Number 285


Bang!


This is another of my favorite fanzines, even if I can't read it. Bang!#7/8 (double issue) was published in Barcelona, Spain in 1972. The cover features a character called Grogui. The bulk of the issue is a retrospective on science fiction comics, mostly Spanish, but with the clear influence of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.


The top illustration and this entire 4-page strip are by Emilio Freixas. "'Grap', El Pirata Subterraneo" is from the 1949 publication, Chicos, done with a strong Raymond style.






From what I could find out from the Internet, in English, Freixas went from comics into illustration, which is why when looking for information I found this picture on a photo hosting website.


Freixas died in 1976. You can see more of his work, and the work of other Spanish comic artists, at this amazing blog, viñetas.

This page from the daily comic strip "El Planeta Del Horror" is written by V. Mora and drawn by J. Remeu, published originally in 1954.



The Al Williamson page is from the Spanish translation of Williamson's greatest (to me) version of the Flash Gordon strip, done for King Comics in the mid-1960s.



Bang! is a great looking magazine, 112 pages, professional all the way. It's probably not even fair to call it a fanzine.

Number 228


Shuddering


To the strains of Danny Elfman's theme from Tales From The Crypt, I descend my basement steps. Anticipation is high; every trip to the basement is a trip into Pappy's past, every box opened, every shelf examined, is an archaeological dig into a half-remembered world. I open a file box sitting on top of a high shelf. "What's this?" I say to no one but the dusty skeletons shackled to the wall. I pull out some old magazines, untouched for years. Fanzines!

Every so often I'll go through and show you some of the fanzines I've hung onto. There wouldn't be enough room in my house for all the fanzines I ever got in the mail if I stored them with my comics, so oftentimes when purging the collection the fanzines went first. I've always regretted it, but while the number of objects to collect is infinite, the space to store them is not.

I got this particular gem, The Shudder Fanzine, in the summer of 1964. It showed up unannounced. I was on the comp list of several fanzine publishers, but didn't know it extended to Birmingham, England, where The Shudder originated, published by cartoonist Mike Higgs. I read the fanzine, but cloddishly did not respond to Higgs, not even to let him know his magazine had arrived and been read.

As you can imagine from the title, Mike's area of interest was in The Shadow and pulp magazines. The fanzine, which is well produced, appears to be a mixture of photo offset and mimeography. The typewriter used had worn keys, which bothered me as letters faded off on their corners, but now I see that as charming in a world of perfect typography thanks to computers. There is an article by Philip Harbottle on the series of Golden Amazon stories from the pulps.





There's a comic section with an article on Captain Marvel. There is even an article on the Salem witchcraft trials, a fiction piece, and then there are a couple of Higgs' cartoons. For a fan artist he seemed a cut above the average. Higgs explains his interest in the Shadow in a one-page introductory editorial: "I first encountered 'The Shadow' about two years ago in a large store pile of old magazines at half price. Among the pile I came across several British reprint editions of 'The Shadow' mystery magazine. I decided to buy one just for something to read. That night having read the story of a weird person in a black cloak and slouch hat, I became a Shadow Fan. I went back to the store the next day and bought the rest of the 'Shadow' mags." Sound familiar? A trufan in the making.

He goes on to explain that only about a dozen British editions of The Shadow appeared, so he had to resort to buying the American magazines for (choke!) $3.00 apiece. He found a contact in the States and was soon getting them at a more "reasonable price." Ah, for those good ol' days of cheap pulps, because no one was collecting them…but I digress. Here's one of Higgs' cartoons, signed as MIK, this one showing his fannish influence.
Beyond the above mention of the Shadow pulps and the cartoons, there isn't anything about the Shadow.
I have read several of the novels over the years, but was never a big Shadow fan. Even so I appreciated Higgs' enthusiasm and the whole tone of the fanzine. Still, The Shudder Fanzine went into storage, and because I didn't send a letter of comment, if there were subsequent issues, I never saw them. Over 20 years later at my local comic book store I noticed this indy comic, Brickman by British cartoonist Lew Stringer. In the lower right corner is a teaser, "Big Thrills with The Redundant Hero by Mike Higgs."


Aha. Brain engaged, memory circuits aglow, I remembered Higgs and The Shudder. The "Redundant Hero" of the title is named The Cloak, but he's a descendant of The Shudder.


