Roy Thomas’OTTO-matic Comics Fanzine & $9.95 In the USA No.147 July 2017 Proudly Presenting: The Wondrous Writings Of GOLDEN & SILVER AGE GREAT OTTO BINDER - Starring – CAPTAIN MARVEL SUPERMAN CAPTAIN AMERICA DOLL MAN MARVEL FAMILY SUPERGIRL CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT THE HANGMAN CAPTAIN BATTLE BLACK OWL & A Zillion Others! 1 8 2 6 5 8 0 0 0 9 4 Shazam heroes TM & © DC Comics; other new art © Estate of C.C. Beck. 3 Vol. 3, No. 147 / September 2017 Editor Roy Thomas Associate Editors Bill Schelly Jim Amash Design & Layout Christopher Day Consulting Editor John Morrow FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck J.T. Go (Assoc. Editor) Comic Crypt Editor Michael T. Gilbert Editorial Honor Roll Jerry G. Bails (founder) Ronn Foss, Biljo White Mike Friedrich Proofreaders Rob Smentek William J. Dowlding Cover Artist C.C. Beck (probably) Cover Colorist Tom Ziuko With Special Thanks to: Heidi Amash Mark Lewis Ger Apeldoorn Art Lortie Dave Armstrong Jim Ludwig Bob Bailey Doug Martin Jean Bails Will Meugniot Shaun Clancy Mark Muller Comic Book Plus Warren Reece (website) Eric Schumacher Contents Al Dellinges Marc Svensson Shane Foley Dann Thomas Writer/Editorial: On Otto-matic Pilot! .................. .2 Stepahn Friedt Tony Thomas Binder’s List ....................................... 3 Janet Gilbert Steven Thompson Anthony Tollin P.C. Hamerlinck (& the FCA), Bill Schelly, & Roy Thomas visually annotate Grand Comics Otto Binder’s mid-’60s record of his many comic book scripts written from 1939-1965. Database Dr. Michael J. Vassallo (website) Yocitrus Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt!: It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World! ... .91 Jim Kealy Mike Zachary Michael T. Gilbert’s tour of some of the strangest comic book ads of all time! Sean Kleefeld On Our Cover: Collector Mike Zachary sent this drawing of the original Captain Marvel and America’s This issue is dedicated to the memory of Uncle Sam to P.C. Hamerlinck, who suggested it be used as the central image of this issue’s cover. The illo was probably done, back in the wartime 1940s, by none other than Charles Clarence Beck, the talented Otto Binder cartoonist who was the artistic co-creator of the World’s Mightiest Mortal. We can’t be 100% sure—but it certainly matches his style, and doesn’t seem to have been done by his colleagues Pete Costanza or Marc If you’re viewing a Digital Swayze. P.C. and his FCA cover coordinator Mark Lewis framed the two figures amid various pieces of Edition of this publication, classic Fawcett art by Beck, Bob Powell, Mac Raboy, & Kurt Schaffenberger. [This art spot & PLEASE READ THIS: next: Shazam heroes art TM & © DC Comics; other art © the respective copyright holders.] This is copyrighted material, NOT intended Above: Look familiar? Yep, it’s the very same Captain Marvel/Uncle Sam illustration used on our for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from cover—minus Tom Ziuko’s cavortin’ coloring! We wanted you to see it in black-&-white as well as color, another website or torrent, go ahead and and the head of this contents page seemed as good a place as any! We’ve wondered if perhaps it was done read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal down- as possible cover art for Captain Marvel Adventures #28 (Oct. 1943), which is also on display above, load, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE but then Fawcett had Beck draw a different angle for Cap and his Uncle instead. No way to know…! IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications Alter EgoTM is published 6 times a year by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. enough to download them, please pay for Roy Thomas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Alter Ego Editorial Offices: 32 Bluebird Trail, St. Matthews, SC 29135, USA. them so we can keep producing ones like Fax: (803) 826-6501; e-mail: [email protected]. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. this. Our digital editions should ONLY be Six-issue subscriptions: $65 US, $102 Elsewhere, $29 Digital Only. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © downloaded within our Apps and at their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © Roy Thomas. Alter Ego is a TM of Roy & Dann Thomas. FCA is a TM www.twomorrows.com of P.C. Hamerlinck. Printed in China. ISSN: 1932-6890. FIRST PRINTING. 