Just because they were geeks doesn’t mean our intrepid Con creators were any less impacted by the “drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll” of the 1960s. We delve deep into the intimate experiences of these colorful characters of the Comic-Con and how their passion for pop culture was affected by the volatile era’s seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts. Includes a special visit from Mr. “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” himself, Dr. Timothy Leary, along with the birth of Star Trek fandom.
Just because they were geeks doesn’t mean our intrepid Con creators were any less impacted by the “drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll” of the 1960s. We delve deep into the intimate experiences of these colorful characters of the Comic-Con and how their passion for pop culture was affected by the volatile era’s seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts. Includes a special visit from Mr. “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” himself, Dr. Timothy Leary, along with the birth of Star Trek fandom.
Narrated by Brinke Stevens
Created and Directed by Mathew Klickstein
Executive Produced by Rob Schulte
Written and Produced by Mathew Klickstein, Rob Schulte, and Christopher Tyler
Edited by Rob Shulte, and Christopher Tyler
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”
The Confessions of Robert Crumb (1987)
Scott Shaw!:
The 1972 World Science Fiction Convention. I had just had my first comic book published by Ken Krueger. And that was the story about the monster from the sewers, the turd. The turd came about me seeing people who really were making incredibly complicated, uh, beautiful costumes that looked like they worked all year on. And my question was, “I wonder what they’d do if somebody came up in a costume that they created in the last five minutes.” I turned 21 that weekend. So to show my maturity, I drove down to the Smart and Final -- a wholesale store -- and bought three six-pound tubs of peanut butter, chunky peanut butter; a pair of legs, uh, hosery for women; and a toilet plunger. And just to make the effect realistic, a can of corn niblets. And I went back to my room and covered myself with peanut butter. I used the hosiery to create like a mask that went over my head, so I could breathe. So I could put this stuff all over me. Oh, and I also put like bits of toilet paper, hanging all over it. Well, I never realized that this stuff would melt, and I couldn't see very well either. And I'm bumping up against people in their costumes, and I'm leaving a trail of melted peanut butter. Well, I entered the contest and they created a new category for me: “Most Revolting.” And I was really proud of that. Well, about two weeks later, all the plumbing in the hotel exploded. I mean, just all over. And they came back to the convention -- I guess it had been the last big convention there. And they said, “The pipes are full of peanut butter.” And they charged the convention thousands of dollars to pay for the damages. So, to this day at the World Science Fiction Conventions, which still occur every year someplace: no edible costumes!
Brinke Stevens:
Hello again, and welcome to Comic-Con Begins: Origin Stories of the San Diego Comic-Con and the Rise of Modern Fandom - a Sirius XM original podcast, hosted by me, your cosplay, scream queen scientist and foundational Con member Brinke Stevens. If you haven't heard Episode One, make sure to go back and start there. There's a lot to cover in our pop culture tale. And I don't want you to miss a thing. Conventions had been running since the 1930s, and they went hand-in-hand with niche zines and magazines like Forrie Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland. These periodicals, along with comic books, helped shape the young minds we met in Episode One. Meanwhile, the Moon landing in 1969 was profoundly inspiring to us all, rock-and-roll had entered our ears and minds, and none of us were untouched by the churning social and political storms that were raging around the country and globe.
Bill Schanes:
In the late sixties, there's a lot of countercultural movements happening with the wars, the protest against Nixon, the stuff over in Europe, Kent State. There's just a tremendous amount of tumultuous times. And we came a few years after that. But, you know, it resonated down throughout the country. But certainly in California, it was a big deal. But we had a really good group of underground comic artists who actually lived in San Diego that really brought home that Berkeley spirit. So we went to those early big Cons in the early seventies. This was really a chance to see things more up close and personal. It was a short drive around to go to Berkeley, to go to San Francisco, to go to Oakland, to look at the burned-out buildings, to look at people protesting, and the signs.
Wendy All:
So, if you think about just the mass numbers of kids that were born in the post-World War II baby boom, that was significant. Advertisers had to think, “How are we going to appeal to this gigantic youth market?” And then there were, of course the people who, their numbers were not quite so vast, but they were still kids themselves. The people who did MAD Magazine, people like George Clayton Johnson, the counterculture that was happening with the Beat Generation … And just the fact that, you know, teenagers are going to go their own way anyway. Oh, and you know, and toss in the war in Vietnam.
Roger Freedman:
I think we were trying to become part of this society, not necessarily the global society, but rather the society of creators, to my mind, still very perceptive and intelligent people who were doing things that other people were not. And that was the part of adult society that we wanted to be part of. And yes, they were a different part than the regular nine-to-five society. Uh, but nonetheless, we didn't feel that we were trying to escape that generation at all; we were actually trying to become part of it and to incorporate ourselves into it.
Dave Clark:
Conventions were an opportunity for people who lived all scattered around, to get together and, uh, and conspire to breathe together in the same room. Sometimes the breathe certain things in the same room. The conventions are like, I'll use an example from the great world of the Grateful Dead, the Shakedown Street and the scene surrounding the Grateful Dead, this wonderful band who I love, that saw many times … But there are people who will follow them around the country and get together. The scene before and after the show was as important or maybe more than the show itself. And Comic-Con and the science fiction conventions that were occurring around the country are like that.
Roger Freedman:
The whole personal computer revolution happened a few years after Comic-Con, again with this notion that people can do stuff that had never been done before. And so I think we were part of that whole zeitgesit, the whole spirit of the age.
Wendy All:
It was a time of such huge change. And especially after the fifties being so conformist and then Kennedy was elected and here's this beautiful youthful couple after, you know, the kind of stodgy yet heroic Eisenhower administrations, and let us not forget Joseph McCarthy and all of that kind of stuff. And so we have all of this hope and then this beautiful youthful Camelot is destroyed with a bullet in Dallas. And it was like, everyone looked like, you know, they had been slammed into the wall, you know, like the world had ended. But from this emerged, what one of my writing teachers said, “Everything changed in 1964.” It was like somebody pulled out the plug, or plugged something in. But by 1966, things were really moving.
Barry Alfonso:
In 1974, when Nixon is about to leave office, as sort of a side activity for promoting the Comic-Con this year, myself and Igor Goldkind launched an organization called Youth for the President. And we wanted to see if we could get on local media defending Nixon with completely ridiculous arguments.
Jim Means:
So there was a meeting, a Comic-Con meeting, one time at San Diego State. And then the meeting was over, and Igor and Barry were still like wandering around San Diego State. And they got the idea to wander into KPBS, which was the public radio station there on campus. So they went in there and said, “Oh, hey, we're with the Youth for Nixon.” The radio station thought that was interesting enough that they decided to interview them.
Barry Alfonso:
And we did a series of shows. And I think we did one probably right around the time of the Comic-Con. And we, uh, were on the shows of some very, uh, famous local people. One was a local talk show, revered local talk show host named Harold Keen. Igor was on that one. I was behind the scenes for that. And, uh, Igor said that we were going around to elementary schools defending Nixon, and he showed a card drawn in crayon of Nixon that said, “We like our president. Our president is a good man.” This is a course something I created.
Jim Means:
It’s at the height of Watergate. And so Nixon was not popular at the time, and especially not special popular among the youth. Of course they were, they weren't supporters at all. They were just, uh, you know, I don't know how old Igor was at the time. He was probably 14 and, and, you know, Barry was a few years older.
