Author Archives: STWALLSKULL

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Learn more about Stwallskull here: http://www.stwallskull.com/blog/?page_id=2

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Big Numbers #3 : April 2nd, 2009

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This has been posted all over the place… with good reason. Black and white xeroxes of the complete third issue of a proposed twelve of Alan Moore’s ambitious but aborted Big Numbers, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Columbia.

INTERESTING LINKS: Viva and Jerry’s Country Music Videos: April 2nd, 2009

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Viva and Jerry are a Minneapolis public access cable phenomenon greatly deserving of wider exposure. Click the image to go experience them, courtesy of the Studio 1020 blog.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Russ Heath’s Brain at Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine : March 5th, 2009

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Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine has a couple of great, over-the-top silly Russ Heath horror tales… The Brain, and its sequel The Return of the Brain. Click the image to go check them out.

INTERESTING LINKS: Jack Kent’s King Aroo to be Reprinted by IDW : March 5th, 2009

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On a thread on comic strip reprints that people wish would happen on The Comics Journal Message Board it was noted that in their Terry and the Pirates V.6 reprint, IDW mentioned they will be doing a reprint of Jack Kent’s wonderful strip King Aroo as part of their increasingly impressive Library of American Comic Strips (along with Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby and Neal Adams’ Ben Casey). This is the first time I have heard this mentioned anywhere. Here are some examples of King Aroo from Cool-Mo-Dee and Cartoon Snap, if you aren’t familiar with it.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Header Strips and More Courtesy of Hogan’s Alley : March 3rd, 2009

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Hogan’s Alley has a wonderful gallery of full-color topper strips courtesy of Bill Blackbeard as a supplement to the latest issue of their always wonderful magazine (#16)…. there are some other great supplements at the link as well, as usual. Topper or header strips, for those who don’t know, are secondary comic strips that used to be published in conjunction with the main strip back when cartoonists were afforded an entire page of a Sunday newspaper to practice their craft on.

Most of these wonderful strips are largely forgotten today, and many are quite wonderful… examples of some of my favorite header strips are featured… Otto Messmer’s Laura (a header of Felix… which they have attributed mistakenly, although understandably, to Felix credit-stealer Pat Sullivan) and Segar’s Sappo (a header of Thimble Theatre) notably. Cliff Sterrett, Billy DeBeck, Rube Goldberg and many other greats are featured as well. There are no examples of Sterrett’s wonderful silent Dot and Dash topper, unfortunately (another of my favorites), but multiple examples of his variously titled marriage-lament topper strips (all headers of Polly and Her Pals).

INTERESTING LINKS: Brian Sibley on View Master Reels : March 3rd, 2009

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Brian Sibley has a nice post on View Master reels with some nice examples of the craft and artistry that went into making them.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Four Color Comics at Cool-Mo-Dee : February 25th, 2009

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Much like the Crosseyed Cyclops I mentioned yesterday, Cool-Mo-Dee has also posted a whole comics collection worth of great old comics. Recently they’ve been doing the world the great service of focusing on one of my favorite series of all time… which is also I believe the longest running (numerically) comic title of all time… Dell’s Four Color series.

Dell licensed and published most of the popular highly recognizable children’s icons of the era that they were in business, and they had most of the best children’s cartoonists working for them (Barks, Kelly, Stanley, and many others) from the 30’s through the 60’s.

I’m not sure how frequently Four Color came out (weekly? bi-monthly?) but the last issue was numbered #1354. It was not a conventional series featuring one character, but a long series of one shots featuring Dell’s huge library of popular licensed characters.

Four Color‘s run includes the first Donald Duck comic and the first Uncle Scrooge comic among other wonderful things… many of the greatest adventure tales of Carl Barks were Four Color one shots. Walt Kelly did a huge body of brilliant non-Pogo work for children in the Four Color books in a number of different titles.

Titles that proved particularly popular were often spun off into their own series, so Four Color was very much a testing ground for Dell as well. The vast majority of the Four Color comics have never been reprinted and probably never will be.

Pictured above is a typically charming cover to a typically charming issue of Raggedy Ann (Four Color #72), which you can download here.

You can read more about the Four Color series on Wikipedia here.

INTERESTING LINKS: Kevin and Zander Cannon Talk about T-Minus at Newsarama: February 25th, 2009

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My good friends Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon have an interview up about their upcoming graphic novel about the space race, T-Minus (written by Jim Ottaviani, who was interviewed earlier) at Newsarama. The interview includes preview images of some of their typically gorgeous pages. Note that this project features space monkeys, so you know you won’t want to miss it.

CRUMBLING PAPER: Winnie Winkle, The Breadwinner (strip #3)

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Here’s another example I scanned of Winnie Winkle, The Breadwinner from 1930 by Martin Branner.

Click the image to view the full strip.

Click here to read more examples of Winnie Winkle at Barnacle Press.

See another Winnie Winkle Sunday strip here.

Click here to read an old article on Martin Branner at the Stripper’s Guide here.

Click here to read Louie the Lawyer by Martin Branner at the Stripper’s Guide here.

Click here to read about Martin Branner at lambiek.net.

Click here to read about Winnie Winkle at Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

See some interesting Winnie Winkle original art here.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : CREEPY and other Comics Magazines at the Crosseyed Cyclops : February 24th, 2009

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The Crosseyed Cyclops blog has a whole comics collection worth of great stuff posted already, but of particular note is their devotion to posting black and white comics magazines of the sixties and seventies. They just posted a huge portion of the run of Creepy (pictured above is the great Jack Davis cover from the first issue). These magazines are particularly hard to collect in my experience due to their non-standard format making them more obscure… many comics shops don’t have magazines in their back-issues (and fewer and fewer comics stores have back issues at all these days… it took me many years of pre-Ebay hunting to find complete sets of Love and Rockets and the lousy Howard the Duck magazine). They also rarely get reprinted, which is probably also due to the non-standard format and the anthology nature of most of them, among other things. There is a lot of wonderful neglected work by many great cartoonists in these things, and a whole lot of it is now available for free thanks to the Crosseyed Cyclops.