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Ragnarok 3: 1974
Publishers/editors: Mark Collins, Eli Friedman

This installment we will focus on a zine I was unaware of until recently, made aware by the fandom version of the Watcher (or, maybe, more appropriately, Odin), Manny Maris (who actually had a hand in making this very zine long ago). Gaze with wonder on….Ragnarok (issue 3)!

Though this zine started as more of a Star Trek zine, it quickly branched out to cover many areas of comics and fantasy, as seen in this issue, featuring two big interviews. The second subject is referenced above, Barry (not quite Windsor-) Smith, while the back cover features the first interview subject, Vaughn Bode. Below you can see an early piece by Barry, and the back cover by Bode.

I talked to editor Eli on Facebook, and he elaborates on how he put together this zine, starting with his convention experiences (and meeting Barry Smith!):

I started attending NY area conventions in 1971, and attended Phil Seuling’s annual July comic art convention in 1972. In those years I went to Lunacon, Creation, all the Star Trek cons starting with the first, and all the Worldcons I could get to, which at that time included Toronto and DC in the mid seventies. I was 14 in 1971, by the way. I became immersed in conventions, and by the time of the second Star Trek convention and the 1974 July con I was on the convention staffs. My name appears in the credits for many early Trek cons, and July cons. I wound up working for both Al Schuster, who printed Ragnarok 3 and was the prime organizer of the first Star Trek conventions, and several years for Phil Seuling, until the end of 1975. I used to manage the Comic Book Marketplace that Phil ran once a month in NYC, and wound up working for his company, Seagate Distributors, the first company to distribute comics to specialty shops. There was a whole contingent of fans who attended all of these events, whom I became friends with, mostly in my age range. Adam Malin and Gary Berman were publishing a fanzine called Infinity and starting up their Creation Conventions, which I believe started Thanksgiving 1971. I met Paul Levitz and his Brooklyn posse, which included Paul Kupperberg, Carl Gafford, Liam O’Connor and others. Paul was producing The Comic Reader and Etcetera at the time. I started going to Brooklyn for The Comic Reader collating sessions in Paul Levitz’s basement, for which I received pizza and an early peek at the zine. I am the centerfold of The Comic Reader issue 100…hanging from a noose! Seeing all these 15 year olds making their own zines was definitely a big influence on me. I met Mark and Steve Collins at the second Creation con in 1972, if I remember right, and then I started to see them everywhere, and we became friends, convention traveling partners, and hotel room mates. We started helping out Adam and Gary with Creation by doing their publicity, for which we got program book credits. I remember being super proud that we were able to get Creation some major local TV news attention which brought in big crowds. Now, to be clear Ragnarok was really Mark Collin’s baby from the get go. He produced the first two issue all my himself, and I jumped in to help out with the third issue because of our friendship, and my interest in doing a zine. All of the art was acquired by Mark and he also did all the mechanical work and the layouts. My involvement was in writing an article about the 1973 July con and I transcribed the Vaughn Bode interview that Mark had conducted. I believe that I set up the Barry Smith interview, and Mark and I attended that with our friend Dave Simons. We had a really pleasant afternoon with a very cordial and friendly Barry Smith, before the Windsor was added. Barry was so generous to us and because we were all young and a little dumb we really let Barry down, for which I have always felt remorse. He very, very generously agreed to do our cover for Ragnarok 3, but he wanted to make sure it would be done in color. Not understanding the mechanicals of printing I told him it would indeed be printed in color. He did a beautiful full color piece, and when it came time to print mark explained to me that we couldn’t afford full color printing so we would have to use Barry’s line art, and Mark would make color separations for it based on Barry’s coloring. The result, while decent, did not come close to doing justice to Barry’s wonderful coloring, and he was, to put it mildly, not happy. Then a couple of years after we put out the zine Mark got a request from a French publisher to reprint the interview in French. I wasn’t aware of this until I ran into a furious BWS at a con, who angrily showed me the publication which was a slick glossy French publication which had appropriated a bunch of Barry’s wonderful early Studio and Gorblimey Press art and printed them full page, in color without Windsor-Smith’s permission. Barry blamed us for the whole mess, and it was hard to disagree. Barry Windsor-Smith, if you read this, I’m so sorry. You were classy and we were young dumb jerks. We meant no harm. The Barry Smith piece that is in the zine was reprinted from an Esquire magazine article in which noted comics artists were asked to draw a one page example of “relevant” comics book. Mark acquired the Bode pieces and the Jack Davis art by befriending both of those very different, but wonderful gents. Mark and his brother used to help Bode set up the audio-visual component of his cartoon concerts and we all got to know him from that. He was truly a one of a kind genius, and larger than life personality, whom we never expected to leave us so soon and tragically. He was a friend to Mark, Steve and I, and a fantastic spirit, and very generous to donate his art at the peak of his popularity. There were two sad things that happened connected to the production of Ragnarok 3. The first was that our printer, who out of respect for the departed will be unnamed, at least by me, made off with some of the best of the original art from the issue. Thank goodness we were able to get Barry’s cover art back to return to him, but Mark owned the art and lost some wonderful pieces that you see in the issue. The second tragedy occurred because I left the country for a few years from late 1975 until 1978, and I had left several hundred uncollated copies of Ragnarok 3 stacked up in my parents basement. After making a couple of futile attempts to have a friend of mine come and get them to bring to Mark, my father got tired of waiting and disposed of all the remaining copies that hadn’t been collated and sold. I never forgave him, but at least it was the worst thing he ever did to me, so I can live with that. Mark, Steve and I remain friends to this day, and visit each other when we can. We’re on different coasts now. I never was involved in another zine. I know we planned a 4th Ragnarok and I even interviewed Roy Thomas for it, and transcribed the interview, but life must have gotten in the way, and we never made it happen. After 1978 I began to work in the video post production industry and my life took a different turn. I’m still currently reading about 25 comic book titles a month, and I won’t grow up.

