Constructing a Collection - On Condition

One thing I've had to come to terms with in this hobby I've chosen, as with most hobbies, is that there are different reasons that people devote themselves to it. I definitely define myself as a "comic collector." It would be the height of ridiculousness for me to deny that. My collection continues to grow, and will do unless some catastrophic event forces me to stop. So I collect. But why I collect is an interesting question.

This morning, as I was sitting and having a cup of coffee before getting ready for work, my Mum (who, at the time of writing, was visiting) came downstairs, brought a cup of tea into the living room. She put the tea down next to The Avengers v.1 #270, the comic I was reading for my project, and told me I should put it away. The comic was sitting on top of its bag and board, and she was concerned about what would happen if she accidentally spilled her tea on it. There were two concerns: one, how would it damage the comic, and two, how would I react?

I told her it didn't really care - if the comic got wrecked, I'd try to find another, and if it was still readable, then no harm done.

This was a bit of a revelation for me (as well as for her, I think!).

Similarly, the most expensive comic in my collection, My Greatest Adventure v.1 #80, is valued online at about $2000. I still take it out once a year or so and read it, regardless of its value. To me, a comic is a comic, and to not read it is to deny the use for which the comic was created. But not everyone feels similarly. Indeed, there are collectors who would "slab" such a comic, have it graded and sealed inside a plastic case so as to cease any further damage and to allow the value to increase. This is what I mean when I refer to the why of my collecting. I collect to read, to create an archive of stories in a particular format. Others collect to accumulate, to invest. In both cases, however, the condition of the comic can come into play.

There is a categorization in my database called "No Cover." Unsurprisingly, this refers to comics in the collection that have come to me coverless. What I really need to do is also add a category for comics that come to me missing center pages. In general, unless a comic is absolutely unreadable, or, as is sometimes the case, unrecognizable (water damage and mold are terrible for this), it will find its way into my collection. Coverless, I still have the stories within. Centerless, I'm occasionally missing a couple of pages of story, but not the vast majority. I keep track of the condition of a comic, but that condition has little to do with whether or not a comic has a place in the collection. Indeed, not worrying so much about condition can often make acquiring very old comics much easier. Some of my oldest pieces are coverless, and I've enjoyed them nevertheless. Occasional Archie comics I've picked up at garage sales for ridiculous prices are missing center pages, but the rest of the stories are intact. For me, considerations of condition are intrinsically tied in to considerations of readability. A comic that cannot be read, or comprehended at all, due to damage is really the only thing that I won't collect. And that happens only seldom.

Thinking through condition is fundamentally tied to our reasons for collecting is the short way of saying all this. If you are collecting for the purpose of investing, or reselling, or even of looking at comics as individual pieces of art, chances are you're looking for the best examples of a particular comic that you can find. And that you can afford, of course. If, instead, you are collecting to read, then condition becomes less important. And less important you consider condition, the broader your collection is likely to be. I certainly would not have the collection I do if I worried overly much about the condition of the comics in it.

Now, in closing, let me be clear: I like to keep my comics in as undamaged condition as I can. In order to increase the longevity of a comic, one should try to keep them as safely as possible. I want to be able to read my comics for a long time to come, and if they are deteriorating that won't be possible. And in a way, I see my job as a collector when it comes to damaged comics as being someone who will preserve that comic from seeing any more deterioration. Some comics come to be damaged through use, through, really, being loved. The way that I continue to love these comics is to make sure they are still readable, still capable of being used for the purpose for which, in my opinion, they were created. The ultimate goal, of course, is for the collection to become a reading library, but that's a project for another day.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 864: Gambit #1, 1986

This comic comes from the last big dollar bin purchase I made earlier this year, and for those hoping it was going to be about the god-awful X-Men character, my apologies. We'll get to him eventually. What we have here, though, is a kind of cool science fiction story starring a character who seems to be a criminal of some sort and a young lady space pilot, who are thrown together by both of them apparently knowing the woman's parents.

I'll be honest, I think I was falling asleep while reading this comic a bit. I've just looked back through it, and there are whole sections that I only vaguely recall. That'll happen sometimes.

