The Spinner Rack Episode One: Introductions

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Multiverse tonight presents the Spinner Rack, Rick Stacy's Life in Comics. And now, here's your host. Hello everyone. This is a brand new segment we're starting today with uh our very special friend Rick Stacy, and we're gonna call this the Spinner, uh Rick's Rick Stacy's Life in Comics.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

I just tried, I heard the spinner rack, as a matter of fact, just a moment ago. Did you hear that too?

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Uh I think but uh perhaps not.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Perhaps not. Maybe it's up here because I think a spinner. Oh, there you go. Good deal. I think a spinner rack is the best way for me to categorize going back to the past and talking about some some really great fun comic stories.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Exactly. Now uh let's start the beginning because that's a that's a very good place to start.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

I like that too. I'm gonna reset my my scene here a little bit. I'm a little uncomfortable, but at my age, I've got to be more comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Awesome. Oh yeah, that's great. Okay. Um, so for people who don't know you, introduce introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Hi, I'm Rick Stacy, and I'm an artist and a writer, and I do some performing. And my my main love and motivator into the art arena was comic books. And that started at a very young age when I, as a child of the um halcyon days of black and white television, was glued to the TV so I could watch Mickey Mouse Club, which had an artist take a series of circles in a demonstration, turn them into Mickey Mouse, and then Woody Woodpecker, where the creator, Walter Lance, would grab a series of circles and a pointy thing and create Woody Woodpecker. Now that's all well and good because that's a fun little hobby for a little three or four-year-old kid back in those days. But but to be exposed to the adventures of Superman with George Reeves and watching that day in and day out. It expanded my imagination, it gave me all kinds of great adventures and ideas, and a bit of a moral compass, too, um, that I think is still applicable today. I would sit there with a towel shoved in the back of my shirt and hold on to my little kid wooden chair, and in my own homemade Superman Wigalia, watch all those 117 episodes over and over and over again. And that might not be too interesting. What might be really interesting is the day after my seventh birthday, and we'll just kill that little email buzz. The day after my seventh birthday, still a little kid. Uh my mom sent me out the driveway and she said, get the morning paper, that's uh your little chore. And I came in and I saw in the rolled-up issue of the Kansas City Times, the morning version of the Kansas City Star, a promotional photo of George Reeves. Now I'd never seen a Superman comic in my life. I probably don't think I've seen any comics at that point. Maybe screwed by the Sunday funnies and the newspaper, but I ran the paper inside and I said, Mom, Superman is in the paper. Pop the string off of it. I thought he's coming to a grocery store opening or some such thing like that. Pop it off there and uh let's take a look and see what's going on. And she broke the string and she opened it up. I said, What does it say? What does it say? I'm buzzed. I'm still at a sugar high from the day before his birthday cake. And she said, Oh, honey, Superman killed himself. So I was deflated and defused, and I and I uh uh uh my spirit shrunk to that of uh of of just nothingness and I wandered back to the to my bedroom where I had some old number two pencils. I don't know why they called them number two. I always wanted a number one pencil to be something. And I picked up one of my dad's uh uh sketch notepads and I started drawing stick figures, and I never stopped drawing stick figures, one with the cape, because in my heart of hearts, I wasn't gonna let this American mythology, this great contributor to what I am, what I wanted to be, die. I've never stopped doing that. So that's what I am, that's who I am. I I've worked in comics since the 70s. I kept the day gig because I like graphic arts and worked in marketing and advertising. I teach comics, cartooning, and sequential storytelling, and I've written a couple books filled with um thoughts, witticisms, I think anyway, and poetry because everything we do, including this, as you know, is storyteller.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Oh yeah. So uh so that was so you're born born in 57, is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

No, no, no, 52. 52, you know, mixed up. I was born on a Sunday, number one, number two, my mom's birthday, number three, Father's Day. That's the great trifecta. And my dad told me as a kid, he said, you're born born on those three days. Great things are expected from you. And I said, I was a baby. I did I didn't understand what he's talking about. Gee, you know, as a matter of fact, uh you can tell from my little mug here, if you can see this here. Okay, this says, You may be cool. I gotta do this, I gotta plug myself.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

You may be cool, but are you George Reeves cool? I sure don't want to spill this coffee. This is George out washing his car. Not a superman, not what not Clark Kent. I design for tea public, and I do t-shirts and cups and just stuff like that. And uh have you seen the film Hollywood Land?

