Cerebus 301

[Bronty]

Very cool... keep posting!

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Very cool... keep posting!

Thanks! Here's Dave Sim's original interview with me, from NOW & THEN TIMES...

 

Interview

Part 1

 

 

 

T. Casey Brennan - Interview by Dave Sim

 

The Interview

 

In December of 1972, T. Casey Brennan made a weekend sojourn

to Kitchener, Ontario. The following questions and answers are

taken from a lengthy interview session which took place at Now and

Then Books during Mr. Brennan's visit.

 

* * *

 

Sim: Do you think that the early comic books before the code, like

the early war and horror books, had any effects on the kids who read

them?

 

TCB: Yes, I think it was a good effect because it showed the

violence while showing the effects of that same violence. What you get

especially today in cartoons and funny comic books and strips, is a

situation where you'll have a character, say, pushed off a cliff an he is

none the worse for wear. It's just an annoyance and no real injury is

involved. In fact, one psychologist pointed out that it's rather frightening

when you think that kids can be watching a television show, watch a

character be pushed off a cliff, and not even flinch because they know

that there's nothing going to happen. After the comics code, even in the

serious comics, you had war comics where men went off to war and

nobody got maimed. There were no legs and arms being blown off, no

blood dripping down the chin as you would see in the comics before

the code. It just seemed to portray violence as a sort of a game, like the

violence of the Batman TV show. Violence was a big game. Compare

the Batman TV show with the Batman punches where no one really

gets hurt to, say, a fight scene or a beating scene out of an EC where

you've got teeth being knocked out, blood and all the effects of the

violence shown. Compare a Road Runner cartoon where the coyote

gets pushed off a cliff and is just rather annoyed with it, with an EC

comic where a guy gets pushed off a cliff and then he'd be at the

bottom with a bone puncturing his skin and just totally broken and a

mass of blood and guts. That's the way it should be shown. If you're

going to show violence at all, you should show the results of that

violence. I think it's very harmful if you don't show the results of that

violence. I did a story like that in Warren in Creepy #37, the issue after

"On the Wings of a Bird." It was a story called "The Cutthroat Cat Blues"

about the kind of attitudes that violent funny cartoons were putting

across. That's when I think our magazines are doing just great. I'm

glad that we've finally got comics on the stands now that are showing

violence as it really is.

 

Sim: Would sales improve for Warren if they had a lot of blood, gore

and violence prominently displayed in the magazines?

 

TCB: I like our covers the way they are. We have very artistic covers

and we always have had them. Those are the covers, I think, that sell

best. I want to be able to do whatever I want to do in these magazines,

as long as there is a definite purpose in what I'm doing. I've thought up

some very violent stores for Jim Warren, some of the most violent that

I've hear of being published. If I write a story that is violent, there has

got to be a purpose to it. I think that the Warren people can tell when a

story is violent for the purpose of making a batter story of whether a

story is violent for the sake of violence. I don't think that they are fond of

publishing stories that are genuinely in bad taste.

 

Sim: How did you happen to have your first Warren -script accepted?

 

TCB: What happened at that time was that (Archie) Goodwin and

most of Warren's staff had left him. This was in the winter of '67 and

'68. Warren was going through some financial difficulties at that time.

He had lost some of his best people. So, just by sheer coincidence, I

had sent Jim Warren a -script in the hopes that Goodwin, missing a

deadline, might want to use something freelance. And, I sent it at the

proper time and he wrote back and said that he'd be using it and I got

a cheque for twenty-five dollars and that was how I started. They

bought very little from me in those days. They were buying very little

from anybody. They were mostly using reprints. My first published story

was called "Family Curse" which wasn't printed until 1969. I sold one

story in 1968 and one story in 1969. And the second story I submitted

was printed in record time, just a few moths later, and it was published

in Eerie #22. It was "Family Curse" and Tony Williamsune was the

artist. It was just a typical horror story. At that time I couldn't afford to be

experimental. I wanted to work my way in by doing average horror

stores. My second published work, I believe, was "Death of a Stranger"

in Creepy #31, and I'm rather proud of that story. I think my third

publication was "On the Wings of a Bird" in Creepy #36, at least that

was by first really big story for Warren. "Death of a Stranger" was bit too

obscure. "On the Wings of Bird" was very direct.

 

Sim: A lot of stories you say you are writing, like the ones about

despair, suffering and so on with these themes in them, must be

going over the heads of a lot of the people who read Warren

magazines.

 

TCB: I don't know. I'd hate to think that my stories are going over the

heads of the majority. But still, I think the kids can understand a lot

more than we give them credit for, even the eleven and twelve year

olds. I'm really impressed with the quality of the letters that Warren

gets and the fan letters that I get. I am very impressed with the things

that kids can understand that some of us don't think they can

understand. I'm definitely writing for intellectual readers. But I don't

assign those readers any particular age. I don't say that they are

necessarily college age or anything else, because there are intelligent

comic book readers at all ages. When I was eleven and twelve, I was

reading and enjoying the more intellectual comic book work. Man in

Black #1 was a really intellectually-oriented comic book as I recall. It

was the kind of work I liked - the kind of work I think a lot of kids like.

The trouble is that there are too many publishers and editors that are

trying to play the same roles as the educators are, and give the kids

meaningless pabulum. They're writing down to them and I don't think

that's necessary.

 

Sim: What do you predict for comic books, in general, in the future?

 

TCB: I think that the publishers are going to continue to look for new

means of marketing comics - new ways of putting comic books back

on the stands. What happened was that twenty years ago, after the

horror book scare, a lot of retail outlets stopped handling comics and

today there aren't that many places that stock the actual colour comic

book. The drug stores, for the most part, sell drugs and they may have

a small magazine counter, but no comic book stand. Comic books are

virtually unheard of in candy stores. The small grocery stores

sometimes sell comics, but most people do their shopping at K-Mart

and such which don'' handle comics, except for comic-packs perhaps.

