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!

(more…)

Here’s the fifth Ethics column I published in The Comics Journal back in the mid-’80s. This one appeared in issue #106, the March 1986 issue, and dealt with my realization that I’d spent my entire career in comics trying to be Stan Lee, rather than myself.

But by the time I realized that, it was too late.

That issue of Captain Marvel I mentioned? You can read more about it here. I see now that when I’d written that entry in August, I’d forgotten the Space Phantom was meant to be a part of the story. Was it him impersonating Wonder Man on that final page, which would have lead to a confrontation between Captain Marvel and the real Wonder Man the following issue?

We may never know. But I guess I should never say never, for who knows what else I might discover in the vault?

As for the main point of the essay, I do sometimes regret that I didn’t start to find my voice in the comics field until just as I was leaving it. Will I ever give comics a try again? It seems impossible now with all the many things I’m trying to get done each day, but as I’ve already written above … never say never.

Like many of you, I’m planning to attend next year’s World Horror Convention in Brighton. I’m sure I’ll have fun, especially since my zombie collection from PS Publishing will launch there. But for extra insurance to make sure the trip goes well, I pulled out my favorite guidebook so I could brush up on the ways of those mysterious Brits.

Let’s flip through its pages together and see what sort of useful advice we can find!

Uh-oh! I see a problem right away. It seems that the convention, scheduled to run from March 25-28, won’t be held during the most fashionable time of year for a visit:

The ‘London Season’ is chiefly comprised within the months of May, June, and July, when Parliament is sitting, the aristocracy are at their town residences, the greatest artistes in the world are performing at the Opera, and the Picture Exhibitions open.

Ah, well. I’m sure I’ll manage to have a good time anyway. So what else do I need to know?

Passport: These documents are not necessary in England, though occasionally useful in procuring delivery of registered and poste restante letters. A visa is quite needless.

I’m glad to hear that England is such an open country! Anything more? (more…)

Yesterday, I shared a letter from Roy Thomas printed in an ancient issue of Comic Fandom Monthly. Flipping through the pages of that 1972 fanzine, I came across a couple of charts—assembled by a young Paul Levitz, then the editor of his own fanzine, The Comic Reader—that deserve to have the dust blown off them and reexamined.

The charts Paul drew illustrated falling comics sales, reflecting numbers which indicate how bad things have gotten over the past few decades, in that the companies involved would likely be thrilled (correct me if I’m wrong) to sell today at levels which were once thought depressing.

Here are Marvel’s sales figures:

And here are DC’s:

What message did Paul draw from this?

He wrote that ” … comic books, per se, are dying, a fact which many fans can’t face. Sales have slumped steadily for the last couple of decades with the only upswing being during the camp era. That was of very short duration, anyway. The graphic story IS achieving acceptance, but the comic book is on its way out.”

There was an upside, though, wrote Paul:

“There is one cheery note in all this gloom. Comics are back to a battle of quality. Comics will no longer be sold on the basis of price but on the basis of their content.”

Of course, price meant something different then than it does now, since in the same essay he refers to the fact that “DC has switched to the 32-page, 20¢ format. Marvel, of course, has been at that size since September.”

So those good old days? They weren’t quite as good as you think they were.