SPEAKER_02 5:59

Um, haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Ben Ben Affleck plays George Reeves, and he tells the tale of George's career and what may have happened from the standpoint of George George's suicide. Many, many of us believe that there was no suicide, that we believe that he was off. And uh anyway, having said that, I was out in LA when that came out in 2005. Yeah, and I went to see an unedited rough cut version in a shopping mall, you know, a little storefront where nobody was. There's a party afterwards, and all of us were like aficionados of films or Ben Affleck or George Reeves. And at the uh the party in Malibu on a rooftop, which is kind of cool for a Kansas City kid. I'm walking through the little buffet line and getting my cheese dip and my celery and my olives and what have you, trying not to spill my scotch and soda, and I hear a woman's voice singing, Nobody agrees for George Reeves. No, I looked up and I thought, she looks familiar, that blonde lady. And if you ran to the buffet table together, it was Loretta Swift from MASH. Yeah. This is on my website too. And uh she was a big fan. I guess that's how she got to come to this uh early screening. And she said, Did you like the film? And I said yes, and what have you. And she noticed I had my Superman watch on, which I have something Superman all the time. Just it's just the way I roll or fly. And uh she said, Why are you interested? And I told her the George Reeves story, and she walked around the end of the buffet table with her drink in one hand and her dish in the other. She kissed me. And when Hot Lips Wolhan kisses you, she kisses you. It's a big it's a kiss, buddy, let me tell you. And I said, Why did you do that? She said, My boy, you're still my boy. Gil Kane used to say, My boy, my boy, you're still wearing a Superman watch and still drawing, right? I said, Yeah, and she goes, You're in therapy from all this. So I'm believing that the George Reeves impact stays there to this very day. And uh in the big picture, that's okay with me.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

Yeah. I remember watching uh watching the the reruns on Nick at Night.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:17

And then I think something sometime after that, I think they they did George Reeves's murder on Unsolved Mysteries at one point. I mean, that's how I remember seeing about that.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

It's a mainstay on YouTube right now because if you go into George Reeves, everybody has their own detailed account of what they think happened, and that's great. And I know some experts, and I take that with a grain of salt, although I'm led to believe that he was killed. My my opinion. And I also received commentary, I'll say, from Noelle Neal, who was Lois Lane. Uh, gave got her to come to her first Comic Con in 1980. We became very fast friends. And I saw her up till and including the time she died. Well, not the time she died, but beforehand. Noelle would send us Christmas cards because she was a sweet lady every year. Talk to Jack Larson to talk to a gentleman who knew um Inspector Henderson uh Shane, Robert Shane. And the the thought was is that he was he didn't kill himself, let's put it that way. A lot of controversy and some maybe even litigious that would come up, I'll stay away from, but yeah, don't I don't think he did it. And uh that's just my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

And then I stick my George Reese coffee cup on it there. So there you go. Oh, there you go. Looking good.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

There you go. All right, now uh kind of uh pushing the subject a little bit. Uh do you remember the first comic book you ever read?

