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FADEAWAY #40 is a fanzine devoted to science fiction and related fields of interest, and is produced by Robert Jennings, 29 Whiting Rd., Oxford, MA 01540-2035, email fabficbks@aol.com. Copies are available for a letter of comment, or a print fanzine in trade, or by subscription at a cost of $20.00 for six issues. Letters of comment are much preferred. Any person who has not previously received a copy of this fanzine may receive a sample copy of the current issue for free by sending me your name and address. Publication is bi-monthly. This is the April-May 2014 issue __________________________________________________________________________________________ INTERESTING NEWS Brad W. Foster, well known science fiction fan artist and regular contributor to

the pages of this fanzine is running for the office of TAFF for 2014 along with his wife Cindy. The Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund was established to bring well known and popular fans on both sides of the ocean across the Atlantic to major conventions. This year it is the turn for a North American fan to journey to the UK to attend the World Science Fiction Convention being held in London over Labor Day weekend. TAFF exists solely thru the support of fandom. Anyone can vote, so long as each vote includes a donation toward the fund of not less than $3.00. Larger amounts are earnestly sought and gratefully accepted. The deadline for voting this year is 22 April, 20l4. The TAFF fund provides for a (mostly) expense paid round trip to the London convention. Brad is the winner of multiple Hugo Awards as best fan artist, he writes witty and interesting letters to assorted fanzines, and people who have met him in person at conventions also note he is articulate and often has humorous and insightful comments to make. His better half Cindy is no less articulate, and in addition has a wonderful memory for names and faces. She is definitely a convention person.

I believe Brad and Cindy would be excellent choices for the TAFF honors this year, and as if they are the winners, Brad has promised to do more than a ‘mere’ convention report related his assorted adventures on British soil. In addition to Brad and Cindy, two other fans are on the ballot this year: Curt Phillips and Randy Smith. These are both fine individuals, trufen each and all, but I believe Brad and Cindy would be the very best choice

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to carry the TAFF banner from the US to the UK this year. I urge you to vote for them, and since the deadline is short, to please do so as soon as you can. The web link to the TAFF Ballot with all the pertinent details is---http://taff.org.uk/ballots/taff2014.html

And, a final brief word from the candidates: “We'd appreciate your support, of course, so we can visit London. Look on it as a way to get us out of the US for a while! So, don't forget to vote soon, and vote often!” And, what would be a TAFF campaign without a campaign poster? MORE AMAZEMENT, ON A DAILY BASIS I have been vaguely aware for some time now that there are quite a lot of national holidays, both the official and the unofficial kinds.

The most significant ones are the 13 Official Monday Holidays that the federal government acknowledges by allowing all government workers to take the Mondays the holidays fall on off. The stock market, banks and other semi-odious businesses usually follow these declarations by closing down as well. Of course this does give rise to some speculation as to why every

important person in US history was born on a Monday. It does seem like an amazing coincidence. Well, anyway, there are also religious holidays like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, plus some Jewish or Islamic holidays devoted to the art of gluttony.

There are also other assorted Official Holidays, momentous events certified and acknowledged by our benevolent government, but which those who observe are not allowed to take any work time off. This includes things like national Peanut Butter And Jelly Day (2 April, for those who will probably miss it this year and want to began making those gala Peanut Butter & Jelly Day 2015 party celebrations early).

Many of the more unusual national proclamations are heralded in the Calendar Section of The Insider, an excellent fanzine produced by Richard and Michelle Zellich for the St. Louis Science Fiction club. This is a great mag that is always a fun read, and I don’t just say that just because I happen to contribute a fanzine review column to its pages every issue either. It’s a unique publication with a full array of articles and news that takes a side-whacked bizarre look at the world of science and technology as well as covering news events concerning the world of science fiction, both print and media. But despite the meticulous attention Richard and Michelle give to their listings of unusual national days of celebration, I have to admit I was completely unaware that there

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was a National Science Fiction Day until I saw it mentioned in the “Holliday Droodles” cartoon by Missy Meyer (reprinted ovdr there). 2 January is National Science fiction Day, which Wikipedia, the universal font of all true knowledge, says “is given some degree of credence by its recognition by organizations such as the Hallmark Channel and by the Scholastic Corporation” even tho it is not acknowledged by any governmental agency. 2 January just happens to be the birthday of famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Gosh, call me a cynic, but my suspicion is that the reason Scholastic Books and the Hallmark Channel acknowledge the day is so they can relentlessly promote the works of Asimov and other things science fictional, particularly films, in order to (gasp) reap profit from the occasion. Shocking indeed.

I think it is up to us dedicated SF fans to turn this into a genuine holiday. 2 Jan is pretty much the absolute pits as a time to schedule any kind of holiday event. It’s right after New Years Eve’s drunken debauchery, and it also follows what should be acknowledged as National Buffalo Wings and Football Day on 1 Jan, so its pretty clear this isn’t going to attract large hoards of people. But still, science fiction literature despite its current fad status in movies and video games has never been the fashionable In Thing with the general population. Really, if the entire genre is stuck with 2 Jan as our national holiday of recognition, we should do something with it, something beyond buying Hallmark Cards or distributing public domain Scholastic Paperbacks to grammar school libraries. Maybe we could have our own parade, filling the air with giant flying saucers and Robbie the Robot floats. Why couldn’t we have a Miss Universe beauty contest with representatives from Neptune and Mercury, for example? Costumers could go wild for this event. I see the potential for a major SF convention-cum-media campaign that could result in lots of publicity for the literature we are all supposed to be reading these days. Since 2 Jan is so soon after the New Year, the event could take place is some warm climate, and be a totally liquor free event. That alone would garnish the con plenty of free publicity. Altho, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a Hallmark Science Fiction Day holiday card. Has anybody stumbled across one of those things? I would be very curious to see what they have turned out for this special “Holiday”. HE HUNTS THE BIGGEST OF ALL GAME…

While realizing that many people reading this may not be greatly interested in Old Time Radio, nonetheless I am going to mention some important news for those of us who are involved in the hobby. It is now official that vast numbers of original Green Hornet radio shows held for years by the family of George W. Trendel, one of the owners of radio station WXYZ in Detroit, have been released to the hobby. The new transcription disks are being released thru Radio Spirits. New material from the late war years, (1944 and 1945) and from the character’s relaunch in 1952, when he fought those dirty commies trying to infiltrate American society, have already come out, and more are due to be released over the next three years. This is good news indeed. Part of this was directly due to the preparation and release of that awful Green Hornet movie that appeared back in 2011, a dismal effort that tanked in theaters thruout this country. Incredibly, that turkey made money via overseas release, which either says something about the total lack of good taste among foreign movie goers, or the deplorable state of movie making overseas that causes something this putrid to actually be welcomed abroad. I leave the actual details to film historians.

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The appearance of Marty Gram’s monumental 816 book on the Green Hornet which included his interviews and discussions with the offspring and relatives of George W. Trendel helped aid their decision to release those shows to the hobby. A link for those interested to Marty’s website for that book (still available for sale) is here--- http://martingrams.biz/books-2/the-green-hornet-a-history-of-radio-motion-pictures-comics-and-television/

Some of those programs, particularly the late war years when many of the writers and a lot of the actors/staff working at WXYZ were off in military service, are pretty bad, but many others are excellent, and it’s good to hear any of these lost episodes again. The shows from the later part of 1945 and onward are particularly strong. This has also helped to spark more interest in the Green Hornet comic book(s) being produced by Dynamite Comics. Just recently I sat down (actually, I lay comfortably on my bed) and reread the entire run of all the assorted Dynamite Green Hornet series titles from the first issue thru the most recent one. This has been a mixed bag. Some of those comics are excellent. Some had been disappointing. The biggest letdown to me was the eight issue run reprinting many of the original Green Hornet comics from the 1940s. The publishers of that particular series claimed in later years that the comic never made any money, and after reading these reprints it’s easy to see why. The art by the Whitman studio is pretty crude, even for the time period.

But even with lackluster art the series could have been saved with some decent stories. Unfortunately what the publisher chose to do was to adapt Green Hornet radio scripts and turn them into comic book stories---five or six pages worth of comic stories. Since most GH radio shows involved at least several plots and sub plots, the efforts to cram a half hour of radio adventure into five pages of comic panels doesn’t work at all. They weren’t all failures, but most of them were. The modern reprint series ended abruptly after eight issues. The original series ran 47 issues, from 1940 thru 1949 under two separate publishers and thru several title changes. Likewise the quality of some of the new Dynamite series has been uneven. Some of the short run series, particular Year One, and Blood Ties have been excellent. Some of the others have not been. There have been two regular ongoing Green Hornet titles, the original series that had been going for over four years, which was basically set in today’s world, and a second series by Mark Waid set in late 1930s era Chicago. Martial arts action abounds in all of these modern Green Hornet comics. This was a feature of the (deservedly) short lived television series that co-starred Bruce Lee as Kato. The primary series, set in current times, has an involved back story in which the original Kato sought to return the glories of the past by re-creating the Green Hornet persona with a new member of the Reid family. The new Kato is his daughter. In the original radio programs Kato plays a significant part in the adventures, but there is no martial arts action of any kind by anybody.

Generally speaking I’m very happy with the story quality and the art of the Mark Waid authored title, but the regular ongoing series, which ended after 42 issues, took a sharp downward turn shortly after the midpoint, in my opinion. The stories were inept, with no strong themes. In addition the stories spread out over multiple issues (at $3.99 a pop), and the artwork lacked definition. The faces of all the characters was especially weak, so it was often hard to tell who is who in this series. Machinery and autos were also not strong points of the artists working the regular series. This long on-going title started out well, but fell on hard times as different writers and different art teams were swapped off thru the run. I continued reading this series all the way to the bitter end, but if the publisher had not cancelled this series I would have dropped it from my reading list anyway.

I thoroughly enjoy the Mark Waid series, but I can’t help wishing that he had not set his treatment of the character into late 1930s Chicago. I realize this is a background setup with the Dynamite Comics Green Hornet mythos, but Chicago is a real life city, and the history of that metropolis as well as that entire mid 1930s period is easily accessible, so anyone with the slightest interest in history can check on it and compare the fictional adventure with realty. I don’t think that’s a good thing for most comic books, especially not for a masked vigilante character like the Green Hornet. Still, I haven’t read a bad number in that series so far, and the art had also been exceptional. Will there be more new Hornet comic series? Hard to say. The Green Hornet craze, fostered by the movie, seems to be over. On the other hand if the new Mark Waid series continues to gain popularity Dynamite may decide to add a few new mini-series or short run titles to capitalize on the situation.

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Comic readers who have not sampled this newest Green Hornet comic book title should check it out. It is well worth the asking price. Those who are interested in the radio series are advised to visit the Radio Spirits web site and look over the new boxed sets of Green Hornet radio dramas now being offered in exceptional sound on CDs at affordable prices. I am certainly enjoying them, and you might too. REMARKABLE NEWS ON THE FANZINE FRONT Canadian fan friend Murray Moore recently stopped by after attending Boskone #51, held in mid Feb over in Boston. This was an after con meeting. We missed a meeting on the Friday before the con because of classic miscommunications. I wound up sitting outside the restaurant in my car, waiting for Murray and his better half to arrive at their appointed time, while they had actually arrived much earlier due to light traffic, and were inside waiting for me to pop in the door. Anyway, during our conversation on President’s day morning over breakfast we were discussing the circulation of my fanzine Fadeaway. Murray was amazed that I was mailing out about twenty copies to people in Canada. I ventured the opinion that altho the fanzine was posted on the eFanzines site, I wasn’t sure that very many people were reading it there, since damn near nobody was sending in letters of comment based on the internet exposure. Murray filed those comment away, and later the same week he emailed me some interesting stats. It seems that Bill Burns who runs the eFanzines site, keeps meticulous information on the site usage, including number of visits, number of downloads, number of people visiting the site, the most active times of each day broken down by hours and even more. Murray directed my attention to the pie chart and total stats for fanzine downloads during the merry month of February. It turns out that Fadeaway #39, (my most recent issue) was the third most popular fanzine on the site for the month, with an incredible 4,927 downloads for the issue! The most popular zine was Chris Garcia’s Drink Tank #365 with 10,142 downloads, followed by Science Fiction/San Francisco #149 with 5,560. Fourth was another Drink Tank issue, #364 with 2,774 downloads, then there was everybody else, lumped on the chart as ‘Other’ with dramatically fewer downloads.

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I am stunned! Who wudda thunk it? I am just amazed. My next thot after getting this info was that I was glad all those people hadn’t asked for printed copies of the fanzine. My next thot was to wonder why, if so many people are downloading and reading the fanzine, was I am not getting more LOCs from them? I get lots of LOCs from the people who receive printed copies of the zine thru the mail, but for that particular issue posted on the internet I have gotten exactly three comment emails. Clearly, the people most interested in the mag are the ones who want printed copies; they seem to be the most involved.

However, I am still impressed that almost five thousand people are downloading it from the internet. A lot of discussion has taken place in this and many other fanzines, indeed, thruout the whole world of SF fandom in recent months, about the vast difference in response rates between printed fanzines (referred to from this point onward as Real Fanzines) and e-zines posted on the web, whether posted either on the eFanzines site, free-standing, or otherwise. In general the response rates for on-line fanzines is abysmal. Nobody has been able to figure out why there is such a huge difference in the fan response rate between Real fanzines and fanzines made of pixels displayed on computer screens. I think the main difference is that the people who read the Real Fanzines happen to be genuine science fiction fans. Some of the people reading the e-zine postings may be trufen as well, but I am willing to bet that the majority are not. They are certainly not fanzine fans, otherwise they would try to get more involved with the fanzines in some way, and clearly they don’t. I think the fact that most of the material offered over the internet, both informational and entertainment oriented, happens to be offered for free, and that very few of these sites even pretend to offer a viewer/reader response facility, has a lot to do with this. People have gotten lazy. They are so used to having everything they want handed to them for free over the internet that they do not even consider that the people who create and write something like a fanzine would appreciate feedback from its readers. Since everything is free, and most site designers don’t care what their opinion happens to be, they don’t bother to offer feedback for those few places where it would be appreciated. Considering that the internet has and continues to be in the process of wiping millions of print venues off the face of the earth, this is a situation that is not likely to change in the future either. As I may have mentioned before, we seem to be going full-circle here. Once the mantra of SF fandom was that “it is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan”. Today you can just insert the word ‘fanzine’ into that line to have a true picture of what modern SF fandom has become. I am a print fanzine fan. I will remain a print fanzine fan as long as there are other print fanzine fans out there willing to read my stuff and provide me with comments that let me know somebody actually cares about what I am producing, and to provide springboards for discussion and the free exchange of interesting ideas. Not many of us left, I guess, but I guess I’ll continue on with it anyway.

MORE NEWS ON THE SERIAL FRONT Following up on comments received from readers who were interested in additional doings of our local serial appreciation club, the Cliffhanger’s Collector’s Club, I thot I might provide some news from one of our recent meetings, where the club has decided to expand its range of material somewhat, venturing beyond the conventional confines of “Perils of Pauline” and “Zorro’s Fighting Legion” and others of the same ilk.

