We forge ahead at light speed into the complex scenario of how the first San Diego Comic-Con was cobbled together by our illustrious cast of kooky characters. From there, we venture onward through the mid-1970s as the Con grows exponentially in both physical size and attendance, heralding the “golden years” at a ramshackle downtown hotel that had seen better days called the El Cortez.
We forge ahead at light speed into the complex scenario of how the first San Diego Comic-Con was cobbled together by our illustrious cast of kooky characters. From there, we venture onward through the mid-1970s as the Con grows exponentially in both physical size and attendance, heralding the “golden years” at a ramshackle downtown hotel that had seen better days called the El Cortez.
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”
Maureen Cavanaugh:
I'm Maureen Cavanaugh, and you're listening to “These Days” in San Diego. Huge sci-fi posters drape downtown buildings. The streets are filled with people in costume, and celebrities are arriving. There is no doubt that Comic-Con 2010 is underway in San Diego. But this massive convention did not spring fully-formed into the cultural universe. It had to be created and nurtured. And at times trained to behave. Joining me are two of the original founders of San Diego's comic convention, Mike Towry and Richard Alf. Mike and Richard, welcome to “These Days.’ Now, take us back to those early days. I'm going to start with you, Richard. How did the idea for a comic book convention come about?
Richard Alf:
Well, actually, it wasn't my idea. It was the idea of a man named Sheldon L. Dorf. Um, he was an East Coast resident who happened to be here in the summer of 1969 because he helped his parents move here from Detroit. Uh, he was running short of money at the time and I was a mail-order dealer buying and selling comic books. And, uh, he got ahold of me, uh, and uh, told me that he'd liked to sell me some comic books. And could I come and take a look at them? And it was during that initial visit that he talked to me about how, uh, when he was living on the East Coast, he'd been involved with these comic book conventions. Wondered if we had anything like that going out here. I told him we did not. He wondered if there were any clubs in town that dealt with comic books. I told him I didn't know of any. Uh, he asked if there were any stores in town that sold used comic books. I could only tell him of one Lannings Bookstore down on Broadway, which had coverless comics for sale. And, so at that point, he said, “Boy,” he says, “You know, I would really like to start another comic book convention.” And he says, “I'd like to do it here in San Diego.”
Brinke Stevens:
Greetings once again, geeks, nerds, and mundanes alike. Welcome to Episode Three of SiriusXM’s Comic-Con Begins. I'm your host, Brinke Stevens. That clip you just heard was from a 2010 KPBS radio interview with Comic-Con co-founders Mike Towry and Richard Alf. Sadly, Richard passed away two years later. But as you can tell, even toward the end, he had all of the passion, vim, and vigor for fandom and Comic-Con we needed to get it started way back in 1970, back when we were all just a bunch of comics-, sci-fi-, movie-, and animation-obsessed high school and college kids in what was then a small town most people hadn't heard of before called San Diego. It's quite a story we've been telling so far. So, if you haven't heard the first two episodes, we highly recommend you give them a listen to catch up to where we are now. And just where is that? Or perhaps more importantly, when was that? March 21st, 1970, the pre-event we put on to raise some funds and teach ourselves how the heck to put on one of these dang things in the first place. Here's Comic-Con founding committee member, Dave Clark.
Dave Clark:
To raise money to put on the convention, because we were starting from nothing, it was decided to put on a mini-con, a little one day thing as a trial balloon, and also give us a chance to get a hands-on with putting it together. And Forrie Ackerman was invited and came as our guest. And I think Mike Royer, who's a cartoonist and then went on to great acclaim as the inker for Jack Kirby. One of the finest inkers in the business. Mike came and gave a Chalk Talk, which is a big piece of paper and a pen. And he would do drawings and talk about how to draw and tell stories about comics and such. The convention was just, this mini-con was one room. There were dealers tables, tables with people with selling comic books and stuff. It was all in one space.
Barry Alfonso:
I remember how big the rooms looked and how small they looked when I went back many years later. It was in the basement, the lower floor of the US Grant Hotel. I think there were only two rooms.
John Pound:
I think I was surprised that, that they went into doing a three-day convention after the one-day convention, just because it had turned out so well. And it was so popular, and there were more people that wanted to come. And we had a lot of people coming from LA and some from the San Francisco area. And then people from all over the country started coming.
Scott Shaw!:
I’ll never forget there were a lot of mothers there, and looking back, and even again, some of my observations at that time, I think when people, when kids went to their parents and said, “I'm going to a comic book convention, and it's being held in the basement of the US Grant Hotel!” and San Diego had not been gentrified at that point … Downtown was where you went to buy drugs, get a hooker, or see three shitty old movies for a quarter down in the grind houses.
Archival:
Almost without exception, every city has an area like San Diego's lower Broadway. It's known for its high crime rate and prostitution.
Scott Shaw!:
Back then it was like wading into a cesspool. So, I think that a lot of moms figured that this was like a giant roach motel for pedophiles. Because those moms were standing around with an eagle eye on their little one. Now it's like the most expensive area of town practically.
Mark Evanier:
See, the first 10 years of not just San Diego, but all comic cons, here was the programming: “Uh, let's say at two o'clock, let's have a writers panel. Say, somebody do a writer's panel. Three o'clock, let's do an artist panel. Hey, somebody do an artist panel.” At the ‘75 or ‘76 New York con, we did, I did a writers panel. And all it was was Phil Seuling running the convention went to Mike Fredrich, friend of his, and said, “Mike, will you do a writers panel at two o’clock?” And Mike just went around and said, “Hey, will you be on the writers panel? Will you do the writers panel?” And we were the writers panel. That was, that was, there was no program book saying who was on the writers panel, because we were picked by who was not at lunch at that moment.
