In 1963, MSgt. Percy Brown Jr. interviewed Swinnerton for Armed Forces Radio. Comics fan Milt Kagen, who helped arrange the interview in the first place, saved a tape of the program. It's the only known public audio recording of Swinnerton.
In 1963, MSgt. Percy Brown Jr. interviewed Swinnerton for Armed Forces Radio. Comics fan Milt Kagen, who helped arrange the interview in the first place, saved a tape of the program. It's the only known public audio recording of Swinnerton.
But that's not courage. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is not the opposite of fear. Courage is having the inner strength to do something IN SPITE OF fear. In order to be courageous, you need to be first be fearful of something so that you can overcome that fear.
You can still be heroic without being courageous, mind you. Superman is very heroic. He goes around saving people all the time. But it's not courageous for him to stand in front of a bank robber's gun since he knows that his skin is hard enough to deflect every one of the bullets without so much as leaving a bruise. Heroism ≠ courage. And it's fear without courage that's driving a lot of our problems today.
"I don't really know any gay people. Their culture includes things I don't understand. I don't know what to say or how to act when they display those cultural touchstones that are unfamiliar to me."
"I don't really know any Black people. Their culture seems different than mine, and I do not want to risk theirs superceding mine. I'm very comfortable with my own culture, and not comfortable with theirs."
That's essentially what racism and homophobia and that kind of hatred all boils down to: a mechansim for justifying treating someone poorly because they look/act/sound a little different than what you're used to. They're reacting out of fear. They're reacting fearfully because they have no courage. They fear what they don't know or understand, and don't even have the courage to try to learn about it. They don't have the courage to say, "Just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong." They don't have the courage to say, "Just because it's different, it doesn't invalidate my preferences."
And perhaps that's part of the problem in comics. There are so many out there that talk about heroism, but don't touch on courage. Spider-Man doesn't fear going against the Green Goblin. Batman doesn't fear confronting the Joker. Those characters are/were absolutely acting heroically, but not courageously.
I can't help but wonder, then, if we would see fewer instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. in the comics community if the stories were less focused on heroism, and more focused on courage.
(Full disclosure: I backed the Kickstarter at a level that I'm actually drawn into the book itself.)
Silvani has divided the book up into three sections: History, Piracy 101/How to Pirate, and Individual Pirate Profiles. Not surprisingly, the History section covers the history of piracy dating back to the dinosaurs (well, not quite) and covers piracy all over the world, not just those who sailed in/around the Carribbean in the early 1700s. The Piracy 101 section is all about the day-to-day lives of pirates, mostly relaying how awful everything was and that the only reason a pirate would put up with that was because their other options were even more awful. And the Profiles section, of course, designates a few pages each to several of the most famous pirates throughout history.
The text is largely written independent of the art in a kind of omnsicient narrator approach. But rather than just rattling off dull dates and statistics like Ben Stein, Silvani has a fun, casual style that includes self-corrections, deliberately bad jokes, and a generally satirical tone that often mocks the actions taking place in the art. Art which, in turn, also frequently mocks the narration.
In fact, the style and general approach remind me very much of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the World books, just with a narrower focus and on much better paper. While we don't see a narrator in the same way Gonick handled his work, there's still the sense of talking to the reader and the 'actors' in the story sometimes recognizing their role and responding to the narrator or the reader. Like Gonick, too, Silvani also includes a variety of gags in the background throughout the book; the racous partying and massive fight scenes in particular lend themselves to any number of visual Wile E. Coyote style jokes.
The actual research here is all solid to boot. I've done more than a little studying of actual piracy, and I was generally impressed with the details Silvani included. If I had to make a criticism of the content, I would say that Profiles section feels a bit too Euro-heavy. Silvani does call out, for example, Zheng Yi Sao in the History section, but she's only given 2/3 of page there and no separate write-up in the back. The Profiles are generally the Carribbean pirates you might already be familiar with: Blackbeard, William Kidd, Anne Bonny, etc. Similarly, other non-European-born pirates are noted in the History section but aren't reflected in the Profiles. No Black Caesar or Diego de Los Reyes, or Ipseiodawas either. Obviously, there wouldn't be enough room to list EVERY pirate and I get that there are many that we simply don't know much about, but while the main book is relatively diverse, that doesn't extend to the Profiles section.
