Mike Gold Interview

Comments by John Ostrander and Tim Truman

By Alex Ness

Mike Gold is the only editor whose name on a book made me think I should buy it. Now as he is and was an editor you might ask why? Good enough, when I read comic books with him as editor, whatever the talent on that book, and however it fell into the schemes and workings of continuity, the comic was good. Today he has made some noise as one of the key players who rescued the character GrimJack from legal limbo. There is no doubt that his career in comics has much further to go, but before he goes there, read his thoughts and words herein. Then go out and buy tons of his comics.

AN: Where are you from and now live, married? kids?  cats or dogs?

MG:I was born in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood on August 4, 1950, and despite my wanderings I remain a loyal Midwesterner. I've been married to the former Linda Johnson and have an amazing stepdaughter, Adriane. Both Linda and Adriane are comics fans; Adriane was the assistant manager of a comics shop. No dogs or cats; when I come to my senses and get back to the Midwest I'll change that situation.

AN:How did you enter the comics industry?

MG:Well, I was a longtime fan and I consulted for a few comics shops in Illinois and Indiana, and I had worked with a lot of talented comics artists -- particularly "underground" guys like Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson. I was one of the people who helped form the original Chicago Comicon (since sold to WizardWorld) and I programmed the first ten years of the show. I started working for DC in 1976 because I had worked with Jenette Kahn back when she was the publisher of several magazines for Scholastic Books.

When she became publisher at DC, I called Jenette to offer my congratulations and to invite her to be co-guest of honor (with Stan Lee and Harvey Kurtzman) of our first Chicago Comicon. We started talking comics, often two or three times a week. Finally, she suggested I fly out to New York to meet with her and Neal Adams -- Neal was looking for a business manager for Continuity Associates and Jenette thought I had the right combination of business and creative skills to pull it off. I had met Neal several times, particularly when he was working with director Stuart Gordon over at Chicago's Organic Theater Company (my relationship with Stuart is a whole 'nother story). So I flew out to New York and Jenette gave me a tour of DC's offices. This was a fanboy's dream. During the tour, Neal called to beg off due to some horrible situation at the studio. Jenette and I went to lunch at one of those swank Manhattan places that business people go to (Jenette always had excellent taste in restaurants) and we started talking comic books. Go figure. And as we spoke, our passion for the comic art medium was unleashed. We talked for over three hours. Business geeks sitting near us couldn't believe these two adults were spending so much energy talking about comic books -- this was in 1976, before comic books became acceptable.

After lunch we went back to DC where I met a lot of folks on staff, including my hero Julie Schwartz. I discovered Julie and I shared a passion for 1920s and 1930s jazz -- King Oliver and Louie Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, those guys.  What a thrill.

I had a great time and I flew back to Chicago. I didn't give the Neal Adams thing a second thought because I had such a great fanboy experience and, what the hell, I already had a job broadcasting, and writing and running my own company.

The next day Jenette called me and said "Screw Neal Adams, I want you to work for me."

AN:Are you suggesting that Neal Adams and Jenette Kahn had a sexual liaison over your working at DC or at Continuity?

MG:I wasn't suggesting that, but I'll stand behind my language. Since you asked, Neal and Jenette were an item at the time, although I'm not certain that's anybody's business. Their relationship wasn't a secret.

AN:D’OH!!!!!

What Jazz do you listen to now and what else is in your CD changer?

MG:I have really broad tastes in music -- just about anything except Country Pop and opera. I'm a big blues fan, I'm into Aretha Franklin and the Who, Louis Prima and Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan and Bobby Darin, Cab Calloway and Canned Heat, the Kinks and Louis Jordan, Miles Davis and Del Shannon, Gov't Mule and Fats Waller -- you get the idea. I've got several thousand CDs, I've been slowing digitizing them but I maxed out my 30 gig iPod the day it came out. 60 gigs won't cover it.

AN:Your name is really associated with DC and First as an Editor, did you start out as an editing sort or did you start as a writer?

MG:A writer. A reporter, actually. My first professional work was at age 17 writing sports for a Chicago-area newspaper. From there I branched out into all media, working as a broadcaster, writing and producing television commercials and documentaries, I even produced a couple of record albums. I didn't sleep much; the late 60s and early 70s were way too much fun. I'd written for such diverse publications as the Chicago Tribune and The Realist, the Forensic Echo and the Society of Illustrators.

I also have done, and continue to do, media and political work around social service issues, particularly as they affect adolescents and children. I co-founded the National Runaway Switchboard and have worked in the drug abuse education field. More recently I did a great deal of political work around protecting Head Start programs. I spent a year as a public information officer for the Chicago Seven trial (a.k.a. The Conspiracy Trial) and I continue to function as a political activist. I'm quite radical on some issues, fairly conservative (in the pre-Ann Coulter sense of the word) on others.

