http://povonline.com/COL233.htm

BY MARK EVANIER

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 4/16/99

Let me set the scene. It’s Day Three of last year’s Comic Con International in San Diego…August
14, 1998, 4:00 in the afternoon.  The room is packed.  An amazing percentage of those present are professional comic book writers, most of them the right age to have read comics in the sixties or before: Marv Wolfman, Kurt Busiek, Roy Thomas, Mark Waid, Dan Raspler, Mike Friedrich and many others.

    So you know right there, this is something special.  Folks who do comics almost never go to convention panels ˜ not unless they’re up there behind the table, answering questions.  Still, they’ve all turned out for this one.

    One of those on this panel is Murphy Anderson, one of our best artists. Another is Julius Schwartz, one of our best editors.  They are fine gents, well worth hearing…but they are — this is not a criticism — convention regulars.  Everyone in the room knows them.  In fact, a high percentage of those present has actually worked for Julie.  Important though they are, Anderson and Schwartz are not the reason all these writers are here.

    No, the reason is John Broome.

    John Broome wrote for DC from 1946 until 1970.  Most of his work was done for Julie, who was also his best pal.  But it was not friendship that caused the man they call B.O. Schwartz (for “Be Original”) to have Broome writing Flash and Green Lantern and Batman and The Atomic Knights and so many more.  It was because John Broome was a terrific writer ˜ arguably among the three-or-so best among many fine writers who worked for DC over the years.  Many in the room might say he was the best, but I don’t want to go there.

    Few of them have met Broome before this convention.  He did his last script for DC before most of them were in the field.  He has always been a world traveller, so even when he was working at DC, he was often away from the office for months at a time.  He has been away from comics altogether since ’70 and has never been to a comic convention before this one.

    And though he’s a Guest of Honor at this convention, the con didn’t arrange for him to be here, didn’t pay his way over from Tokyo, where he now resides.  An ad hoc group of Broome fans, headed by Rich Morrissey, arranged it and put up the bucks.  That’s how important it is to them to have him here, to meet him, to hear him.  All would be pleased to find him a charming, self-effacing gentleman.  He blushed every time someone said to him, “You were a major influence on me,” which meant that he did a lot of blushing at the con.

    Now comes the panel, which I get to moderate, along with Mike Barr — another writer who lists Broome as a major influence.  Here is some of what was said in a room thick with love and respect…

M.E.: You have an enormous number of fans out here.  We have all loved your work for many years
and I can’t tell you how much I have stolen from you. I want to go back to the earliest part of your career.  I believe the first comics you wrote were for Fawcett. What was the first?

JOHN BROOME: I remember the very first one.  I don’t remember much after that (laughs). If I’m correct ˜ and I might not be entirely correct because that was a long, long time ago ˜ the first one wasn’t a super-hero at all.  It was an ordinary guy in the South Seas named Lance O’Casey.  It was just an adventure story.  Just like you might read in the South Seas magazine.

JULIUS SCHWARTZ: Edited by Ray Palmer…who was the real Atom.

M.E.: At that time, you wanted to write professionally ˜?

BROOME: I think I realized that I wasn’t good enough to be a real top notch science-fiction writer. You know, these things happen.  You just want to be something and you don’t get to be it.  Your wishes are completely disregarded by somebody who regulates these things.  (Audience laughs).  And so, when I found out that I could make money in comics, I became a comics writer.

SCHWARTZ: I must interrupt Mr. Broome.  I was your agent for a while and I sold at least 12 science-fiction stories.  That’s not too bad.

BROOME: Not too bad. But they weren’t very good.
SCHWARTZ: I sold them — they must have been great.  (Audience laughs).

BROOME: You were one salesman.

M.E.: What were your influences as a writer?  What did you read that excited you?

BROOME: I read everything. I was a reader.  I wasn’t a writer, I was a reader!  I loved them all ˜ all the great writers…H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky…I read them all.  That had nothing to do with my comics career. Comics is a very special field and, somehow, it suited me.  That was what
made me realize that somehow. I was being cared over by something, somebody, somewhere.  Somebody was taking care of me!  I realized that, all of a sudden.  Later on, it became more obvious but, at that time, it was the first inkling that I wasn’t going to have to go out and hold out a tin cup in order to make my dinner.  I could make my money writing comics.  That was the big event of my life!

