Since we're on the cusp of Halloween, I thought I'd run a piece on Tom Fagan, comic fan extraordinaire and founder of the Rutland Halloween Festival. This is a 2007 interview that ran in the Rutland Herald and, since it seems to have since fallen off the internet, is why I'm posting it here. It's more about his interest in Halloween than his work in comics fandom, but still touches on that as well. The interview was conducted by Sarah Hinckley...

Tom Fagan, 75, could be called a star among superheroes, a fan of phantoms or a heathen of Hallows Eve, but for many years most called him Mr. Halloween.

"I think if I pass over around Halloween time, I'll be riding in a casket in the parade," said Fagan outside his ghoulishly decorated room at the Loretto Home. "I'd be all for that, too."

It was Fagan's love of the October holiday that made the Rutland Halloween Parade into one of the most coveted costumed carnivals in the country. A couple from England is scheduling a visit to Vermont just to see the parade, according to one Shrewsbury inn owner.

Legendary tales of comic book characters caravanning past the marble and brick edifices of downtown were born from Fagan's passionate pen. Annually he would write a letter to [DC Comics*], creators of Batman and the like, but it was the first that got the ball rolling.

"They printed that letter and that really kicked things off," said Fagan. "I was getting letters from all over the country. Each time they printed it we would get more people and more people."

Not only did his letters draw comic book character enthusiasts to the Vermont city, it also got Fagan and the parade featured in a number of strips. In 1972, [DC Comics'] Justice League of America, made up of Batman, Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Phantom Stranger, featured the group battling a demon incursion at the parade in Rutland.

Fagan's inspiration came from the first Rutland parade he watched with his daughter, in which William Ciofreddi, son of John Ciofreddi, then superintendent of the Rutland Recreation and Parks Department, dressed in a comic book costume. "I maintain that he has to be the first comic book character," said Fagan about the start of the theatrical theme.

According to Fagan that first parade consisted of a couple of high school bands and an assortment of costumed children. But the man who had grown up loving Halloween wanted more and approached the elder Ciofreddi after the parade.

"That was good, John," Fagan remembers telling him, "but it could be better." So, Ciofreddi handed the ball over to Fagan, appointing him parade general chairman. Fagan recollects the theme of the 1960 Rutland Halloween Parade was "Creatures in the Night."

"You could come as you wanted," said Fagan. "The parade was very well received. That was supposed to be the night that people could be who they secretly wished to be."

As it grew, there were floats from comic book companies such as [DC Comics], Marvel Comics, Comic Crusader. Even Madd [sic] magazine had representation. Fagan recalls at one point there being as many as 181 different comic characters represented at the parade and celebration.

"You'd be going down the street and you'd see Aunt Jemima standing next to Ronald Reagan," he said.

Not only were the characters coming to town, but those within the comic book industry who penned their fates also joined the fun. Writers and artists arrived in Rutland for the parade and an adjoining party thrown largely in their honor for a number of years.

"All sorts of great things happened," said Fagan. "We kept building it up and building it up. I don't know how many bands at one time… You had bands that were nothing but Batman… All I know is that the parade grew and grew and grew. I certainly hope it will continue for a long, long time."

Fagan was given a seat in the judge's station at last year's parade. More than 10,000 people attended the event last year; a record number of floats have registered this year.

"I was just amazed at the crowd last time," said Fagan, who has yet to miss the Rutland Halloween Parade. "I've always seen 'em one way or another."

With less than a week to go before another cast of characters parades through the streets of downtown, Fagan watched a classic horror film in his room. Bats hung from the ceiling, a wolf posed to howl at the full moon perched upon a table. Other colorful decorations seem to scream out that this man is haunted with a love for Halloween.

"I've been collecting decorations since grammar school," said Fagan. "I used to leave them up (longer than the holiday), much to the consternation of many."

Fagan, hunched with age, wore a pair of black jeans and an orange T-shirt with the words, "Sleep all day, Party all night," framing a human outline sporting batwings.

Fagan's love for the holiday goes back to when he was two or three years old. He had attended a big Halloween party at the Colony House in Rutland for children of low-income families, according to Fagan.

"I even got permission to stay up until midnight because that's when the witch was going to fly across the face of the moon," he said. "I love it when it's close to full-moon time."

He slept through the witch's journey that night and remembers being upset.

When asked if that child's curiosity has ever been quenched, Fagan replied, "Out of the corner of my eye I've seen her fly."

