Mike Ploog Interview - Comic Book Artist #2

The Man Called Ploog

Bronco-busting to Eisner to Frankenstein

Conducted by & © Jon B. Cooke

Wendy Everett is the daughter of Bill Everett, creator of Sub-Mariner and one of Marvel's greatest artists. She lives in San Francisco and was interviewed by Mike Friedrich, Bill's friend, former Marvel scribe, and artist representative. This conversation took place after lunch in a San Francisco restaurant on June 20, 1998.

By his own admission, Mike Ploog, the artist who seemed to come out of nowhere into Marvel, has not done many interviews. I knew nothing about him other than I liked his work, that he was born in Minnesota, and (I had learned an hour before I called him) that he worked for the great Will Eisner, creator of the Spirit. What I didn't expect was the rollicking good time and laughter! Getting to know Mike is like finding a long-lost buddy; he's, well, cool. This interview, transcribed by John Morrow, was conducted via phone on May 31, 1998.

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: You were born in Minnesota. You weren't much of a comics fan as a kid?
MIKE PLOOG: Not really. Being a farm kid, we didn't get to town much. Usually the comic books they did sell were Donald Duck. The only one I kinda got wrapped up in was the old Roy Rogers comic book; I wanted to be a cowboy, that was my big aim in life. That was it other than the Sunday funnies; I was crazy about Al Capp. In my teens I moved to my grandmother's house, and she had a whole basement full of old comics, and I discovered Kirby and the Boy Commandos. I flipped over that.

CBA: Did you key into Kirby's style right off?
Mike: I never got into his style, but I loved the Boy Commandos. But I never keyed into a style because I never thought about being an artist. I doodled and drew, but I never took it seriously.

CBA: When did you enter the service?
Mike: When I was seventeen; a little early, due to circumstances. My mother signed me in, and I went in for four years initially. When my reenlistment came up, I really didn't know what I was going to do. I had spent three of those four years on the Marine Corps rodeo team; I had it made. [laughter] Being born on a farm, I was always into that kind of thing. I was a bareback bronco rider and a Brahma bull rider—I'm starting to feel it now. [laughs]

Toward the end of my great military career, I spent some time overseas, working on Leatherneck magazine. I did a little bit of writing, a little bit of photography, a little bit of artwork, a little of everything.

CBA: When did you start developing your drawing abilities?
Mike: When I was at Leatherneck, I was doing some drawing. I just decided I'd had it with the Marine Corps after ten years. I figured I'd give art a shot, so when I got out I drew up a portfolio. I'd literally draw up the portfolio the night before for whoever I was going to see the next day, thinking, "This is what they want to see." Relatively quickly, I went to work for Filmation doing the Batman & Superman series, about 1969. I started off doing cleanup work for other artists.

I did cleanup for one season, and then I was doing layout work for Batman & Superman for one season. The following season I went to work for Hanna-Barbera. I was doing things like Autocat & Motormouse and Whacky Races. I worked on the first Scooby-Doo pilot; nothing spectacular, though. Layout is what happens between storyboarding and actual animation; you're literally composing the scenes. You're more or less designing the background, putting the characters into it so they'll look like they're actually walking on the surface. It was okay; it was a salary, y'know? It was a way of making a living without sitting on a tractor. I had very few aspirations, because I didn't know where anything I was doing was going to take me.

CBA: How'd you get involved with PS Magazine?
Mike: Will Eisner started that magazine; he was the creator of it, way back in 1940. He came up with the idea and started the magazine. The ten years I spent in the Marine Corps, I spent taking a look at that crazy magazine. It was brilliant; I loved it. I copied stuff out of it continuously, never even thinking I'd ever work for Will. I didn't even know who Will Eisner was; I wasn't a comic book fan as a kid. So when I got a call from Will, it was just another name. When he said "PS Magazine," I thought, "I can do that."

CBA: How'd you get the call from Will?
Mike: I was working for Hanna-Barbera, and the guy in the room with me belonged to the National Cartoonist's Society. He got a flyer Will had put out, looking for an assistant. He looked at it and said, "Ploog, this looks like your stuff." I looked at it and said, "It is my stuff." [laughter] I called Will, and two days later he was in L.A. and interviewed me. We met at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The following week I went to work for him.