Barry Alfonso:
On one show when, uh, we were pinned down about our nonsensical beliefs, Igor said, “All we know is what we believe.”
Jim Means:
I guess they made such an impression that the people at KPBS said, “Well, we have a talk show on the air in a couple of days. Why don't you come back and you can be guests on it?” So, I'm listening to the two of them on the air. And they're just like making up stuff as they go along.
Barry Alfonso:
At one point, uh, Laurence Gross, who was a local talk show host and later television personality, said, “Don't you think that Richard Nixon has to operate within the boundaries of society, within the constitutional boundaries?” And, uh, Igor said, and I prompted him to say this, “Maybe it's best to make an analogy for a minute. Now, we see the country as like a big boat, and Richard Nixon's the captain, and he's trying to steer the boat. And the boat is in the middle of a raging storm and it's rocking back and forth. And it’s this terrible storm. And in the middle of this storm, the American people and the press have the audacity to come up to the captain and ask, ‘What time is lunch going to be served?’” And then there's a pause. And Gross says, “That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. What does that mean?”
Jim Means:
And it's like a half-hour show or something there. They're pulling this gag: they had heard the Nixon was going to resign and then Gerald Ford would become president. He would pardon Nixon. And then he would name Nixon to be his vice-president. Then Ford would resign, and Nixon become president again, he'd be pardoned. And I remember the host saying, “No, no, no, that's not possible. He can't do that.” And I think I called in and said, “Oh yeah, I've heard the same rumor.”
Barry Alfonso:
Well, at one point we said that Nixon really hadn't resigned. It was an audio animatronic figure. And we actually got to say this on the radio. You know, we were 15 and 17 years old and we got a big kick out of this. And, and you know, if Nixon hadn't quit, we wanted to go all the way on to go on like the Tom Snyder Show. And we, we, I think we could have done it, but that, that bum Nixon quit. And we couldn't keep it going.
Bob Arendt:
People are gullible. Even reporters are gullible. They'll go after a story. And a lot of it is about appearance. Because, they could call up; they’re persuasive; they could talk to people and make them believe them and believe that they were sincere. And a lot of the media then, even in the seventies, was becoming more about the show of media or news, as opposed to the actual content or truthfulness.
Barry Alfonso:
This is what happens when you fill kids heads up with comic books and science fiction: they start blurring the lines of reality. And Hunter Thompson … And they start doing stuff like this. So, this is the wages of comic book fandom right there.
Archival:
The San Diego convention opened yesterday and already it's in high gear. Superheroes are everywhere. But so our customers and that's one major reason for the convention: share and share alike, for a profit, of course.
Wendy All:
We didn't know that we couldn't do it. We were going through adolescents when a lot of people seemed to be either fighting back or being given permission to misbehave or to go against the grain. I think it was, you know, kind of a thrill to see, you know, how you could piss off the adults by just, you know, coloring outside the lines. So, that might've had something to do with it. Here you have a bunch of kids who seem to be given permission to do this. And in a really big way.
Paul M. Sammon:
We were all surfing this forward wave of geek culture. This thing that was starting to coalesce and starting to bring in people from all around the world who had never really had a chance to interact, because the closest they got prior to this was either going maybe to a local group or local fan club that usually meets at a library or somebody’s house once a week … But all of a sudden you have these conventions where you'd have hundreds and then thousands of people like-minded for yourself. It's the oldest trope in the world, but context really is everything. And the context of the late sixties … Well, let's say from about ‘65 to ‘66, to about ‘75, ‘76, it was honestly a short period of time, but it seemed like it went on forever.
Dave Clark:
Really a time of immense cultural change, controversy. The War sparked all kinds of controversies and drove a line of cultures between the young and the old. So there was an “us or them” aspect.
Paul M. Sammon:
You have this explosion of liberation throughout America and the world. And it's mostly generational. There used to be this old saying, “Never trust anyone over 30.” And people proudly wore buttons like that. I had one. All of these groups were under the same umbrella. We were all young. We all had long hair. We all rejected the status quo. And we're all going to change the world.
Dave Clark:
Well, we weren’t hippies. But we were hip. Or wanted to be. We were high school students. So we wanted to be. And we had dress codes, which we were rebelling against. So, you know, “Let us wear blue jeans at school” doesn't seem very meaningful, but that was an issue.
Mike Towry:
Richard Alf was the first student at Kearny High to grow his hair out. And that really upset the administration of the school. So they came to him and told him one day, they said, “Hey, you know, if you don't cut your hair, we're going to suspend you.” So, he got his grandfather to write a letter to the school saying that they were interfering with Richard's constitutional rights, and if they did not redress this issue to their satisfaction, they were going to sue the school, and blah, blah, blah. And so all of a sudden, the school got worried. So they decided to come up with, uh … they had a trial for Richard. You can imagine how it went, and they ended up voting, but Richard had to cut his hair. So he cut his hair, but he immediately grew it out again. And after that, they didn't hassle him again. Because I think they had to save face, you know; they had made a big deal out of it. And then, um, the next year when I ended up at Kearny, then I was the first kid in my class to have long hair. But I didn't have any problem with it because Richard had already paved the way for that.
Roger Freedman:
So even though, for instance, that same week that the astronauts landed on the Moon for the first time, within that same month was when David Bowie's “Space Oddity” came out. It was all part of a continuum for us. Though I can't say that any one particular song or any one particular album was more influential than any other, it was all part of this, this tremendous creative milieu that was all happening at the same time. And we were very fortunate to be there when that was all happening.
Wendy All:
Here we were just teenagers doing what we like to do. Yeah, there was a certain aspect of we were going against the grain, but we didn't care. And we weren't breaking the law, or maybe we were by some people's standards, but, you know, because of the underground comic things and, “Oh my God! There's a penis on that page!”
Jim Valentino:
At some point or another, underground comics came into the mix. So you have people like Dan O'Neill, Trina Robbins, “Baba” Ron Turner … We had all these people from the underground. George DiCaprio: he and his son would come to the convention. You may have heard of his son.
Barry Short:
One night, I'm running projectors in the film room, and he comes in and he says to me, “Hey, could you watch my kid for a while? We've got a party going on upstairs.” And I said, “Yeah, George, you know, I'll keep an eye on him, make sure he stays in the room.” And he says to his son, “Now, Leo, you be good for this guy.” Now, that guy of course was Leonardo DiCaprio. But he's like, you know, seven or eight years old at this point. But you know, uh, fun things that happened at Comic-Con uh, years and years ago.
Jim Valentino:
I remember going through the hallways with Dan O'Neill and a bottle of whiskey, and he was playing his banjo. Somebody was passing around dope. And the security for the convention kept on telling the security for the hotel that we were on a different floor than the floor that we were at. They’d go to a different floor: “No, no, no. They're down on the fourth now!” Dan O'Neill was an extremely brilliant underground cartoonist. He’s the one who started the Air Pirates Funnies and got sued by Disney. And so, during the early days of the convention, they would hand out these little sheets of paper, almost like a Post-It. And they'd have you draw a picture of the mouse, you know, for the Mouse Liberation Front. And you're supposed to sign it with your Mouse Liberation Front number, not your name.
