Last Saturday, something magical happened at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in Johnstown Pennsylvania — a one-day mini-convention was held to honor a hometown hero, the legendary Steve Ditko. And because the event was organized with the cooperation of his family, I was not only able to spend time with other comic fans and creators, but was privileged with the presence of Ditko’s nephews and brother as well.

Since you couldn’t be there with me, I decided to get some of the mini-con’s special guests to share their stories here about Steve Ditko’s life and legacy. Because this is a podcast which uses food to loosen the tongues of its guests, and since there was no time during the short one-day event to head out for lunch or dinner, I brought along a Spider-Man PEZ dispenser so I could offer my guests candy. Plus I ran over to Coney Island Johnstown — in business for more than a century — and picked up some gobs — think of them as a regional variation of whoopee pies — which I handed out to some of my guests before we began chatting.

As I wandered the exhibitors area, I was able to grab time with four guests — Javier Hernandez, Zack Kruse, Carl Potts, and Arlen Schumer — all of whom had taken part earlier that day on a panel about Steve Ditko.

Cartoonist Javier Hernandez has been publishing comics through his own imprint Los Comex since 1998, His character El Muerto was made into a live action film starring Wilmer Valderrama in 2007. Hernandez co-founded the Latino Comics Expo in 2011, and created the zine You Don’t Know Ditko, an expanded deluxe edition of which debuted at Ditko-Con.

Zack Kruse is the author of Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity. His comic strip, Mystery Solved!, appeared in Skeptical Inquirer, and his essays have been published in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Studies in Comics, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. And he also has a gorgeous Ditko-inspired tattoo.

Carl Potts began his comics career in 1975, eventually spending 13 years as an editor at Marvel, where he not only discovered and/or mentored the likes of Arthur Adams, Jim Lee, Mike Mignola, and others, but occasionally worked with Steve Ditko. he’s given seminars on visual storytelling techniques at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons, New York University, LucasArts, and elsewhere, and presented his lecture on Sequential Visual Storytelling for the con Saturday afternoon.

Arlen Schumer is the author and designer of the The Silver Age of Comic Book Art which when it was published won the Independent Book Publishers Award for Best Popular Culture Book. He’s a pop culture authority whose visual lectures on creators such as Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, and of course, Steve Dkitko, are a must-watch on YouTube.

Join us to hear Javier Hernandez analyze the hypnotizing choreography of Spider-Man’s fight scenes, Zack Kruse explain how Ditko’s early work for Charlton held the seeds of everything the artist did later in his career, Carl Potts reveal what happened when he returned to Ditko an original page of Creeper art after he learned it had been stolen, and Arlen Schumer declare Ditko was more than just a great comic book artist, but instead a great American artist who happened to create comics — plus many more fascinating insights.

Here’s how you can hang with us at Ditko-Con — (more…)

Readercon went virtual in 2021, but because I refuse to allow the pandemic to steal from us the conversations I’d have had if we’d been able to gather together in meatspace, I arranged a wonderful virtual meal connected to the con, too. Award-winning writer Veronica Schanoes and I shared Indian food though there were hundreds of miles between us — hers from Brooklyn, New York’s Masala Grill, me from Hagerstown, Maryland’s Sitar of India.

Veronica Schanoes has published fiction in the magazines Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Sybil’s Garage, and Fantasy; the anthologies The Doll Collection, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction; and online at Strange Horizons and Tor.com. Her novella “Burning Girls” was nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award, and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. Her first scholarly monograph, Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Re-telling the Tale, was published by Ashgate in 2014. Her collection Burning Girls and Other Stories was published earlier this year.

We discussed what it’s been like trying to write her first novel during a pandemic, why she can only read Jane Yolen’s intro to her new collection half a page at a time, how she makes sure her fairy tale-inspired fiction works even for those who don’t catch the allusions, the joy which comes from putting the right words in the right order, how Kelly Link convinced her she should take herself seriously as a writer, whether research inspires stories or stories inspire research (and how writers make sure they don’t force readers to suffer for that research), the way fairy tales take place “outside of historical space-time,” the importance of Joe Strummer and the Clash, and much more.

Here’s how you can take a seat at that virtual table with us — (more…)