Special 200th post!

This is the 

200th blog post

I've done for the 

Great Comic Book Heroes. 

Working on this blog has been an amazing ride.

Scott McCloud speaks about the vast world of comics in his classic Understanding Comics. 

I started writing the Great Comic Book Heroes in January 2011, about 4 and a half years ago because I was looking for a more rewarding way to spend my time and I wanted to get into my passion of Comics more deeply and maybe give something back to the Comics Community that gave me so much.

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)

RAW Comix vol. 2 #2, Required reading for the post literate

 A cornucopia of graphic eye candy!

cover by Joost Swarte, a Dutch artist who often deconstructs the comics format as in this illustration where the depicted pictures interact with each other. 

I read these when they first came out. I loved volume 1 with it’s large size format that emphasized the graphic qualities of the comics inside. In contrast volume 2 is a digest size (6’ x 8 ¾’) which is better suited for narrative driven stories and the diverse art styles that illustrate the stories in here really shows off the wide range of ways that great stories can be told.

Mark Beyer's "Agony" and our ecstasy!

In the 80's I grew up loving RAW Magazine and anything to do with it. One of their regular artists was Mark Beyer. He was a naive artist who took perverse pleasure in satirizing the hardships of life.