Barry Short:
They’ve made a lot of changes to copyright law in the years since. But they basically did these two issues of this comic. Some of which included Disney characters who they assumed were in the public domain, doing things that Disney characters would not normally do. Because it was an underground comic. Uh, you know, there was some drug use. There was more exploration of the, uh, relationship between Mickey and Minnie for instance, and perhaps a couple of the others. So, uh, they got themselves into some big trouble and they went through a very long lawsuit about that. And I know it's still a sore point. I followed Bobby London on Facebook and he complains about that, how he was screwed over in that deal all the time. So there are definitely people who are, are still feeling the punch.
Robert Crumb:
Hello. My name is Robert Crumb and this is my wife, Aline. We're underground cartoonists.
Aline Crumb:
On the surface, our life appears to be really quaint and charming.
Robert Crumb:
Yes, doesn't it. But underneath it's a steaming cauldron of sexual perversion, drugs, and twisted neurosis.
John Pound:
I was less interested in the “mass media,” let's say, cartoon art than something that really pushes at the edges.
Scott Shaw!:
I wound up starting out doing underground comics. You know, my first comic was one that Ken Krueger had published. He actually put his money where his mouth was and hired John Pound and I to do this underground comic for him. I think I got $10 a page. But, you know what? Doesn't matter. He put money in my hand and he bought the originals on top of that. He gave me like an extra 50 bucks for the pages. I was very proud of that. And no matter how offensive the story may have been. Remember, Marvel was doing a lot of these monster comics. So it was kind of my takeoff on that, except my monster came out of the sewer and he was a monster made out of shit called the Turd. Very deep stuff there. It was, it was about as juvenile as you could get. But at least I got into print.
Jack Kirby:
I see it my own way. And I feel, in doing that, I become an individual. If I played piano my own way, I'd be an individual. And I feel that I have some enriching quality. And I like that. I like to have some enriching quality that makes me feel good. Some people don't like to have enriching qualities, see. And they just go about doing whatever they're doing in business or something else. And they do well at it and they accept it. But I don't accept that. In fact, I don't accept anything. I fight … I fight anything that comes along.
Mark Evanier:
Underground comics came along to fill a void. They were people who still loved the idea of comic books, but they didn't want to read things that were basically aimed at ten-year-olds. And undergrounds did a lot of that. And eventually the business matured as, as all media matured.
Clayton Moore:
In fact, the whole comic industry almost went away in the 1950s. There was a book written called Seduction of the Innocent by a psychologist Dr. Frederic Wertham.
Dr. Frederic Wertham:
In this comic book is a love story. A boy and girl in love. They get married. And after an offensively lurid description illustrated of course of a couple's wedding night, the book shows how the bride murders her husband by chopping his head off with an ax. This comic book describes a sexual aberration so shocking that I couldn't mention even the scientific term on television. I think there ought to be a law against them. Tonight, I'm going to show you why.
Clayton Moore:
And he laid the blame for juvenile delinquency on monkey-see, monkey-do when kids read comics. That never happened. Not on a large scale. But he created the paranoia over that. In the fifties, people were burning comics. You know, like they burned Beatles records in the sixties. And it was sad. They put comics out of business that were too, too radical. And all the comics publishers got together and said, “We don't want Congress to regulate us. We've got to create a Comics Code. We've created our own Comics Code. And we put a stamp on the book.” And by 1960, most comics had this “Comics Code approved” stamp on it, which meant you couldn't have zombies and you couldn't have blood. And death was really kind of awful in it. They put a lot of, you know, self-imposed restrictions on the content as editors, because they were paying for it, and they wanted to stay in business. And family comics like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Harvey Comics, Richie Rich comics, Archie comics, those were fine. They had no problem. But the superhero comics, horror comics, war comics, Western comics, all subjected to the Comics Code. And that went away in the 1980s when they had a direct market. Publishers could sell directly to comic book stores. And that created a whole new market away from the distributors who would only distribute a book with the Comics Code on. And by then, the country had moved on.
Barry Alfonso:
Gradually, underground comics and alternative press things became more mainstream. People felt less threatened by them. They were more accepted. There was no discrepancy between liking Carl Barks and Robert Crumb.
Paul M. Sammon:
Part of the overlay of the culture in America, and in that period of time, it was permissiveness. It was a liberal atmosphere. It was the birth of what we would now think of as modern feminism, gay rights movement, uh, any kind of like, you know, trans or LGBTQ+ … You know, that was all starting up. Anti-war fervor, which was really the glue that held everyone together, because everyone hated that war in Vietnam. And I, as the son of a military professional, who then went into military intelligence and grew up in the Philippines, I, as a boy and as a teenager grew up seeing the damage early on. And my father being in military intelligence of course was close-lipped. But our daily life was informed by what was really happening in the Third World, and within American government and within the American bureaucracy. So in a sense, um, I don't want to use the word “wised-up.” But in a sense, I was getting a lot more information than your person on the street was getting in America at that time. So when I came back to America in the late sixties, it was just like, “Wow, look at this!” It was like a giant candy store. And our generation was the one that was out in the streets, getting our heads cracked, tear-gassed, thrown in jail. It was a very militant time. And that in a sense, was the Boomers’ gift to the next generation. The Boomers also had a lot to answer for, but all of that came together in the Comic-Con.
Dave Clark:
In the beginning of 1971, I was drafted into the Army, and I became a combat infantryman. Yeah, ’73, I came back from Vietnam just before the convention. And I was in events in the central Highlands, surrounded by the North Vietnamese army. We blew up our ammunition dump a lot of serious, serious things happened. And then suddenly, I was home, and I was at the convention. And there were all of my friends. And then, uh, my sergeant … It turned out … I wanted a pass for the whole thing, so I could go to Comic-Con. And when I told him that, it turned out he was a big Ray Bradbury fan! And I said, “Ray Bradbury is going to be there.” He says, “Really? Can you get me Ray Bradbury's autograph?” I said, “I … Certainly, I can get you Ray Bradbury's autograph.” “Okay!” And he wrote me a nice five-day pass. And I drove to San Diego. And so I told Ray this story, and he signed a hardback copy of Fahrenheit 451, and he wrote the most beautiful, full-page inscription to my sergeant. And when I, I brought that back to him, I never got put on another crap detail after that. Ray Bradbury helped me get along with my platoon sergeant. So, that was a very good thing. But yeah, you know, the real world intruded in on our vision, and things have worked out differently than what we expected. But that's, that shouldn't be surprising.
Jim Cornelius:
During the time I was in the Army and everything, I ended up in People’s Park, and the demonstration up there in Berkeley. And that was just on a weekend. And I came back to the base, and they, they wanted to bring charges against me. And the idea that I was a conscientious objector, they didn't seem to realize that. They wanted to put me on guard duty, and that just wasn't going to happen. You know? And I would no sooner pick up a gun than, uh, train myself to be a fuckin’ assassin. I'm sorry. You know, that the idea that there's just no way, I, I just do not believe in this violence, you know, and I always have accepted that and I've had to fight my way, uh, just to be who I am, you know. And the idea that that's not right, you shouldn't have to, every foot you step in this life, profess that you believe in peace. Military service is still affecting me. You know, it never ended. You know, they changed me. There's just no other way around that. You know, the bureaucracy itself, the institution of the military will change you. Not, not just combat.
Dave Clark:
I was different. That event changed my life. Of course.
Jim Cornelius:
And I got out of the Army, and then I ended up at, uh, I met, uh, an illustrator, uh, Linda Trujillo who invited me to an art party with Roger and Elizabeth Penny. And at that party, I ended up meeting, uh, John Pound, Richard Alf, Jack Dickens, Scott Shaw! … Uh, Roger and Elizabeth put on parties for two years and then ended. And then I started putting on art parties.
