Interview conducted by Blake Bell for "I Have To Live With This Guy!" TwoMorrows Publishing, 2002 Part 5: Professional Editing and the Comics World BB: What about Comics: Between The Panels? How did you get involved with that? I must have just consumed your life. JE: That was more than four years of my life. BB: Was that four years of 9 to 5? JE: On and off. That came about because David Scroggy, who’s a good friend of mine that I met working the Comic Con back in the 1970s, ended up at Dark Horse Comics. At one point he was vice president for publishing or some title like that. Anyway, there was a book that had been in the works at Dark Horse for a long time. It was Mike Richardson’s idea. Mike owns Dark Horse, it’s his company. He has a friend, Steve Duin, who is a writer for the Oregonian, the Portland newspaper.
							Jackie's only project for a major comics publisher: the massive Comics: Between the Panels.
				Mike’s idea was for a book that would consist of lots and lots of anecdotes from comic history—anecdotes about creators, collecting, and all the oddball stories that he had picked up over the years. The two of them had made a list of something like 800 topics that they wanted to put in this book. Steve had written about a third of the entries. Diana Schutz, who was their editor at Dark Horse, had gone through the pieces and given Steve feedback. But this project was sort of stagnating. I think Steve had been working on it for six or seven years. Scroggy called me up and said, "We really need an editor who can make this book happen, because Mike really wants this book to happen. But we don’t have the capacity here to do a full-color, 500-page book, which is what we have in mind. I know you’ve done lots of books that size and have a designer that you’ve worked with down there in San Diego, and if you guys can put together a proposal for doing this book as an independent contractor, then we can finally have a book." So I called Tom Gould, who is a designer I worked with back in my CRM Books days. He was the art director at Psychology Today and did lots of their award-winning covers from the early 1970s. Tom came up with some design proposals for the book and for handling all the production here in San Diego, himself. Dark Horse gave us the go ahead. By the way, we went through lots of ideas for titles, but Comics: Between the Panels was actually suggested by Bat. My job then was to not only to crack the whip over Steve’s head to write the rest of the book, and to edit all of the articles in the book, but to come up with all of the artwork. The book was heavily, heavily illustrated. For the item on ashcan editions, I contacted Gary Colabuono and said, "Gary, you’re the expert on ashcans. What can you give us?" Tons of stuff came from my files and collections of fanzines. I picked out most of the comics covers that were reproduced in the book. Some of them were from my own collection or from Steve’s, but all the Golden Age ones were from Gerber’s Photo-Journal Guide and were supplied as slides by Diamond Comics. Almost all of the photos in the book are mine. They’re from the years when I was the official con photographer, as well as on my own travels. BB: What are some of the perils you ran into, or was it just smooth sailing? JE: The hard part was trying to smooth out the writing, because Steve tends to have an acid-tipped pen. I had to keep reminding him that writing for a book that would be on people’s shelves for years is not like writing for the newspaper that’s read today and gone tomorrow. We had two reviewers for the book who were experts on the Golden and Silver Age material. The one reviewer pointed out, "If you say negative things about a creator, just remember that his kids are probably going to read this book." So, it’s one thing to have anecdotes about Bob Wood, a comics editor who went to jail for killing his girlfriend—that’s on the public record—but it’s another to say that Artist A was a pathetic drunk or that Artist B’s bad drawing was the brunt of everybody’s jokes. You’d better be careful about that kind of stuff.. The great thing is that Steve interviewed several people from the Golden Age about what it was like to work in the various studios and about guys who have long been dead: "What was Lou Fine like, what was Bill Finger like?" He got a lot of original information that is unique to the book. It’s not really a reference book—it’s just lots of interesting stories about all eras of comics. Interestingly enough, Dave Estrada works at Dark Horse these days, and he did the indexes for the book. BB: You’re happy with the results when it came out? JE: Yes, I’m happy with it. I was involved in working with the proofreaders, working with the color separators, checking over every stage as the went along, making corrections, making sure the corrections got made. BB: Why, why, why, why haven’t you been offered an editor job at Marvel, DC, somewhere in comics? JE: Because I’m not part of the good old boy network. BB: But yet you’re connected to a lot of creators there. Is this something you would be interested in or would pursue if you felt there was a door opened? Who is the good boy network? JE: I think I have always been perceived as somebody who’s a volunteer type or somebody you go to for help with the Comic-Con. Many people think I’m an employee of the convention, which I’ve never been. Most company folks or pros who call or e-mail me want to know how to sign up for pro registration or how to get in touch with the program coordinator, or they want me to do something for free. I produced something like a dozen of the Comic-Con’s program books between 1977 and 2000, which I got plenty of praise for, and at no time did anyone ask if I was