PAUL KUPPERBERG: 13 Essential PETE MORISI Stories
To celebrate the unsung Charlton artist’s birthday… — UPDATED 1/7/25: The late Pete Morisi was born 97 years ago! Perfect time to re-present this column from 2021. Dig it. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG As a 13-year-old first coming across the Charlton Comics work of writer/artist PAM, I knew that whoever this creator, known only by their initials, was, he had it all figured out. There was something familiar and comfortable about his clean, open style and hard, defining line. His storytelling was solid and the composition of his panels no-nonsense. His backgrounds could be sparse or nonexistent, sometimes even weirdly impressionistic, and his characters seemed a little posed; someone once wrote that people “often resembled a drawing of a sculpture of a person.” But it worked. PAM was, I later learned, Pete A. Morisi (Jan. 7, 1928–Oct. 12, 2003), a Brooklyn-born artist who, more than half a dozen years into what appeared to be a successful career in comics, fulfilled a lifelong dream by joining the New York Police Department and spending the next 20 years in blue. The pseudonym was an effort to keep his two professions separate. Pete is best known for his creation of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, part of editor Dick Giordano’s mid-1960s “Action Heroes” line, along with the revivals of Captain Atom and the Blue Beetle, plus Peacemaker, Nightshade, the Fightin’ 5, and others. But Pete had been plying his trade since the 1940s, writing and/or drawing for Marvel, Harvey, Lev Gleason, Quality Comics, and others in all genres all across the board. DC Comics bought the rights to the Charlton characters in 1983 and in 1992 gave him his own title, Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt by writer/artist Mike Collins and inker Jose Marzan Jr. that lasted 12 issues. I was the editor of that series (and would later get to write Thunderbolt in a Charlton heroes’ team-up story in Justice League Quarterly, also with art by Collins, this time inked by Eduardo Barreto), and was fortunate enough to spend a very entertaining lunch with Pete and Dick Giordano at New York’s Society of Illustrators, being regaled by tales of early comics and old Charlton. If I hadn’t already been a fan, that afternoon would have made me one. Here are 13 ESSENTIAL PETE MORISI STORIES: 1. Peter Cannon… Thunderbolt (Charlton Comics, 1966-67). Rather...
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