[00:02] Intro: Welcome to the Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet, comics, and everything related to it.

[00:24] John: Hello, and welcome back to the Corner Box. I'm one host, John Barber, and with me as always, my good friend, David Hedgecock. And David, we're not alone today. Man, I am excited to talk to Stephen Grant, who's here with us. Certainly best known for creating Whisper, for writing the first Punisher limited series, for writing Badlands, Counter X, Two Guns, of course, The Edge with Gil Kane. Too many things to mention. Stephen, thank you for coming here. Oh, you're welcome.

[00:54] David: Yay! Welcome to the show, Stephen. for joining us.

[00:57] John: Super excited to talk about some of these things. Usually David asks this question, "What got you into comics originally? What was the stuff that really made you think that this is the thing you wanted to do or that led you in the direction that you got into it?"

[01:09] Steven Grant: I was a kid growing up in Madison, Wisconsin in the middle of nowhere. This is early '60s and I got sick. This is one of my theories about comics is why the readership of comics fell off during the 1960s is that childhood diseases got conquered because my first real exposure to comics, I think I'd seen a Lone Ranger comic in a barbershop when I was like four and had no interest in it whatsoever. I got the measles and was bedridden for a week and this is back in the days when TVs were just too big to move around so I was stuck in bed. My father figured, "Okay, well, let's get him a comic book just to keep him entertained." I had no idea, but apparently I I was big on Westerns in those days, like every other kid. So he brought me a copy of All-Star Western, which I think was like the third to last one. And it was okay. It was fine. And I didn't realize until later how much it influenced me. But in it, it was a full page ad and was across the top. It was just imagine in big letters and then this arrow going down the side and superimposing the arrow is Superman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. in one comics magazine, the Justice League of America, and it was this, you know, I think it was number five, when gravity went wild, and everyone's like flying through the air. And it's like, this is something I had never seen before. This was like a totally different experience to me. And I'm going just like, what is this? And it's like, oh my god, I got to get out of bed. And I got to go find this thing. Which I didn't for a week. And by the time I got to a store to find it, how it was kind of interesting, because where comics that came in this glass rack and glass enclosed rack that you spun around and then put a dime in where you wanted and it spat out a comic at you, which I've never seen before since. Anyway, I got the next issue of Justice League. And that's pretty much what started me is just this, you know, this was just weird. This is like stuff I had no preconception of. And then the next comic that I got was, of all things, The Flash 123, which, Of course, all hardcore comics fans know what that is. Flash of two worlds. And there was just all this weird stuff and it kept going like that. So I got hooked on comics very early. And by the time I was in my teens, I was, I'm pre-teens actually, you know, I was thinking up my own storylines and characters and things like that, like we all do.

[03:34] David: Wait, your third comic book ever was Flash of two worlds? Third, if you could, the second that I bought,

[03:39] Steven Grant: third that I got.

[03:40] David: That is amazing. No one you wrote on comic books, of course. Comics in a vending machine? I need this in my life. How is that?

[03:48] Steven Grant: I've never seen it since. I love the idea. And it only worked when they were a dime. That's what drove that out of business.

[03:55] David: Yeah, I guess putting four bucks worth of change into a vending machine.

[03:59] Steven Grant: Yeah, even 12 cents. When it got to 12 cents, they couldn't do it. And it went up to 12 cents shortly afterwards, like I think a year after I started buying comics, it went up to 12 cents. But anyway, I mean, I read all this stuff and I think Green Lantern was my favorite back then. And I didn't realize it, but it was because I really like Gil Kane's work. And I didn't know who Gil Kane was at the time, but he was the guy who drew the Johnny Thunder story in All Star Western.

[04:24] John: Wow. That's amazing.

