Remembering Don

Originally published June 24, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1075

As a writer, one takes a certain perverse pleasure in using words to elicit emotional responses from people. What is writing, after all, but using the printed word to get reactions? When people say to me, “I read such and such of yours and it made me cry,” I feel I’ve done my job… at least, if sorrow was what I was attempting to put across.

Which is probably why I’m having real trouble with this installment of “But I Digress.”

When I began this column, in the first calendar year of its existence, I didn’t write any columns about someone dying.

The following year, 1991, was the year Carol Kalish passed away, and naturally I wrote about that. In 1992, there were two more: one about Isaac Asimov, the other about Joe Shuster.

1993 was fairly calm.

Now we’re in 1994, and we’re not even halfway through the year. Yet this is already the third column of this type that I’m producing. And it’s the hardest.

Why?

Because every so often when I write an obit column, Maggie Thompson–who has edited every single BID for the last four years–will say to me, “You made me cry, dámņ you.”

Usually this means, to me, that I’ve done my job.

I don’t want to do my job now. I don’t want to make Maggie cry. It’s not fair and it’s not nice and it makes me feel like a first class cretin and world class heel.

But I have to write something about the unexpected passing of Don Thompson, a man whose work in, and love for, the comic industry has been an influence on me for two decades. I mean, what the hëll am I supposed to do? Run my review of The Flintstones and hope no one thinks the omission odd?

Ðámņ.

All right. Let’s try and refrain from my best, no-holds-barred tear-jerking style.

Many years back, I was intent on learning more about the history of comics.

Comics, particularly at the time, were the favored entertainment medium of kids. Kids have a very limited understanding of history, unfortunately. (Of course, so do many adults, but at least kids have an excuse.) At the time that I was a youngster reading comics, however, there was an ongoing reminder that there had been comics produced “before my time”: Namely the 80-page giants produced by DC, reprinting stories from the Golden and early Silver Age of comics. (This was back before reprints at DC, and at Marvel for the most part, became the province of upscale collectors in fancy editions. Thus did reprints become instruments for those fans who had read the stories years before to relive their youthful fantasies, rather than a means of entertaining young fans and giving them the chance to easily purchase stories created before they were born.)

In reading those early stories, I wanted to learn more about the time from which they came, and the people who had produced them.

Three reference works formed the foundation of my “classical” education. One was Jules Feiffer’s The Comic Book Superheroes, which featured dazzling color reprints of Golden Age stories and fascinating insights into the origins of the characters (although, in my later years, I now strongly disagree with much of what Feiffer said. But it was food for thought at the time). The second was two humongous trade paperbacks by Jim Steranko about the history of comics, copiously illustrated and with remarkable wraparound covers (further volumes were promised but I don’t recall ever seeing them.)

But the third–and certainly the one that I read over and over–was All in Color for a Dime. It was edited by two names unfamiliar to me: Ðìçk Lupoff and Don Thompson. There were essays about comics by such guys whom I did know, like Roy Thomas (a comics god) and Harlan Ellison (who I felt was, y’know, okay, but he weren’t no Roy Thomas) and Bill Blackbeard (whom, in fact, I’d never heard of, but what a cool name). There was a sixteen-page insert with full-color reproductions of various comic covers (including Marvel Comics #1 which, the caption informed us, was “one of the half-dozen rarest comics known, commanding $250 and more in dealer’s catalogues.” Wow. Two hundred fifty smackers. At the time it seemed like all the money in the world. Nowadays it’s pocket change, particularly in view of such things as price-inflating auctions. Perhaps a new book should come out about back issue collecting entitled All in Color for a Grand.)

And this Thompson guy also wrote an essay called “OK, Axis, Here We Come!” about the World War II adventures of Captain America, Sub-Mariner (which I, like most kids, pronounced “Sub-MuhREEner,” at least until I saw the cartoon in the late 1960s) and the Human Torch. Thompson’s writing style had a wry deadpan irreverence to it. For example, in describing the Sub-Mariner/Human Torch wars to which recent fans have probably had their first exposure in Marvels #1, Don wrote, “Torch and Sub-Mariner were both given command of armies… and the army invariably was wiped out. Yet all they had to do was ask for more men and they got them, along with praise for their leadership abilities and effusive expressions of gratitude and unswerving loyalty from their new batch of followers.” Yet for all his deconstruction of the stories, his affection for the source material shone through.

I made a mental note of his name and filed it away.

The next time I came into contact with Don was when he and Maggie were editing a magazine about British science fiction called Fantasy Empire. It was Maggie I talked to mostly at the time, rather than Don. I don’t recall whether she had acquired it from me, or through some other means, but Maggie had read a fanzine I’d produced called The Tardis at Pooh Corner, a melding of Dr. Who and the A.A. Milne characters and the only instance of my fanzine writing that I can still stand to look at (Sample story titles: “Genesis of the Heffalumps”; “Terror of the Woozles”; you get the idea.) Only 500 of them were ever produced, and a certain percentage of the sales are directly attributable to the nice write-ups that Maggie gave it.

I got to know Maggie as a voice on the phone, and somewhere along the way a tumbler turned over in my head as she referred to her husband, Don. I made the connection to the guy who’d been a part of my favorite book about comics, and was both pleased and amused at the way things had a habit of turning out.

I would now like to tell you about the first time I actually met Don.

I would like to, but I can’t, because dámņëd if I remember. It’s hard to single out the moment of a first face-to-face encounter with someone who was somehow just always there in your consciousness.

Taking a reasonable guess, I’d say it was at a convention. Instinct says it was at a New York convention, or else the Chicago Comic Con, which was the first major convention I worked as a representative of Marvel Comics.

Once having met Don, though, it was impossible to forget him. For one thing, he had an air about him that made him seem like your favorite uncle. It was as if someone had taken a weeble and put glasses, grey hair and a beard on it. One of those people who would say “How are you?” and then actually listen to the answer, he had a slightly reedy voice, like a cross between a flute and an oboe.

I had tremendous respect for Don’s judgment and opinions; even when I disagreed with them, at least I saw where he was coming from. His reviews could frequently be scathing, but he was also the most capable reviewer for acknowledging that something might have merit, but not be to his personal taste. There are some reviewers who pedal the attitude of, “I don’t like this, and if you do, there’s something wrong with you.” Don, having too much style for that, would more often than not take the attitude of, “For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.” A guide, just as the title said.

On the many occasions when I would call him in the past several years, he would always answer the phone in a slightly deeper timbre with a matter-of-fact “Don Thompson” before relaxing to a more conversational pitch once he knew who it was. He was an incredible fount of information. From bits of comics trivia to arcane grammatical rules, I could always check with Don and he’d have the answer, or be able to get it in short order. Sometimes I’d be speaking to Maggie and Don would be kibitzing in the background (although, to be fair, the reverse also occurred).

He oftentimes sounded slightly rushed, which was not surprising considering the burden that he and Maggie undergo every week putting out CBG. But he was pleasant. Always pleasant.

Everyone knew the incredible pressures under which he and Maggie operated. Likewise, everyone knew of his bouts of ill health. The hospital stays, the close calls. The rest of us were able to put two and two together and urge Don to slow down, to take it easy. The vision of Don having to undergo some sort of emergency surgery and not making it, or being hooked up to a respirator, struggling for life and losing. Or just flat-out collapsing at work while madly laying in type because God forbid that CBG should come out a day late.

And Don would hear these concerns voiced, and he would bob his head pleasantly and say that we shouldn’t worry about it. That he was watching himself, and everything would be fine. He was always very pleasant about it.

Maybe he knew something we didn’t know. Maybe he knew, or at least sensed, that it wouldn’t happen like that.

And, as it turned out, he was right.

No mad dash to the hospital. No being carted out of Krause on a stretcher. No histrionics or death watch. Nothing undignified.

He went in his bed, after a nice weekend with his family. No big fuss, no dragging his loved ones through a lengthy and heart-wrenching departure. As if he considered a major production to be inappropriate or unseemly.

Pleasant and unassuming. That was Don. He ended his life the way that he lived it, bringing a symmetry that a lover of stories like Don would have appreciated.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, doesn’t feel like writing anything clever here.)