Tom DeFalco: Consummate Professional Part 3 with Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview former Marvel Editor in Chief, Tom DeFalco in a third of a three parter, where we discuss his reign as Marvel as Editor-in-Chief, his run on the Fantastic Four with artist Paul Ryan, the original vision for the Spider-Man Clone Saga, the Marvel bankruptcy of the mid 1990s, the Clone Saga ending that led to his co-creation of the Amazing Spider-Girl, working with Pat Oliffe, the creation of the MC2 timeline, and his post Marvel work, and returning the Archie. Edited & Produced by Alex Grand. Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders, CBH Podcast ©Comic Book Historians. Thumbnail Artwork ©Comic Book Historians. Support us at https://www.patreon.com/comicbookhistorians

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Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What’s your take on the Image revolution of ’92? Larsen, McFarlane, Liefield, Jim Lee, they go to make Image. Fingeroth said that the percentage of profit sharing that Marvel had in the 80s contributed to this mass migration of talent. You were there when all this happened and when McFarlane was in the room saying how we wanted things to be for him. Tell us your view of all that.

Tom DeFalco: Well, Danny is right. The money that those guys were making was so much that it gave them the capital and the freedom to form their own company. I found out about that by accident one day. There was going to be an auction at Sotheby’s for comic book art, a first-time auction. The president of the company, Terry Stewart, said to me, “You and I should go, should be together when the auction starts.” I said, “Okay, fine.”

Tom DeFalco: Then it’s about 6:30 at the end of the day, I realize I had never spoken to Terry. I didn’t know if I was going to meet him at Sotheby’s or I was going to meet him at Marvel’s. I tried to call his office. Nobody was answering the phone. I figured, “Ah, I know Terry’s… It’s got to be up there on the 11th floor.”

Tom DeFalco: I walk up on the 11th floor, I knock on the door as he’s in meeting with what became the Image guys. Terry looks at me. He says, “Come on in here, Tom. We could use you here. Come on in here.” I said, “Nah, I’m just trying to find out something.” “No, no, no. Come on in here.”

Tom DeFalco: This is when the Image guys were basically asking for their demands, telling Marvel what they wanted, that they wanted to get a bigger share of profit. One guy would say one thing, “I think we should have 80% of the profit.” The other guy said, “No, no, we should get 90% of the profit.”

Tom DeFalco: Somebody would say, “Listen, when Frank Sinatra comes into town, he never has to buy a drink. When I come into town, I should never have to pay for a drink. When I go to a convention, I should be flown first-class with my wife and children.” Somebody else says, “Well, wait a minute. I don’t have a wife but my girlfriends and entourage should fly first-class with me.”

Alex Grand: Oh, wow. Okay.

Tom DeFalco: Everybody had different things. Terry, after about, oh, I’m going to say about three hours, because we ended at about 9:00-9:30. Terry said to them, “Listen, guys. Guys, you’re all over the map. Why don’t you guys sit together, make a list of what you want? Once when you agree on that list, give us the list. Then we’ll go through the list point by point and we’ll tell you what we can do and what we can’t do.” I thought that was a very reasonable thing. They said, “Fine.” They then got up and they left.

Tom DeFalco: The next day, we’re at Sotherby’s and I see one of them talking to a fanzine reporter. I walk up and he’s announcing to the fanzine the formation of Image Comics. I said, “Formation of Image Comics?” I said to him, “Wait a minute. At the end of the meeting, you guys were going to come up with a list.”

Tom DeFalco: He said, “Tom, listen, that meeting was kind of a show thing. We just wanted to be able to say to the public that we approached Marvel and you didn’t give into our demands but we’d already decided. We’d already signed our contracts.” I said, “You son of a bitch. If you knew that that meeting was a farce, why didn’t you signal me so I could have gotten out of that? I ended up wasting three hours on that stupid thing.”

Alex Grand: Staying there till 9:00 PM, yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. “You could have signaled me and I could have gotten the heck out of there. Why did I have to suffer through that bullshit for three hours?” I said, “I don’t mind you jerking Terry Stewart around but you shouldn’t jerk me around like that.”

Tom DeFalco: He said to me, “Yeah, we’re sorry. We felt bad about jerking you around but we said we approached DC last week, we had to be able to say we approached Marvel for publicity things.” I said, “Okay. Well, good luck.” I said-

Alex Grand: That’s interesting. It was more as part of forming publicity inertia in a way.

Tom DeFalco: … Yeah. It didn’t surprise me because the history of Marvel was you go and you become a superstar and then you go to DC and you spend the credit that you got when you were over at Marvel and then you get forgotten. A lot of guys had done that. Kirby had kind of done that. Ditko had kind of done that. A number of people had gone from Marvel to DC.

Alex Grand: Yeah. Roy Thomas, Gene Colan. A lot of people did that.

Jim: Byrne. John Byrne.

Alex Grand: John Byrne, yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Although, I can’t say that happened to everybody because Byrne was a superstar at DC, came back to Marvel, still a superstar.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: Today I think he’s still a superstar.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: Roy Thomas, the same thing. Gerry Conway, the same thing. These are all very talented guys.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Then now Fantastic Four, you started it with issue 356, issue in 1991. Paul Ryan was artist. You had a long run, almost, what, 60 issues. How’d that come about, doing the Fantastic Four, and how was working with Paul Ryan?

