Welcome Back!
Starting up a newsletter is like opening a restaurant — it's a big leap of faith that people will try it. They may like a particular kind of food, but will they like it the way that you cook it? If there's one thing people are fussy over, it's food, and newsletters aren't far behind. I just unsubscribed to one because the author was sending out messages every day, and that's waaay too much interaction.
You won't have to worry about that with me! 20th Century Refugee will be weekly at first, then settle into biweekly or monthly (or bimonthly) after that. Ultimately, I've resolved to land upon whenever there's actually news because I'll run out of behind-the-scenes stories pretty quick. I may have a career that dates back (almost) twenty years, but that doesn't mean there's always a story to tell. Most of this stuff is pretty boring, and the times when it isn't... well, let's just say that sometimes it's better to keep the details to yourself.
So that’s a pretty good incentive to subscribe, right? Maybe you’d remember to check in every week (and thank you for your patronage!), but after a month has come and gone, let’s face it, you’re going to forget. It’s not your fault — it’s human nature.
If you’ve already subscribed, thanks for sticking around, and to my new subscribers — welcome! Subscriptions to 20th Century Refugee have more than doubled since the first post, which, if that continues onwards towards infinity, means that eventually everyone will be on board!
Out Now!
This is appropriate for an installment of a newsletter that contains the second part of The Secret Origin of The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum. Back Issue! #140 (out now!) has my article entitled, "The Man With the Dinosaur Brain!" about a project that didn't materialize when Dave was a freelancer designing model kits for Aurora. He had an idea for one about a guy who somehow acquired a dinosaur brain — I guess he lost his own — and it would've come complete with a comic book in the package. It didn't happen, so when BI! editor Michael Eury (who had a dinosaur-themed issue on his schedule) asked me to write about it, who was I to say no?
As luck would have it, while I was working on my own book, Dave's three Captain Marvel, Jr. sample pages surfaced. What's more, they featured Cap. Jr. fighting a dinosaur! When it became obvious that I didn't have room to run them in my book, I passed them along to Michael with the suggestion that they'd make a nice fit for his magazine.
Well, of course he couldn't resist using them. So there are four pages of Dave Cockrum content in Back Issue! #140! Think of it like a coda to The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum. Speaking of which, don't I owe you Part II of that story?
The Secret Origin of The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum: Part II
Back in Part I, I explained how I got the assignment to write an cover story about Dave Cockrum for Alter Ego. Here in Part II, I'll explain how that article became a book. But first, we need to take a trip back to 2008, which was a very busy year for me.
In 2008, the article came out and was well received. A couple of months later, The Titans Companion Volume 2 was released, and that would turn out to be my last project with TwoMorrows Publishing for twelve years. There was no falling out or anything like that — it was just a case of diminishing returns. Each project was taking longer (and was harder) to do, and sales were heading in the opposite direction. Plus, in the fall of 2008, I finally got my big toe in the comic book door with a pair of stories that were published in back-to-back issues of Cthulhu Tales, and it appeared as if my career was now heading in an entirely different direction.
Then came The Great Recession, and honestly, I still don't think that the publishing industry has recovered from it. Advances are less now than they used to be, and books sell fewer copies these days. What looked like a plane taking off the ground turned into an emergency landing before it could even leave the airport. Opportunities dried up, and I went from selling everything that I pitched to a dry spell that turned into a desert.
I won't bore you with the details, but those were lean times. There were some close calls with success, only to have the brass ring snatched back just as I was ready to grip it. Copies were still being sold of my older books, so money was coming in, but new (fiction) projects failed to materialize and I had left non-fiction behind. Eventually, things started up again, but it was a good, long while.
In 2019, I was asked to write an essay about my time with TwoMorrows for an anniversary book. I did, and it came out the following year, just as the pandemic hit. But it opened up a door again, and led to me writing a (still unpublished) article for Alter Ego. Not only that, but I was asked to do a "40 Greatest" list for another TwoMorrows' publication, Back Issue!. Suddenly, everything old was new again.
The following year (2021), I took out my original Dave Cockrum manuscript and read it over. I was inspired to do so because I had read an issue of Alter Ego that was about Dave (not the one written by me), and I was happy to see that my original manuscript still held up. So I reached out to John Morrow and asked if he'd be interested in publishing it. (This was in November.)
