The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2410: Two-Fisted Tales #7, April 1994

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Publisher: Russ Cochran

Writer: Harvey Kurtzman & Ed Rock

Artists: Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Johnny Craig, John Severin

We're coming up to the end of Year 7, and, as I noted in the last post, this year has been difficult. Hell, the last couple of years have been difficult, but that's the same story that everyone has right now, so at least I'm not alone. But I've quit my delivery job, I'm having a go at writing full time, and I love it, and I want to get the project up and running again.

I don't read, or generally consume, media that has to do with war or crime. They're two human activities that I am pretty much against hallowing through art. Unless, that is, the art is decrying the darker natures that lead us to these pursuits. While I acknowledge that they're fertile places for stories to be told, the sometimes celebratory atmosphere of such tales makes me uncomfortable. But when Mike at the Purple Gorilla suggests something to me, I'd be a fool not to listen. And, of course, the tales in this comic don't celebrate war - they decry it and point to the horrible inequities and violence that grow from it.

That said, as much as the stories and art were fucking brilliant, it didn't resonate with me as much as the horror and sci-fi titles coming out of the company at the same time. I have a much easier time finding my metaphors in things that I can fully divorce from reality. In stories that take place in less-stylized settings, I sometimes have a hard time finding the piece of the tale that resonates with me. Perhaps that's something to keep in mind as I move on.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1355: Moon Girl #3, Spring 1948 (Flashback Replica #9)

Yeah, I got hooked. But at the price these comics command, I'm going to have to stretch things out.

We get a nice mix of tales today, and even a visit back to Moon Girl's home country, Sarkomand. It isn't, as I'd first thought, a female-only society, a la Themyscira, but is a matriarchal society. Moon Girl, or Princess Luna's mother, the Queen, is caught up in a coup, and the Prince and Princess return home to lend a hand.

Satana shows up again, firing missiles at various targets all over the US for reasons. The final story is a classic twist story: we see a splash page of Moon Girl as criminal (shocking!), and follow the exploits of a villainous double until the real hero shows up and all is explained. I think that one thing that gets overlooked here is that, without prosthetics or make-up, there was literally someone who looked exactly like Moon Girl, just with blonde hair. How weird would that be? Then again, this is a superhero world. Stuff like that just happens.

From what I can tell, Canton Street Press published seven issues of Moon Girl. These two are all my local comic store had, so it looks like cons or the Internet next. But not until I've saved up my pennies.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1354: Vault of Horror #2, October 1990

(I'm a bit behind. I read the comics, but I'm just getting them blogged now.)

Now that I have a bit of perspective, I can see where the kinds of stories Bruce Jones told in yesterday's comic come from. While I stand by my assertion that Mr. Jones is a master of the short story form, I also see now that he is upholding a venerable, and important, tradition in comics. Something I think is interesting about this is that his stories, like those in today's comic, do not suffer under the auspices of the Comics Code. And are therefore better.

I know that sounds like a sweeping statement, and some of the greatest comics I've read were produced under that governing body. But I also know that a number of the comics I've read in my life were significantly changed from the way that their creators originally envisioned them. In a well-told story, the parts aren't simply interchangeable. You can't swap out one climax for another. The parts work together as a gestalt. The trouble of censorship is that it ignores the holistic nature of storytelling and encourages a pattern instead. It may be a wide pattern, but it's a pattern nonetheless, which by its very nature occludes that which is not part of the pattern.

Anyway, the reason that these horror comics are so good is that they are allowed to think beyond the pattern. In fact, they were creating the medium from which, in this case, the pattern was born. I think I've already said that I recently read The League of Regrettable Superheroes, and one thing that Mr. Morris mentions in the introduction is that this early period of comics was one of unprecedented experimentation. Though they weren't always good, the ideas were very often strange and novel. The Comics Code discourages this kind of experimentation and encourages instead that writers pull from a large, but still limited, subset of medium's capability. It's publications like Jones' Twisted Tales, from an indie publisher, that keeps this experimental attitude alive until the mainstream catches up in the late 90s to early 2000s.

I've been struck over the last decade or so by the amazing variety of really, really good comics that are out there. It's impossible to read them all, and across the board, all genres, all (most?) publishers, are telling some fantastic stories. I think in part the dissolution of the Comics Code in recent times has allowed writers to tell stories they want to tell in much greater range, and in mainstream vehicles. Rather than the subset, they have access to the Source. I mean, if the Code were still around, there's no way we'd have the Bat Penis.

And that is all you will ever see me say about that most stupid of recent comics phenomena.


More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1352: Moon Girl #4 (Flashback Replica #11), 1948

As I was discovering the wonders that are pre-Code horror and science fiction titles, two things happened in succession. First, I finally read Jon Morris's amazing The League of Regrettable Superheroes, a wonderful look at some of the strange heroes of the early days of comics. Moon Girl is one of them. Second, as I was picking up a reprint collection, I noted that they had replica editions of some comics at my local comic shop. Moon Girl was one of them.

