Showcasing the DC in the 80s webzine

Mark Belktron (Executive Editor) and Justin Francoeur (Editor in Chief ) are the brains behind DC in the 80s, the webzine which deals with all things DC Comics in the 80s. You might recognize the name Mark Belktron as I recently interviewed him for his successfully funded Kickstarter DSM-10.

The DC in the 80s Facebook page has close to 10,000 "Likes" and over 3,000 followers on Twitter. I remember posts from DC in the 80s appearing in both my Twitter and Facebook feeds from time to time. I was surprised to learn that the Executive Editor was living in Albany NY.

It was October 2016, when a message from Mark appeared from the Facebook group for this blog. Mark and I chatted a bit about cons we had both attended on the East Coast. Later on, I would run into Mark at a seperate event, the Albany Comic Cons and now we talk on a regular basis.

Who's Who: Meet the DC in the 80s Editorial Staff:

Justin Francoeur (Editor-in-Chief)

As the editor-in-chief of the webzine, he researches and write articles, organizes interviews with comic pros, post/edit/format articles for the site, coordinates with new contributors, fusses with the web metrics, and posts links of the articles to social media.

He says 'Editor in Chief' was the role he assigned himself because it sounded important, going on to say that he believes that he and Mark drew straws to see who would be 'Editor In Chief' or 'Executive Editor', and he won.

"I guess I have 'final say' on what gets posted, but I always turn to Mark to read it over and get his final opinion/approval first -- because he's the best co-editor a guy could ask for."

Mark Belktron (Executive Editor)

As Executive Editor, Mark writes articles, interviews people, talks with Justin about things, promotes the site, and posts things on social media.

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How did you get into reading comics? (When, what was that one book that hooked you…)

Mark: The comic that first hooked me in was DC's Who's Who #1. I was walking at a mall with my Dad and saw the amazing George Perez cover featuring Aquaman. I thought the comic would have pictures and explanations of all the Super Friends, so I was excited. I remember asking him to buy it for me, taking it home, and opening it.

And my brain exploded. "This is a whole book of characters whose names start with A. There was a team from the 40's called the All-Star Squadron that had Plastic Man on it. There were three demons who were brothers, a guy named Animal Man, and TWO Atoms.

The other part that really hooked me was that every picture had another artist. I didn't even understand the concept of artists at the time, it was just here are cartoons, there are comics. This also started my lifelong love of Illustrators, especially Keith Giffen, George Perez, Steve Bissette, and Jerry Ordway, who I discovered for the first time.

That was when Earth-2 was introduced to my young little 10-year-old brain, and I've been hooked on comics, especially DC Comics, since then.

The next comic I bought was Crisis on Infinite Earths #2, and that was it. The dawn of time all the way to the 30th century, heroes actually dying, characters brought together from different Earths, heroes and villains, George Perez. I'll never forget how that issue made me feel.

Justin: I was born in 1981. Throughout my youth, my dad was picking up comics for me whenever he saw them at flea markets, yard sales and thrift stores. Up until the age of 7, I was allowed to look at them with parental supervision (because they were worried I'd destroy them), but they were more or less kept out of my reach. It was a pretty mixed assortment of comics: mainly Marvel and DC, with some Gold Key thrown in.

I don't know the exact title that made me a life-long fan -- I seem to have fond memories of reading Mike Barr's Batman and The Outsiders, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron, Dan Jurgen's Booster Gold and the Giffen/DeMatteis' Justice League. But really, I grew up to be a pretty well-rounded comic fan who knew just as much about the Teen Titans as I did the X-Men

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Why focus on DC Comics in the 80s and where did the idea come from?

Mark: The idea for DC in the 80s comes from Justin Francoeur, someone I met online from Ottawa. He had the site, the FB, and blog up and going. This was his passion project and I just jumped on.

Justin: When DC in the 80s first started as a Tumblr blog back in 2013, I was just posting cool-looking house ads of DC comics from the 80s and giving a half-hearted review of the work in question with one or two sentences. As I started to post more house ads, I started investigating the 'story behind the story' and the reviews started to get a bit more in-depth -- my reviews were suddenly several paragraphs longer. This is when Mark found me. It was Mark who actually suggested we start interviewing actual comic pros (I was originally planning on it just being a review site) and we became a "REAL blog/website from then on."

Why 'DC in the 80s' and not 'Marvel in the 80s'? Simple, somebody else ALREADY had a "Marvel in the 80s" Tumblr blog running at the time, and they were doing a great job of it, and I wanted to fill the 'DC comics' void."

Mark: I am still chasing the dragon of how the DC Comics from the 80s made me feel. The stories, art, characters, are timeless. DC almost closed in the 80's until they went HAM on taking chances. Giving Frank Miller free reign on Batman, giving Superman to John Bryne to change as he wanted, changing everything on Crisis, Wolfman and Perez on Teen Titans, allowing Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to practice their magic on Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, and a twisted version of the Charlton characters. Really could go on all day.

