Marvel announced yesterday they'll be publishing a book collecting over 700 covers of Fantastic Four as part of the 65th anniversary of that title. They're going with the descriptive, if unimaginative, title Fantastic Four: 65 Years of the World’s Greatest Comic Covers!

This won't be the first time Marvel's celebrated an FF anniversary with a cover collection. The "Director's Cut" edition of Fantastic Four #500 from back in 2003 ran a multi-page 'collage' of all of the covers up until that point. And, if you look at the credits of that issue, you'll find my name as the person who provided them. So it's got me wondering if they'll use my scans for this new issue as well.

It would be pretty cool if they did, but I suspect they won't. When I provided the scans back in 2003, that was prior to Marvel's digital program. The so-called "golden age of reprints" was just getting underway, so much of their library hadn't seen print since it had first been published; the original production art would've been long since gotten rid of and new scans of everything wouldn't have been made yet. They would've only had scans for maybe whatever had been re-published traditionally via, say, their Masterworks books, but that would've only covered maybe the first 60 issues of the title. I had been running a major FF fan site for several years at that point, and had talked with editor Tom Brevoort more than a couple times, so he thought to reach out to me to get a hold of the remaining cover scans fairly quickly. They weren't professional-grade scans but, if you look at the issue, they're reprinted as thumbnails, so even a poor quality scan would've been 'hidden' by the small size.

Of course, that was over two decades ago now. Marvel has since released every single issue digitally, which means that they've professionally scanned and cleaned up not only the covers but all the interiors as well. So I suspect they'll just use the cleaned up versions from those releases. Since they're doing a full book of covers, I expect they'll be considerably larger than the thumbnails used in #500 and they'll want to rely on the best sources available. Otherwise, a book of thumbnails the size of the ones they used in #500 would only be five pages!

On the off chance they happen to use my old scans, there should be a pretty easy 'tell.' All of the scans I provided were from my personal collection, and several of the issues had been signed by the creators. In the instances where a creator signed the cover, you could still see their signature in the reproduction in #500. But only if you know what to look for -- again, they're all thumbnails, so the signatures barely even register as a dark squiggle. I can go through my collection again now, and see what issues I have signed, but I honestly don't recall which ones I would've had signed back then. I'm pretty certain I had a few issues signed by Len Wein, and I think Marv Wolfman and Paul Ryan. Maaaaaybe Keith Pollard? I think all the other creator signatures I have on FF issues came later.

In any event, if you look at their new covers issue and there happen to be a few scans that include creator signatures, that's where they came from!

Yesterday, I mentioned some unusual dealings with the Allied MFG. This is only a comic-adjecent story at best, but I do find the events infinitely fascinating and it makes me wonder about the legality of the licensing deals involved.

What would become known as the Komic Kamera was patented by 18-year-old Harold B. Shapiro in 1934. His invention wasn't entirely novel, and his patent application even states that it's basically just a modification of an invention patented by Harry Zimmerman the year before. The reason how/why Shapiro was able to find and re-engineer the device so quickly was because Zimmerman was an employee of Allied MFG Co... which was owned by Benjamin Shapiro, Harold's father. It was Benjamin who brokered the licensing deals needed to create film strips based on comic characters like Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, and others. It seems as if the agreements were larger than just the film strips as Allied made other toys based on some of the characters, one of the other more popular ones being The Playstone Funnies Kasting Kit which allowed kids to create three-dimensional molded figures. In fact, many of Allied's products around this time featured licensed characters.

But, of note here is that because Allied used Harold's design instead of Zimmerman's, the royalties could stay within the family. (Indeed, Harold was still living at home with his parents, Benjamin and Louise.) There's no proof of any wrong-doing here, but it does strike me as a little sketchy at best.

