Shel was also hired as a consultant for Warren Beatty's 1990 Dick Tracy film adaptation, with promotional photos showing him on the set sharing his Blackthorne comic book proofs with Beatty himself.
Marvel and DC legend Jack Kirby drew Shel into his Mister Miracle comic book as a character named Himon. Caniff even created a football player character based on Shel named Thud Shelley who made several Steve Canyon appearances. And these weren't imaginary fanboy musings, either. He always availed himself of any opportunity to talk about the people he knew, places he'd been, and the comics and creators that he adored - especially stories where he somehow played a personal role. Shel often mentioned Caniff when he came to Steve's Blackthorne headquarters to pick up packages of materials for the reprint comics. His interviews with Caniff were transcribed for the University Press of Mississippi publication Milton Caniff: Conversations. Shel used to letter the Steve Canyon comic strip for creator Milt Caniff over the final dozen or so years of its run. Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould's daughter, Jean Gould O'Connell, publicly credited Shel for his role in bringing the character to life for "another generation." Around a hundred Blackthorne Dick Tracy comics were published, as well as twenty-four book collections of the same material, most of it cut and pasted into comic book format by Shel himself, using little more than a lightbox, scissors, commercial paste-up glue sticks, and Blackthorne's photocopy machine.
#SCRAWL BOOKS SERIES#
San Diego Comic-Con co-founder Shel Dorf was an editor on the locally published Dick Tracy reprints from Blackthorneīlackthorne's Dick Tracy reprint series was overseen and edited by Shel, a friend of Steve's since the early '70s, when both were part of an informal local comic collector's club.
#SCRAWL BOOKS TV#
Video: May 1987 Dick Tracy 50th anniversary KNSD TV with Shel Dorf, Bob Lawrence While I was disappointed in what had gone down at Pacific, Steve had always treated me fairly, paid me nicely and, well, he clearly needed some help getting Blackthorne off the ground. I went to work for Steve in his basement office near Grossmont High and his rented warehouse on Johnson Avenue off Fletcher Parkway (the warehouse shared space with Boundy Rocking Horses, which handcrafted adult-size horsie toys). I got to know Shel a bit better when I was working for local comic publisher Pacific Comics, as detailed in a 2005 Reader cover story "Two Men and Their Comic Books." When that company went under, one of its co-founding brothers Steve Schanes decided to get right back into the comic biz, saying "We needed to create a corporation quickly, so we set up a company headquarters in our two-story house and took the name of the street that we lived on, Blackthorne Avenue, and called it Blackthorne Publishing." Unlike some publicly shared (and re-shared) accounts of Shel seeking "tit-for-tat" reciprocal favors, Shel never lorded his influence on my career over me, nor asked for anything in return.other than friendship.
#SCRAWL BOOKS PROFESSIONAL#
One of my biggest professional or personal thrills to date was drawing a little skullface barbarian onto a gigantic wall-size paper gift-card that everyone at Shel's party was drawing on that night, along with personal messages of cheer and well wishes - I sheepishly scribbled my art between drawings by the likes of Berni Wrightson, Frank Brunner, and John Pound, feeling for all the world like an interloper and imposter, brazenly defacing Shel's giant greeting card with my own inadequate scrawl. Shel withdrew from the Con in 1984, but not until after my first-ever professional "comic-creator" Con pass came courtesy of friends of Shel, who let me attend his farewell party where I met dozens of comic creators and publishers who'd later be instrumental in my own career. I didn't begin attending the local Comic-Con until 1983, when it was being held at downtown's Community Concourse and its Civic Theater and Golden Hall, but from then I went every year up until I retired from comic book publishing in 2000. Shel was involved with throwing Detroit pop culture cons as early as the mid-1960s, before moving to San Diego in 1969. Before I even met Shel, he knew my former employer at Rock 'N' Roll Comics, Revolutionary Comics founder Todd Loren, back when Todd was first doing comic conventions around Detroit.
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