Bob Hall, Comic Artist, Writer & Actor Interview Part 1 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview Bob Hall, from his early days as a comic reader, his University education in Theatre, his turned in first work for Charlton Comics, studying at the John Buscema Comic Art School, getting into Marvel under editor Archie Goodwin, then under new editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, the Yellowjacket Wasp story, Squadron Supreme with Mark Gruenwald, co-creating West Coast Avengers, Emperor Doom, Valiant Comics, Future Comics, his Joker graphic series for DC, and his modern theatre work.  Edited & Produced by Alex Grand.  

#Avengers #SquadronSupreme #Valiant #Marvel

© 2021 Comic Book Historians

Transcript

Alex Grand:
Welcome back to the Comic Book Historians Podcast with Alex Grand and Jim Thompson. Today, we have a very special guest Mr. Bob Hall, who has an interesting and very fun career in penciling, inking, editing and writing comic books. Bob Hall, thank you so much for joining us today,

Bob Hall:
Glad to be here.

Alex Grand:
All right. So we’re going to hopscotch through your life. This is your life Bob Hall.

Bob Hall:
Oh, good.

Alex Grand:
We’re going to start in your early years. Go ahead and take it away.

Jim Thompson:
You were born in fall 1944 in Lincoln, Nebraska, which is definitely your place amongst all your travels, correct?

Bob Hall:
Yes.

Jim Thompson:
And I always like to ask a little bit about family. I know you, you come from a blue collar background. Tell me about your mom and your dad.

Bob Hall:
Well, my mom and my dad were supers of an apartment building where we lived until I was about six and a half years old. Then we moved right across the street from it. So my dad could continue that work. And my mother worked with him, although she didn’t get paid, of course. This was the late 40s, early 50s. And she was just supposed to help him. And, but he had that job. He got it though the depression. They were both older, which I never figured out until, oh, about 1997. I found out that I was adopted, and so I have no idea who my birth parents were, but these guys were my mom and dad. They were great people.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s interesting. At age four, and this is a common trope with a lot of comic book creators and such, but at age four, you had [inaudible 00:02:01] to put you in the hospital. In your case, it was intestinal measles. Is that right?

Bob Hall:
That’s right. They didn’t know what was wrong with me. So they put me in a private room because they didn’t know what was wrong with me, which was good. And they tried to pacify me because I didn’t feel that terrible. After the first day I was apparently vomiting blood. That was my folks was of course, very worried. And they stuck me in this private room and to pacify me, they kept bringing me comic books and I couldn’t read yet, but I ended up accumulating a huge stack of them. And then they were actually going to do an exploratory on me. And they were about to wheel me out. And the nurse noticed me itching behind my, scratching behind my right ear. And she looked and some of the measles head appeared and she said, “Oh my God, you’ve got measles.” We have to call the doctor and he confirmed it and said, we’d have to get you out of here out of the children’s ward right now. Measles being one of the most contagious diseases going. And you have to take all those comic books with you. And so I ended up with this stack of. Oh, if I had those today, but be that as it may.

Jim Thompson:
And that would have been your introduction to Donald duck and Uncle Scrooge, which became one of your favorites?

Bob Hall:
It probably wasn’t my introduction to Carl Barks. I think my folks had bought me some of those with the Dell Comics seemed to be wholesome, so they bought those. And it was my introduction to unwholesome comics. And I don’t remember exactly what they were. I presume there was some curvy in there and that would have been the, I don’t know if EC was in operation by that point. I’m not a good enough comic historian, but some of the second chair superheroes, and of course some Superman, Batman, and that kind of stuff, some DC comics as well. So it was my introduction to the more adult kind of comic book.

Jim Thompson:
[crosstalk 00:04:06] When I was doing the timeline. It looked to me like you you dropped out of comics in your early teens at the latest, which is around the time that EC would have been right in there. So, I think you might’ve missed that.

Bob Hall:
I missed… I don’t think I quite missed EC because I think I got the beginnings of EC. I remember for some reason, Atlas Comics horrors, more than I remember reading a bunch of the EC, but I had no idea of the EC ethos at that time, you know. I was just a kid and Atlas, probably read whatever was available to me on the spin rec.

Alex Grand:
I learned about tainted meat from DC comics. So…

Bob Hall:
I can believe that. Yes.

Jim Thompson:
So I read a story, an interview where you mentioned something about a Sunday school teacher. I think her name was Evelyn.

Bob Hall:
You got a good memory. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
Tell me about that.

Bob Hall:
Oh, well, I was sent to church and my folks were not churchgoers, but they felt… I think they felt a great deal of responsibility as adoptive parents when I looked back, that I should have a normal childhood in spite of the fact that they were both over 40. And so I was sent to church. Well, the church was right across the street from where we lived, so that was convenient and it felt safe. They could just send me across the street and it was called the City Wide Gospel Tabernacle. And it was… I guess they themselves evangelists, although it wasn’t evangelist in the current sense of it. It was evangelist in the Billy Graham sort of evangelism, which is a more progressive sort. I guessed. It certainly seemed kind of benign.

Bob Hall:
Although I was never managed to get sick as a kid. And I kept going all the time. I remember my first taste of cognitive dissonance was when, of course I found out immediately that everybody was going to hell unless they accepted Jesus. And I began to pray incessantly for all my friends and relatives and my folks and my dad one day caught me praying. And he said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Praying.” And he said, “Oh, well, that’s that’s that’s okay. What are you praying for?” I said, “Well, everybody’s going to hell and you’re going to hell, I don’t know if you’re a saved.” And he took a deep breath and he said, “Look, you have to go to church because your mom wants you to go, but don’t take it too much to heart.” And that was total like, holy moly. Then what is it that one’s life mean then?

Bob Hall:
And I kept trying to sort that out for a long time and some somewhere when I was about 10 or so, I think I began to realize that I was basically an agnostic, but I still had to keep going to church and I’m not getting to Evelyn, but church was great because in some ways, because we had to memorize all these Bible verses from the King James Bible. And I found that by the time I was in high school, I understood Shakespeare because it’s the same lingo. And so that’s been my other career as a Shakespearian director. So that’s a whole nother story.

Bob Hall:
Evelyn, I was in love with, but she was an early crush of mine. She was these, the Sunday school teacher. And then the minister’s maiden daughter who never married and stayed, she was a church lady. And she did what was in essence comics on a flannel board. She had these characters and she would tell these stories and put these figures up on the flannel board and make them walk across and do all this stuff. She was a great storyteller. And that part of it was I think, influential in, she was doing comic books. She just didn’t know she was doing comic books, so.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s great. I like that story when I read it. And I wanted to ask you about that. So the combination of all the Bible verses and some of this other pointed you in the interest in Shakespeare, I assume at an early age, pointed you toward University of Nebraska Lincoln and studying theater?

Bob Hall:
I loved comic books when I was a kid, absolutely adored them and had a ton of them. Which again, wish I had now, but nevermind. My folks got rid of most of them when I ended up going to college, and they just sort of disappeared and that was okay. That was what seem to what was supposed to happen. They tore up… My mother tore up a lot during the Frederick Wortham, Dr. Wortham days. Anything that had like Wonder Woman or a scantily clad woman on the cover. So there went the EC, then went Wonder Woman. And so, I had stopped reading comic books mostly by the time I was 12. I guess I was just gotten in on the DC relaunch of their second-tier heroes. I remember the first I had the first Flash Issue and those that’s the one I remembered. The first few Flashes.

Bob Hall:
And at some point in there… But the idea of course, what that time was that you were expected by the comic companies that get kids would stop reading them at a certain point. In fact, DC recycled so many of their stories and would have them redrawn because you assume that that nobody was going to read them twice. You know, there, it was a limited timeframe. And I did, I became much more interested in theaters, and theater and horror movies, Hammer films had a great influence on the Hammer films and Shakespeare. And so when I got to high school, they would do these speech contests. And I did one of them in my… Did Shakespeare. And my teacher thought I was pretty good. Actually, I was kind of disappointed. I didn’t get the highest grade.

Bob Hall:
And she said, maybe you just listen to it yourself. So I listen to a tape recorder and found that I had sounded like this. I had a Sylvester, pussycat lisp, which kids will have, and they don’t know they have it. You don’t don’t hear it the same way on the inside. So I had to lose that, but then I became… I’d never been… I’d always been a shy kid and I could never quite find my place in the universe, which was usually in my basement reading comic books. And this was the first time I had found something that was a social activity that got me out of the house and got me working with other kids. And I really kind of was being pretty successful as an in college as and high school wasn’t as an actor and later as a director. And because I can draw, I also did a lot of scenery design, so it was a whole new world for me.

Jim Thompson:
And your bachelor’s in 1967 and then went on and got your masters in 1969, both at University of Nebraska Lincoln. Is that right?

Bob Hall:
Right.

