Bob Wayne tells stories of Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Carl Barks and Moore

Posted in: Comics, Comic Publishers, Conventions, Latest News, DC Comics, Events, Pop Culture, San Diego Comic Con | Tagged: Alan Moore, Amdrew Sumner, Bob Wayne, Dave Gibbons, SDCC

Bob Wayne tells stories from DC Comics, Paul Levitz, Bill Gaines, Carl Barks, Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore at San Diego Comic-Con

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At the San Diego Comic-Con, former DC SVP Robert Wayne was organized by Andrew Sumner of Titan Comics and Forbidden Planet to talk about his career. Well, at least the first 65 years of it. For decades, Bob Wayne was the public face of DC Comics to comic book retailers, with a bitingly dry sense of humor that also went down well with British comic book retailers, unlike the usual rabble-rousing PR people of the comic book gang. In fact, he recently did a warm-up for it at the MCM Comic Con in London. But San Diego Comic-Con was the main stage.

How meeting Bill Gaines changed his life: “I go to a pay phone, call my mother and say, ‘Mom, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I’m going to be in publishing because you can be as crazy and eccentric as you want and apparently still make a living, and my mother just says, ‘Oh my God.'”

Like working on fanzines as a retailer, working with Phil Seulings proto-comic distributor Seagate was the perfect precursor to dealing with people like me. “I was Seagate account number 40 and I also did fanzines… so when Savage Sword of Conan was on Phil’s order list, the first issue was basically all that was there, as Wild Sword of Conan Number one, Marvel and the price…I called Marvel…they say I’m not supposed to know about this, but it’s a secret. How did you know about this?…I said, here’s a tip: you should probably announce things before they go into the Seagate order form.” I’m sure I’ve had similar conversations with Bob from the other direction.

And a repetition of one of my favorite Bob Wayne stories about a “strange convention I attended in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that has a lot of meaning for me… sirens went off, and we looked through the big glass thing, and there was a tornado coming right at us… and there was this big kid running around in a diaper and a T-shirt and ran outside. So some braver souls than me went and dragged that boy back inside. And when they brought him back inside, they said, ‘No! Let me go, I want to go to Oz, I want to go to Oz!’ And that boy became Harry Knowles, the founder of Ain’t It Cool News.”

And why he chose to work at DC instead of Marvel: “When I decided to leave retail, I called DC at some point and said to my friend Paul Levitz.. I would like to talk to you about a job at DC. I will be in New York a week from Monday, do you have time? He says I can see you at 11.., I called Carol Kalish at Marvel Comics who was head of sales at Marvel. Can we meet for lunch on Monday a week from now around one? I called people I knew from DC editorial, and I have a great pitch for you for a miniseries. Can I come over and pitch it? Come by at three. So I met with Paul, Carol Kalish for lunch in the morning and the DC editorial team in the afternoon. I flew back the next day with a job offer from DC, a job offer from Marvel, and a series pick… Kalish said, “I’d love to have you at Marvel, but if you take the job at DC, you can stay there as long as you want.” That was the best career advice I ever got, and I stayed there as long as I wanted. It worked out great.”

“At DC, I was one of the people who was constantly pushing to do things in book format… I wrote a memo when we were doing the Death In The Family miniseries and I said we needed to get this out in book form immediately, there weren’t enough comics on the market and I thought we could sell 40,000 copies. Over time, I was only off by about four million.”

“I had the honour of being the second person ever to be Funky Flashman from the Fourth World… I appeared in Sleeper as Agent W… I helped Dave Gibbons got a job to do a promotional poster to hand out in Hall H when the Watchman promo was done because one of the other guys asked how could we get hold of Dave Gibbons? I said you sit here while I call him… if you ever saw DC promo stuff like the (Green Lantern) rings, if you liked them, it was my fault if you didn’t like them. Fletcher (Chu-Fong) had a lot to do with that… the idea of ​​having 52 covers on Justice League of America #1 was unfortunately my idea too… I wanted to do one for Puerto Rico and it turned out that a convention in Puerto Rico sold thousands of copies… I’m the last DC executive to Alan Moore to dinner. In fact, I left a note on my expense report saying you won’t see anything like that again.”

And then we got the questions and answers from people like the former Diamond manager Bill Schanes, Stuart Schreck, Fletcher Chu-Fong and more. It takes an hour, these are just a few excerpts, it’s worth taking the time.

SATURDAY, JULY 27
11:00 – 12:00 Room 4
My Life at Stately Wayne Manor – Bob Wayne’s First 65 Years in Comics!
Comics industry legend and Inkpot Award winner Bob Wayne was the friendly face of DC Comics for 28 years as Head of Sales and Marketing. Bob was there at the birth of direct sales and worked at DC during a long era of high-caliber, industry-revolutionizing creativity. Meet Bob as he sits down with his old pal (and one of his favorite Englishmen), Andrew Sumner of Titan Comics/Forbidden Planet TV, to discuss his extremely eventful career – from his secret origins in Fort Worth, Texas, to his early years attending conventions and selling comics professionally, to his nearly three decades of marketing some of the best comics of all time! Bob may even give a glimpse of what he’s up to now…

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