I was only nominally aware of the First Chechen War, but I recall loosely following the Second Chechen War and not understanding Vladirimir Putin's intentions behind it. As far as I could tell, the land itself wasn't especially valuable and the region was sparsely populated enough that any additional taxes he might try to extort out of its citizens wouldn't amount to nearly the costs of what he was spending in bombing the ever-loving crap out of them. To this day, I don't see any upside to that war from Putin's perspective other than the wholly egotistical ability to claim that he 'won.' I don't see his war in Ukraine much differently; there's not enough there that can possibly be valuable to Putin besides being able to say that he 'won.'

Sadly, though, that seems to be enough for him. And he's trying his damnest to slaughter any- and everyone in the region.

You've seen/heard the news. While the Russo-Ukrainian War has been going on since 2014, in 2022 Putin massively amplified the conflict with an open, full-scale invasion. And here again, he's trying to bomb the ever-loving crap out of them. I suspect one of the primary reasons this war hasnt gone the way of the Chechen War is because his "strategy" is to just keep throwing more troops and weapons at them until everything crumbles, but the military resources at his disposal are wearing thin. But that doesn't mean he's not able to inflict pain and suffering to the Ukranian people. And that's where Igort's How War Begins comes in.

Igort has taken stories of people involved in the war and put them in comic form. Stories he heard directly from the people themselves, usually relayed over the phone. He told a new story each, originally posting these online, as something between graphic journalism and simply bearing witness to the ongoing tragedies. There is no through-line to these stories, no single protagonist that we follow, and no ending. It's a series of vignette after vignette after vignette, each capturing a small fragment of the larger picture. Everyday people relaying how their lives have been totally upended by Putin's egotisical whim. Some talk about the family they've lost, some saw their homes destroyed, some just trying not to starve. Some stories are several pages long, others are barely more than a few sentences. They're all heart-breaking. It's not an especially long book but it took me rather a while to get through because I had to keep setting it aside.

As far as the formal elements of comics go, it's honestly closer to illustrated prose. There's no question that it does fit what I think most people would recognize as "comics" but there are also a lot of extended text passages with many silent, stand-alone panels. But it's still illustrated very well, and even those instances where the images just sit next to the text, they do compliment each other very well. But, frankly, that's not why you should pick this up anyway.

You should pick this up to bear witness to what's happening in Ukraine right now. Not the media stories with broad statistics about the number of casualties or troops' ground movements or whatever, but the real stories -- the human stories -- of people who are being forced to live through this. This is the very real effects that trying to rain death and destruction down on the Ukranian people looks like. None of these vignettes have endings -- the war is still ongoing after all -- but it's probably better that they don't because I strongly suspect the vast majority of them would end in death.

How War Begins came out from Fantagraphics last month and retails for $29.99 US.

Last week, someone mentioned the old Bungles comic strip by Harry J. Tuthill. I had heard of the Bungles, but knew little about them and nothing about Tuthill himself. So I started with a quick Wikipedia search. Tuthill was something of an unlikely cartoonist, seemingly not doing anything related to drawing or illustration until his 30s. But he launched Home Sweet Home in 1918, which he retitled The Bungle Family in 1924. He finally retired in 1945, and passed away in 1957.

Here's the passage from his Wikipedia entry that stands out to me, though...

Tuthill continued to draw The Bungle Family for McNaught until he had a dispute with the syndicate in 1939, which no longer carried the strip in 1942. After a hiatus, the strip returned — syndicated by Tuthill himself — on May 16, 1943, with newspapers running a promotional banner, "The Bungles Are Back!" It ran for two more years until 1945 when Tuthill retired.

However, the explicit nature of this "dispute" isn't mentioned and there's no citation about it. The only other place I'm aware of that mentions it at all is 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics. The notion of ownership would be an obvious consideration, although given that Tuthill later returned to the strip without McNaught suggests that he was able to hold on to the copyright, so maybe that was never in contention. Indeed, Allan Holtz's Stripper's Guide explicitly states, "Tuthill owned The Bungle Family strip and ended it on August 1, 1942." So was there really a dispute here at all, or was Tuthill indeed just "bored" and "tired" as Time and Newsweek noted at the time?

