Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I reviewed Alice in Comicland, the latest Craig Yoe book, at Robot 6 today. It's just what it sounds (and what it looks) like: A collection of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass-related comics of various kinds, mostly from the same time period, with a emphasis on Alice riffs from comics masters over other concerns. It's a great-looking book, and the prose pieces at the beginning are well worth reading for the insights they offer on the relationship of Lewis Carroll's Alice books and comics.

I felt like I learned quite a bit from these introductions. Like, for example, I learned that original Alice illustrator John Tenniel had a serious mustache:

While many of the artists were quite familiar, there were a few I had no prior exposure to (that I can remember). One of these was artist Chad Grothkoph, who drew the book's only full adaptation, of Through The Looking-Glass. Here's the cover to the cominc in which his adaptation originally appeared:

Additionally, there were references to, and covers from, many Alice comics that didn't make it into the collection. I was sorta bummed that the one in the upper right corner of this book didn't make it in, just because I was curious about it:

I do so like seeing different artists drawing the same character over and over in vastly different styles. Just on that one page, you can see three completely different Alices, each looking rather far removed from the two that exist most prominently in my head, Tenniel's black-and-white Alice and the one from the Disney cartoon.

If you've been reading comics very long, you will no doubt rather quickly think of dozens of Alice comics not included or mentioned. One of these, for example, is Caleb's Adventures In Wonderlean by Russell Waterman and James Jarvis (the cover of which you can find at the top of this post). I bought it during PictureBox's going out of business type sale a few months back, specifically because of my affection for Carroll's Alices, and the fact that it replaced the little girl named "Alice" with a dude named "Caleb."

It's an odd book. It's only 12 pages long, but it has very nice paper stock and is expertly stapled. You guys, I had no idea how hard it was to staple a comic book together until I made my last mini-comic. Stapling is soooo hard! Each page has a nine-panel grid of comics on it, and I really like the rough, gritty, heavy line with which Jarvis draws everything. The story is pretty simple. This yellow-skinned, blue-haired guy name dCaleb is handing out in the park one day, and he sees a squirrel run by, saying it's "late...very late." So he follows it down a rabbit squirrel hole, and has a brief series of encounters that are like abbreviated, not-quite-right versions of various Alice episodes.

For example, he meets a hare smoking a hookah atop a mushroom, rather than a caterpillar; sees a pair of lemurs ("cat-things," he calls them) perched in a tree, and they completely disappear, leaving only their grins; he attends a tea party witha talking dog in a yellow top hat, a blue bear in a bonnet and a sleeping toad.

I know nothing of the background of the comic, although based on the Caleb's slang, I'm assuming it was produced in England, or somewhere similar that is foreign bust still English speaking. Nice lines, nice colors, nice name for a protagonist, but sorta random, sorta pointless story.

Anyway, go check out my review at Robot 6 if you like, and check out Alice In Comicland as well (from your local library, if you haven't got $30 to spend on a coffee table art book type of comics collection book).

Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6, I have a review of Steve Ditko's Monsters Vol. 1: Gorgo, a Craig Yoe-curated collection of all the Ditko-drawn portions of Charlton's 1961-65 series, based on the pretty terrible giant monster movie that was the subject of an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As I mentioned, I was looking for any Objectivist subtext in any of the stories, but came up empty. The only politics of any kind came in this one story, wherein--well, check this panel out:

Talk about a one-issue party! Death to Gorgo and his mother! I wish I knew the name of their pary: The Death-to-Gorgo-crats? The Gorgo Death Party...? What?

Earlier in the week I reviewed Barry's Best Buddy, Renee French's new Toon Books book, at Good Comics For Kids.

Also at Good Comics For Kids this week, I participated in a roundtable discussing Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli's Ultimate Comics Spider-Man Vol. 1.

Meanwhile...

