REMEMBERING SHEL DORF
The love
affair of his life began early and lasted long. Born July 5, 1933, Shel Dorf
said he was “born again” when he saw his first comic strips at about the age of
six — a book of Katzenjammer Kids reprints. When he was seven, he bought his
first comic book — Sure Fire, No. 1,
cover-dated June 1940. Hooked, he spent his 25-cent weekly allowance on the
four-color pulps — Superman, Action, Blue
Beetle, Super Comics, Disney titles, Captain
Marvel, Bullet Man, Doll Man, Batman — or on movies. By the time he was ten,
he was clipping comic strips out of the newspapers in his hometown,
Shel went
to the nation’s first comic-con, staged in downtown
As Entertainment Weekly’s cryptic 2009 history of the event notes: “In the last decade, Comic-Con has exploded into the most important pop culture event on Hollywood’s calendar — a frenzied marketing free-for-all where, each July, major studios and networks flaunt their coolest new projects, trying to woo an audience of 125,000 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fans.”
Shel
watched it and wasn’t entirely thrilled: “
The supreme
irony of Shel’s last years is that what happened to him echoed the original sin
in the comics industry. The industry’s continued prosperity has been built upon
the four-color fantasies of do-gooders in brightly colored costumes, all
inspired, at first, by the startling newsstand success of Superman, invented by
two
Like Siegel
and Shuster and scores of syndicated comic strip cartoonists (whose syndicates,
until recently, owned their creations), Shel was not able to enjoy a reward
commensurate with his creation. The Comic-Con had fostered the careers of
scores of cartoonists, writers, movie producers and actors. But not Shel. Like
Siegel and Shuster in the years before Warner granted them pensions, Shel was
virtually penniless. And ill, suffering from diabetes. You’d think (wouldn’t
you?) that Comic-Con officials, fans enough of the medium to know the shameful
treatment that Siegel and Shuster endured before the pensions — you’d think those
Comic-Con officials wouldn’t want to be guilty of the same original sin and
would award the founder a pension. And, indeed, they tried. But Shel was a
proud and stubborn man, and he resisted attempts to alleviate his situation.
At the end, though, he knew he was loved. One of Shel’s earliest cohorts, Mike Towry, who was publicity chairman for the first Cons while 15 and 16 years old, said when he heard Shel had died: “He was a completely generous person who was wholly devoted to furthering the comic arts, bringing the fans and the professionals together. He never made a dime off Comic-Con.” Mark Evanier, a comedy and comics writer who was involved in the Con variously from almost its beginning, saw the truth about the Comic-Con and its founder: “The guy just lived and breathed comics his whole life. The Con was built on his passion and his cheerleading.”
For
the Whole Story of the founding of the Con and Shel Dorf’s life (with lots of
pictures of the comic strip we worked on together), consult the

