When the legendary Daily News sports cartoonist Bill Gallo died last week at age 88, I thought that was an opportunity to show you the drawing he gave me when I visited the paper in the early ’70s. Instead, it’s an opportunity show you that my memory’s not quite what I thought it was.

I didn’t have time to dig out my Bill Gallo drawing and scan it the day he died—it’s been a busy week—and when I pulled out my sports cartoon of Art Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, I noticed that—wait a second! It isn’t signed by Bill Gallo! It’s signed by Gene Ward. So I guess I’d remembered that childhood incident wrong.

But who’s Gene Ward?

I figured he must be a second string cartoonist who lived in Bill Gallo’s shadow at the Daily News, but when I started to do research, everything I could find tells me that Ward was a respected sports writer at the paper who, according to his obituary, covered 29 consecutive Kentucky Derbies. But nothing I could uncover showed that he was an artist as well. And yet … there’s his signature.

Which means … what?

That he was a columnist who drew cartoons for his own column? I find that difficult to believe, since someone somewhere online would have surely mentioned that.

That the piece was done by a staff artist at the Daily News who never got credit for his assignment because the writer hogged it all? I find that hard to believe, too, particularly since I’ve seen other art credited to Gene Ward for sale.

That this is really by Bill Gallo after all, as I first thought? The more I look at it, and compare it to other examples of Gallo’s art, the more I think that can’t be true either.

All I’m sure of is … I was handed this artwork at the Daily News by the artist himself … whoever that was.

So … who actually drew this piece? Who did I actually meet as a kid in the early ’70s? Looks like even though I thought I knew … I don’t.

Any ideas?

World Horror Con 2011 is over—but it’s never too soon to think about World Horror Con 2012. And what I really mean by that is—it’s not to soon to see what Adam Richman of Man v. Food has in store for us all in Salt Lake City.

Some of you who were at World Horror last weekend and at World Fantasy in October were dragged along with me on my Man v. Food triathlons. So be warned—if you plan to be in Salt Lake City March 29-April 1, 2012 for next year’s WHC, here’s where you might be roped into going.

Get ready for the Hell Fire Challenge! (Which for a horror convention will seem quite appropriate.)

Sunday at the World Horror Convention began in the middle of the night, which is appropriate, I guess, for a horror con. But the things that went bump in the night weren’t vampires or werewolves, but instead those damned frat boys, who for whatever reason decided to begin moving furniture from one hotel room to another at around 3:45 a.m., drunkenly bumping into walls as they carried box springs while shouting directions at each other. When I phoned the front desk, the immediate answer I got was, “I’m sick of these complaints. I’m calling the PD.” Whether the police ever arrived, and what they might have done when they got there, I have no idea, because I turned up the fan to block the noise and struggled to get back to sleep. Which, after 45 minutes or so, I was finally able to do.

After I woke, packed, and checked out, I headed to the 10:00 a.m. “Zombies Mega-Panel,” a 90-minute celebration of the living dead moderated by Joe McKinney and featuring me, RJ Sevin, Julia Sevin, Joe R. Lansdale, and John Skipp. (And Brian Keene, too, whom we pulled onstage about halfway through.) But before we began, I tossed out a couple of dozen glow-in-the-dark zombie finger puppets to get people in the mood.

It turns out that Lee Thomas also had something planned to get people in the mood—a video which was played before any of us began talking about why we loved zombies so much. Thanks for warming up the crowd, Lee! Check out what we all saw in Austin.

As soon as the panel ended, I ran off with my only willing victim … er, volunteer … Liz Gorinsky, to the Cathedral of Junk, which I already told you about, after which I dropped Liz back at the hotel and headed to the airport … where I discovered the con was not yet over.

I had lunch at the airport branch of the Salt Lick, which as you might expect wasn’t quite as good as its Driftwood branch (no ribs!), but was still some of the best airport food I’ve had in awhile. And then when I wandered toward my gate, I bumped into this motley crew …

That’s Derek Clendenning, Gord Rollo, and Eunice Magill, and since the pic was taken by Michael Kelly, you can see that World Horror was the con which wouldn’t die. I hung out with these guys as long as I could, but eventually I had to board my flight to Dulles. But WHC wasn’t over then either, as I happened to overhear the person in front of me mention the word “horror,” and when I asked, learned he was Henrik Sundqvist, one of the artists who had displayed work in Austin. We chatted a bit, until my exhaustion overtook me (damned frat boys!) and I slept for most of the flight.

And that was my World Horror Con!

Well … there is one more thing I have to tell you about—my Friday night outing to the Rude Mechanicals production of the play “I’ve Never Been So Happy.” But I’ll leave that for another day …

After a long Friday at the World Horror Convention last week, I went to bed early Saturday morning at the Doubletree Hotel looking forward to some good sleep. But I wasn’t to get it, thanks to the sound of a crying woman and a man’s muffled voice that woke me around 4:00 a.m.

