Recently I’ve been devoting a lot of time and energy into compiling and editing a new feature for RevSF. Similar to the Geek Movies NOT on DVD feature from a few years back, the RevSF Brain Trust decided to put together a compilation of the Comics Books That Are NOT Collected. As the editor for this project, I contacted friends and colleagues to contribute. The response was overwhelming with thirty contributors, fifty entries and over 12,000 words of text.

Part of what I’ve been doing beyond standardizing the format of the entries and general clean up, is determining the series/characters’ creators and exact issues that should be collected (along with original dates of publication.) Between the sensational Grand Comics Database, Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, and Wikipedia, I’ve been able to ascertain most of the info I needed. Well until I hit the western Ghost Rider.

Later renamed Night Rider then Phantom Rider by Marvel to avoid confusion with the popular motorcycle-riding, hellfire-wielding character of the same name, the Ghost Rider first appeared in Tim Holt #11 (November 1949) with art by Dick Ayers. He eventually appeared in three other Magazine Enterprises publications through 1954, when the new Comics Code made the character inviable.

Where the series appeared and why it ended was never in dispute, but I was finding contradictory info about the artists on the series. While Frank Frazetta did indeed produce many fantastic covers for the run, there was info from at least one source that he also illustrated some of the interiors. The only artist credited at GCD, Toonopedia, and Wikipedia is Dick Ayers. The fact that GCD and Wikipedia are compiled by user contributions makes them not always the most reliable resource. I did countless other searches, all finding similar results but nothing conclusive. Then I remembered the Maurice Horn-edited The World Encyclopedia of Comics.

During the pre-Internet, 20th century times, writers relied on books, often compiled by specialists, for their information. At one point, I owned a decade’s worth of almanacs, countless movies guides, price guides, book histories, science texts, countless compilations of baseball stats, and the like. Around the turn of the century, I pared down my collection to just some essentials. Basically stuff, not easily found on online or compiled by particular experts. Horn’s oversized, massive 1976 tome fell into the latter category.

According to Mark Evanier, who wrote the entry on Ghost Rider, "Dick Ayers did all of the interior art." Given Horn and Evanier’s pedigrees, I was able to definitively state that Frazetta did not illustrate any Ghost Rider adventures.

This all got me to thinking about which reference books I actually use any more. I own an unabridged dictionary but I can’t remember the last time I even opened it. Judging from the layer of dust, it’s been a long time.

I refer to the John Clute-edited Encyclopedias of sf and fantasy from time-to-time, both volumes still superior resources to anything online. When I encounter some confusion surrounding formating I’ll pull out my Chicago Manual of Style.

Perhaps the most used books in my collection are Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus and Webster’s Instant Word Guide. Faster and more helpful than digital resources, I use this print thesaurus especially with its theme references to find that precise word. The Instant Word Guide helps when you sort of know how to spell a word but can’t get quite close enough for the spell checker.

I still own a small three shelve book case worth of reference books, but I rarely add anything new. But when something like this comics project rolls around, I’m glad for the ones I do have.

(The Comics NOT Collected feature, probably under a wittier Joe Crowe-generated title will most likely appear sometime in October.)