1963: THE SIMULATED SWEATSHOP

PINKHAM: In the first Rare Bit Fiends, you tell the story of what went on behind the scenes of 1963.

VEITCH: I should tell the whole 1963 story, because it’s actually a kind of interesting time. Bissette and I figured we needed to self-publish, because obviously the Tundra thing wasn’t going to work. Tundra hadn’t been sold yet (to Kitchen Sink), but Steve and I had both come to the conclusion that Dave Sim was right. Dave Sim had warned us about every pitfall, but we went ahead with Tundra anyway. Finally, it began to make sense; we really wanted and needed to take control of our own fate, and take responsibility for business decisions. But we were missing the capital. We were both making decent livings, but we needed some sort of capital, because publishing just doesn’t happen without it.

So, we were just sort of thinking about that when Image came along. I think everyone was surprised. Those guys all left Marvel, formed Image; and it was really happenin’. We were excited by the fact that here were some creators that didn’t stay at their publisher and turned around and started their own thing, and actually continued the big sales, gouging market share out of the industry giants. That’s a key point in the evolution of the comics business.

Anyway, those guys were coming along, and we saw in what was happening, the good potential being, “Hey, here are some creators with responsibility and control over the business side of their comics.” At the same time, I’m a little scared for them, ’cause I’d just been through the Mirage and Tundra explosion — gold rush mentality and capital coming in combined with poor organization; we were crawling out of the trenches. I had just gotten an after-the-fact work-for-hire contract [laughs] from Mirage. Some crazy maniac at Mirage I’d never met, in some strange position of power down there, was calling me up and threatening that if I didn’t sign over work I’d done years before I would never see any more royalties.

PINKHAM: Ouch.

VEITCH: Worse, the contract is more wretched than anything even DC had ever done to me.

PINKHAM: Eastman and Laird are friends of yours, right?

VEITCH: I’d like to think of them as friends.

The pressures they were under I understood. I felt bad for them, for the positions they had found themselves in: possessors of incredible means, and owners of a rich vein of comic book culture, namely the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But on the personal level, they were in an organizational nightmare.

It seemed they’d lost the human connection that had been such a part of why the Creators’ Bill of Rights happened, and it was like the flip side of being so generous to all of the people around them right after they’ d hit it big.

So, me getting that horrible contract and being ragged by some junior-level flak, whom I’ve never heard of, really kind of ended the possibility of me working with them.

PINKHAM: Did you have to sign?

VEITCH: No, I never did. But I know a lot of other people who are worse off signed.

What they’re afraid of is they’re going to get sued — for good reason. The way the laws are set up in this country, you have to protect yourself from lawsuits. That means having a contract with every dot on the “i” and every “t” crossed. If they ever want to sell The Turtles, it may cause a problems that they let people like Dave Sim, Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette, Michael Zulli and a number of others draw their own versions of the Turtles on a handshake deal.

PINKHAM: Although you’d think Mirage would have no problem outlasting any freelance cartoonist’s pocketbook in court …

VEITCH: Honestly, I don’t think it’s Peter or Kevin; It’s lawyers sitting around looking for something to do. [Laughs]. You know, I’m glad it didn’t happen to me.

PINKHAM: Back to 1963.

VEITCH: Out of the blue, Jim Valentino called Bissette; he wanted to spread the gravy around to other creators. Jim wanted to bring Alan in. I think it started out he wanted Alan and Steve, to do another Swamp Thing, and Alan just wasn’t interested in Swamp Thing at all. He had this vague idea to do a superhero comic deadpanned exactly as comics used to be. It was real vague, but it was enough for Valentino to go, “Yeah, Sounds great!” And he sold it to Image. Early on, they decided they wanted me in. Again, I think a lot of it was I’m good at … production.

PINKHAM: [Laughs.] “Now all we need is someone who can do the work.”

VEITCH: So, early on they called me, and Alan overnight created the world of 1963, all six titles. It took Steve and me awhile to catch on to what he wanted. We were doing the production sketches and we faxed them over to him: “No, no, Rick … That’s too good [laughs]. Do them looser.” Pretty soon, as it picked up, we became a “virtual bullpen” on the phone and the fax machine. He became “Affable Al,” I became “Roarin’ Rick” (which actually was my nickname in the Hero Comics I did as a kid), Bissette became “Sturdy Steve.” And creatively, stuff began to happen. It came together pretty quickly.

Bissette and I went down to San Diego that year, and we still hadn’t agreed on the deal. One of the reasons was Jim Lee wanted to work with Alan; he very much wanted to be brought in on the comic. So, the idea began to come together of Lee doing the Annual to end the whole project. Our characters from 1963 and modern, 1993 Image superheroes having a big bash —

PINKHAM: So you guys weren’t going to be the art team for the Annual.

VEITCH: Right. We were going to do the first six.

But we still hadn’t cut the deal; Steve and I were still afraid of it. We were talking a lot with Valentino, who was terrific, really working his balls off to bring the other Image guys around to what we wanted to do. We were one of the first outside projects Image took on, and those guys were having a hard time agreeing on where they were going. There were seven of ’em, having this massive success, trying to get a hold of it, trying to come up with some sort of direction. They’re hiring people, and starting organizations — a lot of confusion. And we’re looking at this, going: “Oh, man … it’s Tundra all over again!” [Laughs.]

