It all started in the basement.

When it comes to pop culture, there is no golden age. Or rather, the golden age is different for everyone, depending on where (and when) you were around age 10. My passions were forged in the NY metro area in the ’60s, huddled in the basement with my brothers Steve and Rob. Drawing and painting, performing "radio shows" on reel-to-reel tape, shooting 8mm movies, with the steady drone of the TV in the background—it was a rich, creative time.

The Bat’s Pajamas

At WonderCon '09 in San Francisco, I moderated a panel for Ray Griggs' new film Super Capers, which included none other than Adam West. After interviewing William Shatner back in college, I'm on my way to closing the book on my fifth-grade heroes (I wonder what Robert Vaughn is up to these days..?) Even at 80, the former millionaire-playboy and self-described "Bright Knight" worked the crowd beautifully. The most surreal moment came after an unkempt 30-year old in a Superman costume asked an unintelligible question about water sports and West asked "Do you know what he's talking about?" All I could say was "Holy swim team, Batman!"

Kong is still King

Back in the day, WOR-TV wasn’t a superstation, but a little independent channel with a meagre library of RKO movies from the ’30s and ’40s. That included the original King Kong, and there were days when the announcer intoned “If you missed any part of King Kong, or wish to see it again, the next showing follows this commercial break.” Movies were programmed back-to-back for 24 hrs., or twice a day for a week. On Thanksgiving, Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young were shown consecutively in a Monkey Movie Marathon.

Needless to say, the big ape was a seminal influence on me and my brothers (and a lot of other guys—even Tony Soprano’s a fan). I've got a weakness for stories of fish out of water, of strangers in a strange land. So in 2005 I enjoyed the good fortune of handling one of the film’s original concept paintings and shaking hands with the star of the show himself: The last surviving stop-motion puppet, in the possession of fantasy film expert Bob Burns. Kong seemed a little smaller in person, but he still casts an awfully big shadow.

 

Jack and a pair of Joes

Marvel Comics was a pop-culture juggernaut in the 1960s, turning anti-heroes into superheroes and cartoon unbelievers into true believers. The prime movers were Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and their work on The Mighty Thor, Nick Fury, Captain America and especially The Fantastic Four inspired me to put pencil to paper everytime I encountered it. The cover of FF #79, above, dazzled me both for its content and its execution. Ben Grimm, doomed to be the misshapen Thing---forever! What a great metaphor for an insecure adolescent, and the drawing was slick beyond belief.

In 1976 my pals Ron Maslanka and Larry Bugal helped me to create a foam rubber Thing suit in which I clobbered the competition at a NYC comic-con costume ball. There, I snapped this shot with Jack “King” Kirby and “Joltin'” Joe Sinnott, the team that produced that cover years earlier. I even got a mention in Ronin Ro's breezy chronicle of the Marvel Age, Tales to Astonish (page 177). But if I had it to do all over again, I would change one thing: I'd have taken another photo—without the mask!

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

—Albert Camus, author of The Stranger

 

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