Wagner asked Grant if he could help him write the "Tarzan" comic he was working on; so began the Wagner/Grant writing partnership.

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Alan Grant is one of the comics industry's most respected writers.

amiable but forthright Scot with a wicked sense of humour, he first rose to

prominence writing Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog for British

weekly 2000AD with his friend John Wagner.

for his work on Batman: Shadow of the Bat and Lobo.

I tracked his down to his home in Essex - a stunningly beautiful 14th century

converted church, complete with stained-glass windows and a sensory-deprivation

tank in the sanctuary (I kid you not) - and started off by asking him how his

I answered an ad in the papers for "trainee journalists".

DC Thompson was a very patriarchal company to work for.

work there for life, and in return they would really look after you.

Wagner, Pat Mills and I all benefited from the fact that they gave you a

thorough training in all aspects of editorial work.

around from department to department; you were encouraged to learn other

people's jobs rather than just doing the one

My very first job in journalism - I was 18 years old - was working for DC

Thompson in what they called their General Fiction Department, and the first

week that I worked there, I was given the horoscope column to write for the

So I was Madam Gypsy Rose Lee or whatever it was...

guess it's quite a good way to learn, because it requires a certain creativity

And I know that Wagner and several other of my

friends who went through the Thompson set-up - we all ended up doing the same

You start slipping little messages in like, "Pisces: a close relative is

in danger" or "Taurus: it may be unwise to leave the house today..."

Another of my early jobs was, I was given a 75,000 word paperback novel which

they had for serialisation in their afternoon newspaper, but it was serialised

in like ten chunks of 750 words - so my job was to cut 75,000 word novel down to

wants to be a writer - they should start doing that.

any Stephen King book is always a good start, and go through it and cut it by

Then read it again, and see if it still makes sense as a story.

Okay, the early days of 2000AD - what was it like behind the scenes?

Well, not only was I behind the scenes, I was behind the scenes approximately

500 miles from where it was happening, because I was living in Scotland at the

time, and I didn't have anything to do with 2000AD other than the fact that I

was a friend of John Wagner and Pat Mills.

American comics, and had been for about the previous ten years

and Jack Kirby started the Golden Age of Marvel, I had been a Marvel Comics fan,

So John and Pat visited me with a view to

looking through all the American comics to see if there was anything that they

And it was quite funny because they went though -

I'm not saying they read them all, but they certainly flicked through many many

hundreds of American comics, and at the end of the day they said that there's

nothing there that they could use in 2000AD!

the thing that actually came closest to being any kind of consideration for a

2000AD-type story was 'Deathlok The Demolisher', which was actually very

intelligently done when it first came out.

When I was kid, I grew up on a mixture of British and American comics.

when I was eleven years old - 1960 I think it was - Marvel launched The

Fantastic Four, The Sub-Mariner, The Avengers, The X-Men and everything, and I

gave up all other comics and became a Marvel comic reader.

British comic again until 2000AD actually came out, so I never saw any copies of

John and Pat were working in comics, because when they left DC Thompson, they

went down to London and started working on the humour division at Fleetway or

IPC, whereas I had ended up somehow at DC Thompson at Romantic Fiction

went down to London, I ended up working for magazines like Honey and Loving and

Love Affair and Mirabelle and Valentine and God knows what else.

So when I eventually left IPC to go freelance, it wasn't

comics I was thinking of writing at all.

myself - how to write women's fiction, and I became a women's fiction writer, I

I wrote stuff like 'I Stole To Have An Abortion', 'My Boyfriend Was A

Hell's Angel', 'I Threw My Baby Off The London Train'... These were all first

My first ever comics story was printed round about then, I think it was in a

It was a romantic story, although even then there was

traditional romance story with a touch of horror, so people get stabbed and

It wasn't a normal story - which was I guess why they bought

The British 'Action' comic was withdrawn for being too violent, even

though they'd hit on a hugely popular formula.

carry-through from Action to 2000AD - like, 'This time it's got to be science

Well definitely, but I think the 'It's got to be science fiction' came from

Kelvin Gosnell, who worked quite closely with Pat.

involved in the creation of 2000AD, or he came along very soon afterwards.

was already working for something like Buster as what they would call an 'art

If the artist had tried to slip something through, like in the

background drawing a pair of breasts on a statue, it was the bodger's job to go

through it and white out things like that, or if the artist had signed the work,

it was the bodger's job to go through looking for signatures and white them out.

So Kevin was doing that kind of thing on Buster when 2000AD was started, and he

soon gravitated on to become Art Assistant.

Gosnell and Kevin O'Neill, although I believe it was Pat's brain-child and he

was the carry-through between Action and 2000AD. Because, having been the editor

of Action, he saw what the right type of story could do.

Now, almost all if not all of the stories in Action, as I recall, were based

on things which were culturally popular at the time, but which weren't

necessarily available to kids of Action-reader age.

instance, was their version of Jaws, and of course it was actually much more

But the kids weren't allowed to see Jaws because it

had an X or an A certificate, I dunno how they work these things.

tough cop in the manner of Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies, for

instance, which again were forbidden to kids

tie-up between things that were forbidden to kids and what was going on in

popular culture, and when they switched to 2000AD, I think it was Kelvin who

pointed out that the Star Wars movies were being made at that time, and that

they were expected to be huge, and that they should go down the path of science

It's remarkable that 2000AD has lasted almost 20 years, you know,

particularly with the amount of bitterness they've caused between themselves and

nearly everybody who's ever worked for them...

You've done a lot of writing in partnership with John Wagner.

I got a job working editorially on 2000AD when Steve McManus was the editor,

and John was writing Dredd and Strontium Dog and Robo-Hunter at the time.

sharing a house with him, so he was using me as a sounding board for his ideas

When I left Fleetway, I didn't actually leave to go freelance.

was offered another job with a guy who published puzzle magazines, and it wasn't

a great job but the money was 50% more than Fleetway were paying me.

turned up on the Monday morning at the offices to start this job, and there was

a guy I didn't recognise there, and I said "Hi, I'm Alan, I'm looking for

And the guy had sold out the week before,

That was how I ended up as a freelance writer.

freelance writer, but I had just arrived to start my job and there's no job.

And as fortune - or ill-fortune - would have it, at the

time John Wagner was suffering from some kind of illness, and he wasn't able to

maintain his obligations to write for 2000AD, so he asked if I could help him

We were sharing a house, so we were sitting around at night talking about

It made sense to formalise it and that was it, we started

We had been friends for, I dunno, a decade before that, so we

knew each other quite well, and I have to say that although I've tried writing

with several other partners, since John and I ceased writing together on a

regular basis, it's never worked out as well.

Is there a significant difference in the work you produce with him and the

Humour material is always better when there are two of you working on it.

That's why so many famous TV shows and funny movies were written by two people,

not because you get an instant reaction. Whereas if you're working on something

of a serious nature or something that means something to you or has a message

that you personally want to say, if another person is involved in the writing of

that, then the whole work becomes a matter of compromise, and you end up saying

I think John and I can pinpoint the exact moment our partnership... it didn't

fail, we stopped before it failed, but it started to falter.

Last American for Epic, with Mike McMahon as the artist, and we spent a whole

day working on something, and at the end of the day we had actually written two

pages less than we had when we started, because we had argued so much

At the same time we were writing the end of the Chopper in Oz story, and we

had - very unusually for us, because John and I don't usually disagree - but we

had a vehement argument about what should happen at the end of Chopper.

wanted Chopper to win the race, and escape from Dredd.

the race and for Dredd not only to shoot him dead but to shoot him in the back

And John's agenda was, he wanted Chopper brought up as a hero, whereas my agenda

was that I wanted Dredd painted as even more of a bastard than he already was.

And shooting Chopper in the back - I don't think he would ever have been

Anyway, we split up at that time and John actually

wrote the last instalment of the story himself.

Do you think the younger readers pick up on the irony in Dredd - the fact

Sometimes it seems to me that the irony escapes the older readers as

well! It's a really hard one for me to comment on, because when me and John

write the story, obviously we know exactly what we are getting at, and obviously

we know that there are two layers to it, and obviously we know if we're being

But we can't interpret it through anyone else's eyes.

But as you say - and I suppose it is particularly

with younger readers - the irony escapes them.

what makes Judge Dredd popular, and I figure it's because nearly everybody would

like to break many of the stupid laws which we have, but they're afraid to do

And instead of that fear translating into rebellion, it's translated in a

more politically correct way which is enjoying other people being

And it's like, watching criminals being punished has now become the major

It's like every channel, every night, you've got

programmes where the hero is our drug squads or the bill or customs and excise

men - anybody that wears a uniform is a hero.

are always shown to have no redeeming graces, like for instance if they're after

heroin guys, these guys are smuggling in forty tons of heroin and it's gonna

kill all the children in Europe and stuff like that.

With Judge Dredd, we used to think that it was a satire on that sort of

used to say, "Well, Dredd is a pointer towards the way the world's going, and if

you're not careful, that's what we're going to end up with."

Dredd's set up in something like the year 2115, the horror is we've actually

come up with Dredd laws now - almost all the world is under oppressive

I don't know if something like, say, the Internet can prevent this, with the

Information can spread faster than the authorities can

The authorities are all in the business of stopping the

spread of information, so they can control it.

because then the worst excesses of Judge Dredd would be avoided.

For instance, at the end of The Apocalypse War, we had Dredd do a really

He forced the East-Megs to select the centre of their city and

then detonate a nuclear device in it, killing millions, as if the lives of all

And actually, the way the world is, to the

authorities - to all authorities - lives don't mean anything at all.

They will kill all of us if they have to,

if they thought that it would do them any good.

Never mind all the rhetorical "do it for the good of

I saw Howard Chaykin's got a new comic out called Cyberella, and I saw that

he starts the story off with a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying that 95%

of the people in the world are sheep, and need to be told what to do.

Now, to a certain extent I can accept that.

the people who think they should be telling the other 95% what to do are people

That's where the horror comes into it, because

people like him believe that they have a right to tell other people what

Nobody has a right to tell anybody what to do, as long as their action

What did you think of the Judge Dredd movie?

