A Chilling Look Back at Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
, COMiCs bROnzE AGE AnD bEYOn Di. 01 2 Oct. 2 o.60 N . 9 5 $ 8 . d e v r e s e R s t h g i R l l A . s c i m o C C D © & M T w o r c e r a c S d n a n a m t a B A chilling look back at Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale ’s 9 0 8 2 6 7 7 2 8 HALLOWEEN HEROES AND VILLAINS: SCARECROW 5 6 2 • SOLOMON GRUNDY • MAN-WOLF • LORD PUMPKIN • 8 1 and RUTLAND, VERMONT’s Halloween Parade Volume 1, Number 60 October 2012 Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond! The Retro Comics Experience! EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich J. Fowlks COVER ARTIST Tim Sale COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Scott Andrews Tony Isabella Frank Balkin David Anthony Kraft Mike W. Barr Josh Kushins BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . .2 Bat-Blog Aaron Lopresti FLASHBACK: Looking Back at Batman: The Long Halloween . .3 Al Bradford Robert Menzies Tim Sale and Greg Wright recall working with Jeph Loeb on this landmark series Jarrod Buttery Dennis O’Neil INTERVIEW: It’s a Matter of Color: with Gregory Wright . .14 Dewey Cassell James Robinson The celebrated color artist (and writer and editor) discusses his interpretations of Tim Sale’s art Nicholas Connor Jerry Robinson Estate Gerry Conway Patrick Robinson BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: The Scarecrow . .19 Bob Cosgrove Rootology The history of one of Batman’s oldest foes, with comments from Barr, Davis, Friedrich, Grant, Jonathan Crane Brian Sagar and O’Neil, plus Golden Age great Jerry Robinson in one of his last interviews Dan Danko Tim Sale FLASHBACK: Marvel Comics’ Scarecrow . .31 Alan Davis Bill Schelly Yep, there was another Scarecrow in comics—an anti-hero with a patchy career at Marvel DC Comics John Schwirian PRINCE STREET NEWS: A Visit to the (Great) Pumpkin Patch . .36 Scott Edelman Dan Slott Karl Heitmueller corrals comics’ creepiest for an All Hallows’ Event Mike Friedrich Aaron Sultan Joe Giella Roy Thomas BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Black and White and Dead All Over: Len Gould John Wells The Solomon Grundy Story . .39 Grand Comic- David Wenzel Born on a Monday, Grundy keeps coming back to bedevil. With Conway, James Robinson, and Thomas Book Database Randy Wiggins BACKSTAGE PASS: Rutland Memories . .51 Alan Grant Wikipedia Al Bradford’s Polaroid-packed peek into the costume parties that most of us only know through Robert Greenberger Gregory Wright their fictional comic-book incarnations Karl Heitmueller Heritage Comics Auctions BEYOND CAPES: That’s Not a Man, That’s a Man-Wolf, Baby! . .59 David Hyde The horror series that spun out of Spider-Man’s web. With Isabella, Kraft, and Slott FLASHBACK: Dead Avengers . .65 If you’re viewing a Digital Resuscitating the classic Avengers storyline “The Korvac Saga” Edition of this publication, BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Life, the Ultraverse, and Everything: The Reign of PLEASE READ THIS: the Lord Pumpkin . .69 Dan Danko, Steve Englehart, and Aaron Lopresti illuminate the lore of the Malibu menace This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our BACK TALK . .77 website. If you downloaded it from another Reader feedback website or torrent, go ahead and read it, . s c and if you decide to keep it, DO THE i m RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, BACK ISSUE ™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, o C or a printed copy (which entitles you to the Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE , c/o C D free Digital Edition) at our website or your Michael Eury, Editor, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: [email protected]. 2 1 local comic book shop. Otherwise, DELETE Six-issue subscriptions: $60 Standard US, $85 Canada, $107 Surface International. Please send 0 2 IT FROM YOUR COMPUTER and DO subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Tim Sale. © & NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR Batman and the Scarecrow TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective If you enjoy our M POST IT ANYWHERE. T companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2012 Michael n publications enough to download them, Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. Prince Street News © 2012 Karl Heitmueller. BACK ISSUE is a TM a m please pay for them so we can keep t of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. a producing ones like this. Our digital B editions should ONLY be downloaded at www.twomorrows.com