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Oh, yes, I do. I remember the first comic book I ever read because it's the first one I ever saw, and I bought it. I was a little kid, uh really suffering this loss in Overland Park, Kansas. You may have heard of Overland Park, it's a teeming big uh area now. It was rural when we moved there from the midtown in Kansas City, downtown really, Kansas City, and it was farmer fields and gravel roads and people on horses, quite honestly, back then. My father dropped me off at Red's barber shop on Santa Fe in Overland Park, Kansas, and he went off to where he would go off to. And I sat there in the barber chair, he said, stay in this barber shop until I come back and get you. And I thought, I'm gonna leave because he was late. I walked out of the barber shop, walked into Shalinsky's Rexal drugstore next door, and I saw magazine racks, shelves, you know, stacks of stuff up there. At the bottom, I saw red, yellow, and blue stuff, and I locked eyeballs with what would be my first visualization, first sighting of Superman. And that was Superman Annual number one, and it was 1960, I think. And yeah, because George died in 59. Uh, it was a corner. Oh, I love that. It's not it was just a spitter rack moment. And uh I had a quarter, and back then they didn't charge tax, so it was a it was a good world we lived in. Yeah, and I bought it and I went back to the barbershop waiting for my dad. He said, Where were you? And I thought, oh god, I'm in trouble, but it was worth it. So that was my first comic book. That would be one of many I bought tons and collected and sold, and this and that. And downstairs, uh near my art studio, I have a spinner rack with that a reprint of that issue, and then uh other issues that are important to me, be they comics I've been inspired by or I've drawn, or my friends have worked on. So, really, all the more reason to call this a spinner rack moment.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

So, oh yeah. And uh, so how you know, so you start off with that that that issue. Did you become a big a big collector or was that just a layer thing?

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Uh there was no such thing as big collecting back then at that point, because there was no community that I knew of. Now I had 60 count them, 60 comic books over a period of time. I also, on my I think my 10th birthday, uh one of my dad's friends gave me a dollar in a birthday card. Say, hey, welcome to your big 10. This is great. I took that dollar and that bought me a year's subscription to Superman Comics. Published eight times a year, and they'd send you the comic, and the comic was in a brown paper mailer, and the comic was folded and creased tight in the middle. So if there was anyone that didn't want that for potential collectibility, tough too bad that's what you got. But I put those to one side and I'd accumulate them over uh many years, they became my art lessons.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

Oh, that's fantastic!

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, Kurt Swann. Let me share Kurt Swann. Uh I drew Superman uh because he did. Uh I love Shelly Moldoff. We became friends, we worked together, uh many cons side by side, sharing lots of very personal stories, and he is a great mentor to me. But as a little kid, I see Shelly Moldoff trying to ape Bob Kane's work on Batman, and I thought, I'm better than that, I could do better than that. So I had some incentive there, Carmen Infantino with the Batman new look. And as this evolved, I moved over to Marvel for a while as a preteen, and I soped up Kirby and Dick Co until I saw Neil Adams, and I lost my mind. I would skip school, take a bus trip downtown to a place called the Dirty Bookstore, where all that pulpy stuff was for the older men of the back, and there were comics up front, and I would buy every comic they had, and I would read Neil's work first.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

So so as you get older, then you know what made you decide to get into comics?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

I couldn't help it, I couldn't stop. That torch was passed to me because I said so, I thought so. And I can't let that die, nor can I let the characters, the, the the romance of comics, the fact that that is an American art form, uh go dormant. I have to do it. Matter of fact, I'm teaching it now at the Art Institute because I want this to go on and on. And it is comic books, of course, and storyboarding, but under the the umbrella of storytelling, so people know what's gone before, people know where they can take their path now, because there's there's so many freshmen at uh Kansas City Art Institute who are fervent and on fire with desire. Uh, young men, young women that want to do comics, their characters, somebody else's characters, and boom, boom, boom, they hang around the table at Planet Comic Con. Yeah, then we establish relationships, and they've had their first class Saturday. They'll have five more. And because of my affinity and my affection for the genre and these people, I'm gonna push them because they need to be pushed into possible next stages. So you'll see three, count them three, at art tables and maker tables in Smallville if you go to Smallville Hutches show this summer.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

And of course, uh, I'll be there, you'll be there. Yes, they'll be there.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yep, they'll be there. You may want to you may want to talk to them. Oh, sure. We can put together at the little symposium, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

A little round table discussion? That'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

I'll buy you lunch. No, I maybe I will. They're so great, they really are.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Oh, that's awesome. Now um so let's see where the what was your when let me put it this way. What was your first encounter with someone famous growing up?

