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Happy New Year, and welcome to the same old story…   At least in the comic pages sixty years ago, the standards of line art were fantastic, such as the panel above in Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby.    Nowadays, not only do we have to put up with degrading and meaningless searches, but the comics that are “fit to print” look about as sophisticated as Cathy Guisewite.  Yuck!

Anyway, let’s enjoy this incredible profile from Alex Raymond’s incomparable brush, and aspire to something better!

Missed the premiere broadcast of Lloyd Dangle’s live streaming video feed last week, but somehow managed to tune in to the wrap up of this week’s “Big Ass Sarah Palin Episode.”    And well worth it!

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This “sample page” appears on Golden Age Comics blog, and makes me wonder if the wolfbane is blooming yet!    The artist, Howard Norstrand, was a prolific inker of horror comics in the 50s.  Thanks, Mr. Door Tree!

While randomly grazing the sweet grass of the intertubes, and reading about such things as the Comic Salon Erlangen and looking at Andy Konky Kru’s photos of the 2006 Salon, I stumbled across Skip Williamson’s recent post on the history of Underground Comics.  Not only did this remind me of my first major comic book convention (at the Playboy Towers in Chicago) where I met Skip Williamson, but also of Skip’s terrific “Class War Comix,” published about five years later in Snappy Sammy Smoot (1979).   In addition to the classic newstand headline: Agnew Breaks Wind, Thousands Die! this comic featured a paranoid schizophrenic Richard Nixon being replaced as President by an even more freaked out long-haired capitalist, Amphetamine Arnie.

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Money saving tips are very useful these days, so take a word from the pros:  when your beard gets too weird know how to mow it! This and other great advice is currently available in a series of 50 scans of Basil Wolverton’s “Culture Corner,” which appeared in Whiz Comics between 1945 - 1952.

Thanks Dinosaur Gardens, for posting this incredible series!

Also thanks to Drawn! twitter feed.

Ran over to Mass Art Paine Gallery (how apropos!) to see the R. Crumb Underground exhibit, which was written up recently in the Phoenix and the Globe.   This exhibit kicked off two years ago at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and has been making the rounds from city to city, and finally seems to have drifted into Boston on a Greyhound bus, clutching an old leather bag of 78s and sinsemilla buds.

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Let’s see if the traitors fleeing the pirate ship run by Bush and Cheney have as many tricks as my personal hero, Felix the Cat.  Hopefully not!  They deserve whatever is coming to them!  Meanwhile, we can enjoy this strange journey across the Universe by our feline friend, drawn by Otto Messmer, and originally featured in Felix the Cat Winter Annual #2, 1954.  [Courtesy of Comicrazy's]

Agree or disagree, it’s still a fun list of the 50 things you really must have in your comic book collection.

It crawled off to wheeze in the Art Institute of Boston annex behind Kenmore Square, under the beer-breath shadow of Fenway Park. Although I still preferred the big ratty room full of zines at MassArt, where Beantown Zinetown used to live, it’s still nice to know that zine makers have a place to gather and set up their wares. This year’s Boston Zine Fair was split up on three floors of the Institute, which also had it’s advantages since there were smaller clusters of tables where visitors could converse with zinemakers. On the other hand, the sparse attendance makes for some sort of awkard transitions when someone else walks into the room. In the MassArt space it was easier to sort of wander around aimlessly and go back to a table when a conversation came to it’s natural conclusion.

Even so, there were some people who really couldn’t be overlooked at this year’s event. In particular I’m glad to have met the artist Dan Nolan, who has a new graphic novel called Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy. Nolan is doing an all-out marketing blitz for this comic, which is printed on glossy paper in full color (looks like 5 color process). When I saw the printing job on his novel I said: “man you are plunging directly into bankruptcy… in the most flamboyant fashion possible!” Nolan replied, “You know I thought that nothing could be worse financially than being a painter, until I discovered publishing my own comics.” What really amused me was that Nolan was standing there in his own Death Boy t-shirt under a bathrobe. In front of him was a peanut butter sandwich on a plate with a single bite taken out of it. Right in next to the sandwich was a single proof copy of the novel. And right behind the artist was the original oil painting that became the basis of his Death Boy novel. His entire look was amusingly surrealistic. Worth checking out his stuff.

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Only by chance did I notice that Lloyd Dangle, cartoonist and creator of Troubletown, is currently tramping across America on a 20th Anniversary Book Tour, celebrating two decades of ceaseless trouble! How can it be that most people know Dangle only because of his Airborne packages, and not for his amazing comics?

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Now where have I heard a similar story before? Where was it again? Give me a minute! It’ll come to me, if I think about it. Hmmm… something to do with crime. Something to do with politics. Yes, yes… Something to do with the President of the United States. But what was that example that I was thinking of? Hmmm… Okay, think about evil, think about some perverted rotters who would turn the Presidency into a criminal operation. Think of traitors. They would stoop to nothing. They would tear up the Constitution itself, even torture random people off the street in order to pillage and steal from the U.S. treasury. They would not even hesitate to kill and destroy their own people, for what?! To get their hands on stinking money, covered in blood… That’s it! I remember now! This is exactly the story called “Woody Woodpecker, the Evil Genius,” by John Stanley, which appeared in Four Color Comics #169 (1947). Whew! For a minute there, I though I was losing my memory.

If you haven’t yet seen the film, Dark Knight, please do that first before reading this post, because you will definitely spoil the “tension” of the plot, assuming there is any. For some reason this film is a runaway hit, with critics pissing all over themselves to outpraise each other. From my perspective, despite some excellent cinematography and a stellar performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, it is really just another Batman movie, but with a troubling dichotomy at its core that is getting scant attention. There are clearly two very conflicted subtexts in the film, one centered on Batman and the other on the Joker. Batman’s supposed internal conflict we are all familiar with — having to take the law into his own hands in order to fight evil — dating back to his first appearance in Detective Comics #37; on the other hand, unlike the ridiculous slapstick Joker that Burton and Nicholson gave us, Ledger pushes his exploration of the Joker’s mercurial psychology into whole new realms of uncharted territory.

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Amusing story from Airboy Comics vol 4 # 9 (1947), by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.   Kirby’s aggressive and yet fluid brushwork fills the panels of this comic, which also features a series of aircraft rendered in flawless perspective.  Although the flying machines bring to mind the work of Milton Caniff in Steve Canyon, they begin to have Kirby’s generalized bodies and a hint of the circuitry patterns that were to explode from the pages of Fantastic Four (in the 60s) and the New Gods (in the 70s).

While cleaning up a shelf, I discovered a folder full of freebie cards that I picked up at the Alternate Press Expo (APE) in 2006. It was a fun time that year, with Keef Knight as one of six GoH, and a fine cast of erstwhile comix artists and DIY crafters filling the concourse. There is no point in just stashing these away in a box, so let’s look at some eye candy!

First up, Doug Sirois and Steamcrow :

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The caption for this image is:

a) Douglas Feith  still defending his wretched lying treason in the year 2025

b) Beaver Cleaver (reincarnated in 2025 with the brain of Tom Cruise) is asked to hold the e-meter

c) Joe Sixpack is told how much he *actually* owes the bank in the year 2025

Actually it’s an illustration by Alex Ebel for James Gunn’s Breaking Point.