Bon Jour, mes ammines, and welcome to the new year, a year which sees our glorious club, the Cliffhangers, expand beyond the borders of provincial America and embrace the possibilities of world cinema. Indeed, the March meeting of the Cliffhangers, sparsely attended, but bringing together the core heart of our glorious organization, saw the club take a dramatic move into new directions, venturing into new, unheralded territory regarding the episodic serial film format. By a unanimous vote of all those present, the club decided to expand our club holdings to material of an episodic nature which here-to-fore had not been considered within the scope of our organization’s core mission. We finished off the bland and banal “Deadwood Dick” serial,

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produced by Columbia Pictures on a decidedly limited budget, and after a few chapters of the even more dull and pedestrian thirties pot-boiler “Chandu the Magician”, starring Bela Lugosi sleep-walking thru one of the most boring stories ever placed on celluloid, the club took its acquisitions into bold new directions with the presentation of the French chapter classic “The Adventures of Charlotte”. This wonderful internationally recognized cinema masterpiece of chase and dangerous exposure had been mostly unavailable to the general public for several decades, generations even, due to the misguided efforts of certain reactionary splinter groups; a minority segment of small minded provincials, which felt that this bold, innovative film production features elements which, in their restrictive outdated Victorian viewpoint, did not fit into a narrowly preconceived notion of what the theater going public at large should be allowed to watch. Their efforts, instigated against the will of the majority of film viewers and upheld in part by politically appointed doddering right-wing decrepit old coots in the court system, have kept this French film classic out of the hands of viewers and collections for many a year. But, with a new century, a century of human progress, tolerance, openness and artistic integrity, this long unavailable film classic has been released in the USA in a fully digitized restored print with clear sharp English language subtitles for those few scenes in which speech actually takes place. Most of this wonderful film has lots of intimate, adventurous action and little or no vocal lines, altho there are certainly ample sound effects thruout. The cinematography is extraordinary for its panoramic views, and particularly for the close-up scenes of actors in actions which bring the exciting events on the screen to a successful climax for both actors and audience members alike. This film was so well received with the membership that we watched over half of the serial, eight chapters, on the spot, and would have completed it all that very night, except for a motion, carried by popular vote, to go back and rewatch chapters three, five, and seven again, to make sure we fully understood all the plot intricacies which were taking place, particularly as those specific chapters took place on a single static set which made the activities of the stars that much more extraordinary.

Even at that, we decided to take yet another look at chapter seven, to make sure we appreciated all the magnificent dramatic action nuances the young virile actors portrayed when they were on the screen giving it their all. Indeed, several of us wondered how such remarkable acts of movement, position and dexterity could be performed by human beings who did not otherwise appear to be double jointed. It was certainly something to marvel at, and we did, three times in a row. We also watched a feature film, “Kiss of Death”, a film noir classic featuring Victor Mature and Richard Widmark, which most of us had not seen in a good many years, and some had never seen at all. It was all right. But it certainly palled in comparison to the exciting French serial classic “Adventures of Charlotte” and its cast of talented players. We will be finishing up “Adventures of Charlotte” at the next meeting, and we may just take the opportunity to watch the opening chapters of another serial, also newly available to the discriminating buying public, one from Indonesia which is supposed to be even more graphic than “Charlotte.” It depends on how much time we have. Members are advised to arrive early and plan to stay late. You don’t get a chance to see material like this very often.

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BOBBY BENSON:

The Cowboy Kid

By

Jack French This article is Copyright by Jack French, 2014 The Bobby Benson radio series, in it’s two versions a decade apart, was unique in broadcast history since it straddled both the origin and the demise of the Golden Age of Radio. When the show debuted in 1932, the only other juvenile shows on network radio were LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, LONE WOLF TRIBE, and THE SINGING LADY. So the first BOBBY BENSON series pre-dated THE LONE RANGER, TOM MIX, and JACK ARMSTRONG. The second version of BOBBY BENSON which began in 1949 and aired until June 1955, outlasted virtually every other kids’ adventure show, including SUPERMAN, GREEN HORNET, CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT, SKY KING and STRAIGHT ARROW. The creation of this remarkable western series rests in the genius of a British citizen in Buffalo, NY, who had never been west of Chicago. Herbert C. Rice, an energetic immigrant from England, had been working since 1928 at what he termed “the American BBC” (Buffalo Broadcasting Corporation) consisting of WGR, WFBL, WKEN, and WKBW, all under one roof in the Rand Building. Rice was a radio director, writer, and actor of amazing versatility. He was the first to pair “Budd

and Stoopnagle” and Rice discovered an 11 year old boy-musician who would grow up to be “Buffalo Bob” on HOWDY DOODY. Prior to BOBBY BENSON, Rice had created dozens of local dramatic series, including POLICE STORY, THE GREEN ROSE, FEARBOUND, THE COBRA, and CLOUD TRAIL. In 1932 the Hecker H-O Company of Buffalo approached Rice and offered to sponsor a kid’s radio series to promote their cereal products. The “H-O” in their title suggested a cattle brand to Rice and he quickly drew up a story about an orphan named Bobby Benson who inherits an H-Bar-O Ranch in Texas. Rice not only sold his idea to the Hecker advertising people, he also convinced CBS to give his new show a network slot. This new series, called THE H-BAR-O RANGERS, began on October 17, 1932 at WGR with a cast of Buffalo actors. Richard Wannamaker, the 11 year old son of a local attorney, played Bobby while Rice, in addition to writing and directing the show, was also the voice of Buck Mason, the foreman, and Wong-Lee, the Asian cook. Others in the cast were Fred Dampier and Lorraine Pankow (whom Rice had married the previous year.)

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The success of the series was nothing short of phenomenal. Within months, the Hecker Company had to assign twelve women full-time to answer the fan mail and process the box tops of H-O Oats that were arriving daily in exchange for premiums advertised on the show including Bobby Benson code books, cereal bowls, drinking glasses, card games and more. Locally Rice promoted the show through many personal appearances by Wanamaker, dressed in a cowboy costume and riding a pony named “Silver Spot.” The youngster, who was doing three radio shows a week, appeared with movie stars Ben Turpin and Snub Pollard at Shea’s Buffalo Theater and later visited with Monte Blue when he came to Buffalo. Wanamker was also part of the contingent who welcomed Santa Claus to the Buffalo Airport. When the first season of 78 episodes ended in March 1933, the series was so popular that CBS ordered the production moved to New York City where they recast the entire cast and crew. When it resumed that fall 12 year old Billy Halop, later to achieve fame in “The Dead End Kids”, became the new Bobby. The show was still officially THE H-BAR-O RANGERS, but most of the listeners and the broadcasting publications were calling it THE BOBBY BENSON SHOW. Halop’s little sister, Florence, played “Polly Armstead” on the show. Buck Mason was changed to Tex Mason and the character of Sunny Jim (the sponsor’s symbol) was gradually phased out. Diogenes Dodwaddle, Windy Wales and Harka the Indian were added to the show. Eddie Wragge, the brother of Betty Wragge, portrayed “Black Bart,” who despite his name was not a villain, but a pal of Bobby’s. Another occasional friend, Jock, a Scottish boy, was played by Walter Tetley, one of the busiest child actors in radio. The identity of the director of this series in Manhattan is still unknown, but a prominent author, Peter Dixon, who was writing for several network shows including SKIPPY, was hired to produce the scripts. Craig McDonnell played Harka and other roles, including youngsters (in a falsetto voice.) Woodward “Tex” Ritter, then 28 years old, was on other radio shows including COWBOY TOM’S CAMPFIRE, LONE STAR RANGERS, and MAVERICK JIM. While Ritter played occasional roles on the BOBBY BENSON show, it’s unlikely he played Tex Mason, as some source claim. Billy Halop was given even more star treatment than Wanamaker. Photos of Halop were distributed in several radio premiums and he toured

summers as “Bobby Benson” in the W.T. Johnson Circus Rodeo. There were actually two concurrent casts, one on each coast, staffing the BOBBY BENSON radio show. CBS in conjunction with the Don Lee Network, also produced this show in Los Angeles with a local cast, using the same scripts that Peter Dixon was writing in Manhattan. The identity of the actor who played Bobby in California is not known, nor have I determined how long this arrangement continued. Incidentally, Peter Dixon was more than just the writer on this series. Contemporary accounts in L.A. newspapers reflect he had casting approval and he was sent there to audition for the west coast version of this juvenile western. In a 1961 newspaper interview, television perennial announcer, Bert Parks, claimed that he was the 1930’s voice of “Little Luke Ledbetter,” the best friend of Bobby Benson. It seems doubtful that an 18 year old boy who was a six foot high junior announcer on CBS, would be cast in this role, since his voice had long since changed. But let’s give Bert the benefit of the doubt. This 15 minute show enjoyed substantial success and logged over 700 episodes before it went off the air in December 1936. Halop had left the radio

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show to join the Broadway cast of “Dead End” in the fall of 1935, but the identity of the boy who replaced him for the last year is unknown.

Despite the length of the series, not one recording from this 30s program is known to exist today. I’ve located only two scripts from the CBS version, both in anthologies. The two scripts, which represent individual episodes from different story lines months apart, are typical of the series. Although it was set in the West of cowboys, Indians, stagecoach robberies, cattle rustling, and claim jumping, it was still contemporary. Bobby and Tex traveled on horseback, but also used fast cars and airplanes. One of the scripts is about the H-Bar-O Rangers trying to stop a jailbreak while the other has Bobby piloting a small plane in an around-the-world race. The Hecker Company promoted the show a great deal, including printing full color comic strips of Bobby’s adventures on the back of the boxes of “Force” cereal. The firm offered a raft of premiums in exchange for coins and box tops. Among the most popular ones were code books, photos of the cast, card games, cereal bowls and tumblers with Bobby’s likeness on them. There were also two full-length adventure books written by Peter Dixon, “The Lost Herd” and “Tunnel of Gold,” (the latter illustrated by Glen Thomas) which the Hecker Company distributed as radio premiums. In addition, in 1934 they authorized Whitman Publishing Company to release a Big Little Book entitled “Bobby Benson on the H-Bar-O Ranch.” Dixon wrote the text for that little volume, but the artist who drew the pictures for every other page is uncredited. It would be thirteen years before the program was resurrected. In June 1949, Rice, by then a U.S. citizen, was a Vice President with the Mutual Network and he put the show back on the air. With no sponsor in sight, he renamed the ranch “The B-Bar-B” and pared the

cast down to five regulars: Bobby, Tex, Windy, Harka, and a new character, Irish. The versatile Craig McDonnell was again in the cast, playing both Harka and Irish with completely different voice characterizations. Don Knotts (who would later go on to TV and movie fame) was then in his mid-20s and got the part of the old geezer, Windy Wales. Ivan Cury, a talented 12 year old with over two years of radio acting, beat out several auditionees to win the lead of the “Cowboy Kid.” Rounding out the cast as Tex was veteran actor Charles Irving. Jim Goode was the sound effects man, with occasional assistance from Barney Beck. Frank Milano did all the animal voices, and the announcer was “Cactus Carl” Warren. Milano was superb voicing all the animals, including episodes where he had to do two animals fighting each other. Other regular performers on the show included Bill Zuckert, Earl George, Gil Mack, Ross Martin, Jim Boles and his wife, Athena Lord, who played the Mexican cook, “Tis Maria.” In the summer of 1951 Bob Haag took over the role of Tex Mason from Charles Irving. Many years later Jim Boles got a role in Don Knott’s movie “The Shakiest Gun in the West.” Ross Martin, after a successful radio career, went on to co-star in television’s “Wild, Wild West.” A young director, Bob Novak, was in charge, and Peter Dixon returned to write the scripts. However his age and illness prevented him from keeping pace with the series, which required several

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scripts a week, (By 1950 this 30 minute show was on Monday through Friday at 5:30 pm and also Monday at 8 pm, Saturday at 5 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, all from the studios of WOR.) Peter Dixon’s son David, also a writer, helped out with some of the scripts, but the problem was not solved until Jim Shean arrived in September 1949. A young man and a military veteran, Shean quickly took over the bulk of the script writing duties, and within a year was the sole writer. The cast and crew liked to tease Knotts about trying to make “Windy Wales” sound like Gabby Hayes. Don wasn’t (and the others knew it) but he was a nervous guy and susceptible to teasing. Years later, in his 1999 book, “Barney Fife and Other

Characters I Have Known,” Don recalled a day in which he was at the microphone rehearsing when Gabby Hayes stormed into the studio and yelled, “Gol-dern it, you’ve been doing me on the radio every day and I’m sick of it!” While Don quaked,

Hayes ranted more and then burst into laughter. In the control booth Don noticed Bob Novak and Jim Shean, who were in hysterics. They has set up the whole thing with Gabby and fooled Don Completely. BOBBY BENSON AND THE B-BAR-B RIDERS was an immediate success, and it alternated days on Mutual with STRAIGHT ARROW, which was produced on the West Coast. Cury appeared on the cover of “Sponsor: Magazine for May 22, 1950, which contained a lengthy photo article. One of the photos was a personal appearance by the radio cast at Macy’s Department Store. Cury and Knotts were there as “Bobby and Windy” but two substitutes were necessary. An unknown New York actor was dressed as “Harka” and David Dixon was impersonating “Tex Mason.” Later Cury appeared in a photo shoot for an article on the series in the August 1950 issue of “Radio and Television Mirror.” Herb Rice always pushed the personal appearances of his young star. So when he wasn’t on the air, Ivan was dispatched to parades, rodeos, and festivals throughout the East Coast, accompanied by his parents. But when Rice tried to send “Bobby Benson” overseas (the show was also popular on AFRS) Ivan’s mother put her foot down and refused permission. Instead of Ivan, Rice corralled a juvenile singer, Bobby McKnight, dressed him up as “Bobby Benson” and sent him on a ten day tour of Europe. Thereafter McKnight handled most of the public appearances in the U.S. while Cury had all the radio duties. Both of them can be heard on the Decca 7 inch record, “The Story of the Golden Palomino,” with Cury doing the dialog and McKnight doing the singing. Eventually Rice designated his executive assistant, Mary Jane Williams, to be the “Bobby Benson” chaperone on all the domestic trips of the Cowboy Kid, disguising her in press releases as his “Tutor.” Beginning in 1950 WOR-TV produced a weekly television version of BOBBY BENSON for local airing. With Ivan Cury and Don Knotts and some of the radio cast, the show was produced live at the New Amsterdam Theater. Al Hodge, better known as Captain Video on Dumont Television, played Tex Mason because Charles Irving looked too old for the role, and both Irish and Harka were eliminated from the TV show since Craig McDonnell, a portly Caucasian, did not resemble either ranch hand. Shortly thereafter the program was moved to Channel 9 Studio on West 66th. This TV series, a 30 minute drama, was sponsored by Foxe’s “U-Bet”

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Chocolate Syrup. Their most famous promotion was a contest with the winner receiving a live pony. This live television show was written and directed by Hal Cranton who had to use a lot of stock film footage to convey the corrals, cow herds, horses, and the Big Ben countryside. It must have been rough on the cast for in addition to doing the radio show three times a week, they also had to memorize their lines and blocking for the television show plus endure a rigorous rehearsal schedule. They rehearsed in a studio setting for three hours in the morning on Monday and three hours in the afternoon. On Tuesday they moved to the New Amsterdam Theater where they had a final dress rehearsal for three hours in the afternoon before “going live” for the half-hour evening airing. These early days of live television provided many occasions for near disasters as actors forgot their lines, props turned up missing, or commercials fell apart, and the BOBBY BENSON show was no exception. On one occasion, Al Hodge could not find his pistol on the prop table, so he stuck out his middle finger to confront a robber, hoping the camera man would change the angle of the scene to shield the absence of his weapon. Recently Ivan Cury told me of one of the funniest incidents that occurred during the live airing of one episode, which involved a real pony in their commercial. This disastrous episode began routinely as the script called for the B-Bar-B riders, trapped in the bunkhouse by owlhoots, to escape by making smoke with a device to smoke out bees from their hive. However the actual smoke was created on each side of the stage by two members of the crew, who had not had time to test their smudge pots. The result was giant smoke clouds that completely concealed the entire set and actors. And it was time for the live commercial in which Ivan was to stand next to the pony that the sponsor was giving away to a lucky viewer. Ivan gamely struggled through the smoke, located the pony, put his arm around the animal’s neck, and launched into the commercial pitch. The thick smoke apparently irritated the pony’s bowel system, and the proceeded to dump several pounds of steaming fertilizer behind him. The smoke concealed this accident and Ivan continued on, with a straight face, trying to finish the commercial. One of the camera men, overcome with laughter, fell off his boom crane onto the stage, breaking his arm…which was also unseen in the smoke. This incident. and others like it, would convince WOR-TV to use a much more modest and

controlled format in televising the next version of BOBBY BENSON, some years later. In early 1951 Ivan left the B-Bar-B for a role on PORTIA FACES LIFE and more free-lance work on network radio. Bobby McKnight was pressed into service as the new Bobby Benson but he lacked radio experience and soon, as his voice started to squeak into maturity, another replacement was sought. Rice looked no farther than his next door neighbor in Stamford, CT, a nephew of his, Clive Rice. This ten year old lad was born in Surry, England and had immigrated to the U.S. the preceding fall with his parents. Herb had him audition for the role under the name of Clyde Campbell so the decision of Mutual executives would not be influenced unfairly. Clive won the role, and after some quick diction lesions at the Alfred Dixon School to “Americanize” his dialog, he joined the cast in the WOR studios in April, 1951. “Bobby Benson” was once played by a girl! Clive’s sister, Rosemary Rice, (not the radio actress with the same name) was in the studio to observe his rehearsal and a live performance. Just before the “On the Air” sign lit up, Clive developed a profuse nosebleed. As others tried to stop the bleeding,

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Rosemary took his script, raced to the microphone and delivered his lines until Clive recovered. Since her voice sounded so much like her brother’s, no one in the vast radio audience noticed the switch. The personal appearances of Clive Rice as “Bobby Benson”, accompanied by Mary Jane Williams, must have been exhausting. Occasionally Tex Fletcher, Don Knotts, and a local actor hired to play “Harka” would appear with them. Fletcher, a cowboy singer from New Jersey, was born Jerry Bisceglia, and he would play “Tex Mason” on these tours. But the trips were grueling. A Mutual press release in the fall of 1951 lists the sites of their personal appearances in September and October: Waterbury, CT; St. Oetersburg, FL; Waterloo, IA; Huron, SD; Seaford, DE; Ocnacock, VA; Minneapolis, MIN, Waverly, IW; Fall River, MA; and Mooseheart, IN. Every one of those destinations could mean over a dozen appearance shows on a weekend. I had an opportunity to see the scrapbook at Clive’s mother kept for him, and for one stop in Waterloo, IA it lists two dozen live shows over a four day weekend. These included appearances at churches and hospitals, radio studio interviews, plus six shows a day at the Dairy Cattle Congress. Don Knotts makes it clear in his autobiography that he resented being sent on these trips, since although Herb Rice covered their expenses, the actors were not paid for their time. In a typical state fair appearance, Clive and/or Tex Fletcher would sing a few songs, and Don would tell a funny “tall tale.” If a local actor could be hired to “Harka,” he would demonstrate some archery.

