M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T H I R T E E N :

Captain Marvel, Shazam TM & ©2007 DC Comics.

JERRYORDWAYJERRYORDWAY

By Eric Nolen-Weathington

Table of Contents

Introduction by Geoff Johns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Part One: All You Need is a Little Incentive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Part Two: Keep ’em Flying—the Pages That Is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Part Three: To Infinity Inc.... and Beyond! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Part Four: He’s an Artist! He’s a Writer! It’s Superman!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Part Five: It’s All about Family... the Marvel Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Part Six: Marvel, Alan Moore, and the McCarthy Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Part Seven: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Modern Masters Volume Thirteen:

JERRY ORDWAY

MODERN MASTERS: You were born and raised inMilwaukee, Wisconsin, and you were born in Novemberof ’57?

JERRY ORDWAY: Yeah. I was a Thanksgiving baby.

MM: Was it really onThanksgiving?

JERRY: It reallywas. My moth-er, a singlemom, raisingmyself and mytwo brothers. She ran a tav-ern as kind of a home busi-ness, basically, because welived in the back of it, and sheusually did a big Thanksgiving din-ner for all the customers. Most of thecustomers were retired guys and old war vet-erans and stuff, and they were regulars and a lot ofthem were there from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00at night, so she would generally feed them, as well.But she had a big Thanksgiving spread. And the storythat I always heard was that she had the baropen all day, prepared and served turkeydinners to a couple dozen people, andthen washed the dishes and cleanedup after this whole thing beforeshe called my Aunt Mary todrive her to the hospital.Unfortunately, they didn’tmake it on time and a coupleof Milwaukee’s Police helpeddeliver me. It’s probably theonly time I was ever earlyfor anything. [laughter]

MM: So you had twobrothers. Older brothers?

JERRY: Yes, both of them.My oldest brother Mike is15 years older than me,so there’s a big gapthere. My brother Mikewas effectively away at

college by the time I really had much memory of him.He came home on school breaks and I remember himworking as a coach at the local playgrounds in the sum-mertime. It was a bonus because he was driving, and tookus places, almost like an uncle would. My brother Joel,

who is two years older thanI am, shared a room

with me growingup, and we’re stillpretty close, eventhough he nowlives in NorthPole, Alaska.

Growing up inWisconsin, theywere both fishermen

and hunters, which Ireally never was. I liked

to draw, and read comics.

MM: Did either of them readcomics at all?

JERRY: Yeah, my brother Mikewas of the age that he read stuff dur-ing the ’50s, but it was also during

the EC scare—the Congressionalhearings and all that. I heard

his complaints many timesthat he was only allowed toread Classics Illustrated andmaybe Gold Key. When he

got older and dumpedcomics, he still had a box of

comics in the basement of myaunt’s house, and unfortunately there

were no super-hero books except for two. Onewas Superman 3-D, and the other one was Captain

3-D, the Kirby 3-D book. The rest were ClassicsIllustrated, so I was kind of disappointed. My brother

Joel and I probably both discovered comics around thesame age. When we were pretty young we used to get bagsof coverless comics and beat-up comics from this friend ofour family—mostly Superman and Batman. They were prettyworn out, but I know we pored over them before my momprobably tossed them out. We really got into it laterthough, when the Marvel Superheroes cartoon was on TV,

Part 1: All You Need isa Little Incentive

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around 1966. He and I both used to run home from schoolto watch that. We discovered the comics later, as an off-shoot of that.

MM: So you didn’t really become a Marvel-head untillater in the game?

JERRY: Well, with the giveaway comics that we got, Ithink I was too young to really register much about themexcept to recognize Superman and Batman, and I don’tthink I was really at a reading age at that point. I wasmaybe four or five, and not totally absorbing it. WhenMarvel Superheroes came around, I was closer to eight yearsold, seeing them on TV first with all the action, and like,“Wow! Cool characters!” My brother really liked Thor, andI liked Captain America and Iron Man, so it was a progres-sion from there. And a lot of stuff happened in ’66, too,because the Batman TV show came on. A lot of peoplehate the show, but I loved it. I was the right age for it. AndI think it helped comics a lot, because it brought comicsback into the vocabulary for a while, with Adam West asBatman appearing on the cover of Life or Look magazine.

MM: At what point did you start paying attention to the credits in the comics?

JERRY: Oh, I think when we first got the Marvels on a train trip to Colorado. We weregoing to my older brother’s graduation from college in May of 1967. We were heading tothe train station to take a train to Denver—it was an overnight train ride. My mother hand-ed us a dollar and we went to the Milwaukee train station lobby, the little gift shop, andfound a dollar’s worth of 12¢ Marvel comics. I took a chance on Spider-Man and Daredevil,who were not on the TV show, but they looked interesting. Thor. I think Fantastic Four, even.And then we really fell in love with them on that train ride. We read them over and over.With Spider-Man I just really zeroed in on Stan Lee and John Romita.

MM: What are your earliest memories of drawing? Were you drawing before you got intothe comics?

JERRY: Yeah, I think I was always somebody who used to draw. I was always into craft stuffwhen I was a little kid. When I was in first or second grade, the teacher asked us to writeabout, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wanted to be a clown or a race cardriver. [laughter] I never heard the end of that. [laughter] Whenever I was misbehaving and

making my mom mad, she’d say, “This is thelittle clown who’s going to make me laugh?”

MM: How long did you hang onto thatdream? [laughter]

JERRY: Honestly, I don’t know. That wouldprobably have been ’63, ’64, something likethat. If you didn’t want to be a race car driv-er, you probably wanted to be an astronaut.

The local TV stations that ran MarvelSuperheroes—because it was a syndicatedshow—a lot of cities ran contests during theshow. Kids would send in drawings, and youcould be entered to win a bicycle. There werethree age groups, and I was in the youngest

Previous Page: A 1990sreimagining of Jerry’schildhood creation, Proton.Above: Jerry (sitting)and older brother Joel intheir finest cowboyregalia ordering up sarsaparillas at theirmother’s tavern.Left: Jerry (age 8 or 9here) stands guard outside his mother’s tavern.

Proton ™ and ©2007 JerryOrdway.

age group. I’m sure I sent in more than onedrawing. During the show, maybe once aweek they would have a little gallerywhere the TV host would have thecamera pan across the winningdrawings for that week, and mybrother and I would sit there andmake fun of the drawings, because wewere totally superior. [laughter] “Oh,look at that one, that’s terrible. How canthat win?” And here we were, really makingfun of these drawings, and then he says, “And inthe youth category, Jerry Ordway.” I said,“Wait a minute!” I had drawn aThor, and had forgotten todraw the wings on his hel-met and his cape, or some-thing like that. I didn’t winthe grand prize, but every win-ner in each category got a dollar, and Iremember being very thrilled with acrisp, brand-new dollar bill arriving inan envelope from Channel 18.

MM: You said you were more intocertain characters. Was there apoint where you started followingcreators from book to book? Iguess with Marvel it wasmostly Kirby, anyway.

JERRY: In the period thatI started, on the mainbooks, Spider-Man wasalways John Romita.I believe John Buscema had taken over Avengers around that time, so there were steady guys, andthose were the guys that I really learned to love, all the way across the board. My least favoritebook was probably the one with Sub-Mariner and the Hulk. I didn’t care as much for it, but Istill bought it. I loved Iron Man, I loved Captain America, I loved The Avengers, Spider-Man, Daredevil,Thor. Fantastic Four was kind of like, enh; I wasn’t that into it at the time because it almost seemedtoo science-fictiony for my taste, you know, the sophisticated taste of an eight- or nine-year-old.

