Anecdotally, I seem to have noticed an increase in comics done in 3D recently. It could totally be some kind of attention bias thing on my part, but I don't think I'm totally off-base either since even Marvel seems to be getting in on the deal, as evidenced by the recent release of Fantastic Four #51 redone in the 3D format.

It's a trend that ebbs and flows periodically, but the first anaglyph 3D image (i.e. the first 3D image created using the 'standard' red/blue filtering technique) dates back to 1853. Because of production costs, it wasn't really developed as a media form unto itself until the 1890s and it wouldn't be until the 1950s that it became cheap enough to make it into the pop culture zeitgeist. While the popular form it has historically taken has been though those squared off cardboard glasses, in more recent years further production cost reductions has meant you can get readily obtain sturdier, 'permanent' glasses that can used over a longer timeframe.

Speaking personally, the 3D technique was always a form that frustrated me because I wore prescription glasses and the cheap cardboard stereoscopic glasses never fit well over or under my 'real' glasses. I could get them to work, but it often involved having to physically hold the cardboard glasses over my regular ones leaving only one hand for holding the comic in question AND turning the pages. It was only a couple years ago that I happened across a pair of lens that, instead of having their own frames, could clip on to an existing pair of glasses and finally make reading 3D comics a practical option for me.

I think, though, the bigger "problem" with 3D comics is that it's largely a novelty gimmick. This recent i> Fantastic Four #51 book for example. It reprints the original Jack Kirby/Stan Lee comic from 1966; it's frequently used as one of the best single-issue examples of their work from that period. The 3D effect has obviously been done retroactively here, but thanks in large part to Kirby's dynamic drawing style to begin with, it works well. Kirby naturally drew with a very strong sense of depth to his comic panels, so applying a 3D effect to his work is relatively easy. But here's the thing... it's the exact same story. Whether the 3D effect is there or not, it reads exactly the same in terms of the storytelling and the emotional beats.

Don't get me wrong, the 3D effect is generally done well here, but it doesn't really add anything to the story. Some of the characters do pop out visually a bit more in some panels, but they don't really need to thanks already to Kirby's drawing style. The one page where I think it might have been really interesting to see a heavy 3D effect applied -- the big collage splash page shown here -- has the weakest 3D effect, realy only visible in having the figure and word balloon floating on top of the collage. The collage itself looks pretty flat. I don't know how much could really be done with this since, again, they're applying the 3D effect retroactively and the page was very much NOT designed for it, but it would have been the page with the largest potential impact if it could have been done really well.

All of which is to say that when people see a story like this, they look at it and say, "Hey, neat!" And they look at the next one and say, "Hey, neat!" And for the third one, they say, "Hey, neat!" And there's never anything more than that. So after the third or fifth or twentieth story where they see the same effect done in the same way for the same impact, they eventually get to the realization that the extra effort of wearing 3D glasses isn't worth it for just one more "Hey, neat!" and they move on.

I suspect there's some way the effect can be legitimately designed into the story to provide something truly additive. Something beyond just adding the illusion of depth. Maybe where the reader is given a perspective unavailable to the characters. Or maybe some kind of faux animation that results from the red/blue dichotomy. Something that takes advantage of the unique aspects of anaglyph stereography to do something with the story that simply is not possible without it. I certainly haven't played with the form enough to know what all is possible. But what we see here today is pretty much the exact same implementation that people might've seen back in 1853. And until someone comes up with a new use for it, every time it circles around to pop culture again, it will continue to remain a short-lived "Hey, neat!" gimmick.

The subtitle of Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832 Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert goes a long way to telling you what this book is about. That seems a somewhat obvious statement, as the point of a book's title is to summarize its subject, but if you have a reasonable grasp of American history, I think the title here gives you enough information to figure out what happens.

If your sense of history is a little fuzzy when it comes to dates, I'll start with a little perspective. The US Civil War didn't begin until 1861 and slavery wasn't abolished until 1865. Some states had passed laws to abolish slavery before then, but they were very much a hodge podge of different plans and processes. New York, for example, passed its law abolishing the practice in 1799 but it was a gradual rollout and slavery wasn't fully outlawed there until 1827. Southern states, of course, had no such laws independent of federal ones, which is why the Underground Railroad existed to help enslaved people move to Northern areas. Some, however, pursued other, less covert means of attempting to gain their freedom and Nat Turner famously led a rebellion in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of over 50 people in 1931. Turner made national headlines and was executed later that year, in part to make very public the notion that enslaved people attempting to gain their freedom would be thoroughly and aggressively punished. This was, of course, a scare tactic designed to try to counter the fear that slave owners had of what a retribution-minded enslaved person could do.

