Welcome back to 20th Century Refugee, the official newsletter of Glen Cadigan. Unless this is your first installment, in which case, welcome! There are no blue checkmarks here, so you'll have to take my word for it that it's really me, putting this out. As if it would be anyone else...
Time Keeps On Ticking...
If you're reading this in the present (and not the future) this is June, which means there was no newsletter in May. That means we're on a bi-monthly basis for the foreseeable future (unless it becomes quarterly, or whatever comes after that. Half-yearly?)
When I first started this newsletter, it was to keep people up to date on what was going on in my career. And honestly, there's only so much news to report lately. Writing is a field in which things get announced and then they come out, and then, if you're lucky, people say nice things about them. But every project has its own lifecycle, and eventually they all run their course.
That's where I am right now. The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum will be one year old next newsletter, so there's no new news there. My biography of Edmond Hamilton will be out next spring, and that's a long ways off. I've got something else that has nothing to do with comics that keeps getting pushed back, and I don't even want to talk about it until there's a firm release date.
Most of writing takes place in the dark with no one watching, and while there are people who like to give progress reports on what they're working on, I'm not one of them. I feel it's premature to talk about something until it exists, because who knows? It might never get finished, or even published. I've made the mistake before of mentioning something that didn't come out when it was supposed to (through no fault of my own), and then you come across as either a liar or an exaggerator. As a for instance, my Edmond Hamilton biography was written in 2020, but won't appear until 2024. I didn't schedule it that way -- the whole thing was out of my hands -- but if I had a newsletter then and I mentioned it, boy, would people be waiting a long time for it to get published!
So what do you put in a newsletter if there's no news? How about...
Since Last We Met
I did a Q&A about my Dave Cockrum bio for Cora Buhlert, last year's Hugo Award winner for Best Fan Writer. The Hugos, like the Nebulas, don't have a non-fiction category, but they do have a Best Related Work category in which everything that isn't fiction gets lumped together in a free for all. So full length books (memoirs, biographies, behind-the-scenes, scholarly works) are bundled with free, online articles (which people are more inclined to vote for because they're short, free, and online, therefore they've actually read them), as well as YouTube videos, documentaries, interpretative dance (I'm kidding about that last one), or whatever else fits the bill.
It's all very non-specific for awards that are very, very specific when it comes to fiction. They don't lump short stories and novels together in a general Fiction category; they have four (4) separate categories for fiction, based upon length: short story, novelette, novella, and novel. If you've got a novelette category, you're hard core. So they obviously care way more about one than they do about the other, but that's unlikely to change because in order for things to change, people would actually have to care, and they very clearly don't.
Since I know that people rarely follow links out of an article, I'm putting the whole Q&A here. Think of it as bonus content for missing last month. You can also read the original here:
Tell us about your book.
The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum is a cradle to grave biography of the comic book artist best known for co-creating the All New, All Different X-Men for Marvel, and before that, for revitalizing the Legion of Super-Heroes at DC. It tells the story of how he went from an enthusiastic fan and aspiring pro in the '60s to the driving force behind the X-Men reboot in the '70s to a down-on-his luck-creator in the early 2000s, fighting for his life in a veteran's hospital while Marvel was making millions off his creations as he made nothing.
It's a story about justice and injustice, both on the page and off.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I started writing about comics twenty years ago, and returned -- after a hiatus -- last year. I've done volumes on the Legion of Super-Heroes (The Legion Companion, The Best of The Legion Outpost) and the Teen Titans (The Titans Companion Vols. 1 & 2), as well as articles in Alter Ego and Back Issue magazines and Comic-Con International's annual Souvenir Book. I've interviewed literally dozens of writers and artists, and I've been doing it so long now that they're starting to die on me.
In between, I've dabbled in fiction. I have two ongoing series, both humourous: Bedlam & Belfry, Intergalactic Attorneys at Law, and Tall Tales, Fairy Tales, and Bedtime Stories (For Former Children). About the latter, I say that the stories are for those young at heart but old enough to drink.
What prompted you to write/edit this book?
My association with Dave Cockrum goes back over twenty years, to when I was a regular on his message board. During that time of his life, he was a forgotten man. Editors wouldn't hire him, and he received no compensation from Marvel for the use of his X-Men characters, which was a constant irritant to him.