But, yeah, I knew all the artists. I was impressed with Gene Colan, I was impressed withJohn Romita, I was impressed with John Buscema, and Kirby. Nobody seemed to drawthose guys like he did. I used to sit down and look at the cover and go side-by-side and tryto make my own version of the cover on Manila paper with markers, or pencils with mark-ers—whatever I had handy. I did that for several years. I remember having the neighborkids, friends of mine, be impressed. “Oh, wow, look how good you did that!” The people inmy mom’s tavern would of course see that art, and the first question they would ask is, “Isthat drawing freehand, or did you trace it?” So I was always very conscious of the fact thatreal art had to be drawn freehand and not traced, which I found out later was not the casewhen I got into commercial art. Everybody traced! [laughter]

MM: At what point did you start drawing your own stories?

JERRY: I have a whole pile of stuff that I did, my own characters, when I was around that age.Everybody’s got their own really stupid characters. I had Rubber Man, which was probably

Right: One of Jerry’sfavorite characters—Captain America—in a2007 commission piece.Below: The Acrobat wasJerry’s very first creation (way back in1969).Next Page: Jerry’s coverart for Okay Comics #1and #2 (both from1975)—the only twoissues Jerry and friend,Dave Koula, published.These black-&-whitecomics were printed on8-1/2" x 11" sheets,which were then stapledand folded in half.

Acrobat, Proton ™ and ©2007Jerry Ordway. Captain America™ and ©2007 MarvelCharacters, Inc.

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pointers and stuff, but no work. But he did give usa big pile of Xerox copies of pencils. It was what-ever was current at that point—George Tuska,Jack Kirby Machine Man, a couple of John ByrneMarvel Team-Ups—so we were happy with that,even though we were disappointed. Meanwhile,Steve Clement had gotten us an appointment tovisit DC and have our work reviewed there, so westill had the afternoon at DC, where I got a port-folio review by Vince Colletta.

MM: He was the art director at that point.

JERRY: Yes. I showed him finished art for aMessenger story I had done, which eventuallysaw print in Bill Black’s Americomics in 1983. Anyhow,Vince kept asking me for pencil samples. He was saying,“Go home and bring me some pencils.” I’m like, “Well, Ilive a little bit away—in Wisconsin.” “Well, I can’t judgethis. It’s all inked.” And I said, “Well, can you judge theinks?” “No, I’m only looking at pencils.”

I was very disappointed and perplexed, really. I mean,he was an inker. After that trip, I came homeand decided that comics didn’t want me, soI would get into commercial art. I starteddrawing stuff that I thought looked likecommercial art samples, and then madean appointment with an ad executive atHoffman-York, which was the biggestfirm there at the time. Really gutsy,and stupid because I didn’tknow anything about any-thing. I made an appoint-ment with the head guy, whoactually saw me. He was very nice. He lookedat my work which was still very comic booklooking, and mentioned his love of PrinceValiant when he was a kid, and how mywork reminded him of that. He saw a bitof himself in me. He had no job there,but knew of a place looking for some-one to do photostat work at an artstudio in downtown Milwaukee, andthat it was the type of job where Icould work my way up.

So I switched jobs and went intothe art studio. I worked in the dark-room department for, like, fourmonths, while the regular guy, anold-timer recovering from a stroke,would supervise me. The guy, FrankHelfert, was about 5' tall, with aGeorge Gobels look, and an ever-pres-ent cigar clenched in his teeth, hadloss of control in his right arm,

so I became his hands, basically. The darkroom had noventilation fans, and some horrendous smelling chemicalswhich were hard to avoid. Everyone joked that whenFrank started work there he was my height, 6' 3", but theconstant exposure shrank him down. [laughter] Eventually,as Frank’s arm recovered full mobility, I worked my way upto a little office in the bullpen. When it was slow, they’dlet me practice on stuff, and when it was busy I sometimesgot to pitch in on doing layout roughs, ad comps, andthings like that. That was really my college, my educa-tion. A lot of good illustrators were there, and I started

working with color, and the medium that most ofthese guys used for their stuff was Dr. Marten’sdyes, the watercolor dyes. They worked ongiant boards, really heavy-duty illustration

board in pencil, with a watercolor wash,which dried fast, perfect for ad work. Iwould go home on a weekend and I dotwo or three of these watercolor-typepaintings. Then I’d bring them in to workMonday, and the old timers would come

in and critique them. I mean, they were pret-ty brutal, but I needed it at that point. Theyhammered away at all the stuff that I didn’t payattention to in high school about color valuesand warm and cool, and all that stuff. Little bylittle, I learned. I mostly did watercolors andacrylic and things like that, and worked myway up in the studio after a year to the

point where I got to do some coloringbooks. I guess the first project was aDC super-heroes coloring book forWestern Publishing, which was alocal client in Wisconsin. I didmaybe 30 pages of fun-&-games—find the stars on Wonder

Woman’s costume, connect thedots, and all that type ofstuff. And it went over reallywell.

15

MM: You shared a studio with Machlan and Vey whileyou were in Wisconsin, right?

JERRY: Right, we set up in the beginning of ’84 in a studiowe called Jump Start Studios. That was kind of instigatedbecause Pat Broderick had moved with his girlfriend fromFlorida to Milwaukee. She worked for the yellow pagescompany, the advertising company. He and I hooked upright away, and he was pretty aggressive about wanting tohave a place outside of his house to draw in, so he was agood influence in that sense, that he pushed all of usto do a studio setup. Pat had worked atContinuity, and he was clearly better establishedthan any of us. It was exciting, too, because Patknew people that we didn’t, in the busi-ness. And it was fun to watch some-one else draw, too, as I had beenworking in my Mom’s house previ-ously. And, man, he was fast. He dida good job, but he didn’t linger onanything. If he had to do five pagesin a day, he could do it. I was work-ing on Infinity Inc., and then that ledinto Fantastic Four and then Crisis with-in that time at the studio.

MM: With All-Star Squadron, whatdid you do for reference? Becauseyou had to draw historical fig-ures from time to time.

JERRY: Oh, all the time. WhenRoy found out that I was the inker—boom!—the mail shows up, and there’sa box packed with Xeroxes of old comics.It was like he Xeroxed his whole collec-tion with characters that might beneeded, reference, whatever. HeXeroxed some of his military uni-form books. Each script he sentwould come with alittle stack ofXeroxed refer-ence, whichwas great and Icertainly appreciat-ed it, but Xeroxed refer-

ence was really not very good, because a picture wouldturn black, so all you really got were silhouettes and tanta-lizing bits of details. But it was clear once I started gettingthese that the detail was going to be up to me. RichBuckler, while he was really good and he was doing reallygood super-hero stuff, he was on the clock, so to speak.He had a book set in the 1940s, but he wasn’t really refer-encing beyond what Roy had given him, and he wasn’ttoo careful about it, either. In the preview that ran in JusticeLeague there’s a scene where a mysterious figure, who turns

out to be Robotman, is seen wandering aroundWashington, DC. And in this one shot Rich hadfound a picture of the World War II Memorial,

which he drew as a big element in this page. I getthis page, and there’s a big note on the art thatsays, “War Memorial not there yet because thisis 1942.” [laughter] So it was like, “Oh, I guess

that’s up to me.” That’s what that waslike. I mean, Roy would ask for

changes, and it was stufflike “changeRobotman intoLiberty Belle.” That

wasn’t the type ofthing that you would do as an inker. That’s penciling.And that was from the git-go, that was the deal.

