Tuesday, May 6, 2003

Another Wise Man

This time, it's my pal Andy Ihnatko, who includes this site in a list of ten recommended sites in this article in today's Chicago Sun-Times. The man knows. He just knows.

• Posted at 11:41 AM · LINK

Four-Color Fiascos

A fellow named Bernard Duggan writes to ask...

Hi! I read your post about Don't Give Up The Ship and saw that there is a Dell Comic adaptation. Could you tell me more about the Dell Four-Color series? How many issues were there? Was it a monthly series? What were the best issues? Did Dell ever make a Herbie the Love Bug comic? Thanks for your time!

Ah, Dell Four-Color...the series specifically designed to make comic book indexers remove large clumps of hair from their heads. Well, the easiest explanation for it is that Dell put out a lot of comics, many of which were either one-shot publications or part of a kind of "test" situation where they'd put out an issue of something and then, nine months later, put out another issue...and then, maybe a year or three later, put out yet another. For distribution reasons that I can't begin to comprehend let alone explain, they decided to number all of these miscellaneous titles as almost-sequential numbers of an irregularly-released series that was known, mainly internally, as Dell Four-Color. Most did not carry that name anywhere but there would be a little number on the first page of art that said, "O.S. 229" or whatever. (That particular number appeared on an issue of Smokey Stover. It did not mean that there had been 228 prior issues of Smokey Stover. It just meant that it was #229 in the Four-Color series.)

The first Four-Color issue appears to have been an issue of Dick Tracy in 1939, which was followed by an issue of Don Winslow of the Navy. They numbered up to #25 (an issue of Popeye), then started numbering over again with a 1942 issue of Little Joe. This numbering continued until 1962 and the last was probably #1354, which featured Calvin and the Colonel. One cannot be absolutely positive about this because they occasionally skipped numbers or even released them out of numerical sequence. Last I heard, for instance, no one had ever reported any sighting of #1351 through #1353. Don't Give Up The Ship was #1049.

To make matters more complicated, a lot of comics that appeared in the Four-Color series later spun off into their own bi-monthly or quarterly books, and the numbering sometimes retro-actively counted Four-Color issues. The first Uncle Scrooge comic was #386, the second was #456 and the third was #495. When they decided to then launch a regular Uncle Scrooge comic, they started with #4 and continued from there. In some cases, they didn't count accurately. Woody Woodpecker, for instance, appeared in 16 Four-Color editions, then started his own comic with Woody Woodpecker #16, not 17.

They were not monthly. They were not put out in any discernible pattern or frequency. Four or five non-sequential issues might come out one day, then nothing for a month. As for what were the best issues, that would depend on your tastes. I suspect most folks might name the many issues done by Carl Barks, Walt Kelly or Alex Toth but I liked a wide range of them.

All of these were done as part of a partnership arrangement that Dell Comics had with Western Publishing (aka Western Printing and Lithography). If you're interested in how that worked, you ought to read this piece that I wrote to answer the Incessantly-Asked Question about that. By the time the movie of The Love Bug came out, Western was issuing all Disney-based comics without any Dell involvement. They put out a one-shot, unnumbered adaptation of that film in 1969 and also did the sequel — both drawn magnificently by Dan Spiegle. Same guy who drew the comic of Don't Give Up The Ship. They're really stunning books, as Dan had to draw that Volkswagen about a hundred times in each and, despite having only one piece of photo reference from one view, he somehow managed to breathe life into his drawings of a faceless car and to depict it from every conceivable angle. (To see another incredible Spiegle-drawn movie adaptation, seek out the 1963 Gold Key version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Absolutely amazing.)

• Posted at 11:08 AM · LINK

How To Succeed...

The Comics Journal's weblog — which is well worth a daily stop, by the way — linked this morning to my earlier item about how I don't recommend the current comic book industry as a career. This prompted an extra number of hits, as well as e-mails asking me to elaborate. So I will.

In this world, it's always great when you can turn your hobby into your occupation; when you can make your living doing something because it's a passion, rather than just a means of paying the mortgage. The trouble is that you need it to be both — and lately, I know too many very talented writers and artists who are scrounging about for work. I don't mean just beginners. Some of them are long-established talents who are almost certainly qualified to be doing Superman or X-Men or any of those books. A few have been deflected by simple, sometimes openly-admitted ageism. For others, it's simply a matter of X number of qualified people seeking work where there are Y number of openings — and X is 3 to 10 times Y. I gave up editing comics some time ago but tomorrow, if I had to find one person to write a generic ghost comic for me, I can think of at least 20 friends who would be up to the task and welcome the work.

Once upon a time, there were those of us who could line up three or four comics a month to write and even without a contract, count on that as relatively steady for the foreseeable future. Today, few are in that category — and they're all looking to line something else up. Never before has writing an established, well-known comic seemed so much like a temp job.

Now, in and of itself, that may not be a bad thing. I coined a phrase some time ago, which was to never get possessive about characters you don't own. Writing your childhood fave or something of the sort can be a dream come true, and even lucrative for a time. But you're just baby-sitting and some day soon, the parents will reclaim their kid and maybe even hand it off to another baby-sitter who'll declare your stint apocryphal. A lot of folks — writers, especially — wake up one morn and realize that they have spent too many of their most fertile, creative years building on someone else's property and/or constricting themselves by the demands of such jobs. One comic artist friend of mine, lacking work in that field and trying to break into another, believes he is at a huge disadvantage: He picked up too many bad habits drawing super-hero comics. It's not that he should never have done them. He just should have done something else, as well — preferably something that was his, in spirit if not in copyright.

None of this is to suggest that no one can get into comics these days and do good work and make a decent living. Some will. Some will also win the lottery. In the case of the lottery, most people come to it with some sense of the odds against them, and they make what one can only hope is an informed, realistic decision that the possible gains justify the definite outlays. I think that today there are a lot of kids — many of them, quite talented — who are so horny to write Batman or whatever that they do not realistically assess those odds. If they did, they might well find that some of their other dreams are eminently better investments and that if they do comics — especially of the work-for-hire variety — they shouldn't even dream of doing them full-time. That's partly for the soul and partly for simple economic survival.

• Posted at 2:40 AM · LINK

Feiffer Alert

R.C. Harvey has a good article up about Jules Feiffer. Go read it by clicking here.

• Posted at 12:57 AM · LINK