I was suddenly fully awake and at the door of my room, heart pounding, not sure whether or not I was going to have to leap out and interfere in a possible sexual assault. I listened for a brief moment to the voices outside my door. I peered through the peephole, but couldn’t see what was going on. The wailing woman was drunk and incoherent, and the man’s voice, based on what he was saying into a walkie-talkie, seemed to belong to a hotel employee, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was helping (turned out he was, but you can’t be sure about these things), so I leapt out and asked the woman if she needed help, if she felt safe. She was blonde, in her late teens or early twenties, and from what I could gather (and from what I learned the next day from others who were also on the fifth floor) had been going down the hall banging on random doors because she was unable to remember her room number and find her boyfriend.

She cried into her cell phone, telling her boyfriend that she had no idea where she was or where she was supposed to be, and would he please come get her? Eventually, he did, and I went to back to sleep. Or tried to go back to sleep. I don’t know about you, but thinking I might have to get into a physical confrontation kicks in my adrenaline, and it took about an hour before I could wind down enough again to fall back to sleep. And it wasn’t an unbroken sleep, either, because for the rest of the morning, I could hear drunken kids returning from their late nights of partying.

When I went to the front desk the next morning, I was told that a couple of busloads of frat boys had arrived the day before, though the hotel claimed that if they’d known in advance that they were from a fraternity, the reservation wouldn’t have been accepted. I was also told that the group was now on a zero tolerance policy, and any infringement would result in immediate expulsion. (You’ll see below how much good that did.) (more…)

I woke up far too early last Friday morning while in Austin for the World Horror Convention. I have no idea why I was unable to get back to sleep at 5:15 a.m., but for whatever reason, I was suddenly wide awake. Since I knew my first stop was going to be Round Rock Donuts (part of my Man v. Food triathlon), which opens at 4 a.m. each day, I figured, why not just get going? So I showered, shaved, cruised the lobby for any other bleary attendees who might want to board the crazy bus, and then hopped in the car and pointed it toward the city of Round Rock, TX.

By the time I got there, not that much past six, the sun was barely up, but the parking lot was packed, as were the nearby streets, the line for the drive-through went around the block, and people had to step aside so I could get in the lobby. I bought six dozen donuts, plus that one monster donut I showed you here, and headed back to the con hotel where, since the con suite was not yet open, I set up in the lobby and made sure people started the day out right by handing out free donuts as they woke.

Luckily, that con suite eventually did open, so I was able to dump the remaining donuts there and head off in time to see the Yvonne Navarro/Weston Ochse reading which started at 10:00 a.m.

Yvonne went first, reading Chapter 13 of her novel Concrete Savior, and if you click below, it’ll be just as if you were there.

Wes went next, reading the short story “Fugue on the Sea of Cortez” from his collection Multiplex Fandango.

(more…)

I’ve already told you about my trip from Hell to get to Dulles Airport last Thursday morning, and where I stopped In Austin on the way to the World Horror Con hotel that afternoon. But what about the rest of Thursday?

Well, the first thing I did was take a long, hot shower to make up for the icy sponge bath I’d had to suffer that morning due to our thunderstorm-induced power outage. Then I headed down to the lobby in search of trouble, which I found in the form of dastardly duo Eunice Magill and Scott Browne, who kidnapped me for a massive dinner at The Cedar Door with Weston Ochse, Yvonne Navarro, Rain Graves, John Tomaszewski, Bradley and Sue Sinor, Chris Marrs and others, after which we headed to the Congress Avenue Bridge to wait for nightfall.

To wait for bats!

The wait was fun (see how Yvonne and I are smiling?), but unfortunately, the bats only come out at night, which means … the bats only come out in the dark. I couldn’t see them very well, so they didn’t look like much more than a swarm of gnats to me. Then it was back to the hotel, just in time to catch Norman Prentiss reading his short story “The Man Who Could Not Be Bothered To Die” from Blood Lite 3.

And now you can see it, too. It’s a fun one!

Then it was party time, where I chatted with Joe Lansdale (whose short story “Letter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogdoches,” I published in Last Wave 25 years ago way back in 1986) and Steve Niles (whom I’d never met before, but whose Guest of Honor interview I’d be conducting two days later). I only partied for an hour or two, because the lack of sleep the night before and the tense trip getting to Austin had left me exhausted, so I headed off to crash at around 12:30 a.m.

But as you’ll see when I fill you in on Friday, I wouldn’t end up sleeping for long …

I seem to have had fewer dreams in April than during any other month I’ve yet shared with you. Some of that is due to the exhaustion of two con weekends—Ad Astra and World Horror—which messed with my sleep cycle so much I was unable to bring any back from my subconscious. We had our daffodil party weekend that month, too, which also had me running on fumes.

