Serendipity

There is definitely a serendipitous nature to blogging - well at least in terms of this blog. My decision to reprise some of my favourite horror comics in the run up to Christmas, has been so well received by you guys that it's got me digging up as much additional material as possible to shed some more light on the genesis of the Warren line of comics.

Yesterday's posting, which made brief mention of James Warren's early experiments with fumetti like use of photos in some of his monster magazines did remind me that one of the key players in those early years had posted a fascinating reminiscence about his days with Warren. Russ Jones was the first albeit short term, editor of Creepy and how that comic came together is described in some detail by Russ here.

As you can surmise the term serendipitous can also be applied to the way in which Russ came to work for James Warren and certainly does apply to the way that first landmark issue of Creepy came about. There's a lot more on the evolution and history of the entire family of Warren magazines in David Roach and Jon B. Cooke's excellent and essential, "The Warren Companion". If you can't get hold of a reasonably priced copy (it's retailing at Amazon for £95.00) it's available as a Google Book on line - immediately - now!

The story I'm going to run past you today which appeared in issue 75 of Creepy, was when it appeared jarringly atypical. If Creepy and Eerie were a reprise of E.C.'s Tales From The Crypt, Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, then the story in question "Thrill Kill" would have seemed to stem from the much more polemical and controversial fare that had so characterized Shock Suspenstories. Jim Senstrum the story's author had attempted to break into comics at the age of 19 by sending Stan Lee a twenty page Hulk story that he had put together in his basement whilst as he put it, "all my friends were out on dates and driving around in hot cars". Lee was evidently impressed enough to invite the young Senstrum to New York the following week but as luck would have it, came the day and Lee was unavailable and it was John Verpooten who met Senstrum. The meeting came to more of a pat on the back and keep up the good work.

A break for army service followed and then it was back to pitching comic ideas with a vengeance, unable to secure the assistance of a reliable writer, Senstrum started creating his own scripts and it was John Cochran then working for Warren who bought the first of what was to be many scripts from Senstrum. Senstrum's agenda was still to make it as a full time comic penciller but along the way he discovered he had a real talent for writing - serendipity kicks in again!

The title "Thrill Kill" was also to an extent the product of serendipity having first entered Senstrum's consciousness several years earlier as a great title devoid of any plot when he encountered a private Thrillkill while still on basic training with The National Guard in Minnesota. The resultant story with it's real life "Texas Tower" references and documentary style exposition was unlike anything that appeared in comics before. Editor Bill DuBay considered the script so exceptional that he scrawled "For Neal Adams Only" across the draft.

Here then is that story as it appeared nearly thirty five years ago and still just as powerful and all too resonant.

Dracula, Fumetti and James Warren

I'm going to tease you with another recent production from the ongoing epic that is Cloud 109. The page in question is when Gina, Cary and Rabby manage eventually to re-boot themselves out of the increasingly hellish Dungeon of Death game and return to the cyber-lounge, but as you can see David's script required a horror version of the lounge.

This enabled me to have great fun with lots of goth symbolism and draw in a few references to films of yore. Sadly Tom and Sheryl are no longer an item, they've both gone and got themselves new partners - hence the bleeding heart with OTT dagger, but Sheryl is (I believe) still cool with appearing as the female lead in this epic and the thought of having to remodel Gina every time Tom ends up with a new G/F is too painful to contemplate. Sheryl is absolutely perfect for the role, so if you're reading this Sheryl you are still forever ensnared in the cyber world of Cloud 109. Bottom line is there is no escape until the books are completed.

Now the observant amongst you will doubtless notice one or two luminaries from the annals of horror but there is a delightful little detail regarding Rabby's jacket which I lifted from the jacket that John Van Eyssen wears in his portrayal of the luckless Jonathan Harker in the Hammer production of "Dracula" ("Horror of Dracula" in the U.S.) which was released in 1958. To my mind it still ranks as the best of the entire output of Hammer films. The adaption of Bram Stokers text does take terrific liberties but the result is a film full of pace and dynamism and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are perfect in their roles of Dr. Van Helsing and Dracula.

Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas all cite this as being a key influence on their cinematic sensibilities and you could add to this list a host of other creatives including one James Warren, publisher extraordinaire. Prior to the debut of Creepy, Eerie, Blazing Combat and Vampirella, there was a line of comic adaptations of horror films that Warren was putting out as individual titles in their own right as well as running some of them in his horror magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World. The comics were painstakingly assembled from a mix of production stills and blurry screen captures, in fact the process was such a nightmare that latterly the stories were redrawn by Russ Jones (Creepy's first editor) and Wally Wood with Joe Orlando pitching in. The experiment was a brief run and immediately preceded the debut of Creepy magazine but there were some interesting anomalies thrown up by the adaptation of Dracula for the one off Curse of Frankenstein/ Horror of Dracula magazine.

Hammer films were apparently released in three different versions due to censorship requirements. The longest versions were released in Japan and had the least censorial excisions, next came the U.S. version and last and most heavily excised came the U.K. version. The scene of Dracula's facial decomposition was removed from the U.K. and U.S. releases but did appear in Japan and also in Warren's adaptation.

But well worth a check out, there is a beautifully pristine print which was used for the U.S. DVD release which does include the re-instatement of the Lucy Harker stakeing.

Cloud 109 - The Tenth Instalment

Today we're back in the cyber lounge with Gina, Rabby and Cary, they know that somethings not quite right but they're going to stick it out and hope that they don't get weirded out by more strange happenings in the weird and wonderful cyber world of Cloud 109.

Eagle eyed observers will notice Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre drifting down the stairs, mutton chop sideburns and slightly pissy demeanour. This guy it has to be said is a musical genius and anyone remotely interested in checking out the mesmerically addictive vibes of The Brian Jonestown Massacre are strongly, nay urgently implored to locate any of their albums - they're all brilliant but perhaps "Take It From The Man" is as good a place to start as any.

Also worth checking out is Ondi Timoner's film "Dig" which documents the utterly dysfunctional progress of these guys including the memorable night when the band had an onstage punch up (not an infrequent occurrence with the BJM) and blew a showcase with various suits from big deal record labels in attendance and a million dollar contract on the table.

Love em...

Here's a clip of them performing "Going to Hell", which could well be their theme tune.

Planet of the Knobheads

Today as promised we're very privileged to have a piece by David Orme the writer and originator of much that makes Cloud 109 such a fun project to work on. So without further ado I'll hand you guys over to David ...

O.K., so here’s something about me, how I got started as a writer, early influences, especially science fiction. Early influence? I have to face it; I’m the SF adolescent nerd that never grew up. Our spare room is lined with ancient, rotting pulp mags that I still take down and fondle lovingly. I have to keep them in plastic bags to stop the smell of decaying paper spreading through the house – and yes, my wife has made threats.

So, who am I and what do I do? I’m a 61 year-old jobbing writer, who will write anything as long as there’s money in it, and have a bit of fun with it all along the way. I’m married to Helen, who is also a writer, specialising (as I do) in books for reluctant readers. She does the girls’ stuff and I do the boys’ stuff. We both do fiction and non-fiction, teacher’s books, and I have a little sideline in poetry.

The very early sixties were a great time for SF. There were still great British SF magazines such as New Worlds. Restrictions on imported US mags had been lifted, and you could buy Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, IF, Galaxy, all at half a crown a time. Some of the material was iffy, but a lot was good. It’s now forgotten that JG Ballard learnt his trade writing for mags such as New Worlds and Amazing; the iconic Drowned World started life as a novella in a magazine called Science Fiction Adventures. I have it on the shelf.

By 1963 the UK magazines had given up artwork because of the cost, but it still thrived in US magazines. There were wonderful marriages of old and new – JG Ballard illustrated by that greatest-of-all pulp illustrators, Virgil Finlay, for example.

Of course, I needed more of this stuff. So on a Saturday I’d get on my bike and cycle around London finding branches of the Popular Book Centre. These were piled high with pre-war pulps, going back as far as the early days of Amazing Stories (1926) on sale for around five bob a time. Thus began, the first magazine collection, the one I flogged off when I went to college, leading to a lifetime of regret. Reassembling the collection has been a great deal more expensive.

Then I discovered I wanted to write, and I produced the odd story for SF fanzines. I wasn’t very good at it at first, but then, who is to begin with? I also started writing poetry at this point, which is an excellent way to learn the craft of writing, whatever sort of writing you ultimately do. I became a teacher, and edged into writing by producing textbooks – including thrill-a-minute titles like 150 literacy hours for year four.