Knotts recalled their appearance at the St. Joseph, MO Rodeo when an actor named Bob Douglas portrayed “Harka.” He was stripped to the waist in Indian fashion and would shatter three balloons with his arrows from 30 yards. But this particular night, the temperature had dropped to near freezing for the last evening performance. Bob was trembling from the cold and had trouble getting the arrow in place on his bow. Don and “Bobby Benson” stood behind him as his shot and his arrows went wide of the target. So he walked several paces closer, still shivering in the cold, with Don and Bobby following him. But he again missed from his distance. He walked resolutely toward the balloons, with his two companions right behind him, and stopped about seven yards from the target. Don thought ‘Hell, I could hit them from here.’ Bob finally shot the three balloons and the B-Bar-B trio quickly exited the fairgrounds.

After the Dixons left the radio writing team, Jim Shean was the sole write and he was more than adequate for the task, even when the show was airing five times a week. He wrote exciting episodes about bank robberies, escaped convicts, wild horses, cattle rustling, and border smuggling. Occasionally he was frustrated by the lady in charge of “Continuity” at Mutual since she took it upon herself when reviewing his scripts, to not only keep “dirty” words out of the dialogue, but also to tone down scenes she deemed to horrendous for juvenile audiences.

“As a result,” Shean told me in 1994, “I was in constant conflict with her in trying to write an exciting show, so in revenge, I began spicing up my scripts to annoy her. At the same time, it helped brighten up things for the cast.” An example of “Jim’s revenge” can be found in Script #238 which aired 12-3-50 under the title “A Life In the Balance,” in which Bobby is in the hospital in intensive care for a serious injury where a broken rub is pressing into his heart. The B-Bar-B riders are gathered in the waiting room, fearing the worst. At the end of the show, Shean had Tex Mason come out of the operating room and say to the apprehensive cowboys: “It’s all over, boys. The Little Bastard is dead. He died from the shock of being commercial.” Of course the lady in “Continuity” probably went through the ceiling, but director Bob Novak merely changed the lines, after the cast had collapsed in laughter during rehearsal. After a few years of writing only adventure episodes for the B-Bar-B. Shean wanted to do some

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humorous programs. He convinced the director, Bob Novak, to let him write every third show as a comedy. Of course these “comedies: still had some excitement, but they were primarily humorous. Shean capitalized on the funniest guy in the cast, Don Knotts, to star in these comedic episodes. Some of these shows are among the 19 programs for which audio copies are in circulation among the hobby today. Included are “Cyrano Wales” (Windy gets the lead role in a play put on by a bogus acting company), “Tunnel of Trouble” (Windy’s letter to a lonely hearts club brings a suitor to the ranch), “Killer Wales” (Windy is mistaken for an outlaw and has to play the part) and “Grandma Wales” (Windy’s grandmother and an escaped convict come to the B-Bar-B.) In 1952 a spin-off of the BOBBY BENSON

show was created but Jim Shean did not do the writing for it. This came about when a prospective sponsor, the makers of Dentyne and Chiclets gum, came to Herb Rice to discuss an advertising arrangement. While they said they could not afford to sponsor the half-hour version, they wanted a smaller version to feature their advertisements. Rice created a five minute show for them, SONGS OF THE B-BAR-B which involved only three cast members. Each brief show consisted of a song from Clive Rice and another one from Tex Fletcher with a “tall tale” by Windy Wales in the middle. Most of these were recorded on disk with the Chiclets commercials. Jim McMenney directed (and probably wrote) these mini-episodes and they aired for most of 1952, usually once a week, and later resumed

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in 1954. I’ve located five audio copies of these and put them in general circulation. A second BOBBY BENSON local television series was shot in the mid 1950s with Clive Rice at the WOR Channel 9 Studios. The interior set, adjacent to that of “The Merry Mailman” was a tiny bunkhouse. The cast consisted of only three people, Clive, Tex Fletcher, and a comedian “Mr. Nobody: played by actor Paul Brown. The show was sponsored by Wilrich’s Grape Drink. It aired every weekday from 6:35 to 7 PM with Clive and/or Tex singing cowboy songs. Clive would also talk about western history and answer questions sent in by letter from his fans. I have yet to discover who the director and producer of this TV series was. The radio series remained on network radio for about six years, and the half hour version was a sustaining show for all but one season, when Kraft Foods paid the bills. The modest budget for the series gradually shrink: i.e. three live musicians were replaced by an organist, and later the show just used transcribed music. By that time John Gart’s position as musical director and organist had been eliminated. In the mid-50s BOBBY BENSON was popular enough to be featured several times in the hobby magazines of that era. He was on the cover of the July 1955 issue of “Model Fun: and it included a story of his adventures entitled “Rescue in the Dark.” A year earlier, in a series of issues, “Air Trails; Hobbies For Young Men” ran a special BOBBY BENSON contest to build the best model of the B-Bar-B bunkhouse.

The prizes, co-sponsored by Mutual, were quite generous. First prize was a gold mine and a one month trip to Deadwood, SD. Second prize was a four year scholarship to Sul Ross State College in Texas. The 13 follow-up winners each got a complete 20 volume set of the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia. One can only imagine the surprise when the September 1954 issue announced the winner to be a girl! Nancy Nibler, a 12 year old youngster in Lincoln, NE had one with the best model of the bunkhouse. The cast of BOBBY BENSON was also featured in the mid-50s issue of Dell’s “Who’s Who in Western Stars,” including photos of Tex Fletcher, Craig McDonnell and Clive Rice (identified by his professional name of “Clyde Campbell”.) McDonnell was incorrectly listed as the voice of Tex Mason. While he portrayed Irish and Harka very well, he

never played the foreman of the B-Bar-B Ranch on that series. The radio show finally ended in mid-1955, having broadcast over 350 episodes. Starting in 1950 there were 20 issues of a Bobby Benson comic book published with the last issue released in 1953. In addition the character appeared in other ME comic books such as “Best of the West” during the same time period. In addition to the comic books, premium merchandise from both series, including the one Big Little Book, our radio legacy from this popular program includes 19 half hour episodes, plus an audition disk with an Australian cast, and five of the 5 minute shows from 1952, all of which are currently being traded among the Bobby Benson fans today. When the series ended most of the cast and crew remained in the performing arts. Clive Rice did not. After high school he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and went on to serve decades on the sea for his adopted country. Don Knotts was unquestionably the most successful of the group; he was not only prominent in the movies but also won five Emmys for his television work. In the 1990s some of the BOBBY BENSON alumni attended OTR conventions in Los Angeles and Newark, including Ivan Cury, Clive Rice, Barney Beck, Bob Novak, Jim Shean, and Mary Jane Williams.

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Now, a half century after BOBBY BENSON ended, very few of the cast and crew art still with us. Don Knotts was the most recent death. He died of lung cancer on February 24, 2006. Ivan Cury lives and works in Los Angeles, producing and directing television commercials. Clive Rice retired in central Virginia where he and his wife are active in Civil War research. Jim Shean is retired in the Los Angeles area; he and Ivan Cury get together once in a while. Mary Jane Williams is in a retirement community in northern Virginia, and she has occasional contact with Clive Rice, whom she still calls “Bobby.” The BOBBY BENSON show was very special, not just to its thousands of fans for whom it provided years of adventure and entertainment, but the series also became a never to be forgotten part of the careers and lives of those who worked on the show. Clive Rice never worked in radio after 1956, but he still deeply cherishes the memories of that western program. He has retained all the precious souvenirs of BOBBY BENSON, including the cowboy outfit he wore, the holster set he had, his radio union ID card, and a scrapbook full of news clippings, photographs and programs from his personal appearances as The Cowboy Kid. His will specifies that these go to a local OTR library so future generations can enjoy them. Ivan Cury has remained in the broadcasting business all his life. Although he has been active as a television direction and producer, and has written two books on that venue, he still is very proud of his radio work on BOBBY BENSON, and frequently shows up at OTR conventions to talk to his fans. In 1994 he helped organize a BOBBY BENSON reunion at SPERDVAC’s annual convention where he, Don Knotts, director Bob Novak, and writer Jim Shean were present. Even those who did major work in radio, before and after their time on the B-Bar-B Ranch, were convinced that this juvenile western was the most enjoyable part of their careers. Bob Novak told me: “I’d served in the capacity of producer, director, and/or writer for a ton of major network radio shows…WE, THE PEOPLE; KATE SMITH; MARCH OF TIME; BRIGHT HORIZONS, the list goes on and on. But….nothing gave me more pure total fulfillment and joy than the B-Bar-B. It was such a great family of pros.” Writer Jim Shean worked on a number of shows, including GRAND CENTRAL STATION, CURTAIN TIME, SUPERMAN, COUNTERSPY and

others. But despite that, he always ranked BOBBY BENSON as his favorite. Shean explained: “The B-Bar-B was very special to me for two reasons. One was the camaraderie and professionalism of the cast and crew. I’ve often suspected that Bob Novak selected people with compatibility as a prime requisite. As a result, our group became a second family. Secondly, we all socialized together, with Novak leading the way. We even played lots of practical jokes on each other, although Don Knotts was the most frequent victim. But it resulted in total unity, so if we had a crisis on this live show, it was quickly resolved.” In 1993 I spoke with Don Knotts on the phone, chiefly about BOBBY BENSON. Knowing that he had left the show and then joined the Broadway cast of “No Time For Sergeants” (where he first met Andy Griffith) I asked him why he left radio. Don replied, “Heck, I didn’t leave radio; radio left me.” BOBBY BENSON ADDENDUM by Jack French © 2014 The two versions of Bobby Benson are a continuing research project for me. Here’s some additional facts I’ve learned about both versions in the past eight years. The west coast cast of the CBS version in the Thirties, while not fully identified yet, is beginning to be disclosed. Muriel Reynolds played Aunt Lily and Lawrence Honeyman was Black Bart. The two leads were portrayed by juvenile Hollywood actors, with George Breakstone as Bobby Benson and Jean Darling in the role of Polly Armstead. Both of them were well known to movie audiences of that period. Breakstone had played leading roles in several motion pictures (including Great Expectations, Dark Angel, and Swanee River) and almost got the role of “Puck” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Mickey Rooney won. Darling starred in dozens of Our Gang comedies and was also in 1934‘s Jane Eyre. She went on to be a Broadway performer and did television work in the 1950s. I haven’t yet determined how long the west coast version aired, but it was probably not on network radio as long as the Manhattan one with Billy Halop. Since I had interviewed Ivan Cury and Clive Rice multiple times, both of whom played the Cowboy Kid on Mutual, I tried hard to locate Robert McKnight,

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who had that role between Ivan and Clive. Unfortunately I never did, so I was very disappointed recently to find his 2009 obituary. McKnight, born in Hoboken, NJ on June 24, 1936 was a successful juvenile singer and actor in the 1940s. The lad was a winner on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, was Sal Mineo’s understudy for the role of the Crown Prince in Broadway’s The King and I and did regional theatre after training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After a three year hitch in the U.S. Army, he entered a Catholic seminary in 1964 and after his ordination in 1973 he served as a Catholic priest for the next 36 years. During that long time, he was assigned to several parishes in New Jersey and Vermont, achieving “senior priest” status in 2005. He died June 29, 2009 in his hometown of Hoboken. Tyne Daly gave the obituary at his funeral; they had appeared in summer stock together before he went in the Army and had kept in touch over the years. McKnight did not play Bobby Benson at the radio microphone for very long (I’m still working on that) but he made a lot of personal appearances as the Cowboy Kid, including a 10 day tour of the NATO countries in Europe. With the death of McKnight, only three members of the cast and crew survive today. Ivan

Cury lives in the Los Angeles area and has stayed in the performing arts business as an actor, director, and instructor. He is a regular guest at OTR conventions and will be at Nostalgia Expo in Cincinnati, Ohio May 16 and 17, 2014. (More details at <http://expo.wayback.net> Clive Rice, who served his adopted country well on the oceans with a long career in the U.S. Navy, retired to Roanoke, VA. Recently widowed, he devotes much of his time to Civil War research, battlefield tours, and conducting seminars on the Confederacy. Jean Darling, after a lifetime in the performing arts, retired to Germany, where she lives today, a still-spry 92 year old. She has her own web site <http://indigo.ie/~jdarling> and keeps in touch with her fans via email. She was recently hospitalized with an undisclosed illness and is now recovering at a convalescent

home where she will be until the first week of April, 2014. Cards and letters will reach her at:

Jean Darling Bowen Zimmer E16 Artemed Pflegestift Ober-Roderner-Str. 7 DE- 63322 Roedermark GERMANY

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Jack French of Fairfax, VA, a former Navy officer and retired FBI Agent, has been researching and writing about the Golden Age of Radio for the past three decades. He was inducted into the Radio Once More Hall of Fame in 2011. His first book, Private Eyelashes: Radio’s Lady Detectives, published by Bear Manor Media, won the Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction. His second, compiled with David S. Siegel, Radio Rides the Range, was released by McFarland in

November 2013. It has complete details on over 100 western radio dramas from 1929 to 1967 and is available in both paperback and ebook from several Internet dealers.

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BOOK BENDER THE VIKING PRINCE by Robert Kanniger and Joe Kubert; DC Comics; 2010; 7x10-1/2” Hardback graphic novel, 296 pages; ISBN 978-1-4012-2777-7; orig price $24.95---review by Bob Jennings I’ve had this book for a long time, but I’ve only recently managed to read the entire thing all the way thru. This volume reprints the Viking Prince comic stories that appeared in Brave and Bold 1-5, 7-24 and Our Army At War 162, 163. These are not all the Viking Prince stories that appeared in the late 1950s thru the mid 60s, but this volume includes most of them. The Viking Prince is a widely recognized and widely beloved DC comics character that has made periodic return engagements thru the years, including hardback graphic novels and numerous guest appearances thruout the DC universe. In the beginning a young man washes up on the shores of a Scandinavian village suffering total amnesia. The villages name him “Jon” after a legendary prince. Chief bad guy Thorvald knew his secret identity and wanted to kill him, by “accident” preferably, before Jon regained his memory or someone recognized him. The ‘secret’ was held close for several issues. After awhile the entire back story changed. Jon was suddenly the son of King Rikk, but had to earn the right to inherit the throne by performing twelve legendary and virtually impossible mystical tasks. Then, as an added complication, the usurper who sits on the throne and doesn’t want to relinquish it, feeds Jon a special potion that steals his memory. For daring to help him during a duel of mortal combat, a mute bard is forced to accompany the Prince, and aid him as Jon is thrust out into the world to accomplish his impossible tasks. This goes on for a bunch of stories with mythical monsters and fantastic menaces the norm. Then the backdrop shifts yet again, as we find Jon the happy son of the still living king Rikk who has adventures helping defend his father’s kingdom against invaders and other menaces, both mortal and fantastic. These stories tended to be longer, often taking up entire issues of Brave and Bold. These are the stories I initially read when I first encountered the character, and thinking the rest of the series offered the same story

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depth and scope, I bought scattered back issues of B&B over the years when I came across them at acceptable prices.

