Another Jim Starlin interview, accompanied by Al Milgrom and Al Weiss, mostly covering the 1970's era at Marvel, from COMIC BOOK ARTIST 18.

http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/18cosmic.html

I like that it starts out covering their experience as fans in the early/mid 1960's, trying to meet and learn from pro artists like Ditko, early work doing stories in fanzines, in Starlin's case drawing stories and submitting them while serving in Vietnam. Starlin was pretty ballsy, he just looked up artists in the New York phone book, and even persisted after he knew they didn't want to talk!
I'd forgotten that Steve Englehart initially wanted to be an artist and not a writer. I have a story he pencilled, inked by Neal Adams for an early VAMPIRELLA issue.


A part of the interview that stood out for me:

 Quote:
Allen [Milgrom]: Marvel was trying to expand in the early '70s, when all the new guys started getting into the business. Warlock was essentially a new character, and they didn't know what to do with Captain Marvel... first he was a Kree soldier in that ugly green-&-white costume. We had different points of view, different attitudes, and different things we wanted to convey, and it was a time of turmoil in the world. So when we were given these characters, we went off on some tangents. Plus, we were probably the first generation that got into comics because we wanted to do comic books. It wasn't, "I can't make it in illustration, I can't get a newspaper strip, this is a stepping stone." We were really aiming to have a career in comics, period. For us, that was the pinnacle! What do you want to do a newspaper strip for?

Jim [Starlin]: We were also some of the first new professionals to come into the business in 30 years, with the exception of Neal [Adams], Steranko, Roy, and Denny [O'Neil]. Before that, it was a closed shop. But in terms of that time period, just like everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, I was just as crazy as the rest of them. Each one of those stories was me taking that stuff that had gone before and trying to put my own personal slant on it. Mar-Vell was a warrior who decided he was going to become a god, and that's where his trip was. But Warlock was already a god from the Gil Kane run, so I had to take the god and make him back into the man. And a suicidal paranoid-schizophrenic man seemed to be the most interesting one to write about at that point. [laughter]

CBA [editor Jon B. Cooke]: How cheerful!

Jim [Starlin]: Everybody's out to get him, including himself, and he kills himself at the end. Twice! [laughter]

Alan [Weiss]: I always loved your happy endings!




Starlin in another interview said that he was lucky enough to apply at Marvel when they were vastly expanding from like 20 titles to about 40. With some modesty, he said "They were hiring anyone who could pick up a pencil."