Good-Bye Jerry Bails

Jerry Bails was in many ways the founder of modern superhero comic-book fandom. He died on Wednesday evening of a heart attack.

Born in 1933, Bails was just a kid when Superman first took to the skies, and he bought and loved comic books as they first were developing. He also became a correspondent with some of the creators of those comics, perhaps most significantly editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox; Bails had a particular love for a feature those two helped create: The Justice Society of America. He continued his interest in comics as he grew older, and in the early '60s he took the step of publishing a fanzine called Alter-Ego. There had been some fan organization around EC Comics, but Alter-Ego was the first real organized fan activity directed toward superheroes. It came at a time when DC Comics was releasing new versions of some of its '40s heroes--The Flash, Green Lantern, and others--and when Marvel was establishing its own superhero universe consisting of The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The X-Men, and more, so Bails's superhero nostalgia was able to mingle with the new forward movement. Although it's hard to imagine in this time of the Internet and worldwide interconnectiveness, most comics fans at that time enjoyed their hobby in solitude or with a local friend or two. Alter-Ego allowed collectors to find others who enjoyed their hobby and get in touch with them. Although Bails never became a comic-book pro himself (he was a university professor), many of his compatriots--Roy Thomas being the prime example--did make the jump and molded the adventures of their favorite characters. Now, forty-five years later, the vast majority of creators have come out of the fan foundation that Bails established.

In his interview with Fanboy Radio a couple of weeks ago (which I discussed here), Alan Moore contrasted American comic-book fandom with British fandom, asserting that American fans were first attracted by nostalgia, quickly identifying a Golden Age of comics from twenty years earlier, whereas British fans, who started to come into their own in 1967, were more forward looking. I don't know enough about British fandom to know if the point and the comparison are valid, but I do think American fandom has largely been focused on the past. Sometimes we yearn for the comics of our childhood and youth, and sometimes there's an attraction to comics that existed before we were even born. The DC Archives series reprint many Golden Age comics, beginning with Superman's first appearance in 1938. At 73, Jerry Bails was among the youngest people who had the chance to buy those comics when they were new. As the comics marketplace seems to shrink more and more, we need to reestablish the zeitgeist that existed when Bails first published Alter-Ego and add a healthy dose of looking toward the future to our appreciation of our past.

You can read more appreciations of Bails from Mark Evanier and Tom Spurgeon. And Bill Schelly offers an online excerpt from his book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, in The Birth of Alter-Ego.