But here’s the worst part: On that preview, Ibusted my butt, and I was totally scared, and I

was totally panicky about the whole thing,but I did the best I could. I would talk to

Len Wein because I didn’t know RoyThomas, and Len was the editor. Iturned in the first preview, Len lovedit. He said, “Oh, great, beautiful. Youdid a great job and fixed things that

needed to be fixed.”About a week before thefirst issue, I get a letterfrom Roy. I still haveit. I’ve never reallybrought it up to him,but it was painful atthe time. It had to be

about six pages single-spaced of panel-for-panel critique of all

the stuff that I did wrong. He started out by saying, “I had

Part 2: Keep ’em Flying—the Pages, That Is

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hoped that Dick Giordano was going to bethe inker on this thing.” So I’m immediatelylike, “Oh my God, I can’t compete withDick Giordano.” It totally deflated me. I wasfeeling nervous, but still really good, andthen suddenly it was like someone poppedthat balloon. This thing is hilarious now, butat the time it was like getting an F on areport card or something like that. I mean, itwas a painful blow to my ego. I was used tosuccess, especially when I applied myself, soit was really disheartening.

MM: I assume you got paid more than aregular inker.

JERRY: Yeah, I was being paid as a finisher,and the finishing rate was a couple dollarsmore than inks.

MM: Just a couple?

JERRY: Roy was always fair about this partof it. He really did work me hard, but he didsay, “If DC won’t pay you extra, I’ll pay youout of my own pocket.” So it wasn’t like

money was a big issue, it was just that I feltlike I was being called upon to do more andmore. And the first issue of All-Star Squadronpages doesn’t arrive, and it doesn’t arrive,and it doesn’t arrive. And then I get a couplepages in the mail, and I’m thinking, “Okay,why am I getting these pages?” They weretowards the end of the book. I found outthat the first twelve pages had been lost byFederal Express; I never got the pages. I waslike, “Well, what do I do?” “Well, we’ll sendyou copies of what Buckler did and you justink it on vellum.” I never had practice inkingon vellum. Vellum is tricky. If you put downbrush lines and ink, it wrinkles. When I gotthe Xeroxes, I only had portions of Roy’scomments, because the Xerox would cut ahalf-inch off the margin of each side of thepage. I had to reconstruct as best I could,and ink on the vellum, and it really was—Imean, it was just not great, coupled with thebad critique I got previously.

By the second issue I felt like I was actu-ally making some progress, and I think thatthere is a distinct jump in what I was doing

Previous Page:Commission drawing ofThe Tarantula. Above: This 2-pagespread appeared in1983’s The DC Sampler.

All-Star Squadron, Infinity Inc.,Tarantula, and all related charac-ters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics.

from the first to the second issue. I think youcould see that I at least was getting the hangof things. And I was able to use zip-a-toneand stuff on the real board that you can’treally use on the vellum. It was a nightmareway to start. Roy would still send these real-ly long critiques, again, panel-by-panel, sin-gle-spaced. Each issue they got a little bitshorter, but they never went away. [laughter]

At that point DC put me in a little box,typecast as a finisher but not a penciler. I wasgood enough to do finishes, but not goodenough to be a penciler in their eyes. And Ikept working at Len, and I.... You know,when you’re working on a 25-page book amonth, you don’t have time to draw pencilsamples. So I had sent Len a whole bunch ofpencil samples I did just before I had gottenthe DC work, of a character I came up with

called Proton, which I was doing formyself, basically. I sent him thesethings, and he thought they had

promise, but nobody wantedto upset the apple cart. ThenKaren Berger asked me if I

would ink the

“Huntress” back-ups that were running inWonder Woman, which Joe Staton was draw-ing. When I first agreed to do it, I didn’t real-ly want extra work, because at that point, 25pages a month of that much detail and thatmany characters was really pretty hard tokeep up with, and here I was adding seven oreight pages, maybe nine to my schedule. ButI agreed to do it, and she had indicated thatJoe wasn’t going to be on it that long. Whenhe left, I could take over as penciler, and itwould be a good transition. And I thought,“Well, that’s good, that’s something.” I think Idid three of them, and I wound up talking toJoe Staton—I met him at a show or some-thing—and I said, “Uh, when are you leaving‘The Huntress’‚” And he said, “I’m not leav-ing.” “Okay, I am.” [laughter]

MM: Was it upsetting for you when Rich leftthat they got Adrian Gonzales?

JERRY: Yeah. I didn’t know any of this exceptI finally got a cover to do by Rich. I think itwas for issue #6 with Hawkman. Len calls meup and says, “Rich is leaving the book.” And I

Next Page: Pencils fromAll-Star Squadron #24,introducing Infinity Inc. Below: Jerry almost gotto pencil the Huntressafter all. In 1985, hepitched a story pairingup the Huntress with therecently acquiredNightshade. But whenHelena Wayne died inCrisis on Infinite Earths,Jerry’s story died alongwith her.

All-Star Squadron, Huntress,Infinity Inc., Nightshade and allrelated characters ™ and©2007 DC Comics.

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was like, “Oh.” And he goes on, “Uh... Ihope you’re not going to leave, too.”And I’m like, “Uh, no, why would I?”And he says, “Oh, great.” [laughter] I did-n’t know the business enough to knowthat a lot of people do that. It’s time toleave, you go do something else. Aftersix issues, I was getting noticed by otherpeople, and I did get some calls fromeditors, so I understand that maybethat’s your opportunity to bail or some-thing, but not me, “Oh, no,” because I’mjust hoping for steady work.

Adrian’s artwork was really solid—he was clearly a good draftsman—butRoy had a lot of changes on the stuff.It was little stuff, but it was a lot ofpanels per issue that I wound up havingto do something different, or he’dchange a character and ask for some-thing totally different. When Rich left,I then became the dominant art forceon that thing. And that worked out. Ithink that helped my standing, as well,with DC, because I think they respect-ed the fact that I stayed, and I thinkLen respected the fact that I was mak-ing the look of the book my own.Adrian’s work reminds me a little of[Ed] Barreto’s stuff, actually.

MM: Yeah, I can see that.

JERRY: The work itself was really morefinished than what Rich was doing, butit lacked a little of the detail and stuff.Rich’s layouts were like scribbly pen-cils, but they at least indicated a littlemore rendering, so I think I got toimprint my style, as it was developing,over Adrian a little bit more because itwas traditional layouts, with no rendering. There wasmore room to render and do Wally Wood-type lightingeffects and things like that.

I was really kind of desperate, because at that point Ididn’t want to get used to the inking money, because Icould ink faster than I could pencil. I didn’t want to getused to that income level, because I knew it could trap meinto just inking. Meanwhile, for a side gig I kept pushingfor pencils, pushing, pushing. Nothing happened. Andthen I got a call out of the blue from Ernie Colón, who wasediting The Flash. He was looking for somebody to takeover the “Creeper” back-up. He wanted me to pencil andink it. I thought about it, and I said, “If I penciled and inkedseven pages, the paycheck would be close to what I make

inking 20-some pages. It’d be at least close, plus it wouldn’tbe that gigantic of a deadline if I really tanked on it.” So Isaid sure. And then I said, “But I’ll have to quit All-StarSquadron.” He goes, “Oh, well, I can’t be part of that.” So Icalled Len up, and I said, “Len, here’s the problem.” Lentotally understood, and immediately said, “Why don’t youdraw All-Star Squadron then?” I said, “Because All-StarSquadron isn’t looking for a penciler.” And he said, “It’s noproblem. Adrian is taking over Arak, and I’ve got plenty ofwork for him. I don’t think he would mind at all.” I said,“Well, I don’t want to get somebody bumped off the book.”“No, no, no. Honestly, I would rather have you pencilingthe book.” So that’s how I got into penciling. And theygave me a couple months off to start up penciling on it.

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Part 3: To Infinity Inc....and Beyond!

