Time for one last New York Comic Con update before we roll into the next convention season.
This fall marks 55 years since my first comic book—or any kind of pop culture—convention. So if I look tired… well, I have good reason.
Happy to see so many old friends, but I wish I’d learn to get a few more photos with them before we all wander off in different directions.
Well, it’s good to have goals.
And why, you ask, is Jamie Moy (Albert Moy’s spouse) pointing to my zipped jacket pocket? I’m glad you asked. Because, for once, I had my wallet secured—something she’s been relentlessly reminding me about for a few years.
That zipper isn’t easy to open. But if I were really smart, I’d put the wallet in, sew the pocket shut, and save a lot of money.
I’d call this a “realistic” dinosaur, but how would I actually know without a time machine?
Its tail hit me in the head a few times, so that’s realistic enough for me.
It looks like Blue from Jurassic World, although its name tag says “Rocky.” Maybe Blue is his stage name.
I never did figure out why its handler was dressed as if he’d wandered out of The Matrix. Maybe it relates to the most recent Jurassic World film, which I skipped. Come to think of it, it could relate to one of the previous films. Those weren’t just terrible; they weren’t memorable.
Or maybe the guy just likes The Matrix and has a pet Velociraptor.
But, as always, I digress.
One of the best things about this encounter was how many people barely gave the dinosaur a second glance. Then again, this was a comic book convention. In New York.
You’d be surprised how little attention a dinosaur attracts.
Walter Simonson with his HUGE oversized original Marvel Thor art, donated for the Hero Initiative Auction, moderated by Scott Dunbier. The Auction rased 100K for the charity, with Walter’s piece the big gun (literally) at 32K.My favorite convention of the year came and went much too quickly.
So much talent…
Andy MacDonaldAdriana MeloAnthony_MarquesArt AdamsBilly Tucci & Brian PulidoBrian StelfreezeCaitlin_YarskyBob McLeodColeen DoranCreees LeeDan ParsonsDan JurgensDean HaspielCully HamnerDave JohnsonDon SimpsonEric CaneteDrew MossJason AaronErik LarsenEric PowellJeffrey BrownJames RobinsonJerome OpenaJG JonesHoward Chaykin & Bob ChapmanFrank Cho
Darwyn Cooke drew only four “regular” issues of Catwoman.
Four.
Yes, there was also “Trail of the Catwoman” in Detective Comics, and the terrific Selina’s Big Score. But still, it wasn’t nearly enough.
Ed Brubaker and Darwyn gave us a terrific version of Selina Kyle. Smart, stylish, funny and noirish, with a costume that was both sexy — and, for a change, a bit more practical.
She finally looked like someone who could actually leap across rooftops without losing parts of her wardrobe.
This page, inked by Mike Allred, is a great example of Darwyn’s storytelling. Two small panels to set things up, followed by one big payoff.
Simple. Clear. Terrific.
And, of course, Catwoman owns the page.
I’ve featured Darwyn’s work on the blog many times: Parker, The Spirit, and those wonderful classic comic-book reinterpretations he apparently created to “relax.”
(Most of us relax differently. But I digress.)
Darwyn’s Catwoman run was much too short. Sadly, so was Darwyn’s time on planet Earth. He died in 2016 at the age of 53.
He was one of the greatest cartoonists of his generation, despite entering the field relatively late, and I was fortunate to know him and work with him. I might be biased, but his Parker graphic novels (IDW Publishing) are some of the best ever published.
The man and his talent are very much missed. Fortunately, the art and the stories are still very much with us.
I’m thrilled that DC is finally publishing Batman by Darwyn Cooke: The Absolute Edition, collecting all of his extraordinary work with the Batman family in a format it deserves.
DC asked me to provide images of several pieces of Darwyn’s original art from my collection, and I happily obliged. Which pieces did they actually use in the finished book? Excellent question.
Apparently, even with a $125 cover price, their budget didn’t quite stretch far enough for a contributor copy. As a former publisher, I definitely recognize fiscal discipline, although this might be pushing that philosophy a bit too far.
No worries. I’ll contribute to the Warner Bros. bottom line as soon as I can get a copy.
Meanwhile, this page is a pretty good reminder of just how much Darwyn could accomplish in a very small amount of space.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, September 10, 2026
I’m a little late to the party on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Plenty has already been written, photographed, discussed and dissected. Some of my friends have written wonderful overviews.
So this isn’t an attempt at a definitive review.
It’s just what struck me.
In a word: astonishing.
