Don Markstein's Toonopedia Blog Entries

EXCERPT: In my article on Wonder Warthog, I mentioned a Gilbert Shelton creation titled Not Quite Dead, about an aging rock band, which, when I wrote the article, was available in parts of Europe but not in America. A few years ago, I not a message from a friend, to the effect that Not Quite Dead had recently made it to these shores. I made a note to myself to check it out at the neighborhood funnybook store, next chance I got. Used to be, the comics store was one of my regular stops....

EXCERPT: In the Toonopedia Forum the other day, the topic happened to come up (in a thread titled "The Real Reason") of partisan politics impinging on Al Capp's Li'l Abner. Newspaper editors are collectively accused of having dropped the strip for attacking their "sacred cows", causing premature (two years before Capp's own death) cancellation of the strip itself. Apparently, the poster was thinking of this alleged "sacred cow" attack as an...

EXCERPT: I just posted a new article on Billy Make-Believe, only a day after doing one on Bobby Make Believe. Gosh, I hope nobody is confused by them. (The fact that the two titles appear on different lines of the Contents page should help us avoid that.) I've done this sort of thing before — in fact, just three months after opening the site, I posted Hippety Hopper and Hoppity Hooper on the same day. It appeals to my sense of — something or other, no doubt. Or maybe it just...

EXCERPT: I see the heirs of Jerry Siegel have succeeded in legally reclaiming a portion of his greatest brainchild, Superman. Also grabbable under the same legal principle are Robotman, The Star-Spangled Kid, Red, White & Blue and maybe some other stuff, but I don't think anyone's opposing them quite so hard on those. And we're all glad of that, aren't we? After all, DC Comics having bought Superman, who made billions for them, for $130, is widely known as the...

EXCERPT: I have an old robe that zips up in front and fits like a muumuu — very comfortable, next best thing to being naked. Unless I go out for some reason, I sometimes don't get out of it all day. I also have white hair and a long, thick, Santa-like beard, neither of which I take the trouble to cut very often (tho it's getting harder to find hair that "needs" cutting). These are among the rewards of freelancing — I don't have to look...

EXCERPT: I've mentioned before that I've written in print about some of the more bizarre e-mail I've gotten here, so I actually have a record of some of it. So even now, I can quote stuff I got years ago, word-for-word. Here's one I got in 2004. I would hope this is not a unique question, but I don't have a clue as to where to get an answer. I like Betty Boop, but I'm a black lady and I cannot wear anything with all white people on it. I would love to...

EXCERPT: When I told my wife about the blog entry I was preparing to write, she quoted Tom Lehrer's dictum that "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd." I can see that point of view about most things — but Wonder Woman of the early 1940s is hard to view "incorrectly". Of course, when (in the early 1960s) I read about her in Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, I was as skeptical as the next guy. Wertham called Wonder Woman "the lesbian...

EXCERPT: The other day, I posted a review of a comics history book that wouldn't have given a reader much accurate information about comics. There's still a lot more to say about its misconceptions and inaccuracies, but I was already to the point of having written at such great length as to bore the average reader. But now, one little item is gnawing at my brain, insisting I should have included it anyway because it's just so darned egregious. I'm going to scratch that...

EXCERPT: A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find two full-length books in my P.O. box, apparently sent to me for review. I've never reviewed anything on this site before, but then, I didn't have a venue for free-form writing here, before starting this blog, late last year. Until then, I confined myself to writing what amounts to encyclopedia articles; and while the ones I do here often bear certain similarities to reviews (I'm not good at hiding the fact that I have...

EXCERPT: In the mid-1990s or so, a controversy flitted across a couple of message boards, triggered by Marvel Comics having committed a fairly egregious faux pas. (Hey, we've already established that I think it's perfectly okay to dredge up ancient news for current blog topics.) What happened was, through a series of lettering, engraving and proofreading errors that weren't the company's fault, a Marvel character referred to another character by an ethnically insulting...