Bill almost had a heart attack when the colorist asked him wasn’t there something funny about the splash panel. What a great opportunity for collectors was missed!
Woody and I had personal differences and the partnership was dissolved. I became a fast and talented inker and found myself drawing less and less. It was then that I started a partnership with Warren Broderick, a talented artist. He came from South Jamaica, very close to where I grew up in Jamaica. It was a nice, middle-class family. His father was a railroad porter; one of the few jobs open to intelligent blacks at the time. Walter was a shy guy and didn’t like to face art directors. So we had a good relationship. I went out and sold the stuff. He penciled the stories and I inked them. We worked together until I found myself doing more packaging and writing. As the work slackened we drifted apart, since I was doing very little art.
What little I did, I would hire a penciler or a breakdown artist to rough in the panels. I would tighten the pencils of the faces and hands, and render the rest directly into ink with a number seven Winsor & Newton camel hair brush. Clean and fast.
My variegated skills would be very useful on the next project that came up—or exploded up, so outrageous was the idea. MGM had invested a lot of money in what they hoped would be a blockbuster. They had worked a deal with DC, who would publish the comic of Samson and Delilah to tie in with the release of the film. Then a comic book packager named Barney was struck with this tremendous and obvious idea.
You can’t copyright the Bible—right? It was there for all to see. Meaning that anyone can bring out a Samson and Delilah comic on the day the film was released. With this surefire deal to hand, Barney made the rounds of all the dicey publishers who would surely love the idea. But he struck out! There were no takers. These guys who would normally run their grandmas through the presses if it made money had suddenly got religion or something, wary of the Bible tie-in. This lasted quite a while until one publisher realized he was turning down a win-win deal. Negotiations were begun, contracts hammered out until Barney had the deal. Then he began counting on his fingers and broke into a cold sweat. There were exactly twenty-four hours left before the finished comic had to be turned in. Barney got on the phone and thus began Operation Deadline. Sometime during the night I had a call and was swept up in the plea for aid and the offer of lots of greenbacks if we made the deadline.
It was a strictly by-the-numbers project, in the hope that the final product might have some consistency. Fat chance! The breakdown men practically grabbed the script from the two writers. They passed it in to the pencilers, who tightened the figures. Background men roughed in their bit and it then went to the inkers.
Around two in the morning fatigue began to strike. Cardboard cartons of coffee were distributed and a contest organized. The six inkers, including me, were going to have a contest and see who inked the fastest. This woke the troops up and the betting began. Freshly finished pencils were distributed, facedown. Lap boards were adjusted, pens cleaned, brushes pointed. Unknown to us someone had found an authentic starter’s pistol, which made an incredible bang when the starter shouted GO! Bending low under the cloud of smoke, shivering in reaction to the explosion, we began to ink.
Watching inkers ink is like watching paint dry. I can say with some pride that I won, having finished my page in seventeen minutes. As far as I know my record still stands.
For the record, we finished by deadline. Our super-hack comic appeared on time and we thumbed our nose at the licensed one.
Being ambitious I also began to do packaging for smaller publishers. For a fixed price I would deliver a camera-ready comic book. Lou was a perfect example of the small comic publisher. He had managed to collar a contract with Kable, the biggest distributors of comics. And then he hired me. The money was miserable so the comic was just as bad. I wrote the stories myself so that money was saved. If the fee was slightly better than usual, I got a good artist to draw the cover. If not, not, and I drew it myself.
After the cover, there were still thirty-two pages to fill. If it was a romance comic, I used the two non-art pages as a letter column and let the readers tell their troubles to Aunt Harriet. I stopped the column when real women wrote in with their real problems. Pregnancy advice from a twenty-four-year-old ex-GI—I just could not do it. After that I settled for a quick thousand words of fiction to fill the spot.
