Interview of Pierre V. Comtois

by David Daniel

Prolific Lowell author Pierre V. Comtois has a new book. David Daniel recently sat down with Pierre to discuss his just-published Marvel Comics in the Early 1960s.

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Daniel: Marvel Comics in the Early 1960s is the fourth entry in your popular Marvel Comics by the decades series. You’ve covered the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The new book examines the early 60s. What prompted you to go back?

Comtois: Actually, you might ask what prompted the publisher. The original first volume, Marvel Comics in the 1960s, was a cherry-picked compendium of the best issues, encompassing the entire decade of the sixties–which I broke into the early years, years of consolidation, grandiose years, and twilight years. As that and the three follow up volumes in the series continued to sell steadily, the publisher asked me about the comics that I’d left out of that original volume. I said I had them ready to go. It was determined that covering all the comics that weren’t included in that original 60s volume would be too much for a single new book, so it was decided to split the work. Marvel in the Early 1960s, covering the years ’61-’65 is the first. A second volume covering the years ’66-’70 is scheduled for  next summer. That said, the 1960s is my favorite era anyway—it was when I first started to collect comics.

D: You’ve written—notably in “I Was a Teenage Bibliophile” (River Muse 2012)—of  how your boyhood peregrinations in the bookstores of Lowell helped shape your reading and writing tastes. How so?

C: It’s a subject largely interesting only to me. One that I’ve long contemplated as an exercise in self-evaluation, namely, how did my interest in comic books, science fiction, and imaginative literature in general develop? Where did it come from? Certainly not from my parents who were old-fashioned, down-to-earth people who weren’t readers. And not from my siblings or friends. Except for a childhood friend, whose enthusiasm for such things quickly fell off, I was alone in my pursuits. But I think I can say that my interest in fantastic literature was largely due to my discovery of comics when I was nine, which opened my mind to the sense of wonder and the far out.

I soon graduated to Tom Swift and Tarzan novels, which led me to the science fiction section of the library. TV shows and movies dealing with sci-fi also piqued my interest. Perhaps the real gateway drug was my discovery of the Captain Future novels of Edmond Hamilton. After that, my hunger for sci-fi was insatiable. By high school I was devouring the stuff and luckily Lowell was a cornucopia of book and magazine stores that kept me well supplied. Somewhere along the line also I found that my interest wasn’t entirely fulfilled by just reading fantastic literature, I felt a yearning to create it too. And so began my earliest attempts at fiction writing, while in grade school. It took years though, decades even, of persistence to hone my skills to the point where sales and eventual publication became a regular thing.

D: Does the Merrimack Valley figure in your work?

C: Not too much with my science fiction novels and stories, or my horror stories. Nevertheless, as a lifelong resident of Lowell, I’ve learned to love this town and all its familiar byways, which I still enjoy exploring on long walks around the city. Inspired by the TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables many years ago, I determined that I could do what author Lucy Maud Montgomery did . . . that is, capture my youth in the form of a young adult novel. Which I duly did with Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls. Partially based on my own experiences growing up in Lowell during the 1960s, it’s my love letter to this town and the one place that really reaches deep into my connection with it and the river that runs through it.

D: You’ve spoken of your love for the “Golden Age” of science fiction—the late 1930s up to post-World War II—what is it about that period that gripped your imagination?

C: When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be an astronomer and then an astronaut, but for various reasons, mostly dealing with arithmetic, I had to give up those ambitions. But those desires did indicate a nascent interest in science in general, specifically science connected with avionics and space exploration. It may be the reason why I gravitated toward “hard science fiction” rather than the softer or social based kind that became popular in the late sixties. But the best place to find the kind of hard sci-fi that I liked was in the stories written during the “golden age,” the era of Astounding Magazine that birthed classic authors like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. That stuff, together with the sixties’ ongoing real-life exploration of space, all congealed to fire my imagination. What wasn’t there to like?

D: An argument can be made that comics are an adolescent preoccupation, and in the world of entertainment are a kind of invasive species sucking up the oxygen for more serious fare. Thoughts

C: The recent success of the Marvel movies has been both a blessing and curse to fans. On the one hand, the films are a dream come true for readers who previously had only such low budget fare as TV renditions of their favorite characters—Spider-Man, Hulk, Dr Strange, etc. With the advent of CGI FX, plus huge expenditures of cash the latest films  have made super heroes totally realistic on the screen. And thus, more accessible to the larger public who had mostly considered super heroes kids’ stuff. The dream of fans to have their hobby accepted by fellow adults as a legitimate form of mass media was finally being acknowledged.

The curse however, has been that these impressive films have mostly been a betrayal of the original source material, in many ways coming off as less mature fare than the comics they sprang from. The audiences that enjoy the new super hero movies haven’t  gravitated to the comics, let alone the original comics from the 1960s and 70s. One of the things I hope readers take away from my Marvel books is how their manner of storytelling could be both fun for young people and thematically intriguing for adults.

D: What are you working on now?

C: I’m doing prelim work ahead of the next issue of my ongoing small press magazine, Fungi [the Magazine of Fantasy and Weird Fiction] and will soon be proofing Marvel Comics in the Later 1960s. Beyond that, the publisher has asked me to consider writing another volume of Marvel in the 1970s. I’m also waiting on the publication of a new young adult novel, a prequel to Sometimes a Warm Rain Falls called The Boy Who Invented Himself, which will be even more Lowell-oriented than the first. Only problem is the publisher has had the manuscript for almost three years now so I’m not sure when it will appear. Soon I hope!

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Among Comtois’ many books are the Science Agents trilogy (Extra Galaxia, Novus Inteligens, Solve Gorgoni); novels Scheduled for Extinction and Talismanic; and story collections Autumnal Tales and The Way the Future Was. His work is available at Lala Books in Lowell. For further information see Richard Howe’s extensive interview in The Lowell Review issue 2 (2022). Visit the author at www.pierrevcomtois.com.

Pierre’s newest book, Marvel Comics in the Early 1960s, is now available from the publisher, TwoMorrows.