The write stuff

Though they work their magic far behind the scenes of the comic book business, comic book writers are often some of the most interesting and unusual people in the business of creating comic books. In addition to conceiving the adventures of our favorite heroes and heroines each month, they have some unexpected hobbies and pastimes. From slight of hand to unusual collections, here’s a look at just a few.

Comic book writers share their favorite pastimes (COMBO #27) By Alex Amado • Art by Bill Jankowski

Mark Waid, Prestidigitator

Mark Waid, author of last summer’s smash Kingdom Come, is a truly multi-talented individual. In addition to his writing skills, which can be seen every month in DC’s Impulse, he has numerous other skills. He is, for instance, an amateur magician. According to Mark, he’s been interested in the art of legerdemain since he was a kid. “I’ve always been into all forms of entertainment,” he says. “Anything that gets me up on a stage is cool.”

Among his earliest influences, he cites The Amazing Kreskin. “At the tender age of 8,” Mark admits, “I believed in [Kreskin] with all my heart. What a maroon.” Still, the no-longer-credulous Waid has taken to magic like a materializing dove to the sleeve of a tux.

Waid hasn’t actually performed magic in front of an audience since he was in college, but he can be caught showing off the occasional slight of hand at a few comic conventions every year. His favorite type of trick?

“I like any kind of card trick, be­cause everybody’s got a deck of cards sitting around. I don’t like stuff where you have to pull out of your pocket a steel tube and a live pigeon. It’s just not natural,” he explains.

Asked about the greatest feat of magic he ever performed, Waid deadpans: “Bringing my career back from utter extinction in 1989.”

James Hudnall, Movie Maven

James Hudnall, writer of The Unauthorized Biography of Lex Luthor, as well as his current, just-moved-to-Image book, Espers, is a movie buff. A big-time movie buff.

According to Jim, he has more than 500 films on VHS and laserdisc, as well as a quality entertainment setup on which to view them. “I have a wide range of films. I like all kinds of stuff, but I especially like classic films, film noir, and Hong Kong movies,” he says. Some of Hudnall’s favorites are The Killing, Oklahoma!, The Wild Bunch, Sullivan’s Travels, The Third Man [dig that crazy zither music!—ed.], and Vertigo. The collection also ties in with his profession as a writer. “I’m much more influenced in my writing by films and novels than I am by other comics. Basically, there are a lot of things in film that can inspire me. Also, if I’m stuck on a problem, going and doing something completely unrelated—like watching a good film—gives me the inspiration to work it out.”

Hudnall has been collecting films since 1981, which is about when home video recorders made their way to the consumer market. He took one wrong turn early on, however: “I started out with a Betamax machine. I still have it. It’s not hooked up now; it’s just sitting there.” Looking at a film collection from the quality side, James says that laserdisc has both types of video beat hands down.

James Robinson, Toth Authority

Another avid collector is James Robinson, who pens DC’s Starman, as well as Leave it to Chance, a joint creation with Paul Smith, published by Image Comics’ Homage imprint. Robinson’s particular passion is the work of seminal comics and animation artist Alex Toth, who is perhaps best-known today for his design work on Hanna-Barbera’s Space Ghost. Robinson has been accumulating Toth’s printed works and his originals for over 15 years. “I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t like Toth’s work at all,” says James. “It was the antithesis of everything else that was out there. Then as I got older, I started to get into what he did, and through him, I discovered some of his influences, like Frank Robbins, Roy Crane, and such.” Some of the prides of Robinson’s collection include “a complete Fox story, all of the original pages, and pages of ‘Lone Wolf,’ which is a great war story.”

These originals are all stored in a portfolio, James explains, because of the nature of the work. “First off, I’m not a big one for putting things up on walls. I have a display book where I mount the pages and put all the originals. Also, one of the problems with Alex’s work is that he tended to use elusive media, like markers, that do not age well. So I keep them preserved in a portfolio and look at them whenever I feel inclined.”

In the area of Toth’s printed work, James is a self-described completist. However, he notes, “There are always those things that you just never see. There’s a book called Love, the Ultimate Manifestation. It’s an underground that he did one page in. I can’t find it anywhere.” Toth’s work has special significance for Robinson, who admits, “It’s now become my only collection, where before it was just one of many things I collected.” Incidentally, James has had the opportunity to meet Alex Toth on several occasions, and says that they correspond regularly.

Harlan Ellison, the Ultimate Collector

A great number of people have collections of this, that, and the other. But few have gone to the lengths that Harlan Ellison has in collecting and displaying his thises, thats, the others—and a few more things besides.

Ellison is a world-renowned author and critic, and has adapted a number of his short stories into comic book form under the title Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor from Dark Horse—though he is probably best-known as the author of the original screenplay on which the award-winning Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” was based. His collection of stuff, for want of a better word, has become the focal point of his L.A. home, which he has built up over the last 30 years to house his diverse possessions.

“I look on my house as, in some ways, Shangri-La, or even the Hearst Mansion,” Harlan explains. His various collections include rare glassworks by Lalique, a vast array of original paintings, a comic book collection that he estimates at $3 million to $4 million in value, and thousands of pewter figurines. But he balks slightly at the use of the word “collector,” and stresses that he is certainly not a “fanatic collector.” For instance, he explains, “I have the first comic I ever got. It was back in 1939 in Shelby, N.C., and it was a [New York] World’s Fair comic [from] 1939, with Superman and Batman and Zatara. That’s now worth about $4000 or $5000. If I were to be missing that comic book from my collection, I would not pay $5000 for it, because it was 15 cents when it was new.”

Ellison explained some of the attitude behind his accumulations. “Part of my philosophy of life is that I judge success by only one standard: If you can achieve in mature adult terms the dreams you had as a child, you’re a success. So, say if you wanted to be a cowboy, and you wind up owning a ranch, you’re a success. When I was young, I always wanted to have a house filled with secret passages and rooms.” And Harlan has succeeded in creating the house of his boyhood dreams. One of his rooms, accessed via a secret passage, is a temperature- and humidity-controlled archive with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that contain his entire comic collection. “They’re all bagged,” he says, “but not in such a way that I can’t read them. I’ll go down there from time to time and pull out a comic from 1943 and sit down on the floor like a 9-year-old and read it. I think collecting things that you cannot touch and play with is counterproductive. It’s an alien kind of thing.”

Also among his many items, Harlan owns some one-of-a-kinds. “For instance,” he begins, in a rapid-fire reminiscence, “the great comic artist Jack Kirby once gave me a pen. It’s the pen with which he first drew the Silver Surfer, and he autographed it for me. It was in my drawer, and I picked it up one day and was looking at it, and it’s just a Crowquill pen with Jack Kirby’s signature on it. And it struck me that I was the only one who knew what it was. It’s a wonderful pop cultural artifact, but if I were to croak tomorrow, somebody would find this crummy chewed-up pen and probably throw it in the garbage.” So Ellison had the sculptor Barclay Shaw create an Art Nouveau mounting for the pen, along with a brass plate explaining what it is.

Harlan continues to verbally catalog his possessions, which include more than 25,000 record albums, and over a quarter of a million books. But despite the enormous value of many of these items, that’s not what collecting is about for Ellison. “I collect things that will enrich and pleasure me. People buy stuff for investment, but I don’t. I buy things because I want them. I’ve had people from museums offer me $200,000 for selected pieces, but I wouldn’t get rid of any of this stuff. There isn’t one thing in my house that I would sell.”