The art was terrible but Lou couldn’t tell the difference. He passed on the romances but only exercised his editorial prerogatives on the horror comics. He was a necrophiliac of a specific kind. He loved bones. When I brought in the cover art I also brought along some illo board and rubber cement. Then I drew skulls and crossed bones, shards of skeletons, and more bones until the cover looked like some kind of comic ossuary. When I left Lou’s office most of them dislodged and a trail of comic bones fluttered to the hall behind me.
As I began to package more and more titles I found myself drawing less and keeping busy enough editing. What little art I drew was for the science fiction pulp magazines, since SF was still my first love.
I was saved from comics by a congressional investigation. Horror comics were getting pretty repulsive. When a Dr. Wertheim put them on television, during his investigation into the horror comics industry, they looked even worse. The moment that comics died was when Bill Gaines was cross-examined. Wertheim was a renegade Freudian who was a little exotic himself but his impact on the industry was dramatic. Bill volunteered—and we all wished that he hadn’t.
After some meaningless bumf, Wertheim whipped out a pretty horrible cover. It was a close-up shot of two hands. One was holding a decapitated head by the hair. The eyes were rolled up and just the front of the neck was showing. The ax held in his other hand was dripping blood. Wertheim asks: “Now, isn’t this horrible?” A laidback Bill says, “No, not bad, in fact quite mild in this competitive world. We toned it down—it could have been a lot worse.”
“Worse!” Wertheim shouts, bits of spittle on his lips. “How could it be worse?”
“Well, you know, we could have shown an end shot of the chopped neck. With all the tubes and blood and all the bones and things.…”
He killed it. Bundles of comics were returned unopened and the comic book industry almost collapsed. The big, quality firms like DC and Marvel stayed in business, while the fly-by-night operations went to the wall. Before the investigation there had been over six hundred different comic titles on the newsstands. After the investigation this number dropped to a little over two hundred. Unemployed comic artists wandered the cold streets of New York, and I was one of them, but not for long.
A new professional career was opening up for me. Since I had not been drawing very much, but had been editing comics and writing scripts for them, it was very easy for me to take a step sideways and go into editing pulp magazines. This was when science fiction saved me.
5
When I was in the army I had continued to read the science fiction magazines. I still read them after getting my discharge. When I was beginning to be an illustrator, fitted in between my comic book stints, I did book jackets for Gnome Press, a small SF publisher, as well as illustrations for Galaxy, Marvel Stories, and various other SF magazines. I became a part of the professional New York scene in SF publishing—albeit as Harry the artist, not yet the editor and writer.
And New York was the place to be in science fiction after the war. All of the SF magazines were published there; eventually paperback and hardback SF would be published as well, and New York had always been a hive of fanac—or fan activity. I had been there at the beginning; as I have said, I was one of the founders of the Queens Science Fiction League, along with the same superfan Sam Moskowitz who also helped found the Newark club. In Manhattan there were a group of fans—many of whom would eventually become pros—called the Futurians. They were the nucleus of the Hydra Club.
There were nine founding members of the club—the nine heads of Hydra—and this organization became the center of science fiction a
ctivity in New York. Most of the meetings took place at the apartment of Fletcher Pratt on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. Fletcher was a longtime and well-established professional writer, so, along with his wife Inga, a top-notch fashion artist, he opened their rather luxurious doors to the science fiction riffraff. Some, like Fred Pohl, Don Wollheim, and Damon Knight, were already employed as editors. Others, such as Fred Brown, Mack Reynolds, Lester del Rey, and Cyril Kornbluth, were established freelancers. Martin Greenberg, a glazier by trade, was also publisher of Gnome Press. The rest of us were trying to break into publishing with various degrees of success.
I was still grinding out comics when I did a book jacket for Gnome Press. On the strength of this Marty took me around to a Hydra meeting. It was like coming home. This was SF fandom come of age; I took to it as a fish to water.
