Our Third annual Halloween tribute continues now through October 31.
Charles P Wilson III creates a knockout cover for a collection of Joe Hill’s unrealized scripts for a proposed reboot of Tales From The Darkside.
Wilson is absolutely among the top underrated artists working in comics and graphic novels today. He created a number of terrific looking projects for us at IDW Publishing, including Hill’s the Wraith and illustrated some other stunning variant covers for Locke and Key, X-Files, and TMNT, among others.
Today, after an 18-month pandemic induced delay, No Time To Die finally opens in the United States. We mark the occasion with our third, and final, piece of James Bond original art.
Ah, comic book art in the age of powerful digital technology. This original cover by Glenn Fabry starts off with two beautiful Russian women, but ultimately ends up without them.
(The gun in the background also disappears between solicitation and actual publication, but that is more a function of the trade dress choice, and certainly less jarring.)
Digital manipulation aside, it’s still a cool cover. And kudos to Dynamite for landing the rights. At IDW Publishing, we hounded the rights holder(s) endlessly and continuously came up empty handed. (I’m sure other publishers tried as well.)
And speaking of disappearing acts — When I was at Topps Comics, we acquired the Goldeneye (Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as Bond) rights in 1995. We launched with a first issue of what was planned as a three-issue adaptation. Unfortunately, issues two and three never appeared. In addition to approvals that came in at the speed of molasses, the licensor — and I kid you not — objected to the adult material that was appearing in the comics.
Nothing crazy — just the same “adult” material that appears in the film.
Seriously.
The infamous Topps Goldeneye comics; Issue #1 was published (and also distributed as a special #00 issue at the James Bond Convention in NYC.) Issues #2 and #3 were cancelled. All three featured great painted covers from Brian Stelfreeze.
John Byrne pretty much wrapped up his 21st century run at DC with the launch of The All New Atom in 2006. Great art and storytelling, but John only drew the first three issues in the series (with nice finishes by Trevor Scott) before departing.
This might have been bad news for DC’s Byrne fans, of course, but, selfishly, it was good news for us at IDW Publishing. Byrne’s Next Men ultimately returned, and John found time for some additional Star Trek series and a fun Jurassic Park mini, among many others.
Gail Simone created the character and wrote this Atom series, and like all of Gail’s work, it was a fun take, with Ryan Choi as the Atom’s alter ego, replacing Ray Palmer.
Also, Gail is one of the liveliest and funniest (and prolific) comics creators on Twitter.
Trust me on this.
See you back here next Tuesday. Have a safe and fun Holiday weekend!
How big a deal was it when Milton Caniff left Terry and The Pirates to create Steve Canyon, a new comic strip that he would own exclusively?
It made the cover of Time Magazine.
Time, the most important news magazine in the world in the mid-20th century, also featured Gandhi, Princess Elizabeth, Eva Peron, The Shah of Iran and Jackie Robinson on its covers that year.
One of America’s best-loved comic strip creators had declared his independence.
The big newspaper syndicates would no longer control the rights to Caniff’s cartooning.
In the days when star cartoonists were pretty much rock stars (popular comics helped drive newspaper sales), “The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip” was now fully in charge of his own destiny.
It was indeed a big deal.
To this day, when you want to reprint Steve Canyon, or chose to produce some lovely retro Canyon merch., you make a deal with the Caniff estate directly.
Milt Caniff — one of the medium’s greatest creators — leaves behind a legacy of independence that hundreds, if not thousands, of cartoonists and storytellers embrace on an ongoing (and not at all risk-free) basis.
Happy Independence Day.
From Top left: Cover of Canyon Vol. 2 featuring today’s strip; cover of the Eisner winning Caniff retrospective (both books from The Library of American Comics and IDW Publishing); Caniff in his studio with the model for Canyon’ s initial romantic interest Copper Calhoon; Caniff on the cover of Time Magazine; and a small hand-colored print of Calhoon. Caniff would send these prints to fans who wrote him requesting art or an autograph.
Al (Alden) McWilliams gives us an uncanny glimpse of a cool flip phone — about 40 years ahead of its time.
(Of course, there’s the terrific use of shadows and light to admire as well. But, as always, we digress.)
Twin Earths was one of the few strip collections that we could never make happen at IDW and The Library of American Comics. (For reasons involving both rights and availability of materials.) It’s too bad, because it was a fun and well-rendered adventure strip — one of the few that dealt with “flying saucers.” Capatilizing on UFOs in the news headlines, it was part of an overall more realistic trend in SF post World War 2.
Also, McWilliams is a terrific artist who never quite achieved the fame of some of his contemporaries — seemingly never quite being in the right place at the right time.
