Kurt Schaffenberger holds an odd place in my brain as far as comics artists go. The comics I read at a very young age were largely DC books from the early to mid-1970s. Mostly their big heroes. So lots of Curt Swan and Neal Adams and Jim Aparo and all those cats. Looking back, it strikes me as interesting that, except for Batman, it seemed that every time I picked up a book with a certain character in it, it was drawn by the same guy. I wasn't actually reading the credits at the early age, but every time I saw Superman, he was drawn by Swan. Every time I saw Green Arrow, he was drawn by Adams. Every time I saw the Flash, he was drawn by Irv Novick. There was, as far as I was concerned, only one way to draw Superman and that was how Swan did it.

(Curious side note, my Batman comics of that time alternated between Adams and Aparo. But I was apparently too young to discern any appreciable difference between them, and I've held more of a melded image of Batman in my head at that time. I think I had a few Nick Cardy drawn stories, too, which I could tell were somehow different but, I think, only in that Batman's cape seemed a little short.)

While I had a decent range of DC superhero comics back then, I did not have any of their then-recent revival of Captain Marvel. I somehow missed the Filmation cartoon and the live-action series (although I must've seen at least one episode of the latter as I do have extremely vague recollections of Les Tremayne's role in the show for some reason). Most of my familiarity with the Marvel family came from a set of ViewMaster reels and the Little Golden Book pictured at the right.

Shazam: A Circus Adventure was published in 1977. It was written by Bob Ottum and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger (misspelled "Shafenburger"). It was, as I recall, a silly story of the Marvel family stepping in to perform all the acts in a circus because the regular performers had walked out. They did a trapeze act with no trapezes and some old school lion taming, and there was a particularly embarrassing looking clown outfit for Captain Marvel himself at one point. But because of the superhero angle, it held the longest shelf-life of any of the Little Golden books I read as a child.

Now what struck me, at least a little while later, was when I picked up Super Friends #32, which also features art by Schaffenberger. I recall noticing that, not only did Superman not look like the Swan version I was familiar with, but he looked a lot like Captain Marvel. A lot. As in, "That's not really Superman, that's Shazam in Superman's costume!" (Bear in mind, I was eight years old at the time, so not only did I not understand the distinction between Captain Marvel and Shazam, but I also couldn't accept that Superman might be drawn by somebody other than Curt Swan. Although, I strangely never seemed to have issues with reprint material by the likes of Joe Shuster and Wayne Boring.)

I have another vague recollection of re-reading Super Friends a couple years later, and realizing then that it obviously wasn't Captain Marvel wearing red and blue tights, it just happened to be the same artist who worked on both stories. And by then I had seen Schaffenberger's work in a few other places. (Notably Jimmy Olsen. In fact, one of Schaffenberger's Olsen stories stood out so strongly for me visually that I wound up purchasing some of the original art for that story!) Rarely any of the big name titles, and usually characters whose "look" was defined (for me) by other artists.

Today, decades later, I still don't have a very large collection of comics featuring Schaffenberger art. But I'm always quick to notice his style, probably as he was the first comic artist that I recognized beyond a single character. There always seems to be a classy simplicity about his work and, as I think about it, probably helped to pre-dispose me to the elegant brushwork of Joe Sinnott once I started reading Marvel titles. It also helped define how the Marvel family "should" be drawn, and Schaffenberger's version remains my default visual for Captain Marvel.

Even when he's wearing Superman's costume.

In case you couldn't figure it out, I tend to be a bit progressive when it comes to technology. My school reports were typed and printed with digitally drawn covers back in 1985; I was logging in to BBSes by 1987; a friend and I started a virtual design studio in 1993; I was fully invested in and using my PDA for daily tasks by 1997; I got a robot to vacuum my floors in 2004... I'm not bleeding-edge, by any means, but when I see a technology that works and improves my life in some fashion, I try to take advantage of it. I see the potential it was designed to achieve and maximize it as much as I can.

That's one of the reasons I love the exploration of web comics -- how the medium is being taken advantage of during a digital revolution. My biggest surprise so far was just that it's taken me so long to get on board. (I didn't really start reading any regularly until 2004.) And now, seeing how great the possibilities are, am almost as surprised that more isn't being done in this arena. That the big guns in comicdom are being extremely cautious about this whole online comics notion. I know Marvel and DC at least both have people specifically hired to put their content online. Their job is, in part, to give their respective companies the best presence possible online. I know I would have been arguing for developing more comic content online for a couple decades now if that was expressly my business.

Now, to be fair to those tech guys, they're only allowed to do what their superiors let them. If Marie Javins and C. B. Cebulski (the current EICs at DC and Marvel) say, "Don't put our comics online" there's not a whole lot they can do. But if I were in that position, I'd have gone back again and again with different methods to get something out there and new business models and get the bean counters to run numbers and whatever I could to drag those companies into the 21st century.

Now, this is Marvel and DC we're talking about and, like the Titanic, they don't exactly turn on a dime! Admittedly, they have made some attempts in the past couple decades but they haven't made much progress since. In a lot of respects, Marvel in particular has back-tracked considerably. DC's current efforts -- their handful of Webtoons titles -- seem to finally be successful at least from the point of view of the fans, though it's unclear if those actually within DC see it that way.

Now I don't expect Javins and Cebulski to be lead champions of online development. They're not tech kinds of folks. Which is fine; they're not supposed to be. But you're supposed to hire talented tech kind of people to tell you how to improve your company in the tech area and, more importantly, listen to them! They have expertise for a reason!

Several years ago, I read The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. His basic premise was that technology has gotten advanced enough that it levels the playing field for everybody. The fact that you've been around longer or have more cash to spend on marketing matters less and less with each day. The old ways of doing business are being superseded. The global village is virtually upon us (pun intended). And it's why a company like Naver -- originally just a tech company that built their own search engine -- seemed to come out of nowhere to a lot of people as a major force in webcomics. They were leading on the technology front and overlaid comics on top of that, giving deference to their IT folks for developing a user interface and experience that didn't just try to replicate printed comics on-screen.

Jack Kirby was once asked in the 1980s what he thought the next big thing in comics was going to be. He said that he didn't know, but it was almost assuredly going to come from some guy sitting at home by himself, and not from some corporate office. Jack was mainly talking about style and genre, but I think it applies just as well to business models. You want to know what the next big thing is in online comic development, Marvel and DC are the last places you want to look!

Earlier this year, I posted about a then-upcoming crowd-funding project to publish The Adventures of Lion Man, which was to pick up the public domain character Lion Man -- formerly of All-Negro Comics #1 -- and bring him into the 21st century. Well, that book is now out -- or at least backers of the campaign are getting their copies -- and I wanted to share a review.

Lion Man was originally the creation of Orrin C. Evans, but could essentially have been described as a Black Tarzan. Lived in the jungle but had a formal education, super athletic, wore just a loincloth, fought against white colonialists... Evans did a good job with and it didn't feel entirely redundant, mind you, but it was still a pulpy jungle action story. Arguably, he was the first Black superhero. The Adventures of Lion Man reprints that first appearance to kind of level-set the reader as to where they're coming from.

We then get three new stories featuring different takes on Lion Man: "The Tower," "A Plague on the Nation," and "The Lion Outside." The first and last are written by John Jennings, the middle one by Bill Campnell and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. All of the story art is by David Brame. I won't got into the specifics of each story, but to say that they interestingly take the Lion Man concept in very different directions. In one story, he's treated sort of like a Black Panther character, in another he's fighting an interdimensional villain in a story that seems like it might be at home in a Dr. Fate comic, and in another he seems to be split between life as a scientist in the real world and a superheroic fighter in the dreamscape not unlike the Garrett Sanford version of The Sandman. Each of these versions -- and indeed the original written by Evans -- are solid takes on the character and reflect a 'missing' history not unlike The Sandman character concept, which has also had taken radical conceptual turns since the original gas mask wearing vigilante debuted in 1939.

I like the idea that, you know, maybe we've had Lion Man stories published sporadically since 1947 and the character had been "re-invented" repeatedly for different audiences. Much like Sandman and Dr. Fate and Black Panther. This book, then, might represent a snapshot of those different re-inventions, which is a really neat idea I think. I might've liked to have seen different artists' takes on those ideas, too. Brame definitely does a good job re-designing the characters for each story, but they do all utilize his same artistic style, and I can't help but think that bringing in additional artists would've helped to differentiate the story approaches that much more visually. We get a hint of that with the pinup section at the back with illustrations from a variety of different artists, but it would've been neat to see that more in the stories too.

