Remembering Roger McKenzie

Paul Kupperberg
7 minutes ago
3 min read

Left to right: Roger McKenzie, Mort Todd, Steven Butler, and me representing Charlton Neo Comics at the Fayetteville Comic Con in 2017.

I wrote this tribute to Roger McKenzie (November 8, 1950 - August 21, 2026) in 2014 for ACP Comics Presents A Tribute to Roger McKenzie, a nod to the writer from his friends and fans:

I’ve known Roger McKenzie for something like forty years. Back in the mid-1970s, long before the internet and Express Mail and UPS, most people who were or wanted to get into the comic book biz were pretty much obliged to live in New York where the comic book biz made its home. DC, Marvel, Gold Key, Warren...all the big players had offices in Manhattan and the five boroughs were lousy with guys and gals looking to work for them. Sure, some established writers and artists mailed their work in from more distant locales, but newbies knew they needed to be on the spot if they hoped to get their faces known by editors and make a career out of this business we call comics.

I could list scores of names from that period of us wannabes scurrying around the city and haunting the halls of the DC and Marvel in hopes of breaking in. But no matter which company we wanted to work for, we were all pretty much coming from the same place (fandom), traveling in the same orbit, and playing in the same poker games. One of those out-of-towners and fellow orbiters was Roger McKenzie, a good ol’ country boy with a drawl and a sittin’ ‘round the potbelly stove tellin’ tales sense of humor. Back then, before political correctness was in vogue and we were in the throes of youthful wiseassosity, the insults would fly freely. Ethnic, religious, regional, didn’t matter. We mocked one another’s race, creed, and anything else we could hang a good insult on with equal vigor and Roger’s accent was fodder for much hilarity. He talked funny...says the kid who at the time sported a thick “des, dems, and dose” Brooklyn accent, but he could give as good as he got.

Oh, and he could write. We may have made fun of the other guy for his ethnicty or for being tall/short/fat/thin or the way he spoke, but all of us respected talent and I don’t recall a whole lot of derision about the other guy’s work. Roger wrote superheroes, horror, Westerns, and more for DC, Marvel, Warren, Gold Key, and likely other publishers in the course of a relatively short period, about a dozen years or so if memory serves me (and it doesn’t, so I Googled it), turning out some memorable runs on Captain America, Ghost Rider, and, of course, Daredevil, bringing the darker tone to that series that would later be credited to the artist who drew his stories.

Roger and comic books parted ways in the late 1980s. I don’t know where he went or what he was up to during his absence, but then in 2014, there he was again. Facebook, that great reuniter of lost friends (not to mention high school acquaintances you find you don’t like any more now than you did in high school) brought us back into contact and Roger back into comic books.

He says it was my involvement with Charlton Neo that made him take a look at what we were doing and dip his toes back into the medium and become part of this ad hoc effort to make a comic book publisher out of nothing. If that’s the case, well...you’re all welcome and it’s my pleasure to have been the catalyst that drew Roger back into the funny book fold. But my guess is he would have taken any excuse to get back into writing comics. It’s a job that gets under your skin and never quite lets go of you even if you give up on it and move on to other things, as evidenced by the fact that even after a twenty-plus year layoff, Roger jumped right into scripting and hit a homerun his first time back at bat with his Spookman stories for The Charlton Arrow. Roger can still write.

And he still talks funny.