Supermatters Arising.

A quick follow up on the Big Blue project. First I just wanted to share one of the stupid scribbles from my other job working in a library. Every day we send boxloads of books back to the uni campuses they belong to. So the couriers will know which place to take them we leave a note on top of the box -usually they'e headed to Carlton, Bundoora East (pleasingly known as Beast) and in the past, to the (now-closed) Business campus. If I have 5 minutes to spare, or a teabreak when really keen, adding a cartoon to the note seems like the polite thing to do. The dumber the better. Working on Superman meant I'd become acquainted with this picture:

The cheeky chappies of Carlton are quality genre buffs, so it seemed like they really needed this:

Stay classy Metropolis.

I like this idiotic thing so much I'm tempted to turn it into a full colour print.

Lastly, this - discovered in the uni library collection while making my comic cover was a book charting the strange twists & turns of Joe Shuster's career. Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster were the high school friends who together went on to create Superman. Disagreements with the publisher led to a contract-ending falling out, and the removal of their creator credit from the comics. The company held the rights, so with no royalties and little success creating another major character, Shuster had to pick up work wherever he could. His years illustrating spanky bondage comics with a yen for torture (knives & hot pokers seem to have been popular) were probably not his favourites. Then his eyesight started to fail. Later in life they did both end up with a settlement and restored credit for Superman, so at least the awfulness isn't completely unleavened. The whole tale of Shuster's "lost" years is told in this book by Craig Yoe:

It's great. The full story and the sometimes-funny, sometimes-nasty plates are a terrific piece of investigative art history/journalism. Tame but quaintly salacious sample:

The work itself reminds me of the parallel career of Archie artist Dan DeCarlo, in that it's obviously the same hand & almost exactly the same characters, now retasked to carry out all the closed-door fantasies often implied by their mainstream comics. The squeaky-cleaning imposed on most big publishing houses of the time certainly wasn't indicative of actual public taste or demand, so as you'd expect the things suppressed just hid away & intensified. This is a fantastic peek in the closet of pop culture. Highly recommended.