After The Fanfare Dies

by The Editor

I sit quietly, contemplating how to begin this thing.

Shadows of laughter, stray conversations drifting, being packaged up, carried
away...

Guest speaker at Detroit's Triple Fan Fare was Roger Zelazny.  This was the
first time this fan had ever seen the man and I had great expectations.  The
trouble with having high expectations is that they often go unfulfilled,
causing quite a letdown.  Not so here -- maybe because I had just finished
reading "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" shortly before the talk and its spell
enwrapped me all the way through the speech.  The dreary feeling is now, after
it's over, realizing that the high point has passed.

Mr. Zelazny impressed me.  No one to idolize and fawn over, exclaiming, "I got
his autograph!  I sat next to him for a half hour!"  No one rates that.  But, a
quiet, modest man with deep capacities of feeling.

He's received a lot of awards, a lot of acclaim.  It arouses apprehension in
the image of brilliant skyworks shortly fizzling out.  I don't feel this'll be
the case here; acclaim hasn't gone to his head and one respects him the more
for it.  And in his deep capacities lies a great deal more promise.

My interests being science-fantasy, Triple Fan Fare equalling science-fantasy,
movies and comics with comic fans super-abundant and the science-fantasy genus
rather rare, I had apprehensions as to whether Mr. Zelazny's talk could
possibly be of real interest to me and them both.  It turned out to be for me.
It should have been for them.

The basic motif of the talk was:  shadows.

"Literature, of necessity, contains shadows," Mr. Zelazny began.  A writer or
illustrator or movie maker never writes or draws or films an entire story.
Shadows are necessary.  A writer must select the salient features and imply a
lot of things.

What is left out forms the shadows; and the readers' or viewers' inferences
from the implications the author has left are the part of the story that that
participant creates himself.  Shadows are not in the pictures or the words;
shadows are what lie between them.

Reading involves taking things in through words and interpreting what one
ingests, playing with the shadows.  It is at this point that one may feel that
elusive sense of wonder, caused by a fascination with the outre', the strange,
the fantastical, the horrible; and it's the shadows with which the sense of
wonder plays.

What was great about some of the old radio programs in comparison to the
current TV or movie varieties, Mr. Zelazny continued, was that they left a lot
for the imagination to play with.  Pictures can cheapen the images of
imagination, destroying much of the shadow.

In the visual media, comic art-wise, shadow exists between panels, the
happenings happening thence.  In films shadow comes with fade-outs most often.
It can also exist in flashbacks or, say, in the unseen background in close-ups.

The different fandoms -- film, s-f lit, and comic -- represent different ways
of dealing with the same basic subject matter.  Although these different
dealings hit different senses, the fandoms are close, and close because of the
common sense of wonder dealing with the shadow.

Mr. Zelazny mentioned ways in which cross-fertilization goes on between the
areas of film-fantasy, comic-fantasy and literary fantasy, and read an example
from his own work.  Comic art influences the sf novel and short story by its
sense of the visual, serving as a valuable writing tool towards another way of
describing.  Zelazny, when wanting quick descriptions, often visualizes a
panel, freezes it and describes it.

Motion picture influence enters through the use of the camera and the effects
of zooming in, backing off, shifting and fading out which it can create.
Zelazny mentioned that he finds himself thinking of sequence in movies and
applies this to his writing.

Vice-versa, the modern novel with its breaking of traditional patterns has
influenced the movies in some of its approaches, in French movies particularly.

A summarization followed, and thus ended the essence of Mr. Zelazny's talk.

The talk was useful in this listener's case because it, too, left intriguing
shadows.  I found myself thinking about the few things which I shall herewith
throw out in their half-thought forms.

In view of borrowing from other media, cannot the success of Marvel comics be
attributable to cross-fertilization and their use of the shadow?  It seems to
me that the Marvel story formula is a mixture of super heroes, the old pulp
formula as found in such things as The_Shadow, Doc_Savage, G-8 et al. and
changeless old soap opera.  Melodrama, wise-cracking, and pathos; mix well and
apparently it's much more interesting than past and current comic pap.  It
really still amounts to pap, by any higher standards, but standards are
relative, depending on the individual applying them.  And it can all be fun, as
long as one's willing to adjust his standards.  I can read Stan Lee, Walt
Kelley, Roger Zelazny, Mack Reynolds, Alan Watts, Dylan Thomas, Lao Tzu,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Planet_Stories and Trace -- all with pleasure, at
times, but certainly not with the same critical standards.

