Verbum et imago sicut unum.
Word and picture as one.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently... Kleefeld on Comics: Familiarizing Myself with My Collection https://ift.tt/ryJQ1u4 Kleefeld on Comics: Filmation's Flash Gordon https://ift.tt/TvCW2OM Kleefeld on Comics: Them Days Is Gone Forever https://ift.tt/mCTdufH Kleefeld on Comics: Do the Right Thing https://ift.tt/Th3bWYq Kleefeld on Comics: Animal Crackers Who?…
I don't think I've read Animal Crackers since the late 1980s. It ran in The Plain Dealer , which my parents got, and I'd read Bollen's strip along with whatever else was on the page. I don't especially recall any strips in particular, but it just kind of rolled in the background with Hagar the Horrible and Beetle Bailey. I was more interested in Garfield when I was younger, and Calvin & Hobbes and…
When I was a teenager, I saw the movie Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. I don't remember exactly when I first saw it -- sometime after it had started showing up regularly on cable, so probably when I was in the back half of high school when I was starting to give serious consideration to a career. The movie mostly revolves around Hanks' character reconciling and getting along…
A little while back, I was digging around for information on the old Everett True comic strip and stumbled across Barnacle Press where they're housing a huge number of old comic strips. Scanned at pretty decent resolution and cleaned up (a bit) for all the world to see. Obviously, it's all public domain stuff but there's famous works like Barney Google and Katzenjammer Kids to more obscure titles…
I believe I've mentioned previously how I spent many of my Saturday mornings as a kid glued to the television watching cartoons, and how most of those were themed around comics or superheroes. There were a few years when that included a Flash Gordon cartoon, that looked exciting and different from just about everything else on TV at the time. It also infuriated me to no end. The show was put…
As I've noted before in a few different places, earlier this year I began using my "media server" (i.e. an old laptop that I've thrown a bunch of music and video files on) to host a local comics database as well as any digital comics I have. And since my prior database died back in 2019, I was not only several years out of date with cataloging of my collection but my data set had developed some…
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently... Kleefeld on Comics: How to Survive the End of the World Review https://ift.tt/2VwC7MJ Kleefeld on Comics: There Will Come Soft Rains https://ift.tt/i5YvHI1 Kleefeld on Comics: Cave Painting Inches Closer to Comics https://ift.tt/d3ZT7Vh Kleefeld on Comics: Ad Populum Is Burning Money https://ift.tt/ZH7bkCs Kleefeld on Comics: These…
I've happened across more than a few instances recently of comics fans who are out there talking about their favorite hobby online. They've got their own channel/outlet and they're doing their own takes on Jimmy Olsen and Jack Kirby and the Eternals and Wally Wood and any/everything to do with comics. There's nothing new with this, of course; fans have been talking about comics LOOONG before the…
Well, lookee there! A settlement from the painfully long-running Diamond bankruptcy nonsense! Heidi MacDonald has a good summary of everything if you haven't read about it yet. There have been a variety of non-news events regarding legal motions being filed and such, but we haven't had a real update on this story in over a year. But the short, short version of what this most recent development is:…
A few years ago , I posted about how archeologists realized that some paleolithic cave paintings were actually done as multiple images on top of one other that were something akin to crude animation when viewed in flickering firelight. A newer report takes a look at the "rules" of cave paintings in the Basque region of Spain and found that certain animals are almost always depicted pointing the…
Ray Bradbury's work has been adapted into comics form many times. And, although I find his original prose story much more effective from a narrative perspective, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is incredibly evocative and almost demands to be visualized. The story was first published in 1950, with the EC Comics adaptation coming out three years later. But the whole thing is set on August 4, 2026 so I…
Possibly the single most impressive thing about Katy Doughty's How to Survive the End of the World is that she spends 256 pages talking about different ways the entire world either could or almost did end, and she manages to keep things cheerful and upbeat the entire time. I mean, even when Douglas Adams -- an iconically funny writer who had written for Monty Python -- wrote about the planet…
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently... Kleefeld on Comics: Proto-Watchmen https://ift.tt/qhV40Qc Kleefeld on Comics: The FF in In-Continuity Media https://ift.tt/NKTmwfB Kleefeld on Comics: A Dearth of Stan and Jack Photos https://ift.tt/ywU81qu Kleefeld on Comics: The Comic Habit https://ift.tt/fdV7DTl Kleefeld on Comics: Minor Thoughts on the Sale of the Kubert School…
