Alex Grand: [00:00:00] Well, welcome back to the Comic Book Historians podcast. I have a lifelong creator author artist, Jim Starlin here, whom I’ve loved since I was a kid. His death of Captain Marvel was the comic that showed that superheroes can have souls, and when they die, we can mourn their passing. Jim Starlin, thank you so much for being here today.
Jim Starlin: [00:00:21] My pleasure.
Alex Grand: [00:00:23] Something that I’ve written about in my book, also in an upcoming issue of Back Issue magazine about your work, is that you were the really the first creator author who put together the first large scale multi-title cosmic meta series with your villain, Thanos. You also introduced realistic and existential threat and fear of death to the superhero genre at both Marvel and DC. And you actually wrote A Death of Captain Marvel, which is the one character that’s managed to actually stay dead.
Jim Starlin: [00:00:55] Like Jim Shooter for that.
Alex Grand: [00:00:57] You know, I want to kind of start at the beginning and kind of get into, you know, the lore that you’ve created first you were born in. From what I understand, 1949, you were raised Catholic, but, um, maybe you didn’t stay Catholic. If I’m if is that correct?
Jim Starlin: [00:01:12] Oh, I’m definitely lapsed. Yeah. Eight years of parochial school will do that. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:01:18] And, um, and born in Detroit. What what did your parents do?
Jim Starlin: [00:01:23] my father was a draftsman at Chrysler. he did the worked on the blueprints for, dashboards and seats. yeah. That was very instrumental in me getting into comics, because he figured one of his fringe benefits was stuffing his briefcase at the end of the day, with as much tracing paper, masking tape, and number two pencils as he could get away with. he was going to use them for his bookkeeping hobby. And I found I could trace off the characters from the comic books, and that led to eventually drawing a freehand. Oh, wow.
Alex Grand: [00:02:02] So you watched him draw, and that was definitely an encouraging factor when you started to yourself?
Jim Starlin: [00:02:11] No. And actually never saw him work. He worked down at Chrysler, and so he’d get up in the morning and leave and come back. I just knew what he did.
Alex Grand: [00:02:19] And how about your mom?
Jim Starlin: [00:02:21] housekeeper? later on in life, she started working in an administration office at a hospital. But she was pretty much a stay at home mom, and, you know, she was a good lady.
Alex Grand: [00:02:33] What kind of TV shows movies did you watch as a kid?
Jim Starlin: [00:02:39] Oh, well. Superman, of course. The 1950s. Superman. Black and white. Typical thing. I grew up in Looney Tunes. My, phone ringtone is a Looney Tune theme song, the fugitive. Sea Hunt. I mean, these are the kids, the shows I watched as a kid that probably nobody remembers anymore.
Alex Grand: [00:03:00] What about, like, movies? Science fiction movies? Were you a science fiction fan?
Jim Starlin: [00:03:05] I really didn’t get into reading science fiction until while I was in the service, actually. I’d gone through the Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff beforehand. In high school, there was a few books I picked up. Remember, there was a science fiction writer named Dan White. I think it was. And he had this thing called The Weapon Shop or something like that. It was an ultimate weapon that anyone could carry, and it was a balance of power between individuals and government. Kind of looking like this at this point is kind of proud, boyish, but, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:03:41] Yeah, but I mean, I think a lot of your work that you’ve done is about that, which I want to ask a little more about. And as far as comic books, were you a comic book fan as a kid?
Jim Starlin: [00:03:51] Yeah. But at that point there were three comic book superheroes. There were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Everything else had gone out of business or been driven out by the Senate hearings and the advent of the Comics Code. So, you know, I, one of my favorite stories as a kid was the imaginary Death of Superman. Obviously, it was a had an effect on me and played into my death of Captain Marvel years decades later. Batman was all these huge typewriters and stuff like that. So it was kind of a silly thing to be reading at that particular point. The Dark Knight had sort of gone into hibernation, and this sort of silly character with Robin running around was all we had in one room. And I vaguely recall, because it had this really nice art by Ross Andru.
Alex Grand: [00:04:40] That’s interesting, that imaginary Death of Superman affecting you as a kid. Had you encountered real death at that point, or was it really that comic that really made that initial interest for you.
Jim Starlin: [00:04:53] There were some deaths of relatives that I barely knew. I was just, you know, if I was eight years old at that point, I’d have to look up what year that came out. But no real death. , the death of Captain Marvel was more inspired by my father’s passing from cancer. And that happened only six months before. Or something like that.
Alex Grand: [00:05:14] When we get to that part, I want to ask about that because I interviewed Jim Shooter, who had mentioned something about that as well. So then as far as Marvel, Kirby, Ditko, you were reading that stuff then in real time as it was coming out?
Jim Starlin: [00:05:27] Oh yeah, I was reading the monster books, and then when Fantastic Four came out, I started picking those up and running down to the drugstore every Thursday on my bike to see if I could get them as soon as they came out, before they disappeared.
Alex Grand: [00:05:40] The stuff that you’re reading, you know, monster books, the early heroes, um, Marvel superhero stuff of the 60s. If I were to put like a 1 to 10, as far as you know, who really kind of grabbed you. What would you say if I. Jack Kirby, from 1 to 10, what would you. Oh, Kirby.
Jim Starlin: [00:05:56] And Ditko were both tens. Later on, as time went on, there was other major influences. Buscema. Colan. Kubert. I didn’t get into until later because he was doing the war books, and once I discovered him, he was just amazing. , Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane on the Green Lantern. These were all inspirations. , I should have been rating them, I guess.
Alex Grand: [00:06:24] Um, and then would you say Neal Adams 1 to 10? What would you say?
Jim Starlin: [00:06:28] O’Neall was a big influence when he came on the scene. I mean, he came in much later, and he was doing something that was completely different than anybody had been doing. , he brought the Dark Knight back at the Batman stuff. , me and covers over at DC. , he revolutionized the business at the time, , when I came in to New York around 71, 72, literally everybody was trying to draw like him. He had people up at the studio, , you know, Alan Weiss, , Howard Chaykin, others, they were they were started off as little Neal Adams clones, you know, like I was a Kirby clone, you know? Yeah. Oh.
Alex Grand: [00:07:13] That’s cool. What about Steranko? Where was he.
Jim Starlin: [00:07:15] At? Steranko was up there. , more for storytelling than anything else he tended, especially in his later issues, to to get very good on cinematically telling the story rather than writing it all out.
Alex Grand: [00:07:29] There is a story I read that you had stopped by Ditko Studio when you were young. How did that exactly happen? Tell us about that.
Jim Starlin: [00:07:37] , we came to the World’s Fair in New York, , whatever year that was 65 or something like that. I was 16, I think it was. And, , I got on the phone and started calling different people that I found in the phone book. , Ditko and Tino, , found Kirby and somebody else. , I got Carmine on the phone, he answered, and then pretended he wasn’t himself. , no, he’s never here, he said, and only years later did I realize this when I actually met Carmine and went, God, I remember that voice even years later. But Ditko was very cool. He, , he said, where are you at? And I said, I’m only a couple of blocks away. I was in Manhattan itself at that point, and he said, okay, , and he was coming to the end of his, , Spider-Man run at that point. And, , he invited me up and showed me a lot of things. He had all these notebooks that had, , drapery. He had done, , you know, he had that really calligraphic style of inking and that and any arm that needed a fold illustrated. He had it in these notebooks, and he would just go and, , you know, it was a real assembly line. I mean, that’s what they were back then. In those days. You had to get a book out. You just had to get the book out. There was no missing deadlines back then. And so, , he spent a couple hours with me and, , you know, , if he hadn’t been my major influence before, he certainly would have been that, , I know some folks have had trouble with Steve with because of his politics, but I. I just think he was a terrific gentleman.
Alex Grand: [00:09:25] Oh. That’s great. It sounds like he was fairly encouraging to you then.
Jim Starlin: [00:09:30] Yeah. You know, , I, I left there flying, , you know, I don’t, you know, he made some suggestions, told me to try this and that, and, , , he was very helpful.
Alex Grand: [00:09:43] Do you remember anything? Ask him about Spider-Man or Doctor Strange or, um. Or why he was leaving. Did any of that stuff come up, or was it more just kind of kind of appreciating the stuff he had in his studio?
Jim Starlin: [00:09:56] Oh, we were just talking art the whole time. I didn’t ask him about the characters or anything like that. He had a little chalkboard up in his studio, and it said which stories he was working on. And the last one was a guy named Joe, which was his last issue in the series. And so I didn’t realize he was leaving it until I got home. And the next issue after a guy named Joe. John Romita was on the book. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:10:25] Yeah. Did you like Ditko stuff more than Romita’s or.
Jim Starlin: [00:10:28] Well, I grew up on Steve’s, . When I first started working up at Marvel, I worked with John on Spider-Man. I was doing layouts for him because he was behind on his deadlines. John pounded into me how to get those webs write, you know, they were two different animals, you know. I know that the book really started selling under John, but I and I admire John’s work. But it was Ditko. Ditko was Spider-Man as far as I’m concerned. I always for years later, I kept doing those webs under his arm that Ditko did that John didn’t because he wanted to stick them in there. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:11:05] Um. That’s cool. That kind of was like your homage to Steve. That’s really great. Um, so now tell us, were you for when you served in Vietnam? Were you drafted? , how’d that work?
Jim Starlin: [00:11:16] I joined, , I joined the Navy because all my friends were joining the Navy, and they were getting sent to Great Lakes and getting stationed there, and they were coming home on weekends. And I thought, okay, you know, if I’m going to do this, let’s do this. So I joined up and three and a half years later, I finally get home. Mhm.
Alex Grand: [00:11:36] That’s cool. And that’s great to know that because I know I have some friends that when they were kind 18, they just kind of joined the Navy. And and I totally understand that.
Jim Starlin: [00:11:43] I didn’t serve in Vietnam. I served in an intelligence outfit in the Philippines. , I was working in a photo lab, mostly.
Alex Grand: [00:11:54] From what I understand, it’s been labeled as aviation photography. What kind of imagery were you kind of dealing with while you were there doing that?
Jim Starlin: [00:12:02] A lot of shots of craters. You know, , we developed this film and there would be, , it looked like the moon.
Alex Grand: [00:12:11] What was your impression of the Vietnam War while you were kind of in that in that field there.
Jim Starlin: [00:12:18] At that time, while I was in the Philippines, I, , I wrote a story, a comic group wrote and drew a comic for Texas trio called The Eagle. Yeah, which had a very heavy anti-war stance. I made the mistake of showing it to some other people in the barracks, and I caught a lot of shit for this, , you know, but that’s another story entirely.
Alex Grand: [00:12:45] A lot of that, that fanzine material that you did, you know, I’ve looked at a lot of that stuff and, you know, there was one called doomsday. You know, there was one called The Miracle. And there’s definitely, like, death explorations in this stuff. And I know by the late 60s, early 70s, you know, Janis Joplin died, Jimi Hendrix died. There was Manson family, you know, murderers. The Vietnam War was taking its toll on the country.
Jim Starlin: [00:13:11] Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy junior, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:13:15] Yeah, all that was happening. It was a pretty, you know, socially traumatic time. Did did a lot of that weigh into, you know, kind of what you were expressing there.
Jim Starlin: [00:13:25] That had factors? I mean, everything if you’re really wanting to be an artist, everything that comes into your life gets into the mix. , movies, , events, conversations all becomes part of what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. And not only was the environment a factor in it, but also what I was reading at the time. In a photo lab, they had paper that would run out of stock. It was time would expire and it was 11 by 17. It was perfect for drawing comic book pages, so I grabbed it all up and kept sending in the samples to Marvel. Mostly Hulk stories because he was the easiest one to draw. And, um, you know, they always turned me down, but, , eventually, , Herb Trimpe, , sent me back a letter saying he really liked my Hulk. And, , that was very encouraging. And that came out of the blue. And that probably was a big inspiration for me to finally, after I got out of the service to, , pack a couple bags and head to New York, and that’s cool. I got to New York, and, , folks like, you know, , Weiss and that were turning me on to, , , Joseph Campbell and, , Wilhelm Reich and, , Castaneda, just different people who were different head trips and looking at the world differently. And, , when I came in all the 1940s, artists were sort of retiring. And so there was a big influence of young people about my age coming through. , Howard Chaykin, Simonson, Milgrim, , you know, others that I’ve spacing out here, you know, there was a whole influence of really good artists coming in at that time, and we bounced off each other and were influences in different ways.
Alex Grand: [00:15:24] Yeah, it was within that creative, , soup that you were kind of gestating a lot of your ideas, it sounds like. Tell us about meeting Roy Thomas. Entering Marvel. Like you said, you did layouts on Spider-Man, and you also worked then on Iron Man. Tell us about like, that transition when you went off to New York to kind of be a comic guy.
Jim Starlin: [00:15:45] I had sold two, two page stories to Joe Orlando for his mystery books House of secrets, House of mystery. And so that was the main thing to get me into New York. And, , I came in and, , I think it was Frank Giacoia, an inker who worked up at the office who looked at my stuff and then took it into Roy. And, , Roy didn’t figure I was good enough to do any books at that time, but Marvel didn’t actually have an art director. And so they brought me in and said, come on in. And, , you can do, , art corrections. You know, John Buscema is fantastic. Four Human Torch didn’t have his mouth open when Roy wanted him to speak. I’d open the mouth. , I also did layouts for all the covers for about six months. , these were layouts that other artists were going to pencil, like Gil Kane and John Buscema and that, , I’d get in there in the morning and, , grab the xeroxes of the interior pages, looked through the story with no script, try and figure out the story and then create a cover, design it, and then, , Stan would come in around noon and we’d hash it through, and you’d eventually be sent out to somebody else to draw.
Alex Grand: [00:17:05] How was Stan at that time? Did you talk to him much?
Jim Starlin: [00:17:09] , some. Every. Every day. Practically. On these covers, , you never got to know Stan. Stan was a performer. , I kind of doubt that anyone other than his wife ever got to really see the real Stan. He. He wanted to be an actor when he was a kid. That’s what he was. That’s where he was heading. And, , , his uncle sort of forced him into working with Simon and Kirby and, , and, , becoming the editor of Marvel. , there’s a lot of stories about just how much, , Simon and Kirby and Lee hated each other at the beginning and then worked, , worked it out because he was only 16 when he started. You know, time as I spent with him. I can’t say I really got to know Stan. How was.
Alex Grand: [00:17:54] , Roy Thomas as editor in chief?
Jim Starlin: [00:17:56] He was terrific. He’s up there. , maybe Archie Goodwin edges him out as my favorite editor just by a little bit. Roy was the first editor after Stan, and, , they were expanding from, like, eight books a month to something in the 20s. , I think that’s why I got work up there, because they were just basically hiring anybody who could hold a pencil. So, , you know, Roy was a terrific I mean, he always seemed to have faith in me. He, . I remember one story conference. I came in, and he wanted to know what I was going to do with Captain Marvel, and I sort of hedged and said, well, I think I’ll use the Super-Skrull. And he went, fine, go. And I went, what? That was it. That was the whole thing. Yeah. Okay, we’ll go from there. And, . When Stan hated the Iron Man job that the second Iron Man, after I did two fill ins and first, when we introduced Thanos, the next one was a funny one I did with Steve Gerber, , involving Rasputin in some big monster. And Stan hated it. And, , he fired both Gerber and I and Roy came along, and, , he gave Gerber. , I think it was Man-Thing two, right? Yes. So that was Man-Thing, and, , he came to me and said, you know, I’ve got this book. It’s probably going to get canceled, maybe even before you finish your first issue, but give it a shot and you know if it doesn’t work out, we’ll find something else for you to do. And that was Captain Marvel. Well, yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:19:38] Because the cool thing is you’re able to bring Thanos into these different titles. Like you said, by almost happenstance of external factors. It became this multi series villain. But he basically, you know, you had him follow you of course, because you created him. But but what an amazing accident that kind of turns into.
Jim Starlin: [00:19:56] Well, it took them a while to realize that when they were hiring me for Captain Marvel, Warlock or Silver Surfer, basically they were hiring me to do a Thanos job and eventually just said, okay, go off and do Thanos. That’s great.
Alex Grand: [00:20:10] Well, he’s the best Marvel villain. So, um, the so, so at the time, you know, as you’re kind of doing Iron Man, you know, as far as, like storytelling, you know, Gerry Conway killed Gwen Stacy and Submariner’s dad In another story, Stanley killed George Stacy. You know, Roy Thomas killed Dorma in submariner. So there’s death, you know, kind of all around. But you did an initial story with Steven Skates, and it looks like it almost predates the mainstream Marvel death figure that you made. But it was in Journey to Mystery Volume two as a story called You show me your dream. I’ll show you mine. Do you remember doing that story?
Jim Starlin: [00:20:50] , did somebody else, , did I do layouts or full pencils? Well, it’s interesting. You did, you did.
Alex Grand: [00:20:57] You did the pencils. And Steve Skeates is, you know, credited as the writer. But, you know, the storytelling. Back then, it was kind of a mixed creation, but but it’s interesting because there’s actually you actually draw a robed figure of death, kind of like laughing at the end.
Jim Starlin: [00:21:12] And that’s the one that I think Mike Ploog inked. Yeah, I vaguely recall the story. , I did a couple of, you know, I did one love story and a couple of things for their horror books before they let me do Iron Man. So those are kind of vague. I remember the love story more because it had Tom the truck. Tom the truck driver. Dick the dude and Wendy the waitress. Yeah, it was complete alliteration by Gary Friedrich, as I recall.
Alex Grand: [00:21:45] You know about that is that there’s that rope death figure, which pretty shortly after, you know, you actually bring as a character in, you know, with, with the, with Thanos. And what inspired you to personify death as, like, its own cosmic entity.
Jim Starlin: [00:22:01] Okay. That issue that I mentioned, where I was going to use the Super-Skrull at one point, I did a the reveal of that the villain is Thanos, who was a full page shot, and I stuck a couple of figures behind him, just sort of sketched in. , one was the the smaller, shorter Skrull that, , comes to a bad end at the end of the story. Um, but I just sort of had no idea who the other figure was going to be. And so I said, okay, I’ll put in a rogue figure. And then I got the rogue figure in there. And then I thought, , that’s not what I want. And then I said, oh, I know what she needs. She needs a set of breasts. He she needs a set of breasts. And so I went back and raced and gave her a bit more of a female figure. And that was basically the beginning of it.
Alex Grand: [00:22:53] Wow. Yeah. Because you have breasts, you know, on that Star Beach cover, too. So that’s that’s a trend.
