comics history
CBLDF gets Comics Code seal of approval
In an ironic footnote to comics history, the Comic Magazine Association of America has given the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund the rights to the iconic Comics Code Seal of Approval.
The CMAA administered the Comics Code, a self-censorship scheme agreed upon by publishers, from the 1950s until January 2011, when it was officially disbanded. For most of its existence, the code was enforced by distributors, who would not carry a comic that did not bear the seal. Dr. Amy Kyste Nyberg chronicles the rise and fall of the Comic Code in a nice article on the CBLDF website.
Now the seal goes to the CBLDF, which dedicates itself wholeheartedly to fighting censorship — and even more appropriately, the transfer was announced during Banned Books Week! In keeping with its mission, the CBLDF will not put the seal on comics but instead emblazon it on T-shirts to raise money for the protection of the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers and readers. Said CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein, “It’s a progressive change that the Comics Code seal, which is yesterday’s symbol of comics censorship, will now be used to raise money to protect the First Amendment challenges comics face in the future. That goal probably would have been unimaginable to the Code’s founders, who were part of a generation of comics professionals that were fleeing a witch-hunt that nearly trampled comics and any notion that they deserved any First Amendment protection.”
- September 29, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
50 years ago today, Fantastic Four #1 changed the comics world
Fantastic Four #1
As Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort notes, 50 years ago today, The Fantastic Four #1 debuted, beginning a 102-issue run by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — an unfinished issue was completed in 2008 — and giving birth to the Silver Age of Marvel Comics.
Given Marvel’s recent legal victory in the bitter copyright battle with Kirby’s heirs, the anniversary is undoubtedly a bittersweet milestone, but an incredibly important one all the same. Happy 50th to “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” and the Marvel Universe as we know it. And thank you, Lee and Kirby, for the Fantastic Four and much, much more.
- August 8, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The Walking Dead bookstore streak; Parker delay
The Walking Dead, Vol. 14
Retailing | Although the 14th volume of The Walking Dead wasn’t released until June 21, it still managed to secure the No. 2 spot on BookScan’s list of graphic novels sold in bookstores that month, behind the 51st volume of Naruto. It’s the ninth consecutive month that at least one volume of the horror series has appeared in the BookScan Top 20, a run that began as marketing geared up for the AMC television adaptation. [ICv2.com]
Publishing | Darwyn Cooke has announced that the release of Parker: The Martini Edition will be postponed for a few months, and takes full responsibility for the delay. The book is now scheduled to debut at the Long Beach Comic Con in October [Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog]
Publishing | John Jackson Miller looks at the history of comics numbering, which he traces back to dime novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries: “Comics are anomalous in American magazine publishing because most comics don’t use volume numbers and issue numbers that roll over ever year; rather, the numbers keep on going. In that, our numbering is much like that used for the cheap, disposable fiction of the earlier days.” [The Comichron]
- July 11, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
A first look at SVK, and other comics that trick the eye
Two panels of SVK with and without the hidden content
Comics critic Paul Gravett has a peek at SVK, the new graphic novel due out from Warren Ellis and D’Israeli, as part of an interesting article on comics that trick the eye. SVK, which was announced last December, is a graphic novel with a hidden agenda, so to speak: The private thoughts of some characters are invisible on the printed page until the reader shines an ultraviolet light on them, at which point they appear in thought balloons. Gravett shows a few examples of this and then goes on to some interesting historical examples of other comics that use concealed content, including 3D comics, vintage newspaper strips that used invisible ink, and a comic that flips upside-down halfway through.
- July 4, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Revamped Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark performing well
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Broadway | Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the retooled $75 million Broadway musical, took in $1.7 million for the week ending this past Sunday, which is above the $1.2 million the producers have indicated they need to reach to stay viable. The amount made it the No. 3 musical for the week, after Wicked and The Lion King. [Associated Press]
Legal | Robert Corn-Revere, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s general counsel, discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. EMA, which sought to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. He notes that the court drew upon the history of comic book censorship in reaching its conclusion to reject the ban: “Citing the amicus brief filed by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, it noted the crusade against comics led by Dr. Frederic Wertham and observed that it was inconsistent with our constitutional traditions. The Court traced the history of censorship that targeted various media directed toward the young and held that restricting depictions of violence could not be justified under established principles of First Amendment law.” [CBLDF]
- June 28, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | B&N has $74M loss; Lew Sayre Schwartz passes away
Barnes & Noble
Retailing | As the bankrupt Borders Group weighs competing bids, Barnes & Noble — the largest book chain in the United States — reports a loss of $74 million for the fiscal year, in part because of heavy investment in its digital initiatives. However, the company saw a 50-percent sales increase at BN.com, fueled by Nook devices and digital content sold through the Nook Bookstore. [Publishers Weekly]
Passings | Lew Sayre Schwartz, one of Bob Kane’s ghost artists on Batman and Detective Comics, passed away June 7 as the result of an injury suffered in a fall. He was 84. Schwartz drew as many as 120 Batman stories between 1948 and 1953, all signed “Bob Kane,” before leaving comics after a junket entertaining troops in Korea. Eddie Campbell quotes Schwartz as saying, “’When I got back, I couldn’t stand drawing another page’ of Batman.” He went on to work in television advertising, co-founding the commercial production company Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz. [Mark Evanier, ComicMix]
Conventions | Scott Lewis looks at the plan by Mayor Jerry Sanders to pay for the $500-million expansion of the San Diego Convention Center: the Convention Center Assessment District, an entity that will add an additional 3 percent tax on room bills for hotels downtown, 2 percent on those out to Mission Valley, and 1 percent on those farther away. [Voice of San Diego]
- June 22, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Marvel Cybercomics: A blast from the past
Sean Kleefeld points out a bit of comics ephemera that has resurfaced on the net: CyberComics, Marvel’s early (1996) attempt at webcomics. Apparently these comics have disappeared from Marvel’s own archives, but writer D.G. Chichester still had them on his hard disk so he went ahead and posted them, both in panel-by-panel format and as videos. Despite being 15 years old, they look pretty much like webcomics today, with standard navigational arrows and a panel-by-panel reveal that is just like the one used in, say, Red Light Properties.
