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Miss Cellany Clears the Queue

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D. D. Degg April 5, 2024 2 minutes 0 comments

Before another Saturday comes around I’d best get this Wayno Blog from last month out of the way where Wayno discusses the idea of waiting for an idea to come to you rather than chasing an idea.

Our colleague Mark Parisi, cartoonist of the award-winning panel Off the Mark, recently started a lively social media discussion after hearing an interview with a writer who said, “Don’t try to find ideas. Wait for ideas to find you.” Naturally, people who meet regular deadlines disagreed with this advice, poetic as it might sound.

I didn’t hear the interview myself, and I wonder if they provided context about an idea being a starting point that may or may not lead to creative work, but taken on its own it sounds like a plan for accomplishing nothing.

Wayno goes on that, as a daily cartoonist, he doesn’t have the luxury of waiting, or laying down ’cause he’s sick, or forgetting about it when he isn’t in the mood, or…

Deadlines don’t care if you’re depressed or hung over or have the flu.

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Hangin’ around in the queue just as long is this piece, In My Own Words: Comic Art Collector Denis Kitchen by the underground comix artist and publisher about some of the cartoon art he has collected and the cartoonists who gave them to him: Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Mark Schultz, etc.

As an earnest amateur I was also periodically stung. One particular incident lingers. Around 1970 I attended an estate auction in Milwaukee and picked up an early Peanuts Sunday for 20-some dollars. A steal, even then! Shortly afterward I spotted a small ad in Comics Buyer’s Guide offering Jack Davis art for sale or trade. I loved Davis art and was anxious to own a classic page. But without sufficiently establishing what I was getting in return, I foolishly mailed the Charles Schulz art for what ended up being a low-grade Davis quickie. Hard lesson learned.

Editor’s note: Denis Kitchen was an original member of the Underground Comix movement in the late 1960s and ’70s, as well as the founder of the pioneering publishing house Kitchen Sink Press. A portion of his collection will be offered in Heritage’s April 4-7 Comics & Comic Art Signature^® Auction.

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From Easter weekend comes: How Johnny Hart Pointed to the Cross and Empty Tomb in the Funny Papers

On Holy Saturday 2007, cartoonist Johnny Hart died of a stroke while working at his drawing table. Hart was the award-winning creator of the popular comic strips The Wizard of Id and B.C. which, at one time, reached 100 million readers worldwide every day. In a 1999 Breakpoint commentary, Chuck Colson identified Hart as “the most widely read Christian of our time,” with “more readers than C.S. Lewis, Frank Peretti, and Billy Graham combined.”?

John Stonestreet tells of Johnny Hart’s conversion and his sometimes controversial, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes heavy handed use of the B.C. comic strip to spread the Good News.

If that Chattanooga Times Frees Press link above doesn’t work for you the Colson Center Breakpoint has it.

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More recent news:

ComicBook.com is among those informing us that Action Comics #1 Sells for Record Amount at Auction

A copy of Action Comics #1, the 1938 comic book that introduced Superman to the world, sold for $6 million Thursday at Heritage Auctions. The sale took place during the first session of Heritage’s four-day Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction. Graded at 8.5 by CGC, the issue marks one of the best-condition copies known to exist in the world. According to a statement from Heritage, only two previous copies have ever been graded higher. This is also only the second comic ever to sell for over $5 million and — surprise! — the previous record-holder was also a copy of Action Comics #1 from back in 2022.

There are 78 copies of Action Comics No. 1 in CGC’s population report, with the grading service estimating there are only about 100 surviving copies of the comic at all. In September of last year, Heritage sold an issue graded CGC 0.5 [beat-to-hell condition] for $408,000.

As IGN explains in the same auction This $264,000 Letter Reveals the Very Different Superman We Almost Got

Siegel and Shuster had temporarily parted ways back then, after their earlier version of “The Superman” had been rejected by publishers. Shuster became despondent, even burning the original artwork (only the cover survived). Hoping an established artist would help change things, Siegel wrote to several.

Russell Keaton was the artist of the popular newspaper comic strip Skyroads [at the time of the letter], as well as the ghost artist on the Buck Rogers Sunday strip [up to 1933]. His illustration style was similar to Joe Shuster’s, Superman’s other co-creator, but it was more developed.

Their Superman was literally the Man of Tomorrow, a toddler sent not from distant planet Krypton but from millions of years in Earth’s future, when humans have evolved to gain “titanic strength.” As “giant cataclysms” destroy the planet, the last man on Earth, an unnamed scientist, sends his son back to 1935 in a small time machine he invented (Siegel intended the adult Superman’s adventures to take place in the near future).

The letter can be read at the Heritage Auctions site – free registration and they don’t bother you with emails. The Action Comics #1 page at Heritage Auctions.

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Allan Holtz’s Stripper’s Guide presents Jeffrey Lindenblatt’s Paper Trends: The 300 for 1999

feature image from Hagar the Horrible