By Dewey Cassell & Aaron SultanT

TwoMorrows Publishing | Raleigh, North Carolina

INTR

OD

UCT

ION

...4

FOR

EwO

RD

...5

Ori

gins

....

....

6

mar

vel C

omic

s...2

2

Spotlight o

n the P

hotosta

t Machin

e...27

Spotlight o

n “Herb

Trim

pe, We Love You”...

30

Spotlight on Hulk Reprints...64

The Other Heroes...86

Spotlight on Spider-Man...96

Animation........128

Trim

pe o

n Tr

impe

...12

Romita on Trimpe....

....34

Sinnott on Trimpe.....

..........

...41

The Incredible Hulk...4

6

Spotlight on Wolverine..........

........5

8

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogues Gallery........65

Trimpe Inking Gallery........73

Inking Trimpe Gallery...77

Thomas on Trimpe...81

Buscema on Trimpe.............83

Spotlight on Ant-Man........89

Spotlight on Captain Britain..................91

Spotlight on Iron Man...92

Spotlight on the Defenders........94

A Finger in the Dike...98A Sense of Humor........101Spotlight on the Black & White Magazines...102

Licensed Characters........104Spotlight on G.I. Joe...106

Spotlight on Godzilla........109

Spotlight on Indiana Jones..................115

Spotlight on Shogun Warriors...117

Changing With The Times........119

Leaving Marvel.............121

Spotlight on The New York Times Article........122

Advertising & Promotional...126

Peckmann on Trim

pe...130

List of Crest Comm

ercials...131

New

spaper Strips...133

After marvel...136

Spotlight on The Power of Angels...139

Herb Trim

pe Gallery...141

IND

Ex...16

7

INTR

OD

UCT

ION

...4

FOR

EWO

RD

...5

Ori

gins

...6

Mar

vel C

omic

s...2

2

Spotlight o

n the P

hotosta

t Machin

e...27

Spotlight o

n “Herb

Trim

pe, We Love You”...

30

Spotlight on Hulk Reprints...64

The Other Heroes...86

Spotlight on Spider-Man...96

Animation...128

Trim

pe o

n Tr

impe

...12

Romita on Trimpe...3

4

Sinnott on Trimpe...4

1

The Incredible Hulk...4

6Spotlight on Wolverine...5

8

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogue’s Gallery...65

Trimpe Inking Gallery...73

Inking Trimpe Gallery...77

Thomas on Trimpe...81Buscema on Trimpe...83

Spotlight on Ant-Man...89

Spotlight on Captain Britain...91

Spotlight on Iron Man...92

Spotlight on the Defenders...94

A Finger in the Dike...98

A Sense of Humor...101

Spotlight on the Black & White Magazines...102Licensed Characters...104

Spotlight on G.I. Joe...106

Spotlight on Godzilla...109

Spotlight on Indiana Jones...115

Spotlight on Shogun Warriors...117Changing With The Times...119

Leaving Marvel...121

Spotlight on The New York Times Article...122

Advertising & Promotional...125

Peckmann on Trim

pe...130

List of Crest Comm

ercials...131

New

spaper Strips...132

After Marvel...136

Spotlight on The Power of Angels...139

Herb Trim

pe Gallery...141

IND

EX...1156

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogues Gallery........65

6

Origins of Herb Trimpe Origins of Herb Trimpe

CH APTER 0 N E

In the spirit of the comic book origin story, it seems only fitting to begin at the beginning. In this interview, Trimpe talks about his family and school, shedding light on the origins of the artist. (No gamma radiation involved.)

Dewey Cassell: When and where were you born?Herb Trimpe: In Peekskill, New York, May 26th, 1939, on the Hudson River, an hour and a half from New York City.

Cassell: So, what does the “W” stand for in Herb W. Trimpe?Trimpe: It is “William.” Actually, they named me “Herbert,” after my dad, even way after the name wasn’t popular any more. And they named me “William” after his brother, my uncle. So it’s all family-related names. I wish they’d been a little more original. I would rather be a “John,” actually, or a “Fred” I think.Cassell: “Herb” is very distinctive, though.Trimpe: Yeah, actually, it works as “Herb,” but it doesn’t work as “Herbert.”Cassell: What did your parents do?Trimpe: My dad did various things. He was primarily a skilled sheet metal worker. That was his job during World War Two, working in ship-ping yards in New Jersey. When World War Two was ending, we moved back to Peekskill. My dad had to leave New Jersey because we lived in an area below sea level and it was very damp and he wound up in the hospital with pneumonia as a very young man. It nearly did him in, so we moved back to New York State, when I was about five or so. And then he worked at various places. There were a number of companies around that are no longer there. You know, American industry is not what it used to be. You could live in a small town and go to work in a local factory, but it’s not doable any more.Cassell: That’s very true.Trimpe: He actually wound up retiring with a very good pension from the Peekskill Public School System, where he was a—I don’t know what they call it now—maintenance engineer. In those days, they called him a janitor. So that’s where we wound up. I don’t know if he actually retired. I don’t think he had reached 65 yet, but he got sick from working around asbestos for too long and wound up contracting lung cancer and that took about two years to finish dad off. And my mom, who had been a stay-at-home mom when

Home and Family

ABOVE: The guest of honor.

Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

RIGHT: Parents Annie and

Herb Trimpe with son Herb.

Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

7

I was in elementary and junior high school, she worked in a local supermarket in Peekskill at the time, back in the meat packing department. When my dad died, she was kind of on her own. By that time, my brother and I were grown-up and out and married. She lived alone for ten years after my dad died and then at 70, she remarried. It was an old friend of hers and my dad’s, actually going way back to elementary school, whose wife had also died of cancer. They just started hanging out and wound up getting married. They were married for 14 years and then he died. She lived up by herself in Peekskill for a while. Then we bought a bigger house in Hurley after renting for three years in Rhinebeck, New York, and she moved in with us. My wife Patricia’s mom is with us, too, so we’ve kind of got a mini-old folks home here. The only other thing I can tell you about my mom is she always wanted to play golf, so she’s very hip on all the tournaments that take place and she has her favorites. And she loves to watch Dancing with the Stars and both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, which she gets very opinionated and steamed up about. So that’s the family history. Cassell: You told me that you had a brother, named Mike, right? Were you the only children?Trimpe: Yeah, we were. And we were seven years apart, so it was quite a gap. It wasn’t a brother you could interact with much in the early years, because of the age discrepancy. But when he got into high school, and I was in my twenties, then we did a lot of stuff together, mostly playing

baseball or just talking about baseball or talk-ing about movies. But we were very close and stayed in contact on a regular basis. Yearly visits, sometimes twice a year, because he was living in Virginia with his family and I was still up here, but we always stayed in touch. We played tabletop gaming, war games.Cassell: Oh, really? Any favorites?Trimpe: Well, he was a Civil War re-enactor. You know, it’s quite a commitment, actually. It’s almost like being in the military because they have meetings and you have uniforms and you have to buy all your own stuff, and you join a unit, just like you would have at the time. If you were from New York, you’d be in a New York unit. If you were from Virginia, you’d be in a Virginia unit. It kind of works the same way, depending on what state you’re in. So he was a member of a Virginia unit and my nephew Mark was too. My nephew’s still doing it. He’s a big Civil War buff. I never saw any of the re-enactments, but I saw plenty of the people, a lot of the friends that were involved in it, and actually got to shoot some of those guns, like a rifle musket and a cap-and-ball pistol.Cassell: Oh, wow. So, what was it like shooting one?Trimpe: A black powder pistol is big, it’s heavy, and it makes a cloud of smoke every time it fires that obscures everything within ten feet. Not to mention the noise. It’s hard to believe. And also, since the barrels of the pistols were unrifled, it was like throwing a knuckleball. There was no direction on the ball when it came out, so it could do anything. It could go up, it could go down. He

ABOVE: Brother Mike Trimpe.

Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

LEFT: Herb Trimpe (back row

with hat) and cousins. Cour-

tesy of Herb Trimpe.

RIGHT: Trimpe’s oldest daugh-

ter, Melissa. Courtesy of Herb

Trimpe.

12

Trimpe met and married Linda Fite while working for Marvel Comics and together they had three children—two girls and a boy, Alex, who recalls in this interview what it was like growing up Trimpe.

