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Waaaay back when I first started blogging, one of my semi-recurring themes was just sharing the covers of all the comics I could find that came out in a given month. Rather than just choose any ol' month at random, though, I tried to pick months that were significant for some reason. The debut of what would become a historical issue or creator or something. The idea was to provide a measure of context to illustrate what was going on in the industry more broadly when a particular event happened. I think September 1947 is particularly interesting, as you might see when you begin scanning the covers below...


Today, we're looking at the spinner rack of September 1947. The date is significant because it marks the debut of Joe Simon's and Jack Kirby's Young Romance -- the first comic book in the romance genre.

It strikes me that, generally speaking, the comic selection of the time looks rather similar to the offerings we have today. There's a domination of superhero titles with a few "name" heroes -- namely Superman and Captain Marvel -- being cross-sold through multiple titles. There are a variety of other genres available, but not in particularly large quantities. Some of the books, like Green Hornet Fights Crime and Shadow Comics, are based on licensed properties that originated in other media. There are even some books that cross multiple genres such as Terry-Toons which features Mighty Mouse, a funny animal with super powers.

Westerns, by and large, are not around. They really wouldn't become popular until 1948, and then the market was flooded with Western titles. Naturally, romance flourished at that time as well, with the success of the aforementioned Young Romance.

I might remind readers as well that, in 1947, some characters that are now associated with DC and Marvel were owned by companies other than those two. Captain Marvel was from Fawcett, Plastic Man from Quality, and Daredevil (admittedly, a wholly different DD than the one we know today) from Gleason. Further, the creators typically associated with some of the big name characters have already stopped working on them.


Trivia: Action Comics #112 is the first cover featuring Superman with a chess-based theme. All-Star #36 (whose cover you might recognize) features the first time Superman and Batman are actually shown to fight alongside the JSA. The "Dick Tracy" and "Bugs Bunny" comics are actually two issues of a Dell series entitled Four Color which had a rotating line-up, which also included the Lone Ranger, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Woody Woodpecker, Tarzan, Charlie McCarthy, and Roy Rogers. Archie Andrews is billed as "America's Top Teen-Ager" on the cover of Laugh, but it's Buzzy Brown who's billed as "America's Favorite Teen-Ager" on the cover of Buzzy.
2010 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide
2010. Ten years ago. Let me rattle off a few tidbits, with varying degrees of significance, about what we started 2010 with...
  • Zuda Comics was still an ongoing experiment.
  • None of the major comic publishers released their digital comics on the same day as their printed ones.
  • Harvey Pekar, Joe Simon, Jerry Robinson, Shelly Moldoff, Al Feldstein, Nick Cardy, Herb Trimpe, Dick Ayers, Al Williamson, and Joe Kubert were still with us.
  • The as-yet-to-be-called "Marvel Cinematic Universe" consisted exclusively of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.
  • Neil Gaiman was single.
  • Copies of Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 were, during the year, auctioned off for over $1,000,000 each, breaking the previous record of most-expensive-comic-ever-sold by at least 300%.
  • The Xeric Awards were still a thing.
  • The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum had not yet moved into its current home in Sullivant Hall. Lucy Caswell had not retired and was still the curator.
  • The Kenosha Festival of Cartooning had not started. Neither had C2E2 or the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE). Mid-Ohio Con had not been purchased by Wizard World.
  • Time Magazine named Kickstarter one of "The 50 Best Inventions of 2010." Patreon hadn't been created yet.
  • The iPad (also named as one of Time's "Best Inventions") was first released and included the newly created comiXology app.
How many of those items do you discuss the same way now as you did in 2010? When was the last time you had a "day and date" discussion? How often does crowd-funding NOT come up in talks about making money from your comics? How many days do you go without catching wind of something Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Tom Hiddleston, etc. were doing, even if you're not paying attention? When planning which conventions to attend, how many different choices do you consider?

My point is that, in all likelihood, your thinking about the comics industry has changed pretty radically in the past ten years, whether you realize it or not. What you consider normal now was viewed by many with skepticism or even outright fear just a few years ago. More significantly, however, is that these changes in the overall industry mean that individual businesses need to change as well. You can't continue to operate in an environment that's changed without making changes yourself. Remember the old adage about being the town's best buggy whip manufacturer in an age of automobiles?

What's more, while people typically think of these shifts in terms of business, they not surprisingly apply to individual creators as well. When it comes down to it, most creators are operating as small businesses unto themselves, so that makes sense, right? But it also applies to readers/consumers. How you read comics is impacted by how they're created. How you buy comics is impacted by how they're distributed and sold. How you relate to comics is impacted by how they're marketed.

