INTERVIEW: STEVE SKEATES
Silver Age super scribe Steve Skeates recently spent time with Mark F Davis, Comicbookinteriews.com Chief Correspondent-USA and talked about his career in comics and what he's up to now. The legendary writer candidly revealed details of his career...
MFD: Where were you born and raised?
STEVE: Like a way too pat piece of fiction, one that would cause any editor I’ve ever worked for to abruptly adopt a disgusted expression and exclaim “Aw, c’mon now!” -- or even more likely far stronger words to that same effect – I’m right now basically right back where it all began, hanging out in that quaint sturdy two-story house that my father and my uncle (members of what these days is often referred to as “the greatest generation,” those who seemed able to do just about anything they set their minds to) built back in the late forties, the home my aforementioned father, my mother, my baby brother, and I moved into when I was but four years of age! I am in fact currently in the process of transforming what was my childhood bedroom into my office, my den, and my library! A little cramped perhaps, a little hard to move about within without knocking something over, but hopefully it’ll all work out!
But to speak more directly to the question, I was born in Rochester, NY, spent the first four-and-a-half years of my existence in a temporary apartment that had been set up in
the attic of my maternal Grandmother’s home in near-by Fairport, NY, a fairly upscale suburb of Rochester, while my father was busy about a mile away in an extremely under-developed portion of that suburb building our home! Back in the day a sleepy lane is how you’d best describe the road out in front of that place – so much so that my dog used to do just that, sleep unperturbed in the middle of that road, yet it’s since become the preferred route to the largest most pseudo-sophisticated shopping mall in the Rochester area, so that even as I’m busy reconfiguring my old bedroom the town crew is busy out front uprooting trees, widening the road, and even putting in curbs!
MFD: Have you had any formal training as a writer?
STEVE: An inquiry that begs a question of its own, i.e.: Is there any form of formal training that actually works writing-wise? Or, does it all boil down to what New Yorkers still enjoy telling obviously lost out-of-towners when they ask, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice! In other words, the best way to learn how to write is to write! A lot. All the time. And enjoy doing so! Still, upon actually somehow graduating from high school, one reason Alfred University became my college of choice is that a number of the catalogs I consulted concerning colleges listed Alfred as being recommended for writing! It wasn’t until I became an actual student at that school that I discovered the reason behind this recommendation -- that AU offered a sum-total of one whole two-credit course in creative writing! Had I been gypped? No, not really, especially considering that the professor vis-à-vis this course, Dr. Ernest Finch by name, would have agreed whole-heartedly with my previous paragraph (though I wager he’d have preferred it if I hadn’t gone with that dangling participle up there!)! The only requirement he had for this course was that you write three short (but not too short) stories during the semester! Furthermore, Dr. Finch would change the number of the course each time it got listed in the curriculum, so that one could take it again and again and again, getting credit for it each time, while simultaneously being required to write more and more and more! Practice, practice, practice!
MFD: Who do you list as your creative influences?
STEVE: Now here we have an inquiry that could without much sweat and toil at all blossom response-wise into a full-blown article (perhaps even a book), seeing as everything that one reads or sees or otherwise experiences in a rather vicarious manner (especially those entities of that sort that the individual in question thoroughly enjoys) can easily become an influence upon the direction of that individual’s artistic endeavors, and this can happen consciously or even upon a sub-conscious level.
That said, and considering that in my youth, although I did indeed want to become a writer, I hadn’t even glanced in the direction of comic books, let us nonetheless press on as I dutifully mention that back then I instead had my sights set upon becoming a humorist! Write funny prose pieces for magazines, sophisticated stuff that would ultimately be collected and become books – that’s where I was at! But then the fifties happened, and they were all about television! Magazines were folding left and right! Humor was rapidly getting replaced by comedy, and humorists were suddenly something less than hardly in demand! Thus, putting my dreams back on the shelf, when I entered college it was as a math major!
Yes, do please bear all of that in mind, even as I now construct a partial list (obviously in no specific order) of those I consider to be my major influences: Robert Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Wolcott Gibbs, Walt Kelly, Joseph Heller, Harvey Kurtzman, Rex Stout, Bob and Ray, Olive Higgins Prouty, Lester Dent, Mickey Spillane, O. Henry, Jay Ward, Geoffrey Chaucer, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jack Cole, Jack Kerouac, Skip Williamson, Rory Hayes, William Burroughs, John Lennon, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Philip K. Dick!
MFD: Could you talk about how you broke into the comic book industry?
STEVE: It has been suggested by more than one obviously smirking reviewer in his or her attempt to analyze the trajectory of my entire comicbook career that I started at the top and worked my way down! Admittedly there’s a kernel of truth in that, yet it is all but completely overshadowed by the existence as well within the events I’m about to discuss of an unbelievably heavy dose of truth being stranger than fiction! In any event, when we last encountered me (i.e.: within my response to the previous
question), I had just entered college as a math major. That, a truly silly idea from the start, lasted merely a year, whereupon I switched my field of study to English Literature which is where I belonged from the git-go! Still, once a total of nearly four years had passed and graduation had become a discernable looming specter, I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was going to do with the degree I’d be getting! Oh sure, mainly as a way to waste time, I had been applying to be a reporter at various big city newspapers but wasn’t holding out much hope there, and it was hardly anything I really wanted to do anyway! It was then that comic books finally caught my eye!
This was the mid-sixties and down at the pool hall (the only place in the town of Alfred where they sold comics, displaying them all mixed in amongst the men’s adventure magazines and things like Guns And Ammo and Playboy), there appeared something new and different, something called Marvel Comics, all of them written by Stan Lee and drawn by people like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck. Always up for something new, I bought a couple, devoured them, rushed back and bought a copy of everything Marvel-wise I hadn’t bought during my initial impulse, and immediately became a fan! Then, on a whim, broadening my horizon by figuring that if comics this much fun could be produced at Marvel they could be made to flow forth from virtually any comic book company, I sent letters of application to what I figured were the four major comic book firms in the world! The weird whims didn’t exactly stop there, though, seeing as I also decided to write those applications in the form of what seemed essentially to be collections of comic book captions but with me as the central character rather than some superhero!
