When I first started doing comic book research many years ago, I focused primarily on the Fantastic Four. It was my favorite comic by far, and I found the more I knew about its creation, the more I appreciated the book itself.

One of the theories I had was that creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were influenced in creating the FF by movies of the time, and I went through watching a number of movies that were made from 1959 through early 1961. I even tracked down actual release dates to see which movies would have been in the theater around the time the FF was being created -- probably around April or May 1961!

I pretty well kicked my theory out the window, as I wasn't finding much in the way of direct inspiration. The closest movies I could really get were The Lost World featuring Michael Rennie and Claude Rains, and The Angry Red Planet starring Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne.

The Lost World is (very) loosely based on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel of the same name. Professor Challenger claims he discovered a remote land where dinosaurs still exist, and he takes an expedition down to prove it. Though the group in the movie consists of eight members -- obviously more than either the original novel or the FF that I thought might take cues from -- there are too many characters for the writers here to adequately handle. Professor Summerlee and Costa are entirely superfluous to the journey, and the Holmes siblings do very little to advance the story either. Perhaps most striking about the movie -- as it pertains to a possible influence on Lee and Kirby -- is that love interest Jennifer Holmes follows along mostly to be with John Roxton, and David Holmes comes along because... well, he's Jennifer's kid brother. David is also the smooth-talker of the group, managing to successfully woo a native girl despite a language barrier.

The Angry Red Planet is about a group of four "scientists" that are the first humans to visit Mars, and run into a few scrapes before returning to Earth. They're called "scientists" in the movie, but they're more 1950s-style adventurers; their casual disregard for scientific examination or analysis of anything throughout the whole movie is almost hilarious. They do have more of a physical template for the FF, though: three men, one woman. One of the guys is bruiser type from Brooklyn, another is grey-templed hero. There's not a direct parallel, by any means, but some of the same general themes are prevalent in the early issues of Fantastic Four.

As I said, I dropped my theory as these types of connections are, at best, tenuous. But it is interesting, I think, to help get a feel for where the U.S. was as a society at large. There were all these discoveries and advancements going on, which most people didn't really understand. Science was, for the average Joe, just another big adventure that could wrestled and hog-tied like the Old West. Just charge on in, and you could just figure it out as you went along. Actually, a lot of America's psyche flows from that mindset to this day. We remain a nation playing at "cowboys and injuns". But it's interesting to see that application of science hold true in our fictions, regardless of whether we're sending someone to Mars or tracking through the jungles of the Amazon looking for dinosaurs. I think that was really the big take-away for me.

On a curious side-note, three of the main actors from ARP later went on to take roles in comic-related properties. Gerald Mohr became the voice of Mr. Fantastic (1967 Fantastic Four cartoon) and Green Lantern (1968 Aquaman cartoon). Jack Kruschen played Eivol Ekdol (1966 Batman) and Captain Keene (1994 Lois & Clark). Les Tremayne played Mentor in the 1970's Shazam! show, as well as lending his voice to Ultraman: The Adventure Begins, Challenge of the GoBots and The Pirates of Dark Water among a host of other Saturday morning favorites. Jill St. John, from Lost World, also appeared in Batman and later took the title role in the 1976 Brenda Starr movie. For completeness' sake, I have to point out that Reinne, too, appeared in Batman.

Like, I expect, many of you, I don't recall the first time I heard many fairy tales. I would guess I saw Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty when they were re-released in the theaters in 1975 and 1979 respectively. I'm pretty sure I knew how "Little Red Riding Rabbit" and "Three Little Bops" were parodying the original stories when they cycled through on Saturday mornings. The stories were certainly all old hat by the time I got the "Big Bad Wolf" text adventure game for our Vic-20 in 1983. The most well-known fairy tales were just kind of a part of the cultural mileu, and I'm sure I heard a dozen variations on each of those stories before I was ten.