Well, now you're asking... Firstly, I feel pissed off that by the time they

got around to asking John Wagner and I if we were interested in having a go at

writing a screenplay for it, they had already had fourteen screenplays written.

When they called us, we spent six weeks working on it, and we finally figured

out what we thought was the way to make Judge Dredd palatable to a mass

So we called the studio, and they immediately said, "Fax it to us,"

and we said, "Well, we've spent six weeks working on this, we wanna know if

"We'll talk about pay after we've got the idea," and

we said "No, that's what you're paying for, the idea," and they said "Well, fuck

I have lost count of the number of times that I've been phoned up by people

from the film world saying, "I've got a great new 'in' to this studio, I've got

a great new source of finance, or whatever, and we need ideas to get it started

At the moment, the people who have the option to the Lobo movie have had at

least three screenplays written, and all three of them - which I have seen,

although I'm not supposed to have - are total shite.

first twenty minutes of the movie, Lobo's a really bad bastard, doing all the

And then you get a scene of Lobo in a hospital

where his grandmother is dying, and it turns out that the reason he's committing

all these crimes and carnage and atrocity is because he loves the old lady so

much, and she's on this rarest drug in the galaxy...

So Keith Geffen and I decided we'd had enough, and we've done a treatment for

a Lobo movie off our own backs, send it in to the studio, and the feedback that

we got back from everybody except the executives is that it's great, this is the

But the feedback that we get back from the

executives is "Oh, well, we're not sure about this.

we're used to working with professional movie writers."

the editors I was talking about earlier.

purpose is to justify their own existence rather than to make money or produce

(laughter) Right, the finished product, the Dredd movie! I thought

that visually it was very good, I thought Kevin Walker and the guy who did Mean

Machine, Chris Halls, they did a marvellous job, it looked really great.

kernel of what was wrong with the movie is the fact that, instead of telling Sly

Stallone, "You're being paid nine million dollars for this, Sly! Act the part of

Judge Dredd!" - Sly said, "I'm being paid nine million dollars for this - write

Judge Dredd to fit my pre-existing character."

tough-guy, Judge Dredd had to be a nice tough-guy.

I mean you can put it another way and say, what

they were trying to do was gloss over the fact that Judge Dredd is a fascist,

because they figure you can't have a fascist as a hero.

Now, I haven't seen the Tank Girl movie, but I've read the comic adaptation,

and they changed the essence of Tank Girl.

shit which she'd never had, and it made her into something which she wasn't.

Tank Girl was Tank Girl because she was anarchic, and they tried to give an

anarchic character a structure, and of course the movie was gonna be a failure.

If you look at the one character that has been a consistent hit in the

movies, it's Batman, and that's because they haven't changed the essence of

Batman. Batman is still an obsessed loner who fights crime because his parents

were killed in front of him when he was a child.

They made the Joker the guy who did it, but that didn't matter - the

basic kernel of Batman is at the centre.

, they changed what was at the core of Tank Girl.

any of these versions of Lobo that they've got scripts for so far, they'll have

changed the essence of Lobo, and it'll be a failure.

It's like Hollywood trying to cash in on teen crazes - you just know, you

just need to hear the title of it to know they're not in step with the audience

happened in the Dredd movie, they didn't get it.

and it's hard to do, but had they come to John and I at the start, when they

first decided to make a movie - if they'd said, "Do you wanna have some input on

this," we could have corrected every mistake that they made all the way along.

Instead of an eighty-five million dollar failure, they could have had an

But there you go - as I say, it's easier to say

that, and it's a lot harder to have proved it at the time.

with Lobo, and it'll be a lot harder to do it.

The Bogie Man was an extremely funny independent comic about an escaped

lunatic who thinks he is Humphrey Bogart, set in modern-day Glasgow.

You'll have to forgive my perception of time, I can't tell you what year this

was, but the first year that DC started looking for British talent, they sent

Dick Giordano over to this country to interview people who might want to go to

I think they called people like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons,

John Wagner and I decided that we should get in on this trend as

well, and we came up with this character who was a detective.

actually set I believe in New York, and it was The Bogie Man.

I think that at that time Ian Gibson, we wanted him to be the artist on it,

but he read the script and he wasn't amused.

"No, we don't publish this kind of thing."

O'Neill, and he said, "No, we don't do this."

Vertigo, I guess that it could have been published by Vertigo.

Anyway, it just languished in a file, and we thought no more about it, until

it was announced that Glasgow was going to be the European City of Culture.

Robin Smith and John McShane, who owned AKA Comics in Glasgow, were talking, and

John McShane was saying that Glasgow was gonna get world-wide publicity because

and really they should publish a Glasgow comic.

bright idea - he remembered this Bogie Man thing that John and I had done and he

said, "Would that work if you set it in Glasgow?"

It probably worked much better in Glasgow than in New York.

It was much funnier than it would have been if we'd done

John McShane with his partner George set up

a company called Fat Man Press, and they published the first Bogie Man

However, because of a series of misunderstandings and the fact that

they didn't realise that publishing is as hard as it is to make a profit in,

I believe that at 28,000 copies, The Bogie Man's

still the best-selling independent comic ever in this country.

50,000 copies were stolen from a warehouse, the comic shop

was broken into and thousand Bogie Man T-shirts were stolen - y'know, just a

whole load of things like that, and the publisher's budget ran out.

didn't actually appear until a year after issue 1, and nothing is hot enough to

Channel Four, BBC and Scottish Television approached us to

buy Bogie Man for television, and because the publisher was acting as our

agent - that was normal in these cases - and as we didn't have any

first-hand knowledge of either STV or Channel Four, we chose the BBC.

Bogie Man as you know is a farce, and it is impossible to translate

But at the time, Robbie Coltrane wanted to escape his comic actor

image and he insisted that Bogie Man be written to give emotional depth to

So that instead of just being a lunatic, he was a lunatic

with a purpose, a lunatic for a reason, or a lunatic with a cause,

whole search for his father's death and all that sort of nonsense.

totally lost the farce-like intensity of it - and having watched the first

episode of Cracker, it was obvious from that that Robbie had found what he

just fucking left Bogie Man alone, ya bastard,

Because, like the Dredd movie, it turned into a hybrid.

and half of it, you're going, "What's all this about?" Whereas they should have

Because the first one was a flop in the ratings, it

meant that they didn't pick up on the Chinatoon story and they didn't pick up on

the Bogie Goes To Manhattan, and the fourth and final Bogie Man story - Return

To Casablanca - is still languishing in our Bogie file.

because we don't have a publisher for it.

We got excited about two years ago - Andy Helfer's Paradox Press decided that

they would like to publish Bogie Man in their little format books, and they told

us that if it was successful, they'd then commission Return To Casablanca for an

original Bogie novel, which is all we want to do.

that we want to tell, and just leave it there.

And the contract stipulates that we can't do a new version for any other

publisher until they've done their version

Although I can complain that I'm one of the only three people in the country

who's had a show on the BBC and hasn't been paid for it.

went bankrupt, so John and I haven't even got our writer's fee from the BBC!

A lot of your writing includes references to old movies.

I guess these were movies that we were brought up on, black and

From a writer's point of view, almost any movie which had Humphrey

Bogart or Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney, just having these people in them

did something to lift it above the normal quality.

say, the Three Stooges, although they're a bit slow compared to comedy now, and

Laurel and Hardy - if you can slow yourself down to that, in essence they're

much funnier than almost anything that I see now.

I was a kid that's the sort of thing I was seeing at the Saturday morning

matinee or whatever, but I've always had a great love for black and white

I was gonna say it's not just the nostalgia, but it might just be

I prefer black and white comics as well.

comics and to me a colour comic is an American comic, and when I see 2000AD now,

and I see that it's all painted colour, it looks like segments taken out of a

graphic novel rather than a vibrant, spontaneous weekly comic

feel that sort of put it in tune with the readers.

Well, Batman's always been my favourite comic character, even though I gave

up on DC Comics when Marvel launched The Fantastic Four etc. I didn't buy an DC

Comics for at least the next 20 years, so I'd no idea what was happening with

Batman, I learned about Neal Adams and stuff in retrospect.

and I had tried to get DC Comics interested in us, and DC Comics weren't

The first was Bogie Man, the second was Bob The

Galactic Bum, which they finally got around to doing last year, and the third

one was, I think, The Chronicles of Ghengis Grimtoad, which eventually was

mutated into a thing that Ian Gibson illustrated and that Marvel UK put out.

Anyway, they had turned them all down and John and I were at our wits end.

Totally out of the blue we got a call from Denny O'Neill saying, "I've just

taken over as Editor on Detective Comics, I'm looking for a new writing team.

I've read your Judge Dredd, we think you could do Batman in that kind of gritty

So we did The Ventriloquist story, and he said okay, you've got the job.

John and I wrote another three together before John decided to pull out.

Sales of Detective were below the break-even point, and I believe that even

though it was DC's oldest comic, they were considering closing Detective Comics

down at that time, because it was selling so badly

But then the first Batman movie came out with its

attendant hype, and sales of Detective Comics went up by close to a thousand per

From that high point they fell gradually over the next couple of years,

but then they took off again when the Knightfall thing started in Batman.

I like it because Batman has always been my favourite character.

surprised that I'm still working on it after all this time, and in an ideal

world I would actually have gone to work on something else, but like everybody

else I've got the rent to pay, and it's not easy to give up a job if you haven't

So what kind of story would you like to do ideally?

Well, ideally I would like to do my own comic.

it is the way of the future for anti-authoritarian freelancers like myself, who

find that many editors are so fucking stupid that they could do it themselves.

believe that self-publishing is the real answer.

spent my entire working life, or almost all my working life, as a freelance,

which means that I am dependent on other people coming to me with characters and

saying, "Could you write a story about this character for us?" To self-publish

something means that I've got to come up with a character of my own, which is

And I think it would be easier to do that when

you're young and at the start of your career rather than suddenly having to do

it - not when you're thinking of retiring, but you know what I mean?

years old, and the older you get, the harder it gets to make any kind of change

So ideally, I've got things worked out for it, I've got artists planned, I've

spoken to artists, and they keep trying to gee me into doing it, I've got plans

And it would not be to please anybody except for me.

