Although I certainly have my preferences when it comes to comics and I tend to focus on particular creators and styles and genres that I like, I do try make an ongoing attempt to gain as broad an appreciation of comics as possible. So while I picked up the Kamandi Archives because I really like Jack Kirby, I got the Justice League Archives so I had a better understanding of Kirby and Stan Lee were reacting to when Martin Goodman told them to come up with their own superhero team. Consequently, I have a number of comics and graphic novels that I don't necessarily enjoy for their own sake, but appreciate them from a historical perspective and find them sometimes useful for research.
One problem, though, is actually reading older Golden Age stories to conduct the research. Setting aside the horribly sexist and racist attitudes many of them display, many of the stories are just drek. The plots are shallow, the dialogue is stilted, characterization is minimal... plot holes abound, the storytelling is confusing, the illustrations are crude...
I get it. Comics were basically a commodity item, and publishers were trying to churn out as many as they could. They hired anyone who could string two sentences together to write them, anyone who'd ever sat at a drafting table to draw them, and they had to crank out whole issues in sometimes as little as a single weekend! Making comics wasn't a craft, it was a job. It was just a notch above putting bolts on a car in an assembly line. That's why we have differentiated artists, inkers, colorists, etc. -- that was Will Eisner's idea to streamline comics' production and make it more like an assembly line.
But that also means the stories aren't as good as they could be. Which maybe wasn't so bad if you were eleven and spent a dime for a single issue every other month. There was enough of a gap between readings that you didn't notice that Batman was being drawn in the same eight or ten poses every issue. Or that Daredevil was repeating the same handful of plots. Or that Nelvana hadn't actually done anything heroic herself in a dozen issues.
But reading them in a more condensed form, whether that's in a fancy Archive edition or on a series of microfiche or even copies of the original comics, that can be hard to wade through for extended periods. They can become a chore to push through.
I don't know that I have a real point to this, other than to suggest, if you're reading through many of these GA books, I recommend having a number of bookmarks handy! I can't tell you how many of reprint books are only part-way read because I just had to put them away for a while.
One thing that I have never quite figured out is the pricing on original comic art. I mean, I get some of the generalities -- like why a Jack Kirby page is priced higher than a Mike Sekowsky page, or why a cover is priced higher than an interior page, or why a page with all of the Avengers on it is priced higher than a scene-setting page with no named characters of any importance -- but why is this specific page this specific price?
Why is this Gil Kane-drawn Marvel Team-Up page worth $2,500? Is it really worth only five dollars more than this Tom Palmer drawn Dr. Strange page? And those are both within $100 of twenty-five pages of Superman: Speeding Bullets from Eduardo Barreto?
A John Byrne interior page from Fantastic Four #214 for almost $10,000?!? And that's the same price as a cover he did for Hawkman? And why does The Walking Dead #27 page 19 by Charlie Adlard cost even more?
And the cover to Ghost Rider #16 by Mark Texeira is nearly three times that amount?
There's an old adage that it's only worth that amount if someone is actually willing to pay for it. But that these sellers think these numbers are reasonably comparable is just something that I can't really wrap my head around.
This image comes from Cartoons Magazine, Volume 11 Number 1 circa January 1917. The text reads...She is a "regular" cartoonist and has her workshop in a real newspaper office amid the click of telegraph instruments and typewriters. She is Miss Edwina Dumm, of the Columbus Daily Monitor, and one of the few women cartoonists in the United States. She had always wanted to be a cartoonist, so she went to work to pay for an art education, thus showing a lot of spunk and independence. she is quite old, being in her early twenties, and is a daughter of a newspaper man. Below is one of her cartoons.
"Quite old" -- HA! Wonder what they would've said when she retired... FORTY-NINE YEARS LATER! Or when she finally died TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER THAT at age 97!
Anyway, Edwina (as she signed all her strips) started doing political cartoons, often of a pro-suffrage nature, at the Columbus Daily Monitor a year before the above piece ran. She then started a regular strip called The Meanderings of Minnie, but she soon picked up a national sydicate. She moved to New York and changed the strip's lead to a boy, renaming it Cap Stubbs and Tippie. (The Sundays featured primarily Cap's dog and were simply called Tippie.) It ran until her retirement in 1966.
In the 1930s, she also began a weekly strip in Life called Sinbad and a second newspaper strip titled Alec the Great. All three of her strips took their names from the dog she would use as a lead character, and all of their designs were based on her own short-haired pups. In fact, her dog from that time was himself named Sinbad. But her practice made her quite adept at drawing dogs, that short-haired one in particular, and Trina Robbins called her "a dog artist par excellence, possibly the best in the 20th century."
