Bet you didn't know it's America Recycles Day, did you? Zippy did.

Actually, no he didn't. This Zippy cartoon ran back in May.

Today was Day One of the academic presentation portion of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum Grand Opening Festival of Cartoon Art. (I think that's the full official title.)

Um... wow.

I mean, really. Just... wow.

I visited the Museum almost exactly one year ago in their old facility, and I was summarily impressed. And I've been following their postings and pictures as the new facility has been taking shape, so I had to stop a moment and smile on my way in initially as I saw "Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum" carved in stone on the face of their new home. This has been a long time in coming, and comics research just leveled up. Multiple times. From what little I've really seen of the place so far (basically, just the lobby and the auditorium) it's super impressive. I can't wait until the tours to see the full breadth of the place!

The first two days here, though, are focused on academic presentations. Papers and lectures from people doing academic work on comics. Subjects ranged from the Yellow Kid and the Armory Show of 1913 to Walt Kelly and Charles Schulz to Ariel Schrag and Alison Bechdel. I don't know that I can summarize all the presentations here; some were better presented than others, but they were all deeply fascinating, well-researched and very enlightening. I was exposed to a number of comics creators and works I had never heard of before, and a number of conceptual ideas that presented old works in startlingly new contexts. My head is swimming with ideas right now, and it's frankly hard to process everything that was presented by the sheer volume of great work shown.

And tomorrow promises another day of the same!

You know, I've gone to comic conventions put on by the likes of Wizard and ReedPop, and those are fun and all, but I always find that, despite multiple tracks of programming, there simply isn't that much that leaps out at me. And, frequently, what I do find is a bit hit-or-miss. But let me tell you that today, I sat in pretty much the same spot for from 9:00 AM until 6:00 PM, and was at rapt attention the whole time. I would love to attend more conferences like this.

The other cool thing about today was who was in attendance. Because of the type of conference this is, and how it's attached to the new facility opening, it's drawing a crowd of people interested in comics research. Naturally, the folks from the Billy Ireland Museum itself (Lucy Caswell, Jenny Robb, Caitlin McGurk and others) but off the top of my head, I saw R.C. Harvey and Charles Hatfield; I chatted with Henry Jenkins and Tom Spurgeon; I had lunch with Dan Fingeroth and Kirk Taylor (whose above photo of the event I liberally swiped from his FB page). Setting aside the academic folks presenting their research, there was just a LOT of note-worthy comics thinkers in attendance.

That comics is at this level where so many people are giving such fantastic consideration comics, in all its myriad forms and in as many different sub-niches as there are being researched, is just amazing. And that the Billy Ireland Museum can and does host these types of events, and that they are doing such a brilliant job of it, and that they have an incredible research facility to help in all that research...?

Wow. Just... wow.

Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl can often be more cerebral than I like at any hour involving an "AM" but I think this morning's comic does a good, if cynical, job of explaining fandom. This applies to any fandom; comics, cosplay, Star Trek, classic Greek tragedies... you name it!

For as many times as I've heard someone say that their fandom is about inclusion and welcoming people of all sorts, I've seen just as many, if not more, counter-examples of that taking place. You know, it's great to gather together in small groups around a shared interest, but don't deride everyone else because they don't appreciate things in the same way you do. Yeah, some people are going to be assholes, but deride them for being an asshole, not because they're not in your club.

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here are ten random facts about me related to comic books...

1. The first comic I can recall purchasing with my own money is Action Comics #495. The story is one that should've been written/published about ten years earlier because it was pretty silly compared to just about everything else DC, much less Marvel, was publishing at the time. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing a return appearance of Gnmod.
2. For some reason, I have never been able to track down a copy of The New Warriors #61. I have an otherwise complete run of the series.
3. The very first check I wrote was made out to Mile High Comics. I believe I bought several Marvel Two-in-Ones.
4. The hallway leading to our bedroom has two commissioned pieces of original art, both cartoon-ized portraits of the S.O. and me. One is by Frank Page and the other is by Alex Heberling.
5. I once wrote a letter to Marvel complaining about the artwork in Marvel Tales compared to Spectacular Spider-Man. I was too young to realize that Marvel Tales was just a reprint book. I was also too young to appreciate that I was comparing Ed Hannigan to Steve Ditko.
6. I like Marvin and Wendy more than Zan and Jayna.
7. My ex-wife made me get rid of Grendel: Devil Child. They creeped her out so much that she couldn't stand them even being in the house.
8. Remember the After Dark screensavers from the 1980s? Flying Toasters and all that? They had a licensed Marvel version which I was quite fond of. My favorite of that collection was the Beast hopping around the Danger Room.
9. Alphabetically, the very last comic in my collection is Zot! #36.
10. I first read Watchmen as the individual pamphlet issues as they came out. At the time, I was still discovering all the different things that could be done with comics and comic storytelling so, while I realized that Watchmen was different, I didn't have good appreciation of how different it was from everything else. It was very new and fresh to me, but so was just about everything else I read at the time.
    

