???

[jaylynch]

I think the whole chain of publishing contacts began with Hugo Gernsback, Nicole Tesla and ultimately Lovecraft.  It then crossed over into music...Doodles Weaver (who was with Spike Jones' band) was a member of the Weird Tales club as a youth...Johnny Legend was a high school chum of Glenn Bray.  Len Brown who worked at Topps now has a deejay show in Austin, Texas where he is known as the Rockabilly Rebel...Jean Shepherd, who was in the early MAD mags hung out with Shel Silverstein.  Silverstein often visited Woody Gelman,who worked at Topps...Silverstein wrote a number of popular c&W songs...
     There is a scinece connection, as the early fanzines were about electronics and radio. Sci Fi writer L. Sprague De Camp wrote a Lovecraft bio and collaborated with Willy Ley on science books... But there is no sports connection at all that I am aware of.  Generally, everyone I've ever known in comix and publishing always hated professional sports. 
       The late John Petrie and I once wrote an article for Blab that begins to scratch the surface of all these connnections.  It was printed in one of the early Blabs.
        The whole comics thing comes from Heinrich Kley.  Before Kley there wasn't the kind of art that we associate with the EC comics...and the good comics.  The weird thing is that Kley did these two sketchbooks (known as sketchbook one and sketchbook two) Before that...he was just a unmemorable commercial artist...but overnight something seems to have come over him, and he produced these two sketchbooks that changed the course of cartooning forever.  Meatball?