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Tom Fagan 1935/36-2008
posted October 23, 2008
 

The Rutland Herald reports that Tom Fagan, a longtime newspaper reporter and the founder of that city's Halloween parade, has died at age 76. It gets mentioned here because the Rutland Halloween celebration was attended by a number of comics professionals and worked into superhero comics continuity in issues like the Roy Thomas-penned Avengers #83 represented by the accompanying image. A sign of an earlier time when the bleed between adult fan and the American mainstream comics industry was much more pronounced, and one of the odder reading memories for a lot of kids of that era, many of whom quickly picked up on the fact that this was something that existed in the real world. As Cole Odell wrote CR this morning, "As a little kid growing up in small-town Vermont, coming across these stories of Batman or the Avengers running around about 45 minutes from my house blew my 6-year-old mind."

I see Mark Evanier has something up here.