Comic book scripts aren’t written to be read. At least not in the way a short story or a novel is read. A script is work product, a blueprint for the finished comic book. Most of the words that go into a comic book script will only ever be read by three or four people; the dialogue is the only element that survives from the blueprint to be seen by readers.
But sometimes a script doesn’t make it all the way from the larval stage to full maturity as a published story. The reasons can range from cancellation to a change in editor or even format. Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg contains stories in all those categories, including a three issue Green Lantern story arc for DC Comics’ Legends of the DC Universe that was left without a home after the title was cancelled and a pair of issues of Batman: The Brave and the Bold that didn’t survive a change in both format and editor.
Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg also contains the original typed and hand-edited manuscript for an unused 1987 Green Lantern fill-in, as well as a never published “Elongated Man” back-up for The Flash, the script for a framing sequence for the short-lived Elvira’s House of Mystery, and stories written for DC’s Time Warp and the Warren Publishing horror magazines.
All scripts except for “The Eyes of the Beholders” are reproduced from copies of the original typed manuscripts or reformatted from surviving electronic manuscripts.
Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg TABLE OF CONTENTS
Still Available: THE UNPUBLISHED COMIC BOOK SCRIPTS OF PAUL KUPPERBERG, Volume 1!
Featuring 5 scripts for the never published NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY #55 and the canceled pre-CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS reboot of SUPERBOY and SUPERGIRL in DC DOUBLE COMICS!
JSA: Ragnarok by Paul Kupperberg Cover by Daerick Gross Sr. Crazy 8 Press Paperback & eBook
In the closing days of the second World War, the Justice Society of America prevented the villainous Wizard from unleashing a deadly magical evil upon the world.
But it didn’t prevent him from making a deal with the devil… a deal that may now doom the JSA!
In New York, Mister Terrific barely survives an attack by the Tigress. Across town, Power Girl is grounded by the power of Count Vertigo. In Keystone City, Jakeem Thunder and his magical Thunderbolt face off against Blackbriar Thorn. In Blue Valley, Stargirl feels the power of the Geomancer.
Why have the villains of the Injustice Society of America suddenly declared war?
The answer spans the globe, as in faraway Casablanca, a collector of antiquities is murdered by a mysterious woman thief for what appears to be a minor Roman relic. And on a German waterfront, an old man kills a young man to steal a World War I artifact.
These events and others soon point legendary heroes Green Lantern, Flash, Wildcat, and their JSA teammates to the Wizard and a threat they believed they had destroyed in the last days of World War II. But now the Spear of Destiny, the powerful mystical weapon once wielded by Adolph Hitler himself, has again surfaced… bringing with it an evil from out of the JSA’s past and the promise of a fate worse than death! Now Mister Terrific, Power Girl, and the other members of the world’s first super team must break an evil half century old pact… or be doomed forever to a living hell.
On days like this Michael Holt was glad he’d decided not to die. That the early autumn air was pleasantly crisp after a brutally hot and sticky New York City summer was only one factor contributing to his contentment. The foliage in Central Park in the heart of Manhattan was just beginning its seasonal color changes, greens morphing into blazing reds and oranges, falling to carpet the park’s East Meadow.
It was one of those rare, perfect New York afternoons, the kind you usually only saw in movies with soundtracks by Gershwin. But today wasn’t a movie, only the life that Michael was living, and, for once, it felt good. For the moment, he was happy.
Well, okay, very content, which was the closest thing to happy he usually got. But it was hard to be anything else, what with the happy shouts and cheers of the kids at play all but drowning out the sound of the traffic on nearby 5th Avenue.
Normally something of a jock, in fact an uberjock, today Michael was happy to sit back and watch from the comfort of a picnic blanket at the edge of the field. The kids—not his own kids, although they were here under his charge—were having a great time, running themselves ragged in an endless game of serial touch football.
“Yo, Mr. Holt, man,” 19-year-old Tyler Williams called from the line of scrimmage. “I know you’re kinda over the hill, dude, but think you wanna get in the game anyway?”
“Don’t think so, Ty. I’m about two servings of potato salad and three cupcakes past being able to drag myself off this blanket.”