* Hinckley repeatedly refers to DC Comics throughout the piece as "Detective Comics." I suspect this was a misunderstanding on her part; the letters "DC" do indeed come from the name "Detective Comics" but the company hasn't actually been called that since 1939. I've replaced all instances here with the company's formal name of "DC Comics."

I'm sure you've heard it said thart art is a reflection of life. Art isn't creating in a vacuum; it's created by an artist (or artists) in the context of their society and, thus, both speaks and is responding to that society. Nuclear war was on everyone's minds back in the 1980s, which is why there was such a proliferation of post-apocalypse stories for example.

Within the horror genre specifically, the types of horror stories being told and the types of monsters that appear in stories reflect the fears of the times. Mary Shelly's original Frankenstein novel reflects concerns people were starting to have about science outpacing man's ethos, and the notion of using science to "defy" nature. Vampires have been notably mutable over the generations, reflecting whatever elements of sexuality and gender that are concerning people at the time. (Part of why vampires are frequently shown as eternally youthful -- it's the younger generations that are more often seen as being "in danger" of committing waton sexual behavior.)

While the concept of zombies has been around for ages, they started gaining popularity back in the 1970s and began really taking off in the late '90s and early 2000s. In particular, the notion of the zombie apocalypse where the individual zombies were less of a threat than the sheer overwhemling volume of them. This can be read as a reaction to the notion of societal changes happening at an increasingly faster and faster pace (I've written about the notion of "future shock" more than a few times here) and it becoming more and more difficult to keep up. I once saw someone make the analogy specifically to email; that you take care of one email and there's another behind it, and another, and another, and another... and you set up more spam filters but they keep coming... and you keep trying to get to Inbox Zero, but the moment you do another shows up... and heaven forbid, you take your eyes off it for too long -- you'd be just overwhelmed!

You can also read zombies as a fear of losing your individuality and just becoming another mindless consumer, buying whatever the latest doohickey is because some corporation's ad told you to. Within comics specifically, the notion of being a "Marvel zombie" meant that you simply bought every Marvel title by default without giving thought to who the creators were or what the comic was about. (That specific concept has rather died out, I think, mostly by the financial impracticability of buying every Marvel title! I just scanned through the November previews, and it'd cost you over $50 to buy just the #1 issues coming out!)

With all that said, though, I'm not seeing a whole lot with zombies this year. Personally, I've seen none at all in people's Halloween decorations in my neighborhood. There don't seem to be too many comic titles around with zombies in them. (Not "none" certainly, but not a lot, it seems to me.) And you could argue that The Walking Dead's popularity cycle has gone on long enough that might deplete people's interest, it seems that the concept of zombies is a perfect metaphor for the AI slop we're seeing everywhere these days. Content that's human-shaped but lacking any soul. Something made from the vestiges of human ingenuity but not inherently creative itself. Something mindless that comes at you through your screen, and every time you click it away, there's another that pops out in a virtual jump scare. I should think the notion of fighting through an army of zombies a perfect analogy for trying to sort through the non-stop barrage of AI slop coming through our monitors.

But I don't see that anywhere currently.

Maybe it's just me. I've never been partial to the zombie concept to begin with, and maybe I've self-selected out of those avenues so much over the years that it just never hits my radar any more. But with Halloween right here, and seemingly everybody talking about spooky season and such, I would think the idea would at least show up a little for me.

Then again, I've never exactly been on the cutting edge of trends, and I've never quite understood how any given thing becomes popular in the first place, so what do I know?

Like any industry, comics has its own lingo. Language that is used pretty exclusively for comics, or at least have their own definitions unique to comics. Gutters, word balloons, TPBs, etc. Sometimes industries overlap, though, and marketing industry language gets used when talking about marketing comic books. As I happen to work in marketing, I thought I might take a blog post to make sure we're all speaking the same language when it comes to that.

What are, for example, POP Displays? "POP" is an acronym for "point of purchase." It's a general term used to describe any promotional material that's designed to be placed at the location where you actually buy something. It could be a sticker meant to actually be adhered to the cash register or a poster intended to hang behind the counter or an old-school spinner rack that's displaying comics or even a life-size figure. Sometimes they're made by the publisher, sometimes the retailer. Really, it's just about anything that a retailers utilize as a way to promote their products.

"POS" stands for "point of sale" and is a sub-set of POP. The point of sale is where the actual transaction takes place, where the cash register is. These are typically smaller items, and try to play more heavily on the impulse purchase mentality, whereas POP can be (but not necessarily always are) larger and geared more towards overall awareness.

