Happy Birthday to me!

It's my birthday today!

It's been an interesting year.

the Joker in Gotham Central

The Joker is a touchy subject because no one seems to understand this character. 

One person who understood him is Ed Brubaker in his 

Gotham Central. 

I think that Bill Finger nailed it when he first created the Joker but it seems that he has been misunderstood since. Ed Brubaker has managed to to capture the essence of Finger's Joker in his Gotham Central and made it his own.

Charles Burns' Marriage Made In Hell from RAW Magazine #6,

Charles Burns has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for his Black Hole and his Xed Out trilogy but before he did these great works he was twisting pop culture on it's head with works like...

Mike Mignola's Swamp Thing Annual pages

In the late 80's Mike Mignola transformed his art to a stunning degree. He went from a work horse struggling to put out monthly books to a premier artist that garnered the prestige format that had become so popular at the time. He was creating breath taking work with strong contrasts and stunning compositions.

Happy 67th Birthday Art Spiegelman!

In the early 80's Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly decided to put out a very new and experimental magazine that would contain all of the awesome new comics that they were discovering over seas in Mouly's homeland of France as well as all the great new comic artists Spiegelman was meeting while teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts. They would call this new magazine RAW Magazine and among the new and experimental works that they would publish in it was Art's own story of his dad and his struggles surviving German concentration camps of WWII, a work that he would call Maus. 

 Happy Birthday 

Art Spiegelman!

(born February 15, 1948)

Happy 86th Birthday Frank Frazetta!

Frank Frazetta is one of the greatest practitioners of the comic arts to have ever lived. His stunning draftsmanship is so perfect as to almost look inhuman. In all of his work, no matter the genre, from funny animal to romance, there is this barbarian aesthetic that peeks it’s head which eventually manifested itself into a career of illustrating Conan paperbacks and other barbarian paintings which were so revered that they spurred a whole genre of painting all it’s own.

Frank Frazetta
(February 9, 1928 – May 10, 2010)
A giant of the Golden Age of Comics!

Happy 58th birthday Gilberto Hernandez!

Gilberto Hernández 

born February 1, 1957, creator of 

Heartbreak Soup

Gilbert is here with 3 of his most popular creations, Luba, the local theater owner and bañadora or bath giver of the fictional village of Palomar, Chelo, the sheriff of Palomar and a competitor bañadora, and Tonantizin, the local hot girl.