I recently had a chance to sit down with Gary Friedrich at a local comics convention here in St. Louis. He graciously agreed to answer a number of questions.
Mr. Friedrich is easily best known as the creator of the Ghost Rider and for his long run as the writer of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. He also worked with a number of other titles at Marvel Comics that include Amazing Adventures, Captain America, Daredevil, Frankenstein, Gunhawks, Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Marvel Spotlight, and Red Wolf. His body of work easily speaks for itself.
JAMES JOBE: I’m sure that you, like most of us, grew up reading comics. Which characters were your favorites and why?
GARY FRIEDRICH: The first comics I remember were my dad reading The Fox and the Crow to me. I actually learned how to read by looking at the words and associating the pictures with what he was reading. By the time I got to first grade it was pretty boring because I already knew how to read from The Fox and the Crow. I also read Little Lulu and stuff like that. When I got older I was into the superheroes. Superman was first, but then I found Captain Marvel. Once I found Captain Marvel, I didn’t like Superman anymore.
JJ: Of all the characters you’ve worked with, which was your favorite?
GF:Sgt. Fury would have to be my favorite character, maybe because I (worked on) him more than anyone else. I liked having the opportunity to go from World War II to the present on Nick Fury, Agent of Shield. It is certainly the character I remember the most, and probably my favorite. When people ask me that question, it is always what comes to mind first, so I guess it is my favorite.
JJ: So, Sgt. Fury is the character you’ve likely had the longest lasting impression on as far as the way other creators might still write the character today?
GF: Yeah, no question about that.
JJ: How did you break into the comic book world?
GF: I broke into the comic book world through my friend Roy Thomas. We went to school together in Jackson, Missouri and worked in the theater together. Roy began to pick up comics at the drugstore while we worked in the theater and we’d read them in the afternoon when things were slow at the concession and popcorn stand. This was when DC was just starting the Silver Age and I would read the Flash, Green Lantern, JLA and all of that stuff. We began to really enjoy the comics. When the Marvel stuff first hit we immediately lost interest in the DC stuff and started reading copies of Marvel comics. We thought it was much better written and we enjoyed that much more.
In the early 60’s Roy began working on Alter Ego with Jerry Bails and I actually helped with some of the first few issues that were put out right there in Jackson. I mostly ran stuff to the printer and back and whatever needed to be done.
Roy went to New York in ‘65 and went to work for DC for a couple of weeks and then he went over to Marvel. In November of ’65 he called me up and asked me to come to New York and told me it would be worth my while to give comics a try. So I left my factory job in Cape Girardeau (Missouri) and went to New York and eventually did some freelance work at Charlton. By September of ’66 I had a job at Marvel. It is all about who you know. It was that way then and it is that way now. (Laughs)
JJ: You’ve surely worked with many other great comic creators at Marvel and Charlton. Who was the one person that had the greatest influence on your work?
GF: That would have to be Stan Lee, without any question. I learned how to write comics from reading Stan’s comics. Stan wrote the comics I liked then and his comics still remain the ones I like to read today. Nobody writes comics like Stan and Roy Thomas. They are the guys that taught me how to write. They don’t make comics like that anymore so I don’t read comics anymore.
JJ: (Laughs) Well, Stan has done a few years or so. He even did a few for DC. I don’t know if you ever had a chance to look at any of those.
GF: I never did. I’m going to have to check that out one of these days.
JJ: They actually let him write his own origin of Superman.
GF: Now that would be interesting! (Laughs)
JJ: They were interesting to say the least. What can you tell us about the differences in the way Charlton and Marvel did business in the 60’s?
GF: (Laughs) It was night and day. Charlton was a very tight fisted outfit. They didn’t pay much money and as a result they didn’t get the best writers and artists, but they could get new people coming in (to the business). Denny O’Neil after working at Marvel for a short time before I did went up and did some work some work at Charlton for a while before he went over to National (DC). Dick Giordano was willing to take a chance on me when I’d never written anything for four dollars a page. That’s what they paid writers. They could afford to take a chance.
Marvel was still pretty small and thrifty outfit at that time, too, but not as much so as Charlton. Of course, Marvel was on the way up, and it was very apparent to me that they were. I was glad to leave Charlton and go over to Marvel when the opportunity arose.