So people have been coming out with these new ideas for getting

comic books onto the magazine stands. I guess the first idea they

came out with was Mad which was, as far as I know, the first

magazine-size funny comic book. And that went on the magazine

stands. And after Mad's imitators came along, then came Creepy,

another entirely new idea - the first serious magazine-size comic. And

that went on the magazine stands. And then you had the Digest

comics; you had the paperback book collections of comics; you had

the comic books, four in a plastic bag to go to the supermarkets. Again

with the latest think, Jim Warren has come out with something no one

in the U.S. has come out with before, and that's the five dollar Dracula

book to be sold in book stores. This is strictly for adults because no kid

is going to say, "Mom, can I have five dollars to go to the store and buy

Dracula?" So that's a new idea in comic books - the idea of a quarterly

to be sold in book stores for a high price and for adults only; not in the

sense that 'adults only' has come to mean in comic books and other

magazines - that it's dirty. It's just good work.

 

Special thanks to Sheri Admans for typing all this into the computer for me.

 

Page created January 17, 1997

Web Author-Donald Van Horn

Page design © 1997 Donald Van Horn

 

 

Interview

Part 2

 

 

 

T. Casey Brennan - Interview by Dave Sim

 

The Interview Part 2

* * *

Sim: Do you think comic books have remained the same over the last thirty years

with just new characters added from time to time?

 

TCB: Oh, no. I think the field has changed again and again. When comic books

started off, there was just primarily funny work. They were just comic book versions

of the comic strips. You had the super-hero age lasting through the 1940s. You had

the early fifties with the emphasis on horror; even Captain Marvel had a horror story

every issue with "Captain Marvel and the Vampires" and such. After (Dr. Fredric)

Wertham, you had a very insipid era where you had DC with stories that usually

involved some kind of a thing from another planet and very little danger or

excitement or action - "Jimmy Olsen, Turtleman" or something like that. Then you

had Atlas at the same time where every month you had "I Met Oog, the Thing That

Lived!" It was the same story over and over again. There were two endings. In one, it

turned out that the creature was actually bad and somebody conquered it. In the

other, it was actually good and we rip ourselves off by killing it. Those were the two

standard endings. Then the 1960s began moving toward the trend of revitalising

the super-hero with Jack Kirby's work. Then in the late sixties we have Denny O'Neil

stepping into the scene and he took the idea one step farther because his heroes

were not only human, but they were involved in real life problems like pollution and

drugs and racism and such.

 

Sim: Are colour comic books going to die out, leaving magazine-size comic

books in black and white only?

 

TCB: I think you're going to have magazine-size comic books with colour

eventually. I don't see much of a future for the twenty and twenty-five cent comic

because the prices keep going up and up and kids can't afford to buy them now in

many cases. I think it will be the older readers that will buy our magazines. The

Warren magazines cost seventy-five cents each and I can't believe that it's mostly

the eleven and twelve year olds who are buying them. I think you must have a lot of

college age and older people buying them. Maybe not the majority, but certainly a lot

of college age and older people buying them, and I think of myself as an intelligent

educated person. I bough Creepy from the very first issue for years and years.

Comic books are for kids; the Warren magazines are aiming for adults. A lot of

people who would buy our magazines wouldn't buy a comic book because they're

not ashamed to walk out of the store with our magazines. Actually, it's mostly the

younger guys, the guys seventeen or eighteen years old, that are ashamed to buy

comic books. The older fans, it doesn't occur to the older fans that they're doing

anything silly by buying a comic book, but the younger fans don't know that they

have perfect right to do it. It's just the guys in that age group that seem to feel silly

about it. I know I never do. When I was seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, I

remember that I bought the Warren magazines quite regularly but I did feel rather

silly buying the comic books.

 

Sim: Do you think there is a possibility of a competitor rising up to match

Warren's success with the black and white magazine-size comic books?

 

TCB: I don't think anybody's smart enough. From what I've seen, Marvel has tried

it, DC has tried it, a host of little companies have tried it. You had Ripley's Weird

Tales, Fantastic Monsters, the Charlton Monster books, Cracked's For Monsters

Only and Web of Horror and a multitude of others. So many people have tried it. A

few of them were good products, but the trouble is that they weren't salable

products for the most part and they just couldn't make it ion the stands the way we

can. At this point I really don't think anybody is going to beat us or even match us at

our own game.

 

Sim: The things that seem to be the most successful these days are Mad and

National Lampoon, which are satires on social conditions. Is there going to be

something to fill the gap between satire and the super-hero?

 

TCB: Barbarella would be a perfect example. Mad and National Lampoon are

doing very well. Again, that is what I was talking about earlier, that adults will buy

Mad and National Lampoon in spite of the fact that they are partly comic book. It's all

right to buy them in spite of that fact because they're satirical. It's not all right to a lot

of hung-up adults to buy one of our magazines despite the fact that our magazines,

in many cases, are just as adult. Because they're serious, they figure they're for

kids.

 

Sim: What do you think of the lack of censorship in the underground comic

books?

 

TCB: I've seen this trend growing in the underground comics where it started out

as a good idea. They were going to bring out underground comic books which were

to be sold to adults, not under the supervision of the comics code, not even under

the hassle of a distributor since they would all be handled by an underground

distributor. So they figured they could do what they wanted. They violated all the

taboos. They put in sex, they put in violence, they put in dope, they put in everything

they were'nt supposed to put in a regular comic. It was just done to symbolize the

new freedom you could find there. Unfortunately, they go stuck in that rut and they've

been there ever since, where they're not doing real underground material. They're

doing, for the most part, little eight-page dirty comic book material. What I'd like to

know is where are the real issues that the underground newspapers are dealing

with? There are very few underground comics and underground writers and artists

that I am impressed with, that I think are really dealing with the issues. Slow Death

has done it with ecology, not terribly well in every case, but at least they are dealing

with a genuine issue. Most of Trina's work is relevant. It's dealing with women's

liberation and I think that is very important, with Girl Fight Comics, All Girl Thrills.

Comics like that I'm impressed with. I'm not too impressed with these comics that

strictly revolve around sex. I am in favour of Justin Green's work; I think he portrays

neuroses so incredibly well that I can't help but be impressed with the things he's

doing.

 

Sim: A lot of the undergrounds seem to be lampooning some very "wholesome"

titles, don't you think?

 

TCB: Yeah, well, Trina's new book is called Girl Fight Comics and the "Fight" is

the same logo that appeared on the old Fiction House Fight Comics. I thought that

was kind of cute. The underground comics have taken up where the comics of the

forties and early fifties left off. They've captured a lot of the forties and, in some

cases, fifties style. The Air Pirates comic which featured Mickey Mouse is really hard

to tell from early 1950s' Dells. Some of the others look precisely like early fifties,

late forties funnies. Others look like 1940s' super-hero.

