Marks out of five...

Spotted this morning...

How many stars do you think your life would score in an Independent obituary?

(* © independent.co.uk)

Comic Cuts - 28 October 2011

Finally... some news. Regular readers will know I've had my nose to the grindstone writing information for images that have been appearing on the Look and Learn Picture Library (specifically this bit of the site) which hasn't left much time for anything else. I was slowly and unsteadily putting together notes for the introduction to the next Bear Alley Books project, collecting some strips by C. L. Doughty and, last weekend, reached a point where I was able to start writing. So, I've written about 2,000 words so far and have broken the back of the research needed to write the rest of the piece. It's always a good week when you can look though hundreds of beautifully drawn illustrations like the above.

I'm also hopeful that another Bear Alley project might now also have, let's say an amber light rather than a green light because one hurdle, getting permission from the copyright holders, has been successfully hurdled. I've still got to figure out the best way to present the material but we're moving in the right direction.

I had to do a little juggling act last weekend when setting up this week's blog features so that I could fit in the regular Recent Releases and Upcoming Releases columns. Next week's 'The Man Who Searched for Fear' is the promised 4-parter and, sadly, it will bring the strip to an end. Some folks have asked whether it can be put together as a collection and I'll certainly give it some thought. The scans I have which look fine on a computer monitor aren't up to scratch for print publication, so it would involve rescanning the whole thing; if it happens it won't be instantaneous.

Back in August I mentioned the passing of Francisco Solano Lopez and said that I had written a piece for The Guardian, which was published this week. Reading that episode of Comic Cuts, I see I also mention "two projects" — the same two projects I've discussed above, which gives you some idea of how slowly these things evolve. In my ideal world there are no such things as rent, bills, expenses... and the days are 48 hours long.

Someone else also wishing the days were longer is John Freeman. Following last week's announcement about the launch issue of Strip Magazine being delayed thanks to couriers not delivering on time, there has been some good news. The last I heard was that the copies destined for Titan Distributors were with them and would shortly be heading into comic shops. The official release date is now 2nd November. A separate pile of comp copies sent via FedEx also went astray... life really does kick you when your vulnerable!

The two graphic novels due from Print Media are also well along the pipeline with Mirabilis Volume 2 heading out of the printers and Frontier almost at the final proofing stage.

Scholarly Resources is a new section of Comics Forum, established in 2009 as part of the Thought Bubble convention in Leeds. The new section has information and papers from the 2011 Comics & Conflicts conference at the Imperial War Museum, including links to various podcasts that were earlier broadcast on Panel Boarders in August and September 2011.

Mind you, not all resources are free and some are far from scholarly, as I found out to my cost this week. Doing some further research into the curious Nictzin Dyalhis, a fellow researcher pointed me to something called Archives.com as they claimed to have birth records for the author and there was a 7-day free trial. Well, the 7-day free trial button simply led to a pay page and the minimum payment was a 3-month subscription. Searching for other associated names turned up birth records for both of Dyalhis's wives and with what looked like five promising records, I thought I'd stump up the cash. A quick £16 credit card payment later, I discovered that the "birth" records were actually census records, which I'd already described in my original article. In fact, all the records that I found were available free elsewhere on the web.

What a rip-off. I don't know if British or American advertising or trading standards authorities have any juristiction over the company, but they really should be looked at carefully as promising "birth records" when you don't have them is, I suspect, a breach of the law. I pointed this out to them... haven't had a response yet.

Roy of the Rovers was briefly resurrected last Friday (21 October) in the pages of the Daily Mail, where he visited the Manchester derby fought last weekend.

And, talking of football strips, the Striker website at striker3d.com seems to have disappeared. According to a news report on Downthetubes (dated 11 October) this was a temporary measure and would be sorted out "in the next week". Well, it's still down over two weeks later. Striker creator Peter Nash has been hinting at big things to come, responding to concerns about the site by saying "As quiet as everything has been, there is a lot that has been going on with regard to Striker and the other projects, which I and the consortium I am working with hope will come to fruition by the end of the year."

Random scans this week are classic covers from Corgi Books. I spotted an article in one of the broadsheets about Joseph Heller, whch made me think of the Corgi edition of Catch 22 and its classic cover. So I've dug out a few more classic Corgis for you.

Next week... 'The Man Who Searched For Fear' - the final chapter!

Ray Harryhausen Films in Comics part 2

RAY HARRYHAUSEN FILMS IN COMICS
Part Two: The Valley Of Gwangi to Clash Of The Titans

by Jeremy Briggs

Harryhausen stayed with a dinosaur theme in 1969 for the dinosaurs and cowboys tale of The Valley Of Gwangi. After The First Men In The Moon comic had been published by Gold Key, once again it was Dell that published an American colour comic book of the film in September 1969, a comic which also does not appear to have been reprinted in the United Kingdom.

