American art director James Plumeri, who worked at New American Library for fifteen years and Bantam Dell for twenty, died the same day, aged seventy-nine. Amongst the mass-market covers he designed were those for Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and The Shining.
Multiple Hugo Awardwinning fan-writer, editor and author Richard “Dick” E. (Erwin) Geis (aka “Peggy Swenson”/“Alter-Ego”) died on February 4, aged eighty-five. Best known for his influential SF fanzine Science Fiction Review/The Alien Critic, the reclusive Geis also wrote more than 100 softcore erotic novels, along with four nearfuture thrillers with Elton T. Elliott.
American TV writer Ruel Fischmann died on February 7, aged seventy-three. He scripted episodes of Salvage 1, The Incredible Hulk, Fantasy Island, The Powers of Matthew Star, Silk Stalkings and Time Trax.
Scottish-born author and scriptwriter Alan Sharp died of brain cancer in Los Angeles on February 8, aged seventy-nine. He scripted the 1977 film adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and the 2002 version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. He also worked on episodes of The Snoop Sisters and Nightmares & Dreamscapes (Stephen King’s “The Fifth Quarter”). One of his former wives was writer Beryl Bainbridge.
American novelist W. (William) Watts Biggers (aka “Buck Biggers”) died on February 10, aged eighty-five. He created the animated TV series Underdog (1964–66), about a canine superhero. It was turned into a live-action movie in 2007.
Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and producer Richard [J.] Collins died of aspiration pneumonia on February 14, aged ninety-eight. He worked on the scripts of Cult of the Cobra, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and an episode of TV’s Planet of the Apes. A member of the Communist party, after he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly witness in 1947 he did not work for four years. As a result, he recanted and named more than twenty colleagues and friends in the industry, thus saving his own career. When actress Dorothy Comingore, Collins’ first wife, refused to answer questions, it resulted in the end of her movie career.
American SF writer and professor of creative writing Daniel Pearlman died on February 18, aged seventy-seven. Some of his stories are collected in The Final Dream & Other Fictions, The Best-Known Man in the World & Other Misfits and A Giant in the House & Other Excesses. His other books included the novels Black Flames and Memini, and the novella Brain and Breakfast.
Eighty-six-year-old Cuban writer Angel [José] Arango [Rodriguez] died in Miami, Florida, on February 19. The last survivor of his country’s three founding fathers of SF, during the 1960s he published four collections of SF stories which were followed by the series of novels comprising Transparencia, Coyuntura, Sider and La Columna Bifida.
American comics artist Scott Clark, who worked for WindStorm, Marvel, Aspen and DC Comics, died on February 21, aged forty-three. He started his career in the early 1990s and contributed to such titles as Brightest Day, Batman Inc., Grifter and Manhunter. He also illustrated a number of covers for Deathstroke.
American editor, author and fan Jan Howard Finder (aka “Wombat”) died of complications from prostate cancer on February 25, aged seventy-three. He edited the fanzine The Spang Blah and was a Fan Guest of Honor at ConFrancisco, the 1993 World Science Fiction Convention. He also edited the 1982 anthology Alien Encounters. An expert on J. R. R. Tolkien, he organized the First Conference on Middle-Earth in 1969 and, later, tours of the Lord of the Rings film sites in New Zealand.
Prolific Italian film composer and jazz pianist Armando Trovajoli died on February 28, aged ninety-five. His more than 200 credits include Uncle was a Vampire, Atom Age Vampire, Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules, Hercules and the Captive Women, The Giant of Metropolis, Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (as “Francis Berman”), Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (featuring Christopher Lee), Planets Around Us, Dr. Jekyll Likes Them Hot and Frankenstein 90 amongst many other titles in various genres. The first of his two wives was actress Pier Angeli.
Scottish thriller writer Campbell Armstrong (Thomas Campbell Black) died in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1. He was aged sixty-nine. The son of a Glasgow shipyard engineer, his books included the bestselling horror novel Jig, and he also wrote novelizations of the movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and Dressed to Kill.
Canadian comics writer and manga translator Toren Smith died on March 4, aged fifty-two. He wrote strips for Epic Illustrated, Amazing Heroes and Eclipse Comics, and in 1986 he moved to Japan to create Studio Proteus, one of the top two companies to translate and sell manga to the English-speaking world. Smith was briefly married to SF and fantasy artist Lela Dowling in the early 1980s, and in 1991 he married Japanese illustrator Tomoko Saito.