I think by the time I got to college, I'd become nominally aware that every version I'd ever seen/heard/read -- not just the Disney ones -- had been watered down/sanitized from the Brothers Grimm versions; although I'd never actually read theirs. (Although I do distinctly recall having a book with the story of "Snow-White and Rose-Red" which was probably closer to the Grimm version than most other fairy tales I'd come across. I don't recall the name of book that was in and I haven't seen it in decades, but I'm basing that guess mostly on the fact that it's a comparatively lesser-told story and there were/are fewer distortions that might've happened from fewer variations.) And as I got older, I would come across other versions and twists on the stories. I recall The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! being something of a hit when it came out in 1989 and Bill Willingham's Fables series gained a fair amount of popularity when it began in 2002. All of which is to say that today, in 2026, I've seen/heard/read all sorts of versions of all sorts of fairy tales and, while I'm certainly no expert on them, know something of the journeys the stories themselves took before and after Disney got his hands on them.

Which brings me to Happily Never After by Lou Lubie. Based on the sales copy, I expected the book to basically just be a re-telling of various fairy tales, but hewing closer to how they were originally told. It does have that, but Lubie goes deep into the where/why/how of all of not only the specific fairy tales she re-tells but just fairy tales in general. She discusses the long oral traditions before various authors (of which the Brothers Grimm were just another in already existing line of) and how the various authors' own preferences and the social norms of the times caused changes in the stories. She explores the thematic commonalities across all fairy tales, and how they differ from folk tales and legends. The whole thing is expertly researched and Lubie provides a slew of end notes to her sources.

The book is relatively dense. Not difficult or anything; the language is quite accessible in fact. But Lubie packs a lot into it. In places, it feels closer to illustrated prose than comics. But Lubie manages to weave back and forth between relaying facts, offering analysis, and providing light entertainment. Tonally, I was reminded of Larry Gonick's various Cartoon History and Cartoon Guide books. Like with Gonick's work, I would find myself in the middle of Happily Never After fascinated by some new-to-me insights about the topi, only to get blind-sided by an unexpected joke or gag that made me laugh out loud. Although light in tone, she still treats the works themselves seriously and never writes them off dismissively.

The book's physical presentation is pitch-perfect. It is (as of this writing) only available in hardcover, which includes some gold foil on the exterior, gilded page edges, and an attached ribbon bookmark. While this probably added something to the cost, it also means the book feels VERY much like a storybook collection you might've had as a child. (Did I actually have any like that? Honestly, I don't remember. I know we had a few books with gilded page edges and ribbon bookmarks when I was a kid, but I don't recall if any of them were actual storybooks. At least a couple of them must've been, right?) I don't usually comment much on a book's presentation, but it works to excellent effect here.

Honestly, I can't really find anything here to be critical of. It's an excellent work all around, and if you have any interest in fairy tales or the history of oral storytelling or anything along those lines, I think you'd find this quite a nice addition to your collection.

Happily Never After was originally published in France in 2021, and an English translation will be available from Helvetiq in the US in March. You should be able to pre-order it now through your favorite bookseller with a retail price of $28.95 US. The publisher did provide me with an advance review copy.

It is Veterans Day in the US and Rememberance Day in Canada, so I've collected today's comic strips that I could find marking the day...

Joe Maneely is one of those comic book creators that I think a lot of people don't know, but still has an incredible reputation among pretty much everyone that does know him. That's undoubtedly at least partially because of his incredibly short career (he died when was only 32) but I think also partially because he died in 1958, just before comics started to take off again. In fact, nearly his entire comic career -- between 1948 and 1958 -- occurred during one of the most depressed points in the industry.

He started in comics working for Street & Smith, initially working on largely forgettable characters like Mario Nette, Roger Kilgore, and Ulysses Q. Wacky. He also did work for Hillman Periodicals and George A. Pflaum's Treasure Chest. He then started doing work for Timely/Atlas, beginning in late 1949 with a story for Black Rider that didn't see print until 1950. He quickly became friends with editor-in-chief Stan Lee, and was brought in on a staff position around 1955 where he co-created the Black Knight, the Ringo Kid, the Yellow Claw, and Jimmy Woo.