This has made the rounds periodically the past couple years, but on this Veterans' Day, I really want to say that I would pay good money for Tom Scioli to draw an ongoing series of comics featuring Jack Kirby fighting in World War II.

You know, for as powerful as Jenette Kahn was in comics, for as long as she was in comics, I've seen/heard scarcely anything about her. She was the publisher of DC Comics for nearly three decades and I don't think I've ever seen her interviewed and only heard/read interviews with a couple of times. Maybe that's a lapse on my part and there's a wealth of information out there that I'm just totally ignorant of, but the Art Institute of Chicago tonight hosted a session with her as part of their Chicago Humanities Festival, and I couldn't pass up that opportunity.

The format was pretty straightforward. Liz Mason, manager at Quimby's bookstore and long-time zine publisher, did the interviewing as the two women sat on the auditorium stage with Mason showcasing a collectin of comic images behind them to help prompt the discussion. The place was full, but not packed, and the audience seemed to be about 75% Art Institute patrons and about 25% comics fans, judging by entirely superficial outward appearances.

Mason set the tone almost immediately when she sat down by stating that she felt like a little kid, given the size of the chairs they were sitting in and the fact that she was sitting next to an influential figure like Kahn. She proceeded to ask about women and minorities in comics, and then skipped over to Andy Warhol and pop art, the DC explosion/implosion, Frank Miller's Ronin and Dark Knight Returns, the death of Superman, Arkham Asylum, Neil Gaiman and Sandman, before finally ending on Camelot 3000. If that sounds like a disconnected and haphazard list of topics, that's because it was.

Kahn's answers were professional and generally poigant, with a couple of digressions that got into deeper territory than the original questions demanded. She also had a few anecdotes, the most notable that apparently Joe Orlando threw up in the men's room when he heard that a woman had been put in charge of the company back in 1976. But the crowd here was largely one that was relatively removed from comics and so most of the discussion was, for me at least, a fairly cursory level. I was particularly disappointed that, despite leading with women and minorities in comics questions, the topic was largely dropped in short order in favor of pretty standard (if non-linear) DC history from the late 1970s onwards.

I was very glad to see and hear Kahn talk. I think there's definitely more one can get out of seeing and hearing a person than the handful of quotes or text interviews I've seen from Kahn. So I got some sense of her personality and demeanor, which was insightful. But it was an interview that largely gave texture to her place in comics history without adding much substance. But this was an event populated by non-comics folks and they only talked for an hour, so maybe I was expecting too much. But especially with all the discussion these days about women in comics, I would think the manager of a comics shop would take greater advantage of furthering that discussion with a hugely signicant female force in comics.

OK, so The Comic Journal has this piece looking at some old letters from the early days of Marvel Comics. The link's made the rounds; I trust you've read it by now.

But I just noticed something that points to Stan Lee as a bullshit artist from Day One. Check out this letter to Jerry Bails from August 25, 1961...

This was written three weeks after Fantastic Four #1 first hit the stands. Given the lead time comic book production takes, issue #2 was probably done and #3 (when the characters' costumes debuted) was just starting to be worked on. So, Stan's thinking at least one issue beyond that when he mentions the Sub-Mariner. Definitely interesting, but no big revelations there.

Here's what catches my eye. Stan says, "judging by our early sales records, I think we have a winner on our hands." Early sales records? In 1961, at a time when comic book distribution and record-keeping was haphazard at best (I've personally found release dates for FF #1 ranging from August 3 to August 9) and publishing decisions weren't made until three months after an issue came out because the data influx was so slow, Stan is claiming to have early sales records? What newsstand was keeping meticulous enough records that they could have any sort of report back to Indpendent News and have them report back to Stan in a matter of weeks?

That line can only come from one of two things. Either Stan is making this up wholecloth or, if you're feeling more forgiving, the handful of copies at one newsstand where Stan picked up his copy of the New York Times sold out.

For years, I've been of the opinion that Stan was mostly just an opportunist who was savvy enough to take advantage of the media hype that Marvel found itself immersed in. He played to an audience because of the egoboo, and things kind of got out of hand, but he rolled with it anyway. But seeing this, I can't help but think he's been bullshitting everyone about everything since he first started working at Timely. Makes me really wonder about how Joe Simon and Jack Kirby really got fired in the early 1940s, or what really happened to cause the Atlas implosion of 1957.

Stan Lee: Bullshitting everyone since before he was even "Stan Lee."