When publishers reprint comics, they sometimes get new cover art for them. Often, the cover art has to be re-worked to some degree anyway, to accommodate a different logo or publisher format changes, so it's sometimes easier and cheaper to get a new artist to create a new cover image rather than try to adjust the old one. Sometimes, editors feel, too, that getting a different artist to draw a new cover might make it fall more in line than whatever new stories are being contemporaneously published. If you got whoever's drawing Amazing Spider-Man this month, their artwork on a reprint cover might attract some readers who would gloss over or ignore a Steve Ditko cover. Whatever the case, there certainly are solid justifications for getting a new cover drawn up for a reprint issue.

Of course, it's also sometimes the case that there's not enough budget to hire a new artist, but the original cover art still needs to be re-worked for new format considerations. In these case, it usually then falls to someone on the production team to try to make whatever modifications are necessary. That might be simply re-cropping the original, or it might involve moving around individual components. These days, all of that is done digitally, of course, but before computers became a staple of the industry, someone would have to photostat the image (basically, a high-quality photocopy), cut it up with an X-acto, and paste everything back down in the new format. Depending on the number of changes needed -- particularly if they involved having to resize only certain portions -- this could be quite tedious.

Check out the huge number of changes that had to be made when reprinting Fantastic Four #97 as Marvel's Greatest Comics #78. Take a look at these two covers... Most obviously, the creature figure and the story title have been swapped. The Human Torch figure has been shrunk and placed higher on the page, and the entire shoreline has been re-drawn. Almost an inch of additional art has been added on the right side to show the Thing's left leg, and the radio from above his head has been moved down to the side. There's also a beach blanket drawn in for him to lay on, and the Human Torch is given a can of soda (with two straws for some reason). The ground texture has been entirely re-done from waves of sand to somewhat more rocky texture.

That's a fair amount of re-work to achieve, essentially, nothing. It's still Jack Kirby artwork, and the adjustments don't change the impact of the visual. The FF are relaxing on the beach, with the Torch moping off to the side, and they're all oblivious to the monster sneaking up behind them. The elements are moved around a bit, but the visual impact is more or less unchanged. I was really puzzled by this for a while. The whole logo/corner box area is formatted a little differently, but doesn't take up appreciably any more room on the page. So why go through all the time to re-work everything?

Then, I noticed a new element to the layout -- the UPC symbol. In the eight years between the release of Fantastic Four #97 and Marvel's Greatest Comics #78, Marvel had begun adding UPCs to their covers. That effectively kills that bottom corner of the page from an art perspective since any art drawn in that corner would get covered by the bar code. The layout changes then begin to make sense... the Human Torch was moved up so he wasn't getting cut off by the bar code; he was shrunk a bit to keep the figure perspective; moving the Torch would have interfered with the monster figure, so that was moved to the right; the story title was then shrunk slightly and was used to fill the space left by the creature; other elements were drawn in to fill in the now-empty spaces. That all kind of makes sense.

Except...

Except pretty much none of that was really needed. Here's what it looks like when I took the Marvel's Greatest Comics masthead and UPC, and drop them on top of Fantastic Four #97 with no other adjustments...

The Human Torch figure remains almost entirely visible, and everything else fits pretty well as is. The monster's head breaks into the "R" of the title a bit more than would be ideal, I suppose, but not so much that it's no longer legible. The new copyright notice does overlap with the monster's shoulder, but there's plenty of space under the masthead Torch figure where the old corner box used to be.

So I'm ultimately still a little confused by all the changes. The modifications they did make were pretty significant, and I'm sure took someone in the production department a great deal of time and effort. The end result isn't bad, certainly, but it seems like a heck of a lot of work when they could've left it almost unchanged and gotten the same effect.

The BBC has recently begun uploading classic-era Doctor Who stories to YouTube under their Doctor Who: Classic channel. Despite being a Who fan going back to the 1980s*, I've only seen a smattering of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton stories so I've been going through to catch up on some of these stories that I was only nominally familiar with. While there are definitely some interesting stories here, I quickly noted that some of them stand out as being particularly... well, not "bad" exactly (or at least no worse than anything else from the same period) but not enjoyable for me. Mainly those in which the Doctor finds himself in situations that are effectively outside the scope of the show.

In any sort of fiction, and certainly in science fiction and fantasy, the creators have to establish the "rules" of the world they're introducing their audience to. Are dragons real? Does time travel exist? Has Earth made contact with aliens? That kind of thing. The creators can make up whatever rules they want, but as a general rule, they should remain consistent so the audience feels like there's some coherence to the story. If you establish that shape=shifting aliens are a thing but then turn around and say that intersteller space travel isn't possible, you're going to causing confusion and frustration among your audience who are trying to process your story. The characters established in the story work within the framework of how their universe is set up. So it doesn't make sense if you drop Spider-Man into a One Piece adventure because, despite One Piece having a range of characters with literal super powers, the notion of putting on a costume and saving people just to save them doesn't fit the mindset of anyone in that world.

This is why a lot of IP crossover stories don't really work. A character like Superman doesn't really work in a world-view like what you'd see in Marvel; there's top much inherent skepticism for a Marvel resident to fully accept someone like Superman. How does a group like Starfleet come up if you've got a galaxy that includes people who can wield the Force? What happens to Fred Flinstone's job at the quarry if you introduce someone like Devil Dinosaur to the story? The characters themselves might be interesting to play off one another, but the environments they come from are generally different enough that any sort of story beyond just that cursory interaction starts to break down quickly. That's why it can be fun to think about Judge Dredd versus Deadpool, but a full story with the two of them won't hold up well.

The reason why I introduced this piece with Doctor Who is because I watched "The Mind Robber" story for the first time. In the story, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his companions have an accident with the TARDIS and are transported into a world of fiction. They encounter Rapunzel and Gulliver and Captain Karkus, a fictional comic book superhero from one of the companions' time period. And I thought it was a lousy story. The "rules" of Doctor Who were thrown out the window and the protagonists were thrust into what was effectively a bunch of nonsense. All the world-building that had been going on for the previous five years' worth of stories were tossed aside for bizarre face-swap puzzles and giant wind-up soliders and Captain Karkus spontaneously showing up in a nick of time because the Doctor wished him to. "The Celestial Toymaker" story is similar, as is its much later sequel "The Giggle." Those don't occur in the Doctor's world, and therefore are not stories the Doctor should be used in.

Whether or not you watch or even are familiar with Doctor Who, the same idea applies to all stories, I feel. Sure, it makes sense for Alice to fall into Wonderland and deal with all sorts of whimsical nonsense, but that's because she was designed as a character specifically to deal with said nonsene. Shazam was not meant for that world. Nor Captain Carrot or Peter Pan or Santa Claus or any of a hundred other characters that have been thrust into it in one story or another.

I've pointed out before that I rather enjoy the "archeology" aspect of long-running stories as are often found in comics. This notion of world-building, while complimentary to it, is a little distinct. I want to see that not only what came before matters, but how the characters' entire world is sturctured matters. They act the way they do, in part, because of their environment and whether that includes dragons or aliens or whatever else helped to shape who they are. That strikes me as something many people don't think about when they say they want to see a team-up between John Wick and Deathstroke.

* The first story I saw was "The Masque of Mandragora" from the 1976-77 season, but that was likely not until 1987. Our local PBS station where I first discovered the show didn't begin airing Doctor Who at all until late 1980. Going through some old broadcast schedules, my guess is that I didn't start watching until 1987 even though the Mandragora story had already aired a few times before then. I know I never watched the show during the week, only on weekends, so I would've missed everything prior to 1984 and I certainly wouldn't have been allowed to stay up to watch the 11:30pm timeslot when it did run in '84. The only two other times they broadcast the Mandragora story was in 1987 and then again in 1991, but that latter date was after I left for college. Honestly, I could've sworn I'd been watching Who going back several years earlier, but I don't see how that's possible if these broadcast schedules I'm looking at are accurate. That would also explain how I missed seeing almost all of the first three Doctors, since the station didn't air any of the pre-Tom Baker episodes between 1986 and 1989.

