I may be a little late to report this unfortunate news, but better late than not at all. Gene Colan, an amazing comic-book artist who is perhaps best known for his 81 consecutive issues of Dardevil, the entire 70-issue run of Tomb of Dracula, and most issues of Howard the Duck, is reportedly suffering from liver failure, which has led to perilous complications, among them fluid retention and encephalitis. Gene’s wife, Adrienne, shared some of the details here.

Gene has been drawing comics for more than 50 years. If you’re not familiar with his work, check out one of my favorite sites, the Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index, which features a gallery of some of Gene’s greatest covers. Personally, I’ve always had a nostalgic soft spot for the cover of Marvel Super-Heroes #12, shown to the right. I can still remember encountering it in a Brooklyn candy store when I was 12 and being blown away by the first appearance of Marvel Comics’ Captain Marvel. (My fondness for that memory has nothing to do with the fact that I’d end up writing his adventures a decade later.) I recall staring at the cover and desperately wanting to know, who is this guy? Gene’s distinctive artwork, which displayed human emotions through facial expressions and body language in a way few could, certainly contributed to that. (more…)

I had a dream this morning in which I was at Readercon, sitting in one corner of a boisterous con suite, catching up with Resa Nelson. I’ve known Resa for more than 20 years, but these days we tend to only see each other face to face once a year at that convention, which is coming up in two months, so it made sense that she would appear in one of my dreams.

Then into the con suite comes, of all people, my mother, who plops down in a chair next to us. She’s out of breath from playing tourist during the day, and tells me that she just wanted to check how I was doing. Her visitation in my dream also makes sense (even though she’s never attended a convention in real life) considering that yesterday was Mother’s Day, after all.

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The latest issue of the weekly Variety brings belated news of the death of Werner Groebli, who died back on April 14 at age 92. That name is probably unfamiliar to you, as it was to me. But you might recognize, as I did, the identity he took on in the ’30s, when he entered show business and needed to spare his family the embarrassment of his taking part in such poorly regarded profession.

Groebli, an ice-skating wizard, dubbed himself Frick, while Hansruedi Mausch, his partner, named himself Frack, and as the team of Frick and Frack they became world famous, both as superstars of the Ice Follies and in films such as Let’s Dance and Silver Skates. Groebli performed more than 12,000 times (both with and without his partner) from 1939 through 1981.

But there’s more to the story than that, as some of you may have already realized, just from hearing those assumed names. For not only did the team turn into skating legends, but their names entered our language, becoming synonymous with any two people so alike as to be indistinguishable, a phrase I still hear in use today, though likely by people who have no idea of its origins, and also usually in a disparaging manner. (The phrase almost missed its chance to enter the lexicon, however, as Groebli and Mausch first thought of calling themselves Zig and Zag.)

So even though Werner Groebli is dead, Frick lives on as one half of a figure of speech!

I had two comics-related dreams this morning. I’m not sure why, as those dreams are usually sparked by something that happened in real life, such as a conversation with someone I used to know in the old days, or discovering the news of the death of a friend. (As opposed to my SF-related dreams, which seem to pop up unbidden, as anyone who follows this blog already knows). Whatever the reason, they seemed interesting to me, which means that now you’re going to have to suffer.

In the first dream, I was on a panel about mainstream coverage of the history of comics. I was with others behind a table up on a stage looking down at the audience. Also in the dream were Jim Warren (former publisher of Creepy, Eerie, and Famous Monsters of Filmland), Jim Steranko (the groundbreaking artist of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the late ’60s and early ’70s), and John Verpoorten (Production Manager of Marvel Comics when I was on staff there from the mid- to late ’70s). Oddly, we were not the ages any of us could have possibly been at the same time in reality. Warren was the age he would have attained in real life now, Steranko was the age he had been in the mid-’70s, and Verpoorten was the age he would have been in the late ’60s, a look I only know from photographs of him.

I spoke on the reasons why stories about comics in the mass media are so often flawed. This is what I’d said, which I scribbled down immediately upon waking: “The person who can get it done can only get it done wrong; the person who could get it done right can’t get it done at all.” Usually, the statements I make in dreams that seem to make sense in sleep make no sense in the light of day, but this one seems to have some truth to it. What I meant by this was that most writers either have the connections to get the assignment or the background knowledge, but not both. (more…)

In Sunday’s Washington Post Book World, David Ignatius reviewed the new Richard Bausch novel, Peace (not to be confused with the Gene Wolfe novel of the same name). At the end of his long critique of the novel, Ignatius quoted Bausch’s contrasting definitions of the novel and short story. Apparently, Bausch has written that with a novel, it’s a matter of the writer “staying with it and working it over until it is right, and complete—all emotions earned, all strands of interest played out, everything resonating as it should, everything as lucid as it can be made without doing violence to the demands of the story,” while a short story is instead “the world in miniature.”

So far, so good. But then Ignatius inserted his own opinion about the difference between longer and shorter fictional forms, and seemed to demonstrate a complete lack of appreciation for one of my favorite story lengths. He stated that:

This book is somewhere in between the two forms—a novella would be the proper term, I guess. That’s an awkward length, too long for the diamond solitaire of a story; too short for the jewel box of a novel.

First of all, I find it odd that Ignatius seemed unfamiliar with the novella, as if this was the first time that he’d ever had to grapple with the concept (indicated to me by his “I guess”). But in addition, I find his distaste for the novella to be, well, distasteful, and not just because many consider the novella to be the best tool with which to tell a science-fiction tale, which means that a slam against the novella could be taken (if we follow the thought out to its natural conclusion) as a slam against science fiction. It also stands as an illogical literary statement in its own right, because setting genre aside, many of the fiction’s finest stories have been novella-sized, everything from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” to Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” to Joyce’s “The Dead.”