Rick Geary:
And it was during these parties that I got to meet all the local cartoonists in San Diego, in the San Diego area. I met Scott Shaw!, Dave Scroggy, and especially Shel Dorf, who was, uh, became a good friend and kind of a mentor to me. And he's the one who got me involved in the Comic-Con.
Jim Cornelius:
Two years later, a lot of the underground artists from San Francisco had started coming down. Uh, I've been a cartoonist my whole life and read comics my whole life. And so that's how I connected with the Comic-Con.I was sitting around my house one day, and we're having a little party in the back of my house, and in the front of the house was my studio. And, um, my ex sister-in-law had always, always had a hard time keeping her clothes on, and she was dancing on the dining room, not dining room, the coffee table in our back room. And a knock came on the door and I peeked out the door.
Scott Shaw!
Of course, we're paranoid already from smoking the weed. And on top of the, the laws of the time, we're like, “Holy crap, it's the cops!” But Jim's a pretty cool guy. He goes to the door, and it’s Shel Dorf. And Shel Dorf comes in, and he has this little man behind him that looks like he's working for the government; he's wearing a suit. This is like on a Friday or Saturday night, about nine o'clock at night, and here comes this little … And he acts like Droopy. It's like, “This is my friend, Joe.” “Hello, folks.” You know, I mean, it's not … He didn't make this big Stan Lee kind of entrance. And instead of just saying, “This is Joe Shuster; I thought he'd like to meet some local cartoonists,” which is what any sane person would do, Shel starts acting like we're on some sort of game show and he's going, “You know, Joe’s a cartoonist too.” And it’s like, “Well, that's great, Joe.” And of course we're all mentally thinking, “Joe, Joe, please leave. Please leave. I'd like to talk to this, this surfer girl for a while.” And uh, no, Shel just keeps going. The one thing I remember, the last one was he said, “Well, he designed a very famous logo with pop-out letters.” And I, or somebody said, “Shel, would you just tell me who he is?!” I mean, we're acting like Joe isn't even there at that point, because it's just Shel trying to do his own Shel Dorf spiel. And of course, it’s Joe Shuster. Joe Shuster was one of the most important men in the history of comics, in that he was the co-creator of Superman. And he drew the strip for many years until it became so popular, he had to hire assistants to take it over. And his, his eyesight was declining significantly. So, I think the last work he did in comics was probably in the mid-fifties. And at that point we’re really like, “Wow!” ‘Cause we knew exactly who he was. But at the same time, we still wanted to get rid of him. And in my back of my mind, I'm thinking, and I've had this happen more than once, I would have killed to meet so-and-so; why do I want him to leave me alone now? And they got the message. We didn't have to be mean to him fortunately. But it was kind of, I think, I don't know exactly how it happened, but they got the message and got out of there.
Mark Evanier:
Less and less in movies and television were we seeing pure golden heroes, John Wayne, perfect, no flaws, the “American Way” characters. And, naturally, in comic books, because they aped movies and television so much, uh, we were seeing more and more flawed superheroes, misunderstood superheroes, heroes for whom the powers and the responsibility of saving others was a burden, as opposed to maybe a blessing.
Jack Kirby:
There was a very tragic figure. Doom has got a lot of class. I liked Doom. And he’s got … Doom has got a lot of class. He's got a lot of cool. But, Doom has one fallacy. He thinks he's ugly, see. And he's afraid to take that mask off. And if he knows, you know … Doom is an extremist, he’s a paranoid. He thinks in extremes, you know. He can't think, “Well, I've got a scar on me, but that doesn't make me, you know, repellant.” Actually, Doom is a very handsome guy, with a scar on him, he got from acid when he was a child. But Doom is an extremist, he's a paranoid. To him, he’s extremely ugly. If Doom were to lose one hair, he’d put on a wig, see. And, uh, if Doom had an enemy, he’d have to wipe ‘em out. And if Doom thought that anybody was smarter than himself, he’d kill him, because Doom would have to be the smartest man in the world. He's an extremist. But, you know, he has good manners.
Mark Evanier:
You know, there was a tendency all the time to look for the dark side of, of heroic figures. People don't like that in some cases. I have mixed feelings about it. But, it did fit in more with the era we were living in. We less put absolute, unvarnished faith in our leaders. We now tend to question them much more. Even the ones we follow, we tend to see us flawed and human and capable of error, or capable of weaknesses or human weaknesses. And comic books were just reflecting the times, I think.
Scott Shaw!:
I made a t-shirt that was a response to that whole wave of the smiley face button and had a big yellow smiley face, except the smiley face had this horrible, you know, leer on its face. And it had fangs. And it as saying, “FUCK OFF!” It just said, “FUCK OFF!” across the top. Because, everything was like, “Oh, let's just be happy!” It's like, no, it was 1973; everything wasn't happy. But anyway, I'm wearing this thing. And Bob Clampett is walking around the, the exhibit hall and, um, or as we called it in those days, the dealer's room, and he stops and, and I recognized who he was, because I, he looked just like Roy Orbison. And I was kinda gushing. And all he was interested in was my shirt. He says, “Where can I get one of those?” I said, “Well, I made this.” He goes, “Well, can I buy it from you?” I said, I said, “I'm not selling you anything, Bob Clampett. If you want it, you can have it.” He goes, “Yeah, when can I get it? Can I have it right now?” And I said, uh, I said, “Who are you mad at?” He goes, “No, I just think it's funny. I want to wear it around the convention.” Okay. So I peeled it off and uh, he put it on over his shirt, but I didn't really have a shirt. So I just went over and bought like a Freak Brothers shirt from somebody. But, uh, the rest of the day, Bob’s struttin’ around there with “FUCK OFF!” on his chest. It's just like one of the most respected guests we ever had.
Brinke Stevens:
When we return, we'll find out what happened when those of us who loved science fiction were confronted by the superstore Trek fans that seemed to be taking over our convention. Or were they?
[INTERMISSION]
Scott Shaw!:
Wendy did a lot of things, but the most interesting thing she ever do, which I'm sure she's told you, was about babysitting Timothy Leary. I would've liked to have babysit Timothy Leary, but we would've never gotten back to the convention.
Wendy All:
I mean, little did I know when I saw Timothy Leary talking on television, that I was going to be on a date with him, you know, a few years later.
Barry Alfonso:
Timothy Leary was an academic. I believe at Harvard. Who, uh, began investigating the prospects, the potentials of psychedelic drugs to improve the mind. And he turned into something of a guru and an exponent of the value of LSD. He's the man that coined the phrase, “Tune in, turn on, and drop out.” I think I've got that in the right order. And he was identified as the number one “Pied Piper” for psychedelic drugs in the sixties. And he ran afoul of the law. Uh, I think it was on a charge of marijuana. Fled the country, was put in prison, and was in a correctional facility in downtown San Diego during the Comic-Con years, the early Comic-Con years.
