Four Color Comics

Rhonda called this morning. “There’s a garage sale near me where a guy is selling old comic books. They’re from the seventies. You might want to come take a look.”

I did want to take a look, though I knew it was dangerous business. One key to managing your money is to avoid temptation. It’s foolish to purposefully put yourself into a position where you’re likely to spend.

And yet I drove to the garage sale to look at the comics books.

I’ve collected comics since I was a boy. I used to collect the actual magazines, buying them at grocery stores and bookshops. I grew out of them in high school, and in 1989 I sold my entire collection for $100 to a comic book store near my university. I needed the money to take a girlfriend on an expensive date. (The collection I sold included many fine runs, including all of Miller Daredevil, most of the “new” X-Men, all of Marvel Star Wars — basically all the cool stuff from the late seventies and early eighties when I had been actively collecting.)

Most garage sale comics are woefully overpriced. People ask $5 for a common-as-dirt mid-nineties Batman, for example. Nobody’s going to pay that. But the garage sale I drove to today was different. The seller had two boxes of mid-seventies Marvel comics, all of which were priced at about $2 an issue.

He had Amazing Spider-Man from about 115-145. He had Fantastic Four from about 130-160. He had Incredible Hulk from about 180-200. He had various issues of Avengers, X-Men, Captain America, and Daredevil. There was a lot of great stuff here, and two years ago I would have offered $100 for as much as the seller would let me take.

I didn’t do that today. Today I leafed through both boxes, thanked the man, and left. Why? Two reasons:

1. I no longer collect the comic magazines themselves. I collect comic compilations.
2. I’m a better money manager than I was two years ago.

Would I have liked to have these comics? Absolutely. They would be great fun to read, especially since most won’t be collected in reprint volumes for another five or ten years, if ever. But I can’t keep up with the comics I buy currently. I’m thinking of cutting back to collecting only comic strip compilations. And there are other things I’d like buy with that money. (MacBook Pro, anyone?)

In the end, I only spent a few dollars in gas to drive to the sale and back: a victory for the new frugal J.D., but a defeat for collector J.D.

BeaucoupKevin has posted a parody of Watchmen. Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating Watchmen is just what it sounds like: a re-imagining of this landmark comic as if it had been created by Stan the Man. Read all four parts:

• “And lo, there shall toll a bell…of freedom!”
• “By Veidt &dmash; betrayed?!?“
• “Now strikes…communism!”
• “Whence comes the Watchmen?”

Though funny, this could have been better. I’ve been reading BeaucoupKevin for a while, and I’ve never felt it’s risen above mildly amusing, which is too bad because I think a lot of it could be truly hilarious.

I went last month with my brother Andy to the recently closed Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It seemed like we were going to have to skip it due to too tight scheduling, but we let everything else go and took the hour-plus drive up to Milwaukee to see it, and I’m so glad we did. The exhibit will be opening in two separate (but equal) pieces September 15^th at the Jewish Museum in New York & the Newark Museum (unsurprisingly) in Newark. I highly recommend a look-see if at all possible…

As classy and sophisticated as I like to pretend to be, I generally do not overly enjoy museum exhibits. This is not a matter of not liking art (which I genuinely do), or modern art (which I certainly want to and believe I do), or hushed public places (which I absolutely do, having worked in a library for approximately 5 years of my life). My problem is more something to do with personal versus public pacing. First of all, I rarely, if ever, find myself at an exhibit by myself, so I am, to a certain extent, at the whim of whoever I am with as far as time spent at the gallery. Of course, parties must split up some or all the time when exploring a museum, based on personal interests, but falling two or three rooms behind (or ahead) makes for an awkward museum experience. Then there is also the timing interaction with complete strangers. If I take too much (or too little) chin-stroking time at piece after piece I am constantly having to dosado with complete strangers to get the experience I want out of the exhibit. Going into this exhibit, in particular, I thought this would be a serious concern, because all of the pieces were comic strips, a very personal medium, almost always experienced at ones own pace (except for the times when your dad has presented you with the funny pages, demanding that you give Shoe a really good read and he stares at you grinning gape-mouthed, quietly laughing and waiting for you to get to the line).

As I entered the special exhibit hall in Milwaukee’s beautiful art museum on the lake, this problem of pacing started creeping up. As I began getting impatient with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Rarebit Fiend, both of which consist exclusively of characters experiencing strange dream scenarios that become more and more bizarre until the protagonist awakens in the bottom right frame, safe and sound in bed – in Nemo’s case fallen off the bed, and in the rarebit fiend’s promising never again to partake in a midnight snack. Particularly in the case of these earliest strips, the humor seemed antiquated and the strips validity doubtful. I found myself wondering if anyone had ever found such clichés funny, and even if these were what the clichés had come from, why anyone would have ever read more than two or three of them. Then I think of my dad, who watches countless reruns of Becker on late-night TV and can find nothing humorous at all in the SNL “More Cowbell” skit they play before the bottom of the 9^th at Milwaukee Brewers games.

As I slowly started to settle into the pacing of the show (and letting myself occasionally, or not so occasionally completely block out people’s views of exhibits, because I needed to spend more time reading the entire strips) I began to find a lot of what I was hoping to find in the exhibit, namely, fine art in the comic strip. This is not to say that I hadn’t found this before, or that this was necessarily the way to experience it, but what the exhibit provides, is a wonderfully complimentary showing of a handful of early great comic artists.

