We plunge down the time tunnel to the earliest days of fandom: back before nerds were cool, before science fiction was taken seriously, and before comic book characters ruled Hollywood. It was a time when fans could only connect through ‘zines and specialty magazines. A time when MAD Magazine and The Twilight Zone expanded the minds of youth across the nation. And a time when a small group of high school kids in San Diego met a visionary super-fan from Detroit named Shel Dorf.
We plunge down the time tunnel to the earliest days of fandom: back before nerds were cool, before science fiction was taken seriously, and before comic book characters ruled Hollywood. It was a time when fans could only connect through ‘zines and specialty magazines. A time when MAD Magazine and The Twilight Zone expanded the minds of youth across the nation. And a time when a small group of high school kids in San Diego met a visionary super-fan from Detroit named Shel Dorf.
Narrated by Brinke Stevens
Created and Directed by Mathew Klickstein
Executive Produced by Rob Schulte
Written and Produced by Mathew Klickstein, Rob Schulte, Christopher Tyler, and James Bilodeau
Edited by Rob Shulte, Christopher Tyler, and James Bilodeau
Mixed by James Bilodeau
Original Music Composed by Max DeVincenzo and Produced by Fox Tracks Music
With help from Brannan Goetschius and Michael Fische
All interviews (unless otherwise noted) conducted by Mathew Klickstein.
Principal interviewees/contributors (in alphabetical order):
Al Jean, Anthony Russo, Barry Alfonso, Barry Short, Bill Lund, Bill Mumy (provided by contributor), Bill Schanes, Bjo Trimble, Bob Arendt, Brinke Stevens, Bruce Campbell, Caseen Gaines, Chuck Graham (provided by SDSU), Clayton Moore, Dave Clark, Dave Scroggy, Erin Hanna, Gene Henderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Gus Krueger, Felicia Day, Frank Miller, Ho Che Anderson, Igor Goldkind (provided by SDSU), Jackie Estrada, Jeanne Graham (provided by SDSU), Jim Cornelius, Jim Means, Jim Valentino, Joe Russo, John Pound, John Trimble, Kevin Eastman, Linda Yeh, Lloyd Kaufman, Kevin Smith (provided by contributor), Len Wein (provided by M. Klickstein archive), Maggie Thompson, Mark Evanier, Mike Towry, Mo Alzmann, Neil Gaiman (provided by contributor), Paul M. Sammon, Phil Yeh, Richard Alf (provided by KPBS), Richard Butner, Rick Geary, Roger Freedman, Scott Aukerman, Scott Shaw!, Sergio Aragonés (provided by contributor), Stan Sakai, Tim Seeley, Trina Robbins, Wendy All.
We are grateful to the family of Mary and Gene Henderson (who, sadly, passed away during the final stages of Comic-Con Begins' post-production). This production is dedicated in part to their memory, as well as the memory of the many Con contributors no longer with us but whose legacy will continue to live on for time immemorial.
Archival material and additional research provided by:
Mike Towry and his “Comic-Convention Memories” website.
Alan Light’s 1975 Comic-Con recordings
Jackie Estrada and Comic-Con’s 40th Anniversary Souvenir Book
Pamela Jackson and San Diego State University’s Comic-Con
Maureen Cavanaugh at San Diego’s KPBS
Erin Hanna and her book Only at Comic Con
Bjo Trimble and “The Star Trek Concordance”
Fantagraphics’ “We Told You So: Comics As Art”
News Anchor:
The first annual Golden State Comic-Con for commercial artists and cartoon buffs gets underway this weekend at the US Grant Hotel. Artist Shel Dorf says he hopes to make this event an annual thing.
Shel Dorf:
This is a chance for the amateur fan and the amateur writer to really meet with the professionals and find the magic secret of how it's done.
Natalie Best:
How long have you been interested in the cartoonists? This is, when did you first start getting them together? And when did you start collecting?
Shel Dorf:
You really want to know?
Jim Valentino:
Comics for me was like what people describe a religious experience.
Caseen Gaines:
Art has always informed who we are as a society.
Felicia Day:
The first time I ever went to Comic-Con, I think it was completely overwhelming. But at the same time, it's also like Nirvana.
Jackie Estrada:
I grew up in the fifties. When everybody read comics.
Scott Aukerman:
It really is the cast-offs of society that have found each other.
Kevin Smith:
Walking into Comic-Con the first time was almost like walking into the Internet years later.
Sergio Aragonés:
I knew I wanted to make comics, but I didn't know anything about how to make them.
Frank Miller:
My first San Diego was an overwhelming experience.
Neil Gaiman:
Scary big. It could be as many as a million people making Comic-Con stuff happen.
Joe Russo:
It is the inflection point where geek culture met pop culture, and overtook it.
Anthony Russo:
The power of Comic-Con came into focus simply the first time I attended. It was shocking.
Ray Bradbury:
Everyone who is here tonight. The reason why they're in the field they're in, they went into it for romantic reasons. They went into it to help themselves to grow and become certain things. And because of their influence, they romanced us into wanting to live. That's what it's all about. Your love of comic strips and the kind of art that we're all fascinated with is the love of high romance. The love of life itself. The ability of each of us in the field, one way or another, to say to you, “Yes, there’s much negativity. Yes, there’s much to criticize in the world. But, there’s much excitement. And much beauty.” And people like the cartoonists, the illustrators I’m sharing this evening with do that sort of thing for us. They make us want to go on living. It’s a very important thing.
Brinke Stevens:
Greetings fangirls, fanboys, and mundanes alike. Brinke Stevens here: cosplay pioneer, the original scream queen, marine biologist, comic book creator, author, and filmmaker. I also happened to be the widow of late comics legend Dave Stevens, who put me in the pages of the award-winning classic The Rocketeer. But, that's not all. I'm also one of the foundational members of what would eventually become known as the San Diego Comic-Con. After five decades and counting, Comic-Con has exponentially grown into the largest pop culture event worldwide. Just ask our pals over at the Guinness Book of World Records. My longtime colleagues from the Con invite you now to join us for a rather novel experience in storytelling, stringing together the intimately personal anecdotes and unfiltered reflections that may occasionally contradict one another, but together tell the entire story, not only of Comic-Con, but the evolution of modern fandom. So hold on tight, because this story is rare and in near mint condition. Grab your bag and board, and let's travel back in time. In the years leading up to the first Comic-Con, fans of comic books, sci-fi, and fantasy were outcast from the mainstream. And just as any out-casted group of people would do, they started to find each other. They were the aspiring cartoonists, comic book collectors, and underground zine writers of the time. The first geeks. And they wanted to connect. Here's one of Comic-Con’s founding members, Dave Clark.
