SETH’S PICK :: SATELLITE SAM #1: I contemplated picking the glorious Mickey Mouse Color Sundays vol. 1, but figured Andy Mansell would do a much better job of churning up excitement for it.  Then I realized that Satellite Sam debuts from Image this week, and thought it best to remind our readers of that.  It’s a collaboration between Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin, and is set in the Golden Age of television. Fraction’s something of a film and T.V. history buff, so this makes me think it’ll be tonally closer to Casanova than his Marvel work.  Toss in the fact that he’s working with a legend like Chaykin, and you too might see the potential of this new book.  To summarize, we have two versatile creators telling a story about a murder mystery set against the backdrop of fifties era entertainment.  At the very least, that should warrant a thorough read.  Don’t forget it on your trip to Heroes this week!

After the departure of original artists Ub Iwerks and Win Smith on the newly created Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, a young artist named Floyd Gottfredson was pulled from his steady job as an in-betweener in the Disney Animation department to temporarily fill-in.  Gottfredson’s  temporary substitution began in April 1930 and continued  until his retirement in October 1975.  His decade long tenure on the strip is legendary and worthy of a high quality (but very reasonably priced!) collection. During the 30s and early 40s, Mickey Mouse was one of the most popular and best executed strips around.  This is the fifth volume of the project complete work of Gottfredson on Mickey.  DISNEY MICKEY MOUSE COLOR SUNDAYS HC VOL 01 CALL of the WILD is the first volume to collect the Sunday strips. Like many comics of its day, the daily was intended for an older audience while the Color Sundays–whether a continuous story-line or as a gag page–   were designed to appeal to the young as well as the old.  These full color stories are fresher, breezier, funnier than the daily adventures, but still chalk full of the great Gottfredson storytelling, solid characterization in a fully realized world.    They are a perfect accompaniment to the old Mickey Mouse cartoons and they are ideal for younger readers. Enjoy!!!

Our HeroesCon 2013 Rocketeer shirt featuring art by Lee Weeks was such a huge hit we sold out of most sizes by Saturday morning of the show! If you missed out or were unable to attend, now is your chance to pre-order one of these shirts featuring Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer. A portion of all shirt sales goes to the Hairy Cell Leukemia Research Foundation in the name of Dave Stevens. Also available in women’s v-neck! Shirts are $20 plus shipping & handling. PRE-ORDER until July 31st. Shirts will print and ship in August 2013. Place your order here!

KARLA’S PICK :: HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE #3: Yes, I’m picking HE-MAN and the MASTERS of the UNIVERSE AGAIN. Why? Because it’s my FAVORITE and it comes out on my BIRTHDAY. That’s why. Also because this isn’t your old-school He-Man. This new run on MotU has taken a far grittier turn than it’s nostalgic counterparts, and ushers in a fierce, and far more brutal, Evil Horde! Along with fresh and interesting back stories for some of my favorite characters, the story-line by Keith Giffen has kept me intrigued, while the artwork from Pop Mhan has solidified my belief that, in the right hands, a MotU book could be stunning!

The  Classic Comics Cavalcade continues on unabated to the quarterback!

After volume one of the Archie Newspaper Strip Library collected the first three years of the Archie comic strip, the good folks at IDW have decided to jump ahead almost a decade to 1960.  Enjoy the riotous adventures of perennial high-school student Archie Andrews and the entire cast of well defined supporting characters– the classmates and faculty of Riverdale High. With these strips writer/artist Bob Montana perfects his craft and begins his finest period as a daily cartoonist.  This volume includes every daily from September of 1960 to April (SPRING BREAK!!) of 1963.    Plus– Betty! and Veronica! along my all-time faves–Miss Grundy!! and Cafeteria Lady Miss Beazly!! Don’t judge me.  ARCHIE HC VOL 02 COMPLETE DAILY NEWSPAPER COMICS 1960-1963 is a great choice for fans of classic humor strips and an absolute must-have for all Archie Fans.

