“We Were A Wonderful Match!”
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thought that was a great idea, and he’d been thinking along the same lines, I’m sure. That’s how the Who’s Who really got started. Of course, I had a lot of comics from a lot of companies. My favorite companies were Quality, Fiction House, Dell, and the lesser companies. I liked Magazine Enterprises, and Orbit, and especially Fawcett. Sometime before I corresponded with Jerry, I wrote Wendell Crowley. Wendell Crowley had been editor for most of the Fawcett comic line. Like Rafael Astarita, he hand-wrote voluminous letters, and was very impressed with the information that I had gathered from the Fawcett comics that I had. By that time, he was in the lumber business, and periodically came through Arkansas to buy lumber or buy timberland. And so one day, the editor of my favorite company actually came to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I thought this was wonderful. I was still a teenager, I guess, and he came over to the house and sat down at a table that spread out all my Fawcett comics on. He was a giant of a man—the nicest guy in the world—with a big booming voice. “Okay, Hames, what do you want to know?” This was a kid’s dream come true. I had the editor of Fawcett Comics sitting in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, saying, “Yeah, this is Carl Pfeufer and his inker John Jordan. This is Harry Fiske. And Bill Brady drew this funnyanimal comic book, and he only had vision in one eye, so some of the stuff you see is kind-of lopsided.” Wendell had personal memories of all these people, and he made me aware of the Binder Shop.
Holmes, Sweet Holmes It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to figure out that, if Jerry Bails were going to index one artist’s work first, it was likely to be that of Joe Kubert. Joe himself had drawn an aged (and unnamed) Holmes in the “Hawkman” story for Flash Comics #69 (Nov. 1947). Thanks to Al Dellinges. [©2007 DC Comics.]
I didn’t go back to the comics for several years, and even then, when I went back, it wasn’t the same, but I had kept everything. That was about the time that I decided that I needed to fill in some of the gaps on some of these people I didn’t know. My grandfather—I’m named after him; his last name was Hames, Scottish for “home”—gave our family a tape recorder. So I used to do these cartoon voices, and I’d get the neighborhood kids in when I’d perform. We made our own old-time radio-type shows. We did a mock soap opera, a Western, and a super-hero series, making up our own characters. So my imagination was really, really fostered well. My granddad had practiced medicine in New York at one time, and around 1959 he got me a Manhattan telephone directory. I went through and circled any name that I thought belonged to a comic book artist. I remember circling “Rafael Astarita,” because it was such an unusual name. In the midst of this, I discovered others who also collected comics, like Michael Barrier. His interests were animated cartoons and Dell Comics. There were a number of such people out there all along, but living in Arkansas, I wasn’t aware of them. Mike was the first person I knew from Arkansas who also collected comics. Then, Jerry DeFuccio suggested, “You should write to Jerry Bails, because he’s a fellow who’s trying to collect information, and is a comics historian.” I told Jerry Bails something like, “I have all these ledgers where I put all this data. I have all these names of comic book artists, and I can recognize their styles pretty much. I can document the years that they worked in these comics.” I suggested that this information be collated in some fashion. He was very excited about that, and wrote back, “I think this is a great idea. Let’s spend our first year on Joe Kubert.” I wrote back, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m saying every contributor, every artist who contributed to comic books: a Who’s Who of all of them. [chuckles] If we take one artist per year, we’re not going to be on Earth long enough to finish.” Jerry really
Wendell Crowley said, “Trying to identify the Binder Shop is difficult because the Binder Shop was more like an automobile assembly plant. It’d be like going back and trying to figure out who put the fender on a particular 1948 Studebaker, or who did the paint job.” Wendell told me as many people as he could remember from the shop. Later on, Jerry Bails pulled off a real coup because he knew Otto Binder, and through Otto he got in contact with Jack Binder, who supplied Jerry and the Who’s Who with an entire list of the Binder Shop employees. We could have chosen anybody to dedicate the Who’s Who to. But because Wendell Crowley had been so instrumental, I felt—and Jerry agreed—that he deserved it the most. The Who’s Who was built on several different pillars of information. There was the input from those wonderful people themselves: Astarita, Wendell Crowley, Gill Fox, Lou Cameron, etc. Each artist who responded was an immense help. I loved the cartoons and the people who voiced them. God blessed me with two abilities: not only could I identify comic book artists; I could also identify the people who did voiceovers for cartoons. I wound up later in life writing columns dealing with both subjects, as well as contributing to several books on the subjects. Being able to change my voice got me my first job, as a teenager, working for the local radio station, and when I went off to college, I continued to commute home on the weekends to work at the radio station, and to see my girlfriend, who was still in high school. The radio job, along with playing in a band, helped me pay for college; and fortunately I managed to get an assistantship at the University and obtain my Master’s degree there. Another opportunity that arose was I got to visit the West Coast offices of Dell. Del Connell was there, and I got to meet a wonderful little fellow named Nat Edson, who drew a lot of their comic books. He had a disability, though I don’t know exactly what it was. He said, “I can’t travel. I’ve never been to Arkansas, but would you send me a map of the state? I collect maps.” When I got back home, I sent him a map of Arkansas. He wrote me a really nice letter. He was a big help, filling in creator names for Dell Comics, who graciously let me go through all their comics, which was wonderful. They had copies of everything, all the way back to Crackajack Funnies, and some of their earlier titles.