Greg Bear:
Some of the early cons were pretty chaotic and I was just kind of bringing science fiction writers and were trying to. And then there were the people doing the comic stuff. And it was quite a mix.
Jackie Estrada:
At one point, they had an art show at the, this was when the convention was at the El Cortez Hotel. And one of the rooms was an art show. And Davey and I were just in there looking at the pieces, and the guy in there, Shel Dorf, saw us and said, “You know, nobody's manning the door here. Could you guys -- I know I don't know you -- but could you just kind of stand here and make sure nobody takes anything until Clayton Moore comes back? ‘Cause he's the one ;sposed to be running this.” And we said, “Okay.”
Roger Freedman:
‘72, for some reason, uh, you know, I noticed this in other social contexts where if a group is too small, sort of the dynamics doesn't really take off. If it's too big, it becomes unwieldy. But something about the size of the 1972 convetion, I could not tell you what the numbers were; again and not so good on the, the statistical aspect of it. But somehow the numbers were just right. The vibe was right. And I think everyone just had a tremendously fun time. And I think it was not despite the fact we were so disorganized but probably because we were so disorganized and that the whole thing was actually loose enough that it could become whatever you wanted it to be.
Brinke Stevens:
The most important element of those early Comic-Cons was making sure that those fans who came through the doors every year would be back the following year. One of the ways we did that was through annual progress reports. At each Comic-Con, we would take attendees’ names and addresses and start a mailing list. Here's Jackie Estrada:
Jackie Estrada:
Science fiction conventions always had progress reports where they would send out what the plans were for the event. And, uh, it was a really a way to get people to sign up and become a member or a supporting member. So you could be someone who sends in some money, but isn't planning to go to the event, but then you get sent the, what they call the souvenir program book from the event. So you got something for it. So Comic-Con followed that model and a souvenir book for the show, but also did progress reports where we announced, you know, new guests, hotel rates, you could fill out this form so you can reserve a room for $35 a night for the hotel. You could register for a membership, that kind of thing. And those were little eight-page, you know, things that were … we'd have mailing parties where we’d print out all the labels and sit there and staple the things shut and put the labels on them and that kind of thing. So it was very volunteer, you know, just, “Everybody, we're going to do a progress report party and do a mailing party!” and that kind of stuff. So, the events guide had all the programs and what the information on the art show and the Masquerade and all the other aspects of it. Whereas the souvenir book has the biographies of all the guests and pinup art, which is a great thing to have because professionals could send in pin-ups, but aspiring artists could send in too and they would be on themes. So if there was a theme for the year was, you know, Spider-Man, everybody would send in their Spider-Man drawings. So that they were a great combination of information and participation.
Chuck Graham:
I had to run back to the bookstore in Ocean Beach every day with the latest updates, and then run the mimeograph machine over there to run off a few hundred copies of the, of the newsletter with the latest updates and schedule changes, if any of that sort of thing. And the attendance figures for each day. And they went up and up.
Jackie Estrada:
There were posters that we did that were taken around to libraries and put up that are now collectible. But they weren't intended to be collectible at the time that they were done. They were just, you know … It's like when you go to Disneyland, you know, you buy a souvenir or this or that, or the other thing, cause you want to have memories of it. But whether that suddenly becomes a collectible, it's up to, uh, the kinds of people who have the collector mentality, I guess.
Barry Alfonso:
I can remember the very first Comic-Con posters, which featured a Scott Shaw! drawing of Superman along with Mickey Mouse, Mr. Natural, and other representative characters. And I can remember putting it up in certain stores around Clairemont and Pacific Beach. And I would sell memberships at my school, particularly in high school, I remember. I, I got a bunch of kids to, uh, buy memberships and, you know, I don't know if they still do this, but they would print the names of the advance members, you know, one through fifty. And there was one kid I convinced to buy a membership as Mango the Talking Chimp. So he’d be listed as that, and he agreed. So between, uh, Bob Smith and Dave Stevenson is Mango the Talking Chimp at Number 17. But I'd go around to all the radio stations. I mailed them a letter. I mailed them the PSA spots we suggested. And I learned the craft of being a publicist over a span of about three-and-a-half years.We delighted in putting them out. And I think people delighted in getting them. And even people that were not part of our group would contribute.
Roger Freedman:
And so that's really how we got the word out. Later on, you know, we were actually able to get some television time appearing on local talk shows. But even that pretty hit-or-miss. But we certainly weren't taking out advertisements.
Brinke Stevens:
After starting off at the US Grant Hotel, the Comic-Con committee, led by chairman Richard Alf, decided to move the convention to the University of California, San Diego, where Richard was a student. Now that the Con had some momentum, the thought was that they could hold the event on campus and utilize the empty dorm rooms during the summertime. Here's Mike Towry:
Mike Towry:
Well, they had a thing at UCSD, if you had a campus club, then you could apply to use campus facilities for an event. And so Richard Alf and Roger Freedman, uh, were both going to UCSD. So they started a comics club, comics and science fiction club, or something like that at UCSD, and then applied to use the facilities there for the next Comic-Con, which was allowed. So that's why the 1971, the second Comic-Con was that UCSD.The attendance went from 300 up to 800 that year.