Maneely was pretty universally considered exceptionally talented. Herb Trimpe once said, "his pencils [were] almost nonexistent; they were like rough, lightly done layouts with no features on the faces ... It was just like ovals and sticks and stuff, and he inked from that. He drew when he inked. That's when he did the work, in the inking!" (You can see some of that in the photo I've included with this post.) Stan Goldberg noted, "Joe wasn't just a great craftsman; he worked so fast and he was one of the few artists who could go from drawing the Black Knight to drawing Petey the Pest, or a war story. He had an unbelievable knack..." And while admittedly known to hyperbolize, Stan Lee went so far as to say, "Joe Maneely to me would have been the next Jack Kirby. He also could draw anything, make anything look exciting, and I actually think he was even faster than Jack."

Due in part to his friendship with Lee, Maneely would almost assuredly have had a hand in crafting the Marvel Universe had he lived even just a few more years. I've seen several people suggest that he would likely have been more instrumental than Jack Kirby, as Lee would likely have given him projects like the Fantastic Four, Thor, and Hulk at the outset. They've suggested that Kirby got those gigs in large part because Maneely was no longer around.

That, of course, is speculation since Maneely died tragically in 1958. He had spent an evening dining with artists George Ward and John Severin, and got on the train from Manhattan to New Jersey to head home well after midnight. Having lost his glasses the week before, he evidentally had difficulty seeing clearly as he walked between two of the commuter cars and fell onto the tracks. He was later found still holding onto his portfolio.

It was, by all accounts, a very tragic end to a very talented, if short, career. But his talent is worth remembering, even if the characters and stories he created haven't been made into blockbuster movies.

I don't think Bernie Krigstein gets enough accolades in the comics industry. Yes, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame back in 2003 and his "Master Race" story for EC is well-known, but I don't think many comics fans would be able to cite any of his work beyond that one piece. (It's mentioned six times on his Wikipedia page!) So it's in that context we come to The Outsider by Joe D'Esposito, which is a graphic novel biography of Krigstein.

The book starts with a short introduction to Krigstein as a boy, working for his father and getting hassled on the street for being Jewish. It then jumps to 1950(-ish) after Krigstein's gotten married and has been working for Hillman Comics. There's a fair amount of frustration shown as he wants to do more with his comics but isn't allowed, and his more "serious" painting is largely ignored because it's not trendy enough. He continues working as his wife has a baby, but finds things get very stressful as his wife get post-partem depression and the baby winds up being fairly unhealthy, eventually dying not long after his first birthday. Krigstein loses himself in his work and begins trying to form a union for comics creators, much to the chagrin of all the publishers. Although his wife is able to continue working as a writer, Krigstein himself is largely blackballed by everyone exept Bill Gaines. He was soon caught up in the witch hunt that was spearheaded by Frederick Wetham and eventually dejectedly left the comics industry altogether to teach. The book ends with his getting a bit of closure when he's invited as a guest to a 1976 comic convention.

D'Esposito does a good job capturing Krigstein's seeming love/hate relationship with comics. Loving the medium itself, but hating the industry. He's even given the "comics will break your heart, kid" line of dialogue that's been attributed to everyone from Charles Schulz to Jack Kirby. Speaking of Kirby, he makes a brief appearance... as do many other comics professionals that Krigstein would've interacted with. I'm not familiar enough with Krigstein's personal relationships to know if they're portrayed accurately or not, but I did like that we see not only his connections to the industry but how those relations were different depending on who they were. Particularly when it came to Krigstein's attempt to form a comics union.

I also quite liked the D'Esposito made several visual references to Krigstein's work, picking up page and panel structures. Particularly since they don't feel forced or out of place. They really only stand out at all if you're familiar with Krigstein's work already. (I don't claim to be a Krigstein expert, by the way. I recognized some references, but I'm certain I missed more than not.)

