Bob Hall, Comic Artist, Writer & Actor Interview Part 2 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview Bob Hall part 2, 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

Bob Hall:
There’s an op-ed, nationally syndicated writer named Leonard Pitt who is in all kinds of papers and he … Doing editorial stuff, and he wrote something about the nature of power and stuff and referenced Emperor Doom. And I wrote to the guy and said, “I drew that and I was so pleased that you remembered it after 20 years.” And he said, “Oh, yes. I have never forgotten that.” He said the idea that Thing has nuance, that Dr. Doom actually-

Bob Hall:
He said the idea that thing is nuanced, that Dr. Doom actually does a damn good job of running… The trains run on time, but nobody has free will. He said that the concept of free will with a benign dictator was a fascinating problem to have explored. I appreciated that. So that’s the best feedback I’ve gotten on my book.

Jim Thompson:
That’s great. All right. In ’81 as well. There was, and I think it might even have been a fill in, I don’t know. But Spider-Man 222, you draw the Speed Demon formerly the Whizzer. I just want to make sure, so that’s the first time that you… That’s sort of a harbinger of things to come, in that that’s the first time you’re drawing one of the Squadron’s… Well, this is Squadron Sinister, but what will become the Squadron Supreme book that you do. Is that the first time that you did any of those characters?

Bob Hall:
Oh yeah, I believe so. Yes, I believe so. Yes.

Jim Thompson:
Did you redesign the costume or did someone else?

Bob Hall:
You know, I don’t remember. I think that there were…. I think I had some input into some of the costumes in the new ones. But I expect that they were redesigned for me. I think I would remember if I really did the designs. I think there were some tweaks that I suggested. But I suspect that they were done in-house by somebody.

Jim Thompson:
I’ll let Alex ask about the actual Squadron Supreme. I was just asking about when the Whizzer became Speed Demon, that costume.

Bob Hall:
Oh no, no. That one was just… I don’t know who came up with the design. But at that point you usually got a… You were presented the job with a design.

Jim Thompson:
Okay. Then in ’81-

Bob Hall:
Especially on team-ups, because team-ups were not considered the place where people… Costumes got altered.

Jim Thompson:
In the same year, in ’81, you’re starting to do some work for DC as well. Are these all done by… They’re the Weird War Tales. Is that under the war editing or is that under Joe Orlando and the horror editing? I take it that’s under the War Books, right?

Bob Hall:
It’s under the War Books, yeah.

Jim Thompson:
And you did [crosstalk 01:48:08]

Bob Hall:
I don’t remember, who did I talk to? Who was the editor of that? I don’t even remember.

Jim Thompson:
I’m not sure. Because it changed over time. Was Kubric doing it at that point?

Bob Hall:
No, I would have remembered that.

Jim Thompson:
Okay. So you do one with [crosstalk 01:48:24] Barr.

Bob Hall:
He did some of the covers, which was an embarrassment. Because he was so much better, more than the insides [crosstalk 01:48:34]. I’ll [inaudible 01:48:35] with Joe, yeah.

Jim Thompson:
Weird War Tales does have some really amazing Alex Toth short stories. He did a few that are stand out. You did three, I think. One was, were a couple with… One was with Barr, one was with DeMatteis and-

Alex Grand:
DeMatteis.

Jim Thompson:
You did a House of Mystery story called New Hope with Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn.

Bob Hall:
The House of Mystery story, I don’t remember that at all. I’m listed, I know I am and I can’t remember it.

Jim Thompson:
I’ll ask those guys. I’m friends with both of those. Gary lives in Richmond where I’m from. I’ll ask him about it.

Bob Hall:
The Weird War was… I think what I wanted to do was I just was beginning to become kind of tired of superhero stuff.

Alex Grand:
There you go.

Bob Hall:
Exclusively. And I wanted to do something else. I enjoyed doing them. I was always a little bit disappointed in the finish. John Celardo, I think it’s Gelard, or there might be Celardo, John, do you know…

Alex Grand:
Yeah, Celardo, he did… Gosh, that… The Captain Easy… After… He took over Captain Easy at some point.

Bob Hall:
Well, he was… it was a thrill for me to have him ink it, although I don’t think it turned out very well. But he was the Tarzan artist when I was a kid. Who was doing my Sunday paper Tarzan. He was… I just the other day, somebody posted one of his Tarzan’s and it’s a very Burne Hogarth, derivative Tarzan. But he was the Tarzan artist for me. I used to imitate it when I was a kid. So the fact that he did it, I’m still thrilled that certain people… That I got inked by certain people.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, that is cool.

Bob Hall:
And he was one of them. Even, I don’t think we were compatible, but still, it’s like, I think that’s great. Him, oh God! And now I’m blanking on his name, the guy that… The big influence on Adam’s the Heart of Juliet Jones, guy. Trying to see if I have one right around here. Never mind.

Jim Thompson:
Also, I just looked up, the editor on Weird War Tales during that period was Lynn Wayne.

Bob Hall:
That’s what I kind of thought, was Lynn. Yeah, that’s it. If I had had to answer the question, I would have said Lynne.

Jim Thompson:
Was he a good editor?

Bob Hall:
I don’t know.

Jim Thompson:
Okay.

Bob Hall:
I don’t… He never… I don’t think we ever had any interaction on that book. So, I mean, he certainly was getting some successful stuff at Marvel. At that particular one, I think that was sort of a… it was kind of a throwaway book, maybe for him. I don’t think there was… I don’t think it was taken that seriously.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
There was not an attempt to make it into a really, really great looking book.

Jim Thompson:
The covers were really good though.

Bob Hall:
The covers were magnificent, yeah.

Jim Thompson:
You know the other thing I really liked about it now that I think about, is the EC artist that did all the planes. He came back out and did a lot of work for that. The one that did Aces High.

Alex Grand:
What? Angela Torres or something like that?

Jim Thompson:
No, no, not Torres. He only did plane stuff. Well, I’ll think of it. But, he was a really good war artist dealing with those biplanes. He came back and worked for those books.

Bob Hall:
I think I had a Hispanic artist did the second one, I think. Of the Weird War Tales. At any rate, it was a lot better. It was pretty well inked.

Jim Thompson:
Let’s see, there is a Charlton cover that popped up. I’m sure that was just one that was in an inventory. You never went back to Charlton to do anything, did you?

Bob Hall:
No. What’s it say I did?

Alex Grand:
There’s a cover to Scary Tales 27. But probably, like Jim said, inventory. That’s what I was thinking too.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Scary Tale I think maybe that was the Martian kind of flying saucer wasn’t it?

Jim Thompson:
George Evans was the artist that I’m thinking of.

Bob Hall:
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
That was really nice to see him get work again during that period.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Really good artist.

Jim Thompson:
And Alex back to Marvel and back to you.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Personally, I loved your Marvel. I love your Marvel lady stuff still. But even the stuff that you don’t like, I like.

Bob Hall:
That’s good. That’s good.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. I mean, really, I can read that stuff any time. Now in 1982 pretty much through 1991, you’re working over at Marvel. Avengers, we mentioned before Squadron Supreme. There’s a really great Thor, Annual #10, 1982. It had like the dark hold and the Marvel kind of chthonic creation, myth of Marvel that you penciled. That’s great because they reference that in later stories. Then you also then co-create the West Coast Avengers in 1984 with Roger Stern, which I love that book. Tell us about how that came about.

Bob Hall:
It came about the same way I’ve described everything coming about at Marvel. Is that you got called up and said, “Would you like to do this book?” And Roger, I’m sure, pitched the idea and got a go ahead. I would like to think I was the first choice artist, but I doubt it. I would suspect that I was available and pleased that I got a chance to work with Roger. Working with… There is something about working with certain people that you just say, “Oh, this is easy.”

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
Roger’s one of them.

Alex Grand:
Like, as far as being like visually able to write the story, something like that?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. He writes visually, he writes economically and he gives you a little space.

Alex Grand:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
I thought Squadron was, I’m sorry. West Coast was maybe the first thing I did at Marvel that I was… There were two things, I don’t know which came first. That this one I thought turned out pretty well. Then I did a What If Conan was Trapped in the 20th Century, Part Two?. That one I got to ink myself. It was the first time I’d inked my own work for Marvel in an interior.

