Roger O Green

The Tom Skulan FantaCon interview

The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures.

FantaCon, once an Albany tradition for fans of comic books, fantasy, and in its later incarnations, horror films, is returning after a brief, two-decade hiatus. FantaCon 2013, operated by its original creator, Tom Skulan, will be held Saturday, September 14 and Sunday, September 15 at the Marriott Hotel on Wolf Road in Albany. Ticket for the related Three Nights of Horror at the Palace Theatre on September 11-13 in Albany, will be available from the Palace Theatre box office, starting on February 13.

FantaCo, the store/mail-order company Tom started, operated from 1978 through 1998 at 21 Central Avenue, Albany, NY. I worked there from May 1980 to November 1988, worked at the first five FantaCons, and attended the sixth.

Incidentally, Skulan is pronounced like the third word in Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
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Tom, when you owned FantaCo, you ran seven FantaCons, in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1989, and 1990. But you had a store, and often, publications to use in cross-promotions. You have a FantaCon planned for September of 2013, after a twenty-year hiatus. Why FantaCon, why now?

There are three reasons that come to mind. First, I have always wanted to do another FantaCon when I wasn’t preoccupied with the store, the publishing, and the mail order. I have always wanted to see what that would be like!
Second, time is creeping up on me and these old bones have only so much time left where I can handle the demands of the show. And finally I like the numbers of doing the show the weekend of Friday the 13th in 2013.

What is the theme of the upcoming convention? What guests have you lined up so far?

The theme for this show is to try and recreate all the FantaCons all at once. Some shows were strongly comic-oriented and some shows were strongly horror-oriented. This show will be both at once. I want to create a party atmosphere for all the original attendees AND the new attendees too.

The guest line up confirmed at this time is Steve Bissette, Ari Lehman, John Russo, George Kosana, Russ Streiner, Judy O’Dea, Judith Ridley, Geri Reischl, Belinda Balaski, Kyra Schon, A. Michael Baldwin, Kevin Eastman, Richard Brooker, Michael T. Gilbert, Jason Moore, Jarod Balog, Dennis Daniel, Bob Michelucci, Mark Martin, Bill Anderson, Jim Whiting, John Hebert, Herb Trimpe, Dustin Warburton, Jeff Lieberman, Fred Hembeck and a few other surprises to be announced. You can read all about each guest at our website at www.fantacon.com.

Let’s go way back in time, to the mid-1970s. When I first met you, you were working at a comic book store in New Paltz, NY, halfway between New York City and Albany. Tell me about the Crystal Cave and its owner, Peter Maresca.

The Crystal Cave started as a little shop in a second-floor walk up on Main Street in New Paltz. It was run by Peter and his then-wife Rita. It was one of the first 100 comic book stores in the US. Peter was definitely a fan more than a business person whereas Rita was a business person more than a fan. The combination worked for a while. I hightailed it to that little shop the moment I saw a flyer for it hanging in the Ariel Bookstore. I preceded to visit it every time I got out of a class. I devoured the newest issues of TBG and started advertising myself. Eventually, I hounded Peter into giving me a job. The Crystal Cave then moved across the street to a ground-level storefront where it established itself. A couple of years later it moved to a much larger location off the beaten path. My years spent working at the Crystal Cave during the development of the comic market are fond memories for me.

You were going to school at the State University College at New Paltz to be a teacher. How long did you teach, and how did you like it?

After doing my student teaching in Carmel, NY I was asked to stay on and fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. I taught junior high school in the morning sessions and high school in the afternoon. I taught for one full school year.
I met David Greenwood and Gerry Michalak who would become friends. I enjoy teaching. I DIDN’T enjoy the administrative aspects of it, though, and that spun me around to doing my own thing.

A couple of years later, I would run into you selling comic books at small shows. Then on August 28, 1978, which you insist was NOT keyed to Jack Kirby’s birthday, you opened FantaCo. What did the name mean to you, and why in Albany?

Oh, what a search it was to find a location for the store!! I started in Danbury CT, which was near Carmel, and looked at all kinds of storefronts in all kinds of locations. I then moved up and through NY state and ended up with three possible locations in and around Albany. 21 Central was the last location I looked at and it was the 55th time I had inspected a storefront. The large front window sold me as did the location.

