An inordinate amount of attention is suddenly being paid to the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel back in the ’70s, especially considering the lack of attention that was paid to them at the time. The recent reprintings of the tales in the Legion of Monsters hardcover and the Essential Marvel Horror volume two trade paperback has caused a flurry of blogging about those ancient stories lately, such as the comment from Greg Hatcher over at Comic Book Resources this week that “there are moments of real potential in Scott Edelman’s work on the Scarecrow.”

Whether there was or not, that potential remained unfulfilled, as I only ever got to script two issues about the character. But since people are talking about the Scarecrow again, it seems a good time to share some never-before-reprinted art which appeared in Marvel’s UK titles when the stories were reprinted there.

First up, three covers of the weekly black-and-white book The Super-Heroes from the mid-’70s:

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I’m about halfway through the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and that is where I think I’m going to have to stop. It isn’t that Lovecraft doesn’t have fascinating things to say. It’s more that at times the things he has to say are … well … too fascinating.

Sometimes I find his sentiments interesting in terms of the way they differ from my own, as in this letter from August 12, 1928, in which he states:

I prefer non-committal, non-sensational titles as a general rule; especially when the stories are themselves subtle & elusive in their weirdness.

Not me! I prefer more ornate titles, both in my own writing (the titles of mine I like the best are always more complex, as with “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” and “10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing”) and in that of others (as with Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”).

I also break with Lovecraft’s comments from August 20, 1928:

I note that you prefer the dialogue form as a medium of expression—a circumstance which perhaps indicates that you are a playwright at heart. I myself am the exact opposite. My purpose in writing a tale is to delineate a certain visual picture or crystallise a certain atmospheric effect—in which human beings are only incidental “properties”.

While it’s interesting to see Lovecraft make his methods concrete in that way—since the allure of his stories has always been the language and the atmosphere, rather than any of the people—in my own work, it is the people and characters who come first. (more…)

I like Christmas. I really do.

I love going out at night and driving around looking at lights, I lust after fruitcake, and I can’t watch It’s a Wonderful Life without sobbing like a baby.

So why is it that as I searched for Christmas imagery to illustrate the day, the only pieces of art which spoke to me show poor Santa either threatened …

… or dead? (more…)

Even though I wouldn’t have gotten along with H.P. Lovecraft on a personal level—his feelings about racial purity and his fear of non-Aryan immigrants have creeped me out ever since I read the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft in the ’70s—as I move deeper into the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, I find more and more points on which we agree, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Here he is on May 16, 1927, addressing the choices we all have to make to put food on our tables and keep roofs over our heads:

An author really ought to be financially independent, so that he need neither cater to the commercial field in his writing, nor expend his time & energy on other pursuits. However, of the two evils, catering & outside work, the latter is by far the lesser evil. That at least does not impair the artistic sincerity of the small amount of writing one does do. I have more respect for an honest plumber or truck-driver who writes to please himself in his spare time, than for a literary hack who extinguishes his own personality in a service acquiescence to the puerile & artificial demands of an ignorant herd.

We’re in agreement there. One reason I’ve always held day jobs was to prevent economic issues from influencing my artistic decisions. (more…)

On Friday, after having read a particularly entertaining entry in The Book of Lists: Horror, edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley, I asked the question, “Who the Heck is Warren Martense?”

I believed that Warren Martense had to be a pseudonym, and so I e-mailed Del, who e-mailed Scott, who contacted the writer of the list which had piqued my interest, and the big brains conferred to decide whether the secret could be revealed, and lo, the curtains opened …

Well … better make that, the curtains parted slightly.

For though I haven’t yet learned the true identity of the writers (yes, writers) who came up with “Ten Things H.P. Lovecraft Never Asked for in a Bar,” I now know this much, that Warren Martense is “the Lovecraft-inspired pseudonym of two UK writers.”

And now you know, too.

I began reading the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth last night. The relationship between the two began in 1926 when Derleth wrote a letter to Lovecraft asking for help in tracking down a couple of short stories by M.P. Shiel, and blossomed into a correspondence that continued on a weekly basis through 1937.

