Tom Skulan Archives - Page 3 of 3

FantaCon 2013 is coming soon!

As I have noted, I’m not one much for nostalgia. I don’t long for the “good old days.”

Also, I used to think in terms of time being linear. You do this; this is over. You do that; that passes. On to the next thing. I’m more likely now to see things as parabolic, with events somehow coming back to re-inform one’s life periodically.

I do have a sense of history, though. That is why my friend Steve Bissette and I tried to fix some of the more egregious errors on the FantaCo Wikipedia page a few years ago. I worked at the comic book and film paraphernalia store/publisher/mail order/convention place at 21 Central Avenue in Albany from 1980-1988; Steve wrote and drew and edited some publications in the late 1980s.

It’s been an interesting summer for me. I was putting together a part of a bibliography of FantaCo publications from 1979-1988. It’s not that someone else couldn’t have done it, though I am hard-pressed to identify who. Except for owner Tom Skulan, no one else was present during that period.

It was surprising to me to discover that I had many of the publications in my possession. A set of the comic-related stuff had gotten damaged in a flooded basement, but as I explored my attic, I came across items I did not know I owned, mostly the horror film stuff that didn’t especially interest me, yet I still had copies. When my friend Bill Anderson was seeking covers to scan, I was the one with easy access to Splatter Movies; in fact, I had two copies.

What were initially harder to find included items I actually was involved with: magazines about superheroes, namely the X-Men Chronicles, Fantastic Four Chronicles, and Spider-Man Chronicles, all of which I edited and contributed to.

This bibliography was not just an exercise, though. It will be part of the program for FantaCon 2013, which will be taking place Saturday and Sunday, September 14 & 15, 2013 at the Marriott Hotel on Wolf Road in Colonie, NY, near Albany. You’ll meet tons of guests, including the aforementioned Bissette. There are some two-day tickets available for a couple more days, or you can get the one-day tickets through the opening day.

Also taking place that week are three nights of horror films at the Palace Theatre in Albany, September 12-14, with the outgoing (in both senses of the word) mayor of Albany, Jerry Jennings, kicking off the opening night activities.

Here from YouTube are some scenes from previous FantaCons:
MEDIA ZONE FANTACON 1990 Screamin Models Comic Horror
MEDIA ZONE FANTACON 1990 Kane Hodder Jason Friday 13th
MEDIA ZONE FANTACON 1990 KNB Effects Group Walking Dead
Horror Convention Fantacon 1988 clip with Forry Ackerman

The Tom Skulan FantaCon interview

The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures.

FantaCon, once an Albany tradition for fans of comic books, fantasy, and in its later incarnations, horror films, is returning after a brief, two-decade hiatus. FantaCon 2013, operated by its original creator, Tom Skulan, will be held Saturday, September 14 and Sunday, September 15 at the Marriott Hotel on Wolf Road in Albany. Ticket for the related Three Nights of Horror at the Palace Theatre on September 11-13 in Albany, will be available from the Palace Theatre box office, starting on February 13.

FantaCo, the store/mail-order company Tom started, operated from 1978 through 1998 at 21 Central Avenue, Albany, NY. I worked there from May 1980 to November 1988, worked at the first five FantaCons, and attended the sixth.

Incidentally, Skulan is pronounced like the third word in Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
***
Tom, when you owned FantaCo, you ran seven FantaCons, in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1989, and 1990. But you had a store, and often, publications to use in cross-promotions. You have a FantaCon planned for September of 2013, after a twenty-year hiatus. Why FantaCon, why now?

There are three reasons that come to mind. First, I have always wanted to do another FantaCon when I wasn’t preoccupied with the store, the publishing, and the mail order. I have always wanted to see what that would be like!
Second, time is creeping up on me and these old bones have only so much time left where I can handle the demands of the show. And finally I like the numbers of doing the show the weekend of Friday the 13th in 2013.

What is the theme of the upcoming convention? What guests have you lined up so far?

The theme for this show is to try and recreate all the FantaCons all at once. Some shows were strongly comic-oriented and some shows were strongly horror-oriented. This show will be both at once. I want to create a party atmosphere for all the original attendees AND the new attendees too.