You can find examples of her strips online pretty easily with a simple Google search, but I'll include here instead an ad promoting Cap Stubbs and Tippie just before it began...
Black men are stereotyped in a number of different ways. One of the primary ones is as the "angry Black man" -- the guy whose perpetual rage is barely held in check and could explode into violence at any second. It's how police viewed Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Darren Wilson, the officer who murdered Brown, said exactly that: "The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked."
As with all stereotypes, it's bullshit. It's an attempt to justify dehumanizing an entire group of people to fit your own prejudices, so you can stroke your own ego and feel superior. Bull. Shit.
It's not that Black people don't have a right to be angry! They have LOADS of reasons to be angry right now. And many of them are indeed furious. Even setting aside past problems that have never been fully addressed (like, you know, slavery and lynchings), you've got: people today who deny racism even exists, the high per capita volume of Blacks that are incarcerated, having a "Black-sounding" name means it's less likely to have your resume looked at favorably, the average white household has 22 times as much wealth as the average Black household, increased security in urban schools with predominantly Black students despite most school shootings occurring in suburban schools with predominantly white students, deliberate and ongoing attempts to suppress Black votes...
But anger does not always beget violence.
When the officers who killed Eric Garner were officially not even indicted for their acts, editor Bill Campbell, like many others, was enraged. But he didn't go busting windows or start throwing rocks at police. He called Jason Rodriguez and John Jennings, and they chose to make something. They were all sick of the regular feed of news where police were given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, up to and including murder, Black citizens without consequences as long as they said they feared for the lives. But instead of unleashing their anger with destruction, they unleashed it with creation.
APB: Artists against Police Brutality is a compilation of pieces gathered together on the subject of how the police treat Black people. There are comics and pin-ups and essays, some are recollections of bad personal experiences the creators had with officers, some are biting satire, some are more analytical examinations like how the very notion of comic book superheroes itself suggests that the justice system is flawed. (I should note that "flawed" does not mean "broken.") Some of the pieces are more metaphorical; others frightfully aren't.
As with any anthology, some pieces are better than others and some pieces resonate more than others, but they are all created from a deep emotional place from each of the creators. There's a huge line-up of creators here, and I imagine most of the invitations went something like...
"Hey, this is Bill Campbell. I'm putting together a comics anthology called Artists against Police Brutality where..."
"I'M IN!"
Every work in here is deeply personal. Regardless of how they approached the topic here, this isn't about Garner, or Brown, or Rice regardless of how frequently their names get invoked. This is about Ytasha's uncle, and Melanie's dad, and Lance's kids, and Jerome's nephew... This is personal. This is personal because every one of these creators has seen people in their immediate family arrested, beaten, and/or killed by police because of the color of their skin. I'm not talking about some distant relative who's been dead a hundred years; I'm talking about people in their immediate family circle. I almost added "that they talked with and knew" but Melanie's father was buried three weeks before she was born. These creators all have something to say about police brutality, and it all comes from personal experience.
I'll be honest: this was a hard read. Not because the stories were poorly done, but because they're painful. They come from a place of pain and anger and frustration. And creator after creator has these stories of police encounters that went south. Not all of them end in death, and some of the messages are quite hopeful. But the point is that every creator has these stories. These aren't one-off instances of some rogue bad apples. These are tales that point to a systemtic problem in the structure of the organization itself. No one here is saying all cops are bad, or all cops are violent, or all cops are racist. They're saying the system itself is fundamentally unjust. Let me repeat that: No one here is saying all cops are bad. They're saying the system is fundamentally unjust.
And while the one or two stories you might hear on the news might sound like isolated incidents, having so many of them collected here in one book says otherwise. And while that makes for difficult reading, it also makes for important reading, particularly if you haven't experienced these types of problems first-hand. This is not one voice crying in the wilderness, this is Ashley A. Woods and Keith Knight and Lalo Alcaraz and Dean Haspiel and Ytasha Womack and Lance Tooks and Tak Toyoshima and Barbara Brandon-Croft and...
If you didn't understand why Ferguson blew up, you should get this. If you heard "Black Lives Matter" and tried to counter with anything, you should get this. If you've ever wondered why your friends who are people of color are more reticent to interact with the police than you are, you should get this. For that matter, if none of your friends are POC in the first place, you should get this. What's in Artists against Police Brutality is the reality for an increasing number of Americans; you should be aware of what's being done to them.
This image comes from Cartoons Magazine, Volume 11 Number 1 circa January 1917. The text reads...