I'm curious as to whether or not the series ever managed to get where it wanted to go. The inside cover editorial notes that a part of the story was told in an anthology/try-out book that Oracle produced, and the GCD lists one more issue of the series. Which leads me to think that the story never did reach completion. I often wonder if any of the creators behind these books that didn't really have a huge chance in the indie glut of the 80s would ever think about going to webcomics as a way of reviving the stories they tried to tell 30 years ago. It's so much easier to distribute independent comics work now than it was back then. I suppose the trouble would be whether or not the stories are relevant to the creators anymore.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 763: Tales of the Sun Runners v.2 #2, September 1986

Yep, whatever it was that caught my attention with these characters last time I read them has sucked me right back in. It turns out it wasn't an FCBD issue I read them in, but actually the first issue of the series, published by Pacific Comics. And just as with that issue, I'm thoroughly intrigued by the story, the characters, and the universe. Remarkably epic things seem to be happening, and I'm curious to see where it all goes.

Well, where it all goes is 2 more issues through Amazing Comics, which means the likelihood of my finding them is fairly low, as is the likelihood of the story concluding in a satisfactory manner. Nature of the beast, I suppose.

I don't know what it is about elephant-based anthropomorphized characters. The lead character in these last two issues, Doc Gibraltar, comes from a line of such creatures. I think I like how the trunks, short though they are, are used as expressive tools on the faces of the characters. It's like having a prehensile nose that reacted to your state of mind (which, for us, would be really distracting, I'm thinking). Regardless, I find them fascinating. Glen Johnson's artwork is especially expressive in the facial features, and oftentimes we can forget just how much difference this makes for us identifying with the characters, regardless of how alien they are. Perhaps this is a nice shortcut for comics that feature non-human main characters. Even if they don't look like us, if we can recognize their emotions through their facial expression, we can understand that they at least feel like us. Affect theory as applied to non-human facial features. Probably a paper in there somewhere.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 762: Tales of the Sun Runners v.2 #1, July 1986

Somewhere in my collection, I have another issue of a Sun Runners title that I'm sure I got at a Free Comic Book Day some time ago. I can't, for the life of me, find it in my database, though. I do remember, however, really quite enjoying it. I enjoyed today's comic too.

It's tough to combine the genres of fantasy and science fiction in a way that doesn't simply take all of the stereotypical tropes of both and mash them together. Sun Runners does a very interesting job, similar in many ways to how The Force is treated in Star Wars, incorporating magic into a soft sci-fi setting and story. I know we're all familiar with the all-too often used idea that magic is simply technology that we don't understand, and that works in many ways, but with magic there's oftentimes an element of belief or will that's involved, something intrinsic to the caster, not to the machinery, physical or spiritual, that's being used. Magic comes from consciousness. Though I suppose it's a technology for manipulating reality through the application of directed consciousness. Or something.

Anyway, the comic was pretty cool, though I do feel like I'm well behind. It seems the the title bounced between a number of different publishers in the 80s, so while I didn't feel completely lost while reading this issue, I didn't feel completely found, so to speak, either. But I'll read the follow-up tomorrow - there was definitely enough in this issue to pull me back in for more.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 761: Archie #220, August 1972

As I've often said, we can rely on Archie to cleanse the palate, offer entertainment without too much investment (well, immediate investment, anyway), and, when I'm very tired in the mornings, it's a no-brainer call to read an Archie comic.

As usual today, Archie trips a lot, infuriates Mr. Lodge and Mr. Weatherbee, and somehow manages to entrance the prettiest girls in Riverdale, even though he's a bit of a klutz.

And, seriously, that's all I've got. I'm running on about 10 hours of sleep over the weekend, and simply cannot form complex thoughts. Which does not bode well for working today.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 760: Extreme Hero, 1994

What is it about Extreme/Maximum/Awesome that keeps pulling me back in? I mean, I guess there's the occasional good creator that is somehow convinced by Liefeld to work with him until the inevitable financial disaster. And perhaps, just perhaps, there's something about the ridiculously hyper-masculine aesthetic that I find fascinating, and slightly titillating. Though when we come to the 8 or 12-pack stomachs, I think perhaps these comics artists need a bit of an anatomy lesson.

This is a sampler that was distributed with the now-defunct Hero Illustrated, one of the numerous comic industry magazines that offered "news" to fans in the 90s. And anything new from Liefeld and co. in the 90s was news. As far as I know, none of the series in this sampler made it beyond maybe issue #3. Liefeld, as is well known in the industry, is insanely bad at business. I mean, really, who fucks over Alan Moore when he's writing one of your comics? Who does that? He, for some reason, booted Joe Casey from an excellent run on Youngblood, managed I think one issue that he decided to write and draw, and then the comic folded.