JUSTIN’S PICK :: THE MALEVOLENT MR. BURNS: For any kid born in the eighties, and coming of age in the early nineties, the Simpsons likely hold a special place in your hearts. Watching the show ebb and flow to varying levels of quality over the years has been a pleasure (or in some instances, displeasure) other generations may have missed. Now, Bongo rolls out a one-shot devoted entirely to the villainous Montgomery Burns. Burns’ character evolved drastically over the early seasons, from the steely, imposing boss, to bona fide baddie, and onward to bumbling comic relief. Also, Burns comes standard with his sycophantic Smithers, adding a component of creepiness as unnerving as it is entertaining. Hopefully, The Malevolent Mr. Burns issue will touch on all of these elements of the character. Only one way to find out.

Painting of Kim Thompson by Felix De La Concha.

1.

I didn’t grow up in a household full of books. My dad never finished college, my mom never finished high school, and neither of them were readers. Buffalo libraries were terrible. The collections were old and small, and budget cuts during the inflationary ‘70s limited my local branch to 30 open hours a week, most of them happening while I was in school. I was forced to help my brother with his paper route, and use the cash I made each week to buy books to read. My lifelong reading habits—pulp like Doc Savage and Perry Rhodan, and of course comic books—were shaped by how dirt cheap genre paperbacks and comics were. I wanted to get maximum reading for my money.

I kept buying comics, and one day on a whim I also bought a copy of The Comics Journal. (I’m sure I thought, “Hey, here’s a magazine about comics, and I like comics, so…”) My first issue was #69 (December 1981), which featured an awkward cover painting of Dr. Strange and Clea, a long interview with Marvel/DC scripter Gerry Conway, and obituaries for two artists I didn’t know, Russ Manning and Wallace Wood. Reading that issue of the Journal, however, was as bracing as a slap across the face: I remember in particular a raw review of Bruce Jones and Brent Anderson’s Ka-Zar the Savage by J.J. Pierce. This was no wallow in lowbrow pleasure: the men who edited the Journal (and they were all men, back then) thought seriously about comics, and prodded the medium to live up to some nebulous standard of aesthetic quality.

I must’ve been intrigued, since I picked the next issue I saw at the local comic shop (#71, March 1982), and was amazed to read a long debate (between R.C. Harvey and Gary Groth) over the merits of Frank Miller’s Daredevil, a comic I uncritically worshipped at the time. I remained intrigued enough to buy every subsequent issue of the Journal since, up to the current book-sized #302 (2013). I read countless Journal articles referencing the work of Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb, so I hunted down and read the work of these artists. I read a positive Journal review of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor #8, so I bought that issue of Splendor, wrote to Pekar, and drove to Cleveland to meet the man in the mid-1980s. Eventually, I’d write for the print Journal myself a few times, and I currently write an intermittent column for the updated-five-times-a-week TCJ website. I’ll always be grateful to the men and women who edited the Journal and gave it its confrontational yet thoughtful vibe.

2.

When Fantagraphics, the company behind the Journal, ventured into publishing its own comics, I was skeptical: I couldn’t figure out how Fantagraphics could compete with Marvel and DC, or even Eclipse and Pacific. But as Fantagraphics released titles like Love and Rockets, Neat Stuff and Eightball, and I fell hard for these comics, I realized that their publishing strategy, such as it was, consisted solely of finding unique artists and giving them a regular outlet for their art. I’m grateful to the editors who had the good taste, the curatorial savvy, to bring cartoonists like Los Bros Hernandez, Jessica Abel, Tony Millionaire and Michael Kupperman to my attention. (Not to mention their recent reprint volumes of Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Pogo, Barnaby, etc.)

3.

I begin my “Introduction to Comics and Graphic Novels” class with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics—not because I agree with all of McCloud, but because Comics is an accessible, productively controversial introduction to such issues as cartoon abstraction and closure between panels. I typically schedule one McCloud chapter per class meeting, and cover the book over eight periods, along with other ancillary reading. In the class on chapter 2 of Comics, for instance, where McCloud argues that readers experience greater identification with abstracted, cartoony characters, I’ll also assign some readings from film theory that challenge McCloud’s argument. (The gist: movie viewers have no trouble identifying with hyper-realistic, photographic characters, so why should comics readers?)

