Saturday, January 29, 2005

Captain Sticky, R.I.P.

Here's a picture of two super-heroes at the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention. The one at right is Stan Lee, and he's quite the super-hero but this posting is not about him. The gent at left is Richard Pesta, who was known to many as Captain Sticky, and I just now found out that he passed away almost a year ago.

Billing himself as the world's only real-life super-hero, Captain Sticky was a fixture of the early San Diego cons. He operated out of that city, driving around in his Stickymobile (a highly-customized Lincoln Continental), functioning as a flamboyant crusader, mostly for consumer rights. For a few years there, he often appeared on the news, battling various injustices that ranged from nursing home abuse to auto mechanic rip-offs. As I understood it, he got results largely by just showing up at the crime scene. He was one of those colorful characters that no reporter could resist. So if he pulled up outside your business, so did the TV cameras...and if you had a lick of sense, you'd just correct whatever he thought needed correction.

That he righted some wrongs is undeniable, but a lot of us were skeptical about this person, who'd named himself based on his love of peanut butter. He sometimes claimed to be independently wealthy and said his heroic exploits were his way of "giving back" to society. Maybe...but he was also constantly trying to get writers and artists to whip up pilot issues of a planned Captain Sticky comic book and blanched at the suggestion that he pony up a bit of cash. Around the time of the above photo, Marvel was interested in publishing his exploits, and a fine writer-artist named Don Rico was engaged to produce the first issue. This lasted until Don discovered that Marvel was expecting the Good Captain to underwrite the costs, while Sticky was expecting Marvel to shower all with currency. Don quit, I turned it down and so did everyone else I knew.

But as I said, the guy did some good...and he had a real flair for self-promotion. The TV series, Real People, briefly made a celebrity of him and he turned up at a lot of public functions all over California in the late seventies and early eighties. I don't recall seeing him anywhere after around 1985. This article fills in the rest of the story and tells us of his death last February.

My thanks to Alan Light for the photo (he took it) and for calling my attention to the obit. Rest in peace, Sticky.

• Posted at 10:35 AM · LINK

A Few More Johnny Links

Nick Madigan reports on how Johnny spent his retirement years.

Warren Francke examines Johnny's Nebraska roots.

Former Tonight Show writer Tom Finnigan remembers.

David Letterman will be back from vacation on Monday night and will do a show about Johnny. He has former Tonight Show producer Peter Lassally and former Tonight Show bandleader Doc Severinsen, plus clips from both Johnny's shows and Johnny's appearances on Letterman's old NBC program.

• Posted at 8:39 AM · LINK

Well-Read Fred

My amigo Fred Hembeck has one of the best comics weblogs out there. He writes about his love of the medium. He offers up historical artifacts. He even prints Fred Hembeck cartoons.

In the middle category, he's currently offering two bits of funnybook history. One is this 1966 article on Will Eisner from the New York Herald-Tribune Sunday magazine section. The author, Marilyn Mercer, knew Eisner pretty well, having worked for him for years.

The other is this 1966 article by Nat Freedland, also from the New York Herald-Tribune Sunday magazine section. It's a profile of Stan Lee and, peripherally, Jack Kirby...and it was one of the dozen-or-so factors that destroyed that partnership. Jack was furious at how little he was mentioned, how unflattering the few mentions were, and most of all at how Stan was depicted as the sole genius of Marvel Comics. Jack's wife Roz read the article early the Sunday morning it came out, woke Jack up to read it...then Jack phoned Stan at home to wake him up and complain. Both men later recalled that the collaboration was never the same after that day, and it was more than just an injured ego at work.

Jack had then been promised he would soon receive a hefty raise and some bonus for the way his art was being used in Marvel merchandising. Shortly after the article came out, things changed. The raise turned out to be minimal and the bonus disappeared because (he said) Marvel's business folks elected to believe the article, or at least to use it as a reason to deny him his due. According to Jack, when he argued his worth to the company, someone there would cite Freedland's piece as independent verification of how things were. It pretty well firmed up Kirby's view that he was being swindled because he was contributing mightily to the creation of the characters and stories but being credited only for artwork. Not long after, in an attempt to appease Jack, the credits on most Marvel books were altered so they didn't say who did what. Instead of saying "Written by Stan Lee, Drawn by Jack Kirby," an issue of Fantastic Four would say something like "by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" or "A Lee-Kirby Production." As far as I could tell, most readers did not appreciate the difference. They just figured it was a different way of saying Stan wrote it and Jack drew it. (The less-specific credit format had been used occasionally before Jack and a few other artists complained, but it became standard for a while in response to those complaints.)

There were other, more serious events that drove Kirby from Marvel a few years later...and I think I describe them all in the bio of Jack I hope to finish in the next year or three. But this had a major impact, and I'm sure we all thank Br'er Hembeck for making it available for us to read.

• Posted at 7:55 AM · LINK

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