Alex Grand:
Uh-huh (affirmative)

Bob Hall:
I thought that that looked really good.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. You felt like he probably looked more like you as well, right?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. I eventually realized that my problem with inkers was that I’m a person that likes to draw when I ink. So the pencil drawings I do just aren’t quite complete. When I’ve inked one, I ink my own pencils. I change things a lot.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. That’s interesting, because I was going to ask about, there was a Thor issue… Or you did some Thor issues and you had a range of inkers. You had Colletta on one hand, you had Joe Sinnott on another hand. Actually, that’s interesting that you’re saying that. Did you have a favorite inker of those guys? Did you feel like, Ooh, that doesn’t look good on me. That looks pretty good on me. Or would you rather just ink your stuff?

Bob Hall:
Well, it depends on whether you’re asking what I felt at the time or what I feel when I look back at it?

Alex Grand:
Yeah, sure.

Bob Hall:
Like the… Colletta was Colletta and he always… I think he got kind of a bum rap a bit because he would leave out stuff. You’d put in a lot of detail, he was famous for leaving it out.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
That’s not good, but people that John… John, Vinnie, Gene Colan also, people from… You started in the 60s with Marvel, the rates were so damn low that you made money by…

Alex Grand:
Cutting corners.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. It was a really a by the pound business. You had to turn out a lot of work to support your family.

Alex Grand:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), sure.

Bob Hall:
If you could find ways to do that. For some people like Vinnie, it was leaving stuff out. Jean would, sometimes… The pencils wouldn’t feel quite complete, although they always looked gorgeous when they came in. But sometimes it would just clear. He was rushing a panel here and there. And Buscema learned to do it by doing the breakdowns and sometimes not doing his best work. Something had to inspire him or he would, he was kind of… John as brilliant as he was, could be kind of a hack. So now I look back at Vinnie’s stuff and say, “Hey, that’s kind of fun.” You know, “My stuff looks like Vince Colletta, Hey, that’s not so…” At the time, I think I was like, why did I put all that time into it?

Alex Grand:
Yeah. At the time. Right. But looking back, it’s kind of cool. Because he inked Kirby on Thor and he inked you on Thor. That’s kind of cool.

Bob Hall:
Oh yeah, exactly, exactly. I don’t remember everybody else. I remember… [inaudible 02:00:02] inking me once on Thor. That was a little later and I thought, boy, that one turned out really well. It was sort of a collage of Thor’s career.

Alex Grand:
Oh Yeah.

Bob Hall:
I had a lot of fun with that one. Again, my draftsmanship was getting a lot better and it showed.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Towards mid to later 80s, you feel like you’re coming into your own at that point?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. There were some… I know some Thor that… Maybe it was just covers that Joe inked something and I always liked, I’ve always liked what Joe did, Rubinstein did over me.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
He would be one of my favorite inkers. I think again, he always made me [crosstalk 02:00:47]

Alex Grand:
Oh that’s cool. And he inked like, well almost the whole Marvel Universe books too.


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Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
He knows how to ink for sure. Then another thing [crosstalk 02:00:58]

Bob Hall:
Have you seen what he’s doing lately with watercolors?

Alex Grand:
Oh yeah. he’s an artist for sure.

Bob Hall:
Oh my God, he’s just like a brilliant portrait artist, yeah.

Alex Grand:
He is. An illustrator for sure. Then another thing I actually kind of like personally, as a kid reading West Coast Avengers, that you did. Off a newsstand at 7-Eleven, by the way, so it was like your real comic reading experience. But also I was also reading Mark Gruenwald’s Hawkeye mini series and I felt like there was some… There was a cool, integrated feeling of those two limited series that came out around the same time. So for me as a reader, I loved it.

Bob Hall:
I don’t remember if Mark was the editor of…

Alex Grand:
West Coast Avengers?

Bob Hall:
Of West coast Avengers. But I know he and Roger worked close [crosstalk 02:01:49] together.

Alex Grand:
Closely, storywise.

Bob Hall:
So it was the same character. I liked that too. That was who Hawkeye was.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, Clint Barton, for sure. Then speaking of Gruenwald, obviously you guys then worked on Squadron Supreme together. Which I love, that first issue just starts out with a bang where you see what Hyperion in space and there’s stuff falling to earth. The angles, I mean, it felt cinematic that was a real treat. Seeing your… Especially your issues on it. Tell us [crosstalk 02:02:26]

Bob Hall:
Go ahead.

Alex Grand:
So tell us about getting that script and going through Squadron Supreme and some of the talks with Mark Gruenwald and working with Mark Gruenwald in general.

Bob Hall:
Again, it’s been a long time and I remember liking Mark a lot. I remember we talked about it and I don’t remember much. I know he had it in mind and the script was pretty well complete. But he was very open to me… I think it was the first time that I made some suggestions and back and forth about the art and what we liked. I said, … I remember that I was saying, “Okay, I want Tom Thumb’s laboratory to be just a mess. Not look anything like a Dr. Doom laboratory that has a lot of cords hanging around. That the screens they just been through hell with stuff. So things are held together with tape and stuff.” And have a lot of fun with it in that way.

Bob Hall:
I had more fun with that book. And that was the… There were two things about it that I was… And I loved… Both of my inkers on that book were good, but I thought, what’s his name, John? Was it Beatty? Who did the first few. I thought, wow! That guy’s … this feels good. Because he was doing his style over my style and and they mished.

Alex Grand:
Yeah! It does, you’re right.

Bob Hall:
It was one of those things where you felt you were interacting, Oh, I see what he’s doing, I’m going to pencil into, or work what he’s doing with it too. That doesn’t happen that much. Sometimes you feel like, Oh, I’m going to pencil tighter so that the guy can’t do what he’s doing. And [crosstalk 02:04:31]

Alex Grand:
There was actually a synergy on that, you’re saying?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. And unfortunately I was wondering why they took him off it. And then it later… More recently he told me, “Well, he had a deal that he would, whenever they did stuff with Zeck that he would work with Zeck.”

Alex Grand:
I see.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, because he was The primary Zeck collaborator for sure. They did a lot of work together.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. So he got… A Zeck project hadn’t come through and so he was available for this. But then a Zeck project came through. Now I can’t remember, I’m blanking on the guy’s name, who did it, the next one. He was fine, but it was… I really liked that maybe established the way the look of the book with me and that was great.

Bob Hall:
Then what happened was my slowness got to me eventually. At the point where they were putting the bad guys in and it got to be a book with… close to what it was, it was close to 20 characters running around all the time.

Alex Grand:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
Which was not my forte. I could not make the deadlines and continue the quality I was doing with the book. I think at the time I thought about suggesting that I go to breakdown, but I really didn’t want to do it with that book. I was… Felt I was really doing some wonderful draftsmanship. But I had to say, “I can’t, I just can’t do it.”

Alex Grand:
Yeah. That’s why you didn’t do issues six and seven. Then is that also why you didn’t do the last four, also?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. And the other thing, I didn’t like the ending.

Alex Grand:
Oh! Okay.

Bob Hall:
I also felt… I had really felt strongly about where the book was going and felt that… I don’t… Believe me, I don’t want to speak ill of Mark, because I think he’s brilliant, was brilliant. He was a brilliant person in-person. Because one of the most fun people…

Bob Hall:
I remember there was once that I forget who it was, it was Marvel wanted us to be more corporate and to dress better in the office and to be neater and have less debris around. Mark’s response to this was to have a platform built for his desk. The desk went on the platform. I think both he and I think it was Mac Macchio was his assistant at the time. They both were raised up. Every piece of paper that came in, they wadded it up and threw it over their shoulder. Until after a week and a half or so, they were floating in a sea of paper. So when this guy came back and opened the door, it was like the office had become everything he feared. That was the end of that, that notice that Marvel should become more… Have a more corporate look in the building.

Alex Grand:
Oh, that’s cool.

Bob Hall:
So Mark was brilliant. But I felt that there was the one kind of book that I did not like at Marvel and never liked, was the kind where you felt as if we had this character, this character superpower is this. This person has this kind of weapon, and this has this kind of a weapon. Then you would have them match with the heroes and the heroes would have to figure it out on the spot, how to overcome this person. The last issues are just filled with that. I thought somehow the center of the book had gotten shifted. Then the last issue, it tried to wind it up into something and it never quite went where… It was one of the books that I really believed in where it was going and it didn’t go there.

