A few years before my father died on January 27, 2009 at age 76, he sent me a manuscript he’d written about his life growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I’m missing him, and since I’m in the mood to feel his presence for awhile, I pulled out those pages and started to read. But because I’d like to feel him flowing through me for a bit, I’m going to retype some of it here. I could simply scan it to share—that would certainly be much quicker—but it wouldn’t bring him back quite as strong.

So here is what my father thought important enough to want to tell us. On the front of the yellow folder he sent me was written, “My Long Story,” but inside, he titled what he’d written:

Growing Up and Stuff: An Adventure

I grew up in Brooklyn. You have to understand the sound of the way we talked in Brooklyn. It was rough to the ear, and had its own unique sound. You’ve probably heard someone try to talk the talk of a kid from Brooklyn. They either come close or miss by a mile.

To me, it was a sweet sound, and never having been away from Brooklyn at the time, I had no idea that we sounded different. That is, until I began to travel and heard some very distinctive accents. Have you ever heard someone in Scotland try to imitate a Brooklyn accent?

All over the world, kids play in parks, playgrounds, backyards, and schoolyards. But for us at that time in Brooklyn, it was the streets, close by our houses. Our block was our playground. It was our own safe little universe.

Getting up a game on our block was easy. You’d meet up out on the street and in no time, you could get up a game of touch football. You have to understand that this was all before any formal leagues of any sort had been formed, in our area anyway, long before anything like Little League or anything like it.

It didn’t matter if it was winter or summer. If you were a young, adventurous kid growing up in Brooklyn, the streets were your playground.

The cold winters held the thoughts of snowball fights and ice-skating, maybe a sled ride down a driveway. Or if you were lucky, you could make it over to one of the parks.

The warm summer and long daylight hours helped when you were exploring your youthful needs on the streets of Brooklyn. (more…)

Because one taste of Steve Gerber isn’t enough—at least, not for his true fans, of which I suspect there are many of you out there—here’s an additional chunk of my 1975 interview with him which had somehow gotten separated from the first part.

This section is entirely about his plans for Crazy magazine, which he had just taken over as editor. The sound quality on this section isn’t the best, but if you love Steve you’ll be willing to put up with it.

Those of you who do struggle through will hear him discuss how his (then) year and a half of therapy qualified him to edit the humor magazine, why he got the gig in the first place, how he once thought he might go into television until he realized he was too ugly, and more.

And near the end, you’ll also get to hear a few (insulting) words from Don McGregor.

In 1975, I interviewed Steve Gerber, as I’d interviewed so many of Marvel’s writers when I worked there and (among other things) edited FOOM, the company’s fan magazine. I’d decided that rather than have a standard news section on oncoming comics, I’d print edited transcripts of the writers talking about what was around the corner, so readers would get a taste of creator personalities as well.

So here’s Steve talking about Crazy magazine as well as his work on Man-Thing and The Defenders in the only surviving tape from those years. Parts of this interview appeared transcribed in FOOM #9, the March 1975 issue.

And once more I ask myself—Did I really sound like that? I am forced to admit that I did. How did those of you who knew me then ever put up with me?

Back in 1975, while on staff at Marvel Comics, I edited the company’s official fan magazine, FOOM. One of the things I did as editor was to change the format of the news section. Rather than just running unadorned information, I decided I’d print interviews with the various writers and editors about what was upcoming on their titles. That way the fans would not only get facts, but also an insight into Bullpen personalities.

Some of those interviews were more successful than others.

As you’ll hear in the clip below—if you can even make out what I’m asking through the thick Brooklyn accent I had back then—my inability to get anything useful out of Archie could just as easily have been the fault of my goofy questions as anything else.

Keep listening for a special guest star—because the brief clip includes an even briefer cameo by Marv Wolfman.

And if you happen to remember why I would have made a joke back then about out-of-work police officers, please let me know—because I remember nothing!

(Thanks to Alan Light for the use of the photo I married to my audio. It’s a 1982 pic with a 1975 voice, but I hope you won’t find it too jarring.)

I’ll be in Toronto April 8-11 to attend Ad Astra. I was Editor Guest of Honor there in 2000, and for its 30th anniversary year, the con is trying to get as many previous GOHs to attend as possible.

Complete programming details are still being ironed out, but here’s what I know so far:

Using Conventions To Your Advantage
Friday, April 8, 9:00 p.m.
Conventions can be important venues for writers to meet editors and publishers. Hear stories from professionals in the field on how-to and how-not-to use your con experience to network.
(with Ian Keeling and Justine Lewkowitz)

The Walking Dead
Saturday, April 10, Noon
Discuss the television adaptation of the graphic novel series The Walking Dead.
(with Colleen Hillerup, Ian Keeling and Mandy Slater)

Why Professionalism Matters
Sun, April 11, 11 a.m.
Writing is an art, but publishing is a business. How writers and artists should act, and what they need to understand when trying to sell their work.
(with Ziana de Bethune, Adrienne Kress, Matt Moore, Mandy Slater, Howard Tayler and Gregory Wilson)

I’ll also be doing a reading, date and time still to be decided.