available for other editing work Even after I did the Dark Horse book, nobody inquired if I was available to do things. On the other hand, I’ve seen 20-year-old fanboys with no experience whatsoever be offered editing jobs at the major companies. Fanboys whose only experience has been working for comic conventions. Needless to say, this is has been a sore point for me, because I do see that people like myself, with proven editing skills and an extensive background in publishing, aren’t the ones who are offered positions. It’s someone they hang out with at conventions, or It’s one of their friends: "Oh, I went to school with him, so I’m going to ask him to be editor-in-chief of our new publishing company." BB: Is that when the industry started on its road to "badness," when that whole group that was raised on the ‘60s Marvels moved into the editors’ rooms? JE: I think that had a very bad effect. BB: They started limiting what kind of books would go in there- JE: There were two things that had a bad effect. One was the whole fans-becoming-pros phenomenon, where these guys just wanted to keep doing the same kinds of books they liked as kids and teenagers, and they had no experience anywhere outside of comics. That’s the core of the good old boy network. The other was the development of the direct market, where comics companies came to see their target audience as 16- to 30-year old males who like superheroes—the kinds of customers who would frequent comic book stores. As smart marketers, the companies said, "This is our built-in, for-sure audience. We’re going to do stuff for them and we’re not going to do anything else." The owners of the stores were 90% from that fanboy background, so that’s the only kind of comics they would put in their stores. So, that became the only kind the companies would produce. If you look back to the early ’80s, you had all these companies like First, Pacific, Renegade, and Comico doing titles like The Rocketeer, Johnny Quest, Neil the Horse, Grendel, American Flagg—wide varieties of books that were fun to read for all ages. People couldn’t wait for the next Nexus to come out. So the early days of the direct market were very exciting. But now, if anybody tries to put out anything new or different, they have a tough time getting retailers to carry it. Instead we’ve gotten to the point where the most popular characters have so many titles coming out, there’s no way to keep track of them. You have to be a hardcore fan to know the difference between this X-Men title and that X-Men title, or between this Batman title and that Batman title. BB: Just to finish up on this good old boy network thing, how have you personally experienced it? JE: Well, I can specifically think of one occasion several years ago where I was trying to put together a seminar related to comics, and I was having a hard time getting any cooperation from the higher-up guys at one of the companies. I was explaining my frustration to one of the seminar organizers, who had been involved in comics in various capacities for some 25 years. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was being stonewalled because I wasn’t part of the network. And seeing as how he was one of the good old boys, he made a few phone calls for me to see what the scoop was. As it turns out, I hadn’t followed the right protocol—I was supposed to have talked to guy A before guy B (even though the procedure had been the reverse in my past dealings with this company). So this kind of stuff goes on behind the scenes all the time. Women in Comics BB: The last thing I’d like to talk about is women in comics. First of all from your perspective of being a wife and being connected, I assume to some degree, to other wives, how do you look upon other wives of other creators in terms of their personalities and their opinions? You must have shared stories with various ones over the last- JE: The ones I have the most in common with are those who are in the same position of publishing their husband’s work. That would be Vijaya Iyer [Jeff Smith’s wife], Maria Lapham [David’s wife], Robyn Moore (Terry’s wife), and other women who are encountering the same things I am as far as trying to deal with printers, sell books to bookstores, set up booths at cons, that sort of thing. We all just kind of commiserate. (laughter) BB: Do you find that most of them are dealing with extremely similar experiences that the artists are all, no matter what kind of unique characters are all kind of the same, wired the same way? JE: We all nod our heads knowingly. (laughter) BB: What about when you talk to an Ann Eisner or Adrienne Colan or someone like that? Can you tell distinct differences and what are some of the difference between- JE: I think it’s a generational thing. Ann is someone who was never involved in her husband’s work and not really that familiar with it. Carrie Nodell is 100% committed to Marty’s stuff, but he hasn’t done anything new in umpteen years. (laughter) But they’re partners and they share everything. I think that in that older generation the wives had a different function. Today, we’re career people. Each one of us has had some kind of separate career that we know and are confident about. BB: That’s what I’m interested in. Deni would talk about how she just lost herself—how everything was being directed towards Dave and Dave’s comic. The people like Vijaya and Maria now—you yourself have said you’ve been able to achieve a separation and have a lot of different things whether it’s your Eisner awards or your editing. Do you find some of the mistakes that perhaps Deni would talk about repeating themselves in people like Maria or Vijaya have they learned to have their own separate identity, their own separate