STWALLSKULL

Amusements, diversions, whirligigs, geegaws, humbugs and comics, comics, comics.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Dynamic Boy at Pappy’s : April 24th, 2009

Posted on April 24, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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I could recommend a lot of good stuff from the below list (like Walt Kelly’s wonderful take on Disney’s Three Caballeros)… but today I will instead I will call your attention to this glorious train-wreck of a “Dynamic Boy” story at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. Clearly, I should not be trusted.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis Cover : April 16th, 2009

Posted on April 16, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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The cover to Robert Crumb’s much-awaited new Book of Genesis, called to my attention courtesy of cartoonist Cat Garza at The Magic Inkwell… go there to see it at a larger size.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Local Hero Kevin Cannon on 288-Hour Comics at Powell’s Blog : April 15th, 2009

Posted on April 15, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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Local hero, Kevin Cannon has posted a hilarious account of his attempt at the 288-Hour comic that resulted in his soon-to-be-bestseller from Top Shelf Far Arden (shipping next month!). I have a guest-starring role in the strip… and if you were ever at a Minneapolis 24-Hour Comics Day event, you may be in there too… Go read it here!

Note:

Far Arden is still here online… reading a few pages of it will make you ache for next month when you can buy the Top Shelf book.

If you want to read my introduction to the self-published first edition of Far Arden, you can read it here.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein at The Greatest Ape : April 3rd, 2009

Posted on April 3, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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The Greatest Ape has been posting examples of Dick Briefer’s charming Frankenstein humor comics recently here, here and here. Additionally, I recently linked to Again With the Comics when they posted a comparison between Briefer’s funny take and his scary take on Frankenstein, so you might want to check that out too. Also note… I haven’t seen a copy yet, but there was recently a book collection made of Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein work called The Monster of Frankenstein (note that it is not complete, and only includes his horror take rather than his humor take on Frankenstein, apparently).

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

Posted on April 2, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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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.

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

Posted on March 5, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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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.

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

Posted on March 3, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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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).

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

Posted on February 25, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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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.

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

Posted on February 24, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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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.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Michael Furious’ DOGS : February 23rd, 2009

Posted on February 23, 2009 by STWALLSKULL

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My friend Michael Furious has started a fun project online called DOGS that he is hoping to fuel with some audience participation. He is going to base what happens in the comic on comments received from the audience as to where they think the story should go.

That man can draw! The easiest way to view it is as a Flickr slideshow here. Do yourself a favor, go check it out, and then give him some feedback on where you think the story should go.

Here are the rules to participate.

Here is the spiel from Michael…

Iâ€™d like to invite everyone to participate in a comic experiment Iâ€™ve just started, called Dogs.

The idea is based a little off of some meditations on Charles Dickens public readings, the nature of the internet, and just wanting to have a little fun. The comic is not.

So what Iâ€™ve done is draw the first 27 pages of story, which provides a cast of characters, a setting, and several possible plot devices and hooks. The hope is that you, the reader, will drop by and leave comments. Who you think is who. What you think is what. What will happen next? And so on.

Then I draw more pages of story and around and around it goes.

The full â€œrulesâ€, and story, are here.

(I know, I know. LJ is made of blinking lights and fail. So is my knowledge of code.)

You can also find it here.

A sample page: