I came to Marvel relatively late: my comics reading began with the Weisinger-edited Superman titles in the early sixties, and moved from there to the broader DC line slowly.  I read a few Marvels along the way from friends’ stacks, but my mom limited me to three new issues a week in hope of preserving…

I’ve probably done dozens of interviews and convention panels over the years, maybe a hundred?  Some questions come up over and over, and at this point trigger almost prerecorded answers.  Some, of course, deal with confidential information that I don’t feel can be spoken about.  Others that I think someone might be curious about never come up.  Here’s one…

Tex Blaisdell was a long time comics pro, both skilled and well liked, but by the early 1970s, not in top form.  He’d done work on many newspaper comic strips, most recently a stint on Little Orphan Annie after its creator, Harold Gray’s death.  For some of that time he’d collaborated with Joe Orlando on…

I don’t think anyone likely to be reading this website isn’t going to check out the new SANDMAN series when it drops on Netflix this Friday, and based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think anyone will be disappointed.  I’ve known and enjoyed working with all three of the key creative folks: Neil through all…

For the ancient history buffs, the Phantom Stranger launched as a title of his own in 1952, at a time when it was pretty rare for DC to debut a character in their own pages.  The original thought was to do a riff on Mark Twain’s the Mysterious Stranger, and if you look closely at that…

One thing that worries me about the increasing trend of virtual offices is the learning process.  In some fields, very specifically comics but I’m sure others as well, much of the learning is informal and osmotic.  There’s some formal or structured training, to be sure, but equally important (more important?) is what you learn by observation. When…

It’s July 4th weekend, a time when many fans of my generation remember the amazing time we had at the New York Comicons of the 1970s.  Everyone’s memories of great events is biased by the point they occurred in the individual’s life, so it’s pretty much useless to argue about when the “best” Comicons were. …

I’ve been teaching on an undergrad and graduate level at a number of colleges for the last dozen years or so, usually 3-4 classes per term.  I don’t teach required courses, or relatively conventional classes because I’m not the best person for them; traditional pedagogy isn’t something I ever studied, and my goal is to…