Drugstore Cowboy Author Dies in Prison

RIP James Fogle.

From a piece in the Seattle Times...

Fogle died Thursday at a prison in Monroe, Wash., about 30 miles from Seattle, said Selena Davis, a state corrections spokeswoman. A judge had sentenced him to almost 16 years in prison for holding up a pharmacy in a Seattle suburb in 2010, the last in a string of crimes that put him behind bars for most of his adult life.

Fogle died of probable malignant mesothelioma (meh-soh-thee-lee-OH'-muh), the Snohomish County Medical Examiner's office said Friday.

The ailing Fogle was emaciated and connected to several medical machines in the last week of his life, close friend Daniel Yost told the Seattle Times in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
He was terminally ill and barely able to breathe, but his sharp wit and creative drive were ever-present as he pushed Yost, one of his final visitors, to get another of his novels, the autobiographical "Doing It All," onto the big screen, the Times reported.

RIP Joe Kubert

From ‘Sgt. Rock’ to the Kubert School, comic book creator and teacher Joe Kubert leaves a legendary legacy.

From an obituary in the Washington Post...

Kubert was one of the few left whose careers stretched back to nearly the dawn of the comic book. Born in Poland in 1926 shortly before his family immigrated to the United States, the Brooklyn-raised Kubert reportedly drew on the shop paper of his father, a kosher butcher. Young Joe would gain entrée into professional comics by somewhere between age 10 and 13 (depending on which his own recollections you believe). 

Kubert spent most of his career working for DC Comics, developing his kinetic line and exquisitely weighted cross-hatchings that defined his signature style. The artist-writer became most associated with Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace and Hawkman and the prehistoric Tor — on his way to becoming a master of action and the recognized leader in “war comics.” He also had a stellar run on Tarzan. As Mark Evanier writes: “Joe had a way of imbuing the work with a kind of four-color testosterone. No one did male better.”

In Memorium

RIP Adrienne Rich

She has died at the age of 82.



Wait

In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tent hell’s noise
in your nostrils crawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
wait no place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you

More poems from Rich, here.

And recordings, here.

Berenstain Bears Co-Creator Dies

R.I.P. Jan Berenstain.

The Co-Creator of Captain America Dies

Joe Simon has passed away at the age of 98.

From an obituary in the New York Daily News...

"Wherever I was, I'd always be thinking up new characters - the idea for Cap came to me while I was riding a Fifth Ave. bus," Simon, who co-created the character with artist Jack Kirby, told The News earlier this year, as the major motion picture featuring their hero hit theaters.

"Captain America was designed to be the perfect foil for the Führer, and the Nazi Bund didn't like the fact that we were making fun of their great leader."

When the first issue hit the stands in March 1941, readers snapped up almost a million copies of Captain America Comics - which featuring the shield-carring hero punching Hitler square in the jaw.

“Tall, deep-voiced, cigar smoking, always armed with a quip or a wise crack, Joe Simon was my first boss at Marvel which was then called Timely Comics,” says Stan Lee. “He was an incredibly talented artist as well as a writer... I couldn't have had a better mentor.”

The Creator of Joker, Two-Face and Robin Dies

RIP Jerry Robinson.

From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...

Working with Kane — who was a decade older — opened up new frontiers for the gifted young artist, but Kane took the credit when Batman became a sensation. It was Robinson, who started working on Batman in 1939 with Kane and Bill Finger, who came up with the name “Robin” for Batman’s sidekick, and he was the creator or key contributor to the first and formative appearances of enduring characters such as the Joker, Two-Face and Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler. As comics historians now credit writer Bill Finger with co-creating the Caped Crusader, they also acknowledge that the polished, high-verve style of Robinson is clearly evident in many issues that do not bear his name.

In those early days of the comics industry, the product was seen as totally disposable and all the original art in the office would be thrown away. Young Robinson, though, so admired the work of his older peers that he fished the pages out of the trash and saved them. That led to Robinson possessing perhaps the most esteemed collection of original art from the golden age of comics. Key artifacts from that pen-and-ink archive were displayed at museums, including the Skirball Cultural Center in 2009, and then sold at private auction in 2010.

Ziggy's Creator Dies at 80

Flavorwire remembers Tom Wilson, here.

Dead Authors

Some of our favorite authors have met the Grim Reaper in unusual ways.

From a piece on Publisher's Weekly...

1. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. In 1983, Williams was found dead with an eyedrops bottle cap blocking his larynx. An empty bottle of wine and several kinds of medications were also found, and their consumption was thought to have restrained his gag reflex.

2. Sir Francis Bacon died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow. In 1626, Bacon wanted to do a meat preservation experiment so he went out in a blizzard with a piece of meat. He died a month later.

