John Sutherland, a former Disneyite, explains the economy in What Makes Us Tick, a 1952 animated industrial film produced for the New York Stock Exchange.

Now if only we had one of these to explain the bailout!

Just after we finished eating dinner, the phone rang. Irene answered.

“It’s someone from the Writers Guild,” she said.

I picked up the phone, and heard a woman tell me, “We’re holding some residuals for you. We tried to send them to you, but they were returned by the post office.”

She asked for my new address, which I gladly gave her.

“How much are you trying to send me?” I asked. She rattled off three figures, which totaled $116.74.

This was money earned for work I did on Tales From the Darkside from 1984 through 1986.

It’s not a huge amount of money, but nothing to sneeze at either, and so I repeat—I just got paid for work I did more than twenty years ago.

Do you need any further evidence than that?

In a recent Washington Post article about Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground, the reviewer mentioned in passing about the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley that “after graduating from Barnard, Highsmith supported herself writing for comic books.”

Am I the only one who did not know this?

I guess so, because according to Highsmith’s Wikipedia entry (and we all know that Wikipedia is never wrong):

Living in New York City and Mexico between 1942 and 1948, she wrote for comic book publishers, turning out two stories a day for $55-a-week paychecks. With Nedor/Standard/Pines (1942-43), she wrote Sgt. Bill King stories and contributed to Black Terror. For Real Fact, Real Heroes and True Comics, she wrote comic book profiles of Einstein, Galileo, Barney Ross, Edward Rickenbacker, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, David Livingstone and others. In 1943-45 she wrote for Fawcett Publications, scripting for such Fawcett Comics characters as the Golden Arrow, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, Crisco and Jasper. She wrote for Western Comics in 1945-47.

So this seems to have been more than just a brief fling.

That information on the non-fiction narratives of famous people sounds very specific, so I’m assuming that I could track them down if I wanted to. But do we know exactly which issues of fictional superhero adventures she wrote? Those sound far more intriguing.

I can’t find this information online (well, maybe I could, but I’m not having much luck), so if anyone can point me in the right direction, please pipe up!

Happy birthday, Jack!

Thanks for a lifetime of amazing art, and also for illustrating the most grotesque, over-the-top ending to a horror comic ever!

Check out these unforgettable panels from “Foul Play,” which originally appeared in The Haunt of Fear #19 back in 1953, based on a story idea by William Gaines and a script by Al Feldstein.

And thanks, too, for your quick caricature back at the EC Comics Convention in 1972!

The Book Design Review has just announced its favorite book covers of 2008.

I was pleased to see that the cover to the reissue of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! was there, because the moment I saw it many months ago, I also decided it was one of the best covers of the year.

I was fascinated to discover the cover to the UK edition of Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, which I found much more intriguing than that of the U.S. edition.

The site invites you to vote on your favorite from among these finalists, so head on over.

And while you’re there, check out the site’s choices for the best covers of 2007, 2006, and 2005 as well.

Stan’s Soapbox: The Collection, which I’ve told you about many times before, is finally out. The book, which collects all of Stan Lee’s “Stan’s Soapbox” columns which originally appeared from 1967 through 1980, plus essays from people such as Joe Quesada, Roy Thomas, and others, including me, has been published by the Hero Initiative as part of its fundraising efforts for comic-book creators in need of financial support.

The large trade paperback is in full color, beautifully illustrated, and turns out to be far more elegantly designed than I’d anticipated. You should all rush out and buy it right now!

But I must admit that there was one page of the book which took me aback. (more…)

According to the GenderAnalyzer, there’s a 56% chance that my blog “is written by a woman.”

The site then adds, “however it’s quite gender neutral.”

I think that means I’m doing something right!

Chris Claremont, with whom I worked at Marvel Comics back in the ’70s, turns 58 today. Chris is perhaps best known for his 16-year run on Uncanny X-Men.

But Chris wasn’t always the trusted comics veteran that he is today. When I was editing the Marvel fan magazine FOOM, I asked Marie Severin to draw this image for the June 1975 issue just as Chris was at the beginning of that amazing run.

According to the caption, the image depicts “What the fans wanted to do to Chris Claremont, Len Wein, and Dave Cockrum for destroying the X-men before they saw the book. Once the finished product was in their hands, they quickly changed their minds.”

But as I look at the expression of agony on Chris’ face, I suspect that what this picture really shows is how he might be feeling inside today as the realization sinks in that another year has gone by.

Happy birthday, Chris!

Yesterday’s New York Times contained an Op-Ed piece by James Gleick which for the most part had little new to say, merely recycling platitudes we’ve all already read elsewhere.

But the piece, titled “How to Publish Without Perishing,” did contain one passage which, while it may also be obvious to you, seemed new to me:

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

I’d never thought of it in quite that way, though I’ve often thought something similar—that is, we love the wine, and not the bottle.

And so the text is more important than the clay tablet upon which it is baked, the sheepskin scroll on which it it inked, the book in which it is printed, or the pixels of which it is made.

If nothing else, at least that one concept of Gleick’s stood out.

Over at The Beat, Heidi MacDonald recently shared a photo taken in a comics shop in 1967. She found the photo at the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, which has digitized 5,746 images from its photographic archives which originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News from the 1920s to the 1990s.

As fascinating a photo as that is—you can see a copy of Action Comics #1 out on a table rather than under glass—I’m not going to share it with you here, since you can wander over to Heidi’s site and check it out for yourself. But as soon as I heard of the existence of those UCLA archives, I immediately went and did some research of my own. I found this fascinating photo of Los Angeles city councilman Ernest Debs holding horror comic books which he had purchased in his district.

I have no idea what Deb’s role was during the comics censorship scare, but from his expression, I’m guessing that he didn’t enjoy the experience!

With a little browsing at The Grand Comics Database Project, I was able to identify all six comics. They are Tales From the Crypt #43 (August-September 1954), Chamber of Chills #24 (July 1954), Forbidden Worlds #31 (July 1954), Marvel Tales #125 (July 1954), Strange Mysteries #17 (May 1954), and Fight Against Crime #20 (July 1954). I’m not 100% sure that’s the correct Chamber of Chills issue, since so much of the cover is obscured, but the other IDs are definite.

And here they are! (more…)