David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi have edited the hundreds of letters into a fascinating two-volume set from Hippocampus Press. I read the five-volume Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft thirty years ago, but as those books contained letters to multiple correspondents, I don’t remember the reading experience as having had as intimate a feeling as this.

I’m also finding that these these letters will appeal to more than just those with either a scholarly or fanboy interest in Lovecraft. The editors’ helpful footnotes make sure that no prior knowledge of either Lovecraft or Derleth is necessary. I think any writer, whatever his or her level of familiarity with these men, will find something of interest here relating to the creative process, dealing with rejection, the nature of fantasy, and more. (more…)

According to Carleen Brice over at The Washington Post, December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month.

An interesting article, and an intriguing promotional strategy, which Brice describes as “this guerrilla marketing effort—although sort of a stunt.”

Unfortunately, the online commenting got ugly. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Over at The New York Times, Grant Barrett, the head of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, has anointed “The Buzzwords of 2008.” To make it even more interesting, artist Jessica Hische has whipped up some intriguing typographical treatments of the chosen phrases.

Here’s one you may recall, spawned by a particularly idiotic moment in one of the year’s biggest blockbusters.

I once complained that Deep Throat didn’t go to prison. I wasn’t to learn what I’d done for several decades, though.

When Mark Felt—not Henry Kissinger, or Alexander Haig, or L. Patrick Gray, or any one of a number of other suspects—was revealed three years ago to be Deep Throat, the man who helped bring down Nixon, the first thing I thought was—”Wait a second! I know that name!”

And I did, but not from a Watergate context. It’s because I sent the following letter to the White House on April 20, 1981:

Dear President Reagan:

I must write this letter to strongly protest your recent pardoning of W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, both of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of whom were convicted in a court of law of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans in the early 1970s.

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, we, the victors, introduced the important Nuremberg Principle—”I was only following orders” was determined not to be an allowable defense for the commission of a crime. With your pardon you have canceled our this important principle, telling employees of the United States Government, in effect: “Go ahead and do what your bosses tell you. Don’t bother your head about whether it’s moral or not, or whether it’s legal. Just do it. If you do something wrong and you’re found out, someone will come along with a pardon to haul your ashes out of the fire.” And you have done just that, sir, like a Mafia don springing his faithful henchmen.

This is supposed to be a democracy—one citizen, one vote—and no man, not even a President, should be allowed to overrule the wisdom of a jury’s democratic verdict with a capricious pardon.

I must strongly urge you not to make similar misuses of your pardoning power in the future.

Sincerely yours,

Scott Edelman

I know, I know. Not only was the tone of my letter over the top, but its message was unlikely to be heard. Plus, letters like these— of which I wrote many in the early ’80s to various elected officials—probably got me an F.B.I. file. But at the time, it seemed important to let the emperor know that he wore no clothes.

If anyone had told me back then that someday we’d have a president who’d make me long for Reagan—or even Nixon—I’d have called them mad!

Anyway, farewell to Mark Felt. Whatever your other sins, it turned out that you deserved kudos after all.

I ran across two stories this week dealing with African-American comic-book creators, one meant to make me laugh, the other designed to tug at my heartstrings. The piece that wanted to move me succeeded, the other … not so much.

The supposedly funny skit appeared as part of the Chocolate News TV series on Comedy Central. I’m a big fan of David Alan Grier, and have been ever since In Living Color. I like him still. Only what I tend to enjoy most about the new series is the personality he lets shine through during his monologues, rather than the skits, which can be hit and miss.

The bit on Blomicon 2008, The Black Comic Con, was one of those misses. It could have been funnier. It should have been funnier. Here it is for those of you who might not have caught it when it aired. Maybe you’ll find it funnier than I did.

Then there’s the recent Washington Post article, “Comic Book Hero” written by David Rowell, which follows Andre Campbell as he navigates the 15th Annual Pittsburgh Comic Con. Campbell is a legally blind artist who has created more than 500 characters and hopes to someday make it as a comic-book creator. I wish him well.