The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2083: Famous Funnies #213, September 1954

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Back in time we go to the mid-50s, just before the return of The Flash and the advent of the Silver Age. Or rather, just before the destruction of the comics industry by Wertham and his cronies and the introduction of the Comics Code. Depends how full your glass is today.

My copy is coverless, and no wonder. That's a Frank Frazetta cover up there, and it's fucking gorgeous. I would be completely unsurprised to find that the cover to my copy ended up gracing a wall somewhere. Beautiful.

The stories inside are pretty good, a couple of nice adventure/drama/science fiction newspaper reprints and some odd 2-pagers about "real heroes" and the heroic things they did. A cool little glimpse back at the history of the medium and its origins in the Platinum Age.

Which I will read some stuff from, promise. Just gotta figure out what.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1344: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century #11, February 1981

There are a couple of cool things about this comic.

First, it's been in my collection for almost as long as I've been collecting comics. I think I've written of it before, but when I first started collecting, my Mum and Dad gave me a collecting kit for Christmas one year. It was a three-quarter length box and inside were some bags, some boards, a current price guide, and a grab bag of about 20 comics. This was one of them. I'm not sure why it's lasted. I know that there are comics that I have owned and then have traded away, or sold (before I was so adamant about my collecting), but this one hasn't, even though I've never really been that interested in it.

And that's where the second cool thing comes in. Every now and again I'll pick up a comic to read for the project, and I'll be surprised to find that it's written by someone I recognize. In the case of today's issue, it's written by a writer whose work I hold in high esteem, J.M. DeMatteis. His Brooklyn Dreams was an amazing work, so much so that I had it added to my reading list for my American Literature comprehensive exam. He's a writer who I keep meaning to delve into more deeply, but the problem is he is just so fucking prolific. I don't even know where to start. A bit of research has shown me that he actually has a substantial number of Man-Thing stories, so perhaps I'll start there.

What this means is that I've had this story kicking about in the collection for ages, but had no idea it was this good. I do vaguely remember reading it when I was very young, but I probably haven't opened it up in a good 30 years. Mr. DeMatteis apparently wrote a couple of other issues, so I'm going to see if I can find them as well. Though one was only published in Germany, so that might be difficult.

More to come...