An Interview with Alex Trimpe

Dewey Cassell: When I was talking to your dad the other day, he was saying that you were born in the middle of a comic book convention.Alex Trimpe: Yeah. Well, I can’t say that I recall that, obviously. But that’s what I hear. I guess my mom went into labor when they were at a comic book convention. I’ve got a bunch of cards that people made in my baby book. Obviously a lot of people were artists of some kind so they’re

pretty entertaining. But yeah, that’s the story. Like I say, it could be a complete lie since I was not conscious at the time.Cassell: And you are the oldest, right?Trimpe: I’m the oldest of my mom and my dad’s three kids, but I have an older half-sister.Cassell: When were you born?Trimpe: ‘Seventy-three. Amelia was born in ’76, and then Sarah was ’78. Cassell: When you were born, was your mom still working for Marvel or had she already left?Trimpe: I don’t know. I know that when I was growing up, she definitely wasn’t and I don’t think she worked there very long.Cassell: Was your dad working out of the office for Marvel at that time or was he working at home?Trimpe: It was only at home. I mean, I don’t know when I was really little, but I think we lived in the city, in Manhattan, for a year. So probably during that time, he was still going to the office because he was in Manhattan, but then we were in Cornwall, England, for a year. Some of my earliest memories are from then. Obviously from there, he was sending it overseas and that’s also where he learned to fly an airplane. But for my whole conscious life, he was working at home in various parts of the house, but mainly a little, tiny office space on the second floor that was next to my bedroom. He also had a big drawing table downstairs, in the living room.Cassell: Do you have any particular memories of him drawing while you were growing up?Trimpe: No, I’m sure things could probably spark a memory, but nothing that just sort of floats in my mind. Actually, the one memory I have, for some reason, has nothing to do with him drawing, really. My mom’s bedroom is where all of the comic books were kept, because we got free comic books, which was the staff of life for me and my friends when I was little. But they were all on these metal shelves in there and in

Trimpe on Trimpe

ABOVE: Alex Trimpe with Dad.

Courtesy of Herb Trimpe.

BELOW: Commission

drawing of the Wrecker by

Herb Trimpe.

13

fact, they might even have been in the hallway. They were down the hall from where his little office was and I guess at some point I came to him, excited about somebody. There was something I’d seen in one of the comics and he was on the phone and he sort of acknowl-edged what I said, then I heard him say on the phone, “Yeah, my son has discovered Jack Kirby.” For me, it was like a connection, he was talking to somebody who knew what I was get-ting excited about before I got excited about it, and it was sort of like a window into the comic book artists’ world.Cassell: Did you ever have a chance to meet Jack?Trimpe: No, not that I can remember. I remember my dad said that Jack Kirby would come in only to drop artwork off and then change things if Stan asked him to. And then my dad said everyone would gather around to watch him change stuff because he’d just blow through it really fast and amaze everybody. Cassell: I have heard Jack was fast.Trimpe: Before the Shogun Warriors [came out] there was some meeting and I was there, I must have been really small, but however it worked out, they settled on a creative team before there was this meeting. And again, I’m small but I was really excited because I think they’d already given me these gigantic plastic toys that were like two feet tall. But then Stan Lee showed up at that meeting. I remember he was late and if you’re 45 minutes late when you’re an adult, it’s kind of a pain in the butt. But when you’re a kid, I just remember thinking, “How is this possible that this person is so late?” It was weird because whenever we’d gone to Marvel before that —I’d go down there with him sometimes—it was a rickety place, but my memory of wherever this meeting took place, it was a much slicker kind of meeting room, but that was my one and only exposure there. I just remember my dad saying, “Yeah, he’s late,” and me being antsy, waiting. But to be able to tag along on stuff like that, obviously, was great.Cassell: I remember your dad saying that he got toys for the Shogun Warriors to use as a model to know how to draw them. Did you get to play with them?Trimpe: Yeah, those are the things —actually, I’m just assuming we got those before that meeting and that’s why I was stoked and all into it. But yeah, those are still at my mom’s house.Cassell: What about the G.I. Joes?

Trimpe: The G.I. Joes came out at the same time as Transformers and I was more into Transform-ers. And also, when they were “developing” the G.I. Joe comic, they asked my Dad to do charac-ter designs and he did sort of pragmatic designs of things that had a function, most of them, perfect for what the characters are doing. But I think he said later, they’d already settled on the design and they were kind of goofy, more super-hero designs for what they used. And so I don’t know if it was my taste intersecting with what he was saying about those designs that they were using, because he wanted it to be more realistic. So I was not really into G.I. Joe. I think I prob-ably played with them, you know, but I was more

Cover of Shogun Warriors

#1 by Herb Trimpe. Courtesy

Heritage Auctions.

22

Marvel ComicsMarvel ComicsCH APTER TW O

Marvel Comics began in 1939 as Timely Publications, founded by pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. The company enjoyed early success with characters that included the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, the latter created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Goodman hired his wife’s cousin, Stanley Lieber, who wrote stories under the pseudonym Stan Lee and took over as editor when Simon left in 1941. When super-heroes fell out of fashion after the war, Timely branched out into multiple genres at a time when copying the competition was the order of the day. After weath-ering a downturn in the late 1950s by reducing staff, the company now known as Marvel found a new lease on life with the introduction of the Fantastic Four in the fall of 1961. By the time Trimpe joined Marvel, the super-hero revolution was well under way, and he had an opportunity to work with some remarkable people, while making his own mark in the field. Like all the members of the Marvel Bullpen at the time, he was given a nickname by editor Stan Lee: “Happy” Herb Trimpe. After hearing him talk about his various accomplishments during the course of his career in a modest and matter-of-fact way, it seems perhaps that a more appropriate moniker might have been “Humble” Herb Trimpe. In this interview, Trimpe talks about how he got the job at Marvel Comics, the work he did in production and inking westerns, and the unique nature of the company and the people, including Stan Lee.

Cassell: How did you get the job at Marvel?Trimpe: A friend of mine from The School of Visual Arts, John Verpoorten, was working at Marvel. I’d known him before—in fact, when I left Tom Gill to enlist, he took over and started working for Tom himself. By the time I got back, he had wound up at Marvel as the production chief. I did take some samples up to DC, but I didn’t have anything current. It was all stuff I’d done in art school or done for fun. So, I got talking to Verpoorten, and he said, “You should bring whatever you’ve got up to the office and let Sol Brodsky take a look at it,” because Sol was screening incoming artists, of which there weren’t very many, I can tell you. It wasn’t like now. Cassell: What was your first assignment at Marvel?Trimpe: When I brought my work up and Sol Brodsky looked at it, I immediately got work inking Westerns freelance—Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid—and that worked out good.Cassell: Do you think Stan had you ink Westerns as a try-out for penciling work?Trimpe: I don’t think he saw inking as a lesser form of the artwork where you could take an amateur and have them do it, since inking takes quite a bit of expertise in itself. But saying that, I did start out inking Westerns at Marvel over

top of Werner Roth and Larry Lieber and guys like that. I think I inked some of Dick [Ayer]’s stuff and it was quite enjoyable. So I don’t know if that was by design or just because they needed inkers on the work, because the number of Western titles was quite extensive in the mid-’60s. There were probably five, six [Westerns] out of less than 20 overall titles. When you included the romance magazines, they took up quite a percentage of the total output of titles in the mid-’60s. And they were good books to work on, too. Cassell: I heard that at one point you ran the Photostat machine.Trimpe: I got a call from Sol one day and he said, “We’re not going to send galleys out to copy any more. We’re going to do all that stuff in-house and we’re getting this big photographic device that we can shoot text or pictures on.” This was when cut-and-paste was actually cut-and-paste. And it was about eight feet long and it had a bed to put the work on, and a huge adjustable cam-era, and you could feed the paper right into a developer and then a fixer and then into a dryer. And he said, “We need somebody to operate that—there’s a technician coming in from the company—would you like to take the job?” And I said, “Sure, it sounds good. I’ll do that.” So that’s

ABOVE: Detail of 1970

Marvelmania self-portrait

by Herb Trimpe.

BELOW: Cover of Kid Colt

Outlaw #134 by Trimpe, which

featured his first story for

Marvel, “Shoot-Out at

Hooker Flat.”

