Tag Archives: Bill Rotsler

Scott Shaw! Deuce of Deuces

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Scott Shaw!’s costume for the 1972 Worldcon – The Turd — was made with 3 jars of peanut butter, a pair of Leggs pantyhose, cornstarch and some cornhusks. It brought him lasting infamy and inspired one of Rotsler’s Rules for Masquerades. And after decades of sharing the story with convention audiences Shaw has now told it to the camera.

I was one of the first fans to see Shaw in costume that day and many times considered sharing my eyewitness account here. But there’s really no second line to a story that begins, “I was there when The Turd came out.” Put another way, I was standing in front of the elevator doors when Shaw arrived and stalked off to the ballroom, leaving chunky drips in his wake.

Comics artist Scott Shaw! was 21 and his story about a monster from the underground sewers called The Turd had been published not long before he arrived at the Los Angeles Worldcon of 1972. He’d been to a Worldcon masquerade before. This time he felt an overwhelming desire to see what people who worked all year on their costumes would think about an entry someone had made in the last five minutes.

They didn’t think kindly of it, was the answer. Shaw laughs as he retells the grim details in his video. Thanks to him, Rotsler’s Rules for Masquerades [PDF file] admonishes fans —  

7. Parts of your costume should not be edible or smell. Parts of your costume should not fall off accidentally, brush off against other contestants, or be left lying around on the stage.

Afterwards Shaw took an epic shower. He worried about what the maid would think, but that’s nothing next to other embellishments that end his story. As Shaw tells it, a few weeks after L.A.Con the hotel plumbing exploded, having been clogged with massive amounts of peanut butter. The hotel came back to the convention committee and charged them thousands of dollars for the repairs.

That last part never happened.

For one thing, the con only cleared a couple of thousand dollars altogether and they didn’t spend any of it replumbing the International Hotel. The peanut butter reportedly did clog the bathtub in Shaw’s room, but that’s all.  

Still, you have to appreciate the symmetry that Shaw ends his story with a bunch of BS.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, David Klaus, Steven H Silver and all the ships at sea for this story, and to Craig Miller for a memory download.]

Hertz: C. Ross Chamberlain Wins 2012 Rotsler Award

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By John Hertz: C. Ross Chamberlain of Las Vegas has won the 2012 Rotsler Award, given for long-time artistic achievement in amateur publications of the science fiction community. Established in 1998, the award carries an honorarium of US$300.

Chamberlain is an adept humorist known for graceful line and eye-catching composition.

As a good artist he makes use of available technology. In the days of mimeography he was masterly with stylus and shading plate. Now he works marvels with Photoshop.

The Rotsler Award is sponsored by the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests, a non-profit corporation, which in 2006 hosted the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention. The award is named for the late Bill Rotsler, a talented and prolific artist over many years. Claire Brialey, Mike Glyer, and John Hertz are the current judges.

The award was announced on Saturday, November 24, 2012, at Loscon, the annual Los Angeles SF convention. This year’s convention was Loscon 39.

For more about the Rotsler Award, visit www.scifiinc.org/rotsler/.

Digging for Pixels

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That internet archeologist Bill Burns has discovered it’s still possible to view Michael Bernstein’s old Rotsler.com dedication site on Archive.org, with images.

Rotsler’s drawings on restaurant dishes are most nostaligic. They remind me of the 1974 Westercon where Bill impersonated AWOL guest of honor Phil Dick at the start of the banquet, and later entertained fans at nearby tables by drawing on their bread plates. (So far as I know, the committee was never billed for all the disappearing dishes.)  

I assume the examples on Rotsler.com were drawn in later years because Ken Forman is listed as the owner. But it isn’t as if Rotsler didn’t do this performance more than once…

[Thanks to Lee Gold and Andrew Porter for the links.]

The Quick and the Dead

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A lot of people want to know how they can win a Hugo Award. I don’t think any of them are looking to win one posthumously, which is just as well, because it would be a terrible strategy. In fact, you could say that Hugo Seeker Tip Number One is: Don’t die.

