We saw a couple announcements this week that are worth examining jointly, I think. First, we have a relatively simple, not-especially-surprising reveal of The Art of The Mighty Thor reprinting art by both Jack Kirby and Walt Simonson. It's the third book in the Bullpen Books line, after one focusing on John Romita Sr.'s Spider-Man and another on Kirby's Fantastic Four. That it's the third book in the line and following the same basic format -- revisiting one of Marvel's earliest heroes with some work that is pretty universally lauded -- is why it's largely unsurprising.

It's also unsurprising in that we've seen a number of book treatments along these general lines for several years, reviewing classic works through an artistic lens with a somewhere-between-academic-and-popular critical eye. There are a number of "Artist's Edition" style books, of course, and things like Chip Kidd's panel-by-panel books; these are books that may not be overloaded with essays, but offer the artwork up from a perspective that's not simply just a nice reprint but a way to examine the art differently.

The other announcement I'd like to highlight is that Oni Press put out a press release noting that they will, beginning in fall of 2026, beging a series of new titles featuring a variety of characters from the Archie Comics stories. These will not be in quite the same vein as traditional Archie fare, and sound like a re-imagining not unlike the Riverdale television series. There will also be another more-YA-focused line of graphic novels coming in 2027, apparently unrelated to either the original Archie Comics or these newer ones from Oni. And, to be clear, the titles currently being published by Archie Comics themselves will continue as they have for decades.

Now, what both of these announcements have in common is that we have long-established comic book publishers not only licensing out their characters -- which both Marvel and Archie have done for decades -- but they're licensing them out to other comic publishers. Not just for reprint rights, but for publishing entirely new material outside their direct editorial control. In that respect, this is not new for Marvel. While the "Heroes Reborn" books from 1996-97 were farmed out, they still maintained a level of publishing control, but some of the more recent books from Abrams like Fantastic Four: Full Circle and The Avengers in the Veracity Trap are not.

I've made note before -- and I still see barely anyone acknowledging this -- that Marvel officially stopped being a comic book publisher and started recognizing themselves as a character licensing company back in 2000. Over the course of just a couple years, they changed their business model pretty radically such that, by the time they were bought by Disney, Marvel only earned about 25% of their revenue from actual comics. The vast majority of their money came from licensing. That is, in fact, why Disney bought them -- they saw that Marvel had "grown up" and began to see what their real stock-in-trade was. Not unlike the revelation McDonald's had that they weren't a hamburger chain, but a real estate company. (McDonald's, if you didn't know, is the fifth largest landlord in the world; over a third of their revenue just comes from rent.)

What's interesting is to see Archie Comics make this same recognition. MLJ Magazines and Timely Comics were both founded in 1939, both started branching out into animation in the 1960s, both started seeing minor success with live-action interpretations in the 1990s... yet it took Archie nearly a quarter century longer than Marvel to see where their real value was.

There was a period in the early 2000s where people would set up comic book companies as a specific means to sideways themselves into Hollywood. Platinum Studios was probably the most nakedly open example of this. The problem they had was very much one of putting the cart before the horse. They had built up nothing to sell to Hollywood but tried making money off high-concept ideas like "cowboys and aliens." Both Marvel and Archie spent decades building up their characters with a lot of trial and error. And while Archie Comics are sometimes knocked for a house style that is largely built around Dan DeCarlo's illustration style from the 1960s, they have spent decades honing their storytelling and style of the Archie universe such that virtually everybody knows what to expect, in much the same way that everybody knows what to expect with Marvel. (Which is largely built around the storytelling -- not illustrative -- style of Kirby.)

There's more to The Art of The Mighty Thor announcement that a cool art book, and there's more to Oni's announcement than someone-other-than-Archie-Comics-to-publish-Archie-comics. In both cases, we're looking at an expansion/update of comic publishers' business models and I see a future for them sometime down the road where neither company actually publishes comics at all any more.

Here's a 1984 article that ran in Amazing Heroes in which Richard Pachter spoke with long-time Superman artist Wayne Boring, who passed away in 1987...