We’re a little afraid of it, and we hadn’t decided— and a couple of points were dangling, and one of ’em was Jim Lee; if he was really into it. And I’m walking around the dealer room in San Diego when up runs Don Simpson: “Hey, man — you’ve got to get up to the Image panel right now! They want to talk to you. Grab Bissette.” So Bissette and I go up there, and there’s like 2,000 people — I mean, it’s a mob scene. McFarlane’s doing his Oprah Winfrey shtick, he’s got the audience eating out of his hand. I mean, it’s obvious they had really tapped into something. And here’s Steve and me, in the back of the room, trying to cut the deal with the guys on stage —

PINKHAM: Over a microphone?

VEITCH: No, through hand signals. You know, like Valentino would run down to talk to us, then he’ d run back, then he’d send someone else down. Finally, Lee came down, and we asked the question: “Does Jim Lee really want to do the project?” So, he said: “OK, listen. If we can announce it right now — [laughs] “I’m on the project.”

PINKHAM: They wanted to get this all wrapped up oh the spot, so they could announce it on the panel?

VEITCH: That’s it. It was a huge pressure situation. Steve and I, we were completely out of our element. We’d never had to deal with anything like this.

So, we talked it over and after about five minutes we signaled “OK.” So, they announced it and a big cheer went up, then they rushed us up on the stage. They talked a little bit more, then Liefeld started throwing T-shirts and hats and things into the audience. The audience surged the panel, and the security guards were pushing us out the side door [laughs]. The crowd came up on to the stage — Bissette and I were like “What happened?” [Laughs.] We were flabbergasted by the whole crazy situation we’d been caught up in.

PINKHAM: Sort of like being signed to Apple Records during a Beatles concert.

VEITCH: But we still didn’t have a final deal. It was basically a handshake, and we started work. The terms were outrageous: Image makes 10 percent of the profit, Valentino’s Shadowline gets 10 percent of the profit, and the creators get the other 80 percent — which is fantastic. It was like a dream. At the same time, Alan and I were in such financial straits, we needed some sort of funds. We needed a loan, which Valentino provided through Shadowline, sort of bankrolling a really small page rate — 75 bucks a page — just enough to keep us afloat until some of the profits came in.

And so we came back to Vermont, and called up Alan — bing, bing, bing — and started work. Steve and I rented a little cabin right between our houses (we live 30 miles apart) and a couple days a week we’ d meet at the cabin and we’d start blastin’ out the comics, Alan saying, “You’ve got to draw two or three pages a day.

PINKHAM: To give it that rushed look.

VEITCH: “… Blast it out, like Ditko and Kirby.”

PINKHAM: Under those conditions, I hope he didn’t give you one of his usual scripts—unless he meant reading two or three pages a day.

VEITCH: It was all done Marvel style. Affable Al would call up and sort of describe what would take place. Then we would fax him finished pencils, which he would dialog — and if you read 1963, dumbing the dialog down, which is difficult for Alan.

PINKHAM: Well, after flipping through Violator…

VEITCH: The mistake we made — actually, I can remember a lot of mistakes. One of the mistakes we made was that Steve and I took on editorial and production of the whole series, with no pay. We figured this thing was going to pay off, and pay off big. So we ended up working our balls off organizing, making sure the thing happened. Valentino was right there all the time; he couldn’t have been better, handling everything on the Image end. Anything we needed, he took care of. But we just — we should have known better. Organizing a bunch of crazy artists all over the world, and a writer who’s a world-class eccentric… [Laughs.]

PINKHAM: So the simulated sweatshop was becoming a real one.

VEITCH: What’s funny is it really kind of did evolve into that. I don’t think Alan was really ever connected with the thing like he gets with his real projects, like From Hell. As we got deeper into it, he seemed to become disengaged; we were stuck with a lot of the letters pages, and ads, shit like that, that he should have been doin’.

Steve and I sorted out whatever problems were coming from Image. You know, it was crazy. They were in this protoplasmic stage of massive success, kicking the shit out of Marvel in terms of market snare. And of course it fueled the speculator bubble. Steve and I didn’t understand what the speculation was all about — because none of our comics were really speculator comics —but we caught it. We had our books out just as the bubble burst, so the first two issues of 1963 had ridiculous orders — I think the first one was 600,000.

PINKHAM: Jesus [laughs].

VEITCH: The second issue ordered 500,000. They were massive, massive — Although the big mistake we made, this was the main thing: we didn’t understand promotion and advertising, how important it was to the Image cachet. If you go back and look through the distributor catalogs, there’s massive blocks of full-color Image ads: “Man! 20 pages of full-color Image ads …” We never did that. We didn’t understand how important it was, and we didn’t have time because we were just barely holding the virtual bullpen together, getting the books out on time. I think we were the only Image book ever to ship on time — ever.

So the creative end really came together. Valentino, in a last desperate act to promote the book, hired on Larry Marder to do an ad campaign, although it was very late in the game — the book’s about ready to come out. And he was able to identify a certain amount of the problems and address them. I think the sales of ’63 could have been better in the retail outlets.