Some suggestions for queer comics to read...

I gave a talk at the Memorial Library in Calgary this weekend as part of the kick-off celebrations for Pride this year. I love doing this event. When else is a comic-geek like me given 2 FULL HOURS to talk to a captive audience about comics?

It's a really great chance to meet other readers and collectors, people dipping their toes back into comics after years absent, creators, and the merely curious. I like to think we have a good time and get a chance to talk about comics from a perspective that's interesting to all of us.

I promised a list to this year's audience of titles that I mentioned in the presentation, and some others, that I think are interesting parts of the history of queerness in comics. I welcome any suggestions, for sure. This is a history that is fascinating to uncover.

The earliest stuff I mentioned was Marston's original Wonder Woman stuff. There's lots of reprint volumes, depending on how high quality a reproduction you're looking for. Very cool, and much more readable than I find many Golden Age comics.

A recent discovery, for me at least, is David Anthony Kraft's Defenders #48-50 arc featuring Scorpio - I recently read an interview with Kraft where he says he was trying to subtly suggest that Scorpio was gay. To be honest, from a contemporary perspective, it's not that subtle.

Must mention Northstar in Alpha Flight, of course.

The next section dealt with Vertigo. I'll just list the titles. It's hard to go wrong with early Vertigo in general, though be warned that it's often dark and quite violent.

Sandman Mystery Theatre (specifically #13-16, "The Vamp") - Seagle, Wagner, Davis
Enigma #1-8 - Milligan and Fegredo
2020 Visions (specifically #4-6, "La Tormenta") - Delano and Pleece
Doom Patrol (specifically #64-88) - Rachel Pollack and others

I didn't mention quite a lot of Vertigo titles. There's The Sandman, The Invisibles, Lucifer, lots of really great stuff.

21st Century starts to get copious.

Kevin Keller #1, I still think, is one of the most important queer comics. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, all-American Kevin Keller is gay, out, and headlining his own comic in Riverdale for goodness' sake! I've always thought Archie Comics were a pretty great publisher. They're not afraid to change and shift with the times. That's the secret of their success.

Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams' Batwoman in Detective Comics is a beautiful piece of art, a challenging and tense narrative, and a queer woman headlining one of the most revered superhero comics titles in the history of the medium. You can't go wrong, honestly. Can't wait to see the television series this Fall.

Other stuff: The Infinite Loop from IDW publishing, Small Favors by Colleen Coover.

I'd recommend anything from the Young Animal imprint at DC. Though I haven't read Bug yet, the first wave of titles is highly recommended, with Doom Patrol and Shade, the Changing Girl being particular favourites for me. Eternity Girl is amazing too. I just pick this stuff up on principle now. I've never been disappointed.

And I think that's it. I'll see if I can upload the presentation for those who might be interested. And I'll be back to updating in the next couple of days. Gotta recover from the vacation ;D

The 40 Years of Comics Project - RE-Introduction

Every now and again I feel it's worthwhile to repost this introduction to the project, just in case there are new readers joining me and wondering what the heck is going on on this blog. Here's what's going on. Originally posted in...2015, I think.

Welcome to the 40 Years of Comics Project. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I at one time ran a less-than-successful comic book shop called “The Magic Mirror.” At one time the amount of stuff I was left with after the store closed could have filled 2 houses. No kidding. Presently, all I have left of the store is a “Grand Opening” sign, my original business plan, and an enormous and wonderful comic book collection. Over the years, I have added to this already impressive collection, and, as of 2015, have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12000 individual works of comics (Edit: A scant 2 years later I've just hit 14000. It's an illness, I know!). I approximate because I’ve not yet catalogued my graphic novel and trade paperback collection, nor have I catalogued my magazines. I have, however, catalogued my comic books. I, again as of 2015, sit at 11805 individual works.

But here’s the thing: At a best guess, I’ve read probably only half of them. The other half came from my store, and many are titles and characters that I had absolutely no interest in reading. (So why keep them, you ask? That’s a whole other conversation.) But I thought, recently, that it is an extremely unfair assumption to make that these comics, in essence, have nothing to offer me aside from their physical presence in my collection. So I’m going to read them. All.

