzechowski: Well, there was that and on tour all the time. The baseball thing that’s …

Bill Field: That’s cool though, I thought.

Tom Orzechowski: That was his fanboy passion.

Bill Field: The first time that anyone recognized the fact that people made that much money from comics to where they could explore their passions to such a level.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, Todd had went to college on a baseball scholarship.

Bill Field: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Tom Orzechowski: And he realized in maybe his third year that only so many people are ever going to play pro ball but an awful lot of people draw comic books. And so he subdued the one passion for the other one and delivered his samples to the X-men slush pile along with ten thousand other people. Steve Englehart was needing an artist for a backup feature. He was with Epic Illustrated wanting to create his own thing. He asked Ann Nocenti, who was then the X-men editor, if he could look through her slush pile, her admissions pile. Sure, of course. And he found Todd in there and so Todd’s first published work was the back of an issue of Coyote. From there he went to DC and did Infinity, Inc. for a while.

Bill Field: His page layouts were really off the charts. He was unlike anybody that had come up to that point and I still remember how his capes of characters would create the whole page format.

Tom Orzechowski: He’s always been irrepressible. He’s always got to do things his way, full bore. Nothing holds him back. Which is why he upset the entire toy tie-in to this. Because his toys were going to be fabulous, they were just going to be fantastically sculpted. Really well painted, articulate in every way you can imagine instead of the really cheap things that DC and Marvel were producing up to that time. Toys suddenly had to make Todd’s standard. But he wanted his issues to stand out and be unlike anyone else’s. Especially with Spider-Man. He figured, “I want my Spider-Man to be the Spider-Man.” So the web shooting webbing suddenly looked interesting and the intensity of the webbing of his entire costume was suddenly much more so than it had been during the previous artists after Ditko. And texture became Todd’s thing. You know, backgrounds. Big contorted body shapes when he swings in the city. More of a Ditko style. Todd does an amazing job.

Bill Field: And that brings us to phase two of our interview with you today Tom. And that means it’s time for our two registered fanboys, Jim and Alex, to ask you a few questions. And they’re champing at the bit. I can just tell because I see them via video. I’m gonna let Alex start this round. Ales, what do you have to ask Tom?

Alex Grand: Tom, I love all the insight you’ve given us today. You’ve mentioned Jim Shooter and the editorial direction of killing Jean Gray for the genocide of the Asparagus planet. Was that the only time he gave an editorial directorship or do you feel like you guys didn’t have to deal with too much control on the X-men book.

Tom Orzechowski: As time went on, Chris had a pretty good sense of what his editors wanted to see. I have no doubt their massive struggles, arm wrestling … wrestling on the floor struggles. Partly because Chris’ stories didn’t really seem to conclude. But then again, life doesn’t often seem to conclude either. Things just kind of drift away and become focused later on perhaps. As things went into the five issue format for the sake of the reprints, I think that’s another thing he was chafing up against, Chris was.

Tom Orzechowski: Shooter, he was a realist. He had his own sense of how things ought to be done. He and Frank Miller had some notorious battles. But Jim was editor-in-chief. Someone’s got to be in charge. It isn’t just a free for all. As far as I’m aware, that was the only time that Jim really stepped in and said, “You know, Chris, your logic is flawed in relation to what I think is a more sensible larger view of Marvel as a publishing entity, as a profit making entity.” Chris and I were in touch quite a bit in those days. Sometimes he’d stay out in San Francisco for a week or so with us. I can’t think of any other time off hand.

Alex Grand: how could the corporate guys drive Jim Shooter crazy?

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, it was Shooter’s thing … because Jim Shooter, the good and the bad, was that …, and he did a lot of good. He increased the company’s fortunes enormously because he was being pushed constantly from upstairs from the money guys to simply make more and more money every year, which kind of made him crazier.

Alex Grand: I gotcha. Were you doing most of your lettering from California most of that time?

Tom Orzechowski: Oh yeah. I was out there from ’81 until 2005. Then out to Portland. So I was back in New York for three and a half years from ’78 to ’81. And then didn’t really look back.

Alex Grand: Okay, so most of the lettering was all from California after 1981.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, but by then as I say, everyone had a modem … emailed across. Sometimes six days a week between X-men, New Mutants, Wolverine, maybe What If? I forget what else I was doing by that time. Star Wars for a while. Spider-Woman for a while.

Alex Grand: When you were lettering those newer comics from Chris, X-men Forever and New Mutants Forever, did it feel like old times? How was that?

