Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday.
By Michael Swanwick: Fan cartoonists occupy an obscure corner of what is admittedly a minor art form. They are the Rodney Dangerfield impersonators of their kind.
And yet… Wit is wit and, as far as I’m concerned, their best is as good as anyone’s.
Decades ago, a minor kerfuffle briefly played out in the letters column of the New York Review of Science Fiction over the perennial question of who was responsible for the death of science fiction. I have forgotten what occasioned the fuss. But it was notable for blaming groups and abstracts rather than individuals. So, in a puckish mood, I wrote to NYRSF saying, “It was me. I killed science fiction. The bastard had it coming. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Editor David Hartwell ran the letter. Fan Joe Mayhew read it.
Joe Mayhew was a big, gentle, multi-talented man. In my memory, he was always making things: whittling fantasy-themed walking sticks or wizard staffs, carving small figurines out of modeling clay, creating tales for children’s storytelling hours. So it came as no surprise to learn that he was also a cartoonist.
Joe drew the first cartoon, of a robot gunslinger holding a wanted poster with my name and image on it, saying, “I’m a lookin’ fer the man who killed my Pa.” Hartwell ran it in the letters column, possibly the first visual image ever printed in the zine.
I offered to buy it. Joe offered to give it to me free. We eventually settled on a price.
The second cartoon was drawn by Alexis Gilliland. One of his characters, looking disgusted, holds up a book from which something liquid drips, and says, “Never let a bibliosexual into your library.”
I saw it I-don’t-know-where and needed it for my library. So I wrote Alexis begging to buy it. He said the fanzine editor had kept the original but drew me a duplicate. I sent him payment, though he hadn’t asked for any.
When my son Sean was a boy, he had a publishing program that allowed him to make his own zine. So he created The High-Flying News containing personal essays, book reviews, and whatever hit his fancy. At its peak, it had a circulation of forty, mostly friends. Sometimes, one of them would send him something―a picture, an essay―and, regardless of quality, he would run it.
When he did, he and I would send the contributor two copies of the zine, five dollars, and return his original submission. One of the cartoonists mentioned here was surprised and delighted because in his longtime experience he got nothing but a copy of the zine―and we were returning his art to boot!
I knew that we could have gotten the art for free. But I wanted to teach my son an important lesson, the bedrock of our household morality: The artist always gets paid.
Whenever I tell this story to an artist and I reach that line, they laugh uproariously.
By Rich & Nicki Lynch: Memories can be wonderful things. They are moments, frozen in time – much better than photographs because they are three-dimensional rather than flat, holding so much more than just isolated bits of scenery; they don’t fade with the passing of years, either.
For those of you who don’t know much about him, Joe Mayhew was a member of the D.C. fan club, the Washington Science Fiction Association, and was a very prolific fan artist – his cartoons were a feature in many fanzines, including the one we published, Mimosa. He was nominated for the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award four times and won the award twice, in 1998 at Bucconeer and again, posthumously, at Chicon 2000. Joe was also a fan historian of sorts – his fan activity dated back to the 1960s, and he was always able and willing to talk in fascinating detail about events long past and people now mostly forgotten. He was one of the rocks of Washington fandom, someone who you looked forward to seeing at club meetings and conventions.
That short description doesn’t at all do him justice, of course; it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Joe lived a life of science fiction. Before he retired in the mid-1990s, he worked for the Library of Congress where one of his titles there was Recommending Officer for Science Fiction. He was a prolific reader, and his reviews appeared in many places including The Washington Post, the magazine Absolute Magnitude, and the locally produced cable television show about science fiction, Fast Forward. He was also a professionally published author and artist, with his stories appearing in Tomorrow, Absolute Magnitude, and Aberrations and his cartoons in Asimov’s and Analog.
Joe Mayhew. Photo by Evan Phillips.