There's also Fantomah story included in the book as well by Damian Duffy and Brame. Fantomah is another public domain character that's gotten a little more attention than Lion Man thanks to creator Fletcher Hanks' bat-shit-crazy approach to comics. Here, she's been re-imagined as a Black wrestler that operates in a kind of supernatural version of the WWE.

I think one of the big takeawys from The Adventures of Lion Man is to encourage creators of how many creative directions they can go using already existing ideas. It's kind of a tired trope already that when a character lapses into public domain, someone makes a slasher horror version of them. But the creative team here instead shows that there are plenty of other interesting directions you can take a character like that. The point is even more poignant if you're familiar with Jennings' interest in the horror genre to begin with -- that he didn't go that route with his stories here emphasizes the other options even more. All in all, the stories are all fun takes on existing characters you might not be familiar with and because they go off in different directions, you don't need to have any familiarity with them in the first place!

As I said, the book was originally crowd-funded and those copies are being mailed out right now. The book should become available to the public in the next couple of weeks from Rosarium Publishing with a list price of $19.95 US.

Last week, I re-posted an old piece in which I elaborated on why the price you're paying for any given comic is NOT for the content of the comic but for the delivery mechanism. That's why you pay a different price if you want to read a story digitally or in monthly installments or as part of a bound collection or whatever. You're not paying for the story so much as the artifact it's presented in. If all readers cared about was the story, everyone would buy everything digitally since that's pretty much always the cheapest option.

While I only chose to re-post that particular piece because I hadn't made on this blog in some time, it turns out that Marvel made an announcement at Comic-Con that is a perfect example of this: X-Men: Elsewhen.

Here's an article explaining in more detail but the tl;dr version is that in 2019 John Byrne started posting an X-Men story on his message board. The basic premise of the story is: what if Byrne had continued writing and drawing Uncanny X-Men instead of leaving that title in 1981? Marvel's announcement this past week was that they're formally publishing it in three volumes beginning next year.

So how does this prove my point about the story content?

Byrne wrote and drew this new story as fan fiction. It was something he was doing in his free time without any editorial oversight from Marvel. He posted material as/when he finished it, so it didn't follow to a precise set of regular deadlines. But he was just posting it to his message boards, mostly as an exercise in creativity. No one was paying him for it; it was just something he felt like doing. He could put as much or as little effort into any portion he wanted. You can see that very much in the simple fact that the entire story is just done in pencil. They're fairly tight pencils, to be sure, but you can still see guidelines and eraser marks and the like. But there's no inking done, and no coloring to speak of.

It wound up taking up the equivalent of 32 issues. He stopped in 2022 basically when he hit a creative dead end. He had the last "issue" done for months before he posted it because he wasn't happy with it and didn't think one of the subplots was resolving well. It was just something he was doing for fun, so he was under no obligation to take it to a specific end point or work on it for a set amount of time.

And it's all posted on his message board. You can go there right now and read through the whole thing. One of message board memebers even posted an 'index' of the entire thing so you don't even have to go hunting around for all the individual posts. And it's all available online. For free.

So why would Marvel (well, technically, Abrams ComicArts working under their license agreement with Marvel) bother publishing it? The story is now a few years old, it concerns an alternate continuity that doesn't "count," it's by a creator who isn't "hot" right now (legendary though Byrne may be, his last professional work of note was over a decade ago), and -- and this is my key point -- it's freely available online! If you're a die-hard fan of Byrne's, there's a good chance you've already read it. It's been online for several years already, no doubt many fans have downloaded the entire thing, and it's been captured by the Internet Archive so even if Byrne is asked to remove all of it before it's published, it's not hard to get a hold of.

The reason they're publishing it is because fans will be willing to pay for the specific book format. So they can have a copy of the story sitting on their bookshelf. Yes, Abrams is going through the effort of having the whole thing inked and colored and re-lettered, but the story is already out there. If you just wanted to see what Byrne would've done in 1981* you can see that right now and not have to pay for it. Fans will buy the printed version, though, specifically so they can have a printed version. It's not about the story, so much as the format. At least that's what Abrams' is banking on and, frankly, I think it's a pretty safe bet.

* The caveat, of course, is that Byrne is over four decades older now. He's had all that time to noodle on differnt story ideas, certainly many of which might've been introduced specifically by social and technological events that he hadn't considered back in 1981. Not to mention, he's got several decades of additional practice in terms of writing and drawing comics. He doesn't create comics now the same way he did then for any number of reasons. So it's not really "what would Byrne have done in 1981 if he continued on the book" but "what would 21st-century Byrne do if he went back in time and picked up where his 1981-self left off?" I'm sure some of the basic ideas would remain but the execution is certainly radically different.

Today is Jim Davis' 80th birthday. To celebrate, let's study this "undated" (you'll see why I use quotes in a bit) photo of him...

What I find interesting is how much we can glean from him by other elements in the shot.

First, in the upper right, you can see the bottom of the famous Farrah Fawcett poster, allegedly the single best-selling poster in history. The poster was actually the idea of Pro Arts Inc. who hired Bruce McBroom to shoot Fawcett, who did her own hair and makeup for the shoot as she was still mostly known for small, bit-parts on television at the time. The poster came out in early 1976 and was so popular that it led to her getting a starring role in Charlie's Angels later that year. The poster sold even better after the show's popularity took off. I mention the history a bit here because there's an implication that he kept that poster up for several years, as we'll see in a minute.

The next item of interest is the calendar. Although the date is a little fuzzy, the image helps to confirm it's March 1979. The image is a relatively identifiable Kliban cat cartoon. Bernard Kliban's cat comics first became quite popular in 1975 with his first book, and the first Kliban cat calendar came out in 1977. The first calendar was the best-selling calendar of that year, and Kliban calendars continued to be the best-seller every year through 1981. Although not visible in the black and white photo above, that cat above the March 5-6 boxes is colored orange like Garfield.

Next, there's a comic section from the newspaper visible on Davis's desk. I'm guessing it's The Chronicle-Tribune based out of Marion, IN. Davis, I believe, was actually living in nearby Muncie at the time but the Muncie newspaper is The Star Press, and there seem to be too many letters in the masthead for that. Regardless, plainly visible before the fold are the top two panels of a Peanuts Sunday strip. I believe that's the March 4, 1979 strip; there are only two Sunday strips between 1976 and 1980 that feature Charlie Brown by himself in the first panel, and him with Lucy in the second. (It's possible that it's an even longer timeframe there; that's just as far as I went in either direction.)

So the photo is at the earliest from March 4, 1979, although possibly a little later. Davis would have been a little shy of 34th birthday and likely had that Fawcett poster hanging up for at least a few years by that point.

The Garfield strip Davis seems to be work on, though? We can actually see the whole thing pretty clearly. It actually ran in newspapers on October 29, 1978, about four months prior to the earliest date this could've been photographed.

My guess is that he wanted to use a Sunday strip since those are just bigger and would take up more of his art board, and four months seems that it would be about the right amount of time for a syndicate to get his original art back to him after he sent it in for production. (Recall this is 1979 and you couldn't send files electronically yet.) So I can see it being possible that this was actually the latest Sunday strip he had original art for, but had already been published. I can also see him not wanting to use an as-yet-unpublished strip as that might give away the joke before readers saw the actual strip itself in their newspaper. But I could be over-thinking it, and he just simply liked that strip for whatever reason.

What I find interesting is the three non-Garfield elements we can use to date this photo are three of the most popular pop culture items of their respective genres. The most popular comic, the most popular calendar, the most popular poster. You could say they were the most broadly appealing items of their day. I find it interesting that Davis gravitates towards that so strongly, even in his personal life. Davis was always clear that he tried to write Garfield to be as broadly appealing as possible. In a 1982 interview, he stated, "It's a conscious effort to include everyone as readers. If you were to mention the football strike, you're going to be excluding everyone else in the world that doesn't watch pro football... I don't use rhyming gags, plays on words, colloquialisms, in an effort to make Garfield apply to virtually any society where he may appear. In an effort to keep the gags broad, the humor general and applicable to everyone, I deal mainly with eating and sleeping. That applies to everyone, anywhere."

