« Our Betty Cooper is still the girl next door – she literally lives next to Archie. And she’s the blonde all-American girl; she’s so sweet and forgiving, gives people the benefit of the doubt and second chances, wears her heart on her sleeve. But she’s also incredibly broken on the inside, for many different reasons. » — Lili Reinhart
As a whole, comic book artists are not a happy lot, and for good reason. During the Golden Age, at least, there were countless publishers, so one could move around if unsatisfied with the working conditions.. even if meant finding out that things were rotten all over. After the mid-1950s, when the field violently contracted — you know the story — leaving scant players standing, you pretty much had to take the work, and the abuse, as they came. And certain publishers frowned upon ‘their’ creators playing what little remained of the field.
Kurt Schaffenberger had steady work at DC, but presumably — and understandably — sought to keep his options open, so he moonlighted for ACG, often under a pseudonym, probably unaware that the ‘competitor’ was covertly owned (at least in part) by DC co-founder and co-owner Harry Donenfeld. One can imagine Kurt’s distress when ACG folded in 1967. From what I can surmise, he did, in 1970, a lone, inexplicable cover for Stanley Morse… wildly outside his range but still kind of awesome. And then… he quietly boarded a bus to Riverdale.
A couple more samples from Mr. Schaffenberger’s all-too-brief Archie period — solid, well-paced, ably-designed and economical storytelling:
And then, there’s the case of Sal Amendola, a Neal Adams protégé whose reputation in comic books largely rests on a single Batman story, 1974’s ‘Night of the Stalker’, a highly praised tale whose chief conceits is that Batman never utters a word and weeps bitterly at the end. I’d apologise for the spoilers, but honestly, it’s been half a century, what mystery is there to dispel?
Anyway, after his turn in the Bat-spotlight and 1975’s Phoenix, one of the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard‘s more daring titles, Amendola turned up at… Archie. And it was not a good fit.
This, in fact, was the springboard for this post: a couple of years ago, I encountered an Archie story that so grotesquely missed the mark — stylistically speaking — that it bordered on the fascinating. You guessed it, Sal Amendola, utterly out of his element, not to mention, surprisingly… his depth.
Here are a pair of pages from Coach Reproach, published in Everything’s Archie no. 71 (Dec. 1978, Archie), script by George Gladir, pencils by Amendola, inks by Jon D’Agostino.
Schaffenberger’s fellow Golden Age veteran, Gene Colan, also found himself moonlighting in the 1960s. In his case, it was for Marvel, under the alias of ‘Adam Austin’, but also for Dell (just a couple of covers mid-decade) and more significantly for Warren Magazines. In the 1970s, he concentrated on Marvel and was, in the chaos that was the so-called ‘House of Ideas’ at the time, the single most reliable artist in the maelström: surely none can match his seventy consecutive — and meticulously detailed — issues of Tomb of Dracula, in addition to lengthy runs on Howard the Duck, Daredevil, Captain America, Doctor Strange and so forth.
Enter Jim Shooter, a man only Vinnie Colletta could love.
« When writer Jim Shooter became Marvel’s editor-in-chief in the late ‘70s, the tension between Colan and the younger authors came to a head. By 1980, Shooter and Colan were totally at odds with one another over Colan’s approach to storytelling. »
« [Shooter] was harassing the life out of me. I couldn’t make a living,” Colan said. “He frightened me, he really did. He upset me so bad I couldn’t function.” Just as she had urged Colan to quit one job [in] the 1960s, wife Adrienne begged him to leave Marvel in 1980. After delivering his resignation, Colan was asked to sit down and seek resolution with Shooter and publisher Mike Hobson. Colan agreed to the meeting, but declined any overtures to stay at Marvel. “Shooter was in the same room,” Colan recalled, “and I said, ‘That man’s not gonna change. He is what he is. Whether it’s six days, six months or six years, it’s not going to be any different, so I’m not going to put up with it for another minute.‘ » [ source ]
He then scampered over to DC for a few years. His production there was hit-and-miss, but his Batman run (1981-86) was outstanding, pairing him with some of the rare inkers who could do his nuanced pencils justice: Klaus Janson, Tony De Zuñiga (to my amazed delight!) and especially Alfredo Alcala.
But once his contract ran out, he was out knocking on doors again. Against all odds, Archie beckoned.
-RG
Who's Out There? 
Great post! And if I may add to the “Coach Reproach” mayhem, Veronica’s left leg in her first panel is way too high — I don’t know anybody whose heel basically smacks their derriere with each forward step while running. And you’re not kidding about Linda Blair — the lines in Archie’s shirt in the fourth panel look more like a spine than an attempted six-pack, meaning between that and the high collar (which is completely missing in the first two panels), his head has already done the ol’ 180 degrees. Regan MacNeil would be proud.
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Ah, Gene Colan. So sadly wrong for ARCHIE, so wonderful at so many things in his Marvel heyday. I loved his work there. (One of my big personal bucket list joys was getting to ink a Colan pencil drawing for an ad in TOMB OF DRACULA…)
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Hi Connor — Thanks for dropping by!
I’m surely not the only one who envies your shot at inking Colan… which issue of the mag did the ad appear in? The GCD’s data is… well, a work in progress.
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My copies are in temporary storage while I’m completing an office move, but I am pretty sure it was either in issue 4 or 5 of the b&w magazine version of the title. When I get to that box in the unpacking I will check.
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Gene Colan also drew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #22 for Archie in 1991. It was a very odd-looking issue.