In any case, here’s what April left me with—visits from Walt Disney, Adam-Troy Castro, Dan Aykroyd, Stan Lee … and maybe you.

April 2011

I dreamt I was at a snooty club ordering a drink and explaining to Barbara Walters why life was like an Amtrak train ride from DC to NYC. 26 Apr

I dreamt that when I opened my local newspaper, every comic strip there was drawn by the same guy — Dave Cockrum’s (nonexistent) brother. 25 Apr

I dreamt Paul Di Filippo and I found a cache of hand grenades near a school and raced to submerge them in wet concrete before they exploded. 25 Apr

I dreamt I was bitching because my favorite local comics shop was closing and would reopen where I’d never be able to visit it — in London. 25 Apr

I dreamt I was a woman dying of cancer who was working up the nerve to break up with her girlfriend in order to attend a Worldcon in Israel. 25 Apr

I dreamt I tried to crack open a safe — if clumsily hitting it over and over again with a hammer can in any way be considering “cracking.” 24 Apr

I dreamt I snuck into K. Tempest Bradford’s dorm room (next to my own) to pull a prank involving old timey rolls of fax paper and Mars bars. 24 Apr

I dreamt Stephen Colbert and I wandered a college campus as he told he about the new character he’d portray — the anime hero Charlie-Har. 24 Apr

I dreamt I wandered Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, where I bumped into Bob Eggleton and asked him in amazement — Bob, when did you move HERE? 24 Apr

I dreamt I was at a luncheonette counter discussing spousal abuse, which I could see struck a nerve with the other couples sitting there. 24 Apr (more…)

Some of my favorite things at last weekend’s World Horror Convention had absolutely nothing to do with the World Horror Convention. There was my Man v. Food triathlon. There was the illicit cultural outing to a performance of “I’ve Never Been So Happy” by the Rude Mechanicals, about which more later. And there was the trip to the Cathedral of Junk.

While in Austin, I’d planned to visit the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata. I’d been there before, but had liked it so much I’d hoped to drag some of my friends along while I checked out any new exhibits. When this came up while talking to a friendly flight attendant—who also had some great BBQ suggestions—she said I sounded like the kind of person who might want to visit the Cathedral of Junk, a bizarre construct a guy built in his backyard out of tons of … let’s not call it junk. Let’s call it treasure.

Once I did some research, I decided I had to see this for myself before the county shut it down, which it seems to be constantly threatening to do. So I put out the call for volunteers. Only Liz Gorinsky was brave enough to rise to the challenge.

Here I am in Vince Hannemann’s suburban backyard, showing as much of the “junk” as can be fit into one picture.

You can find more photos of the Cathedral of Junk over on my Flickr stream starting here.

But photos don’t tell the whole story, so here’s a video of me walking through Vince’s marvelous folly. It only shows the ground level, though, not the second level or the third level crow’s nest/gangplank, a little bit of which you can see in those pics.

Once you watch this, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be ready for a road trip.

Since I failed to keep up a contemporaneous account of this year’s World Horror Con while attending this year’s World Horror Con, expect there to be many posts over the next week as I play catch-up. I’ve already shared twice about things that occurred on the way to the hotel, but now I’m going to start talking about con itself by posting video of my reading, since there’s no law that says I must write the trip up chronologically.

On Saturday, April 30, 2011, I read my short story “Are We Not a New People?,” which had originally appeared in the anthology Zombie Apocalypse. The faceless woman who introduces me is Martel Sardina. As for what you see me tossing to the audience before I begin, those are glow-in-the-dark zombie finger puppets, some of which I’d already given out before the reading began.

And now, a message from the President of the United States …

To start catching up with the weekend’s World Horror Convention trip …

Since the con wasn’t going to start until late Thursday afternoon, and my flight was supposed to land in Austin around 11:00 a.m.—at least until the weather delayed my takeoff by two hours—I made plans to get together for lunch with a high school friend I hadn’t seen since 1973.

As so many high school friends have, Rita popped back into my life on Facebook, but unlike most of those other friends, she now lived in a city that was on my con circuit. Turns out she’d moved from Brooklyn to Austin many decades ago, and once we reconnected, we figured we’re try to get together during WHC. Since I live and breathe cons once I hit the hotel, Thursday lunch seemed to be the only possible time.

We met at Rudy’s, which claims it serves “the worst bar-b-q in Texas,” and proceeded to catch up on about 70 years of history. (That’s around 35 years apiece.) I’ll keep the details between Rita and me, and instead just present you with a visual aid so you can see what the years have done to us.

Here we are Thursday at Rudy’s.

And here’s how we appeared in our high school yearbook.

Still about the same, huh?

What do you think? Do I need to bring back the goatee?