Philip José Farmer’s website reports the author has passed.
“Philip José Farmer passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning.
“He will be missed greatly by his wife Bette, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends and countless fans around the world.
“January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2008. R.I.P.
“We love you Phil.”
Best known for creating Riverworld, Farmer has written science fiction, fantasy and dabbled in other genres. His concept of metafiction, bringing in characters from other authors’ worlds in many ways led to birth of the fan fiction universe. His Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life blended elements from across fiction and reality, leading to the introduction of the final publication of Riverworld concept: everyone who ever lived wound up resurrected in an afterlife located on a river that circled an entire world. The concept was developed for a series on the Sci FI Channel but never went beyond the pilot. Farmer first conceived the notion for a story he wrote in 1952 for a contest, which he won.
Farmer first gained attention for his World of Tiers series of stories which crossed multiple artificially constructed parallel universes. The first was published in 1966 and ended with a final volume in 1993.
Among his peers, he was bold in his use of sexuality and religion beginning with his first published effort.
The author was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, but relocated to Peoria, Illinois and lived there for much of his life. His first story was “The Lovers” which won him immediate attention and the Hugo Award as "most promising new writer" in 1953.
Through the years he wrote original works and played with other franchises including authorized Tarzan and Doc Savage stories in the wake of his “biographical” work with both pulp heroes. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews and articles with several projects still scheduled for publication.
But what he may be best remembered for is his work in creating the Wold Newton family; a group of heroic and villainous literary figures that Farmer postulated belonged to the same genetic family. Some of these characters are adventurers, some are detectives, some explorers and scientists, some espionage agents, and some are evil geniuses. The Wold Newton family originated when a radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, England, in the year 1795. The radiation caused a genetic mutation in those present, which endowed many of their descendants with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds.
Popular characters that Farmer concluded were members of the Wold Newton mutant family include: Solomon Kane; Captain Blood; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Harry Flashman; Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; The Time Traveler; Allan Quatermain; Tarzan and his son Korak; A.J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage, his cousin Pat Savage, and one of his five assistants, Monk Mayfair; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; and Travis McGee. Others took it even farther, proposing that the family reached as far into the past as Conan, and as far into the future as Mr. Spock. Farmer’s work was a direct inspiration for Warren Ellis’s Planetary.
He was nominated six times for the Hugo Award, winning four times while collecting two Nebula nominations. Farmer received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, lifetime achievement, awarded at the 2000 Nebula Awards Ceremony in addition to the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Long before AleX Ross, Bob Larkin became the first major painter to be known for super-hero covers thanks to his work on Marvel’s black & white magazine covers throughout the 1970s. He was also tapped to paint the Marvel super-heroes when Fireside Press began collecting origins of the heroes.
Since then, he has been a celebrated figure for his work in science fiction, fantasy and comic books. More recently he has done licensing artwork featuring the WWE superstars. His work will be the focus of The Savage Art of Bob Larkin – Volume One, just announced from Sal Q Productions for February 2009 release.
According to a release: “There are innovators who blaze trails to show the way forward, and creative genius Bob Larkin is certainly one of them. His magazine and paperback covers are legendary. From Conan to Star Wars, Doc Savage to The Hulk, there’s little that artist Bob Larkin hasn’t painted during his lengthy career. This full spectrum color retrospective also includes an introduction by Joe Jusko and an afterword by Alex Ross.”
The 64-page volume will be an oversized softcover retailing for $19.95.
Full disclosure: I had edited a [[[Flash Gordon]]] comics series at one point in my life. It was the third greatest nightmare in my professional life. Not the part about working with the talented and understanding Dan Jurgens; Dan’s a class act and a fine storyteller. No, working with King Features Syndicate was akin to Sisyphus’s task, except the big rock was a huge boulder of shit and pushing it up that mountain happened in the dead of the hottest summer in the innermost circle of hell. And I’ve lightened up on this over the years, too. And so, on with the show.
There may be no greater icon in comic strip history than Flash Gordon. Sorry, [[[Buck Rogers]]]. You came first but Flash had better art and story, and a much, much better villain. Creator/artist Alex Raymond is generally regarded as the greatest craftsman in the field; so great, in fact, that after Dave Sim recovered from producing 300 consecutive issues of [[[Cerebus]]], he started up on a series called [[[Glamourpuss]]] that, oddly, is all about Raymond’s work.
