Illustration by Tim Estiloz

Most of us remember fondly our love of comic books. For some fleeting period of our childhood, we eagerly flipped those colorful pages, transported to a world where superheroes -- or, in some of our cases, Betty and Veronica -- ruled. And then, just as quickly as the obsession came upon us, it faded, and we were returned to our stacks of library books and twilight games of kickball.

Make that some of us. For Les Daniels, comic books have been not just a fleeting summer pastime, but a bona fide, decades-long career. As the author of several pop-culture histories, including Superman: The Complete History (1998), Batman: The Complete History (1999), Wonder Woman: The Complete History (2000) (all from Chronicle Books), and DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes (Bulfinch Press, 1995), Daniels is widely considered a top authority on -- and in -- the world of comics.

But lest you think him a one-trick pony, consider this: the Providence resident is also an award-winning author of horror novels, including The Silver Skull (Scribner, 1979), Citizen Vampire (Scribner, 1981), and Yellow Fog (Tor Books, 1988). With such a varied repertoire, perhaps it's not surprising that Daniels fancies himself a modern-day Plastic Man.

Q: Why comic books? Where did the interest come from, and when did it start?
A: Well, it started when I was a kid. Back decades ago, comics were a lot more popular than they are now, and I think most kids read them, and it was kind of a kids' special medium, the way maybe video games or something like that is today. And there was a campaign started, as they often are, accusing comics of corrupting the youth and leading to crime and all that sort of thing, again the way video games or rap or something is today, except it was very successful, and a tremendous number of the comic-book publishers went out of business. The industry was really damaged, and never quite recovered. This was sort of traumatic for me in some sense, because I enjoyed the medium, and I think that attempt to destroy it actually had the effect on me and a number of other people of making them see it as something special, to be preserved in some sense.

Q: What's the first comic book you remember reading?
A: There's two of them from 1948: one is a Donald Duck comic by a writer/artist named Carl Barks, called The Old Castle's Secret, and there's another one, the old character Captain Marvel -- who people know today under the title Shazam -- there was one of his.

Q: Which comic book do you think is best artistically or aesthetically, and which is best from a writing standpoint?
A: It's extremely difficult to pin it down to one. I have quite a working knowledge, so I'm really reluctant to do that. Sometimes it seems like the best comics are the ones where the writer and the artist are the same person; there's kind of a synergy that they can create that doesn't always work when there are a lot of different people working, although most of the comics today, the mainstream comics, the superheroes and so on, have separate writers and artists.

Q: Why do you think comic books are less popular now? What contributed to that?
A: Well, it's a complicated issue that people argue about. I think really the whole business of the attack on comics, which worked better than any attack on any other medium, really had a terrible effect: there were dozens and dozens of comic-book companies publishing, and there were maybe five left when the dust settled, and they had gotten a bad reputation of being kind of corrupt, and they never really recovered. I mean, there have been hills and valleys in between, but they never really recovered from that. Because of that, I think the people who were most interested in comics tended to go into the field, so it became more incestuous; the people who wrote the comics were the same people who were reading them, and they appealed maybe less to a general audience. And also, I guess it's just a passing of time. As I say, there are so many things now, from TV to video games -- there are a lot of things for people to be interested in that are not comics, and I think that sort of diverted the audience.

Q: Do you see comics ever making a comeback?
A: They do from time to time, but I can't imagine they'll ever be as popular as they were. When they first really came into their own it was during World War II, and for that period and for a couple decades afterwards, they were universally available -- every store you would go into, every drugstore, every convenience store, had a rack of comics, and they were just ubiquitous, and I don't think that'll ever happen again.

Q: How'd you get interested in horror?
A: Again, it's my childhood, I guess. I remember hearing stories at kids' camps and things like that; I remember one counselor who would do his versions of literary ghost stories, or Edgar Allan Poe stories, and so on.

