anatomy of a typeface

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals we learn from graphic artist Nate Piekos’ Better Letterer corner (see also) that traditionally in comic book captioning the “I” with crossbars is used exclusively for the personal pronoun whereas the single stroke “I” is used in all other contexts.

your friendly neighbourhood draughtsman

Everlasting Blört introduces us to the amazing artwork of illustrator and author Jeffrey Veregge whose portfolio includes figures from popular culture adorned with kinetic references to Native American, specifically of the Pacific Northwest tradition of his ancestral Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, motifs.  I really like his use of negative space. Check out more of Veregge’s works at the links up top.

age of aquarius

Appearing in only a handful of editions of comics since the early 1970s, Wundarr the Aquarian was commissioned as sort of a New Age, enlightened super hero—but has been largely forgotten and disdained, like all those other characters with questionable or dubious super powers. His story parallels that of Super Man (or Moses) with his distraught parents launching him into space for a life among mortal Earthlings.
Wundarr’s father’s apocalyptic prophesies did not come to pass, however, and the home world was not engulfed by its dying sun—leaving the family, to include their estranged son to be menaced by zealots who weren’t happy that one of theirs had left the flock. Having grown into adulthood in isolation (his escape pod crashing into the Everglades in 1951 but with sufficient life-support systems to sustain him until 1973), Wundarr emerged rather simple but a later communion with the Cosmic Cube—a Sword in the Stone type of talisman of such unbelievable power that no one could tolerate a full dose of its strength, save one with Wundarr’s extraordinary energy-damping abilities—gave him inarticulate insight of the nature of the Universe and instilled within him a sense of purpose. Afterward, Wundarr became the charismatic leader of a pacifist cult, trying to impart and give form to what he experienced when coming in contact with the Cosmic Cube—and welcome the coming of the Celestial Messiah. Too bad that Wundarr has been neglected—I think he’d make a good candidate for the next movie franchise once ideas for the current iteration are exhausted.

mensch und übermensch

I’d guess I’d need to categorise this as one of those things the more one thinks about it, the more manifest it becomes, and I had not given much thought to the thesis beforehand that comics as more than caricature or a stock-epithet is an act of cultural reclamation.

The rise of the genre parallels social and political movements that co-opted and perverted mythological themes, pantheons and notions of bodily perfection not in the classical, athletic and temperate sense but in terms of eugenics and dehumanisation. The bombastic fantasy of Richard Wagner and the Nietzschean Übermensch had been misappropriated and the medium of comics, drawing on real and imagined legendary sources and superhero avatars, is the taking back of such shared heritage—story-telling separated from propaganda. In the beginning, however, these characters sometimes volunteered for deployment—like in the 1940 first issue of Captain America, where the hero is portrayed as socking Adolf Hitler—sometime before the US had actually entered into the war and bucking popular sentiment—in protest to the country’s isolationist policies. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels even went so far as to ban the distribution of Superman comics under the Third Reich over intentional or perceived Jewish roots in Kal-El (close to the Hebrew phrase for “voice of God,” whom was saved from a dying planet in a space capsule but unlike Moses being found among the reeds), but the Third Reich was also very efficient on accentuating and bestowing otherness on people with traits that they would not readily self-identify with. The universes that comics contain is certainly a reaffirmation of narrative, allegory and inclusion and our alter-egos have a mythos that’s forward-going as well.

inútil

Retronaut curated a series of funny comic book panels depicting rubbish superpowers (but does include this image of this Legion-hopeful being summarily rejected). What would your highly specific and apparently of limited utility superpower be? There are unfortunately more and more situations when Colour Kid's abilities could prove useful.