Dave Clark:
San Diego’s comic convention started really with two groups of people. And one of those groups went to the high school that I went to: Crawford High School here in San Diego. Uh, Greg Bear, Scott Shaw!, John Pound, Roger Freedman, and myself. Crawford High School had 3,700 students. The year I was a senior, when I graduated. One of the largest high schools in the world. You know, science fiction fans, comic fans were at the time, a little tiny niche subculture. That was something we talked about every day. Crawford High School encouraged students to organize clubs for their special interests. Uh, there was probably a chess club and a Latin club. Well, there was an Underground Film Club. We didn't really know what underground movies were, really. This is the late sixties: “underground” sounded cool. And we found a willing teacher to be the teacher sponsor for it.And it brought together the science fiction, fantasy, comic, and film fans at Crawford High School, and put us all in one room. We were all talking to each other at lunch anyway. But that kind of formalized it. Pre-Internet, it was hard to connect with other people that liked the stuff you did. I was lucky that I went to a school with so many fans.
John Pound:
The film club was pretty neat because all of a sudden I met this group of kids at the high school that were all into films and science fiction and comics. It was like a mini-convention of a sort. Or a precursor, I should say.
Dave Scroggy:
In those days it was too geeky to even let your fellow students know that you liked comic books, let alone have a place to go talk about them.
Scott Shaw!:
Crawford High Underground Film Society met in a bungalow on the, uh, campus. I think we met once a week and it was really mostly kind of a “show-and-tell and discuss,” because we were all buying the latest Ace Double paperback science fiction books and the latest Marvel and DC comics …
Dave Clark:
Our social groups spanned all of the classes. There was no division between seniors, juniors, freshmen. And some of the guys graduated in ’68: Greg Bear, Scott Shaw! graduated. They were all going off to, you know, their higher education. But, they stayed very connected to this group. In fact, they would still show up on campus. And I did the same thing when I graduated in 1969. The following year, I was writing the comic strips with John Pound for the school paper. So I was actually on campus often.
Scott Shaw!:
Our real motive, I think, was just to kind of enjoy what we liked with each other. We’d talk about what movies we last saw. We'd make plans on which movies and things, events we wanted to see.
Roger Freedman:
Actually, our first enterprise was a tremendously ambitious one. We actually formed a film club, and so we set out to make a version on film of Ray Bradbury's short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” And it was interesting how we pooled resources from various things that were available to us. Probably first and most important resource was we had parents who were willing to drive us to these places, ‘cause none of us had driver's licenses yet. So, for instance, John Pound, his mother ran a Montessori school. And so we were able to use that for doing office type scenes. Scott Shaw!’s father was in the security force at the San Diego Zoo, as a recent Navy retiree. He was able to get us onto the grounds and kind of behind-the-scenes at the San Diego Zoo for shooting jungle type scenes. And so on. And also a number of people, like Dave Clark in particular, was getting pretty talented with doing stop-motion animation. And so the plans were to do that for the dinosaur scenes and so on.
Scott Shaw!:
My dad got us into the zoo, and got us in. Since he was a security guy, we got to go like on the service roads and stuff. We were definitely driven weirdoes and we all wound up, you know, having achieved our dreams.
Dave Clark:
And the film was never finished. It was far too ambitious for our abilities at the time. But it was a great focus for our energies.
Scott Shaw!:
I didn’t realize that there was another group of fans in San Diego.
Mike Towry:
So the Patrick Henry people actually came later. Wendy um, she, she was from there. Barry, I think, went to Mission. But he was in junior high. He was 12 when we started, actually. He was our youngest.So there was the Crawford guys: Scott Shaw!, Greg Bear, those guys. But we, the founding group of Comic-Con, out of the six of us, three of us went to Kearny High School. And we were all from the same basic neighborhood in San Diego. We were all young comic dealers. Um, so we had that in common and that's how we met.
Bob Arendt:
I really never knew anybody at Crawford, really. The way things were in San Diego, the junior highs fed to their high schools pretty much.
Mike Towry:
So, yeah, we had no contact with the guys at Crawford High. And we didn't know they existed, they didn't know we existed.
Roger Freedman:
David Clark, Scott Shaw!, John Pound, Greg Bear. All these people happened to be at the same high school and this remarkable sort of concentration of talent and interest in science fiction, comic books, and that whole series of interconnected genres, all happened to be in the same place, and happily, we all found each other.
Brinke Stevens:
Not only did they find each other, they also found their talent. Here's cartoonist and Comic-Con’s first publicist, Scott Shaw!.
Scott Shaw!:
I've always wanted to be a cartoonist since the time I was about, I dunno, three. Reading a lot of comic books and funnies in the newspaper … You know, I taught myself how to read, uh, with looking at comics, ‘cause the words supported the pictures, and vice versa.
John Pound:
In the year before I went to Crawford High School, I was walking home from junior high and I saw this newspaper in the gutter that had like a little comic strip and it was done by a fella named Scott Shaw!. “That's cool cartooning, and that looks like fun! And I'd like to do that, too!” So, the next year, I signed up for journalism when I went to Crawford. And Scott was the resident cartoonist.
Roger Freedman:
Scott’s actually one of my best and longest-term friends. We’ve known each other since high school. The first person I know that actually created comic books, first in undergrounds and later on and through mainstream comics as well.
Rick Geary:
Yeah, Scott and I hit it off from the very beginning. And I, uh, I appreciated the kind of art that he did even though it certainly wasn't what I was pursuing at the time. But, uh, it was more of his volubility, and his articulateness and his sense of humor that attracted me. And when we've been great friends all these years.
Barry Alfonso:
I do know that in a related incident, that Scott tried to give Jack Kirby a dirty poster.