Jim Thompson:
Now, I saw some reference to University of Iowa. Was that a mistake, or did you do something?

Bob Hall:
I went to the University of Iowa for one year, and had some good experiences? The best experience was that I became friends with, close friends with Nicholas Meyer, who-

Jim Thompson:
Oh.

Bob Hall:
The director now he’s the director, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and all the Star Trek films, and still been in touch keeping I’ve kept in touch with him all this time. And he was going to the University of Iowa as well. That was the best thing about the University of Iowa. But, and I was, I don’t know, my career would have taken a whole different tack, but it was the Vietnam era. They draft had not ended. And I was classified as 1A, which meant that you were going to go. And that was at the end of my first year at the University of Iowa. And so they were starting a summer theater at the University of Nebraska, and they asked me to come back and direct.

Bob Hall:
And I did that gladly because I kind of wanted it to be at home. I wanted to figure out what I was going to do. And I was also scared shitless because I had terrible foot problems. I still do. My feet were, I had high arches, extremely high arches. And I didn’t realize that when you went through a physical, the only thing that automatically kept you out was flat feet and a guy at the University of Nebraska. So I’m back at the University of Nebraska. And this guy named Jim, who was interesting fellow. He was studying, acting at the University of Nebraska on the off season and playing for the Buffalo Bills in the on season. And it started as a football player at the University of Nebraska. He realized he was never going to be a great football player, but he was huge and he was offered a contract with the Buffalo Bills. We decided to go.

Bob Hall:
So he carried some weight in more ways than one. And he said, well, what are you doing back here? What’s going to happen? What are you, what are you up to? And I said, “Well, I think I’m going to get drafted. I don’t know.” He said “They can’t draft you. I’ve worked with you for several years now you have terrible feet.” And I said, “Well, yeah, but they classify me 1A.” And he said, wrote down the name of a doctor. He said, “Go to this doctor.” And so I went to the doctor and a orthopedics guy, and he looked at my feet and he wrote this letter to the draft board. It was one of the snottiest letters I’ve ever heard, said, “You could draft Mr. Hall, but have to have three different pairs of orthopedic shoes. One for a normal wear, one for standing of attention and one for combat. And he would have to change them constantly. So do what you want.”

Bob Hall:
And I was afraid to give this to the draft board. And I handed it to the draft board guy, had made an appointment. You can request another physical. I handed it to the officer who was in charge and he looked at it and he said, “Okay.” And that was, of course, there in my underwear with no shoes on. He said, “Put one foot up on my desk.” And I put the foot up and he looked at it and he said, “Leave up there and put the other foot up.” And I paused a moment. And then he started to laugh and said, “Nah, you’re out.” And of course I realized then that all these guys knew each other, this guy was friends with the orthopedics guy.

Bob Hall:
And so I was not drafted, but by not till it was too late to go back to the University of Iowa. And I was kind of disgusted. I just wanted to get to New York at that point and pursue a career in directing. So I opted for getting a master’s degree at the University of Nebraska, which I could finish in one year and just get on with life.

Jim Thompson:
That explains a lot. Because I was trying to figure out the Iowa thing. And that helps a lot just to go back to Nicholas Meyer just for a minute. I just want to say I was, I read Seven-Per-Cent Solution before he ever started in film and it was a real favorite of mine. And also he did Time After Time. Alex, have you ever seen that?

Bob Hall:
Sure.

Alex Grand:
I have not. I have not seen that.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s a great film. Great. H.G. Wells time-travel. Jack The Ripper.

Alex Grand:
I haven’t seen it.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, Malcolm Miguel. It’s it plays wells. It’s fantastic.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. He’s got a number of new Holmes, books. Every time he’s not engaged in movie work, he writes a new Holmes, novel and Sherlock Holmes and the Peculiar Protocols is the latest one and I highly recommend it.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, I will look for that. Because I haven’t read those since of the first one.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. So yeah. Oh yes, he has several. So look them up. They’re all great fun. Nick had one of the most peculiar careers. When I talk about careers, I think he would probably deny this, but I think Nicholas was just sort of raised by parents who made him feel that he was successful. He was already a successful human being when I met him and I was saying, what do I have to do to be a success? Nick was wondering what he had to do to pursue a career because he was a very confident person seemingly. Now, maybe I don’t know what he was on the inside, but he outlined that what he intended to try to do was write a best-selling book. And then he would be hired to write the screenplay. He would insist on writing the screenplay and that would be his entree into movies. And he did it. He did exactly what he said.

Jim Thompson:
That’s amazing. Because that never works.

Bob Hall:
Just astonishing. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
All right. So you, when you’re back at school, you’re trying to finance a move to New York through, one thing that you’re doing to save money is you’re doing a lot of posters for the theater department and for the Nebraska Union. Is that right?

Bob Hall:
I did that. And well, actually that was what put me through undergrad. As a grad student, you got an assistantship and I was building props. I was very good at building stage props. And so I did that. And then they hired me again to direct in their summer program. And then for two years I ran a children’s theater in Omaha that they were looking for a director. And so that was a job job. And I can actually save some money. Which at that time, if you were moving to New York, you thought, oh, if I can just have a thousand dollars in the bank, I’ll be okay. Which is, of course insane now. You could no more move to New York for a thousand bucks than God only knows, but you could in the early, this would have been 1971 when I finally finally made the move.

Jim Thompson:
Now, did you have anything lined up? I know you became resident director, this CSC Repertory, and you had other things with the George Street Playhouse and various jobs there, but were any of those already on your radar when you left?

Bob Hall:
No.

Jim Thompson:
No?

Bob Hall:
Nah. I had nothing. I had nothing. All I had was friends in New York that we could stay with until we could get an apartment. I had a wife, my first wife who was willing to get a job. She was dying to live in New York, thank God. And she was much more employable than I was because she’s smarter than I am. And I had been trying to figure it out. I would… I visited New York and realized that if you wanted to be a theater director or an artist or anything in the arts in New York, that unless you were wealthy or had a job lined up, or had a ton of highly successful contacts, you needed some kind of marketable skill. And a friend of mine who was a comic book fan, and I had started reading comic books again a little bit. I was very fond of the Warran comics. And I picked one up in the magazine section and flips through. And the art was so wonderful that I would occasionally buy Warrens, but-

Jim Thompson:
Those early, those were in the early years, like when Archie Goodwin was the editor and people like Alex Totes and Steve Ditko were doing it, or was it later?

Bob Hall:
It was just a little bit later. Just a little bit later. I think Archie was still working for them, but it was the time when, well, occasionally Neil would be doing something, but I’ve got, now I’m blank on the names of the people that I really loved. Ernie Cologne was doing work for them. And I remember liking Ernie’s work because it was different. And so it would have been about that era. Would have been 1969, 70 right in there. And my next thing was, my friend, actor friend of mine, Bill Szymanski loved comic books. And he said, “Well, why don’t… You’ve always drawn. You can draw. Why don’t you consider doing comic books?” And I remembered some of those comic books I got, that I still had from the, when I was sick. I think I still probably had those until I was 11 or 12 years old and tons of other comics that I had that I bought.

Bob Hall:
There was a Salvation Army store near where I grew up, where you could buy comics for two cents a piece and you could come home with shopping bags full of them. And I shudder to think what those comics would be worth because they were a lot of the comics that they had were very pristine looking ones from the 1940s. And I remember there were wonderful artists, but there were also some pretty lousy artists, especially in the 1940s and early 50s ones. And I thought, well, I can be lousy. I mean, I thought I could kind of at least fit in. And so he gave me some stuff to look at. Well, what he gave me was Berry Smith’s was doing Conan. That was also the first ones he gave me. So my introduction was Berry Smith. And then I started going to the newsstand and Jack had just left Marvel or was about to leave Marvel, I’m not sure, but he was in his prime.

Bob Hall:
Bernie Wrightson was doing work for DC, and also for Warren. Joe Kubert was doing some of his stuff. But I think he, I think he had just started doing Tarzan. I know-

Jim Thompson:
Yeah that would have been about right.

Bob Hall:
I know Neil was doing Batman and Green Lantern and also The Avengers, had just started as one of The Avengers, somewhere in there had just started his run and he started his run on The Avengers. But in other words, Bill showed me the best people. And I said, I can’t do this. I’m not good enough to do this, but I really wanted to, because I thought this incorporates everything that I’ve done all my life, the storytelling, the art, and because you had both Roy and Stan quoting Shakespeare all the time, and that didn’t hurt either. So it felt like something that I could do. So I was crazy enough to think, okay, well that will be my marketable skill. I’ll break into the comic book industry. And actually I did.

Jim Thompson:
Now, is that what led you to go to the, to go to the School of Comic Art of John Bueschema?

