Steve Bunche got a bunch of old comics collections from a neighbor and found some gems, including several Pogo books and a copy of BACKSTAGE FROM THE STRIPS. Unbelievably, the above strip is from 1970. Bunche explains.

But the main reason why I’m happy to have received BACKSTAGE AT THE STRIPS is that it contains a strip I never forgot since I first saw it in there three decades ago, namely the following unbelievable DENNIS THE MENACE daily from 1970, and not 1917.

Yes, this actually ran nationwide in 1970, which beggars the question of just how out of touch creator Hank Ketcham was. Were the 1960’s something that didn’t happen for him? Whatever the case, the Cleveland Press printed this apology the day after the strip ran, printing it in place of what would have been that day’s DENNIS THE MENACE installment:

Yesterday’s DENNIS THE MENACE cartoon offended a number of Press readers. The Press apologizes for the affront caused by the cartoonist. It assures subscribers that such a thing will not happen again.

What truly amazes me about it is that I don’t think Ketcham actually meant any harm and just didn’t know any better. DENNIS THE MENACE always kind of existed in a 1950’s-style, suburbia-that-never-was OZZIE AND HARRIET universe of bland (though very well drawn) blandness that was informed by generations of outdated humor, and the depiction of the kid as a Sambo stereotype was just a part of the once-accepted visual language. Too bad Ketcham apparently hadn’t payed attention to social advances and depictions of us “race” types since the mid-1940’s.

Mike Fiffe once again reaches into his vault for the conclusion of “Mutant Beach Party” and some Kyle Baker rarities from the DC vaults.

Variety announces that WANTED director Timur Bekmambetov will direct a new version of MOBY DICK , which wouldn’t in and of itself, be of that much interest to a comics blog, except that everyone connected with the movie seems to be rushing to tell Variety that this classic tale of man, marine mammal, vengeance, and destiny is actually almost as good a basis for a movie as a graphic novel!

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive. [snip]

“We wanted to take a graphic novel sensibility to a classic narrative,” said Collage.

Ah yes…that much prized “graphic novel sensibility.” Are the writers unaware that Bill Sienkiewicz already turned Moby Dick into a graphic novel?

…and one that looked pretty damn cool.

Technorati Tags: Herman Melville

Sterling archivist Michael Fiffe once more opens the vaults with this collection of Kyle Baker’s X-Men comic strip, “It’s Genetic”:

The 11 “It’s Genetic” gag panels below were taken from the now defunct Marvel Age comic, the official Marvel Comics news comic. These were the only ones that I know of and they would pop up once in a while. They’re posted in order of appearance (Marvel Age #s 31, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 54, 57, 59, 60 respectively). I think they’re great and beautifully drawn… maybe some of these were inked while riding the New York City subways? After all, that’s how Mr. Baker got all “expressive”! Would I lie to you?

Technorati Tags: Injury to the nads.

It seems that Little Lulu wasn’t the only tot in a red dress that legendary John Stanley wrote about. Pappy’s Golden Age has reproduced some of John Stanley’s NANCY comics, and if Nancy and Sluggo come off a bit like Lulu and Tubby, there’s no doubt that Aunt Fritzi is wayyyyy hotter than Lulu’s mom.
[Via Journalista]

Bully rounds up the greatest ads of all time.

The Beat is showing her age, but it is fair to say that nothing entranced this young comics reader as much as those ads (drawn by the great Russ Heath) for toy soldiers of various eras on the backs of the comics.

12 Shooting Infantrymen!

12 MARCHING Infantrymen!

Dear God!

Our own wonderful mother, perhaps wearying of treading every night over our standing armies of dinosaurs, cowboys, Indians and Africans (one of the best and if you had it, you know what I mean) quietly discouraged our interest with brutal reality checks, such as “They wouldn’t actually look like THAT, you know.”

In fact, here’s a website that has ACTUAL PICTURES OF THESE SETS! AND THEY DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THE PICTURES!

The possession of one of these sets was — like our dream of a tabletop football game — never to be realized. That’s why they call life poignant. Thanks for the reminder, Bully.

Everyone else has been linking to the 1907 comic strip Madge the Magician’s Daughter by W.O. Wilson — why shouldn’t The Beat?
While enjoying this newspaper strip’s whimsy and imagination, it also gets us pondering. What would W.O. Wilson be doing today? The market for lavishly drawn comic strips has dried up; ditto illustration. Perhaps he would do children’s books. As wild and fun as the strip is, the art is kind of weird and wonky…nowhere near the virtuoso skill of a Feininger or O’Neill. If we plopped Wilson down in today’s comics market, he’d probably be doing weird-ass indie comics for AdHouse or Top Shelf or PictureBox, and he’d be considered an “indie” artist. Whatever that means.

Seems like everyone is on vacation or in an extended version of Coma Week, so not too much is going on these days. We’re working on a few of our “rainy day ” projects here at Stately Beat Manor, so let’s all kick back and enjoy a nice Mango Fruit Breezer, k?

As usual when we’re too busy to post, we’ll just try to distract you with pretty pictures. Courtesy of ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive — gaze upon the newspaper comic strip sections of yore and weep, weep, weep.

Images via Cover Browser

The D&Q blog runs this picture of cartoon master John Stanley when he was a teenager. It’s always refreshing to see a great artist captured in the full bloom of youth; our ideas of Stanley are mostly of the older, curmudgeonly but still insightful playwright of the heart.

Jeet Heer takes the oppotunity of D&W’s thrilling announcement of more John Stanley reprints to take on the great debate:Stanley vs. Barks:

There are not many cartoonists who have claims to greatness; perhaps a dozen or a score. Of this elite group, the least known to the general public and most underrated even by the cartooning cognoscenti is John Stanley (1914-1993). To the extent that he’s remembered at all, Stanley is known as the writer for the Little Lulu comic book series published Dell Comics. Stanley worked on the series from 1945 till around 1961 but during his long tenure at Dell worked on many other titles, ranging from characters created by others (Tubby, Nancy, Andy Panda) as well as characters he himself invented (the horror-spoof Melvin Monster, as well as teen comics like Dunc and Loo, Thirteen, and Kookie).

Heer judges Stanley to be the better writer, an assessment we agree with but only by a whisper. And that whisper could change when the wind does. Such comparisons are not really necessary — in the shorter stories of Walt Disney Comics & Stories, even those starring bit players like Gyro Gearloose and Gladstone Gander, Barks showed a mastery of relentless destiny and stinging irony that few could surpass. Let’s just say they are BOTH great and reprint everything they ever did in living color!

Beat readers were divided over the $600k sale of recognized Pop Art master Mel Ramos’s painting based on a Gil Kane cover. So here’s a little cosmic balance: The art for the cover of WEIRD SCIENCE #16 has sold for $200,000:

A major, sophisticated collector of comic book art has paid $200,000 for the original cover art of a 1952 horror/science fiction comic in a transaction brokered by Heritage Auction Galleries, the Dallas-based firm announced. Wally Wood’s cover art for Weird Science #16 (EC Comics, 1952) had been the property of another private collector.

“This the highest price we’re aware of for a single comic art page,” said Jared Green, Vice-President of Business Development for Heritage, who negotiated the terms of the sale on the owner’s behalf. “Then again, this cover had everything the collector looks for: a highly collectible artist in the talented Wally Wood, rendering what is considered by many collectors to be the most striking cover scene of his entire career. EC’s publisher Bill Gaines reportedly said that their bestselling issues were the ones that showed boys in trouble, so this comic with its menacing aliens must have flown off the stands.”

When you put it that way, it’s quite the bargain. (Via Tom.)

Drawn and Quarterly continues to do God’s Work be announcing even more John Stanley reprints:

We’ll be starting off with a three volume set of Stanley’s Melvin Monster. During the “monster” craze of the Sixties, Dell Comics launched this short-lived but hilarious and weird series about a good little monster boy and his disappointed family. While primarily know as a writer, Stanley actually wrote and drew all nine issues of this series. This series will be designed by longtime Stanley champion Seth.

Next up, a three-volume set of the Stanley “Teen” comics–Thirteen going on Eighteen, Around the Block with Dunc and Loo, and Kookie. These frantic comics about teenagers and beatniks remain compelling 40 years later largely because of the skill that Stanley brought to his pacing, joke-writing, and character development. Thirteen is again almost all Stanley written and drawn and is one of the great “lost” treasures of silver age comics. Dunc and Loo and Kookie feature other artists (notably Bill Williams) finishing Stanley’s layouts but still maintaining that manic quality that was a Stanley trademark. Again, Seth will lend his design talents to this set.

This is fantastic news. With Dark Horse’s Little Lulu project rounding up nearly 20 volumes of Stanley’s best known work, this should supplement it nicely and show future generations just what a genius Stanley was.

This old Donald Duck one-pager has been making the rounds lately. Or should we say, this Donald Goddamn Duck one pager. He shows them how it’s done.

To our untrained eye it appears to have been drawn by Jack Hannah. Can anyone correct our woeful ignorance?

Shaenon K. Garrity cuts straight to the quick of John Stanley’s Little Lulu in this piece:

The thing about the Little Lulu reprint project is that, brilliant as Little Lulu is, no one really needs 19 volumes of it. It’s a very repetitive comic. The adventures of Lulu Moppet, Tubby Tompkins, and their many small neighbors were published in a time when kids read their comics and threw them away; a month later, they were ready for more of the same. John Stanley and his nameless assistants worked out a series of reliable formulas which play out, often with only slight variations, in issue after issue after issue:

If you want a succinct disquisition on the strengths and weaknesses of Lulu, this is it.

The kids in Little Lulu have the kind of freedom modern middle-class American kids can hardly imagine: they have the run of the town, they play in the woods unsupervised, they pick up stray dogs and skate on thin ice and run errands for local shopkeeps that take them into the homes of friendly strangers. In one story, Lulu and Tubby play mountain climber and scale the outside of a brownstone with ropes tied around their waists. In another, Tubby teaches the West Side Gang “riding the pookle,” which involves swimming for miles through an underground drainage pipe. (It’s a ruse, of course; you know Tubby.) Kids today could never do anything remotely this dangerous. And if they did, you couldn’t draw a comic about it. The Scholastic Book Club would have your ass on a platter.

