About a week before the convention John DeWalt called and wondered if there was room in my car for another rider. So Friday morning he drove up to Detroit, got here around Noon, transferred his stuff to my car and by 12:20 we were off. I had five banker's boxes of stuff, a overnight case, an insulated bag stuff with cans of pop and a briefcase with everything else. I had wanted to travel light and was pleased at how light I had got.
The drive was uneventful until we hit Chicago. I guess I should have anticipated some trouble since the route I'd gotten from Maps.Com had wanted me to get on I-94 near my house, then get off and divert around Ann Arbor before rejoining I-94 again. Having driven both routes before, though for differing reasons I could see no advantage to the diversion. Maybe it was a mile or two shorter but that hardly compensated for the directness of getting on I-94 a mile from my house and staying on it till Gary, Indiana.
The hotel was located in Arlington Heights in Northwest Chicago. The Internet generate map I was following took the shortest route through downtown Chicago We got asa far as the Dan Ryan Expressway and stopped. Then moved ahead a car length. And stopped. And so on for what I think was two hours, but it may have only been one. It just felt like eternity. We got to the hotel at 7:30 exhausted and frazzled.
There had been some doubt whether the dealer's room would be available on Friday but Doug was able to announce a week before the convention that the room would be open from 2PM to 9PM, which meant that I was able to set up my table to sell for about an hour that night. Had a couple nice sales which made me feel good.
The hotel was nice but kind of odd. The bar and restaurant was a couple steps up from the floor of the lobby while the elevators were a several steps below the floor of the lobby. In addition to the hotel restaurant was a Starbucks built into the lobby. And down by the elevators was the entrance to a large waterpark. I read in comments by other attendees posted on PulpMags that the waterpark had a Pizza Hut and an A&W restaurant, either of which would have been cheaper than the hotel restaurant. Outside of the hotel was -- nothing!
The dealer's room was on the same level was a hotel restaurant, up a couple steps from the lobby, and down a long and meandering hallway. Chairs and couches were positioned along the way so it would have made a nice place for sitting and gossiping during the day. The dealer's room was quite large, maybe half the size of the Dayton Convention Center and well laid out with wide aisles. Space behind the tables was a little tight, though. I have no idea what the attendance was but the "buzz" of the room seemed better than what I've experienced at Pulpcon these last few years. Now I was hoping for a larger attendance with more walk-ins, and non-Pulpcon regulars because there's not much point in going to two conventions where pretty much the same people come. But there was a different mix of dealers present and it seemed like there were a lot more pulps and paperbacks than at Pulpcon.
Because of the time different between Chicago and Detroit, when the dealer's room closed at 9 it was really 10pm my time and I had had this horrible drive to the convention. So I stopped at the hotel restaurant had a $10 hamburger then crashed in the room I was sharing with John and Ray Skirsky. It was a nice room, wider than normal with like 6 feet of walkway between the beds and the dresser/TV. The beds came with headboards and footboards (which seemed a bit much), and the usual flock of pillows. The bathroom was divided into three (!) parts. Tub and toilet was in one cramped room beyond the sink and mirror. Off to the side was a walk-in closet big enough for a full-size bed. Another odd thing about the room was that this room and the room next to it opened into a small vestibule before opening into the hall. There were doors on the vestibule so the rooms could serve as a shared double room.
The convention had a consuite up on the 14th floor but for some reason I never made it up there. There was an art show which I never made it to, nor did I go to any of the movies Ed Hulse worked so hard to show. I was either very tired or very anti-social that weekend.
The guest of honor was artist Gary Gianni. He had a table in the dealer's room where he was selling posters of the cover he did for the program book, some of his original art and talking to anyone who dropped by. My table was right behind his, which turned out to be pretty cool. I recalled his name from some Conan drawings he had some, and recalled that he had drawn one of the Shadow revivals (Which had prejudiced me against him because I had expected Mike Kaluta to draw this series as he had the ones in the past.) What I had forgotten was that Gianni had taken over Prince Valiant after John Cullan Murphy retired. a couple years ago.
There was a time in the 70s when I was driving into town every Sunday to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune (I think) because it carried Prince Valiant. (Now that I think of it, it was probably the Detroit Free Press which continues to carry the series to this day.) Times have changed. The strip is 70+ years old. The storyline is pretty well played out. Adventure strips are no long popular with Features Editors, continuity strips are no longer popular (unless disguised as joke-a-day strips). Prince Valiant is still carried in 300 newspapers, which is a lot though Gianni was lamenting that the St. Louis paper had just dropped the strip after 70 years.
