I just received  the sad news that my old pal Al Levine has passed.

Many of you knew him, a fixture at North East conventions  for DECADES…

Alan was one of the originals, his ads for comics going back to some of the earliest issues of the Comics Buyers Guide.

He also sold pulps, and perhaps most famously, movie material, and memorabilia. (Al wound up helping to sell the E. Nelson Bridwell collection, and MANY other assortments, over the years!)

There was his store in Bloomfield, New Jersey, for AGES. (And Al was a key figure in the transitioning of Manhattan’s monthly one-day comic book marketplace convention from the auspices of founder Phil Seuling, after he passed, to Fred Greenberg, in the mid-1980s. A few years later, he was also in on the origins of New Jersey’s Chiller Convention!)

And Al was someone I, and so many others, could trust.

And he was FUNNY!

And raised a lovely family, including, a beautiful granddaughter. (Amazing to me now, she’s  in her twenties… I can remember cradling her on my shoulder at a Gallagher’s paper show!)

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More info to follow, but I wanted to get word out, for anyone who might wish to attend tomorrow’s memorial service, at 12:00 PM, Noon at:

The Jewish Memorial Chapel
841 Allwood Road
Clifton, NJ. 07012

http://www.jewishmemorialchapel.org/directions.htm

About The Author

James H. (Jim) Burns was a pioneer of the second wave of fantasy and science fiction movie magazines, being one of the first writers for Starlog (and several other late 1970s publications), and a contributing editor to Fantastic Films, and Steranko's Prevue. (He wrote the earliest of these articles, when he was thirteen...!) Jim was also a key figure in many of the era's North Eastern American comic book and Star Trek conventions. Burns was one of the field's first writers to cross over to such mainstream fare as Gentleman's Quarterly, Esquire and American Film, while still contributing to such genre stalwarts as Cinefantastique, Starburst, Heavy Metal and Twilight Zone magazines. More recently, Jim has made several contributions to Off-Broadway, and Broadway productions, become active in radio, and written Oo-Eds, or features, for Newsday, The Village Voice, thesportingnews.com and The New York Times.

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