Tom DeFalco: Well, Paul Ryan was a dream. I’ll get to that in a second. Ralph Macchio was editing Fantastic Four. Walt Simonson was leaving the books. The sales on the newsstand had fallen on Fantastic Four and it looked like we were going to have to take Fantastic Four off the newsstand. I thought, “Yeah, I don’t want to be editor-in-chief when we take Fantastic Four off the newsstand.”

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: We tested Four off the newsstand. And I, you know, spoke to Ralph and Ralph spoke to a couple of people. It’s to see if you can get people to work on the book. He’s spoken to Chris Claremont, I think. I think he had spoken to Byrne and found that that Byrne wanted to erase everything that had happened between the time he had gotten on the book and the time he’d spoken to a couple of other people and he couldn’t get anybody in. He said, listen, we want to fix the newsstand sales. Right now, the two bestselling newsstands sell books were Thor by me and Ron and Captain America by Gruenwald and, oh, and Larry Hama’s GI Joe. Those were our three best selling newsstand books. So how, would you and Ron take over the Fantastic Four?

Tom DeFalco: And I said, I got to talk, I don’t know, I got to talk to Ron before I, you know, I can’t make a decision for Ron. So I spoke to Ron and we had too much stuff going on with Eric and I said yeah we can’t, we can’t give up, we got just too much stuff going on cause we deeply love our characters and, and so, you know, Ralph said to me, well would you want to write Fantastic Four by yourself? And I thought, you know, I’m already editor in chief. I don’t know if I can actually do two books a month. But I was doing some other work outside of comics and thought, maybe if I cut back on some of that I could, I could try it.

Tom DeFalco: And, and then somebody said to me, don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way you could do two books a month. And they did it in such a scary voice, I thought, I’m going to see if I can. So I said to Ralph, okay, now it may sound strange cause you know, you know, I’m the editor in chief. Ralph reports to me, but yet, because I started working for Ralph long before I became editor in chief, we’d already established the ground rules on how we worked as a team and you know, so when I worked for Ralph, he told me what he didn’t like.

Alex Grand: I see.

Tom DeFalco: And you know, unfortunately he was always right. And I think we spoke to Ron Lim about maybe taking over FF. But Ron was doing Captain America and didn’t want to leave Cap. And then I thought about Paul and you know, Paul, again, a consummate professional, could draw anything. And if you read any of our Fantastic Four one, he had to draw pretty much anything, cause it was a wild roller coaster ride. And I said to Paul in this, in the beginning, Paul, we got to pull out all the stops. This has to be, you know, a super, super soap opera.

Alex Grand: Yeah. Cosmic.

Tom DeFalco: Cosmic soap opera. I always looked at Fantastic Four as Dallas, Dallas in Space. Instead of a well oil rigs in the background, you saw spaceships and that sort of stuff. I said we’re going to kick up the soap opera elements and just, you know, go to town. And our first issue we guested the New Warriors cause they were outselling Fantastic Four.

Alex Grand: Oh wow. I didn’t know that. Okay.

Tom DeFalco: So we wanted, we wanted to get a little boost from the New Warriors, and then we started our roller coaster ride and just, you know, kept on throwing twists and turns and every wild thing we could think of.

Alex Grand: And you made Alicia, it turns out she was a Skrull when she left Ben for Johnny during Secret Wars. So what was the thinking behind that?

Tom DeFalco: The thinking? I stole that idea. And I stole it from Mark Wald and Ralph Macchio.

Alex Grand: Okay.

Tom DeFalco: Years earlier we were sitting at Ralph’s house, he had a swimming pool, was sitting at the pool and Ralph and Mark are arguing about, you know, Johnny marrying Alicia. And how it didn’t fit into character or John would never do that to Ben. What was Alicia thinking? What was going on? Alicia looked like his sister, what the heck is, you know, and, and they were trying to come up with ways to avoid it. And they’re going back and forth and back and forth. And one of them says, well, we can always say that Alicia was a Skrull.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And they said, well, again, that would do it. We just have to figure out a story for that.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And they turned to me and said, what do you think of this? And I said, I think it’s a moot point because none of us are writing Fantastic Four. So let’s move on with our lives and enjoy the pool. And then when the time came to come up with an idea, I thought, I remembered that conversation and I pitched it to Ralph and Ralph said, Hey, that’s a pretty good idea, where did you get it from? And I said, I got it from you and Mark and I reminded him of this, of the day at the pool. He goes, I don’t think we came up with that. I said, you did trust me.

Tom DeFalco: And you know, cause it made sense. Everything fit together the way you needed it to fit together. And we could go back and, you know, can we, you know, all the discrepancies and stuff?

Alex Grand: Right. And that also adds some soap opera element also.

Tom DeFalco: Yep. It’s all Soap Opera. People look at Stan Lee’s biggest contribution to comic books and comic books superheroes.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And they get it wrong. It’s not characters with feet of clay. It is the soap opera elements.

Alex Grand: Yes, that’s right. I want to ask, there are two specific issues in Fantastic Four in your run. There is Fantastic Four 358 and issue 400 and the reason I bring them up is because Stan Lee had written letters that were published in these two issues. One was where released in 358 his original synopsis of the Fantastic Four number one story. Do you remember that?

Tom DeFalco: I remember he did. What issue was 358? I’m sorry, the numbers-

Alex Grand: Well, you know, let me see. Let me see if I can find the plot in front of me real quick.

Alex Grand: But that one, he actually releases his synopsis. Fantastic Four 358. So on the cover there’s,a die-cut cover. There was a four in the middle with, with all four of them around the circle.