If you divide 11805 by 365, you get 32.342465753424657534somethingsomethingsomething....

Let’s say 32. That means that, reading one comic a day, I will make it through my collection sometime around my 73^rd birthday. I call this the “40 Years of Comics Project” to account for additions to the collection over that period and the aforementioned uncatalogued collections. The plan at the moment is to read the separate subdivisions of the collection (which I’ll explain one day, I’m sure) in alphabetical order. If that begins to bore me, I might change things up, but this seems the easiest way to keep track right now.

(Of course, thinking of it that way, I realize that every comic published by Archie Comics is filed under the publisher, rather than title, in the collection. Which means I will have a stretch of about a year, pretty soon, of pure Archie comics. Wow.)

What this also means is that, once I start, I’m going to try, really, really try, to post a short blog post about each comic. Look for some of them to be single lines saying something like “Busy day. Archie #603 was good.”

But hopefully sometimes I’ll have something interesting to say. And I’ll try to note whether it’s a comic I’ve read before or not.

So, I can’t ask you to take this ride with me to the end. In a lot of ways, the only person this project is really going to speak to is me, the many mes I will be along the way. But if you want to tag along for a bit, see where I am and what’s going on, maybe it’ll speak to you a little bit too.

Welcome (the return of the sequel to the original 'Welcome')

I had thought for a little while there that the huge bump in page views was due to a particularly insistent bot or something, but the numbers appear to be steady, so I'll chance it, and welcome new readers to the blog!

Hi. I'm really honoured that you've taken some of your time to have a look at what I do. Here's some links that might help:

These social media ones occasionally will have content not on the blog, but mostly link back to the 40 Years project.
Facebook
Tumblr
Twitter
Pinterest

For those just joining the 40 Years of Comics Project, here's the first entry, and an explanation of the project.

If you're curious about where my collection came from (in part), here's some pictures of the store I ran in 2001 - 2002, The Magic Mirror.

I also have some semi-regular features:

On the Run: Mark Waid's The Flash - unfortunately on a bit of a hiatus - life and stuff, y'know?

The Dollar Bin - in which I wax lyrical about the pleasures and pains of cheap comics.

Artists to Check Out - whenever I find a bunch of cool art, I'll give you links to the artists' sites.

And, just occasionally, I venture into actually making comics: Sad Monster Comics.

There's more up here, so much that I've probably lost track. Have a poke about, and drop me a line if you're inclined. I'm always happy to talk about comics!

Sorry if this is awkward...

It occurs to me that I have no idea, really, who reads this blog. Yesterday I had 293 page views, but a HUGE number of those were from Russia, so I think I have a large spambot following at least.

But, just on the off chance that you do read this, and you might need someone to write something for you...you can hire me if you'd like. This blog is my resume.

It just occurred to me that, in the case of "it's not what you know, but who you know," I know you.

In case you're new here....

...Hi! Thanks for taking a moment to stop in and see what I have to say. Here's a link to the beginning of the 40 Years Project, to let you know what it's all about, and a bit about who I am. But that's not all I do on the blog. I've been known to write about The Flash, both the show and the comic, the links between music and comics, the wondrous glory of the Dollar Bin (and, that joy of joys, the Quarter Bin), and other assorted things.

Have a poke about.

I've been known to bite only occasionally, and never very hard.

A Brief Note on Scheduling

First, once again, welcome to the Giant Box of Comics. It never occurred to me, really, that anyone would be reading this, so it's really cool and gratifying to see so many people from all over the world paying even a little attention to my thoughts on comics. I have SO MANY OF THEM!

However, if you don't want to check back constantly to see what I've posted, I'm trying to set up a schedule of posting, to make things easier on both myself and my readers.

As you're probably well aware, I'll be posting a short blog entry about whatever comic I read once a day. I don't have a set time for this, as it happens whenever the time permits, and, as a grad student, my schedule is often very weird and flexible. I am trying to get them done early in the mornings, before I start work, but that's not always the case.

My other plan is to post something non-40 Years of Comics Project-related, or only tangentially related, every Friday at noon. This will include old academic papers I've written, new pieces on things I've discovered, (hopefully) continuations of things I started writing here years ago, metadata about the collection as a whole, or musings on the experience of interacting with such a collection, and, hopefully relatively soon, some guest posts. I'm actually scheduling these, so the next month and a bit of Fridays are taken care of, so if you're a "read it like a digest" sort of person, Friday after noon MDT is the time to hit up the blog.