Every time we read and discuss a chapter of McCloud, I also have my students read the same graphic novel, over and over again, eight times. That way, they develop a deep knowledge of at least one book, and hopefully also a sense of how McCloud’s concepts (and the other critical ideas I drag into class) can be used to increase our understanding of real-life, out-there-in-the-wild comics. For me, the graphic novel that works best in juxtaposition with Understanding Comics is Jason’s Hey, Wait… (American edition, 2001). Wait is short, easy to read multiple times, and crammed full of examples of McCloudian form; you can discuss  about how Jason’s anthropomorphic characters encourage identification, and there’s a heartbreakingly poignant example of aspect-to-aspect panel transitions about halfway through the book, right after the six black panels representing Bjorn’s death. And students love to debate the ending of the book. Has Jon rewritten history to bring Bjorn back to life, while obliterating his own adulthood? Has Jon died?

It doesn’t hurt that Hey, Wait… is magnificent. I adore Hey, Wait…, my students find it both confusing and moving, and it works great in class. I’m grateful to Jason for writing and drawing Hey, Wait…, and for all his subsequent books, and I’m also grateful to the man responsible for translating Jason’s work into English and for making it available to U.S. readers, especially my students.

4.

What’s the best (anti-)war image you’ve ever seen in a comic? The ones that I can’t shake involve the face of Huet, a French soldier in Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches (1994; American edition 2010). We see Huet in close-up, in a No-Man’s-Land trench during World War I, staring through the fourth wall, his eyes at half-mast:

Then a flashback explains Huet’s troubles: in an earlier battle, he was ordered to fire into a phalanx of innocent bystanders, and he is haunted by the fact that he gunned down a woman and her two children. Tardi shows Huet’s escalating madness in a non-consecutive series of static panels, where the most significant changes occur in the soldier’s eyes:

Huet’s widening stare reveals his impotence, hopelessness, anger and outrage. (Did I have to open my eyes that wide to take in the horror of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs?) I’m grateful to Tardi for all his World War I comics, and I’m grateful to the man who’s made so many Tardi books (anti-war and otherwise) available from Fantagraphics.

Thank you, Kim.

SETH’S PICK :: HAWKEYE #11: I’ve long extolled the virtues of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye on this blog, in the store, and just about anywhere else I get the chance.  If any of you caught the Hawkeye panel at HeroesCon, you probably saw why I (and so many others) enjoy this book.  There’s something unabashedly joyous about how these two creators continue to push each other’s creativity.  That iron-sharpens-iron mentality is on full display in this week’s issue #11. [Here’s a condensed version of all you need to know to appreciate this issue.  Hawkeye is about the avenging archer Clint Barton on his days off, when he’s away from his world-saving exploits.  In the first issue, Clint fed a dog some pizza.  That dog later saved his life, and was nearly killed in the process.  Clint then saves the dog’s life, and adopts him.  The dog’s collar showed that his name was Arrow, but Clint thought that was a little hokey, so he changed it to Lucky.  Still, Clint and just about everyone else know Lucky as Pizza Dog.] Getting back to that display of creativity that I alluded to earlier, this issue is told entirely from the perspective of Pizza Dog.  That means all the language in the book will be seen as a dog hears it, with only words he commonly hears highlighted.  This issue also deals more with scent thanks to Pizza Dog’s status as – you know – a dog.  All these things alone should pique your interest for this particular issue, but even more, David Aja’s work on this one suggests he not only read Chris Ware’s acclaimed Building Stories, but decided to channel it into a Marvel comic.  Needless to say, this is not only entertaining, but maybe even a little envelope-pushing.  With storytelling like this, it’s no wonder Hawkeye received 5 Eisner Award nominations this year.  I’m betting they’ll bring at least a couple home. 

RICO’S PICK :: FURY: MY WAR GONE BY #13: Top to bottom this has been my favorite Marvel book since it started coming out in 2011. Every month we were greeted by another beautiful cover by Dave Johnson, a tough-as-nails story by Garth Ennis and flawless story telling by Goran Parlov and Lee Loughridge. This issue is the series finale and I’m going to miss it!