How was the money from the previous “Spacenite” show used to improve Bill Mantlo’s quality of life?
I work with Bill Mantlo’s brother, Mike, who is also his caregiver. Bill is a ward of the state, living in a special care facility. The state sustains him there and gives him an annual allowance of something like $1000-$2000 a year. But Bill can’t have any possessions of his own. Anything beyond that, his brother and family must provide. So the money we contribute can get him things like changes of clothes, food that isn’t hospital food, things like that. I wish there was something hopeful I could say about his situation, but from my phone conversations with Mike I can tell it’s a pretty heartbreaking story.
Mike did tell me that Bill is aware that we’ve been doing these tribute shows, and Mike said he really got a kick out of seeing the artwork. It’s been fun connecting with Bill’s peers like Al Milgrom, Herb Trimpe and Walt Simonson. They all had very kind messages to share with Bill.
This week’s event is the “second and final” ROM tribute show–why is it the last one?
Mainly, I’m going to stop doing the shows so I can finally publish the tribute book that I’ve been planning for the ROM artwork. This second show was supposed to double as a book release, but I kept pushing the date back in order to give artists more time. Finally I decided, let’s just do the show, that’ll be the deadline, and then I’ll do the book 6 months later without having to rush it all at the same time. That basically worked out. Once I finally set the date of the show in stone, the artists knew it was real deadline time and they got their art in.
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The initial idea was just to do a book of ROM fan art. The art exhibits sort of grew out of that. So that’s what I get to focus on after this show, putting the book together. I found out that Chris Ryall from IDW is also a ROM fan and he’s going to put me in touch with other writers and other ROM fans, so there’ll be some written content for the book too: testimonials and dedications from others that have had their lives changed by Bill Mantlo’s work. Also, you can probably guess there’s some tricky legal stuff. Diamond has said they wouldn’t carry the book without written permission from Hasbro. I contacted Hasbro; they didn’t give permission, but they didn’t cease-and-desist me either. Maybe that was their way of saying “go ahead, we know it’s for a good cause.” It’s been a little frustrating to contact Marvel or Hero Initiative, but then they can’t really comment or get involved because of legal nonsense. I think Chris is gonna help me navigate these legal labyrinths to see if Diamond will carry the tribute book. I also want to give big thanks to Brian Vaughan, Brian Bendis and Rick Remender, other Mantlo/ROM fans that helped spread the word about the show and put me in touch with artists. There’s lots more people to thank, but I guess I’ll save that for the book.
It’s going to be so awesome to get the book back from the printers and then send a copy to Bill and Mike. It’s my way of saying thanks to Bill for getting me into comics as a kid. Along the way, I’ve met so many other fans with the exact same story–artists from South America, Croatia, France, who loved ROM when they were younger.
Who’s going to be contributing pieces to this show? Are there any that have particularly surprised you?
We got some amazing contributions from comics artists like Mike Allred, Jeffrey Brown, Tan Eng Huat, Bryan Talbot, Farel Dalrymple, Zack Soto, Michael Deforge, Matt Timson, and Benjamin Marra. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for some late submissions from J.H. Williams and Rafael Grampa. (Hey, Batwoman fans, you can suffer some more delays for a J.H. Williams ROM, yeah?) Still waiting to hear back from Frank Miller (pleeeease? you can have the cover!). Frank did the covers to ROM #1 and #3, by the way.
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But I think the real surprises are from the illustrators and designers that aren’t from the world of comics. Veronique Meignaud did a really beautiful surreal illustration of ROM sort of deteriorating and fighting with some plant life. There were a couple others by Ian Lynam and Patrick Gildersleeves that also surrounded ROM with plantlife and fauna. I wonder why that is? Yuta Onada did a killer iconic ROM that we used for some of the promo posters. Ben O’Brien did a very celebratory image based around some sort of ROM parade, as if Spacenite was a global event that brought out the balloons and ticker tape.
One surprise was when I contacted Jhonen Vasquez to see if he’d like to do a ROM. He passed the invite along to Jon Schnepp and Chris Prynoski from Titmouse, the creators of Metalocalypse. Turns out they’re both huge ROM fans, and they wrote back saying they’d love to be in the show. Chris just emailed me a pic of his Dire Wraith painting, and it totally made my morning.
I also really enjoyed when artists would include other Spaceknights or the Dire Wraiths. There wasn’t as much of that as I expected. But there were at least two Galactuses. Simon Gane did a beautiful poster in our 2007 show. It’s ROM in his human form embracing Brandy on the planet Galador. It’s the happy ending from issue 75, the last issue. Dude did his research.
It was fun contacting these illustrators who didn’t really know the comics. But they were attracted to the cause, and the more they studied about ROM the more they got into it. There are a lot of interpretations that take ROM’s basic form and combine it with human heart/cyborg machinery themes and Bill Mantlo’s tragic story.
What do you think is Bill Mantlo’s legacy in comics?
As I’ve learned over the past few years doing these events, Bill will be remembered as a kind and funny guy who wrote almost every single title published by Marvel Comics. There’s a lot of fans of his Hulk and Alpha Flight runs, but if you ask most people they will say he’s most famous for ROM, Micronauts and Cloak and Dagger.