Overall, Pirates: A Graphic History (But Not THAT Kind of Graphic) is a really fun read. Plenty of solid info there if you're not already super-familiar with the topic and it's still handled in a very fun and entertaining way if you are! I'm not sure about the full breadth of distribution, but Silvani is selling the book from his website (signed!) for $30 US if you're interested. I believe all his Kickstarter ones have been sent out, so he should be able to get to 'regular' orders fairly quickly, I should think.
Except!
If you've looked at the cover a little more closely, you might notice that it's actually NOT from the regular Fantastic Four title. It's titled "Fantastic Four Classic and there's a note where the UPC symbol would go that says "Distributed by: So Much Fun! Inc." You might be prone to thinking, "Fantastic Four Classic?!? I've never heard of that title before! I know Marvel's done some FF reprint books but that doesn't sound familiar at all! What gives?"
Well, that's what I thought when I saw it at any rate!
To set your mind at ease, there is no Fantastic Four Classic title that you somehow missed. The "Classic" only appears on the cover, and the official indicia inside just says it's a second printing of Fantastic Four #306. So what's with the "Classic" and who is "So Much Fun! Inc."?
There's actually a bit of a mystery around this. There are, in fact, twelve different comics that seem to have a So Much Fun! distribution notice on them, and they all also have the word "classic" attached to the title on the cover. But the list of issues might surprise you. They are...
- Amazing Spider-Man #292
- Archie #282
- Batman #401
- Betty and Veronica #289
- Fantastic Four #306
- G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #63
- Incredible Hulk #335
- Justice League of America #217
- The Man of Steel #1
- Star Trek #6
- Superman # 161
- Uncanny X-Men #221
Nobody seems to know a whole lot unfortunately. I'll relay what I've been to find and put out a few ideas afterwards.
So Much Fun! Inc. operated out of Massachusettes for a brief period in the late 1980s. They apparently had connections with non-comic shops that sold paper products (think: stationery and greeting cards -- like Hallmark stores but small, independently owned shops) and thought that maybe comics might sell in those venues as well. Perhaps to kids who were dragged into the store by their parents. Rather that trying to set themselves up as a regular distributor of new comics like one might for a newsstand, they instead opted for selling a bagged collection of three different comics. This is very much like those bagged sets of three issues that you might've found in drug stores in the 1970s and 1980s.
I've seen people claim the initial print run for these was 5,000 for each issue. I've seen no citations for where that number comes from though. I've also seen no details on which comics may/may not have been packed together; given that there are only two Archie books, you must've gotten at least two publishers in some bags, but I don't know if there was any rhyme or reason to how they were bagged together or if it was just random.
In doing some digging, I found So Much Fun! also produced sticker packs that were clearly aimed at kids. Rainbows and unicorns with a prism reflective effect, that kind of thing. Given that they seemed to put some degree of effort into the promotion and packaging of these stickers, my guess is that was closer to their main business venture.
If you love these stickers --(It's not good, but it required effort!)
And they are the best,
We offer many others,
Collect all the rest!
My guess is that stickers were their primary business. Sticker collecting was definitely a big thing in the late '70s and early '80s. As the '80s wore on, though, and stickers weren't as popular, they looked for other ways to make some money that would be adjacent to sticker production. Someone almost certainly recalled those 3-comic bags from earlier and felt there was a decent overlap. They would've been in stationery stores already with a product that was aimed at a kid market. They managed to contact the "big 3" comic publishers and arranged to have small runs of existing comics printed up, presumably to be bagged (and distributed) by themselves.
DC put in the most effort, reworking their cover art to update logos and remove cross-promotional banners and such. The Man of Steel issue loses it's mini-series and "comics event of the century" tag lines, the Justice League issue has the logo replaced with the then-current version, and the Superman issue updates the DC logo and re-sizes the Superman title for examples. They seem to have taken the approach that every place they appear, it should reflect on them as pristinely as possible. Presumably, given the range of issues selected for reprinting here, they put some effort into those selections as well. Digging out that 25-year-old production art for Superman was no small task, I'm almost certain.
