At the ComicConMemories.com web site, you can listen to audio recordings of many committe members and guest speakers from the first San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con, which was held August 1st thru 3rd, 1970 in the U.S. Grant Hotel. The list of those recorded includes the following: Ken Krueger, Shel Dorf, Barry Alfonso, Greg Bear, Ray Bradbury, Roger Freedman, Mark Hanerfeld, Earl Kemp, Jack Kirby, Scott Shaw!, and Morrie Turner.
Comic-Con International
The new online, Fall 2009 edition of the Comic-Con Magazine is available from http://www.comic-con.org/common/cc_magazine.shtml. It features very nice articles on San Diego Comic-Con International Founder Shel Dorf (pages 4-5) and Chairman of Comic-Con #1 Ken Krueger (page 6). There is also a great picture of Ken with some of the original Comic-Con crew at the 2009 Comic-Con on page 36.
This past Sunday (December 27, 2009) the San Diego Union-Tribune paper published an article titled “The year we lost legends.” The article’s introduction cited the passing, among others, of Walter Cronkite, Patrick Swayze, Farrah Fawcett, Andrew Wyeth, John Updike, Ted Kennedy, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. It then went on to explain, “But behind the headlines are real people who touched lives. We asked staffers to write a tribute to someone who died in 2009.”
Staff writer Pete Rowe, who has written previously on things Comic-Con, and whom we have been assured by another staffer is
among the “cream of the crop” of Union-Tribune reporters, chose to write about none other than our very own Shel Dorf and Ken Krueger!
Links to online-media coverage of Ken Krueger’s passing and his legacy in comics and science-fiction fandom. The links were good as of December 2, 2009. They may, however, not be “permanent” links and may be in effect for only a relatively-short period of time.
The original Comic-Con group watches The Phantom Empire at Ken Krueger’s bookstore back around 1970. Ken says to keep an eye out for stuntman Yakima Canutt holding his cowboy hat on his head while tumbling down a hillside so as not to reveal his bald spot.
Alan White sent in the following picture of Ken Krueger with some of the original Comic-Con gang at Comic-Con International #40, July 2009. Alan helps to put on the Xanadu science-fiction convention in Las Vegas (http://www.xanadulasvegas.com/). He has a nice mention of Ken on his web site (http://www.scifivegas.com/) along with a link to this site.
It was in a phone conversation with Ken that I discovered that he, like myself and several other alumni had been invited as special “40th Anniversary Guests” to the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. I think it took me all of a day to realize that this would be a perfect opportunity to gather all of Ken’s “boys” together in one room. It was Ken who started the tradition of Sunday dinner during the cons at Filippi’s, an Italian restaurant in the Little Italy section of SD. A tradition my sons and I had kept going all these years, so it was a fitting place to have the dinner.
Why is Ken important? Because in the late 1960s he reached out to a scattered neighborhood of green youngsters and introduced them to professional publishing, cheap collector’s items, fan and pro history… I could go on and on, but Ken Krueger was one of my earliest publishers of both literary essays and artwork. He clearly […]
Ken Krueger caricature by Milton Caniff