There's plenty of new Caleb-writing-about-comics content on the Internet today, just not here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

I have a review of Craig Yoe's awesome anthology Comics About Cartoonists at Las Vegas Weekly. It's just what it sounds like: A collection of comics covers, strips and gag-panels from a who's who of the greatest cartoonists in comics history, the subject of each being the cartoonists themselves (Some are autobiographical, some simply feature cartoonists as their protagonists, as in a Jack Kirby-drawn romance comic).

Speaking of Yoe, I have a review of The Art of Betty and Veronica, which he co-edited with Victor Gorelick, at ComicsAlliance. (Do click on that link, even if you don't want to read all my words about the book; it's well worth skimming just to see all that great art from the likes of Bruce Timm, Norm Breyfogle, Dan DeCarlo and others).

And, finally, at Robot 6, I wrote about Incredible Hulk By Jason Aaron Vol. 1, which is where the above image is taken from (I'd tell you who drew it, but I have absolutely no idea who drew it; there were something like 19 credited artists contributing to the comics it contained).

I don't know that the above sequence is the best part of the entire Hulk book, which has a lot of cool stuff in it, but I was pretty excited when that one character pulled out an adamantium chainsaw. Why doesn't the adamantium chainsaw guest-star in more books, or even have its own book at Marvel yet? They could call it Adamantium Chainsaw. If there is a more bad-ass title for a Marvel comic book than Adamantium Chainsaw, I'd sure like to hear it.

Three things I learned from Dan DeCarlo's Jetta

I have a short Q-and-A style interview with comics historian and editor Craig Yoe about Dan DeCarlo, Jetta and Dan DeCarlo's Jetta (IDW Publishing), his new book collecting all three issues of the series and a bunch of pin-ups by 37 artists.

In addition to being a nice little bit of recovered comics history, an entertaining read, a collection of great comics art and a source of hours of Googling enjoyment scanning the home pages of the contributing pin-up artists, it's also a very educational book.

For example, here are three things I learned from it:


1.) Once upon a time, a "#1" on the cover of a comic book was seen as a deterrent rather than an enticement to buying a comic book. Jetta was only published for three issues, but those issues were numbered #5, #6 and #7. Why was that?

According to Yoe, "Many of [Jetta publisher] Standard's comics, like Jetta, began not with a number one issue, but with the number five. This was a ploy to fool newsstand dealers into thinking that it was a solid title with a track record."

Given that comics today are often relaunched, and publisher's occasionally go to great length to get a "#1" on the cover, I thought that was a pretty telling detail about how much the selling of comics has changed in the last fifty-some years or so.



2.) Betty Cooper cosplays as Black Canary. As you can see from the above image, a piece of original art DeCarlo drew for Will King. That's actually only half of the image, which is spread across two pages of Dan DeCarlo's Jetta, but I could only fit half of it on my scanner. DeCarlo drew Betty in Black Canary's original costume, so the other half has her high-heeled black boots with the pirate-y cuff, with DeCarlo's signature beneath it.



3.) Before Willie Lumpkin had The Baxter Building on his route, he starred in his own comic strip. Yoe includes a page of four comic strips in his introduction to the book. The first three are try-out strips form a newspaper syndicate, and the fourth one is the one above (which I've cut from it's four-panel horizontal strip format to make it fit better on a vertical blog like this). It's called Willie Lumpkin, and was published through Publishers Syndicate around 1960 or so. Look how young Willie was! (You can see a few more examples of the strip here).

Some additional thoughts on Craig Yoe's Secret Identity, a great idea for a cop show and searching for Jimmy Olsen fetishists

I have a short review of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams ComicArts) in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly which you would perhaps like to go read. Go on, I’ll wait right here for you.

Hey, welcome back. So yeah, that’s what the book is in general, and how it is.

For a general audience, it’s probably something of a curiosity, a tragic tale of how this industry treated the artists who founded it and the dirty secrets behind our most beloved heroes, a so-perfectly-dramatic-you couldn’t-invent-it true story of cosmic ironies. Coupled with naughty but safe coffee table-ready fetish art for guests to chuckle over while you finish brushing your teeth or finding your wallet before you go out.

I think that for an audience already immersed in the wonderful, horrible world of comic book creation, publishing and consumption, it’s a rather more urgent work—or at least Yoe’s opening essay is.