2 writer/editorial On OTTO-Matic Pilot! eah, that’s what I thought this issue was gonna be, all right. Ludwig, Doug Martin, Jim Kealy, Art Lortie, Stephan Friedt, Mark Y Otto-matic = automatic. A snap! Muller, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, Anthony Tollin, and several others who provided an odd scan or two. You can see my indebtedness I mean, after all, Bill Schelly had turned over to P.C. to them—and to the online Comic Book Plus site—on many of the Hamerlinck and me scans of all 70-plus pages of the list that Golden pages in of this issue. and Silver Age writer Otto Binder had compiled in the mid-1960s (see Bill’s intro on next page)—and P.C. would supply most of the So what I’m saying is, this issue of A/E turned out to be quite a Fawcett illustrations for the sprawling FCA segment that would bit more work than I expected. But hey, nobody ever held a gun to make up more than half of the coverage. And I had enlisted long- my head and said, “You will spend an inordinate amount of time in suffering A/E contributor Bob Bailey to send me scans from a your later years putting out a heavily illustrated magazine about goodly number of the Superman-related and science-fictional yarns the Golden and Silver Ages of Comic Books!” that made up much of Binder’s post-Fawcett career at DC Comics. Bill, P.C., and I had agreed that Otto’s list should be published. All I’d have to do was track down art to spotlight Otto’s Otto was not only one of the greatest and most prolific writers of pre-Fawcett stories, edit P.C.’s drafts of captions and write my the original Captain Marvel… and a major contributor to the “Mort own—stick in a few ads and “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” (no Weisinger Mythos” of the 1950s-60s “Superman” comics line… he room for a letters section this time)—and voila! This very different was also one of nature’s nicest people, a gentle soul who, from the issue of Alter Ego would be ready to be sent to press! moment he discovered comics fans (like Dick and Pat Lupoff) in the early 1960s through those of us he befriended a couple of years later Yeah, right. (Jerry Bails, Bill Spicer, and myself in particular), was unstinting of Turns out that, though P.C. did indeed send loads of Fawcett his aid and encouragement. scans, he hadn’t had a chance to coordinate them with the Binder In addition, his exhaustive mid-’60s list of his stories was one of pages, so there might be three art spots that should go on one the things that helped jumpstart the Who’s Who of American Comic particular page (where we just had room for two) and only one for Books and today’s Grand Comics Database. If not for pros like Otto another page (which also needed two). Besides, during the early helping the above Silver Age fans and others, we wouldn’t have the part of Otto’s tenure at Fawcett, he was also writing for Timely, plentiful digitized data that is now at the beck and call of anybody Anglo-American, and other companies, and we needed to showcase with a PC and a typing finger. art from those, as well—yes, even in the FCA section—so it was down to me to come up with it. You were one of the special ones, Otto—and that’s why this issue is dedicated to you, the third patron saint of Alter Ego (along with Which meant that I was, as always, dependent on the kindness Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox)! Even above and beyond the of—well, not of strangers, but of correspondents and collectors, a stupendous stories you wrote, we wanted to honor Otto Binder— number of whom came through for A/E… especially Warren Reece the man! (who else owns copies of most of the really early Timely comics and would photocopy those precious, fragile pages for me?), Jim Bestest, COMING IN AUGUST #148 The LAST—& GREATEST— Golden & Silver Age Comics Convention Ever! • Dynamic cover featuring art by JOE KUBERT, CARMINE INFANTINO, & GIL KANE! • Panels, patter, & pictures from JOE PETRILAK’s ALL TIME CLASSIC NEW YORK COMIC BOOK CONVENTION, held in White Plains, NY, in 2000—featuring 60th-Anniversary Celebrations of The Flash & Green Lantern & the talents of KUBERT • INFANTINO • SCHWARTZ (JULIE, ALVIN, & LEW SAYRE) • MOLDOFF • NODELL • HASEN • LAMPERT • BUSCEMA • GILL • DRAKE • GREEN • AYERS • SEVERIN • CUIDERA Art TM & © DC Comics NOVICK • BOLLE • FOX • FLESSEL • GOULART • THOMAS, et al.! • Bonus! A spectacular 4-page spread of RUSS RAINBOLT’s magnificent 60-foot mural, done for that con, showcasing the greatest heroes of the Golden & Silver Ages! • Plus—P.C. HAMERLINCK’s FCA [Fawcett Collectors of America]—MICHAEL T. GILBERT EACH ISSUE NOW & MR. MONSTER on Peter Cannon – Thunderbolt creator PETE MORISI—BILL SCHELLY 100 PAGES! with SF/comics aficionado TED WHITE [Part 2] —& MORE!! Subscribe! Six 100-page issues: $65 Economy US, $83 Expedited US, TwoMorrows.