Tom Orzechowski: Oh it utterly … especially X-men Forever, that was absolutely old times. I was suddenly 15 years younger. The book didn’t last forever unfortunately. It ran about a year and a half. A bi-weekly … Chris had an arrangement with Marvel to give him two books a month that way there’d be a constant stream of X-men of his style. X-men Forever picked up the moment he left Marvel in 1992. So the Avengers team was the 1990 new team and Chris had to figure out, “How can I make this different from 1992 without anyway conflicting with X-men as it is today in 2010, 2015.” So he made some remarkable changes to the lineup almost immediately. Yes, everyone sounds like themselves. Kitty sounds like Kitty and Gambit sounds like Gambit. It was lovely. I was hoping it would go on forever.

Tom Orzechowski: Also, because they put my name on the cover. Not initially the first time that it happened. But it might have been the first time at Marvel.

Alex Grand: I love reading Chris Claremont’s stuff. I like how he puts a lot of explanation in things. Did you ever feel like, “Whoa, that’ a lot of letters for this page?” Did that ever come up.

Tom Orzechowski: It was a lot of letters. Fortunately, I’ve got a light enough grip on the pen that I was never getting cramps. I’ve known people that started to get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome after just a few years professionally because their grip was too tight. Part of calligraphy training is to hold a much more of a feather weight on the pen. Chris’s style involved typing back when it was in analog format, I guess you now call it physical format. He’d write on 8 1/2 x 14 paper instead of 8 1/2 x 11.

Tom Orzechowski: They were the top seller in the line, more than the flagship titles. Toward the later eighties, it was selling between a half and three quarters of a million copies. So when people say, “Oh, it’s crappy. They should fire Claremont. It’s just terrible. Why do they keep letting him write this stuff.” Everybody was buying it. It wasn’t for its collectibility necessarily because it’s not as if it was being drawn by Frazetta or someone that would be immediately slabbed. Smitty was good, Romita Jr was good. There were already a lot of very good people on there. But it was kind of X-men as usual. But it kept selling and the consistent point was Chris’s writing.

Tom Orzechowski: So people could say it was all down hill after Byrne left but the sales continued to climb.

Bill Field: Jim.

Jim Thompson: I have four questions. My first question would be, for a lot of fanboys, you can open up a book and recognize the artist or the inker almost immediately. I can do it usually by a single panel or so. In terms of letters, I’ve never been that good at it. How would I recognize your lettering versus somebody else’s upon opening a single page of an X-men comic?

Tom Orzechowski: Oh, I don’t know. Tell me it was really about the sound effects I’d have blasting all over the page … since I’ve been on the book through four editors-in-chief and about literally 10 editors and I don’t know how many assistant editors. They just let me do anything I wanted and Chris let me do anything I wanted so I would add sound effects when I felt they were necessary. I’m nothing compared to Ken Bruzenak who letters for Howard Chaykin all the time. He’ll dominate an entire page with interesting sound effects and … I think my strongest point is in my work which doesn’t exactly deflect your question. It’s like copy placements. It’s deciding where the script goes on the pages. Because I approach it like Ella Fitzgerald bebop singing where I interplay with all the elements on the page instead of putting stuff at the tops of the panels and the bottoms of the panels.

Tom Orzechowski: If everything has equal priority on the page, the hair, the dialogue, the captions, the fists, you do a triage. Which thing can we afford to sacrifice so that everything reads in the proper order? Because the characters don’t always speak in the order in which the artist has drawn them. So you have to syncopate throughout the page. I think that’s what I bring to it. Either your jazz sensibility will bring you syncopatical with me or else it’s purely too arcane and doesn’t make any sense at all.

Bill Field: I always liked your tight style … tight and smaller … your dialogue style, because you would give more room to the sound effects and to the power of the page.

Tom Orzechowski: The question that could never be answered was whether Chris wrote so much because I could always make it fit or whether I worked small because there was so much that had to fit.

Jim Thompson: I think you answered my question exactly. The next question I had for you was, in terms of instruments. I know artists have their own favorite instruments. In terms of letterers, are there different ones? And what were yours?

Tom Orzechowski: In present day we’re all working with … you know it’ll be an illustrator on that.

Jim Thompson: Right.

Tom Orzechowski: At that time, most if not all were working with speedball nibs and pen staffs. We honed them down on a knife sharpening stone, I think John Romita showed me how to do that. Some people used regular quill pens. John Costanza had honed his pen down, it was a crow quill pen, to the point where he could do the dialogue … to the regular weight and the bold weight with the same pen.

