Front cover by Doug Herring
THE COMICS JOURNAL #36 (AUGUST 1977)
CONVENTION REPORT: "The Day of the Trekkies" by Clay Geerdes is just that, a weekend at the Star Trek convention Space Con Three in San Francisco. Geerdes brilliantly analyzes the herds of Star Trek fans and the dealers who prey on them. He respectfully deconstructs the fandom culture developed in these wilderness years when there was no new Trek content coming out. The highlight of the article is his reporting on Harlan Ellison's appearance at the convention:
"Harlan Ellison stole the show. And he did it by deliberately playing the bad guy. He came on like a sadist and verbally whipped hell out of his masochistic audience and they loved it."
From THE BUYER'S GUIDE #183 (May 20, 1977)
EDITORIAL: Mike Catron gives a "state of the union" on his and Gary Groth's first year publishing THE COMICS JOURNAL. He provides a follow-up to the Journal's expose on Alan Light and THE BUYER'S GUIDE: "We've caused a few changes at our chief competitor THE BUYER'S GUIDE. As a direct result of Gary's editorial in the Journal 27, TBG publisher Alan Light is now paying at least some of his writers for their work. Larger abuses, unfortunately, go uncorrected.
"One new feature appearing occasionally in TBG's pages is 'The Fan's Corner', a direct copy of our own 'Journal Listings' of conventions. TBG's column has taken to 'lifting' much of it's contents directly from our pages, typos and all, which gives that information a wider distribution to fans and dealers, to the benefit of fandom at large. Light however, does not credit the Journal as the source of much of this information."
Image from GCD
NEWSWATCH: The biggest focus of this issue is MARVEL COMICS SUPER SPECIAL #1 which starred popular 70s band Kiss. The book is mentioned in the lead editorial, Newswatch, and a review by Gene Phillips. Here's the write-up from Newswatch:
"Marvel's KISS has proven such a success that Marvel is planning more rock group adaptations in the same format. The Kiss book sold out its first printing before its on-sale date, according to Dave Kraft, who will edit and write the new rock group adaptations. KISS was so successful it went into a second printing of 100,000 copies.
"According to Kraft, the returned questionnaires printed in the KISS book indicate that its readership is composed largely of rock music fans as opposed to regular comics readers. Marvel has been getting about 1,000 letters and questionnaires back per week.
"The new rock group adaptations Kraft will be editing are still in the planning stages, and Marvel is negotiating with various rock groups now..."
Here are a couple more music-related Marvel comics from the same era, only the first one had any involvement from David Anthony Kraft...
All images from GCD
REVIEW: MARVEL COMICS SUPER SPECIAL #1: KISS reviewed by Gene Phillips. Phillips mostly (and incredulously) rehashes the story from the comic with some good criticisms of the lack of creativity in story and art. I like the last line of the review best: "Maybe next time, if Marvel can think of more ideas like that of printing the book in blood (sort of), they'll have my support."
THE DARKER SIDE OF FANDOM DEPARTMENT: This fucking advertisement...Yikes!
Image from TCJ Archive
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