The exhibit commentary (most of which was written, I believe, by co-curators John Carlin and Brian Walker) is simultaneously helpful and belittling for an understanding of comic art. It seems that the commentary provided for particularly the early comic artists is only thought of in terms of other art forms, rather than commented on in their own right. Therfore, Winsor McCay is called the D.W. Griffith of comics, because he was among the first to find the ability to think outside the frame and Milton Caniff (artist & author of Steve Canyon, among others) the Alfred Hitchcock. The curators only seem to be able to discuss (particularly) these early cartoonists in terms of the media of either film or fine art (that is, painting or drawing). The discussion of the complex blending of word and image is not a concept to be found in this exhibit, but a worthy exhibit it is, nonetheless.

I found myself gaping slowly past Will Eisner’s The Spirit, Caniff’s Steve Canyon, and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, enjoying the strips not so much for the actual content, but for their place in a longer line of the tradition of the comic strip. Approaching any of these works separately (even Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, a strip I’ve long known is an important part of the history, but have never personally appreciated until seeing it placed in this show) I might have overlooked the noticeable progression in the art form, the way in which each artist built off the last, and importantly progressed from it.

Seeing artists’ works I’d long known and loved, such as Schulz’ Peanuts (which rightfully already has it’s own museum in Santa Rosa, CA), George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Jack Kirby’s Captain America or early Avengers works placed (art) historically amongst artists I didn’t know (or appreciate) as well gave me leverage not only into the works of these new artists, but also a better understanding of the one’s I’d known all along. The exhibit is especially well presented in its presentation of the progression of the art form. The text that accompanies the works is particularly insightful in its thoughts about how quickly the art form had to progress, from its classic form, to the modern and into the postmodern. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Carlin and Walker so often discuss their exhibit in terms of the other media developing alongside it.

I believe it is with the most recent strips that the exhibit does its best work. Not only does the exhibit succeed in placing postmodern cartoonists, such as Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Gary Panter, rightfully in their place as the next generation of these great cartoonists, but it also poses interesting questions about where the art form is going. The work of the most recent artists incorporates the work of earlier cartoonists in the exhibit. Sometimes this happens explicitly (as in Spiegelman’s taking actual Steve Canyon images and feverishly replaying and layering them through the course of a strip) and other times through the influences of earlier artists (such as the echoes of Harvey Kurtzman and R. Crumb found in Panter).

All in all, the exhibit is fascinating and illuminating. It goes a long way in bringing the comic art into its own rightful spot in art history and hopefully exposes a new audience to an alternative art form it might have previously overlooked.

I’m using this space as a sandbox for creating new features for Get Rich Slowly. Yes, I know that’s unfair to Four Color Comics. And yes, I know that I’m doing a very poor job of maintaining this site. I’m a bad man.

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• Ye Olde Comick Booke Blogge >> Who Still Wants to be a Superhero?
  A great summary of the second episode. I haven’t seen any of this yet, but this makes me want to download the first eps and keep an eye out for the rest of the show.
  (tags: television stanlee real-life)

• Walt and Skeezix: An Appreciation
  “By time I read the last strip I was disappointed that I would have to wait another year to read about these characters and their lives. What I thought was mundane at the beginning was really my unwillingness to let things unravel at a natural and normal
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The Walking Dead (Vol. #1-4)
Image Comics
Reviewed by : Seeger
Reviewer’s Grade : C-

When my set of all four volumes (thus far) of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead first arrived from amazon.com I was positively giddy. I’d heard nothing but good things (from reviews that evidently were written by his mother) and was thinking I was coming into a world of Romero-level zombie thought in this exciting new series.

BUT, instead, what I found was a cliché-ridden work of zombie survivor fiction that’s been told too many times, and always in the same way. Kirkman does not help his cause in the introduction to Volume 1 when he writes:

“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy character and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.”

Even casual fans of zombie films and literature see such societal critiques at work, but for Kirkman to explicitly make such a blatant statement in the introduction to his first volume bodes ill for the whole run and is a sign of what’s to come. Kirkman suffers from over-writing and an often painful lack of subtlety, a trait shared by artists Tony Moore (Vol 1.) and Charlie Adlard (Vols. 2-4).

The story traces police officer Rick Grimes who awakens from a coma in an empty hospital some days (28 perhaps?) after the zombie necropalypse has hit earth. We follow Grimes as he heads home, discovering his old neighborhood mostly abandoned and slowly discovering the new world order. Through contrived conversations with another survivor and a horse we learn about his wife and child (which we also found out about several panels earlier in the artwork), who he leaves town to try and find.

Kirkman shows disrespect to his readers by having to spell out every notion in words. He seems to not trust his artists, who in turn seem not to trust him (using the most extreme ‘surprised’, ‘angry’, ‘sad’ looks in any frame they want to express emotion).

Some of his frames are so full of words there’s almost no room for characters to walk around in them. When his characters fight, their dialogue feels like an 8-year-old at play: “I’m going to blow your head off” says one survivor to another at one point, presumably before she is about to blow someone’s head off.

With all its negatives, though, the most frustrating thing about The Walking Dead is its amazing potential. The artwork, when it’s not painfully obvious, is quality black and white, which adds to the bleakness of the world the characters inhabit. The covers, all done by Tony Moore are beautiful, if a bit repetitive and the splash pages, few and far between are used very effectively. The Walking Dead is at its best when Grimes is wandering alone and there are two or three wordless pages in a row, capturing the voiceless zombie threat more perfectly than any conversation can, but Kirkman again finds a way to spoil many of these with a speech bubble filled only with “…”.

Kirkman is asking very interesting questions about humans living in extreme circumstances, I just wish he could sometimes avoid asking them right out loud.

Here’s a great 20-second clip of silent film featuring Frank King drawing his strip, Gasoline Alley.