Flash was the subject of what is also generally regarding as the three greatest movie serials ever made due, in no small part, to the performance of actor Charles Middleton as Ming The Merciless. And he had all the other media tie-ins: a radio series starring Gale Gordon (yep; Lucille Ball’s foil), a teevee series staring future Doc Savage model Steve Holland and a teevee series on Sci-Fi last year that was completely unwatchable, various animated series, a movie feature and another one in pre-production and numerous comic books by people including Archie Goodwin, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall, and Wally Wood, and licensed items. When Raymond went off to war, he was replaced by a series of artists nearly equal to him in talent: Austin Briggs, Mac Raboy (my favorite), and Dan Barry.
There’s a reason why Flash Gordon attracted such top-rank talent. Sadly, that’s also the same reason why Flash Gordon is an icon and no longer active in our contemporary entertainment: nostalgia. Flash Gordon was a product of his times, a wondrous visionary made irrelevant by real-life heroes such as Laika the dog, the first living being to orbit the Earth, and Yuri Gagaran, the first human being to orbit the Earth. Only Yuri returned alive, but I digress.
Science fiction was rocked to its core. It took talent like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, and Gene Roddenberry to re-purpose the genre, to focus more on the social aspects of the genre and extend those concepts out into the future. If you’re going to make Flash Gordon work in the 21st century – or the last four decades of the 20th, for that matter, you’ve got to distill the concept down to its essence and rebuild according to the mentality of our time.
For over a decade, Moonstone has been publishing titles that even non-comic fans would recognize – The Phantom, Doc Savage and more. Now, they are poised to make some big moves in 2008 and we give you the first look right here – Plus:
— It looks like Witchblade is headed back to television
— The X-Men go manga
— Harry Potter fans get an early Christmas gift
— An ABBA museum… no we aren’t kidding!
Captain Action and Airboy are coming back. Press The Button and we’ll tell you more!
In the first part of our extensive interview with publisher Anthony Tollin (yesterday), we learned how a story that apepared in The Shadow Magazine some two and a half years prior to Batman’s debut, proved to me the template for the Cpaed Crusader’s debut in Detective Comics #27. This is fodder for the historians who have studied what Bob Kane and Bill Finger each brought to the table during the creation of DC’s second successful super-hero. The story will be publsihed this summer in the ninth volume of Shadwo facsimiles being publsihed by Tollin.
Greenberger: How will you celebrate this discovery in volume nine?
Tollin: By pairing it with Doc Savage #8, which showcases Doc’s utility belt (which Bill Finger acknowledged was the inspiration for Batman’s).By the way, Doc’s utility belt was introduced by ghostwriter Harold A. Davis, Newsday‘s first Managing Editor. (Davis ran the paper through its first four years, and was succeeded by Alan Hathway, another Doc Savage ghost, who headed the paper for 30 years. Will Murray also provides a dynamite article on the real-life inspiration for both Doc Savage and The Avenger—Richard Henry Savage. The real Savage was a fascinating, larger-than-life American hero, a West Point graduate who served in the U.S. and Egyptian armies before joining the diplomatic corps. In his later years, he wrote more than 40 novels, many of which were based on his own adventurous life. Street & Smith published one of them in 1898, and Henry William Ralston, a recent addition to the Street & Smith staff, never forgot the charismatic Savage. Decades later, as S&S’ circulation manager, he launched The Shadow Magazine and developed the characters for Doc Savage and the Avenger, basing elements of all three pulp superheroes on Richard Henry Savage’s adventurous life.
And The Shadow #10 will be a super-villains issue, featuring The City of Doom (the second Voodoo Master story which inspired Batman’s Doctor Death storyline), The Fifth Face (featuring a master of disguise called Five-Face) and "The Immortal Murderer," a 1944 Alfred Bester Shadow radio script which pits The Shadow against an immortal Neanderthal (and yes, it was a rewrite of Alfie’s earlier Vandal Savage story from Green Lantern #10). Along with Sax Rohmer, Walter Gibson pretty much originated the concept of super-crime, and the villains he called super-crooks. In 1933, Gibson introduced a slew of super-villains including The Red Blot, The Wealth Seeker, The Black Falcon and Gray Fist. Others soon followed including The Cobra and Dr, Rodil Mocquino, the Voodoo Master; and years later, Shiwan Khan. Early on, Gibson realized that a superhero like The Shadow needed something more than garden-variety crooks and gangsters to test his mettle, just as Jerry Robinson would later realize that Batman needed his own Moriarty when he created The Joker. In fact, The Shadow’s Dr. Mocquino appears to have inspired Batman’s first recurring villain, Doctor Death.
