If you follow me on twitter or facebook, you already know how I spent the past few days. For the rest of you …

I flew down to Florida Friday so I could participate in the unveiling for my father, Barney Edelman, who passed away January 27, 2009. For those unaware of such Jewish traditions, an unveiling is when, around a year after death, the marker on a person’s grave is revealed to the world.

The reason the unveiling was held Sunday, rather than on a date closer to the anniversary of Dad’s death, is because he and Mom met 57 years ago yesterday, on December 13, 1952. Mom felt it was right to choose that date, that there was a certain symmetry to it. Since they were an unbreakable couple. and had been married 55 years—he died four days after that anniversary—it seemed proper to my brother and me as well.

Here’s what I saw at the Star of David cemetery Sunday.

It felt odd to be snapping a picture after such an emotional event, and yet … I don’t live in Florida. I won’t be able to visit him often. I wanted a picture so I could visit with him at any time I chose. If that’s a sin, well, I’m guilty.

I’m home now, exhausted from an emotionally draining weekend. But before I crash, I thought I should pop up here to say that I’m back, and that we’ll soon resume our regular programming, already in progress.

Those of you who attended Readercon last July can skip this entry. But as for the rest of you …

I’ve attended every Readercon since the first, back in 1987, the only non-committee member to have done so. When the con runners asked for appreciations to print in the program book on the occasion of its 20th installment, I decided to do something no other attendee was capable of doing—write up my thoughts on all 19 cons that preceded it.

Since I’ve been keeping an almost daily diary since 1978, I went back and pulled out one anecdote per year, to which I added clarifying footnotes. In a few instances, Eric Van added footnotes as well.

In any case, I’ve had several requests for copies of this essay, so I thought I’d toss it out onto the interwebs. It should explain to anyone’s satisfaction why Readercon has always been my favorite con.

And here it is, the seventh and final Ethics column I published in The Comics Journal in the mid-’80s. This installment appeared in TCJ #109, the May 1986 issue, and dealt with the great dichotomy between what the superheroes I read about were doing with their lives and what I was doing with my own.

I also wrote two other columns for TCJ which were never published. One dealt with censorship over at The Comics Buyers Guide, for which I obtained a quote from Bill Gaines, and the other was about my relationship with Jim Shooter. If I can find the manuscripts, I’ll share them with you here.

I can no longer remember exactly why Gary Groth decided he didn’t want me to continue. Maybe it’s because I was growing more and more didactic.

Or, as in the case with the column below, maybe I was becoming dickish.

That’s right. Dickish.

Because this is the only one which, upon rereading, had me feeling l sounded like a dick. (Of course, you might have been feeling that all the way back at installment one.) (more…)

I missed wishing Ira Gershwin a happy birthday Sunday. But I guess that’s appropriate, because when I heard about it on yesterday’s installment of The Writers Almanac, what first came to mind wasn’t his birthday, but rather his death day.

Back when I still lived in New York, I was always alert for the death of a songwriter, because I knew that whenever a composer died, ASCAP—the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers—would rent out a Broadway theater and host a memorial, a celebratory concert that was free and open to the public.

Ira Gershwin’s was just one of the many I attended. Here’s the program that ASCAP handed out at the event:

(more…)

I headed over to Silver Spring, Maryland, this morning to catch the documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist. Had it not been the D.C.-area premiere, with director Andrew D. Cooke scheduled to be present for a Q&A, I might have instead waited for the DVD. But since it had the feel of an event, I thought it might be fun, and worth the drive. (After all, I’m about an hour and 45 minutes away.) Also, I was intrigued to see whether serendipity would throw me together with any other members of the comics and/or science-fiction tribe.

I’d never been to the AFI Silver Theatre before, so I made sure to get there early and scope the place out. While waiting in line wondering whether I’d see any familiar faces, who should appear but local fan Kyle Scott McAbee, someone I’d often seen at Capclave, Balticon, and even a few Worldcons. While we waited to be let in, we chatted about Walter Karig, the novel Zotz!, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I’d have liked to have kept talking, but unfortunately, we parted once we were let in, since he wanted to sit in the back row and I preferred to sit closer to the front. (Sorry, Kyle!) (more…)

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…)