Bendis: That’s very funny, because if you don’t speak French, it looks like a real magazine. I didn’t know it was a joke. I want to rewind the clock a little bit. According to the internet, you worked with Jack Kirby at Hanna-Barbera Studios?

Darrow: One time he came in and he had to finish something, so he asked me to sit down, and he took one of my pencils, just a nub of a pencil. And he did a model drawing on my desk, and I’m watching him. Afterwards he left and I took the pencil and I put it in an envelope and wrote “Kirby’s Pencil.” I don’t know where it is anymore, because I’ve moved so many times. He did models. He did character designs at Hanna-Barbera. He’d come in once a week, and he’d bring in a stack of drawings. It was a lot of money compared to a comic page; it was like $150 a drawing. He worked on everything. At the time there was Super Friends, he worked on Scooby-Doo. Those were the best. Some of the drawings he did for Scooby-Doo were amazing because they were so off-model. Working in animation is a particular kind of work, and you have to stay on model. And Jack just did what he did.

I’d met him at a convention because he was like a god to me. New York used to be the big convention. He came there one year in ’75 to announce he was returning to Marvel to do Captain America. We ran into him outside at the hotel and he was so nice. I was with some friends, and he asked what we did. We said we were trying to draw comics. He gives us his room number, and says, “Come up to my room and show me what you got.” We never did because we didn’t want to interrupt him. Another one of my friends named Gary Gianni asked if he wanted to come out and have a drink with us. He said, “No, no, I’m too old. I can’t keep up with you young guys.”

Years later, he was there at Hanna-Barbera. I went to his house. What a sweet, wonderful man. You’d show up at his house and he’d invite you in for dinner. He was that kind of a guy.

Bendis: You’re literally asking my questions for me. I was going to ask did you literally sit and watch him draw? Did you get to watch Kirby draw?

Darrow: My magical moments were Kirby, Moebius and Vaughn Bode, who was drawing at that same comic convention. I watched him draw as these two elderly women just shook their heads. They were so saddened, because he was very androgynous. He painted his nails and looked very effeminate. And they just thought, He’s lost to Jesus forever! I remember hearing them say that. They were genuinely concerned for him, which struck me as pretty funny, just watching him draw the Masked Lizard. I just like to watch people draw.

Bendis: And it’s so funny, because we get to an age where some of my long-term collaborators will start drawing, and I’ll start staring. One artist friend of mine said, “You’re not making fun of me, are you?” And I said, “No! I’m just watching you!” It’s fun to watch someone do craft. I just love it.

Darrow: To me, it’s always been magic to watch people. The funny thing is, I’ve also watched Moebius struggle, too, which was kind of great. It was probably sadistic on my part. He had these rough days, and he’d tell me he had rough days where a single little head would throw him off.

Bendis: That’s genuinely fascinating. I think it helps people. Even people who are good…everyone has a shit day. It’s why I like the Raiders of The Lost Ark development pitch. You’ve probably read this, where they’re trying to figure out Indiana Jones. It’s literally a transcript of Spielberg, Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan trying to figure out Indiana Jones, and they don’t have it yet. They’re just trying to figure out all the different ways they can do the story. When you see them struggle with it, you’re like, Oh thank God. In my head, Indiana Jones was birthed complete out of the air. When I hear Moebius struggled, it just makes me think, OK, good.

Darrow: When I first met him, he told me that he spent 40 years learning how to draw, so he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. I understand what he was saying in that he could draw so well that that part of his mind was freed up to go into the imagination and creative part of it. He wasn’t always fighting to get the anatomy right; he could think about what the character would be doing.

Darrow: I think there’s room for all kinds of comics. One thing I was going to ask your take on…. One thing that kind of bothers me. Now there are comic books and there are graphic novels and it’s the same thing. I understand the need for graphic novels and I guess people say they don’t want to read comic books. But it bothers me that people have to call them graphic novels.

Bendis: It has shifted so much, and I’m sure you feel the same. When I broke in, it was still Bing, Bang, Boom!, though Harvey Pekar’s work had come out 30 years before. But over the course of the past few years, I guess the aughts were when the TV shows and movies really landed. My frustration now goes from people who would poo-poo the medium, but are obsessive about seeing these characters in other media. They’ll see Avengers: Age of Ultron 19 times, but they’ll never do the comic, because that’s beneath them. And that is ridonculous.

Darrow: I’ll go to some conventions where I’ll talk to people and they’ll say, “Do you read comics?” “Oh yeah, I love comic books.” “Which ones do you read?” “Oh, I just see the movies.”

Bendis: Listen, we have lots of fans who just watch the movies and TV shows. Do whatever you want. If you go, I’m just not much of a reader, great—no problem. But if you say comics are shit? No.

Darrow: I was in a cab somewhere in Europe or France, and somebody asked me what I did and I said I drew comics. They were hardly impressed. If you said you drew comics, they’d go, “Oh yeah?” He said, “Get a real job.”

Bendis: You have some credits you could throw in their faces. You could shut them up. I do feel, and this is what I’ve been thinking about all summer and I’m actually going to Marvel next week to discuss this at great length: everything about our culture has changed. Everything about the relationship the audience has with these characters, and not just the superheroes, but Hellboy, has changed. It’s completely different. Yet, the industry we work in acts completely the same as it did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. We do nothing different, even though everything around us has changed, including the fact that these characters are so available in so many media, that comics are becoming the least important place where they are. And I think it’s important to make sure that that doesn’t happen. It starts and ends with us and I think we have to look at the format of our product, we should look at the pricing of our product, the delivery of our product and really sit there and ask, What are we doing that’s right and wrong? I’m worried about us getting buried by our own awesomeness. That’s a problem if everyone has a TV show. And literally every one of my friends has a TV show based on a comic that they wrote, or created or are working on. Well then, who’s going to be making the comics?