of Comic Book Artist Magazine
March 13, 1998
Comic Book Artist:
Were you much of a comics reader as a kid?
Michael Wm. Kaluta:
I wasn’t a student of comics when I was young, I was a plain old reader. Junior high school was the time when I stopped reading any kind of comic books avidly and high school was when I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs avidly, looking at the illustrations. In the year I took off between high school and college, I met Steve Hickman, a big Burroughs fan. Then, through Hickman I met Steve Harper, who had the information about all of the old ERB illustrators. It was a real shot in the arm to see all this imagery that obviously had inspired Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta. We all loved ERB and the illustrations; we loved those worlds almost to the point of wanting to go and leave this life behind. Most of the time the two Steves and I were together, we were drawing and drawing and drawing.
CBA:
I was fortunate enough to see, hanging on Carmine Infantino’s apartment wall, an original by St. John and across the room is your illustration for the masthead for the Korak, Son of Tarzan letters page.
MWK:
That’s not my masthead drawing. The one that Carmine has was actually by Roy Krenkel and inked by Jeff Jones. It’s inked on vellum because Roy had done his in ballpoint — and it’s pure Roy. It looks like my style because Roy so influenced me. The reason that I know that it’s not Roy’s original is because I have Roy’s ballpoint original in my Studio. It’s flattering to hear I did that art but it’s not too surprising. I studied Roy — who said, “Don’t study from my work because you’ll just learn my mistakes!” I told him that his mistakes are gold. If I’d have done that beautiful Korak figure, leaning to the side shooting the arrow straight up, I’d have just retired.
Hickman, Harper and I got to New York in 1967 to attend the SCARP Con, where we met up with the guys from the EC fanzine Spa-Fon: Rich Hauser and Helmut Mueller. We hung out at Phil Sueling’s table and he was, of course, always willing to introduce us to all the good artists. This young Catholic kid from Baltimore, Bernie Wrightson, was at the convention and he won an award for best young talent. We all met, hit it off and went everywhere together. The guys from Chicago said, “Frank’s upstairs and he wants to meet you,” so we ran up the nine flights. We were too impatient to wait for the elevator! We all had portfolios under our arms and we went to Frank’s room. Ellie was there and so were their kids. Frank was on his hands and knees trying to plug a TV set in for his kids to watch cartoons. Then he looked through our portfolios, one by one, as we were standing there, awestruck to be in the presence of the Master. I don’t remember what he said to me, if anything, because Bernie had presented him with a drawing and Frank said, “Look, here’s a bunch of Johnny Comet originals — go pick one.” They were Sunday pages! It was flawless work! Later, the Chicago Boys, with Bob Barrett and Frank, brought Frazetta’s originals to the hotel. We had this big artfest up in the room and everybody there went absolutely bugfuck looking at this stuff. It was also very sobering because after staring holes through the paperback covers the originals were so much more painterly with so much incredible depth — I was not the only guy to think “...might as well just give up... this guy is too good!”.
CBA:
What were your aspirations as a young artist?
MWK:
I never even thought about being an illustrator or comic book artist. I’d just finished my second year of college...I didn’t know what I was going to do, stay in school or join the army. After the next SCARP convention, Phil Seuling contacted me and said that Al Williamson had seen stuff that I did and was interested in talking to me about maybe helping with a story. That flipped me out. At the next New York Convention I went up to Al and he gave me a script that he was having trouble getting in to. He asked me to stretch it out. “Give me plenty of boots, girls, dinosaurs and stuff” he said. I made 7 pages into 12. Al still has my fumbling pencil originals and unless he gets mad at me we won’t tell anyone. They’re really awful, awful stuff. I was so uptight about doing the job that I just rendered and detailed it to death. Later Al did a fine job with the story and let me doodle a bit on a page or two. DC Comics published it under the title The Beautiful Beast.
CBA:
Did you meet Jeff Jones at around this time?
MWK:
1967... Jeff had been the winner of best young talent at the previous SCARP convention and so we got to meet him there and see some of his originals. Fairly amazing. We (Steve Hickman, Steve Harper, Bernie and I) went to his apartment uptown in New York — in the same building Bernie and I would eventually live.
CBA:
Was this the place where First Fridays was held?
MWK:
The First Friday Get Togethers I remember best took place in Jeff and Weezie’s new apartment on the sixth floor. It had a very large living room. Anywhere from five or six to 25-30 people would show up. It was a very eclectic crowd; one one hand, you had Bill Stillwell who was studying to become a surgeon and on the other, Larry Hama, fresh back from Vietnam with sunglasses and camouflage clothing (a frightening-looking man; a sweetheart who looked like a warrior — which was what he was!). Then there would be little Rick Bryant…
CBA:
Did Woody come over at all? (Wally Wood)
MWK:
Not that I recall.