Bob Hall:
John? No, it… Eventually, but I got to the point where I was submitting portfolios, and getting rejected and had just learning on my own, copying a lot of work and I can actually produce something that wasn’t bad if it was like a single illustration and I spent a week on it, but I got, you know, I got good enough that Charleston hired me to do some of their horror comics. And don’t ask me which ones, because they all had, where something like Dr. Creeper’s House of Slimy Things, you know, they really strange titles that Charlton have. And I really don’t remember what was it that I did.

Jim Thompson:
I can tell you that the two that I saw that you drew, not covers, but actual inside was the werewolf’s ghost that was in Baron Werewolf’s Haunted Library. So that was, and that was with Nicola Cuddy. And you did one called He Worshiped Beauty and then he goes to Dr. Graves. And that was written by Joe Gill.

Bob Hall:
That was the first one that I did was the He Worshiped Beauty. And I may have done one more or I may just have done a few covers for them because shortly after I got the job and remember I was doing theater all the time. I really was breaking into the theater business.

Jim Thompson:
Passionate Dracula, you were working on that. That started in 70, was it 76 that it started running on off Broadway?

Bob Hall:
I think it was 70… Either 76 or 77. I don’t, yeah, it might’ve been 76. It was, what year did I become an editor?

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that was 78.

Bob Hall:
It may have been 77 because they’re connected. So I wasn’t working, but no, I wasn’t not working on that yet. At about the time that I got accepted by Charlton, shortly thereafter, John put an ad in the back of Marvel Comics that he was going to start teaching this class. And you had to bring him a portfolio and you had to be living in the New York area and you had to bring in a portfolio.

Jim Thompson:
So, then that class was in 1976 then? Probably around the time when you did the Charlton cover.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. So that was 75, I think was the class.

Alex Grand:
Okay. So then probably when you made those, when you-

Jim Thompson:
76 is when the Charleton books are coming, but you may have done them in 75.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I think John’s was 75, 76 the class. It started, it was really a full, he admitted that he had actually given it to many weeks eventually, but he had, he met except for holidays. You met every week for the year, for the school year. Like a school year. And so it started in the fall and went through the spring. And I got in the class, I got accepted. And it turned out that I was the most experienced person in the class. It was the beginning of fandom. Well, not the beginning, but beginning of the point where fans were trying to break, seriously breaking into the markets, that just about everybody, if you think about it after that point, who broke into the market, instead of being people who wanted to be doing newspaper strips back in the 40s and, or wanting to get into commercial art in the 40s and 50s, and now they may have changed in this. I didn’t know my career is in comics, but their initial impulse was usually not comic books.

Bob Hall:
And that all changed in the early 70s. By that time, there were fans that were devoted fans that wanted to be comic book artists, and they were fans of John’s. And almost everybody who broke in was a fan. Some very talented people, but they had not had anywhere near the amount of art experience that I’d had. And so after the class was over, John wanted, I think somebody from that class, and I’m not saying that I was all that good, but I was the one in the class that had had some background. And John wanted somebody in that class to get a job at Marvel, I think, or maybe I’m being too humble. Maybe he really said, you’re ready to go to Marvel. But I kind of think maybe a little of both, but he, he got me the job at Marvel. And without that, I don’t know if I ever would have… I suppose eventually I would have, but helped me on the way.

Jim Thompson:
That’s, that’s great. Now. So at the same time that you’d taken that class, that’s when you’re writing with David Richmond, the, the Dracula play, which does start in September of 1977. So that’s that’s right, timeline-wise.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. The George Street Playhouse was a regional theater that started in, and it was a commute from New York. It started in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Eric Krebs who ran it, wanted to have a Dracula. And I looked at the Dracula scripts and said, “There aren’t any good scripts.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you write one?” And I had written, I think, yeah, I adapted to children’s play. But that was the extent of my writing. And so I felt, okay, well, I’ll give it a shot and worked on it for a while, but it wasn’t ready to go by the time we needed to do it. So we picked one of these other ones and I kind of cut it and rewrote it. I can’t remember what it was called. It was the, not the… Dean is the original Dracula. And it’s what the Donald Lugosi movie is based on.

Bob Hall:
And that was the standard script. And it creaked a lot. It was pretty creaky. I thought, well, everybody, you know, it was all based on, nobody knows what a vampire is. And you’re dealing with the time when everybody knew some of the things about what Dracula supposedly was. And so you, I think I required a different script. And the one that we did was campy. I took some of the camp out of it, and it was okay. Was well directed and well acted, but we had… The theater wasn’t burning rich, and we had to fly a bat. In a proscenium theater, that’s pretty easy, but this was a three quarter round theater. And we kept trying to find a way to do it. And David Richmond was a wonderfully wonderful guy, very bright and a career alcoholic, who, my stage manager, he played the Butler in this version of Dracula.

Bob Hall:
And my stage manager, a woman named Lois said, “You want to cast this guy, actor, David Richmond.” And he came and auditioned. And I said, “Well, he’s, but I think some other actors.” She said, “No, you want to cast him.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “He’s been sleeping on my couch for two weeks. And if you cast him, he’ll have enough money that I can throw him out.” And I said, “Okay.” So I cast him. And so we were trying to figure out a way to do this bat. And we had things, we had no money. So we had one of these plastic windup things, that flap their wings. And we tried running that across. Painting at black and running that across a line. And it, it, all it did was go around the wire in a circle, and then finally broke the wire and is flapping at my feet.

Bob Hall:
And every time we’d try something new, this guy, David Richmond would come up and say, “I think I know how to do a bat.” And I would usually say, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you later sometime.” And finally, when it was, this thing was flapping at my feet, I said, “Okay, you’re telling me how you want to do a bat.” And it turned out that David had toured with a magician called Dr. Silkini, who did what they called spook shows. And if you don’t anything about spook shows, you guys ought to read up on spook shows. Because they’re… Somehow they relate to comics a little bit. They’d get… These itinerant magicians would travel around the country, rent for walling, a movie theater for usually a midnight show.

Bob Hall:
And they would do a magic. They’d show Pirates and Prince of Dracula and Frankenstein, and then do a magic show, which basically amounted to turning out the lights and making spooks fly around. And you got to collect your date. And David had toured with this guy. And so he knew, what it evolved into was we built an origami that out of screen wire painted it with luminous paint. Did, if you have the timing just right, you could actually make it look like Dracula disappeared. And all of a sudden there was a luminous bat flying around and buzzing the audience, which was really a kid with a spook pole, shaking it in your face, but you’d been blinded by flash pots. And all you could see was the bat. And it was so good that Clyde Barnes from the New York Times, Eric got him out to see the theater. And he said, he said, “Well, it’s… The play isn’t that good. But, just the most sensational.”

Bob Hall:
The play isn’t that good, but this is the most sensational, special effect I’ve ever seen, and on the basis of that, Eric said, “I’ll produce the show if you and David write it.” And so, we wrote it. And it turned out to be a hit, and it was helpful that we had no idea that this Balderston Deane version had been optioned and was going to be done on Broadway with Frank Langella. And that was [inaudible 00:35:32].

Jim Thompson:
[inaudible 00:35:32] time-wise that that was right around the same time. Interesting.

Bob Hall:
It was… We had thought we were safe because that particular version had been optioned to be made into a musical, and it kept getting announced in variety with different people. It would be announced that Ricardo Montalban was going to play the lead, and then six months later, it would be announced again and Haley Mills was going to play the ingenue, but Ricardo Montalban was nowhere in the list. Usually what that meant was that was out of gas. They weren’t able to really commit to these people, and they were scrambling trying to raise money. If you’d been around the theater a little bit, you knew that that meant this is never going to happen. And so, they let the option expire.

Bob Hall:
We didn’t know that these people were waiting with production for that option to expire and they were going to bring it into Broadway with the Edward Gorey sets and the whole thing. We said, “We got to get ours on first. This is our only hope. Otherwise, we’re going to look like we’re just imitation.” So, we did. We had a remarkable cast, and the play got reviews as good or better. Everybody reviewed the sets for the uptown one and Langella’s performance, but we got reviews as the reviewers liked to play and they liked our cast. And we ran for two solid years with it, which is pretty darn good for off-Broadway

Jim Thompson:
And you’re lead, Chris [Burnell 00:02:09], he came from Dark Shadows?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. He’d been in Dark Shadows. And he was known for soap operas. Yeah. That soap opera. I think some other ones. He had a certain following. He wasn’t a huge star, but he helped us… His presence helped raise some money. Lovely man. Really was a fine Dracula. Poor guy died of AIDS in the AIDS epidemic. Right? Died way too young. The other thing about that, to get back to comics, that happened was that Marv Wolfman and Jean both came to the play, and there is a issue of Dracula where Dracula comes to see our play.

Alex Grand:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Jim Thompson:
Wow. That’s amazing.

Bob Hall:
I can’t think what the.. I’m no good with those numbers. I’ll send you a scan of it actually, of the cover [crosstalk 00:38:14].