Wayne Boring calls himself "the cat who started this whole mess with Jerry and Joe!" - with an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence -- just like in a comic book word balloon. He's right, of course. After Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman and started the super hero genre, Boring's art gave the character power and grace and put him in a realistic-but-fantastic setting. His Superman is actually the definitive one. All other artists who've drawn the big guy from Al Plastino to Curt Swan to Dick Dillin to Joe Staton to Jose Garcia Lopez or anybody consciously or not follows Boring's example.

When artist Joe Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel, two teenagers from Cleveland, first put the strip together, it was intended as a newspaper feature. Comic books weren't even considered at first, since most were reprints of material originally prepared for the daily and Sunday press. After gettting rejected by the syndicates, who distributed the strips around the country, Jerry and Joe placed their Man of Steel with Irwin Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz's Detective Comics, Inc.

When Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), he was an immediate hit. The demand for original material by DC obliged Jerry Siegel to find an assistant for Joe Shuster. He placed an advertisement in Writer's Digest.

Wayne Boring recalls: "I carried the magazine in my back pocket for a couple of weeks until I dropped them a line. And I got an answer back. I sent some samples of my work."

At the time, Boring lived in Norfolk, Va. working as an artist advertising salesman at the Virginia Pilot. Born and raised in Minnesota and South Dakota, Boring attended the Minneapolis Institute of Art after high school and studied anatomy at the Chicago Art institute with J. Allen St. John, the illustrator of the original Tarzan stories.

Although Wayne made a decent living at the Pilot, he wanted to be a cartoonist like his idols Frank Godwin and James Montgomery Flagg. When jerry Siegel asked him to come to New York, he jumped at the chance, secured a leave of absence from the paper, took a train to the Big Apple, and met Jerry at Grand Central Station. Siegel met him there and they went to see Joe Shuster.

"Joe was living over on Third Avenue in a real rat-hole right on the elevated (subway)," Wayne laughed. "He had a room with a cot that you had to walk over to get to the other end! And there was the elevated right outside his window! Joe was a very timid little guy who wore elevator shoes. He got up and we shook hands on the bed."

Jerry and Joe asked Wayne to move back to Cleveland with them. They set up a shop and were joined by three other artists -- Paul Cassidy, Leo Nowack, and John Sikela. DC had sold a daily and Sunday newspaper strip to the Bell McClure Syndicate, which placed it with hundreds of papers around the country. Boring pencilled, inked and even lettered the strip, which, like virtually all the Superman material during the time, was written by Jerry Siegel. Wayne also worked on stories for Action and Superman comics.

I asked Wayne how they'd work. Did Jerry write the scripts and then have Joe lay them out? Boring replied, "At first, Joe would sketch it out pretty lightly and we'd work over it. Later, he developed something wrong with his hand and his eyes were very bad. He already wore very thick glasses. Now, he's almost blind. But he came in one day and started to delegate the work to someone else. He wore a gadget a doctor gave him -- a leather glove that completely immobilized his hand!"

Boring laughed as he talked about the studio. "We had an office about 12 by 12 with four drawing boards set up there. Jerry had a desk in the anteroom. But it was the smallest office in Cleveland.

"Once, some reporters came out to interview Jerry and Joe for an article for the Saturday Evening Post. they had photographers and everything. So they were photographing Joe and talking to him and here I was working with my back to the.em. One of the reporters came over and said, 'Would you please leave because we need the room!'"

I asked Wayne if, in the beginning, DC knew that he had been drawing Superman.

"No," he replied. "They kept that pretty much in the dark, and I didn't sign it at that time."

In addition to Superman, Jerry Siegel wrote other features for DC, including Slam Bradley and Spy. But the company wanted him to spend all his time chronicling the adventures of The Man Of Steel.

"Donenfeld and Liebowitz came out to Cleveland and had a hell of an argument with Jerry," Wayne recalled. "They were paying him a fee for writing and they said 'Jerry, stop writing all this other crap! All we want you to do is write Superman' and Jerry had grown up poverty-stricken and said 'Look, I'm gonna write it all!' I think they paid him ten dollars a page for writing and they said they'd make up for it by paying him more to do Superman, but he said no. He was going to hang on to Slam Bradley and the others. Of course that didn't last."

In 1940, the Siegel and Shuster shop moved to New York City, at the urging of DC. Wayne, along with his bride Lois, made the trip to New York, too.

As Superman grew in popularity, a series of animated features were made by the Max Fleischer Studios for Paramount. A radio show also went on the air and was quite successful.