Greenberger: What else will be in the book?
Tollin: The Shadow #9 , our special "Foreshadowing The Batman" volume, reprints "Lingo," one of Walter Gibson’s all-time classics which inspired the Batarang, Theodore Tinsley’s "Partners of Peril" (the novel that inspired Detective Comics #27’s "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," plus a bonus Tinsley novelette: "The Grim Joker" (featuring a murderous, white-faced crime clown). Next spring, we’ll be releasing a special "Foreshadowing The Joker" volume that will reprint Ted Tinsley’s "Death’s Harlequin" and the 1940 Shadow radio script, "The Laughing Corpse." The latter, broadcast six weeks before Batman #1 debuted, featured a chemical that caused victims to laugh themselves to death, quite similar to The Joker’s original M.O. "Death’s Harlequin" was on sale the same month as Detective Comics#27 (when we can be pretty sure that Bill Finger was paying close attention to The Shadow Magazine) and pitted The Shadow against a murderous clown who like The Joker was a vision of madness: "The thin lips were drawn away from skull-like teeth. The cheeks were sunken and leathery. Dank black hair lay matted thinly on a baldish scalp the color of old parchment. A living corpse in the costume of a gay Harlequin! With a wide-muzzled gun. And a jeering laugh that made the silence in the room crawl with menace."
Greenberger: Any idea what DC’s reaction was when you made them aware of this?
Tollin: Actually, Paul Levitz was quite interested and very cooperative with my request to reprint panels from Detective Comics #27 in the historical articles. Paul recognized that his story was part of Batman’s history, and basically just wanted some copies for DC’s library.
Greenberger: Do you think this will change people’s perceptions of Batman’s origins?
Tollin: Actually, my hope is that it alters people’s perceptions of The Shadow. Finger and Kane As I observe in my supporting historical article: "The Shadow was a master of disguise. Perhaps his greatest masquerade was transforming himself into Batman, and in that guise continuing his reign as the world’s greatest detective superhero into the twenty-first century."
I find it quite interesting that at nearly the same time that DC Comics was taking legal action to eliminate Victor Fox’s Wonderman because it was an imitation of Superman, they were about to launch a new character who was a far more blatant imitation of The Shadow, right down to the plots, bat-motif, surroundings, villains and supporting players. At that time, The Shadow was still far more prominent than the recently-launched Superman, since he was featured in the only twice-monthly hero pulp as well as the weekly radio thriller, which was the #1 daytime series in the radio ratings. As pulp publishers of the Spicy line, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz and their editors had to realize that Batman was based on The Shadow, even if they didn’t know that the plot of the first Batman story was a recycled Shadow novel.
While I want to give proper credit to Walter Gibson and Theodore Tinsley for their part in inspiring Batman, I’m certainly not out to tarnish Batman or Bill Finger. I have no animosity towards Batman. I’m actually very fond of the character, and Adrienne [Roy] and I used to jokingly refer to our New Jersey home as "the house that Batman bought." While Batman started out as a clone of The Shadow, the feature came into its own with the introduction of Robin, which added a touch of humanity to the formerly grim Batman that was lacking in The Shadow. Robin was almost certainly inspired by Junior Tracy, but it was just what the feature needed at the time. And of course, the succession of wonderful villains that began with The Joker and Catwoman in Batman #1 and continued with The Penguin, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Clayface and The Riddler made Batman a very special feature. While Finger’s first Batman story was a blatant swipe of a Shadow novel, he quickly developed into one of comics’ greatest and most-innovative scriptwriters.
Greenberger: Are there other parallels between The Shadow and Batman?
Tollin: Certainly. I’ve recently spotted several more early Bat-stories that were lifted from Shadow novels. Readers will be able to compare for themselves when I reprint "Serpents of Siva" in The Shadow Volume 12. The Golden-Age Batman lifted The Shadow’s suction cup climbing device, autogiro, and "yellow boomerang," along with the friendship with the Gotham police commissioner. But the most lasting influence is to be found in Batman’s talent for escaping deathtraps, which started in his debut story when he escaped from the same glass gas chamber that The Shadow escaped from in "Partners of Peril." This mastery of escape was The Shadow’s most lasting legacy to Batman, a legacy from Houdini to his biographer/ghostwriter Walter Gibson and on to Bill Finger’s Batman via The Shadow.
