The First FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL

FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL (1975) drawn when I was 18... Some of you will remember "FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL", the fumetti (photo comic) that I produced for THE COMIC READER in the '70s-'80s, "starring" my cartoonist cohort Chuck Fiala and I as comic book news reporters... What you may not know is that the very FIRST Fandom Confidential was this comic strip that appeared in THE BUYER'S GUIDE (not sure of issue# and date---Rascally Russ Maheras?). The IDEA was essentially the same, making fun of the comic world, but this was done as one of a big page of "daily" comic strips at the request of old friend Alan Jim Hanley, who asked a number of his friends to each do a strip, and he assembled them into a big facsimile of a newspaper comics page. The original IDEA, as I recall, was for it to become a regular TBG feature, but there was only the one page, and for some reason no more. This is reproed from a stat I had of it. I may have the full page SOMEWHERE, but I dunno where. I should explain the jokes (as best as I can recall) I suppose, as they are rather vague 40 years later. From L to R--ME, auctioning off Martin Greim. I remember Marty himself frequently auctioning stuff off back then ( I THINK his own art) and always saying "Serious Bids Only". My T-Shirt is a reference to a guy who'd been arrested for stealing comics, or mail fraud re: comics... ALLEGEDLY, of course. Next, CHUCK FIALA with a "joke" based on then-current rumors about JFK surviving as a "vegetable" in a secret room somewhere & receiving covert visits from Jackie. I sort of forced a tasteless Kelly joke on "Chuck" as he adored Kelly (as did I, but...). Next is TIM CORRIGAN, clipped from one of his CBG ads talking like the old Famous Artists School ads, cuz he was always looking for zine contributors. My friend JEROME SINKOVEC, publisher of THE COMIC READER, and the MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE & GUARDIAN is up next--the "spare change?" being a refernce to Street Enterprises' precarious financial situation (the newspaper sez "MENOMONEE FALLS! SINKOVEC SUNK?"). My late great friend Gary Ricker reports next, making a crack about C.C. BECK simply using a "Lucy" (Lucida) machine to project those covers he reproed onto art board, VS drawing them (we felt it was cheating then, today I see it as being professional). Gare's shirt mocks our host, AJH, and "Hiya!(Taheeya)" references a phrase John Belushi used to say on the NATIONAL LAMPOON RADIO HOUR (which line Gary repeated often). After Gary, we have STANLEY BLAIR. "Stan" was te publisher of the pre-CBG adzine STAN'S WEEKLY EXPRESS, which we'd all loved, but he'd sorta sgued into awhole "Seal of Approval" (the "WSA"--WE--Weekly Express-SEAL OF APPROVAL)--his stamp on dealers as being trustworthy. Did they pay for it? I forget..Their TBG ads then bore their WSA#, etc... We thought it kinda of fascistic I guess--Blair got kinda weirdly authoritative... Lastly--the STAN LEE T-Shirt ad. this was done before anyone would seriously have considered really PRODUCING a Stan T-shirt (there WERE some later)---it was THEN like can you imagine something so ridiculous? BUT, I must admit, I was seriously hoping that Mr. Light might be bombarded w/$ and real orders for it. HE clearly saw my ruse, cuz in the printed page, he whited out the "C/O TBG" part. So there you have it--the first FANDOM CONFIDENTIAL. A few years later, when Mike Tiefenbacher & Jerome Sinkovec asked for a comic page for TCR, I remembered this (and how much I enjoyed making fun of comics/fandom), and went back to it. The idea to do it with photos of Chuck & I VS drawings like these was just my fear that drawing it would be too much of a commitment that a fumetti could short-cut...