Siegel and Shuster and their team of artists continued to supply DC and Bell-McClure with hundreds of pages of material a year. Even after World War II broke out and Siegel went into the army, he continued to send in scripts to be drawn, although others started to contribute to the Superman legend around this time.

Despite the war, comics were booming. In addition to the usual pre-teen market, millions of servicemen now read comics, too. And after the war, the famous post-war baby boom continued the upward sales spiral.

Superman brought in millions of dollars for DC, but not nearly that much for its creators. Boring and the other artists were relatively well-paid by Siegel and Shuster, who in turn were paid by DC. But Dc owned Superman and didn't share the revenues generated by the outside merchandising, the cartoons, the radio shows, and (later) the movie serial and the television show.

Wayne Boring recalled the origin of the situation: "Donenfeld and Liebowitz knew that Superman was a hit, so they called these kids (Jerry and Joe) in and told 'em, 'Here, sign this' and they did and they signed away all their rights. Of course it was a swindle."

Why didn't Siegel and Shuster fight it? Boring's opinion is that the company "scared the hell out of these kids. DC had a whole pack of lawyers. These guys would come in with their briefcases and there would be these two kids from Cleveland...!"

Eventually, Siegel and Shuster brought suit against DC. But they sued Wayne Boring, too.

He recalls: "Jerry hired a lawyer, the lousiest lawyer I've ever seen. I was sued for abrogation of contract and told that I was fired. Why his attorney advised him to do that, I don't know, but he said, 'You're no longer drawing Superman!'"

How did he feel about being sued for no apparent reason by his employers? "I didn't care about it. Not really. I also worked for Johnstone & Cushing, an advertising agency. I got 600 bucks for a half-page, which Stan Kaye would ink for me. Remember How to Fly a Piper Cub? I did that.

"But I went to see Jack Liebowitz at DC and said, 'Look, what the hell is this thing?' And he said that they were being sued by Siegel and Shuster and that I should continue to work for them (DC) until it was straightened out."

So Wayne Boring worked directly for the company now, while Siegel and Shuster went ahead with their case. But their suit never got off the ground. Jerry Siegel wrote for several other comic companies until returning to Dc in 1959. He wrote many more Superman, Supergirl, and Superboy stories as well as The Legion of Super-Heroes.

Joe Shuster didn't fare as well. With his bad eyes, he was unable to draw or do any other graphic work. He left comics completely. In the late seventies, Neal Adams and other comic creators and fans crusaded for Jerry and Joe. Warner Communications, who owned DC by then, agreed to pay Siegel and Shuster a yearly pension. They also receive credit in every Superman splash page for creating The Man of Steel.

Wayne Boring continued drawing Superman for DC into the 1960s. Originally, he was able to ink his own pencils, but because of all the scheduling demands, he eventually had to give it up. The DC bullpen occasionally inked his work, but Wayne eventually took on Stan Kaye as his regular embellisher; working closely under Boring, Kaye's inks kept the art clean and sharp and beautifully enhanced the lucid layouts.

Wayne now worked with writers other than Siegel. Bill Finger, the original Batman scripter, wrote several Superman stories, as did Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton, Leo Dorfman, and a very young Jim Shooter, who sent in little self-drawn and scripted comics to DC.

Boring says that Edmond Hamilton was his favorite writer. "No doubt about it. He wrote good pictures. I could always visualize his descriptions. There was no effort to draw. Always smooth. His stories sang."

Boring's work continued to mature. Whether he depicted downtown Metropolis or uptown Krytonopolis, it was always realistic. Steranko, in his History of Comics, refers to Wayne's "towering cities." However, the realism he brought to this fantastic otherworldly feature made Superman visually compelling throughout the '50s and '60s.

Editorially, Wayne worked first with Whitney Ellsworth and Jack Schiff, but later (and finally) with the legendary Mort Weisinger.

Weisinger, originally a science fiction fan, agent, and editor, came aboard as writer for the Sunday Superman strip, according to Boring. He eventually became editor of the line and stretched the Superman legend to include many more survivors of Krypton, as well as a host of Bizarros and other looney heroes and villains.

Boring recalls a stormy but productive relationship. Weisinger was somewhat difficult to work with and bullied artists and writers, he said.

