Free Vertigo First Issues Online

DC Comics imprint Vertigo is offering free .pdf files of the first issues of many of their titles online… a number of which are quite excellent. You can download them here.

(above image of Swamp Thing drawn by John Totleben found here)

I’m sure most of these are worth checking out, but some of them really shouldn’t be missed (in their entirety, not just the first issues)… Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Death: The High Cost of Living, and Books of Magic, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, and Grant Morrison’s Invisibles are all quite fabulous.

All of the above series have been completed and reprinted in book form. As far as stuff that is currently being serialized, I’ve been reading Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man and Bill Willingham’s Fables recently (courtesy of the Minneapolis Public Library) and those are both good reads as well.

Crumbling Paper: Happy Hooligan (1904) by Frederick Opper (strip #4)

Here’s another example of Frederick Opper’s strip Happy Hooligan from 1904. Click the image to read the strip.

You can see more examples of Happy Hooligan (and many other classic comics) at Barnacle Press. Here are some other Opper strips at Barnacle Press.

Here are some other Happy Hooligan examples from Bugpowder.

Here are some other Opper strips from Coconino Classics.

Far Arden Chapter Seven

Chapter seven of Kevin Cannon’s epic 288 hour comic, Far Arden, is online, and continues to get better and better… Kevin is blowing me away with this stuff every month. You would think, producing this stuff under such time constraints (all chapters drawn in 24 hours) that something would suffer… art, storytelling, plot, composition, layouts, design… hell, lettering! Kevin continues to make it all flow perfectly and beautifully, and make it look deceptively easy.

Click here to start reading at chapter seven.

Click here to start at the beginning.

Click here to read more about Kevin Cannon’s mad, mad project.

Click here to cheer Kevin on in his comments.

Crumbling Paper: Happy Hooligan (1905) by Frederick Opper (strip #3)

Here’s another example of Frederick Opper’s strip Happy Hooligan from 1905. Click the image to read the strip.

You can see more examples of Happy Hooligan (and many other classic comics) at Barnacle Press. Here are some other Opper strips at Barnacle Press.

Here are some other Happy Hooligan examples from Bugpowder.

Here are some other Opper strips from Coconino Classics.

Comic Books and Your Little Brain

It’s came to my attention today that comic books can hurt your brain.

Here’s Jerry Lewis on the effects of comic books on the brain in the movie Artists and Models.

You can find other clips from the film on youtube as well.

Boing Boing via Joey Manley called my attention to this article about a disturbing entry on comics from the Illustrated World Encyclopedia of 1966.

Read the full text of the encyclopedia entry here.

I will be burning all of my comic books this weekend. I suggest you do the same… or you may end up like this:

700 Things: (Pirates) #10: Ol’ Pinkeye

Here’s my contribution to the 700 Pirates project from the larger 700 Things project.

Pirate #10: Ol’ Pinkeye.

As with many pirates, Ol’ Pinkeye was shanghaied at an early age, forced to serve under the infamous Captain Bilgewater as a cabin boy on his decrepit vessel The Syphilitic Sue. An orphan all his life, Ol’ Pinkeye had no home to long for, and circumstance made him a fast home of the seven seas.

His inflamed eye is not the product of conjunctivitis, as his name would imply. He actually is a victim of eye-scurvy… indeed, it could easily be cured with citrus, and Ol’ Pinkeye is well aware of this. However, Ol’ Pinkeye refuses to eat anything but salted pork and that which the sea provides, raw weepy eyeball be damned.

Crumbling Paper: The Love of Lulu and Leander (1903) by F.M. Howarth (strip #1)

Here’s a fun example of F.M. Howarth’s strip The Love of Lulu and Leander by F.M. Howarth from 1903. Lulu and Leander is apparently one of the earliest domestic strips. The big-head artwork for this strip is pretty bizarre. Click the image to read the strip.

You can see more examples of this strip (and many other classic comics) at Barnacle Press.

Here’s what Don Markstein’s Toonopedia has to say about Lulu and Leander.

Here’s an article on Howarth.

I have scanned a LOT more examples of this strip coming soon to this blog.