Honestly, I was a little overwhelmed. There is a ton to take in, and I know I missed things.
Fine by me. I’m going back.
The building itself is spectacular — and innovative, to say the least — but once I got inside, the architecture pretty quickly became secondary.
I’m an art guy. Put great stuff on the walls and that’s where I’m looking.
And there is some really great stuff on those walls.
The Norman Rockwell collection alone is worth the trip. I’ve been to the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and it’s terrific, but Stockbridge is not exactly on the way to anywhere.
Seeing this many major Rockwells together in Los Angeles is pretty remarkable. A few, including The Problem We All Live With, are on loan.
The Frazetta collection is smaller, but there are some monsters there. Same with N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and a long list of great illustrators.
One fun surprise was Parrish’s Old King Cole. I’ve seen the famous mural at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis in New York — worth an overpriced drink if you get the chance — but not this one.
Here, you can stand in front of it as long as you want.
Which I did.
One of the bigger surprises, though, was what I didn’t see.
When we did the three Star Wars Galaxy card series at Topps in the 1990s, Lucas bought a ton of the original artwork. He also accumulated an enormous amount of other Star Wars material over the years. For a long time, he had first right of refusal on any newly created Star Wars and Indiana Jones art.
I saw very little of it.
There is certainly Star Wars material in the museum, including the Star Wars in Motion exhibition, but I expected much more original art to come pouring out of the vaults.
No big display of Star Wars Galaxy paintings. Much less production and concept art than I expected.
So… where is all that stuff?
The museum owns tens of thousands of works and can obviously show only a fraction at a time. Presumably much of it will rotate in.
I hope so.
Naturally, I spent a lot of time with the comic art.
There are some terrific pieces, including one of the best Bernie Wrightson Frankenstein drawings I have ever seen. And anytime any original comic art is hanging in a museum, which is not often enough, I still get a kick out of it.
But I wanted more.
And more focus.
Oviously, I’m biased.
Still, this is the Museum of Narrative Art. It’s hard to imagine an art form more literally narrative than comics.
And the museum does own plenty of important comic art. Which makes some of the choices on display a bit puzzling.
No Ditko.
One Kirby.
Jack Kirby probably had more impact on contemporary popular culture than any comic-book artist who ever lived, so one piece seems… light.
Also odd: quite a bit of the comic art was material collectors have watched change hands at auction during the last decade or so.
Where is the stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day in 30 years?
That remains a mystery. For now.
My other quibble was context.
There is wonderful art everywhere, but often very little explaining why a piece matters, how it fits into the history of illustration and visual storytelling, or sometimes even why it’s hanging next to the thing beside it.
For a museum about narrative art, I’d like a little more narrative.
Apparently I’m not alone.
I learned afterward that you can use the museum’s mobile site and your phone camera to get additional information about the art.
Cool idea. I’ll try it next time.
But there was also plenty of room for a paragraph on the placard.
Still, what I kept thinking about afterward wasn’t any individual painting.
It was the scale of what George Lucas and Mellody Hobson have done.
Collectors collect. I understand that impulse pretty well.
But assembling a collection like this and then building a museum so the rest of us can see it is something else entirely.
Rockwell. Frazetta. Wyeth. Parrish. Comics. Film art. Illustration. Photography. Popular culture.
Images that lived in magazines, books, movies, advertisements — and our memories — now hanging together under one roof.
I can wish there were more comic art. I can wonder where all the Star Wars material is. I can complain about a placard.
Fair enough.
But when you step back and look at what Lucas and Hobson have built, those complaints get pretty small pretty fast.
There was also one slightly ridiculous collector moment.
Walking around, I realized that George Lucas and I have occasionally owned the same kinds of things.
His collection is, admittedly, a little more impressive.
And no, he wasn’t eaten by angry, time-hopping dinosaurs, as depicted in one of those wonderfully deranged Topps Dinosaurs Attack! cards (’88) — Len clutching a stack of classic back-issue comics, Mark Newgarden down front, and Art Spiegelman actually being eaten.
He died of considerably more conventional causes on August 11 at age 84.
Len was one of those guys whose career ran somewhat parallel to the comic-book business, but whose influence on it was enormous. At Topps, where he eventually became creative director, he helped shape more than four decades’ worth of non-sports cards and pop-culture projects.
He joined the company in 1959, basically right out of high school, and stayed for 41 years.
Forty-one years.
And during that time, an almost ridiculous amount of talent passed through Topps.
Wally Wood. Jack Davis. Basil Wolverton. Bob Powell. Norm Saunders. Jay Lynch. Art Spiegelman. John Pound.