MM: Had you planned on being on Infinity Inc. for onlya short period of time, or was that just kind of the waythings happened?

JERRY: No, Mike Machlan and I both had our contracts,and the contracts were written in a vague way to incor-porate whether either of us would draw. Mike’s plan wasthat he was going to draw it and I was going to ink it,and then when that switched at the last minute and Istarted drawing it, we both had 12-issue contracts. Itwas open, certainly, to stay on another year or whatever,but my initial feeling was that the book wasn’t going inthe direction that I thought it was going to go in,because the initial promise of Infinity Inc. was that it wasgoing to be more akin to New Teen Titans than a tradition-al Justice Society book. And I think Roy did a lot morewith that after we left. I don’t know if he just had thisone story that he wanted to get out of the way and thenmove on beyond the Justice Society, but while we werethere, all I was seeing was the same stuff that I drew inAll-Star Squadron, and I was tired of it. Not that I didn’tlike the characters, it just was.... Infinity was also ourchance to grab a bigger audience and break into a wideraudience like Titans had. Titans encompassed an audiencethat read X-Men, for example. I mean, Titans was DC’sbest-selling title at that point. People were talking about

what was selling in the direct market versus what wasselling on the newsstand, and Titans was the benchmarkwe were going for.

After a couple issues, honestly, I was just kind of dis-appointed and I was looking for a change. It’s hard, too,when you invest a lot in a group of characters like thatover the ten issues that I did. I certainly felt like I’ddeveloped the characters visually, and developed theirpowers, to some degree, too. We were still workingplot-style, so there was a lot of input on the drawingside as far as how to set up a fight scene or somesequence like that. It wasn’t as simple as nowadays witha full script, where the writer really takes you all theway through what the characters are doing. In a caselike this, it was, “Here’s pages 4-8: big fight. Let’s getsomething good for all the characters to do visually.”[laughter] You basically have to invent, and that’s what wedid. With the Obsidian character, a lot of his specificpowers were really not defined, whereas Jade was clearlymore of a Green Lantern spin-off and could use hergreen power energy to create things like the GreenLantern had done. With Obsidian, the shadow stuff justkind of came out of nowhere. “Hey, wouldn’t it be coolif the shadow kind of creeped up on the wall and itturned out to be him?” The powers kind of came out offinding visual ideas for the fights.

But, like I said, I was ready for achange. And I wasn’t under an exclusivecontract with DC, so I was getting a lot ofinquiries from Marvel about my availabili-ty. I also had kind of a silly dispute.Looking back on it, it’s kind of funny, but Iwas trying to get a better page rate. I’dbeen working at DC for a couple years,and they weren’t willing to bump me up tothat next rate level. I got an offer fromJohn Byrne to ink Squadron Supreme, whichhe was going to be drawing with MarkGruenwald, and I actually inked a promopiece that John drew that ran in theMarvel books as a teaser, which made itlook like Marvel was going to do theJustice League “the right way.” It was a sil-houette shot of all the characters, whowere supposed to look like Superman andHawkman and Wonder Woman and allthat. While I was finishing up Infinity Inc.,and after I had done that teaser thing, Johnleft the Squadron Supreme project and askedme to ink Fantastic Four. And I went, “Ooh!Wow! That’s going to be hard to turndown.” And I know Mark Gruenwald wasdisappointed that I bailed on the SquadronSupreme, but at that point Byrne was myconnection, and Mark really wasn’t, so Ijust followed John’s offer. And that was myfirst working experience with Mike Carlin,which was to become a long-term friend-ship.

MM: So it was actually John that came toyou, rather than one of the editors?

JERRY: Exactly. I was pretty loyal to DC,and I felt like if I was getting my steadywork from them, I couldn’t do more than abook a month, so I never really looked fortrouble. But I had gotten some inquiries,and I know I had some scripts that weresitting in the studio as possible projects todo, but they had no deadline. I know oneguy that I had a script from was Carl Potts.I also had a couple of scripts for What If?—a Kurt Busiek script and a Peter Gillisscript—but Byrne’s Fantastic Four trumpedall that. I agreed to do the six issues of inkson the Fantastic Four as a way to rechargemy batteries.

MM: Was that the first time you metJohn? Had you met him before that at all?

JERRY: I had never met him. I had senthim a letter when he’d first taken over thefull art chores on Fantastic Four. He wasinking it himself, and he was gettingtrashed in the fan press for, “Why isn’tTerry Austin inking him?” So I sent him aletter basically saying, “Good for you. Gofor it. I like what you’re doing on it.” Andthat turned into a pen pal thing. Weexchanged probably three or four lettersover that year. To be honest, I never metJohn in person until I moved toConnecticut in ’87. All the Fantastic Fourstuff was done with Mike Carlin as themiddle-man. I really had no contact withJohn beyond that except to hear, “Oh, heliked it,” or, “He didn’t like this.”

But going to Marvel and doing theFantastic Four with Byrne was something

Previous Page: Unusedpencils intended for theInfinity Inc. entry in1991’s Who’s Who in theDC Universe #16.Above: Promotional artfor the Squadron Suprememini-series. Pencils byJohn Byrne.

Infinity Inc. ™ and ©2007 DCComics. Squadron Supreme ™and ©2007 Marvel Characters,Inc.

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where I knew right off the bat, “Wow, I’m going from abook that sells X number of copies to something thatsells four times that.” On my part, I was going into thisknowing that John Byrne was the leader and I was thesupport, so it was a good experience, because I knew Icouldn’t overwhelm his pencils. I knew that my job wasto just bring out the best in them. That was a goodprimer, in a way, for doing the Crisis stuff, too, because Iwas in a situation where the burden wasn’t on me, thesales burden wasn’t going to be on me, either. BothByrne and Pérez were the draws. I was just there tomake it look good.

MM: Are you a fan of comic strips? Because in that firstissue you inked, John had a lot of comic strip charactersin there in disguise.

JERRY: That was kind of funny when I first got thosepages, because I recognized most of them, but therewere a couple that I was a little fuzzy on. But he had lit-tle margin notes to explain who everybody was sup-posed to be. I originally was going to be inking pencils,and then the first two issues he did layouts. And I waskind of panicky when I got those. His layouts were veryclean and very precise—it wasn’t sloppy stuff—but therewere no blacks in it, and my fear was that I was going tolose his style. So after the second one, I just said to

Carlin, “Please have him do pencils. I’m fine with justdoing inks.” I didn’t really want to do finishes, because Iwas afraid to alienate his fan base, y’know? And he did-n’t need me, he was already selling; he was the top guy. Ididn’t need to have somebody say, “Oh, yeah, Ordway’sruining him,” or something like that. Looking back onthose first two issues I think you see a little more of myrendering and my approach, because, again, there wereno black areas.

MM: From then on it was full pencils?

JERRY: Yeah, after the witch story, which was the firsttwo issues, then he went to full pencils. I don’t think itwas a major thing for him, but I heard afterwards Johnhad kind of wanted me to go to town on it, but I justwasn’t prepared to step into that at that point.

MM: During that time, you inked three covers for ActionComics, and you also penciled and inked a Superman cover,pre-Crisis.

JERRY: You know, I think I did some of the coverstowards the end of my Infinity stuff. And DC tried tokeep me. They didn’t want me to leave. And the funnything is, the minute I agreed to do Fantastic Four and wasoff, I got a call from Pat Bastienne, who said, “Oh, Dickapproved you to get top rate.” [laughter] You never can

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MM: What kind of lead time did you have on Adventuresof Superman? At what point did you actually start workingon it?

JERRY: I started in May of 1986, while I was doing theFantastic Four stuff. I think the last thing I did was part ofthis bigFantastic Fouranniversaryissue, andduring thattime Iremembergetting pho-tocopies ofwhat Byrne wasdoing on Man of Steel.Andy Helfer wassending photo-copies, and Iknew I was goingto be involvedwith one of thebooks, but I actuallywas expecting them toask me to ink the ByrneSuperman. But they said, “Oh,no, you’re going to be doing one ofthree books,” and the early wordthat I got was that AlanMoore was going to writethe one I was going todraw, and I was like,“Whoa! Cool!” I reallyliked Swamp Thing, andI thought he was really goodon Superman. But, of course, itturns out that this was wishfulthinking on Andy Helfer’s part.He had a wish list of people thathe wanted.

Marv was also set up to bewriting one of the books, sosomewhere along the line Iwound up beingteamed up withMarv and Mike

Machlan was going to be inking. Within the first couplemonths, there was major trouble. It was just an unfortu-nate situation, because there was clearly.... I wasn’t partyto any friction between Marv Wolfman and John Byrne,but clearly there were some issues. I don’t know if Marvjust didn’t like the idea of being subordinate, in a way,

because Byrnewas control-ling themythos atthat point,or if it wassomething

else, but plotswere really slowcoming. By thetime I started onmy second issueof Adventures of

Superman, the firstone was horriblylate. Mike Machlanbowed out becauseit didn’t look goodfor him. He wasn’t

a fast inker, and hewasn’t getting pages.

He got through thefirst one, but by the second one

there was nobody to ink it, so Iinked it myself, which

made it even later.That first year on

Adventures ofSuperman was justpainful. And,

again, it was a badtime for Marv. I never

really bonded with Marv. I never hadany contact with Marv during Crisis, sowe really didn’t have the benefit of,like, maybe he and George, wherethey were pals or whatever. All Iknew was that I wasn’t getting plots,

and when I was getting plots,they were not what I was

Part 4: He’s an Artist! He’s aWriter! It’s Superman!

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looking for. Out of that, my first plottingcredit is the third Adventures of Superman, Ibelieve. It’s the Legends crossover, withSuperman on Apokolips. That was, I think,my first conversation on the telephone withByrne. Basically Mike Machlan and Al Veyand I sat in the studio and I wrote out stufflonghand, and we plotted that issue out.While Mike was still on Adventures ofSuperman, actually, we created Gangbusterand plotted out that whole story arc, whichwe wound up using while Mike was stillsupposedly going to be inking the book.

We wanted to use Kirby’s Guardian, but wecouldn’t, so we came up with Gangbusterinstead.

But it was definitely a book that was inneed of ideas. Again, it was just an unfortu-nate situation that didn’t work out. That yearwith Marv—it’s nothing personal, because Ididn’t know the guy—but it was a painful,painful year, because, from losing the leadtime right off the bat, there was unbelievablepressure, because we weren’t allowed to havea fill-in. A fill-in during the first year of abook was, like, you were going to lose all the

momentum. Nowadays, peopledo two issues and they get a fill-in, but we had to make our waythrough that. And I think I didwind up getting a one-issue fill-inthat Erik Larsen drew when Imoved from Wisconsin toConnecticut. So I didn’t really getany time off. I moved over aweekend and had to set up shopin a new town, and I startedworking that Monday. It got bet-ter when I moved, because I waswithin hailing distance of DCComics, and I was able to thengo into the office, and I thinkthat helped tremendously as far asgetting my ideas.... I was gettinga little more confidence, and Iwas getting a little more.... Youtake your frustrations and youapply it rather than complain, Iguess. So I would take Marv’splots and I would retype themand send them back to Helferand Carlin. I was hoping for co-plotting credit, but at that point Iknew I wasn’t going to get it,because I was basically rewritingsomething that they’d alreadypaid for. But there’s competition,and when you’re competingagainst Byrne... I didn’t want tobe the weak link in thatSuperman chain.

MM: Visually it looks like itprobably took two or threeissues for you to really get thefeel of how you wanted yourSuperman to look. Am I lookingat it correctly?

Below: Pencils for theGangbuster entry inDC’s Who’s Who.Next Page: An alternatesketch for the cover ofAdventures of Superman#430, along with aSuperman commissiondrawing.

Gangbuster, Superman ™ and©2007 DC Comics.

JERRY: Actually, I think it took longer than that. I guessyou’d have to understand being in that situation. When Ifirst started it, I was kind of following John’s cue as far asdrawing Clark and Superman—I was trying to stay some-what grounded with what he did, even though we haddifferent styles. But I think after the first couple issues,when it became more competitive to me [laughs], I thinkthat’s when I started playing more with the dimensions ofSuperman’s face. From my All-Star Squadron days, I alwayssaw the Joe Shuster look, because you go back to thesource, right? And there’s Joe Shuster’s Superman withthe big jaw, and he didn’t have a perfect nose. He had alittle bit of a Roman curve to his nose, and to me thatwas always a visual distinction that I wanted. I wanted tomake the character have some kind of visible hook so hewouldn’t look like Batman, so he wouldn’t look like anyother black-haired character in comics. And it’s hard todo with line drawings unless you’re using a photographicmodel, but that was my goal.

John Beatty has been a friend of mine for years andwas always funny. We used to call him the instigator guybecause he was always egging us on. And Carlin, or, atthat point, Helfer, would catch the hell from it. So I

remember Beatty instigating me early on about, “Youknow, Jerry, you should make that Superman have a bigjaw, give him that Fleisher look and blow Byrne’s versionaway.” So I started, little by little, making his jaw biggerand bigger, and it really got to the point where it was,like, “Okay, I’ve gone too far.” [laughter] It is funny,because you realize something like that when it becomeslooking a little too buffoonish or cartoony looking. Butsome of the stuff that came out of the early issues withMarv, it’s kind of funny to look back on, because whenthe character of Bibbo came out of a story—

MM: I was going to bring him up.

JERRY: He came out of maybe the fourth Marv story,somewhere around there.

MM: It was issue #428.

JERRY: Okay. You know, you always bring your own expe-riences into stuff. Like I said earlier, I grew up in a tavern. Itwas a traditional neighborhood bar—not Cheers, more of aDamon Runyan type of [laughs] run-down place that you’dsee in some movie—and one of the characters in the tavernwhen I was a little kid was an old guy named Joe Kominski.Joe was a merchant marine, a dockworker; he was every-thing that Bibbo became, really. He was a tough guy, buthe was sweet. He was a guy who would fight 15 policemanto a standstill by himself, but yet he would take my brotherand myself, when we were little, to our grandmother’shouse. He was like our watchdog, our guardian, really a

39

MM: Did you start working on the Power of Shazam!graphic novel as soon as you were done with Superman?

JERRY: Around the time I stopped drawing Superman andswitched over to Adventures and was just writing, I thinkthat is when I first got going on it. It wasone of those projects that started upreally slowly, because I had to getthe story approved first. A lot ofthought went into setting up whatFawcett City was going to beabout, and all the other littledetails. It was definitely before“The Death of Superman,” so it hadto be around ’91, maybe?

MM: Yeah, that sounds right. Late 91,I guess. Now, at that time, was it justgoing to be a graphic novel, orwas there a series in dis-cussion?

