Day Two of New York Comic Con 2015 can be summed up by "Nothing to see here - but plenty to read!"
With the First Day Rush out of the way, and the massive Saturday crowds looming, Friday seemed the most logical day to dedicate to comic book shopping - and that was exactly what I did.
My odds and collection-hole-filling ends included:
One Dell LOONEY TUNES:
Three issues of TOM AND JERRY (One Dell and Two Gold Key) including a reuniting with one of the VERY FIRST COMICS I had as a preschooler - pictured first below.
As on THIS DAY last year, six more DC SCOOBY-DOOs, for at or below the cover price of a current issue.
And finally, three issues of DC's short-run parody humor series INFERIOR FIVE.
How do you not love that cover!
Nothing valuable and nothing at all expensive - but, like Scrooge McDuck and his money, they all mean something to me!
That's it for Day Two! Hopefully, the next two days will be somewhat more interesting, and less like me photographing my own restaurant food and showing it off to you! (Somebody explain THAT phenomenon to me, will you!)
4 comments:
I haven't read a lot of the old Tom and Jerry comic books, but I recall reading a few of them back in the late 70's/early 80's. They were cute and had some very nice artwork. It's probably no surprise that someone who draws a comic about a cat and mouse liked another comic about a cat and mouse, is it? That third cover looks like the artwork I recall seeing in the issues I read years ago. (While the Gold Key/Whitman comics had no credits, even as a youngster I could tell some of the comics were reprints by reading the copyright notices on the first page). It's a shame that someone doesn't reprint some of the better Tom and Jerry issues, particularly those that look like the third cover shown on your blog. I guess that while there is a market for Disney comics and Popeye reprints, there isn't one for other older funny animal books.
Deb:
Tom and Jerry, as with the other MGM and Hanna-Barbera properties, fall under (…or, in terms of comics books, one might say “are imprisoned by”) the great Time Warner Umbrella.
And, through their DC Comics arm, they only seem interested in publishing Looney Tunes and Scooby-Doo – and nothing else in the animated genre, despite owning many of the best animated properties ever created!
So, like The Flintstones or Yogi Bear, Tom and Jerry would have to go through them. And, even if they WERE inclined to publish Tom and Jerry (and why not, as they endlessly pump the property out on home video) they would seem as unlikely to offer works from this fine era of comics as they are to do the same for the Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera characters.
As the Dell and Gold Key eras recede further and further into history, I sometimes wonder if anyone at DC, or Time Warner for that matter, knows this material even exists! I believe that the corresponding Disney material only remains in the general American public consciousness because of the CONTINUITY of publishers utilizing that material that has occurred since the demise of Western Publishing in 1984.
Tom and Jerry, and to a lesser extent the classic, non-Scooby-Doo Hanna-Barbera characters have not benefited from a “publishing continuity” that has kept this material in the public eye. And, even though Looney Tunes has been published consistently by DC since 1994 (pretty incredible, if you stop to think about it), the particular material produced by Dell and Gold Key is unknown to most today (save “true” comic book fans and collectors) because it has never been part of the continuum that extended beyond the end of the Whitman comics.
That said, I think IDW (not surprisingly) would be the PERFECT comic book home for Tom and Jerry. They would know how to create a nice mix of classic Western Publishing stories and the newer material produced in Europe – not unlike their Disney line! Don’t imagine we’ll ever see it, though.
Of the covers published in this post, the FIRST and THIRD are by Harvey Eisenberg – the Dell being an original and the Gold Key being a reprint , and the SECOND was by Phil De Lara. Such great stuff, and no modern place for it – even in an archival collection. Sigh...
I think that the Disney Comics are kept alive in this country not just by publishers, but by fans of the material. With the possible exception of BOOM's earliest issues, the people in charge of these comics since Gladstone Comics in 1986 have been dedicated fans of Donald, Scrooge and Mickey as well as Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson. (Even Disney's in-house comics had fan and Disney employee Bob Foster editing their Duck titles.) These are the people who will endure the whims of Disney's legal department, fight to present the truest representation of controversial material and persevere through maddening delays to get the license to keep Donald, Mickey and Scrooge alive in their home country.
Deb:
I couldn’t agree more! I wonder if “what we still know as the classic Disney comic”, would be vital today (…or as forgotten as the Tom and Jerry comics), if not for Bruce Hamilton and company stepping-in to celebrate Barks and Gottfredson, give us Rosa and Van Horn, and introduce the USA to prime European creators, at precisely the time he did – and, to one extent or another, influence every subsequent Disney publisher since then.
Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, and (until IDW) Popeye, to name but a few, had no such “publishing champion” to keep them similarly “alive”. And Time Warner, as noted above, ran with their own versions of WB and H-B character comics – as, I might add, is certainly their right to do.
So, really Bruce Hamilton and his dedicated efforts of the mid-to-late-eighties are very likely responsible for the quality of the IDW Disney comics and Fantagraphics book collections we enjoy today!
Post a Comment