 

Sim: One of the things that seems to make the early comics popular is not so

much the quality but the enthusiasm with which they were created. Perhaps the fact

that the overground comics have lost their freshness and the underground comics

haven't would indicate that they are following a pattern already set during the late

thirties and early forties by saying, "Maybe this isn't the greatest art form in the

world, but let's have some fun with it."

 

TCB: What you're saying is a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah,

maybe that is what made the 1940s so great and what makes the undergrounds so

popular - an enthusiasm that is sometimes sorely lacking in the professional

comics. This writer was telling me once about this one particular editor who really

doesn't seem to like his job too much and his idea of a professional is someone

that hates his job. And if you like your work you're obviously an amateur. That's a

pretty sad way of looking at things.

 

Sim: If you were deciding to organise your own company and had your choice of

any four artists, whom would you choose?

 

TCB: Well, it would depend a great deal on what kind of comics I was putting out

- some of my favourites like Jim Steranko, Like Neal Adams, like Esteban Maroto. I

like Kirby on super-heroes. I like Charles Schultz on peanuts. I'm very impressed

with Jim Steranko's imagination and his talent for understanding the comic book

story-telling method so well. He really has it down to a "T." He's explored so many

different subtle points as to how to put a story across in comic book form. Maroto

has the ability to do these incredibly surrealistic scenes - pure fantasy, very

imaginative. I was especially impress with his work on my story "A Stranger in Hell."

That is the best work I've seen him do. I would like to see him get an award for that

story. Adams does a fantastic job with everything in general but faces in particular.

The faces are so full of emotion and force. Those are the ones I would choose.

 

Sim: How about writers, then? Taking Denny O'Neil as an example.

 

TCB: I really like Denny O'Neil's work, but it's a different kind of work than what

I'm doing. He's dealing with timely concepts - drugs, war and peace, racism and

pollution. These are things that have to be dealt with and I'm very pleased that he is

dealing with them and dealing with them so well. However, the things that I am

dealing with are concepts of a more timeless nature. I was defining despair in "On

the Wings of a Bird." I was discussing man's descent into evil or degradation in

"Carrier of the Serpent." I discussed the meaning of suffering in "A Stranger in Hell."

So this is the kind of story I will probably be doing most if I were to be publishing.

The writer I would want if I could get him would be Harlan Ellison. I think he is

probably the best science fiction and fantasy writer in the business.

 

Sim: If Carmine Infantino had offered you the Green Lantern/Green Arrow drug

story, how would you have handled it differently from Denny O'Neil?

 

TCB: I really shouldn't take it upon myself to say how great I would've handled

them because I did a drug story for Warren called "Mark of the Phoenix" which really

wasn't an example of my good work. Of course, it was done a time when the editors

were leaning on me to do more established horror work. So, I'm hardly in a position

to criticise the way Denny O'Neil handled his work since he certainly did a much

better job than I did.

 

Sim: What do you think of Jack Kirby's writing with respect to the super-hero

thing? Does he write a good super-hero story?

 

TCB: Yes, I really think he does. He's done so many things; he's brought in so

many things that were never tried before. In I think it was Forever People, the

Forever People are having a big battle with their enemies and what should happen

but the landlady calls the police, which is precisely what you would expect in the

real world. But who would think of putting it into a comic book? These things just

weren't put into comic books until Kirby decided to use them in like, Fantastic Four.

That was a real innovation.

 

Sim: Then you subscribe to the theory that Jack Kirby did write most of the

Fantastic Four books and not Stan Lee?

 

TCB: Yes, I do indeed subscribe to that theory.

 

Sim: All the material that Kirby reportedly did with Stan Lee comes out looking

very much like Kirby's solo work.

 

TCB: True. True. That would be my opinion. Don't get me sued, okay?

 

Sim: Have you ever wanted to do a kind of "Fourth World" of your own, as Kirby

has done, with two or three different books being inter-related?

 

TCB: I did that with Vampirella. In my first Vampirella story, that Norto character

was supposed to Ahzid. That first Vampirella story was a sequel to "On the Wings of

a Bird." However, the editor took that out without my permission and rewrote it and

really took away a lot of the impact, because it really would've started things off with

a bang on my Vampirella series. I was so hassled on that Vampirella series that I

really wouldn't want to think about doing anything with Vampirella again. I don't think

I'll use the "On the Wings of a Bird" character again after the pathetic job that was

done rewriting the sequel.

 

Sim: Has anyone ever said to you, "Hey, do a -script for me because I'd like to

draw it?"

 

TCB: Steranko enjoys my work which is something I was very pleased to hear

because I admire this work so much. Steranko and I will be doing some work

together, definitely. I can't say what magazine it will be for. It'll have something or

other to do with Super-graphics. I will be doing a -script for him. It isn't done yet, but

I've promised him one. Actually, a number of artists have come up to me like that,

but really there's not much I can do unless they have their own publishing company.

Warren is using mostly Spanish artists now, so no one has called me up from

Spain and said, "I'd like to do some work with you." I don't really choose my own

artists. It's the Warren people who do that.

 

Sim: How about an impression of your first convention?

 

TCB: I was really impressed with conventions and organised fans in general.

They're a very intelligent lot. I think it's these people that will upgrade the image and

the quality of the comic book if anyone will. I try to take in as many conventions as

possible and I try to meet as many people as I possibly can. I think it's important to

me as a writer to do that.

 

end

 

Special thanks to Sheri Admans for typing all this into the computer for me.

 

 

Page created January 17, 1997

Web Author-Donald Van Horn

Page design © 1997 Donald Van Horn

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

P.S.: Here's a more recent online interview with me, with new photo...

 

http://homelessdave.com/tt20060407tcaseybrennan.htm

[Timulty]

This isn't an insult but when I saw your picture, the first thought was "You know, this guy looks like a homeless person." Then I read your interview. Dude, you need to break the stereotype. Granted, I am not saying you should be trucking in Armani or donning Speedos but you could at least get a better jacket. Something more suitable for cooler climes. It was a good interview by the way.

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Here's the Bill Clinton document described in the latest interview...

