Shelf Scan 2024: Can’t-Miss Comic Book Reprints
We go a little off the reservation this time to embrace a few pre-code comic book reprints and underground favorites that have come back into print this year. Classics from Joe Sacco and Richard Corben resurfaced this year to garner new audiences, and Fantagraphics’ ambitious schedule of Atlas Comics reprints took off. And we get to watch the mayor of Duckburg discover his adventurous side.
The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics
Fantagraphics characterizes the pre-Code comics from all the popular genres of the early 1950s as “B-movies studio” output. No truer words have been spoken. Even the best of these horror, sci-fi, adventure tales barely match the worst of EC comics. Sure, there are visual gems to be found from Bill Everett, Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Basil Wolverton, et. al. But man, the weak writing and hackneyed tropes across most of these stories really makes a guy appreciate Al Feldstein’s wordy-smithing at EC. Personally, I find most of the non-EC titles to be too uneven to merit my attention to full issue reprinting. Lovers of anything pre-code should get these. Among the first handful of books in the series Artist Edition of Joe Maneely the most interesting. We see a modestly talented artist develop across a wide range of genres. The Days of Rockets reprint is fascinating both because it captures an era of American sci-fi imagination and has relatively consistent art. Otherwise, anyone looking for the best of non-EC pre-code comics should fall back on Fantagraphics earlier compilation across titles, Four Color Fear.
Vanguard Press really has a jones for Wally Wood. Deservedly so. From his pioneering sci-fi visual tropes in pre-code ECs and pulp magazine covers to the erotic Sally Forth and Marvel’s Daredevil, he is in the pantheon. His Witzend magazine project stretched across occasional issues from 1967 to 1985, offering fellow artists a haven from editorial meddling. In Best of Wally Wood from Witzend (Vanguard, $39.99) we get the Vanguarg gathers only the Wood from these omnibus issues in a large, crisply printed collection. Man those swathes of Woody inking really pop here. In the illustrated prose tale World of the Wizard King, the action send-up Animan, Sally Forth, Lunar Tunes, among others, we get the real hard Wood.
I do want to go a bit outside the usual coverage area at Panels and Prose to call out reprints this year of two indispensable American cartoonists, Richard Corben and Joe Sacco. Corben’s uncanny use of color printing in the original Den cycle of the 70s and 80s has been restored superbly by former collaborator José Villarrubia. This is the spirit of Heavy Metal magazine in all of its weirdness, political incorrectness and beauty. Corben’s combination of otherworldly textures and colors transport you in ways one doesn’t expect.
Speaking of greats, the massive Fantagraphics reprint of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck stories is comng to a close soon by circling back to his earliest work. Barks already came to the job of putting Disney’s star to comic books with serious storyboarding chops from his days at the studio. But in these earliest volumes you really get to see how he starts to recast Donald and his nephews as suburbanites with post-WWII sensibilities. While disgruntled and always on the social margins, the Duck clan is animated by adventurism and an entrepreneurial hunt for the big chance. Barks was the quintessential American armchair adventurer. His fertile fantasy life was fed by National Geographic’s plastic and technicolor vision of exotic realms. It fit right into a post-war culture that on one hand enshrined corporate bureaucratic structures and suburban blandness while fantasizing about Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, the lost masculinity Western lawmen, and interstellar exploration.
Joe Sacco is a criminally underappreciated cultural treasure. As he says in the new forward to this reissued compilation of the 9-issue 1993-95 comic book series, “Putting out a new edition of Palestine at this moment is hardly a cause for celebration.” It is instead a recognition that the underlying problem Sacco chronicled in his two month visit to Occupied Territories in 1991-92 remain unresolved. On so many levels this is a landmark of comics journalism. Sacco shows how this medium can be used to surface nuance, empathy, ambiguity, rage, historical context in ways unavailable to journalism, scholarship or even video and photography. It is in the overlay of text and drawing, unreal juxtapositions of people, voices, backgrounds, that the aching complexity of this situation comes through. I recommend this book to anyone interested in this medium, if ont in the politics involved, because it will make you think about the uniqueness of the cartoon arts. Run, don’t’ walk. Sacco has been an outspoken critic of the current war in Gaza and his compilation of cartoon columns at Comics Journal, War on Gaza, just released at year’s end.
In our next round-up round, we look at books about comics and their creators, including what formal scholarship has been up to this year.