The zine actually starts with a very early two page strip by Matt Howarth, very much in Wrightson mode here, as you can see…

Howarth is followed by a contents page and the letters section (you will notice the pdf shows spreads, not single pages, but that is how it was sent to me very graciously by Manny, and cutting them up to make single pages did not seem like it was worth it). Jim Jones and Laurine White, both fandom regulars, are a couple that fill the letter columns. One of several spot illustrations that fill the pages starts here, the cute as heck Big Barda piece by Alan Hanley, which you see to the left. Horror Comes to Archie Comics follows (by Jeffrey Wasserman, part two), with a nice Brother Voodoo piece by Eric Harrison adorning one of the pages. On the heels of that article is a centerspread focusing on the Kung Fu movies of the day, a house ad, and then the Bode interview begins. Here is where the boys could have used some design help, I think. There is no masthead or adornment, and you would barely know the interview begins if you did not look closely! But hey, they were kids!

The interview was conducted at the Creation Con that year, one of several conventions that play a part in this issue. First though, you can see a few Bode pieces below.

In fact, the next feature is a photo adorned piece on the New York Comic Art Convention of 1973. Cosplay did NOT start in the last few years, as you can see! If fact, many of the pros of comics and fantasy took part in these contests back then, including, this time, Al Bradford and Cara Sherman. Below you can see a few examples of the finery on display.

Before Masochism and Me (a feature on editor Friedman’s trials working as a convention staff member), there are a few nice illustrations…a few showing characters from the old Andy Griffith show by Jack Davis, as well as a typically powerful Billy Graham piece. It is said early in the zine that an interview with Davis happened…but the tape machine malfunctioned! Look below for the goods…

Editor Collins was also kind enough to respond to me within Facebook with his backstory, so get ready! I first asked him how he and Eli met.

Roughly speaking, my twin brother and I were either 15 or 16 when I first met Eli at Creation. Actually no, it could’ve been sooner than that because our mom would drive us into the city and I think we met (as Eli said) at the second Creation convention. I remember that one because our mom was there and she would go off and wait for us but our mother was always very good about encouraging this sort of stuff, she was a great mom and I guess maybe after this we became friends with Adam (Malin) and Gary (Berman) who ran the Creation con. I remember Creation, because they were showing the Furry Freak Brothers live action movie, there was a sex scene in the middle of it. They were worried about getting in a lot of trouble for showing it, but they managed to squeak by and not have to suffer any consequences. I had started putting out Ragnarok, the first one having came out a little bit after the first Star Trek convention, because I remember I used graphics from it. Then, I did the second one maybe a year later containing the interview with Marie Severin. She was very good to me and gave drawings to use as a cover. Then Eli and I put our heads together for the third (I was a senior in high school in 1975 when we put that together). Eli had coordinated the Barry Smith interview. Smith was probably pretty mad at us after that for a few reasons. Keep in mind that we’re 64 years old now. We were only 16 back then…I need to make contact with him and apologize for all that went down. I was just kind of an empty headed teenager back then and wasn’t so mindful of consequences from adults. We had good feelings towards Barry even after that French interview fiasco pissed him off, though I thought that magazine had permission from him to publish it… apparently they didn’t!

I had a good printing program at my high school so I started learning about graphics and laying out stuff. I also learned a lot from studying other fanzines like Adam and Gary’s Infinity, The Comic Reader (digest size just like our zine), and Fantastic Fanzine. I paid attention to things like coloring (multiple passes using zip-a-tone layers and stuff which is very tedious and time consuming… the old school coloring sort of thing).

I also asked him why he started the zine in the first place, which starts with a crazy story!

I was just so in love with comics and loved going to conventions. Keep in mind this was decades before the internet. Eli and I met at the Phil Seuling con…I think they were once a month gatherings at the Statler Hilton. We saw a tiny postage stamp ad in one of the comics, probably Marvel. So, we found the place and it was just so weird…a whole other world of collectors! Prior to conventions, the only people you could really talk to about comic books were your friends in your immediate area. Everybody was isolated in their own spaces. Fanzines sort of functioned as the early internet. You could communicate with each other through them, sending letters back and forth, opening up a whole world of discovery! Subsequently, we aided in the very first Star Trek convention, meeting all of the early actors from the original series. I don’t think Eli talked about the World Science Fiction Convention, where, at this cocktail party in one of the ballrooms, he clambered over the balcony and dropped into the middle of the cocktail party, spraining both ankles! He ended up sitting in the middle of the floor like a puppy that had been hit by a car. We had to grab him, spending the rest of the convention carrying him around in a sedan chair because of that incident! I learned about fanzines from those that I mentioned, as well as zines such as RBCC. I still have a box of all of those fanzines, I never throw anything away! It was just a fun sort of a thing to do, making zines…I enjoyed it, even though I can’t draw or anything like that myself. I could, though, do a kind of a primitive layout…nowadays of course you do all that stuff on your computer. Back then, though, it was more primitive.

Mark went on to talk about some of the amazing art he could get for pennies back then.

We just basically put the word out that we were looking for articles. We got a great interview with Jack Davis, who was very gracious and gave us a lot of stuff. But, as Eli mentioned, that interview got destroyed in the tape recorder and we were never able to follow up on it, which I felt very bad about. As for the cost of some of the art…the Vaughn Bode back cover, for example, I think I gave him 10 bucks for that (which I colored)! Fantagraphics subsequently took that image and put it on the back of a Bode magazine they published (without my permission). I don’t have a copyright on the black and white art, but what I do have is a copyright on the coloring. I hand colored it with zip-a-tone tone layers. Back in those days you could get sketches from famous artists for very little money. I bought those little Roy Krenkel illustrations for 10 bucks! I’d gotten a drawing of Bruce Lee by Neal Adams that he did one evening at one of the conventions for maybe another 10 bucks! The next day, John Byrne, still a fan artist at the time, had a cartoon of ROG 2000. I asked if he would ink it. He pulled out his brush and bottle of black ink (I had never seen anyone ink in person with a brush instead of a pen) and I gave him five bucks for that! Dennis Fujitake gave me a very nice piece which I still have…all of this stuff and more was going in the fourth issue but then, I was off to college and just didn’t have the time for it anymore. Other people were doing much better jobs than what I was able to do, but it was still a lot of fun at the time. Meeting people like Eli, Adam, Gary, Manny Marris… I am still friends with all these people that we met when we were 16 years old!

