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Joe Wehrle Jr, The Digest Enthusiast, Clarion, Sense of Wonder, Fawn the Dark Eyed, The Menomonee Falls Gazette
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Fawn the Dark Eyed comic strip

Joe Wehrle Jr, The Digest Enthusiast, Clarion, Sense of Wonder, Fawn the Dark Eyed, The Menomonee Falls Gazette No. 42

Joe Wehrle, Jr.’s story “The Bandemar” appeared in the first Clarion anthology and the comic version in Bill Schelly’s Sense of Wonder No. 12.

“Several years later,” Joe explained, “I resurrected the idea, and Fawn, with a slightly different storyline, was published for 36 weeks in The Menomonee Falls Gazette from Wisconsin, an all-comic newspaper.

“Toward the end [of Fawn’s run], I got those commissions from Lava Mt. Records to do H. P. Lovecraft portraits for their record jackets, and those took a lot of time, so the Gazette guys were alternating Fawn with something else on a bi-weekly basis. Then their paper just sort of fizzled out. They continued to run a handful of strips that they had al- ready paid for in their Comic Reader, but they were completely broke as far as the Gazette was concerned. It’s probably a wonder they were able to publish as many issues as they did.”

The cover of The Menomonee Falls Gazette No. 142, September 1974, featured the debut of the Fawn the Dark Eyed comic strip. The strip appeared in issues 142–161, 163–171, 173–176, 178, 179, 181, 183, and 188.

Joe’s bibliography appears on the Larque Press website.

'The Bandemar'Joe Wehrle, Jr.
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Clarion: One

Sense of Wonder No. 12
Sense of Wonder No. 12

Excerpt from “The Creative Works of Joe Wehrle, Jr.” from The Digest Enthusiast No. 8, June 2018.

“The Bandemar” was part of the first Clarion anthology, written by the workshop’s lecturers and alumni, published by Signet in 1971. Joe also drew a four-page wordless comic version that appeared in Sense of Wonder No. 12. By this time, Fawn, who encounters the bandemar, was modeled after Karen Wehrle and appears with lighter hair.

In 1981, the story was translated into German (“Der Bandemar”) for Germany’s Science-Fiction Story Reader.

Sense of Wonder No. 12 back
Sense of Wonder No. 12 back cover

The story and the comic version appear together in The Digest Enthusiast No. 9, Jan. 2019.

Joe’s bibliography appears on the Larque Press website.