Old Comics

In 1989 The Simpsons were still on the drawing board, an cartoonist Matt Groening was a freelance illustrators, and Apple was a rising company whose ungainly, boxlike beige computers boasted lordly hard drives of 40 mbs.

From Little Lulu 39, 1950

Craig Yoe is putting out another one of his numerous comics compilations and this one has a fun theme. It's called Comics About Cartoonists What's...

So Amethyst is finally back! I admit this fantasy saga of a 13-year-old girl who finds she actually a princess of Gemworld was one...

While there is a certain dodginess that makes linking to this feel a little weird, I found this listing for a liquidation center's comic...

By Steve Morris Just like every delicious Cow Pie you've ever had the pleasure to eat, The Dandy is now reaching an end. One of Britain’s...

Mitch O'Connell is known as a wonderful artist in a vintage/pin-up style. He also has a huge collection of old comics. And at a perhaps unthinkable cost to himself, he's used that collection to give us one of the great treasures of our age: Sex in Comic! The top 100 strangest, suggestive and steamy vintage comic book panels of all time! Here are three excerpts but the whole thing has us gasping for air.

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.

by Casey Burchby

Frank Frazetta’s prodigious and varied output is given even more breadth by a new collection from IDW of the artist’s humor work. The contents of Frazetta – Funny Stuff date from the late 1940s, when he was still just a kid, really, and still a long way from the cavemen, exotic temptresses, movie posters, and cover paintings that would come to define his work. Yet, as Frazetta told The Comics Journal in 1994, “The funny stuff is the real me.”

From the gory, lurid world of pre-Code comics....Dark Horse is putting together some kick-ass collections -- in fact, you'll soon be able to read the insides of all those comics that we post whenever we're sick or late or whatever. ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN indeed.

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.