CBA: When you hooked up with Will, did you move east?
Mike: Yeah, the following weekend. I was a bachelor then. I just packed my bag—I don't think I had any belongings—and moved to New York. Most terrifying experience of my life. [laughter] I stayed at the Washington Hotel, down by Greenwich Village. That was a nightmare; the first night I moved in, a rock group came in and stayed there. They were up and down the halls all night long, drunker than skunks. I really thought I was going to kill one of them that night. [laughter]

CBA: How was it working on PS Magazine?
Mike: I enjoyed it. It was something I was very familiar with, stuff I'd dealt with a lot in my military career. It was really easy. I was doing character stuff; all of the stuff Will had done earlier. I was doing the gags.

It was a clever magazine, and it took somebody like Will to actually think of doing something like that, and then actually pulling it off. Will has got a real talent for taking something really complex, and turning into the simplest form, to where the average G.I. can understand, or the average guy on the street, or the average kid.

CBA: Was it tough working for Will? Was he a taskmaster?
Mike: Well, he was. One of his biggest gripes was when he would hire somebody, and two or three years later the guy would leave and become world famous. [laughter] It really pissed him off. [laughter] He would go out of his way not to teach you anything. [laughter] You had to watch him to learn, but I don't think he wanted to teach anybody anything, because as soon as they got good enough, they left him.

I love Will; he's a dear, dear old friend. He's been an enormous influence on my work both in comics and film.

CBA: Who did you get together with to get the PS contract?
Mike: It was Will and I. I was going in and picking it up by myself, and Will was going to be my shadow. He and I were going to be partners, but I was actually going to hold the contract. That didn't work out for beans! [laughter] For one, Will's smarter than I am; smart as a whip, ol' Will! [laughter] Part of his character is, if he can get the edge, he'll take it. [laughter] A damn good poker player. I let it go, and then Murphy Anderson picked it up.

CBA: When you first burst upon the scene in comic books, you had a style very reminiscent of Will's work. Did you start developing that style through osmosis, just being around him?
Mike: It was very difficult for me, because I hadn't done that much work. I really didn't know what a "style" meant. When Will saw my work, he said, "This guy can adapt to what I'm doing easily." Obviously whatever I had, it was adaptable to him. I could emulate Will right down to a pinpoint on an occasion. I never felt it was a style. When I left Will, whenever I was insecure about something, I'd probably fall back on it. But it was basically what was there was there. I'm sure from working with Will, it developed in that direction.

CBA: Not only did it resemble Will, but it also had humor.
Mike: With Will, I did an awful lot of the gag writing. I'd get an article, and I had to come up with the gag that was going to fit the big piece of machinery or something. I love humor; I don't take much of anything seriously. That's probably why I've lasted as long as I have in the film industry.

CBA: Did you start thinking about writing then?
Mike: I didn't know how to write. I could do a gag, but to string a story together—I didn't have a clue. It wasn't until I actually got into comics that I realized stringing a story together was not all that difficult. With most of the people I worked with, we'd talk about the premise of the story over the phone. We'd come up with the gag, and I'd put the gag on page fifteen, and work my way backwards to page one, then get together with the writer again to figure out how to end it.

CBA: You'd actually do page fifteen first?
Mike: Oh yeah, because the gag was the point that you had to get to, and you didn't know how many pages it would take to pull it across. I'd work my way to the front, and work my way to the back. Sometimes it was just rough thumbnails, but often I'd just sit down and start drawing. In those days you didn't have time to do thumbnails. I love it when these guys talk about sitting down and doing a complete book in thumbnails. I would've starved to death if I were doing that. [laughter]

CBA: When did you start getting an independent yearning working for Will?
Mike: Actually, it was out of necessity. I was living in New York, and there were no animation studios I could fall back on. People like Ben Oda, who was doing our lettering, and Wally Wood, who was hanging around the place, suggested I get into comics. Ben took me over to Warren. I did two or three stories for him. That was the first work I did.

