Welcome to 20th Century Refugee, the newsletter of author Glen Cadigan. Why a newsletter? Well, blame it on algorithms. The way social media sites work is they reward their frequent users, but not so much their infrequent ones. So if you only have news every once in a while, you fall off their radar and your posts don't get seen by all of your followers. Newsletters don't work that way; if you subscribe, you get it, every time. So if you don't want to miss anything, they're the way to go.
Why the Title?
Like a lot of people reading this, I was born in the 20th Century. That's when my tastes were formed and my brands were established, so living in the 21st Century can often feel like being a man without a century. Back in the days before everyone had the Internet on their cell phones all the time, people behaved differently. They didn't expect everything right now, and if they had to wait, the world didn't end in between. A newsletter is a lot like that; you can read it when you want to read it. Unlike a social media post, it won't be old news until the next newsletter comes along.
Am I Going to Regret Subscribing to This?
I hope not! My goal isn't to annoy you, it's to inform you. There'll be news when there's news. When there isn't, I'll probably run reruns from my website. The plan is to go once a week in the beginning, then after an audience is built up, it'll start to drop off. Unless there's news! Then the frequency will pick up. In the end, this will probably be a monthly (or less) newsletter.
The Past is Present
As promised when you signed up, one of the things 20th Century Refugee will do is showcase behind-the-scenes stories from past projects, and what better place to start than with a recent publication, The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum. It's fresh in people's minds, so there's less remembering to do. This story is so long it's divided into two parts, with Part I just below!
The Secret Origin of The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum
Like a lot of stories, this one begins before it actually begins. The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum started life as "The Man Who Loved Comics," a cover story I wrote for Alter Ego # 78 back in 2007. After Dave passed away in 2006, I approached AE editor Roy Thomas to ask if he had anything planned about his former colleague (Roy was the person who was originally going to write Giant-Size X-Men # 1, before he bowed out due to his workload), and he suggested that I should write a piece about Dave myself. I didn't tell Roy that was my secret plan all along, I just took the ball and ran with it.
For the article, I interviewed people who knew Dave personally at various points in his life. He had maintained an active online presence at a few message boards (remember those?) over the years, and people who knew him from his past had popped up. These included Tom Hoffman, who was in the Air Explorers (think Boy Scouts) with Dave, as well as Jerry Thompson, who not only went to high school with the co-creator of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, but also crossed paths with him while both were serving in the Navy. The only other person who could've given me the same insights would have been Dave himself, and I'm not sure I would've thought to ask him the questions that would've produced the same answers!
Those were the friends; next came the family. Through Dave's son, Ivan (whom I also interviewed), I spoke with Dave's first wife, Andrea, who was there throughout his Navy days. She was in the room when Nightcrawler was created (see the book), as well as present during the early part of his career. I found Dave's younger brother, Doug, in the phone book (pre-social media, remember), and he filled me in on Dave's childhood. Combined with interviews that appeared in 1960s fanzines, along with articles that Dave wrote himself (photocopies of which were sent to me by his fellow subscriber to the Yancy Street Gazette, Fred Hembeck -- thanks, Fred!), the early years of Dave's life fell into place. Tom, Jerry, and Doug are no longer with us, so if I was writing the book today, none of what they told me would be available.
Another person who is no longer with us who agreed to do a phone interview was Murphy Anderson. Murphy was the man who hired Dave as his assistant, and he was also the one who told a young Dave Cockrum about the opening for an artist on "The Legion of Super-Heroes." I knew that friend-of-the-San Diego Comic Con (and the man responsible for tracking down many Golden Age legends who appeared there), David Siegel, would know how to contact Murphy, and he put me in touch with the legendary artist. Murphy then told me about mentoring Dave and gave me information that, I think, would've been lost forever if I hadn't asked him, so I'm glad that I did.
Of course, I had to speak with Paty Cockrum about her recently departed husband. She was very honest and forthright about the problems he faced both professionally and personally later in life, namely the health problems that came with being a Type-2 Diabetic. She also told stories of how they met and other details of their lives together, some of which were laugh-out-loud funny.
Next was Cliff Meth, who spearheaded the movement to get Dave compensation from Marvel to put him on more secure financial footing. Cliff was involved with Aardwolf Publishing and had published Dave's work at a period in the latter's career when he was being overlooked by the big two companies. In Dave's time of need, Cliff rode to his rescue, and we talked about all of that.
That just left one more person to hear from, and that was Dave himself. Fortunately, I had interviewed him for The Legion Companion, and he’d sent me a lot of copies of his art (via my accidental courier, Kevin McConnell) for the book. Unfortunately, I didn't conduct an in-depth interview about his career because that would've been beyond the scope of the project. I did get some very honest answers about his situation, and how it bothered him that Marvel had effectively abandoned him while the X-Men went on to make millions of dollars, and I can still remember the emotion in his voice as he revealed how deeply it hurt. But outside of going into details about T.H.U.G.S., I didn't have a bounty of unused material that had fallen to the cutting room floor which I could then use to fill the void.
But remember those message boards that I mentioned earlier? Dave had answered questions about just about everything from his fans, and they were all there, waiting for some server snafu to wipe them out. I downloaded all of those threads, then came up with a file which I filled with quotes organized by category. There were things about working at Marvel in the '70s, his attitudes towards creating heroes and villains... all the nitty gritty that might not come out in an interview. Suddenly, I could pick his brain retroactively. I could conduct a form of posthumous interview to get the answers I needed from a man who was no longer around. Add to that the print and online interviews that existed and I could get the answer to just about any question I might ask.
So I sat down and wrote the thing over a period of I-can't-remember-how-long, and I didn't edit myself as I wrote it. I figured I could always cut parts out later, but if I wanted to change my mind and put something in after I was done, that would be harder. I even used WordPad instead of Microsoft Word, so I didn't know how long the article actually was because WordPad doesn't keep track of things like that.
When I was finished, I had written over 70,000 words. That's not an article, that's a book. But I was writing an article, and I’d always expected to cut it down later, so that's exactly what I did. I whittled my work away until I had an essay about 13,500 words long, and that's a big difference. That's over 57,000 words shorter, and that's a book in itself.
I guess you can see where this is heading... in Part II!
Also on Sale
If you've been paying attention to my social media accounts, you’re probably aware that I have a short story collection available right now. It's called Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children), and here’s the ad promoting it:
Like the ad shows, you can get it just about anywhere. It's available in both print and digital, plus there's even an audiobook of it for those who prefer that medium.
As you can see, the cover had to be changed to turn it into an audiobook. Audiobooks still operate upon the principle of physical media (even though they're all digital these days), so the cover had to resemble a CD package. The place to go for the audiobook is either Google Play or Kobo. Audible effectively punishes authors for not going exclusive with them, so you won’t find it over there.
It was a huge thrill to get R.L. Stine to blurb the book, so if you don't trust my judgement, trust his!
'Til next time,
Glen