The guest line up confirmed at this time is Steve Bissette, Ari Lehman, John Russo, George Kosana, Russ Streiner, Judy O’Dea, Judith Ridley, Geri Reischl, Belinda Balaski, Kyra Schon, A. Michael Baldwin, Kevin Eastman, Richard Brooker, Michael T. Gilbert, Jason Moore, Jarod Balog, Dennis Daniel, Bob Michelucci, Mark Martin, Bill Anderson, Jim Whiting, John Hebert, Herb Trimpe, Dustin Warburton, Jeff Lieberman, Fred Hembeck and a few other surprises to be announced. You can read all about each guest at our website at www.fantacon.com.

Let’s go way back in time, to the mid-1970s. When I first met you, you were working at a comic book store in New Paltz, NY, halfway between New York City and Albany. Tell me about the Crystal Cave and its owner, Peter Maresca.

The Crystal Cave started as a little shop in a second-floor walk up on Main Street in New Paltz. It was run by Peter and his then-wife Rita. It was one of the first 100 comic book stores in the US. Peter was definitely a fan more than a business person whereas Rita was a business person more than a fan. The combination worked for a while. I hightailed it to that little shop the moment I saw a flyer for it hanging in the Ariel Bookstore. I preceded to visit it every time I got out of a class. I devoured the newest issues of TBG and started advertising myself. Eventually, I hounded Peter into giving me a job. The Crystal Cave then moved across the street to a ground-level storefront where it established itself. A couple of years later it moved to a much larger location off the beaten path. My years spent working at the Crystal Cave during the development of the comic market are fond memories for me.

You were going to school at the State University College at New Paltz to be a teacher. How long did you teach, and how did you like it?

After doing my student teaching in Carmel, NY I was asked to stay on and fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. I taught junior high school in the morning sessions and high school in the afternoon. I taught for one full school year.
I met David Greenwood and Gerry Michalak who would become friends. I enjoy teaching. I DIDN’T enjoy the administrative aspects of it, though, and that spun me around to doing my own thing.

A couple of years later, I would run into you selling comic books at small shows. Then on August 28, 1978, which you insist was NOT keyed to Jack Kirby’s birthday, you opened FantaCo. What did the name mean to you, and why in Albany?

Oh, what a search it was to find a location for the store!! I started in Danbury CT, which was near Carmel, and looked at all kinds of storefronts in all kinds of locations. I then moved up and through NY state and ended up with three possible locations in and around Albany. 21 Central was the last location I looked at and it was the 55th time I had inspected a storefront. The large front window sold me as did the location.

The name means either the Fantasy Company or the Fantastic Company. I used both interchangeably when I was thinking it up.

In 1979, you held the first FantaCon at the Empire State Plaza, called FantaCon ’80 to confuse future historians. What are your recollections of that first convention?

It was a whirlwind!!! From conception to the actual show was only a few months!! I do remember drinking obscene amounts of coffee, staying awake for days on end, and ultimately stumbling into the Convention Center on a bright August morning and labeling the tables. The lift started bringing up dealers and then the show was on! I remember that everyone we had brought in was a trooper and did a great job. By the way, you can thank Kevin Cahill [now a New York State Assemblyman] for calling the first show FantaCon ’80. HE convinced me that it would make the show sound futuristic!!

The cover of that first FantaCon program was drawn by the late Raoul Vezina. Raoul was, in many ways, the face of the Crystal Cave, and in the early days, the face of FantaCo. What was it about Raoul that made him suitable to be the guy everyone saw in the front of the store?

Raoul was a super popular artist and musician in New Paltz. And as soon as he did the window mural for the Crystal Cave he became known for that as well. Everyone liked Raoul!
So considering that I had worked with him for years at the Crystal Cave it was logical for me to ask him to come to Albany and help me with the new store. The earliest days of FantaCo very much mirrored the Crystal Cave in that Raoul did our first window and he was the frontman for the store. I took care of the finances and ran the mail order which carried over from my own mail-order business. Most people thought that Raoul owned the store.

