I knew that somewhere on my harddisk, I had a better photo of Richard Kyle and I found it. That's Richard on the right and I took this at one of the earliest San Diego Comic Cons. You now know that annual media-orgy as Comic-Con International but this was back when we convened at the El Cortez Hotel down there. This is probably from 1972 when we are all impressed that attendance topped 900. I did not accidentally leave any zeroes off that number.
The man on the left was the great comic book artist — best remembered probably as the creator of the Jonny Quest cartoon show — Doug Wildey. I have a vague recollection of the conversation that day.
I believe I introduced Doug to Richard and vice-versa, and Richard — who was quite familiar with Doug's work — began talking about how much he admired it and its value as creative art. He noted how Doug, who'd begun like so many as a Milton Caniff imitator, had developed a unique approach to the language of comics and graphic storytelling.
Doug was having none of that. More so then than later in his life, he'd pooh-pooh talk of enduring art and using the visual language to convey ideas. Richard often talked like that but Doug was more likely to hit you with "Hey, I just do it for the money. I just give the editors want they want, hand it in and cash the check!" And Richard just grinned — as you can see, he had a great smile — because he didn't buy a word of that. He knew Doug's work and knew how much passion and caring went into it.
Doug's defense mechanism — saying he didn't sweat over his work when clearly he did — was understandable, given the mores of the business in which he worked. The guys who really thought that way — and I encountered very few — may have been happier than those who gave every job their all, then watched it be badly-inked, needlessly-corrected, poorly-colored, cheaply-printed and quickly forgotten. It could break your heart if you didn't at least occasionally try to convince someone, including yourself, that the dough was all that mattered to you.
I knew Doug a while before I fully understood that about him. Richard got it immediately.
Richard was a very perceptive, good person. He was probably one of the first people ever to write about comic books from the viewpoint of an adult who understood and appreciated the form. He loved good comics but did not get childish or petulant about the bad ones. Almost instinctively, he seemed to understand the handicaps of the industry and so respected anyone who labored in it…even a guy like Doug Wildey whose work belied his claims about grabbing the cash and fleeing.
Richard saw trends coming. He and a fellow named Fred Patten opened a shop in Long Beach — a newsstand that specialized in comics and imported comics. Nowadays, you walk into a comic book shop and see hardcover comics, magnificently-printed comics, high-ticket comics. When Richard and Fred opened the Graphic Story Bookstore in Long Beach, it was amazing to see so many comics not printed on the cheapest paper stock. They'd scoured the world to find them and I recall Jack Kirby at the grand opening, holding court and predicting (correctly) that soon, there'd be comic book shops in every city filled with graphic novels and deluxe collections.
The store went through several names and locations, and Richard delved into publishing. I mentioned his magazine Graphic Story World, which he later retitled Wonderworld. He published other things, such as when he obtained the rights to the then defunct Argosy magazine and revived it with disastrous financial failure. Still, he was proud that he'd done it and of several things that were done for it.
Richard had become friends with Jack Kirby and had heard Jack tell long, wondrous tales of his childhood and of his service in World War II. For Argosy, he went to Jack and offered him a modest fee (though still a lot of money for Richard at the time) to draw a short story for the magazine — but he didn't want super-heroes or monsters. In fact, he didn't want to tell Jack at all what to draw. He said, approximately, "Just do something like one of those great stories you tell people."
What Jack produced was a tale called "Street Code," which a lot of people thought was the best thing he did late in his career. They also wished he'd done more like that and I still kick myself that I didn't arrange something like that. But Richard did. He was also wise enough to insist that he printed from Jack's pencil art instead of having someone else render it in ink.
When I did my 2008 book on Jack and his artistry, I knew I had to include that story. I didn't need his permission but I called Richard to tell him what I planned to do, to ask that he let me interview him about how it came to be…and what did he have in the way of stats or reproduction materials?
Before I knew it, he'd made the hour drive to my doorstep. He gave me the photostats and original film negatives he had, then we sat in a deli for hours talking about the origin of the story, as well as other topics. He did not ask for any money or even that I say anything in particular about him or his vital role in making the story happen. He was just so proud to see it published again and to have it in a fancy book about Jack. That was Richard.
(He did Jack another favor, too. When Jack found himself at one point without anyone local who could ink his comic book work for DC, Richard helped arrange for an artist friend who occasionally worked in his store, D. Bruce Berry, to audition for the job. Bruce inked Jack's work for several years.)
There is much more I could write about Richard Kyle but someone else already did a better job than I could. Our mutual friend Alan Brennert is an acclaimed novelist and TV writer-producer. He also made some brief forays into writing comic books that were so memorable that DC Comics recently brought out a book that collects just about everything he ever did for them.
Alan is a true hero for all the aid he gave Richard in the last few years but does not mention that in this piece he posted last night on Facebook. He gave me permission to quote it in full here — so here's another testimony to what a great, important guy Richard Kyle was…
My friend Richard Kyle passed away this morning, after the latest in a long series of aftereffects from a stroke in 2014. He was 87 years old. He had been living in a nursing home in Long Beach, California, which is where I met him back in 1974.
I was a recent immigrant to California and knew virtually no one on this coast; I walked into what was then called Graphic Story Bookshop, began talking with the jovial, smart, funny man behind the counter, and we kept talking for most of the following 42 years. In addition to owning a successful bookstore for over 20 years, Richard was a brilliant writer and critic and a founding member of comic book fandom.
It was he who coined the term "graphic novel" that we now see labeling bookshelves at Barnes & Noble. He and Dennis Wheary published George Metzger's Beyond Time and Again, which was the first self-labeled graphic novel, and as publisher of the revived Argosy, he solicited and published Jack Kirby's famous story "Street Code."
I will leave it to others more knowledgeable than I to talk about his seminal work in comics fandom. Personally, I can't begin to say how much Richard meant to me — from giving me a job at his bookshop when I was a college student to letting me type up the manuscript of my first book on the Selectric typewriter in his office, to simply being a friend to me and to so many creative types who wandered into Wonderworld Books (later Richard Kyle, Books) in the 1970s.
It was a magnet that attracted talented people like Phillip Dana Yeh, Glen Murakami, Roberta Gregory, Greg Bear, Herb Patterson, LeClair Pearson, and many others I'm probably too scattered to recall just now. Richard encouraged all of us to pursue our dreams and always had something fascinating and illuminating to say on almost every subject. He was a kind, generous, deeply honest man, and I will always treasure his friendship.
Goodbye, Richard; goodbye my old friend. Thank you for welcoming the 19-year-old me into your bookstore. My life has been the richer for it.