Tom DeFalco: Oh yeah, yeah. Okay.

Alex Grand: The synopsis for whatever happened to Alicia. That’s was that story.

Tom DeFalco: Right.

Alex Grand: And, and so in it, there is the bonus material of Stan Lee’s letter of how, of his original plot synopsis for the First fantastic Four issue. So, why do you think he released that synopsis at that time? Is there any reason why he did that? Or was there any talk about why he could have released it on that issue?

Tom DeFalco: I think that synopsis had been published once before. I don’t know where or wherever, but we, you know, I think 358 was like an anniversary issue of Fantastic Four number one or something like that. And I think that’s why we decided to, you know, Hey, we’ll throw in the first plot. I see. If you look at that plot and then look at the actual comic, you see how much Kirby contributed to it.

Alex Grand: Yes.

Tom DeFalco: Because you know, Kirby contributed a lot to Fantastic Four.

Alex Grand: Right, right. Do you think he was doing that because there were these fandom claims that Kirby originated all of it and that he was basically trying to defend his, defend himself to some extent, credit wise?

Tom DeFalco: No, no, because that plot, I think that plot first surfaced when Roy Thomas was working with Stan, years earlier and Stan Lee had found it in papers or, or Roy had found it, I forget how it worked out, but one of them had found it, read it and you know, always kept it around. I don’t know if Stan even knew that we were going to reprint that when we did it. We did the anniversary issue. Or if we called Stan and said, Hey, guess what going to we’re going to reprint that, that thing. But that was decided in the office.

Alex Grand: I see.

Tom DeFalco: We’re, we’re going to do an anniversary issue of Fantastic Four number one. So, Hey, you got the original plot. Put that in.

Tom DeFalco: I see. It was more as an anniversary celebration type thing-

Alex Grand: Than anything else.

Tom DeFalco: Than anything else.

Alex Grand: Yeah. Okay. That’s cool. And I get curious about stuff like that.

Tom DeFalco: You know, it’s funny, people often look at the Challengers of the Unknown and they say, Challengers of the Unknown, Fantastic Four, four guys, blah, blah blah. But if you look around, there were also the Sea Devils, which were just like the Challengers of the Unknown and the Suicide Squad, that different Suicide Squad. Just like the Challengers, all these groups that were essentially the same. Four or five skilled people, and the only thing that that made them different were their skills. Or one of them talked with a Brooklyn accent. When you look at Fantastic Four, the personalities are so diverse.

Alex Grand: Yes.

Tom DeFalco: And that’s something that, you know, Kirby had never really done. And I can’t see Kirby bringing, saying, Hey, I’m going to bring back the, I’m going to create a new team and bring back the original Human Torch. Again, that’s-

Alex Grand: Yeah. And back then it could have been Martin Goodman even ordering something like that.

Tom DeFalco: Well, I think it was Stan saying, well, Goodman was saying, Hey, you know, bring back the old superheroes and, and Stan saying, well, I’ll bring back the Human Torch.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: But you know, none of the other guys. But you look at the FF and it’s such a mixture of Kirby, Kirby and Stan, I have to say, it’s got to be at least 50-50. Cause what we fell in love with the Fantastic Four and with Spider-man and with Thor and all these were the personalities, and the conflicts and all that other stuff. And that was all Stan, that personality stuff was Stan.

Alex Grand: Right. The voices for sure. Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. And I don’t mean to take anything away from Kirby or Ditko because-

Alex Grand: Right, right.

Tom DeFalco: Every comic book is at least 50-50. At least. And maybe even 75-25 you know, leading 75 for the artist. Cause this definitely is a visual medium and-

Alex Grand: Yeah, that’s right.

Tom DeFalco: You know, we can never, never forget that.

Tom DeFalco: So then in Fantastic Four, 400, so Jack Kirby dies in 1994 then Stan released another letter in FF 400 and it’s kind of like an obituary type of letter where he talks about how he and Jack co-created the Fantastic Four together and kind of a letter to Jack, a very friendly letter. What was your impression of that letter and do you remember reading that?

Alex Grand: I’m sure I read it at the time, but now it’s like 20 years later or so.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah.

Alex Grand: I’m afraid I don’t recall the letter at all. Listen, Stan always had warm feelings for Jack. He, anytime he spoke about Jack spoke with such reverence and such warmth and such real love. And the one time I saw them together, you know, Stan ran across to Jack and they embraced and hugged each other and were obviously very happy to see each other.

Tom DeFalco: Oh, and you watched that happen?

Alex Grand: And I saw that happen in that, that was during the time when Kirby was trying to get his artwork back and Marvel, sort of, you know, Marvel was the villain because Stan had a, you know, put some, put the artwork in a warehouse as opposed to DC, which cut up the artwork. DC was the hero. They cut up the artwork. Marvel was the villain. They saved the artwork.

Alex Grand: Yeah, Fans are funny like that.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah.

Alex Grand: So now then, so now why did you resign as editor in chief in 1994? What led you to do that?

Tom DeFalco: I didn’t resign. I was fired.

Alex Grand: Oh, okay. So tell me that story there.

Tom DeFalco: You know, we had a big discussion about pizza and you know, some of those guys were from Chicago and that was the end of it. The company wanted to do a major reorganization. Earlier in that year, Superman, Superman had died and then, Superman returned. And when Superman returned, all of the retailers ordered the amount of books they wished they had ordered when Superman died. And they all got stuck with them. And the industry took a big hit. And you know, sales were down all over the place. In Marvel sales, we’re actually for the year up 15%, but for the rest of the market was down to like 35%. And you know, the company was trying to figure out a way to reorganize things. One of the ways they, at one point they proposed to me, they brought me into a room and they said, you know, we’re producing 120 titles at the moment. And we were. And I said, yes, we are producing 120 titles. All of them profitable.