M.E.: What was your first page rate?

BROOME: A dollar a page. (Audience laughs).  Julie, is that right?

SCHWARTZ: Not at DC, I beg your pardon! (laughs)

M.E.: How did you get into Fawcett?

BROOME: That’s a good question. I think I heard that Fawcett was publishing comic books.  There was
someone named Wendell Crowley who was editor at Fawcett and somehow, I got the chance to try-out…to write a story and have it looked at. From there on, it went like that.

M.E.: Was this before or after you sold the science-fiction stories?

BROOME: I think it was right in the middle of it.  Julie and I were trying to figure out when we
first met…

SCHWARTZ: Not just when but who first introduced us.  We came to the conclusion that it was
a good friend of John’s ˜ I think he went to Brooklyn College with you ˜ named David Levine at that time.  Then he changed his name to David Vern and wrote science-fiction and many comics under the name of David V. Reed.  Also, David knew Mort Weisinger and he came up and did some comics and he brought John along.  This is about as close as we can get.

M.E.: Did you do any super-hero stuff at Fawcett?

BROOME: Yeah, I did Captain Marvel.  He was a good character.  He wasn’t up to Superman or Batman, but he was a good character.

M.E.: How did you get from Fawcett to DC?

BROOME: Through Julie, whom I was getting to know fairly well…then the Army intervened.  I was
in the Army for two-and-a-half years.  After I got out, Julie was already established as an editor at DC.  So all I did was to go up to Julie’s office and start writing.

SCHWARTZ: That’s not quite right. (Audience laughs)  Alfred Bester got me my job at DC — or All-American, in that case.  When Alfred left, he had been writing Green Lantern.  I persuaded a science-fiction writer named Henry Kuttner to do some, which he did for a while, then he decided to move on. 
I was doing fairly well with John on science-fiction.  I said, “How about trying some comics?”  That is about the most reasonable explanation I can think of.

BROOME: Do you remember the editor of Amazing Stories, I think, or Astounding?  When he read
one of my stories, he said, “This guy’s science is terrible.”  Remember that?  Well, I never claimed to be a great scientist! (Audience laughs)

SCHWARTZ: But I’ll bet I sold the story, anyway.  So I think I immediately put John on Green Lantern because I needed someone, and eventually, he did some Flashes.  But the main thing he did, as far as I was concerned, was to take over the stories that were appearing in All-Star Comics that dealt with the
Justice Society of America.  He wrote many of the latter stories before the magazine was discontinued.  I hope there is an expert in here.  I said to John, I think you did a backup story in All-Star Comics about
a girl in the future called Astra.  Does anyone know anything about that?  Oh, Mark Waid!

MARK WAID: That was actually in Sensation Comics.

(This is M.E. here in italics. Sure enough, down in the front row, Mark Waid not only knows about Astra,
he happens to have a copy of her first appearance ˜ Sensation Comics #99, Sept.-Oct. 1950 ˜ which he shares with the panel.  It’s a treasure which, he later tells me by e-mail, “by dumb luck I’d bought in the dealers’ room about an hour beforehand with no notion it might connect with Mr. Broome in any way.”)

SCHWARTZ: That was a forgotten gem.  I always forget ˜ whenever I have questions about anything,
Mark Waid knows the answer.

M.E.: Now, after you started working for DC, did you work for any other comic book companies?

BROOME: I don’t think so.  Julie?

SCHWARTZ: You may have done an occasional story for Mort Weisinger or Jack Schiff.  Once he got
started at DC, he was treated very well.  He got a fairly good rate, as high as any in the field.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Were you familiar with Batman before you wrote him in 1964?

BROOME: Sure.  I wrote Batman for Mort Weisinger before Julie took over.

SCHWARTZ: How well John knew Batman and how well I didn’t know Batman became apparent in the first story that appeared [when I took over as editor].  The first error was that Batman was on the hunt for the villain during the daytime.  The second was when Batman caught up with the villain, pulled a gun on
him and held him at bay.  Neither one of us realized that Batman didn’t use a gun, but we learned quickly.

M.E.: All right now…you wrote westerns, science-fiction, super-heroes…Did you have a favorite
genre?  Rex the Wonder Dog?

BROOME: Detective Chimp.  Rex the Wonder Dog was an important character.  I remember being in St. Tropez, writing Rex the Wonder Dog or Detective Chimp and it seemed a little odd that I should be writing things like that in such a setting.