If there’s a positive aspect of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s experiences with the comics industry, I suppose it would be that they offer the ultimate cautionary tale for creators interested in the field and, I would hope by 2009, publishers on how to treat creators (I assume—or should that be hope?—that the folks running the comics industry today grew up sympathizing with the Siegels and Shusters of the world, and are now in comics because they love comics and are dedicated to not repeating the sins of the past, whereas the folks running the comics industry at its infancy were mostly guys from other industries who saw away to make some bucks).

And Yoe tells that story here, with a focus on Shuster. The opening essay neatly summarizes the ups and downs of Shuster’s life and career, rather elegantly relating things I had read about it before (the anecdote about the down-on-his-luck Shuster taking a job as a delivery boy and on one occasion having to deliver something to the offices he used to work at always stuck with me), and some new, equally sad anecdotes I had not (including a story about Shuster drawing Superman’s for strangers to prove he created him). And then there’s the subject of the book, the fetish art Shuster provided to accompany BDSM prose porn.

That being the reason for this book’s existence, it gets a lot of attention here, and I think it will prove particularly interesting in light of some fairly common topics in the comics blogosphere/comics media over the past few years, including the legal discussions revolving around the Siegel and Shuster families’ claims to certain aspects of DC’s Super-franchise and the mid-‘50s crackdown on comics that was the subject of David Hadju’s 2008 book The Ten-Cent Plague (recently released in paperback!)

It’s one part of the book I’d recommend pretty much anyone reading this blog read, and yet it’s hard to recommend the book itself too enthusiastically, as Yoe’s essay accounts for a relatively small amount of the entire $25 package. And the rest of the book is BDSM fetish art, which a lot of folks might understandably not want around their house.

(I should note though that as sensational as the art work might have been to 1950s audiences, it’s really rather tame. It looks pretty weird, and there is a lot of submission and people getting whipped and threats of sexual violence and rape, but they are more suggestive that exploitive; for the most part, they are things that are about to occur, and perhaps they do in the prose stories, but they’re not illustrated. The only nudity is the occasional nipple or the side of a woman’s ass. There’s no intercourse at all, and no gruesome wounds or anything; only things like scratches on a man’s chest or a woman’s bottom indicating that perhaps the raised whip has already fallen. Also, it is all Shuster art, so it’s hardly realistic looking, so much as it looks like excerpts from some kind of BDSM how-to manual).

I’d usually suggest the library for those who might not want to part with $25 for a comics-related work (or who might be troubled by some of the imagery), but given the subject matter, I’m not sure how common this will be in libraries (at least a few already have it at the moment, according to Worldcat.org). I know I was afraid to bring my review copy with me to the library to make any scans from it, and I’m glad I brought the ComicsArt catalog instead as I ended up sitting next to a little girl at the library playing video games on the next computer over as I went about scanning pictures of the Justice League fighting Dr. Destiny.

At any rate, there’s a link to my review of it, and a more long and rambly endorsement of the well-written and revelatory first 35 pages, but there are a few more reasons that I think it may particularly appeal to those in the comics blogosphere. Well, two more.


1.) Stan Lee’s introduction. Yeah, Stan Lee writes a one-page introduction, and it’s a pretty nice piece of writing, avoiding most of the peculiar personal tics one so often associates with Lee (it does end with the word “Excelsior!” however).

“One of the ironies of life is the fact that in comic book stories the good guy always wins out, and yet in real life neither Jerry nor Joe reaped any financial rewards from their creation,” Lee writes.

He mentions that he knew Siegel, but had never met Shuster, which struck me as a somehow impossible fact. The Golden Age comics industry that exists in my imagination all happens on the same block, and all the creators eat at the same diners, share cabs and meet at the same bars after work, I guess.

He refers to Yoe as, “My colorful friend Craig,” which gives me weird mental images of this guy


and this guy

out together for a night on the town or playing chess together in Central Park or drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups while on stake out together. He’s a comics historian. He’s comics history personified. Together they’re cops. That show would be fantastic!

Finally, Lee writes that “Obviously, there’s far more sexy stuff here within these pages than you’ll find in any mainstream super hero comic book.” (Lee doesn’t read any mainstream superhero comic books anymore, does he?) But there’s the good part: “Much of it isn’t the sort of material that rings my bell…”

Ah! There you have it, True Believers. I’m sure many of you have, over the years, wondered exactly what kind of sexy stuff it is that rings Stan Lee’s bell, as it were. Well, while we still don’t know his exact turn ons, we can safely eliminate the sorts of stuff in here.


2.) Many of the characters resemble the Superman cast to a downright disturbing degree. I don’t know if “thrilling” is necessarily the right word (probably not, when discussing fetish art), but “exciting” doesn’t seem quite right either. “Interesting” definitely isn’t an interesting enough word.

But it’s thrilling/exciting/interesting the degree to which so many of the characters share features with those we’re familiar with from Superman comics (not unlike the experience of reading The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo and recognizing grown-up versions of Betty, Veronica, Josie and Melody in lingerie).

Yoe wonders if this was simply a matter of the way Shuster draws, or if it was a small act of rebellion and intentional subversion, whether conscious or unconscious.

I don’t know. Based on the simplicity of Shuster’s character design, I suspect any pretty brunette he tried to draw would end up looking a lot like Lois Lane. He just didn’t work in enough details to give his gals, say, different shaped noses or faces or eyes. They were mostly defined by their hair and clothes.

But hey, if you ever wondered what Golden Age Lois Lane looked like in her undergarments, her bra falling off to reveal a nipple, here you go!

Here, for example, is a bald bad guy who looks like Lex Luthor dangling a woman who looks like Lois Lane over a pit inhabited by…whatever that animal is supposed to be (a dinosaur, maybe?):

That’s from the strangest set of illustrations, in which the bald chap has all sorts of bizarre devices, none of which match up with the story they were used to illustrate at all (Yoe doesn’t reprint the actual stories, just brief summaries, and context for the individual images).

Here is (a cropped image of) Lois, dressed up like a sexy maid, whipping a shirtless and bound Superman:
Given the weirdness of many of Lois Lane’s comics adventures, I can’t be sure that this same exact thing didn’t happen in a DC comic book. Although that whip would have been kryptonite.

And here is a photo I took of a page featuring Jimmy Olsen getting Lucy Lane high on marijuana as part of her initiation into a teenage sex gang in a story entitled Never Been Kissed.
I never saw the 1999 Drew Barrymore vehicle with the same name. That’s…that’s not what that movie was about, was it?!
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Check out Yoe’s secret-identity.net site for lots of examples from the book, and the extremely colorful-looking launch party for it, which involved live re-enactments of some of the pictures, and some crazy superhero costumes.


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A couple days ago when I was preparing this post, I looked online to see if I could find a scan of the above image featuring characters who looked like Jimmy Olsen and Lucy Lane smoking, not wanting to bring a book of fetish art with me to the public library to scan.

So I Google image-d "jimmy olsen" and "fetish," hoping I'd turn up a scan of the image, and dreading I'd find amateur porn featuring naked people wearing nothing but green check-patterned blazers, bow ties and drawn-on freckles, or maybe Jack Larson's head photoshopped onto naked bodies.

I didn't find what I wanted, but I didn't stumble upon a world I feared might exist (Apparently, no one actually has a real Jimmy Olsen fetish).

The number one result was the cover of Secret Identity, and the first page full of results had the cover and some select, non-Jimmy Olsen-looking scans from Secret Identity. Here, for no reason other than I found puzzling over why some of these came up amusing, are the top seven non-Secret Identity related Google image results for "Jimmy Olsen" and "fetish."








The cross-dressing story was no surprise, but the robot? Turtle Boy? Weird. The search I did, by the way, was like Sunday or Monday night. I just did another one to see if it's changed much, and the results were indeed different. Just in case you wanted to repeat the experiment. And hey, who wouldn't?