The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2093: Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan #70, July 1955

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 583: The Outer Limits #17, October 1968

There's a strange disconnect in this comic. As we're all aware, comics can be a remarkable example of creative collaboration. Claremont and Byrne. Ellis and Cassaday. Morrison and Quitely. The proper team can create magic. Unfortunately, the opposite can often be true, too. Since this is a particularly old comic, there's no listing for the writer, and I only know Jack Sparling is the artist from the GCD, but it really seems that these two creators were just not communicating properly. The script says one thing, the pictures another. A "strange, gleaming metallic building" is depicted as what honestly looks like a child's version of the sun coming up over the hills. A sound weapon that "quivers like a tuning fork, vibrating faster and faster till the sound shreds [the gun] to pieces and pulverizes it into harmless dust" becomes a heat ray, and the guns melt, rather than disintegrate. Of course, it's hard to say what came first, the script or the art, but it really does seem that one of the creators involved just didn't like what the other did, and changed it.

This makes for a very off-putting reading experience. On the one hand, we can consider it from the above point of view, that there was a disconnect between the creators involved. If we want to be slightly more optimistic about it, this could be a perfect example of unreliable narration, both linguistic and pictorial, in comics. Something happened, but neither version of events lines up with the other, and so we can't really tell what happened. Similarly, the aliens in the story are only ever referred to as "the monsters" by the verbal narration - their depiction is simply one person's attempt at parsing that term.

Old science fiction is always interesting - so much less space opera, so much more hard sci fi. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 562: Roy Rogers' Trigger #10, September-November 1953 (Western Week, Day 5)

(Written on the 11th)
This afternoon, a friend came over and was browsing through this comic. Prior, he'd been looking through the issue of Rawhide Kid that'll be on the docket a couple of days from now. We both agreed that today's comic, about an action horse, contained some real dramatic moments, some actually interestingly constructed narratives, and did Westerns in a way that many traditional ones don't (in that, it was set in the West, and deployed the tropes, but wasn't about hyper masculine men wandering around deserts and shooting at people).

I often think that this is what the great writers of Westerns are going for - not the stereotype, but the behaviours and settings that are associated with the stereotype, but without the stereotype being present.

What I mean to say, then, is that of all the more traditional, old-school Western comics I've read this week, this one has been the best. Also the oldest, and definitely one of the oldest comics in the collection. I have a few from the very late 40s, but, like my copy of this comic, they're in very bad condition. The middle pages are missing from my copy, but I'm assuming that everything turns out okay. Except perhaps for the mountain lion in the first story. I get the feeling he doesn't make out okay.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 414: Marge's Little Lulu #118, April 1958 ("Hey Kids! Comics!" Week, Day 2)

Before getting to today's comic, the subtitle of this week's theme needs a bit of explanation. Back when comics were more commonly available in convenience stores, they were housed on the dreaded spinner rack - this was a convenient way of displaying the comics, but didn't do much for keeping them in the pristine condition we collectors like to see (that's sarcasm, btw). Some places still use the spinner rack, but more commonly now comics are displayed like their magazine cousins. But the top of many spinner racks looked a little like this:

Hence, our subtitle.

There are so many things that are fascinating about this comic. I've had this run of kid's comics sitting, waiting to be read, for a few months now. I'm not sure when I got this Lulu comic, but it's not in my database for some reason. I must have procured it, set it aside for a week of children's comics, and then never entered it into the collection. I'll remedy that today, though I cannot for the life of me think of where I got it.

This is one of the oldest pieces in the collection, almost 60 years young, and it really shows. The ads inside are incredible, and I learned from the back cover that the company 3M, you know, the one that makes Scotch tape and stuff, is actually called the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company. One day I'll compile ads from old comics into a post, and at least a couple from this comic will be included.

As I've noted a few times over the last months, I've been teaching a course on dream literature, and I wish I'd come across this comic right at the beginning of term, rather than here at the end. The opening story in this issue would have been a perfect text for the class. Lulu falls asleep (but has that Alice-esque moment of dream and reality bleeding into one another) and then starts growing and shrinking while her dolls and stuffed animals complain about not having enough room in the bed. It's obviously trading on the Alice stories, as well as McKay's Little Nemo comics. But not only does this happen to Lulu in the first story, but to Tubby in the final story, and he even goes down a rabbit hole and discovers the secret Easter Bunny egg-making factory. Both stories exhibit that same kind of uncanniness that books like Alice, or Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, do, while also paying tribute to McKay's remarkable strip. Of course, being who I am, I can't help but see parallels to Little Ego as well, but perhaps a discussion of children's comics is not the place to bring up that particular bit of erotica.

What these interesting stories do is mask, to a certain extent, the buried mores evident in the comic. It's from 1958, remember. The cast is completely white-washed - I suppose it's better than having the usual stereotypes one finds in comics from this period (have a look at the Barks duck comics some time), but apart from one outburst from Lulu's friend Annie ("We'd fix the food, Tub!" says Lulu. To which Annie adds "That's what girls are for, silly!"), Lulu presents a remarkably independent and assertive female presence. I'm curious about the comic now, both for its stories and for its potentially forward-thinking position on gender politics. Though I'm not sure how much more Lulu I have in the collection.

Onward! Tomorrow some more contemporary children's fare.