M.E.: No preference for any type of story?

BROOME: I think I preferred Hopalong Cassidy.  I liked it because I could work in a more human
kind of story into these.  I can remember giving someone advice about breaking into comic books.  “Start with the character,” I told him.  “Start with the character.”  So when I was writing Hopalong Cassidy,
I would think of some doctor who has a problem, some lawyer who has a problem ˜ something simple ˜ and work from there.

M.E.: Did you like the way your scripts were illustrated?

BROOME: Yes, I think so. I found that DC had good artists and they did a good job of illustrating
the story.

SCHWARTZ: I never thought to ask.  After the story appeared in print, did you look at it?

BROOME: Sometimes, I would reread it.  I would admire my own work! (Audience laughs).  I
worked on a kind of philosophy of comics.  I said that, “The essential of comics is a gimmick that works!”  And Shelly Mayer, who was my editor somehow before Julie, said this about me.  I’m boasting a little now, because I don’t have much chance to boast, but this is my one chance.
(Audience laughs)  He said he never came across a writer who, when he hit it — that is, when the gimmick was operating, hit it as hard as I did.  (Audience applause).  I would work up a kind of a curve of an idea.  It would start off low and finally, all of a sudden — POW!  That’s what I prided myself on when writing the story.

M.E.: Now, John, in the 1950s you wrote the Nero Wolfe comic strip, right?

BROOME: That’s right. Is anyone going to ask me about the first union that ever existed?

M.E.: We’ll get to that. (Audience laughs).  Let’s discuss the way you worked with Julie. How many pages did you write a week?

JOHN BROOME: I think I did enough to make a living.  As I said, I wrote for money.  I don’t want to disguise it.  I wasn’t working to try and make a lot of friends. 

I seem to have a lot of friends but I didn’t work for that.  I went for the money. I did the best I could, and Julie and I turned out to be a good team.  We complimented each other, we supplemented each other
and I could always rely on him to have a good reaction to any ideas that I would bring up.  People would often ask me, “Where do you get the ideas?” Well, I don’t think any comic writer can ever tell you where ideas come from.  If you are a comics writer, you get ideas. That’s your business — to get ideas.  I remember, I got an idea…”The Guardians of the Universe!”  That was an idea.  As far as I know, they didn’t exist.  (Audience laughs)  That didn’t keep me from writing about it.  That’s what the stories were based on — ideas.

JULIUS SCHWARTZ: That originated in a science-fiction story, I believe, that appeared in either Strange
Adventures or Mystery in Space.  It was called “Guardians of the Clockwork Universe.”  That eventually lead into the Guardians that appeared in the Green Lantern series.  Incidentally, why do aliens have to
look different from the way we do?  Maybe in this particular universe, all the aliens look alike.  The Guardians of the Universe were all based on the prime minister of Israel, Abin Sur.

MARK WAID: No, not Abin Sur —  Ben-Gurion.

SCHWARTZ: Oh, right! (Audience laughs)

M.E.: Abin Sur was the first Green Lantern.  Would you describe for us what it was like to work with Julie in the typical session?  You would come in the morning and he would tell you what he needed?

SCHWARTZ: He would probably say, “What are you going to have for lunch?” (Audience laughs)

BROOME: He would say what he needed.  For example, he would say, “I need a 12-page Flash story.” 
We always knew the number of pages ahead of time.  That was very important. An idea for a story had to be bigger for twelve pages than for six or eight. 

You had to get the right kind of idea for the length of the story, and that came with practice.

SCHWARTZ: Well, of course, we came up with the idea of having the cover first.  We had a provocative
cover and it was a challenge to us to look at the cover and figure out how a thing like that happened.  A typical example was the Flash cover in which he was holding up a big hand toward the reader and the copy read, “Stop!  Don’t pass up this magazine!  My life depends on it!”  (Audience laughs).  We worked it out and it became a beautiful story.There was another reason, incidentally, why we had the cover done first.  After the artwork was done, there might not be a decent cover scene in it, so it was much better to get the cover beforehand. 

Poor Murphy, poor Gil Kane, poor Carmine Infantino, poor Mike Sekowsky would pace up and down, trying to think up an original cover idea. Sometimes, nothing came out but some days, you’d get three or four.  I’d present the cover to John and say, “OK, let’s solve it!”  We had a great time doing it.