Given the range of effort in the companies' response, I suspect no one at So Much Fun! had much knowledge about the comic book market of the late 1980s. They seem to have left many of the decisions up to the publishers and were okay with whatever the result was as long as they got some comics they could turn around and sell to stationery shops. Of course, that's almost certainly why the project failed. Well, I'm assuming it failed since there appears to have only been the one "run" of issues, and they're not that hard to come by despite the low print quantities. By 1987, comics were well into the days of the direct market and the semi-"blind bag" drug store approach was effectively dead. To my recollection, it was even starting to get difficult to find comics just on a newsstand or spinner rack by that point.
(As I think on it, I seem to recall Marvel trying the 3-comic-bag approach with their original Secret Wars comic in 1984. They had the main title available in 3-issue runs, and another two or three sets of all the other issues that directly led up it -- the ones where the different heroes find that weird structure in Central Park, wander into it, and then vanish. If those sold poorly, that might explain why Marvel put so little effort into the So Much Fun! issues -- they knew first-hand that they wouldn't sell very well.)
Anyway, as I said, those last few paragraphs are mostly speculation on my part. The books are an interesting curiosity, but probably not relevant unless you have some kind of completist mindset for them. (No judgement on my part, by the way! Whatever floats your boat is cool! They're just not for me.) But now you know what you're looking at if you happen across one of thesse "Classic" titles as you're scanning through a back issue bin and find yourself wondering what the heck you're looking at!
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
As I said, I hadn't purchased anything from them for a year prior. I'd also canceled my Prime account early in 2025. Both part of a decidedly conscious effort on my part to separate myself from their influence. So I'm not mad or upset about losing the account. I'm a little annoyed that they flatly lied to me about why they were canceling my account, but clearly they found something about me and/or my account they didn't like and they actively no longer want me as a customer anyway.
That was the last week or two of 2025. However, it only just dawned on me that I will have also lost my Comixology account in the process as well. Obviously, since it took me a few weeks to even realize that, it's not a big concern either. Once Amazon purchased Comixology and tried incorporating it into their Kindle format, the user interface was so awful that I only used it when I absolutely had to. (I think the last time I'd looked at it was in early 2023 when I was an Eisner Awards judge and spent every free moment for the first part of that year reading comics.) But back before Amazon got their hands on that platform, I'd amassed a good number of comics on that account. At a rough guess, maybe 1000? 1500?
Despite Comixology originally launching in 2007, I don't think most people started really paying attention until 2010 or so when A) they launched a stand-alone app that came pre-loaded on Apple's then-brand-spanking-new iPad and B) that happened to coincide with Marvel and DC having their titles released digitally through Comixology. That's probably about when I signed up as well.
However, it was quite a while longer -- years, I think -- before I bought my first comic digitally. I snagged plenty of free ones though! A lot of titles had one or two issues for free. Marvel had a couple of massive promotions where they'd give away 500 free comics or something, in addition to for-a-while-weekly releases of some newish issues from both Marvel and DC. And there was a weird incident when they were in some agreement with Amazon, but before they were bought out, where someone at Amazon accidentally mis-maked a slew of Marvel Masterworks with a cost of zero; that only lasted for, like, a half hour before someone corrected it, but I was able to grab digital copies of something like the first fifteen years of Fantastic Four stories!
The reasons I wasn't actually buying anything, though, came out of a business model arguement people were having right at the start. Namely, that when you bought a digital comic on Comixology, you didn't own it. There was very clear language early on that you were essentially just renting the comic until such time as either A) you closed your account, or B) Comixology decided they didn't want you to have it any more for some reason. You couldn't download the issue at all, not even a DRM'd version.