If people don't like it, they could fuck off and not buy it.

it, that would be okay, but at the end of the day I would still be able to say,

have been partially developed, but because of my regular work, which I've got to

do to make a living, I don't have the time to devote to it that I would like to

However, I'm hoping that after this summer...

I'm doing the junior novelisation for the new Batman movie, and they've asked

have always been on the lookout for alternatives to comics, and we have tried,

you would not believe how hard we've tried.

stories which are published by Hamlin and Purnell and various other publishers.

We tried doing some stuff for radio which didn't work out, we tried doing some

stuff for TV which hasn't worked out yet, although we've got a brilliant idea

for a situation comedy, the best sitcom since The Young Ones, in fact.

well-developed, there's only the last part of it to be done, but every time we

sit down and start on it, something seems to happen.

We've tried a gag strip for The Daily Mirror and The Sun, both of which had

the same reaction to it - "We thought it was hilarious, it made us laugh out

it would upset too many of our readers."

because I've been involved in this business long enough to know that ideas are

Everybody who works in this business should have a hundred ideas a

The hard part is firstly, finding a good idea, and secondly, putting that

And this gag-strip that John and I did for the

newspapers, I'm not saying it would be a phenomenon, but it would be very

popular, just because of the nature of it

first it sold something like 250 copies and they were doing it as a home

It required the marketing deal to expose it to the audience that it

Instead of comics fans it was kids; obviously

It's galling that, having had an idea that has global potential, we can't

even get it published in this country because they're afraid that it'll upset

Although they themselves - they the editors - think it's funny -

so funny that they laughed out loud - they are trying to do it for the sake of

If they think it's funny, other people will think it's funny as well.

Anyway, it's not just cynicism, that - there's truth to it.

organisation has been set up - any group - it's almost impossible to get it to

close down again, whether its objectives have been achieved or not.

a life of its own which seeks to kill competition off at the roots.

It's what makes it harder for lots of these young kids to get into

comics now, although there are so many people looking for work that you could

almost put out a proper little comic aimed specifically at people who wanted to

I've thought about writing a book - "How I Made A Million

Writing Comics" - although I could call it "How I Made A Million Writing A Book

Called 'How I Made A Million Writing Comics'"!

It's interesting to hear you talk about self-publishing, because Alan

Moore has been talking about producing his own magazine...

I think that would be great, and it would be the perfect way in which to view

Alan and Alan's views, rather than filtering Alan through the medium of Image

Yeah, I sincerely believe it's the way of the future.

just that for anybody who's set in their ways, it's really difficult to break

out of them and break into self- publishing, and to a large extent economic

necessity is what's gonna drive people into it.

If you did do an anthology comic, what sort of stuff would you want to

I'm not telling you that - because then you'd go and do it! (laughter)

It's really easy to sit around and talk about something like that - the hard

However, let me put it this way - it wouldn't be a

case of "get the old guys together again to show what we could do".

a case of utilising the wannabes and the people who are on the point of making

There comes a point in everybody's would-be career

where, if their confidence isn't built up, everything goes downhill after that.

Now for me it was when that editor rejected my first comic stories when I was 17

He cost me ten years worth of comics writing.

I never tried comics writing again for ten years.

not what we want - but if you did this and that in the next thing and tried

something else", gave me encouragement, hope, optimism, it might have changed

I might have been writing Batman ten years before

So I feel really bad when I see other people

having difficulty, when they have talent.

Isn't this a risky time to develop a new comic?

greatest depression that the greatest opportunities arise.

off a successful comic, or successful line of comics, could be in at a turn of

, and they will be first, and they will make the most money out of it.

Fleetway in particular - and this isn't just their comics division - Fleetway is

renowned for being a follower rather than a leader.

motto, "Wait until somebody has a success, and then we put our vast resources

If you look at what Fleetway have done over the years,

they've hardly ever started any trends, but when a trend has started, they jump

Whoever starts the next trend, or whoever's in there at the start of the

next trend is gonna make a fortune out of it.

Even if you could predict it, it has to be something which

For a while it looked like Manga was going to be it,

but I watched half a dozen Manga movies, and figured, that's enough.

all that I ever want of it, so for me, it didn't really work.

What advice would you give to would-be comics writers?

First, if you believe in yourself, don't let anybody else put you off.

doesn't mean to say, don't listen to other people's advice, but don't let

anybody talk you out of it if you have a sincere belief in yourself.

Quite often when I write back to people who are trying to

get stuff accepted into the market, I use the example of a crime writer called

John Creasey, who did a character called The Toff, who you may not have heard

of, but he was quite popular I think in the 1950s.

tens of millions of copies in languages all over the world, but Creasey had 450

rejections from publishers for various stories before he got his first Toff

I don't know why it sold tens of millions of copies, but the point is he

believed in it enough to keep on doing it, and if you believe in your stuff then

It's very easy, and I speak from personal

experience, it's very easy to be put off.

A lot of the characters you've written tend to be outsiders.

part of yourself your own character coming through?

I love people in general, I love the idea of people and

I love the idea of Mankind living in harmony... but I find that on an individual

ideally, I would like to live on a secluded cliff-top fifty miles from the

nearest civilisation, and once a month I would go and get my groceries and that

The only people I would see would be the people who considered it

worth making the effort to make the journey.

So instead of some rocky island in the Atlantic, I live in

Do you feel a moral responsibility towards your readers?

I wouldn't write any story with a moral contrary to what I believe

(pause) I'm just trying to reconcile that with Lobo...

(laughter) You've got to treat Lobo the way that I treat him - he's a

He's a cartoon character, and DC don't accept this.

Lobo's part of the DC Universe and that he's a superhero, whereas I know that

Lobo's like Bugs Bunny, that's what Lobo is.

that, and consequently a lot of the stuff I write that is parody gets censored.

I don't know if you saw Lobo Goes To Hollywood, but that had to be re-written

Under American law, if something is stated to be a work of parody, for

instance National Lampoon or Mad Magazine, they have then got some amendment

under the American Constitution which protects their free speech to make parody

But unless DC announce that Lobo is a parody, Lobo doesn't enjoy

At the moment I believe that DC is being pursued by Johnny and

They're blues guitarists who were also pop stars during the late

They're albinos, they've got white hair and pink

eyes, and they're shit-hot blues guitarists.

Anyway, Joe Lansdale - I think in a Jonah Hex comic - as a tribute to

the Winter Brothers, used a pair of villains called the Winter Brothers who were

- and I quote, I think - "Pig-fucking cannibals".

course when this came out in print and the Winter Brothers saw it, they failed

to see it as the homage which Joe Lansdale meant it

I got a call from the editor of Lobo to say that he was in a bit of a

quandary because in an issue of Lobo that I did with Martin Emond, I had called

them Johnny and Edgar Summer, and although they weren't cannibals and they

weren't pig-fuckers, they were remarkable mainly for their stupidity...

(laughter) But the DC lawyers had sent a memo around asking everybody if

they had ever mentioned these brothers, and to let them know.

handed over, and since then Lobo scripts have been subjected to quite a lot of

There's one Lobo script - which was originally called "The

Hand-To-Hand Job"... (laughter) ... which was changed to something like

"It's A Man's World" and famous artist Frank Quitely who is doing the Flex

Mentallo stuff with Grant Morrison, he was the artist on it, so he did all the

They have got a 22-page Lobo sex story, which they refuse to

The guy gets kidnapped by this male-liberation

group because his exposure of the female body is responsible for female lib

This is one of these Iron John male-bonding groups who kidnap him and they're

gonna torture him, and Lobo is hired to get him back.

funny, but it's never going to see the light of day!

into quicksand, and he's in danger of drowning - even his great powers can't get

out of quicksand - so he gives the dog these detailed instructions - "You've

gotta go do this, get that and save me".

over the page, the dog's seen this female dog (laughter).

, and anyway, it gets involved its own adventure, and it's only on the

second to last page it remembers it has to go back and save Lobo.

artist drew the dog complete with bollocks in every picture, and in the pictures

where the dog has a secondary role, like something else is happening, he's drawn

the dog just sitting casually scratching itself and licking itself!

paid for it, but now they've binned it - they're never going to put it in an

You've described yourself as anti-authoritarian.

The way I see things, only an anti-authoritarian is capable of any

Almost all authority in today's world is corrupt.

The people in positions of power use deceit to get themselves elected,

manipulation to keep the masses enslaved, and force or threat of force to keep

Unfortunately, the example they set means that their evil

has spread to almost every part of life today.

How can anyone whose existence depends on deceiving or threatening or

assaulting other human beings possibly feel any sense of responsibility? Of

course, all authorities trot out the same irrational reasons for their psychotic

behaviour - they claim that everything they do is for the good of 'the state',

or 'the country', or ' the ruling ideology'.

reasoning which allows Deng to crush protestors with tanks, or Yeltsin to

slaughter 80,000 Chechenians, or John Major to keep the war alive in Northern

Look at it this way: when Fred West killed a dozen innocent people, he was

branded one of the most evil men in history.

speaking - behaviourally speaking - speaking from the point of view of all those

innocent dead people - which man is the more evil?

Or take the right-wing president of Albania, whose Shik secret police have

tortured and slain many tens of thousands of innocent people

been given billions of dollars by Britain, Europe and America, whose governments

were all aware that money would be used to kill his political opponents.

they gave that money anyway - they took it from honest, hardworking Brits like

you and me, gave it to a psychotic mass-murderer, and now they profess shock

The truth is, the authorities don't give a

shit how this dictator treats his 'subjects'.

them share a terrible secret - they would just as happily torture and kill their

own people if they thought that they had to.