[04:27] Steven Grant: You know, and Gil Kane was always my favorite artist. Still is really. I mean, I mean, I can make arguments for all kinds of artists, but I send them, mentally Gil will always be my favorite, but eventually, you know, I got into other things. By the time I was in late high school, I was paying a lot more attention to Underground Comics. My graduation gift from high school was to go to the Phil Soolinkon in New York, where I met all kinds of people. Benny O'Neill, Jim Staranko, Jim Staranko insulted me. That was fun. Will Eisner, all kinds of people. It was easy to run into people then. So on the way back, since I lived in Madison, I had to fly to Milwaukee and then to Madison. And on the plane to Milwaukee, I ended up sitting next to Dennis Kitchen, who was at that point doing Kitchen St. Comics Underground. So we talked the whole way through. And honestly, I don't remember what we discussed, except it was fascinating. He invited me to come visit him anytime. So I eventually, you know, I went to visit him and was going to do an underground comic for him. That was 1971. By now it's 1973. Are you still in high school at that point? No, no, I'm out of high school in '71. Okay, you're out of high school, okay. But this is before I went to college. I was out of school from like mid '71 to January '74. And anyway, so I was going to do a comic for him and I went to his office on the day that Supreme Court handed down their ruling on obscenity, making it a local thing that every locality could choose their own standards, which shut down underground comics because nobody wanted to face 13,000 individual lawsuits. And there were plenty of prosecutors that were just waiting to make a name for themselves by taking on these evil underground comics. But underground comics had a huge influence on me. So I had this comic that I had done, which was actually since I was ballsy and stupid at the time and had no idea what I was doing. I actually wrote to Michael Moorcock and asked for permission to adapt Elric, which he gave me. He said, yeah, go ahead. Fine. You know, I sent him a whole stack of underground comics because he hadn't seen any and he was like, whoa, all this stuff is going on. You know, I mean, I think I sent him like 25, 30 underground comics. Hold on, Steven.

[06:50] David: Okay. You're like 19 years old, 20 years old. 17. "Okay, okay, even better." So you're 17 and you're like, "I'm just gonna mail some comics to Michael Moorcock."

[07:01] Steven Grant: No, no, no, no, no, no, I somehow found out how to contact him and I wrote him first and then when he said yes, then I sent him the comics just to reassure him that this wasn't like some- There were basically no strings attached, including I didn't have any permission to do, you know, to continue doing it. I could do two.

[07:17] David: You have been in writing? Can you be adapting Michael Moorcock stuff now? I feel like that might be a thing that you might wanna explore a little bit more.

[07:23] Steven Grant: Oh no, you know, honestly, I would not try it now. Did you adapt? Yeah, an artist named John Adkins Richardson drew the thing and it's really the story I kind of cringe at. The art I still think was really good. It was very medieval looking art. It worked very well, but he had worked with Jan Stronod on books with Richard Corbin and things like that. So anyway, I had this comic that I then had nothing to do with And I ran into a guy at a, this is a long-winded story, isn't it? At the time they had conventions, one-day conventions in Chicago once a month, which were just basically big dealer's rooms. So I would go down there with a friend of mine named Bruce Ayers who was a partner in an antique shop. We'd go down there and I'd help him, you know, cart the books in and out and then I'd wander around. And I ran into a guy who was starting his own, what then was called ground level, you know, indie comics called Windy City Comics. George Breo, I'm pretty sure it was. We got to talking and I asked him if he was interested in publishing that and he goes, "Oh yeah!" So and he did publish it. There's a magazine spice comic out if you can find it. It's really rare. But he said, "You know, there's some guys over there you ought to talk to. They come in from Indiana every convention too." So I went over there and got to know Bob Layton and Roger Stern who published a fanzine called CPL, which I think it was contemporary pictorial literature, which I thought was always kind of beautifully pompous, uh, idol. Anyway, so I ended up writing stuff for them. And now George also put me in touch with this artist, a fan artist who was looking to do some new comics named John Byrne out of Calgary, who also knew Roger and Bob. So I sort of became, uh, adjacent to that click. Weren't you buzzed with Roger Stern? Yeah, I mean Roger and I clicked the most, I think. I mean John and I clicked pretty much. We were putting together, before he got into Marvel, we were putting together a series to try and push to some publisher. So we were working together a little bit and got to know Roger and Roger ended up becoming an assistant editor at Marvel. And I always liked to get out of Madison and I enjoyed going to New York. So when I went to New York, I would stay at Rogers. I'd just crash on a cell phone. '78, my girlfriend at the time was trying to get an internship. There was something at Juilliard. She was going to audition at Juilliard for something or other. And so I went in with her over Easter and I called Roger before that and I said, "Hey, is it okay if I crash with you while I'm in town for a week?" And he said, "Yeah, sure. When are you getting there?" And I said very late Sunday night, he said, "Oh, that's great. Be ready to write an issue on Marvel 2 in one Monday morning." [LAUGHTER] Jim Schueter had just come in. He'd just been promoted to editor. And as he put it, the book was 18 months behind, which is mathematically impossible, but he needed scripts is what it amounted to. Because Jim was basically promoted to get the trains running on time. Because there were so many like books and such, and you know, reprint issues and things like that, that they had to do that was getting embarrassing. So the mandate was get books done. I said, well, what character do I mean? He said, I'll just pick anyone, just, you know, that's fine. So he and I had previously discussed how probably inappropriate I was for writing anything at Marvel at that point. And I didn't have any great ambitions to do it at that point. I had had great ambitions earlier, but by then it kind of faded away. You found girls clearly. I actually found literature is what I'd amount to.

