Tom Skulan Archives - Page 3 of 3

Dealing with Stuff

Saw a couple people yesterday that reminded me about my war with stuff. There was a period, once upon a time, when I coveted stuff – new music, new books, pretty much what every good American has been trained to do. Yet at the same time, I admired people who had a better handle on stuff. I knew this couple from my former church who lived in a small house, and they had a rule that for whatever came into the house, something of equal size had to go out. Music, books, magazines were purchased, but something else had to be passed along.

This is why I have rules about playing music; if I own it and am not playing it, what’s the point? To “have”? (Whereas I’m keeping my Warner Brothers’ Loss Leaders LPs for a reason.)

Alan David Doane, noted comics blogger, and former FantaCo customer, came by my house yesterday morning and took a comics magazine-sized box of periodicals out of my house. It included early Amazing Heroes (back when it WAS mag size), about 30 Comics Journals, and various and sundry other bits of comics journalism from the early 1980s. As I looked through the box, I had a twinge of nostalgia, especially for a square-bound CJ featuring the Pinis and Elfquest. But an even stronger sensation was this: I will never read these magazines again. ADD will enjoy having them much more than I at this point. And, if he finds any FantaCo-relevant info in there, ADD will tell me, making it a win-win.

Less than an hour later, I had lunch with Mitch Cohn, who used to work at FantaCo and edited 2/5 issues of the Chronicles, Gates of Eden and Deja Vu. (Mitch says hi to Fred and Rocco.) In the course of catching up on our lives – he’s teaching English in NYC – Mitch wondered whether Tom Skulan, former FantaCo owner, still had this copy of Abbey Road purportedly signed by all four Beatles. I said no, he gave it to me for Christmas or my birthday in 1984 or ’85. Here’s the weird thing about that; I often forget that I have it. There was a show of Beatles memorabilia to which I had contributed some pieces, but the Abbey Road, which was/is NOT with my Beatles’ materials, totally slipped my mind. So,I’m thinking that I probably should just sell it. Of course, this would probably involve authenticating the signatures. The Beatles were notorious for letting their surrogates sign on their behalf. But having it to “have” it just isn’t making sense anymore.

It’s not that I’m immune to wanting stuff altogether. Sure I’d like a stereo HDTV some day. But my now 21-year-old, pre-SAP, pre-V-chip TV still works, and I’m not throwing it to the curb (probably not literally; there are rules in this city against that) for something I want but just don’t need.
***
Things that are bugging me:
*the way the US Census discounts, or more correctly, uncounts married gay couples
*this cartoon featuring Barack Obama; I think it’s racist. No, it’s not the New Yorker cover.
*and I feel rather callous about this one, but after Martha Raddatz, the ABC News White House correspondent reported on the death of former White House press secretary, who died of colon cancer at the age of 53 earlier this month, anchor Charlie Gibson thanked her, adding “I know how hard this story was for you.” Undoubtedly, some affection develops for someone one talks with on a near-daily basis, but hearing “how hard” it was for Martha, who was showing no visible signs of emotion, made me wonder how aggressively the network was in dealing with the Bush administration. (No, that’s not the ONLY thing that made me question that.) And it made Martha’s reaction part of the story, which made me uncomfortable.

What Hast Moss Wrought

Lynn Moss, the wife of Fred Hembeck, has posted pictures of the second FantaCon back in 1980, before she WAS the wife of Fred Hembeck, if I’m remembering correctly. (EDIT: I wasn’t remembering correctly: they were married the year before.) The convention was put on by FantaCo Enterprises, the comic book store I worked at from 1980 to 1988. The pictures feature Fred, Lynn, Bill Anderson, Joe Staton, Wendy and Richard Pini, Dave Simons, and John Caldwell, plus FantaCo artist/front man Raoul Vezina, FantaCo employee Mitch Cohn and FantaCo owner Tom Skulan. The pictures also feature the “art jam” drawing done by Fred, Raoul, Wendy Pini, Berni Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Simons, Caldwell, and Staton, a drawing Fred described on November 28, 2003.

