Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price
Something of a preamble, here, so sit tight and now dig this: The comics-censorship ruckus of the post-WWII years had begun to peter out, if only just, as the phobic 1950s gave way to the larger struggles – expression vs. repression, in the long wake of the Depression – of the presumably more free-wheeling 1960s. All were rooted in a popular urge to embrace the freedoms that the close of World War II was supposed to have heralded; a contrary urge to confine such freedoms to a privileged few was as intense, if not necessarily as popularly widespread.
Everybody wants freedom, but not everybody wants freedom for everybody: Hence the entrenchment of Oligarchy within Democracy, like that essential flaw in Green Lantern’s otherwise limitless Power Ring.
(Some handy background: Van Jensen’s ComicMix commentary, “Was Frederic Wertham a Villain?”)
The comic-book flap was an element of a larger insurgency-and-putdown cycle that pitted, for example, Cavalier Hollywood against a Roundhead Congress in the purges of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Within the microcosm of Hollywood itself, struggles erupted over whether individual films – such as Dore Schary’s production of a pacifist fable called The Boy with Green Hair (1948) at hawkish Howard Hughes’ RKO-Radio Pictures – should convey instead a war-preparedness message in those days when much of America was still looking for another Axis to whip. (more…)
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955, Paul Kupperberg got his start in comic fandom. He and Paul Levitz produced the comics fanzine The Comic Reader from 1971 to 1973, and Etcetera from 1972 to 1973. In 1975 Kupperberg sold several short horror stories to Charlton Comics, and then a few months later sold a World of Krypton story to DC for their Superman Family comic. He has written for many other DC comics since then, including Superman, Doom Patrol, Green Lantern, Justice League of America. He created the series Arion: Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion.
, went under the gun on The Colbert Report on Wednesday to talk about the book. The full segment, which is just as inane as expected, can be seen below.
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Over at Journalista, Dirk Deppey flexed his scanning muscles yesterday and posted a nice set of images from one of the illustrated books on his shelf. The book is Frank Wing’s Fotygraft Album, published in 1915, and features the following:
It’s one of those weeks. It’s hot, and the elections and other summer cross-over events are not even in second gear yet. Nothing grabs me for an entire column of deep thoughts. So lets skip some stones across the idea pond.
Born in 1929, Jon D’Agostino got his comic book start in the 1940s at Timely Comics. In the early 1950s he did work for several different publishers, including Story Comics, Master Publications, and Charlton Comics. D’Agostino continued to work for Charlton on a variety of titles throughout the ’50s and ’60s, though in 1963 he also did the lettering for the first three issues of Marvel Comics’ new title The Amazing Spider-Man.
With Incredible Hulk hitting theaters this weekend, the crazy cats over at io9 recently posted a list of popular comic book characters whose talents might allow them to save the universe — but cause problems when they start to feel a little frisky.