“Uh-oh. That’s gonna cost you in the gym.”
Holt smiled and lay back down. “I’ll worry about that tomorrow, man.”
A 12-year-old girl named Rena came charging up to Tyler and slapped the football from his hands. Another boy swooped in and grabbed it. Tyler laughed, shrugged, and ran off in hot pursuit. Tyler was one of the big successes of the Harlem youth center that Holt funded and oversaw. He had come to the after-school program a sullen fifteen-year old drop-out, already in gang colors and a world of hurt. Michael had assumed Tyler was looking to make trouble or recruit other kids, but the pot-smoking, gang-running, 9mm-toting gangsta found something with the other kids at the youth center that the gangs never provided. Without ever knowing exactly when or why it happened, Tyler shed the colors, went back to school, and was now, four years later, a sophomore at Columbia University on a full scholarship. He earned his walking around money as a counselor at the youth center.
And since he and the two other counselors were taking such good care of the rest of the kids, all twenty of them, ranging in age from 10 to 15, he couldn’t think of a single reason to budge from his place in the sun. The birds were chirping in the trees. Somewhere, a lone raven cried out. Everything was under control. There was nothing for him to do but to do nothing.
So, he did.
Michael Holt settled back, hands clasped beneath his head and closed his eyes, letting the sun’s warmth wash over his six-foot two frame, clad in comfortable jeans, sneaks, a Yale sweatshirt, and a denim jacket. He knew he had a lot to be grateful for, certainly more than most people, and absolutely more than the kids he mentored at the center. They had everything in the world working against them, born into lives of poverty, products of broken homes or victims of abuse, tempted by the lure of gangs and the empty promise of drugs.
Michael knew he’d had one cushy life compared to theirs. He had been born into a comfortable middle-class family, an unnaturally gifted student with an eidetic memory, a talent for the sciences, and a natural bent for athletics that he followed to an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon.
Having conquered the Everest of physicality, he turned his sights to business. Michael could easily have ridden his athletic fame to riches, but he couldn’t see spending his life on a ball field or endorsing underarm deodorant, not with the ideas spinning around in his head. He went to school instead, collecting degrees the way other kids collect baseball cards. Engineering at Cal-Tech, physics at M.I.T., law at Harvard, computer sciences at Stanford, medicine at Yale, and on, feverishly trying to stuff the bottomless pit of his mind with knowledge before he hit on the invention that allowed him to become one of the earliest, and certainly most successful, African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
He developed the next generation of cybernetic software, the first commercially viable application of a system that controlled robotic devices through mental feedback. His development attracted the attention of every major high-tech company from Microsoft to Hewlett-Packard to WayneTech. Michael had taken his technological achievement as far as he could on his own. The only decision left to make was deciding which corporate monolith he would sell out to. Bruce Wayne himself, CEO of WayneTech and scion of one of America’s wealthiest families, showed up on Michael’s doorstep to personally conduct the negotiations for the sale of his little cyberware concern, cinching the deal.
When he was a kid, Michael had often heard his mother describe people as having “more money than they knew what to do with,” but he could never quite wrap his mind around the concept. After his deal with Wayne, he got it. With an impressive mound of cash up front and a healthy block of WayneTech options and generous royalties cushioning the back end, Michael Holt was rich. Filthy, stinking rich. He had, hey, look mom, more money than he knew what to do with. Michael Holt could afford to do anything he imagined anytime he imagined it.
He could take care of himself and his family and, best of all, spend the rest of his life sharing all the wonderful things his newfound wealth had bought with the love of his life, his wife, Paula.
Karen Starr just knew this wasn’t going to be her day.
Of course, in all fairness, Karen hadn’t started out a new day with any sort of optimism whatsoever in, well, if she stopped to think about it, it would just depress her more.
Which really was, Karen thought with stoic resignation, the story of her life. A matter of keeping her depression from advancing to the next level. Okay, maybe depression was too tough a word. How about calling it sorrow; or maybe emptiness described it better.
Of course, she was willing to concede that, under the circumstances, maybe she was overreacting. But it really didn’t seem to be asking too much of the powers that be, to ask that if the big things in her didn’t go right, couldn’t at least the little things?
