The Strange Customs of Steve Ditko

Sometimes you just find yourself looking at pictures of homemade action figures on the internet.


From megomuseum:



By Ken Pick:



Created by a genius known only as Bottleimp

The Strand on Comics Style, circa 1909

John Adcock digs up another great old article about comics. "Style in Comic Art" was published in 1909 in the Strand Magazine. It showcases the work of McCay, Zim, and Lawson Wood. John has also dug up some great old Cruikshank illos and Harry Rountree, the original Sherlock Holmes illustrator.

Uncle Bobby, R.I.P.

From this Citytv site comes the news that kids' tv host Uncle Bobby (aka Bobby Ash), who had a popular show in the 1970s has died at 82. Quite surprising, considering he appeared very old to his childish viewers. Uncle Booby was born in the UK and was one of those gleeful, earnest host that used to be very common on local tv: everyday he'd show a bunch of cartoons, interact with some puppets and stiff humans, and announce the birthdays of his viewers, to the accompaniment of a very annoying but unforgettable song (originally recorded by Jim Reeves?) called Bimbo the Birthday Clown. The show went through several name changes, and began on Hamilton's CHCH before winding up on CTV. The cause of death was heart attack.

CTV has the news video attached to its website --I would suggest those eager to preserve this kind of video info try to save the footage digitally.

I couldn't find any more footage online (mostly because CTV has removed its content from youtube) but here is some more info:

Show memories

Buffalo Tribute Site

Canadian site

Canadian Holidays Breed Wonderful and Frightening New Puritans

Superman Coloring Book

Sorting through some old magazines, I came across the Superman Coloring Book, published by Whitman in 1966. It has a nice Curt Swan cover with a full-colour Superman posing in front of a page of black-and-white strips, but the real treasure is inside. Normally finding an old colouring book with the pages coloured-in is a disapointing experience. Collectors want their books mint, with no markings or damage. But for me, the thing that really makes this book worth owning is the inventive colouring that adds life to the mediocre hackwork of the interior drawings, produced by something called "Jason Studios" for Whitman. The coloured-in pages are just beautiful and make the story of the book almost a surreal reading experience. You may have read the classic Superman adventure, "Superman Red, Superman Blue" --now read "Superman Orange, Brown, Pink, and Green!"

After a really slow start to the story, featuring the gang hanging around the Daily Planet office on a slow news day, the plot really begins with Superman chasing some crooks who hit him with a Red K missile which causes him to shrink. That's when our mysterious colourist really gets interested:




Our only clue to the identity of this coloring genius --a scrawled "Joann" at the top of the page!

Eventually Supes figures out some sort of solution involving a Lead Mine (!) and things get back to normal.

Lois looks kind of disappointed that Superman is no longer tiny!



The End!

Wildcat gets Pacemaker

We still haven't decided if Wildcat is working class, and I think it's safe to assume that Irwin Hasen hasn't been a prole for several decades. However, Hasen does have a brand-new pacemaker, according to Mark Evanier.

Wildcat Tribute

TwoMorrows interview

Some History

Pedigree Junction

I like this quote from comics retailer Mike Sterling that was featured on Journalista last week:

Currently processing a nice collection of books, ranging from the Golden Age into the mid-1980s. Highlight of the collection so far (though I don't see much surpassing this): a couple hundred original E.C. comics, including full runs of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Shock Suspenstories, and the 3-D books (all two of them), and near-full runs of Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, and Vault of Horror...plus a handful of Mads and other random E.C.s. I'll let you folks know when they're available for sale.

However, what I'm most excited about in this collection are the issues of Nancy & Sluggo and Fox and the Crow. I'm not letting you know when these are available for sale, because I'm keeping them. So there.

(I should also make up some kind of "pedigree" name for this collection, like the, I don't know, "Seaside Funnybooks in Cardboard Boxes Collection," and price them accordingly. Plus, I can tell exciting stories about how the collection was acquired: "Well, one day, a guy called and asked if we wanted to buy his comics, and we said 'sure, let us take a look at 'em,' and we saw he had some pretty good stuff, so we bought them. The end.")

Sterling's right: why does every Comic Book Guy who buys a collection feel the need to get the thing certified as a "Pedigree Collection"? There seems to be too many of those things already and they're just an excuse to charge more money for an old comic book.

I guess a comic book collection purchased by a comic book store is not technically a Mystery Hoard, but I still like to read about hoards of comics.