So that he himself is so strongly influenced by and seeks out the most popular is interesting. What I don't know is that because he just liked stuff that everybody else seemed to like, or was he actually studying those items to determine what made them popular? In that same interview, he also said, "I'd like to say it was some sort of a divine inspiration that created the strip. In fact, it wasn't so much that as a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character. I've been trying to get syndicated for eight years. That's a lot of time to try to figure out what makes some strips go and others fail... It's essentially a formula. I notice dog strips are doing well, and I knew an animal strip would be strong. People aren't threatened by an animal. They have a lot of latitude. Do a lot of things that humans can't. By virtue of being a cat, Garfield's not black, white, male or female, young, or old or a particular nationality. He's not going to step on anyone's feet if these thoughts are coming from an animal."

So did he get that Kliban calendar because he actually likes Kliban cats (I've never heard him mention Kliban as an influence) or was he just doing research for how to make Garfield more marketable? The cynic in me says the latter, particularly in light of multiple times Davis has claimed that he chose to make Garfield a cat because he "noticed that nobody had yet created a popular comic about a cat." It seems hard to claim that when he had a Kliban cat calendar on his wall only a few months after he created the character. I can't find Davis mentioning Kliban at all until 2015, although he clearly had at least an awareness of him early on.

I've kind of felt this way for a while, but I feel it kind of makes Davis seem more and more like Bob Kane, and I'm left thinking he's better at crafting a story about himself than he is about crafting one for the comics pages.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: How To Fall In Love With Pogo Redux
https://ift.tt/HUP60DR

Kleefeld on Comics: Remembering Jerry Bails
https://ift.tt/YufgEHa

Kleefeld on Comics: Remember ComicSpace?
https://ift.tt/mEkcgMv

Kleefeld on Comics: Remembering Steve Gerber
https://ift.tt/ZIYqsuh

Kleefeld on Comics: In Response To Spurgeon
https://ift.tt/BG4Psr2

Friday of Comic-Con! Everybody's focus is on San Diego and no one's paying attention to li'l ol' me, so I'm re-running this old post from 2008. I won't offer any additional setup here; I think there's sufficient context in the piece itself...

---

Tom Spurgeon posted this piece up on the cost of comic books today. He concludes...

They're too expensive to facilitate a multi-level, satisfying buying experience -- the experience that structurally they cultivate -- for all but a declining few. The squeezing of profits through elements like pricing that outpaces inflation leads to an ossified marketplace that has come dangerously close to fully abandoning its role as the fertile, chaotic creative ground that feeds the medium entire.

Alan David Doane responds by pointing out that a lot of pirated free comics are still too expensive.

I'd like to add my two cents to the debate here by saying that both Tom and Alan have valid points, but they're also both hindered by thinking in terms of an increasingly outdated business model. (To be fair, just about all publishers, writers, artists, etc. are working under the same misconceptions.) The idea that we, as consumers, are paying whatever the cover price of a comic is for the content within it. The latest episodic adventure of Batman, the small slice-of-life reflections of Paul, the slapstick comedy of Groo... whatever type of story you want to read. However, that is NOT what you're paying for. The content you're looking for is, for all intents and purposes, free. What you're paying for is your preferred delivery method -- in the case of comics, frequently, a 32 page pamphlet.

The internet has opened up the ability for just about anyone in the world, regardless of skill or creativity, to publish whatever they like with effectively no start-up costs. That might be a blog, a podcast, a comic, a book, a movie... just about any type of content one might want to put out for the world to see/hear.* They can put their ideas, their creations, out for public consumption. There's no charge to publish, so there's no charge to consume. However if you, as a consumer, want to experience something more than just the ideas being presented -- if you want some tangible aspect of those ideas -- that is going to cost you.

Take a look at the Foglio's Girl Genius. (Yes, I know they get trotted out every time the discussion goes to successful web comics. I'll have more examples if you just bear with me.) You can go to their web site and read the entire series from page 1. You can read ancillary stories that have never been published in paper form. You can download audio plays. All by the creative minds who came up with the idea. All for free. All legally available for free.

And yet, the Foglios are making a living drawing comics. How? By selling the tangible goods related to their story. You can buy the original pages of art. You can buy collected graphic novel versions of the story. You can buy t-shirts and mouse pads and coffee mugs. All of that costs you, the consumer, money. But what are you paying for? You're not paying for the image of Agatha Heterodyne, you're paying for the raw materials that image is on. Whether it's bound sheets of paper or molded plastic, you're paying for stuff. Actual, tangible stuff.

