"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." - John Barrymore, quoted in GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE by Gene Fowler (Viking, 1944), a book from the collection of my great, late, writer friend Ken Jackson

Update: 17 APRIL '08

 

     Folks who like their adventure high and wild - especially when it comes from the pages of the pulp magazines of yesteryear - know the name Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, whose over-the-top tales from the '30s and '40s pulps found a whole new audience decades later as paperback novels (and, in fact, continue in new reprints today.).
     He's one of the major heroes from the pulps, an Olympian group that includes the likes of Zorro, Tarzan, and the Shadow.
     So, maybe you know Doc Savage. But do you know Jim Anthony - Super-Detective?
     If the answer's no, we can take care of that in a New York second. By we, I mean my pals and collaborators John McMahan and John Locke. Collectively, we have just produced a new trade paperback that reprints a pair of Jim Anthony adventures in what we're calling the Super-Detective Flip Book: Two Complete Novels. It just hit amazon.com and other cyberspace outlets; you can find it there, or you can order it from Off-Trail Publications (offtrail@redshift.com) via PayPal ($18 plus $2.50 for media mail, $5 Priority) or by sending a check or money order to Off-Trail at 2036 Elkhorn Road, Castroville, CA 95012.

     

     What do I get for that geetus, you ask? Well, what we've done is reprint a couple of the best novel-length (using the admittedly generous word-count standards the pulps used to define a "novel") Jim Anthony yarns, taken from two separate phases of the Super-Detective's career.
     The first, 1940's Legion of Robots, can certainly be taken as, uh, an hommage to Doc Savage. Anthony, with his secret fortress and preternatural powers, will certainly remind the alert reader of Doc, something that was purely intentional on the part of Anthony's publisher, the always opportunistic Trojan Publishing Corporation. At the time Legion of Robots came out, however, comic books were beginning to steal the thunder of what were known as the hero pulps, offering thrills and power fantasies more easily accessed by young readers. Still, the folks at Trojan figured there might be a buck to be made in another hero pulp, and so along came the underrated Anthony.
      (Anthony's relationship not only to Doc Savage, but also to DC Comics and its flagship character Superman, is explored in a fact-packed introduction by McMahan.)

     By 1943, Jim Anthony had undergone a major overhaul, with the more juvenile aspects of his stories gone in favor of a more down-to-earth, hard-boiled approach. We were fortunate to find a great, timely-as-today's-headlines tale, Murder's Migrants, to complete our twofer flip book. It's a fine effort, written by two of the most famous guys to come out of the detective pulps - Robert Leslie Bellem, creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, and W.T. Ballard, whose Bill Lennox, written for the famed Black Mask magazine, was the first true Hollywood detective character in the pulps. Together, these two solid wordsmiths crafted a swift and entertaining novel (and the backstory of their collaboration is one of the things I deal with in my own introduction).

     So there you have it: Two novels, bound together in a style intentionally reminiscent of the Ace Double Novels of the '50s and '60s, and brought to you by John Locke's Off-Trail Press - purveyor of some of the best pulp reprints and associated non-fiction that you'll ever see - and Reverse Karma Press, the little outfit McMahan and I have put together.
     We've spent a couple of years delving into the world of Jim Anthony, and we find it a fine and exciting place. We think you will, too, and we'd be delighted to have you check out Super-Detective Flip Book: Two Complete Novels. and let us know what you think.
     And, as always, big thanks for stopping by.

Update: 14 MARCH '08

 

    Both Dave Stevens and Mario DeMarco loved the romance and wonder of entertainment from days gone by - loved it so much that they filtered it through their own souls, reshaping it and recasting it, shining it up and sending it out.
    Dave, of course, was the artist and writer best known for creating the great comic-book character the Rocketeer, a character rooted in the gosh-wow science-fiction movies and pulps of the '30s and '40s. His stunning work on the Rocketeer stories quickly made him one of the first and brightest stars of the independent-comics movement of the '80s. Mario, on the other hand, was less well known, his audience comprised mostly of fans of B-western movies, for whom he created pen-and-ink portraits and self-published paeans to the cowboy-movie stars of yesteryear. (His obituary in the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette indicates that he also had a 50-year-career as a cartoonist with the Navy Times.)
    They both created a lot of their oeuvre in the '80s, although I have no idea of whether they were aware of each other's work or not. They both died in early March, within a week or so of one another. And I knew them both, at least a little bit.