There are some standards that often get thought of with regard to POP. The "tent card" is a classic because they're easy to create and can be tweaked to fit a wide variety of sizes and proportions. It's essentially just piece of heavy paper folded in half. The V shape is placed upside down on the counter, allowing the text and graphics to be seen/read while the customer is standing near it. Because there's so little involved in the actual production of tent cards, creators not infrequently provide PDFs for retailers to print out themselves.

"Table tents" are essentially a more elaborate version of tent cards. Unlike their namesake, table tents do not necessarily fold up in a tent-like shape but, rather can be nearly any sort of self-standing piece designed to be placed on a table or counter. You see this type of thing a lot in mid-scale restaurants. Sometimes they're just cardboard standups plugging the desserts, sometimes they're more elaborate and hold copies of the menu or napkins. (Though don't confuse table tents with napkin holders; there needs to be a marketing/sales angle here.) Those cardboard cut-outs of characters you sometimes see on comic convention tables with the speech balloon hawking the latest book? Those are table tents.

Another simple, and common, POP for comics are "header cards." These are basically a flat piece of card stock that's as wide as, but an inch or two taller than, a comic book. They're designed to be placed behind a stack of comics on the rack, and the portion that sticks up above the actual comic has some type of promotional message. I've seen store-specific ones frequently that highlight staff picks, while publisher ones use them to tie together storylines that cross over multiple titles.

Also used right next to the comics are "shelf talkers." These are also generally simple card stock pieces, but they rest underneath a stack of comics and stick out slightly beyond the shelf. Publishers again can create title-specific shelf talkers, but many stores also use them to highlight "New Comics This Week" or "Featured" books as seen in this photo.

Less used, because they're a tad more expensive in large quantities, are "window clings." These are thin plastic, usually translucent, promotional pieces that adhere to smooth surfaces like windows via static electricity. I have to admit that I haven't seen these used much in comicdom; the only instance I can think of offhand are the Visa/Mastercard pieces often stuck on the front door.

From time to time, "standees" are available. These basically large cardboard cutouts that are free-standing. You tend not to see too many of them in comic shops since they take up a fair amount of precious floor space. They also are fairly expensive for as quickly as they begin to look worn. Some of the more popular characters have commercially available versions for fans. I recall there was an Arthur Adams drawn Wolverine that was rather prolific in the 1980s.

That's certainly not all of the POP items that are available, but that covers some of the more common ones that use terms you might not be familiar with. Check out the promotional kit below and see how many different POP pieces you can identify!

I've been running behind on a number of things lately and just had a chance to read Rob Salkowitz's piece talking with Joshua Williamson at New York Comic Con from a week and change ago. It's a good read overall, but let me quote a portion I want to focus on...

DC has, at times, been prone to playing too heavily into that, manufacturing crises and continuity events that landed with diminishing returns, exhausting existing fans without bringing in new ones.

These days it is doing the opposite of that. The lineup is bristling with new takes on old characters that offer onramps for fans with varied tastes and sensibilities...

Williamson credits a lot of that to the culture created by editor-in-chief Marie Javins. "Everyone likes her total leadership," said Williamson. "She has a lot of trust in us. I think that's because she was also a creator, a colorist. She has this experience and understands it from that perspective, not just a business perspective."

Williamson says that under Javins, creators have a lot of freedom to take books in their own direction, almost as if they were creator-owned.

That, to me, sounds remarkably like, Jim Shooter's early days at Marvel. Jim Shooter had been a writer for (primarily) DC starting back in 1966. He got to be editor-in-chief at Marvel in 1978, and soon helped to usher in the legendary runs of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller's Daredevil, Walt Simonson's Thor, John Byrne's Fantastic Four, and Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight among others. And if you read/hear interviews with any of those creators talking about that era, they all say that they had a lot of latitude to do what they wanted. They took the characters in then-new directions based on the creators' visions, almost as if they owned them outright.

Shooter has since gotten a bad rap for his later levels of editorial interference, and sliding his focus more to the business end of the company to the detriment of the creative end. (I recall Byrne citing that he had been working on Fantastic Four about 3 months ahead of his deadlines, but then Shooter changed the deadlines and he became six months behind overnight.) I knew a retailer who made a very clear distinction between "Early Shooter" era Marvel and "Late Shooter" era Marvel with the split being 1984 with the Shooter-scripted Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars. Because Late Shooter era Marvel seems to have less creative (as generally perceived) output, more complaints from creators, and even several creators (notably Byrne, Moench, Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, and Gene Colan) having left to work for DC, Shooter's reputation with Marvel isn't great. But his first years there were qualitatively and quantitatively excellent.

For pretty much the exact reasons Williamsons attributes to Javins.