CBA: How was that?
Mike: [laughter] Have you ever met Jim? Well, then you know. [laughter] Actually, Jim and I got on great. He was the cheapest man I ever worked for, and he was full of sh*t. Two-thirds of Jim—and he's not all that big—is sh*t. [laughter] But we got on, 'cause I'm full of sh*t myself. [laughter] He's was kind of taken by the fact that I was this ex-Marine, and all that macho crap. We got to be decent friends. But he was cheap! [laughter] I think I was making $23 a page for those black-&-white books.

One time, I'd just picked up a freelance check from Murphy [Anderson], and I had $500 worth of $50 bills in my pocket. I walked into Jim Warren's office, and I'd just finished a monster story about a flaming hand that somebody turned into a candle. I said, "Jim, I busted my ass on this thing. I've got to have more money." He said, "How much more you want?" I said, "Let's make it an even $50 a page." Jim had just returned from lunch with Bill Dubay. He called Bill into his office. Jim looked at me and said, "$50 is a lot of money. I betcha we don't even have $50 between the three of us." Well, Dubay was broke; he probably bought Jim's lunch. Jim had about a buck on him. "How much do you have, Ploog? If you got $50 on you, I'll give you that page rate." So I began to pull $50 bills out of my pocket, one at a time, and he gave me the page rate. Thought it was the funniest thing he ever saw. He thought it was a set-up, like I had instigated it.

I think that was the last book I did for him. [laughter]

CBA: Where'd you go from Warren?
Mike: I'd done up a western, and I took it in to Marvel. They looked at it and said, "No way. We don't do books that look like this." But I'd met Roy Thomas there, and I went on home, trying to figure out what I was going to do next. A couple of days later, they called me up and said, "How'd you like to do monsters?" Obviously they'd seen what I'd done for Jim, because I'd done some werewolf stuff. I said, "Sure, I'll do anything." I couldn't draw super-heroes; I had no heart for super-heroes.

CBA: Was "Werewolf By Night" the first thing you did for Marvel?
Mike: Yeah. I thought it was going to be a very short-lived thing for me. It was really hard work; I was drawing things I was not accustomed to drawing, like cars and chairs and things like that [laughter]—things I'd never drawn before in my life. I thought this would be a great learning period, and they'll get wise to me real fast, and I'll be off this job. Well, I just kept doing it and doing it, and they didn't tell me to stop. [laughter]

CBA: What did you think of the comic book industry when you got into it?
Mike: Marvel Comics at that time was magical. There was magic around that place. John Verpoorten took me under his wing; God love the great big giant. Everybody there were great people.

CBA: Did you work "Marvel Method"? Did you co-plot these stories?
Mike: Oh yeah. I think most people did. When I was doing Man-Thing, poor Steve Gerber was going through every crisis of life known to man! [laughter] He was like an insect; every day, somebody was trying to kill him! [laughter] I loved him; he'd call me up with this, [whispering] "Mike, I can't talk right now. I'll get back to you later." And I'm thinking, "Steve, why'd you call me in the first place?!" [laughter] I'd say, "Okay Steve, what are we doing this month?" "Oh Mike, I can't think now. My wife just left me," or "I just shot myself in the foot." He had everything wrong with him. Steve and I worked this very strange method; it was wonderful. Then I'd have people like Gerry Conway come in and say, "I don't like the ending." I didn't even have a beginning! [laughter]

CBA: So you'd get very loose plots?
Mike: Yeah. I didn't mind that. It got to where I preferred working from a loose plot. What I really enjoyed was coming up with the gag. Sometimes, the sillier the gags were, the easier it was to plot the story.

CBA: You did some great stories with Gerber on Man-Thing.
Mike: Steve really is a bit of a genius. But genius comes in very strange forms. With Steve, it was not only strange, it was very deceptive. My favorite one was the clown story. That was a goofy one where we really didn't know what the hell we were gonna do. Just over the phone came the ghost of the dead clown; we milked it for three books.

CBA: Do you remember how "Ghost Rider" came about?
Mike: That was a Roy Thomas idea. Roy asked me if I wanted to do "Ghost Rider." I thought, "Yeah! Horses! Get me away from these city scenes!" [laughter] It wasn't until two or three weeks later they called up and said, "Can you do some drawings of costumes and the motorcycle?" This was the first I'd heard about a motorcycle. So off I went; I did a bunch of drawings for the character, and off I went.