1974 saw Harryhausen return to the myths and monsters theme with The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. This was his first film to be adapted into a comic format in the United States by Marvel Comics when it appeared over issues 7 and 8 of Worlds Unknown, dated June and August 1974 with Len Wein (who would go on to edit DC’s Watchmen) scripting, George Tuska on pencils, Vince Colletta on inks and Wein’s then wife Glynis on colours. It is interesting that multi-armed statue of Kali is referred to as Karo in the comics - perhaps Wein was using an early draft of the script or alternatively Marvel were being cautious and renaming the character so as to not use the name of the Hindu goddess.

As with a lot of Marvel US material of the period, it was reprinted by Marvel UK with the two issues of Worlds Unknown each split in two and printed in black and white (Glynis Wein’s name was removed from the credit strips) in issues 35 to 38 of the weekly Planet Of The Apes which had cover dates of 21 June to 12 July 1974. While this may seem like an unusual location for the reprint, since the comic at that point was reprinting the American originated adaptation of the second Apes movie, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, there was a certain logic for editor Matt Softley running the Sinbad film adaptation as a backup strip to an Apes film adaptation.

After the success of The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad at the box-office in 1974, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, originally released in 1958, was re-released in 1975. To tie-in with this release Marvel adapted the movie in issue 25 of Marvel Spotlight dated December 1975, written by John Werner with art by Sonny Trinidad. Unlike the Worlds Unknown Sinbad strip this one was not reprinted by Marvel UK, however Britain did have its own 7th Voyage comic strip to tie-in with the re-release of the film.

Legend Horror Classics was an unusual publication that was similar, although not identical, to the British poster magazine format that was prevalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s of a large single sheet folded into a sixteen page A4 magazine with an eight page poster. Released by Legend Publishing and edited by Gent Shaw, Legend Horror Classics was a single large sheet folded into a twenty page, near A4-size magazine with a four page poster and, in the early issues at least, a tie-in comic strip. Issue 3 of the magazine featured a ten page comic strip adaptation of the film illustrated by the magazine’s Art Editor Kevin O'Neill in black and white with an unusual mixture of yellow, blue and green spot colours. The issue is undated but all the adverts that it contains suggest that it was published in 1975.

The third and final Sinbad film, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, did not fair as well in the United States as the previous two Sinbad films with apparently no comic book publication, however the British publication more than makes up for the lack of it. With a no publication date and only a copyright date of 1977, the Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger magazine was a one-shot publication from General Book Distributors, edited by Dez Skinn and with a format very similar to his then current House of Hammer magazine. The main feature of the Sinbad magazine is a sixteen page black and white adaptation of the film scripted by Benny Aldrich and illustrated by Ian Gibson. This comic magazine was also promoted in the Columbia-Warner Exhibitor’s Campaign Book that was issued to cinemas to help promote the film on its British release.

In America there was a rather nice press strip to go with the film’s release. Like earlier ones it concentrated on the film’s visuals rather than the plot and these were represented in black and white line and wash in what could well have been used as a half page advert in a magazine.

Clash Of The Titans was the final cinema release that Harryhausen worked on and it was to be his biggest film with star names such as Sir Laurence Olivier and Ursula Andress making cameo appearances as the gods of Olympus. Clash also has the most unusual set of comic strips associated with it.

In America Golden Press released a full colour graphic novel of the film written by Mary Carey and illustrated by Dan Spiegle. This American book was then reprinted in the UK as a softcover annual sized book by ITV Books Ltd that was tagged as a Look-In Film Special, although no other spin-off from Look-In magazine looked anything like it. While the US version used a selection of colour photos from the film for its cover, the British one had a newly illustrated, albeit rather uninspiring, cover - it was a pity that they didn’t use the fully painted cover that was used on the regular weekly Look-In when it featured the film on its centre pages.

In addition to these books there was also a series of black and white comic strip adverts for Clash Of The Titans that tied in with the promotion for the film being carried on Smiths Snacks. These were illustrated by Pat Wright and ran as a series of six sequential half page adverts over six weeks in IPC titles such as 2000AD (Progs 214 to 219, 30 May to 4 July 1981) and DC Thomson titles such as Warlord (issues 349 to 354, same dates). A two page advertising strip then appeared in the monthly Starburst film magazine issue 34 which, although by the same artist, covered the same ground as the six weekly episodes but with new artwork and panel designs. These Clash Of The Titans adverts, from the weekly comics and from Starburst, have already been covered on Bear Alley - here and here.