I suspect that if you look any of the collectively great periods of a comic publisher's content, you'll find not only some incredibly talented creators (which seems obvious) but also an editor-in-chief who trusted that talent in the same way. Bill Gaines' "new trend" EC comics. Early '60s Marvel under Stan Lee. Like Shooter, their work isn't devoid of controversy but there was some amazing creative output that came out of those periods. Creative output that directly led to higher sales.

Funny that has to be learned over and over and over again.

Marvel tried to jump on the youth culture magazine fad of the late 1970s with Pizzazz. Each issue, like most of its competitors, featured a combination of pap interviews with celebrities, trite articles about popular movies and music, and a few comics. The series lasted for about a year and a half and is largely only remembered these days for a serialized Star Wars comic strip started by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin.

Personally, I just find it kind of amusing that Shaun Cassidy is shown or referenced on six of the 16 covers. And on every cover that uses his image -- it's literally the exact same image! Even the illustration on #4 clearly uses the same photo as a reference. The next most frequent cover guests are the Hulk (five covers), Spider-Man (four, not counting the Marvel logo appearances in the upper left of every issue) and Peter Frampton (three). Star Wars is referenced on ten(!) covers. Also worth noting is the Linda Ronstadt cover. Oh, sure, it's a good likeness of her and the fact that Captain America and Dr. Strange are playing guitars behind her is chuckle-worthy. But I think it's more entertaining to see C-3PO playing drums behind them!

Despite Superman's commentary on that last issue, he had actually already appeared on the cover of a Marvel publication! Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, the first modern intercompany superhero crossover, came out as a joint Marvel/DC publication in 1976!

Finally, does anyone actually have a copy of #12? I want to read up on those "Albino Roach Jokes!"

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Pancho Villa Monster Hunter Review
https://ift.tt/DnzR0ak

Kleefeld on Comics: The Maxx
https://ift.tt/AWLTbDv

Kleefeld on Comics: The COMPLETE Infinity War Digital Comic
https://ift.tt/2wvYpaE

Kleefeld on Comics: Gigs Review
https://ift.tt/gZJB8he

Kleefeld on Comics: Who or What Is Stereon?
https://ift.tt/5eTU34i

There's a semi-famous incident from the early 1980s where Johnny Carson got a hold of some 3-D glasses that featured some Jack Kirby art and credited him as the "King of Comics." Carson had never heard of Kirby and, assuming "comic" to mean "comedian", proceeded to mock this obviously overly self-important jokester. Mark Evanier helped to sort the matter out, and Carson publicly apologized on his show.

But where did those 3-D glasses come from?

I haven't quite been able to figure this out completely. The 3D Video Corporation put out a comic in 1982 called Battle for a Three Dimensional World with a script by Ray Zone and art by Jack Kirby (pencils) and Mike Thibodeaux (inks). It's a fairly short (15 pages) and self-contained story. From what I can tell, though, the 3-D glasses that came with the comic were pretty generic. Every version I've seen for sale that comes with glasses has the same bland pair. No Kirby art, nor any mention of Kirby.

At the same time, 3DVC also put out a promotional mini-poster of the comic's main character, Stereon. Again, Kirby and Thibodeaux on art. And the poster also came with a pair of 3-D glasses. As near as I can tell, it was this poster that came with the special 3D glasses with Kirby artwork, not the associated comic.

What I don't quite get is that all of the "how 3D works" pieces that are included in the comic and the poster specifically talk to how 3D television works. And that make sense from a company called 3D Video Corporation. What I don't get, though, is how/why they wound up doing a comic book and poster, and who this was intended for. I've seen backer cards for the comic, suggesting that it was sent to comic shops and sold (as opposed to some kind of promotional giveaway to television producers and directors) but to what end? They don't seem to have published anything outside this single issue, so it doesn't seem like they were shooting to become regular comic publishers. So who was this intended for and why? How was it distributed? Was the poster an advance teaser of the comic or did they come out simultaneously? And why put the higher end glasses with the poster, but not the comic? Lots of questions here that I can't find answers for.

As an interesting aside, the 3D effects for this comic were done by Tony Alderson. This comic was one of his first jobs for the company. He also did the 3D conversions for the Jaws 3D trading cards from Topps. His process was to use Kirby's original line art as the left image, then cut apart a copy of that and re-assmble it with slight displacements for the right image. He left 3DVC not long after, but continued doing 3D work, including the 3D comic versions of Sheena, The Spirit, The Rocketeer, Spacehawk, and Dracula. Alderson passed away in 2002.