 

[Timulty]

So, Old Bill gave you a whole month. Got to say that's quite an honor. It was a pretty good thing you did there, T. Good to see someone, who is part of the solution and not the problem.

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

So, Old Bill gave you a whole month. Got to say that's quite an honor. It was a pretty good thing you did there, T. Good to see someone, who is part of the solution and not the problem.

 

Here's one from Miam Beach that pre-dated it. Alex Daoud was the only Arab mayor of Miami Beach; he later got in trouble, I'm told, on some vague financial improprieties that I never understood...

 

[ShoNuff-migration]

Very cool stuff!!!

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Very cool stuff!!!

Thanks much! Here's a drawing of me by comics legend, Michael Netzer:

 

[Zonker]

 

 

In December of 1972,

 

...

 

Sim: What do you predict for comic books, in general, in the future?

 

TCB: I think that the publishers are going to continue to look for new

means of marketing comics - new ways of putting comic books back

on the stands. What happened was that twenty years ago, after the

horror book scare, a lot of retail outlets stopped handling comics and

today there aren't that many places that stock the actual colour comic

book. The drug stores, for the most part, sell drugs and they may have

a small magazine counter, but no comic book stand. Comic books are

virtually unheard of in candy stores. The small grocery stores

sometimes sell comics, but most people do their shopping at K-Mart

and such which don'' handle comics, except for comic-packs perhaps.

So people have been coming out with these new ideas for getting

comic books onto the magazine stands. I guess the first idea they

came out with was Mad which was, as far as I know, the first

magazine-size funny comic book. And that went on the magazine

stands. And after Mad's imitators came along, then came Creepy,

another entirely new idea - the first serious magazine-size comic. And

that went on the magazine stands. And then you had the Digest

comics; you had the paperback book collections of comics; you had

the comic books, four in a plastic bag to go to the supermarkets. Again

with the latest think, Jim Warren has come out with something no one

in the U.S. has come out with before, and that's the five dollar Dracula

book to be sold in book stores. This is strictly for adults because no kid

is going to say, "Mom, can I have five dollars to go to the store and buy

Dracula?" So that's a new idea in comic books - the idea of a quarterly

to be sold in book stores for a high price and for adults only; not in the

sense that 'adults only' has come to mean in comic books and other

magazines - that it's dirty. It's just good work.

 

....

 

Sim: Are colour comic books going to die out, leaving magazine-size comic books in black and white only?

 

TCB: I think you're going to have magazine-size comic books with colour eventually. I don't see much of a future for the twenty and twenty-five cent comic because the prices keep going up and up and kids can't afford to buy them now in many cases. I think it will be the older readers that will buy our magazines. The Warren magazines cost seventy-five cents each and I can't believe that it's mostly the eleven and twelve year olds who are buying them. I think you must have a lot of college age and older people buying them. Maybe not the majority, but certainly a lot of college age and older people buying them, and I think of myself as an intelligent educated person. I bough Creepy from the very first issue for years and years. Comic books are for kids; the Warren magazines are aiming for adults. A lot of people who would buy our magazines wouldn't buy a comic book because they're not ashamed to walk out of the store with our magazines.

 

I thought this was particularly interesting given current angst about shrinking distribution of new comics, rising cover prices, alternative formats, etc. It's been this way for the last 35 years (longer, if we consider TCB's tracing this back to the Wertham days). I also remember Archie Goodwin writing in one of his editors' pages in a 1974 Detective Comics that given the distribution problems of the times, and the supposed inability to continue to raise prices, that the 32-page color comic was going to go away. Of course, this was probably an article of faith at DC in the early 1970s as they led the way with higher-priced, higher-page count formats (Limited Collectors Editions, 100 Page Super Spectaculars, 52-Page Giants). Instead, Marvel showed that the 32-page comic had some life left in it, and could support price increases (at least as long as it undercut DC's more expensive packages), until the industry migrated to Direct distribution at the close of the decade.

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

 

 

In December of 1972,

 

...

 

Sim: What do you predict for comic books, in general, in the future?

 

TCB: I think that the publishers are going to continue to look for new

means of marketing comics - new ways of putting comic books back

on the stands. What happened was that twenty years ago, after the

horror book scare, a lot of retail outlets stopped handling comics and

today there aren't that many places that stock the actual colour comic

book. The drug stores, for the most part, sell drugs and they may have

a small magazine counter, but no comic book stand. Comic books are

virtually unheard of in candy stores. The small grocery stores

sometimes sell comics, but most people do their shopping at K-Mart

and such which don'' handle comics, except for comic-packs perhaps.

So people have been coming out with these new ideas for getting

comic books onto the magazine stands. I guess the first idea they

came out with was Mad which was, as far as I know, the first

magazine-size funny comic book. And that went on the magazine

stands. And after Mad's imitators came along, then came Creepy,

another entirely new idea - the first serious magazine-size comic. And

that went on the magazine stands. And then you had the Digest

comics; you had the paperback book collections of comics; you had

the comic books, four in a plastic bag to go to the supermarkets. Again

with the latest think, Jim Warren has come out with something no one

in the U.S. has come out with before, and that's the five dollar Dracula

book to be sold in book stores. This is strictly for adults because no kid

is going to say, "Mom, can I have five dollars to go to the store and buy

Dracula?" So that's a new idea in comic books - the idea of a quarterly

to be sold in book stores for a high price and for adults only; not in the

sense that 'adults only' has come to mean in comic books and other

magazines - that it's dirty. It's just good work.

 

....

 

Sim: Are colour comic books going to die out, leaving magazine-size comic books in black and white only?

 

TCB: I think you're going to have magazine-size comic books with colour eventually. I don't see much of a future for the twenty and twenty-five cent comic because the prices keep going up and up and kids can't afford to buy them now in many cases. I think it will be the older readers that will buy our magazines. The Warren magazines cost seventy-five cents each and I can't believe that it's mostly the eleven and twelve year olds who are buying them. I think you must have a lot of college age and older people buying them. Maybe not the majority, but certainly a lot of college age and older people buying them, and I think of myself as an intelligent educated person. I bough Creepy from the very first issue for years and years. Comic books are for kids; the Warren magazines are aiming for adults. A lot of people who would buy our magazines wouldn't buy a comic book because they're not ashamed to walk out of the store with our magazines.