Those two regular things aside, I'm obviously going to post things randomly when inspiration strikes. We should all keep a bit of random in our lives. Mine really seems to have more than its fair share though....

Thanks again for reading.

Oh, HI!

Over the last month or so, I've had a fairly large increase in traffic, which is thoroughly gratifying. It's also really amazingly cool to see all the different parts of the world that my visitors hail from. And so...

(Also, sorry if I left out a country, but this is based solely on the stats that Blogger provides for me.)

Grüezi
Jó napot kívánok
Zdrávstvujte!
Hallo
Bonjour

¡Hola!

Dia dhuit
Namaste

And, as well as Hello, I want to say Thank You. It's really lovely to think that people might be reading, and hopefully enjoying, what I've got to say.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Introduction

Welcome to the 40 Years of Comics Project. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I at one time ran a less-than-successful comic book shop called “The Magic Mirror.” At one time the amount of stuff I was left with after the store closed could have filled 2 houses. No kidding. Presently, all I have left of the store is a “Grand Opening” sign, my original business plan, and an enormous and wonderful comic book collection. Over the years, I have added to this already impressive collection, and, as of 2015, have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12000 individual works of comics. I approximate because I’ve not yet catalogued my graphic novel and trade paperback collection, nor have I catalogued my magazines. I have, however, catalogued my comic books. I, again as of 2015, sit at 11805 individual works.

But here’s the thing: At a best guess, I’ve read probably only half of them. The other half came from my store, and many are titles and characters that I had absolutely no interest in reading. (So why keep them, you ask? That’s a whole other conversation) But I thought, recently, that it is an extremely unfair assumption to make that these comics, in essence, have nothing to offer me aside from their physical presence in my collection. So I’m going to read them. All.

If you divide 11805 by 365, you get 32.342465753424657534somethingsomethingsomething....

Let’s say 32. That means that, reading one comic a day, I will make it through my collection sometime around my 73^rd birthday. I call this the “40 Years of Comics Project” to account for additions to the collection over that period and the aforementioned uncatalogued collections. The plan at the moment is to read the separate subdivisions of the collection (which I’ll explain one day, I’m sure) in alphabetical order. If that begins to bore me, I might change things up, but this seems the easiest way to keep track right now.

(Of course, thinking of it that way, I realize that every comic published by Archie Comics is filed under the publisher, rather than title, in the collection. Which means I will have a stretch of about a year, pretty soon, of pure Archie comics. Wow.)

What this also means is that, once I start, I’m going to try, really, really try, to post a short blog post about each comic. Look for some of them to be single lines saying something like “Busy day. Archie #603 was good.”

But hopefully sometimes I’ll have something interesting to say. And I’ll try to note whether it’s a comic I’ve read before or not.

So, I can’t ask you to take this ride with me to the end. In a lot of ways, the only person this project is really going to speak to is me, the many mes I will be along the way. But if you want to tag along for a bit, see where I am and what’s going on, maybe it’ll speak to you a little bit too.

Welcome

So, here's the thing. I love comics. All kinds, shapes, and sizes. And I'm going to talk about them here. I'll offer opinions and editorial, appreciations and reviews. I'll apologize in advance if my stuff offends your favourite writer/artist/hero/book/whatever, or if something clashes with your sensibilities. I'm extremely liberal in my views on sex, politics, religion, and other such inflammatory subjects, so in as much as those have to do with comics, I'm sorry if I offend.

In commenting, I'd ask that you keep belligerent behaviour to a minimum. I'm interested in discussion, rather than argument.

I've a few things I'm working on right now to post here. A four-part essay called "Flex Mentallo and the Ages of Comic Books" is in the planning stages. I'm going to start reviewing comic book shops in Southern Ontario (where I'm based), concentrating away from Toronto, and more on the stores in surrounding towns and cities. There'll be "floating features", reviews of comic shows in the area, bargain basement treasures, stuff like that.

While I'm working on new stuff, I'll post a few old pieces.