Alex Grand:
I see. So it was almost like you’d rather not even do it.

Bob Hall:
I would rather have not done it. That’s, and that’s… And I felt…. While, I continued to work at Marvel, I felt that it was really, in a funny way, it was some of my best work and also kind of a death knell. Because I think I got… I think I had before done somebody who would take off time to do theater. I think people just kind of… At one time that was a big advantage, because I got to do movie books and stuff. I got to do all kinds of stuff because I was doing short runs on things. Somewhere in there, I think that the whole feel of it, of the place changed. That people were not happy with me for that part of it. But I think it would’ve been very different. Had I said, I’ll do it. I can’t make the breakdown, but I’ll do it in breakdowns. But that was the reason that I didn’t want to do that.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, later, later, years later, I moved back to Lincoln and I used to work in a coffee house down here called The Mill at one time. I would get tired of being in my studio and I would just… They had almost a table that I would go down and just be doing Shadow Man in that space. The guy who owned it was a friend and he would sit there roasting coffee in this big coffee roaster, reading the New York Times. He walked over one time at the time, he said, “Hey, got this something, some guy Marvel died and they’re putting his ashes into the ink.”

Alex Grand:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
I looked up and I said, “Oh my God, it’s Mark.” He must’ve known that he had a problem, because he had made the…

Alex Grand:
Put that in his will, right?

Bob Hall:
Put that in his will, that he wanted his ashes put into printer’s ink and used to reprint Squadron Supreme. So, a few weeks later I got my issues of… Like a couple of months later, I got my issues of Mark’s… A little bit of Mark.

Alex Grand:
With a little bit of Mark in it [crosstalk 02:11:02].

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Marvel actually… There was some time way before that, that kids put their blood in the ink. So I guess there’s a rich history there.

Bob Hall:
Well, I… Yeah, they… I suppose they did that, who knows?

Alex Grand:
The witchcraft people, the witchcraft people love that stuff.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I know I know.

Alex Grand:
So now Emperor Doom, you mentioned that earlier. It’s a beautiful book and you penciled and inked it in 1987, but there was some inking assist by Keith Williams? What was the story behind that?

Bob Hall:
He did my backgrounds.

Alex Grand:
Okay, so it was more inking backgrounds, actually?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah. I wish they had put backgrounds in…

Alex Grand:
That way it’s more specific, yeah.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. But no, I inked everything.

Alex Grand:
Oh, that’s cool. All the characters and stuff. [crosstalk 02:11:51] Yeah, I love it because it’s almost like another West Coast Avengers story, too. For me as a West Coast Avengers fan, I love that book.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. It was a chance for me to do the West Coast Avengers, plus. I was able to even give them a little bit more character. I loved doing that book. Although, it was pointed out to me by somebody, can’t remember who, but they said that, “The most powerful thing that’s ever happened in the Marvel universe is where Iron Man manages to seal up the hole in Doom’s underground thing where the sea is pouring in. Because if it would be like impossible to do.” So I said, “Well, it wasn’t really in the middle of the ocean, it was in the middle of stiller water or something.” I don’t know.

Alex Grand:
Maybe there’s a plausibility there, sure. Tell us about the last… This shift between Jim Shooter to Tom DeFalco. Did you notice anything going on that would suggest that there would be a changing of the guard at Marvel at that time?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. I kind of think that… You kind of knew something was going on. There were people who were more intimate with what was going on than others. I almost date something… Jim being interested in a different direction. Jim interested in of course, wanting to buy Marvel at one time. From the New Universe. That it was clear that Jim wanted to remake a universe in a different way.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
Somewhere around there, I thought… I remember kind of thinking, Jim wants his own company.

Alex Grand:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bob Hall:
Now, I think he was… It took him getting fired at Marvel to get him to do that. So maybe it was a good thing. But certainly different. I think Jim was Jim. He was a strong, strong personality. I think sooner or later, something was going to clash. I always liked Jim a lot and disagreed with him also. I think there were things about stuff he did that… There would always be something that people, somebody would not be happy with something that Jim did. But overall I think he made Marvel into… He took Marvel when it needed to be made into a company and made it into a company, made it into a business. You can say that Jim disagreed with the way Jim changed the look of the comics. But as we both said, I think it needed that stability of the sense that kids had to understand what was going on. That’s what I thought was very good. At the same time, some very experimental people like Sienkiewicz and Miller got their big shot under Jim.

Alex Grand:
That’s right.

Bob Hall:
So he was… When he saw a genius at work, he worked with it.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
And gave it some room. So I think he did a good job. I think it’s just one of those things that happens. I mean, he had a long thing at a company and the changing of the guard of the company. I know that there were various things that went on. Jim told me about it, has told me about it. I don’t remember all the details because it was… Details that were very important to him that are not very important to me.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, the corporate stuff, right.

Bob Hall:
I remember it being a good story. We hadn’t seen each other for years and we got together at Louisville. I thought gee, because that was after all these stuff about the slap kept coming up. And I said, “I hope Jim will come out and we’ll have a drink and we’ll just talk about… I’d like to get that… Just see if he’s really pissed at me or something?” We ended up closing a bar in Louisville and having really a lovely time. I’ve always enjoyed Jim. Jim was on the board of directors of a small… after he left Marvel and while he was in process of starting Valiant. I did a… Had a little theater company in New York called the New Rude Mechanicals and Jim was on the board of it.

Alex Grand:
Oh cool.

Bob Hall:
So I kept in touch with him. Jim was on the board and Stan was sort of on the board. We were trying to form a board and I wrote to Stan who was mainly out in LA and said, “Would you be on the board?” And he wrote back and said, “No, I would never be able to come to a meeting.” And I wrote back and said, “Stan, I don’t care if you ever come to a meeting. I just want to be the only theater in New York that has Stan Lee on the board.”

Alex Grand:
Yeah, just put his name on it!

Bob Hall:
He wrote us this wonderful letter back saying, “As long as you promise never to stage any adaptations of DC Comics or any porn, I will be on your board.”

Alex Grand:
There you go.

Bob Hall:
“And I don’t have to come to a meeting. I’ll be on your board.” [crosstalk 00:32:50].

Alex Grand:
Yeah, he had his [crosstalk 02:17:50].

Bob Hall:
So we published that in our first program.

Alex Grand:
He made his boundaries well-known. Now DeFalco, how was he at… Actually a quick thing. Carl Potts mentioned that behaviorally, there was a flip that went off or something switched in Shooter during his run. Had you encountered anything like that or was he pretty much even keel with you the whole time?

Bob Hall:
I did not work closely with Jim. I got to know Jim, enjoyed him, but I didn’t work with him.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
After the Avengers and after I… I think it was after the Avengers. I didn’t work with him very much. I think the last thing that we kind of had input on, was the Emperor Doom book. Because I remember he called me into the office and did what I called the Cosmic Eraser Speech. One of Jim’s things that he was always trying to get right was, what would happen if somebody had a cosmic cube or he would say, “This eraser, supposing I could take this eraser and it would give out something that everybody on earth would listen to what I would say.” Now maybe this was the editor in chief’s fantasy of any editor in chief, but it was also… Jim would massage that story and assign it to people, I think. Because I ended up… I think he had forgotten that I already had already drawn it twice. Once in the Super Villain… When Super Villain team-up met the…

Bob Hall:
I’ve been talking too long. The first book that I did for Marvel was the…

Alex Grand:
Yeah, like the serial table with Red Skull and Dr. Doom?

Jim Thompson:
Or champions, you’re saying?

Bob Hall:
The champions, yes, thank you. When the super villain team that makes the champions and those two things came together and it was about Dr. Doom having this gas that made everybody obey him, and it was really Squadron Supreme… I mean emperor doom done…

Alex Grand:
Again.

Bob Hall:
Well, the first time and Jim may have done it before but this was the first time. And then I did something with the cube, with Moondragon, having that same power in the Avengers, that was one of the first avenger things that I did. Basically the same idea and then we did it one more time with him for Doom.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
And I think Jim had been talking to Michelinie about it and we did it and I thought it was probably the more successful-

Alex Grand:
Version.

