In 1969, I discovered that a comic book artist lived near me. I was 15 years old and comics was my life, so, even though I had never heard of him, this was more exciting than I could imagine. The artist was Pierce Rice. I don't remember how I learned of him, nor how I got in touch with him, but I remember my parents driving me to his tasteful, modest apartment in Washington, DC, and spending a couple hours asking him questions about comics. I remember absolutely nothing about the conversation, only that he was about my father's age, and quite gracious and forthcoming to a solicitous teen-ager.

A few years ago, I decided that his recollections of the comics industry ought to be recorded and, much to my surprise, found that the old phone number in my rolodex still worked.

Pierce Rice is a relatively obscure figure in the history of comics, a journeyman artist undistinguished except for his competence, who drew comics from 1939 to the early '50s and, unlike so many of his contemporaries, got out while the getting was good. In an uncharacteristic burst of accuracy, the Dark Horse encyclopedia Between the Panels describes Rice as "one of the most thoughtful, nimble, and unpublicized artists in the first two decades of the comic book business." He was clearly too intelligent (and insufficiently enthusiastic about comics) to remain in the business. He was one of the few artists to have effected a successful escape, and went on to become a successful artist in both commercial and fine arts fields, as well as a writer, teacher and art historian. In this short interview we discuss his career and his acute observations of the comics business. His is a refreshingly candid and independent view and he is wonderfully free of the typical obeisance of the oldtimers (he does not bend the knee toward Stan Lee or Will Eisner, for example), as well as from any political grudges.

This interview was copy edited by Pierce Rice.

Gary Groth
January, 2000

GARY GROTH: You were, according to my notes, born in Brooklyn.

PIERCE RICE: That's right.

GROTH: And your first comics work was in 1939 for the Iger shop.

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: My understanding is that you got into the Iger shop by answering a newspaper ad placed by the shop.

RICE: Right.

GROTH: To skip back a little bit, you obviously were drawing before then. Did you have an ambition to get into comics?

RICE: It was assumed from childhood in my family that I'd be an artist. Now, that's unusual because most families are horrified by the idea.

GROTH: That's right.

RICE: But the fact was, on my father's side, everybody painted and drew. And the original Pierce, who came from England, was a sculptor's carver. My father's sisters both painted, and my grandfather painted -- as a hobby only, but nevertheless. And the two cousins on that side of the family were artists until they grew up and got out of it. But the point is that it was a natural thing as a youngster, for everybody to be drawing and painting.

GROTH: So you were not only encouraged to, but it was almost assumed you'd be an artist.

RICE: Yeah. I want to give you an example: In the early 1950s, I was working on a staff of a firm that turned out numbered picture sets. One assignment given was to design the boxes for the sets themselves; another, to paint a mural for the company reception room. At the same time I was paying rent on my midtown office in Manhattan, and at home in the evenings I was painting. The point of that was, all of these activities went in different directions, but they had a creative similarity. So I wasn't simply looking for scripts.

GROTH: That was in the '50s?

RICE: Well, it was just an arbitrary date. When I went to Boys High in Brooklyn, which was a school of some distinction, I took what they called a Major Arts course there. When I was 14, I went to Pratt Institute under the Saturday morning classes. The emphasis then was slanted toward illustration. They had originals there on view by people like Oscar Edward Cesare, Charles Sykes, and Norman Rockwell. What they had in the way of instructors was students of their own instructional courses. That meant that I was drawing under a little guidance for the first time in my life.

GROTH: How intense was your interest in drawing at that time?

RICE: It was the main thing in my mind -- to the detriment of schoolwork!

GROTH: Were you good academically in terms of drawing?

RICE: I would say this, Gary, the one advantage of taking the Pratt Institute courses until I was through with high school was that when I went to qualify at the Academy, I had a general command of drawing. And that was key. The Academy itself was free then, unlike the $300 a course now. But you had to first bring drawings which qualified you as an applicant, and then you had to make a drawing for a week. And out of the people who tried out that week, they made a selection of those who would be admitted to the school.

GROTH: I understand you were a pupil of Leon Kroll.

RICE: Yes, for many years.

GROTH: Could you tell me who that is?

RICE: Leon Kroll was a very prominent painter in his time. He still has pictures in museums. The Archives of American Art has a very large Leon Kroll picture on view permanently. He was a knockout at winning prizes and shows throughout the country. He has pictures at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] and most of the museums of any consequence, pictures of his from the 1920s.

GROTH: Can you tell me, in what context you were his pupil? Did he teach at the school?

RICE: He taught at the Academy, sure. I didn't like him much as a person because he came in and talked about himself most of the time. [Laughter] But he was a painter of genuine eminence.

I was also a pupil of Arthur Covey, of interest in that when I taught at the Academy myself, my subject -- Perspective and Design -- was close to Covey's.

GROTH: Did you learn a lot from him?

RICE: I'd say I learned a good deal about painting from the nude. On the other hand, in light of what we're talking about, it had nothing to do with what you might call improvisatory drawing. He wouldn't do so much as a tree other than from nature.

GROTH: Whew -- which you couldn't afford to do when you did comic books.

RICE: Well, the comic books were almost a low moral standard regarding plagiarism and copying. Plenty of the work was traced, you know.

GROTH: Yeah, it still is. Did your father make a living as an artist?

RICE: No, he didn't. Nobody in the family worked at it -- except in the sense that my grandfather himself, is a sign painter. But even that was handling the brush. My father didn't work at it, but he did draw.

GROTH: So he was an amateur in the best sense of the word?

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: And he obviously encouraged your entry into drawing and art.

RICE: That's right. And in those days, illustration in particular was a more esteemed profession that it subsequently became. People like James Montgomery Flagg and Maxfield Parrish were as eminent as movie stars today.

GROTH: You broke into comics when you were about 23 years old.

RICE: That's right. It coincided with the opening of World War II! [Laughter]

GROTH: Is that right?

RICE: That's true. I was 23.

