The start of this long, wandering essay can be found right here. I'm still not sure where and when the end will be.
As I've mentioned often here, I can't recall a time in my childhood when I didn't have comic books. My parents couldn't, either. They were buying them for me before I could read what was in them. In fact, I believe i learned to read in large part because of them.
It was Dell Comics at first, particularly Dell Comics that featured cartoon characters I knew from TV — Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — all characters with tails except Elmer Fudd. I collected them, read them and tried to draw the characters I saw in them. Much inspiration came from drawing lessons that Walter Lantz gave between cartoons on The Woody Woodpecker Show and from a book called Easy Way To Draw which I wrote about here and other places on this blog.
One day in early 1959, I began adding super-hero and adventure comics to the mix. I started with comics featuring Superman, a character who I, of course, knew from TV. The George Reeves TV series was on several times a day in Los Angeles and Engineer Bill, a local kids show host, showed the Fleischer/Paramount Superman cartoons again and again and again. There were only seventeen of them.
I loved Superman with this reservation: I was able to draw the funny animal characters fairly well for a kid my age. But no matter how I tried — and I tried and I tried — I wasn't able to draw what I considered a decent Superman. The best I could so was to draw his chest insignia. That, I mastered pretty well by the age of eight. Ten years later, I worked for a man named Jack Kirby who, largely against his will, was drawing the Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic book and Jack would sometimes have me draw or redraw Superman's chest insignia.
Buying Superman comics in '59 quickly led to Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and others. And then, shortly after Christmas of that year, I found a comic on the newsstands that excited me in a way no comic book ever had or has since. It was The Brave and the Bold #28 and it introduced The Justice League of America. It featured Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, John Jones (aka J'onn J'onzz, aka The Manhunter From Mars) and maddeningly brief cameos of Superman and Batman.
Even the cover thrilled me. I still don't know what the hell Wonder Woman was doing with her golden lasso connecting to nothing but I will always love that cover…
Ganging up characters like that is pretty common now. In fact, these days readers complain if any two characters don't appear together now and then. But when I was seven years old, as I was in '59, that was something special…something very special.
The Brave and the Bold had become a "tryout" comic and that issue was the tryout for the Justice League to see if readers would buy enough copies to warrant a regular J.L.A. comic. I don't see why they needed a tryout. Of course, it was going to sell. But there were two more issues of the J.L.A. in The Brave and the Bold. One came out the following March 1 and the next came out a bit less than two months later. Then in August, they brought out Justice League of America #1 as a bi-monthly. DC was ridiculously cautious then about starting new comics.
It was edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox. It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky doing what I later heard some of his fellow artists describe as The Hardest Job in All of Comics. To draw all those characters and to sometimes fit all of them into one panel along with Fox's often-excessive captions and dialogue? One of those fellow artists, Gil Kane, once told me, "It's not that I couldn't have drawn that comic as well as Mike Sekowsky. I couldn't have drawn it at all."
The Schwartz-Fox-Sekowsky issues of that book became my favorite comic of the day and I think it's still one of the two best "team" comics ever done. The other, which came along two years later, was the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four. In the next part of this, I'll tell you how I came to know and work with Mike Sekowsky and I may finally get to the part where knowing him convinced me to give up drawing.
