The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion. Compiled by Brian M. Kane. Fantagraphics, 2009. $24.99.
I wish I'd written Dan Nadel's post about Prince Valiant, not only because it's a typically erudite Nadel post, but also because I'm a latecomer to Prince Valiant myself. Like Nadel, I'd ignored Hal Foster's knights-and-adventure strip until Fantagraphics remastered, recolored and repackaged the first two years of Valiant (1937-38) into one of the loveliest reprint volumes of 2009. I became a Foster fan immediately, and bought Brian Kane's Definitive Prince Valiant Companion to learn more about Foster and the other talents (John Cullen Murphy, Gary Gianni and Mark Schultz) who'd worked on the comic during its 70+ years. Unfortunately, I can't recommend The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion (abbreviated from here on out as DPV) with any of the same enthusiasm that I would the Prince Valiant reprint project.
A portrait of the blogger as a peddler of the dying medium of text. Photo by Mary Burton Willis. Click to enlarge all images.
I've been away for too long, but don't worry--it's not because I've stopped loving you. It's just been a complicated summer. Really. I'll spare you any blah-blah excuses for my skimpy updates, but I will mention that one event that's kept me busy is the Playhouse Family Music Festival, a Kidstock that my wife Kathy organizes to raise money for her non-profit children's museum. Longtime readers of this blog--all three of you--might remember that I've written about the Music Festival before, because I set up a tent and sold comics and books to the kids who attended last year. (If you'd like to read those earlier posts: here and here.) I called my little book stall "Operation Ramona," after the sublime Ramona Quimby, and the money we made went straight to the Playhouse.
Operation Ramona re-opened for business this year, last weekend. Once again I purged a bunch of old comics from my collection (farewell, Simonson Fantastic Fours and Wolfman-Perez Teen Titans!) and priced them to move at 25 cents each, 5 for a buck. I also dredged from the longboxes some comics I forgot I had, including an unexpectedly rich run of Drake-Premiani Doom Patrols, which I decided to keep for a while longer. I also re-discovered this weird, variant copy of E-Man #2:
The cover is printed on cheap paper, even nastier than the cover stock usually on Charlton comics. Note the "Modern Comics" logo in the upper-left corner: Modern was an offshoot of Charlton that, according to editor George Wildman, was "a merchandising type thing. They would sell them to department stores--Caldor, Wal-Mart, name any chain stores you could think of. And our people didn't have to worry about distribution on these...you buy them outright. Here's how it worked: J.C. Penney would buy 100,000 [copies] from us and they could then advertise 'Buy a T-shirt and get three comics for free.' The comics were used for merchandising." (This quote is from an interview with Wildman in Comic Book Artist #12, and can also be found in Mike Ambrose's piece here.)
Incidentally, I'm keeping this E-Man comic, primarily because it has a Steve Ditko back-up strip about a red-costumed crime fighter named Killjoy who silently beats up some eccentric villains and animals. Even in this 8-page trifle, however, Ditko still manages to squeeze in some of his patented editorializing for the Objectivist cause. Take that, Teamsters!
To get ready for Operation Ramona, I accept book donations from friends and Playhouse supporters, and I also visit garage and estate sales to hunt for cheap piles of children's book that I can resell. Occasionally I'll find something cartoony, like 1958's A Book of Satellites for You, written by Franklyn M. Branley and illustrated by Leonard Kessler. There's not much scientific information in the book--poor Dr. Branley only had four satellites to talk about in 1958, Sputniks I and II (II was Laika's rocket), Explorer I and Vanguard I--but Kessler's pictures are the height of 1950s minimalist space-age kid-cool:
Another Operation Ramona book with nifty cartoon illustrations was The Biggest Dog in the World by accomplished children's artist and Hazel creator Ted Key:
I'm glad to raise money for the Playhouse, but I'm ecstatic to sell books (at a cheap price!) like Key's to kids: Biggest Dog sure beats the hell out of Clifford, and books like it hearken back to a period when commercial illustration and cartoon imagery were more common in American culture, when a playful Jack Cole illustration could be found on cocktail napkins and Thurber was a national hero. The books and comics we read as children and adolescents are the ones we remember all our lives, and if I can introduce at least one kids in this demographic to Key or Kirby, I'm happy.
Photo of Ted Key, from the back cover dust jacket of The Biggest Dog in the World.
