I received my schedule for Balticon 43 yesterday, which will be held May 22-25 at the Hunt Valley Inn in Baltimore.

All of my programming takes place on Saturday, May 23.

If you also plan on being there, here’s where you’ll be able to find me:

10:00 a.m.: Autographing (with Steve White)

12:00 p.m.: Submission Faux Pas (with Michael Kabongo, Joshua Palmatier, and Angela Render)

5:00 p.m.: Are Short Stories Still Worth Writing? (with Larry Hodges, Tom Doyle, and Robert R. Chase)

See you there!

Do you remember where you were over the 1972 Memorial Day weekend? I do!

I spent every hour I could at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel attending the 1972 EC Fan Addict convention. I paid my $7.50 entry fee and got to hang out with the madmen (and one crazy lady) behind one of the most amazing comic-book companies ever.

And I have the button to prove it!

Those of you who couldn’t make it to New York back then are able to catch up with a report in the pages of the September 1972 issue of Graphic Story World magazine, one of the high-end fanzines of the day. (And if that cover boy below puts you in mind of Watchmen‘s Nite Owl, well, that’s not him. It’s just … The Owl, a character created by Jerry De Fuccio and Mart Bailey for a potential newspaper strip in the mid-’60s.) (more…)

Rich Buckler, best known for having co-created the character Deathlok the Demolisher and for his art on Fantastic Four in the mid-70s, turns 60 today.

But years before he did either of those things, he drew a convention sketch for an annoying teenager with a sketchbook—me!

I have no idea what con I would have been attending in New York in late November of 1972. I think it might have been one of the first Creation cons. Anyone out there know for sure?

In any case—Happy Birthday, Rich!

When I heard that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry had died, I immediately remembered the first time I’d met her, which sent me scurrying back to the autographs I’d gathered as a teen at my early conventions. What I found, which you can see at right (click to view at a larger size), showed that what I’d always thought occurred never did, that I hadn’t met her when I thought I had.

The image I’d always held in my mind was very specific. It was back at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in 1972, either at the first Star Trek convention or a Creation Con, and if I close my eyes I can even see the interior of the small room where I filled this page, which was off a corridor near the elevators. Yet when I found this sheet which was supposed to contain her signature, her name was nowhere to be seen.

Ah, fickle memory! (more…)

For those of you who’ve grown tired of seeing endless photos of the Stan Lee of 2008 due to the National Medal of the Arts he received from President Bush at the White House last Monday, here he is 41 years ago at the 1967 New York Comic Convention.

That’s Big Name Fan turned pro Dave Kaler on the right.

And before you ask, no—I wasn’t there to take this picture, though I wish I had been. I was only 12, and my first comic-book convention was still three years away. (As for Stan, I guess the goatee was still in his future.)

Though I’ve had the photo in a folder for decades, you’ll have to thank either Andy or Pat Yanchus for its existence. One of them (they’re not quite sure which; after all, it was 41 years ago) snapped it at this early con at the City Squire Hotel.

As I wrote in my remembrance of Tom Fagan, who passed away last month, he often mentioned me in his con reports back in the day. I just came across one such report in a copy of the 1972 fanzine Ragnarok, published by my friends Mark Collins and David Simons. (Note the spiffy Marie Severin cover.)

The issue included (along with an extensive Marie Severin interview, the reason for the cover) Tom’s write-up of that year’s New York Comic Art Convention, organized by the legendary dealer and con-runner, Phil Seuling.

It was the first one of those cons for which I got a hotel room (along with Mark and David) rather than being a daytripper, and it seems as if, based on Tom’s report, that I took full advantage of my presence there, and acted like a wild man, for he mentioned my doings multiple times, at one point dubbing me “irrepressible.” (more…)

Due to my New York trip Saturday, my only appearance at Capclave this year was Friday night, so I tried to squeeze in as much as I could. Lunch with Resa Nelson, who included the con as part of her three-week tour in support of her new novel The Dragonslayer’s Sword, dinner with the newest member of the Analog mafia, Oz Drummond, who kindly took pity on me, after which we were joined by Traci Castleberry, and Andy Duncan (the last of whom is pictured with me below), plus two panels.

I was joined on my 5:00 p.m. panel, “Eureka: The New TV Season,” by Perianne Lurie, Resa Nelson, and Davey Beauchamp, who acted as the moderator. I’d brought along a stack of the Fall Preview issue of SCI FI magazine to hand out to the audience so that we could all be on the same page. Most of us were not impressed by what we’d seen of the new shows this season and were disappointed by many of the returning shows. I talked up True Blood, my favorite of the new batch. Perianne and Davey discussed how much better the BBC version of The Eleventh Hour was than the Americanized version the rest of us got to see. Opinions on the latest season of Heroes differed, and when I said that I felt the creators had amazingly figured out a way to make Mohinder even more annoying than before, most seemed to agree. There was a lot of love expressed for Pushing Daisies, though it’s such a delicate show that we all trembled for its future. Most of us wished that last season’s Journeyman was still with us. A lively panel. (more…)

Capclave for its opening night next weekend, since I’ll be heading off to Manhattan the next morning to attend a memorial for Tom Disch.

But if you’re in Rockville, Maryland, on Friday the 17th, this is where you’ll be able to find me pontificating:

5:00pm: Eureka, Battlestars, and other new television

8:00pm: SF Generation gap
Writers used to believe that most of their audience had read the classics and so had a shared background and that understood Asimov’s robots, Wells’ time travel, Zelazny’s alternate universes etc. Does that common background still hold? And if so, from where—television? Movies? How do you write for audiences, some of whom understand the basic tropes, while others are new?

I hope to see some of you there!

That being said, I’m having trouble finding an affordable hotel room in New York for the night of the 18th. My usual haunts are all booked, and I can’t find anything else under $325 a night. Is that the going rate these days?

Does anyone know of anything less expensive out there, or do I just have to bite the bullet?

I have been dithering for months about whether or not I had both the time and the money to make it to this year’s World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, and after much wavering, I finally decided that I will not attend. I just canceled my hotel reservation.

So those of you who thought you might see me there … well … won’t.

It’s the day before Denvention begins, and I’m close, but I haven’t quite made it there yet. I’ve gotten to Colorado, but instead of heading straight to Denver, I’ve stopped in Westminster to visit an old friend. Before tomorrow’s chaos begins, we’ll be heading to the top of Pikes Peak, which should provide the opposite experience of what waits for me tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d finally share the drawing I’d promised back at Comic-Con, the one by an artist that I felt didn’t really capture my likeness.

George Evans was a brilliant comic-book artist, who was most renowned for the WWI aviation stories he did for the EC Comics military title Aces High. In fact, he once did me a very nice sketch of an aviator in a biplane. But I think I startled him a bit at the 1972 EC Comics Convention when I asked him for a caricature, as I had done earlier the same day with Jack Davis. (As I’ve said before, I was one of those creepy kids carrying a sketchbook back then, but I eventually got over it. At least I think I got over it.) Evans quickly penciled the drawing above.

While you could look at many of the other caricatures I’ve shared with you and probably think, yep, that’s Scott, I’m not sure what you’d make of this one.

Maybe I’m being overly harsh. Not about Evans—who definitely acted like a gentleman in the face of an overbearing teenager, and was probably thinking, “How do I get rid of this scary kid?” (and believe me, I feel for him now)—but about the likeness. Maybe my spirit is really in there after all.

You tell me.