Bob Dienenthal

 Hi. It's me again.

It would take a real fanatic and completist and database compiler to recognize Bob Dienenthal's career in comics: he 'lettered' and 'inked' Shatter at First Comics after Mike Saenz left the book and I asked for it back.

Mike was doing the book actually on the computer (in MacPaint, no less) and there was quite literally nobody around who could do that. So Steve Erwin pencilled it conventionally, and it was ThunderScanned and given to Bob to clean up and letter (also in MacPaint.) 

(Thunderscan was one of those kludges that are truly inspiring: you took an Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer, pulled out the printer head and replaced it with the module. Then instead of sending data to the printer to print, it reversed the flow and, as the head moved back and forth and the platen moved, it would send scan information back to the computer and assemble a graphic. This was before scanners were even available retail: it was (IIRC) about four years later that I bought a Microtek black and white scanner for nearly $2000, and made quite a bit of money scanning in color by putting a red, green and blue gel in front of the photo , scanning three times, and assembling it in Photoshop. So we're talking desktop publishing in its Quest for Fire stages.)

Bob had gone up to the First Offices with lettering samples that art director Joe Staton liked--but was disappointed inn when he found out they were mechanical. Thus it was that , when things developed in re Shatter the way they did, Bob got the job, and I got to know him.

Bob died a few days ago: in keeping with his wishes, he was cremated immediately, and there was no memorial services. The reason was straightforward: he smoked like a chimney, and cancer got him.

I was his friend for twenty-five years. And if I'm a footnote in comics history, he's a footnote to a footnote. But his life was far larger than that--and that's one of the big injustices the world does to human beings.

Bob was the only guy I knew who had a phototypesetter in his basement. Those things were huge: about the size of a Soviet tractor. HE was doing production freelance long before the Macintosh brought neos like me into it. He had worked many years doing greeting cards, and was both diligent and creative in finding ways to make money in the strange places of the capitalist system. (ever wonder who lays out those bunches of coupons you get, unwanted, in those envelopes? That's my Bob!)

He was ten years older than me, but it's amazing what barriers Mac fanaticism will o'erleap. He was a Vietnam Vet, and I an only-partly-ex hippie, but there was no distance between us. And he was an easygoing garrulous guy who liked everybody, and I was an easygoing guy who wanted to be liked by everybody,and so we were foredoomed to friendship. We shared not only our hopeless Macitude, but the woes and bitter delights of the freelance life. I cheered him on as he did his victory dance after his triumphant dive into the socialist end zone of Social Security. He got to enjoy it for far too few years, but that cigarettes=cancer equation is so established that (except for the fact we die at all) it's hard even to rail against fate here.

Bob went to First Comics the way he went to dozens of other potential clients--and stumbled into a world in which just another production job endows one with a sort of geeky nanoimmortality: like the world of Best Boys and Key Grips in the eternally scrolling Book of Life of the movies, but more obsessive. Bob did all sorts of stuff in his life, and any one of his greeting cards (which he never showed me) probably met the eyeballs of more people than saw those shatter issues, and by a large margin. But comics carved his name on the war memorial.

I am sick of the death of my friends, and sick of writing about death--and my desires in this regard don't seem to count for much. Bob was a wonderful guy, a good friend, a smart, talented and resourceful individual. His death is just plain terrible.

If there's a dominant trope in talking about a death like Bob's, it's viewing him as part of a mass, part of the rank and file, a little cog in a generalized machine. But Bob was  never a cog, he was a working device that was a complete machine, and whose function in the world of work was governed by intelligence. A senior vice=president with two houses and yacht is a cog: Bob changed his function as opportunities changed and redefined himself as technology developed. He was not regimented, controlled, briefed, debriefed or numbered. And he was rewarded for his talent, intelligence, and perseverance with a life on the edge and on the outside. Did he complain? Yes, all the time. Ultimately, though, it fed his cheerful cynicism and wry humility.

It is one of the wonderful things about comics--and comics fandom. I may have written this before, that one of my fondest memories of being at Marvel was sitting in Ralph Macchio's office and shooting the breeze with Ralph, Vinnie Colletta, Frank Giacoia, and Morrie Kuramoto. George Roussos stopped in, and (I think it was) Ralph remarked that we had in that office the two guys who put together the very first Marvel comic back in thhe Thirties. Yeah, said (I think it was) Frank--and we've got the guy that made it Marvel Comics #1 instead of Marvel Mystery Comics #1, like it was supposed to be! (looking at Morrie, who just growled 'shut up!') I feel safe in saying that most comics fanboys would have had the same intense delight as I had that lazy afternoon. Because the magic and the history is made by everybody.

And I keep thinking that that's the way it should be for everybody, even though it's impossible. Bob never even thought about going to a convention, and clearly had no need for even that little soupçon of fame. He was happy just to be alive--which makes his death so profoundly grim.

So there we are, in the midst of life. A brief and immortal footnote that may or not be better than nothing.

I'll miss you.