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Kevin Noel Olson Interviews Ron Fortier
September 4, 2009 |
Ron Fortier and I go back to the early 90s, though we did not meet until three years ago or so. Our connection started far earlier. Let me explain; as a boy, I used to listen to old-time radio shows at 10 PM over an AM radio station. Between comedies and westerns, they would run shows of pulp heroes such as The Shadow, The Whistler, and The Green Hornet. Wanting to listen, I would stay up past my bedtime to listen to these shows. I am uncertain how many children stayed up past their bedtime to listen to the old radio shows, but I was one.
When Now Comics came out with a new Green Hornet series, I voraciously bought anything I could get my hands on. It was a superb series with excellent writing and art. On a project, I was ecstatic to learn the man who headed it had also written one of my favorite comics. It has been an honor to work with Ron Fortier and I have had the rare luck of turning from admiring fan to working on a project with him. Ron now produces books with Airship 27 Productions, published and distributed by Cornerstone Book Publishers. This interview took place on a day of thunder and ill weather for Ron. The weather set a mood not out-of-place in an old suspense movie from the 1930s. The same type of spirit of thrills and adventure Ron Fortier is recreating with Airship 27. Read on.
Kevin Noel Olson: You’ve been writing comics and fiction for quite some time, Ron. How did you get started as a writer?
Ron Fortier: Comics brought me into writing. I read and collected them as a child. By the time I reached High School, I wanted to be a part of the comic community and create comics. I had a minimum amount of drawing skills. I realized by my sophomore year that as okay an artist as I was I wasn’t gifted to the full amount needed to become a graphic illustrator and make a career out of it. That being the case, I realized the only other avenue open to me to get involved with comics was as a writer. Suddenly, that became my avocation. I took every writing class and joined the journalism club in High School and just kept writing away. I learned everything I could about literature. I came out of the military, after serving three years as a clerk, and I started writing for fanzines. Ultimately, I did enough fanzines where I got to a point where I could do professional submissions and that’s how I broke into the market.
KNO: You have a new comic series called MR. JIGSAW. What can you tell us about him?
RF: The character himself has the ability to dismember every part of his body and control them with his mind. It’s a comedy character not intended to be taken seriously and is done with tongue-firmly-in-cheek. Basically, my artist Gary Kato and I looked at the Golden Age comic heroes ala the original Captain Marvel and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man for our inspiration for Mr. Jigsaw.
Rob and I are doing individual issues of Mr. Jigsaw. So far we’ve done four of them. The first three are reprints of all the old Mr. Jigsaw material, the fourth issue of Mr. Jigsaw has all new material and is the first new Mr. Jigsaw in eight years. Those are only available through www.indieplanet.com. Sean Collins of Wild Wolf Entertainment came to us and asked if we could make a deal and print the first three issues together as one graphic novel. We agreed, Gary Kato did a new cover for it and we changed the title to The Adventures of Mr. Jigsaw to differentiate it from the single issues. It is now available through all the major distributors such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and through the new Haven comic distributors so comic stores can order it.
KNO: I know you’re working on new Green Hornet stories for Moonstone Comics. Can you talk about how you got started with The Green Hornet?
RF: I was a fan of the short-lived 1960s Green Hornet television show and that was my introduction to the character. It wasn’t until many years later that I ran into Texas comic artist Steve Erwin. Steve suggested that he and I get together and come up with a proposal for a new Green Hornet comic book series. At that time there hadn’t been a new Green Hornet comic since the old Gold Key series based on the T.V. show of which they had only produced three issues.
I set out for the next four or five months writing a proposal for a new Green Hornet comic combining the elements of all the previous incarnations from the radio, serials, and the t.v. show. My then-agent suggested I travel to San Diego that year for the comic con where I met Tony Caputo of Now Comics. During one of my conversations with Tony, this was after he hired me on the spot to be the new writer for his Terminator comic, he and I got to talking the last day of the show about classic hero characters that hadn’t been seen for a long time in comics. We mentioned the Lone Ranger, Tarzan, and Tony said, “The Green Hornet.”
I just laughed, picked up my briefcase, put it up on the table and opened it up. I took out my 40-page proposal and handed it to him and said, “Here you go.” Well, he took it home, read it, loved what we’d done, and made an appointment to find the license holders in New York. He went to them, showed them the proposal, and I was tickled pink. Apparently, Marvel and DC over the years had tried to get the rights and couldn’t. The people in New York, after reading my proposal and talking to Tony, were impressed with what we had there and gave him the go ahead and the permission. Suddenly Now Comics had the rights to the Green Hornet.
