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Nothing in this comics world is more compulsively readable than random Steve Ditko comics, and here’s a recent favorite: The Big Man, from the 1986 Renegade Press release Murder #1. Simplicity in action – an anxious toymaker gets back at his nasty business partners by building a super-costume that transforms him into an enormous guy at will.  Then he crushes his enemies with enormity. “An envious mind, maybe a tiny mind with a big hate. A victimized mind seeking redress, etc. etc. etc.” muses a detective, whose function is mostly philosophical elaboration; the villain dies in a costume malfunction. So basically it’s The Incredibles, if The Incredibles was 115 minutes of Syndrome handing out critical beatings.

Murder was one of frequent Ditko cohort Robin Snyder’s anthology projects with Renegade, loosely arranged under the banner of Robin Snyder’s Revolver, as in ‘revolving’ artists and themes, although only the first six issues were numbered under the Revolver title – then came three issues of Ditko’s World: Static, an issue of Ernie Colon’s Manimal, three issues of Murder and a reprint-heavy Revolver Annual subtitled Frisky Frolics. Ditko showed up in almost every issue, as well as various artists and writers associated with the Warren magazines, which had folded a few years prior in 1983; indeed, some of the content is reprinted from Warren publications, while it’s possible the assorted Bill DuBay and Jim Stenstrum pieces (scripts?) were intended for Warren during their time with the publisher. To your left you’ll see Jim Stenstrum’s Tales of the Siberian Snowtroopers #1 (Revolver #6, reprinted in Annual #1), drawn by future Image co-founder Erik Larsen, who otherwise contributed a few illustrations to the extended Revolver project. If the story wasn’t intended for Warren, this would mark the only original, non-Warren comics work by Stenstrum, a specialist in keen violence and sarcastic heroism of the sort that would eventually spark a pre-Image comics revolution in America, the ’80s British Invasion fed by a growing 2000 AD and Warrior, as I’ve indicated in this space before. Here, it seems several time periods exist at once, although I wouldn’t call Stenstrum ‘ahead-of-his-time’ in the ’70s – internationally he was perfectly of his time, while many American genre comics hung a few steps back.

But now, onto the sequels, collections and follow-ups you dare not miss:

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One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn’t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page. Bushmiller was aware enough of this complaint to draw at least on one occasion a strip where Nancy and Sluggo do in fact emerge from the push and pull of a rubber stamp, a sort of comic strip version of the myths whereby the Gods of old emerged out of nothing. It is true that in the prime years of Nancy, say from 1945 to 1970, Bushmiller’s characters possessed a startling degree of iconic solidarity: any simple drawing of Nancy or Sluggo in profile looks remarkably like another such drawing, right down to the uniform bristle that surround Nancy’s hair. But Bushmiller wasn’t content to have his characters look recognizably similar from panel to panel and strip to strip which is after all what almost all cartoonists do. Bushmiller also had a propensity to proliferate images of Nancy and Sluggo within each panel, as if to show off his virtuoso skills at replication. Examples would include stories where Nancy and Sluggo have almost identical looking doppelgangers (such as the 1947 story with Nancy’s cousin Judy, which manages to be both stupidly funny in the Bushmiller manner and also a little bit creepy).  Also panels where the characters see themselves in mirrors or dreams. Or the general tendency of all of Bushmiller’s secondary characters to look like Platonic-types of characters rather than individual characters.

Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen, in his formidable and daunting book The System of Comics, has made “iconic solidarity” a key feature of the language of comics (within of course a much more complex system). But if “iconic solidarity” is a formalist property common to comics in general, what Bushmiller is up to is heightening this formal property by making it as blunt and visible as possible. In effect, Bushmiller’s gambit is to make us aware as possible that we’re reading a comic by taking a key formal property and making it part of the narrative itself. Hence all those twins and mirror images. This might explain why so many comics aficionados have a special regard for Nancy, which often seems to be the very beating heart, the very distilled essence, of comics itself (for those who still believe, of course, in essences). And wasn’t that part of the point of Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury”, to show how Nancy could retain her iconic solidarity even if distorted in countless different ways?

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If readers of this blog are up on Sunday morning and want to catch some comics talk, then you should tune into the CBS show called, appropriately enough, Sunday Morning. They’ll have a segment on Little Orphan Annie. I was interviewed for the segment and the people doing the show really know what they’re talking about, so it should be an interesting overview of Harold Gray’s masterful comic strip.

Because Tribune Media Services is canceling Annie, there have been a number of retrospective articles in the press. Sharon Cohen of AP has an interesting analysis which can be found here, and Michael Taube, a former speech writer to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, weighs in here.

As always, I’d encourage readers to take a look at the Complete Little Orphan Annie series issuing forth at a rapid rate from IDW.

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A couple things to bring to your attention:

1) Sir Gary Panter, recently knighted by the United Schwingdom, has relaunched his web site, and his holding a special contest to celebrate. He is also having a show in L.A. with Bob “50 years of genius work” Zoell and Devin “Lady Pants” Flynn.

2) Over on his “personal” blog, Frank revals that after some 150 years in the comics biz, he’s finally sold out. Thanks heavens. Now come stand over here, Frank.

3) Yuichi Yokoyama recently had an exhibition of new and recent work in Tokyo. Some tantalizing images here.

That’s it. Now go about your morning.