It took me a long time to read this book because I found that while some of the individual stories were interesting, many, most actually, were not. The stories are clearly hampered by being written during that period when the Comics Code was at its most restrictive. This meant that despite stories involving combat with swords and arrows, with blood-thirsty Viking raiders and wolfish barbarians, no blood of any kind can be shown, let alone the death of any human opponent. Even supernatural menaces are dispatched without the appearance of death. A few of the story plots are clever, but most are prodding and routine. Jon encounters a foe or a fabulous menace, he battles it, the menace is dealt with, his girl friend tells him what a great guy he is, and the story ends. They are not rubber stamps of each other, but conflict and the potential for enormous difficulty is more often hinted at than actually shown. In addition altho I have always been fond of Joe Kubert’s artwork, he was also working under the same constraints as the writer. Battles with armed opponents involve a lot of swords banging on shields, fallen opponents scream “I Yield!” at the top of their voices, with all violence downplayed. Arrows never hit human opponents, raiders attack but never burn buildings, no person is ever wounded or harmed. This is a series that calls for sweeping, panoramic shots of action, but there aren’t many of those present thru most of these stories. Instead we get close ups and medium close up shots. Even battles with mythical beasts such as dragons and flying monsters are shot in close perspective, as tho these were all B-Movie takes from a production company could not afford decent special effects. In addition the color in the early stories is just short of being drab, with lots of pale purples, pale blues, and pale orange colors dominating. Sharp heroic action calls for sharp, dynamic color combinations, but you won’t find any of that until the tail end of this volume. In the last pages of the book things open up somewhat. The stories are longer, and a new writer is handling the series. Bob Haney was able to create more interesting situations so the stories are better plotted. To be fair, he also had an entire comic book to work with, whereas the earlier stories were limited to eight or ten pages, which can be stifling, as reading those earlier stories clearly demonstrates. The last two stories with Kanniger back doing the writing recreated the character yet again. Sgt. Rock discovers the Viking Prince frozen in a glacier. He magically revives and fights along Rock and Easy Company in their WWII suicide mission against a particularly nasty Nazi menace.

In this incarnation Jon has a death wish. He has fallen in love with a valkyrie (this was not the same one he encountered back in B&B #19 when he had to obtain a feather from a flying horse). However no moral man may enter Valhalla, nor may a valkyrie fall in love with a mortal man, so Odin banished him until he died a heroic death. To make things interesting, with that nasty little twist so peculiar to ancient gods and so beloved by ancient poets, Odin decrees that “neither metal, nor wood—neither fire nor water harm thee! So thou must die in battle by anther way!” This situation was resolved at the end of Our Army At War #163 when the Viking Prince is killed by a plastique explosive charge. Plastique clearly fall outside the terms of the curse. As I said, it took me a long time, years in fact, to finish reading all the stories in this volume. The book is now technically out of print, altho plenty of copies both new and used can be found on web book sites such as alibris.com and amazon.com. Most of these stories do not date well. The adventures are routine, and those that offer the potential for sweeping heroic action are usually handled ineptly, with no sense of suspense or unique plotting that would hold a modern reader’s attention. Live and learn. If I had bothered to go thru my comic book collection and reread the Viking Prince stories I already owned I probably would not have bought this collected volume.

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RADIO RIDES THE RANGE: A Reference Guide to Western Drama On the Air, 1929-1967; by Jack French and David S. Siegel (editors); McFarland; 2013; 7x10 Trade Paperback; 244 pages; $49.95—review by Bob Jennings This is an impressive book. This is the first volume which attempts to list and offer information about all the western dramatic programs aired during the golden age of radio, a formidable task. Of course, as the editors cheerfully admit, the first problem they faced was what to actually consider a western radio drama.

For the purposes of this book “the west” is defined as being beyond the Mississippi River. This means that all the frontier pioneer adventures, stories in the tradition of James Fennimore Cooper, Drums Along the Mohawk, Seth Jones, Daniel Boone and many others were automatically excluded from consideration. I am not sure I agree with this definition at all, and it leaves out some interesting and important programs. Even more contentious for most people is the decision to also exclude all the nor’western adventures as well. This means that you won’t find Sgt. Preston, or Renfrew of the Mounted here, or any of the stories set in the wilds of Oregon or Washington state either. Also, no forest rangers or fire jumpers made the round-up. Less worrisome is the decision to eliminate all the programs that are primarily musical in nature. So we get Roy Rogers when his programs primarily consisted of dramatic elements, but not the Roy Rogers musical shows. Gene Autry is included, even tho at least half (and often more) of each show was music, because the other half (or less) consisted of a short western adventure scenario. Considering the hundreds of national and local western music programs that sprang up and disappeared over the decades this is certainly a wise decision. Music per se is not the focus of this volume, but drama certainly is, and no really suitable explanation is offered for passing over the frontier dramas or the nor’western thrillers. These decisions were apparently completely arbitrary on the part of the editors and are passed on with a brisk take-it-or-leave-it attitude. However once the reader jumps this hurtle the contents of the book make fascinating reading. Every single western radio drama that was ever on the air, or mentioned as being on the air, is covered in detail. Programs are written up in friendly, detailed fashion, covering the creation of the show, the players, the scripts, what the focus of the show was about, plus some examples of the story plots used in the series. In addition there is info on when and where the shows aired, who the sponsors were, and what happened to the programs at the end of their runs. I started reading this book intending to sample a few of the articles and wound up spending five hours reading and sometimes rereading the write-ups here. This is not just an invaluable reference guide; this is a loving appreciation by fans of these old programs, explaining to the reader what they were about, how they were created, and what made them enjoyable to the listening audience. Even those programs for which only one or two audio copies are available, or sometimes only a few scripts are available, are treated to the same careful consideration and attention to detail that long running series enjoy. Even programs for which only trade paper notices exist are covered. The wealth of background information often includes facts not generally well know. Jack French and David Siegel offer a lot of this material, but they share the writing assignments with other collectors who have a special interest in each individual show. What emerges is much more than a simple reference guide, or a simple appreciation of these old programs. What we get is an expansive encyclopedia of the western radio dramas that played such a large and significant part in the history of broadcast radio

There is a sampling of photographs sprinkled thru these pages, but not that many. The actual written appreciations and the information conveyed are the heart of this book. In addition there is a chart that slots each of the programs into the years it was broadcast, and depicts these shows in a thirty year running time-line. There is also a special section on westerns covered in mainstream radio drams and a listing of programs that are impossible to classify because information about them is virtually non-existent.

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Once I got over the fact that not all the westerns genre was going to be covered, I found that I loved almost everything about this book. Everything except the price. This volume retails for $49.95, which is a lot of money for a trade paperback, even for a trade paperback as valuable and as entertaining as this one is. The publisher is McFarland, a company which has always been delighted to charge everything the market will bear, plus an additional ten percent. Thru the years collectors and fans have had to make very difficult choices when it comes to buying or not buying their products, and I envision the same deep soul searching happening with a lot of radio fans about this particular title.

Let me tell you to bite the bullet (an old western term), and buy this book. Yes, fifty bucks is a bunch of money, but this is a wonderful book. I loved the write-ups, I loved the meticulous attention to detail, I loved the wealth of information provided, and especially I loved the long, chatty, interesting articles about these shows. If you are a fan of OTRadio you will love this book. Make some adjustments somewhere in your budget and purchase this volume. Give yourself a belated Christmas gift. Really, just buy it. You will not regret it.

You can access info about how to buy the book direct from McFarland at their website: www.mcfarlandpub.com, or you can call them at 800-253-2187.

JACKY’S DIARY by Jack Mendelson; Craig Yoe Books/IDW Books; 2014; aprox 9x12”; 192 pages; Hardback; ISBN 9781-61377-8388; $39.99---review by Bob Jennings Craig Yoe, producer of assorted esoteric books reprinting pivotal art and stories from the long histories of both comic books and comic strips has released one of the most important and certainly one of the most enjoyable volumes of his career. What can be said about “Jacky’s Diary”? That it was one of the most innovative, cleverest, and funniest Sunday comic strips ever created? That the artwork, purposely drawn as tho it was created by a small child, is so meticulous and carefully developed that it manages to

always look childishly crude, yet always manages to capture expressions, pertinent background, and to completely enhance the satire and humor its author generated? Jacky’s Diary: was the creation of Jack Mendelson when he was thirty-one and a half years old. He is now 86-1/2 years old (clearly stated on the front cover), and he has had an extensive career in the humor business. He has worked doing comics books thruout his life, painted cels for Famous Studios in the 1950s, became one of “the usual gang of idiots” at Mad Magazine, did story boards, breakdowns, wrote gags and scripts for Jay Ward and Hanna-Barbara, wrote for Laugh-In, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke, Three’s Company, the Muppets, Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dennis the Menace, helped script the Yellow Submarine movie and a lot more. Much of the history of Jack Mendelson is covered in an extensive twenty page biographical section at the beginning of the book. This is a guy who has made humor and cartooning his life, and seems to have enjoyed almost all of it. There are a host of amusing anecdotes and intimate background details about all the people and the projects he worked on, invaluable research information as well as being amusing and highly entertaining in its own right. There are forewords and afterwords by Mort Walker and Mel Lazarus that add even more info about Mr. Mendelson.

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But the heart of the book is the full color reprints of the Sunday comic strip. This volume carried the entire run of the strip which ran from 1959 thru 1961, during which period “Jacky” aged from 31-1/2 thru 34-1/2. The art itself looks crude, but a closer examination reveals that the layout, the design, even the lettering, is quite sophisticated. Everything is composed to maximize the humor potential and to deliver it in a clear story flow that carries the reader along from gag to gag. If you think consistently trying to draw like a little kid is easy to do, ask any artist about that, and s/he will cheerfully set you right on the matter. The adult overview to the writing with its sly sarcasm and minimal understatements, the deliberate mis-representation of words and adult actions as tho they were actually seen from the viewpoint of a very naïve young boy, make this a delight to read. Jacky’s Diary fought an uphill battle with newspaper editors thru its entire existence. Editors were trying to cut back on the Sunday comics in the late fifties and early sixties, not expand them. Meanwhile the King Syndicate people were delighted with the strip, but they really wanted Mendelson to add a daily. The comic strip syndicates made most of their money distributing black and white daily artwork. Doing the Sunday strips was more expensive, and without a substantial base, preferably a subscriber base of newspapers that was world-wide, such as Prince Valiant or The Phantom enjoyed, the profits were much thinner than they preferred. At its peak Jacky’s Diary was carried in seventy-five newspapers, half of them foreign clients, which meant the dialog had to be translated into other languages, an added expense that weighed heavily in King Feature’s decision to cancel the strip.

Jacky’s Diary breathed its last in 1961, altho a chopped up version was reprinted as a Dell comic book (Four Color #1091) in 1960, while some of the gags and the characters were recycled in Mendelson’s work for the assorted TV cartoons he helped write and produce, including two short Jacky’s Dairy cartoons that aired on Saturday morning TV and reran occasionally.

Recently Mendelson has donated his entire collection of original art to The Ohio State University’s Museum of Cartoon Art, and now, finally, after decades, this near-legendary comic strip creation is being offered in a hardback book. This is a wonderful comic strip and this is a must have volume. It is difficult to explain with mere words how clever this comic strip actually is. You really need to see this material to appreciate it. Words, or even a random sample strip cannot convey how insightful and how genuinely funny this material can be. You don’t have to take my word on this. Luckily many web-based book sellers including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are offering this volume at a substantial discount, AND, they are allowing potential buyers an opportunity to look at some of the inside pages so you can see for yourself exactly what the strip looks like in full color, and more important, just what an exceptional piece of humor this creation actually is. Here is a link to the Amazon page---http://www.amazon.com/Jackys-Diary-Jacky-Mendelsohn/dp/1613778384 Or just go to your favorite web based book seller and type in Jacky’s Diary.

Go there right now and read some of these strips. Glance over a few of these pages and you will instantly become a fan. Then buy the book. Do it right away. Like many Craig Yoe/IDW volumes, this title has a limited print run, and when the copies run out, they will be gone forever. Don’t be one of the fans who waited too late to purchase this wonderful collection and rued the loss forever after. BEYOND THE POLE AND OTHER WEIRD FANTASIES by Philip M. Fisher; Black Dog Books; 2014; 325 pages plus ad pages; 6x9”; Trade Paperback; ISBN: 9781884449376; $24.95---review by Bob Jennings Black Dog Books continues its efforts to rescue material from the pulp magazines of yesteryear and present them to modern readers in affordable trade paperback form. This is one of their latest efforts.

Philip M. Fisher Jr. was better know in decades past, altho he was primarily known as a writer of sea stories. He mainly wrote in the late 19teens thru the early 1930s, and his secondary specialty was weird stories, usually with some connection to the sea. He drifted away from the field of the fantastic when his career in the civil service and more profitable writing opportunities presented themselves.

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He was well known enuf to fans of supernatural tales to be profiled in a 1935 issue of the fanzine Fantasy Magazine. Born in 1891, he died in 1973. Despite the fact that many of his stories were reprinted in the late 1940s and early 1950s by magazines such as Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Super Science Stories and the Avon Fantasy Reader, he is largely unknown to modern fans and collectors. This trade paperback and a larger hardback collection not yet released may remedy that situation. This book is a mixed bag of material. It should be noted up front that Fisher’s writing style started out verbose and somewhat flowery, but as he honed his craft his writing skills sharpened and he was able to shape his stories with less wasted wordage and a lot more pertinent detail. The volume begins with a nifty little science-fantasy story in which a noted professor has decided that human will can achieve anything, if it is properly focused. Historical mystics and gifted individuals have managed to do such things in the past, but the protagonist has decided to use science in his quest for mind over matter. He has devised a battery operated machine that enhances and strengthens his thot waves so he can move objects with his mind, manipulate fire or chemical reactions, and more. When he attempts the ultimate demonstration, disaster occurs, because the inventor failed to realize that batteries in use can run down,

and without the boost supplied by his battery driven mechanism, his mental force alone cannot sustain his new powers. The second story is a forgettable, verbose ghost story set on the battle fields of WWI.

The third story is the most unbelievable, and the most frustrating story in the book. A professor of biology has decided that if some creatures and animals have managed to achieve near invisibility, so might a human being. His friends decide to play a joke on him by pretending he is completely invisible, only to discover that the man has suddenly become completely invisible. The feeble explanation for this process involves vibrational energy, but the story centers on the mental impact being invisible would have on a person, along with his frantic efforts to shed this curse and somehow insure it does not return. This particular piece of fiction has been reprinted at least five different times, so perhaps I am the only person who just doesn’t appreciate its merits, but I found the writing slow, the plot prodding, and the story ultimately unbelievable. The stories here are widely varied. Some could technically be classed as science fiction, but science so far as Fisher is concerned is what he read in the daily newspapers. Magnetism, electricity, radioactivity, these are important, but the force of human will and determination is as much a factor in his stories as any hard science. What he does deliver is an overwhelming sense of eeriness and outré menace. Strange, fantastic things confront his protagonists, occurrences they cannot at first understand, but which form a force that solidifies and which they must confront and deal with on their own. There is no duex ex machina in these adventures, the characters are on their own and face the unknown on their own terms. The short novel that forms the title of this collection is an oddity, but reflects the themes that Fisher had already touched on in his other stories. After the Great War a German war reparation Zeppelin becomes the property of the United States who refit it and send it on an ambitious far eastern tour. At the end of their tour the Captain decides to return to the States by flying across the North Pole.