Anyway, the short stories in here are exactly what you'd expect. The art is okay, though very 90s Image. The stories are blunt. It's meant to entice us into reading the regular series, but the problem is that the regular series never appear. *sigh*

I'm hoping one day that I'll stop being so annoyed with Liefeld and 90s Image. But I don't know if it'll happen.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 752: Daemon Mask #1, 1987

I set this comic aside from my recent quarter bin purchases as I was databasing them because it stood out as being something very strange and wonderful as I flipped through it. A one-shot (YAY! I love completing series!) in the style of the old pulp adventure magazines (yet another genre I think I need to add to my database), it promised international drama, over-the-top villains (and heroes), and mysterious islands filled with strange creatures. And it delivers all of this, and a bit more, though its execution is a bit wobbly.

What I didn't bank on was the philosophical subtext of being or creating "nothingness," and what that might mean, or that this would become a tale of the apocalypse on Earth, but set in the 30s. Both of those things were nice surprises. The story itself involves the discovery by a mad artist of a "universal solvent" that literally reduces all matter to nothingness. In the first few pages, the entire city of Paris is wiped from the face of the Earth, and our hero, The Whisper, sets off to discover the source of the solvent and destroy it. But The Whisper himself is an interesting study in nothingness. When he slips on his daemon mask, his humanity slips away into nothingness, even to the point of leaving the woman he loves to be devoured by a giant spider (that cover does not play out the way you'd imagine) because he deems her less important than stopping the villain. There's no grey area here. So even as the world is threatened with nonexistence, we watch, over the course of 32 pages, a human soul, one battered and bruised even before the beginning of the story, slip away into nothingness too.

Artistically, the work is competent and occasionally excellent. The writing is a bit clunky, and not in the way that apes the mode of the pulps from which the story draws. That said, it moves along at breakneck pace, and is occasionally quite exciting. Part of me feels like this could have been adapted from a pulp adventure role-playing game. And, given the era in which it's produced, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 748: Cyborg Gerbils #1, August 1986

At first I was pretty sure this was going to be yet another throwaway TMNT spoof, but as I was entering it into my database and had a chance to have a quick look through it, I realized it was something else. And now, after reading it, I see I was right.

This isn't a perfect comic. It's a bit flawed in its visual storytelling - I wasn't always sure where the panels were leading me. Thank goodness for the tiny arrows that the creators inserted to keep things flowing relatively smoothly. Some of the dialogue also seemed like it wasn't quite sure where it was going. Responses, once or twice, just didn't seem to make any sense. That said, a tale of four angry, surgically-enhanced gerbils that have to travel back in time to stop the spread of a mutated human darkness that consumes the entire world, while also attempting to stop the mad scientist who created said darkness, makes for an interesting story. The characters are interesting, in that they're not completely good or bad. The art, cartoony as it is, belies the seriousness of the story. It's a funny animal comic, but the animals in aren't all that funny.

I hold out little hope of finding the second issue. There's a listing in the GCD, but no cover scan, which never bodes well. That said, I've come across a few comics in the last few weeks that aren't in the GCD, so perhaps Cyborg Gerbils #2 will find it's way into the collection one of these days.

To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 747: Demonslayer: Prophecy #1, September 2001

Reading a typical Avatar Press comic is a bit like reading an Image comic from the early 90s. You know, pretty much, exactly what you're going to get. I was looking at that cover, and for a while I simply assumed that the Demonslayer's costume was a very similar colour to her skin. If you look a the red "costume" parts, there seems to be no way they could possibly be covering up her nipples. But then I realized that the red bit is all there is to the costume, and that she's...I don't know. A Barbie doll? I've always thought that anatomy would be one of the first things a comics artist would know, but perhaps I'm wrong. To give Mychaels his due, the men in the comic are often naked as well, and every bit as overwrought and nipple-less.

Sorry. I just don't get it. The story is interesting, but nothing we haven't seen before. The art is provocative, or is meant to be, but I've never been a fan of Mychaels' work. Avatar publishes comics for a very specific subset of the comics-buying public. I guess I'm just not a part of that subset.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 746: New Orleans & Jazz, January 2006

When I pulled this comic out of the quarter bin, I really wasn't sure what to expect. As far as I can tell, Narwain Publishing is an Italian company, though this comic includes a number of North American creators, all donating their time and the proceeds of the comic to the American Red Cross's work helping victims of Hurricane Katrina. There's some nice art pieces, and a couple of short stories about jazz in the city. I'm not sure the tale of a young Louis Armstrong playing at a jazz recital attended by the big names of New Orleans jazz is apocryphal or not, but it makes for a nice creation myth of sorts, and for a nice part of the myth of New Orleans.