Who was the original Smilin’ Ed, and how did the rat become the emblem for FantaCo?

Fortunately, the absolute original first Smilin’ Ed character exists in about 50,000 copies of the 1979 Overstreet Price Guide as a full-page ad announcing the new store. Anyone can pull out a copy and see the original character.
The way it went was this: I had reserved a full-page ad in Overstreet timed to come out just after the store opened. I had laid out the page and written the copy I wanted it to say but I had no central comic character so I asked Raoul if he could draw a rat in a spacesuit. I figured that was different enough from all the other characters. So Ed began as an advertising character. The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures. So I came up with the basic rat character but it was Raoul who gave the “rat in a spacesuit” a personality and a name. It was a good blend of ideas and I really think we could have continued the comic series until it caught on.

Smilin’ Ed was the star of four comic books, created by Raoul and you, and published by the company in 1980-1982. It was never particularly commercially successful, unfortunately. Why do you think that was?

At the time we were publishing Ed, independent comics were in their infancy. They were B&W and cost more than color comics. Fans wanted a superstar artist on the series to make the relatively high cover prices palatable. All we had was good art and good stories. That was not enough at the time.

What’s your favorite Phil Seuling story? [Among other things, Phil pretty much invented the direct market for comic books. His company, Seagate, was FantaCo’s distributor of comic books and was early in carrying FantaCo publications. FantaCon 2013 is dedicated, in part, to Phil’s memory.] ]

OMG!! How long is this interview??? I have SO many Phil stories I could go on forever. Probably “the pact”, which lasted many years right up to his death, is my favorite. At some point during a particularly slow show in Boston, Phil and I decided that we were going to eat out way through the cuisines of the world. ALL of them, no matter how obscure were there to be tasted. We did this at conventions and on my weekly visits to his home in Seagate. After several years we really started hitting the obscure. One of the last places we ate together was a Cuban-Chinese restaurant (which was wonderful by the way). Later Hank Jansen and I would go there too.
The other part of the pact was that whoever left the country had to send the other one a postcard saying “I’m in (fill in the country) and you’re not!! I have a lot of those cards and sent a lot too!!

The first artist FantaCo published was Fred Hembeck. It was Fred’s second book, Hembeck 1980, which actually came out in February 1980. Fred has been quite clear that FantaCo didn’t “steal” him from Eclipse Comics, who had put out the first Hembeck issue. What’s your recollection of the story?

My recollections were that Dean [Mullaney] had a big hit with his Sabre book. It had gone through some 3 printings with 30,000+ copies. I think that Dean wanted (expected?) the Hembeck book to sell just as many copies and when it did not he kinda lost interest in it. It was nothing against Fred and certainly, we NEVER stole the book away. It was offered to us.

Hembeck did a total of seven books for FantaCo, but three new items plus an expanded reprint of issue 1 just in 1980. Wasn’t that an ambitious schedule?

Yes, looking back on that it was ambitious. If you remember at the time one of the biggest complaints about the independent comics was that they were always late. Fred was fast so we tried to keep up a steady schedule. It worked.

How the heck did you get John Caldwell, who had done work for National Lampoon, to do Mug Shots with FantaCo in 1980?

I hand that miracle off to Kevin Cahill who convinced John to do the first several FantaCons. At each show, John would organize a group drawing by all the guests and then auction it off for charity.
At some point, I think that Kevin mentioned to John that we were publishing and the idea snowballed from there. Unfortunately, we did not lay out the book the way John wanted it and he was quite disappointed. I wish there had been more communication as that book could have been a nice seller in book stores over a long period of time.

In many ways, I was a bit surprised that you had a store primarily focused on comics since you were much more interested in film and music. Were comics a toehold, a recognizable store genre, you used to eventually do what you REALLY wanted to do, such as the horror film books and magazines?

