Joe Sinnott Inking Mutts!

"This Man... This Muenster" indeed!

Last Sunday's installment of Patrick McDonnell's Mutts was guest-inked by the great Joe Sinnott and you can see the result for yourself above.

Of course that drawing is a lampoon of the below-shown 1966 classic cover drawn by Jack Kirby and the self-same Mr. Sinnott.

Hooray for all parties involved in executing this exercise in fannish fun!

My Vinegary Letter to The Comics Journal in 1981

The Comics Journal began humbly as an adzine with little-if-any editorial content but it rose to be a major source of comics-related information from the late 1970s through the 1990s and maybe slightly beyond.

TCJ 63 dated May of 1981, for example, included long-form interviews with Steve Englehart and Wendy Pini and it also featured fiction by Harlan Ellison with illustrations by Gil Kane! Not bad! Most issues of TCJ were standard magazine thickness but the above squarebound issue reported in with 336 pages, slightly akin to a phone book.

Every issue of TCJ had a lively and long letters column titled Blood & Thunder. I have chosen issue 63 in particular to show you because that issue features a letter to the editor written by me. I was particularly proud that they ran mine in the pole position of very-first-letter that issue. The editor gave my missive the heading "NOT LETTERS TO THE EDITOR" and here's what I wrote:

For over 20 issues I've been reading and disliking the letters to the editor that you print, but only yesterday did I consciously realize the reason for this disliking.

The whole problem stems fro the fact that they are not "letters to the editor." What are they then, you ask.

Well, half of them speak directly to the reader, which makes them letters to the reader, not the editor. The writers of these letters have taken it upon themselves to presume that their letter will be printed, and so take the liberty of making the letter sound like an article.

The other half of them are written by your staff writers, and so cannot properly be considered letters to the editor. Seeing Martin Pasko's tirade appear as a letter to the editorand then seeing the very Pasko himself answering other people's letters made my eyes feel tremendously silly(the tirade in question might have more reasonably be billed as an introduction to those subsequent letters).

The other half are not so much letters as theses, whose authors are bent on convincing the editor/the reader/themselves that they know a whole lot about comics and that they drink vinegar for breakfast.

I could tell you about the other half of the letters, but I'll restrain myself. I will blurt out, though, that some other fraction of them are written by pros just for the sake of being written by pros. Again, an integral part of  a letter to the editor is the chance that it will not be printed, but from the look of things, any old pro who writes a letter to you (no matter how many times, I might add) is guaranteed publication.

I cannot bring myself to be as negative as most of your letter-to-the-editor writers are, so I will concede that the other half of the letters that you print are in fact perfect examples of what letters to the editor should be like. No unlike this one.

The Comics Journal has not published a print edition for a few years now but it does maintain a quiet online presence.

(The Hayfamzone Blog thanks John Stangeland of Atlas Comics for generously loaning out his copy of TCJ 63 which paved the way for the above transcription.)

Sandy Jarrell's Kirby Kamandi

Comics artist Sandy Jarrell recently displayed on twitter his Jack Kirby pencil drawing of Kamandi. So nice!

The suppleness of the line suggests to me a vintage of between 1972 and 1974, my favorite of the many phases of Kirby. And how about the expressiveness of those eyes?

Hooray for Jack Kirby!

Many Marvels at the NYT

The opening of the Captain Marvel movie last weekend was the catalyst for The New York Times publishing the above full-page feature in their Sunday edition. It's always great when comics make a nice splash like that!

DC Primal Age at Target

DC Primal Age is an all-new 100-page squarebound comic that is available only at Target retail stores. I like the comic but I do not like the limited availability.

I go to my Local Comic Book Store (Atlas Comics!) every week and that's where I  buy my comics. That's where I like to buy my comics. I do not want to have to run around to a bunch of different stores to round up my various comics purchases. The above Target comic is a one-shot but, even worse, the half-dozen or so DC Giants sold exclusively at Wal-Mart stores are ongoing series. (I went to Wal-Mart last summer the week that the first of their DC exclusives was released, and it was already sold out; that soured me so much on the milieu that I have not been back to Wal-Mart and I have purchased none of those DC/Wal-Mart comics even though they contain some non-reprint material.)

Target's DC Primal Age is all new with artwork by Jerry Ordway and Phil Winslade and Keith Pollard. And how about Batman by Brent Anderson? What a nice treat to see work by those gentlemen whose artwork doesn't show up in comics these days nearly as frequently as I would like! The coloring through the entire comic is far darker and somber-hued than I would prefer, but I did appreciate the artwork. And, though I enjoyed the issue, I hope I will not have to run to Target to buy any more comics in the future.