Belgian comics artist Didier [Hermann] Comès died on March 7, aged seventy. His best-known graphic novel is Silence (1980).
American writer and editor David B. (Beecher) Silva died in early March, aged sixty-two. From 1982–91 he edited the influential, World Fantasy Awardwinning small press magazine The Horror Show, which led to the anthology The Definitive Best of The Horror Show from Cemetery Dance Publications. Silva’s novels include Child of Darkness, Come Thirteen, The Presence, The Disappeared, All the Lonely People, The Many and “The Family” series (in collaboration with Kevin McCarthy). A 1991 winner of the Bram Stoker Award for his story “The Calling”, his short fiction is collected in the International Horror Guild Awardwinning Through Shattered Glass, Little White Book of Lies and The Shadows of Kingston Mills. With Paul F. Olson, Silva edited the anthologies Post Mortem: New Tales of Ghostly Horror and Dead End: City Limits, along with the weekly industry newsletter Hellnotes, which they co-founded in 1997 and still continues as a website today.
American illustrator Mitchell Hooks, whose work includes the cover painting for the original paperback edition of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, died on March 18, aged eighty-nine. Besides covers for publishers including Avon, Bantam, Fawcett and Dell, Hooks also contributed to Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, Redbook and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as designing such movie posters as Dr. No and The Face of Fu Manchu.
Britain’s most successful horror author, James Herbert OBE, died in his sleep on March 20. He was sixty-nine. After studying graphic design at Hornsey College of Art, he worked in a London advertising agency, where he wrote his first novel in his spare time. He submitted his manuscript of The Rats to six publishers on the same day. Only three replied and just one accepted it. It was published in 1974 in an edition of 100,000 paperback copies, which completely sold out within weeks. It has never been out of print since. Herbert went on to write a string of bestselling novels, including The Fog, The Survivor, Fluke, The Spear, Lair, The Dark, The Jonah, Shrine, Domain, Moon, The Magic Cottage, Sepulchre, Haunted, Creed, Portent, The Ghosts of Sleath, ’48, Others, Once … , Nobody True, The Secret of Crickley Hall and Ash. A number of his books were filmed. The City (1994) was a graphic novel in The Rats sequence illustrated by Ian Miller, while James Herbert’s Dark Places: Locations and Legends was a collaboration with photographer Paul Barkshire. Herbert was Guest of Honour at the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London, and he was presented with the Grand Master Award at the 2010 World Horror Convention in Brighton.
American horror writer Rick Hautala (Richard Andrew Hautala) died of a heart attack on March 21, aged sixty-four. He began his career in the 1980s and wrote more than thirty novels, including Moondeath, Moonbog, Night Stone, Little Brothers, Moonwalker, Winter Wake, Dead Voices, Cold Whisper, Dark Silence, Ghost Light, Twilight Time, Shades of Night, Beyond the Shroud, The Mountain King, Impulse, Cold River, The Wildman, Reunion, Indian Summer, The Demon’s Wife and Mockingbird Bay. As “A. J. Matthew” he published The White Room, Follow and Unbroken. Hautala co-wrote five novels with Christopher Golden in the “Body of Evidence” series along with a Poltergeist: The Legacy TV tie-in, and he collaborated with Matthew Costello on Star Road. His short stories are collected in Bedbugs, Four Octobers, Untcigahunk: Stories and Tales of the Little
Brothers, Occasional Demons and Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala. He was a former vice-president and trustee of the Horror Writers Association and a recipient of the HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
American screenwriter and producer Don Payne (William Donald Payne) died of bone cancer on March 26, aged forty-eight. A writer and producer on TV’s The Simpsons, he scripted My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Thor, as well as coming up with the original story for Thor: The Dark World.
Forty-five-year-old American writer Jennifer Schwabach died the same day after a long illness. She published two novels, Dark Winter and Curse’s Captive, and contributed stories and poems to a number of titles, including Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine.
