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Visual Wonders 1: Winter 1978
Publishers/Editors: Gary Dolmorn, Steve Vance, Bill Whitcomb

It’s always a pleasure to discover a fanzine I have never seen or heard of. Visual Wonders is a really well put together zine, especially visually. The design in general is far beyond most fanzines, this being the product of co editor and art director, Steve Vance. He has since gone on to forge a career in that discipline, which is no surprise, even judging by this very early example! From the editorial, it appears the “VW studios” crew produced some work a few years prior, had a gap, then produced this. I will have to see what I can find out about the previous work.

Steve Vance provided a generous amount of input via email, below he talks about his beginnings.

Bill Whitcomb and I have been friends since early childhood. Growing up, we had similar tastes in pop culture, particularly SF, pulp fiction, and comics. Bill always read comics, but I didn’t become a serious fan until I was about 12, when a friend of my older brother gave me a stack of comics he’d “outgrown,” a pile containing several consecutive months of Marvel superhero books from a few years earlier. I devoured most of them in a single afternoon and soon was haunting the local outlets waiting for new issues to arrive. I’d always liked to draw, but this stack of comics really clarified the kind of drawing I wanted to do. Bill was interested in writing, so it was inevitable that we’d eventually try to do comics of our own — and our collaborative name, VW Studios, was probably equally unavoidable. 

In high school we stumbled into the local fandom scene, which consisted mainly of a few college students and recent grads who shared an interest in comics, SF, old movies, and the like. A hub of this group was Richard Small, an amazingly prolific contributor to various APAs and zines of the time. He encouraged/badgered us to participate in the group’s casual local zines, which Rich printed on his own ditto and mimeo machines. It was through him that we met Bill Black, probably the only comics pro in town. Black had worked for Warren Publishing and was then publishing the Paragon line of high-quality semi-pro zines, which had numerous pro and soon-to-be-pro contributors, and he showed us some of the rudiments of the production process. Bill Whitcomb, a fan of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and other fantasy writers, got in touch with author Karl Edward Wagner and somehow persuaded him to allow us, two enthusiastic novices, to do a comics adaptation of one of his sword & sorcery stories featuring his character Kane, for our zine to be called Dark Phantasms, which included contributions Bill solicited from Roy Krenkel and Steve Fabian, as well as a strip drawn by future pro Wes Hoberg. I think that one may have originally been intended for one of Bill Black’s books, but he sold it to us. He also contributed art and gave us valuable suggestions, a few of which we even listened to.

That first zine lost money, of course, but it wasn’t sufficiently catastrophic to dissuade us from trying again, this time in a more superhero/SF vein. Leaning into the VW idea, we modestly called this one Visual Wonders. We had ideas for our own stories, but we needed some recognizable names to help sales (and besides, we didn’t want to have to fill the whole thing ourselves), so we looked for other material. Back in those pre-internet days, one main means of communication in the world of fandom was Alan Light’s weekly tabloid, The Buyer’s Guide For Comics Fandom, which was filled with ads for, among other things, old comics, other zines (and solicitations for contributors), and original art sales. I did a few pieces for other now-forgotten zines I contacted through their ads in TBG (as well as doing a cover for TBG itself), and I’m pretty sure it was through an ad there that we bought a previously unpublished comics story by Al Milgrom. I have no memory of who was selling it, but I know that we made the purchase based solely on a brief written description, since most ads were all text. But hey, Milgrom was by then a big-time Marvel artist, so why not? (Pretty sure we acquired the Dave Cockrum and Steranko pieces the same way.) When we received the story, we weren’t exactly bowled over — Milgrom had apparently done it in his own days as a young fan — so we decided to rework it. Bill wrote new dialogue to try to add humor, and I traced the art onto new paper and re-inked it in an unsuccessful attempt to make it look more like his then-current work. We may not have made it better, but we did make it different. I’ve never met Milgrom, but I don’t imagine he’d be too excited about it seeing print in either form.

The cover features the main character, a superhero called “Paraman,” as does the first strip of the issue, Paraman vs The Rocketeer (no, not that one). The layouts and plot are by long time industry mainstay, Al Milgrom, done a bit before he turned pro. Steve Vance finishes the work with a clean and professional flair (with Bill Whitcomb on script). You can see a few pages as a sample below.

Following Paraman is as expansive interview with Bill Black of Paragon fame. Steve’s professional design work is very evident here. On the subject of said interview, Bill told me via Facebook that “the interview is a hoot! Several mistakes: radio show was RICHARD DIAMOND, not RICHARD PALMER. The CHARLATAN Editor/Publisher was Bill KILLEEN. I don’t remember sending a strip to Archie Goodwin at Warren who returned it. And that I then sent it to WEIRD and they didn’t return it. I really don’t but maybe I did? What I know I did do was to send a strip to Archie who was doing the MIGHTY CRUSADERS at the time. I never got that back. It stirred up memories that I had not thought of in years. Much of it, like the Army years, are covered fully in the STRANGE LUCK documentary that Drew Mack made.”