Well, it was, has been, and still is a Catch-22 for me. I started my interest in this specialty market from horror-oriented products: Mars Attacks cards, Famous Monsters, Gary Svehla’s Gore Creatures fanzine, Steve Ditko’s Fantastic Giants comic, Creepy, Eerie, and others. I would always choose a horror comic over a superhero comic. Fantastic Four #19 was the first superhero comic I ever read. Much later in 1968, I bought all the first issues that Marvel was putting out that year- Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Hulk 102, etc., etc. It was then I caught the superhero bug and waited for every issue. It was also when I began buying multiple issues for later resale. So that is my messy answer!!
***
Xerox Ferox, John Szpunar’s forthcoming book, with a cover created by Steve Bissette, will be premiering at FantaCon.

***
Photos, taken by Roger Green (top to bottom):
Tom Skulan, 1982 or 1983; founder of FantaCo and FantaCon
Steve Bissette, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, a guest at FantaCon 2013
the late Raoul Vezina, 1982 or 1983; co-creator of Smilin’ Ed comics, FantaCo front of the store guy
Bill Anderson, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, worked at FantaCo, a guest at FantaCon 2013, the guy who scanned all of these pictures and about five dozen more

FantaCon 2013 update

Haven’t seen Steve Bissette in person since 1988.

Michae

As some of you know, I worked at FantaCo, the comic book and film book store/publisher, et al in Albany, NY from May 1980 to November 1988, the second-longest job I ever had. (The current one is #1.)

There will be a FantaCon in September 2013, the first one since 1990. I’ll be there, Allah/Yahweh willing.

You’ll note that Tom Skulan, the creator of FantaCo and FantaCon, has dedicated the show to the memory of three individuals. I KNEW THEM ALL.

Phil Seuling was one of those people that the term “bigger than life” was designed for. He essentially invented the direct sales market for comic books, and his Seagate Distributors was not only FantaCo’s primary supplier in the early years, but the fact that he took a chance on FantaCo’s largely untested product line helped permit FantaCo to become a successful publisher. He threw some of the most lavish parties I’ve ever been to, in Brooklyn, NY.

Not only did Raoul Vezina work the front counter at FantaCo, he also designed the FantaCo logo, Smilin’ Ed. He drew the duck character that graces this blog. One of my favorite memories ever was co-plotting a Smilin’ Ed story with him for the X-Men Chronicles. He also was friends with more folk than anyone I knew, and would often get us into the J.B. Scott’s nightclub for free when some band he knew was playing.

Chas Balun was this gentle giant of a man. Had a great sense of humor, which showed up in his horror film writings. He lived on the West Coast of the US, so I didn’t meet him that often. Since I shipped most of the FantaCo publications, I got to speak with him on the phone regularly. My buddy Stephen R. Bissette was speaking fondly of him on his Facebook page earlier this month.

Speaking of Steve, I’m looking forward to seeing him in person, at the only show he’s doing outside his native Vermont in 2013. He’s the artist probably best known for his collaboration on Swamp Thing, though he’s done a lot of other great stuff. Haven’t seen him in person since 1988.

Also haven’t seen Michael T. Gilbert in a very long time, probably since before Raoul died, in 1983. On the other hand, Fred Hembeck, who Tom and Fred have confirmed is coming, though he’s not noted on the site yet, I got to see on November 11 of this year.

I have two tasks in re: this, and some of you may be able to help me. I’m interviewing Tom Skulan, sending him a bunch of questions by the end of the year, which he has agreed to answer. If YOU have questions you want me to ask, please let me know. I’m also working on a FantaCo bibliography for 1978-1988; if you happen to have any of those items that I could borrow – and that would include FantaCon programs, FantaCo catalogs, and Splatter Movies T-shirts, I would appreciate that. Contact me at the e-mail on this blog.

Roger Answers Your Questions, Tom, LisaF, Arthur, and Scott

In May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store.

Lisa from peripheral perceptions, who has very nice toes, writes:
You may have already been asked and answered this one, but…How and why did you get into blogging?