[11:10] David: Yeah, I think so.

[11:11] Steven Grant: And so I decided, okay, well, this is the only time I'm ever going to write anything from Marvel. Let's just have some fun with it. So I decided to use Moon Knight as the co-star, even though I hated the character for obvious reasons. There was a certain running confusion there that annoyed me, but I played on it because I thought, okay, I'm going to write a Moon Knight story and I'm going to have him narrate it in the first person. And that was the joke of the story. I have to say I didn't put an awful lot of thought into it. I think it was a perfectly fine throwaway superhero story, but I wouldn't call it a work of genius or anything. And so I went in with him on Monday morning and I sat at a typewriter in his office and I spent a couple of hours typing up the plot and I handed it to him and he read it and marked it up, handed it back to me. I re-typed it, handed it to him. He read it again and handed me a voucher. So I filled out the voucher and turned it in. And I went home. thought that was the end of it. And then a couple weeks later, I got the check in the mail. And I thought, hmm, perhaps I'm being hasty. They paid really shit in those days, but it was a lot more money than I was making at the time. If I can actually make money doing this, and it'll get me out of Madison, it might be worth doing. So that's how I ended up writing for Marvel. So, So, you know, basically, I mean, I like to tell people that it's kind of a humble brag is that I did not break into comics. I was asked. I wasn't even asked. I was told I was going to write comics.

[12:56] David: Love this fascinating. Also, I think it's hilarious that anyone in the history of comics has ever looked at a comic book paycheck and went like, oh, I can make a living. That's a new one I've never heard before.

[13:09] Steven Grant: I could make more money than I could write as me.

[13:11] David: So we're going to completely derail this timeline, but I have to ask this question because this is the thing that really stuck with me. So Gil Kane, like your favorite guy, by the way, great choice. Gil Kane's amazing. One of the best all time ever for sure. There's no doubt of that. What was it like for you when you worked on edge with him?

[13:33] Steven Grant: How can I put this? It was kind of like the culmination of my childhood is what it was. First of all, working with Gil was great. I had no problem working with Gil. It was wonderful. I loved working with Gil. I loved his work. He did great on the book. He was always very friendly and cooperative. I think I got on good terms with him by not only immediately complimenting him and gushing over, you know, telling him my childhood story, but there was an interview that he did with Roy Thomas in like 1969 and Roy's fancy and alter ego, which Roy was trying to do as a because he was the assistant editor or whatever it was at Marvel then. I quoted to Gill things that Gill said in that interview that that interview was a big influence on me too because it was the first time I think, well probably the second time, but it was the first time it really coalesced in my head that you could look at comics intellectually. Yeah, this is tangentially related

[14:34] John: to it, but there was an interview in the "Chaken Shadow" paperback that I read that had this a similar impact on me that was him talking about stuff that I'd never heard of. You know, it wasn't just, "What did you draw last, Wolverine? What are you going to draw next, Batman?" Actually

[14:49] Steven Grant: approaching the material as if it was meaningful. Yeah, if it actually had content and context. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think I think I quoted to Gil was his comment that about art is that curves are static and angles are active. That went into my head and I went, "Ha!" Because I'd never thought about it that way before, but when I started looking, I thought, "Yeah, that's actually true." And the whole interview was like that. He goes through all

[15:19] David: this stuff. That wasn't an early issue of Alter EO, the Roy Thomas. Well, it's actually one of

[15:25] Steven Grant: the later ones for the time, but it was the first run of them. Yeah, it was like Roy hadn't in like five, six years, but then he came back trying to make it a professional magazine, basically.

