Thanks to Sinous on the Comics Journal message board, the biggest omission to the Wertham Library has been found. He points us to two different locations on the web that you can read Dr. Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent… here and here.
This week was Banned Books Week. I decided to celebrate by seeing how many of the comics featured in Fredric Wertham‘s notorious book Seduction of the Innocent I could find floating out on the internet to share with the world in one convenient location.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE DOWNLOAD PAGE.
Wertham’s writings on comic books were very influential in the senatorial investigation into juvenile delinquency in 1953, and Seduction of the Innocent went on to become a best-seller, outraging parents across the nation.
We got another review for BIG FUNNY today, from Susannah Schouweiler at minnpost.com.
As I look through “The Big Funny,” it strikes me that this collective elegy for the newspaper comic strip intends more than mere nostalgia for a fading form; its artists are sounding an impassioned call to action, too, aimed at both readers and artists who love the medium. “Let us not mourn the death of the newspaper comics,” the editors write, “rather, let us have a wake to celebrate what they once were, and to perhaps build something new.”
Note that if you are in the Twin Cities, the show is up until the 29th… and if you are not in the Twin Cities, you can order a copy online here.
ALTERED ESTHETICS
1224 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413
SHOW RUNS AUGUST 7-29, 2009
GALLERY HOURS:
TUESDAY & THURSDAY 1pm-7pm, SATURDAY 1pm-5pm
I’ve recently realized (and you have probably noticed if you follow this blog) that I can no longer keep up with the kind of thoroughly obsessive-compulsive linkblogging that I managed to provide for about a year-and-a-half… which was a pretty insane thing to even attempt to provide in retrospect… it almost drove me mad! There is simply too much wonder and novelty out there to even attempt share it all with you anymore. It was a good run! Hope you will stay with me, nevertheless.
So, anyhow, my HEY! KIDS! COMICS! and Interesting Links posts will no longer provide enormous lists of things for you to check out… they will simply be links to occasional random things that I feel like blathering on about.
For those of you who check out my blog for the express purpose of checking out the huge lists of links that I am no longer providing… here is an opml file of the sites I currently subscribe to for comic scans. If you use this to subscribe to them all, you will get much the same thing as what I used to provide here in those posts. In addition, here are some individual links to RSS feeds (rather than the sites) for the blogs I have been regularly linking to. If you are not currently following blogs with a newsreader, you should really consider looking into it… I highly recommend Google Reader for this purpose.
SUBSCRIPTION FEEDS OF STWALLSKULL’S TOP SIXTEEN BLOGS FOR COMIC SCANS:
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog
Barnacle Press
Comicrazys
Cool-Mo-Dee
Fortress Of Fortitude
Golden Age Comic Book Stories
Hairy Green Eyeball (recently moved here)
I Love Comix
Mark Kausler’s CatBlog
Nedor-A-Day
Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine
Stripper’s Guide
The Crosseyed Cyclops
THE HORRORS OF IT ALL
Those Fabuleous Fifties
Yesterday’s Papers
SUBSCRIPTION FEEDS OF STWALLSKULL’S BIG LIST OF COMIC SCAN BLOGS (also available in OPML download):
Again With the Comics
Agence eureka
Alternative ComiX
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog
Barnacle Press
Bear Alley
Beautiful Balloons with Maggie Thompson
Behind the counter comics
Blimey! It’s another blog about comics!
Cartoon SNAP
Cartoons, Model Sheets & Stuff
Classic Cartoons
Cole’s Comics
Comic Book Resources Presents… Comics Should Be Good!
Comic Books Are Interesting Except When They Are Not Interesting
Comic Strip Library News
Comicrazys
Comics Down Under
Comics en extinción
Comics Scans: Where Comics Are Scanned
Cool-Mo-Dee
Covered
cul de sac
Cul de Sac – GoComics.com
Daily Scans
datajunkie
Dickie Dare by Milton Caniff
Diversions of the Groovy Kind
Dr Hermes Retro-Scans
Drex Files
Easily Mused
Electric Cabinet
Ethan Persoff
Filboid Studge
Fortress Of Fortitude
Freshman for Life
Geeklog Site: Oddball Comics
Golden Age Comic Book Stories
Golden Reading
Goofbutton
Hairy Green Eyeball (recently moved here)
headsOnBoards in Joyville
Henry Comics
I Love Comix
I Love Comix – Abbie Slats
I Love Comix – Blondie
I Love Comix – Buck Rogers
I Love Comix – Buz Sawyer
I Love Comix – Freckles and Friends
I Love Comix – Kerry Drake
I Love Comix – Mickey Finn
I Love Comix – Moon Mullins
I Love Comix – Mr Punch
I Love Comix – Nancy
I Love Comix – Private Breger Abroad
I Love Comix – Red Ryder
I Love Comix – The Newfangles (Mom ‘n Pop)
I Love Comix – Winnie Winkle
ILLUSTRATION ART
Latigo by Stan Lynde
Looky
lowbright
Magic Carpet Burn
Male Call by Milton Caniff
Mandrake The Magician
Mark Kausler’s CatBlog
Mattias Inks
Misce-Looney-ous
Nedor-A-Day
Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine
Peripecias de Chiquirritipis
Peter Gray’s Cartoons and Comics
Photos from featherbed
Pogo In Pandemonia
Popeye Animator ID
Punch in Canada
Ramapith: David Gerstein’s Prehistoric Pop Culture Blog
Rodney Bowcock’s Comics & Stories
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities
Scans Daily
SCREW Magazine Cover Art
Sekvenskonst
Sequential Crush
Simon and Kirby – Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center
Spectorphile
Stanley Stories
Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff
Storyboards & Comps dot Com
Stripper’s Guide
Sweater Thieves
TAGTOONZ
ThadBlog
The Barnacle Blog
The Comic Book Catacombs
The Crib Sheet
The Crosseyed Cyclops
The Greatest Ape
The Harvey Kurtzman Collection
THE HORRORS OF IT ALL
The Magic Whistle
The Olden Age
The Pictorial Arts
Those Fabuleous Fifties
Thrilling Adventures!