Barry Alfonso:
From what I understand, there was enough misbehavior, a few things here and there, that UCSD did not care to have us back. But as I recall, there was not a lot of that. There might've been a few things, but it might've been too many things for UCSD. I don't know if they were in the habit of doing things like that. But they did do it that one year.
Richard Alf:
Well, that Is true. I, um, you know, it was an unfortunate situation that we became to successful too quickly in some ways. Our first three-day convention in 1970, we had 300 people that, that was an increase from 100 at our one-day convention. We estimated 600, maybe tops, at UCSD. And they just kept coming. And before we knew it, we were over 800 and the university didn't plan for that many. We didn't plan for that many. It ran 24 hours a day for three days. And, and unfortunately they had booked us in with other study groups. There was a Montessori study group there. There were some other study groups there in the same dorms with us and they'd interspersed us on different floors. And so it was just a matter of people couldn't get to sleep at night because there was this constant activity going on 24 hours a day.
Brinke Stevens:
So, while the Con was successful, in terms of attendance, there was still a lot to figure out. A new location included. The next year, 1972, wouldn't be any easier. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that made it tough for the Con to thrive. It did, however, lead us to what would become the home of the Con for many years. Here's Barry Alfonso:
Barry Alfonso:
I remember ‘72 being a difficult year and the funding not being there. I think that was the year that Bill had to bow out, and Mike Towry and Richard Alf jumped in to take over the convention and make sure it was put on at the El Cortez. What happened was that there was very little organization done until about a couple months before the convention. There just wasn't anything done. So Mike and Richard Alf had to jump in and take it over and they had to do a lot.
Mike Towry:
Yeah, ‘72 was an interesting convention because things weren't getting done, things weren't getting organized, the ads weren't going out, people weren't getting, you know, lined up for, I don't know, uh, you know, attendees, dealers, and whatnot. And it was starting to look like it might not happen. And so Richard and I, and the science fiction fan and artist, Dennis Smith, basically we, we had a meeting, um, in the park, I think it was, and we kind of laid out the whole thing about the Con isn't happening … And so we kind of staged a coup in a way and said, look, if this is going to happen, Richard and I are going to have to take it over. And so that's how that year I became chairman of Comic-Con, Richard was co-chairman and we just kind of went a little nuts with it and had a lot of fun and really kind of changed, I think, the direction of Comic-Con.
Barry Alfonso:
Considering that it had more attendees than the year before, that was impressive. So it might be partially because it was the first El Cortez and partially because it almost didn't happen that people remember it as a special convention.
Mark Evanier:
I will tell you the secret of the Comic-Con no one knows but me. I'm going to reveal it here. They announced the dates of the convention. And then two weeks later they announced they moved them. They said, oh, put out a press release. Instead of this weekend, it's gonna be the following weekend. So, I was curious as I would be, Why did they move it? It turned out the reason they moved it: Shel had insisted they move it. Because he found out that the same year, if we had the original dates, we would've had to share the hotel on Saturday with a, with an event. The event was the Miss Nude California Pageant. And Shel thought, “Oh, we can't have children there when there's nude people in the building.” So, they moved to another date, and I thought, “Shel just miss the chance to have the greatest comic convention ever!”
Brinke Stevens:
Oh, don't you worry, folks. While longtime Con historian Mark Evanier may have regretted our missing out on what could have been one sexy and sultry convention, there will be plenty of juicy tidbits ahead when we come back, particularly when it came to the pool parties at the El Cortez Hotel, the home of the Con for much of the seventies.
[INTERMISSION]
Barry Short:
There's one real unsung hero in Comic-Con. There are several, but there's one that I really need to say something about. And that's Eugene Henderson. Gene was the Head of Security for Comic-Con. Lots of us who were involved in the comic club first, ended up being involved with Comic-Con. And it's entirely because of Gene Henderson. Because he would say to us, “Look, can you come down and help out with security? We've got a couple crash rooms for people to stay in.” When you're a college student, like I was at that time, you know, “Boy, I can go to Comic-Con and I don't have to pay to be there? That sounds fantastic! You bet I'm gonna come do that, Gene!” Gene is really a guy who had a huge impact on the growth of Comic-Con because of the number of people he was able to bring into the organization. I can't mention Gene without mentioning Mary Henderson, his wife. Uh, if you find old pictures from Comic-Con, you may find Mary dressed as Black Canary, which is now a hysterical picture to see, but it's, it's a lot of fun. Mary was everyone's surrogate mother at Comic-Con, and we all loved Mary very much. She was the one who kept Gene grounded.
Brinke Stevens:
Welcome back to Comic-Con Begins, with me, Brinke Stevens. When it comes to the earliest days of the Con's creation, I was just one of many young women and men working our butts off to make sure everything came together correctly. It was a group effort and we each had our specialty. There was no division between what the men could do and what the women could do.
Roger Freedman:
Today, there's a lot of tension you'll find in some aspects of the comic book world about the influence of women as creators, whether they're really fans or not, which I always thought was perfectly ridiculous because we had the great advantage in the early years of Comic-Con, that we had lots of female participation. While it's certainly true there were more males than females involved with the early years of Comic-Con, we certainly had lots of women present as well. And at no time did we ever think that any of them were somehow less than real fans are really enthusiasts because we know they worked just as hard as everyone else, they contributed just as much as anyone else, they added things to Comic-Con that the rest of us could not. So, I think in many ways, although we probably did not think of it this way at the time, it was actually kind of an enlightened group in that it really made things open to both men and women to participate equally as they should in the world of Comic-Con. And by extension to the world in general.