One day in 1966, Weisinger told Boring he was fired. Wayne was astonished and asked, "You mean I'm not working for you anymore?"

Weisinger repeated: "You're fired!"

Boring persisted, "Fired? What do you mean? All you've got to do is stop sending me scripts!"

Weisinger then said, "Do you need a kick in the stomach to know you're not wanted?"

Weisinger said he'd call Stan Lee and try to find something for Boring at Marvel. Wayne said he liked what he called Marvel's "punchy style," but after doing some sample work for the company, didn't get any work just yet.

The day after he was sacked by Weisinger, he contacted Hal Foster, and went to work for him as his assistant (and ghost) on Prince Valiant. Wayne later worked with Sam Leff on Davy Jones, another newspaper strip, and with John Prentice on Rip Kirby.

But it must have been a shock to be fired from Superman. Wayne recalls, "I was kind of down after 30 years."

As for Weisinger, "I was afraid I'd die and go to hell and he'd be in charge! That would have been the capper!" he laughed. Wayne eventually did do some work for Marvel Comics, including some Captain Marvel art, with a Roy Thomas-scripted issue of Thor a few years back.

Now 66 and working as a part-time security guard, Boring draws a bit and started painting several years ago. He says, "Painting has improved my drawing 1000 percent. Now I'm cussing myself that I didn't start years ago. By God! I've still got some punch yet!"

He frequently hears from fans and loves to talk about his work on Superman. The fans, of course, love to talk to him. Ultimate fan Fred Hembeck, in fact, met Wayne at a comic convention a few years back in Orlando and the two artists swapped sketches.

Sitting on his patio, I told him that Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane returned to DC, once again drawing and entertaining a new generation of fans, and also about the company's new enlightened and benevolent management which seems to be far more considerate towards it artists than its predecessors. I wondered if Wayne would want to draw Superman comics again.

He paused for a few seconds and said, "You know, I'm pretty well situated now. This is a mild job I've got, as a day security man. They're the nicest people I've ever met. They pay me well." He paused again and looked me in the eye and said softly, "Of course. Yeah, I'd like to get back to drawing, now that you mention it."

Will the man who drew the classic "Superman's Return to Krypton" himself return to DC Comics and the Man of Steel? Stay tuned...

Let's say you've got this cool new comic you've done. Maybe it's a webcomic, maybe it's a series of floppies, maybe it's gone straight to the graphic novel treatment. Doesn't matter. You might describe it in a shorthand that sounds like...

"It's a cross between Superman and Liberty Meadows."

Or...

"It's kind of like Death Note meets Spy vs Spy."

And you're thinking to yourself that part of your goal is woo in readers who already interested in those comics. That makes sense, right? If they've expressed an interest in one comic, they might express an interest in your comic that has some of the same elements. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but you've at least got a frame of reference to start with.

Another way you might describe your comic might be...

"It's just like Deadpool, but funnier."

Or...

"It's the next Pearls Before Swine."

That's a harder sell, because people know that it's almost certainly hyperbolic. Plus, you're making a direct comparison to a single, well-done comic (you wouldn't be comparing yourself to a piece of crap that nobody liked, right?) and you're expressly saying that yours is better. At least with the mashup version, you're acknowledging multiple sources of inspiration and the comparisons are more oblique.

Regardless of how you're approaching selling your as-yet-unknown comic to someone, here's something to keep in mind: you are not, I repeat, not in competition with whatever you're comparing it to.

If you like Superman, there is no substitution for Superman. You can get kind of close with Supergirl or Captain America or Superduperman or your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup, but those are not Superman. They would only serve as possible substitute for Superman if Superman were not available.

Comics are not commodities. They aren't interchangeable. You can't simply swap Superman with Moon Knight and expect readers to be happy. That should be fairly obvious, right?

(By the way, I'm talking primarily about characters and titles here, but the same applies to creators. People might read Superman because of the writer on the book, and will happily switch over to Captain America if the author starts writing that title. But if that's the case, they're not going to be swayed by your character analogy/reference in the first place; you'd have to say something more along the lines of "I write kind of like a cross between Scott Snyder and Gail Simone." In any event, the basic concept I'm talking about here will still remain the same.)

Your competition is not against those other titles that you compare yourself to. Your competition is actually whatever title(s) the reader likes about equally to yours.