But here's the other thing that strikes me: Tuthill syndicated the strip himself in the 1940s. That wasn't unheard of, I suppose, but syndicates had been the primary distributors of newspaper comics for at least a couple decades by then. Tuthill certainly would have been aware of, if not made many contacts in the newspaper world by 1943, so that would have helped him. Creators often don't syndicate their own work because it requires a lot of business and social skills that right-brain creators don't often possess in abundance, if at all. I suspect it's much easier now, with so much being run digitally, but back in the mid-1940s, everything would have had to have been done manually. However, the original strip was successful enough, Tuthill may have had enough money to simply hire someone to deal with all that for him.

As to Tuthill retiring the strip once and for all, D.D. Degg has noted that The Bungle Family ended in 1945 three months after the Battle of Iwo Jima in which Tuthill's son George was killed, and that the timing of the two probably is not a coincidence.

The handful of shorter pieces I've read on Tuthill and the Bungles are absolutely fascinating. Someone really ought to write a comprehensive biography of the man!

It's Earth Day! Here's what today's funnies have to say about it...

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Tax Comics
https://ift.tt/Mvt67Bm

Kleefeld on Comics: Bookscan Shows DC Still Hates the Web
https://ift.tt/icH0vpB

Kleefeld on Comics: Midlife Review
https://ift.tt/Fn0XPuY

Kleefeld on Comics: The Evolution of Cap's Shield
https://ift.tt/phe134s

[Author's Note: The following was originally published in The Jack Kirby Collector #59.]

While Captain America was not the first patriotic superhero, he quickly became the most popular. The cover of Captain America Comics #1 expressed a widely held, but largely unspoken, sentiment in the U.S. at the time -- recall that the issue debuted months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the country’s formal entry into World War II. But while the original design for Captain America was by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby became more associated with the character and returned to detailing his exploits several times throughout his career. Jack remained remarkably (for him) consistent in how he drew Cap, but he did make several design changes to the iconic shield, most of which have gone unnoticed.

The original shield design, by Simon, was largely triangular in shape, with a scalloped top. It featured three stars and seven red, white and blue stripes. The splash page of that first issue sports what is basically just a somewhat tighter version of Simon’s original sketch. Though the number of stripes varies a bit throughout the first issue, Jack generally kept things consistent.

The first issue of Captain America Comics was wildly popular and garnered a lot of attention. Including from John Goldwater, the dominant partner in MLJ Publications (now known as Archie Comics) whose own patriotic hero, The Shield, had debuted a year earlier. Simon notes in his autobiography that Goldwater was “admittedly upset that Captain America had far surpassed his hero” and he objected to the shape of Cap’s shield because he felt it was too similar to The Shield’s chest insignia. Martin Goodman, who published Captain America Comics, was leary of legal action. Simon quotes him as saying, “... lawsuits are expensive and we’d better go over there to talk to him.” To avoid a lawsuit, they agreed to change the shield to a circular design.

(Interestingly, they found themselves in Goldwater’s offices again the following year when he threatened file suit over a villain in Captain America Comics #6 called The Hangman, feeling it infringed on the MLJ character of the same name. That Goodman backed down a second time and promised to never use the character again speaks volumes to the relationship between the two publishers.)

What seems to go unnoticed by many fans, however, is that the convex circular shield that debuted in Captain America Comics #2 is not the same design they’re familiar with. Throughout Jack’s work on the stories in the 1940s, he drew Cap’s shield with two red bands and two white bands. All of the shield artwork after the company became formally known as Marvel in the 1960s displays two red bands and only a single white band. A minor distinction, perhaps, but it does have an impact on the overall visual.

The round shield became more of an offensive weapon as well. Cap does backhand one crook with the triangular shield in his first issue, but the shield was largely incidental in that fight; Cap’s fist would have been there if the shield wasn’t. With the round shield, he begins to use it as a battering ram and large, blunt object eventually throwing it for the first time in Captain America Comics #4. It’s thrown a second time in #6, and becomes something of a regular tactic beginning in #8.

