By Lee A. Breakiron REVIEWING the REVIEW
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REHEAPA Summer Solstice 2010 By Lee A. Breakiron REVIEWING THE REVIEW Belying its name, the first issue of the fanzine The Howard Review (THR) contained no reviews, but only because its editor and publisher, Dennis McHaney, had wanted to hold it to 24 pages while including Howard’s story “The Fearsome Touch of Death” and Glenn Lord’s “The Fiction of Robert E. Howard: A Checklist.” McHaney had sent a list of the published works to Lord, who added the unpublished works. “Fearsome” had not been reprinted since its appearance in Weird Tales in February, 1930, and it was de rigueur at the time for any REH fanzine to feature some unpublished or unreprinted material by Howard. Lord had provided the material and permission required, as he was to do for so many fanzines, magazines, and books published during the Howard Boom of the 1970s. In the issue’s editorial, McHaney states that his zine “will be strictly devoted to Robert E. Howard, and will only review new material by others if that material is directly related to R.E.H., or one of his creations,” including pastiches. It would also “contain fiction and poetry by Howard, including obscure, out-of-print items as well as unpublished pieces.” [1, p. 3] And so began one of the better known fanzines of the period, produced by the longest active contributor to Howard fandom, given that he is still active. Marked by continual experimentation and improvement in format and style, THR reflected its creator’s interest and skill in graphic design and his drive to constantly hone those skills and utilize the best technology available. He had been creating and publishing fanzines since 1963. He acquired a used manual Gestetner mimeograph machine in 1971, which he utilized for a couple of years. His first fantasy zine, Mesmeridian #1 of 1973, consisted of 200 mimeographed copies with no Howard-related content. Published in the summer of 1973, his Mesmeridian #2 was a 30-page, 8½×11-inch mimeograph inside covers offset-printed by his friend Tom Foster, in a run between 100 and 150 copies priced at 50 cents each or “your fanzine in trade.” The contents were an article by McHaney on REH’s unreprinted boxing, western, adventure, and spicy yarns; his index/survey of the pulp Golden Fleece; Grover Deluca’s “The Manner of Roses: The Works of Thomas Burnett Swann” (the 1960s fantasist) ending with a bibliography; letters from Edgar Rice Burroughs collectors Vernell Coriell and Darrell C. Richardson; and art by Foster (including a four-page, full-color, offset-printed cartoon). A copy of the zine now sells for $20 to $40. 1 REHEAPA Summer Solstice 2010 In discussing the surprising success of the modest Mesmeridian #1, McHaney said: I’d always wanted to do a successful fanzine. I’d been doing them for years, but never sold many because of my rather eccentric choice of subject matter. So why did this one do so well? The Howard Collector had just stopped publishing, and as far as I knew, there were no other Robert E. Howard fanzines available. I’m sure that had nothing to do with my pitiful effort’s success, but I saw a void, and had the silly notion I could fill it. [2, p. 10] Thus, McHaney and Foster decided to launch THR, which sold well and garnered favorable reviews despite its frequent changes in format. McHaney would sometimes take subscriptions and sometimes not, depending on what was feasible at the time. For similar reasons, his plans for content, print runs, and availability often changed before a project was done. True to form, he was dissatisfied with his first attempt at THR #1, a 6½×8½-inch staple-and-tape-bound typed mimeograph of 32 pages in black and white with some touches of color done in December (though dated November), 1974 in a print run of 206 copies, so he redid it a year later in a second edition of 600 copies priced at $2.50 each. That edition sold out upon publication. Having mastered offset plates and half-tones, he did a revamped second printing of the second edition in January, 1976, in a run of about 500 copies for $2.00 each. Without asking, the printer, instead of the cover stock McHaney had requested, substituted paper that did not dry very fast, so a lot of these have ink smears, especially on the back cover. The second edition was typed, offset-printed in black and white, and saddle-stapled, as all THRs and his other publications would be through THR #11, except where noted otherwise herein. In May, 1975, McHaney published an updated, corrected version of Lord’s Checklist as a 24-page, 4¼×5½-inch