Now comes the spooky part, considering that more or less simultaneously with yours truly coming down with that aforementioned case of the whims, Stan Lee, needing some relief in having to both write and edit all the Marvel Comics, had been running a Want Ad in the New York Times (a newspaper I rarely came in contact with), asking people to apply for the position of Assistant Editor at Marvel and to write their applications in comic book form! If I had known Stan had asked for this I probably would have overdone it, but since I saw what I was up to as merely being my idea I was a little shy about it, a tad reserved! I think that goes a long way in explaining what happened here – everyone else who applied for the job had read the Want Ad and therefore had overdone it! Thus, I became the one who received that fateful phone call from Stan Lee himself and was hired over the phone to be his Assistant Editor!
I didn’t last long in that job, mainly because a major portion of what I was expected to do was proofread, and I’ve always been terrible at stuff like that! Ultimately, Roy Thomas was called in to take my place, while I was given a couple of Marvel westerns to write rather as compensation (which was nice), yet the main thing was I now had my foot in the door, was able to go around to all the other comic book companies and tell them I had worked as Stan Lee’s assistant while failing to mention how short a period of time I had done so, and in that way picked up writing work elsewhere, worked for Tower, then Charlton, then DC, and once things really loosened up and none of the big companies were any longer demanding exclusivity, I was even writing for Marvel and DC at the same time -- and Gold Key, Red Circle, and Warren as well!
MFD: Do you have favorite characters you liked to writer?
STEVE: Since I really got into that previous question up there, going on and on and on just a bit, perhaps I should (merely, mind you, for a change of pace) make this particular response short and directly to the point – in fact, I’ll even do it in alphabetical order: Aquaman, Bucky Bizarre, Kid Montana, Lightning, Pantha, Plastic Man, Timmy the Timid Ghost, and Underdog! Not exactly any common thread there that I can see, so what else can I say??
MFD: Have you had favorite artists you liked to work with?
STEVE: Wow! Lemme tell yuh, and I don’t wanna git too fawning or come off all mawkish here or anything like that, but really now when one is handed the supreme privilege and the utter pleasure of having his half-baked ideas and hastily thrown-together words that seek somehow to convey some sort of excitement, thrills, chuckles, goose bumps, insights, an overview of societal norms, and maybe even a moral or two – let’s blithely toss false modesty out the window and label these so-called stories of mine a body of work – one after another illustrated by such artistic luminaries as Dick Ayers, George Evans, Gene Colan, Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Jerry Grandenetti, Dick Dillin, Ramona
Fradon, Mike Sekowsky, Mike Grell, Jaime Brocal, and I mustn’t forget my old pal and favorite editor Dick Giordano who drew all those snarling tough guys and beautiful top-heavy women for those too few Sarge Steel stories I penned! And then there’s Sergio – all those stories I wrote that he drew, all those stories that he plotted and drew that I dialogued; we even (with our very first collaboration) shared the ACBA Shazam Award for the best humor story of 1972, The Poster Plague, a yarn that was in fact the inspiration for that bizarre sick humor anthology known as Plop! Furthermore, merely by bringing up the Shazam Awards I have succeeded in reminding my often out-of-control ego that I also copped the best humor story award in ’73; this time my partner in crime was none other than Bernie Wrightson, while our accolade was for a story, The Gourmet, that for quite a while seemed to get republished somewhere or other every couple of years, by a whopping landslide quite definitely the one tale I played a part in the construction of that has been reprinted the most number of times! All in all, so many great artists with so many differing styles that ultimately identifying my favorites without filling up forty pages or so would actually seem downright impossible and were I to attempt it, no matter how “together” I thought I was being, I’d undoubtedly nonetheless accidentally leave out someone abundantly important vis-à-vis my life and career!
Still, back when I was first learning that writing short (eight- or nine-page) pseudo-horror stories (those things that the Comics Code Authority – feeling that the word “horror” was somehow repulsive -- wanted us instead to refer to as “mystery stories”) could be even more fun than dealing with a superhero, there were three particular artists whom I quickly found myself totally depending upon, three artists who (to put it simply) simply never let me down! The year was 1967, and after writing two stories for the second issue of a certain mystery anthology up at Charlton entitled The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves – one of those stories, in my opinion, quite a nifty tale; the other a total turkey – I was (nonetheless) abruptly given complete control of that book writing-wise, thus I wrote every story in there, from issue 3 to issue 12! Still, it remained the job of my boss, Dick Giordano, to decide who would be doing the art on each one of those twenty-seven stories of mine, and whenever Dick would give one of those tales to one of these three gentlemen – Pat Boyette, Steve Ditko, and Jim Aparo – it would indeed (upon my part) be a definite cause for celebration!
Ultimately, when I moved from Charlton to DC, I never worked with Pat again, while working with Ditko on DC’s The Hawk and the Dove became a real pain due to the political aspects of that series and the fact that politically Ditko and I were (and are) poles apart! From my perspective, then, it was really only Jim and I who were able to move on to bigger and better things, i.e.: three years’ worth of Aquaman! Still, I do consider all three of these artists to be my three particular favorites of all time!
MFD: Do you have particular comics you're written you are most proud of?
STEVE: There are, of course, more than a few issues of Aquaman that I’m definitely proud of! In point of fact, I do believe I comported myself quite well while writing that series! However, there is a certain other comicbook series that (in my mind at least) easily rises above that one when it comes to being all puffed up about something, a series I played an integral role in the creation of, a series that (for better or worse) spoke quite emphatically to the disillusionment extant at least throughout this country during the so-called Watergate era, and of course I’m referring to Plop! I spoke earlier of how the story The Poster Plague (drawn by Sergio Aragones and written by this peculiar correspondent) was a definite inspiration vis-à-vis this appropriately sub-titled “magazine of weird humor”! Why, even the very title of this comic was three-quarters mine, seeing as The Poster Plague revolved around a certain sound effect, namely “Klop!” which in a brainstorming session Carmine Infantino accidentally referred to as “Plop!” which everyone liked better (not just better than Klop, but better than anything!) for what would be shouted on the cover of every one of those books, myself included!
