Culture

Tarpé Mills is a name well known to comics historians, not only as one of the best of the female cartoonists of the war years, but as the creator and artist of Miss Fury, one of the first successful superheroine characters, which ran for nearly a decade as a sunday newspaper strip. It was a lively blend of outre characters, adventure and naughtiness. This April Dean Mullaney's Library of American Comics is reprinting the best of the strips in a deluxe volume complete with an introduction by comics historian Trina Robbins. Mullaney provided a desception of the volume and this preview for our Anniversary week:

While we're spotlighting creators issues and outlooks here at Anniversary Week at The Beat, here's an oldie but a goodie: The (Sad) Saga of Black Lightning’s Creation by Daniel Best which presents documents and drawings from writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor von Eeden, the team known to have created Black Lightning's first appearance. There's some dispute over how the two should be credited -- Isabella claims sole creative credit due to having come up with the character all on his own and described the costume and so on -- but von Eeden has drawings but...we'll we won't get into that here. von Eeden doesn't want the creator's credit--or the royalties that come with it -- but has his own opinions. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. As is well known, Isabella had the foresight to keep a piece of the character he had created independently of DC editorial -- a move he thinks backfired…

A couple of interviews out now clarify controversial comics news stories of the past and more recent past; both are a reminder that what you read on CBR or Newsarama is rarely the whole truth -- and that's it's not always our business to know the whole truth.

ReedPop has just announced that this year's New York Comic-Con is expanding to four days. The show will run from October 13-16, with Thursday a day for academic programming, beginning at noon, and a "Preview Night" running from 4-7. Only 10,000 tickets will be sold for all four days -- nearly 100,000 people attended the 2010 show, according to show runner Lance Fensterman.

Just sayin'.

No wonder that creators are getting a little more vocal about the importance of creator-owned material. Eric Powell's controversial video got things going, but itself was a response to a week-long tweet storm by writer Steve Niles who blogged recently What’s all this Creator-Owned Talk?

If there's one thing comics bloggers love, it's those old B&W photos from Life Magazine showing kids reading comics--proof of a simpler time when children read things, bananas were a vegetable, and your real father dropped off a bottle of milk at your mom's house every day. Well, recently on the LA Times Southern California Moments feature of reader-submitted photos we came across what looks to be a contemporary example of the genre:

Just to send you off on your weekend, here's Eric Powell of THE GOON with a hilarious and yet sobering video on what is really going on in the comics industry.

When it was announced that Stan Lee would be "creating" a bunch of superheroes to represent the 30 NHL hockey teams, it kind of whizzed by in the blizzard of such announcements of projects Lee was working on this year -- he's surely the world's busiest octogenarian. However, as the characters are unveiled in anticipation of this weekend's NHL All-Star Game where they will "come to life" via some unholy method, it's becoming clear that these characters may in fact be his Clarinet Quintet, his Black Paintings -- a twilight exploration of the themes that have preoccupied his work for a lifetime.

With the Comics Code all but buried, what ever happened to the CMAA's priceless archives of historical documents?

An astonishing icepunk adventure by the great French cartoonist Jacques Tardi is coming in March from Fantagraphics. It looks incredible.

That's the original from "Silver #22" but the reimagining by Robert Goodin is even more disturbing -- please click on the link to enjoy! But we couldn't help wondering...what is this "Silver"? An early comic by Jim Woodring or Hans Rickheit? The work of an unknown cousin to Fletcher Hanks? Or a spin-off from KRAMERS ERGOT? Surely only the fecund imaginations of a contemporary indie cartoonist could imagine a calfskin giving birth to an Indian, face first, through a large vagina in its throat. Right?