Reading Hembeck's FredSez page tonight (see previous entry below), I was taken back 30 years to my time with the Pittsburgh Comix Club. I started to type Fred a note about those legendary days, and then I thought, "Why am I wasting this valuable blog material on a single person?" No offense, Fred. But there's gold in them thar bloggin' hills!
I first moved to Pittsburgh in March of 1974 to attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. At that point in time, the 2-year program, optimistically called "Visual Communications," consisted of a bunch of teachers who worked for years in fields like architectual rendering, department store merchandising, and portrait caricature. (Someday I'll tell that whole, twisted saga.) But 2 things that I came across in my early adventures in the "big city" were my first comics store (Eide's, which still exists) and the Pittsburgh Comix Club.
The latter was a loosely-based group of striking individuals, mostly just barely post-adolescent males with one common bond: A love of comics. The age range was roughly 13 or so to 30-something. We met once a month in Greg Eide's tiny little comics shop in the Pittsburgh suburb of Etna. Greg was a law student at Duquesne University who decided to sell comics for a living, and 32 years later, he's still doing it, albeit at a much larger location in downtown Pittsburgh, with one of the best stocked stores in the country. One time we had so many people packed into that one-room shack in Etna that the fire marshall came by and closed us down.
One Saturday of each month, we'd all make the trip out there, most of us by bus, since for some strange reason, many comics fans don't drive (no disposable income?). At that point, Greg's business was mainly in old comics, fanzines and books (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.). It was basically a used book store. The club met and tried to come up with plans. Fanzines, conventions, picnics, what-not. It was hard to get anything done with all the internal bickering and ego-balancing, but they did a lot of things. They took trips to places like Phil Seuling's New York cons, came to the San Diego Comic-Con once, went to the Rutland, Vermont Halloween Parade another year. Some of the members loved to dress up in comic character costumes, and the rather large club membership allowed them to do groups like The Avengers and the Legion of Superheroes. They published an anniversary special each year, a thick sheaf of xeroxed pages that the club president had bound into hardcover books. I still have one. Everyone contributed...a story or article, a piece of art, something. It didn't matter if it was good or bad. The president was an equal-opportunity editor. He'd use anything as long as someone took the time to contribute.
The patron saint--and president and founding member--of the Pittsburgh Comix Club was a shy, hearing-impaired male nurse named Ben Pondexter. Ben worked at Shadyside Hospital (in a time period when male nurses were a rarity) and he loved comics. The slogan of the club was the awkwardly-worded "comics are the good times," and Ben lived by that. He was big on discovering new talent. Howard Bender, who went on to a nice little career in the comics biz, was a Pittsburgh resident at the time, and a strong proponent of producing a fanzine. He did the first issue of the club's Pittsburgh Comix and Fandom. And then I came along and picked up the torch and did the second issue.
I don't quite know how many members there were at any given time. It fluctuated. Sometimes some of the younger guys got their nose bent out of shape and went off and then came back. The club, especially Ben and Howard and another young guy by the name of Mark Lerer, were all pretty ambitious. While I was involved with them, from about 1974-1981, they had a number of conventions. One was held at Duquesne University, and then they did these weird mall cons, one at Monroeville Mall and one at Northway Mall. Imagine setting up in the aisles of a mall with your comics on tables. I don't know of anywhere else where this was done, and it was quite a schizoid event; comic shoppers amongst mall shoppers. We'd use the common meeting room most malls had at that time for programming. And the PittCons, as they came to be known (not related to the fine Pittsburgh Comicons that Michael and Renee George have been doing for the past 10 years), were fun events with a great pro attendance. People like Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Paul Levitz, Jim Shooter and many more attended, year-after-year. I remember having dinner with Marie Severin at the Brown Derby in Monroeville Mall and it was great. I did programming and the program book for PittCon a couple of years in the late 70s. Little did I know what the future held for me along those lines.
Even when I moved away from Pittsburgh, I still stayed involved with the PCC. Mark Lerer, who had been editing the club newsletter, went to college and it was passed on to me. At that time, I was working for a local newspaper in my hometown of Tamaqua, PA as art director. I had access to a photostat machine and a new computerized typesetter. My bosses graciously let me use the equipment at just the cost of material, and I produced 10 issues of Pittsburgh Fan Forum as a digest-sized publication (the cover of my last issue is seen on the Hembeck.com page). It was a lot of fun, and even then showed my propensity for publishing. Eventually, the club just kind of drifted apart. Some of the younger guys discovered girls (without staples in them) and went off to college. The in-fighting, such a major part of a lot of comics-related groups and clubs, got to be too much for Ben. Never in good health, Ben's ear problems came back and he died in the early 80s of cancer. He was older than we all suspected (in his 50s, I believe). When he died, the Pittsburgh Comix Club went with him. No one else had that kind of dedication or drive.
Thirty years later and Fred Hembeck (damn him) takes me back to that time. I still see Mercy Van Vlack's name pop up from time to time. She was a charter member and almost always the female costume wearer in group events: Black Canary when the club dressed as the JLA, or the Scarlet Witch to Ben's Vision in The Avengers. Tom Hegeman is still in touch with me. Tom was (and is) an attorney in upstate New York and was an honorary PCC member. He's still very much involved in comics fandom. Howard Bender lives in New Jersey and is still a freelance artist. Mark Lerer showed up at a Comic-Con a couple of years ago and is a fine artist with gallery showings in the New York area. And me? Well, ironically, here I am in San Diego, as Director of Programming for the biggest comics and pop culture convention in the world, still trying to get Ben's word out there.
Comics are the good times, indeed.
Hey Gary! I meet a guy a couple weeks back (in a strip club of course) and we started talking and he was the guy who dressed as Electro at the Monroeville Mall Con when Ben The Vision.(THE scrawniest Vision you'd ever want to see.) I remembered that Electro costume being a pretty cool costume but he said it was pretty bad. You got any pictures of that? I never made it to the Etna Eide's. My first trip to the PCC was in the basement of Eide's North Side store somewhere around where Atria's is in PNC Park.
Posted by: Rich Yanizeski | 01/14/2005 at 10:14 AM