Then, as I quickly became the most frequent contributor to this particular magazine at least writing-wise, we (myself, the other writers, and a number of the artists) noticed that something indeed weird was happening here, that Plop was developing “all by itself” a particular theme that reflected the era we were trapped within, a theme that went something like this: “All institutions are corrupt. It is the innocents, those who believe in these institutions, who get stepped on. Only the cynical survive!” By imparting this particular philosophy were we warping the minds of our youthful readers, or merely cluing them in on the self-serving shortcomings of humanity? The jury’s still out on that one, yet the fact that I’m even now citing Plop as my proudest moment does seem to suggest that I (for one) lean toward the latter!
MFD: Could you discuss some of the more interesting experiences you've had in the comic book field?
STEVE: Ah, the progression here, from prideful moments to interesting experiences, has in fact served to focus my so-called mind in a certain direction, a path I probably wouldn’t be on had these two inquiries not been placed back to back! Oh, sure, the occurrence I’m about to blather about is, I believe, quite interesting, albeit in a rather chuckle-worthy fashion, and, yes, this baby’s basically all about comics! Still and all, though, what got me thinking along these lines is the fact that this particular (over twenty years old now) project of mine stands as the one entity within my body of work for which my wife is the proudest of me for having embarked upon! Is she crazy? Or am I? Or is it the rest of the world as portrayed twenty-some years ago by my publisher and his bowling buddies? Are they the ones who were off on an all-expenses-paid trip to Dementia Land? Let’s see if we can find out!
At the outset, though, I should mention that I’m a big fan of irony, and I must say it certainly seems ironic to me that this, now known as my most interesting experience within the wonderful world of comics, should occur after I had totally disassociated myself from the comic book industry and was, truth be told, busy pursuing a career in the field of bartending! It was the late eighties, and comic books had changed a lot within those past seven or so years! They were now primarily being sold in comic book shops rather than the drug stores, grocery emporiums, and pool halls I was used to, and the target audience had become the hardcore fans, angry escapists who had always been there but had never before been in control of the market! They were older than the youthful innocents I was used to writing for; they had a warped view of reality, and they wanted their literature of choice to reflect a similar point of view! I honestly tried as hard as I could to write what these people wanted (or, to be more exact about it, what the editors I was working for thought these people wanted) but it was nothing that I could get into, so instead I got out!
Trouble is, my new chosen profession, the aforementioned bartending, was leaving a lot of my creative juices (or whatever you wanna call them) unsatisfied, the central problem being that twenty-five years of admittedly happy though hectic toil as a freelance writer had somehow robbed me of the ability to do something artistic as simply a hobby; I needed pressure, an impetus; I needed to place myself under an obligation – in short, I needed an assignment! And, as I began to bounce around that particular realization within what passes hereabouts for a brain, I suddenly found myself concentrating upon the fact that whenever I told someone that I used to work in comics, used to in fact work for the big boys, for DC and Marvel, that person would immediately automatically assume that I knew how to draw! Obviously up there in that squishy gray organ of mine a plan was starting to take shape!
I had decided, furthermore, that it was high time I learned how to draw, or, if that was too much for me to handle, at least high time I took those primitive doodles I’d absent-mindedly fool around with in the margins of my note-pad while trying to come up with an idea for a story and make those silly scratchy kinda sorta drawings work for me! So, I went to the offices of the only daily newspaper around – I was living and bartending at that time in one of the poorest counties in New York State – told the editor that I used to work for DC and Marvel and now that I had relocated to an area that I was actually quite familiar with (having attended one of the many colleges that abounded there in that otherwise poverty-stricken county) I wanted to write and draw a weekly locally-oriented comic strip for the Living Section of the Sunday paper! I even allowed the editor to assume that he was gonna git something slick and superhero-ish! And the clincher was that I’d only be charging them for the supplies I’d be using in the construction of this strip!
What emerged looked rather like a humor strip (due to that being the only sort of so-called “artwork” I could muster), yet actually it was a continuing adventure story, a bizarre mish-mash of stuff that didn’t quite mesh, a strange combo that early on I came close to concluding “the world wasn’t ready for,” seeing as the comment I’d most often hear about one week’s strip or another week’s strip was “I don’t get it!” – an indication that the modern-day general public (at least in that county) had been conditioned into believing that every episode of every comic strip should end with a punch line! Actually it didn’t take all that long, though, for most people to realize what it was I was up to here, the exception of course being the newspaper’s publisher and his aforementioned bowling buddies! Thus the latter (still totally confused) convinced the former that he should have that “stupid strip” thrown out of the paper! However, the editor (who incidentally was a comic book fan and therefore actually liked the strip) somehow talked his boss into letting the readers decide what would happen, did so via placing a ballot in the newspaper that would allow anyone interested to vote either for scuttling the strip or keeping it in there!
I of course subsequently stuffed the ballot box, or, to be more specific, I xeroxed up a huge quantity of those ballots, passed them out at my place of employment, and even offered each of my regulars a free drink if they’d vote in favor of saving the strip! Yes indeed, I am right here right now finally revealing how I was able to continue producing for that otherwise staid and grumpy newspaper that very strange little avant-garde entity that was taking up space that could have been better used for – oh, I dunno, advertising or bowling scores or something – kept it going for just about exactly a year, whereupon, due to a fairly complicated and convoluted plot, my two main characters, a pair of what I called “localized private eyes,” had to sacrifice their own existence in order to save the planet Earth! And that was it! The experiment was over! Time to move on!
MFD: You are currently doing some writing for Surprising Comics. Could you touch on that?