Jim Starlin: [00:22:59] Yeah. A lot of times things were just at the last moment when I was doing the Captain Marvel issue of metamorphosis, shortly before I got well, I was at the beginning of the story, and I actually threw out a couple of pages to accommodate this. , I was coming home from a party, and I stopped at a light in New York. And as I was sitting there waiting, I looked over and there was this bag of garbage with a grease stain on it. And I sort of looked at it, and I really liked the shape. And it suddenly hit me. So I immediately ran home and did my first drawing of Ian, who was sort of that floating turd with the wig on and the head and the eye. So a lot of times things were, oh, that’s cool. I’m going to add this in now. Last moment things.
Alex Grand: [00:23:48] Was Steve Ditko’s Eternity and Influence. When you created the death figure, like the fact that everything existential can be personified into like one conscious entity. What did you feel about Steve Ditko’s eternity?
Jim Starlin: [00:24:04] Oh, I thought it was terrific design, a terrific character. I mean, like I said, Steve was one of my heroes in his Doctor Strange stuff, as simple as it is, is just mind blowing. He created his own little universe there. Maybe he didn’t stay with the fashions of the time as far as clothes went, but, . And people have complained about what his women look like. But he was one hell of an artist, as far as I’m concerned.
Alex Grand: [00:24:31] How did you create Thanos?
Jim Starlin: [00:24:34] , Thanos goes back from when I just got out of the service, and, , I was, , taking advantage of the veterans education thing and going to a junior college for, you know, a few months before I decided to go to New York and I did some drawing classes. You know, I mean, not that they really helped much. They were drawing fruit, you know, we didn’t even have a model. , so, , but the other class I took was, , a psychology class, and one day they had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the Freudian concepts of Eros and Thanos lighter and darker sides of the human nature. And once again that night I went back and started drawing and designing up these characters. Thanos before Eros. Eros came in sort of later and, , was very, quite a long time before I actually developed a good personality for him. But, , , basically it was from that class. And , later on when I came to New York, , just a few blocks away from my apartment I was staying at, there was a Greek restaurant called Thanatos, which I passed every day. And, , so it kept on building into my consciousness as this character. , I always thought it was a strange name to name a restaurant after a death. , but, you know, , it didn’t last. It eventually went out of business, strangely enough.
Alex Grand: [00:26:09] That’s amazing. From what I understand, I read an interview you did once where you kind of showed the character you had, like an initial version of Thanos that you showed to Roy Thomas. And I think from what I understand, Roy had said maybe beef it up a bit, kind of like Dark Side. How did that transformation of Thanos, you know, before we got to the printed page take place and was Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, you know, what did you think about that stuff? And was that an influence at all?
Jim Starlin: [00:26:35] It was an influence, but not in the way most folks think, because most folks thinks I sort of ripped the Thanos off from Dark Side. But actually it was a mentor mentor Metron who was a much more influential. He was as much more interesting character, and he had these visors over his eyes that that’s where Thanos visors came from. They were inspired by that. , Jack’s stories were just always amazing. I loved the Fourth World. I wasn’t crazy about the, , Forever People or Mister Miracle all that much, but, . The Jimmy Olsen stuff and the new God stuff. I just couldn’t believe it when they finally cancelled it. I thought, oh, man, come on. This is the best thing you got going here.
Alex Grand: [00:27:24] I love the the whole mythos you created around Thanos’s backstory and the planet, you know, Titan and the what? Mentor. And, , you know, Starfox or Eros and his relationship with his mom. And, I mean, where did that come from, that mythos. And because that’s just amazing stuff. Like, I even remember as a kid when I first read that stuff and it, like, kind of blew my mind.
Jim Starlin: [00:27:47] Well, Titan came from Kurt Vonnegut is Sirens of Titan inspired that, you know, didn’t use anything like what he did with that. But, , killing his mom just seemed like the most nasty thing I could come up with for the character to do. He started off pure villainy. It’s only later on that we got to see the other sides of him, where he was actually altruistic Occasionally. Um, but that came with the character development. , my standard answer, when people ask me why I’ve done some science fiction is I tell them that that way I don’t have to draw horses or cars. But but the truth is, I just I just enjoy setting things off in a world that I can build up. , I’d like to do a story, but I don’t want to be preachy, and it’s so much harder to do a story set in the real world doesn’t come off that way. Star Trek was a good inspiration for that. That first series, they did one episode where this alien, two alien races were at war with each other, one because they had a black on one side of the face and white on the other, and then it was reversed on the other. And that’s why they hated each other. And, , they were able to do a story on bigotry that was very effective for that period without being preachy. And I want to always wanted to do the same thing. I think it was Steve Scates who warned me off earlier about don’t become a preacher. You know, nobody wants to hear that.
Alex Grand: [00:29:23] You know, you have a like a very nice, pictorial ized autobiography book that I read. And you said that what Pip the Troll was, he was based, kind of modernized off of Jack Kirby. Is that true?
Jim Starlin: [00:29:34] Oh, yeah. The cigar, a short, . Yeah. No, , Jack was, , Pip was sort of a conglomeration of Jack, visually, and, , I hate to admit it, but me personally, at that particular point in my life.
Alex Grand: [00:29:50] Pip the troll kind of represented, like your ID, in a way.
Jim Starlin: [00:29:54] Yeah, it was the, you know, it was ingesting a lot of things I shouldn’t have had at that point. And, , it was basically, , , you know, I mean, before he becomes Pip the Troll, He. His hobby was painting star fields. I mean, that’s what I did all the time. So basically, , Pip was sort of between Jack and I.
Alex Grand: [00:30:18] In the 70s, you know, from what I understand about that period, culturally, young people, you know, there’s, you know, there’s mushrooms, LSD, there’s all this stuff. And you see it in music, movies. Do you feel like that was a force in the 70s in comics that added something to that era?
Jim Starlin: [00:30:39] , I indulged during that time. , yeah. And, , basically, I think some of those, , , moments were inspirational for what I was doing. , it also was a time where you get stoned and you, , you talk with other artists, and that was inspirational that that brought things out. , you know, we had a president who was about to get booted out of office. So, , you know, Nixon was an influence in different ways. Once again, it comes down to everything that’s going on around you. , has some influence on what your output is.
Alex Grand: [00:31:26] Does Nixon play any role in your creation of Thanos at all?
Jim Starlin: [00:31:30] No. He was more in Captain America. Englehart had him as the villain in one of the Captain America stories. , Neal Adams used him in the Agnew as the bad guys in Green Lantern. One story visually, if not, , story wise. Thanos and all the bad guys are sort of a conglomeration of all the things that have gone before, from Joseph Stalin to Adolf Hitler to, , the Khmer Rouge. , you know, we’ve got, , a lot of inspiration when it comes to bad guys out there.
Alex Grand: [00:32:06] So now when you were kind of now comic artists, let’s say in the 70s, you ran into Ditko again after that time in his studio. Um, tell us about encountering him. Um, you know, as now a professional comic artist at that time.
Jim Starlin: [00:32:22] We had brief encounters mostly coming up to him at the office. We never ran into each other on the street or out there, you know? , he had come back to work on speedball and some other things over at DC. Ever at Marvel. And, , you know, we talk a few times. I remember he was very surprised when I dedicated, , a thing Hulk story to him. You know, , , you know, it was at that point I reminded him of him, , inviting me into his studio, which he didn’t remember, of course, but I thought it was a, . The least I could do is thank him for that again. , I always, like Steve, was very quiet, mild mannered person. , he had some radical politics that reflected inside his things, like Mr. A and stuff like that. But, , like I said before, I’m basically a good person as far as I was concerned.
Alex Grand: [00:33:23] You’re now in the 70s. You’re a comic artist. Tell us about kind of interacting with Neal Adams and what’s your overall impression of him?
Jim Starlin: [00:33:31] I was always very impressed with Neal. , I mean, his art, he was had a bigger than life personality. , I never really became part of continuity, even though later on I rented some space in the back, which I was sharing with Marshall Rogers. He he’d worked there in the night, and I’d worked during the day and the same desk. And, um, you know, , Neal was a character. , I’m good friends with his son, Joel Adams, who lives out in LA. Um, you know, we we all have our good sides and our bad sides. And, , Neal was so complex that he had a lot of different aspects all the time. , he was a leader who did great things. Gideon. Simon and Schuster. , some help with, , after they got shafted by DC, by Superman, , worked with, , Michael Uslan to get Bill finger recognized for his work on Batman. Um, you know, , Neal was inspirational and Neal was human. And so, , you know, , I saw his good sides and his bad sides and, , you know, we always stayed, , if not friends, friendly, you know, I mean, I see him at a convention. We sit there and chat for a half hour, go out for dinners for hours at a time. I don’t know what much more to say about Neal than that. He inspired me and at times horrified me.
Alex Grand: [00:35:11] Were you a fan of his Dead Man comic?
Jim Starlin: [00:35:13] Oh, very much so. That was early on. His Batman The Dead Man comics were just terrific. I mean, he was he was bringing something completely new to the table that doesn’t happen all that often. And Neal was one of those exceptions.
Alex Grand: [00:35:28] Chaykin. Simonson. These guys that you had your own personal and professional relationships with them. Tell us about kind of meeting Chaykin and your guys’s friendship overall.
Jim Starlin: [00:35:39] Oh, I don’t remember how I met Chaykin. Probably at one of these first Fridays. We used to have, , , a monthly First Friday over at Frank Brunner’s house up in the two hundreds in Manhattan. And everybody would show up, get drunk, show the artwork, and , , get their either egos either soothed or ruffled. , so, , I’m pretty sure I remember meeting, , Walter up at DC. , he had come up there, and Archie really liked his stuff, and nobody knew where to put him. , because his style was so radically different. They couldn’t put him on Superman or anything like that. So they they pulled up this Manhunter series for him to start off with. He eventually ended up sharing an apartment with Alan Milgrom, who was a friend of mine from way back in high school. And, , so we got to know each other better than that. , as it happens, he just moved into my neighborhood. , , in the last few months, he’s, , like, ten miles over to the west. I think it is. , so I’ve been over there a few times, and we’re we’re supposed to have dinner this coming week, actually.
Alex Grand: [00:36:50] Did you ever have any interactions with John Byrne and what was your impression of his work?
Jim Starlin: [00:36:55] Nice work. I didn’t really know John. John. As most folks know, it was kind of prickly. So, , after, , a couple of negative comments about my work, , getting circulated around, I have found a reason to really go out of my way to connect up with him.
Alex Grand: [00:37:15] Yeah, I see. So when when that stuff comes out in the fan press, even if you don’t necessarily directly hear from him, it’s still kind of affects. It affects things still. Is that right?
Jim Starlin: [00:37:25] Because Joe Rubinstein has to call you up immediately to tell you about it.
Alex Grand: [00:37:30] As you’re getting into, you know, Captain Marvel, also with Adam Warlock, you know, these characters pre-existed your time there. But what I feel like you gave them souls. I feel like they were great visually, but I feel like you actually gave them a soul as you develop them over their series. How did you go about, you know, kind of coming up with how what direction they were going to go. And you’re also kind of working with Mike Friedrich at the time kind of doing this. How was working with him? And tell us about developing those characters?
Jim Starlin: [00:38:05] Okay. Mike was one of the, I think, five people who was sharing an apartment with me in, , in, , Staten Island. It was Mike. Steve Skeates myself. Milgrom came in later, and Bill Dubay, , who was the editor over at Warren Magazine, basically. Um, I found that with Captain Marvel that the best thing to do. And Roy letting me go loose and go run and do whatever I want was to take characters that had failed. You know, , Captain Marvel was moments from being canceled. Warlock had already been canceled. , plus, they were both designed up by Gil Kane, who did terrific costumes, especially on Captain Marvel. I learned to hate that lightning bolt on Warlock really quick, so I got rid of that early on, but I kept the belt for the longest time, which was always a bitch to draw. And basically, I just wanted to go off and vent my spleen about different things in life. , Warlock in particular was much more of that than Captain Marvel. , Captain Marvel was a warrior that I took on a journey. So he became a holy man. And then when I took on Warlock, he was already the holy man. So I said, where am I going to go with him? And eventually came up with the idea that he should become a paranoid schizophrenic with suicidal tendencies. And that worked out just fine.
Alex Grand: [00:39:38] I love that, that’s incredible. And when you phrase it like that, it makes so much sense elevating one and almost like kind of degenerating the other. But but they both learn about themselves. So it’s, , it worked, So it worked so well.
Jim Starlin: [00:39:52] The characters on a journey where they develop something with the surfer. It was having to come to terms with the fact that his soul had been manipulated, so that he wasn’t feeling guilty about being an accessory to mass murder.
Alex Grand: [00:40:07] How did you get involved in the Star Reach? And you did. In that first Star reach, you did the cover and, you know, death on the cover. Two stories inside.
Jim Starlin: [00:40:17] Howard did the first and first. Bernie and Howard had to cover some reason. Mike decided to switch the covers in the second printing.
Alex Grand: [00:40:24] Oh, yeah, that’s right. Well, that explains that funny discrepancy now that I kind of think about that. Um, so you did that first, or you did that cover on the second printing of the first issue, and then you also did two stories inside, , Death Building, which looked like it was you in that coming to Marvel. There’s like a death scenario and then also the origin of death. You know, why is death on your mind as much as it is.
Jim Starlin: [00:40:50] Well, Norman Mailer once said that all true stories end in death and took that to heart. And when I was reading comics and nobody died, you know, as a kid, nobody died. Um, and there were the biggest threat was an atomic bomb. Somebody wanted the bad guys getting an atomic bomb. So when all this new guys came in, everyone started upping the game, not only in the way we were writing and drawing, but also in what the characters were doing. , suddenly, you know, and Kirby was doing already doing a bit of this, you know, in Thor and the Fantastic Four. He was doing bigger stories, bigger threats, and the rest of us came in and we started doing our own bigger threats. And so, , death became part of the equation. It only seemed to make sense that when you’re playing the high stakes games that they are playing. They were playing that eventually you would lose, , happens in real life. It should happen in fiction. Also, sometimes, you know, I mean, associated with death, but sometimes, , it was the company itself that prompted it in.
Alex Grand: [00:42:02] That starreach issue. You did like the origin of death in that, like you wrote that that story, whenever you were personify death in Marvel. Would you say that same origin applies to the Marvel death that you were using, or is that just kind of a one off side story?
Jim Starlin: [00:42:17] , no. , the Starreach one, I can’t remember. I think that was after Mistress Death, and, , I just wanted to do, you know, it was already I was clearly on a death kick, but, , , I never actually thought of them much, , on the same character. When I went over to DC after, , , I left, , Marvel the first time I went over and created Mongul. And he was definitely supposed to be Thanos over in the DC universe. Yeah, but the death characters I did were pretty much, , separated. They were. There was no real connection there.
Alex Grand: [00:42:55] As the Thanos story is going, you know, his you know, ship sanctuary is like exploding, you know, and exploding planets and and murdering, you know, millions of people and moondragon’s like, whoa, you know, was that was the Death Star and Star Wars. Was that stuff an influence or or or was that kind of like your own? You know, just kind of genocide is a cosmically real thing, you know? What were you doing there?
Jim Starlin: [00:43:24] I think I was already doing Captain Marvel and Star Wars came out because, remember Howard Chaykin, , getting all of us invited to a screening, you know, to Star Wars, of course, was a big influence on everybody as far as art. And that goes in the comic books. , it was the beginning at a point where the movies could start doing better at this stuff than we could. Up until that point, , we could draw a dozen spaceships and, , it would be a spectacular scene. Now you do a dozen spaceships in the movie. It’s nothing. They can do that over, you know, that that passes without. We. It’s much harder to do that, , really impressive visual than it was when we were when I first started off. Mhm.
Alex Grand: [00:44:12] Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s an interesting point that you say that, that that’s kind of when that switch happens. Um, , but I still love the comic stuff more , especially the stuff that you were doing. So, so when you were kind of ending that Thanos, you know, saga in the 70s, he I. For a short time dies. , Adam Warlock kind of dies, but there also seem to be some sort of afterlife, you know, is death and rebirth. And that cycle that seems to be a concept in the stuff you do. Is that something that you kind of think of in the real universe, too? Tell me about what those topics that interest you there with death and rebirth.
Jim Starlin: [00:44:50] My my foundation was Catholicism. And then it got mixed in with a lot of other different philosophies and reading. So, um, you know, I have no definite answers on what’s coming. Nobody does. , so I’m just trying to get by like everybody else with trying to make as little of a shambles of my life as I can. Not always succeeding, but, you know, being part of just trying to do as right as I can and waiting for the end to see what, , see what the big surprise is afterwards, whether I come back as a poodle or something. I have no idea.
Alex Grand: [00:45:32] Yeah. Anything’s possible. Um, so then the. Did the Copyright Act of 1976 play a role in an ending that Thanos saga?
Jim Starlin: [00:45:43] Yes and no. A number of us, when that came out, would not sign the work for hire contracts. , everybody at the studio, Bernie Wrightson’s, , Barry Windsor-smith Kaluta, Jeff Jones, they went off and did their own things. And, , , Star Wars star reach was sort of a reaction to that beforehand, but, , , I avoided working for Marvel for quite a while after that until I was able to, , work a balance between the work for hire and the and creator owned stuff with Marvel through their epic line. So that was all basically in response to that. As it happens, it turned out that it worked out very well for me. As far as Thanos, whenever they we used to get our paychecks and on the back it say you, you’re signing away all your rights by cashing this check and I would always take a magic marker blacking that out. And so and also, there was some kind of fire where Marvel lost a bunch of paperwork. So when Disney put, , Marvel put, , Thanos at the beginning of the Avengers thing, , Disney finally started looking through their paperwork and realized that they had no no copyright stuff. They didn’t own Thanos. So, , you know, that was the approach. And, , we worked out a deal, which was I’m pleased with still to this day. I mean, , a lot of stuff has gone the way of the dodo as far as, , the benefits. They don’t they don’t do a royalty anymore. So. So it’s just an incentive pay thing. The industry has changed so radically since then, but, , basically the, the that law changed the whole game in many ways. We got a lot more of the independent publishers coming around, And, , it helped, , you know, , at this point, I think the independents are anyone who’s starting off. That’s the way to do it. , I don’t think you have to be, , Marvel or DC artists anymore to get your name out there. , social media can do that for you. Those two companies are not paying anything anymore.
Alex Grand: [00:47:56] Yeah, it comes down to the reprint rights. Right? And, you know, with Star Reach, you know, you that’s your copyright with the epic stuff. You know, you get those reprint rights are yours. Um, they can’t do it without, you know, some sort of deal, and it’s your stuff. So, um, at the same time, you know, content wise, what you had, you had. If I read your autobiography, right, you did some book cover illustration and kind of developed skills in painting around this time, is that right?