25

when I started working for $130 a week, and I did that for maybe six months.Cassell: Did you continue to do any artwork?Trimpe: During that time I did ink some Westerns on the side, and then I did “The Phantom Eagle” with Gary Friedrich and some other odds and ends. Cassell: Did you enjoy doing the Westerns?Trimpe: Yeah, because I liked Western comics. Actually, I think the first full-length story I did was “Shoot-Out at Hooker Flat.” It was written by Gary Friedrich and it was in a Kid Colt comic. [Kid Colt Outlaw #134, May 1967.] Cassell: Did you have reference for what horses looked like or different styles of guns?Trimpe: I made ‘em up. I made horses up. I draw terrible horses. I didn’t really use photos much. That might have been one of Jack’s influences, because Jack just made everything up out of whole cloth. He just invented it, and I think I was doing the same thing. And we were asked to look at Jack. Not so much “draw like Kirby”—that wasn’t it. A lot of people voluntarily drew like Kirby, like Barry Smith had a strong Kirby [influ-ence] in the beginning, as did Jim Steranko, but they both took it one step further. They both went into their own realm after a while, and they were both unique and unusual because of that. Me? I didn’t know where the hell I was going.Cassell: What other artists were working at Marvel at the time?Trimpe: Most of the guys in place were a genera-tion before me, and they were solid craftsmen. When I came into Marvel, I had to squeeze in between guys like Romita, Colan, Kirby, Buscema, Don Heck, Bill Everett. These guys were excel-lent artists. They had grace and style. Inkers like Sinnott and Giacoia—nobody can do that today. Nobody knows that kind of brushwork and the kind of things they did with ease, it seemed. It was magnificent-looking art. If you see an origi-nal Buscema page, it’s just astounding work. It’s incredible. So when I was coming in, I was the piker of the bunch. I came on around the same time Barry Smith came in and shortly after (or maybe before) Jim Steranko. We were the more-or-less contemporaries in the ’60s. Of course, I couldn’t draw anywhere near any of them.Cassell: That generation of Romita, Colan, Kirby and others were really very humble, though.Trimpe: Yeah, that’s true. At the time, it was, “Okay, it’s another plot, it’s another story. Here’s the character, draw it, make the deadline, get the check.” That’s all there was to it then. Most

of the artists came from commercial art back-grounds, even though to one degree or another, they loved doing comic books. I’ve heard Syd Shores and other artists say, “If things got slow when I was doing commercial work, you could always run over to a comic book company. They’d give you a script and you’d go home and do the artwork, bring it back, and they’d pay you right away.” They’d pay on delivery and that was one of the advantages of working on comics in those days. It helped tide people over. At times, comics were used by commercial illustrators, or people who worked outside the business on a regular basis, to supplement their income. They didn’t tell anybody they drew comic books. That would not be wise as a career move, you know.Cassell: Did you ever hang out with the other artists outside of work?Trimpe: We had a softball team in the publishers’ league. Jim Shooter was the driving force and

Splash page to Marvel

Super- Heroes #16 by Trimpe.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

46

With the success of The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby decided to try to make lightning strike twice with The Incredible Hulk in May 1962. The Hulk was, in some respects, the least novel invention of Lee and Kirby. Marvel had been publishing monster comics for years. At a time when they were re-inventing the super-hero genre with characters that had as many human weaknesses as superhuman strengths, the Hulk seemed a bit out of place. In fact, the initial comic book series was cancelled after only six issues. However, Marvel recognized that there was something different, something special about the jade giant and he did not go gently into that good night. While he lost his own title, the Hulk began to make guest appearances in other comics, beginning with The Fantastic Four. He became a founding member of the Avengers and then began appearing alongside Giant-Man in the split book Tales to Astonish, where he remained until he got his own title back with issue #102. A number of well-respected artists rendered the Hulk over the years, from Kirby to Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Bill Everett, John Buscema, and Marie Severin, before the reins passed to Herb Trimpe. Trimpe first inked the Hulk in five issues of Tales to Astonish, beginning with #94, and then later took over the penciling with issue #106 of The Incredible Hulk in 1968. After a slow start, the Hulk has proved to have enduring popularity with fans, many of whom consider Trimpe’s rendition to be the definitive one. In this interview, Trimpe talks about how he got involved with the Hulk and some of his favorite things about the green goliath from his eight-year tenure on the book.

The Incredible Hulk

Cassell: How did you get involved with the Hulk?Trimpe: I inked a couple of “Hulk” stories in Tales to Astonish that Marie Severin did. And then, for some reason, Marie went on to bigger and better things. Stan had other plans for her. I don’t know if he wanted her to do more coloring or what, but I had been working in the production department for about six months—and doing freelance on the side, which included the infamous “Phantom Eagle”—and he stuck his head in my cubicle one day and said, “Hey, Trimpe. You want to draw The Incredible Hulk?” I said, “Oh, okay.” To me, it was more of a steady gig.Cassell: When you started inking The Incredible Hulk over Marie’s pencils, did you have any inkling that they were going to want you to take over the book?Trimpe: Well, no. I do think that the inking I did on that was really building a foundation for going further, although, at the time, I had no idea how long that would be. We just didn’t think in those terms. It was just, “Oh, it was a job? Okay. What’s next?” Cassell: How was it picking up where Marie left off?

Trimpe: I don’t think I ever had a serious hitch except when I started penciling The Incredible Hulk. There was a little transition period when I was doing layouts, and I was kind of falling into the EC style. I did about four pages and showed them to Stan and he said, “Ehhh, let me get Frank [Giacoia] to lay this out and you follow that. And that’s the way I want you to do it from now on.” So I said okay. I tore up the pages and I threw them in the trash, right in the Bullpen, and Frank laid out the story. I followed Frank’s lead and I tight-ened it and it was fine. But the first complete issue that I penciled was laid out by Frank Giacoia who, of course, was an inker. That was [The Incredible] Hulk #109. These were the days when inkers were first-rate pencilers. They pretty much are today, too, but he was an excellent penciler, as is Joe Sinnott. And I kind of got it right away.

ABOVE: From Trimpe Hulk pin-

up in Hulk magazine.

OPPOSITE: Hulk Smash! Cour-

tesy of John Morrow.

48

good deal. It’s kind of like overtime. Obviously, the faster you were, the more pages you turned in, the more money you were going to make. I was working that way practically until I left. I got a check every two weeks. And it was very comfortable, and it was fun, and working in the Bullpen was a blast. I couldn’t wait to get to work every day. At that time, I was living in Peek-skill and I was commuting. I hated to commute. I didn’t have the patience for it. So I was glad when I got to the office and I stayed late and we hung around, went over to the bar or whatever, and it was a lot of fun.Cassell: If you both penciled and inked a story, did that count towards your quota, as well?Trimpe: Yeah, that worked. I had an inking rate. I could apply the inking to the quota, or once the quota was matched, I could apply it to freelance and voucher it. It was an interesting way to work. Cassell: When did you start working at home?Trimpe: I worked in the office for six months maybe, probably not more than a year, after I started The Incredible Hulk. Actually, if I looked at the issues, I might be able to tell. I was ink-ing Marie in the beginning and it was not unusual that if I were working on that stuff in the office, I would very likely take it home on a weekend or an evening, and work there also, so it was a mix of things that were going on at that time. It was pretty active in the Bullpen. There were a total of

ABOVE LEFT: Marie Severin

rendition of the Hulk

from FOOM #2.

ABOVE RIGHT: Detail of

transformation from page 19

of The Incredible Hulk #109

by Trimpe and John Severin.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

BELOW: Detail from page 2 of

Tales to Astonish #96 by

Marie Severin and

Herb Trimpe. Courtesy of

Stephen Moore.

Stan had no complaints and from that point on, never really said anything about any layouts or storytelling again. He asked me a couple of times when I was going to learn to draw, but other than that, there was no real critical discussion as to the content that I was doing. I was trying to follow Marie’s Hulk, and I think I eventually got around to it after a year or so. Stan was abso-lutely correct, but in retrospect now, I’m looking at that stuff and it has a quaint quality to it that I think a lot of the fans liked, because they still continue to ask for signings and pictures and drawings and the collectors seemed to have maintained an interest. Cassell: When you started working on The Incredible Hulk, were you still doing some produc-tion work as well?Trimpe: Yeah, I was on staff. I did production work plus inking, plus I started penciling The Incredible Hulk while I was on staff. I was getting a flat salary, plus extra for the work that I was doing freelance that went over the amount of salary that I was getting. If I exceeded that, anything on the side, I could voucher for it. Say, if I was making $200 a week and I was getting $50 a page, I would only need to do four pages a week to justify the two hundred. But of course that’s not nearly enough to match the schedule, so if you were doing ten pages a week, those other six pages would be freelance and could be vouchered, so it was a

“Herb was an amazing

storyteller. You could give

him anything and he knew

how to run with it and tell

a story that was stunning.

And boy was he fun to work

with in the bullpen. And all

the girls loved him. We had a

lot of fun over the years.”

- Marie Severin

52

and 2,000 pounds? That means he goes through a teething process that by no comparison does a baby go through, even with their first teeth and as much pain as they go through. They don’t fit in his jaw, or they’re too big for his jaw, or his jaw’s too big for them. His whole physical structure would be totally at odds with each other, as far as the physical growth goes. Truthfully, I never thought of it that way, but I’ve had a lot of den-tal work done, so I’m kind of tooth-conscious. I’ve had so many root canals, I could actually do one myself. I know the whole procedure. So, yeah, if the guy looks like a brute, then he should have teeth that look like a brute, not like Arnold Schwarzenegger, that goes to some Dentist to the Stars and has everything re-implanted and perfect like some sort of robot or android. That was part of it. The other part was that I always wrestled with his hair. I couldn’t quite ever decide how I wanted the hair to look. I loved Kirby’s hair because it was a little bit of hair on top. I think that was accurate in terms of what the charac-ter might look like.

