The last thing I want to do is write about Ray Bradbury.

I don't have anything against the guy, in fact the complete opposite is true. I love Ray's stuff. It's my personal connection with his stories that makes writing about him hard. I can't help falling into cliche. Summing up how grateful I am for his stories is beyond my writing and yet no tribute at all would be worse.

The first sci-fi book I ever read was Bradbury's "R is for Rocket". I discovered it in my Jr. high school library and the reading opened a whole world of imaginative literature. If I had never read another one of his books I would still be eternally grateful, but many of his stories are personal favorites.

Bradbury doesn't just write a story, it runs from his veins. He ties off his writing arm with a long rubber hose, uses his pen to extract a story and plunges the results onto paper. His stories of the impossible seem personal as if they've already been lived. Bradbury isn't just writing, he seems to be retelling stories as he heard them from the characters involved. I picture Ray in white tennis shorts at the last stool in the Mos Eisley Cantina, a sort of intergalactic Norm from Cheers. He's nursing a warm bottle of Atomic Ale and drinking in the stories.

I got to meet him once at a signing. I had a brand new journal I had purchased for writing down ideas. What better way to break in a book of ideas than to have a childhood hero sign it first? Seeing all white pages, Ray Bradbury took his sharpie and drew a big goofy face in profile. Next to the face he wrote his secret to success.

Write, Write Write, Dammit.

I've never received easier advice so difficult to follow.

Bradbury Links

Ray's official site is here.

Did you know Bradbury won a Pulitzer this year? Yup. "A special citation to Ray Bradbury for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy."

An interview with Bradbury from Jason Marchi I think about 1998 or 99. At the time, Mel Gibson had planned to remake Farenheit 451. This article talks about that and other stuff.

Last year, Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan Ill. started a story telling festival. The one night only event is scheduled for Oct 26. This year's theme is Literary Monsters for more info...

If you're looking for a good bibliography start here. If you're looking for a more in depth look at his work, this site from the UK is exhaustive

If anyone in the blogosphere is paying attention, I am sorry for the long delay. I will be back shortly. Please accept this Indian Head test pattern as a temporary substitute for content.

Thank you for your patience

Safety Card Friday #4

The characters are almost on model and the coloring isn't too bad but what's with the slogan? "Obey your Safety Patrol He is there to help you" Shouldn't it be they are there to help you Or obey your Safety Patrol leader? Something like that. I'm also not seeing Yogi as the safety conscious type. This is the bear who runs willy-nilly through Jellystone with unauthorized picnic baskets.

And what curbside danger is Yogi saving anybody from? If he's about to help Top Cat across the street, he's doing it with no crosswalk in sight. I'm thinking Yogi needs some supervision. Since Ranger Smith isn't doing the job, maybe it's time to call in someone with more authority. Yogi needs someone like Smokey Bear who can whack him with a shovel and knock some sense into him. Just don't ruin the authorized yellow safety headgear.

Happy Birthday Jay North

At some point every generation embraces it's inner brat. There's a long history of fictional characters that are funny because of their nasty behavior. Just how mean the characters can be or how much they can get away with depends on the mood of the country at the time. Before the kids of South Park there was Bart Simpson. Before that, Kevin Mcallister [Home Alone] & Junior [Problem Child] and on down the line. In the 50's, the brat du jour was Dennis the Menace.

Hank Ketchum was living in Monterey California with his wife Alice and 4 year old son Dennis. One peaceful day Alice checks in on Dennis who has been put down for his nap. Mrs. Ketchum discovers that Dennis didn't want a nap. He's not only awake, he's in the process of ripping his room apart.

I'm sure Hank can hear a commotion, but every married man knows what's coming next. No matter how bad Dennis has been, Alice can only be so mad at the kid but the rest of that frustration and anger has gotta go somewhere. Being smart, Ketcham stays in the studio and waits for the storm to come to him. He didn't know his wife's next words were going to change his life.

"Your son is a menace!" Alice roars, and the little light goes on. Our son Dennis ...the Menace. In her exasperation, Ketcham's wife helped to create one of the most popular and enduring comic strips of the 20th century.