Cut to a few years later, a couple days after Christmas 1936. Benjamin's wife Louise opened their apartment's front door, expecting a visiting friend, when two masked men barged in, held Benjamin and Louise at gunpoint (with Harold sleeping in the other room), and stole $6000 worth of cash and jewlery. (That'd be a little over $100,000 today.) The Shapiros were one of the more well-off families in the building, so targeting them over, say, the neighbors makes sense. But knowing who they were, which apartment they were in, and seemingly that Louise would likely just open the door expecting a friend at the time also seems a bit sketchy, as if they had some inside information.

Not known to the police at this time, Louise had actually been the victim of virtually the exact same crime exactly six years earlier. Right around Christmas 1930, two men barged into her and Benjamin's apartment and stole $7500 in jewelry and cash. Harold would only have been 14 at the time, and Benjamin seemed to conveniently not be home.

A couple days after the 1936 burglary, a couple of cops came across a pair of questionable-looking guys about a mile up the road from the Shapiro's place. As the police approached to question them, one not-subtly tried hiding a small package behind a lamppost. When the police checked it, they found the stolen jewelry, and they promptly arrested the two men.

Once at the station, one of the men, Robert Lewison, confessed to the robbery. In fact, he sang like a songbird and noted the inside man who actually plotted the whole thing was by-now-21-year-old Harold Shapiro! Lewison also identified his partner in the burglary, and the other man who was arrested was considered an accomplice, though he wasn't at the scene himself.

It turns out Harold had met all three at a local boxing gym. Once they learned where he lived, they pressured him for information on who best to rob and how, since there were a number of wealthier families in the area. Harold offered up his own parents, and they spent over a week planning the operation. Harold openly confessed both to the police and in court.

Interestingly, while Benjamin and Louise did initially assist the police and filed charges against the three "thugs", they repeatedly and actively opted not to press charges against Harold. He was ultimately only indicted by the State Attorney. It was at this point where Benjamin and Louise stopped. They stopped helping the police altogether, they openly ignored the judge's orders to appear in court for any of the four men, they routinely took vacations from their Chicago home to New York and Biloxi during court dates... It got to the point where the Assistant State's Attorney had to threaten conspiracy charges against Benjamin and Louise!

The couple basically used every stalling technique imagineable -- including Louise suddenly falling ill on court days -- and it eventually paid off. Nothing was ever brought to trial, and all four men escaped any jail time. Of course, all of this distracted them from running the actual business and Allied eventually folded in the late '30s. But Benjamin created a new company, Acme Plastic Toys, just a couple years later doing basically the same thing. Somewhat more surprisng, though... Harold, now in his mid-20s, was made vice-president. Indeed, within a few more years, Benjamin and Louise retired to Miami while Harold ran the business. Even after Acme was bought out by Thomas MFG Corp after World War II, Harold stayed on until his early retirement.

Benjamin's nearly over-the-top efforts to avoid even implicating his son -- coupled with the unsolved 1930 burglary -- make me wonder if he in fact was the real mastermind behind both crimes. Did he stage the 1930 burglary to turn a nice profit to help him launch Allied? Did he later relay that story to Harold, who wanted to emulate his father? Was Benjamin protecting Harold so his 1930 crime wouln't get discovered? Or did he actually directly instruct Harold, thinking he could get away with it a second time? If Benjamin and/or Harold were willing to go to such lengths against their own family, what kind of shady behavior was involved in brokering those character licensing deals? I think there's a LOT of questions here that seem to have been swept under the rug back in the day.

Benjamin lived to the age of 86, dying in 1982, while Harold lasted until 1998, passing away at 82.

The image here is a "Komic Kamera" from the Allied MFG Co. circa 1934. Looking through the eyepiece on one end, you could see an enlargement of a filmstrip backlit from a hole on the opposite end. The knob on the front cranked the filmstrip forward one frame at a time. It essentially acted liked a ViewMaster but without the stereoscopics to produce the 3D effect.

