The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 291: Adventure Comics #414, January 1972

I don't want to make it sound like I've not been enjoying the comics I've been reading for almost the last 300 days, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed every story in this comic a great deal. Bob Oksner is now my absolute favourite Supergirl artist. And not just because of the hotpants! It's also cool to see some Len Wein stuff from around the same time that Swamp Thing is taking off - he writes a pretty decent superhero story as well as his more famous horror stuff.

Unlike yesterday's Adventure Comics, this issue takes up the anthology nature of the title that I think continues until the series ends. We've got a couple of gorgeous Supergirl stories, a Zatanna story by Gray Morrow and Wein, and the second Animal Man story with art by Gil Kane (and written by Dave Wood, about whom I can find almost no information except that he co-created Animal Man - I probably should have heard of him sooner). And all of them were excellent. There's definitely a EC Horror comics vibe to a couple of the Len Wein-scribed stories, which makes a pretty cool combination with the superheroes (SG and Zatanna) that he's playing with. The stories are also less-bombastic than what one might expect from 70s DC, and you can see the transition from goofy 60s television Batman-inspired shenanigans to writers who are thinking through the ramifications and ways of telling superhero stories. I'm definitely going to have to see if some of this old stuff has been collected so I can get a better idea.

Strangely, this comic was in my Supergirl section in the collection, even though it prominently features an Animal Man story. It's going to go back into the AM collection now. Animal Man's earliest adventures originally appeared in Strange Adventures, and were reprinted years later as back-ups to Supergirl's Adventure Comics run. They're not easy to come by, but as of this writing I'm only missing one of Animal Man's earliest adventures. What's interesting is the recolouring job that some of the stories undergo in the 6 or so years between publication. Such decisions, though, are best left to the mysteries of the universe.

A bit more Adventure tomorrow, I think. I'm enjoying the crap out of the Supergirl stuff, and it's great to revisit the early Animal Man adventures. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 63 - A Date With Judy #77, June-July 1960

Over the weekend I was at a flea market in town, and found a stack of old comic (torn up, covers missing) that were being sold for $10 for the lot. The guy selling them cautioned me that I should check them first, that they were in pretty bad shape, but I assured him that I just like to read them. Condition is very rarely a concern for me. It turns out that, aside from a single Mickey Mouse comic from 1973, they're all from 1960 and earlier. It's really cool to read stuff from this Golden/Silver Age transition period, especially since none of them are superhero comics. There's some old Archie stuff, some westerns, a few childrens' comics, even a few newspaper strip reprint books. And then there's stuff like A Date With Judy. I was just reading in Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men about the spate of teen romance comics that flourished in the post-war period, but they're not something I've ever given much time to. And that, mainly, is because they're not really the sort of thing that gets reprinted, so one has to wait until a bunch of reading copies show up at a flea market....

That having happened, let's see what this particular issue is like. First, Bob Oksner draws the most fabulous, tiny-waisted ladies. His work reminds me of a slightly more sophisticated take on the Archie Comics house style, and is definitely inspired by the look of the film starlets of the time. I can also see the Bruce Timm animated style growing directly from the work of such artists as Oksner. The comic does fall prey to that problem that also afflicts Archie, in that every woman is drop dead gorgeous, and is obviously rendered to have maximum attractiveness, while every man is a caricature. An interesting perspective to consider this from is that the men have more visually linguistic cues from which the reader can determine their personalities, whereas the women are much harder to read. We have to judge them from their actions and their words, rather than from their physical appearances. Which, having written that, is pretty much the opposite of what one might expect. So the men rely heavily on caricaturization to communicate their roles in the stories, whereas the women rely more on characterization. We have to acknowledge, as I pointed out above, that all the women do conform to a hegemonic ideal of beauty, but the fact that we come to know them not from their appearances but from their behaviours in some ways plays against this hegemonic notion.

This is not to say that there aren't a number of problems with the stories themselves, but rather than read a piece simply as another example of normative behaviours and notions of beauty, the contrast of visual linguistic indicators and verbal linguistic indicators allows us to reverse the practice of judging women for their looks and men for their actions. Whether or not this was what Oksner was going for, it's hard to say, but that's what I got out of the reading experience.

And that was a lot more theoretical than I thought this would go this morning. The stories are cute, to be sure, very much of the sort typified (and some might say perfected) by Archie Comics. It's quite a treat to have a chance to read these kinds of books. The chance of them ever being reprinted is slight, as there are no capes or long-underwear anywhere to be seen. Another reason to never knock the dollar bin, or any cheap reading copies that you might come across.

See you tomorrow.