The only self-destruction comparable to the Dilbert guy in comics history was Al Capp. In the 1950s, L'il Abner was the biggest strip in the land. Film, broadway, wildly popular, adding phrases to the national lexicon. Capp was a celebrity w/ regular spots on the Tonight Show. 10 years later he's overcome with hatred for the Sixties counterculture and went full Nixonian rightwing. No Youtube, of course, so he destroyed himself live on stage, going from campus to campus ranting at 20somethings to a cascade of boos.

46 years ago, in Jan. 1976, the first big comics ”event” hit, “Superman & Spider-man: the Battle of the Century.”

It spawned nearly 50 years of similar attention-grabbing events, which have been the bane of both Marvel & DC.

But it's an interesting book. By 1976, traditional comic books were in big trouble. Readership was plummeting, the biz was a mess, popular young creators were abandoning the field rather than be underpaid and exploited, and old guard giants like Kirby were past their prime. The “magic” was lost.

Drawing bare trees takes a lot of patience. And you can't do it fast or you'll screw it up. I had to redraw quite a few of them in KENT STATE because I wanted to move on to other things, and they looked like hell.

Done beautifully here. This is how you do it, kids.

https://twitter.com/Susan16Park/status/1470648032290959362

The trick is to stick to the proper sequence. You start with the main trunk and major branches, which gives you the basic shape of the tree. Ash, Oak, maple etc all have different shapes. Then you draw the smaller branches, then smaller still

Don't get me wrong, I adore Gil Kane's art. But his covers? Meh. They all look the same!

#comicbooks #BronzeAge #GilKane I guess this is what Marvel bigshots wanted, but every cover is a crowded fight scene, usually with a superdude flopping over backwards with one of Kane's signature limp-wristed poses.

"(Roger Stone) protege Jacob Engels appeared at a School Board meeting, blending in with concerned parents, to discuss sex education books. When Engels took the mic, he read aloud an explicit passage from (the graphic novel) “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”"

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1… This is exactly what I've been tweeting about. And again here's Maia Kobabe's graphic novel GENDER QUEER being used as scare tactic in school board meetings.

This is the book outraged zealots and professional rightwing plants wave around at school board meetings.

#bookbanning

Since everyone is talking about the crisis at the @usps and the Trumper creep #DeJoy, the Postmaster General. These are mail sorting machines at the main Cleveland postal facility last August.

DeJoy ordered them torn out and they were left to rot in the parking lot. Not removed and reused at another facility. TORN THE FUCK OUT, and purposely left outside to get rained on and ruined so they could NEVER be used again.

With Jose Canceso trending for some reason, let's remember one of the greatest plays in baseball history, when a fly ball bounced off his head for a homer!

I was at this game!! It was 1993, and the Indians were a very young, very talented, but not very good team. It was the final season in wretched old Cleveland Stadium.

Carlos Martinez, a journeyman 1B, hit a long fly ball to center. The rest is history.

Another blow from the Year That Won't Stop Sucking. The great Ron Cobb has left us, dead at age 83. Cobb is one of the greatest political cartoonists of the late 20th century and on the short list for greatest ever. he worked exclusively in the underground press of the 60s and 70s. His cartoons were devastating, gut-wrenching and cut to the bone.

Hmmm. Not seeing much here that looks any different than Fury Road or any other action blockbuster. Certainly doesn't match the visuals of David Lynch's glorious mess of a film. They should've just replicated those visuals and made a better movie.

https://twitter.com/TwitterMovies/status/1303729244221169664

Or brought in Jodorowsky!

Good thread! Moving forward, comics creators should heed this info here. This is a how-to on how to make a living in comics right now.

https://twitter.com/alexdecampi/status/1301177666972704773

1. A couple addendums. I'm with Abrams. They are very generous and I'm very happy with them. They don't publish a lot of GNs, but the 10 or so they do every year of are very high quality. Big names are flocking to Abrams now.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

Example #7: the political cartoons. This is the best political cartoon I found, by Don Wright of the Miami News. Wright was one of the new stars of the genre, having won a Pulitzer in 1966 at age 30 (he’d win another), and on his way to being one of the most widely syndicated cartoonists of the 1970s and 80s.

This author is trending today.

"For (the rich), the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape."

onezero.medium.com/survival-of-th… "They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader?"

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8,, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”
Example #5: Capt. America #120, from December 1969. “Crack-up on Campus.” Stan Lee wades into campus protests again. At the behest of SHIELD, Cap gets a job as a phys-ed teacher at s suburban New York City college, which is suddenly plagued by student protests.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

Example #6: Undergrounds.

Surely THEY dealt head on with the protests of the era? Surprisingly, no. I’ve scoured my collection and found very few underground comics that depict antiwar protests. You’d think it would be front and center in this revolutionary comics movement, but that’s not the case.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

Example #4: Brother Power the Geek, #1 and #2, October and December 1968. The biggest WTF of all comics interpretations of antiwar protests, and one of the great WTFs in comics history PERIOD, is DC’s totally bonkers title, Brother Power the Geek. This came out at the end of 1968, the most tumultuous year of political unrest since the civil war.

A couple cowardly smalltown papers apologize to Blue Lives Matters types for a Mike Luckovich cartoon. One in NH decided to stop running ALL political cartoons, just to be on the safe side.

And these editors wonder why no one reads their papers anymore.

dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020… "cartoons like this one serve mostly to inflame an already polarized public discourse... we conclude they have reached the point of diminishing return. we’ll use the space previously reserved for editorial cartoons for something else."

"We’re open to suggestions."

Nice sentiment, but notice Jack Kirby, the guy who actually created the Black Panther, not Lee, is not mentioned in tweets like this.

Sigh.

https://twitter.com/SavageAmethyst/status/1299558802686119936

Stan Lee is trending because of this.

Double sigh.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

Example #3: Mad magazine #139, December 1970. So what of the greatest satire comics mag of all time? Surely Mad weighed in frequently on the antiwar movement, the crackdown by cops and Nixon’s goons, and the campus unrest roiling the nation?

Nope. Not really.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

As far as I can find, this splash page is the very first depiction of an antiwar protest in mainstream comics. This is Showcase #75, the debut of Hawk and Dove, June 1968. Of course, Ditko, an Ayn Rand devotee, is not the guy who want weighing in on the antiwar movement. Hey kids! Objectivism is FUN! But he’s fairly restrained here. It’s brazen content for conservative DC.

With the release of Kent State looming (Sept. 8, everyone!), I’ve been looking back at the comics of the Vietnam Era, to see how antiwar protests were depicted in “real time.”

First example: Amazing Spider-man #68 from January 1969. This issue was on the racks in November 1968, and in production in September or October 1968, thus JUST after the shocking “the whole world is watching” street battles of the Democratic Convention. 1968 was also the deadliest year in the Vietnam War, with 16,600 US deaths.

I come from a long line of Akron tire men. In fact, I'm the FIRST man in my direct lineage who DIDN'T work in the tire biz since my Great-grandfather, fresh from Germany, arrived in Akron in 1900 and hired on at Firestone. He worked there literally until the day he died in 1935. My grandfather worked in the offices of the massive BF Goodrich plantin downtown Akron for 45 years. Dad was a research chemist for Goodrich for 37 years.