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Needless to say problems develop. Electro-magnetic forces interfere with the radio, the controls are frozen, then the engines stop while the ship drifts ever upward. Days become weeks and months as the crew discovers they no longer have to eat or drink, strange energies feed them directly. They began to become transparent, and they gradually become aware of other invisible beings around them who turn out to be the spirits of the dead. The crew finally goes to join these spirits in their new plane of existence.

The underlying theme is that all life is based on electromagnetism, and the enormous electromagnetic forces around the Pole have disrupted both machines and men to separate the souls of the crew from their bodies. The record of this bizarre experience is discovered a year later by the brother of the dirigible’s Captain, who headed the rescue attempt. He discovers the strange narrative wrapped in a container of metal, asbestos and rubber. This wrapping was necessary since objects thrown from the vessel on its slow rise into infinity burst into flames instantly. Trivial and hackneyed tho this short synopsis makes it seem, this is a story with a lot of emotional impact, and a haunting feeling of strange twisted destiny, as the captain and crew are completely at the mercy of forces they do not understand and cannot affect in any way whatsoever. Most of the stories in this collection have that same unique appeal. It is Fisher’s handling of the themes that makes them interesting, and still very readable almost a hundred years after they were written. The sea was Fisher’s early occupation, and it remained a lifelong fascination for him. The mysteries, the superstitions, the awesome power of the oceans and the potential for unusual adventure upon those waters was his inspiration thru all the years he wrote. He turned out fiction thru the early 1950s, close to 250 stories according to some sources. Some of his best fantasies are collected in this book. It was an enjoyable read.

Once again, the major on-line book selling sites are offering copies of this volume at a respectable discount. It is certainly worth your effort to check this out and see why his writing is being rediscovered and reprinted in this new century.

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READER REACTION

Lawrence Dagstine; 1801 Bay Ridge Ave. Apt B-11; Brooklyn, NY 11204

Received FADEAWAY #39 in the mail today, and wanted to say thank you. Haven't gotten around to reading too much just yet, but definitely will. I enjoyed Issue #38 very much. I would have written sooner but I've been bogged down with health issues, a rare liver disease of all things and I am getting a biopsy next week. Wish me luck with that. I've written very little in the way of new speculative fiction these past 3 months because of it (short stories and novellas). However, I do have two collections commissioned for release in the UK in 2015. Small press. One is called FROM THE DEPTHS, and it is a 420+ page collection of stories and bronze age style comic illustrations by artist Bob Veon, front to back. It is a collaboration, and it is a beauty. 10 stories, 8 of which are new and mostly novellas, including a slightly extended Child Weeps in Moscow. My other collection is far less pages and is a "half-a-repro" collection with primarily scifi, called MY OWN PRIVATE EARTH. But FROM THE DEPTHS will be the ultimate of the two, and it will feature horror and dark, dystopian scifi. I'll send you a review copy upon release, as it will be available in print and ebook format.

I snuck the first page of FADEAWAY #39 though, and I couldn't help but notice what you and Kent McDaniel (who I am friends with on Facebook) had to say concerning Ebook royalties on such places as Amazon and Smashwords. Lately, I find Apple and Smashwords to be the more profitable of the ebook distribution networks. Amazon comes third for me, Nook fourth, and Kobo stinks altogether; don't expect any sales there. I was able to get some ebooks in libraries though, thanks to Smashwords, which I think is cool. The publishing climate is SO clogged right now, SO filled with would-be writers who don't proofread or edit their own work and put out incoherent garbage with ill-thought covers. Is it

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no wonder writers aren't making any money? Professionals included? To be honest, my earnings from my ebooks for 2013, of which I have six (mostly novellas), equaled a grand total of $500.00 for the year. Worldwide. Readers bought my work in South Korea, Denmark, England, the US and Australia to name a few places. That $500.00 in royalties for one year paid a few utilities, which was nice. If you think about it, that $500.00 is the equivalent of two professional story sales from a professional market, or four semi-pro sales from semi-pro paying markets. If I was at the top of my A-game, writing and submitting competitively, I would have possibly (probably) earned the SAME two professional sales, or four semis (the same 500 bucks, as you are competing against better authors for slots). But this way I get to keep my rights. The fact that I earned the equivalent of two pro sales on my ebooks out there also makes me wonder how actual professional markets survive in a digital world and in this ruthless economy. Also, I sometimes wonder if there is a point to all this. I've been thinking about putting out a professional anthology or venue, after 2015, through Kickstarter (see kickstarter.com). Doing things professional and RIGHT. A lot of genre authors, RPG makers, comic book artists, video game designers and film producers use it, and MUCH to success. Creative people with ideas helping other creative people with ideas, by making donations and pledges for a final copy of the finished product or some other traditionally published gift or perk. Have you ever heard of Kickstarter? What are your thoughts on the crowdfunding model? I ask because ebook sales in genre (especially genre) are so miniscule all around, Kickstarter or IndieGoGo seem to be the latest place to go to. At least to get your book project funded by similarly-minded people who enjoy such things. ///I hope your health situation improves. It seems like a whole lot of people developed health problems around the end of this past year. I hope this is not a trend. I read your comments on e-books and digital publishing with interest. I still think writers need gatekeepers, editors and publishers who can separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately the situation seems to have gotten well beyond that. Anybody can produce an e-book, and almost everybody is doing it. If there were even some kind of central company that would edit the manuscripts and declare that they approved of the books they released, that alone might be enuf to help make sense out of the sea of material out there. I'm also willing to support the concept of a legitimate review zine that focuses solely on e-books and would produce honest options and honest ratings to guide readers thru this morass. My belief is that the number of magazines, professional or even semi-pro, is going to continue to decline in the coming years. The reality is that the magazine distribution system is broken, and is probably beyond repair. The number of retail outlets that carry any kind of magazine has dropped sharply in the past ten years, and those outlets that still have a magazine rack devote the space to women's fashion, self help, news or sports, and that's all. I wish you luck with any Kickstarter campaign. However the vast majority of Kickstarter drives fail. Something like 92% don’t make their funding, and fantastic fiction anthologies don’t seem to play to the primary Kickstarter crowd, who are primarily media oriented folks. On the other hand, my opinion is that whether the campaign succeeds or fails, it would still generate some interesting publicity for your project, probably more free publicity that you would be able to drum up any other way, so it is certainly something worth doing. I assume there is a lot more involved than just announcing, hey, I’ve got this great idea, anybody want to send me some money? Most Kickstarter projects I’ve looked at offer all kinds of graduated inducements for people who actually pledge money, plus I believe there has to be some sort of deadline that any project, once approved, has to be completed (or at least promised to be completed by) before Kickstarter will release the funds. I also wonder how many folks back out at the last minute. For that matter, I wonder how many people would still go ahead and send some money along even on a failed campaign?///

Ned Brooks; 4817 Dean Lane; Lilburn, GA 30047 The Bezos Amazon drone delivery system seems ideal to me – most books do weight less than 5 lbs, even with weather-proof packaging. And would the FAA be any more interested in them than it is in radio-controlled toys? I was once told that the FAA ignored anything that stayed under 500 feet above the terrain. SFPAns will be amazed (perhaps even hurt) art your assertion that you “know no one in the South”… The house next door is vacant but has not been put on the market. Not that metro Atlanta is toasty warm – we had a low of –8 last month, and now it is snowing and the man on the radio says there are wrecks everywhere. I’m not sure why – my driveway and the street are just wet, not icy. Dwight Decker says that no moons of Mars were known in 1744 – bit in fact the

fictional astronomers of Laputa in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726) describe the two moons quite accurately as to period and distance from the primary. Kindermann does not seem to have had that sort of data, even tho he could have read the Swift book.

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///The Amazon drone delivery system was clearly a publicity stunt. I don’t doubt that such a delivery system is possible, if nobody is really concerned about what it would cost to implement. Running that kind of fulfillment delivery package would require not only a massive start up investment, but also plenty of money to keep the mini-drones operational and keyed in to drop packages in the right place. The other part of the problem would be “dropping” the package. How are people who live in apartments or condos going to get delivery by drone? They have no individual door steps/patios where the package could be dropped.

I would also foresee some severe problems with pilfering. People have some reluctance about stealing from a mail box (it’s still a federal crime), but would they worry about snatching the package of brand new DVDs or music CDS or whatever that’s laying out there in plain sight on a door step? That kind of delivery system seems more usable for people with medical issues who are unable to travel easily but need pills or eye drops or whatever right away. I think Walgreens or CVS is much more likely to initiate a drone home delivery system than Amazon is. Previous issues of Fadeaway discussed the moons of Mars, and moons for Pluto were discussed in previous articles and thru the letter column, including Swift’s remarkable predictions on the subject. True, I know people down south, just not very well. I still have a few relatives in Tennessee, but we don’t really communicate. If I were going to move I’d at least like to go to an area where there were some people around I knew. The vacant house next door to you sounds interesting, but, alas, I still have tons-O-crap to get rid of. I do not see me loading multi-trailer loads of books and comics to move down to a new location, as nice as the weather prospects might be. Atlanta sounds positively tropical compared to the battering we’ve been getting around here this winter.

I know people who have essentially rid themselves of all their possessions, except for two homes, one in Florida (or Texas, or some other warm region) where they winter over, and one small home in New England where they spend late spring thru early autumn. It sounds good. I could do without the normal amenities home owners feel they need (most furniture and the like), but I also don’t want to abandon my collections of books, comics, radio shows, dime novels etc. I’m stuck here hoping the warm weather will come along sooner than it’s supposed to. It could happen---nobody really expected the winter to be this brutal either.///

Dwight Decker; 2902 King Arthur Court; Northlake, IL 50164 The new Fadeaway arrived in my mailbox, and it looks good. Hope the readers don't mind all that Decker in it, though... By the way, since you're here... Pulp Tales Press has been reprinting an awful lot of Palmer-era Amazing and Fantastic Adventures issues lately, and I've picked up a few original issues as well. I've

noticed that in 1942 and lasting into 1943, Amazing nearly doubled in page count, from ca. 128 pages per issue to 244, and at the moment I'm working my way through an extra-jumbo issue of over 270 pages. Fantastic Adventures also went to the 244-page count, and they were publishing even more massive reprint issues in the 448-page range. Plus, house ads mention companion Ziff-Davis magazines like Mammoth Detective that have huge page counts. Palmer is cute about Amazing's increased size in the editorials, making it sound like he's putting one over on his bosses by slipping these jumbo issues past them for the benefit of the reader, but what's the real story here? I mean, what wartime paper rationing and shortage? Is the explanation that the Ziff-Davis executives foresaw paper rationing and shortages, and the idea was to increase their use of paper as much as they could while they still could, so that when the crunch came, they could cut back to something like their original paper consumption, whereas if they maintained the old level, they'd have to cut back even further? Or were they already allotted some paper quota that happened to be more than their actual needs at the end of 1941, and it was a case of use it or lose it, so they decided to use every bit of what they could get while they still could? Just wondering... ///You raise an interesting question that I do not know the answer to. Paper was a rationed item relatively early in the war. The primary problem was not necessarily production (altho most timber went for construction purposes). There was plenty of paper still being produced, particularly in Canada, the problem was getting it to the printing plants. Most rail cargo transport was needed for military goods, then came food, clothing, coal and oil, tools such as farm implements, and somewhere way down on the list, were things like paper and other items for civilian use. In the US there was a paper allocation board and a system for allocating paper based on past sales recorded by a publisher and potential sales of any projected new projects. Sometime around late 1944 or early 1945 there were serious objections by the magazine publishers, pointing out that the recycling of magazines and newspapers thru paper drives far exceeded the government’s most optimistic expectations, yet the

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magazine industry was disproportionably bearing the brunt of the paper rationing system. The restrictions were apparently eased somewhat after that and more paper was allotted for periodical publishers. The increase in page count for all the magazines Ray Palmer edited may have simply been a marketing ploy. With the war creating an increase in magazine sales, he and the owners of the Ziff-Davis company may have figured this was an excellent way to dramatically increase their sales and steam-roll most of the competition. The most expensive part of printing a magazine is the cover (same with comic books). Increasing the interior page count does noticeably increase the cost of printing, but extremely thick issues with no big increase in cover price make an immediate strong impression on the buying public. This may also have been a reaction to the decision by Street & Smith to move all their pulp magazines to the bedsheet size. However, my guess is that in Jan 1942 when the cover price went up from twenty cents to twenty-five cents, Palmer and the powers at the company decided to soften the blow by offering an extra eighty-four pages and let the customers know they were getting a great bargain with cover blurbs about giant sized issues. Paper rationing may not have been in full force at that time, and a history of producing jumbo sized issues would have been useful for getting a larger allotment when things got really tight. The jumbo issues didn’t last, and in Sep 1943 the magazine went to a bi-monthly schedule, presumably as a direct result of paper rationing. It didn’t return to a monthly schedule until the May 1946 issue, at the end of the war. Maybe somebody in the fanzine’s reading audience can offer more detailed info. So far as I know Ziff-Davis was the only publisher to go to jumbo page count issues.///

Rich Norwood; PO Box 336; Mountain Home, TN 37684 Thanks for Fadeaway #39. On the racism in old books: the racism in Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe novel shocked me. Essentially, in the absence of other clues, Nero Wolfe uses racist theories to solve the crime. Going back to old favorites can be disillusioning. I recently decided to complete my collection of Saint novels by Leslie Charteris. Then I actually read a few of them. Talk about plots not making sense! (Do you know anybody who wants to buy a complete run of Saint paperbacks?) I agree with Milt Stevens that the best jokes often take a minute to get. For the last thirty years, I’ve been reading Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven volume “The Story of Civilization”, and am currently enjoying the last book, “The Age of Napoleon”. The Durants often drop a sly observation into their prose. For example, on the celebration of

the French Revolution on the first anniversary of Bastille Day: “…Catholic and Protestant pastors embracing as if they were Christians.” But the following remarks took me a minute to get, and they brought a smile to my face” “Talleyrand is one of the doubly intriguing characters in history.” In the conservative bid to destroy the federal government, the Post Office is now on their hit list. Republicans in congress passed a bill requiring the Post Office to set aside eight billion dollars a year to pay employee pensions, even tho the actual cost of pensions is about three billion a year. Yes, government agencies should set aside money for future pensions, but not all at once. The big change I’ve experienced at the Post Office, which has always done a fine job delivering my mail, is the huge increase in the cost of sending mail overseas. ///I have to agree that many of the Saint stories do not age well. I think the primary format for a successful Saint story was the short novelette. The most disappointing Saint story I ever read was “The Saint In New York”, a novel that seemed like it was being pushed forward a thousand words at a time thru grim determination because Leslie Charteris had signed a contract and had already spend the advance money, so he absolutely positively had to turn in something that would meet the minimum length for a novel. I recently rewatched the movie based on that novel and despite good actors I thot it was a poor film. Some of the other problem with those collections is that every issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine featured a short story (or longer, but they were usually shorts) by Charteris featuring his character. Turning out a new story every month may not seem like that big a deal, unless it is becomes a chore, something you are required to do, thru all 141 issues. I read the magazine off and on for years, and while some of those stories were good, a lot of them weren’t. But good or bad, all of them got collected in those Saint paperback collections anyway. I sell books/comics/games thru the mail and I have found the USPost Office generally provides excellent service. I don’t know where the idea that Post Office has to be self sustaining ever got started (maybe back in the early 1970s). The PO is a government service, something the government provides to benefit its citizens, just like the patent office, the FDA, the Corps of Engineers or the military. Does the US Geodetic Service have to break even or show a profit? Why should the postal service have to do that? The Republican Party will not

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rest until the Post Office and most other parts of the federal government have been destroyed and the US has been turned into a third world country.///

