Bullet Review: Alter Ego #133 & Jim Mooney

Alter Ego is a comic magazine publised by TwoMorrows which focuses on golden age and silver age creators. Edited and basically run by comic legend Roy Thomas, the magazine is really a treasure trove for amateur comic historians like me.

Last week, Alter Ego #133 came out and included a very long interview of Jim Mooney done before his unfortunate death several years ago. Mooney drew the first first years of Supergirl's adventures in Action Comics, starting with her second adventure in Action Comics #253 and continuing for almost a decade.

His career started long before his work on Supergirl and continued long after he left Action Comics but for me he is the definitive Supergirl artist. So I was eager to hear what he had to say, especially about Kara.

Get ready for a surprise. The word he used most about her is 'bored'! So sad.

Now I suppose that doing anything for 9 years would get monotonous. But I was hoping he would have a love for the character, especially given the apparent love that he put into the books.

Later in the interview, he does say that he got bored with many of the comics he was put on because the stores became repetitive and boring to him.

The article/interview is nearly 40 pages and includes a lot of stunning pictures including this personal commission Mooney did for someone. Just beautiful.

And also this commission and print focusing on Streaky!

So fantastic!

I do like that he put in that knowing little nod to readers at the end of the stories.

And hearing about his approach to commissions was also interesting.

I have to be honest, I forgot he actually worked on Ms. Marvel for a while. The Danvers girls! Two of my favorite characters!

We also get a little Streaky history as well.

Mooney created Streaky and modeled him after his own cat!

It is telling that he felt he needed to move on from DC because of the influence of Neal Adams and realism in the book. I am pretty sure that Kurt Schaffenberger, maybe even more cartoony than Mooney, worked there through the early 80s.

As a Supergirl fan, even hearing how bored he was with Kara, I enjoyed reading this interview. And as a comic buff, it was truly fascinating to see his earliest stuff, including Batman stories from the Sprang/Robinson era and even characters he created in the Golden Age. And while I think of him as a DC guy because of Supergirl, his time at Marvel was pretty prolific. That is also covered in the magazine.

Great stuff!

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