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

The FF's Anniversary is NOT August 8!
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/the-ffs-anniversary-is-not-august-8.html

Database as Research Tool
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/database-as-research-tool.html

ComicCon@Home Circa 2009
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/comicconhome-circa-2009.html

Random Comic Photos In The Library Of Congress
http://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/random-comic-photos-in-library-of.html

Thoreau, Shakespeare & Comics
https://www.kleefeldoncomics.com/2026/07/thoreau-shakespeare-comics.html

You ever read Walden by Henry David Thoreau?

Don't bother; it's a crock of shit. I forced myself to wade through it when I was in my 30s and, despite how lauded it often is in literary circles, I found myself almost immediately disliking it. Thoreau struck me as a hypocritical slouch who wouldn't know what self-reliance or responsibility were if they spit in his face, made fun of his mother's army boots, gave him a wedgie and then beat him up and took his lunch money. You ever see that episode of Friends where the woman claims Dead Poets Society was a life-affirming film because she thought it was the worst piece of trash she ever wasted two hours on and she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to make up for that? That's my feeling about Walden.

Now, if you're interested in something philosophical in nature, I'll point to one line from William Shakespeare:

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Act I, Scene III, Hamlet

Most of the speech from which those lines come from is advice a father gives his son, and most of that is rather generic. But what Shakespeare hits towards the end with these lines, I think, does get to the crux of living a life well-lived. If you follow your own path -- a path you actively choose, not one laid down by someone else -- and stay true to it regardless of obstacles or opposition, then your honesty with yourself will give rise to an honest life without regret or remorse.

I don't know that I'd go so far as to claim that I use those words as a credo of any kind, but I have spent a lot of time in my own head over the years and I have a pretty good grasp on who I am and what I believe. I live my life in a way that I can lie in bed every night, and go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I did nothing that day worth losing sleep over. I did my best, learned from my mistakes and, tomorrow, I'm going to do that again.

For the past several years, I've had an idea for a book rolling around in my head. I've done most of my research, and have a pretty good grasp on the subject. I don't know that it'd sell -- in all honesty, it probably wouldn't, given the subject matter: a largely forgotten comic book from the 1940s -- but it's something I'd like to do because... well, no one else is. I haven't yet sat down and written Word One, though, because I haven't really developed a good hook for it. A unifying theme(s) that tie the whole thing together. The best I've come up with is a straight chronological approach. It would work, I suppose, but... meh. I think I need a good hook for the whole thing and that's why I haven't started writing it yet.

BUT...

I'm not sitting here complaining that I haven't done anything. I'm not making excuses to myself for not getting anything done. I've gotten compliments about this blog a number of times in how I'm not one to follow whatever the current comic topic du jour is, and how I speak to things that aren't necessarily popular within the comic community. And you know what that comes from? "To thine own self be true." I know who I am and what I like and where my interests lie. I don't especially care how expertly (or not) the Watchmen movie was made; I don't especially care what DC's next company-wide crossover is; I don't especially care who the next creative team on Uncanny X-Men is.

So I just write about comics' topics that interest me. If you'd like to come along for the ride, that's great! Welcome! If not, so be it. But, if you do get something out of what I have to say, I encourage you to think and talk about it more. I encourage you to get into your own head for a while and roll around the subjects I touch on here. Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I just spouting my own brand of blinkered, philistine pig-ignorance?

I've heard that Jack Kirby didn't want people to imitate him. He took it as a much greater compliment if his work inspired people to go off and tell their own story. Similarly, I hope my work gets you to think your own thoughts. I don't care if you agree with me or not, or respond or not, but take the time to reflect and make up your own mind. Just make sure it's your own mind.

"To thine own self be true."

I was just trolling through the Library of Congress website (as one does) and found a few photos of possible interest to comics folks...

Winsor McCay sketching for the Actors Benefit for Crippled Children, 1908...

From a school for refugee children, 1942. Photo by Marjory Collins...

Wanda Newman and Teresa Phillips at Do Dah Day in Birmingham, AL, 2010. Photo by Carol Highsmith...