Ten years. It doesn't seem like an especially long time, but things can alter pretty dramatically. You don't necessarily have to jump on board and embrace each and every change that comes along -- some will be short-lived failures, of course -- but be aware that things ARE changing, and you need to think about and react to them; you can't just assume that what worked five or ten years ago will continue to work today because the environment is constantly changing around you.
Right now, a good chunk of the planet is on some version of lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic has been a major disrupter throughout the world -- the only continent so far that has not had a confirmed case of COVID-19 is Antarctica. With so many people staying in place -- whether that's via a police-enforced quarantine, or generally following WHO guidelines, or because a person has been furloughed can't afford to go anywhere -- that means delivery services are being extensively used. You might not be able to go out to get groceries, but you can have them delivered.

Here in the United States, deliveries of all sorts are primarily handled by the United States Postal Service (USPS). And there are two issues worth discussing here.

Super Heroes Stamp Album
First (and probably less well-known) is that the USPS is no longer accepting deliveries for -- as of this writing -- 66 countries. If you need to get something to one of the countries on this list your primary (and probably most affordable) option is simply gone. Now, in some cases, that's because some countries are not accepting incoming mails from other countries. Countries like Libya, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and the Cayman Islands won't accept anything from the US anyway. But in many cases, places like Cuba, Zimbabwe, Moldova, and Venezuela, the USPS isn't going there. With a few exceptions (notably India and the Congo), these aren't the most populated countries, so there's certainly less of an impact than if, say, Brazil, Mexico, and Japan were on the list, but that could obviously change.

And where this can be problematic is with creators -- whose revenue streams have had the convention circuit denied to them, and are forced to make all their income online -- who need to ship purchases internationally. What's a creator supposed to do when they get an order from Costa Rica? Or Kenya? Or South Africa?

I don't know how many more countries will be added to this list and when, but it's probably worth keeping an eye on if you do have any merchandise that might require international shipping.

The second issue is that the main source of the Postal Service's income -- first-class and marketing mail -- has largely dried up because of pandemic concerns. So estimates currently say that the USPS will be “financially illiquid” by the end of September, and the most recent bill to get more money to the post office was rejected out of hand by Trump. Letting the USPS run out of money would be disastrous for the post office itself, of course, but for creators relying on them as a means to deliver merchandise when their sole revenue stream is now remote ordering.

While some might claim that private companies like UPS and FedEx do the same thing, and could fill a void left by the USPS, that's currently not possible. In the first place, neither UPS or FedEx are designed to handle smaller items like letters. The cheapest option available for either of those services is over $10 for a single letter! That gets prohibitively expensive really quickly, as you can see!

But perhaps more significantly, both UPS and FedEx actually use USPS as part of their delivery system! Some areas are, logistically, too remote for either company to actually deliver to themselves, so they will basically only go so far as the nearest post office and let the mail carrier finish the shipment to the customer's front door. It's financially impractical for those two private companies to actually deliver to each and every house in the United States, and in the absence of the USPS, many people (particularly in rural areas) would lose access to any delivery services.

Not to mention that UPS and FedEx would need to radically upscale their entire operation to make up for the 600,000 employees currently working for the USPS. Those 600,000 people handle a LOT of mail, and shifting that workload onto their current private staff would be virtually impossible. Both UPS and FedEx would need to add 50% more workers than they have right now to make up the difference!

So even if the increased price of postage would not be a concern, and even if these "mail deserts" would be considered acceptable, there would still be huge delays as the companies ramped themselves up to handle the additional capacity. How fast do you think either company could hire and train 300,000 people? UPS touts itself as being great at logistics, but I can guarantee they'd still have trouble getting this sorted!
Most of my personal comics library consists of books. Several thousand pamphlet comics, a few thousand trade paperbacks and hardcovers, and a few hundred prose books about comics. When I first started getting in to comics, reprints were sporadic and inconsistent at best, so a lot of what I picked up were the original printings of the comics stories. Because that's what I was primarily interested in. I wanted to learn about how the Avengers formed and what those original adventures were like, I didn't necessarily care that I had an actual copy of The Avengers #1. But for many stories, getting those original issues was literally the only way I could read them.

In the vast majority of cases, I'm interested in the story so I don't care what format it comes in. At one point, I wanted to see how Batman evolved as a character and bought the first several volumes of The Batman Chronicles. They're not great reprints and they're on cheaper paper, but it gets the basic stories across. I can see, "Oh, here's how they introduced Catwoman" or "Oh, I've got context for the Red Hood now" or whatever.

On occasion, I do find the context of the original book helpful. If I know a reprint has been modified somehow (often getting recolored) or if I want to look at the original fan letters or ads or something, I'll try to go back to the original if I'm able. That's still not always possible from a practical standpoint, but there are sometimes facsimile editions that come very close. I've actually picked up several of the IDW Artist's Edition books so I can even look at close reproductions of the actual art used for production. It's not quite as good as looking at the actual art pages themselves, but those are even harder to get your hands on than the old comics!

