Rick Klaw
Richard Ira (Rick) Klaw (born December 22, 1967, Brooklyn, NY), is an American editor, essayist, and bookseller.
Rick Klaw is the paternal grandson of Irving Klaw, the photographer and film maker most noted for his bondage photos of Bettie Page. In 1979, the family relocated to Houston, Texas. Klaw moved to Austin, Texas in 1987 and participated in the Austin cadre of comics and science fiction writers and artists in the early 1990s, a group which included Shannon Wheeler, Chris Ware, Martin Wagner, Lea Hernandez, Roy Tompkins, John Lucas, and Mark Finn.
From 1990 to 1994, Klaw was the managing editor for the independent comics publisher Blackbird Press, which produced the first collection from cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, an anthology entitled Omnibus: Modern Perversity, and other projects. After leaving Blackbird, Klaw along with Ben Ostrander established Mojo Press, a comics and fiction small press, where he served as the Managing Editor from 1994-98. At Mojo, Klaw was responsible for fifteen publications most notably Weird Business, a hardcover comics anthology co-edited with Joe R. Lansdale, and a reprint of Michael Moorcook's novella Behold the Man. Weird Business was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Anthology in 1996.
Since leaving Mojo Press, Klaw has pursued a number of ventures, mostly online. From 2000 to 2004, he wrote a monthly column, "Geeks with Books", for SF Site, most of which were included in his collection Geek Confidential: Echoes From the 21st Century (ISBN 1-932265-06-6), published in 2003 by Monkeybrain Books. The SF Site column is defunct, but Klaw has continued a sporadically produced e-mail list, "All the Geek That is Fit to Print" as well as being a regular contributor to The Dark Forces Book Group Blog.
He was the founding fiction editor of Revolution SF from 2001 to 2002, and he still serves as a Contributing Editor on the site. As the fiction editor, he published both experimental and post-modern fiction by new and established authors such as Moorcock, Don Webb, Joe R. Lansdale, Neal Barrett, Jr., Scott Cupp, Vera Searles, and others.
Since 2002, Klaw has written book and film reviews for the Austin Chronicle, film reviews for Moving Pictures Magazine, and essays for other venues. Klaw has been preparing a biography of his grandfather, tentatively entitled Pin-Up King: or, How My Grandfather Incited the Sexual Revolution.
Recent short-fiction includes the Robert E. Howard homage, "A Penny A Word," co-written with Paul O. Miles, in the World Fantasy Con-sponsored anthology, "Cross Plains Universe," as well as the story "John Calvin" in Electric Velocipede # 5.
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