Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Comics History: Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine


If you're interested in the history of comics, you might want to check out Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine. At Pappy's you might find crime and superhero stories from the '40s, historical fiction and talking animals from the '50s, or science fiction and horror from the 60's (though the focus is clearly on pre-Comics Code material). Everything appears in very clear scans that come up full screen with a single click.

To give you some sense of what you might find, here are a couple of pages from a recent post that features a Captain Marvel Jr. story from 1943. In this story, the gangsters and the poltergeists form a pact to fight their mutual enemy: Captain Marvel Jr. The layout of these two pages is beautiful and facilitates storytelling that is very smooth and economical; I especially like the way the cartoonist, Emmanuel Raboy, controls eye movement, even using the shape of the panel to help move the action along in panel 3 of the first page. There's also some great use here of unbounded panels, especially panel 4 of the second page, a panel that works especially well because of the way it is positioned on the page in relation to both panel 1 and panel 3. Of course, that's not quite the end of the story as Captain Marvel Jr. still has to deal with the poltergeists, but I'll let you see how that plays out yourselves.

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