RED RANGE Interviews 

Drew Ford Talks Resurrecting A “Red Range” Of Comics On His New Imprint

By | June 23rd, 2016
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

While you’ve probably noticed by now that nobody stays dead forever in comics, you might have missed the fact that it’s looking more and more like no book stays dead, either.

With an increasing number of archival releases hitting shelves every week, today’s fan truly finds themselves in the Golden Age of Reprints. And making a name for himself as one of the best archeologists of the medium is Drew Ford. Formerly the comics man at Dover Books, Drew started up his own imprint, It’s Alive!, earlier this year and has already launched his first Kickstarter campaign for his newest book, Joe R. Lansdale & Sam Glanzman’s “Red Range”.

Here’s how a review from LOCUS Magazine when the book was originally released in 1999 described it:

Joe R. Lansdale’s certainly a modern legend himself, having been around for some time now. But comics artist Sam Glanzman’s got an even more legendary historical grounding, having been professionally drawing for six decades or so. These two worthies have collaborated on Lansdale’s graphic novel, RED RANGE. The first page of RED RANGE itself begins full tilt with graphic ultraviolence as Lansdale and Glanzman plunge us into a 19th century Klan lynching of a black Texas family. Abruptly in the midst of the atrocity, the Kluxers are interrupted by a mysterious rider who’s a deadly shot with both his pistols and long-range Sharps buffalo rifle. It’s the feared and hated (by the KKK, at least) Red Mask, a tough, lethal, black man who wisely keeps his identity concealed. Writer Lansdale’s unerring ear for exotic period and regional dialog remains constant. His penchant for grim humor appears throughout. His hardcore, hard-nosed sense of social conscience remains intact.

With the campaign already reaching its initial funding goal, Drew took time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions about It’s Alive! and what it takes to bring yesterday’s comics back from obscurity.

There are plenty of lost gems and out-of-print treasures out there, waiting to be brought back into the spotlight. What do you look for in the books or works you spend your time resurrecting?

Drew Ford: To be honest, the main component of deciding which collections to work on is what I personally enjoy. But while I am curating a line of archival reprints that I would read, I hope very much that others would enjoy them as well. Looking at the incredibly positive response to some of the collections I have already done (such as “A Sailor’s Story”, “The Bozz Chronicles” [reviewed on this very site], “The Puma Blues”, “Through the Habitrails” and more), I feel like I’m really on to something! And I’m grateful for all the public support for these new collections that honestly mean so much to me.

In your time at Dover and now with It’s Alive, you make bringing these books back look so easy from this side of the press release. We’re big process junkies here at Multiversity, so can you walk us through how these projects go from idea to bookstore shelves?

DF: Each collection is different. And some are easier to put together than others. A good example of a tougher one would be “A Sailor’s Story” by Sam Glanzman.

First, I had to obtain the publication rights from Marvel. Then, I made a deal with Sam Glanzman to make sure that he was paid (this part is very important to me). Then I took the two original graphic novels and had them scanned in. Then we sent the scanned files to a professional colorist, who used Sam’s 100 pages of notes to touch up and fix the colors on every page of the collection (Frank M. Cuonzo did a great job with the colors, by the way…I hope more people will hire him!). Then I went to visit Sam at his home, and he and I went through a bunch of old artwork and photos that I might want to include in the new collection. Then I took a painting that was hanging on his wall and gave it to a very talented designer (Jeff Menges) and a new cover was created.

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Next I contacted a ton of comic professionals, asking for tributes to Sam, and wow, we got some great ones from folks like Stan Lee, Walt Simonson, Russ Heath, Timothy Truman, Joe R. Lansdale, Denny O’Neil, Kurt Busiek, Paul Levitz, Chris Claremont, Stephen R. Bissette and many more. Then I found out that Max Brooks, author of World War Z, was a big Glanzman fan, and I asked him to contribute a foreword to the new collection. I also reached out to the original editor of the Sailor’s Story graphic novels when Marvel published them in the 80s, Larry Hama, who was kind enough to write a new introduction. And another huge Glanzman fan, Chuck Dixon, contributed an incredible afterword. Then I worked with a very close friend of Sam’s, who had a bunch of photos of Sam while he was in the war, and found a way to include those as well.

And finally, I found an unpublished ten page U.S.S. Stevens story that Sam gave me the permission to include. Then I took all these elements, and put them together in a way that made sense to me. Of course there was all the work of emailing folks in retail and the press, to try and sell them on this crazy idea of mine to save the history of comics one collection at a time, but that’s a whole other story.

Yeah, all in all, it was a lot of work…but boy, was it worth it!

That was DEFINITELY a lot of work! What sort of timeframe was that all done under, start to finish? And at any given time, how many different projects do you have going?

DF: Each project takes about six months, give or take how much work is involved. Right now I have several projects I am working on, including the first two books I will be coming out with: “Red Range” and “Dope”.

RED RANGE art by Sam Glanzman
RED RANGE art by Sam Glanzman

You mentioned earlier that enjoyment of the material you work on is the deciding factor of what you focus your time and energy on. How much of your title scouting is based on works you read growing up and want to revive versus works that, while older, are ones you’ve come to later in life & enjoyed? Do you have a team of Baker Street Irregulars out there, scouring back issue bins & used bookstores for material for you to ‘research’, or is it all down to Google at this point?