Scott Shaw!:
I, uh, had met Jack a couple of times. And one of the times, he told me, well, he asked me what I was working on, what I, how I was trying to become a professional. And I said, “Well, I'm doing underground comics now.” And his answer was, “Oh, I like underground comics.” Well, you know, when you're, when you're young and foolish, you're thinking you don't know many professional cartoonists, and Jack was so open to everybody, I'm thinking, “Well, I guess he likes to read Zap Comics and the Freak Brothers and all that stuff!” What I didn't realize was Jack was referring only to the fact underground cartoonists owned their own work, underground cartoonists drew in their own style, underground cartoonists, for not being a major comic company, got a decent pay: $50 a page for each printing wasn't that bad in 1970, 1971. So I thought, “Boy, Jack really likes underground comics.I'm going to do this poster in honor of him!” And I found an old issue of Strange Tales that he'd done the cover for that had this kind of a biped bulldog-looking alien standing in the middle of an arena. So I thought, “Well, let's make this, uh, let's make this into a, into an underground version of Jack Kirby!” So, I added a big schlong that I had more or less learned how to draw from looking at S Clay Wilson's underground comics. And now it's Deranged Tales. And he's saying, “No human can beat me off!” And at the bottom is signed, “By Scott Shaw!, in honor of Jack Kirby” or something like that. I mean, I actually put Jack's name on it because I wanted people to know it wasn't a slight.Mike Towry was so impressed by it. Now, he won’t like me saying him, but I can't help it. He printed up about a thousand copies of it as a poster. I mean, looking back, Jack is looking at it not only horrified that I signed his name to a piece of essentially pornography, but also that this is one of multiple copies of this poster. And he said, “But I've got a family!” And I still wasn't getting it. And I said, “Jack, maybe you could just put this up in your closet, in one of the closets.” And he's like looking at me like I've lost my mind, but not in an angry way. Just trying … I think he was just trying to figure out what my intention was.
John Pound:
So I started hanging out with these people and like, maybe like, I go over to like Scott Shaw!'s house or Dave Clark's house. And we’d talk about books and science fiction and they'd show me the things that they collected. And I just felt like I learned a lot from them, ‘cause they were just these bright minds. They both had a great sense of humor.
Barry Alfonso:
John Pound was very good friends with Scott Shaw! and Roger Freedman. John Pound was and is a very talented artist in a more sort of, you know, serious, realistic comic book way than say Scott Shaw! was, who was more of a “funny animal” sort of comedic artist.
Scott Shaw!:
But, John has done underground comics and over-ground comics … Probably his biggest claim to fame is he painted a lot of the Garbage Pail Kids cards back in the eighties. And even now I think he still works on that stuff.
Roger Freedman:
Certainly one of the folks who was really involved very early on this, another San Diegan, was Greg Bear. It's interesting. Greg was always interested in science, always interested in science fiction, started off at San Diego State as an astronomy major and decided that, “Yeah, this is a little too mathematical for me. And I'm really more interested in the science fiction aspects of it.” And so, he changed over to become an English and writing major. So, I think Greg was a good example of both the people who were involved with getting Comic-Con started and also with people who were influenced by and motivated by Comic-Con to go forth and be fruitful and to produce the sorts of things that we would frankly like to read, and has been extraordinarily successful in that.
Scott Shaw!:
Greg was the first guy who ever sold anything. And it was this little digest science fiction magazine that looked almost like a fanzine. And I mean, it wasn't even as fancy as the other little digest magazines that were coming out at the time. But it was professional. But anyway, he was the first, then John Pound and I were the first with Gory Stories Quarterly in ‘72. So, we all had potential.
Stan Sakai:
We used to make our own comic books. At first, it was literally making a comic book. It would be on 8 ½ x 11-inch paper, stapled together; lettered, inked, everything. And, uh, bound together to make an actual comic book. And then, later we found out about fanzines. This is back in the, let's see, late sixties, early seventies and fanzines were kind of like what underground comics or more like what independent comics are now. These are basically people who love comics would make their own comics and did publish it somewhere as cheaply made as mimeographed, others were full-color. So, you had the whole spectrum.
John Pound:
When I got into high school, I started writing letters to a friend of mine, Bill Richardson, who lived on the East Coast. And the letters evolved like over the course of a couple years, from just letters like, “Hey, I saw this movie and I bought this book and watched this TV show or heard about it …” They evolved into single-copy fanzines. And I would paint like a handmade cover on some of them with felt pens or acrylics.
Jackie Estrada:
These fanzines would tell you who did those comics. And then you'd start to look at them and say, “Oh yeah, I can tell the same artists did this comic, did that comic. Even though it's not signed, I can tell it's that same style.” And so you'd start looking for them. The fan aspect of it was becoming involved in the fanzine community, in that I would occasionally write letters to the fanzines and subscribed to all of them.
Dave Scroggy:
Though there were comic bookstores in a few places, they hadn't very much reached, Akron, Ohio. And for us, the only way that you could find out about comics and what was going on were through letters to the editor and fanzines, through the fan letters. And I actually wrote a couple myself. We understood that there was more.
Dave Clark:
Letter columns in magazines or in fanzines and professional magazines were one of the key ways to find out what was going on. And, way back in the day, Weird Tales, they would publish your address. This is before concerns about identity theft and privacy. They put your address in there. So, you live in the middle of the Midwest someplace and you write a letter about how much you liked something. And you started getting mail from people who shared your interest.
Alan Light:
Science fiction writer, author of Psycho, Mr. Robert Bloch, gave a talk on Lovecraft.
Robert Bloch:
My own relationship with Lovecraft goes way, way back. I was 15 years old living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I read Lovecraft stories and Weird Tales and read the letter column about other stories that had been published previously. Nowhere to get them. There were no paperbacks, no reprints. Wrote to the magazine, they didn't have any copies. So I decided to write my first fan letter to Lovecraft and I did. I got an answer.
Dave Clark:
HP Lovecraft himself, the great HP Lovecraft was in amateur journalism. And he edited and wrote for these publications that, um, fostered his career and his writing abilities. That's very much like chat rooms that we have today.
Brinke Stevens:
Even as comic book clubs were popping up and zines were connecting fans around the country, back in San Diego, the first geeks were catching the attention of a couple of key players in Comic-Con’s origin story.
Scott Shaw!:
I wound up going to college. I got a scholarship because they needed a cartoonist, believe it or not! And I went to this party school out on Point Loma, which was near Ocean Beach, which was even then becoming the hippie center of San Diego.
Dave Clark:
Ocean Beach was the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego County.