Sean sketches out a little background for these, pointing out that rather than use webcomics to bring people to the print comics, which is often the current model, Marvel was doing the reverse—promoting the digital comics in the print version. They never could find a way to make them pay, though, and the experiment was dropped after four years.
- June 20, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Car damages Superman tribute fence surrounding site of Shuster home
The plates on the fence surrounding the site of the Shuster family home (via CapedWonder)
A month after thieves stole a historical marker near the Cleveland house where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the Man of Steel, a man drove through the fence surrounding the site of Shuster’s former home on Tuesday night, damaging large metal plates that reprint the first Superman story.
According to The Plain Dealer, the driver is believed to be a neighbor, who’s offering to pay the estimated $2,600 to replace the seven plates he destroyed. The panels, which reprint pages from Action Comics #1, were installed two years ago by the Glenville Development Corporation and the Siegel and Shuster Society.
There is good news, though, at least regarding the historical marker: The newspaper reports that the plaque, stolen in April from the intersection of St. Clair Avenue and East 105th Street, was left at the Glenville neighborhood fire station, presumably because of the intense publicity surrounding the theft. It’s thought that the aluminum sign was taken by scrap-metal thieves who mistook it for bronze because of its coloring.
- May 26, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
When comics history attacks: Read Gary Groth’s controversial Jack Kirby interview
“Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything! I’ve never seen Stan Lee write anything. I used to write the stories just like I always did.”
“It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories. Stan Lee was a guy that knew where the papers were or who was coming to visit that day. Stan Lee is essentially an office worker, OK? I’m essentially something else: I’m a storyteller.”
“On The Fantastic Four, I’d tell him what I was going to do, what the story was going to be, and I’d bring it in — that’s all.”
“I created Spider-Man. We decided to give it to Steve Ditko. I drew the first Spider-Man cover. I created the character. I created the costume. I created all those books, but I couldn’t do them all.”
If you listen closely, you can still hear comics’ collective jaw dropping upon reading the above quotes, and many more like them besides, from Jack Kirby’s bombshell 1990 interview in The Comics Journal, conducted by editor and publisher Gary Groth. And now that the Journal has posted the interview online in its entirety, jaws will likely drop all over again.
It’s a fascinating document. Here you have the King of Comics himself, angry and exhausted from years of feuding with Marvel over credit and access to his original art, feeling personally slighted by the company’s other guiding light and figurehead Stan Lee, lashing out with the kind of bombast usually reserved for his spectacularly cosmic comics. In the course of recounting his career (with a little help from his wife Roz), Kirby basically takes sole credit for the creation of the entire Marvel Universe, from the Fantastic Four to Thor to the Hulk to the Avengers to even Spider-Man, relegating Lee to the role of an office boy and credit thief whose only contribution to most of the comics for which the pair shared billing was slapping his name on them and collecting checks.
Kirby’s boldest claims here have proven tough for even his most ardent defenders to swallow — and indeed he goes much further here in asserting sole authorship of the Lee/Kirby co-creations than he ever had in the past — but what his recollections may lack in historical accuracy they gain in evincing the passion he still felt for the work, the degree to which Marvel and Lee’s treatment of him hurt, and, as always, the astonishing imaginative power with which he infused every character he touched. Read the whole thing.
- May 23, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Thieves steal sign marking Superman’s Cleveland birthplace
Home of Superman historical marker
A historical marker near the Cleveland home where a teenage Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman has been stolen.
The likely culprits, The Plain Dealer reports, are scrap-metal thieves who mistook the plaque for bronze because of its coloring. It’s actually made of aluminum.
The sign was installed by the city at the intersection of St. Clair Avenue and East 105th Street in 2003, the 65th anniversary of the release of Action Comics #1. The nearby house where the Siegel family lived until 1950, and where the young collaborators dreamed up the Man of Steel, was restored in 2008 through efforts spearheaded by the nonprofit Siegel and Shuster Society. Two larger markers created by that group hang on a fence outside the Glenville neighborhood home.
