More things I want to be able to find again:
“Comics are written by people whose lives suck, for people whose lives suck.”
—Nick Montfort (Who continues, “Obviously, that’s not entirely true.”)
I’ve linked to these in blog comments elsewhere, but haven’t yet done so on my own blog.
First, Kevin Huizenga discovered Superman plugging universal health care in a 1952 issue of The Adventures of Bob Hope. (Isn’t it amazing that there was once a comic called The Adventures of Bob Hope? Today, Bob Hope would be a gritty, morally questionable comedian whose kid sidekick died violently at the hands of Dorothy Lamour, and he’d get killed off by an evil Bob Hope from an alternate universe and be replaced by Bing Crosby and then come back to life as a zombie.)
Second, here’s a pro-health-care Steve Canyon strip from… I can’t quite read the copyright… it looks like 1949. Steve Canyon was cold war propaganda and Milton Caniff wasn’t exactly a hippie. So it’s interesting that, in extolling the virtues of the Free World, Caniff is proudest of exactly the things modern conservatives decry as “socialism.”
After three weeks of embarrassing stasis, I’m finally posting comics again. Of course, it’s the same long story that’s been dragging on for months. I’m as sick of it as you are, and once it’s over I’ll go back to single-page strips for a while.
I’ve got a webcomic. Lately I’ve been averaging one comics page a week, if that. That’s because creating each page is like dragging myself uphill.
Longer stories–like the one I’ve got going now–start with a pile of scribbled notes from three or four different sketchbooks, which may or may not originally have had anything to do with each other. Eventually I seek them out–or at least the ones I remember–and piece them together chronologically.
This is why I usually have no idea where a story is going until I’m halfway through. (Further details, and illustrations, past the link.) Continue reading Why the Comics Take So Long
I had no idea Snowy was this hard up for cash.
Ever hear of the book Futility, by Morgan Robertson? It was about an indestructible, lifeboat-deficient ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank. Fourteen years after Futility was published, the Titanic went down.
On a similar note, as the Bush Administration draws to a close it seems a good time to observe that E. C. Segar could have warned us, if only we’d listened:
It’s like he knew.
Right now my site statistics list the current top search query as “fairy bowling ball.”
Here you go, guys! Happy now?
