Tales of Syzpense #35
Letters from Bradbury and Tales of Lore; plus a return to Big Lick and the Spinner Rack of Fame!
Commercial Break #1: Marvel’s first ROM OMNIBUS book is out in the world now! Come for the 30 issues being reprinted for the first time ever, stay for my 6-page introduction that leads into those stories!
Letters from Bradbury
During the holiday season, one of the new books I dug into was Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury. The newly released book is a collection of the many (many!) letters Ray wrote over the decades—to Hollywood luminaries, to journalists and fellow pro authors, to up-and-coming writers, and other people besides.
I always find old correspondence, especially between peers, to be a fascinating read. And a reminder of the lost art of letter-writing in these days of terse, abbreviated, and disposable electronic communication.
One of the longer exchanges in the book are the letters passed back and forth between Bradbury and a neophyte writer named Richard Matheson (who certainly shed that description quickly, and you can chart the progression of his career in Bradbury’s responses, as he writes to Richard first as kindly pro to respectful amateur, and then soon enough, it’s just two peers talking about life and work.
One part of their communication that I found so interesting, and also somewhat depressing, was in an exchange where they lamented shrinking attention spans and the ways in which other media, was hurting peoples’ interest in reading, especially in reading novels.
This was in 1951.
From his letter to Matheson dated January 22, 1951 (page 114), Bradbury wrote in part:
“One thing I would like to re-emphasize and detail, if “The Fireman” ever goes into book form [CR: which it does—it became Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451], is the fact that radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention’ simply because we tune in, see five minutes of one thing, ten minutes of other, half an hour of this, an hour of that. This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a quick reading people…
To which Matheson responds on January 28, 1951:
“Your points on radio are, alas, only too true. And on television. Reading a book has become something you do after you’ve broken a leg putting up your television aerial. I haven’t thought about it, but it definitely could be that the reason I have trouble reading is the one you mentioned, the growing inability of our times to concentrate because all things are handed to us in pills of minutes.”
Not to put too fine point on it, but this was written over 70 years ago! Seven decades past, two authors—novelists, even!—were lamenting the shrinking of attention spans and questioning the place of novels in a world too overrun with easier options.
Which, on the surface in our current era of never-ending entertainment options and infinite micro-distractions available on all our devices, is deeply depressing. If those guys found it hard to focus and read before they had any screens in front of them, what chance do any of us who are still writing things even have?
Then again, for those who’ve read this far, if you’re reading this far, it’s because of your ownership of one or more screens. (And thank you again for your patronage.) But more than that, this exchange from so long ago felt like a distant echo of a conversation that I keep seeing lately: the incessant drum-beat of posts, opinions, and articles about the impending death of [comics, comic-book stores, comic-book movies]. As was predicted in 1951. And 20 years later. And in the ‘90s and on and on to today.
When I was at IDW and paying much more attention to the Diamond Previews catalog’s massive array of offerings in every monthly 300-page catalog, it would give me a near-panic attack every month. How could the books we’re making, some of which were pretty obscure or of more special interest, find traction amidst that monthly glut? Was there any point then or now to releasing more books?
Well, sure. People with shortened attention spans didn’t read novels in 1951… except many did. And they did in the ‘80s and the ‘000s and they do now. Same with comics and graphic novels.
For our entire lifetimes, we’ve had more entertainment options than could ever be consumed. The great thing is, the person next to you has different tastes and so deserves to have books (or whatever) that cater to them, too. People consume micro-bursts of entertainment all day long… and still like to read a book if it’s compellingly done.
So seeing two old-time novelists talk about how they could no longer focus on novels 70 years ago is actually comforting: novels have always been a hard sell. Comics have always been dying. People have always been distracted.
I think, a half-century from now, this conversation will still be taking place.
Where we’ve gone awry in the comics world, anyway, is assuming that what we did then still works now. There are real, and challenging, conversations that the comic industry needs to have without its ever-present blinders on, about the relative value of so many serialized monthly comic books rather than books that offer a complete read to readers who don’t necessarily go to the comic shop every single week the way we did as kids.
