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False Starts
posted December 26, 2004
 



"Christmas is for Consumers" Report

1. Comics-related gift I received: The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker.
2. Comics-related gift I bought for someone: Hero for Hire #9.
3. Comics I bought for myself in a Christmas sale, for various projects: Captain America #107 and #201-206, Fantastic Four #85, St. Swithin's Day, Mister Miracle #16-17, Spider-Man: Blue #2 and #4-5.

There From Here

News that Will Eisner is recovering from bypass surgery spurred me into several minutes of aimlessly looking for Will Eisner stuff on the web, such as this really long entry at the Lambiek site. I stopped the longest here, on one of Denis Kitchen's sites, looking at original art from people like Eisner, Jack Davis and Peter Poplaski. And then I forgot what I was doing and went to see if the Colts-Chargers game was the national.

This morning I thought it might be funny to celebrate the holiday season by doing something on porno comics, so I looked up a few titles of high-quality porno comics that I could remember from working at Fantagraphics twenty feet from the Eros editor, which led me to the gorgeous-looking but really nasty Young Witches 2, which led me to this biography of F. Solano Lopez on a Dan Dare site. Then I decided to do something else.

A little later in the morning I suddenly remembered that it had been ten years since the strangest Christmas day of my life, my first year in Seattle when I knew almost no one and I spent much of the holiday in Gary Groth's basement watching movies with his then-tenants the cartoonist Jeremy Eaton and longtime Fantagraphics art director Peppy White. Our double-bill: In the Name of the Father and Captain America. As I recall, the best scene in Captain America involved the super patriot faking the pukies and asking to be let out of the car and then when Ned Beatty lumbers forward to check on him, Captain America runs around him and snakes the car! Here's hoping Ed Brubaker remembers this highly effective combat strategy.

Short, Incomplete List of Comics About Sports

Air Gear
Baseball Comics
Baseball Greats
Big Ben Bolt
Captain Tsubasa
Cotton Woods
Eyeshield 21
George Foster, Man of Dreams
Gil Thorp
Girl Got Game
Greatest Stars of the NBA
Harlem Beat
Hikaru No Go
It's Only a Game
Joe Palooka
Johnny Comet
Ozark Ike
Prince of Tennis
Rebound
Slam Dunk
Tank McNamara
The Golem's Mighty Swing
Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys
Whistle!
Whoa, Nellie!

There are several more. There are a number of untranslated sports manga, including many of the more classic serials, and I'm sure there are a few sports BD series as well. I don't know how to list the various drag racing cartoons that were in the Pete Millar magazines. When Revolutionary was cranking out the biography comics in the early 1990s, they did several sports stars, as did a few other companies I barely remember, like Personality and Magnum.

Actually, this is a much bigger list than I thought I could piece together starting out this morning. Has anyone out there ever seen that George Foster comic? It sounds fantastic. So does Hamilton's "Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders" and "Stan Lee Presents Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys in Danger in Dallas," but they sound less about sports. You know, like NFL Superpro.