Jim Thompson:
Yes, please.

Alex Grand:
Would love to that. That’s so cool.

Bob Hall:
But the cover is the real Dracula throttling our stage Dracula.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. I remember reading that because I read that run not too long ago. That’s crazy that that was yours. So, yeah, in the later part of the run. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
That’s really cool.

Bob Hall:
I was insane at the time not to ask Jean for the pages. I think he would probably have given them to me, and I don’t know where they are now and I probably couldn’t afford to buy them if I did know. But I would love to have them.

Jim Thompson:
Now, my only last question on the Dracula production is, is Showtime actually filmed it as part of their Broadway on Showtime thing that they were doing at the time. Do you know if that’s available in any format that we could watch it?

Bob Hall:
Well, I have it. If I can find it. I have it on disc. It’s really awful. It’s just terrible.

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Alex Grand:
I’m sure that adds to the charm, though.

Bob Hall:
They had no idea. First of all, it was of the theater. It was a theater piece, and they were originally going to do it as a theater piece. They were going to get an audience in and do it live. And that’s the standard now. If you’re doing these things like live from the National Theater in London and the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, they all have series where they stream things, and you watch it live. And they do all the camera work. They do it extremely well. But this was the first time anybody had suggested doing that, and live television was a lost art. It was no longer being done much at all.

Bob Hall:
And so, they chickened out, and they did it soap. And so, doing something soap means that you’re using a two camera setup, and it felt like a soap opera, meaning that the pace is slow. And we had a couple wonderful actors playing Van Helsing, and they wanted more of a name and they got somebody that I think he… I don’t remember what he had been on. I’ve blocked his name because he was, again, he was just not right. Then the special effect had no meaning in the [inaudible 00:41:02] on a soap type production, which means that it felt like a TV show minus or a movie less. The special effects had no meaning whatsoever because you can do them… They were magic tricks. They were amazing because they were happening right in front of your eyes, and the minute you have the chance to cut away or do them as media, it had to be done a different way and they never could figure out why. So, it’s awful, but I’ll try to get you a copy.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, please. I would love to see that just for the fun of it.

Bob Hall:
Sure.

Jim Thompson:
I only have a couple of cleanup questions in terms of the Charlton stuff and the early stuff, and then Alex is going to take you through Marvel.

Bob Hall:
By the way, as you can hear, I’m perfectly capable of holding forth, and since this was going to be edited, I’m just blabbering. So, if that’s okay, I’ll just keep doing it.

Alex Grand:
No. Yeah. Sure.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, no. I mean, obviously, we’re digging into a lot of stuff, so we want to do a thorough job. And the GCD, they credit you with a Marvel cover, Our Love Story Number 36. before you do any of the other stuff, did you have any recollection of doing that?

Bob Hall:
No. None.

Alex Grand:
But that’s probably an error. That’s what we were thinking because that’s actually dated earlier than all the other stuff, so it didn’t makes sense.

Bob Hall:
That makes no sense to me at all. No.

Alex Grand:
Okay. So, that’s wrong.

Bob Hall:
Wrong!

Jim Thompson:
That’s good to know. And then-

Alex Grand:
And then, also, in… Oh, maybe Jim’s going to say this, but in Wikipedia, it says that you’re doing the Charlton stuff in ’74, but all this stuff is in ’76. So, that’s another, I think, thing that’s just out there that’s wrong, also.

Bob Hall:
I could have done something that was put in the drawer in ’74. That’s entirely possible. In fact, I think that’s accurate. I think that first one was done in ’74 because I did it and remember trying to get it done because we were going to London. It was the days of the Freddie Laker plane flights, where you could go to London for 100 bucks. Well, we were going, and I think I got that done just a little bit before. And that was in ’74. So, I suspect it just stayed in the drawer, because the nature of those horror stories, they hung around for awhile. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
That makes sense. And then the other cover I wanted to ask you about was it was in a Fightin’ Marines Charlton 132 in 1976, And they have you drawing that and Dan Adkins inking it. And it has Hitler on it.

Bob Hall:
It’s conceivable that I’ve forgotten something, but I don’t think so.

Jim Thompson:
Okay. All right.

Bob Hall:
I don’t think that’s mine either. I’m sure I would remember Dan Adkins inking me. I’ve always wanted Dan Adkins to incoming, but I don’t think it ever happened.

Jim Thompson:
All right. Those are the ones that stood out as I don’t know about that, so that’s good to know. Alex, Marvel.

Alex Grand:
So, then, you were saying that John Buscema had recommended you to Marvel through his class. He saw that he liked your style, that it stood out. Was that to Archie Goodwin then?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. That was Archie. By the way, he pronounced it Buscema.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Buscema. And you’re right. It is Buscema, and I always do that for some reason. I took an Italian class in college. I took an Italian class in college, and I’m cursed with saying his last name wrong.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. He knew it was not the Italian way. He said it had evolved from the time they entered an Americanization.

Alex Grand:
Right. Of course. Yes. I know about that. Anglo-cessation is evolution. Am I right?

Bob Hall:
Yes. Or something.

Alex Grand:
Something like that. Now, this is interesting. So, then, Archie then, did he assign you to a book then? Because it looks like that was The Champions probably. Right?

Bob Hall:
That’s right.

Alex Grand:
And he assigned you to that. And then it looked like Bill Matlow was the writer. So, he was the first writer you worked with at Marvel?

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Okay. And then, it looks like that was Champions eight through 10, dated 1976. Then you also did issue 16. How was working with Bill Matlow? Was that Marvel style? Was there a plotting session first before a script?

Bob Hall:
No. I don’t think I ever engaged in a plotting session at Marvel, ever. Except that maybe when I finally did Emperor Doom with McEleney, I think that would be the only one. Everything else was… People don’t think of Marvel as much of a writer orientation because of the Marvel method, but pretty much at that time, the writer would get an approval from the editor in chief and then they would assign an artist, unless you were on the series. But usually, while you were finishing the last one, the writer was writing the next one.

Bob Hall:
So, yeah. And working with Matlow, I appreciated Bill and always liked working with him and stayed friends with him until he had his terrible accident. He was very generous in saying, “Okay, I’m going to teach you how to read one of these scenarios,” especially working with him as to what was wanted. And I learned a lot about storytelling from Bill cause he was generous with his time. And I think probably in that first one, I’m not sure I thought that Bill was the best writer going, because I don’t think I liked the Champions stories all that well. But when I think back, because Bill, I think became a very good writer, and was somebody that I turned to a lot when I was an editor, I think it was almost an impossible group to write.

Bob Hall:
Tony Isabella originally pitched it, and he’s told me that he intended it as a buddy comic based on Route 66 with just the two X-Men meeting up with people and having adventures. And it grew as it was accepted as a concept, but it grew into a group book. And the group was one of the strangest collections of characters, which I suppose might be the charm of it, unless you were trying to draw Ghost Rider as your first thing that you get assigned… First of all, getting a job at Marvel and getting assigned a group book, I suppose is like being thrown not into deep water, it’s like being thrown into the Bermuda Triangle because everything is about… You’ve got to get it in within a month. And I was like [inaudible 00:48:28] and Ghost Rider. I’m the kind of person that I should not be allowed within six feet of a motorcycle, let alone on one. I knew nothing about motorcycles. And this was the time when you couldn’t get picture reference.

Bob Hall:
So, Ghost Rider, to me, I looked back at those and say, “He looks like he’s riding a bicycle all the time.” I mean, the way he’s sitting on it, the way that… And just getting enough reference to draw a motorcycle, I was not good enough to know how to fake stuff. In drawing comics and that kind of schedule we had, everybody had to learn how to fake stuff so that you would draw the shape of a motorcycle eventually, and then if you were somebody who used a lot of reference, you could fill in and make it more realistic, but you had to be able to lay it out accurately without tons and tons of photo reference, because you couldn’t get photo reference. It was hard to… You go out and you try to find exactly the picture of the motorcycle that you need if you’re drawing from a photo it was hard. Now, artists do it all the time, but [crosstalk 00:49:45] online.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Google makes it a lot faster, obviously.

Bob Hall:
But back back then… And so, my job was, I think it was the first issue, it might’ve been the second one, but the rule was you had to get Ghost Rider in as many scenes as possible because he was the only star at that time that was in the group. And he was put there to help sell the book, which I think he did not do because it was so insane to have him there because he’s a loner, for one thing.

Alex Grand:
Anti-hero, not a team player.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. He was there all the time, and if he was there, his motorcycle had to be there. So, my first thing I had to draw was an office on fire with Ghost Rider there on his motorcycle in the office. And it made me insane because the hard part was drawing an office. I had to have [inaudible 00:50:44] Polaroid camera and have my wife sneak me into the office where she was doing temp work to take pictures, because one of the hardest things is to draw stuff where everybody… Nobody has ever looked at it closely, but everybody knows if you’re doing it wrong. Doctor Doom’s laboratory is easy because everybody just makes it up, but the real stuff is what’s difficult. Thank God for Google images. Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. And then, now, I know that you were kind of doing that Buscema style at this point, did anyone ever say, “Draw like Jack Kirby?” Or were you pretty much just continuing on with more of a Buscema, or Buscema, approach to it?

