Egomania Read online

  Okay, I know. That was somewhat of a complicated footnote slapped into the above paragraph. Maybe implying far more innocence to those in-volved, but, well, never you mind that. The point is made.

  Yes, I know that Big Bill was heavily involved in the adult fiction field!

  Hamling was Greenleaf Classics, and well-known science fiction fan Earl Kemp was his editorial director. Before that, Kemp had been a co-founder of Advent:Publishers in Chicago.

  This certainly was the quality line of Hamling’s many multiple lines that ground up endless adult titles from its San Diego central.

  So this “classic” factor certainly must promise the best possible packag-ing for such a fine and deserving teenage novel of sf adventure in outer space with a vampire alien lady thirsty for an endless supply of blood that only Earth could, in the end, so generously offer.

  Another of my magically complex statements. But it makes the point. I think. Maybe. I hope.

  This was super clean, teenage packaging to match the squeaky pure sto-ry contents, based on the quickie sf horror flick slanted for the twentieth century movie audience.

  Gulp!

  Keep it Hays Office perfect!

  How’d Mr. Hays get into the act? Again? And again. And again! I mean, he was always stickin’ his prudish nose into the imaginary bedrooms of the All American Public. Okay. More clearly put: his famed office was the mighty voice of Censorship Deluxe! These blue nosey folk monitored the film Industry like super hawks to ax anything suggestive that might pervert the public morals. I mean, oh, heck! As Bette Davis might say: “What a dump!”

  The Hays Office dictated that no couple could be seen together on a bed! If it so happened that a cozy bed was being used by a, say, lady much desired by all concerned, her male companion (married to her or not) had to keep one foot planted safely on the floor!

  Heaven’s to Betsy were they inventing a new, interesting sexual posi-tion to foster onto the nation’s public at large.

  Hell no! [Though I’m certain that some creatively talented adult author could come up with something quite stimulating to teach his (or her) audi-ence about a new and joyfully stimulating adult position to ecstasy. The One-Foot Passion Dance?]

  Okay, bad idea.

  Anyway, I’ve delayed long enough with coming to the most sinful ele-ment of this story of woe concerning the Queen of Blood.

  On the cover they literally offered up: MOVIE NOW SHOWING against a classic cover painting by the great Robert Bonfils of the Martian landscape featuring a threatening sandstorm with a couple of space-suited men in the distance approaching the green Queen who was blatantly pre-sented totally stark naked for all to see! Can you believe? Believe! On your knees and believe you sinners all!

  For shame! Perverting countless teenage boys to snap her up and devour that sensuously stimulating image until they turned as green as she appeared—but with envy that she wasn’t real! How they must have wanted this lovely creature desperately clutched in their arms in a passionate em-brace destined to drain them of all their throbbing hot blood!

  Okay. I made that up. Darn if I ain’t ashamed of myself.

  But, another point has been hammered home!

  If I had retained any doubts about the book, a very delightful man named Bill Trotter told me that the Queen had been literally published as an Adult Novel. He was a part of this publishing giant in San Diego long before branching out on his own with Powell Publications. I packaged a number of books for his various lines, including “inventing” and developing Powell Sci-Fi during its first year of existence.

  Well Trotter’s words had stripped naked any doubts I might have re-tained in my mind.

  The BIG BILL PUBLISHING HOUSE had lived up to its true rep and released just another grand sampling of Adult Packaging that has stayed with the book forever more!

  Cheesy Adult fiction it has been called.

  Imagine that. How insulting can “they” get (whom ever “they” may be!)?

  I don’t mind the Cheesy part for a quickie flickie turned into a quickie bookie of questionable quality—to boot.

  But this was pushing things beyond bearable torment!

  Can you imagine having your second book under your own name com-ing out as a cheesy adult novel of questionable design? And, on top of that, it was my very first sf novel ever published!

  Of course there are some rewards hidden in what was to be the Queen’s future, and now her present status in the world of collectable items. Today the price tag, which was originally a mere seventy-five cents, has elevated to well, blushing at the thought, $360 if you can get it!