Judging by the images on the unit itself, it was mostly used to present comic strips. (The back side features Krazy Kat, Dagwood Bumstead and other poorly drawn versions of comic strips characters popular around that time.) The only strip example I've seen featured illustrations; I'm guessing the black and white linework was cheaper to produce in this format than photos and/or color? You swap the film out like you would with a camera of that period, and you could purchase new film strips with other characters/stories for (from the one advertisement I found) five cents.

Now, here's the interesting bit. The one strip that I've seen up for auction was NOT in fact a popular Sunday strip character, but parodies of popular celebrities of the time. Here's the title image...

The story, from what I can tell, is basically just a sex romp with no appreciable differences from a Tiajuana Bible! There's some pretty lewd imagery and a variety of celebrity appearances like Jimmy Durante and Samuel Goldwyn (of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame). The story is a little over 30 frames long, so substantially more detailed that a typical Tiajuana Bible, and the art at least in this particular one seems of considerably higher quality.

The steroescope was around long before ViewMaster came into being -- the earliest ones date back to the 1830s! But ViewMasters' big revolution was in using them to present stories instead of just scenic images. I argued back here that this made those reels comics. But evidently, ViewMaster wasn't the company to come up with the idea in the first place. These people were doing comics and comics porn decades before!

And what I find really amazing is that these ever existed. Compared to a Tiajuana Bible, these must have been incredibly highly priced just to cover the basic costs. That ad I mentioned cited a retail price of 39¢ -- about the equivalent of eight bucks today. Eight dollars for what's essentially a viewer for a six-page comic book, plus another dollar for every additional six pages. I was always under the impression that smut from that era was produced as cheaply as possible because it was all under the table. Evidently, though, there were several socio-economic levels in that particular black market!

One other interesting addendum to this: the Allied MFG Co. folded before World War II. The company's owner was robbed of several thousand dollars by his own adult son in a mob-style hit. The subsequent legal fees and general distraction of the scandal seem to have contributed to the company's downfall. But I'll post more on that tomorrow!

When I was writing Webcomics, I made a point to include some space to discuss Tatsuya Ishida and his Sinfest comic. I made a point to include it because he had radically shifted the tone of the strip from a pretty sexist male-gaze-pandering to a radical feminist message, and I wanted to note how his audience reacted. In most cases where a creator wants to shift their messaging substantively, they'll stop one strip and introduce a new one. With clear jumping off and jumping on points for readers. But Ishida offerred the rare opportunity to see how a tonal shift can affect readers and readership over an extended period.

Shortly after Webcomics was published, I was challenged for not including mention of Ishida's hard tonal shift to an expressly trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) message. The reason I didn't include it was simple -- my final draft of the book was turned into the publisher before this newer shift was fully realized. Ishida had indeed begun dropping TERF messafing into the strip, but there was, at the time, ongoing discussion on his own message boards what his overall intent was. Was he actually demeaning the trans community or was he poking fun at the fact that there's even a debate about them? Longer-term fans gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, and Ishida himself wasn't saying anything outside of the strip itself. So the is he/isn't he question wasn't really resolved until after my manuscript was out the door.

I re-visited the strip again in late 2023. I tried following it for about six months but found myself pretty lost. I initially thought it was because I was trying to jump into the middle of some larger storyline but it seems he'd taken another turn from TERF messaging to anti-semitism. What was hard for me to parse at the time was that his visual metaphors were so strained that they didn't make sense, using symbols to represent things 180 degrees opposite of what they actually mean.

A few weeks ago, I was told Ishida had gotten worse. I was a little dumb-struck honestly because... how? I mean, Ishida had already taken a pretty firm stance against every group imaginable -- he's anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Jew, anti-women, anti-capitalism, anti-communism, anti-every-spectrum-of-politics... what more could he possibly come out against? Well, it turns out, he's not aligning against anything new or different now; he's taken a stance on something he's actually supportive of!

Hitler.

I shit you not; he is now praising Adolf Hitler.