GROTH: That's right, 1939.

RICE: And when I went to Iger's there were substantial people there: Bob Powell was one of the artists, Lou Fine, George Tuska and others who became conspicuous in the field.

GROTH: Did you get to know those artists?

RICE: Not really. The friend that I made was Arturo Cazeneuve, with whom I worked with for many years. And that was probably on the strength of the fact that I knew a little Spanish from having lived as a child in Havana, and he was an Argentinean just off the boat. And Louis, his brother, had been a conspicuous artist in Buenos Aires. He thought he'd come up north and astonish the North Americans.

GROTH: Were you young for being an artist in the studio? Or was everyone in their 20s?

RICE: They were all kids. The first story I did, just for the record, was Thor, strangely enough.

GROTH: When you went to the Eisner/Iger shop, who did you see? Who were you interviewed by?

RICE: I really don't remember, but it was probably Bill Eisner.

GROTH: Did you get to know Eisner at all?

RICE: I passed the time of day in the street with him once in a while. But I didn't socialize at all with him. When I had an office at 415 Lexington Avenue, it was in the same building as Busy Arnold's Standard Comics, which had Eisner and Iger people in it. I'm not sure whether Eisner/Iger was still down around the corner on 42nd Street or not.

GROTH: What was your impression of the Eisner/Iger shop when you went there for the first time?

RICE: Well, it was kind of sleazy in some respects. One of the things they used to do was buy six-panel strips on the outside, then have us enlarge them into two or three pages in the studio.

GROTH: When you say "buy them on the outside," what do you mean?

RICE: Freelance artists. They'd take a drawing, white out the borders, and extend the backgrounds so that the page could be doubled. Monkey business, but... They were living by their shoelaces then I suppose.

GROTH: And that was a way of basically increasing production?

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: What did you work on at the Eisner/Iger shop?

RICE: That one I remember was Thor, and I remember doing some work at home too for them.

GROTH: They would basically sell that work to publishers, correct?

RICE: Yes. They weren't putting out anything themselves. Fox was the publisher who was chiefly in the picture and who I was working with soon. But I took off with Louis and Arturo, who had a room on 45th Street, and Fox was the main consumer [of their stories]. Sandell, who would later on work as the editor of MLJ, was the editor at Fox. Another editor at Fox was Al Harvey.

GROTH: How long did you work for Eisner/Iger?

RICE: It's hard to say with this span of time, but maybe a couple of months.

GROTH: Who supervised you?

RICE: I don't remember much intrusion on the boss' part, but it probably would have been Eisner who could draw, rather than Iger, who couldn't.

GROTH: Before you went to the Eisner/Iger shop, were you familiar with comics?

RICE: Looking back over 50 years, I suppose I knew there was such a thing, but I'm not sure I had even so much as opened one at the time.

GROTH: Is that right? Were you familiar with newspaper strips?

RICE: Oh, very well, sure. I knew [Alex] Raymond... Once I did a job for Ed Sullivan which he was very critical of. He said, "You don't get the idea -- you're supposed to lift everything from Caniff and Raymond!" [Groth laughs] Another memorable quote is from Fox himself, who said, "I don't want no Rembrandts; I want production!"

GROTH: [Laughs] What did you think of that at the time?

RICE: I thought he was just a sleazy operator.

GROTH: Can you tell me where you were in terms of being an artist? Did you have a sense that this was sort of commercial hack work?

RICE: I'll tell you: The original companies were under great disrepute and, after a reasonable degree, the artists subscribed to that and we all thought we were in the field temporarily until something else unfolded. But the fact was, I think to the credit of the comics, that it had to do with the human figure in motion, and that made it much more attractive than commercial art or advertising or some other aspect of drawing and painting. That's what I relished and what I counted on to lend my work a little distinction.

GROTH: Prior to going go the Eisner/Iger shop you had not practiced drawing comics.

RICE: No. When I drew pictures I made up the figures and the arrangements, so I had a certain command of the pencil in light of that.

GROTH: How easy was it for you to catch onto the idiom?

RICE: Well, it's hard to say. The editors would be the judge more than myself. It seems to me there was extremely attractive work to be doing.

GROTH: Now, you left the Eisner/Iger shop within a couple of months. Why did you do leave them?

RICE: I got fired.

GROTH: [Laughs] Oh, you did? May I ask what for?

RICE: I really couldn't say. I don't know what it was they took exception to.

GROTH: Do you think it was just your professional --

RICE: They might have just been cutting down the staff, or they might have just disliked the work. I really don't know. They printed enough of it.

GROTH: How much work could you actually turn out?

RICE: This is hard to say, but they were urging you all the time to do it faster and faster, and I was pretty fast. In fact I remember once one weekend, it was inconceivable, but they gave me a 12-page story to bring in on Monday! Over the weekend!

GROTH: Jesus!

RICE: I think they paid $5 a page, which was extraordinary, because the salary in Eisner/Iger was $15 a week. So to make $60 in two days seemed a little upside-down, although welcome enough.

GROTH: Was that pencils only?

RICE: That was complete -- pencils and ink.

GROTH: Lettering as well?

RICE: No, that's right, not lettering. The lettering [and the actual script] was written into the balloons and panels after the work was done. You didn't see any script floating around. There was a girl there who was well-known, and for practical purposes, wrote all the scripts.

GROTH: You must have been given a script to draw from.

RICE: I would be given some kind of an outline for that 12-page story.

GROTH: But not a full script.

RICE: Not scripts in the true sense of the word at all. But now that I think of it, and I haven't thought of it in all these years, they did provide one-page outlines of the action, and you drew the pictures from that.

GROTH: I see. Were you familiar who Will Eisner was? Did you know he was the author of The Spirit?

RICE: No, I had never heard of The Spirit.

GROTH: So you got fired from the Eisner/Iger shop and I think you set up a shop with --

RICE: With Arturo and Louie Cazeneuve.

GROTH: So essentially you became an entrepreneur.