I haven't seen this make the rounds on comic book news sites yet, but it was announced this week that The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art has been "acquired" by County College of Morris. The Kubert School was founded, of course, by Joe Kubert back in 1976 and has been pretty instrumental in a number of comic artists' careers. A very partial list of alumni includes Tim Truman, Rick…
If you've read my blog for any length of time, you're probably aware that I'm an old school Fantastic Four fan. Even when I'm not talking about the book explicitly, it's been something of a background topic that I've used to launch into something else. I started reading the series when I was 11 years old and continued month-in, month-out until the Civil War storyline. I thought they collectively…
I started writing a piece about Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and I went to get a picture of the two of them. I realized that I've only ever seen three photographs of the two of them together: one from 1966, one from 1975, and a fairly recently uncovered one from a convention in the 1980s... Considering how much they worked together, and how significant their partnership was to comics, it strikes me as…
In part because folks are still recovering from Comic-Con and not paying attention to me but in part because it's still just generally busy here at Kleefeld Headquarters, I'm going to pull out an article I wrote a decade or two back concerning how the Fantastic Four have been portrayed in media outlets within the Marvel Universe. It's old enough now that I'm 100% sure I'm missing some more recent…
Watchmen has become one the seminal comic book stories of the past several decades. It's probably been read and discussed and poured over more than just about any other single work that's come out, certainly since 1970. So it's also fairly common knowledge that Alan Moore's original idea pitch was largely based around the Charlton characters that DC had then-recently acquired, but wasn't doing…
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently... The FF's Anniversary is NOT August 8! http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/the-ffs-anniversary-is-not-august-8.html Database as Research Tool http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/database-as-research-tool.html ComicCon@Home Circa 2009 http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/comicconhome-circa-2009.html Random Comic Photos In…
You ever read Walden by Henry David Thoreau? Don't bother; it's a crock of shit. I forced myself to wade through it when I was in my 30s and, despite how lauded it often is in literary circles, I found myself almost immediately disliking it. Thoreau struck me as a hypocritical slouch who wouldn't know what self-reliance or responsibility were if they spit in his face, made fun of his mother's army…
I was just trolling through the Library of Congress website (as one does) and found a few photos of possible interest to comics folks... Winsor McCay sketching for the Actors Benefit for Crippled Children, 1908... From a school for refugee children, 1942. Photo by Marjory Collins... Wanda Newman and Teresa Phillips at Do Dah Day in Birmingham, AL, 2010. Photo by Carol Highsmith... Maybe it's just…
If you're bummed that you can't attend Comic Con in person this year (it formally kicks off tomorrow, but there are some unofficial parties starting this afternoon) I might suggest looking back at this Foxtrot strip Bill Amend did back in 2009. Jason and Marcus * had the Comic-Con@Home experience figured out a decade-and-a-half ago! * There's a coloring error here -- Marcus is supposed to be…
I mentioned back in June that I had recently returned to using ComicBase as a way to catalog my collection. It's had some substantial improvements since I'd last used it in the early 2000s. (I just double-checked; I still have the physical manual to ComicBase 5, which was released in 2000.) Partially because of that and partially because of what I do differently, I'm setting this database up to be…
We're in the back half of July, which means that we'll inevitably start seeing some people making note of the anniversary of the Fantastic Four (and therefore Marvel Comics in general) on August 8th. Supposedly, this is because many people claim August 8, 1961 as THE day that Fantastic Four #1 first hit the stands. The problem is: that's not the correct date of the FF's anniversary. That date…
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently... Kleefeld on Comics: What's Up with Comix Wellsping? https://ift.tt/Ek0OrUx Kleefeld on Comics: Both Prophetic and Not https://ift.tt/bLZyah9 Kleefeld on Comics: Marvel's Very First Cover Variant https://ift.tt/r4Z0k5z Kleefeld on Comics: Marble Comics Group's Slimeboy https://ift.tt/jwPm4gv Kleefeld on Comics: Thoughts on This…