Three Musketeers

I hope you'll enjoy this re-recording of "Three Musketeers." I've entered it in the NPR Tiny Desk Concert Contest. There's a lot of love in this tune. Grandpa sings of days gone by, I guess.

Copyright © 2023, Salvatore Caputo

Three Musketeers

Last night, I finished polishing up a new song I had been thinking about all week, Today, I got to play it for a live audience at the 26th Annual Arizona Songwriters Gathering at the Glendale Public Library. My thanks to everyone there for a wonderful experience, and for the opportunity to get this song out in front of people. It means a lot to me. Three Musketeers

Copyright © 2023, Salvatore Caputo

The writer who used to be ...

I used to write for The Arizona Republic. The Republic was my longest-term employer. I worked there from February 1981 through the middle of January 1997, so pretty much 16 years. 

Being there so long I held a number of positions, most of them behind the scenes. I was a copy editor in the news department, which was responsible for our daily production of international, national, state and local news, for about seven years. I moved to the features copy desk, which was responsible for the daily production of our entertainment and lifestyle coverage. I used to describe copy-editing as "fixing mistakes and writing headlines." Really, it wasn't just fixing mistakes - such as grammar missteps and typographical errors - but also preventing them by asking the right questions to be sure that what the writer meant to say was conveyed accurately to our readers.  

It's not a glamor job. 

Once, There Was a Fanzine ....

My friend "The Kizer" and I were deeply into comics back in the late 1960s. So much so, that I proposed we make our own "fanzine." At the time, fanzine meant a certain kind of amateur publication made by and for fans. The idea of this type of fanzine started in the science fiction fan community, but as far as I've been able to document, sometime in the early 1960s, comic book fanzines started to appear as well. 

Excelsior #1 cover, drawn by my
pal, The Kizer. 

For my pal and me, it's unclear exactly when we found out about fanzines. I think we might have attended Phil Seuling's Comic Art Convention in New York City in 1967 or 1968, and that could have been where the door opened for us. 

I know I got onto the mailing list of something called the DallasCon Bulletin, which I probably first saw at the Comic Art Convention. It was published by a group of fans who intended to put on a science fiction fan convention in Dallas. The bulletin was their vehicle to build up excitement for their convention. It was through the bulletin, I think, that I first heard of Fantasy Illustrated. This was a fanzine that combined original comic stories with reviews, history and news about comic books. 

Fantasy Illustrated's publisher was Bill Spicer, and he had high hopes for extending the form of the comics. So much so, that as I subscribed to Fantasy Illustrated, Spicer decided to change its name to Graphic Story Magazine. He was a proponent of the form and felt that if there would ever be comic books aimed at something other than "the bubblegum brigade" (i.e., young kids), then the form would have to be called something other than comic books. After all, the name "comic book" was based on the idea that these were "funnies," but the kinds of storytelling possibilities that Spicer saw were maybe akin to the French art films that were making noise at the time. It was in the pages of Graphic Story Magazine that I first heard of a "graphic novel." Nowadays, that's a commonplace.