Today’s Inspiration
TOMB IT MAY CONCERN – David Zuzelo Scribbles on Mangled Media!
Top Shelf 2.0 Webcomics
Töpfferiana
Uncle Ernie’s Creature Ink
Uncle John’s Crazy Town
Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves
Vintage Story Books
Viñetas
What once was, once again Is!
Yesterday’s Papers
Yesterday’s Papers
Yesterday’s Papers Archive
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:
My friend Tim Sievert (author of the wonderful graphic novel That Salty Air) has an excerpt of his fun adventure comic The Intrepideers featured today in a 9-page excerpt on the topshelfcomix.com site.
TODAY’S FEATURED LINK:
My good friend Danno (aka Staplegenius aka Dank) has recently started a blog at staplegenius.com that he is posting his hilarious comics to on a daily basis. Danno is one of the fastest and funniest cartoonists I know, so hopefully he will keep up the pace! He is currently serializing his comics series Manly Tales of Cowardice, featuring Fleming Hazmat… go check it out!
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:
The Crosseyed Cyclops has a big stack of issues of DC’s series The Fox and the Crow available here. The series was based on characters created by Frank Tashlin for Columbia’s Screen Gems cartoon series (you can see some of the cartoons here).
Fox and Crow started their comic book career in the pages of DC’s Real Screen Funnies, but were popular enough to eventually graduate to their own series, which ran until 1968.
In spite of their popularity they are mostly forgotten today… which is a shame, because their comics (and cartoons) are usually wonderfully executed and frequently hilarious. I don’t know much about the creative teams on these books, but Don Markstein’s Toonopedia credits them primarily to artist Jim Davis (obviously not the Jim Davis of Garfield fame) and writers Hubie Karp and Cecil Beard.
Read more about Fox and Crow on Wikipedia.
Read more about Fox and Crow at Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:
Another great issue of Four Color from Cool-Mo-Dee… Walt Kelly’s Brownies. I posted a link to another issue of Brownies that Cool-Mo-Dee posted the other day as well. Walt Kelly is easily one of my top ten favorite cartoonists of all time… he is endlessly inventive, uproariously funny, and his drawings are always gorgeous. His skill at character development and dialogue is unsurpassed in comics.
In spite of his popularity, very little of his non-Pogo work has been reprinted. I’m optimistic this might change soon for some reason… partially because there are two thick books of children’s comics coming out soon that will inevitably dazzle people’s eyes right out of their sockets.
One is edited is edited by Craig Yoe and is called Golden Treasury of Krazy Kool Klassic Kids’ Komics and one is edited by Art Spiegeman and Francoise Mouly called The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics.
The books are going to feature a LOT of wonderful neglected childrens’ comics by a LOT of great cartoonists… in addition to Walt Kelly: Carl Barks, John Stanley, Sheldon Mayer, Basil Wolverton, George Carlson, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Frank Frazetta, Dr. Seuss, Syd Hoff, Jules Feiffer, Dan DeCarlo, and presumably a lot more. Since Kelly is one of the best, and has an enormous body of work for children that has never been reprinted, I hope it inspires a complete reprinting of this work over the coming years.
Note that in addition to having an eagerly-awaited complete Pogo reprinting in the works, Fantagraphics books has also been reprinting Kelly’s wonderful Our Gang comics (3 volumes released so far and a fourth on the way). This is currently the only Kelly work other than Pogo in print. Let’s hope that changes soon.
Click the Brownies cover above to go download the comic book. Kelly also had some of the most consistently beautifully colored covers on his comic books.
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:
Dumbo’s Sky Voyage is not the best comic on the list below… heck, it isn’t even close to being the best issue of Dell’s Four Color series on the list below (I mean, Carl Barks classic tales Lost in the Andes and Voodoo Hoodoo are down there! It doesn’t get any better than that! Why am I talking about Dumbo?).
I speak to you about it solely because I read my copy of it to my daughter the other week.
Even bad issues of Four Color (and this is a pretty bad one) are pretty entertaining. Dumbo is one of my favorite Disney cartoons, but this doesn’t preserve much of its charm. Dumbo talks in this comic (he’s silent in the movie), and his entertaining sidekick Timothy the Mouse is nowhere to be seen. Strangely, although Timothy and all other characters from Dumbo are completely absent, Doc from the Seven Dwarfs shows up (tangent: why is it dwarfs instead of dwarves when these imps are mentioned, anyhow?)… all Disney characters apparently living in the same shared Disneyverse. Needless to say, continuity was never a concern in the old Disney comics (at least not until Don Rosa’s excellent take on the Disney ducks). I think there was at least one other random Disney character that showed up somewhere in it… damned if I can remember at this point, and it takes too long to download and find out. My memory is lousy anyhow, and this is not a memorable comic. Kind of fun, though, and I’m a sucker for about any issue of Four Color. So, I liked it. But I can’t really recommend it! Maybe you just like old Dell comics like I do… you can download it by clicking the image above.
Don’t miss those Carl Barks comics, though! Square eggs!!!
Donald Duck in Lost in the Andes
Donald Duck in Voodoo Hoodoo
TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:
The reliably incredible ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive blog posts a bunch of jaw-droppingly gorgeous, detailed Sundays by Dudley Fisher from his strip Right Around Home. Go ogle them here.
