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Hey there, True Believers! Welcome to Comics Comics Sunday edition. I need one more week to pull together a coherent continuation of my romance comics posts, so here’s some gossip from last week’s SPX. Well, not gossip, but some “thoughts” about the show one week later. I was going to skip posting a report cuz Dan’s pics and Tom’s pics basically tell the story. But I figured traditions exist for reasons, and it’s a tradition to do the SPX round-up. So here goes.

Really missed BC – Brian Chippendale – this year. An advance copy of If ‘n Oof was waiting for us at the hotel convention. It’s completely insane. Eight hundred pages of hammers dropping on my head. Brian just ripped it. Art comics – hardcore art comics – are alive and well. I think BC is gonna stun everyone with this new one. He was supposed to come down for the show but since the main shipment of books is still a couple weeks away it didn’t really make much sense to ask BC to come down and show off that one copy. Actually, that would have been fun to watch. (more…)

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I was interviewed by Sean T. Collins over at Marvel.com about my Silver Surfer story for the Strange Tales II series. Check it out!

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Hey hey hey. What’s happenin’? SPX is what is happening and there’s no time for me to continue my series on romance comics and naturalistic drawing. So here is a related post from last summer. It’s about P. Craig Russell’s color work from the early ’80s published by Pacific Comics. Last week in the comments section to my weekly post there was a mention of these comics and I thought I’d rerun the post I made about them. Check it out if you haven’t already. Over and out.

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Hey there, True Believers, welcome to Comics Comics Sunday edition. For those of you still following along, we’ve been talking about romance comics and also naturalism in comics. So, hopefully that all set the table for you, dear reader, and you will appreciate this week’s post before we get back into studying ye olde American romance comics during the coming weeks.

Manuele Fior’s 5000 Kilometres per Second was one of the most interesting comics that I found at last year’s Angouleme festival. I don’t know much about Mr. Fior and I think I’ll let him stay mysterious to me for awhile. Feel free to google him. Personally, I like to think of him as one of the artists whom I “discovered” while in France. I had never heard of him, no one had told me to check him out, he was completely off my radar. I searched and searched at Angouleme to try and find some artists that didn’t subscribe to what I call the dominant “Canniffer” style of European comics. It took days. I swear. There are so many books (they call them albums) to look through at Angouleme that it can be depressing when they all start to look alike. I’d search all day and not really find anything I really liked. I swear. Then one day I found Brecht Evens. The next day I found Bastien Vives. And on the last day I found Manuele Fior. These three artists – for my own personal taste – provided an oasis of sorts. They all felt, feel, current and conversant in a living language whereas many of their peers seem occupied with speaking in an older, distant language. Simply put, they aren’t “Canniffers” or “Blutchies” or “Girs” and I found that interesting. Still do. (more…)

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Reading My Love recently has got me thinking about naturalism in comics. What do I mean by the term naturalism? That’s what I call a bare boned observational (from life) drawing style. It’s not dissimilar from documentary illustrations published in newspapers before photography was affordable. A modern equivalent would be court sketches. And in comics the examples that come immediately to mind are Noel Sickles, Alex Toth and Jaime Hernandez. A clear, observational drawing style based on a study of life as it appears to the naked eye. Stylized, yes, but accurate to life in proportion and feel. (more…)

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I realized after posting about My Love last week that there’s no way to write about these romance comics without writing about the search for them, finding stories on blogs, diggin’ thru bins in dusty warehouses. So these posts are gonna ramble. I’m only talkin’ to the True Believers out there who wanna help me study this workshop known as the Marvel Bullpen. And specifically this workshop’s romance comics: My Love and Our Love Stories. These are some of the more difficult Marvel mags to track down for various reasons. I haven’t seen many of them in my lifetime of comics collecting. And they have not been reprinted much at all. So it’s always a shock when I find an issue that I’ve never seen before. Even seeing the covers are a shock. It’s only in recent memory that these things began floating around on the web. The covers weren’t often reprinted in Price Guides or fanzines or even in other Marvel Comics from the period. I like finding stories on the web but it just makes me want to own them, to possess them. I don’t like rare comics shopping on eBay—I want to find it in the comics store and flip through it and decide if I want to buy it. You know, that whole “joy of the hunt” and everything. It’s not until I find it myself, hold it in my grimy hands and smell the newsprint, that I feel connected to the thing. Luckily, I live in a town that has some great secret comics warehouses that have every single possible back issue you could imagine and eventually I found a handful of My Loves and Our Loves that I don’t own so I can continue my studies. (more…)

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Hey there True Believers, welcome to Comics Comics weekend edition. This one is for those of us who love Romita, Colan, Colletta, Buscema, Ayers – the late ’60s Marvel Bullpen essentially. Maybe you’re like me and love all these artists but maybe you get a little tired of reading the same old reprints over and over again, right? Well, the doctor is here with the cure. It’s called My Love.

A re-vamp of the old school Romance comics published in the ’50s and ’60s, My Love was a late ’60s update with the Marvel Bullpen in full swing (It was also a Marvel romance title from 1949 that turned into Two Gun Western at issue #5). Generally, when people think of Romance comics they think of the classic ’40s-’50s vibe or maybe the gawdy but sharp Charltons of the ’70s. But My Love slips right in between there. It has the innocence of Laugh-in with that bright, morning fresh hippie vibe of the late ’60s AND the beginnings of the lurid, graphic ’70s. That’s how I see it anyhow. (more…)

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This one is for Mr. Evan Dorkin. Drawn by Mr. Jim Rugg. I had imagined that this scene could possibly be something Evan dreams about at night: Milk & Cheese beating up a “Neal Adams” Batman. Then I told Jim about it and we had a good laugh. The next day, the above image showed up in my mailbox. Apologies to Mr. Neal Adams. And thanks to Jim Rugg.

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So I went to the bar the other night. Saw this guy who is trying his hand at comics. He’s good. Got a western sort of style. Gets faces and gestures without photos. One time he was there showing me his pages and you could tell he was proud. They looked great. He said the stuff was just pouring out of him. Then the other night I see him and he’s gabby. He asks me what “Marvel Method” was so I told him. We talked about different ways of writing stories. It was fun. Bar talk. Then I asked him how the work was going. He said it was a little tough with his day job taking up all his time. I said yeah. He said I wanna be like you and get a paycheck from drawing. Who? You. Me? I don’t make money drawing comics. What about Marvel he said. Yeah one story. A great job. Now I’m looking for another. How do you survive? I live in a house I bought off my uncle for one dollar. I live cheap. Oh. He sat down. Hadn’t taken a drag off his cigarette for awhile now. I could see his escape plan folding in on itself. I saw the thought balloon form above his head. It read I’m going to have to keep my day job in big letters. He was silent now. The bartender yelled last call. I ordered another round.