The nineteen seventies—or, as many of us who lived then thought of it, the much much later nineteen sixties, with better drugs, better night spots, and better grooming—were, in two words, fucked up.
And New York City in the nineteen seventies was, in a few more words, a particularly fucked up shitshow.
Which, just to be clear, is not to say that it wasn’t fun. To be equally clear, being in my twenties in New York City in the nineteen seventies was a reckless joy, a frequent adventure, and, in retrospect a bargain. I had a great apartment, I was having frequent and interesting sex, and I was making my living, such as it was, doing for money what had been an obsession since I was barely out of toddlerhood.
Despite the shittiness, the dirtiness, the ever present threat of violence, the NEW YORK CITY CAN DROP DEAD headlines, believe you me, I had a really good time.
None of which is to say that work was abundant. Like most if not all of my contemporaries, all of whom were far more skilled than I, I lived a day to day life of perpetual scrounge, bounced between DC and Marvel, the only games in town…
…Until Martin Goodman, the man who’d run Marvel from when it was Timely, and then Atlas, and finally got run out of town himself, decided he had the goods to give Marvel a run for the money.
Comedy gold.
If a better definition of hubris might be found in the comic book business, I’d be hard pressed…well, maybe THE LAST KINGDOM…but really.
This new company, ATLAS COMICS, was short-lived, and in that brief span, was responsible for, for the most part, utter and complete shit.
It did give Goodman’s son a job, so there’s that.
On the upside, and to its credit, Atlas got rates raised across the board by introducing, albeit briefly, competition for talent, and, because they had no infrastructure for storage, they also returned the original artwork, which Marvel and DC then did as a result.
I was approached at the company’s inception to create, and this is as close as I can get, “…A 1930s pulp hero, called THE SCORPION.“
In retrospect, I think they expected a pastiche of THE SHADOW, but I gave them something else, an apparently immortal hero for hire, with no secret identity, a hot girlfriend, and a lot of guns, cars and airplanes.
Even then, I was already me.
I lasted two issues. They hired Alex Toth and told him he could do whatever he wanted. He did, and the piece he delivered finally got published elsewhere, years later.
The book then became an astonishingly lameass knockoff of SPIDER-MAN, minus whatever it was that made that book even vaguely appealing.
But all this was a few months in the future. I got shitcanned or quit, I forget which, and stormed out of the offices, on 57th Street between 5th and Madison, past the Lubavitcher Tefillin Mobile always parked out front, the Hassidim demanding from passersby they presumed were Jews as to whether they’d tied their tefillin today, and stormed into the Marvel offices on Madison between 57th and 58th, and said, again I paraphrase, “I’m not working for Atlas anymore. How about I do THE SCORPION for Marvel, with a different name?”
They said yes. To be honest, I was not surprised. Pages needed to be filled.
And as carefree, as casual as all that may seem, in our tight assed modern media culture, that’s how DOMINIC FORTUNE was born.
I lost the immortality stuff—who cares, right? I made him a barely reformed criminal, redesigned the outfit, changed up the weapons, and moved the action to California, a place I knew only from the movies—where I have now lived more than half my life, and boy did I get it wrong—and made the hot girlfriend the authority figure in our hero’s life.
Fortune wasn’t explicitly Jewish—yet—but all of my heroes are endowed with a measure of implicit Yiddishkeit, secular, like me, but more than a tad Talmudic nonetheless, so he’s always been my first (un)officially MOT comic book hero creation.
As I write this, I have no idea which, what or how much of the material featuring Dominic Fortune is included in the book you have purchased, bought for reasons which I have to presume are mostly of an obsessive completist nature. That said, I have little or no recollection of the process that went into the earlier material featuring this character.
I do recall that I was once again a willing conscript in making writers’ lives easier in an unfortunately considerable number of cases, providing complete stories of a character I had functionally created for a number of writers to invoice for scripts, with none of that cash accruing to me.
It’s been too long a time since those years, with a lot of drugs and alcohol in the intervening decades, to recall how I felt about this shitlaced situation at the time, but, in retrospect, there’s a certain frisson of bitterness in the memory.
It’s worth noting, and perhaps with irony, that that bitterness has never reached the consideration of my foolishness at creating a character which immediately became the property of the publisher. This was, from my perspective, par for the course. And if I wanted to work on material that gave me some personal satisfaction, creating a character to fit that bill seemed like the only way to achieve this goal.
The character has now, of course, been absorbed into the Marvel Universe. Dominic Fortune is, also of course, so minor a presence in that vast swathe of super stuff as to be invisible and irrelevant—and, at the very least, plastic and open for interpretation. He’s over a hundred years old, for fuck’s sake, but still an occasional walk on in some backwater comic book or another.
In that regard, in a television pilot that never made it to series, he was cast and played by the wonderful actor Delroy Lindo.
So much for Yiddishkeit, right?
I might also add here that I hate the way Dominic Fortune is drawn and written by anyone but me. I don’t flatter easily, and the general treatment of the character doesn’t flatter me in the least.
My penultimate relationship with the character was a MARVEL MAX series I did ages ago, that was wildly satisfying. I have to assume it’s not published in this volume*—it might just be too damned dirty.
In sum, Dominic Fortune is a minor and forgettable part of my career of more than half century of labor in the comic book world, but it is the first character I created that, crudely and tentatively yes, but genuinely too, pointed at the mindset and point of view that would become an imperative part of my brand for that over fifty year span of work.
*To my shock, the MAX miniseries is included in the published volume. Now if only they’d greenlit my follow up pitch, about Fortune’s adventures in the Spanish Civil War…
Trust me on this.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…A prince.
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