From 1958’s SUPERMAN’S GIRL FRIEND, LOIS LANE #5

Can you imagine what would have happened if the Internet existed in 1958? Perhaps people like Mort Weisinger could not exist in a wired world. Julie Schwartz would probably have been running a website and playing Halo.

(Via J. Caleb Mozzocco)

An EC classic by Johnny Craig for some holiday ho ho horror.

When Joe Simon passed away at the age of 98 last week, he left behind an impressive body of work. Although everyone knows he was the partner of Jack “King” Kirby, Simon and Kirby were partners in the truest sense — collaborating freely on art and writing, with Simon mostly the editor and Kirby the art director. However, Simon was a prolific artist on his own. While he didn’t have Kirby’s command of sheer power and imagination, he did have a way with wiry, dynamic heroes. Heritage Auctions recently ran a cover tribute to Simon in their newsletter — have a look:

And yes, that STARDUST on the coverline of Fantastic Comics refers to the bizarre Fletcher Hanks creation who was the subject of two retrospective anthologies.

Is there a new Lichtenstein roaming the forests? Scott Edelman has brought to our attention the work of Sharon Moody, who paints trompe l’oeil paintings of comics by Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema and others — but Edelman is bothered by the fact that the source artists are not credited anywhere:

The intended market of buyers for these works of art would probably assume that the comics depicted in them sprang whole from the mind of the artist, and are a commentary on pop culture in general, rather than being line for line reproductions so close to the original comics that the artist might have been better served taking a photograph of the original comic book pages and framing that. Roy Lichtenstein, who I felt was profiteering on the work of great comics artists, at least altered them to suit his own style…

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Moody and her appropriations:

And Moody’s own explanation of her work:

Recently I have been making paintings based on games, toys and other forms of entertainment that reflect the universal human desire for amusement, diversion, and stimulation. These seem a proper subject for trompe l’oeil paintings, which by their very nature are intended to divert and entrance us with their illusionism and by the questions they raise—in a playful way—about perception and reality.

Edelman is surely right to become protective of the rights of the artists who actually created the Pop Art comics style of comics that has been so widely appropriated. And a mention of the original artists might have been appropriate. However, Moody’s considerable skill at trompe l’oeil indicates to me that she is bringing something to the party, art-wise.

It’s part of the whole problem in the mash-up age of art — curation has replaced creation at times. Moody could have just sat down and made a Tumblr blog, but she picked up a paintbrush.

Not too long ago, we presented for your amusement several videos recapping the rather appalling events of AVENGERS #200, in which Ms. Marvel was kidnapped, drugged, and forcibly impregnated, and after giving birth to a reincarnation of her rapist, went off with him in a happy daze. The writers on the story are listed as Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, Bob Layton, and George Pérez but it’s been noted that in the years since, no one has actually taken credit for coming up with the story. It’s like that one round of blanks in the firing squad — every man can believe he is the innocent one.

Now over on his blog Jim Shooter has come out and confirmed that he’s wiped the entire incident from his memory:

I found my copy of Avengers #200. I read it. I agree with the consensus, it’s heinous. But, I don’t remember much about how it got that way.

I am credited not only as Editor in Chief but as one of the co-plotters. However, I didn’t see anything in the book that jogged my memory. No bits that I remember suggesting. No corrections of the sort I might have made to a plot passed before me.

But I did see many things I would have had changed if I’d seen the plot. For instance, leaving aside the Ms. Marvel mess for the nonce: Iron Man thinks it’s okay for the weird, mysterious child to be given a “laser torch” and electronic equipment so he can build a machine. What?! As the massive machine is being assembled, no one bothers to question what it is or does. What?! Trouble ensues. No kidding, really? Good grief.

Shooter offers a few hypotheses about the story’s origin — a feud between Michelinie and Chris Claremont being one possible motivation — and hints that Jim Salicrup might know more — definitely something to remember next time The Beat sees him!

There is perhaps some comfort all these years later in knowing that Shooter offers a flat-out apology:

But, in those days, in any case, the buck stopped at my desk. I take full responsibility. I screwed up. My judgment failed, or maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. Sorry. Avengers #200 is a travesty.

Yesterday’s comments by Tom Brevoort on the lack of sales support for female characters at Marvel did not go unnoticed by the usual gender issue commentators.

Sue at DC Women Kicking Ass suggests that blaming the readers may not be the way to go given a lack of marketing support:

Did we give these books the level of promotion that we do for the bazzillion  ‘WOLVERINEDEADPOOL!” titles.