Tom DeFalco: And the publisher, the distributor makes the least amount of money. The publisher makes more than the distributor, but the person that makes the most is the retailer. They get 50%. And as you know, some of them got the 55% off cover price. So they said, you know, we’re making money so everybody else down the line is making money. What do you think if we cut from 120 titles to 60 titles. With the remaining titles, sell twice as well and double our profits.

Tom DeFalco: And I laughed at them because, you know, I said to them, no, that doesn’t work. And I left. And then I realized that I’m the only one laughing. Everybody else has a shocked expression on their face. They didn’t expect me to laugh.

Alex Grand: And these are the Revlon people like Perleman and those guys, right?

Tom DeFalco: This was the president of the company. The guy in charge of marketing and the man in charge of the sales.

Alex Grand: I see. Okay.

Tom DeFalco: And I said to him, listen, the comic book sales don’t work that way. I said, you know, if somebody is reading Ghost Rider, and you canceled Ghost Rider, it’s not like he’s going to then pick up Captain America. This is what, we’re producing four Spider-man titles. If we got rid of two, wouldn’t we double in sales, I said no, because it’s the same guy buying all four titles.

Tom DeFalco: And I said, because if you’re a Spider-man fan, you want to read Spider-man every week, right? You don’t want to have to wait 30 days between your Spider-man fix. And I said, you know, it’s like movies. Three good movies come out in a weekend, you know, maybe you’ll see one, maybe you’ll see two, the third one you say, maybe I’ll catch that next week. If no good movies come out in a weekend, you don’t say, well, okay, no good movies come out, so I’ll go see a bad one. You go off for pizza instead.

Alex Grand: Right. You do something else.

Tom DeFalco: You do something else. The comic books, the same sort of thing. We’re in entertainment. And they just didn’t understand comic book sales and I thought these guys don’t understand publishing.

Tom DeFalco: And then they started talking about buying their own distributor. And I remember saying that is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard by life. And also when they bought Malibu, I was not supportive of the idea. So basically they could tell that I was not a team player for their team, and they decided that they wanted to make a change. It’s their company, they’re entitled to it. So they informed me that they didn’t need me as editor in chief anymore. They were going to you know, give me a job where they sent me to Europe. I said, thanks, but no thanks. I’m out of here.

Alex Grand: Wow.

Tom DeFalco: And this was on a Thursday and they said, well, you know, we’ll talk on Monday. And I said, okay, we’ll talk on Monday, but I’m out of here. And you know, I mentioned sometimes I don’t think about things. So for that weekend I started pursuing other forms of employment.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: It never once occurred to me to get in touch with DC or Image. Never, never occurred to me to talk to another comic book company. I just assumed that’d be out of comic books.

Alex Grand: Oh wow.

Tom DeFalco: So I got, I set up other things to write, other things to do. When Monday came in, I’m figuring out, I’m covered. And they said to me, well, you know, we at least want you to be a writer. And they offered me a great writing contract.

Alex Grand: Oh cool. Okay.

Tom DeFalco: So I ended up staying with Marvel.

Alex Grand: As a writer and just not, not editor in chief.

Tom DeFalco: Not editor in chief.

Alex Grand: Oh, so that, yeah. Cause you still were doing Fantastic Four after that.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Grand: So yeah. That’s interesting. So it was more like corporate business, funny movements and you kind of thinking these guys have kind of lost their minds.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it’s not that I quit or anything, they just decided they wanted to go in another direction.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: I got one of those fantasy things that happen. They fired me and replaced me with seven people. Five veteran chiefs and two other guys who did two other aspects of my job. And then they went bankrupt seven or eight months later.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: I got to live a fantasy life.

Alex Grand: You did.

Tom DeFalco: Not that I wanted Marvel to go bankrupt or anything.

Alex Grand: Right. But I mean you were holding it together though for a while. So then, so you started writing also, you went back to Spider-man as a writer. Tell us about the clone saga, making Ben Reilly the real Spider-man and then it kind of reverting back to Peter again. Tell us what went on with that.

Tom DeFalco: Well, they, Danny Fingeroth the editor of Spider-man had arranged for a meeting, a Spider summit where the writers and artists get together to come up with the plan for next year’s Spider-man. And he came to me at the end of the day and he said, they have a weird idea. I said, okay, do you like it? He said, well, it’s very weird and they want to talk to you about it, and I said, what do you think about it? He said, do you want to know what it is? I said, no, Danny, if you, if you like the idea, you go with the idea. You don’t like the idea, you don’t go with the idea. And he said, they want to bring back the clone and that’s the real Peter Parker and the Peter Parker we’ve been following for the last bunch of years since the first clone story is really the clone.

Tom DeFalco: I said, what? That’s crazy. And he says, well, the guys really want to do it, they want to talk to you about it. I said, all right, I’ll show up at the meeting. So I showed up at the meeting, I walked in and they looked at me and they said, Danny told you, didn’t he? And I said, yeah. What’s your first reaction? My first reaction is this is crazy. We don’t want it. We don’t want to do this story.

Alex Grand: And who came up with that idea?

Tom DeFalco: I believe Terry Kavanaugh was who originally came up with the idea.