lives not all directed towards their husband and the work he creates? JE: I know that Vijaya was very successful in the computer business in California before she and Jeff moved back to Ohio. She’s very much a businessperson and seems to enjoy that aspect of it. Maria seems to love what she’s doing. BB: So these are independent women able to keep their own mindset and not lose themselves. You are a publisher on one hand, all of you are publishers, yet it’s all directed towards one individual and I’m assuming that Renegade came out of the need to have a separate entity. JE: Terry Moore didn’t really start doing comics until their kids were teenagers. I’m sure Robyn had her own thing that she did before they decided to make a commitment to do the publishing company. There are certainly plenty of other businesses where husband and wife go into it and it becomes their lives. I don’t think it’s any different than that in comics, except that there is a uniqueness to the creative person’s lifestyle, and you have to be the right person to go along with that. BB: What makes a good comic book creator’s wife, if you will? JE: I’ll tell you what doesn’t—that’s the woman who feels she has to be the center of attention. "How come you’re spending all your time doing that when you should be paying attention to me?" "Well, what do you want to do?" "I don’t know. I want you to pay attention to me." (laughter) The kind of woman who can’t find things to do herself is not going to do well married to a comics creator. I do know of cases of divorce in comics where the woman, even though she was warned ahead of time of what it was going to be like, didn’t believe it until she got married. "He doesn’t want to go do things. He doesn’t want to sit around and do nothing with me." The thing about cartoonists is that they’ve got to be working all the time. They go nuts "doing nothing." BB: I don’t know if this was an East Coast phenomenon during the late ’60s and early ’70s and onwards, but can you speak—and you would have some perspective having direct contact talents over the years—to the incestuous nature of relations within the comic book field—how everybody seems to marry others in comics? Is there a comfort level between these people that they all know each other? JE: It’s called the proximity effect. (laughter) Because comics people tend to work at home or in studios or alone, their social lives tend to be with other people who do the same thing or who they share studios with. So that’s who their spouses get to know, and lots of times you had situations where a couple divorce and the wife marries one of the husband’s friends, and vice versa. I can see how that’s happened. It’s not that big of an industry. BB: Is that a healthy thing though? A lot of the Golden Age or Silver Age related people—Dick and Linda Ayers, they didn’t socialize with other comic book artists. Ann Eisner, she wouldn’t talk about socializing with other artists. But then the hippie generation onwards, all the sudden, Boom, they’re all thrown together. JE: When you hear stories of what it was like for cartoonists in the ’40s and ’50s, they didn’t want anybody to know they were in comics. They did comics temporarily till they got their real job. They didn’t even want to tell people at parties this is what they did, because comics were looked down on—they were for kids and illiterates; they were making juvenile delinquents. BB: Even amongst the artists themselves, I always expect to hear great stories from the Romitas or the Ayers. "Oh, tell me about hanging out with Stan Lee." "Never met him." Or barely ever met him. Then you get into that ’70s group, boom, they’re like trading cards. JE: A lot of the guys shared studios together—Chaykin, Starlin, and Simonson. You had the Studio with Kaluta, Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, and Barry Windsor-Smith BB: It sounds it kind of all went crazy in terms of their personal relationships. JE: They’re all interesting guys. (laughter) There was a lot of camaraderie among them. Of course, some of those people hate each other now. BB: Given some of the stories Ann Murphy was telling me. It’s not surprising. The place of women professionally in comics has evolved—there’s a lot more women in there—but yet, a lot of the women fans have dissipated. JE: I think there are more women fans than ever before. BB: You think so? JE: Definitely, just from my observations at conventions and from posts online. I think the readership among females, especially those who are not girlfriends or spouses, has gone up, particularly because of manga. A lot of girls got into reading comics from reading Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon—stuff like that. Also, X-Men has always been a comic that girls get into comics. But as far as women creators are concerned, one reason we have so few is that it just didn’t occur to girls that doing comics could be a career. They never thought, "I read comics. I want to be a comic book artist." It’s just not something that went into their minds. However, what I’ve been observing lately is lots of teenage girls doing their own comics. Some of them are doing autobiographical things, minicomics, all kinds of oddball things. BB: What are some of the examples of what you’re talking about? JE: One girl, a college biology student, sent me a minicomic she did about underwater worms. (laughter) The worms interacted socially, told jokes. Girls are seeing comics as a creative outlet, but not as something you can do and make money at it. So if you go to something like SPX or APE, you’ll see many, many female faces behind the tables. From 16 on up to 40- and 50-year-old women, doing minicomics, handmade comics with pictures glued to the covers, all