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 1966: Ghostly Tales #118, November 1975

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Okay, first things first. I chose this comic, amongst the other Charlton horror titles I've pulled, to read today because the character on the front reminds me of Squirrel Girl. Which is appropriate, given that the cover artist helped create her. Many times I'm interested in these old Charlton comics because they feature art from post-Marvel Steve Ditko. That said, his work in this really seems to be phoned in. A mediocre story with some mediocre art, sadly. But there's a silver lining: the issue features the work of Tony Williamsune. Mr. Williamsune is actually Tony Tallarico and Bill Fraccio, an art team who I am absolutely in love with. I illegally posted the story a few years back. I was moving about some books the other night and came across a Lynd Ward-illustrated edition of Frankenstein - I love the aesthetic of a lot of those old wood or lino cut works, and the Williamsune style, as I've said before, reminds me of these kinds of etchings.

I have been finding some of their other work in the collection, though the black and white stuff I've got, mostly in Warren Publishing reprints, isn't quite as enchanting. I don't spend nearly enough time considering the work of a colorist in comics, but I wonder if the reason I like this work so much is because of the choices the colorist made.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1965: The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves #59, October 1976

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I recently pulled from the collection all of my Charlton "horror" titles. I put the term in quotation marks because these are obviously horror stories that are trying, as the little box in the top right of the cover suggests, to keep within the framework of the Comics Code. It's a pity, because without those restrictions, I think that some of these stories would be really creepy.

That said, the very best part of this comic is the cover by Rich Larson. There's definitely something of the Bernie Wrightson school of art here, one that continues with a artist like Kelley Jones into the 80s and 90s. It's got me thinking about the some time disparities between cover art and interior art, even when it comes from the same person. The purposes of the two kinds of comic art are very different. The cover is meant to draw us in, while the interior is meant to convey narrative once we're drawn in, puns intended. But often the interior will feature art that doesn't necessarily match, or live up to, the cover. Though Mike Zeck's work on the inside of the comic is excellent, it's the only one that comes near to the quality of the cover art. And this, for the most part, has nothing to do with the relative strengths of the artists. Mike Zeck, I'm sure, could have created a spectacular cover for this comic where he commissioned to do so. But the cover, and I say this as someone with very, very little strength when it comes to visual art, seems more like a portrait, more like fine art, than the narrative art within the comic. Only rarely, and often with great delay, do we see comics with spectacular cover art in which the interior art is of the same quality.  And even then, because the interior art's ostensible purpose is to convey story, the interior and cover art are always going to be of differing quality. Cover art wants to suggest to us a story that we will want to read. Interior art attempts to tell us that story, to meet our expectations, and, hopefully, to surprise us a bit.

Not sure where the blog's going over the next little while. I feel an overwhelming urge to keep posting works by BIPOC, but I also want to delve into some of the strange stuff I've got kicking about. And I'm thinking of reading as much of the old Marvel "Onslaught" crossover as I have. Been a while since I read a crossover. So we'll see. I'll probably try to mesh everything together. Seems to be my way of doing things.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1932: Ghost Manor #45, September 1979

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There's something so very intriguing about the Charlton Comics horror output from the 70s. While researching today's featured creator, the late Wayne Howard, I found an excellent articulation of this intriguing feeling from blogger Mark Andrew at Comics Should Be Good: "...since Charlton didn't want to do anything that'd offend your average 9-year-old, you can feel this book fighting against the uber-restrictive comics code." This is the sense that I get every time I read a Charlton horror title. The writers and artists want to be telling us much more interesting stories.

The other really interesting thing I came across, thanks to Mr. Howard's Wikipedia page, is that he was the first comics creator to receive the "Created by" credit in a comic for his work on Midnight Tales for Charlton. Such credits become common over the course of the 80s and 90s, but Mr. Howard was there first.

