Remembering Lee Tennant

Originally published October 18, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1196

“No one ever said life was fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”

—from The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

 I don’t remember when I met Lee Tennant. He was just always… there somehow.

Taking a guess, probably the first time I met him was the first time that I went to a convention in an official capacity for Marvel Comics. I had been working for Carol Kalish, manager of direct sales, as her assistant. I’d only been with the company for about two months, and then one day Carol said to me, “I’m not going to be able to make it out to Chicago this year for the convention. So I want you to go to Chicago and represent Marvel at the Chicago Comicon—which is no relation to the San Diego Comic-Con, even though they both use the term “comicon” and should really resort to legal matters to try and see who has the trademark on the phrase.”

(Okay, she didn’t say the part after the dash. So fine. When you have your own column, you can write things the way you want to write them.)

While I appreciated the vote of confidence from Carol, I was still petrified by the notion of being the official presence and Marvel spokesman. Not because I was afraid of—oh, I dunno—someone taking a flamethrower to me (which would seem a legitimate concern nowadays), but simply because I didn’t want to screw up.

Lee was very likely at that convention, just because he was at all those conventions. He’d be there behind a table, the quintessential aggressive retailer. A massive presence, somewhat Brando-esque in his girth, but he didn’t have a particularly loud or booming voice.

What he did have, though, was very much a friendly “Hi, how are ya, glad to see you” attitude. This may sound like nothing particularly unusual when one considers that—at the very least—a retailer should be welcoming of, and encouraging to, any potential customers. Or any potential business contacts. Or any potential guests at his store. In short, anyone who might, in some way, shape or form, be able to result in monetary gain.

But I’ve encountered enough retailers, and heard horror stories about others, in all walks of life (so no one thinks that I’m holding comic book retailers up for opprobrium; I’m not) who can be quite dismissive or uncaring of people and uninterested in the product they actually sell.

For that matter, I can’t tell you the number of times I personally dealt with retailers who were openly hostile. I remember one convention when I: had a breakfast meeting with a retailer who complained about Marvel; opened up the Marvel display booth and worked there until lunch; had a lunch meeting with a retailer who complained about Marvel; worked the display booth until closing; had a dinner meeting with a retailer who complained about Marvel.

The point is, Lee was never one of those retailers who made my life any more difficult than it already was. He was always genuinely happy to see me, genuinely eager to spend time with me. On those occasions we did go out, he loved to take me out to some steak place, occasionally accompanied by his wife, Louisa. They were not, physically, two people you’d expect to see as a couple somehow. As large as Lee was, Louisa was the exact opposite. Diminutive, at least two heads shorter than Lee, quite petite.

I said in the first paragraph that I can’t say for sure when I actually met Lee. For that matter, I’m not even sure when it was that I actually became friends with him. It was one of those odd things which one thinks of as a convention friendship. Someone whom you only see at a convention, have a great time with, then go back to your “normal” day-to-day life wherein you don’t give the other person much thought for months at a stretch. But the next time you go to a convention, there he is, and you pick up exactly where you left off.

I made a number of stops in Chicago during my tour of duty in sales, and I always made it a point of visiting Lee’s then-burgeoning “Heroland” stores. One day I even spent time working behind the counter. At one point a kid came up to me with a copy of The Dark Knight Returns and, curious—not about the story, but about its investment potential—asked, “How high do you think this will go?”

I took the comic and tossed it straight up. It ricocheted off the ceiling, I caught it, and handed it back to the kid. “About that high,” I told him. The kid bought the comic while Lee stood there and grinned.

He had a consistently ebullient spirit and was an aggressive businessman who put more than a few noses out of joint. From time to time he made some injudicious decisions which cost him, both reputation-wise and finance-wise. But let’s face it, ain’t none of us are perfect, and I’m quite certain that—given time—he could easily have worked through things and come out on top. Because he had those kinds of smarts and that kind of spirit.

But he was not given the opportunity.

Instead what he had was a series of health problems. For the longest time he was in the hospital, out of the hospital. There aren’t many people whose absence from a convention could be noticed, because how many people are there who are genuine mainstays? But we knew that Lee wasn’t there. Word would drift in through the grapevine that Lee was better, then he wasn’t, then he was, then wasn’t. He would need a transplant, he would need medication, he was up and down and then back up again more often than Bill Clinton’s political career.

There was a long period of time where I didn’t see him—and then, one convention, I did. He was in a wheelchair, and he easily weighed less than half what had used to weigh. His previously short hair was now almost shoulder length, and he had a long and bushy beard. I didn’t recognize him at first, which was certainly understandable—and yet I felt guilty for not realizing.

It was clear that he was fighting a losing fight, his body breaking down. But if Lee realized it, he certainly didn’t acknowledge it. He refused to give it its due, was still fighting back. Difficulty upon difficulty was heaped upon him, but Lee still maintained his determination. He became a regular presence on computer boards, CompuServ in particular, holding court regularly. Lee was always the consummate convention presence, and when his body wouldn’t allow him to maintain that at real conventions, the BBS served to create a sort of virtual convention where his presence could continue to be felt.

At the end he lay in a hospital bed, comatose, in Rush Hospital in Chicago, his skin tinged yellow with liver failure. He needed a liver transplant, but they couldn’t do one because his body was wracked with infection. The infection had to be cured with antibiotics before a transplant was possible, or else his body would reject the liver—but in the meantime, his liver was failing, hence the jaundice. In a way, it was a race against time.

And he lost.

They say that when one lies in a coma, one is in a sort of dream state. I can’t help but wonder what Lee was dreaming about. About conventions and steak houses and an industry that was once as big and alive as he was, filled with energy and life? An industry that many feel has become as frail as he himself had become, hooked up to life support and barely recognizable as its former self? He wouldn’t have liked to see it that way, just as people hated to see Lee that way.

In the final analysis, Lee was a guy who did what he loved, made a lot of friends, made a life for himself, and then lost it in a hideously unfortunate series of health problems.

And in a way, William Goldman wasn’t quite correct. Because death actually is fairer than life: It comes to everyone, young or old, fat or thin, rich or poor. Life is far more unfair, because it capriciously doles out staying power to some, and cuts short others.

Perhaps that’s why Lee (and, for that matter, we) loved and love comics so much. Because the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Unfortunately, when a Lee Tennant dies, we all lose.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)