And that’s hardly the whole list.
Spiegelman basically began his professional career there and eventually became one of the key creative forces behind Wacky Packages. Jay Lynch was another longtime contributor. John Pound became indispensable to Garbage Pail Kids. Shortly before decamping for Haight-Ashbury, Robert Crumb even did a card series for Topps.
All of these people wandering in and out of a chewing-gum company in industrial Brooklyn.
And Len, with a very good eye for talent and ideas, was right in the middle of it.
He developed an astonishing volume of licensed and non-sports card projects — everything from The Beatles and Batman to monsters, movies and TV shows — and for years handled much of it essentially on his own, until Gary Gerani joined him in 1972.
How juggling that many licensors and creators at once didn’t drive him right off a cliff, I have no idea.
Imagine being a kid opening those packs.
Now imagine being one of the guys deciding what went into them.
Pretty good job.
Len was also, at heart, a genuine comics guy, which naturally led Topps into some wonderfully oddball territory.
With his one-time roommate Roy Thomas, he was involved with the terrific Krazy Little Comics series — tiny superhero parodies with titles like The Amusing Spider-Guy, Fantastic Fear and Stupidman, with artwork by Wally Wood and Gil Kane.
Wally Wood and Gil Kane drawing tiny parody comics sold with bubble gum.
Only at Topps.
And then, of course, there was Mars Attacks.
That alone would have been enough.
Len was a lifelong fan of science-fiction movies and EC Comics, and he came up with the idea that became Mars Attacks, working with Woody Gelman to develop the storyline. Wally Wood and Bob Powell helped visualize it, and Norm Saunders painted most of those unforgettable finished cards.
Basically, Len took all the great 1950s science-fiction movie ingredients — bug-eyed aliens, flying saucers, death rays, terrified crowds, destroyed landmarks — and turned the dial way up.
Especially on the gore.
Way, way up.
The result was one of the most memorable trading-card sets ever produced, horrifying parents and making a permanent impression on a generation of bubblegum-chewing boys.
Some of whom never quite recovered.
Len’s comics connection went well beyond Topps.
He was involved in the creation of Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and wrote the original Dynamo story. Wood returned the favor by giving Dynamo the civilian name Leonard Brown.
Len always seemed a little sheepish about that when it came up.
But really — how many people can say Wally Wood named a superhero after them?
I think it should have been on his business card.
Len was also a very early collector of original comic art, recognizing that this stuff was beautiful and important at a time when hardly anybody was thinking about it that way.
His collection was long gone by the time I knew him, unfortunately dispersed after a difficult divorce. But just hearing Len talk about some of the pieces he once owned was jaw-dropping.
I was lucky enough to work with him for about four years at Topps, during the early ’90s when Topps Comics was launched.
For a lifelong comic-book fan who had spent decades working around the edges of the industry, that had to be pretty satisfying.
And Len was all over it.
I loved talking with him because the conversation could go just about anywhere — comics, cards, old movies, television, original art … and music.
Len was a huge rockabilly and classic-country fan and eventually became a radio DJ as well, hosting shows devoted to the music he loved.
That enthusiasm was genuine.
That was Len.
When I first walked into the old Topps building in Brooklyn in 1992, Len had already been there for more than 30 years.
Thirty years.
The Beatles had formed, conquered the world and broken up. Marvel Comics had created nearly its entire universe. Batman had gone from Shelly Moldoff to Carmine Infantino to Neal Adams to Frank Miller.
And Len Brown was still at Topps.
Still paying attention. Still plugged into what was going on. Still looking for the next big thing — and, more often than most people, finding it.
The funny thing was, he looked ridiculously youthful.
So youthful, in fact, that the first words out of my mouth when I met him were:
“You’re Len Brown?”
I later found out he’d heard that more than once.
Yes.
He was Len Brown.
The one and only.
One More Len Brown Story
I mentioned that Len was a very early collector of original comic art, long before most people saw much value in the stuff at all.
Funny thing is, years later I accidentally ended up with something that had once been in his collection.
Around 2009, I spotted this terrific Kurt Schaffenberger Shazam! page online and bought it before I noticed the inscription:
“To Len Brown — Kurt Schaffenberger.”
So I called Len.
I told him what had happened and offered to send the page back.
He passed.
Losing the collection under the circumstances he did wasn’t a particularly happy memory, and by then Len was pretty much done with original art.
But I do think he got a kick out of the fact that, completely by accident, one of his old pages had found its way to me.
