Larry Blake (1952-2024)

Following is a tribute that I wrote for Larry Blake for the day and place of his graveside service, Saturday, April 20, 2024, Eden Cemetery, Reedsville, Ohio:

Larry Perrin Blake was born on October 18, 1952, in Greenfield, Ohio. His parents were Ervan Vinson Blake (1923-1975), a U.S. Army veteran of World War II, car mechanic, used car salesman, and operator of a taxi service, and (Edith) Lavonne Perrin Blake (1926-2007), a wife, mother, and homemaker. She was an artist, too. Larry grew up in Greenfield and Springfield, Ohio. He studied commercial art at Springfield-Clark County Joint Vocational School and graduated from Springfield High School in 1970. As an art student, he met Larry Nibert, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator.

Everyone who knew Larry knows that he was a talented, imaginative, and very creative artist. He began drawing comics in 1960 and first saw his work in print in 1973. From then until the end of his life, except when he was in ill health, Larry drew and drew, always with great energy and enthusiasm. He loved drawing comic books, but Larry was also a gag cartoonist, illustrator, and muralist, and he made many colorful and evocative paper collages. Over the years, he knew and collaborated with many other artists and writers who were and are involved in small press, amateur press, and alternative comics, including Jim Pack, Jim Main, Tim Corrigan, Mike Gustovich, Steve Keeter, Doug Phillips, Larry Johnson, Russ Ferryman, Gerry Lee, and Dale Sherman, among many, many others. In later years, Larry worked with Kevin Yong, Eric Jansen, Tom Ahearn, Gary Gibeaut, Jason Gibeaut, and Terence Hanley.

Larry attended comic book conventions and other pop-culture conventions beginning in the 1970s. In the 2000s, he was a regular at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and other events close to his home in Reedsville, Ohio. In 2009, Larry received a lifetime achievement award at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (S.P.A.C.E.), an event put on every year in Columbus, Ohio, by Bob Corby, also a longtime friend.

Larry was a great fan of rock 'n' roll music. Like the rest of America, he watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, but it was the Monkees television series in 1966-1968 that turned him into what he called "a foaming-at-the-mouth rock 'n' roll fanatic!" He began collecting records, magazines, and memorabilia about his favorite kind of music and his favorite bands. During the 1970s, he attended lots of rock concerts. If you wanted to find Larry at a convention or other event, you just had to follow the sound of the music.

In addition to the Beatles and the Monkees, Larry was a fan of Alice Cooper, the Ramones, and KISS. For years he had artwork in fan magazines such as KISS Crazy, and he learned to draw flawlessly and from memory the members of that band, as well as the Ramones. Larry knew everything there is to know about rock music--all of the bands, band members, singers, songwriters, and songs. He also knew all about television shows and old movies. "I loved going to drive-in movies with my family," he remembered. "We'd pile in the car with a grocery bag fill of bread, lunch meat, chips, bottles of soda pop! Great fun." Family meant a lot to Larry. In addition to his younger sister Rita, he had many cousins with whom he played and pretended when they were children.

The comic book titles on which Larry worked is long and varied. I'm not sure that there will ever be a complete catalog of his more than half-century's worth of work. Titles on which he worked or that he created himself include: Afterworld, Alpha-Omega, The Big Book of Christian Comics, Christianman, Comet Tales, Ditkomania, Facets (Harrison Ford fanzine), Fandom Teamup, Fanzine '77, Five Star Comics, Followers of the All, KISS Crazy, Mothman 'Toons, New Sons of Thunder, Skeet's Fab Forum and Review, Reeealy Comics Presents . . ., Rotgut Funnies, Silver Wolf, Spectrum, Tim Corrigan's Comics and Stories, and Zero Man. Larry also created a long-running comic book series called Kevin Kool, based on his own friends and experiences from high school and after. He began drawing Kevin Kool in 1966, the same year in which he discovered the Monkees.

Larry's most ambitious work--really his life's work, a sprawling and ambitious epic--is Psychozort, an anthology of his own characters and stories that ran for dozens of issues from the 1970s until the early 2000s. Larry first started working on the characters that would one day fill the pages of Psychozort when he was just eight years old. Like much of Larry's work, stories in Psychozort were based on his own life, its characters based on people he really knew. Paul Burden, sidekick of super heroine Nightstar, is Larry himself, while Nightstar was based on a young friend. The fact that Larry's characters were based on real people made them and their stories more authentic, interesting, and compelling. The story of Nightstar and Paul Burden will never be finished. Maybe that's just as well. As in John Keats' poem, addressed to the ageless figures on a Grecian urn, "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

Larry was close to his paternal grandparents, Reverend Eldon Blake and Harriet "Hattie" Blake. "Grandpa was an amazing guy," Larry wrote, while his grandmother encouraged him to draw. "I'd give her drawings," Larry remembered, "and she'd keep them in a dresser drawer in her bedroom." Larry and his family visited with his grandparents a lot when he was a kid. In 1983, after a bout with serious illness, Larry returned to the Reedsville area and his mother's Meigs County home. He lived there for more than three decades after that, just down the road from his friends Dee and Jeff Kimes. In 2018, Larry moved to Boonville, Indiana, at the invitation of his friend Kim Hemmerlein. She and her son Gary became a home-away-from-home family for him, and it was Kim who helped look after Larry and took care of his affairs at the end. Larry spent the last years of his life in Boonville and passed away there on March 28, 2024, meaningfully, I think, during Holy Week and just three days before Easter Sunday. He was seventy-one years old.

Larry was smart and funny and generous. He was a talented and extremely prolific artist, his body of work numbering in the thousands of pages. What he wanted was for his art to survive him and for people to go on seeing it for a long time after he was gone. We will miss Larry, and though he might be departed now, his art remains. He remains in our memories, too, as a happy, cheerful, laughing, and funny guy. Larry was a Christian. In his last letter to me, he wrote, "PSYCH [his comic book Psychozort] is the ONLY reason I still wanta BE here! Actually what comes NEXT sounds much more interesting! A new body, reunions with all who went on before & the full-time ALL enveloping presence of GOD who is love!" We can take comfort knowing that Larry is in that presence now. Meanwhile, as they say in the comic books, we go on here.

Quotations are from an interview Larry did with D. Blake Werts, published in his mini-comic Copy This! #32, October 2016. Thank you, Blake. All other text is copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley.

The final panel in Larry Blake's first story of Nightstar, published in the initial issue of Psychozort, 1998. Everyone who knew Larry recognizes the male figure here as the artist himself. Note that Larry's autobiographical character is wearing a Rez t-shirt. Music from that band played at his graveside service. So, again, if you followed the music, you would find Larry.