PAUL KUPPERBERG | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Mar24

PAUL KUPPERBERG: 13 DC BRONZE AGE Staffers You Should Know More About

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 24, 2023

PAUL KUPPERBERG: 13 DC BRONZE AGE Staffers You Should Know More About

The celebrated Mr. K shines a spotlight on the behind-the-scenes staffers who brought you the comics you love… By PAUL KUPPERBERG If you’re in the vicinity of Harrison, NY, Saturday, March 25 between noon and 2 pm, I’m going to be signing Direct Conversations: Talks with Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators and other bits of ephemera at Aw Yeah! Comics at 313 Halstead Ave. Hope to see you there! * * * In Direct Conversations: Talks with Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators, one-time assistant editor and former company president and publisher Paul Levitz remembered, “(The DC Comics offices of the early 1970s) wasn’t a terrible environment to be in. And it was an easy environment to learn in. … Imagine the opportunity to work in a place with 35 people, and one out of every five of them will become Hall of Famers in the industry. Bear that in mind. Two out of the five were in drudge jobs that mostly involved moving stuff along, so maybe half of the people with any responsibilities would become legends. And never mind all the other people walking in and out of the office. How could you not learn? How could you not grow, surrounded by that many role models of creative success?” Or, as sports manager Spencer Tracy famously assessed athlete Katharine Hepburn in the 1952 classic Pat and Mike, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce!” That little company, hidden away on one-third of a floor in midtown Manhattan’s 75 Rockefeller Center was indeed home to a powerful line-up of creatives. The two who were in “drudge jobs” Paul references were company president Sol Harrison and production manager Jack Adler. The other three were Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, and Julie Schwartz, but that left out a couple of dozen names that, while not legendary, perhaps deserve to be and were, in their own ways, every bit as important as Sol, Jack, and the rest to the history and development of DC Comics. Readers of certain ages will likely be familiar with some of the names below in different creative capacities for DC and Marvel (among others), but a lot of people got their start on staff during this pivotal era in comics history. A forgotten source was the “DC Profiles” feature (many of which I...

Mar22

PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite JOE GIELLA Stories

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 22, 2023

PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite JOE GIELLA Stories

Paying tribute to the late artist, whose career spanned the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages… — UPDATED 3/22/23: Joe Giella has died at the age of 94, his family announced Wednesday. This piece ran on his birthday in 2022, in slightly different form. We present it again today. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG Joe Giella (born 94 years ago on June 27, 1928) seemed to be the inker of practically every DC comic book I loved as a kid and later, after I had achieved adulthood (according to the calendar anyway), he was assigned to ink a number of stories I wrote. He’s listed on Mike’s Amazing World of Comics (http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/index.php) as comics’ 11th most prolific inker even though he was largely retired from regular work by 1984, 38 years ago (my Adventures of Superboy looks to be his last regularly assigned book). Joe got his start in 1947, long before I was aware that either he or comic books even existed, inking features like Black Canary, Johnny Thunder, Wildcat, Jimmy Wakely, the JSA, King Faraday (in Danger Trail), the Trigger Twins, Knights of the Galaxy, the Phantom Stranger, Captain Comet, Detective Chimp, Hopalong Cassidy… not to mention scores of one-off science fiction, war, Western, and other genre stories. There were a couple of constants throughout Joe’s career. One was that he did 98 percent of his work for DC Comics, with a few Marvel jobs scattered over the years, some Archie Comics work (on their Mighty Heroes line in the ’60s), and credits on a handful of stories for Tower Comics. Another was that probably 60 percent of the work he did at DC he did for editor Julie Schwartz, and likely 50 percent of those jobs was his inking over Carmine Infantino. You can learn more about the fascinating life of this comics legend (who I was fortunate enough to meet on a couple of occasions at Terrificon) here, but the best way for his fans to celebrate his 94th birthday is by celebrating his work! Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE JOE GIELLA STORIES: — The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961). As I’ve noted often in this space, “The Flash of Two Worlds” is one of the most important stories of DC’s Silver Age, introducing the concept of the Multiverse into the DCU. It’s also the story...

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