Do we maybe ask our overlords at Disney for some advice, “Hey, you guys seem to know how to market female-led IP, um, help?”

Right now Marvel is profitable; they have the money to grow the business. And as I said about DC earlier this year, I believe Marvel is leaving money on the table with female readers.

I am aware that Marvel’s purse strings are apparently tied up in in the hands of dude who makes the Simpson’s Mr. Burns look like a soft touch.

Susana Polo at The Mary Sue also suggests that not trying to reach a new audience may not be ultimately advantageous:

 

That’s right, ladies. All we have to do to get a retailer to see us as a part of their audience is to spend money on them. But the money comes first, and in comparable quantities to the rest of the entrenched demographic that they are already focusing on to the exclusion of others, or no dice. This is absolutely how a shrinking industry should feel about attracting a new and potentially eager audience. It is absolutely not the opposite of the way this transaction is supposed to go. Companies in the business of giving product in trade for money always play hard to get with untapped demographics. That’s how you know the demographic wants you.

 

The comments thread after this one is particularly lively if you like that kind of thing.

Also linked to at the Mary Sue: this two-part Escapist look at the strange history of Ms. Marvel

I watched these videos all the way through because they clicked something in my subconscious brain. Short version: In Avengers #200, Ms. Marvel, who was (as the above covers indicates) was created as a direct attempt to play off the then current surging waters of feminism, is abducted to hell, given mind altering drugs, has sex while in this date rape state, and eventually gives birth to the guy who raped her, all while the rest of the Avengers look on and think it’s awesome. At the end of the story she even goes off with the guy who arranged the kidnapping, rape, and mind control pregnancy. And no one stops her.

Although the Escapist doesn’t mention it, the story in question was written by Jim Shooter, George Perez, Bob Layton, and David Michelinie. It squicked out enough people to give rise to this bit of historic comics criticism from the ’70s by Carol Strickland..

It also squicked out Chris Claremont, who created the Ms. Marvel character wrote several issues of the Ms Marvel comic. (Gerry Conway created the character.)Say what else you will about Chris Claremont, but he sure created a lot of great female characters (and male ones, too.) Claremont eventually wrote an Avengers annual where a depowered Carol Danvers (she lost her powers to Rogue, remember) busts on the Avengers for failing to look out for her.

And now the memory dump: I do remember reading both these stories as a kid. And I remember being really, really disappointed that Ms. Marvel, who was a total kick ass hero, had to get all loved up AND later lose her powers. I was pretty young but I remember a real feeling of disenchantment and never really liking the Ms. Marvel character again. (It was Claremont who depowered her, BTW.) Even though she came back as Binary it wasn’t the same. Spider-Man and Thor and the Hulk and all the guys got to stay themselves…why did Ms. Marvel have to get de-powered?

I’ve written about this many times before, but as a kid, picking up an issue of JSA with a hugely boobtastic Power Girl was enough to totally turn me off DC for the next 10 years.

So, just FYI, Marvel and DC, young girls do pick up on your subliminal messages. And when we don’t like them…we walk away.

About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on.

This is that post, c. 2011.

I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time — perhaps even at this very moment — made use of some kind of  software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.

Herewith, some observations on comics and collecting comics.

• Art supply stores have some awesome storage options.

Screw “The Container Store” and all that expensive bullshit. I made a trip to A.I. Friedman, the venerable art supply store here in NYC, and came away with two items that I’ve long thought would be very useful. #1 was a cheap portfolio for storing artwork, flat posters and the like. All of that stuff had been sitting in an unsightly pile on top of my Expedit, and now it looks all sleek and organized in a black portfolio like all the cool kids carry. Less than $15 and you’re good to go.

The second item was one that I did not know existed. Cool-looking poster tubes in colorful plastic! Alvin Ice Tube 25 Inch Clear

You know all those unsightly rolled up posters from Con and so forth? Now they are super sightly! The tubes have a strap for when you are banging around the Javits or wherever.

I should add that this was a prime spot for purging. I live in a New York Apartment and don’t really have room for an art show. I saved a few key pieces –some nice screen prints various folks gave me over the years, Ben McCool’s first signing poster, a giant poster from RETURN OF THE KING that shows Frodo and Sam in a very gay embrace on the skirts of Mount Doom – you know the kind of stuff that will make a great art show some day.

I was pleased to note that although it had started out as an art and office supply store, A.I. Friedman has been attempting to adapt to modern times with a huge section of laptop and iPad bags and covers. Although it was large, it was dwarfed by the row upon row of racks of Moleskine and Moleskine-like little notebooks for jotting important thoughts. Everyone may own a tablet soon, but to be truly profound, a ponder must be scribbled in a little wee bookie.

• A pamphlet is a fleeting thing.
Every time I do a purge, it’s easier to get rid of these suckers. I will, however, never get rid of my original runs of SANDMAN, PREACHER, and INVISIBLES because they had the cool letters pages which were all the contact we had with the industry before the internet.

• BUT — which edition to keep?
As we wade further and further into the Golden Age of Reprints, deciding which edition to keep becomes harder and harder. Which is better the original Epic edition of MOONSHADOW…or the new one from Vertigo? (I did not flip them open to compare repro, which would have been the right thing to do.) For my favorite series — like SWAMP THING or PREACHER or PLANETARY — I now have the pamphlets, the original paperbacks, perhaps the hardcover, and now the DC deluxe trade series AND an Absolute edition. Can you keep only one? How about keeping two, one for reading one for display? So many great books now have multiple editions — HICKSVILLE, SAME DIFFERENCE, BLACKSAD — the newer one is usually the best updated and corrected one, but not always. And sometimes things are just cool for their own sake. I love the collected hardcover edition of Brian Ralph’s DAYBREAK, but getting rid of the cute Bodega editions seemed so wrong.

• If money is no object, assembling a collection of the greatest comics of all time is now an afternoon’s work.

Comprehensive editions of the major work of nearly every cartoonist who appeared in the Masters of American Comics show are readily available: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gary Panter, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman.

Kurtzman and Crumb — among the more prolific — would be the hardest to assemble, and the Gasoline alley reprint series didn’t get too far. But handsome editions of Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Peanuts, THE SPIRIT, and Kirby’s major works for Marvel and DC have all been collected. Spiegelman’s output is slim but most of it is in print. Ware’s and Panter’s work has been in so many formats that a complete set is basically impossible — but the emblematic work is not hard to come by.

Looking beyond this lauded group, the key work of the Hernandez Brothers, Dan Clowes, John Stanley, Alan Moore, and Herge is all available. Lynda Barry is getting the complete works treatment. You can buy Little Orphan Annie reprints and Prince Valiant and now Pogo. Anders Nlsen, John Porcellino, and Carol Tyler have been collected.

Our comics heritage is accessible — and that has never existed in this country before. Huge props to Fantagraphics, IDW and Drawn & Quarterly for leading the charge on this.

• Many master great cartoonists have now had the resources to publish a body of work that could potentially stand the test of time.
While I was writing about Chester Brown the other day it dawned on me how important it is for an artist of his caliber to have his work in print. This is a guy who started out drawing a story about a man who couldn’t stop shitting, after all, and now he’s a master.

The best part of cleaning up is organizing everything, and putting all the books by one author together. It gave me great pleasure to assemble a single shelf containing the works of Bryan Talbot, Carla Speed McNeill, Richard Sala, and Paul Pope. Not that they have anything in common…and that’s the point. Sala’s work is so consistent and marvelous for over nearly 30 years; FINDER gets deeper and more magical with every page; Pope’s works are sporadic but create a lyrically violent world of sex and drugs; has there ever been a cartoonist who tackled so many subjects as Bryan Talbot? From child abuse to dystopic science fiction, steampunk funny animals, and a a scholarly exegesis on the history of one town?

Putting together the works of Posy Simmonds, Rick Geary, Kyle Baker, Marjane Satrapi, Seth, Tom Hart, Natsume Ono — that there is some good shit, and it’s only scratching the surface.

• Man, there have been a ton of books about comics in the last 10 years.
I counted three separate surveys of artists in their studios, and a surprising number of “The [finite amount] of GNs you must read!” surveys. These are not all going to fit into the house, so some culling is going to occur. I can tell you one thing up front — I’m keeping the ones by Paul Gravett. Also, cartoonist bios. Haven’t read them all!

• The self-publishing scene has sure improved in the last 15 years.

In a long unopened short box I found an envelope of comics that had been given to me at a long ago SPX back when it was a Sim-model self-publishing fair. They all looked so horrible that I chucked them all — behavior quite unusual for me. By contrast, even the student publications from last year’s SVA show were so professional and cute looking that I couldn’t bear to do anything but shove them into another shoe box.

• What do you do with mini-comics?

Not just minis but little publications like SULK and MORNING STAR and so on. You can make colorful piles of them on one cube of an Expedit or put them in a mag file or just shove them in a shoebox…but none of these solutions seem ideal to me.