Jackie Estrada:
In 1970 was the first Comic-Con, and I went to it. Davey Estrada did not go with me. I just was curious, it was downtown San Diego, I said, I'll just go pop in there for a day. And I saw Jack Kirby talk. I saw Ray Bradbury talk. I looked at the art display they had. They had approximately 300 people there. Uh, there was a little dealers room, and I didn't know anybody. I got looked at strangely a lot because I was a woman in my early twenties. And most of the attendees were teenage guys. And in fact, one person kind of looked at me and said, “Are you looking for something? Because this is a comic convention here.”
Barry Short:
We had a pretty diverse demographic from the very beginning at Comic-Con. Partly because of the underground comics influence, which always had a lot of women in it. Trina Robbins, obviously; Shary Flenniken, Lee Mars, Dori Seda … So many others that I'm sure I'm neglecting way too many names when I say those. But we always had a lot of women at Comic-Con. Surprisingly so, you know, because everybody thinks it was a boys club, even in the seventies and early eighties. But it really wasn't.
Brinke Stevens:
Here's Wendy All, early Comic-Con contributor, to talk about what is now known as the First Girls Club.
Wendy All:
Well, the First Girls Club was a name that Jackie Estrada and I came up with when sadly we were writing the obituary for Vicki Kelso who passed away right after the 40th convention. Jackie and I were sadly recounting the old days and what it was like to be a girl at Comic-Con, a young woman at Comic-Con. Jackie was older than I was. But nobody called us the First Girls Club. That was a name that Jackie and I came up with for the obituary; not for the obituary, but a way to kind of collect us. So it did not really become an official name until then. But it did consist of people like Lee Mars and Trina Robbins. And I am thinking maybe Shary Flenniken came along a little later. You know, we weren't drag-along women. We weren't women looking for guys. We were women looking for our life. We were women looking for, you know, what was next for us.
Mo Alzmann:
No, I never saw it as a boys club at all. There were female members and we all had just as much say, you know, as any of the male members and we all did equal shares of the work.
Wendy All:
I don't think from my perspective back then that I thought of myself as this radical girl crossing, you know, sex lines into comic books. I just thought of myself as, “This is a cool place to learn about things that I'm interested in.” I approached it the way that I think I approached everything in my life. “This is cool. They're letting me do it. You know, how long can I do this? What can I learn from it?” Scott Shaw! has told me that he was convinced that one of the reasons why Shel always brought me along on our little field trips was because I was sort of the legitimizing face of Comic-Con to show that it wasn't just a bunch of fanboys.
Brinke Stevens:
Wendy All makes a crucial point here. When it came to Comic-Con and its relationship to San Diego, we did experience a bumpy start. The local Powers That Be were still not sure that they wanted a surround at all. Hence why we had to bounce around in those early years. The US Grant Hotel, the University of California, San Diego; and eventually the El Cortez Hotel. If Ken Krueger's bookstore, where we first all met and devised the Con, was our CBGBs, the El Cortez was our Shangri-La.
Archival:
The El Cortez may have seen better days in its 50 year history. But the old hotel is part of our history. And even in its passing, certain memories linger. It has been a place where people came to play and to stay. A landmark to tourists since long before the glass elevator made a little bit of history as the first of its kind. But also a community resource. The site of club meetings and senior proms, New Year's Eve celebrations, and election nights.
Brinke Stevens:
Although it had seen better days, we took what we could get.
Barry Short:
We had no support from the city or county of San Diego in the seventies, or even into the mid-eighties.
Greg Bear:
And really in the early eighties, they tried to shut down Comic-Con, because they thought it was not a good look for Downtown San Diego to have all these comic book fans with their t-shirts and so on.
Barry Short:
Uh, it was after that, that somebody finally ran the economic numbers and said, “Hey, maybe we ought to like that these people are here.” I mean, we met in the hotels of Downtown San Diego, which was not a hot, happening place in the seventies and in the early eighties. It was still kind of a mess. It was a city that had boomed during the wartime. There'd been a huge boost to the economy. And it had kind of been deteriorating since the end of World War II. You know, we were at the El Cortez Hotel for many years. They did as much to maintain that property as they could, but clearly it was not a, a high-class place. But it was perfect for us.
Scott Shaw!:
We would come down when I was in junior high and we'd all take the bus downtown. We’d go see three monster movies for a quarter. We’d still have money to get something at Woolworth's bar. I mean, sounds like Archie in Riverdale or something. And then still have enough money left or for the bus ride home and maybe buy a monster magazine or a couple of comics at a newsstand down here. And my dad always said, “Take a flashlight.” And I’d say, “Why?” He goes, “Well, if some sailors are parking their buddy there, ‘cause he had a big drunk on, there's probably puke all over the seat. So you'd better be able to see that you don't sit in something. And by the way, don't let anybody touch ya.”
Mike Towry:
Ken and Will Lund, I think, and Shel had lined up the El Cortez Hotel, which at one time had been like one of the premier hotels in San Diego and had this famous glass elevator that you would ride up to the Starlight Room, the bar at the top of the hotel. And you would see San Diego at night as you went up. It was very cool. But you know, by the seventies, it had fallen on hard times and was no longer a great destination for, for major conferences or conventions, which meant was great for us because they were desperate for business. So they would take us.For a lot of people, that's the golden age of Comic-Con. Of course, we were young then. And you tend to remember when you were young, there's a golden age, but that was kind of a special time for Comic-Con.