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By now the legend of the Art in Time L.A. event at Cinefamily has probably not reached you. Basically, thanks to Cinefamily and Sammy Harkham, I gathered a pantheon of great cartoonists under one roof for an early evening gab fest and book signing. Johnny Ryan interviewed Lawrence (Real Deal) Hubbard; I interviewed John Thompson, Sharon Rudahl and Barbara “Willy” Mendes, and Jaime Hernandez screened the fabulous A Letter to Three Wives, after which Sammy briefly interviewed him. Books were signed, beer was consumed, and after all that I ate an enormous corned beef sandwich at Cantor’s. But! It was not without its moments, best of which was a fairly intense exchange between Hubbard and Mendes. Anyhow, lucky for you, dear readers, I recorded the whole thing the first two panels in a single take. There’s a brief dead zone between the Hubbard/Ryan panel and the Art in Time panel, but let it roll. It’s worth it. The recording picks up with Johnny introducing Lawrence. Enjoy.

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Kill your morning by listening to an interview over at Inkstuds. Listen to me rant on about Art in Time and other matters of the heart. Robin is always a fine host.

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I found this Thor origin story by Steve Ditko in a comic called The Saga of Thane of Bagarth issue number 24 from 1985 which was a reprint of an old Charlton comic from 1973. I’ve never seen or heard of it before.

I posted it on my back issue blog. Check it out!

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Last week was a slow one for me, comics-wise. My main pleasure was this – finally tracking down a copy of issue #7 of Viz’s old release of Cobra, a Buichi Terasawa manga from the late ’70s/early ’80s about a secret agent-type space hero with a cannon for an arm. This was during Viz’s period of releasing portions of manga series as perfect bound miniseries (at higher prices – Cobra ran $3.25 per issue) which would then sometimes get collected as softcover books, though not in this case. This was also a time of fairly aggressive framing of ‘manga’ as akin to Western comics, so a lot of chest-beating action stuff or fantasy work got translated, all the better if it had some awareness in anime fandom, which Cobra did among miscellaneous sci-fi fans (already aging a bit) who maybe traded tapes of the 1982-83 television anime.

Of course, Cobra ran for 18 volumes in Japan, so Viz’s 12 comic books didn’t get very far into the story. Terasawa would eventually develop into an illustration-oriented, rather cheesecake-y comics artist, but this ’70s stuff bears a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s stamp, in that he started out apprenticing in Tezuka’s studio. This was all part of a plan to somehow become a film director — he did eventually direct some of the anime based on his own comics — which contrasts a bit in approach with the movie pitch comics of today. This is an older kind of comic, even in terms of English adaptation – Marv Wolfman is credited with such, as another means of familiarizing North American audiences with Japanese comics. He has a small essay in issue #7 about discovering the old Cobra tapes while watching anime with Chris Claremont and James D. Hudnall, the latter a prominent figure in manga-in-English, having been (among other designations) one of the souls present for Naoki Urasawa’s first appearance in English in the form of the urban military action series Pineapple Army, though Urasawa (still years off from Monster) was best known as a popular sports mangaka, and anyway was working from scripts by Kazuya Kud? of Mai the Psychic Girl, whose presence I imagine was the real draw (if indeed there was any; the series didn’t run for too long).

And yes, I know I can just buy all these old comics off the internet — issues of Cobra aren’t particularly rare —  but hunting around for missing pieces is part of the fun for me. Many of the following selections are, however, very self-contained or now easier and more collected than ever:

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Last fall, not long after Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days was published, I interviewed Al Columbia. I thought he might be a tough subject, reticent to talk about his work and himself, but he was quite the opposite: thoughtful, friendly, and easy to talk to. I liked him quite a bit, in fact. If you haven’t already bought the book, do it now.

NICOLE RUDICK: How often do you work during the day?

AL COLUMBIA: Pretty much from when I get up till I go to bed.

You draw all day?

That, and other things. These days, I don’t draw as much as I did a couple years ago. A couple years ago, I would work from when I got up to when I went to sleep, but that would either be a very long day or two days in a row. I spent a lot of time pushing that, going into two days and getting very little sleep and waking up and doing it again. I became very obsessed with what I was doing at the time. For many years, I wasn’t getting very much sleep. I was just working, working, working, working—until it just seemed to turn in on itself, and it became a weird experience to draw, a little less pleasurable. Not that it’s always pleasurable—it’s hard work—but it seemed to scrape at something inside—deep inside, actually—that made me uncomfortable. So I don’t draw as much as I used to.

When did you start?

Really young, very, very young, two or three. I remember seeing Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, on the television and falling in love with her. I tried drawing her face, and I remember it didn’t look right. So I drew it again, and it didn’t look right, and I drew it again. I got really upset: I kept drawing her face over and over until I got it as best I could, so I could remember her until next year, when she was on TV again. Back then, they would only show The Wizard of Oz once a year, so that was the only time I would get to see Dorothy. I was kind of heartbroken.
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If you head down to the comic shop this week, make sure you pick up a copy of the free Jonah Hex comic. Why? So you can see for your very eyes how photo-referencing has taken all the fun, gesture and action out of comics.

Exhibit A: Here’s a panel where a kid is getting smacked in the face. Look at that movement! Isn’t incredible how it really feels like the action is occurring? So realistic!

Exhibit B: Just look at the FORCE at which the hand with the gun swoops through the second panel and clocks the guy’s head! Wow!

Exhibit C: Another amazing action sequence! See the knee to the face and the recoil of the victim! The feeling of motion just sweeps me off the page.

Anyone who’s read this blog long enough knows how I feel about heavy duty photo-referencing. Is it legal that so many mainstream comic books have shed cartooning in favor of such stiff stage acting? I know, I know, it’s a movie tie-in and they want it to look “real”, but man, this stiffness is so pervasive these days that it makes me just go… limp.