    I met Dave Stevens in San Diego in 1974, where I was fulfilling my obligations as a Navy Reservist - following two years on a helicopter carrier - by spending a couple of weeks as part of the crew of a fleet tug. My previous Navy service had included some time in that city, where I'd had the good fortune to meet Shel Dorf and Richard Butner, both of whom were heavily involved with the San Diego Comic Convention (which had then been going only a few years). I believe it was Richard who introduced me to Dave one weekend, when I was able to get off the tug and into town. I was impressed when I found out this young guy was inking backgrounds for one of my comic-book heroes, Russ Manning, on the Tarzan comic strip.
    I recall Dave as being pretty shy and reserved that day, but we nonetheless hit it off. Both of us not only dug comics and pulps, but old movies and serials and - perhaps most important - the leading ladies of low-budget horror and science-fiction movies.
    As the years went by, we'd exchange the occasional letter or phone call, in addition to seeing each other at conventions, where we'd make the time to do some catching up. After he'd begun dating the '50s B-movie actress Yvette Vickers, I went to my mailbox one day to find an envelope with an 8X10 glossy, taken on the set of Attack of the Giant Leeches, she'd signed for me. For my part, I sent him a cassette tape of Dreamsville, one of my all-time favorite LPs, featuring Henry Mancini's ultracool jazz orchestra behind vocalist Lola Albright, who played Edie Hart on the Peter Gunn TV series. In 1991, when Disney put out the Rocketeer movie, I was able to interview Dave for the Tulsa World, where I was working as an entertainment writer. Later, he told me that the picture had been the No. 10 moneymaker for that summer - which, unfortunately, wasn't quite big enough to trigger the planned sequels and other spinoffs.

    After the Rocketeer comic-book stories hit, and especially after the movie, Dave Stevens became a huge star on the convention circuit. His Betty character, a tribute to '50s pin-up queen Bettie Page, led to Ms. Page's rediscovery, and Dave ended up becoming the most famous pin-up artist since Alberto Vargas.
    As fame increases, so do the demands on a person's time and energies, and the last few times I saw Dave we talked through a stream of interruptions and distractions, which seemed to bemuse him a bit. It was clear that day that he did what he did from love, not a lust for fame or money. It may be clichâd to say that, but that doesn't make it any less true.
    Dave Stevens, to the end, remained one of those people you always look forward to seeing again. To know that you won't be able to do that in this particular sphere of existence has saddened a great number of people, myself included.     While Dave died early - at 52, from leukemia - Mario DeMarco was 86 when he passed, having actually lived through the movie heyday of the B-western stars in the '20s, '30s and '40s.

    Mario and I never met, but we wrote one another, and I have several of his handcrafted B-western books in my library. I first became aware of him in 1979, after I'd left my college-teaching job to move back to my home turf and try to make it as a writer. The very first gig I got was at a tabloid-sized newsprint publication called The Big Reel, published out of North Carolina by a man who was, I believe, had a day job as a carpet cleaner. His name was Don Key, and his publication, slanted toward the old westerns, was for folks who - in those pre home-video days - collected, sold, and traded stills, movie-related publications, and 16mm films. Just after we'd moved, I saw a notice that he was looking for a book reviewer for The Big Reel. The pay was a penny a word, and you got to keep the books and magazines sent to you for review, as well as receiving a gratis subscription to the publication itself.
    I've never been much of a reviewer, but it was a paying gig, so I applied. For the next couple of years or so - before the mag was inundated with amateur critics who'd do the job for free - I got a check every three months right on the dot, and that $45 paid for a lot of groceries in those days.
    Mario DeMarco was doing line drawings, coupled with biographical nuggets, for The Big Reel, and he crafted a little logo for my column. Right after I started working for the magazine, he sent me his self-published Yours Truly, Tom Mix, a "photostory" of the great western star, along with a letter talking about how the book "wasn't meant to be a 'classic' - it was printed at my expense (and extremely expensive) for the fans who really loved Tom - and for the collectors too - for in it went a lot of love and care."
    There was a lot of love and care in everything Mario did to help keep the B-westerns alive, and perhaps to help telegraph their joys to a generation that didn't grow up with Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups. And a lot of love and care went into Dave Stevens' wondrous work as well. They were working very different sides of Nostalgia Alley, certainly, but Dave Stevens and Mario DeMarco covered their respective turfs with joy and wonder, working with the benign ghosts that haunted them to create new images for our dreams and daydreams.