If he's still around, and if you know Mike Higgs, let him know about this blog. If you're Mike reading this blog, then I'd like to offer my apologies. Thanks for sending this entertaining and well-done fanzine, and I'm sorry it took me 43 years to tell you that.

*******

By coincidence, after writing the above several days ago, I found this book in the library. It's a graphic novel aimed at children, and the villain is patterned after the Shadow.

Number 92


Secret Origins and Sky Bird #2


June, 1961 was a good month for me. On June 22 I got Superman Annual #3, and on June 29 I bought the first Batman Annual, which I thought was excellent, and still do! But a couple of weeks earlier, on June 15, I waited impatiently at Sunnyside Pharmacy for Gus the pharmacist to put out that week's comics, pouncing on the one special squarebound issue I'd been waiting for, Secret Origins. I'd been primed for it since seeing the ads in some DC Comics.

I was 12-years-old, would be 13 in less than a month. A teenager! Time to put childish things like comic books behind,* but not just yet. I just had to have something called Secret Origins.
After all, it promised to show me the origins of the Superman-Batman team, which I followed in World's Finest Comics, Adam Strange, a terrific strip from Mystery In Space, Flash (one of my favorites), Green Lantern, and even lesser super-heroes like Green Arrow and J'Onn J'Onzz, the Martian with the stupidest name ever. I could have skipped the Wonder Woman origin, but I was especially interested in the Challengers Of The Unknown, by a "new" favorite artist, Jack Kirby.

I took the book home and with shaking hands started to read, only to find by the last page that I'd been screwed. It wasn't at all what I wanted or what I'd hoped it would be.


Apparently Jim Harmon, who wrote the issue of Sky Bird#2 devoted to just that subject, felt the same way.

I showed you Sky Bird #1 back in Pappy's #26. Number 2 is a five-page fanzine produced like the first issue on a spirit duplicator. The cover artist, Ronn Foss, was a talented amateur who was expected to go places in comics. As it turned out he didn't--not the way he had planned, anyway--because by the time Ronn was ready for comics they weren't ready for him. Comic book companies by 1961 were closed shops; they had all the artists they needed or could keep busy. Ronn worked on fanzines, taking over The Comicollector and Alter Ego from Jerry Bails, and published his own 'zines for several years.

Jim Harmon wrote the book, The Great Radio Heroes, and was one of the first writers to take popular culture of the 1930s and '40s seriously. At the time I read this issue of Sky Bird** with its critique of Secret Origins I said a loud, "Amen!" in agreement. In the 46 years since I've softened my opinion. For its time the editors published what they felt was the most commercially viable material. They probably thought that no one would be interested in the early 1940s comic books.

I pulled out my original copy of Secret Origins (I still have it, along with the other DC squareback annuals I bought that month) and re-read it. I should say I skip-read it, since the stories were familiar enough to me. I agreed with Harmon in his original assessment of what should have been included, but neither he nor I had any idea that by the mid-1960s we'd see The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer, reprinting several great stories, which in turn begat book after book of comics archives and reprints. (That's not to mention the Internet and Pappy.)

In 1961 neither Harmon nor I could have dreamed that within the next few decades we'd be seeing all of the things that we wanted for Secret Origins and much, much more.

*I'm still reading comics nearly five decades later. So much for outgrowing them.

**Incidentally, I scanned Sky Bird #2 before selling it a few years ago on eBay for the outrageous winning bid of over $200. I'm still shaking my head over that one. It made me wish I'd held on to more of the old fanzines, which I thought were interesting, but to which I assigned no value either personally or financially.

Number 81


An Alter Ego For The 21st Century



The first comics fanzine I ever saw — the first fanzine I ever saw— was Mike Britt's Squatront #2 in 1959. It was produced on a spirit duplicator (a "ditto machine") in purple ink on white paper. It was an EC fanzine and yet I knew nothing about EC. It had articles on EC artists who were second-tier, like George Roussos or Sid Check. Never mind I really didn't even know anything about the first tier artists. It had an article on Jules Feiffer, a cartoonist I'd never heard of. (I found out in that article that Jules Feiffer didn't care much for Mad Magazine and he thought Harvey Kurtzman could have been a great cartoonist if he'd stuck to it.) I read and re-read that issue of Squa Tront to shreds and it's 40 years gone from my collection, but I've never forgotten it.