Barry Short:
It was, uh, a place that had rooms. It had meeting facilities, it had a room that was big enough for our, our dealers room, which we now call an exhibit hall, but it was a dealers room then. As long as you had enough money to pay their rent, they didn't really care very much about what you were doing. And that was kind of our relationship with the hotels in Downtown San Diego at that point. We came in, we, we rented rooms, we paid them for the space and they said, “Hey, whatever you're doing, that's fine. Don't break anything.” So they kind of left us alone to do our thing, which is really pretty darn cool.
Mo Alzmann:
Well, I think in the early days, the El Cortez Hotel at least, I think that they had never dealt with a group like us, you know. Number one, our hotel was full and number two, there was all kinds of other people there as well, you know, ‘cause some of these rooms had, like, the first year I was there, I bet there were probably 12 of us in one room just because, you know, we tried to combine all the costs, so it wouldn't cost so much. And at that point I was just like a volunteer and it was my first year and I wasn't getting anything free. And so, you know, we were all sleeping on the floor and it was so crowded in there that my two friends and I said, just forget it. And we went down to the main bathroom and the main lobby of the hotel and went inside and slept in there on these lounge chairs. And I remember we would wake up in the morning and the housekeepers would be in there and they would just be cleaning around us. You know?
Richard Butner:
Our group was, you know, a bunch of geeks. They weren't troublemakers and they weren’t drunks. So they didn't cause any real problems for the hotel. In fact, the hotel was appreciative of the fact that, that our guys were kind of, you know, very cooperative with the hotel staff and everything was cool. In fact, the hotel staff dug it. They would go to the programs when they were off work because they wanted to see what was going on
Gene Henderson:
This wasn't like some of these conventions where the people are adults: got out of hand. Remember, a lot of these were young kids and the, a lot of our guests were older people that understood how behavior should be.
Jeanne Graham:
The El Cortez Told us, you were, you were not by far the rowdiest bunch of people, Comic-Con wasn't anywhere near the rowdiest. He said, “You should see the insurance salesmen's convention!”
Wendy All:
One of the reasons why we look back at the El Cortez with such fondness is that it was this wonderfully self-contained bubble that we could just turn into our world for five days.
Mark Evanier:
The conventions were a lot of fun. They were very party-like. Everyone knew everybody else. You got a chance to see everyone. If I went to a San Diego Con, and Bob Clampett was there, and Chuck Jones was there, and Dawes Butler was there, and Milton Caniff was there, and Charles Schulz was there, I got to spend time with every one of those guys.
Jeanne Graham:
I mean, there were always some pranksters pulling silly stunts at the convention.
Chuck Graham:
Or guests wouldn't show up or, or somebody’s car would breakdown or the film projector wouldn't work or, uh, somebody stopped it and burned a hole on the film.
Jeanne Graham:
A lot of things would go wrong, but nothing disastrous that I can recall.
Brinke Stevens:
Yes, there were plenty of pranks and lighthearted shenanigans during the El Cortez years: jumping naked from the balconies into the pool, plastering bumper stickers everywhere, food fights, late-night beer runs despite the fact that most of us were underage. But we were young, on our own, and having fun.
Sergio Aragonés:
I remember a cartoonist editor from France saw people swimming. And he said that he didn't have a bathing suit. I says, “Oh, it doesn't matter.” And we were very liberal, so he went, he jumped naked on the pool. And other people saw him and to start jumping naked and people of the hotel start complaining.
Gregory Benford:
The nude swimming at the El Cortez Hotel was contagious in the sense that it started in a hot tub. I remember George Clayton Johnson was there and maybe Sturgeon. And then within a few more Cons, it spread all the way to the swimming pool. And hotel management just looked the other way, because the whole hotel was full of people like us. So, what the hell? You could smoke marijuana walking through the corridors, and nobody would care.
Mo Alzmann:
Like the second or third night I was there, I was 18. My parents kept trying to call the room, and of course I wasn't in the room. It was after-hours, and we were out wandering around in the hotel. And they kept calling and calling, and they could never reach me. And I remember that my mom finally called and spoke to one of the hotel operators, because they had operators then. And she told my mom that she didn't know what was going on, but there were naked people jumping off the balconies, down into the hotel pool. And if she had a daughter there, she would come down and get her right then. And so of course my parents freaked out and they came down to the hotel and I had to convince them that no, you know, everything's fine.
Scott Shaw!:
At the El Cortez, it was kind of constructed like the Bruce Wayne Foundation building in Batman comics back in the seventies, where it was like a kind of a skyscraper, but with a big atrium in the middle with a swimming pool. So, that pool was kind of like in, in nature where all the animals gathered, that's where all of we gathered. In the daytime, we did our drawing demonstrations and auctions. And it was also the place that you just hung out with, when you’d see cartoonists who just had to get out of the dealers room or, you know, or take a rest from being on a panel. I mean, they were in Southern California. So I'm sure the real goal was: “I want to sit on a lounge chair for a few minutes and get some sun!” But at night, that pool was a lot different. Uh, one time, uh, it wasn't me, but I loved explaining results. Somebody threw shark repellant into the pool. You know it's shark repellant, because it's what they used to call “emergency orange,” which is a kind of dye color that anybody would notice.
Roger Freedman:
Where the shark repellent came from, I have no idea. Now, it is true at that time, you know, there were a bunch of military surplus stores in San Diego. So I guess if you're looking for that stuff, that would be the place to go. Why someone would have sharp repellent? I don't know.
Jeanne Graham:
That was one of the best ones, I think. The stupidest ones. Depending on your point of view.