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Okay, that's a good one.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

Um score, I win.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Yeah, I'm trying to think. Okay, but my uh my first personal encounter with somebody famous. I got out of high school in uh I was 17 in 1970, and I got on a plane to go to New York to interview at Marvel in DC. And I I had an appointment with Stan, and he wasn't there. Uh that's okay. But I got there too naive to be too intimidated, and I've never had a job interview before. I was a paper boy. Then when I got older, I got a driver's license, and I drove a newspaper truck and delivered papers before school, then after school, and uh lack of sleep during those days. But I went to Marvel for my first interview, and of course, Stan wasn't there, and the place was not a big, beautiful office, it was kind of a college dorm dump, quite honestly. And my first encounter with a famous person was Roy Thomas, and he was less than amiable to me, to the point that Marie Severn, who's off to the side, was embarrassed by his behavior. And uh, that was just Roy back then. You know, we've worked together many times on different projects, and she said, Oh, honey, come here. Let me look at your artwork too. Well, this is promising, this is nice. And to date myself, she said, uh, here's kind of a constellation prize. Here's this week's stack of Mighty Marvel magazines, and on the top was Conan at number one. The next day I interviewed at DC with a junior editor and a fantastic artist named Dick Giordano. That that cut the mustard for me. He was great, and he and I became fast friends, he even ached my work later in my career. Uh, he even came to my house a couple times for parties that we had when we lived out in Shawnee. So Roy and Dick, and I ended up working with both of them. And then you move and you segue into 1975, my second convention. I'm working with Stan Lee. That's a great story in itself, too.

SPEAKER_02 18:52

Now that uh makes me want to go slightly after when was your first convention?

SPEAKER_00 18:58

My first convention was in 1975 in April. It was called Fool Con, like April Fool. And I'd never done one of these before, I had no idea what it was. A buddy of mine said, There's some creative people at Johnson County Community College on the campus, and they have FoolCon. Why don't you take your um your markers and some cardstock and just draw and see if you get a crowd there and then maybe sell some stuff? I thought, okay. And my wife was traveling with me then at that point, been married for about a year, and she take the requests, and the requests are coming, and it's like Batman, this, that, whatever. Color was five bucks for an illustration. Black and white was $3.50, $3.50. And we're getting busy, and I'm drawn and drawn and drawing. I've got a kid hanging around my table all day long watching. I thought, huh? But then again, I had nobody to talk to to watch or to help me along the way. This kid wanted to watch drawing and talk about comics. Uh interesting, my wife was helping me fill these orders. I said, Who's next? And she said, Okay, Howard the Hulk. And I said, What? She said, or the incredible duck. I said, which is it? And she said, I don't know. I can't read my writing. And I said, Okay, we've got to figure out a way to do this better. But I draw and sell these drawings, and I would receive instant gratification. And this kid, whose name of this day I remember, was he's probably 11, Tiger Roht, R-O-H-O-L-T. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted and I've had been shoving dollars in my pocket. I thought this is great. My arm was sore. And an older gentleman comes up to me and he said, uh, thanks for letting Tiger hang out here all day. I said, Okay, that's fine. He just is interested. I had no one to talk to. Now we're starting what we'd end up calling a community of fandom. And he said, Tiger's birthday is next month. What he wanted for his birthday was a comic con. And I thought, okay. And he said, Would you like to come as the guest artist to his birthday comic con in Mall of America? And I said, Sure. Can I bring my wife? He said, Yeah, we'll put you up overnight. It's a one-day show. You'll be the featured artist. And for one day, we have Stan Lee. And I said, sure. And I was just buzzed and so excited, as was my wife. So uh that's the first really famous, famous person I met. He couldn't have been any better to me or my wife, Sharon. He is was inspiring and uplifting. And when you see Stan, you kind of come up off the ground. And we would have subsequent visits uh over all those years, professionally and personally, to uh hold dear in our hearts. If you'd like sometime, I'll send you a couple of snapshots from that that show.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Yeah, we'll do what we've done today.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