While the comic strip adaptations of the Harryhausen films would have been expected to finish with the films themselves, the on-going sales of TV and film tie-in comics in the USA in the mid-2000s lead American independent comics publisher Bluewater to license a series of comics based on the various Harryhausen films which and they were released under the generic banner of Ray Harryhausen Presents. These were mainly comic strip sequels to the films and ranged from the rather good Wrath Of The Titans to the incomprehensible Flying Saucers Vs The Earth. There appears to have been more of these titles advertised than were actually released and the licensing agreement between Harryhausen and Bluewater has now expired with only a few of the mini-series being collated into graphic novel format. None of the Bluewater series adapted any of the cinema releases directly but the promotional title Ray Harryhausen Presents issue 1, cover dated October 2007, adapted one of his short “Mother Goose” films, The Tortoise And The Hare, as a five page humorous comic strip written by Jason Schultz and illustrated by Brian Hess.

Ray Harryhausen moved from California to Britain in the early 1960s and married Diana Livingstone Bruce, great grand-daughter of the explorer David Livingstone, in 1962. He has lived in the UK ever since and in 2004 he designed and donated a large bronze statue of the famous explorer fighting off a lion attack to the National Trust For Scotland’s David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre near Glasgow where it has been placed in the park outside the museum for the public to see.

Along with his daughter Vanessa, Harryhausen set up the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation in 1986 to preserve his collection of film artifacts ranging from his original design artwork to the actual stop motion figures that he worked with. In 2010 when Ray Harryhausen was 90 years of age, the Foundation donated the collection to the National Media Museum (the former National Museum Of Film And Television) in Bradford for preservation and display in his adoptive country. The National Media Museum described the collection as “one of our most significant acquisitions of recent times.”

As well as inspiring the cinema-going public to part with their money during five different decades, Harryhausen’s films are familiar now to television viewers either from broadcasts during holiday periods or from video, DVD and now Blu-Ray releases. Despite stop-motion special effects having given way to digital CGI, his films have inspired generations of film makers who now pay tribute to him with 'in-jokes' in major motion pictures such as the Harryhausen piano in Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride or Harryhausen's Restaurant in Pixar's Monsters Inc.

It all goes to show that Ray Harryhausen's imagination, which has inspired and influenced people for decades, will live on for many more years to come.

More details of Ray Harryhausen’s career can be found on his official website.

Postscript: It is entirely possible that there is a Ray Harryhausen strip, like Mighty Joe Young or Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, buried within the confines of another British comic waiting to be discovered. If you know of any Harryhausen strips, either British or American, or even more of the press strips that not covered in this article then please leave a comment.

(With thanks to Robin Kirby)

Complete scans of some of the comics in this article can be found on other blogs: Dell: The Valley Of Gwangi; Marvel: The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad; Marvel: The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.

Ray Harryhausen Films in Comics part 1

RAY HARRYHAUSEN FILMS IN COMICS
Part One: Mighty Joe Young to One Million Years BC

by Jeremy Briggs

The phrase "a legend in his own lifetime" is all too often bandied about but for stop motion special effects man Ray Harryhausen it rings true. He made sixteen feature films that were released between 1949 and 1981 and thirty years after his last film left the cinemas he is perhaps even better known now than he was then. In 1991 the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him with the special Oscar known as the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry" which was presented to him at the 1992 awards ceremony. Of course it is often forgotten that he was a major part of his mentor Willis O'Brien's special effects team on Mighty Joe Young when that film won the Special Effects Oscar in 1950.

His feature films are -
Mighty Joe Young - 1949       
The Beast From 20000 Fathoms - 1953   
It Came From Beneath The Sea - 1955
Earth Vs The Flying Saucers - 1956
The Animal World - 1956
20 Million Miles To Earth - 1957
The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad - 1958
The Three Worlds Of Gulliver - 1960
Mysterious Island    - 1961
Jason And The Argonauts - 1963           
The First Men In The Moon - 1964           
One Million Years BC - 1966
The Valley Of Gwangi - 1969   
The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad - 1974
Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger - 1977       
Clash Of The Titans - 1981

As can be seen, Mighty Joe Young and Clash of The Titans bookend his feature film work and Hollywood has since remade both films. Of the rest, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad gave Tom Baker his audition for Doctor Who while One Million Years BC made a star out of Raquel Welch. In the days before Jurassic Park the dinosaur fight sequence from One Million Years BC was the stock footage that television programmes used to illustrate dinosaurs, publicity photos of the flying saucers from Earth Vs The Flying Saucers have become a standard reference for both print and television items on UFOs, while the skeleton fight from Jason And The Argonauts, in which live action actors fight against seven stop motion skeletons, is considered by many film critics and fans to be the greatest stop motion special effects sequence ever filmed.