The HOW question I answered, among other places, here, specifically in the fifth paragraph; curse you, Fred Hembeck! The WHY I’m sure I’ve answered, but, to reiterate, it’s mostly because I was composing things to write in my head, I didn’t have a place to put them, and the subsequent noise in my brain got too loud; I blogged to stay (relatively) sane. Now it’s so I can “meet” people like you.
***
Thomas McKinnon, with whom I worked at the comic book store FantaCo, said:
Hey Roger
Tell us the story of how you met Tom Skulan and started working at FantaCo.
I have never heard the story.

Well, those are two very different things. I’m going to go back to the old days of comic book collecting when you had to get your comics off the spinner racks at the local convenience store. I started collecting comics by early 1972 (Red Wolf #1 was cover-dated May 1972, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire June 1972). My friend and I were at college in New Paltz, NY but we had to go to some little hole-in-the-wall store on 44/55 in Highland, the next town over, to get our four-color fix.

At some point, maybe as early as 1973, a guy named Peter Maresca started a comic book store called the Crystal Cave, buying from a direct market distributor (Seagate? Bud Plant?) It was right across from a bar called Bacchus. It later moved a couple of blocks.

The chronology fails me here, but at some point, Tom Skulan, Mitch Cohn, and Raoul Vezina all worked at the Crystal Cave, so I met them all there. Tom also put bicycles together at Barker’s department store just outside the village limits.

At some point, Peter closed the store and sold the comic inventory, I believe, to Tom. In any case, I would see Tom at these little comic book shows up and down the Hudson River periodically. Then on August 28, 1978, he opened FantaCo at 21 Central Avenue in Albany, with Raoul as the front guy/graphic designer in residence, the same function he served at the Crystal Cave.

I was living in Schenectady by that time, and lost my job at the Schenectady Arts Council in January 1979; the federal funding was cut off. So I couldn’t afford to buy comics for a while. I’d take the hour-long #55 bus from Schenectady to Albany, sometimes do some work in the store, and get store credit in return so that I could feed my addiction.

I did some work on the first FantaCon in 1979. I know I helped schlep stuff into the Egg convention center, and worked the front door and/or the FantaCo table.

In August 1979, I moved to Albany, to attend grad school at UAlbany (or whatever it was called at the time) in public administration. It was a disaster, in no small part because I developed a toe infection two days before registration and literally almost died; I spent nearly a week in the college infirmary and never really caught up. But it was also very cutthroat competitive, unlike my later time at library school, which was very cooperative, and it did not suit my personality at all.

So in May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store. I told him that I didn’t want to work at the store; I needed to go back to college in the fall. But I COULD use a summer job. So I was hired on that basis, primarily doing mail order, and didn’t end up leaving until November 1988.
***
Scott from the on-hiatus Scooter Chronicles – come back, Scott! – wonders: What is your take, if any, on the DC relaunch, with 52 new storylines and rebooted famous characters?

First, I know it’s inevitable that characters will get reimagined from time to time, in part a function of them not aging as the rest of us do. Still, the whole renumbering and reinventing the whole line smacks of both a frustrating disrespect for its own history and commercial desperation. If I hadn’t stopped buying new comics, this ploy might have motivated me to scrap the entire line. In other words, I HATE it.

That said, it appears that a couple of titles featuring female characters are specifically problematic.
***
A fellow political science major in college, Arthur@AmeriNZ, asked about a story. AP Reporter Responds To Chris Hayes Panel Debate On Racism Of Droppin’ G’s From Obama Speech
On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, the panel discussed the contrast between the way Politico reported President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus and the Associated Press‘ reporting. Unlike Politico, who used the official transcription to pull quotes, the AP’s article reflected the President’s folksier delivery by quotin’ him without the dropped g’s. Karen Hunter called the AP’s treatment racist, John McWhorter disagreed, and Hayes got a laugh by saying, “I can go both ways on this.”

My first instinct was to say that, if that same news organization would drop the G when quoting, say, George W. Bush (which seems to be the case), it’s a non-issue, but would be if Obama were dealt with differently. However, it is NOT because, as McWhorter argued, “Black English is becoming the lingua franca of American youth, and that ‘America, including non-black America, loves that way of speaking.'” Yuck.

