Longtime Overstreet Advisor and pop culture authority Jerry Weist lost his battle with Multiple Myeloma Cancer on January 7, 2011. He was 61. His longtime friend and fellow historian and collecting enthusiast, Roger Hill, drafted his obituary, from which this is excerpted.

Though not very well known to the general public, Jerry Weist will always be remembered by his family and the community of science fiction and comic book fandom as a man with a passion for life and a drive to accomplish great things. During his sixty-one years on this planet he became an artist, a writer, an independent business man, a publisher, a husband and father. He also put together one of the largest and most amazing collections of science fiction and fantasy art and related memorabilia that has ever been amassed.

He walked in the footsteps of his mentor, Forrest J. Ackerman (1916-2008), past editor of the world’s first and foremost monster magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, which he discovered with the second issue on the magazine racks in 1958. In those days Ackerman lived in Los Angeles and resided in a four level home located in the Hollywood Hills that was packed from wall to wall with science fiction and fantasy related artwork and memorabilia of all kinds. Jerry read about Forry’s collection in the pages of Famous Monsters and saw the amazing photos of his collection. Jerry was nine years old when he was first introduced to the old Universal horror and science fiction movies on a Wichita, Kansas late-night television show called Nightmare, and it changed his life forever.

Born on September 16, 1949 in Wichita Kansas, Jerry Norton Weist began showing artistic interests at an early age sketching and drawing fantasy characters on lined school tablets of notebook paper. He attended public schools in Wichita and graduated from Derby High School in Derby, Kansas in 1967.

After discovering Famous Monsters magazine and the Universal horror movies he decided to publish his own mail-order monster magazines calling them Movieland Monsters and Nightmare. He wrote and drew most of the contents and ran them off on his father’s Mimeograph machine located at their family-owned grocery store in the North end of town. Around the same time, in 1963, he started the Forrest J. Ackerman Fan Club where for a whole quarter you could receive a club card (signed by Jerry) and a copy of one of his horrific fan-publications.

A year later, on his famous cross-country trip from California to New York City to attend the World Science Fiction Convention, Ackerman and his wife stopped off to meet and visit Jerry and other Wichita monster fans at Jerry’s home. It was a highpoint Jerry would remember with great fondness for the rest of his life. The year was 1964 and the monster collectibles field was gaining in popularity and spreading across America like wildfire. Boys, and yes, even a few girls, were fast becoming horror and science fiction memorabilia collectors and going after everything they could get their hands on.

When he discovered EC (Entertaining Comics) comic books and MAD magazine in 1964, he became a devoted fan and collector and began putting together complete sets of Crime Suspenstories, Tales From the Crypt, Weird Science and all the other titles that had been published by William M. Gaines during the 1950s. In the pre-internet days of the 1960s this was not an easy task to undertake. Luckily there were a few mail-order comic book dealers just beginning to sprout up across the country who occasionally turned up these rare four-color gems that had been stored away in people’s attics and were now being rediscovered by a whole new generation of kids. EC comics were like a breath of fresh air to Jerry who up to this point had been raised on a steady diet of superhero and big-foot monster comics produced by Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics. He also collected DC Comics’ Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, with a passion and during his lifetime had put together complete collections of these and other titles. His book shelves became loaded with all the great science fiction and fantasy novels ever written including the works of early authors such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. When he discovered the stories and characters of Edgar Rice Burroughs he bought all the paperback editions and then went after the early, more rare and expensive hardcover book editions building a library of vast proportions. In 1967 he bought his first piece of original fantasy art when a dealer’s catalog showed up in his mailbox with a listing for a John Carter of Mars pencil preliminary illustration by the great J. Allen St. John (from a Burroughs story) for seventy-five dollars. It was the most money he had ever spent on anything in his life.

Science fiction pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Weird Tales and many others began overloading the book shelves in his small bedroom at home in Wichita along with stacks and stacks of big little books, fanzines and more and more monster magazines.