Roger Freedman:
I will say it was very effective. ‘Cause at no point during that year’s comic convention did I see any sharks in the swimming pool. So it must have worked.
Scott Shaw!:
I don't know who did it, but remember: Hunter Thompson was a big deal to most of us. So we were just trying to do things that we considered Gonzo. And I'm sure that was the source of that. One night I was down by that pool with Terry Stroud, who was a comic dealer that came to that very first one-day show and still still exhibits. I actually worked for him in LA when I first moved there from San Diego. And Terry had brought in a Roman candle to shoot off. Well, shooting off a Roman candle when you're surrounded by four walls, probably isn’t the best idea. But of course we were young. So we not only assumed we were in vulnerable, we assumed the building was too. And so we're about to light this thing up. And Jack Kirby comes across and by himself. And you know, I knew Jack well enough. I said, “Jack, come on over here!” He comes over. Said, “What's that?” “It’s the Boom Tube, Jack!” He kind of perks up; “Yeah, light it with your cigar!” And he's like, for just a moment, he's almost ready to do it. You could tell by the look on his face, you suddenly, he was that Jack Kirby back, you know, in Brooklyn with his buddies, “Let’s cause some fun.” You know? And then he thought, “No. Burn down the hotel? That's gotta be the number one thing; we aren't going to do that.” And he kind of leaned back and said, “No, I think you boys know what to do,” and just walked away. And, uh, Terry shot it off and fortunately it went straight up in the air.
Roger Freedman:
Scott Shaw! actually did a one-page story of one of the alternate universes, where these things turned out differently and Jack actually lit off the firecracker. And so at the end of the story, you actually see Mike Towry – who that year was the convention chair -- saying, “Yeah, after lighting that thing up, Jack Kirby is going to be giving his, uh, his keynote speech with his bandaged hands from his cell at this, at the San Diego jail.”
Richard Alf:
I think on of the incidences I think of is, you know, a lot of people associate the glass elevator and the Starlight Room with the El Cortez. You know, that room that was at the very top. We would have people as a prank that would get out there and go climb outside up the sign and onto the roof and even send off skyrockets at times. I mean, this was just one of the normal events that would kind of happen during the each year.
Jim Cornelius:
I'll always remember Kate Kane and her lesbian friend giving me a carwash in their hotel room. And, uh, I'll always fondly remember that.
Tim Seeley:
It's kind of a kinky, you know, sort of get together of like-minded people wearing, you know, sometimes wearing crazy stuff that they wouldn't get to wear in their normal life, getting to be who they wouldn't get to be in their normal life and being themselves.
Roger Freedman:
Basically, I would have to say in those days the convention barely worked. But that's all it had to do.
Brinke Stevens:
Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of places to eat in the area and everyone would kind of gravitate toward the Denny's that was in walking distance. But you'd meet a lot of people there. Like I was at the Denny’s with a friend of mine who happened to have a handmade phaser and John Landis walked in to eat at Denny's and he says, “Oh, can I see your phaser?” And he picks it up and he breaks it in his hand. And my friend's face just falls. He's so disappointed. And Landis is like, “Oops, sorry. Here, take it back.” So little encounters like that.
Mo Alzmann:
The Denny’s by the hotel was like the only place that you could go and leave the hotel in the middle of the night. And you know, we were all a bunch of night owls and we were all up and we were all wired. And so, you know, we would go to Denny's and I know there was more than one time at Denny's that they were obviously not able to handle the sudden crowd, you know, from the convention, you know, they, they can't just go and hire 20 additional people for the Con. When they were so backed-up, and so far behind and things were running so badly that I went back and helped them. I helped them cook. I helped them serve. I helped them do everything, just because I was used to working in restaurants at that time. And they didn't, they didn't say a thing.
Richard Butner:
I remember one time I was hanging out with Dave Stevens throughout the night and Saturday night and I go like, “Hey, Dave. What time is it?” He said, “It's five.” I said, “Five?!” We hung out the whole night. I said, “Let’s go get some breakfast.” We walked down the hill to the Denny's and, and had breakfast. And it was filled with Comic-Con people who stayed up all night because didn't want to miss a minute of it. You know?
Brinke Stevens:
In 1984 and ‘85, I was a host for CCTV. It was a closed-circuit television that Comic-Con people did. And it went into all the major hotel rooms around the convention. So the first year I did a sort of a vampire character, which two years later would sort of become Evilla from Monsterland Magazine. Then in ‘85, I did a detective sort of host and we would interview people. We would do programming. I was on camera a lot.
Barry Short:
CCTV: Comic-Con TV or closed-circuit TV, whichever one you want to do, was a big thing for a while. Primarily late seventies, early to mid-eighties, because all of the hotels had the capability for us to hook into their system. We had a private channel, uh, sometimes two channels that you could pick up on your TV in your hotel room. And so, um, a lot of anime ran on it. Uh, sometimes there were old movies. But then we did intersperse a number of live-action shows. People were just on there goofing around. We didn't know what we were doing.
Wendy All:
Scott Smith's closed-circuit Comic-Con station was such a big deal. You know, he was doing something that was incredibly unusual. You would turn the TV on at the El Cortez, and all you had to do was like put in a request that you wanted to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers and like, okay! Invasion of the Body Snatchers is going to be on it, you know, whatever time. And he would feed it through the El Cortez closed-circuit hotel loop. But the point is, you know, we did what we needed to do to create our world for us the way that we wanted it.