RICE: Yeah. Initially we were on 45th Street, around the corner from 42nd Street, more or less the center of the world. We were there several months, and then we took a flashier office around the corner on 415 Lexington Avenue. And that was up the street from DC. We were on 43rd Street and they were on 45th.

GROTH: How long were you in partnership with the Cazeneuves?

RICE: It was never formal, but for many years.

GROTH: My understanding is that they did the inking and you did the penciling.

RICE: That's right. I penciled for the two of them.

GROTH: Can you tell me how that would work? Your first client I think was Fox. So would Fox give you scripts? Or would you create scripts then?

RICE: The editor gave us scripts then.

GROTH: So you would deal with him.

RICE: Right. I would see Fox once in a blue moon in the distance, but I never spoke to him or made any kind of connection.

GROTH: Can you tell me what your impression of him was?

RICE: Fox was supposed to be a kind of rogue. He was notorious for not paying people, stuff like that.

GROTH: [Laughs] Did he ever not pay you?

RICE: At a later stage something came up along that line. This is post-War. But in those days, as far as I can recall, we were always paid. But there was a lot of monkey business in the field.

GROTH: Was not getting paid common?

RICE: It wasn't common, but it shouldn't occur at all, and it did occur. There was a fellow who had a staff on 26th Street, like Eisner/Iger, and they used to get stiffed. He'd postpone payday sometimes from Friday to the middle of the following week, and the next thing you'd know, they would have missed a week.

GROTH: Who was this?

RICE: I can't think of his name at the moment. And Irving Novick, by the way, went to the Academy with me, for the five years.

GROTH: Did you befriend him?

RICE: We were very good friends. We are to this day.

GROTH: What was he like?

RICE: Well... [Laughs] An affable sort.

GROTH: Was he passionately interested in comics?

RICE: No. [Groth laughs] In fact, he was less interested in drawing than I was. Arturo never drew a line, except for money.

GROTH: [Laughs] I see!

RICE: I don't say it out of cynicism; it just wasn't an interest of his. He was an art director at Time, but he never so much as put a line down on paper.

GROTH: He just did not love the act of drawing for its own sake.

RICE: Right.

GROTH: Can you give me an outline of a typical week doing work for Fox? How that whole process worked?

RICE: What's interesting is that the work I did for Louie and Arturo -- I used to work for other people who would come in sometimes, and [Laughs] we'd all saunter into 415 Lexington Avenue around lunchtime and be there until about one or two o'clock the next morning. There was a lot of exchange back and forth between the office and Harvey. Harvey's was a low-paying, agreeable place to work for. One of the people over there was Elsie Feldstein, who was engaged to Joe Simon.

GROTH: Simon had his own shop. Did you ever work there?

RICE: No, but I would see the two of them around. In fact, once Simon and Kirby went out to lunch with Al Harvey, and when Al came back, he had a cover they had sketched during the course of the lunch. That's when I was tied up with Stan Lee.

GROTH: Was the comics community back then a close-knit group?

RICE: It was in the sense that you knew most of the conspicuous people there.

GROTH: Did you ever get to know Simon and/or Kirby?

RICE: Only to nod to them when I saw them. I worked for DC and MLJ and Hillman, in addition to Harvey. I was penciling for the artists.

GROTH: And you did something for a place called Centaur.

RICE: I don't know a thing about that. It's totally likely that there are publishers who I've forgotten completely. For Harvey, the main features were Captain Freedom, The Green Hornet and The Black Cat.

GROTH: Right. Now, you did an awful lot of work for Fox. Can you tell me how that work? The process, how they gave it to you, and you gave it to them and so on?

RICE: It would have been typed-up scripts that we got from Fox. But Fox didn't stay indefinitely in the business. I did a lot more work for Al Harvey.

GROTH: So they would give you a script or scripts. Would they give you a deadline?

RICE: I think not. I think it was assumed that you'd get it in a fast time. The deadline was more just an actuality. But they did pressure production in Eisner/Iger, but I don't remember too much of that in Al's case. Another quotation, by Al Harvey: "I'm in the business of selling paper and ink." [Laughter] He said the pictures were secondary to his main concern.

GROTH: How did you feel at the time working in a business where the business was paper and ink?

RICE: I suppose the drawing end of it was so satisfactory that I didn't think of the [negatives] of it.

GROTH: How did your father feel about you entering comics?

RICE: Oh, I guess they thought it was pretty good to have me busy.

GROTH: I see.

RICE: In those days, the great thing was to have any kind of a job.

GROTH: Right. So you didn't exactly have a high falutin' attitude about your art.

RICE: No, no. On the other hand, I was better off than all my friends and colleagues from the streets of Brooklyn, I can tell you that! So I was kind of vain about the distinction that did exist.

GROTH: Well the Depression was still going full-force at the time, wasn't it?

RICE: Yes, very much so. The War [affected] the atmosphere too.

GROTH: You said at the Eisner/Iger shop, there was Bob Powell and George Tuska and Lou Fine. What was the general social climate among everybody? What attitudes were there about the profession?

RICE: There was very little talk about drawing or painting. It wasn't at all aesthetic in the sense you might think with a bunch of artists drawing together.

GROTH: Were they enthusiastic and passionate about what they were doing?

RICE: I think there was very little evidence of that. I think everybody was just bending over his desk, and that was that. There wasn't much discussion about what was actually being turned out.

GROTH: So basically the attitude was that they considered it a job.

RICE: Right. I really don't know what Eisner or Iger themselves would have said or thought.

GROTH: What was your impression of Iger?

RICE: That he was a promoter and an operator. I know he used to think of himself as a cartoonist and all, but he was a cartoonist at a low level.

GROTH: Yeah. Was your impression of Eisner different than that?

RICE: Yeah, but The Spirit... It wasn't because you were admiring him particularly.

GROTH: When you were doing work for Fox and Harvey, was this through the Cazeneuve brothers?

