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Direct Conversations: Talks with Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators
Interviews conducted, transcribed, and edited by Paul Kupperberg
Introduction by Robert Greenberger
Illustrated by Adam Wallenta
$16.00
Crazy 8 Press
234 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8373651769
CLICK HERE TO BUY FROM AMAZON.COM!
Even the old-guard management at DC Comics recognized that the new generation of readers called for a new generation of creators, writers, and artists closer to the age and interests of these new fans than the 20-, 30-, or even 40-year veterans still responsible for most of the publisher’s output.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. The growth of the 1960s fandom movement had produced countless young wannabes anxious for the opportunity to “go pro.”
Brooklyn-born Paul Kupperberg made the jump from fan to professional writer in 1975. Now, nearly half a century later, he’s sat down to reminisce about the good- (and some not-so-good-) old days of their Bronze Age beginnings with ten friends and colleagues from the time: Howard Chaykin, Jack C. Harris, Tony Isabella, Paul Levitz, Steve Mitchell, Bob Rozakis, Joe Staton, Anthony Tollin, Bob Toomey, and Michael Uslan.
Paul Kupperberg is a prolific writer of comic books for DC Comics, Archie, Marvel, Bongo, and Charlton, as well as everything in between, from coloring and activity books and Mad Libs and more. He is also the author of numerous books and short stories of fiction and nonfiction for readers of all ages, from Crazy 8 Press, Heliosphere, Titan Books, Stone Arch Books, Rosen Publishing, Citadel Press, Pocket Books, TwoMorrows, and others.
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May
15
Paul Kupperberg on May 15th, 2022
All my life, I was told I was lazy.
Too lazy to be bothered studying for school.
Too lazy to help with chores.
Too lazy to join in with activities and events.
Too lazy.
The incident my family could point to to prove my laziness occurred in the summer of 1966, when I was 11. We lived in Brooklyn, New York, in a two-bedroom apartment in which I shared a room with my two brothers. My mother’s sister Maura lived in Cleveland, Ohio, in a nice two-story private home in Shaker Heights with her husband and their three sons, each of whom had a bedroom of their own. Once every year or so, we would pile into the car and make the 8- or 9-hour drive from NY to OH for a family visit (mom was born in Cleveland and had a bunch of aunts, uncles, and cousins who still lived there).
On this particular visit, Uncle Ernie was in the process of having a family room put on the house (or maybe just a down-to-the-studs remodel) and announced that his visiting nephews were being recruited to help install fiberglass insulation before the arrival the next day of the sheet-rockers. I followed my uncle, brothers, and cousins into the room. Ernie quickly ran through the process—shove the bare face of fiberglass batt into the stud bay, trim, repeat—and set us to work. That old school pink Owens-Corning insulation was miserable stuff. There was no way to avoid fingers being lacerated by the glass fibers and, within minutes, we were all scratching at our hands and arms and sweating like pigs in the July heat in the non-air-conditioned space.
I asked my uncle for gloves but was told there weren’t enough for everyone, so none of us could have a pair.
A moment later, when Ernie’s back was turned, I walked out of the room, grabbed my notebook and pencils, and sat down in an easy chair in a corner not 6-feet from where the work went on, and lost myself for the next several hours, drawing a comic book story. Ernie and others passed by where I was sitting all day, but no one gave me a second look.
Finally, the job done, everyone went to clean up and, all of a sudden, Ernie was towering over my chair, his hands literally on his hips and angrily glaring at me.
“Where the hell you been? We’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been right here the whole time.”
Ernie went off on me. Years (decades) later he would be diagnosed as bi-polar and start taking meds, but at that moment, he was just a red-faced, spittle-spewing adult screaming at me for some crime that I had committed in his head.
“I can’t understand why you’d treat me like this! You’re a guest in my house!” he thundered.
Uncle Ernie was a bully. To his wife. To his children. Probably to a lot of others. And I hate bullies. My older brother bullied and tormented me from birth until the day, as a 40-something, I stood up to him and promised, with every intention of following through on it, that I would beat him to a bloody pulp if he ever raised his hand or voice to me again. He believed me. When I was 8-years old, I used the jump rope the bully on our block was forcing me to twirl for him late into a winter afternoon to trip him up, giving him a concussion. He avoided me after that.
“Hey! Leave him alone,” my father said. “The job got done, with or without him. It’s over!”
“No thanks to his laziness,” Ernie sneered.
But it was official. I was lazy.