There are heated discussions to come about the number of monthly releases starring the same character that can be foisted on retailers and consumers; the need for fifty variant covers on a particular comic; the rates paid to creators and the ever-stressed distribution system and so many other things that we’ve collectively just hoped would work themselves out.
And there are surely hard times to come for some: for creators, for publishers, for retailers. I know that for me, 2023 was the most challenging (the most polite word I could use but there are more apt if profane descriptors) year I’ve experienced in my 20 years in comics. But I also know that for all its challenges and whatever necessary changes to come create even more short-term havoc, well, in decades hence, people will still be trumpeting the impending death of comics and novels and reading… and people will still be making and and selling and reading comic books and novels in some form or another. The same as it ever was and will be.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of forcing yourself to slow down, look away from a screen, and enjoy the slow, steady pace of a good read. Or writing someone a nice, helpful, or encouraging letter. You never know, it might end up in a book some day.
Commercial Break #2: Over at 13th Dimension, longtime writing partner and dear friend Scott Tipton and I offered up 13 post-Bronze Age characters who’ve had the greatest impact in comics. And over at that same site, on January 26, they’ll be running a piece I contributed that offers 13 (well, I cheated and threw in about 5 more beyond the requisite 13) pieces of Sal Buscema art in celebration of his birthday.
Tales of Syzpense
We’ve come out of the gate hot in 2024, as we prepare for the release of:
the final issue of A Haunted Girl
the debut issue of The Cabinet
the one-shot wrap-up Saucer Country: The Finale
Ashley Wood’s multi-part return to monthly comics, in the form of March’s 7174AD anthology and April’s Lore: Remastered.
Commercial Break #3: For those Syzygy fans in and around the Roanoke, VA area, I’ll be returning to the Big Lick Con in Roanoke the weekend of February 10-11, alongside my Power Rangers co-star, Amy Jo Johnson, plus Lou Ferrigno, Ming Chen, Howard Chaykin, table mates Guy Dorian Sr. (we’ll have a cool little ROM bookplate available) and Joe Staton, Christopher Priest, Keith Williams, John Beatty, and a massive array of other talented folk, too:
Spinner Rack of Fame
This is a tricky one, at least as far as how I approach it. Now, there have been more celebrities on the covers of comics than could fit in one or two spinner racks, but when I went looking for good copies of comics-with-celebs, I dismissed most of those out of hand.
In part because it’s become such a commonplace occurrence now, I avoided any of the Archie Meets… covers, I skipped the Barack Obama Amazing Spider-Man issue, I went nowhere near the comics named after and starring presidents and actors like the couple we did at IDW, the idea and look of which basically sustained Blue Water’s existence for the next few years; I skipped the comics with celebrities in the title (sorry, Charles Barkley vs Godzilla), and in general chose to leave out anything overly obvious in that way.
(There was one that would’ve fallen into the above criteria of avoidance, but I would’ve made it work anyway because of its quality, if it wasn’t oversized. That book?)
No, I don’t want my celebrity cover cameos to be obvious, I want them as odd and obscure as can be… which usually means continuing to dip back into Silver and Bronze Age comics, which were chock full o’ weirdness just for the sake of it. So I know there are others I’m forgetting and need to add, but the ones that did fit my rigid criteria here are as follows:
That’s right: I prefer my comic covers to involve the guy who claimed he could bend spoons with his mind; the Candid Camera guy, the original SNL crew, and even a rocky version of the Beatles. You can have your presidents and your athletes and your made-up rick stars but me? When I fill out the spinner rack with celebrity cameos, well, it’s got to include the comic starring Jack Kirby’s version of “Mr. Warmth” himself.
As always, if others occur to you, please let me know. Uri Gellar deserves to be surrounded by more of his goofy peers…
I so remember seeing the Letterman Avengers cover on a 7-11 spinner rack as a kid... ha!
Great stuff! "I prefer my comic covers to involve the guy who claimed he could bend spoons with his mind" - LOL Loved that ish, was part of Tony Isabella's DD run, I seem to remember. And Jack's 4th World Don Rickles crossover! Didn't Rickles appear in some Beach Party movies? That, I gotta see...!