Dave Scroggy:
Timothy Leary was just being released from federal prison in downtown San Diego the week before the convention. And I said, “Great! We can construct a panel on the future!” Everyone at the convention committee was very excited by this. I mean, it was obviously a huge celebrity, whether you bought into his message or not, and it was considered a real feather in Comic-Con's cap to have him join us. Until Shel Dorf talked to Russ Manning, a top cartoonist/illustrator of Tarzan, mainly. He also wound up doing the first Star Wars newspaper strip. So, Russ was a truly top talent and a great supporter of the Comic- Con. He was also very conservative, politically. He called up Shel Dorf mad as a wet hen, and said if somebody like Timothy Leary was going to be a guest at Comic-Con, that he was pulling out. And not only that, he was calling up all his other old-time cartoonist friends and encouraging them to pull out too. Shel is going off about this. “We have to rescind our invitation to Timothy Leary!” And he was so abrasive and smug about it, that I could see that my friend John was having to physically restrain himself from reaching around from the back seat and grabbing Shel by the throat and strangling him. We did wind up resolving it in a very sensible and simple fashion. We didn't make Timothy Leary an official guest. We just presented him any way.
Wendy All:
He was sitting by the pool of the El Cortez. That was the first time that I actually met him. And I didn't realize who he was. He had those eyes, those charismatic eyes, and they were sky blue. But it's, like, we locked eyes. And I was like, “Oh my God! I'm in trouble!” Because he was just so fascinating, and I could not stop listening. So of course I wanted to go to dinner. And so the coordinates for meeting were behind the back of the El Cortez and he drove up in this beat-up old car and there was nobody else in the car and there was nobody else waiting with me. And so he said, “Is it okay if it's just us?” And I thought, “Oh, okay, well, I think I can handle myself.” You know, the “Most Notorious Man in America,” labeled by Richard Nixon, no less. But we ended up at this place called the Old Spaghetti Factory. This was when it was a warehouse in San Diego. It was really a cool place. Very dark and, uh, inviting, and kind of romantic and kind of funky. And no one had any reason to recognize him. He didn't really look like, you know, the pictures people might've remembered on The Huntley-Brinkley Report. So, we were left alone to just eat this dinner. But then he started talking to me in a way that I can only say was like, I completely understood why so many college students had followed him. And he said, “So, Ms. Sweet-and-Twenty, what do you want to do with your life?” And I said, “I don't know. I'm just trying to figure it out right now. I'm in college. You know, Comic-Con has had this amazing effect on me …” And he said, “You don't know how lucky you are to be your age, because anything you want is yours. All you have to do is reach your hands out and just take it.” And, so we went back to smoke by the pool with everybody. Everybody was getting high by the pool, and George Clayton Johnson kind of had the room, so to speak. And his wife, Lola, was sitting on one of the lounge chairs. Timothy Leary and I went and sat with her. And we all, the three of us, were all cuddled up, hugging together, and getting high while George was talking about Logan's Run. It was just another day at Comic-Con. I don't know how else to explain it. And other people were all having their own amazing parallel experiences at that time. But that was kind of mine.
Brinke Stevens:
I have to say that our dear friend Wendy All is so right in not only recounting her outrageous outing with Timothy Leary, but also in suggesting her enlightening experience was merely one of many we were all having. Personally, becoming a fixture in the Con’s long-running costume showcase, the Masquerade, is the enlightening experience I always come back to. An acolyte of Forrie Ackerman myself, it was no wonder that when I decided to enter the 1974 Con’s Masquerade event, I put together more an outfit that paid tribute to his super-heroine, Vampirella. When I won the Masquerade, I was only 19 years old and already being tasked to take my costuming passion and skills to the next level, by becoming the coordinator of the event. Before this, I wanted to become a marine biologist and was on my way to a PhD. I was attending Scripps Institute and focusing my energies on the science behind what I hoped would be a breakthrough in communication with dolphins. Like so many others involved in the Con in those early days, I was certainly a nerd -- inspired throughout my life as I was by sci-fi books, comics, fantasy stories, and hard science. Who knew that my side interest in costuming and running the Masquerade would so dramatically shift the trajectory of my life. Thanks to my involvement in the Masquerade, producers in the audience took note, and I soon began my never-ending film career. Before I knew it, this young science buff on her way to becoming a marine biologist was suddenly acting in movies, transforming me into the original scream queen, starring in such cult classics as Slumber Party Massacre. As it turned out, Wendy's encapsulation of the Con as a series of amazing experiences we were having throughout the days at the El Cortez is particularly apt for another longtime Con contributor. The leading force behind the Con's own parody band, the All-Human Orchestra. Take it away, Roger Freedman.
Roger Freedman:
For many years, kind of my main involvement as part of the entertainment for every year's Masquerade was we became the musical entertainment that only appeared at Comic-Con. No other times. With me as the lead singer. The name of the group was actually borrowed from a 1940s outfit, which was the All-Girl Orchestra. Well, an orchestra in which all, all the participants were women. So we became Dr. Raul Duke and his All-Human Orchestra. And the name Raul Duke, of course, is stolen from Hunter S. Thompson. That was the pseudonym under which he originally published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when it appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. And as far as I can tell, all of the members of the band were at least partially human. So, so it wasn't terribly incorrect advertising. But for several years after that, what we would do was we would perform popular songs at Comic-Con and just change the lyrics to be more appropriate for the comic book and science fiction audience.
Scott Shaw!:
And so we wrote a parody of “Valley Girl.” We didn't know this, but one of the people there, I don't think he was a guest, I think he just came out with Marvel's people was Marvel editor Jim Shooter. Jim Shooter was a guy who had gotten in the comics when he was a teenager and worked his way up to becoming the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Anyway, we perform one of our songs, and one of the parts of the lyrics is about, you know, “Oh, I want to buy that comic because it has such a great cover. Oh, geez. I opened it up, and it's inked by Vince Colletta,” which was a typical gripe you always heard in the comic shops at that time. We did it. Everybody laughed. We got a lot of applause, and they were back to the rest of the show. And Jim Shooter storms backstage. I mean, it looked like Frankenstein was after us and he gets right down in our faces. I mean, literally starts screaming at us that we have ruined Vince Colletta's career. Why? Because Vince Colletta was sitting next to him at the show. And, we never said he was bad. We never said … We just kind of repeated what everybody used to say. And we were joking. Some people in comics have a very short fuse.
Roger Freedman:
We also did some other, not exactly musical performances as well. What we did as the All-Human Orchestra … it was just to do theater on stage. And at that point it was all connected with the Saturday night Masquerade, which by the way, that was where you saw people doing cosplay.
Gus Krueger:
You know, growing up around the Con from such an early age, the cosplay just seemed perfectly normal to me. For some people, it shifted more away from guys just super-happy to have a, another excuse to wear a Halloween costume or as an adult, to be able to dress up as your character and not be shamed because you're asking for candy dressed as Gandalf and you're 40, right? So I think it really is an outlet for adults to be able to do that in a safe environment.
Scott Aukerman:
Everyone at Comic-Con speaks a language that we all can kind of understand, in a way. And you can make jokes there that no one else would understand in the real world. And I remember being in an elevator, and there was a guy dressed up as the Flash in the elevator. And, no knock on this, but he had a few extra pounds on him, and God bless him, he, you know, he looked great out there. And he got off the elevator and these two nerds, next to us in the elevator, laugh to themselves and said, “Yes, the Flash, as drawn by Sergio Aragonés.” Which I thought was such a great nerd slam of like, “Okay. Yeah, we all know who that is.” Um, good stuff.
Roger Freedman:
Cosplay dates back much earlier to science fiction conventions.