[15:37] David: I just got the latest issue like a week or two ago. So. Sorry, I had to hear about, so we're back in the late 70s now, you're like, hey, I think I might be able to make a living in this. So you just call up Roger Stern like, hey, give me more work or how does that work?

[15:56] Steven Grant: No, basically I, actually I ended up crashing on Rogers College for eight months because I couldn't find an apartment. So, which got a little touchy, but not too much. But yeah, basically I moved to New York. The thing is you could get into the office really easy at that point if they knew who you were. So, I had entree to the offices and then I just go to editors and I think I got actually a lot more work from Al Milgram than I got from Roger. Also, like I say, they were trying to get the trains running on time. So, So the thought at the time was that every book should have at least one fill-in issue so that if the schedule goes awry then they've got something they can slot in there so they don't have to miss shipping. Because they paid lots of money for missing the printer deadline. That made it fairly easy to get a lot of work, although there were limitations to it. Like you couldn't really do anything with any characters because you weren't allowed to change anything. So you know, but it was a good learning experience. I mean, and I was learning on the job, I gotta say. I did not go in there knowing what I was doing.

[17:07] David: For a long time now, I've submitted that Al Milgram is probably one of the best editors, unsung in many ways, best editors around. And the reason for that is because I'm sort of an art forward comic book person myself. Not that the writing isn't important, but I think the art is the sales pitch. And Al's eye for art and artists, I think is top notch. Like that guy knows how to pick him. How are his skills on the writing side of things? Like as an editor, like coaching you up, did you find him helpful? How was he as an editor?

[17:36] Steven Grant: Al has a very good story sense. You know, that's what you really need is somebody to... And he was very flexible as an editor. A story about Al, and this is something he put up with for me. He asked me to do an issue of Shogun Warriors. Now to me at the time, there was no dip your book on the face of your earth and shit. Shogun Warriors. It was simply not my kind of book. However, one thing I learned very early on is that if anybody asked you to do a story, you did it because if you didn't, they didn't mind, but you didn't get asked again. You know, so the way to get work was to keep taking whatever work was offered to. So he asked me to do an issue with Shogun Warriors and I said, "Okay, but I don't know anything about the book." And he said, "Oh, well here, here's the series Bible that Doug Mintz wrote up. Take it home and look at it. It'll tell you everything you need to know. And there were like three main characters, two guys and then this Japanese woman. Yeah, because it was set in Japan. It was giant robots. So there were these vast descriptions of the guys and the woman. Doug's description of her was, "She speaks with unconscious poetry." And I'm going, "What the hell does that mean?" And that's all he says about it. So when I turned in the script, I said, "Okay, I just have one request, Al. If you change any dialogue, you can change anything you want to, except if it's her dialogue come to me and ask me to change it." And he looks at me and he says, "Why?" I said, "Because all of her dialogue is written in haiku." Beautiful. He had thrown me out of his office, so I got to give that to Al. Anyway, so no, Al was pretty terrific as an editor. I had never had any issues with Al that I don't remember. There was a story I did for Marvel Fanfare that Joe Barney drew, and I think George Freeman inked and colored, but I'm at least colored, with the Hulk versus Eunice and the Blob. And that was Al's story, basically. I mean, I fleshed it out, but it was Al's concept. So Al knew what he needed in stories, and he was very good at expressing it. And of course, being an artist, he had a real good eye for art. So yeah, he was a pretty good editor, I gotta say.