RICE: Yeah. I'll tell you another thing, for the actual record: Louie Cazeneuve, the older brother, had broken off at this time to work for himself. So I was working with Arturo. And 415 Lexington Avenue had become something of a social place. A lot of guys came in and out just to visit. Standard Comics was upstairs in the same building.

GROTH: You never worked for Standard Comics, did you?

RICE: No. In fact I've wondered why I didn't make a point of doing something for them because it would have been so convenient. But for some reason or another, I never did.

GROTH: Could you, or did you pick and choose what you wanted to do for Fox and Harvey, or did you do everything they gave you?

RICE: I did whatever they gave me. Harvey was much more in the picture, in my recollections, than Fox.

GROTH: Right. Did you deal directly with Al Harvey?

RICE: The interesting thing about Harvey is that they were down the street, I think on 43rd Street, just a short walk, but Elsie was the main editor, and there was a fellow who was there in an editorial capacity, and Al Harvey. While I dealt with him socially, he paid very little attention to the pages themselves.

GROTH: You mentioned Elsie Feldstein. She is one of the only women I've ever heard an artist of your generation even mention to work in comics.

RICE: [Laughs] Well, she was the boss there alright!

GROTH: Is that right?

RICE: Yeah. And just for the historical record, during the course of the War, she changed her name to Vivien Fields and went to work for Biro and Wood. She knew all about the business. She didn't draw herself, but she was a pretty good editor.

GROTH: Do you know whatever happened to her?

RICE: No, I've often wondered since. Jill Elgin I knew, who also worked for Harvey. And an artist named Barbara Hall. So they had an all-girl staff.

GROTH: [Laughs] Good God! What did Jill do?

RICE: Jill Elgin was a children's book illustrator who was doing some pages for Harvey. I never really knew her well, but I did know her and recognize her. And similarly Barbara Hall. She was from Tempe, Arizona, and came to the Big City to make her fortune.

GROTH: Can I ask you if you were married at this time?

RICE: No, I married down here.

GROTH: Did you ever date within comic book circles?

RICE: [Laughs] I took Elsie Feldstein to the movies once. And I had lunch with Jill Elgin. But no romance bloomed in either of those circumstances. [Chuckles]

GROTH: It doesn't sound like they took off. [Laughs]

RICE: But I really had my eye on Barbara Hall.

GROTH: But that didn't come to anything.

RICE: It was interrupted by the war. I went to visit her at furlough, and she was living with somebody, which wasn't so popular then.

I think the best time of my life was the couple of years I spent between Eisner/Iger and finally going into the army.

GROTH: Why is that?

RICE: There was something about the ease of the exchanges with editors and publishers, everyone was located within walking distance, having our own place... It made it extremely agreeable. Being on a payroll. That was more pleasant. And as I say, there was constant visiting at 415 Lexington itself.

GROTH: It was always my impression that comics were a male preserve.

RICE: And, to a degree, they were.

One factor is, wives stayed home.

GROTH: Sure. Took care of the home and the kids. So you went into the service in '43.

RICE: Yeah. I went to Fort Dix, just as a lowly private. I soon was outfitted with a broom and drab working jobs. I hadn't been there very long when I was sent on an assignment where I was cleaning up the [enlisted] mens club. There was a soldier asleep at a table with a pad in front of him, and there were some odds and ends of sketches on the pad. I couldn't resist waking him up and asking him what was going on. I said, "I'm an artist." He said, "Then what are you doing with a broom? The artists aren't supposed to do any work!" His name was Lou Golden, and he'd been with MLJ. He was a strip artist. He said, "Hell, you're making a mistake! You don't want to be doing any actual work!" I thought that was very unlikely, but I took his word for it and went into the orderly room after lunch and introduced myself as an artist, and they immediately concerned themselves with something to do which would warrant setting aside any labor. They said, "Well, they're painting a mural in one of the rec rooms. Maybe if you go over there they'll put you on the staff." Well, the guys who were painting the mural didn't want anybody else. So I came back to the orderly room and told them that. They said, "Well, maybe you can draw the captain's picture." In retrospect, their problem was to keep everybody busy. But the fact was, I found myself dressed in my uniform and not fatigued at all, and doing what I pleased on the post.

GROTH: [Laughs] Because of your status as an artist.

RICE: Yeah! I thought I had the army life settled down. But then I was in Mississippi shortly after that, when they discovered I was an artist, they had me painting the regimental fields for the officers' club, and that took up the first couple of weeks of my time in the service.

GROTH: I assume you were in the army?

RICE: That's correct.

GROTH: Were you drafted?

RICE: Yes. The fact was, a certain amount of the distinction inferred by drawing pictures, was working on my behalf all through the service. I was treated better than I would have been as a simple listee.

GROTH: You might have been treated better than you were in the comics business.

RICE: Well, in some respects that's true [Laughter]. In a peculiar sense, it saved my life. In 1943, when the company fell out, nearly everybody who was in that original roster was killed or wounded. In the succession of shipments out, for a long time it was just replacements. People would come in and be trained and be on their way. There was always some felicitous cash on me, not to get onto any of those lists. And one of the factors was that The Green Hornet was of great consequence because of its radio connection. So they thought they had a celebrity on the premises. I didn't go abroad until the following year.

GROTH: That was in Europe?

RICE: So it was a relatively short time in the trenches, so to put it. One interesting thing was, I drew a great deal of the time and when we were going overseas, I drew pictures of the draft board and those pictures were recently shown in my gallery here in Georgetown. When the regiment itself was installed in England, the battalion commander said, "Sergeant Rice, you're allowed to draw whatever you please." Do whatever you please! [Laughter] So I did a lot of landscape drawings and odds and ends of that sort in connection with our fairly generous stay in England.

GROTH: Were you able to draw comics while you were in the army?

RICE: I got to do cartooning when the war was over and I was assigned to the 7th Army newspaper in Heidelberg. That was a full-time job drawing, and extremely pleasant because we were in a Heidelberg hotel and my accommodations were on the top floor, and the newspaper was published on the second floor, so I didn't even have to go out into the rain.

