The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1658: Girl Fight Comics #2, 1974

It's Trina Robbins. That's just about all you need to know about this comic. Her art is, as always, just stunningly beautiful, the stories biting and witty.

I've been reading a lot of undergrounds over the last couple of days, which is not always a good thing. They can be very heavy, either from social commentary or from the density of the art. Ms. Robbins' art is not dense, but the issues she deals with in this comic are. The worst part is that they're issues that we're still talking about, 45 years later. That said, I'd totally read more stories featuring any of the characters introduced in this issue. I'll have to do a bit of research to see if they make any more appearances.

I think that tomorrow I may dip my toes into some of the comics that bridge the undergrounds and the indies of the 80s, stuff like Star*Reach or Arik Khan. Been a while since I read some good, solid Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

"Lissen, buster, the name is Katherine Black, but my friends call me Kat!"

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Paper Dolls, by Trina Robbins

You know the drill!

Apply nuns to cardboard, then carefully cut out habits.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1284: Vortex #8, April 1984

1 - Trina Robbins' "Queenie Hart" is so. Good. Will have to start reading more Trina Robbins.

2 - Steve Leialoha's "Corrective Surgery" was really weird, and beautiful, and off-putting, and great.

I'm going, it seems, to have to track down the rest of the series. These last few days of comics have been some really wonderful science fiction, and that's not one of my favourite genres to read. But these stories are, importantly, very varied. I never feel like I'm reading an entire anthology book of the same story over and over again. Some are funny, some are serious, and some are just weird. It's easy to see how something like Vortex grows out of the undergrounds, and publications like Andromeda. In some ways it's like the undergrounds "genre-fied" in the late 70s. Something like this title, or Andromeda, are the science fiction bastions, the sex of the undergrounds is focussed in the adult comic industry, publishers like Fantagraphics give a home to the more literary parts of the underground.

Having these kinds of specific venues for specific genres is great, but there's also something to be said for genres feeding off one another, and that's something that is lost in this diversification. Or, at the very least, it's something that becomes more muted.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 148: Eclipse Monthly #1, August 1983 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 12)

Anthology titles are always an iffy prospect, and that's why you find a large number of them in dollar bins. This title, for example, has five different stories in it. While the caliber of talent lined up for these stories is pretty impressive, you're always going to have one story you enjoy more than the others, and then the others pale in comparison. So then you don't really look forward to the other stories, and end up paying a lot of money for 5 pages in an anthology title.

Or, at least, that's how I find it is with me.

Of all of the stories in here, I think I enjoyed Doug Wildey's "Rio" the most. So far it's reading a bit like a Cormac McCarthy novel, and while I'm not a huge fan of McCarthy, the particular atmosphere and period he evokes in Blood Meridian is really pretty fascinating. So to see it transferred to the comics page is a treat. I was kind of excited to see another oddball Steve Ditko piece in here, but "Static" failed to electrify me (see what I did there?). But I did get the first four issues of the title, so perhaps they'll get better as we go on. While I do like Trina Robbins' art, her contribution to this anthology is a continuation of her work in Eclipse Magazine, so the story's a bit lost on me, it being part 8 of 10. Which leave Marshall Rogers' "Cap'n Quick and a Foozle" and B.C. Boyer's "The Masked Man," both of which were entertaining, but not terribly gripping.

So the western wins out. Interesting. As I say, I've got at least three more issues of this series to go through. I'm curious as to why anthology titles very rarely succeed. I've suggested a reason above, but I don't think that's all there is to it. Perhaps it's because it's so hard to convey any drama and development when you've only a small amount of pages in which to tell (part of) a story. I'll think more on this, and talk about it a bit more next time we have an anthology come up.

See you tomorrow.