(This is why there're no images with this post; literally every strip I might use as an example for anything I'm talking about today has something blatantly offensive in it.)

His current storyline, which started back in December, is all about re-framing Hitler as a hero. Which he justifies by saying that if Hollywood can re-frame villains like Cruella, Maleficient, and Elphaba as good guys, why not Hitler? He then proceeds to relay how all of World War II was in fact a plot by the Rothchilds, who had Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as their pawns, and Hitler trying to save the world from transgenderism, child sex workers, and physical emasculation. It's so absurd in its positioning, it almost seems like he's satirizing the villain-as-protagonist concept, but there are enough 'tells' to confirm that he's indeed pretty genuine in his beliefs here.

It's certainly not unheard of to present a well-known story from alternate perspectives. Back in the late 1990s, Mark Waid wrote an issue of Captain America almost entirely told from the Red Skull's perspective. Red Skull himself was the narrator and spoke about how oppressed he was by non-Ayran races. How he was the victim, and he his acts of violence against them at the behest of Hitler were only a form of justice. But what was key was that Waid also included a scene at the end told not from Red Skull's perspective, but Kang's and he clarified that what we had seen was specifically Red Skull's version of things and he was contemptably evil. So readers were afforded an immediate perspective that even the most vile villains see themselves as heroes in their own stories, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. But it only worked because of that point of contrast in the last two pages.

(As a point of clarification, the issue that was ultimately published was changed by editorial pretty substantially to the point that Waid asked for his name to be removed from the book. But his original script was later put online, and shows what his original story was. I've got more background and tried to recreate Waid's version of the story here. And to further make clear, the officially published version of the comic with the editorially-revised script takes the same basic approach, but is just considerably less nuanced.)

Here we are, nearly half of a year into Sinfest's current storyline -- still running in daily installments! -- and there's been no indication that everything isn't 100% sincere. He's not presenting any counterpoints in any fashion.

A second key indicator that he's sincere is that his re-imagining of World War II not only places Hitler as a hero, but THE hero against literally everyone else. Ishida has had no issue caricaturing various world leaders but he's notably left Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini out of the story entirely. In fact, Ishida has shown Japan as a whole under Jewish influence with only their previous culture to protect them. So he's not coming from the idea of "the Allied powers were in the wrong" but rather "Hitler was the only person working to save the entire world."

Further, the current story make explictly clear that World War II was not only the fault of Jewish people broadly, but the Rothchild family in particular. It's not just anti-semintism -- which Ishida has been displaying for several years already -- but conspiratorial anti-semitism. Ishida portrays Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin as golems under the direct control of Baron Henri de Rothschild in particular. (To be fair, I only think it's supposed to Henri. He's not been given a first name I can find, but it does look more like him than any other Rothschild as far as I can tell.) And they're relying on the "Kalergi Plan" -- a "Great Replacement" style conspiracy theory based on a deliberate mis-reading of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Praktischer Idealismus. This all goes well beyond "Hitler was just misunderstood" and requires not only an understanding of Jewish and WWII conspiracy theories but an appreciation and affection for them.

For the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that Ishida doesn't hold any Nazi sympathies and he's trying to use this storyline only to satirize various attempts of Hollywood to turn well-known villains into heroes. (We'll also ignore that Wicked was originally a 1995 novel that was turned into a 2003 Broadway musical before it finally got to Hollywood in 2024. I'm sure many people who only saw the film version don't know it's origins.) For these types of stories to work, they need to keep the source material intact. To keep the audience following along, they need the source material as common touchpoints, so the audience understands and appreciates how it can be interpretted in multiple ways. Ishida is not doing that here. He's inventing wholecloth new elements that provably never existed. Ishida is not illustrating Hitler responding to external events he may have viewed differently or in a different context than the rest of the world; Ishida is having Hitler respond to external events that never happened. Provably. You can't have readers sympathize in a "well, if you put it that way..." point of view if your "that way" is completely inevented from nothing. No one even heard of the so-called "Kalergi Plan" until it was coined in 2001 by Gerd Honsik -- a neo-Nazi and author of the book Hitler Innocent? in which he tries to justify Hitler's war crimes -- long after Coudenhove-Kalergi himself had passed away.

