Here I was all ready to sink my teeth into the upcoming Bernie Krigstein Atlas comics reprint, when instead I got this weighty surprise at the mailbox last night. And I do mean WEIGHTY! A two-volume The Crypt of Covers: The Complete EC Covers Compendium is a monster. Over 600 11×14.6 pages in a box, this thing blows up ever EC cover to small poster size. And brace yourself when picking it up. This package is dense.
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Marvel ‘s March 8. 1977 launch of Star Wars, the comic book, was never just another opportunistic hit-movie tie-in. In fact, no one knew then what a pop culture “Force” the franchise would become. The film itself premiered three weeks later, and many were skeptical that audiences would embrace a pulp-style space opera. But a comic book version of his epic property had been in George Lucas’s master plan all along. As Peter Sanderson recounts in his thorough introduction to TASCHEN’s Star Wars Comics Library. Vol. 1. 1977-1979, the director and his publicity man had been pitching the idea as early as 1975. Famously, Stan Lee wouldn’t even take Lucas’s first phone call, and Marvel resisted the project for a while. Ironically, the Star Wars comic series not only proved to be a massive hit once the film opened, but it outsold all other Marvel titles and helped save the struggling company.
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Unlike many previous reprints of EC Comics, Fantagraphics organized its “Artists’ Library” not by title but generally by artist. Better still, a black and white format highlights beautifully the line and ink work by legends like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, etc. And it shows these masters rendering some of the most suspenseful, violent, ghastly and otherworldly material across a range of stories so lurid and weird they attracted censorious government scrutiny. In other words, the Artists’ Library showcases the best cartoonists at the height of their powers and working on content that editor Al Feldstein deliberately matched to each one’s specific strengths. The project has been magnificent, especially in showing Davis, Wood, Kurtzman, Craig, Kamen and others evolve over time and respond to different material. It has been a thoughtfully designed series that makes even aficionados of EC think differently about what is in my mind the greatest run of comic book art ever. But the 40th volume in the Library, Shock Treatment, is unusual in many respects.
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Popeye’s impact on E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre in 1929 was so enormous that the previous decade of the strip’s life soon became a footnote to comics history. But, of course, Segar’s legendary storytelling skills in sagas like Plunder Island and the Popeye’s Ark/Spinachova cycle did not spring spontaneously from any newfound talent. He spent the previous decade developing a unique comic voice. Until now, the only deep dive into Pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre came from the beautiful, oversized, pricey collection from Sunday Press that collected select color Sundays across the1920s. But two new reprints of extended daily runs now let us zoom into the maturation of this singular American humorist through extended runs of the dailies. Thimble Theatre, The Complete Dailies, 1919-1920 (Boring Comics) initiates a multi-volume reprint project of all pre-Popeye strips from Library of American Comics veteran Kurtis Findlay. And Thimble Theatre: “The Saga of Cylinda Oyl” Vol. 1, which covers April 22, 1926-Jan. 19, 1927) starts three-volume coverage of a major story, which comes to us from filmmaker Frank Tovar.
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Harvey Kurtzman and Hugh Hefner were the two towering figures of 1950s culture who showed how idiosyncratic personal vision innovate even in an era of corporatized modern mass media. The best evidence of this is the abject failure of other publishers to imitate their success, at least in their first decade. Kurtzman’s MAD and Hef’s Playboy were singular efforts that made the many knock-offs seem like crude and exploitive misunderstandings of what these geniuses had wrought.
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The Fantagraphics project of reprinting extended runs and top creators from 1950s Atlas comics continues at a breakneck pace. I won’t bother arguing whether such a completist approach to non-EC pre-code comics is worthwhile. Clearly the effort found a hardcore market of fans for exceptionally well restored, presented and contextualized output from the pre-Marvel days of Marvel. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo provides dense intros that both situate the title at hand as well as add to his ongoing history of Atlas. In this case we get the first 10 issues of Adventures Into Weird Worlds (1952), one of the better efforts to cash in on the peaking horror/weird comics craze. Some of the greats of the pre-code genres are here: Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Bill Everett, George Roussos, and even a Bernie Krigstein effort (albeit underwhelming). While all of these artists clearly are hacking it out here and working generally in second gear, there are joys to be found nevertheless.
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We could easily frame Hal Foster’s 1931-1937 run of Tarzan Sunday comics merely as a pleasant preamble to his magnum opus, Prince Valiant. By his own admission, Foster was a reluctant cartoonist. The successful magazine and commercial artist carried that world’s condescension towards the comic strip. Famously, he quipped in 1984 that being invited to replace Rex Maxon on the Tarzan Sundays was “To be asked to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.” But the Great Depression had hit advertising and print media hard, so Foster took the life raft. But as TASCHEN’s new and definitive reprint of his Tarzan years shows, Foster was doing more than warming up. Others like Frank Godwin and Nell Brinkley had already started to introduce less cartoony, more illustrative styles to comics pages. But Foster brought into the mix dynamic, realistic figure art, a remarkable attention to color, and an appreciation for spectacle that newspaper Sunday pages hadn’t seen since the earliest years of experimentation by the likes of McCay and Feininger.