Like the ATM.
How tough should it be to get $60 out of her account? She had her ATM card. Inserted in the correct orientation into the ATM machine. Followed by her PIN number, which was, of course, stupid and redundant. An ATM machine. That’s the same as calling it an automated teller machine machine. The personal identification number number. Machine and number were built into the name. And why the hell was she even thinking about that? The salient facts were (a) she had no money on her whatsoever, and (b) the ATM machine just ate her damned ATM machine card card!
Karen pressed buttons. Enter. Clear. Cancel. One. Nine. Four. Her presses became jabs. Seven. Three. Clear. Clear. Clear. Her jabs became blows and why the hell didn’t they have a “Give Me My Damned Card Back You Stinking Metal Box” button?
Karen Starr was a woman people looked at, men with undisguised lust, women with admiration or jealousy. At five foot seven inches tall and one hundred and sixty pounds, Karen Starr was an impressive and stunningly beautiful woman. Her features were model perfect, her voluptuous figure gym-toned, straddling that fine line between ripped and overdone, her blue eyes dark and intense, peeking out from behind blond bangs.
“My card or my money,” Karen demanded from between clenched teeth.
Her friends told her she had anger management issues. Karen told them to mind their own damned business.
She jabbed buttons. Cancel. Delete. Delete.
She was fooling no one, least of all herself. She was angry. Well, in truth she was sad, and it was her sadness that made her angry. But six of one, half a dozen of the other, right? End result was Karen Starr was a pissed off lady and pissed off was not a state in which you wanted to see her. Especially not if you were a defenseless ATM.
And Karen Starr was jabbing fingers of steel into your poor keypad.
Through your poor keypad.
“Aww, hell,” she snarled, prying her fingers out of the mess of punctured aluminum keys and exposed wires. “Now not only don’t I get my money, but I just bought myself a busted ATM.”
She looked into the video camera mounted over the ATM and stuck out her tongue.
Michael Holt knew he shouldn’t go there, knew it the instant the image of her face formed in his mind, evoking a bittersweet smile.
Michael had met her in grad school, during the year he spent at Harvard studying for his law degree. The moment he walked into the Foreign Criminal Policy class and saw her sitting there, he knew she was the one. A moment of clarity unmatched in his experience, at least until…
She didn’t look up from her conversation with a classmate, hunched forward as though whatever the other woman was saying was the most important thing she had ever heard. Michael was struck breathless. She was beautiful, yes, but that wasn’t what made him fall in love in the space of a heartbeat. To tell the truth, even all these years later, he still couldn’t say exactly what it had been. It was just her. The scientist in him attributed it to pheromones, but he knew better.
And, at the end of that first class, when he timed his exit from the room to coincide with hers and she smiled and, for the first time, looked at him with eyes so soft and yet so penetrating that his heart literally skipped a beat, he no longer cared if he ever defined the attraction. To hell with analysis, the razor-sharp scientific mind of Michael Holt screamed in a skull suddenly empty of all thought but the thought of her. He knew only that he wanted to spend the rest of forever by her side.
He was amazed a woman like Paula would become his. That’s how lacking in conceit he was. It never occurred to him that she would fall for a handsome and brilliant young scholar and Olympic gold medalist. But from the second class on, Paula and Michael were inseparable and, the day after graduation, to no one’s surprise, they were married. Not too many years later, he was rich, and they had nothing but time to spend together.
And then…
The last thing Karen Starr wanted to do was trudge all the way back uptown, dig through the clothes in her closet and her pocketbooks in hopes of finding a stash of some forgotten cash, then race back down here to the Village to make her movie.
Karen had been looking forward to this screening of The Big Sleep at the Cinema Village. She’d seen the 1946 film noir classic, directed by Howard Hawkes and starring Bogart and Bacall, a few times on TV and DVD, but never on the big screen. To this day, she wasn’t sure who had done what to whom in this convoluted classic—even Raymond Chandler, the author of the book it was based on, didn’t know who killed the chauffeur—but she knew the anticipation of seeing it in the all-enveloping confines of a movie theater had been the one thing that had kept her going through the last few days.
She checked her watch. Twenty minutes. To get from Greenwich Village to Morningside Heights and back.
Not undoable.
And worth the effort. So, okay, Karen took a deep breath, left a note in the slot of the smashed ATM, and decided to at least try not to turn this anthill of a problem into a mountain of an emotional situation. She had, she knew, a tendency towards the melodramatic. But, hey, looking at the circumstances of her life—strange, to say the least—melodrama wasn’t totally uncalled for.
“Strange visitor from an unknown planet or time or dimension or whatever,” she muttered under her breath as she sought out a deserted doorway and began pulling off her clothes.
It always came back to that day.
That damned Sunday morning, like every other Sunday morning since he had known her, when his otherwise rational wife awoke early and headed off to church. A lifelong Protestant, she would sometimes try to convince her agnostic husband to come with her. He needn’t believe to attend services. It was just something else they could share, but Michael Holt was too much the scientific rationalist to buy into the anachronistic ritualism of organized religion. They seldom if ever argued, but for whatever reason, Michael and Paula got into it that morning with no other result than to make her late for church.
To put her in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To be on that particular patch of sidewalk at the precise instant an out of control car jumped the curb and plowed her down.
Her and their unborn child. A son, if it mattered. It was his fault, of course. If he hadn’t been such a hard-headed ass about it, she would have left earlier and would have been somewhere else when the car jumped the curb. He had instigated the argument, hoping to do… what? Change her mind about the existence of the almighty in a five-minute harangue? And how was he supposed to reconcile his arguments against her beliefs, with what he now knew and the beings he’d met?
His last memory of Paula alive was of her face screwed tight in anger, their last words to one another before parting that morning a clipped “You’re just wasting your time,” and an angry “We’ll talk about this later,” instead of their customary “I love you.” His very last memory of Paula, the picture he would see for too many years after her death, was her laying crushed and dead in a pool of her own blood on a sidewalk.
That was the moment Michael Holt stopped caring whether he himself lived or died.
While the countdown continues for the Kickstarter campaign for Crazy 8 Press’Thrilling Adventure Yarns Volume II, here’s a little taste from my story, the sixth outing starring Leo Persky, aka Terrance Strange, investigative reporter for “the world’s only reliable newspaper,” the Weekly World News. Joining me in this titanic tome of tales are stories by my fellow Crazy 8’ers, Aaron Rosenberg, Michael Jan Friedman, Glenn Hauman, Mary Fan, Bob Greenberger, and Russ Colchamiro, as well as stories by David Mack, Paige Daniels, Will Murray, Karissa Laurel, William Leisner, Danielle Ackley McPhail, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Greg Cox, Heather E. Hutsell, Kelli Fitzpatrick, Michael A. Burstein, Richard White, Scott Pearson, and Sherri Cook Woosley… and another previously unpublished story by the legendary creator of Doc Savage!
Thrilling Adventure Yarns II, cover by Cary Carbom
“Man-Bait for the Snake God”
My name is Leo Persky. I’m more popularly known as Terrance Strange, my byline in the Weekly World News, the tabloid newspaper next to the other tabloids at the supermarket checkout. Most people assume that because of our subject matter — the unusual, the supernatural, extraterrestrials et al — that we’re being ironic with the slogan, “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper.” Ironically, it’s all really, if weirdly, true. Well, except for my byline. And the photo of the handsome, square-jawed adventurer that goes with it. Those came from my grandfather, Jacob, the foremost monster hunter of his day, who thought “Strange” sounded better in his line of work than Persky. So did the News.
“Don’t we have a stringer in Peru we can use instead of flying me halfway around the world?” I asked. Whined.
“If you’d rather,” Rob responded in the tone of voice he uses when he’s about to delight in telling me the even more repulsive alternative he’s got planned, “it is possible to drive from New York City…”
“No.”
“… By bus, to Peru, a total of about 12, 13,000 miles, through South American…”
“Jesus, Rob,” I moaned.
