Matt Dembicki's minicomics collection in the Library of Congress

I was chatting with the serials librarians (electronically) today after dropping off some comics and minicomics for their collection (curbside), and Matt Dembicki (former ComicsDC writer and our logo artist) came up. He donated his minicomics collection to the Library of Congress a few years back and this search will let you find the 355 issues that he passed along, as the "Matt Dembicki Mini-Comics Collection" nestles in the main comic book collection. The "Small Press Expo Collection" has 3250 pieces cataloged, but the librarians solicit those at the con (when there is one).

I was there! A boast about the Palais du Louvre comics exhibit in 1967

 by Katherine Collins*

September 18, 2020

(reprinted with permission)

Since the famous Louvre exhibit of Comics is cited so often, and was mentioned again in a lengthy press release from Heritage Auctions, I think the time has come for me to puff out my chest and reminisce about having been there, in Paris in 1967. (Yes, it was 1967, not 1968, as was mistakenly stated in HA's post.)

I am a Canadian, not any species of European. I happened to be in Paris in spring of 1967, just wrapping up a one-year "tour by bicycle" of Europe with my good friend Alan Hughes. We had split up for the day, to pursue separate interests. I was strolling along the Rue de Rivoli, in central Paris, not knowing that I was beside one of the walls of the rather enormous Palais du Louvre, and with no knowledge that there was an exhibit therein of (ta-da!) COMICS! Suddenly, I came upon a door into the Palais, with a lot of huge signs all around it, and up the high wall, proclaiming Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative — meaning Comic Strips and Graphic Narrative. (Luckily I could speak French a little bit.) The outside display also sported really enormous blow-ups of portions of panels from Hogarth's Tarzan, and Prince Valiant and Terry & The Pirates and lots more. I was utterly dumbstruck. It was like finding a gold mine! It was a gift from the gods! There was nothing in the world that I could have more happily come upon!

I had been digging for comics all over Europe for the previous year, and was fully aware of the European love of classic American comics — and of the many excellent reprints of the same, during the long period of drought of appreciation for those comics in North America. I was 19 years old, and had been very consciously and assiduously collecting everything to do with newspaper comics that I could find ever since I was nine years old, in the mid-50s. As anyone who was trying to do the same at that time can attest, there were very slim pickings. I had been buying every single available book of comics history and scholarship ever published, and I had maybe about five books. Plus my own scrapbooks, and my mother's scrapbooks of Caniff's Terry from the thirties and forties.

I was well aware of the energetic scorn consistently heaped upon comics by anybody who fancied themselves an arbiter of culture. I had been drawing my own comics since I was about 7, and publishing a strip in my University newspaper for the last two years. (And I went on to publish lots of comics for the next 21 years, and more again, more recently.) But I was never given any credit or praise for my work, alongside the others in my university "creative writing" community. If I had been writing puerile poetry and shallow short stories, I might have received some respect. But that did not happen. Nonetheless, I had no other ambition but in comics.

So, finding a comics exhibit, loudly trumpeted in The Louvre of all places, boosted my self-esteem and my belief in the worthiness of my interests. I have remained bolstered and proud ever since. Of course it was another twenty-five years, more or less, before genuine scholarship and quality reprinting of comics began to noticeably wriggle their way out of the Halls of Shame. I had to continue buying European reprints of American comics, in assorted languages, on buying trips to "The Continent." I would ship boxes of books home to myself.

I have never forgotten the joy and encouragement of that Louvre event. I have here beside me the "programme book," which is a 256-page, 8x11 very detailed history of, and love letter to, our favourite art form. Its bright-red covers have always shone proudly from my bookshelves ever since I brought it home in 1967. Maybe it is valuable, but I have never sought to find out. It is my treasure! It was translated into English in the early 70s or so, and of course I have that right beside me as well.

I lost track of the hours I spent inside the exhibit on that day. What sticks in my memory the strongest is the huge — really huge! — enlargements of individual panels of all the great strips from throughout comics history. You name them, there they were. Their size recalibrated my standards of appreciation for comics. Before then, I had seen only, at the biggest, panels of maybe 6x8 inches. These were up to 6 ft. by 8 ft.! Maybe bigger. Ever since then, I have always preferred my comics really big!!

And the lengthy texts posted on the walls gave an intelligent voice to the analysis and appreciation of the comics; this was something I had been lacking for my whole life. Although I have, in the subsequent 53 years, forgotten a lot of the details of the show, I can still easily call back to my mind and emotions the astonished excitement of being there, surrounded by huge comics and the obvious respect they were given. My heart once again beats faster, my mind reels with mounting pleasure, and I am once again distracted from any other reality in the world. I can feel it again any time I want.