GROTH: You pretty much had to sever your connections to the New York comics publishers while you were in the army.

RICE: Yeah. I'll tell you something funny: Arturo came in after the war was over and was stationed in Frankfurt. And he had a script and an armful of Bristol board, and he was supposed to do a story while he was over in the army. [Laughs] He did it.

GROTH: At what time were you discharged?

RICE: At the end of '45, or early '46.

GROTH: So you served in the European theater.

RICE: Yes.

GROTH: Were you scheduled to go to Japan?

RICE: Sure. So we said our lives were saved when we heard about VJ Day.

GROTH: Where were you in Europe?

RICE: In Germany, most of the time. All the newspaper work occurred deep in Germany, at Heidelberg. We were at the falling, the capture of Leipsig later on.

GROTH: So you saw some fighting.

RICE: Yes. And I did some drawings of war activity itself.

For the chronological record, when I came back here, I was working with Bernie Sachs and Arthur Petty. I really don't know what that amounted to because I've never seen that stuff in print, but it was work for DC because Arthur's connection was with DC. I did other stuff too, but they had a studio on 42nd Street and I'd go in there and draw with the two of them.

GROTH: Can you tell me who Bernie Sachs was?

RICE: One answer to that is: No! [Laughs] Because I remember very well from coming in and out of 415 Lexington Avenue as an inker, and then there was this work following the close of the war. But I don't know what further happened, and I don't know anybody who would know him. Arthur Petty did a fair amount of work for DC. The full-time, eight-hour-a-day connection was Timely, not long after that. Additionally for Timely, I did confine myself to Western subjects, cowboy stories.

GROTH: Right, Tex Taylor and Arizona Annie.

RICE: Right, Blaze Dawson... Those were the titles I remember.

GROTH: When you got out of the service, you were about 30?

RICE: Yes.

GROTH: What was your attitude about comics at that time? Were you raring to get back into them? Or did you think you wanted to progress beyond comics?

RICE: I was ambitious. The truth is, illustration was coming to a close. Magazines didn't even publish fiction. So the scheme in my mind was, what is the art world consisting of? There really wasn't much substance to it. There was no such thing as illustration. I didn't particularly want to do commercial art. But I had no idea what I wanted to do, and the natural thing was to go back to drawing pages. That was always a great pleasure.

GROTH: So it wasn't real labor; you did derive pleasure from doing that.

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: What at this point, were your other interests?

RICE: [Laughs] I was going to get to that. One of the reasons I recited that little paragraph to you about doing the picture sets, and doing the boxes and painting at home at the same time, was when the firm turned out a number of pictures... I only had lost the ideas about painting. One of the things I always thought was surprising about the comics field was that nobody sketched. What I mean by that is, when I was at Eisner/Iger, I used to draw people in the cafeteria when I was having lunch downstairs. It struck other artists as a curiosity to see this going on [Groth laughs]. It put it in their minds to do it themselves. But as Eisner said about Arturo, "He never drew a line out of creative interest." But I always drew, and I drew when I got down here. So that drawing from nature was as much a habit of mine as drawing from the imagination.

GROTH: What do you think that means in terms of --

RICE: I think that drawing from nature fortifies, in effect, what you do. It gives it a strength that's lacking if you simply derive your creative instincts from other published materials.

GROTH: Why do you think so many other cartoonists weren't interested in doing that?

RICE: Well, I wonder about it. Because when I teach, I always encourage drawing from nature...

GROTH: Do you think that suggests they didn't derive joy from drawing? Or that they were interested in it purely as a profession rather than a vocation?

RICE: It's hard to say. An architect who comes to see me every so often, from North Carolina, he always brings his sketchbook to show me how earnest he's been.

GROTH: [Laughs] Right. A lack of earnestness.

RICE: What you learn in an art school is wasted if you don't draw from nature at all. Irving Novick has the same background as myself in that he went the same span of years at the Academy, but he never draws independent of the pages.

GROTH: Hmmm. It just seems a little impoverishing, artistically.

RICE: Oh yeah.

GROTH: Irv Novick, from as far as I can remember, can draw pretty well.

RICE: Very well.

GROTH: Do you think he learned to draw just by looking at other drawings?

RICE: Well he learned to draw probably at the Academy. He drew very well making up things for this stories. I did a fair amount of penciling for him by the way, when he was drawing for MLJ, and then later for DC.

GROTH: So you got out of the service around '45, '46, and you did some work for Bernie Sachs. What publishers did you start working for then, after the service?

RICE: One was Connely.

GROTH: How did you get hooked up with them or with any publisher after the service? Did you actually just drop by the office and offer your...

RICE: Connely. They're in the Empire State building, and they had a lot of space to fill, and they hired at large because almost everybody was starting out, that was on the staff.

GROTH: I understand you drew Captain America for Marvel as well, for Timely.

RICE: I'll tell you something funny about Captain America: I did a Captain America with Louie Cazeneuve when I was working for Harvey. I don't know why that was, why we did it. Then, when I was at Stan's, at one point he asked us if we wanted to do some work at home. At one point I got a six- or seven-page Captain America story to do, which I did off the premises. Stan Lee, with all his credit for creativeness, he was... I did Arizona Andy at home, which I thought was one of the best stories I had done. But when I brought it in, he said, "Did you do all this last night?" I said yes. And he said, "Why can't you work as fast in the room?"

GROTH: [Laughs] I see! So at that time you dealt with Stan Lee.

RICE: Yeah. There was this funny, little routine: You'd finish a page, walk down the hall to show it to Stan, then you'd return to the room and the inker would get it when his time came. But there was no strict collaboration between inkers and pencilers, which I think was a mistake. Sometimes a story would be done by more than one inker, which was a great error.

GROTH: Aesthetically.

RICE: It broke up continuity.

GROTH: Right, but it increased production.

RICE: And the penciler had no authority over the inker to direct things.

GROTH: But my impression was that that was really not a consideration among publishers.

