The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1338: Critters #8, January 1987

Forgive me, I'm tired. I'll talk a bit about this and it may sound like rambling. Something about anthropomorphic animals actually makes the stories more realistic?

Here's the thing: very often anthropomorphs are involved in fantastic situations. Even someone like HTD, who just wants to live his life, is enmeshed in the fabric of strangeness and fantasy in the universe. These fantastic situations, were we to see them depicted with relatively realistic looking humans, would be quite ridiculous. Hence superhero comics (obviously said with love). So if a situation is ridiculous to begin with, the insertion of a focal character with whom we can partially identify, but not wholly identify, allows us to suspend our disbelief of the situation more so than would the same situation with human beings.

Yep. Rambling. Good night.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1285: Vortex #9, May 1984

Ty Templeton's "Killing Dragons" has an excellent denouement, which I won't spoil here just in case anyone ever wants to go out and track this issue down. It's a thoroughly satisfying ending to a story.

The other standout for today is Dan Day and Jim Waley's "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust," a grim tale that very nicely encapsulates what it was like to live in the last years of the Cold War. I try to explain to people younger than me that the rhetoric of the day was that we'd all likely die within the decade from a nuclear war. As the 80s grew old, the possibility of it loomed less direly, but it was still there. That was a dark decade, which is perhaps why it's having a bit of a renaissance these days.

No more Vortex, unfortunately, but a couple of other comics from the publisher. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1283: Vortex #5, September 1983

How about we read some independent Canadian science fiction from the early 80s?

Okay.

Vortex is a cool series. Beside the fact that so many big names cut their teeth here (Ty Templeton and Ken Steacy in this issue alone), the stories are thoughtful and entertaining, well-written and well-illustrated. The addition of ads for the comic shops I used to frequent as a young one is a lovely pinch of nostalgia added to a satisfying read.

In today's issue, the standout story for me was "T-Wreks" by Ken Steacy. The cover up there does a nice job of emblematizing the tale, and the story itself spoke to a younger version of me that had very similar fantasies as the narrator of this story. I still see construction vehicles as stand-ins for dinosaurs. And when I finally learned to drive one, it was just like what driving a dinosaur would be like. Well, it was to me.

I'm going to stick with this series, and with some of the others published by the similarly-titled publisher. I anticipate enjoying them a great deal.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 795: True North II, 1991

The first of the inevitable slew of comics I've picked up at the con this weekend. This issue features 53 different creators (so I will not be tagging them all) doing 2-4 page stories about censorship. It's perhaps a little-known fact that the Canadian border is (or was) quite restrictive on what kinds of comics could be shipped to comic stores in Canada. This comic comes about as a direct result of the Toronto police actually raiding stores in the city, and, I think, Aircel Publishing's warehouse, on charges of distributing pornography to minors and obscenity. Back when I had my comic store, Diamond Comics simply refused to ship anything even remotely "mature" across the border because there was no way they could guarantee that the comics would ever reach the stores they were meant for.

The editorial on the back page articulates the argument against this kind of censorship quite well. Derek McCulloch notes that "[m]any of the comic books I find myself...called upon to defend are ones I find personally repugnant...No matter what I may think of this title or that, though, there is presumably someone out there who...read them and enjoy [sic] them; it would be a gross kind of hubris for me to think my opinion of the material superseded anyone else's." This is absolutely the crux. While we have governments in place to maintain a particular level of civilized discourse and conduct, such strictures have a way of becoming restrictures, when one person, or a small group of people come to believe that the way they think of things is obviously the best way.

Oh. Right. We live in Trump's world now. You know these things already.

Some of the comics in today's selection were really cool, some not quite to my taste. But that's the point of art, right? We all have our own tastes, and we should all be able, as long as we're not hurting anyone, to indulge them.

To be continued.