Alex Grand: I got you. Okay.

Tom DeFalco: But this idea caught fire in the writers’ room and everybody got up and started talking passionately about how this would change things, how this would shake up the whole Spider-man line, all the Spider-man readers, you know, this’ll be the most revolutionary thing.

Tom DeFalco: And I’m watching them all and, and the guy that, the guy that turned to me was Sal Buscema who’d been in the business forever.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Sal is a good buddy of mine. I love Sal. When he’s passionately telling me, this is going to shake things up, we haven’t had this sort of craziness since Stan was running the company and that’s what I think you got to, you know, got to do this. And I’m looking at my guys and I’m thinking, my guys are so passionate about it. And these are guys, comic book creators sometimes get very jaded about comics.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: But this got them all fired up. I think if they’re fired up, the readers are going to be fired up.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And I said, all right guys, but how do we end the story? I said, if you’re going to send Peter and Mary Jane off, people love them and have loved them for years.

Tom DeFalco: They have to have a happy ending. And they said, well, what kind of happy ending? I said, I don’t know, they have a baby or something. Mark Madison and Howard Mackie smacked fists, said, we knew you’d come up with the ending. And I thought, what the fuck did I just say? I can’t say that on your podcast, can I? Sorry about that.

Alex Grand: It’s okay, yeah, no, we’ll keep it. I like it.

Tom DeFalco: All right. And they, they said that’s it. They go off to have a baby living happily ever after. And everybody’s very excited. And I said, okay, terrific. And I called Danny on the side. I said, okay, you know, here’s your three act play. Ben Reilly comes back, you know, he’s the clone.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: You know, he comes back and Peter’s surprised, the clone is still alive. That’s the end of act one. End of act two. Wait a minute. Then Reilly is really the real Peter Parker.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: Okay. You know, act three, Ben Riley becomes the new Spider-man, except, at the end, something terrible happens. Act four. He says, wait a minute, it’s a three act play. I said, no, it’s a four act play, act four. Peter Parker has to come back and reassume, and we find out it’s all been a lie. It’s been Peter Parker from the beginning. And he says, really? I said, yeah, but when you don’t tell the guys at act four until after they’ve completed act three.

Alex Grand: I see.

Tom DeFalco: I said that’s the kicker.

Alex Grand: That’s kind of like how when Superman died but he comes back. I mean this is like a very similar kind of thing.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. I said, because comic book readers are a cowardly and superstitious lot. They’re never going to buy this.

Tom DeFalco: So we have to really, we really have to twist people around, but it has to end up that the Peter we’ve been following is the Peter we’ve been following, and the Mary Jane and he says, but what about the baby? I said, Peter, Spider-man is all about responsibility. We’re giving him a child. It just adds to his responsibility.

Alex Grand: Yes.

Tom DeFalco: You know, think of him as a cop or a soldier now. It adds to his responsibility. I said, and then at the end of this, we have two books. We have Spider-man, with Peter Parker and Mary Jane and their baby. And then we have, we didn’t know it was called Ben Reilly at the time, we have the clone book, we spend him off and we have essentially a Peter Parker, a single Peter Parker. So we’ll have, we’ll do kind of what we did with Thor and Thunderstrike, we’re going to do with Spider-man. Give him two books. We did with Iron Man and War Machine. We’re going to do it with Spider-man. And that was the plan from the beginning.

Alex Grand: Wow.

Tom DeFalco: Now what happened was between then and fruition, a couple of things changed.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: I got fired. Marvel bought its own distributor. Sales plummeted 60% on all titles at Marvel. Only two titles recovered. Two groups of families recovered. The X books and the Spider books.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: They said the Spider books are recovering because the only thing that’s selling is the Clone saga. So we got to keep the clone saga going. So they kept it going longer and longer and longer.

Alex Grand: Yeah. That drug out for a while and they got rid of the baby.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. That, that always annoyed me.

Alex Grand: Yeah. Same here. Because I wanted to know what happened, which I ended up getting with your Spider-Girl series.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. The Spider-Girl series, at one point, Marvel, I was working on Spider-man. They decided to take me off for Spider-man cause they’re going to, you know, let Byrne and Howard Mackie do it. So he, they had to give me a title. They gave me What If to do.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And I thought, well, I was always wondering what happened. You know, what would have happened if Spider-man had had that daughter?

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: So that’s why we did that Spider-Girl.

Alex Grand: And to me, because that’s the Spider-man that I grew up with, I felt like May Parker, that whole storyline you wrote, I felt like that was the real Peter, and we’re getting like bizarro Peter now. That’s how I feel about it.

Tom DeFalco: A lot of people felt that way.

Alex Grand: Yeah. Cause it’s a natural, you know, a progression of the character is the thing. So, when you came up, so you and Ron Frenz co-created Spider-girl with the What If, how did that get picked up into the Spider-Girl series that it became?

Tom DeFalco: When we did the issue, we were thinking that there’s just the one shot, you know, it’s a What If. And we had to plan what would the future be like. So we planned the, an Avengers team and decided to do the Fantastic Five and Ron said, Hey, I’m going to draw Herbie the robot into the Fantastic Five. Herbie the robot, he said, fine, it’s only going to be for, you know, a one panel scene.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And Ron had to do all these character sketches. What does Mary Jane look like, an older Mary Jane look like? What does an older Peter look like? What all the older characters look like? So he did all this, this background material because that’s, you know, Ron and I always write Bible’s about the characters I’m writing, even if they’re only going to appear in a couple of panels. Ron always does all sorts of sketches so that he knows exactly what he’s drawing. And, and at one point I, you know what, when we finished The What If, I didn’t need this stuff anymore so that he, I just want to show you the kind of stuff Ron does in background and gave it to the editor and a couple, you know, couple of months later after, that Spider Girl came out and sold out, did very well. And this is in the days before they comic books went back to press and you know, Bob Harras said, “Hey that, What If, you did sold very well.”

