Just recently, I received a big box filled with books from one of my favorite publishers, Fantagraphics.
This company, which has been around for years, publishing everything from The Comic Journal and Amazing Heroes (trade journals for comic fans) to Love and Rockets, the award-winning series from Los Brothers Hernandez, to a line of sex comics, under the “Eros” imprint.
Naturally, sales from the Eros titles have long kept the company financially afloat.
But what Fantagraphics does best is to produce lavish, lovingly designed and edited reprint editions of vintage comic strips and comic book stories.
While I was tempted to label them “classic” comics, these aren’t always the most familiar titles and characters, even among seasoned, serious aficionados of the comic medium. Sometimes, they feature obscure forgotten titles, characters and artists, but with one thing in common – quality.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little exposure to make a forgotten work of art from a long-ago time seem like a classic today. Fantagraphics is but one company currently producing these beautiful tomes filled with fun words and pictures taken from original publications produced at the time as disposable, cheap entertainment, like newspaper comic strips to be read on the train into work or on a relaxed Sunday morning, or as ten cent comic pamphlets (they really aren’t books now, are they?) marketed to children and (let’s face it) slow-witted adults.
In many people’s minds, comics are still that most-lowly form of art, meant for children only. Camp out on any metropolitan street corner, stop people as they pass by, and ask, “Do you read comic books?” You’ll probably get a lot of shrugs, nervous chuckles at the thought of such a thing, or downright hostility for implying that they would stoop so low as to admit they were comic fans.
The ones that respond favorably would tend to be seen as “comic nerds,” social outcasts among their peers, or more likely a fan of big-budget blockbuster movies starring big Hollywood Names, based on some comic that they were vaguely familiar with but never a big reader.
So why do companies like Fantagraphics, IDW, Dark Horse, Drawn and Quarterly, and others even bother putting out such books with a limited appeal?
Most of these would never stand a chance at hitting the New York Times best seller list. Yet here they come, one beautiful book after another. In my box was a book of EC war stories written and drawn by Harvey Kurtzman, the genius behind the original Mad Magazine; books reprinting, in full color, no less, extremely obscure comic book stories by artists like Joe Kubert and Alex Toth during the early 1950s, and a nice thick paperback book loaded with all-but-forgotten superheroes that sprang up in the early days of the medium, characters with names like “Yarko,” “Fantomah,” and “Skyman,” characters that were designed to compete with the big sellers like Superman and Captain Marvel, but quickly sank into oblivion. And every book is crammed with scholarly text pieces examining the art & stories as it they were as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
But you know what? They really are that important to me.
In fact, I make my living by being knowledgeable about this kind of thing.
Somebody out there must really care about this stuff, besides me! And there are those who do, all over the world. It’s long been known that Europeans hold comics with much higher respect than your everyday American passing on the street.
How come? Do they see something we jaded Americans refuse to see, except for that small cultish handful of “comic book scholars” that pour over every nuanced detail of the art, the story, the captions, the type of paper comics are printed on? Maybe they do.
Friends, we’re truly living in the Golden Age of comic reprint books. There are lots of them out there, books reprinting long runs of comic strips like Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley, issue-by issue volumes of Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comic stories from the late 1950s and early ‘60s, on and on. Most of them are great fun to read and are a real look through a window onto a long-past era.
Some appeal to the kid in us, like a lavish book of Felix the Cat comic book stories; some to the art-lover, with meticulously researched volumes of Flash Gordon comic strips from the 1930s or Basil Wolverton’s magnificent Spacehawk stories from the World War II era. I myself have recently completed work on a book on one of the most obscure comic book features of all – Henry, the little bald kid in the newspapers who never said a word until he hit the comic book page (and then never shut up).
I scanned a ton of old, yellowing comic book pages and then over every panel of each page in a painstaking manner, cleaning up old printing errors and making the colors bright and lively instead of dull and drab. In fact, that’s how I got that box of books – it was a partial payment for my work preparing the Henry book.
Will it sell when it comes out? I certainly hope so, but who can say? I suppose someone will buy a copy here and there, and maybe the publisher will make enough on it to commission me to prepare a second volume.
In short, there are lots of great, well-produced books reprinting old and obscure comics currently being offered for sale in bookstores and online shopping sites.
By David Tosh