https:\/\/bigapplecc.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nQ: You\u2019ve had a long career in comics and in dealing with the world of media. What do you consider the most important moments in your career that you want people to realize? You wrote Nick Fury, had your own magazine, came up with a design concept that nobody else has ever thought of for comics. Where do you feel one\u2019s education should start?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I think all those things that you mentioned and a few others besides that. They\u2019re all my children, so I do not have a definitive answer when people ask me what my favorites are and what my most important things are that I\u2019ve done in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: What were your the biggest challenges\/legacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: My biggest legacy, that\u2019s something\u2026 I leave that to my fans and my friends. I don\u2019t make that decision. I want them to make the decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: When you were developing your concepts for \u201cNick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.\u201d you came into the field with a particular vision and visual style. Where and when did you decide how to step away from comics traditions and add all the collagic effects, the big panoramic images, and the psychedelic influences? Whoever thought a secret agent or someone part of a spy organization would fit in to that kind of environment? You really affected the way comics were conceptualized from that point going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I grew up with comic books, and found that when I was in a position of power, that I couldn\u2019t imitate what came before. I had no interest in being a rubber stamp artist. That\u2019s not what I do. At the time I got into comics, I had a full-time job as an art director and manager \u2014 it was eight to five. I also played rock and roll for 12 years, three to five nights a week \u2014 that\u2019s a second full-time job. Then, along the way, I got an assignment to do a number of Marvel comics. I worked for them for three years. It was a somewhat uphill battle to convince Stan [Lee] to adopt non-Marvel-type techniques and treatments in my books, Captain America and Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. He resisted that idea, even though they called themselves the \u201cHouse of Ideas.\u201d But don\u2019t make me laugh. I guess I developed a kind of system where the work was an ultimatum. For example, I would never tell Stan what I was going to do ahead of time because he would say, \u201cDon\u2019t do that.\u201d I\u2019d just bring the work in on the day of the deadline when there was no time to make changes, and they\u2019d have to take it or lose their monthly distribution. So those firsters that you were talking about, those puzzle pages, I called them innovations because they had never been done before in comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: They hadn\u2019t even been done in normal illustrations as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: A lot of them. But the number that you\u2019re looking for is, 150 of them I brought to comics in the space of about three years. The unusual thing about that is, that if you took every comic artist from the beginning of comic book history \u2014 American comic book history \u2014 and added them all up, they wouldn\u2019t be anywhere near that number of 150 \u2014 150 things, graphic things, that had never been done in comics before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Take artist\/writer Neal Adams. A lot of the ideas Neal later incorporated into DC with \u201cGreen Lantern\u201d were ideas that you also had about the way a page should look and the elements you could bring on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: Neal did not represent what I represented in the field. He had his own agenda and I had mine. Even Jack Kirby, who was the king of all of us, was unparalleled in terms of what he contributed to comic book art. Not only in the number of pages, but the quality of those pages. But Jack had few innovations, maybe not more than two or three. Believe me, I\u2019ve looked at his work and know it very well. I knew Jack and admired him for decades and decades, and he was a good friend of the family. He was a wonderful man but in terms of innovating new things, that was not Jack\u2019s idea. He wanted to draw the greatest action figures and stories that could possibly be done in comic book lore. He achieved that, that was his goal. Mine was something completely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: One of the things you also did was to be one of the first comic artists to create their own publishing company. You brought out your own magazine \u2014 Mediascene (beginning with issue #7, Dec. 1973) and ultimately, it transformed into Prevue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: Yes, I was in publishing for 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Nobody can question you about your knowledge of comics because you also created histories of comics \u2014 \u201cThe Steranko History of Comics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I wrote the first two comic history books. And, I believe to this very day, they are different from the thousands of comic history books \u2014 literally thousands of them. Book shelves full of them. The reason I believe mine are different is because I wrote them from a position inside the business. Get it? Everything else has been written from the outside, by strangers. They\u2019re making comments, some of them really important ones but they\u2019re not from my viewpoint as [a comic book insider]. I knew the artists, writers, publishers personally. I knew them myself as a friend or they if they were enemies along the way. That personal touch, I think, is evident in \u201cThe Steranko History of Comics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Those books are loved. They have their own voice. When you did the magazine, you not only were doing comics, you were covering pop culture in general so you had your own viewpoint. You did a lot of the interviews, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: yes I did a lot of TV, film, and\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Music?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I was on the set of many, many Hollywood films. It was an education for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Why haven\u2019t you made a movie yourself? You have your legacy in \u201cCaptain America\u201d and \u201cNick Fury.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I\u2019ve just been so busy along the way that making a film, in the space of a year and a half or two, doesn\u2019t work. However, right now, at this very moment, I\u2019m engaged in one of the largest assignments that I\u2019ve ever had in my life. I\u2019m working for an international corporation to develop a new and different compelling strange world that will be turned into 3D and played by millions of gamers all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Do you like how the movies treated the characters you worked on and how they interpreted your work? Did you like they way Nick Fury was transformed by Samuel L. Jackson? Do you think they captured the spirit that you were trying to convey?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: This may disappoint you, but I have generally found, particularly with the early Marvel adaptations \u2014 and the DC ones \u2014 that the actors who played the key roles, the superhero roles, looked to me like they had just graduated from college earlier in the week. They have zero authority. And I know that Captain America \u2014 one of the [key characters] that I worked on and that I loved, and I still love to this very day \u2014 he is the pinnacle of authority and justice. A kid just out of college for a week just can\u2019t make that work. So I stopped looking at the Marvel movies. They have incredible special effects and things that have never been done before. I love that material but I believe the heart of filmmaking really exists in the characters, and I don\u2019t believe those characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: Who would you like to see make a movie of some of your characters? Do you have anybody in mind? Do you have any character creation that you would like to see turned into a movie?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: Not really. I have no jones about that at all. I think eventually the right people on one side of the camera will connect with the right people on the other side of the camera and give us the kind of superhero movies that I think should be made. With really engaging stories and individuals and great acting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: People haven\u2019t appreciated that you\u2019re as much of a writer as you are an artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: Nobody thinks of me as a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: With all those issues of magazines, you delivered great coverage and had great ideas. What do you think about the current state of pop culture now, and how would you write about it if you had the magazine still going?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JS: I could be answering that question for the next 45 minutes but I find myself generally disappointed with contemporary comic books. Why? We have the best looking art that we\u2019ve ever had. We have our pick of the crop of the entire world because of the internet. We have great, great art being produced. The thing is, most of them don\u2019t know anything about narrative technique. Their pages are simply chaotic. I can\u2019t read the stuff. I can\u2019t read it. And I refuse to read it in that form. The artwork is often excellent. Most of the really good stuff is saved for the covers. You\u2019re on your own when you get into the interior of them. Frankly, I can\u2019t read that material. There are exceptions to the rules [but few are] available.<\/p>\n
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