Released over five decades by many different distributors, and as a mixture of major releases and B features plus, unusually, one feature documentary, Harryhausen's films have had very mixed coverage when it comes to comics both in the USA and the United Kingdom. Many of the British comics of his films have been reprints from America, however those that were originated in the UK feature work by some of the most notable British comics artists of their time including John Bolton, Ian Gibson and Kevin O'Neill.

The first British Harryhausen comic strip, remarkably, was Mighty Joe Young. At a time when publishing in the UK was still influenced by post war paper rationing, Sun comic, originally published by J B Allen but taken over by the Amalgamated Press in 1948, ran a six part single page adaptation of the film illustrated by artist Robert McGillivray. This wasn't that an unusual strip for the comic to feature as it regularly featured comic strip adaptations of films. Printed in partial green and orange, the Mighty Joe Young strip ran in the biweekly comic from 10 December 1949 until 18 February 1950. There doesn't appear to have been an American comic strip of Mighty Joe Young while the next three films, The Beast From 20000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath The Sea and Earth Vs The Flying Saucers, were all black and white B movies that also don't appear to have received the comic strip treatment on either side of the Atlantic.

Some of these films did however have press strips as part of their advertising. These were provided by the distributors as publicity about the films to be printed in newspapers or magazines and usually told the basic story of the film in a series of comic strip frames often totaling three rows of three panels each.

Of the black and white films both It Came From Beneath The Sea and Earth Vs The Flying Saucers had press strips associated with them and there could well have been similar ones produced for the other films of this period.

Things changed for the better comic-wise with The Animal World, a 1956 feature length documentary produced by Irwin Allen who is now better remembered for his SF television series such as Lost In Space. The Animal World was a wildlife documentary that featured an extended stop motion sequence covering animals from pre-history that was animated by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen. A comic of The Animal World was published by Dell in the US in August 1957 as Four Color Comics issue 713 written by Gaylord DuBois and this was reprinted in the UK by World Distributors as Movie Classic issue 24.

The last of the black and white B movies, 20 Million Miles To Earth, like its predecessors also appears to have been ignored by the comics publishers. However things improved again with the first of the colour films, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, a film in which Harryhausen's theme changed from monsters to myths and legends. In the US Dell published the first of Harryhausen’s Sinbad films as Four Color Comics issue 944 in September 1958 with artwork by John Buscema before he moved over to draw for Marvel and, like The Animal World before it, it was also written by Gaylord DuBois. Also like The Animal World, the Dell version of 7th Voyage was reprinted in the UK by World Distributors this time as Movie Classic issue 68. There were later adaptations of 7th Voyage both in the UK and America but we will return to those in Part Two.

 

 

Dell’s Four Color Comics title was a long running series of one-offs that included many TV and film adaptations which continued to feature Harryhausen films. The next three films were all covered in the US by Dell, with The Three Worlds Of Gulliver published as Four Colour issue 1158 in 1960 and Mysterious Island published in 1961 as issue 1213 while, with the cancellation of Four Color Comics in 1962, Jason And The Argonauts, penciled by John Tartaglione, was published as a one-off title dated August-October 1963. As can be seen above, the details of the Mysterious Island comic were included in the American Columbia Pressbook for the film. In the UK World Distributors ceased publication of their Movie Classics series in 1960 and so there appears to have been no British reprints of any of these three Dell comic adaptations.

Jason And The Argonauts also had a press strip available to the newspapers and which, like the previous ones mentioned, consisted of three rows of three panels although this time none of the panels featured speech balloons as the strip concentrated on the visual imagery of the film rather than the characters and plot.

The next film The First Men In The Moon also didn’t have a British adaptation although there was an American comic which was published by Gold Key in March 1965 with art by Fred Fredericks. Of these last four films that had no UK comic adaptations, it is perhaps surprising that there was no British comic strip of The First Men In The Moon as it is Harryhausen's most British film populated by British actors playing British characters on a British lunar expedition.

Again the comic book was promoted in the publicity material for the film which, in the USA at least, included a black and white press strip made up of three separate sections that could be used by the cinema to help advertise the film in a local newspaper or magazine over three issues. 

Due to its fame today, it is perhaps surprising that there wasn’t a comic of Harryhausen’s next film on either side of the Atlantic when it was released in 1966. The dinosaurs and cavemen film One Million Years BC was billed as Hammer Film's 100th feature and was based on the 1940 Victor Mature film One Million BC which had not used stop-motion. While the Hammer version features some of Harryhausen's best dinosaur effects, it was the publicity shot of the leather bikini clad Raquel Welch as "cave-girl" Loana of the Shell Tribe that became an iconic image of the 1960s. Eleven years later Dez Skinn, as editor of The House of Hammer magazine, returned to the film. Issue 14 of HoH from November 1977 gave us a fully painted cover by Brian Lewis and a 15 page black and white comic strip scripted by Steve Moore and illustrated by John Bolton.