In his book "The Insanity of Normality", America's top psychologist Dr Arno

Gruen remarks that he applied the test for psychotic behaviour used in mental

institutions to American presidents Bush and Nixon

Gruen concluded that, if they hadn't been politicians, they'd have been forcibly

Do you get the feeling that comics are diversifying now to seek out new

Oh yeah, yeah, and I think that quite a good job is being made of it in the

Although I used to be a science fiction fan, I'm not

particularly a science fiction fan any longer.

superhero fan, I'm not particularly a superhero fan any longer.

the soap opera which most superhero comics are

I'm 47 years old, I should be tired of it, y'know?

But the whole thing needs a fresh slant on it, in

the way that Frank Miller and Alan Moore gave the whole market a fresh slant

Miller's take on Batman took it back to its roots

but in a context that we could relate to.

Having said that, the other side of that coin is, very few people are

character creators, and you notice that characters like Batman and almost all of

the Marvel characters and almost all of the 2000AD characters were created by a

Wagner and Mills for 2000AD, Kirby for Marvel, and

Bob Kane and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson on the Batman stuff.

that very few people have, to continue to spew out new characters and make them

And what I do and what most other people in this

business do is to interpret characters that these few character creators have

I mean, both Miller and Moore fall into the category of character

interpreters rather than character creators.

Alan Moore's ever done, there's only one comic still going, at least for DC,

that has his stuff in it, and that's Hellblazer with John Constantine.

they've been using ideas that Alan gave them.

The whole of Vertigo is based on his ideas, isn't it?

The guy's a fucking volcano of ideas, they

should never have let him go in the way that they did.

Because they would rather bite off the hand

that feeds them than allow the hand to have any kind of share in the profits

Have you ever been tempted to tell a company or an editor to get lost?

Ah... Yes, I have told editors - it's not anything I would want to talk

about, but yes, I certainly can be a fairly forthright person.

When I first started off as a freelance,

I was the National Union of Journalists Freelance Organiser, and had several

brushes with management which may have coloured their attitudes towards me in

It was the same people who fired me that I came up against fighting

But I quarrelled with the Union as well - I quarrel with all

and basically the Union fired me as well!

they didn't fire me, but I resigned from the Union.

the same as the employers, in different ways.

purports to tell you what to do, if you're not harming anybody else in what you

do, everybody who purports to tell you what to do is wrong.

but I don't know how entertaining it is.

Norm Breyfogle where I'm attempting to have Anarky espouse my own political

At the time that I created Anarky, I thought I was more or less an

I realise that I'm not an anarchist, I'm something else.

sure that there's a name for it, but like I said earlier, my observation is that

almost everything in society is based on deceit, and the ones who commit the

greatest deceit have to have armed force to back them up.

apparently live in a democracy, if there's anything that you don't agree with...

Let's say that you don't agree with your Income Tax being used to subsidise

arms companies that are selling arms to the Indonesians that killed 300,000

If you don't agree with that you've only got one option - vote Labour at

Which won't make any difference, because they give the same

So there's something evil going on here.

Money is taken off us - because if you refuse to pay it, you are put in jail,

and they'll take whatever you've got anyway - so we are being forced to

give money to make guns to shoot innocent people on the other side of the world.

make a living out of deceit have got any reason for doing anything at all like

that. Sue forbids me to watch the news or current affairs programmes or anything

else like that on the television any more, because it is a constant stream of

outright lies, sly deceits and subversive non-sequiturs.

I read The Guardian, and The Guardian has been raving about this new sitcom

But I watched it, and all I want to do is hit these people.

have a big chain around my fist and just pound it into their stupid, lying,

And yet, according to The Guardian it's the high-point

, and it's like life has been reduced to a series of fucking

one-liners, and there's no context for any of it.

context, and hopefully I can put it over via Anarky.

Alan Moore has said that he doesn't want to use superhero stories to

discuss important issues - whereas you don't seem to have a problem with

Maybe Alan's just quicker on the uptake than I am.

that it's impossible to deal with many real-life situations in comics for the

simple reason that all comics are founded on irrationality.

It is not possible to use irrationality as a

foundation for the rational treatment of story subject material.

if there really was a Batman, he'd have used his incredible detective brain to

have figured out exactly what is wrong with the world.

Superman, he'd immediately be able to see through the web of lies that enmeshes

If there really was a Green Lantern, he'd fuck off and live on

However, never let it be said that I don't enjoy butting my head against a

Do you feel like you're trying to 'teach' people--?

No, no. Fuck, I'm a hopeless teacher, but through the medium of what I hope

is an entertaining story, I want people who read the story to think about it,

I believe - and I'm not alone here, this

isn't any sort of elitist nonsense, in fact it's anti-elitist nonsense - but I

believe that I have seen through something that, so far, not many people have

seen through, and that in that the near future, an awful lot more people are

going to have to see through, because we cannot go on the way that we are.

speaking globally, where tens of millions of people are dying every year, for no

these people that are dying could be buying my comics, you know?

making me rich and instead they're dying!

the more that I look into it, the underlying reason behind all of it, and I

don't want to be too simplistic, but... Ah fuck, there's not any way of me

telling you this without going into the whole fucking thought behind it, okay?

It's generally accepted that consciousness has been evolving since Man first

evolved as a separate species around two million years ago, and that

consciousness is supposed to have evolved gradually since then.

Julian Jaynes, about twenty years ago, came out with a radical theory - that

consciousness was only invented less that 3,000 years ago, as a result of

Prior to that point - and he has given evidence that

has swayed me, I believe him - prior to that point, man was an unthinking,

unconscious animal who was capable of arithmetic, hieroglyphics, reasoning,

astronomy, astrology, but he did not have ego-consciousness that allowed him to

think in blueprints and maps and metaphors the way we do.

society became so complex around 1,000 BC that the old ways of doing things

could no longer stand the sheer pressure, society collapsed and

ego-consciousness was born out of that collapse in society.

Now the extrapolations from Jaynes' theory is that for the last two and a

half thousand years approximately, since the golden age of consciousness in

Greece, we have been living under a particular paradigm which is wrong.

In ancient Greece the two philosophical schools basically were Plato's, which

held that Mankind was by nature a brute and an animal, and needed an elitist

government to look after it - much as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say - and

Aristotle, who said that Man is basically good and kind and decent and gets on

okay with other men, as long as some bastard doesn't come along and try to

impose an external authority on him, which is basically what my philosophy would

For the last 2,500 years, the Western world has followed Plato's ideas.

form the ideological bed on which all government by force or coercion is

he 'reasoned' that some men have golden souls, and that this entitles

them to rule the men with 'silver souls', who still get to lord it over Joe

Public, who only has a crappy bronze soul.

country/flag/ideology/religion is always worth more than the actual human

This allows Marxism, fascism, Catholicism, Islam to slaughter anyone

who refuses to accept the 'one great truth' which they always profess to have.

If I can divert us again for a moment; in the harshest economic terms, there

are only two kinds of people in the world.

and values to sell or exchange with others... and Non-producers.

recognised that certain non-producers (the sick, old, young) must be cared for.

But there is a class of non-producer which seeks deliberately to live off the

producers; call them parasites, or leeches.

facets of life produces some interesting results - chiefly that politicians,

royals, religious leaders, lawyers, bureaucrats, gurus, and many journalists,

Since the discovery of rational consciousness, they have constantly abused

rational consciousness to provide their own unearned livings - only possible by

Now, for the first time in recorded history,

there are more leeches than there are producers.

global civilisation continues to become more complex, at an ever-increasing

The mumbo-jumbo voodoo answers given by all politics,

religion and philosophy are found to be wanting.

spreads, the parasites are increasingly revealed for what they are.

In a perfect world, the parasites would all just fade away and die.

real world, it is evident they will never give up their unearned privileges.

They have now embarked on the greatest feeding frenzy in history in a desperate

attempt to grab what they can before the planet goes down the drain.

this is also totally irrational behaviour.

thought that keeps me going - one by one the people of the world are going to

They're going to realise - there are no Messiahs, no Gods,

any more than there is a need for force-backed government.

I'll tell you, though - it's really hard to get that across in a comic book!

Alan Grant first entered the comics industry in 1967 when he became an editor for D.C. Thomson before moving to London from Dundee in 1970 to work for IPC on various romance magazines. After going back to college and having a series of jobs, Grant found himself back in Dundee and living on Social Security. He then met John Wagner, another former D.C. Thompson editor, who was helping put together a new science fiction comic for IPC, "2000 AD", and was unable to complete his other work.


As of February 2019 the song has sold 132,000 units in the United Kingdom making it Marina's 4th best selling single in the United Kingdom as of February 2019.

(meta data) TITLE: Marina announces new single: Her biggest songs revealed

# Marina has announced her new single Handmade Heaven so let's look back at her Top 5 biggest songs

## Before we get new Marina music, we celebrate the best of what came before...

Marina and the Diamonds is making her long awaited return this week with her new single, called Handmade Heaven.

Now just going by Marina - a decision she says doesn't have a big reason behind it and that "it just felt natural and right to me" - it's the singer-songwriter's first headline release in four years following two collaborations with Clean Bandit.

To celebrate her proper return, she recently posted a clip of her evolution as an artist, looking back over ten years since her first release:

When it comes to Marina's music, expecting the unexpected is the norm, and going by her recent posts on Twitter, she's got a few surprises in store for her next collection.

"When people hear the first song they'll probably think 'Oh, I think I know what this album is gonna sound like'," she said.

When it comes to chart success, Marina has been pretty consistent on the Official Albums Chart, where all three of her records have peaked inside the Top 10, including 2012's chart-topping Electra Heart.

"Rule Number 1 is that you've got to have fun..." goes the first of Marina's instructions on how to be an A-grade player.

It was the third and final single from her Electra Heart album (added to the tracklist after the record's release) and missed the Top 40, peaking at 88, but ranks as her fifth biggest track to date with 95,000 combined sales.

A fan favourite from her debut album Family Jewels, I Am Not A Robot is Marina at her quirkiest but also her most vulnerable.

At the time, she said the song was "me singing to myself.

It's me saying, stop being so ridiculous, you can't let having a fear of failing hold you back and you're just one person."

The single became her second Top 40 single at 26 and has shifted 132,000 combined sales.