Much is made in a lot of the things I read about Mr. Howard's art style, some calling him the best of the Wally Wood school of artists, some calling him a really good imitator of Wood. I think they're really saying the same thing, but the language they're using really shifts meaning. I don't think there's anything wrong with coming from an artistic school - we see so many creators who are Kirby-inspired - where do we draw the line between practitioner of particular artistic techniques and wholesale copier? For the record, I think Howard's art is fantastic - it is dynamic while hanging onto a sense of menace that, as Mr. Andrew above notes, fights against the restrictive reigns of the Comics Code. The comic is really quite well done, for the genre of non-scary scary comic (?), and were I still an academic, I'd probably have something to say about the depictions of the Devil in this book and some of the similarities I see to the depiction of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. But I'm not still an academic, so never mind.

One last interesting thing to note is that Mr. Howard apparently did not want to talk about his work for Charlton, turning down an interview in 2001 with Comic Book Artist. I'm curious as to why this was the case, but that may simply be one of the great unsolved questions of comics.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1674: Herbret West #2, November 2008 (Cthuliana Week)

Though I find Herbert West to be one of Lovecraft's least-memorable characters, he seems to be the one that gets continuation after continuation of his adventures. I think it might be because he's the least-Lovecraftian protagonist in all of Lovecraft's tales. The original story was written in a more popular style than most of Lovecraft's works, an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. As a morally-ambiguous anti-hero, West has had numerous films and comics patterned on his original story. This particular version seems to be a reworking of the original tale, but set in the contemporary world. I'm not sure that West's particular brand of mad scientist really translates well to a modern day setting (something his films also suffer from) - he really does need the battlefields of WWI, or the creepy, ancient streets of Arkham in the 20s, otherwise it's completely unbelievable that he'd be able to continue his reanimation experiments. I know we're supposed to suspend our disbelief, but I'm firmly convinced that there are characters who belong in particular periods.

This issue didn't really help me with my Lovecraft conundrum. It adapts one of his stories without really offering any commentary or critique on the man who wrote it - like the films that were based on West's story, this comic focusses on the horror aspects of the story, rather than the social or systemic critique that's often inherent in Lovecraft's tales. Which makes it entertaining, but, honestly, a little vapid. In the glut of zombie-themed stories of contemporary times, you need to do something to make a story stick out.

"I will never forget those terrible events that summer night."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1673: Yuggoth Creatures #3, July 2006 (Cthuliana Week)

I know it's not quite a week of comics. I think I have six for each theme, leaving myself the option of doing something completely random between themes. But I want to jump into my Cthuliana Week right away.

I'm calling it that, rather than "Lovecraftian" week because I'm wrestling of late with the figure of Lovecraft himself. It's no secret that Lovecraft was a horrendously racist individual. His stories revolve around old and revered white families mixing with foreign blood and literally turning into monsters. And don't even get me started on his poetry, which features a disgusting piece called "The Creation of N******s." It's awful.

So how do we go about reconciling ourselves with this if we love his stories. When I submitted an article to The Lovecraft Annual, it was accepted with the note that the editor, S.T. Joshi, wanted a section where I pondered this question removed from the paper. There are those who study or read Lovecraft who prefer to not quite ignore, but glance past, the racist overtones of the stories. I'm not sure, if we're to keep him as a canonically significant writer in the horror and American traditions, that we can do that. His work grows from a place of racism, couched in a fairly intense xenophobia. So how do we, or I, reconcile with this?

I started out thinking about Shakespeare. He's another writer whose name has become an adjective (Shakespearean; Lovecraftian), an adjective that we use with impunity. But Shakespeare doesn't exactly have a clean track record when it comes to inclusion and diversity. Shylock is not treated particularly well in The Merchant of Venice, and Catherine is little more than a prize in The Taming of the Shrew. While these two plays smack of sexism and antisemitism, Shakespeare is still lauded as one of the greatest writers in the language. The trouble is that we have few examples from Shakespeare's life to tell us if these were attitudes he held or simply things he decided to write about. Lovecraft has left us a much fuller archive.

I'm going to ponder these questions over the next few days as I read some "Cthuliana," some adapted from Lovecraft's work, some original. Today's issue is excellent, a series of strung-together narratives that tell the tale of an unfortunate researcher into the Cthulhu cult and the Old Ones. I assume that the first two issues of the series are very similar, and are part of the same story, as this definitely reads as the climax to a longer tale. The structure of the series nicely picks up on the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos through a series of smaller tales, ones woven together over the years by fans. There's also little actual dialogue in the comic, with the exception of the framing sequence, leaving the narration as text boxes, a technique that also nicely links the comic with the original prose source material. As usual, for an Avatar Press comic, it's gory and horrific, maybe a little too much to quite qualify as Lovecraftian, a word that more often means that we don't see the scary stuff, we just have to imagine it.

"He voiced terrible words, impossible sounds that I could not bear, nor shut out, no matter how I tried."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1666: Marvel Spring Special #1, 1988 (Movie Adaptation Week)

In an effort to get back to regular updates, I'm doing some theme weeks. This week we'll be looking at film adaptations. Like novelizations of films, these are always a bit of a dodgy prospect. The comic can't deviate too far from the source material, though there are instances where the comic was created from an earlier draft of a script and features things not in the film. I imagine that artists would also try as hard as possible to give the characters in the comic as much resemblance to the actors as possible, but in a stylized art form, that's not always easy. As such, adaptations can disappoint for not cleaving quite so photo-realistically to the film they adapt.

I've never seen the Elvira, Mistress of the Dark film. Or if I have, there's no recollection of it in my brain. I know of Elvira, mainly because of her prominent cleavage that was in the background of my adolescence, but I don't think I ever watched any of her television shows. For those not in the know, Cassandra Peterson plays Elvira as a late-night horror film host, sort of a sexy version of the Crypt Keeper. She's also featured in comics where she plays a similar role. At some point her popularity must have crested and she got her own feature film. The story is somewhat akin to Footloose, though with a slinky goth/valley girl in the role of agitator rather than Kevin Bacon. The sultry Elvira inspires the youth of the town to overthrow the restrictive laws of the older generation.

One thing that I'm curious about is whether or not each discreet scene in the comic follows the film. I suppose this would hinge on whether or not the artists were able to see the film prior to creating the comic. If not, I imagine that Colon made decisions for each scene that might have been substantially different from the choices director James Signorelli made. I am not, however, going to sit through the film just for the sake of comparison, I'm afraid. The story just wasn't that good.

Join me at the movies again tomorrow, won't you?

"Hey! I've seen "The People's Court"! I'm entitled to one phone call and a strip search!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1665: Night Force #9, April 1983

I see Night Force comics in numerous dollar bins, and I've never really given them much thought. Just another obscure DC title from the early 80s that didn't make much of a splash.

Well, I will not be passing them over any more. This was a creepy and very strange comic, and I'm dying with curiosity to see what happens to the people trapped by the weird creature on the cover. The Night Force themselves don't really show up in this comic, either. The protagonist is a murderer who has been pressed into service by the mysterious Baron Winter to do battle against the creature. There's some really murky morality on display here, and the comic's not shy about addressing that fact.

It's Gene Colan on art, so you know it's going to be good. Apparently this series was the first time that Marv Wolfman and Colan collaborated again since Marvel's Tomb of Dracula, which, given the quality of this comic, I may actually have to see about reading. I'm sure I've got a couple of issues, at least.

Worth your time if you find this in a cheap box.

"Only now she's gone. I don't know if the creature got her or not."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1654: Haunted Love #3, April 2016

Not quite the same as the old Charlton title, this series, edited by the talented Craig Yoe, collects some very strange and gruesome love stories from the pre-Code days. It's interesting to contrast these stories with some of the later horror stuff - I've been reading, though not blogging, some of the old Marvel reprints from the 70s, Creatures on the Loose and Vault of Evil and such. There's just something a little more neutered about those later stories. So much happens off-panel, or almost happens but then doesn't, whereas the old stories just go all out. While the sexual politics of virtually every story are pretty shady, the art and the willingness to take the stories to extremes is really lovely.

Well, not lovely. Gross, really. But that's what we come to these old comics for.

"I'm glad you value it, my dear husband. Then, perhaps, you won't mind when it cracks your skull wide open! I can wait no longer for you to die!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 27: Vampire Tales #6, August 1974

My quest to read all things Gerber led me into an area of Marvel's legacy that is completely esoteric to me - fittingly, perhaps. The Marvel horror magazines of this era never held much draw for me as a kid, when they were in their dotage, and the older stuff was just never available enough to even register on my pre-pubescent brain. If is wasn't superheroes or Transformers, I wasn't interested.

In today's issue, we have the first story of Lilith, the daughter of Dracula, plotted by Marv Wolfman and dialogued by Mr. Gerber. It's an interesting way of writing. If I understand the Marvel method, Wolfman would have plotted it, given it to Bob Brown, who would have drawn it, and then it would have gone to Gerber, who would dialogue the art according to the plot. I guess it makes more sense if the same person plots and scripts, but when it's someone else, that would be strange. Conversely, perhaps that's a more truly representative way of thinking about the collaborative process of comics. The dialogue is provided after the story has been told. Though I imagine Brown would be thinking about speech bubble placement while he was drawing.

It's not a collaboration that I see in contemporary comics that much, except perhaps in cases where a writer has...um...unexpectedly departed a title, where they might be credited with the story, along with a fill-in scripter.

So, as far as a Gerber piece, it was middling. Lilith is a nicely feminist character, despite her typical superheroine garb, but the stories really are pretty run of the mill. The same goes for the other tales in here, all interesting takes on vampires, but nothing that leapt out at me. Maybe that's a good thing in a vampire comic ;D

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1025: Ghost Manor #20, September 1974

(We'll start Christmas stuff tomorrow?)

There's a cool little booth at my local flea market called "Snobby's." Thankfully, the proprietor is anything but. I bought a large stack of coverless Archie comics from his a few months back and got some really amazing, really old, stuff that I likely wouldn't have had the chance to read otherwise. And the other day I picked up a "15 Comics for $5" pack at his place. Today's comic was one of the random things in there.

There were actually quite a few old Charlton horror comics, and I'm really looking forward to reading them. This one had some interesting stories, and sort of seemed to be a hybrid of horror and romance. The cover story, for example, is about a couple who purposefully get themselves bitten by a vampire to keep the woman, who is dying of...something, alive. And they get married at the end. And then the story about the man and woman who meet in the wake of a UFO crash ends with him, having known her all of about 6 hours, proposing to her. It's actually really odd. But perhaps that was the schtick for this title, that it was going to attempt to bridge the gap between male and female readership by offering something that, supposedly, appealed to both sexes.

I don't know. It was entertaining.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 737: Bloody Bones and Blackeyed Peas #1, 1984

According to the GCD, this is the only comic that came out from Galaxy Comics. It hearkens back to the horror comics of yore, so to speak, giving us a couple of grim tales that wouldn't have been out of place in an old Warren Magazine. The art's not quite on par, the writing's a little bit trite, but somehow these things contribute to the retro feel of the comic. Given that it was published in the early 80s, I'm not 100% sure that retro is what the creators were going for, but reading it 30 years later, that's what they deliver. It's interesting that reception of a comic can shift that way dependent on when one reads it. At the time it was written, such horror classics as Twisted Tales and Alien Encounters were coming out of Eclipse Comics, though I still think these would have spoken more to the older Warren tradition than Bruce Jones' single-handed revitalization of the short horror comic story.

There's very little information about the comic or the publisher available, but I did manage to find a short(ish) playthrough of a fantasy (actually, "fantegy," a portmanteau of fantasy and strategy) game called Lordlings of Yore that is advertised on the back cover. I remember video games like this one. But I'd forgotten how slow they are.

To be continued.