That is all offerred in the book's introduction before getting to the main story. And it's with this backdrop that Prudence Crandall made her Canterbury Female Boarding School, that itself had opened only 1831, an integrated institution welcoming Black girls and women beginning in 1832. While locals tolerated, often with some measure of mocking dismissal, the idea of educating women, they found the idea of intergration downright insufferable. Crandall soon found all of her white students removed by their parents, and rebuilding the class of only Black girls and women turned out to be a slow process, but its unique opportunity for Black women did eventually draw a number of students from all over.

Crandall, not suprisingly, faced a fair amount of opposition. When being publicly snubbed didn't work, she was cut off from getting supplies locally. Her father had to travel a fair ways to obtain basics, and his longer trips led to physical harassment. Threats to both the school in general and people associated with it individually increased, and intimidation tactics include everything from smearing the front door with feces to poisoning the school's well water. With those means proving ineffective, legal means came into play and laws were passed to make Crandrall's school illegal, leading to her arrest and imprisonment. Crandall, with the help and funding of the absolishment movement, were able to fight these charges legally and eventually won in court. This, not surprisingly, enraged some locals who attacked the school and burnt it to the ground. This drove Crandall away for good. And while she and many of her students did well elsewhere, the town essentially resumed its technically free but still heavily segregated platform from before.

The story is told well overall. Fert's artwork has almost a Mary Blair quality about it and Lupano is impressively restrained in his dialogue, letting the artwork do much of the heavy lifting. I would've liked to have a seen a little more with regard to Crandall's motivations, though. Were her convictions exclusively rooted in her faith, or were there any life experiences prior to the 1830s that influenced her thinking? Perhaps that veers a little more into speculation than what they wanted to do here; the book sticks to the facts (well, the facts as I'm familiar with them at any rate!) and the basic human behavior of the people of Canterbury is sadly predictable, again, as I suggested with the book's subtitle.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first comic to cover Crandall or her school and I'm definitely very appreciative of that. There are an infinite number of stories of Black histories that haven't been covered very well -- or at all -- in the medium and I'm thrilled to see more of them, rather than another biography of Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks (impressive a woman as they each are). I think Crandall's story isn't widely enough known, and I'd love to see more of these stories from Lupano and Fer.

Surrounded actually came out a year ago, so it still should be readily available from your local book retailer. It was published by NBM and lists at $24.99 US. However with NBM having recently been purchased by Ablaze, I'm unsure if that means the book will remain in print and for how long.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Originalism in Comics
https://ift.tt/EjLFCya

Kleefeld on Comics: Speculative Fiction... Now Known As Current Events
https://ift.tt/Up1FqHe

Kleefeld on Comics: The Red Blazer Circa 1941
https://ift.tt/Nzx9kla

Kleefeld on Comics: Ron Cobb on the First Week of 2026
https://ift.tt/E9sBaXc

Alright, it's been a rough news week. I don't know what to say about anything. Here are some 50+ year old Ron Cobb cartoons that sadly seem as timely now as they did when he drew them. Same as it ever was.

Here's the original art for "The Red Blazer" from Pocket Comics #1. Not only is the first appearance of the Red Blazer chracter, but it's the very first Harvey Comic. It's also one of Al Avison's first published works, if not the first published work from him. The story is from 1941 -- two years after the debut of the Human Torch and The Flame -- and bears all the hallmarks of a superhero comic of that era (i.e. it's not all that good) but it's amazing to see the whole story in its very original form.

Today's date is, of course, January 6 and it marks the fifth anniversary since the violent attempted coup of the US Capitol. My thought for today's post would then be to re-run the review I posted last year of two works of speculative fiction showcasing alternative possible outcomes. The difference between when I wrote this a year ago and now is that Donald Trump is once again in the White House and has pardoned literally every person who was involved in the insurrection.

In re-reading what I wrote last year, I detect in my reviews a note of optimism despite their being dystopian fictions. There's more than a hint of, "Wow, we sure dodged THAT bullet" even with the 2024 election then behind us and knowing that Trump would step back into the Oval Office a couple weeks later. Sitting here now in 2026... well, let's just say that the scenes of militias marching through the streets depicted in Rogue State hits a little different in a year when we've had ICE patrols kidnapping people from their homes.

Anyway, here's what I wrote about the books last year...

