History

A powerful looking Ron Ely, star of the TV's "Tarzan"(1966-1968) and "Doc Savage: Man of Bronze" (1975) spellbound his audience at WonderCon Friday, relating...

The secrets of Stan Lee's hair and other tidbits from comics history at the just concluded Asbury Park Comicon.

Women's History month is wrapping up, but we at The Beat don't feel we celebrated it properly, so for the next 24 hours most of the Beat staff is collaborating on "24 Hours of Women Cartoonists" to spotlight some of our favorite creators.

As the first of several “Comic Book Roundtable” events to be held at the Soho Gallery of Digital Art under the auspices of gallery...

by Lea Hernandez - My long-time friend Toren Smith has passed away after a protracted bout of ill health, and I'm heartbroken. I worked for him over the course of seventeen years as part of his elite Studio Proteus team; doing retouch on adult comics, and rewriting titles like 3x3 Eyes, What's Michael? And Oh! My Goddess!. If Toren had lived another year, I would've known him for exactly half my life.

Okay he was only the head of Marvel for six months during Ron Perelman's murky march to bankruptcy—in fact he was the guy in charge when Marvel filed—but former Marvel CEO Scott Sassa has been canned from his current gig at Hearst after steamy texts from a Las Vegas stripper showed up somewhere they shouldn't.

Cartoonist Nate Powell (left) along with Rep. John Lewis and writer Andrew Aydin—all collaborators on the upcoming graphic novel March—walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL, March 2013, where in 1965 600 marchers protesting for civil rights, among them Lewis, were tear gassed and beaten with clubs by police.

Via Sean Howe's invaluable Marvel tumblr, this photo of future Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter at age 14. At that age he sent a spec script to DC editor Mort Weisinger and was hired to write the Legion of Superheroes at that age. While the world of superhero comics was not quite as harsh as it is now...it was still probably no place for a boy, as Howe writes in MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY:

Well here's a must do: a chance to see Carol Tilley, the heroic professor who proved Dr. Fredric Wertham was a fraud, in person with Paul Levitz, David Hajdu, Craig Yoe, Sharon Packer and Danny Fingeroth at a talk celebrating Wertham's 118th birthday on March 20th. I

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog has a nice post onJackie Ormes, creator of Torchy and the first African-American woman cartoonist of note. And she did get note in her day:

As Dave Sim noted the other day, Wendy and Richard Pini, creators of Elfquest, the pioneering indie comics fantasy, held on to all of their artwork. And now they are bequeathing it to Columbia University's archives. The PR below explains all you need to know, but we should note that Columbia's tireless librarian and comics-scholar Karen Green has been busy indeed.

Poisoned Chalice Part 3: Marvelman Falls The actual work on the Marvelman titles was done by various artists, and Mick Anglo goes into quite a bit...