This brings me to a bit of my current dilemma.

I also have in my possession any number of ephemera that is tied to comics, but not actually comics themselves. Marketing pieces, mostly, promoting an upcoming series or event. They're almost entirely tangential to the comics I normally read. But they can provide a great deal of context that would otherwise be absent from the actual comics. Often there's some additional art unique to the marketing that is absent from the comics. Letters or promotional copy that help explain what the creators were trying to do, which might not be evident in the final product depending on how talented they are! I find this type of stuff incredibly useful when I'm researching something, but the problem is that it's frequently so rare that it's barely even known about by anyone, much less accessible in any form!

Taskmaster business card
For example, I have in my possession a "business card" from Marvel's Taskmaster character that was used to promote the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline. (The front is pictured at the right, the back featured a checklist of all the issues the crossover was featured in.) Now, this was from Marvel and was widely promoted so I expect a number of folks who were Marvel fans from that era might recall it, but how often does this come up? If you were working on a piece about "Acts of Vengeance" how likely would you be to even come across a reference to it if you didn't know it already existed? And if you did, how likely would you be able to find one? It would have to be an original artifact because it's never been reprinted. Why would it be?

And that's one of the interesting challenges. Finding these esoteric metatextual items to put the actual comics in a broader context. This is the stuff that wasn't saved at all because people were interested in the comics, not the promotions of them. There historically was that proverbial mother who threw out every kid's comics, thus making many of them rare, but the kids themselves often didn't even bother to save the ancillary stuff, so those pieces can be even more rare! But those pieces can prove very enlightening if you can find them.

Of course, the downside to recognizing that is that you loathe to throw out anything you might get contemporaneously because you never know when it might prove to hold some significance later on. Which means I've also got in my personal library several drawers and boxes full of what likely looks like (and may well end up being) garbage. But you never know when it might come in handy...
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

MopKleefeld on Comics: Last of the New Comics

Kleefeld on Comics: The Years Start Coming & They Don't Stop Coming

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Webcomics as a Genre?, Part 1

Kleefeld on Comics: Comics: Right Now Redux

Kleefeld on Comics: Instructible Comics

Patreon: Webcomics Textbook: Critical Uses: Webcomics as a Genre?, Part 2

Kleefeld on Comics: Morrie Turner + Mr. Rogers
Clinton Robison, host of the Coffee & Comics Podcast pointed out to us that Morrie Tucker, author of Wee Pals, visited Mr. Rogers and I thought it was a strong enough segment to share. The episode first aired in May 1971.
I was initially thinking I might try to find a good comic on how to make a surgical-style mask. Instructional guides can be very effective in comic form as the illustrations can show individual steps sometimes more clearly than either a verbal explanation or even a video. Illustrations can remove a lot of extraneous and distracting detail that can complicate understanding of photos or videos, and prose can prove complicated for those with limited understanding of the language it's written in. (Arguably, comics have their own grammar and linguistic type rules that can vary from culture to culture, but it is often easier/quicker to grasp the basics of comics 'language' over the written word.

Interestingly, I could not find any decent comic instructions for making your own mask. At most, they were prose with illustrations showing occasional outcomes and not really comics themselves. I did, however, find two comics on the proper way to wear a N95 or surgical mask...
Instructions for how to wear a surgical mask
Instructions for how to wear an N95 mask
Several interesting bits in these two.

First, you can clearly see they were created by the same person/group. Not only are they in the same basic style, but the illustrations are identical in several places. However, they're both branded differently. My guess is that these were generic graphics sent out to various health and wellness practices, where they were meant to drop their logo in the bottom and share online and on posters around their waiting areas or something. Perhaps they were made by a mask manufacturer?

Second, given that they're obviously both from the same place originally, I find it curious that the first and second steps are so radically different. Both sets of directions make sense, but the focus of each is very different. Why would hand-washing be important in one instance but not the other? Why discuss the general fit of the mask in one case, but the specific orientation in another?

Third -- and this is something you wouldn't necessarily know from just looking at these -- I found both of these in posts made last September in relation to the "ongoing haze situation in some of our South East Asian countries." These were made for a completely different situation than what we're seeing now, and for a decidedly specific geographic group. But they still function very well in today's situation for any English-speaker in any country around the world.

Will Eisner was a big proponent of the instructible type comic. He used them extensively in PS*Magazine during World War II. These types of comics are currently ubiquitous in the airline industry where every airplane has a card of safety instructions they provide every passenger before take-off. And yet, they're often not seen as comics despite serving exactly in the purpose. These types of instructions are not only useful but, as in the two cases I have shared above, can save lives.