Monday, March 23, 2009

Sam I Am

I am informed by any number of folks, starting with Bill Mullins, that the "Sam the Bellhop" routine was not invented by Bill Malone but by Frank Everhart, a magician-bartender who worked at the Ivanhoe restaurant-dinner theater in Chicago back in the late fifties. Mr. Everhart apparently did it with just a stacked deck and Malone added in all the fancy sleight of hand and false cuts that make it into a truly dazzling effect. I remember seeing Malone do it a few years ago in the Close-Up Gallery at the Magic Castle and it was quite a crowd pleaser.

• Posted at 10:53 PM · LINK

Monday Morning Mystery

Here's a little puzzler or possible area of research for us comic historians...one brought to my attention by Scott Edelman. Last week, a gentleman named Lionel Ziprin passed away at the age of 84. I had never heard of Mr. Ziprin but he was apparently rather well known as a New York-based writer of poetry, mysticism and other heady topics, and the center of some artistic circles. He also apparently had a connection to the comic book industry. In his New York Times obit, it says, among other things...

Physically unfit for military duty, Mr. Ziprin began writing poetry after attending Brooklyn College and worked at an assortment of extremely odd jobs. He helped create a short-lived puppet show called "Kabbalah the Cook" for television. For $10 apiece, he wrote the text for a series of war comic books published by Dell.

And over on Mr. Ziprin's website, Scott found the following...

Through the late forties and into the fifties, Ziprin also cranked out comic books for Dell Publishing. At the time, DC Comics had a lock on the superhero genre. "You couldn’t write about Superman or space. Dell made contracts with all the movie companies and I wrote a series of comic books on every battle in the Pacific and European theatres. They gave me the theme, or movies would come out, big movies; they handed me the script, and I had to put it into comic book form. All I got was ten dollars a page: six boxes, balloons and lines, and I had to sign away everything, that it was not my property, no credit. But I was America’s best-selling writer of comic books, my comic books sold in the millions of copies."

Hmm. Like I said, I never heard of Mr. Ziprin and have seen no mention of him in any of the comic book history projects. That last sentence above is an obvious exaggeration. Dell had, during the period mentioned, a number of comics selling a million copies per issue and one or two that sold upwards of two million...but those were of name characters, mostly Disney, and if you ever wrote Donald Duck, you'd certainly mention that any time you talked about your work.

I am, however, not here to suggest Ziprin never worked for Dell. I assume he did, and there certainly are plenty of folks who did who have never been identified. I'm just a little fuzzy on what he worked on and when. I can't think of a series of comic books that firm published about "every battle in the Pacific and European theatres," especially not one done in the late forties and into the fifties. They weren't paying ten bucks a page for script back then, either. (As an aside: At that point, if you were working on the comics published by Dell, you were actually working for a separate company called Western Printing and Lithography. A more detailed explanation of the relationship between the two firms appears here.)

It would seem more likely to me that he worked for Western in the late fifties when they were really cranking out the movie adaptations. A few of them did sell into the millions and if the material was complicated, they might have upped the money occasionally to ten bucks a page. All those, however, were edited out of Western Publishing's Los Angeles office, which rarely employed writers outside of town. (They had a New York office and an L.A. office, and the only times I know of a writer or artist crossing over were cases where someone had a contract with one office and there was some special reason to have him do a job for the other.) The obit for Ziprin says he lived in New York until the late sixties when he moved to Berkeley.

So it's all kind of puzzling. Anyone here have any other ideas? Am I forgetting some Dell-published war series that would make all this make more sense?

• Posted at 10:49 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Most great magicians have a "signature" trick. They may or may not have invented it but if they didn't, they made it their own with clever twists and just plain doing it better than anyone else. I'm not sure if Bill Malone invented the trick called "Sam the Bellhop" but if you mention it around other magicians, they all say, "You gotta see Bill Malone do it." And if you're not a magician...well, you've gotta see him do it, too...

• Posted at 1:13 AM · LINK