DF: Great question! I would say the books I bring back are 50% stuff I grew up on and 50% stuff I discovered later in life. I read “The Bozz Chronicles”, “A Sailor’s Story”, and “The Magician’s Wife” when they first came out…but I discovered “The Juggler Wife” by R.O. Blechman and “Murder by Remote Control” by Janwillem van de Wetering & Paul Kirchner later in life. And while I don’t have my own dedicated staff of researchers (maybe someday!), I do receive suggestions all the time, and I am always excited to discover something new from the past that I didn’t know about. In fact, that is the exact feeling I am trying to share with new readers, when I make these collections available in new editions.

What has the bookstore and/or library response been like (if they’ve been different)? On the one hand, your books are things any decently stocked collection should, almost by definition, have in their possession. On the other, since these are older works, they may not have the of-the-hour title or creator name recognition that would make them jump out at first glance to non-comics-savvy employees making orders (although Harlan Ellison is certainly a name that carries weight across the board…)

DF: I think the bookstores/libraries have shown a bit more interest in these collections, than they might if I was just putting out a new untested series of graphic novels by newcomers. Not that the new stuff by newcomers isn’t important, because it definitely is, but I’m just saying that stores and institutes outside the comic shop world seem to be taking me at my word that we are saving the history of comics one book at a time, and if bookstores, and especially libraries, don’t carry these collections, it’s sort of all for naught. So I’m very thankful that bookstores and institutes are taking what I am doing seriously. And hey, I won’t lie, the Eisner nomination helps in that regard.

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RED RANGE art by Sam Glanzman
RED RANGE art by Sam Glanzman

With the Eisner voting just wrapping up, it’s only a matter of waiting at this point to find out if your “The Puma Blues” collection will take home the award it was nominated for (congratulations, BTW). How did you find out you got the nod? Did any work get done the rest of the day?

DF: I was waiting with baited breath to see what and who was nominated, and as soon as it was posted online, I went straight to the archival category and was like…YAHOO! I think I spent the rest of that day on the phone with everyone that was involved in Puma Blues, congratulating them for this awesome recognition of all their brilliant and hard work.

As we learned above, there’s a lot of things that have to happen and happen correctly for these projects to see the light of day. Are there any particular books you would love to do that just aren’t feasible given a lack of available source material? Things like no film or original art to shoot, or pages missing? Not to be a downer, but wanted to give you an opportunity to head off any “I wish he’d do a collection of X” questions…

DF: While I would always prefer to shoot or scan from original art, most collections are made by scanning and touching up old comics. Original artwork gets sold at conventions by most artists over the years, and film from before the digital era is usually not in good enough condition to work with. If you have a pre-production artist who knows what they are doing, you can usually get really good results from scanning from comic books and doing touch up/restoration work.

A good example of that is the upcoming “U.S.S. Stevens” collection, which collects all those four- and five-page stories by Sam Glanzman that were tucked away in the backs of various war comics out out by DC in the 1970s. We had NO original artwork on any of those stories, so we hired Michael Kelleher, who has worked on a number of very important projects, as we allowed him to scan from the original comics and clean up and restore each page in the collection. It’s coming out next month from Dover, and believe me when I say, he did an excellent job making Sam Glanzman’s art really pop on every page. I think that book will be flying off the shelves very soon.

Unfortunately, none of what I just said even came close to answering your first question. I can tell you that for the most part, if we have decent books to scan from, not having original art or film will not stop us from putting together a collection. And I LOVE to get recommendations of stuff that should be back in print. So if someone has a list of “I wish he would reprint…”, post it in the comments!

You cover “Red Range” pretty well in the Kickstarter notes, so lets look ahead a bit at the next It’s Alive release: “Dope” by Trina Robbins. I’d literally never heard of this before seeing your announcement. What is that about and what made that title the next in the queue?

DF: “Dope” is Trina Robbins’ 1981 serialized comic book adaptation of Sax Rohmer’s 1919 novel by the same name, which was one of the first books to explore the international drug trade, along with the death of a celebrity by drug overdose. Pretty scandalous stuff to find in a book back in 1919! It was published a few pages at a time in the pages of “Eclipse Magazine” starting in 1981, and since very few people actually own all those back issues of that comic mag from 35 years ago, I felt like the only way any current or future audience would get to experience this excellent story would be to pull to all together in a proper collection. A little piece of comics history that I happen to think is important, and don’t want to see disappear. This is the first time it has ever been collected.

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“Dope” had kind of a scattershot release. How large of a work is it once you finally put all the chapters in one place?

DF: Around 60 pages. It’s a little short by American Graphic Novel standards, but definitely packs quite a punch for it’s size!

It’s probably too early to tell, but what kind of release date are you looking to hit with that, and do you think you’ll be Kickstarting that as well?

DF: I would like to see it come out a few months after “Red Range”, and I will be launching another Kickstarter soon to raise the funds we need to make it happen!

 


Greg Matiasevich

Greg Matiasevich has read enough author bios that he should be better at coming up with one for himself, yet surprisingly isn't. However, the years of comic reading his parents said would never pay off obviously have, so we'll cut him some slack on that. He lives in Baltimore, co-hosts (with Mike Romeo) the Robots From Tomorrow podcast, writes Multiversity's monthly Shelf Bound column dedicated to comics binding, and can be followed on Twitter at @GregMatiasevich.

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