In 2014, when I last talked about how Ishida shifted Sinfest's focus, I mentioned that it was demonstrably alienating his readers. The forum on his own site had become a virtual ghost town from 2018 when readers at least still logged in to chat with each other, even if they didn't really discuss the strip itself very much. From what I can tell, the last thread took place between May and July 2024 and consisted of exactly three messages: one poster saying he was back after being gone for a year, another responding 30 days later saying "Get ready to watch Tat completely go off the deep end," and the original poster coming back two weeks after that to say he enjoyed the schadenfreude. It looks like Ishida removed the forums altogether a couple months after that; I strongly suspect no one noticed.

I'm still at a loss on how he's surviving; it sure as hell ain't on money he's making from Sinfest. The site has zero advertising on it any more (which largely dried up for all webcomics back in 2016 anyway). He does have some merch available, but he also has a note on his home page from January indicating that both Redbubble and Spreadshirt rejected his designs entirely. Of the nine designs he posted up on Fourthwall, it looks like four of those have been rejected. (There are spots indicating a design with a name for each was there, but they don't actually display anything.) With his radical politics, I have trouble believing he would be hired in any position above minimum wage, and I'd be surprised if he would tolerate dealing with a just-above-minimum-wage manager for long. I have to believe he's got someone (parents? wife? a generous trust fund?) effectively subsidizing his entire life.

I don't know where he gets any information; this stuff is more bonkers than anything I've seen from Fox or OAN. He only uses social media to post his latest strips; he certainly doesn't respond to readers' comments and I don't think he even sees them. Some of the references in his strip suggest he's still interested in media generally -- I've seen him draw elements from The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, Saw, A Clockwork Orange, Nosferatu, and That Mitchell and Webb Look in just the past few months. Although he seems to have completely missed the point of each and every one of those, but he has clearly seen them. And just prior to his current Hitler storyline, he was making overt references to various current events. Although here again, he seemed to have a very distorted view of some of the basic facts.

I am by no means a psychologist but at this point, I think Ishida is legitimatly disturbed. Not just because he's had an increasingly overt message of anti-semitism for several years or because he's started praising Adolf-fucking-Hitler. I don't see evidence of any human contact any more. He seems increasinly out of touch with reality. The conspiracies he's subscribing to are increasingly unhinged, fueled by whatever worst common denominator rabbit holes the algorithms have thrown him down. I don't think anyone would be surprised at this point if he shows up at some public Jewish festival with a loaded automatic weapon. Or he blows up a temple. Let me be clear that I have no knowledge or intel that he's actually planning something like that, but reading through and thinking about his most recent work has me legitimately concerned.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sinfest is an outlet for all his worst instincts, and doing the strip allows him to vent enough that he can still go around like a regular guy. Or maybe he views everything around/about the strip as a giant piece of performance art where he does a big reveal on the strip's 30th anniversary that he's actually a very nice guy and he donates billions of dollars he earned from selling his life story to Steve Spielberg to help Jewish refugees. Occam's razor, though, suggests he's really just a mentally unwell piece of shit and wants to eradicate literally everyone who isn't a cis hetero white Christian, and he might be far gone enough to acting on it one day.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Creative Connections
https://ift.tt/7ZCrcYt

Kleefeld on Comics: Amazon AI Cancelling Webcomics
https://ift.tt/WGrAZo3

Kleefeld on Comics: Webtoons Embraces Enshittification
https://ift.tt/IYls70K

Kleefeld on Comics: The Anti-Comics Crusades (plural!) of the 1950s
https://ift.tt/6Lvh7jC

Kleefeld on Comics: Electric Company Spidey Covers
https://ift.tt/VMcombk

So I was watching some old clips of The Electric Company on my lunch hour yesterday and saw a few spots featuring Spider-Man. As many of you may remember, the "Spidey" stories on Electric Company couched all of his adventures within the context of comic books. The introducing song ran over a clip of someone opening a Spidey comic, the episode itself was framed within a comic book panel, and the series ending with the closing of the comic.