So why does Ignatius seemed baffled by novellas with his first sentence and disdainful of them with his second? His aside seems to me to be too broad a statement to be included in a review of the particular book under consideration, and completely unnecessary.

I had a dream early this morning in which I was hanging out with Bill Shunn and Wil McCarthy on the way to the Denver WorldCon. We’d bumped into each other at some interim airport at which we were changing planes. Our conversation was so interesting that at one point I realized I was about to miss my flight, and so I was forced to run for my gate. As I raced, two things caused me to wonder.

First, I passed a healthy Jerry Orbach, that song-and-dance man who became a star of Law & Order, which confused me, because I thought, “Isn’t he dead?” (In the waking world, he is.) And then, as I continued running, I got to thinking—why would I bump into Wil at an airport on the way to Denver? Doesn’t he live in Colorado? (In the waking world, he does.)

Once I got to my gate, I learned that I still had plenty of time, so I sat and opened my mail, which included cards (that I never got out of their envelopes, so I never learned the occasion—Happy Birthday? Congratulations? Get Well?)—or who they were from, and copies of (gulp!) Reader’s Digest (which in the real world I only ever flip through when the line at the supermarket check-out aisle is moving too slowly). I woke up before I could board the plane.

Later that morning, I had a second SF-related dream (and can recall three other dreams that had nothing to do with writers or writing). I was attending a reunion of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop—one made up not just of my year, but of all years. While there, I bumped into Cory Doctorow. We caught up for awhile, and then I moved on to look for other familiar faces. And strangely, though the public areas of the building were packed, I recognized no one else from my year or any other year.

I was given a pamphlet that contained photos of all other graduates, but I could recognize no faces there either. In the dream, I wasn’t perturbed by this, just found it odd and interesting, since from my years attending cons I figured I should be able to recognize graduates from almost every year of Clarion. I woke while flipping through the pamphlet, which was laid out like a high-school yearbook.

My short story “The Awful Truth About the Circus,” which appeared last year in the anthology Zencore!, has just been reviewed at the site The Future Fire. (Actually, I’m not entirely sure exactly when the review was written and published, as it’s undated and was only just pointed out to me now.)

The reviewer, credited as “The Exploding Boy,” had this to say:

“The Awful Truth About the Circus” and “Red Velvet Dust” are both excellent, well-written stories, nimbly capturing what magical realism is all about, turning the reader’s eye inward to the human condition, describing hope and loss with delicate brush strokes.

Thank you, Exploding Boy, whoever you are!

Catching up on recent unread editions of the Washington Post Book World, I came across an interview with Tobias Wolff which accompanied the review of his new collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. As is sometimes the case, I found the questions to be as interesting as the answers.

Interviewer Daniel Asa Rose asked Wolff the following in the April 13 issue:

I’ll bet you’re sick of the term “dirty realism”—first applied to you and fellow writers Raymond Carver, Richard Ford et. al., by Bill Buford in Granta in 1983.

When Wolff replies that he doesn’t know what that term means, the interviewer explains:

To me it means martini drinkers writing about beer drinkers: the fascination certain middle-class authors have for working-class characters.

I was glad to see that Wolff had never heard of the term, since I had never heard of the term. I understood the school of writing practiced by Carver, Jayne Anne Philips, and others to simply be referred to as “minimalism.”

Need I be embarrassed by this hole in my knowledge? Raise your hand if you’re also unaware of this literary distinction.

Or am I the only one?

I was so busy attending (and recovering from) the 2008 Nebula Awards weekend that I failed to mention that the June 2008 issue of SCI FI magazine went on sale last week.

In addition to our cover feature on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we also spotlight the films Speed Racer, Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Wanted, Get Smart, Wall*E, and The Happening, plus the SCI FI projects The Sarah Jane Adventures, Doctor Who, and Heatstroke and Aztec Rex, two upcoming SCI FI Saturday night movies directed by David Kemper. The issue also includes the usual reviews of books, DVDs, games, and more.

The June 2008 issue will be available in bookstores and on newsstands through June 16.

Ads close this afternoon on the August issue, which will occupy most of my thoughts until it heads to the printer 15 days from now.

John Berkey, one of our greatest science-fiction and fantasy artists, passed away Tuesday. He was a frequent contributor to both Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy. (Click on the cover at right to begin viewing a gallery of nine Science Fiction Age covers I’ve uploaded to honor his memory. Each cover can be clicked on yet again to be seen full size.)

His impressionistic paintings had a dreamlike quality which made them a welcome change from the photo-realistic images that many other artists seemed to be aiming for then. But John embodied more than just talent. He was a consummate professional who made all of his deadlines without complaint, whatever his circumstances. And those circumstances were often dire.

Back when I worked at Sovereign Media, I always looked forward to my conversations with John, and almost thought of them as perks. We never met face-to-face, but he was always warm to me over the phone, and we had many long talks, not only about art, but also about the differing challenges life had handed each of us.

During one of those talks, John once segued with a phrase I’d never before heard used in a conversation and am unlikely to ever hear again—”When I first came out of my coma, I … “—which certainly perked up my attention for what he was to say next. John had been dealt some fairly tough hands in his personal life, but he always faced them with dignity and grace.

Considering his many health problems over the years, his passing was no surprise. But that doesn’t make him any less missed.