Bob Hall:
I loved the class, and I certainly became an acolyte of John’s style because I felt it was… It’s what I learned. And also, because I think it was what people rather expected of me. S, when I turned to an image, I would turn toward him. It took me a while before I figured out that I had not gotten the job in order to draw like John Buscema. That wasn’t what was expected of me, per se, maybe the first couple of things, but it took me a long time to do something else. So, it was my default. [crosstalk 00:00:52:21].

Alex Grand:
Yeah. More Buscema than actual Kirby, it sounds like.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Nobody ever said, “Draw it like Jack,” except that when Jim Shooter took over, he would take artists aside and showed them some Jack Kirby stuffs. He loved early curvy Kirby, like before started doing the big flashy stuff, he loved smaller panels where Kirby would pull the camera way back and you’d see a lot of stuff. That’s about the only time was when I was doing the Avengers that I thought I was being forced into a Kirby mode and it wasn’t the Kirby that I-

Alex Grand:
That you particularly liked. It was almost the more boring Kirby in a way.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Yeah. It was… Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
Not boring Kirby, but okay.

Bob Hall:
It’s not boring Kirby. It’s great storytelling, but it was stuff that I felt, “Well, this is 10 years out of date.”

Alex Grand:
Yeah. And I think a lot of Shooter’s stuff seems to have a lot of that zoomed out that you’re talking about.

Bob Hall:
But he was very concerned that people would not understand where comics were going, that comics would be produced… And to some extent he was right, that there would be comics that the average kid couldn’t pick up off the newsstand and look at and understand what stories were there. And I think he was right about that. I think the only thing he was wrong about was the idea that who was reading comic books anymore. [inaudible 00:53:53] being a big transition from kids to fans.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. I will say, though, as a kid in the ’80s, I did like the stuff that he had a little more control over that. I was born in ’78, so as a kid, I did appreciate it. I was able to hook right into the Marvel universe through a lot of the stuff he was overseeing, so it did help me integrate into it.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. No, I think exactly that. It felt like an accurate assessment is what you had to do, because I remember going to those spin racks that were still there when I started reading comics again and saying, “Okay, wow. Well, I want to find the issue before this because I want to catch up on it, but I can understand it if I start at this point. I’ll still get it.” And we were all, we were all quite concerned with the storytelling when I started, that you had to be able to do that.

Alex Grand:
And then, now, you did FF annual 12 1977. This book was split in half with Keith Pollard, and the script was by Marv Wolfman. It was an Inhumans issue. So, did you ever have to go back to` Kirby Fantastic Four as any reference on the characters? Were you already familiar with a lot of these characters by this point? How did that work?

Bob Hall:
The ones that I was drawing I was familiar with, but that was the first realization of what would haunt me, really, for most of my career at Marvel was that I’m slow. I got much faster once I started working at Valiant. But I was supposed to do the whole thing, and I just could not turn that out in the length of time that was available and had to go to John [inaudible 00:55:54] and say, “John, I can’t do it.” I’m just not capable of doing that at this point in my career.”

Alex Grand:
I see. That’s why it was split in half like that. I see.

Bob Hall:
That’s why it was splitting in half. That happened to me several times during my career at Marvel that I felt… I think sometimes the Marvel people thought, “Oh,, he’s just off doing theater again,” but the truth was that I just was too damn slow. And I think people didn’t quite get that because I was John Buscema’s pupil, and Buscema was the fastest person, one of the three fastest people, in comics.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. He could do like three pages a day or something. Yeah.

Bob Hall:
He could do up to five pages if he was doing breakdowns.

Alex Grand:
If it was just breakdowns, that’s true.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. And those breakdowns were astonishingly good. You had to have somebody as good as like a Tom Palmer doing the finish on them, because a lot of artists, unless the artists could draw really well, you didn’t know what to do, or you’d try to redraw it in your style or whatever. But they were magnificent line drawings [crosstalk 00:57:13].

Jim Thompson:
We talked to Tom just a couple of weeks ago about exactly that, about… He talked about doing atoms and he talked about doing colon. And he was saying with Buscema, that it was layouts, but it was perfectly done and how much he enjoyed working off of those pencils.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. The draftsmanship inherent in those pencils was crazy. He showed me how he did it. He was always working with a light box, and I own a bunch of his underlays that he did. He would do these gestural drawings that were on the first section, and then he would go slap those on a light box and do these line drawings over them. The gestural drawings are magnificent.

Alex Grand:
Oh, I see. That’s cool. because he had stock poses basically.

Bob Hall:
No. [inaudible 00:58:08] of stock poses. That’s what’s crazy. It was like he had done it probably holding the pencil like this… Not going to get the pencil in there. Yeah. Right? Like this. And very sweeping. And with John, the amazing thing was that… Watching John draw was like those old semi coloring books that you used to get where you would brush water on the page and a drawing would emerge that was hidden. And with John it was like, that he would move his hand around almost too fast for you to see, but very elegantly, and this drawing would just start to emerge on the page.

Alex Grand:
Wow. That’s cool.

Bob Hall:
It was astonishing.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. That sounds astonishing. And I would have loved to see… I have some of his pages, some breakdown, some more full, and he would doodle on the back of them, too. But-

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Always. Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Okay. Now, you also worked with Matt Lowe in Super-Villain Team-Up, issues 10, 11, 12, 14, 1977. Now, this is interesting, Don Perlin inked a lot of that stuff, and you guys worked together at Valiant. So, were you guys friends?

Bob Hall:
No. I never met Don until I was an editor. I think a lot of the people I met, Matt Lowe, a lot of those guys, the people that I worked with, I never really met until I was an editor there. Can I tell you one story about shifting from Champions to Super-Villain Team-Up, which I thought was a, “Thank God.” I was able to do a book with a contained number of characters. But I was at, I think it was the New York… Yeah. It was the New York Comic-Con. I think it was just called the New York Comic-Con then. And it wasn’t ReedPOP at that point, it was just one of the early Comic-Cons.

Bob Hall:
And this kid who couldn’t have been more than 10 came up and said, “You’re Bob Hall. Right?” And I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?” He said, “Somebody told me. You were working on The Champions.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.” He said, “No, you’re not. They’re going to put you on Super-Villain Team-Up. They’re going to give that to John Byrne and put you on Super-Villain Team-Up,” and he walked away. And it was the first experience I’ve had with a fan, especially a preteen fan, knowing more about what was going on in the Marvel office than I did, but that was fandom. Now I understand fandom.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. “No, you’re not. You’re going to do this.”

Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah.

Alex Grand:
Okay. Now around this time, then, ’78 starts coming up, and Archie Goodwin then is no longer editor in chief. Jim Shooter becomes editor in chief. Do you recall that shift and any changes in Marvel at the time? And were you at the bull pen a lot when you were there?

Bob Hall:
Well, I would go into the bullpen on a regular basis because that’s how you got work, especially if you were doing books like The Champions. And I was on the, “This book is going to fail,” end of the Marvel universe at the time. They used those books well. They use them as training grounds for people, and they would shift new people around and see how you did. But yeah, there were a lot of changes. When Archie was there, it was the time of the writer/editor, and I was glad I didn’t get mixed up with that very much because I was working for Matt Lowe and Matt Lowe was giving me… It was a more typical relationship. He would give me the Marvel scenario.

Bob Hall:
Nobody who was working from that kind of Stan Lee thing where he called up and just gave you a real quick synopsis of what you were going to do. They would be written out, usually page by page as a scenario with no dialogue, or maybe one place where the writer knew damn well that he wanted you to do a panel where there was a major speech, and he would have heard that in his head and he would write that out for you. But the writer/editors, of course, were notoriously just… Their books got, for the most part, later and later and later. And that was a big problem. And some of the books went off into a strange place. That wasn’t true of all of them. Sometimes in hearing that it sounded like that was happening with everybody, and I’m sure it wasn’t. But the books at Marvel, because of this revolving door of editor in chief, Archie was probably the most successful one of that… We had Len and-

Alex Grand:
And Marv.

Bob Hall:
We had Len, we had Archie, who else was… Is there somebody else who was editor in chief? I can’t remember.

Alex Grand:
Well, Marv Wolfman was also an editor in chief.

Bob Hall:
That’s right. It was Marv. It was Marv. And you had to have some consistency there to get the books on time. And Archie is a wonderful, probably one of the best editors ever to exist in comics, but not necessarily as an editor in chief, whose primary job was making sure it was a business and that it got done at that point, because Marvel was turning into a different kind of company. And Jim was quite capable of doing that, and I think really saved Marvel’s but [crosstalk 00:29:34].

