In 1960 I met Dick and Pat Lupoff and soon found myself working closely with them as the art director of their publication Xero. Dick calls Xero a "journal of popular culture" in this July 13, 2004 panel discussion on KUSP radio (88.9 in Santa Cruz, California). The other panelists are Jeremy Lassen (Night Shade Books), author Kage Baker (In the Garden of Iden), Pat Lupoff (children's book buyer for Cody's Books), Marty Halpern (Golden Gryphon), Jacob Weisman (Tachyon Publications) and moderator Rick Kleffel (The Agony Column).Dick gave Xero a unique format, inspired by the Ace Doubles. One side of Xero targeted the science fiction community, both fans and professionals. Flip it over, and the other side was devoted to vintage comic books. It was a pioneering effort since almost no serious studies of comic books existed at that time. Xero went on to win a Hugo Award in 1963, and its articles on comics were later collected in the book All in Color for a Dime (Ace, 1970).
Above is a cover I did for Xero 9. I'm posting it here to clarify, since it was recently reprinted in The Best of Xero (Tachyon, 2004) with the caption crediting another artist. This was created by dripping rubber cement on a board, letting it dry, covering with India ink, pulling up the rubber cement and then drawing in the white areas. It was printed on red dayglo paper.
Bhob --
ReplyDeleteSorry about the erroneous credit line in THE BEST OF XERO. That was (still is) a pretty good book but there were far too many errors in it. Reason: the publisher found that scanning and OCR didn't work well on those old mimeographed pages, so he had the whole thing retyped. I proofread the typewritten ms. which then went to the typesetter. Alas, I never saw galley or page-proofs. Didn't see the book again until it was finished. I was, to say the least, upset, but there was nothing I could do about it. You have my apologies!
-- Dick Lupoff