DC for Me, See?
By the end of 1986, I was ready to move on from MARVEL AGE. My employment there was a little odd. I was not officially on staff at Marvel Comics. In fact, I was working freelance and billing Marvel for every completed issue of MARVEL AGE, as well as DOCTOR WHO, THE TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE, and other projects. For some reason I was feeling paranoid about not having health insurance, and the roller coaster ride of freelance work was driving me slightly crazy. I decided I had to find steady, full-time employment.
Over the next few years became assistant to the editor (and later, assistant editor) at Video Magazine, then associate editor at Consumer Electronics Monthly. After Consumer Electronics Monthly was bought out and put to sleep by the competition, I was hired as an editor at Welsh Publishing Group, Inc., where I worked from 1990 to 1994. Welsh published quarterly magazines for kids starring licensed characters; I edited DISNEY’S DUCKTALES, THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, SUPERMAN AND BATMAN, SIMPSONS ILLUSTRATED, GARFIELD, WHERE’S WALDO, MIGHTY MORPHIN’ POWER RANGERS. Some, like Simpsons and Ghostbusters, I worked on for just a couple of issues, but I edited others, like Turtles and Garfield, for around 10 issues. I also edited several magazines starring the breakfast cereal mascots of General Mills, and, somehow, the official souvenir magazine for Woodstock ’94. The most high-profile project I worked on was a series of four one-page comic strips that ran on the back of Teddy Grahams cookie boxes, illustrated by Larry Nikolai, now a highly regarded Disney artist. Each box had a print run of about 5 million!
(Side note: The secret to Welsh’s success – at least, one of the secrets – was that their magazines were offered through Publishers’ Clearinghouse. Since the magazines were all 32 pages and quarterly, they were the cheapest items on offer, which means they sold a lot of subscriptions. TMNT had over a million subscribers, as an example.)
During this time – from 1987 through 1994 – I continued doing freelance work when the opportunities arose. I kept coloring for Marvel for a few years, mostly on promotional artwork. I also wrote and fact-checked a couple of articles about newspaper comic strips for Entertainment Weekly; despite my best efforts, I was unable to parlay that into more work. I suspect the person who grudgingly hired me didn’t like the idea of EW covering comics of any kind. Then, thanks to my work on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES MAGAZINE, I was asked to write the trading card adaptation of the movie TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II for Topps, which led to me writing trading card sets for THE LAST ACTION HERO, HOME ALONE II, a season of THE BATMAN ADVENTURES, and the FLINTSTONES movie. That gig ended abruptly when the art director who hired me said they couldn’t afford to keep paying me the price we had originally agreed on for my work.
All this time, my goal – my dream employer – was DC Comics. I admit that as a kid reading comics, I wasn’t really a DC fan, and was much more of a Marvel Zombie. But after working at Marvel in the 1980s, I still wanted to work in comics, but longed for a little more…professionalism. I had visited DC a few times with my then flat-mate Kurt Busiek, and had befriended a few of the editors, which was enough to make me think this could be the place for me. One big clue? There were no running Nerf-gun fights when I visited – something that could happen at any moment at Marvel.
So, between the late 1980s and 1994, I applied for jobs at DC...a lot of jobs. These included:
Proofreader (interviewed with Bob Rozakis)
Assistant Editor (interviewed with Mike Carlin)
Associate Editor (interviewed with Archie Goodwin)
Editor (interviewed with Joe Orlando — lunch at a fancy Spanish restaurant!)
Editor (interviewed with Paul Levitz)
Copy Writer (interviewed with Neal Pozner)
Copy Writer (interviewed with Lee Nordling – got the job!)
I started in November 1994 as DC’s first, and to this date only, Copy Writer. Neal Pozner had conceived of the job as a way to have one person writing all the ads that ran in DC titles and elsewhere, to give them a consistent tone. Sadly, Neal got sick, went into the hospital, and died before he could hire me, but his replacement, Lee Nordling, picked up the ball and ran with it, bringing me onboard at the home of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
I had a lot to learn.