    For my money, those were two lives well lived.

     (The Internet is full of obituaries and tributes to Dave Stevens. My friend Jim Vance has a very nice one at http://www.james-vance.com/jvblog/?p=80)

Update: 04 MARCH '08

 

    My webmaster and cyberspace advisor, Jonathan Wooley, having educated me recently about the importance of website blogging, has now advised me that it's a good idea not only to regularly add links to other websites, but also to write a bit about the linkees. With that in mind, here's a little something about the folks behind the web addresses:

    --Jim Vance ( http://www.james-vance.com ) has been a very good friend and occasional co-conspirator of mine for more years than I'd like to remember. I will not embarrass him here by relating where we met, but I will say that it was at the world premiere of a local movie in which he had, shall we say, a major part. I will also note that he was the sober one at that meeting. In the immediately subsequent years, we visited a lot of comic-book conventions together, notably Larry Lankford's late and much-lamented Dallas Fantasy Fairs and Festivals, and entered the independent comic-book market as scripters, with Jim receiving well-deserved acclaim. (Among other things, he won a Harvey and two Eisners for his superb graphic novel with artist Dan Burr, Kings in Disguise , a Depression-era tale told from a boy hobo's point of view. Recently reprinted by W.W. Norton, it belongs in every American's library. Honestly.)
    Jim continues to turn out great work full of wisdom, compassion, and clarity. I also envy him for his ability to knock out first-class blog entries on his site http://www.james-vance.com, most of them having to do with comics and graphic novels, which is where he's doing most of his work these days.

    -- Chuck Ayers (http://www.chuckayers.com ) is the creator and host of a fine radio show called the Red River Jazz Cafe, which I've been enjoying beginning at noon Saturdays on radio station KZLI (1570 AM). KZLI is (along with oldies station KRVT, 1270 AM) half of a great northeastern Oklahoma AM-radio combine that's bravely swimming against the current (forgive the mixed metaphor) by offering programming that couldn't be different from the soulless corporate effluvia clogging our airwaves.
    Chuck's show is a great example of what I mean. It's full of laid-back, small-combo jazz - often including something from my favorite, Oklahoma boy Chet Baker -- strung together with Chuck's equally relaxed conversational reminiscences of his younger days in California and Oklahoma. KZLI, for all its wonderful qualities, isn't exactly a clear-channel flamethrower, so if you're not in the Tulsa area, pick up the cafâ on Chuck's website. Heck - you can even order up a show from the menu. Plus, there's some old-time radio programming and '50s rock 'n' roll available there as well.
    And while we're on the topic of music . . . Broadway, concert, and TV star Sam Harris (Did you catch his laugh-out-loud character on last year's sitcom The Class?) is working on a new album, and he's released a track on YouTube. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulqENsff5bw to see "War on War," an anti-war number that, to me, is a first-class, spirited, re-imagining of the late 1960s, when kids marched for peace and love was in the air. (Following my time as one of those peace marchers, I ended up on a helicopter carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin, but that's another story.) Sam's song hits all the right buttons, spiritually and musically - there's a little echo of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love" in the chorus, a Beatles evocation on the bridge, and a nod to Edwin Starr's greatest hit.
    Sam's organized a music-video contest around the song, so those of you who are into that sort of thing should check it out. So should everyone else - except, maybe, those who still believe that folks like Bill O'Reilly speak for America.

