Who's Out There?

« There’s a saying among prospectors: ‘Go out looking for one thing, and that’s all you’ll ever find.‘ » — Robert J. Flaherty

Here’s a rarely-seen Stephen R. Bissette gem, The Prospector’s Luckiest Strike! I wasn’t aware of its existence until recently, when I chanced to purchase an issue of Scholastic’s Bananas devoted entirely to comics. It turned out to hold a pair of Bissette aces, the other being A Toast to Mr. Dalyrimple!. I wondered why these dark lovelies had been left out of Eclipse’s 1985-86 Fearbook and Bedlam, collections of Scholastic material. Were they too recent?

As it turned out, these remaining tales were soon gathered in a one-shot anthology entitled Deadtime Stories (Nov. 1987) published by the short-lived New Comics Group (1987-1989).

I turned to the artist for his recollections, which he most generously provided:

« Scholastic Magazines was one of the luckiest strikes I ever had in my early freelance career, that’s for sure! Between the generous page rates (best I’d earned from any publisher at that time, better even than Heavy Metal), the very kind people I was fortunate enough to be working with—editors Bob and Jane Stine (Bob was later better known as R.L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps empire), art director Bob Feldgus, writers like Suzanne Lord, and everyone at Scholastic at that time—and the frequency of steady freelance assignments from them, I couldn’t have hallucinated a better, more rewarding work relationship or environment in my wildest dreams.

“The Prospector’s Luckiest Strike” was late in the game for me, among the Suzanne Lord scripts I was assigned, and I gave it my all for a variety of reasons. First of all, it was exciting to be invited to contribute not one but two stories to the “all comics” issue, and even more exciting because of my friend Howard Cruse doing the cover and a one-pager, closer-still friends Tom Yeates, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch also contributing top-notch work, and Alyse Newman, Bob Taylor, and John Holmstrom (hey, I was a fan of Punk Magazine) also in the lineup. It was an unusual venture and sounded like a great issue, and Bob, Jane, and Bob F. were so enthusiastic about doing it — well, that was contagious. 

The deadlines were tight, and I’m not entirely happy with my second story in the issue (Rick Veitch still mocks my splash page for “Mr. Dalyrimple,” justifiably so), but “Prospector’s Luckiest Strike” turned out to be one of my best jobs for Bob, Jane, and Bob. 

It was, sadly, also among the last. Bananas #54 came out in 1982, if memory serves, and I was amid a really screwy project with Marvel at the time (the never-completed, never-published Titan Science Project), and one year later I was both a new father (our firstborn, Maia, born at home April 1983) and working on my first collaborative Saga of the Swamp Thing issues, major life changes, to say the least. »

A huge thank you to Mr. Bissette for his generosity and insight!

-RG