•••

It’s no secret. Mike Carlin suggested I plot and pencil the story, and Chris script it. That way I would not need to look at it once my part was done—and so far, I haven’t.

Chris and I met when he was about half a notch above being an intern at Marvel. By then I was working full time at Charlton and starting to develop a rep for being fast and reliable. Not long after Chris picked up the Iron Fist assignment (then appearing in MARVEL PREMIERE), and when the decision was made to replace the penciller (who had a habit of crowding deadlines), Chis nominated me. So I penciled IF’s last PREMIERE appearance, and became regular penciller of his own series.

[A small sidebar to the Working with Chris carnival. IRON FIST was the last Marvel comic to be published twice-quarterly. That meant it came out monthly in the summer, bi-monthly the rest of the year. So 8 issues annually. I pointed out to Chris that if we worked on it on a monthly schedule, we’d build up a backlog of issues. By the end of two years we’d have another full year (8 issues) in the drawer. Chris agreed to this—and then never so much as once delivered. On the skip months he’d disappear, running off to work on other projects, leaving me sitting on my hands.]