Dennis the Menace first appears on March 12, 1951 in sixteen papers. Eight years later millions are reading the strip around the world and the Dennis the Menace TV show begins it's four year run. Jay North is hand picked by Ketcham to play America's new wonder brat.

North played Dennis for four seasons and may have played him longer but near the end of the third season, Joseph Kearns who had been playing Mr. Wilson passed away. The show brought in Gale Gordon to play Mr. Wilson's brother for season 4. It's no fault of Gordon's but the show didn't recover.

For North, Hollywood roles slowly dried up and he eventually became a prison guard in the Florida penal system. He is now retired and living in Central Fl. He occasionally attends nostalgia conventions signing autographs for fans and discussing his days as Hollywood's tow headed terror.

The official Dennis the Menace site is pretty good with lots of info on Hank Ketcham and his creation

Hank Ketcham also wrote his autobiography and you can get it from the publisher here. This same publisher [Fantagraphics Books] is also releasing all of Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace strips in a planned 25 volume set. Every year a new book is released with two full years of Dennis strips. If you're a big fan of comic strip art, you owe a visit to Fantagraphics site.

Happy Birthday J. K. Rowling & Harry Potter

The first book was an instant hit with kids. The original popularity of the young Harry Potter series was not due to it's extensive ad budget or endless television commercials, the popularity was due to kids [and adults] who loved the story and shared their enthusiasm with other readers. It was this unintentional literary grass roots movement that caught the media's attention.

In the first few years, Harry's popularity was fueled by a huge readers circle involving a few countries and in this day and age, that's intimate compared to the world wide media storm that circled around the last few books in the series.

As a lark and well before any author could imagine how her writing was going to change her life, J.K. Rowling made Harry Potter's birthday the same day as her own. She will share July 31 with her fictional creation forever. I'm sure it will be both a blessing and a curse. As Rowling enters her octogenarian years and Harry reaches middle age, new reporters will seek her out to ask the same old questions. They'll use a shared birthday as the story hook and bang on her door right around her birthday for the rest of her life. Rowling will always be able to gauge the popularity of her book by the amount of e-mail she receives in July.


Now that the series is finished, a new Harry story begins and it's this next chapter in the saga I'm interested in. Where does it all go from here? Where will the community of Harry Potter fans find it's level? Will it's numbers increase after the ending like those of Star Wars or Star Trek? Will there be giant Harry Conventions or will it simply blend with current fantasy culture? As time moves on will the culture of the books or the movies become most dominant? Will these cultures be forced to split or will they share the same space and jab at each other only in fun? Will the box office of the last two films increase or will the intensity fade now that the story is over in it's original medium?

Harry Potter is not a fad, at least by my definition. Sure, the media spotlight and the gossip around the author will fade [thankfully], but the book series will take it's place on the classics shelf and be mentioned with Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz for the next century. How the movies are accepted is another story.

Nearly 15 hours of a story that grows darker every episode doesn't seem like a recipe for a family film favorite. You don't see Old Yeller as the center of many film festivals. Young goths of the future who see Harry as the poster child for their own misunderstood youth, will give it a cult following, but I have trouble seeing the middle of America accepting the entire body of work as a pop culture classic. Mass culture will likely cull the first movie from the herd and ignore the rest.

After the final film, the Harry Potter community has a big problem. Everything they feed on will now be up to them. Rowling has no plans for further Harry stories and she has stated that no one else will write about her characters. The communities of fans that are largest & strongest are those with something new to explore. Mickey Mouse, Luke Skywalker and James T. Kirk survive because they are professionally reinvented in new mediums. Excellent fictional characters who are kept from those opportunities [Bozo and Calvin & Hobbes come to mind], become fond footnotes only to be explored by those who remember and those who accidentally stumble across them.