    Finally, check out the newest two issues of Fangoria the world's No. 1 horror-movie magazine, for a couple of pieces I'm proud of. I visited the Oklahoma City-based set of the new movie Soul's Midnight for my report in Fangoria No. 270. It includes a sidebar interview with director (and stand-up comedian) Harry Basil, who talks about both Soul's and Fingerprints, a second Oklahoma-lensed feature that's generated a lot of pre-release buzz.
    In Fango No. 271, the current issue, my pal and frequent collaborator Michael H. Price joins me for a look at the underrated 1980 horror film Without Warning, which was undoubtedly an "inspiration" for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator. We've said it before and we'll say it again: The big studios co-opted every good idea the low-budget drive-in filmmakers had, pumped 'em up with money and starpower, and released 'em as major movies, without acknowledging their cheap-film roots at all. The Without Warning/Predator similarities, I think, were a harbinger of this practice, which still exists today, you bet.

 

Update: 04 FEBRUARY '08

 

    If you happen to be interested in Oklahoma-related movies and music, you might want to check out a couple of newly released articles penned by your faithful (sort of) correspondent.

    The current issue of Fangoria, No. 270, carries the story of my visit to the set of Soul's Midnight, a vampire film starring Armand Assante that's due out on DVD even as we speak. My Oklahoma City-based friend and entertainment insider Bud Elder, who was helping with publicity for the movie, got me down to OKC and in to see Gray Frederickson, the Academy Award-winning producer who was overseeing Soul's Midnight for his company, Graymark Productions. Long affiliated with Francis Ford Coppola, Gray was a producer on the Godfather films (he won his Oscar for Godfather: Part II), Apocalypse Now, and The Outsiders, among many others.
    An Oklahoma native, Gray decided to return home a few years ago and make some movies that, thanks to his skill and savvy, look a lot bigger that their budgets would suggest. On Soul's Midnight, he had a solid group of familiar faces in the lead roles, topped by the veteran Assante. I was able to visit with Mr. Assante in his trailer, and I'm happy to report that he was pretty much how you'd hope he'd be -- sophisticated, kind, thoughful, and articulate. In fact, everybody on the set -- beginning with Gray -- seemed to go out of their way to tell me or show me whatever I might need for the story. In my nearly 30 years of writing about entertainment, I can say that this is something that doesn't always happen in set-visit situations, and after my evening on the Soul's Midnight set, I came away pulling for Graymark and for everyone associated with the picture.
    One of those people, by the way, is Harry Basil, a stand-up comedian as well as a director, who was a protege of the late Rodney Dangerfield. Basil is justifiably proud of Soul's Midnight, as well as another Oklahoma-lensed Graymark picture, ,Fingerprints -- as you can tell from the sidebar interview I did with Harry for the Soul's Midnight story.
    I'm proud to say I've been appearing in Fangoria, the world's most popular horror-movie magazine, since issue No. 23, which came out in November of '82. I broke into Fango by writing up an interview with the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Ed Neal, who was a fellow guest at one of Larry Lankford's wonderful Fantasy Fair conventions in Dallas. For more on the magazine and the whole Fango empire, check out www.fangoria.com

    The music story appears in the current issue of Oklahoma Magazine (Vol. XII, No. 2), in which I have a bimonthly (soon to be monthly) column, It's an interview with my pal David Teegarden, the Top 40 hitmaker (Teegarden & Van Winkle's "God, Love, And Rock & Roll" in 1970) and longtime drummer with Bob Seger's Silver Bullet Band. Dave tells the story of the long-suppressed rock 'n' roll/political documentary, Ten for Two, in which he, Seger, and Skip "Van Winkle" Knape appeared. It's a fascinating story, and I hope I did it justice.

    You can judge for yourself -- for free -- by picking up Oklahoma Magazine's latest issue, available at finer restaurants and clubs (and possibly, a dump or two) in the Tulsa area. I believe they're also in some Oklahoma City venues as well. And they don't cost a dime.
For more info, check out www.okmag.com

As always, thanks for stopping by.