Bob Hall:
…of the attempt. And so I remember Jim, bringing him in the office and talking to me about that and I never… I thought I want to work with Michelinie and I’m going to insist on inking it myself because it’s not out of continuity. And I’m just not going to tell him that I’ve done this story for him twice before and maybe he knew, maybe he thought, “Well, you’ll be able to get it right this time.” So, it was a good experience. That was the last Marvel interaction that I remember having with Jim.

Alex Grand:
With Jim.

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, because he-

Jim Thompson:
Speaking of that, I just want to do a timeline question. At some point, Dr. Miller of University of Nebraska, Lincoln theater department invites you back to return as the Artistic Repertory Theater, in charge of that, and you did that for six years. Is that, and there’s a blank spot there, is that coming in around 1988, ’89? I mean, when is that happening?

Bob Hall:
’87.

Jim Thompson:
’87?

Bob Hall:
The first year was ’87 and-

Jim Thompson:
…which is when Shooter leaves. So, that’s what I thought, that’s the right timeline.

Bob Hall:
Yep.

Jim Thompson:
So, you were gone from comics for a while?

Bob Hall:
No, I’m doing fewer comics because Jim was very conscious about giving me the work. That was maybe my big interaction with Shooter and no matter what anybody else says about him at that time, Jim kept me working and he would remind me occasionally that I should get a raise. And after Jim left, I don’t think I had the same…

Alex Grand:
Deference.


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Bob Hall:
Yeah, I didn’t have somebody that was doing that for me, I had to try to scrounge the work a little bit and go and get in the office and wander around and see who had something and I never had a project that I liked as well as Emperor Doom, really ever again. But I had a number of things that I did and some of it, some of my favorite stuff, I don’t know whatever happened to it. I don’t know if Marvel still has it but it was… They were doing a Nightmare on Elm Street comic and I did a couple of those and then they never got printed. Somebody said, “We can’t do a comic about a child molester and they dropped it. And under Tom, I did one of the last Howard the Duck’s and that never got printed.

Alex Grand:
I see.

Bob Hall:
And then I did the… One of the probably worst things I did for Marvel was the adaptation of the Captain America movie was about that time.

Jim Thompson:
I was going to ask you about that. What Captain America… Are you talking about the really bad one?

Bob Hall:
The Salinger one.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah the Salinger one.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, Salinger.

Bob Hall:
And I did it because Stan was supposedly going to write it and I thought, “Well, I’ll get a chance to work with Stan and Stan looked at the script because we were going to work from the script and he looked at some of the photos from it. And I don’t think we ever saw a print of the movie but we saw a focus from it, and Stan essentially said, “I can’t do this.” And so I did ended up doing the adaptation and just really from the script, as if it were a scenario and then Stan wrote the dialogue.

Alex Grand:
There you go.

Bob Hall:
So, in essence, I got to work with Stan, but boy it was bad.

Alex Grand:
Well, you know, I did read it when it came out. I liked it, but I mean I was 11, but yeah. So it sounds like the main difference going toward DeFalco was that just you weren’t having as much deference or someone keeping you occupied with work, it was actually less stuff of yours was being printed and you were being called less, things like that. That’s the main difference it sounds like.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, and I was working in the theater and I didn’t… That was when I would have had the small theater in New York and I was trying to get that started and I had determined that I was going to try to pursue that theater career.

Alex Grand:
I see.

Bob Hall:
And part of that was I was doing in the summers, the thing in Lincoln was a summer thing, but the pay was good and I was enjoying it and I’m really a very good stage director.

Alex Grand:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
And I enjoyed being able to do that. And also because of the nature of it, I got to hire people and so I would direct usually one show a season or sometimes two and then I could bring in other people that I knew and bring in New York actors and integrate them with some students and with some remarkably talented local people. And I was enjoying that but I continued to do the work for Marvel, occasional work for Marvel, it wasn’t as steady but that was okay. And I continued doing work right up through… I had one disastrous ending with Marvel and it was when, again I’m blanking here, the guy that followed DeFalco.

Alex Grand:
Oh, Bob Harris?

Bob Hall:
Bob Harris. I’ve never talked to Bob about it but Bob was not yet… This was still under DeFalco and Bob was doing a… There had just been a mini series about… I’m trying to think… I can’t. I really have talked too long, I’m beginning to run out of steam here, the Nick Fury, the Nick Fury series. And that had been quite successful, I think it was Zack did it but so they decided they wanted a monthly and they asked me to do it and I was…

Bob Hall:
I can’t remember what I was doing at the time whether it was another comics project or a theater project but I said, “I have time to do it but only if there’s a script waiting for me as soon as I’ve turned in the last one, the next script has to be there because I’ve got other stuff on my plate and I can do it as long as we keep rolling with it.” And I did the first one and it was good, Harris was writing it. And when [inaudible 02:28:55] the script and there was no script. And I said, “Okay, well, can I kind I get it in a couple of days?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I’m purposely blanking on who the editor was, I just don’t want to [crosstalk 02:29:12]

Alex Grand:
Don’t want to say it, yeah.

Bob Hall:
And getting back in a couple of days, no script and a week went by and a week and a half went by and close to two weeks went around then I had to say, “Look, you’ll have to get somebody else, I can’t do this. I told you, I now would never be able to get it in on time.” And then Harris… And I don’t think… In retrospect, I’m guessing that Harris was never told that that was the deal because I can’t imagine him not endeavoring to get the script and I didn’t know about it well, and he always works through an editor, you weren’t going to call somebody up and say, “What’s going on?” But then he became editor and then I never worked for Marvel again.

Alex Grand:
Ah, interesting. So that was… So, now we’re going to just go through the later years and I could-

Jim Thompson:
We’ll move faster.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, we’ll move faster for you.

Bob Hall:
I’ll try to talk less.

Alex Grand:
No, you’re great.

Jim Thompson:
No, you’re great.

Alex Grand:
But okay. So then in 1991 then, you left Marvel pretty much to then go to Valiant with Jim Shooter and Bob Layton, you worked on Shadowman, which you actually did some plotting then also writing and penciling, Don Perlin would ink you. Tell us about… How did you hear about Valiant? How’d you then start working for Valiant and Jim shooter again?

Bob Hall:
Well as I said, Jim was on my board of directors and he was starting Valiant at the time and I did some work for Valiant during that time, some early stuff of just posters of wrestlers because they had all this [crosstalk 02:31:02]

Alex Grand:
You mean the wrestling stuff, yeah.

Bob Hall:
All this kind of work going on for a while and I was going to do a Zelda book for them but they abandoned the Zelda thing before I could really do it, and that’s just as well. And then, it became clear… The theater job I had in Nebraska, and by this time I was going through a divorce, I decided to just move out to Nebraska for a while. I really wanted to get away from New York and then I found that the job in Nebraska was not going to continue probably because it was tied to the chairman of the department. And the Dean of the college said, “Whenever this guy Tyson Miller leaves that post, I’ll have to offer what you’re doing to the next chairman.” And I said, “Well, we are now at the place where we would have to develop a five-year plan if this was going to go anywhere so I’m just going to make this my last year then.”

Bob Hall:
And I thought, “Okay, well, what am I going to do?” And I called up Jim and he said, “We don’t need more artists right now, we need writers,” he said, “We’ll work with you as an artist too but for right now, what we need is artists.” And he said, “I’ll give you a choice of four or five different books,” that he mentioned that he was juggling around with, who would write what and then I picked… Shadowman was one of them and I read all of them and Shadowman seemed to me to be a failed book. There had been five issues and there have been, I think maybe three different artists or three different writers and two different artists or something like that but it was just changing all the time and it was not clear who the character was or what was happening. It just was clear that it was not going somewhere and I thought, “Well, I’ll take that one and if I fail with it too, I’m in good company, and if I succeed with it, I’ll look pretty good.

Alex Grand:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
And besides which it was tucked away in a corner of the universe and I thought, “We know it’s not going to be as much crossover with this guy and it’s New Orleans and if it does work, I’ll have to go to New Orleans.” So, I thought that all of these things are good things. So, I did take it over and took it over with issue six, which was kind of fun, Steve Ditko had drawn it and I got to write the dialogue for it. I think I may be listed as a co-writer but really it all been plotted, I just wrote the dialogue and then started.

Alex Grand:
Did you meet Steve Ditko at all?