Bill Plott, 190 Crestview Circle, Montevallo, AL 35115 Well, not exactly the "usual excuse" for no LOC on #38. The day after the family gathering on Boxing Day I was looking at five writing and editing deadlines before the end of January. Fortunately, I got three or four uninterrupted days to tackle the projects. Not the least of them was my book on the Negro Southern League. Happily, all 587 double-spaced pages went off to McFarland Jan. 27, four days ahead of my extended deadline. I don't know John V. Cody, but he is most worthy of congratulations for both his birthday and his work, which I enjoy seeing. Reminds me a bit of REG and some of the other artists who

were around when I first got into fandom in the late '50s. There was a time when weaponry would have been of great interest to me, but late in life I find it less so. Still, I found Jefferson Swacaffer's Poul Anderson project interesting. I can understand his intrigue with the piece and the overriding desire to three-dimensonalize it. By all appearances he did it masterfully. I was unaware of Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories, so your history of the magazine, Harold Hersey and the Dold brothers was quite enjoyable. I think what was the most fun, though, was seeing all of those other magazine covers. Speakeasy Stories? Racketeer and Gangland Stories? And best of all, Gangster Stories, "a magazine of racketeers and gun-molls." Unless we are immersed in serious collecting and research as you are, we forget just how big magazines once were and how incredibly far-reaching the subjects were. I have a bunch of coverless copies of Railroad Stories and Railroad Man's Magazine somewhere in a box. They are still fun to thumb through now and then. I sent one to an old high school friend who had railroad men in both sides of his family. Coincidentally it arrived on his birthday and I think it was one of his most enjoyable presents ever. I would love to stumble across box of assorted subjects to while away an evening with. In lieu of that, I at least have Fadeaway with its fascinating histories and cover reproductions. I like your idea of some kind of review clearing house for ebooks, but I doubt the practicality of it. The idea of somebody setting up such an entity and making it work in today's everybody-has-a-published-voice world seems unlikely. It reminds me a little of something I've expressed before -- authors blurbs on books are not an encouragement but an annoyance. If I pick up a paperback and it has nothing but author blurbs I will not even consider buying it. Come on, no writer is going to trash another writer because it might be his or her book that gets blurbed next. I want one or two paragraphs telling me what the damn book is about. In a round about sort of way, I think this relates to your ebook observations -- is the book worth reading? New England snow getting to you after all of these years? Let me share a story of hope about one of your fellow Massachusetts resident who is in the midst of getting out even as I type this. My wife had a Navy buddy named Carol Kehoe. Through the wonders of the internet they reconnected after decades of lost contact. At the time, three or four years ago, Carol was in Spring Hill, Fla., settling her mother's estate in a modest gated community. We went down for a few days. I visited breweries and they visited each other and sometimes there were overlappings of both activities. Later, when Carol was returning to Massachusetts, she stopped in Montevallo and spent several days with us. She fell in love with this little college town of about 5,000 (an event not totally unconnected to being sick of snow). She is a painter and found a decent art scene here, a vibrant community theatre, just 35 miles from Birmingham and big city amenities. At her request, we beginning scoping out houses for her, taking pictures and videos. Long story short, she bought, sight unseen, using just our images, a $30,000 foreclosure. She had some renovations to do but what a starting price! Took a year or so but she finally unloaded her mother's house in Florida and this winter has sold her house in Peabody, Mass. She will now be a permanent resident of Montevallo. A single woman in our age group disposing of two households some 2,000 miles apart in less than a year. It can be done, Robert. Not many fans around here, but a lot of nonetheless interesting people here. You'll be welcomed if you join us. Thanks for the Captain Marvel Jr. recap. Captain Marvel was always my favorite comic as a kid. Indeed, when I had to come up with some bullshit secret question identifier recently, Captain Marvel was what I used. You've told me a lot more about Jr. than I remembered and it was a good read. The reference to the boarding house reminded me of Bill Ahern's Our Boarding House with Major Hoople. I never lived in a boarding house but even as a kid I could connect to the scene. Loved that blustery old fraud, his feet-on-the-ground wife and the wise acres working stiffs. Thinking about it sent me to the internet to find a collection which I ordered tonight. Of course, you are right in that people maybe 40 and under have no concept of what a boardinghouse was like. I remember touring Thomas Wolfe's abode in Asheville and learning that it was a place with both hot beds and shared beds. Man, what a way to have to live.

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///One of the most disappointing things in recent decades, for me anyway, has been the decline and fall of print magazines. Not just science fiction/fantasy, but magazines of all types are a dying breed. The days when people read magazines for pleasure or information seems to be almost done. There are some survivors left, but increasingly the number of print magazines continues to contract and those that are left are trying desperately to make themselves available on the internet. A new service (new to me anyway), offers 147 magazines that can be downloaded to your e-reader or computer for a flat fee of $10 a month ($15 if you want the feeds without annoying header/footer ads). I barely glanced at this service, but it appears that there are no fiction magazines at all (unless you count some of the more rambunctious political opinion journals). The world is changing all the time, but this is one kind of change I don’t care for. I think an online journal/magazine that would review e-books honestly would be a great service. It certainly would not stop the tsunami of new material flooding the internet daily, but a source that would provide decent reviews, either long or short, of the e-books out there and tell the readers if something is good or bad or has flaws but might be worth reading anyway, would be extremely useful to those of us who are trying to navigate the ocean of digital sludge that is swamping us right now. Without some kind of reliable guideposts there is no way to tell whether a novel is good reading or drivel bolstered by hype from the writers friends, family and assorted pseudonyms. Something that provides those guidelines is sorely needed. I would like to move somewhere not in New England, during the winter season at least, but as I mentioned in my editorial, I have a warehouse full of crap, and even more stuff in this house. Moving all that material would be enormously expensive plus it would take two or three tractor trailer loads. I didn’t used to mind the NE winters so much when I was younger, but as a friend used to say, we’re younger no more. Last year we got a thirty inch snowfall in a single night, and shoveling out was a lot of exhausting work. This winter it has been extremely cold, far worse than usual. It brings thots of sunnier climes to mind immediately. Unfortunately unless there is a huge buying spree on the part of customers who will help clear out my warehouse book/comics/game stock in a hurry, I don’t foresee me going anywhere else in the immediate future.///

Lloyd Penney; 1706-24 Eva Rd.; Etobicoke, ON CANADA M9C 2B2 I received Fadeaway 39 a few days ago…a quick look inside shows that I didn’t respond to issue 38 fast enuf, so here comes another LOC to make sure it appears in issue 50/ First things first… It sounds like we could use a guide to e-books, perhaps a list, to help us through the morass of e-books, may be along the lines of eFanzines.com. I have asked a similar question about the myriad of

SF podcasts, and others agree that such a list is needed, but no one seems willing or able to put that list together. If Amazon decides to go SFnal and use mini-drones to deliver books and other merchandise to the average American reader or shoper, I can see one weapon of the past becoming popular again—slingshots. A good-sized rock, with sufficient velocity, should bring those drones down, especially from those with enuf paranoia about their privacy being invaded by any technology from the skies. (Especially if that cartoon comes to any level of fruition). I know that it’s depressing enuf (for both of us) to see book stores close down everywhere, but now, it’s the used books that are losing what little value they have had. I found out just yesterday that when books are brought in to local Goodwill stores, new employees have instructions to instantly toss them in the garbage. A local friend has set up a wide chain of micro-libraries across southern Ontario, and is now asking for contributions for restocking the existing libraries, and stocking any new libraries he might build. I’ve never read any of the Captain Marvel of Captain Marvel Jr. comics, but I note in these and other media the theme of the weird, forgetful, eccentric or mildly evil scientist. Some of them somehow have daughters, which makes one wonder what Mrs. Scientist ever saw in Dr. Scientist. Is this an expression of doubt or wariness of science? ///That’s exactly the problem with creating an on-line zine or prodcast to review the flood of new science fiction e-books; nobody wants to do the work. I can’t say as I can blame anyone for side-stepping this task. I have about two hundred printed books in my To Be Read stack, a pile running up the back wall that never seems to go down very much, since brand new, interesting titles continue to be released faster than I can read thru the accumulation. My ventures into the e-books field, even at low prices, or even FREE -Now prices, have been an extremely mixed bag. For every one e-book that I thot was pretty good, there were six that were so awful I never even made it past page 100. In a few cases I didn’t even make it that far. This just demonstrates the need for this kind of journal. Surely there must be at least a few fans out there who can read very fast and are willing to provide honest evaluations of the material they sample. Sling-shots are semi-illegal in most parts of the US, including in Massachusetts. You have to belong to a sporting club authorized and licensed to even possess the things. On the other hand they are pretty easy to make from scratch so drone dropping with Li’l David’s weapon of choice may yet become popular. This

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assumes the FAA manages to hammer together some regulations about commercial use of the things. The internet news sites had one of their heart-warming fluff pieces this weekend about the feds banning a liquor store that wanted to deliver cases of beer to ice fishermen via hella-drone. With fake pics even. Drones, military and commercial could be the hot fad topic of the new year. I don’t know about Goodwill (none of their stores are in this region), but the Salvation Army and Catholic charities stores still sell old books. What they do is weed out crappy copies and either send them to a paper recycler, or toss them into the trash. This seems reasonable to me; since nobody is going to buy gummy, shredded, pages-missing, moldy or cat peed-on books.///

Milt Stevens; 6325 Keystone St.; Simi Valley, CA 93063 miltstevens@earthlink.net As you say in your editorial in Fadeaway #39, there are hundreds of thousands of e-books out there. By itself, it’s an overpowering factoid. On the other hand, it’s something like saying there is material for 22 trillion ice cubes at the south pole. Never in my lifetime am I going to bother with the hundreds of thousands of e-books or the 22 trillion ice cubes. It has been decades since I have picked up a random novel and read it. I only read novels that people I trust are talking about in a favorable manner. I didn’t get to be an old penguin by jumping off the ice berg first. At LASFS, Jerry Pournele suggested the club should publish an e-book review journal as a

fund raising effort. Everybody agreed that the field could use a number of such journals to separate any good stuff from the vast ocean of crud. However, we aren’t going to do it. For one thing, we don’t have the excess labor available to do such a project. For another, the thought of trying to read all those teenage zombie romance novels makes our collective toenails curl. I do wonder what future collectors will do. Competist collecting was always ill advised. Now it is total insanity. I didn’t read many issues of Captain Marvel when I was a kid. I don’t think I read any issues of Captain Marvel Jr. I did read the issue about the far future rats. I just accepted the premise at the time, but now I can think of all sorts of implications. Was their currency the pound cheeso or something similar? Did they have atavistic urges to run through mazes? Did they believe rat life was sacred? You’re right that Dr. Sivana doesn’t look like potential father material. His difficulties with dating girls probably led to his going into mad science in the first place. However, cloning could be a great thing for mad scientists. The Boys From Brazil idea has many interesting implications. I remember seeing the Our Boarding House comic strip when I was a young child. I thought the idea was archaic as the time (although I couldn’t have told you what archaic meant). I also wondered why The Colonel wore a fez indoors. Come to think of it, why did he wear a fez at all. Boarding houses do still sort of exist in the form of assisted living centers. A major advantage of a boarding house was its inexpensive price. Assisted living centers aren’t inexpensive. A local assisted living center which looks like a small luxury hotel charges $4000 a month for a one bedroom with meals, laundry, and housekeeping included. As I said, not inexpensive. ///The fact that you only read a new novel (in any format) based on a review or recommendation of somebody whose opinion you trust probably applies to a lot of SF/fantasy readers. The reality is that more and more e-books are being produced. The price is generally less than the prices being asked for print books, which means the e-book format is more attractive to most of today’s readers, particularly those who may only want to read a book once or twice over the course of a lifetime. Given those perimeters, there needs to be some kind of service or forum where e-books can be objectively and honestly reviews, but there isn’t. Or at least there is not such a journal that I am aware of. Without some kind of guides as to what is good and what is pure drek, many e-book readers are going to be turned off by the bad stuff out there, or decide not to venture into the whole field of e-books. This will hurt the field of SF/fantasy more than it might harm, say, the genre of fast action men’s adventure thrillers or romance books. The problem is pretty much the same as with any kind of book review service---somebody has to be willing to do the job; that is, read the books and write the reviews. Your experience with the LASFS is typical of the situation with the entire hobby; people either claim not to have the time, or are afraid to take the initiative. Meanwhile, the e-book field is still being flooded by thousands of books, and nobody seems able to point out the excellent new titles so they can get the recognition they deserve. The “Our Boarding House” comic strip was popular for decades, even when boarding houses were rapidly fading from the American landscape. Major Hoople (self styled, he never claimed to be a Colonel) wore the fez indoors in reference to an even reference when the fez was referred to as a reading hat. It had no brim to make reading the small print in newspapers easier back in the days of candles and coal-oil lamps. Back in

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those days winter heating from fireplaces or Franklin Stoves didn’t provide the degree of warmth we moderns are accustomed to either, so wearing heavier clothing, including head coverings was not unusual./// Jerry Kaufman; PO Boz 25075; Seattle, WA 98165

39 is a good number - it was Jack Benny's permanent age for decades. This was a very good issue - Dwight Decker's article, for example, is one of the best on science fiction history that I recall reading. Jeff Bezos and Amazon being locals, we read and hear quite a bit about them. Our daily newspaper ran the McKee cartoon you reprinted. It's doubtful that Amazon will ever really use drones for package delivery, but on the other hand we just saw a news bit on television about a store in Minnesota (I think) that wanted to deliver beer to ice fishers. The video showed a drone with a case of

beer suspended below it, and lots of fishing shacks on some large lake. If it weren't illegal to use drones (I think the story was that the FAA has these regulations), the store could have done a lot business. Your editorial about the unusual DVD sent to your Cliffhangers club could easily be expanded to a short story, with additional material to add plausibility and specific characters. The only slightly puzzled reaction to the government DVD and the relief when DVDs #2 and #3 are the silent serial and not top secret material about defense and aliens would be a comic highlight of the story. Dwight Decker on Kindermann and The Speedy Journey was very interesting, and I thought his writing was quite good. In those early days of fiction, it seems, many writers used allegorical abstractions as characters, like the five senses in Kindermann's case. (But I'm far from expert on this subject.) I wonder if there are forgotten little treasures like this in other European or Asian languages. I rather hope so. I am not a big fan of superhero comics, though I read them as a child and even as a young man (at times I've lived with comics readers), but the point of Captain Marvel Jr. (aside from selling more comic books) escapes me, as he seems to be a carbon copy of Captain Marvel Sr. Wasn't Billy Batson also handicapped in some way? No, that's my poor memory speaking. So what did I take away from your essay? Mainly that the humor came from really silly ideas about scientists, and about science itself. I mean, isn't that caterpillar "trap" the silliest thing ever? What makes the Professor think that, among other things, all caterpillars eat the same leaves, that caterpillars have necks to break, that rolling down the incline would break the caterpillar's neck (if it had a neck), or best of all that there's no practical reason for getting rid of caterpillars? Okay, I'm too literal-minded. Dold's artwork looked "primitive" to me. But I'm often not as smart as I think I am. No matter - I liked it whether it was primitive or sophisticated. I've looked at the SF Encyclopedia's entry on him. I had never heard of him before your article, but he's much better known than I gave him credit for. If ever you do an article focused on his work and career, I'll be eager to read it. ///I saw the story on CNN about the liquor store that wanted to deliver cases of beer to ice fishermen via drone ship. It was an amusing little squib, however after thinking about it, I went back and took a closer look. It’s pretty clear that the picture posted with the story is faked. You don’t have to be an aero-engineer to see that that little helicopter style drone could never pick up anything as heavy as a case of beer, much less fly it any distance (say, out to an ice house on a frozen lake). The local newspaper, on the other hand, has run a couple of stories about how drones are useful in farming operations. I don’t know if buzzing drones will ever replace sheep dogs and cowboys to keep the livestock contained, but they could be useful for checking irrigation systems and spot animal or weather damage to crops. The FCC continues to say they are working on regulations for civilian drone use, but judging from their past experience, that probably means at least two or three or four years before they get around to posting anything on the subject. I can wait. I don’t know how George Orwell managed to overlook surveillance drones in his classic novel “1984”, but modern science has managed to make up for his oversight. The point of Fawcett publishing CMJr. was pretty much the same as DC publishing Superboy; a different character with super powers obviously younger than the adult hero, and with different kinds of problems and adventures. Kid heroes and young super powered heroes had shown they could be strong sellers in the early days of comics, and Fawcett was eager to expand the market for their comics by venturing into that area. CMJr. used more realistic artwork, and as I tried to point out in my article, his stories were more human oriented. Jr.’s friends and acquaintances and their problems were more often the focus of his adventures. Captain Marvel Sr. tended to be more cartoon-like and his stories were usually painted with a broader brush, as it were. There are probably other lost, or at least pretty much forgotten science fiction stories from the distant past in European literature. The problem is not just unearthing the material, but making it available to a wider

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audience. Dwight Decker has an e-book upcoming which will offer an English language translation of that Kindermann story very soon at a very low price for those interested. I will try to provide a link in the next issue of the fanzine./// Jefferson Swycaffer; PO Box 15375; San Diego, CA 92175

Another great issue of Fadeaway. I love the front cover art! Kenneth Gentry's storm giant is a delightful con-trast to the science-y spaceship. This reality ain't a-big enough for the both of us, pard! Dan Carroll's back cover is wonderfully Frazetta-esque: voluptuous, lovely, yet brave and bracing and bold and untamed. I adore the "squiggly" hair. Mr. Carroll is a man whom artists should study, to comprehend the subtleties of his technique!