JJ: I guess Charlton didn’t really last much more than about 10 or 20 years after that.
GF: Something like that. They had their little market niche and the system was setup then so that little companies like them could make a buck even putting out the cheap stuff they did. You still run into fans who like that stuff. My wife has a nephew that loves the old Charltons. I don’t understand it, but whatever turns them on.
JJ: You know, some of the covers alone are what sells people on those comics. The cover art and the captions on them; some of the silliest out there is exactly what appeals to them. The camp of it…
GF: I’ll tell you my favorite Charlton story, and it says pretty much how Charlton was. I did a lot of romance stories for Dick. I tried to make them somewhat different from the usual soapy, sappy stuff. I used some humor and I tried to put some action element into them. One of the things I did was a female private eye. In the story that I wrote, it was set in St. Louis, and the (Gateway) Arch figured into it. There was a chase scene where the female detective chases the bad guy down to the Arch, and so help me God, I’d give anything to remember the issue it was in so that I could find a copy of it. It was so funny. The artist had the guy shimmying up, arms and legs wrapped around it, climbing the arch. (Laughs) I just died when I saw it. That’s the way it was at Charlton.
JJ: I know someone on one of the websites I frequent that specializes in Charltons. I’m going to have to see if he can figure out which issue that is. It sounds like a page of art that I just have to have.
GF: I did a ton of romance stories, and that happened in one of them.
JJ: Were you ever able to work with Dick Giordano again after leaving Charlton?
GF: I came very close to doing something with Dick in 1983. Roy (Thomas) had had the idea for a long time to do a funny animal superhero series. Dick was interested in that and I flew up to New York from St. Louis and we had a meeting. Stan Goldberg was going to draw it and I began working on the plot, but there was a terrible tragedy in Stan’s life. He wound up not doing any work for a while and that project kind of went by the wayside because we didn’t have Stan G. to draw it. That was as close as I came to doing anything with Dick after Charlton.
JJ: You are obviously famous for your Sgt. Fury stories. Have you spent any time in the military?
GF: No.
JJ: So what did you draw on for all of those stories that people tend to love so much?
GF: Well, I was something of a history buff and I tried to tie some realism into it. I was very actively involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement and I always tried to throw some anti-war sentiments into the stories whenever I could. But basically the Fury books were all character driven. Their superhero books were all set in the same world. Fury and the Howlers were superheroes. They take on a thousand Nazis and kill them all and none of them gets a scratch. (Laughs) It’s a little bit of a different setting, but it is a Stan Lee superhero story all the way. I just picked up what Stan had done and took it from there and threw in the anti-war element.
JJ: It seems to have worked. (Laughs)
GF: Apparently. (Laughs)
JJ: Why do you think the Combat Kelly and Captain Savage series of the same era didn’t see the same level of success that Sgt. Fury did?
GF: I think there wasn’t anything original about them. Martin Goodman, who owned Marvel at the time and continued as president after he sold them out, saw that Sgt. Fury was doing pretty well and told Stan ‘Let’s do some more war comics’. Stan’s ideas were to do more of the same and that’s what we tried to do. I was in it for the money. If they wanted me to write ten war comics, I’d write ten war comics. The originality was gone though, and they weren’t nearly as good as the Fury books.
JJ: I know that you have an ongoing lawsuit against Marvel and a few other companies over the Ghost Rider movie and merchandising. Are you allowed to speak about that, or should we just move on?
GF: I’m not allowed to say very much about it. The suit is filed because I felt for a long time that the creators get stiffed by the comic companies and it has been going on since Siegel and Shuster. I’ve always said if I got the opportunity and it seemed right and I could find the attorneys to help me that I would be willing to take on those companies and try to right things not only for me but for other creators as well. That’s what I hope to do.
JJ: Do you have any plans to ever return to comics?
GF: I’m looking to do something along that line and I have some ideas. I’ve been talking to Herb Trimpe and Dick Ayers about some stuff. I’m hoping to make some contacts while I’m out at the San Diego con next month. Maybe I’ll get something going.
JJ: That would be great! What else does the future hold for Gary Friedrich?