The name means either the Fantasy Company or the Fantastic Company. I used both interchangeably when I was thinking it up.

In 1979, you held the first FantaCon at the Empire State Plaza, called FantaCon ’80 to confuse future historians. What are your recollections of that first convention?

It was a whirlwind!!! From conception to the actual show was only a few months!! I do remember drinking obscene amounts of coffee, staying awake for days on end, and ultimately stumbling into the Convention Center on a bright August morning and labeling the tables. The lift started bringing up dealers and then the show was on! I remember that everyone we had brought in was a trooper and did a great job. By the way, you can thank Kevin Cahill [now a New York State Assemblyman] for calling the first show FantaCon ’80. HE convinced me that it would make the show sound futuristic!!

The cover of that first FantaCon program was drawn by the late Raoul Vezina. Raoul was, in many ways, the face of the Crystal Cave, and in the early days, the face of FantaCo. What was it about Raoul that made him suitable to be the guy everyone saw in the front of the store?

Raoul was a super popular artist and musician in New Paltz. And as soon as he did the window mural for the Crystal Cave he became known for that as well. Everyone liked Raoul!
So considering that I had worked with him for years at the Crystal Cave it was logical for me to ask him to come to Albany and help me with the new store. The earliest days of FantaCo very much mirrored the Crystal Cave in that Raoul did our first window and he was the frontman for the store. I took care of the finances and ran the mail order which carried over from my own mail-order business. Most people thought that Raoul owned the store.

Who was the original Smilin’ Ed, and how did the rat become the emblem for FantaCo?

Fortunately, the absolute original first Smilin’ Ed character exists in about 50,000 copies of the 1979 Overstreet Price Guide as a full-page ad announcing the new store. Anyone can pull out a copy and see the original character.
The way it went was this: I had reserved a full-page ad in Overstreet timed to come out just after the store opened. I had laid out the page and written the copy I wanted it to say but I had no central comic character so I asked Raoul if he could draw a rat in a spacesuit. I figured that was different enough from all the other characters. So Ed began as an advertising character. The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures. So I came up with the basic rat character but it was Raoul who gave the “rat in a spacesuit” a personality and a name. It was a good blend of ideas and I really think we could have continued the comic series until it caught on.

Smilin’ Ed was the star of four comic books, created by Raoul and you, and published by the company in 1980-1982. It was never particularly commercially successful, unfortunately. Why do you think that was?

At the time we were publishing Ed, independent comics were in their infancy. They were B&W and cost more than color comics. Fans wanted a superstar artist on the series to make the relatively high cover prices palatable. All we had was good art and good stories. That was not enough at the time.

What’s your favorite Phil Seuling story? [Among other things, Phil pretty much invented the direct market for comic books. His company, Seagate, was FantaCo’s distributor of comic books and was early in carrying FantaCo publications. FantaCon 2013 is dedicated, in part, to Phil’s memory.] ]

OMG!! How long is this interview??? I have SO many Phil stories I could go on forever. Probably “the pact”, which lasted many years right up to his death, is my favorite. At some point during a particularly slow show in Boston, Phil and I decided that we were going to eat out way through the cuisines of the world. ALL of them, no matter how obscure were there to be tasted. We did this at conventions and on my weekly visits to his home in Seagate. After several years we really started hitting the obscure. One of the last places we ate together was a Cuban-Chinese restaurant (which was wonderful by the way). Later Hank Jansen and I would go there too.
The other part of the pact was that whoever left the country had to send the other one a postcard saying “I’m in (fill in the country) and you’re not!! I have a lot of those cards and sent a lot too!!

The first artist FantaCo published was Fred Hembeck. It was Fred’s second book, Hembeck 1980, which actually came out in February 1980. Fred has been quite clear that FantaCo didn’t “steal” him from Eclipse Comics, who had put out the first Hembeck issue. What’s your recollection of the story?

My recollections were that Dean [Mullaney] had a big hit with his Sabre book. It had gone through some 3 printings with 30,000+ copies. I think that Dean wanted (expected?) the Hembeck book to sell just as many copies and when it did not he kinda lost interest in it. It was nothing against Fred and certainly, we NEVER stole the book away. It was offered to us.

Hembeck did a total of seven books for FantaCo, but three new items plus an expanded reprint of issue 1 just in 1980. Wasn’t that an ambitious schedule?