Brinke Stevens:
The CCTV programs in ‘84 and ‘85 provided some alternate programming for people who were in their rooms at Comic-Con. Like we would show Plan Nine from Outer space. And I would introduce it and talk about some of the characters and stuff like that. So there was a surprising amount of interest. I guess you can't be at a convention 24 hours a day. You have to go back to your room at some point and people would tune into the CCTV and I would be there as a hostess.
Barry Short:
But later on, we actually got to doing some pretty good scheduling of a TV schedule during the day. While I was program director, there were several years that I would do a half-hour show at like 8:30 in the morning, previewing panels that were going to be done during the day, and maybe having a guest in and talk to them about what they’d be talking about later during the day. So that was a lot of fun and a lot of people did enjoy it. I remember one year that I did a section of the Comic-Con News wearing a Condorman mask and claimed that I had been taken over by Condorman, that he’d commandeered the show. That was kind of fun. But, yes, closed-circuit TV was a blast.
Brinke Stevens:
While CCTV Was a great way to watch these movies in your hotel room, the real fun came when we all watched these movies together as a group.
Mike Towry:
Movies were a big, important part of the conventions, comic and science fiction conventions, because it was a chance to see a lot of the movies you normally didn't get to see, and you got to see them with other fans. So you know how that is. You're in an audience where everybody is on the same page and they're all responding to the same things and getting excited about it. It's a lot of fun. So that was a big part of that.
Scott Shaw!:
The film part, they'd have all-night films running, and that was especially well attended by people that couldn't afford a room, and they’d literally sleep in the movie room.
Greg Bear:
We would get together for the 65th anniversary of the King Kong, and all sit in a row. I'm sitting next to Bradbury and Harryhausen, you know, Forrie Ackerman, all these people who were there back in the thirties, watching the original King Kong. And that was just an astonishing moment.That was of course, that that influenced a lot of us kids, but also influenced the animators of the day. I think that was the film that made Phil Tippett want to be an animator. And of course it was an amazing production, because it's all fake. You know, all the monsters were, were made of rubber, and, and they were basically animated by this master artist who gave them his own personality.
Barry Short:
Someone had acquired a 16-mm print of Yellow Submarine.Which is really cool, ‘cause we were all big animation fans down there anyway, and it's Beatles, it's avant-garde animation. I can recall watching that in a midnight screening with probably two- or three-hundred people, and all singing along with everything.The pure joy of that experience is overwhelming to remember even now.
Scott Shaw!:
My friend, Bill Richardson, known as “Billzo,” who was the projectionist at a ring of theaters, a chain of small theaters in San Diego. So he had access to films without ever telling anybody. I have a feeling he may have been behind getting that print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the more we thought about it. But he always would bring things that we would just show for fun. Well, they had, were showing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a Russ Meyer movie that was incredibly inappropriate, even at the time. But very funny. It was actually co-written by Roger Ebert, which makes it kind of funny. But um, we thought, why not show that?
Mark Evanier:
If you watch that movie on DVD or see it alone in a theater on TV, it's really boring. You see it with an audience, a hip audience, it’s hysterical.
Scott Shaw!:
Down front was Theodore Sturgeon and his wife. Theodore Sturgeon, the famous science fiction author. And he was like, “Aren't there anymore?” He wanted to sit there; I don’t know: maybe taking something too.
Roger Freedman:
It’s an interesting question: When you talk about the popular arts in general and science fiction is certainly a good example of that, as are comic books. The question is so, so which is the good stuff and which is the not so good stuff? And the answer is the good stuff is whatever you like. So for instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first movie that I can say that I saw 20 times in the theater itself. Back in the days when you couldn't just rent the video and watch it 20 times. No, that means I made 20 trips to the theater to go see it.
Dave Clark:
2001: A Space Odyssey is absolutely one of those visionary things and a watershed to my imaginative life and also the culture. And it puts science fiction out there in a way that it never really went away after that. I had been reading about 2001 in things like Popular Mechanics ran an article about the special effects a year before the movie came out. Greg Bear and I were anxiously awaiting this film. We were already big fans of Arthur C. Clarke who of course was responsible for the story. And I saw advertised in the paper advanced tickets for 2001 limited engagement in Hollywood in the Cinerama theater. And so Greg and I bought tickets two months early, and so on the fourth day of release of 2001, we went to Los Angeles, stayed at Greg’s grandmother's house, went and visited Forrie Ackerman, and did a bunch of other amazing things. We saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brand, brand new before anybody had gotten their eye tracks all over it. And before it had been over-reported. And that just blew my mind. All so visionary.
Roger Freedman:
So that's certainly had a huge influence on me as well, but I'm just as excited about seeing B movies from the 1950s about science fiction or early stuff in the 1930s as well. I’m as enthusiastic about 1930s science fiction as I am about modern options that we have today.
Dave Clark:
I think one of the really interesting things about the Comic-Con ethos, really from the very beginning, was an embracing of art high and low. Here you've got 2001: A Space Odyssey. Great art. I’m mean, it's an art film and a work of art, an enduring masterpiece that critics acknowledge and such. And then, an appreciation for low stuff. You know, Flash Gordon serials, and, uh, B movies, Robot Monster, and Plan Nine From Outer Space. And the thing was, we loved it all.
Gregory Benford:
I, as with many, was struck by the showing of 2001 and Flash Gordon. Little later on, by the way, they showed Flesh Gordon, the porn version, too. Which of course we all went to see as well.
