Dreamsongs, Volume I Read Online Free Page A

did…but not for
SSC
. He explained to me that the Trio’s flagship fanzine had a full slate of characters. Rather than adding more, he and Howard and Buddy wanted to develop the heroes they had already introduced. They all liked my writing, though. They would be glad to have me write for
Star-Studded Comics
…so long as I wrote stories about their existing characters.
    That was how it happened that “The Strange Saga of the White Raider” ran in
Batwing,
Larry Herndon’s solo fanzine, while I went on to appear in
SSC
with text stories about two of Howard Keltner’s creations. The Powerman story came first. “Powerman Vs. The Blue Barrier!” was published in SSC #7, in August 1965, and was well-received…but it was “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark,” my Dr. Weird story in
SSC
#10, that really made my name in comicdom.
    Dr. Weird was a mystic avenger who fought ghosts, werewolves, and other supernatural menaces. Despite the similarity of their names, he had little in common with Marvel’s Dr. Strange. Keltner had modeled him on a Golden Age hero called Mr. Justice. Doc Weird went my White Raider one better, dying halfway through his first story instead of at the end. A time traveler from the future, he had stepped out of his time machine right into the middle of a robbery, and was immediately shot and killed. By dying before he was born, however, he had unbalanced the cosmos, so now he had to walk the earth righting wrongs until his birth came round.
    I soon found I had an affinity for Doc Weird. Keltner liked what I did with him and encouraged me to do more stories, so when he spun the character off into his own fanzine, I wrote a script called “The Sword and the Spider” that a new, unknown artist illustrated handsomely. Jim Starlin also adapted “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark” to comic form…but the text story came first.
    Comicdom had established its own awards by then. The Alley Awards were named after Alley Oop, “the oldest comic character of all” (the Yellow Kid might have disagreed). Like the Hugo Awards, the Alleys had categories for both professional and fan work; Golden Alleys for the pros, Silver Alleys for the fans. “Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark” was nominated for a Silver Alley for best text story…and to my shock and delight, it
won
(quite undeservedly, as Howard Waldrop and Paul Moslander were writing rings around me). Visions of gleaming silver trophies danced briefly in my head, but I never received a thing. The sponsoring organization soon collapsed, and that was the end of the Alley Awards…but the recognition did wonders for my confidence, and helped to keep me writing.
    By the time my Dr. Weird stories appeared in print, however, my life had undergone some profound changes. I graduated Marist High in June of 1966. That September I left home for the first time in my life, and rode the Greyhound out to Illinois to attend the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
    College was a strange new world, as exciting as it was scary. I lived in a freshman dorm called Bobb Hall (my mother kept getting confused and thinking Bob was my roommate), in this strange midwestern land where the news came on too early and no one knew how to make a decent pizza pie. The coursework was challenging, there were new friends to make, new ass-holes to contend with, new vices to acquire (hearts my freshman year, beer when I was a junior)…and there were
girls
in my classes. I still bought comics when I saw them, but soon I was missing issues, and my fanac dropped off precipitously. With so much newness to contend with, it was hard to find the time to write. I finished only one story my freshman year—a straight science fiction story called “The Coach and the Computer,” which was published in the first (and only) issue of an obscure fanzine called
In-Depth.
    My major was journalism, but I took a minor in history. My sophomore year I signed up for the History of Scandinavia,