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You weren’t kidding, Ben! Actually, it’s in a similar spirit to his Howard the Duck work — that perfectly handled tension between the more ‘realistic’ and the cartoony. Too bad he only did one issue… it works!
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While the characters are quite on-model, Schaffenberger’s panel composition looks radically different from most Archie comics of the time. I’m no art expert, but is it more depth of field? The characters are also rotated to angles they aren’t usually seen at, too, aren’t they? There’s the different body language as well. It’s interesting stuff, not that Archie didn’t have regular artists who were good, of course.
On a separate note, apparently Marvel writers were complaining about Colan’s pacing on stories, that apparently he would only look at enough of his scripts to figure out each individual page he was drawing and then cram in the endings he hadn’t budget pages for. Now, I admit I don’t really get how that applied to the Marvel Method, but it does play out in the one Killraven story he did which is both the best-looking of the series and has a jarringly hurried ending.
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Hi Eric! You wrote:
> While the characters are quite on-model, Schaffenberger’s panel composition looks radically different from most Archie comics of > the time. I’m no art expert, but is it more depth of field?
That’s exactly how I’d describe it. Great call!
>The characters are also rotated to angles they aren’t usually seen at, too, aren’t they? There’s the different body language as
> well. It’s interesting stuff, not that Archie didn’t have regular artists who were good, of course.
It’s clear that Schaffenberger took his task seriously. Archie did have some talented artists, but many — if not most — were either ill-suited to the job, overworked, or just kind of lazy or jaded.
>On a separate note, apparently Marvel writers were complaining about Colan’s pacing on stories, that apparently he would only look >at enough of his scripts to figure out each individual page he was drawing and then cram in the endings he hadn’t budget pages >for.
That’s what I’ve read from Jim Shooter, but he grossly overstates what was likely a case or two that he turned into a landslide. I’m sure Don McGregor or Steve Gerber didn’t have any issues with Colan.
I mean, listen to this obvious bullshit: ““It wasn’t just me,” Shooter once said about the conflict. “The writers he was working with, with the exception of Marv on Tomb of Dracula, they would be coming to me out of their minds because they had written a plot, and [Colan] had kind of ignored it and drawn a lot of big, easy pictures, then 16 panels on the last page.”
“Big, easy pictures”? I’m sorry, you must be talking about some *other* Gene Colan.
>Now, I admit I don’t really get how that applied to the Marvel Method,
Exactly! Whatever happened to the penciller doing most of the heavy lifting?
>… but it does play out in the one Killraven story he did which is both the best-looking of the series and has a jarringly hurried
> ending.
That’s perhaps the instance Shooter’s alluding to… because I haven’t seen too many such cases of pacing problems in Colan’s work. It’s entirely possible that McGregor tried to cram too much plot into a mere *fifteen* pages (they actually had room in the book for a three-page filler… I suspect some wires got crossed) Certain pages in the middle of the story have many panels, so it’s not a cut-and-dry case of running out of space at the end. And yes, it’s a great-looking issue… Dan Adkins never ruined anyone’s pencils, to be sure.
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I’ve heard the criticism and had to do with so-called Marvel method — the artist breaking down the stories from a plot. Colan definitely had pacing issues but I never saw a story from that era when the last page or so was so crammed as to be a problem. I should say the tighter the plot or script, the less of a problem Colan. Too, when he was good, which was nearly all the time, he was absolutely fantastic.
that said, his Avengers gig under Shooter… Shooter had the idea that crippling Colan’s breakdowns and having an inker who ignored the rendering was in any way a good thing…
Shooter has a controversial reputation, he did some good things but wasn’t exactly a people person. On a human level, he completely mistreated Colan no matter how much he claimed otherwise.
When it came to art, he maybe inexplicably preferred dull as he proved in a couple of stories he drew at Marvel. The more control he had on a book, the worse it looked as a rule. And it extended to every publisher at which he worked.
And, under the Marvel method, any failings he had in breakdown could have been fixed easily enough in the scripting.
And at about the same time Shooter was f***ing over Colan, he gifted usual with the debacle of his New Universe.
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For the record, ACG was shut down a couple of years before Schaffenberger’s gig at Archie.
As for the pseudonym, KS was working for Mort Weisinger and ACG and NPP/DC were, like, step-sibling companies. So no way was Schaffenberger going to risk a steady gig at DC with the ACG work. Funny thing — or maybe the opposite of funny — is that his and Colan’s art was so distinctive that no pseudonym should have been protection. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
As for Colan no words, you have to see the work. His last gig, IIRC, was a Captain America story (issue 601??) plotted to his strengths by Ed. Brubaker. Of course not Colan’s best work — he was old — but a) nothing to be ashamed of and b) a lot better than many (most?) artists could do.
As for all three artists, American comics has never been the path to wealth or ever a better than average living, if that. So if one had the time, there was no reason not make a few bucks at Archie. I’m sure the lack of credits helped 😉
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If I understand correctly, the situation at DC was even more intense than you’re laying out. I was under the impression that editors at DC didn’t like their artists and writers working for other editors at the same company. I recall reading that it was only after they had given the older writers the old heave-ho after they asked for benefits and with the advent of younger writers like Denny O’Neal that people were working for DC at large and not just for, say, Weisinger.
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Of course the ACG thing wasn’t DC’s only problem when the latter shut down.
I was focused on Weisinger and his two artists moonlighting there, Schaffenberger and Pete Costanza.
I should add that around the same time as all that, Marvel was starting to hurt DC sales-wise. Anodyne comics apparently didn’t have much of a chance against Kirby, Ditko and Lee.
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