Bob Wayne Tells Tales Of Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Carl Barks & Moore

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Bob Wayne Tells Tales Of Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Carl Barks & Moore

Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Conventions, Current News, DC Comics, Events, Pop Culture, san diego comic con | Tagged: Alan Moore, Amdrew Sumner, bob wayne, Dave Gibbons, sdcc

Bob Wayne Tells Tales Of DC Comics, Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Carl Barks, Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore at San DIego Comic-Con

At San Diego Comic-Con, former DC SVP Bob Wayne was hosted by Andrew Sumner of Titan Comics and Forbidden Planet to talk about his career. Well, the first sixty-five years of it at least. For decades, Bob Wayne was the public face of DC Comics to the comic book retailers, with an acerbically dry wit that also found a welcoming home for the British comic book retailers, distinct from the usual rabble-rousers of comic book huckster PR men. Indeed, he recently did a kind of warm up for this at MCM Comic Con in London. But San Diego Comic-Con was the main stage.

How meeting Bill Gaines changed his life, “I go to a pay phone I call my mother and say Mom I don’t know how I’m going to manage it but I’m going into publishing because you can be as crazy and eccentric as you like and apparently still make a living and my mother’s just like oh dear lord.”

How working on fanzines as a retailer, working with Phil Seuling‘s proto-comic book distributor Seagate, was the perfect precursor for dealing with the likes of me. “I was Seagate account number 40, and I was also doing fanzines… so when Savage Sword of Conan was on Phil’s order list, the first issue all it basically said when Savage Sword Of Conan number one, Marvel and the price… I called Marvel… they’re like you’re not supposed to know about that yet that’s a secret, how did you know about it?… I said here’s a tip you should probably announce things before they go in the Seagate order form”. I am sure I had similar conversations with Bob from the other direction.

And a repeat of one of my favourite Bob Wayne stories about a “strange convention I went to in Tulsa Oklahoma, that has a lot of significance for me… sirens went off, and we looked out through the big glass thing, and there’s a tornado heading right toward us…  and there’s a child like this big running around in a diaper and a t-shirt running around heading outside. So a few braver souls than I am, go and drag this kid back in. and as they bring him back in, “No! Let me go, I want to go to Oz, I want to go to Oz!” and that kid grew up to be Harry Knowles, who founded Ain’t It Cool News.”

And why he chose to work at DC rather than Marvel, “When I decided I needed to leave retail I called up DC at one point and said to my friend Paul Levitz.. I’d like to talk to you about getting a job at DC. I’m going to be in New York Monday week, do you have any time? He says I can see you at 11..,  I called Carol Kalish at Marvel Comics, who was the head of sales at Marvel. Can we get together for lunch around one o’clock Monday week? I called DC editorial people I knew, and I’ve got a great pitch for you for a miniseries. Can I come in and pitch it? Come in at three. So I met with Paul in the morning, Carol Kalish for lunch, and DC editorial in the afternoon. I flew back the next day with a job offer from DC, a job offer from Marvel and a series pickup… Kalish said, “I’d love to have you at Marvel, but if you take the job at DC, you’ll be able to be there as long as you’d like. That was the best career advice I ever had, and I was there as long as I wanted to be. It worked out great”

“At DC I was one of the people pushing constantly to do book format stuff…. I wrote a memo when we did the Death In The Family miniseries and I said we need to bring this out in a book immediately, there’s not enough comics in the market, and I believe we can sell 40,000 copies. Over time I was only off by about four million”

“I had the honour of being the second person ever to be Funky Flashman from the Fourth World…  I appeared in Sleeper as agent W… I helped Dave Gibbons get a gig to do a promotional poster to be given out in Hall H when the Watchman promo was done because one of the other people said how do we get a hold of Dave Gibbons? I said you sit here while I call him on my phone… if you’ve ever seen like DC promo stuff like the [Green Lantern] rings, if you liked them it was my fault if you didn’t like them Fletcher [Chu-Fong] had a lot to do with… the idea of having 52 covers on Justice League of America #1 sadly my idea as well… I wanted to do one for Puerto Rico and it turned out a convention in Puerto Rico bought thousands of copies… I am the last DC executive to take Alan Moore out to dinner. In fact, I put a note on my expense report saying you won’t see another one of these.”

And then we got the Q&A from the likes of former Diamond exec Bill Schanes, Stuart Schreck, Fletcher Chu-Fong and more. It’s an hour long, these are just a few snippets, it’s well worth taking the time.

SATURDAY JULY 27th11:00AM – 12:00PM Room 4My Life at Stately Wayne Manor – Bob Wayne’s First Sixty-Five Years in Comics!Comics industry legend and Inkpot Award winner Bob Wayne spent 28 years being the friendly face of DC Comics, as their head of sales & marketing. Bob was there at the birth of the direct market and worked at DC through an extended era of supercharged industry-revolutionising creativity. Join Bob as he sits down with his old pal (and one of his favourite Englishmen), Titan Comics/Forbidden Planet TV’s Andrew Sumner, and talks through his wildly eventful career – from his secret origin in Fort Worth, Texas, to his early years attending conventions & selling comics professionally, to his almost three decades marketing some of the greatest comic books of all time! Bob might even give a glimpse of what he’s up to now…

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