Was That Guy Somebody Important

by Josephine Riesman

I had no way of knowing my third conversation with writer/editor Dennis O’Neil would be my last—indeed, the last any reporter would have with the man who redefined Batman for the Boomers. Dennis “Denny” O’Neil had been a journalist himself, but in the 1960s he found himself working at Marvel Comics under the cheerily tyrannical Stan Lee. That was the episode in his life I wanted O’Neil to tell me about when I called him on February 5, 2019—I was working on my first book, a biography of Lee. 

O’Neil, born in 1939 and 79 at the time of our chat, was an ace raconteur, the kind into which any good comics writer (or newspaperman) eventually pickles. Before this interview, I’d talked to him about his tectonic decision, with artist/co-writer Neal Adams, to place racial justice concerns at the forefront of their run on Green Lantern. And before that, we’d talked about his decades-long run as the editorial steward of the Batman line. A few months after this interview, we were scheduled to speak again, for a story about his and Adams’ revival of The Joker in the ’70s. But O’Neil had been injured and had to cancel. He did not recover. He died at age 81 on June 11, 2020.

Below is a transcript of my conversation with O’Neil, edited for length and clarity. 

Josephine Riesman: Do you remember when you first became aware of Stan Lee’s existence and that he was making comics?

Denny O’Neil: Yeah, I was working as a police beat reporter for a little newspaper in Cape Girardeau in southeast Missouri [circa 1965], and I didn’t know anybody there. I had been a Navy journalist—I was saving you from the commie hordes [in Vietnam]. I thought, my future, if I had one, lay with writing. So I spent a lot of time by myself in this little town, staring at magazine racks in bus stations and things. 

I was a pretty avid comic book guy when I was, like, five and six years old. Every Sunday after Mass, we stopped at a little what would’ve been called a mom-and-pop store here. It was called a confectionary in the Midwest—quart of milk for the family and a comic book for me. So, many years later, I saw comic books again, and I was curious. I mean, have they changed? What’s going on here? I ended up writing a couple of pieces. My hunch was right—comics were making a big-time comeback, and they hadn’t been available widely for almost a decade.

What happened after the war?

People came home and the world was changing. Those little mom and pop stores, little candy stores, were going out of business. The ones that survived found they could put paperback books in that space and have a much higher profit margin; comic books had always this kind of little backwater of American publishing anyway. 

Most Saturdays, I drove 110 miles back to St. Louis. I had a girlfriend back there and I had family and so forth. So I was driving back to Cape Girardeau with Anne, who became my wife, and I had gotten a communication from [soon-to-be comics editor] Roy Thomas, whose parents read the paper. Roy was, at that time, a teacher of English at Fox High School, but was on his way to New York to accept a job with Mort Weisinger as assistant Superman editor.

So I thought, Well, we will talk to this guy for 20 minutes, on my way back to Cape Girardeau. And he just absolutely gobsmacked me. For about two hours, Roy, who was co-editor of Alter Ego, which was easily the best fanzine around, introduced me to this whole subculture that I didn’t know existed. So I did another piece about Roy, and we hung out. Then he went to New York and I did something egregiously stupid. Absolutely the most prize-winningly stupid thing I’ve ever done.