An original Frank Frazetta painting originally used as the cover to the Lancer paperback edition of Conan the Conqueror sold last week for $1,000,000.

I may not own a Frazetta painting, but I do have his autograph, as you can see below, obtained back in the early ’70s when I was an annoying kid with a sketchpad. The sheet below was signed either at the 1971 or 1972 July 4th weekend Phil Seuling Comic-Con. It couldn’t have been any earlier because I didn’t start doing this until after my first con, and it couldn’t have been later because Syd Shores passed away before the ’73 convention.

In addition to Shores and Frazetta, you can also see Bruce Jones, Harvey Kurtzman, Jeff Jones, John Putnam, and Jerry DeFuccio below

I know that without a painting attached, the Frazetta signature alone isn’t worth $1,000,000, so I’ll tell you what—feel free to knock off a zero. Heck, I’ll even knock off two.

So who wants to start the bidding?

I dreamt that I was talking on the phone with Stephen Segal, who in the dream had nothing to do with Weird Tales, but was now in charge of editing and publishing Locus. I was explaining the details of the current Harlequin Horizons vanity publishing fiasco, and he told me that he wanted me to write an article about it for him—and he wanted me to write it the same way the late Charles Brown would have. But that wasn’t the oddest thing about the dream. No, what was oddest was that I was wearing a bracelet made of Spanish olives. Not wax ones. Real ones. A ring of small pimento-stuffed olives was looped around my right wrist. I can understand why I might have been dreaming about Stephen—he’d sent me an e-mail a couple of days ago inviting me to a steampunk event in Frederick, MD. But where did the olives come from?

Then I had a dream in which Irene and I were moving from our current house and I was doing the final packing of last-minute forgotten items before I’d pile the boxes in the car and drive off. I was wrapping up things like extension cords and putting them in boxes by the back door. Only I had no idea where we were moving to. And, hard as it is to believe, I had no emotions one way or another about the move. I woke up, turned over, and went back to sleep, and then there we were outside of our new home, some urban apartment building. I had no idea in what city it was located, I just picked up a broom and started sweeping up all the broken glass from the street out front so we could begin moving in. I woke, still sweeping.

And then I also had a dream in which I was in a meeting with the cast of Mad Men, plotting an ad campaign. As we discussed a commercial, I wasn’t any of the characters, I was actually me, as if I’d happened to get a job there. Everyone seemed to be getting along, which was strange, if you’ve seen the show. Don Draper was actually smiling! The other strange thing? Peggy Olson was wearing a see-through blouse. Don was bemused about it, but no one told her to change. There wasn’t anything sexual about it. It was more of an “I am woman, hear me roar” ’60s moment, with Peggy expressing her independence. Thinking about her character now that I’m awake, I doubt she’d ever do such a thing. But I do see her going boldly into the ’60s in other ways as the series moves forward.

So—three remembered dreams from the night, but only one with an apparent catalyst. Who ever knows where these things come from?

Here’s the fourth Ethics column of mine which appeared a few decades ago in The Comics Journal. This one, focused on what we say about our friends when they die (well, after they die, since when they’re dying I hope we’re all calling 911 or giving CPR or something), appeared in issue #104, the January 1986 issue.

And if you’re still here after I’m gone—feel free to tell the truth about me. I won’t mind!

I’m about to sit down and try to watch AMC’s Prisoner miniseries straight through. Which might not be the best idea.

I’m a huge fan of the original series. How huge? This huge:

Back in 1972, even though I was just a teenager, I tried to organize a Prisoner convention. I left out fliers on the freebie table at Phil Seuling’s July 4th weekend Comic-Con that year, hoping to pull off a Prisoner con the following year.

Here’s a scan of probably the only surviving copy of that flier, which I only own because one of them was mailed back to me attached to a long letter from a fellow Prisoner fan offering to help.

Why did I think a teenager could pull off running a con, dealing with a hotel, organizing guests, and fulfilling such outrageous promises as listed on the flier? Probably because Adam Malin and Gary Berman, who were even younger than I was, mere tadpoles, had already started running the first of their Creation cons.

I never went ahead with the con, I’m guessing because I realized how overwhelming the project would be. And also because though I desperately wanted to attend such a con, I didn’t really have the personality capable of running it.

In any case, that’s how much I loved the original Prisoner.

Excuse me now while I pop in that DVD. I hope it’s not as bad as everyone else says it is, but if you hear screaming coming from the East Coast … that could be me.

In addition to the Jazzy Johnny Romita and Valiant Val Mayerik originals I picked up in 1974 that I’m currently in the middle of auctioning off to fund next year’s trip to the Melbourne Worldcon, I put four other items on the block today.

Check them out below!

First is the signed and numbered Abyss promotional portfolio with artwork by Berni Wrightson, Jeffrey Jones, Bruce Jones, and Mike Kaluta. Those are the Kaluta and Wrightson plates below. I picked up this rare set at a Phil Seuling July 4th con sometime in the early ’70s.

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I received my contributor copies of the anthologies The Dead That Walk and Postscripts #19 this week, and since those contain the last two stories of mine slated to appear in 2009, I figure it’s time to update you on this year’s output.

I had seven short stories published in 2009, which marked my best year yet. I don’t think I’ve ever before published more than five in a single year.

