A Get-Well Card for Stu

Taral Wayne has produced a one-shot, The Slan of Baker Street [PDF file], that he hopes friend and fellow fanartist Stu Shiffman soon will be reading:

I don’t remember my first thoughts when I learned of Stu’s stroke. I doubt it was until the second day, or even the third, that I decided Something Ought to be Done. Since I was unable to perform miracles, I decided that perhaps a one-shot, get-well zine would help cheer Stu up, and aid his convalescence.

The Slan of Baker Street contains memoirs from Taral, Andrew P. Hooper and Rob Hansen, and artistic tributes by Taral, Sheryl Birkhead, Kurt Erichsen, Alan White, Steve Stiles, Brad Foster. Its grand finale is a gallery of Stu’s work from the Seventies and Eighties

I’m a big fan of the writing of Andrew Hooper: his contribution to The Slan of Baker Street shows why you should be, too:

The flights are as safe as one can make a ride in an antique airplane, but I feel just a little uneasy as I peer between the trees and clouds to see the tall tailfin float by again. Another flying B-17, Liberty Belle, made a forced landing in Illinois last year, and was totally destroyed by the fire that followed. Aluminum Overcast drifts overhead so slowly that it gives an impression of searching for something, like an aircraft lost in an old Twilight Zone episode, confronted with the 21st Century landscape below. These anxious fantasies come easily to mind this week, because I’m waiting for someone to get well, someone whose condition seems analogous to an aircraft trying to make its way home through a persistent fog. Stu Shiffman is one of my oldest friends in fandom, a longtime collaborator, correspondent and colleague.

2 thoughts on “A Get-Well Card for Stu

  1. Stu did an entire hoaxzine (or, more properly I think, an parallel reality zine) for the Flushing in 1980 bid in 1976 which Gary Farber published, which had news items of the in-his-’80s astronomer Howard P. Lovecraft, sercon works by A. W. Tucker, faanish articles by Bobby Bloch, and a report of the new Conan musical on Broadway, starring Robert Goulet as Conan and Shirley Jones as the Stygian maiden, with a title song, “A-a-a-a-aquilo-nya, where the wind comes streaming o’er the plains….”

  2. The Flushing in ’80 bid prospectus is what David means, I think. There was also a LIECon (Long Island Expressway Con) program book that I did the cover for.

    The prospectus is one of the covers reproduced in “The Slan of Baker Street” — the cover artist was Phil Foglio.

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