 

I thought this was particularly interesting given current angst about shrinking distribution of new comics, rising cover prices, alternative formats, etc. It's been this way for the last 35 years (longer, if we consider TCB's tracing this back to the Wertham days). I also remember Archie Goodwin writing in one of his editors' pages in a 1974 Detective Comics that given the distribution problems of the times, and the supposed inability to continue to raise prices, that the 32-page color comic was going to go away. Of course, this was probably an article of faith at DC in the early 1970s as they led the way with higher-priced, higher-page count formats (Limited Collectors Editions, 100 Page Super Spectaculars, 52-Page Giants). Instead, Marvel showed that the 32-page comic had some life left in it, and could support price increases (at least as long as it undercut DC's more expensive packages), until the industry migrated to Direct distribution at the close of the decade.

 

Just as a footnote, one of the reasons my VAMPIRELLA comics were so tame, is that I was trying to convince Jim Warren to do a leotard-clad G-rated Vampirella that could work in a Code-approved color comic. Best -- T. Casey Brennan

[Timulty]

God forbid, that should ever have taken.

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

God forbid, that should ever have taken.

It might conceivably have saved his company. Picture, if you will, a code-approved Warren Comics line. I ALSO tried to home in on the concept of the phrase "Captain Marvel" as up-for-grabs...Myron Fass, Stan Lee, etc., all trying to put out their own. Mine was to be the "Captain of Marvels" - "Capt. Marvel", for short, and a citizen of Drakulon, that meets Vampi. Jim liked it but said he'd have to think about me.

 

Best -- T. Casey Brennan

[the blob]

those are interesting quotes from 1972, but my recollection, growing up in Manhattan in the 70s, was that virtually every newstands/magazine stand (and those were on street corners all over) had a rack of comics. probably by about the mid-80s, many of those started disappearing. comics in candy shops and drug stores was more sporadic. of course, i don't mean to extrapolate my experience to the rest of the country, but that's how it was here.

[HouseofComics.Com]

Btw, that teeter totter interview is just classic.

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Btw, that teeter totter interview is just classic.

 

Thanks. Here's the photo of me holding up FOLLOWING CEREBUS #6...

 

 

I assume you're either under 25 or awfully hip. NO adults liked it --- didn't understand the wardrobe (shredded Kikwear jeans, Newbalance athletic shoes, beads & badges) or the philosophy ("...the rage is the message..." -- however, I STILL get emails from local hardcore bands that loved it.

 

Best,

 

T. Casey Brennan

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Btw, that teeter totter interview is just classic.

 

Thanks. Here's the photo of me holding up FOLLOWING CEREBUS #6...

 

 

I assume you're either under 25 or awfully hip. NO adults liked it --- didn't understand the wardrobe (shredded Kikwear jeans, Newbalance athletic shoes, beads & badges) or the philosophy ("...the rage is the message..." -- however, I STILL get emails from local hardcore bands that loved it.

 

Best,

 

T. Casey Brennan

 

P.S. -- Here's the entire interview...

 

TT with HD: T. Casey Brennan

 

 

HD: Sometimes it's an effort for me to be gracious.

 

TCB: It doesn't appear that way.

 

HD: Ready to mount?

 

TCB: Of course.

 

HD: Okay, here we go.

 

TCB: Okay ...

 

HD: I'm going to need to scoot forward. I definitely outweigh you.

 

TCB: Oh, yes.

 

HD: This going to work for you?

 

TCB: Of course, of course.

 

HD: You know, we've been talking, or actually you've been doing most of the talking, for the last good hour or so, and I'm still not sure that I know the answer to the following question, so let me put it to you very simply: who are you?

 

TCB: I'm T. Casey Brennan: has-been comic book writer, band member, alleged JFK figure, homeless guy.

 

HD: Unlike me, who is just a pretender, an imposter?

 

TCB: No, that's totally cool. One of the many factors that have contributed to my sort-of 'comeback' if you will, is that it's now fashionable to speak out on the rights of homeless people or even to identify with them to a certain extent.

 

HD: So being authentically homeless is a part of the package that you present?

 

TCB: Yeah, it's another oppressed minority group. Americans in this era, they identify with oppressed minority groups. So I'm a part of an oppressed minority group.

 

HD: So you find that being homeless is an asset in what you present to people in terms of who you are?

 

TCB: Well, I've made it an asset. One thing is, though, I don't drink. Not only don't I drink, I don't like alcohol to even touch me, I simply refuse to drink.

 

HD: But you do smoke.

 

TCB: Yes!

 

HD: And that surprised me, because part of the background reading I did, I uncovered, well, I didn't exactly uncover it, because it's right there on the internet, so it's not like I did a whole lot of library research, but one of the things that, I guess, is commonly known about you is that back in the early nineties you organized a campaign against the depiction of smoking in comics ...

 

TCB: ... 80's, yeah, yeah

 

HD: ... and the culmination of that effort was the declaration of T. Casey Brennan Day ...

 

TCB: T. Casey Brennan Month ...

 

HD: ... in Arkansas by none other than ...

 

TCB: ... Bill Clinton ...

 

HD: ... then-Governor Bill Clinton. Which is, I suppose, ironic that Bill Clinton would have had anything to do with an anti-smoking campaign of any kind, given his connection to cigars later in his political career. But also ironic because you smoke? How is it that you smoke now?

 

TCB: I smoke. There is a book called the Warren Companion. It is a history of the Warren Publishing Company, which was my primary publisher during the 70's. They did Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. In that interview I admit that it was purely a combination of a political publicity stunt and a vendetta!

 

HD: So it wasn't a moral issue for you?

 

TCB: Oh, no, no, no. The thing is, I think that had my [anti-smoking] statements been accepted, I think it would have been a boon to the comic book industry. I think one of the things that made comic books appealing in what we call the Silver Age, in the 60's and in the 50's and the 40's, is that they were always taking ethical positions on something. We have lost that and I think it would have been ...

 

HD: ... you mean along the lines of fighting for Truth and Justice and Right?

