While I'm at Comic-Con this week, I may not have time to post much on this blog (click here to see why) but I don't want this page to look abandoned. Therefore, I "wrote ahead" a long story about something that happened at Comic-Con in 2003 and I'll be serializing it here over the days I'll be down there doing this year's con and perhaps collecting tales of equal interest.
This occurred on Saturday, July 19 of that year in Room 6A at Comic-Con International. In a blog post here shortly after, I gave this account of the panel I hosted there that day…
At 3:00, I ran across the hall to moderate a gathering of three legends of science fiction: Forrest J Ackerman, a still-feisty Julie Schwartz…and the incomparable Ray Bradbury. Ray is still confined to a wheelchair due to one or more strokes but from the waist-up, he's still Ray "The Martian Chronicles" Bradbury. I took the three of them through the saga of their three-way friendship: In the thirties, the L.A.-based Ackerman and the New York-based Schwartz struck up a correspondence which led to Ackerman contributing to The Time-Traveller, a small-circulation mimeographed publication which Schwartz produced in 1932 with his friend, Mort Weisinger. It was the first science fiction fanzine ever. Ackerman also participated in a small s-f fan club in Los Angeles, which is where he met Bradbury. Later, when Ray travelled to New York (via a gruesome Greyhound bus) for his first science-fiction convention, it was because Forry had loaned him ninety dollars, which he later paid back by selling The Los Angeles Times on street corners.
It was at that convention that Bradbury met Schwartz who had become an agent for s-f writers. Two years later, Julie sold a story of Ray's — the first one ever to be purchased by an editor. As it happened, Schwartz was planning a trip to Los Angeles anyway, so he decided to deliver the good news and payment in person. He drove to L.A. and his first night there, hooked up with a friend and went out to get some dinner. By coincidence, the restaurant was across the street from where Bradbury was hawking newspapers. Schwartz recognized his client…and that's how Ray Bradbury found out he'd become a professional writer. Julie walked up and handed him a check for $35, less the 10% commission.
Bradbury spoke eloquently and passionately about a range of subjects, including the space program's shameful (to him) neglect of Mars. He's just finished an article for Playboy on the subject, so those of you who buy Playboy for the articles can find out his thoughts on the topic. He also spoke with even greater passion to those in the audience who aspire to write, urging them to follow their own muses and to not listen to "any damned fool" who tells them how and what they should write. It was a short but wonderful hour and I doubt anyone who was present will ever forget it.
That's how I wrote the story back then and every word of it was true. But it wasn't the whole story about that panel. If you want to read the whole story, stop by here tomorrow. And the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and as I'm writing this now, I'm not sure how many days it's going to run.