Calling the image below my favorite photo from San Diego Comic-Con might seem like faint praise, considering how few pictures I snapped this year, so busy was I with getting content online for Blastr (this post about the DC reboot protest being my favorite example of that). But I have a feeling that no matter how many photos I might have ended up taking had I the free time, I still would have liked this one the best because of the way it marries the past and present.

To celebrate 50 years of comics fandom, Comic-Con threw a party Saturday night, “for fandom’s founders and early participants, including folks who were active in the 1960s, and 1970s, whether producing fanzines, writing LOCs, selling comics, or putting on conventions.” I was only able to attend briefly because the event conflicted with the party Syfy was throwing, but during the time I was there I was able to speak with George Clayton Johnson, Doug Fratz, George Olshevsky, Jim Salicrup, Greg Bear, Astrid Anderson Bear, and others, plus the stars of my favorite picture&#8212Pat and Dick Lupoff.

What you see in their hands is the back of the program Jackie Estrada had printed for the occasion, which features a photo (one you may have seen before) of Pat and Dick from 51 years ago dressed as Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel at the 1960 World Science Fiction Convention in Pittsburgh.

Dick said he still owned that red shirt emblazoned with Captain Marvel’s lightning bolt, and threatened to wear it to the convention Sunday. I don’t know whether he did so or not … but man, if only I’d gotten a picture of THAT!

Feel like paying only a $2.50 admission to get in to Comic-Con? You can. But it won’t be the one that starts in San Diego tomorrow, I’m afraid. And you won’t be able to get there without a time machine, either.

Because the con I’m talking about took place in 1967, and in addition to only costing $2.50 to attend or to grab a dealers’ table, hotel rooms started at $7.50.

But if you do happen to have a time machine … then pay close attention to the details on the flyer below!

Since every use of the word “con” is in “quotes,” does that mean the word was still considered suspect slang back then? Or is that just the way they did things in Texas?

As soon as I learned that this year’s Stoker Awards banquet was going to be held on Long Island, I decided to make the most of it. And one way I did that was by bookending the event with lunches that had absolutely nothing to do with the primary reason for my trip.

I planned a Thursday lunch with Frank Cama, the Junior High School drama teacher who changed my life, and I planned a Sunday lunch with Marie Severin, the Marvel Comics artist who’s the funniest, nicest lady I ever met in the business. (Don’t worry—Irene won’t mind in the slightest that I said that.)

As the time for my lunch with the Mirthful one drew near, signs indicated to me that Fate was not indifferent to my trip, and very much wanted us to spend time together.

For example:

1) I was asked to present one of HWA’s two Lifetime Achievement Awards to Al Feldstein. The fact that Feldstein was an editor at EC Comics also meant that he was … Marie’s boss.

2) A couple of days before I was to head off to Long Island, I was contacted by Sean Howe, author of an upcoming history of Marvel Comics in the ’70s. He gave me the phone number of fellow Bullpenner Stu Schwartzberg so I could pass it on to Marie the next time I saw her … which Sean had no idea was only going to be a few days later.

3) I had dinner Friday night with (among others) William Freedman, who’s married to the niece of one of Marie’s high school classmates. We’d met online when he reached out to tell me about his encounter with Marie Severin and how she drew on his walls, and he retold that tale at our dinner party.

4) Sunday morning at the hotel, while noodling around online, I discovered that one of Marie’s most famous covers was on display as part of a comics exhibit at an Istanbul museum. Since Marie doesn’t do the Internet, this meant the only way she’d ever know about this honor was if I showed her that pic on my iPad.

You’d think those would be enough reasons to prove the universe was smiling at my encounter with Marie, but no, there was an even more astonishing one … (more…)

I’m just back from Long Island, where I went to take part in the Stoker Awards weekend, and I’ve got lots to say and neither the time nor the energy to say it all now. But one thing I want to make sure I do before the work week begins is share the remarks I made to present Al Feldstein with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association.

I may have deviated from the script below as I moved through my speech, but I think you’ll get the gist of it—to explain in 3-5 minutes to all those present the reasons why Feldstein deserved to be honored by the organization. (Fingers crossed that I haven’t deviated from fact.)

And so …

Those familiar with the Golden Age of horror comics our Lifetime Achievement Awards recipient Al Feldstein was responsible for back in the 1950s know that if HE had scripted the Stoker Awards weekend, it would start off with a punning title like, “I’m Fine, Horror You?” It would culminate in a banquet at which one of our Guests of Honor would mysteriously fail to show and meanwhile the steaks would taste REAL good. And once all the speechifying was over and we’d start rushing out of here to party, we’d find the halls lined with razor blades … and then some idiot would turn off the lights.

