The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1305: The Calgary Herald Comic Book, September 16, 1977

I happened upon a bunch of these at a local thrift shop. They're somewhere between golden age and magazine sized, and are a full 22-page comic insert that was published with the Calgary Herald between 1977 and 1982. The cover art on all of them is by submission from local kids.

The collection of comics in here is really pretty great. All the old standards, of course, though missing Peanuts, which I find very strange. I'd picked them up in the hopes that they might contain the old Howard the Duck strips, though perhaps they were a bit earlier than this publication. From the superhero set, we do have Spider-Man and the Justice League, and the Archie Sunday strip is also featured here. I don't know if newspapers do inserts like this anymore. I think they're really great, and the ones that came in the Toronto Star on Saturdays were definitely my gateway drug to comics proper.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1043: Brigade #2, October 1992 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 3)

There are a couple of things that strike me about this comic.

First, Brigade are basically the Avengers, right? You've got a battle-hardened fighter (Captain America), a growing guy (Giant-Man), and archer (Hawkeye), a water guy (Namor, perhaps?) - but they're renegades, not playing by the government's rules. It's ironic then that the Avengers themselves managed this much better than Brigade about 15 years later, after the Civil War. What I suppose this proves is that the Image comics creators had the ideas, but sadly not the skills. As I noted in yesterday's post, McFarlane was clever to get established and well-regarded writers on his book early on. It took Liefeld a little while to come around and let Alan Moore have a go at his characters. It's a pity Liefeld pulled the plug. All that said, this is actually not one of the worst comics. It's produced by a sort of second tier creative team, not one of the Image founders, but a disciple of sorts. And in that, it doesn't really have anything to live up to, the way the rebellious artists books do. It wasn't a great comic, but it had its moments.

And one of those moments is the other thing that struck me, a moment that doesn't actually feature the titular team. There's an extra feature in the comic starring a character named "Infiniti," who I know absolutely nothing about, and who apparently only features in 4 small back-up comics and that's it. What really got me about this short feature was a character who appears right at the beginning of the story, but looks like he's just stepped right out of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol:

Apparently known as "The Enigma," you can bet that I will be tracking down the other piece (I'm only missing one) of this story to see what he's all about.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1042: Spawn #2, July 1992 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 2)

I was trying to decide this morning whether or not Spawn is a title I'd have picked up if I were as deep into comics in 1992 as I am now. I will admit to loving Todd McFarlane's art - there's a reason he's so highly regarded. Well, highly regarded for his art, at least. He's also a well-known jerk, as evidenced by his long feud with Neil Gaiman over creators's rights. This was perhaps the problem with the early Image founders: by and large, they ended up becoming what they beheld at Marvel. Considering the impetus for their exodus, that's textbook irony right there.

I've a passing knowledge of the Spawn series. I used to have the first few trades, though they appear to have vanished from my collection in the last 15 years or so. McFarlane was very smart about his series - he realized that he's a really good artist, but that his narratives needed a bit of work. While working on this aspect, he brought in other writers on the series, resulting in some stellar comics from Alan Moore, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Grant Morrison. In fact, the McFarlane/Sim collaboration in issue #10 ranks as one of my favourite comics.

But what about today's issue? Well, there's a lot of monologuing. When I teach communications, the "monologuer" is one of the negative forms of conversationalist that we look at. Of course, when Violator is monologuing to a small kitten at the beginning of the issue, it's hilarious. But the other monologues, notably the ones from detective Sam Burke and the extended ruminations of the main character himself, are tiresome. There's a reason thought bubbles have all but died out in comics. Over use of the monologue makes every issue of a comic seem like it's a Shakespearean tragedy, though Shakespeare knew that a monologue or soliloquy needed to be balanced by some dialogue. The balance is a bit off in this comic.