Yes, looking back on that it was ambitious. If you remember at the time one of the biggest complaints about the independent comics was that they were always late. Fred was fast so we tried to keep up a steady schedule. It worked.

How the heck did you get John Caldwell, who had done work for National Lampoon, to do Mug Shots with FantaCo in 1980?

I hand that miracle off to Kevin Cahill who convinced John to do the first several FantaCons. At each show, John would organize a group drawing by all the guests and then auction it off for charity.
At some point, I think that Kevin mentioned to John that we were publishing and the idea snowballed from there. Unfortunately, we did not lay out the book the way John wanted it and he was quite disappointed. I wish there had been more communication as that book could have been a nice seller in book stores over a long period of time.

In many ways, I was a bit surprised that you had a store primarily focused on comics since you were much more interested in film and music. Were comics a toehold, a recognizable store genre, you used to eventually do what you REALLY wanted to do, such as the horror film books and magazines?

Well, it was, has been, and still is a Catch-22 for me. I started my interest in this specialty market from horror-oriented products: Mars Attacks cards, Famous Monsters, Gary Svehla’s Gore Creatures fanzine, Steve Ditko’s Fantastic Giants comic, Creepy, Eerie, and others. I would always choose a horror comic over a superhero comic. Fantastic Four #19 was the first superhero comic I ever read. Much later in 1968, I bought all the first issues that Marvel was putting out that year- Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Hulk 102, etc., etc. It was then I caught the superhero bug and waited for every issue. It was also when I began buying multiple issues for later resale. So that is my messy answer!!
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Xerox Ferox, John Szpunar’s forthcoming book, with a cover created by Steve Bissette, will be premiering at FantaCon.

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Photos, taken by Roger Green (top to bottom):
Tom Skulan, 1982 or 1983; founder of FantaCo and FantaCon
Steve Bissette, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, a guest at FantaCon 2013
the late Raoul Vezina, 1982 or 1983; co-creator of Smilin’ Ed comics, FantaCo front of the store guy
Bill Anderson, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, worked at FantaCo, a guest at FantaCon 2013, the guy who scanned all of these pictures and about five dozen more

Anderson Cooper is the answer to everything

I suppose I DO care a bit about this, since I’ve been watching JEOPARDY! with Trebek or original host Art Fleming for more than half my life.

The NBC-TV morning news?/entertainment show Today has only been around for 61 years. The program, envisioned by Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, Sigourney’s dad, has had its controversies with staff, such as when Deborah Norville replaced Jane Pauley as co-anchor in 1990, to disastrous ratings until she herself was replaced by Katie Couric.

In the current drama, Meredith Viera as co-host was replaced by long-time newsreader Ann Curry. The ratings went down, Curry left, after giving a painfully personal farewell. Many blamed her ouster on co-host Matt Lauer, for no good reason I’ve read. So the scuttlebutt now is who will replace Lauer, even though no announcement of his departure has come from the network.

This generated this unscientific Parade magazine readers poll about who, if anyone, should replace Lauer:

Matt Lauer should stay on ‘Today’ 25.59%
Anderson Cooper 44.44% (CNN anchor of multiple shows)
Willie Geist 11.17% (former FOX news anchor now on NBC)
David Gregory 5.23% (host of NBC’s Meet the Press)
Ryan Seacrest 6.85% (host of FOX’s American Idol, and NBC contributor)
Other: 4%

I don’t much care myself – I’ve been watching the CBS Morning Show, when I watch anything at all at that hour – except that a choice of Seacrest would be proof positive that Today should be run by the entertainment division, not the news.

Further speculation is that Lauer would replace Alex Trebek as host of the game show JEOPARDY! when he retires, presumably in a couple of years.

From an Entertainment Weekly poll, equally unscientific:

Ken Jennings 42.32% (won more games on JEOPARDY! than anyone)
Anderson Cooper 25.15%
Other 7.79%
Seth Meyers 6.69% (from Saturday Night Live -SNL Weekend Update)
Tom Bergeron 5.98% (co-host of Dancing With The Stars and a number of other shows)
Andy Richter 3.59% (Conan O’Brien sidekick)
Rachel Maddow 3.34% (host of an MSNBC news program)
Meredith Vieira 3.31% (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host)
Matt Lauer 2%
(Did any of these people actually show an interest in the job?)

