C.C. Beck
interviewed by Tom Heintjes

Excerpts from the last extensive interview with the chief artist behind the Big Red Cheese

The following is a compilation of a series of interviews I conducted with Charles Clarence Beck in the middle and late 1980s. The interviews were both conducted by mail (I would mail him a list of questions, he would type his responses and mail them back from me, whereupon I would concoct follow-up questions to be mailed back to him) and by phone.

Beck was not always as cooperative as I might have hoped; he was forthcoming one time, close-mouthed and curmudgeonly the next. (Surprising to me, we were better able to forge ahead in our mailed interviews than we were in our phone sessions; on the phone he seemed more concerned with parrying my every thrust. But through the mail, I was able to pose more pointed questions to him -- and he was more willing to write candidly.) His written reply to my suggestion that I travel to interview him in person was vintage:

Beck: "The idea of meeting in person, so popular today when everyone is clamoring for peace talks and get-togethers, is rather foolish; usually nothing is accomplished except to arrange for another meeting at which again nothing will be accomplished." When I tried to develop a profile of Beck as a human being, he said, "One thing I want to bring to your attention is that my work is much more important than my personal life. Interviews today take great delight in probing into the personalities of people, describing their clothing and their hair and what kind of glasses they wear and all that trivia. To me, this is hogwash. Such stuff is written by people just out of a course in writing run by a half-ass professor who believes in 'caring' and 'feeling' and 'sharing' and all that folderol. Phooey on such crap, I say. I'm a professional artist and writer and hope that you are, too. Let's leave that sob-sister stuff to People magazine and such publications. Or DC."

Elsewhere, Beck vehemently rejected any efforts on my part to allow readers to become acquainted with C. C. Beck, the man: "I have no sympathy for writers and artists who gabble about 'art' and 'feeling' and 'emotion' and 'caring' and all that garbage that is so popular today. This is the mark of the dilettante, the poseur, not of the professional artist. I have always considered myself to be a professional and hope that [these interviews] will make this clear. I'd hate to come across as another old nut who never knew what he was doing until other people told him."

Heintjes: You were born Charles Clarence Beck on June 8, 1910 --

Beck: The year Mark Twain died, incidentally.

Heintjes: -- so we lost a Clemens but gained a Beck. You were the son of a preacher father and a mother who was a teacher. Did anyone in your family exhibit any artistic tendencies?

Beck: No, I was the only one, and I was always doodling, as children often do. But I kept at it for decades. [laughter] I also liked to write and play music. I learned how to play the guitar, and I played into adulthood.

Heintjes: How did you continue to educate yourself as an artist?

Beck: I checked books out from the library and studied and practiced -- nothing fancy. When I was a teenager I took a correspondence course and after high school I went to art schools in Chicago and Minneapolis. Actually, I always wanted to be a writer. It's much easier to draw then to write. But I got started early in life as an artist instead.

Heintjes: Did you go to art school with the intent to acquire the skills necessary to become a cartoonist?

Beck: Far from it. I wanted to learn art, not just cartooning. I studied the history of art and art criticism. I never studied cartooning in a formal way. I think that's what's wrong with a lot of cartooning today -- the artists never learned anything but a cartoony style, and there's no real substance beneath the cartoony style. But it seems to be popular, so what do I know?

Beck: My first job as an artist, if you can call it that, was tracing existing, famous comic-strip characters.

Heintjes: That must have been some of the earliest comics merchandising!

Beck: There was some other stuff, but this was an interesting idea: we were tracing the characters onto handmade lampshades. It was authorized and everything, and we traced characters such as Barney Google, Sparkplug, Little Orphan Annie, Smitty and others. Those were probably the best-known ones.

Heintjes: What was the technique you used to transfer the drawings onto lampshades?

Beck: I traced the drawings, poked a lot of little holes in the lines I drew and used charcoal to transfer the art onto lampshades. This enabled me to get a job with Fawcett Publications later, working on their humor magazines -- Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, Smokehouse Monthly and other titles. In 1939 Fawcett got into the comic-book field, and I was assigned the job of illustrating three stories in the first issue of Whiz. Bill Parker wrote all of them, featuring Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible and Spy Smasher. I had nothing to do with either the characters or their actions. I simply put them into picture form.

Heintjes: You say "simply" as if you're diminishing your role.

Beck: Adding pictures to a written story, or turning a written story into picture form, as is done in comic-book work, does not increase its appeal to the imagination but diminishes it. This is because the reader is not allowed to use his own imagination to create in his mind how the characters look and act but is forced to accept an artist's version instead.

I didn't create any of Fawcett's characters -- I was just the first person to put them into visual form. They were conceived in Parker's mind; I was just the doctor who held them up and slapped them on their bottoms to make them draw their first breaths.

For example, Parker created the word "Shazam" from the first letters of the seven gods' names. He created the word "Sivana" by combining the name of the Indian god Siva with the word Nirvana. This gave his work more lasting value than other Golden Age comic characters and stories had, as the elements in Parker's stories were already familiar features in our culture.

When Bill Parker and I went to work on Fawcett's first comic book in late 1939, we both saw how poorly written and illustrated the superhero comic books were. We decided to give our reader a real comic book, drawn in comic-strip style and telling an imaginative story, based not on the hackneyed formulas of the pulp magazine, but going back to the old folk-tales and myths of classic times.

