The Avenger's The Earth's Mightiest Comic title!

There is so much goodness packed into The Avengers over the years with so many amazing creators that each one deserves a essay of their own, but for lack of space and time I'll give you the abridged highlights of the title.

The Avengers issue #177 is one of the first comics I ever owned and made me a life long Avengers fan.

Four color comics for just a dime!

With the success of Superman in Action comics #1 new publishers where popping up hoping to catch some of the magic that Superman was. The comics were produced quickly and cheaply so that they could get out there before the craze died down and so that the publishers profit margins could be larger.
One of the very early publishers of comics was Quality Comics. Their first comic was Smash Comics (Aug. 1939) featuring master spy Espionage, the exotic Abdul the Arab, humorous Archie O'Toole, adventurous Wings Wendall, and super robot, Bozo the Robo the iron man and his human friend Hugh Hazzard.

Eisner creating Spirit's four color world!

In the late 30's Superman hit the scene in Action Comics #1 and comic books became a huge business. To fulfill the need for new material, sweatshops like the Eisner/Igor studio popped up and created new comic pages in an assembly line process.

They were made cheaply using a pulpy newsprint paper and an efficient method of reproducing color called the four color process which used 64 colors mixed from four inks; yellow, cyan (blue), magenta (red) and black.

Planetary's Doc Brass and other supermen in comics.

One of my favorite things in Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary is Doc Brass and his league of pulp heroes.

Doc Brass and his crew are all take-offs of famous heroes of the pulp era.

Art Spiegelman's "Two-Fisted Painters"

Art Spiegelman is not only the creator of the  Pulitzer Prize winning graphic Novel Maus, he, along with his partner Françoise Mouly, were the creators of Raw Magazine where Maus first appeared. I was a huge fan of Raw Magazine back in the 80's. Reading it had a way of altering your view of what comics were. I would read something like Art Spiegelman's Two-Fisted Painters and I would start to see color breakdowns in all comics that I read afterward. I remember studying all the nuances of the book. I would look at the color break-downs and compare them to the finished pages, and study the pages with the 'wrong' color separation on them.

click on the pictures to get larger versions -

Jack Kirby's use of 4 panel grid

I find comics fascinating, not only in their content but also in the way that content is communicated. With this and subsequent posts I'd like to look at some of the more popular forms of panel arrangements in comics.
Besides the splash page (which is technically not a comic page in the true definition of comics being a medium of sequential panels) the most basic of the common page divisions is the 4 panel grid.
When I think of the 4 panel grid I think of Kirby's Silver and Copper age work on titles like the Fantastic Four and the New Gods, in fact I have a hard time thinking of any other artist that does use this form of page layout.

The 4 panel grid can be good when you have a very wordy page. The sameness of the panels creates a rhythm that is easier to follow. A 9 panel grid might work as well or better depending on the page.

Alan Moore's Green Lantern annual #3

Ever since reading my first Moore story back in 1985 (Swamp Thing #40) I've been a Moore fanatic picking up everything with his name on it. When he left DC it was a hit or miss thing but in the early days everything he wrote was head over heals above any other comic, it was MAGIC! One of my favorite of his (and I had many) was his Green Lantern annual #3 that he did with Fables and the Elementals, Bill Willingham.