Bill Field: Whoa.

Tom Orzechowski: He’d just alter the grip slightly. I always had to use two different pens to get a bold weight versus a regular weight. But yeah, a speedball, which are still available in well stocked art supply stores. They were forty cents when I started and now they’re like two and a quarter.

Jim Thompson: What was the difference between working with a full script and working in Marvel method for you as a letterer?

Tom Orzechowski: Again we’re talking about working by hand and there was no difference.

Jim Thompson: If there was one artist that you would have liked to have gotten to letter for that you never had that opportunity, who would it have been?

Tom Orzechowski: I think I worked with everybody. I never lettered Marie Severin, that would’ve been fun.

Jim Thompson: What about Alex Toth?

Tom Orzechowski: Well, he always did his own.

Jim Thompson: Yeah, I know. That’s what I was thinking.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, I would have detracted.

Jim Thompson: In terms of your influences, and you talk about Artie Simek, but both in terms of letterers that preceded you but also other influences, what were the ones that you think are most significant to how you approached it?

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, I had a few key note aha moments. Certainly one stands to give the credits to Simek and Rosen and everyone else on the teams. I’ve started to see oh yeah Simek is more like a draftsman and Rosen is a little wackier. They were both influential in their different ways but seeing Zap Comix, only four or five years into the Marvel Age of things, it’s like holy smoke. You can do anything. So it’s a matter of understanding what anything means. What are the parameters of anything. A bit later I started recognizing Gaspar Saladino’s work on all of Julius Schwartz’s books at DC, Justice League, Atom, Hawkman, Adam Strange, Atomic Knights, these things. Peerless title designer. Once I became aware of his lettering, the covers after 1968, “Wow, this guy is the best there will ever be.” All respect to Todd Klein and John Workman and Mike Heisler and everyone who’s come up since.

Tom Orzechowski: There’s no touching Gaspar. Ira Schnapp was very doctrinarian, very much a draftsman and extremely good. But Gaspar, rest his soul, he was a true crazy man, a true … he was the best ultimate designer that we will ever see in this field. Especially now that everything has gone to digital.

Jim Thompson: So how was it that he was doing page one of the X-men comics?

Tom Orzechowski: He was doing page one of all the Marvel comics after about ’72 for two or three years.

Jim Thompson: Ah.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, Simek had died, Rosen had retired, and then there’s suddenly a dozen new people like me who didn’t know much about anything about doing attractive title display work for a splash page. John Verporten, who was then the production boss, gave Gaspar a call and said, “We need title pages only. You won’t be credited.” I was getting five bucks a page, he was getting for the title designs.

Jim Thompson: That’s fascinating. I did not realize that.

Tom Orzechowski: Yeah, they just wanted to have a consistently attractive look on the splash pages. And I realized after about six months, I could use an extra five bucks an issue. It’s more than nothing. So after about our fourth book or so, fifth book for them, I was doing an issue called Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. John Buscema pencils, Giordano inked it. Oh my gosh, what I am doing in that league. I’m only a few months into the office. I figured I better get good so I won’t detract from the appearance of these guys work as I was saying to your other question. That kind of self-consciousness kicked in.

Tom Orzechowski: I worked on Ditko’s pencils. I worked … Gil Kane, Infantino … there’s my entire adolescence of pencilers. A great deal of it. I never worked on Curt Swan, that would’ve been something.

Alex Grand: I had read somewhere that the Flash Gordon newspaper strip was something that you enjoyed and had some influence on you creatively. Is that a correct thing?

Tom Orzechowski: Oh yeah, the Alex Raymond 30s stuff. When I was about 15, 16 at my first Con an outfit called Nostalgia Press, run by the late Woody Gelman, published first a hardcover and so when I was 15, “Yeah, I should look good as that.” Well, that was not possible but it was something to strive for. And it didn’t look like Marvel Comics, which sent me to the side of the Marvel doctrinary disciplined kind of look which is based on probably Sam Rosen and then John Costanza as we got into 1970. And I never looked anything like that. But no one said I should. There was no Marvel style-sheet which surprises me after all this time.

Alex Grand: That’s cool that Gaspar Saladino did the first page for a lot of the new letterers. It sounds like when people would join Marvel and go off of the Kirby or Buscema layouts … it sounds like it’s a similar concept.

