Joe Orlando
Wally Wood's drawing of Joe Orlando (left) and Wood collaborating on a comics page in the early 1950s
Born	April 4, 1927(1927-04-04) Bari, Italy
Died	December 23, 1998 (aged 71) Manhattan, New York
Nationality	Naturalized American (immigrated Italian)
Area(s)	Illustrator, writer, editor
Notable works	Creepy, Mad, DC Comics
Awards	Inkpot Award, 1980 Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 2007

Joseph Orlando (April 4, 1927 — December 23, 1998) was an illustrator, writer, editor and cartoonist. He was the vice president of DC Comics for many years and also the associate publisher of Mad.

[edit] Early life

Orlando was born in Bari, Italy, emigrating to the United States in 1929. He began drawing at an early age, going to art classes at a neighborhood boys' club when he was seven years old. He continued there until he was 14, winning prizes annually in their competitions, including a John Wanamaker bronze medal. In 1941, he began attending the School of Industrial Art (later the High School of Art and Design), where he studied illustration. This school was a breeding ground for a number of comics artists, including Richard Bassford, Frank Giacoia, Larry Hama, Carmine Infantino, Rocke Mastroserio, Alex Toth, and future comics letterer Gaspar Saladino. Infantino and Orlando remained close friends for decades. While Orlando was still a student, he drew his first published illustrations, scenes of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper for a high-school textbook.

After his high school graduation, Orlando entered the U.S. Army and was assigned to the military police, doing stockade guard duty, followed by 18 months in Europe. From Le Havre, France, he was sent to Antwerp, Belgium, and then to Germany, where he stenciled boxcars and guarded strategic supplies for the occupation forces.

After his 1947 discharge, he returned to New York and began study at the Art Students League on the GI Bill. He entered the comic book field in 1949 when the packager Lloyd Jacquet assigned him to draw for the Catholic-oriented Treasure Chest. This was a "Chuck White" story that paid nine dollars a page. At the Jacquet Studio he met the artist Tex Blaisdell, and the two teamed later on many projects.

[edit] Professional career

[edit] EC and Mad

Orlando illustration for Mad.

In the early 1950s, he was an assistant to Wally Wood on stories for several publishers, including Fox, Youthful, Avon and EC Comics, before becoming a regular staff artist with EC in the summer of 1951. He was earning $25 a page at EC, and shortly after his first EC stories under his own name were published that summer, he married his first wife, Gloria, in September 1951. His contributions to EC's Weird Fantasy later earned him a ranking in Entertainment Weekly’s "Sci-Fi Top 100".

After EC, from 1956 to 1959, he drew Classics Illustrated adaptations, including Ben-Hur, A Tale of Two Cities and Rudyard Kipling's Kim. In addition to many contributions to EC's Mad (1960-69), Orlando also scripted the Little Orphan Annie comic strip beginning in 1964. He did covers for Newsweek and New Times, and his work as an illustrator appeared in National Lampoon, children's books and numerous comic books.

[edit] Creepy editor

For Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Creepy, debuting in 1964, Orlando was not only an illustrator but also a story editor on early issues. His credit on the first issue masthead read: "Story Ideas: Joe Orlando."

He also worked in toy design, packaging and advertising; sales of Harold von Braunhut's Sea Monkeys escalated considerably after Orlando drew a series of unusual advertisements visualizing the creatures' enchanted and peaceful undersea kingdom. In 1992, the short-lived live-action television show The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys used special effects make-up designs based on the character concepts created by Orlando for his Sea Monkeys illustrations.

[edit] DC Comics

Art by Orlando, letters by Todd Klein.
Created for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987).

After 16 years of freelancing, he was hired as a DC Comics editor in 1968, handling House of Mystery, Plop! and other titles, including Swamp Thing, The Witching Hour and Weird War Tales, eventually serving as DC's vice president while guiding the company's Special Projects department. During the 1980s, Orlando began teaching at the School of Visual Arts, continuing as an art instructor there for many years. Some of his outstanding students were given art assignments through his DC Special Projects department, illustrating DC style guides and sometimes debuting their work in New Talent Showcase, the 1980s revival of Showcase).

[edit] Watchmen

In 1987, he created an illustration for the supplemental text piece from Watchmen #5, a page from the comic-within-the-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter. Orlando's contribution was designed as if it were a page from the fake title; the conceit being that Orlando had been the artist for a run of stories from the fictional Tales of the Black Freighter comic. Watchmen writer Alan Moore chose Orlando because he felt that if pirate stories were popular in the Watchmen universe, DC editor Julius Schwartz would have lured Orlando into drawing a pirate comic book. In reality, however, the Black Freighter pages for the comic-within-a-comic were all drawn by series-artist Dave Gibbons. The Orlando page was the only artwork for the series not drawn by Gibbons.^[1]

DC published a Phantom comic book from 1988 to 1990; the initial mini-series (dated May-August 1988) was written by Peter David and drawn by Orlando and Dennis Janke.

Orlando had a long working association with the prolific letterer Ben Oda, roughing out display lettering effects which Oda would finish. During the 1990s, Orlando was pleased to discover that designer-typographer Rick Spanier, working on a Macintosh computer, could create polished Oda-like finishes of Orlando's roughs. These Orlando-Spanier collaborations were printed in DC's Superman Style Guide and other DC style guides.

[edit] Associate Publisher of Mad

After the death of Mad founder-publisher William Gaines in 1992, publishing company/owner Time Warner brought Mad magazine under the purview of fellow-publishing-subsidiary DC Comics. After this shift, Orlando became the magazine's Associate Publisher. Concurrently, he was involved in creating exclusive Mad products for the then-new Warner Brothers Studio Store on Fifth Avenue.

Although he retired from DC in 1996, he nevertheless maintained an office at Mad where he worked on Mad cover concepts and other projects for the next two years. At the time of his death in 1998, he was survived by his wife, Karin, and four children.

[edit] Reprints

Joe Orlando in the early 1950s

Orlando's artwork for EC Comics has been reprinted extensively in recent years by publisher and reprint rights holder Russ Cochran. Following the 2006 culmination of Cochran's Complete EC Library reprint series with the EC Picto-Fiction volumes, other EC reprint volumes featuring Orlando illustrations have been published by Steve Geppi's Gemstone Publishing in their EC Archives series.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• "Mummy's Hand," complete story by Russ Jones and Joe Orlando
• Classics Illustrated: A Tale of Two Cities, illustrated by Joe Orlando

[edit] External links

• 1998 interview with Jon B. Cooke
• Russ Jones, Joe Orlando and the Genesis of "Creepy"
• Orlando Bibliography for Jerry Bails and Hames Ware's Who's Who in American Comic Books