Welcome to BillSchelly.com!

"Bill Schelly has an obsessive yet intelligent passion for things many might consider marginal if not bizarre -- always the mark of an interesting mind."

-- Tom Robbins
Author, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

BILL SCHELLY
has been chronicling and adding to the pop culture fringes since the 1960’s. He published his first fanzine (short for fan magazine) about comic books and cartooning just as he turned 13. He wrote two imitation James Bond novels at 15, and his first "serious" novel, the semi-autobiographical Come With Me, before graduating from high school.

But it's for his popular fanzine Sense of Wonder that Schelly became known to the comics community. By the end of its twelve-issue run, Sense of Wonder had presented the first attempt to chronicle the whole career of comics innovator Will Eisner, as well as by Steve Ditko, Frank Frazetta, and Stanley Pitt.

Bill’s first book published in hard cover was Harry Langdon, a biography of the brilliant comedian of silent films (Scarecrow Press in 1982). He played a part in a revival of interest in silent cinema in Seattle at the time, and lectured on the subject at the University of Washington. The Langdon book remains a subject of hot debate among devotees of the pantomimist, who seem to either love or hate it. At the time, The Journal of Popular Film & Television said of it: "William Schelly's remarkable first book ... should be relished by anyone who appreciates screen comedy and Langdon's unique approach to it." However, it has also had its detractors.

In the 1980s, Schelly revised Come With Me for the Young Adult market, and worked on several aborted projects including a screenplay and a biography of Francis Ford Coppola. The event of that decade, which brought him back into the comic book hobby, was the 1985 publication of Crisis on Infinite Earths (DC Comics). By early 1986, which saw the publication of the seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Schelly and a partner had already opened the first comics specialty store in Seattle’s University District: Super Comics & Collectibles.

Though his involvement in the store was short-lived, Bill’s fascination with the comics field had been thoroughly re-awakened by the experience. When he met a local fan who was active in comics fandom in 1991, Schelly re-joined comics apa (amateur press alliance) CAPA-alpha, and began researching the history of comicdom. Thus began a series of fanzine-format publications (Ronn Foss Retrospective, The Alley Tally Party, Labors of Love) which culminated in his trade paperback publication of The Golden Age of Comic Fandom. He established his own company to publish the book, which went on to be nominated for a 1995 Will Eisner Comics Industry award.

Since then, Hamster Press has published a series of widely-praised books about the early years of fandom, including two volumes of Fandom’s Finest Comics and Alter Ego, Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine, co-edited with Roy Thomas, also nominated for an Eisner Award. The collaboration with Thomas led to the revival of Alter Ego as a magazine from TwoMorrows Publishing, edited by Roy, with Bill as Associate Editor.

As part of his research, Schelly interviewed many of fandom's founders. As it turned out, his timing was fortuitous, because a number of them have since passed away: Don Thompson, Howard Keltner, Ronn Foss, Grass Green, and G. B. Love among them. He himself was the subject of interviews which appeared in Comics Interview, Secret Identity, Scary Monsters and Comic Book Marketplace. The Comics Interview piece (conducted by Roy Thomas) was reprinted in Comic Fandom Reader (Hamster Press, 2002).

In 1997, with the help of Russ Maheras, Schelly organized a reunion of old-time comics fans during the Chicago comicon, which drew 33 people including Jerry Bails, Howard Keltner, Maggie Thompson and Jay Lynch. An account with numerous photographs appears in the revised edition of The Golden Age of Comic Fandom (1998).

Recently, Bill wrote a memoir of his teenage years in fandom titled Sense of Wonder: A Life in Comic Fandom (2002, TwoMorrows Publishing), and edited the graphic novella Xal-Kor The Human Cat, the last work of popular fan artist Richard "Grass" Green. He also published The Eye Collection (2002, Hamster Press), a trade paperback gathering all the new illustrated adventures of The Eye, Under-world Executioner, under a single cover. His collaborators on this project were Ron Frenz, Josef Rubinstein, Roy Thomas, Bill Black, Michael T. Gilbert, Jerry Ordway and J. E. Smith, among others.

All told, Bill Schelly has authored or edited 13 books, as well as writing a column appearing in each monthly issue of Alter Ego magazine. He is now working on his 14th and 15th tomes: a retrospective of the classic fanzine Star Studded Comics, and a biography of one of the most important artists in the history of comics. Thus, Schelly continues his penchant for exploring the byways of popular culture.