 

18 DECEMBER '07

 

    So my webmaster son, Jonathan, who is a 23-year-old filmmaker and hip to these sorts of things, tells me the other day that if I don't start doing a little more blogging in this space no one's going to visit any more.
    I have to tell you that I'm fairly reticent to plunge into this blogging thing, which is no surprise to anyone who's taken a look at this website over the months and noticed that I update it once or twice a year, when a new book or something else of mine comes out. I figured that would do the job, but apparently not.
    Okay, look. Here's the deal. When I was Jonathan's age, the closest analogue to blogging we had was fanzines, little magazines done for the sheer love of it, usually having to do with comic books or science fiction and fantasy or old pulp magazines and other nostalgia/escapist topics. A few of us like-minded kids would talk our way into church or school offices and commandeer a duplicating or mimeograph machine, and crank out these little publications in editions of 20 or 50 or 100 and mail them off to people across the country, hoping to get back at least what we called an LOC (letter of comment).
    Yes, those were the '60s and early '70s, and things change. But chances are if you're one of those folks who were around when dinosaurs ruled the earth, like yours truly, you've got a bit of an approach-avoidance problem with cyberspace. I think some of it can be boiled down to this: It just seems too easy.

    Probably, this is just the latest manifestation of that line the old folks have used on every new generation: "Well, in my day, we didn't have it so easy!" Of course, that's true. Things do get easier in a lot of different areas as the years pass, thanks to unrelenting technological breakthroughs. And that's all fine. But I'm with another old poop, the unfortunately late Kurt Vonnegut, who opined toward the end of his life that we'd advanced technology enough - how about trying to advance humanity a little bit?
    These days, anyone in the world has the potential to communicate with loads of people via the internet. A person can do this regardless of whether he or she has anything to say, or even whether he or she has the skills necessary to communicate it. (And don't get me started on how cowardly it is to hide behind a fake name and take ugly potshots at others.)
    Chances are, if you're of a certain age (hint: mine), you've blanched at the execrable communications skills flaunted by many of the denizens of cyberspace. Forget such niceties as subject-verb agreement, modifiers that don't dangle, correct spelling, or actual sentences. Some of the stuff is absolutely incomprehensible, and it's going out there where tons of people are supposed to see it. In some cases it's like - as Raymond Chandler wrote in a different context -- an idiot with a machine gun. There's all this power to communicate, and, if you'll excuse the expression, it's being pissed away by people who don't care enough to learn how to communicate.
    It's the same thing with radio call-in shows. Now, I don't spend one millisecond of my life listening to the saliva-slinging political airhorns, but I do like sports talk about major league baseball and pro football, and I especially like the syndicated Jim Rome show. But we have some good local guys on our sports-talk stations around here too, people who know their topics and do their homework and come up with some intriguing ideas and angles -

    And then, they open the phone lines. And here come people who, in what seems to me to be the overwhelming majority of the cases, haven't given any real thought to what they plan to say (something along the lines of "How 'bout my Sooners?" is all too typical) and don't have any new angle and just take the air out of everything. Even the callers to Rome's show -- who tend to be of a higher caliber, or at least a weirder bent - are hit and miss, and I find myself switching the channel when they come on almost as much as I do when our local guys open up the phones. I simply prefer to be entertained by professionals.
    Just because you can get access to the airwaves doesn't mean you automatically have something to say. Or, as my pal Jim Millaway once put it, there's a reason you have a radio receiver and not a radio transmitter in your car.

    Now, of course, thanks to the internet, we all have our freaking transmitters, and we can use them at any hour of the day or night. We don't have to go with an unexpressed thought, and I'm not sure that's particularly healthy.
    I've brought up a lot of this with Jonathan, and he's asked me how communicating on the Internet is any different than writing for the fanzines.
    It's a good question, and maybe it's simply the far greater number of participants, but I think it's more than that. I remember when I wrote my first piece for a fanzine - Paul McSpadden and Steve Fears' MASTERMIND, back in 1964 - I saw it as a huge opportunity, and a big responsibility. I strove to get everything right. I used every English skill I'd learned in school, and went over it several times, looking for the slightest error. I did not shoot it out into cyberspace like some wobbly, slapped-together projectile and go on to something else. I took a lot of time with it.
    So, yeah, it was harder. Maybe I even made it harder than it should've been. But the people who really interest me in cyberspace are the ones who insist on taking the time to craft something, who realize that just because it's easy to communicate on your computer, you shouldn't just throw something out there. Scattering some random thoughts with no regard to communications skills doesn't make you a writer, just like a bunch of blank verse scribbled after your girlfriend dumps you doesn't make you a poet. To be good at anything, you've got to work at it. I think it may just be that simple.