Feldstein was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and when he was 15, barely able to afford the subway fare to the High School of Music and Art which he attended in Manhattan, he learned that a friend was earning some money in the comic book business. Feldstein was hired by Jerry Iger of the Eisner and Iger shop, which created content for the comics publishing companies of the day, to do the scut work of ruling panel border, inking pointers on word balloons, and erasing pencils once pages were done … for three bucks a week.

He enlisted in the Air Force in 1943, where, among other thing, he designed flight jackets and painted squadron insignias, and after his discharge, he started freelancing for Fox Comics. But there was something missing about those assignments. Something like … getting paid in a timely manner, which I think many of you here in this room are all too familiar with. But he heard about another publishing company that treated its freelancers a little better, one called Entertaining Comics, owned by a guy named Bill Gaines. (more…)

Former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter posted an essay the other day which makes it sound as if, once Stan Lee no longer had the time to oversee how others were playing with his toys, no other editor-in-chief paid much attention to what was going in any books except for those he wrote himself until Jim arrived to take the reins and put things right. Shooter repeated this line of thought in a second essay, writing that “any outside observer would have guessed that [Production Manager John Verpoorten] was the boss, at least during the time that Len, Marv, Gerry and Archie were Editors in Chief.”

As someone who was hired when Roy Thomas was in charge, and who continued on staff at Marvel under Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, and Archie Goodwin, I feel called upon to defend my former bosses and say—not so! Verpoorten, though important, was not acting as de facto editor-in-chief, making all art assignments for editors who were supposedly uncaring of what was going on in the rest of the titles. While Verpoorten made sure that Vinnie Colletta, who hit his deadlines, got more assignments than the rest of us would have liked, he wasn’t running the show. I witnessed this on a daily basis, as editors held plotting sessions with writers, were deeply involved in art assignments, and pushed all freelancers to be accountable.

In lieu of an elaborate rebuttal right now, here are a few memos to let you see that even though once in a while a slip-up might let a superhero do something preposterous like drag Manhattan Island, not only did the editors who came before Jim try to make the trains run on time (something Jim was admittedly very good at), but they also paid attention to what the heck was happening on those trains. (more…)

I guess I was tweeting my dreams before Twitter was even invented.

I’ve been sharing my dreams online since I started blogging in 2007. And once I got hooked on Twitter, I continued the practice there, which made sense, since not every dream deserves more than 140 characters.

Some nights the picking are slim, but other nights I’ve remembered as many as eight dreams. I’ve been asked whether I’ve always been able to recall my dreams, and I think I have. As proof, here are some dreams I scribbled down from January through March of 1970, when I was only 14.

Some of you have told me that you look forward to learning each morning what I dreamed the night before. You might enjoy this blast from the past.

Others have told me they wonder why I share my dreams at all. You won’t.

I’d read a paperback about lucid dreaming—this was a period when I was reading a lot of Edgar Cayce—and so I decided to attempt it. I was never successful at it; that is, I was never able to control where I went in dream. But when I woke, I was able to bring back many surreal moments. Here are a dozen of the most interesting ones from that period.

I was walking on ceiling in an anti-gravity atmosphere. Filled with seats like from a movie.

Two men are pushing a rock down a ditch. Their boss comes along and kills one of them but spares the other one.

I am doing experiments on mice. The mice are spelling words by crashing through holes with letters on them.

A stuntman in a motion picture is being whipped. Something goes wrong and the whip really works. He becomes completely deformed somehow. A boy turns him into a monster in a comics shop.

Person floating down river covered with a plastic shield or force field.

I get a phaser. We get in car and I try using it but it doesn’t work. We go to Coney Island. … When we are leaving, I phaser a radio that is in front of dad. It all disintegrates but one metallic part.

Reading Fantastic Four comic book.

There is a fight between Hulk, Dr. Strange and me (Thing). The front door gets knocked off. At the end, Hulk is in my room and throws stuff (books) all over the place.

Someone stole a script from me while I was on another planet and became famous on it. To get revenge I come to earth with evidence. While getting out of spaceship had to run so that we could destroy it so no one could learn her secrets. We stole a miniature tank from the army and destroyed the ship.

One of my friends dies but a man living with us brings him back to life.

I go back into the past with [REDACTED]. We never leave the car. We meet a caveman. An ostrich takes something of ours and runs away. He tries to get it back. I open the window of the car and the ostrich tries to stick his head in and I close it on him.