Igor Goldkind:
Social misfits, outsiders, people on the fringes of mainstream. What was mainstream acceptable? There was obviously a lot of convergence with, you know, what was going on with the kind of hippie/Yippie counterculture. There's a lot of convergence there. It was the fringes of what was mainstream acceptability.
Dave Clark:
In the sixties, there were head shops and record stores. There was a co-op market. This was definitely the hip part of town.
Scott Shaw!:
And on the main drag, there was a science fiction bookstore, which I just couldn't believe.
John Pound:
Ken Krueger. He ran several bookstores and he was an old time science fiction fan. And when I say “old time,” meaning he was about my mom's age. And I bought some early science fiction comics from him.
Scott Shaw!:
Ken Krueger was a very hip guy. He was one of the attendees of the first science fiction con in New York in 1939. He'd been a book dealer, a publisher…
Dave Clark:
Ken's store was an eclectic grab bag.
Scott Shaw!:
I never was aware of this, but somebody once asked me, they said, “Didn't you ever notice there might have been a beaded curtain in front of one of those doors?” I said, “Yeah. I never thought of going in there.” Well, that's where the dirty books were.
Mike Towry:
In the front of the store there in Ocean Beach, it was, you know: comics, science fiction, paperbacks, that kind of stuff like a regular bookstore. In the back was the inventory that actually made the money, which was porn.
Barry Alfonso:
It was California, you know. It was San Diego, California. And people were just tolerant. And, uh, the adults did not feel threatened that their children were going to the back of a dirty bookstore, where there were marital aids and pornography or adult literature on sale, as well as, uh, science fiction books and pulps and things. And Ken never abused that. Ken never thrust that upon us. It was there and he could joke about it. So, we could place these things in their proper perspective and the adults that were present, the older people did as well.
Dave Clark:
The cluttered windows: they were dingy, they were fly-specked. There were dead flies in the windows. There were curious displays of really nice books. And then strange film magazines and stuff. You couldn’t see in the shop all that well because of stuff in the front.
Scott Shaw!:
Ken wasn't a creepy guy in the slightest, though. He was like everybody's father.
Jim Valentino:
His store was great. I mean, it was, it was, it was like Ken: it was a disheveled mess. With lots of fun stuff all over the place. Sometimes he would dig through piles of stuff, you know, and he'd find something that he had no idea he had.
Dave Clark:
I have a Virgil Finlay portfolio, the published small press thing, published in the early 1950s that I literally sat down and picked up in a little stack of things. And you know, it was the second item down in the stack. It's a treasure in my collection to this day. In there, there's a transmission from the Buddha to his follower, to the next one, to the next one in an unbroken chain to the present date. Well, this is the Dharma transmission of all of this culture of fan culture. And Ken Krueger was a member of first fandom. And so he was, he was the guy.
Scott Shaw!:
Ken Krueger was an eccentric guy who had a very big heart and never looked for an iota of credit for anything. He was the opposite of Shel.
Brinke Stevens:
After moving to the area from Detroit, a more polarizing figure started attending the first geeks’ club meetings at Ken Krueger's bookstore. While his credits are often disputed, there's no doubt that he invigorated the burgeoning San Diego fan community … in his way.
Roger Freedman:
Another person who came into the orbit of this was then Shel Dorf, who had recently arrived from Detroit and had become a San Diego native.
Jim Means:
The meeting is actually held upstairs, which was where Shel Dorf was living at the time. So it was sort of a loft above the bookstore. You know, it was musty and you know, it wasn't a place I would want to live.
Mike Towry:
You know, Shel seemed like an old guy to us. He was 36, you know, so that seemed pretty old to us. And, and, and that was the age of, uh, the “generation gap,” “Don't trust anyone over 30” …
Richard Butner:
Shel was the main founder of the convention, recognized as the main founder of the convention, along with Ken Krueger and other guys in the group: Barry Alfonso, and Mike Towry, and Scott Shaw!. Uh, but Shel kept It alive.
Jim Valentino:
Those meetings at Ken's bookstores were really, that was the steering committee.
Igor Goldkind:
And at the end of every meeting, Shel Dorf would address like a “state of the Con,” and he would get everybody to quiet down and he would give this stirring mood-elevating cheerlead to all of us and talk about his youth, you know, with, with comics and newspaper strips and how important all this was and the creativity involved, and, you know, learning to express ourselves and all that. And Barry and I used to sit in the back and just giggle at this. ‘Cause we thought, this old fart, you know, what does he, you know, what does this guy know? What was interesting in hindsight was of course was, you know, Shel Dorf and Ken Krueger, and these, you know, these hippies, you know, people at Dave Clark, you know, long-haired freaks who were a good generation older than us kids. And we were having these meetings in effectively what was a porn bookshop in Ocean Beach. I mean, looking back on it, you could, you know, if you took a bird's eye view of it, you could say, “Well, there’s something really dodgy about this!”
Brinke Stevens:
“Dodgy,” maybe. But Shel and the first geeks were determined. And it all came from one simple inspiration: collection. And wheeling and dealing in rare and sought-after comic books.
Maggie Thompson:
In Detroit, Shel Dorf helped put together a convention that was focused on science fiction, movies, and comics for fans thereof. One of the things that happened at that convention that I remember was researcher and fanzine producer Jerry Bails going through dealers’ bins to try to find all the issues of comics that had been published and what were the dealers charging for them, because they had to put together some sort of informational basis. So, he’s creating, in effect, Jerry Bails was creating “Excel files” from nothing! That was the sort of event which Shel Dorf helped put together that made it possible for information and collections and brainstorming to happen.
Mike Towry:
The Detroit Triple Fan Fair was really the model for Comic-Con. And it's what we, what we understand today as a “comic con.” One day, Shel's dad was looking at this thing called, I think it was the Pennywise Press, and his dad was like, “Hey, Shel, I'm looking in this Pennywise Press here. And there is somebody in here advertising that they want to buy comics. And I know you need money. Why don't you call this kid up and see if you can sell him some stuff and make some money?” So, Shel goes, “Okay, I'll do that.” So he called Barry Alfonso.
Barry Alfonso:
I had this idea of trying to get old back issues of comics. I actually had the idea of even going door-to-door, as this 11-year-old looking for them. But I, you know, seemed more sensible to put an ad in a free-weekly newspaper, a PennySaver, saying, “Wanted: old comics.” And I gave my phone number.