Jim Starlin: [00:48:23] Yeah. I was sharing a studio with Walt Simonson, Howard Chaykin and, , Jim Sherman for a while, and then Val Mayerick, , or the other way around. , and Howard was doing a lot of painting. He was just starting on the stars. My destination, , graphic novel, and watched what he did, and he inspired me. And, , so I started, , the Metamorphosis Odyssey in, , on board and was painting it up with just pulling out the whites and laying down the blacks. , so it was an early painting. Plus my wife Diana was, , she was a painter, and she she actually taught me how to use paint.
Alex Grand: [00:49:09] I didn’t know that about, , the, um, your wife and she teaching you the painting part, but the chain link is also very cool. Um, then content wise, in The Metamorphosis, I mean, you’re kind of going through your own metamorphosis, too, because by developing painting, um, switching more toward that, , reprint rights model, but at the same time, the storylines within the Dreadstar stuff, and even with some of the manga stuff you did, it’s all about the rebellious notion a rebellion against large, monolithic, imposing belief systems. You know that the Magus and the instrumentality in Dreadstar. Tell us about that theme. You know, you were kind of leading to it earlier. That’s part of that, your convergence into kind of what you were becoming and what you were kind of writing about artistic style, changing kind of economics of comics changing. Tell us about that.
Jim Starlin: [00:50:05] As I mentioned before, I was, , went to grade school at a parochial school and was indoctrinated in what the church was wanted. You know, I’m looking at it now. I still have this book called The History of Tyranny. , and, , basically I came across it in a used bookstore, and I remember getting sitting down and reading it, and they had this whole section on the Inquisition. And I thought to myself, this is something I was never told. Made me look at things differently. The more I went on, the more I came to realize that any institution, especially big institutions, are run by people who are imperfect and sometimes villainous. Actually, you can’t find any institution that hasn’t gone through about a black spell where their leadership has not led them astray. And it was something that struck me as that’s good story material. I mean, not that it was an original idea. On my point, if you go back through any, you know, Dickens, Shakespeare, they all touched on this at one point or another in their stories. It might have been Kings back then, or the miserable London courts, but it was basically the same man against the institution.
Alex Grand: [00:51:30] Do you still kind of have those notions.
Jim Starlin: [00:51:34] In my new Dreadstar stuff? The institution is somewhat the heroes. They’re in charge of this thing, but there are threats beyond them in Dreadstar versus the inevitable. That was, , sort of inspired, if nothing else, by and done during the pandemic. , so that was a big start. , there was a bit of a change, , going forward. Now, there’s really not the institutions as much as doing more of the interpersonal stuff. , the third Dreadstar book will be about, , Karla Dreadstar, who was the dreadstar for Malibu Comics. , I’m bringing her back, and we’re going to reprint the Peter David, Ernie Colon, , Malibu things as a separate booklet, , to be offered, because that’s going to be the Lord people’s version of what happened back then. And then Dreadstar versus Dreadstar will be dreadstar. Version of what happened back then as he tells it to Willow. So I’m doing sort of a Rashomon kind of thing with this thing.
Alex Grand: [00:52:36] Cordwainer Smith was a Cordwainer Smith an influence on any of your work?
Jim Starlin: [00:52:40] I’m sure it was. I mean, it was science fiction. , it was very spacey, as I recall. Um, it’s been a while since I read it, so I don’t remember the entire story, but I’m sure it was. I couldn’t tell you anything more particular than that.
Alex Grand: [00:52:54] Now, with Marvel, you know, I asked, , Roy Roy Thomas about the illusion of change at Marvel and how you can shake things up. But it’s got to go back to the way it was that that started, like in the late 60s, , that that kind of approach to comics in making your own dreadstar was that was that kind of like your escape also away from the illusion of change, where you can actually really make permanent change in your own storyline? And was the illusion of change over at Marvel or DC? Was that kind of annoying to you?
Jim Starlin: [00:53:26] , it was part of doing the business. You know, you play with the toys, you got to put it back in the box in one piece. I got some exceptions with Captain Marvel, of course, but, . Yeah, freed me up. Originally, the Metamorphosis Odyssey protagonist is and was supposed to be throughout Ankydon, , pointy eared, pointy nosed alien, , the fifth episode and through dreadstar in there. And it went. He’s the one I want to do now. , I was doing a lot of model work. , we were photo reference we had in the studio. We had a shot up, and, , it wasn’t because Dreadstar sort of looked like me that he became the guy. Because I was also doing the modeling for Anknaton, and. But he just didn’t strike me as the character that I wanted to keep doing. And Dreadstar did. And eventually he became the main driver and I killed off at the end of the Metamorphosis Odyssey.
Alex Grand: [00:54:28] If you were to say Pip the troll was kind of like your ID. What would Dreadstar be in the relationship of channeling yourself in Dreadstar?
Jim Starlin: [00:54:36] Well, like I said, there was a visual resemblance. I’m never as I’m not as bulky as Dreadstar, but, , when I met Jack Kirby, he told me that he always tried to create a character that you could summarize in one sentence. And with the Hulk, it was the Hulk is stupidity. The harder you beat on him, the stronger it becomes. , when I did Thanos, Thanos was appetite that could never be satisfied. And with Dreadstar. Dreadstar was an anarchist without a second act. I always knew that he was always going to be good at fighting. But once the fighting ended, , it goes it goes to pieces for him. He becomes a cop at the end of the instrumentality thing, and he’s terrible at it. He’s letting the bad characters go, and he’s ended up fighting Willow. And he just. You know, he’s just not a person who’s good at peace. So in the new stories I’m doing. I found a way to vent that he’s the one who brings in. He goes to tyrannical planets. And overthrows them and brings them into the Willow consortium. So he finally finds a constructive. Use for his more volatile impulses.
Alex Grand: [00:55:54] The graphic novel line at Marvel that that coincides with. Also the creation of those new kind of, , incentive contracts at Marvel that you worked on with. Mike Hobson, , Mike Friedrich and Jim Shooter. You know, you guys kind of put those contracts together. Tell us about co-creating those contracts and then how that then dovetails into the death of Captain Marvel.
Jim Starlin: [00:56:19] Well, it was interesting because we’d, . When it was just the four of us, we’d, , we’d work out a deal. , almost from the beginning. I mean, I think we had a couple of sessions before we worked out a deal, and then they would send it upstairs to the lawyers, and the lawyers would send back a contract that resembled nothing. You know, it had nothing to do with what we had sent up there. And so it was a slow process of sending it back and having them change this or having them change that. , some things we had to relent on, some things we got extra. It was basically everyone wanted those things to work out, and they did for quite a while.
Alex Grand: [00:56:58] You know, I’ve interviewed a few of the Image Comics guys, and from what it sounds like, the money that they use to create image from when they were working at Marvel because they were working under those same contracts that you guys had co-developed. And maybe that also factored into when Marvel kind of goes bankrupt and comes back like they didn’t want to do that anymore. , do you feel like that contributed to the end of those contracts?
Jim Starlin: [00:57:22] Basically, it was just a metamorphosis of, , laissez faire capitalism in this country. , corporations have one purpose to make as much money. I mean, there is nothing altruistic or. And so they’ve slowly picked away at all the benefits that we have at that point. I mean, we got we had health insurance became an expense they didn’t want to pay. So we lost our health insurance. , you know, they now want to own everything. So, you know, there’s no such thing as a work for hire, , anything other than work for hire up at Marvel or DC, you know, like, now, , both of those companies are getting so many artists from overseas that, , they’ve been cutting everybody’s pay rates. , I think you’re starting rate up at either company for inking, for instance, is only about $60. That’s a pittance. I mean, you can live well in Argentina that way, but United States, you’re having to work all the time just to keep up with the paycheck. So, you know, and I think, , to go back to what you were talking about, image. Image. Those guys were making a good deal of money, but it was Marvel itself that sort of drove them out. I remember the story of Jim Lee. , he was going around to conventions, and they were sending him on first class flights on these things. And, you know, he was doing books that were selling a million copies. And the the bean counters at Marvel said that no more first class flights. He’s got to take coach. And, , the other guys were trying to start image and they came over and, , you know, that was the reason he joined them.
Alex Grand: [00:59:14] And you had mentioned with the death of Captain Marvel, your father had passed away from cancer before that. And tell us about first, how did the death of Captain Marvel come to be and the discussions you and Jim Shooter had and and putting what you put internally into that story?
Jim Starlin: [00:59:34] Yeah. With the death of Captain Marvel, they didn’t know what to do with him at that point. And they wanted to create this new female Captain Marvel, which became proton eventually. And so Jim Shooter approached me to do the death of Captain Marvel, kill him off on the first graphic novel that they made. I made a deal with him that I’d do their Captain Marvel one if the third graphic novel would be dreadstar my own character, which I owned the rights to. We went from there. , I came up with three, 4 or 5 different plots that I typed up that I just hated because they were all things that you had seen before, where the character dies heroically and some explosion or something at the end. , they already done that in the Doom Patrol, and I don’t even remember how it happened. But the whole thing with my father kicked in and I did the cancer story. As I recall, it went around the office and there was a bunch of, , assistant editors at that time, and I’ve been told that they all hated it. , and it was Jim Shooter himself who said, no, this is what we’re going to go with.
Jim Starlin: [01:00:39] He was the only one up at the office who seemed to like the story. So, , you know, drew it. , I was playing volleyball and dislocated a finger just as I was, , , started working on the book. I’d finished most of the pencils. I hadn’t started inking yet. And, , so for the longest time there, , and I had just bought a house up north. I had I had to get these payments, you know, so every morning I would get up and I would take a pen to The one of these felt tip markers, and I would tape it into my hand to hold it because I couldn’t do it otherwise. And I would ink that day and lunchtime, take it off, and then rewrap it after lunch. And that’s why, in the death of Captain Marvel, there are no long lines. It’s very Moebius looking because it’s just the best I could do at that point was a lot of little skit, skit, skits and, , you know, , you look back at it, it seems like a crazy thing to have done, but it was just making things work at that point.
Alex Grand: [01:01:45] That’s beautiful. I’ve read it over and over again. I love that story. The art’s beautiful. Um, and it, , I think I was ten, and even now, as an adult, it still makes me feel the same way. So, um, it was a big influence on my love for comics. So, um, tell us about working with Jim Shooter. How do you like working with him?
Jim Starlin: [01:02:08] Actually, I’ve never worked with Jim other than until we got to Voyager. We did this job that Voyager, one of these other companies that had video games. . , no, I mostly worked with, , , Archie Goodwin. I started off with him when he was the editor doing The Avengers and 2 in 1 annuals for him there. And, , , when Jim took over, , we negotiated on the contracts and we set out on to the death of Captain Marvel book. And, , but when it came time to actually doing the work, , I think it was Alan Milgrom who was my editor on it. So I worked with Alan a lot on the death of Captain Marvel and Archie again on, , on Dreadstar. So, , Jim and I didn’t work actually together on anything until, , there was this crossover. I’ve forgotten the name of it already. , for this company that had the rights to, , Magnus robot Hunter and Doctor Solar. And so we started in on a working for a mini series for them. But they, they started tanking in the middle of it, and the series never got made. We finished it. , now it’ll never see print because they no longer have the rights to have the characters. You know, Turok and all these other ones went back to another publisher and they got they got left with what was left. When you were working on.
Alex Grand: [01:03:43] The Epic Comics line with Dreadstar, and then it ended up over at First Comics, and then you’re at DC comics working on completely other characters. What exactly happened during that transition?
Jim Starlin: [01:03:54] I got in trouble with somebody at the bookkeeping at Marvel. This day, I don’t know what happened. , I was working on Dreadstar and my checks just disappeared and they would get cut, and they never made it to the house. They went in the trash can someplace and shooter tried to fix it. Archie tried to fix it. So eventually, , , took Dreadstar over to First Comics. , did that for a while. And then, , when Peter David took over, that’s when I went over to DC and did things like the cult and, , Death and Family, , New Gods, a few other things over there. I see.
Alex Grand: [01:04:36] So that bookkeeping error, that really that’s why you kind of ditched Marvel and said, okay, I’m going to go to DC then.
Jim Starlin: [01:04:42] I couldn’t afford not to do this stuff for free. Tell us about.
Alex Grand: [01:04:47] That DC experience. Did you did you enjoy it? And you know, of course, as you said, you created Mongul and worked on the cult and Kgbeast, the death and the family. A lot of death in a lot of that stuff. So tell us about your experience there. Did you enjoy it? And kind of bringing death to DC comics as well?
Jim Starlin: [01:05:05] The big difference between Marvel and DC at that time, and I’m not sure where they’re at these days, but Marvel would do anything to shake the. A few more cents out of the fans pockets. Dc they had a whole different bailiwick. It was fiefdoms. Each editor was a kingdom unto itself, and they were always fighting with each other and making it difficult to do anything. , started off working with Bernie on a thing called the Weird over there, and, , got to write the Justice League editor, Andy Helfer. He let us use the Justice League, but then it got tricky because originally it was supposed to be Captain Marvel who was taken over by Superman at the end. , couldn’t use Captain Marvel because the editor didn’t want it. , then it was going to be Wonder Woman. And then John Byrne was doing Wonder Woman at a time, and he said, no, we can’t use Wonder Woman. , so the next thing I knew, I was stuck with this character called Nuklo, who apparently was from Infinity Incorporated. Had no idea who he was, and so had to write this character that I didn’t have a clue about. , there was always something strange, , the cosmic Odyssey. Dc had done a book called A Book of Magic where they mapped out all their sorcerers characters, and they approached me to do something similar.
Jim Starlin: [01:06:35] They wanted a map of the science fiction universe. Of course, they started changing it, , immediately by wanting Batman and Superman to be in it. And so I just sort of, , gave up on that whole idea. , and I just wrote, , Cosmic Odyssey for what it was. And, , they didn’t notice this until about the third book was penciled, and I got called in and they say, hey, this is not what we wanted. And I said, well, you know, I mean, you’ve got this so far. Your editor didn’t say anything to me about it. They said, well, we’re going to have to rethink our whole working with you. , we’re just going to dump this book out here and no one’s going to remember it. It’s going to just go and sell. And so I said, okay, , you know, , let’s see what happens. And in the meantime, I was working on the Batman at this point, too. So, , the cult and that was going on. And in the end, you know, the they’re still paying me royalties every six months on the cosmic Odyssey.
Jim Starlin: [01:07:35] So it worked out okay. , the other strange thing that really happened up at DC was the death in the family. Robin’s death was a little bit different. There was a. I never thought that it was a good idea to go off and fight crime in a gray and black outfit, and then bring along a kid in primary colors. , it seemed like child abuse. The only thing he stopped short on is not putting a bull’s eye on the poor kid’s head. And so that’s probably why there’s been so many different robins’s not a job with a long shelf life. We did the book, and they didn’t tell anybody in licensing that they were going to kill off Robin. And they had all these, , these lunchboxes and pajamas with Robin’s picture on it still. So, , that that caused a stir and, , the corporate started blaming and it went down to, , you know, from upstairs to publisher to editors to finally to me. So it became all my fault. And, , after having the Cult was their best selling book that year, bar none. You know, I sold everything. And after having done that within a couple of months, all my work at DC dried up. It just disappeared.
Alex Grand: [01:08:56] So although there was that whole voting thing that happened with Robin. There are still some corporate thing that happened where there was some you felt. Did you feel like it was like a corporate kind of blackball kind of thing happened there?
Jim Starlin: [01:09:09] No, it was it was all editorial. You know, the editorial just decided to, you know, , yeah. I don’t think the corporate had much to do with it after the original thing, it was just editorial decided not to use me anymore.
Alex Grand: [01:09:27] How did you feel about writing comics as opposed to also drawing them or just drawing them?
Jim Starlin: [01:09:33] It’s a lot easier. You don’t have to draw. It’s, . I think it was Steve Englehart who once said, it’s much easier to write that there are 25,000 soldiers coming over the hill than draw it.
Alex Grand: [01:09:43] And then you also wrote some movie treatments that kind of got picked up but didn’t quite. I read in your autobiography that that they didn’t quite go the distance, but when they get repurchased, that also creates a source of income for you, is that right?
Jim Starlin: [01:09:58] Well, they do these things called options. When they’re doing a movie, they’ll buy the rights to see if they can shop it around for like six months or a year. And it was more to do with the novels that my first wife, Diana, and I wrote. At one point, Steven Spielberg talked Warner Brothers into buying the rights to this book we called Thinning the Predators. He never got around to making it because he went off and started his, , Amblin with his two partners. But I think, , thinning the predators. We sold the rights to that at least twice an option on it. And, , , among Mad Men, I think we got three different options because it was going to be a cheap one to make, but it never got made. , 90% of the 97, I think is percent of the movies. The the properties do get optioned, never make it to the screen. We were just part of that ladder.
Alex Grand: [01:10:56] Did you miss writing Thanos when you were at DC?
Jim Starlin: [01:11:00] Yeah, um, he was my baby. He was the first character I ever created. , you know, I always, whenever I went back to Marvel, it was to do Thanos. , it was kind of funny. When I went back over to DC after years away from Mongul, they wouldn’t let me near him. , so, . Yeah. Yeah, , Thanos was always the baby. And, , I would have loved to continue doing him, but things didn’t work out that way.
Alex Grand: [01:11:29] Why did DC not want you to go near the Mongul character?
Jim Starlin: [01:11:34] Oh, he was a Green Lantern, , character at that point. And, , he was a property of Geoff Johns. I think it was at this point, so nobody else could use him. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:11:42] Do you like Thanos more than Mongul, anyway?
Jim Starlin: [01:11:46] Oh, yeah. , Mongo was a retread. Yeah. I mean, popular character, it turns out. But, you know, he was he was basically a a paler version of Thanos.
Alex Grand: [01:11:59] So when you went back to Marvel, it sounds like you had, you know, Thanos on the mind. , did you reach out to them or did you talk to an editor there? Which editor? That kind of got you back into Marvel, then?
Jim Starlin: [01:12:11] I started off with Roy at, , on Captain Marvel and, , went over to DC for a very short time and then came back to Roy and did the Warlock series with Thanos. Um, went through several different editors at that point. I think Lynn was the first editor at Marvel. , then Archie and then, , shooter. oh, no. Gerry Conway was in the mixer somewhere. He came in after Marv or Len, one of the two, and, , I quit, , during, , Jerry’s, , tenure. As I recall, and went over to back over to DC for a bit, but, , eventually, you know, the after the whole mess with, , death in the family, I went back over there to do Silver Surfer, which led to the the gauntlet and the Crusade and the war.
Alex Grand: [01:13:08] How was working with Ron Lim on that stuff?
Jim Starlin: [01:13:11] Oh, terrific. Um, I’ve worked more with Bernie Wrightson and Ron Lim than any other artist. And, , Bernie and I had completely different visual senses. , loved working with him, but when I would write something down, I’d have a visual in my head. And then when he would pencil it, it would look nothing like I pictured, but it would always work. Ron Lim, on the other hand, him and I come from the same thing, and when I write something down and he pencils it, it looks exactly like what I was picturing. .