#### 3. Baby (with Clean Bandit and Luis Fonsi)

Marina snuck in her name change on last year's Clean Bandit/Luis Fonsi collaboration, a latin guitar-flecked number that sets the tone for her upcoming, radio-ready pop.

It's her third biggest single with 207,000 combined sales, powered by 16 million streams.

A whopping great chorus, sharp lyrics about being "obsessed with the mess that's America" and the best use of a cod-American 'Oh my GAWD!' since Janice in Friends

, Hollywood is quintessential Marina and is one of her best performing singles, peaking at 12 and with combined sales to date of 211,000.

The lead from her Electra Heart album saw Marina take on the female archetype of drama queen, the result a part Mean Girls, part Kate Bush pop monster.

It narrowly missed the Top 10 (just 545 sales away on its first week!) but remains her biggest single overall with 334,000 combined sales.

Look over Marina's complete Official UK Chart history in full

Pink celebrates her third UK Number 1 album with Hurts 2B Human

Marina and the Diamonds shares update on new album

Marina & The Diamonds updates fans on new album: "I'm almost ready"

I Am Not a Robot debuted at number 74 in the United Kingdom, two weeks later the song reached a new peak position of number 26. In total the song was present for 7 weeks on the chart.


Modie's brother, Arthur Spiegel, was the great-grandfather of Spike Jonez.

(meta data) TITLE: Modie J. Spiegel | Immigrant Entrepreneurship

(meta data) PUBLISHER: German Historical Institute

## Modie Spiegel, along with his younger brothers Sidney and Arthur, expanded their father's erstwhile Chicago furniture retail business into one of America's leading mail order firms, the Spiegel Company.

Social Status and Immigrant Entrepreneurship

his four decades at the helm of the Spiegel Company (from 1893 to 1933), Modie Spiegel

(born April 21, 1871 in Chicago, IL; died January 8, 1943 in Kenilworth, IL),

Chicago furniture retail business into one of America's leading mail order

In the process, the Spiegel brothers became innovators in credit

merchandizing, installment plan sales, and advertising techniques.

publication of the iconic Spiegel catalog, beginning in 1905, defined the

company's image and popularity among its millions of customers throughout much

of the twentieth century. Although Spiegel, Inc. (as the company was later

renamed) would never come close to its main competitors Sears, Roebuck &

Co. and Montgomery Ward in terms of overall sales, the company nevertheless managed

to capture and retain a distinctive segment of the mail order market by

specializing in apparel, home furnishings, and accessories aimed primarily at middle-class

Joseph Spiegel, also known as Modie, was the oldest son of Joseph Spiegel (1840-1918)

According to family legend, his nickname, which he used officially

later in life, came about as the result of the persistent mispronunciation of his

father, Joseph Spiegel, was a German Jew who, together with his parents and

three sisters, immigrated to the United States as an eight-year-old in September

The Spiegel family left their home in the small village of Abenheim, near

the city of Worms in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, during the violent revolutionary

turmoil that engulfed the German states in 1848 and 1849

departure, Joseph's parents, the Rabbi Moses Spiegel and his wife Regina (née

Greenebaum) had become disillusioned with the political situation in their

homeland, and they were particularly concerned about rising anti-Jewish sentiment

Their firstborn son, the adventurous and rebellious

Marcus Spiegel (1829-64) had become actively involved with the liberal-democratic

revolutionaries after joining Franz Sigel's Landsturm

regiment, which fought against government troops in the state of Baden.

uprising appeared destined to fail, and it was not long before the rebels started

With Marcus missing in action and presumed

dead, the Spiegel family feared a devastating backlash and decided to flee the

In August 1848, Moses and Regina Spiegel, their son Joseph, and their

daughters Sarah, Minna, and Theresa crossed the border into France and headed

to Le Havre, where they boarded the ship Española,

their arrival in America, the Spiegel family quickly settled among the sizable

community of Jewish immigrants around Manhattan's Lower East Side

unable to speak English, Moses Spiegel earned a meager living by peddling

Regina Spiegel died about a year later, most likely

as a result of a disease contracted during the Atlantic crossing

Moses Spiegel found it difficult to cope with the loss of his wife and to care for

he began to adjust to his new situation.

original profession and eventually achieved great respect within the Jewish community

Meanwhile,Marcus Spiegel suddenly reappeared.

He had survived the revolution in Germany

and had made his way to the United States by the spring of 1849.

however, did not stay in New York for long; rather, he decided to seek his

fortune elsewhere: first in Chicago, where he found work as a dry goods clerk,

and then in Millersburg, Ohio, where he married Caroline Hamlin and fathered

As the Civil War began, he became a staunch abolitionist, and in

November 1861, he joined the Union Army's 67th Volunteer Infantry

Marcus Spiegel was quickly promoted to the

rank of colonel, thanks to his prior military experience in Germany

a war hero, was wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg, and died on May 4, 1864, in

a Confederate attack at Snaggy Point, Louisiana.[4]

members of the Spiegel family left New York as well.

Sarah Spiegel married Michael Greenebaum (her second cousin), the owner of a

Her younger sister Theresa followed suit in 1856,

when she married Henry Liebenstein, a successful Chicago furniture merchant and

For his part, Joseph Spiegel worked as an

apprentice in several retail stores in New York until 1862.

example of his older brother, Joseph enlisted as a sutler[5]

as both headed south to Louisiana as part of General Ulysses S. Grant's army in

There, Joseph witnessed his brother's death in battle and

ended up as a prisoner of war at Fort Camp, Texas, where he remained until May

, Joseph Spiegel joined his sisters in Chicago, where he entered

into the furniture business of his brother-in-law, Henry Liebenstein.

Henry quickly became formal business partners, and Henry helped him set up a

small home furnishings retail shop on Wabash Avenue, in downtown Chicago

the next five years, the business thrived and their relationship became even

closer when Joseph, at the age of thirty, married Henry's niece, nineteen-year-old

Matilda Liebenstein, on June 22, 1870.[7]

ten months later, Joseph and Matilda Spiegel celebrated the birth of their

Little Modie was barely five months old when

the most devastating catastrophe in Chicago's history occurred – the Great

Raging for over thirty-six hours, the fire

destroyed approximately 18,000 structures in an area of about four square miles,

killed about 300 people, and left roughly one third of Chicago's 300,000 residents

Although Joseph Spiegel's furniture shop was ultimately destroyed in the flames,

he frantically managed to rescue most of his merchandise as the fire was

spreading and stored it out of harm's way in the backyard of his house at 833

Thus, only days after the Great Chicago Fire, Joseph Spiegel

was able to reopen his furniture business in a temporary location (at 320

Michigan Avenue), and within a year, J. Spiegel and Company had returned to a

brand new building at 222 Wabash Avenue, where the business enjoyed a brisk

rise in sales as the massive effort to rebuild Chicago moved forward.[9

1872, Joseph and Matilda Spiegel had a second son, Sidney.

Spiegels had become well-established among Chicago's bourgeoisie.

members of the small Sinai Congregation and practiced Reform Judaism.[10]

Although they maintained their distinctive religious identity, the Spiegels

appear to have been well-assimilated and thoroughly integrated into American

Joseph Spiegel joined a Masonic Lodge and various

he built up an extensive network of contacts with other entrepreneurs and

and later also assumed civic responsibilities as a board member of the

Joseph's far-reaching connections proved to be very useful for his business.

the sharp economic downturn in 1873, he entered into a new business partnership

in fine furniture, retail, and some wholesale, and it also offered upholstering

services to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive market (Chicago's

furniture manufacturing industry was second only to that of New York; with over

a hundred manufacturers, it employed approximately 7,000 workers).[13]

The business was profitable, largely due to Joseph's merchandizing skills and effective

and Sidney must have had a comfortable yet unremarkable childhood.[14]

They were joined (somewhat unexpectedly) by a third brother, Arthur, in 1884.

at the age of seventeen, Modie entered his father's business as a salesman.

thereafter, Sidney also joined the firm as a part-time bookkeeper, while

attending the Bryant and Stratton Business College.[15

The Spiegel brothers were being groomed as their father's heirs and successors.

and Company continued to expand in the late 1880s.

home furniture and "high art novelties," the firm faced stiff competition from

middle-class Chicagoans, who typically paid cash, but who were also quite

In order to lure more customers from the suburbs and surrounding

rural communities into the store, Spiegel began issuing its first advertisement

However, many of these new customers, some of whom travelled significant

distances to downtown Chicago, proved to be very slow to pay for their purchases.

This left Spiegel with overstocked warehouses of unsold merchandise and quickly

plunged the company into great financial difficulties.

business from bankruptcy, Modie Spiegel proposed to sell cheaper, lower quality

furniture, and – more importantly – to offer customers credit and convenient

Joseph and Sidney initially opposed the idea, despite the

fact that other enterprises, such as Singer Sewing Machine Company, had already

successfully adopted similar payment plan options years earlier.[17]

Nevertheless, in 1893, after much debate, Joseph gave Modie permission to reinvent

the firm as the Spiegel House Furnishings Company, with a dramatically

Spiegel House Furnishings Company tried to set itself apart from its rivals by using

aggressive advertising in newspapers (with either full-page illustrated ads or

multiple smaller ads on several pages), extravagant promotional events (such as

holiday sales featuring food and entertainment for customers), elaborate store

displays that often evoked exotic locations (the interior of a Bedouin tent,

for example), and a variety of high-pressure sales techniques.

started working in his father's store, it became clear that he was a natural-born

salesman who immensely enjoyed interacting with customers.

tall, sported a handlebar mustache, always dressed in expensive suits, and had

a flamboyant and outgoing personality, as well as a penchant for dramatic acting,

which he honed in an amateur theatre company in his spare time. Along with numerous

other salesmen in the new store, Modie applied a variety of well-rehearsed techniques

One sales routine – frequently performed as a kind of

It involved passing along (i.e., turning

over) a hesitant customer from one salesman to another, using successive stages

of emotional sales pitches and enticements

Another wily scheme was known as "going to Detroit."

routine went as follows: if a customer stubbornly resisted or appeared to be

getting annoyed with a salesman's efforts, Modie would suddenly swoop in from

another part of the store, loudly berate the salesman for offending the

and then ostensibly fire the salesman on the spot.

