Working on the auto-b. Still in the draft stage, but I hope you like the cutting. If you were a real-deal fan of Comics in the 1960s, Jerry Bails was on your radar, “Good lord, he’s the guy who puts out ALTER-EGO, lives close to me and I try to buy ever issue every time they come out.” I was watching and buying local. Comics fandom was very small in those days, yet galvanizing at an alarming rate thanks in no small part to Jerry Bails. Everything a Comic-loving kid could hope for in his home- town: an expert. He’d been a fan since the start of the medium. I had coverless copies of old BATMAN and ALL-STAR and comics from the 1940s fascinated me. In the early part of the 1960s, I had no idea that there was a .guy with all of the answers two bus rides away with answers to my questions. Living in my hometown, Detroit, Michigan. Reading JUSTICE LEAGUE had put him on my radar because he aways had letters printed in the title. Jerry: the guy was what they call lanky thin or lean. While not with as much flavor, he carried himself like he was James Stewart. I suppose he was as easy-going with his college students as he was with my puny-little fifteen–year-old ass. I knew that and appreciated it. Jerry took me under his wing quite naturally as I’d been digging into the Jack Kirby legacy with great enthusiasm. Jerry liked what I had learned and what I could bring to his table. Kirby in my case, and not much more. I helped him with his WHOS’ WHO OF AMERICAN COMICS. I presented my facts as best I knew them and here, a college professor agreed with me. I was a very happy young pup. I once visited his humble Detroit home, a’trembled but Jerry was used to dealing with students a’tremble and was a very good guy about it. From my very young perspective, you have to back up a couple of steps. Jerry was a big fan of the ALL-STAR title and the sprouts knew it. After all, we were reading the JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, the modern re-boot and loving it as much as Jerry had loved the JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA when he was a kid. A dozen heroes for our dimes. Bails was my first mentor and was a good one . We went over his WHOS’ WHO Kirby records and re-arranged Comic history. Cool stuff at fifteen. Then he gave me a list of Golden-Age artists and pointed me in the direction of two dozen White Pages. Seems if you called some city and asked for a phonebook they’d send you one postpaid. And so, in a pre-Internet age, my young fingers scanned very many pages in an attempt to please the master. I was on some kind of Comics mission and Jerry Bails was my master. As college professor, I took everything that he said with great weight. A “This is how you do it,” with a great, academic tone. Lanky but academic, as all of the best academics seem to be. Casual in their lanky delivery. But, that was Jerry. A really good teacher. Jerry was into Science Fiction as much as he was Comics, or maybe even more so. At the early Detroit Triple Fanfair conventions, I watched him hob-knob with the SF people far more than I ever saw him communicate with the Comics fans. Jerry seemed to enjoy the non-Comics material as much as I did, maybe more so. After all, he lived through Big Little Books, Serials, and ALL-STAR COMICS. This was the man my father was supposed to pass me off to, in the best Joseph Campbell tradition. And he did it with such ease, like my slightly disinterested father couldn’t. So, I scanned White Pages from all over the country in an effort to please my mentor and in an effort to compile Comics history. As I grew older, Jerry’s lessons stuck with me the way I hoped his lessons to his college students stuck with them. All of the research I’ve done is due to that lanky, Jim Stewart kind of guy. Another older Comic collector in the area was Edwin Aprill Jr. He was also a professor in Ann Arbor Michigan where he lived. He had one of the most amazing collections of popular culture that I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen some pretty amazing collections. He’d started amassing stuff when he was a kid and never quit. Old comics and original art were quite cheap in the late ‘50s and eary ‘60s and Ed bought the stuff by the mit-full. One piece of art on the wall intrigued me. It was a color design for NICK FURY AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. #5 by Jim Steranko. I knew Jim and I knew that he never let go of his art. I quizzed Aprill how he got it. Ed replied, “I had my eight year old daughter write him a letter and gave her twenty dollars to enclose and he sent me that.” My history in fandom goes back to 1968. There was an organized movement in the Greator-Detriot area. It was a terrific place to be interested in Comics because Jerry Bails was there, Shel Dorf was there and many collectors were there as well. Shel did the first Detroit Triple Fan Fair Comics con and I worked on them for years, ultimately owning the show. A tip of the Theakston topper to Shel. Funny story: Shel answered a classified-ad in the DETROIT NEWS. They were looking for an “artist,” and when he arrived at the