So while I can’t answer too many questions — confidentiality issues, general decency, and limits on the number of hours in the day I can spend here — I’ll try to answer questions that seem of general interest as often as I can.
General caution: please don’t ask me to review portfolios, scripts, or help you get work (time just doesn’t permit).
Facebook pretty often, my own website not often enough (sorry). Twitter almost never these days.
Dunno that I meant that Nelson was in any of those stories. He definitely was drawn into an INFERIOR FIVE issue that featured a tour of the DC offices in the late ’60s. But his legend is definitely a part of the DC Universe and the stories he contributed to the Legion (and his own creation, the original Secret Six) enhanced it.
One of the proudest accomplishments in my tenure at DC was the birth and success of Vertigo. Karen Berger launched a line of comics that attracted a new audience at a time when it was very challenging to do so, and went on to build a groundbreaking library of amazing titles. I once described her job as publishing things that made me uncomfortable, and I’ve never enjoyed being uncomfortable more.
I’m afraid there’s no current plans for those individual volumes. It amazes me that Taschen has done so many editions from the original, and I’m pleased everyone seems to keep enjoying (and buying) them…
Back in my assistant editor days, probably in 1973 or 1974, Allan Asherman and I were dispatched to a Brooklyn warehouse where DC had some of its old files. I’ve long forgotten what we were sent there for (hope we found it), but it turned out to be a building that Warner Bros. owned and had inherited from the days when they made movies in New York City. Maybe it was First National, an early movie company that had been acquired by WB in the twenties that had originally owned it? In any case, the warehouse was a mile or two from my childhood home, and I’d walked past it many, many times without ever realizing it. Our prize find that day was one of George Reeves’ costumes, a brown and yellow one used for shooting the black & white episodes. Allan, a great expert on the Reeves shows and the earlier serials, understood what it was immediately.
Thanks, Robert. I especially appreciate reactions from folks like you who knew Will. His teaching years were one of the least documented parts of his life, and so many of his students were great to share their memories.
Nope. Done some single lecture/seminars on aspects of comics writing, and many years ago we did a long program at DC for some prospective new comics writers that I spoke at every week (and yielded the talented Mindy Newell and longtime Dark Horse editorial wizard Randy Stradley), but never any writing on the subject.
Most of the good stuff from the Implosion was eventually published, and I think there were very few instances when single (or double or triple) pages were cut out. The tendency was to cut 25 page stories into two issues, and fill in the back with 8 pagers that either existed or were commissioned for the purpose, as I recall.
Over the years there were a few single pagers cut for one reason or another…I recall a Legion page from the Grell era which we eventually printed in an AMAZING WORLD OF DC issue…but it was pretty rare.