As EC's only costumed hero, I was intrigued, and the reprints from Canton Street Press are super-cool. And I've been talking about adding depth to the collection. The replica is slightly different than the reprint in that the comic in its entirety is reprinted. We don't often get this in reprint volumes. Indeed, the ads from 1948 are chilling - one invites you to purchase, through the mail, a proper .22 caliber rifle for $11.95. I know that was a lot then, but it's the mail order aspect I find bizarre.

Moon Girl's adventures are cool, and I think I might pick up a couple more of the replicas, though they are a bit more expensive than your average comic. What these editions do bring nicely to the books is the materials from which they're made, far superior to the original editions. There was definitely something a little magical in reading a comic that, aside from its newness, was exactly the same as the original, read by some forgotten fan 70 years ago. Literature forges connection.

(Edit: I totally forgot to mention that the last story is an incredible one about crooks trying to stir up racial unrest in order to buy up property and make a lot of money. Remember, 1948 - things haven't changed much in the last 70 years.)

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Bi-Weekly Graphic Novel Number 78 - Weird Fantasy Annual #1, 1994

Oh my goodness! What have I been thinking all these years avoiding reading these incredible comics?

All I can think is that I somehow needed to be in this particular place in my life in order to appreciate them fully (not sure what that means, but let's run with it).

These are gorgeous, amazing, thrilling stories. They raise genuine goose flesh occasionally, they entertain, every story, to a fault. The draughtsmanship from Feldstein, Kamen, Kurtzman, and Wood (primarily) is simply wonderful, in all it's catastrophic detail (that cover up there isn't the only story in the book in which the Earth gets destroyed. But it is the best one!)

I have had a few reprint comics in my collection for a while now, though some are mysteriously missing at the moment, but I've not really given them much thought. As I noted in my last look at a graphic novel, the Harvey Horrors book, I've quite taken to these pre-Code stories. The writers are telling really, really interesting tales. Though they may seem like run-of-the-mill twist-ending tales (and let's not forget that these were the comics that popularised that narrative structure), the endings are always either really well renedered, so as to be truly shocking, or are completely not what you expected, which I find is rare in a comic.

(And I'm having deja vu right now about having typed that sentence before.)

I've picked up a couple more of these reprint collections, so I'll make my way through them for a bit. But I definitely think that one of the expensive comics I'm going to have to put on the "One Day" list is an old, pre-Code EC horror comic. That would be a very cool thing to own.

Onward...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 85: Supreme #44, January, 1997

The second-last issue of Supreme for this week wraps up what's ostensibly the Golden Age history of the hero. Though re-telling the Superman story, Supreme's tale begins somewhat earlier than Kal-El's, with,  variously, a magic belt buckle, a strange meteor, or an exploding planet, in the early 1920s. It's an interesting change to make, and one I'm not sure what to make of. Was it simply to place Supreme's origin before that of Superman, or is Moore offering his tribute not just to the Man of Steel, but to the proto-superheroes who appeared in the pulps and early comics before him? Given that Moore moves on from Supreme to the ABC line, where League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Tom Strong draw directly from those earlier mass-market publications, the placing of Supreme in that lineage isn't too far a leap to take. We don't actually see anything that looks like a pre-30s comic in the flashbacks, though, which makes the placement of the character there, by the logic of the comic itself, problematic.

This issue hits the 1950s and everything comes to a stop. I'll admit to only being a little familiar with the early EC comics, and what I've read has never impressed me very much. Perhaps I'm just not reading the right ones, but I found them boring and kind of predictable. Which is strange because I quite like their ancestors in Bruce Jones' Alien Worlds that came out from Pacific and Eclipse in the early 80s. I think perhaps it's the hyperbolic writing about issues that are, quite frankly, very dated that turns me off. But, if I'm not careful, I'll have to stop reading all comics, because datedness is becoming a rapidly contemporary problem. Can imaginative works keep up with reality? Tune in next week to find out!

The Allied Supermen of American confront strange, Crypt-Keeper-esque creatures from the future who transport them into weird analogues of the early Mad, Tales from the Crypt, and Shock Suspenstories. What's kind of interesting about this particular flashback is the steps toward and away from reality it takes. The initial flashback, to the Allies 1950 New Year's party, fills in some of Supreme's back story, and is thus "real" in the sense that it's an event that happened in the ostensible real world that the character inhabits. But the three adventures that various members get taken on over the course of the flashback aren't real. The Morgue Minder tells the group of Allies that he accompanies into a post-nuclear apocalyptic landscape that it's not real, but it is what America will be afraid of in the 1950s. So where exactly is it that the Morgue Minder takes the heroes? Into the fears of the populace? Or into the comics that will entertain that populace? It's almost as if the superheroes, as stories, are being shown the stories that will replace them, though the irony is that it's happening in a flashback from a superhero story from a time in which EC-style horror comics have all but vanished.

And with that, I think it's time to get back to work for me. We'll finish the first chunk of Supreme tomorrow with a quick initial foray into the Silver Age flashbacks. See you tomorrow.