The Gentleman of Comics

Murphy Anderson

by Laurie J. Anderson

Murphy Anderson started working professionally in comics in the early 1940s while still a teenager. He went on to both pencil and ink some of the classics of the superhero genre — the daily Buck Rogers comic strip of the late 1940s, and in comic books, Hawkman, The Flash, The Spectre and Superman, among others. Anderson's work on the latter with penciller Kurt Swan in the early '70s is still considered by many fans to be the definitive visual portrayal of the Man of Steel.

Anderson can usually be recognized at conventions as one of the few (if not only) artists to wear a suit and tie, even while doing sketches for fans. This, combined with his polite and reserved manner, have earned him the nickname "The Gentleman of Comics". This interview occurred in June of 2001 at Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Sequential Tart: What part of North Carolina were you born in?

Murphy Anderson: Asheville.

ST: And you still have family around here?

MA: Oh yeah. Anyone you see hanging around [the exit] may be a relative.

ST: What kind of upbringing did you have?

MA: My mother's parents had a working farm. In the Depression it was a godsend. My dad, the first job he could find was driving a cab for a 25-cent commission. Anywhere in town for a quarter. [chuckles]. You can imagine how much money he was making.

ST: How did you get into drawing?

MA: Well my mother was a teacher, [and she] taught me to read from comic books.

ST: What were your art influences — the cartoons and comics you watched or did you have any other artists ... ?

MA: Oh boy, yeah, my grandmother had a Doré Bible, and I was fascinated with that. I don't know if you know what I mean.

ST: Gustav Doré?

MA: Yes. Illustrated by him, and I would sit and try to copy those drawings [Editor's Note: The following link is to see examples of a Gustav Dore bible]. I guess maybe that's where I love to draw accurately; I try to draw accurately, much better than a cartoon. Even though I love Popeye and Mickey Mouse; I can still do a pretty wicked Popeye. But other than that, my interests were really in the realistic drawing.

ST: What did your family think of you doing all that drawing?

MA: Well, my mother encouraged me; she didn't object to any of the things I was doing. When I brought the pulp magazines home I thought she would hit the ceiling. She looked at them and said "That's nice." She couldn't find anything wrong with the science fiction. I didn't bring in the old romance, you know; the detective magazines she didn't object to.

ST: Are you self-taught?

MA: Yeah, you might as well say so. I started at the University of North Carolina, just to study, I thought I would be under his influence somewhat, the head of the art department, who was William Meade Prince. Now Prince was at the time doing a comic strip in the funny pages for King Features called Aladdin Junior. He was an illustrator, worked in the late teens and the '20s and the '30s, was one of the top commercial artists in the business, and was still doing some illustration. He was a marvelous illustrator, a marvelous artist. But he got sick three weeks into my freshman year and was out for the rest of the year, so I dropped the art.

So that's about all the formal art training I had.

ST: Where was your first paying job?

MA: Fiction House, up in New York. They published five or six regular comic books, and a number of science fiction titles. I was a big Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon fan. Those were my big influences initially.

Plus Popeye; I loved Popeye.

ST: You liked the comic book version?

MA: No, the newspaper comics. The comic books came along after that. I was around for the first comic strips. It was where I encountered Buck Rogers....

ST: When you were working at Fiction House, how did you get your assignments?

MA: They looked at my samples and we talked. Then if they had a pulp magazine with the same name or theme as my samples, I worked for them. I did comics that fit what they were publishing. I got to know the editor and he gave me assignments to do illustrations for Pulp. Basically the stories that I did were science fiction.

ST: You both pencilled and inked.

MA: Oh yeah.

ST: Did you have preference?

MA: No, I like to do it all.

ST: What was the kind of turnaround time they expected of you? When did they want the work back?

MA: They gave me a desk and I worked on the premises. I never had any pressure. They would work with what I had. I guess they didn't give me work that was that time-sensitive. But I pencilled better than a page a day. They seemed satisfied.

ST: So you pencilled in about a day, and then the inking would take you another day?

MA: Yeah, something like that. I could figure on eventually averaging about a page a day.

ST: When you were working for the big comics studios, you said you had an office and a desk?

MA: Yeah, when I started at Fiction House they had offices where the "three sixes" are. If you know New York at all, that's where DC was located for many years.

ST: Most of those people working in those offices at the time were men; there were very few women

MA: No, just the opposite! When I started there they were all ladies, practically. There were only two or three males in there.

ST: What were the ladies doing? Comic books?

