Interesting thread. Though I worked professionally, I did it all from an LA backwater. That fact combined with crippling shyness meant I met very few pros of the day. I still regret never having met Archie Goodwin; I always imagined we'd have an interesting chat. Likewise Herb Trimpe, who at the time was the only other guy who'd done a fantasy-airplane strip. Most of my big-name-pro encounters were during my fanboy days, when the San Diego Comic Con was held at the El Cortez Hotel. The Con was young, vibrant, and just barely professional, so there were many opportunities to run into THE PROS.
The more memorable encounters included a conversation with Gil Kane and his wife about his work in the 1950s (wish I'd had a tape recorder). Kane was simultaneously gracious and opinionated, and great fun to talk to. Jim Vadeboncoeur and I hung around a lot at San Diego, and he knew Jim Steranko. One year we chatted with Steranko for a long time at his booth. He was a thorough showman and told endless stories. I appreciated that even though he was quite aware that he was a superstar, Steranko talked to me person-to-person as if we were both on the same level. Another fun San Diego moment was when I briefly met Dan Spiegle, who back then wasn't well-known outside of Dell Comics fans. I had a copy of an old TV tie-in (the 77th Bengal Lancers) which I was pretty sure he'd drawn and asked him about it. To my amusement he paged through the book just like I had, saying things like, "Well, this kind of looks like me...this looks like a Spiegle head..." He wound up unsure whether he'd drawn the book or not--just like me.
Ever since discovering the 1930's "Terry and the Pirates" in my college's newspaper archives, I'd been a passionate Milton Caniff fan. One year he was Guest of Honor at San Diego. After his talk I stood in line (not a very long line, really) and asked him to sign a Harvey reprint of his 1935 strips. He flipped through it and said, "Boy, I haven't seen THIS stuff in a long time!" Being a fanboy without much tact I asked him if he'd followed George Wunder's work on the strip, and what he though of GW's ignoring or doing away with most of the strip's famous supporting characters. Caniff said, "Well yes, I did wonder about that, but I guess he figured it was his strip now, and he wanted to start with a clean slate." Which is almost surely the case. Like Kane, Caniff was very gracious and talked with me a little before moving on to the next fan.
Surely my most pleasurable Pro Encounter was the time Jim got John Buscema (during his "Savage Sword" days) to consent to an interview about his career. That should show you how informal things were--he spent hours with us, going over the stack of books Jim had brought, one moment roaring out opinions ("I HATE Alcala! His inks are like somebody screaming nonstop at the top of his lungs!") and the next telling stories on himself (incredibly for someone we knew as a tireless workhorse, JB used to be rather irresponsible. He was finally fired from Dell after he spent a weekend working on a handmade chessboard instead of meeting a deadline). What a great time we had! In that interview I was struck by Buscema's paradoxical attitude. Over the years I saw it resurface again and again in interviews and stories from people who knew the man. Buscema swore repeatedly that he was just in it for the money, that comics were baloney and that he didn't care about anything as long as he got his paycheck. Yet it was obvious that he DID care. He cared about how his drawings were treated, he cared about how to tell comics stories, he cared about the artists and editors with whom he'd worked over the years...and he cared enough to later teach classes which trained a new generation of professionals. He just wasn't willing to admit it.
