[[[The Comics: The Complete Collection]]]By Brian Walker Abrams ComicsArts, 672 pages, $40 Growing up the son of cartoonist Mort Walker, Brian Walker clearly had four-color ink flowing through his veins. Learning at his father’s side, the boy absorbed folklore, myth, and legend; not just about the characters Mort wrote and drew in Hi & Lois…
Sixty years ago next year, the remnants of the Fleischer Studio teamed up with the folks at St. John Comics (Tor, Three Stooges, and the original 3-D comics) to create Casper The Friendly Ghost #1. It lasted five issues. Paramount, owners of the Fleischer operation, took the license over to Harvey Comics and a legend…
The notion of retelling history with a twist has become a very popular sub-section of fiction, heavily mined by Harry Harrison and by Philip Roth. In comic books, Marvel’s What If? title and DC’s Elseworlds imprint also explored possible scenarios. But no one has ever looked at how a single element could propel comic book…
It’s no small feet for a comic book character to last over 60 years — but that’s exactly what the Huntress has done. Debuting in the ‘40s as a villain for Wildcat, she was recreated for the Silver Age as Helena Wayne, the daughter of the Batman and Catwoman of Earth-2, which was an alternate…
In David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, as well as in most other books about the golden age of comics, Fredric Wertham is used as an antagonist, that stuffy pseudo-psychologist who decided comic books made kids do evil things and helped topple the industry. Wetham wrote the best-selling Seduction of the Innocent, which purportedly proved that…
Over at Newsarama, frequent ComicMix comment-thread presence Vinnie Bartilucci interviews David Hajdu, author of The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America. Previously known for his books on various musical subject matter, Hajdu’s Ten-Cent Plague examines the anti-comics movement in the ’50s that threatened to destroy the industry. In…
In days of yore – my yore anyway – I briefly wondered if my particular literary backwater, the writing of comic books, would be properly remembered. It seemed to me that young snots such as myself were getting attention – interviews and the like – and the guys who were around at the beginning, the…