Fast forward a couple of years to 1961 and in the mail I got a complimentary copy of something called Alter Ego #1. It had some articles about some Golden Age comics called The Justice Society Of America, and a wonderful (to me, anyway) comic-style satire of The Justice League Of America called "The Bestest Society Of America," by a young teacher named Roy Thomas.

Along with the comics I was reading at the time those two fanzines led me down the path to today, sitting at the keyboard of my computer, writing this blog. The fanzines of today, many of them, like Pappy's, are produced in cyberspace, floating out there in some sort of Never-Never Land of technology I can't seem to completely understand.

The old fanzine style, the print fanzine, still lives in some form or another, though. I just bought a group of issues of the new Alter Ego, which is the spiritual, as well as the titular, descendent of that purple-printed fanzine I got in the mail 45 years ago. Roy Thomas, who was co-editor, with the late Jerry Bails, of the original Alter Ego, is an editor of this incarnation as well.

The two issues I was most interested in of the current series were numbers 61 and 62, both still available at the publisher, Twomorrows. I bought them because of their interesting and scholarly history of one of the more interesting comic book publishers of both the Golden and Silver ages of comics, ACG. Mike Vance, who created the comic strip, "Holiday Out," wrote the articles. They detail how the American Comics Group grew from the B.W. Sangor art shop, which packaged comic books for publishers.

Despite Bill Gaines' "admission" to the Senate Subcommittee hearings on comic books that he created horror comic books, ACG actually published the first line of horror comics with Adventures Into The Unknown, which ran for twenty years as both a non-code and then code-approved comic book. During that time many artists went through the company, but only one editor, and that was Richard E. Hughes. During the post-code era he wrote almost all, or maybe it was all, of the stories that appeared in both Adventures Into The Unknown and its companion, Forbidden Worlds.

The ACG comics hold a great deal of nostalgia for me, because at one point in the late 1950s they were my favorites, right before I got swayed to DC by that original ditto'd Alter Ego!

Current issues of Alter Ego are printed in black ink on newsprint paper. They aren't slick. They don't need to be. What's important to me is the information. I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm really interested in the kind of arcane knowledge this magazine gives me about the old-time comic book business. Maybe it's my obsessive compulsive disorder that gives me interest in the comic book business as well as comic book creators. Whatever. I'm very happy with these issues.

And they aren't the only issues that are great. You could just about pick one and find something of great interest to a Golden Age Comics fan.

Alter Ego and I have been companions a long time. You might say we've grown up together. And Alter Ego has aged much better than I.

Graphics are excellent. Every page is well-designed with lots of pictures for emphasis. After all, this is a visual medium they are reporting on. Click on pictures for full-size images.

Number 26


Ron Haydock's Sky Bird #1


Every once in a while I'll be departing from my usual Golden Age comics format to show you something from the fanzine days. I was on a comp list and used to get things like Sky Bird #1, posted here. They'd show up in my mailbox, and not many of them survived the periodic purges of my basement.

It's not strictly comics related, but I'll justify posting this by saying that Flash Gordon, the King Features comic strip of the 1930s by the artist, Alex Raymond, was the inspiration for not only the movie serial, but also influenced many of the earliest comic book artists of the golden age. How's that?

Science fiction and comic book fanzines, and especially the mimeo or ditto kind, were something like the Internet is today, only without the broad reach. I doubt Sky Bird #1 reached more than a hundred people, and probably more like fifty, which is about what a typical spirit duplicator stencil would last on a machine. What they were, more specifically, is freedom of speech. It was the right of anybody, anywhere, with access to a duplicator and a typewriter to make a stencil, to publish. That's what blogs are, many years later, just that sort of publishing, done in cyberspace instead of on 20-lb. duplicator paper. And of course, the potential to reach millions instead of a couple of dozen.

Author Sam Sherman takes an uncritical--what we used to call a "goshwow"--look at the old Flash Gordon serials, starring Buster Crabbe. Sherman lived in Hollywood and apparently knew Crabbe, who is quoted in this article.

Ron Haydock,who published this 4-page fanzine, was a very interesting character: rock singer, actor, writer. After his fanzine days he was the editor of a short-lived but entertaining magazine called Fantastic Monsters Of The Films.

By presenting this issue of Sky Bird, I'm giving it a potential audience unheard of by a fan editor in 1961, even someone who believed in the promise of a science fiction future like Flash Gordon's.