JERRY: At thetime the ByrneShazam! projecthad just col-lapsed. I thinktheir ultimategoal was tohave a series,and it was one ofthe few timeswhere I felt like Icould call someshots, becauseJonathan Peterson wasthe editor and he reallywanted me to do it, so I thinkI had the option there to pushthings a little bit. Doingmonthly comics back then,there was no guarantee ofanything being reprintedin a book form. None ofthe Superman stuff hadbeen collected, whichwas frustrating, and I

wanted to do something that was kind of all my own, aswell. First we had to get approved for hardcover status.Then the next thing was, “Gee, can I color it? I don’twant to do it on blueline, I would like to color the artitself.” And those were all control issues for me at thetime, because I knew what would happen if it was done

on blueline. They would want all the line art donefirst, and then the blueline color would be doneafter the line art, and I didn’t want to lose controlof that, because that’s what happens a lot of times.I think it might have happened with the Kubertswhen they were doing Adam Strange, where there’sa lot of pressure then, “Well, the pencil art andthe ink art is done, so why can’t we get Joe Blow

in production to do the blueline color, tospeed it up?” So I told them, “I want

to do it full-coloron the board,” and

they would worryabout reproduction.Because they didn’t real-ly do a lot of that. Itwas during the begin-ning of incorporat-

ing computers,but it was still afilm process fordoing painted

artwork.That was my

goal, and I paint-ed myself, so tospeak, into amajor corner withthat, because it wasa very slow process.It’s one thing to say,“I’m going to colorthis myself,” but it’sanother thing whenyou start working onthe actual drawingitself. The black line

isn’t as strong, soyour contrasthas to be good.

Part 5: It’s All about Family...the Marvel Family

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Above: Cover art forthe hardcover edition ofThe Death of Superman.Pencils by Dan Jurgens.Next Page: WildStarpromotional artwork.

Doomsday, Superman ™ and©2007 DC Comics. WildStar ™and ©2007 Al Gordon & JerryOrdway.

You have to do really clean work, as well,because if you have to erase something orpaint a mistake out, it will show.

At that point they were nice enoughthat it wasn’t scheduled. I was doing it asmy side job. As I recall, when I finished onSuperman—“The Death of Superman,” and“The Return of Superman,” which was ’93—I had maybe 30 pages done, at that point,over a couple of years. It was really slow.

MM: You also worked on a couple of otherprojects, too, during that time, WildStarbeing one.

JERRY: Yeah, WildStar kind of fit in

between the end of “The Death ofSuperman” and the Shazam! book. And DCwas very supportive of that. My plan wasto finish WildStar and then to finishShazam!. And Shazam! was certainly inter-rupted for WildStar, but I think from DC’spoint of view, they were holding that char-acter for me. I think somewhere in there iswhen it became, “Well, would you do theseries?” I started thinking about what itwould be to do the series at that point, butI knew that I wasn’t going to be able todraw it. I was trying to scale my workloaddown with the birth of my first child, and Ijust didn’t want to be on constant dead-lines. Because drawing and writing, somepeople can do it pretty matter-of-factly, Iguess, but for me it was pulling teeth. Andit’s a grueling kind of thing, month aftermonth. I was able to hedge my bets there,too, when we finally were going to launchthe Shazam! book, by getting them to letme do painted covers, and that would bemy art contribution for the book. But thatalso seemed to be in dispute.

MM: Were you asking for more money forthe painted covers?

JERRY: You know, it wasn’t even that.Painted covers are a standard now. Backthen, they didn’t do them very oftenbecause they were very difficult, produc-tion-wise. The system was geared towardsflat color and being able to reuse theblack-and-white line art. There wasn’t abudget for a painted cover—that was a bigissue. Their painted rate was much betterthan a pencil-&-ink rate and a flat colorrate. At that time I think it was the differ-ence between getting paid something like$1500 for a painted cover versus gettingsomething like $300 or $400 for a pencil-&-ink cover. That was an issue, but I said,“Look, I’ll take the rate of just doing flatcolor,” which was, I think, $100, “on top ofthe pencil and ink cover rate.” I did thatfor the first year’s worth of covers, maybe.There was some period in time when theyfinally said, “Okay, what we’re going to dois we’re going to come up with a specialrate. It’s not the full painting rate, but it’snot the other thing.” They were veryagreeable, I just had to prove that I wantedto do it. [laughter]

MM: And that you could turn in a painting everymonth.

JERRY: I had to hold my breath until I turnedblue. But in any tantrum—it wasn’t even atantrum—but any type of situationlike that where I drew a line in thesand, I always did it over artisticthings rather than,“Oh, I want thisbecause this guygot that.” In comicsyou really aren’t incontrol of things,you’re part of anassembly line. Sothe idea of beingable to do it all bymyself was just a dream.And it’s a tricky thingfor them, work-for-hire-wise, becausepart of their loophole with work-for-hireis that you’re contributing to a product ratherthan creating a product. I believe I had to be incor-porated at an earlier point just to be able to write anddraw the Superman books. I had to be incorporated justso I could qualify from their legal standpoint, not beingable to claim copyright on any of the material I did.

MM: Interesting.

JERRY: The other thing I think was interesting wasJonathan Peterson and I knew we were doing

this hardcover which was going to bepriced at around 20, 25 bucks. We

thought, “Well, ifyou’re going to try todo this and get theaudience that you want,

the pricey hardcoveris going to limityou.” So I drew allthe artwork on thePower of Shazam!graphic novel in

black line form,then I made reallyclean photocopiesthat could be shotfrom, and then I

colored the pages over the blackline. That way we had a record of it in

line art, because the plan was to break that96 pages up after the hardcover came out and reprint

it in a cheap format with flat colors as a four-issue serieswith filler pages here and there. It would be a way ofhelping launch the regular book. But then that planwent by the wayside, so it was a lot of effort that wasreally wasted, because they just decided they would doeditions in trade format.

The original orders were something like 16,500.They printed 18,000, from what I understand, and theyactually sold the overprinting pretty quickly, which gavethem license to put the trade paperback out a littlequicker. They pumped out probably 20,000 of those,and that sold out. And then the next edition went downin price from, like, $14.95 to $12.95, and that’s been theone that they’ve kept in their backlist. And it sells con-sistently; in the years since then, it’s been a real steadyseller. Every year I get a royalty off of it, and it’s in itsseventh or eighth printing now, which is cool. It’s nicethat it’s had a long life.

MM: I guess the extra effort you put into it paid off, tosome extent.

JERRY: It’s also an original story, so I think that helps. Itwas also the only real Shazam book that they had out fora while, too. So it was gratifying in all the right ways, andit won Best Original Graphic Novel, the Buyers’ Guide fanaward. I proudly have my award sitting on the mantle.

MM: Let’s go back and talk about WildStar for a minute.You were co-creator, but I think you said before that itwas really Al Gordon’s—

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MM: Why Avengers next? Did DC not have anythinglined up for you?

JERRY: The last year of Shazam!, Karl Kesel was doing aWorld’s Finest mini-series for DC. I don’t remember if hewas, at that point, writing Harley Quinn, but he had plen-ty of stuff, and he asked me if I would be willing to comeonto Adventures of Superman again, to do the dialogue. Hewould just plot the book. He and I worked that way forthat year, and as he was wrapping up his run on Adventureshe said, “I’m passing the torch back to you.” JoeyCavalieri was the editor, and Joey was like, “Yeah, great!”So I agreed to write Adventures of Superman fora year, and Joey put in for my contract.Then Joey was replaced, andthe new editor, EddieBerganza, came on. Ithought I wassecure; I thoughtI was going toget a shot, but theword came downthat they wereprobably goingto can everybodyand start fresh.Berganza called meand said, “I’mstarting fresh, soyou’re out.” I hadhad a verbalagreement todo a year’swork, and theyhad been work-ing on a contractfor it, and that wasmy dispute. Myfirst call was toTerryCunningham,and I saidthat I felt DCowed me acommitment ofwriting for a

year. I knew Shazam! was ending, and my third child, myson James, was just born in September of ’98, so I wasalso a little frightened—I had another mouth to feed.And DC, all they could do was say, “Well, you shouldn’tworry about it. You know you’ll get work.”