Jack came back to Captain America in the 1960s in the pages of Strange Tales. In issue 114, a villain called The Acrobat poses as Cap using a three color band shield. As noted at the end of the story, it was a test to see if fans wanted a return of the original character, who later made his famous return in Avengers #4. In both Strange Tales and Avengers, while readers see a three color band shield for the first time, it’s still not what they’re likely most familiar with. Unlike the four color band shield from the 1940s, in the early 1960s Jack largely drew Cap’s shield as completely flat, not convex.

This seemed to change in Avengers #7. Although there are few instances of a convex shield in #6, it seems to increasingly become the norm beginning in following issue. Chic Stone inked both stories, so this doesn’t seem to be an instance in Jack making alterations to his drawings based on what the inker was doing as was the case with Joe Sinnott inking the Thing over in Fantastic Four. I suspect that Jack had simply drawn the convex shield almost accidentally and editor-slash-defacto-art-director Stan Lee liked it, asking Jack to draw the shield in that manner more regularly. That would explain why it switches from flat to convex and back to flat again throughout the next several of Captain America’s appearances, as Jack may have needed repeated reminders. He took a short break from the character in late 1965, his last Cap story appearing in Tales of Suspense #68 with more than a couple flat-looking shields.

When Jack returned to full pencilling duties in Tales of Suspense #78, the convex shield had become the norm and it only appears flat from a few odd angles. It should be noted, too, that the convex shield became Jack’s default ultimately. Certainly when he returned to Marvel and Captain America in the 1970s, his pencils clearly show he was regularly drawing a convex shield instead of a flat one, and even his sketches for fans from that period and later show that Jack embraced the idea of a convex shield.

Despite seeming like the single, most iconic element of Captain America’s character since his second appearance, his shield actually spent roughly a quarter of a century undergoing modifications and adjustments by Jack himself. Not sweeping changes, but noticeable ones that enhanced the very image of the shield. Jack’s final design on this has remain in place for decades since, even when the shield is passed from one character to another. And it’s worth noting, too, that even Hollywood hasn’t sought to tamper with the iconography that Jack came up with here. It might be a fairly simple design, but that it hasn’t changed since Jack touched it last says how powerful those nuances were.

As a rule, I don't care for superhero origin stories. It's not so much that I don't want to know how they got their powers but rather, there's a general tendency to focus so intently on how they got their powers that there's no "why" attached to it. As in, why does this person decide they're going to take up superheroing? We get all this exposition on some bullcrap "science" to explain how someone shoot electricity out of their hands, but precious little on why they choose to then zap bad guys instead of anything else. As a counter-example, that's the beauty of Spider-Man's origin: he starts off by using his powers to try to earn some money and it's only after the death of his Uncle Ben -- a death that he could have prevented but actively chose not to -- that we understand the persistent guilt that drives him to be a superhero. That's not to say motivations are entirely ignored, but they're often pretty weak and feel more like a writer's excuse to get to the superheroing part of the story. If you don't have a good motivation story and just want to do the superheroing part, that's fine -- just skip right to that then. As I've pointed out repeatedly in the past, one of the best superhero movies produced to date leaves the audience with zero indication on how any of the characters got their powers.*

Midlife (Or How to Hero at Fifty) by writer Brian Buccellato and artist Stefano Simeone takes a different tact. Ruben is a fifty-year-old firefighter, experiencing something of a mid-life crisis. While the whole mid-life crisis idea itself is an overly used trope, it does seem to be explored relatively reasonably here. He doesn't go off to buy a sports car or cheat on his wife with a younger woman or any of the usual go-to cliches. Instead, Ruben is just wrestling with the "what have I been doing with my life" idea. And you might ask, "the dude's a firefighter -- how do you question yourself like that if you've been saving lives for the past quarter century?" And that's precisely where he's coming from -- he's not the guy to go running into a burning building, he's on the administrative side of things, dealing with HR related crap from behind a desk. Necessary work, but not of the "putting his life on the line" variety like his father, who had been a firefighter before him.

