MattBrady
12-03-2002, 09:40 AM
<center><a href="http://www.newsarama.com/Thousand_Flowers_index.htm"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/flowers_banner.jpg" width="475" height="75" border="0"></a></center>
<font face="Arial, Verdana"><center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center>
<center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center>
<center>Installment 6</center>
<center>by Stuart Moore</center>
6. Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction
Part Three: Eating Raw Dough
Uh-oh. Uncle Hugo -- the author’s increasingly irritating stand-in for the field of science fiction -- is still ranting about what we talked about <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000011" target="_blank"> last time</a>:
“…so for decades, it was all about the magazines. All the great sf used to appear in magazines first, even the novels. Book publication came later, if at all. Then everything shifted to books -- but it took awhile.
“You’re goin’ through that now, ain’t you, kid? All I gotta tell you is, be careful just what you wish for -- I miss those damn magazines. Damn, where are my ****ing smokes…”
He’s got a point (about changing publication patterns, not his ****ing smokes). But while Comics, Uncle Hugo’s estranged nephew, fidgets and soaks that one in, let’s look at the two fields from another angle.
**
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/chastkafka.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/chastkafka_t.jpg" width="300" height="141" border="0" align="right"></a>There’s a great Roz Chast cartoon from The New Yorker called “Where Their Paths Crossed,” graphing the lives of Davy Crockett and Franz Kafka. The Kafka line has points along it labeled “Depressed kind of guy,” “Lived in Europe,” “Modern writer,” and “Thought the world had a lot of problems.” The Crockett line is made up of points like “Folk hero,” “Frontiersman,” “‘The Coonskin Congressman,’” and “Could whip his weight in wildcats.” And there’s one point where the lines cross, marked: “Liked to eat raw dough.”
This time around, we’ll look at sf/comics writers and editors who liked to eat raw dough.
The fields of sf and comics were founded within a decade of each other -- sf in 1926 with the publication of AMAZING STORIES, and comics in the mid-30s -- and both were considered trash-literature by the general public. So it was natural that many pulp writers, always looking for another market, crossed over between the two. In the early days, most of that crossover revolved around two men: Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger.
Schwartz and Weisinger had both been active in early sf fandom. In the early ‘30s, they published THE TIME TRAVELLER, a seminal fanzine; and in 1934, they founded Solar Sales Service, the first science-fiction literary agency. Two years later, Weisinger became editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES, while Schwartz continued to recruit an impressive array of writers for the agency.
Most comics fans know what happened eventually: by the early ‘40s, they both began long-running careers as well-respected editors at DC Comics. Schwartz is still a consultant there; his recent autobiography, MAN OF TWO WORLDS: MY LIFE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND COMICS, covers a lot of this territory in much greater detail.
While editor of THRILLING WONDER, Weisinger published many top sf writers. He bought the first story by Alfred Bester, who would later write two acknowledged classics of the field (THE DEMOLISHED MAN and THE STARS MY DESTINATION). According to the CD-Rom ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION: “in 1941, Weisinger shifted over to DC COMICS, and took many of his top writers with him, including Edmond Hamilton, who worked for some time in the mid-1940s as a staff writer on SUPERMAN, along with Henry Kuttner and others.”
Those others included Bester, who wrote stories for Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Green Lantern. Bester is often credited with originating Green Lantern’s oath. Otto Binder, whose sf work included the important early Adam Link, Robot stories, also wrote Superman and Captain Marvel stories, sometimes under the pseudonym Eando (Earl And Otto) Binder.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/captfuture.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/captfuture_t.jpg" width="250" height="183" border="0" align="left"></a>Edmond Hamilton is an interesting case. In a fifty-year career, he wrote a mixture of “serious” sf, comics, and light space opera. His space opera stories included the CAPTAIN FUTURE prose series, which appeared in the ‘40s and early ‘50s both in its own magazine and, later, in STARTLING STORIES. CAPTAIN FUTURE, a juvenile-adventure series heavily influenced by DOC SAVAGE, was reportedly the brainchild of Mort Weisinger during his time at Standard Magazines. Hamilton wrote most of the stories, some under his own name and some under the pseudonym Brett Sterling. Small wonder he was later tapped to write THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES and the futuristic “Superman of 2966” stories, both (again) for Weisinger.