BROOME: That’s right. The cover sometimes provided the story in a sketchy kind of way. Then I’d work out some kind of understanding or explanation of the cover. The cover usually presented some kind of mystery.  Something was happening, someone was getting poisoned, or frozen or killed or something like that.

M.E.: You would come up with ideas and he would come up with ideas…

BROOME: I would usually have a day or two because he would contact me by telephone and, a day or
two later, I would come in with some ideas for a story.  I might have several ideas and he would pick one of them.  He knew what was good and what wasn’t.  Then we began the most intricate and interesting part of our meeting, which was the plot.

SCHWARTZ: No, it was discussing where we were going to have lunch.  (Audience laughs)

M.E.: After you settled on lunch, you’d talk through the plot, you’d take notes?

SCHWARTZ: John never took any notes.

M.E.: You would go home and write the script in a couple of days ˜?

BROOME: Maybe two or three, maybe a week.

SCHWARTZ: No, let me interrupt again.  John would say, “When do you want the story?”  I’d say,
“Wednesday,” for example.  He’d come in Wednesday and have the story done and the beautiful part was I had the check ready for him.  In Mort Weisinger’s case and Jack Schiff’s, the editor made you wait a few
days to a week.  But my writers knew they the check was waiting in my drawer, and that’s why most preferred to work for me.  (Audience laughs and claps)

MURPHY ANDERSON: Not true. (Audience laughs) That was a factor but that was not the big thing.

M.E.: Julie, how often did you want rewrites on these scripts?

SCHWARTZ: When the rewriting had to be done, I did it.  Yes, I would say, “John, I didn’t like this,” but I would rewrite it myself.  With John, there was very little rewriting.  Gardner Fox, quite a bit.  It would be easier for me to do it than to try to explain where again and bring it in.  A terrible example of that was Fox.  He bought in a story we had plotted and I said, “Oh my God, there’s a hole in the story,” and Gardner said, “I know.” I said, “Why did you write it that way?”  And he said, “That’s the way we plotted it!”  (Audience laughs)  John always brought it in on time and with very little rewriting.

ANDERSON: I can attest to that.  I’d get John’s scripts and there would hardly be any editing at all.  But with Gardner, it sometimes took quite a bit of figuring out.

M.E.: Let’s talk about the Atomic Knights.  What do you remember about how that strip came to be?

BROOME: I remember, in the beginning, we both got the feeling that it had something to do with King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  We thought if we could make a modern version of that spirit and the feeling, that would be a new kind of comic that hadn’t been done and we would enjoy doing it. So
we worked out a third World War where life was almost destroyed and crime was all over.  And the Atomic Knights stand for justice and faith and all that.  So that is the way the story began.

M.E.: Murphy, do you remember starting on the Atomic Knights?  Was it one of you favorite assignments?

ANDERSON: Oh, yes, I remember.  Yes, that is something I really enjoyed doing.  Except it was a back-breaker and I was thankful it only appeared every three months.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: While we are on the topic of the Atomic Knights, I just have to know this. 
What did you get the idea for the giant dalmatians?  (Audience laughs)

BROOME: That was one of the stories?  (Audience laughs)  That’s been long ago! Sorry.

M.E.: Towards the end of your career at DC, there was an attempt to form a writer’s union…

BROOME: Oh, yeah. I developed a fixed idea that DC should pay us for reprint material. When they reprinted a whole story without paying us, that was a stealing of our abilities.  It was stealing something away from us.  I knew that, in movies and television and ASCAP [the composers’ union], they paid royalties…so I thought comics should pay royalties and I talked to the other writers.  I didn’t talk to the artists…they were above me, anyway. There were five or six writers ˜ Eddie Herron, Bob Haney, Otto
Binder, Gardner Fox, a few others.  I think it took six or eight months but one day, I got them all together ˜ all in the same room, ready to do what we had to do, which was to march into Liebowitz’s office.  Liebowitz was the millionaire boss.  We marched in and demanded reprint rights. 

And Liebowitz, who I understand is still alive…he’s about 95 or something

SCHWARTZ: Or more!

BROOME: He didn’t waste any time.  He said, “Boys, I’ll give you a two dollar raise,” and immediately, my union collapsed!  (Audience laughs)  That was the end of the first union at DC.

