Author-historian Jim Harmon died February 16 from (I am told) a heart attack. Jim was born in 1933 and in the forties, he was an avid collector of pulp magazines — science-fiction, especially — and a devout fan of radio programs of the day. He became an expert in these areas, authoring several fine books, most notably The Great Radio Heroes, a top-selling 1967 chronicle of an art form and an era. He was also a fan of comic books of the forties and so was a contributor to the earliest comic fanzines. He could talk for hours about the nexus of radio heroes like The Green Hornet and comic book characters like Batman.
Jim wrote a lot of fiction under a number of names. His own appeared on dozens of stories the sold over the years to science-fiction magazines and he wrote often for film publications. In the seventies, he briefly edited Monsters of the Movies, which was Marvel's attempt to mine the marketplace that bought Famous Monsters of Filmland.
I did not know Jim well and our paths didn't cross much the last decade or so. But there was a time when we often sat and talked at local conventions or appeared together on panels. He was a friendly, bright guy who took his work seriously…but not, I'm pleased to say, too seriously.
