Category Archives: Fan Artists

Stu Shiffman Update 12/7

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Stu Shiffman is keeping up a gradual recovery from a stroke suffered in June, with this encouraging news just posted on his Caring Bridge page:

Stu continues to improve solidly: still no speech, but Andi’s been reading the one-shot fanzine for Stu to him and showing him the cartoons, and he’s actively appreciating them in a way he hasn’t been able to before. He’s gesturing, smiling, and nodding to folks: if you haven’t visited in a while, it’s a very good time to do so.

Good to read that Stu is at last enjoying the one-shot, The Slan of Baker Street [PDF file], arranged and edited by Taral Wayne.

Fanartist Alan Hunter Dies

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Alan Hunter. Photograph by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

British fanartist Alan Hunter died August 1 after a long illness. Ned Brooks learned of his passing from Alan’s son.

Andrew Porter published many pieces of Hunter art in Algol/Starship and Science Fiction Chronicle and recalls that the back cover on the final issue of Starship was by him. Porter visited him in Bournemouth on a trip to the UK in 1993 and says, “A really nice guy and a wonderful artist, who should have been an artist guest of honor somewhere. But now it’s too late.”

Here are three examples of Hunter’s art which appeared in Science Fiction Chronicle as headers above Porter’s editorials.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Mining for Foglio’s Gold

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Before Phil Foglio was a prolific and dominant pro artist he was a prolific and dominant fan artist. He racked up two Best Fan Artist Hugos (1977, 1978). Over three decades later, Foglio’s vintage fanzine art is the heart of John Teehan’s new project:

I’ve gotten Phil Foglio to agree to let me (as Merry Blacksmith Press) take a stab at pulling together a bound collection of his early black and white fan art. He doesn’t have much from his early days still hanging around and wouldn’t know where to find them if he did. Kaja might know, but it was before her time and she’s not so sure either.

If anyone can help me track down some art, or help with some scans or originals to scan, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Can you can help? Contact John Teehan at jdteehaniphone (at) gmail (dot) com.

If I were Teehan I’d start looking through the top genzines published from 1976-1978 (or perhaps a little earlier). He not only needs to find Foglio illos, he needs to find well-reproduced copies. The best bet is to search in zines like Outworlds or Simulacrum.

(Foglio once sent me something but I made a mess of it. Save your time, no need to look in old issues of Scientifriction or Prehensile…)

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Worldcon Sunday Funnies

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Chicon 7 achieved Fan Guest of Honor Peggy Rae Sapienza’s vision of giving Worldcon members a special Sunday morning edition of the daily newzine.  “The Sunday Funnies”  is now available at eFanzines.

Edited by Kurt Erichsen, the four-pages of color comics were created by Randy B. Cleary, Phil Foglio, delphyne woods, Richard Chwedyk, Alan F. Beck, Sheryl Birkhead, Kurt Erichsen, Steven Vincent Johnson, Howard Tayler, Anne Trotter, Kurt Erichsen, Taral Wayne and Spring Schoenhuth.

Fan Hugos: Random Numbers

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File 770 landed on the fortunate side of another close count but must be using up its nine lives awfully fast. I’m afraid to check how many times in recent years the zine has reached the finals by a single vote.

The 2012 Hugo statistics show that Argentus, the fanzine edited by Chicago-area fan Steven H. Silver, also could have made the ballot with one more vote. I know how much he’d have enjoyed being in the race.

However, there was nothing close about the final vote in the Best Fanzine category. SF Signal, the popular blog, started with a 137 vote lead over 2011 winner The Drink Tank and still led by 97 votes when all the traditional fanzines had been eliminated. In the last round SF Signal and The Drink Tank essentially split File 770’s remaining votes with a preference.

The runoff in the Best Fan Artist category, on the other hand, made all the difference and illuminated a dramatic schism among voters.

A Hugo winner needs a majority. Voters rank the finalists in order of preference, then in each round the low vote-getter is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed to the next highest preference still in the race.

Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd) started with a 74 vote lead over winner Maurine Starkey. Munroe picked up only 26 votes in the following four rounds; Starkey collected 92, but still trailed. Then at the very end she got the lion’s share of Steve Stiles’ support which put her over the top. So you had two truly irreconcilable communities voting in this category, the Munroe fans, and the anybody-but-Munroe fans.

Lastly, I wanted to see the response to George R.R. Martin’s endorsements in the fan categories. They didn’t make the final ballot, but where did they end up? Here’s what Martin wrote on his Livejournal in January:

Some of my own favorites include PAT’S FANTASY HOTLIST, THE WERTZONE, MAKING LIGHT, THE BLOG OF THE FALLEN (okay, he doesn’t like my stuff, but it’s still a good read), STOMPING ON YETI, CHEESE MAGNETS, HATHOR LEGACY, and PUNKADIDDLE. And for Best Fan Writer, I’d suggest you consider some of the folks who write for these blogs and e-zines, including Patrick St. Denis, Adam Whitehead, Adam Roberts, and John J. Miller.

Patrick St. Denis and Adam Whitehead and their blogs did reach the top 15. (I’ve added links beside their names.) None of the others got over the event horizon.

Best Fanzine (329 ballots cast)
83 The Drink Tank, edited by Christopher J Garcia and James Bacon (25.23%)
42 Banana Wings, edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer (12.77%)
39 Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, et al. (11.85%)
38 SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo (11.55%)
37 File 770, edited by Mike Glyer (11.24%)
——————————————————————–
36 Argentus (10.94%)
30 Challenger, edited by Guy H. Lillian III (9.12%)
29 Yipe! (8.81%)
26 The Wertzone (7.90%)
17 Chunga (5.17%)
17 Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (5.17%)
15 StarShipSofa (4.56%)
13 A Dribble of Ink (3.95%)
13 eI (3.95%)
12 The Coode Street Podcast (3.65%)
12 SF Commentary (3.65%)
12 SF in SF (3.65%)

Best Fan Writer (363 ballots cast)
63 Christopher J Garcia (21.67%)
56 Jim C. Hines (15.43%)
51 Steven H Silver (14.05%)
43 Claire Brialey (11.85%)
41 James Bacon (11.29%)
——————————————————————–
37 James Nicoll (10.19%)
30 Cheryl Morgan (8.26%)
25 Adam Whitehead (6.88%) [The Wertzone]
23 Mark Plummer (6.34%)
20 Abigail Nussbaum (5.51%)
20 Mike Glyer (5.51%)
15 David Langford (4.13%)
13 Patrick St. Denis (3.58%) [Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist]
13 Guy H. Lillian III (3.58%)
13 Mette Hedin (3.58%)

Best Fan Artist (217 ballots cast)
49 Steve Stiles (22.58%)
41 Maurine Starkey (18.89%)
25 Spring Schoenhuth (11.52%)
25 Taral Wayne (11.52%)
20 Brad W. Foster (9.21%)
20 Randall Munroe (9.21%)
——————————————————————–
14 Frank Wu (5.11%)
14 Sue Mason (6.45%)
10 Alan F. Beck (4.61%)
10 Dan Steffan (4.61%)
9 Kurt Erichsen (4.15%)
9 Dave Hicks (4.15%)
9 Dick Jenssen (Ditmar) (4.15%)
9 D West (4.15%)
9 Delphyne Woods (4.15%)

Shiffman Update 7/23

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Milestones in Stu Shiffman’s continuing recovery from his stroke over the past few days have been (1) doctors removing his nasal feeding tube, (2) continued speech and physical therapy, and (3) Stu spending more time sitting up in a chair.

Tom Whitmore reports on Stu’s CaringBridge journal that Andi and Stu also talked abut decorating the hospital room walls with some of his artwork.

Stu Shiffman Update

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Following a second brain operation on June 16, Stu Shiffman remains under sedation but is breathing on his own (though still intubated) according to his journal at CaringBridge.

Because he’s sedated, doctors had yet to effectively test the extent of damage or function loss caused by the stroke.

Also reported is that on June 15, the day before his second surgery, Stu managed to get out of bed then fell, breaking one kneecap and possibly his nose as well.