You know, again, anything you can provide, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Now uh I want to broach a subject. Uh we this past week we had the passing of Mad magazine's Al Jaffe. Do you have yeah uh was it 103, 102?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

102 years old.

unknown 22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Do you have any stories about him?

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Have you ever met? No, no, I never met Al Jaffe. Um, matter of fact, uh looking at the Mad magazine people, I had a few drinks of Sergio Aragotas at a party one time, but I don't remember meeting anybody else from Mad, which is too bad. Because in 2006 I went back to DC to visit my friends Paul Cupperberg, who's a very, very close friend uh and co-worker in comics and on some of his projects. And I love the guy like a brother. We all went upstairs after hanging out DC to Mad's offices and looked at all the big old lateral drawers and files at art from the 50s and 60s and 70s up to present day from Mad magazine. And I wanted so much to meet an Al Jaffe or a Mort Drucker, who is the most inspiring character chartist uh since Hirschfeld.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

Yeah. And uh when I when I heard that he passed, I checked. And do you know he has the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comics artist? 73 years and three months, and that was back in March 30th of 2016.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

That's fantastic. Because you take a guy that's got life as as well lived and as long as he's lived, and you look at the creative impact of what he's done, and you think there should be a lot of people really, really inspired by him.

SPEAKER_02 23:39

Oh yeah. Now, uh, how about are you looking forward to going to 103?

SPEAKER_00 23:47

I'll be lucky to make it to four o'clock today, I think. So I'm I'm I just whatever the good Lord gives me the next step. I just know that uh I'm older now, as we all know. And I think of two things, two quotes, almost daily. One of which, and I'm serious about this too. George Reeves said, You don't have to be Superman to do super things. The other one, it was David Cassidy, if you recall him from the Partridge family. Um Keith Partridge on the Partridge Family. Yeah, the singer and the performer and all that stuff. Who on his deathbed told his daughter, all the time I've wasted. That was it. That's his last words. So both of those quotes are very poignant to me. And uh, you know, we've we've lost two family members in about the last month, which is extremely unfortunate, natural causes to both. You don't want that to happen, but when you're facing the future like that, you think, what can I do to live as fully and as okay, righteously as possible today?

SPEAKER_02 24:59

All right, and uh let's uh let's go for a random question here from a deck here. Okay, uh what instantly makes you not like another person?

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Uh bigotry. But bigot but bigotry, not in the TV word sense, bigotry about anything. If they want to put a big umbrella over everything, you know, and uh uh selective, selective bigotry, like this is good and this is bad, you know. There's so many people that want to lecture so many other people about where they should be in life, who should be accepted, who shouldn't, and yet at the same time, they are um hypocritical and two-faced because if you want to apply the term bigotry to certain timely issues right now, apply it to everything and everybody.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Did that make sense to you? Yeah, it did. Okay, good. Words, words of wisdom from a wise, wise man.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Can I hear that spinner rack again then? Do you have a spinner rack? Here you go. I love it. Drives you crazy if I love it.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Well, Rick, I think uh we should put a pin in this right now. Okay. Um, I think this was a good good first episode. I think we have very much to talk about in the future. Um, for next time, let's talk about uh the distinguished competition, DC Comics.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Sounds good to me. To me, that's like family, but then again, it really is all like family. Marvel DC and all of our community, and that in itself is a major blessing.

SPEAKER_02 26:47

All right. All right, everyone. Uh we'll see you later. Thank you. Copyright 2023 Half Big Genre Production. All right, reserve