I was going through some old comics to prepare them for sale (a story for another time) when I noticed something on the cover of Strange Adventures #71, the August 1956 issue.

Floating above the image of an interplanetary clock counting down the time until the death of Earth was a banner which read “EXCITING NEWS! GIGANTIC CONTEST!” And what did you have to do to win one of those “5000 PRIZES?” Simply come up with a new slogan to describe DC Comics.

DC provided a few (rather lame) examples, such as “I buy when I see DC,” “DC Comics are Decent Comics,” and “Your reading key is the symbol DC.”

[I’m sorry the interior pages aren’t crisp and clear, but considering the comics’ age and value, scanning was out of the question, so I simply snapped the best photos I could.]

There were no details yet on how to enter. That was to come later, as announced on the cover of Mystery in Space #34, the October/November 1956 issue. Inner pages provided a list of prizes and an entry form. (more…)

Below are scans of the sixth Ethics column I published in The Comics Journal back in the mid-’80s, after I’d left the field and was trying to make sense of it all. This one appeared in TCJ #107, the April 1986 issue.

This installment dealt with sexism in the comics industry, and the politics of privilege, how those of us who benefit from an unfair institutionalized situation often cannot see the workings of the machinery that acts in our favor.

If I could temper anything I wrote here, it would be … well, give the piece a read, and I’ll see you on the other side.

As I was saying …

I shouldn’t have allowed my disappointment with Women in the Comics, by Trina Robbins and Cat Yronwode, to cause me to damn it to the extent that I did. Yes, I felt, and still feel, that the many silences I noted should have been documented, still need to be documented. But I can see, as I could not see then, that I gave in to hyperbole, and it wasn’t the evil book I painted it to be. I didn’t necessarily need to trash their efforts to make the case I was trying to make, and I’m sorry.

Only one published Ethics column remains. There were two further ones written which The Comics Journal never printed. Will I share them here? We’ll see …

Les Edwards, who will be one of the Artist Guests of Honor at the 2010 World Horror Convention in Brighton, was commissioned by PS Publishing to zombify me for the cover of my upcoming collection which will launch there.

I have no idea what the drawing will look like once incorporated into a cover design, but here’s the raw image in all its gory glory.

I don’t know about you, but I creep me out!

More info on the book—which will incorporate all of my existing zombie stories and include an original tale written specially for the collection—will be forthcoming.

I’ve just finished reading Lucius Shepard’s novella, “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” which took up 90 pages of the 308-page DAW anthology Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake. There are many excellent stories in the book, most notably Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Goat Variations,” and Paul Parks’ “A Family History.” But the Shepard is the jewel in the crown.

The story is about a writer named Thomas Cradle who discovers the existence of a book, The Tea Forest, written by a second Thomas Cradle, a book, better than anything he’s yet to write himself, that appears to have slipped through from the universe next door, written by a man who seems to be a variant of himself. In fact, there turn out to be an endless number of Cradles in similar universes, all slightly different from this one, and our Cradle abandons his life and goes on a quest through Cambodia and Vietnam to uncover the ur-Cradle and the meaning of it all.

I’ve always loved Shepard’s lush prose, and he doesn’t disappoint here. I’m going to quote a single paragraph to demonstrate the level at which he works, a paragraph more than two pages long that is positively Malzbergian in its syntactical complexity. (And in its bitterness, too.) (more…)

My father was supposed to have turned 77 today, but instead he passed away on January 27, 2009. We’d left very little unsaid to each other, and I said those things that I needed to say when he was no longer around to hear them earlier this year. So what I write today is more to mark the absence than to add anything useful or illuminating.

There he is below in his high-school yearbook. “Cheerful and happy all day long” is how some anonymous fellow student wrote him him up, and it’s nice to know he was thought of that way back then. While I can’t say that he was always cheerful and happy, he was certainly calm and even-tempered, and a peaceful influence on my life.

He married when he was 21, and I was born when he was 22, so when he posed for the school photographer, I really wasn’t that far away at all. I wonder what he would have thought if he could have seen the path ahead. (more…)

There was a Ravens game in Baltimore last night, but those of you who know me know that not only couldn’t I tell you who they were playing, but also that the only reason I even knew there was a game at all was because I headed into town for another reason entirely and noted the increased traffic and trouble parking. It was all worth it, though, because I was going to The Book Escape to take part in the latest stop on Jeff VanderMeer’s five-week book tour for Finch, for which he’d arranged a reading and discussion with mystery writer Sandra Ruttan.

Sandra started by reading from her novel Lullaby for the Nameless. I wasn’t at all familiar with her work, but she read a section from the beginning of the book which obviously moved her snd moved me as well. It was an intense piece of writing. Jeff read from Finch, of course, and if you’re in the mood to, you can download and listen to his 11-minute reading here.

After their reading, there was an hour-long discussion of noir, of what mysteries and thrillers can gain when set during wartime, of the recombination that occurs when fantasy and mystery mix, and more.

After the event, about a dozen of us headed off to the Double T Diner in Catonsville, where we compared the differences between mystery and SF conventions (who knew it was considered vulgar self-promotion to do readings at mystery cons, and frowned upon?), reconfigured the Geek hierarchy, and explained furries and bizarro fiction to the unenlightened who probably would have preferred to remain unenlightened.

That’s Jeff and me above. We’re not wearing our chipmunk suits, though based on last night’s conversation, that’s how you might see us next. Check here if you want to see other photos from the event.