Tom DeFalco: And I didn’t know which one he was talking about.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: And he said, I want I want to I want you to walk with me.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: Said we’re thinking about doing a deal with a Walmart where we put three comic books in a bag, but a lot of our comic books no longer appeal to the mass market and you really have to be a hardcore comic book fan to follow them. He said, but you do material that works for the mass market.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: And I said, yeah, well, yeah. He said, “what would you think if we brought back that Spider-Girl character, could you do 12 issues of her?” I said, I said, Bob, I could do 12 issues of anything, probably.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And, but we need two other things. How about you do, you know, you could do either The Avengers in the book or The Fantastic Five in the book, one of those and maybe do that little Juggernaut character. I thought little Juggernaut character, what the heck is he talking about. Then I looked at The Avengers and I thought, Oh no, no, that was supposed to be The Juggernaut, but I said, okay, yeah, we’ll do the Little Juggernaut character.

Alex Grand: Like his son, yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah.

Alex Grand: Which is a funny, I actually really liked that issue with the constant referral to the Professor X and him as brothers, and oh that ought to, with your stupid looking face hanging out. And I mean those are just great.

Tom DeFalco: So, so we, you know, we’re going to do three, three books. They were going to be 12 issues each. That was going to be the end of them, as we finished that up, he said you know what, we never did the deal with Walmart, but these things are selling pretty good in the direct market. Can you do, can you do five, five or six more issues of Spider Girl? Yeah. I said yeah and, and maybe do one or the other, so we did the Wild Thing and we did The Buzz and Fantastic Five and then, you know, as we’re getting, we doing the last couple of issues and the last issue I think we were supposed to end with issue 17, he said, can you make that a double size issue? Yeah, we can make them double size issue, it’s the last issue of Spider Girl.

Tom DeFalco: And we were heading you know for the end of a Spider Girl. And then they came back to me and said, you know this thing is selling really, really too well too to cancel. Can you do six more issues? And I said six more issues. Yeah, I guess we could do six more issues. And then for the next 12, 13 years, it was 13 years in total. They kept asking for six issues, can you do six more issues? Can you do six more issues? And we kept coming up with six more issues.

Alex Grand: Yeah. And you really progressed that character great. I actually fell in love with May Parker as a character and that went on for 12 years, and that’s what they call the MC2 timeline. Right?

Tom DeFalco: Right, right.

Alex Grand: Yeah, MC2. So then now I noticed Pat Olliffe did a lot of the earlier Spider Girl issues, and then Ron Frenz comes in later. What, what was up with the, I mean I liked, I liked those are issues obviously, but what was up with Pat Olliffe doing so many and then Ron Frenz coming in later, what happened there?

Tom DeFalco: Well when we decided to do the, the original books, I thought Olliffe would The Avengers and Ron would do Spider-Girl.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: But, but because The Avengers had Kevin Masterson in it, Ron wanted to do, Kevin Masterson in The Avengers and Pat had done, Untold Tales of Spiderman and said, yeah, I wouldn’t mind doing Spider-Girl, so they did that. And Ron Lim was always the choice for, for J2, because I knew I was going to do a really goofy book. I knew that Ron could draw the goofy and do it straight.

Alex Grand: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And, and-

Alex Grand: I actually laughed out loud during some of those panels from J2. I think it’s hilarious.

Tom DeFalco: Well, it was, it was my humor book.

Alex Grand: Yeah, it was.

Tom DeFalco: And, and you know, we were going along and then at one point they said to us, Spider-Girl is going to get canceled with issue 60, this is it. It’s definitely getting canceled. There’s no hope for a reprieve.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: I said, okay, all right. We lasted a lot longer than I thought we were going to last. So you know, we’re good. And as we’re coming towards the end, Pat Olliffe got offered another assignment. There’s a book, it’s going to come out, you’re going to get a two year guarantee on this, on this title.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: It’s going to be our next big push. But you’ve got to have to leave Spider-Girl a couple of issues early.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Two or three issues early. And Pat called me up, he said Tom, I don’t know what to do. I said, Pat, I know what you do. You’ve got a guaranteed two years on this other book versus three more issues on Spider Girl. If you don’t quit this book right now, I’m going to kick you off the book. I’m going to, you know, it’s ridiculous. Take the other assignment, you got to take care of yourself. So I said, just grab the other side and don’t worry about it.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: You know, and Ron Frenz was temporarily out of work. I can never believe that statement, as I say it, cause I still think he’s one of the greatest storytellers this medium has ever seen. Ron is going to do the last three issues; we’re basically finishing up.

Tom DeFalco: No, we finished our last issue. We were ahead enough. I go into the office, I check around any other work for me? Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll check around. I thought, okay, this is it, so I walked around and said goodbye to everybody. Walked out of Marvel figuring that’s the end. And about a week and a half later on April Fools Day, they call me up and said, sales on Spider-Girl are too good. We can’t cancel it. Can you get us a plot in two or three days?

Alex Grand: Well I see.

