From Cover to Cover

A Tribute to Bernie Mireault, Shortbox Comics Festival is Live, Kurtzman, Toxic Fandom and more- Comic Bookmarks- October 5, 2024

Scott Cederlund -

Let’s just dive into this week’s links that you should check out.

The Form Is the Story in Kevin Huizenga’s Fielder #3
Huizenga’s playful pages lead to the truth of his cartooning.
From Cover to CoverScott Cederlund

I’m always excited for a new Kevin Huizenga book. One of the things I really like about his is that with every new comic, it feels like you need to relearn how to read his stuff. The lessons of the last issue were just for the last issue and this is a new one.

Headlines

ShortBox Comics Fair
ShortBox Comics Fair is a unique and innovative digital comics fair, where every exhibiting artist debuts a brand-new comic!
ShortBox Comics FairSkip to Content

It’s the ShortBox Comics Fair, the only comics fair for the whole month of October. I haven’t had a chance to dig into anything yet but I’ve been seeing a lot of good stuff about the books featured in this year’s fair.

Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out for Blood’ — From Social Media Boot Camps to Superfan Focus Groups
The threat of toxic fandoms — from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to Bridgerton and Game of Thrones — has become an intractable headache for almost every studio.
VarietyAdam B. Vary

This is more comic adjacent than directly about comics but it seems like once again, comics where ahead of the pop culture curve as this was happening in mainstream fandom 10 or so years ago, whenever Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were replaced in their comics. Another reminder that the loudest parts of fandom are always the smallest and angriest parts of fandom.

Viz Media Summer 2025 License Announcement Recap
Viz Media is back again with their Quarterly License Announcements on X (Formally Twitter) today with a whopping twenty-six announcements! There were Twenty-one print titles announced and five digital only titles. Let’s take a look at what they announced!Viz Media Summer 2025 License Announcement RecapAnnouncementsTokyo Fears Rhapsody by Akira SugitoPublisher Summary: Mighty monster Hachiro just wants to eat human sweets in peace, but between fighting ghoulish foes and evading his mad scientist
BehindTheMangaManga Alerts

A lot of Viz announcements for next summer. I never have a sense with manga about what’s the next big thing to look for. There’s some stuff in here that looks like it can be fun but I’m just not a great judge of knowing what to look for in these announcements this far ahead. I really need to be in the store, flipping through the books to get a good idea about them.

A good tribute to a cartoonist who should have gotten a lot more attention than he did.

Business

The Funny Pages

ComicConnect - Davis, Alan - EXCALIBUR (1988-98) #66 Cover - VF: 8.0
ComicConnect is The Online Marketplace for Comic Buyers & Sellers. The Online Marketplace for Comic Buyers, Sellers, Games, & More. Online Comic Auctioneer.
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O.k. So this image doesn’t look like much but follow the link and see all the steps that Alan Davis had to go through to make what looks like on the surface a fairly simple, if colorful, cover that had to be incredibly complex to fixture out every layer that was needed for this one. Davis is a bit under-appreciated for just how good of a cover artist he is.

Interviews

Harvey Kurtzman on the big comic cleanup of 1954 - The Comics Journal
In 1972, Patrick Rosenkranz talked with Harvey Kurtzman and his wife, Adele, about the Senate Comic Book Hearings of 1954 and the subsequent establishment of the Comics Code.
The Comics JournalPatrick Rosenkranz

To celebrate Harvey Kurtzman’s 100th birthday, it’s been Kurtzman week over at The Comics Journal. This interview from 1972 is a great take on the Wertham hearings when it wasn’t too far in the distant past. It’s a bit weird reading this— I grew up in the 1980s when Wertham was still the bogey man. It’s this weird bit of nostalgia to read this and remember the days when his spectre still hung over everything.

Jeff Lemire Teases His DC All In Run On JSA, Absolute Flash | Comic Book Club
Writer Jeff Lemire discusses what to expect from his DC Comics All In series Justice Society of America, and Absolute Flash.
Comic Book ClubAlex Zalben

What’ this I feel? Optimism about DC books? That DC All In special this week wasn’t anything groundbreaking but was fun. I haven’t heard a negative thing about this week’s Absolute Batman launch. And I’m willing to give Jeff Lemire a bit of leeway with this JSA book.

Reviews & Features

A (somewhat) forgotten gem: Rocketo ⋆ Atomic Junk Shop
A glimpse into a wonderfully imagined retro-future post-catacylsmic Earth
Atomic Junk ShopEdo Bosnar

For you kids not old enough to remember, Frank Espinosa’s Rocketo was all the rage back in the mid-Aughts. Coming out of the animation world, Espinosa was probably a bit ahead of the game with this type of style and story. If this had come out like 10 years later, it wouldn’t have been “memory holed” like the article describes. And it needed a publisher like Oni or Dark Horse behind it. Instead, it was published by an outfit called Speakeasy that didn’t last all that long. And it looks like Image picked it up at the end there but it feels like this was at a time when Image was publishing anything and everything so that most books just got lost in the shuffle.

Early Review: We Called Them Giants is expansive, yet intimate stories about finding friends and families at the end of the world
Even though it’s a fantasy story, We Called Them Giants is different from much of Gillen’s previous output
Graphic PolicyLogan Dalton

Logan compares it to both The Iron Giant and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? That’s an interesting comparison