I got a call around the time I was finishing up Shazam!to ink an issue of Thor over John Buscema’s pencils,which was like a dream come true. That got me into[Tom] Brevoort’s office, and then a little later I got a callfrom Brevoort asking if I would be willing to write athree-issue arc of Avengers to spell George and Kurt. I

said, “Well, coincidentally, I hap-pen to have a hole inmy schedule.” So Iagreed to do it, and I

also said I’d be willing todraw it, too. He said, “Oh,

sure, great.” Two days later I gota call from Mike Carlin, who

at that point wasthe managing edi-tor—he was thebigshot. He wascalling me fromArizona while hewas on vacation tosay, “Please don’tmake any moves,

we’ll make this work,we’ll work this out.”

But by then it wasalready done. I felt

kind of hurt,y’know? After put-ting a lot of yearsin at DC, to feel

that I could be justshuffled off....

I would neverdispute the rightof an editor tomake a changelike that, but Ihad a deal in theworks for twelve

issues, and all they

Part 6: Marvel, Alan Moore,and the McCarthy Era

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had to do was call me and say, “Come upwith a character or something.” Thatwould have solved it. But it led to a lot ofhard feelings, and I tried to make mineMarvel at that point.

MM: Did you discuss what the story wasgoing to be with Kurt?

JERRY: He said, “Here’s where we are, andhere’s where we’re going.” His main thingwas to say I get to break Justice’s leg in mystory so that it’ll feel like it’s an importantpart of the continuity, but then I had to kindof shoehorn that into it. But it was my story.

It was fun, but The Avengers, Spider-Man,and Daredevil were my all-time favorites as akid, so working on The Avengers was like, “Ohmy God! This is really scary!” [laughter] I haddone Superman and all this other stuff, but Ifelt very intimidated. And I felt intimidatedby being at Marvel, because I really didn’tknow anybody. I tried as best I could tocatch on there, but I’m not a networkingguy. I’ve always been an assignment-orientedperson. In the case of Avengers, Brevoortcalled me and said, “Here’s three issues,come up with something,” and I can do that.But I’m not going to sit on my hands athome and say, “Ah, the ultimate She-Hulkstory,” and type up a spec script. Numberone, I’m drawing full-time, I don’t have timeto type up spec stuff. Number two, I don’tthink about super-hero battles. [laughs] Iliken it to the old Hollywood studio system,where someone would call you up and say,“You’re doing Gone with the Wind on Monday.Report to wardrobe,” as opposed to beingClark Gable trying to develop a role forhimself by optioning a book.

MM: I’ve always liked the Wrecking Crew.They’re one of those quintessential Kirbycreations. [Jerry laughs] Did that have any-thing to do with you picking them?

JERRY: Yeah, in the Thor comics, the issueswhere the Wrecker first appeared were clas-sics to me. I just thought that was the great-est, and that was kind of the impetus there.When you get an assignment like that, it’snot like they say, “Use whoever you want.”It’s, “Who do you want to use?”, and thenyou start throwing out characters, and theysay, “Oop, can’t use him. Oop, can’t usehim, he’s in this. Oh, we just used him.” So I

wouldn’t say the Wrecking Crew was myfirst choice [laughs], but it was in the top500. [laughter] It really was like that. Butthey were available, and the DoomsdayMan from Captain Marvel was available,because he was pretty lame. [laughter] Really!

I said, “Well, let’s see. When’s this storycome out?” And it was supposed to be aMarch book, so I said, “Well, what aboutMardi Gras?” I think Tom suggested usingthe Cajun Captain Marvel that Roger Sternhad done in The Avengers. So that dictatedanother piece of it. You always try to thinkof a scene or something that gives you ahook—something that gives you some entryinto the story—and what opened that door

Previous Page: Coverpencils for Avengers #16.Above: Cap chastisesThe Wrecker for hisbetween-meal snacking.Pencils for Avengers #16,page 13.

Avengers, Captain America, TheWrecker ™ and ©2007 MarvelCharacters, Inc.

Below: Romanticintrigue in a savage land.Avengers #18, page 11pencils.Next Page: This backcover art for Monsterman#2 later became thecover to The Messenger.

The Messenger ™ and ©2007Jerry Ordway. Arkon, Avengers,Thundra ™ and ©2007 MarvelCharacters, Inc.

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was the vision of the Wrecker with one ofthem there New Orleans doughnuts. [laugh-ter] “He’s going to crash through some guy’shouse, and the guy is just having himself abeignet, and as he’s crashing through hegrabs the guy’s doughnut.” [Eric laughs] Thenit’s how do you go from that, and how doyou make the Wrecking Crew somewhatformidable and all this other stuff.

I mean, if I had had my choice, I wouldhave loved to something with Red Skull orDoctor Doom, but you make the best youcan. With any kind of story, you have to

find the ingredients and try to combinethem in a way that makes it palatable. I’mkind of a half-assed cook, too. [laughter]That’s how I approach cooking. I’m notsomebody who goes through the cookbookand says, “Hey, I’ve always wanted to makethis!” Karl Kesel is a masterful chef, and he’llfind some recipe that turns him on, and he’llgo and make some really complicated thing.I’ll look at what’s in the refrigerator and say,“Okay, well, we need to use up this, this,and this. What can I make with those threeingredients?” And that’s what stories are like.

MM: In 2000, The Messenger—your childhoodcreation—was published through Image.

JERRY: I think I started working on itwhile I was doing Shazam!. Mike Manley,who was inking Shazam!, was also self-pub-lishing Action Planet Comics. He said, “If youever have anything you want to do... Ican’t pay you. You’ll be part of this otherthing.” At that point I was trying to get thetrademark for the Messenger, and I had touse it. I had an intent to use, I had the fil-ings and all that stuff, but I needed to actu-ally use it, so I started doing it as chapters.I had drawn something like four or fivechapters by the time Mike pulled the plug.

I called up Jim Valentino at Image andsaid, “I have this thing, and I wondered ifyou’d publish it as maybe two issues.”Because the story worked out to 48 pages.“I can pad it out to make three issues orsomething, and I’d like to do it in black-&-white.” And he said, “Let me get back toyou.” I sent him all that I had produced upto that point. Anthony Bozzi was the mar-keting guy or the sales guy, and he said,“All in one, squarebound, one-shot, fullcolor.” “Ohhhh, okay.” Now, unfortunately,that’s on your back. Image doesn’t pay youfor comics unless it makes a profit. And ina good market, that was great. In a badmarket, it’s not so great.

It was fun to do, and I was glad I did it. Ihad a great colorist that Anthony really setme up with, Nick Bell, and it came out verynicely. I’m certainly proud of it, but it justdidn’t do anything. It wasn’t really a super-hero, it was more... I don’t know. It was cer-tainly very fulfilling, but I think it’s stilltechnically in the red for Image. It nevermade back the margin of sales. I don’t know

MM: When you’re penciling for someone else, are youdrawing tighter than when you’re penciling for yourself?

JERRY: When I pencil, if I know I’m going to ink it, Igenerally don’t pencil. I do a layout and then I scribblearound and ink the rough layout. When I’mpenciling something I’m not inking myself, Ialways pencil tight. I’ve had to ink my ownstuff when I didn’t expect to, like a couple ofpages on US Agent I wound up inking myself,and also a couple of pages on Maximum Security,where the inker wasn’t available. It was prettybrutal. It’s no fun, as an inker, to ink on reallytight pencils.