Not much else to say about the comic. It was short on narrative. The art is lovely and varied, and the cause is a good one.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 738: Pep #364, August 1980

Archies, as I've noted before, are a great standby for those days where I feel like I've run out of time. Though I'm going to try to change that on days that I'm not working (i.e., weekends). I run into a bit of a problem occasionally in that I'll pick up a comic to read one morning, and it's a 100-page giant or something, and I just don't have time to read the whole thing on a work morning. So perhaps I'll try to get to them on weekends instead.

Anyway, this was a pretty standard Archie comic. I was talking with a friend the other day about Riverdale, and we were bemoaning the fact that Archie has been made into kind of a hunk in that series, whereas one of the best things about the old comics is trying to figure out exactly what it is about Archie that makes him so irresistible to Betty, Veronica, and the myriad other ladies he attracts. While he may be a talented musician (occasionally) in the comics, he's certainly not the tortured ab-life support system he is in the television series. So today's comic gives us lots of Archie silliness, Veronica being a right bitch, instead of a Dorothy Parker accolyte, Betty as girl next door, not crazed detective. It's nice to remind myself occasionally of how the Archie gang used to be. Not that there's anything wrong with the new interpretations, but there's still definitely a place for these old versions.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 737: Bloody Bones and Blackeyed Peas #1, 1984

According to the GCD, this is the only comic that came out from Galaxy Comics. It hearkens back to the horror comics of yore, so to speak, giving us a couple of grim tales that wouldn't have been out of place in an old Warren Magazine. The art's not quite on par, the writing's a little bit trite, but somehow these things contribute to the retro feel of the comic. Given that it was published in the early 80s, I'm not 100% sure that retro is what the creators were going for, but reading it 30 years later, that's what they deliver. It's interesting that reception of a comic can shift that way dependent on when one reads it. At the time it was written, such horror classics as Twisted Tales and Alien Encounters were coming out of Eclipse Comics, though I still think these would have spoken more to the older Warren tradition than Bruce Jones' single-handed revitalization of the short horror comic story.

There's very little information about the comic or the publisher available, but I did manage to find a short(ish) playthrough of a fantasy (actually, "fantegy," a portmanteau of fantasy and strategy) game called Lordlings of Yore that is advertised on the back cover. I remember video games like this one. But I'd forgotten how slow they are.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 736: The Spiral Path #2, July 1986

I was surprised by the outcome of this comic. The two protagonists that we meet in the previous issue, Caed and Bethbara, meet a tribe of little people and are subject to a hallucinatory experience with the elder woman of the tribe. At which point Caed finds himself on the battlefield with Artuk the dead king, and ends up taking his place. Whereas Bethbara, after ascending into the sky, becomes a queen and, seemingly, is set in opposition to the new king of the dead. Very much not where I saw the two characters going, which is always a lovely treat in a story like this one. Parkhouse is pulling on some very deeply mythic language and imagery in this series, and his combinations of North American and British legend and myth is simply wonderful. He treats each with respect, and reminds us that there are undeniable similarities in the systems of belief that have stirred the great civilizations that arose in both of those places. The final page of the story teases that a sequel, The Silver Circle, "may appear at a later date," but from what I can tell that later date has not yet arrived. I can only hope.

I recommend this one, if you can find a copy of the two issues. Lovely art, cool story, and definitely a deep read. I feel like I'll be coming back to this one, one day.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 735: The Spiral Path #1, July 1986

As I noted a few weeks ago, I picked up a box of indie comics on the cheap, and found some real treasures (both of the excellent and execrable kind) contained within. Having made my way through some of that box, I found a few series that I thought were worth pursuing, so I returned to the scene of my previous purchase and made another, this time with some method to the madness. I was fortunate to come across in these quarter bins a few complete runs of old school comics (Jon Sable#1-20, Aztec Ace #1-12), and a couple of complete series. Today's comic (and tomorrow's) are examples of these.

The Spiral Path is a cool little fantasy comic, reprinted from the seminal British comics weekly Warrior, and written by Steve Parkhouse, the man responsible for many of my favourite old school Doctor Who comics. It's cool because it is meshing, somewhat seamlessly, the aesthetic of ancient Britons and ancient North Americans - it works nicely, given the correspondences between Druidic belief and Native American belief. I'm a little concerned that this might qualify as appropriation of a culture that still believes in many of its ancient ways, though the other side of that is that many ancient practices are used as settings of fiction. I suppose the difference is that not all of them have been the target of such a protracted attempt at erasure as Native American belief has. On the plus side, then, this comic is celebratory of such beliefs, casting them as a defense against the power of death.