Cassell: I always thought you did a good job with the hair and even with the proportion. One of the things I notice when you see other people draw-ing the Hulk is that frequently the head is out of proportion to the rest of the body. You always seem to get it right.Trimpe: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. There’s something about early cartooning that if you’re going to show a big, strong guy, the thing to do is give him big thighs, big forearms like Popeye, and definite-ly a little head, because a little head accentuates the body size. It makes the body look bigger with a smaller head. So they’ve been leaning in that direction and I don’t know why. When Kirby and Lee came up with the character, the Hulk was what he was supposed to be, a distorted human being with an illness, basically, a serious illness that affected growth hormones to the max. So that’s the way I consciously, or subconsciously, always thought of the Hulk, that he was a mon-ster. What people in the 18th Century would have called a monster. But really, a person who was born deformed would have wished like any-thing to be like everybody else. That’s the way I saw the Hulk, that’s the way Roy saw the Hulk, and I think that’s the way Len saw the Hulk. It was an abomination—no pun intended—for the Hulk to be what he was. That’s the human side that he never lost, and that’s why there was a theme of pathos and humanity that ran through the Hulk’s character. Now I don’t see it that way. I don’t see the humanity in the Hulk, especially now. His thighs got really big and his head got really small. And every time you see somebody doing a commis-sion, he’s always enraged, crazy enraged. In our stories, a good part of the time, he was not en-raged. He was stumbling his way through a forest or fishing himself out of the ocean or wondering what the f*** was going on here. It’s not a new theme, the Hulk. It’s the idea of dual personality. It exists in fiction, it exists in real life, and the full forms are schizophrenia and multiple personalities. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s successful. Nobody can identify with Captain America, but you can definitely identify with a character like the Hulk, especially in those days, in every decision you make, because you’re torn. You don’t know which way to go with it. “Should I do this? Should I do that? If I do this, what’s going to happen, and if I do that, is it going to change everything?” Not to even get into the area of people with ill-nesses they can’t control, which is basically

58

SPOTLIG H T O N

about, writer Len Wein re-sponds: “You’re kidding, right? I think there are people in Ethi-opia who know how Wolverine originated. There are very few people who don’t know. Maybe an Eskimo somewhere. “ So for the outsider Ethiopians and Eskimos, and anyone else un-familiar with how the idea for the Wolverine materialized, Len proceeded to share the story once again, “Wolverine came out of Brother Voodoo, weirdly enough. I was doing Brother Voodoo and the book was set in the Caribbean. The characters had Caribbean, Ja-maican, and Haitian accents. Roy Thomas called me in one day and said, ‘I hate you be-cause you do great accents and I can’t, and I’d love to hear what you’d do with a Canadian accent. And so I have a name, Wolverine.’ And I went and re-searched wolverines to find out that they are short, hairy, ferocious animals with razor-sharp claws and no fear, who would take on creatures ten times their size . It’s as easy a character as I’ve ever cre-ated. And the funny thing is, I thought I did a terrible Cana-dian accent. I decided to use him in the Hulk simply because it seemed like a good place to use him. I made him a mutant because I knew there was talk of eventually reviving the X-Men as an international group of mutants, and I figured it would give whoever ended up writing the book a Canadian

character if they wanted one. I never knew I’d be the guy who ended up writing the book. It’s really all as simple as that. I did a number of characters with John Romita: Brother Voodoo himself, Wolverine, the Con-strictor, a couple of others, where we’d just sit down and work out the design together. And I did the same thing with Dave Cockrum. Dave had al-ready done some design work on some of those characters. We did a little adjusting on some of the pieces here and there.” So with the design in hand by Marvel art director John Romita and the idea and defi-nition under the supervision of Roy Thomas and Len Wein, Herb Trimpe brought the char-acter to life, first as a cameo at the end of Hulk #180, and then as full story material in Hulk #s 181 and 182. “The way I see it, Romita and Len Wein sewed the monster together and I shocked it to life! It was just one of those secondary or ter-tiary characters, actually, that we were using in that particular book with no particular notion of it going anywhere. We did characters in The Incredible Hulk all the time that were in particular issues and that was the end of them,” Trimpe re-members. Little did anyone re-alize that the Wolverine would become the signature char-acter of Marvel’s best selling book for decades to come—the X-Men.

Comics fandom would be forever changed in the fall of 1974. The introduction of Wolverine in the pages of The Incredible Hulk #s 180, 181, and 182 would catapult the character into comic book im-mortality and be the defining moment of the Bronze Age, as Spider-Man was to the Silver Age. 35 year old Herb Trimpe, now seven years into his in-comparable run on The Incred-ible Hulk, was asked to bring to life a Canadian mutant by the name of Logan, a.k.a. Wol-verine. Equipped with the un-canny ability to rapidly recover from injuries, Wolverine also has the ability to be a vicious fighter, complete with retract-able claws that spring forward from the back of his hands. His body’s skeleton is reinforced by a fictitious metal known as adamantium, making him virtu-ally indestructible. When asked about shar-ing how the Wolverine came

wolverine With Len Wein

Wolverine commission

drawing by Trimpe.

Courtesy of Sean Rutan.

65

Over the years of drawing The Incredible Hulk, Trimpe put his mark on a number of classic villainsand created some new characters as well. Here is a “rogues gallery” of some of the friends

and foes of the Hulk as rendered by Trimpe.

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogue’s gallery

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogue’s gallery

Trimpe’s Hulk Rogues gallery

67

LEFT: Cover of The Incredible

Hulk #115 by Trimpe and Dan

Adkins featuring the Leader.

RIGHT: Cover of The Incredible

Hulk #168 by Trimpe featuring

the Harpy (a.k.a. Betty Ross.)

BELOW: Detail from page 4 of

The Incredible Hulk #108 by

Trimpe and John Severin

featuring the Mandarin.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

71

TOP LEFT: Cover of The

Incredible Hulk #167 with

MODOK by Trimpe. Courtesy

Heritage Auctions.

TOP RIGHT: Xeron the Star

Slayer from The Incredible

Hulk #136 by Trimpe and Sal

Buscema. Courtesy Heritage

Auctions.

LEFT: Splash page from The

Incredible Hulk #166 by Trim-

pe and Sal Trapani featuring

Zzzax. Courtesy of Stephen

Moore.

RIGHT: Maximus the Mad on

the cover of The Incredible

Hulk #119 by Trimpe and John

Romita. Courtesy Heritage

Auctions.

77

Even with fully rendered pencils, the inker can have a tremendous impact on the appearance of a finished comic book page. Trimpe had the opportunity to work with a variety of inkers, among them

Jack Abel. In an 1983 interview by David Anthony Kraft in issue #7 of Comics Interview magazine, Abel comments, “I enjoyed doing The [Incredible] Hulk with Herb Trimpe a lot. Trimpe is of the Jack Kirby

school, which, believe it or not, I’m not one of the great admirers of, although I can see why it was suc-cessful. But Trimpe did a completely professional job, and anyone who does that is easy to ink. He put down in pencil what was supposed to be there —no scribbles, everything sharply defined, easy to ink.”

Able goes on to remark, “I always did think that Severin’s inks over Trimpe’s Hulk pencils were really incredible. Of course, as I know from working with him, Trimpe is a stickler for authenticity himself, and really knows equipment and weaponry. I am thinking particularly of one Hulk story where the Hulk was

in a parallel di-mension where

World War II was going on. I thought that it

was about as good artwork as I have ever

seen.”

What follows are examples

from the various artists, includ-

ing Abel, who inked Trimpe’s

pencils over the years.

ABOVE: Detail from The

Incredible Hulk #193 page

16 by Trimpe and Joe Staton.

INSET: Hulk sketch by Jack

Abel.

LEFT: From the splash page

to The Incredible Hulk #171

by Trimpe with Jack Abel inks.

Courtesy of Stephen Moore.

Inking Trimpe galleryInking Trimpe galleryInking Trimpe gallery

81

Roy Thomas was editor and writer at Marvel Comics for many years, taking over the reins from Stan Lee. In this interview, Roy talks about Marvel Comics and working with Trimpe on The Incredible Hulk.

made it both an Avengers and a Hulk. I was very enthusiastic about it, and I was quite happy with the outcome. Cassell: Wasn’t it somewhat unusual at the time to use an author from outside of comics?Thomas: Well, sometimes I went after a par-ticular person because I wanted to. For example, getting John Jakes to do a couple of plots for Conan and Kull. That was my idea, because he was writing sword and sorcery, and I thought it would be good to bring him in. Cassell: Why do you think Herb lasted so long on The Incredible Hulk?