Steve also mentions the clean design work in passing, saying “Bill majored in English and has written numerous short stories and produced several books about magical symbol systems, while also working as a technical writer. I got a degree in graphic design, and I moved to Los Angeles to start a career. I’ve been here working as a freelance designer/art director/illustrator/cartoonist/etc. ever since. Before long I was hired to do the packaging for the home video release of the Transformers and G.I. Joe animated shows, with a comics-style front cover and a multi-panel strip on the back of each box, and I roped Bill Black into working with me. I wrote, pencilled, lettered, and colored, and he inked and did the color separations (hand-done overlays for each color, as pre-computer comics were produced). We did about two dozen, often cranking them out over weekends via FedEx or Express Mail. Though I was doing well in other fields, I continued trying to break in to mainstream comics. Looking back at VW #1, I think the best part of my contribution was the design, so it may not be surprising that my first mainstream comics work was doing logos for DC and Eclipse. “

Above you can see a Dave Cockrum centerfold, showing the zine’s Azrael character…in fact, showing a little more of her than usual! Steve talks a bit about this character, saying “our original story for the issue was set in a science-fiction world and featured a female adventurer named Azrael (this was before the DC character of the same name). I don’t remember actually producing that story, but I do recall that the Cockrum piece we’d picked up portrayed a somewhat generic SF/fantasy character, so I redrew her face to make her resemble our hero and added the logo and background.”

Following that is a short story called Ai-uchi (explained as meaning “mutual slaughter”) by Gillies MacKinnon, in a style that made me think at first glance that it was Jim Pinkoski. Steve has a bit to share about Gillies as well.

I met Gillies MacKinnon through my family — he was married to the daughter of a friend of my parents. At that time he was working as a freelance artist, but he’s gone on to have a very successful career as a director of film and television, mainly in the UK. Gillies produced another story for our planned second issue, Bill and I started work on a second Azrael installment, and we had several other interesting pieces lined up, but VW #1 also lost money and soon we were busy and broke college students, so VW #2 never happened. I imagine some of the material for it is still buried deep in my files. (One other detail about this zine: “Publisher” Gary Dolmorn was a pen name I’d used earlier for one of Rich Small’s zines, and we added him to the masthead, presumably in an effort to make it seem like we were a bigger operation. I think I got to be Editor on this one because I paid for the printing, whereas Bill paid for Dark Phantasms.)

When the Black interview finally wraps up, Azrael appears in strip form (but not as stripped as Cockrum’s version), by Vance and Whitcomb. Again, the art is clean, with a liberal (but intelligent) use of zip-a-tone. The only thing I noticed is the exit from the brothel seems to be given more drama than the last panel/exit of the main character, but that is a minor complaint. There are also a few confusing panels here and there, but again, minor.

Steve, as I said earlier, has gone on to do much more in the visual field. He mentions a few projects below.

Within weeks of moving to LA I met two people who would be a big part of my life: my future wife and studio partner Cindy, and then-struggling cartoonist Matt Groening. Both of them hired me to do illustrations for the publications they were working for, and both would be my collaborators in the future. A few years later, Cindy and I got married and she left her job as a magazine art director to help me with my growing workload, and Matt and I started working together on various freelance art/design gigs, including a line of dozens (hundreds?) of greeting cards in the style of old B movie posters and pulp magazines. When Matt hit it big with The Simpsons, I nudged him to launch Bongo Comics to publish stories of the various Simpsons characters, including Radioactive Man, and Cindy and I, along with our friend Bill Morrison (there are a lot of Bills in my life!), ran that line to begin with, and I wrote and drew a lot of the early issues (and of course designed the logos). 

After leaving Bongo, I freelanced for DC and Dark Horse for the next decade, primarily as a writer. I worked on several of the Big Book series for DC/Paradox, and Bill Whitcomb helped out by ghosting some of “my” stories in The Big Book Of Vice. Comics was a sideline, however, as I focused mainly on design and illustration, largely in the music industry. I don’t know how many albums I’ve done — maybe a couple hundred? — for artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to the Grateful Dead. I won one Grammy for package design and have been nominated for two more. (Cindy, Bill Morrison, and I also won an Eisner for our work in the first issue of Simpsons Comics, and some of my other comics projects have been nominated.) I also fell into the wacky world of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and illustrated and designed the DVD releases of something like 100 episodes of that show, as well as doing alternate covers for the Dark Horse comics series. I manage to stay busy — and Bill Whitcomb and I are still talking about future collaborations!

A few house ads appear, then, aside from the Steranko sketch on the back cover, that wraps it up! Promising work, and I hope I find more by this crew.

Thanks for stopping by and check in again the first of next month for another Ink Stains.

Ken Meyer Jr.
kenmeyerjr@yahoo.com