The Monolith
In my most recent blog I talked about doing cover illustrations for some of the early self-published Star Trek fanzines and novels across the US. But, I also did a self-published book and fanzines in Utah as part of that early creative rush.
After I graduated from USU, I came into contact with SF and Trek fans at my first art job at the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. They immediately involved me in their finish activities, one which was producing a fanzine called Clavius. My art was especially appreciated for helping liven up the publication with interior illustrations, culminating in a cover highlighting a prized interview with noted SF writer, Larry Niven. I even started doing cartoons which grew into a comic strip for the zine. After a few issues with these cartoons, several of the editors and writers of the zine approached me with an idea. why not do a small book, full of cartoons and sell it along with the fanzine at one of the big new Star Trek conventions? One member of the group’s father ran a print shop and could give us a good rate for the book. Not being one to turn down a foolish idea, I readily agreed.
At that period of my life, I was unemployed and living at home, so time and money was not a problem, and I launched into the work, not realizing what I had gotten myself into. Over the next few months, I drew and hand-lettered one hundred ink-drawn strip cartoons, only in a vertical format to cut down on costs. I also used pressed down, hand-cut dot screens to add gray-scale backgrounds which would be easy to photoprint for the book. We hand-assembled the pages and glued them into a fairly thin wrap-around book cover. (After a couple of years the glue would dry completely and the pages began to fall out, and the cover stock was terrible and the ink would readily smear.) But we had our book just days before a major convention, so several members of the group traveled to Los Angeles to Equicon 76 and sold out a lot of the print run to eager Star Trek fans there.
The cartoons were not specifically Star Trek in nature, there were no references to anyone or anything Star Trek. I had just used the space ship as my main character in the cartoon narrative. Other characters included a maniacal asteroid, a ufo, a Klingon ship as the bad guy, of course, and a very hungry space monster along with other strange bits and pieces from science fiction. One of which was, the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey, hence the ungainly title of the book, Who Was That Monolith I Saw You With? Most of the money made from the sale of the book went into travel expenses and printing costs, I actually made nothing from that first book. Later I would sell the book to a small press publisher and did 3 books, Who Was That Monolith I Saw You With? Son of Monolith, and My Stars! A cartoon strip, My Stars! ran in a local newspaper for 9 months, and ended up in the books and a little later, I did a personal fanzine, self-published, which used the rest of the cartoons in a book selection titled, Tripping the Light Fantastic. And then I pretty much forgot about them for over 30 years.
(The material below is not to scale. Clavius and the Starry Night fanzines are 8.5 by 11 inches. The original white Monolith is paperback book size, and the rest are trade paperback book size. My Stars is notable as the best of the series and has my rather iconic Jaws/Star Trek illustration as the cover piece and the book also has a rather nice foreword by writer friend, Alan Dean Foster.)
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