Not, I wasn’t interested in or just didn’t want to be pressed into being used as free labor to build his house. I couldn’t possibly have an opinion, ergo it had to be laziness. And as a neurotic, overweight insecure kid, I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. Look at my grades, all Cs and Ds (except for the straight-As I received in almost every English, creative writing, or lit class I took). And how about the two and a half years of monthly fanzines Paul Levitz and I put out simultaneous with our high school years? Or the dozens of APA zines and stories and comic books I wrote and drew on my own?
By 19, I was a professional writer. By 25, I was writing Superman for DC Comics and had published 2 novels. Throughout the late-70s and the 80s, I was one of DC’s most prolific writers.
But the fucked-up thing is, I continued to believe I was lazy. I would chide myself for every minute I wasn’t at the keyboard. I had an inordinate fear of missing deadlines, afraid it would reveal my laziness to my editor and get me fired. During my own editorial career at DC, my fear of being found out grew even worse, especially since most of my time operating in the DCU was under a group editor whose default management style was to shout and bully, making no distinction between dangerously late books and usually on-schedule books only a few days late. At one meeting, I responded to his dressing down over an issue of John Byrne’s Wonder Woman that would end up being 3 days late (as John warned me it would be, a fact already I’d already reported to him), “Even if the book was delivered right now, it would get stuck in the production department queue behind all the really late books like (I named some titles, including two of his, both over 3 weeks late), so I think we can give John, who by the way never misses deadlines, the benefit of the doubt.”
He didn’t agree. “That’s not the point! The deadline is the deadline. Stop being so god damn lazy and fix it!”
He couldn’t possibly be overreacting (or as was actually the case, be totally unqualified for his job). No. I was lazy.
The other day, 56 years after my “diagnosis” as being lazy, I was looking for an old story on my “brag shelf”—the space in a writer’s bookcase where they shelf their own work—and realized mine took up 9 and one-half 26”-inch long shelves, or about 20 feet of comics, books, graphic novels, magazines, fanzines, tabloid newspapers, custom comics, and other formats. And that doesn’t include the 4 short boxes crammed in the storage closet with my editorial output.
I’m turning 67 years old next month. I consider myself semi-retired, happily receiving SSI and my Warners pension. Yet, I just finished my second screenplay (for hire), and the active projects on my desk today include: a novel, a book of interviews with my Bronze Age peers, at least 4 short stories for various anthologies, as well as the several columns a month I write for a comics website. Later this coming week I have a Zoom meeting scheduled about possibly writing a new 4-issue webcomic series. On the editorial side, I’m project managing and editing/rewriting a 96-page graphic novel.
Lazy? No. Just stubborn. I never wanted to do what I didn’t want to do. But the stuff I do want to do? Try and get in my way!
And fuck you, Uncle Ernie.
Crazy 8 Press
Paperback & eBook
Nonfiction / Supernatural Humor
206 pages
$16.00 / $6.99 eBook
NOW AVAILABLE!
Signed and personalized copies $20.00 (US shipped)
$30.00 (Canada shipped)
or
CLICK HERE to buy the paperback on Amazon.com
or the eBook edition.
Meet Leo Persky
“The first thing you’ve got to know is that while I write like a Terrance Strange, I look like a Leo Persky. Which makes sense since I am Leo Persky. Strange is my penname, as well as a bit of a family legacy. I’m an investigative reporter for World Weekly News, which also makes “strange” my profession. Just like my granddaddy before me (my daddy, between us, was an appliance salesman for Sears). Granddaddy was the first Persky to go, for professional reasons, by Terrance Strange.
“I’m everything you think a Leo Persky would be. A solid 5’ 7”, 142 pounds of average, complete with glasses, too much nose, not enough chin, and a spreading bald spot that I swear isn’t the reason I always wear a hat. Just so you know how cruel genetics can be, Grandpa Jacob, the Terrance Strange I might have been, was ten inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than me, movie star handsome, and a world renown traveler and adventurer. I’m also a traveler and adventurer, but since I’m short, scrawny, and funny looking, nobody knows who the hell I am.
“Even the photo that I use at the top of my column is a 1943 Hollywood publicity shot of my grandfather. It was my editor’s idea to replace my face with someone else’s as he felt my real one ‘would probably repulse even our readers.’”
Leo Persky has survived werewolf squirrels, intoxicated djinnis, seven years of bad luck for breaking a magical Atlantean mirror, giant Peruvian Devil-snakes, and an alien reality TV star and his human baby momma…not to mention his mother’s nagging after the retired septuagenarian monster hunter has to take care of the vampire stalking her at her local Brooklyn supermarket while waiting for her celebrated son to return her calls.