• While I was cleaning up I found a few promising first efforts by cartoonists little heard from since. Maybe I will do a few spotlights on them over the next few weeks. Also, at least one publisher, when their books were assembled, displayed such an odd esthetic that it deserves a thorough retrospective which maybe I will do before I die. No promises.

• I love my paper world.

It’s the Hope Diamond of the comic book set. The one-of-a-kind 9.0 graded copy of ACTION #1 that once belonged to actor Nicolas Cage is going on the auction block — and it is expected to set a record for a comic price. The comics-loving actor purchased the copy — the finest of ACTION #1 known to exist — in 1997 for $150,000. It was then stolen from his house in 2000 and vanished from history until it was found in a California storage unit last year. According to ComicConnect’s Vincent Zurzolo — the go-to man for all comics collectible lore — the stolen comic was actually tracked down and traced to a man who had purchased it from the owner of the contents of the unit. Will someone please make a movie about this investigation? Starring Ryan Gosling? And Tom Hardy?

Anyhoo, we digress. An 8.5 copy of ACTION #1 was sold last year for $1.5 million. Zurzolo expects this one to go for more than that. Not a bad investment.

This is one of my all-time favorite comics stories. I’ve often alluded to it in conversation as “It’s like, you know, that story where Gyro Gearloose builds a house for a picnic?” Very few people get the reference. In fact I am the only one. But It’s a couple of things: a fine example of Carl Barks at his 1957 form — sure fluid art with the joke extended visually to its fullest extent, and a tight plot based on human folly — all executed with a seeming effortlessness.

It’s also a fine example of the Gyro story — a well-intentioned dullard whose high intelligence is unencumbered by any sign of wisdom (he’d outsourced that to Helper, his little lightbulb-headed robot.) Gyro Gearloose and Helper call into the category of foolish leader and the sidekick who saves him — Wallace and Gromit, or Green Hornet and Kato in the recent film. “Picnic” takes that basic dynamic and adds in another universal human truth: how the solution is often worse then the problem; and how losing sight of the goal can take you in the exact opposite direction. 

While I was cleaning up, I was going through my collection of Gladstone’s Carl Bark Library, a series of 8 1/2 x 11″ albums — in the European size — that came out every month during the 90s. With Fantagraphics reprint series now under way, these editions are being replaced as the most complete color run of Barks’ work — in the US at least. The much-hated coloring is on display here — by Mike McCormick — it’s serviceable but way too revisionist and garish for most Barks experts. I don’t think it detracts from “Picnic” that much, however.

Anyway, I know his is all kinds of wrong, but just for one week, here’s “Picnic” by Carl Barks from Picnic Party #8, July 1957. It’ll be a few years before Fanta gets around to Gyro, so consider this a preview. All contents © The Walt Disney Company.

At least maybe more than one other person will get my references to this story now!

These Defenders don’t mess around.

Also, call me nuts, but on the off-chance that this just happened to be the first comic book I ever picked up, I’d rather just read a big old caption explaining who these groovy characters are than read dialog like, “Namor will not let your gamma-radiation based mutation take over, Banner!”

Although considering that this is a ’70s comic, they probably ALSO said something like that inside even though there was a caption.

The insides are even better.

Via

An iconic — and, they say, ironic — Roy Lichtenstein painting based on a drawing by William Overgard is expected to sell for $35-45 million at a Christie’s auction. In 1988 the painting sold for $2.1 million, but a recent Lichtenstein sale for $42.6 million suggest the market for his work has expanded a bit more. The painting has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lichtenstein based the image on a Steve Roper panel by Overgard, which is reproduced at the Deconstructing Lichtenstein Flickr set. Experts think the copy is quite something, however.

“There’s no romance, there’s no woman and it’s quite dark, but it’s a marvelous painting,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes, co- owner of Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, which has mounted four solo Lichtenstein exhibitions in the past 10 years. “It epitomizes Roy’s use of irony, which is the most important theme throughout his work.”

Yes, irony. Hahahaha.

What were we just saying about cartoonists not getting paid a living wage?

Chris Illuminati at TheFW marshals the evidence, and it is quite compelling.

That is all.

Via

PS: Okay, we couldn’t leave it unmentioned that this cover by Sheldon Moldoff has everything that a comic book cover needs: a screaming Robin in the corner; a Batman who is so freakish and powerful that he is bending lamposts with his freakish power; tiny silhouetted men who flee in terror while exhibiting the perfect body language of flee-ers; and of course an innocent bysander whose hat is blowing off in shock at the awful sight before him—Batman, a menace to all with his zebraness.

Taken as a group, this would still be a perfect comic book cover — throw in a zebra Batman and you have hit the jackpot!