Roy Thomas on the Passing of Bill Schelly

This past week someone very dear to me suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth…almost without warning, as far as I was concerned. Only a few days before, I had received an e-mail from Jeff Gelb informing me that Bill Schelly was in the hospital with multiple myeloma and that the prognosis was grim.  I had had no hint that he was even ill, and we'd been communicating by e-mail every week or two.  Jeff later told me that the illness had come upon him rather suddenly, only over the past few months.  I guess he decided, for the most part, to keep it to himself… but I wish I had known.

Bill, of course, has been the editor of the "Comic Fandom Archive" section of each issue of my comics-history magazine ALTER EGO since the current volume began in 1999–almost exactly twenty years ago.  But Bill and I go back even further than that.  In the mid-'90s he approached me, I think at a San Diego Con or some such event, to tell me that he was writing a history of comic fandom (its precise title:  THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMIC FANDOM) and asking for my cooperation.  Happy to see that aspect of comics history being handled by someone who really seemed to care about it, I gave him whatever help he asked, including proofreading the book and writing an introduction to it when it came out in 1995 from his own little company, Hamster Press.  It was a tremendous success and was soon reprinted in a second edition.  Before long, too, he and I were working together on a BEST OF book containing pieces from the 1961-1978 run of the first volume of ALTER EGO; that book came out in 1997.  Bill continued to put together books about the early days of fandom, and when I revived ALTER EGO as a full magazine in '99, I offered him a spot in it each issue, dealing with matters related to early fandom.

Along the way, Bill widened his scope to include biographies of major comics figures.  The first, based on a suggestion of mine, was about the life and times of Otto Binder, primary writer of the Golden Age Captain Marvel.  He went on to do several others. After just one or two, he approached me with the idea of writing a biography about me, but I told him I'd prefer to tell my own story someday.  Accepting that, Bill cast about for a second choice–and settled on this guy named Harvey Kurtzman, who apparently wrote and drew a few comics back in the day. That book won a well-deserved Eisner Award.  See what a favor I did Bill by turning him down?

I'll miss Bill.  I'll miss his contributions to ALTER EGO (he kept talking about phasing out his contributions, feeling there were few early-fannish things to write about–yet he kept coming up with more of them!)… I'll miss our occasional conversations (he was a funny, intelligent guy, and I knew that any opinion he gave me had been carefully considered)… I'll miss his books (who knows who he could have added to the list of Binder, Kubert, Kurtzman, Stanley, and Warren?)… and I'll just miss HIM.  In terms of comics history, he's one of those who made a difference. And there aren't nearly enough of them.