Pointing to the door, Modie would say to the visibly

despondent salesman, "Get out you no-good, you're through!

Impressed by this display of authority on his behalf,

the stunned customer would thus be much likelier to make a purchase, while the

"fired" salesman quietly reentered the store through the backdoor, waiting

According to James Cornell, the "wild and wacky"

antics of Modie Spiegel and his crew "would have put the Marx Brothers to shame."[19]

sales techniques such as these were commonly frowned upon in Europe and by the

late 1890s states intervened to officially put an end to them.

Orange Smalley nor James Cornell, in their exhaustive overviews of the

company's history, suggest that Spiegel ever violated any business laws or

experienced any kind of backlash as a result of these dubious sales practices.

On the contrary, both authors emphasize that Modie Spiegel's success as a

salesman was largely due to his mischievous charm.

such as forthrightness and honesty in business were apparently not quite as expedient

or profitable in the notorious "windy city" of Chicago.[20]

sharp contrast to the extrovert Modie, Sidney Spiegel was quiet and withdrawn,

preferring to focus on bookkeeping and other administrative tasks.

surprisingly, the two brothers' personalities frequently clashed.

Spiegel was quite content to transfer more responsibilities to his oldest son.[21]

With Modie now firmly in charge, business was booming more than ever.

World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893, a celebration of the 400th

anniversary of Columbus' arrival in America, was a significant turning point

that transformed Chicago's cultural landscape.[22]

It drew an estimated 27 million visitors and benefitted the city's business

By that time, Chicago had become a shining example of modern

urban planning; unemployment was low, and a steady influx of immigrants swelled

the city's population to almost one million

families, earning an average of eleven to twelve dollars a week, now became

In need of affordable furniture and a variety of

other goods that Spiegel added to its inventory (such as iceboxes, carpets, and

ovens), these customers took advantage of Modie's generous credit offers and

"offering liberal terms of purchase to everybody so that buying is made easy to

wage earners and people of moderate means," as a 1903 advertisement in the Chicago Daily Tribune boasted,[23]

the Spiegel House Furnishings Company took a considerable financial risk.

remaining true to the company's ubiquitous new advertising slogan, "We Trust

the People," Modie Spiegel employed a simple yet effective screening process,

correctly assuming that stable, hardworking families that aspired to a middle-class

lifestyle would be appreciative and reliable enough to not default on their

Customers who applied for credit at the Spiegel store merely had to

fill out a standard form, providing some basic information, such as their

address, marital status and number of dependents, occupation, and income.

Spiegel examined these application forms personally, asked customers a few

then made an instinctive decision whether or not to

His judgment appears to have been quite sound.

period from 1893 to 1910, Spiegel only experienced moderate bad debt losses,

and fewer than a dozen lawsuits against defaulting customers appear in the

typical Spiegel payment plan for a piece of furniture is summarized by the

following excerpt from a 1905 advertisement in Woman's Magazine: "This full size Morris Chair [ . . . ] is of

handsome solid oak with rich velour cushions and the price is only $5.75.

Customers usually had up to one year to pay off their purchases in full.

increase business, Spiegel offered its customers convenient shopping hours from

10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays.

company regularly ran half- and full-page ads in Chicago newspapers, and Modie

Spiegel even sponsored theatre productions, providing furniture and props for

stage sets to draw ever greater numbers of customers to the store – evidently

Spiegel's profits increased dramatically from 1897 to 1903.

In 1897, for example, Spiegel registered $5,894 in profit ($160,000 in 2010).

The next year, its profits had more than tripled, to $18,296 ($496,000 in

and in 1899, Spiegel's profits rose sharply to $48,084 ($1.3 million in

By 1903, Spiegel reported $106,842 in annual profits ($2.73 million in

Modie's leadership, the Spiegel House Furnishings Company soon moved to a new

and much larger location on the corner of State Street and Van Buren in

Chicago's Loop (downtown business district), and the company added two

additional branches on Chicago's south side.

in 1903, when the Spiegel House Furnishings Company bought the large retail

furniture house of May, Stern & Co. for $500,000 ($12.8 million in 2010).[27]

Under the new name of Spiegel, May, Stern & Co., the firm now became the

biggest furniture and housewares retailer in the city of Chicago.

rose from an initial value of $100 per share in 1893 ($2,500 in 2010) to well

this juncture, Modie's youngest brother, nineteen-year-old Arthur entered the

well-established family business as a sales clerk.

streak" and with a reputation as a troublemaker in school, Arthur Spiegel initially

displayed neither interest in nor aptitude for furniture retail.

found working in the store to be extremely boring, and his first few months on

the job seemed to consist mostly of being reprimanded for slacking off or for taking

needed discipline, his father "banished" him to the warehouse.

Arthur actually relished the physical labor and hectic activity of this rather

went on to develop a deeper understanding of

business fundamentals, in addition to great problem-solving and organizational skills.

Eventually, he was promoted to the company mailroom, where one of his more

tedious duties was answering stacks of letters from people far and wide who

wanted to purchase Spiegel merchandise on credit.[29]

effective newspaper advertising campaigns were reaching ever larger numbers of

potential customers throughout the Midwest; yet it was company policy to only

extend credit to customers who came to the store, and not to deliver orders

Arthur's task was to use generic form letters

to politely decline these out-of-town requests.

help but wonder how much more revenue they would generate if they met the

evident demand for their goods and credit.

worked on a comprehensive proposal to address the various strategic and

logistical aspects of expanding the company's reach beyond the Chicago area.

devising this plan, he drew some inspiration from the success of Montgomery Ward

When he presented his ideas to his father and brothers, however, he encountered

The obstacles (e.g., merchandizing, credit verification,

Spiegel found Arthur's concept of expanding into the mail order business far

too risky, especially with regard to payment defaults and repossession efforts.

Nevertheless, Arthur refused to give up and continued to lobby for his plan,

finally convincing the company hierarchy to allow him to open a small mail

order department on a trial basis in 1904.

Spiegel devoted himself to the implementation of his project.

personally, advising customers of their credit terms and payment plans, and calculating

freight and shipping costs; he oversaw the bookkeeping and packing processes,

and eventually hired several workers to help him, as more and more orders

Spiegel, May, Stern & Co.'s new mail order business was

off to a good start, earning Arthur the respect of his elders, as well as a $1,000

bonus at the end of the year ($25,300 in 2010).[31]

Having successfully completed the trial period, the next logical step for

Spiegel's mail order operations were limited to a radius of about one hundred

In order to reach more customers and offer a greater

selection of merchandise, the company published its first mail order catalog in

Arthur singlehandedly compiled and published this modest twenty-four-page

booklet (printed on extra-thin paper), which featured a variety of living room,

dining room, bedroom, and kitchen furnishings, and a small number of kitchen

the first company to offer credit through the mail,[33]

Spiegel, May, Stern & Co. now modified its slogan to "We Trust the People –

As a result, it opened up a very large, previously untapped base

of customers, who pushed Spiegel's mail order sales to about $1 million in 1906

mentioned previously, Spiegel had actually published numerous catalogs for marketing

The 1905 version was in many ways similar to these earlier

It contained generic pictures of various items, along with vivid

descriptions of materials, textures, and colors

The new Spiegel catalog allowed customers to conveniently place

explained the company's unique credit policy in simple

terms (i.e., $5 minimum order, fifteen percent down payment, monthly

installments payable by cash, check, or money order), but the key component to

its remarkable success was Arthur Spiegel's editorial introduction.

blend of sales-pitch hyperbole and pre-Freudian mass psychology, the editorial sought

to dispel widespread public mistrust against mail order purchases and

installment plans by emphasizing three crucial concepts that became synonymous

with Spiegel's image over the next five decades

notion that Spiegel was a highly reputable company that only dealt in quality

products; second, it stressed that Spiegel offered a combination of quality,

price, and credit second to none; and third, it emphasized that making credit

purchases on installment plans was a convenient, perfectly respectable, and even

sophisticated way of acquiring home furnishings that were previously only

to the positive reception of the Spiegel catalog and the expansion of the company's

shipping radius to 500 miles, mail order sales continued to rise during the

Spiegel, May, Stern & Co. was subsequently decoupled from

the Spiegel House Furnishings Company so that it could focus exclusively on

further expanding its mail order business and thereby assume greater debts,

while allowing the traditional retail branch to conserve its limited resources.

Arthur Spiegel became president of Spiegel, May, Stern & Co., while Modie

Spiegel continued to operate the furniture stores, with Joseph and Sidney's

1910, the mail order company employed about 300 people and had relocated to new

Along with dramatic growth came a massive expansion in its line of merchandise.

The Spiegel catalog soon exceeded 136 pages and featured items ranging from

clocks and lamps to refrigerators and floor coverings

1912, Spiegel, May, Stern & Co. even launched its own line of ladies'

apparel under the name of the fictional designer Martha Lane Adams.

Lane Adams" line was so popular that it prompted the establishment of a wholly

owned subsidiary, along with its own catalog.[38]

More importantly, however, Spiegel's growing focus on women as independent and

educated consumers foreshadowed some of the far-reaching socio-economic changes

associated with women's emancipation in the aftermath of World War I.

language of the Spiegel catalog typically addressed women as household

decision-makers who were practical, financially savvy, and status-conscious.

clothing line, especially, sought not only to appeal to a woman's sense of

style and economy, but also to convey an image of glitz and glamour.

following decades, the Spiegel catalog reflected – or perhaps even helped shape

– the identity of the modern American professional woman.

Spiegel's customer base grew, extending to twenty-three states and parts of

Canada, it became necessary for the company to adapt to new realities.

business historians such as Alfred D. Chandler or Richard S. Tedlow have

demonstrated at length how rapid growth presents companies with a variety of challenges

and dangers, ranging from the need for managerial and administrative changes to

For Spiegel, May, Stern & Co., one of the most immediate tasks was to

reflect the diversity in both customer needs and merchandise pricing; for

example, down payment amounts now ranged from thirteen to eighteen percent, and

installment plans were extended to sixteen months for more expensive

Another aspect concerned minimizing the risk of offering credit to

so many people across such a large area.

which were eventually included in every Spiegel catalog, inevitably became

to screen out as many potential defaulters as possible.