I suppose I DO care a bit about this since I’ve been watching JEOPARDY! with Trebek or original host Art Fleming for more than half my life.

(A sarcastic Ken Levine suggests How Matt Lauer can save his career; some language may offend.)

Anderson Cooper also appears regularly on the CBS News program 60 Minutes and has swum with man-eating alligators.

Former SNL cast member Jimmy Fallon is scheduled to replace Jay Leno as host of the Tonight Show, also originally created by Pat Weaver near 60 years ago. I didn’t watch Johnny Carson much over his 30 years (1962-1992) on the show, or his successor, Leno. I tended to watch talk show host Dick Cavett (1969-1975), and later, the news program Nightline (1980-2005).

To the degree I care at all, I should note that Fallon went to the College of Saint Rose in Albany. NY, about four blocks from my house, and grew up only 40 minutes south of here, in Saugerties, NY. He is bringing the show back to NYC, after four decades in Los Angeles, thanks in part to some tax incentives doled out by New York State. Who will replace Fallon on the show that follows Tonight? Hey, why not Anderson Cooper? Apparently, he can do it all.

She was loved (Annette), hated (Maggie)

I have no recollection that the deaths of Richard Nixon (1994) or Ronald Reagan (2004) generating anywhere near the same level of vitriol as Margaret Thatcher’s passing.

I was feeling as though I wanted to write about a couple of recent deaths, but I needed an angle. Then it came to me.

Annette Funicello, who appeared on the Mickey Mouse Club, was my first TV crush, as I have previously noted; I was hardly the only one – e.g., see Ken Levine’s piece. Heck, my wife said she had a little crush on her. And it wasn’t just my generation: Cheri remembers her as well.

I watched Annette in a number of Disney programs, and almost certainly in Make Room for Daddy with Danny Thomas. Here’s a story about her in Salon. And enjoy this Parade magazine photo flashback.

But the best love letter to Annette I saw was from Chuck Miller, who even included a clip of the Disney comedy called ‘The Monkey’s Uncle,’ where she performs the title song with the Beach Boys!

Almost everyone loved Annette.

Margaret Thatcher was another matter. I had mixed to negative feelings about her tenure as Prime Minister of Great Britain. I agree with these complaints about her: presiding “over the Falklands War with Argentina, provided critical support to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and famously labeled Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” while backing South Africa’s apartheid regime.” She opposed the reunification of Germany, while, at home, was a union buster.

Arthur from New Zealand, by way of the US, wrote: “They say if you can’t say something nice about a person who’s just died, you shouldn’t say anything. Not very useful advice for a blogger.” Meanwhile, Shooting Parrots from the UK damned her with the faint praise of thanking her for the way that spin has become an end in itself.

These were mild complaints, though, compared with these: The woman who wrecked Great Britain and A terror without an atom of humanity.

Apparently, Margaret Thatcher inspired a whole unique genre of British culture: “We can’t wait till Margaret Thatcher dies”, years ago, including songs by several musicians. Now that she is deceased, Brits have sent “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” into music charts.

There have been American politicians who were reviled by certain segments of the population. But I have no recollection that the deaths of Richard Nixon (1994) or Ronald Reagan (2004) generating anywhere near the same level of vitriol. I have two not mutually exclusive theories about this: 1) the world has gotten even nastier in the past decade, and 2) the politics in the UK is more rough and tumble; if you’ve ever watched the debates in Parliament, with the Prime Minister in the thick of it, you’d know it’s measurably different from the way US Presidents are generally treated.

Certainly, it must have been difficult being a woman in a very male-dominated field, as the movie Iron Lady made clear. I thought that film, picking up her story in her dotage, was rather unfair, even though finely acted by Meryl Streep, who got her well-deserved Oscar. Speaking of unfairness, I found it very distressing that she has repeatedly been referred to by the c-word; amazingly sexist.

I should note that Mikhail Gorbachev said that she helped end the Cold War. You can read Parade magazine touts her accomplishments.

Racialicious’ take on Roger Ebert. I must say getting the Westboro Baptist Church to fuss at his funeral must be a badge of honor.

Evanier has more about Carmine Infantino.

Memory, in which I’ll tell you…wait, what was I going to say?