Mike Towry:
So, Barry's mom brought him over, and Barry's looking at all the old comics Shel has to sell, and he's going, “Yeah, you know, Shel, I'm just a kid. I'm just 12 years old. I, I just don't have the money. I can't buy all these comics. But, you know, there's this person here in San Diego, Richard Alf, who's just started advertising in Marvel Comics. You know, I bet, I bet if you got a hold of him, he could buy everything you’ve got.”
Roger Freedman:
He was one of the few people at the beginning who was actually collecting comic books and then realized, “Oh, other people want these things.” So, he’s selling them and making a profit and was actually making pretty good money.
Dave Scroggy:
When John and I left Akron in 1975, we had both accumulated what today would be pretty impressive collections of comics. We had all the early Marvel’s and a lot of those Silver Age DC’s, and there was literally no place or means to sell them. Uh, we wound up selling all of our comics to a dealer in a flea market in Summit Mall, in Akron, Ohio for pittance. Pennies! But we thought this would help finance our road trip to San Diego. When we arrived in San Diego, there were a few comic stores there, Richard Alf's Comic Kingdom, and Pacific Comics, one or two others. We realized as soon as we saw Richard Alf's buying list, we could have made five times as much money selling our comic books to him if we'd have thrown them in the trunk of the car.
Mike Towry:
So, Shel got a hold of Richard, and Richard was over at Shel’s place and was looking at his comics, and while he’s looking at the comics to buy, Shel’s telling him about the Detroit Triple Fan Fair. So, Shel says to Richard, “Do you think any fans here in San Diego would like to get together to do something like that here?” So, Richard said, “You know, I can ask. I know some people I could ask, and we’ll see.” Richard and I had been talking earlier about doing like a comic collectors swap meet in my backyard. Which obviously would’ve been much different than Comic-Con, but it would’ve been the first comic event in San Diego if we had done it. But then Shel came and actually gave us something better to work on. And, so, anyway Richard came and talked to me, and I got a hold of Bob Sourk – we all lived in the same neighborhood. You know, we talked about it and decided, “Well, we’ll go and give him a listen.”
Barry Alfonso:
And out of that came a meeting that Shel called in the bedroom that he he had in his parents' apartment in Clairemont.
Mike Towry:
I know in later years, um, Richard actually became a pot dealer. I've heard from other people that he decided that the way pot was sold kind of clandestinely by shaky characters, meeting in alleys or whatever, he just thought that was wrong and that it should be done in a, in a business-like manner. And it shouldn't be dangerous and you shouldn't have to deal with sketchy characters and you should be able to keep hours and give people schedules when they could meet you and be reliable. And so he tried to set up this whole pot business in that way. He was very, he was very much into business processes.
Scott Shaw!:
So I went to this meeting, and it was Shel Dorf and a bunch of people, 20 years younger than him. And he was showing slides of old Golden Age comic book covers. And among the people in the crowd, there were Richard Alf and Mike Towry.
John Pound:
But then I get this call from Scott Shaw!, and he says, “Come check it out. This group of kids is interested in putting on a, some kind of comic and science fiction convention.” So, I already knew what a convention was, but the idea of putting on one in San Diego seemed like a big stretch. And then Shel Dorf was involved there and he knew a lot of cartoonists, um, like Milt Caniff and Jack Kirby and just hundreds of people. He was like a super-fanboy.
Dave Clark:
Shel Dorf came to this meeting. What he said then is, “We're meeting in Clairemont.” And so, all of us, the Crawford circle, showed up a few days later in the evening. And we had a formal meeting, and Shel got up, and Ken was there. Shel was there, and Shel made a pitch, basically. And I was just reading in the 1974 program book, a thing by Shel talking about making the comparison to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney films, where Mickey says, “Hey, we can put on a show right here in the barn and all the kids can play a part!” And that is exactly how he pitched it to us. And that's how it seemed.
Mike Towry:
And the question was, do we want to do just a comic convention or do we want to do like a multi-genre/multimedia thing, like they did at Detroit Triple Fan Fair and include these other things: science fiction and film …
Scott Shaw!:
And, you know, you hear fans now complain about Comic-Con: “Oh, there's too much about TV and movies!” Well, that was built into the … Well, we didn't know it was a mission statement; but we had some sort of thing about it. But it was true. It was like, back then, having a, uh, an event that honored movies meant that somebody might have a 16-millimeter print of King Kong! And I remember we even showed our Castle films at the thing, you know, the old ones you buy in the magic department that, you know, at a department store. So, it was all from a fan point of view.
Mike Towry:
So, in fact, if you look at our original logo for the convention, which Scott Shaw! does lettering for, but Shel designed it, he did like an outline of the state of California. And he put these three circles in the state outline: uh, one for comics or comic art, one for science fiction, and one for film. And that's the thing that you actually hear a complaint made, that people have said, “Oh, Comic-Con’s not just about comics anymore.” And, well, it was never just about comics from the very beginning,
Wendy All:
The trifecta of Comic-Con. I think what made it as important as it was, was that when Shel Dorf started it, he realized that it wasn't just science fiction. It wasn't just comic books. And it wasn't just classic films. That they all needed each other in support to be able to be what they were. So, that little bit alchemy is what I think by bringing those together is what not only brought me, but a lot of other people into it.
Brinke Stevens:
When we return, you'll hear what happens when the catalytic elements of science fiction, fantasy, and comics collide against the backdrop of the 1969 Moon Landing, propelled by a little fairy dust from our mentor and friend Forrest J Ackerman.
[INTERMISSION]
Brinke Stevens:
Welcome back to Comic-Con Begins. I'm Brinke Stevens. Here now is early Comic-Con contributor and physics professor Roger Freedman to tell us why the Con came together at just the right time in our nation's history.
Roger Freedman:
The timing of the first Comic-Con is really rather interesting, because it coincides very closely with the first landing on the moon on July 20th, 1969.It's interesting to note that the first Comic-Con happened within a few months of that. So all that was happening at the same time. It was a very transformative time for the nation as a whole, for the world was a whole. And I think people were beginning to think about space travel in a fashion they had not before. Certainly the Space Race had been going on for over a decade at that point. But the fact that the entire world was paying attention to events in Space, something that had seemed like a completely science-fictional idea in the not-very-distant past, really, I think made everyone more conscious of the contributions of science fiction and thinking of the comic book and science fiction world as having such a large overlap with the science fiction world, it kind of made everyone, I think, more attentive to that entire universe of creativity.