Barry Alfonso:
I can think of many different strains. There was a guy named Eric Hoffman, a film collector who was brought in by Shel to show old films and old horror films. There was the Society for Creative Anachronisms who were part of the ‘71 convention, I think. There was STAR -- the Star Trek Association for Revival -- that came in in ‘73. It was not, “You don't belong.” It was like, “If you possibly can come, come.” I think it might've been to attract more people, but also because we weren't sectarian, we didn't see any problem with that. It wasn't spoiling it to have this.
Mike Towry:
So Richard Alf, he really liked people, unusual people in different odd groups and things. And he wanted to involve everybody in Comic-Con. It was very open and very welcoming to anybody at the time. And so, yeah, there was a guy named Ron Cearns led a group here in San Diego called the Society of the Friends of Hobbits. And Richard contacted them and got them involved. And they were a big help. And the local Society for Creative Anachronism. So, they're the people that … they're like the medieval times re-enactors. Poul Anderson, the great science fiction author and his daughter Astrid Anderson were very involved in the founding and the, in the early days of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Astrid ended up … she was very involved in the letter-writing campaign that saved Star Trek and gave it a third season.
Greg Bear:
And she became kind of a royalty figure, figure of royalty in her youth. And they did costuming on a medieval scale. They really wanted kind of precise medieval costumes. But they had a lot of people who were writers involved as well, like Katherine Kurtz and so many others.
Barry Alfonso:
I can remember these guys walking around in like Viking outfits or medieval warrior outfits. And I remember, one of them was standing around at the ‘71 Comic-Con drinking out of a, uh, a paper cup. And I said, “Is that mead?” And he said, “No, malt.” You know, they obviously stood out. And I, and I don't think that there was necessarily that much overlap. I mean, we allowed them to be part of our group. We thought that our attendees would enjoy their presence. But they weren't necessarily interested in what we were doing.
Greg Bear:
And they would put on these tourneys at conventions in padded armor and go out and whack each other with these padded swords. And that would become the whole Tolkien Society would join in on that side. And, you know, there was just so much cross-connections with culture here. Actors would come in and they would suddenly realize, you know, they can walk around as themselves and hardly be noticed.
Brinke Stevens:
Then, of course, there were always the naked or semi-naked women that went into the Masquerade. Have you heard about this?
Paul M. Sammon:
There used to be this thing in the costume contest called the Most Naked Man and the Most Naked Lady Award. And that was something that went through all the seventies.
Brinke Stevens:
It faded out after a while. And I think it was forbidden. There would be statements that would say no nudity, no weapons, things like that at the Masquerades. But it was a thing for a while in the seventies to have at least one naked woman come out for the Masquerade, just in her birthday suit.
Richard Butner:
Yeah, we did have the “clothes-required rule” at the Masquerade because, uh, I know the Equicon in ‘73 in LA, one girl who was into masquerading, she wore a jewel on her belly-button and that was all. It was an interesting costume. And, uh, we also had one rule about sword play on stage, because one sword went flying off the stage; it got out of a guy's hand and almost skewered Robert Heinlein, which wouldn't have been good. So we, you know, we put in safety precautions.
Paul M. Sammon:
You have people who are walking around stark naked, and it's okay, because they're supposed to be part of the upcoming costume contest. You had massive amounts of alcohol, uh, massive amounts of weed. People were dropping acid right and left.
Chuck Graham:
There's an interesting anecdote about how it works both ways that has been going around for many years. It was told by Jim Shooter, who was for many years the publisher at Marvel Comics. He was down in Little Rock, Arkansas for a comic book convention. And one time, he got into an elevator wearing a business suit, because Jim Shooter always, always wore a nice suit wherever he went. And there was this guy in the elevator wearing flip-flops and cutoff jeans. And he had this big pig on his head -- foam rubber -- I guess it had something to do with the Arkansas Razorbacks. There was some sort of a football function going on at the hotel at the same time. And he said, “You there with them-there funny book people?” And, uh, Jim Shooter said, “Well, yes, yes, I am.” “Well, that's and awfully funny way for a man to make a living!” or something like that.
Jeanne Graham:
“A damn silly thing for a grown man to be doing,” wearing this hog on his head. And Jim Shooter said, “I looked up at his hog. And I looked down at his shorts, and I didn't say a word. I should have if I hadn't gotten off the elevator.”
Ken Krueger:
And are you ready for a program change? Isn’t it more fun this way, wonderin’ what’s goin’ on? We seem to be running into an awful lot of comic material today and not too much science fiction material today. The seven o'clock session tonight will be …
Dave Clark:
Star Trek fans were very much a part of Comic-Con in the early days, with special places in the art show for Star Trek art, there was Star Trek programming on the, always on the schedule area set aside for Star Trek fans to get together and talk. Also -- that's not as obvious today -- when I look at the early program books for the early comic conventions, there's all kinds of material from Star Trek fandom and STAR – S T A R – was the Star Trek fan club that had many chapters around the country. And there was certainly one in San Diego, and the people who were active in STAR were big contributors to what went on at the conventions.
Maggie Thompson:
At the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, there was a bit of a pop culture spin to it, in that two different television groups came to promote their upcoming science fiction TV shows. And the first case was a gentleman who came out and said, “You're all gonna want to go out and buy color television sets, because our show is so wonderful. Oh my gosh, this is just the most fantastic thing in the world. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And it was Time Tunnel.”The audience was, to put it mildly, unimpressed. Gene Roddenberry, then, I think observing what was going on, stood up and said, “I know you guys know all about science fiction. I'm so grateful that you let me come to show you what I've done. I hope you enjoy it.”And we loved it. And it was Star Trek. The next year, Star Trek had been so influential. There was disdain from the hardcore “I read the science fiction, I don't go to movies! And television shows: Ewww!” Very contemptuous about Star Trek. That it wasn't true science. It was somehow didn't meet their high standards. And Bjo stood up. Bjo Trimble stood up in front of that audience at one point and said, “How dare you? I have listened for years for you people griping that there weren't enough girls. Now, here they are. And you're mocking what brought them in.” And I was among those applauding what she said. I was an old hand in science fiction and absolutely appreciated everything Roddenberry did.
Dave Clark:
A lot of times, those fans, they were TV fans. They weren't really science fiction readers. And so for an old science fiction fan … Listen, I’m talking about myself as an old science fiction fan when I was 17. For an old-style science fiction reader -- you're reading “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein and that sort of thing -- the Star Trek fandom seemed a little distant to me because their connection was with a television program and not this deeper thing. But I cannot and I would not take away from their enjoyment and their love for Star Trek. And I have continued to follow all the franchises. Now I'm a bore among my friends talking about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is the greatest of all the Star Trek programs.
Bjo Trimble:
The younger fans just went for it. And those of us who are a little older sort of went, “Well, let's see how this works out.” Because let's, face it: We had been promised a great show in Lost in Space, and it suddenly devolved into a kiddie show.