Beck: In the 13 years I spent drawing Captain Marvel, I wrote only one story, about Billy's trip to a Mayan temple, which had to be submitted in typed form and edited and approved before I was allowed to illustrate it. There was never any direct cooperation between the writers and the artists at Fawcett, but there did develop an interplay of ideas between the two departments that kept Captain Marvel changing and developing instead of getting bogged down and repeating himself tiresomely after the first few issues, as so many other comic characters did. Ralph Daigh, the editorial director at Fawcett, has said that I had complete license to change and alter scripts to suit myself. I don't remember his saying this to me back in the days when I was drawing Captain Marvel. Either his memory or mine must be faulty.

Heintjes: Did you ever find yourself trying to augment the content of a story?

Beck: No. A well-written story actually will not need pictures added to it, as it will be complete by itself, and the Fawcett stories were well-written. A good writer will tell you only certain things and will not tell you others. If an illustrator draws pictures of the things the writer has already described in words, he will be merely duplicating them and will be wasting the reader's time. If he draws things that the writer has intentionally not mentioned, he will run the risk of spoiling the story, just as he would ruin a magician's act by drawing attention to things from which the magician has deliberately diverted his audience's attention.

Beck: When I was illustrating comic books, I always considered the stories to be what we were selling, not the pictures. I looked on myselfasthe director/producer of a play. My job was to hire the actors, design and produce the scenery and supply the props and costumes. I didn't want to draw the reader's attention to the production itself but to the story that the performers were acting out. I knew that if the story was not good, no amount of lavish overproduction and overacting would make it any better, while if the story was good my work would not make it better, but just clearer and more easy to understand by young people.

To keep readers from having their attention drawn away from the stories, I deliberately used characters, settings and props that would be instantly recognized by everyone everywhere ...in other words, stereotypes. If the story called for a stuffy corporation head or a conservative banker, I drew a pompous man wearing a high, stiff collar and sporting a small mustache. If he was a crook I gave him a big cigar and a bigger mustache.

When characters fought, they fought each other; when they talked, they faced each other; when they ran, they ran across the stage, not out of it and into the laps of the audience. This kind of presentation was in such contrast to the superhero comics of the time that it caught on immediately and made Captain Marvel the biggest-selling comics of the Golden Age. He was a comic-strip character, as plain and simple as Harold Teen, Daddy Warbucks or Offissa Pupp. He was not -- I repeat, not -- a superhero.

In fact, he wasn't even the hero of the stories he appeared in. I have always maintained -- and will to my dying day -- that Captain Marvel's great success was due not to the way he was drawn but to the stories he appeared in. Fawcett employed professional writers who had to submit plots and outlines for editorial approval before the shooting scripts were written.

Heintjes: At Fawcett, were the writers and artists free from interference from the publisher?

Beck: They occasionally tried to impose rules. The publisher wasn't aware of it, but Billy Batson was the real hero of all the Captain Marvel stories, from the first issue until the last. At one time, believe it or not, the publisher sent down word to drop Billy from the stories, saying that he was only taking up room that could have been used to show Captain Marvel instead, and that he wasn't contributing anything to the stories.

Fortunately, the editors paid no attention to so ridiculous a memo and Billy Batson continued to appear in every story. Without Bill Batson, Captain Marvel would have been merely another overdrawn, one-dimensional figure in a ridiculous costume, running around beating up crooks and performing meaningless feats of strength like all the other heroic figures of the time who were, with almost no exceptions, cheap imitations of Superman. In fact, I have always felt that flying figures in picture form are silly and unbelievable, and I would much sooner have never drawn them, but the publisher insisted on them.

The publisher also once wanted to drop Sivana, claiming the old rascal was becoming a more interesting character than Captain Marvel. The editors paid no attention to so silly an order and kept him alive and cackling.

Steamboat was created to capture the affection of negro readers. Unfortunately he offended them instead and was unceremoniously killed off after a delegation of blacks visited the editor's office protesting because he was a servant, because he had huge lips and kinky hair and because he spoke in a dialect. He was always a cartoon character, not intended to be realistic at all, but he was taken seriously by some, sadly enough.

Heintjes: How did the lawsuit affect you?

Beck: Apart from being fired when Fawcett lost, it didn't. That was the lawyers' job. I mean, we took it as a compliment. It meant that Captain Marvel was putting Superman out of business. If he hadn't been any good, National wouldn't have bothered to sue us. When the end came, they let us go like so many factory workers. I worked as a commercial illustrator again. Except for a few engravers and printers, who liked my work because it was easy to engrave and print, nobody ever paid attention to me, and my name was so unknown that I usually had to spell it out, letter by letter, for the people who made out my checks in payment. Wendell Crowley went into his father's lumber business. Otto went to work for DC, where he was treated like a dog by Mort Weisinger.

Heintjes: Do you ever assess your role, historically speaking, as the chief artist behind one of comics' great success stories?

Beck: I never think of myself as a great artist. I was better than some but worse than others -- that's all.

Excerpted from Hogan's Alley #1.

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