[19:54] David: Hey everybody, we're gonna take just a break here for a minute and talk about my new book that is launching soon on Kickstarter. The best way for you to support the work we do here on the podcast is to buy the books that we make. It's kind of a win-win for you guys. You get entertained here on the podcast and then the way to support it is to get entertained by a cool book. That book is "Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians." book we have done. So we are kick-starting soon. It features the artistic talents of the Xiong brothers on interiors. They are an amazing art duo. They're twins. Their art style has a beautiful manga-infused influence to it that I find super appealing and I think you guys are going to love it. And we have some fantastic cover artists that we brought on for this one. We have Chuma Hill who has been covering Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute of "Bantman" amongst other DC titles. Eisner Award-nominated Ludo Lullaby will return for another cover on Miss Mina. And we also have Tony Harris. Yes, Tony Harris of "Starman" and "Ex Machina" fame. Gorgeous painted cover for us. So those are just some of the cool things that we have available for you. We also brought back Jonathan Mayberry, five-time Bram Stoker award-winning author and New York Times bestseller. Jonathan Mayberry is doing an original prose piece the book that will accompany a backup story that is being drawn by Green Lantern artist Osvaldo Montpeler. Very excited for you guys to see it. The Kickstarter will launch in just a few weeks but the best way to support us right now is to go to get.funtimego.com and you'll learn all about the book and you can sign up for our VIP package. The VIP package basically gives you extra special discounts and secret reward tiers that only our VIPs get to see. So it's the best possible way to get access to the Kickstarter campaign when it goes live is to have that VIP in your back pocket. So head over to get.funtimego.com and learn about the book and sign up for our VIP. Thanks so much. Let's get back to the show. So you're getting trained up, you're getting piecemeal work here and there. must be doing something. I guess you're sleeping on somebody's couch. Maybe that's how you're making the ends meet. Fairly soon after that, I gotta think, within a couple years at least, you get like the first miniseries in the history of Marvel comic books, right? Like how does that happen?

[22:13] Steven Grant: It didn't. It's all an illusion. I mean, somebody asked at the convention a while back, when you were doing Contest of Champions, did you have any idea it was going to change the face of comics. And I said, when we were doing Contest of Champions, we didn't even know we were doing Contest of Champions. Because the thing was, is that Bill Mantlow had brought me in to co-write with him this Treasury edition that they published, which was the Hulk and Spider-Man at the Winter Olympics in 1980. Then they did the Summer Olympics, which Mark and I worked with Bill on, Mark Ruhnwald and I worked with Bill on to bring in tons and tons of Marvel superheroes because that's what everyone wanted was like just let's get all the Marvel superheroes in one place. And it didn't quite get to that level but it was pretty involved. And that was for the Marvel Summer Olympics but then Moscow invaded Afghanistan and Carter pulled us out of the Summer Olympics. So this was a book they couldn't publish. So, we're into a drawer. And then a year or so later, whenever it was, '81, '82, whenever it was. Now, I had personally been advocating for miniseries since the moment I showed up at Marvel, that they should be doing them. And everyone was like, you know, looking at me funny. But I knew Eclipse was doing well with them and other companies were doing fairly well with them. And I thought, this is like really the future of comics. This is where it should be, because I always tended to think of story over character, not in that the stories were plot driven, but that I can't really separate characters and stories. What happens to the character is the story, and there's all these elements that are all interacting, and you can't really separate, at least I have trouble separating them out into different categories. Anyway, so I'd always thought that this was a great way to get away from the soap opera thing of always having to continue the story, is that you have complete stories. He can do that in miniseries. At some point, Jim Shooter, and it wasn't through any influence of mine, I guarantee that, decided Marvel should be trying, I think DC had done miniseries by that point, and Jim decided Marvel should do it, and went to the people upstairs and said, we should be doing miniseries, and they said, well, if you really want to, but if you can figure out a way to do one without spending any money on it, then fine, go ahead and try it. So then he went in and he found this in the drawer and then split it up into three issues and got John Romita Jr. to fill in there because John had drawn the original one, got John to draw in some filler material so that the breaks weren't like ridiculous, then published in his Contest of Champions and it became this huge success and of course caused what was it called? Secret Wars. Secret Wars, you know, immediately, Oh, we got to do Secret Wars now. And then, you know, I think it probably had a lot of influence on Crisis on Infinite Earths, too, in terms of them willing to do that. Literally decades of event comics can all be played at your show. It goes back to that. Now, I take very little credit for it. Again, it's a humble brag. It's one of my many little influences on comics that no one really knows about that. I probably shouldn't be telling you stories, but whatever anyone else thinks about my career, I can safely look back and say there are a number of things that would have been significantly different had I not been.