I dreamt that I came downstairs within my actual house and stepped into my actual kitchen (not a common occurrence in my dreams, as they so often take place in previous houses or apartments or in residences I’ve never seen in real life but am not surprised to be living at in dream) into an extremely sunny kitchen. Irene is sitting directly under one of the skylights, ablaze in a beam of sunshine. I tell her that I’d just that moment received an e-mail from Marvel Comics hiring me to work as a proofreader for a week. She seems a bit puzzled, and it’s only when I see her expression that I am, too, for it’s only in that instant that I think—how exactly as I supposed to be commuting each day from West Virginia to Manhattan? Or if I stay in a hotel, won’t that cost more than I’ll earn? That issue arose as if I’d never thought of it before, and trying to figure out how the job was supposed to work, I woke. I’m often thrust from dreams when I realize that there’s something I haven’t realized before.

I also dreamed that I was giving a symposium on how to get published, not at a science-fiction convention, but on a college campus. I’m standing in front of an audience in an auditorium and rattling off markets. When I try to tell them about a writer who’ll be editing three themed anthologies, his name escapes me, and as I stand up there saying things like, “oh, you know who I’m talking about,” all I can remember is the name of his son, and so I say that it’s River’s dad, and then his name comes back to me—Tim Pratt. Now in real life, Tim isn’t editing anything fiction-related (as far as I know), so don’t start sending him your manuscripts! But in the dream, he was. And as those in the audience scribbled down the information, I moved on to other actual markets.

And still I continued to dream, though I’m not sure whether the next scene can be considered an entirely new dream or an extension of that second one …

I was hanging with Paul Di Filippo on a college campus, each of us stretched out on different couches on the first floor of a massive dormitory. And as we lounged there, for some reason I was thinking of what would happen if the building with its hundreds if not thousands of students were to be cut off from the rest of the world. I suggested that everything would soon turn all Lord of the Flies inside.

“Nah,” he said laconically, and with a smile. “I’m sure everything would be all right.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is that because people from Rhode Island don’t ever go all Lord of the Flies?”

Which is the first time I realize that the campus is in Rhode Island. I don’t hear Paul’s answer, because then I wake.

In the night’s final remembered dream, Maureen McHugh steps up to me carrying a baby. In the dream, it seems to be hers. She sits down, and then I suddenly notice Ellen Datlow is also there, and instead of any of us ever saying anything, we instead watch as Maureen feeds the baby Cheerios, because all we’re capable of is oohing and aahing over the cutie pie.

And then I wake for the final time and put an end to dream.

Long before Paul Levitz became first a comic-book editor and then the president of DC Comics, he was both the editor and publisher of a monthly fanzine titled The Comic Reader. Below is the cover to issue #98, dated June 1973, with an image that highlighted “the crowded and confused Marvel universe.”

In addition to containing news of upcoming comics, that issue also reported on the death of Syd Shores on June 3rd, the upcoming move of DC Comics (still being referred to as National) to 75 Rockefeller Plaza on July 27th, and the fact that Phil Seuling’s legal troubles for allegedly selling underground comic books to a minor was still unresolved.

But back to that cover.

Now that you’ve studied the image, can you tell me which future comic-book writer and editor, not at all known for being an artist, provided the illustration?

I’ve erased the signature so as not to spoil it for you.

The only thing further I’ll say is that it wasn’t Paul, and it wasn’t me.

Any guesses?

Yesterday, I told you about the reactions I had to Chip Delany’s experimental film The Orchid when I first saw it at a comic-book convention in the early ’70s, and pointed you to a YouTube version of the film, one that was in less than stellar condition, and chopped into four pieces on YouTube.

If you checked it out, you should consider it a poor advertisement for itself, because I’ve been alerted by one who should know that the YouTube version is of low quality due to its ancient videocassette source. You can, however, find a version which has been pristinely restored from the best surviving original print of the film itself as part of the two-DVD set of the Delany documentary The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman.

The first disc of the two-DVD set contains the award-winning 80-minute documentary The Polymath, which I saw at Readercon, and which is magnificent. You can catch a small clip (including one of its most moving moments) at the director’s site here.

The second DVD of the set not only has a pristine transfer of The Orchid that’s far superior to the version posted on YouTube, but over two hours of additional interviews with Chip.

If you need any further convincing that you need to own this DVD, check out these reviews from The New Yorker and CinemaQueer.

Unfortunately, director Fred Barney Taylor, though a great documentarian, isn’t so great at marketing and making it easy for you to order the DVD, as there’s no BUY ME NOW link on his site. But if you use PayPal to send $35 ($30 for the DVE plus $5 for shipping and handling) straight to Taylor at fredtaylor@nyc.rr.com , he’ll get one out to you ASAP. The process may be convoluted, but I assure you it will be worth it!

Imagine that you’re 16 and collapsed in the film room of an early ’70s Phil Seuling Comic-Con, dazed from a day storming the dealers room and attending panels. You’re with your friends enjoying Star Trek bloopers and installments of old Captain Marvel serials and maybe even Bambi Meets Godzilla—

—when all of a sudden you’re staring up at Berni Wrightson’s junk!

Not at all what any of us were expecting from the 1971 experimental short film The Orchid by Samuel R. Delany, now up on YouTube in a restored state thanks to filmmaker Eric Solstein. If you’re patient, in addition to a brief glimpse of Chip himself, you’ll also see such comic-book and SF names as Frank Brunner, George Alec Effinger, Alan Weiss, and Mary Skrenes.

I’m glad for the chance to see this again after all these years, because all my younger self took away from the film at the time was “WTF!” long before any of us ever thought “WTF!” There’s lots of intriguing imagery here beyond the junk of people I was trying to get sketches from back then. I just wasn’t ready to see it.

If you think you’re ready, click away!

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