Gregory Benford:
After the Moon landing, a lot of commentators who didn't know anything said, “Well, you know who in science fiction ever predicted that we’d watch the landing on television?” Well, as it turned out, somebody looked it up and they found that there were more than half a dozen stories that had that in it! Some of them all the way back to the 1940s, shortly after the V-2 rockets, they came known. Science fiction has benefited from the Space Program, because any time you open more doors, you've got more doors to walk through. And Space, after all, is a truly infinite horizon.
Igor Goldkind:
Part of what, where we live now, as opposed to 30 years ago, 40 years ago, is that the distance between reality or what becomes real and what is speculated is a lot shorter. To kind of make any progress or any kind of improvement, you have to be willing to think outside of the, you know, the parameters of conformity that you're in.
Dave Clark:
The whole approach that you saw with computer people, the early versions of computer people, very much crossed over to science fiction. We knew them from conventions, you know, and they would tell us what they were doing. And sometimes people, like Jerry Pournelle, would get involved in the journalism of new computers and all that sort of stuff. Then he’d become kind of a big wheel in promoting these things.
Bob Arendt:
I can sort of see an analogue certainly between some of the Silicon Valley startups and all that. In fact, I had a little bit of involvement with Steve Wozniak later on. So, just sort of the enthusiasm for a lot of the Silicon Valley upstart that led to the economy of the character of like Steve Wazniak, the enthusiasm for what they did. They did it as a hobby, just because it was cool stuff to do. That same enthusiasm I think really existed with the comic industry.
Igor Goldkind:
You look at the banking collapse, the global financial collapse. The kind of questions that really need to be asked are outside of the box, which is like, “Well, is this kind of global market system/banking system the right model? You know, is this the only way to do it?” And that, that kind of nonconformist thinking is what's necessary to solve problems. That's speculative thinking. Yeah, you have to speculate in order to look at, uh, progress and, uh, science fiction writers just did it for … you know, they wrote down those speculations for a living. There's also forewarning. I mean, you know, Philip K. Dick … I mean, there's a lot of quantum possibilities: “This is the way things could be if we continue down these lines” or “This particular technology offers these particular solutions; this is where we might wind up.”
Dave Clark:
Also, the gaming industry was getting started, and that was even more connected. So, we would go to conventions that were doing Dungeons & Dragons, and all that kind of stuff. And that was in the early stages. And these things came out of role-playing games, RPGs, which were very popular in the sixties.
Brinke Stevens:
As the Moon landing caught the world's attention, all the first geeks couldn't help but look back at all the stories of space travel and far off worlds that had existed well before.
“Lost in Space”:
Here now is the Jupiter 2, the culmination of nearly 40 years of intensive research and the most sophisticated piece of hardware yet devised by the mind of Man.
Brinke Stevens:
These stories were the beginning of what came to be known as “sci-fi.” But how did it begin? And how did it converge with comic book culture? Here's Comic-Con science fiction coordinator Greg Bear.
Greg Bear:
As I look back over the years, I realized the major differentiation between literature and science fiction was science. That goes back to World War I, just after World War I. When suddenly the literary people in England -- the Virginia Woolf crowd -- realized that science had killed a lot of the upper-class youth of England. And that was a major shock, a realization that science and technology were not necessarily friendly.
Gregory Benford:
Science fiction was the cultural expression of a scientific technical leap, which wasn't finding a voice anywhere else in literature. So, they invented it themselves. And Hugo Gernsback got permission from the editors of a bunch of radio magazines -- radio was the big high-tech, miracle thing of the 1920s; he said, “Why don't I just publish a magazine that’s got stories about this. And then we can go to other magazines, like Amazing Stories, and maybe generate more readership.” Which actually worked, which is why the magazine actually survived. And none of the other magazines from that old publishing group exist today. After all, comic books got started from a short story in a fanzine in the middle of the 1930s called the Superman.
Mike Towry:
Jerry Siegel in the 1930s had a science fiction fanzine. And he actually published in an early story in it about the Superman. Not the character that it became for the comics, but it was like an early version of it. And he was into science fiction. He was corresponding with Forrie Ackerman.
Gregory Benford:
Forrie Ackerman introduced the term “sci-fi” in the 1950s. Because it rhymed with “Hi-Fi,” which was a big hip thing.
Dave Clark:
And there was a magazine started in 1958 called Famous Monsters of Filmland. And its editor was a guy named Forrest J. Ackerman. And he was one of the old science fiction guys. He also was at the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention in New York. He was a “first fandom” guy.
Mike Towry:
So, Forrie Ackerman knew Siegel and Mort Weisinger, who became the chief editor of comics for Spiro Comics at DC. He was a big fanzine publisher himself along the Julius Schwartz. Julius Schwartz was a fan who helped put on the first big science fiction con, the Worldcon in ’39, and started a literary agency for science fiction writers. And he ended up also at DC, and he was the one that started re-introducing superheroes and started what's called the Silver Age of comics. In the fifties. He brought the Barry Allen Flash, the new Flash, back in a comic called Showcase. And he gave origin stories that were more, tended to be more science-based, because he was out of science fiction. And that was more in keeping with the way society was because science was obviously becoming … we could all see the effects, the technology that was happening.
Dave Clark:
In the mid-sixties, with the Baby Boomers growing into young teens and such, monster movies and science fiction movies took on a life, a new life on television. And for kids like myself, I just loved old science fiction and horror movies, monster movies. And Ackerman loved science fiction movies. And he collected vastly. And so he became editor of this magazine. John Cameron and Spielberg and Phil Tippett … all of these guys that went to be big in film, all were Forrie Ackerman's kids. They were, we were all … he was our Uncle Forrie. And people called him Uncle Forrie. He hosted people at an open house every Saturday in his house in LA at the Ackermansion. Uh, but then he came to all of the comic conventions, and encouraged people to follow their vision. And a lot of guys who went on to really do things were nurtured by Forrest Ackerman.
Barry Alfonso:
I remember Shel was a little protective of Forrie, because Scott Shaw! drew a cartoon for Mike Towry’s fanzine Train of Thought that suggested that when Forrie was too old to do conventions anymore, he ought to be stuffed and have a cassette player in his back, so he could keep telling the same stories over and over again. And, you know, personally, I think Forrie could take it. But Shel was very defensive and thought that that was in bad taste, you know. But I, I never had the impression that Forrie got his, his, uh, his finger, his, his feelings hurt. Forrie was part of this world. This was his, this, these were his people. This was his tribe. And I think he could take a little bit of, of joshing from the younger generation.
