The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1189: Myth Adventures #12, 1986

Right at the very beginning of this project, I noted that one of the reasons that I'm reading through everything is that it is supremely arrogant of me to assume that any of the comics in my collection that are not the ones I collect or have some personal interest in have nothing to offer. As both yesterday's and today's comics attest, I was right in this reason. This issue of Myth-Adventures, the last one, skewers comics conventions in a lovely way. Well, it skewers comics conventions of a particular era in a lovely way. I was chatting with a friend last night about my time as a comics shop owner, and how terrible it was, but I came to the realization that 17 years ago the comics industry was a very different place to what it is now. Opening a comic store, or running a pop culture convention, would be a very different thing to do in 2018 than it was in 2001. Or, for conventions, and this comic, in 1986.

I will also say that I'm becoming a bit more fascinated by Jim Valentino. Unlike the other members of the Image exodus, he seems to have worked with some really cool publishers (not that Marvel isn't cool, but they're a bit too mainstream most of the time), and has a definite underground bent to his aesthetic. It makes me want to track down Shadowhawk, just to see how he translates this varied history of production into the Image aesthetic.

Because I always need more comics, right?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1185: Ms. Fantastic #1, 1992

I've probably waxed lyrical about Phil Foglio's Xxxenophile at some point or another in this project. It's definitely one of the erotic comics that I use to set the bar for others in my collection. Foglio's little stories evince a great joy in sex that is both inspiring and arousing. And they're really, really funny. Ms. Fantastic comes pretty close to achieving the same kind of feeling, not least because the art styles are very similar. Today's comic is a little less explicit than some of the adult comics I've looked at, and creator Dennis Stahl addresses this in the closing text piece, noting that "[s]ex is just one element of the whole" in the comic. There's also a heavy dose of satire of the superhero genre, which I always love to see. And, surprisingly for an adult comic of this era, some fairly explicit moments of Feminist thinking. Mr. Stahl obviously has a good head on his shoulders, and understands not only the tenets of the superhero genre that he skewers quite expertly, but also the problems of female representation not only in superhero comics, but in culture more generally.

I've a couple more issues of this series that I'm quite looking forward to reading, but we'll leave them for a later date.

More to come...

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!)