The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 978: Jack Kirby's Secret City Saga #0, April 1993

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I'd like to make an admission.

(And as I write this, I feel like I've already made this admission before.)

Sometimes, I just don't get the hoopla surrounding Jack Kirby.

I think that we have literally seen developed every idea the man had over the course of his life. Very often they involve cities made out of trees. And underground complexes. In fact, were we to put the vast majority of Kirby's ideas onto the same planet, we would be living on a giant ball of Swiss cheese.

When I feel like this, I have to remind myself of my experience reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. As I made my way through that...dense...tome, I kept shaking my head and wondering why this was so important. She would come to a conclusion of some sort, and I'd sort of nod my head and say "Yep, how is this news?" Until I realized that, before her, no one was saying these things. In some ways, Kirby is the same. Before him, there was no Marvel Universe. And, yes, his art is amazing and dynamic and all of the other superlatives one likes to use. But does this mean we need to keep mining little notes and ideas and sketches and attaching his name to them to make more comics?

All this said, I found today's comic to be quite enjoyable. There's an old saw that is often repeated by comics people that Kirby was amazing, yes, but he needed an editor more than most. What we see in today's comic is just that. Roy Thomas, editor (amongst other things) extraordinaire guides the interconnected Secret City Saga, and it reads so much more naturally than, say, Captain Victory. In fact, I'm intrigued enough to see about tracking it down (through dollar bins, of course). A secret civilization, the "Ninth Men, in an age fifteen millennia before our own," whose time is over. A few individuals stash themselves away in life support pods, and hope for the best.

I can only assume a few of them come out in the next issue.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 361: Welcome Back, Kotter #3, March 1977

I was three years old when this comic was released.

Welcome Back, Kotter, the TV series, is one of those shows that lurks vaguely in the back of my mind. I sort of remember Gabe Kaplan as Kotter, and young John Travolta as Vinnie Barbarino, and the rest of the Sweat Hog stereotypes. I don't remember any specifics, though. Just a general sense of the show. So what I can't tell you is whether or not this comic is even remotely reminiscent of the aesthetic of the show. If it is, then the show was a lot more slapstick than I recall. There's really a lot of dumb humour in this comic, and ridiculous, even by sitcom standards, plot devices. It's an interesting perspective to be taking on an adapted work - reading it without really having a good knowledge of the source material. It's a smaller-scale version of what Frye says about knowledge of the Bible and studying literature - without that knowledge, we're missing a vast amount of the experience.

That said, this comic was amusing, in sort of a mediocre Archie comic kind of way. The art is good, the dialogue is good, and very Seventies-specific. Not my favourite comic ever, but certainly not the worst.

More tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 141: Black Lightning #9, May 1978 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 5)

This comic, or my version of it, at least epitomizes something I was talking about in my post about the dollar bin. There's a scan of the cover of my actual copy there that will show you how worn this comic is. The top staple has come loose from the cover, the pages are faded, there's a hunk of the lower right corner missing. But all the pages are still there, thumbed and touched into a pleasant roundness. This comic has been read. Considering the publication date, it's been read for about 37 years. Or has been circulating, anyway. How did it come to be in the particular shape that it's in? Was it one of the comics that was just always at someone's cottage through their adolescence, a memory of vacations with family? Was it handed down, from brother to brother, father to daughter, over the course of almost 40 years until it found its way into my collection? I like to think it's found the place it was always meant to be.

I liked this story, but then I've always liked Black Lightning. I've mentioned once or twice on this blog an old DC Blue Ribbon Digest I had as a child. I blame my love for all things Animal Man on this lovely little "Secret Origins" special. Black Lightning was also one of the characters featured in that book. I only, really, have a tangential knowledge of him, but I enjoyed the characterization in this issue. The writing is just the right balance of gritty urban and cheesy seventies, and the Von Eeden/Colletta is so emblematic of the era that you can't help but love it. BL's relationship with the police in this comic is great, exactly how a superhero/police relationship ought to be - reciprocal.

Also, BL's pimp side-kick, Two-Bits, is hilarious for all the wrong reasons.