Think about it this way... what if you ranked all the comics you currently read in the order that you enjoy them? One being the title you like most of all, two being your second favorite, and so on. If this new comic is #12 on the list, your competition is #11 and #13. Because if the reader has to start cutting back on their reading for time or budget reasons, they're going to start by trimming off what they like the least. They're not going to drop their #1 favorite book unless they absolutely have to. But their #12 book? That's not going to be as painful a decision.

So if your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup ranks at #12 for somebody, you are competing not against Superman but against whatever is in spot #11. Maybe that's Archie. Or maybe Spawn. Or maybe Star Wars. Whatever it is, that's what your comic has to become better than if the reader decides they can only afford eleven comics now.

Similarly, you also have to remain better than whatever is at spot #13. Because they're trying to become better than #12 -- your Superman/Liberty Meadows mashup! If you start going farther down the list, you risk greater and greater danger of being dropped.

You, as a creator, can't know what every reader's list looks like, and you can't know how your comic rates in the minds of the readers relative to everything else they read. So all you can do, really, is put out the best comic you possibly can.

And not worry about whether you have to be better than Superman.

A few years ago, I took a look at the comic strip that Jack Kirby did based on the 1979 movie The Black Hole. As part of some background, I looked a bit into the comic book adaptations of the movie, done by other creators. What struck me as interesting is that there were three different releases... but no one could seem to conclusively identify if they were different adaptations or just reprints of the same story. I found conflicting information from generally reliable sources. So I finally got around to tracking down some copies of at least two of the titles for myself. This gets a bit odd though.

The first version that was published was the 48-page Walt Disney Showcase #54 from Gold Key. Although the issue itself has no credits listed, Mary Carey and Dan Spiegle are generally believed to be the creative team behind it. The story follows the plot of the movie, with a change in the ending to allow for a ongoing series. The characters don't look at all like the actors, likely due to a rights issue, but they're all recognizable enough.

It was only a couple months later, though, that they put out a comic titled The Black Hole (this one published under the Whitman banner). It's the exact same story and art, but split across two 24-page issues. The story was clearly designed for this format in the first place, since the page that becomes the opening splash of #2 has a lot of dead space at the top when it's published in Showcase #54. It's evident in looking at BLack Hole #2, that space was in fact designed to leave room for the chapter title. The third and fourth issues of the series pick up after the events of the movie and send the characters on entirely new adventures.

Now, here's the odd part: these two publications -- while using the exact same art and script -- have two different letterers. Whereas the dedicated title has traditional hand lettering, Showcase #54 is entirely typewritten. Not someone using a Leroy Lettering guide or something that looks mechanical, this is a font from a typesetter on display. No bold anywhere but emphasis is done with italics, and the captions are ALL CAPS. I haven't gone through and compared each and every word balloon, but they seem to have identical scripts throughout.

But to make things even more strange, the actual word balloons are the same in both version. The outer edges of each word balloon with their associated tails are identical in both issues. Normally, this would be handled by the person doing the lettering, but I can't see a typesetter doing that kind of thing. Did Spiegle draw and ink the balloons in place with just rough lettering done in pencil? I can't think of another plausible scenario. I presume the typesetting was done as a time-saving measure to try to get the book out closer to the movie release, but why put in the effort to completely re-letter the entire story just a couple months later? I would expect the publishers and editors would have felt the typed version was suitable enough. It wasn't like the movie was a massive hit and they wanted to do a 'prestige' version of the comic or anything; why not just keep the original lettering in place for the reprint?

Golden Press put out an adaptation as well, although I have conflicting information on whether or not it is a reprint of these first two instances and, if so, which version of the lettering it uses. I'm trying to track down a copy to check for myself.

I understand how/why Disney wanted to push The Black Hole as the next Star Wars. The movie was kind of a bust, though -- it has all the hallmarks of a "too many cooks" situation if you asked me -- so all of the comics and toys and coloring books and everything wound up collecting dust on store shelves. The more I look into this attempt at a media franchise, though, the more confused and messy the whole thing looks.

I've reviewed a couple of First Second's History Comics books here and read several more. I find it a fascinating series on the whole for a couple reasons. First they tend to cover topics that haven't been done to death in comic form already and second, they seem to largely take a "just hire talented creators and let them do their thing" approach. So today, I'm looking at The Great Depression: From Hard Times to the New Deal by Tim Stout and Joe Flood.

