Tom Fagan is dead at the age of 76, and I probably need to explain to most of you who he was. Tom was a longtime resident of Rutland, Vermont and he was the mover and shaker most responsible for that city's famous annual Halloween parades. As he explained in this interview last year, he'd always loved Halloween and he had a vision for what the town's parade could be and set about to make it happen.
A lot of it involved filling the streets with comic book characters. Fagan promoted the idea in comic books and to comic book companies…and by the early seventies, the parade was awash with superheroes and villains. Writers and artists from the industry journeyed to Rutland to participate in the festivities, often in costume, and art began to imitate life: Many comic book stories were done that were set in Rutland involving DC and Marvel heroes actually attending. The illo above is from an issue of Batman in which the Caped Crusader went there…and the guy you see him talking to is Tom Fagan.
I never got to attend one of Tom's public parties but I always heard great things about them. We corresponded briefly in the seventies and you could tell from the way he wrote about the events that he was very proud of what he'd created. Here's a link to an obit in the local paper there.