Dreamsongs, Volume I Read Free Page B

my LOCs as well. Down the slippery slope I went, from letters to short articles, and then a regular column in a fanzine called
The Comic World News,
where I offered suggestions on how comics I did not like could be “saved.” I did some art for
TCWN
as well, despite the handicap of not being able to draw. I even had one cover published: a picture of the Human Torch spelling out the fanzine’s name in fiery letters. Since the Torch was a vague human outline surrounded by flames, he was easier to draw than characters who had noses and mouths and fingers and muscles and stuff.
    When I was a freshman at Marist, my dream was still to be an astronaut…and not just your regular old astronaut, but the first man on the moon. I still recall the day one of the brothers asked each of us what we wanted to be, and the entire class burst into raucous laughter at my answer. By junior year, a different brother assigned us to research our chosen careers, and I researched fiction writing (and learned that the average fiction writer made $1200 a year from his stories, a discovery almost as appalling as that laughter two years earlier). Something profound had happened to me in between, to change my dreams for good and all. That something was comics fandom. It was during my sophomore and junior years at Marist that I first began to write actual stories for the fanzines.
    I had an ancient manual typewriter that I’d found in Aunt Gladys’ attic, and had fooled around on it enough to become a real one-finger wonder. The black half of the black-and-red ribbon was so worn you could hardly read the type, but I made up for that by pounding the keys so hard they incised the letters into the paper. The inner parts of the “e” and “o” often fell right out, leaving holes. The red half of the ribbon was comparatively fresh; I used red for emphasis, since I didn’t know anything about italics. I didn’t know about margins, doublespacing, or carbon paper either.
    My first stories starred a superhero come to Earth from outer space, like Superman. Unlike Superman, however, my guy did not have a super physique. In fact, he had no physique at all, since he lacked a body. He was a brain in a goldfish bowl. Not the most original of notions; brains in jars were a staple of both print SF and comics, although usually they were the villains. Making my brain-in-a-jar the good guy seemed a terrific twist to me.
    Of course, my hero had a robot body he could put on to fight crime. In fact, he had a whole
bunch
of robot bodies. Some had jets so he could fly, some had tank treads so he could roll, some had jointed robot legs so he could walk. He had arms ending in fingers, arms ending in tentacles, arms ending in big nasty metal pincers, arms ending in ray guns. In each story my space brain would don a different body, and if he got smashed up by the villain, there were always spares back in his spaceship.
    I called him Garizan, the Mechanical Warrior.
    I wrote three stories about Garizan; all very short, but
complete
. I even did the art. A brain in a goldfish bowl is almost as easy to draw as a guy made of fire.
    When I shipped off the Garizan stories, I chose one of the lesser fanzines of the day, figuring they stood a better chance of being accepted there. I was right. The editor snapped them up with shouts of glee. This was less of an accomplishment than it might seem. Many of those early fanzines were perpetually desperate for material to fill their dittoed pages, and would have accepted anything anyone cared to send them, even stories about a brain in a goldfish bowl. I could scarcely wait to see my stories in print.
    Alas. The fanzine and its editor promptly vanished, before publishing even one of my Garizan stories. The manuscripts were not returned, and since I had not yet mastered the complexities of carbon paper, I had no file copies.
    You would think that might have discouraged me, but in fact the acceptance of my stories had done such wonders for my