If you’ll be there, I look forward to seeing you. And if you won’t be there … why not?

I interviewed Isaac Asimov on November 7, 1972—Election Day—for my high school alternative newspaper, Kong. When I ran across the tape last year, I discovered to my horror that three years later, I’d recorded over the first 31 minutes of that tape with a second interview, this one with Steve Gerber. So all that remains of my Asimov interview are these concluding five minutes.

Please don’t hate me … but you’re free to hate the impetuous 19-year-old me who reused the tape!

The photo embedded on the video below shows us in Doubleday’s Park Avenue offices. Isaac is wearing his traditional bolo necktie. Unfortunately, I can be seen wearing a puka shell necklace, which I guess I thought was cool back when I was 17.

We discuss the sexual aspects of The Gods Themselves, the number of typewriters he owns, his advice for breaking into the business, and more.

I’m the one who asks the first complete question about the collection The Early Asimov, and it’s Asimov, of course, who answers. The third voice is that of high school classmate Eric Shalit.

Last night, looking to rest my brain after a heavily wired day, I pulled out my bound volume of the July-October 1898 issues of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. About as far as you could get from science fiction, right? You’d think so. But mixed in with articles on “The Irish People at Home” and “The Jews of the United States” was an advertisement in which Jules Verne tells us that “Vin Mariani prolongs life, it is wonderful.”

And the father of science fiction isn’t the only notable to urge us to take a sip of “the popular tonic” that is proclaimed to be “nourishing, strengthening, refreshing.” Also recommending the drink are the man who exonerated Dreyfuss (Emile Zola), the author of The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas), the composer of “Ave Maria” (Charles Gounod), and the designer of the Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi)!

Why, so amazing is this beverage that it’s recommended “For Overworked Men, Delicate Women, Sickly Children.”

Since I’d never heard of this miracle elixir before, I decided to learn a bit about Vin Mariani, which turned out to have been created in 1863 and (as I should have expected) was “made from Bordeaux wine treated with coca leaves.”

In fact, at first it contained 6 milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine, but when exported to the U.S., that was raised to 7.2 milligrams per ounce.

No wonder it is “recommended by all who try it”!

Yesterday’s posting of four rejection notes I received from Paul Levitz caused one of you to ask whether one-line rejections were common. Since many of the rejects I received back during my comics years were received orally in face-to-face pitch meetings, I don’t have that much experience with written rejection. But I found one more reject from the late ’70s that will give a little more documentation of what it was like to have stories kicked back by a comics editor. At least from a horror anthology, that is.

Once I was no longer on staff at Marvel and was free to try selling comics scripts elsewhere, I not only hit up the editors at DC, but at Gold Key as well, because the latter company was still publishing both Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery and The Twilight Zone.

Here’s what editor Denise Van Lear had to say about three plots I’d submitted to her.

I’m not entirely sure when this letter would have been written, but the two Gold Key comics she suggested I try submitting stories for, Boris Karloff #87 and The Twilight Zone #89, were cover dated December 1978 and February 1979 respectively.

As for her suggestion that one of my stories, “A Model Murder,” might be “better suited for Marvel or D.C.,” she was right—the story ended up being published in House of Mystery #270 (July 1979).

And guess what? You can read it here!

I’ve been sharing lots of old timey comics memorabilia from my personal files lately, some of it tied into birthdays and anniversaries, some related to events that happen to be in the news, and some simply to make sure possibly historic info is out in the world should something catastrophic strike here.

And then there are the letters, memos, and clippings I dig out because some comics historian is writing an essay about something that happened more than 30 years ago, and I head into the vault in search of data that might shed a little light or spark some memories.

So when I was contacted by a writer researching a piece about DC’s horror books like House of Mystery and House of Secrets for Back Issue magazine, I went looking for some of my plots or scripts that I thought I’d held on to … but no. They were nowhere to be found. I did, however, come across four late-’70s rejection notes written to me by editor Paul Levitz. (Don’t worry—he was also buying many other similar tales from me at the same time.)

I have no memory whatsoever as to the plots of the rejected stories. What legal problems was I going to cause? What industry in-joke was I hoping to get away with? No idea. I’m thinking that perhaps the cancer plot might have tuned into my short story “The Man Who Would Be Vampire,” but I can’t be sure.

Anyway, since I’ve shared these with that writer, I figured I should share them with you, too.

Forty years ago today, on March 14, 1971—it was also a Monday—the Dark Shadows comic strip began. Not many people remember it, as it only ran for 52 weeks. Even though the entire run has been collected in a book, unless you were a Dark Shadows fanatic, you probably had to be there.

Well, I was there, and got to meet the artist of the strip, Ken Bald on September 26, 1971, during the 75th anniversary celebration for the comic strip I told you about in January.

Annoying 16-year-old comics fan with a sketchbook that I was, I of course had to get an autograph …

… as well as a sketch.

But I came away with something even more special than either of those—a photo of Bald himself dressed in Barnabas Collins garb that he took to use as reference for the strip!

Rather dashing, don’t you think?

And if Wikipedia can be trusted, Bald, at 90, is still with us. He must have more vampire blood in him than I thought!