The story centers around siblings Alex and Kassie. They're apparently out of school because of some local wild fires, which is also keeping them indoors. In addition, the fires have been causing some line problems and their mom asks them to stay offline so she can have a clear connection for an online meeting she has to attend for work. They both complain about the inevitable boredom of not being online, and Kassie suggests playing a game. After dismissing all the others they've played to death, she pulls out one called The Great Depression Game. Almost as soon as they start playing, they find themselves transported back to 1929. In a sort of Jumanji-esque fashion, they have to play the game to its completion within the Depression itself in order to get back home.

The game consists of tasks that need to be completed in the game world, provided to our protagonists via cards that magically appear in their pockets. Some of the cards offer some historical context for when/where they are. (Time flows in a haphazard fashion, often jumping several years in a matter of seconds.) But the tasks they need to complete are generally vague and require some connection with the on-the-ground experiences to understand. It is largely this framework in which Alex and Kassie learn about the Great Depression from a more on-the-ground perspective.

They both wind up living (more like "surviving") from 1929 through 1941, having mostly separate adventures relative to the ages/genders. They finally find the 'key' and are transported back home. But rather than just get back online as their mother finishes her call, they go out to offer the firefighters water and snacks, putting the lessons of helpfulness and humanity they got from the Depression to good use.

The book feels strangely timely. The specific events and areas of focus from the book (Stout notes in the afterword that he had to leave a lot out due to space limitations) are largely unique to the 1930s, but it's hard not to see parallels with today. The solutions the kids use to accomplish their tasks remind me of efforts people are moving to today to divorce themselves from enshittified technology. Some of the massive mis-steps from President Hoover can be seen in echos from Trump. (Although Hoover's efforts seemed largely misguided, whereas Trump's are vindictive.) If this had come out any later, I'd have thought it was written directly as a response to current events, but with publishing lead times and such, I can't believe this wasn't started before the 2024 US elections even happened.

I'm unfamiliar with both Stout and Flood, but their work here is solid. While the stoty's conceit of having to live through a game is hard to mentally divorce from Jumanji, they handle it differently enough that The Great Depression doesn't feel like a re-hashed Jumanji. There's a time-travel element here, too, to potentially confuse readers -- on top of this trying to be educational -- and they keep everything pretty straight-forward and clear throughout the book. Which is saying a fair amount, I think, given the storytelling complexities they're dealing with here. Kudos to both Stout and Flood on that front.

The one element that bugged me a little was the time jumps within the game. From a storytelling perspective, the jumps themselves were all clear enough. But the first one is expressly noted to go from 1929 to 1932 and Kassie finds herself suddenly jumping from age 11 to age 14, which includes a growth spurt and forces her to find new clothes. (Or, more precisely, make new clothes out of an old potato sack.) This scene is handled well and all, but the problem is that that's the only time we see anything like that. Following the in-story logic, Kassie should be 22 at the end of the story, and Alex should be in his late 20s. But neither look any different. To be fair, Alex is never given an actual age, so if he were maybe 17 or 18 at the start, then he might not look appreciably different eleven years later, but Kassie should very much not look like she's still fourteen.

A bigger concern of mine is actually what isn't covered. As I noted, Stout does acknowledge that he had to skip a lot because of space limitations and he does provide a couple sentences on a half dozen areas he either skimmed past or didn't include at all. The one I think is a big miss, though, is the racial distinctions. There are only a few darker skinned characters shown in the background at all anywhere, and they seem to be presented on equal footing with their white counterparts. Nothing about any Asian or Native American groups. The version of the Depression that's presented is not a pleasant one, certainly, but it's a very Caucasian one.

This struck me for two reasons. In the first place, they do touch on gender-related differences, so there's some level of consideration there. Secondly, I think the Depression is a topic that gets at least some coverage in grade school so kids are already getting a Caucasian-focused version of events. Of all the other books that are in this line, I think World War II is the only other topic that's really covered in schools, so the vast majority of these books for a large portion of their audience are seeing/hearing this information for the first time. But with a topic they likely have at least heard something about, there's more opportunity to cover aspects that are in your seventh grade textbook. There is some of that here, I think, but I think how race played a factor would've been much more significant/noteworthy than the symbology used by kids who 'ride the rails.'