---

January 6 was over this past weekend, and it marked the anniversary of Donald Trump goaded thousands of his followers to storm the US Capitol and kill any members of Congress they found in order to overthrow the US government. So far, around 1200 people have been formally charged with federal crimes associated with the attempted coup with about 60% of them having been sentenced with an averag sentence of a little over three years in prison. (Far too lenient, if you asked me.) But rather than go over what did happen, I'm looking today at what could have happened by way of two comics: Rogue State by Matteo Pizzolo and Carlos Granda, and 1/6 by Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan. Both comics start from the premise of "what if Trump got his way?"

Both books approach the idea a bit differently. 1/6 is more direct and literal -- the insurrection happens exactly as Trump wanted, the election results are over-turned, and Trump stays in the White House. Rogue State doesn't have the coup as successful but the Supreme Court reinterprets the 2nd Ammendment, effectively making any armed group of citizens a de facto militia, fully deputized as law enforcement but unbeholden to actual laws. While the corrupt President is technically out of office, he (who is not actually Trump, but a thinly disguised surrogate) still holds the sway of the military and the police, including most of these right-wing militias. In both cases, though, martial law is enacted and anyone who doesn't pledge fealty to Trump is either "disappeared" or simply killed on the spot and, not surprisingly both titles follow a few characters in whatever loose network of a resistance has been building.

Rogue State runs closer to my most extreme fears of where Trump is trying to get to: armed soldiers literally marching down the street and shooting at basically anyone that don't like the look of. I do recognize that this is an extreme that isn't likely to happen, certainly not out in the suburbs where I live. Even if things do go that far south, armed groups of soldiers patrolling my street on foot is just not something I'm going to see out my window. It's a horrifying visual and it might make sense in more urban environments like we see in Rogue State, but at worst we'll get three or four fucknuts driving around in their oversized pick-up truck. Still frightening, but at a ever-so-slightly diminished capacity.

1/6 is less extreme, I suspect, because it's a deliberate attempt to hew closer to what could/would in fact happen. Martial law is imposed here as well, but it's only the official military and police, and much of their monitoring is through flying drone cameras, and tracking people's digital behavior. It's still very much dystopian but there are fewer open demonstrations of violence in the streets, primarily because it's made clear the military/police will face no repercussions for using deadly force. While that is also the case in Rogue State, it seems early enough after things go to sh*t that many citizens are still incredulous that police and their deputies can murder people pretty indiscriminately.

I'm intrigued by both stories, mainly because both focus on the journey of one person and how they become an active part of the rebellion. They both do a good job of setting up the particulars of their worlds; 1/6 rolls the plot along at a quicker pace while Rogue State spends more time setting up the protagonist's background. One isn't necessarily better than the other in this case; they just have different modes of storytelling and they both work reasonably well here. Personally, I did prefer 1/6 a little more, but that has more to do with my personal tastes in storytelling than the craft on display.

Both titles are still ongoing and I have no idea how/where they might go with these bleak tales. Do the protagonists win and Trump gets what's coming to him, or do they take a more 1984 direction and showcase just how bad these types of dystopias can get? The second issue of 1/6 was just released last week and the collected edition of the first three issues of Rogue State comes out in early February. I think they're both worth picking up because most people do not seem to understand just how close the US got to these types of outcomes in 2021. Yes, these are works of speculative fiction but if you consider either as too wildly impossible to happen, then you're part of why all those asshats thought they could storm the Capitol and get away with it in the first place.

When I reviewed Lucas Wars back in September, I relayed a bit about reconciling some family lore with functional timelines to estimate that I probably first saw Star Wars in the spring of 1978, which would've been part of the film's original theatrical run despite debuting a year earlier. Yes, it was legitimately in first-run movie theaters for that long! Despite seeing it during its initial run, though, I've never actually seen the original movie. See, while George Lucas famously made a slew of alterations to the movie in the late 1990s, he had actually begun making changes in the first weeks and months after its May 1977 opening. If you didn't see the movie until August of that year, you got some altered special effects from some of the lasers and a different audio track with minor dialogue changes.

When the movie got re-released to theaters in 1981, Lucas added the "A New Hope" subtitle to the opening crawl and made some additional effects updates on the opening scene with the ships in space. When the movie came out on VHS in 1985, there was yet another new audio track (mostly with just slight changes in the timing of dialogue) and the accompaying LaserDisc version was sped up by 3% to keep the entire movie on a single disc. The 1993 LaserDisc version cleaned up the prints and made some color corrections. So even before the "Special Edition" version hit theaters in 1997, Lucas had been modifying his film. Admittedly, he was mostly just tightening things up around the edges before, but my point is that unless you saw the movie in theaters in the first two, maybe three, months that it was out, you have never seen the original version.