Greenberger: How is this line performing and what’s coming after this?
Tollin: Each Shadow and Doc Savage volume has outsold the previous, and sales are still building. This is most unusual within the Diamond and comic collectors market, where sales usually drop after the first issue. This seems to indicate that our sales are actually generated by people who are actually reading and enjoying the books, and encouraging others to do the same.
The Shadow and Doc Savage reprints are available from most full-service comic stores, and also Borders and some Barnes & Noble stores. They are also being tested in double-packs at a small number of Costco and Sam’s Club outlets. They’re also available directly from me (sanctumotr@earthlink.net or www.shadowsanctum.com), with six-issue subscriptions available within the USA for $72 via first class or $66 via media mail. They’re also available in Manhattan at The Mysterious Bookshop, and in Minneapolis at Dreamhaven Books and Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction, The books are also available individually via mail order from me, and from Bud Plant, Vintage Library, Adventure House, Mike Chomko, and in Canada from Girasol Collectables,
Greenberger: Beyond Doc Savage and The Shadow, are there any other pulp figures you’re looking to resurrect?
Tollin: The Avenger and Nick Carter, and hopefully The Whisperer as well. Do you think readers would like to discover the secret life of Police Commissioner James Gordon, aka The Whisperer?
Greenberger: With Moonstone’s recently announced Spider anthology and your facsimile reprints, why do you think people remain interested in the pulp heroes?
Tollin: Hopefully.It definitely seems to be the case.But there are many pulp heroes that always seem to be with us.Don’t forget that Zorro, Tarzan and Conan all originated in the pulps, as well as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
Greenberger: Anything else you’re working on?
Tollin: Well, two double-novel pulp reprints a month is keeping me pretty busy, and this will only increase when The Avenger and some of the other S&S characters are added as quarterlies. I am expanding a Shadow coffee table history that I wrote a few months back. And at this year’s Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention, I’ll be directing an X-Minus One cast reunion. We’re thrilled that this year we’ll be reuniting the series’ scriptwriters, Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, who haven’t seen each other in 40 years. Kinoy of course went on to win an Emmy for his screenplay for the landmark TV miniseries Roots.
The Sci-Fi Channel is going dipping into the golden age of comic strips and resurrecting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for a new television series.
Eric Johnson has been named as the latest actor to portray Flash in this radical reimagining of the series. Johnson is best known to ComicMix fans as Smallville’s Whitney Fordman, quarterback and love interest for Lana Lang.
Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov and Ming the Merciless have yet to be cast with production of the 22 episodes set to begin in, where else, Vancouver on May 1.
The series will debut on the channel in August, date and time to be announced. Rick Rosenthal, who worked with Johnson on Smallville, and has also handled Sci Fi’s The Dresden Files, will direct the first two episodes. While the original strip featured the story of the planet Mongo threatening Earth and Flash journeying into space to save his planet, the television series will dramatically alter the premise. Mongo will now be another dimension with Flash giving up his original polo in favor of other pursuits and being located in the pacific northwest.
The last time a live action Flash was on the small screen was in 1954 in an eight episode series starring Steve Holland, who later provided the visual look for James Bama’s Doc Savage paintings.
Flash Gordon has been previously portrayed by Larry “Buster” Crabbe in the three Universal movie serials from the 1930s and later, by Sam J. Jones, in the tongue-in-cheek Dino DeLaurentiss travesty from 1980.
O.K. If this is a review, it’s of The Spider Chronicles, published by Moonstone Books, released this week, and written by all kinds of wonderful people including Steve Englehart, John Jakes, Ann Nocenti and Robert Weinberg – all under a nifty introduction by ComicMix columnist and gadfly-about-town Dennis O’Neil.
Having a full-time job right here at ComicMix, I’ve only had time to read half the stories thus far, but all were worthy of the task: translating into short story form the most bizarre and over-the-top hero of all time, period.