Alex Grand: [01:13:46] Is his version of Thanos your favorite visual version of Thanos?
Jim Starlin: [01:13:50] Other than my own, yes. Yeah. Davis is really up there, too. Boy, what an artist.
Alex Grand: [01:13:56] Alan Davis. Oh, yeah. Um, yeah. Ron is a is a pal, and I and I’ve talked to him quite a bit, and he said he loves working with you, and he read your stuff when he was younger, too. So he said it was like a dream come true working with you. So, um, it’s awesome to to see that mutual enjoyment. You know, when you brought Thanos back in Silver Surfer and the whole, like, Thanos quest and Infinity Gauntlet, you know, Infinity War, Infinity Crusade, you know, the whole.
Jim Starlin: [01:14:25] I went to infinity well, a few times there.
Alex Grand: [01:14:28] Yes, but you evolved Thanos through those stories. He learns about himself. He confronts his own weaknesses. He becomes what I feel is very three, maybe even four dimensional character. I feel like I know the character as a person because of how you developed him over decades. What was your mission statement in evolving Thanos and and Adam Warlock during this period of time, during that second period of time?
Jim Starlin: [01:14:56] As I went on, I realized that I had created a much more complicated character than I had originally intended in Thanos and in Warlock also. And those complications created new opportunities for the story to go in different directions. With Thanos, I was keeping it much on a higher cosmic level. , and because of that, at that period, I was getting shit from people saying, hey, you’re just doing the same story over and over again. And, you know, I looked back at it and go, no, it wasn’t. Each one of these things had a different perspective. There may have been some kind of cosmic, omnipotent threat in each one of them, but it wasn’t the same story. It was each one. I wanted the character to go through a journey that would lead him to some place different than where he had been at the beginning.
Alex Grand: [01:15:52] That co-development of not just Thanos and Warlock Adam Warlock, but also they form a relationship with each other through those decades of adventure. Like they become this unlikely pair of friends, I guess. Tell us about developing their relationship.
Jim Starlin: [01:16:13] I always thought that it was the Marvel characters. And then there were the outsiders. And, , at the time that I started, , Englehart and I sort of figured that Doctor Strange and, , Captain Marvel and was sort of the outsider characters, and Warlock definitely was an outsider. , so that they weren’t part of the institution. You know, the Avengers was the institution. These were outliers who just did their own things, often their own, , little bailiwicks. And so, , because of that, similarities between, , Warlock and Thanos. Warlock was stealing souls for the longest time. Basically, that that similarity would eventually, , create a rapport, if not a friendship. They respected each other, and, , they they exploited each other. Both of them. Did, you know, in the different stories and that. So, , from there can can create contempt, but it also can create, , bonding.
Alex Grand: [01:17:24] And it’s true. And I and I love the bond that they form. And it’s all kind of very unlikely and uncomfortable. Um, did you find that because they’re looking at almost, , they’re outsiders that are outside of kind of that mainstream Avengers X-Men storyline? They did a lot more freedom in sending them off in different directions.
Jim Starlin: [01:17:43] Yeah, for a writer, that was the freedom that they gave. , as characters, I thought the outside influences would change them from, , say, like The Avengers. They wouldn’t have the same outlook. , use that in some of the stories later on with the I think, crusade in that, that they’re working toward the same end with different, , paths that they’re taking to get there.
Alex Grand: [01:18:09] Tell us about the origin of the Infinity Stones. Um, kind of that whole folklore behind the stones and what they represent. And, and coming up with all that Gil.
Jim Starlin: [01:18:21] Kane and Roy Typekit, the soul gem, , for their run on Warlock, I expanded on what that was. And for the Avengers Annual, I needed, , power sources. So I just created a bunch of new stones and threw them in the story. Didn’t name them or anything like that later when I wanted to develop it into something more. , I broke it down into different aspects of existence, the power of the thought and so on and so on and so forth. It was basically, , coming back to, , Catholicism and, , my time at parochial school. I wanted to do a story where God is not this benevolent being out there. , God is a nasty son of a bitch who wants to kill off half the people in the universe. So that’s where that came from.
Alex Grand: [01:19:16] Basically, when you were making those infinity stories, you know, were those, , were those considered financially successful? I think you’re operating under that old contract, , for that early part of that.
Jim Starlin: [01:19:27] Yeah. We were getting incentive pay. So it was a profitable book. It still is. You know, um, basically, , just before we did the gauntlet. , Jim Shooter had him do a mini series called The Secret Wars, and everybody up at Marvel hated it. , they just. It interrupted their continuity. Everybody was pissed off about it. So when we did, , Infinity Gauntlet, everyone was thinking it was going to be the same thing. But I just wanted to write the story with the characters. I didn’t want them to have to do things in their own books. But, you know, editorial gave everybody because of the bad feeling. Defalco was now the editor in chief up there. , he said, you can have the option if you want to be, , connected to the book, you can link into it. And I remember Roy linked in on Doctor Strange and a few other people did. And so when the Infinity Gauntlet came out, it sold really well. And all the books that were connected to it got a boost in sales. , so we came along and we were going to do the war, and all of a sudden everybody wants to be connected up to the story. And at one point they said, well, you got to throw this guy named sleepwalker in it. And I went, Who is sleepwalker? Because it hadn’t had a book out. They said, oh, this is his new character we’re developing. And they gave me xeroxes of the pencils and said, you can work from that. I had no idea what the story was. I knew he could walk in the air. So when we got to the point where I had to throw him into the story, there’s two characters inside a building, and the sleepwalker walks past their window, and that’s his entire time he’s in that story. And so he got to connect in that way.
Alex Grand: [01:21:20] There was actually some incentive with the other editors and writers to to work it in, because it was seen as a lucrative thing to do.
Jim Starlin: [01:21:27] Yeah, it helped their sales. Yeah. It’s one of the books did that. , by the time we got to Crusade, there was every book was linking in, and I was doing the same thing with the Infinity Watch. , bringing that into the story and jumping back and forth between the Infinity Watch and the Infinity Crusade.
Alex Grand: [01:21:47] Drax the destroyer. I know there are some similarities with the doctor weird character. Um, tell us about creating Drax the Destroyer, because it seems to carry like this symbol of life. I kind of read that from the doctor. Weird. You know, miracle storyline. Tell us about that kind of relationship there.
Jim Starlin: [01:22:04] The connection is I ripped off my own costume. I redesigned Doctor Weird’s costume at Texas Trio, and, , pretty much just used it as, , change some colors in that and used it as Drax costume. , Drax was going to be, , Thanos Kryptonite. That’s why he’s green. , it was a, you know, definitely thinking about Superman at that point. , never was really happy with his. Persona. Until we got him into the Infinity Watch and I dumbed him down. Marvel had made the Hulk smart. So I figured Marvel needed always needed a big green dumb guy. So he became that over there. And I found his character at that point was is my favorite run on Drax. Um, the fact that they took the new Drax visually, but they sort of took the dumb Drax from the Infinity Watch for the movies I’m rather pleased with. I think that was a great combination.
Alex Grand: [01:23:12] Yeah. That’s true, that’s that’s great. And it’s funny. I don’t know why I never connected the 90s Drax with the movie Drax, but you’re right, it’s that same character and I love the Infinity Watch. I love that series.
Jim Starlin: [01:23:26] Yeah, that was fun. , you know, it’s, , sort of petered out as it went along. It was one of the only times I didn’t leave Marvel in a huff. I just I figured it was time to move on, and it went on for a little while after I left, but not too long as I recall.
Alex Grand: [01:23:43] What about creating Gamora? Was she in any way influenced by the green woman from Star Trek that 60s show?
Jim Starlin: [01:23:51] Absolutely not. , her origin is I started writing the series and, , realized I had a sausage fest there, and I said, I better throw in a female character. And being the politically correct creature that I am, I was in the studio with Alan Weiss, and Alan always had these skin books for reference. A lot of European skin books. And, , there was one where a pictorial section where this guy, this gal, is in a fishnet outfit with a big black wig on, and I thought, this is the character. And the funny thing was, the Spanish artist Esperanza maroto obviously saw the same pictorial. And so within a month or two, I forget which one of us came out first. Gomorrah and his creepy, eerie story. Whatever it was that hit, Maroto had used the same reference. They both came out and his looked much better, but mine lasted longer.
Alex Grand: [01:24:56] Then there is almost like another phase. You did what? Marvel Universe? The end. And then there was these more infinity stories after. And Thanos has what looks like a lot more dialogue in those stories.
Jim Starlin: [01:25:10] There was no supporting Captain Marvel or Warlock. They were just playing Thanos stories, you know? By that time, Marvel knew that I was just going to come back and do that, so they just let me do it.
Alex Grand: [01:25:20] What was your kind of mission statement in evolving Thanos consciousness? Even more at that point? Because he he doesn’t stay the same character Every time you go back to him, he’s evolving and learning new things, and referring to old stuff and growing and becoming more complex. Is that more a reflection of you doing the same, growing, becoming a more complex person? Did you grow along as Thanos grew?
Jim Starlin: [01:25:43] Yeah and I also examined what he was doing. I thought about there was one, the Infinity Abyss. I guess it was where there is all these clones of Thanos running around. And that was going back to he was Thanos, the Mad Titan. And what was the craziest thing I could come up with him to do? Duplicate himself in the most dangerous ways possible. Basically have to solve that off with Warlock. So, , to entertain is always the main goal. The secondary goal is to find that hook that will take them on their journey for this story, and examine something that I want to examine, you know, at that particular point in time. And so those stories were basically Variations of his day to day life going on and him changing as he went on, and continued on until I came back later on and did him with, you know, after the Marvel movies, I started doing the hardcover things, the hardcover editions of Thanos and drawing them myself, or Ron Lim or Alan Davis and, , those were those were all different stories to, , one of my particular favorite ones is The End, which is had as much pip in the heroes in it as it did Thanos, , had a great time with that, and much to my surprise, when they finally made it to the screen, they made it together.
Alex Grand: [01:27:11] Do you feel that the MCU version of Thanos, do you feel like that lives up to the Thanos that you created?
Jim Starlin: [01:27:18] Yeah, it’s not the letter of the law, but definitely the spirit of it. , you know, even the things that they varied on from the gauntlet. We’re from, , the Silver Surfer. You know, the whole thing of wanting to balance out the universe for overpopulation reasons was a scam that he did on the surfer back in, , in issue, just issue or two before we went to the gauntlet. I’ve kidded with the the Russo brothers that the only thing I didn’t like was the blue eyes. I always thought they should have been warmer, but, you know, I understand why they did it. There’s variations. If you think you’re going to get a carbon copy of what you write down, , when it gets turned over to a movie, you’re an absolute fool.
Alex Grand: [01:28:04] Free will seems to show up a lot, even in some of your later stuff. The Eternal Light Corporation, the interplanetary wars, even in breed, where Raymond Stoner, you know, maintains his identity despite his demonic traits. It seems like that’s coming up a lot of like the individual against almost this bullying, corrupting force. Do you feel like that’s what makes a good hero story?
Jim Starlin: [01:28:30] Having an opponent worthy of what your your main character is always mandatory. , I tried doing it differently. Most of the time, I would bring in supporting characters. , Brita was an exception. I wanted to do just internal dialogue as much as I could without him having any sidekick or any. He was the ultimate loner, as far as I was concerned. , basically it was. It’s always been, you know, you have the three plots man against man, man against nature, man against himself. And, , these were, , different ways of handling that man against man storyline.
Alex Grand: [01:29:12] So one thing that I noticed in a lot of your stories with death is that and you said it earlier, when that heroes can’t prevent all deaths from happening, they can minimize it and sometimes they can’t actually do anything about it at all. And death of the New Gods seems like where Superman is there trying to stop it all from happening, and he just leaves like he couldn’t do anything about what was happening to the New Gods. And a lot of your stuff, even Cosmic Odyssey. I mean, there are whole galaxies dying, and these heroes are just trying to put their finger in the dike and they can’t stop the flood. Tell us about that theme. And also, what was it that you wanted to bring that theme to Kirby’s Fourth World?
Jim Starlin: [01:29:55] I think there’s always limits on a character, you know? That’s why we gave them the yellow for Green Lantern and Kryptonite for Superman. And if they succeed all the time, there’s no drama. There’s no cost. Back in the 50s. Superman always saved the kid who falling off the building. Never once did he let him go. And, you know, get there a second. Too late and watch him squash. Um. Not real. The Kirby New Gods. Dessa was a another DC boondoggle. I took that on and it was supposed to be connected up to a thing that Grant Morrison was going to do afterwards. Grant kept on asking us to do things in the book, the lead up to it, , and Dan DiDio would pass it on to me like that merging of the apocalypse. And that was something John Byrne had already done. But they asked for that to be in there. So I did it. And then when Grant came out with his own book, he said, oh, I was never planning on connecting up to that. So, you know, all of this was and there was a lot of things. I’m not very proud of that book at all. You know that story? I think that was a mess that I suffered through along with that when I did with shooter for that other company. Sometimes these things just don’t work out. And I think the death deck of cards didn’t work out too well.
Alex Grand: [01:31:21] Who was your favorite editor besides Archie Goodwin?
Jim Starlin: [01:31:24] Bob Schreck was very good to work with. Roy was extremely good to work with. He was one of my top three. You know, I think those guys, you know, when Schreck left over at DC, everything sort of fell apart for me on that one.
Alex Grand: [01:31:39] You did some Captain Comet work over at DC, and. And I really like those stories, and.
Jim Starlin: [01:31:46] So did I! I thought I had a hit on that one. I thought we were going to go with that one for a bit. Then it got messed up.
Alex Grand: [01:31:51] So, so on that Captain Comet stuff. Were you a fan of that character, like when you were a kid?
Jim Starlin: [01:31:56] Every summer we would drive up to Torch Lake in Michigan, and I would sit in the back of the station wagon and books all the way up. And Captain Comet, , was one who showed up regularly because I bought most of my comics from a used bookstore. They’d sell them for a nickel apiece. And so I got a lot of Captain Comets, And originally, I wasn’t supposed to be doing Captain Combat. I was supposed to be doing Adam Strange. I had arranged it all with Dan DiDio, and then Dan calls me up while I’m in Leek. I was on Lake Michigan vacationing at that point and says, we can’t use Adam Strange because they just blinded him in crossover. So he’s he’s out. , why don’t you use Captain Combat? And I went, let me think about this. And, , so I took a walk down the beach with a joint, smoked it, thought about it, and by the time I got back to where I was staying, I had the whole story worked out, including Tyrone the Bulldog. , it just all all came pouring out. , I would have gone further with comet. , except they did the 52 and they changed it, and, , then Dan decided that every story, science fiction story had to have a million different characters into it. So the Thanagar War and, , whatever the bizarre Adventures was later on, they just it just kept getting harder and harder to do it.
Jim Starlin: [01:33:31] And, , comet kept getting pushed further and further in the background because we had to have Hawkwoman or Hawkman or, , gal from the Teen Titans, the one with all the hair. Sean Davis was the artist on it to begin with, and we never even got through the first mini series before they yanked him off to do something else. And Ron Lim came in and did a good job to finish it off. I like comet, I wasn’t a big fan when I was a kid. , he. From what I could read, he was never into service. He just called himself Captain Comet. So I got rid of that, you know? And, , I was going to turn him into a psychiatrist. , that was my plan. , I did a short story later on called , Mind Games, and that was basically where I wanted to take, , comet but never got the chance. And, , some other artists took comet, I think it was in Superman and used Captain Comet as a character in there, so there was nothing more I could do with it. He he didn’t exist anymore in the DC pantheon, so I never went back to him again. Mhm.
Alex Grand: [01:34:39] And it sounds like you were more of a Adam Strange fan then than Captain Comet.
Jim Starlin: [01:34:45] , he was my favorite. I loved that Carmine Infantino Murphy Anderson stuff from back in the 60s and that , so yeah, I always wanted to do him in the long run. Once I did get to do them, they changed his outfit. So I didn’t think it was as good as it was back then. I mean, that whole Flash Gordon streamlined outfit that, , Carmine had designed up, , I enjoyed much better than the. I always thought the new thing with the. He looked like a walking refrigerator. Yeah. So it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything I wanted to do as much as before.
Alex Grand: [01:35:19] Well, as you were kind of developing Thanos in the later era, it stopped. It. Did editorial at Marvel become more and more difficult? What exactly led to no more Thanos stories as of now?
Jim Starlin: [01:35:30] The movies were out. I called up and said, hey, we’ve got these movies with Thanos. How about I do a Thanos miniseries? No, we want somebody else to do it. Okay. , then later on, , suggested it again, and they, , said, no, we got this. , in fact, I called up the editor and he said, no, we got this guy, Danny Gates, who’s going to be doing the book. And, , then the editor begins to tell me the plot, and I’m sitting here going, well, that’s really similar to the plot I’m doing with Tom Brevoort. And I said, did you run this past Tom? And they said, oh yeah. And he approved. And I’m going, well, this is this is a lot like my plot. This is my story. And so, you know, I call up and I say, hey, this is what’s happening. And they just say, no, it’s not the same. You know, we didn’t do it. You did future Thanos before. And I said, no, I haven’t. And you know, this is what I’m doing now. This is what you’ve got on your desk. And they just wouldn’t change it. And so, , gave them a month. , they went with the story. I went and changed mine so it wouldn’t be, , as much like, , Donnie Gates’s. And, , I figured, , Tom had purposely went out to sabotage me. And so I said, I just can’t work under these conditions anymore, and I never will again.
Alex Grand: [01:37:04] Is age discrimination a thing in the comics industry?
Jim Starlin: [01:37:08] Younger guys than me were getting the stories that I thought I should have gotten, but it had to do as much for the fact that they were new names as anything else. And plus, you know, as you get older, you don’t do, you know, you do some of your best stuff when you’re young, you know, when you got all that fire in that. And though you may develop your craft and, , polish it up and make it better, , the energy that you have when you first starting off is really, , but I think fans like, you know, and, , I’m very proud of, , the dreadstar material I’m working on now. Very proud. But, , working with the talented Jamie Jamison on this, and, , but I look back and I just ran into Klaus Janson at a convention, and he came over and was talking about the artist collection of the Captain Marvel books they did back then, and just going on how much he liked them. And, , I went, yeah, you know, I just I had a lot of fire back then. So ageism, you know, there’s probably a bit of that, but, , you know, it has as much to do with what the medium is and what pop culture is than anything else, I think. I don’t think I’d have a good case for ageism lawsuit.
Alex Grand: [01:38:37] That young fire you’re talking about. Where did that fire came from? Was that internal? Were there external things that occurred to you or that happened to you that fed into that fire? What was what do you feel was the source of that fire personal experience?