Bob Hall:
I don’t think anybody met Steve Ditko at that point. So, I think maybe two or three issues that I wrote with other people drawing it and then I took over drawing it as well, and drew it through, basically did that, wrote it and drew it through issue 43. And so it was a long run and the book did well.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, you brought it back.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, it wasn’t a giant yet but it was always in the top hundred. And I felt I was doing good work, was inked by John Dixon and then by Tom Ryder. The thing with it was that by the time I had done the first story arc, and I was nervous about it, I thought, “Okay, I’ve not written a real arc stories for comics before, I had written plays mainly and I had not done a lot of comic book writing.” The closest I came was doing some rewrites when I was an editor and so I’m going to have to show this to Shooter and we’ll see what he thinks of it. And by the time I finished it, he was gone.

Alex Grand:
Right.

Bob Hall:
He’d been forced out of the company, and so I was working with Bob Layton and Layton pretty much left me alone. And Don Perlin was my editor and Don was a good editor, sometimes he didn’t know exactly what it was that I was doing because I was able to go off into some odd directions. But he had a lot of faith and he went with me on it and the feedback I got from him was always good. And I just had a wonderful time doing it and probably as much pleasure doing that. And the next thing I did, which was Armed and Dangerous, which I created from scratch as anything I’ve done in comics because there’s something very heady about writing and drawing your own stuff. And so that was probably the best time I’ve ever had and we were all making a lot of money and it was the nineties.

Alex Grand:
Oh, cool.

Jim Thompson:
Alex, can I pick that up with Armed and Dangerous?

Alex Grand:
Yeah sure, go for it. And just one quick thing, did you enjoy drawing what you wrote?

Bob Hall:
Oh my God, yes, because you were interacting with yourself, you would get an idea… And I usually use the Marvel method, I would do a scenario and I would draw it and as soon as I drew a panel, I knew what they were saying in the panel. So, it was a good experience, and it worked right up until when Acclaim took Valiant over, the handwriting of doom was on the wall. For one thing, sales were solely going down at that point, they were starting a collectors market, was starting to… That collectors market was just insane and it really was beginning to deteriorate, and I never understood collectors markets but they almost always, from the first one in history, the big tulip market that burst back in the 17th century, those bubbles always burst. And so if you’re smart, you didn’t buy a Porsche, you saved your money and in my case, my indulgence was I went and lived in Europe for a while, for a couple of years in England in Ireland but I was still working at the time so it worked out very well.

Bob Hall:
But we got to the point of Acclaim taking over and a claim was very insistent to what they… The guy, head of the company came in and said, “What we want is you to create icons that we can make into games.” And apparently, I was the person that opened his big mouth and said, “Well, if that’s all we’re doing, the company’s going to go under, we’d better tell good stories too.” And I don’t remember that except several people from Valiant had said, “Don’t you remember you saying that?” I said “No,” but it was true. And if one thing Valiant had was pretty good storytelling, it slowly went downhill because there’s a lot of stories that were still in the… they were underway and stuff. And then it was a certain point where I got called in and they said [inaudible 02:39:26]. And I said, “What do you mean? He said, “Well, he’s a black guy.”

Bob Hall:
And I said, “Well, he’s a Creole, he’s always been a Creole. That’s a very specific kind of culture and that’s what he’s always been, that’s what he’s always drawn.” And was quite insistent that he was a black guy and there certainly were enough African-Americans in the strip, it wasn’t [inaudible 02:39:53], it just that wasn’t who this particular character was. And I, “What’s going on?” And then I realized Valiant, Acclaim has done the demographics and decided that if they make Shadowman into a game, it will work better with the black protagonist. And so I said, “Look, this is a different character. Why don’t I do something else?” And because first of all, I was under contract, I’ll do something else and relaunch it, reboot the character with whatever Acclaim wants, and everybody was agreeable to that.

Bob Hall:
And I had the chance to almost kill off my character, I left him in issue 43 halfway, he jumped off a building because he was supposed to have died in the year 2000 and I thought anybody that was stuck with that as a prediction would be having a nervous breakdown. He went, “What’s happened if I tried to commit suicide before 2000?” But I can’t. And so I gave him a nervous breakdown and had him jump off a building and left him halfway down and said, “Okay, if they want him to live, I know how we can do that. If they want him to die, here’s their chance.” And as soon as I can tell, he’s still halfway down the building, so I went on to do Squadron Supreme so that’s the story of that one.

Jim Thompson:
So, you were talking about going to England and then Ireland, and you were living in Cornwall for a while. You were working at Valiant at that point? Okay. And how many years or how long were you over there?

Bob Hall:
About two and a half years until things really until the shit really hit the fan with the comics industry. Valiant was… Well first of all, that’s where it was when I found out I was adopted, so I did want to come back to Lincoln, that’s why I’m in Lincoln now because I said, “Okay, I want to move back to Lincoln for a while and try to find out something about that.” And also it just became clear eventually that the Acclaim was going to go under. You can just see the print runs were getting… I was doing Armed and Dangerous, print ones were getting less and smaller and smaller and smaller. And I think the last issue that was published of Armed and Dangerous, I had to find it on the newsstand and buy a copy, they weren’t even sending out copies to the artists anymore.

Jim Thompson:
And were you in England? Were you in England at that point?

Bob Hall:
Yep, I was living in York, England at that point. And so I said, “Well, I got to be back in the States.” I still was making pretty good money, my page rate was what was on my contract and so I was still producing the comic and it was the royalties that were going to hell but it was still fine and I’d saved a bunch of money but I… So, you came back home and actually had one more arc of Armed and Dangerous that I was doing and it was a four issue thing. And at that time, Fabian had taken over as editor and he called me and said, “Produce these pages as fast as humanly possible and we’ll try to pay you for anything that you get done.” And so I got three issues that I knew it would never be published.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
But that they paid me for it. And I thought I would never see those again but actually, they got returned to me about three years, four years ago.

Jim Thompson:
Before we talk about Armed and Dangerous, where did you live in Ireland? Just curious.

Bob Hall:
Dublin.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, okay. I love Dublin.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I loved it too. It was great.

Jim Thompson:
You a stout drinker?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I drank entirely too much Guinness and actually, my drug of choice was a Bushmills Black and yeah, well I came back weighing considerably more than I do now after all the stout but it was… yeah.

Jim Thompson:
So, let’s talked about Armed and Dangerous, that’s my favorite thing that you’ve done. I think that’s really-

Bob Hall:
Me too.

Jim Thompson:
That’s really good work, amongst other things I like, but that one, that’s special. What was it like? Because you’re doing that at the time that Miller has done Sin City, Stray Bullets is out, there’s some black and white stuff going on that’s really nice. Was it intimidating to jump into that?

Bob Hall:
I think when I first… Bob Layton suggested that that should be what I do as the alternative to Shadowman, was a crime thing of some kind. And I knew what they were looking for, nobody was saying you have to do imitation Miller, but I knew that it was in their heads and it was also in mine and I had to get it out of my head before I can do it. And Bob was very helpful, I did a little long one act play at that point in New York, I was living back in New York at that point. And Bob came to see it but but I also did a poster for it, and the poster was nothing like what my comic book work had been like, and he said, “Can you do that style for the book?” And I said, “Well, I can play with it,” because I’ve done a lot of black and white poster work and stuff like that, and I said, “Yeah, I can do… it won’t be exactly like that but I’ll come up with something.”

Bob Hall:
And that freed me a little bit from the Miller thing but the really freeing thing, I think if you start with a story and don’t feel it has to look a certain way but you let the story determine the look of what you’re doing, which I think was a little bit what I had done to discover that it was Shadowman because with Shadowman, I was at least freed from the think of everybody had to look like, “Yeah, I want to do my own thing but it has to look like Marvel, you know for Marvel. And so it was more freedom with Shadowman than with Armed and Dangerous. And so Armed and Dangerous, I just started trying to work from stories that I knew or had heard for most of the details in the book. The overall plots were mine but the details were all based in something, and so they had a life of their own already. And I think that’s why the book worked so that the first issue was…

Bob Hall:
Early on, when I moved to New York, we had just moved into the second place we lived, which was on West 81st street and it wasn’t a great neighborhood at the time, it’s really a lovely neighborhood now but it was a rough neighborhood, a lot of the upper west side was in the early seventies. And it wasn’t that far from Needle Park down on 72nd street to what’s known as drugs. A lot of drugs around the neighborhood and dealing, and there was a laundromat a block away that occasionally we went to and one day, I was walking past the newsstand and looked at the New York post and it said something about a severed head being found in a dryer in a laundromat. I looked and it was that laundromat, and I kept that story in my head for years, and for a while, I read the New York post because I wanted to find out what happened to that and it’s the only story I ever heard about it. I never heard about why the story… whether they caught anybody or stuff.

