Close Encounters
Affinities and a Moment in History and Time
This photo is more than an opportunity to name-drop or wallow in nostalgia, or even to contemplate as a momento mori. If I do say so myself, it’s a teachable moment in history and the history of comics that says something about the passing of the torch. Therefore, it’s a lesson for all you kids out there—cartoonists who want to break into comics or still have their careers ahead of them. And I’m running into more and more of those, lately.
The picture is by Jackie Estrada (b. 1946), longtime administrator of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for the San Diego Comicon (as I still call it), and self-appointed shutterbug of legend of the comic book industry—she has published two books of her beautiful black-and-white photography recording comic book gatherings and legends from Kirby to Kane to Stevens to who’s who.
In the foreground in Batton Lash (1953-2019), her late husband. In 1993, when this photo was taken in the bar of Wondercon in Oakland, California, Batton had been drawing his comic strip, Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre—begun in a Brooklyn newspaper—for a hundred years, and had repurposed the IP into a self-published comic book through his and Jackie’s imprint, Exhibit “A” Press. Batton had by this time enlisted me to create a new logo for the comic, and we would soon be exhibiting together at industry trade shows from coast to coast. I think I may have also lettered a short story he had written and penciled that would be inked by none other than Steve Ditko for Jack Kirby’s Satan’s Six for Topps Comics.
To the far right is Jim Valentino (b. 1952), whom I had met while he was almost surgically attached to Dave Sim at an evening party at the Chicago Comicon in 1984, before I was published, but had found a publisher for Megaton Man #1—Kitchen Sink Press. I never thought on this at the time, but it was rather remarkable that the book had not come out yet, yet word was spreading thanks to photocopies—plus, I had submitted Megaton Man #1 to Aardvark-Vanaheim, publisher of Dave’s Cerebus and Jim’s (he was known then simply as “Valentino” or Val, for short—I still call him that) normalman. Dave rejection letter for Megaton Man #1 on the grounds that he was already publishing a superhero parody, appears in this previous post.
Jim (or Val), by the time this photo was taken, had already reinvented himself twice—as “Jim Valentino,” he single-handedly re-engineered Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, going from superhero parodist to serious writer-penciler in one fell swoop, a transformation I would have never thought possible and something I could never pull off. He then became an Image Founder—he was studio mates with Rob Liefeld, and helped foment the insurrection of six or so Marvel upstarts including Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Erik Larson, and Marc Silvestri—to form an offshoot imprint, Image Comics—at first with Malibu Comics, then on its own.
Jim would further reinvent himself with his Shadowline sub-imprint, if you will, publishing an arty line of indie comics within the Image (then predominantly hot superhero) brand, and then for a time becoming publisher of Image Comics.
At this point, Val’s dream of The normalman vs. Megaton Man Special—a time capsule of mid-1990s independent comics, it would turn out—was a couple years away, although he had already hooked me up with Image with Splitting Image, which led to The Savage Dragon vs. the Savage Megaton Man—three comics and two big paychecks that changed me life, and enabled me to self-publish Bizarre Heroes, an expansion of the Megaton Man universe I was then cooking up. Oh, yeah, and I was lettering 1963—another Valentino joint with Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch—around that moment.
Peeking over Batton’s head is Jim Pascoe (b. 1971?), at the time Faye Desmond’s righthand man at the San Diego Comicon and Batton’s afternoon aperitif companion—they once took to someplace in San Diego that looked like the waiting room of a bordello for cocktails. I had known Jim from Pittsburgh and a highfalutin academic confab he organized at Duquesne University that brought in Bissette and Veitch to discuss comics in an academic setting—and later to see dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Jim appears to be fighting his way to the bar, which is probably an apt analogy—at the time, he was single, and as they say, “hungry”—his hardboiled mystery, By the Balls, written with Tom Fassbender, and later Buffy comics were still some years off. Now, Jim is arguably the most active and successful creator in this photo—author of Jim Pascoe’s Playbook, author of the graphic novel Undertown and series (soon-to-be trilogy) Cottons for First Second, and having a hand in just about every movie trailer and ad campaign coming out of Hollywood for at least a decade—not to mention devoted husband and father of a couple college-age whizbangs.
The point here is not to name-drop or revel in nostalgia. This magic photo captures a moment in time—history, if I may say—of four individuals hanging out after a con, kicking back, cutting loose. The individual narratives, the diverse agendas, and the paths each of us were on before and after this photo at the time were only emerging, half-hidden, half-dreamt, partially fulfilled.
If you could widen the shot—and I’m sure Jackie chronicled everyone in the bar that evening—you’d see thirty or forty or fifty or sixty even more fantastic and unlikely narratives—some individuals at the top of their careers, others looking for a way to break in, still others never to be heard of again—all mixing it up and rubbing shoulders with others and making their way in the world of comics and the world.
Moments like this are occurring all the time, particularly at comic books shows—we called the conventions. But they happen in small local scenes, coffee shops, chance meetings at airports obscure social media “likes.”
I’ve emphasized the dates to stress the timelines—there is a continual, invisible, glacial transfer that happens among our species. Older contemporaries hobnobbing with younger, “living legends” (who don’t know it yet) telling stories for the millionth time to the future young lions.
I myself (b. 1961) have never been able to predict the winners or the losers, nor did I ever hang out with people thinking in those terms. If I had tried to position myself or network with the “right” people—whoever I might have thought they might be at any given moment—I’d have never ended up in the middle of a photo as astonishing and unlikely as this one.
All you can ever do is find affinities and hang with the people who will somehow tolerate you and hope that somehow you help people along on the way in their own journey. And look back at a document like this from time to time and say, “Holy mackerel! Was I really there?”
As it happens for you, try to appreciate it, kids.