Mike Towry:
Forrie Ackerman, one of his, uh, um, credits is: he was honorary lesbian. Forrie was working, I think, at an office that had something to do with the film industry. And there was a … This is the story, as I understand it, and they had a, uh, there was a woman working in there, um, who was lesbian and, and she, she was involved in this organization called the Daughters of Bilitis, which was an early clandestine group helping LA area and Southern California lesbians to meet each other and socialize and whatnot. And obviously it wasn't something that could be “above ground” in those days. So she wanted to publish a newsletter for it. And Forrie, with his extensive fanzine experience and publishing experience, helped her to get going to publish this newsletter or whatever it was for the, for the Daughters of Bilitis.And then he started under a pseudonym, started writing lesbian fiction. So it, it had a certain popularity among the, you know, the readership for that. And so one day, the Daughters of Bilitis, the authors who … other authors, actual lesbians who were writing lesbian fiction, they, they had a party and, um, Forrie showed up at it and they were like, you know, “Well, you're a man. You can't come in here. This is, this is a lesbian event or, you know, party.” And he was like, you know, explained who he was and all that. And they were like, “Oh, gee, you know, it's like … We don't know what to do. ‘Cause we really like your books and we like you, but you know, we don't know what to do.” And so they decided, the solution they came up with was, they named him an honorary lesbian and they let him into the party and he hung out with them. So ...
Brinke Stevens:
Sci-fi and comic culture were on a collision course. And some of the pillars of the comic book industry weren't so keen on the convergence. Here's comic book artist and creator of Captain America, the late great Jack Kirby, talking at the 1970 Comic-Con.
Jack Kirby:
I feel like science fiction has its own thinking level. I think comics is a more basic response. I feel like science fiction is a more sophisticated response. Science fiction is a sophisticated response of the incredible or to the projected. You take a situation today, and you can project it far into the future and come up with something fantastic. But you are thinking on a sophisticated level. The comics, you have to think on a more basic level. I have to show you a picture, and you have to know right away what I'm saying in that picture, what that picture is saying and what it's doing. And you can't think about it, because you won't tolerate it. You won't tolerate trying to make out what I'm saying. So, comics has to be quick. It's got to be fun. And it's got to tell you the story immediately in that panel. And that's why you buy comics. And that's why you understand ‘em.
Mike Towry:
As comic fans, we were kind of at the bottom of the cultural totem pole. So, like for instance, society at large looked down on science fiction. But even the science fiction fans looked down on us. So we were very conscious of like being in the bottom and kind of like … we were just glad if anybody would hang out with us, or be willing to be seen with us.
John Pound:
They were just reaching deeper into our culture. I remember a story about EC, that they were even reading Ray Bradbury stories without telling him, and borrowing a few of his plots. And Ray Bradbury wrote them a nice letter saying, “Hey, I think you forgot to send your royalty check for using that story in that other issue.” And so that worked out where they, they decided, “Well, let's play ball with him and let's send him the check.” And then they were able to adapt several of his stories for other EC comics.
Brinke Stevens:
Ray Bradbury didn’t so much enjoy being labeled a “science fiction writer.” But his pension for the genre and also for horror and fantasy made him an icon of the first geeks.
Igor Goldkind:
Yeah, I was a big Ray Bradbury fan. That was a huge benefit of being involved in the comic convention, was getting to meet Ray Bradbury.
Mike Towry:
I don't know if anyone's told the great story about Ray Bradbury's involvement of how Comic-Con became non-profit.
Barry Alfonso:
This is something I heard from Richard Alf. Richard and Shel approached Ray Bradbury at a speaking engagement, I think it UCSD, about coming to the comic convention. Ray was interested, and he said, “Well, you should get in contact with my agent. You know, my speaking fee is $2,000.” And Shel, on the spot, says, “Well, we're a nonprofit organization.” And then Ray says, “Okay. Then I'll do it for nothing.” And that's how the comic convention became a nonprofit organization. It was completely improvised. That’s how Ray agreed to come to the first one.
Igor Goldkind:
He was here at the very early Con, but he was a friend of the convention. And he was somebody that would give -- Richard Butner was the chairman there -- he would give him lists of phone numbers, you know: Larry Niven, uh, Jerry Pournelle … Um, I think he's the guy that gave Shel Kurt Vonnegut's number. I mean, you know, these were, you know, it was all that network. I mean, if Ray Bradbury said it was okay, then it was okay.
Brinke Stevens:
And it was. His ability to translate modern issues into fantastical plots helped comic culture find a legitimate place in not just pop culture, but American culture. This was especially evident by his diehard support for a particularly edgy publication. Here’s the late Ray Bradbury himself.
Ray Bradbury:
I've been a great collector of MAD for years. In fact, I've constantly said at all universities and tested them to see if they'd come up with the right answer: “What is the greatest intellectual magazine in the country today?” And the answer is MAD. Why? Because, can you name one responsible liberal gazette or conservative gazette that has the guts and the humor at the same instance to attack with the same ferocity and wit and high style that MAD has for all these years? No, there is none. There's such a lack of sense of humor among the intellectuals on both sides. I think that's a shame, ‘cause it's the only way we can survive. We're so goddamn serious about everything, that we bore everyone to tears. We can't listen to these truths continually without a flash of humor, finally, to save us and save our sanity. Very important. And MAD to me is one of the great salvations of our time.
Dave Clark:
My mother didn't like MAD Magazine. But when Ray Bradbury said MAD Magazine by parody teaches us to see through the cloud of lies of Madison Avenue … that was it! She just, you know, Ray Bradbury signed my hall pass.
Scott Shaw!:
MAD Magazine was something that, it was an eye-opener. I had a couple of friends who had a subscription to it, and I'd go over to their house for sleepovers and I'd go pour in through these things. And unlike Boy's Life, the magazine the Boy Scouts would get that also had a lot of cool cartoons in it, this I knew I could get on the newsstand or the local market, more likely.
