Instead of heading directly back home after the end of Irene’s romance convention, we ventured even further afield, out onto Long Island for a visit with old friend Marie Severin. Irene and I have known Marie professionally since 1974, dating back to when we started on staff at Marvel Comics, where Irene was lucky enough to have had a few more months of Marie than I did due to her earlier start date.

Actually, since the two of us were fans long before we turned pro, we both ran into her even before that. I know that I did, in my guise as annoying kid fanboy. Anyway you look at it, Marie has been in our lives for more than a third of a century.

For those who’ve never experienced Marie up close and personal, she’s always brought to mind the following equivalency: Marie was to Marvel Comics as Rose Marie was to the Dick Van Dyke Show. She’s a dame with a zany sense of humor.

She’s also the nicest person either Irene or I ever met in comics. Too much time has passed since our last visit with her, since we don’t get out to Long Island very often, so we were happy that Irene’s con got us within striking distance. (more…)

As much as I enjoyed my brief visit to the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society as recounted in my previous posts, the primary reason I’d headed into Manhattan occurred later that day—a mini-reunion of writers and editors from my high-school newspaper. I was part of the first graduating class of Brooklyn’s South Shore High School, which meant that it had no newspaper before we got there, and so it was up to us to invent the paper’s journalistic traditions instead of having any to follow. The writers and editors of that newspaper, which we dubbed Shorelines, were advised by a teacher named Ernie Seligmann who is no longer with us, but whom we all loved. We were a tight bunch then, but as the years went by, time, as usual, tore us apart.

For the last few years, we’ve been trying to arrange a reunion of those staffers, but until Sunday, we were never able to achieve even the smallest critical mass. Finally, four of us were able to be in Manhattan on the same day. We gathered at Marsielle restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen on 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets to finally catch up. Below you can see Barry Chaiken, Donna Grant, me, and Marc Frons.

Though I’d seen Donna within the past year, I hadn’t seen Barry since 1993, and hadn’t seen Marc since 1985. (more…)

While waiting for John Scieszka’s presentation to begin, I fell into conversation with a couple of other artists who were there to speak about their projects, including Mahendra Singh, who has been creating a graphics novel version of “The Hunting of the Snark” and blogging about it.

It turns out that not only did Mahendra work for Gary Groth and Fantagraphics books at the same time as I was writing a series of Ethics columns for them, but he had also done illustrations for Sovereign Media’s Realms of Fantasy, and I had edited Science Fiction Age for more than eight years for the same company. So we had plenty to talk about, at the same time proving that six degrees of separation are really too many.

Then the program began, with society president Andrew Seller introducing John Scieszka with a few words and then this Youtube video.



Scieszka then explained that one reason he was so in love with Lewis Carroll was because he had grown up in the ’60s immersed in Mad magazine, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Loony Tunes. He told us that he got his Masters degree in fiction, which is a valuable thing to have because it “allows you to paint apartments.” He said that he ended up writing for kids because what he liked to do were “short funny pieces which you can sell nowhere—but in children’s books they live on that thing.” (more…)

Irene has been attending the annual Put Your Heart in a Book conference run by the New Jersey Romance Writers for years. It’s been a long time since I tagged along. I usually just stay at home and try to write, write, write, or if the print deadline for SCI FI magazine intervenes, edit, edit, edit. But this year I was able to set up a reunion some old friends and I have been trying to pull off for a long time (about which more later), so I decided to make the trip.

But since that reunion wasn’t going to happen until 2:00 p.m., which meant that I had the morning and early afternoon free, I had time to fit in an event I’d read about on one of the comic-oriented blogs I follow.

It turns out that John Scieszka was scheduled to speak Saturday morning at 11:00 as part of the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society, and the event was open to non-members. Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, had recently written a children’s book version of Alice in Wonderland based on the concept drawings done by artist Mary Blair for the 1951 Disney theatrical adaptation. (more…)

I have nothing more to say at the moment about Tom Disch or last weekend’s memorial gathering, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more for you to see.

Here are the remaining pictures I snapped of the photos which were on display.

My favorite may be this one from 1950 of Tom at age 10 with Mr. Potato Head. (more…)

As reported by The Comics Reporter, Mark Evanier, The Rutland Herald, and others, Tom Fagan died on Tuesday at the age of 76. Tom Fagan was a comic-book fan who founded the annual Rutland, Vermont Halloween parade back in 1959, an event which later drew many fans and pros, was featured in both Marvel and DC comics of the ’70s, and even led to an unofficial crossover between the two companies.

I got a chill when I heard the news, because even though I haven’t spoken to Tom in at least a decade, he was the first person to make an impression on me at my first comic-book convention. Which means that my acquaintance with him extends back as far as Phil Seuling’s July 4th weekend Comic-Con in 1970. (more…)

Thanks to The Comics Reporter, I’ve been wandering The Little World of Harvey Kurtzman, a site devoted to the first editor of Mad magazine.

Perhaps I’m weird (scratch that—I know I’m weird), but I found this old Mad magazine letterhead fascinating. If you check out the site, you’ll find other examples.

Which leads to me believe that maybe I’m not the only one intrigued by old stationery. With that in mind, at left is a sheet of Marvel Comics letterhead from the old days when the company was at 635 Madison Avenue, with a detail at right.

I can’t remember what span of years Marvel would have been at that address, because by the time I started working there in the mid-’70s, the company was already down the street at 575 Madison Avenue.

I’ll leave it to someone else who has more free time to dig through old comics and figure out exactly when this letterhead would have been in use.

Meanwhile, treat this artifact responsibly, and don’t go forging any old letters from Marvel staffers!

I had a dream this morning in which I was flying to a football game. And when I say flying, I mean without a plane. I was swooping through the air along city streets, like a superhero, but never more than a couple of dozen feet above the ground. I soon realized that I wasn’t in the air under my own power—the only reason I appeared to be aloft was that I was dangling at the end of a wire attached to a moving crane.

When I got to the stadium, it suddenly came to me that I wasn’t just there to attend a game—I was actually the new owner. And I was the coach as well. I know nothing about football (or any other sport, really; that’s just the way I am), so luckily my pal Gene O’Neill, with whom I attended the Clarion Writing Workshop back in 1979, was there to advise me. Good thing, too, because I desperately needed to pick his brain. For some reason he was dressed quite formally, in a business suit, as if ready for church or a wedding, while I was my usual casual self.

As we spoke, I was sitting at a table and flipping through the sports sections of various newspapers, trying to glean as much information as I could about football, but also trying to figure out the name of the team of which I was now in charge, because I couldn’t seem to access that memory. I woke while doing that, riffling the pages and scanning headlines, just as I realized that the team for which I was now responsible was the Bears.

Check out cartoonist Kevin Cannon’s Blotchmen, which was created as part of this year’s 24-Hour-Comics Day event in Minneapolis.

Fanciful, fun, and worth your time whether or not you’ve ever read Watchmen. It’s far more than just a spoof—it’s one of the more joyful things I’ve read all year.

Symmetry magazine, which is put out by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, recently published an essay by William S. Higgins on Jack Williamson’s 1942 short story “Collision Orbit.” That story contained science fiction’s first reference to contraterrene, or as we know it today, antimatter. You can find a manuscript page from that story here.

A sidebar to the main article references my 2003 visit to the Williamson ranch. Included are photos of the shack in which Jack wrote “Collision Orbit.” That’s me at right inside Jack’s shack.

The article has been linked to by many blogs, usually those focused on either science or science fiction. But what I found most interesting were the two links from sites unconcerned with either of those topics.

Here’s a link from Materialicious, which bills itself as “just another shelter blog,” and here’s one from Shedworking, which is “a lifestyle guide for shedworkers.”

Who knew that there was such a thing as shed fandom?