Here’s how strong the bias is in favor of the living. Bill Rotsler died in October 1997 after winning two consecutive Best Fan Artist Hugos. Fanzines printed dozens and dozens of previously unpublished Rotsler cartoons in the year of his death, yet he was not even a Hugo nominee in 1998.

Voters want to see happy winners appearing on stage at the Hugo Ceremony.

Voters are even impatient with living proxy accepters. Emily Mah said she found Denvention 3 a cause for mourning, partly because “The [Hugo] ceremony was dominated by other people reading acceptance speeches of little slips of paper.”

The voters’ preference for live winners has been reinforced by bad experiences with the other kind.

Lester del Rey, in a letter read by a spokesman, declined the Best Professional Editor Hugo voted posthumously to Judy-Lynn del Rey in 1986, saying that she would have objected to the award being given to her just because she had recently died.

When the late Jim Baen appeared on the 2007 Hugo ballot as a nominee for Best Professional Editor in 2007, there was a bit of suspense until the Hugo administrator made public that she had the approval of Baen’s exectors Toni Weisskopf and Jessica Baen. (However, in a comment posted at Whatever, James Nicoll forcefully advocated honoring the living by dismissing the Baen nomination: “He’s dead now and no matter [what] his fans do, he will never experience winning a Hugo.”)

The League of Extraordinarily Selfless Fan Artists

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Frank Wu has preemptively announced that he will decline if nominated for Best Fan Artist in 2008.

“This essay is incredibly hard to write. I don’t want to be misunderstood, to come across as churlish, arrogant, calculating or ungrateful…. Having won three Hugo Awards for Best Fan Artist, in three of the last four years, I have decided that – should I be nominated – I will decline the nomination [in 2008],” wrote Frank in an editorial published in Abyss and Apex issue 24, dated the fourth quarter or 2007.

I learned about Frank’s decision when his editorial popped up in response to a Google search about another fan artist. Such news must have been reported and discussed long since (though not anywhere Google could show me). Such a remarkable example of selflessness is worth retelling, in any case.

Frank thoughtfully explains that his decision has been made for the sake of the vitality of the Best Fan Artist Hugo category. He wants to “break the logjam” for other fan artists like Alan F. Beck, Taral Wayne, Dan Steffan, Marc Schirmeister, Alexis Gilliland, and Stu Shiffman. (Though Frank surely must know Gilliland and Shiffman have won before.)

To help show that withdrawing is not an ungrateful response to his popularity, Frank lists many other people who withdrew from past Hugo races. He might have added the two most important examples from the Best Fan Artist category itself. There’s not another category where serial winners have been so conscientious about sharing the limelight.

Phil Foglio won the Best Fan Artist Hugo in 1977 and 1978. During his last acceptance speech, Foglio withdrew from future fanartist Hugo consideration saying, “I know how hard it is to get on the list, and once you do it’s even harder to get off.” Victoria Poyser won the category in 1981 and 1982, then announced she would not accept future nominations. Foglio and Poyser both went on to professional success.

Frank does tell how Teddy Harvia and Brad Foster declined their nominations in 1997. He speculates, “Apparently they were trying to clear the path for fellow nominee Bill Rotsler, who would pick up his Hugo and then pass away a month later.” Well, no. Just the previous year (1996) Rotsler had won the Best Fan Artist Hugo, a Retro Hugo, and a Special Committee Award. He’d already cleared his own path.  The reason Harvia and Foster gave in 1997 is that they had a self-perceived conflict of interest created by their close involvement with the San Antonio Worldcon. Foster had drawn the covers for all the Progress Reports, and Harvia contributed other art. They made a highly-principled decision. A past progress report artist had been criticized for having an unfair advantage over competitors for the Hugo — that’s fandom for you, where someone demands that our top talents forego Hugo nominations as a condition of being allowed to provide art for free!