Meantime, many friends are coming together to provide practical support for Stu’s partner, Andi Shecter. Facebook and the CaringBridge page are places to connect and help with that.

Huett: New Yorker Fanoclasts

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By Kim Huett: I trust you have all seen the cover of The New Yorker’s special skiffy issue? Don’t know about you but to me this cover has a certain fannish sensibility about it. Actually the more I look at this cover the more it looks to me like Daniel Clowes has channeled the spirit of ATom in order to draw a cover that I could imagine gracing Hyphen (though obviously not in so many colours). In which case this is clearly a New York Fanoclasts meeting at the Lupoff apartment being interrupted by a visitor from the future. The couple in the foreground were originally Dick & Pat Lupoff, the bearded gentleman an aged Ted White with Sylvia Dees neé White behind him etc. 

I imagine this is set in the early Sixties when the Fanoclasts were the sort who listened to jazz and folk. Of course they look aghast at a man from the future who looks like an Elvis clone and who is even posing like Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show (before it was decided to only film him from the waist up so those sinful gyrations couldn’t be seen by the young and impressionable). They, of course, have the look of people who had always imagined the future looking like Thelonious Monk with rockets because they (like so much of the science fiction they had read) had assumed the future would be a mirror image of their world with added gadgets rather than genuinely alien. That, of course, is the implicit ATom style joke which could always be found in his Hyphen covers,

Drink Tank Handicaps the Hugos

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The Drink Tank’s relentless schedule usually means that by the time I get ready to comment on “the most recent issue” there is an even more recent issue.

Issue #315 of The Drink Tank is the one I have in mind, where Chris Garcia and James Bacon, joined by Niall Harrison, Aidan Moher, Charlie Jane Anders, Jay Crasdan and Chris M Barkley, set about “Handicapping the Hugos”.

The premise of Hugo handicapping is to ruthlessly predict the winner – not rank one’s personal favorites, or arrange the nominees in ascending order of objective quality.

And Chris and James have certainly done that in the fan categories. Wiping the tears from their eyes, the duo predicts all the nominated blogs, bloggers and web artists will make a clean sweep of the fan Hugos. Yes, they can haz cheeseburger! Randall Munroe will overcome last year’s one-vote loss to be named Best Fan Artist. Pro writer Jim C. Hines will be annointed Best Fan Writer. SF Signal will win be voted Best Fanzine.

Is that true? Is the only remaining question whether concessionaires will be able to keep enough rope in stock at the Chicago Worldcon for all the fans who’ll want to hang themselves? Because these seem like pretty reasonable guesses to me. Can no one save us from this electronic doom?

But wait! I forgot one thing! Chris and James are kings of the internet too! They not only put out a PDF zine, last year’s Hugo winner whose titanic 300th issue will be featured in the Hugo Voter Packet. Their award acceptance video got over 40,000 views. They went viral! Who else on the ballot has done that? The only time I ever went viral was in high school with the Hong Kong Flu. They got four Hugo nominations this year! What’s with all this modesty? Why would the voters suddenly stop liking these guys? They didn’t predict themselves to win, the only thing that might have jinxed them — so look out world! I’m thinking that if Randall Munroe wins a Hugo this year, the main reason will be that Chris and James never took up drawing…

2012 FAAn Award Voting Stats

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Andy Hooper’s compilation of the 2012 Fan Activity Achievement Awards can be downloaded via this link: 2012-FAAN-Awards-stats.pdf [PDF file].

Fifty-six fans voted. You can find nearly all of the zines they liked at eFanzines.com, now the cornerstone of the fanzine field. Indeed, I thought it would be useful to post links to all the online sites that received more than 10 points:

Best Fan Website
eFanzines.com – Bill Burns: 179
File770.com – Mike Glyer: 48
Ansible.co.uk – Dave Langford: 27
Fanac.org – Joe Siclari/Jack Weaver: 23
Fiawol.org.uk – Rob Hansen: 20
Cartiledgeworld.co.uk – Graham Charnock – 17

P.S. True, you’re already here. You don’t need a link. But what if someone copies this list to another blog, eh?