Bob Hall:
So I said, “Well, the first story that I do for Armed and Dangerous is going to tell the story of how that head got into that dryer, and I just went from there and the plot I’d had was a kid who didn’t know his folks were in the mob, had been kept somewhere upstate in a boys school, and it had been kept from him, and now all of a sudden, there had been deaths in the family and he was going to have to come down and he’s found himself in this milieu. He was called upon to be part of this severing of the head that his uncle, was one of the guys working for the mob, and he gets involved in it. And at the same time, just a lot of little smaller details with things that I had run into in New York or even things that happened to happen to me when I was in school, when I was just kid’s age and I could use them, transfer them to New York and use them.

Bob Hall:
And that gave, I think the thing of life and made it other than a Frank Miller rip off. I mean I was very satisfied with that, I would suggest to anybody that that’s the way to work, is to take stuff that you know and it will all of a sudden have a different identity. And later on, there was another story that I thought was just… Somebody told me this story and I said, “Oh my God,” that’s a whole issue that really happened, that there was a drug bust just outside Lincoln and somebody from Lincoln… I was living in New York and they had sent me this article, that the Nebraska highway patrol had stopped a car coming across to interstate 80, coming across country on its way to New York and found that it was a car full of cocaine. And so, the FBI got involved and there was a dispute between the highway patrol and the FBI as to who had jurisdiction.

Bob Hall:
But it occurs to the FBI’s they said, “No, they crossed the state line, that’s our,” and they were resistant and they said, “Look, okay, we won’t object,” but the guys who made the bust on the highway, “We get to go to New York and watch the FBI in action.” And so the guys in the car had talked and said where they were supposed to leave the car. And so that’s great< it’s their story, here’s the car sitting at a spot in New York and I have all of my characters sitting in one pizza place across the street, keeping an eye on it, they’re not going to go to that car until they’re sure it’s safe. And in this restaurant on the other side are the FBI and the guys from Nebraska watching it too, waiting for the crooks to come. And this is the part of the story that was a wonderful, it was true. It was parked in a no parking zone and the New York tow came and started to tow it away.

Bob Hall:
And the FBI came running out and said, “You can’t, you can’t tow this car, we’re FBI.” And the tow truck guys said “To hell with you, we’re New York tow.” And they got into a fight and the FBI’s trying to arrest the tow truck guys. So there’s a guy outside the tow truck and there’s a guy inside the tow truck, and the guy inside the tow truck called in an SOS and more tow trucks show up and block the street.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s great. Fantastic.

Bob Hall:
And so my guys are sitting over in the restaurant saying, “I think we’re going to let this one pass.” And it was just you can’t think up stuff like that, you could build on it but it was a gift, they was a gift that just all the stuff that had happened when I was in New York just could be there.

Jim Thompson:
So, would you say Armed and Dangerous was a book that’s unfinished, that you would have liked to have kept doing, that you were having fun with it?

Bob Hall:
Oh yeah. Well, like I said, I kept doing it and there’s an unpublished one, but we don’t even know who owns the rights to it, Armed and Dangerous. Supposedly, Valiant bought it maybe on mass and you can’t really ask, it’s like… Oh, I can’t think of the guy’s name, he’s the CEO of IDW, Goldstein?

Jim Thompson:
Yeah. Is that right, Alex?

Bob Hall:
Yeah, I think it was Goldstein. And he called me up few years ago and said, “I was working as an assistant at Acclaim back when they went under and they gave me a whole bunch of pages to put in a cardboard box and keep in my garage.”

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s how you got it back.

Bob Hall:
And he said, “I’ve been going through it,” and he said, “…and this stuff is great. Do you own the rights to it?” And I had to say, “No, I was under contract. Valiant owns the rights.” And I spent a little time trying to find out, I emailed Fred, who just avoided the issue of, “Did they buy that when they bought…” But of course, why would they not say that they own it? It’s easier for them to say they own it. And I would have to prove they didn’t own it and it’s… So anyway, but yes, I loved it. I would’ve kept doing it forever.

Jim Thompson:
That seems like a work of yours that other fans that weren’t necessarily following your Marvel stuff or your peers, some of the artists that you knew, would come up to you and just say, “Yeah, I really liked that.” That’s obviously a different level.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, there aren’t thousand…

Jim Thompson:
… different level.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, there aren’t thousands of them, but when they do, it’s memorable. They really remember that book.

Jim Thompson:
I’m one of those guys. I like that an awful lot. Do you think it helped you when you moved? Because after this Valiant goes … Or Acclaim goes away, you go and you do a little bit of work at Marvel, but you go and do a second round at DC doing Batman and stuff. Do you think that the grittiness, the urban aspect of that, of Armed & Dangerous, and getting away from Marvel helped you understand or do anything differently in terms of Batman and the Joker stuff?

Bob Hall:
Oh, I think so, although I’m not sure it was for my own good. It was in Denny O’Neil’s last days there. He was going to retire soon. He liked my ideas and what I did. And the best thing I did was an Elseworld’s thing called I, Joker. And I loved that, because it sort of anticipated the Hunger Games by any number of years. And that one was great fun. Then I wanted to do just a typical Batman story from when I was … The kind of stories that I read when I was … That I remembered them as being when I was a kid, although they weren’t really like it, but with a little bit of the early ’70s Batman, which I really loved thrown in. And I did Batman: DOA, and I had fun with that one. I just enjoyed doing it. It was just doing Batman.

Bob Hall:
Then, finally, I think it was my death knell at DC. Working with Denny, it was the last vestiges of the sane Batman. It was Batman had not gone really … He was grittier than some, but Denny didn’t do a gritty Batman. He did a dark Batman. You know what I mean?

Jim Thompson:
Yeah.

Bob Hall:
And it hadn’t gotten to that point where Batman was psychotic or was he not psychotic or that it got to be later on. It was kind of an old-style Batman. My favorite thing, but I think it was just like totally out of sync with where DC was going, was to do It’s Joker Time. Which had Joker take over a reality TV show, and because he had been … It was my version of Network. It was all about TV, and they were trying to cure him in Arkham Asylum by forcing him to watch daytime television constantly. It eventually made him even more insane than he had been before. The Joker end up winning at the end. And I kind of loved it, but it was all satire, and I think satire wasn’t in. I think it just puzzled people in DC.

Jim Thompson:
Did you see the recent Joker movie?

Bob Hall:
Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
And did you think of that at all when you were thinking back about your stuff?

Bob Hall:
I think they read I, Joker, or It’s Joker Time. I swear they did, because a lot of little elements in there that were …

Jim Thompson:
It’s hard to see it otherwise.

Alex Grand:
That struck a chord when I was looking over it, because there was Joker child abused as a kid, and then like him yelling at the TV cameras and the crowd, and I was like, “This is from the Todd Phillips movie.”

Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah.

Alex Grand:
But by 20 years before it. So I thought that was interesting.

Jim Thompson:
And probably better than the movie, because I’m not a fan, but. And now we just kind of want to go through quickly some of your more recent projects, and then I want to talk a little bit about your drama stuff for a few minutes and we’ll be done.

Bob Hall:
Okay.

Jim Thompson:
I’m sorry, go ahead.

Bob Hall:
Go ahead, you’ve got a list of stuff, I’m sure. You have lists.

Alex Grand:
So kind of as we gear towards the end, you penciled an issue of Freemind for Bob Layton and Dick Giordano Future Comics in 2002. And I assume this was because of the Bob Layton connection you had from Valiant, is that correct?

Bob Hall:
Sure.


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Alex Grand:
And what was your impression of this Future Comics endeavor that Giordano and Layton were going for?

Bob Hall:
I don’t know. Oh, what was the guy’s name that wrote A Brief History of Time?