  [Just checked that out on the Internet and you can have it! Every bloody word and even that delicious, delectable Bonfils cover painting of the Queen lounging there in all her naked glory, stripped bare for all to feast upon before she catches you under her alien spell and drains the red blood out of your veins forever more!]

  Well, Earl Kemp asked for it and he sure as hell has gotten it: a pure verbal nightmare designed to reveal an author’s memory of his involvement with a Queen of Blood.

  Now, just to confess something: I am fully aware that Mr. Kemp was intimately involved with Big Bill and all the many houses that were so fu-riously publishing at least fifty books a month—so it has been reported, real or imagined, myth or magic. Earl may have even been involved with the Queen, too, for all I know. And he probably knows far more about her than I have herein offered the reader.

  Quite frankly, I guess I shouldn’t be too pushed out of shape about how it all came out in the end. Taking everything into account, that is.

  The hard facts (excuse the “H” word, please) is that all too many of those science fiction pulps of the ’40s were known for offering cover art that presented horrid, terrifying BEMs (remember those Bug Eyed Mon-sters?) threatening nearly naked ladies screaming in desperate horror! And all those Damsels needed to be rescued! What red—blooded American boy would not eagerly leap across a thousand magazine stands to win their fa-vor?

  Certainly the fantasies held by these young male would-be studs ranged from more innocent motivations to rather raw dreams of ravishing their lush bods! Natch.

  Those semi-naked ladies certainly served the same purpose, I suppose, as the fully naked green Queen of Blood.

  Perhaps those guys in San Diego knew what they were doing.

  I suppose she’s kinda okay, after all. And maybe that inflated price tag now being demanded to totally possess her isn’t out of line!

  After all she is a bloody Queen?

  THE REAL STRAIGHT DOPE

  CONCERNING A FAMOUS LOVE SONG!

  How did Love Song by Phil Farmer come about? Not quite as most people might think.

  And right up front, I have to say: I’m as responsible for its existence as any other person living or dead.

  That’s what you call a narrative hook! And now that I have you by the line, I’ll reel you in with the following confession.

  The other day I happened, through a series of events on-line, to discover Phil Farmer’s website https://www.pjfarmer.com/. There I skimmed and scanned. Saw his listings of books and came across the Love Song title, which I’d forgotten all about. That brought memories swiftly back.

  One of them was the fact that one of Dad’s Amazing Stories covers was used for Phil’s e-book Green Odyssey at:

  https://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/PhilipJoseFarmereBooks

  I have no objections to this, of course. I’ve done much the same thing with a lot of Dad’s cover art for my own e-books to be found on https://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/CharlesNuetzeleBooks.htm, too.

  And in fact used the original covers of other books I’d written which didn’t contain Dad’s art. I suppose we all do this.

  Seems a common reality that all artists and writers face on the Internet.

  In any case, that’s merely a side issue.

  In the 1960s on I was fairly active not only in writing, but also in pack-aging pocket books for local publisher
s in the Los Angles area. It all started out with Bob Pike who bought an original manuscript from my Lost City of the Damned, for which I convinced him to us my father as the cover artist. Dad, Al Nuetzell, had made a reputation for himself as an s-f cover artist during the 1950s, selling to Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, and Famous Monsters of Filmland. So this was the first cover he did for one of my books and the led to finally our teaming togeth-er to do a number of packaging jobs. [Earl has asked me to do an article on that period of my professional life, and I plan on doing so in the near fu-ture. But enough to say there were a number of projects that came into be-ing after that first round with Pike Books.]

  As a result of all this I had ended up working with a very good artists, after Dad had died in 1969. Bill Hughes by name.

  Well, now. I was sitting one day by the phone and I got a call from Bill who was doing covers for Rubicon Classics, a line of adult novels. I’d been packaging books for Powell Publications, using Bill as the cover artist after my father had become too ill to continue doing them for me. Bill was an outstanding cover artist and graphics man. I was lucky to meet and know him.

  Well, anyway, he told me about this new line of sex novels, and would I be interested in taking over the packaging of it? The man packaging them for the publisher wanted out of the deal. So a new guy was being recom-mend: me, if I was interested.

