Dreamsongs, Volume I Read Online Free

confidence that I hardly noticed their subsequent disappearance. I went back to my typewriter, and invented a new hero. This one I named Manta Ray. A Batman wannabee, Manta Ray was a masked avenger of the night who fought crime with a bullwhip. In his first adventure I pitted him against a villain named the Executioner who had a special gun that shot tiny little guillotine blades instead of bullets.
    “Meet the Executioner” turned out much better than any of the Garizan stories, so when it was done I raised my sights and sent it to a higher-quality fanzine.
Ymir,
edited by Johnny Chambers, was one of a number of ’zines coming out of the San Francisco Bay Area, a hotbed of early comics fandom.
    Chambers accepted my story…and what’s more, he
published
it! It appeared in
Ymir
#2, dated February 1965; nine pages of superheroics in glorious purple ditto. Don Fowler, one of the leading fan artists of the time (actually a pseudonym for Buddy Saunders), provided a dramatic title page showing the Executioner shooting little guillotines at Manta Ray. He added some nice spot illoes as well. Fowler’s art was so much better than anything I could have done that I gave up my own feeble attempts at drawing after that, and settled for telling my stories in prose. “Text stories,” they were called in those early days of comicdom, to distinguish them from fully-illustrated comic strips (which were much more popular with my fellow fanboys).
    Manta Ray later returned for a second story, this one so long (twenty single-spaced pages or so) that Chambers decided to serialize it. The first half of “The Isle of Death” appeared in
Ymir
#5, and ended with a “To Be Continued.” Only it wasn’t.
Ymir
never had another issue, and the second half of Manta Ray’s second adventure went the same way as the three lost Garizan stories.
    Meanwhile, I had raised my sights still higher. The most prestigious fanzine in early comics fandom was
Alter Ego,
but that was largely given over to articles, critiques, interviews. For text stories and amateur strips, the place to be was
Star-Studded Comics,
published by three Texas fans named Larry Herndon, Buddy Saunders, and Howard Keltner, who called themselves the Texas Trio.
    When
SSC
was launched in ’63, it featured a full-color, printed cover glorious to behold, compared to most other fanzines of the day. The inside of the first few issues was the usual faded ditto, but with their fourth issue the Texas Trio went to photo-offset for the interiors as well, making
SSC
far and away the best-looking fanzine of its time. Just like Marvel and DC, the Trio had their own stable of superheroes; Powerman, the Defender, Changling, Dr. Weird, the Eye, the Human Cat, the Astral Man, and more. Don Fowler, Grass Green, Biljo White, Ronn Foss, and most of the other top fan artists were doing strips for them, and Howard Waldrop was writing text stories (Howard was sort of the fourth member of the Texas Trio, kind of like being the fifth Beatle). So far as comics fandom was concerned in 1964,
Star-Studded Comics
was the big time.
    I wanted to be part of it, and I had a terrific
original
idea. Brains in jars like Garizan and masked crimefighters like Manta Ray were old hat, but no one had ever put a superhero on
skis.
(I had never skiied. Still haven’t.) My hero had one ski pole that was also a flamethrower, while the other doubled as a machine gun. Instead of fighting some stupid supervillain, I pitted him against the Commies to be “realistic.” But the best part of my story was the ending, where the White Raider met a shocking, tragic end.
That
would make the Texas Trio sit up and take notice, I was certain.
    I called the story “The Strange Saga of the White Raider,” and sent it off to Larry Herndon. As well as being one-third of
SSC
’s august editorial triad, Larry had been one of the first people I’d struck up a correspondence with on entering comicdom. I was sure that he would like the story.
    He