Worse is that newspaper so hate to spend money on paper that Prince Valiant, which was designed as an epic is routinely cut down to 3-4 panels and reduced to a space smaller than the size of a sheet of paper. To work as a once-a-week series the strip needs twice as many panels, twice the real estate, but that aint going to happen. That said I had come to realize that Gianni's art and Mark Schultz's stories were bolder, more dramatic, a bit more fantastical. In short a lot more interesting. But the strip still tends to come in at the bottom of polls and Gianni is looking for ways to jazz the strip up either further. DeWalt suggested it needs more naked chicks, ,which couldn't hurt. Gianni's craziest idea would be a crossover with Flash Gordon, using a time machine to travel to different periods in history. It would either make the strip or kill it. I'd love to see the idea, maybe as a graphic novel, because I think it would kill the strip because it would be too radical a change.
The thing is, Gary was there to celebrate the 75th anniversary of whats his face the barbarian; I was thrilled to met the current artist of Prince Valiant!
Saturday.
9 to 5 in the dealers room. Moderate sales. Had a long talk with Tony Tollin about the Nostalgia Ventures reprints of Doc Savage and The Shadow. Actually it was more like I stodd near Tony and he talked. He is an effective salesman.
Tony said sales were continuing to be strong, growing with each more solicitation from Diamond, doubling since they released their first volume last year. He was using two covers for the Doc reprints, either one of the Bama paintings or a Baumhofer. As a result he could place an print run order for around 5000 copies. He mentioned that a lot of the people ordering the books were ordering both covers, which surprised him. He explained that the added content in each book was to entice the people who already had the Bantam pbs to buy these copies for the additional material. He also mentioned that they were beginning to resort some of the text cut from some of the Docs, text which Will Murray has mentioned in the past in his PEAPSzine. I'm not sure if these restorations are mentioned on the covers anywhere. It would be a selling point for some fans.
Tony said he was surprised to see that the Shadow was selling slightly better than Doc, since he thought Doc had the better name recognition. I would have thought the Shadow had the better name recognition from all the Old Time Radio people. Also the Doc reprints have to be seen as competing with the existing Bantam paperbacks while the Shadow has never had an extensive reprinting. Tony's table featured two stand-ups for bookstores, free standing cardboard display unit with bins for 8-10 books and a nice bit of art featuring Doc and the Shadow across the top. I have seen the reprints in a Borders in upscale Royal Oak but have not seen them in either the Barnes & Noble near my house in Detroit or the near-by Borders in Grosse Pointe.
Tony mentioned several up-coming plans, theme issues for the Shadow as it were. Most interesting was a plan, in celebration of Doc's 75th anniversary, for a Doc-Shadow cross-over story written by Will.
TONY TOLLIN: "What is definite re: Doc's 75th anniversary is that I'll be publishing a double of MAN OF BRONZE and its Hidalgo sequel THEY DIED TWICE in February, followed by IN HELL, MADONNA and UP FROM EARTH'S CENTER in March ,,, and will be publishing for the first time the art that Edd Cartier did in 1948 for IN HELL, MADONNA."
Tony also said that Nostalgia Ventures was negotiating with Sam's Club and Costco to carry twin-packs of the reprints. This wold be two doubles in a flat package priced at $15.95. Now that would be a bargain. I said they must be taking a beating on their profit margin. Tony explained that Costco and Sam's Cost simply add such a small mark-up on their products that sellers still get close to their regular wholesale price. So Nostalgia wouldn't be losing their shirt on that.
I gather that Nostalgia and Tony are working together but remain separate operations. Tony does bookstore sales while they go after the big box store sales. Tony's success has been inspirational because, frankly, I didn't think the market could support as large an program as he has set out to do. Gunnison apparently opined that sales would top out at 1000 copies but Tony is doing two, three times that. Still this is only the first year of operation and it';s still too early to say whether this is going to be a broad but shallow sales pool or both broad and deep. A year from now we're have a better idea about that.
I wandered around a bit, shopping list in hand, looking for All-Stories in particular, but not finding any I wanted. I did hit something of a gold mine for Argosy's at Nick Certo's table. He was selling off the late Harry Nobel's pulps, and he was an Argosy collector. I eventually pulled twenty issues I needed to fill in my collection. Some were single issues needed to fill in a run, but there were also a couple runs I picked up complete in one sitting. Nick had priced them at a very reason $10/3 for $25, but even so there went my weekend's profits.