Thomas on TrimpeAn Interview with Roy Thomas

Dewey Cassell: How did you first meet Herb?Roy Thomas: I don’t recall except that he came to work there in the office. He was a buddy of [John] Verpoorten, but I can’t remember which of them came first. I think he started out working in the stat room, and then he was doing corrections and different things. He was probably in a differ-ent room than I was, but of course there were only two or three rooms at that time. He was about my age, so I got to know him somewhat, but we were always busy at the office, so I think we just exchanged a few words here and there. We got along well, but we didn’t socialize, really.Cassell: You wrote quite a few of the Hulk stories that he drew. Were you using the Marvel Method at that time?Thomas: Yes. We would just talk it over. Some books I wrote a plot for, two or three pages, especially if it was somebody not in the office, like Buscema. With Herb I doubt if I ever did, and certainly not often. With Herb or Marie, we just sat down and talked for a while and got the general direction, some of the plot, and then he’d start drawing. And if he needed to talk to me about anything else, if he hit a snag, or he wanted to clarify something, or something wasn’t work-ing, all he had to do was say so, and then we’d talk and work it out. Although I don’t think that happened often.Cassell: Do you know what prompted Harlan Ellison’s Hulk story about “The Brute that Shouted Love at the Heart of the Atom”?Thomas: Of course, it was Harlan’s idea to do that particular story. I don’t know if Stan had talked to Harlan, but I did know Harlan slightly. I’d met him a few times here and there, at con-ventions in New York. I was in touch with him, and he submitted his idea, and I thought it was great. Harlan had submitted the Jarella story as a single issue, but I decided we should stretch it over two issues, because it seemed a bit much to force into one story of 20 or so pages. So we

ABOVE: Roy Thomas from

the 2004 Heroes Con in

Charlotte, NC.

BELOW: Cover art to The

Incredible Hulk #129 by

Trimpe featuring the Glob, a

favorite of Roy Thomas.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

83

When Trimpe left The Incredible Hulk, it was Sal Buscema who assumed the artistic mantle. In this interview with Aaron Sultan, Buscema talks about his experience with the jade giant and his predeces-sor Herb Trimpe.

to see how beautifully graphic and simple, yet dynamic his storytelling was. And that made an impression on me, and I said, “Certainly I will do my best to emulate him in that respect.” So I thought that was fascinating. That of all the peo-ple that Stan had working for him at the time, he showed me Herb Trimpe’s work. And I was always a fan of Herb’s. I understood at the time that he was probably one of the nicest people in the industry, a real gentleman, as well as being a consummate professional. As a side note, I didn’t meet Herb until a couple of years ago at a convention in Baltimore, Maryland. And that was the first time that he and I actually met face-to-face, and I have no problem saying that we embraced each other because we had talked on the phone several times, and it was just a real kick meeting him for the first time.

Buscema on TrimpeAn Interview with Sal Buscema

Aaron Sultan: Just to kick this off, can you give some background on when you got started in comics? Sal Buscema: Sure. I had been in commercial art for about 13 or 14 years and always wanted to do comic books. The industry was pretty much dead, and when I found out from John, my brother, that he was getting back into it, I thought, “Here’s the opportunity.” So, to make a long story short, I had to work for about a whole year at night after work and after dinner. My regular job at the time was working in a studio in Washington, DC. I had to learn how to do comics, because, except for the short stints that I had working with John in a rather limited capacity, I really did not know how to do them. Especially super-heroes. So we worked for about a year. That culminated in a six-page Hulk story that was very simple, just to show what I could do, whatever dynamics I could put into it, and so on. Stan Lee saw them, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.Sultan: So that brings us to Herb Trimpe. I no-ticed that you and Herb, the two of you, your lives intersected fairly early on, when you arrived at Marvel. There were a couple of very early Hulk issues where Herb penciled and you inked with the Rhino and a few others. You mentioned to me you didn’t meet Herb until years later, but I know Herb was doing The Incredible Hulk right before you did. When you got the opportunity to ink him, what were some of the impressions of inking over his pencils?Buscema: Well, Herb was a master storyteller, and if I could just digress for a minute, I will give you this little anecdote. When I went up for my interview with Stan in order to acquire a steady amount of work, one of the first things that Stan showed me what he was looking for was from Herb Trimpe, and it happened to be a Hulk story that he did at the time. And Stan wanted me

ABOVE: Sal and Joan

Buscema from 2003 Heroes

Con in Charlotte, NC.

BELOW: Detail of the Leader

from page 4 of The Incredible

Hulk #124 by Trimpe and

Sal Buscema. Courtesy of

Stephen Moore.

86

While he may be best known for his work on the Hulk, Trimpe drew a lot of other characters for Marvel Comics, from the tiniest of heroes to Marvel’s flagship character. His tenure varied from a few months to several years, but in each case, he brought the character to life with his remarkable story-telling ability. Among the Marvel characters most influenced by Trimpe are Ant-Man, Captain Britain, Iron Man, the Defenders, and Spider-Man. He talks here about some of these Marvel characters (and some not from Marvel) that received the Trimpe touch.

Cassell: While you were working on The Incredible Hulk, you picked up some other artwork assign-ments as well, like Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD.Trimpe: Well, at one point, the office was very close to our apartment in the city. I delivered the work by hand and sometimes came into the office to work since I was nearby. So, especially if you were close at hand, you could always pick up extra things to do. There was always some-thing that had to be done or somebody who had missed a deadline or corrections to be made. It was pretty straightforward.Cassell: How did you get involved with Iron Man?Trimpe: I was living in England at the time and I was talking to John [Verpoorten] on the phone. I said, “Look, I don’t want to do The Incredible Hulk any more. I want to do something else.” He said, “Well, we don’t have anything else right now, but I can get somebody else to do the next Hulk.” And I was so tired of doing it that I said, “Okay.” So in the meantime, while I was waiting for something to come through, I did an inventory Iron Man [sto-ry] on my own and sent in the 20 penciled pages with notes in the columns, because I plotted and almost wrote the story in the columns. And John got kind of annoyed and pissed off. He said, “Don’t do that any more.” Luckily, it happened to fall right in the place where they needed an in-ventory in Iron Man. I think that was the reason, but the fact is they printed it in the run almost immediately. Cassell: You drew Iron Man a dozen times over the years. Did you enjoy drawing the Armored Avenger? Trimpe: I drew Iron Man a dozen times? Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. “Enjoy” is prob-ably not the word, as those jobs were probably in a rush. I can remember in particular one story I

The Other Heroes

did in two or three days, penciled, if you could call it that, and inked. Including the cover, and it looks it. Nice thing about Iron Man is that the armor was fairly simple, something that I’m sure was a break for me considering some of the other more complicated stuff I was involved in. Cassell: Did living in England lead to drawing Captain Britain?Trimpe: I was in the UK, in Cornwall, actually, and I met up with Chris Claremont at some point, on the beach, walking and talking, and whether we had discussed Captain Britain, or that discussion only came later after we were back in the states, I can’t really say. Cassell: What was your next assignment?Trimpe: The next thing I got might have been the beginning of doing Defenders, Godzilla, and Sho-gun Warriors, all at once. I was doing three books at the same time—for two years in a row, I think. Cassell: Did you get involved with the Defenders because of your association with the Hulk? Trimpe: I don’t think the Hulk had anything to do with me drawing The Defenders. [It was] just another hole in the dike that somebody had to put their finger in. Cassell: What was your impression of them as a super-hero team?Trimpe: Back when I was doing The Defend-ers, which I enjoyed quite a bit, if someone had asked me what team I would choose for success between the X-Men and the Defenders, I would have said the Defenders, hands down. I’ve made many choices like that over time. Maybe it wasn’t the X-Men characters at all. Maybe it was in the name. Picture it. If the X-Men had been called the Defenders, and the Defenders called the X-Men, I believe things would have turned out differently. The Defenders were more varied and fun.

ABOVE: Ant-Man from

splash page in Marvel Feature

#4 by Trimpe. Courtesy of

Nick Katradis.

BELOW: Close-up of Ghost

Rider from issue #60 by

Trimpe and Don Perlin.

89

Marvel Feature debuted in 1971 as a bi-monthly forum for trying out new characters (or more accurately new combina-tions of characters and varia-tions on existing characters) before giving them their own book. It was in concept, if not in format, similar to DC Com-ics’ Showcase, which was first published in 1956. Former Mar-vel Comics editor and writer Roy Thomas explains the mo-tivation behind a try-out book, “Stan wanted to do a bunch of them. Marvel Premiere, Mar-vel Feature, Marvel Spotlight. They were all his ideas, and his titles. In the early ’70s we were just trying to get an increased place on the [news]stand. That’s the period when we be-gan to actually outsell DC in terms of number of books.” The first characters to ap-pear in Marvel Feature were not new, but the notion of them working together was. The first issue of the title featured the debut of The Defenders, star-ring the Hulk, Doctor Strange, and the Sub-Mariner. Fan reac-tion to the team was positive, so after three issues in Marvel Feature, the Defenders got their own title. When the Defenders cleared out of Marvel Feature, Ant Man moved in. Ant-Man had starred in the split-book Tales to Astonish in the mid-1960s and was a founding member of the Avengers, but his most recent solo appear-ance had been in a backup

story in issue #44 of Iron Man, six months previously. Thomas felt it was time to try it again, “I know that I had wanted to do Ant-Man more than most, because I just felt like he was a good character and I thought it’d be good to bring him back. I think at one stage I was actu-ally hoping I could write it, but that proved impossible.” So Thomas tapped Mike Friedrich to write the new Ant-Man sto-ries and artist Herb Trimpe to illustrate them. Thomas edited the series going forward. That Trimpe got the as-signment was circumstantial, but he was glad to have it. “It was a matter of availability, [but] I really liked the idea of Ant-Man. I was crazy about The Incredible Shrinking Man, any-thing that put an individual in a place where everything was so gigantic and it takes half a day to cross the room—or anything to do with insects, for that matter. I loved fan-tasy writing where people rode the backs of ants. I think it all started with the New York Daily News years ago. They had a half page feature called The Teeny-Weenies. There was always like a cut-out of one of the characters that you could paste on cardboard and then fold back the base and they would stand up, so you could collect them from Sunday to Sunday. I had a whole lot of them and they lived in a micro-world. They were big enough to sit in a thimble and they rode

ABOVE LEFT: Art from the

retelling of Ant-Man’s origin in

Marvel Feature #4 by Trimpe.