The concept can be barely contained in the novelette-length stories of the 1930s. In case you’re not familiar, let me ramble off some of my favorite story titles: King of the Red Killers. Slaves of the Murder Syndicate. The City That Dared Not Eat. Machine Guns Over The White House. Hell’s Sales Manager (I think I had that job once.) And my all-time favorite, The Mayor of Hell.
How can you beat titles like that? Only with execution that make those titles seem lame.
There’s usually one madman who pretty much looks like Charles Lane. We may or may not know who he is at the outset, but within several chapters he’s managed to paralyze the city (usually New York or Washington or both), if not indeed the whole quadrant of the nation, if not indeed the entire nation itself. By chapter six, the death count is enough to fill Yankee Stadium to the brim.
Only three people stand in the madman’s way: Nita Van Sloan, a woman as tough and clever as they come; Ran Singh, loyal, faithful assistant to The Spider and an ace at cutlery; and finally, wealthy playboy Richard Wentworth who likes to play the violin, not take advantage of the adoring Nita, and dress up in a variety of disguises – most notably in the monstrous visage of The Spider.
Wentworth’s the one who does the heavy lifting. He doesn’t mind killing each and every person he and he alone deems worthy of killing.
If you could hook your hybrid into a Spider story, the energy would drive you coast-to-coast and back again. Imagine the Kree / Skrull War with all the Kree and all the Skrulls on one side, three people on the other side, and all the battles taking place in an area no bigger than your bedroom.
There have been any number of Spider reprint projects going on, most notably the double-story ventures similar to Anthony Tolin’s Shadow and Doc Savage reprints (see Dennis O’Neil’s column here at ComicMix this week) as published by Girasol Collectibles (www.girasolcollectables.com/). They’re worth checking out.
But our friends at Moonstone have boldly ventured where no one’s gone for quite a while by commissioning these short stories by such famous authors. Given their length they might be sedate by “Grant Stockbridge” standards (the pseudonym under which all but the first novels were written). Pick up The Spider Chronicles. It’s the heroic ideal taken to its most bizarre limit.
There has been quite a revival of interest in the old pulp heroes over the last year or two. Moonstone Books launched with the pulp-like exploits of Kolchak the Night-Stalker before adding characters such as The Phantom and The Spider, while Anthony Tollin has relaunched The Shadow and Doc Savage in two lines of facsimile reprint editions. In Hollywood, Sam Raimi has signed on to produce a movie about Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. With so much renewed interest, we here at ComicMix thought we should dig a little deeper.
The energetic Joe Gentile has been running Moonstone Books for a decade now and has grown the line from a one or two comic books a month outfit to a burgeoning publisher of not only comic books but prose works. I chatted with him by e-mail to learn what’s been going on.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have written one story for Moonstone’s anthologies, with work beginning on a second, and ComicMix columnist John Ostrander has contributed a story to the recently released Kolchak prose anthology.
Robert: Joe, for those not in the know, what is Moonstone’s mission?
Joe: Well, we thought there were some niches that weren’t being filled in comics. We thought that if we could fill some of those, perhaps (with promotion and advertising, which we did a lot of at the beginning) we could bring either new people or readers who left the hobby, to come back to the comic shops. Great stories was always our #1 priority, all things else aside.
Philip José Farmer’s website reports the author has passed.
Through the years he wrote original works and played with other franchises including authorized Tarzan and Doc Savage stories in the wake of his “biographical” work with both pulp heroes. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews and articles with several projects still scheduled for publication.
Long before AleX Ross, Bob Larkin became the first major painter to be known for super-hero covers thanks to his work on Marvel’s black & white magazine covers throughout the 1970s. He was also tapped to paint the Marvel super-heroes when Fireside Press began collecting origins of the heroes.
For over a decade, Moonstone has been publishing titles that even non-comic fans would recognize – The Phantom, Doc Savage and more. Now, they are poised to make some big moves in 2008 and we give you the first look right here – Plus:
In the first part of our extensive interview with publisher Anthony Tollin (
The Sci-Fi Channel is going dipping into the golden age of comic strips and resurrecting Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon for a new television series.
O.K. If this is a review, it’s of The Spider Chronicles, published by Moonstone Books, released this week, and written by all kinds of wonderful people including Steve Englehart, John Jakes, Ann Nocenti and Robert Weinberg – all under a nifty introduction by ComicMix columnist and gadfly-about-town Dennis O’Neil.
There has been quite a revival of interest in the old pulp heroes over the last year or two. 