My biggest criticism of the book, somewhat unusually, is the lettering. There are several instances where word balloons are placed in a way that's counter to how they should be read. In a couple cases, they're placed backwards with the left-most balloon needing to be read after the one on the right. There's also a few shifts in how captions are written -- switching from an internal monologue to an omniscent narrator to the internal monologue of another character -- but with no visible distinction between them. It's not that hard to figure things out, but it does interrupt the flow of the story briefly each time it happens.

But overall, it's a very welcome addition to my collection. As I said earlier, I don't think Krigstein isn't celebrated enough to begin with and telling his story as a graphic novel is the ideal way (IMHO) to do that. The Outsider came out from Fantagraphics in September and should be available through your favorite bookseller. It retails for $25 US.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Well, I *Was* Going to Highlight Pre-Election Concerns
https://ift.tt/9XdT6W4

Kleefeld on Comics: The Day the Klan Came to Town Review
https://ift.tt/vCH6GS1

Kleefeld on Comics: Framing Emmett Till Review
https://ift.tt/tQ2Mizb

Kleefeld on Comics: My First Graphic Novel
https://ift.tt/bdPnkWt

Kleefeld on Comics: The Great Comic Book Artists
https://ift.tt/hFIOMTx

Ron Goulart's The Great Comic Book Artists from 1986 is probably the first book of straight-up comic book history that I ever got. Sort of. As you might surmise from the title, it's actually a series of profiles of comic book artists. Each of the 60 artists has a one-page write-up opposite a sample page of their art.

I was probably initially attracted to it by the John Byrne cover. He was working Fantastic Four at the time, and I had been loving it since I discovered the book a couple years earlier. But what I recall striking me after I started reading it was the number of creators I hadn't heard of. There were a lot of guys I recognized: Jack Kirby, Joe Shuster, John Buscema, Neal Adams... basically a lot of big names in the superhero genre. (I was barely a teenager at the time; that was all I knew.) There were some other names that I was kind of passingly familiar with: Harvey Kurtzman, C.C. Beck, Alex Toth, Jack Davis... but these were guys whose style was so distinctive that it was easy to spot.

But then there were a bunch of guys I'd never heard of. Matt Baker, Reed Crandall, Lou Fine, Fred Guardineer, Mac Raboy... Mostly guys from the '30s and '40s. (And I should probably point out that, sadly, it is pretty much ALL guys that Goulart wrote about here. The only woman mentioned is Wendy Pini.) As I had no real concept of comics' history at that point -- the entirety of my knowledge of comics history was basically: 1938, Superman; 1939, Batman; 1941, Captain America; 1961, Fantastic Four -- the book proved very insightful. Even though each artist got only a single page, that was far more than I was aware of at the time. I daresay that, for some of those creators, it was the most that had ever been published about them up until that point.

I was, however, sadly disappointed with the art. The selections were interesting and not always what you might think would be obvious choices. The Shuster sample was a Mr. Mystic page, for example, not Superman. But the reproduction quality left a lot to be desired. The pages were all printed in black and white, but a good number of them were just taken directly from published comics. The colors all became grey tones, and the bad color registration got reprinted. Several pages wound up looking so muddied as to be almost unreadable. The Neal Adams, Alex Schomburg, and Berni Wrightson samples look especially terrible. I could understand in the cases of some of the older art not being available, but even the then-recent images from Walt Simonson and Bill Sienkiewicz from only a year or two earlier were taken from the published books.

Goulart was probably the first comics historian of any sort that I read, and from that perspective, I appreciate that he helped usher me into thinking about comics as more than the end product. But I've found that much of what he has written (at least with regards to comics) to be pretty superficial, and rarely gets to any real depth. But, as I said, he was the first historian that I really read and his overviews still came as welcome beacons for the mostly empty comics knowledge-base I had at the time. So while it's been decades since I really checked out any of his books, they are worth a look if you can't tell a Charles Biro page from a Jack Cole one.