The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1950: Calibrations #1, June 1996

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Today's featured creator, Marc Andreyko, takes on in today's comic a fascinating character in queer literary history: Peter Pan. Since its earliest appearances on stage, the character has been played by a woman, including the very first stage performance in 1904. I'm not 100% certain what to make of a character who refuses to grow up who is always played on stage by a woman (though not in film?) - I can see the choice being a logistical one, in that a woman has the maturity to play the role and the voice to carry off a pre-pubescent boy. But there's also something to be said for a character that has been so significant in English literature, and in English Children's Literature, a specifically-male character, having such strong ties to women. Optimistically, I think it offers a way of parsing, in a century vehemently opposed to any kind of  questioning of the gender binary, the breakdown of traditional gender roles. Even the fact of the character being a "role" that a woman inhabits offers a place to start an interesting conversation about gender roles.

All that said, the Peter Pan that we encounter in today's story, a sneak peek at a longer series, does not seem particularly happy with the actress playing him on stage. Indeed, he becomes quite murderous about it, it's hinted in the final few panels, even screaming out his fury over girls playing him on stage. Is this Peter the toxically masculine, come to take what he thinks is revenge for his emasculation? Sadly, I've no idea. I may well see about tracking the series down, especially if Jill Thompson, who illustrates today's short story, continues to be involved.

More to follow.

Caliber is such an interesting publisher. Generally pretty high quality stuff.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1854: Moebius Comics #1, May 1996

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You may have noticed I'm not reading Jon Sable anymore, despite my liking of the series. I just needed to do some different things, which I'm kind of blaming on the quarantine, and kind of blaming on my ADHD.

Moebius plays a background role in my comics education, much the same way that Heavy Metal (his primary vehicle in North America) does. I, of course, have always been aware of Giraud's work, but my preference for the mainstream, and for superheroes, has always kept me from getting into his stuff. Which, I suppose, is why I started this project to begin with. That said, science fiction comics have never really been a thing I enjoyed. Or rather, have never been a thing I enjoyed as much as some other things. It's weird, because as a genre I quite like science fiction - I just often find that there's not quite as much of a spiritual dimension to such stories, or not in the way that I like to see/read a spiritual dimension, anyway. For me I think that's why superhero stuff works so nicely - it meshes the magical and the scientific into a pretty good amalgam, which is also how I try to order my brain.

Today's comic is a bit of a mishmash. In order to spread the one complete story out over a few issues, we get a scant amount of the primary tale, "The Man from [the] Ciguri." Everything else is stuff from Moebius' sketch book, or from abandoned projects, which is interesting for the collector of Giraud's work, but not necessarily for the casual reader. I do like the "Arzach Jams," in which another artist takes some of the sketchbook work and fleshes it out into a proper story. William Stout's work in today's issue pays homage to Moebius without totally ripping him off. It's quite a lovely piece.

Isolation life is weird. My schedule is becoming non-existent, as there's nothing pulling on my time. I'm still writing for CBR in order to make a bit of money, and I'm still taking care of the house, but there's no sense of urgency to any of these things. Right now, though it's not an ideal circumstance, I seem to have time. Now I just have to get off my ass and fill it with all the things I want to do when I don't have any.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 742: Lori Lovecraft #1, 1997

This comic has been kicking about in my collection for a very long time now. I picked it up mainly for the name "Lovecraft" in the title, but also for Mike Vosburg's art, which is just lovely. Sadly, the comic has nothing to do with that old Providence writer whose work I like so much, but it is a neat little tale of the occult in a Hollywood that is more 40s than the 90s it's meant to be set in.

The story is kind of straightforward - B-movie actress is given a part that is actually a ruse to set her up to be sacrificed to a demon. In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of B-movies that Lori herself would star in, which only goes to enhance the feeling of the tale. When I say it's a straightforward story, that's not to say it's not done well. When I teach Shakespeare, I always tell my students that his genius was never in telling the original stories, but retelling old ones in new and interesting ways. Lori Lovecraft does something similar, and, now that I think of it, does something similar to what Joss Whedon wanted to do with Buffy. Lori technically should be meeting a bloody end, if the story were to follow the plot of one of the exploitation movies she stars in. Instead, though, at the end of the story she absconds with the Necronomicon (damn, that book gets around), and decides to study it and magic. It's quite the turn from the typical "buxom bimbo is killed, after having her clothes torn off, by demons" schtick from 80s slasher movies, but that's what makes the story, at least by its end, more refreshing than those sorts of over-used plots. Instead of a tale all by itself, the story really serves as a good origin story for a character who, by the end, has become much more interesting than she was to begin with.