Plus, in the all-new novella “The Devil and Leo Persky,” the intrepid investigator into the unknown learns that a decades’ old deal between Beelzebub and his grandfather has begun to unravel and the tangled threads are threatening to trip him up and land Leo in Hell!
(Paul Kupperberg is the author of more than three dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Same Old Story, JSA: Ragnarok, Direct Comments: Comics Creators in Their Own Words, and Paul Kupperberg’s Illustrated Guide to Writing Comics, as well as of more than 1,000 short stories and comic book stories. He has also been an editor at DC Comics, WWE Kids’ Magazine, and, of course, Weekly World News.)
Read an excerpt from THE DEVIL AND LEO PERSKY
I guess once a monster hunter, always a monster hunter, because my mother instantly sized up the situation and assumed a defensive posture.
“He’s possessed, Leo!” she shouted.
“No kidding? Why do you think I wanted us to run, crazy lady?” I snapped.
“Twice have ye been summoned, twice has my lord been ignored!” Wallace growled in a voice that belonged to something that had never been human.
I plucked at my mother’s sleeve.
“Let’s go, Mom,” I croaked.
“Shh, Leo,” she hissed.
“You don’t get it. If you don’t run, I can’t either.”
“He’ll only follow us. You can’t run away from a dybbuk. You’ve got to face it head on.”
I started to offer a counterargument, but Mom was already off, launching herself feet first with a savage yell at the charging Wallace like a little old Jewish Bruce Lee in a pant suit.
I think I stood there blinking like an idiot at the sight of Barbara Persky delivering a pretty damn good flying kick to Wallace’s midsection. Possessed by a demon or not, a man has got to breathe, which isn’t helped by taking a good shot to the solar plexus.
Wallace grunted, then grunted again as my mother landed nimbly and executed a neat pirouette, leaning away from him and driving the heel of her left foot into his chin.
“Mom, Jesus!” I shouted. I ran toward her, but she held up a hand to stop me dead in my tracks.
Wallace swayed back and forth a couple of times, then his eyes rolled back in his head and the big man crumbled to the floor, out for the count.
I looked back and forth a few times between my mother, straightening her blouse after the brief tussle, and Wallace, the big demon possessed ex-cop, unconscious on the floor of the Brooklyn Museum’s Middle Eastern wing. I had to keep reminding myself that this was no helpless old lady – hell, I think we’d just proved who the helpless old lady here was – but a trained ex-professional who kept herself in fighting shape.
Mom saw me looking at her in disbelief and laughed. “It’s not quite as impressive as it seems, sweetheart. Wallace once told me he tried boxing when he was a young man but had to give it up because he had a glass jaw.” She looked down at him and frowned. “I hope I didn’t hurt him too much. It’s not his fault he got possessed.”
“Hear me,” Wallace said in the demon’s voice, and I jumped. He was still prone on the floor, out like a light and unmoving except for his lips.
“Twice have ye been called. I am the third and last summons. Respond or face the consequences of Nilshalzratoth’s displeasure.”
Then Wallace shuddered from head to foot, said, “Pluff!” and settled into peaceful unconsciousness.
“Poor Wallace,” Mom said, then in a worried-mom tone, “How badly do they want you, Leo?”
“Pretty bad, I guess. What the hell was Gramps up to that they’re so desperate to have him or a blood heir under their thumb?”
“I hope that’s a rhetorical question because I have no idea.” Mom knelt next to Wallace, checked his pulse, then lifted his eyelids to check his eyes. Satisfied with what she saw, she lightly tapped at his cheek with her fingertips and softly called his name.
“What the hell is so all-of-a-sudden urgent about getting me down there?” I said.
Wallace groaned softly in his own voice.
“Wallace?” Mom said.
His eyes fluttered open, and the ex-cop looked around in confusion.
“What? Oh. Ms. Persky. Where…? How did I get here? I’m supposed to be at the door.”
Mom shot me a glance, then smiled at Wallace as she helped him get unsteadily to his feet. He was confused and got only more so when he touched his jaw where Mom had tagged him and winced.
“You came looking for me, but you slipped and fell before you could say why. You probably hit your chin when you went down.”
“I did?” He looked at the floor around him, as if searching for the leg that had tripped him up.