It seems crazy to think that, while the X-Men are so well-known today, the names of the people who created it are not. Everyone knows Stan Lee, but not as many people are aware of Jack Kirby, the other creator of the original X-Men. When it comes to the All New, All Different X-Men (think Star Trek: The Next Generation compared to the original series, or the version with Wolverine in it), how many people who've seen those movies have ever heard of Dave Cockrum? Or know what happened to him, later in his life, while his creations were the bedrock of Marvel's publishing empire?
I wrote the book because it's necessary, and the story needs to be told. And it's not the first time something like this happened to a comic book creator: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, had a similar battle in the '70s. So for the co-creator of the version of the X-Men that was the backbone of Marvel for decades to end up in the same situation was just once too many.
Why should SFF fans in general and Hugo voters in particular read this book?
If you've heard of the X-Men, you should know the story behind the most successful version of the team. You should know the story of the man who originated the new characters, and even modified the ones he didn't. He was the first artist to draw Wolverine unmasked, and one of two people responsible for saying, "Hey, what if his claws weren't in his gloves, but in him?" You should know how he fell on hard times while his creations were the cornerstone of Marvel for decades before they appeared in movies.
Today, all the Marvel movies and TV shows have a paragraph buried in the credits which list not only the creators of the characters, but also the writers and artists who came after them whose stories were incorporated into the adaptation. When Dave Cockrum sat in a movie theater in 2000 and saw Storm and Mystique (and Logan) on the screen, he didn't see his name anywhere. He was as forgotten and neglected by the movie company as he was by the comic book company.
This book also treats every other aspect of his career with a fine-toothed comb. His years in fanzines are covered in detail, as are those spent on other comic book properties, such as his own Futurians (featured on the cover), T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and especially the Legion of Super-Heroes. His personal life is covered, as well as his professional career. His contemporaries (Marv Wolfman, Paul Levitz) have had nice things to say about it, and fans turned pros (Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Neil Gaiman) have helped to spread the word. If people don't want to listen to me, I hope they listen to them!
Do you have any cool facts or tidbits that you unearthed during your research, but that did not make it into the final book?
Well, there is one story that I couldn't work into the narrative. When Dave Cockrum was a teenager, he was in a group like the Boy Scouts called the Air Explorers. Dave's father was the group leader, and also a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force. So one weekend, the kids are brought to this campground in Colorado, which is where the Cockrums were living at the time, to do whatever it was they went there to do.
There was also someone there with a couple of beagles, and they just started digging and digging and wouldn't stop. So the guys go over there to see what's going on, and the dogs uncover a human hand. As it turned out, a local banker had murdered his wife and buried her there, and Dave and the other boys were on hand when she was found.
That story was told to me by another member of the group, who clearly remembered it. Oddly enough, Dave never mentioned it -- at least in print -- while he was alive.
SFF-related non-fiction is somewhat sidelined by the big genre awards, since the Nebulas have no non-fiction category and the Best Related Work Hugo category has become something of a grab bag of anything that doesn't fit elsewhere. So why do you think SFF-related non-fiction is important?
The history of the field is important. No one would question preserving the history of Hollywood, or the music industry, or professional sports. People need to know where they came from, and who was there before them. Whether it's a biography, memoir, behind-the-scenes book, or scholarly work, non-fiction is one of the legs on the table, and a three-legged table isn't as stable as a four-legged one.
Are there any other great SFF-related non-fiction works or indeed anything else (books, stories, essays, writers, magazines, films, TV shows, etc…) you'd like to recommend?
This is a great year for non-fiction SFF books, enough that they could have their own category with projects left off the ballot. Hopefully, one day they'll get that at the Hugos.
Right now I'm actually reading a Hugo Award-winning piece of non-fiction called Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction. It's Jack Williamson's autobiography, and it's SFF history right from the horse's mouth.
If it's not too forward, I could plug my upcoming biography of Edmond Hamilton, coming in 2024 in Alter Ego # 187. It's an issue dedicated to arguably the most successful writer of science fiction's Golden Age. He was the author whom Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury read growing up, and Ray was even the best man at his wedding!
That's it until next time. Unless something Earth-shattering happens before August, that'll be when the next newsletter arrives.
'Til then,
Glen