Here's the question from from J. Williamson. He (or, I guess, she) is referencing this post here…
I read your piece about uncredited artists doing assistant work on comic books and I know you draw a little so I thought I'd ask did you ever do uncredited art on any comic book?
Yeah. I drew a few things for the Hanna-Barbera comic book department when that operation was in operation. And any time for any outfit when I wrote a comic book and the original art passed through my hands on its merry way to the editor or printer, I might do some corrections. Usually, they were lettering corrections but occasionally, an art fix was necessary. A couple of times, I was fortunate that someone who drew way better than I ever did was visiting me and I'd arm-twist them into doing it. I recall arm-twisting, at various times, Sergio Aragonés, Dave Stevens, Carol Lay, Scott Shaw! and maybe one or two others — to do small repairs but often, I did them.
When I was the writer of the Blackhawk comic book for DC, even before they made me editor, I did a few things like that. There were a few back-up stories (i.e., not drawn by Dan Spiegle) where I did some of the inking. There was a short story that Alex Toth penciled and in one place, Alex drew the wrong character and I was afraid to ask him to correct it so I did. There were other examples.
There was a period there where the great artist Alfredo Alcala was living close enough to me that we shared the same Federal Express delivery guys. We were both getting a lot of FedEx packages from DC or Marvel and the drivers, if they saw the DC logo or a drawing of Spider-Man on the mailing label would sometimes just drop the package off on my doorstep even if it was addressed to Alfredo. One time, I got up in the morning, opened one such package before I read the label and found 20 pages of Conan the Barbarian artwork penciled by John Buscema.
This is the original art I'm talking about here, not stats or Xeroxes. Genuine, fresh, pristine John Buscema pencil art.
I briefly considered just keeping the pages. If you've ever seen what that man put on paper before anyone applied ink, you'd understand why. But I guess all those years of reading comic books about honorable super-heroes doing the right thing ruined me and I instead drove the pages over to Alfredo's apartment. Alfredo didn't drive but if he had, he would have figured out a way to ink an entire comic book while driving to the supermarket.
Another time, I got an entire issue from DC of Batman pencil art by Gene Colan, whose work was, prior to inking, equally stunning. I drove it over to Alfredo's and this time — I think because he was lonely, not because he needed actual help — he told me to pull up a drawing board and ink some backgrounds on the story. So I did…and no, I can't identify which issue.
Alfredo's apartment was dominated by a huge drawing table that two or three people could have worked on. It was scattered with various pages from various projects he was working on and he might ink a few panels on a page of Conan, then leave the ink to dry while he penciled part of a mystery story on a commission drawing he was doing for one of his many fans.
He had four or five TV sets in front of him, all on, each connected to a VCR that was running one of his favorite movies. When he had company, the sound was muted on all of them. When he was alone, which he was most of the time, he would turn on the audio of whichever caught his interest at that moment. When any of the videos reached its end, it was rewound and restarted at the beginning until he got bored with it and switched cassettes.
He didn't do this while I was there but Tom Luth, who occasionally assisted Alfredo, told me he saw Alfredo just doze off in mid-inking, sleeping with a wet brush looming over the page. An hour or two later, Alfredo would wake up and resume what he was drawing or inking. What's more, Tom said, Alfredo was totally unaware that he'd done more than close his eyes for a minute or so.
The day I brought those Batman pages to him, I did about an hour of inking buildings and trees, sitting at a smaller drawing table he had chatting with the man as we both worked. Alfredo had opinions about everything and a lot of valid (I thought) gripes about how American comic book companies had made use of his services. It was fascinating but eventually, the oppressive odor of his constant cigarettes drove me from the premises.
Come to think of it, I probably have quite a few anecdotes like these. If anyone's really interested, I'll try and excavate them from my memory but this post has gone on long enough.