People I saw there: former PEAPS members Mark Hickman, Doug Ellis, John Gunnison and Tom Roberts (who was selling his latest trade paperback releases). Current members Ed Hulse, James Van Hise, John DeWalt, Ray Skirsky and Randy Vanderbeek. I thought I saw Rusty Hevelin but that turned out to be some other guy about Rusty's height with long hair and a beard, like Rusty's but not as white. I thought I saw Bill Mann, whom I wanted to talk to about the Robbins index but he was on the other side of the room one minute and gone the next. Saw and talked to Bill Thinness.
Scott Cranford wasn't able to attend though he had wanted to. There had been a rumor that Norm Metcalf might show up but if he did no one spotted him. Kevin Cook was a no-show because of the expected one day of shopping. By the time Doug announced the Friday dealers hours it was too late to think of airline tickets.
Former Marvel comics writer Gerry Conway was there, spotted walking away with an armload of Doc Savage pulps. Joe Siclari, a science fiction fan / collector of old fanzines was there. And the usual suspects for dealers.
Last bit about the dealer's room. Sunday as I was making a final round I noticed a guy in the corner who had propped up an old scrap book on his table. In it were pasted Buck Rogers newspaper strips from the 30s. Mentally I drooled. I love those old strips even though they were embarrassingly corny. I had to ask how much. He had eight scrapbooks, covering with few exceptions everything from the beginning through 1934 -- $1400. I have no idea if that is high or low. It was well out of my price range.
Oddly, someone (the dealer?) standing near by mentioned that the scrapbooks themselves were probably worth that much because the collector had used old dealers' catalogs. Hardcover catalogs maybe 9" x 14". It must have been the dealer because he showed me a page that didn't have the newspaper strips pasted over it. It shows a variety of chairs this furniture company was selling. These catalogs are treasured in the antiques markets as references. I just wanted the Buck Rogers, which by the way, had been pasted in with a glue that had not damaged the strips at all.
After the dealer's room closed I went back to the room to rest, then joined the guest of honor's speech at 7. This was proceeded by a multi-media display. It was hilariously bad, campy. A celebration of Conan the barbarian that just didn't know when to quit. (It featured numerous clips from the Conan movie, interspersed with the same clip of some nimrod saying "you..." Next year will be the 75th Anniversary of Doc Savage. I shudder to think what heroic statement will be made by re-editing that movie.
Gianni gave an excellent slideshow presentation showing how he put together some of the Robert E. Howard illustrations he's famous for. He emphasized his use of earlier artists for inspiration, also silent-film era cinematographers and photos of models. Afterwards the convention committee gave, as their presentation piece, a layer cake with several of Gianni's pictures printed on the frosting. I took pictures, I hope they come out well.
After a nice mosh and an interesting conversation with Gianni about Prince Valiant, it was time for the auction. There was a huge amount of material, from what I'm told and more interesting and varied than what has show up in some Pulpcon auctions.
I have a short attention span and no money for bidding so I went back to the room and again crashed early. DeWalt had been feeling under the weather so he had been crashing early as well. Ray, on the other hand would wander in around 5:30 in the morning. Complaining on Friday night, that the consuite had closed early.
Sunday.
Got stuff packed and moved into the car. But when I wanted to settle up for the room, first there were matters to be straightened out at the desk, then John had the final receipt, no he couldn't find it. So I'm wanting for Ray to get his credit card bill so we can apportion costs.
I opened my table for a couple hours. Made a couple sales but wanted to hit the road by 1 PM Detroit time so I didn't stick around. It looked like new people were beginning to arrive for the show as I was packing up so it's possible that things might have picked up if I had stayed longer.
John and I took various freeways to I-294, the Chicago bypass which runs well to the west of the city. We followed that down to I-80, somewhere it merged with I-94 and we stayed on that all the way home. It took us 5 ½ hours to get back versus 7 hours to get there. John paid for gas on the trip which cost him more than he expected, I think. We gased up twice, once coming and once on the way back. 10 gals each time, at $3.18 a gallon. That has got to hurt. Then again my Eagle Summit was getting good mileage ~~ 30 mpg. The trip was around 330 miles from house to home. A long drive even without the heavy traffic of Friday night.
When we got home I was pleased that Sarah hadn't destroyed the place while I was away and Denice at work. We moved John's stuff to his car and him adieu. I went inside, collapsed and a week later still haven't finished unpacking the car!