Jim Starlin: [01:38:55] , you know, times, , wanted to be a cartoonist since I was eight years old. You know, I found Lee Elias’s signature hidden away on a in some shrubs in the Green Lantern backup store. Green arrow backup story. And, , you know, when I realized that somebody actually did this for a living, that’s what I wanted to do. After that, you know, nothing else mattered. So, , you know, , you are what happens around you and what you experience. And as an artist, that’s your source material. And so that’s basically the answer to that question.
Alex Grand: [01:39:38] You occupy an entire chapter in my book because when you know the the idealism of the superhero in the, in the 40s, , kind of the realistic science fiction that Julie Schwartz adds in the 50s, um, Marvel with, , Kirby, Ditko, Stan, they add, you know, really anxiety to the superhero and and you added a legitimate, um, fear of death to the superhero story. And all of these are escalating.
Jim Starlin: [01:40:07] I’m going to burn in hell for that, aren’t I? All right.
Alex Grand: [01:40:10] But you definitely added that each phase in that evolution of the superhero narrative, it’s adding more realism and the fear of death, you know? Was that next thing after the anxiety of the 60s? Um, then Alan Moore kind of did the the next stage, which is with after Fear of Death, comes the selfishness of the superhero, that they’re not a super person. How did you feel about Watchmen when that stuff was coming out and what he was bringing that that that selfish superhero?
Jim Starlin: [01:40:41] I enjoyed the hell out of that story. Um, you know, , I don’t think it’s ever going to get a a sufficiently good movie adaptation of it. I mean, they tried, but, you know, they went off and, , messed around with the ending and sort of killed the whole point of the story. Um, no. Alan’s, , one of my favorite comic book writers. You know, , I always found anything he did more than worth reading.
Alex Grand: [01:41:14] I want to say, you know, just as a young reader, but also for what you’ve done to superhero comics and what you’ve done for comic books and storytelling in general, you’ve expanded the consciousness of generations of readers with with the work you did, the cosmic consciousness of, of just comic book storytelling in general. And and I and I really want to thank you for everything you’ve done, for the positive impact you’ve had on me, and to millions of people who’ve who’ve enjoyed your stories. And I want to say thank you.
Jim Starlin: [01:41:43] And I want to thank you back, say thank you back to all the folks who read these things kept me alive. You guys may have gotten entertained and maybe inspired occasionally, but I got to eat. I think I win.
Transcript from Jim Starlin Biographical Interview part 2 by Alex Grand:
Alex Grand: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Comic Book Historians Podcast. We have part two of our Jim Starlin biographical interview. Jim, thanks so much for joining us today.
Jim Starlin: [00:00:09] Yeah. It’s fine. Yeah. How are you doing before we.
Alex Grand: [00:00:11] Go along into kind of filling in some really fascinating details of your life? First, let’s talk about what are the new Adventures of Dreadstar. And from what I understand, there’s a Kickstarter involved. Tell us about.
Jim Starlin: [00:00:23] That. I came back to Dreadstar a couple of years ago, and we’ve produced two graphic novels. Dreadstar Returns and Dreadstar Versus the Inevitable, and we are about to do the Kickstarter for the third one, which is Dreadstar versus Dreadstar, back years ago at Malibu. There was a version of Dreadstar. It was a female version that Peter David wrote and Ernie Colon drew. I decided to revisit that story and what we were doing in the Kickstarter. We’re offering her in a collected version of Peter and Ernie’s Malibu, Dreadstar, and we’re doing a new story involving Karla Dreadstar Dreadstar his Sarah’s daughter. We’re doing sort of a Rashomon thing, where it’s Peter and Ernie’s story is the Lord. Paypal’s version of what goes on the new book is Dreadstar versus Dreadstar. Is Dreadstar telling Willow exactly what happened, at least from his point of view. We’ll have two completely different stories here. There are some similarities, bits by piece, but for the most part, it’s a whole different story than what it was originally.
Alex Grand: [00:01:25] So how was that for you? You know, expanding on the storyline, the universe of Dreadstar, but also expanding on your own very already advanced storytelling abilities? How do you make those choices?
Jim Starlin: [00:01:37] We didn’t have the computers that we have now when we were doing Dreadstar before, and so there’s a whole range of things that I’m doing with the storytelling and the art that I just couldn’t have done in the old days. I have a central character on a page, and behind him is his death. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You know, it has driven me nuts to have to draw or paint down xeroxes in the old days. This time I’ll be able to just color it and then take that little candle and duplicate it behind the main figure over and over again, showing this guy’s death continuously happening over and over and over again. And the color range is another thing. And now we have these Kickstarters so they can avoid working with the two major companies, which is always a blessing. Monkey Wrench Press, which is my publisher, will be announcing sometime in the coming week the previews to the Kickstarter. You’re my first interview on this. Woo hoo! All right. We will be, uh, opening up the Kickstarter within a week or so after that, and people can come in. We’re also doing dreadstar going over to Dark Horse, also the hardcovers that we’re doing. They will start doing the softcover editions, and we will be getting into the comic book shops. Finally, I’ve done up covers for the first three omnibuses, and one of our bonus features is going to be we’re going to do lithographs of the pencils, and those are giveaways for people who hit a certain category or something on the Kickstarter. I’m not exactly sure how all that works, but that’s that’s Chris’s department.
Alex Grand: [00:03:16] It seems like you’re doing a good job of keeping up with the times and different distribution channels, different ways of putting out almost kind of the special order stuff through the Kickstarter, but also going through the traditional as well through Dark Horse. So you’re kind of hitting different sides. How have you found Kickstarter? Has it been helpful in the past? Well, our.
Jim Starlin: [00:03:37] First one, Jujitsu Returns, was through ominous, the previous company that was my publisher, and, uh, that one got kind of messed up. Everyone was complaining. It just took forever to get the things. Uh, Chris over at Monkey Wrench is going to be a whole different story. We’ve already done Inevitable. It came out fairly smoothly. You know, a couple of hiccups because it was his first time off. I think we’ve got it down to a much more smoothly running machine now. I suspect once we get the pledges in and send the thing off to the printer, all we have to do, the only thing that’s going to hold us up is getting it back from China, where they all printed these days.
Alex Grand: [00:04:14] The love of storytelling. You know, you’ve had this, it looks like, since you were a kid. Looking at Lee Elias comic strips, wanted to be a cartoonist and tell stories. Is that just kind of a lifelong obsession? Is that just something you can’t ever imagine giving up?
Jim Starlin: [00:04:29] Yeah, I mean, I toyed with the idea of becoming a paperback illustrator at one point, you know, doing covers and that. But it’s the stories I really love. I want to be able to create a different world, a different adventure, different characters for people to enjoy and think about. I tried to do stories that have an element that will make you think about it afterwards. You know, that’s my goal. I just don’t want to entertain. I also want to, you know, say, okay, gee, I wonder if he did it this way instead. Yeah. The storytelling has always been my mainstay. The illustration and the art are augmentations to the storytelling. They’re not my actual goal. I’m not I’m not going to end up in the Louvre anywhere, or the metro in New York. I’m I’m a I’m a storyteller. It’s the books that are important to me.
Alex Grand: [00:05:21] Has Dreadstar matured as a character, like the way you’ve matured as a person? Does your storytelling and your characterization become, in a way, a mirror of yourself in any way?
Jim Starlin: [00:05:34] Well, I decided when we were going to bring back Dreadstar, I was going to bring it back 25 years later, just like it’s been about 20 some odd years since I had worked on it before. And so I gave a time lag. And, uh, the first part of the Dreadstar returns is finding out where everybody’s been. You know, Willow is still running things as a disembodied, cybernetic leader of the what is now called the Willow consortium. Uh, hundreds of planets under her rule. Uh, Eddie’s a cop. Uh, two tons. Uh, sometimes cop when he doesn’t get fired. And Eddie hired him back. Uh, fixes around still and dreadstar who his original concept was that he was an anarchist without a second act. And so, um, it’s 20 years later, and he’s finally found a use for that urge of his to overthrow, uh, unjust governments. And, uh, he just doesn’t leave him in shambles anymore. He allows him to come into the consortium. So he’s sort of a recruiter these days. Not like the ones that down at the marine recruiting office. It’ll tell you. Yeah, we’ll make you a pilot. And then next thing you know, you’re, uh, you’re cleaning dishes. Uh, he’s a recruiter who, uh, overthrows the government and gives them the option to come in. And just when it looks like everything is going to be keeping working, fine, we get our danger element in.
Jim Starlin: [00:07:06] And it’s something from the past. In the first book that, uh, nobody saw coming. And, uh, from a character that nobody ever expected to see again. So, uh, it was kind of interesting doing that one. And the second book was my pandemic book, basically, Jamie, my anchor, Jamie Jamieson, was very sick with Covid the first time, the first book through, and, uh, took us forever to get to done. The second time around, she’s a little bit better off. It was inspired by Covid. It was, you know, dreadstar versus the inevitable and coming to terms with the fact that even as powerful a character as he, he’s got to have points where he has to accept that there’s just nothing more he can do. He can’t win them all. And Dresser. Versus dresser will be a family drama, you know, a dysfunctional family drama. We’re done with the fourth book. I’m done with the pencils. Jamie’s inking it right now. Where’s Dreadstar? Which is basically Dreadstar disappears for a book out of his own book. And the final one, which I’m in the midst of penciling right now. In fact, here’s a page from it behind me. Beautiful. It was originally supposed to be called Dreadstar and omnipotence, but it’s now, I think I’m going to call it Dreadstar and the Good Death.
Alex Grand: [00:08:24] Yeah. I love it. More Jim Starlin death. I always read your stuff. Especially if death is involved in some way.
Jim Starlin: [00:08:30] This is a real freak out on the fifth one here. I’m having a great time because even though each of the books has been an individual story, they’ve all been leading up to this book.
Alex Grand: [00:08:42] Oh, wow.
Jim Starlin: [00:08:43] And I’m having a hell of a time trying to put it all together. I got 50 pages of it put up, and, uh, I’m trying to. I’m constantly pulling pages out and renumbering them because I want to get this story just right. And it’s it involves everything from, uh, new, new creation myth to, uh, godlike powers, omnipotence. Uh, uh, family matters again, and, uh, a number of other things that are just, uh, I had left enough loose ends where I have to all tie them off here in the last book, and it’s it’s turning out to be quite a challenge. Amazing.
Alex Grand: [00:09:19] Like what the Russo brothers did with endgame having to converge like, a bunch of different things. And that’s that’s not easy. But the punch line, I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. And I’m I’m really looking forward to it.
Jim Starlin: [00:09:29] Everybody go off to Monkey Wrench Publications and get into our Kickstarter for the third Dreadstar, and you can get the the previous Dreadstar books over there too. There’s my pitch. I got I had to make sure I got that in at the end.
Alex Grand: [00:09:43] There’s some questions that I kind of last time I thought, oh, I should have asked that. And so again, I’m going to go kind of chronological just to make it, um, kind of a smoother way of doing it. But curious, when you were a kid, um, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, did you watch any of that stuff?
Jim Starlin: [00:09:59] Well, I don’t remember. Yeah, both of those, you know, if they had anything to do with science fiction, Forbidden Planet, all those early science fiction and horror things, uh, if they were available. Uh, when I was a kid, we used to go to the theaters on Saturday afternoons for a quarter, and you would get two horror films, and, uh, I would always get on my bike and drive on down to the Royal Oak Theater and, uh, catch the monster matinees.
Alex Grand: [00:10:24] We talked about child stars, and we talked about young adult Starling entering the Navy. But teenage Starling we didn’t talk about before. And from what I understand, there is the Detroit mob and the comic conventions. When you were a teenager and you were friends with Al Milgrom, uh, Rich Buckler, I.
Jim Starlin: [00:10:41] Only knew Al Milgrom. I didn’t meet most of the rest of these guys until just before, until after I got out of the service. And I was just about ready to go to New York. That’s when I met Rich Buckler, Arvell Jones, Keith Pollack, uh, Greg Theakston, and a whole bunch of folks that were from the Detroit area. But no, Milgrom was my one contact with the fandom. He was going to conventions while I was in the service, and I remember him hauling me off to one just afterwards, and Russ Heath was a guest. Milgrom was immediately running over to have him sign things, and I said, I don’t want to bother the guy, you know? I mean, I had no idea what these conventions were all about at all.
Alex Grand: [00:11:23] Oh that’s interesting. Okay. So in the Detroit mob, although people have been you guys have been put in that really your friendship more was with Al Milgrom and it wasn’t really in comic convention fandom yourself, it sounds like.
Jim Starlin: [00:11:35] No, no, no, I never went to one of these until after I got out of the service. Wish I knew who Jerry bails was, who was a big comic book person down in the Detroit area. And I believe Milgrim and I went to visit him one time when we were teenagers. And there was Mike. Mike Vosburg. Rather, I knew him also from Pontiac. Milgrim had connected up with him through some fan outlet, and we hitchhiked out to his place in Pontiac one time, uh, you know, which is about 16 miles out of Detroit.
Alex Grand: [00:12:05] What year would you say that probably was?
Jim Starlin: [00:12:09] Probably around 67, 68, something like that. Just prior to my going and graduating and going into the service.
Alex Grand: [00:12:14] Okay. Yeah, that’s actually part of that fandom era is kind of around that time. A little bit earlier. But really going into 67, that’s great. Dave Cockrum We didn’t really talk about him last time, but from what I understand, I think there’s a shared Navy background. Is that correct? But tell me about you and Dave Cockrum.
Jim Starlin: [00:12:33] I didn’t know Dave all that well. I did a couple conventions with him. Uh, I remember we had one up in Toronto, but, uh, you know, we met a few times, but I didn’t really know him all that well.
Alex Grand: [00:12:45] And did you guys interact much in the 70s at Marvel?
Jim Starlin: [00:12:48] He ain’t one of the Captain Marvel issues that I did. Didn’t see him at all during that time. His wife worked up at Marvel. Patsy I think her name was. And, uh, I would run into her occasionally and ask how Dave was, but, uh, there wasn’t really much socialization. In fact, it was kind of strange that I think about it because there was much of a social scene among the young artists. Uh, when we first came in there, uh, we used to have First Fridays at Frank and Jan Brunner’s place up in the Dikeman area in Manhattan, where everybody would come together, get drunk, and show each other their artwork and egos would explode. Uh, it was fun. Um, but I don’t remember Dave at many of those things or at all. Any of them, now that I think about it.
Alex Grand: [00:13:34] Who would you say were kind of your closer pals in the 70s at Marvel while you guys were working there.
Jim Starlin: [00:13:41] That would be Milgrom and Alan Weiss. Uh, Steve Englehart. Uh, we used to hang out quite a bit together, go to shows, uh, you know, uh, just wander around town, uh, coming up with ideas, going off to a Halloween party’s over in, uh, someplace in Connecticut, uh, famous Halloween party. I can’t remember the name of the town. Um.
Alex Grand: [00:14:06] Oh, uh, the Halloween party. Are you talking about the, um.
Jim Starlin: [00:14:10] Rutland, Vermont?
Alex Grand: [00:14:11] Yeah. That’s right, the Rutland Parade and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. How were those, uh, Halloween parties there?
Jim Starlin: [00:14:17] They were pretty wild. I remember only going to. One of them had a good time. My girlfriend at the time came along, and, uh, we had a pretty good, fun time. Steve. Uh, skates. I hung around with quite a bit. He was a writer, in fact, uh, Steve and I shared an apartment in Manhattan for a while. There was a lot of that going on, Milgrom and Simonson shared an apartment for a while. Uh, you know, everyone was trying to get by on the meager funds we were getting paid for all this work we were doing.
Alex Grand: [00:14:46] When you were doing the those kind of Marvel UK covers, like Mighty World of Marvel, you had different editors guiding you along that. And were you getting coaching on layouts, things like that, and do you feel like you were kind of developing a style while you were doing that early stuff?
Jim Starlin: [00:15:01] Didn’t get a lot of coaching. Um, these were reprint books that they were doing over in England. They would just tell me what was going to be in that book, and I would, uh, sketch up a sketch, you know, do up a sketch of what I wanted to do and then sit down and pencil it. Uh, you know, it was it was a real back burner job. It was something that nobody else wanted to do. So there wasn’t a lot of scrutiny involved. In fact, as it went along, I started farming out. And this is something I don’t do all that often, was farming out some of the work I do on a layout and milgrim. And I remember Bill Dubay at one point he had the editor over at Marvel, over at Warren Magazines, Creepy and Eerie. He finished it off at least one cover, did a couple of them that way. They were just, you know, um, they were money making things that I did between doing pages of Captain Marvel or Shang Chi along that period. Just prior to that, I think Captain.
Alex Grand: [00:16:00] Marvel, you know, you created Nitro.
Jim Starlin: [00:16:03] He was a joke, you know, I thought, what is the most stupid power he could have blowing yourself up?
Alex Grand: [00:16:09] It’s still really interesting because there’s almost like a terroristic aspect to a villain like that. When you did that story and. And Captain Marvel grabs that gas container, right? That’s what was the explanation for him later. You know, having the cancer that he had in in the death of Captain Marvel. Did you intend for that panel? Him holding that to for that to give him cancer at that moment or did that come later?
Jim Starlin: [00:16:39] That came later. I went back and looked at the final issue and saw that thing and said, well, that’s where he got it. That’s his cigarette.
Alex Grand: [00:16:46] Of course, you said last time this was related to your father’s experience and you, you know, reconciling that. But as far as the the origin of the cancer itself, um, did you what kind of cancer did Marvel have? Did did you ever.
Jim Starlin: [00:17:05] I never specified wondering what it was one way or the other, because alien biology. I figured I should leave it rather nebulous.
Alex Grand: [00:17:12] Did you have any particular one in mind?
Jim Starlin: [00:17:14] My father, when he had it, he ended up with multiples. So there was no saving him. So, uh. Uh, no, I didn’t have anything. It was. Wasn’t lymph node, wasn’t lung, wasn’t, uh, prostate. It was just, you know, an overall spread throughout the body.
Alex Grand: [00:17:32] A multi system kind of.
Jim Starlin: [00:17:33] Being not a medical doctor I figured I had to keep it kind of loose.
Alex Grand: [00:17:38] You mentioned your friendship with Steve Englehart. You guys co-created a masters of Kung Fu together. Tell us about creating Shang Chi.
