The Great Comic Book Heroes, Golden Age goodness! Edited by Jules Feiffer

When I was an impressionable kid, I would spend hours pouring over the books at my local library. One book in particular I would come back to again and again and again. It was The Great Comic Book Heroes edited by Jules Feiffer.

The Great Comic Book Heroes was a distillation of the dawn of the superhero comics in the early 1940’s.

Highly Contrasting artists; Steranko; Miller; Sales; Snejbjerg; Risso

My mind has the habit of putting order and classifying everything that it sees.This is true of comic artists and comic styles as well. One style I've recently been thinking about is the high contrast style.

It can be argued that Steranko started this whole style off with his later Film Noir style that he used in his book, Red Tide.

Jim Steranko from Chandler: Red Tide (1976)

Art Spiegelman's Deconstructing comics (NSFW)

I love comics that deconstruct the comics form.

The cover of the 1977 edition of Breakdowns. There are three more pages to go with this one showing the infinite combinations of this image.

For example in Art "Maus" Spiegelman's "Breakdowns" he explores what goes into making the very cover image by breaking down the printed image into it's individual parts and recombining them in a multitude of ways.The first image is the "normal" image. The next image is only the yellow and blue plates printed; then blue and red and so on until he starts to really mix things up with printing the "blue" plate yellow and black plate red. It makes for a surprisingly fascinating picture that I end up spending a lot of time just studying.