interview, some lower-echelon groundling told him that it was a job rolling white paint on the sides of tiers on the raised lettering. As history records, he didn’t take the job . Back to 1968 I published my first fanzine, the AARDVARK ANNUAL. I printed it in the laundry room of our house in Farmington on a used mimeograph my father had bought for me. There were probably 25 copies of this twelve-page ‘zine but it brought me to the attention of the founders of F.F.C.G (Fantasy Fans and Comic Collectors Group) in Detroit. The club had .planned to do a book on Jack Kirby, and I had been accumulating a checklist of his material. I was in contact with Kirby, so it became my project for the club. Jack had been part of a boys’ club as a kid, appreciated what we were trying to do and gave us more support than we probably deserved. As the club expanded, we were able to afford photostatic reductions of contributed art for THE FAN INFORMER and I found an art studio in the heart of the city that could do them. Like, the “heart” heart of the city. As downtown Detroit as you could get. The studio also “jobbed-out” stats to help make the rent. The first room off the hallway was the camera room and always dark. Odd to come out of a fully lit hall into a darkroom. Now, today, when people think of cameras it’s usually the one in your pocket. Not then. That monster took up one-third of a very large room, bubbled with trays of chemicals on steel rails with controlling chains and some damned bright lights. I actually shielded my eyes from them the first time they came on. Now, working on our budget, I asked if I couldn’t get a better price if I helped around the studio. This seasoned old-timer taught me how to use a stat camera and for that he gets a tip of the topper. How it worked out I can’t say but eventually I became the studio intern. I do remember showing my feeble sixteen-year-old artist’s portfolio. They liked it and any time I cared to, I could bus into downtown Detroit and work in a real art studio. I’d hit the place at about 3:45 and work until about 5:30 learning the proper way to make an overlay for art and mechanicals, fine-tuning my stat skills, and sweeping up when needed without being asked. Eventually, they asked me to do some rough sketches for a Christmas L.P. for an account they were fishing for. When the boss saw what I’d done, he flustered, “This is finished art! This is supposed to be a sketch!” But, that was the only way I knew how to produce and couldn’t understand the problem. After all, I’d done my best Vaughn Bode rip-off and it looked good. I scuffed it up to make it look more spontaneous. Not one to be left out, the photo retoucher grabbed me one afternoon and asked if I wanted to learn how to fix a photo. Now, tone was something I’d already mastered: how to blend; hide the seam; and make a finished product. “I’m going out for some coffee,” he stated, as he shoved a large black-and-white photograph of a plaster dummy-head and a few forgotten items my way. “Get rid of the specs.” He instructed. Forty-five minutes later he returned to the office to see how I was doing. I was cleaning my nails: the job had only taken a half-hour. “It’s done.” his shocked voice blurted. I suppose in some face-saving gesture he was obligated to come in and “fix” a few things but my sixteen-year-old eyes knew that he was just making motions. I’d finished his job for him, for free, on his coffee break. It was at that moment when I sensed that I could make a lot of money retouching this very easy stuff and I sensed that he sensed it too. He always looked at me funny from then on. I got to be friends with the staff and bosses. One of the two owners had strawberry-blond hair, with a neat Van Dyke. Wow, just like an artist. One afternoon, I was sitting with him in his office and he was a little on edge. Seems they’d gotten a job to come up with a cover for a program book to be passed out a big dinner clelebrating Lee Iacoca with a magazine at some big dinner. “I’ve got Norman Rockwell’s phone number in front of me but I just can’t get the nerve to call him.” Now, by this time, I’d spoken with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, and Chester Gould, so I was getting used to talking to famous people. “I’ll do it.” Hell yes I wanted to talk to Norman Rockwell, even though his work over the preceding years was less then stellar he was still a legend. I dialed and tried to look cool even thought it was nerve-wracking. Anyway, some woman, wife maybe, called the Dean of American Illustrators to the phone and we spoke briefly. Seemed as though Norm, (yes, well we were now on those speaking terms,) Norm tells me that he’s booked up three years, so no quick-fix cover. Got another Norm story for you later. The work at an art studio seemed like a very good step in my evolution in an attempt to morph into an artist. There’s nothing like on-the-job training and doing a good job to give you confidence. I’d need it in the coming months.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 21:08:49 +0000
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