The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2100: Dark Shadows #16, October 1972

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The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: The Fantastic Four in The House of Horrors, Western Publishing, 1968

Let's dive back into the past, a mere 7 years since the fateful rocket ride that turned these unlikely (and, in some cases, totally unqualified) astronauts into the Fantastic Four. The Big Little Books are, to be fair, not very good. These are simple stories, never, I think, intended for an adult audience.

That said, some of the art is actually quite nice.

The format of the book is one page of text, one page of art, illustrating something that has happened on the preceding page. This puts the Big Little Books far more in the realm of the picture book than the comic. It's one of the fundamental ways of differentiating the picture book from the comic book - in the picture book, the picture illustrates a moment, rather than adding to the narrative in the way that the art complements the text in a comic book. Some picture books straddle this border, but then so do some comics. Is Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage a comic, or a very weird picture book?

I honestly find discussions like that pretty boring. I include this book in my comic collection, as it is a publication whose existence hinges fundamentally on a comic book.

Again, unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's very good. The art has a Jack Kirby quality to it, but it's not Kirby. I found, somewhere on the web, the suggestion that it was Gene Colan doing a Kirby style. But try as I might I can't find that article anymore. If I do, I'll pop a link in here somewhere.

Our story is literally the team following a villain, at what seems like a very slow pace, around a house filled with rooms that are only traps - nothing else, no kitchens or bedrooms. Just death trap rooms. And Dr. Weird is using these traps to try to convince the team to work with him? Every few chapters, he confronts them, asks them to join him, and when they refuse drifts off as a cloud of smoke. Then the FF face some more death traps, and then he asks them again. It was a bit difficult to get through.

So I suppose my recommendation would be that if you love the Fantastic Four, maybe you should check it out, at least for the art, but the story will only make you feel embarrassed for our usually much more competent quartet.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1344: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century #11, February 1981

There are a couple of cool things about this comic.

First, it's been in my collection for almost as long as I've been collecting comics. I think I've written of it before, but when I first started collecting, my Mum and Dad gave me a collecting kit for Christmas one year. It was a three-quarter length box and inside were some bags, some boards, a current price guide, and a grab bag of about 20 comics. This was one of them. I'm not sure why it's lasted. I know that there are comics that I have owned and then have traded away, or sold (before I was so adamant about my collecting), but this one hasn't, even though I've never really been that interested in it.

And that's where the second cool thing comes in. Every now and again I'll pick up a comic to read for the project, and I'll be surprised to find that it's written by someone I recognize. In the case of today's issue, it's written by a writer whose work I hold in high esteem, J.M. DeMatteis. His Brooklyn Dreams was an amazing work, so much so that I had it added to my reading list for my American Literature comprehensive exam. He's a writer who I keep meaning to delve into more deeply, but the problem is he is just so fucking prolific. I don't even know where to start. A bit of research has shown me that he actually has a substantial number of Man-Thing stories, so perhaps I'll start there.

What this means is that I've had this story kicking about in the collection for ages, but had no idea it was this good. I do vaguely remember reading it when I was very young, but I probably haven't opened it up in a good 30 years. Mr. DeMatteis apparently wrote a couple of other issues, so I'm going to see if I can find them as well. Though one was only published in Germany, so that might be difficult.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1226: Donald Duck #198, August 1978

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from today's comic based on the cover, but it certainly wasn't Biblical epic! King Og was apparently ruler of a nation that Moses and the Israelites conquered. He is mentioned in Deuteronomy, and did, it seems, have an iron bed.

So we have a cute little time travel story in today's issue, but I wonder if it's not actually something more. I wrote a few years back for Sequart.org an article about Christian comics texts. I'd thought through there being different kinds: the faithful adaptation, the "paraphrase," and the paratexts. I wonder if a story like this one, not quite a paraphrase, but an insertion of contemporary pop culture into ancient Jewish tradition, would fit somewhere in there? I'm intrigued, now, by this series. It's said that Carl Barks instituted this tradition of the Duck comics being more adventurous, and slightly more serial, than a typical cartoon adaptation comic (see my thoughts on Bugs Bunny a few days back). It's interesting to see that it was carried on even after Barks' time on the titles.

This is the last of the Western comics I'll be reading for now. I've got a stack of their more serious titles lined up for next month, but we'll finish with Donald, who heralds the coming of another duck character a little later on this month. Of the comics I read this week, Andy Panda and today's comic were the ones that grabbed me most. I'll have to see if I have any more kicking about!