Manly Wade Wellman was another prolific pulp writer, known more for horror and fantasy than straight sf. But he worked in many fields, even filling in on one of the “Brett Sterling” CAPTAIN FUTURE novels in the mid-‘40s. In comics, he similarly ghosted THE SPIRIT for Will Eisner while Eisner was in the army. (World War II provided a lot of fill-in opportunities for those writers left on the home front.) While Eisner’s own SPIRIT stories are regarded as the best in the series, Wellman’s are currently being reprinted in DC’s beautiful SPIRIT ARCHIVES set.
Where Hamilton and Wellman were always primarily prose writers, Gardner Fox really made his name in comics -- despite having supposedly published more than 150 books. (It’s hard to get an accurate count -- he used a lot of pseudonyms.) But Fox never broke out as a prose writer, while his comics work eventually made him a star in that field. He wrote countless stories for DC in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but it was in the ‘60s that he did the work for which he’s best remembered.
When DC decided to revamp its superhero line in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Julie Schwartz was the editor they turned to. And Schwartz made full use of his sf background: Gardner Fox was one of his most prolific writers, salting science facts into stories in FLASH, JUSTICE LEAGUE, BATMAN, and others. The new ATOM owed his powers both to an extraterrestrial substance and to his own scientific ingenuity, and his name -- Ray Palmer -- was taken directly from a writer/editor of AMAZING STORIES and other sf/paranormal publications. The real Palmer was hunchbacked and stood four feet tall -- fitting inspiration for the world’s smallest superhero.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/schwartzamazwrld.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/schwartzamazwrld_t.jpg" width="175" height="227" border="0" align="right"></a>But it was the revamped GREEN LANTERN that really drew on Schwartz’s and Fox’s sf backgrounds. Where the original character had drawn his power from an ancient mystical lamp, the new Lantern came down in a straight line from E. E. Smith’s Lensmen, with the power ring standing in for Kimball Kinnison’s lens. Like the Lensmen, the Green Lantern Corps was a huge, powerful, intergalactic peacekeeping force. Schwartz, Fox, and sometime-pulp-writer John Broome made the most of this premise, dividing their hero’s time between terrestrial adventures and large-scale epics ranging through space and time.
Schwartz was also instrumental in the early days of organized comics fandom. In the introduction to Roy Thomas’s ALTER EGO collection, Schwartz recalls an early meeting with Jerry Bails -- co-founder of ALTER EGO and, arguably, of comics fandom: “I told Jerry about science fiction fandom. I dug up some fan magazines from a drawer and showed them to him. His eyes popped out. He didn’t realize there was a fan movement in science fiction with fan magazines. I told him they were called ‘fanzines.’ I realized that sitting before me was a guy who was as nuts about comic books as I was about science fiction.”
So a lot of the similarities between sf and comics fandoms, as described in <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000006" target="_blank"> installment 4</a>, are not coincidences or simple cases of fans showing their appreciation for their chosen fields in similar ways. Julie and Mort were there to show them the way.
Mort Weisinger edited the Superman comics until his retirement in 1970. Julie Schwartz edited virtually every title in the DC line at one time or another, coming full circle with a line of sf graphic novels in the mid-80s, adapted from prose stories by writers including Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and Robert Silverberg. They were not big sellers, perhaps because the price-to-content ratio was pretty high -- they seemed like a pretty thin slice for the money -- and perhaps because some of the material was becoming dated.
But there may have been a different reason. Paradoxically, sf in comics has always been a hard sell, from E.C. Comics on down to the present. We’ll get into some of the possible reasons for that next time -- but wait. Do you hear something…?
**
Oh -- it’s Uncle Hugo’s nephew, Comics, interrupting his uncle’s ramblings:
“Okay, okay, dude. I hear you -- we got a lot of common ground. Lot of the same guys have helped us out over the years. And I think I even understand that ‘raw dough’ business. It’s a metaphor, right?
“But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. If we’re so much alike -- if we’ve been through so much of the same stuff -- how come you always hated me? How come you always brushed off my achievements -- treated me like some second-class citizen in the literary world? Huh?”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. Uncle Hugo takes a long drag off that cigarette. Finally:
“I don’t hate you, kid. I just -- you got all those pictures and everything, and -- aw, hell. I gotta think about that one for a while.”
So we’ll give the old screwball a couple weeks, and come back to that topic in the final installment of Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction.
**
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
Currently Stuart freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #4 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s message board at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else you like. And don’t worry: One more week, and Uncle Hugo’s gone forever. Maybe…
<font face="Arial, Verdana"><center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center>
<center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center>
<center>Installment 6</center>
<center>by Stuart Moore</center>
6. Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction
Part Three: Eating Raw Dough
Uh-oh. Uncle Hugo -- the author’s increasingly irritating stand-in for the field of science fiction -- is still ranting about what we talked about <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000011" target="_blank"> last time</a>:
“…so for decades, it was all about the magazines. All the great sf used to appear in magazines first, even the novels. Book publication came later, if at all. Then everything shifted to books -- but it took awhile.