Alex Grand:
Right. [inaudible 01:04:35] Landau in ’75 was president, and then some things were happening with the money so Jim Galton comes in, and now he was the one that wanted everything to be more business run. And then, Jim Shooter probably becoming editor in chief was instrumental in making that happen.

Bob Hall:
Yes, he was very much so. I was part of the first wave of editors. He called me and asked if I wanted to be an editor. And I had done the play at that point. I had taken time off from Marvel because we’d been doing the play. Getting a play on off-Broadway, we were rewriting constantly, and especially off-Broadway, we were all doing more than one thing with the production and blah, blah, blah. And so, Jim called me, said, “I would like you to be an editor.” And I thought about it and didn’t really want to do it. And one reason I didn’t want to do it was that it looked like Passion of Dracula was going to get options to be done in London, and I certainly was going to go to London if that happened. And I wasn’t quite sure it was going to happen, and so I didn’t feel like committing… The job sounded like a big commitment.

Bob Hall:
And Jim kept calling me back and wanting me to do it, and I think Jim thought I was negotiating because he kept offering me more money. And finally, because I had never made any money the time I was in New York and doing Marvel… You started your page rate when you first started with something like, I think it was slightly less than 30 bucks a page. Unless you were very fast, just couldn’t make much money. And I thought, “Wow, I can make enough money doing this to successfully go to London,” so I made the deal that I would do it for six months, and that if the London thing was going to happen, then I would leave and do that. And he said, “Great.” So, I did it for six months.

Bob Hall:
And indeed, every book that I had was behind except for Devil Dinosaur done by Jack Kirby, which was six months ahead, which was typical Kirby. But most of my job during that time was to try to get the books back on time, and that was what we were all doing for a while. We weren’t doing that editorship of planning stories. All of that stuff came later. This was about nuts and bolts. These books have got to get back on a monthly schedule.

Alex Grand:
Interesting. So, then, did you find that you faced some backlash from the artists and writers then when you tried to reel them in like that?

Bob Hall:
For the most part, it involved just telling people that, “Okay, hey look, this is the situation now,” and people would go with it. And I think everybody knew that that had to happen. There were a couple of things, and I won’t talk about who or what, where the only solution was to fire somebody because things were behind and they clearly weren’t going to get more on time. That was the least fun part about it because you would find people who were sometimes [inaudible 01:08:27] and one instance in particular, it was a very talented person, but it just was clear that it was not working.

Bob Hall:
And then you would turn toward some of the remarkably fast artists to get things back on time. Usually it would be Sal Buscema or… John at that time was pretty much his own man. You could get him to do some filling kind of work, but he was pretty much assigned to what he was doing and you weren’t going to be able to get him to help you out. But Sal was still at that point where he was the go-to guy, and he wasn’t firmly on the Hulk yet. We got him on the Hulk. I think Don Perlin ended up on The Defenders. Some things like that we were behind that you solved it that way.

Alex Grand:
That’s interesting. Yeah. Because just to name a few issues under that time, some Marvel Team-Up issues, Mary Joe Duffy was your assistant editor, there was Chris Claremont and John Byrne was working under you there in the beginning part of that. There was an interesting issue, the Marvel Team-Up 74, where you actually had Saturday Night Live-

Alex Grand:
… ’74 where you actually had Saturday Night Live in the [crosstalk 01:10:06].

Bob Hall:
Not Ready for Prime Time Players technically.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and you did the interior art for that. Cochran did the cover, Chris Claremont wrote that one. And then Marie Severin, I guess because it was a comedic one, Marie Severin then inked that issue. How did that issue come to be?

Bob Hall:
Well, Chris pitched it and we all liked it. I don’t know who, probably Shooter, managed to make the contact with Saturday Night Live. I can’t remember who did that, probably to Lorne Michaels, and they said yes. Then I was editing Team-Up and I was damned if I was going not do it myself, because I knew we would get together at 30 Rock and meet those people, sit in on rehearsal, and we did. So it was great fun. Loved doing it. The only probably I had with it was that Chris was a television watcher and I’m not a television watcher.

Bob Hall:
So Chris would … I watched Saturday Night Live, I loved Saturday Night Live, but he would want characters from the Muppet Show to be in it and stuff. I didn’t know who these people were, but they had to get me reference because I … Again, the reference problem, if you turned on the TV, those characters were going to be there until … It might be three or four weeks before they would appear. But it was a fun project, we did get to meet, say hello to most of them. But we did give the cover to Belushi and got to … He invited us to the opening night party, the wrap party, for … Maybe it was the opening, I guess. I guess it was the opening of Animal House. I got to meet him, had a little bit longer conversation with him, and give him the cover.

Alex Grand:
That’s the cool thing about everything being in New York, it’s all close by like that.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Yeah, and I remember there was one weird thing that happened with it that had to do with coming from Nebraska. And that was that the lawyer for NBC. We tried to figure what would we … How would we do the logos stuff on the comic. We felt we had to represent NBC in some way and the show, but we couldn’t put everybody’s face on the cover. Actually, I kind of wanted to do that, I thought it’d look like an old Blackhawk comic, but that wasn’t what was wanted. So I said, “Let’s use the NBC symbol.” Everybody said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.” Then we got a call from the NBC office and their lawyer invited us, didn’t invite us, said, “You have to come talk to me about using that symbol.” We sat in the office and the guy said, “Now you cannot change this symbol in any way.” And we said, “Okay, fine, we won’t.” He said, “No.” [crosstalk 01:13:29]-

Alex Grand:
Yeah, it’s a trademarked symbol, you have to be careful.

Bob Hall:
He said, “You’re not … Understand, you really cannot change it.” And he said, “You can’t, in any way, you can’t.” It got to the point where you was saying, “Well, what’s the real deal here? This is … Yeah, yeah, we got it. What’s …” He keeps stating it. Suddenly the light dawned on me and I said, “I understand, I’m from Nebraska.” He said, “Then you know what I’m talking about.” I said, “Yes, I do.” And that was the end of the meeting.

Bob Hall:
And we got in the hall and I think Shooter was there, and Mary Jo, and they said, “What just happened?” And I said, “There’s a educational television station associated with the University of Nebraska and this guy, Jim Brown, was their staff artist. He invented the NBC symbol, only for Nebraska television, and it was exactly the same as what they later came up with. That NBC eventually came up with their symbol, post Nebraska television having the same one. So it was already trademarked and Nebraska sued them.” And they had to settle for … I think eventually they settled out of court and gave them a remote truck which is what they really wanted. So that was the story, that was the guy was all about this Nebraska-

Alex Grand:
That’s funny. There was actually a legal thing there.

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Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah, weird.

Alex Grand:
And then you also worked with Chaykin doing Dr. Strange. You did a nice-

Jim Thompson:
No, that was Marvel Team-Up. It was just Dr. Strange was the guest in that one.

Alex Grand:
Was the guest in that one, and then there’s also a Marvel Two-in-One Thing in Hercules #44, in 1978. It says that you penciled the cover, there’s a question mark in the Grand Comics-

Bob Hall:
I did not pencil the cover.

Alex Grand:
Oh.

Bob Hall:
I did the interior.

Alex Grand:
Oh, that’s interesting.

Jim Thompson:
You did the layouts on the interior? They’ve got you drawing and inking the cover.

Alex Grand:
They have you as actually penciling and inking the cover, too. That’s wrong then?

Bob Hall:
I believe that’s wrong. I’ll take a look at it, but I don’t think I did the cover. I might have done the cover, maybe I did? Oh, no. I did do the cover.

Jim Thompson:
It’s a good cover.

Alex Grand:
There you go.

Jim Thompson:
You should take credit for it.

Bob Hall:
I’m thinking of something else. No, I’m thinking of a Cochran cover. Yes, I did the cover. I did the cover as well.

Alex Grand:
And did you ink it, too?

Bob Hall:
I don’t remember. I might have, I think I did. I think it might have been the first cover that I inked myself.

Alex Grand:
So GCD may have gotten that one right then.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I remember that issue because I did full pencils and Giacoia inked it. I really appreciated Frank Giacoia’s inking. He also inked a Super-Villain Team-Up I did, I think. Somewhere in there I got two things inked by Frank, and they were the first time I thought it all looked professional. He really made me look like I knew what I was doing. It was the first time I had almost no quarrel with any of how it was turning out. Because a lot of … I think John Byrne was somebody who came in with a style that controlled the inker, almost anybody, unless you really tried to change him, you just followed his pencils and it’d turn out well.

Alex Grand:
Controlling the inker, that’s an interesting concept, yeah.

Bob Hall:
I was struggling to do that. It was not turning out the way I hoped it would turn out. So that one did and I recall it fondly.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Now you also took over editing Defenders from Shooter around issue 61. You’re both listed as editor on that issue, so it sounds like it got handed off to you in the middle of it maybe?