GF: Who knows? I’ve been driving a courier route in St. Louis for about the last thirteen years and I’m burned out and tired of it. I’d like to write comics again instead of driving all day. Hopefully there will be more conventions, appearances and I’ll actually be writing comics again.
JJ: I have a few questions from my publisher. I told him I was coming out to have a talk with you today, and he got really excited, and wanted me to ask a couple of questions for him too.
What did you do in life prior to comics and how did that affect how you worked in comics?
GF: When I got out of high school, I worked in a music store in Cape Girardeau and became the buyer in the record department. Roy Thomas and I were both in a band during that period and played rock ‘n roll music. I played drums and Roy sang. After about three years of that I went to work for the newspaper in our hometown of Jackson and became the youngest managing editor of a newspaper in the state of Missouri at that time. I really learned a tremendous amount about writing from my mentor there, Tom Stites, who went on to become an editor at the New York Times, Newsday, the Philadelphia Enquirer and several other major newspapers. I really began to get my teeth into what professional writing was all about at that time. That really helped me a lot. I went from the newspaper to briefly working in a factory in Cape Girardeau until Roy invited me to New York, and that’s how I got into comics.
JJ: What role do you see the internet playing in the world of comic publishing?
GF: I have no idea because I’m a computer idiot. (Laughs) My daughter is a computer genius, and anybody’s brain I can pick about computers I try to but I don’t really understand a lot of what I’m hearing. It would seem to me that there will come a time where you will be able to get your comics right off the net if you can’t already, and self publish them at home.
JJ: There actually are a large number, especially smaller publishers who are doing that. They aren’t solely using the internet, but they are making their comics available that way too. They will put them out on the stands first in a printed fashion, and then a month or so later they will make a file available for around one dollar on their website.
GF: It’s probably just a matter of time before you’ll have to buy all of the new stuff directly off the internet.
JJ: In the long history of comic publishing what publisher lived far too long, and what publisher should have gone far longer?
GF: (Laughs) I don’t know about that. (pauses) I’m not going to say anything because I’m trying to get back into the business and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. (Laughs)
JJ: (Laughs) How about just of the publishers which have disappeared, which would you have liked to have seen last longer?
GF: I can’t think of any because I haven’t really followed comics for nearly thirty years.
JJ: The ones that would come to mind for me would be some of the Golden Age publishers that are long gone.
GF: Again, I’ve never been a fan, per se. I like fans and enjoy talking with them, but I’m not one myself. That doesn’t make me special or better than anybody, it is just the way that it is. I wrote comics because it was an enjoyable way to make a living. Therefore my knowledge of comics publishing is pretty much limited to the period of time in which I was writing. I don’t know a lot about the Golden Age. I know what Bill Everett taught me, which was a little bit, and that was about it. I don’t know anything about 1978 until today.
JJ: What comic talent who wrote in the 60s and 70s but left the industry would probably be very successful today?
GF: I think Roy Thomas, who I know is still doing a little work, but not nearly the amount of work I think he should be. I’m surprised he isn’t inundated with offers. It’s very strange, indeed. I rather see Roy doing work than anybody else. Roy or Stan, of course.
JJ: One last thing. My publisher asked me to tell you that his eight year old son Jonathan thinks Sgt Fury is the best comic ever written or will ever be written.
GF: (Laughs)
JJ: I try and send him a box of comics every now and then, and try and throw in as much different stuff as I can. I try to cater to his age as much as possible, too. We’ve introduced him to many characters to see what he might want to collect, and apparently his favorites are those Sgt. Fury books.
GF: Well, that’s neat. I’m happy to hear that. (Laughs)
JJ: Thanks you so much for your time! We definitely appreciate the interview and hopefully we’ll get a chance to do it again on of these days.
GF: You’re quite welcome. Anytime! It was my pleasure.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I would again like to explicitly thank Mr. Friedrich for allowing me to sit down with him for the amount of time that I did. Even after we were off the record for the interview, I still chatted with him for a quite a while. He signed five different comics for me that I shall treasure for years to come. I was also lucky enough to be able to purchase from him a limited edition print by Herb Trimpe of the Ghost Rider that he also signed for me. I honestly think I've not had this much fun at a comic show/con in a long time, and sincerely hope that he shall be willing to attend one of our local shows again sometime soon.
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