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10. Flights of Fandom

I bought, read, and enjoyed comics through the sixties and the seventies. At the time, I was content to do no more than that. It wasn't until the eighties that I put a toe into the cold wave of fandom. I began that journey by writing a Letter of Comment, or LOC, in response to an issue of World's Finest. What a thrill it was to find my letter published a couple issues later. I didn't write often. My letters saw print in only a handful of titles, Superman and Action among them. But each publication brought the pleasure of receiving a response from an editor, if only a few lines.

I miss letter columns (I'm glad to see that, in his Savage Dragon, Erik Larsen is keeping the tradition alive). I'd now compare them to going out to a nice dinner in a coat and tie as opposed as eating at McDonalds in cut-off jeans. If you'll allow me to climb on my soapbox for a minute, a lot has changed in twenty years and not all, I think, for the better. It seems to me that the sheer speed of the Internet has fostered much rudeness and nastiness - not to mention grammatical incorrectness - in fan response. Don't misunderstand me. Fans have always heaved their bricks (I remember when Martin Pasko wrote LOCs to the Superman comics. As far as he was concerned, these people couldn't do anything right.) There's nothing wrong with criticism in itself. But there was a time when the bricks were cleaner and sharper, more like finely crafted arrows. One reason must surely be that, as the name suggests, snail-mail took time! It took time to think about what you were going to write before you wrote it. You didn't sit at a keyboard just a mouse click away from making an enemy. You knew you had a month or so to write. You knew you weren't going to get an immediate response. So the time factor tended to mellow and civilize one's correspondence. As Obi Wan might've said, "LOCs - not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized time."

Speaking of correspondence, the appearance of my long ago letter to World's Finest led to the longest and greatest friendship I've ever had. I'll tell you more about my friend another time. For now, we'll just say that he introduced me to Gene Kehoe's It's A Fanzine. I was fascinated with this publication, done on a shoe-string by the great team of Gene Kehoe and Dennis McDonough. The guys who wrote for IAF seemed to be about my age, thirty-ish, with a love for Golden and Silver Age comics. They brewed up a mixture of nostalgia, pungent commentary, and fun. I got stuck on this thing like Winnie the Pooh on honey. Soon, I was pitching Gene an idea for a series of articles entitled, "Great Moments in Super-History." As you might guess, GMiS-H spotlighted Superman stories from the Silver Age. By this time, the Byrne revolution had begun and the Superman I'd grown up with was, it seemed, no more. At the time, I was a bit disappointed with the new developments. So I had a ball revisiting Mort Weisinger's world: Kandor, Superman Red and Blue, the planet Lexor, etc. Yet, I didn't confine myself to stories from the sixties. I also examined Denny O'Neil's new take on an old hero as well as the swan song sung by the legendary Alan Moore. (In a stroke of Weisinger-ian irony, now I find myself a bit misty over the Byrne days!)

Time and reality have caught up with Gene Kehoe, of Waterloo, Iowa, a man I've never met, with whom I've spoken once or twice on the phone in twenty years, but whom I still count a friend. He doesn't get IAF out like he used to. In fact, when I came onboard, it seemed that his publishing schedule was already becoming erratic. He's working on #50, though, and when he publishes it, you can bet it'll be a grand read.

It was during one of those hiatuses that I was standing in my all-time favorite comics shop in Canton, Ohio, reading an editorial in a publication called Amazing Heroes. Then-editor Mark Waid was putting the call out for contributors to its pages. He read me the law (e.g., "It's not Spiderman. It's Spider-Man."), then sent me out with three ringing words, "Get to work."

I did. Before you could say "published writer," I'd cranked out an essay chronicling my visit to the Mid-Ohio Con. I put in a 9 by 12 Manila envelope, the kind I used for years before editors began accepting manuscripts online, and sent it to AH. I tried to play it cool, fellas, believe me. I'd been freelancing for a while. I knew that editors really don't ache to pick up the phone and reassure a writer anxious for the fate of his newborn. But I just couldn't help myself. So I called Mark. He said, "Yeah! Good article. It'll be in the next issue." And the rest, as they say, is history - if you're familiar with AH, that is.

It's great to share one's passion with the passionate. It's nice to be paid for it too! The checks from Fantagraphics were never very big, but I got one for every article they published - and they published just about everything I sent them. From 1988 to 1992, I wrote opinion pieces and feature articles for a parade of AH editors (the last - Chris McCubbin, I think - joked about being Editor-of-the-Week). The topics ranged from the loss of the child market for comics to the depiction of the Bible therein.

Pleasurable memories from that time include:

1. Hearing from Jerry Siegel. First, indirectly: In an LOC, he responded positively to an article I'd written. Later, he wrote to me directly in response to my naïve request for an interview. He declined, but not without warmth.

2. A letter from a fan. The editor forwarded this one to me. The guy had evidently enjoyed my feature on comics "fatties." His letter consisted of several hand-printed pages... in code! It took me hours to read it - once I finally deciphered his cipher!

3. The help and support of a dealer. That all-time favorite shop I mentioned above wasn't much more than a hole-in-the-wall on Cleveland Avenue in Canton. But the guy who ran it, Tom Matevvi, had a heart as big as all outdoors. I used to spend hours sitting and talking with him about life, religion, theater, movies, and, of course, comics. Since leaving the Canton area, I've frequented many comics shops, but never found the home I had in Comics, Cards, and Collectables. Tom was an immense help to my research, loaning me many old comics for that purpose. If you ever come upon such articles as "This Hare, This Hero" or "Faith and The Funnybooks," and you like them, why, thank Tom Matevvi. He was the hero who had the faith to lend me all those funnybooks.

When AH quietly folded, I felt a little lost. Several years passed before I again found a regular (albeit gratis) outlet. This was an online 'zine, my first writing gig in cyberspace. They called it The Kryptonian Cybernet. At the time, around 1998, it was ably edited by Jeff Sykes and Shane Travis. I started out writing reviews for Young Justice. Later, I added some Superman one-shots, then Action Comics. I wrote for KC for a couple years, but, eventually, had to give it up due to time-pressures. So, I guess, did the keepers of this particular cyber cabinet. I'm glad the Superman Homepage archived the complete 70-issue run.

There are other things to tell about being a fan in the last two decades of the twentieth century - cons and shows and brushes with celebrity. I'll tell you about them as we go along. But, for me, the biggest thrills of the period came as I discovered, practiced, and honed my own "super power," writing. Edward Bulwer-Lytton is credited with the saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword." I love Clark Kent's paraphrase in an old Adventures of Superman episode: "The typewriter is mightier than the brass knuckle." Either way, you get the idea. The pleasures of fan-writing, contributing to the body of opinion and commentary, being part of the magic, being noticed and admired for your work - these are mighty pleasures, indeed. But, regardless of what you write about or who you write for, the power of publication will never be as great as the simple, self-forgetful pleasure of filling a blank page with meaningful words. In Stephen King's novel, Salem's Lot, a character suggests that the thought process isn't complete without writing. You can take that any way you want, I guess. For me, it's another way to say that writing completes me.

As I think about it now, I took as much joy in writing three paragraphs in response to an issue of Jonah Hex twenty-five years ago as I do writing...well, writing this latest chapter in "Superman On Earth."

I'm only sorry they didn't publish those three paragraphs!

Don't Miss the next thrill-packed episode: Super-Friends.

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