Greg Bear:
Irwin Allen created these kids TV shows with fabulous special effects. If you take a look at the effects of Lost in Space, they are much better than Star Trek, at that point. The sets are much more expensive-looking. Star Trek sets are quite wonderful from our perspective today, but they're pretty rudimentary compared to what they were doing with, with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space and Time Tunnel and all that kind of stuff. Irwin Allen was spending huge amounts of money on special effects. Star Trek was trying to avoid that. But, but the main thing that Roddenberry got correct was the characters. The characters are the most important part, and their interactions, hiring the right actors -- and they were brilliantly cast, I think -- and the hiring the right writers. I think DC Fontana, Dorothy Fontana, one of my favorites, because I think she actually helped create the character of Spock, you know. And then you had other writers being brought, in science fiction writers. Uh, Poul Anderson went in and pitched, but they didn't like his idea because he really wanted to do a Lieutenant Uhura. He thought she was a fabulous character, but they didn't think she was quite ready for it. So he didn't get a chance. But Theodore Sturgeon did. And Theodore Strugeon did the opening episode of the second season. It was called “Amok Time,” and, and it brought in T’Pring and T’Pau and all these Vulcan women. And they were fabulous. And, you know, the casting there was great as well because one of them was the widow of Peter Lorre. And that chance to go to that world and see it from its inside. And to watch it through Spock's eyes, as he's going through this torment of the mating season for Vulcan, that was huge for fandom. It was really huge, because suddenly you had all of these people who would eventually, you know, kind of think of themselves as being trans or, you know, not quite within the binary system. They could be given a sense of, “This story is about us.”
Dave Clark:
In the sixties, I was a child of that era. And, uh, we were very optimistic and, uh, expectant. We grew up in rising prosperity. And so we expected vast open vistas, and that in our lives, we would see great changes and wonderful things. And Star Trek represents that. And optimistic. And Ray Bradbury in his writings, Arthur C. Clarke and his visionary material … We went back to guys like Olaf Stapledon, the British philosopher who wrote four profound science fiction books, imagining the history of the solar system and the history of the universes. And this kind of stuff all fed our expectations as Boomers and what we thought. And then of course, reality of war, poverty, and inequality. They reared their head.
Jeanne Graham:
So I grew up with the fantasy. And then in 1966, this thing called Star Trek came along and I fell hopelessly in love with that and started writing to pen pals all over the world. Uh, at the time the show was on the air. So, during the late sixties, when it was still on the air, I was writing to I think 350 pen friends around the globe at the time. That was really the precursor of meeting up with other fans at San Diego State when I went out there in ‘70 and ‘71 and we started getting together and eventually we had a costume party at my parents' house that became STAR San Diego in ‘72. And they were fine with that. They loved it. The church people, not so much. You had a hard time explaining any of it to them. And some of the relatives just didn't get it. They just thought, “You're crazy. What are you getting involved in this strange stuff for?” And some of them would outright think you were getting involved in some satanic cult. I mean, seriously, they did. But for the most part, the family was, it was very cool. So, from there, meeting Comic-Con committee members and, uh, set up a Star Trek exhibit at Comic-Con. And in ‘73 and ‘4.
Chuck Graham:
When I went out to UCSD as a student in fall of 1969, I was a history major. And, um, one of the early other Comic-Con people, Richard Butner, was in some of my classes. And, uh, we discovered a mutual interest. We went to Comic-Con first time in 1972, and that's how both of us eventually ended up on the Comic-Con committee. I found out about STAR through Richard, as a matter of fact.
Bjo Trimble:
STAR stood for Star Trek Association for Revival. Fandom sprang up all over the place. And STAR was just one of the major fan clubs and were quite active. This wasn't easy by mail instead of by computer, but most people managed it.
Mike Towry:
Bjo also was the one who got the letter-writing campaign going that Astrid Anderson helped out on. After two seasons, they were going to cancel Star Trek. And so they got a commitment that if they could get a million letters sent in asking for it to be continued, they would give it another third season. So, Bjo Trimble headed up a group that actually organized this letter-writing campaign. And they succeeded in getting the million letters sent in. And so the network or studio, Desilu or whatever, they actually did, um, a third season of Star Trek, which I understand is one of the things that allowed it to go into syndication. And that's sort of like: the rest of history, because that's how possibly most people actually became familiar with Star Trek, was through the reruns.
Bjo Trimble:
We mailed at least 25,000 letters. And then, by the way, postage paid for by donations from fans. And, um, we would say, write a letter and then ask ten friends to write a letter. They write letters and ask ten friends to write letters, and so on and so on. And that's what happened.
Roger Freedman:
Star Trek was certainly a major influence on all of us. I think, you know, we all watched Star Trek, and were all disappointed by the third season when that happened as well, because it didn't quite have the same feel as seasons one and two had. But the series had come to an end by the time that Comic-Con got started. But it was really the beginning of Star Trek fandom.
Bjo Trimble:
Well, there wasn't technically a real Star Trek fandom before the letter-writing campaign. We were a loose group of individuals and occasionally in various places, uh, the fans would get together, but that was about it. Nobody really recognized a club per se. Afterwards, when the club started sort of springing up, you had your choice of a whole bunch of things. Either, uh, nationwide or, um, local clubs. And, um, it went on from there.
Roger Freedman:
Again, this is some of the pre-history of Comic-Con, because this is stuff that happened before Comic-Con got started. And as I recall, there actually was a bunch of students from Caltech who marched on the studios and said, “Save Star Trek! We want to keep this going!” And so it was one of the first cases where there was kind of a crowd-sourced influence on popular culture.
John Trimble:
I think this was the, probably the first time that fans, the public, had gotten a network to renew a TV show.
Jim Means:
At some of the meetings, I saw the start of fandom. People like Bjo Trimble. She came to one of our meetings, and she’d written the Star Trek Concordance. I know there was an excitement among the people there, because they said, “Oh, Bjo Trimble’s coming! Bjo Trimble's coming!”
Roger Freedman:
Again, a major influence in the early years of Comic-Con. The fact that she showed up and played a regular role, interacted so much with people like Greg Bear and so on, and helped us to establish our science fiction cred as not just a comic book convention, but someplace that was also a place where science fiction writers could come as well. So, so it's interesting to see those connections between, um, what's happening in the, in the late sixties with the beginning of, of really fandom for a comic book and science fiction showing its influence not just in the printed word, but also having its influence on in this case, the television world as well. And later on, by extension, to the world of film, also.
Jeanne Graham:
STAR was asked to set up an exhibit and, uh, ‘73 was at the Sheraton. And Walter came, and was our guest and, uh, Dorothy Fontana. And that went over very well. We had a ball, and came in Star Trek costumes and the, and the news media would come and they would always focus on the Star Trek costumes ‘cause they were the most colorful outfits instead of the comic book costumes, some of which were colorful too. But for some reason, Star Trek being such a big fan of them at the time, kind of got all the media attention.
Bob Arendt:
Certainly we didn't want this to be just a Star Trek convention. And it seems like much from my science fiction perspective, it seemed to be much too focused on one specific show. In fact, a show that was no longer in production. But I think there's also a positive aspect of that too, because it, it also helped swell the ranks of the actual convention itself.
Roger Freedman:
To be honest, we made fun of them. We actually did have “Stamp out Star Trek” buttons that we'd hand out just to get under people's skin a little bit. “You guys are all upset because Star Trek has been canceled, and you'd like to bring it back on the air, but it hasn't happened. But you know, there's another great fantasy series that was on TV and was canceled, which actually ran longer than Star Trek, which was Gilligan's Island.
Jim Means:
Bob Denver played Gilligan, the first mate on the boat and he was always an eternal screw-up. But he would wear these like red shirt and had this funny little sailor’s cap. They thought it'd be funny to go to the Masquerade at the Comic-Con dressed as “Gillies,” you know, and they were supposedly obsessive fans of Gilligan's island who wanted the show to be brought back just like the Trekkies, you know? So they were just spoofing the Trekkies. So they all got like identical, like red shirts and the white sailor’s cap. And then they went on stage together and, uh, there's probably half a dozen of them stood there and sang the Gilligan's Island theme.
