Spooky Weird Thrills #2 Page

Here's another great page by Neal Obermeyer from the forthcoming Weird Thrills #2. 

Neal has just completed the artwork for this issue, and his work is stellar throughout. 

I'm really excited about WT#2, because it's the best old-fashioned adventure-comic writing I've done yet, and Neal has totally exceeded my (already high) expectations with his phenomenal artwork. 

This issue is both weirder and more thrilling than the first, and there's lots more where that came from. 

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

More Sleepy Hollow

Here's another page of Tim Durning's from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

Tim's handling of light is, again, wonderful. I love the way he captures the subtle gradations of light on the chalk-board.

The picture of Ichabod Crane reading the letter is great as well. What a charming, expressive drawing: the slight incline of his head; the glasses resting on the tip of his nose; the little smile that plays at the corner of his lips; that enormous ear sprouting above a thatch of muttonchop. 

Good stuff.

Sensation Comics #1

In 1974 Lyle Stuart, Inc. of Secaucus, New Jersey published a tabloid-sized hardcover reprint of Sensation Comics #1.

I found a copy in a gift shop at Sea World in Orlando Florida in 1976 and bought it for $5.00. 

I must have read this book a hundred times. I carried it with me everywhere I went that summer. For years afterward I'd dig it out and re-read it. 

Sensation Comics #1 was originally published in January, 1942 by J.R. Publishing Company, Lafayette Street, New York, NY (the company had not yet consolidated itself under the name of DC Comics). 

The book is 64 pages long, with six stories between 4 to 13 pages, each featuring different adventure-oriented characters. 

The most famous and enduring of these characters is Wonder Woman. The others are mostly second-string superheroes, with a couple period-drama swashbucklers thrown in for a bit of dash.

It's a charming book, full of crude but invigorating art and story. Maybe someday I'll re-read it and see if I can still find the magic in it.

Because it is about magic. Comics are just one of its talismanic props.

A Day at the Races

Here's a preliminary sketch of a page by Tim Durning from the upcoming Powerpop Comics Classics adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

Tim's an amazing artist. I love the way he handles the lighting effects. I also love how he draws horses.

We are nearing the climactic chase scene, and I can't wait to see it.

When you think about it, comics and horse-chases just go together.

Comics excel at depicting the movement of physical bodies in space. That's why superheroes and slapstick both work so well in the form.

Horses are these beautiful, athletic, well-muscled creatures with enormous physical grace and power--nature's superheroes, if you will.

If I accomplish nothing else with Powerpop Comics, at least I managed to bring back the classical horse-chase scene. Comics needs more horse-chases!

Here are some after pictures of my newly rearranged comics library. Not only am I able to access the books, I can now shelve them vertically, rather than horizontally. 

It's a small thing, but it really makes a big difference. 

I have a pretty diverse collection of books: classic newspaper strips, cartoon collections, golden age reprints, contemporary comics, and lots of books about the form and its practitioners. 

My plan over the coming weeks is to read (or in many cases re-read) these things and use them as fodder for this blog. 

Stay tuned.

 

Spring Cleaning

I decided to rearrange the comics section of my office/library. What follows is a photographic record of this fun-filled project. 

Here are a few "before" pictures.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the idea of documenting this process until after I had unpacked the bookcase on the left, so I took a photo of the books piled on the floor, just to give an idea of the sheer mass of the things. 

This is the corner of my library wherein my comics collection resides. As you can see, it's a bit cramped. There are two bookcases--one prefab and one I built myself--housing my graphic novels, cartoon collections, and comics-related prose. Unfortunately, the long boxes in front of them render half the collection inaccessible. 

My plan is to move the shelves perpendicular to the door and the long boxes behind them, hopefully making the room more functional and less cluttered. 

I'll keep you posted of my progress.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Borges once said, "Books are incantations uttered in the dreams."

He said this to me, in a dream; so take it with a grain of salt. Still, even as a figment of my own sleeping mind, when an artist of Borges' stature makes such a pronouncement, I take it seriously.

Dreams are certainly powerful and inscrutable psychic mechanisms of some sort. Think of how "Across the Universe" came to Lennon and "Scrambled Eggs"* to McCartney in dreams. Or the visionary fragment of "Kubla Khan" that Coleridge was able to snatch from a dream. I'm sure the night-mind has spawned countless works of art over the ages.

I've written a lot--entire books, actually-- in the midst of hypnagogic reveries. A vastly different version of Weird Thrills actually came to me in its entirety, pages speeding past my attention like a flip book, while I half-dozed in the grip of a fever. This has been an area of particular interest to me, thoughout my writing "career." Powerpop Comics was, in fact, originally called Hypnogogix.

I think of comics as being uniquely close to the the sub- and/or unconscious mind. I dunno if it's something to do with the right/left brain engagement required, or what. For some reason, the cognitive geography where comics are located seems very close to the region of dreams.

I think the content of comics has always reflected this. You have this improvised gallery of gods and demiurges, tricksters, monsters and grotesqueries of all kinds, seeming sprung fully formed from the collective unconscious. I mean--Superman! What could be more mythic and elemental than that?

I find this landscape peculiarly congenial to my tastes and preoccupations. This is where I stake my own ground, I suppose: in the wild, unmapped landscaped of the human mind as it dissolves itself in mythic reveries.

*I insist upon using the original title for the tune to honor the composer's unconscious intentions. Besides, I think if you really analyze the song, it is about scrambled eggs after all.