The caffeine in this morning’s coffee jarred loose a memory about Steve Stiles needing a website to effectively compete for the Hugo. Remember? Frank Wu said it here. I’d noticed something missing myself when I made a collection of links to last year’s Hugo runner-ups. I thought here we are again, the nominations just announced, Steve Stiles on the list, but what about a website?

Then I remembered the Internet. Did you know that every fan with a computer is just a click away from having their own Steve Stiles website? All they need is the kind of direction we can easily provide here on Trufen. Armed with my best friend, Google, I set out to harvest the best of Stiles links from the web. And what a fine researcher I turned out to be, because the very first thing I stumbled across was… stevestiles.com

Steve Stiles in caricature poses beside a buxom friend promising a site “loaded with sophistication (as you can see from the broad in the foreground).” And Steve delivers in six colorful segments – Comics Articles, Computer Art, Fanzine Art, Fanzine Articles, Professional Art and Links. Bill Burns hosts this site and receives big credit from Steve for providing help and encouragement.

Comics Articles: Stiles has collected 75 articles he wrote about all kinds of comics for CollectingChannel.com in the days when Arnie Katz was at the helm.

Computer Art: With help from his Mac, Steve can play around with colorful imagery that once he could only do with rare colored ditto masters.

Fanzine Art: Thumbnails of 33 fanzine covers are displayed for you to click on and see the full-size version. His work has appeared everywhere, from classic faanish zines to Worldcon progress reports (“Crabs of Our Solar System” for ConStellation PR 2.)

Steve has done over 4,000 pieces of fannish artwork since his first cartoon appeared in Cry of the Nameless
in 1959. “It was ghastly beyond belief…” Steve insists. I guess when you grow up to be a brilliant artist you are sensitive about these things.

Fanzine Articles: But wait, Steve is a brilliant fanwriter too. He offers a wide selection of his fanzine articles, led off by “Art School.” It was originally published in Mimosa, and its Joe Mayhew illustrations are done in a homage to Steve’s underground style. Most impressive is Steve’s report of his 1968 TAFF trip, titled “Harrison Country.” Without a doubt, people visiting this site to see Steve’s art will also leave with a new appreciation for his written work as a humorist and critic.

Professional Art: Three dozen thumbnails lead to full-sized examples of his pro comics work, for example, “Mind Siege!” published in Kitchen Sink’s horror title Death Rattle. Steve selected a page that includes tuckerizations of [Barry] Smotroff and [Don] Keller.

As you can tell, Steve doesn’t need the do-it-yourself kit I had in mind. But if a visit to his website whets your appetite for things Stilesian, friend Google can help you out. A search of the eFanzines site alone returns 115 links to documents with Stiles references, such as “The Trickle-Down Theory of Dr. Fandom” by Ted White in Apparatchik 72, an article inspired by experiences working at the same company with Steve.

Elsewhere on the web you can find examples of his pro art that are not collected on Steve’s own site. Lambiek.net’s Comiclopedia has two examples, one of them from The Adventures Of Professor Thintwhistle And His Incredible Aether Flier, a strip he did with Dick Lupoff for Heavy Metal (still available from Fantagraphics Press).

Hugo nominations are nice, but egoboo is even better – so take advantage of the e-mail address listed on Steve’s new website to personally tell him how much you enjoy what he’s doing.