Igor Goldkind:
A lot of the convention was about making fun of people. And as much as we absorbed the Star Trekkies, the Trekkies, we called them … We called them Trekkies because they insisted on being called Trekkers.
Greg Bear:
They didn't really like the word Trekkies. I think they prefer the word Trekkers. I got called out for calling them Trekkies once. I think we accepted it after time. I says, “I'm a Trekkie.” It doesn't matter. Just call me when there's a show on.
Gregory Benford:
When I wrote a piece for the LA Times about the -- what was it? -- 25th anniversary of Trek, for example, I called it the McDonald's of science fiction. It's what the public expects and knows. And we'll always get the same thing. And that's why fast-food made such enormous impact on American life.
John Trimble:
Science fiction fans and comics fans are inveterate spoofers. And if they think something's being taken too seriously, they're going to spoof the blazes out of it. You can get all upset about that if you want to. But I, frankly, have got a touch of humor that accepts kind of thing. And I'm perfectly willing to have somebody kid the socks off something. Even if I feel passionately about it. It's still fun.
Bruce Campbell:
My little town, Medford, Oregon, which, uh, I live nearby has the distinction of kind of being the beginning of the Trekkies. In Medford, Oregon, in 1967, Leonard Nimoy comes to do an appearance, and he comes as Spock, in the outfit, with the ears. The cops thought, they planned on maybe a couple hundred people. I think they had something like 2000 people and they were like, “What?!” ‘Cause the show wasn't that well-rated, but this gave the creators of the show, the studio, the network of like, “Wait a minute, something's going on here.” So I'm kind of proud to be part of the origins of that. My home state.
Brinke Stevens:
When you give a group of kids the opportunity to meet and hang out with their heroes, they're going to make it the best it can be. There's not one person involved in birthing the Con who can't say they're a profoundly different person today than who they were before they joined our team.
Mark Evanier:
One of the main great joys of Comic-Con is the number of people who built their careers there. They may have come as amateurs at first. Some of them walked in with art samples and walked out with a career their first visit. You know, everybody comes to Comic-Con with some goal. Some people just want to find that one missing issue of Iron Man they don't have. And some people come because they want to meet certain celebrities and get an autograph or a selfie photo. And some people come because they want to make contact. They want to know more about the comics. These are the people I get to see in panels that I host about how the books are done and how they're made and what goes into designing a good cover. What goes into writing a good story. And there are people come there because they want to make friends. And there are people who come because they just want to touch that industry.
Felicia Day:
I think that's the wonderful thing about Comic-Con. It is a cross-pollination area where people who are coming up in their career can truly meet and network and just share admiration for people who inspired them in their careers. And so that sort of cycle of creativity is something that you don't get in person a lot. There are a lot of Hollywood parties, but that's a whole different crowd. When you're a geek creator, it's so wonderful to have an artist be able to meet an actor that they love or a costume designer meet a director or any illustrator. So, it is a place where a lot of geek interests all combine. And I'm sure that a lot of cool projects have come out of that.
Barry Alfonso:
Being part of the San Diego Comic-Con from the beginning was one of the most, if not the most decisive things in my entire life. I became a writer. I became a songwriter. I became a journalist. I've had radio shows. I've written books. All of that didn't seem like something fantastic. And it was because of these early interactions that I have and the great kindness that people like Jack Kirby and George Clayton Johnson showed me. So, Comic-Con changed my life. I'm eternally grateful to it.
Gus Krueger:
Comic-Con, actually, and the comic industry, made me what I am today. I get to work at a theme park and create seasonal attractions to entertain thousands of people. Because as a child, I read too many comic books.
Roger Freedman:
Today, I'm on the physics faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My father was a mechanical engineer working for Convair. And, so, that science and science fiction stuff really blended together I think in a fairly seamless fashion. I guess the main moral I derive from this is: if there's something you can imagine doing, just go out and do it. And it doesn't matter whether it's in comic books, whether it's in finance, whether it's in science, what-have-you, if there's something completely wacky that you can think about doing, just try it. If a bunch of kids just barely into puberty can work together with adult supervision and make all this stuff happen, I figure pretty much anybody can do it.
Barry Alfonso:
I think the Comic-Con, A) Helped to give the industry of Hollywood and the comic book industry a way to market and to make its, uh, appeal to the general public, a very direct and not filtered through any prejudice, uh, possible. But more than that, if you went to Comic-Con, you're with people that had the same imaginative view of the universe. And it exponentially sort of grew, it became respectable. The idea that comics would stunt your growth or science fiction would keep you from reading real books. This idea dissipated with time. And I'm sure that Comic-Con had a hand in making it respectable and making it even a healthy and beneficial, uh, thing, uh, to make part of, uh, American and international culture.
Stan Sakai:
It's gone so far. It's just inconceivable. And I, I'm just glad I’m around to see this. It's … I can't even express how flabbergasted I am.
Kevin Smith:
Comic-Con has been absorbed by the larger mainstream to absolutely say the least, man. Um, it is the mainstream at this point, you know. It's no longer some fringe event for people that, “Oh, you know, we like movies and comic books and stuff like that.” Everybody knows it. You don't get to 200,000 attendees with just a fan base. You know, that's looky-loos. That is people like, “I hear you can walk the floor and you could see panels and stuff like that.” So, it's become much bigger than I think the founders intended and probably will continue to grow and maintain, you know, a rightful place at the center of all things, uh, pop culture.
Jim Means:
To take all these, these people that are spread-out. And they all have their interests in different things like Star Trek or comic books, who may be isolated from, from other people with similar interests. And it would bring them all to the same place. And they, you know, instead of being the nerd, then, they're like everyone else. They see all these people with common interests and they get together. And then I think those connections would go beyond. And that's probably one of the reasons it's grown so much over the years, is because there are lots of people that share their interests, and Comic-Con brought them together.
Barry Alfonso:
Our love for comics and fantasy was validated.
Wendy All:
I think, for me, it was just finding my people and it was a place where I felt safe. And not weird.
Len Wein:
You know, there, there is a diagram of the history of scientific evolution. If you look at the chart, the chart basically is virtually a flat line across, you know, thousands of years from the start, to about 150 years ago, where it almost makes a vertical climb. It's amazing to watch. And I think comic book fandom and Comic-Con is very much like that. You know, we were all in our little niche, those of us who love the medium and what it can bring to us. And then one day, especially once the San Diego Con started to grow and move to the Convention Center where there was more room, some PR guy in some film studio went, “You know, maybe we can pitch our new movie to that audience. There’s almost a certainty that at least the majority of them want to see it and word of mouth will get around and let's see what we can do.” And, it worked, and suddenly it became not-quite-so Comic-Con.
Bruce Campbell:
I think what geeks have finally come to realize, is that they rule the roost. They run the show. Geeks are running Hollywood now. So that's why Marvel is doing quite well. And many thanks to the fans for their support, because if they didn't crowd into the San Diego Comic-Con, my kids would not have gone to a college that they dropped out of.
Brinke Stevens:
Thank you for journeying with me once more to the early days of the San Diego Comic-Con. I'm Brinke Stevens. And I hope you'll continue tumbling down the rabbit hole on our next episode where we'll explore just what it took to put the Con together back when none of us had any idea what the hell we were doing!
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