Shameless Shill Dep't: My pal Ben Towle and I are again inflicting our love of comics on an unsuspecting North Carolina populace. On Saturday, September 12, at the Bookmarks Book Festival in Winston-Salem, Ben and I--along with cartoonist/retailer Adam Casey, author and webber Ursula Vernon, and scholar Mark West--will convene a panel on various forms of contemporary comics. The schedule is still being tinkered with, and I'll post an update as soon as the time and place of our panel is definite, but here's a description of the panel, written by Ben, to make you curious:
The New Frontier: Graphic Novels, Webcomics and Manga
Comics, narrative combinations of words and pictures, have existed for well over a century, but only recently have they become a formidable presence in mainstream book publishing. Graphic novels (long-form comics narratives) are now reviewed alongside prose works in periodicals like The New York Times Book Review, have been chosen as a Time Magazine's best book of the year, and have even garnered The Guardian's First Book Award. While traditional print newspapers struggle to remain afloat, webcomics--online comic strips and longer serialized online comics stories--are growing ever more popular, with 15,000 titles on the web and counting. Beginning in the mid '90s, Manga (Japanese comics) has become a major force in youth culture in the U.S., and with its success comes an increasing diversity of titles and genres of Manga translated and sold in the American market. Join a panel of cartoonists, scholars and retailers for a discussion of the emerging presence of these three types of comics in today's publishing environment. Guests include:
A cartoonist and retailer, Adam Casey has worked both for specialty comics shops and at general interest book stores.
Dr. Craig Fischer (panel moderator) is a noted comics scholar who's written for critical publications such as The Comics Journal and teaches a Comics and Graphic Novels class at Appalachian State University.
Ben Towle is a cartoonist whose works include graphic novels and comics for various publishers, such as SLG Publishing and Disney/Hyperion.
Ursula Vernon is a prominent webcomics artist, known for her ongoing series Digger as well as the children's book Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew.
Dr. Mark I. West is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte whose recent collection The Japanification of Children's Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki examines Japanese popular culture and its influence on youth culture in the U.S.
See you there?
(Click on pictures below to make them bigger.)
These days, it's easy to get depressed. These days, I can't watch TV news or listen to NPR. I know I should keep up with the latest economic catastrophes, but hearing about mega-corporations collapse while bilking their employees out of 401(K) savings makes me feel like the characters in Akira (1988), as they watch a shapeless blob inflate exponentially and swallow up people in its path. It's a murderous, incomprehensible mess. So I pretend that the blob is further away than it actually is, and I help out my friends--growing in number every day--who have lost their jobs, savings, and insurance plans to the fiscal tsunami. I also remind myself that I'm a lucky person: I've been blessed with great families and friends, and I've got a university job that won't evaporate anytime soon.
What does all this have to do with comics? In all aspects of my life, including my interest in comics, I've benefited from wonderful luck and the generosity of others. It amazes me how often people have given me comics and comics-related material as gifts. A couple of years ago, I was at church, blathering about a comics class I was teaching, when an older member of the congregation named Ben mentioned that he had some old comics that he'd like to pass on to me. Next Sunday, Ben handed me a cardboard box that included original copies of Mad #6 and #9 in tattered condition. He mentioned that his kids had read and re-read these issues, and I was touched by how much these comics were worn out by everyday use, in the Alice Walker sense of the phrase. I can't stand CGC embalmment, and the copy of Thor #172 in my collection--the one defaced by some kid with a marker before I bought it for a buck--never fails to crack me up:
Along with the issues of Mad, Ben's box also contained several issues of Dell's Pogo Possum title from 1951-54. Holy cow, did Walt Kelly draw some charming, gorgeous covers for those comics:
And now I read these comics to my eight-year-old daughter. I turn the pages carefully, so the slightly brittle pages don't tear, and we laugh before she falls asleep.
