History

Meanwhile, what is going on over at the Billy Ireland collection of comics and cartoon art? Oh just some doodles by Playboy/New Yorker cartoonistEldon Dedini like this one of painter Diego Rivera. Dedini donated his art archives to the collection before his death.

Lettering king Todd Klein has a couple of great blog posts showing a series of photos by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez in 1979 on a visit to DC's offices. Klein's memory is prodigious and it's a great look at everything from obsolete technology to the prevalence of sweater vests in the late 70s to a different way of working:

Indonesian pro photographer Agan Harahap has taken his love of history and superheroes to make this Flickr set of superheroes looming in various historical moments. You'll want to check out all of them because they are incredibly evocative. Above V herds surrendering Germans on June 9, 1944, in the wake of D-Day. Below, Darth Vader helps out at the signing of the Yalta Pact, where Churchill and Roosevelt would sign over Eastern Europe to Stalin.

Dara Naraghi has been running a features on his blog called Indie Cover Spotlight where he goes through his longboxes and pulls out the amazing, unlikely, and just plain forgotten indie comics of yore, say, like this cover of something called STAR RANGERS by Dave Dorman, a loving tribute to Fredric Wertham.

Well here's a new Kickstarter campaign for a comics memoir by former DC staffer Scott Young which promises some first-class lid ripping including the legendary comics scandal known as "Compgate":

Daniel Best is at it again, this time with the decades-spanning story of Joe Simons's stolen artwork and a subsequent investigation by the FBI:

As a lagniappe to the current "All Things Alan Moore" wiki currently going on in our comments, here's Pádraig Ó Méalóid with a little-remembered crossover between the Watchmen and the Question...that took place all the way back in THE QUESTION #17, June 1988. Think of it as "The Five Doctors" of this particular timeline.

My—hopefully—last post on Before Watchmen and Alan Moore and the role of the comics creators.

When you get a flyer for a $395 scholarly compendium on comics, you think it must be some kind of scam. Then you see it was edited by Bart H. Beaty and Stephen Weiner and you decide you want it badly.

Our feverish maunderings about old comics did draw one great link, from Jamie Coville, this interview with DJ Arneson, who was the editor for Dell after Western pulled its licenses and the company essentially started a comics company from scratch in 1962. It's a fascinating look at the business away from Marvel and DC. And it also provides a glimpse into a long ago Shangri-La before...approvals:

While looking for a comics cover for a sick alert, I realized that the heyday era of the doctor comic was definitely the early '60s. Licensed comics were such a big deal then, especially for Dell/Western. They licensed just about anything. The BEN CASEY and Dr. KILDARE comics were based on popular TV shows of the time. Dr. KILDARE lasted about 9 issues, BEN CASEY 10, although it did spin off into a comic strip which was written and drawn by Neal Adams.

Reporter Michael Dean's long, investigative reports are one of the things we most miss about the old print Comics Journal, but he's back with a look at MoCCA, both the festival and the museum: