Ray Bradbury Met Al Feldstein at Comicon

Last week I recounted the history of how editor Al Feldstein of EC Comics adapted Ray Bradbury stories for Weird Science and their other titles. It's a fun old chestnut of history that I've known for decades and I shared it in the hope that maybe someone would be reading of it for the first time.

Well, a couple of days ago I came across an item on Mark Evanier's blog in which I learned something for the first time: Feldstein and Bradbury never met in person until the 2002 San Diego Comicon! Mark was the moderator of a panel featuring Bradbury and Julius Schwartz, and Feldstein was in the audience. Schwartz let it be known ahead of time that he did not want to share the stage with Feldstein but Mark went ahead and called Feldstein to the stage anyway and, whoa! What is this Peyton Place? You can read the Mark's four-part account over here in his June 2012 blog archives (just scroll down to the 9:31 p.m. post dated June 15).

(You'll read in the article that the typed transcript of the panel was provided to Mark by James Van Hise, who was the editor and publisher of the Rocket's Blast Comic Collector (that's RBCC, of course) back in the 1970s. Mr. Van Hise has also been a visitor to the hayfamzone, buying one or two of my comic book offerings a year or two back.)

As for Mark Evanier himself, I've been proclaiming for six years that I consider his blog to be a paradigm of Blogworld!