Now this is a real Mystery Hoard:

When we were kids, my brother acquired a modest collection of old comics--already old in 1981 or so--that sat around upstairs til my parents finally moved this summer, 2002. (I salvaged one or two of them.) There were two Archie books, I think, and one Richie Rich; one Incredible Hulk collection, one compelling Batman story in six issues, one dark and enthralling issue of the X-Men, and the first fifteen or so issues of Spider-Man in three volumes. Oh, I forget, there were also some DC collections: a collection of magical sports stories, a collection of team-ups involving Superman and the standard rotation of allied heroes, and one collection of villain-origin stories; all stuff from the fifties and sixties, I'd guess. All these, I read so many times I could probably reconstruct their stories and much of their dialogue with fair accuracy.

May Day 2007

Happy May Day!

some links about working class superheroes:

-are vampires the real working-class superheroes and are Marxists their arch-enemies?

-software designers for a game company dream up the next big Hollywood properties: The Plumber, Super Civil Servant, and The Fast Food Superhero

-is Spider-Man really working class?

-is The Thing working class?

-The Super-Hero League of Hoboken?

and, in the spirit of internationalism: Not Working Class but Communist Superheroes




-the Great 10

-The Collective Man

-Soviet Super-Soldiers

-Red Star

-Rocket Red

-Crimson Dynamo

-I don't know any Cuban superheroes --maybe Elpidio Valdes?

(top image: Jean-Claude Poirier's Supermatou from the French Communist Pif-Gadget; bottom image: Jaime Hernandez's Comrade 7)

John Peel's Mystery Hoard starring The Fall

A Mystery Hoard is a small cache of comics; a found collection of strange origin.

There are mystery hoards in other genres, of course. I used to call my favourite books my Apocalypse Shelf.

John Peel had an Apocalypse Shelf of 45s.

Blast from the Past

Awhile back I started the Canadian Comic Fan Project, posting the names of fans who appeared in old comic books. When I come across a Canadian letterhack in these old comics, I always wonder if they are still around and if they remember being a comic book fan. Do they still care about the superhero adventures and Archie jokes they loved as a kid? Do they have nostalgia for the comics of the past? Did they maybe grow-up to become comic book writers or cartoonists? I always ask, "where are they now?"

You will hopefully be only slightly less excited than I to learn that earlier this week I got my first answer!

Hello Bryan...I was googling around and did a search for my own name (Roy Bishop) in Hamilton, Ontario. To my surprise I stumbled onto your website.

Years ago when I was about 12 I joined the Archie Fan Club. I wrote to them and gave them a short blurb of how much I liked their TV show on saturday mornings. They published my comments in one of their comic books and I won a cash prize of $1.00...yee ha! Well, jump ahead about 38 years to now. I still have the letter and envelope they sent to me and my original copy of Archie #191. It's one of my childhood joys.

They also spelled my street address incorrectly but no problem. Even today my brother and his wife live at [the same address]. I am still in Hamilton about 5 minutes from the home I grew up in.

I wrote to a pen pal who lived in England because of my mention in that comic. We wrote letters for a few years afterwards.

Bryan, Thanks a bunch for putting my name and address on your webpage. It brings back many good memories.
Have a great day. Roy Bishop.

Thanks for writing Roy! It's wonderful to know that the Archie penpal club actually led to some international correspondence in the days before the interweb!

Jaime Hernandez Sketches

I like Jaime Hernandez drawings.

Some obscure Jaime art that I do not own. Many of it viewable at the comicartfans site. (Fans can also now read an interesting blog post by the genius art director who decided to hire Jaime to do the DVD cover for Divorce, Italian Style.)

Music from the Comic Strips

via Frames per Second magazine, a link to a Vancouver radio show about music inspired by classic cartoons and comic strips --available as an MP3 for the next few days.

more sheet music images

Readers Create Monsters!

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part 4

This time out, reader submissions to Space Family Robinson: Lost in Space published by Gold Key Comics. A fun reader participation gimmick, "Reader's Create Monsters" tied-in nicely with the comics' science fiction theme and gives a new meaning to "fan art". Two of the above submissions, the "Po-Go Champ Monster" and "The Thorn Bird", were created by Canadian readers. They appeared in issue # 25 of Space Family Robinson, published December 1967.


Where are they now?

Kenny Quercetti
North Burnaby
BC

Cathy Rawlings
Edmonton
Alberta

As well, the letters page of the same comic lists several letter writers whose letters were not published, including:

Wade Nott
Vancouver, BC

&

Matt Viceri
Montreal, Quebec

Felix the Cat

A friend of mine is selling some older Felix the Cat items ebay.