booklet, with covers and interior illustrations by Foster, entitled The Fiction of Robert E. Howard: A Pocket Checklist by McHaney and Lord in two printings. The first printing of 500 copies was priced at $1.25 (including postage) and sold out in 3 weeks. A facsimile reprint of about a hundred copies was done in October, 1986, priced at $1.50 each, but half of these remain uncirculated. McHaney published further updated versions as The Fiction of Robert E. Howard in his REHupa zine* The Blufftown Barbarian #5 of 60 copies in August, 1994, as part of Mailing #128; The Fiction of Robert E. Howard: An Illustrated Bibliography (Part One of which appeared in THR #13); and the 106-page The Fiction of Robert E. Howard: A Quick Reference Guide, which was available as a 106-page perfect-bound *REHupa = Robert E. Howard United Press Association 2 REHEAPA Summer Solstice 2010 softback from the print-on-demand Web site Lulu.com in 2008 for $12. He has also contributed a fair amount to the REH bibliographic Web site HowardWorks.com and has been an activist in getting correct and pure texts into print. Since he had already reprinted the Checklist, McHaney replaced it in the second edition of THR #1 with REH’s poems “Moon Mockery” and “Dead Man’s Hate,” reprinted from the Lord-edited Always Comes Evening (1957), and “The Thunder of Trumpets,” a story on which REH had collaborated with Frank Thurston Torbett. The latter was REH’s only collaboration to appear in Weird Tales. Torbett was a Howard correspondent who, at this time, was still living in Texas. Torbett’s father had a sanitorium that REH had taken his own mother to. Torbett probably wrote most of the story. All versions of THR #1 were priced $2.00 each and were illustrated by Foster, who was joined in the second edition by artist Steve Fabian (who did the cover and other pieces) and Roy G. Krenkel, a McHaney favorite. Both editions now sell for about $35 each, except for a 26-copy variant bound in greenish cardboard, which has fetched up to $878. McHaney tried a newspaper format for his next issue, a choice he soon regretted because of its fragility and unwieldiness. The THR #2 was published as a 24-page, 11½×15-inch, unbound tabloid in a run of 1790 copies in 1975, with a price of $2.00 each. Again profusely illustrated by (and co-published with) Foster, the all-REH zine featured two humorous stories, “Vikings of the Gloves,” starring sailor/boxer Steve Costigan, and the western “The Riot at Bucksnort,” starring Pike Bearfield (a small section of which was published out of order); three unpublished fragments lumped together as “The 3 Perils of Sailor Costigan”; poems “Song before Clontarf” and “Riding Song”; and ads. It sells now for $10 to $30. The Costigan story and fragments were published in 1987 in McHaney’s zine The Perils of Sailor Costigan, which also included a list of all the Costigan stories and where they were originally published, in a run of 25 copies, though only 11 were bound. THRs #1 and #2 were later bound together in a spiral softback entitled The World’s Largest Robert E. Howard Fanzine in a run of 11 copies, which has sold for up to $87. The third issue of THR, dated June, 1975, was in still another format, a 40-page, 4¼×5½-inch booklet, with a cover reproducing a photo of REH holding his hat at his side, reprinted for the first time since its first appearance in Fantasy Magazine (typoed in the credits as The Fantasy Fan). The issue contained the REH stories “The Reformation a Dream” (title typoed therein; reprinted from the Howard Payne College student newspaper, The Yellow Jacket) and “The Beast from the Abyss” (reprinted from Lord’s The Howard Collector); the REH verse “The Soul-Eater”; six reviews by McHaney and Jeddrick P. Manteel; and the first installments of “The Heroes of Robert E. Howard (on the humorous western character Breckinridge Elkins, listing all the stories and books featuring him) and of “The Illustrators of Robert E. Howard” (on the Weird Tales artists Harold S. Delay and Virgil Finlay, with summaries and examples of their work). THR #3 was printed in a run of 500 copies each, with a cover price of $1.25. The smaller size of THR #3 was dictated by budget constraints. He put out a second edition about 1997 or 1998. These editions of THR #3 now sell for $10 to $30, though a rare third edition full of type scan errors and with a Fabian cover sold for $547.50 in 2007. Born in 1950 in the bootheel of Missouri, McHaney lived in Memphis, Tennessee, for 48 years and worked in a jewelry mail-order firm for 7 years and then in a comic-book store during his late twenties.