NBC aired a 90th birthday tribute to Betty White last night, and the telecast included a montage of her funniest appearances as Sue Ann Nivens on Mary Tyler Moore from 1973 through 1977. One moment stood out more than the others. (To me, at least.)

It involved a kid reading a comic book. And what makes it interesting is that it’s a comic book with a title I can’t make quite decipher and a logo I don’t recognize.

Take a look below and tell me if you can do better. (I wish the screen shot could have been sharper, but this is the best I could do.)

So … what comic book was that?

Fantastic Blob? Apparently not, since according to the Grand Comics Database, the only comic with the word Blob in the title was published in 1988 … in Sweden. Searching on the word Slob was no help. If there’s some other word that ends with “lob” that was used in a title, I have no idea what that could be. And a search on the word Fantastic alone doesn’t yield any possibilities either.

I considered that perhaps the word in the title wasn’t Fantastic, but Funtastic. However, there seems to have only been a single title that ever included the world Funtastic— The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera—and none of that book’s three issues matches the cover seen on screen.

Could it be that this is one of those fake covers assembled solely for the purposes of being seen on TV without the show needing to worry about getting permissions?

Any comics gurus out there have any better ideas?

Boy … it was a heck of a lot easier tracking down the comic that appeared on an episode of Law & Order: SVU back in 2010!

As soon as it was announced yesterday that Connie Willis had been named the next SFWA Grand Master, the Internet exploded with a wide range of chatter, ranging from “It’s about time!” to “Wow, I suddenly feel very old” to “Already?”

That was to be expected. Science fiction fandom doesn’t speak in one voice on anything.

But what I didn’t expect was to find some science fiction fans who had no idea who she was.

Here’s just one example, from Reddit:

Wow… Never heard of her, but she’s never written a series; it’s all short stories and individual novels, by the look of her wikipage.

How very unusual… And unmarketable, which is presumably why I’ve never heard of her.

Will look her stuff up, though.

How interesting to think that to some readers, if you’re writing short stories, or if your novels are not part of a series, you’re invisible—even if you’ve won seven Nebula Awards and eleven Hugo Awards.

I’m not judging the commenter, I’m just … surprised.

Damon Knight used to say that science fiction was the thing we pointed at when we said “science fiction,” but these days, science fiction is so fragmented that Damon would throw his back out trying to point in a thousand directions simultaneously.

And I keep forgetting that.

I dreamt I was at a Cory Doctorow reading, and Cory came up to where I was seated and handed me a medicine bottle filled with pills. And because it was Cory, I downed them all. But then I looked down at the empty bottle suspiciously, wondering what I’d just done. There was no label on the bottle to tell me what I’d ingested, however.

“Trust me,” he said.

And because it was Cory, I did.

He them brought over a laptop device a few feet square, bristling with glowing vacuum tubes, but still light enough to rest on my knees. He slipped headphones around my ears, plugged them into the machine, then plugged in a microphone as well and handed it to me.

He told me I should begin to wail.

Before I could, however, he asked if he could borrow my phone. He was disappointed to see when I handed it to him that it was an iPhone. But not disappointed in the way you’d expect Cory to be upon seeing an Apple product. Instead, he asked me, “Why don’t you have the most powerful device?”

“I don’t need the most powerful device,” I said. “I just have what I need to do the job.”

I saw the sadness in Cory’s eyes, so added: “Look, I can cut up a board with a saw or a nuke. But I don’t need a nuke when I can get away with the saw.”

“Nukes are cool,” he said.

I agreed.

And then I woke, never finding out what chemical wonders awaited me from the drugs, or what technological marvels would occur were I ever to get the chance to wail into that microphone.

Looks like there’ll be a few further examples of my ancient comics career excavated and put on display during the coming months. So if you’re interested in checking out some of my Bronze Age Marvel back-up features, but don’t want to go through the hassle of tracking down the original comics, here’s where you’ll be able to find them.

First out, on February 22, is Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Volume 8, which will apparently reprint my solo Angel story that originally appeared back in 1980 in Marvel Treasury Edition #27.

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I recently ran across an interview I did way back in 1976 for a newspaper called Compass, and while I’m surprised by what I’ve forgotten since then, I’m also a little surprised by what I remember now that I didn’t seem to remember then.

Let’s see what those forgotten facts are/were, shall we?

I said: “I remember picking up Fantastic Four #1. I guess I was bored by comics before then—I can’t remember anything before that. There may have been others, but if there were, I’ve forgotten them.”

And yet … how could that be? Because today I remember, among other things, reading copies of pre-Fantastic Four issues of Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, and The Brave and The Bold, particularly the issue of that latter title that included the first appearance of the Justice League of America. Did I only read them as used copies traded for or bought later? But surely I read comics before FF #1. Am I misremembering now or was I misremembering then? There’s no way to know now!

And what’s this? I sold a story to Marvel the year before I went on staff there as an editor? And Craig Russell was going to draw it? Really?