Here they are, broken down by genre:

“Glitch”
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three

Fantasy Book Critic reviewed the anthology and gave my story, which is about robot sex in the future (did that get your attention?) 4 1/2 stars … which I hope was on a scale of 1 through 5. Reviewer Liviu C. Suciu also called my story “interesting, funny and dark at the same time.”

“The World Breaks”
Postscripts #19

I’ve read this tale of a small town’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic U.S. aloud many times, and it’s one of those that chokes me up, as you know if you’ve heard me try to get through it. I made the mistake of reading it at Nippon 2007, having somehow forgotten the various references to nuclear weapons being dropped, and felt odd coming upon them and suddenly remembering in the midst of reading the story to a Japanese audience. (more…)

Here’s the third and final Ethics column of mine which appeared in The Comics Journal in 1985. I’d go on to publish four more of them in 1986, and write two more after that which were never published. Now that the decades have passed, I’m not sure why those final two never saw print. I’m sure if I dug out my correspondence with the editors, I’d be able to dredge up the memories, but I’m not in the mood to do that right now.

Give it a read, if the first two installments haven’t scared you away, and then join me on the other side for some thoughts my 2009 self had about what my 1985 self thought of my ’70s self.

And now, a few random comments: (more…)

The December 2009 issue of Esquire includes an interview with Jason Reitman (director of Thank You for Smoking and Juno), the son of Ivan Reitman (director of Stripes and Ghostbusters).

It was a short interview, no more than a few hundred words, and in it, Reitman the younger attempted to explain how his father’s films and his own differ, as follows:

The difference between my father’s movies and mine is this: If you imagine my father and I each as musicians, my father wants to take your favorite song and play it better than you’ve ever heard it. I want to take a song that you hate and play it so well that you learn to like it.

At first I thought, oh, what an interesting metaphor. But then I thought, what’s with all this liking? I already complained to you about that type of thing earlier this week.

Tell me you want to move me to laugh, cry, dance, or sing along … but don’t just tell me you want me to like you.

Liking is overrated.

Oh, not where you and I as human beings are concerned. But when we’re talking about art in any form, “like” is far too neutral a word. Sort of the way the word “nice” is when applied to people. If I ask you about your friend, and all you can tell me is that he or she is nice, you’ve told me far more than you really meant to.

So a truce, universe, OK?

Don’t let me read any more this week about people who want their stories, movies, songs, or restaurants to be liked, and I’ll try to be … well … nicer.

Yesterday, I shared the first in a series of Ethics columns I wrote for The Comics Journal in which I attempted to make sense of the time I worked for Marvel Comics. Here’s the second installment, which appeared in that magazine’s September 1985 issue.

But first a few comments from the perspective of 24 years later—

1) One of the editors at TCJ—I can’t remember who it was, though I’m sure I have the correspondence around here somewhere—insisted on formalizing the names of all of the people I mentioned, changing Marv and Len and even my wife Irene to Wolfman and Wein and Vartanoff, not at all the way I thought of them or should have had to refer to them. They were adhering to a journalistic style I didn’t think fit a memoir or personal essay, and it still seems strange to me when I reread the pieces, as if I’m holding at arms length those whom I should be embracing. If I ever collect and republish these essays, I’ll give my friends (and my wife) back their first names.

As for my other two comments, I think I’ll leave them until after you read the following, if you do bother to read the following.

2) I have no memory whatsoever of the fear I described at the bottom of the first column of page two. I remember the CPL essay, but I have no memory that once it appeared, I was worried about the repercussions. I think that ties into something I said in response to a comment on my previous Ethics entry—that time does heal all wounds. Many of the negative memories I had of my Marvel experience are gone, and the bile you’ll see in some of these installments has vanished. Some of that cleansing, as you’ll see later if I continue posting these columns, came through the very act of writing, which had an extremely exorcising effect.

3) All of the highly emotional details I wrote about the circumstances of my departure from Captain Marvel are also gone. If asked today to tell you what happened then, I could sketch in the vague details of Archie Goodwin’s unhappiness, Jim Shooter’s betrayal, and my own ineptitude at stating my case, but they would be factual only, coming from the head and not the heart. I am truly a different person, and those ancient emotions no longer resonate. But I share them here because, well, they’re honest to who I was then, and those who’ll want to know what it once was like at Marvel will get a more honest answer out of the me of 1985 than the me of 2009.

Next up—”Opportunity Knocked.”

Sean Howe, writer/editor of the book Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, has been in touch with me because he’s writing a book in which he’ll attempt to sort out the Marvel Comics of the 1970s, which means that I’m doing some sorting out of my own.

During the mid-’80s, after I was no longer working in comics, I tried to process some of what went in in the mid- to late ’70s by writing a series of Ethics columns for The Comics Journal. And since I’m scanning copies of them for him, I figure why should the two of us be the only ones who suffer?

So here’s the first installment, which appeared in the magazine’s June 1985 issue, and started to explain how my love affair with comics turned into a love/hate relationship. You’ll see, if you hang in through all the installments—including the final one, which has never before been published—how my ambivalent feelings were eventually exorcised.

Somewhere I have copies I’ve proofed to correct typos and editing errors, but since I can’t find those right now, I’ll let these stand as originally printed.

I’ll be interested to learn how these read to you, because sitting down today and reading my 1985 opinions of my 1974 sure seems odd to me!