You’re no doubt aware that a lot of people make all sorts of New Year’s resolutions in December to begin acting on in January. Some people try to lose weight, or stop smoking, or learn a new language, or… What inevitably happens, too, is that webcartoonists take stock of their comic output and notice they haven’t made an update in months, so they make an effort to get back to their strip. Also inevitably, many of these cartoonists will make a handful of updates in pretty short order, then slow down their frequency to something they think might be more manageable, and eventually they realize it’s December again and they haven’t made an update since March.

That’s one of the reasons I subscribe to webcomics’ RSS feeds: they’ll catch whatever updates come through regardless of how long it’s been since I’ve actually check in on a comic. And having read a large number of webcomics for some time now, I’m used to seeing a bunch of comics update in early January every year.

What's striking, though, is that many of them seem to come out of nowhere. It's not just the comic that hasn't been updated since August, but comics that haven't been touched since 2016! Stuff that I'd entirely forgotten I had put in my feed reader years ago. Not only could I not remember what happened in the last installment, I couldn’t even remember what the comics were even about!

My first question is: what am I supposed to do with that?

Yeah, some of these are gag-a-day type strips, and whatever happened before was more or less irrelevant, but the ones with serial continuity make no sense without context. Sure, I can go back to the previous post from multiple years ago, but that far back into the rear-view mirror requires more context than a single installment. Are the creators expecting readers to remember the story that long and/or wade back through the archives again to refresh themselves on where things left off? There’s a reason why old movie serials and comic books often start with a “When we last saw…” type of introduction, and those are rarely more than a month apart in installments. I think it’s more than reasonable for a reader to expect a summation of where the story was after a long hiatus.

But that’s only part of the problem a webcomicker faces. They’ve also breached a level of trust with their audience. They promised updates on a regular schedule — whether that was weekly, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, or whatever — and introducing a long, unannounced, evidently unplanned absence makes the reader question the commitment the creator has to the project. Now the creator may well have had a completely valid and justifiable reason for not updating for an extended period, and those regular updates can be very, very hard to keep up with for months on end but, whatever the reason(s), the viewership now has seen that the creator could drop the comic at any time. They now have to question whether they want to invest their time (again) in catching up on a comic that might simply stop in another month or two?

These aren’t obstacles that a creator can’t overcome, but they should be very aware of them when they’re returning to their comic after a long break and they should directly address these two questions readers have, whether the readers themselves openly ask them or not.

Often when you hear about a print versus digital debate regarding webcomics, it’s putting the “final” formats against one another. Typically, newspaper cartoonists railing against these young upstarts and their webcomics, and how they couldn’t possibly be earning a living without a syndicate deal and they must all be lying about their income.

But there is in fact, another print versus digital debate regarding webcomics that doesn’t seem to get discussed nearly as much. Namely, whether the artist is better off drawing digitally or with traditional tools like pen and paper.

When comics first started being drawn digitally, it was cool (because it was new) but it was also blatantly obvious that it was being drawn with a computer. The resolution simply wasn’t there to hide all of the pixelization. After that improved, then the issue became one of having the right tools. Drawing tablets weren’t commercially available, and drawing software was largely limited to what you could accomplish with your mouse, so digital artists worked in programs like Illustrator and Freehand, using Bézier curves to create extremely precise drawings. The precision was also cool (again, because it was new) but it was also obvious because the lines were too meticulously accurate to be organically drawn.

But we’re at a technological stage now where artists can simply hold a stylus as they would a pen or brush, and draw onto an electronic tablet instead of a piece of paper. The lines—complete with textures, pressure marks, and other hallmarks of traditional tools—are captured by the computer without an actual mark ever being made. When looking at a finished comic online, it’s nearly impossible for most people looking at the final result to tell if it was drawn with a stylus or an actual pen.

So what’s the benefit of one over another?

Personal preferences aside, the biggest factors seem to be time and money. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the electronic version is going to be more expensive to set up. I know some webcomickers who use simple Sharpies instead of “proper” brushes or pens for their inking, and those are certainly all cheaper (even in the long run) than a few hundred dollars for a tablet.

A different issue, still related to money, though, is one of sales. Artists who work traditionally have a piece of original art that they can turn around and sell once their comic is published. Digital artists can make prints, of course, but they simply don’t have originals to sell. While there’s definitely some validity to this, what artists need to keep in mind is that the prices they can charge for originals varies based on their popularity. Meaning that an artist just starting out isn’t likely to earn much from original art sales, compared to a more well-known, tenured artist, so the sales benefit here tends to be more longer-term.

Which brings us to time. Most accounts I’ve read/heard put digital as the clear winner in the time department. It’s easier/faster for most artists to work digitally, and therefore gives them more time to work on other aspects of their business and/or life in general. This speed comes from a number of factors, including switching between digital tools at the click of a button, and making corrections more smoothly. (While there is a learning curve to working on tablets, it’s worth noting that there is one for pens and brushes as well, but those are often overlooked as artists are frequently already familiar with them when starting a comic.) How much time might be saved depends a lot on the skill of the individual artist, and a good many might not see any speed benefit by switching.

While many artists make a decision to work digitally or in print based on personal preferences and stylistic biases, there are concrete, real world implications to consider in terms of the creator’s resources. Does it make sense to work digitally? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but whether it’s a good artistic decision is not necessarily the same answer as whether it’s a good business decision.

My background is in graphic design. I went to college in the early 1990s and got a Bachelor's degree in it, before working in the field for several years. The timing of my education is particularly interesting because that is precisely the period when the profession was changing from traditional, analog materials and processes to digital ones. When I started school, they had just opened a computer lab and it consisted entirely of three computers, one of which was hooked up to a flatbed scanner and was allowed to be used for that. And despite only having that few machines, it was never full. By the time I graduated, the lab had expanded to about 100 computers and you frequently found yourself waiting for someone to finish up so you could jump on the machine they were using. During my internship between my sophomore and junior years, we had a local photographer give us a tour of his studio to drum up business and his main selling point was that he had the only digital camera in the tri-state area.

This timing meant that we were among a pretty small group of graphic designers who were actively trained on BOTH traditional and contemporary techniques. I don't doubt design students today get history lessons on how things were done before computers, but we were basically the last group of students who actually had to practice those techniques. Corrections made by hand on physical paste-up boards that then had to be photostatted for a final piece. Taking tours of printing presses which still largely relied on processes that had been in place for the better part of a century.

This background has proven to be immensely useful in my comic book hobby. Because I have a pretty intimate knowledge of old production techniques, I can look at old comics and understand precisely what went into making them and why they look the way they do. When I learned about the pink/green variant of Fantastic Four #110, just one glance told me exactly what happened. Because I'm familiar with those printing processes, it was immediately obvious what had happened; there was essentialy only one way that could've happened. I was formally studying graphic design, not comic books, but the printing process remains basically the same whether you're making newspapers, magazines, fliers, posters, record album covers, cereal boxes, stickers, menus, greeting cards, election ballots, and just about anything vaguely paper-ish that has printing on it. Including comic books.

All of which I use as a preface for today's post to say that I'm very familiar with printing production processes. But it's still only within the past year or so that I've learned about flongs.