  Well, I was never the one to turn down a good deal. And this one looked excellent. They were paying a very good price for original novels. All they wanted was a lot of graphic sex. The publisher told me: The ideal story would have been a literary classic. Natch. And he’d love it to be noth-ing more than one prolonged seductive scene offering all the graphic details of two lovers sharing a magic moment of mutual passion. That kinda set a rather obvious editorial policy. WOW! And in a manuscript running some 200 pages or more! Give me a break! But advances were half on signing the contract, the rest on delivery of the final book, if I remember right. And solid delivery to the authors!

  I remember that I was fairly busy with a number or writing and packag-ing deals at the time and was delighted that a cover artist (Bill Hughes) and a built in editor was part of this packaging deal. All I’d have to do was get the manuscripts from writers and write the cover lines. I didn’t even have to read the bloody stories. The editor would call me up and tell me what the book was all about and I’d use that information to do the required flyleaf and cover copy. This would be handed over to Bill who would have it all set up in type and then would lay the cover graphics all nicely together with his artwork.

  A sweet deal with a bit of money in my pocket for very little effort on my part.

  And for the writers it was a sure sale. Well, okay, that depended on the writers. I, being somewhat interested in an easy, fast buck, decided to go for some fairly well established writers who would deliver—and on dead-line.

  I decided I could tease some good writers into considering doing busi-ness with me. I contacted my own agent Forrest J Ackerman and got the phone numbers and addresses of some serious top grade writers. Okay. Writers who were not your standard sex book novelist, but rather into other more literary fields, like s-f. Or to put it another way: established profes-sionals. [Or even put another way: Phil Farmer, who was famous for his The Lovers, a short novel that had broken all literary boundaries when it appeared in an s-f pulp magazine back in the 1950s, would be an ideal choice. Back then, when this story originally appeared in print, the idea of sex in s-f was like oil and water. Bad mix. You couldn’t have one with the other. One or the other, but not mated. Well, not until Farmer exploded on-to the publishing field with this story.]

  Well, who could be better than a Mr. Philip José Farmer? Forry seemed to think this nice fellow would be more than willing to consider such a pro-ject as I was offering up.

  So, along with a number of other writers I contacted him and what a delightful experience that turned out to be. He was very professional about it, and able to bring it all together on deadline and deliver the final manuscript without any problems. A total professional, of course. Natch.

  Well, as it turned out Rubicon Classics didn’t last long. This was around 1969-70 and things came crashing down on the country, one of those depressive recessions. It wasn’t the only local publisher to feel the crunch. In fact Powell Publications was squeezed by the months on end strike where even truck drivers were pulling back and not doing their best to deliver pocketbooks to local distributors. When the books don’t get from the printer to the local newsstand something has to give! And that’s the publisher, unless they have enough money behind them to survive the pro-longed crunch. Some didn’t make it by choice. The publisher of Rubicon Classics decided to pull up stakes and take his losses.

  Thus, there was the Phil Farmer manuscript, all paid for (that was one of the prime features of the deal: full advance on delivery of the manuscript). So what was he to do?

  Well, I lost track of it all at that time and was into other things—surviving.

  The next thing I learn is that Brandon House, the local BIG PUBLISHING HOUSE for hard-core sex books and magazines, had re-leased Love Song by Philip José Farmer. This was, in fact, one of the bigger publishers in and around Los Angeles area. [As an interesting point, they were out with Fanny Hill before any New York publisher could get their editions on the stands.]

  So. I just wanted to put the record straight. Brandon House may have ended up with Love Song, but it would never have existed if Bill Hughes hadn’t called me and suggested I take over that packaging job for Rubicon Classics.

  DREAMER OF TOMORROW

  This is based on an article published in Vertex Magazine of Science Fiction.

  Albert Augustus Nuetzel(l) (the extra “l” was used to balance the “N” when signing a painting for covers) was a full-time commercial artist. Un-like many sci-fi artists, who start as fans, breaking into illustrating and cov-er art in order to work their way into higher paying markets, Dad entered the field later in life, more as a side-line to please me.

