Thursday 29 December 2011

Howard The Duck

Howard The Duck #8 (Marvel Comics, November 1980)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #82, July 1983)
...that was Marvel's serpent-in-the-garden phone call. Marvel is well known for their serpent-in-the-garden phone calls. Just when you get set on what you're going to do, Marvel phones up and asks if you want to work for them... For me it was a phone call from Bill Mantlo, saying that they had decided to do try-out pieces for Howard The Duck to be used as frontispieces, and they were paying real money for them, and it could be whatever I wanted to do. "How Dave Sim would handle Howard The Duck." And I did that for the experience of it, for the exposure; I mean, nothing succeeds like Marvel in fan's eyes. Like being able to tell them I did a story for Epic now. For a lot of them it's like you really exist now. Before you were off in a Never-Never Land. I think it was after that that Lynn Graeme called and said that Bill Mantlo had quit Howard after I had done the page (just a coincidence) and that they liked the page I did. Would I be interested in writing it? And at the time I had just decided to go monthly with Cerebus. If the phone call had come two months before I would have thought, "Well, great, I'll write Howard The Duck one month and do Cerebus the other month." They didn't have any interest in me drawing it, which - this has been a lot of the drawback with a lot of places. If you want to get to Dave Sim you best bet is to ask him to draw something for you and tell him that you're not crazy about his writing since I've heard the other side so many times.

I never really actually "almost wrote" Howard The Duck. I decided against it after about five seconds.

1 comment:

John Pontoon said...

HOLY. FRICKIN'. CRAP.

Of this, I was unaware.