RICE: No, it wasn't at all.

GROTH: So you worked in the Timely offices?

RICE: Yes.

GROTH: Were you paid per piece?

RICE: No, on a salary.

GROTH: Can you give me some idea of what the pay scale was back then?

RICE: It was about $100 a week. I think I was high at $90, then there was a raise...

GROTH: That would have been a pretty good pay back then, wouldn't it?

RICE: Yes, it was.

GROTH: That would have been solidly middle-class?

RICE: Yeah. On the other hand, it wasn't as pleasant as it had been floating around. But it was a lively atmosphere. Dan De Carlo was on the staff and he was offbeat even then. And an artist named Al Frost, whom you might or might not know.

GROTH: No... Now I have to ask you: What was Stan Lee like?

RICE: He was a cheerful guy who everybody was suspicious of.

GROTH: Why is that?

RICE: Well, they thought that his general animation was forced. He wasn't as kindly as he pretended to be. And he was a nephew.

GROTH: He was a nephew of Martin Goodman?

RICE: Yeah. I remember hearing about him as a teenager, when I was working before the war. I never saw any particular keenness on his part, but he's the main representative of the comics...

GROTH: Right. Did he do writing back then?

RICE: Some. I say "some," because I'm not even sure I ever did a script that was actually from his hand.

GROTH: He was also an editor?

RICE: Well, he was the boss of the premises. So yeah, he was an editor.

GROTH: What did you think of him in terms of creativity?

RICE: Well, I thought the general production of the office was commonplace.

GROTH: Were there any people in a position similar to Lee whom you thought were outstanding in terms of creative perspicacity?

RICE: Gene Colan. And John Buscema.

GROTH: When did they work there?

RICE: The whole time I was there.

GROTH: At Timely?

RICE: Yeah, until the thing folded, for whatever reasons.

GROTH: Were they excellent artists even then?

RICE: I thought Gene Colan was kind of dumb, but he was a very gifted, talented artist. I'm not sure if I paid much attention to Buscema at that time, but later I came to admire his work.

GROTH: Yeah, he certainly developed into a very, very technically polished artist. He didn't do much with his drawing, but he could draw well.

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: Did you ever hang around with people like Buscema or Colan socially? What was your social circle?

RICE: My connection with a social circle was Al Frost, and strangely enough, Saul Stein, who is still in touch with me.

GROTH: Is that right? I didn't know he worked in comics.

RICE: And Tom Hook used to go to lunch with us. Most of them disappeared, I never heard of them again in comics. Dick Rockwell was there. Dick was Norman Rockwell's nephew.

GROTH: Good God!

RICE: Which was kind of a distinction.

GROTH: Not for Norman.

RICE: [Laughter] Yeah!

GROTH: Now, did Buscema and Colan work on the premises?

RICE: Yeah, sure. All these people I mentioned were at a desk.

GROTH: Could you physically describe what the Timely offices were like then?

RICE: Yes, they were long offices with one desk behind the other. The final desk was at a window. What [Lee] did was try to [keep] people quiet.

GROTH: How many artists would work there at one time during the day?

RICE: I would say there was a good crowd, maybe a dozen, maybe more than that. And there were two of these long offices.

GROTH: How long did you work at Timely?

RICE: About two-and-a-half years.

GROTH: Was that an enjoyable period of time?

RICE: Yes, it was pleasant because it was nice to be drawing and hanging around with the fellows. But it wasn't as nice as our own place at Lexington Avenue.

GROTH: Why didn't you try to recreate the Lexington Avenue environment?

RICE: Well, that's a good question. I'll tell you the truth. We did something like it. When I left Timely, I rented space at 109 West 42nd Street. Bill Savage had been there and Charlie Feldman and Bernie Krigstein and Bob Sale. It was a succession of cartoonists, and I just moved in there. But it never had the same atmosphere as before the war.

GROTH: Right. You can't go back again.

RICE: No. But it wasn't as boggling and disagreeable as the other place had been.

GROTH: You entered comics in '39, and we're now talking about the late '40s. Did you have the sense that you were getting better and better? That there were leaps in your improvement as [an artist]?

RICE: Oh, there was a great deal of improvement. If I send you any kind of a succession of drawings, you'd see that. I don't know if anybody else noticed it, but it was apparent.

GROTH: Were you excited about improving as a cartoonist?

RICE: I wouldn't say I was excited, but I was gratified. This led, to some degree, to more attention. Another artist I teamed up with Johnny Tartaglione.

GROTH: Really? I know him primarily as an inker.

RICE: He's done a lot of work. I think now he has some kind of a Catholic Church connection. I might be wrong about that, but that's the idea I get.

GROTH: I assume he was penciling back then?

RICE: When we were working together, I was doing the penciling, and he would ink. They were his stories. He'd get the script and I'd draw them, and then he'd ink them. We did Rasputin, and Crime Stories, and Rebellion in Sicily...

GROTH: Did you like his work?

RICE: No.

GROTH: [Laughs] I didn't either.

RICE: Well you know I worked for Biro and Wood. I did the stories and they did some kind of serial story about little gangsters.

GROTH: Charlie Biro?

RICE: Right.

GROTH: Did you ever work for Crime Does Not Pay?

RICE: No.

GROTH: When you were working for Timely, my impression is that they just fed you scripts and you drew them. and you didn't have much say over whether or not you would or wouldn't draw a script.

RICE: Right.

GROTH: Now, let me ask you a hypothetical question: If you told them you weren't interested in drawing a particular script, what would their response have been?

RICE: There was no "they," it was just Stan. But I don't remember anything like that ever coming up. People would ridicule scripts but... When I was doing Buster Crabbe I was doing scripts that defied belief.

GROTH: [Laughs] Do you mean in terms of how stupid they were?

RICE: Yeah. There was one where Buster Crabbe is fighting Communists with his submachine gun! And no one distinguished between them and when he was fighting Indians!