Greg Bear:
Yeah, we learned that Bjo had been working on a pornographic parody of Flash Gordon called Flesh Gordon. She was there doing makeup and she told the stories and they were pretty raunchy about what was going. And this was actually a hardcore porn film done with major money, pretty good money, and a lot of special effects artists working on it. People who would later become famous for working on things like Close Encounters and being the head of Industrial Light & Magic and that kind of stuff. For, for many science fiction people, the combination of knowing that these guys were working in pornography, as well as science fiction, I think we put a cartoon together of robots and naked women walking off into the sunset. Now this, this just was fascinating to us as how the culture is mixed.
Gregory Benford
Because the tribe was so much smaller that they included everything. It wasn't as though they was SF falling within view for everyone in the world. It wasn't a constant presence on television and so on. And that has gone away because people have become more narrow, I think generally, and there's so much available if you're just like, pulp SF, you can watch all you ever want and it'll keep coming. If you want much more hard stuff, like, say The expanse on television now, that's analog, engineer-y science-fiction and you can just watch lots of it and read all the books and so forth. The genre has broken down into smaller and smaller subdivisions. And just like that, you can just stay there all the time. That was not true when Comic-Con started. You just gobbled up everything.
Roger Freedman:
I think part of being an enthusiast for this stuff is appreciating not only the high points, but also the low points as well. And even the low points, you know, were tremendously innovative for their time. Flash Gordon? Pretty amazing. Yes, it is true the spaceships in Flash Gordon sound remarkably like a Douglas DC-3 in cruise, because that's what people thought a fast-moving vehicle was going to be like at the time. And the special effects look a little silly now, but they were state of the art for the 1930s when that was created. In the same fashion, when you think about King Kong, look at the original King Kong and say, “Oh, that's really low-tech. That's, that's old 1930s technology.” But if you look at the work that went into creating King Kong and just the ideas that are behind it, they're absolutely at the forefront of what science fiction fantasy can be. And yes, we have better technology. Now, does that mean that you make a better movie? Not necessarily.
Ray Bradbury:
Fantasia was 30 years ahead of his time. And today it's 40 years ahead of its time. Yeah. We're relearning from looking at that show. I've seen it about 20 times. I've seen every one of Disney's cartoons, at least 10 times. So you have an enthusiast here before you today, don’t you. Someone who's not ashamed of his taste. ‘Cause when I was in high school, and all the kids in 12th grade found out I'd seen Snow White eight times …
Brinke Stevens:
In 1975 Comic-Con incorporated. Here's Clayton Moore to explain how and why it all went down.
Clayton Moore:
Around 1976, we're having our meeting after the convention, and, “Hey, it went pretty well!” And we made enough money for next year and nothing got stolen and no one got hurt. Yeah, that's really cool. But what if somebody did get hurt? What would we do? Well, the silence was deafening for a minute there. And Shel said, “Well, uh, I'm the president, but I'm not in charge of that.” Nobody was in charge of that, right? Who would be responsible? So, to make a long story short, our president found a lawyer and the lawyer advised our committee to incorporate. That way, the Comic-Con, our nonprofit entity could become a nonprofit corporation and then insurance and other of those larger issues can be dealt with more appropriately. The expansion had a little bit of growing pains. I guess there were some kind of little rivalries getting set up, you know, cliques on the committee. ‘Cause it was, you know, a little more political when it came time to run for office.
Jim Means:
One of the things that people these days probably quite hard to believe is that the Comic-Con back then just ran on a shoestring budget. You know, I don't know what the budget is these days, but I would assume that it's like tens of millions of dollars to run Comic-Con. Back then, the bank accounts may have had one- or two-thousand dollars in it. And so I just remember it was always kind of touch-and-go.
Richard Butner:
After 1975, we had a great convention, but we couldn't pay the hotel bill. Okay? We were just short of money. This is a true story. I'm telling you. Shel and I went into the sales manager's office at the El Cortez Hotel, and we negotiated. They were anxious to sign us up for 1976. And we came. Within 10 minutes, we had the dates set, we signed a contract. Everything was a go. Okay. And then Shel said to me, “Um, we got to tell him.” I said, “Yeah.” And he, I said, “Yeah, we do.” Uh, and we turned to him and said, “Could we have a moment alone, please?” And they looked at us funny, the manager and the sales manager. And he said, “Well, sure.” So they exited the office and Shel said, “What do we tell them?” I said, “We already signed the contract for ‘76. What are they going to do? We tell them we can't pay it. We just be honest.” And so they came back in and, and Shel said, “Um, we don't have enough money to pay the hotel bill.” And they stood there for a couple of heartbeats, and the manager looked at us and said, “Why don't you put on another convention later in the year, kind of, uh, uh, to help raise money, to pay your hotel bill? And we'll get some more rooms sold during that convention.” And so, like that, we had Comic-Con: Part Two. We charged a dollar a day to come in and we had a good attendance and we sold a lot of rooms and we had a very relaxed convention. So that's how Comic-Con: Part Two occurred.
Brinke Stevens:
Before we sign off for another episode, it's worth taking a step back to reflect on a name you've been hearing a lot during this series: the late Shel Dorf. Many loved him. I mean, they really loved him. Many hated him. And I mean, they really hated him. But everyone can still agree that there would be no San Diego Comic-Con without Shel as our founder. What Steve Jobs was to Apple, what Stan Lee was to Marvel, what Anna Wintour's to Vogue, Shel Dorf was to Comic-Con. Find out from those who knew him best how this polarizing figure went from Detroit to San Diego and started the biggest pop culture event ever. Next time on Comic-Con Begins.
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