MA: Oh yeah, oh yeah. There was Fran Hopper, she did a number of adventure stories for Planet Comics and all over. Lilly Renée who did their lead feature for Planet Comics. Oh, Ruth McCully was a letterer. Ruth Atkinson was an artist who worked there. Her brother happened to be a very prominent jockey; he was one of the top jockeys in the country at the time. And Marcia Snyder, she did a very heavy adventure-type of material.

ST: Was that because it was around the war years?

MA: Oh sure, it was war time. There was a shortage of anyone to do the stuff. How do you think a 17-year-old kid could walk in and get a job?

ST: When you went into the service were you drafted or did you finally decide to enlist?

MA: Well, I was going to be drafted, but I volunteered for early induction. I tried to enlist, but I have what they call "amblyopia", or "lazy eye syndrome", and the Navy wouldn't touch me. It's a long story, but I kind of got through the physical exam without anyone detecting my condition, until they were swearing me in, and someone dredged up the bad news about my eye.

And they said to me, "What are you doing here? You can't go into the Navy!"

And I said, "Well they sent me from Fort Bragg to Raleigh to be sworn in."

And he just scratched his head, and I said, "The officer down there said for them to check my binocular vision." In other words, what I see with both eyes rather than one eye ... So I got by the exam.

ST: And obviously it's never hurt your art, either.

MA: Naw ... but my overall vision is better with both eyes than with the one eye.

ST: Which one of the superhero characters that you worked on was your favorite?

MA: Well, I drew Hawkman for about 21 issues, plus some other stuff. I introduced some of the Golden Age characters in Showcase. Plus, I worked with Julie (Schwartz) on those; we brought back a number of them. I worked with most of the pencillers at DC at one time or another.

ST: Was there one you were particularly fond of?

MA: Hawkman, Black Canary ... and then we revived The Spectre, and that sort of thing.

ST: What did you like doing best — the Buck Rogers stuff?

MA: Yeah. That was my favorite character, my favorite vehicle, I guess. But my favorite assignment in my professional career was working for the Army on PS Magazine.

I worked with Will Eisner for about two-and-a-half years; worked in his shop. And I got out of comics to do that, basically. That was during the Batman craze. He offered me the job and I thought, well maybe I might not ever have another chance to get out of the books. You know, because the comic books were viewed by most of the artists as a dead end. It was only after the super heroes started coming back that the interest was generated again in comics. The Batman television series was a big part of that. It interested the general public in super heroes again.

ST: And what did you do with PS Magazine?

MA: Preventive Maintenance, actually. Will Eisner founded the magazine [Editor's Note: To see a sample check out this website]. He was a contractor for the first 20 years.

ST: What was the work in that, that you did? Did it have any continuing stories?

MA: Well, it had a continuity, not continued, but a six-page continuity in each issue, done in full color. The rest of the magazine was two-color. The colors used were a functional device, to help highlight, trying to call the attention of the reader. Say it's your camera, and there's some adjustment that needs to be made, telling them how to adjust the lens, that sort of thing. All army equipment, at some time or other, is written up in PS, mainly maintenance tips.

ST: And did your illustrations show "how"?

MA: Well, they would write a regular article, and send it to us as art contractors, and we'd have to break the thing down, and use their copy generally. I mean, we could translate some of it to balloon copy, and have the characters dramatizing a point, not dramatize it, but make it funny.

And you'll pardon the expression, but the buxom girls were part of the way to get the G.I.'s attention. But of course, during my tenure it became very controversial. Not because of my drawing, but because of the culture changes in our society, the feminism and so forth. The lady soldiers started getting a little upset about it, and they complained. The one I remember complained to Senator Proxmire and one of my center spreads for the magazine wound up in newspapers all around the world. [chuckles] Because he got hold of it and made an issue of it.

ST: What was the upshot of all that?

MA: Nothing. It's all died down. No one's intentions were to harm anyone. It was just a device to get some soldier's attention, and the buxom girl kind of annoyed the lady soldiers, 'cause a lot of the guys were comparing them with "Connie" in PS Magazine. She was the teacher, the instructor.

ST: She was the main character, the buxom instructor.

MA: And she had a black counterpart that we introduced a little later on.

ST: When was that big brouhaha?

MA: I started working on the comic in the '60s and what I'm talking about occurred in the '70s.

ST: If people were interested in seeing your work from PS Magazine, do you know of any reprints or any way they would be able to find it?

MA: The stuff is still around; many career soldiers keep the stuff. Some of them collect the magazines, and they refer to 'em. They actually use the stuff and much of the stuff is taken and used in classroom situations. They blow them up and dissect the articles and use them to teach.

ST: Is that what you are the most proudest of in your career?

MA: Yes, because I felt like I was doing something worthwhile.

ST: That's all that matters!

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