George Carlin used to have a routine about all the stuff people have. But he was, in effect, making fun of consumerism. The act of amassing larger and larger piles of stuff which is only representative of our thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Or, more accurately, representative of other people's thoughts, ideas and experiences which we would like to share.

Because what is reading a comic book, but an experience? There are any number of ways we can participate in that experience and share it with others. But we frequently choose to have that experience represented as a series of 32 page pamphlets, shoved in a ever-growing number of long boxes. We're paying money NOT for the experience itself, but for a tangible representation of that experience.

Here's another example: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You can download a copy of the original text of the book here. You can download a copy of someone reading the text here. You can download a relatively recent comic book adaptation of the original story here:
[EDIT: The iframe I had here pointed to a site that no longer exists and was spitting up a 404 error.]
All of these are completely free and completely legal, and will sit unobtrusively on your hard drive.

Alternatively, you can head over to Amazon to buy a copy of the book here. Or the same story with annotations. Or the Cliff's Notes version. Or a pop-up version. Or a DVD of Disney's version. Any of which will cost somewhere between $5 and $25, but you'll have a tangible version to place on your bookshelf.

Alternatively, you could shell out substantially more money to obtain a rare 1899 copy of the book. Or a 1918 copy. Or an original animation cel from one of the various movies. You still get a tangible version, plus you get the ability to place it under glass and have your friends "Oooo" and "Aaaah" over it.

In any of those scenarios, you get essentially the same story. The same thoughts and ideas Lewis Carroll put down almost 150 years ago. But some will cost you a good deal more than others, and for what? For a different delivery method. For a different object. For a different piece of stuff.

I could go to the Folgio's web site every other day and read their latest story developments one page at a time. Or I download an audio version of Alice and listen to it while I walk the dog. But I actively choose to buy Girl Genius as it gets published in a trade paperback format. I actively choose to buy a new/different edition of Carroll's masterpiece. I am willing to pay for a specific delivery method for content which is freely available.

And that's the point that Tom misses. Sure, three bucks is too much for a 32-page gamble on what may or may not be a decent story. But that's NOT how people sample comics. They read Rainbow Orchid or Tozo or Hereville or Templar, AZ or whatever online and, then, if they like it, they drop a few bucks for a printed copy of it. Sure, some people will always have an impulse purchase in their LCS from time to time when they see something that strikes their fancy. But that's not the primary business model going deeper into the 21st century. It can't be because, as Tom points out, it's too cost-prohibitive from a consumer standpoint.

The corollary to this, of course, is that the current system at Diamond doesn't work. It's built and structured around an untenable model in which not only are samples unavailable, but the purchases must be made months in advance, often before the product is even itself complete. That it's sustained itself this long honestly surprises me to no end. Many people have complained about issues with Diamond over the years, but as creators and publishers recognize better ways to generate income (i.e. the "Airship Entertainment Publishing Model") Diamond will become less and less relevant to publishers' revenue streams.

Which actually presents something of an opportunity. Comic fans will want to be able to sample more and more comics, but they won't want to have to go to each publishers' web site to download samples. I think someone will be able to clean house in another decade or so if they were able to A) establish themselves as a one-stop repository for all publishers' sample/downloadable comics, and B) also set themselves up as a retailer so that you could not only sample, but order whatever comics/graphic novels you like. Sure, you'd get some folks who read the digital versions and never ordered anything, but it would go a long way to creative diversity in the field and helping to support the smaller, independent folks who otherwise wouldn't get the shelf space that's normally devoted to marvel and DC.

And that's where Tom's argument falls apart, I think. He recognizes the problem in the current, antiquated system, but doesn't bring in the new/current business models that are replacing the status quo to see that we're actually getting more creativity, more diversity, and at a lower sampling cost.

* Admittedly, the 'net is still lacking dimensions for taste, touch, and smell but I'm largely talking about comic books here. The content of comics only has the dimension of sight. The smell and touch of an old comic, while certainly notable to the experience, is generally not intended or designed by the creators. The only portion of the comic reading experience they even attempt to influence is sight -- which is wholly replicable online.