Lately, I've received some unexpected, generous gifts from Erin Guffey, the manager of my local comic shop, Plan 9 Comics. (Just to avoid future pronoun trouble: Erin's a guy, despite the spelling of his first name.) Erin knows his alt-comix, and when I bought the first volume of Brian Ralph's Daybreak, Erin and I chatted about Ralph's work, Cave-In, and Fort Thunder. The next time I went to Plan 9, Erin, mentioning that he had "doubles," gave me a copy of Ralph's Fireball #7 mini from 1999. The aesthetic is radically different from Pogo, but Ralph's silk-screened cover is equally vibrant:
I buy magazines about art and comics, such as The Comics Journal, Alter Ego and Illustration, at Plan 9, and that's why Erin recently gave me the first two (and, I think, only) issues of John Benson's Panels magazine. Although Panels #1 was published in 1979, and issue #2 in 1981, they're full of articles that remain interesting and important. Most of Panels #1 is comprised of "Art and Commerce: An Oral Reminiscence by Will Eisner," which is probably the most informative interview with Eisner that I've ever read. (A portion of "Art and Commerce" was reprinted in The Comics Journal #267, following Eisner's death in 2005.) "Art and Commerce" is followed by an interview with Jules Feiffer (focusing on his contributions to the Spirit sections), a notorious article by Bill Griffith denouncing the "TITS and MONSTERS and WEREWOLVES" school of underground comix, and various short reviews.
Panels #2 covers much of Carl Barks' career, including blue cartoons Barks drew for the Calgary Eye-Opener, but my favorite feature is Alex Toth's six-page, densely hand-lettered tribute to the art of Jesse Marsh. I'm not a Marsh fan--even Gilbert Hernandez and Adrian Tomine praising his art in the most recent Comic Art failed to change my mind--but I'm nuts for Toth's elegantly calligraphed lettering and his cranky memories of the cartoonists he jostled elbows with:
Look at that lettering--and look at that bird with the nutty beak! Maybe I need to give Marsh another chance...
I wouldn't be the comics fan I am today without one gift in particular. My memories of early childhood are pretty hazy, but I distinctly remember buying and reading my first comic at the tail end of the 1960s; I was born in 1963, so my first encounter with the medium came before I was eight years old. I remember that my first comic was an issue of Superman (or maybe Action). I remember images of Superman lying on his back in a dark pit, with a supervillain--a green man with a piece of Kryptonite in his open chest cavity where his heart should be--hovering menacingly above him. (I don't know what specific issue of Superman or Action this is, and I don't want to know; I remember these images as potent and disturbing, and I'm sure I'd be disappointed by how tame they are in the actual comic.) I started looking for more comics (and more potent images) wherever I went; I plowed through all my friends' collections, and begged my parents to buy me new comics every time we walked into a supermarket or drugstore.
I discovered Marvel Comics, however, and The Fantastic Four, at the worst possible time. The first FF issue I read was #104 (cover-dated November 1970), two months after Jack Kirby had given up the title and "defected" to DC. The penciling in #104 was by John Romita--who by his own admission was not the visionary Kirby was--and I recall wondering if The Fantastic Four was worth my princely 15 cents every month. All this changed about a year later, however, when Gaspar "Gabby" Madonia, a friend of my brother's, saw me reading Fantastic Four #111 ("The Thing Runs Amok!") on my front porch. Gabby mentioned that he had some old Fantastic Fours that he wanted to get rid of, and that he'd drop them off at my house sometime. After school the next day, I went to pal's house to play some street hockey, and then walked home. As I came through the door, my mother, with a huge smile on her face, directed me to our couch, where Gabby had left four stacks of comics, at least a hundred comics--many of which were Fantastic Fours, but there was a healthy sampling of other Marvel titles (Thor, The Avengers, The Silver Surfer) too. I dove into the former Madonia collection, and within a week I was a confirmed Marvel maniac. Jack Kirby was now my favorite cartoonist, comics were now my favorite medium, and my life changed forever. Thanks, Gabby.
To brighten these days of privation--is that a hungry blob I see on the horizon?--I'd love to hear from Thought Balloonists readers about comics-related gifts that enriched their collections and their lives.
Before you begin, please read this earlier TB post first. For those of you too lazy to follow that link: back in June, I wrote about my plan to sell comics to kids at a fundraising event on August 16th. Here's the update on "Operation Ramona."
All summer my kids (my son Nate and daughter Mercer) and I bought children's books at garage and estate sales to build up the stock for our own used book sale. Surprisingly, we also got more batches of comics to sell in addition to the ones I purged from my collection. In late June, a friend (Hi, Robin!) asked if we'd be interested in her son's old Shonen Jump magazines. We took them, figuring that with the popularity of manga these would be excellent sellers. In July, while on vacation in the Adirondack Mountains, I saw an old pal (Hi Karen!) who brought me a present: a batch of recent Marvel comics, mostly issues of Ultimate Spider-Man. Ideal beach reading, but nothing I needed to keep permanently. We also found some fat Garfield paperbacks for next to nothing at a library sale, and a couple of What's Michael? books for a dollar each at a booth in Heroes Con. These went into the sales pile too.