Jim Starlin: [00:17:49] It all started off with the Kung Fu TV series. The first season of the Kung Fu TV series with David Carradine was just terrific. They had this guy named Furia, I think his name was. And he was a, I believe, what would be called a showrunner now and was doing a lot of writing. And, uh, after he left the series went really downhill fast. But that first season, we were just inspired by it, and Englehart and I wanted to do a comic book version of the series. And so we went over to Warner Brothers DC, uh, which is owned by Warner Brothers at the time and said, we’d like to do this thing. And they said, no, we’re not interested. This kung fu shit is not going to last. You know, it’s a flash in the pan, but we really like you to do this thing called the Scarlet Pirate. And I went, oh no, I don’t think pirates are my thing. And as I recall, the Scarlet Pirate lasted about two issues before it disappeared. Pirate comics were never going to be the big thing, I don’t think. But somebody had that idea that they were on their way in. So we went over to Marvel and said, we’d like to do something like this. And so Roy Thomas, the editor, said, start putting it together. Worked a lot with Stan on this particular thing. He approved the costume finally, which was basically just a guy with some symbols on it.
Jim Starlin: [00:19:07] We ended up having Fu Manchu grafted onto the project. I thought it was Stan who had bought the rights, but turned out later on I found out it was Roy. He bought the rights to Fu Manchu, and so we sort of put him in as the Yellow Claw kind of character, which was, I think what we were going to do originally was dig it that old character out or something like that. Uh, or maybe we were making up a new one entirely, I can’t recall, but Fu Manchu got pulled into it. And, uh, when the first book came out, Larry Hama, he came up and asked me, have you ever read a Fu Manchu book? And I went, well, no. And the next day he brought in a Fu Manchu book, gave it to me, and I went home and read it, and it was just horrifying. They’re the most racist things. I mean, they are. You gotta give em a give em a little bit of slack preachers. They are books of their time, but still, uh, you know, nobody but the white English were worth keeping alive in those books. And, uh, so that’s why I didn’t last. It was the main reason I didn’t last on Shang Chi more than the three issues. I just said, I don’t really want to do this. And besides, I wanted to do Captain Marvel more. Rather do spaceships in city streets?
Alex Grand: [00:20:29] Yeah, right. Were you a fan of Bruce Lee?
Jim Starlin: [00:20:32] I enjoyed his movies, you know. Was that a rabid fan? Like, uh, some folks? Uh, no posters on my walls or anything like that. But I enjoyed the few movies he did. And, uh, I used to live on 44th Street in Manhattan, and 42nd Street was two blocks over where all the theaters were. I was really in the in the red light district of Manhattan at that point. It was cheap rents. And, uh, so, uh, Alan Weiss would haul me off, uh, regularly to movies, and he was the one that actually got me into kung fu movies. Uh, so you got to come see that, you know, this is this is really cool. So, you know, we’d go over and, uh, spend an afternoon matinee, uh, watching people kick the shit out of each other. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:21:18] Did you get ideas for, uh, comic fight choreography from those movies?
Jim Starlin: [00:21:22] Yeah, it’s a bit. But you know, in the comics, you have a frozen moment. Howard Chaykin once pointed out to me that he and I had different moments. We picked. He always picked the moment of the act, and I always picked the moment the second. Afterwards, if my person was being punched, the other guy was flying across the room, and I’d never thought about the time sequences. And I began giving me a different ideas on how I would go about using time in freeze frame.
Alex Grand: [00:21:54] Yeah. Because I noticed your death of Captain Marvel has great, some great fight choreography in that as well. In some scenes that aren’t about the humanity stuff. There’s some fight stuff in there. And I noticed that that felt very martial arts y. Some of that stuff.
Jim Starlin: [00:22:08] I was doing Captain Marvel when the kung Fu series first came out. And so, yes, I was being very influenced by what I was seeing in these films and that, and I was taking him from being a warrior to being a holy man. And so it was sort of a journey, like a Shaolin priest getting indoctrinated into the into the merits of looking at the world in a certain way.
Alex Grand: [00:22:34] Yeah. Space karate, which is kind of a George Lucas kind of does later. But you did it first, right?
Jim Starlin: [00:22:39] Not too far apart. Synchronicity.
Alex Grand: [00:22:42] Fans will say this, that. Oh, this happened here. This happened here. You don’t know what’s true sometimes, but there are some stories circulating around that. One time in the 70s, something with editorial. There was a gun involved. Do you know anything about this? Is this. Did this not occur?
Jim Starlin: [00:22:58] I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Alex Grand: [00:22:59] Okay.
Jim Starlin: [00:23:00] Editorial. Get involved. Not me.
Alex Grand: [00:23:03] Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.
Jim Starlin: [00:23:05] I never brought a gun into the office.
Alex Grand: [00:23:07] That’s what I figured. The 70s. You know, we’ve talked about it before. The. There was something about different figures had died, and death was in the air. It was also kind of the era where the most serial killers were operating at the same time. There was something odd. There was an unusual prevalence of death in the media and whatnot as you were living in that era in real time, you know. What was your impression of seeing a lot of that weird stuff on the news?
Jim Starlin: [00:23:37] Well, I was living in Manhattan when the Son of Sam was around. Our favorite nominee for being the Son of Sam was Jim Shooter because of his name. It was a time when you were becoming more aware of things that had been taboo to talk about before then, uh, incest was something that came up and something that I used inside Dreadstar series. I had a sort of a passing relationship with a serial killer back in high school. Uh, there was a fellow named Byron. And, uh, when I was back in junior high, uh, this Woman who lived two blocks away from us was killed. She was murdered, and her husband eventually was convicted of this. But there was always a handprint, a bloody handprint that didn’t match up with him. And it was like 20 years later, they finally identified the handprint. And it was with this guy Byron, who I went to school with, uh, seemed like an innocuous he. I came off much more menacing than he did by a long shot. Most of the friends, my friends were much more. He was more buttoned down. But, uh, it turned out he was. After high school, he started going around Michigan, uh, picking up hitchhikers and killing them. Well, got a good sized count, too. They don’t. Never figured out what. And, uh, it turned out that he and another two guys had murdered, uh, the woman down the street from me, and eventually they had to release the guy who her husband who had been unconvicted. The local police chief, to this day, I think, still claims that he was the one that did it, even though all the science shows that he didn’t. And I believe Byron actually confessed that at least that one at that point. He did it with two other guys who had long ago either been killed or in jail for prison for other crimes.
Alex Grand: [00:25:39] That’s a wild, uh, that’s a real close proximity story there to write.
Jim Starlin: [00:25:45] A book about it. But, uh, it was just always too, too much conflicting stuff and going back to high school reunions and talking to people. And I was shocked. I mean, I talked to two women who knew that they had killed these people 20 years before, and they had never said anything. Yeah. Yeah. So I just eventually abandoned that project.
Alex Grand: [00:26:09] Wow. You might be able to work that into some science fiction, uh, story. Some sort of murder mystery thing.
Jim Starlin: [00:26:16] I’ve had a few. I’ve had a few serial killers in the books as I’ve worked my serial killers out.
Alex Grand: [00:26:21] You have? Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [00:26:23] That two ton lands on one at one point. And the Dreadstar story.
Alex Grand: [00:26:26] Yeah. Because that’s the same area. As, you know, Zodiac killer was doing some things. John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, even Jeffrey Dahmer’s first murder was in 78. So it was just an odd decade. And it’s interesting that you had this proximity like that.
Jim Starlin: [00:26:41] And I think once again, it was technology that was bringing this stuff to the front. Up until that point, up until like the 50s and 60s, we didn’t have teletypes. I mean, there was no computers in that. And so a person could, like Byron, could go along for years, uh, preying on people without anybody being aware that they were linked up. Uh, you know, he’d kill somebody over in one county. And whenever the urge hit him next, he would go over two counties over and do it. And the people never put it together. And it was only when the the use of computers, early computers that they were able to correlate some of this stuff, and they began to realize that serial killers were something that actually existed. Yeah. You know, and they they’ve existed for, you know, I mean, we had Jack the Ripper back in the 1890s, and before that, there was a guy over in Europe, in Russia, who had an astounding body count before they ever caught him. I mean, it was literally close to 100 people he killed before anyone caught on, that he was going around murdering people.
Alex Grand: [00:27:46] Albert Fish and some weird people kind of in the early 20th century. Maybe it’s just detection, but it just seems like there’s a lot more after the 60s and in the 70s and then a little bit less, but still kind of a lot. Do you feel like media TV has just increased detection, or has it also increased motivation?
Jim Starlin: [00:28:06] Well, it’s also the increased population. We have more people alive today than have died ever before. I mean, everyone who’s ever. You know, it would be if the zombies came back. It would be a pretty fair fight. At this point. We’re pretty evenly matched. Um, so there’s more so many more people now. And so there’s twisted chromosomes or whatever it is that causes these people to be the way they are. There’s just more of them now. I think culturally, also, there’s a there’s a much more acceptance of the psychopath. Um, there was one survey recently that survey or study or something that said, like 80% of the CEOs and major companies are could be easily qualified as sociopaths, which is just a wafer thin distance from being a psychopath. Right.
Alex Grand: [00:29:03] It’s like that American Psycho movie. Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [00:29:06] Yeah. So, uh, you know, I mean. Any machine that gets complex, the more complex it becomes, the more likely it’s going to have trouble. And I think the human race is getting to that point easily.
Alex Grand: [00:29:20] Yeah. It’s interesting. Yeah, I agree there’s a weird more mutations, more offshoots, more aberrant or deviant things kind of start to pop out of the machinery. You’re right. And we’re going to return back to that a bit when we talk about breed later. But um, but staying on chronology, uh, tell us about creating, uh, co-creating Korvac in 1975.
Jim Starlin: [00:29:41] Yeah. Korvac. Uh, you know, he was a throwaway. He just was something in the defenders story. I believe it was. He was a guy in a box with a wheel underneath him. And, uh, actually, Korvac is much more somebody. Something you ought to talk to Jim Shooter about, because I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t really remember much of anything he did with the Korvac afterwards, because I just threw him out there and they ever use them. I’ll get a check from the movie people, but I don’t really remember much about them. I had a look when when I settled with Marvel on the paperwork. When Disney took over Marvel, they realized they were missing a lot of paperwork. They sent me a list of the characters I had created, and there was a couple of them I had, and I said, you know, I didn’t do anything with this. And who’s this? Korvac? And they explained to me and I went back and looked it up and went, oh, okay. That’s interesting credit on that one.
Alex Grand: [00:30:33] Hey, I think Gerber, Len Wein and you put that together.
Jim Starlin: [00:30:37] It was for Defenders Annual. That’s what it was. And I just did layouts on it. And I remember Jim Mooney finishing it off. The only thing I really remember with the story is that Daredevil cheats at the end, when he’s doing the flip of the coin with the Grandmaster. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [00:30:52] Upstart associates, you had referred to the studio of you taking my Eric Simonson, you know, sharing a studio, bouncing some ideas, working in that space. But how did that start? What was the origin of Upstart Associates?
Jim Starlin: [00:31:09] Well, I had just come back from California and, uh, ended up getting an apartment out in Queens. And, uh, I didn’t really get to see that many folks out that way. You know, it was, uh, limited income, and I had to take what I could get. And so, um, I think it was, uh, Chaiken who started talking about doing a studio together. Uh, Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Barry Smith and Mike Ludlow had one a few blocks over from where we ended up. Seemed like a great idea. And we went hunting around and, uh, found this place in the garment district, I believe at the beginning it was Walt Howard, myself and Val Mayerick who first started in. We didn’t have any, uh, real electrical outlets or anything. So I went through and I actually, uh, jury rigged up a lot of electricity, which is probably really dangerous. There was a lot of, uh, uh, electrical tape, uh, involved in it. And in fact, at one point, some electrician came in years later and looked at it and went, man, I’m surprised you guys haven’t burnt down by now. Uh, but, you know, we we had a big space. It was, uh. Oh, something like 50ft by 100ft. I mean, it was we had plenty of room there, and we each took a quarter.
Jim Starlin: [00:32:29] We built a dark room off in one corner, and, uh, Simonson built up this huge wall of bookshelves around himself, which I was sitting next to him. So I had a nice private nook all by myself there, too, because of his dividers. And, uh, Chaikin was right across from me, and, uh, we were both getting into painting at that point. He started off ahead of me, and so I picked up a lot of things on how to do the Metamorphosis Odyssey by just seeing what he was doing on the stars. My destination that was over there on this other side of the room, and he was our karate expert after all sorts of other things and comic book artists. And Walter was the talker. He got a job where he was doing an adaptation of the alien movie with Archie Goodwin, and he would talk about it all the time. And when I finally went to see the movie, I was the only person in the audience not jumping out of their seat because he had told me every minute of the movie before I got there. And Walter, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:33:32] So it was spoiled.
Jim Starlin: [00:33:33] For, you know, jaws for moments for me on that one.
Alex Grand: [00:33:36] Yeah. Going into kind of the 80s more, you worked with Jim Aparo on on Batman?
Jim Starlin: [00:33:42] Yes.
Alex Grand: [00:33:42] How was working with Jim Aparo specifically? And when you got Batman, what was kind of your mission statement with him as a character and the personification of Bruce Wayne? Batman kind of all in one.
Jim Starlin: [00:33:56] I quit Marvel or something for some reason. And, uh, Danny O’Neil, the editor, asked me if I would do a fill in issue, and he liked it and asked me if I would do another one. And after about the third one, I said, am I a regular writer on Batman now? And he said, we’ll see, we’ll see. I always thought that going out and fighting crime in a black and gray outfit, while you bring along a teenager who’s in primary colors, um, a little problematic, let’s say child endangerment. And so I never wanted to use Robin in the story. So I always tried to work him out or not put him in at all. And so occasionally, uh, Danny would say, you got to put Robin in the story. And so I’d do a story where looks like Robin’s a murderer at the end because nobody liked this. Robin. Apparently, right from the beginning, nobody liked, uh, Tim Drake or whatever his name was.
Alex Grand: [00:34:46] Oh, Jason.
Jim Starlin: [00:34:47] Todd, Jason Todd, whatever his name. Tim Drake was another one, wasn’t he?
Alex Grand: [00:34:50] Yeah, he was later.
Jim Starlin: [00:34:51] Yeah, he was later. Okay, I’ve mixed up my dead Robin’s. Uh, when Denny came up with the idea of doing the call in thing on Robyn’s desk. I had been lobbying to get rid of Robyn for a long time before then, so I went along with that one quite readily. As far as working with Jim Aparo. Jim and I did our entire run of Batman without ever having laid eyes on each other. Uh. Never spoke. I turned in a script that went to Danny. Danny sent it off to Jim, who was up in Connecticut, who would, uh, pencil, ink and letter a page a day. That was Jim’s, uh, fame, claim to fame. And so, uh, he was just this terrific artist who, uh, you know, uh, didn’t know, had no association with. But he was giving me these terrific Batman stories, so I had no reason to complain. I also had, uh, Bernie Wrightson to work with on a number on the Cult Batman series, which was one of my pleasures. I mean, working with Bernie was so much fun all the time. Yeah, we lived near each other. In fact, I’ll tell a story about this. We we did the cult. And one of the things with Bernie is you had to stop by once a week or so and look over the pages and tell him how great they were looking. And because they were I mean, this was not like me having to stroke somebody’s mad ego.
Jim Starlin: [00:36:13] It was just to keep him interested. And this is how you got work out of Bernie and Ron Marz was also living in the area. And so we we between the three of two of us, we got like about five different books out of it. And when we did The Cult, it was their best selling book over at DC. So we went over to DC, we wanted to do a sequel. They said, no, we want Bernie to do a Swamp Thing story with Len Wein. It made sense, except that Len lived in LA and Bernie lived in New York. And I said, you’re never going to get this story out of him. And they said, no, I will do it. We’ll manage it. Well, of course, he got ten pages into the project and he quit. So we took the Batman cult sequel, and we changed it into a Punisher story, and we took it over to Marvel and they bought it. The POV because after Bernie quit at Marvel, they were all at DC on the Swamp Thing thing. They weren’t going to do it over there. They were pissed off at me for something or other at the time too. So we we did it as a Punisher story, which was challenging because Batman has some personality and the Punisher doesn’t.
Alex Grand: [00:37:16] So you adapted it a bit to fit that character.
Jim Starlin: [00:37:19] We had to fill up the side characters more. There was more side characters than there are the Punisher in that story.
Alex Grand: [00:37:24] And the Cult. It’s really dark. So it seemed to me that you really wanted to confront Batman one on one against some really dark, intensely, you know, just murderous bad guys. I think it made Batman, you know, almost kind of scary to read. You didn’t know what kind of psycho he was going to face next.
Jim Starlin: [00:37:43] Frank Miller had done a bit of that before me, you know, I mean, with his Dark Knight series. And basically that’s where Batman came from. He was a dark, mysterious, scary character. You know, before they threw Robin in there, some of those early Batman stories were kind of ghoulish for 1940s comics. In fact, I always thought it was kind of interesting. Bob Kane, who created with the Bill finger, he had a piece of the action. And so when they had that 1960s Batman show coming on, he had to go out there and say, oh yeah, I love it. I love it, even though it’s a complete antithesis of what he had created. He was just glad to be getting some another check on it. But, uh, was I was going into to watch the Infinity War. I was thinking about Kane and that because Joe Russo had contacted me for about two weeks before the movie and said 45 minutes of the Thanos stuff that we had planned in the Infinity War, we had to scrap the studio. Just wasn’t doesn’t want to have that much without the Avengers. And I went, oh my God, that’s going to turn it into the Justice League movie. So I was thinking about, as I’m sitting there walking in the line to go to the premiere and going, okay, I better practice this. I love it. Oh yes, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. Five minutes into the movie, as soon as the Hulk shows up, I said, I don’t have to fake anything. I really love this thing. Yeah, yeah, it worked out just fine.
Alex Grand: [00:39:16] Another thing, you also worked with Bernie on The Weird at DC. It’s an interesting story. I’ve read it, I like it, it’s science fiction. It’s a strange story. Tell me about creating the weird with Bernie Wrightson.
Jim Starlin: [00:39:27] Well, I had this idea and I did a sketch of what the character should look like. I designed most of it. Bernie came back and he gave it more opera gloves. I had him more tight fitting, so he turned it into a much more interesting looking character by doing the folds and that into it. It was a difficult book because at that time, Marvel has always been do anything you can to make money. Dc, on the other hand, almost seems like they go out of their way to just sabotage whatever they do. Uh, at that point, uh, every editor was sort of a fiefdom unto themselves. So as we started working on the weird story, we wanted the Justice League, who was in there, and Superman. The whole idea was that these macro lots who were the bad aliens, they were going to take over Superman, and the original idea was going to be Superman and Captain Marvel fighting the rest of the Justice League, and the weird has to end up defeating them. Editor’s up at said, no, I don’t think we can use Captain Marvel right now. We’re having some trouble with the Fawcett people or whoever owned it at that point. So then it went off to Wonder Woman. Where are we going to use? And John Byrne shot that down because he didn’t want anybody else using Wonder Woman. There were a couple other characters and they all got shot down. And eventually we ended up with this character called Nuklon, who was from Infinity incorporated, I guess, uh, a book I had never read. I had no idea what it was.