What One Million Years BC did have at the time was the most interesting of all the press strips associated with Harryhausen’s films. The advertising strip for this film was six episodes long and it is heavy on text to go with its nicely illustrated visuals. Each separate part had a title: The Outcast, The Shell People, Man Against Beast, Tumak Returns!, Flight of Death!, and End Of An Era, and together they told the entire plot of the film rather than just being a teaser for it. The “A” certificate and the spelling in the images above show that this particular press strip was from a British publication.

This feature concludes in Part Two which covers The Valley Of Gwangi to Clash of The Titans.

More details of Ray Harryhausen’s career can be found on his official website. Complete scans of some of the comics in this article can be found on other blogs: - Dell 7th Voyage Of Sinbad; Dell Jason And The Argonauts Part 1, Part 2; HoH: One Million Years BC Part 1, Part 2.

Comic Cuts - 21 October 2011

Another slow week for news from me, unless you want to hear about the Wisteria being cut back. The new house (as it's still called, although we moved in over a year ago) has this massive plant growing up the back which was starting to overshadow the windows and tangle itself around the guttering. As we needed to get some work done on the roof and there was scaffolding already up, it was a good opportunity to take a saw to the damn thing and cut it back. Now we're actually getting the benefit of the October sunshine, although my little office - not in direct sunshine and with no insulation whatsoever - has been freezing.

I did get a chance to read one of the latest DFC Library books, which I've reviewed below. I'd hoped to also have a review of the new Strip comic, but there has been short delay - the comic is being printed in Bosnia and the couriers have failed to meet their delivery date. Print Media also have a couple of books due out shortly which I'll review when copies turn up.

John Adcock, on his Yesterday's Papers blog, has a review of a book that might be of interest to fans of the oldest British comics and story papers. The Curious Cyclists by John Reynolds is the story of two young Nottingham men who decided to take a trip to Gibraltar by bicycle in the waning days of Queen Victoria's reign. It's a true story and the two men were Tom Browne, artist of such early strips as 'Weary Willie and Tired Tim', and Stacey Blake, who wrote popular boys' stories for The Captain, Big Budget, etc. Blake was an inveterate traveller, journeying around Europe, Scandinavia and North Africa by bike or on foot; his trip to Gibraltar was enlivened by having Browne provide illustrations for his journal jottings about their exploits, 42 of which Browne later transferred to slides. These are reproduced in Reynolds' book, which is available from Amazon for as little as £5.

The Guardian carried an obituary this week for John Holmes, an artist best known for his surreal book and record sleeve designs, his most famous image being the cover for Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in 1970. Born in 1935, Holmes studied at the Coopers' Company school in Bow and took on a variety of jobs, including porter at Smithfield market, to support his young family following his National Service with the RAF. He painted abstracts, eventually gaining a place at the London College of Printing in 1965. He subsequently worked as an art director with an advertising company as well as producing numerous covers for Granada, Pan, Ballantine and others, ranging from Vladimir Nabokov's Despair (1969) to Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974); he also illustrated H. P. Lovecraft books for Ballantine and the Horror Stories series for Fontana. Above is one of my favourites, the Futura edition of George Tremlett's The Rolling Stones Story (1974).

This week's random scans have all been supplied by readers. David Ainsworth has sent me over a few in the past ahead of selling off books on Amazon. This week it was the 1961 Four Square edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus) with a nice Edward Mortelmans cover. Phil Rushton sent over a filler for my Isaac Asimov cover gallery, the Digit edition of Second Foundation, which was already a pretty sharp copy when it arrived. The same can't be said for the issue of Schoolgirl Picture Library that Roger Green (suitably apologetic) sent over, which took a lot of work and still isn't perfect. But I'd rather have a rough copy that needs some work than no copy at all.

Next week we have a 4-part episode of 'The Man Who Searched for Fear'. Sadly, we're coming to the end of the strip with only one more story after that. I'll have to put my thinking cap on and see what else I can find. Jeremy Briggs will be filling in for me over the weekend with a nice piece on how comics have adapted Ray Harryhausen's movies, while I fiddle around with some of the earlier cover galleries and bring some of them up to scratch. Once I'm done, I'll put up a list of them so that you can find them without having to use Blogger's internal search system, which can often turn up too many results. That should keep me busy in the evenings...

Review: Baggage by The Etherington Brothers

I reviewed the previous volume from Robin and Lorenzo Etherington almost exactly a year ago. Back then, I praised their work on Monkey Nuts as pacy, funny and deserving a place on your shelves. Well, if you took my advice, you'll know what to expect from their latest collaboration.

