CI: What can you tell me about your Dazzler work back with Marvel? I understand you guys tried to revamp the character somewhat? Do you feel it was successful?

PC: It was the third or fourth revamping. We should refresh your readers’ memory:

Dazzler was one of the silliest superheroes ever created. The concept of it was originally a movie project for Bo Derek in the height of the disco craze. There was this notion that she would be a disco singer that would also put on her own light shows. Somehow, Marvel has always had a relationship with Hollywood, [even] back then...and decided to try it as a comic first. Jim Shooter was running it at the time, and has a stubborn streak and thinks that any concept can be made to work, if you do it right, and if you do it with enough care. Even though no one else liked Dazzler, he was stubborn about it, and she went on for about fifty issues. Having affairs with half the heroes in the Marvel Universe, she [was] going through a lot of changes.

I had tried to sell Concrete and failed in 1983, and decided I needed to try to establish a professional profile before I could find a publisher for Concrete. I think it was Jo Duffy, who was an editor at Epic Comics, who showed my work to Archie Goodwin, and he thought I might be a good artist for this revamping of Dazzler that was really his baby creatively. I was thrilled to work with Archie, he’s a really good writer, and I think I learned a little about story-telling from him. He wrote in thumbnails. I would find that, no matter how I tried to change the layouts, it was never as clear or as informative as Archie’s thumbnails, until I go back to them.

I think we did an okay job, but when the New Universe group of Marvel Comics came around, they decided to cancel their six worst-sellling titles to free up room for them, and Dazzler was one of them. I decided “Here it’s been a year and a half, I’m no closer to doing Concrete, I’m not a star at Marvel, why don’t I just do Concrete before I get too old?”

I kept getting drawn back into the movie business, as a storyboard artist back then. People would offer me interesting movies. I would take those jobs, thinking they wouldn’t last that long, and they always lasted longer than I had thought. So, it was another two years, ‘85, that I had a Concrete proposal done for the first three issues. Sort of moving to a new subject, I circulated that at the San Diego Comicon and got eight offers that year, much nicer than striking out the two years I had previously. I almost went with Epic Comics, because it would be full color, and it would be Marvel, and so on and so on. Dark Horse matched their financial offer, and they were just so enthusiastic about it. [At] Marvel, where they work with all the top talent, I’d just be a small fish in a big pond. Dark Horse had something special to them. I’m very glad at the decision.

CI: Do you think you’re ever going to get to all 100 Horrors?

PC: (laughter) You’re a cruel man!

CI: I was urged into asking that one by a friend, we figured if you don’t the 100th Horror could be Pual Chadwick coming back [from the dead] to finish the 100 Horrors.

PC: At the rate I”m going, I’ll have them finished well by the time I’m 120. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

CI: Do you find it easier to do the series of mini-series, as you’ve been doing with Concrete, as opposed to the first ten issues of the ongoing series?

PC: I think it works for me better in that I like to tell longer stories, and I can’t seem to produce six issues a year, more like six every year-and-a-half. Stretching it out to quarterly would just be too long for continued stories. I wish I could produce more, and I flirt with the idea of collaborating all the time. I think of what a pleasure a regular comic that I can find every month is to me.... I have the other side of me that wants to control every last jot and tittle. I guess as I mature I probably will work, at least with an inker.