Q: How do you think horror writing and horror movies have evolved over the years?
A: This has been almost the opposite of the comic-book story: when I was a kid, [horror] was kind of a minor subgenre, especially the literary end. You know, there were a few people in every generation who would write this kind of fiction, but it was certainly a minority taste. In my generation, a lot of people seemed to be interested in writing it, and a lot more people seemed to be interested in reading it, and you began getting bestsellers starting with, I don't know, Rosemary's Baby and Stephen King and so on and so on, and it became a boom. I think, again, everything is cyclical, and I think it's slowed down a little bit from a peak maybe in the '80s; certainly there aren't so many films and so on, and there aren't so many books that are being published. But this substantial interest, even though it's leveled off, is larger than it had ever been before.

Q: The volume of stuff being produced grew, but do you think they got better?
A: Oh, no. I think they probably got worse. I think the reason the volume grew is because there were a certain number of bestsellers, and as often happens, people decided that they would try to do something similar, not out of any real impulse, but because it looked like a way to make easy money, which didn't turn out to be true for most people. But I think that accounts for the glut on the market.

Q: What horror movie scared you the most?
A: It's harder for me to get scared now, of course; it's easier when you're young. Psycho would be a good example. I think well of that one. I'm almost tired of it now because it's been around for so long. If it came on and I was watching it, I wouldn't really have to pay much attention to know what was going on, so the novelty is gone, but that's one that I remember upsetting me.

Q: What do you think of horror-movie parodies, like Scary Movie?
A: I thought Scary Movie was good for the pre-credit sequence, just like Scream was good for the pre-credit sequence. They had about 10 minutes' worth of ideas and they used them up and then it was redundant, but I enjoyed that much of it, anyway.

Q: Do you think that special effects and makeup and all those other kinds of tricks have improved horror movies, or hurt them?
A: In some respects it's hurt them, because there's such a reliance on them, and sometimes it seems that makeup is running the show. Say, vampire films now -- the vampires used to look more or less like regular people, but now if you watch Buffy or something, it seems like they have to have goo all over their face, because people expect that. To me that's less interesting. But they're no longer making them for me; they're making them for teenagers, which is where I started too. So I don't know if I'm in any condition to complain.

Q: Speaking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, what do you think of that show?
A: I'm not a big fan. It just seems so backwards: the vampires are scared of the high-school kids. It seems like the high-school kids should be scared of the vampires. Just from the title alone, it's not what I'm interested in.

Q: You were writing about vampires before everyone became fascinated with them. Why do you think people have become so interested in vampires?
A: It seemed to be a gradual increase in interest, starting sometime in the '70s. A lot of it had to do with Anne Rice and her particular twist on vampires, which is different from mine, also different from most of what had existed previously. I came out with my first vampire novel shortly after hers, but I was writing mine when her first one came out, and my initial reaction was, oh good, they're nothing alike. Now I think, if only I'd been like hers, I might be rich now. But I think she started this trend, which you still get, of making the vampires much more sympathetic. I was going for a little more sympathetic; I thought it would be interesting to treat them as characters, but they're still pretty offensive, whereas she sort of set up this idea of the vampire as being sort of a club that loners would be attracted to, and would want to join -- you know, the whole goth movement, that sort of thing. It became a symbol for people who felt that they were in some sense outsiders and wanted to develop this fantasy life of omnipotence and coolness that is a little different from what had been popular before, [which] I think accounts for a lot of the popularity. It's sort of, I don't want to say a watered-down version, but in a way I do. They're not so off-putting anymore.

Q: If you were a superhero, which one do you think you'd be?
A: The one that I guess I relate to most is one that you don't see too much anymore, which was Jack Cole's Plastic Man, because I think it emphasized the absurdity of being a superhero by the very visuals, which other characters have used, of being just this rubbery guy who could distort his shape in all sorts of ways. I can imagine being that kind of goofy superhero better than I can imagine being one of the really stalwart ones.

Q: On a personal note, my grandfather Reuben Schrank was one of the original people approached to draw the Superman comic, and he declined. If he were alive today, what would you say to him?
A: Well, actually, he might have been right. If you know the story, the two people who ended up doing it -- the artist was Joe Shuster -- both had quite a difficult time in life. They got their character sold to a publisher, but in order to get it published, they had to sell the rights, and they got into a disagreement, and they ended up not reaping the benefits that they'd hoped to, or that some people think they should've. So he might've made the right choice.

Tamara Wieder, whose personal comic-book phase ended when she outgrew her Wonder Woman Underoos, can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: March 15 - 21, 2002