– without much success – to set up a network of local "agents" to verify credit

worthiness and assist in collection or repossession proceedings

all those efforts, a significant amount of risk would always remain and losses

due to defaulting customers were simply unavoidable.

or less successfully factored into the pricing of the merchandise.[41]

Arthur's direction, Spiegel, May, Stern & Co. became firmly established

alongside Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward as a significant player

consumer credit market, the Spiegel brand was well-respected, and its methods were

However, the continued growth and success of the company

would depend on how well it managed to compete against its much larger rivals.

Therefore, in order to further raise Spiegel's profile

and distinguish it from its competitors, he hired advertising expert Edward L.

the next three decades, Swikard's innovations and advertising campaigns became

instrumental in defining Spiegel's image

he introduced new enticements such as free-trial offers, customer referral

mailing to nine million households, offering a deal on low-cost Congoleum floor

The campaign boosted company sales to $16 million and profits to $4

million that year (in 2010 dollars: $197 million and $49.3 million,

May, Stern & Co. continued to experience steady growth, partnering with an

Arthur Spiegel, meanwhile, began to lose

interest in the mail order business after meeting film pioneers Jack Warner and

Lewis J. Selznik, and he moved on to a new venture in the burgeoning movie

after becoming head of the World Film Corporation in February 1916.[44]

He died soon thereafter, at the age of only thirty-one, from pneumonia, on

## Social Status and Immigrant Entrepreneurship

the untimely death of Arthur, the Spiegel family had lost its most creative and

Modie Spiegel, now forty-five years old, took over from Arthur

as president of Spiegel, May, Stern & Co., while continuing to run the

well-connected member of Chicago's business community by now.

He was also an extremely busy man who not

only ran the family business, but also raised his own family while performing

civic duties as a member of the Chicago Board of Education.

March 1897, Modie had married Lena Straus, daughter of the banker Frederic W.

They had four children: three sons, Frederick W. Spiegel (1898-1975),[47]

Modie Jr., also known as M.J. Spiegel (1901

and a daughter, Pauline Spiegel (1913-76).[50]

The family lived in Chicago's affluent northern suburb of Kenilworth.

matured and settled down, Modie Spiegel shed much of the youthful exuberance and

flamboyance that had characterized his early years as a salesman in "Modie's

madhouse" furniture store; he became more civic minded and politically active,

embarking on a long career in Chicago public life.

Chicago Board of Education in 1906, Modie Spiegel would play a significant role

in shaping school policies in Illinois for decades to come (for example, thirty

years later, he was appointed to the Illinois Education Commission by Governor

involvement in educational matters is amply documented in the Chicago Examiner, which published almost

weekly columns on the board of education's activities for years.

Modie Spiegel frequently backed progressive initiatives in Chicago's schools.

For instance, he helped set up a relief fund for hungry pupils,[53]

advocated for fire safety regulations in public schools,[54]

and voted in favor of a ten-percent raise in teacher pay.[55]

His sociopolitical stance is perhaps best illustrated by a resolution he

Combining the traditional German emphasis on Bildung with American

The true function of the public schools is to

The functions of the school board do not

entirely cease when sufficient book learning is provided.

public school fund is to benefit pupils physically, mentally, and morally.

public schools have a collateral mission besides training pupils.

mission to make true Americans of foreign born parents who have children

The American public school, besides its normal

functions of mental and physical training, teaches patriotism, discipline,

industry, and the elements of hygienic cleanliness, to those who need the

Spiegel's involvement and interest in operating the family business began to

wane in the mid-1920s, as he groomed his two oldest sons as his successors

Spiegel, May, Stern & Co. went public, although the family retained a

By 1932, the economic downturn of the Great Depression

had forced him to shut down the Spiegel House Furnishings Company.

Spiegel, Inc. (as the mail order company was renamed in 1937) fared surprisingly

well during the depression and actually experienced tremendous growth

rose from $7.1 million in 1932 ($113 million in 2010) to more than $56 million

This was achieved by selling cheaper goods and further relaxing the company's

credit policies under the new slogan "no charge for credit" to eager customers.

Sales eventually leveled off by 1938 and Spiegel, Inc., refocused on the higher

income segment of the market, adding various reputable brand names to its

By 1941, though, the war and rationing basically brought Spiegel's business to a

By that time, the company was firmly in the hands of M.J. Spiegel,

On January 8, 1943, Modie Spiegel died of

natural causes at the age of seventy-two.

Modie Spiegel's great wealth and prominent social status, he and his family

struggled to gain acceptance in Chicago's gentile high society.

Holly C. Shulman, states in an article commemorating the life of her mother,

Polly Spiegel Cowan, the Spiegels were quite isolated among their snobbish

The family was part of the Jewish community and had

many Jewish friends, but they did not actively practice Judaism (although they

identified with the moral values of Reform Judaism)

Christian Science, but the children were raised in a completely secular

Still, Polly was never invited to any parties, dances, or other

social events by her Christian peers, and restrictive real estate policies

prevented other Jews from moving into the area.

and the outbreak of World War II eventually forced the Spiegels to rethink

their German-Jewish identity, and the family tried to locate long-forgotten

distant relatives – unfortunately, to no avail

what they could to help Jewish refugees from Europe.[59]

members of the German-Jewish community in Chicago and enjoying a number of

family connections definitely had its advantages for the Spiegels from the very

Henry Greenebaum, a relative of Joseph Spiegel's mother (and the brother-in-law

), was one of the most important figures in the

establishment of Chicago's German-Jewish Sinai Congregation around 1850.

a wealthy banker, set up several B'nai B'rith lodges, and became the first

Jewish officeholder in Chicago (alderman).[60]

When the Spiegels first settled in Chicago, there were around 4,000 Jews in the

By 1900, that number had grown to around 75,000.[61]

German Jews, unlike many of their Eastern European counterparts, were better educated,

better off economically, and well-organized in various influential clubs; they continued

to hold their religious ceremonies in German and maintained a distinctly

The Standard Club, the most prominent German-Jewish social

organization in Chicago, featured among its members such illustrious figures as

the architect Dankmar Adler, the shoe manufacturer Simon Florsheim, and the

As wealthy and successful Chicago merchants, three

generations of Spiegels naturally had a prominent position among the city's

Through intermarriage, such as Modie Spiegel's

marriage to Lena Straus of the W.S. Straus banking family, dynastic ties were

It was also common to invest in each other's

or to establish partnerships, such as Joseph Spiegel's joint

ventures with Henry Liebenstein or Jacob Cahn

Jews in Chicago typically also maintained relatively close and cordial

relations with non-Jewish German immigrants, for example, in the labor movement

On the whole, German Jews generally assimilated

into American society very quickly and many ascended the social ranks.

other ethnic or religious groups sometimes exhibited a somewhat hostile and

discriminatory attitude toward them, many German Jews were well-integrated into

the political, economic, and cultural life of the city.

as America's "second city" and its vibrant business climate in the second half

helped the entrepreneurial spirit of the resident

Merchants, especially, benefitted from the

constant stream of new immigrants who arrived in Chicago before the First World

There was always a demand for affordable goods, and coming up with

innovative ways to fill that demand (for example, by targeting German

immigrants with German-language advertisements in ethnic publications) enabled

enterprising minds like Modie and Arthur Spiegel to make a considerable

By 1914, Modie was earning a yearly salary of $35,000 ($788,000 in

Not surprisingly, the Spiegels were rather status-conscious and resided in

upscale neighborhoods; they dressed well, had busy social lives, owned cars,

The later Jewish immigrant arrivals from Eastern Europe found it much more

difficult to make the transition from the Old World to the New.

European Jews (the majority of whom came from Lithuania, Russia, and Poland)

worked in menial jobs and settled down in the Jewish ghetto around Maxwell

Street, where they maintained their accustomed Shtetl lifestyle.[64]

and Arthur Spiegel's business success was based first and foremost on considerable

risk-taking, and on what seems like an almost naïve trust in the honesty and

The danger that their company would fail due to

customers who defaulted on payments or – worse yet – perpetrated outright fraud

It is perhaps doubtful that Spiegel, Inc., would have

ever been able to enter into credit merchandizing and the mail order business

had the Spiegels not felt secure and confident enough to take these kinds of

Their family ties in the wider German-Jewish community must have

provided an adequate safety net (or some other reassurance) for them to

The Spiegels were able to attract a number of

investors, and on at least two occasions, in 1888 and 1897, cash infusions

the obvious financial risks, Modie and Arthur Spiegel faced other uncertainties

on account of the controversial nature of the mail order business in the United

Mail order companies like Sears, Roebuck

skepticism, hostility, and outright resistance to this new method of commerce.

For one thing, retailers in villages and small towns regarded the mail order

giants as unfair and therefore unwanted competitors, because they undercut

prices and generally hurt small businesses

organized lobbying campaigns against mail order companies in various parts of

even went so far as to stage public catalog burnings.

order customers also feared negative repercussions in their communities if it became

known that they shopped at Sears or Spiegel (for example, there were frequent

efforts to intimidate and ostracize individuals who received packages from mail

In order to keep their customers out of trouble, the mail

order companies offered to ship merchandise discretely in plain, unmarked

major obstacle for Spiegel's business model to overcome was the vastly

different perception of consumer credit in American society in the late

was widely regarded as dishonorable, even immoral or sinful.

typically rooted in Puritanical traditions, but it also had much to do with the

general distrust of modern city culture in rural areas.