Being young and impressionable, full of enthusiasm, has it’s perks! Mark talks a bit about his interactions with the late Vaughn Bode below.

Bode was the most interesting person! We became so enamored of his art, we just followed him around like puppies…he was literally like a god to us! When he was doing his live shows at the convention, we would hump his equipment around for him, bring him paddles and devices so he could get some reverb and stuff on his voice, stuff like that. We just thought he was the most amazing person we had ever seen…there was just nothing like him. He had this big ring binder of his art that he would use as a script, so to speak, so I made an exact copy of that! I got a big ring binder, bought all of the old copies of swank and all of the other magazines he had his work in.

For many, fanzine experience led to other similar work. I asked him about his experiences after fandom.

My work in Ragnarok did sort of lead to animation later later on…I was a video editor as well for many years, eventually getting work on X-Men Evolution, which led to a whole career in animation, which I’m still doing to this day. I finally moved to California, making it a full-time career. The zine work also helped in the sense of learning how to stay organized, which also helped later in school, when I studied music, theater arts, and TV. After that, I went directly into a TV career, editing and working in various studios around New Jersey and New York. Later, I came to visit an old friend in California, went on a job interview on a whim associated with The Simpsons, but got a gig finishing the run of the last season and a half of X-Men Evolution, which in turn led to me getting the last several episodes of Megas XLR at Cartoon Network, also becoming good friends with the producer, (who is still one of my closest friends) and she gave me work on the original run of Ben 10. I did that for two straight years making 50 or so episodes. Later, we did a show called Class of 3000 with André 3000, then I was away to Las Vegas for a year, working on a TV station start up that eventually collapsed, then came back to LA and went to work finally at Hasbro, doing a seasons worth of G.I. Joe Renegades. I did a lot of shorts at Hasbro and also a lot of My Little Pony shorts, as well as two seasons of Kaijudo. In addition, I did some episodes of Stretch Armstrong, although I never really liked working at Hasbro, eventually going back to Cartoon Network working on Craig of the Creek, a very popular show at Cartoon Network, doing over 130 episodes over the past four seasons. I’m still working on that but it all comes back to my love of comic books! I can say that comic books are one of the few things that never let me down, even in my darkest times. I’ve always been very grateful for that. And, at 64, I’m still doing exactly the same things I was doing when I was a teenager in my 20s!

Some photos from the 1973 Worldcon follows, and then the Smith interview, which, at 10 pages, is pretty darn long for a fanzine interview with a very quickly rising star! Done in the artist’s New York apartment, the boys must have been pretty star struck! I know I would have been. Too bad they could not have gotten some unpublished work to go with the interview (I am pretty sure that I had seen that one page Soldier Hero somewhere else)

And that is pretty much the entirety of the zine, though there is a really beautiful Jack Davis centerspread that I had to show (below) before signing off. I do have the previous two issues of Ragnarok and will probably cover them sometime at a later date.

Thanks for stopping by to check out the column, and please, leave a comment below to prove it! Also, big thanks this time to Mark Collins and Eli Friedman for taking the time to make the column much more interesting! As always, you can access all previous installments on my site, kenmeyerjr.com, as well as the pdfs. There is a lot more to see in this fanzine, so go do that now, Jethro!

Ken Meyer Jr.
kenmeyerjr@yahoo.com