Tom Orzechowski: Oh yeah, very much so. I finally met Gaspar, he did one Convention in his life about … I think it was New York Comic-Con perhaps three years ago now. He was 88. He was kind of infirm by then. He’s died since then. But his son-in-law had him in a wheelchair taking him around and the word got out to Todd Klein who was acquainted with the man and myself and then all the way down the line. So Janice Chiang was there and Iliopolis was there, and a dozen supplicants just kneeling in front of him, weeping. Because it’s Gaspar Saladino. Wow. It’s the grandest. I’m talking Alex Grand but anyway.

Tom Orzechowski: If you look back with informed eyes, you can see he was lettering the top books. He was lettering Superman through the 40s, all the dialogue. Off hand, I can’t recall what all but looking through the archives and essentials and whatever these formats are called these days, the best work was his. The best dialogue styles all through action comics and detectives and the backups and the lead stories, there he is on the daily and Sunday strips in the 40s. There he was.

Bill Field: Gaspar?

Tom Orzechowski: No, Ira.

Jim Thompson: Ira, Ira. That’s what I thought. I wasn’t sure.

Tom Orzechowski: And literally it wasn’t until about 1967 or so and then suddenly this rapid succession, actually kind of gradual, but suddenly they were all Gaspar. Very different approach. Carmine wanted more crackle in there and Ira’s stuff had gotten kind of the same. His 40s and 50s cover writing was incredible.

Bill Field: It’s kind of sad because right after he was put out to pasture … about six months later he dropped dead. A lot of people think it’s because he lost the direction of his life by being force out.

Tom Orzechowski: That happens to people that retire from General Motors too. You’re on the line and then there’s a break in the continuity. There’s no more of the physical activity. Neal told me, because I worked at Continuity for a while. But I rented space there, I didn’t actually work in the Continuity of reality. But Neal likes to spin stories because he met everybody and he let everybody meet him. But he said to Ira, “Ira, you’re an old man. You should take some time off.” And his hands would tremble a bit. But give him a pen staff and a drawing table and he was rock solid because he was focusing on the pen, was focusing on the outcome. And I’m sure that’ll be true of all of us one of these days we’re made a junior, made a senior, and Alex Toth dies at his drawing table. A good death. He finished his last issue and then he died. But he finished the issue.

Bill Field: That’s amazing. And it’s a testament to how great these guys were at what they did and their output and how classic it is to this day. We’re talking about Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci because we’re such fanboys ourselves but these were the works that really changed our lives in many ways I think if I can speak for the rest of you all. This brings to what’s arguably the funnest portion of our podcast and that would be the weekly rant. And we’re going to start with our guest star, Tom. Tom, do you have anything to rant about, good or bad, about comics and the years you’ve been in the industry?

Tom Orzechowski: Honestly, comics are just so wonderful because they are adjunct our lives, they allow us to shake off our inhibitions. There’s an Indie comics … well I think every principal city and every secondary city has an independent comics con at least once a year. There’s one here in town called GenghisCon. It’s run by a fellow who does posters for bands, for clubs, for a local sandwich shop which has five locations. And they create a new sandwich every month as a special … he has a special poster for that. I send him t-shirts for local cinemas. Wonderful guy. And GenghisCon gets vendors from New York state, someone was just here from southern California. And the energy in that room is just fantastic. No one’s drawing costume heroes. People are just doing … they’re whimsy … they’re doing the adventures that they think are valuable. They’re doing personal stories about surviving cancer and what have you.

Tom Orzechowski: And comics unfortunately in the last 50 years has been costumes for the most part. Go to a comic shop and an awful lot of them have no costumes. Either Harley Quinn wears a costume but not really. It’s difficult to say … There’s talk of Marvel cutting back from publishing monthly books in favor of just trade paperbacks. But people like to produce comics and that’s the most amazing thing to me. As the prices get out of control and no one can really make a living if they’re doing Indies, they want to do them anyway. It’s just so wonderful to see people have not given up that desire to do comics even though they know they don’t have a snowballs chance of getting to DC or Marvel. Because they don’t want to do DC or Marvel. They just want to do fun stories and have a good time and work with other people and meet other people. And truly that’s why I came in doing scenes when I was 15 and 16. We didn’t know we were going to be working on Ironman’s for four and five years. We just wanted to do adventure type stories.

Bill Field: That brings us to your rant Jim. What do you have to rant about this week?