STEVE: But before I get into that, a bit more of the back-story here! When I spoke in the answer to the previous question of moving on, I was thinking of doing so artistically! I had no plans to relocate! But then I started getting repeated phone calls from my brother and my sister, both of whom lived fairly close to my parents’ home, the one I spoke of at the beginning of this interview! My now late father had developed Parkinson’s, and my mother was having a hard time caring for him! My brother and my sister weren’t all that much help, seeing as they both had families of their own, had nine-to-five jobs, and were pretty much workaholics! Thus, as the eldest and the only sibling who didn’t have a typical job (bartending and freelance writing apparently don’t qualify as typical), I was elected to come up to the Rochester area and help my mother care for my father! What could I say? What could I do?
My wife and I now reside in an apartment about a mile from what I now refer to as my mother’s home which is where, as I indicated earlier, I still have my office! Said office was in the basement, but flooding issues and black mold have driven me upstairs, thus (as I also already mentioned) this particular correspondent is currently in the process of transforming his childhood sleeping quarters into his place of work writing-wise! Recently, I’ve been writing articles about comics rather than actually scripting
comic book stories themselves, but, to be honest with myself, that just hasn’t been working out! For one thing, when it’s not a story, I tend to be way too verbose! Case in point, the piece you’re reading right now!
So, when Mark Davis, the head honcho here at Surprising Comics, ran across a number of my blatherings on Facebook (where I’m known as Stephen Skeates, rather than Steve) and happily recognized me as that dude who used to write for Aquaman, Sub-Mariner, and Tower’s Undersea Agent, therefore immediately deciding that it would be either a real hoot or a downright coup were he to have this proud possessor of some sort of underwater track record write at least one story starring Surprising’s new water-based character named Depthon, whereupon he inquired as to whether I’d be willing to construct a five-page story featuring this character, and I veritably leapt at the chance! I particularly liked the idea that this was gonna be but a five-pager! While the rest of comicdom these days seems determined to stretch even the most insignificant event in some superhero’s life into a twenty-seven issue story arc, I’d be able to head in the opposite direction, see how much of a story I could cram into such a relatively small space!
Mark rather liked what I came up with here and asked if maybe I’d like to write a couple more! I’m now in the process of putting together my third Depthon story, and, despite the fact that some twenty years ago (concurrent with comics becoming something I just couldn’t get into) I somehow reached the conclusion that it had been all over for me for some time anyway, admitted to myself that I was burnt-out, that I had just plain run out of new story ideas, I am now (in blissful defiance of that silly conclusion) totally enjoying being back in the story construction business (could it be I’ve finally caught my second wind?), enjoying it to the point of hoping that there are lots more of these sorts of tales just waiting out there for someone to tell!
MFD: Is there anything else you are working on at the moment?
STEVE: There does seem to be a bit of a “retro” movement going on in comics these days! It’s been there for quite some time actually, and, yes, I noticed it, yet distracted by everyday living, the insanity of politics, and other off-the-wall happenstances, it’s simply taken me this long to get into really thinking about what I now see as a significant movement, to truly consider the machinations of how, while the bigger companies are going more and more for entities that more closely resemble motion picture storyboards than any sort of actual comic books, certain smaller companies seem to be revitalizing the kinds of comics that I used to love to write and now find myself falling for all over again, comics that employ both thought balloons and even the occasional flowery caption, comics that get straight to the point within a limited amount of pages rather than stretching whatever they have to say out to such lengths that it becomes obvious that someone somewhere is hoping it’ll be made into a movie! In other words, comics that want to be comics, not movies, not teevee shows, not even pieces predestined to be collected together into some sort of bigfat graphic novel!
Along these lines, a number of the smaller comic book companies have gotten in touch with me! For example, Jon Gilbert, the editor-publisher of Red Lion, a new company up in Canada, chanced upon my discussion within one of those aforementioned articles of mine of my unsuccessful attempt over twenty years ago to sell DC or Marvel (I even tried Fantagraphics) on the idea of publishing the adventures of a character of my creation called Stateside Mouse who I set up as the hero of a funny animal period piece set in America during World War Two and featuring of course the antics of this three-and-a-half foot tall mouse who would interact in one way or another with normal everyday human beings, superheroes, mad scientists, and Nazi spies! I was so convinced we had a surefire winner here that I told artist Joe Orsak to go ahead, start drawing it, even though I only had what I was to learn was merely tentative approval and then (having set Joe and me up for a fall) had the rug pulled out from under us! In any event, Jon got in touch with me wanting to resurrect the series, and I got in touch with Joe to see if he still had the pages he’d done! We’re now in the initial stages of putting the project back together! And, of course the three of us are looking forward to advertising our finished product with a blurb that shouts “Over Twenty Years in the Making!”
Meanwhile, speaking of pulling the rug out from under someone, I’d be doing that to my own self (though I’m not sure how one would actually physically go about doing that) were I not to mention my own particular self-published take on “retro-comics” – entities that are neither reminiscent of the golden age nor a reminder of the silver one, but instead represent an attempt to bring back the underground comix of the sixties and seventies! My latest offering along these lines is a twenty-two-page magazine-sized book entitled “Could I Have My Reality Check Please?”! And, you can find out how to latch onto a copy thereof simply by getting in touch with me via the directions detailed directly below!
MFD: How can folks get in touch with you to hire you as a writer?
STEVE: Hey, like they say, I’m upfront and out there – you can contact me on facebook where (as I mentioned) I’m using my real first name of Stephen, rather than Steve! Or one can e-mail me at [email protected] -- but be sure to include the word “comics” in whatever you have to say in the subject column so that I won’t mistake your significant, important, and eagerly awaited message for a mere chunk of spam!
MFD: Where were you born and raised?