Courtesy of Nick Katradis.

ABOVE: Splash page detail

from Marvel Feature #6

penciled by Herb Trimpe and

inked by brother Mike.

BELOW: Tag line from the

cover of Marvel Feature #4.

tins cans down the river, which was really just runoff water from a rainstorm. They lived in houses in the woods up in what they considered to be trees, but to us would be considered weeds or bushes. I thought it was great. In fact, when I was doing a lot of writing, I actually came up with a story that was along those same lines. It was about a teenager that wound up getting really small and the battles took place between ant tribes. So when the pros-pect came up to do Ant-Man, I said, ‘Yeah, it’ll be great.’” Marvel Feature turned out to be a family affair, as Trimpe explains, “I liked working with it. And then my brother Mike, who at the time was a graphic designer, he got a little slow at work so he did the inking of two issues, maybe three, of Ant-Man. If I asked to ink the work,

S POTLIGHT ON

Ant-man With Roy Thomas

92

Few Marvel characters have surpassed the popularity of Iron Man in the 21st century. Boosted by three blockbuster movies plus a central role in The Avengers movie, Iron Man has become its own brand and an advertising juggernaut of global proportions. Created in 1963 by Stan Lee, Iron Man made his debut in Tales of Suspense #39, with script by Larry Lieber and the art capa-bly rendered by Don Heck and Jack Kirby. True to the young Marvel Universe at the time, Iron Man’s alter ego was a rich millionaire named Tony Stark. Former Marvel Comics writer and artist Larry Lieber explains the beginnings of the Tony Stark character, “I had

man of action, I thought. That’s the way it came to me.“ Over the next 20 years, Iron Man would gain momen-tum as a core presence in the Marvel Universe. He would be-come a founding member of the Avengers, branch off into his own series after a success-ful run in Tales of Suspense, and even have a cartoon series as part of the Marvel Super-hero TV show in 1966. Dur-ing this time, artistic legends Gene Colan followed by George Tuska would bring the charac-ter to new heights while collab-orating with the likes of Archie Goodwin, Mike Friedrich, Gerry Conway and Len Wein. As fate would have it, the team of Len Wein and Herb Trimpe would again collabo-rate in 1976—two years af-ter they changed the comic book landscape forever with the introduction of Wolverine. This time, in the pages of Iron Man #82-85, the team would excite Shellhead fans with bombastic battles with apes (a play on the film Planet of the Apes), the Red Ghost, the Walking Bomb, and the Freak. But these stellar tales may be overshadowed in the minds of many fans due to a mixup of epic proportions. Len Wein re-counts, “Sweet mother of God, the nose. That’s one of the great “uh-ohs” of all time. Basi-cally, Stan was walking through production one day, and John Romita, God bless him, was do-ing some punch-ups on some

SPOTLIG H T O N

Iron man

ABOVE & BELOW: Panels

from Iron Man #85 by Trimpe

and Marie Severin depicting

Stark donning his armor in a

method similar to that later

used in the movies.

OPPOSITE TOP: Detailed

pin-up of Iron Man

(with nose) by Trimpe.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Cover of

Iron Man #39 by Trimpe. Cour-

tesy Grand Comics Database.

been writing Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, Strange Tales, since 1958. Now, The Amazing Spider-Man came out in ’62, and these came out around that time. So between ’58 and ’64 , I had done a lot of stories, and by that time I had a feel for the names. So something like Tony Stark I probably just made up myself. I thought, I knew he was go-ing to be an industrialist, and I figured he was rich, so I’m not going to call him Joe Cain or something. “Anthony” sounds like a nice name for a rich guy, and I thought “Stark” sounded good. It was short, it went with Anthony, and he has money, and he’s going to be involved in action. Anthony Stark, a rich

With Larry Lieber & Len WeinWith Larry Lieber & Len Wein

98

It may surprise some people to read the inter-view with Herb Trimpe and find that while he re-members a lot about working at Marvel and draw-ing The Incredible Hulk, he does not necessarily remember the details about the four issues of Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD that he drew in 1969. The fact is that for his generation of artists, and the ones that preceded it, drawing comics was fundamentally a job—a fun job, mind you, but first and foremost a way to pay the rent and put food on the table. As Trimpe himself said, “We just didn’t think in those terms. It was just, ‘Oh, it was a job? Okay. What’s next?’” So, asking Trimpe if he remembers creating the villain Bulls-Eye for Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD is a little like asking William Shatner why they beamed down to the planet in episode 26 of Star Trek. In Trimpe’s own words, it was “just another hole in the dike that somebody had to put their finger in.” But the fact is, even on his shorter assign-ments, Trimpe often made a meaningful contri-bution to Marvel comic book canon. This, then, is a slightly more detailed examination of some of the comic book titles in this time period, other than The Incredible Hulk, for which Trimpe provided “a finger in the dike”.

N I C k F U R Y , A g E N T O F S H I E L DAs mentioned, Trimpe drew four issues (#s 8, 13, 14, and 15) of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, and an equal number of covers (#s 13, 14, 15, and 18) for the book. He had tough shoes to fill, follow-ing Jim Steranko, Frank Springer, and Barry Smith on the title. The story layouts by Trimpe reflect a continuation of the dynamic panel designs first put to such effective use by Steranko. And Trimpe co-created the villain Bulls-Eye for issue #15, which proved to be the last original story in the series. While not the same Bullseye that plagued Daredevil, the two villains did share more than a name. Both were assasins, both used a bullseye on their costumes, and both had unerring aim, although the former Bulls-eye owed his accuracy to his weapon. The former Bulls-eye also died in the same issue in which he was introduced. One

other item of note is that Trimpe’s first pencils in Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, in issue #8, appeared only a few months after he took the reins from Marie Severin on The Incredible Hulk.

S I L V E R S U R F E RThis is perhaps both the most brief, and most interesting, interlude in Trimpe’s career in com-ics. John Buscema was responsible for penciling most of the covers and all of the interior artwork for the first 17 issues of the landmark Silver Surf-er series. But in 1970, Trimpe drew the covers for issue #s 17 and 18, and the latter bore the inte-rior pencils of Jack Kirby inked by Trimpe. Taking nothing away from the definitive art of Buscema, this final issue of the series was reminiscent of Kirby’s masterful introduction of the iconic char-acter in The Fantastic Four, and it is some of the most prized artwork of the late Silver Age.

w A R I S H E L LThe comic book War is Hell started out in 1973 as a reprint book, at a time in which the Vietnam War was still fresh on everyone’s minds. With issue #9, a series of new stories began featuring John Kowalski, a dead solider whose spirit could possess the bodies of living people, similar to DC Comics’ Deadman. Chris Claremont was the writer for the series. Trimpe drew covers for the first and last issues of the series, as well as is-sue #5. He penciled the interior stories for issue #s 13 and 15, the final issue. Although not a long tenure on the book, noteworthy is the fact that Trimpe inked his own pencils. This was a genre Trimpe enjoyed drawing, as is obvious in the art-work.

S O N O F S A T A NThe character Son of Satan debuted in issue #2 of Ghost Rider, written by Gary Friedrich, be-fore moving to Marvel Spotlight for what would prove to be a fairly long run. So Jim Mooney was actually the first to draw Son of Satan, but Trimpe refined the look and feel of the char-acter in Marvel Spotlight #12, where he drew

A Finger in the Dike

ABOVE: Son of Satan from

page 27 of Marvel Two-

In-One #14 by Trimpe and

John Tartaglione. Courtesy of

Brian Sagar.

BELOW: Cover of War is

Hell #5 by Trimpe and Frank

Giacoia. Courtesy Heritage

Auctions.

102

Over the years, Marvel branched out into other for-mats for their comic stories, among them black and white magazines. In the mid-1970s, Marvel had an entire line of black and white magazines, some based on existing comic book characters and others featuring new characters. The black and white magazines were not bound by the Com-ics Code and therefore pro-

SPOTLIG H T O N

Black & white magazines

vided a format for more adult storylines and more explicit artwork. As demonstrated by Warren Publications with titles such as Creepy, Eerie, and Vam-pirella, this format lent itself to the horror genre and Marvel capitalized on it with titles of their own that included Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed, and Tales of the Zombie. The black and white stories were frequently done in ink and wash, to provide texture and tone where color was lack-ing. Artists included many of those currently drawing Marvel comics, as well as others who specialized in the magazine format. While certainly not his specialty, Trimpe did contrib-ute to several magazines in the Marvel black and white line—providing another “finger in the dike” — the most notable of which would be:

D E A D L Y H A N D S O F k U N g F U S P E C I A L A L B U m E D I T I O N # 1In 1974, Trimpe worked with writer Chris Claremont on a story featuring the Sons of the Tiger in a one-shot Special Album Edition of the black and white magazine Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. This new martial arts story served as the cen-terpiece of a three-part epic that also included Iron Fist and Shang Chi in an 84 page issue.

R A m P A g I N g H U L k # 8The Rampaging Hulk magazine

began as a forum to tell sto-ries about the early days of the Hulk encountering adversaries like the original X-Men and the Sub-Mariner, while accompa-nied by his friend Rick Jones. But the magazine moved away from that premise, even as it switched from a black and white format to full color and changed the name to simply The Hulk! with issue #10. The eighth issue, which was illus-trated by Trimpe, featured the Hulk, Jones, and their alien companion Bereet doing battle against a Krylorian Expedition-ary Force bent on invading earth. Along the way, the Hulk encounters a Krylorian “trans-former” disguised as Iron Man, as well as the original Aveng-ers. Trimpe would have seemed like a natural to contribute to the magazine version of the Hulk on an ongoing basis, but this was the one and only issue he drew.

m A R V E L P R E V I E w # 1 3U F O C O N N E C T I O NYears before the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the depic-tion of contact with alien life forms was generally pessimis-tic. In 1977, the same year the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Marvel published a one-shot black and white magazine called “UFO Connection!” under the ban-ner of Marvel Preview #13. The two-part story was conceived, written, and edited by David Anthony Kraft, who describes

Splash page from part 2

of “The UFO Connection”

in Marvel Preview #13 by

Trimpe and Pablo Marcos.

Courtesy of Paul Handler.

104

Other than The Incredible Hulk, the comics Trimpe was most closely associated with were based on characters licensed by Marvel Comics from toy manufacturers and movie companies, such as G.I. Joe and Godzilla. The advantage in publishing comics based on licensed characters was instant recogni-tion among readers already familiar with the original product. In this interview, Trimpe talks about how he started illustrating the licensed characters, which ones he enjoyed (and which ones he didn’t).

licensed work of various toys—like Godzilla and G.I. Joe and Transformers and Shogun Warriors, and I was quite happy about that. And I think that’s probably why I got it. When I was substi-tute teaching, I was always getting called into the middle school. I knew all the teachers, so I said, “Why am I always in the middle school? I never get calls for the high school. “ They said, “It’s because you’re willing to do it, that’s why. A lot of people don’t want to work in the middle school.” So that’s why I think maybe I wound up with all the licensed stuff, because nobody else wanted to do it. They weren’t cool. Toys, you know? It wasn’t cool stuff. But the laugh is on them, because now, all the licensed stuff I did, they make movies out of.Cassell: Were the licensed characters easier or more difficult to do?Trimpe: The things that were most difficult were when I started to do some of the licensed stuff and you had these multiple characters. To me and just about every artist, that was a nightmare—nothing against the characters themselves on an individual basis, but doing the group stuff, es-pecially if it involves a lot of high tech and a lot of reference like G.I. Joe or Transformers did, then it was just horrible. Cassell: What about Godzilla?Trimpe: Godzilla, I don’t know [how I got it]. It was another licensed character and I probably picked that up because I needed work and/or nobody else wanted to do it. The licensed characters did not appeal [to some artists], especially to a lot of the newer guys. Nobody wanted to rehash Godzilla. So most of the work I wound up with, especially on the secondary characters, had to do with availability. I was there and they needed somebody to do it. There wasn’t a whole lot of thought [to it] and nobody was particularly ear-

Licensed Characters

Cassell: How did you get involved in drawing the licensed characters?Trimpe: I’ve got a feeling these are going to be the tough questions because they weren’t major long-term bits of business… but let’s see. I wasn’t that interested in super-heroes. I didn’t actually draw many super-heroes. It was mostly the Hulk, which is not a super-hero, due to per-sonality and all, which suited me fine. I did a lot of

ABOVE: Detail from Shogun

Warriors #19 by Trimpe.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

BELOW: Splash page art from

issue #7 of Godzilla by Trimpe

and Fred Kida. Courtesy

Heritage Auctions.

106

SPOTLIG H T O N

g.I. Joe With Larry Hama

Hassenfeld Brothers intro-duced G.I. Joe in 1964 and “America’s movable fighting man” enjoyed tremendous success until 1978, ultimately succumbing to the high cost of petroleum required to manu-facture the 11 ½ inch action figure. But in 1982, spurred by the success of Kenner’s Star Wars line, Hasbro reintroduced G.I. Joe as a 3 ¾ inch action figure, together with a new en-emy, Cobra. Key to the adver-tising strategy of the company was the simultaneous launch of a new G.I. Joe comic book, published by Marvel Comics. The new Marvel comic book, G.I. Joe, A Real Ameri-can Hero, was written by Larry Hama, beginning an associa-tion with the Joes that con-tinues to this day. The rela-tionship between Hasbro and Marvel was somewhat unique in its flexibility, which afforded Hama a tremendous amount of creative license. Hama recalls, “I was left pretty much alone, character and general story wise, on the GI Joe book. I did write all the file card bios on the backs of of the packages, so even if I didn’t design the phys-ical look of the Joes, I created their backgrounds, character-izations, described their skill-sets, personalities and figured out their interpersonal connec-tions. I also scripted nearly all of the complete run of G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero, and G.I.

ic end. Bob Prupis, Kirk Bozigian and Ron Rudat where the guys I dealt with, and they were a fine and sterling bunch.” Herb Trimpe was integrally involved with both Marvel G.I. Joe comic series from the be-ginning. Hama explains, “On Special Missions, I am pretty sure Herb drew every issue and he may have even scripted one. He did script at least two of A Real American Hero is-sues.” Trimpe drew many of the early A Real American Hero is-sues as well, interiors and cov-ers. Hama and Trimpe also pro-duced a four-part mini-series in 1986 called The G.I. Joe Or-der of Battle, which was an ex-haustive inventory/catalog of the characters and equipment in the G.I. Joe “universe.” Trim-pe also illustrated a G.I. Joe and the Transformers mini-series, which was written by Michael Higgins. More recently, Trimpe has drawn the covers for the new IDW Publishing version of G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero, which is written by Hama. Hama and Trimpe have enjoyed a good relationship, as reflected by Hama’s reply when asked what he thought of Trimpe’s work, “That’s a ter-rible question to ask! Don’t you know that the comics commu-nity is like a close-knit small town where everybody is re-lated? That’s like asking, ‘what do you think of your mother’s cooking?’ or ‘Do you think your

TOP RIGHT: IDW edition of

G.I. Joe with Trimpe art.

ABOVE: Panels from

page 29 of G.I. Joe Special

Missions #13 by Trimpe and

Andy Mushynsky. Courtesy of

Rob Pickel.

BELOW: Action panel from

page 29 of G.I. Joe Special

Missions #11 by Trimpe.

Courtesy of Rob Pickel.

Joe Special Missions.” G.I. Joe Special Missions was a second G.I. Joe comic book series that began in 1986. Hasbro had an ulterior motive for the comic book, as Hama elaborates, “The thing to understand, is that the only reason the comic existed, was so that Hasbro could produce four animated commercials for four specific issues in the first year’s run. The commer-cials were supposedly for the Marvel Comic, so by dint of the First Amendment, the network could not dictate how many seconds of animation it con-tained, the way they did with toy commercials. Of course, the comic commercial was re-ally a stealth toy commercial, as it contained all the toys and figures Hasbro wanted to push that month. I designed the four covers that were used in the ads and I had a list of the char-acters and vehicles that had to be in that issue, so I had to make sure those issues coin-cided with the commercials. Other than that (which was highly beneficial to the sales, so how could I complain?), I had almost free rein with the stories—much more than any-body else had in working on a licensed property book. The big plus was that the people I worked with from Hasbro total-ly knew what they were doing and “got” it right away when we explained nuances of the com-