Jim Starlin: [00:40:54] And we had to put this character just because he was strong. And, uh, Bernie kept going. Who the hell is this guy? I never heard of this guy. Why are you putting him in there? I said I’d have to explain to him again. This is the only one we could use. You know, Karen Berger, she was interesting to work with. She was the editor on it. She, uh, directed me more into putting more of the young boy into the story than I had originally planned, and I think that worked out well doing that. I thought Bernie was going to ink it, and he gave it off to Dan Green to ink. And that was kind of interesting combination. You know, I remember much more about, uh, point of view and POV and, uh, the big change and, uh, cult. Uh, than I do the weird. Actually, the weird was something that never they never liked the character up in DC. We brought him back a couple times. Uh, did a Stormwatch reboot during the 52 series and brought him in there and, uh, that, uh, sort of like the Thanos Santos was something that kicked around, uh, Marvel for 40 years, and I was the only person who ever touched it, except for one story. Mark Waid did that. He sort of got Thanos forced onto him to use in the quasar story. But, uh, the weird seems to have the same effect over at DC. You know, I think it’s a really cool character, but nobody seems to be interested in him.
Alex Grand: [00:42:15] You worked with Bernie quite a bit at this time. You also, what did, uh, heroes for Hope and Heroes Against Hunger, those kind of one off things that Marvel and DC were doing, I think like 1 or 2 pages in each one. Uh, what what was that about?
Jim Starlin: [00:42:31] There was starvation over in Ethiopia. And, um, it seemed like a good idea. I was hanging with Bernie and we said, you know, we we got this medium, maybe we can do something. And we went in and talked to First Marvel, and they were good with it. They said? They thought it’d be good publicity for them, showing that they were human. Distributors and printers all gave us a break, and I think we raised about $100,000 in relief at that point, then did the same thing over at DC. It was the same results. Dc was a bit more problematic. As we were getting into the production. One of the writers had gone off to some kind of benefit where he met Cyndi Lauper, and she said, oh, all these charity things are nothing but ego. We shouldn’t do these. So this writer comes back and he starts calling up all the other writers and telling them not to do the book, and I’m having to call him around. And, you know, it’s like herding, you know, 40 some odd people, let’s say 60 odd people to get a book done. It was hard enough. And then half of them wanted, you know, a good not half of them, but a handful wanted to quit after talking to this writer. And, you know, I kind of said, hey, we’re not doing this for ego. People are starving here. This is actually going to do some good. Now, you can either listen to this asshole who thinks it’s all ego, or you can actually contribute something to it. And I left it at that and they all stayed.
Alex Grand: [00:43:50] Yeah, that was kind of the comics version of the Live Aid concert that kind of happened.
Jim Starlin: [00:43:55] Yeah, it was the comic book equivalent to that.
Alex Grand: [00:43:58] Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. And you guys also did a marvel graphic novel with Hulk and the thing. Do you remember doing that?
Jim Starlin: [00:44:05] The big change. Yes. Yeah. Their first job together.
Alex Grand: [00:44:08] I love that that graphic novel. Was that fun to do?
Jim Starlin: [00:44:11] Oh, it was tremendous fun. He was doing it in full color, so I’d go over there and, like, there was these mind blowing pages each time. It was very easy to egg him on at that point. He didn’t like doing it that way. We did it Marvel style. I wrote him up a plot and helped him break down and he didn’t like that. So after that we did it more DC style. Everything was a full script, and that’s how I pretty much worked with everybody at this point. Just it was easier than trying to work it out the other way.
Alex Grand: [00:44:40] And it seems like a less intense, less dark than some of the other stuff you were doing. Did it seem to summon some of your more childhood love of those characters?
Jim Starlin: [00:44:49] Oh yeah. The that original Hulk thing fight back in the early issues of Fantastic Four was one of my favorite books. I just the action was just so incredible. I loved the Dome Hulk. I know everybody loves Peter’s a smart Hulk. I’m at the age where I really loved him when he was. He was as thick as a brick. You know, I always thought he was much more fun to write that way. Yeah, we had a good time with that. You know, Bernie was contributing a lot of different things. At one point, we had to disguise the characters. Bernie came up with the idea of him hitting this octopus character, putting it on his head, and nobody recognizes him.
Alex Grand: [00:45:27] Did you get the impression that he was also enjoying himself during that one?
Jim Starlin: [00:45:31] Oh yeah. I mean, there’s some beautiful artwork there. Yeah. You know, if there’s a testament there that just how nice he was, you know Bernie, uh, you know, Bernie never wanted, never put out anything that was just half assed. If he wasn’t into it, he just stopped doing it. He just quit and went off and found something else to do, and he stuck with us. We did four, four good size stories together. I mean, the fact that I got him that much work out of him, I don’t think anybody other than Len, when he was starting off on Swamp Thing, got that much work out of him. Yeah. In fact, I bet I beat Len in the long run because I think he only did about eight issues in the Swamp Thing.
Alex Grand: [00:46:11] Six issues shorter than what you guys did.
Jim Starlin: [00:46:13] Yeah. Yeah, he was doing 20 page stories, so the most he got was 100 pages out of them. I got 400. I win, you win.
Alex Grand: [00:46:22] That’s true. Um, were you and Bernie friends then?
Jim Starlin: [00:46:26] Oh, yeah. He only lived a few miles away, and, uh, uh, our wives were friends also. And, uh, so, uh, you know, we we’d see each other easily once a week, you know? Yeah. It was. We did a lot of snowmobiling together and tubing and stuff like that. And he always had this Halloween party. Uh, it was the best Halloween party in the world.
Alex Grand: [00:46:49] Because everyone was dressed up. Oh, it was.
Jim Starlin: [00:46:51] All costumes and all cartoonists, and everybody was, uh, being their weirdest. I came one year as Rorschach.
Alex Grand: [00:46:59] Oh, great.
Jim Starlin: [00:47:00] I started off with the sign and, you know, no mask and walking around saying the end is near. And then I would sneak out of the party and come back in the full costume and creep everybody out. And nobody caught on to the fact that I was the same guy. I had the same coat on. You know, people were coming over to Bernie and going, who is that over there? He’s creeping me out.
Alex Grand: [00:47:24] I love that you did the two costumes, too. That’s genius. Um, that’s really good. Um, so then when you guys were making stories, you guys were hanging out in person, talking on the phone pretty often. It sounds like while you’re doing this stuff.
Jim Starlin: [00:47:38] Yeah, yeah, we were. You know, I say, as much as we were best friends at that point, I tended to hang out with Bernie more than anybody else I can think of at that time. I don’t remember us actually sitting down and talking stories all that often, but we talked about just about everything else. He loved monster movies, you know what I mean? What a surprise. He was always turning me on to just the worst monster movies like Re-Animator. I go, Bernie, this is just a terrible movie. And you go, oh, it’s great, I love it.
Alex Grand: [00:48:09] That’s awesome. So those kind of grotesque practical effect visuals, he was into that stuff.
Jim Starlin: [00:48:13] Yeah, yeah, he was very much a fan of that thing.
Alex Grand: [00:48:16] Once you went to Marvel doing infinity stuff, that’s kind of when you guys stopped doing stuff together, right? That’s essentially what happened.
Jim Starlin: [00:48:23] No. After the infinity stuff was POV. We did POV after that. Eventually, Bernie and his wife split up and he moved away. And that’s when we sort of drifted apart, just, you know, the thing was, you know, he was down in Texas. I was up in New York still. So, uh, you know, uh, you know, I didn’t see much of him his last couple of years. And I feel I really regret that, you know, we ran into each other a couple of conventions. We were supposed to go out and have dinner, but he wasn’t well enough, and, you know, it just, uh. Yeah, it was kind of sad there near the end.
Alex Grand: [00:48:59] Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. Divorce changes the whole dynamic of these, especially when wives are friends. So then geopolitical awareness a couple of times that I noticed and likely a lot more. But Kgbeast there was, you know, the Reagan administration, the Cold War, the whole, you know, the Russian, you know, the Soviet Union, you know, what what was what led to kind of the creation of the KGB.
Jim Starlin: [00:49:30] Bernie maybe comes back to Bernie. Bernie was always good about coming up with names like Hand Over Fist and stuff like that. And, uh, I think the KGB was me trying to compete with him on that front. Somewhere along the line, uh, the word KGB came into play, and, uh, I was doing Batman and the beast themed KGB. So, uh, I can’t think of anything much more specific than that about its origins, just other than I think Bernie inspired that sort of thing.
Alex Grand: [00:50:00] That story, I mean, it felt like a political thriller. It felt like it could be a Robert Redford Batman movie.
Jim Starlin: [00:50:06] I was reading a lot of crime stuff at that point. If you go back through that story, uh, there’s a bunch of special agents that show up in the middle of the story, and, uh, their last names are all famous crime writers at the time. Box and MacDonald, uh, Elmore Leonard. They were inspired a lot by the fact that I wanted a multi-level story that involved a crime. And, Amanda Reagan was not my favorite president. He looks like a saint now compared to some of the ones we’ve had since then. You know, I just sort of threw him in there, and I did it. You know, I’ve always been aware of what’s going on in the world later on. One of the Thanos graphic novels, I have one of the characters kidnapping all the world leaders at the time. If you go through there. And now it’s kind of interesting looking at them, because there’s the Israeli prime minister who died, and a number of them who I mean, gadhafi is in the shot, a bunch of different ones. Saddam, they were all the leaders of the world at that point. And a decade later, half of them were dead.
Alex Grand: [00:51:11] Yeah. It was like this era of bad guys that we just kind of were part of our, you know, international news.
Jim Starlin: [00:51:17] Oh, and Khomeini, we had him in Batman.
Alex Grand: [00:51:20] That’s right. I was going to ask about that. Yes, yes.
Jim Starlin: [00:51:23] And oh, we were so worried because his health was going bad and we didn’t want him to die before the book came out because we just looked terrible beating up on this dead guy. Fortunately, he lived long enough and I didn’t get a fatwa set against me for doing it, so it worked out all right.
Alex Grand: [00:51:39] I’ll never forget that. I was I was ten and I was in fifth grade, and and I was reading that and, you know, my parents, we we left there that country, you know, we left Iran back in 79. I didn’t.
Jim Starlin: [00:51:51] Know that.
Alex Grand: [00:51:52] I was I was one. And so, you know, Khomeini my parents talked about that like all the time, you know, the bad guy, you know. And um, so to see to see him in your comic, it was like mind blowing. I was like, oh, wow. Uh, here he is. And he’s hanging out with the Joker. I knew it, you know? And, uh.
Jim Starlin: [00:52:13] Throwback to those 1940 comics where Captain America was punching Adolf Hitler all the time.
Alex Grand: [00:52:20] I loved it. I still love reading that and seeing real life figures who their faces are so iconic. Like, you can recognize him and seeing him in a comic and interacting, I thought that was really great. I still look back. Um, was your was your background in naval intelligence? Did that contribute to to this geopolitical awareness?
Jim Starlin: [00:52:40] No, I was a photographer. I took pictures, and there was a whole division downstairs where the photo interpreters, those were the real, uh, those are the real agent kind of guys. Uh, they did the work. Uh, no, it was just I always hung out with people who were interested in things that were going on around them. And, uh, my second wife, she was a news junkie. I mean, first thing in the morning was New York Times. As soon as PBS was on and any kind of special debates, uh, lived with politics when we lived together.
Alex Grand: [00:53:16] I see now you’ve been married how many times?
Jim Starlin: [00:53:18] Uh, twice.
Alex Grand: [00:53:19] Twice. Okay. Do you have kids?
Jim Starlin: [00:53:21] No. Never draw progeny. I would have been a terrible father.
Alex Grand: [00:53:25] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [00:53:26] Selfish. Okay.
Alex Grand: [00:53:28] That’s okay. Thanos is your is your child. And it turns out so is Dreadstar. Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [00:53:35] And Dreadstar is the bad kid. He was the one who killed me in the thing online. If you went to check to see if you made it through the snap, I didn’t.
Alex Grand: [00:53:43] Yeah. And those characters, they’ll they’ll live on longer than anything. So you mentioned before that as you start shifting away from DC, that it wasn’t necessarily a corporate edict of the Robin debacle with the toys and the merchandise. It was more editorial. What was happening, what was the conflict with you and editorial? What was your perception and what do you feel their perception was that led to that diverging away from there?
Jim Starlin: [00:54:08] You know, I quit Marvel on a number of different occasions for different reasons. First time was when I was doing Captain Marvel. They gave me a different inker each issue. And, you know, it started off with Chuck Stone, uh, Dave Cockrum, Pablo Marcos, Dan Green, Al Milgrom, Klaus Janson and Klaus was supposed to be the permanent inker on it, and the very next book they gave it away to Jack Abel, who was a competent, good inker. I mean, but, you know, they had promised me. Finally I was going to have a permanent inker. And I said, you know, I’ll just go someplace else. Every time it was something different. Warlock. I went through, like, three editors. Roy had quit. And then there was Len, and then there was Marv. And then there was Gerry Conway and Gerry Conway. And I didn’t get along. Some editorial things, and I quit then. It’s a tricky business working with an editor. If you’ve got a good one like Archie Goodwin or Roy. They know when to leave you alone, and they know when to suggest something that will make it better. And both of those were experts at that. You know, if it wasn’t broken, don’t fix it. And if it is broken, be constructive rather than just critical. And both of those guys were like that. And a couple other Bob Schreck. You know, a number of folks I’ve worked with, and then I worked with some just awful editors. I worked with one editor who didn’t know the difference between a panel and a caption. He kept telling me I was putting too many, uh, captions into the story, and I said, I’m the artist. I’m not putting any captions in. He said, no, no, you got too many panels, too many captions. And that’s when I realized he was talking about panels instead. Uh, he was a new editor and very full of himself, too, if I might say now.
Alex Grand: [00:55:51] But in the later 80s, when you start going away from DC comics, there was something where editors were weren’t giving you work at that point and what was what was going on there?
Jim Starlin: [00:56:03] It was more like in the 90s the image style was taking over. I was having a harder time getting work. It was a it was a tough time because I was actually, uh, a mother in law and mother were both in assisted living facilities, and I was having to put money into that. So I was really scraping sometimes to get by. And, you know, it’s just I was out of style at that point. It was before the movies. The movies saved me. You know, I would. I’d probably be retired now if it hadn’t been for the movies. Damn them. But I wouldn’t have this house I’m living in right now if it weren’t for the movies, either. So it all balances out.
Alex Grand: [00:56:40] Yeah. It does. Tell us about creating breed with Malibu and then also. And then Image Comics.
Jim Starlin: [00:56:48] I wanted to do something monstrous. I’d written a couple a few novels with my first wife, Diana Gurganus Thinning the Predators Among Madmen, lady L, and another one called ponds, which we syndicated in the back of the Dreadstar book, serialized in the back of the Dreadstar book. At one point, I wanted to do something along those lines. Malibu or started putting it together. And then Harris Miller, my lawyer, he came through and he worked up a contract for me and Howard and Walter and a few other people out there. And so I just went to town. I was really had a great time with it. I think some of my inking on that first series was the best inking I ever did. The first issue was actually done comic book size. I drew it comic book size. It’s only about this big. Uh, the original art pages. And, uh, it was just a fun romp. And, uh, you know, I came back and we did two, uh, sequence two series, you know, breed and Breed two. And then there was a spell there, you know, Malibu eventually went under. And so years later, I did, uh, breed three over at image. You know, I wasn’t quite sure how they worked. And, uh, found out it was very difficult to work with them because they never returned calls. Hurricane Irene came through here and knocked our power out for weeks. Part of the job was getting online and approving the pages, or you got hit with a penalty and there was no getting online. I had to drive 50 miles. You know, I had a cell phone so I could call. But, you know, they there wasn’t any internet thing on the cell phones at that point. So I had to drive 50 miles down to the city just to get to a thing so I could look through. And I said, if you get on the phone with me, I can fix this. And they said, no, no, no, you got to get online. Okay? So, you know, it was a bit of pain. I haven’t worked with them since then.
Alex Grand: [00:58:49] And then how was it? You know, instead of doing space scapes, it was horror focused, arcane horror. How was that? And having your imagination enter that sort of world and putting that on paper.
Jim Starlin: [00:59:00] I actually think that’s where it got to a point where I asked about the environment is one of the characters elsewhere, which was central to what was going on in that series, was an ornate place. I wanted it to be archaic and mystical and historic looking. And so I had a great time, just especially the first book. I just went crazy on the backgrounds. The second book too, not so much of it happens in elsewhere in the third book, but you know, it is basically a real change of pace. And it was also funny because Hellboy was coming out about the same time. It was a complete synchronicity. Mike was on the other side of the country, and we were both doing the same thing. And when the third issue of both our books, I think it was the fifth issue of his and the third issue of mine, I think he was a little bit ahead of me, came out. It looked like we had the same cover. It’s it’s the main character ripping apart tentacles, you know. Yeah. So I said, okay, you know, what can you say? Synchronicity actually exists.
Alex Grand: [01:00:05] I read it before, then I went back and looked at it later and it was interesting. I went on this like documentary of serial killers, kick. I watched a bunch of different ones, like a couple of weekends ago, and some of them end up talking about some weird things. Some of these serial killers, they talk like I think Ted Bundy heard claimed he was hearing a demonic voice. The more and more he would do his his weird things, and even John Wayne Gacy would say that there was something demonic or some demon that was part of some of his actions. And then there was something with the Zodiac Killer writing that the more people he killed, the more servants he’d have in the afterlife. There’s this weird demonic thing that seems to creep up with some of these guys. After I saw that, then I went and read breed. It gives that first scene a whole nother aspect to that. Well, what’s your take on this stuff? Is this is there something to that and or or is this just all fiction?
Jim Starlin: [01:01:06] Well, it’s basically all fiction, but, uh, I know it’s we’re seeing you’re talking about is that bar scene and coming into the soldiers coming into the town. There’s something I find much more horrifying about the after effects of violence and the violence itself. The violence itself. You can’t have any entertaining aspect to it. I mean, look at the Shang Chi, the kung fu movies and the Avengers and all that. There’s an entertainment value to violence, but the aftermath and seeing the results of it, there’s nothing really entertaining. It’s kind of horrifying. And I know that as a form of entertainment all into itself, or there wouldn’t be horror movies, but a lot of the horror movies are the moment of horror rather than the effects of horror. I find a crime show which where you come in and discover a body. Much more chilling than a Friday the 13th where teenagers are getting cut up by some maniacal character. You know, once again, I think it comes down to what Howard was pointing out to me, that he did the moment of violence, and I did the after effect of violence. And I think that’s where I find much more interesting.