“You okay, pal?” I asked. “You should probably get some ice on that jaw before it starts to swell up.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, and waving off my offer to walk him to the nurse’s office, he left us in the empty Egyptian exhibition hall.
“I feel terrible,” Mom tsked at herself. “He’s such a nice man.”
“Don’t think of it as kicking Wallace,” I said. “Think of it as kicking the demon possessing him.”
“A dybbuk, darling, a malicious possessing spirit.”
“I know what a dybbuk is, Mom,” I said, sounding like a whining fourteen-year-old.
“Then use the terms correctly. You’re a professional,” she said, sounding like a mother speaking patiently to her whining fourteen-year-old. “Anyway, not all demons possess, and, not for nothing, but we are dealing with Jewish spirits here.”
“We are?”
“Follow me,” Mom said.
I followed her. She talked.
“Jacob made his first trip to the Middle East in 1915, a few months after the start of the first World War, on assignment from newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst to lead an expedition to find the lost Mesopotamian temple of the war goddess Ashurina, in what’s now northern Syria.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Because it doesn’t exist. Jacob made the whole thing up, to get Hearst to bankroll his real mission. He figured Hearst was going to end up with a doozy of a story anyway when he found what he was really looking for, so he convinced himself it wasn’t like he was actually cheating the man.”
I chuckled. “A real rascal, that Jacob,” I said.
“And he found what he was looking for and excavated the site, but just as they were preparing to decamp, they got caught between warring Allied and Ottoman Empire forces, and the ancient compound they’d dug up, and most of the artifacts it held, were destroyed in the fighting.”
“Most of the artifacts?”
Mom stopped in front of one of the well-lit, enclosed glass display stands that held a sampling of what looked like ancient earthen pottery and cookware, each piece paired with an explanatory label. I must have skipped past this case a couple of hundred times growing up, but I had never stopped and actually looked at what it held, much less read the labels.
“This is what survived, what Jacob was able to get out of the country.”
“No kidding? Hearst must have been pissed when all he got in return for his investment was a bunch of ancient salad bowls.”
“Read.”
I read. They were, as I already knew, not ancient salad bowls but ancient Jewish prayer bowls, a protective magic found mostly in Mesopotamia and Syria from the sixth to eighth centuries. Also known as incantation, demon, or devil-trap bowls, they were inscribed with rabbinical quotes and scripture from the Babylonian Talmud, usually in a spiral from the rim of the bowl into the center and were buried upside down to trap whatever the user wished to be protected from, whether it was a particular curse or evil in general. Some were known to have been created to trap specific evil spirits.
“Your grandfather had crated the bowls for shipping back to America still embedded upside down in the soil they were buried in, to avoid unleashing whatever might have been trapped beneath them. But the commander of the German unit that captured the dig smashed the crates, looking for… well, who knows what he was looking for, but he got a lot more than he bargained for.”
“I’ll bet. What did he let loose?”
“Jacob once described it as a roadshow version of Hell, and while those unleashed spirits and demons took care of the Germans, he and most of his expedition escaped.”
Read the rest of the story in
THE DEVIL AND LEO PERSKY!
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$30.00 (Canada shipped)
or
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Tags: Weekly World News
Be warned:
This is a HORROR story. It contains animal cruelty, blood, and violence (but no smoking!), but no real animals, children, or abusive rednecks were harmed in the making of this story.
From The Charlton Arrow #5, it’s “Skin in the Game,” written by me, drawn by Sandy Carruthers, and lettered and colored by Mort Todd.
Boo!
Tags: #Charlton Comics, #comic book, #comics, #Halloween, #horror story, #TheCharltonArrow, Mort Todd, Paul Kupperberg, Sandy Carruthers, Skin in the Game
E. Nelson Bridwell (September 22, 1931 – January 23, 1987) is a name that should be familiar to every fan of DC Comics’ Silver Age. Starting at DC in 1965 as assistant to Superman editor Mort Weisinger, Nelson would spend the next thirty years helping shape the adventures of the Superman family of characters as both an editor and a writer. Nelson had an encyclopedic mind and was an expert on not only DC’s history and continuity, but the Bible and the works of Shakespeares as well, but we knew him mainly as the company’s Chief Continuity Cop.
