Identity area
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Schelly, William
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History
William (Bill) Schelly has been chronicling the pop culture fringes since the mid-1960s. Born in Washington State in 1951, he began his career as a writer and artist in the pages of his fanzine Sense of Wonder (1967 – 1972). His first book was Harry Langdon (1982), a biography of the brilliant comedian of Silent Films. Schelly is perhaps best-known for his book The Golden Age of Comic Fandom (1995), the only extensive history of comic book fandom, which was published in a revised and extended version in 1998. Some of Bill Schelly’s subsequent books are Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine (1998) with Roy Thomas, and Sense of Wonder: A Life in Comic Fandom (2001). He currently serves as Associate Editor of the magazine of comic art Alter Ego (TwoMorrows Publishing) and makes his books available through his web site.
William Schelly has enjoyed a long career as a writer, editor, and biographer. He was born on November 2, 1951, in Walla Walla, Washington, and graduated from the University of Idaho in 1973.
A comic-book enthusiast from an early age, Schelly produced his first comic fanzine, _Super-Heroes Anonymous_in 1965. This was the first of a number of fanzines he created through the early 1970s. It was for his fanzine _Sense of Wonder_that Schelly became known to the comics community. It began as a collection of amateur comics and stories, but in 1970, Schelly changed the format to a more general fanzine made up of articles and artwork about the history of comic books.
Schelly has written a number of books on the history of comic book fandom, as well as biographies of silent film comedian Harry Langdon, comic book artist Joe Kubert, _Mad Magazine_creator Harvey Kurtzman, and SF and comic book writer Otto Binder.