Alex Grand: [01:02:22] Yeah. And also when the news reports on serial killers, it’s always after. It’s it’s never during. It’s we’re getting the after effect. And there’s a morbid curiosity of trying to backtrack on what happened. So it’s interesting that you take that approach to a lot of this stuff. So weird. The reluctant warrior. Slave labor graphics tell us what that character is. And I noticed again, the word weird pops up again here. So.
Jim Starlin: [01:02:48] Well, in this case, weird is means fate. It’s an Irish term for fate. It’s weird. This is my foray into Bigfoot. I’d never really done much of that. I did a little thing with a series called Gilgamesh two over at DC, which was a lot of fun, but it was never really my thing, and I wanted to give it a shot again. And we had the computers and, you know, it was all black and white and it was sort of more of an experiment. I’m not really a comedy writer, so it’s not the best story in the world. There are some very funny moments when the beasties who are running around this corporate headquarters end up devouring a carton of Viagra and then cornered this executive. That was one of my favorite moments in the story. But, you know, it was basically just a little one off exercise that looking back on it, I think I could have done a much better job on it.
Alex Grand: [01:03:41] So it was kind of your way of doing kind of cartoon character.
Jim Starlin: [01:03:45] Wanting to do something different. Yeah. You know, I was doing something like that with Kid Kosmos also.
Alex Grand: [01:03:50] And we’re going to get to Kid Kosmos because I’m curious about about that as well. How was working with Slave Labor Graphics?
Jim Starlin: [01:03:56] I turned in files. They’d, uh, print the books up, and I don’t really remember much else about them other than that. Tell you the truth, we did. They were out in California and I was in New York. I think we may have met at a convention one time, but, you know, they were a brief encounter, so I don’t have much of a reaction on that one at all.
Alex Grand: [01:04:14] Egyptian mythology. It seems like there’s a couple times you poke at that in in your comics. There was, of course, the Metamorphosis Odyssey with Akhenaten. And then there is Marvel Universe at the end where there is Akin Akhenaten. Right?
Jim Starlin: [01:04:32] Yeah, there’s the same character, just a different spelling. I mean, it was based on an actual pharaoh. There are actually three different spellings of his name pronunciations. I go with Akhenaten myself. He was a pharaoh who is a follower. The guy who followed him up decided he was going to eliminate all reference to him. And so for the longest time we didn’t know this Pharaoh existed. What he did was break up all his statues and they threw him inside to use as filler inside this column. And it was only when they were doing some repairs and realized that the inside was filled with all this stuff, that his existence came into light. This wasn’t until somewhere in the 1940s. He was somebody who had been erased from history and brought back, and I kind of like that. So I used that name a couple of times.
Alex Grand: [01:05:18] I see. So it was more the disappearance and then the reawakening. There’s something about that. You utilize that in these. Yeah, it was.
Jim Starlin: [01:05:25] Kind of a Phoenix kind of thing.
Alex Grand: [01:05:27] Yeah. Death and rebirth. I mean, we talked about that last time, but there’s some parochial Catholic kind of element to some of that. So. But that’s interesting that that would appear in this Egyptian character that you would bring in.
Jim Starlin: [01:05:39] And I just love the look of the Egyptian motif. I just, you know, hieroglyphics and the, the architecture of that time was just so incredible looking. I, I grabbed it whenever I had a chance to use it.
Alex Grand: [01:05:52] Now, what was the inspiration for Kid Kosmos and creating that character? What were you doing with that Harry Potter?
Jim Starlin: [01:06:00] Harry Potter was big and I thought, gee, I’d like to do a kit. So I worked up this story I really liked. Someday, if I can get the chance to do the third and final book. I sort of left it with him. And the bad ending at in the second series. I’d like to sit down sometime and finish that off and maybe revamp it. Put Donald Trump in the scene that George Bush is in and go from.
Alex Grand: [01:06:25] There, modernize it a little.
Jim Starlin: [01:06:27] Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:06:27] Was portraying like a kid with powers, discovering his powers, exploring this new canvas of universe in front of them. Did some of that early Marvel Silver Age kind of superheroes. Did that come into play? Were you kind of summoning some of your own childhood wonder there?
Jim Starlin: [01:06:46] That and just the whole idea of being a kid again? I mean, I was going for he wasn’t the smartest kid in the world. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack. He misspells his name when he has his christening, you know. He thinks Cosmo starts with a K. There’s always a lot of fun things with him. He. You know, the first time he uses his powers, he traps a bully underneath a dumpster. I mean, I just wanted to go for off kilter stuff with him, and, uh, there was a lot of fun with it.
Alex Grand: [01:07:19] How was working with Devil’s Due Publishing? I noticed you’re doing stuff with indie companies at this point.
Jim Starlin: [01:07:25] Devil’s due had no contact whatsoever. This was something that dynamite set up this thing. I met them one time at a convention. Once again, I have no recollection of other than the publisher was some tall, good looking guy.
Alex Grand: [01:07:39] I’m sure he’ll like hearing that. Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [01:07:42] You know, that’s. That’s all I remember. He had a lot of hair.
Alex Grand: [01:07:44] Just very, very good looking. That’s all I remember. Yeah. Stormwatch reboot. You know, you were. You were talking about that earlier 2012. I think it was around 11 issue run that you essentially reset the team. How did that come about? What was your mission for that series and and did you enjoy doing it?
Jim Starlin: [01:08:02] They were reinventing all of the DC line, starting over from scratch. I mean, there was new Superman, new Batman. Uh, they came and they asked me if I wanted to do a Stormwatch. And this was during that time when, you know, I was scraping by for a living. So I jumped at the chance. And it was a chance to bring weird back one more time. As it happens, uh, Bob Harris, who was an editor up there, wasn’t around at the time. We were doing the revamp. And so he got no, uh, say in it. So we had pretty much free reign. And when he came back, he just hated it. There was nothing about it he liked. I thought evil, who had been doing the work, uh, the pencils. And that was doing a terrific job. You know, I was doing covers for him and Rob. Uh, Hunter was, uh, inking them, I thought were some of the best looking covers I had ever done. It just was a book that sort of ran its course and petered out. And, uh, Bob got rid of it as quickly as possible after I left it. So I think everything from that period sort of got revamped the next year again anyhow. So yeah, DC was going through a reinvention thing. They always thought that would help their sales, and all it did was confuse everybody and probably cost them sales in the long run.
Alex Grand: [01:09:14] Yeah, yeah. The reinvention thing, they do that quite a bit more. The movies you know you you alluded to the guards of the galaxy or rather the Avengers, the Infinity War movie. And tell us what you thought about, you know, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy exploring Marvel Cosmic on the cinematic stage. How do you feel that that went?
Jim Starlin: [01:09:35] Oh, those were some of the most fun movies I’ve ever seen. I enjoyed the first one, the second one and third one. I just I just think they’re terrific little movies. I thought he did a terrific job developing both Gamora and Drax. Drax in the movies is sort of a cross between my dum dumb dracs from the Infinity Watch and the tattooed guy that they use from annihilation. I just think Batista was comic genius. I mean, who would have thought somebody who was this big lump of a human being would be as funny as he is? And he and he is really incredibly big. I met him at a convention one time and just going, wow, this guy is ginormous. I am feel that. I am the luckiest cartoonist around. Uh, so many of the things that everything I’ve done so that have made it to the screen, the creator, uh, they’ve done a good job on. They’ve hit it out of the park. Shang-chi. Uh, Thanos. Gamora, Drax. Even the brief encounter with Eros and Pip, you know, those are fun things. So, um, because, you know, I mean, so many of these in the past, like Ghost Rider, the early Ghost Rider and Daredevil story movies, they were just awful. Uh, you know, I mean, I just cringe looking back at it, you know? And I just thought, you know, what did Gary Friedrichs and, uh, Mike, uh, uh, Pflug, who created the ghostwriter, what did they think of it down the line? You know, they probably shuttered. Yeah. Uh, they’ve done much better ones since then. The ghostwriter and the Daredevil series now on TV is, uh, is terrific. But, uh, those early ones. And there was early Fantastic Four, Captain America. There was a Punisher, one to all of which were just shudders. But, you know, I got very lucky. Uh, everything that, uh, made it to the silver screen of mine is come out. I’m very proud of, you know.
Alex Grand: [01:11:36] And you met James Gunn, right? You actually hung out with him a bit.
Jim Starlin: [01:11:40] Uh, we met in a couple of premieres. Yeah. I mean, uh, never went out for a drink or anything like that. So I’m at the last, uh, premiere, and we talked about his DC work, where he was going. Can’t get him to get me into a cameo. I’d really like to do a cameo with one of his movies, though.
Alex Grand: [01:11:56] No, but you did a cameo in endgame, though.
Jim Starlin: [01:11:58] Endgame.
Alex Grand: [01:11:59] So tell us about how that came about.
Jim Starlin: [01:12:01] Well, I heard that they were doing this thing with Thanos and then my Facebook page. I just out of a joke, said Mr. and Mr. Russos, I’m ready for my close up. You know, in some response. And somebody pointed it out to them. So they decided they were going to get me for a cameo, and they called up Marvel Editorial and Marvel editorial, told them they had no idea how to get Ahold of me, even though they were sending me royalty checks all the time. They said they told them to just no way. So finally they chased me down on Facebook, and one of the producers got Ahold of me, and she invited us down to Atlanta and has spent a terrific day on the set. Walked in there, and I expected I was going to be just sitting in the background somewhere, you know? And if you look close, you might be able to see me because I wasn’t on the best terms with editorial, as you may have guessed at that point. So I wasn’t sure what I would expect from the movie people. And as soon as I got there, they led me to my own trailer. Uh, the make up people came in, they changed. They told me to get out of my clothes and put on their wardrobe, gave me a script which I was a little put off with because the credit, the the credit of the guy was old man. I was like, oh, boy, I’m the old man here. Okay.
Jim Starlin: [01:13:18] They changed it in the credits in the movie. I think a therapist person number one or something like that, which I never complained, but I was kind of put off by it. Yeah, it was just a terrific time. I had, uh, we did about a dozen takes on this scene, uh, just running through it with three different cameras, working it all the times. Uh, there was a lot of equipment I wasn’t familiar with. It was this huge silver globe that they stick in the middle of the scene, and it gets all the lighting and, uh, the white balance in that set for the cameras. And I asked about this. And, uh, one of the actors who was in the scene, uh, a young man next to me said, this is the first time you’ve been on a set. And I said, oh, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, he goes, well, how did you end up getting this gig? Because all these guys were competing for this, you know, they really wanted to be in it. And I said, well, I sort of wrote the comic. This thing was the whole movie is based on. And he gives me this skeptical look like, who do you think bullshitting. And it just so happens that Joe Russo was walking by and heard it, and then just without stopping, he he went by and went. He did, and kept right on going. And so it was it was a little stranger after on the set after that. But it was fun.
Alex Grand: [01:14:38] What was interesting was it was about a scene of people mourning the death of their loved ones, and it just seems so perfect that you were in a scene that discusses that very topic. It’s already a legacy of yours in comic world. But then to see that acknowledged in movie world where mainstream, you know, $3 billion movie, you know that the entire world has seen it’s like Elvis in Aloha from Hawaii. I mean, it touches the planet. And, uh, that must have been quite a feeling.
Jim Starlin: [01:15:10] Yeah, it was kind of interesting that later on, Chris Claremont was the person who pointed out to me that I was a therapist in that scene. I was the one who asked the question. I was the one who was wearing the sports coat. I was the only one who wasn’t in shorts or a rolled up sleeves. And I had never realized, yeah, you’re the therapist. I just thought I was, uh, this crazy old man who they said, well, figure out what your character is, and, you know, just go with it. So I figured I’d lost everybody. And so basically, I was just sort of wringing my hands and, uh, and seething throughout the scenes, uh, but, uh, you know, uh, looking back at it now, uh, you know, it was it was it was a fun day and, uh, I, I’d love to be able to do it again sometime, just for the experience. And, uh, we’ll see what happens down the line. You know, they apparently they’re going to be bringing Thanos back again, so maybe I’ll get another shot.
Alex Grand: [01:16:09] Are you in the Screen Actors Guild?
Jim Starlin: [01:16:10] I am, yes.
Alex Grand: [01:16:12] Okay. Is it because of that scene, or were you already in that before?
Jim Starlin: [01:16:14] No, no, it was because of that. And I’ve kept up my dues and that. So.
Alex Grand: [01:16:19] Yeah, that’s great, because I know that if you say a line in a movie, then that equates to Screen Actors Guild membership in some way.
Jim Starlin: [01:16:26] Oh yeah. I get a check from them once every six months for, you know, a couple hundred bucks for residues from endgame. I have I’d love to see what, uh, somebody like Chris Evans gets on there, you know? But, uh, yeah, they, they show up for quite regularly and, uh, you know, it’s enough to keep the pay to do’s again, so I just keep it going.
Alex Grand: [01:16:48] Now he he was in that scene, right?
Jim Starlin: [01:16:50] Yeah. He had money on some game. And every time, uh, we took a break, he was up with his phone checking out to see what his game was doing. And him and Russo, as Joe, were talking about it the whole time.
Alex Grand: [01:17:03] Did you talk with the Russo brothers much?
Jim Starlin: [01:17:06] Uh, quite a bit. Joe was the only one on the set. Tony I met later on. Tony’s a quiet one. Joe’s the gregarious one, and, uh, I get along pretty well with him. We spent a lot of time at a party, uh, at San Diego a few years ago. And, uh, we were trying to figure out if we could work together on something else. But none of the properties I had really set off the screenwriters, so we never did anything. The two Russo brothers and Markus and McFeely, they are a combined unit. They are the movie making machine and, uh, just never engaged them on any of the other properties. So nothing ever happened. But, uh, you know, I’m still in good terms with all you know.
Alex Grand: [01:17:43] You met Josh Brolin as well.
Jim Starlin: [01:17:45] At the premiere of Infinity War, and, uh, we just reconnected a few weeks ago at a convention in San Antonio.
Alex Grand: [01:17:54] Right. How was that hanging out with him? Talking with him? Did he talk about Thanos? Yeah.
Jim Starlin: [01:17:59] We did. I told him the first time I saw it, and he didn’t know this. Uh, the first time I saw him as Santos, he was naked. They had. And he told me about the whole scene. About. They weren’t sure how they should handle Thanos at first. And so they set up a camera, and he ran through a scene that they never used in the movie. They later used that scene to do the practice videos for what they were going to do with changing him into Thanos. So I didn’t know it. But they don’t start off right off with the whole costume. They start off with a naked figure. And so here’s Josh sitting in the dark talking about something. And he’s, you know, he’s pretty heavily shadowed. So it’s not like an X rated film, but he’s naked. And he didn’t know that they had ever done that with the scene. So I found out what the scene was about. And he found out that, well, that he has a nude scene running around somewhere, as he is. Santos.
Alex Grand: [01:19:02] Um, that’s interesting. And was he a fan of the character? Had he known about the character before? Did he mention any of that?
Jim Starlin: [01:19:08] I don’t know. I rather doubt it. I know he really enjoyed the character. He really liked the layers that the character had even before the first movie was out. I know he was lobbying to get more Thanos into the cinemas.
Alex Grand: [01:19:22] And I’m sure he read the comics to research the character, so that’s cool. Naked Thanos. I know Thanos loves death, has a lust for death, but does he? Does Thanos ever have? Did Thanos have coitus with Taraka or anyone else?
Jim Starlin: [01:19:38] Loving death? I don’t think that he would reproduce all that readily. One of the cliches of science fiction writing and that that goes way back to Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t like bringing kids into the story. It just always seems to water it down when they did this. Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, uh. John Carter. Well, they had these great little stories. And then a couple books later, he introduces their kids, and the stories were never as good. And so I never wanted to do a next generation of anything like that. And a whole idea of Thanos, whose name is death and loves death. I just don’t think he would be procreating all that readily. Right.
Alex Grand: [01:20:20] Or having physical, sexual pleasure either. It sounds like.
Jim Starlin: [01:20:23] No, I think it was more of a cerebral, platonic love that he had for death more than anything else. I’ve never pictured him with his clothes off.
Alex Grand: [01:20:33] So naked. Thanos. Only Josh Brolin.
Jim Starlin: [01:20:35] Only Josh Brolin can do that.
Alex Grand: [01:20:37] Your book, the Art of Jim Starlin Life in Words and Pictures. I love that book. I had already, you know, read of you, of course, and interviews. But that book was at such a beautiful pictorialist color autobiographical discussion of your life. And tell us about making that. And then also you did that with Joe Prewitt.
Jim Starlin: [01:20:56] I think that he did that through IDW. In fact, we’re going to do another book now. Joe’s putting it together now, and I’ll figure out if I’m gonna write some more for it or what have you. He had this idea. He said, let’s do the book. And it seemed like a good time for me to vent my spleen. So I wrote up a bunch of stuff in it, and in fact, I can see a copy of it from over here across the studio right now. Did another little art book over at ominous called The Black Book. It was just much thinner volume. But I think we’re going to do another big, big volume with a lot more of the new stuff that we didn’t have in the first book.
Alex Grand: [01:21:33] You had mentioned your two wives. The second one you said was a newsperson. The first one, you actually co-wrote things and.
Jim Starlin: [01:21:41] She was an SVA student when I met her, actually. Painter. I don’t think she does any art anymore, which is a shame because she was a terrific painter. Just couldn’t get any work. So I think that kind of discouraged her. And we ended up writing four books together. And she lives down in Florida now with her, with her new man. And, uh, yeah, I mean, occasionally it’s kind of funny because we sort of lost touch when we split up. And so every time I sold movie rights to one of our books, I’d have to get on USA search and hunt her down in Florida somewhere.
Alex Grand: [01:22:21] Oh, I.
Jim Starlin: [01:22:22] See. Yeah. Now she. Now she keeps track. She keeps me when she moves or things like that. She sends me an email with her new contact info so it’s a lot easier I gotcha.
Alex Grand: [01:22:32] So no, no resentment. Everything is simpatico.
Jim Starlin: [01:22:35] Yeah. No, no, I mean, uh, Second Life too. I’m, uh, you know, I mean, uh, she just lives a few miles away, and I occasionally go over and help her out with stuff, you know? So, uh, you know, uh, no, uh, don’t know what life’s too short to have a lot of resentment.
Alex Grand: [01:22:54] Yeah. That’s true. Well, um. Yeah, this is fun. I really enjoyed this. And, uh, and thank you for spending time with us here. You know, you. Every time. You know you. I enjoy your answers to questions. You have very analytical way, but also very creative way of answering questions, talking about different life themes, which I find interesting. Thanks so much, Jim.
Jim Starlin: [01:23:19] All right. You take care in the meantime. It was good doing this again.
Alex Grand: [01:41:55] You definitely did. Thanks so much, Jim.
Jim Starlin: [01:41:57] All right. Do you have a good one? You take care.
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