The Fickle Finger of Fate
by Gary Phillips
Gentle readers, as I’ve written before, producing comic books and its ilk ain’t for sissies, and recent events in this far-flung community remind us this is so. In the 1980s, writer Stephen Perry wrote for a couple of animated TV shows, ThunderCats and the SilverHawks, and also did some work for Marvel Comics in those years. But recent times hadn’t been good for Perry, who in his fifties was battling bladder cancer and had legal tussles with his young girlfriend over their five-year-old son. Indeed he had been out of work and homeless at one point, living in a van with his kid in Florida.
The Hero Initiative, a nonprofit that helps down on their heels comics professionals, helped Perry with medical treatment costs, housing and utilities. But this past May, after being not seen for two weeks, police in Tampa found Perry’s severed arm in a room in Tampa. Other parts of his body were found in a dumpster at a gas station a couple of miles from his apartment.
Arrested on separate charges, but persons of interest in Perry’s death, are the husband and wife he was roommates with in a Zephyrhills, Florida apartment. The apartment had been ransacked and initially the couple had gone missing as well. If they did do in Perry, fandom is wondering why ... given he certainly didn’t get rich from his brief time in the comics game. Or did they think he’d secreted away original animation cells from those old shows—given the ThunderCats have developed a cult following.
Though also a sad passing, comics artist and inker Al Williamson, said to have been suffering from Alzheimer’s, passed away recently of natural causes at 79. He was born in New York City, and raised for the first 12 years of his life in his father’s native Columbia, in Bógóta. The young Al returned to the States with his American mom after she divorced his pops. But he’d already been indoctrinated, bilingually, in the comics idiom.
Ms. Marvel
According to various biographies, Williamson took art classes in the mid-'40s with Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth and, later, at Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City. He assisted Hogarth on some Tarzan Sunday pages and at age 17 made his professional debut working on series such as Eastern Color's Famous Funnies and Standard Comics' Wonder Comics.
The thing about Williamson’s work was his mastery of anatomy, his command of an old school style of the heroic human form and its use to tell the story. He did draw super-heroes but not like these snarling warrior men with bulging muscles so big you wonder how they can move or scantily-clad babes (oh say like the pulchritudinous Ms. Marvel rendered by Frank Cho) who you can bounce a fifty cent piece off their tight buns or chest up to the second floor—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Williamson’s art was fluid, a more realistic style, even though he drew a lot of science fiction sagas.
I first stumbled on Williamson’s art when I was a kid and read some reprints of his work on the Flash Gordon newspaper strip, which he drew for comic books as well. He’d been the youngest member of a bunch of artists and writers who worked for EC, Entertaining Comics, in the 1950s. Under Bill Gaines, these cats, including Wally Wood, Jack Cole, Frank Frazetta (who initially inked Williamson’s drawings and who also passed away recently (and whose interesting family squabble over his paintings was chronicled here as well), Johnny Craig, Bernie Krigstein and many others, produced all sorts of stories from Roman sackings to GIs in foxholes in Korea, bloody and violent gangster vignettes, mini sci-fi epics and horror tales.
In particular it was EC’s horror and crime comics that inflamed the 1950s sense of mores and decency. These comics’ covers were gruesome depictions of decapitations, eyeballs about to be slit by a straight razor, and the hanged. As recounted in the culture shock section of the PBS online site, “In 1954 the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency holds hearings on whether comic books inspire juvenile delinquency. A lead witness, psychologist Dr. Frederick Wertham, testifies that comics “create a mental readiness for temptation” and create “an atmosphere of deceit and cruelty” for children. He even attacks Superman for “arousing fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing others punished while you yourself remain immune.”
Wertham had written a sensational book, Seduction of the Innocent, which essentially blamed violent comics for inducing the violent behavior of wayward children and teens. A tenet that’s carried through to today’s forms of pop culture, not without anecdotal incidents to bolster such claims, from gangsta rap to first-person shooting and bursting out alien and zombie guts in video games.
At any rate, EC was a training ground for many of these artists and Al Williamson contributed to its sci-fi titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and the war title Blazing Combat. After EC, he produced hundreds of pages of short stories, westerns, mostly, for Atlas Comics. He worked on the Rip Kirby detective comic strip (created by the by-then deceased artist-writer Alex Raymond, who with his other creation, Flash Gordon, had been an early influence on Williamson). For Warren Publishing he was in on the beginnings of its Creepy and Eerie horror comics magazines. He drew the Secret Agent X-9, later renamed Secret Agent Corrigan, strip for the years that comic book editor and writer Archie Goodwin wrote. Al Williamson would go on to illo such projects as the comics adaptation of the movie Blade Runner, and was requested by the Jedi master himself, George Lucas, to draw the Star Wars comic strip.
Yet such is capricious fate, the roll of the cosmic dice that determines why one person is successful, like Williamson, and another, like Perry, has a relatively brief flash. Take in a related vein, another story, that, like Perry’s unfortunate demise, might have also been culled from the pages of an off-brand EC title ... something like Tales of the Almost Strange.
Canadian mystery writer Howard Engel woke up one morning and went outside to fetch the morning paper. Unfolding it and staring at the front page, the words seemed to be in some other alphabet, like something in Cyrillic, he said in a “Science” segment on NPR’s Morning Edition, “The Writer Who Couldn’t Read.” Turns out Engel had suffered a minor stroke while asleep, and now had something the docs called ‘word blindness,” alexia sine agraphia. He could comprehend words spoken to him, could speak, and could write after a fashion, but had to re-teach himself to read with his fingers on each word and by other methods. After a lot of work and time, Engel wrote a new novel with his character, Benny Cooperman, The Memory Book. The character after being hit hard in the head and left for dead, suffers a similar condition as he sets out to reconstruct his memory and find out who did this to him.
Comics professional sang the praises of Al Williamson and there are several books showcasing his art, while Mr. Engle is no doubt working on another novel. I suppose given how he died, Mr. Perry will get his footnote in history too, but unfortunately it probably won’t be for his work.
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