Jim Thompson:
Hawkings.

Bob Hall:
Yeah. Hawkings.

Jim Thompson:
Stephen Hawkings.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, Stephen Hawkings, I felt it was a little in the design of the character was … I felt a little creepy about it. Because it was really, Stephen Hawkings as person who could become a superhero, and it was pretty clear that they were using his persona. The character looked like Stephen Hawkings. I thought it was a wonderful idea, I was a little … Just in the physicalization of it. I felt a little creepy about it, but I didn’t think it was a bad idea. It seemed kind of like maybe a little bit limited because … I didn’t know where the strip was going and that company didn’t go anywhere. It was just the wrong timing. It just wasn’t time for a new universe to be created.

Bob Hall:
I think it was too close to the cataclysm. And it was, in a funny way, it was old guys trying to do it. It wasn’t that Bob was that old, but it was like a time when what had happened was that the new guys had cleaned out the old guy house in Marvel and DC to a great extent. Most of us who were working, the majority of the people working back then, unless they had achieved superstar status weren’t getting work. And even some of those weren’t … I don’t think Walt got the much work for a while. Byrne continued to work, but it was always … Well, I think he wanted to do independent stuff, but-

Alex Grand:
Yeah, his own thing.

Bob Hall:
But it was just like people weren’t … People started getting work again, but it was just the wrong timing from that aspect. I think Bob wanted to do a good old-fashioned comic book company and it wasn’t the right moment.

Alex Grand:
Right, and I think I had also read that Diamond Distribution and them were doing something that didn’t work for them.

Bob Hall:
There was something going on there, Bob has explained it to me, and it kind of went in one ear and out the other [inaudible 03:03:09].

Alex Grand:
Right, right. And then a quick question, Jim will finish up with theater projects. When Jim Shooter, as you say, was forced out of Valiant in kind of the mid-’90s, and part of it was based on an interview with him that Layton and Massarsky kind of teamed up to get him out. Did you feel any … Because you’re friends with Shooter and he always looked out for you, did you in any way have any weird feeling towards Layton during the time of Future Comics or when you worked with him at Valiant because of that?

Bob Hall:
No. The one thing I did when Jim was fired, I mean, let go. He wasn’t fired in the same sense as Marvel, but he was forced out of the company, voted out of the company, I guess. I did call him up and said, “Well, what should I do? I’m working there now. You have to tell me if you … You were good enough to hire me,” I said. “If you’re going to tell me you can’t do that, I will probably go with wherever you come from with it.” And he said, “No, no. You have to keep working there, obviously, you got work. You must go ahead and do it.” And I had no ill feelings about … I felt, “Okay, that’s fine.” I think I avoided pretty much wanting to know the grisly details of it. It had nothing to do with me, and Jim had been gracious about it. And I thought, “Okay, this is fine. Bob was always decent to me, so that’s okay, you know?” It was what it was.

Alex Grand:
It was more like that, yeah. Okay. All right, Jim, let’s finish up with theater projects.

Jim Thompson:
A couple more comics that he’s done, and then we will. But I wanted to ask about you were going to say something, you had something you wanted to add, what was that about? Was that DC still?

Bob Hall:
Oh, no. It was about two things. The one thing that I did … I’ve done other comic projects in the meantime and a lot of them were private kind of runs and stuff, but I did do part of that one Kiss comic that they did with Platinum. And they wanted somebody who could harken them back to the ’70s, and so I actually got to work on a Kiss project, since you mentioned the blood in the ink. So I did a little bit of Kiss. In fact, I was out in San Diego when what’s his name called me, the guy with the tongue, what’s his name?

Alex Grand:
Oh, Gene Simmons.

Bob Hall:
Gene Simmons. The Platinum people called me and said, “Gene Simmons is here and wants to meet you. Gene Simmons knows who you are,” would know who everybody is. Because one of the deals with working for Kiss is that Gene buys all the art in advance. So he owns all the art. And they said, “He wants to meet you.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll try.” And it was San Diego, and 45 minutes later, I still had not made it to their booth. And Gene Simmons’ attention span is not 45 minutes, so I never got to meet Gene Simmons. I’m not really broken-hearted about that, but.

Alex Grand:
Right, right.

Jim Thompson:
It’s okay, from what I’ve heard.

Alex Grand:
And I’m a big Shannon Tweed fan. Jim knows that about me, so.

Bob Hall:
Yes, well that helps. No, what I was going to say is what I’m doing now. I’ve been working, I’ve been doing educational work, and have done work from … It’s usually on National Science Foundation grants and have done something about the measles called-

Jim Thompson:
Carnival of Contagion. That was a thing I was about to ask you about.

Bob Hall:
So I’ve done that. Well, let me fill you in the rest of it. This last year I did one called Mosquitoes Suck. That will be published at some point, I’m not quite sure when it’s coming out. That’s through the University of Wisconsin and again, the National Science Foundation. Then the woman who’s gotten me these jobs, a woman named Judy Diamond. She got this year a National Science Foundation grant to do, it’s called an emergency grant, to do weekly comic page on the coronavirus for kids. And trying to reach them in a slightly different way. So, that’s been going on. I just finished the last part of it today. It’s our last week, this week, because who knew it’d be going on this long? The great part about it is it’s the first time I got to do funny animals, which is great. If you want to take a look at it, you go to www, obviously, worldofviruses.unl.edu.

Jim Thompson:
Okay.

Bob Hall:
And I pretty much done most of the art with it. I got an assist in the second one from a couple of ones with Bob Camp, did a couple of them. And been working with a Native artist, collaborating with a Native artist on the last arc of it, but you might enjoy it.

Jim Thompson:
That’s a fascinating and rising field, doing medicine-related and health-related comics. And I’m seeing more and more of it and some of it is incredibly well done. I mean, really, really good comics in itself. So I’m very interested in that. So I’ll make a point of looking at that.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, take a look, let me know what you think.

Jim Thompson:
And I will send you a couple of links of some of the things that I’ve seen that I thought were pretty amazing.

Bob Hall:
That would be cool.

Jim Thompson:
Okay, we’ll do that. You also did one that’s not medical, I’ve seen some of it, and it looks just great. The ghostly haunted hallways one that you’re doing.

Bob Hall:
Oh, oh. Yes, yes. That was for the Alumni Magazine. They wanted me to do … It was the 150th anniversary of the University of Nebraska and they asked if I would do a comic about the … A series of comic pages in their alumni magazine last year on the history of the university. I said, “Sure, how many pages have you got?” And they said, “We can give you two to three each issue for four issues.” And I said, “I can’t do the history of the university in that length of time. But why don’t I do a history of one building?” And the theater building, which I know a lot about, is supposed to be haunted. So I said, “Why don’t we do that one and I’ll have the theater ghost narrate the history of it?” Again, it was a lot of fun, something different.

Jim Thompson:
You could tell you were having fun with it, the pages that I saw. That’s great.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, thanks.

Jim Thompson:
So super quickly, you were doing … And I’m not sure when, you started teaching comics a little bit. Teaching a history of comics and some other sequential drawing stuff. When was that?

Bob Hall:
I was working with a college out in central Nebraska, Hastings, Nebraska. They have a nice little college out there, and they asked me to come out and do a series on how to draw comics. So I would go out there. It was their January class. They had a special series in the month of January which was between semesters when you could take a whole class by somebody would come out and do every day for two weeks. So it was all a concentrated thing. Had a lot of fun doing it, and did it again for the University of Nebraska. And did it again for Nebraska Wesleyan University, so I’ve done it several times.

Bob Hall:
Don’t know if I ever want to do it again, but it’s quite enjoyable. It’s something I started having in my back pocket. People have talked about doing something with Native Americans, because what I try to do is get kids to tell their story as opposed to automatically going to do like manga or a superhero story. That’s something I got from doing the Armed & Dangerous is work with … You’ve got a story. You figure out what stories you have to tell, rather than feeling you have to tell other people’s stories, and so did that. This was all while I was running a Shakespeare festival here.

Jim Thompson:
Well, that was going to be my next question. Tell us a little about that. That’s the Flatwater Shakespeare?

Bob Hall:
Yeah. When I got back to Lincoln, I mean, everything was drying up. It was clear that the DC work was … I did some other stuff at DC, I did an issue of Chase, by the way, that was just the inking. The guy, again, I can’t think of the names, there’s been too many names in my … But he’s just a fantastic artist.