The other element in Marvel's success, their use of shadow, isn't really
separate from the recipe above; it all forms one cumulative effect, but we'll
treat it separately for the moment.  Firstly, pictures themselves can be
evocative.  In the science-fantasy field Powers, Bok, Finlay and Calle stand
foremost in my mind; but Marvel has done fairly well with some of their fantasy
scenes -- particularly in Thor (parts of "The Living Planet" and much of the
tales transpiring in Asgard) and Doc Strange.  At times very evocative art
(although the phraseology in Doc Strange with its tenth-rate Lovecraftian
spells and exclamations gets quite nauseating) -- leaving much for the mind to
play with in the domain of wonder.  (However, compare any Marvel cover with
virtually any Bergey cover on Startling_Stories or Thrilling_Wonder_Stories
-- and Bergey received more knocks in the letter column than anyone -- and the
Marvel ones pall in comparison.  Again -- relativity.)

Another very definite place where shadow play enters is in Marvel's "coming
next issue" whettings.  To the reader allowing himself to become involved in
the melodramatic hero's problems, the selection of elements mentioned in the
saga to come leave plenty of shadow to play with.  The fact that the next
issue, soberly and critically looking at it, never lives up to expectations is
beside the point since it's our own minds playing with the shadow spaces that
creates the magic -- and the magic lingers in future expectations.

My personal tastes are attracted to the literary (that word has all sorts of
wrong connotations -- I'm simply differentiating between comic and the "wordy"
variety of reading) treatment of science-fantasy.  A single copy of
Startling_Stories with a novel I've never read by Henry Kuttner would excite
me much more than a box-full of rare comics.  I read comix seldom and watch
films seldomer, and this may tend to make me a bit prejudiced, but in line with
what Zelazny said about the radio programs I think we can make similar
comparisons between the literary, comic and movie media -- value comparisons
Zelazny probably couldn't make during his talk because it may have alienated
4/5 of his audience.  The movie medium leaves the least shadow for the mind and
imagination to play with; comics second least and literary the most, even more
than radio since radio puts vocalized interpretations to what is said.  In the
literary form much more is left for the reader to do; it takes more effort on
the reader's part to fill the shadow.  I like to think there's a
proportionality between effort expelled and joy and value received.  It seems,
to my values, the greater the effort to participate, the greater the rewards,
intangible and unlabellable as they may be.  That's assuming one can
participate meaningfully.

At the Fanfare there was one comic selling fan -- nameless and faceless now --
who found s-f zines too difficult to read.  Nothing to do with quality or his
valuations of quality, it was all those words that threw him!  A rather
frightening level of illiteracy...  Movie watching, too, can easily involve
little to virtually no contribution on the part of the watcher, and this too
can be frightening.

On the other hand, even though the pictures in comics, and the background,
movement and spoken words of a film all tend to fill and limit the areas of
shadow, they do have the advantage of filling in things your mind would never
have imagined.  There is the possibility of them ruining the shadow for you,
but a perceptive artist may well, and in fact does, see things you would not
have seen, so it becomes an enriching experience, giving you more elements for
your own future shadow play.

Some kind of balance becomes desireable at this point.  And Marshall McLuhan's
ideas on media pertain here, I suppose, since they seem a bit unbalanced.  I
tend to dislike his ideas since the printed word does leave more shadow and I
think one still needs the shadow to play with, by oneself.  For shouldn't, in
broader terms, our lives become our own artistic creations also, not just a
gallery of others' creations we wander through?  The strength to dream is
imperative to my values at least, and emptiness is necessary to provide this
possibility.

Interweaved amongst all this may well be a part of the reason many s-f fans try
their own hands at writing, many of the pros themselves having come from the
ranks of fandom.  Science-fantasy with its strangenesses and uncommonality
(relatively, again) takes a more imaginative person to participate in, to fill
in its shadow areas, to sense its implication, simply to read in his part of
the story.  (At least that's what a high percentage of fans have been telling
themselves for the past couple generations).

This leads to sense of wonder, especially when the experience is new; but one
can also see why fans who play very much with these shadow areas (and
science-fantasy provides more provocative shadow than any other genre) --
because of their own involvement -- often begin putting that play into their
own words.  Thus the tendency of s-f fans to write the stuff.

In conclusion, thank you, Mr. Zelazny, for the shadows you've left.  This fan
will continue to play with them, hoping you continue to leave more, equally as
provocative as those you've imparted to us.

--Norman E. Masters

[pp. 4 - 11, 59, NO-EYED MONSTER #13, Winter 1967-8))

[~~written 1967]


Updated May 12, 2001.  If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.