At The Playhouse Family Music Festival, we had a tent decorated with a banner that Nate and Mercer painted, and four tables that we covered with books and comics. This is how our booth looked at the beginning of the day, before 10am, before customers plowed into our stock:
In the last two pictures, you can see some of the new Marvels and the stacks of Shonen Jumps. The studious-looking guy in the blue Illinois shirt is Nate, whose idea of helping me man the booth consisted mainly of reading the chapters of Hikaru No Go serialized in the Jumps.
How did the comics sell? Not nearly as well as paperback books. The fastest movers were a dozen beat-up Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events paperbacks, all of which were gone in the first five minutes. Other highly regarded chapter books for kids--Louis Sachar's Holes, Richard Peck's A Year Down Yonder, Judy Blume's Superfudge, two copies of Thomas Rockwell's How to Eat Fried Worms--went quickly too. We didn't sell a single comic in the first hour, and in fact one mother told her son to "only look at the books, and not at the comics." My dream of peddling cheap comics to kids who love (or would learn to love) the medium was dying.
Perhaps predictably, nostalgic adults were some of the people most excited about the comics. One guy with John Lennon glasses and long brown/gray hair was savvy enough to recognize some of rarer floppies on our tables; he bought two original issues of Jack Kirby's Jimmy Olsen, and chatted a bit about John Byrne's Fantastic Four run. A middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard bought several Marvel's Greatest Comics Lee-Kirby FF reprints, while an acquaintance of mine, journalist and horror author Scott Nicholson, bought a bunch of Thors. On his website, Scott has a fine essay about writing pulp literature, so we had a conversation that touched on the "disposability" of the comic book floppy format and the resurgence of the post-war hard-boiled aesthetic, particularly in the Hard Case Crime books.
In the afternoon, I had better luck putting comics into younger hands. One little boy was desperate for anything related to Spider-Man, and I was overjoyed to sell him an issue of Marvel Tales with an ace Ditko cover and story inside:
Another kid was looking for X-Men comics, and I found him a high-quality reprint of X-Men #1. Two pre-teen girls cleaned me out of Yeahs and Archies, and a boy named Landrum, a classmate of my daughter's, initially bought two Little Vampire books (the Simon and Schuster editions, recently collected in the First Second Little Vampire volume), and then returned over and over again, holding money in his hands undoubtedly begged from his parents, to buy more comics. At the end of the day, Landrum came back one final time and asked, "Are you going to be here next year?"
I think so. We raised over $250 dollars selling books and comics for the Playhouse; I revisited, in a weird way, the days when comics were a quarter; and I saw several kids reading comics while sitting under trees. That's a bucolic image I want to see again next year. My only regret is that we sold only one issue of Shonen Jump all day, so now I've got a box of telephone-book manga digests in my closet waiting for Operation Ramona's second year. So much for more closet space...
Bear with me. I eventually mention comic books in this post, honest.
My wife Kathy Parham is the Executive Director (and one of the founders) of the Children's Playhouse, an art space for preschoolers in our home town of Boone, North Carolina. The Playhouse is a children's museum where kids go to paint pictures, mold clay, make a mess, and participate in storytimes and special programs.
My involvement in the Playhouse is usually limited to taking care of our kids (Nate, 11, and Mercer, 7) when Kath has a nighttime board meeting, but I'm proud of the work she does. The Playhouse is important for the same reason libraries and public swimming pools are important: civic spaces like these defy the tendency towards isolation and "cocooning" in American culture. The Playhouse gives bored parents and bored kids a place to get together with friends and have fun. Recently, Kathy told me about two Chinese immigrants, a little boy and his grandfather, who come to the Playhouse even though neither of them speaks English. About two weeks ago, the grandfather was talking to his grandson in Cantonese, when another adult who happened to be at the Playhouse at the time, an American mother with her son, interrupted their conversation with a few sentences in Cantonese herself. The grandfather was overjoyed to find someone in Boone (a small town in Appalachia) who spoke his language, and the adults chatted for a while before exchanging phone numbers. The Playhouse is indispensable because it builds social capital by encouraging connections like these.
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