Supergirl Debuts

 

With Supergirl about to make her starring big screen debut, here's a look back at the original comic book announcement of her first appearance. Note the realistic dialogue. 

Late '60s Comic Creator Photos

A whole bunch of little seen late '60s photos of comics creators, from a fanzine scan (GOSH-WOW) on Ken Meyer, Jr's 's wonderful fanzine blog! https://www.kenmeyerjr.com/ink-stains-blog

 

An Old Friend's Go Fund Me

 

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-amy-publish-her-books-with-a-new-computer?attribution_id=sl:86bb9560-e945-4434-bd23-b427fd36f615&lang=en_US&ts=1778273468&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_content=amp17_te-amp20_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=facebook

Amy Nichter is one of several folks whom I have mentored as a writer over the years. She's good! In a burst of creativity, she wrote and published her first novel a couple of years ago. I then collaborated with her on a second. 

The problem is that while time has moved on, her computer hasn't. She and her husband packed up all their belongings and animals a few years back and took to the road, eventually settling on a plot of land they bought out west, raising a small menagerie. The money to get even an inexpensive laptop just isn't there. Here's what Amy says: 

Amy’s current computer is over ten years old, and it’s making it hard for her to finish and publish her books. She’s working on two major projects — a novelized testimony/autobiography and a re-release of her earlier work — and her computer is essential for research, formatting, and publishing. A reliable Dell Pro 15 would help her keep her work moving forward without constant technical issues.

Please consider sharing or donating if this cause speaks to you. Every bit helps Amy get her books into the world!

#SupportWriters #HelpAmy

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-amy-publish-her-books-with-a-new-computer?attribution_id=sl:86bb9560-e945-4434-bd23-b427fd36f615&lang=en_US&ts=1778273468&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_content=amp17_te-amp20_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=facebook

Creighton "Lon" Chaney, Jr.

He changed his mind. 

Pleased to hear he got those letters! I was one of those who wrote him when FAMOUS MONSTERS announced he was quite ill. I always wondered if he ever even saw the letters.

After his death Creighton...err...LON's body was donated to science. 

 

Clark Kent Comics and Stories

WHAT IF?... It’s 1954 and comic books are under fire. Most of the superhero books are already gone. EC drops its horror and sci fi books and offers up books about pirates, doctors, psychiatrists, knights, and…newspapermen. DC feels compelled to follow the trend. Batman is dropped all together. Wonder Woman becomes tales of ancient Greece. But Superman, of all their characters, is in a perfect position to be reinvented. He loses his powers permanently and the book reboots as CLARK KENT COMICS AND STORIES, featuring backups with Lois, Jimmy, Perry, etc. Luthor stays in prison and the number of aliens and monsters in Metropolis drops appreciably. The Superman TV show follows suit and continues on as a newspaper drama! IT COULDA WORKED! 

 

Buster Brown and Me-1965

 

One of the very first comic strip characters with staying power was Richard Felton Outcault's Buster Brown, seen here with his dog, Tige. Buster was created way back in 1902 and while the strips faded after a couple decades or so, a 1904 alliance with the Brown Shoe Company kept the characters in the public eye. 

By the time I came along in 1959, Buster was seen in print ads like the above (with famous little person Jerry Maren as Buster), in TV commercials, and in specialty comic books like the ones below. They weren't newsstand comics at all, but rather were distributed through various shoe stores carrying Buster Brown Shoes. 

In 1965, I was in Kindergarten and toward the end of the school year, our class put on a play--my first acting experience (outside of one line in a Christmas pageant). The play was apparently a standard one in Kindergarten circles and was based on a 1929 song entitled "The Wedding of the Painted Dolls."

 One of the song lyrics was: 

"It’s a holiday, today’s the wedding of the painted doll

It’s a jolly day, the news is spreading all around the hall
Red Riding Hood and Buster Brown
The jumping jack jumped into town
From far and near they’re coming here"

Me, I was cast as Buster Brown, a character I only knew at the time from shoe commercials. My mother somehow got hold of a brown Little Lord Fauntleroy-style outfit which was close to Buster's traditional look. I felt silly in it but I refused to wear a blond wig to complete the effect!

I've often wondered what I might have looked like had I gone whole Buster and today, thanks to ubiquitous AI, we have an idea.

 

Booksteve Bookseller Stories--Weird Books and the FBI

The weirdest books I ever saw come through our stores were a series of German photography books that featured real corpses posed in pleasant little tableaus, often depicting scenes from fairy tales as I recall. Surreal, but truly shocking and disgusting. I just wrote a few descriptions from memory but deleted them to spare you the images in your head. As bad as you might think they were, they were worse. Some guy special-ordered one and bought it. That’s when we found out there was an entire series of them and he ordered the rest, one by one. Years later, someone was arrested in Cincinnati for attempting to do that exact same type of photography in the City Morgue. I’ve always wondered…

Another WTF volume was a $60 coffee table photo book we stocked at Barnes and Noble which featured nothing but crystal clear closeup color car crash photos, complete with fresh bloody corpses. Presumably, these were police photos. How anyone got permission to publish them like they were flower arrangements or something is beyond me. 

It was always company policy that we could never even order the infamous TURNER DIARIES book but we did find ourselves often ordering THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK for customers. For those unfamiliar with it, here is a description from Wikipedia: “The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD.” As I recall, It also has an actual recipe for marijuana meatballs. 

Anyway, company policy was that it’s not our business what anyone wants to read. Some of those ordering the book were police officers, who needed it for work. Others—like most of us booksellers—were likely curious as to what all the fuss was about. The FBI, however, were curious for completely different reasons. 

One day in the early 1990s—pre-Patriot Act—at the Florence Mall store, two Men-in-Black-style FBI men, complete with dark glasses indoors, asked to speak to the Manager. Brenda was off. I told them I was the MOD. They calmly but forcefully demanded to see all of our records with names and addresses of every customer who had ever ordered THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. I began sweating and shaking and stammered out an explanation that I couldn’t do that as company policy was that customers had the right to order whatever they wanted as long as it was not in and of itself illegal. 

They began to guilt me, bringing up various then-recent bombings on the national scene and quoting me statistics on the loss of life. I tried to tell them that we’ve had police officers order the book to help find out about how to stop such things. They then said they wanted those police officers’ names. 

I was scared half to death. On the one hand, they were right that people who ordered bomb-making books might seriously be planning to make bombs. On the other hand I was a strong believer in the right to read anything you please, for whatever reason, and that the government didn’t have the right to demand that information.

I gave them the phone number for Waldenbooks’ Legal Department and they left, saying they would return with a court order for the info they wanted.

After they left, I was quickly on the phone with the Legal Department myself, where I was thanked for standing up to them. The Legal Department said that they were likely phishing (although that term was not yet in widespread use) and, without any specific current need for those names and addresses, would probably not have been able to get a warrant or a court order. I think I hid in the back room most of the rest of that day. We never head from them again regarding THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK although it was later added and then dropped from the Do Not Special Order list several times