Huett: New Yorker Fanoclasts

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,

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