Covered 365: Day 104

A safe and understandable pick.

I looked at Young Love and knew that was right up your alley. If the composition had been a little more interesting I might have given it a nod.

For #105 no complete standout but I have to pick Blue Bolt, even though my personal preference is Jimmy Olsen. If Jimmy Olsen #98 is the bizarre extreme, #105 is the metaphysical apotheosis of Olsenity. The World of 1,000 Olsens is the eighth circle of Hell.

We can’t go with another Hulk I guess, but #105 is nearly equal to #104. After saying that I’m not a Cockrum fan, I am also again going to choose X-Men as a runner up. House of Secrets is good but the previously mentioned HoSs were better.

Superman is at it again, finally getting Lois to the Death House, albeit as bride of a convict. Kindly Superman shows his support by reminding Lois “in five minutes you’ll leave alone – as his widow!”

Finally, Adventures into the Unknown (Feb 1959) – Groot!

Wow that’s harsh. “Keep it civil” is a commenting rule. I always try to deliver what tiny critiques I have in as oblique a manner as possible, as not to offend Walt’s delicate sensibilities. I wouldn’t be surprised if the therapy bills overwhelm Big B after that drubbing. For shame.

I think you are basically arguing that there are too many hero book picks. From my perspective I am going to argue the same way that I did to Walt early in this exercise, that “great image” is not the same think as “great comic book cover”. To me the comic book cover has to convey story and action, and do so with comic booky artistry. The Lone Ranger that you cite doesn’t do well with respect to any of these criteria, even though it displays great artistic skill. It looks to me like the cover of a boys’ adventure novel, and when I was a kid I wouldn’t have touched a comic with that cover with a ten foot pole. B-o-o-o-ring. This is not a critique of the art but of its place in the exercise. The Mona Lisa as a comic cover would be far worse still. (However Goya’s “Fight With Cudgels” would make a passable cover.)

The funny animal and funny kid books have a different problem in my mind. I see them as adaptations – in one case of animated shorts, in the other of comic strips. This already to some degree shifts them out of contention for “great _comic book_” covers. But the other problem I see is the “comic booky artistry” requirement. Many of these covers (including some of your examples) are cartoons, and the images are just too simple for me to consider them “great”. Where they are more than cartoons (e.g. the turkey book that Walt picked awhile back), they can definitely be in the running. Also a lot of the Harvey books fall down on my “tells a story” requirement, as they are just sight gags that live entirely in the moment. For #105 (I think), there was one of Richie Rich building a “gold man” rather than a snowman – it was clever and colorful, but I would not call it “great”.

As I have agreed with Walt on a lot of these picks, and I really haven’t seen it all, I think you have to admit that it’s more about proclivities and criteria. The exercise still remains very interesting to me and is really impacting my collecting/investing priorities. The same old might be the same old because it’s the stuff.