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Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Thoughts from Blastoff
http://ift.tt/2fLDmtU

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: Golden Age of Reprints

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld on Webcomics #34: Rated W for Web https://t.co/geK7cq5sNS

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

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Self Indulgence or PSA?

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: By Any Other Name
http://ift.tt/2wYOjhr

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld on Webcomics #35: Think of the Children https://t.co/geK7cq5sNS

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Puerto Rico
http://ift.tt/2x2kc8O
While there has been some news about Puerto Rico's devastation thanks to Hurricane Maria, the press has generally downplayed coverage relative to what we saw with Hurricane's Jose and Irma. That holds true for most political cartoonists as well, but I've collected here some of the comics that did at least try to address things. (The "take a knee" joke is apparently the most obvious approach to highlighting Trump's inattentiveness. I just read that there were no plans or activity from the White House at all as of Monday, a week after Maria hit.) So I'm presenting some Puerto Rico editorial cartoons from the past week or so to try to highlight their problems a little more...
I grew up in a region that called carbonated sugary soft drinks "pop." Everyone around me called it that, and that was the only word I knew for it so that's what I used as well. When I went off to college, though, I met people from other regions who called the same thing "soda." I thought that was a much better word. "Pop" is really an ugly word with that hard "p" on either end and an almost absent single vowel sound in the middle. It's not so much a word as just a noise, and an irritating one at that. I quickly stopped using "pop" and starting using "soda." I've been a "soda" person since then. I'm in something of a minority as I still live in the Midwest, but people still understand what I mean and I don't have to use an ugly word.

I use that as an example of how we use language that we're taught and often don't give it much thought until an alternative is presented. "That's just what that's called." But if we learn of a better term -- whether that's because of phonetics or some other reason -- there's no good reason not to adopt that newer term.

I also grew up around people who used... unflattering terms for everything from "spiderwort" to "ding-dong-ditch." Again, I didn't hear those things called anything other than what people around me were calling them, so that's what I knew them as. I didn't know anyone who might be offended by the slanderous terms, and I certainly didn't intend to demean anybody when I used them, but when I finally did come to understand that they utilized derogatory language, I opted for other non-offensive wording. Which wasn't difficult since they were terms I used much less frequently than "soda" anyway.

The point I'm trying to make here is that your personal history is not an excuse. "That's just what we called..." is not a valid argument for continuing to use offensive language today. If you grew up with everyone around using undirected slurs in everyday conversation, and you used that wording as well, that's more of an indictment of the people around you. But if/when you got old enough to realize that the words were offensive, then it becomes an indictment on you if you continue to use them. Because now you know better. Now you consciously know that you're saying something offensive and you're making a deliberate choice to be offensive.

And the same can be applied to your work in general. Not just the specific wording but the visuals and the broad characterizations. Maybe you did grow up in a time when any Black people portrayed in comics were drawn as Blackface caricatures, but if you know that's offensive, the only reason to perpetuate that is to be deliberately offensive. Maybe you did grow up where Jewish characters were always money-grubbing misers, but if you know that's offensive, the only reason to perpetuate that is to be deliberately offensive.

We spend our entire lives learning. Maybe it's not always formalized like in a classroom setting, but we're always learning. And if you ignore those learnings in favor of using slanderous language just because you don't feel like changing, then you are part of the problem! You are just as guilty for race riots as the person who threw the first brick. Because you're saying that you knew what you were saying was wrong, offensive, and fostered hatred for another group but you went ahead anyway. You're saying that bigotry is okay. You're saying that hating others is okay. You're saying that you don't care about other people. You're saying, "Fuck everybody else! I'm the only one who matters!"

And you wonder why people don't like you.
It's been called the Golden Age of Reprints in comicdom the last few years. It's a hard point to argue since we're getting all sorts of wonderful collections of old material. Everything from complete hardcover collections of Peanuts and Pogo to obscure Tijuana Bibles and a Wimmen's Comix to superhero books that showcase the original line art at actual size. Hell, we've even got books being reprinted today that were originally cancelled because they were printed illegally!

