This is, the column is by Tom Perry. The title is by Dean Grennell, who created it specially for my first fanzine article some years back as he rejected the article for Grue. The rejection was one of the biggest favors ever done me in fandom, ranking along with the favor Ron Ellik did me in rejecting my first column. Fortunately I realized this at the time and destroyed the article, so that all that remains in the title---a name without a referent, like "quagga" or "dodo".
For certainly this piece won't be as sercon as that one, or even one I did recently in another fanzine on punctuation marks. Nevertheless I can't help observing that naming a fanzine Hyphen is no reason to boycott the pther signs on the typewriter. The failure of certain terminal punctuation to appear at the ends of sentences in the last few issues has caused this reader to go crashing helplessly from one sentence to another without stopping. This lack of periods ( known as men-no-pause) could destroy the graceful rhythms of my measured prose and may make you lose your breath, though not from admiration. If the situation prevails in this issue I hope you'll join in urging Walt to end each sentence with a colon in the future, Then it can tryly be said that the pause that refreshes is cola.
Why don't they call them toadstool clouds?
Probably the biggest change in fandom as I knew it in the middle-fifties and now is the rise of comic-book fandom as a respectable institution. There was a time when a fanzine reviewer could dismiss one of the first comic-book fanzines by quoting from a detailed analysis of the plot and character motivation of a murder comic and adding simply, "Now, I ask you..."
No more. My wife Garrett and I were chuckling one night a few weeks back over the latest price list from Claude Held, a New York comic-book dealer, which solemnly listed a Batman No. 1 for thirty dollars and a collection of Prince Valiant Sunday strips for five hundred dollars. Garrett said absently, "You know, my grandmother has a great big box of old crime comics up in her attic."
"She does?" Suddenly the world of comic-book collectors took on a depth and reality Mr. Held's lists had never given it. "How old?" Garrett remembered that the comics dated from the nineteen thirties and forties. "We're rich," I exclaimed, bouncing up and down..
By a coincidence she was going to visit her grandmother in rural Nebraska the next Saturday. I called her from work that evening, hardly daring to hope. It was as I had feared. "She'd thrown them away," Garrett said. "Oh," I said. A dull ache entered my heart. She hadn't disposed of them years ago either, Garrett went on--she'd thrown them out about two weeks before the visit. Somehow this made it worse. I was only slightly mollified by the fact that the old lady was as anguished as we once she learned the things were worth money. No doubt she would have wanted a cut of the swag.
That was the beginning and end of my career as an old comics dealer, but it's caused me to do some thinking about the whole institution. I wonder if collecting comic books makes less sense than for instance stamp collecting (which I've begun to feel lately is a dimbrow mania). At least the comics tell a story, however childish. I am no comics fan myself---they cut off my nostalgia when they discovered I couldn't remember the word Bruce Wayne says to turn into Superman---but I suspect comics fans are commonly put down a little too strongly. I don't say that most comics aren't puerile crap; I do suggest they needn't be.
I won't dwell on this because I suspect that someone has already made the point in a 5000 word article while I wasn't looking, but I think it's sufficient to look at the parent of the comic book, namely the newspaper comic strip. The Associated Press recently estimated that 96% of newspaper-reading Amrticans follow the funnies, and the other four per cent were probably fibbing. {Less than five per cent regularly read the editorial pages.) I do myself, and if that isn't sufficient recommendation---well, you do too, don't you?
The high literary content of such strips as Pogo, Lil Abner, Krazy Kat and such has long since been proven by higher mathematics in august mundane reviews. But the intelligent and even intellectual comic strip has grown increasingly common since a possum first delighted sixth fandom, and it's now more common to read about a caveman gone genius than an English lord gone apeman.
In fact it was in 'B.C.' that I read one of the simplest and most fascinatingcomments on our economic system. On July 19, 1963, a sly cavemen named Peter was telling B.C.: "First we'll gather up all the worthless stufff and set it up as currency. Then we hire all of the guys to gather the good stuff for us, and pay them with the worthless stuff." B.C.: "What in the world will they use that for?" Peter: "To buy back the goodies they gathered.
A year later that still strikes me as quite as profound as Henry Miller's classic comment on economics: "But what makes money make money?"