Flongs are an intermediary step in the printing process. They were basically a way to get printing plates that were set up in an even, flat format into a curved one that would fit on the rollers used in massive sheet-fed presses. I had always assumed that the original flat plates were heated just sufficiently enough to to bend them into a curved shape without appreciably distoring the details for printing. But that is not the case. Instead, these flexible flongs were made off the flat plate and then used to cast a curved plate from. Glenn Fleishman has this pretty comprehensive post about the history and development of flongs. The reason they're generally not discussed in printing process histories likely multi-faceted. In the first place, they were essentially a very minor aspect of the printing process that you wouldn't need to know about unless you were the person who had to make them. In the second place, they were generally made out of paper or a paper-ish material that often got damaged in their use and discarded. Even when they weren't simply burned after usage, they're fragile enough that they'd get damaged in the same way that old newspapers and comic books might if they're not cared for.

Earlier this year, Fleishman actually ran a Kickstarter campaign to write about the entire production process of comics. It's called How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page. Following his work on the book is where I first heard about flongs. (The flongs I have pictured here were ones he sent me as part of my backing the campaign.) His book is printed now and shipping as we speak. He was kind enough to share with me a digital copy shortly before it went to press and, again, even with my comfortable background in printing and production processes, I learned a great deal. I'd like to suggest if you want to know about how comics were produced for basically any time during the twentieth century, I can assure you this is the best book on the subject. And while his focus is primrily newspaper comics, the exact same techniques were used for comic books as well. So if your interest is more in X-Men than Peanuts, just pretend it says "Wolverine" instead of "Snoopy" and you'll be good. Despite the book being a Kickstarter project, Fleishman is selling copies directly from his site for $73.50 US. Which might sound a little steep but it is an impressively long and detailed look at the process -- more detailed than I've ever seen anywhere for comics -- and I can all-but-guarantee you'll learn something new because it's just that well-researched and comprehensive. I am 100% certain he'll get an Eisner nomination at least for this, if he doesn't outright win. Seriously, if you have any interest whatsoever in the production side of comics, I highly recommend you check this out!

This display is sitting just to the left of my computer setup for work. (For clarity, I work from home these day; this isn't in an office cubicle or anything!) It's been built out over the past year and makes for an interesting counter-point to my similarly-sized mostly Star Wars display above my desk.

Given the overlap of comics fans and action figure collectors, there's a decent change you recognize at least a few figures you recognize here. On the left is an Apocalypse from 2004, on the far right is a Dr. Fate from 2008, and in the center are Moon Knight and Indiana Jones from 2022 and 2023 respectively. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might also recall the Khonshu statue I generated with some help from AI. What likely is NOT familiar to anyone is the Shuma Gorath that Dr. Fate is fighting.

Believe it or not, that is little more than a fidget toy.

The basic design of the figure is from Warden Makers. The flexi-tentacles are a not-uncommon approach for making octopus, squid, dragon, and snakes figures for 3D printing: the individual pieces are designed in such a way that they can be printed already interlocked so you have a complete, flexible (but loose) armature that's ready to use right off the printer. No assembly required. It's a clever technique that is unique to 3D printing -- you physically cannot manufacture a part like that with traditional injection molding and so it's a popular style among the 3D printing community. They've applied the same idea here for the fictional but tentacled character of Shuma Gorath.

But, as I said, it's designed to be printed as-is so there's no assembly. Which means you're generally limited by the physical size of your 3D print bed. Most of Warden Maker's designs are chibi-style figures and are designed basically as small desk ornaments, so it's no surprise that a flexi-Shuma-Gorath is scaled with them. It's a clever design, though, and I wondered how it might scale up for action figures.

On my particular set-up, I could only enlarge it to around 200% and still have it fit on my printer. That gave him a full "wingspan" of about 11 inches with the eyeball itself being about 2" in diameter. Larger, certainly, but not remotely big enough to work alongside figures in a 1/12 scale given that the character is regularly shown as essentially a mystical kaiju. (If you're not familiar with the character from the comics, it's depicted -- though not named because of legal reasons -- in the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie.) The particular version that I've created here is about 400% of the original design's size... which does not fit on my 3D printer. I had to figure out a way to break up the figure into consituent parts, print them individually, and re-assemble them. I was able to do very crudely and ineffeciently, but it was do-able even with my limited skills. So with some assembly and a few hits with a can of brown spray paint, I've got a Shuma Gorath to display alongside Khonshu, Bast, and Anubis.

(Honestly, the Shuma Gorath should probably be at least twice as large as how I've got it here to be something closer to an 'accurate' scale. But, if you're unaware, toy designers often have to sacrifice scale accuracy for functional purposes. The original Millennium Falcon toy from Kenner? If that were actually to scale with the action figures, it would be something like six feet long! Where would I fit a giant tentacle monster with a four foot wingspan?!)

I mention all this, partly because I enjoyed the process of making the figure, but also because I don't know that most people think to try to re-work designs in those terms. I obviously didn't design the figure from scratch -- I don't have nearly that level of skill with modeling software -- but I can repurpose another design to make something that we are exceptionally unlikely to see from any toy company. And now I can glance to my side any time while I'm working on some project I don't want to deal with and briefly transport myself to an exciting adventure with gods and monsters in Egypt!

You know the backstory to the original Secret Wars, right? It was about as cynically conceived idea as any in comics; Mattel approached Marvel to do a series in support of a toy line they wanted, and many of the high concepts came about from focus group testing. Like using the words "secret" and "war" in the title, updating Dr. Doom's armor to be less medieval-looking, that sort of thing.

So Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter took all these ideas, and wrapped them up in a simple plot: lots of the Marvel villains battle lots of the Marvel heroes. There was the Beyonder there to provide some coceited impetus but, really, the plot is absurdly thin. Almost to the point of non-existent. In many ways, it was basically fan-service. "You want to see everybody fight everybody else? Here's twelve issues of it!"

I did pick up the first three issues when it first came out, and several of the issues where the heroes were swept off to this "Battleworld." But I didn't have regular, reliable transportation to get to a comic shop at the time and I didn't read the rest of the story until several years later. All I knew was that a lot of heroes disappeared, and returned shortly afterwards... except now the Thing had been inexplicably replaced by She-Hulk in my favorite title.

As I'm sitting here reflecting on the series, I'm struck by how very character-driven it was. Reed Richards' concern for his pregnant wife left back home, Dr. Doom's disregard for the Beyonder's instruction in favor of trying leverage the situation for himself, the justifiable suspicion the X-Men had for non-mutants, the Human Torch's "yeah, we do this type of thing all the time" reassurances to Spider-Man, the challenges Bruce Banner faced in keeping his intellect in charge of the Hulk... Every writer naturally has a slightly different spin on the characters, but Shooter did a good job of ensuring that every character was individually motivated based on their own characteristics and previously displayed personality traits. That made for a good read despite an absurdly weak premise.

Now, it's been a couple years since I've read any of the big event stories from either Marvel or DC, but the last several that I did go through came at things from a polar opposite direction. The events were designed to carry through a very strong story premise -- in the case of the current Secret Wars, reshaping the very Marvel Universe itself -- but what I've found lacking is the characterization. The heroes react to things because the story needs someone to fill a role, not necessarily because there's a driving force behind the character. In most cases, the characters don't suddenly start acting wildly out of character, but their reactions and dialogue ring hollow because they're acting without agency. We see characters, for example, acting sad because a comrade has fallen, but their grief is uniformly expressed. There's no difference regardless of how well one character knew another, what other stress factors might be in their background, what religious beliefs (in any) they ascribe to...

I'm actually kind of reminded of the old DC books from the 1950s and '60s where the heroes were heroes because they were heroes. There were no Uncle Ben moments, just heroes putting on costumes and fighting crime because that's what one does. And the only difference between Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter and the Flash was their power set.

Which is fine if you want to make simple stories that are meant to be obtained cheaply, read, and discarded without thought. And while I get not every writer is out there trying to make their comics into deeply profound, lasting works of high art, I think it's worth noting the success with which a heavily focus-grouped, blatant marketing ploy led to a more memorable series compares against the ostensibly writer-driven ideas that lead event comics today.