Jim Thompson: Mine is not going to be yay comics at the moment because I am pissed off to be honest. Mine is about Comic-Con. This would have been my … San Diego. But I can just say Comic-Con because no one else is allowed to use the word Comic-Con except San Diego because of the recent court decision. But Comic-Con pissed me off. I have been going for I believe 24 years in a row. I’m gonna go this year but I’m not going to go with my regular badge as fan because I could not get a ticket this year. The notion that it’s become such an ordeal that I couldn’t actually get a regular badge this year is to me the opposite of what fandom is supposed to be. And I’m mad about it.

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Jim Thompson: And I’m mad about the judicial decision that said that no one else can actually be a Comic-Con. I think we go to Comic-Cons all the time … it reminds me of Disney trying to control words as well. It’s part of the same problem. So that’s my rant and I am pissed off.

Bill Field: And that brings us to Alex. Alex, you seem a little bemused by the entire thing. But how do you feel this week and what’s your rant?

Alex Grand: Well, we all read a lot of different comics … but I’ve been appreciating Chester Gould in circa 1935 for Dick Tracy comic strips. I love the earlier stuff too but as I’m getting into his 1935-1936 phase I’m loving the way the art is looking. There’s almost a Dick Sprang quality to it 10-15 years before Dick Sprang was doing Batman. And there’s that fun, slick, cartoony visual style to the strips that I’ve been getting through this past weekend. It’s true he’s not an Alex Raymond artist on a Sunday. But I will say I love the stories I love how he pays tribute … I don’t know if it’s paying tribute or just illustrating how infamous some famous criminals are like the Maw Barker Group, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde. I just love that he inserts those characters into the 30s strips. I love the quality of art that feels like Dick Sprang before there was a Dick Sprang. I wanted to highlight that and if anyone out there hasn’t had a chance to look at it I highly suggest it. It’s really fabulous.

Bill Field: And nobody did a midget and a plus sized gal justice like he did. Let’s just spell short backwards, that’s his name. Jerome Trohs, that’s his name. So that brings me to my rant and yes I have another yay comics rant myself. But mine is a love letter per se to all of our fans and yes we have a few out there. And I’d like to thank you guys for listening to us and I’d like to thank you for making it possible for us to get to the point where we could have a major guest like Tom with us today.

Bill Field: The wonderful thing about podcasts is, it adds to the entire love of comics for me. I know it does for Alex and Jim. I’ve done more in comics and video game production but I have to say I have enjoyed working with you guys so much on these podcasts. It gives a new dimension to our love of comics I think. And it gives us a way to tell people what that is if they don’t get to Cons, if they don’t … they might be shut-ins, they might be people that have kids and can’t get out as much as they’d like to. But I’d like to say, “Hooray for podcasts.”

Bill Field: We do have a following and I’d want to thank you guys that are listening to us today. Most of all, today, I’d like to thank Tom Orzechowski. Tom, it’s been a supreme honor for me. It’s been so much fun. And we’ve been friends for at least five years on Facebook but to get to talk to you face-to-face as it were, because we can see each other, it’s been great. And I’ll let Alex and Jim have an outro moment with you themselves because I know they probably feel similar to how I feel. Alex.

Alex Grand: Well, I grew up reading those X-men comics that you are a part of. So it’s a huge treat for me and also I love the comments and your historical insights in the Comic Book Historian Facebook Group. And you’ve always been really … just a real gem as far as your knowledge in the industry of the arts … of just comic book history in general. It’s been a real treat for me personally.

Bill Field: This brings us to the man who always tries to get a word up on me and that would be you, Jim Thompson. What do you have to say?

Jim Thompson: Well Bill, I just want to say that your rant was very nice … your birthday yesterday, not getting a badge, so I’m mad. But Tom, that aside, it has been really, really great having you. I always appreciate the breadth of your knowledge because you do add things and you add insight to it and it’s great fun to have you as a member on Comic Book Historians. It makes our job more rewarding to have people like you knowing that you’re actually … we’re doing something right where you’re actually following and participating with us. I can’t say what a joy that is when someone like you says, “Oh that’s a nice horse.” Or responds to something. It’s great. And we appreciate it and this has been really fun and thank you.

Tom Orzechowski: It’s interesting being part of a community of people that care this passionately about this kind of silly stuff.

Bill Field: Well said my friend. Well said. And that brings us to the end of our Comic Pro Interview episode of the Comic Book Historians podcast. Until Comic-Con tries to sue us for using the word podcast, we’re going to be here every two weeks or every week, whatever it might be. We want to thank you guys again and thank you Tom and we will see you next time, right here, on the Comic Book Historians podcast. I’m your host Bill Field. Goodnight and aloha ladies and gentlemen. And have a great week.

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