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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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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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I read Jeet’s post about Jack Kirby and Dave Sim and thought about Kirby in the early ’70s. Specifically, his transition to DC from Marvel. So, I went down into my basement and dug out a DC comic from 1971. It’s a “Super DC Giant” reprint of all the Kirby Challengers of the Unknown material inked by Wally Wood. When were they first published, the late ’50s? And then I tried to imagine Wood being part of the Fourth World material, just inking one of the books like Vince Colletta did for Forever People. And then I smoked a cigarette. Man, that would have been amazing. For me, anyhow. They could have really turned up the romance angle. Look at those girls. Hubba Hubba.

Can you imagine Big Barda inked by Wood? Oof.