I've bought more than a few comics over the years that were... not great. Ones that I knew were not great when I bought them. Ones where the art looked sub-par, and the creator(s) pitching me the comic from across a rented table didn't make the story sound all that good either.

But, you know, I get that not every artist is going to be able to draw like Chris Samnee right out of the gate. And I'm sure that Tom Taylor's earliest stories could use more than a little polish. And I know that comics is a hard business. An astoundingly hard business. An incredibly, amazingly, profoundly hard business. So if a creator's got a good hustle, is clearly passionate about what they're doing, and it's not something I've seen tried a million times before (Listen, do we really need another straight, white, male superhero? Marvel and DC really have done that ad nauseum, and I'd wager that your version -- no matter how inspired you think it is -- is not actually covering any new ground), I'll try to help out if/where I can.

What surprises me, though, is when creators -- even these new folks who are clearly trying to make their own comic for the very first time -- make some seemingly mind-bogglingly even-rookies-should-know-these mistakes. Let's cover a few of them...

1. Credits -- Include the names of everyone who worked on the book. I just looked at two entirely different comics I picked up at convention a couple years back where no one was creditted at all anywhere in the book. Just a couple years later, and I have ZERO clue who worked on this or how to find more of their work. You want to use a pseudonum or something to protect your identity, that's fine, but put something in the book!
2. URL -- If you list a website in your book -- and you absolutely should! -- make sure it works. Yeah, I get that there can be technical glitches that can cause sites to come down unexpectedly and you might not want to keep old sites up indefinitely but, again, I found multiple books that only came out a few months ago that A) used bad web addresses or B) used none at all.
3. Website -- It's fairly easy to get a decent looking website these days even if you're not a designer or programmer. It's even fairly easy to set up an online shop. But I'm not encouraged to buy something if your website A) doesn't cite credits anywhere (see Rule #1), B) has links to pages that were set up in a template but you never bothered to fill in with actual content, or C) provides zero manner in which to contact you. Again, problems I found from recent purchases.
4. Timing -- I know you're excited about your book and you think it's going to be the next Walking Dead. And I know you've read up about world-building and transmedia and marketing. But if this is your first book, you really don't need all that yet. Just work on the comic itself for now. You work on all those angles right at the start, you'll have a lot of extra shit lying around when your comic doesn't take off right away. I've got a goodie tote bag here with a promo comic, a white paper explaining a huge backstory, a button, five wrist bands, and a poster. But their Kickstarter for a $100,000+ animation project raised less than $10,000. It may eventually be awesome, but you're doing too much, too soon, guys! Make sure you get the basics in place and establish a fan base before doing all the things.
5. Tabling -- Also, recalling where I saw some of these folks on the convention floor, I might suggest they probably paid WAAAAY too much for a booth, given their skill-set (mediocre at best) and level of notoriety (none). I don't know exactly what anyone was actually charged, of course, but I'm betting a table in Artist Alley would have been cheaper and they would've been more likely to make a profit. Or at least break even. I mean, if you see creators like Scott Snyder and Gail Simone -- who are popular and have lines of people waiting for autographs -- if you see them with just an Artist Alley table, what makes you think any random book by someone comic fans have never heard of is going to move so many copies that it warrants a full booth?
   

Like I said, I've bought a lot of books to help struggling creators out. It's a tough market, and I want their voices to be heard. But if you're not even able to get some of these fundamentals down, I definitely won't bother trying to help again.

I believe the first book that I got discussing the production of comics beyond the typical drawing/coloring/lettering of it was Kevin Tinsley's Digital Prepress for Comic Books which came out in 1999. (I could've sworn it was earlier than that, but I double-checked the publication date.) It should come as no surprise that the book lays out many of the techniques needed for producing a comic in the early age of digital comic production. (There were isolated incidents of digital comics production dating back at least a decade by then, but the widespread adoption of even digital lettering didn't really kick in until 1996/97.) Photoshop version 5 was released in 1998, and was the first version to utilize editable type and multiple undos. The "Save for Web" and vector shapes options were still down the road in future versions.

Knowing that, you have to imagine the book can't hold up well. Just flipping through it, you can see plenty of examples of extremely obsolete screen shots, and plenty of indications that the software has improved leaps and bounds in the past decade and a half. Tinsley is still talking about QuarkXPress here for cryin' out loud! But to be fair, Tinsley wrote a substantially updated version in 2009 that I understand to be vastly improved. (Although by now, that is almost certainly pretty dated as well.)

But, you know, in actually reading through some sections of the 1999 edition, it holds up surprisingly well. Sure, a lot of the specific technical references are dated, but the general ideas throughout -- even the ones that, for example, go beyond the basics of color theory -- remain viable. It doesn't work so well as a practical manual, but it does work for understanding the basic processes of going from a page of comic art to a printed comic book.

I think, though, that the book's greater importance in the long-term is that it provides a unique snapshot of comics production as it was in a period of transition. Comics had been produced essentially one way for decades and, throughout the 1990s, computers became so prolific that it was hard not to utilize them in the creative process by the end of the decade. Even so, the idea of using fonts for a comic was still viewed with suspicion, as was digital coloring. It was being done, but a large number of the old guard letterers and colorist weren't happy with these developments. For that matter, many editors were skeptical as well and were just as happy keeping their analog creators busy, thankyouverymuch.

Tinsely clearly saw where things were headed, even as early as 1993/94, as evidenced by the work he did with Marvel converting some of their processes into a digital environment. He, like I suspect many other younger creators, were eager to make their mark by utilizing the technologies that weren't previously available, and ones that older creators might be reluctant to adopt. Today, in 2024, creators have all had to adapt or they've fallen by the wayside. But in 1999, while debating the move to digital production was mostly over and done, the question of digital creation hadn't really been finalized yet.

So we have Digital Prepress for Comic Books explaining this only-a-couple-years-old digital production process before creators had really embraced the idea that a comic could be created digitally from the start. While Tinsley doesn't get on any high horses in his writing here, that background is an undercurrent throughout the book nonetheless. It makes for a fascinating look at how comics were being made in a period of great upheaval behind the scenes.

Picture books and comics are generally considered close cousins. It often wouldn't take much to change a picture book into comics; the words and images are already there, and they just would need to be integrated a little better. Indeed, many picture books are already seen as comics; Mo Willems' The Pigeon Will Ride the Roller Coaster! won an Eisner Award last year. But of course not all picture books are comics; frequently, the text stands quite well enough on its own and the pictures merely illustrate the text. Often enhancing the narrative, true, but not integrating with it. Recently, I did come across a curious... fad, I suppose you'd call it, in picture books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I can't really find much information about this, but I did think it's worth documenting somewhere even if this isn't strictly comics.

Historically, picture books -- any books intended for children really -- were considered very secondary and were given little care. Comics famously used cheap paper and poor printing techniques precisely because they basically considered disposable. Picture books began to rise in popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as we see some talented people working on them, notably Dr. Seuss and former Disney animator Gustaf Tenggren, who illustrated several Little Golden Books. These books were all illustrated, though, because the production process for re-producing photographs was far less than ideal. It was certainly do-able, as witnessed by newspapers using photographs as far back as the 1800s, but the half-tone process required at the time was generally of poor quality and largely used for the sake of expediency. Production processes improved over time, not surprisingly, and in the 1960s, we start seeing the technology improve enough that you could start to reproduce photographs in pretty good quality, and in color.

Which leads me to this apparent fad of the late '60s and early '70s -- picture books utilizing photography instead of drawings. It no doubt stemmed from the publishers trying to take advantage of the better printing and reproduction processes. The part that I find particularly curious, though, is that all of the photographers I've been able to identify so far (which, admittedly, hasn't involved all that much research) have been Japanese and the books are noted as being produced in Japan. Their approaches, while unique, seem not radically different from one another but artists like Keiko Osonoe and Akihiko Tsutsumi would arrange a variety of almost-surprisingly-non-descript toys, usually tied around a common theme.