Mike Towry:
MAD Magazine I think did a lot. It was … I don't think it can really be appreciated now, maybe because what MAD became. But in its time, when it came out, it was really subversive. Teenagers would read MAD, and they would see the satire and they would see politicians and the movies and all the leaders of society and, and society in general poked fun at and made fun, and kind of made a laughingstock. And, you know, if you read MAD in those days, like so many teenagers did, you couldn't help but start absorbing those kinds of attitudes and starting to take a second look at society and see it isn't what it was supposed to be or made up to be. And there were things that were wrong and there are things that were laughable, and I think MAD was really, actually really important for the, um, the counterculture.
Scott Shaw!:
You know, that's certainly the stuff that influenced the underground comic guys, Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, and those guys. They read MAD. Harvey Kurtzman used to refer to himself as the, uh, he wouldn't, he wouldn't call himself the “Father of Underground Comics.” He called himself the “Brother-in-Law of Underground Comics.”
Brinke Stevens:
With acknowledgement from heavy hitters like Jack Kirby and Ray Bradbury, the culture started to resonate. And everyone we talked to was proud to have been involved. Each had their own story of when comics, sci-fi, and fantasy took root in their lives. And when everyone got together for the first-ever San Diego Comic-Con, all the things that made us different didn't matter at all. All that mattered was that we were all fans.
Igor Goldkind:
These older guys, older women were not, they weren't removed, because we were all kind of, um, the, the age difference, and, you know, geographic differences, background difference really dissolved when it came down to the subject, which was, we were all interested in what we could imagine first and what was, you know, imaginatively possible and then looking at what could be done or what could be created, not out of what you were told should be the way the world is, but the way you might imagine the world to be.
Scott Aukerman:
Comic books, yeah, they offered me a window into a life where the X-Men could be outcasts like me, but they still had this secret life where they were powerful and beating up bad guys. But I think characters like Spider-Man, they also are teaching us moral lessons about how to act and how to treat people around us.
Jerry Siegel:
Superman grew out of our personal feelings about life. And that's why, quite often, when we saw these so many other similar strips coming out, we felt that they perhaps they were imitating the form and format of Superman, but there was something that wasn't there. And that's was this tremendous feeling of compassion that Joe and I had for the downtrodden and the people in trouble. And that is something that's in your heart and not, and not in your pocketbook.
Gregory Benford:
Science fiction has often been labeled as “escapist.” But you always have the question, “Are you escaping from, or escaping to?” It can be both, you know.
Wendy All:
I would say that it was more about the mind-expanding aspect of things. Sure, it's nice escapism. But if you really want to do that, they write beach novels, you know? If I want to escape, you know, there's all kinds of stupid crap that I can read.
Igor Goldkind:
Looking at reality or the experience you have in reality and looking at, “Well, what if something was slightly different?” I think that that's what is at the core aesthetically that binds, kind of unites comics fans, science fiction fans, fantasy fans, and all that is: the whole idea of speculating on reality or, or taking a step away from reality and thinking, “What alternative could there be?” is not only at the core of what unites these different types of fans, but also at the core of what I would say the last 25, last 30 years of progress in technology, certainly the advancement in computer science, the desire to go to Mars. You know, all these things I think are in the same camp, really.
Wendy All:
People think similarly, and it's how we fill the need. And there's always going to be 10,000 people that try to do something, and maybe a hundred people that actually do something. And maybe 10 of those people take it to market. And then maybe two or three of them are actually successful, because everything comes together the right way.
Roger Freedman:
This is an era where, in the main, the people who create comic books are largely unknown. For instance, if you know who the people are who created Marvel comics, it's because you read Marvel and you read the letter columns, you read the essays by the editor, and so on. To the general public, these are people that are completely unknown. And so it's very much a specialty interest. Very, very much -- I won't use the word cult -- but it was kind of a cult, really.
Ken Krueger:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to San Diego’s Golden Comic-Con. Right now, I'd like you to meet our founder, our advisor, all-around good guy, Mr. Shel Dorf.
Shel Dorf:
There's a nasty rumor going around that people actually enjoy reading comic books. Sometimes they even learn things. However, the editors shudder at this thought that there may be some educational value involved. They're in the business of entertainment and that's it. If the readers happen to increase their vocabularies or learn about human relations, then that's just an extra bonus. However, you and I know that the fan is a special creature, who after enjoying something good has just got to share it with someone. If the sharing is not accomplished, God knows what the consequences could be. There was that story about the fan who after just having seen Godzilla, couldn't find a single soul to tell it to and just exploded. There's still traces of him on the ceiling of the union hall in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. So, here we have taken the opposite approach. We have created as a yearly event with the specific object of sharing in mind. This is one place where you can feel at home sharing your likes and dislikes. During the next three days, many of you will make new friends, and perhaps lifelong friendships will be formed right here at this convention. It's happened before.
Brinke Stevens:
Next week on Comic-Con Begins, we'll look back to how the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s helped determine the size and scope of Comic-Con, as well as how uniting with Star Trek helped our club blast off at warp speed.
Greg Bear:
One of the really memorable figures of Comic-Con, who I met for the first time at Comic-Con, was George Clayton Johnson. The primarily film and television writer, lived in LA.
Mike Towry:
He’d written the first aired Star Trek episode. He wrote the story for Oceans 11. The one that that film was made from. George is a really interesting character. But, I was talking to him about Twilight Zone. And he said that he thought that Twilight Zone was one of the most mind-expanding things that had ever happened in American culture. That it got people to think things and see things in a way that they hadn't before to a really mass audience who normally wouldn't have watched those kinds of stories.
Barry Alfonso:
He was high on pot constantly. And he managed that very well in the sense that it was just George. I mean, it was sort of a maintenance program, I guess. But again, I mean, he did not force his lifestyle on anybody. But this was part of who he was and we accepted it and we accepted the entire package.
Mo Alzmann:
The only interactions I ever had with George were, you know, as part of a group was more like after hours, you know, when the convention was over and ended, died down for the evening, you know, people would mingle in different groups and just kind of talk.
Paul M. Sammon:
I'm blasted out of my mind on some kind of illicit drug, and we're having some kind of like scrambled conversations. All of a sudden, at one point, all of my senses lock into a normal mode and I'm looking and I'm thinking, “Huh, I'm sitting talking to that guy who wrote that really cool Twilight Zone episode when I was a kid and he's naked.” I hope I'm giving you something you can use.
Brinke Stevens:
All of this and more on the next episode of Comic-Con Begins.
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