Halloween Heroes and Villains Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1 [Editor’s note: This article, which surveys the 1996–1997 maxiseries issue by issue, contains spoilers regarding its murder-mystery plot. ] In 1996 DC Comics introduced the maxiseries Batman: The Long Halloween by writer Jeph Loeb artist Tim Sale. They had previously worked together on a revival of Challengers of the Unknown and had enjoyed the creative process and wanted to work together again. Thus began a series of one-shots produced with editor Archie Goodwin: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight one-shot Halloween stories Halloween Special #1 (Nov. 1993), Madness (1994), and Ghosts (1995). With each progressing work, Loeb and Sale developed by n d a l l C . W i g g i n s R a their skill with the mythology of the Dark Knight. Sales dictated a demand for more and maybe longer work from the pair, so they worked out a scheme with Goodwin that became a maxiseries capped with prestige- format bookends— Batman: The Long Halloween (TLH ). When the first issue, “Crime” (Oct. 1996), hit the stands, I was reaching the end of a seven-year run as a comic-book store owner, so I wouldn’t get to see how well this series would sell or how its influence would impact the world of the Batman—not firsthand, anyway. I do remember that when I was first introduced to the amazing work of the Loeb/Sale team I was skeptical, but interested, and ready to see where things would go. I came from the generation of comics fans where Batman was drawn by Jim Aparo, Gene Colan, Don Newton, and the other incredible artists from the 1970s and 1980s. Tim Sale’s style was an unknown for me and it took a little getting used to, but in time I did just that and he has become one of my all-time favorite Batman artists. Writer Jeph Loeb is a master of suspense, plotting, and character development, and over the years he has only improved to become a leading writer for both DC and Marvel. HAUNTING HUES AND HOLIDAY HORRORS One of the most important, yet often overlooked elements of a comic book is color. We take it for granted as part of the art and just enjoy the story and art as a whole. Batman: The Long Halloween changed that for many people, me included. The Long Halloween , set during the early years of Batman’s career as a crimefighter, tells the story of a serial killer who kills crime figures each month on a real or appointed holiday; because of this, he is given the moniker “Holiday.” Gotham Police Captain James Gordon, District Attorney Harvey Dent, and the Batman team to identify and capture the killer, while Dent is also working to bring down the Carmine “the Roman” Falcone crime family. The Usual Suspects Inside back cover from TLH #3, colored for BI by designer Rich Fowlks. (All other Long Halloween art reproduced herein features Gregory Wright’s colors.) TM & © DC Comics. Halloween Heroes and Villains Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3 the Man of Steel, with the well-regarded Superman for All Seasons .) “Jeph was a writer/producer in movies and TV, and had a relationship with Jenette Kahn, who was DC’s president and publisher in the 1980s,” Sale tells BACK ISSUE . “Kahn had an interest in expanding DC’s properties into those fields, while Jeph also had a desire to write comics, having loved them since being a kid, as many of us do. I had some non-superhero work under my belt that was coming to an end and was looking for work, so I went for the first time to the San Diego Comic-Con— at the time still about comics, primarily—where I met Barbara Randall [Kesel], Jeph’s key editorial contact at Sketching the As the year goes on and the body count rises, various DC, and she put the two of us together.” Batman rogues make their appearances in the series, Sale’s interpretations of the characters that fill the Dark Knight making Batman’s job all the harder in tracking Holiday. Batman universe are radically different from what might (left) A 1992 sketch Nearly every Bat-villain makes an appearance in one or be called a company “house style.” According to the more issues of this series and usually in a highly artist, “DC has always been generous about of Batman by Tim altered state, as Loeb and Sale took strides allowing me to bend the characters to my Sale, illustrated in bringing the old alive in new ways. own whims and ideas. When we later Gregory Wright brought out the expanded to Dark Victory , I very much for Frank Balkin, fine detail work of Tim Sale’s art with enjoyed drawing the character of who kindly shares it a very basic color design.