I also studied design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I've contributed to quite a number of design magazines and books, particularly in the use of computers in print design and graphic storytelling. More recently, artist Frank McLaughlin and I collaborated on a pair of "How-To" books on drawing comics. Working with Frank is great fun. Working with the publisher wasn't, although overall the effort was financially lucrative.

AN:A writer I know in comics hates editors, he says that they are all out to F him, and that every editor he has worked with was a jealous less talented writer who was out rewrite his work.  I know that is inaccurate even for the person with those opinions, that editors are a bunch of wannabe writers.  But to what degree are there many editors who would be far happier as name talent as the writer?

MG:If we were only talking about writing, then the writer you're speaking of must be pretty damn good. Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Gore Vidal and Harlan Ellison all worked with editors, and Gore and Harlan still do.

But we are not talking about writing, we are talking about making comic books. This is a collaborative medium. On the creative side, it's a team effort between the writer, the artists, the letterer, the colorist, and the production people. On the administrative side, the project has to get through the publisher, the promotion and marketing people, the accountants, and the merchandising and licensing people. The needs of the creative side must be accurately represented to the administrative side, and the interests of the administrative side must be accurately represented to the creative side. Each page must be steered through both the creative waters and the administrative waters at the same time. Not everybody has the exact same vision -- certainly not all the folks on the creative side, nor should they. The editor acts as a facilitator. The editor makes a creative contribution to each project, sometimes minor, sometimes major as in the creation of characters or plot lines. It depends upon the mix of talent and, quite frankly, the time of day.

MG: Quite the contrary. I think TPBs have just about saved the industry. They've opened comics up to a whole new market -- potential readers who don't go to comics stores, aren't aware of their existence, or have none in their neighborhood. It's one of the few ways younger readers can discover the medium, it's one of the few ways publishers can take advantage of whatever interest movies like Spider-Man and X-Men can dredge up, and it provides a path from movies like Road To Perdition to the comics world.

>From the publisher's perspective, this market can act as almost a loss-leader (note: I said almost) where the profits from trade reprints create a cash flow that can subsidize new material that, eventually, can be reprinted into future trades. Take GrimJack, for example. Given the character's popularity and John and Tim's track record, we certainly could have gotten a new mini-series deal, but it's a lot more attractive to everybody concerned to have that deal tie into a series of GrimJack trades that will generate revenue for years to come. It will keep the pipelines open for us to do a second mini-series, should we decide to do so.

>From the creator's perspective, well, it's a heck of a lot easier for the folks at the movie studios to see and hopefully even read a trade paperback than it is to plop a bunch of comic books on their desks. The studios like to see that presence in Borders and Barnes and Nobles and so on because it shows a degree of interest from the general public and, quite frankly, if they pick up the movie rights and the film bombs, the guy who green-lighted the project can point to the trade paperbacks and say that at least the original decision was valid. As we all know, a successful career in Corporate America is built around the "Cover Your Ass" model, nowhere more so than in the entertainment media.

>From the retailer perspective, this expanded interest creates opportunities to bring new readers into their stores should they desire to pursue this approach. I'm sure Borders gets a hell of a lot more first-time comics readers than your average comic book shop. Promoting to those potential customers is critical to maintaining the future of the direct sales business.

We're not a lesser cousin of the book industry, although we will be subjected to the high cost of returns and shipping and warehousing that plagues the rest of the industry, and there will be changes in product cycles that publishers must say on top of. Producing comics is a cash-intensive business. But as far as the book industry is concerned, comics and manga have been one of their very few growth areas in the past decade. Retailers make a lot more money selling a dozen graphic novels and albums than they do a dozen paperbacks and hardcovers, and these books have longer shelf-lives.

AN: You were a developer of the IMPACT line (Archie Comics heroes line licensed to DC) was set up as a comic for kids but it went down in flames.  As someone who tried it out I really thought that while the collective effort there was good, nothing really struck me.  However I was around 27 at the time.  Did demographics show kids reading them and did the early death of the hero line indicate poor sales or lack of DC interest?

MG: The Impact story is a bit wordy, but very interesting. There's a web site about the whole thing, and quite a number of us have done extensive interviews about all that.   Mine is at and from there you can click over to other interesting interviews. So instead of going through all that again and eating up a ton of your bandwidth, I just gave you the link.

I will say this: I get as much or more mail about Impact today than I do about any other DC project I was involved with, with the possible exception of Wasteland.

AN:With GrimJack on the way what can you say regarding the first run (an actually

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