CBA: You came up with the idea for the blazing skull?
Mike: Yeah, the blazing skull, the... I tell you, it was a rip-off of the old western one.

CBA: Ghost Rider brought in some good income for Marvel over the years. Did it ever bug you that you didn't have a piece of that?
Mike: No. Stuff like that doesn't bother me. I just felt fortunate I was working at the time. Marvel gave me a lot of good breaks. I was doing three books a month, because I needed the money.

CBA: How many pages did you do a day?
Mike: I didn't; I worked nights. When I was doing "Ghost Rider,"I was doing Werewolf By Night, and I was starting the Frankenstein book, and covers to boot. I was doing all three a month, and I inked the first couple of Frankensteins.

CBA: Did you deliver your work by hand?
Mike: Yeah, I lived in New Jersey. Once a month I'd go into New York. I couldn't afford to go in more often because each time my car would be towed away.

CBA: Did you hang out in the bullpen for any length of time?
Mike: Not so much. Vinnie Colletta had a studio where I used to go over and do my changes. It was pretty busy up there, and there were a lot of stars, and I didn't feel like I was one of them. I always felt like a poor cousin. They didn't make me feel that way, it was my own mentality.

CBA: Did you go to comic conventions?
Mike: No, I stayed away from them. I went to one, and that was enough to turn me off of ever going to them again. In the past few years I've gone to a few. To me it really was a job.

CBA: You must've been aware from some of the fan mail that people really enjoyed your work.
Mike: I did, but I didn't understand it. I was always amazed when I met someone who had actually read one of my books. I'd spent ten years in the Marine Corps, and I was just making a living. I can remember many times I'd be walking through Marvel, delivering pages, and people'd come up and say, "I saw that last issue; that's great!?" And my opinion of that person would drop enormously. [laughter] I felt like I really wasn't an artist; I was just faking my way through this thing. It wasn't until later years that I realized how good I really did have it, and how wonderfully supportive those people really were.

CBA: It always seemed to me you didn't want to stay long in comics. You had a great deal of output for a period of time, and then it got sparse, and then you were gone. I got the sense that you weren't happy with comics.
Mike: It wasn't that I wasn't happy with them. I literally didn't feel like I was a good enough artist to compete with the quality of work that was being done at that particular time. I really felt I had more to learn. I drifted back to film because I could hide in film, y'know? I still had a lot of work to do, and I didn't feel like I was going to get it done in comics. I felt like I was getting into a rut, and I was doing the same kind of stuff over and over again.

CBA: Did you have any concepts yourself you wanted to do? Any story or character ideas?
Mike: Not really, because most of the books I was doing were pretty fulfilling in themselves. I was a great fan of horror films. It was just a fluke that I fell into it. I watched every horror film ever made. I liked the melodrama, because the melodrama has a smile in it. It's the same kind of timing that humor is. You can sit there and kind of make fun of yourself. I really enjoyed that.

CBA: As the monster material started to wane, did you just...
Mike: For instance, they wanted to bring Frankenstein up to the 20th century, and have him battle in the streets of New York with Spider-Man, and I just couldn't do that. To me, I felt it was disrespectful to the poor monster. [laughter] That's when I left Frankenstein. Then they gave me Planet of the Apes, which I got a big kick out of in the beginning. We had a lot of good stories; Doug Moench is a brilliant writer, and we had some real good material.

CBA: That stuff was great. Wasn't some of that reproduced straight from you pencils?
Mike: Yeah, the majority of it was. But the material started getting weak.

CBA: Did you get any interference from 20th Century-Fox about that?
Mike: No, nothing.

CBA: You also worked on a revamp of Kull the Conqueror. Did you feel an affinity for the barbarian material?
Mike: Not the barbarian material so much as the fantasy. I had kind of a secret love affair with fantasy. When we did Kull, the first few issues dealt with a lot of fantasy, and I really enjoyed the hell out of them. Just this invincible, half-naked man doesn't appeal to me all that much. But the fact that it was dealing with man against nature, and man alone against masses, I really enjoyed that.