Something I noticed in watching the clips was the artwork used for the covers... Obviously, these two covers were mocked up specifically for the show but they should look familiar to long-time fans of Amazing Spider-Man and/or John Romita and Gil Kane...


Then there's this next cover, which is obviously a bit more generic and was used for multiple show introductions...

This was actually based on another piece of Romita art that was used, not on a comic, but on the cover to the Spider-Man: Beyond the Grave album from 1972. It was essentially an audio drama but the album cover included what were kind of like storyboards, i.e. comics but with no actual dialogue or captions. It featured Rene Auberjonois as the voice of Spider-Man. At the time, Auberjonois was probably best known as portraying Father Mulcahy in the movie version of M*A*S*H. He would later go on to memorable roles in the TV shows Benson and Deep Space Nine. Here's the first chapter...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you're probably at least passingly familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, and the birth of the Comics Code. There are any number of books and videos out covering the subject any more, from David Hajdu's hefty book The Ten-Cent Plague to Rober A. Emmons' documentary Diagram for Delinquents. Or maybe you've attended a convention and heard Jeff Trexler talk about it in regards to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, or Carol Tilley speak specifically to her research in Wertham's papers. There's plenty of information out there covering all aspects of the anti-comics sentiment that grew through the late 1940s and early 1950s.

But here's the weird thing that I think most Americans don't know: the crusade against comics wasn't just in the U.S. Let me pull out some book excerpts...

From John Bell's book on Canadian comics history, Invaders from the North...

In 1949 the crime-comics campaign gained substantial momentum as community groups across the country lobbied for passage of an anti-cromics law that had been drafted the year before by E. Davie Fulton. Among those who supported a legislative response to the crime-comics problem was Prime Minister Mackenzie King...

From Anne Rubenstein's history of censorship in Mexican comics, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, & Other Threats to the Nation...

Conservative frustration with las historietas reappeared in public discourse not long after a new president, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, took office in 1952... Despite the governmental origin of this second movement against comic books, Catholic leaders sometimes spoke as if the government--rather than producers or consumers--was responsible for objectionable print media.

From Frederik Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics...

In the late 1940s the American Occupation authorities took a dim view of all rhetoric and activities that seemed tied to the disasterous wartime mentality. In the comics this meant replacing the old system of censorship by a new one...

And, lastly, from Paul Gravett's Great British Comics...

In response to his concerns that a minority of American comics available as imports or British reprints were exposing children to gore and sadism, [clergyman Marcus] Morris teamed up with [Frank] Hampson to offer a thoroughly wholesome alternative [in 1950].

Now, all of these countries had obviously different approaches towards "cleaning up" comics and had varying degrees of severity. But what I find striking is that all of these countries were essentially reacting to the end of World War II, despite their level of involvement. And curiously, the countries that had the strictest regulations put in place, in the name of saving the children, were the countries whose children saw the fewest effects of war. Britain had the crap bombed out of it, and we mostly just see a preacher offering up a less fight-y option. Whereas Canada and the United States, separated from the primary conflict by the Atlantic Ocean, put up the greatest stink about comics' impact on children, and had the most legal actions. America was, in fact, so stringent, as noted by the quote above, they even instituted new rules for Japanese comics!

As I said, much has been written about the issues here in the States, and various authors have touched on similar issues around the globe, but I'd be curious to see a comprehensive summary of what EVERYbody was doing and how their reactions differed due to their cultural backgrounds and/or their involvement in the war. What happened in France? Australia? Italy? India? How did this seemingly world-wide comics backlash manifest elsewhere?