The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2000: Wall of Flesh #1, 1992

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Given that this comic is from the same company that have published Femforce for the last few decades, you might be forgive for thinking that this comic, especially based on its cover, might be a weird, slightly-horrific but more titillating comic than it actually is. There's one cheesecake-y moment, with a member of Femforce in a pin-up on the Wall of Flesh, but aside from that it's reprints of old horror comics, and was meant to be the first issue of many.

 

As with a large number of the old 50s horror comics, each of these stories is really, really good. Though the comic suffers from a lack of colour, the draftsmanship apparent in each tale reinforces just how talented these early comics artists were, and just what they could do without the restrictions of the Comics Code. Indeed, it's a testament to how good they were that they could produce some stellar material even under those restrictions, but such tales often pale compared to what was possible before that draconian set of rules was enforced.

 

All that said, this is my 2000th comic! That feels like a lot. I wondered, at the beginning of the project, at what point would I feel like I'd done a significant chunk of the collection, and this is it. 2000 comics. It's a number I can still sort of visualize. I'd considered at one point taking each of the comics I'd read for the project and separating them, so I would have the read and the unread collections. Though I ultimately decided that this would be a ridiculous way to organize my collection, it would have been interesting seeing the shift, slowly but surely, over the years.

 

But what a nightmare it would have been for accessing anything.

 

So it seems somewhat fitting to me that a comic celebrating the brilliant history of comics is my 2000th read. I cannot wait to see what the next 2000 bring.

 

More to follow.

 

Further Reading and Related Posts

 

A couple of other "anniversaries:"

My post on day 100 - I thought I'd read a lot at that point.

And my post on completing the first year - we're in Year 6 right now, for anyone keeping track.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 753: Justice League of America #200

A lazy Sunday morning in bed reading an oversized Justice League comic and having a bowl of cereal. While outside, it looks like it might actually be Spring (I fool myself, but sometimes we have to).

Today's comic follows in that long tradition of comics about superheroes fighting superheroes. I'm not sure where this particular subgenre comes from. Sometimes I think that it has a lot to do with why diverse religions have battled one another over the course of human history. We place our faith in something and can't possibly understand how someone else could place something so important and vital in something different. Everyone has a favourite superhero, one that we place our faith in, so it's natural (?) to want to know who'd come out on top. My god is stronger than your god, I suppose.

On the other hand, it might just come from the idea that we want to see the cool characters duking it out with one another. Yeah, when they fight a villain, it's cool. But villains, by their nature in these kinds of comics, will always lose. If it's heroes fighting one another, who's the villain? Who's going to lose? Such contests offer a bit more suspense.

That aside, this was a fairly standard early 80s DC comic. The artists jam on the issue was pretty sweet, bringing together some of the truly great DC artists of the last few decades. It was also a nice hearkening back to the original JLA case from The Brave and the Bold, though how it would fit in with Mark Waid's retcon in JLA:Year One, I'm not sure. Though I'm fairly certain that's not canon anymore anyway. Well, given DC's propensity for multiverses, it's canon somewhere, I'm sure.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 622: Tor #5, February 1976

In an effort to channel my inner Monty Python (of the "And now for something completely different" mode), let's have a look at Tor.

My knowledge of Joe Kubert is mainly by reputation - he's held up as this paragon of old-school cartooning and comics art, he ran (runs?) a school to train people in the techniques he's mastered over the years, and has sired two of the more popular Marvel artists of the 90s. So to take a moment to actually read some of his works seems to be, sadly, far too long in coming.

I enjoyed this comic, but I didn't love it. I'm not a huge fan of the prehistoric adventure genre, though I do have a soft spot for Kirby's Devil Dinosaur. What I was surprised by was actually Kubert's art. I had a picture in my mind of what it looked like, and the cover to this issue did not dissuade me of my supposition. But the interior art is a bit different. It still evokes the hyper-masculine fantasy of the cover, but there's moments of real cartooniness as well, mostly in facial expressions, which adds a really cool blend of an almost newspaper strip feeling to this comic. Story-wise, I come in part way, as is the case with much of my reading, but I wasn't too lost. There was a very brief and effective recap, and then we move on to the adventure of the exiled Tor confronting a giant man who has a whole valley full of people cowering under his rule. The action is good, the drama is good.

It's cool to consider these masters of the form, and to be surprised by them. I had a similar feeling on reading Ditko's Shade, the Changing Man for the first time, or Kirby's New Gods, that moment of realizing that I'd had a notion of what these artists' works were like based solely on reputation, not experience. I'm looking forward to many more of these kinds of experiences over the next few years.

Onward.