Like Monkey Nuts' Sid and Rivet, Baggage also has a pair of accident-prone, unlikely but likeable heroes. Randall is a much put-upon employee of the lost luggage department of Triptych City's tram station, ruled over by grumpy boss Bronco Lutz. Bawled out for taking a rhino out for a drink and leaving him to destroy the stalls in the concourse of the station, it looks like Randall might be about to lose his job. Not that he's too sure what his job actually is: in five years of employment he has failed to return even one piece of lost luggage to its rightful owner. "I thought I was just supposed to keep all the bags safe and warm at night!" Randall replies.

Sent out to find and return to its owner the oldest piece of lost property, Randall (literally) bumps into Taw, Triptych City's answer to Del-boy, and the two set off at high speed, following clues on the suitcase and followed by a growing crowd of irate citizens (and a rhino) whose paths they cross. The chaotic journey takes Randall to Ruby Bee's sweet shop, the Bridge of Abodes, Mini Mica's Floating Duck milkshake stall, the Wow! shop for collectors, a dustbin, a garbage barge and many more exotic locations.

Lorenzo's artwork is jam-packed with intricate design and detail; it's a book that will pay re-reading because there's a lot going on in the background that you may miss first time round. The story races along, although I'm sure I detect a structure to the storytelling that means the story could be broken down into four-page episodes for serialisation. Not that it interferes with the enjoyment of reading the tale in all its 52-page glory; it builds up to a satisfying climax as the clock ticks - Randall has only one day to find the owner or he'll lose his job - and others - Taw, Mica and fanatical collector Kong - are dragged into the chaos that Randall leaves in his wake.

With all the energy of an animated cartoon, Baggage has enough craziness to entertain even the most hyperactive kid. You shouldn't have any problem getting them to settle down and read for a change.

Baggage by The Etherington Brothers. David Fickling Books (DFC Library) ISBN 978-0385618571, 6 October 2011, 64pp, £9.99. [£6.99 from Amazon]

Nictzin Dyalhis

A question on a chat group I'm a member of prompted some digging around into the career of the mysteriously named Nictzin Dyalhis. Dyalhis has a reputation far beyond the quality of his writing. Everett Bleiler (in Science-Fiction: The Early Years) summed up what is considered one of Dyalhis's best stories, "When the Green Star Waned", as "distasteful and negligible as fiction, what with bad writing, loose ends and illogicalities"; it was, however, "a seminal work in the history of pulp s-f. One of the earliest space operas, it was read by most of the early writers and offered both conceptual and literary patterns. It also may have been the first to use the word 'blaster,' no matter how spelled, for a disintegrator." (Dyalhis describes his disintegration weapons as a 'blastors'.) A Google search will turn up this fact endlessly, along with endless variations of the author's Wikipedia entry.

But little else. Google search 'Nictzin' or 'Dyalhis' and you'll find only references to the author; neither is a real name used elsewhere. Searches of genealogical records again turn up nobody else unrelated who has either name, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that Nictzin Dyalhis was not born with that name.

However, he was known in official records under that name at least as early as the First World War. His draft registration card gives his full name as Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis, born 4 June 1873. The date of registration is 10 September 1918 and Dyalhis is 45, yet this is the earliest record of him I have been able to find.

The card does offer some clues: he was a 'box nailer' working for one Paul Delancey; he registered in Chautauqua which is in the westernmost corner of the county of New York, not far from the state line with Pennsylvania. Dyalhis gives his address as a PO Box number in Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania, which is about 14 miles south-east of Chautauqua as the crow flies.

Sugar Grove is a small borough of Warren County with a population in the hundreds. Amongst its residents back in the late 19th century was Samuel Lord, an Englishman (born in Yorkshire in 1837) whose family had emigrated to America in 1847 and took up residence in Busti, Chautauqua. Samuel was married to Fidelia A. Phillips (born in Busti in 1845) in 1865 and had four children: Murna (1867), Carrie (1869), Ralph (1872) and Hattie (1874).

Samuel, described as a farmer in the 1900 census, died in 1903 and by the time of the 1910 census, Fidelia was living alone. Their daughter Hattie W. Lord had been living with her parents in 1900 but seems to have disappeared from the 1910 census. Hattie - Harriet Weber Lord - was born 1 January 1874 and raised in Sugar Grove where she graduated from the Sugar Grove Seminary. She was an accomplished musician and elocutionist in her younger years and the 1900 census return lists her occupation as "lecturer and reader". 

