Things That I Will Keep

I forgot to update yesterday, so Matt Feazell week concludes with a double dose of minicomics: an instalment of The Death of Antisocialman and the impressive Understanding Minicomics, which both riffs on his friend Scott McCloud's better known book and is a genuinely useful instruction for creating minicomics.

Matt Feazell week continues with a mini-comic called Board of Superheros, made up of characters like Boardman and Stickboy, The Human Fence, Lone Shark, and of course, Cynicalman.

Scott McCloud's ZOT! was a beloved "thinking man's superhero" title in the 80s that ran for 10 colour issues, took a break, and returned to complete its 36 issue run in black and white. In between, McCloud and Matt Feazell conspired to produce this mini-comic where Feazell's Cynicalman gets transported to the parallel universe where the Zot! characters lived. Presumably as a way to relieve some deadline pressure from McCloud, the "Zot in Dimension 10 1/2" feature appeared in many issues of the black and white run afterward.

Feazell has had some mainstream publishing credits as well, including a full-sized comic called Ant Boy! for Eclipse, and a long-running backup feature in Scott McCloud's great title Zot!, in which McCloud's characters had adventures in stick figure form. I've not had the pleasure meeting Matt Feazell in person, but did have a nice long chat with him on the phone once after he put his number in a panel of that book. I wonder how many other calls he got?

You can read much more about treasury editions at this lovely site.

Archie week continues with the first issue of a digest devoted to the other group of superheroes published in Archie comics - the ones populated by alternate versions of the Riverdale gang themselves. Archie was called Pureheart the Powerful, Jughead was Captain Hero, Reggie was called Evilheart, Betty was called Superteen, and Veronica was just rich I guess. This was one of the many alternate realities invented for the gang, and probably the most enduring.

I remember watching the Everything's Archie cartoon as a kid in the early 70s, produced by the Filmation company that seemed to be making half of the cartoons on Saturday morning (the other half were by Hanna-Barbera). The voice acting was bizarre, the animation was repetitive, the stories forgettable, but the show was apparently popular enough for this tie-in paperback, which reprints a bunch of black and white stories about The Archies. The remarkable bit is that the first story has The Archies visit Filmation and meet the executives in charge, naturally causing mayhem at the studio.

This book is pretty painful to read, as it was written with the intention of being silly and campy but it just comes off as kind of desperate. There was some decent artwork at least, by the likes of Mike Sekowsky and Joe Giella.

I have never been a great fan of comics with a heavy-handed agenda, but Hartley's Spire comics are actually pretty decent - especially compared to the hateful stuff that Jack Chick used to crank out.

Anthology and collaboration week wraps up with Mine All Mine, a 2008 minicomic where all of the short stories are written by David Hopkins, dealing with the theme of stealing. Artists include ZeeS,  Chad Sell, Joe Eisma, Cal Slayton, Ryan Cody, and Wes Molebash.

Sunburn was a fantastic anthology created and edited by Karl Thomsen, primarily featuring other Winnipeg-based artists like Greg Oakes, eventually expanding to include talents from across Canada such as Brad Yung (Stay As You Are). The issue shown here included an extra mini-comic in the centerspread.

Halifax artist Mike Holmes and some talented co-conspirators created this tribute to the many faces of Batman, inspired by the indie comics jam Coober Skeeber. Contributors included Dave Howlett, Alex Kennedy, James White, Kathy Yeats, and Jarrod Crouse.