Spiegel spent considerable time and effort persuading skeptical customers that

installment plans and consumer credit were reputable, convenient, and

Eventually, Spiegel managed to convince many

Americans "that life could be much more pleasant – and much more fun – if you

obtained the items you needed when you needed them and paid for them as they

Most importantly, the Spiegel "doctrine of credit was directed at

small-town America, where it was received as a revelation [and] helped to touch

off a revolution in living that would in time lead to lower prices, improved

quality, increased comfort – in short, to the affluent society of today."[66]

the direction of Modie's son and successor, M.J. Spiegel, the company went

through various structural transformations, and faced some inevitable economic

challenges during the Great Depression and World War II, but it basically

with the Beneficial Finance Company proved to be problematic.

Spiegel Company, which was originally founded by a German immigrant in the

nineteenth century, was eventually bought in 1982 by a German company, Otto

Versand GmbH, Europe's largest mail order firm, based in Hamburg.

, Spiegel swiftly underwent a complete makeover and

became more of an upscale catalog retailer, while expanding and diversifying

its business (for example, through the acquisition of the Eddie Bauer retail

chain and the First Consumers National Bank)

the early 2000s had a devastating effect on Spiegel's catalog and credit card

forcing the company to enter into Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Today, Spiegel operates as a more or less typical online retailer (now owned by

Eddie Bauer Holdings and Commerzbank), focusing entirely on high-end women's

Spiegel's tenure as chief executive, from the 1890s to the 1930s, was in many

ways the most dynamic and prosperous phase in Spiegel's history.

only helped oversee the dramatic growth of his father's small furniture

business into one of America's leading mail order companies

foundation for twentieth-century consumerism.

installment plans, company image, advertising and catalog merchandizing all had

a tremendous influence on modern shopping habits, tastes, and branding.

particular, Spiegel's focus on women as independent and conscientious consumers

company's accomplishments were largely attributable to the Spiegel family's

tight-knit nature, hard work and dedication, risk taking and business acumen,

and to their connections and standing within the German-Jewish community of

As the son of an immigrant entrepreneur, Modie Spiegel was immersed in

the family retail business from an early age and inherited a solid foundation

Under his stewardship, the company expanded steadily but

cautiously, achieving considerable financial success and stability.

through various mergers and acquisitions, Spiegel & Co. was eventually

transformed from a traditional family business into another faceless international

Thus, in the final analysis, the rise and fall of the Spiegel

Company mirrors the fate of many other U.S. companies and reflects the broader economic

Smalley and Frederick D. Sturdivant, The

Credit Merchants: A History of Spiegel, Inc. (Carbondale, IL: Southern

Jr., The People Get the Credit: The First

One Hundred Years of the Spiegel Story (Chicago, IL: Spiegel, Inc., 1964),

Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 18-24.

merchant who sells provisions to an army in the field, in camp, or in quarters.

Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 27-29.

Cremin, Chicago: A Pictorial Celebration

(New York, NY: Sterling Publishing, 2006), 17.

Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 31-32.

Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl

to Suburb (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 24-25.

constituted the largest single ethnic group in Chicago in the late

1800s (approximately 470,000 by 1900, or one quarter of the population).

Germans from all regional and religious backgrounds had a particular proclivity

(i.e., clubs) with a wide range of interests and purposes.

specific information on Joseph Spiegel's membership in social clubs is not

Hospital opened in 1880 on Chicago's south side.

bequeathed to the United Hebrew Relief Association by the wealthy real estate

developer Michael Reese (a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria); its mission was to

serve all Chicagoans regardless of race, creed, or nationality.

Best, "Michael Reese Hospital," Encyclopedia

to find any specific information on Modie and Sidney's upbringing, which

school(s) they attended, and whether they spoke any German at all.

Spiegel furniture catalog of 1888 consisted of 103 pages and was offered to

customers who paid 15 cents per copy in postage

catalog appears to have been a response to similar advertising campaigns by

comprehensive overview of Singer's innovative sales and marketing practices,

see: Andrew Godley, "Selling the Singer Sewing Machine around the World: Singer's

International Marketing Strategies, 1850-1920," in Enterprise and Society, vol. 7, number 2 (2006): 266-314.

Universe Corporate Histories: Spiegel Inc.

Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 45-48.

nickname as "the windy city" originated in the 1880s, in reference to its

reputedly long-winded, boastful, and self-promotional politicians.

Zorn, "For Our Out of Town Guests: Why Chicago is Called 'the Windy City,'" Chicago Tribune, July 17, 2006.

Spiegel remained actively involved in the family business until his death in

In terms of personality, he was more like Sidney and tended to avoid the

melodramatic sales tactics introduced by Modie.

All current values (in 2010 USD) are based on Samuel H. Williamson, "Seven

Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to

present," MeasuringWorth, 2011, using the

Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. had been in the mail order business since

1872 and 1886 respectively, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenues

annually, but neither company offered its clients credit or convenient

The Sears, Roebuck catalog, for example,

explicitly stated "our only terms are cash in full with all orders."

See The 1902 Edition of the Sears, Roebuck

Catalogue (New York, NY: Gramercy Books, 1993), 3.

volume of business of Spiegel, May, Stern & Co.'s little mail order

See Smalley and Sturdivant, The Credit Merchants, 45.

Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 59-61.

Universe Corporate Histories: Spiegel Inc.

Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1969), and Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996)

standard Spiegel credit application consisted of fifteen questions, which

included new categories such as previous address, race, other credit accounts,

Smalley and Sturdivant, The Credit Merchants, 86-87.

[41] Cornell, The People Get the Credit, 70-71.

importance to the company is also demonstrated by his salary, which was equal

See "Earnings of Executives Bared By Treasury," Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1937.

Directory of Company Histories: Spiegel Inc. (accessed July 15,

Financial World," Chicago Daily Tribune,

Spiegel, Millionaire at 31 by Own Efforts, Chicago

Yet to Come," Chicago Daily Tribune, March

They were divorced and he later married Ruth Hirsch

He served in the American Red Cross ambulance service in 1918 and

He died in Chicago in 1975. http://www.newberry.org/collections/FindingAids/spiegelhemingway/spiegelhemingway.html (accessed August 27, 2011)

after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1922.

general manager in 1932 and president in 1939.

company expanded into scores of retail outlets in the mid-1940s.

devoted himself to his passion for horse racing.

See "Modie J. Spiegel, 89, Mail Order Executive," New York Times June 28, 1990 (accessed August

Spiegel did not follow in his older brothers' footsteps by entering the family

Instead, he studied medicine at Northwestern University, and became a

nationally renowned social psychiatrist, conducting research on violence as

part of war, the inner city, and the family.

of Chicago as well as at Harvard University

Kenan Heise, "John P. Spiegel Obituary," Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1991.

("Polly") Spiegel Cowan attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York and became

a radio and television producer, as well as a political activist.

famous radio show was called "Conversation," and her best-known television show

was a literary quiz show called "Down You Go."

National Council of Negro Women's board of directors in the 1960s.

Polly and her husband died tragically in

Mail Order Firm Chairman, Dead," Chicago

mentions his attendance at a Republican Party banquet in 1909 (Chicago Examiner; January 15, 1909);

another, in 1912, lists him as a supporter of W. H. Taft (Chicago Examiner, February, 6, 1912).

[55]Chicago Examiner, December 20, 1909.

Universe Corporate Histories: Spiegel Inc.

Directory of Company Histories: Spiegel Inc.,

Shulman, "We Remember – Polly Spiegel Cowan: Civil Rights Activist, 1913-1976,"

in Jewish Women's Archive, 2004. http://jwa.org/weremeber/cowan

Spiegel's lifetime, from 1871 to 1943, the Jewish population in Chicago rose

example, Modie Spiegel and his family went on a vacation to France, where they

were nearly killed in an automobile accident after colliding with a horse-drawn

wagon. Modie Spiegel suffered a fractured collar bone and severe cuts to his

"Modie J. Spiegel." (2019) In Immigrant Entrepreneurship, Retrieved August 18, 2019, from Immigrant Entrepreneurship: http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=140

In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 3, edited by Giles R. Hoyt.

"Modie J. Spiegel," Immigrant Entrepreneurship, 2019, Immigrant Entrepreneurship. 18 Aug 2019 <http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=140>

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Cowan grew up in Los Angeles.  His grandfather created "The $64,000 Question", and Spike Jonze is his 3rd cousin. Cowan's great-great-grandfather was Joseph Spiegel, the founder of the Spiegel Catalog. His great-grandfather, Modie J. Spiegel, eventually took over the catalog in 1893.


He won the Hobey Baker Award as the best collegiate player in America in 1992 while playing for the University of Maine.

(meta data) TITLE: 1992 Winner - SCOTT PELLERIN of University of Maine

## 1992 Winner - SCOTT PELLERIN of University of Maine

With 223 points, Scott Pellerin ranks second as the all-time scorer in Maine history, and is third in career goals with 106, third in career assists with 117, and second in career games with 167.

He holds Maine's record for career power play goals with 47, and was the first Division I player in Maine's history to score 100 goals and record 100 assists.

In addition to receiving the 1992 Hobey Baker Award, he was named 1992 Hockey East Player of the Year and Most Valuable Player of the Hockey East Championship Tournament.

Growing up in Shediac, New Brunswick, he was a member of Team Canada during the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle.

Pellerin was picked by the New Jersey Devils in the third round of the 1989 NHL Entry Draft, and subsequently spent parts of twelve seasons playing in the NHL with that team as well as in St. Louis, Minnesota Wild, Carolina, Boston, Dallas and Phoenix.

He retired from hockeyfollowing the 2003-04 season.

Pellerin was born in Shediac, New Brunswick. He played high school hockey at the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame (a boarding school) in Wilcox, Saskatchewan under coach Barry MacKenzie. In Pellerin's junior year, his midget AAA hockey team took 2nd place in the 1987 Air Canada Cup (the national midget AAA finals). His high school hockey teammates included other future NHLers including Rod Brind'amour, Jeff Batters, Jason Herter and Joby Messier.   In 1988, Pellerin's senior year, he played for the Hounds junior AA team during its 1st season in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League.  That year, the Hounds won the Centennial Cup (the National Junior AA championship) behind goaltender Curtis Joseph.
 Pellerin was drafted 47th overall by the New Jersey Devils in the 1989 NHL Entry Draft.