STEVE: Like a way too pat piece of fiction, one that would cause any editor I’ve ever worked for to abruptly adopt a disgusted expression and exclaim “Aw, c’mon now!” -- or even more likely far stronger words to that same effect – I’m right now basically right back where it all began, hanging out in that quaint sturdy two-story house that my father and my uncle (members of what these days is often referred to as “the greatest generation,” those who seemed able to do just about anything they set their minds to) built back in the late forties, the home my aforementioned father, my mother, my baby brother, and I moved into when I was but four years of age! I am in fact currently in the process of transforming what was my childhood bedroom into my office, my den, and my library! A little cramped perhaps, a little hard to move about within without knocking something over, but hopefully it’ll all work out!
But to speak more directly to the question, I was born in Rochester, NY, spent the first four-and-a-half years of my existence in a temporary apartment that had been set up in
the attic of my maternal Grandmother’s home in near-by Fairport, NY, a fairly upscale suburb of Rochester, while my father was busy about a mile away in an extremely under-developed portion of that suburb building our home! Back in the day a sleepy lane is how you’d best describe the road out in front of that place – so much so that my dog used to do just that, sleep unperturbed in the middle of that road, yet it’s since become the preferred route to the largest most pseudo-sophisticated shopping mall in the Rochester area, so that even as I’m busy reconfiguring my old bedroom the town crew is busy out front uprooting trees, widening the road, and even putting in curbs!
MFD: Have you had any formal training as a writer?
STEVE: An inquiry that begs a question of its own, i.e.: Is there any form of formal training that actually works writing-wise? Or, does it all boil down to what New Yorkers still enjoy telling obviously lost out-of-towners when they ask, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, practice, practice! In other words, the best way to learn how to write is to write! A lot. All the time. And enjoy doing so! Still, upon actually somehow graduating from high school, one reason Alfred University became my college of choice is that a number of the catalogs I consulted concerning colleges listed Alfred as being recommended for writing! It wasn’t until I became an actual student at that school that I discovered the reason behind this recommendation -- that AU offered a sum-total of one whole two-credit course in creative writing! Had I been gypped? No, not really, especially considering that the professor vis-à-vis this course, Dr. Ernest Finch by name, would have agreed whole-heartedly with my previous paragraph (though I wager he’d have preferred it if I hadn’t gone with that dangling participle up there!)! The only requirement he had for this course was that you write three short (but not too short) stories during the semester! Furthermore, Dr. Finch would change the number of the course each time it got listed in the curriculum, so that one could take it again and again and again, getting credit for it each time, while simultaneously being required to write more and more and more! Practice, practice, practice!
MFD: Who do you list as your creative influences?
STEVE: Now here we have an inquiry that could without much sweat and toil at all blossom response-wise into a full-blown article (perhaps even a book), seeing as everything that one reads or sees or otherwise experiences in a rather vicarious manner (especially those entities of that sort that the individual in question thoroughly enjoys) can easily become an influence upon the direction of that individual’s artistic endeavors, and this can happen consciously or even upon a sub-conscious level.
That said, and considering that in my youth, although I did indeed want to become a writer, I hadn’t even glanced in the direction of comic books, let us nonetheless press on as I dutifully mention that back then I instead had my sights set upon becoming a humorist! Write funny prose pieces for magazines, sophisticated stuff that would ultimately be collected and become books – that’s where I was at! But then the fifties happened, and they were all about television! Magazines were folding left and right! Humor was rapidly getting replaced by comedy, and humorists were suddenly something less than hardly in demand! Thus, putting my dreams back on the shelf, when I entered college it was as a math major!
Yes, do please bear all of that in mind, even as I now construct a partial list (obviously in no specific order) of those I consider to be my major influences: Robert Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Wolcott Gibbs, Walt Kelly, Joseph Heller, Harvey Kurtzman, Rex Stout, Bob and Ray, Olive Higgins Prouty, Lester Dent, Mickey Spillane, O. Henry, Jay Ward, Geoffrey Chaucer, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jack Cole, Jack Kerouac, Skip Williamson, Rory Hayes, William Burroughs, John Lennon, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Philip K. Dick!
MFD: Could you talk about how you broke into the comic book industry?
STEVE: It has been suggested by more than one obviously smirking reviewer in his or her attempt to analyze the trajectory of my entire comicbook career that I started at the top and worked my way down! Admittedly there’s a kernel of truth in that, yet it is all but completely overshadowed by the existence as well within the events I’m about to discuss of an unbelievably heavy dose of truth being stranger than fiction! In any event, when we last encountered me (i.e.: within my response to the previous
question), I had just entered college as a math major. That, a truly silly idea from the start, lasted merely a year, whereupon I switched my field of study to English Literature which is where I belonged from the git-go! Still, once a total of nearly four years had passed and graduation had become a discernable looming specter, I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was going to do with the degree I’d be getting! Oh sure, mainly as a way to waste time, I had been applying to be a reporter at various big city newspapers but wasn’t holding out much hope there, and it was hardly anything I really wanted to do anyway! It was then that comic books finally caught my eye!
This was the mid-sixties and down at the pool hall (the only place in the town of Alfred where they sold comics, displaying them all mixed in amongst the men’s adventure magazines and things like Guns And Ammo and Playboy), there appeared something new and different, something called Marvel Comics, all of them written by Stan Lee and drawn by people like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck. Always up for something new, I bought a couple, devoured them, rushed back and bought a copy of everything Marvel-wise I hadn’t bought during my initial impulse, and immediately became a fan! Then, on a whim, broadening my horizon by figuring that if comics this much fun could be produced at Marvel they could be made to flow forth from virtually any comic book company, I sent letters of application to what I figured were the four major comic book firms in the world! The weird whims didn’t exactly stop there, though, seeing as I also decided to write those applications in the form of what seemed essentially to be collections of comic book captions but with me as the central character rather than some superhero!