[25:44] David: I like that. I just realized that we have now interviewed Paul Cooperberg and Stephen Grant. Paul Cooperberg is the man responsible for the first miniseries over at DC. Is that World of Krypton? Yeah, World of

[26:02] Steven Grant: responsible for the first miniseries. I was just involved in it. So.

[26:06] David: We're all okay, yeah, yeah. We're gonna give you full credit. It was all you. Okay. What I heard and what Ed, the way Ed is gonna edit this is that you were fully responsible. You brought everything to Shooter, forced it down his throat, and he was screaming and kicking and saying no the whole time, but you somehow won out.

[26:24] Steven Grant: I'd love to see Jim's reaction when you told him that. (laughing) panel with Dan Chichester, Roy Thomas, and Steve Engelhardt called "Legends of Marvel Comics," which I always crack up when I hear things like that. At the end of it, the guy moderating it said, you know, reintroduced us and said, "Well, Legends of Marvel Comics," and I leaned over to my microphone and said, "By the way, that weird noise you hear when ever anyone calls me a legend of Marvel Comics is Jim Shooter rolling over in his grave.

[27:00] David: Nice. For one reason or another, I mean, you must have been credited with some success for that massive hit, right? Oh, no. So, okay, then tell me how you got the Punisher thing.

[27:10] Steven Grant: I went to another convention in New York City, which took place between Christmas and New Year's. And Bob and Roger both said, "Oh, well, if you were going to New York City, you got to stay with Duffy Vaught, who was also someone who did stuff for their magazine CPL, but Duffy was also a production assistant at Marvel. And I didn't know Duffy from a hole in the wall, but I called him up and said, "Well, you know, they say I should stay with you." And he said, "Oh, no, that's fine. Come out and Duffy-like lived literally in the wilds of Brooklyn. You had to cross through this vast swamp with wild dogs to get from the nearest subway station to the apartment he lived in." First of all, I guess this is a thing for people who worked for CPL, but Duffy made a demand of me in order to stay there, which was I had to pitch to Marvel. Now, like I say at that point, I really had no interest in pitching to Marvel. But I said, what am I supposed to do? And he said, well, just pick characters they aren't using right now and come up with stories for them and go in and pitch the stories. I said, oh, OK, fine. So I came up with the Black Knight. The Black Knight I was like. The Punisher, I can't say I was a huge fan of, but I thought of a good story for him. I forget who the third one was. It was Nick Fury or the Black Widow or somebody like that. I spent a day in his apartment typing stuff up and then went in with him to see Marv Wolfman, who was the editor-in-chief at the time. And Marv has no memory of this and there's no reason he should. So I pitched these stories to Marv. He gave me half an hour and he listened patiently and then said, "We can't really use any of that stuff, but thank you for coming in, which, you know, it was fine. It's not like I had any great ambitions, and it's, I wasn't crestfallen or anything like that. But the Punisher story that I had in mind just never went away. And when I started doing stuff for Marvel, I started pitching a Punisher miniseries. And the Punisher was reviled at Marvel, just thought it was the dumbest character. He was just a guy who went around shooting people. And that there was no potential in the Punisher, which is kind of proven in Bill's story where he just starts shooting jaywalkers because they're criminals, et cetera, et cetera. No distinction between levels of threat. At any rate, but every time a new editor would come in, I'd pitch them on the Punisher, and they'd say, "Nah, we can't really do anything with that." Turned out I really wanted to do this story. If I'm all on my own, I'll start with a story idea and then figure out what character works best. So anyway, I cut forward a few years to the end of Secret Wars, when Mike Zack is coming off Secret Wars. Now Mike and I had worked together on an initial Marvel team up, so we vaguely knew each other. And at that point, they're expanding the editorial line. Mike is the hottest prospect in comics because he's the guy who came off of Secret Wars, and every editor wants them and he's stable. And at that point, Jim has decided that other companies are no competition for Marvel, so every editorial office should be in competition with other editorial offices, which means they should each have their own stables of writers and artists. Basically going to the 1960s DC model. But he wouldn't have framed it like that. I'm married at this point and my wife says, "Well, you know, Mike is looking for work. Maybe you should call him and ask him if he wants to do the Punisher." And it's like a Saturday afternoon, I'm going, "You really think he'd want to?" And she said, "Well, you can try, so I call up Mike." And it turns out that he and John Bader in Mike's basement in Connecticut at that point. They're trying to figure out the next job they want to do after secret wars. He said it's funny because we were just talking and it'd be really fun to do something like the Punisher. I told him what I had in mind and it turns out we pretty much had the exact same vision for how the character should be, which was basically a non-Marvel connected action movie. At that point, Karl Potts had come in as an editor and was looking for books to do and I called Karl and I think I went into his office and said, "Would you be interested during a Punisher miniseries. He probably was to start with because Carl has tendencies in those directions too, but as soon as he heard Mike was attached to it, then it was like, "Oh, yeah, let's do this." And so he went into Jim Shooter and said, "I want to do the Punisher miniseries with these guys." And Jim kind of looks at him as scant and says, "Okay, but it's on your head." Because Marvel had no confidence in me and they had no confidence in the new character. I honestly think the only reason it got done is that Mike and John signed on to do it.

[31:40] David: That sounds like it was a bigger move for Mike than what I would have thought. Mike kind of went out on a limb with this project a little bit, sounds like.

[31:47] Steven Grant: Mike had just come off Secret Wars, which I don't know if I'm talking out of school, but he hated drawing Secret Wars. I think everybody's heard that. Yeah. He hated drawing Secret Wars and just wanted like a palate cleanser is what it amounted to. He wanted to get the taste of Secret Wars out of his mouth. So the story, the Punisher miniseries, outside of the first issue in prison, which Mike said, "Hey, I really wanted to do a prison story, can we start it out in prison?" Because the last time we'd seen the Punisher, he had been sent off to prison. And I said, "Yeah, sure, no problem." Even though I personally had not any particular interest in prison stories. And now for sub-fer, because I've done several people think I'm big on prison stories, and it's actually not true. But outside of the first issue, the Punisher miniseries is the same thing that I pitched to Marv in 1976. Just in the back of my head and I wanted to do it. And as a matter of fact, the Black Knight story, Al, I pitched to Al earlier, he took it on and it ended up not getting, John B. Sema drew an issue back in like '79, I think, but it ended up not getting published until sometime in the mid-90s in Marvel Fanfare when Al was editing Marvel Fanfare. But that story I also did. You know, that was another one that I held onto.

[33:03] David: Ten years to sit on a story seems like a long time, but I don't know that that's that unusual in comic books.

[33:09] Steven Grant: For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that I couldn't just pick up the phone and get anything published that I want to. And I'd say of the things that I pitched, at least 94% never got done.

[33:19] John: It's actually very hard to get somebody to publish a comic. There was always a thing I would tell people trying to break in. I was an editor at Marvel when Brian Michael Bendis was like the biggest writer I mean, there's a ton of Brian Michael Bendis comics at Marvel in those days that never got made and you don't think about it And you don't hear about them because there's a ton that did get made and that's what everybody sees It's a rough business if you're expecting every idea to come out when you come up with it

[34:04] John: I'm fascinated by the way Punisher was perceived at Marvel. And I don't want to turn this into a whole Punisher thing. I'm not like some Punisher maniac about this. But like, it's one of those stories that whenever I hear people talking about the early days of it, it just doesn't line up with what actually got published in my head in a way that like Stan Lee saying like, oh, you want to make a powerful character? So it's a God. came up with the idea of using a god. It's like, well, yeah, so did a thousand other people in the 1940s. You just picked one, right? You know, it seemed pretty clear to me that in the original appearance of the Punisher, he's Remo Williams or he's something like that. He's the men's adventure character. The problem isn't that he ever kills people. The problem is he's been tricked into thinking that Spider-Man is a guy he should go after. And that seemed to be the gist of what that character was about in that initial appearance. Yeah, I'd say that's true. And then later on, By the time he's killing Jay walkers, he's gone crazy. And then Miller pulls him into this particular- to me, there's this one line in the Miller comic. I don't remember it exactly, I think. But it was like, I can't believe the enemy is killing children by sending them against me. And it's like, well, that's a crazy mindset for the character to get into. And that's a really specific take on the character. And I would have thought that would have been the thing that blew up Punisher at Marvel. And they would have been desperate to make a Punisher series at that point. You got to remember, Marvel indulged Frank at that point.