It really was a good time to be alive; the birth of a new world. When book publishers began to consider SF they came to the Hydra Club. Basil Davenport, of the Book-of-the-Month Club, became so involved that he began to host Hydra meetings in his Gramercy Park apartment. All was going fine there until I initiated a mini-tragedy. I slipped into Basil’s bathroom for a pee, locking the door behind me. I lifted the seat, which polite chaps are wont to do, and it fell to the floor. Bladder pressure rising, I grabbed it up, turned about, and saw a waiting hook on the back of the door—I hung it from the hook and did what I had to do. Then I left, thinking nothing about it.
Not for long. The hum of voices bullshitting about SF was cut through by the elegant Southern drawl that was Basil at his best.
“You will kindly lock thu doors—and join me in thu hunt for thu low scalawag who has stolen mah TOILET SEAT!”
Panic among the troops. Much rushing about and looking under Basil’s bed with no result. Of course everyone who searched the toilet threw the door against the wall, thus concealing the pinched article of sanitary hygiene.
It all ended not with a whimper but a yell. I had sneaked in between searchers and put it back—to be miraculously discovered. The meeting at Basil’s broke early that night. We put the toilet tragedy behind us and the Hydra Club carried on.
When Doubleday was considering hardback SF, one of their executives, Walter Bradbury, became a regular Hydra attendee. In true fan tradition, the Hydra Club was social as well as commercial. I remember that we had a chess tournament going and Fletcher Pratt was champion. I was at the zenith of my not-so-great chess powers at the time, doing illustrations for the Chess Review and rubbing shoulders with chess greats like Sammy Reshevsky and Arnold Denker. Some of their genius must have rubbed off because I finally managed to beat Fletcher. However, Frederick Brown thrashed me royally after making sure I was drunk first; gamesmanship at its very best. Life was filled with richness.
There was talk of turning the Hydra Club into something more businesslike, an official SF writers’ organization. I remember at the organizing meeting that Alfie Bester kept asking if it would be an official trade union like the Screen Writers Guild. There was some leaning this way, but Judy Merril led the artistic opposition. This would be no proletarian trade union—but a true meeting of intellectual minds. George O. Smith was elected president. George was a full-time radio engineer, a part-time SF writer, and an almost-across-the-borderline alcoholic. He never held a meeting of our new organization. In the absence of an official organization, the Hydra Club stumbled along with its monthly meetings. We all chipped in quarters to buy the beer, and that was the extent of our official organization at the time.
But we did publish an occasional journal, which I partially edited, then produced and pasted up. A few years later, the Hydra Club even managed to run a convention at the Henry Hudson Hotel, which I chaired. There were many whiffs of fandom still about the Hydra Club; I remember Will Sykora, still leader of the Queens Science Fiction League, passing out pamphlets denouncing me at the convention. I forget what I was supposed to have done, but it was claimed that I had been bought off with a lifetime comic book contract. Despite the fact I was through with comics. As always in fandom, uneasy lies the crown. Later there was a putsch engineered by Fred Pohl—I remember Doc Lowndes was brought in to pad out the vote—when I went from being president of the Hydra Club to nonmember in one evening.
There were a lot of visiting firemen at the Hydra Club. Tony Boucher was editing Fantasy & Science Fiction from the West Coast—and was mobbed when he made one of his rare visits east. Other visitors included Olaf Stapledon, dean of SF writers, who had a more restrained audience.
Then there was Garry Davis, World Citizen Number One, who became a close friend and companion. Judy Merril or someone in the Hydra Club knew him and brought him around to a party. People threw parties in those days and you’d bring your own beer. Garry and I had both been in the Air Corps and we just hit it off very well. He was becoming quite famous at the time, becoming the first “world citizen.” We shared an office for a while. I helped him to design the World Passport, which was in English and Esperanto. My wife, Joan, designed and sewed the World Flag, which she made out of one of her old dresses.