BTW, 21 Central Avenue, Albany, which was FantaCo’s location for its 20 years, has been several things in the years since it closed in 1998. Currently it’s a bazzar (their spelling), a convenience store that sells halal meats and other items.
***
R: You really ought to plug Fred’s upcoming book again.
R: Well, I have all of those FantaCo publications in the Smilin’ Ed and Hembeck series. In fact, just came across them in the attic this weekend.
R: Yeah, but there’s over 600 MORE pages, some of which you’ve never seen.
R: Really?
R: Yeah, and all for about $25.
R: WOW! But I need a new angle.
R: How’s that?
R: I need a new way to plug the book again.
R: How about the cover, with the color scheme they chose NOT to use?

R: That’d work.
***
A bunch of Jack Kirby stories that have allegedly never been reprinted. (Thanks, Dan.)
***
Fred and Rose talk about commerce, of a sort.

ROG

Second Saturday in October

That was one busy Saturday eight days ago. Some of you will understand the need (of my wife) for us to clean the house in anticipation of someone coming over to clean the house; that was the post-breakfast activity. And we were also trying out a new babysitter, Annie, to replace our old sitters Anna (who went to college) and Anne (a busy HS senior).

So the babysitter came, the housekeeper came, and I got picked up by my friend Rocco. Rocco was a kid who used to be a FantaCo customer who became a FantaCo employee in the early 1980s. We traversed over to the Elks Lodge in Troy to go to a comic book program, organized by former FantaCo customer Dave Palladino.

We went to the artists’ table and talked to three guys with a strong FantaCo connection:
John Hebert was the artist on a book I co-wrote, Sold Out and worked at a couple FantaCons, before moving on to fame and fortune. He’s getting married next year, and herein is the proof:

Fred Hembeck, who I saw for the third time this year (yay!), was doing the big reveal of an anthology of his seven books published by FantaCo, plus over 600 MORE pages, news that would soon be wildly and exuberantly cheered by the comics blogisphere. He had on hand a binder that featured the black and white version of the color cover:

and
Bill Anderson, who I see more often than the others, worked at Fantaco, off and on, between 1984 and 1996, but even before that, embellished some of Hembeck pages, before becoming the inker extraordinaire.

Rocco and I had great conversations with them and with Fred’s daughter Julie, between her stints reading homework. She told me she likes doing these trips because it gets her out of the house and because Fred “really needs a navigator,” which even he would admit is true.

I also had some lengthy conversations with other former customers and employees. Talked at length about the late Raoul Vezina (a post for next year) and FantaCo’s founder, Tom Skulan, who has gone into a different line of work.

At some point, I returned to the artists’ table, and a couple little kids asked me to sign a Mars Attacks mini-comic that FantaCo had published. I didn’t have anything to do with it, except shipping it to distributors, and escorting its writer Mario Bruni a Capital Cities Distributor show in Madison, WI back in 1988 so we could promote it. But I signed them anyway.

I now remember why some folks find comic book people really weird, as I heard a number of stories, including Golden-Gate, some debacle involving Michael Golden and a Doctor Strange drawing. It’s interesting in a very bizarre way.

I had a surprisingly good time, though I didn’t buy anything, except for some food. Check Fred’s October 20th post for his take on the event.

Rocco dropped me home long enough to go back out to the drug store and grocery store, before a second babysitter came. We’d NEVER had two babysitters in one day, EVER, but we really wanted to go the 30th anniversary party for our friends, Paul and Mary Liz Stewart, as it turned out, at my church. After a wonderful dinner, there was a short segment of singing to and telling stories about the Stewarts, MCed by me (I learned about this at 10 a.m. that day), thus once again ruining my self-image as a shy person.

It was a good day.

ROG

Chronicles of the Fantastic Four Chronicles

(This conversation will be limited to the Chronicles series. FantaCo had also put out Splatter Movies and Hembeck 6, among other items, in this period.)