Of course, it's not just a fifty-year-old man moping about 100-some pages! They do address why he suddenly manifests powers later in life, and there's a plot around some government agents trying to capture him once he does start exhibiting powers. So there's a decent amount of action scenes as well. Not to mention some family drama rolling around in the background, some of which does directly tie in with how he got his powers. So there's clearly a lot on Ruben's plate.

Having hit fifty a couple years ago myself, I thought the premise sounded interesting. Most hero stories start with the character somewhere between their teens and around thirty, so seeing a quinquagenarian in that role could offer some perspectives and considerations that wouldn't occur to someone younger. Ruben does indeed have that outlook of an older man, but we see enough of his backstory to understand that the superpowers themselves are acting in something of the same role as that sports car or younger girlfriend. While he doesn't seem to carry much geek cred as an adult, his youth was spent on comic books and sci-fi movies, so taking the role of a superhero is as much about trying to recapture his youth as it is helping people.

Weirdly, though, things didn't quite click for me. I mean, I get where Ruben's coming from and the story was executed ably enough -- some elements of it are quite smart, in fact -- but it didn't register as emotionally as I would've thought it might. The story opens with a flashback with Ruben and his friends coming out of the theater, complaining about how bad Batman & Robin was; most of the flashbacks had cultural touchstones like that that were very easy for me to identify with. But Ruben's current situation -- tired of his day job, considering retirement, trying to co-parent two kids with his drug-addled ex-wife, finding out his current wife is pregnant, even just regular contact with friends he had in high school... -- was different enough that it didn't really click. My fiftieth birthday came and went with nothing even remotely like any of that.

Which isn't to invalidate the story, mind you! I'm just saying that my experience turning fifty was different enough that I didn't relate to Ruben as the story premise and, even the flashbacks in the story, suggest I would.

Overall, it was a decent and interesting take on the superhero origin, and a different enough one that it stands out from most others. The sixth issue came out from Image last month, and a trade paperback collection of all six issues comes out in June. The monthly issues (with a cover price of $3.99 US each) are recent enough that they shouldn't be too difficult to find, but the TPB has an MSRP of only $9.99 US so if you're interested, you coud save a few bucks by waiting a bit longer before trying to pick it up.

* It can probably be safely assumed that Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack were born with mutant genes thanks to their parents, but Mr. Incredible's, Elastigirl's, and Frozone's origins aren't even hinted at in either of The Incredibles movies. We have literally no backstory whatsoever on any of them prior to their first appearances on screen, and they're all established heroes "at the top of their game" already.

Late last week, Brian Hibbs published his annual review of the year's Bookscan numbers. Comprehensive and powerful stuff, as always. But also as always, there is a crap-ton of data to unpack, so even Hibbs' nearly-30,000-word analysis skims past a fair amount. As I did last year (that was a year ago?!?) I'd like to make a few call-outs.

Hibbs calls out the new-to-the-Top-750-list publisher Webtoons Unscrolled...

New this year to the Manga charts is another new publisher: Webtoon Unscrolled – they formed right at the very end of 2021, and Bobbie Chase is (was?) the EIC, but they’re already regularly placing books in the Top 750, and they are thus the #7 manga publisher according to BookScan 2023 reporters. They place five books in, all Korean Webtoons, for 92k copies and $1.8m in sales.

Their best-seller is True Beauty where v1 (#1) sells 29k, and v2 (#3) sells 19k. This is followed by Cursed Princess Club, where v1 is #2 (22k) and v2 is #4 (12k), and Doom Breaker where v1 is just a hair under 10k.

Hibbs is comparing them (justifiably) to other manga, but I'm curious how they compare to other web-first comics...

Clarion/Etch was a formerly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt middle-grade imprint. Clarion places a dozen titles within the Top 750, led by the success of the web-first Hooky by Miriam Bonastre Tur – v1 (#2 overall for HarperCollins) leads with almost 77k copies, while v2 (#4) comes in at 75k sold, while v3 (#5) sells 73k – that’s a remarkably consistent sales pattern.

... and...