Technorati Tags: Little Lulu

Our experiment in parsing the superhero trends of today ended in disarray as the discussion devolved into the kind of sock puppetry and name calling we find so odious. However, it did spawn a rather interesting post from Michael Climek in which he talks about how he got into reading comics. We find these origin stories of comics readers in their 20s (Climek is 26) very interesting because we were one of the many observers who thought that the superhero market abandoning comics for younger readers in the 90s would sound the death knell for their readers down the road. While the feeder stream was definitely cut off a bit, the appeal of comics to youngsters still managed to shine through. And there is no shame in acknowledging that superheroes and superhero comics can have an honest appeal to children:

Regrettably I cannot remember the first time I was exposed to comics. I know that many other historians and bloggers can cite a specific issues, and moments, and stores, but I cannot. I’m barely old enough to remember the last death throes of the newsstand concept as the Direct Market took over, so comics were ‘around’ so to speak. Actually, now that I think about it, the first ‘sequential art’ I was ever exposed to may very well have been the little comics that used to come with every He-Man toy. This has just occurred to me as I write this but it makes sense. I was a HUGE He-man fan as a child. I had most of the figures, and many of their accessories, and I watched the cartoon as if my life depended on it. He-Man really clicked with me as a young lad, so one of those many tiny 8 pages comics is probably the first taste I had of sequential art.

Another issue of a comic is one that really haunted young Climek, and appalling as it sounds, there is perhaps a lesson to be learned in knowing that a comic by Peter David and Todd McFarlane had the power to scare a child so much that he threw it behind the couch.

Still, the comic in question did come out in 1987, when there were (arguably) more “regular” comics that were aimed at youngish readers. As many have pointed out, what will be even more interesting is the demographics down the road when today’s manga-reading tots seek more mature fare. When you’re trained from birth in one style, the expectations are far different.

The “Brave and the Bold” discussion did show us one thing: “decompression” is a term a lot of readers throw around without having any idea what the hell it means. For us to figure it out ourselves would necessitate reading a LOT of comics from Marvel and DC…something we may not have time for any time in this epoch, alas.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has been spotlighting Poe with all kinds of incredible artwork and a few comics stories.

The Black Cat (1843)
by Berni Wrightson fromCreepy #62 ~ May/1974

Berenice (by Archie Goodwin and Jerry Grandenetti from Eerie #11 ~ Sept/1967

The Cask of Amontillado! by Archie Goodwin and Reed Crandall from Creepy #6 ~ June/1966

BONUS: Harry Clarke, because we can’t resist Harry Clarke!

This YouTube video has a weighty theme:

The American civil rights movement opened possibilities of empowerment to a new generation. Feminism simply extended that to include equity for the 51% majority of the human race, namely women. 1970’s pop culture reflected society’s struggle to grasp a new, modern, full-range woman. Comic books were in a renaissance through young counterculture creators with more sophisticated stories, art, and outlooks. What better place for higher concepts of new female power than the turbo-amped fantasyscape of superheroes?

But we suspect you will just enjoy its nostalgic, kick-assness. Commentary by blogger Kali here. Via When Fangirls Attack.

After all the deep thots around here of late, cleanse your palette with this hilarious page.

You may just spend a few hours clicking around Steven Stwalley’s Crumbling Paper site, an archive of old comics strips by Herriman, Gruelle, Opper, Gluyas Williams and many, many more. Above, a panel from The Love of Lulu and Leander by F.M. Howarth from August 19, 1906. (Note, we lightened the scan just a tad– the “crumbling” in the title is sadly apt. Much of this stuff is disappearing from our fingertips.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories presents a story by Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel from Astonishing #57 (1957)

As an alternative to parades or football, may we suggest, these 39 never-reprinted Kirby Monsters comics at Philip Parodayco’s Monster Blog. Hours of browsing fun.

Most of Jack Kirby’s 188 pre-superhero stories have been reprinted; here’s the 39 that have NEVER been, in chronological order. As collectors provide me with scans from their original issues, I’ll be posting these stories on Monster Blog for your eternal enjoyment and edification!

Tom Brevoort points out what we’ve been discovering as we’ve cleaned up both home and office: a lot of these reprint books can quietly be…ignored.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I love the fact that so much of this material is readily available, and every reader makes their own evaluation of the work. By the same token, for every real classic run, stories of undeniable merit, there also seems to be a compilation of journeyman quality, or even just out-and out hackwork. This is especially true on the ESSENTIAL collections (and their differently-named counterparts uptown) where entire runs are being reprinted sequentially.

I’m a sentimental for the books of a certain period as anyone you’ll find (in my case, the books of the ’70s, when i started reading this stuff), but most of that sentiment is fueled by nostalgia rather than the quality of the material. I realize that a lot of these books really aren’t all that objectively good. For example, with rare exception, most of the run of MARVEL TEAM-UP is unspectacular. It’s fun, but not especially meaningful. And don’t get me started on the misnomer of ESSENTIAL WEREWOLF BY NIGHT.

[Via Graeme.]