Maybe it's just me, but I find this kind of stuff fascinating. How they show the cultural and social impact of comics over the course of American history.

If you're bummed that you can't attend Comic Con in person this year (it formally kicks off tomorrow, but there are some unofficial parties starting this afternoon) I might suggest looking back at this Foxtrot strip Bill Amend did back in 2009. Jason and Marcus* had the Comic-Con@Home experience figured out a decade-and-a-half ago!
* There's a coloring error here -- Marcus is supposed to be Black. I believe this was corrected in the books, but they've never gone back and adjusted the version online.

I mentioned back in June that I had recently returned to using ComicBase as a way to catalog my collection. It's had some substantial improvements since I'd last used it in the early 2000s. (I just double-checked; I still have the physical manual to ComicBase 5, which was released in 2000.) Partially because of that and partially because of what I do differently, I'm setting this database up to be a more functional research tool.

The basic use of such a comic book database like this is pretty simple and straight-forward: to track which comics I have and, as a secondary consideration, which comics I want to look for. Theoretically, a basic list or Excel file would be sufficient in many cases, but that does get a bit tricky when you're considering alternate versions of the same issue or multiple series with the same title. Differentiating those can be done in a variety of different ways, but those could vary quite a bit depending on the publisher and the time period. Do the covers use different artwork, are the cover prices different, did they come out on different dates, do they have different publishers... So to account for all those variations, you need to expand the amount of data you need to track for each issue, and those Excel files can start getting unwieldly and downright ineffecient pretty quickly.

I don't think I need to get any extended explanations on all of that. So let's get to the research angle.

As I'm working on something, I might want to reference a story point I nominally recall, but couldn't pinpoint off the top of my head. But I can use the database to hunt down the issue in question. "I think it was the first story to introduce [character X]." "I'm pretty sure it was drawn by [specific artist]." "I know it occurred right after [some other storyline]." Instead of having to rifle through long boxes trying to track down a specific issue and relying on a half-faded memory, I can do the tracking work digitally and only go to the long boxes (or bookshelves) once I've figured out what precisely I'm looking for. That's almost inevitably going to be a faster process, and I'm less likely to cause additional wear and tear on (particularly) older issues. And in many cases, I might be able to find that the story I need was reprinted elsewhere and I don't have to touch my original issues at all.

As ComicBase also allows for digital comics to be added, there will be many cases where I do not need to even get up from my computer. I have years worth of digital comics on my hard drive already. Some are public domain pieces that have been uploaded for free online, some are review copies I've been sent. I even found a decent stash of more independent comics on my hard drive dating back to 2006-2008 and had Wowio advertisements embedded in them! (For you youngsters, Wowio was an early attempt to act as an ad-supported digital comics hub, but it really started to stall by 2008 and was all but defunct by 2009.) Which means that, as I'm doing those searches that I mentioned above, I can immediately access the digital versions right from that database entry whether I have a physical copy or not.

As a real-world practical example, as I was cataloging my collection, I came across a couple issues of Radio Shack's History of Electronics comics. I have three copies, each from a different year, but the database points out all the other versions I'm missing. Mine were ones I'd picked up from Radio Shack first-hand back in the day, so they're all pretty close content-wise. But seeing that they ranged from 1972 up through 1990, there must have been some pretty radical changes in the story to account for actual technological changes. Having digital copies of a wide range of them, I can directly compare the full range of them to one another and determine what changes needed to happen and how the 1972 version evolved into the 1990 version. Yes, I could theoretically track down physical copies of all of them and make comparisons that way, but this is MUCH faster and more efficient!

And, furthermore, because I've got all this on a database running locally on my home network, that means that I can continue working on things if there are problems with an internet hub or my ISP or something. Or if the digital copies of those books that are currently available online get removed. You hear about it more with movies and TV shows, but the services hosting online media are increasingly juggling licensing agreements all over the place, so what may have been readily accessible one day is gone the next.

(My personal example -- which still annoys me -- I was watching the Marvel show Runaways on Disney+ when they abruptly removed it from their platform just as I was about to begin season 2. The show remained available on Amazon Prime, but only seasons 1 and 3 for some inexplicable reason. After over a year of that being the status quo, all three seasons only recently popped up on Tubi. Who knows how long it will remain there? I mean, it's a show produced by Disney -- you'd think they wouldn't pull down TV shows they actually own!)

My point being that the few years I spent without having a working comics database was more than just an annoyance in not knowing all the comics I had in my collection. It was limiting the amount and type of research I could do, and making much of what I did do more tedious than it needed to be. If all you need is something to keep track of what issues you have or want, that's great -- you might not anything more complicated than a notepad. But in doing the type of work that I do, a robust database can be invaluable in getting quicker and more ready access to the sources I need to do the research I'm trying to do.

We're in the back half of July, which means that we'll inevitably start seeing some people making note of the anniversary of the Fantastic Four (and therefore Marvel Comics in general) on August 8th. Supposedly, this is because many people claim August 8, 1961 as THE day that Fantastic Four #1 first hit the stands. The problem is: that's not the correct date of the FF's anniversary.

That date seems to originate from Greg Theakston, who mentioned it in Pure Images #2 circa 1991. In his essay on the earliest days of the Fantastic Four, he mentioned that that August 8th date. That is, I believe, the first time anyone put a specific date to the issue's release. Previously, the FF's anniversary was always tied to the November issue of any given year, regardless of when the November issue actually came out. After Theakston published that, however, the conversation started to shift from "November cover-dated issue" to "August 8th release date." My guess is that Theakston got the date by finding the earliest records he could of a newsstand receiving their copies.

But he wasn't comprehensive in his search.

See, back in 1961, there wasn't a single distributor system for comics. It was a comparitively very loose network off regional distributors. Not to mention what was available worked much slower. So different newsstands and drug stores got their shipments on different days. Generally kind of close to one another, just not on the same day. One shop might get their books on a Tuesday, the guy in the next city might get his on Wednesday, and the guy in the city after that might be on Thursday.

There was also poor communication to the retailers. They didn't necessarily know what they would get on any given delivery, or when the next shipment of a particular title might come in. Since all the comics (and magazines) were returnable, this wasn't a big deal. But retailers did need to know when it might be okay to send old books back, so they would often write or stamp the date they received them on the cover. (Collectiblity was obviously not a concern.) Then, as they were surveying their stock, they could easily determine that it had only been three weeks since they got this issue, but maybe ten weeks since they got this other one. But, here and now, decades later, we can use those same markings to determine when certain issues hit the stands!

Which leads us to Fantastic Four #1. If the copies of the version Theakston saw in the late '80s and early '90s had nothing earlier than an August 8th date, it's reasonable to conclude that that was the earliest anyone got it. However, since then -- thanks in large part to the internet -- we've uncovered examples of other copies with other dates, such as August 1st, 3rd, 8th, 9th, and as late as the 21st. I've even found one marked as early as June 30th! Which means, if the title hit some of the newsstands on June 30, then claiming the FF's anniversary is August 8 means you're off by at least a full month. Check out these examples...



Most of the images here are pulled from the Heritage Auction site. There are plenty more examples to sort through there if you're interested, but you can check eBay too as there are usually a few copies available there as well. But the dates just in this small sampling range from June 30 to August 21!

It's a minor point, to be sure, but if you're going to go around celebrating the exact day the issue hit the stands, let's at least try to be accurate about it, huh?

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

Kleefeld on Comics: What's Up with Comix Wellsping?
https://ift.tt/Ek0OrUx

Kleefeld on Comics: Both Prophetic and Not
https://ift.tt/bLZyah9

Kleefeld on Comics: Marvel's Very First Cover Variant
https://ift.tt/r4Z0k5z

Kleefeld on Comics: Marble Comics Group's Slimeboy
https://ift.tt/jwPm4gv

Kleefeld on Comics: Thoughts on This Week's Marvel News
https://ift.tt/Fjg6hDN