Jim Novak's Surprising Contribution to the Creepshow Film

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundredth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

As part of our celebration of SEVEN HUNDRED of these things, this will be a special holiday weekend where we honor seven comic book greats that we lost this year with a legend devoted to each one of them (Steve Ditko, Russ Heath, Gary Friedrich, Marie Severin, Norm Breyfogle, Carlos Ezquerra and Jim Novak). As I add the legends, you can click on the given person's name and it will bring you to their legend!

NOTE: If the CSBG Twitter page hits 11,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow the CSBG Twitter page!

COMIC LEGEND:

Jim Novak designed the actual comic book in the Creepshow film.

STATUS:

True

The comic book within the movie Creepshow is one of the oddest pieces of pop culture around.

The film, as you may or may not know, was done by Stephen King and George Romero and it was a surprise hit in 1982. The basic idea of the movie is that there is a comic book called Creepshow, a reference to old EC Comics horror comics, and then the stories from the comic book would be animated and transition into a short bit for the movie. Essentially, the comic book was used as a framing device.

The movie was a hit and they came out with a comic book based on the movie written by King and drawn by the great Bernie Wrightson (behind a Jack Kamen cover)...

However, that is oddly enough NOT the comic book from the movie. For whatever reason, they created a special comic book for the movie and then never released an official version of that comic book. Seems like a merchandizing failure, right?

In any event, the comic in the film was designed and put together by, surprisingly enough, the late Jim Novak, who was a popular Marvel letterer of the 1980s. He worked on many titles, but seemed to primarily end up on books that John Byrne and Roger Stern did (which might be a total coincidence for all I know), like Byrne's Fantastic Four run...

Byrne's second Sensational She-Hulk run...

Stern's Avengers run...

and Stern's Doctor Strange run...

He did a bunch of other books, but those are four of his most notable runs. Barry Windsor-Smith also personally brought Novak in to co-letter "Weapon X" with Smith.

In any event, Jack Kamen was working with Romero on the project and Kamen contacted Novak to ask him to help him put the book together. Their goal was that they wanted to make the book feel like a REAL comic book, so as part of that point, Novak designed and wrote copy for a number of fake comic book ads that Kamen then drew, to make it look like there were real ads mixed in with the story pages (that Kamen would then draw).

Their efforts resulted in an awesome looking book that people are OBSESSED with, as the number of amateur replicas of the movie version of the Creepshow comic book are through the roof.

Novak was a great designer. He also did great logos (although the story of him doing the famous Star Wars logo is untrue, as I covered years ago).

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Discover the major change that John Carpenter did to Halloween after a film executive that he screened an early version of the film criticized the film!

OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...