“You’re goin’ through that now, ain’t you, kid? All I gotta tell you is, be careful just what you wish for -- I miss those damn magazines. Damn, where are my ****ing smokes…”
He’s got a point (about changing publication patterns, not his ****ing smokes). But while Comics, Uncle Hugo’s estranged nephew, fidgets and soaks that one in, let’s look at the two fields from another angle.
**
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/chastkafka.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/chastkafka_t.jpg" width="300" height="141" border="0" align="right"></a>There’s a great Roz Chast cartoon from The New Yorker called “Where Their Paths Crossed,” graphing the lives of Davy Crockett and Franz Kafka. The Kafka line has points along it labeled “Depressed kind of guy,” “Lived in Europe,” “Modern writer,” and “Thought the world had a lot of problems.” The Crockett line is made up of points like “Folk hero,” “Frontiersman,” “‘The Coonskin Congressman,’” and “Could whip his weight in wildcats.” And there’s one point where the lines cross, marked: “Liked to eat raw dough.”
This time around, we’ll look at sf/comics writers and editors who liked to eat raw dough.
The fields of sf and comics were founded within a decade of each other -- sf in 1926 with the publication of AMAZING STORIES, and comics in the mid-30s -- and both were considered trash-literature by the general public. So it was natural that many pulp writers, always looking for another market, crossed over between the two. In the early days, most of that crossover revolved around two men: Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger.
Schwartz and Weisinger had both been active in early sf fandom. In the early ‘30s, they published THE TIME TRAVELLER, a seminal fanzine; and in 1934, they founded Solar Sales Service, the first science-fiction literary agency. Two years later, Weisinger became editor of THRILLING WONDER STORIES, while Schwartz continued to recruit an impressive array of writers for the agency.
Most comics fans know what happened eventually: by the early ‘40s, they both began long-running careers as well-respected editors at DC Comics. Schwartz is still a consultant there; his recent autobiography, MAN OF TWO WORLDS: MY LIFE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND COMICS, covers a lot of this territory in much greater detail.
While editor of THRILLING WONDER, Weisinger published many top sf writers. He bought the first story by Alfred Bester, who would later write two acknowledged classics of the field (THE DEMOLISHED MAN and THE STARS MY DESTINATION). According to the CD-Rom ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION: “in 1941, Weisinger shifted over to DC COMICS, and took many of his top writers with him, including Edmond Hamilton, who worked for some time in the mid-1940s as a staff writer on SUPERMAN, along with Henry Kuttner and others.”
Those others included Bester, who wrote stories for Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Green Lantern. Bester is often credited with originating Green Lantern’s oath. Otto Binder, whose sf work included the important early Adam Link, Robot stories, also wrote Superman and Captain Marvel stories, sometimes under the pseudonym Eando (Earl And Otto) Binder.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/captfuture.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/captfuture_t.jpg" width="250" height="183" border="0" align="left"></a>Edmond Hamilton is an interesting case. In a fifty-year career, he wrote a mixture of “serious” sf, comics, and light space opera. His space opera stories included the CAPTAIN FUTURE prose series, which appeared in the ‘40s and early ‘50s both in its own magazine and, later, in STARTLING STORIES. CAPTAIN FUTURE, a juvenile-adventure series heavily influenced by DOC SAVAGE, was reportedly the brainchild of Mort Weisinger during his time at Standard Magazines. Hamilton wrote most of the stories, some under his own name and some under the pseudonym Brett Sterling. Small wonder he was later tapped to write THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES and the futuristic “Superman of 2966” stories, both (again) for Weisinger.
Manly Wade Wellman was another prolific pulp writer, known more for horror and fantasy than straight sf. But he worked in many fields, even filling in on one of the “Brett Sterling” CAPTAIN FUTURE novels in the mid-‘40s. In comics, he similarly ghosted THE SPIRIT for Will Eisner while Eisner was in the army. (World War II provided a lot of fill-in opportunities for those writers left on the home front.) While Eisner’s own SPIRIT stories are regarded as the best in the series, Wellman’s are currently being reprinted in DC’s beautiful SPIRIT ARCHIVES set.