Cartoonist and animator Otto Messmer created Felix the Cat for Pat Sullivan's animation studio in 1919 and Felix first appeared in November 1919 in a short silent film called "Feline Follies". He was a big hit and some people say he inspired the creation of Mickey Mouse. A comic strip, drawn by Messmer, began in 1923 and ran for decades. he strip was meant to appeal to kids for the most part but it was beautifully drawn and had some great fantasy and slapstick touches. There was a great Sunday strip as well and other artists helped out over the years, augmenting Messmer's genius, including Joe Oriolo. Toys, books, and various household items inspired by the character began appearing shortly after the first animated cartoons --the start of a marketing bonanza that continues to this day. (I think that Jay Stephens was working on a Felix project recently.)

Some of the older Felix merchandise is quite weird --often off-model and frequently scary. I think many people confuse some Felix toys with the incredibly more scarce Krazy Kat toys. The two items up for auction are a jointed wooden figure and a stuffed toy Felix with an insane grimace. I've never seen the stuffed Felix before --he has a wire skeleton and you can stand him up in the classic Felix "walking" pose.

The Ides of March

From Classics Illustrated #68, "Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare. 1950/1969.
Most likely illustrated by H.C. Kiefer (?) a DC/Fawcett journeyman responsible for many classics.

Beware the ides of March.

I'm Short Measure

Cartoon alcohol is wonderful! Instructions to a box containing the Mr. Bartender bar set.

On the Trail of the Superman, Part 2

2) Lost Superman Comic Strip Gems

It's not exactly Fletcher Hanks, but the old Superman comics make for fun and often bizarre reading. I have a small Mystery Hoard of Superman Sunday pages from the Toronto Star that are precious to me and I've also recently discovered the treasures to be found in the old Superman dailies. These old strips have great early art by the likes of Shuster, Curt Swan, and the sublime Wayne Boring, not to mention interesting scripts from the proudly-Canadian Alvin Schwartz.

I've linked to Jared Bond's wonderful Speeding Bullet site before --he's collecting all of the Superman newspaper comic strips online and often finds very interesting things. The strip was occasionally used as a testing ground for ideas that were later used to better or more memorable effect in the comic book. The first bald Lex Luthor and the first telephone booth costume change, for example, happened in the comic strips. Most of these strips have never been reprinted (there are two nice book collections of daily and Sunday strips dating from 1939 up to 1943, but nothing later is currently available). Most of these events are not documented anywhere (including most standard fan histories, Overstreet, etc).

The latest at Speeding Bullet? As Bond notes on a Superman discussion forum, he has uncovered several new "firsts" from 1958:

1) Brainiac
In April 1958 a storyline began involving an alien named Romado, who is clearly a prototype for Brainiac, who would first appear in Action Comics #242 (July 1958). Romado has a computer-enhanced mind, and collects miniature cities in bottles from around the galaxy. He has the shrunken Kryptonian city of Dur-el-va, which he traps Superman in.

2) Bizarro
Bizarro appears in the strips in September of 1958. Though Superboy #68 (cover date of October 1958) hit the stands earlier, this story was actually written first. In this early version, Bizarro has a "B" on his chest. What is creepy is that Superman convinces Lois to betray Bizarro and trick him into getting exposed to his version of kryptonite, which "kills" him. (Though as Superman says, how can you kill a shadow...)

3) Metallo
December 15, 1958 begins a new story of Professor Vale saving a patient from a horrible accident, and having to put in a mechanical heart, etc. to save him. He is powered by uranium pellets, with the possibility of some other rare mineral....I haven't read much of the story yet, as the year ends, but it is clearly the first Metallo story. This is winter 1958. In the comics, he first appears in Action Comics #252 (May 1959)

On the Trail of the Superman

1) Citations

It's always fun to come across early citations of now-common words. For instance, who knew that the earliest cited use of the noun superpower was in an issue of Supersnipe Comics from 1945? Several people, apparently.

I've always been interested in the history of the word superman. Some odd coincidences: Recently I was reading John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses which traces aspects of Nietzsche's thought up to the 1940s in part through an examination of the British modernists' disdain for popular culture. Many of the most famous (and famously elite) avant-garde writers of the early 20th Century dabbled in proto-fascist ideas --even those who at some point embraced aspects of socialism. Bernard Shaw is a case in point.

I think many dictionaries cite George Bernard Shaw as responsible for the coinage of superman in his 1903 play Man and Superman. Shaw took the word on loan from the German Ubermensch, first used by Nietzsche in 1883's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche's term is literally "overman". There are English versions that translate it as "superman" that predate Shaw.

A member of the non-revolutionary socialist Fabian Society, nevertheless Shaw "yielded to a craving for strong men in government and ignored the faults and praised what seemed to him the virtues of manifest villains, such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini," according to Robertson Davies.

