A Batch of Links

Douglas Wolk reviews an interesting batch of superhero comics in the New York Times.

I'm a sucker for the really early superhero comics. They're like primitive folk art. There's a wonderful, manic incoherence to some of them that I find fascinating. It's like depression-era urban art brut.

Here's a marvelously lurid cover by Jack Cole featuring the Claw, one of the golden age's most diabolical villains.

Origin of Azbezel

Here's a page from the second issue of Weird Thrills, an origin sequence involving the demon lord Azbezel.

I think Neal has outdone himself on this one. I love that foreshortened hand in the last panel.

And check out the skeleton fountain! I want one of those!

This is just one of the delights to be found in the forthcoming Weird Thrills #2.

Click on it to make it big.

The Black Cat

Here are some pages from my adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat.



I'm taking advance orders for this title at my website. Just click on the menu and choose "Powerpop Comics Classics #1" to order single copies. Subscriptions are also available.



The art is by S. M. Vidaurri. He did an phenomonal job.



The book should be ready by mid-March.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Here's a page from Powerpop's forthcoming adaptation of Washington Irving's classic "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

The art is by Tim Durning. His work is amazing. Check out this crowd scene!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" will appear in Powerpop Comics Classics #2. It should be out sometime in May.

Weird Thrills #2

Neal Obermeyer is hard at work on Weird Thrills #2. Here's a weirdly thrilling page from that jolly exciting issue (due out in April).



The book is coming along great. Each page Neal sends me is better than the last.


I'm really (not weirdly) thrilled that Neal has also agreed to do a brief biographical comic about Edgar Allan Poe, to appear in the forthcoming Powerpop Comics #1.

Young Goodman Brown

I'm finally starting to get back the fully-balooned (the book has been lettered for months, but not in proper baloons) pages of my adaptation of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

The art is by Khan Ong.

Conan the Barbarian #10

When we were kids my cousin and I both had big stacks of comics. We used to trade some of them back and forth.

I remember borrowing Conan the Barbarian #10 from him, but having to return it because the pictures in the book terrified me. I was afraid to keep the book in my room at night. It was way too much for a four year old to process.

In retrospect, it's a great story. It contains all sorts of memorable images: there's a giant, anthropomorphic bull-god that somehow manifests out of a pillar of naked human bodies, a public hanging of one of the story's heroes, a shot of a sweaty fat man being squashed to death by the bull-god's red thumb, and a kind of lovely and surreal sequence in which the bull-god's naked (human) torso breaks through a domed roof and stretches his arms to the stars.

The whole thing is brilliantly done, and today it's one of my favorite memories of the comics of my youth. This was part of a great run by the creative team of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. It's one of the high-points of the Conan comic series for me.

Smith's work at this time was not quite fully formed, but it contained the energetic enthusiasms of a young artist on a path of genuine exploration and growth. In a year or so his work would be amazingly lush and gorgeous, but at this point he was just coming into his own as a graphic storyteller.

(The hanging sequence is particulary memorable: it is presented as a series of wordless panels tracking Conan's reactions as his friend's legs kick and dangle from the scaffold above him. It's a pretty powerful sequence, for a sword and sorcery comic.)

A few years later I came across this story again, in a mass market collection of Conan stories. By then I was no longer frightented by the stories macabre or violent elements--indeed, I was entering that phase of male adolescence that finds romance in the violent and macabre.

Today I just admire the vividness of Smith's images, and the flair of his visual storytelling.

Why Comics?

1. For some reason, colorful picture-stories powerfully imprint on impressionable young minds. I caught comics like chicken pox at a very young age, and the virus never left my neurological system.

2. Although they are often vulgar and trashy, there's a powerful energy behind trashy impulses. The products of such have a vigorous, natural vitality.

3. There's something satisfying about the act of viewing marks on paper. There's a lot of great art made in that manner.

4. The repetition of static images in a linear viewing sequence forms a unique non-verbal grammer that has yet to be fully explicated, but it creates an effect that is totally cool.

5. Narrative can gain in both complextiy and velocity with the addition of a visual dimension.

6. Comics require a rigorous formal control that is similar to the discipline of poetry.

That's enough for now. And abstract enough, too. It's getting late.

Sublime Fun

"Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe," from Captain Marvel Adventures #100 (1949), is one of my all-time favorite comics stories. It is goofy, sublime fun of a very high order.

Dr. Sivana is "the world's maddest scientist," and "the greatest enemy of civilization ever known." He is a child-sized, perpetually grinning, bespectacled bald man in a lab coat who vows to wear the crown of "rightful ruler of the universe! " (He actually keeps the crown under a cobweb-festooned glass display, awaiting future use.)

His multifarious schemes for world domination are inevitably foiled by Captain Marvel (whom Sivana likes to call "The Big Red Cheese").

The story involves an attempt to retroactively prevent the origin of Captain Marvel, the kidnap of a talking tiger, a "spider gun" that shoots ropes of liquid plastic, a palace at the top of "The Rock of Eternity," and an army of Sivana clones, who are so obnoxious that the hero gleefully bludgeons and stomps one of them to bits.

This is one of the most pleasantly daft, fun comics I've ever read. It has the simplicity of a folk tale and the logic of a dream.

"Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe" has been reprinted several times. I first read it in Shazam! *from the Forties to the Seventies collection that Crown published in 1977. I think it was also published in one of DC's 100 page giants in the mid-seventies, or maybe in one of their tabloid-sized books; I don't recall exactly which.

It's worth tracking down.

*"Shazam," for those not aquainted with Captain Marvel lore, is the secret word that newsboy Billy Batson would utter to change into Captain Marvel, "the World's Mightiest Mortal." The word is an angagram of the first letters of the names of six heroes of classical antiquity, each representing a specific virtue. They are: Solomon (wisdom), Hercules (strenght), Atlas (stamina), Zeus (power), Achilles (courage) and Mercury (speed).

An American Master

I've been re-reading Charles Schulz's Peanuts strips lately.

Schulz was a genius. His strips have the compression and formal mastery of great poetry.

For almost fifty years the strip appeared in the same format: four panels a day, six days a week (with eight to ten panels on Sunday). Under this severe formal constraint Schulz delivered a series of meditative "gags" that possess acute psychological insight and humane wisdom. And they're funny!

The strips are astonishing in the simplicity of their forms, their narrative inventiveness, their staging, and the sheer elan of their cartooning. Shulz is one of those artists whose visual grammer is so clear you can read it at a glance. It's really exemplary stuff.

Taken as a whole, Peanuts strikes me as a major work of 20th century literary art.