Tony called me at home and told me to start writing the scripts and to get a hold of Steve Irwin and tell him that we’re going to do this thing. Irony of ironies, it’d been six months since my initial talk with Steve. Here I am calling him in Texas and telling him, “Get ready, we’re going to do the Green Hornet.” Steve came back to me and said, “Gee Ron, I can’t.”
I said, “Why not?”
Steve replied, “I’ve just been hired by DC and I’m going to be working for them.”
So, all the sudden I’ve got the Green Hornet proposal picked up by a comic book company and it’s going to start being printed and I need an artist in the worst way. Again, as luck would have it, I remembered meeting a young artist at San Diego by the name of Jeff Butler. In the course of talking with him he showed me his portfolio and in it were pictures of the Green Hornet he had drawn. He was a fan. So I immediately dug through all the business cards I’d brought back from San Diego, found his, gave him a call and said, “How would you like to draw a new Green Hornet comic book?”
Jeff was ecstatic, said yes, and that’s how I got involved with the Green Hornet.
KNO: The pulp field from the thirties traversed a wide range of speculative fiction, including Sci-fi, fantasy, Western, and adventure and so on. What is the attraction of the old pulp stories in today’s market?
RF: The attraction is that most of what should be escapist literature of late has failed their audience. The pulps were born during the Great Depression, and they offered an entire generation a couple of hours of being able to forget their problems by picking up these garishly colored, exciting magazines on the kiosk stands every week.
The thing was that they were very simplistic. All of them were, regardless of the genre. It was basically lots of action in exotic locales and the heroes were stalwart good guys who beat the dastardly villains and saved the day.
So here we are in the midst of a rather monumental recession and the American public is once again looking at cloudy skies. All the sudden we’ve got this resurgence, renaissance or renewed interest in the pulps. I sincerely believe the American reader wants to go back to those kinds of just plain fun escape stories. I think they’re tired of all the dark, gloomy, angst-ridden tales that we’ve being offered in the last 20 years as supposed adventure material. That’s what the attraction to the pulps was all along for me, and that’s why we’re doing them again. I think there’s a need for that.
KNO: What encouraged you to start AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS?
RF: All the time that I wrote comics, and still do, for the last 27 years, you can’t get involved with the comic community without eventually learning its history and the fact that the comics came out of the pulps. First, there were the pulps, and then those young men and women that grew up in the thirties and forties later went on to become the comic book writers and artists that we know of.
The connection is very solid and it’s right there. While working throughout my comics career I’d learned about The Shadow and Doc Savage and G-8, and all those great, great pulp heroes. When I’d get together with colleagues we’d sit around and talk about it and say, “Wouldn’t it have been fun to write those kinds of stories?”
About six years ago I finally retired from the day job, my 32-year-career at General Electric was over. I found myself with a lot of free time to devote to writing. Suddenly, I was seeing this renewed interest in pulp reprints, and started wondering if there was a market there for new stories of all these classic pulp heroes. That’s why I started Airship 27. I hooked up with my buddy, Rob Davis, who signed on as art director. We cast a wide net to see if we could find other people who would like to do this kind of stuff, and lo and behold people were basically breaking down the door to come work with us.
So, just two-and-a-half years ago we launched Airship 27. We did something right, because it’s going strong and it’s getting stronger every year.
KNO: How would you describe the partnership between Cornerstone Book Publishers and Airship 27?
RF: That to me is the most beneficial, symbiotic relationship going. Michael Poll is a terrific guy. He’s an experienced publisher. He knows the book business better than anyone I’ve ever met. The initial six months working with Mike to show him our wares and books were like a tutorial for Rob and I. Mike pretty much held our hands and showed us some of the ‘dos and don’ts about publishing.
At the same time, Mike let us know that it was his goal to expand Cornerstone Book Publishers. He initially began it as a company to publish books on Freemason culture but was looking to expand that to widen his field to what he could offer the readership. He looked at Airship 27 and saw the quality inherent in the books Rob and I were doing. It was a perfect marriage, and one that keeps getting stronger with each new title that we put out.
KNO: Thank you for the interview, Ron. It is always an extreme pleasure. Is there anything further you’d like to mention concerning Airship 27’s activities?
RF: Thank you, Kevin.
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