But would educational publishers be likely to publish the sorts of things I wanted? I had returned to writing SF for fun. My first published SF story as a professional writer was in a children’s newspaper and was called – wait for it – Barry Manilow from Outer Space. A mad scientist held the world to ransom by playing non-stop Barry Manilow from every TV, radio, loudspeaker etc. from a radio station in Earth orbit. The world lasted three days before capitulating. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? 
 Eventually I persuaded Nelson Thornes, a fairly staid publisher, to take on a reluctant reader series called Zone 13, with 18 titles, including such winners as Invasion of the Killer Robots. From then on I turned out more of the stuff, for the likes of Badger Publishing (Starship Football – how do you play football in space?) and Evans Brothers. Then I met Ransom publishing, and got together with Peter to produce Boffin Boy, and so began the great collaboration that has led to Cloud 109. My latest from Ransom is the Starchaser series, a sort of A-team in space. Planet of the Vampires – there’s a title that could have come from a 1930s edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

So maybe all that adolescent reading wasn’t waste of time after all. It has to be said that action-adventure space opera isn’t that fashionable these days – publishers want clever, psychological stuff, and it’s no longer acceptable to assume all aliens are baddies and shoot ‘em up, no questions asked. Even Slime monsters from Venus must have their caring side. But . . . as I mentioned, I write a lot for reluctant readers, and they are a discriminating bunch. They want action from the word go, cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, and no agonising on the rights and wrongs of it all to slow the story up. There isn’t time for that anyway – we are talking of fully plotted novels of 1200 words or so.

Cue the pulp writers of the thirties and forties. Sensation, action, ray guns blazing, a bikini-clad moll to rescue from a scaly, slobbering two-headed monster – just the stuff. (O.K., I have to tone down the bikini-clad moll bit – these are for kids, after all.)

Of course, Cloud 109 is sophisticated stuff, not for reluctant readers, but for the intelligent, discriminating types that read this blog. But read it carefully, and you might just spot the odd Venusian Slime monster lurking in the depths of Gina’s computer.

Seduction of the Innocent

A friend of mine recently regaled me with the tale of his attempts to procure a birthday present for his fourteen year old nephew. It wasn't as easy as it might seem as he thought he ought to run the ideas he had past the wee lad's mum.

Eventually they settled on the idea of a computer magazine, but even here doubts arose when he reported back that the magazines in question had a 15 certificate. The problem being that nowadays computer games magazines review products such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "Zombies from Hell" (OK I made that last one up but you get my drift) which are rated 15.

I don't know exactly what it was that eventually they decided upon as an appropriate present but it wasn't an easy decision to come to.

Now it might appear that this is taking levels of anxiety regarding tipping children into a variety of personality disorders and even juvenile delinquency as a result of unsuitable stimuli, to an absurd level. However I think that it's a part of human nature that is always with us. There was in the 1950's an epidemic of teenage gun crime in both this country and the U.S. in fact the figures for shootings and the coverage that they were given in the UK media was on a par with the recent rise in knife crime. Scapegoats were needed and in both the U.S. and U.K. there was an outbreak of national hysteria over the prevalence of so called "Horror Comics" on newstands.

Nowadays it's computer games, thirty years ago it was "video nasties", it's a sop for the ever anxious middle classes who just need something they can comprehend as being the root cause for their children kicking off from time to time. And to back up their anxieties they've got constant counselling from the media who's increasing tendency to treat their audiences like a mentally frail herd of sheep is evidenced by announcements such as "viewers may find some of the scenes contained within this report distressing" inevitably followed by "we'll be running a helpline after this report so that viewers affected by these issues can talk to one of our advisors".

Sheesh!!!

So censoring your kids entertainment is not that unusual I suspect, but around the age of thirteen children's brains are in a state of hyper-drive as they go through a process of re-wiring. They are seriously exploring the limits of their boundaries and yes they definitely need to know what the limits of those boundaries are. But a lot of the help they get in assessing those boundaries is not just from mum and dad but it's from their own imaginations. Venturing into the darker regions of fantasy is a natural and important progression for them, without that they are heading for dullsville. It's no accident that film directors such as Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino soaked up horror comics, Hammer films and anything else that their parent's generation would have regarded as being entirely unsuitable.

My journey into all this stuff occurred at around the age of thirteen, when a schoolfriend of mine introduced me to the wonderful world of "The Pan Book of Horror Stories" series. For kids my age these things were fantastic reading and after that we were dabbing modelling floc, a kind of weird fine brown stuff that looked in a poor light almost like stubble, onto our baby faces and trying to pass ourselves as 16 year olds so we could get into our local flea pit to see "Dracula Prince of Darkness" and "Plague of the Zombies".