By the 1920 census she has married Nictzin Dyalhis and, as Harriet Dyalhis, is residing with her mother in Sugar Grove. Dyalhis, presumably now released from his war service, was described as a 47-year-old chemist, working in a laboratory. He was born in Massachusetts, his father having been born also in Massachusetts and his mother in Guatemala, which is at odds with information that he was later to give. In a later biographical note in Weird Tales (cited by Mike Ashley in Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction) Dyalhis claimed that his name was an old English name derived from the same Roman word that produced Douglas. Everett Bleiler notes: "He claimed that it was genuine, originating in Scottish memories of the Roman flamen dialis." The flamen dialis was the high priest of Jupiter, a position created by Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome (succeeding Romulus). This has a ring of truth to it - although I hasten to note again that Dyalhis is not an old English name, nor an old Scottish name... Dyalhis had a habit, in his writings, to corrupt words. Thus in "When the Green Star Waned", the green star of the title, Earth, became Aerth, and the invading alien force was from Venhez (Venus). L. Sprague de Camp (in Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, 1976) claimed that Dyalhis was inherited from his Welsh father which is clearly not true as (a) his father was from Massachusetts; and (b) Dyalhis is not a Welsh surname. "There have been reports that it was a modification of a more conventional name like Douglass or Dalziel," continues Bleiler. Another suggestion is that the name is a corruption of Dallas. However a corruption of dialis (Latin for "of Jupiter") from the man who enjoys corrupting planetary names seems just as plausible.

Dyalhis (misspelled Dyalihis) and Harriet Weber Lord were married some time between 1909 and 1913 (cf County Courthouse and Vital Records listed here); this ties in with information to be found on the 1930 census which states that 56-year-old Harriet had married at the age of 38, implying she was married in 1912. So we can say with certainty that Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis had adopted that name whilst still in his thirties; the fact that he does not seem to appear in the 1910 census under any variation of that name may mean that it was then only recently adopted. (Or he could have been abroad.... the simplest explanations often being the correct ones, although there is no trace of Dyalhis in available immigration and travel records.)

On 3 September 1913, the Prescott, Arizona-based, Weekly Journal-Miner noted that "Mr. & Mrs. Dyalhis, the former mining in Lynx creek district, are in the city on a business trip for a few days and registered at the Head hotel." Lynx Creek was heavily mined at the time (a map of the area showing historical mines can be found here) and it seems that Dyalhis would have been involved in mining for or panning for gold.

During the early 1920s, Dyalhis began selling to pulp magazines, notably Adventure and Weird Tales. His stories in the latter - which numbered only eight between 1923 and 1940 - garnered the author a disproportionate number of covers (five), most notable amongst them covers by Virgil Finlay and Margaret Brundage. Mike Ashley says that Dyalhis "began writing in the early 1920s with stories of Amerindian life" before moving on to tales of the occult which he claimed to know through his extensive travels, saying that he had lived in the Orient (where he joined an occult society) and had visited Tibet and Haiti, where he witnessed a voodoo ceremony.

His output was not extensive - in fact I know of only 13 stories:

Who Keep the Desert Law (Adventure, 20 Oct 1922)
For Wounding – Retaliation (Adventure, 20 Nov 1922)
When the Green Star Waned (Venhez; Weird Tales, Apr 1925; Weird Tales, Jan 1929)
The Eternal Conflict (Weird Tales, Oct 1925)
He Refused to Stay Dead, with Eric Marston (Ghost Stories, Apr 1927)
The Dark Lore (Weird Tales, Oct 1927)
The Oath of Hul Jok (Venhez; Weird Tales, Sep 1928)
The Red Witch (Weird Tales, Apr 1932; Magazine of Horror, Jan 1968)
The Whirling Machete (Underworld Magazine, Dec 1933)
The Sapphire Goddess (Weird Tales, Feb 1934; as The Sapphire Siren. Avon Fantasy Reader, 1951; Weird Tales, Spr 1981)
Gangland’s Judas (Complete Underworld Novelettes, Aug 1934)
The Sea-Witch (Weird Tales, Dec 1937; Weird Tales, Jul 1953)
Heart of Atlantan (Weird Tales, Sep 1940)

The 1930 census shows that Dyalhis and Harriet had separated. Harriet Dyalhis is listed as a patient in Warren State Hospital, Conewango, Warren, PA. Originally called the State Hospital for the Insane, the asylum became Warren State Hospital in 1920 and still exists today. What afflicted Harriet is unknown, although the deaths of her mother in 1929 and her elder sister Murna in 1930 may have contributed. She is listed as married and under her married name.

Nictzin is now living in Waynesboro, Franklin, PA, and has a new wife, her name given as Netulyani Dyalhis. His various details have changed: he was now born in Arizona, as were his mother and father; he is 50 (thus born c.1879) and was first married aged 30 (or c.1909/10) - his wife is 39 (born c.1890) and was married aged 19 (or c.1909/10), which is patently untrue. Dyalhis gives his occupation as "machinist (machine tool manufacturing)", one of the chief forms of employment in a town at the time.