Tom DeFalco: And I said, hey guys, who are you busting? And I hung up because I thought for sure it’s an April Fools gag. And, and I got calls from the office throughout the day and I never bought it for a second. And then about seven o’clock, seven-thirty at night, I get a call from Tom Brevoort says to me at seven-thirty at night, I want to be home with my kids.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: You’re the last person in the world I want to be talking to.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: This is not an April Fools joke, we need a plot. We needed it in two or three days. I need a title, I need something to solicit. Can you give me something, something by tomorrow? And I said, Tom, is this real? He says, yeah. I said, all right, I don’t know what the story is but we’re going to call it Marked for Death.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: And then we ended up doing another 70 issues.

Alex Grand: Yeah, that’s right. And I mean I, I love Pat Olliffe’s stuff too. But the, when you and Ron Frenz get together, I always, I think, cause my first, my first regular comic that I actually was like, I want to get the next issue was in 1987. It was a Thor with you and Ron Frenz, and the Annihilus cover when Thor returns to Asgard and Annihilus is taking out each one, one by one. And so I imprinted almost like a little chick out of the egg to this team of DeFalco and Frenz. So when once you guys started kicking back up on Spider-Girl, I mean I got obsessed with those, so, all right. So then, but then it finally actually did end and then there were some digital issues. You guys actually finished that with digital issues, right?

Tom DeFalco: Well, the regular book ended, then we did some-

Alex Grand: Spectacular Spider Girl or something like that?

Tom DeFalco: Yes, yes some digital issues. And then they were reprinted in Spiderman Family. And then there was Spider-Girl and the Spectacular Spider… I don’t remember the titles, but you know, they, they kept telling us we’re canceled and they kept saying, please come back.

Alex Grand: Yeah, that’s cool. So then are there any plans for any more May Parker stories?

Tom DeFalco: Not to my knowledge. I thought that maybe with the 80th anniversary we might get to do one more, but you know, I don’t think that that’s in the cards, but I’ve been wrong, but I’ve been wrong before.

Alex Grand: Yeah, it sounds like that that series was kind of living on a prayer for a while and it just kind of went on for a long time, which is awesome.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah. These days, every time I do a comic book story, I look at it with the idea that this is probably going to be my last one.

Alex Grand: Yeah, but you’re still doing them.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah, but you know, someday it will be my last one.

Alex Grand: Well hopefully not anytime soon. So then after that then you also did in 2011 as Superman Beyond One Shot for DC comics. Did you approach that in a similar way as the MC2 stuff of this alternate future? How did you approach that?

Tom DeFalco: Well, they had already set up the Batman Beyond Universe and had a Superman Beyond in that universe. So we just kind of… I read up what I could on the The Batman Beyond stuff, read the Superman Batman Beyond Team-up, and then tried to do what we thought would be a basic Superman story that would set up a possible series.

Alex Grand: Mm Hmm, I see. So then tell us also about, you worked for Dorling Kindersley for Marvel character guides. How’d that come about?

Tom DeFalco: One day I’m sitting in my office and I get a call guy with an English accent that we’re going to do a book on Spider-man, an encyclopedia on Spider-man. And we were told, you were the guy that we should talk to. And I said, no, no, no. The guy you want to talk to is Peter Sanderson. And he said, well Peter Sanderson works on our X-Men books, but we were told to talk to you. And I said, who told you to talk to me? And he said, Ralph Macchio, right? I said, I said, let me call Ralph. So I called up Ralph. I said, why did you mention me for an encyclopedia kind of book? I don’t do that sort of stuff. He said, well, they wanted to do a book on Spider-man. You’re a guy I know who does books.

Tom DeFalco: And I said, Ralph? Mystery novels, it’s a whole different kind of thing,

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: You know? Yeah, maybe we should cut that, that’s part of my secret identity as I do different kinds of different kinds of work. And he said, yeah, but why don’t you do this, it’s something you could give to your nephews. And I thought about it and thought, and I don’t know how to do this kind of book, but it is something I could give to my little nephews. And I thought about it, thought about it. Well, since I don’t know how to do it, maybe I should try to do one.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: So, I did the Spider-man book, and about halfway through the book I thought, wait a minute, now I know how to do this, these books. So maybe if they ever offered me another one, I’m going to do a second one just to make sure that I know how to do this and then I don’t have to do anymore. But I ended up doing a few more.

Alex Grand: So did you actually enjoy them?

Tom DeFalco: They were interesting, you know, there were a lot of work and just interesting challenges I think, as a writer I like to be challenged.

Alex Grand: Yeah, that’s great. So then now you also got into Archie, the man from Riverdale in 2010 issue 610. How did you get it… how was it going back to Archie?

Tom DeFalco: Oh it was great. My former editor, my former boss, I got to to work with Victor again. The whole thing started cause they, Archie had approached Sal Buscema to pencil, a job for the, they had an Archie new look at the time. And Archie said Sal said to them, I don’t pencil anymore, which is a total lie. And, and he said, get Ron Frenz to pencil it and I’ll ink it. So Ron calls me up and he says, yeah, so Sally wants me to pencil in Archie job and he’ll ink it and you should call him up and tell him that you want to write it. I said, you want me to call up? You know, Archie Comics would tell them I want to write that job?