Is it odd that I'm feeling the urge to put a positive spin on everything I see and hear these days?

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 734: Army Surplus Komikz #2, 1983

The only other Joshua Quagmire comic I've read was the first issue of Critters, which I read some time last year. The Cutey Bunny story in that issue was dark, meditating on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. Today's comic ventures into no such serious waters. Though published in the early 80s, Quagmire's comic retains the sensibilities of the older underground comix, rather than the brand of undergrounds typified by RAW that were appearing at the time. There's lots of bouncing breasts, sex jokes, and parodies of well-known and regarded public figures. The story is also comedically metatextual, in that Quagmire himself appears and is thrown out of a window before finishing the story. Perhaps this is why it makes little sense. My experience of underground comix has always been that, though. One of the wonderful things about this genre is that it is dedicated to pointing out to us that virtually nothing that we experience in life makes any sense - we make sense of it, but it doesn't make sense in and of itself. Maybe this is one of the skills, that of narrativizing, that reading imparts to us.

Maybe some more Cutey Bunny tomorrow. Or maybe not. You never can tell.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 733: Nemi, 2007

Today's comic is one of those rare ones that doesn't have a GCD entry. It's a preview volume for a series of graphic novels to be published by Titan Books, collecting in English a popular Norwegian newspaper strip. Nemi is a cute goth girl who deals with life's odd little dilemmas. The nice thing about the strip is that goth is Nemi's look, and perhaps lifestyle, but that doesn't mean it inflects everything in her life. She has friends who are not goth, and likes guys who aren't necessarily a part of the subculture. In this way, it's a nice way of seeing the similarities between people of different subcultures and, by proxy, cultures.

The art is lovely and evocative, with the characters occasionally transcending into outright cartoonishness - though only when the situation deems it appropriate. And, as it's a European comic, it's not afraid to stray into topics that might be considered taboo in North American newspaper comics, such as not remembering who it is you've woken up next to in the morning. Honestly, Nemi is the sort of person I'd want as a friend, though is definitely the kind of person whose friends might be required to pick up the pieces of her life on a semi-regular basis.

Recommended, if you can track it down.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 731: Giggle Comics #38, February 1947

And so it begins!

(I taught my class about hyperbole the other day. But in the case of kicking off the third year of my project, it seems mildly appropriate.)

A less than auspicious start to Year 3 of the 40 Years of Comics Project. While Giggle Comics#38 is by far the oldest comic in the collection, it is also, bar none, the most racist comic I have ever read. The sole human protagonist of the first story, "Superkatt," is a prime example of the "Mammy" stereotype of African-American women that pervaded popular culture at the time. It is a very difficult visual depiction to look at page after page. One positive that we might draw from this depiction, though, is the laying down of dialogue in dialect. With the recognition of African American Vernacular English as a dialect of the English language common in the United States, the "Superkatt" story can actually serve as a comics-related record of the way that dialect was considered in the mid-Twentieth century.

I'm looking for the silver linings here. Can you tell?

There are some intervening stories that are harmless. A ghost and his house owner set up an spiritual entertainment show, with ghosts performing tricks rather than scaring people. A wolf and a rabbit solve silly crimes. It's all very funny animal/friendly ghost kind of shenanigans, almost enough to make you forget the difficulty of the first story.

Until, of course, we get to the last one. If the depiction of African-American people in the first story is mildly recuperable from a linguistic stance, the final story, "Northern Nonsense," has no such saving grace. The tale of an Inuit father teaching his son to paddle a canoe, this is simply a blatantly stereotyped comedy, laughing at the practices and appearances of Northern Native Canadians. Really, just awful.

But I suppose this is something that we, as comics scholars and fans, have to accept about our beloved medium: It's a product of popular culture, and sometimes (or rather, many times), popular culture is a less-than-savoury reflection of the society at large. The best we can do with such works as Giggle Comics is look to see how far we've come, and recognize how far we have to go.

Welcome, then, to Year 3. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 730: Bold Adventure #1, November 1983

And so Year 2 comes to a close! It's been an interesting year. I've read some really great comics, and a few really, really terrible ones. Re-reading Morrison's Batman was a lovely treat, and I really can't wait to see what I get up to over the next 365 days.