Additionally, I want to meet the people who created this work. I've had the chance to interview greats like Joe Staton, JM Dematteis, Richard Case, Paris Cullins and one of my five favorite all-time creators, Rick Veitch. It's a special thing to meet and talk to these artists who I have the utmost respect for.

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What can readers expect to find on DC in the 80s?

Mark: The concept focuses on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed. We post our interviews, stories about the 80s, stories about now, cosplay, commissions, covers, parts of stories, and a lot more. We also post reviews and articles about comics, video games, trading cards, and really want to explore the fandom of the concept. We also have a zine, Baxter Stock, which has had two issues and we are looking to do a third for the summer.

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If you could bring back one obscure character from the 80s who would it be?

Justin: Oh! Good question! A lot of them have been brought back in the last decade, so finding

an obscure one is going to be tricky. I'm digging through my Who's Who comics here... and I really wish The Creeper (a recurring Batman character; originally created by Steve Ditko) had been given more of an opportunity to appear in stories back then. In order for it to work, however, he'd have to be written bat-$hit crazy (like the way Giffen and DeMatteis did in Justice League) -- I always saw The Creeper as a "what if the Joker was actually a crime-fighting vigilante" type-of-thing. So yeah, there could be some major potential there -- Deadpool look out.

Mark: One obscure character I would bring back from the 80s is The Brotherhood of Dada.

They made their debut in Grant Morrison and Richard Case's Doom Patrol run. They were so surreal, yet so absolutely normal. That's something Morrison does better than anyone.

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What is your favorite 80s DC comics character, favorite story, and creative team?

Mark: My favorite DC Character is The Question. I love his Steve Ditko origins as an objectivist vigilante (which is not me), his Dennis O Neill and Denys Cowan Taoist vigilante run, his Rick Veitch shaman era, and his X-Files cartoon persona from Justice League Unlimited and Brave and the Bold.

There is no character I would want to write more, and I even pitched a story to a great artist I met, and he was interested. He said pitch it to Dan Didio, and I never did, because Dan would surely say "Who are you?"

Justin: Ha. That's like asking me to choose between my children. This is going to sound cliché, but I'm always a) reading old DC comics I originally missed out on, or b) re-reading old DC comics I first read 25 years ago. Every month I have something new I've really 'taken to' and swear that 'this is my favorite' ever.

For the sake of an actual answer, I was always more of a 'team book' kinda guy, and I really really dug Ostrander/Yale's Suicide Squad from the eighties (I was really fond of the story where they fought the Female Furies). I keep coming back to Morrison/Case's Doom Patrol from the late eighties, and the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League run is something that I wish could've kept on going for another 100 issues.

-- Mark: My favorite story is the Painting That Ate Paris in the Grant Morrison and Richard Case run on Doom Patrol in 1989.

They introduced Mister Nobody and the Brotherhood of Dada, which is both criminally forgotten. I mentioned them as the character I would most bring back, and it's because the run really did it for me. Once again, it was surreal, it introduced to new concepts such as Dadaism, and felt like it was a writer commenting on something, but it didn't have to be anything in particular. Kind of like David Lynch, who sometimes just creates something because he feels like it. It doesn't have to mean anything, but it might. That's what that run did. Told a great story about art, about reality, but through the lens of fairly normal people. Grant Morrison had a way of putting the real world inside the comics, and make the real world feel special, magical.

The perfectness of the storyline, along with Rick Veitch not being allowed to finish his Swamp Thing run, and the O'Neill-Cowan Question ending, really kind of finished comics for me. This all happened around the end of 1989, and fittingly, I just stopped buying comics. I tried a few times in the 90's, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s that I returned to comics.

If I had to choose a favorite team, and it's hard, I would say Marv Wolfman and George Perez. The New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths are both all-time classics. I don't know if anyone had a better chemistry in the 80s.

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What are the major differences between the Comics industry in the 80 and today in your opinion?

Mark: The price of comics. It was easier to buy a lot of new comics for cheaper. I think you can still get a lot of back issues nowadays for cheap if you want to get a kid or someone into it, but it's so made for adults. It was 75 cents for a book when I started, and even with inflation, it was cheaper. The cover price of a comics around $4 a book, it's just hard to buy more than 2 or 3 a week. Do I sound like an old man? Back in my day, we had newsprint and gosh darn it we liked it.

Also, I think a lot more people are creating amazing work. On Kickstarter, at Cons. I see so much talent that will never work at DC or Marvel but deserve to. Also, people who do not work for the big two that once did are putting out amazing work with crowdfunding and the net. It's really grown, even if the publishing from the bigger companies has shrunk. It is part of that shared, on-demand economy.

