our 400th installment

[davemerrill]

Our Stupid Comics this week is our 400th, and as such we figured we'd change things up a bit, and instead of making fun of bad comics we'd highlight some GOOD comics that we love. Surely there must be room for love in our teeny tiny hearts, right? Right. We put our brains together and came up with a list of some comics we honestly, un-ironically enjoy. It's by no means a full and complete list - tons of great comics and cartoonists aren't there. Maybe we'll do another one in the future.

Mister Kitty also has an Etsy store now, which we're going to use to both clean out our closets of older comics and ephemera that may be of interest to the world at large, and for selling original artwork and books and things. So stay tuned!

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Excellent examples!

It's funny what can be a 'trigger', what events in our childhood become something of an, well, maybe not obsession but a subject of continuing interest in the backs of our minds.

Your TinTin example echos for me. For me, it's Dan Dare. 1968, flying off to London (and thence to Uganda), a long, long flight for an 8 year old boy, a lovely stewardess offered me a copy of Eagle, a British 'newspaper for boys' which had all manner of interesting and amazing comics, but the stories were generally only 2 pages long! How frustrating! Two comics stood out in my mind all these years, Dan Dare and a strip I can't recall the name of but involved our heroes in a special submarine, which carried a couple of VTOL jet aircraft. It seemed a kind of spy/commando deal.

(and I only learned recently that the Eagle I read was part of a late '60s revival attempt, as Eagle was a product of the '50s. Naught but reprints but, as they say, it was all new to me!)

But that Dan Dare. The colors! the art! so much imagination and such clean work! And it remained a phantom in my brain for decades until 2013, when this book appeared: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Dare-Spacefleet-Operations-Workshop/dp/0857332864/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402716648&sr=8-1&keywords=dan+dare

and suddenly I could identify the unusual alien from the comic, which led me to learn of which story it was (The Man From Nowhere), which led me to learn that Titan Books had for awhile a publishing program putting the serials in nice, oversized hardcovers, which I have slowly bought over the past year. Naturally the early volumes went OOP and are at 'crazy grandma' prices. :(

The other story, I think I'll save for my blog. :)

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

when I was a kid, in the wake of Star Wars, David Kyle wrote this great hardback called "The Pictorial History Of Science Fiction", that great coffee-table size book that was jam packed with old pulp covers, illustrations, movie stills, paperback covers, and TV stars. It's where I first heard about Dr. Who, and there were a few Dan Dare panels in there too, starring that strangely androgynous ducklike Man From Nowhere. That Frank Hampson, he was a talent.

I still have that book.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess you know about Warren Ellis' evocation of Dan Dare, MINISTRY OF SPACE, in which the British, rather than the Americans, take the initiative to seize Von Braun and his staff, and thus become the first spacefaring nation. I remember in the early 90s when Anime UK magazine praised the look of the Luxion in GUNBUSTER for its Dan Dare qualities (presumably referring to such things as its metal-strapped bubble window).

That happens to be the exact (and only) issue of Uncle Scrooge I had, but I loved it. I think the idea of raising a boat by using scads of inner-tubes appealed to me as a kid, because it seemed like the kind of thing I could potentially do (I tended to like best stories with wild ideas that nevertheless seemed doable--like The Mad Scientists' Club books--rather than stories that were completely in the realm of fantasy). Of course, when I was a kid, the implications of Scrooge imagining himself a plantation owner in the Old South, "listening to the cotton pickers strum their banjos" didn't occur to me. However, the story also has one of my favorite sorts of comics endings--the protagonist(s) trying to escape an outraged pursuit. It reminds me of the early Urusei Yatsura stories, when as often as not a lynch mob armed to the teeth marched toward the Moroboshi residence.

"The Idiots Abroad" was the Freak Brothers story that was contemporary when I was a teenager. Gilbert Shelton was always funny and entertaining (qualities not every underground cartoonist possessed), a worthy hippie heir to the great American comedy and adventure strips. Now that I think about it, though, "The Idiots Abroad"'s emphasis on political satire might represent his acknowledgement that the drug culture of the 1960s and 70s had faded away, and it would perhaps be a bit stale to write stories still centered around it. But you also realize in retrospect that the drug culture was a genuine culture. I mean, there was that EC horror parody where they thought Fat Freddy had died and he gets buried alive, only to claw his way out of the grave and reveal that he had merely "O.D.'d on ibogaine." No Smilin' Stan asterisk--the reader of the day was expected to know what ibogaine was.

--Carl