American editor, author and fan Paul Williams died of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in a hospice on March 27. He was sixty-four. Williams likely developed the illness after hitting his head in a bicycling accident in 1995. After moving to California in the late 1960s, he became a friend of Philip K. Dick and was named the author’s literary executor after Dick’s death in 1982. Four years later he published the biography Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick and was also responsible for thirteen volumes comprising The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, personally editing eleven of them before he became too ill to continue. Williams was also often described as the first rock critic, founding the influential music magazine Crawdaddy! while still a college student in 1966. He wrote a number of books about music and the counter-culture movement, and he managed Timothy Leary’s brief bid to become governor of California in 1969.
American illustrator Bob Clarke (Robert J. Clarke), whose work appeared in Mad magazine during the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on March 31, aged eighty-seven. His first professional work, at the age of seventeen, was as an uncredited assistant on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper strip.
Prolific Gothic romance writer Daoma Winston died on April 1, aged ninety. Her many titles include Moorhaven, Emerald Station, The Haversham Legacy, The Long and Living Shadow, The Inheritance, The Wakefield Witches, Seminar in Evil, Sinister Stone and The Vampire Curse. Many of her books feature supernatural elements.
British author and film collector Basil Copper died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on April 3, aged eighty-nine. A former newspaper journalist, he made his fiction debut with “The Spider” in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories (1964). His macabre and supernatural short fiction is collected in the Arkham House volumes From Evil’s Pillow and And Afterward the Dark: Seven Tales, along with Not After Nightfall: Stories of the Strange and the Terrible, When Footsteps Echo: Tales of Terror and the Unknown, Here Be Daemons: Tales of Horror and the Uneasy, Voices of Doom: Tales of Terror and the Uncanny, Whispers in the Night: Stories of the Mysterious and Macabre, Cold Hand on My Shoulder: Tales of Terror & Suspense, the self-published Knife in the Back: Tales of Twilight and Torment, and the two-volume Darkness Mist & Shadow. Copper’s novels range from the Cthulhu Mythos-inspired The Great White Space and Into the Silence, to the Gothics The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, The House of the Wolf and The Black Death. A former Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association, he also continued the exploits of August Derleth’s consulting detective “Solar Pons” in eight overlapping collections and a novel, published fifty-three books featuring Los Angeles private investigator “Mike Faraday”, and ghost-wrote two “Phantom” novels under the “Lee Falk” byline. Copper also wrote two nonfiction studies about the vampire and the werewolf, and in 2010 he was presented with the Grand Master Award at the World Horror Convention in Brighton.
American comics writer George Gladir, who created Sabrina the Teenage Witch with artist Dan DeCarlo, died the same day, aged eighty-seven. He worked on many other titles for Archie Comics and later became the head writer for the satirical magazine Cracked. Gladir received the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing in 2007.
Legendary comic book artist and editor Carmine Infantino died on April 4, aged eighty-seven. He began his career working for Timely Comics (later Marvel) in the early 1940s, but he is best known for his work with DC Comics, starting with such Golden Age titles as Flash Comics, All-Flash, Green Lantern and the Justice Society of America. In the late 1950s, editor Julius Schwartz commissioned Infantino to revive The Flash in Showcase #4 and the Silver Age of comics was born. During the 1960s, the artist worked on numerous DC characters, including Adam Strange (in Mystery in Space), Batman and Robin, Batgirl, Elongated Man and Deadman. Infantino was eventually promoted to art director and, later, editorial director at DC, where he brought Joe Kubert, Neal Adams, Jack Kirby and others into the company. He was publisher of DC from 1971–76, before he returned to freelance drawing on such film and TV adaptations as Star Wars and V. He was also the artist on the Batman newspaper strip from 1990–91.
America’s best-known movie critic, Roger [Joseph] Ebert, died of cancer the same day, aged seventy. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer started out as a science fiction fan – editing and publishing his own SF fanzine Stymie and contributing to others, such as Kipple, Parsection and Psi-Phi – before going on to script the softcore sex comedies Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (as “R. Hyde”) for director Russ Meyer. He published two stories in Amazing, and for twenty years, starting in 1986, he co-hosted the syndicated movie review show Siskel & Ebert with Gene Siskel (who died in 1999), giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the latest releases. Ebert fondly recalled his days in fandom in his Introduction to The Best of Xero (2004), edited by Pat and Dick Lupoff.