Justin: In the eighties, it was pretty hard for a start-up comic publisher to gain any traction. You needed to understand how distribution worked, and you needed to have quite a bit of start-up cash to get off the ground. As a result of this, a lot of really great ideas never saw print (or saw a second or third issue) because the marketing just wasn't there. Thanks to Kickstarter, social media and the web, word spreads faster and new start-ups get a fighting chance.

On the flip-side, I'm really having trouble understanding how the comic book industry will sustain itself if it's relying on the sales of physical comic books. Books being canceled (i.e., DC's new Young Animal imprint) because the sale numbers "just weren't there" totally breaks my heart. Collecting comic books today -- at nearly $4 USD an issue -- is an expensive hobby and comic companies are going to need to adjust expectations or re-think their business model if they expect it to thrive and survive. (For the record, I do enjoy and use digital media, but believe that SOME comic books need to be appreciated as a book held in your hands.)

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What was your favorite article you have done? Justin: I hold our published articles to a really high standard (no click-bait here, folks!), so I'd probably claim my favorite article will always be the last one we just posted. Since we're a fan-site and work at our leisure, we don't have to crank out articles on a timeline and can ensure that our content is accurate and interesting to read before clicking the 'publish' button.

An article that really stands out in my mind was our 3-part interview with Michel Fiffe (writer/illustrator/creator) of COPRA. Fiffe wasn't the first comic pro we interviewed (that would be Fred Hembeck), but he was very thorough with answering our questions and was really generous with his time and seemed genuinely excited with the same comics we were. Fiffe only being a few years older than me didn't hurt, either. Since then, we've kinda developed a quasi-friendship with Fiffe (as in, we can send him an e-mail and he'll actually answer back), he even suggested the name for our fanzine ("Baxter Stock") and generously provided the cover image for our first fanzine.

The thing I am MOST proud of was the 3D DC comics computer gaming zine I created last year from scratch. I had an idea in mind that I wanted to re-create one of those 3D comics (that included the red and blue 3D glasses) that were so popular in the 1980s, and after 3 months of trial-and-error, I managed to do just that. I am personally pretty impressed with the finished product and can't believe it turned out as good as it did.

Everyone who has picked up a copy has been blown away and I am humbled by the response.

Mark: I did an article where I tracked Solomon Grundy through comics in the 1980s.

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Are you looking for contributors and if what type of contributions?

Mark: If anyone wanted to contribute, we take literally anything. Fan art, interviews, reviews, regular articles, Con experiences, fan fiction The more the merrier.

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Watchmen is perhaps the most iconic DC 80s book what is your history with the original series and how do you feel about those characters being introduced into the main DC Universe?

Mark: It's been 30 years. I have no problem with them joining the DC Universe. The original story isn't going anywhere and I am a sucker for the multiverse. If they don't get watered down it is a good thing. To me, they will always be a version of the Charlton Action Heroes, which I love. So they are a part of the DC Universe, whether that is good or bad. If they did this in 1997 it would have been too soon, but it's 2018.

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Any features coming up?

Mark: We have our fanzines, Baxter Stock, which we work on. We have two so far, and working on a third, about Vertigo. Our first was a collection of interviews and art, our second was about DC video games in the 80s. If you're interested in either, email dcinthe80s@gmail.com for more details.

Justin: We've got a few really cool interviews we've yet to post. We interviewed Jim Shooter (Marvel editor-in-chief during the early 80s) earlier this summer and we'll be posting that soon. We hope to have a few more interviews with some VERY recognizable names by the end of the summer, but we're not confirming anything just yet."

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What Are you reading currently that you recommend? Mark: I love anything by Tom King. His Batman and Mr. Miracle are two of my favorite books ever. I really enjoyed the Kamandi Challenge, which was a 12 issue series where every issue was done by a different team. I really like Steve Orlando's work on Supergirl and Justice League. I think Jeff Lemire is also great, and I'm excited he is working at DC again. I think his Sweet Tooth series that came out early this decade is the best comic in the last 20 years. I also loved Christopher Priest and Denys Cowan on Deathstroke.

Justin: Spring/Summer is VERY busy for us since it's 'convention season', so I'm typically binge-reading as much material as I can by whoever we're interviewing next. For instance, we interviewed Peter David a few weeks, so I spent a few weeks prior to that reading all the Peter David comics I could get my hands on. Typically, we like to go into an interview with a comic pro with the illusion that we are familiar with their work and know what we're talking about. ;)

Since DC announced that Brian Bendis would be joining, I'd been going back and re-reading all of his Marvel comics work from the past two decades. I'm currently working my way through his Guardians of the Galaxy stories and can confidently say that DC made an excellent acquisition. I'd recommend anything by Bendis.

Sitting on a shelf next to me is a hardcover copy of "We Told You So" by Tom Spurgeon. I'm really looking forward to digging into it after things slow down a bit.

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Thanks again to the two guys for taking the time to answer some questions about their unique site. I highly recommend checking it out on Facebook and Twitter.