Arnold T Blumberg is a doctor, a curator at Geppi's Entertainment Museum, an associate of Telos Publishing, a forum administrator at Gallifrey Base, a Doctor Who short story author, the co-author of Howe's Transcendental Toybox and Zombiemania!: 80 Movies to Die For, as well as several other noted pop culture and entertainment books, and a good friend. On 21 November, 2009, this Examiner sat down with Arnold over Skype for an exclusive and informative interview on his work, his fandom experience, and his thoughts and opinions of the RTD era of Doctor Who. Below is this first portion of our conversation.
Chris: Thanks so much, Arnold, for agreeing to speak with me today. Since this really is about you, let’s start off some of the basics, like who you are, where you’re from, and your educational path and how it’s got you to where you are today.
Arnold: I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. I’m a native of the area, I’ve always loved the place and I’ve never felt the need to move. I’ve always been interested in genre entertainment. I’ve always been a fan of many things. In fact I’ve found fans are usually followers of many things, so you often tend to connect with people that share a lot of your interests. I’m a life-long comic book collector. I grew up with Marvel Comics, particularly Spider-Man comics. I also was a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars and all types of genre entertainment. I first got into Doctor Who in the ‘80s when my Star Trek interest was waning, but there was a bit of a crossover.
Chris: If we can touch this ‘crossover’ period: did your Star Trek enjoyment fade because of the newer versions of the series, like The Next Generation? This was around the time Star Trek was actually on the rise again on television.
Arnold: I actually love The Next Generation; it was Voyager that killed Star Trek for me, but while I bought everything on Star Trek I became more and more fascinated with Doctor Who during the early ‘80s. But for myself, I was always interested in pop culture and interested in writing my own comics, which of course have never appeared and probably never will, but I enjoyed writing and eventually I was able to do this professionally as a research editor for Gemstone Publishing. They publish the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, which is sort of the ‘bible’ of the comic collecting industry. I joined Gemstone at the end of its first year in Maryland and eventually I became the editor of the Guide and all the other price guides we published. All this work cemented for me a love of books and book design, the idea of being able to create something that would sit on your shelf. For my education I received a Masters of Publications Design at the University of Baltimore, and later I got my Doctorate in Communications Design at the same university. While I was the editor at Gemstone, we started a project to put together a museum for our CEO Steve Geppi’s collection, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. I finished my doctorate in 2005, became Curator in August of that year, and the museum opened in September 2006 at Camden Yards. Since then I’ve also been doing writing for IGN.com, lots of Doctor Who DVD reviews, and of course writing my book, Zombiemania!
Chris: I’m glad you’ve brought up your book because it takes us nicely to my next question. You’re known among Doctor Who fans for not only being a doctor but also for having published Zombiemania! Tell me about what that book is how it came about.
Arnold: Obviously the title tells you it’s about zombies. I’ve always enjoyed zombie movies, although when I was younger I wasn’t as much of a huge horror fan as I was a science fiction fan, but as I’ve grown older it’s more important than before. I love the Halloween movies, and of course I’ve seen lots of horror movies from werewolf films to the Friday the 13th series, but I’ve always loved zombies because they’re such a potent horror figure in that they’re the closest to us. So they resonate more to me. What got me really interested in zombie film was that although I wasn’t prevented from seeing horror movies when I was a kid, I just never saw a lot of these well-known zombie movies. I always wanted to see so many of these movies I’d missed. I met my friend Andy Hershberger at the University of Maryland when we were both starting college. Now he works as the Registrar at Geppi’s, and we loved same stuff like Monty Python and horror films. He’d seen a lot of those movies I had always wanted to see. He’s also a brilliant and funny writer, so eventually we thought we’d write a book of the entire history of zombie movies, and that project finally came together. Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For was published by Telos Publishing in the UK. It’s currently in its second printing, and naturally I’m always promoting the book.
Chris: You’ve definitely got my interest up to read it. On that topic of book projects, I know one other recent book project where you’ve had an important role was Doctor Who charity novel Time’s Champion, for which you did the type-setting. I almost feel nervous bringing this up since I was the co-author of that book [with the late Doctor Who author Craig Hinton], but I think it’s appropriate to mention it because you played a major part in it, too. So, once again, thank you so much for helping me with that, but since this interview is all about you I can honestly ask, how did you get involved with the project; I never quite found out last year.
