They Come in Threes
This is the third installment of 20th Century Refugee, the newsletter of author Glen Cadigan. But you already knew that, didn't you? People don't gift newsletters to friends and family members, let alone strangers. If you're here, it's of your own free will. Speaking of things with free will...
We've Got Bots!
At least, I think we do!
One of the advantages of being at Substack is they keep track of a whole lot of statistics, and one of them is user interaction. If you have X number of subscribers and X-Y interactions, then not everyone is reading the newsletter. This can be suspicious if a whole bunch of email addresses show up one day, long after the newsletter is launched, on a morning when it wasn't mentioned anywhere, not even on Twitter (where my tweets mostly go to be ignored, anyway). This is especially suspicious if the domain names are unfamiliar, say, or if one of them is registered in China, a country I've never been, where they speak a language I neither read nor write.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're really people who are interested in what I have to say. In that case, sorry! Especially to that person in China for giving you a heart attack by calling you out in public! Happy to have you on board!
(It makes me wonder what the point would be in programming a bot to subscribe to a Substack newsletter since, if it's not going to read it, then why even bother? To pad my stats? But who benefits from that -- me? I don't know any bots, personally or professionally. I didn't program any bots to sign up over here. It makes me wonder if Substack is putting its thumb on the scales to encourage me to keep going with this newsletter (since I imagine a lot of people abandon theirs, once they start one) by making me think I have more subscribers than I actually have.)
However, if the bots are subscribing of their own volition, I hope they like what they read. I hope they use their stolen credit card numbers to buy lots and lots of my books (especially the audiobooks, since they cost more, and digital transactions are rarely cancelled) because Christmas is coming up and we could all use a little bit of extra money around Christmastime, right?
Good Housekeeping
My most recent project -- if you can call it that -- has been updating my website. Poor 'ol www.glencadigan.com has been neglected for years (minus the News tab, and even then, not always in a timely manner), so I decided to roll up my sleeves and get down to work.
Here's what I discovered: it's weird scrolling back through time to read all the updates. There I am, in early 2020, with multiple projects lined up, thinking it's going to be a year to remember. How little I knew! There are also things I'd mostly forgotten about, details preserved in amber, like a diary that anyone can read online.
I know websites aren't cool anymore, what with social media that comes to you instead of the other way around, but I still like them. There's a professionalism about them, plus they're permanent. If I make a post on Facebook, it's there for a day or so and then it vanishes forever. Twitter is even worse -- the half-life of a tweet is seconds. Substack is much better because it has archives, so people in the future will be able to scroll back through time to catch up on what they missed. That's a big reason why I'm largely migrating over from Facebook.
But there's very little about the future that we can predict, and even Substack may go the way of MySpace one day. The way I figure it, I'll always be Glen Cadigan, so there will always be a www.glencadigan.com. That's why I renew the domain name for five years at a time instead of one -- I know I'll still be here, and if I'm not, then it'll be someone else's problem.
So the website has been taking up a lot of my time lately. Something that people may not know is that I have an I.T. background, and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. That means I do all of my own HTML coding, by hand, using Notepad. Over the last week nesting tables and missing tags have been the bane of my existence, but it all looks nice and spiffy now, and it's even decorated for the holidays. For something that delivers little in the way of revenue and is mostly there just to save face, it's as good as it's going to get.
Which brings us to our next order of business, in a roundabout way...
Remembering in November
November is a month when I think about Dave Cockrum a lot. He was born on the 11th, which is easy to remember because it's Remembrance Day. Dave came from a military family (his father was a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force), and he spent six years in the Navy himself. Plus, his favorite comic book was Blackhawk, so the military theme continues.
Dave died on the 26th, and that's easier to sneak up on you. When it happened (2006) it was on a Sunday and I didn't find out about it until the next day. This was before social media, remember, so the news didn't come to you -- you had to visit a website devoted to comics to find out what was going on. It hit me hard, mainly because I thought he'd get better once he went on Marvel's health plan. I wasn't under any illusions that he'd return to his old self, but I figured he'd hold the line for the foreseeable future.
I sat down and wrote an essay on that day about my experiences working with him, while my feelings were still fresh. I don't remember the particulars of how it ended up in Interlac, but I was probably asked to contribute to a memorial issue, so I did. Ten years later I posted it on my website, and since that anniversary is coming up tomorrow, here's a sample of how it starts, with a link at the end so you can go over there if you want to read the rest.
Dave Cockrum: A Personal Reminiscence
The above photo was taken by Eliot R. Brown at Marvel in the ‘70s.
