The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2000: Wall of Flesh #1, 1992

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Given that this comic is from the same company that have published Femforce for the last few decades, you might be forgive for thinking that this comic, especially based on its cover, might be a weird, slightly-horrific but more titillating comic than it actually is. There's one cheesecake-y moment, with a member of Femforce in a pin-up on the Wall of Flesh, but aside from that it's reprints of old horror comics, and was meant to be the first issue of many.

 

As with a large number of the old 50s horror comics, each of these stories is really, really good. Though the comic suffers from a lack of colour, the draftsmanship apparent in each tale reinforces just how talented these early comics artists were, and just what they could do without the restrictions of the Comics Code. Indeed, it's a testament to how good they were that they could produce some stellar material even under those restrictions, but such tales often pale compared to what was possible before that draconian set of rules was enforced.

 

All that said, this is my 2000th comic! That feels like a lot. I wondered, at the beginning of the project, at what point would I feel like I'd done a significant chunk of the collection, and this is it. 2000 comics. It's a number I can still sort of visualize. I'd considered at one point taking each of the comics I'd read for the project and separating them, so I would have the read and the unread collections. Though I ultimately decided that this would be a ridiculous way to organize my collection, it would have been interesting seeing the shift, slowly but surely, over the years.

 

But what a nightmare it would have been for accessing anything.

 

So it seems somewhat fitting to me that a comic celebrating the brilliant history of comics is my 2000th read. I cannot wait to see what the next 2000 bring.

 

More to follow.

 

Further Reading and Related Posts

 

A couple of other "anniversaries:"

My post on day 100 - I thought I'd read a lot at that point.

And my post on completing the first year - we're in Year 6 right now, for anyone keeping track.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1304: Mr. Monster's Super-Duper Special #5, January 1987

A really great pulp science fiction adventure today, featuring a flying saucer, a relatively useless female character, plucky aliens, and, of course, a very manly hero.

I'm being facetious of course, though the story does have many of the classic tropes of early pulp science fiction. What we have is simply a very cool old school sci-fi adventure from an era that predates human exploration of space. These kinds of stories are always interesting as there's just so much speculation as what things will be like, and what we will encounter. While we understand space as infinite, it seems to me it was far more so narratively before we had some idea of what was out there.

Well, not hat we really know, but you know what I mean.

I'm glad to have discovered the art of Bob Powell. His characters are super-dynamic, though given the scarcity of reprint comics like this one, it might be a challenge to track down more of his works. Which, honestly, sounds like a lot of fun.

More to come...