 

TCB: Yeah, yeah, oh God, yeah. They had little one-pagers and DC comics where they would counsel kids against racism or say, Support the United Nations! or they would say, oh God, I can't think of them all, you know, any number of things. Of course during the polio thing of the early 50's, they would tell kids how to avoid polio. I think it would have been a positive thing in that sense, if my [anti-smoking] statements had been accepted by the comic book industry. So what I said in the Warren Companion interview, and what I can repeat now, is that privately I alleged that I had been black-listed by the comic book industry in the 80's. But I don't think the 80's would have been the proper time to allege a conspiracy, because people in the 80's were not really amenable to that kind of approach. Now in the post 9/11 era, a conspiracy approach to anthing is a good approach to take, if you're dealing with young people, because they like the conspiracy angle now.

 

HD: You mean just marketing-wise, the marketing of an idea ...?

 

TCB: Yeah, essentially. The thing is, I did not feel that I could have gotten anywhere in the 1980's by doing television appearances and radio interviews and by magazine interviews, I did all of those things for the ban-smoking-in-comic-books campaign, by saying, Well, I've been blacklisted in the comic book industry! I think it would have seemed like sour grapes. And I don't think it would have been appropriate. So I felt the only thing that I could do to counter-attack the comic book industry was to ...

 

HD: ... create this anti-smoking campaign?

 

TCB: ... well, to take them on in that way. They thing they feared most was congressional attention. Many comic book publishers had been destroyed in the early 1950's by these congressional investigations into links between comic books and juvenile delinquency and so on and so forth. The government was their arch-enemy. And I wanted to capitalize on that. And in the interview I say, all through the ban-smoking-in-comics campaign I would tell people privately, I smoke myself, but I haven't read a comic book in twenty years! Ha!

 

HD: Okay, that's cute! When I read your biographical information it says, 'authored' thus and such a comic, you know, Vampirella, or Creepy, or what have you. What does that mean exactly? Does that mean you wrote the text? Does that mean you drew the illustrations, too? Does that mean you did the whole thing?

 

TCB: I wrote the comic book stories like a play -script. And I was very exact.

 

HD: So did you actually do some drawings or was that handed off to a graphic artist, who then had the job to translate your vision into ...

 

TCB: They used to ship my scripts to other countries in those days. In the 70's when I was writing comic books, that was the era in which the comic book artists in New York were getting up on their hind legs and saying, We want to be accepted as fine artists! We want more money for our work! We want this kind of right and that kind of right! and so on and so forth. This is just off the top of my head information, and it may not be entirely accurate, but it's basically accurate: they had been getting something along the lines of $50 a page and they were suddenly asking for $100, you know. So the publishers, these are the comic book publishers, in those days, and I suspect now also, even though I have no dealings with them, they were quite mercenary. They went to these artists who were getting up on their hind legs and they said, Well, we don't have to pay you 100, we don't even have to pay you 50. We can ship these scripts off to essentially third-world Countries, Spain, the Phillipines, and the artists there will do it for $10 a page. And that's what they did. So most of my scripts were drawn in other countries, and for a pittance. What I heard is that a lot of these artists were being paid less for drawing these scripts than what I was being paid for writing them. And there was a lot more work involved. But I would lay down what I wanted done in a kind of a -script format, and I would lay out the number of panels on a page, and I would have the caption, the dialogue and I would have description of what I wanted in the page ...

 

HD: ... like stick figures, or?

 

TCB: No. I would say something simple like, 'Vampirella in a rowboat and she's with Adam van Helsing, who's one of the backup characters, and in the background there's a snake coiled around a tree,' or something like that. Now there's a funny thing: Jose Gonzales was the artist on Vampirella, who drew my Vampirella stories, and he didn't speak English very well. I had a character, his name was Dreamslayer, and he was awfully similar to Freddy, although he didn't come until a decade later ...

 

HD: Freddy from, is it Friday the 13th?

 

TCB: Nightmare on Elm Street, yeah. Freddy did not come for a decade later, but my character Dreamslayer could only kill people in their dreams, you see. And so in this -script, I said I wanted Dreamslayer to have lightning bolts coming out of his headgear. Actually what I was shooting for was a kind of Jack Kirby kind of villain, I think Magneto or one of them was something like that, or kind of a Kirby motif, and so I said I wanted him to have lightning bolts coming out of his headgear. So Jose Gonzales got the -script, so he's looking at dictionaries and all sorts of things trying to figure out what a lightning bolt is. So the only thing he can come up with is it must be something like a lightning rod, so he made a headgear for Dreamslayer, with lightning rods coming out of his head, and it looked like what now would be a guy with his hair spiked.

 

HD: Is that how it was published?!

 

TCB: Yeah, I could probably show you. I think I have a tattered copy of Vampirella in my side pouch.

 

HD: Speaking of copies of Vampirella, I called Vault of Midnight this morning to ask if they had any of the Vampirella stuff from your era, because I guess it continues to be put out on a very sporadic basis ...

 

TCB: There's two collections. I've autographed one of them and that's the only copy I've seen. Vampirella Crimson Chronicles, Volumes II and III have both been published recently and each of them have some of my Vampirella stories in them.

 

HD: They [Vault of Midnight] suggested that they might have some Vampirella, but not necessarily any that you worked on, in the store. When Adam de Angeli was here he said he thought maybe he had some stuff of yours at The Planet. I don't know if he meant comics or music, but really my question is: Where would somebody go other than eBay, to try to find some of the comics that you actually created?

 

TCB: Vampirella Crimson chornicles, Volumes II and III, I think you can order them from the publisher ...

 

HD: ... and the publisher is Warren?

 

TCB: No, the publisher now is Harris Comics. Warren went bankrupt and Harris Comics bought the properties at auction. They continue to release trade paperbacks that contain some of my stories. There's still a couple of things of mine on sale at The Planet. There's a magazine called Steam Shovel Press that has a text, it's one of the JFK stories. He [Adam de Angeli] has just done a tremendous job of mobilizing the community. It takes time for a business to take root and personally what I think that he has to do is to acquire a national reputation for his store so that people that come here from other communities, and from other states, and so forth, so that The Planet is a tourist attraction that people will come to. There's a store in Chicago that's called Quimby's, are you familiar with it?

 

HD: No.

 

TCB: Well, it's a nationally known bookstore that handles alternative publications, but see, with Quimby's there's all sorts of people nationally that know about it. And with The Planet he's pretty much concentrated on a local audience. And those people just don't spend money. He's got to get people from other states and people who, if they come into Ann Arbor, that the first place they want to go to is The Planet. Do you remember Wall Drugs in South Dakota?