I have zero memory of this, but apparently, five years before my short horror story “Picasso Fever” appeared in the DC Comics’ title Secrets of Haunted House, Tony Isabella had accepted it to appear in an issue of Monsters Unleashed—to be drawn by Craig Russell! When I now tell the story of how I got into comics, it all begins with my job in Marvel’s British reprint department. If I hadn’t read this anecdote with the words quoted as coming out of my own mouth, I’d never have believed it! But man, I sure would have loved to have seen what Craig would have done with that story!

There was a lawsuit threatened over the Scarecrow? Really? (more…)

Irene and I have owned four Cadillacs over the last couple of decades—all bought used, of course, since we are definitely not, and probably never will be, the kind of people who could afford to buy one new. But are we the kind of people meant to own a Cadillac at all?

According to an anecdote in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company, maybe not.

Veda Partalo, who works for the ad agency in charge of Cadillac’s makeover, had this to say about what distinguishes Cadillac owners from the owners of other luxury cars:

I needed to know what makes a man choose Cadillac over BMW or Lexus. So I travelled to nice restaurants around Chicago, Detroit, L.A., and New York. I interviewed the valets, those pimply 18-year-olds. What makes car owners different? They dress and tip the same. It’s in how they react when the valet scratches their car. I heard consistent stories: Lexus owners don’t say anything and immediately call the police and insurance company. BMW owners scream at him—”I’ll have your job!” That sort of thing. But Cadillac owners pat him on the back, say, “It’s gonna be all right, kid; we’ll figure it out,” and then tip him anyway and drive off.

I don’t think I’m that guy.

Does this mean we need to sell our 2003 DeVille?

I was chatting with a couple of people a few days back who didn’t realize that original comics art was drawn larger than it was printed nor that the standard size for such art had shrunk over the decades. And it struck me: Hey, they might not be the only ones out there who don’t know that!

And so … here I am with two choice pieces from my collection.

In my left hand, I’m holding a page from All-Star Western #104 (1958; art by Gil Kane), and in my right, I’m holding a page from Dead of Night #11 (1975; art by Rico Rival). Supposedly, the change from one size to the other occurred in 1967, and was all thanks to Murphy Anderson.

I bought the Kane at either my first or second comic book convention; I think I paid $2.00. As for the Rival splash, it’s one of the pages I was given back at Marvel for having written that issue.

As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Now you know.

I was feeling slightly glum last night about some of the things I wrote about Sharon Moody over the past few weeks, because even though I did write that “I’m not saying Moody isn’t a skillful artist, or that she’s bad person” and reported that her paintings are “a spot-on recreation of the original, showing a high degree of craft,” my bottom line, that I was unmoved by her part in the power of the supposedly transformative paintings, had to be a difficult message to hear.

Not that I felt at all guilty about it, you understand, because I said what I thought and still think needed to be said.

But none of us who puts work out in the public arena likes our work to be unloved, unadmired, and (from our point of view) misunderstood, and I don’t like making anyone feel the way I know I would feel had those words been written about me.

Then I came across Philip Hensher’s devastating (and entertaining) review this morning in The Guardian of James Thackara’s novel The Book of Kings, and all I could do was laugh. (more…)

I headed to Manhattan Saturday for a visit to the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery so I could see for myself those Sharon Moody paintings which had so ticked me off three weeks ago. Would experiencing the real-world art hung on a gallery wall, as opposed to seeing them diminished into relatively small .jpgs, change the way I felt? Would attempting to see the artwork with the guidance of gallery director Frank Bernarducci lessen my irritation about what I saw as an obvious attribution issue?

I believed both the art and the artist deserved a shot at changing my mind, so it was worth a trip before the exhibition closed, which it will do on the 15th. So if you want to see it yourself, you’d better hurry.

[And since I don’t want to recap everything I’ve said before, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, and want to catch up, check out this, this, this, this, this, and this, in that order.]

But first, before diving into the visit itself … a tangent.

One reason I’m sensitive to this issue is because the artists whose work has been repurposed here are more than just names to me. Sure, some of them I may know from their work only (albeit work that affected me deeply and helped transform my life), but there were others who were far more than that to me. I worked alongside many of these creators during my days on staff at Marvel Comics (and yes, that’s what I looked like below, seen with my then-future wife in photos from the 1975 Marvel Comics Convention program book) and later as a freelancer for both Marvel and DC.

So I think of these people as friends and colleagues. And when I see an image by Jack Kirby or Ross Andru or José Luis García-López (the last of whom actually drew one of my own stories) or any other comics creator used without even a tip of the hat, I take it personally.

Ironically, even the gallery visit itself was personal. Because 37 West 57th Street happens to be only a block and a half away from 575 Madison Avenue, where I spent so many years working for Marvel during the ’70s. Whenever I’m in that part of midtown Manhattan, I usually pause in front of the building to remember of how my life was changed there. So you can see how wading through the geography of comics past to speak up on behalf of comics past might have gotten me a little verklempt.

But enough misty-eyed nostalgia … (more…)

As I head to New York to see in person the Sharon Moody art exhibition I’ve been going on about ever since this post—I’m hanging out at the Baltimore Amtrak station right now—I realize I’ve never shared the ad that started it all.

So here it is!

I’m looking forward to seeing the paintings in their natural habitat … and to trying to see it all through the eyes of the exhibition curator. Should make for a very interesting day!

Tune in tommorrow to learn exactly how interesting!