“Wait? What? Introducing? Why, we’ve known Henry Vogel for years!”
Ah, yes, you may think you know Henry Vogel, but—
“No, it says right here in my copy of Stupefying Stories that he’s the Rampant Loon Press consigliere—whatever that is.”
“Funny. In my copy it says he’s your dotar sojat, whatever—”
Yes, yes, I have indeed called him that at various times, and Henry himself would be the first to tell you that both I and the movie got it all wrong, because in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoomian Tharkish language dotar sojat actually means…
Oh, never mind. Just sit down, kids, and let me tell you a story about a man named Henry… no, wait, wrong song. Let’s try this one instead.
So let me introduce to you
the act you’ve known for all these years
§
I’d like to claim credit for Henry Vogel’s success as a writer, but he showed up in The Friday Challenge one day mostly fully formed, just needing a little more encouragement, polishing, and refinement. Ever since then he’s been a behind-the-scenes stalwart here, first in The Friday Challenge and then here in Stupefying Stories. Mostly, from my point of view, he’s been the calm voice of reason who has talked me down from the ledge more times than I like to think about, as befits someone who spent most of his career doing software development testing and QA work. From time to time he surfaces and becomes visible to the writing public, to share his hard-won knowledge about life as an indie author and comic book scriptwriter. (“We were Indie before Indie was cool,” he likes to say.) Lately he’s been our foremost scout, exploring and reporting back from the wilderness of the strange land known as Kindle Vella.
Around here, though, he will always be famous, or perhaps infamous, for the time he showed up at The Friday Challenge with his hilarious but hopelessly unpublishable comic book script, “Lex Luthor’s and Bruce Wayne’s Ex-Girlfriends Meet at a Cocktail Party and Compare Notes,” which introduced the now legendary crotchless Batgirl costume. Thus he proved that beneath that calm, quiet, fuzzy and lovable exterior there lurks an encyclopedic knowledge of sci-fi and comic geekdom, and a nearly infinitely deep and dark well of snark and sarcasm, shot through with shining threads of a sly sense of humor.
For the sake of the greater good, he mostly keeps that persona hidden.
Mostly…
§
Like most of us, Henry really can’t remember when he became a science fiction and comic fan; that appetite seemed to be there as soon as he began to read. He got his start on writing side of the business back in the 1970s, as the co-editor of Eternity Science Fiction, a short-lived small press SF magazine. (That description seems redundant.) It’s difficult to tease tales of his experience as an editor out of him; when they do come out, he’ll talk about, say, the time Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” showed up in his slush pile, submitted by someone who insisted the story was their own original work.
Sigh. Do I know that one.
Of his experience with Eternity, the best Henry will say is, “If I hadn’t done that, I would not have had the misplaced confidence to start doing Southern Knights.”
Southern Knights was Henry’s first big foray into indie comic book writing and publishing Essentially, the Knights were a superhero team based in Atlanta, not New York, with a distinctly Southern flair, neatly anticipating DC’s decision a few years later to turn the Justice League into a franchise and open branch offices around the world. Southern Knights opened the door for X-Thieves, the X in the title standing for “Aristocratic Extraterrestrial Time-Traveling,” not Marvel-style mutants, as well as other comic book scripting work, including a brief stint with the company that managed to get the comic book rights to Voltron before anyone in North America knew what Voltron was. If you’re the sort who likes to buy old comic books in sealed bags and never actually read them, issues of Southern Knights and X-Thieves are still to be found on the Internet, and there are even three albums of collected X-Thieves stories to be found, if you prefer graphic novels to comic books, and if you like to give inflated amounts of money to collectors instead of to the original content creators.
Eventually, though, the glamor of being in the comic book business faded, and Henry decided to walk away from it all, to concentrate on his marriage, his family, and having a career with benefits, medical insurance, paid time off, and all that other mundane stuff.
Of course, the number of SF writers who have decided to hang it up and “get away from it all”—there’s even a word for it, “gafia,” in verb form, “to gafiate”—is legion, and sooner or later, most come back. As I can attest, it’s damned hard to walk away from the publishing business, once you’ve had a taste of success.
§
Henry’s return came in an unorthodox way, though. In 2005 he decided to become a professional story-teller, and go out into the world on the school, library, and festival circuit, telling stories to live audiences, mostly of children. (No, not while in drag. Was that question really necessary?) For him, this was a brilliant career move. If you’ve ever heard him speak, he “spins a good yarn,” as the expression goes, and he once told me that nothing makes you focus on keeping your story moving and getting to a satisfying ending like trying to keep an audience of fidgety 8-year-olds entertained.
No, seriously. It would make a great Christmas present, or at least a stocking-stuffer. You should give it a closer look.
§
When Henry first showed up in The Friday Challenge, then, he was already a talented story-teller and a seasoned professional. In the years since, he’s become a good friend and a reliable ally: thoughtful, insightful, and always supportive. While we have published a few of his “adult*” stories in Stupefying Stories—“Heart of Dorkness” in the original Stupefying Stories: It Came From The Slushpile, and “Watch This!” in issue #2—it quickly became apparent that his real hidden strength lay in longer formats.
[ * By “adult” I mean of a length and covering topics and situations not suitable for children. Henry is adamant that his stories never include profanity, explicit sex, or gratuitous violence. While he writes novels intended for adults, he insists that his stories never include content unsuitable for the bright YA reader.]
Of course, if you’re the sort of litterateur who frowns on finding fun in your science fiction, then you should pass this one by. There are plenty of depressing and nihilistic Nebula winners out there, waiting to feed your sense of anomie and existential despair.
To my surprise and delight Scout’s Honor was also our first big breakout bestseller, selling thousands of copies on Kindle. We’ve since expanded distribution to other platforms—the above list is by no means complete, it’s just what would fit neatly in the graphic—and into trade paperback, but go ahead. Click on the UBL image. If you haven’t already read Scout’s Honor, you can pick up the e-book for just 99-cents.
Or, if you’re the sort who would rather binge-read, you can click this link to get the entire series. It’s up to seven books so far, and Henry is showing no signs of stopping: he’s writing the eighth book right now, and running it as a serial on Kindle Vella.
Fiction doesn’t get much fresher than this. On Vella, you’re practically reading over the author’s shoulder while they’re writing the book.
§
Once you’ve had a big breakout success like Scout’s Honor, what do you do for an encore? If you’re me, you do something stupid, like Rebel Moon, but if you’re Henry, you’re more level-headed than I am, so you do the obvious thing: you launch another best-selling series. In 2016 Henry gave us The Fugitive Heir, which again set new sales records for us, sold thousands of copies on Kindle, and proved beyond any doubt that Henry is not a one-hit wonder, a one-trick pony, or a one-idea writer.
With The Fugitive Heir he launched The Connaught Family Chronicles, which led to last year’s hugely successful and award-nominated book, The Hostage in Hiding, and…
And here I am again, out of time to write and with so much more left to say. I guess that’s just what happens when I start writing about something or someone as interesting as Henry Vogel.
Seriously, check out his books. I guarantee, you’ll like what you find.
~brb
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