The Heap For Cheap!

At my new favorite book store Half-Price Books I discovered for small money two of the three The Heap volumes from PS Artbooks. I found the lovely second and third volumes but alas not the first one. That's fine with me (for now) as I discovered that it is in the second volume that the definitive Heap stories from Hillman's Airboy Comics begin, those drawn and written by Ernie Schroeder.

Schroeder is referred to as "the Good Heap Artist", evoking memories of Carl Barks "the Good Duck Artist". It seems Schroeder never signed his work and so no one for years knew the identity of the artist who so distinctively rendered this memorable character for several years to the end of the run. The two volumes I picked up feature delightful covers, one by Frank Brunner that's been featured here before and another by Steve Bissette, an artist with a long association and deep knowledge of monsters in general and swamp monsters in particular.

Maybe one day I'll find the debut volume. I hope I do, but I don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it even if it sports a fantastic Mike Ploog cover.

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The Last Comic Book On Earth - Raw!

Over a year ago I featured the image of Kamandi furiously reading a Demon comic book here. Well above is that same image in its original raw form. And below is the original for the Demon comic he's reading.


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Dodge News!

Above is one of the most beautiful images of anyone reading comics that I've ever seen. It's the cover of Dodge News from the spring of 1953. The two boys are brilliantly presented in vintage Rockwellian style immersed in the wide variey of comic book universes available in the day.

Below as best as I can glean from the image are the covers displayed on this magnificent cover. They all share for the most part either a May, June or July newsstand date for 1948.
























All the covers above are from the Grand Comic Book Database.

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The Well-Read Stooge!

I love pictures of folks reading comics. It's a neat peek into the past when comics were an everyday part of the mainstream culture and not just a sometimes-profitable-for-the-next-big-movie offshoot of pop-culture.

Above the last incarnation of the Three Stooges (Joe DeRita, Moe Howard, and Emil Sitka) from 1971 read some Dell and Gold Key comics from the early 60's. Below are the comics they are reading. Apparently Sitka, taking the place of Larry Fine, was part of the Stooges only for this publicity shoot.




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Hawkeye Reads Comics!

I adore this single page by the incomparable John Buscema and George Klein. These two blended their talents all too briefly on the Assemblers, but they created some exciting pages between them in that tiny period of time.


For one thing I like comic book pages where characters read comics, especially recognizable comics. It's fun, and suits the personality of Hawkeye (not yet revealed to be Clint Barton yet) perfectly.


And for another thing, his page is a clever multiverse-bending ending to a story from Not Brand Echh #12. The whole story can be found here at the Diversions of the Groovy Kind Blog.

The story by Roy Thomas and Tom Sutton is pretty funny and involves these "Resemblers"...er..."Revengers" at a very particular time in their history when they were arguably at their weakest. The team consisted of Goliath, the Wasp, Hawkeye, the Black Panther and brand new member the largely untried Vision.


In fact this story had to happen in between issues #58 and #59 of the Avengers run since that is the only possible time that the assembled team pictured so elegantly by Buscema and Klein ever existed. The Vision became an Avenger in issue #58 and the erratic Hank Pym doffed his Goliath duds to become Yellowjacket in issue #59.


So it is in the pages of Not Brand Echh of all places, in this weird fusion of the of the Marvel and Marble universes where we find this Avengers team assembled for the one and only time really.


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Connecting The Dot!

This is a fun bit of fluff from Harvey with Little Dot enjoying a very specific issue of Richie Rich.

And here's a bonus. Here Casper reads away on a particular issue of Spooky, one with a holiday theme while Wendy cleans.




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Millie The Reader!

This splash page cracks me up. Millie the Model is keeping up with the Fab 4 for sure. As it turns out that particular issue of Fantastic Four was the very first issue I ever saw. It was owned by my cousin but I did get to look at it. While I got a copy of that story soon enough in Marvel's Greatest Comics, it would be many more years before I actually got a copy of that comic itself.

As for Millie, she sure liked her comics. Here's another panel showing her enjoying a Jack Kirby classic!



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The Last Comic Book On Earth!

I love it when comic book characters read comic books, especially when they go to the trouble to reproduce an actual cover. The panel above from Kamandi #4 is more than a bit clever by using the companion Kirby book of the time - The Demon.


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