THE DENNY O'NEIL TAPES: A Conversation About Comics, Culture and America, 1970

It was 1970. A great comics writer was on the rise. Denny O’Neil, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, was a working, 31-year-old scriptwriter for DC Comics in New York City, experiencing burgeoning pop culture fame for his ground-breaking work on GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE, BATMAN, WONDER WOMAN and BAT LASH. That summer, he returned to his home town on a media tour that included an extended, round-robin conversation with a small group of St. Lous comic book super-fans – including me. I was 15 years old, and I recorded the whole thing.

The conversation focused on Denny’s recent revamps of DC characters; how they fit into the evolving pop culture zeitgeist; his views on artists and collaborations; the nature of the “heroic;” and musings on the fate of the comic book industry itself. THE DENNY O’NEIL TAPES is the first wide, mainstream publication of that interview, which was originally transcribed and published in 3 issues of GRAFAN, our mimeograph fanzine, in 1970; it was seen by less than 100 people and never reprinted until now.

As bonus, the book includes scans of the Denny’s original, typewritten script for GREEN LANTERN #63 (“This is the Way the World Ends,” 1968,) *gifted* to me by the writer after the interview. I also included select pages from the published issue, for comparison to the script (and edited-in-pencil by DC Comics’ Julius Schwartz!), and a glimpse at the processes of these brilliant creators.

With additional comic pages of Denny’s work from that era sprinkled through the interview to give to context, and a postscript inclusion of his complete Wikipedia bio, the book is, I hope, a small but worthy salute to the late, Missouri-born comics storytelling master

Here are some of Denny’s quotes from the tapes.

ON ADDRESSING SOCIAL ISSUES IN COMICS

“I’m reacting. We’re all reacting. I’m desperately worried about pollution, for example. I’ve got a four-year-old son who might not live to be my age, unless we do something about this. ... I don’t know that it’s we want to “preach.” ... There used to be a time when comic never got into anything at all. The difference now is that if you have a story you want to tell about some social problem, and you can still make it an entertaining comic book, you can do it.”

ON REVAMPING BATMAN AND SUPERMAN

“I think both Batman and Superman have accumulated a lot of unnecessary trimming over the years. They were characters who were equivalent to those automobiles Chrysler used to put out, with tail fins that shoot out as high as the Tower of Pisa, and 15 tons of chrome – not functional, too much there to work with. We looked at Superman and Batman from way back, the first issues, and we’ve tried to decide what made these characters popular in the first place.”

ON ARTIST NEAL ADAMS

“The reason my stuff looks better when Neal is doing it is because Neal is a heck of a good artist and involves himself totally. ... It’s more visual because Neal is more visual, and he cares more. I wish that I could distill Neal Adams and put him in a hypo and stick him in every artist in the business. It’s unreasonable to expect that all of them would have his talent, but I’d be satisfied if all of them cared as much as he does.”

ON WRITING “BAT LASH”

“It was a chance to do something that only comics can do and the medium has never done. Wil Eisner came close with The Spirit to the sort of thing we were trying to do, but we were trying to go one step past The Spirit. The book was written basically humorously, but we all had very serious ideas about who Bat Lash was..."

ON THE FATE OF THE COMICS INDUSTRY

“We may be on a real Ragnarök trip..."

Don’t worry: there were also a lot of laughs in the interview, too, with the affable writer by his fans.

Denny died in 2022 after a long, award-winning career as writer and editor, but his influence lives on. This book is a snapshot of his early ascendency.