On the plus side, creating a strong fan community has never been easier. The social nature of the Internet has given creative people a place to share their visions. It's easy for me to envision a world wide group of fans creating excellent new content for each other using the original characters creating by Rowling. Sure, it's already taking place with tens of thousands of fan stories and drawings and hundreds of Hogwart's sites and role playing venues where people come to chat in character, but what I'm talking about is quality over quantity, I see a sort of semi - pro movement where small pockets of Internet space is reserved only for the best of the best. I see excellent writers and artists contributing without payment because it's a great outlet for their talent.


Blogs have shown that there are hundreds of thousands of people who can and do create content as good or better than what you already consume [present company excluded]. It's already happening all over the net. I think the fan communities that will survive in the future will intentionally adopt this model for their own. Since Harry's fandom has spent it's whole life on the web, it could easily be carving that wave, but what they actually do remains to be seen.

No matter what, the first saga of Harry Potter is finished and Rowling's writing has never been stronger. The author is on to a new chapter in her own life and I wish her well. Amid all the current signings and readings I hope she has a moment to stop and realize just what a wide open year she has ahead of her. If I had been in her place the last nine years, I would tell my family to take this year off and don't wake me until July 2008. I suspect she will choose a different way to celebrate.

Safety Card Friday #3

Why would you choose the horse to ride a bike?. You'd think Quick Draw has the horsepower to get there pretty quick on foot. If you're a horse on a bike I'm pretty sure there's an Elmer's factory in your immediate future. Wouldn't big lumbering Yogi or Wally Gator be a better choice? [Yes, I am attempting to apply a strangely twisted logic to cartoon characters drawn over 40 years ago. These thoughts spill out naturally for me and the very reason I have ample medication and a blog.]

Today, Quicky would be wearing a helmet under the 10 gallon hat, but in the 60's nobody cared if children or horses were brain damaged.

Could the art have been done in-house at Hanna Barbera? Did they have a consumer product dept? Was it freelanced by an HB artist? The drawings are on model but who colored these things? Quick Draw is usually white with a brown hat. His hat and his hide should be switched. Is this his twin brother Quick Tan? Cousin Brick Jaw? I have so many unanswered questions.

Have a great weekend everybody.

Thank You Scott Corbett

You may not have heard of him but Scott Corbett changed my life.

It was early in my 2nd grade year and we were in the school library. Miss Sporky had given us 15 minutes to find something to read and time was running out. [I've forgotten my teachers real last name. I remember she was young and I had a crush.] I was in one of those kid panics, running through the stacks trying to find something before the librarian or Sporky gave me something off of the teacher approved reading list. The literary equivalent of brussel sprouts.

I don't know what caught my eye but in the last few seconds as Miss Sporky was using her teacher voice to get kids to the checkout line, I finally settled on "Ever Ride A Dinosaur?" by Scott Corbett. I'm sure it was the dinosaur cover that cinched it. Last minute as it was, it was one of the best choices I ever made.

I laughed out loud while I was reading the book which got me in trouble during free time and when it was time to do my oral report, my favorite anecdote had me laughing too hard to talk. Of course that got the class laughing and Miss Sporky had me sit down before I was through. That book traveled through a lot of 2nd grade hands that year.

I don't know why I connected with this book. I liked reading comic books, I liked reading comic strips and I didn't even mind reading textbooks but this was like a reading vacation; a sort of reading road trip. Most of my reading was for getting from here to there but Corbett's book was like finding the open road, the trip was light and relaxing. Recreational reading became a lifelong habit.


Like all kids that lock on to something good, I went searching for more Scott Corbett and the old boy didn't disappoint. I found "The Lemonade Trick, the first in a series of a dozen books that Corbett started in 1960 and finished in 1977. "The Limerick Trick" [4th in the series] was and still is, a personal favorite.


Corbett was born July 27 1913. He had a degree in journalism and was a free lance magazine writer in NY. During WWII, he was a reporter for Stars & Stripes magazine and an editor of Yank, an armed service magazine based in Paris. After the war, he taught at Moses Brown, a private school for K-12. He would teach during the day and write late afternoons. He wrote five adult novels before turning to kids literature. Corbett died last year at the age of 93 . He's not a media darling but with over 80 books to his credit and 30 years of kid lit, Scott Corbett leaves a legacy any author would be proud of.