Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Random research project tonight: What was the first novel featuring Batman? George Lowther's The Adventures of Superman from 1942 is reasonably well-known as the first novel featuring the man of steel, but it occurred to me that I don't know when Batman first appeared in prose. From what I can tell, the first Batman novel was actually a novelization of the 1966 movie by Winston Lyon: Batman vs. The Fearsome Foursome. That can't be right, can it? The first novel featuring Batman didn't appear until almost three decades after the character debuted in comics? He spawned two serials, made appearances on the radio, and THEN went on to a TV show and movie before anyone thought to put him in a paperback novel?
Somebody please correct me here!
I picked up a book several years ago called Visual Literacy by Judith and Richard Wilde. It's basically a book presenting a series of increasingly complex graphic design problems as they'd been posed to students. Actual college students learning graphic design. What these professors had done, essentially, was compile their assignments into book form and present some of the students' results to show how the process worked.
Of particular interest to comics scholars might be "The Jack and Jill Problem." The assignment is basically to illustrate the nursery rhyme in six panels using only a decidedly finite set of dingbats. Here's how it's presented in the book...
I was quite impressed with the assignment -- one unlike any I had undertaken during my undergrad days -- and used a variation of it while I was teaching. (Different set of dingbats to illustrate "Old King Cole".) There are several things going on at work in this assignment. First, is to force people to re-define preconceived notions of representation; for example, "Jack" and "Jill" can't be represented as people because there are no people graphics to work with. Next it breaks the rhyme down into discrete chunks and designates a long sequence into fixed moments -- in essence, taking a story and breaking it down into the most relevant portions. Between thinking in those discrete chunks and putting a set of visuals to them, you have to (by the guidelines inherent in the assignment) make a comic. Perhaps one that's more abstract than, say, the latest issue of Action Comics, but a comic nonetheless. It's a fun challenge and is an excellent way to bring comics into the design classroom.
Here's some of the student solutions presented in the book...
Of particular interest to comics scholars might be "The Jack and Jill Problem." The assignment is basically to illustrate the nursery rhyme in six panels using only a decidedly finite set of dingbats. Here's how it's presented in the book...
Here's some of the student solutions presented in the book...
Some years ago, I moderated a Fantastic Four message board. We would chat about various aspects of the characters, and favorite issues, and what we thought of the current storyline, and all the normal stuff you would discuss on a comic book message board. Periodically, often shortly after a new creative team started work on the book, new folks would join in the discussion. Inevitably, they'd have questions that delved into the annals of history.
"What did Reed mean when he said...?"
"Who was that guy in the background with...?"
"When did they did they first fight against...?"
All of which was cool because A) they were new to the characters and were trying to learn more and B) I regularly got to show off my knowledge of FF trivia. It also not infrequently gave me ideas for content to post on the FF website I was also running at the time, as I figured those questions meant that further/extended explanations were not readily available online.
But, after a few years, some of the questions started to get old. Not because of anything different on the questioners' ends, but because I had already answered the exact same questions a half-dozen times already. (Or, just as likely, pointed people to the answer on my website.) It was totally self-centered, but these were questions that I knew the answers to because I had spent the time to look them up. I had already done my research on the subject and relayed those learnings on to others. I don't want to do that again.
(Despite having a number of teachers in my family, I absolutely could not do it myself. As should be fairly self-evident in the preceding paragraph.)
I eventually gave up moderating those boards, in part, because I didn't want to feel obligated to have those same conversations any more. Nothing against those who were participating in them for the first time, obviously, but I'd been there and done that far too often already.
While I don't have the same discussions any more, I am surprised that I see some of the same items come up on the comic "news" circuit every few years. Someone who hadn't seen it before re-discovers Jack Kirby's original design sketches for Herbie the Robot. Or the pre-Fantastic Four 1960 Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo comic strip featuring Willie Lumpkin. Or the original Fantastic Four logo designs.
I don't know how to respond to this type of thing any more. It's presented as a new find and, for a lot of people, I don't doubt that it is. And I don't want to discourage anyone from discovering that type of thing for themselves. But at the same time, it's decidedly old news for me. But on the other hand I'm also the type of person who really studies this type of thing, so I'm at a complete loss for how widespread some of this knowledge/trivia is. Is it something that I'm only one of a handful of people who actually know? Or is it something that everyone except the most recent comic converts has known for years?
It's one of those times that I wish I did have a better understanding of the mass of fandom, and had a more acute sense of what's popular within comics. I suppose I'll just have to crawl back into my cave and continue grumbling about "these kids today!"
"What did Reed mean when he said...?"
"Who was that guy in the background with...?"
"When did they did they first fight against...?"
