Reading Room I'LL BE DAMNED "Nest Egg"

Here's a sci-fi strip meant for Major Publications' Web of Horror #4...

...but, since that magazine ended with #3, it found a home in Mark Feldman's I'll be Damned #2, a year later!

Note the word balloon coming out of the big black hole in the title lettering where a photostat of "Webster" (the monstrous spider host of Web of Horror) would have been pasted-up.

Instead it's a word balloon coming out of a literal black hole!

Written by Alan Simons, penciled by Steve Hickman, inked by Robert L Kline (1-3) & Dan Adkins (4-6), this never-reprinted tale is an example of the high-quality material in fanzines of the late 1960s-early 1970s, much of which (sadly) has never been seen since the mags were limited to mail order and comics convention sales!

(There were no comics shops, and no such thing as the internet at that time...hard to conceive, I know!)

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Sense of Wonder

My Life in Comic Fandom

Reading Room REALITY "Quasar!"

Long before the internet and DeviantArt, up-and-coming artists were published in fanzines...

...to get their work in front of an audience, receive feedback, and make a few bucks!

Originally-drawn for Web of Horror (which explains the spider-like host of Web, Webster, introducing and concluding the story), this early tale by Steve Hickman ended up in the first issue of Reality, a fanzine published in 1970 by 15-year old Robert Gerson.

When Web died after only three issues, a number of writers and artists had no market for their material without losing all the rights to it, so, in order to get it published to make a few bucks for their labor (and retain the copyrights), they let a young entrepreneur use the stories in his fanzine, which was sold at conventions and in used book stores and head shops alongside underground comics.

(There were no comic book shops back then.)
Hickman spent a few years working in the comics field before moving on to commercial art, particularly sci-fi/fantasy book covers, with over 400 titles to his credit!

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Empyrean

Art of Stephen Hickman