That said, not a bad comic, given the era and company it represents. I guess there's a reason this one has lasted so long.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1041: Youngblood #3, August 1992 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 1)

Happy New Year, all. To kick off the year, I'm going to read comics from Image that came out in the period between 1989 and 1995, a dark period in which I neither read nor collected comics. Apparently I missed quite a lot.

So.

Youngblood.

Let me tell you why I actually really enjoyed this comic. It was not for the art, though I'll say that of all the Rob Liefeld comics I've read, this one is the one where I think I kind of get his art style. I see what appeals to people about it. Well, maybe. It's just that everything is so hyper-realized, so over the top proportionately ridiculous, but it's taking itself so seriously. And it wasn't for the story, which at times seemed to be poking fun at the consumer collector culture that it itself was in the midst of fueling....or something? I don't really know what was happening. The reason I liked it is because of Prophet. I gushed enough about that series a few months back. It really is one of the finest superhero comics I've read. And many of the characters I read about today have futures in that series. It retroactively takes these barely defined characters and gives them identity, which is kind of a lovely gift to give to these otherwise pretty bad comics. All of the various Youngblood series do this - for me, Jeff Terrel is not just the old man from Prophet, but also the sort-of seasoned hero of both Moore's and Casey's takes on the team. He may look like a horrifying serial killer on that cover, but I know from (future?) context that he's actually a big softie. I hadn't anticipated that happening, but it's certainly going to make reading some of this early Image stuff a lot more palatable. Not to say it was all terrible. But much of it was.

To be continued.

(Oh, oh, I forgot, the flip book!

There's a five-page story that introduces one of my favourite superheroes ever: Supreme! Perhaps this is finally the year that I track down all the old stuff I'm missing, and read the whole thing.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1040: Wednesday Comics #12, September 23, 2009

Alright, alright, let's wrap this up!

My votes for the best three features in this series are "Metamorpho," "Supergirl," and "Hawkman." Not how I would have seen things turning out when I started the series. Each does something cool or different with the format. "Metamorpho," much like its protagonist, shifts and melts and fits into the tabloid-sized page in a number of different ways. There are traditional panel arrangements followed by a two-page table of elements-as-dialogue/maze that really pushes what one is able to do, visually at least, with this kind of space. The story was okay - clever, but not really that entertaining.

"Supergirl," on the other hand, uses a very traditional technical structure, but tells a story that is just charming. It's nicely-plotted, something interesting happens in every segment - I think what I want to say about it is that it suits the medium of its publication - the newspaper strip. It wasn't trying to be deep and philosophical. It was trying to be entertaining Saturday morning breakfast comics. And it succeeds.

I have to admit that "Hawkman" was not one of the strips I'd have said I'd enjoy - he's never been my favourite character. But in this iteration, told by Kyle Baker, he's much more interesting. Add to this that somehow in the space of these 12 pages, Baker manages to tell us two really awesome, really short, superhero stories disguised as one story. It really is pretty great.

And we're done with Wednesday Comics. Not my favourite series that I've read, but overall pretty cool.

Tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow.

We'll start with early Image stuff. Oh yes.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1039: Wednesday Comics #11, September 16, 2009

Climax achieved! (Not that way - get yer mind out of the gutter!)

All that remains for each story is a brief moment of crisis, and then a denouement. I'll be in a better position to comment on the narratives tomorrow, I think, as I'll finally have all the pieces I need to see them fully. There are definitely strips that got it right, "it" being that feeling of the newspaper comic supplement strip, but there are others that were more 12-page comic stories published as 12 separate pages. There's a difference, I think.

One strip that I'm actually consistently entertained by, and that I've overlooked thus far, is Kyle Baker's "Hawkman." It's good, solid, adventure, full of terrorists, aliens, dinosaurs, and superheroes, and is actually a very interesting look at the superhero in crisis management - (SPOILER) the plane that Hawkman is rescuing crashes on an island populated by ferocious dinosaurs, and his harness is destroyed. And there's no help coming. We get to see what kind of a hero Hawkman actually is, I think. He's brutal, often to the point of savagery, and in that way resembles at his best that other famed comic book superhero survivalist, Wolverine.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1038: Wednesday Comics #10, September 9, 2009

I've figured out the perfect analogy for reading Wednesday Comics. It's like when we had really slow dial-up Internet, and you'd have to wait 20 minutes for a single image to load. You saw the image in little tiny increments, which in a lot of ways took away from the image in its entirety when it loaded. Sometimes the power of a work of art is in its immediacy.