That said, this apparently newfound wealth of comics reprints has been in the making for at least a quarter century now.

When I first seriously got into comics in the early 1980s, my primary book of choice was Fantastic Four. After I read a few months' worth of current issues, I got hooked and, not long after that, realized that there were around 250 issues featuring these great characters that I hadn't read yet. That's when I began hunting back issue bins, trying to dig up as many old FF comics as I could find.

Somewhere in the back half of my college years, I managed to get the number of FF comics I was missing down to less than a half dozen. They were mostly, if not all, single digit issues. That was when I realized that I didn't really need to get the actual issues any more. I could hunt down these handful of comics and pay a few, if not several, hundred dollars for each one (this was before the speculator market and "slabbing" and all that crap) and what would I get out them? I had some of those single digit issues already, and I'd only flipped through them once because A) they were fragile and I didn't want to over-handle them, and B) I'd already read those stories.

Now, when you're talking about the first dozen or so issues of Marvel's flagship title, it's no surprise they'd been reprinted. I think I had five or six reprints of #1 by then without really even trying. And those issues I was missing were all in the first Marvel Masterworks book I already had.

I got a couple more of those missing issues almost accidentally. (I was at small con and just asked to look at them -- the owner haggled them down to a quarter of his original asking price before I even said anything. It was too good a deal to pass up!) I wound up getting a few more as gifts. (My parents got me a copy of Fantastic Four #1 as a college graduation present!) But I never really hunted for those other issues. To this day, I have still never picked up #2 or #5.

But I realized back then that, for what I was looking for -- the comic stories themselves -- I didn't need the original issues. And I was went forward in my collecting from there, I kept that in mind and made a point of looking for reprints instead of originals. I created a list of where all those Human Torch solo stories from Strange Tales got reprinted, and what stories Marvel Tales contained. And Marvel Triple Action. (Special shout-out to Chris Marshall for compiling a lot of that info! I don't know how long he's been putting posting reprint info online -- I want to say he dates back to USENET -- but I know I was VERY grateful that he shared so much info that helped me read up on the Marvel Universe without spending a truckload of money!)

Not everything was reprinted, of course but even then (this would be the mid-to-late 1990s) you could find LOTS of material that had been reprinted. And that was just expanding and expanding, as publishers started to realize they could collect old stuff in book form to sell it again. DC and Dark Horse began emulating Marvel's Masterworks line. Marvel and DC both came out with cheaper black and white "phone books" lines. There were special collections based on a specific creator and/or character. (Frank Miller's Spider-Man, Neal Adams' Deadman, etc.)

The variety of formats means that, yes, it would be kind of annoying to try to read through Amazing Spider-Man chronologically in my collection since you have to pop around between multiple titles and formats. But since I almost never read more than two or three issues sequentially, it's at least never a problem for me. I'm more prone to look for a specific issue or story as research for something I'm trying to write up. So as long as I have that at hand, I don't much care which long box or bookshelf I pull it from.

All of which is to say that this Golden Age of Reprints didn't exactly come out of nowhere. It's been something that I, for one, have been watching for over two decades now. And even with the advent and preponderance of digital comics, I quite welcome it!
I missed this last year, but A Wise Way interviewed Jud Meyers of Blastoff Comics about running a comic book shop. He has a lot of solid answers and insights that I don't think most comic fans might even consider. Worth sitting through all eight of the videos...
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Monetizing Your Work

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: Where Fan Studies Have Come
http://ift.tt/2xb6H8v

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: The First Spider-Man

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld on Webcomics #32: Just a Stepping Stone? https://t.co/geK7cq5sNS

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/2xi6GQu

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Ad Revenue?

Kleefeld on Comics: On isms: Don't Tolerate Dismissiveness

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld on Webcomics #33: Personal Forum https://t.co/geK7cq5sNS

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Capp in Magazines