When I’m drawing something I’m inkingmyself, I worry mostly about the layout andmaking sure everything falls in the way it’s sup-posed to. Once I start inking it’s, “It’d be good ifI threw a little heavy black here.” And I keepdoing that with the pages, I’ll ink it with pen,and then I’ll go into it with a brush and try topump up the contrast. When you’re just pencil-ing, you try to do that in pencil, but pencil’sgray, and when you hit something with ink,that’s when you first know if it works or not.That’s the way I am. If it’s been inked by some-body who’s a little timid and they just basicallyfollow the lines and follow the line weights on thepencils, it doesn’t look as good as if they had a littlefreer hand. But not everybody is capable of doingfinishes. I think it’d be fun to try doing layouts forsomeone who is really capable of doing fin-ishes. I think it would be fun to try to,say, team up with Klaus Janson some-time, where I’d just do layouts and lethim do the heavy lifting.

MM: Did you do any of that with DickGiordano?

JERRY: When I took over drawing Shazam!,Carlin convinced me to try to just do lay-outs, and Dick would do finishes. I’venever really done layouts, because Ireally don’t know how to hold back. Idid my best, and I left the line weightto Dick. It just didn’t have the punch to

it that I was expecting. It didn’t look like he went into itwith a brush, really, too much. You visualize what you’reexpecting the guy to do—the stuff you’ve alwaysloved—but I think he was trying to stay faithful towhat was down there. So I told Carlin, “Look, thisis Dick Giordano. I don’t want to get him mad.

Part 7: Storytelling andthe Creative Process

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But can he go over this again?” So he wentover it with a brush and punched up theheavy contrast and then it was much better.But Dick was inking a lot of material forDC. He was probably doing Batman orsomething at the same time, so you reallyaren’t getting the loving attention on eachpage. You’re getting a good job, it’s just notthe same job as somebody who’s going tospend 14 hours on a page. So at some pointI said I would like to go back to full pen-cils, and I think that worked a little better.Dick was really nice about it, too. I wouldhave never thought in a million years, butDick was a Captain Marvel fan from hischildhood, so he felt like, “Wow, it’s a thrillto get to draw Captain Marvel.” Whowould have thought? I mean, he’s so associ-ated with Batman and dark, shadowy stuff.

MM: How much time does it take you topencil a page versus penciling and inking apage?

JERRY: Sometimes things go fast, some-times they go slowly. But a page from startto finish, you’re talking, maybe six, seven

hours. When I was doing Superman, I thinkit had to go faster because there was morepressure. But when you’re creating thestuff, it’s not the same as second-guessing awriter. I mean, you’d think it would gofaster drawing from full scripts, but it real-ly doesn’t. Full script makes me moreretentive about word balloons. Whenyou’re doing full script, you can get a pagewhere there’s a lot of talking, and it cantake most of your time just trying tochoreograph how the balloons are goingto work. From my experience as a writer, Iknow a lot of artists don’t think about that,but I do. I guess if I can share one thingwith Alex Toth, that’s it. I can’t share hisgenius, but that’s one thing I rememberhearing him talk about one time was howthe balloons fit, and how it’s important tothe balance of the page. And I totallyagree.

MM: Okay, this is one of those desertisland questions: If you were forced tochoose between being a penciler or beingan inker/finisher, which way would you go?

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Previous Page: CaptainMarvel art for a contestprize.Above: Jerry’s coversketches for Will to Power#7 and 8 (1984)—featur-ing the Superman-esqueTitan—part of DarkHorse’s Comic’s GreatestWorld imprint.

Captain Marvel, Shazam! ™ and©2007 DC Comics. Grace,Mecha, Rebel, Ruby, Titan,Warmaker ™ and ©2007 DarkHorse Comics.

JERRY: Oh, I would rather be a penciler.Every time I think about how greatit would be just to ink, thereality is just not fun. I mean, Ienjoy doing it once in a while,but if someone said, “You can nolonger do anything else but ink,”I would get out of the business. Ijust couldn’t handle it. It’s horriblenot to have any control over thedrawing. I have a very distinctway of telling a story, and maybeit’s not the most dynamic way inthe world, but my goal has alwaysbeen—and I think I’ve been prettysuccessful—that you can followthe story without the balloons.You can look at it and you’re nottotally lost. Clarity’s always beenreally important, and that’s thething that I always gauge whenI’m inking somebody else or doingfinishes, if I can detach myselfenough, then I can handle it.

MM: What about drawing cov-ers? I thought these Red Menacecovers were very interesting.How did the concept for themoriginate?

JERRY: I like the cover to saysomething, and sometimes thetrends change where people justwant cool shots or whatever, butI always prefer something thathas a little story to it. So with RedMenace, my thought was that I was going todo something in gray wash. It’s not a fullpainting, but it’s gray-toned. I wasn’t gettingpaid extra for it, I just thought that it wouldbe distinctive enough that it would standout on the stands at the comic shop. And Isuggested the red lettering based onConfidential magazine, which I saw in one ofmy books when I was doing research.Confidential was like the National Enquirer of itsday, I guess. And I said, “Well, that wouldbe a good framework for it.” The originaleditor, Ben Abernathy, was like, “Oh, welike that. That works because then it givesthat book an identifying thread through allthe issues.” I was ready to break the formatby the second issue. There’s a fine line withfeeling like someone’s going to look at it

and go, “Wait a minute, didn’t I buy thatone already?” That’s tricky.

MM: Where do you start when you’re com-ing up with ideas for your writing? As anartist, do you start with an image, or do youstart with a particular piece of dialogue?

JERRY: Well, the very first thing that I didthat I liked writing-wise, was the story aboutthe homeless guy in Adventures of Superman—the Brainiac story—and that was suggestedby the image that Jimmy Olsen kept seeingthat homeless guy. That’s where that ideacame from. I don’t keep a story file anymorebecause it doesn’t seem like I’m doing verymuch writing, but when I was on Superman Ikept a story file. I always read a couple ofnewspapers every day; I like to keep up on

Previous Page: MikeZeck’s pencils and Jerry’sinks for an early ’90sPunisher poster.Above: Cover art forRed Menace #6.

Punisher ™ and ©2007 MarvelCharacters, Inc. Red Menace andall related characters ™ and©2007 Pet Fly Production, Inc.,Flyworks Productions, Inc., &Second Row Productions, Inc.

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Jerry Ordway

Art Gallery97

©2007 Jerry Ordway

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Left: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #15.Below: Painted cover of Power of Shazam! #16.Next Page Top: Painted covers of Supreme #41 (left) andPower of Shazam! #27 (right).

Next Page Bottom: Jerry’s color guides for the newlycreated characters of the Top 10: Beyond the FarthestPrecinct mini-series.

Billy Batson, Captain Marvel, Mary Bromfield, Mr. Mind, Shazam, and all relat-ed characters ™ and ©2007 DC Comics. Supreme ™ and ©2007 RobLiefeld. Top 10 and all related characters ™ and ©2007 America’s BestComics, LLC.

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Modern Masters:Jerry Ordway

Superman... Captain Marvel... the Jus-tice Society... all classic heroes, and noone does classic better than Jerry Ord-way. With his keen sense of anatomy,proportion, and detail, he draws super-heroes that are powerful, noble... andheroic. What more could you want froman artist? Well, not only is he an artist ofthe highest caliber, he can write a greatstory while he's at it. The Adventures ofSuperman, The Power of Shazam!, TheAvengers—all have been critically ac-claimed for his scripting. In this latestvolume of the Modern Masters series,Ordway’s life and career are spotlighted,as he discusses the work that’s madehim a fan-favorite, complete with an extensive art gallery. Also presented is a lavishcolor section, featuring more remarkable Ordway illustrations. One look at this volume,and you'll see that Jerry Ordway is a true Modern Master!

(120-page trade paperback with COLOR) $14.95(Digital Edition) $5.95

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