In late afternoon, I stumbled back out onto the street, clutching my programme book of inestimable value, thinking of nothing but comics; I was unconscious even of the charms of my favourite city, Paris. And you can tell by this paean to the exhibit and its comics, that I have never lost the thrill and the re-education of the Louvre's history-making creation.

And I was there! I was at an epochal event in the elevation of comics' place in culture. For the rest of my life, it will reverberate in my grateful brain.

*I was the cartoonist of "Neil the Horse," which was part of the black-and-white boom in the 1980s, under my former name, Arn Saba. A big fat anthology (360 pp.) was published in 2017, by Conundrum Press; it was titled "The Collected Neil the Horse." My name change was due to a "sex change", as they formerly were called. It was "announced" in 1993, and resulted in my immediate expulsion from the comics community. I could not get published again until 2017, with the anthology. I am now working on a new graphic novel for Conundrum. It is not a funny animal book this time, but a "real people in the real world" story. Not to be melodramatic, but I may not live to finish it. My health is very dire and uneven. I have long periods of complete disability. Many doctors have failed to diagnose it, over the last five years. But I am plugging along as much as possible. I am happy to say that I am thrilled to be Back In Business as a cartoonist. I owe fulsome thanks for this pleasure to Andy Brown, the Honcho of Conundrum Press, and one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known.

(UPDATED Sept 21 2020):

I try never to miss an opportunity to plug myself. So I should also mention that I have been inducted into both of Canada's "Comics Halls of Fame". (I don't know why Canada has two.) I was named to The Joe Shuster Awards in 2013; and in 2017 was entered into The Giants of the North Canadian Cartooning Hall of Fame. 

One last toot of the horn: the graphic novel I'm working on has the Working Title of "Beautiful". Nice and simple, but could be changed in time. It takes place in Vancouver in 1918, during the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic. I have been planning this book for decades, and its timing, at the outbreak of the Covid-19, is a coincidence. I am not sure whether I think this is a good thing or not. The story is deeply-researched, but is not really "about" the flu epidemic. It is "about" the main characters living through the drama of so much death. Large pages, beautiful scenery, good looks at early Vancouver. It is another "big fat" book, and I hope it will be in colour. It is also a sapphic love story, and what's more involves some Native characters, who have fled up the coast. I have had to constantly pull the reins on myself so that I don't keep writing in all sorts of slapstick and nonsense. (That being my natural tendency.) It is a serious story, but not grim or horrible. There's also some political content, about the left-wing resistance to Canada's WWI conscription, and the simultaneous fierce anti-union stance of the government. One of main characters is an activist.

Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers at Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center | National Air and Space Museum has reopened via tickets, so I stopped by yesterday. It's mostly very large aircraft, but there are a few interesting small things including a ballooning exhibit that includes some early editorial cartooning prints.

There is a very nice exhibit case of  space-toys including a lot from Buck Rogers (soon converted from a novel to a comic strip) and Flash Gordon (originally a comic strip).  Here's my set of photos.

Conrad's last Nixon cartoon: "I forgot the line!"

 by Mike Rhode

I was in a bookstore on Capitol Hill (Capitol Hill Books in fact) this weekend, glancing through the comics and graphic novels section, and spotted this copy of The King and Us: Editorial Cartoons by Paul Conrad (Los Angeles: Clymer Publications, 1974; 3rd printing 1975) collecting his cartoons about the disgraced President Nixon. Conrad's one of the great editorial cartoonists of the 20th century, and had been on Nixon's enemies list so I picked it up to look at...

...$10 and it was a third edition, signed in August 1994 twenty years after it was published, and twenty-five years later, the Sharpie ink is already blurring and fading.... 

 

...but there were two photocopies laid in, one of Conrad's last cartoon about Nixon from April 25, 1994, showing Nixon's tombstone with a double entendre engraving, 

"Here Lies Richard M. Nixon, 1913-1994"

 

...on the back side of that first photocopy was a sketch of the idea of that cartoon, inscribed, 

"For Frank and Estelle, Lisa, David -- All the Best - Paul Conrad"...

 

...but it also had something the final cartoon was missing. 

A caption with a second double entendre - 

"The Final Coverup" 

- which made the cartoon just a bit more brutal, 

as befitting a man who was was audited  by the IRS as a result of the enemies list

and whose favorite cartoon depicted Nixon nailing himself to a cross.

Estelle apparently kept the sketch until Nixon died 

and sent a photocopy to Conrad to remind him of it. 

He wrote back, "Estelle! I forgot the line! 

Why didn't you call and remind me. Love Paul C."

Admittedly, there are some deductions here, and it's a very minor bit of comics history, 

but one never knows what one will stumble across in the pages of a book. 

I wonder where the original sketch is now...

