The Larcenous Lexicon

Christmas has slowed down my reading and I haven't finished the Sherlock Holmes book yet. Nor is my guest blogger-mother reading anything new. So...

Let me tell you about what else I read. I read golden age comic books -- really old stuff, from 1935-1940 (many people even consider 1935-1937 to belong to a different age, the "platinum age" of comics. I've been reading them all in order, and when I say "all," I mean most of them, as more often than not these comic books have fallen into the public domain and can be read at websites like Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum. Of the remainder, a significant portion (though far from all of them) of those published by DC Comics and Timely/Marvel Comics back in the day have been reprinted by the modern versions of those companies. Many of these archive volumes can be interlibrary loaned!

And I've learned interesting things from these projects. I saw rampant racism in the earliest comic books, that was "toned down" to the occasional blackface-type caricature as comic books became more successful and legitimate. Drugs are a social ill addressed in early comics that begin to disappear once comic books adjust to a more "squeaky clean" version of reality.

Indeed, the beginning of the superhero genre was all about addressing social ills -- every early adventure of Superman wasn't about stopping bank robbers and common crooks, they were about combating juvenile delinquency, drunk driving, war profiteering, housing the poor, unchecked capitalism -- each of which Superman solved in the span of 13 pages. Superman was a rough and tough social justice warrior, not a conservative defender of the status quo (that would come during the war years, when the U.S. couldn't be shown to do any wrong). And that early Joe Shuster artwork, so raw and primal, just bursting with the energy of youthful enthusiasm.

I've read all the earliest published stories of Will Eisner, already a master of the form when he was just getting started, as early as 1936! Lou Fine is another masterful artist from the early days that still gets talked about sometimes, but I've also "discovered" artists largely unknown today, like Munson Paddock and Harry Campbell.

I've seen the earliest works of Carl Burgos and Bill Everett. They worked in a shop together and sold their fare to smaller outfits like Centaur Comics, but wouldn't have ever hit it big without coming up with the one-two punch of the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. Those characters put Marvel Comics (then Timely) on the map, and there possibly wouldn't be a Marvel Comics today without them.

So I'm examining these comics, bit by bit, on my blog, The Larcenous Lexicon. I chose the name because larceny is so prevalent in comic books, and it's a lexicon because it's a new way of talking about the comic books, deconstructing them out into their components and describing them in terms of game mechanics.  I'm about to finish my fourth year of doing that blog, and I can't wait to get through 1940 and start on 1941 (maybe next year)!