Garry’s father, Meyer Davis, was Jewish and his mother was Boston upper class—silver hair and real rubies, you know, and a good Boston accent like Kennedy. I met her once or twice and she was strictly upper-upper. She went to Europe, and came back from Greece by train. Trains were still in use in those days; through Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Garry had given her a World Passport, with her photograph in there, and she had an American passport, but she thought she’d try out the new one. When the train came to the Yugoslavian border she passed them the world citizen passport. She was a very upper-class woman in a first-class carriage, and she gave them the World Passport, and they stamped it. And once it was stamped, all the other borders she crossed, they stamped it too! Even France—she got it stamped at each one. A small success perhaps, but an interesting one.
Garry was always brushing up against authority, but it often proved that they were in the wrong and he was right.
He was a very good actor and was in London, acting in Stalag 17, and was in Britain on a visa to perform. Once the show was over, he was out of a job, and his visa expired while he was in London. The English said, “Go back to the land of your birth.” And he said, “I don’t have an American passport anymore.” He’d torn it up and carried his World Passport instead. What the Brits did was to grab him and put handcuffs on him. Then they took him down to the Queen Mary and put him in the brig and locked him in.
They threw him out of Britain because he was in the country illegally now that his visa had expired. With the addition of this little sea trip in the brig of the superliner.
They unchained him in New York and gave him an envelope, and in it on nice white stationery was a letter saying, “I, Garry Davis, born in the United States, wish to return to the land of my birth—signed Garry Davis.” To get his signature they had taken a letter he’d written in prison, on gray prison stationery, and had cut out the signature and pasted it on the white stationery. That may look pretty illegal to us simple peasants, but it must have made the American authorities happy, because they let him back into the United States.
He came to our office and we fixed up a publicity release, wrote to all the newspapers, television, and radio, then marched on the UN. We arranged an interview, and made photocopies of the letter—we had a couple of hundred copies—and Garry had the original letter there, and he held it up for all the press to see. The next day the newspapers and television featured—nothing, not a word about this heinous, illegal, international collusion. The syndicated papers said only that “Garry Davis Raises World Flag at United Nations.”
Come on, buddies, where’s the real story? There was illegal agreement in high places, but I suppose people don’t want to rock the boat. Deep sigh.
I was still working in science fiction. At that time I was illustrating most of the stories in Worlds Beyond, an SF magazine edited by Damon Knight. A bout of tonsillitis put me to bed; my hand sho
ok too much to draw. But I could still type, and I wrote a story called “I Walk Through Rocks” and gave it to Damon. Who bought it, wisely changing the title to “Rock Diver,” and gave me a hundred dollars for it. Since he was only paying me five dollars each for the small illustrations that I was doing for the magazine, this was quite an improvement. My then agent, Fredrik Pohl, put the story into an anthology he was editing and I had another hundred bucks. I did not realize it at the time, but my career as an artist was drawing to a close.
Driven out of comics, I was more than happy to edit some SF magazines for a very cheap and crooked publisher. I edited Science Fiction Adventures, Rocket Stories, and even one issue of Sea Stories. When my budget was too small to pay for enough stories for an issue I wrote them myself. I illustrated the magazine—and even wrote the letters in the letter column. Including a letter column in the first issue of a new magazine—which shows more brass than intelligence.
Harlan Ellison came to see me when I was editing these magazines. Bob Silverberg gave him my address. We had no receptionist; this was just a basic publisher based in a warehouse floor. There were no offices there, no partitions, just people drawing, writing, laying out, and pasting up, the works.
Harlan walks right into this publishing madhouse and says, “Mr. Harrison, I’m Harlan Ellison, and I’m doing a fanzine.…”
He was in the office, so I gave him a sales pitch about the magazines and I talked to him about how when a story ends in a magazine, you have up to half a page blank sometimes. John Campbell used to put a picture of a spaceship there. Or you put an ad for the next issue.
In addition to editing I wrote anything that would earn a few bucks. This was a very natural progression. As a commercial artist I drew for money. “Listen, Harry,” the editor would say. “I need an illo of a girl with big boobs being eaten by a monster by Thursday.” On that day I would turn in a 48-D-cup screamer being tentacled to death. Money!
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 7