I was at Farpoint this weekend and awoke Sunday to discover the news I had expected. The world lost KC Carlson on Saturday night.
KC died from a combination of cancer and Alzheimer’s so my first thought was that he was finally no longer in pain and was at peace. The second thought was that I had yet again lost a contemporary far too young.
When I got home today, I scoured my photos and only came up with two featuring KC, and none with just us, which I regret. ICv2 published a fine obit here.
We met when he joined the DC staff in 1989, initially assisting Richard Bruning, who was the Design Director at the time. Together, they helped develop and share the company’s burgeoning collected editions program, which included the first DC Archives.
He left to work on Comics Retailer for Krause Publications in 1990, but I was happy he came back in 1992, joining the Editorial Department. He got to work on his true love, the Legion of Super-Heroes, which led to his romance with our online guru Johanna Draper. They married in 1999 and were inseparable once they found one another.
KC, as so many have posted, was affable, good-natured, rarely lost his cool, never raised his voice, and was nurturing to new talent while understanding how to work with the veterans. While we never directly worked on anything together, we found ourselves sympathetic to most things. Later, when I was assembling Absolute JLA/Avengers, I asked KC to assemble an oral history of what happened the first time the project was attempted. In the end, Paul Levitz spiked it, noting that no one looked good, and it was better left unpublished. It finally resurfaced in 2022 and you can read it here.
He left DC in 1997, heading to first to Virginia and finally settling in Madison, Wisconsin. So began our regular phone calls to stay in touch. Looking back, it’s pretty impressive for this friendship to endure for some twenty-five years. At first, we chatted about comics and our mutual cronies, but after I left DC in 2000, it moved away from DC stuff to general comics and television and music.
In 2009, he was instrumental in getting me a columnist job at Westfield Comics, one which I happily did until 2020.
He seemed to always be organizing his collection, finally reading things he never had time for while on staff. His music interest was vast, and he made very sound recommendations for newer music (he turned me on to Oasis, for example), while never giving up on the oldies (notably the Monkees).
I often cajoled him to take ideas he had for books on music and actually write them, but he always demurred, preferring the columns he wrote for Westfield Comics or pitching in and working at their retail stores at least once a week. It’s a shame because, based on those columns, he would have written some fun books on various music topics, such as 45s.
As happens, the calls were less frequent but remained regular and then, a few years ago, I noticed he seemed distracted, forgetting things. Not long after, Johanna confirmed he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but we still chatted as I watched my friend slip away. Then came the cancer diagnosis so the clock began to wind down.
We last spoke sometime in 2024, and I knew it would be one of our final chats, never realizing the KC I so enjoyed, had faded. He’s now at rest.
Johanna has always been his rock and support and no doubt the void in her life will be wide and deep. There are the memories and comics and books and records, and they will have to suffice.
#Tags: Comics Retailer, DC Comics, JLA/Avengers, Johanna Draper Carlson, KC Carlson, Krasue Publications, Paul Levitz', Richard Bruning, Westfield Comics
A very nicely written tribute, Bob.
I always enjoyed working with KC, and chatting with him even more. He made his passions clear and I always enjoy that with editors. It helps me to know their sensibilities and preferences. Ultimately, that kind of relationship can make for a better product.
He did wonderful work on Zero Hour and there’s no way I could have done it without him.
I always loved that he had his own logo.