Jim Cornette, a well-known wrestling personality and podcaster, disseminates knowledge and opinion on a twice-weekly basis with his partner in crime, Brian Last. Cornette answers listener questions on Mondays on the Drive-Thru, and The Jim Cornette Experience drops on Thursdays. He first started going to wrestling cards at the Louisville Gardens, where he watched Southern legends like Jackie Fargo, Jerry Lawler, Bill Dundee, and Tojo Yamamoto. The wild action of the Memphis territory informed a lot of Cornette’s views about the wrestling industry.
Jim Cornette can’t hide his enthusiasm for the graphic novel. "It’s a great project, and it’s all real old wrestling stories," Cornette said, emphasizing the word real. "It’s the stuff you would think would be made up, except it’s legitimate."
But now that the interview was actually about to take place, technical difficulties struck - at least for a moment. We were there to talk about Cornette’s then-upcoming graphic novel, Behind the Curtain: Real Pro Wrestling Stories, and to pick his brain about some names not often mentioned in modern wrestling history.
The Genesis of a Graphic Novel
"When I started out announcing the Real Pro Wrestling Stories project - it’s actually a graphic novel - but I started out calling it a comic book because I always wanted a comic book," Cornette said. The project quickly grew. Instead of a simple comic book, a Kickstarter showed just how much fan interest was in the graphic novel.
"The response from the Cult of Cornette has been tremendous," Cornette said. "We blew past the goal for 30 days in 23 hours." And contributions kept coming in.
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The Team Behind the Stories
As a detail-obsessed fan, photographer, manager, owner, and booker, Jim Cornette’s history comes into play here. Did you know? Real Pro Wrestling Stories author Jim Cornette and Paul Heyman broke into the wrestling business by first working as ringside photographers.
The folks at IDW did that great Andre the Giant graphic novel a couple of years ago, which was kind of his biography," Cornette said. "The same team of writer and artist, Brandon Easton and Denis Medri, are doing this piece of work. They’re my stories, but I tend to go into a lot of detail, and it’s a lot different when you’re writing scripts for a graphic novel. The great thing is that the guys at IDW and Brandon, especially, are all wrestling fans.
"We picked nine stories to tell," Brandon Easton said when I interviewed him by phone in early October. Easton isn’t just an award-winning writer. "Being in Maryland, we got a lot of crossovers. We saw the WWF, Crockett, Mid-South," he said. "You could watch wrestling shows from six different territories in a weekend. I always enjoyed NWA wrestling.
Stories That Resonate
"I think my favorite story is the Sputnik Monroe story about desegregating the arenas in the Memphis territory," Easton said. "Most of the stories in the book I already knew, but I had never heard that one, and it’s the most illuminating, for me.
Easton remembers a particular scene that showcased precisely how vicious the Southern style of wrestling could get. In 1985, Tully Blanchard and Magnum TA were in a hot feud for the NWA United States Championship, culminating in an "I Quit" match inside a steel cage at Starrcade.
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"It was brutal," Easton said.
While we were talking, I looked at some of Medri’s art. What struck me was that one of the stories depicted the Fabulous Freebirds in the ring, complete with their Confederate battle flag ring gear during a feud with the Junkyard Dog from the early 1980s.
"Growing up as an African-American fan, you had to develop a thick skin," Easton said. "You had to reconcile what you saw on TV with your own life and experiences. But when it came to wrestling, I loved JYD, and growing up in Maryland, there were Confederate flags everywhere, so the flag didn’t bother me.
But Easton’s race certainly played a part in the way he consumed and reacted to wrestling. He’s still angry about the feud between Triple H and Booker T for the WWE world title - specifically about the promo where Triple H told Booker, "People like you don’t win against people like me." And then Triple H, a heel at the time, retained the title against Booker at WrestleMania 19.
"That’s the kind of thing I’m offended by," Real Pro Wrestling Stories writer Brandon Easton said. "That, and that neither JYD nor Bad News Brown (Allen Coage) never won a title in WWE or something like Vince McMahon using the N-word.
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But eventually, Jim Cornette began working in his home territory as a wrestling manager. From there, he went to Mid-South to work for Bill Watts as part of the legendary Midnight Express. That Express train took Cornette to Dallas to work for Fritz Von Erich, and finally to the Carolinas to work for Jim Crockett Promotions.
That’s already a world-class resume for any wrestling personality. But Cornette wasn’t done. After Ted Turner’s organization bought WCW, Cornette eventually left to form Smoky Mountain Wrestling.
That’s an exhaustive resume, and it shows Jim Cornette’s knowledge - and love - of the wrestling business.
TIMELINE Wrestling | Jim Cornette | 1989-1990
Easton has written about wrestling before, working with artist Denis Medri on a graphic novel about Andre the Giant’s life, titled Closer to Heaven.
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