David Anthony Kraft died recently. He was second-best known for writing Marvel’s The Defenders, Savage She-Hulk, and was the consultant for the young readers Spidey Super Stories. About his thoughtful and subversive work, Peter B. Gillis recently said on Facebook “He was one of the editorial crew up at the old offices in the big room, one of those who would get me past the receptionist—one of those of us who were dead set on changing the face of comics.” But DAK, as his friends called him (and Kraft called himself!) was best known for his wonderful Comics Interview magazine — full title: David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview — which Kraft edited and published from 1983 to 1995 — a whopping 150 issues!
A lot of early info about G.I. Joe filtered out through Comics Interview, as key issues featured interviews with Larry Hama, Buzz Dixon, and Steve Gerber on both Real American Hero comics and television. But hundreds of writers, artists, and projects got covered as well, and it’s a real document of an era. Actually, it’s more than one era! (For example, that Ninja Turtles issue above has nothing to do with Joe, but isn’t a 1985 interview with Eastman and Laird valuable to history?)
Before I get to Kraft’s 1983 and 1996 G.I. Joe connections, I want to set the scene with an excerpt from our 2019 phone interview. Kraft was a talker, and while I did ask questions, I was also able to just shut my mouth and let him go for long stretches. Although this recollection predates A Real American Hero and the controlled and successful Jim Shooter era of the 1980s, I love peeks behind-the-scenes at Marvel, and this is a good backdrop for Kraft’s decision to leave The House of Ideas a decade later. In 1972, Roy Thomas succeeded Stan Lee as Marvel Editor-in-Chief. Kraft had already worked in publishing as a teenager, and then in early 1974 joined Marvel as an Associate Editor working alongside Don McGregor, both under Thomas:
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DAK: I happened to enter comics, Marvel anyway, at a moment of ultimate anarchy, almost. It became anarchy after Roy [Thomas] stepped down [as Editor-in-Chief]. [But before that] what happened was Roy was editing like 40 color titles [on top of] writing all of [his] books. He didn’t have time to micro manage and to look over your shoulder. And he paid more attention to the major books, which made sense. If the books weren’t major books, basically you would talk to Roy and say “Here’s the direction I’m going to take,” and he’d day “cool” or “not cool.”
And then he had a little green file box of index cards of who was using what villains in which books that month. So that there wasn’t an unfortunate contradiction or duplication. The books would be written by the writers, or plotted by them, and drawn, and then [scripted], and then come to Don [McGregor] and me for editing. And there were some writers, and I’ll spare them and not mention names, [whose books] we would shove back and forth, like “You take this book,” “no, you take this book.” Because the continuity would be really, really bad, or the writing would make no sense, and we’d have to rewrite it. There were books that we would fight for, like Marv [Wolfman]’s [Tomb of] Dracula, or Starlin’s book, that I always grabbed. And then the books Don and I were doing nobody looked at except Don and I. So we were, before writer/editors existed, in effect writer/editors, because it wasn’t like Roy read them before they went to the printer, or Stan. They got make-readies after they were printed, and if you fucked up, they would call you on the carpet. So I made it a policy not to fuck up. Simple, right?
Basically all I did was go to Roy on my first color series, Man-Wolf, and I said he’s like a copy of a copy. Marvel has Werewolf by Night, like the Wolf Man in the Universal movies, and now you’ve got a blurry xerox copy of a generic — he around runs menacing people. [FLATLY] Rrrrr. Where’s the future in that? I always say this because post-Star Wars, it’s easy to [assume that space fantasies were popular and the norm], but this was before Star Wars. I’m going to make him a science fantasy character and take him to outer space where he’s a god and do this and that, because that’s something you haven’t seen with a werewolf. And I was kinda worried that Roy would turn it thumbs down. He was like “Sounds cool, go for it.”
Beyond that, he never looked at a plot. He never had any input. Apparently I was okay because he never called me on the carpet. Don and I would write our books, then they would go and be lettered, then they’d be inked, then they would come back and we would editor on the books, then they would go to the printer. Then Stan and Roy and everybody else would see them. That’s the Marvel I came to.
And then over time it became more and more like DC. I worked at DC in ’75. But I used to regard them with disdain and do horrible things. Gee, I don’t know why they didn’t warm up to me over there! They were all these guys in ties and suit jackets. They were all sitting in offices with clear glass. It was like a menagerie of zoo animals. It was so not like Marvel. At Marvel there’d be shit going on, we’d be having fun, but we’d still be working. So whenever I would go up to DC, I was such a hippie, I would go up barefoot with my knees hanging out of my pants just because I hated how constrained it was. Eventually that become Marvel. Then it became all of these offices, with glass, everybody sitting inside. [LAUGHS] It was like Omigod! It became bureaucratic and then more and more layers, and therefore more separated areas.
When there were three of us [editing] 40 color books a month, there wasn’t time for that sort of shit. You couldn’t form your own little area, your own little clique. But over time, eventually it turned into DC as I see things. And there was a lot of crap from that anarchy. As much as I like Steve Gerber, and as good as Steve was – and we all did this — he’d write himself into a corner. Because you were trying to come up with a good cliffhanger. So you’d do whatever was best for the story and you would come up with a great cliffhanger. And then you had to do the next issue and figure out how in the hell you’d get out of that. There was a lot of desperation involved with it. Sometimes the stories never really were satisfying and they meandered and they lost their thread. But you would have never had Howard the Duck and lots of other stuff if you had some kind of regimented little menagerie of editors in their little glass-fronted offices. I love the anarchy period because I could run amok and do whatever I wanted. Later on when it became not fun, I transitioned back to publishing.
[END INTERVIEW EXCERPT]
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On Friday I’ll post Part 2, wherein we get into actual G.I. Joe-related matters — the connection to Real American Hero in 1983 just as Kraft “transitioned back to publishing” and a hectic three months 13 years after that.