Nelson was one of the first professionals I ever met, in 1971 when Paul Levitz and I went up to DC to gather news for our fanzine Etcetera (later The Comic Reader). Later, he would serve as my collaborator or editor on two of my early high profile assignments, 1979’s World of Krypton (comics’ first deliberate miniseries) and 1981’s Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes. As a writer on his own, Nelson wrote for Mad Magazine (1956 – 1975), created the original Secret Six (1968), and the humor series Inferior 5 (1966) and the Maniaks (1967), as well as writing the Batman syndicated newspaper strip and Shazam! The Original Captain Marvel (1974 – 1978, 1982 – 1983), the Legion of Super-Heroes, Supergirl, and countless other stories.
For all his contributions, Nelson Bridwell kept himself mostly to the background. He was naturally shy and soft-spoken, a man who I sometimes felt wasn’t ever quite comfortable in his own skin (but who was also a practicing nudist), overwhelmed by his brasher and more bombastic bosses, first Weisinger, then Julius Schwartz, neither of whom, I’m sorry to say, treated him with the respect he deserved not only as a person and employee, but for his contributions to the DC mythos.
I don’t know how many hours I spent in Nelson’s office, either on business or just talking comics. He seldom discussed his personal life beyond the occasional mention of his family back in Oklahoma. I don’t remember many fanzine interviews with him over the years, but recently came across this one in the pages of New Media Publishing’s Comics Feature #10 (July 1981), the same issue in which my and Carl Gafford’s 1973 interview with artist Murphy Anderson first saw print (and which is reprinted in my book Direct Comments: Comics Creators in Their Own Words). The ENB interview was conducted by and is © Margaret O’Connell, transcribed by Paul Dini (pre-Harley Quinn, of course).
Tags: Batman, Captain Marvel, Carl Gafford, Comics Feature, DC Comics, E. Nelson Bridwell, ENB, Inferior Five, Julis Schwartz, Legion of Super-Heroes, Mad Magazine, Maniaks, Margaret O'Connell, Mort Weisinger, Murphy Anderson, New Media Publishing, Paul Dini, Paul Kupperberg, Secret Six, Shazam!, Supergirl, Superman, World of Krypton
NOW AVAILABLE!
Direct Comments: Comic Book Creators in Their Own Words
The DC Direct Currents Interview Transcripts (1989 – 1991)
Conducted, Transcribed, and Annotated by Paul Kupperberg
Cover by Aalishaa/fiverr
Buffalo Avenue Books
Paperback & eBook
Nonfiction / Comic Book History
192 pages
$16.00 / $7.00 eBook
Comic Book Creators in their Own Words!
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER: Shipping July 1-ish!
Signed and personalized copies$19.00 (US shipped)
$30.00 (Canada shipped)
or
CLICK HERE to buy the paperback on Amazon.com
or the eBook edition.
From 1988 to 1995, Paul Kupperberg wrote DC Direct Currents, the company’s monthly promotional newsletter. Like several predecessor publications (DC Coming Attractions, DC Coming Comics, DC Releases), Direct Currents was distributed free through comic shops to promote upcoming events, specials, and title launches.
Writing Direct Currents could be a chore; endless capsule descriptions of tortured plot twists…and often, the editors had no plot specifics to share, leaving the writer the even more tortuous task of trying to make nothing sound interesting. But conducting the interviews for the Direct Currents “People at Work” feature, profiles showcasing the writers and artists behind the comics, was always more like playtime. It was an excuse to call and chat with a wide array of creators, running the gamut from Golden Age pioneers to contemporaries, including admired creators on whose work he had grown up. One month, he even interviewed himself.
But only excerpts of those interviews were used in the published profiles, and the unedited transcripts of only twenty-two of the more then ninety interviews survived. Now, newly edited and annotated by the editor, you can read the Direct Comments (along with some rarely seen interviews from the 1970s) from some of the greatest creators of the first half-century of the comic book business, including:
Murphy Anderson
Jim Aparo
Kyle Baker
Brian Bolland
John Byrne
John Costanza
Chuck Dixon
Keith Giffen
Dick Giordano
Mike Grell
Ed Hannigan
Adam Hughes
Carmine Infantino
Klaus Janson
Paul Kupperberg
Lee Marrs
Pepe Moreno
Denny O’Neil
Jerry Ordway
Jerry Robinson
Kurt Schaffenberger
Julie Schwartz
Walter Simonson
Jim Warren
Tags: Adam Hughes, annotated, Brian Bolland, Carmine Infantino, Chuck Dixon, comic book history, comic books, DC Comics, DC Coming Attractions, DC Coming Comics, DC Direct Currents, DC Releases, Denny O’Neil, Dick Giordano, Ed Hannigan, interviews, Jerry Ordway, Jerry Robinson, Jim Aparo, Jim Warren, John Byrne, John Costanza, Julie Schwartz, Keith Giffen, Klaus Janson, Kurt Schaffenberger, Kyle Baker, Lee Marrs, Mike Grell, Murphy Anderson, Paul Kupperberg, Pepe Moreno, Walter Simonson
NOW AVAILABLE!