All of which was cool because A) they were new to the characters and were trying to learn more and B) I regularly got to show off my knowledge of FF trivia. It also not infrequently gave me ideas for content to post on the FF website I was also running at the time, as I figured those questions meant that further/extended explanations were not readily available online.
But, after a few years, some of the questions started to get old. Not because of anything different on the questioners' ends, but because I had already answered the exact same questions a half-dozen times already. (Or, just as likely, pointed people to the answer on my website.) It was totally self-centered, but these were questions that I knew the answers to because I had spent the time to look them up. I had already done my research on the subject and relayed those learnings on to others. I don't want to do that again.
(Despite having a number of teachers in my family, I absolutely could not do it myself. As should be fairly self-evident in the preceding paragraph.)
I eventually gave up moderating those boards, in part, because I didn't want to feel obligated to have those same conversations any more. Nothing against those who were participating in them for the first time, obviously, but I'd been there and done that far too often already.
I don't know how to respond to this type of thing any more. It's presented as a new find and, for a lot of people, I don't doubt that it is. And I don't want to discourage anyone from discovering that type of thing for themselves. But at the same time, it's decidedly old news for me. But on the other hand I'm also the type of person who really studies this type of thing, so I'm at a complete loss for how widespread some of this knowledge/trivia is. Is it something that I'm only one of a handful of people who actually know? Or is it something that everyone except the most recent comic converts has known for years?
It's one of those times that I wish I did have a better understanding of the mass of fandom, and had a more acute sense of what's popular within comics. I suppose I'll just have to crawl back into my cave and continue grumbling about "these kids today!"
Here's yesterday'sHeatchliff comic...
Setting aside how funny you think it is/isn't, something I find interesting is that because of the way the narrative is constructed, you can place these panels in almost any order and still maintain the gist of the narrative. Here's a quick example where I've basically just swapped several adjacent panels...
No surprise that one works pretty well. The first two panels introduce the characters separtely, the two panels showing (presumably) the book's contents obviously don't need to be in a specific order, whether the birds look at the book first or say "check it out" first is irrelevant. Because each panel alternates viewpoints and there's effectively no dialogue (the birds' comments are simply statements which don't require any sort of response; hence it's not really a dialogue), switching the order around doesn't have any appreciable impact.
But what if you switched things up more?
Of course, one thing I've done with all these so far is to leave the punchline panel in place. Is it possible to move that around too?
Here again, the panels still work despit echanging the specifics of the narrative. The birds' flight now seems to be escaping from Heathcliff, as they discover what the book is about. And given that all the panels that don't feature the book and the birds both have no enivronmental context whatsoever, they could remain airborn for the remainder or the strip or sitting on a far away branch or dropped right back on the ground after Heathcliff left. The specifics change but we still have the basic narrative: Heathcliff drops a book while carrying out the trash, and two birds discover it to be a cookbook.
What about starting with the punchline?
Obviously, this sequence makes the least sense of any of the ones I'm presenting here, but does the narrative still work? Well, the birds now discover that it's a cookbook before Heathcliff drops it, but in this framing, we don't actually know the book that Heathcliff drops to be the cookbook. It could be seen as the birds discovering the cookbook first, and Heathcliff drops a different book as he carries off the garbage, which then attracts the birds' attention. It's not a great narrative, certainly, but it still kind of works.
I'm sure that a talented cartoonist could come up with a series of panels that do work well to tell a story regardless of what order the panels are placed, but I find it interesting how close Peter Gallagher seemed to have come (presumably) without any intention of doing so.
But what if you switched things up more?
Of course, one thing I've done with all these so far is to leave the punchline panel in place. Is it possible to move that around too?
What about starting with the punchline?
I'm sure that a talented cartoonist could come up with a series of panels that do work well to tell a story regardless of what order the panels are placed, but I find it interesting how close Peter Gallagher seemed to have come (presumably) without any intention of doing so.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
I've been trying some information on these comics for years, but have continually come up blank. I have three comics from King Features, I believe from 1974. They feature Beto el Recluta (Beetle Baily), Lalo y Lola (Hi & Lois) and Lorenzo y Pepita (Dagwood & Blondie). They all feature pretty standard comics about the characters, but the first half of each book is entirely in Spanish. The second half reprints the same artwork, but this time with English dialogue. There's some intro text about helping people to learn either language, and some word-match type puzzles as well. The comics have no real indicia to note any details about publication data or what other comics may have been in the series. There's no price listed either, suggesting they might have been purchased in larger quantities exclusively by schools.
I've seen them sometimes listed for sale but never with any substantive info about their origins, and the Grand Comics Database doesn't seem to list them at all.