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: I said, it doesn’t work that way. I says, you know, call them up. So I called up Mike Pellerito. I said, Hey Mike, I understand you’re going to have Ron Frenz pencil a job and Sal is going to ink it, I says, do you want to write it? I said, absolutely. He says, okay, good. So, and I said, there’s only one thing I know this was supposed to be the Archie new look. Ron wants to do Classic Archie.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: I says, you guys want to do Classic Archie? I said, yeah, yeah. I mean, if we’re going to do Archie, we’d rather just do Archie.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: And we ended up doing a few Archie stories and some Jughead stories. And then at some point they asked us to do this Man from Riverdale thing and, and you know, we ended up doing a whole bunch of Archie stuff again. No, it’s great. Great to be with the old characters again.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative), so then you also did Reggie and Me with Sandy Jarrell as the artist.

Tom DeFalco: Yeah, yeah that-

Alex Grand: Tell us about that, tell us about working with Sandy Jarrell.

Tom DeFalco: Well, Sandy was a real pleasure. We, I called him up before I started and told him vaguely what the story was going to be and he got pretty excited about it and it was kind of connected with the Mark Waid, new Archie kind of kind of style, but with some of the classic stuff back and Sandy did a heck of a job, you know, that was… that was the story, you know, did you read that?

Alex Grand: I read it, yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Okay. In chapter four, something happens to the dog and when that book came out, I got a call from the publisher. He said, I was just reading The Reggie and Me and, and I said, it ends happily. The dog is okay.

Alex Grand: Yeah.

Tom DeFalco: He goes, oh, okay. All right. All right. All right. We’re good. I realized-

Alex Grand: Thank God! They were like, thank goodness!

Tom DeFalco: Hey, if the publisher is that upset? I thought-

Alex Grand: Yeah, that is funny.

Tom DeFalco: This is working.

Alex Grand: So I want to end to today with a couple of, two philosophical questions.

Tom DeFalco: All right.

Alex Grand: So one, 1996 it’s kind of an interesting year, because you leave The Fantastic Four, you know, Jim Lee then starts doing Fantastic Four. Mark Gruenwald dies of a heart attack. There’s a whole corporate shake up and then eventually Toy Biz buys Marvel and just, things kind of change after that. And as you said, this Peter Parker storyline kind of, there’s a fracture during this where you, they have a baby and now the baby’s gone and then you kind of pick up at that fracture with Spider Girl. Would you consider 1996 the death of old Marvel?

Tom DeFalco: I’ve heard a number of people say that. All right. I think that, people of my group of, of my day at Marvel, Mark was the heart and soul of us.

Alex Grand: Mark Gruenwald, yeah.

Tom DeFalco: Mark Gruenwald. He was really the heart and soul of this and when Mark died and died so suddenly it took a lot out of all of us. And we’re, and to a certain extent, we’re still feeling it.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: So I’ve, I’ve heard a number of people say that was the end of the old Marvel and I think in, in people’s minds, they had hoped that in some alternate universe, at some point, you know, Marvel was going to regain it’s head and put me and Mark back in charge and bring back the old editors and bring back the old staff and you know, essentially have a time machine and recreate the Marvel that we had in ’87, the early nineties and stuff like that.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: And I think, you know, that was a pipe dream that was never going to happen under any circumstances again any way. But I think when Mark died that like really closed the book.

Alex Grand: That closed the book, yeah. So you feel that way too.

Tom DeFalco: I don’t know if I feel that way because I think Marvel, Marvel in order to survive is, has to be constantly evolving, be evolving-

Alex Grand: Adapt-

Tom DeFalco: Adapt, constantly move forward, constantly change. And yeah, the Marvel of today is not, is not the Marvel of the 1980s and… but it’s not the Marvel of Stan’s sixties or Roy’s seventies or anything else like that. Marvel, you know, any publishing organization, any entertaining organization has to change with the times. And I’ve been startled a couple of times when I was still up there working where I talked to assistant editors and I’d see they were so locked in the past and I was saying to them, guys, I’m the one whose brain should be calcified. I’m the old, old fart here, not you guys. You know, we have to keep charging forward and creating new things.

Alex Grand: Right.

Tom DeFalco: And so I don’t think that was the end of the old Marvel. I think that, you know, that was just one more turning point.

Alex Grand: Just another turning point. So then the final question is, you’ve created many characters and a lot of them have been licensed for television, toys, tee shirts, posters, trading cards. What goes into creating… is there elemental things that go into creating a character that then is eternalized into these merchandising formats?

Tom DeFalco: I can only tell you how I create and you know, when I deal with the character and a Ron Frenz or whoever I’m working with is also participating in this, I have to do a fully realized Bible of who this character is. Who this character is, what he or she wants. How did she react to things, how does, you know he react to things, what are limitations, what is he or she afraid of, all of these things. And also I try to make it somebody that I want to spend time with because you know, you as a reader, you’re spending, 20 minutes, a half hour with the comic book, I’m spending weeks, months, so it’s got to be somebody that is likable enough that I can spend a lot of time with, and I hope that if the character… becomes that likable, that other people are going to want to spend time with it and then, if they want then wear apparel connected to it or whatever.

Tom DeFalco: But that stuff I’m not really worried about, I don’t really care about, I want the character to work in the medium to which is it’s primary source. A comic book character has to work on as a comic book character, television character has to work as television character and just has to be somebody that we want to spend time with, because if a character is going to be successful, you as, as the reader have to spend a lot of time with them.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: Cause I’m asking of you, your time, which is the most valuable thing you can never get back.

Alex Grand: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom DeFalco: You know, and, and usually some money. Money you can always replace time you can never replace and I want to be worth your time.

Comic Book Historians

Tom DeFalco: Consummate Professional Part 3 with Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

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