CBA: Did you have any favorite writers you worked with?
Mike: I was really fortunate; I had good writers. I think Doug Moench and I really connected well. We'd speak over the phone and do our plotting, and we really had to work closely together. Working with Doug was a good experience because it gave me a little bit more of an idea what story structure was. We were working with larger stories and larger pieces.

CBA: In a weaker moment, did you ever do any tryout pages for a super-hero title?
Mike: Never did. I cannot recall ever sitting down and drawing a super-hero. It's not because I dislike them that much; I was just always so busy doing what I was doing, I couldn't imagine doing something on a lark. On a day when I didn't have anything to do, I was down at the bar playing pool with the boys.

CBA: You really started drawing as a novice, and came into it and picked it up really fast.
Mike: I had to! Can you imagine the fear, walking into Marvel Comics with pages under your arm that you had just faked your way through the night before? I didn't have a clue what I was doing. The Marvel office was a scary place for me, with people like Barry Smith wandering around. [laughter] You're walking through there, just hoping nobody says anything so you don't have to look up, y'know? [laughter]

CBA: But your work held its own.
Mike: But you don't know that when you're doing it. [laughter] I was terrified. I remember when someone introduced me to Bernie Wrightson. I looked at him and thought, "Geez, he's younger than I am. This guy's a genius," but I couldn't look him in the face. [laughter] Today, Bernie and I are the best of buddies. But that's human nature; I was older and I had a lot of experience, but as an artist I was a novice, a kid.

CBA: I seen your recent work; you're better than ever.
Mike: I'm not saying it to blow my own whistle: What I do now comes so much easier. I thinks it's self-confidence, and maturity as an artist. One of the things Will Eisner gave me was the instinct to see as an artist. It's a hard thing to explain: One day you just start looking at things as an artist. As time goes by, everything you see you see as blocks, shapes, forms, colors, hues. After years you know what you want to see on that blank canvas and you just instinctively know how to achieve it. Everything is automatically on the paper. There's no longer any terror of that blank sheet of paper. It's a welcome friend.

By the time I began the Frankenstein series, I had learned a lot. Storytelling became easier and my artwork was beginning to come into its own.

CBA: Would you consider your Frankenstein material the height of your color comics work?
Mike: I really enjoyed doing Frankenstein, because I related to that naive monster wandering around a world he had no knowledge of—an outsider seeing everything through the eyes of a child. That took me right back to my childhood, being a farm kid, moving to Burbank, California in the middle of the hot rods and the swinging '50s.

CBA: Did your Marine Corps experience help you or hinder you in comics?
Mike: It helped me throughout my whole life. There's no trading personal experience for anything. Just getting into a fight... unless somebody's punched you in the mouth, it's pretty hard to make a convincing fight sequence. Living is a very strange thing; you can't help but learn something from it. [laughter]

CBA: What made you leave Marvel?
Mike: I had a disagreement with Jim Shooter. I had moved to a farm in Minnesota, and agreed to do a hand-colored Weirdworld story. Marvel backed out of the deal after I had started. I can't remember the details, but it doesn't matter. I think I was ready to move on. Marvel and I were both changing. I finished off a black-&-white Kull book that was my last comic for many years.

CBA: When you went to Hollywood, is it true you worked on "Ghostbusters"?
Mike: Yeah. I did post-production. All that stuff you saw on cereal boxes are my paintings.

CBA: Did you work with Ralph Bakshi?
Mike: Yeah, I did three movies with Bakshi. I did Wizards, Lord of the Rings, and I worked on a thing called Hey, Good Lookin'. I don't know what the story was on that one, but Ralph likes to do that. He likes to keep the story away from everyone, including the audience. [laughter]

I enjoyed the hell out of working with Ralph, even though we fought like cats and dogs. Part of working with Ralph was the fight, because everything was a fight. He's an individual; quite a character, and even to this day, almost every six months, I get a call from him.