The story this book tells is well-done, make no mistake. My biggest gripe is almost more of a missed opportunity to do something more impactful. Race issues are clearly not a subject First Second hides from -- they've got a book on Claudette Colvin for Pete's sake! -- so I think presenting the Depression as either a whites-only problem or an everybody-got-impacted-equally problem (depending on how you want to read this) is a mis-step.

The Great Depression: From Hard Times to the New Deal came out in October from First Second and should be available through your favorite bookstore. It retails for $13.99 US in paperback and $21.99 US in hardcover.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Philosophy Week, Post 1
https://ift.tt/p0PqmVE

Jack Kirby Collector: Incidental Iconography
https://ift.tt/tDe4QgK

Kleefeld on Comics: Philosophy Week, Post 2
https://ift.tt/p4a5FuI

Kleefeld on Comics: Philosophy Week, Post 3
https://ift.tt/X3M4pAq

Kleefeld on Comics: Philosophy Week, Post 4
https://ift.tt/QOg9csE

Kleefeld on Comics: Philosophy Week, Post 5
https://ift.tt/74eNIW6

My parents (my father in particular) placed an incredibly high value on thinking. Not necessarily memorizing facts and figures, but getting to an actual understanding of a topic and, sometimes more importantly, getting creative with it. Problem solving involved using our education for analyzing the issue, but using our imagination for coming up with a solution. If we couldn't work through a problem, we tried to find a way to work around it. Part of my education was solving riddles and brain teasers. Questions that required heavy doses of lateral thinking.

When I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, so my parents were environmentalists out of necessity. Clothes got handed down repeatedly until they wore out, and then we'd still find other uses for them. Any products that came in a container -- the containers got saved/reused. This was so ingrained in me that, on my first day of school, Mom packed my lunch and I brought home the plastic baggie my sandwich was in so she could reuse it. She was in tears as she explained that was something I could throw out.

Remember when companies experimented with toothpaste pumps? Dad saved our empty ones. Not for anything in particular; he just thought he might have need for the pump mechanism at some point in the future. "Save that; I might be able to use it for something" was almost a family motto. Mom saved empty milk jugs for an emergency water supply. Dad saved old peanut butter jars (the glass ones) for everything from loose screws to turpentine. Old newspapers got rolled into "logs" and bound with wire for our fireplace. Then we'd fish the scorched wire out of the ashes and use it for another newspaper log. Everything got used and reused until it couldn't be used for its intended purpose any more. Then we'd reuse it for something else until it was no longer good for that. Then it'd get stripped for parts.

That was all done for financial reasons. We could save money by not throwing away something just because it didn't work any more or was no longer useful. We'd find a use for something because it was cheaper and more efficient than buying something new. Mom & Dad hated living like that, frankly. Not that they were saving money, but that they felt like they had no other choice. Early on, there were arguments about whether they should buy bread or milk that week because they couldn't afford both. I have a massive scar on my finger from when I was 7 because they didn't think they could afford even the co-pay of an emergency room visit to have it stitched up. (This was in the '70s, too, before health care costs really skyrocketed.)

For me, that was just how things were. You saved everything you could, re-purposed it multiple times, and you damn well got your money's worth out of something. It wasn't done FOR environmental reasons, but it still had a positive environmental impact. We were being good stewards of the environment, even if it was incidental, because doing so had a direct, positive affect on our daily lives. I've salvaged vacuums, furniture, bikes, workshop spotlights, long boxes full of comics... all sorts of still useful goods from people's garbage. Even the broken stuff that can be fixed with a little elbow grease, and a few replacement screws or belts. Not only do I wind up with useful goods that I didn't have to pay for (or only pay minimally to fix) but I'm keeping those items out of landfills. Environmentalism by way of saving money, due to creative thinking.

I try to carry those lessons forward to this day. How can I solve this problem in the most efficient way possible? Can I address this issue with things I already have on hand? Can this item that no longer works be fixed? If not, are some of the parts still functional and worth saving? I've been reluctant to leave the house much less go into stores particularly the past few years, but I've been able to care of issues using stuff I had lying around. It's cheaper, it's more enivronmentally friendly, and I don't have to take huge chunk of time to make yet another trip to Home Depot.