Now comes the spooky part, considering that more or less simultaneously with yours truly coming down with that aforementioned case of the whims, Stan Lee, needing some relief in having to both write and edit all the Marvel Comics, had been running a Want Ad in the New York Times (a newspaper I rarely came in contact with), asking people to apply for the position of Assistant Editor at Marvel and to write their applications in comic book form! If I had known Stan had asked for this I probably would have overdone it, but since I saw what I was up to as merely being my idea I was a little shy about it, a tad reserved! I think that goes a long way in explaining what happened here – everyone else who applied for the job had read the Want Ad and therefore had overdone it! Thus, I became the one who received that fateful phone call from Stan Lee himself and was hired over the phone to be his Assistant Editor!
I didn’t last long in that job, mainly because a major portion of what I was expected to do was proofread, and I’ve always been terrible at stuff like that! Ultimately, Roy Thomas was called in to take my place, while I was given a couple of Marvel westerns to write rather as compensation (which was nice), yet the main thing was I now had my foot in the door, was able to go around to all the other comic book companies and tell them I had worked as Stan Lee’s assistant while failing to mention how short a period of time I had done so, and in that way picked up writing work elsewhere, worked for Tower, then Charlton, then DC, and once things really loosened up and none of the big companies were any longer demanding exclusivity, I was even writing for Marvel and DC at the same time -- and Gold Key, Red Circle, and Warren as well!
MFD: Do you have favorite characters you liked to writer?
STEVE: Since I really got into that previous question up there, going on and on and on just a bit, perhaps I should (merely, mind you, for a change of pace) make this particular response short and directly to the point – in fact, I’ll even do it in alphabetical order: Aquaman, Bucky Bizarre, Kid Montana, Lightning, Pantha, Plastic Man, Timmy the Timid Ghost, and Underdog! Not exactly any common thread there that I can see, so what else can I say??
MFD: Have you had favorite artists you liked to work with?
STEVE: Wow! Lemme tell yuh, and I don’t wanna git too fawning or come off all mawkish here or anything like that, but really now when one is handed the supreme privilege and the utter pleasure of having his half-baked ideas and hastily thrown-together words that seek somehow to convey some sort of excitement, thrills, chuckles, goose bumps, insights, an overview of societal norms, and maybe even a moral or two – let’s blithely toss false modesty out the window and label these so-called stories of mine a body of work – one after another illustrated by such artistic luminaries as Dick Ayers, George Evans, Gene Colan, Alex Toth, Gil Kane, Jerry Grandenetti, Dick Dillin, Ramona
Fradon, Mike Sekowsky, Mike Grell, Jaime Brocal, and I mustn’t forget my old pal and favorite editor Dick Giordano who drew all those snarling tough guys and beautiful top-heavy women for those too few Sarge Steel stories I penned! And then there’s Sergio – all those stories I wrote that he drew, all those stories that he plotted and drew that I dialogued; we even (with our very first collaboration) shared the ACBA Shazam Award for the best humor story of 1972, The Poster Plague, a yarn that was in fact the inspiration for that bizarre sick humor anthology known as Plop! Furthermore, merely by bringing up the Shazam Awards I have succeeded in reminding my often out-of-control ego that I also copped the best humor story award in ’73; this time my partner in crime was none other than Bernie Wrightson, while our accolade was for a story, The Gourmet, that for quite a while seemed to get republished somewhere or other every couple of years, by a whopping landslide quite definitely the one tale I played a part in the construction of that has been reprinted the most number of times! All in all, so many great artists with so many differing styles that ultimately identifying my favorites without filling up forty pages or so would actually seem downright impossible and were I to attempt it, no matter how “together” I thought I was being, I’d undoubtedly nonetheless accidentally leave out someone abundantly important vis-à-vis my life and career!
Still, back when I was first learning that writing short (eight- or nine-page) pseudo-horror stories (those things that the Comics Code Authority – feeling that the word “horror” was somehow repulsive -- wanted us instead to refer to as “mystery stories”) could be even more fun than dealing with a superhero, there were three particular artists whom I quickly found myself totally depending upon, three artists who (to put it simply) simply never let me down! The year was 1967, and after writing two stories for the second issue of a certain mystery anthology up at Charlton entitled The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves – one of those stories, in my opinion, quite a nifty tale; the other a total turkey – I was (nonetheless) abruptly given complete control of that book writing-wise, thus I wrote every story in there, from issue 3 to issue 12! Still, it remained the job of my boss, Dick Giordano, to decide who would be doing the art on each one of those twenty-seven stories of mine, and whenever Dick would give one of those tales to one of these three gentlemen – Pat Boyette, Steve Ditko, and Jim Aparo – it would indeed (upon my part) be a definite cause for celebration!
Ultimately, when I moved from Charlton to DC, I never worked with Pat again, while working with Ditko on DC’s The Hawk and the Dove became a real pain due to the political aspects of that series and the fact that politically Ditko and I were (and are) poles apart! From my perspective, then, it was really only Jim and I who were able to move on to bigger and better things, i.e.: three years’ worth of Aquaman! Still, I do consider all three of these artists to be my three particular favorites of all time!
MFD: Do you have particular comics you're written you are most proud of?
STEVE: There are, of course, more than a few issues of Aquaman that I’m definitely proud of! In point of fact, I do believe I comported myself quite well while writing that series! However, there is a certain other comicbook series that (in my mind at least) easily rises above that one when it comes to being all puffed up about something, a series I played an integral role in the creation of, a series that (for better or worse) spoke quite emphatically to the disillusionment extant at least throughout this country during the so-called Watergate era, and of course I’m referring to Plop! I spoke earlier of how the story The Poster Plague (drawn by Sergio Aragones and written by this peculiar correspondent) was a definite inspiration vis-à-vis this appropriately sub-titled “magazine of weird humor”! Why, even the very title of this comic was three-quarters mine, seeing as The Poster Plague revolved around a certain sound effect, namely “Klop!” which in a brainstorming session Carmine Infantino accidentally referred to as “Plop!” which everyone liked better (not just better than Klop, but better than anything!) for what would be shouted on the cover of every one of those books, myself included!