There was also some artists who used more cohesive sets of toys to tell specific stories, often common fairy tales. (Although, weirdly, despite the creators being mostly from Japane, the stories are almost all pulled from European folklore.) Tadasu Izawa and Shigemi Hijikata favored this approach more and, because they're using specifically crafted armature figures for their stories, they're often referred to as puppet books. (Although that could well be largely because of the particular branding the publisher used.) I suspect, since they were aiming at an ever-so-slightly older market, they also frequently took advantage of the displays' inherent dimensionality and use stereoscopic cameras to take book cover photos that could be presented as 3D images using lenticular lens. (I blogged a few years ago about how lenticular lens could be used to create comics but the description there can also apply to creating 3D images like I'm talking about here.)

I don't know why this seems to have been limited -- as far as I can tell -- to Japanese artists. (Many of these books do not offer any creative credit at all and could easily be the work of non-Japanese photographers. They do seem to have some stylistic similarities, though, and are from the same publishers. Also, I can't find any examples where a non-Japanese person is credited.) I can't seem to find even any information on the artists in question besides lists of books they're given credit on, and those seem to be limited to a small window of about two or three years on either side of 1970. What else did they work on? Why didn't this approach continue beyond the early 1970s? Were there any of these books that incoporated the text more readily so that they might be considered comics? And wouldn't that make them manga? And, by American definitions, wouldn't that make them fumetti manga?

The image at the right is an illustration of Dr. Doom by John Buscema. More accurately, it's a 3D print of a scan of an illustration by John Buscema. The metal plate you see it resting on is actually the print bed from my 3D printer. What exactly is going on here?

As I've noted on my blog before, I got a 3D printer back in late 2021. I've run thousands of hours' worth of prints, roughly split equally between practical items to use around the house and more fun toy stuff. From simple backgrond accessories to useable action figures. But I'd seen a number of designs online for "wall art" where you could print out a flat image of some line art or perhaps a silhouette in whatever size/scale/color worked for you.

Designing those is a relatively simple process, really. You just take a scan of the art you want, extrude in along the z-axis a few millimeters, and you're got a piece of plastic based on someone's illustration that you can stick to a wall or hang from the ceiling or whatever.

More recently, I've come across color versions. Where you not only have the illustrated outline, but the broad colors are filled in as well. I'd initially assumed these were meant for higher-end printers that can handle multiple colors of filament simultaneously. But upon more recent closer inspection, I see that they can actually be handled relatively easily by even basic mono-filament printers like mine.

Take a look at this extreme angle of the same Dr. Doom figure, looking down so you can see the top edge. What you might first notice is that the black outline of the figure doesn't run all the way down the side. The black looks as if it almost sits on top of the everything. That's because it does. If you look more closely, you can see there are actually several layers to the image -- green on the very bottom, with grey sitting on top of that, and black sitting on top of that. Each layer of the print, as the printer slowly rises up the z-axis, has a single color tied to it. The entire base layer is just green; I just loaded green filament in my printer and hit "print." The entire second layer is printed in grey; I paused the printer to remove the green filament and replaced it with grey. But the second layer of the art file doesn't include the full silhouette -- only the parts that I do not want to keep green. When the printer finished with the grey layer, I paused it again and replaced the grey filament with black. The printer then printed everything that I didn't want to keep green or grey. I could theoretically do this for any number of colors, so long as I kept each color on its own distinct layer.

Of course, each color adds an additional layer and additional thickness to the overall piece. The more layers you have, the greater the difference you'll find between the bottom and top layers, and the more unintended dimensionality the final piece will have. So it's probably not a great setup for more than four or five colors. There was Thor design I came across that used seven colors, and the photos other people had posted looked to me to be too drastic of a difference to look decent. YMMV. But it definitely works very well for two- and three-color designs like Silver Surfer and Moon Knight.

The question, then, becomes: why would you even want to do this? After all, the resulting image has a lower fidelity than the original and you're more limited in terms of both color palette and size (most commercial 3D printers only get up to about 8-9" square). For me, at least, permanence is a not insignificant factor. Printing an image onto posterboard or even foamcore is going result in something that's subject to damage pretty quickly; frequently, even it's own weight will cause some minor damage resting against a pushpin or similar, not to mention being more susceptible to moisture and UV light. The 3D printed version, being entirely plastic, has inherently more longevity and durability. If you're looking for a simple background decoration of some kind -- I'm using mine as part of some bookends -- I think they can make for a fun addition to your personal library or comic shop. And while you might not find your favorite artist's version of your favorite character, it wouldn't be all that difficult to create your own from scratch. You can see that even with the poor scanning around Dr. Doom's eyes, the piece as a whole still pops pretty nicely.

As I've noted before, one of the things I haven't cared for much at Marvel in recent years is how they're always in a perpetul now. That except for a handful of key events (most notably, their origin) a character's backstory is generally considered irrelevant any more. Continuity isn't really a concern. I found a comic writer's quote that speaks to this from a creative perspective...

Your job [as a writer] was to come on to a book, and create it out of whole cloth. Marvel history meant nothing, but not because of Marvel history -- just that you were so intent on being better than the past writer, or showing how stupid the past writer was, that you went to great lengths to negate everything he said. Your job was to come in and tell everybody, 'It was totally false, it was totally meaningless, and the history of this book starts right here -- with me taking over...'

That's actually from Bill Mantlo, speaking in (I think) 1978. The approach these days is slightly different, in that writers are just asked to start fresh and ignore the past rather than actively negate it, but the broad direction isn't appreciably different. It's just that whereas editors used to try to keep some semblance of a through-line by keeping on top of continuity and 'fact-checking' a writer against prior stories, that part of their job seems to have (intentionally) fallen by the wayside. But I find it interesting that the current path seems to have been one that Marvel started on decades ago.

Two panels from "Dream of Doom" in Weird Science #12 circa 1950... By Harry Harrison and Wally Wood.

Even setting aside Bob Kane's freqeuent and blatant swiping of other artists' work, which one might attribute to Kane's own unique opportunistic sensibilities, claims of comic book swipes are hardly new. It shouldn't be surprising, in fact, that many comic book artists have done this over the decades. Comic books have always been a commercial medium first and foremost, and many comic book artists during the Golden Age were comic book artists precisely because they couldn't break into more 'high brow' venues. In some (but by no means all!) cases because they simply didn't have the talent. They were trying to make money in comics and that meant cranking out work as fast as possible. Artistic integrity was less a concern than getting paid.

Recall that is precisely how/why Will Eisner and Jerry Iger set up their studio. They applied Ford's assembly line ideas to comics not because it allowed artists to focus on their particular specialities within art, but simply because it was faster. And faster can also mean cribbing from someone else's work, so you don't have to personally sort out issues with layout or lighting or how fabric folds or anything else. Whether or not the anecdote about Eisner coming across a young Jack Kirby using an eraser to correct his work and Eisner telling him to stop, demanding "You're getting paid to draw, not to erase!" is true or not, it speaks to the sensibilty of the time. Comic creators were cranking out work because that's how they got paid and survived. So any shortcut was a valid one.

In some cases, artists like Kirby were indeed talented enough that it was usually faster for them to just draw rather than copy. I'm not aware that Kirby himself ever knocked another artist for swiping (I've always had the impression Kirby understood the realistic expectations of the hustle, and respected people just for getting their job done) but I can certainly see where some of that same era would. Harrison and Wood were apparently among them.

But my point is that complaints of comic artists swiping from others are hardly new, and they were even "public" insomuch as those complaints got written into stories like this one.

