A Spotlight Interview with Mike Grell (part 1)

February 11, 2009 by Richard Caldwell
Filed under Featured, Interviews

In this two-part interview (the first of a special new spotlight series co-produced by Alex Ness), Richard Caldwell talks with industry legend Mike Grell.
The celebrated writer/artist’s long list of credits include such diverse works as the Legion of Superheroes and Starslayer to Green Arrow and James Bond; and among many other achievements, his creation of The Warlord is soon to be revitalized for the character’s 35th Anniversary at DC Comics.

A Spotlight Interview with Mike Grell (part 1)

Mike, you have been in the business, coming up to 40 years now?

Yeah, and it sure feels like it! Actually, I’ve been in this business for a year longer than the Warlord, so- 36 years. I started in ‘73.

Prior to all of that- before you went off to the art schools even- when you were a kid, did you read a lot of comics?

Oh, of course. I think when I was growing up, comics were being invented. I was growing up in the real Golden Age. When I was a kid, I read all of the Carl Barks- Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and that kind of thing. I remember my dad had a box of comics. He had the original Captain America, Human Torch, Submariner- all of that kind of stuff. They were pretty well raggedy because they had been read so many times; but it was great stuff.

And then of course, I was of the age for all of the Silver Age stuff, when it was first starting up. I bought the first issues of Spider Man, and the Fantastic Four, and all the stuff that came out right about then. Up until the point where I became really, intensely interested in girls. I left comic books behind then pretty much altogether, so I missed the huge revolution there that followed.

It wasn’t until I was in Saigon in ‘70, ‘71 that a guy by the name of Ed Savage showed up with a stack of his favorite comic books in hand. Among those were Green Lantern/Green Arrow, done by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, and I was flabbergasted. I was just really stunned because the ‘comic book’ had changed so dramatically from the time where I was reading. The drawings were real well done; they were nowhere near as cartoony anymore, and the stories and characters were much more real and believable.

I was in the Air Force as an illustrator, and I was at that time taking Famous Artists School’s correspondence course in cartooning, with the idea that I’d become a newspaper strip artist and do humor strips, like the next Al Capp. Taking a look at Green Lantern/Green Arrow I decided that that was what I really wanted to do.

Are you really a big game hunter, or is that just part of the mystique of the public persona of Mike Grell?

No, I really do do that stuff. I grew up in northern Wisconsin, and in an area that was then ranked dead-tie for first place of the ten most depressed areas of the United States. If your dad didn’t hunt, then you didn’t eat meat. My dad was a lumberjack and was always employed in some fashion while raising three boys, so with everything else, he hunted and I grew up in that environment.

I’ve been to Africa a couple of times. I spent 18 nights in a tree in Africa trying to ambush a certain leopard. Never got him, but it was a fun time. We had leopards on the bait every night, but it wasn’t the one we were looking for.

I once went ten solid years without ever firing a shot. It’s not about whether or not I’d shoot a deer or something like that; but it’s a great excuse to get out into the woods.

Have you gone bow-hunting?

Yes, I was an avid archer when I was a kid. If you read Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, that scene with Oliver Queen as a kid with a stick bow and arrows down his shirt- that was me. That was me and my brothers, actually. If you didn’t have a bow- you made it. If we didn’t have arrows, we’d make them out of sticks. I had sort of gotten away from archery during the Air Force and art schools. I did resume, however.

I remember the very first comic of yours I picked up with my own money. It was Jon Sable #16. The cover was just so, minimalistic almost- it was just so different from any of the superhero comics that I was reading then. It really pulled me in (and the two-page spread of Maggie the Cat helped, as well), and of course from then on I was a diehard fan of the Sable books.
There is a lot of Ian Fleming to him, a lot of Mickey Spillane.

Yeah, I was a huge Spillane fan, and I had read all of the Ian Fleming books- all the James Bond stuff.
Just looking at my own website here to see what the cover to #16 looked like…

It was with the cat’s paw prints going up the cover.

Oh yeah! You know- that was a really fun cover to do. It was the ‘Return of the Cat’, one of the first Maggie the Cat stories. The first time I did a cover with Maggie was Sable #11, and I had just the woman and the cat on the cover; and the Editor, Mike Gold, responded, “Wait, you’re gonna put a cover out there that doesn’t have a hero on it?”

“Yeah, yeah I want to.” I had to fight a little bit for that one but I got it through; and it turned out to be very popular. Though the one with the cat paw prints- I didn’t actually paint that- my cat did. I had painted her feet with poster paints and set her on a black board. I had to get her to walk across a few times to get those prints. The painting part only took a minute or two, but getting her clean again was a bit more of a chore.

In case you’re wondering how you wash poster paint off a cat’s paws- the proscribed method is to put about two inches of water in the bathtub, grab the cat, drop her in and slam the door before she can escape. When the thrashing stops, she’s generally clean.

Maybe a little upset for awhile afterwords?

Yeah, she wouldn’t talk to me for the longest time after that.

So to expand on Sable a little bit, and especially regarding your work on the Green Arrow series- something that has attracted a lot of people to your work is the very adult voice that you manage. Like how you mentioned before of your first ‘grown up’ encounter with comics- you kind of realized they had grown up as well. In a lot of ways- you yourself have carried on that mantle, with fans.
You don’t ever write down to your audience, and we thank you for that.

I don’t. I absolutely don’t. I think that is the biggest mistake you can make, to try and write down to the audience. If you underestimate the intelligence of your readers, it will just turn everything around. It doesn’t take long for them to catch wise to that.