Then, as I quickly became the most frequent contributor to this particular magazine at least writing-wise, we (myself, the other writers, and a number of the artists) noticed that something indeed weird was happening here, that Plop was developing “all by itself” a particular theme that reflected the era we were trapped within, a theme that went something like this: “All institutions are corrupt. It is the innocents, those who believe in these institutions, who get stepped on. Only the cynical survive!” By imparting this particular philosophy were we warping the minds of our youthful readers, or merely cluing them in on the self-serving shortcomings of humanity? The jury’s still out on that one, yet the fact that I’m even now citing Plop as my proudest moment does seem to suggest that I (for one) lean toward the latter!
MFD: Could you discuss some of the more interesting experiences you've had in the comic book field?
STEVE: Ah, the progression here, from prideful moments to interesting experiences, has in fact served to focus my so-called mind in a certain direction, a path I probably wouldn’t be on had these two inquiries not been placed back to back! Oh, sure, the occurrence I’m about to blather about is, I believe, quite interesting, albeit in a rather chuckle-worthy fashion, and, yes, this baby’s basically all about comics! Still and all, though, what got me thinking along these lines is the fact that this particular (over twenty years old now) project of mine stands as the one entity within my body of work for which my wife is the proudest of me for having embarked upon! Is she crazy? Or am I? Or is it the rest of the world as portrayed twenty-some years ago by my publisher and his bowling buddies? Are they the ones who were off on an all-expenses-paid trip to Dementia Land? Let’s see if we can find out!
At the outset, though, I should mention that I’m a big fan of irony, and I must say it certainly seems ironic to me that this, now known as my most interesting experience within the wonderful world of comics, should occur after I had totally disassociated myself from the comic book industry and was, truth be told, busy pursuing a career in the field of bartending! It was the late eighties, and comic books had changed a lot within those past seven or so years! They were now primarily being sold in comic book shops rather than the drug stores, grocery emporiums, and pool halls I was used to, and the target audience had become the hardcore fans, angry escapists who had always been there but had never before been in control of the market! They were older than the youthful innocents I was used to writing for; they had a warped view of reality, and they wanted their literature of choice to reflect a similar point of view! I honestly tried as hard as I could to write what these people wanted (or, to be more exact about it, what the editors I was working for thought these people wanted) but it was nothing that I could get into, so instead I got out!
Trouble is, my new chosen profession, the aforementioned bartending, was leaving a lot of my creative juices (or whatever you wanna call them) unsatisfied, the central problem being that twenty-five years of admittedly happy though hectic toil as a freelance writer had somehow robbed me of the ability to do something artistic as simply a hobby; I needed pressure, an impetus; I needed to place myself under an obligation – in short, I needed an assignment! And, as I began to bounce around that particular realization within what passes hereabouts for a brain, I suddenly found myself concentrating upon the fact that whenever I told someone that I used to work in comics, used to in fact work for the big boys, for DC and Marvel, that person would immediately automatically assume that I knew how to draw! Obviously up there in that squishy gray organ of mine a plan was starting to take shape!
I had decided, furthermore, that it was high time I learned how to draw, or, if that was too much for me to handle, at least high time I took those primitive doodles I’d absent-mindedly fool around with in the margins of my note-pad while trying to come up with an idea for a story and make those silly scratchy kinda sorta drawings work for me! So, I went to the offices of the only daily newspaper around – I was living and bartending at that time in one of the poorest counties in New York State – told the editor that I used to work for DC and Marvel and now that I had relocated to an area that I was actually quite familiar with (having attended one of the many colleges that abounded there in that otherwise poverty-stricken county) I wanted to write and draw a weekly locally-oriented comic strip for the Living Section of the Sunday paper! I even allowed the editor to assume that he was gonna git something slick and superhero-ish! And the clincher was that I’d only be charging them for the supplies I’d be using in the construction of this strip!
What emerged looked rather like a humor strip (due to that being the only sort of so-called “artwork” I could muster), yet actually it was a continuing adventure story, a bizarre mish-mash of stuff that didn’t quite mesh, a strange combo that early on I came close to concluding “the world wasn’t ready for,” seeing as the comment I’d most often hear about one week’s strip or another week’s strip was “I don’t get it!” – an indication that the modern-day general public (at least in that county) had been conditioned into believing that every episode of every comic strip should end with a punch line! Actually it didn’t take all that long, though, for most people to realize what it was I was up to here, the exception of course being the newspaper’s publisher and his aforementioned bowling buddies! Thus the latter (still totally confused) convinced the former that he should have that “stupid strip” thrown out of the paper! However, the editor (who incidentally was a comic book fan and therefore actually liked the strip) somehow talked his boss into letting the readers decide what would happen, did so via placing a ballot in the newspaper that would allow anyone interested to vote either for scuttling the strip or keeping it in there!
I of course subsequently stuffed the ballot box, or, to be more specific, I xeroxed up a huge quantity of those ballots, passed them out at my place of employment, and even offered each of my regulars a free drink if they’d vote in favor of saving the strip! Yes indeed, I am right here right now finally revealing how I was able to continue producing for that otherwise staid and grumpy newspaper that very strange little avant-garde entity that was taking up space that could have been better used for – oh, I dunno, advertising or bowling scores or something – kept it going for just about exactly a year, whereupon, due to a fairly complicated and convoluted plot, my two main characters, a pair of what I called “localized private eyes,” had to sacrifice their own existence in order to save the planet Earth! And that was it! The experiment was over! Time to move on!
MFD: You are currently doing some writing for Surprising Comics. Could you touch on that?
STEVE: But before I get into that, a bit more of the back-story here! When I spoke in the answer to the previous question of moving on, I was thinking of doing so artistically! I had no plans to relocate! But then I started getting repeated phone calls from my brother and my sister, both of whom lived fairly close to my parents’ home, the one I spoke of at the beginning of this interview! My now late father had developed Parkinson’s, and my mother was having a hard time caring for him! My brother and my sister weren’t all that much help, seeing as they both had families of their own, had nine-to-five jobs, and were pretty much workaholics! Thus, as the eldest and the only sibling who didn’t have a typical job (bartending and freelance writing apparently don’t qualify as typical), I was elected to come up to the Rochester area and help my mother care for my father! What could I say? What could I do?
