Tag: SOLRAD

Quick Hits | Rest in peace, José Delbo

Plus: Amy Chu, Rob Liefeld, Frank Johnson and what the heck is going on with Cadence Comic Art?

José María Del Bó, known professionally as José Delbo, passed away at the age of 90 yesterday. The news was reported on social media by his grandson.

The Argentine comics artist career began in the 1940s as a teenager, with a science fiction tale that appeared Carlos Clemen’s Suspenso title. He left Argentina in the 1960s, migrating first to Brazil and then to the United States in 1965. He worked for Charlton, Dell and Gold Key, contributing art to many of their TV adaptations, including The Brady Bunch, Gentle Ben, The Monkees, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Yellow Submarine.

In the late 1960s, he began drawing comics for DC, working on Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, World’s Finest, Batman Family and Wonder Woman, which he drew for about five years in the late 1970s. From there he moved to Marvel, where he worked on their popular Transformers comic, as well as ThunderCats, Captain Planet and the Planeteers and NFL SuperPro. He also worked on The Phantom and the Superman comic strips.

Together he and writer Simon Furman created Brute Force, a short-lived Marvel series that was intended to be a toy line, but that never came to pass. The series was revived a couple years ago as an Infinity Comics title.

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Sunday Comics | Where there’s a Wilbur …

Check out recent online comics by Karen Moy, June Brigman, Dave McKean, Ryan Bodenheim and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

So have you been following the Mary Worth drama online? Those aren’t words I ever expected to type, but here we are.

If you aren’t familiar with Mary Worth, it’s a long-running, soap opera-style newspaper comic strip. And “long-running” is no joke; it’s been consistently appearing in newspapers and now online since 1938. And it’s origins go back even further than that, to a strip called Apple Mary that started in 1934. So kudos to the creators, Karen Moy and June Brigman, because here we are in 2022, some 80 years later, and the strip is getting all sorts of attention, kind of akin to Days Of Our Lives having Marlena get possessed by the Devil again.

(And yes, June Brigman, the co-creator of Marvel’s Power Pack and all-around awesome comics artist, is the artist of Mary Worth. Alex spoke to her about the comic Captain Ginger back in 2019).

So the attention the strip is getting centers on a character named Wilbur, who I’ve seen described as “miserable,” a “dingdong” and “a giant mayonnaise sandwich” online. Ryan Bradford, who writes for San Diego CityBeat and Vice, wrote about the last few months worth of strips on Substack, where he talks about how Wilbur is dating Estelle but hates her cat, so he kept making death threats against it. Eventually Estelle broke up with Wilbur, but eventually they got back together, and Wilbur proposed to Estelle while on a cruise. That’s where the story really gets interesting.

[SPOILERS WARNING for recent Mary Worth strips, something else I never thought I’d type]

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Sunday Comics | ‘Thomas River,’ World Mental Health Day and Batman

Check out recent comics from Jacob Edgar, Doug Wagner and Brian Stelfreeze, Elise Schuenke and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

Thomas River is a new comic by artist Brian Stelfreeze and writer Doug Wagner, which is currently up on Kickstarter courtesy of 12-Gauge Comics. If you are curious for a taste of what to expect from the project, 12-Gauge has been releasing a daily comic strip by the creative team on social media during the campaign. You can find them in the 12-Gauage Twitter feed.

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Sunday Comics | ‘How did then become now?’

Check out comics by Lynda Barry, Joey Weiser and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online in the past few weeks. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

In her latest comic for the New York Times, Lynda Barry asks the question, “How did then become now?” and chronicles the little things she saw as the world slowly changed from pre-pandemic to pandemic.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Fieldmouse Press

The four men behind the nonprofit publisher and comics criticism site discuss the initiative.

Ryan Carey, Rob Clough, Daniel Elkin and Alex Hoffman are four of the major comics critics in the U.S. right now. In Enemies of the State, Four Color Apocalypse, High-Low, Sequential State and Your Chicken Enemy, along with their writing in various other outlets, each has established a reputation as a thoughtful, insightful critic.

In comics, criticism tends to be maligned, or seen as a stepping stone to becoming a comics professional, but anyone who spends time with serious criticism – and the work of all four definitely are – can see the love for the medium, the passion for creators, the obsession with ideas and formalism. Good critics offer new ways to think about art, can introduce us to new work and inspire not just readers but creators.

It was announced recently that the four have teamed up to establish Fieldmouse Press, and in January 2020 they’re launching SOLRAD, which is just the very first aspect of the nonprofit organization. I reached out and was thrilled that they were willing to talk about criticism, their ambitions, and what people can look forward to next year.

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