Anyway, I discovered my favourite early superman citation recently in a work by one of Shaw's contemporaries, P.G. Wodehouse's Something Fresh, a novel first published in 1915. Wodehouse is described by Carey as a champion of lower middle class "clerk" culture; one of the writers who used vulgar slang and wrote for a mass audience. The quote describes George Emerson, a policeman, and is spoken by the object of his affection, Aline Peters:

"You are too overwhelming, too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of these Supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. I expect it's through having to be constantly moving people on out in Hong Kong, and all that sort of thing. Now Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want someone who would stand up to you."

___

On the Trail of the Superman, Part 2 

Super Penpals

The Canadian Comic Fan Project, Part Three

Where are they now?

Today's penpals are concerned with questions meta and multinational.

From "The Legion Outpost" --Adventure Comics #346, 1966:

Dear Editor: I really enjoy your letter column, but the Legion Outpost picture is out of date. Colossal Boy is shown wearing a red suit instead of a green one and Light Lass has the insignia she used when she was Light Lass.
David Ouellette
Essex, Ontario

From "Metropolis Mailbag" --Superman #128, 1959:

Dear Editor: If Perry White sent Clark Kent to a foreign country, such as Canada, on an assignment, how could Clark get a passport, inasmuch as he has no birth certificate, not having been born on this planet? I know he could fly across the border as Superman, but wouldn't that be too risky?
Edward Katz
Quebec

As well, the letters page of World's Finest #226, 1974 reveals several names "Boiled Down from the B & B Mailbag":

Alex Fedyk
Vancouver, B.C.

Roma Pohorecky
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Kevin Ferris
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Snow in the Comics, Part 2

Part 2 of 3
"We're Wolf" by Genevieve Castree
Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Three
edited by Chris Oliveros
D&Q
95 pages
ISBN 1-896597-88-2
$19.95 Cdn/$14.95 US



It's snowing again today, which puts me in mind of snow in the comics (technically, since it hasn't really stopped snowing for several weeks, there should be many more of these entries, but I've been too busy shoveling).

Perhaps the most famous of all snow-themed comics is Herge's Tintin in Tibet, the classic, austere graphic novel that Herge identified as his favourite. Who could forget, after reading this story as a child, the epic journey of the indomitable boy reporter to find his long-lost friend Chang? During a troubled period of his life, Herge poured all his artistry into this simple tale of Tintin's adventure in the Himalayas, his encounter with the lonely Yeti, and the struggles of his companions to survive and reunite Tintin with Chang, his friend from an adventure drawn decades earlier. The only Tintin album without a villain, Tintin in Tibet is full of haunting cartoon images, emotion, and lots and lots of snow.

The iconic nature of this book, and the place it holds in the imagination of its readers, is one of the themes of Genevieve Castree's (she signs herself Genevieve Elverum here) contribution to the third volume of the Drawn and Quarterly Showcase anthology. "We're Wolf!" is a beautiful meditation on nostalgia, self, and lycanthropy that takes as its inspiration Tintin's snow-bound adventure --its pace, use of silence, and feeling. The story follows a young woman through two seasons, Summer and Winter, both highly suggestive of states of mind as well as stages of life and love, and with aspects of Herge's book used as outward emblems of an interior life.


The title page of Castree's story features a highly stylized version of the famous cover from Tintin in Tibet, grasped in a tiny hand --an elaborate play on words that refers to her title ("We're Wolf" or "Werewolf") and her subject, as well as to the character on her faux-Tintin cover.


The metaphor is stretched even further throughout the story as Castree's character, a young woman/cartoonist surrogate, in turn reads the comic, imagines herself inside it, hiking over snow-covered mountains, and finally giving birth to a brood of tiny Yeti-like werewolves. The narrative is quite dreamlike and Castree's art is a charming mix of ligne-clare cartooning and gorgeous colour with a very personal style. And of course there is quite a bit of snow. Ice-caves, mountain peaks, sleeping bags, pine-needles, vast expanses of white. The story is very evocative of childhood (I particulary like the idea of dealing with a Summer-time depression by curling up with your favourite kids comic --kind of like a snowball saved from winter in the freezer and unwrapped in the hottest day of the year) and it is wide open to interpretation.

How are these images connected? What does it all symbolize? I cannot say. I only know that it is beautiful and that the book (and Castree) is a treasure: the other selections include a nice coming-of-age story by Sammy Harkham ("Somersaulting") and a quirky postmodern pastiche of a 1930s pulp adventure by Matt Broersma ("The Mummy") that is someways reminiscent of early Herge. And yes, I know this book was published in 2005 --I've been saving it for a snowy day.




Next time: the forecast calls for more snow
Part 3
Part 1

R.I.P. Geneviève. Her husband wrote a song about their first meeting and reading comics.