Continuing our month long celebration of the great adventure comic strips: Week 1: Superheroes Week 2: Detectives Week 3: SF Week 4: Comic Book Giants
Sporadic reprints of Twin Earths have appeared from time to time, but as of now (2021) the full run has yet to be collected.
Secret Agent Corrigan (X-9), Daily Strip, October 17, 1969
As noted in a previous post, the amazing Al Williamson spent 13 years illustrating Secret Agent Corrigan as a daily strip. (With writing by Archie Goodwin — also great.)
Here’s a nice example from the earlier period of Al’s strips with a gorgeous final panel.
(Of course as I also previously noted, Williamson could have illustrated a guide to Windows XP, and I would have devoured it anyway.)
Al’s Corrigan strips are relative bargains in the original art market today: Nice examples can often be found in the $400-$500 range.
The complete five-volume collection of Williamson’s Corrigan (Also referred to as X-9) is one of my favorite series form the Library of American of Comics (LOAC), and one of my favorite projects at IDW Publishing.
Yes, that makes me biased. So?
Continuing our month long celebration of the great adventure comic strips: Week 1: Superheroes Week 2: Detectives Week 3: SF Week 4: Masters Of The Form
Secret Agent Corrigan (X-9) has an outstanding pedigree: Created in 1934 by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond for King Features, he was quickly featured in two movie serials. (1937 and 1945, pictured here.)
One panel. That’s all it took to get my attention on this page.
Which one? Trust me, it’s not a quiz: It’s panel three, featuring the CLASSIC Dick Tracy profile by creator Chester Gould
And, as a bonus, our trusty detective is holding a gun.
Of course, it’s an overall great Sunday page with nice action to complement all that detecting. But that specific panel is iconic to a strip and creator that were inexorably tied together for nearly 50 years.
IDW Publishing and The Library of American Comics collected the entire Gould Tracy run — 29 volumes in all.
The New York News water no time promoting the return of Dick Tracy — and the rest of the comics — after a devastating NYC newspaper strike in 1962/1963.
Every so often, I have this daydream, that I will sell most, if not all, of my art and use the proceeds to buy just one piece: An Alex Raymond Flash Gordon Sunday.
First time I ever saw that art as a kid, I recognized that I was looking at something extraordinary.
Nearly 50 years later, I still feel that way.
In the meantime, I have this great Raymond Rip Kirby to enjoy. Frankly, they are all pretty great, but this one especially spoke to me because of the terrific use of light and shadows. (And smaller word balloons than typical means more art to enjoy.)
Publishing the complete Raymond Rip Kirby — and Flash Gordon, with the Raymond Jungle Jim toppers — at IDW was a joy. An absolute joy.
Continuing our month long celebration of the great adventure comic strips: Week 1: Superheroes Week 2: Detectives Week 3: SF Week 4: Masters Of The Form
Fun fact: This is Volume 2 of the complete Alex Raymond Rip Kirby, despite the fact that the years contained within are misidentified here.
Classic Superman artist Wayne Boring provides us with an excellent and rare daily strip at the end of Superman’s 27-year newspaper run.
The excellence is obvious; Superman uses three different super powers in each of the three panels.
Rare because, well, pretty much the same reason: Many, many strips from this period only feature Clark, Lois or other characters in “civilian” garb, with soap opera style plots and stories. In other words, there are many strips where Superman is nowhere to be found.
In fact, in the 80s, Boring would often Remarque those “plain” originals with a Superman figure to make them more desirable in the collectors market.
But of course, no need to add an “extra” Superman here. He’s doing just fine in this good-looking example.
We managed to collect most of the Superman strips at IDW and LOAC, but couldn’t find any collectors with complete runs from the earliest silver age period. (Late 50s.) That era of strips includes the introduction of a Brainiac prototype (“Romado”) drawn by the great Curt Swan.
Back in the Golden Age, Newspapers ruled New York, and Superman ruled the Sunday comics section (16 color pages!)of the New York Daily Mirror. A Golden Age, indeed.
A classic example of a Wayne Boring Superman Remarque, drawn right over the panels.
As nearly any pop culture fan knows, (especially — ahem — older ones like myself) the hugely successful camp 1966 Batman TV show launched a plethora of bat merchandise.
So it’s no surprise that DC launched a revival of the Batman comic strip, which had a successful, but brief run in the Golden Age.
The daily strips initially mimicked the campiness of the TV show, but ultimately moved closer to more traditional DC superhero stories, as did the comics after the show was cancelled in early 1968.
Al Plastino handled the art chores for many of the strips, following Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella.
The strip managed to soldier on until early 1973. Finally managing to collect all of them — the dailies and Sundays — into a three-volume LOAC series was an archival highlight of mine at IDW.
(It only took five years or so to convince DC to let us do it. Perseverance won the day.)
The original art for the third and final volume of the Silver Age Batman strip books is featured here.
