Tag: History

Tim Hanley (he of Gender Crunching) has a great guest post up at DC Women Kicking Ass looking at The Women Behind Wonder Woman. Of course we all know about the men like William Marston and HG Peter, but there were several women involved in the early years as well, including Marston's two wives Elizabeth and Olive (above—yes the three of them lived together and it was a little odd), but also women who worked directly on the series, including the great editor Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk and even a scripter:

Novelist Max Allan Collins is no stranger to the comics, with his ROAD TO PERDITION graphic novel being turned into an actual prestige movie, and his long-running Ms. Tree comic. His new novel is actually set in the world of comics with a comics section by long-time collaborator Terry Beatty.

You know how you're always reading about how great the first Comic-Con in San Diego was with everyone sitting around the pool at the El Cortez while throwing rubber duckies at Jack Kirby and Ray Bradbury? Well some of the surviving founders of SDCC have gotten together to put on an old-timey show called The San Diego Comic Fest, to be held October 19-21 at the San Diego Town & Country Resort and Convention Center. The guest list consists of some people who were actually at the first cons in the '70s, including George Clayton Johnson, Jackie Estrada, Mark Evanier, Murphy Anderson, Ron Turner, and Tim Powers.

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.