A man tries to kill me because I killed his son on Pearl Harbor Day. He then sees a stamp that stated the time that it started and realized that he killed his son, not me.

I guess I haven’t really changed that much at all in the past 41 years.

I wish I could share many wonderful memories with you about my encounters with Jeffrey Catherine Jones, but I can’t, even though I’m pretty sure our paths must have crossed dozens of times from the early ’70s through the early ’80s. I have a couple of scraps of proof of that, too, in the form of autographs I collected when I was one of those annoying kids with a sketchpad you see at comic conventions.

I started attending cons in 1970, started on staff at Marvel in 1974, and burned out on it all by around 1982, but between the beginning and the end, I can picture chatting with Jones many times, even remembering the rooms in which we spoke. I can see her now scribbling her name on the sheets of paper below, and in front of one of her massive paintings at a Phil Seuling con as I said how much I loved it, and at a 1973 Cosmic Con in Toronto, where I bought one of her drawings which had been a spot illo in an issue of Amazing. (Art I’ve been fruitlessly trying to locate for years, BTW, and another quick search today continues to leave me puzzled.)

But as to the content of what we said … nothing. It must have all been inconsequential small talk.

Which bothered me at first, until I started thinking …

In the long run, does it really matter? Because with her art, she moved me. Her paperback covers made me buy books that I would never have otherwise bought. Her comics, particularly a Wonder Woman cover that sticks in my mind, showed me that comics could be done differently. Her career choices proved that a comics creator could expand beyond the limits of the comics themselves, and evolve to encompass greater ambitions. And her bravery regarding gender issues opened minds, spread understanding, and taught tolerance.

And wouldn’t she, wouldn’t any artist, rather I remember all of that than any trivial anecdote of a brief encounter at a con or at a party? I’d like to think that she would.

Those Bronze Age Babies are at it again. Yesterday, they were talking up the character synopsis blurbs that used to appear on top of Marvel splash pages, and today they wrote about house ads and other comics ephemera. Which, though anonymous, also had authors.

And sometimes that author was me.

I’ve mentioned before how I wrote the Bullpen Bulletins page for a couple of years (save Stan’s Soapbox, of course), as well as a set of Marvel Slurpee cups, but I also wrote a whole bunch of house ads. Here are just three of them, plucked from a portfolio I assembled when I started looked for a publishing job outside of comics.

And as for who drew that illo in the last ad, well … I don’t have to tell you, right?

The graphic gurus over at Bronze Age Babies (which you should be reading daily, of course) were pondering a bit of Marvel Comics arcana today—who wrote those intro blurbs that started appearing atop splash pages during the mid-’70s?

Who do you think?

Yes, that’s right. Me, when I was an assistant editor back in the Bullpen.

I didn’t originate the idea—that would have been Stan Lee, who felt that new readers needed an easy entry way into the convoluted Marvel Universe—or start writing them—I’m pretty sure that would have been Roy Thomas—but I wrote enough of them that I included seven examples in a portfolio I put together after I quit my staff job and started looking for a new publishing position elsewhere. Which means that, luckily, I don’t have to rely solely on memory.

The seven I thought worthy enough to show off were those for the Black Panther, Captain Marvel, The Champions, The Inhumans, Killraven, Skull the Slayer, and the X-Men.

I guess I figured that these were enough to demonstrate my ability to digest and regurgitate Stan. I believe I did others, though after this length of time I can’t say for sure which ones they would have been.

Does that answer your question, you Bronze Age Babies, you?

Back in the mid-’80s, I wrote seven Ethics columns for The Comics Journal, which proved to be a very cathartic experience. But two additional columns were never published, both bounced by TCJ.

One of them, about my relationship with Jim Shooter, was in retrospect so personal that it was probably best that no one other then me and Gary Groth ever read it. The other, about a case of advertising censorship at The Comic Buyer’s Guide, was so of its time that it’s probably no longer of interest.

But one small part of that latter column shouldn’t vanish, and that’s a letter I received from Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD magazine. I wrote to ask what he thought about the banning of the word “sex,” considering that he once plastered it on one of his own covers, and this is what he had to say.

Gaines wrote:

“Well, I deplore it—but can understand CBG’s desire to avoid controversy. If, in fact, they followed their ad policy of censoring ads, you pays your money & takes your chances! Personally, I wouldn’t advertise there!”

My apologies to Bill’s ghost for not letting this quote out into the wild until now. (more…)