My wife and I now reside in an apartment about a mile from what I now refer to as my mother’s home which is where, as I indicated earlier, I still have my office! Said office was in the basement, but flooding issues and black mold have driven me upstairs, thus (as I also already mentioned) this particular correspondent is currently in the process of transforming his childhood sleeping quarters into his place of work writing-wise! Recently, I’ve been writing articles about comics rather than actually scripting
comic book stories themselves, but, to be honest with myself, that just hasn’t been working out! For one thing, when it’s not a story, I tend to be way too verbose! Case in point, the piece you’re reading right now!
So, when Mark Davis, the head honcho here at Surprising Comics, ran across a number of my blatherings on Facebook (where I’m known as Stephen Skeates, rather than Steve) and happily recognized me as that dude who used to write for Aquaman, Sub-Mariner, and Tower’s Undersea Agent, therefore immediately deciding that it would be either a real hoot or a downright coup were he to have this proud possessor of some sort of underwater track record write at least one story starring Surprising’s new water-based character named Depthon, whereupon he inquired as to whether I’d be willing to construct a five-page story featuring this character, and I veritably leapt at the chance! I particularly liked the idea that this was gonna be but a five-pager! While the rest of comicdom these days seems determined to stretch even the most insignificant event in some superhero’s life into a twenty-seven issue story arc, I’d be able to head in the opposite direction, see how much of a story I could cram into such a relatively small space!
Mark rather liked what I came up with here and asked if maybe I’d like to write a couple more! I’m now in the process of putting together my third Depthon story, and, despite the fact that some twenty years ago (concurrent with comics becoming something I just couldn’t get into) I somehow reached the conclusion that it had been all over for me for some time anyway, admitted to myself that I was burnt-out, that I had just plain run out of new story ideas, I am now (in blissful defiance of that silly conclusion) totally enjoying being back in the story construction business (could it be I’ve finally caught my second wind?), enjoying it to the point of hoping that there are lots more of these sorts of tales just waiting out there for someone to tell!
MFD: Is there anything else you are working on at the moment?
STEVE: There does seem to be a bit of a “retro” movement going on in comics these days! It’s been there for quite some time actually, and, yes, I noticed it, yet distracted by everyday living, the insanity of politics, and other off-the-wall happenstances, it’s simply taken me this long to get into really thinking about what I now see as a significant movement, to truly consider the machinations of how, while the bigger companies are going more and more for entities that more closely resemble motion picture storyboards than any sort of actual comic books, certain smaller companies seem to be revitalizing the kinds of comics that I used to love to write and now find myself falling for all over again, comics that employ both thought balloons and even the occasional flowery caption, comics that get straight to the point within a limited amount of pages rather than stretching whatever they have to say out to such lengths that it becomes obvious that someone somewhere is hoping it’ll be made into a movie! In other words, comics that want to be comics, not movies, not teevee shows, not even pieces predestined to be collected together into some sort of bigfat graphic novel!
Along these lines, a number of the smaller comic book companies have gotten in touch with me! For example, Jon Gilbert, the editor-publisher of Red Lion, a new company up in Canada, chanced upon my discussion within one of those aforementioned articles of mine of my unsuccessful attempt over twenty years ago to sell DC or Marvel (I even tried Fantagraphics) on the idea of publishing the adventures of a character of my creation called Stateside Mouse who I set up as the hero of a funny animal period piece set in America during World War Two and featuring of course the antics of this three-and-a-half foot tall mouse who would interact in one way or another with normal everyday human beings, superheroes, mad scientists, and Nazi spies! I was so convinced we had a surefire winner here that I told artist Joe Orsak to go ahead, start drawing it, even though I only had what I was to learn was merely tentative approval and then (having set Joe and me up for a fall) had the rug pulled out from under us! In any event, Jon got in touch with me wanting to resurrect the series, and I got in touch with Joe to see if he still had the pages he’d done! We’re now in the initial stages of putting the project back together! And, of course the three of us are looking forward to advertising our finished product with a blurb that shouts “Over Twenty Years in the Making!”
Meanwhile, speaking of pulling the rug out from under someone, I’d be doing that to my own self (though I’m not sure how one would actually physically go about doing that) were I not to mention my own particular self-published take on “retro-comics” – entities that are neither reminiscent of the golden age nor a reminder of the silver one, but instead represent an attempt to bring back the underground comix of the sixties and seventies! My latest offering along these lines is a twenty-two-page magazine-sized book entitled “Could I Have My Reality Check Please?”! And, you can find out how to latch onto a copy thereof simply by getting in touch with me via the directions detailed directly below!
MFD: How can folks get in touch with you to hire you as a writer?
STEVE: Hey, like they say, I’m upfront and out there – you can contact me on facebook where (as I mentioned) I’m using my real first name of Stephen, rather than Steve! Or one can e-mail me at [email protected] -- but be sure to include the word “comics” in whatever you have to say in the subject column so that I won’t mistake your significant, important, and eagerly awaited message for a mere chunk of spam!
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Mark F Davis is staff reporter for Comic Book Interviews and is also Publisher for Surprising Comics.
Mark is a contributing writer at Red Leaf Comics and has crafted several tales for The Leaf, Canada’s Greatest Hero at www.redleafcomics.com. His creator-owned properties include: Skyscraper, Depthon –of the Deep, The American Guard, and other heroes from Surprising Comics and can be found at www.surprisingcomics.com.
Mark F Davis is staff reporter for Comic Book Interviews and is also Publisher for Surprising Comics.
Mark is a contributing writer at Red Leaf Comics and has crafted several tales for The Leaf, Canada’s Greatest Hero at www.redleafcomics.com. His creator-owned properties include: Skyscraper, Depthon –of the Deep, The American Guard, and other heroes from Surprising Comics and can be found at www.surprisingcomics.com.