There's another problem I've encountered, and it's one that regular newspaper comics wouldn't necessarily run into. As the series was set up as a limited run, with a finite number of issues, each creative team was aware of how many pages they had, and when the story had to end. As a result, every story in this series is hitting its climax right now. It's hard to maintain that level of emotional investment for all of the stories, and this inevitably leads to a lack of emotional investment in any of them.

And yet, I still think I like the series. Perhaps its the characters they've chosen, or just the sheer size of the art. There's something quite wonderful about Wednesday Comics, even though, as a collection of stories, I just don't think it's working that well.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1037: Wednesday Comics #9, September 2, 2009

Sort of continuing on from my post yesterday, we're seeing each story hit its high point, its climax. I teach a very simple way of understanding narrative to my classes, called "Freytag's Pyramid." It's a very basic tool for thinking through narrative, but quite effective. These newspaper strip styled comics are adhering to the pyramid quite nicely. These climactic moments are presented in a nice array of styles, from Superman's figuring out of his dilemma to the Flash's maddening skipping through time and dimensions. The climax is the highest emotional point in a story. So how is it that a story told in single pages across 12 weeks can have such a thing? Is there not something to the sense of immediacy a climax has when one is reading a novel or a short story? What if you had to read the story in chunks of predetermined length? Would that affect your enjoyment of the climax when you reached it?

I think I might be talking nonsense today. But that's fine - I've given the ol' brain a few weeks off.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1036: Wednesday Comics #8, August 26, 2009

I've been trying to figure out why it is that I just don't have a lot to say about this series. It could be that it's because I'm blogging and reading it at a very busy time - some days, I'll admit, I just don't want to write anything about the comic I'm doing. But I feel like there's been an unusual preponderance of posts for Wednesday Comics that I haven't felt like writing.

But what I think it might actually be is the format itself. A single page of a story isn't really that much to talk about. I could perhaps go on about the art, but, if we're to be honest, the art is the side of comics that I know the least about. Narrative is kind of my jam. And while the pages are pushing their respective stories ahead, each story is so short that these page-by-page installments might actually be too short to offer much insight into their respective plots. Perhaps we need just slightly more information. This might be why Ben Caldwell's "Wonder Woman" works relatively well, despite my earlier misgivings, because it manages to include so very much on one page. There's an arc to the chunk of narrative that's presented in that strip.

Perhaps. Whatever it is, I'll finish out the series, but I'm not really getting too much out of it. I'm tempted to re-read the stories in completion to see if I appreciate it more. I'll let you know how that turns out.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1035: Wednesday Comics #7, August 19, 2009

So let's do the back end of Wednesday Comics.

I seem to recall when I picked this up, it was purely out of excitement over Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred's collaboration on "Metamorpho." I've always been partial to the character, as he for some reason holds a similar resonance as the Doom Patrol, though I don't know that their adventures are really anything like one another. It's just an odd association, I guess. And while it is a pretty good strip, I have to say that the "Deadman" and "Superman" strips are knocking it out of the park. Particularly "Deadman." I've mentioned before, but it's got that DC Animated U look to it, but it's so much more visceral. Quite an interesting combination, and is making for excellent "newspaper" comics.

I'm kind of into the "Kamandi" strip as well - it's set up like a Prince Valiant-style comic, where the characters don't speak in speech bubbles, but in the text boxes that accompany each panel. It's not my favourite style of comics, but it works quite nicely in this pastiche of the old adventure strips.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1024: Wednesday Comics #6, August 12, 2009

Losing my interest in this series, I'm afraid. Though the Superman story continues to be pretty great, as does the Adam Strange strip, the rest aren't really blowing my mind that much. But that's okay - I'm going to take a break for the next little while and start reading Christmas comics - if I can find any that I haven't already read for the project, that is.

I will say that the Deadman strip is actually pretty cool - it's riffing on the DC Animated style (as is Wonder Woman), and it's kind of a cool take on Boston Brand. He's one of those heroes I'm not super familiar with, but whenever he shows up in a comic, I enjoy his sarcasm. Also, should you ever get the chance to read any of Kelley Jones's work on him, do it. Jones is a treasure.

So, tomorrow we'll start with some holiday cheer. I wish I had some Hanukkah comics, or anything else that celebrated the various holidays that happen this time of year. I'm sure there must be some Yuletide ones out there. And, I'm embarrassed to admit, I still don't have all of Grant Morrison's take on the early days of Santa in Klaus. Maybe I'll treat myself to an early present.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1023: Wednesday Comics #5, August 5, 2009

Not quite half way through the series, and I still think the Superman story is the best one. I really quite like the Wonder Woman strip as well, though I think that Ben Caldwell's decision to use tiny, tiny panels in the strip might have been a mistake. Sometimes I have trouble figuring out what's going on.

And that's all the brain I have today. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1022: Wednesday Comics #4, July 29, 2009

Hopefully you'll forgive the brief reviews this week. Not only am I sick (though getting better), but I'm also deep in marking for the end of term. It leaves me with very little brain power at the end of the day.

Wednesday Comics is a pretty great read, though. What I'm curious about is whether, when it was reprinted, the stories were collected together, or the weekly page-by-page format was kept.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1021: Wednesday Comics #3, July 22, 2009

Apologies. Same situation as yesterday. Even typing hurts.
This comic was pretty cool. The Metamorpho and Superman features are definitely my faves.
To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1020: Wednesday Comics #2, July 15, 2009

Really quite sick right now. I thought it was allergies.

I'll say, the "New Frontier" era Green Lantern (and perhaps Flash) stories in this series are excellent. And John Arcudi's take on Superman is really pretty great. The only dark spot is the Titans story, not for its content, but because it was written by disgraced former-editor Eddie Berganza.

Afraid that's all I've got for today. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1019: Wednesday Comics #1, July 8, 2009

There's something to the tabloid size comic. One of the most beautiful books I own is McSweeney's Quarterly Concern volume 13, the comics issue. The entire dust jacket folds out into a tabloid-sized comic. The size opens up so many possibilities, both for larger reproduction to deliver more awareness of detail, or also for sheer size to be able to pack information into. Wednesday Comics takes advantage of the format in both of these ways. There are stories that are little more than a blown up 3/3 grid, but the amount of reproductive detail is just wonderful. And there are others that pack amazing amounts of art into the space. None of them have sucked me in yet, though I remember being a fan of the "Wonder Woman" story in here. As the series goes on, I feel that the artists were starting to experiment with the medium. Some of Mike Allred's "Metamorpho" pages are wonderful.

I'm curious to see if this series works with a shorter wait between comics. When I teach comics, I sometimes include a section about serialization and the effect it has on storytelling. This series was conceived as a weekly series. I wonder if there are things that will come up and perhaps not work when it's being read on a daily basis.

To be continued.

The Glenbow Museum Celebration of Albertan Editorial Cartooning, May 2015

A quick note before I let the pictures speak for themselves. I approached the Glenbow Museum a number of times for permission to post these pictures to my blog, and on none of those occasions did I so much as receive a response, let alone permission. That being the case, I feel like I've done my due diligence, and that if a collection is owned by a public institution, then the public ought to be able to see it by any means necessary. That said, the display ended ages ago, so I'm not taking anything away from the Museum by posting this stuff. Enjoy! (Sorry for the blurriness of the photos!)

Crosspost from Facebook

(I should explain this. I occasionally wax lyrical about comics on Facebook, when I feel I have a spontaneous sort of thing to say. I'll crosspost here if I find them to be remotely interesting. In my, y'know, humble opinion ;P I'll also add pictures and links to the stuff I'm talking about.)

Forgot to mention I picked up some supercool comics stuff while away in Radium with T___​, C____​, and J____​. We went to a used book store where I found 3 more volumes of Footrot Flats, an awesome comic about a man and his dog from New Zealand. I discovered it a couple of years ago, but I never thought I'd find any more of the collections. By a dude named Murray Ball. At the same store I also found a British comic strip collection by Steve Bell called Further Down on Maggie's Farm, a badass mid-eighties protest comic starring Margaret Thatcher. And then, on the way home we stopped, as I am wont to do, at a thrift shop, and I found a collection of Sam's Strip, a comic strip from the 60's about a guy who runs his own comic strip. Metafictional political newspaper comic strip from 1962? Don't mind if I do.

(FORESHADOWING: Sam's Strip is going to be the inaugural title on my "Graphic Novel Monday" some time soon.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 55: The Montreal Standard Comics, Saturday, November 9, 1957

First, an apology. The "Ballad of the Fantastick" is not done, and might not be for a little while. My time is at a bit of a premium these days. Soon, I promise.

So, the something special I had planned. As a bit of a break, today I read a comics supplement from The Montreal Standard from 1957. I found this at a flea market years ago, and it was super well-preserved, along with the rest of the paper, because it's a commemorative issue about Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Ottawa that year. I checked inside, and there was a comics section. I have a collection called The Sunday Funnies, edited by Richard Marschall, which reprints comics supplement pages from 1896 - 1950, and I have one old front page of a supplement from 1937, but this one is the only complete one I've seen. That said, I remember reading the comics pages when I was a kid, looking forward to Bloom County every weekend. Part of me wishes I'd kept some of those now...

The nice thing about this paper is that it hits a bunch of the well-known names that one hears bandied about when speaking of mid-century comic strips. "L'il Abner," "Mary Worth," "Terry and the Pirates," "Bringing Up Father." As much as it's nice to see re-touched collections of this material appear, reading it in it's original form adds an experiential component to the experience. This is how a lot of comics were consumed 48 years ago. There's something I note in my upcoming, and much delayed, series on building a collection about comics from the dollar bin: the really beat up ones have a certain element to them. Almost as if a Benjaminian aura had been re-established around them by virtue of their having been read and loved. I don't know if this comic supplement has been read before, but it's in a form that was read in mass quantities, so the format of the medium, even though mechanically reproduced, asserts a temporal aura.

Enough of that. As for the comics themselves....I didn't enjoy them that much. There were one or two chuckles, mainly from a single panel gag cartoon called "Grin and Bear It," by George Lichtenstein. Some were obviously serials, and so dropping in halfway told me nothing. What I found interesting is that the serials fell into a number of different genres, rather than just an adventure model, which I had always thought had something to do with the old matinee adventure serials. But "L'il Abner" is obviously a domestic comedy, "Pogo" a strange mesh of about 4 genres through the lens of funny animals. So those I had a hard time getting into due to the serialization. The rest just seemed really culturally specific somehow. I'm reading Thierry Smolderen's The Origins of Comics right now, and I get the same feeling from the comics in this supplement that I get looking at the old reprinted broadsheets from the Victorian period in that book. I see that they're comics, they're using a visual and prosaic language I understand, but there's a cultural language bound up in it that I don't understand.

What worries me is that that can go the other way, and eventually I'll get to a point where I don't get contemporary comics because I will have become mired in a particular period. Aging is a funny thing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this glimpse at an esoteric corner of the collection. I'm going to see about scanning more of this and talking about it a bit more, but my scanner won't accommodate it (I had to stitch that above picture together), so it'll be a bit. Not sure what's on deck for tomorrow, but it'll be something interesting, I'm sure. Til then.