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1225: Tweety and Sylvester #77, January 1978

There's an evolution of the relationship between Tweety and Sylvester in today's comic that I quite like. Don't worry. Sylvester is still trying to eat Tweety, but he's also strangely best friends with him. They hang out, have adventures, and then out of the blue, Sylvester will try to eat Tweety, get defeated, and then they'll keep hanging out. It's very, very weird. And that look on Sylvester's face on the cover makes me wonder how this comic would read if it underwent the Garfield Minus Garfield treatment. What would the tale of a lonely, crazed cat be like?

I've still not come across anything to pull me into these comics, though. I'm not invested in the characters. Well, maybe Andy Panda. He seemed to be a bit savvy.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1224: Chip 'n' Dale #25, Jaunary 1974

I'm starting to think that the reason that I haven't read any Western comics is that they're really pretty unremarkable. Or, the ones that I have are, anyway. So far. (Could I vague that up, do you think?)

I will give the artist of today's issue respect for the facial expressions they manage with cartoon chipmunk physiology. But aside from that, the stories are pretty run of the mill for these characters. They get into mischief. Hijinks ensue.

Okay, one other interesting thing. In the first story, the duo refer to their forest brethren with the honorific "brer," a reference to the Uncle Remus stories, one must think. And that honorific, "Br'er" is short for "brother," and has origins in African Rabbit trickster stories. So there's a weird connection there, though given the use to which we put creatures in funny animal comics, is it really so surprising that there are funny animals in our sacred stories?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1223: Bugs Bunny #213, October 1979

I think the most interesting thing about this comic is that, given the era it's from, it's surprisingly not racist when the action moves to a foreign country.

That aside, it was pretty meh. Bugs is an interesting character, but I often feel he's the sort that would really flourish if you could just let him be a bit darker, for there to be just a bit more bite to his humour. But then, I suppose that's what a lot of the other funny animal characters do, Howard for example. They take the genre into that place that Bugs never seems to go.

Though, I haven't read a lot of Bugs Bunny comics, so I really don't know for sure.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1222: Walter Lantz - Andy Panda #17, January 1977

I recently re-organized my collection, an endeavour about which I'll have more to say at a later date. One of the things I came across during this task was the rather large amount of Western/Gold Key/Whitman comics I have. A large majority of them belong to my wife, who graciously allowed me to fold them into the collection (it must be love!), so reading them is doubly interesting, as I can imagine my wife as a child having read these very same comics. And before I wax Benjaminian on texts and memory, for me it is a connection to a version of her that I never knew, and that's kind of cool.

The other realization I came to, however, is that I've never read any of them. I honestly can't think of one (okay, maybe one) that I've read. So I decided that once my Pride Month reads were over, I'd jump headfirst into some Western Publishing stuff and get an idea of what was going on there. They're a venerable publisher but I think were one that very much believed in the comics are for kids ethos of the medium. Maybe that's why I've never taken to them. But later this month we'll be reading some Howard the Duck, a series I consider to be the apotheosis of funny animal comics, and Western's a nice place to go to see some other articulations of that genre in action. Like today's comic.

Andy Panda was fun and it's humour just intelligent enough to keep me entertained. It's definitely a children's comic, but not one that necessarily is interested in talking down to the kids. Andy and Charlie Chicken hatch schemes and thwart plots - they're more adventurers than they are comedic buffoons, a la Porky Pig, perhaps. I find the funny animal genre fascinating, in that the anthropomorphization of animals is a long-standing mythic tradition, and I wonder what it means when we start using them as stand-ins not for our deities, but for ourselves. I'm sure I'll keep pondering this over the rest of the month.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 728: The Little Monsters #33, April 1976

A couple of years ago I taught Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to one of my classes. In one of the lectures, I gave them examples of how Shelley's Monster has become a staple of our popular culture. It's a pity I didn't have this comic at the time.

That said, there's some weird problems with this comic. First is the really horrendous forced puns. "You're so terror-bly thoughtful." "Bad-bye." I mean, I get it, and very likely the demographic this comic is aimed at would love it, but I'm certainly not that demographic.

The second thing is a little more serious. It seems like the entire monster family lives in perpetual fear of their grumpy father. And not just grumpy. When he's angry, he kicks the kids around and yells, and they all dive for cover to avoid his tantrums. Again, I kind of see where this comes from, in that he's a proxy for Frankenstein's Monster, but there's something downright chilling about the reactions of his family toward his anger, and his reactions toward them. It's behaviour I can't see being accepted as comedy in a contemporary comic. Which, I suppose, is one of the most interesting things about this project I'm pursuing. As popular culture artefacts, comics tend to reflect quite explicitly what was going on in the culture at the time of their creation. You simply have to look at the push toward representation in today's comics to see that clearly. So each time I come across something culturally bizarre in a comic, I'm reminded of how quickly, and sometimes how slowly, culture changes. I can only imagine, 20 or 30 years from now, what the comics of today will look like.

To be continued.