“… Across the 90-miles of roadless swamps and rainforests called the Darien Gap that stretches to the tip of Columbia and…”
I threw my up my hands. “I surrender.”
“You’re getting easy in your old age,” he grinned, exposing the prominent canines that helped fuel the rumors I’d started that he was a vampire. “So. Peru. Up until last week, a country known to be home to 51 indigenous tribes. Now there are 52, thanks to a group discovered high in the mountains of northern Peru by remote mapping drones.”
“And we care… why?”
Rob sailed a photographic print across his desk.
It was a snake.
“It’s a snake,” I said. “I hate snakes.”
“Funny. They speak well of you. Check out the lower left of the shot. See that bundle about halfway down the length of the snake’s body?”
I brought the print closer and squinted at the indicated item. Between the bird’s eye angle and some shadows on the jungle floor, it was hard to make out very many details.
“That’s a man,” Rob said.
“What is? This?” I took a second, even closer look. “Was this taken at some weird angle or with a long lens? Because from this perspective, if that’s a human being, then this snake…”
“… Yeah, factoring in the average height of other indigenous folk in the region, that would make it about 50 to 60 feet long.”
“Holy crap! Amazing, but, you know, cryptozoology isn’t exactly my jam, boss. There’s gotta be somebody better qualified to handle this than…”
He raised a finger to silence me and said, “But, wait! There’s more,” and slid a second photo across the desk to me.
Ten hours and 3,700 air miles later, I was in Peru.
Buffalo Avenue Comics are Kupperberg family comics, DIY compilations of the writing of Paul Kupperberg, the art of Alan Kupperberg, the photography of our father, Sidney Kupperberg, or any combination thereof.
For Signed & Personalized copies CONTACT ME or SEND PAYMENT to PAYPAL at PKUPPERBERG@GMAIL.COM
In 1961, comic fandom founding father and The Comic Reader editor/publisher Jerry Bails added the Comicollector to his schedule. The Comicollector was primarily what we used to call an adzine, devoted to publishing ads for back issues and other fanzines by fans for fans at the rate of $1/quarter page and was sent out free to subscribers of TCR. It also featured a news column (under a revival of the “On The Drawing Board” title that was the original name for TCR) and articles.
In 1964, the Comicollector merged with Florida fan Gordon B. Love’s Rocket’s Blast to become The Rocket’s Blast and the Comicollector, which evolved into a full-fledged magazine with slick color covers that would run for 153 issues until 1984 under editors Love and, later, James Van Hise.
Continuing a look at fanzines from yesteryear, scans of photocopies of fandom’s first ‘zines by founding fan-fathers Dr. Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas. Today, Alter-Ego #1 (Spring 1961), “a new comic fanzine devoted to the revival of costumed heroes” and published months before the Fantastic Four and the future Marvel Universe was even a twinkle in Stan’s eye (FF #1 on-sale date, according to GCD was August 8, 1961). The cost to order the next issue of AE was “24¢ in postage stamps.”
Combining comic book news and historical essays on DC characters the Wizard, the Specter, and Wonder Woman, AE also featured the first chapter of a Roy Thomas written and drawn parody, “One for All and All for Wonderous Woman” starring the Bestest League of America. (The seeds for Not Brand Ecch! were planted early and deep in this one…!)
I especially love that the issue features a look at the first issue of DC’s 80-Page Giant Secret Origins , one of my all-time favorite single comic books. It should be noted that in order to repro that cover, it had to be laboriously traced by hand onto a mimeograph stencil, the work I assume of Roy, who provided most of the art for the issue.
From November 1962, the thirteenth issue of comic fandom founding father’s Professor Jerry Bails’ The Comic Reader, continuing the posting of scans of photocopies of these classic fanzines, HERE and HERE. Comics industry news… fanzine reviews… letters of comment from Julie Schwartz, E. Nelson Bridwell, Don Glut, and others. Try not to cry when you look over the price list of comics for sale.
Continuing the scans of the granddaddy of comic book fanzines, The Comic Reader (formerly On the Drawing Board), shot from the 1970ish photocopies of the zines made from copies lent us by publisher Dr. Jerry Bails, that began HERE.
Hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since we lost Dick Giordano, artist extraordinaire, human being extraordinaire-plus. In the decades we knew each other, he would be an object of my fannish admiration, my boss, my co-worker, my collaborator, someone in my employment as a freelancer, and, always, an inspiration. He was also, on occasion, a mentor, shepherding me through minefields at DC during trying times with a less-than-truthful direct report, and other dilemmas. I wrote this short tribute to Dick that originally appeared in Charlton Spotlight #6 (Winter-Spring 2011-2012): # # #
The first time I became aware of Dick Giordano was during his tenure at Charlton Comics. As much as I loved his art (what’s not to love?), it was his editorial transformation of tiny Charlton from major cheese factory to creative competitor that earned him my admiration. Later, Dick loomed large in my career, being the top guy in DC Comics’ editorial when I went on staff in 1991; in fact, it was Dick who essentially hired me. Dick was one of the nicest human beings on the face of the planet, which always struck me as a bad quality to have when you’re managing a large number of people, especially a large number of flaky, creative people. I figured you were better off being able to raise your voice and be mean to get people to pay attention. But Dick knew better. Plus, everyone he oversaw as DC’s editorial director knew damned well that when Dick asked you for something, he was asking you as someone who had done your job before, no matter what your job happened to be. And done it well, likely under mediocre conditions. He had the love and respect of everyone there. Dick always spoke in low, measured tones and we all leaned in to hear what he had to say.
One of my rare pairings with Dick doing the full art job. THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #163 (June 1980)
Dick, as was no secret, had a hearing problem and wore hearing aids in both ears. He often missed what was being said, especially in meetings when several people were speaking at once. My voice happened to be pitched to whatever frequency Dick could still hear in, so I never had a problem talking to him.
Dick grew up professionally at Charlton, on staff and as an artist throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but I only ever recall two or three times spending any time talking about the old days with him. The first time was during one of the few and far between lunches we had after he had retired from DC but before I left my editorial position. Over a Rob Roy (or two) and a good meal at a pub down the street from the office, Dick talked about some of the talent he had worked with.
The second was on the drive back to Connecticut (I live in lower Fairfield County, he, at the time, in upper) from Shea Stadium where a bunch of DC staffers had just seen the Mets game, viewed from the Warner Bros corporate box (with wait staff! ballpark hotdogs served on trays! by waiters!), a birthday present to Mr. Giordano from DC’s upper management. I don’t follow sports, not any of ‘em, so I could care less about going to a Mets game, but I went because it was Dick’s birthday and, let’s face it, whether you care about baseball or not, how often do you get to hang in a corporate skybox and get served wieners by waiters?
On the drive home, I asked Dick how long he’d been living in Connecticut and he said he moved up here to work at Charlton in Derby and I just started asking questions about the physical plant and how things worked there and some of the people he’d known. Dick loved the place as you can only love somewhere you spent so much fun and formative years; it’s the way I feel about the “old” DC, the company as it was in the mid-70s at 75 Rockefeller Center, with a staff of maybe 35 or 40 that interacted like one, big sick, dysfunctional family. It was an amazing time to be there, at the nexus of the Silver and Bronze Ages, where you still had Swan and Infantino co-existing with Kaluta and Wrightson. Dick was there for, and instigated, the Charlton equivalent of that time during his Action Hero phase.
The last was in 1991, fresh on staff at DC as an editor, and, having just been handed DC’s revival of the Charlton Comics character, Peter Cannon—Thunderbolt to work on, I found myself invited to lunch at New York’s Society of Illustrators with Thunderbolt’s creator, Pete Morisi, and his old pal and Charlton colleague, Dick. To say that there was ever a more content fly on the wall than me, listening to these two old buddies exchange stories about the good old days.
Even after Dick retired from DC and returned to fulltime freelancing, we kept in touch, most often when I would call him with work for everything from custom comics to an illustration for an issue of Weekly World News. Dick was always happy to hear from me and took the job, delivering precisely what I had in mind, only better than I had envisioned it. Because he was Dick Giordano, one of the masters of the art.
I was fortunate to know Dick as an artist, a boss, and, best of all, a friend.
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