Emma’s Landing
Cover by Rick Stasi
Crazy 8 Press
Paperback & eBook
Young Adult
154 pages
$13.00
Signed and personalized copies are available directly from me
$16.00 (US shipped)
$27.00 (Canada shipped)
Payable to PAYPAL.ME/PAULKUPPERBERG
CLICK HERE FOR THE PAPERBACK ON AMAZON.COM!
CLICK HERE FOR eBOOK!
We don’t always get the family we wish for…
But sometimes we get the family we need!
Emma Candella has a lot on her mind.
Her parents are missing on a humanitarian mission in a faraway war-torn country, and she’s been uprooted from her life as a popular middle school blogger in New York City to stay with a grandmother she hardly knows on a lake in a remote corner of the Florida Everglades.
Heavy on mosquitoes and alligators, the town of Land’s End lacks the necessities of everyday life for a big city girl like Emma…including WiFi and an internet connection.
Making friends with her neighbor Carlo from across the lake, Emma is introduced to the lore of the Everglades at Land’s End, including that of P-Alonso, the hermit who lives deep in the swamp and who is said to be immortal. But it’s not until she finds the two hundred and fifty-year-old Candella family journal that Emma begins to understand her heritage…
… And when a child’s cry on a dark and stormy night sends her out onto the lake to help, she finds herself rowing farther than she ever expected to go… all the way back to the eighteenth century where she meets her ancestral namesake and finds herself fighting to save the future of the Candella family!
Tags: adventure, Amazon.com, Crazy 8 Press, Emma's Landing, Everglades, fantasy, Florida, magical realism, Paul Kupperberg, Tha Magic Tunnel, time travel, young adult fiction
Mar
10
Paul Kupperberg on March 10th, 2021
NOW AVAILABLE!
Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg
Cover by Rick Stasi
Buffalo Avenue Books
Paperback & eBook
288 pages
$16.00
Signed and personalized copies are available directly from me:
$19.00 (U.S. shipped)
$30 (Canada shipped)
Payable to PAYPAL.ME/PAULKUPPERBERG
Or on AMAZON.COM!
Comic book scripts aren’t written to be read. At least not in the way a short story or a novel is read. A script is work product, a blueprint for the finished comic book. Most of the words that go into a comic book script will only ever be read by three or four people; the dialogue is the only element that survives from the blueprint to be seen by readers.
But sometimes a script doesn’t make it all the way from the larval stage to full maturity as a published story. The reasons can range from cancellation to a change in editor or even format. Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg contains stories in all those categories, including a three issue Green Lantern story arc for DC Comics’ Legends of the DC Universe that was left without a home after the title was cancelled and a pair of issues of Batman: The Brave and the Bold that didn’t survive a change in both format and editor.
Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg also contains the original typed and hand-edited manuscript for an unused 1987 Green Lantern fill-in, as well as a never published “Elongated Man” back-up for The Flash, the script for a framing sequence for the short-lived Elvira’s House of Mystery, and stories written for DC’s Time Warp and the Warren Publishing horror magazines.
All scripts except for “The Eyes of the Beholders” are reproduced from copies of the original typed manuscripts or reformatted from surviving electronic manuscripts.
Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A 3-issue story arc originally intended for LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE
Art by Peter Doherty & Joe Rubinstein © DCE
A never used late-1980s fill-in for GREEN LANTERN
Art by Rick Stasi & Bruce Patterson © DCE
Scanned from the original script, including hand edits by editor Julius Schwartz
Unused back-up story originally intended for The Flash #270
Unused script co-written for Warren Publishing with Bob Toomey
Unused script for Time Warp
Unused Batman and Guy Gardner script for BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD
Unused Batman and Plastic Man team-up for BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD
Still Available:
THE UNPUBLISHED COMIC BOOK SCRIPTS OF PAUL KUPPERBERG, Volume 1!
Available on Amazon.com!
Tags: Batman, Bruce Patterson, comic book scripts, comic books, Elongated Man, Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, Joe Rubinstein, manuscript, Paul Kupperberg, Peter Doherty, Plastic Man, Ralph Dibny, Rick Stasi, scripts, The Brave and the Bold, unpublished
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