 

HD: Hmm?

 

TCB: Wall Drugs, surely you've heard of Wall Drugs?!

 

HD: Maybe I'm just showing how young I am.

 

TCB: Well, Wall Drugs was this giant drug store out in the middle of nowhere. But they had a national reputation, it was like a tourist attraction.

 

HD: Well, maybe if you get to the point where it's not the first thing people want to go see when they come to Ann Arbor, but it's something that they want to make sure they don't miss, that they don't leave Ann Arbor without seeing. I think that's a much more attainable goal than making The Planet the point of coming to Ann Arbor. You mind if we talk about music for a while?

 

TCB: Sure.

 

HD: This morning I went on the web, and I found a couple of these tunes you've recorded with Frankenhead. One of them is Social Worker Blues. It's not a subtle song, is it?

 

TCB:

 

HD: Did you write the lyric?

 

TCB: Yeah!

 

HD: Well it's easy to recite the whole lyric, but I guess 'recite' is not the right word to use, because it's just one line over and over again: Hey Social Worker, [embarrassing lack of self control] you.

 

TCB: Yes. Well, twice I also say, We're street punks, We're gutter punks!

 

HD: Yeah, so you don't have much left over for social workers, I take it? Or was it meant somehow tongue-in-cheek?

 

TCB: Now, Dave, I'm sincere in that song. I'm one-hundred percent sincere! Yeah, it's definitely new-school punk. The rage is the message. And if we were old hippies, then there'd have to be philosophizing and there'd have to be some kind of blueprint laid down for a solution to the problem, an explanation of the problem, and so on and so forth.

 

HD: Why this rage against social workers? I mean, my next-door neighbor is a social worker and she's nice. Once she baked me a peanut butter pie for no reason.

 

TCB: Boy, you're in big trouble now! You think it was for no reason? Yeah, you've just been registered as a recipient of social services, they've opened a file on you, yeah, there was a price on that!

 

HD: She's just my neighbor!

 

TCB: Did she fingerprint you before she gave you the pie?

 

HD: No, she's just my next-door neighbor. I think. You know I was going to say, She's just my next-door neighbor, T. Casey, but is that whole thing what most people actually call you? It seems a little formal.

 

TCB: The first person on the planet to ever address me as T. Casey, was my former publisher, Jim Warren, and it stuck.

 

HD: The 'T' in T. Casey doesn't stand for anything in particular?

 

TCB: Yeah, my first name is Terrance. My parents named me that, but decided not to use it. They decided to call me by my middle name, Casey. So all through my school days I was always Casey Brennan. When I began publishing, I decided to appropriate my first initial. The customary situation now is that if people are familiar with my work, they will call me T. Casey, if they're not familiar with my work, they'll call me Casey.

 

HD: So the people you spent the night with last night, what do they call you?

 

TCB: I don't remember! See, I crash at too many places. I'm really homeless! And I try to crash at a different place every night. It's just a place to crash. I don't drink, I don't steal, and consequently I have a lot of places I can go and stay. It's just a place to spend the night. If I can shower and wash my clothes, in addition to eating or whatever, then I hit the street in the morning and that's how I do it. But you know, the Social Worker song, you have to understand, I totally dislike the fact that my guitar player named it Social Worker Blues, there's no Blues involved.

 

HD: Yes, it's a very confusing title. I clicked on it to listen and I thought, Hmm, that's not very bluesy ...

 

TCB: Yeah, there's no blues in a musical sense, there's no blues ...

 

HD: ... yeah, there's not really blues, it's more just anger ...

 

TCB: ... right, it's a statement of rage. In the 80's I was homeless intermittently, then I went through a long period where I was employed and housed and so it was not a factor. But when I became homeless this time, in this century, the first thing that I observed was that there are two extremely different groups of homeless people, the traditional old winos ...

 

HD: ... the old-school homeless as it were?

 

TCB: Yeah, and their lives are complete hell. They don't have relationships. They're always drunk. They don't have any parties. They have no fun. They have no lives whatsoever. And in sharp contrast, in sharp variance to them, are the young homeless people, the street punks ...

 

HD: ... and you identify with that group?

 

TCB: Well, those were the only people who were having any fun, you know, for God's sake. And those people are at variance both with the grizzled old wino type of street person and with the social workers. So that's the statement of rage.

 

HD: So I'm getting the idea that finding a home or erasing homelessness from your life is not necessarily a goal?

 

TCB: No, no. I want my career restored. That's the main thing that I want.

 

HD: Your comic book writing career?

 

TCB: Comic books, music, whatever. The thing is I want my career back. Which is being done. The whole concept of whether or not I am housed or whether or not I am fed, that's purely incidental. I mean there have been times in my life when I've always had a home to come back to and always had a job to go to, but I wasn't happy and now I am happy. Plus I'm producing artistic things. And I think that's the most important thing.

 

HD: So, for example, the music with Frankenhead.

 

TCB: Yeah. And I may even secede. I may start Frankenbaby!

 

HD: Frankenbaby?

 

TCB: I may want to start an all-girl band and call it Frankenbaby.

 

HD: You couldn't be in that band, though.

 

TCB: Well, all girls except me.

 

HD: So where can people actually buy the Frankenhead CD?

 

TCB: They can get it at The Planet. There's actually a number of places on the net where you can listen to the music. There's a video of one of them, the satanic one called Let Them Rise ...

 

HD: ... yeah, Let Them Rise, that's a very dark and sinister song.

 

TCB: Well, it is if you believe in religion, if you believe in gods and devils, but, of course, I believe in neither. And when that was podcast in Israel on a program called Kitaro's Sideshow, it's comic books and punk music, the disk jockey was speaking Hebrew, so I couldn't understand what he was saying. But he told me in emails saying that he had qualified it by saying I was a popular writer of horror comics in the 70's and this song was a spin-off of that. And it was played on Crazy Mark. There's something called the Crazy Mark TV Show and this guy is sort of comparable to you in terms of his ingenuity. His show goes out on public access, actually several public access channels in the state of Michigan ...

 

HD: ... he doesn't have a teeter totter, does he?

 

TCB: No!

 

HD: I'm always worried about competition.

