Fantagraphics' Fletcher Hanks book edited by Paul Karasik, I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets, not only sold out at San Diego, it sold out of its first print run, with a second print run of equal size on the way.

Is it just me, or are these things just sort of a crapshoot? Why that Fletcher Hanks book and not say, the Bernie Krigstein book?

Where did Fletcher Hanks come from? It struck me as a moderately interesting oddity in the "Art out of Time" collection.

Random sentence I saw on The Comics Journal message board.

"I liked Harry Potter when it was called Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic."

Groan.

The premise of Harry Potter, in broad strokes -- and that is all I have to go with -- does not strike me as terribly original, and surely can be transferred to any story about a normal young boy who is uncovered to belong in a mystical world, and onto that. If RK Rowling made the formula work for her millions of readers, more power to her.

In the end, who cares?

Hm. This strikes me as a comics journal message board of some interest.

http://www.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?t=2156

Why has nobody else seemed to have noticed that for about 10 years before he started his famous run as an Archie artist, Dan DeCarlo was already doing "girlie" drawings in mags that were shamelessly similar to Betty and Veronica?

Just imagine some other artist doing soft-core porn versions in mags of Blondie. And what would be his punishment? Getting hired by the people doing the Blondie comic book!

Yet this nutty scenario is exactly what apparently happened in the case of DeCarlo. Even Fantagraphics' own book, The Pin-Up Art Of Dan DeCarlo, makes no mention of it. But the dates are all there - he started with what we now know as Marvel in '47, doing Goodman's girlie line,i yet didn't do part-time B&V until '57, getting a full position with Archie comics in the early '60s when he left Marvel entirely.

Point being that from '47 to '57 he was ripping off Archie and his gals up and down the block! Talk about "swiping" (from Montana and company) - this guy was the king! Maybe that's why Archie finally hired him? Because although they didn't dig seeing him depicting "Veronica" types being shown as secretaries or hillbillies bent over for a sound spanking, etc., they respected his sheer nerve?

Any other guy would have been busted for intellectual property violations, copyright infriongement, you name it (shades of Josie & The Pussycats things to come?)! But instead they embraced him and gave him a fulltime gig. Very bizzare goings on, indeed.


You draw one Blonde and Brunette, you draw them all. But the answer seems to be, basically:

I've alays understood that the Archie characters were rather re-vamped in DeCarlo's style AFTER he came over - That before they'd been drawn more in Bob Montana's style . TO... You misunderstand. The Archie characters (as publshed in Archie comics) were of course revamped after DeCarlo's hiring at Archie - HE revamped them. My point is that DeCarlo was NOT working on "other characters" which led to his getting the Archie gig - he was instead working on Archie characters for 15 years while working at a non-Archie company. He was drawing tons of Betty and Veronica lookalikes for Goodman, although of course he wasn't calling them Betty and Veronica then.

ARRGH.

AND Anyways...

They measured about 9X12, on nice thick Strathy-looking paper, and he was really poppin' 'em out, one after the other. Most of the ones I saw him doing were beach type shots, featuring, let us say "B&V lookalikes," showing either their bikini tops or bikini bottoms missing, but none had them totally nude.

There was a long but orderly line, and people were paying for and taking the art, thanking him briefly and leaving right away, as if they were receiving holy communion or something. It was kinda spooky and almost reverential.

(I've still got mine somewhere in my archives. I recall that it's a topless "Betty." Don't know why I wound up with that one, since I would normally opt for a bottomless "Veronica." Maybe by the time I got mine, he wasn't drawing any more new ones, and that was all that was left.)

I suspect a certain amount of embarrassment from these fans in purchasing nude drawings of 16 year old cartoon characters from a man in his ... 70s? Beyond which, there may be children in line -- or watching, somewhere behind them, and thus the quick leave for the sake of the children... and their own shame.

Maybe that's why I rate Samm Schwartz higher. I don't know.

Next post shows that strange good sold on ebay continuously of Betty and Veronica showering together. Which always struck me as just a tad of out of character, as per this comment:

Hmm. Do we know that that's a real DeCarlo drawing? Obviously he had no problem drawing naughty stuff, but I don't see his signature anywhere on there and this seems like a drawing that could've had the potential to get him in some trouble legally. There are a zillion scammers on Ebay selling bogus sketches. Could this be one of 'em?

Hm?

It's definitely DeCarlo. As I said, I saw pictures of the original when it was first sold, and I'm kind of a DeCarlo maniac, and I think I can tell. It's late DeCarlo, but definitely his hand.

Two comments relating to this sketch:

Note to the women:
If your showerhead has eyes, it isn't just a showerhead.

AND
This would be hotter if it wasn't for all the green mildew on the walls.

I like how the same pic has been re-posted 4 times (so far) for everyone to ogle at over and over.

But somebody looked it over for signs of Dan Decarlo verification...

Meanwhile, regarding the shower art, as a comics expert myself, I do NOT confirm it as a genuine DeCarlo. Their shapes are stunted, the lines are smoothed differently, and Betty's butt is too skinny. Even if DeCarlo indeed worked on this, he wasn't the only artist who did. The needless and arbitrary green coloring was also added later by someone else.

Make of it what you will. It looks like Dan Decarlo to me, but again -- I'm not about to study it in depth.

The latest issue of Archie Digest is primarily a reprint of Archie Comics #1, and that first Archie story from Pep, and a couple of goofy "2007 Archie meets 1942 Archie" thingys. Funny, in that my editorial judgement would have stuffed the Jackpot Comics story which appeared in the same month as the Pep story -- the Pep story reprinted quasi-all-the-time (though, realistically, not for 15 years), the Jackpot story never reprinted.

I assume it's a jump in sales. In one sense I see no reason for the company to not do this, and in another sense I do. I think there's a raison d'tre for Archie Digests to not make any particular digest stick out too much, for them to be bemusing bathroom reading.

I leafed through the digests as I usually do -- Jughead Double Digest featured a lack of material that pleases me; Betty and Veronica was better -- though none of the Dan Decarlo material was from a "classic" period which if meted out in bulk would have gotten me to buy it, and was of this curious vintage where I have it reprinted in earlier. I always thought that editor of Archie Digests would be a great job, but I suspect that the editorial guidelines would crush such a job -- on a lease as to what gets to be reprinted, and for some reason they're sorted into clustered such that clusters get reprinted at the same time, and the editing job somehow has come to entail awkwardly editing late 1950 stories where a contemporarious rock band is mentioned and whited-out to mention, say, Green Day. (I saw a reference to such an editing job on a blog.) [The editing job now shifts through some odds and ends of Archie Comics history -- recently the company published just about the entire Jughead's Time Police set of stories in the double digest, and as a by-product slid their way to this strangely impressive Gene Colan story from 1988 which tweaked the formula in some interesting ways -- and just an issue ago they republished from an era I'd thought they would never republish from out of, the official website actually deriding this moment in their history -- albeit pulled from a previous fan-site -- the Daryl Edelman experiment.)

A dirty little secret is that the Archie Comics of the 1940s weren't particularly good or interesting. I read the Americana Series volume 2, and it really was off-putting and dull. But historical purposes insist you purchase that Archie Digest -- and lull yourself through that weird funny animal bear strip that was in the first issue of Archie Comics -- and onto the re-introduction of Veronica...

Archie Comics Screws Dan Decarlo yet again.