In 1932, Nictzin and Netulyani had a daughter, Mary Agnes Dyalhis, born in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania on 11 March 1932. Her marriage certificate reveals that her mother, far from being Netulyani, was born with the rather more down-to-earth name Mary G. Sheddy, although she is listed on her husband's World War II draft registration card as Netulyani Del Torres Dyalhis. Her death in April 1977 was registered with the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) as Mary Dyalhis, which also gives her date of birth as 5 July 1897 and age at death as 79 which, if correct, means the 11 year gap in ages between Nictzin and Netulyani given on the 1930 census was actually 24 years.

A more likely date is 5 July 1891, given on a social security application made in September 1938. In this, Netulyani Deltorres Dyalhis, daughter of John T. Deltorres and his wife Annetta, claimed to have been born in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, which agrees with the 1940 census return, which gives her age as 48. Her daughter is listed in the latter aged 8, the family living at Tyaskin in Wicomico County, Maryland, having lived in Rural, Wisconsin, at the time of the 1935 census.

Nictzin is listed as a writer for magazines in the 1940 census, but had also then recently (May 1939) made an application for social security, claiming that he was born on 4 June 1880 in Pima, Arizona. In this, he claims his father's name was George A. Dyalhis and his mother Natulyani Deltorres Dyalhis, under which name his wife had tried to claim social security eight months earlier.

The last official record of Dyalhis I have found is his WWII registration card, which also lists his birth as 4 June 1880 in Pima, Arizona, and gives his then current (1942) address as Allen, Princess Anne Road, Fruitland, Wicomico, Maryland (⇒ Google Maps). Dyalhis died on 8 May 1942 in nearby Salisbury, MD.

In an essay on Dyalhis ("Nictzin Dyalhis: Mysterious Master of Fantasy", Echoes of Valor III, ed. Karl Edward Wagner, 1991), Sam Moskowitz recorded information from the author's death certificate which records his birth as being in Pima, Arizona, although the town was apparently only founded in 1879; however, this is contradicted by earlier records which date his birth as 1873, a fact backed-up by a letter that Dyalhis wrote accompanying an early story in Adventure (1922) which said he was nearly 50, and his 1920 census return statement that he was born in Massachusetts. Dyalhis also claimed that his father was an English sea captain (again at odds with the census return, which gives his father's birth place as Massachusetts) and his mother a Guatemalan mestiza of partial Aztec stock.

If we accept that the birth date and birth place is correct, we should also accept that Dyalhis's mother was indeed Guatemalan, as stated on the 1920 census return. That Dyalhis had an interest in Aztecs and the history of the pre-historical Mexican races is clear - he even stated that his (second) wife's race was 'Toltec', although Mary was most likely from Pennsylvania. To my mind, the name Nictzin sounds like something that might be derived from Aztec or Toltec.

Alternatively, could it be derived from Indian pictogram writing? While looking for information I stumbled upon a book called The Lenâpé and their legends: with the complete texts and symbols of the Walam Olum by Daniel G. Brinton (published in Philadelphia, 1885, online here). The Walam Olum (which Brinton translates as Red Score) is a narrative of the Lenape Native American tribe of Delaware, now thought to be a hoax. However, this is a recent theory and, for 150 years following its first publication in 1836, was thought to be a genuine historical narrative. The book contains Lenape pictograms and text and I couldn't help but read the poorly printed picture 29 which reads "Oligonunk sisilaking nallimetzin kolakwaining" (At the place of caves, in the buffalo land, they at last had food, on a pleasant plain) as "nalli-nictzin".

(I'm not seriously suggesting the above as the actual source of Dyalhis's invented christian name; I'm just noting that the Nictzin Dyalhis might not have had to transport his thoughts all the way back to ancient Rome or ancient Mexico for inspiration.)

Questions about Nictzin Dyalhis's name have been asked for ninety years and it seems we are no closer to the truth. That he was legally known as Nictzin Dyalhis - for draft registration and census returns, for marriage and death certificates, for social security records - is undeniable, although I still feel that this was not the name he was given at birth.

Harriet Weber Dyalhis, nee Lord, died in 1959. She was buried at Cherry Hill Cemetery, Sugar Grove. Mary Dyalhis died in 1977; Mary's daughter, Mary Agnes Posavec, died in 2009.

Interest in Nictzin Dyalhis, however, has not died. Quite a few of his stories have been reprinted in anthologies over the years and a collection of his work is due from Battered Silicon press under the title The Nictzin Dyalhis Portfolio edited by George A. Vanderburgh and Robert Bleiler.

(* With acknowledgements to Phil Stephensen-Payne and Steven Rowe. The covers above are from Phil's Galactic Central website, with a bit of cleaning up by me; other documents are from public records.)