sorts of imaginative works. BB: But that doesn’t translate necessarily in the professional world? JE: Right. Because they don’t see a market for the kind of thing they’re doing compared to what’s being published. BB: How does Friends of Lulu fit into that? Your first memories of that were what—Heidi MacDonald? JE: Heidi came up to me at the 1993 San Diego Con and handed me a little flyer saying "Preliminary meeting for new organization—Friends of Lulu." BB: Was it her flyer? Was this her that it all started with her? JE: Yes. The meeting was a Sunday afternoon at a coffeehouse across the street from the convention center. I have pictures from it. You had Deni Loubert, Wendy Pini, Kim Yale, Trina Robbins, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Maggie Thompson, Martha Thomases, cat yronwode, Anina Bennett, Sarah Dyer, Barb Rausch, Barb Kaalberg, and lots of others I can’t recall just now. BB: That’s quite an impressive list. JE: It was a wide range of people. BB: What did you guys discuss there? What were some specifics? JE: Some of the women wanted to get complaints off their chests of how they were treated in the industry. I remember one woman who worked at DC saying, "I’m the only editor there who doesn’t have a computer. All the guys have a computer. I don’t have a computer." Then other women were talking about, "Well, if we had an organization, what would be the purpose? What would we try to do? Would it be something that would be activists for employee rights?" So, it was just lot of ideas thrown around. BB: You ended up as president in 1995? JE: Yes. A steering committee (which I wasn’t on) had been set up at the Chicago Con to come up with the basic goals and structure of the organization. Then in San Diego that year the elections for the first committee were held. I and six other women were elected. Our first order of business was to get nonprofit status. Then, when the committee became the first board of directors, the board chose me as president. BB: You were president for five years? JE: Yes. BB: What do you feel you accomplished with Friends of Lulu during your time? JE: A number of things. One was the Lulu Cons, in particular the second one held in New Jersey. That had a theme of getting more kids into comics. We had various experts come in and talk about how, for instance, comics were being used in school curricula, and how Scholastic Books was publishing some graphic novels. We had editors from Nickelodeon magazine talking about how comics came to be included in that publication. The third LuluCon was held in Los Angeles in conjunction with Book Expo America, where the theme was getting graphic novels in bookstores. Another big accomplishment was the "Friends of Lulu Recommends" catalog put out by Diamond. We distributed lots of those. BB: Do you feel you were able to get more comics into schools, libraries, and regular bookstores? JE: I think we helped bring the topic into the spotlight, which inspired other people to pursue things. BB: How about media coverage? Were you guys able to get positive media coverage? JE: We got some good media coverage. We had some write-ups that were nationally syndicated in newspapers. I wrote an article for the Overstreet Price Guide. It addressed some of the questions you asked me about how it came to pass that women became such a small part of the comics industry. BB: How about with stores and the consumer base, which seems to be the big issue? JE: Friends of Lulu produced a handbook called How to Get Girls (into Your Store). Deni was the editor, and several members researched and wrote the chapters. We were able to get Quebecor to donate the printing and I lined up advertisers to cover all the other costs involved. Diamond sent a copy of each of its 4000 or so retail accounts. BB: What about the retailers, in terms of their reaction to your organization in that regard? Were you fighting an uphill battle? JE: Unfortunately, the retailers most open to reading the handbook were the ones already doing everything we suggested. The store owners least likely to even open the book were the ones that could have benefited most from the suggestions and recommendations. It’s hard to know how many retailers actually took it to heart and made any changes as a result. When I was on the board, Friends of Lulu also did a lot of other things. For instance, we had a booth or table at all the major conventions, and we put together panels and programs for Chicago Con, Wonder Con, Comic Book Expo, and the San Diego Con, on various issues. BB: How much of your day on average in a week would you spend working on the project? JE: Way too much. (laughter) BB: Is that why you left eventually? JE: Yes, because something had to go. The Eisner Awards became more and more time consuming, and I was not paying as much attention to Exhibit A as I should. I was not only running the board meetings (which we held online) and chairing the Lulu Cons, I was producing the newsletter, running the recommended reading committee, producing fliers, updating information for the website, and getting the Lulu Awards made. I ended up doing too much because several of the volunteers weren’t doing what they had said they’d do. BB: Are you someone who can delegate authority or are you someone who goes, "When there is a vacuum, I’m going to take on responsibility." JE: I wait a certain amount of time, and when the delegate doesn’t come through, I do the job so it gets done. BB: Do you consider that a bad trait in yourself or a good one? JE: That’s a bad trait. BB: What were some of the best, or craziest experiences, you had as president? I imagine you had both positive and negative reactions. JE: That would be Dave Sim trying to pick a fight with us. BB: What were the details behind that? JE: In an issue of Cerebus Dave completely mischaracterized the organization as being only for women, as only for professionals, as militant feminist, and as anti-free speech. His challenge was, "To prove to me that you are anything different than how I have characterized you. I issue a challenge to Friends of Lulu to raise money for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund." He wanted to get a real feud going. So we drafted a response that he ran in his next issue. We basically said, "Gee, Dave, thanks for giving us the opportunity to clear up misconceptions about Friends of Lulu. For instance, it’s for men and women, it’s for professionals and nonprofessionals. The purpose is to get more women and girls reading and doing comics and to just expand the readership of comics in general. It’s an inclusive rather than exclusive organization. The fact is that many of our members and board members are also members and supporters of CBLDF; however, because of our nonprofit charter, we can only engage in activities related to our mission statement. We cannot, as an organization, give financial support another nonprofit organization that has a different purpose. We’re different organizations. We have a different purpose. That’s what we have to do in order to maintain our goals and status." Dave got very upset about that because he thought it was just too bland a response. He wanted us to be all lathered up and show our emotional side. But in this case we women were being the rational, logical ones and he was being illogical and emotional. He challenging us to respond again, and we didn’t. He got really upset about that because we wouldn’t play his game. (laughter) BB: What was the whole response of the Friends of Lulu board members, whatever to him and his writing from Cerebus #186 onwards? JE: He wanted to set up Friends of Lulu as the enemy and as representing the feminist sucking-the-brains-out-of-the-guys organization, and we weren’t like that. It’s true that some of the Friends of Lulu members were extreme feminists. In any organization like that, you’re going to have some members who have views at each end of the spectrum. But that doesn’t represent the whole organization. That was the main problem I had to fight—the misconceptions like Dave held, and the fact that people didn’t like some of the statements or actions of a few women identified with Friends of Lulu. You cannot find a way to reach everybody who has had bad experiences, and those people tend to tell others their stories as being about FoL and not about the person they dealt with. BB: How do you maintain your objectivity when people call you, not you, but the group, "witless whores" and things like that? JE: You laugh about it. (laughter) My policy with everything that I do is whenever I encounter misinformation, I just put out the correct information. I don’t call people names. I don’t start having a feud with them. I just say here’s the accurate information. My goal is to get that information out there, rather than get mad about it. BB: How long ago did you leave as president? When did you retire? Was it 2000? JE: 1999 was the last time I was the president. BB: In the last three years, how have you viewed it and what has it accomplished since? Have they been able to run with what you’ve done? JE: No, the organization has been kind of moribund. BB: Why is that? JE: I think people didn’t realize how much work was really involved in being on the board. They accepted a position and then realized, ‘Hey, I have to have a life too.’ BB: So, it’s a lack of leadership at the top, or a lack of ability to take the ball and run with it like you would run with it? JE: When the board I was on was replaced—because only two people ran for the board again, so the new board had five new members—none of the new people contacted any of us previous board members. Even though we had offered transition information and our availability as a resource, they never asked us anything. Of the two people who were carryovers, one of them ended up doing all the work that year. The next year, new people came in and the organization became a bit more active. BB: Do you ever look back and think, "Why did I bother over those five years if everybody else didn’t put in the effort or if it didn’t mean as much to them as it did to me?" JE: Well, I can at least be proud of what I did and feel that I did the best of my ability. We’ve seen in comics that there really haven’t been any volunteer organizations that have succeeded. (laughter). Most nonprofits have to have a paid executive director or staff person who can do the day-to-day stuff that nobody wants to do. When you have something that’s all volunteer, you often depend too much on too few. BB: You said once in an interview, "I would change the ratio of the types of retailers from being 95% fanboy 5% businesspeople to the reverse. " I guess the same applies to not just retailers but every aspect as you’re speaking of now. JE: I just expect a certain level of professionalism out of people. Lots of times my expectations are not met. I certainly have to say that I benefited from Friends of Lulu in developing friendships that are lasting. People that I worked with on the board are still very, very good friends of mine, especially Rochon Perry and Laurel Carpenter. But I look on the Friends of Lulu experience as part of what has become one of my overall missions in life, which is to promote the comics medium and the best it has to offer. I tried to do that with FoL and with Comics: Between the Panels, and I’m trying to do that with the Eisner Awards and with our own Exhibit A publications.
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