He was, and he wanted to know how long it would take for me to write it. I told him it was already written, and that changed things. As it turned out, TwoMorrows was just finalizing its schedule for 2022, and something that was supposed to come out in the summer had to be pushed back. So John asked to see some chapters, liked what he saw, and reached out to Paty Cockrum for her permission. She loved the idea, gave it her blessing, and I had to immediately find cover art for the book because the clock was now ticking. In the span of a few weeks it went from a (mostly) unpublished manuscript to being put on the schedule for seven months later. If you don't know anything about publishing, take it from me, that's unusual. Books usually take years to come out, but this one was going to set some kind of record. Also, what people might not know is these books are solicited before they're finished (and sometimes, before they're even started), similar to movies and comic books. That then makes the on-sale date a very real deadline.
When Eric Nolen-Weathington signed on as the graphic designer, the band was fully assembled. I had a month to gather up artwork (a lot of which I already had), then we were to hit the ground running in the new year. Which we did; we started to put together the book in January, and it was turned in during the first week of March. All modesty aside, that's what happens when you have two veterans on hand who know what they're doing. Eric is the writer/editor of TwoMorrows' Modern Masters line of books, so as an editor in his own right, it was like having two editors on the book.
Throughout it all, Paty Cockrum was going through Dave's files to locate rare art that I asked her to find. And during her spelunking expedition, she would show me what else she uncovered. She was the single greatest contributor to the book, with hundreds of scans sent from her to me, most of which (unfortunately) didn't make it in. The problem with a 160 page book is there simply isn't enough room to include everything, and a lot of hard choices had to be made as to what to use and what to set aside. Visions of pages of art galleries had to be abandoned as the whole thing came together, and it was a race to the finish to get all of the words in, along with the artwork to illustrate them.
It was a whirlwind of activity, with my winter of 2022 spent in the Cockrumverse. Every week I would look forward to new pages arriving over the digital transom, then I’d make my notes and eagerly anticipate the next chapter. Spoiler alert: we had our deadline, and we hit it. Finally, all of the files were sent off to the printer in China, well in advance of the June on-sale date. Everything was going according to plan, right?
Unfortunately, things don't work that way in our modern world. There were supply chain issues, with COVID hanging over everything. Delays at the printer, then delays in shipping (a literal slow boat from China), then delays at Customs in the U.S. didn't help, either. Neither did slow shipping past that point (I'm told a forklift operator knocked a crate off a pallet somewhere along the way), but eventually the books arrived roughly nine months after I first reached out to the publisher. I repeat, that simply does not happen in the publishing world, but we did it, so I guess it does now.
Response to the book has been good. Anything that gets people talking about Dave Cockrum again is a good thing, so I consider the book to be a success. Paty is happy with it, Dave's first wife Andrea is happy with it, and even Cliff Meth told me I did a good job, so all the people who count are satisfied. That doesn't always happen with biographies, especially when it's some stranger you don't even know who's taking the life of your loved one and putting it on paper, but everybody who matters likes it, and that's what matters to me.
A Reminder.....
If you read The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum and want to tell people how much you enjoyed it, here's a way you can do exactly that:
All you have to do is push the buttom above and it’ll take you directly to the necessary form on Amazon. Some people have already left it stars (thank you!) but no one has written a proper review yet, so you could be the first! The way things work over at Amazon is reviews help a book get into their algorithms so then other people can see it and potentially buy it, so if you're a big Dave Cockrum fan and want to help spread the word, all you have to do is write a few lines about it, whether or not you actually purchased it there.
Still on Sale...
Yup, Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children) continues to be available for purchase! Here's another ad that attempts to sway prospective readers:
If you think it's written for children because of the quote from R.L. Stine... well, it says right there in the title that it's not! In fact, kids would find the grown-up situations boring, like an astronaut who keeps floating when he returns to Earth, but only when he sleeps, or a medium who discovers she can speak to the dead using Zoom, but it's her husband who's on the line, or two guys who go door-to-door, trying to get people to worship Lucifer (they call themselves Devil's Advocates). I don't think kids would be interested in stories like that... and I wouldn't let them read them if they were!
'Til next time,
Glen