Jim Barker
(???? -- )
A Scottish fan and pro artist. He entered fandom in the mid 1970s and almost immediately began to produce a large amount of fanzine art, some of the earlier pieces signed anagrammatically "J. Mike Barr". The first fanzine to print them was Dave Taylor's Nebula, but it was his work for Rob Jackson's Maya which catapulted him to prominence. Along with Harry Bell -- who became his firm friend -- he became one of the best-known fanartists in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was particularly noted for illustrating fanwriting by Bob Shaw. He also contributed a card to the Fantasy Showcase Tarot Deck.
Despite living in Falkirk, geographically remote from most other UK fans, he was frequently to be seen at conventions. He stood unsuccessfully for TAFF in 1980.
He contributed two ongoing comic strips, "Elmer T. Hack" and "The Captive", to BSFA publications, sometimes with other fans as scriptwriter; a fanzine The Best of Elmer T. Hack with Christopher Evans (1980) collected the former. Elmer T. Hack was, as his name suggests, a bad writer of sf; "The Captive" was a fan take on the TV show "The Prisoner", where a hero based on Barker himself continually tries and fails to escape a convention.
He drew a comic strip, "Bleep", for UK kids' comic "Wow!"; he successfully inserted some Tuckerizations into it, e.g. the inventor of Bleep (a robot) is "Professor Willis".
After the early 1980s, his professional work as an artist and cartoonist led to a decrease in his fan art production. He remains a professional artist to the current day.
Awards, Honors and GoHships:
- 1980 -- Albacon 80
- The Best of Elmer T. Hack [1980]
- Dead Hedgehog [1980-83]
- Helpmaboab [1983-84]
- Oomsoon [1995]
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