Jim Thompson:
Williams, right? Is it?

Bob Hall:
Williams, yes, thank you. And he inked it, it was just beautiful, it was beautiful stuff.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, he’s a great artist.

Bob Hall:
But I was back, I wasn’t getting any work, I intended to stay here for maybe a year or so, and try to see what I could find out, which was nothing about my background. But all of a sudden, the cost of living in Lincoln looked awfully good. I had saved up money during the ’90s and I was okay for a while. And then, the opportunity came to start a Shakespeare festival here. A small one, but we had a facility in a local historic cemetery that had been there since the end of the Civil War. And there was an old stables in that cemetery and somebody said, “You should take a look at this, this could be a Shakespearean theater.” And I thought, “Yeah, really? In a cemetery? Okay.”

Bob Hall:
I went out and it was perfect. You know, when the plague would hit London, Shakespeare’s troupe would have to go out and play in inn-yards, and they would have to leave London and tour around. They would play in inn-yards. His stuff works in that way, if you don’t have the audience at one end and play at the other end, if you have the audience all surrounding it. And it was just a beautiful place to do Shakespeare and we started doing it and it’s still going. I ran it for 15 years and that was enough. I realized that I had done, over the course of my entire career, I directed Twelfth Night six times and that was probably one time too many and it was time for me to pass it on somebody. And you want to pass these things on and see it have a life afterwards, but. And that’s when I started doing the educational stuff was about the time … And I went back to school and got an MFA in art also.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, was that at New School?

Bob Hall:
No, that was that down [Stacey 03:15:48] thing that I talked to you about.

Jim Thompson:
Okay.

Bob Hall:
This was like the year I turned 70, I started going back to school. I’ve always loved doing paintings that had nothing to do with genre stuff, and usually they’re on the abstract side. I’ll show you one, that one behind me here.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s nice.

Bob Hall:
And it was something I did when my writing partner, this guy, David Richmond I told you about, passed away. And he was living at that time on our horse farm down in Versailles, Kentucky. This one is called Mr. Richmond Walking Away. But I love doing this kind of work. And it’s just a different … It’s just such a different thing for me.

Speaker 1:
Daddy, do you want [inaudible 03:16:43]?

Jim Thompson:
Almost [crosstalk 03:16:43].

Alex Grand:
It’s interesting, that art, you can tell that you had quite an affection for that guy.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, yeah. I started doing painting on the side when I was in New York still.

Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 03:17:00].

Bob Hall:
When I was attending that studio where I do models. And I always did … I ended up doing mainly abstract work because comics is so much like drawing, sometimes it gets to be like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the heads of pins. It’s like this kind of work. And doing something where I could just take paint and move it around was so cathartic. And also, I didn’t think much about trying to sell any of it. Occasionally I would sell a piece, but to do something I wasn’t trying to make money from was very freeing. It freed my head up a lot because everything you do in comics is to make money. I mean, you may really feel something about it, but it’s your job.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, it’s a commercial art, absolutely.

Bob Hall:
Yeah, and doing something very-

Jim Thompson:
I have two quick questions, Shakespeare related.

Bob Hall:
Okay.

Jim Thompson:
Did you ever want to do anything, any adaptation or anything, play with Shakespeare in terms of your art or your comics work?

Bob Hall:
I was going to do, you know, a Valiant … One of the last things that Acclaim … Acclaim was doing this, they bought the rights to Classics Illustrated, and I was going to do King Lear. I was going to draw King Lear and still would like to that. But there have been so many manga King Lears and various comic adaptions. I think most of them, there have been a lot of them, and most of them have been pretty lousy. So I would love to have a crack at that and see if you could do something as elegant as P. Craig Russell, is my idol for that kind of stuff. His adaptations of operas, have you seen any of those?

Jim Thompson:
Oh, yeah. All of them. Beautiful.

Bob Hall:
Oh, they’re just breathtaking. If you could do something that good with Shakespeare, it would be fun.

Alex Grand:
He’s a painter, too. So that would work out really well.

Jim Thompson:
And then my final question on that, is what was your favorite Shakespeare experience as either a performer, or as a director, or even as simply in attendance at a show? What was the most meaningful, just perfect, Shakespeare experience did you have?

Bob Hall:
I can tell you two. They’re probably not the most profound ones, but the first one is an actually Shakespearian experience. My ex-wife and I, Lorraine, and we are still very close, she and I. I’m now married to a woman named Paula Ray, that’s her last name, Ray, who’s … It’s just been a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful relationship. But anyway, Lorraine and I are going to London for the first time. It was that time when we went over on the [inaudible 03:20:04] Express and we’re seeing the [inaudible 03:20:08] and we go in every day to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and say, “What seats have you got?” So we can get the discounted seats which means that we’re seeing all these plays, but we’re seeing them in different parts of the theater the whole time.

Bob Hall:
And for Henry IV, Part 1, we’re seated in the front row. And Prince Hal and Hotspur are having a duel. And the sword of Hotspur breaks and goes flying into the air above our heads and comes down, falls at Lorraine’s feet, and bounces up and she catches it in her lap. We look up and all of the great actors in England are staring at Lorraine for one moment. And then someone tosses Hotspur a sword and they go on. And the only bad part is that at intermission, all of these usher people come running up saying, “Are you okay?” And she said, “Yes.” And they said, “Well then, give us back the sword.” We thought we could take it home.

Jim Thompson:
That’s like going to a ball game and catching a fly. That’s fantastic.

Bob Hall:
So many years later, it was at the end of the ’80s, by this time we’d done Dracula in England and we’re staying in Stratford with a guy named Jack Moore who was an actor, he was in that. He became a friend of ours and he’s playing Stratford. So we go over to see him because he said, “You can come over and stay with me.” So we’re there, and he arranges a reading of … I did an adaptation of Frankenstein that has been done a couple of times. It’s never quite been right, but the Royal Shakespeare Company did a reading of it which was delightful.

Bob Hall:
And then we go to see this play, now it’s not a Shakespeare play, but it’s at the Royal Shakespeare Company in their little theater where the audience is sort of surrounding everything. It was called The Art of Success. I don’t know what there was about night, but again, it was Lorraine and I, sitting, watching it. And it was one of the best theater experiences I’ve ever had. There was something just magical about … The actors were wonderful, the play seemed wonderful, and it was just something in the air.

Bob Hall:
And they came out for a curtain call and the audience kept applauding, and they went off, and anymore standing ovations are a dime a dozen. Everybody stands up for everything because they’ve paid a lot of money and they want to be sure they’re getting their money’s worth. This was, the audience didn’t stand up, we just sat there. I still get emotional thinking about it, because it was like we just kept applauding, and we decided as a group, as the audience, that we demanded another curtain call. And they had already left. And we sat there and we just continued to applaud, and we applauded for what must have been like 10 minutes, which is crazy in a theater. It doesn’t happen. And finally the actors came back on and some were crying. Some had makeup, cold cream on their faces and in their bathrobes. And they had been rounded up and asked to come back to take one more bow.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, wow.

Bob Hall:
And the next day at breakfast, Jack said to us, “What happened? What happened? Everybody’s talking about it.” And I said, “I don’t know. It was just something that … I don’t know.” I probably will never have another experience like that again, where everybody makes this kind of decision that this was wonderful and we’re not ready to go home yet, and come back one more time. It was great. So that’s my best theater experience of all time.

Jim Thompson:
Well, we’re not going to get a better story than that. That’s great. So I think we should close out.

Bob Hall:
Okay.

Alex Grand:
Bob, thank you so much for your generous time. It’s actually quite amazing, you’re really different from the other interviewers in that you’re an actor, performer, writer, editor, artist, an auteur, and it was a real pleasure to learn the different dimensions of your artistic and professional outlets. Thank you so much for your time today.

Bob Hall:
Well, thanks for doing it. Let me know when it becomes a reality. You’re going to tell me, “Okay, now we’re going to get this down to 10 minutes.”

Alex Grand:
No, no, no.

Jim Thompson:
No, no. We go long.

Alex Grand:
This is a holistic Bob Hall experience, yes.

Bob Hall:
Okay. Great, this was a lot of fun.

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