Where Hamilton and Wellman were always primarily prose writers, Gardner Fox really made his name in comics -- despite having supposedly published more than 150 books. (It’s hard to get an accurate count -- he used a lot of pseudonyms.) But Fox never broke out as a prose writer, while his comics work eventually made him a star in that field. He wrote countless stories for DC in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but it was in the ‘60s that he did the work for which he’s best remembered.
When DC decided to revamp its superhero line in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Julie Schwartz was the editor they turned to. And Schwartz made full use of his sf background: Gardner Fox was one of his most prolific writers, salting science facts into stories in FLASH, JUSTICE LEAGUE, BATMAN, and others. The new ATOM owed his powers both to an extraterrestrial substance and to his own scientific ingenuity, and his name -- Ray Palmer -- was taken directly from a writer/editor of AMAZING STORIES and other sf/paranormal publications. The real Palmer was hunchbacked and stood four feet tall -- fitting inspiration for the world’s smallest superhero.
<a href="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/schwartzamazwrld.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/schwartzamazwrld_t.jpg" width="175" height="227" border="0" align="right"></a>But it was the revamped GREEN LANTERN that really drew on Schwartz’s and Fox’s sf backgrounds. Where the original character had drawn his power from an ancient mystical lamp, the new Lantern came down in a straight line from E. E. Smith’s Lensmen, with the power ring standing in for Kimball Kinnison’s lens. Like the Lensmen, the Green Lantern Corps was a huge, powerful, intergalactic peacekeeping force. Schwartz, Fox, and sometime-pulp-writer John Broome made the most of this premise, dividing their hero’s time between terrestrial adventures and large-scale epics ranging through space and time.
Schwartz was also instrumental in the early days of organized comics fandom. In the introduction to Roy Thomas’s ALTER EGO collection, Schwartz recalls an early meeting with Jerry Bails -- co-founder of ALTER EGO and, arguably, of comics fandom: “I told Jerry about science fiction fandom. I dug up some fan magazines from a drawer and showed them to him. His eyes popped out. He didn’t realize there was a fan movement in science fiction with fan magazines. I told him they were called ‘fanzines.’ I realized that sitting before me was a guy who was as nuts about comic books as I was about science fiction.”
So a lot of the similarities between sf and comics fandoms, as described in <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=000006" target="_blank"> installment 4</a>, are not coincidences or simple cases of fans showing their appreciation for their chosen fields in similar ways. Julie and Mort were there to show them the way.
Mort Weisinger edited the Superman comics until his retirement in 1970. Julie Schwartz edited virtually every title in the DC line at one time or another, coming full circle with a line of sf graphic novels in the mid-80s, adapted from prose stories by writers including Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and Robert Silverberg. They were not big sellers, perhaps because the price-to-content ratio was pretty high -- they seemed like a pretty thin slice for the money -- and perhaps because some of the material was becoming dated.
But there may have been a different reason. Paradoxically, sf in comics has always been a hard sell, from E.C. Comics on down to the present. We’ll get into some of the possible reasons for that next time -- but wait. Do you hear something…?
**
Oh -- it’s Uncle Hugo’s nephew, Comics, interrupting his uncle’s ramblings:
“Okay, okay, dude. I hear you -- we got a lot of common ground. Lot of the same guys have helped us out over the years. And I think I even understand that ‘raw dough’ business. It’s a metaphor, right?
“But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. If we’re so much alike -- if we’ve been through so much of the same stuff -- how come you always hated me? How come you always brushed off my achievements -- treated me like some second-class citizen in the literary world? Huh?”
There’s an uncomfortable pause. Uncle Hugo takes a long drag off that cigarette. Finally:
“I don’t hate you, kid. I just -- you got all those pictures and everything, and -- aw, hell. I gotta think about that one for a while.”
So we’ll give the old screwball a couple weeks, and come back to that topic in the final installment of Comics’ Drunken Uncle: Science Fiction.
**
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/Creators/stuartwizphoto_f.jpg" width="110" height="113" align="right" alt="Stuart Moore">Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
Currently Stuart freelances as a writer of comic books and nonfiction; he’d like you all to go out and buy ZENDRA, his epic science fiction series from Penny-Farthing Press. Issue #4 of the second series, ZENDRA: HEART OF FIRE, is on sale now, and the trade paperback ZENDRA 1.0: COLLOCATION collects the first series. Then you can go to Stuart’s message board at <a href="http://www.joequesada.com" target="_blank">http://www.joequesada.com</a> and discuss ZENDRA, this column, or anything else you like. And don’t worry: One more week, and Uncle Hugo’s gone forever. Maybe…