The reason I try to do that, is basically I write for an audience of one. I write for myself, the types of stories that I would like to read; and I am just lucky to have fallen in to a broad range of readership. We did a survey way back when, during Jon Sable: Freelance, and discovered that my average audience was between 18 and 25 years old. These days, I would say they’re older- extend that on up to the 40’s, but with a couple of years of college, middle income brackets. People who are looking for a story that is interesting and exciting, but not dumb. There used to be more of a myth that comics were being written for a nine or ten year old audience, and back in the 70’s the industry began to change really dramatically. People were writing more intelligent comics, allowing them to keep their audiences longer.

Right now actually, one thing that is missing from the comic industry are comics that appeal to young readers. The younger audiences are sort of left out now, because there aren’t really any great entry level comics.

That is why Shrek was so popular, you know? Shrek is a terrific movie for kids, but it’s really an adult movie- it’s done at an adult level. The kids can get it to a certain extent, and the adults get it for darn sure. So it’s possible to cross these lines, and get all the people to read the story.

I guess Hollywood can have a lot to do with that, with selling this huge property; but when fans track down the source materials, sometimes it’s a different creature I guess. There is misrepresentation everywhere.

Yeah, oh yeah. That’s almost always the case. It certainly happened with Sable. The television series they did on Sable was so unlike the comic book, it was clear the people doing it did not grasp the concept.

Sable was actually a reversal of all the comic book stereotypes. Your standard comic book hero is by day a mild-mannered fill in the blank, and by night the dark avenger. So I took Sable and turned him completely 180 degrees. He’s always ‘Mr Blood and Guts’, everybody knows he’s ‘Mr Blood and Guts’. You look in the phonebook under blood/guts and there is a photograph of Jon Sable. The unique thing about him is that he writes children’s books. He uses a pen name because bloodthirsty mercenaries don’t write children’s books, and that’s his big secret. The only time he ever dresses in anything resembling a disguise is when he has to make a personal appearance as “B.B. Flemm”; and that’s just to save himself the embarrassment of going out in public as the author of this children’s series.

When ABC got their hands on it, they said, “No, no, no- you’ve got it all wrong. See, we’ve got a better idea- By DAY he’s a mild-mannered children’s author and by NIGHT- get this, this is totally unique- he becomes the dark avenger”. So they reversed my reversal to make him exactly like every other comic book-type character, and it sucked so bad it was cancelled after the second episode. They actually shot and broadcast six, but it was canned after the second.

The only good thing that came out of that was Rene Russo making her acting debut. There were quite a lot of memorable performers involved in it, and some really great people involved on the tech side; and they were all immediately snapped up by other series, other studios, when it was cancelled. Rene of course was wonderful and became a giant superstar.

Have there ever been any motions to get maybe a dvd collection release of the episodes, even the ones that weren’t officially released?

They have been bootlegged all over the world. I would be surprised if you couldn’t go to a comic convention and buy a copy of it. They were all broadcast, in just about every English-speaking country, and so far as I know- in Spain and Brazil as well.

Neat. Now with the Iron Man property, after so many decades of the writers trying to conceal what it is that Tony Stark is actually up to, in your time on that title you came right out and said, “No, let him go public”. That caught on well enough and was even incorporated into the blockbuster movie, like there you were somewhere ahead of the beat.

Thank god. If you’re not ahead of the beat, then you’re just copying someone else.
I had wanted to do that because I thought that realistic character development called for it, and over the years there was a certain silliness involved with Tony Stark trying to keep this secret. He wasn’t fooling anybody, especially when reaching the point where Stark was being drawn like a more muscular version of Schwarzenegger. I mean, Stark at one point had a head the size of a fist, and a 24 inch neck, and bulging muscles under his suit- and you’re supposed to accept that this guy’s an intellectual? That he’s a brain throwing around money instead of putting the armor on? Not terribly likely. So I thought it was the right timing, right for the character, and had the approval from the editors at Marvel Comics behind it to expose the secret identity for good.

The way I chose to do it was that instead of having him forced to show his hand, like saving the city from some fierce disaster or something like that- he did it to save a puppy. He did it, and it wasn’t so much for the puppy, it was for a little boy. He had a choice, he had a capability, and for him it wasn’t worth watching this puppy get rolled over in the street just to protect his identity. And of course that was following an intense ordeal with Pepper and he was thinking of all the possibilities that might have been had they gotten together. This situation prompted him to help the boy.

You were just trying to give him a more realistic/humanistic approach.

Right. The thing I wanted to emphasize was the man inside the suit of armor. The armor is what protects him, but it also isolates him from the world. There is a cause and effect there. If you surround yourself with an armored shell, you are protecting yourself from anyone harming you, but you’re also shutting out the people you want to have close to you. That’s what I saw happening to Tony Stark, so I brought back the thing about his heart being powered by the same power units that are powering his suit; and that it’s possible for him to use up all of his energy and burn out. That’s something I just thought was a great bit in the original Iron Man, that he had to recharge every 24 hours. I cut it down so that in certain circumstances he could inadvertently use up so much power he’d be in danger of losing his own life.
That comes back to the thing about how he’d make the sacrifice if the cause is just.

Like a real hero ought to.

Note- To see more (and/or for purchase inquiries) of Mike’s original art, Scott Kress of Catskill Comics would be happy to assist. http://www.catskillcomics.com/grell.htm
This two part interview shall conclude tomorrow. I would like to thank Alex Ness for his instigation, and Mike Grell for not shooting me.
Images of Green Arrow are copyrighted by DC Comics.

www.mikegrell.com
www.catskillcomics.com
www.comicmix.com