Sunday Funnies - A Retrospective, 5 of 5!

Richard Marshall and Bill Blackbeard's grand "The Sunday Funnies" from 1978 comes to a close this week with coverage of the 1940's.  The decade of WWII and when America truly reached maturity.  Not modernity maybe, but certainly we knew who we were then, like that "All in the Family" theme song says.

The apex of the Sunday Funnies before they started their slow decline into banality.  Sure there were still plenty of highlights to come.  "Peanuts", "B.C.", Doonesbury", "Calvin & Hobbes", "The Far Side" and a few others but for the most part, more and more mainstream guidelines and financial shifts in importance and competition from other mass media limited the gorgeous tabloid, four-color landscape from here on out.

Luckily, thanks to publication like these by Messrs Marshall and Blackbeard and mass ready inexpensive communication media like the World Wild Iintertube, we'll never lose the art these masters created.  

From just a few decades ago, but seeming so far away, here's the mastery of Chester Gould ("Dick Tracy"), Burne Hogarth ("Tarzan"), Bill Holman ("Smokey Stover"), Clifford McBride *"Napoleon"), Bill Freyse ("The Nut Bros.", "Our Boarding House"), Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster ("Superman"), Hal Foster ("Prince Valiant"), Milton Caniff ("Terry & the Pirates"), Ham Fisher ("Joe Palooka"), Al Capp ("Li'l Abner") and Walt Kelly ("Pogo") all side by side and delivered to your doorstep for mere pennies.  

There's lots of reasons that "the good 'ol days" weren't really so good.  This is one of the reasons they were great.

Talk to you soon.

Whitney Museum and the Comic Book!

As I continue to share my scans of the Whitney Museum of Art comic art exhibit co-magazine, the chapters veer from comic strips (which I like to highlight on Sundays here) to the other worlds of cartoons, the comic book and animation, so I'll keep these posts going and conclude this week.

Here's the first of two chapters on the comic book. "Representing Force: from Superman to the Fantastic Four".

Enjoy!

Talk to you soon.

Nemo number 2: the Many Incarnations of Superman

Day 2 of Nemo #2 and continuing from the article on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and their creation Superman.

If you downloaded the pages post yesterday from the Siegel and Shuster interview, you may have noted pages 10 and 11 were missing, here they are in all their shrunken down poorly reproduced glory...

...and I've taken the liberty of offering these easier-to-read alternatives which I scanned from "Superman: the Dailies" 1939-1940 jointly published by Kitchen Sink Press and DC from 1999.

Much easier on the eyes and the nice grey-tones and cross-hatching's are here for us all to appreciate.

Also included in this issue is a science-fiction fan-zine which Siegel and Shuster created back in their Cleveland high school back in 1932...6 years before Superman hit the newsstands...and it features their FIRST interpretation of a character with this name.

I had partially posted part of this back on October 17, 2009 as part of Jerry Sigel's 95th birthday and now here it is intact.

Enjoy!

More to come!!

Nemo issue 2 - Enter the Superman

As long as the scans are complete on this one I might as well jump on it. Number 2 of the great "Nemo: the Classic Comics Library" takes a decidedly comic bookian approach in it's views on comic strips as they land an interview with Superman creators Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster in this August 1983 issue.

Here's a look at what's coming up in my posts over the next few days...

...a happy note from Richard Marschall...

And the interview itself!

Low budget printing and the publishers still feeling their way here make some of the strips printed in this issue a little difficult to read, in particular some of the Superman dailies I'll be posting tomorrow and the Fred Harman strips coming in a few days. It's kind of a combination of the strips being reduced to an unreadable size and the simple technology of ink on newsprint not giving the best resolution. This is one reason I sat down to scan these issues, so I can enlarge them on my computer screen and also so I can have the files as a easier access reference than a stack of magazines is.

I'll be including these pages so you can see for yourself...if anyone out there has any scanning tips for this humble novice, please feel free to drop me a note. I'd love to tweak some of these if I'm able.

For now, enjoy.

See y'all back here tomorrow for more Nemo fun!