And even less entertaining strips have their value. Dondi, which centers around a World War II orphan who must be mentally retarded, is surely one of the most stickily saccarine confections offered. But February 17, 1964, found Dondi and one of his friends discussing the shortcomings of a fat friend who strongly resembled a certain statement: "You ought to be just as selfish to him as he is to you." Dondi: "That's dopey, Baldy. You mean if I can't change Chuck into being nice, I should let him change me into being selfish?" Baldy: "Sure, why not?" Dondi: "Can't you see that if every good kid took your advice, the whole world'd soon fill up with selfish Chucks?" This appeared in newspapers whose editorial pages, about that time, were devoted to insisting that we should try to starve the Communist countries by refusing to sell them wheat we didn't need."
Of course when it comes to editorializing, Little Orphan Annie is the old original. No US reader can fail to know what I mean, but Britishers may need to be told that the pubescent orphan has been used to support the impeachment of President Franklin Roosevelt, the defeat at the polls of reform politicians, the acquittal of crooked businessmen like Samuel Insull, and--- is nearly as one can tell from the nice nostrums the message is phrased in---a nuclear world war.
Fortunately the harm she might do is offset considerably by the heavy-handed treatment her moral messages are given. In this Harold Gray closely resembles Ayn Rand. It seems to be a truism that earnest moralizers forget they are writing entertainment and come closer to turning out tracts, even as Robert Heinlein has been doing lately.
Still I have to wonder at a recent achievement of Gray's. General Douglas MacArthur, who was fired during the Korean war for refusing to obey orders, was much admired by conservative newspaper owners who, one suspects, wouldn't hesitate to fire their own subordinates for similar refusals. After his death last spring two newspaper columnists produced delayed-action interviews in which the general said he had wanted to drop atomic bonbs on Red China after his strategy with conventional weapons had failed in Korea. He was also supposed to have mentioned favorably a plan for spreading radioactive cobalt around over wide areas.
Without commenting on the controversy raised by these proposals, I must say I'm amazed that Harold Gray managed to kill off his heroic munitions tycoon,"Daddy" Oliver Warbucks, the same day that General MacArthur died. To appreciate this you must know that comic strips are drawn from a month to three months ahead of their publication date. The next day found Orphan Annie listening to a conversation on the streets of a large city. Several pasty-looking young men with beards, glasses and long hair were commenting on the death of Warbucks: "Good riddance. Why, he might have got us into a WOAH!!! " A bulldog-jawed citizen in suit, tie and hat replies: "Oh yeah? Well, if he did, he was one guy I'd bet on T'WIN it for us, panty-waist! "
Maybe I'll never know how Gray managed to co-ordinate the two events. (Surely he can't have had the co-operation of the general?) But I can take comfort in the fact that, while Daddy Warbucks surely will return, the general, this time, won't.
Scott is the author of Waverly
"Little Joe Pilati's come to our house to stay. ."And the Birchers gonna get you if you don't watch out!" Yes, Joe, here for the summer with a newspaper job, makes us nervous with his insistence that Goldwater could win in November. For comfort I have to turn to John Boardman, who assures me he can't. My own opinion is muddled. I don't think he can, but I have been leary of complete confidence in impossibilities lately; I remember too well the assurance I felt a year ago about President Kennedy's re-election. A lot can happen.
But other than that, Joe Pilati is a very pleasant house guest. It's nice for an isolated fan to find someone else with similar attitudes...for instance, towards the coming of the mail. My wife and the neighbors are practically indifferent to this exhalted event, but Joe shows a proper reverence. My only complaint is he seems to get more than I do.
That, and of course his carelessness about MY mail. I was working from 10am to 6pm recently and had to call home each day to find out what had come. "Nothing," Garrett said after Joe had brought in the mail. I went home to lunch with my heart down in my socks. When I came back I found a note to call home. Joe Pilati was apologetic. "There is a letter from Bob Lichtman for you," he said. "It got lost in my letters. I'm really sorry, Tom." I could hear him chuckling off mike. "That's OK, Joe," I said. "There's also a letter from Germany, he added. Now his laughter was wild, insane. "It must have got, uh, lost among my huge masses of letters," "Sure, Joe, sure," I said, senile tears in my old eyes. Fortunately, there WERE letters from Lichtman and Germany waiting when I got home---else you might read in Fanac next year about a sensational fannish murder case in Ohama, Bebraska.
(data entered by Judy Bemis)
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