 

TCB: Oh it could happen! They could swipe it right out from under you! And then sue you and claim that you no longer have any right to the teeter totter! Get rid of some of these Ann Arbor radicals!

 

HD: Well, that would be a sad day. From some of your earlier conversation before we got on the teeter totter, I got the impression that finding food here in Ann Arbor is not a huge challenge, that there's a lot of places that you can get free meals?

 

TCB: Yes.

 

HD: But shelter? You say you've got a lot of different places you stay. Is that difficult to manage on any given day?

 

TCB: Yeah. But to hell with it. I can stay out for days at a time. I can go days at a time without food. I can go days at a time without sleep. I need to have fun. I'm not that much into food and sleep. And if they're there, they're there. If not, then to hell with it.

 

HD: You also said there's no place else on earth other than Ann Arbor that you'd rather be homeless and penniless in.

 

TCB: Oh God, no. This is perfect.

 

HD: I was thinking some place warmer would just generally be a more pleasant place to hang out.

 

TCB: Nooo. There's other things besides a warm climate. I didn't like California at all when I was in California.

 

HD: So it's fair to say you have a certain fondness for Ann Arbor?

 

TCB: Yes.

 

HD: Would you say you would elevate that fondness to the level of 'pride'? I mean would you say you're proud to be from Ann Arbor?

 

TCB: I'm an Ann Arbor patriot! Yeah, baby! The Ann Arbor patriot movement! Maybe so.

 

HD: My thigh muscles are starting to wear out, I don't know how you're doing.

 

TCB: I'm impervious to absolutely everything.

 

HD: I think you're a hardier soul than I am. Let's pause the teeter totter so I can take your picture.

 

 

 

 

[Ed. note: The Frankenhead II CD featuring The Social Worker Blues is, true to T. Casey's word, available for purchase at The Planet, which has a relatively new location just north of Felch on N. Main St. in the same space as Natural Canvas: 613 N. Main St, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sound sample below (click on the play button) appears here with T. Casey's permission and is not work- or family-safe, so put on your head phones. The disk also includes two versions of Let them Rise, plus covers of Falling in Love and Fall to Pieces. For T. Casey's interpretation of these Elvis Presley and Patsy Kline classics, buy the CD.]

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

DAVE SIM NEWS FROM JIM MCLAUCHLIN & ACTOR!

Casey,

1) I finally caught up with and coordinated with Dave Sim yesterday, and he likes your Hypothetical Cerebus and the Necronomicon Monks -script. In fact, he's just started drawing it for inclusion in the ACTOR anthology book we're publishing...

 

2) Dave and Gerhard did a limited-edition print of the "recreation" art to A Boy and His Aardvark limited to 25 copies. They have signed all. They sold about five at a recent convention in Ohio, and would like to send the rest to you for your purposes. It's recommended that you sign them as well, and you can use to generate some money by selling to local bookstores/comic stores, or selling via eBay auctions. Again, advise a mailing address where we can reach you, and I'll arrange to get these sent out.

 

Jim McLauchlin

 

Plus, this:

 

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2006/05/castle-mirage-by-alice-brennan-unibook.html

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

I am a Michigan-based 1970s comic book writer, noted for work on CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, HOUSE OF MYSTERY, RED CIRCLE SORCERY, and the pre-Cerebus Dave Sim comic, "A Boy and His Aardvark". I am now homeless; see my name on the Celebrity Homeless List at...

 

http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/lists/homeless.html

 

...and I am being assisted by the ACTOR Comic Fund; see their site at...

 

http://www.actorcomicfund.org/

 

As part of ACTOR's project for assisting me, Dave Sim has prepared a limited edition of the pre-Cerebus aardvark story I did for Dave, which he has redrawn. ACTOR CEO Jim McLauchlin has described the product in his emails following. It's my responsibility to find dealers who will retail and/or auction the product. Interested parties can contact me at tcaseybrennan2002@yahoo.com ...

 

Sincerely,

 

T. Casey Brennan

 

 

--- JMclauch@aol.com wrote:

 

Dave and Gerhard did a limited-edition print of the "recreation" art to A Boy and His Aardvark limited to 25 copies. They have signed all. They sold about five at a recent convention in Ohio, and would like to send the rest to you for your purposes. It's recommended that you sign them as well, and you can use to generate some money by selling to local bookstores/comic stores, or selling via eBay auctions. Again, advise a mailing address where we can reach you, and I'll arrange to get these sent out.

 

All,

Just so you're all clear, this is not a book, fanzine or any such. It's an art print, about 11-by-17 in size (I think) signed by Sim, Gerhard, and Casey (if and when we get an address to get ’em to Casey).

 

 

 

Jim McLauchlin

 

--- JMclauch@aol.com wrote:

 

> Casey,

> Possible resources to sell/consign the "Boy and His

> Aardvaark" prints:

>

>

> Vault of Midnight

> 219 S. Main St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48104

> Ph: (734) 998-1413

>

> Comic City

> 42823 Ford Rd., Canton, MI, 48187

> Ph: (734) 981-3561

>

> A to Z Cards & Comics

> 32659 Ford Rd., Garden City, MI, 48135

> Ph: (734) 425-6780

>

> Pandemonium Games

> 1858 Middlebelt Rd., Garden City, MI, 48135-2817

> Ph: (734) 427-2451

>

> Back to the Past

> 27512 Schoolcraft Rd., Livonia, MI, 48150

> Ph: (734) 261-5411

>

> RIW Hobbies

> 29116 5 Mile Rd., Livonia, MI, 48154-3850

> Ph: (734) 261-7233

>

> Comic Rox Collectibles

> 19190 Eureka, Southgate, MI, 48195

> Ph: (734) 324-3160

>

> Play Ball Cards & Comic: Date info last verified:

> 08/12/02

> 35121 Warren Rd., Westland, MI, 48185

> Ph: (734) 326-3930

>

> Fun 4 All Comics & Games

> 2742 Washtenaw Ave., Ypsilanti, MI, 48197

> Ph: (734) 434-7440

>

[T. Casey Brennan-migration]

Here's a new T. Casey Brennan page where you can listen to a new interview with me...

 

http://www.annarboralive.com/A3Radio/Hydro/scripts.html

 

Best,

 

T. Casey Brennan