Public Domain Comics! - "Heroes of the Old Testament" from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact v.20, #1, 1964

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Today's story comes from a Christian comic that was distributed to schools and not on news stands, as far as I know. The series began publication in 1946, and managed, according to the GCD, 496 issues before ceasing publication.

It's really a pretty great story, and does so much of the work I would like to do in showing how comic book superheroes and Biblical heroes are really one and the same.

Public Domain Comics! - "Bill and Koo" from Cartoon Funnies #13, circa 1948

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I suppose, as with most things on this blog, the comics will come when they come 😬

Today's story comes from a Canadian reprint comic from Bell Features, reprinting material from Frisky Fables. With this old stuff, I'm trying very hard to avoid the blatantly racist stories, but I apologize if something unpleasant manages to sneak through.

Public Domain Comics! - "Could Stranger Things Happen?" from Jim Dandy #2, July 1956

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So maybe every 3 days....

Today's story is from Jim Dandy #2, published by Lev Gleason. Contextually, it appears to have been written and drawn by Charles Biro.

Public Domain Comics! - "Three Eyes Look Earthward!" from Adventures Into the Unknown #119, September 1960

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

I thought since most of us (hopefully) are practicing safe distancing from others, and staying home more than usual, that a few interesting comics to read might be fun. I've gone through my collection for all of my public domain stuff, and I'll be posting stories from them for the next little while. I'll try to go daily, but, let's be honest, that's not my strong suit.

Today's story is from Adventures Into the Unknown #119, September 1960, published by American Comics Group. The story was written by Kurato Osaki and illustrated by Ogden Whitney.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Year 4 Collage

Read some cool stuff this year. And finishing 10% of the project actually makes me feel like I've accomplished something!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Year 3 Collage

Treasure from Tumblr

Another round-up of the neat art, costumes, and other assorted stuff from the Giant Box of Comics Tumblr feed.

First up, a cool little bit of writing about Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

 

I know next to nothing about Spider-Gwen, but I do know that this cosplay is fricking amazing.

Some very creepy, but really, really cool, art.

A lovely comic about body-positivity (and about the importance of listening to our drunk selves occasionally.)

Perhaps one of my favourite Batgirl pics.

Artists to Check Out

Been a while since I've done an artist post. Rather than look to traditional comics artists, these are artists whose work has popped up on my Tumblr and that have caught my attention.

Raf Banzuela: Pen and ink, I think, and heaping helpings of strangeness. I'd love to see a comic illustrated by Mr. Banzuela.

Richard Vergez: Some very cool mixed media weirdness going on here. It's one of the things I love about art that manipulates photography so well - it looks like something that's happened even though we know that it's something that could never happen. Cognitive dissonance like that makes me happy.

Mark Powell: I'll admit, what caught my eye about Mr. Powell's work was the picture below that uses playing cards as the background. I love this kind of layering in a visual medium (there's a word for it that has completely escaped me right now). His other work uses other materials as backgrounds, giving the art a kind of physical aesthetic/medial depth.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Year 2 Collage

Collecting and smooshing together the covers of everything I've read during Year 2.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Metadata Post

 A few thoughts on my database software.

I've used the Collectorz.com software for years now. When I worked at Sunrise Records in London, Ontario, every now and again we would get a dewy-eyed person come in with a list. It would inevitably turn out to be a list of CDs or video tapes (it was some time ago) that had been lost in a theft or in a catastrophic house disaster. The lists were for insurance purposes. It may come as a shock, but back then, I didn't have nearly the same amount of stuff I have now, let alone the extensive collections I have. But some years later, after the store had closed down, I realized that my comic collection was indeed that significant a collection that I should think about getting it insured.

Yeah. Looked into that for all of three milliseconds, saw how much it would cost on a monthly basis, and decided to simply be very careful about playing with matches in the house.

The next best thing, I thought, would be to have a comprehensive list of my comics. My Dad got me a copy of an early Collectorz, and thus began my database. I think I've lost the data once in about 10 years, but I'm a much more careful computer used now.

The layout of this program is great. Neat, simple, customizable, but not to the point of ridiculous minutiae (at least, not that I've yet discovered). The above picture is how I usually have the window organized. This gives me a good look at all of the relevant data, both through the list view and the cover view. Increasingly important these days is that little eye icon which, if bright, means I've read the comic already.

The view is nicely manipulable, however. Here's a few examples:

No list view isn't great, but it does give a nice view of the cover. I kind of wish more of the information was available on this view. That big empty space seems a bit wasted to me. Ah well.

List view isn't the only option, though. One can also have a number of different views of the comics while retaining the detail window at the bottom:

The card view is one I don't use very often. I find it clunky, and the information provided on the card not be quite as useful as that which is available in the list view.

 More often than not, especially when I have the display set to only the comics that I have uploaded covers for, I'll have the screen configured in this way - it's nice to see all of the covers, and I'm at the point in my 40 Years project that there are comics I've forgotten that I've read, so to see these covers is a nice reminder.

When I don't have the thumbnail gallery of covers up, I have the cover flow, which lets you scan through nice-sized representations of your collection, with the comic whose details are displayed taking center stage. It's nice, though of the three ways I prefer to have the collection displayed, this is the least useful. But it looks pretty. Especially when you full screen it:

And that's the program I use, and some of the ways it looks. Check out Collectorz.com. They do database software for all kinds of media collections, and they're pretty great.