Some years back, Tom Brevoort had mentioned that that Klaus Janson (with an assist from Walt Simonson) came in to the Marvel offices to teach a course in comic storytelling to the editors. At one point, evidently, the discussion ranged into the area of "a comic with the words removed is still a story, but a comic with the art removed is not." Tom's initial reaction was to disprove that notion with the following sketch...

At the time, a couple of people -- including myself -- pointed out that, in this case, the text and the word balloons themselves are acting as art. However, I'll also point out that it's not impossible to come up with a solid example of a comic that would read reasonably well without the art. Here's a random page from Shock Suspenstories #7...

And here's the same page without the art...

Even without the sound effects, and the fact that we're jumping into the middle of a story, it still seems to make perfect sense to me. Conversely, though, here's an example of a comic page with the text and word balloons removed...

It's from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and in this sequence, he's discussing nuances of language and imagry. Becuase of the specific nature of what McCloud was trying to do here, we have effectively the same image repeated six times. (Ten times, actually, since the previous page in the book has four more copies of the same panel.) But without the text, does this tell you anything? We see a man standing in front of a painting. He moves his arms a bit, but I don't know that that really conveys a story of any sort.

Or what about a sequence whose textual narrative is disconnected with the imagry depicted? Where a narrator might be telling one story but the imagery is depicting another? The "Black Freighter" sequences from Watchmen, for example...

What I mean to boil this down to is that storytelling is an art, whether you use words, pictures, sounds, gestures, whatever... Comics are a form of storytelling that can, but not necessarily always include pretty pictures and/or flowery language. Comics, despite McCloud's excellent attempt, still defy a concise definition. Or, at least, a generally accepted one.

At some point, comics cease to be comics but the question is: at what point?

There have a been a handful of stories/franchises that I became a fan of almost from the moment I became aware of them, and I've remained a fan of since. In the order that I discovered them: Star Wars, the Fantastic Four (and, to a lesser extent, the Marvel Universe in general), Doctor Who, and Firefly. I enjoy other franchise as well, of course, but those four are the ones that have remained perennials. While I don't partake of each and every iteration of them, I do give them enough attention to be able to scrutinize whether I want to pick up the latest book or watch the latest movie or whatever. I bring this up because, of late, they largely haven't spoken to me at all. And today's post is me trying to sort out why.

I've already talked here about the past two years of Fantastic Four comics have left me cold. This weekend, I happened to read through the Clobberin' Time trade paperback that came out in January and felt much the same. Like Ryan North's stories, it was executed well enough but it ultimately fell flat for me. I didn't connect with at any level. I've had the same general disinterest in Moon Knight which was another favorite of mine back in the day. (Though, to be fair, the character has been handled very inconsistently over the decades so I've never been as big a fan.) There's been exactly one Fantastic Four story published in the past three years I've really enjoyed at all, and nothing's been done to follow up on it. (And, actually, as I think on it, the FF story I last enjoyed before that was never really followed up on either.)

Doctor Who. I watched the two new episodes Disney+ dropped last week and... meh. I think Ncuti Gatwa and Milli Gibson do a fine job and I like their characters, but the stories just lie flat for me. I wasn't a big fan of any of the specials from last December either. The show has never been even close to 'hard' sci-fi, but it's shifted into straight-up fantasy with barely a veneer of science fiction. I also hate musicals; however good the music itself is, the story always grinds to a screeching halt and we get an extended charaterization monologue that I would rather see handled in a "show, don't tell" manner. The story, for me, is what's most interesting and most important and I don't care for these literall-anything-can-happen fantasy stories.

Firefly is certainly not as robust a franchise as the others I've mentioned, but it's had a variety of comics since the show ended two decades ago. While I liked the early stories Dark Horse put out, the Boom! Studios ones since 2018 have all felt like pretty generic sci-fi with the characters' names dropped in place. I'm not opposed to adding new characters like they have, and even having the existing ones grow beyond who they were in the original, but there's a lot that misses the feel of the show. They've introduced aliens and space portals and sentient robots, and it feels less like the gritty, backwater 'verse we saw on the screen and more like any other sci-fi story with a few Western aesthetics thrown on top when the artist can remember to include them.

The one bright spot of any sort for me lately has been Star Wars. I didn't care for Young Jedi Adventures and Tales of the Empire was just okay. But I quite enjoyed Bad Batch and, while The Acolyte doesn't really interest me yet, Skeleton Crew does sound intriguing. Andor season 1 was excellent, and I'm looking forward to season two whenever that drops. So not everything, but what I have enjoyed was really enjoyable.

So the question is: have I outgrown those story franchises that I used to enjoy or have audience tastes changed sufficiently that, in order to obtain an audience for what I used to enjoy, it has to be changed sufficiently enough that I no longer engage with it?

The notion of my growing older is certainly viable. I am, indeed, older than whenever I first encountered any of these and, particularly over the past several years, have had some experiences that have impacted my overall outlook. Notably Trump's presidency, COVID and the lack of an adequate response and most personally, getting hit by an SUV and being unable to walk for months afterward. Any/all of those events could have steered the direction of my life view to the point where I'm responding to very different story elements than I used to.

But let's stop a moment and look at what those story elements even were. Take a moment to review those franchise I listed; what do they have in common? (For Star Wars, think of that primarily in terms of the original trilogy and for Doctor Who, focus on the classic episodes.) I'll save you some time since I've actually given that a lot of thought over the years. The two biggest things I respond to in those are: a spirit of finding the new and exploration, and the centeral notion of a found family. They each have that in varying degrees and they have their emphasis in different places but they're all there. The found family elements should be pretty self-evident if you're at all familiar with the stories. The exploration elements of Fantastic Four and Doctor Who are pretty straight-forward, too. It's there to a lesser degree in Firefly; the explorations there have already happened, but only recently, so all those backwater moons are still trying to get things organized and settled. The characters aren't explorers per se but early settlers, which covers some of the same territory. In the case of Star Wars, the exploration is a little more meta -- while the characters aren't doing much in the way of exploring, the audience very much is with new aliens and systems popping up in every new scene of the original movie.

So can we apply that to more recent stories? Fantastic Four -- the found family element is very much there, but there's been precious little in the way of exploration since the "Empyre" crossover in 2020. (Although that had all the baggage of a crossover event that hampered that from being very good.) Doctor Who -- the found family element here again is very much in play with the Doctor and Ruby, and there is some exploration with the space babies and "Wild Blue Yonder" and whatnot, but the fantasy angle feels like they've thrown out all the internal rules of the show that they've spent decades (even just with the new series) establishing. Firefly -- the found family is technically there, but the character dynamics of the recent books feel just like a crew and not a family. There's some measure of exploration, but they've also thrown out many of the internal rules of the original show. Star Wars Bad Batch -- heavy found family story and lots of jumping around to new planets; virtually all of season 3 and much of season 2 was expressly about trying to find Tantiss. The found family idea is still prevalent in all these, in part because it's baked into their respective premises, but the exploration idea seems to have been largely downplayed across the board.

I obviously like stories that do not have the explortation and found family elements to them; they're not necessary for me to enjoy something. But when having those elements there are a large part of what attracted me to the story in the first place, and then you have them largely removed for an extended period, I very much feel their absence. Is exploration not trendy any more? People have been rattled by too much change and having too many unknowns in their future, and prefer their fiction to show something more stable? I don't know. I'm pretty selective with my media, so I don't try a lot of new shows and movies to see what's going on with broader trends. But in the small subset of "franchises I like that use exploration as central pillar," I certainly don't see much of it. Which suggests to me that, however my personal tastes have changed in the past several years, it's actually the media that has changed more.

Marvel, BBC, Boom! -- it's not me. It's you.