  The surprising fact is that Dad wasn’t a sci-fi buff. He considered the idea of space travel to be the stuff of dreams, fantasy—it would never hap-pen in his life-time, or in a hundred years—if ever! Yet he lived to see man reaching into space.

  Art was a serious business to Dad. He believed a person should use his creative abilities to express beauty, offering something to others—not just to artists and a few select “experts”—and make money doing so!

  But even though committed completely to this concept, he enjoyed painting pictures which people could hang on their walls. To quote him:

  “The highest compliment which can be given a true artist is when a per-son is willing to pay hard cash in order to own a painting—a creative prod-uct—which was formed from colors, brush and canvas out of the feeling and emotions in his own being—mind.”

  In the beginning years he developed his fine art abilities, while making a living doing commercial art; and only after retirement did most of his ef-forts go to painting for galleries.

  Dad was born in 1901, Jan. 18, and died some sixty-eight years later, mere weeks before Man landed on the Moon. At an early age his family brought him to California, where he spent the rest of his life. While working for his father, as a teenager, Dad went to art school at night, learning the fundamentals of his craft. In Los Angeles, on June 27, 1931, he married Betty Jane Stockberger, daughter of a newspaper editor.

  In San Francisco he worked for Fox West Coast Theaters, making oil paintings to be hung in the lobbies as “ads” for the current film playing at the theater—now they use printed posters for the same purpose. During his free time he painted gallery art, and had showings in San Francisco, did movie ads for newspapers and designed a series of small pamphlets for the California Missions. But beyond that and a few “faked” hardcover jackets done late for motion picture title backgrounds (screen credits) he had little to prepare himself for magazine covers. In the early ’4
0s he moved back to Los Angeles and worked for Pacific Title, where he did a lot of work for the movie industry.

  In the early fifties Dad did some experimenting in sci-fi cover art, and the four black and white reproductions shown here [taken from the maga-zine layout for the Vertex article], are prime examples of the kind of work he did in those years for magazines.

  In the last months of his life we were involved inputting together pock-et books for publishers. There would have been at least twelve Nuetzell co-vers—the line was dropped after a year—if Dad’s death hadn’t aborted his efforts after the third book. Our concept was, at the time, to do large oil paintings (wrap-around covers—actually works of art to hang), the originals to be given to the authors.

  Between the first magazine sale and last pocket book cover he managed to produce around forty covers. When he started sci-fi work, in the early ’50s, it was considered impossible to break into the New York market from the West Coast. But he managed. By the mid-’50s Dad was getting assign-ments from such magazines as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction—along with many pocketbook commissions.

  To me, personally, the final painting my father did—for my book Im-ages of Tomorrow—combines both his commercial and artistic talents in the very finest level. It was my personal treasure, and I have the original hanging in my home. It was a final statement—a perfect combination of what he stood for as an artist. It said it all.

  DAD & I*

  By Charles Nuetzel

  And what makes us want to write?

  To present a message we consider of value to the world around us. Our ego or our needs or our natural human instinct to add to humanity drives us to have this mad desire to communicate our ideas we consider original con-cepts.

  As for me?

  I think it was a desire and need to communicate my thoughts and ideas to a father with whom I shared a lot of love, but with a father who, at times, had difficulty in verbal exchanges. Mother was a talker. Dad was a painter (commercial artist); he didn’t think in words so much as in images. He had an older brother who was gifted with words, who talked in a very interesting and intelligent way about many things, and had traveled the world over his years of living. But Dad? Well he was an artist and expressed himself creatively through art rather than through words. Not that he was a dummy. Heck no. Not that. Just that his communicating talents were channeled mainly through his art. He didn’t like to argue, have debating exchanges, mental fencing. I loved to work out problems of the world and everything in a verbal way. But my mouth always stumbled over the words. And I found it very difficult to have complete, satisfying conversations that were conclusive. I’ve been told by a life-long friend that I write more clearly than I speak. Okay? Debate ended.