One Last Bit Of June, Echoing Still...

Oops. Apparently today is July 1st in these parts. With all that time slipping i've been doing lately, i ran out of June without getting to one topic i wanted to be sure of posting. It was originally planned for Juneteenth, but got bumped by the post i did use, and then my peripatetic brain wandered away, thinking it had already been there. So i'm pushing July back by a day, and we're hopping back 56 years to June of 1964 and a comic that was legendarily rare but should have been widely distributed...

It may have been over half a century ago, but it still resonates today with our current struggles. Don't go looking for #s 1-4, this was the first comic book published as part of HARYOU's outreach programs.

The comic was years ahead of its time, illustrating a thick & wordy report - Youth In The Ghetto: A Study Of The Consequences Of Powerlessness - the way we'd see done later for things like the Iran/Contra Affair and the 9/11 Attack, making the information readily accessible to the general public.

I'm very curious about Sam Huger, the artist on this book. It appears to be the only comic he ever drew, at least under that name. I say 'at least under that name' because it's surprising well done for someone with no experience in the field. I'd very much like to know what else he did, comics or otherwise.

Without further comment from the old white dude, let's head on inside the covers...

(For all you Neil deGrasse Tyson fans, that's his Dad being named in the first panel.)

Hmm...
I was going to put the full report here, but i don't see a way to link it or store the file here on Blogger.
However, i did find a .pdf copy over at the Internet Archive. Here's the link, and hopefully it's still good by the time you got here.

page art by Sam Huger from Harlem Youth Report #5 (1964)

The Grass Cat

If i've managed to get through the week without losing complete track of time (again), then we've reached Saturday. This weekend, let's return to an old favorite once more - This Guy:

You may recall Grass Green's early work in fandom on strips like the Bestest League of America, the Frantic Four, and the Scavengers. Or perhaps from those Far-Out Fairy Tales he drew for Charlton. Or maybe from The Shape, Superella, or his Super Soul Comix with Eric Private, The Black Eye and Soul Brother American. Not to mention his library of Blue Works.

Somehow along the way, i don't believe we've talked about arguably his greatest creation - Xal-Kor, The Human Cat. Like the photo above, Xal-Kor comes out of a semi-mythical fan publication from Texas - Star Studded Comics. Between 1963 and 1972, the Texas Trio published 18 issues (the final three under the truncated Star Studded title). The semi-mythical status derives from some of the people who worked on it and the low distribution. 

Contributors included folks like Dave Cockrum, Jim Starlin, Ronn Foss, Rich Buckler, Biljo White, George R.R. Martin, Al Milgrom, Bill Dubay, Alan Weiss, D. Bruce Berry, and Dennis Fujitake. (How have we not looked at Fujitake's lovely works yet?)

Originally only 250 copies were printed. By the end of the run, circulation had doubled. But that's still not a lot of copies out there, so the book was rarely seen even among collectors.

Add to the scarcity the fact that the early issues were mimeographed...

...and that's what it looks like after major clean-ups & restoration on the scan of the severely faded original. Even when copies survive, reprinting from faded mimeos is not often contemplated. Some are so faded that text cannot be read - it must be laboriously deciphered. Large areas of some pages are faded to pure white. Some pages, however, are still quite readable. 

I thought about doing a black&white conversion for this story, but let's stick with the original purple mimeo. Note that the other colours were usually added by hand - another reason for those low copy counts per issue.

Fortunately for us, with issue #4 they upgraded to offset printing and black ink. Later Grass Green stories are much easier to read -

And the switch to better printing was just in time. With issue #5, Green's Xal-Kor crashed onto the scene -

Here's his debut tale from that issue -

Xal-Kor appeared in another half dozen issues of Star Studded Comics. Fortunately, they're all sitting here, so we'll be diving in deeper this weekend.

page art by Richard 'Grass' Green from Star Studded Comics #s 1, 2, 5, & 15 (1963, 1964, 1969)

Departing Ditko Days

We've got just enough room left in the week for one more visit with Steve Ditko. Let's start where we left off, with some stories from the mid-50s...

This is The Voice Of ODD!, so let us take a hard turn into Odd territory for some completely different Ditko -

He even brought us the cover to that issue...

...and it was hardly his only trip into weird comedy...

This one was rarely seen, originally slated for Plop! and published in the Amazing World Of DC Comics, we get Steve Ditko working with Steve Skeates and Wally Wood -

And now we seem to have looped back around to where we started...

...so i guess it's time to move along...

page art by Steve Ditko (and Wally Wood) from Spellbound #29, Mystery Tales #s 40, 45, & 47, From Here To Insanity #s 10 & 1 (v.3), Amazing World Of DC Comics #13, and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (1955, 1956, 1964, 1975)