But EC comics were his growing passion and first love and in 1967, with the help of local Wichita collectors Bob Barrett and Roger Hill, and with the kind permission of publisher Bill Gaines himself, Jerry decided to put out a fanzine devoted to the writers and artists of EC Comics. He called his new baby Squa Tront, which is a Venusian exclamation derived from EC science fiction stories meaning “Good Lord!”

This professional looking fan-magazine, printed with offset printing and a four-color cover drawn by Hill and colored by Weist caught on with EC fandom right away and within the next few years became the acknowledged “Cadillac of EC fanzines.”

Through the courtesy of EC publisher Bill Gaines Squa Tront eventually presented the previously unpublished EC 3-D (three-dimensional) science fiction stories that had been created during the early 1950s and laid in Gaines’ storage vault for many years. This was a major breakthrough for a fan publication. EC comic artists such as Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson and others contributed their art to the publication helping it to become one of the most revered EC fanzines ever produced.

When Jerry graduated from Derby High School in 1967, he applied to Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. Four years later, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree under his arm, he turned over Squa Tront to another editor and moved to New York City to break into the field of fine arts.

In 1973 Jerry was living in a loft apartment in Manhattan’s lower East side and presenting one-man art shows for a gallery in Soho. He subsequently relocated to Boston and a year later, during the summer of 1974, formed a partnership with fellow collector Chuck Wooley and opened one of the first world-class specialty comic book stores in North America, called The Million Year Picnic (This name comes from one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories in his novel, The Martian Chronicles).

Shortly after the store got up and running, Jerry opened a second shop called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Bookstore, also located in Harvard Square. With a new partner, Barbara Boatner, he formed the Boatner/Norton Press and published the R. Crumb Price Guide and The Underground Comic Price Guide.

After ten years in the retail store business, he moved back to New York City in 1991 and with his friend Tom Horvitz convinced Sotheby’s auction house to mount the first major comic book and comic art auction, which sold over $1million of rare comics and comic art in their first auction held that December.

Between 1991 and 2001 Jerry produced ten auctions for Sotheby’s, which included two successful science fiction auctions and the very successful Mad About MAD auction, all of which totaled up to over $14 million in sales.

In the process of working with the firm, he met and eventually married Sotheby’s Auction Specialist Dana Hawkes.

With the help of other knowledgeable collectors and dealers, he wrote and produced the first edition of the Original Comic Art Identification and Price Guide. This book was published in 1992 and updated again in 2000. At the time of his passing, Jerry had just completed and turned in a new updated third version of this book. This new edition is due out in 2011 from Ivy Press of Dallas, Texas.

He traveled to California to meet this Ray Bradbury at his home and in 2002, working closely with him, wrote and produced Bradbury: An Illustrated Life: A Journey To Far Metaphor, a tour de force presentation of much of the art that had illustrated Bradbury’s stories during his lengthy career.

In 2004 Jerry wrote The 100 Greatest Comic Books, featuring 100 of the most important comic books ever published in the United States.

One of his last and most exciting projects was working on the book called From The Pen Of Paul: The Fantastic Images of Frank R. Paul. Released in 2008 from Shasta/Phoenix Press, Jerry collaborated with his life-long friend, and fellow collector, Roger Hill writing a lengthy overview of the life and career of one of the earliest and greatest science fiction artists that ever lived. At the time of his passing, Jerry was working on a new deluxe book on the art of Frank R. Paul with a new perspective on the artist’s work.

His experience and vast knowledge of the many different fields he specialized in brought him into contact with hundreds of other professional authors, artists, dealers and collectors.

“The landscape of genuinely reliable reference guides is an ugly, arid junkyard. Mostly lit by the dim bulbs of the amateur, the slovenly, the jumped-up fans stealing from each other's inept, error-riddled trashbooks. Jerry Weist towers, like the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, casting a knowledgeable, insightful beacon. He can be trusted because he be so savvy,” Jerry’s friend Harlan Ellison once said.

Jerry Weist is survived by his wife Dana Hawkes, two sons, Ian, 15, and Eric, 13, his sister Lenore Leader of Wichita, Kansas, and many nephews, nieces and cousins. Our sincere thanks to Roger Hill for sending us this piece, and to Russ Cochran for arranging it.