How about a Flashback Friday? The following is the very first piece I wrote for The Jack Kirby Collector way back in 2003. Actually, I think I may have written in 2002, but it didn't get published until issue #38 in 2003. Frankly, I'm kind of surprised how quickly/easily I found an electronic copy of what I wrote in a format (RTF!) that was still useable! Anyway, here my original "The Buttons of Doom!"
 

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Think big, but start small, they say. Appropriate here for two reasons. First, this is my foray in the researching Jack Kirby’s artwork and, while I have aspirations for great discoveries, this is not one of them. Second, how many of you noticed the size of Dr. Doom’s buttons over the course of Jack’s run on the Fantastic Four?

Upon reading through The Jack Kirby Collector #33, I found an interesting aside. As the caption points out, Stan Lee added some gutter notes to the original art of Fantastic Four #85, page 9. Playing art director, Stan apparently was dissatisfied with the large buttons used to clasp Dr. Doom’s cloak in place. He writes, “I think the big ‘buttons’ should have more detail, pattern, or modeling. They look too unfinished, too cartoony, this way.”

At first, it struck me as an odd request. Why would Stan now begin to concern himself with a minor detail like that? Especially on a character that had been around for the better part of a decade.

A quick scan through Dr. Doom’s previous appearances, though, reveals that the large clasps were in fact part of an evolution of the character’s visual. His early appearances in Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man show a single small button holding his cloak in place. Not being one to dwell on inconsequential details, though, Jack’s renderings of Doom alternate between double and single button clasps over the character’s next several appearances. (Sometimes within the same issue!) Jack eventually settled for the two button approach, but down-played their visual importance. Even Doom’s appearances as late as Fantastic Four #60 show him with small claps, often covered by his hood.

So Fantastic Four #84 marks the first significantly-sized buttons on Dr. Doom’s cloak. They grow even larger in #85; a comparison between the splash on page 5 of #84 and the last panel on page 9 of #85 shows the circles to be the same size, despite a vast difference in the figure proportions. Stan’s suggestion for more detail begins to make sense.

Then we find Stan’s gutter notes again on the artwork for Fantastic Four #86, page 17. “Sol [Brodsky] — I’m not sure I like these designs on the button. They look like sunflowers!” Curious, considering the design we see published is simply a few diagonal lines to represent a reflective surface. Clearly the artwork was changed at some point after Stan’s comment.

So what design would Jack have included to make Doom’s clasps look like sunflowers? Well, without having the original to examine carefully, my guess would be a simple cross-hatching pattern. A rather logical texture for buttons.

It seems to me that this was production manager Sol’s invention, however. In the small reproduction I have, there are two circles also in the gutter next to Doom’s clasp. One hollow, one slightly smaller, but nearly filled in. The simple word “Thruout” hangs next to them. A note from Sol, perhaps, suggesting an idea to Jack. Or directions to inker Joe Sinnott. Was that filled-in circle the actual pattern Sol wanted before Stan’s sunflower reference? And who finally decided on the reflection lines? Why was Sol acting as a go-between for the writer and artist?

Minor questions in the end. Virtually insignificant in fact. But I think it shows a part of the failure to communicate that built up to Jack’s leaving a little over a year later. It also shows that we should be grateful Stan had some say in the art direction; otherwise we may have had to witness the Thing rolling on the floor laughing at the Sunflowers of Doom!

There has always been, for me, a crossover interest between comics and action figures. No doubt going back as far as the 1970s when I was playing with Mego figures, making up adventures that generally couldn't happen in the comics. (Because of intellectual property reasons, not any lack of creativity on the creators' parts!) Naturally, my eye on action figures fell towards characters I already enjoyed in the comics, so I was a little more prone to Marvel figures than DC. One that I always kind of liked -- though, admittedly, not at the top of my list -- was Nick Fury. Kind of a cross between G.I. Joe and James Bond, he was able to drop into all kinds of stories pretty easily whether that was an intergalactic dust-up involving alien Skrulls or a secret stealth mission in Latveria. So when Toy Biz finally made a Nick Fury figure in 1995, I picked it up to accompany my other five-inch figures at the time.

Of course, the problem is that Nick Fury is (or was, depending on what's going on with Marvel continuity whenever you happen to read this) the head of a large organization called SHIELD. Again, kind of a G.I. Joe thing but within the Marvel Universe. Which means that Fury by himself is only part of the story. He's got a literal army at his command and Toy Biz didn't make any other SHIELD figures. I was able to repaint the G.W. Bridge figure to give him a SHIELD uniform and I believe I also repainted a "spare" Punisher figure to stand in as a generic SHIELD agent, but that didn't amount to much. Also, I'm not a good customizer, so they didn't look very good.

I ran into the problem several years later when the Marvel Legends series began. They made a Nick Fury early on -- which I picked up -- but no SHIELD agents. So when I first built my action figure metropolis, I wanted to use my Enterprise playset as a SHIELD Helicarrier, but the only character to populate it would've been Fury himself. (I did have four Skrulls, though, so the Enterprise became a Skrull spaceship.)

I mostly stepped away from action figures for several years but have circled back to it again starting in 2022, as I began to realize I could use my 3D printer to tackle projects I was never able to satisfactorily complete previously. In that time I had been away from action figure collecting, Hasbro had released several additional SHIELD agents (in no small part thanks to the organization's prominent portrayals in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). So with a few ebay purchases and a week or so of 3D printing (plus some very limited figure customizations) I was able to pull together the SHIELD display seen here: a SHIELD facility populated by not only Nick Fury but another dozen SHIELD agents.

Over the past few months, I've actually knocked out several projects along these lines. Projects that I was only partially able to try years earlier and, because of limited skills and/or budget and/or resources, never completed. Since these were never things I actually had, it's not really a dip into nostalgia, but rather finally being able to scratch a creative itch that I first got decades ago. I find it a little surprising that I've been able to whip these out so quickly relative to the time I spent on them years ago without making any appreciable headway, but that's almost certainly a result of having acquired more skills since then, having a 3D printer to produce precision parts quickly/easily, and having more disposable income to throw at any given project.

I'm not sure what I'll be working on next; I think I've finished now all of these types of projects that I was unable to complete years ago, but it's certainly possible there's some other stuff I just haven't remembered yet. I've talked elsewhere how my -- and many Gen Xers' -- life goals were set against a 30-35 year life-span since we grew up being regularly told by the world at large that we wouldn't live longer than that anyway. Nuclear war or AIDs or climate change ("global warming" as it was called back then) would make life literally impossible in the 21st century. We're obviously a couple decades past that now and I've accomplished FAR more than I ever anticpiated, so I'm finishing projects now that I hadn't even given a passing thought to for years. Who knows what's next?

[Author's Note: The following was originally published in The Jack Kirby Collector #59.]

While Captain America was not the first patriotic superhero, he quickly became the most popular. The cover of Captain America Comics #1 expressed a widely held, but largely unspoken, sentiment in the U.S. at the time -- recall that the issue debuted months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the country’s formal entry into World War II. But while the original design for Captain America was by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby became more associated with the character and returned to detailing his exploits several times throughout his career. Jack remained remarkably (for him) consistent in how he drew Cap, but he did make several design changes to the iconic shield, most of which have gone unnoticed.

The original shield design, by Simon, was largely triangular in shape, with a scalloped top. It featured three stars and seven red, white and blue stripes. The splash page of that first issue sports what is basically just a somewhat tighter version of Simon’s original sketch. Though the number of stripes varies a bit throughout the first issue, Jack generally kept things consistent.

The first issue of Captain America Comics was wildly popular and garnered a lot of attention. Including from John Goldwater, the dominant partner in MLJ Publications (now known as Archie Comics) whose own patriotic hero, The Shield, had debuted a year earlier. Simon notes in his autobiography that Goldwater was “admittedly upset that Captain America had far surpassed his hero” and he objected to the shape of Cap’s shield because he felt it was too similar to The Shield’s chest insignia. Martin Goodman, who published Captain America Comics, was leary of legal action. Simon quotes him as saying, “... lawsuits are expensive and we’d better go over there to talk to him.” To avoid a lawsuit, they agreed to change the shield to a circular design.

