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Back in the 1980s, the Marvel role-playing game from TSR provided a wealth of information about the various Marvel superheroes and the universe they inhabited. TSR seemed to worked relatively closely with Marvel, and did a pretty good job updating information based on the current stories being told at that time. What's more, in some cases, they were allowed to expand upon what was presented in the comics. While this wasn't done very often with the characters themselves -- as much of their information had already been fairly well-documented, mostly by Mark Gruenwald -- some of the seemingly tangential elements were left up to the writers with TSR.

One case I found particularly notable was the Fantastic Four's headquarters. While the original Baxter Building had been detailed pretty well in the comics, their (then) new base of 4 Freedoms Plaza had not. David E. Martin expanded on that greatly in the Fantastic Four Compendium, using his background in architecture, but much of his original text didn't ultimately make it into the book. However, years later, he returned to the idea and "re-published" the Compendium in digital form with the updated information. In the process, he also included the initial draft of an adventure in the book, which had been cut early on for space reasons.

I had talked a bit with Martin a little over a decade ago when I was running my Fantastic Four fan site, and got a copy of the updated book in PDF form. (Thanks, in part, to the now-defunct Zan's Super Home site.) I dug up a copy of that updated Compendium and thought I would share it here as a snapshot of what Marvel fans were using as secondary source materials back when I was a kid.

Download the updated Fantastic Four Compendium here.
I see the question come up regularly among the small press crowd: how the hell do you store minicomics? They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but they're often quite a bit smaller than a regular comic. They can get lost in a long box or on a bookshelf. Putting just your minicomics in a shoebox or a drawer ends up with a unorganized and constantly shifting pile. Ones that are hand-cut tend to have irregular edges, which can get caught and damaged. So what's a person to do?

The best solution I've found, and what I've been using successfully for several years now, is to bag and board them all, and then file them in my long boxes in and among everything from Marvel, DC, etc. Typically, we think of bagging and boarding as a means to preserve our comics, but they can actually be used for organizational purposes with minis.

The first thing that bagging/boarding does is unify the comics' sizes. In the photo I've included with this post, you can see I've how a variety of differently sized minicomics, once they're bagged/boarded, end up taking the same amount of space. While it might seem a tad excessive in the case of those smaller ones, it does mean that they don't get lost nearly as easily. I'm just as likely to come across Amazing Spider-Man as Bad Chris as that small untitled one with the Disney-esque castle on it. By bagging/boarding, they've become unified in that sense and they can all be stored/filed next to one another with ease.

Bagging/boarding of course also protects your minicomics. That's kind of the original point of bagging/boarding, as I noted above, but it works a little differently here. As you can kind of see if you zoom in on those books, the edges aren't always even, thanks to hand-assembly. Which means that having them sit out loose will make it more likely for individual pages to get caught on something, pulling the whole book apart. Having them bagged prevents this, regardless of how evenly or regularly the pages were cut.

Now it does seem a bit curious, I think, to bag/board a comic that you might not even have had to pay for, or that was clearly printed on a next-to-nothing budget but if your goal is to keep your minicomics around in any capacity and you are able to afford a little more to protect them, the bagging/boarding option is the best solution I've come up with or seen so far.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: How's the Show?
http://ift.tt/2kjfTnr

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: Knowing What You’re a Fan of
http://ift.tt/2kj66Ok

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: The Day the Law Died
http://ift.tt/2jQ2HFv

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/2kRoHhU

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Collectives, Take 2
http://ift.tt/2kVxvTa

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: James Baldwin
http://ift.tt/2kl8W2B

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Snuffy Smith Cartoon
http://ift.tt/2kwUwiC
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was a popular strip back in its day. It debuted under the name Take Barney Google, F'rinstance in 1919 under the talents of Billy DeBeck, and continues to this day under the hand of John R. Rose. I don't have any insights as to when the strip saw its greatest level of popularity, but I would guess between the mid-1920s and early 1930s, judging by the number of toys, short films and animated theatrical features that were made.

It would appear that King Features made a concerted effort to re-popularize the strip in the 1960s. There were plans made for building a chain of "Snuffy's Shantys" hot dog shops towards the end of the decade, with the hopes that 700 locations would be open by 1970. It does seem like at least some such restaurants were opened, but I can't seem to find how many. One presumes not many given that no one has ever heard of them.

But the other thing they tried was a television cartoon featuring the characters. They actually produced fifty six-minute shorts that were coupled with Beetle Bailey and Krazy Kat segments under the King Features Trilogy title. Despite using the exceptionally talented Paul Frees for the voices of both Snuffy and Barney, the animation is incredibly stiff, even by television standards, and the jokes and gags fall incredibly flat. Whatever level of syndication it may have gotten in 1963, I don't believe this made it back to even local stations years later when they might pick up Baby Huey and Popeye cartoons from about the same era.

Here's the first episode so you can judge for yourself why this hasn't seen much airplay in the past half century...
This weekend sees the opening of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary about the history of race relations in the United States, largely through writer James Baldwin's own knowledge and recollections of various civil rights leaders. It's based off an unfinished manuscript by Baldwin, and makes heavy use of recordings of him.

Someone had posted the trailer for the movie on Facebook a couple weeks ago, and the first response that came up was from someone asking who the guy who was shown at the start of the clip and did all of the talking. While they don't expressly say "This is James Baldwin" in the clip, it's pretty apparent that's who it is. But, even after identifying Baldwin by name, the original responder still had no clue who he was until someone pointed to his Wikipedia entry.

I don't say this to mock that individual. I suspect most people in the States have never heard Baldwin's name before. I know I hadn't until only a few years ago. As far as the majority of America is concerned, the Civil Rights movement consisted of entirely Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Maybe, among those who went out of their way to learn something outside of their classrooms, you could add Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and (recently) John Lewis. Names like Baldwin, Huey Newton, E. D. Nixon, Medgar Evers, Whitney Young, and who knows how many others simply don't get mentioned at all.

I've mentioned before how I think more comic biographies of Black luminaries need to be made. Today, I want to make a special call-out to suggest someone make one of James Baldwin. That people like him are so widely unknown, I think, is a large part of the problem today, where people don't listen -- don't want to listen -- to views and experiences that don't closely reflect their own. I'm not about to claim a biographic comic about Baldwin is going to bring peace to the world, but it sure would help in its understanding.