CBA:
So there was a Marvel crowd who would hang out at their own place, and your own crowd at First Fridays?
MWK:
The First Friday Get Togethers were open to all, but the crowd tended to be folks who wanted to go on and do anything that had to do with comics or painting. None of us had become “company men” yet. Roy Krenkel was usually the center of attention when he was around because he was so funny and so unusual. He was always the teacher. We’d all sit around talking about our stuff and where we wanted to go. Roy would show us old-time illustrators from his vast collection. Everybody drank in the art and inspiration.
CBA:
How did you become involved with DC Comics?
MWK:
When I first came to New York, in January 1969, I went right out the 60 miles to Al Williamson’s place and stayed there, working on the story I’d pencilled, helping out with Al’s daily strip (Secret Agent Corrigan) and looking at his phenomenal original art collection — more Hal Foster originals than I ever dreamed of seeing.
After two weeks, I got a call from Bernie who said I had received a package from Charlton Comics with a script enclosed. Al said, “Hey, that’s real work! Off you go.” Al had talked to Dick Giordano, who at the time was an editor at Charlton, to see if he could give me a job.
Before anything could come of that, Dick went over to DC Comics. Charlton Comics still had my samples... I guess they liked them... out of the blue Charlton sent me a 3 page script, full of adventure, and those hard to draw subjects: people and horses. I drew it for $20 a page, sweating every line and turned the pencils in. Then they told me the pencils were lost but offered me another script. This one was a western. Al had given me all this great horse reference from The Cisco Kid newspaper daily proofs.
THAT helped me immensely. After the Western, Charlton gave me a romance story which I tried my best on but I turned in a real goofy job. So the editors finally realized that I wasn’t a western or romance artist and they found the adventure strip pencil pages that they’d misplaced. So I inked that, sent it in and got my other ten dollars.
About that time Al said that I ought to go over and see Dick at DC Comics. I had been going over there with Bernie who was drawing the Nightmaster stories at the time. One time, Bernie and I were sitting in the little lobby and Dick came out to escort him in. I said, “If you have a little one or two-page script lying around…” Bernie comes out later with a big Cheshire grin on his face and says, “Here you go,” handing me a two-page script.
I must have spent four or five weeks just going around and around with these two pages! I did it, took the pencils in and Dick started to teach me the rudiments of storytelling. I had just been doing drawings. He taught me with overlays but said, “Don’t change this — just ink this up. We’ll give you another one.”
Dick eventually gave me three two-page strips, one Bernie helped with a lot with the figure-work (I had been helping Bernie with the Nightmaster stories, helping to draw the panoramas that Bernie was uncomfortable drawing... it was a trade-off). The wonderful thing was, that after those three stories, Dick gave me a five-pager (The Coming of Ghaglan) that I went absolutely crazy on and had the greatest time doing. I used Zip-A-Tone (without even asking, as far as I can remember), did all these neat effect things and brought it in. Everybody loved the story saying it was so unusual and graphic (even though the drawing was somewhat crude). It looked like I’d get more work soon. But Dick went freelance again and he was the only editor I knew there! I should have talked to the other editors but I just didn’t even think to schmooze around. So then I had my hiatus from DC for maybe a year or so.
CBA:
On average, how long did it take for you to do a page?
MWK:
Three days. For me, my overhead was so low that any kind of money was pure gold. I have no idea how I made it through some of those months of slow work.
CBA:
Did you aspire to a regular gig or just go along project by project?
MWK:
I didn’t even think about doing regular comic book work. One thing that frightened me about comics was that I never knew how to draw the same face twice — but I later learned that people give you a lot of leeway (especially kids) and the faces don’t have to look the same.
CBA:
How did you get back to work at DC Comics?
MWK:
I can’t recall. Somehow I ended up back there, probably by just hanging out in the coffee room. Every once in awhile we’d hang out in Neal Adams’ special room watching him draw — he had this big projector that would blow-up his little sketches onto the drawing paper.
I always had my portfolio along and at one point, Julie Schwartz came to the door and announced that he needed a good science fiction artist to do a five-page story. He asked, “Who do you know? Who’s good?” And I poked my head around the door and said, “I’m pretty good and I have some stuff.” He bellowed to me, “Who’re you?” And I said, “Mike Kaluta.” “Kaluta? I’ve heard that name before.” The reason he heard that name is due to Neal using it as a sound effect in the “Peril in Plastic” story from Green Arrow/Green Lantern — everybody in the office had been chanting, “Ka-looo-ta! Ka-looo-ta!” for weeks.