Joe was a very complex, sometimes temperamental person, somebody who could (and did, at various times) either infuriate you or make you fall off the chair laughing – often both, within minutes of each other. In a remembrance, Elspeth Kovar wrote that Joe could be “stubborn, acrimonious, rude and arrogant. At least once I had to consciously and deliberately repress the urge to leap across a table and strangle him; the knowledge that I probably couldn’t fit my hands around his neck helped. He had an incredible mind, full of a vast and deep range of knowledge. He was a wonderful talker and storyteller, richly humorous – a warm and generous person.” Another friend, Laurie Mann, wrote that “Joe did have the famous temper that many of us know about, but for the most part he was a smart, surprisingly gentle and perceptive human being. One of his finest talents was a true talent for friendship – Joe always went out of his way to make new people feel welcome. I saw him talking to new fans at almost every convention I ever saw him at. Joe’s art, which almost always humorous, had a great range from the obscure historical nitpick to the latest fannish trend. He was also quite prolific – there will probably be new Joe Mayhew art in fanzines for the next two years. So in at least one way, he really hasn’t left us at all.” And Sam Lubell wrote that, “In a nutshell, Joe cared. He cared about everything and everyone. He was a talented artist, an insightful reviewer, a knowledgeable conversationalist, a gifted linguist, an imaginative author, and a creative humorist. We shall not see his like again.”
We lost Joe on June 10, 2000. It was at Balticon, several weeks earlier, when Joe had first showed outward signs of the rare illness that would kill him; soon afterward he was hospitalized and rapidly started to lose higher brain functions. By the end of May he had been only able to speak a few words, though he had showed some recognition of the all the people who had come to see him. A couple of days later he’d lost even that ability, and a few days after that he lapsed into a coma. Joe had plenty of visitors throughout his hospitalization, though at the end it had pretty much turned into a vigil. We’d all realized long before then that Joe wasn’t going to get better, even though the doctors hadn’t yet found out what the cause of his decline was. When Joe first became ill he had started behaving a bit erratically, so it was assumed that he’d had a stroke. When that was ruled out, the doctors had thought there might be some kind of tumor that was affecting his central nervous system, or perhaps a virus of some kind that was causing a form of encephalitis that was resulting in dementia. The cause of the illness wasn’t determined until a few days before Joe died, after a brain biopsy was done on him – it was Creutzfelt-Jakob Disease, a relatively rare form of spongiform encephalopathy that causes rapid and irreversible deterioration of the brain.
Joe was one of the first fans we’d met after our move to Maryland in 1988, and one of the first friends we’d made after the move. It hadn’t been pleasant to see him just before he died but as another of his friends said, that wasn’t really Joe at all – the real Joe had already left the building by then. So our memories of Joe are of happier times. One of them is his visit to our house three months before he died; in response to our request for help he made the long drive from Greenbelt, where he lived, to Gaithersburg, where we live, to do some last-minute illustrations so that we could get the masters for Mimosa 25 to the printer on schedule. There was lots of pleasant conversation and a nice dinner expedition.
It’s been a long time. Laurie Mann’s estimate on how long Joe Mayhew illustrations would continue to appear in fanzines has turned out to be way too conservative. Even now, a quarter century after his passing, it’s not unusual to find Joe Mayhew illos in fan-produced publications. And as for us, our memories of Joe remain evergreen. So much so that it’s still hard to believe he’s gone.
(This essay is adapted from a remembrance of Joe we wrote that was published in the 2001 Capclave Program Book.)
A gallery of Joe Mayhew’s artwork follows the jump. (Click for larger images.)
The Melbourne Science Fiction Club is hosting a “Tribute to Ian Gunn” on November 28, a memorial to the well-known Australian fanartist who passed away ten years ago. Donations to the Ian Gunn Memorial Fund and the Anti-Cancer Council are welcome.
Teddy Harvia’s article for Mimosa about his friendship with Ian underscores what fandom lost (and in another way, so does its beautiful drawing of Ian Gunn and Teddy Harvia by the late Joe Mayhew.)
Update 10/24/2008: Cheryl Morgan is looking for more details. The little more I know from the current issue of MSFC’s clubzine, Ethel the Aardvark, is a calendar entry that says: “Tonight [November 28] we join Jocko Allen and KRin Pender-Gunn to acknowledge and celebrate the life of a man still sorely missed. Supper will be served.”