I was also a little surprised to see a fairly low number for the webtoon-originated Batman: Wayne Family Adventures where v1 only trickled in about 6700 copies. And let’s maybe try to forget the other webtoon titles Zatanna and the House of Secrets or Vixen NYC where v1 of those didn’t even sell enough copies to pay for the printing costs – 757 and 302 respectively.

And I suppose I should make the semi-obligatory reminder that Raina Telegemeir's Smile was a webcomic before it became a perennial best-seller. Hibbs reports that book came in at 103,000. That's something of an outlier for what I want to compare, so let's set that aside.

So what does the above look like in a somewhat-easier-to-digest presentment?
 

Book	Publisher	Sales
Hooky vol. 1	Clarion/Etch	77,000
Hooky vol. 2	Clarion/Etch	75,000
Hooky vol. 3	Clarion/Etch	73,000
True Beauty vol. 1	Webtoon Unscrolled	29,000
Cursed Princess Club vol. 1	Webtoon Unscrolled	22,000
True Beauty vol. 2	Webtoon Unscrolled	19,000
Cursed Princess Club vol. 2	Webtoon Unscrolled	12,000
Doom Breaker	Webtoon Unscrolled	10,000
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures	DC	6,700
Zatanna and the House of Secrets	DC	757
Vixen NYC	DC	302

I think it's worth looking at in this format to see the breakdown more readily. First, each publisher has its own ballpark that it's playing in, sales-wise. You can probably chalk that up, in part at least, to the fact they've got on their physical distribution methods and varying degrees of expertise there. Webtoon Unscrolled is, after all, a newer publisher here in the States, so that an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt wildly outsells them should be no surprise. But the chart, I think, even further highlights just how piss-poor a job DC is doing. Hibbs expresses his surprise at this as well, but I'd like to add that DC has ALWAYS done a phenomenally bad job at digital. Over a decade ago, when DC shuttered their first digital comics initiative, I wrote...

Frankly, I'm not at all surprised Zuda has closed. It was almost inevitable. Not because Zuda was doing anything so wrong, but because office politics and "this is the way we've always done it" stood in its way. Zuda was always "not-DC" within the DC offices, and it's likely that DC Comics getting folded into DC Entertainment and Diane Nelson's subsequent appointment as President last year is what's kept Zuda alive this long. (Not infrequently, an incoming leader likes to take some time to survey the status quo before making significant changes.)

Several years later, when DC closed their ReadDC.com website, I posted this...

That obliquely points to one of DC's problems: they still don't know what they're doing online, despite running a company website of some sort since 1994. Back in 2014, I talked about how they seemed to approach their whole online presence with no sense of strategy, like they were just copying what other companies are doing without understanding why. But even so, they seem to be deliberately holding one hand behind their back in their approach to digital comics...

Digital comics aren't part of "DC-proper" and they're given the short shrift. Which is mind-boggling to me! I can almost guarantee that Marvel is making tons more money than DC when it comes to digital comics, because they've given digital comics some measure of consideration and have a strategy around them. They don't have an also-ran "well, we've got the files digitally to send to the printer anyway" approach...

You'd think somebody in the publishing division wouldn't continue to approach the web as if it's some strange new thing that no one has figured out how to monetize yet. DC's management has changed several times since 1994 but they don't seem to have altered their thinking about the web since then.

Decades later, DC continues trying to half-ass their online efforts, offering no support to the people producing them, and then using the inevitably poor showing as "proof" why the web doesn't work. When the world wide web was only a couple years old in the mid-90s, that was maybe a valid excuse. EVERYBODY was still trying to figure out what the web was back then. But thirty years on, after multiple publishers have proven what can be done with it? That's just sad and pitiable, DC.

Hibbs still remains surprised that Marvel is doing a worse job than other publishers at selling their own material. I pointed out last year that this is precisely part of Marvel's long-term plan in order, I think, to get out of publishing altogether. DC's spent the past several years trying to copy Marvel's franchise success in movie theaters; maybe they should try copying their publishing plan too. Even if they do as bad a job imitating that as they do Marvel's movies, that'd still almost certainly be better than paltry 302 copies of Vixen NYC!