So in the last month, I’ve been trying to read more superhero comics than I ever did before, trying to give myself a crash course in an art form I should have followed when I was young, but didn’t. (So please remember this in light of what follows, and make allowances for the narrow, American-corporate-comics […]

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Of IDW’s recent Archie comics collections, Archie: The Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948 is by some distance the best. First, it’s a real collection; it has all the daily strips written and drawn by Archie creator Bob Montana (who mostly concentrated on the strip, rather than the comic books, until his death in 1975) from the […]

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I picked up IDW’s first Archie Comics collection, The Best of Dan DeCarlo Volume 1. Since no one has yet posted a list of the contents, I thought I’d have a go at it. Before I do, I’ll give some brief thoughts: the biggest quibble is that there are only 26 stories here, and they […]

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The one thing Archie Andrews can be thankful for is that Betty Cooper doesn’t (usually) have god-like magical powers that allow her to kill or maim other people on a whim. Harvey… er… No-Last-Name is not so lucky. As revealed in this story from Sabrina # 21 (September 1974), written by Frank Doyle and drawn […]

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I don’t think a lot of people still read Al Capp’s Li’l Abner; Capp’s extreme misanthropy, combined with his shift to the hard right late in his career, can make the strip a bit of a slog at times. But at its best, it was comics genius. And it was never better than in the […]

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Reading old Code-approved humour comics frequently raises the question “was that intended to mean what we now think it means?” So, here’s a question, in lieu of actual content: do you think the innuendo in these comics panels is a) intended by the writer or b) not? 1. From Marvel/Timely/Atlas’s Millie the Model # 92 […]

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Every so often I get a comment on my blog that makes blogging worthwhile. One of them is this comment I got on a post about comic book artist Samm Schwartz: I’m Sam Schwartz’s daughter. I googled him and was surprised to see a substantial number of hits. I think it’s terrific that people are […]

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Okay, so let’s say I told you that in 1964, a comic book character was so out of control that the doctor prescribed tranquilizers. Let’s also say that this character started taking the tranquilizers and immediately became prone to narcolepsy. And let’s throw in the fact that even in a state of drug-induced narcolepsy, this […]

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You know what surprises me about remakes in comic books? It’s that there haven’t been more of them. Formula or no formula, there does usually seem to be a presumption that a new script is better than re-illustrating an old one from a decade earlier. Which is a good thing; I’m just not sure if […]

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A commenter on MGK’s requests post asked for something about Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and while I’m not MGK, I thought I’d take a stab at it. Pogo is sort of in limbo at the moment in terms of availability; Fantagraphics was supposed to have year-by-year Peanuts-style collections ready over a year ago, they have still […]

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In lieu of a somewhat more substantive post that I’m still tinkering with, here’s a 1964 comic book story whose Cold War origins have always confused me. Not that it’s confusing that a science fiction story would be about the Cold War; what else was it going to be about? The question is, who’s who […]

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The year is 1958. The month is June. The teenagers of small-town America are filled with a nebulous sense of rebellion against repressive sexuality and social convention. It was inevitable that some business genius would make money off their forbidden longings. A proto-beatnik named Forsythe P. Jones opens his own “escort service,” which involves not […]

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I don’t think any comic book of the ’70s had as much insane shit in it as Archie at Riverdale High. And that’s saying a lot, because we are talking about the ’70s here. But this title, launched in the early ’70s as a home for “serious” stories focusing on academic or athletic issues, packed […]

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I once described myself as an “Artists and Models junkie,” which is not a description you hear very much outside France. We all can name movies that somehow manage to bring together a lot of the things we like, and this 1955 film by Frank Tashlin, which I watched again recently, has always been the […]

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I can’t add much to MGK’s definitive explanations of why Betty Cooper is insane, but I just wanted to make note of one thing I found recently. When I called MGK’s attention to the first page of this story, I hadn’t actually seen the rest of the story. And I assumed that if I ever […]

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