Hunter says she teaches “a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar because you don’t want them to sound ignorant. For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.” That was an interesting point. I’ve seen literal transcripts in the newspaper, often in criminal cases, sometimes with the (sic) or “as stated” designation, and I’ve been of two minds on that, how that might color the public’s perception of the case.

I guess I agree with Hayes when he suggested, “journalistically speaking, the AP’s transcription gave a more accurate impression of the flavor of the speech.” Especially when the President clearly intended to be dropping his Gs for the particular audience to whom he was speaking. Or speakin’.
***
You have more questions? Just ask away!

Art from Sold Out #1 by John Hebert; story by Skulan, Green, and Hebert

FantaCo birthday musing

FantaCo was a part of my personal history that required a greater deal of accuracy, lest the faux facts proliferate.

There was a time when I used to buy into the notion that the past is past, and you move on to the next thing, as though life were some connect-the-dots puzzle, where you go from point A to point B to point C without ever doubling back. It’s not that I ever really thought that on my own, but that others suggested it, and I, for some reason, bought into it for a while.

I suppose it can be a useful tool, letting go of the past, when the past was awful. But when it was good, why forget it? (And I could make the case for remembering the less good as well.)

And some people don’t forget. Not that often, given the fact that I worked there 8.5 years, I’ve mentioned FantaCo, the comic/film book retailer/publisher/convention operator in Albany, NY. Even less frequently, I have mentioned Raoul Vezina, the house artist who also worked on publications for FantaCo (Smilin’ Ed, X-Men Chronicles) and others (New Paltz Comix, Naturalist at Large). But those brief comments generated not one but TWO of Raoul’s friends, to write to me this summer, days apart, indicating that they appreciated the mention of their friend. Understand that Raoul DIED in 1983, and it’ll give you a sense of how much impact he had on their lives, and to be sure, on mine.

These are drawings, obviously, that he did for his friend Buck. I know I have one that he did for me as the duck caricature that you see on the header.

I also reached out to Tom the Mayor, a reader of this blog, (not to be confused with Tom, the owner), who worked at FantaCo after Raoul died, right as I was leaving. Since today is the anniversary of FantaCo’s birth in 1978, I asked him if he had any impressions of FantaCo to share. He wrote:
When I first started at the company, we ran the whole publishing and shipping operation out of the very cramped back room of the store; if you stepped wrong you could fall into the basement. Your desk was there, Tom’s desk was there, Hank Jansen worked in one corner, and I was in another corner. What with backstock everywhere, if a freelancer came in the room, somebody would have to step out. I can understand why you got burnt out shortly after you brought me into the company.
Actually, I was burnt out BEFORE we brought him into the company. Yet it is often interesting to get the perspective of other people regarding events at which you were present. But Tom is right; that backroom WAS an accident waiting to happen, especially for those unfamiliar with it.

Getting back to Raoul, his friend Ed also allowed me to post these drawings by Raoul; the top one is less clear because it’s still in the frame. I’ll have to get around and scan some more of my Vezina artwork.

As I’ve noted, FantaCo closed in 1998. My buddy Steve Bissette and I, a couple of years ago, found it necessary to make corrections in the FantaCo Wikipedia listing, not because, as someone wrote to Steve at the time, we wanted to “correct the Internet” – twice this month I’ve quoted that phrase – but because it was a part of each of our personal histories that required a greater deal of accuracy, lest the faux facts proliferate.

Oh, yeah, on this date, Jack Kirby was born in 1917; he died in 1994. Tom (the owner) said that opening the store on Jack’s birthday was purely coincidental.
***
A mass e-mail I received from John Hebert, with whom I worked on the comic book Sold Out for FantaCo:

Subject: Hell has frozen over!!!

For any of you who haven’t heard yet…….John Hebert is a father!!!!

Welcome to the world, Ari Michelle Hebert- born after all of an 8 minute delivery on August 10th, 2010; 6 lbs, 11.5 oz, 18 inches long… and she is GORGEOUS and has already been on the local news and the front page of the local Business Review!!!!!!!!!!

And all this time, people said I was a real mother!!!!