If there’s a silver, or aluminum, lining to the theft, it’s that it provides officials with the opportunity to make a correction on the replacement: Siegel’s last name was misspelled on one side of the original marker.
- April 28, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Bill Blackbeard passes away; Borders probes data leak
Bill Blackbeard
Passings | Writer, editor and historian Bill Blackbeard, widely credited with saving the American comic strip from the ash heap of history, passed away on March 10 at a nursing home in Watsonville, Calif. He was 84. A lifelong collector of comic strips, Blackbeard founded the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art in 1968, filling the garage and basement with thousands of bound volumes of old newspapers let go by libraries when they converted their archives to microfilm. His collection grew by the 1990s to 350,000 Sunday strips and 2.5 million dailies, which eventually made their way to Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Blackbeard wrote, edited or contributed to more than 200 books on cartoons and comic strips, including The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, 100 Years of Comic Strips and Fantagraphics’ Krazy & Ignatz series.
Numerous obituaries and reminisces have appeared since yesterday, most notably from R.C. Harvey, Tom Spurgeon, Jeet Heer, Dylan Williams, ICv2.com, and Dan Nadel, who collected a handful of tributes. [The Comics Journal]
- April 26, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Lithuanian publisher fined over The Simpsons comics
Duffman
Legal | The Lithuanian publisher of The Simpsons comic has been fined for breaching laws banning the advertising of alcohol with its depiction of Duff Beer, the fictional brand consumed by Homer and other residents of Springfield.
Although Simpsons creator Matt Groening has never licensed the Duff trademark out of concern that it might encourage children to drink, companies in several countries have released beer using the Duff name (Fox and Groening sued an Australian brewery for doing so in 1995, forcing the product to be pulled from shelves and destroyed). The existence of unlicensed Duff beers apparently was enough for a government watchdog, who handed down the more than $4,000 fine. The publisher said it has stopped publication of The Simpsons while it tries to address the Duff matter — a major issue, considering that Bongo Comics reportedly doesn’t permit content changes to licensed titles. [The Australian]
- April 20, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Joanne Siegel’s passing, Archie’s ‘quiet revolution’
An early drawing of Lois Lane by Joe Shuster, who used Joanne Siegel as a model
Passings | As Comic Book Resources reported, Joanne Siegel, wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the model for Lois Lane, passed away Monday in California. She was 93. Although news of her death first circulated online via Brad Meltzer’s Twitter account, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Michael Sangiacomo had the first official report, only hours after he wrote about the installation of signs bearing the honorary street names “Joe Shuster Lane” and “Lois Lane” in the Cleveland neighborhood where Siegel and Shuster created the Man of Steel. CBR’s Kiel Phegley spoke with Meltzer, who met Joanne Siegel while researching his novel The Book of Lies. Heidi MacDonald, meanwhile, has reaction from Bradley Ricca, who’s working on a documentary about the Siegel family. The Hollywood Reporter and The Superman Super Site also have obituaries. More will certainly appear throughout the day. [Comic Book Resources]
Publishing | Acclaimed cartoonist Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For) has been named the guest editor of the 2011 edition of The Best American Comics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. [Shelf Life]
Publishing | Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson spotlights the “quiet revolution” at Archie Comics that finds the publisher expanding into graphic novels and digital delivery, further diversifying its characters and tackling more topical issues. [Publishers Weekly]
- February 15, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Women in Comics Wiki debuts
An image from the wiki
Why are there no great women comics creators? That’s a trick question, of course. What makes a creator “great” is recognition as much as ability. The Women in Comics Wiki is, as you might guess from the name, a collaborative effort to publicize the work of the many, many women who have worked as writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers, and other types of creator throughout the history of comics. One good starting point: A list of women who were active during the Golden Age, drawn from David Hajdu’s book The Ten-Cent Plague.
This isn’t an ancient history wiki, though—contemporary women are included as well, and creators are welcome to create or edit their own pages, as long as they follow the general Way of the Wiki and aren’t too self-congratulatory. The Wiki was started by the Ladies Making Comics Tumblr but anyone can play, and it has the potential to become a useful resource if enough people contribute, so go, look, write.
(Via The Beat.)
- January 26, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Diamond plans digital service? Eisner judges named
Diamond Comic Distributors
Retailing | Rich Johnston confirms that Diamond Comic Distributors is developing a digital comics service that, in the words of a company representative, “will be entirely focused on driving sales of digital comic-related content through brick and mortar comic book specialty retailers.” No details were made available, but an official announcement is expected “in the near future.” In the meantime, Johnston gathers initial reactions from several retailers. [Bleeding Cool]
Publishing | Amit Desai, who has worked at Warner Bros. since 2004, has been named as DC Entertainment’s senior vice president, franchise management: “In his new role, Desai will develop and implement the individual franchise plans for Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, The Flash, MAD Magazine, Vertigo titles, and other DC properties. This will include driving wider cross-promotional support across all Time Warner divisions.” [press release]
Publishing | Alex Segura, former publicity manager at DC Comics, has been hired by Archie Comics as executive director of publicity and marketing. [press release]
- December 6, 2010 @ 07:28 AM by Kevin Melrose