Bob Hall:
Probably.

Alex Grand:
Probably, that makes sense. It seems like toward the end of the editing, Al Milgrom kind of came in after you. Is that correct? It went to Al Milgrom after you?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, they were looking for the next editor, because I knew I was going to leave. They were doing it in London, and so I said, “It is happening.” And about that time Al was let go by DC, and I heard that he was available and suggested that Al be the person that take them over.

Alex Grand:
Oh, you suggested that?

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Well, that’s cool. Yeah, that’s from the DC implosion that him and DeFalco and other people went over there.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. I would have liked to seen Mary Jo take it over, but that wasn’t happening yet over at Marvel.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s interesting.

Bob Hall:
And that’s just my opinion, I just think that wasn’t something that was ready to happen yet. I think she would have been great.

Alex Grand:
Interesting, so almost like maybe you had mentioned that to Shooter and he-

Bob Hall:
I don’t think so. I think it’s my fault. I think I sort of felt that was the way it seemed to be working. That it was-

Alex Grand:
At the time [crosstalk 01:19:22].

Bob Hall:
… all of the people who had come in at this point were men.

Alex Grand:
I see.

Bob Hall:
And I sort of felt, “Well, that’s the deal.” Again, you got to remember it was the ’70s, and I sort of felt, “Well, I guess that’s the deal,” rather than thinking, “Why don’t I suggest …” So I still kind of feel …

Alex Grand:
Yeah, it was almost like a cultural subconscious thing.

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Now you also edited Daredevil around this time, a few issues there. And there were some that were drawn by Gene Colan. Did you know Gene Colan?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I got to know Gene after he did that thing with the Dracula play. And he invited me and my wife out to his house and played … He had a movie studio in his house. Not for taking movies, but I mean for showing, a showing room. A viewing room. I think we watched King Kong. But it was just great to go out and see some of his work hanging on the walls. Some of his early commercial work, too. I really liked Gene a lot.

Bob Hall:
Again, it’s one of those things, it’s an odd thing, that I’m not listed as the editor for the issue where Gene started doing it again. Because I think it was another one of those things where I was just starting as editor and it got handed off to me. But I wasn’t credited, but I know that people were saying, “Who can do Daredevil?” We were looking for an artist for Daredevil and I said, “Well, hey, I want to call Gene. Let’s see if I can get Gene back on the book for a while.” And I remember that as being one of my things that I felt, “Okay, I’ve done some good. That’s a good artistic move, we’ll get Gene back on Daredevil for a while.”

Alex Grand:
And how about Frank Robbins? I think he drew one of those as well, right?

Bob Hall:
I don’t remember if he did a Daredevil. The one I remember Frank with was the Human Fly.

Alex Grand:
Okay.

Jim Thompson:
He did a Daredevil during your editing. I checked it last night.

Bob Hall:
I’m sure he may have. I just don’t remember it. I remember the Human Fly because we kept going through inkers and I think Leialoha did some of his stuff. Made Robbins look pretty good, but it didn’t quite look like Robbins, and eventually I put Frank Springer on him. Which I thought was a good team, because I was looking for somebody that made Robbins … I mean, Robbins, I think is one of those guys if you … I know there were people that didn’t like his work, but he just needed to look like Robbins. I mean, Frank Robbins is Frank Robbins, and trying to give him a different look just isn’t there. He needs to be what he is and Springer was able to do that.

Jim Thompson:
Springer was his best inker during the Marvel stuff, I think. It worked really well, I agree with you.

Alex Grand:
Now also then, Hulk, you did a few issues of Hulk also. And you edited that Hulk Annual #7, December 1978, by Stern and Byrne, and that was a great issue. So when you’re editing, are you giving feedback on the art, or is it mostly the script and then assigning who does the issue?

Bob Hall:
It really depended on what it was. There would be times when I would give feedback on the art, there were times when you felt you did not have to give feedback on anything. And you were sort of praying for that to happen because you were juggling all of these books and trying to make sure they all got out and stuff. So it was very nice when a combination like Stern and Byrne were pretty self-contained. You got two of the ultimate pros going.

Alex Grand:
Right, right. Because they had a great Captain America run, obviously, too. So now, in 1979, you did the Human Fly, cover to issue 17, five Tarzan issue covers, you inked over Sal Buscema on some interiors, inking over John on some covers. So tell us about that, working on Human Fly and some of those Tarzan images. And did you like Tarzan, and what was up with the Human Fly?

Bob Hall:
Well, the Human Fly was weird. It was strange, because Stan had apparently met the Human … You know the Human Fly was a real guy?

Alex Grand:
Yeah, Rick Rojatt or something like that?

Bob Hall:
I can’t remember. Probably, that’s sounds right. And Stan had met him at a party or something and thought, “What a great idea for a comic.” So we did it. Yeah, it was kind of fun in that it was not superhero, and it was sort of fun to do one non-superhero book although he was sort of a semi-superhero. There was something about it that it never quite … I don’t anybody believed that it was going to take off.

Alex Grand:
Because he was like a Evel Knievel-type stuntman, right, masked?

Bob Hall:
He was Evel Knievel-type stuntman, but shortly after we started doing the book, he stopped doing stunts. And part of the deal we felt was, “Well, we’ll sell the book because he’ll be doing these stunts like Evel Knievel, and unless he gets killed, the stunts will help sell the book.” And we eventually thought, “Whatever good, great stunt he comes up with we’ll try to incorporate it in the book.” And he just kind of stopped doing stunts. Came up to the office with … He had wanted us to put in a sidekick, and he brought him up and introduced him, he said, “This is Speedy, my sidekick.” And this is unfair, but we, several of us in the editorial department, got together afterwards and said, “Speedy, this looks like this guy picked up Speedy in a bus station. This is not good. This is not good.”

Alex Grand:
Maybe outside of a Studio 54 or something like that.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah. We got to get him to do more stunts. That’s the whole idea. So I called and pressured him, “You’ve got to do more stunts.” And eventually he called me back and said, “I got it. I’m going to fly across country for Easter strapped to a wing of a Boeing 707.” And I said, “Okay,” and thought about it, and told other people. They said, “What did you just tell me?” And I said, “The only question I have, do we just tell him that he’s going to die if he does this? Or do we just let him do it?”

Alex Grand:
Just let him do it. It’s fun.

Bob Hall:
And eventually he decided not to do it and the book got canceled about the same time. The good thing about the book was that for some reason Jim decided because, not being a superhero, it didn’t have to have a Marvel look. That he would ask me to use a number of older artists who were looking for work who had amazing backgrounds, but were not doing the Marvel style. So I got to work with Frank, and Bob Lubbers, and Lee Elias. And they were superb. They were all just wonderful.

Jim Thompson:
Which one did the splash page, the opening page where he’s just playing the guitar? Because that’s the one I remember.

Bob Hall:
I don’t remember, I don’t remember.

Jim Thompson:
Those were all so fun. That’s the only reason I bought the book at the time was because I knew who they were bringing out, the artists, and it was a real treat. Lee Elias was especially good.

Bob Hall:
And Lee Elias, it was great to see his pencils come through. He had a unique style, he worked with a stump, you know what I mean? A paper stump, so he would put in the black areas by rubbing the pencil with this stump, which doesn’t sound that interesting, I guess, except for they were beautiful. They were beautiful pencil drawings. Just gorgeous.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, I like his Beyond Mars strip. Because I think he’s always thought of as somewhat of a Caniff imitator, but he had his own skill, obviously.

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
All right, so then-

Bob Hall:
Well, that was actually kind of the problem. You’d get people who had been raised in the Caniff school and we were definitely … Everyone wanted to look like Adams at that point. If you were with it, your stuff looked like Adams, I guess.

Alex Grand:
I see, it was almost old-fashioned to be a Caniff imitator in 1979.

Bob Hall:
Almost, yep. You could be other kinds of things, but the Caniff school was sort of out, which was really too bad, because it’s really superb stuff.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, sure.

Bob Hall:
But it somehow didn’t seem to fit the superhero genre as it was being done at that point.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, yeah. I think even John Romita, transitioning from his Caniff-style in the ’50s to his Marvel-style in the ’60s. Although it looked smooth and sleek I think it was actually hard for him to make that adjustment, but he did, obviously. And he was a great art director and all that stuff. But it’s still a different thing and there is a transition.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, and you can always see it in when John would feel he had to redraw a face on a cover. The part of the Caniff that he retained would be sometimes very much like, “Oh, John Romita redrew that face.” And it would [crosstalk 01:30:10]-

Alex Grand:
And there would be a Caniff face there, nice.

Bob Hall:
There would be a Romita Caniff face, yeah.

Alex Grand:
A Romita-sized Caniff face, right, exactly.