CBA: Do you enjoy working in animation?
Mike: Animation is tedious. Film as a whole is tedious. It takes too long; especially animation. You work on a concept for two or three years and, by the time it's finished, it's already history before anybody sees it. But it beats working for a living. [laughter]

CBA: We all have a price. [laughter]
Mike: Yeah, and mine isn't all that high! (laughter)

CBA: What movies did you work on?
Mike: I've done like forty of them—storyboarding, design work. I was the production designer on Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. I was designer on Little Shop of Horrors. I enjoyed that; I was working with Frank Oz, and I'd done a lot of work with the Muppet people. Frank is the Gentleman of Motion Pictures. That was his first movie, and he walked into the art department and said, "Okay guys, I want to let you know right now: Family comes first, movie comes second." That's the way it is with Frank. He was a jewel to work with.

CBA: Did you do any work for Jim Henson?
Mike: I worked on Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Return to Oz. There was a TV series I worked on called The Storyteller. I've done a lot of work with the Henson organization.

CBA: So you gravitate toward fantasy material.
Mike: Yeah, I like that kind of material. It's easy to do. There's nothing worse than working in the story department and not being able to relate to the story. But on the other side, I worked on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. [laughter]

CBA: Did you work closely with Kevin Eastman when you did your Santa Claus book?
Mike: Actually, I didn't do it for Kevin at all. I did it when I was living in England, and the original publisher was in Paris. We just sold it to him. That was a labor of love. I worked on in-between movies, and it took me about two years all together.

CBA: Do you have any similar projects planned for the future?
Mike: Yeah, actually, I'm really looking forward to getting out of the movie business altogether, and moving back to England and doing nothing but comics, even though the future of comics is a grey area right now. I have a deep-felt desire to be a storyteller again and I think I can walk in there and look Bernie in the eye now. [laughter]

CBA: Once you got into comics, did you become a fan of others' art yourself? Did you hang out with the guys?
Mike: I did in a sense. I respected their talents but I knew nothing about comics. I remember sitting in a cafe called Friar Tuck's, across from DC Comics, with a group of artists. Sitting next to me was a total stranger. He had been introduced to me as a big wig at DC Comics. His name was Carmine Infantino. Everybody was chatting and drawing on the table cloth. Suddenly this executive next to me picks up a ball point pen and begins to draw on the table cloth. I was impressed; imagine an executive that can draw! I attempted to pay him a compliment, and said, "I'll be a son of a gun! You can draw too!" [laughter] He glared at me, and you could have fried eggs on his cheeks. I don't think he said a word, just glared at me as if to say, "What do you mean, I can draw??" I looked around the table at a lot of blank, wide-eyed faces. And, with a further display of ignorance, I added, "Yeah, now if worst comes to worst, you could do that for a living." My memory is a bit vague about what happened next but I never worked for DC Comics.

CBA: What was John Verpoorten like?
Mike: He was magic. When he died, I wept for him. He was this gentle giant, and I really loved him

CBA: Did the office change when he left?
Mike: The changes began before Big John died. Stan had become more of a figurehead in the company, and I always felt that a lot of integrity went out the window about that time. After Verpoorten, there was a lot of shuffling around. I don't remember who became what but it seemed everybody became something. Comics were attempting to become big business. All I remember was that Johnny Romita became art director, and he kept reinking my pages with the wrong side of the brush, which used to piss me off. He should really know the hairy end goes in the ink.

CBA: Did you get to talk to Stan at all?
Mike: Oh, yeah. He had an awful pretty secretary, Holly Resnicoff, who in a weak moment married me. She soon regained consciousness and thought better of it. Stan was a big part of that office and he took pride in being a major contributor to what was known as the bullpen.

CBA: Did you do work for Atlas Seaboard?
Mike: I did a couple of stories for their black-&-whites. One of them I've never seen in print; it was this Artful Dodger story, but it was in more modern times. I wrote it and illustrated it.

CBA: Overall, how would you rate your experience at Marvel?
Mike: They were great years; I'd do them again, any day, but I'd want to do them with the same bunch of guys. I'd want to do them with John Verpoorten, and Gary Friedrich. I never met anybody that could outdrink me until I met Gary. [laughter] I think the last time I saw him we were both sleeping on John Verpoorten's floor. (laughter)

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