109

The origins of Godzilla lie on the island of Japan. In 1954, Ishiro Honda directed the first Godzilla film, which depicted the giant reptilian monster as the fire-breathing by-product of nuclear radiation. Godzilla was a hit, both in Japan and abroad, and Toho Co., Ltd. produced a total of 28 films starring the “King of the Monsters.” Marvel Comics had a long tradition of publishing comic book stories based on mon-sters. So it is perhaps logical that during the late 1970s, when Marvel Comics was latching onto numerous li-censed properties as a way of expanding their readership, they should turn to the infa-mous monster for inspiration. Doug Moench was the writer Marvel chose to pen the Godzilla series, as he explains, “I was up there [at Marvel] to talk about something else, maybe Moon Knight, but I saw

think that was worked out as part of the deal with Toho. This was not like Star Wars. When Marvel got the rights to Star Wars, they had to do it just like the Star Wars universe and not have anything to do with the Marvel Universe. But Agents of SHIELD were perfect an-tagonists for Godzilla, pursuing Godzilla all over the place. And we’ve seen Godzilla stomp To-kyo again and again, but now we could set him loose on Amer-ica. So much opens up if you did it that way. And why repeat what the movies have already done? We’ve seen him stomp Tokyo. Let’s have him trash Mt. Rushmore. It was very ripe and rich for a Marvelized version.” In fact, Toho gave Marvel a remarkable amount of leeway in adapting the character to comic books. Moench notes, “I assume Toho had final approv-al, but there was not one time where one change in anything was ever requested. I didn’t have to change anything, ever. All I can assume is they either loved it exactly the way it was, or they took the attitude, ‘Well, maybe these crazy Americans know what they’re doing,’ but, one way or another, they never asked for a change.” The only restriction from Toho was with regard to the villains. Marvel could do with Godzilla as they saw fit, but they could not use the other supporting charac-ters from the Godzilla movies. Moench elaborates, “The deal did not include Mothra or any

S POTLIGHT ON

godzilla With Doug Moench

ABOVE LEFT: Schematic of

Red Ronin from page 7 of

Godzilla #6 by Trimpe and

Fred Kida.. Courtesy of Gareth

Gaudin.

ABOVE: Godzilla #1 by Trimpe.

BELOW: Cover art to Godzilla

#14 by Trimpe and Dan Green.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

Stan Lee in John Verpoorten’s office, and Stan turned to me and said, ‘Hey, Doug, do you want to write Godzilla?’ I don’t know what prompted it, but I said, ‘Let me think about it.’ Then I went to Stan’s office and said, ‘Stan, I know I have this reputation of doing more adult-type writing than the typical super-hero thing, but if I were to do Godzilla, I would deliberately try to flip that on its head and do it for a younger audience, more like my son and all of his friends, who are Godzilla-crazy.’ I would try to do it in a way that adults could also enjoy, like the best chil-dren’s books, but I would defi-nitely aim towards that age. And Stan hesitated a little bit, and then he said, ‘You know, you’re exactly right. Go for it.’” Rather than depict Godz-illa wreaking havoc in his native homeland, Marvel chose to bring the monster to the Unit-ed States, making his path of destruction more recognizable and relatable for its readers at the time. And unlike many of the other licensed properties, such as G.I. Joe and Indiana Jones, Godzilla was introduced into the Marvel Universe. What that meant was the creature would encounter the likes of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Fantastic Four in its trek from west to east coast. Moench explains the rationale, “One of the main goals was to ‘Marvelize’ it. Be true to Godzilla, but don’t for-get this is Marvel Comics. I

119

There came a time in the early 1990s when Herb deliberately changed his drawing style to more closely align with the popular artists of the time. The result was interesting, but bore virtually no resemblance to the traditional Trimpe drawing style from the 1970s and 1980s. Still, his adapt-ability likely prolonged his tenure with Marvel and won over new fans. Alex Trimpe recalls the change in his fa-ther’s drawing style: “I read things on occasion about the last years at Marvel where his style

Changing with the Times

changed kind of dramatically. And I’m sure he’d say this himself, but he seemed the most into comic books then that I can remember; he was jazzed. First of all, he got anatomy books and studied anatomy. Because he was looking at art by Rob Liefeld and he was into it. He would say, “This is like Jack Kirby. This is very exciting stuff, but the anatomy is all wrong and what if you did it, but with correct anatomy?” I don’t really love all of that stuff, but it was nice that he was really into it.”

ABOVE: Detail from page 17

of Thor #415 by Trimpe.

Courtesy of Jeff Jaworski.

BELOW: Double page splash

art from Avengers Annual #21

by Trimpe with inks by Charles

Barnett and Brad Vancata.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

121

As the saying goes, “All good things must come to an end.” In 1996, Marvel did the unthinkable and let Trimpe go, after more than 29 years in the Bullpen. In this interview, Trimpe talks about the circum-stances that led to his leaving Marvel Comics.

only numbers that sink you, it’s attitude. They had the corporate attitude that’s so prevalent today in so many corporations and that’s mini-mize. Get the most for the least. And any of the beneficiaries, cut them off as best you can and still keep them going for you. I think that they probably have learned their lessons since then, but I’m not really sure that any of the titles in the Marvel publishing end bailed itself out. I think it was the popularity of the movies that happened to be coming out along through that period that

Leaving marvel

Cassell: I gather things changed at Marvel in later years.Trimpe: Yes, but Tom DeFalco was particularly supportive in keeping me working even before the sh*t hit the fan. I became a nonentity to most editors, but in their defense, there really wasn’t much work available during the dark days.Cassell: What happened at Marvel?Trimpe: After Cadence, it went downhill. When it got in the hands of Revlon, they just totally bled the company dry. Tom, when he was Editor-In-Chief, told me an interesting story. He was at a board meeting with all the suits from Revlon and they’re doing marketing ideas and so-on and so-forth. They didn’t really know anything about comics, so they were trying to sell it like you sell cereal. If something sells, you just sell more of it. So their idea was to do more spin-offs and more titles with the successful characters and just dump everything else, or at least sideline it or support it with the profits that were made off the books that were selling. And Tom said he was sitting there and he laughed because he thought the guy was kidding. He said, “Two weeks later, I was back as a writer again and I was out as Edi-tor-In-Chief at Marvel Comics.” So that’s the kind of mentality that had started quite a while back and eventually, it led to Marvel’s Chapter 11. I always thought that one of the saving graces had to do with the numbers published and the philosophy that Stan had. Usually, if a book went one or two sales periods, two monthly periods, and it didn’t do well, it was cut. It was dropped or reduced somehow and they didn’t fool around with it. But what these guys were doing, in my understanding, they were supporting some of their lesser successful titles, with the money they were making off Spider-Man and the Hulk and X-Men. Now what that does is it stops the creative turnover. Everything goes stale. It’s like status quo, dead in the water. And I think it’s not

ABOVE: Detail from page 18

of The Incredible Hulk #136

by Trimpe and Sal Buscema.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

BELOW: Back cover of 1975

Marvel Con program by Trimpe.

141

Herb Trimpe galleryHerb Trimpe galleryThe following pages provide a sampling of the varied

artwork Trimpe has done over his lengthy career.

ABOVE LEFT: 1972 Silver

Surfer pin-up by Trimpe from

the first issue of the fanzine

Second Foundation.

ABOVE RIGHT: Herb Trimpe at

work, from the 1970 Marvel-

mania Bullpen Photo Set.

LEFT: Commission drawing

of Wolverine and the Hulk by

Trimpe. Courtesy of Thomas

Suhling.

144

TOP: Back cover from the

1978 Hulk calendar featuring

the friends and foes of the

Hulk by Trimpe.

BOTTOM LEFT: Instruction

booklet illustrated by Trimpe

for the 1974 Aurora Comic

Scenes model kit featuring

the Incredible Hulk.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Marvelmania

poster of the Incredible Hulk

by Trimpe.

OPPOSITE PAGE:

Son of Satan pin-up model

sheet art by Trimpe. Courtesy

of Jeff Jaworski.

THE INCREDIBLEHERB TRIMPE

From running the first photostat machine at Marvel Comicsto being the first to illustrate Wolverine, no other memberof the Marvel Bullpen has had such a varied and remarkablecareer as Herb Trimpe. He drew licensed characters basedon toys such as G.I. Joe, Godzilla, and Transformers, whichwent on to become blockbuster movies. He drew runs ofsuper-heroes like Iron Man, Defenders, Captain Britain, andeven Marvel’s flagship character Spider-Man. But he’s bestknown for his definitive eight-year stint drawing the Incred-ible Hulk. This book chronicles the life and art of Trimpethrough his own voice, as well as the voices of friends andcolleagues like STAN LEE, TOM DEFALCO, ROY THOMAS,JOHN ROMITA, BILL PECKMANN, SAL BUSCEMA, JOESINNOTT, LARRY HAMA, DOUG MOENCH, ELIOTBROWN, LEN WEIN, RON FRENZ, STEVE ENGLEHART,and his son ALEX TRIMPE. Their testimony to his talent andhis legacy of artwork leave no wonder why he has beendubbed “The Incredible Herb Trimpe.” By DEWEY CASSELLand AARON SULTAN.

(160-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $34.95 • (Digital Edition) $7.95 ISBN: 9781605490625

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