British writer and critic Roger [Alan] Dobson died on April 12 of complications from a stomach ulcer. He was fifty-nine. He edited a number of books about Arthur Machen (often in collaboration with Mark Valentine), along with the periodicals Aklo: The Journal of the Fantastic (1988–98), Redondan Cultural Foundation Newsletter (1994–98) and The Lost Club Journal (1999–2004). Dobson also scripted a number of BBC radio programmes, ranging in subject matter from movie Scream Queens and a celebration of The Eagle comic to the Caribbean literary realm of Redonda, and he contributed articles to a wide range of magazines, including Antiquarian Book Monthly, Strange Attractor and Faunus.
American writer Nick Pollotta (Nicholas Angelo Pollotta, Jr) died of cancer the same day, aged fifty-eight. A former stand-up comedian (as “Nick Smith”), he wrote more than fifty novels under his own name and various pseudonyms, including Illegal Aliens (with Phil Foglio), That Darn Squid God (with James Clay), Damned Nation, Belle, Book and Candle and three “Bureau 13” role-playing game tie-ins. He also contributed to other series as “Jack Hopkins” and under the house names “James Axler” and “Don Pendleton”.
New Zealand fan and collector T. G. L. Cockcroft (Thomas George Cockcroft) also died on April 12, aged eighty-six. He had been in a nursing home for some years following a stroke. In the early 1960s he published a number of seminal indexes, including The Tales of Clark Ashton Smith, Index to the Verse in Weird Tales, Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Title and Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines: Index by Author, amongst other titles.
American screenwriter Michael France died of complications from diabetes the same day, aged fifty-one. He worked on the original stories for the James Bond films GoldenEye and (uncredited) The World is Not Enough, and scripted the Marvel Comics adaptations Hulk (2003), The Punisher and Fantastic Four (2005). During the early 1970s, France published the short-lived 007 fanzine Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
British occult expert Rob (Robert) Turner died on April 15, aged sixty. As well as translating many occult texts, he was also a major contributor to The Necronomicon (1978) and its sequel, The R’Lyeh Text, both edited by George Hay.
American comics writer Robert Morales, best known for the 2003 Marvel mini-series Truth: Red, White & Black – a Captain America prequel – and Captain America: Homeland (2004), died on April 18, aged fifty-five. A graduate of the Clarion W
riters Workshop, he was an executive editor at Reflex magazine in the early 1990s, where he brought Neil Gaiman on board as a consulting editor. A close friend of Samuel R. Delany, Morales was intended to be the author’s literary executor.
American artist Quinton Hoover, who contributed many designs to Magic: The Gathering and other collectible trading card games and role-playing books, died on April 20, aged forty-nine. Hoover was also co-creator of the comic Morgana X.
American fantasy and SF author Andrew J. (Jefferson) Offutt reportedly died of cirrhosis after a long illness on April 30. He was seventy-eight. After winning a story competition in If magazine in 1954, his professional career began six years later with a story in Galaxy. He published more than seventy-five books, including Evil is Live Spelled Backwards, The Castle Keeps, The Galactic Rejects, Messenger of Zhuvastou, Genetic Bomb (with D. Bruce Berry) and My Lord Barbarian, along with the “War of the Wizards” trilogy (with Richard K. Lyons) and the “War of the Gods on Earth” series. Offutt continued the adventures of Robert E. Howard’s Conan in Conan and the Sorcerer, The Sword of Skelos and Conan the Mercenary, and Cormac Mac Art in six volumes beginning with The Sword of Gael (the final two in collaboration with Keith Taylor). He also extended the “Thieves’ World” shared universe with Shadowspawn, Deathknight and The Shadow of Sorcery, edited five volumes of the Swords Against Darkness anthology series, and wrote erotica as “John Cleve”, “J. X. Williams” and “Jeff Douglas”. Offutt was twice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, from 1976–78.
American screenwriter, producer and director Mike Gray (Harold Michael Gray) died of heart failure the same day, aged seventy-seven. He began his career filming TV commercials and documentaries in the early 1970s before going on to script The China Syndrome, Wavelength (which he also directed) and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (he produced the 1988–89 season). Gray also produced and developed the 1986–87 TV series Starman, based on the movie of the same name.
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