Calling All Fans

Friday Comic Book Day.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Marvel and DC are sitting on treasure troves of comic book art from the forties and sixties. In this period most books were of the anthology style, each containing many shorter stories. In the forties, this meant that many new heroes could be tried out - a great deal of which have survived over the decades. In the late forties and fifties, when hero comics made way for genre books, whole issues were filled with stories about characters which could not be picked up in later books (the occasional Groot notwithstanding). In many cases these stories represent the best artwork of certain artist. Our view of their career is colored by what is reprinted and not by what they drew. Artists such as Gene Colan, George Tuska, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, Bob Powell and many, many others are often misrepresented in books about their work, just because not everyone has every comic ever published and those from Marvel and DC have the extra problem of being worth a lot of money - especially if there happens to be a very collectable superhero story in the same book (something that especially counts for the late forties DC books). Of course these companies have tried their own reprint series, but both tried to rely on the know to sell the unknonw. In DC's case, this meant that most of their reprint books were character based, collectingall of Wonder Woman from her various comics, but none of the seperate stories by artists such as Carmine Infantino, Irwin Hasen or Bernie Krigstein from the same books. Marvel tried to reprint whole books or lines, but that meant they had to choose series that have a few duds as possible. Neither have tried doing it the Craig Yoe way, the whose IDW imprint Yoe Books has books that are selected either by aris, by genre or by sunject. Now that all reprint series from Marvel and DC have been cancelled I suggest they open their library to Craig and have him do his type of books for them. Horror collections with only the best stories by the best artists, overview books of the careers of Gene Colan or Russ Heath or Carmine Infantino or even Henry Boltinoff or subject related books, such as a reprint of historical stories from Marvel's war books from the fifties. So that we can have more of this: