I love Lucey (with apologies to Desilu)

Harry Lucey is my favourite of the Archie artists from pretty much any era - he isn't as widely known as some of the others, Dan DeCarlo for instance, but I've always appreciated the sense of design and economy that Lucey brought to his work. It's unfortunate that he isn't more widely known; the practise of giving specific writers and artists credit for their work came about largely after Lucey's tenure in comics. It doesn't help that the bulk of the work published by Archie Comics has never been fully catalogued outside of the company (and possibly inside the company as well), making it difficult to pull together a decent list of his work.

This is an appropriately seasonal story by Lucey from Archie Comics #97 (from 1958), a little late for Christmas, but just in time for New Year's.

Happy holidays!

Eisner's Hawks of the Seas

The new film version of Will Eisner's The Spirit opened wide on Christmas Day this week, and the reviews have not been kind. Two days later, the Rotten Tomatoes review-aggregation site pegs the film as only 16% fresh. While it's too soon to gauge the film's relative box office success, the grade breakdown at BoxOfficeMojo shows an interesting phenomenon: the distribution is an inverse bell curve. Admittedly based on the site's users' self-reporting, there's a love-it-or-hate-it reaction to the film, which I would think (not that I know much about these things) isn't a good omen. I think Neil Gaiman might be right about this - Frank Miller's film version of The Spirit seems closer in tone and presentation to Miller's own Sin City than to Eisner's vision and classic Spirit stories.

Since we're talking about Eisner, here's a sample of his pre-Spirit work. In 1937, Eisner, using the pseudonym Willis B. Rensie, created a weekly newspaper strip called Hawks of the Seas, a pirate adventure set in Caribbean during the 18th century. Years later, the publishers of Jumbo Comics would re-purpose those strips to fit the standard comic book format - this is one of those re-purposed stories, from Jumbo Comics #36, published in 1942.

Remembering Alex Toth

The mid-1950s was a fascinating period in the development of animation and comics. In the animation field, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery were producing some of their best work, and the UPA studios were in top form, expanding the range of tools and pushing boundaries to tell stories more effectively. The same was happening in the comics field. While critical studies of the medium by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud would be decades in the future, artists like Bernie Krigstein and Alex Toth were struggling with the conventions of the day, and pushing themselves to develop their craft so that they could take full advantage of the specific strengths that a comic page can offer.

Toth in particular gained attention for both his skill and his devotion to improving himself. He studied endlessly - other artistic fields, movies, etc. - for ideas and inspiration. Staging, pacing, the use of silhouettes, lighting, - Toth recognized that each could contribute effectively to how a story is presented, not just in celluloid, but in printed form too.

This is one of Toth's western stories, from Western Gunfighters #24 (Atlas Comics, 1957). To my knowledge, like much of his work, it hasn't been reprinted anywhere.

Raison d'être

There's always been a strange disconnect between people flocking to see movies based on characters and stories that originated in comics, and their disregard for the comics medium itself. It's sad, because many very talented men and women have worked in the comics field during the last several decades, often with little recognition for their effort and the trails they blazed for people working in their footsteps today.

The landscape is changing gradually in terms bringing great material back into print. Classic newspaper strips are seeing a remarkable comeback, with the current Terry & The Pirates and Scorchy Smith collections being prime examples. Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum is due to make a reappearance (hopefully) soon, although given Pogo's past presidential aspirations, it would have been nice had Fantagraphics' original publication plans held together so that we would have had Pogo hitting the stump alongside Obama and McCain.

What I'm going to try to do here is present some classic material and point you in the direction of finding more. It will be subjective - art always is - but I hope you see something you like.

To start, here's a quick police procedural from Jack Kirby & Joe Simon, published in Police Trap #5 (Charlton, 1955).











btw, Abrams published a terrific biography/retropective of Kirby's work earlier this year, written by Mark Evanier, called 'Kirby: King of Comics' (Amazon U.S./Canada/U.K.)