Aging indy comics crank P. Bagge gets the treatment in this TwoMorrows publication that is filled with old, new and rare artwork along with brand new interviews with and commentary on the one and only Mr. Bagge. I guess this means Pete is now officially part of the comic book mainstream. Or does it?
Oh, what the heck, we might as well go ahead and go all out in our trumpeting of our customers' pen and ink prowess as this issue of the Kirby Collector focuses on one of our favorite aspects of "The King"'s many talents, namely his ability to render awesomely abstract technological apparatuses - in other words, Kirbytech! And that's the focus of this issue, which features 80 giant-size pages held together by a pair of stunning Kirby covers, the front inked by Terry Austin and the back inked by our pal Tom Scioli, who is also featured in a brief interview that discusses his original, Kirby-inspired series, The Myth of 8-Opus.As an added bonus, there is a feature article penned by Adam McGovern of Dr. Id fame which discusses the concept of Kirby as a genre in his own right. How about them apples!
Yes! Matt Baker is one of the all-time greats of Golden Age and Atom Age comics. His lack of greater fame is largely due to the fact that he eschewed delineating superheroes – at least of the masculine variety – instead choosing to focus largely on employing his prodigious talents in the service of bringing a long line of feisty fighting female firebrands to the comics page. While Baker made a mark with his minor foray into the world of caped crusaders with the infamous Phantom Lady (singled out by Dr. Frederic Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent for her heady "headlights"), he is best known for his down to earth women. Some of these were serially recurring characters like the military-based, Canteen Kate, and, especially, the more exotic types like South Sea Gal, Vooda, Tiger Girl and, of course, Sheena, which were Baker's forte. The core of Baker's oeuvre, however, was the parade of women who populated the pages of Crime and, especially, Romance comics published by St. John's Comics during the late '40s and early '50s in titles like Authentic Police Cases, Diary Secrets, Pictorial Romances and Teen-Age Temptations. And he did plenty more besides, managing to produce an immense body of work in his all-too-brief 38 years of life, which ended in 1959. Local Copacetic customers will be interested in learning that, shortly after his North Carolina nativity, Baker's family moved to Pittsburgh, and he grew up right here in Homewood. In addition, it is worth pondering a moment the fact that Matt Baker was one of the few – and by far the most successful – black men to work in comic books during their formative, pre-code years. Matt Baker is a comics figure worthy of attention, and with this volume we have a good place to start.