GROTH: [Laughs] Right. Did it ever cross your mind to object to a script that you thought was too absurd or stupid to draw?

RICE: [Laughs] No, I'm afraid not! Sometimes I would laugh at the scripts, but I always drew them.

GROTH: So that was not a consideration.

RICE: There was one other artist who I used to lay stories out for, Irv Chairman. He drew for Fawcett.

GROTH: Did you feel in any sense that you were being exploited back then, insofar as you didn't own the work you did, that you didn't have any say in terms of what you did?

RICE: No, I don't think I had that reaction to what I was doing.

GROTH: Was there any sense of that at all among the artists? That you weren't being paid commensurate to your contribution?

RICE: Bernie Krigstein tried to get a union. There was a feeling we ought to be paid more, sure.

GROTH: What year would that have been Krigstein organizing?

RICE: The best I can say is the early '50s.

GROTH: OK. My understanding is that you were a significant part of that attempt at organizing a union. Is that true?

RICE: No, I wasn't, but I did put the paper out for them a couple of issues. Kind of a mini-newspaper. I'll tell you something funny: In those days you could rent a typewriter in a hotel, and I remember running the thing off. I was kind of skeptical of the whole thing, but I was alongside Bernie in the office, so...

GROTH: Which office?

RICE: 109 West 42nd.

GROTH: Were you a friend of Krigstein's?

RICE: I don't like to be unkind, but nobody was a friend of Krigstein's!

GROTH: [Laughter] Can you tell me why?

RICE: Well, he had a talent for rubbing you wrong. I don't know what it was...

GROTH: Can you expand on that? What kind of a person he was, or how he dealt with people professionally?

RICE: I met Mrs. Krigstein several years ago when there was a big post-Krigstein life exhibition of his work downtown in the Village. It was in an exhibition gallery, very extensive, and it was associated with a building that I think was run by the City of New York that accommodated artists. Mrs. Krigstein said she met me in the office, although I couldn't quite place her. Bernie went from comics to teaching at the High School of Music and Art in Midtown Manhattan.

GROTH: In the '50s, I think.

RICE: Yeah. As I told you earlier, we had done a story together.

GROTH: Right. And who was that for?

RICE: I have no idea.

GROTH: [Laughs] OK.

RICE: It was a romance story --

GROTH: You didn't answer my question about why Krigstein was so irascible.

RICE: It's hard to say. Most people just found him hard to get along with. The truth is, and this might be to his credit, he was fairly belligerent about editorial treatment of his work. If he didn't like scripts, he'd let everybody know.

GROTH: That's what I understand.

RICE: Sometimes it was to his credit. But other times, it was, to some degree, just silly.

GROTH: Was that considered by other artists as presumptuous on his part? Or did he perform a rallying service?

RICE: Well, nothing came of the union activity.

GROTH: Can you go into as much detail as you could about how he tried to start the union and what came of it?

RICE: It was a poor time for the undertaking because the business amounted to nothing. You'd do all you could do to get a script at all, much less being paid properly for it. But I gave little attention to it. It seems to me there was one meeting held. I think I even introduced the speakers, or something like that. But I never was a zealot; I never wanted prospects of what Bernie was up to.

GROTH: Can you tell me what artists attended the meeting, to the best of your recollection?

RICE: I can't think of a single one. [Laughs]

GROTH: [Laughing] Well, it was you and Bernie...

RICE: Yeah, and one of the editors at DC -- I guess he'd be on our side just by the fact he was there. If I have it right, we had a meeting and we invited a speaker who was an editor from DC. [Can't remember name.]

GROTH: Was it Bob Kanigher?

RICE: I'm not sure, it perfectly well could be.

GROTH: I have a first person account that you had words with Bob Kanigher at the meeting.

RICE: [Laughs] It's funny, there are things you don't think about for 30 years, you forget the details of them.

GROTH: Is that likely, or is that possible?

RICE: It seems to me unlikely. But what kind of a first person account do you have?

GROTH: I was talking to Gil Kane. I don't know if you know him or remember him...

RICE: I know the name perfectly well, but I don't identify him with anything.

GROTH: OK. Well, he knows you, and had nothing but wonderful things to say about you. He said he remembers attending the meeting and that Bob Kanigher apparently was dissenting from the idea of a union.

RICE: That could be, because he did represent the publisher.

GROTH: Right, and that you were quite forceful in your rebuttal.

RICE: [Laughs] Well, somebody should have taken down the dictation.

GROTH: Really! Can I ask you what the atmosphere was during the meeting -- was it militant, or was it mushy?

RICE: I was on the dais, but I have a very unclear idea about the details of it. Strange, I don't even have a copy of that paper I wrote.

GROTH: I was going to ask you about that too.

RICE: I must have had a hundred at some time, but I haven't seen it in all these years.

GROTH: Right. Now, I assume Krigstein must have been pretty militant.

RICE: Krigstein I thought of as the central source of the whole thing.

GROTH: I assume his politics were left-leaning.

RICE: Yeah, probably so.

GROTH: What was your political affiliation like then?

RICE: Half liberal, half conservative.

GROTH: So you were middle-of-the-road.

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: OK. But you were in favor of a union.

RICE: In a mild way. I still was skeptical of any prospects because I knew the business wasn't making any money at the time. It was on the eve of my coming down here, as a matter of fact.

GROTH: I see. But it doesn't sound like there was widespread dissatisfaction among artists.

RICE: No, I don't remember anybody except Bernie making anything of all this.

GROTH: [Laughs] I see. And then it pretty much died.

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: You said you put out about two of these newsletters?

RICE: Yeah.

GROTH: Can you tell me what kind of content the newsletters contained?

RICE: [Chuckles] No, I really have almost no recollection, except that at that time you could rent a typewriter from a hotel, and I remember going around the corner and getting into a little room with my own typewriter. Mimeographed paper, which preceded Xerox.

GROTH: Right. Now, it's my impression that Krigstein was also pretty militant about comics being an art form, and that he was an artist who engaged in that art form.