Your seemingly “brilliant” thought has vanished in the haze.

I’m watching the quiz show JEOPARDY! earlier this year, and the category for the final was MUSICAL THEATRE: “Before this show hit Broadway in 1964, one of its working titles was ‘The Luckiest People'”. I knew the song to which the clue referred was People. I knew Barbra Streisand was in the subsequent movie. But could I remember the name of the musical/movie? I could not; the answer, of course, was Funny Girl.

I was SO annoyed with myself. I don’t mind being unfamiliar with information, but I HATE it when it’s something I DID know but just can’t retrieve. It happens now and then; Hal Holbrook and Audra McDonald, for example, I could visualize, but the names just left me.

I’ve never been great with names. I see someone I know in passing, I’ll say, “Oh, hi!,” which gives me a few seconds to say, “So how are you doing, X?” where X is, I hope, the name of the person in front of me.

If I want to remember something really important, the worse thing for me to do is to write it on a piece of paper, which I will inevitably misplace. Since I have committed the info to paper, I lose the ability to retrieve it mentally. It’s better if I e-mail it to myself.

I have been taking this statin for high cholesterol for about a year and a half. My prescription ran out at the end of December, but I still have a couple of months of pills left. It may be my resistance to the fact that I need them at all that makes me forget to take them. The good news is that my cholesterol is still in a good range, verified with a blood test on January 31, which I would have forgotten to have done had not my doctor’s nurse called me.

Does this ever happen to you? You’re in a conversation, and you have a really great point to make. But you are being polite and let others speak so that by the time it gets back to you, your seemingly “brilliant” thought has vanished in the haze.

Seriously, there was more to this but I forgot to write it down, which I would probably have lost anyway…

Corporate politic$ in America

I think the Tea Party and the ACLU (or other odd bedfellows of your choice) should get together and think of some strategy to address this issue. It may have to be outrageous.

Folks in America like to think that our elected officials are beholden to Us, The People. We have spirited elections, and if we don’t like Candidate X, we can vote for Candidate Y. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about it.

Then why does the FAA have a “no-fly zone” over Mayflower, Arkansas being overseen by Exxon Mobil? “In other words, any media or independent observers who want to witness the tar sands spill disaster have to ask Exxon’s permission.” I don’t recall anyone electing Exxon as overseer of our skies. And a technicality has spared Exxon from having to pay any money into the fund that will be covering most of the clean-up costs.

How does Congress quietly pass, unbeknownst to most, even those who voted on it, a secret provision to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 which protects the manufacturers of genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health concerns, such as inflammatory bowel diseases? And check out the waiver Monsanto makes farmers sign.

Most observers believe Monsanto is likely to win a Supreme Court case which one must read to believe; that Justice Thomas, former Monsanto lawyer, doesn’t recuse himself is typical Clarence behavior. Now, if Vermont’s Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act passes the state legislature, requiring manufacturers to label modified food products as such, Monsanto has threatened to sue the state. Meanwhile, food safety advocates have called out President Obama over his broken promise to label GMOs.

Or, as I mentioned before, how do copyright holders give quasi-governmental powers to cut off Internet services?

The answer, my friend, is money. Money in politics. The ‘Revolving Door’ lobbyists have helped create the corporate betrayal of America. Check out The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secret website. So that is how one could have an anonymous! member of Congress slip something into a bill that protects the corporations.

None of this is news, exactly – see the FDR quote – but seems to have become both more pervasive and more perverse. So what are we going to do about it? I was watching this TED talk on Arthur’s blog, and it got me to think that there are many people on the political left and the political right who have a common agenda: a sense of fairness. Money trumps fairness, inherently.

I think the Tea Party and the ACLU (or other odd bedfellows of your choice) should get together and think of some strategy to address this issue. It may have to be outrageous.

Let’s face it: governments chug along doing the things they do, often in a self-serving manner, until the people get a bit uppity and sit at a lunch counter where they are unwelcome or refuse to sit in the back of the bus. Not sure what action it is should be yet, but as they say, it could be epic…

As my friend, Dan wrote, in response to the post cited above: “No corporation… has any right to enforce anything. If our government leaders give them that kind of power then we the people have every right to defy their bogus powers…”
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“For someone the right wing press likes to call a socialist,” Obama’s regressive record makes Nixon look like Che.