Jim Thompson:
And Bob, I just looked, it was Lee Elias was the one that did the Human Fly kicked back on the couch, playing the guitar.

Bob Hall:
Oh, cool.

Jim Thompson:
And that one stood out. But Goodwin was editing it, by that point, so that’s probably why it’s not in your mind.

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
And then you took a break from comics and that was basically to work on your theater, right?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, it was spent … Or at least four weeks in London, and came back and I have no memory of exactly what happened when I came back. I know I went back to doing stuff. You probably know more about that I do. That’s sort of a vague period for me up until Shooter asking me to the Avengers.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, in the database, 1980 is a complete blank, you have zero credits.

Bob Hall:
Well, that’s why it’s a blank, that’s why it’s vague to me. I was apparently going through vagueness. I actually think I was doing a lot of theater at that point. I was a guest artist at Cornell University and working at the George Street Playhouse, and just doing more theater work.

Jim Thompson:
All right, so now we have to talk about the Avengers. This is a tricky part, because I hate what happens, you know? I mean, beyond hate, because if I was a kid, a juvenile, I would say that Ant-Man, Hank Pym was one of my favorite characters. But I’m an adult, so I’m not going to say that. Hawkeye is my favorite character. It’s such a different controversy because I want to read what Jim Shooter says about it. And then let’s talk about that, because he kind of, in my opinion, hangs you out to dry on this after the criticisms come in. Where he says, “In that story, Issue 213 …” And for anybody that doesn’t know, we’re talking about Hank Pym-

Bob Hall:
Walloping the Wasp.

Jim Thompson:
Yep, committing domestic violence against the Wasp. Part of my distaste, Bob, when I’m not doing the comics stuff, I’m a divorce lawyer and I deal with domestic violence all the time. So this one’s little personal for me. Also, I think this was a turning point in comics the same way that the 1986 stuff over at DC with Dark Knight and Watchman was that this was the beginning of a darker tone to comics that I never liked especially.

Alex Grand:
And this was kind of a little after the Jim Shooter Hulk story of the rape at the YMCA and stuff like that. So there’s a few different things that was happening.

Jim Thompson:
Shooter’s doing that, Englehart’s doing some stuff later in West Coast Avengers, things that … There’s a lot more rape and lot more brutality going on in superhero comics. So in this issue, Hank Pym, who’s kind of lost his mind at the time, there’s this panel where he just knocks the hell out of the Wasp over to the corner. And what Shooter says is that wasn’t his intent. That he had a very nuanced notion of this and it wasn’t going to be like that. And that, I’m going to read it, so I don’t get it wrong.

Jim Thompson:
“In that story there’s a scene in which Hank is supposed to have accidentally struck Jan while throwing his hands up in despair and frustration, making a sort of get-away-from-me gesture while not looking at her. Bob Hall, who has been taught by John Buscema to always go for the most extreme action turned that into a right cross. There was no time to have it redrawn, which to this day has caused the tragic story of Hank Pym to be known as the wife-beater story. When that issue came out, Ben Sienkiewicz came to me upset that I hadn’t asked him to draw it. He saw the intent right through Hall’s mistake, and was moved enough by the story to wish he’d had the chance to do it properly. By the way, I was too busy to finish the story, so Roger Stern took over two thirds of the way through. I thought he did a great job.”

Jim Thompson:
So what’s your response? Does that jibe with your memory of it? I’ve read your response to it, but I didn’t know if that was still your mindset. So I just want to ask you, what do you think of that?

Bob Hall:
I don’t know. My biggest response to it … What was the date of that, the issue?

Jim Thompson:
Oh, the issue itself? 1981.

Alex Grand:
1981, yeah.

Bob Hall:
1981, so that’s 40 years ago. That’s my response to it. It’s 40 years ago and I don’t think anybody remembers anything accurately after 40 years. So I think Jim’s memory of it is probably as accurate as Jim can remember it. And I won’t try to dispute it. I know that, yes, I had trouble drawing it. I wasn’t sure what was wanted and I eventually did that. I don’t think I got to the point where I could pull off something subtle for another three or four years. I think I was … I think all the work that I did on the Avengers was crap. It was another group book and I don’t think I ever felt comfortable doing it.

Bob Hall:
It always felt, to me, like I had more to draw than I could fit in. I always wish that I had … In fact, when I was working with Roger even, on West Coast Avengers, I think I eventually said, “Look, if you can write me …” These are 22 page stories. “If you can write me 20 pages, and just give me two pages to do something interesting.” So I can expand action rather than try to draw a million panels. But I was never comfortable doing it, it felt … No. I don’t think I did a very good job on it. So I think that part of it is probably true. I do have the reaction that next … And then, I have a different reaction to it as a writer, which is that the next day she shows up at the Avengers headquarters with a black eye. So clearly something had happened, and to her, that was brutal, it didn’t have to be that brutal.

Bob Hall:
I read a book on boxing. One time I was trying to figure out, “God, I’m sick of doing fights that look like roundhouse rights.” I got a book on boxing that had a bunch of photographs. I don’t remember if it was Ring Lardner, I can’t remember who wrote it. But I remember that he said, “The hardest punch he ever saw thrown in his life was Rocky Marciano hitting,” I believe it was, “Ezzard Charles.” Charles had dropped his guard, he was actually winning the fight, he had dropped his guard. Marciano saw the opening and that the blow traveled maybe 12 inches, and boom.

Bob Hall:
I am certainly not disputing that it could have been a more subtle slap or hit, but it definitely gave her a black eye, so that was part of the plot. My sense of it is if that happened by accident, then the entire story should have been scrapped. That if he didn’t slap her and intend to hit her, then the idea that, “Oh, it happens by accident.” No. I don’t buy that for a second. I think the intention of the story is that he … The marriage is sour, he’s crazy, it builds to the point that he hits her. And I think the hit ends up, in the story with Hank, implicitly, is that Hank is involved in that syndrome of people who hit their wives, or hit their spouse, it can be the other way around, too, on saying, “See what you made me do.” And I think without that syndrome being there, there is no story.

Jim Thompson:
I couldn’t agree with you more. If you go back and read the story, and it’s not just Hank, but Janet Pym is acting like an abused … Like a spouse that got hit, she’s lying about it, she’s making excuses, everything that both of those characters do indicate that that’s how that entire story is written, not just that one panel that you did.

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Alex Grand:
That one panel. Yeah, it was intended to be domestic violence. Like when she takes her sunglasses off at work, and her coworkers see it, and they’re shocked and concerned, right? That’s what happens at Avengers mansion.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, she’s lying about it and that’s a sign that she was being abused, not that it was an accident where he accidentally raised his hand like that. So I think your interpretation of that as a writer is exactly spot on. So I’m glad you said that.

Bob Hall:
Yes, yeah. And on the other hand, I think, yes, Ben Sienkiewicz could have handled it more subtly. I didn’t really know … I knew that at the time, I tried drawing it more subtly, and it never seemed to work when I did it. I think it took a level of draftsmanship to do that I didn’t not … I had not attained at that point. And so, that’s the part of it that I would agree is my fault. It wasn’t a matter of intent, it was a matter of I did what I could.

Jim Thompson:
Did you get a lot of blowback for it at conventions and things? Did people come and talk to you about it?

Bob Hall:
No, I don’t consider it blowback, I consider it interesting to have had this be the most iconic thing in my career.

Jim Thompson:
And I’m sorry for the fact that I done that to you.

Alex Grand:
Good going, Jim. Thanks a lot, Jim.

Bob Hall:
No, it always happens. And I think what people are … What seems to strike people, if it wasn’t for this particular moment I don’t think I would have said much about … I don’t think I was a very good artist at the time. I think there were a few things that I’d done that were okay. And people are just … That seems to be what gets people upset and I understand why. Is I’m taking something that they remembered and saying, “Well, it wasn’t very good.” And I think it’s important to know at some point about this time, and it had something do with that issue, that I looked at that and said, “I’m not doing what I want to do.”

Bob Hall:
And I started going back to square one with drawing, started going to a studio in New York called the Stacy Studio. They just had a model in three or four times a week. And I would go in three or four times a week, and spend three hours drawing naked people. Drawing models, trying to get the draftsmanship to where I thought I could do something like that and pull it off.

Jim Thompson:
Because in five years time, when Emperor Doom comes out, I suspect that people come up to you and talk about that book in a very different way. That’s a fan favorite, I know.

Bob Hall:
It might be, but nobody ever comes up and talks to me about that book.

Jim Thompson:
Really?

Bob Hall:
The only feedback I have gotten from that book … I think that is probably not completely true, but no, it’s not part of the regular Marvel Universe. People who are heavy-duty fans are into the continuity stuff, I think. But, no, I think that was the best work I did at Marvel, but some years ago-

Jim Thompson:
That’s what I was thinking. So I’m disappointed everybody else isn’t doing that, because that’s what I would have said to you.

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