In the fifteen-ish years I had a Comixology account, I think I paid for only three issues. All of which were expressly for the purpose of doing research for some articles -- two were issues that were too expensive to buy for real and hadn't been reprinted in any capacity, and one was a issue I already had, but I needed to do some research while I was travelling and didn't have access to my collection. So from a stric cost perspective, losing my Amazon account -- and those digital comics I paid for 8 or 10 years ago -- cost me only a few bucks.
I definitely have a much larger collection of digital comics that I've downloaded from other places (legally!) sitting on my hard drive. Definitely a lot more independent work there, of course, and some of them are older as I'd been looking at digital comics for more than a couple years before Comixology. Many of them are still avaiable online in various place, so I could download them again if I needed to (I seem to recall a good number of them are, in fact, public domain comics pulled from Digitial Comic Museum, now celebrating their fifteenth anniversary!) but it's not necessary. They're on my hard drive, which is backed up nightly. They're my copies, and I don't have to worry about losing them just because some nameless entity decided I wasn't an account worth having any more.
I also recently set up my own media server. I'd done a somewhat makeshift version of that with my music some time ago, just "hosting" MP3s ripped from my CD collection 15-20 years ago. But using a refurbished old laptop dedicated to hosting up files, and a relatively cheap ($150 US) 8 TB hard drive, I can throw movies and TV shows on as well. (Mostly streaming captures through legitimate sources, though there's a number of public domain works downloaded from the Internet Archive and YouTube as well.)
What's been interesting with video files is that, even in the few weeks I've been loading my system with them, I've seen several that I captured from legal sources, only to see them disappear a week or two later. Obviously due to a contract expiration, but it's another way emphasize the same point from before: that unless you have a copy of some media in your home, you don't own it. I was particularly annoyed a year and change ago when I was watching Marvel's Runaways on Disney+ when they pulled the whole series just as I finishing season 1. I checked Amazon Prime and they had only seasons 1 and 3 -- no clue why season 2 wasn't available. I did find just this past week a notice that Tubi will allegedly begin streaming it in February, but I don't know if that's necessarily the whole series or just certain seasons. If I had downloaded all of those back when I was watching it, it would've been a non-issue.
Again, my point is that we're living in an era when many of the things you've bought and paid for can be pulled out from under you with little-to-no notice. People have been warning for YEARS that any of these platforms -- for comics or music or movies -- are only as permanent as the company hosting them feels like. Maybe that is indefinitely. More than likely, probably not though. But we're fortunately at a point where you can get a good sized hard drive relatively inexpensively, so it might be worth considering hooking one up to an old laptop or something and figure out how to host all your media locally. (As long as your machine still works, it's honestly pretty easy. It took only took me several months to set mine up because I had to get an old laptop in working order in the first place. Once I got things basically working again, getting it set up to host media wasn't much more difficult than installing an app.)
I think things will only get more chaotic and unpredictable in the near future, so if you're able, I'd strongly recommend trying to get your media house in order before you lose all your music or movies or comics!
Buster Brown debuted as a comic strip in the New York Herald in 1902. It was created by Richard Outcault, who is perhaps better known as the creator of the Yellow Kid from almost a decade earlier. The character was then bought by the Brown Shoe Company in 1904 and debuted as the company mascot at the World's Fair in St. Louis. Outcault continued drawing the character in the comics until 1921.
But the character continued on. Beginning in 1925, a series of live-action comedy shorts were produced featuring Arthur Trimble in the titular role. Tige the dog was played by Pal (at some point renamed Pete), who would later go on to become the iconic Petey in Our Gang shorts. Here's "Buster's Mix-Up"...
There were, I believe, 49 Buster Brown shorts in all. "Buster's Mix-Up" was #9 (I think) and was first released on May 26, 1926. Buster Brown didn't receive any notable media exposure again until a radio show in 1943, and then a television program in 1951. The Buster Brown comic book ran from 1945 until 1956, with a handful of additional one-off issues throughout the 1950s.
After that, the only new Buster Brown material I'm aware of are commercials. There were a few reprint books in the 1970s, but nothing new that I can find. Which would probably explain why many folks my age or younger aren't aware of Buster Brown's history as a bona fide comic character!
