The Comics Journal

Shel resigned as “founder and president” of the San Diego Comic-Con in 1984. At the time, he explained to me that he felt it was “time to move on” or some such evasion. Later, after our friendship had matured somewhat, he said he’d quit because he couldn’t stand the political atmosphere in the committee meetings anymore: the emphasis was shifting to Hollywood and motion-picture stars, and not many of the committee, he claimed, were any longer fans of comics and cartooning. The Con, he said, had become “this huge monster” that he no longer enjoyed. That was his side of the story; there’s another side that we’ll hear about anon.

When Steve Schanes started Blackthorne Publishing in the mid-1980s, Shel joined the enterprise to produce a series of 72-page square-back booklets reprinting famous newspaper comic strips, supplying camera-ready pages of strips harvested from his scrapbook acreage. After a couple dozen volumes, the Dick Tracy series evolved into a 32-page monthly magazine, also edited by Shel, who delegated the paste-up chores to teenage would-be artists. The delegation relieved Shel of the most tedious part of the production process, but he had another motive for doing it: he knew the work would teach the young artist aspirants professional skills that would be valuable to them in commercial art, should they actually get into it.

Shel had created the Comic-Con by delegating jobs, and he was adept at the practice. Once he subcontracted an art job to me—drawing cartoon figures for the box cover of some sort of board game. Some among Comic-Con officialdom maintained Shel’s penchant for delegating hands-on work disqualified him as the Con’s founder: the work, they said, was done by others. True, but the inspiration came from Shel, and most of the Con’s organizers recognized his role.

After about 100 issues of Dick Tracy Monthly, Blackthorne collapsed in debt and rumors. And then Caniff died in 1988. Shel, shattered personally and unemployed professionally, tried to withdraw from comics fandom. He took up painting and focused on the history of the media he loved, comics and film. He attended Cinecon regularly and screened hours of old movies on DVDs at his Ocean Beach apartment. He did lettering and design jobs, but he was increasingly incapacitated by diabetes and wasn’t able to pound the pavement to find work as he had once done. To make ends meet until he started drawing Social Security, he sold original art from his collection. Sometimes, rarely, he evoked Porgy’s song from “Porgy and Bess”—“I got plenty of nothin’”—“but, like Popeye,” Shel was quick to add, “I yam what I yam and tha’s all I yam.” And he regarded the Comic-Con with affection and pride. “I have the feeling that I ‘done good’ by establishing the Comic-Con,” he wrote me. “It does help a lot of folks! For the most part, it’s a happy thing. I know I’d feel terrible if it ended.”

Mike Towry wrote Shel in 2002: “It is impressive what the Con has evolved into, but it has only had the chance to do so because it was founded upon your true love of comics, their creators, and their fans, and because you generously shepherded it through its critical early years at material disadvantage to yourself.” Towry went on to report that his oldest son was a volunteer at the Con that year.

By the time Shel officially “retired” from the Con in 1984, attendance had reached 4,000, and Hollywood, as I mentioned, was becoming a big part of the mix. With the recent blockbuster success of movies featuring comic book superheroes in subsequent years, the invasion was complete. As Entertainment Weekly’s cryptic 2009 history of the event notes: “In the last decade, Comic-Con has exploded into the most important pop culture event on Hollywood’s calendar—a frenzied marketing free-for-all where, each July, major studios and networks flaunt their coolest new projects, trying to woo an audience of 125,000 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fans.”

Shel watched it and wasn’t entirely thrilled: “Hollywood has kind of hijacked the Con,” he said, his voice a gentle rumble, and in his eye, the glimmer of a twinkle.

Comics fans are not what Hollywood is after. The number of comic book booths in the mammoth Convention Center’s exhibit halls is further testimony to the subversion of the Comic-Con to the power of celluloid and money in a capitalist society. Mostly, the booths display videogames and motion picture tie-ins and toys derived from the lot. Comics are a small delegation; and old comics, the tattered and yellowed survivors of the Golden Age, are in even shorter supply. The guest list for the last dozen years or so included very few comic-strip cartooners. In Shel’s regime, they were there in considerable numbers, their presence conjured by Shel’s insistent letters. For the last decade or so, comic-book artists and TV and movie stars far outnumber the comic-strippers.

Shel took away with him many pleasant memories of his years with the Con and all that the association engendered. As Laura Embry wrote in a 2006 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “The convention helped him get more work as an artist and a writer and enhanced his reputation as a historian of comics. When Warren Beatty turned Dick Tracy into a movie in 1990, Dorf was a consultant.” And if there was a strip that captivated Shel more than Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, it was Gould’s Dick Tracy. “Dorf can remember as a kid waiting on his front porch for the carrier to bring the day’s paper so he could learn what had happened to the square-jawed detective. He loved the stories, and he loved the artwork.”

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