The X-Men Chronicles was a hit for FantaCo Enterprises in 1981. We had printed 50,000 copies and had presold at least 35.000 to the distributors. And not only did it also sell as an individual item in the store and in the mail order, we were able to trade some for Marvel, DC and other companies’ product, particularly underground comics from Last Gasp, a company our comics distributor, Seagate, wasn’t dealing with.
So what do we do as a follow-up? We decided to do two books, the Daredevil Chronicles, which Mitch Cohn would edit, and the Fantastic Four Chronicles, which would be my baby. I’m not going to talk much more about the former, except that I thought it was terribly Frank Miller-heavy. One of the Mullaney brothers from Eclipse Comics, Jan or Dean, apparently agreed; he wrote to say he read the book and threw it in the trash. (The letter, I think, appeared in the Spider-Man Chronicles, or maybe the Avengers Chronicles.)

The stuff below in italics is directly from my journal:

September 2, 1981: I call John Byrne, who agreed to write an article and do a centerspread, in addition to the front cover. And I called Jack Kirby, who agreed to fill out a questionnaire about the FF. “What a coup!” I wrote.
October 16: George Perez agrees to do the back cover for the FF book.
October 22: Receive Byrne front cover, centerspread and article.
November 5: Call Jay Zilber re: Wein/Wolfman interview. Then called Jack Kirby re: Q&A – he said he couldn’t answer questions re: FF, Marvel, only re: new projects. I panicked and got upset and angry. By that point, we probably had sent out info on the book to the comic distributors, indicating its content.Mitch calmed me down & said “Why don’t you do interview on Kirby now with a caveat. He [Kirby] agreed to that & also said I could use the rather nasty stuff re: FF 236 & his lack of prior knowledge that it would be used. Typed up new questions.
November 18: Michael Hobson of Marvel called to OK licensing on the FF and DD books, and that the company had “no problem” with the non-licensed X-Men Chronicles.
November 23: Get Kirby response.
December 17: I was going to do some editing (e.g., Joe Fludd’s lengthy piece, Jay Zilber’s just-arrived article), but instead spent most of the day looking unsuccessfully for a letter from Mike Hobson of Marvel giving us permission for licensing, which Tom needs for another bank loan.
O.K., I lied. I AM going to talk a little about Splatter Movies. This was a book written by an author named John McCarty that was really Tom’s baby; Mitch, Raoul and I were all a bit disturbed by it, although I did end up up proofreading it. And it turned out to be the most profitable thing FantaCo published in my tenure there. But at $8.95, it was initially a slow road selling to our distributors, who, after all, were comic book folks. This created a cash flow problem, for which the loan was to address.

January 3, 1982: Type the FF checklist at home while I watch football (Cincinnati beat the Bills, the 49ers beat the Giants; I doubt I was happy about that.)
January 7: I assume we found the Hobson letter eventually because Tom was able to secure $25,000 note from the bank so we’ll be able to pay $8700 printing bill for Splatter Movies.
January: Get various articles and artwork, not including Perez back cover. At some point, I call John Byrne, who allows us to use the front cover as the back cover as well, for free. Byrne was not universally loved, but I always had very good dealings with him; the FFC was not the last time. After the covers go to the printer, Perez cover FINALLY shows up, and I end up replacing content from one of the inside covers. (I’m thinking it was a Joe Fludd piece, because it seemed ironic that such a Perez devotee would be bumped by Perez himself.)
January 26: Tom called accounts (Bud Plant, NMI, Pacific). We now have fewer than 100 out of 50,000 X-Men Chronicles, and anticipate print runs of 70,000 each for FF and DD (the latter, eventually set at 80,000).
March 1: Start shipping out FFC, DDC orders, which takes a week, between the wholesale and retail orders.
March 5: Tom had made up 100 copies each of FFC and DDC in white paper stock, rather than newsprint. Gave 25 each to Mitch and me, 2 each to Rocco and Raoul. Somewhere I still have some of these.
March 15: Returning artwork, paying contributors, sending out review copies.
March 22: For Spider-Man Chronicles, got a Fred Hembeck to interview Roger Stern.
March 26: Mitch called Jim Shooter, who told Mitch in no uncertain terms (“What the f*** were you guys thinking about?”) that they at Marvel were unhappy with the Chronicles series, that there can be no licensing in the future, and that we’d “better be careful” in the future…No [more] Chronicles would be disastrous because another loan was contingent on publishing them…Tom called a patent attorney.
Oddly, a couple months later, there WAS further conversation with Mike Hobson about licensing, but nothing ever came to fruition, and the Avengers and Spider-Man Chronicles came out license-free, with no hassle from Marvel. We DID have another legal tussle, however, but that’s for another day.

In retrospect – let’s hear it for retrospect – I should have either 1) called Marvel about the content of the Kirby interview or 2) pulled the Kirby interview. The former just didn’t cross my mind. The latter did, but I was resistant because it would have meant resoliciting the FFC to the distributors and a costly delay.

I wrote this today for two reasons. One: FantaCo’s birthday was August 28, 1978; the store survived 20 years. The other is that Jack Kirby’s birthday was August 28, 1917, which means he would have been 90 today; he passed on February 6, 1994. Here’s a picture of Jack from the 1982 San Diego comic con, taken by Alan Light.

Daredevil Omnibus

ADD wrote to me a couple weeks ago:
Hey Roger,
I have a question for you that I just posted to my blog
Let me know if you have any info at all.
Hope all is well!

As I may have mentioned, it was rather strange to see in the pages of the Daredevil Omnibus the pages from FantaCo’s Daredevil Chronicles, a magazine I worked on, though Mitch Cohn was the editor. The intrepid Alan David Doane asked me if Marvel had asked permission to appropriate pages directly from the FantaCo publication, and whether they paid the contributors.

The short answer, as far as I know, is no. The long answer is a little more complicated.

When FantaCo put together the X-Men Chronicles, a fanzine about the uncanny mutants edited by me, Marvel was very pleased. SO pleased that they gave us permission to use the Marvel Comics Group strip on the top of the page of the Fantastic Four Chronicles (cover by John Byrne, edited by me) and the Daredevil Chronicles (cover by Miller/Janson, edited by Mitch). In other words, they were licensed products of Marvel. Therefore, my guess is that Marvel believed they had a right to appropriate the DDC for the DD Omnibus, as it was their product, so there was no need to give permission.

Fred Hembeck tells me that Peter Sanderson, whose FantaCo interview of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, appears in the book, was given a copy of the book, according to Sanderson’s Quick Stop column. Fred, whose illustration accompanies that interview, is still waiting for his copy. You’d have to ask John Byrne and George Perez whether their Daredevil drawings earned them a copy, or something more.

Incidentally, at least one “independent comics” publisher loathed the DDC, because of the emphasis on Miller and Janson, to the exclusion of the rest of the canon (Wally Wood, e g.). I won’t tell you who he is, but you know when the sun or moon temporarily disappears?

I asked Mitch about all of this. He wondered about the copyright issue too when I first mentioned the project to him. I agree with him that would depend on how the copyright was done, which he recalls was all FantaCo except for trademarks owned by Marvel. While he notes that Tom Skulan (the FantaCo owner) might have a case against Marvel, we both would think Marvel would have run it past their legal department before committing to do it. “It’s not like they needed that stuff in there,” Mitch opined.

You should know that the subsequent Avengers Chronicles, which Mitch edited, and the Spider-Man Chronicles, which was my baby, no longer had the Marvel Comic Group strip. That’s because of something that happened, a decision I made, that caused Marvel editor Jim Shooter to call with a profanity-laden tirade that poor Mitch got to hear. But that’s a story for another day.

ROG