Now, I was just reading the latest Usagi Yojimbo graphic novel. In the “About the author” section, Stan Saki lists most of his past and present works. It also states that he does the lettering on the Spider-Man Sunday comic strips. Not the writer, not the artist, but the letterer of the newspaper strips. I never would have known that. He has a long list of famous works of his, and then he mentions something that he gets no recognition for. Interesting.
So, tell me, has your favorite horror author done the astronomy column in a small town newspaper? Has the Directing Genius you are found of done a popcorn flick? I’ll take any example, no matter how loose the connection, but bonus points are awarded for the artist/author/writer/fictional character having done the work after they become recognized, and for the work not being a sell-out, but instead simply humble.
Quite a few artists (e.g., Kevin Smith) in other genres wrote comic books after they became famous, though these were usually well publicized.
It’s the same with Star Trek novels. For awhile, they were recruiting serious novelists to write them. These include John Ford, George Zebrowsky, Pamela Sargent, Greg Bear, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Lathryn Rusch (who at one time edited Fantasy and Science Fiction), Josepha Sherman (who wrote scholarly books on folklore, too), William Fortschen (who also coauthored a – terrible – novel with Newt Gingrich), Esther Friesner, K. W. Jeter, A. C. Crispin, Dafydd ab Hugh, and Melissa Scott. Of course, for many, it would be the other way around: these Star Trek authors actually wrote non ST books!
Many successful authors kept their day jobs. Hal Clement taught school for years, and Scott Adams remained on the job for a long time after Dilbert was a success.
I knew Clive Barker occasionaly directed adaptations of his work, but I had no idea (until ABARAT) that he was an accomplished, even brilliant, painter.
Oh, and speaking of comic books, Alan Moore was in a rather funny band with a guy from Bauhaus.
Speaking of Trek, I had no idea that Jeffrey Combs was, well, Jeffrey Combs. I also didn’t know that he played both Weyoun and Brunt on DS9 until I had seen almost every single episode of the show.
I didn’t know that Cree Summer the singer was the voice of a whole lot of animated characters until recently.
I believe Neil Gaiman did the script for the dubbed version of Princess Mononoke. I don’t know if you would consider that a sell-out though, considering the spectacular success of the movie. My thoughts are that it’s not, since the script is a fairly behind-the-scenes bit of work.
Well, Bill Mumy was the kid who played Will Robinson in the TV show Lost In Space. Later, he played Lennier on Baylon 5 (one of the best science-fiction television series ever).
And he was one half of musical comedy duo Barnes & Barnes, responsible for that melodic masterpiece, Fish Heads.
I’ve been a fan of Cree Summer for ages. She was my favourite character on “A Different World” and I liked her as Princess Kneesaa on The Ewoks animated series, and of course then she was Elmyra in Tiny Toons. More recently she was Princess Kida on Disney’s Atlantis. However, I didn’t connect the dots on them all being the same person for a while, and when I did I was quite surprised.
Sometimes I watch a bit of that The Wrong Coast show while waiting for The Daily Show to start. (God help me, I don’t know why.) Anyway, last night was the first time that I noticed that Mark Hamill does the voice for the male host. (Jeffrey Combs also worked on The Guyver with Mark Hamill and Jimmy Walker from Good Times.)
This is a bit of a stretch, but when I was teen I developed a serious crush on Saffron Henderson after seeing her in Rainbow War, a big cheesy short film made for the CN Pavillion at Expo '86. Red leather jumpsuit, buckets of paint. Lovely stuff. (Saffron is the daughter of Bill Henderson, who fronted the Canadian hair band Chilliwack, which debuted the year I was born and is named after the godforsaken hole in which I was born.)
Anyway, my lust for Ms. Henderson abated a few years later when I attended a house party at which she had consumed more alcohol than was strictly advisable, and she kind of dropped off my radar – until I grudgingly picked up a dubbed tape containing some episodes of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku that I was unable to get subbed, and there she was in the credits, providing the voice for Kozue’s little brother. Later, the same thing happened with Ranma 1/2 – and after looking into it, I realized that doing voice work for Japanese animation is pretty much her bread and butter, and she was already doing it when she worked on Rainbow War, twenty years ago. Wow.
Now I reflect on the few times I was ugly-drunk at house parties in my youth, and the crush kind of creeps back in – only now it’s geek-enhanced.
Wow. I got one reply to this thread. (Albeit a very good reply.) and left it for dead. Then some posters took it off page two, and contributed more great posts. Thanks.
Dr. Howl, narrator of Arise: The Subgenius Video and co-host of The Hour of Slack and Over the Edge…
…provides a multitude of voices for all of the Half Life games – mostly the scientists, but also marines and Barney the rent-a-cop. Didn’t click for a long time.
“The demons you may see during the initial hallucination sequence are not real. But those ones trying to rip your face off are, actually.”