Arnold: Well it was my pleasure to help with Time’s Champion; Craig was a good if brief friend of mine, too. It came about through my working relationship with David J Howe [owner of Telos Publishing] and Telos. That all developed in the late ‘90s when I was working at Gemstone and I had this dream project of making a price guide on Doctor Who collectibles because there was nothing like it around. I knew that the big authority in that area was David, so I contacted him cold and asked if he’d be interested in the project. David got back to me and said he had had this book in mind for years! So we worked together and developed the price guide, and Gemstone passed on the project. We pitched it to other publishers and no one wanted it, so we decided to publish it ourselves at the time, and Howe’s Transcendental Toybox helped David to launch Telos Publishing. The book launched in November 2000, which was the same month David got the call that confirmed Telos had been granted the rights to produce Doctor Who novellas. Since then I’ve done a lot of interior layout and design for Telos books, including most of their TV/movie guides and other books like the Time Hunter series [a Doctor Who spin-off]. And so for Time’s Champion, David asked if I would do it and I said of course. I had a lot of fun designing that book because I wanted to really capture the mood and look of the Virgin-era novels - I even measured my copy of The Well-Mannered War to find out the exact sizes, margins, etc. of the MA [Doctor Who Missing Adventure] book format. So thank you for the opportunity!
Chris: You’re welcome. And your book is certainly a credit to your name, and in the case of fandom, literally so. But let’s talk about Doctor Who fandom for a moment: if I see an announcement for a Doctor Who convention I often see you listed as a guest. At what point did you become so involved in this level of Doctor Who fandom? I should also ask, since we’ve mentioned Craig Hinton, how you came to meet him and became friends?
Arnold: Well, when I started working on the Toybox I was already a fan of Doctor Who but not really part of its fandom. In fact, I’d never gone to any of the conventions. But starting with the Toybox, David and I knew we needed to promote the book, and we knew going and speaking to fandom directly was the way to do it. In November 2000 I went to England to promote our book where we launched at The Stamp Centre and Tenth Planet, and I also joined Outpost Gallifrey, the main internet Doctor Who fan forums/website at the time, and I learned about the Los Angeles and Chicago conventions. My first time going to an actual Doctor Who convention was Gallifrey One 2001, where I met Craig. Now I had already read his books and I absolutely loved them. I loved the way he reveled in continuity. He had that amazing ability to see the entire history of Doctor Who as one big universe, and he could make all these incredible connections between stories and bring them together so perfectly. So I brought his book The Quantum Archangel, which I think is my all-time favorite Doctor Who novel, for him to sign. I went to a late evening panel where the authors were reading their stuff and Craig was there. And you remember him, how he had that great, gravelly voice. He was so dejected because the panel was poorly attended, and when the conversation started Craig got miffed and said ‘no I won’t read,’ and then someone said ‘please let him read’ and so he was encouraged and he stayed and read a whole chapter. I talked to him a few times via e-mail and the forum, where I eventually became a staff moderator, and I later saw him in 2003 at Gallifrey One again, where we talked about a Doctor Who novel idea I had. I really liked his ideas, and we had hoped to talk about a new version of the Doctor Who cosmology he had worked out years ago with some colleagues for research purposes. We finally got a chance to have that talk at that convention. It was amazing because he never gave me any ideas, but it was as if he already knew the answers and guided me to them. Craig may have been troubled but he was always a joy to talk to and to have him offer approval for something I showed him… it was a real privilege. The saddest thing of all is we know how he loved the Master, and Craig died before Series 3 aired. I know he would have loved to see it happen.
For more on Dr. Arnold T Blumberg, please visit his official blog, a panel without borders, here.
Arnold's Geppi's Entertainment Museum page, which discusses more books Arnold has authored, may be viewed here. View Arnold's UMBC faculty page here. Follow Arnold on twitter here. A video of Arnold explaining his career can be viewed here. A video of Arnold discussing Geppi's Entertainment Museum appears here.
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