I very much enjoyed Dwight Decker's historical and literary analysis of “The Speedy Journey”.

I certainly enjoyed your article on Captain Marvel, Jr. I'm glad that these kinds of historical analyses are around. We are always at risk of losing our past, especially the mass-market, "disposable" heritage of the comics and of the pulps. You guys are doing heroic work -- scholarship and heritage preservation!

Not much else to add... I recently discovered Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Dealings of Captain Sharkey," hot-blooded pirate fiction, with a very distinct nasty edge. Cap'n Sharkey is no Jack Sparrow! He is, rather, of the rip, rape, and ravage variety -- probably much closer to the actual historical pirates. Conan Doyle rounds the book out with some sea stories and some ghost stories.

Does anyone have a strong opinion of Conan Doyle's "History of the Great War," his account of World War One? Is it good stuff...or is it obsolete, surpassed by better scholarship? Worth taking the time to read (it's huge!) or best to walk away?

///I read the Conan Doyle sea stories quite a long time ago. My memory is that they were good, but that’s about all I remember about them. I have never read his history of WWI. I am more prone to checking out insightful histories such as “The Guns of August” which takes a look at the motivations and early developments of the conflict. After the third Balkan Crisis almost everybody figured that Europe was headed for another major war, but I don’t think anybody could have figured that modern technological developments, particularly machine guns, radio, airplane reconniance, barbed wire and trench defenses would have such a monumental effect on the way that conflict unfolded, or that direct naval warfare would be much less of a major issue than it turned out to be. 37 million lives swept away, and the geography of the world redrawn, not necessarily in the best way either, plus the Great War clearly sowed the seeds for an even mightier world conflict and a protracted cold war that followed, along with all the colonial and ethnic wars we are dealing with to this very day. It seems I remember some science fiction story that projected what the world would be like if WWI had never taken place, but I can’t remember the title or even who wrote it.///

Brad W Foster; PO Box 165246; Irving, TX 75016 bwfoster@juno.com This will be, I'm afraid, a rather short loc. Read and enjoyed everything in the issue, but found I only had one or two comment hooks noted down when done. And now you know why I'm always sending cartoons!

My first thought on seeing the cover was it depicted the discovery by primitive man of the first Hugo award rocket. I liked that idea so much, it has also been my second and third thought on looking at the cover again.

I liked the whole idea behind why "The Speedy Journey on the Air-Ship to the Upper World" was written, according to Dwight. That is, as away to announce a new scientific discovery. One can only imagine what kind of stories we would have if this method had caught hold with the scientific community over the years! The entire article was quite fascinating, and one of those things that reminds me how amazing it is to live in this time. Here's a story almost 300 years old that is being read again, analyzed and discussed in a magazine, and bringing to bear on it much of the most modern technology. (Love to be able to tell Kindermann that the writer of this article on his book was able to make use of a machine that allowed him to see what the night sky might have looked like at just about any time in the past!) ///Sometimes scientists have used science fiction stories to discuss their discovers, altho it seems to me that mostly they use fiction to speculate on experiments or theories that didn’t quite pan out. Way back when there was a hardback anthology of original science fiction stories written by actual scientists, which created a lot of interest when it was announced. I read the book but have very little memory of the contents, except most of the

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stories were kind of drab and so-so. I think the concept sank pretty quickly; scientists are not necessarily great writers, and writing fiction demands a good imagination and good writing skills. The field’s perennial anthologist Groff Conklin also produced a collection titled “Great Science Fiction By Scientists” in 1962, which was a lot better, since it drew on published science fiction writers who had some connection with science (like Isaac Asimov, most famously). Somewhere around here I have a few strange little booklets of science fiction fantasy stories issued by manufacturers of products (usually drugs) using fantastic adventures to promote their products. Nothing very good there, but the whole concept was so strange I used to buy the things whenever I came across one at a flea market or convention. Would those short movies produced by assorted companies and issued in connection with World Fairs about how great the future would be after the world adopted their new innovation count? Nylon certainly changed the world, but I’m still waiting for the kitchen that cooks and delivers a gourmet meal with the touch of a button. Yesterday’s future never did turn out as wonderful as people thot it would.///

Murray Moore; 1065 Henley Rd.; Missiissiaguga, ON CANADA L4Y 1C8 Kent McDaniel is being realistic by not expecting to sell e-book versions of his fiction.

You must have heard 'Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?' Okay, the context is not book-buying, and I doubt that your mother ever asked you that question, but... Why pay for fiction if you can access www.wattpad.com? Visitors to Wattpad are told "With over 10 million stories and millions more added every month, you'll never run out of things to read. Whether you love a great mystery, steamy romance or want to dive into a world of science fiction, Wattpad has a story just for you - all for free!"

The internet is a petabyte-size slush pile. I expect that some clever types right now are creating an algorithm to search on-line fiction for a pattern of words that gives the hint of a novel that will be a best seller. That's how resumes are handled, many resumes filtered by software to produce the few resumes that will be viewed by a human.

Another group endangered by change is editorial cartoonists, including your current favourite, Rick McKee. No newspapers, no editorial cartoonists.

You want reviews. You can read the Asimov's and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction review columns, free, on-line.

I will be reading an older Paul McAuley novel because one of his newer novels is a 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award nominee. I am reading the short story collection “Extremities” by Kathe Koja because I knew her name and I discovered, during Legendary ConFusion last month, that her husband, photographer and illustrator Rick Lieder, and I, share admiration of great SF artist Richard Powers. I am reading “Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets” by astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana because I read in my local newspaper that Jayawardhana will be speaking at my city's central library.

Captain Nazi killed Freddie Freeman's grandfather and attacked Freddy, you explain. Is the name Freeman a hint to readers that Freddy is Jewish? And what is the story behind the names of the villains Ibac and Sabbac? When I see names like Ibac and Sabbac I read them backwards. Usually in this situation, when I read right to left, I see a word I recognize. Not when the read-backward names are Cabi and Cabbas. My compliments to the creator of the name Eza Zomby.

But would you shoot at an Amazon drone if you knew that it would return fire? Eberhard Christian Kindermann, as described by Dwight Decker, was a man of many parts; at least five parts.

Darrell chides you, twice, about spelling, while, in one sentence, gives us author Larry Liven and famous Poul Anderson novel “Tay Zero”. You copy and paste LoCs, yes?

My New Year's resolution to read Theodore Sturgeon's (1918-1985) short stories, and Philip K. Dick's (1928-1982) and Clifford Simak's (1904-1988) novels, in order starting with the oldest, is semi-proceeding. I am most of my way through the first collection of Sturgeon's stories, “The Ultimate Egoist”; reading them on my Kobo Touch, the e-book being the cheapest option. The best quality of Sturgeon's earliest stories is their shortness. The general interest stories were sold to the McClure's syndicate and published in newspapers. Sturgeon's good early stories, the stories that are admired today by readers like us, were published in Astounding and in Unknown, and in the British Argosy ("Bianca's Hands").

Editor of the collected short Sturgeon, the late Paul Williams, provides notes for stories, quoting from letters by Sturgeon and later-life interviews of him by people like Sam Moskowitz and Dave Hartwell. In his review of Volume XI Paul Kincaid typed "One of the things this exhaustive and exhausting series demonstrates is how much that is mediocre surrounds those stories on which his reputation deservedly stands." True, reading all of Sturgeon's approximately 200 short stories is unnecessary to appreciate this writer. However I will continue.

I have read “Vulcan's Hammer” described by Wikipedia as "a 1960 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was released originally as an Ace Double. This has been considered to be the final outing of Dicks' 1950's

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style pulp science-fiction writing, before his better received work such as the Hugo Award winning Man in the High Castle published three years later."

I have not started “Cosmic Engineers” (1950) by Simak. The reason is that books I have requested to borrow from our public library become available and become my reading priority. Last fall I decided, for the first time, to read the five books nominated for Canada's best publicized, and richest, literary prize, the Giller. When January started I was reading the fourth book, then my turn came for the fifth novel.

Maybe I will read Dick and Simak in alternating months. Or maybe my attention will wander: look, John D. MacDonald! Thomas Burnett Swann! ///The very fact that vast amount of fiction new and old is available for free over the internet is a major deterrent to creating a professional cadre of writers and editors willing to tackle the e-book situation. I would be delighted if somebody came up with a search engine, or a review site, or a rating service, or anything at all that would help separate good, readable e-books from the absolute drek, but after many years nothing has emerged. The task is large and the potential for the project to make enuf money to break even or generate a small profit seems remote to me, which does not help the situation at all. Asimov’s and the other print magazines review print books. There are plenty of good zines and sites that review print fiction, but so far as I know, there is no effective effort to conscienceously review e-books. Editorial cartooning has been endangered for at least twenty years. Even before the massive shrinking in print newspaper circulation made itself known the publishers were working to devalue or eliminate editorial cartoonists and rely instead on nationally syndicated names. Even recognized and award winning cartoonists are having their appearances cut back. This is something that is sure to continue as more newspapers bite the dust and more publishing companies try to figure out new ways to cut back on expenses. And, of course, we’re all still waiting for an on-line newspaper that actually makes money instead of existing as essentially a novelty off-shoot of a print entity. My opinion is that the overwhelming majority of people want headline events and quirky stories of oddball happenings with a strong helping of celebrity gossip and cute cat videos sprinkled in. CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post and Fox.com already provide that, which pretty much eliminates the chance of a newspaper making an internet project work. So far as I know Freddy Freeman had no Jewish ancestry. In one of the later stories CMJr goes back to medieval England and helps an earlier version of his alter ego achieve freedom from serfdom to become a Freeman in name and reality. One of the major problems with being a professional writer, in any genre, is that you have to keep writing if you want to survive. Some writers have vivid imaginations that enables them to come up with new plots and new ways to explore older ideas all the time, but most writers have a peak period, three to six years, where the words and ideas merge just right, and after that things begin to fall apart. Some writers can keep on going and turn out interesting stuff thru their careers, but as I recall, Sturgeon suffered from frequent and sometimes long lasting bouts of writer’s block. Some of his later work was very uneven. It happens all the time with other writers too. This is one of the reasons I lean toward Best Of collections, even multi-volume Best Of author collections rather than trying to scoop up everything a writer ever turned out. Those efforts are nice for greedy publishers, since it provides a lot of material to fill a lot of books, but it often means showcasing some inferior works along with the gems.///

John Purcell; 3744 Marielene Cirlce; College Station, TX 77845 Hello again, Robert. Once again I find myself totally in awe of the quality of the two main articles in your zine. I will get to those in a moment, but first some comments on the artwork in the issue. First off, there is that fine title page illustration by Kenneth Gentry mainly because it reminds me of that classic Twilight Zone episode featuring Agnes Moorhead, where she is the giant who smashes the toy spacecraft that the Earth expedition arrives in. The rocket ship in this piece doesn't stand a chance against this guy pictured here. I also loved that Op/Ed cartoon you put on page 3, Mark Schirmeister's illo on page

5, Brad Foster nails it again on page 6, and as usual, Dan Carroll provides a wonderful barbarian babe on the back cover. Good artwork throughout, sir. The fun facts about Mercury were, well, fun! Texans might be the most acclimated to Mercury's temperature range since summer here is probably a little warmer than Mercury. At least that's how it feels to me, and I've been living in Texas for almost 13 years.

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Hey, that NORAD strategic plan DVD sounds interesting. Now my mind is asking in a computerized voice "would you like to play a game?" Or did you Cliffhangers really do that and you're just not saying? Somehow I get the feeling you did, and frankly, I would not be surprised. Great article by Dwight Decker! I have never heard of "The Speedy Journey" and now I would love to acquire a copy of the translation that Mr. Decker has finished. I found the back story about Kindermann fascinating reading. What is most interesting to me is how Kindermann was able to figure out a plausible means of space travel based on the science available at that time. How cool it is to work on what is most likely the first true science fiction story written in German. I guess I will have to hit the Internet to find a copy of the 2010 translation mentioned in Decker's article. As for your extensive survey on Captain Marvel Jr., all I can say is "Shazam!" Very interesting and informational and fun reading. I didn't know this comic existed, so all of this article was new to me. Okay, well, not complete new, since I know about Billy Batson and the Captain Marvel series, but even so, a well-researched article. I really liked this one a lot. I wish I knew more about the series so I could add something interesting about CMJr. Great work, Robert! A good, solid letter column rounds out this issue, too. Overall I think this is one of the best issues of Fadeaway I have yet read, and that's saying something since you've pubbed quite a lot of good issues. So until the 40th issue arrives, I thank you.

Michael Dobson; 8042 Park Overlook Dr.; Bethesada, MD 20817 To book or to ebook? Yes, it's a very good question, but the answer, as in many cases, is "it depends." Few books ever become hits, but you can make a decent living as a writer without ever making the New York Times bestseller list.

The glut of new titles has increased significantly with ebooks, but it's been a growing issue for a long time. More and more houses are putting out more and more books, and reviewing outlets and other neutral gatekeepers have long since failed to keep up.

It used to be that only major houses could get you distribution, but that's no longer the case. While major houses serve as a gatekeeper for readers, guaranteeing some minimum level of quality, they aren't generally very good at marketing new authors unless you're already a big name. Authors are always on their own when it comes to promotion, whether you're with a major house or going solo.

I've been published by major New York houses, by smaller presses, and gone the self-published ebook and POD route, and each has advantages and disadvantages. A major house usually pays 15% royalty (less a reserve for returns and other expenses) whereas you get 70% from ebook sales. At any given price point, that means you have to sell five times as many books through a major house to make the same amount of money.

I've followed a "both-and" strategy as a writer, and have explored many different avenues for bringing in money. For me, books generate speaking engagements that pay very well, and I sell books in the back of the room for extra revenue. At 50% author discount, that can be very good money. ///I have a friend named Mel Simons who is primarily an entertainer and lecturer in the New England area, who also has written nostalgia books. His strategy agrees with yours---after one of his shows or speaking engagements he plugs his books and sells autographed copies on site. He is currently making close to half as much money selling his books as he does with his comedy and speaking gigs. He has certainly sold lots more copies of his books in person than the publisher has thru book stores or thru their own site. However this may not be the best policy for everyone who writes. A writer has to have some kind of sales record and recognition to generate appearances anywhere, even friendly chats with schools or local book clubs. With zillions of e-books flooding the market right now, my original point that it is almost impossible for the good stuff to break out from the morass of bad stuff seems more true than ever. A huge royalty rate is fine so long as somebody buys the book, but if almost nobody even samples the book, how is the new writer going to prove the worth of his literary creation? Investing as much or maybe even more time relentlessly promoting yourself thru social media sites than you do writing seems a bad trade-off in my opinion. But then, I am not one of those people who is trying to make a living writing fiction these days either./// AND THEN MICHAEL WROTE--- You're absolutely right that there is no single good strategy for writers. What works for me won't necessarily work for someone else; what works for them won't necessarily work for me. People write different things for different reasons. My only argument is that there are ways to break out even in a saturated market. These methods all take work; the odds of it happening spontaneously are pretty much the same as winning the lottery.

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As far as social media promotion, the mistake most people make, as far as I'm concerned, is that they think of their social media presence as "promotion." They flog their works relentlessly and everybody gets turned off. There are any number of ways to get good engagement that supports your work without "promoting." Gardner Dozois has a nice daily Facebook post on holidays; I share interesting maps. What we have in common is that our posts get engagement; people leave comments and engage in discussion and share what we post with others. There's no way around the necessity to promote one's work. It's very tough to break out, but I wouldn't say "almost impossible." I don't think a lack of sales track record means you can't find places to speak; that certainly wasn't my experience when I got started. As far as "proof of worth," it's word of mouth that sells books. If you can get a few readers who sincerely like it, they'll share it with others. Going with a major publisher doesn't make as much difference as you'd think. Sure, having a good publishing house serves as a minimum guarantee of quality for the reader, but that doesn't count for very much. "Hi! Here's proof my work doesn't suck!" isn't quite the ringing endorsement we writers are looking for.

