The Stan I knew

Here’s a picture of the Man, i.e., the persona, that I knew well from my initial comics madness years. You could find cartoon versions everywhere as well, whether affectionate as in FOOM or derisive as in the New Gods.

This blog has turned out to be mainly about the births of characters and the deaths of people. A lot of ink’s been spilled about which one Stan was, or which one we should like or loathe or analyze or criticize.

This isn’t the time for that. Maybe in about a year.

 

 

Shine a Light

Today it’s about semi-autobiographical comics – fiction pieces that depict things close to the author, drawing heavily upon their immediate concerns, small press almost by definition, but not featuring the author as a character or claiming to depict their actual life. They loot freely from themselves and their kin and acquaintances, but put it into just enough of a fictional blender to be its own thing.

Numbed

Mike is dead.

It’s horrible to say it that way. “He passed,” is a phrase I cannot use, although I recognize that others take it seriously. “He died” sounds active, like he went and did it. I say it horribly because that’s the way I feel about it.

Aces high

Art by K.C.

This is a tribute post to K.C. Ryan and a reflection on his superhero group the Four Aces. You may be surprised to know it’s not a role-playing post at all, and part of the reason I’m writing about it is to investigate why not.

Tom Artis

Note to readers: this post was supposed to be scheduled for August 30, but I accidentally posted it along with the August 27 post. The new/next post arrives on schedule September 3rd.

So I’ll tell you an anecdote from the late 80s. This was during the two years between college and grad school, when I was living in Chicago and working at the Field Museum, living in a studio in Hyde Park, and living life as a series of daily adventures.

I, said the Fly

This was real.

Every so often, one can see superhero comics’ heart.

Kim Yale

Kim

I’d returned to reading comics in the summer of 1985. By the summer of 1986, I blush to confess, I had become an ardent letter-writer to multiple titles, a letterhack as the term went then, as well as pen-pal with several other people with the same behavioral disorder (remember: no email, no internet, no personal computers, nothin’ but paper letters and the phone, people).

K.C. Ryan

Summer ’88

I don’t exactly remember how they came to contact me, maybe due to some embarrassing letters published in some comics (maybe more than “some”), but I was invited to join The Clobberin’ Times Amateur Press Alliance when it was begun by Tim Watts and Mike O’Connell of Sacramento, California, in the summer of 1988. The topic was any-and-all things Champions, meaning the roleplaying game published by Hero Games, then in its third edition (1985) and – although gaming culture seems to have forgotten – considered at the time simply the most with-it, solid RPG in the hobby.