Tag: History

In addition to popularizing "Sterankoing," artist Jim Steranko is quite a tweeter. Every Sunday night he holds a regular talk, and last night he...

Just before Christmas, I ran a picture tweeted by DC Comics of the 1945 DC Christmas party, with many figures from comics history—from artist Joe Kubert to publisher Harry Donenfeld —in the room. The photo conveyed a palpable sense of the past brought to life, the clinking of glasses, the laughter of women, the camaraderie of the still young industry. And now Letterer/historian Todd Klein has identified as many of the people in the photo as possible.

Marc Tyler Nobleman is the author of Bill the Boy Wonder, a kids picture book bio of Bill Finger, illustrated by Ty Templeton, and...

Recently I posted a news item about the new Badger book from Devil's Due having low orders. Writer/creator Mike Baron reached out to me...

When you look at the list of comics publishers who have stayed the course throughout decades of tumultuous changes in distribution and audience, one...

WOW! Talk about historic finds! DC Comics just tweeted this historic photo from a comics industry Christmas party from 70 years ago. While there is a slight Shining view to it (is that Hank Kanalz I see in the back?), it's also an amazing view into the Golden Age. After it was tweeted DC Comics was kind enough to send me a high res scan which I am sharing with you so all the comics historians out there can pour over it. There is a handwritten guest list as well, but its provenance isn't known so I am not posting it.

While poking around on the A Moment of Cerebus site following my previous post on Glamourpuss, I noticed that the remastered editions of Church...

Well speak of the devil, here's a new Kickstarter from the Locust Moon folks that plans to reprint some long lost early work by...

Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel is a new book by former DC publisher Paul Levitz that looks at Eisner's historical contribution to...

The New York Times, which is the one newspaper that never ran comics strips, reverse engineers their insertion into Sunday papers as something of...

Word going around on Facebook that master inker and comics technical innovator Murphy Anderson has passed away at age 89. Anderson was one of the great DC inkers of all time, providing crisp clean lines that defined the look of Hawkman, Superman, and Adam Strange, and, indeed, the whole DC line of the Silver Age, inking over Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane and most notably, Curt Swan. He was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame (precursor of the Eisner HoF) all the way back in 1988, a tribute to his statue in the industry.

Reid Fleming and David Boswell are two of the great legendary figures of the 80s black and white comics boom – Canadian born cartoonist Boswell created an enduring character in the irascible delivery man Reid Fleming whose bellicose shouts — "I thought I told you to shut up!" — and hostile approach to dairy deposits made him an angry everyman hero. The character became incredibly popular during its '80s run, and a big studio movie was contemplated, with Boswell writing the script, until the project reached a film exec who didn't get the unique, absurd humor of the comic. The rest, as they say, is a cartoonist's life.