I find myself thinking about this because I've spent the past couple weeks setting up a home media server to host movies and TV show files locally. I had set something up for music a year or two back, but I wanted to expand that to video after seeing and increasing and accelerating news tidbits about this or that show being suddenly removed from one of the streaming services. I don't want to hunt through a long list of brand names with a plus on the end of them just to find a show I was already in the middle of watching. So I managed to salvage and repurpose an old laptop with a new 8TB plugged into it, and started throwing MP4s on there for shows and movies I either already enjoy or have been on my TO WATCH list.

And what struck me was coming across some 'oddities.' Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, for example, has been on my TO WATCH list on Disney+ because I want to see how well it holds up after several decades. But when I went to download it, the episode count was wrong. It turns out they don't have the Red Skull episode because it features some Nazi symbolism. OK, fair enough, but they also then re-ordered half the episodes. So the collective experience is different than what was intended. Once I got copies of everything, I had to manually re-order them and find a bootleg copy of that Red Skull episode if I want to see what the original series looked like.

And when I went to check out Daria -- which I'd seen clips of but never got around to watching -- I learned that it originally used a variety of then-popular songs as incidental background music. Due to copyright and licenses problems, they opted to simply remove all the music rather than either A) pay the appropriate royalties or B) add in similar-sounding-but-less-expensive alterantives. The show, as it's been seen since the original broadcasts have effectively been without a soundtrack. It shouldn't surprise you, though, that some enterprising fans ripped the DVD releases and went about adding all the original music back in. That's obviously not up for streaming anywhere, but you can find digital copies if you know where to look.

I bring this up because comics do this kind of ongoing tampering as well. I first saw this back in the 1980s when I was initally getting into the Fantastic Four. I was trying to learn as much as I could about their history, but the reprints were few and far between back then. But I was pleased in 1984 when I found Fantastic Four Special Edition #1 which reprinted the old and hard-to-find (i.e. expensive when you're 12) Fantastic Four Annual #1. Except it's not really a reprint of FF Annual #1. The original page 18 was removed, and John Byrne provided a brand new five-page sequence that expanded that portion of the story. It's done reasonably well, with Byrne doing a fair job mimicking the original style of Jack Kirby inked by Dick Ayers but my point is that it's not the original.

But we see that in virtually every reprint. In the case of anything originally published before, say, 1995, the reprints are being re-colored. Maybe they're trying to adhere closely to the originals, but maybe not. I made a post not quite a year ago about how the Masterworks had changed the racial diversity of background characters by making some of them Black. And for particularly old reprints where even the original line art isn't available, they'll scan actual finished comics and try to manually strip out the color. These days, that generally involves scanning the page and digitially erasing everything that isn't black but there's some inevitable touch-ups that have to happen as well. And this was even more significant before computer work became the norm -- Greg Theakston used to bleach comics pages to get rid of the color, but this would also lighten the black marks pretty considerably as well and he'd wind up having to re-draw/re-ink not insignificant portions again.

In many -- probably even most -- cases, these changes are insignificant. They have zero impact on the vast majority of readers' thoughts about the story. I've watched more than a few reaction videos to the original Star Wars and, while people will not infrequently comment on how good the CGI is for 1977, not realizing the actual CGI portions are from two decades later, they're very much more invested in the story. They laugh at the banter between C-3PO and R2-D2, and take great interest in the potential love triangle set up between Luke and Leia and Han, and cheer when the Death Star blows up. So who are we to say that Lucas was wrong?

But the question you need to ask yourself is: why am I trying to get into this story? Is it just to get the general gist of it, so I have a vague notion of what people are talking about? Or are you interested in what exactly readers got back in the day? For me, personally, I tend to be more interested in the original. Even if it is a technically inferior version, because I want to see the piece with as much context as I can. And that necessarily includes whatever artifacts -- whether of the materials used or the imposed limitations from money-holders -- were present in the original.

Which is part of why I have a huge library of physical comics. In most cases, I want to experience the story in the same way a fan did originally. That often means the original floppies. I obviously can never experience the full cultural/social context those issues were published in/during/around but the closer I can get to that, the better for my purposes. But that obviously requires more effort on my part, trying to track down originals and/or reprints that alter nothing.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you reach for a shelf full of trade paperbacks instead of rifling through the dollar bin.