    I realize that I've tackled a number of different notions here - but, hey, isn't that a part of blogging? And please don't construe this as a rant. I'm more bemused than anything else, and I'm just trying to dope the whole thing out rather than dismiss it out of hand. So, if you'd like to enlighten me, or explain why I'm not looking at it right, or even agree with me, please feel free to send me an LOC. Yes, I'm kidding. Please email me at webmaster@johnwooley.com

     Meanwhile, here are a couple of things written in the spirit of the holiday season. The first is a little poem that came unbidden to me yesterday morning. The other is a story I wrote back in 1995 for the Tulsa World editorial section. Those of you who are comic-book fans might want to know that the man I refer to in the opening paragraph of the newspaper piece was the great Funk Age artist and writer Leonard B. Cole, whom I was proud to call a friend.

 

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY HAIKU
Puppet plays in black and white
And a starry sky
Gently snowing Jesus Christ

 

(THIS ORIGINALLY RAN ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 1995, AND IS POSTED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE TULSA WORLD.)

    About a week after we'd sent him a chatty Christmas letter with a picture of the family, my wife, Janis, and I found out that an old friend in New York had died. The death of any friend is a tragedy; the death of a friend you haven't seen as much as you want to can be especially unsettling -- especially at this time of the year.
    "You know," Janis said as we talked about it that evening, "it just doesn't seem right for people to die around Christmas."
    No, it doesn't. All the accouterments of Christmas, from the manger scene on the living-room table to the star at the top of the tree, symbolize joy and hope, not sadness and death. The whole story of the Savior's birth is the story of hope fulfilled by God, delivering on a promise. These days, we react to the spirit of that fulfilled promise by giving some of what we have to make other people joyous. The Tulsa World sponsors a drive to help the area's neediest families. Churches and radio stations and service organizations and merchants all organize efforts to help others, and it's a rare working man or woman this holiday season who won't be helping someone else -- a stranger -- realize some Christmas hope.
    Maybe in the middle of all of this necessary and wonderful effort, though, it would be good to remember that without sadness, there would be no need at all for hope. If we were all joyous and content, why would we have to hope? For me, the most poignant Christmas moments of all are those in which sadness and hope are intermingled, with people nobly overlooking their own sadnesses in favor of providing hope and joy for others.
    It's the sight of cardboard letters proclaiming "Merry Christmas" in the smeared window of a subsidized apartment on the wrong side of town. It's the aging members of a dying organization pulling together to decide how many Christmas baskets they can afford to give away this year. It's a poor kid, a kid that's maybe been kicked around, buying a can of peas -- or taking one out of a meager pantry -- to donate to a church food bank. It's a guy, two days off the street and two days sober, volunteering to pull on a Santa hat and ring a bell in front of a Salvation Army kettle. It's a child wrapped in rough garments approximating the clothing of Christ's time, shivering as he or she stands stock still in a "living nativity," watching the cars roar by on the street in front. It's even ourselves as adults, remembering our Christmases as kids, and the precious innocence and sense of wonder that gradually fell away from us like shed, shimmering skin as we grew up.
    There's no joy, no hope, without sadness. Even the Savior was born in a stable, to bedraggled and undoubtedly stressed-out parents who'd looked all over town to find a decent bed and instead ended up sharing a stable with animals. The moment their blessed child was born, he was on his way to the cross. And the star of God shone over it all, over this sweetly transcendent mixture of hope and pain, sadness and joy.
    In this season, we strain toward the light of that star, and its light, in turn, illuminates us from within, lighting up the darkness of our lives. We call that light the Christmas spirit, and nothing is more holy. It continues, as long as we live, to see us through our sorrows and to shine just often enough through our mortal eyes in this, the most joyous, most hopeful and saddest season of them all.

    If you're a fan of '60s and '70s music, you might want to catch another piece I've just reprinted, concerning my musical hero Augie Meyers.


(Click on the picture to read the article)

    That's it for this go-round - except for a piece of subliminal advertising buy my books and my best holiday wishes. Many thanks, as always, for dropping by.

 

 

 

           -- Back atcha soon, you bet...
                 -- John Wooley

 

Contact at webmaster@johnwooley.com