M.E.: Can you give us a year on that?  About ’68 or so?

BROOME: By ’68, I was already cashing out of the picture.  It would be earlier.  Maybe ’65 would be about right.

M.E.: Now were there other grievances besides the reprints?  Didn’t some of the guys want health insurance?

BROOME: Maybe.  I think maybe they had other demands, but that’s the only part I recall. Liebowitz was afraid of me.  He knew I was a danger to him. I was going to cost him money! (Audience laughs).  So he didn’t like me but he really couldn’t get rid of me too easily.

M.E.: Now, one day, years later, they started sending you reprint checks.  How’d you feel the first time you got one?

BROOME: I loved it!! (Audience laughs and applause)  I felt that I had it coming to me.  The new management, Jenette [Kahn] and a couple of others seem to me to be a new breed, different from the old breed hanging on to their money.

SCHWARTZ: To show you an instance…when the Flash went on television, I received a check, Robert
Kanigher received a check, Carmine received a check…John, they sent you a check for how much?

BROOME: It was $5000.  (Audience applause)

SCHWARTZ: They didn’t have to do it.

M.E.: So that was sometime in the sixties.  You didn’t work for DC much longer after that.

BROOME: Not much longer.  I wasn’t fired or anything like that.  I just lost momentum. I lost steam.  I just couldn’t keep going.  And so I went into the business of teaching English, and that was the end of it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: John, I was wondering if there was any sense of competition between you and Gardner Fox?  I always feel that you guys were the two giants of DC writers. Did you ever feel competitive with him?

BROOME: I’m afraid when it came to comics writing I never recognized that I had any competition. 
(Audience laughs and applause)  We were good friends.  He was an honest man. I had a very enviable position.  I remember Eddie Herron ˜ some of you may remember ˜ a giant of a man. He said to me, “Your stories are cold.  Mine are warm.”  He was trying to make up for the fact that I had this great ‘in’ with Julie.  I could travel around the world, so he was jealous of me, as I’m afraid other people have been.

Marv Wolfman: Julie’s books and comics back in the fifties and sixties for a long time never had credits. However, there were always stories that all of us would say somehow resonated a lot more than the others.  Later on, when I became a professional and had access to DC office files, I checked out all the stories from my childhood that I liked.  There were so many that you wrote that I want thank you for my childhood, as everyone else here does, too.  (Audience applause)

M.E.: He’s basically saying we all stole all our ideas from you.  (Audience laughs)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Broome, I had a question regarding the current direction of Green Lantern. 
How do you feel about DC taking your baby and turning Hal Jordan into a mass murderer?

SCHWARTZ: He knows nothing about that.

M.E.: DC has done a storyline in which Hal Jordan has become a mass murderer and gone crazy…

BROOME: I would never write that story! (Audience applause and shouts of approval)

DAN RASPLER: Mr. Broome, I’m an editor at DC Comics.  I would just like to cordially offer you the opportunity to, if you have any interest in writing a story for DC Comics, we would always be interest in talking with you.  (Audience applause)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wonder if you recall any of your favorite gimmicks that you came up with?

BROOME: That’s a good question! As I’ve said, I think that is the key to a good, successful comic. It’s
very hard to say what a successful gimmick is.  A gimmick could be something like a banana peel.  A typical example from newspaper comics ˜ in  the old days, they used to show a guy walking along and he would slip on a banana peel and land on his head and that was considered very funny. But if you put a banana peel down on a villain who is running away from Green Lantern or Flash, you want him caught because he  is an evil person.  Well, he slips on that banana at the right moment and the reader feels great.  The reader feels fate overtook him. 

It’s what you used to say, Julie ˜ “tragedy struck and fate intervened!” That was the slogan.  We would joke and say. “At this point, tragedy struck and fate intervened!”  (Audience laughs)

M.E. again.  This has been an edited transcript of maybe the best panel I’ve ever seen at any convention.  Admittedly, what made it great cannot be reproduced here.  It was the massive amount of respect and affection that filled the room, emanating from the audience to John Broome (and also between Broome and his collaborators, Julie Schwartz and Murphy Anderson). At the end, Mr.
Broome received a standing ovation that rocked the convention center.  I hope, back in Tokyo where he now lives, he’s still hearing its echoes. It was loud enough that he should.