(Interestingly, they found themselves in Goldwater’s offices again the following year when he threatened file suit over a villain in Captain America Comics #6 called The Hangman, feeling it infringed on the MLJ character of the same name. That Goodman backed down a second time and promised to never use the character again speaks volumes to the relationship between the two publishers.)

What seems to go unnoticed by many fans, however, is that the convex circular shield that debuted in Captain America Comics #2 is not the same design they’re familiar with. Throughout Jack’s work on the stories in the 1940s, he drew Cap’s shield with two red bands and two white bands. All of the shield artwork after the company became formally known as Marvel in the 1960s displays two red bands and only a single white band. A minor distinction, perhaps, but it does have an impact on the overall visual.

The round shield became more of an offensive weapon as well. Cap does backhand one crook with the triangular shield in his first issue, but the shield was largely incidental in that fight; Cap’s fist would have been there if the shield wasn’t. With the round shield, he begins to use it as a battering ram and large, blunt object eventually throwing it for the first time in Captain America Comics #4. It’s thrown a second time in #6, and becomes something of a regular tactic beginning in #8.

Jack came back to Captain America in the 1960s in the pages of Strange Tales. In issue 114, a villain called The Acrobat poses as Cap using a three color band shield. As noted at the end of the story, it was a test to see if fans wanted a return of the original character, who later made his famous return in Avengers #4. In both Strange Tales and Avengers, while readers see a three color band shield for the first time, it’s still not what they’re likely most familiar with. Unlike the four color band shield from the 1940s, in the early 1960s Jack largely drew Cap’s shield as completely flat, not convex.

This seemed to change in Avengers #7. Although there are few instances of a convex shield in #6, it seems to increasingly become the norm beginning in following issue. Chic Stone inked both stories, so this doesn’t seem to be an instance in Jack making alterations to his drawings based on what the inker was doing as was the case with Joe Sinnott inking the Thing over in Fantastic Four. I suspect that Jack had simply drawn the convex shield almost accidentally and editor-slash-defacto-art-director Stan Lee liked it, asking Jack to draw the shield in that manner more regularly. That would explain why it switches from flat to convex and back to flat again throughout the next several of Captain America’s appearances, as Jack may have needed repeated reminders. He took a short break from the character in late 1965, his last Cap story appearing in Tales of Suspense #68 with more than a couple flat-looking shields.

When Jack returned to full pencilling duties in Tales of Suspense #78, the convex shield had become the norm and it only appears flat from a few odd angles. It should be noted, too, that the convex shield became Jack’s default ultimately. Certainly when he returned to Marvel and Captain America in the 1970s, his pencils clearly show he was regularly drawing a convex shield instead of a flat one, and even his sketches for fans from that period and later show that Jack embraced the idea of a convex shield.

Despite seeming like the single, most iconic element of Captain America’s character since his second appearance, his shield actually spent roughly a quarter of a century undergoing modifications and adjustments by Jack himself. Not sweeping changes, but noticeable ones that enhanced the very image of the shield. Jack’s final design on this has remain in place for decades since, even when the shield is passed from one character to another. And it’s worth noting, too, that even Hollywood hasn’t sought to tamper with the iconography that Jack came up with here. It might be a fairly simple design, but that it hasn’t changed since Jack touched it last says how powerful those nuances were.

The space above my work desk at home is decorated with some action figure displays. I somehow got it into my head that a neat "end cap" type of piece for them would be a fire escape on the side of a brick building, where I could place some pulpy Golden Age comics characters. I was able to get pretty easily a Plastic Man (debuted 1941) and Wildcat (debuted 1942) and "first appearance" Batman circa 1939. But I wanted include some characters beyond DC lore. (I could technically throw in my Captain Marvel figure as he was owned by Fawcett back then, but I'd also like to keep this a bit more pulpy.) There's some nice Flash Gordon and Phantom figures out there... but frustratingly not in a 6-inch format. Both Mezco and Boss Fight Studio have some very nice, in-scale Popeye figures but the Boss Fight ones are a little too cartoony in style and the Mezco ones are too expensive for not using a centerpiece to a display. The Dick Tracy figures from both Shocker Toys or Mezco would fit the bill but, again, those are far too expensive for this. The Collectable Legends Blue Beetle isn't super outrageous price-wise but I've literally never read a Golden Age Blue Beetle story. Fresh Monkey Fiction has a nice collection of Golden Age figures like Phantom Lady, the Blue Flame, Atoman, Black Terror, the Claw, Fantomah, the Green Turtle, and Miss Fury among others. But here again, none are in the 6-inch format.

Well, maybe I could customize a figure or two. I'm not great at painting but I could probably do a simple deco job like the original Daredevil or something. Boss Fight Studio even has a line of blank figures available for pre-order now... except those aren't scheduled to be released until 2025. My 3D printer also isn't high quality enough to do good six-inch figures -- at least, not ones with much articulation. I did make a bunch of army-builder type Skrulls a little while ago, but they pretty much only work as background fodder. Ah, but there's a thought... what about a character that didn't have a lot of articulation to begin with?

And that's how I got to thinking about doing a custom action figure of The Heap. He's the original swamp monster in the same vein as Man-Thing or Swamp Thing but he debuted decades earlier in 1942. His design changed a bit from issue to issue, but he was really only humanoid in the loosest sense: two arms, two legs, and a head. Sometimes he had hands, sometimes not. Sometimes feet, sometimes not. Sometimes he was white, sometimes brown, sometimes green. Sometimes he had eyes or a mouth, sometimes not. About the only thing that was consistent in any way was that his "nose" was kind of a root-looking thing in the middle of his head and even that was inconsistently rendered.

As I began looking for models to work from -- I was originally thinking maybe a "shambling mound" Dungeons & Dragons miniature that I could add some articulation to -- I stumbled across someone who had recreated Kenner's old Wampa creature from The Empire Strikes Back toys. It had the articulation already and the basic design was there; all that really needed to be tweaked was the head. The modifications weren't difficult -- I was able to do them in Tinkercad, which is about the most bare-bones 3D modeling program out there. I basically just removed the ears and horns, and tuned one of the horns into a nose. The hardest part was actually trying to blend the blank spots left by the horns into the rest of the head, but I eventually just copied the upper part of the shoulder and let the piece mesh together naturally.

While I was in there, I opted to add a few other joints as well. By splitting the torso and the two arms each in half and dropping a simple rod through the middle of each, I easily created swivel joints for the hip and biceps. Because of the original design, they don't line up super smoothly if you rotate them a solid 90° but they add a great deal of movement, almost doubling the amount of joints of the original figure. I printed all the parts at 142% to make sure the figure towered appropriately over the other figures. Printing and doing the additional design work took a grand total of maybe two and a half days.

As you can see from the photos, I use green filament for the base and that alone make it look more like The Heap than a Wampa. A little on the overly bright side, but it's what I already had. So to give a little more depth and nuance, I hit the printed pieces with a can of grey spray paint. Not much, of course, just enough to dull the color a bit and make things look a bit "dirty." I then assembled the figure and did a light paint wash over the whole thing with some really, really, really thinned out brown paint. The only thing left at that point was a spot of solid brown for the nose.

Less than three days, start to finish.

The model did cost me about five bucks, and I probably used maybe a dollar's worth of materials that I already had lying around. Buying an appropriately sized Wampa figure would set me back at least $60 and I would have had to have done a LOT more work on it, no doubt taking much longer than just a few days.

Now I just have to wait until somebody makes a six-inch Airboy figure and I'll be all set!