When I was a kid, I used to read my brother's comic books. I also used to read (and buy) my own, but we more or less had a system: if he bought it, I didn't. That freed up my money to purchase titles which he wouldn't look at, comics like Dazzler and Power Man and Iron Fist and G.I. Joe. On the surface, the system made sense, except when you factored in that he was developing some pretty awesome collections of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and X-Men while I was building my own, "lesser" collection out of the remaining titles that Marvel and DC published. Years later I would remedy the situation with some well placed money and a back issue sale at a local comic book store, but back then our collections were pretty lopsided, and even though I still like the books that I bought back in those days (yes, even Dazzler), at the time it seemed as if one of us was making out like a bandit, and that person wasn't me.
The first time I started buying the X-Men month-in and month-out was with Dave Cockrum's second run on the series. I can still vividly recall the cover with Dr. Doom standing triumphant over the defeated X-Men, Storm on his arm, a goblet in his other hand. My X-Men purchasing habits were hit-and-miss before then (as was the X-Men's newsstand distribution where we lived), and, as I said earlier, my brother was buying it, so I didn't have to, but somewhere along the way I made the decision to start buying it anyway, and I didn't miss an issue after that point. When I think back to when I first started reading the X-Men on my own, that's the run that I remember reading first hand, not as back issues. I don't know why it made that impression on me, but I can only conclude years later and from a standpoint of pure logic that the timing, coming as it did with the change in regular artists, couldn't have been a coincidence. I'm not sure that I knew the difference back then, but from the standpoint of today, it must have been the deciding factor.
In 2002, I began work on The Legion Companion, my first publication from TwoMorrows Publishing. Dave Cockrum was the second person who I interviewed for that volume (Jim Mooney, whom I ran into months earlier on eBay, was the first), and I remember the interview well. Over the summer of that year he had popped up on the X-Fan message boards in his own sub-board, entitled "Classically Cockrum," and I just about fell down when I discovered that I could correspond with the man who had revitalized both the Legion of Super-Heroes and the X-Men three decades earlier. I had wondered previously how I would find him in order to interview him for my book, and here he had found us. I participated in that message board as "Disco Dan" (just a random name - no meaning attached), and enjoyed responding to his posts and seeing him respond to mine. Over time he migrated to the DC "Legion" message board, as well as to "Cockrum's Corner," located at NightScrawlers.com, and the posts started to die off at X-Fan, not due to Dave's lack of participation, but to that of the other posters there. You see, other X-Men creators, both past and present, had their own sub-boards there, too, and apparently Dave's wasn't "cool" enough for the kids who were buying the then-current X-Men titles. I just wanted to reach into my computer screen, grab them by their scrawny necks and scream, "What is wrong with you people?" but in any event, Dave had fans elsewhere and he even still poked his head in at X- Fan from time to time, lest some question directed to him go unanswered.
People who congregated at the "Legion" board in those days should remember the period well. Most of the posters there were in their thirties, and thus were weaned on the Legion of the Seventies. The very idea of mingling with Dave Cockrum was enough to make certain heads explode. He chose the handle, "Dark Bamf," revealing more about his personality than a well-written post would. And his posts were well-written; Dave could string sentences together just as well as any quote unquote "writer". In fact, it was his writing ability which led me to conclude that perhaps an interview conducted by instant messaging would be best, not just because his answers read so well, but also because the thought of speaking to Dave Cockrum on the phone intimidated the hell out of me. So we set a time and tried our best, but he couldn't get the furlushinger software to work. We scrapped that idea and agreed to try something else, and I felt foolish for wasting his time. He was Dave Cockrum, after all.
Some time later, I looked up his phone number online (he was in the white pages, no unlisted number for Dave) and called him up. I had emailed him about a date for our interview, but he hadn't responded in a while, and since people do have lives offline, I figured that I had better take the initiative and just call him. He was in the midst of a power outage (which explained the lack of email), and what he said next caught me completely off guard.
"How about now?" he asked.
How about now?
You can read the rest of the story over at www.glencadigan.com. This link will take you directly there: https://glencadigan.com/cockrum.html , whereas the other one will let you in through the front door.
Still on Sale
It goes without saying, The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum is still available, and so is Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children). If you're a subscriber to this newsletter, chances are you've already purchased the former, but probably not the latter. I'm hoping that'll change since that represents the future for me. The sequel is already written and ready to go in 2023, so if you're not up to date, pretty soon you'll be falling behind!
Next week will be a Christmas-themed release. What does that mean? You'll find out when it arrives!
'Til then,
Glen