RICE: Sounds familiar, now that you bring it up. But I take that all with a grain of salt.

GROTH: What was the general feeling of comics among the artists of that time? Was it an art form that should have the dignity of an art form? Or was Krigstein an anomaly?

RICE: Well, I'll tell you, once down here I met Arthur Petty who came to visit me in Washington. I said that I missed the guys and he said, "I'd like to talk about drawing -- all they talk about is price!"

GROTH: [Laughs] And that would have been the '50s?

RICE: Right.

GROTH: Jesus, that's a little sad.

RICE: Whatever happened to Arthur Petty, do you know?

GROTH: I don't know, but if you want to, I can check into it.

RICE: I'd appreciate it if you have some kind of record.

GROTH: I definitely will. Now, you got out of comics around '51 or '52. And as far as I can tell, you haven't done any since.

RICE: No. However, there was a long spell when I drew for Harvey. Beverly Souser was the editor up there. That's another woman, by the way, in the business.

GROTH: What period would that have been?

RICE: I think it was the early '50s. But for the social record, she had been a the girlfriend of Arturo. And subsequently she married Henry Rould, the publisher and editor of Time.

GROTH: Oh really? So when you got out of comics, did you move to Washington at that point?

RICE: I didn't think that I was moving to Washington; I went down to Washington, had the idea of producing portraits on a mass scale. But he couldn't dig up any artists in the Washington area to do it, so he had to round up New York City artists. So three or four of us were from the City, and the rest of the staff was local people. But I was doing the portraits for a while, then that ended up having no real prospects, it was silly. But other things turned up: Commercial work, and I did some work for a firm called Creative Arts. One of the projects was painted pictures of the Spanish-American war, for the movies. To my surprise, one of those pictures turned up in the Museum -- the only picture I've gotten into a museum [Laughter]! I did covers for the CIO magazine. A there was a brief period of several years, which I should have extended, when I was hired by the Housing and Home Financing Agency, which is the predecessor of HUD. That was another very pleasant set up, because there was very little exception to anything I did. And there was always lots of work.

GROTH: When you left comics, was that a conscious decision, or did you just drift out?

RICE: No, I just thought I was going down south to take advantage of this temporary portrait project. But, at the same time, I always had my eye out for something that would be a little more purposeful than comics as such.

GROTH: Right. It's a little odd because you seem a little too thoughtful to have continued in comics.

RICE: [Laughs] Well, this is true! If I had been purposeful or forceful like others who got out of the business... But in Washington, one of the things I did was to win a $1,000 prize from the Franklin Mint for a bicentennial coin design. And then I got another prize of $750 from the Treasury itself, who paid several hundred dollars to a dozen finalists. Then in recent years I won a $10,000 for the Suffix County Jet and Air Veterans on Long Island. And I did CIO covers for a number of years down here. CIO put out a little magazine.

GROTH: Was that politically motivated? Were you supportive of the CIO?

RICE: No, I never even thought about it! [Groth laughs] I was doing work for an advertising agency and they commissioned the thing. I'll tell you something funny about the Vietnam veterans competition that was made so much over at the time: I submitted a design for that of which nothing came, but a month ago that was sold by my gallery. That is, the drawing for the competition. So it wasn't a total loss. And also, over the course of all this activity, back until the close of the war, I did a great deal of drawing for the 69th Division, which was my outfit.

GROTH: Oh really? What kind of drawing would that be?

RICE: The principle thing was covers for the magazine they put out. And then we had to present retiring officers with memorial scrolls that I used to paint. The biggest thing of all was the Phillip Morris project. They have a 14-foot, circular medallion in bronze over the entrance of 120 Park Avenue in New York. I spent two-and-a-half years designing that.

GROTH: Phillip Morris -- is that the cigarette manufacturer?

RICE: Yes.

GROTH: I see. What kind of sculpture was this?

RICE: A 14-foot bronze circle.

GROTH: Jesus. And that was a commissioned job?

RICE: Yes.

GROTH: Do you smoke?

RICE: No! [Laughter] There was a stigma attached to it from the beginning. I did it a dozen years ago and there was much less of a stigma then, but some people did bring it up that I had been working for the cigarette company.

GROTH: How did you feel about that?

RICE: I didn't smoke all my life, so I never gave a thought to it.

GROTH: [Laughs] I see.

Let me ask you a couple things: You worked for the Bernard Baily shop, I think.

RICE: No, I didn't. I delivered stuff to Baily, but I never worked there.

GROTH: You delivered stuff?

RICE: Well, I put it that way. I did a story about the massacre of the innocents for Bernie Baily. What I remember about that was delivering the job, and Baily saying, "King Herod isn't beating anybody!" and I said, "No, he isn't beating anybody, these are all his friends." He said, "No, no, with a picture like this, you have to have the King smashing people!" [Laughter] Along with everything else, I wrote a book: Man As Hero: The Human Figure in Western Art. It's the same relation with what we're talking about in that my theory is that western art is associated with the human movement.

GROTH: The Human Movement?

RICE: Yeah, literally. Art as systematic study of the human being. Which relates to the view I take of comics.

GROTH: You said you worked for Charlie Biro.

RICE: Yes, I worked for the Biro and Wood office.

GROTH: Do you remember when that was?

RICE: I don't remember the two of them at all. It was fairly shortly after the war.

GROTH: But you don't remember them at all?

RICE: No, it seems to me I have met them, but I can't even swear to that. You know, Fox revived in the late '40s. He stiffed everybody by issuing checks that weren't honored. I went over to the office and I'm usually very unassertive but I made such a commotion that they gave me another check which turned out to be a good one, but half the artists remained without their money. What interested me about that besides the financial side of it, was I did the oil cover of a Dorothy Lamour book, but I've never seen it reproduced. I don't know what to make of it. That would have been the first painting I did that was published, as such.

GROTH: I assume that the publisher always kept your artwork.

RICE: In those days, yes. It didn't occur to the publisher that they had much.

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