3. Molière was seized by a coughing fit while performing one of his plays and died hours later. While performing his play The Imaginary Invalid (off-the-radar irony) for King Louis the 14th, Molière started coughing and gasping and, after a brief delay, resumed and eventually finished the play. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for years and died hours later.

Joanne Siegel, the Model for Lois Lane, Has Died at 93

The New York Times has her obituary, here.

Offering the Last Word on Obituaries

CBS Sunday Morning has a piece about obituary writers (like I was, once, for the Seattle Times).

RIP, Cathy

ACK! Cathy is no longer after 34 years as a daily comic strip.

From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...

On Wednesday, "Cathy" creator Cathy Guisewite announced she'll be retiring in October. She cited several reasons for calling it quits, including a "creative biological clock."

It's the kind of joke the comic Cathy might make as well. During the '80s and '90s, the comic gave the tribulations of single women lighthearted treatment, from Cathy's annual bathing suit shopping trip to her many, many failed dates.

But if Cathy was a chipper, comic-bound Mary-Tyler-Moore type, that kind of single gal eventually started to look a bit, well, dated. Cathy's heavy thighs didn't have the sass of popular books like "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing" by Melissa Bank or "Good in Bed" by Jennifer Weiner, didn't have the glamor of the "Sex and the City" girls in their Manolo Blahniks. Despite not needing to age, Cathy was starting to feel a bit old.

RIP Harvey Pekar

The comic book artist made famous by American Splendor has passed away at the age of 70. Vanity Fair remembers him, as well. The Awl gives him props, too.

Here he is waxing poetic with David Letterman:

R.I.P. Jose Saramago

The Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author of Blindness has died at 87. The Paris Review interviewed him in 1998, here.

Space Illustrator Robert McCall Dies at 90

Touted by Isaac Asimov as “nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space,” Flavorwire honors Robert McCall.

J.D. Salinger Has Died

A sad day, really. The man turned me on to writing. For a fuller post to all things Salinger, visit Fine Books & Collections.

The Swayze Question

The literary magazine, Barrelhouse, loves Patrick Swayze. Every time they had an interview with an author they asked said author what their favorite Swayze movie was. Since Swayze died this week they decided to compile all the responses in a thoughtful post.

From the piece...

For the past five years, Barrelhouse has ended every interview with the same question: what is your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? We’ve asked The Swayze Question, quite literally, to anybody who would talk to us, everyone from Emmylou Harris to Ian MacKaye to Malcolm Gladwell to the Hold Steady.

Why The Swayze Question? Part of this whole Barrelhouse enterprise, as evidenced in our tagline, is the celebration of low culture along with more traditional “art.” And there are no movies that embody the greatest aspects of “low” culture better than Swayze movies. Road House and Point Break may be preposterous, but they are so unabashed and inventive in their preposterousness, so goddam comfortable in their own preening, goofy-ass, impossible skin, that some of us quite literally had no choice but to fall in love with them.

And alongside those ridiculous, accidentally hilarious movies, there was Dirty Dancing and Donnie Darko, Ghost and the Outsiders. People love these movies.

Confounding. Fascinating. Kind of awesome.

Also, kind of awesome, this famed Saturday Night Live piece (sorry for the quality):

Julius Shulman, Dead at 98

Architecture and photography - two things I love. Julius Shulman combined them. A celebrated photographer of modernist architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames, Pierre Koenig, etc) has died.

Frank McCourt, Dead at 78

The author of Angela's Ashes has passed away.

Here is the entertaining man speaking to model UN students:

The Final Edition: In Praise of Obituaries

There's a renaissance afoot in regards to obituary writing. The Smart Set takes a look at their resurgent popularity.

From the story...

In her 2006 book The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson reveals a worldwide ring of rabid obituary enthusiasts—members of the Church of Obituaries, she calls them. They flip past the Sports and Business sections eager to read the day’s death roll. They “surf the dead beat” poring over blogs and newspapers searching for fascinating facts about Antoinette K-Doe, who turned a nightclub into a public shrine to her husband, or the guy who invented sea monkeys. Obituaries aren’t dirty little secrets as much as they used to be, lurking in hidden corners and ready to terrify those who cross their path. They are public, normal, interesting, fun. There’s howtowriteanobituary.com which involves everyday people in the writing process, and patrickswayzeobituary.com, a forum writing the demise of the movie star even as he lives. There’s even a glossy online magazine with the snappy name Obit.

But the real change is with the obituary writers. Once shamed to the backs of periodicals to deliver dour, Margie Zellner-style obituaries, many are now part of this new movement to “out” death by making it more accessible and “natural.” They are reconsidering the obituary not as the final judgment, but as a way death can be presented as a sum total of its stories. Everyone has stories, everyone dies, and in writing about death, death and life become more of a circle. The obituary is not the period on the sentence of existence, but a mere interpretation.