Halcyon days indeed!

Right now that we're on a horror theme - here's the contest:

The picture below is the first published artwork by a then sixteen year old who was destined to achieve great things in the field of horror and fantasy comics and illustration. The magazine that it appeared in published the artwork in their fan section and several years later the artist concerned was producing some of his greatest work for that magazine.

So I want you to tell me who the artist is.

Lucky first correct response (post it in the comments section so I can see who's first) gets to appear in Cloud 109 with a partner of their choice - could be an S/O or someone either real or fictional you would fancy hanging out with for a panel or two.

Complete Control

The digital age has created some weird anomalies for the reproduction of artworks. I did have the honour once upon a time to be contacted by the art director of Playboy magazine to create an artwork of the then current "bad girl" diva, Alecia Beth Moore aka Pink.

The art direction was nice and simple and followed on from an earlier illustration of mine that had aroused the A/D's interest. All I had to do was to pretty much follow my already established template in terms of pose and perspective but substituting Ms Moore and her chien andalou aka "Fucker" in place of the original characters I had previously created.

So far so good ...

But there was one additional request from the art director that did have enormous ramifications. They wanted the artwork supplied with the background layer separate to the figure. The fee was generous and it was a nice assignment so I happily nodded my head in assent and got on with the job.

It went through incredibly smoothly, just a couple of minor tweaks and it was in the bag, so to speak. Bang off the invoice and await the copy of the magazine which was to be sent to me upon publication of the piece.

The magazine, in fact several of them arrived some few weeks later and I eagerly tore open the package and leafed through the endless pages to arrive at ... ulp! ... the article in concern.

There indeed was my artwork but barely recognizable, the A/D had completely reworked the original background so that he could run text through it and as the final macabre twist had actually artworked the name Pink to the resultant concoction. To me it looked Godawful and i think to the powers that be at Playboy it looked dire too as I've never worked for them since.

The example here is an approximation by yours truly of the resultant page I was so depressed with the magazines themselves that I quickly binned them.

There wasn't much I could do, the final twist being that to cash the cheque that finally arrived I had to sign a mini contract on the back of the cheque which essentially assigned all my rights in the artwork to Playboy.

You live and learn ...

I'll be running a little comic competition tomorrow - first prize (well the only prize) is that the lucky winner gets transported to the Cloud 109 cyber lounge and you can nominate a partner too.

And further excitement on Monday David Orme the guy behind the wonderfully wacky script for Cloud 109 takes the stand to regale you with some of his experiences and passions including "Planet of the Knobheads".

P.S. I'll try and get the contest up by 9.30 am GMT tomorrow, it's being run on a first with the correct response basis. If you don't win this one don't worry because I've got some more daft contests I want to do in the run up to Christmas. Today's blog was horribly late as I got dragged down our local boozer by some of my flaky boho neighbours. I did ever so slightly try and protest but they wouldn't have it and the inevitable happened and I got trashed again, so I'm having a quiet night in to make amends.

More of the Lost Treasure

I'm currently hard at work with the day job, i.e. producing a comic strip for the N.H.S. and after that there's another for a U.S. client, so to provide you guys with reasons to keep visiting the blog during a relative "Cloud 109" news lull, I'm running with some of those all important formative influences of mine, without which I probably wouldn't be a functioning artist.

Carrying on from yesterday on the basis of this is as good a time to share these gems with you as any, here are some more of Giorgio De Gaspari's cover artworks for War, Air Ace and Thriller Picture Library, several of which have never appeared beyond their original appearances on the Fleetway libraries.

I'm also enclosing a couple of examples of his earlier work, it seems evident that he was producing work for magazines as well as film posters in his native Italy. The paintings which are available as posters from AllPosters.Co.Uk. are interesting as they reveal weaknesses as well as the strengths of his later war orientated work. The principal weakness at least in my humble opinion is when you look at both the weather balloon painting and also the Loch Ness Monster artwork is whereas the elements are really nicely handled they just don't seem to sit very comfortably with each other. The figures in the weather balloon artwork are individually very pleasing, but they just don't seem to be all that credible, they're trying to look busy without really convincing you that they are and the brutally pollarded tree in the Loch Ness scene looks for all the world like a not very convincing stage prop that's just been dragged on and dumped unceremoniously into the frame.

But compare and contrast with the sheer bravura paintings that De Gaspari was creating some few years later for Fleetway and you'll see a man at the peak of his creative powers and firing on all cylinders.

Lovely stuff!