Marlin Franzel; PO Box 122856; San Diego, CA 92112 Thanks for Fadeaway #39. Thank Ghod for zip codes—till I read your editorial re shoveling snow, I thot you lived in Maine! My experience of New England stops at Danbury, Connecticut. Totally enjoyed your article on Captain Marvel Jr. I ordered a copy of Blue Boy Chronicles #1 and also sent money to your friend John Cody for three books.

Got to learn to type or get my printed hooked back up. When I retired to San Diego from India and Thailand in 1995 I wrote about 95- pages of memoirs, going from childhood in Texas to San Francisco in 1969, living with Earl and Jan Eavers and printing for Earl’s ‘Zeen’. I’ve considered getting segments dealing with fandom and collected in Trap Door Chuinga etc. If the winters get too heavy for you there, move down here to Mexico! We’ve had almost no winter at all this year. 80 degrees in San Diego two weeks ago. ///When I got this letter, with its reference to 80 degree weather, back in February, with the latest snow storm dropping ten more inches on top of the packed snow already piled high, I was prepared to buy a voodoo doll of you and push pins into painful places. But now it’s near the end of March, the snow has mostly melted and I’m in a more forgiving frame of mind. As I said in my editorial write-up, much as I would like to move to some warmer clime and avoid the perils of winters In New England, I have a warehouse full of stuff I am trying to sell off, plus a house crammed to the rafters with books, comics, games, video tape and the like. It would cost a fortune to move this stuff, which means I am not going anywhere for a long, long, looooooong time to come.

Living in New England is very pleasant most of the year; it’s just the winter months that are bad. Living here I expect the weather to get very cold in winter, and I expect to get a lot of snow, but this year has been awful, as in one of the worst winters I have ever endured, and it’s still not done yet either. The only experience I can remember that was even comparable was back in 2008 when the region got hit by a huge winter ice storm that ripped down thousands of power lines. I was without power for five and a half days, while some places were without power for more than two weeks. The roads were like polished glass, and the whole region came to a dead stop for quite a while. Fortunately my warehouse is near a big power sub-station, so I knew that area would get power back within a day or so, which it did. I slept and lived in the warehouse during that period. Not fun. I am sure John Cody will appreciate your purchasing some of his comic strip reprint volumes.///

Michael Tuz; PO Box 182; Bridgewater, CT 06752 I’m not a hunter or a gun enthusiast, but the prospect of rebelling against the ongoing intrusion of technology by getting a “drone-hunting license” might just be enough to make me want to channel my inner Sarah Palin! Thanks for sending me the introductory copy of Fadeaway #39. If every issue of your zine proves to be as enjoyable as this one was, then (to quote Rick Blaine) “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” As a fan of sci-fi and fantasy who is also interested in astronomy and the history of science, I found Dwight Decker’s article on Eberhard Christian Kindermann

absolutely fascinating. I had never heard of his works before, but I’m now anxious to read Dwight’s translation of “The Speedy Journey On the Air-Ship to the Upper World” (ah, those Germans and their verbose titles!) one day soon. My

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thanks to Mr. Decker for opening my eyes to Kindermann, and for striving to make his story known and available to the English-reading populace at last. I think that accurate translation—that which remains true to the original intent of the author—is an under appreciated skill. It is a technique that involves far more than simply substituting one word for another. Every writer, every written work, has a particular cadence and tone that is established within the unique grammatical nature of their native language, and a good translator must do more than define meaning, they must be able to recapture the nuance of the author…those subtle qualities which are created by the writer’s choice of words and structure. This goal is further complicated by the fact that individual cultures frequently have words, phrases and expressions which have no true equivalent in other languages. Finding appropriate substitutes can’t be an easy task. I once heard somewhere that even a very good translation is akin to looking at the back of a tapestry. This is not an insult to interpreters, but an observation of the fact that some linguistic differences are irreconcilable. And some of those differences have led to unintended miscommunications and misrepresentations when a piece is translated from one language to another. When I read that the story of “The Speedy Journey” was built on Kindermann’s erroneous belief that he had discovered a previously unknown moon orbiting Mars, my mind instantly drew a parallel between this German astronomer and the American sky gazer Percival Lowell. Lowell was a 19th century member of a wealthy Boston family who loves astronomy, and who became enthralled with the widely reported observations of Mars made in 1877 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. During this unusually close passage of the red planet, Shiaparelli reported having seen thru his telescope a network of parallel and intersecting lines on the surface of Mars—features that he described as canali, the Italian word for ‘channels’, or ‘groves’. In newspaper accounts of Schiaparelli’s discovery, the word canali was mistranslated into English as ‘canals’, a word which in the era of the recently completed Suez Canal created an implication among the American public that those new found features on Mars were engineering feats of intelligent design. Percival Lowell was captivated by this notion, and his moneyed heritage gave him the time and the resources to explore that presumption much further. He had an observatory with a 24 inch telescope built just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona (on top of a mountain which he dubbed “Mars Hill”), and in 1894 began observing and mapping the surface of Mars, an obsession that he passionately pursued until his death 22 years later. Over those years he drew dozens of intricate charts of the canal systems, and developed and promoted a theory that the canals were intricate, crisscrossing waterways built by the Martians to transport water from the polar regions to the arid plains of a dying planet. Amazingly, he dedicated over two decades of his life to seeing and studying something that did not exist. The story of Percival Lowell’s fascination with the fictional canals of Mars is a prime example of the power of obsession, or how passion can drive the human mind to see and believe in things which do not exist. As Carl Sagan noted in his book and TV series “Cosmos”, Lowell’s belief that the canals that he saw on Mars were of intelligent design was indeed true, but ultimately that intelligence proved to be present on the earthbound side of the telescope. Lowell’s neigh hallucinatory interpretation of Mars became even more astounding when you realize that he was no crackpot, but rather a first-rate astronomer who made important contributions to the field; most notably observations that led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930, sixteen years after his death. Yet when it came to Mars, he saw only what he wanted to see rather than what was really there. From what Dwight said in his article, the view that exists of Kindermann today is from a narrow window in time and of very limited scope. It would be interesting to know if Kindermann was constitutionally like Percival Lowell—whether the man spent his life stubbornly clinging to the faulty belief that he had discovered a large moon of Mars, or if he eventually came to realize and accept the fact that he had merely observed a deep space object that happened to be situated near the planet in his field of vision that night. Was he someone who was so driven to prove himself right that his passion clouded his objectivity, or was he capable of letting go of his pet theory when it didn’t stand in the light of further observations? Or in his later years, did he even care? Just what kind of a scientist was Kindermann over the remaining years of his life? Your own article on Captain Marvel Jr. was a fun and interesting read. I’m certainly aware of the character, and highly regard what I’ve seen of the artist Mac Raboy, but I must sadly admit that I can count on one hand the number of Captain Marvel Junior stories that I’ve ever read…and I’d still have fingers left over. I can see that this is one void in my comic book reading experience that I need to fill one day. (Let me query you this; if Captain Marvel was called “The Big Red Cheese”, was Freddy Freeman’s super powered alter ego ever referred to as “The Small Blue Cheese”?) Those accompanying black and white cover reproductions brought back fond memories of the day when I got my copy of the “Steranko History of the Comics” and saw all those hundreds of Golden Age cover images for the first time. And your article itself is reminiscent of the enthusiastic appreciations of past characters that used to appear in the pages of Gordon Love’s Rocket’s Blast/The Comic Collector…back in the days when most collectors saw comics as the world’s greatest form of entertainment rather than as monetary investment. The well intentioned Prof. Edgewise—whose plans often go astray with disastrous consequences—sounds a bit like the character Prof. Pepperwinkle who would appear with some regularity on “The Adventures of Superman” television series a few years later. This makes me wonder when and where the stereotype of the benign, yet dangerously absent-

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minded professor first came into being. Even if the concept wasn’t originated with Edgewise, it’s still intriguing to speculate that the premise may have been ‘borrowed’ from Fawcett’s Marvel Family comics by the writers of the Superman TV show. The timing makes it a distinct possibility. I always love to see letters pages in a fanzine! All of the letters of comment printed herein are thoughtful and well written, and I can see where I’d enjoy this column in future issues of Fadeaway even more when I’m familiar with the articles and earlier letters that they are referencing. I was surprised by Jefferson Swycaffer’s self-depreciating appraisal of what he termed an “unconscious racist allusion” in his own writing. From what I can tell, he’s being too hard on himself. There is nothing inherently racist in describing a black man as being dark skinned, no more than it is inherently derogatory to describe someone as being short, blonde, old, blue-eyed, or female. People are all different, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging those differences. What is derogatory is negatively judging someone’s value as a person based solely on their physical, racial, or gender differences—which I think I can safely assume wasn’t the case in Swycaffer’s story. The phrase ‘swarthy workmen’ isn’t racist; it’s just a statement of fact that adds color (pun intended) to the prose, even if the word ‘swarthy’ didn’t mean what the author had thought it meant. I liked everything about this olde tyme fanzine, Bob. The only suggestion that I could make to improve the zine is a technical adjustment: I think that text on a page of this size, printed in a font of his size, would look better, and be easier to read, in a two column layout with justified margins. But that’s a pretty minor point…and one that didn’t interfere at all with this issue of Fadeaway being a wonderful diversion on a cold and stormy winter’s day. Thanks for sharing! ///I appreciate your long and thotful comments, but I wish you would use email instead of snail mail. When I type out a letter that has to be printed out and mailed, it means I have to haul out the manual typer to type up the address on the envelope to send it out in, plus spend the money for a stamp. Email essentially costs nothing. While I am sympathetic to the plight of the USPost Office, I am not disposed to spending money for their stamps if I don’t have to. Plus, letters take a couple or three days to reach destination, while email takes a fraction of a second. I am in favor or progress, especially progress in communication. My email address (for future reference) is fabficbks@aol.com I use double columns with justified margins on most of my long articles dealing with science fiction or assorted other subjects, but I decided not to do that with the CMJr. article because of the odd sizes of some of artwork I wanted to use. Placement and the type of illustrations can be a major factor in those kinds of layout decisions, at least the ones I make. An article with lots of big illos seems to call for one column rather than two, but there is room for lots of variation. There are no set stands with fmz publishing. The concept of the well intentioned, brilliant scientist or teacher whose plans lead to problems or even disasters was certainly not new to the CMJr. stories. I have read examples in some of the dime novel stories from the 1860s and onward. The early Gernsback science magazine featured stories about Professor Heidrick who created silly inventions that went wrong. Those stories were badly written and were panned by readers even in the first decade of the 20th century. The concept was probably a familiar stereotype by the time comic books became big biz in the 1940s and up. I can’t recall offhand if there were any other ongoing characters similar to Prof. Edgewise in other Golden Age series, but there probably were. So far as I can determine CMJr was never given any put-down nicknames by any of his foes. You have to remember that generally speaking the Jr tales were more serious that most of the Captain Marvel Sr. adventures, despite the incredible diversity of story plots being used. For those who want to read the Captain Marvel Jr. stories without paying the big bucks for back issues, DC Comics, his current owner, has produced two hardback Archive volumes that reprint his origin and earliest adventures, plus there are any number of semi-professional reprint volumes in both print-to-order and e-book format for sale at places like alibris.com and amazon.com. Human beings in general seem to have a pre-determination to fixate on some idea and hold to it no matter what. Trifling matters such as facts, scientific proof, or logic, are brushed aside as unimportant. This annoying quality can be very destructive, as it causes wars, religious persecution, bigotry, and lots of other ills all to common in human society. It is particularly evident in today’s political climate where leaders and philosophical stalwarts of both major parties have dug into their respective positions and are unwilling to accept even the potential of compromising their viewpoints, no matter what the long-term consequences may be. This pretty much borders on insanity, at least in my opinion. There is a definite balancing act to translating fiction from one language to another. Famed Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem claimed at various times that most of the English language translations of his stories were completely wrong. He wasn’t too happy with the Russian or Italian translations either, but then, there were quite a few things he was more than ordinarily grumpy about. Translations of Russian science fiction into English have often been clunky because the translator tried too hard to make the Russian words transpose exactly into

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English, no matter how stilted the phrasing might be. I don’t think that will be a problem with Dwight Decker’s translation of “Speedy Journey)./// Ray Palm; Boxholder; PO Box 2; Plattsburgh, NY 12901

Your essay: To Book Or E-Book, Is It Even A Question? I went to Kent McDaniel's blog and read his post about his Kindle and Smashword experiences. Yes, the market is flooded with SF e-books but then again the p-book market has been "flooded" also. Walk into a bookstore or library, you'll see all sorts of tomes competing for your attention.

In his post Kent says what I've been saying for years: yes, the market is crowded, but it's better to have it out there, online, than to leave it buried in a computer backfile.

I do agree that it would help to have critics to filter out the crap from the candy. But it ain't going to be me. I have too many projeX.

I have seen a friend who jumped through the Kindle hoops, spending hours re-formatting his works to work properly with that service, only to see minimum response. That's why I never jumped on the Kindle bandwagon. I'll stick with easier stuff like PDFs, Word documents and blogs. Even though I'm giving it away for free at least someone out there is reading it.

Your essay: Snow, Snow, Everywhere. Yup, I'm in the same trap. I would like to move to a sunnier clime but what about all my stuff? If I could only chuck it out and hit the road. That might happen if winters stay like this one and we don't get a repeats of the milder ones we've had.

I've bought an inexpensive wifi router and now I can use my Android tablet in my apartment instead of going to a wifi spot like a coffee house or library. I've been using my tablet as a portable internet radio, checking out all sorts of stations. There's one called Roswell UFO Radio that airs OTR radio SF/fantasy programs like "Dimension X" and "Lights Out." That William Conrad was busy in the day, even without being Matt Dillon on the radio version of "Gunsmoke." It's interesting to hear different versions of Ray Bradbury short stories like "Zero Hour" and "Kaleidoscope," in some cases produced decades apart. So thanks to my tablet I'm getting more into OTR.

I've been working on issue #100 of my zine but it's slow going, thanX in part to this insufferable winter weather. Anyway, it should be in the snail mail to you by the end of the month. ///You are correct that there is no shortage of print books. In addition to the normal steady stream of hardbacks and paperbacks pouring forth from the big market publishers, there are now thousands of new books coming from small press and specialty publishers. The computer revolution has made it much easier to set up a book to be printed. Type setting and metal plates are no longer necessary, and the cost of actually running copies off has gone down as well. That said, the number of ebooks out there is FAR in excess of the number of print books, because it is even easier to produce an electronic book. With no editing, no proof reading, and no production standards, anybody can generate an ebook about any subject, and they are. The number of SF/fantasy ebooks being churned out every month staggers the imagination. A few years ago nobody would have believed that so many books could possibly be released in any format. How is the good stuff going to succeed? Most of these new writers have no merchandising expertise, altho some are adapt at creating innovative reviews and recommendations of their material. There may be somebody out there reading all this stuff, but then again, maybe not. It is interesting that the minimum level of sales commissions Amazon will allow before it actually sends out a check to any author whose work is offered runs thru amazon.com is $10; yet only 18% of all the authors being featured in their e-book listings ever reach that minimum plateau (and that includes writers who offer multiple books). That tells me that very few people are actually reading all those e-books. William Conrad was one of the most popular, in demand radio actors during the late 40s and early 1950s. His distinctive voice and his obvious acting talents kept him busy constantly. There were a number of big name radio stars who were everywhere because of their versatility, including folks like Elliot Lewis, Parley Beahr, Paul Freas, Howard McNear and more. Some of these folks moved over to TV and movies, and a lot more found ready work doing cartoon voices and voice-over commercials./// OUR ESTEEMED ART STAFF & WHERE THEIR WORK MAY BE FOUND HEREIN: Dan Carroll---44 Brad Foster---2, 27 clip art from the internet---20, 28, John Cody---1 Missy Meyer---2 29, 30,31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Robert Cepeda---Pages 5, 27 Dave Puck---7 38 30.

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