EHR Insights - A Secret History of Comics story

by Mike Rhode

In 2011, 3 issues of EHR Insights were published by the Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) which was based in Falls Church, VA at the Skyline complex. The comic book was built on the same lines as Will Eisner's WWII-and-beyond-era PS Magazine. The comic was "the new training booklet for the military's Electronic Health Record" which was designed by the Army to complement its pre-existing AHLTA system.

Unlike PS Magazine, EHR Insights survived for only a year and has mostly vanished without an electronic trace. ComicsDC writer R.M. Rhodes gave me a copy of issue 2 today and I started poking around looking for information on it. The main source of information online is a blog post by Brandon Carr who was the creator of the comic.

The comic itself is a mixture of single page comics and text, and a feature story. In #2 it's an Indiana Jones takeoff, "Montana Jackson on the Quest for the Golden Record."

Carr wrote that 10,000 copies of each comic were printed, but none are currently cataloged in WorldCat and only my copy is now indexed in the Grand Comics Database, although a set should theoretically be in the National Archives. My copy of this issue will be sent to Michigan State's Comic Art Collection soon, but it's also now scanned and available in the Medical Heritage Library.

I've reached out to both DHIMS's successor agency and Carr, and and the successor agency says they have no information on it.

The Spirit on the radio in DC (UPDATED)

As we've noted in the past, Pete Mullaney is going through the microfilm of the Washington Star, finding items of interest in the comics.

Pete's latest find is that the Star was planning on running the Spirit comic book insert, and advertised it with an ad for Mr. Mystic on May 27, 1940.

They followed that up on June 1, 1940 by announcing the Spirit radio show, which was apparently very rare.

Local writer Karl Schadow researched the show in 2012, after Ken Quattro asked for information about it. Thanks to Bruce Rosenberger for the links to these articles.

UPDATE: Pete found another announcement for Lady Luck from June 8th's front page.

More spot illos from CHAD-

As in the previous post about CHAD-, which helped identify him as Chad Grothkopf, these are from a newspaper held in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's archives, here in Falls Church. The run is being digitized and put online in the Medical Heritage Library.

These are from the US Naval Hospital Memphis' newspaper The Hospital Clipper from 1972-1973.

More PSAs from The Hospital Clipper - Doonesbury and Wee Pals (and Love Is and Moon Mullins)

As in the previous post, these are from a newspaper held in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's archives, in Falls Church. The run is being digitized and put online in the Medical Heritage Library.

I'm not actually sure if the Doonesbury panel is actually a PSA, or if an enterprising editor just pulled it out from a strip. Any thoughts?

These are from the US Naval Hospital Memphis' newspaper The Hospital Clipper from 1972-1973.

Anyone know anything about the artist CHAD from military newspapers? (UPDATED)

As in the previous post, this is from a newspaper held in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's archives, here in Falls Church. The run is being digitized and put online in the Medical Heritage Library.

Possibly he worked for the American Forces Press Service because the newspaper used other material from them (update: I have found a piece of artwork clearly marked AFPS). These are from the US Naval Hospital Memphis' newspaper The Hospital Clipper, December 1971.

To me, he looks like he could have worked in comic strips or books. A later example, not scanned yet, is very reminiscent of Will Eisner.

Does anyone know who this is, or anything about him?

Update:

In the comments, Unknown says "That small mark after the CHAD sig reminds me of Chad Grothkopf, though I would have no idea what his later "human" art looked like."

Thank you! I believe you are correct. If you look at his Lambiek page at https://www.lambiek.net/artists/g/grothkopf_chad.htm you can see the signature mark clearly. In 1971, he would have been 57, but neither Lambiek nor Jerry Bails' Who's Who lists work for him at this time, so he could have been doing spot illos through his own company.

You can barely see his signature in this example, but the inks made me look twice to find it.

CHAD - Will - Hospital Clipper 5-11 1971-11

Here's two other pieces I found, both clearly showing the syndicate initials.

CHAD - lightning - Hospital Clipper 5-04 1971-04

CHAD - sleep to dream - Hospital Clipper 5-05 1971-05

2 ads and a panel from a US Naval Hospital Memphis newspaper

This is from a newspaper held in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's archives, here in Falls Church. The run is being digitized and put online in the Medical Heritage Library.

Milt Caniff, Smokey Stover by Bill Holman, and... Johnny Jones by Criner? Anyone know anything about the last? It appears to be self-syndicated BTW, they come from The Hospital Clipper 5:11, November 1971. It'll be online at https://archive.org/details/usnavybumedhistoryoffice?sort=-publicdate moderately soon.

Update: Criner was distributed though the AFPS, and earlier examples of the strip are marked with those initials, rather than his own syndicate.