Today's comic is a bit of nostalgia for me, even though it was one of the comics that was part of my quarter bin buy a few weeks ago. I first came across Bold Adventure #1 (though I mistook the title for "Time Force") back in the earliest days of my collecting. When I first got into comics, my parents went out and bought me a comic collecting kit. It included a box, which was somewhere between standard short and long box size, a price guide, and a package of 20 or so comics. I can't for the life of me remember what most of them were, though it seems to me they were generally from indie publishers from the 80s. I do, however, remember this comic, and if I'm to be honest, it was probably because my pre-pubescent brain was fascinated by the very prominent breasts on the cover. I wish I could say I've changed...

The stories inside are pretty neat, all penned by Bill DuBay. There's a bit of science fiction, a bit of adventure, and what is potentially a horror tale in the final short piece entitled "The Weirdling." I was a little confused by the "Time Force" story, as it ends quite suddenly with the death of the main character and the triumph of the bad guy, and with no "to be continued." At first I thought it was quite a gutsy move, to give so much set up and then have all the hope one invests come to naught. But it turns out the story does continue in the next issue, so perhaps all hope is not lost. Perhaps.

Tomorrow begins Year 3. I'll be reading the oldest comic in my collection as a way of kicking off the year, and then I've got a bit of a theme planned for the first couple of weeks. I hope you've enjoyed Year 2, or some of it anyway. I know I have.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 729: The Puma Blues #22, 1989

This is a very cool comic. There's a definite impetus of resistance going on in it, very much focussed on the environment, and given that it's a 27 year old comic, some of the ideas and subjects brought up in it are really very contemporary. The back matter includes political cartoons about the denial of climate change, zine ads about resistant action, and a call from Amnesty International to abolish a death penalty that is used primarily against the most vulnerable members of society. It is an unabashedly, vocally resistant comic.

And as if that wasn't awesome enough, it features stunning (and I mean absolutely stunning) artwork by Michael Zulli. His nature scenes are on par with Masashi Tanaka's amazing work on Gon, though skewing more to the ruggedness of the American landscape, rather than Tanaka's often lush jungle and forest settings. Let's be honest: anything Michael Zulli does is going to be pretty breathtaking, but I think this might be one of my favourite things I've seen by him.

And still there's more: The Puma Blues, this issue at least, falls into a very small category of comics I've read, one that includes such strange works as Martin Vaugh-James' The Cage and Rick Veitch's Can't Get No, comics that move fairly explicitly into the realm of the poetic rather than the prosaic. There's a link between words and images, but it often veers off into the metaphoric rather than the literal, forcing a much closer and slower reading experience. Such works can be frustrating (I have, indeed, heard much hatred for The Cage), but ultimately, if one gives them the time to work both independently and concurrently on the verbal and visual, one is gifted with a rather fantastic experience of metaphoric language through the lens of comics.

I was going to add The Puma Blues to my list of comics to track down until I found out that the series was never completed as periodicals. However, Dover Publishing, that champion of cheap editions of great works of literature, has a graphic novel of the series that includes a new 40-page chapter that finishes the series. I think that'll have to go on my list of stuff to get.

Tomorrow is the end of Year 2. Time flies when you're....well, this year hasn't actually been very fun, but at least I've gotten to read a comic every single day.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 728: The Little Monsters #33, April 1976

A couple of years ago I taught Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to one of my classes. In one of the lectures, I gave them examples of how Shelley's Monster has become a staple of our popular culture. It's a pity I didn't have this comic at the time.

That said, there's some weird problems with this comic. First is the really horrendous forced puns. "You're so terror-bly thoughtful." "Bad-bye." I mean, I get it, and very likely the demographic this comic is aimed at would love it, but I'm certainly not that demographic.

The second thing is a little more serious. It seems like the entire monster family lives in perpetual fear of their grumpy father. And not just grumpy. When he's angry, he kicks the kids around and yells, and they all dive for cover to avoid his tantrums. Again, I kind of see where this comes from, in that he's a proxy for Frankenstein's Monster, but there's something downright chilling about the reactions of his family toward his anger, and his reactions toward them. It's behaviour I can't see being accepted as comedy in a contemporary comic. Which, I suppose, is one of the most interesting things about this project I'm pursuing. As popular culture artefacts, comics tend to reflect quite explicitly what was going on in the culture at the time of their creation. You simply have to look at the push toward representation in today's comics to see that clearly. So each time I come across something culturally bizarre in a comic, I'm reminded of how quickly, and sometimes how slowly, culture changes. I can only imagine, 20 or 30 years from now, what the comics of today will look like.

To be continued.