Would you like to hear an interview I did with George Carlin when I was 16? Well, so would I. And after a discovery I made last week, we both might.

I was going through a file cabinet last week, came across an old 3″ tape recorder reel, and suddenly thought—could this really be what I think it is?

Back on June 23, 2008, I told you about an interview I did with Carlin either in 1971 or 1972, and showed off a picture I had my father take of the two of us. There’s a tape recorder in my hand, and I always intended to transcribe that tape and publish the interview, but never did. Holding the reel, I had a sense that it might not be too late. The problem is, I no longer own a tape recorder.

So I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook for someone with an ancient tape recorder who could check whether the tape was indeed my Carlin interview, and Analog writer Tom Ligon stepped up. I shipped it off to him this morning, and who knows, a never-before-heard George Carlin interview from the early ’70s may suddenly appear.

As for where I’d intended to publish the interview, check out the images below. (more…)

The universe would like me to share an anecdote about the short-lived comic-book company Atlas, founded in 1974 by Martin Goodman, who also founded another company you might have heard of—Marvel Comics!

As I’ve mentioned before, Sean Howe, author of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, is working on a book about Marvel in the ’70s. His mention of Atlas in an e-mail today sent me scurrying to the vault …

So here’s a memo, dated March 18, 1975, from Marvel Publisher Al Landau to Production Manager Sol Brodsky that was then forwarded to Editor-in-Chief Len Wein before eventually making its way to Editorial Assistant me.

Obviously, Landau was hoping there’d be a smoking gun that would prove Marvel had been ripped off. (more…)

Michael Dirda reviewed the biography Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic last week, but I’m only just getting around to it.

I used to think I’d like to meet George Orwell, but after reading the following paragraph … not so much.

Actually, I don’t think I’d have liked either of these guys.

Scammell relates this telling exchange between the author of Darkness at Noon and the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four: George Orwell said, “When I lie in my bath in the morning, which is the best moment of the day, I think of tortures for my enemies.” Koestler replied, “That’s funny, because when I’m lying in my bath I think of tortures for myself.”

Both of them apparently had seductive personalities, but when you got within their orbits—watch out!

And speaking of quips exchanged between authors, here’s another one recently related in the pages of the Washington Post, this one from Erich Segal’s obituary:

While jogging in New York’s Central Park, Mr. Segal once recalled, he saw novelist Philip Roth and said, “I admire your work.”

“And I admire your running,” Roth replied.

What do you think? An actual incident or only an apocryphal one?

I was going through some old comics this evening and found the ad below in Jimmy Olsen #90, the January 1966 issue. The Superman 80-Page Giant being advertised was cover-dated the same month.

If you click through the image several times to blow it up as large as you can, you’ll see a couple of things that intrigued me.

First, note Superman is telling the audience of 1966 that the reprinted stories were “published before you were born,” that “less than 100 copies of this issue are still in existence” (tsk, tsk, Superman, don’t you know the proper usage should be “fewer”?) and that “collectors will pay $30.00 and up for a perfect copy!”

$30.00? Wow! (more…)

Many years ago, my brother and I made a movie to show at the surprise party we threw for our parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, which was 31 years ago today. That’s them below, in the Bensonhurst apartment where Irene and I lived at the time, just before they cut the wedding cake.

At the time, I was 23 and my brother was 19. We ransacked our parents’ photo albums, trying to be surreptitious about it so they wouldn’t suspect what we were doing. Lee, who at the time was taking film classes at Brooklyn College, did most of the hard work—he shot the film and cut it together the old-fashioned way, by hand, and did all of the animation himself in those difficult days before digital. (more…)

Today’s mail brought yet another omnibus volume from Marvel Comics which reprinted one of my late ’70s stories. With the reprint books I’ve been in over the past few years, plus the ones coming out over the next 12 months that I already know of, there’ll soon be little left from my early Marvel comic-book output that won’t be available to new readers.

The latest collection is Essential Avengers Vol. 7, which includes my 8-page story about the Vision, drawn by Herb Trimpe. It’s a fun little story, but as I flipped through the book, and realized that it included writer Steve Englehart’s final issues of the Avengers comic, I remembered I owned something I think you’ll find far more interesting than anything I ever wrote. (more…)

During Capclave last October, Mike Zipser interviewed me for the long-running show Fast Forward: Contemporary Science Fiction, and the 18-minute video has just gone live.

It was an eclectic conversation, ranging from my days in the Marvel Bullpen and writing for Tales from the Darkside, through Science Fiction Age, and up to my current job at SCI FI Wire.

And of course, there was talk of zombies. From now on, there will always be talk of zombies.

I can’t embed the video, but if you want to see me pontificate, you can check it out here. I don’t think I came off too goofy. But you’ll let me know one way or the other, I’m sure. You always do.

With the constant talk about the death of paper and the eventual triumph of pixels, I thought the following quote, which I included in a handout I prepared for an early Readercon panel titled “Losing Money for Fun and Profit: Small Press How-To,” remained as relevant as ever.

I can’t recall where I copied this from, but I attributed it to John Bennett. While there seem to be a number of John Bennetts out there, I think it came this John Bennett. (I’ll try to verify that.) One reason it rang so true with me is that even though I love beautiful books, I also know that what truly matters is the wine, not the bottle.

This quote, copied down by me in the late ’80s, long before any of us ever thought that books and magazines could be threatened by that spawn of DARPA, seems to have presciently addressed the transition we’re now going through:

You could bring the mag out twice in a month and then once in two years and everything would be fine if the stuff between the covers was good; you could bring it out on glossy paper using a letterpress or on a mimeo using recycled paper and it didn’t make any difference; my God, you could print the magazine with rubber stamps and that wouldn’t matter, that would not make it bad and it would not make it good, the method by which you got the word out was incidental, the important thing was to go after all those vague dissatisfactions, to get at the core of them, to not fall for the soft persuasions and rationalizations, to not cower in the foothills of the mountain of accumulated and historical evidence that tell you you are wrong.

He was right then. And he’s right now.

I wonder whether, given the chance, he’d update this quote to add something like, “why, you could abandon paper completely and even that wouldn’t matter”?

I’m going to try to find out.

Update:

It turns out that the John Bennett I linked to above was the correct John Bennett. He writes to say:

Scott … yes, that’s my quote, from way back when. I’m not even sure where it appears! Possibly in Black Messiah, The Vagabond Anthology, Survival Song or one of the installments in my White Paper series.

Looking through a copy of the October 1944 issue of Action Comics, what attracted my attention wasn’t wasn’t any of the, well, action comics, but rather the ad below, which appeared on the back cover.

The fact that we were promised a “recipe on every wrapper” makes me think that Baby Ruth candy bars were once a baking staple, but could that really be? This is the first I’ve ever heard of it.

And how many recipes could there possibly be? Other than using them in those cookies the sailor seems so thrilled to be biting into, I can’t think of many other uses for them.

Besides—what’s he doing taking cookies from a strange woman anyway? Wasn’t he paying attention to all those WWII ads for venereal disease? He should have known better!

DC Comics would like you to pitch stories for their new “EC-type” book Strange Adventures of Science Fiction.

And by you, I mean me.

And by me, I mean me in 1979.

I received the letter below from editors Jack C. Harris and Joe Orlando almost 31 years ago to the day. January 9, 1979, in fact. Just in case the date alone doesn’t make you realize how long ago that was, perhaps their statement that “We also want the book to sell like tickets to King Tut” will!

(more…)