[35:22] Steven Grant: If I think wanting to use the Punisher, it's like, okay, if you want to use the Punisher, go ahead and use the Punisher. It's like, you can use it, and that's fine. You're Frank Miller. This is my joke about this stuff, because I mean, I honestly believe, and this is self-aggrandization, I'll give it that, but I honestly believe that the Punisher miniseries had as much influence on how comics were made after that as Dark Knight and Watchmen and things like that. It was certainly I don't. I'm not claiming it was on their level, but in terms of how the future creators reacted to it, the way people started developing their stories afterwards, I honestly think that was a big influence on it. My joke is when Howard was doing "American Flag," everyone was going, "Oh my God, Howard Shaken's a genius. No one can do what Howard does." And when Frank did "Dark Knight Returns," everyone was going, "Oh my God, Frank Miller's a genius. No one can do what Frank does." And then when Alan did Watchmen, everyone's going, "Oh my God, Alan Moore's a genius. "No one can do what Alan does." And when I did the Punish miniseries, they said, "Well, fuck, if he can do it, anybody can."

[36:32] John: When David Hedgecock here texted me a few weeks ago and was like, "Would you be interested "in Stephen Grant coming out?" I'm like, "Yeah, well, obviously, yes, definitely." The first thing I think of is, man, I really like Return to Big Nothing. Earlier this week with a little trepidation because it's like I realized I haven't read it in a very long time. I took it off the shelf and I reread it. And my reaction was, "Holy shit, this is a masterpiece. Surely everybody's talking about this online and I've just missed out on this." So I Google it and then I found some older reviews, you know, some like people quoting older reviews from the time. And I had forgotten about this little facet of comic history, which is that there was a whole swath of comic book fandom that turned their nose up on "The Punisher" on a fundamental level in a way that they didn't with "Watchmen" or "Dark Knight." And people were just like, well, the Punisher stories are just dumb stories about guys going out and shooting people. Large part, that was probably true. Well, maybe. But when you get something like your series or whatever, you know, again, yeah, I'm not trying to defend every Punisher story I've written, but I'd sort of forgotten that there was this like huge critical gap in terms of the way people were approaching the stuff, which I think just has disappeared over the years. I don't think people look at it at all the same way now. And it's one of those things where like, like you said, the people that read it and that emulated it didn't think that. The people that, you know, that read it when they were young and it didn't think that, you know, like that wasn't what was going on. It wasn't the right interpretation. I found it baffling because, man, I don't want this to turn into the Chris Farley show either, but Big Nothing is so good. I mean, the art is A plus obviously, right?

[38:00] Steven Grant: That was, you know, Archie Gudu, and asked us if we wanted to do a Punisher graphic novel for Epic and we went, hey, sure, of course. And Archie, you know, Archie just basically let us do whatever we wanted to do and in the way we wanted to do it, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, I mean, I approached it from the point of view that this is probably the last time I will be writing The Punisher. So I want to make this the statement about The Punisher, which I think I did. I still view that as close to the perfect Punisher story as anyone ever got. I don't mind if other people have a different opinion. You know, we were allowed to do exactly what we wanted to do, and we did what we wanted to do in the way that we wanted to do it. Again, with the Punisher miniseries and the way we were both feeling our way through the character, by Return to Big Nothing we both knew exactly how we wanted the character to be. That's certainly my expression of the Punisher.

[38:59] David: And with that, dear listeners, we're going to have to take a pause. We are going along with this episode as you would expect. But we're so excited, we're having such a good time talking to Steven Grant and man, we are just getting into the good parts. I hope you love the journey so far. Come back next week for the second part of the Stephen Grant interview. John asks some really amazing, poignant questions about Stephen Grant's time with Punisher. The revelations are amazing. Anyway, come back next Tuesday with the rest of the Stephen Grant interview.
Thanks everybody. Bye.

[39:32] Outro: This has been the Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating. It really helps. and join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.