Brad W Foster, Irving Texas USA
bwfoster@juno.com
Seems to take me longer to get through an online zine, staring at that screen do start to tire the eyes after a bit. But, this is a new issue of Challenger, so not going to leave it alone too long!
Sorry to hear about the forced move, but I hope things will still turn out good in the long run. Hey, come on down to the Red River Revel next fall and say hi. I've exhibited my work there the last few years, and hopefully I'll get juries in again this year! (Even if they don't let me back, it's still a fantastic art and music fest to check out there in Shreveport. It's the first place I ever saw a rock group with an electric bag pipe. And that wasn't just for background, this guy could step up front and rock out with that thing!)
I loved Terry Jeeves' "The Old Old Story", though being more a child of the last half of the last century (what an odd phrase!),that outline sounded more like every "sci-fi B-and-C-Movie" plot I'd seen. Actually, guess I've always been prejudiced toward print, and so felt the cliche's must fall only on film. Ah, but no, every genre and media must have just such a baseline they have to rise above. On the other hand, lots of fun to use that plot when you inject the humor.
Thanks so much to Sheryl for getting this wonderful update from Tim Kirk on what he has been up to in her "Fanartists on Parade", and to Chall for giving her a place to print it, along with all that great Kirk art. Tim was pretty much out of fandom when I first got into it, but I saw enough of his art to be totally blown away, and his Kirk's Works collection is still a treasured addition to my shelf of art books. I never felt I could achieve anything like the levels of quantity and quality that he seemed to do so effortlessly, but looking at his work was what made me think it would be possible to actually have fun with my own. In recent years, I never could find out what had "happened" to him. Knew he had worked at Hallmark, and only some rumors of Disney...we used to joke about how he got swallowed up by two corporations where the individual artist kind of vanished into the maw of it all under the company "signature". After I won my last Hugo award ten years ago, I joked that people really needed to vote me just one more, since that would mean I had finally won more than Tim, and so he would have to start doing art for fanzines again, just to reclaim his title there.
Well, no one has taken me up on that offer, but hey, here's a whole mess of Tim's art... and he'll probably win this year, cause even a little bit of Kirk art blows the rest of us completely out of the water. One of the best, most creative artistic talents around!
And I agree with Sheryl Birkhead on deserving fan artists getting a little more recognition. I hope she is able to get something from Steven Fox. Another incredibly prolific and highly talented artist, I was lucky enough to have exchanged a few letters with him way back when, though he always seemed to be changing his address, and was hard to keep track of, until eventually I was just never was able to track him down again, and he seemed to kind of fade out of fandom. But what a unique talent he had. I'd love to hear that, like Tim here, he has simply gone on to greater artistic challenge and reward.
Sheryl's other piece "How Far will Water Run Uphill?" was one of those stories where you feel, no matter how bad things are going for me, it is probably going worse for someone else. (Which means, of course, that there is someone else out there with an even worse situation than Sheryl, and another worse than them, and so on... let's not go there!) We've had all kinds of problems with water flooding into the back of our house for several years. Lots of suctioning water out of the carpets, trying to dry things out, standing in the backyard in the middle of driving rainstorms, tossing buckets of water out into the alley, digging ditches, installing pumps, etc etc... but no way could I have put up with lugging buckets loaded with water up stairs for hour after hour. I think after the first 30 minutes I would have decided that the basement would now officially be the indoor swimming pool, and left it at that! Great issue!
Seems to take me longer to get through an online zine, staring at that screen do start to tire the eyes after a bit. But, this is a new issue of Challenger, so not going to leave it alone too long!
Sorry to hear about the forced move, but I hope things will still turn out good in the long run. Hey, come on down to the Red River Revel next fall and say hi. I've exhibited my work there the last few years, and hopefully I'll get juries in again this year! (Even if they don't let me back, it's still a fantastic art and music fest to check out there in Shreveport. It's the first place I ever saw a rock group with an electric bag pipe. And that wasn't just for background, this guy could step up front and rock out with that thing!)
I loved Terry Jeeves' "The Old Old Story", though being more a child of the last half of the last century (what an odd phrase!),that outline sounded more like every "sci-fi B-and-C-Movie" plot I'd seen. Actually, guess I've always been prejudiced toward print, and so felt the cliche's must fall only on film. Ah, but no, every genre and media must have just such a baseline they have to rise above. On the other hand, lots of fun to use that plot when you inject the humor.
Thanks so much to Sheryl for getting this wonderful update from Tim Kirk on what he has been up to in her "Fanartists on Parade", and to Chall for giving her a place to print it, along with all that great Kirk art. Tim was pretty much out of fandom when I first got into it, but I saw enough of his art to be totally blown away, and his Kirk's Works collection is still a treasured addition to my shelf of art books. I never felt I could achieve anything like the levels of quantity and quality that he seemed to do so effortlessly, but looking at his work was what made me think it would be possible to actually have fun with my own. In recent years, I never could find out what had "happened" to him. Knew he had worked at Hallmark, and only some rumors of Disney...we used to joke about how he got swallowed up by two corporations where the individual artist kind of vanished into the maw of it all under the company "signature". After I won my last Hugo award ten years ago, I joked that people really needed to vote me just one more, since that would mean I had finally won more than Tim, and so he would have to start doing art for fanzines again, just to reclaim his title there.
Well, no one has taken me up on that offer, but hey, here's a whole mess of Tim's art... and he'll probably win this year, cause even a little bit of Kirk art blows the rest of us completely out of the water. One of the best, most creative artistic talents around!
And I agree with Sheryl Birkhead on deserving fan artists getting a little more recognition. I hope she is able to get something from Steven Fox. Another incredibly prolific and highly talented artist, I was lucky enough to have exchanged a few letters with him way back when, though he always seemed to be changing his address, and was hard to keep track of, until eventually I was just never was able to track him down again, and he seemed to kind of fade out of fandom. But what a unique talent he had. I'd love to hear that, like Tim here, he has simply gone on to greater artistic challenge and reward.
Sheryl's other piece "How Far will Water Run Uphill?" was one of those stories where you feel, no matter how bad things are going for me, it is probably going worse for someone else. (Which means, of course, that there is someone else out there with an even worse situation than Sheryl, and another worse than them, and so on... let's not go there!) We've had all kinds of problems with water flooding into the back of our house for several years. Lots of suctioning water out of the carpets, trying to dry things out, standing in the backyard in the middle of driving rainstorms, tossing buckets of water out into the alley, digging ditches, installing pumps, etc etc... but no way could I have put up with lugging buckets loaded with water up stairs for hour after hour. I think after the first 30 minutes I would have decided that the basement would now officially be the indoor swimming pool, and left it at that! Great issue!
posted by ;-p at 7:07 PM
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