There's a few more stories of Lori in the collection, and it seems Mr. Vosburg has continued producing them bit by bit over the years. I've added the stuff I'm missing to the list. Maybe the Calgary Expo will help me out...

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 574: The Three Voices, 1994

Months and months ago I featured a Gustave Dore comic from Tome Press and talked about the place in indie publishing that Caliber occupied, and talked about the notion that a comic can be considered by virtue of the intent of its publishing or its audience, rather than just from the arrangement of words and pictures upon the pages. I delve back into this area with today's comic. While I found the editorial section a bit dodgy (blame it on the far-too-over-developed grammatical sense I carry with me now), the reprint of both the poems and the Frost illustrations is just wonderful. I've read "Jabberwocky" before, of course, but the other two poems, the titular one and "Size & Tears" were new to me. Carroll has a lovely sense of the ridiculous, and these poems foreground that. Not necessarily nonsense poems like "Jabberwocky" (though the woman in "The Three Voices" does seem somewhat nonsensical), these poems attack the idea of nonsense from more sensible directions. "Size & Tears" could even be considered a very early look at body shaming and the love of thinness.

There's no listing for this comic on the GCD, and I know they're pretty strict about the amount of actual comics that have to be in a publication in order for it to merit inclusion in the database. While I understand the need to limit, I think this is comics doing what it does very well, juxtaposing art and words, demonstrating a collaborative medium, and publishing to a mass market. Frost's illustrations do no simply depict what's happening in the poems, but offer interpretation of the characters, creatures, and action. One curious thing about this comic, and about the other two Carroll reprints I have from Tome Press, is that it claims on the cover to be number two of two, but I don't think any other issues were published. Which is great, actually, because I've spent the last number of years keeping my eyes open for the first issues, and now I can take them off the watch list!

More that's new and strange tomorrow! Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 140: The Illustrated Dore: The Book of Apocrypha, 1991 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 4)

A while back I was reading Thierry Smolderen's The Origins of Comics. It's a really cool history of the comics medium. One of the artists that he touches upon is Gustav Dore. You've probably seen his artwork before. If you're from Canada, I can almost guarantee that the last time you were in a Chapters bookstore and looked at the Bargain Art Books, there was a book featuring illustrations by Dore. This comic is a presentation of his work illustrating events from the Apocrypha. I have a soft spot for the books that were left out of the canon. Call it a comics scholar thing.

The other cool thing about this comic is that it's the first one that I've run across that isn't in the Grand Comics Database. When I was recently looking up the old Marvel Age news magazines, I discovered that they're listed, but only as shells, and that a comic has to have more than 10% comics content to be included in the database (that was my understanding of it. Please don't quote me). So I wonder if that's why this one's not in there.

The comic was published by Caliber, an indie-publisher from the 90s, under their "Tome Press" imprint. Caliber are known for.....actually, I don't really know what they're known for. There's a couple of minor Warren Ellis works that came out in Caliber publications. Bendis did some really dreadful Lovecraft adaptation work for them. I think. What I do know is that I have a number of comics like this one, all reprints of Victorian artwork, or writing, with contemporary art. Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark will come up some time in this project. And the first issue of a Jack London adaptation. It's a weird little corner of the comics world, but I respect the idea that words and pictures have always worked in tandem. It's nice to see the history.

But that brings up the question of what a comic is. For me, Marvel Age might not have had a large comics content, but pre-Wizard Magazine, that's how I stayed in touch with developments in that small part of the industry. Are they comics? Yes, if we consider comics a descriptor for the larger culture that has grown up around graphic narratives. Similarly, though this is illustration and prose, not necessarily comics, the fact that it is a juxtaposition of the two, arranged in a sequence by someone, published in a format and through a market that caters to comics people, makes it a comic.

These, I think, are really the sort of thing you're only going to find in a dollar bin. People don't keep mint condition, bagged versions of these comics, because no one wants them. But, in a way, that's what makes them cool.

But back to Dore. His artwork's super cool. He's thought of as one of the important artists in the development the comics medium. He's worth a look. As for the Apocrypha, I think they're something that superhero scholars need to consider, as our field is littered with apocryphal texts. Every reboot, every character revamp creates apocryphal works. I think it's worth considering what role those texts play in the canonical stories.

Enough of that. See you tomorrow.