His first records at Bulwark Publishing mention him as a copyboy working for editor August Villers in 1909. He stayed with Bulwark for his entire multifaceted career, retiring only in 1970 due to ill health. He continued writing and contributing to Bulwark Comics until his death in 1988.

According to anecdotal accounts told by more than one source, C.K. Gill was born on August 18 in 1895 on a steam ship two days before it docked in New York harbor. A midwife brought the baby to Ellis Island allegedly wrapped in his mother’s shawl and travel papers; an immigration agent misread the papers of the now-deceased Crotian woman Samantha Gilleva and stamped the boy’s name as Sam Gill.

Gill lived in an orphanage in Brooklyn and by all accounts his youth was hard there. Adopted in 1902, the boy moved to Milwaukee Wisconsin with the new name of William Carson, a name and life he abandoned by running away in 1907. He resurfaced later as C.K. Gill, news hawker turned copy boy at Bulwark’s Chicago offices. Throughout his career, he remained loyal to his immediate superiors and Bulwark’s owners, the Kharm family.

Over time and despite a early lack of schooling, Gill rose through the ranks of the editorial departments with his natural skills at storytelling and writing. Gill once admitted in a 1959 interview, “I learned more about the world, history, science, and writing from fact-checking or composing magazines than I ever might have in school.” The boy who never finished primary school eventually earned honorary doctorates from Northwestern and the University of Chicago in 1968 and 1975.

While not the quickest writer on staff, he always seemed to have a story or essay of an appropriate length on hand when a magazine needed filler material. According to Simon Kharm in 1960, “Gill is probably the most published author we have, once you add up all the words he wrote under house names before he grew famous.”

Gill began work with Bulwark during the heyday of the dime- and nickel-novels and penny papers (or dreadfuls) before World War I. His near-sightedness kept him out of military service but not out of print. He advanced into editorial roles, finally becoming a full editor on Books Bizarre in 1921. He worked throughout the pulp era on many different magazines and was one of the few able to shift his writing style to comic books starting in 1938.

By 1940, Gill had moved fully out of the fiction magazines and into the comics as a lead editor and writer. He remained with Bulwark Comics through 1958, returning to edit Green Gazette until 1965 when he and A.J. Soltare became the only Golden Age creators to work on the Silver Age revamps of many characters they had created 20 years before. Gill remained one of the group editors for Bulwark Comics until 1970. After that time, he continued working either as an assistant editor or freelance writer for a few books, most notably KHARNDAM Tales (for which he and Thomas Roy contributed the only major canon to KHARNDAM outside of Kharndam’s four original writers).

Characters created or co-created by C.K. Gill, whether under pseudonyms or his own name, span more than 50 years, starting in 1917 with BARNSTORM BRADLEY. Others include one version (or more) of AIR RAID REED, AMERIKIDDO, BRICK BRADLEY, THE BULLETEENS, CALAMATINA, THE CATTALION, THE CONSTELLAGENT, DOCTOR ENIGMA, DOC SCARAB, THE DYNAST, THE FIVE PROMETHEANS, THE G.U.A.R.D. (Global Union for Armistice, Reform, & Détente), HANDORR, HEADLINE HAL, JOHN UNKNOWN, MIKE MAELSTROM, THE NEWSIE, O.R.P.H.A.N. (Organized Resistance of Patriotic Heroes Against Nazism), THE PHARLAKANS, THE PHARAOHAWK, THE RAPTANS, TANK TAYLOR, THE THEONS, T.H.R.E.A.T. (The Heroic Resistance vs. Esoteric & Arcane Terrors), USAPES (United Super-Alliance to Protect Europe’s Shores), THE VOID VANDALS, XERXREX, and ZYNTHORN.

Despite his longevity in the office, none can say they knew Gill’s name other than to call him C.K. or Gill. He never offered anyone his full name, preferring to let others guess for what his initials stood. The only time Gill apparently disliked someone’s guess was in an insult. An unnamed rival comic book writer from Fox Syndicate once called him “Chuckle Killer Gill” and received a black eye in 1945. The most common guesses were “Charles Karl,” though many joked it was “Clark Kent” after 1940 when National Periodicals’ hero took off in popularity. As usual, Gill only grinned and kept working.

C.K. Gill died on July 20, 1988 of natural causes. As per his will, he was cremated and his ashes were interred in a custom-crafted urn. The silver urn appears as a hardbound book with its spine reading “The Collected C.K. Gill” and his will stipulated that the book-urn should remain on the bookshelf of Bulwark’s publisher. Those who read his nonfiction Almanarcana wondered about the magical significance of his aping the burial methods of occult figures like Pierre Aurlathe, John Hawksmoor, Stavros Krashos, or Vasily Nashivev. Those who knew him well claimed it was just Gill’s last chance to get in a good joke.

Hidden History

Known to very few even among esoteric circles, C.K. was a member of the Vanguard. Never a field operative, C.K. was one of their longest-serving research historians. One of the reasons his writing focused on magic were his researches—he compiled studies and encyclopedias on the history and practice of magic across the world. Expurgated and bowdlerized versions of which were published by Bulwark as The Almanarcana in seven different editions between 1935 and 1984.

Whether due to Gill’s link to the Vanguard or his reticence, elements of his background remain shrouded in secrecy even now, years after his death. The biggest secret is Gill’s name—all his personal data was destroyed at various times by apparent accidents. So if anyone ever knew his actual given name, they never revealed it. He smiled at those who grew exasperated about his name; a mystery to others seemed to make little difference to him. C.K. never admitted how close any came toward his true name (and some in mystic circles suggest that his true name was something else entirely and C.K. Gill a pen name that became his common name in life).

The Collected C.K. Gill is actually two identical silver book-urns that reside in two locations, each holding exactly half of his body’s ashes. One rests, as stipulated, on Oscar Kharm’s shelf in Bulwark Publications’ central headquarters in Toronto. The other, which also contains Gill’s Vanguard ring among the ashes, sits on a display shelf at Geneva House. The latter book-urn shares its shelf with a photo of Gill along with the seven editions of his Almanarcana and a massive two volume bibliography of Gill’s writing output (an unpublished holograph manuscript compiled by Gill and various Vanguard researchers).

For all the thousands of pages of writing Gill produced publicly, his research journals and notes for the Vanguard comprise at least several thousand more pages. At the time of his death, Gill worked to uncover the secrets and true history of the Comte du San Gyrmayn and the long-lost volumeternal called the Gyrmayn Annals.

© 2009 by Steven E. Schend. All rights reserved.

©2010 The Codex Continual. All Rights Reserved.