Julie looked through my stuff, said it was okay, and he gave me the Amazing World of Krypton story. Besides a pile of covers later on, I worked with Julie on just that one job. We were friends ever since but, boy, he made me erase so much stuff. I kept putting in more than he thought the story needed. His old time Superman approach was very much aimed at younger readers — nothing and everything was left to the imagination.
One day a bunch of professionals had met at the office to go on a field trip to Sparta, the comic book printers and see how things were done. I felt a misanthropic wave and didn’t want to be there so I went up to the empty office and was doodling. Carmine Infantino, then President of DC Comics, came by and said, “Mikey, ever thought about doing covers? I think you’d do good covers. Tell you what: drop off a few Batman ideas and I’ll see what we can do.” So I started drawing them up and took them in. Carmine picked one and that became my first of a successful run Detective Comics covers. I was flattered beyond belief.
CBA:
Would Carmine do the breakdowns to the covers?
MWK:
Rarely ones that I followed. He would do one but I would do my own thing and he would say, “That’s great, Mikey, do that.” Once, he said, “No, do it like I drew it,” and the finish looked just like an Infantino layout — a ghost coming through a wall with upper body, one knee and one hand coming through the bricks. I caught hell from my editor but Carmine had wanted it that way.
Carmine was very, very good to me. I wasn’t a Neal Adams or Bernie Wrightson. My stuff was much cruder. Enthusiasm, mood and possibly concept might have carried my stuff but I had no real technique. Somehow they dug my potential and I’m very grateful to all the people up at DC. Carmine was always there and he always had a good word to say. Neal would always help me out and walk me through stuff — sometimes to my detriment. There was one mystery story I did about a boxer who gets bitten by an ant. Neal helped me with the layouts — there’s all these little Neal Adams’ cliches in the story that don’t really work with my novice style. However, there’s some really nice drawings of city scenes in that story... images that would eventually blossom in the Shadow material.
At one point while I was doing the House of Mystery and House of Secrets covers, Joe Orlando came into the room where I was sketching and said, “Listen, DC is getting the license to the Edgar Rice Burroughs characters. Is there anything that you’d like to do?” I said, “John Carter of Mars!” But Joe said, “No, no. Murphy Anderson has wanted to do that since he was a kid. What else? Tarzan?” I knew I wasn’t going to get any of the big ones so I said, “How about Carson of Venus?” He said, “I don’t know if I remember that one.” He got Len Wein to do the scripting and I did the drawing. It was a good team. Eventually Len left for other things and it came down to me to adapt and draw it myself.
CBA:
Joe Kubert fondly explains how absolutely, painstakingly literal your adaptions were.
MWK:
That was my intent although I skipped a scene and caught all hell from the Burroughs fans. I was so hungry to get to the airplane and make Carson the character Burroughs intended, the Aviator, and in my haste I left out a primal scene that everyone loves (and Frazetta did so beautifully on the cover of Lost on Venus). I just kind of skipped it.
The one place where Joe Kubert and I bumped heads was when I drew a scene on board a ship where Carson and his other captives were planning a mutiny. I had a shot of Carson and a whole bunch of close-ups of five or six faces. When the galleys came out, Joe had put lines on their faces, lines atop of their eyes, beards, and mustaches over the characters’ faces and I did my version of hitting the roof. (It’s very difficult to hit the roof when you’re talking to Joe Kubert, of course, because he could just stand up and poke you!) I said, “Joe, what did you do?” He said, “Well, you handed in a job where the drawings weren’t finished.” I said, “Yes, they were! You put beards on these guys but Venusian guys don’t have facial hair — it’s a big deal in the books!”
He actually did his version of an apology: “Maybe you knew what you were doing and maybe I was wrong doing that.” That’s the story that I tell whenever I can, to Joe’s charming discomfort. He’s invited me once or twice to the commencement exercises at The Joe Kubert School in New Jersey — with the big turkey dinner and all — and I’d tell that story so the youngsters would giggle about him.
But, after that incident, Joe would just let me do what I wanted with Carson until DC could no longer afford to publish it. They were paying a lot to ERB, Inc., and to the artists. At this time they also found all those great artists over in the Phillipines and Spain who would work for chump change (great money to them but a third or a quarter of what I was being paid). DC Comics said if I could do an entire page for $26, including the lettering, I could continue. I tried but I just couldn’t for that kind of money.