The long awaited full length book, The Epic (Annotated) Life Story of Keith Chatto , is now available, right here, right now.  And the price for this is whatever you decide you feel like paying.  That's right, there is no set price for this book. I've decided to offer the following as a deal - feel free, download it in it's current .pdf format, an EPUB format will be coming along soon, read it and then decide if you wish to pay for it or not.  If you do decide you want to pay for it, then the price is up to you - pay whatever you want to pay, or what you can afford to pay, or pay nothing.  So it goes.  My only wish is that people do read this book and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together. The book is a two part affair.  The first part of the book is an autobiographical tome as written by Keith Chatto himself and looks at his early life, his service career and how he became a comic book artist.  Keith's writing has been annotated and expanded upon to enh

I've always found it highly frustrating, that some of the attacks on Stan Lee in the now legendary Stan Lee vs Jack Kirby flame wars centre around articles such as this two parter, mainly because Lee, and Kirby for that matter, had zero control over what was going to be written about them in newspapers and magazines.  Reporters would visit the Marvel offices in the 1960s and 1970s and find Lee, who was articulate, engaing and entertaining, and write their stories accordingly.  Perhaps if Kirby was in the office a bit more often he'd have gotten some more print ink.   I have no doubt that Lee would mention his artists, and other writers, in the same way that I have no doubt that such mentions were merely edited out of the finished product for space reasons.  Plus who, back then, really cared about the artists?  Only those in fandom...or did they? This is a two part article, written about Marvel Comics in the first week of January 1966, meaning it would have been in the wor

Most people are very familiar with John Ryan’s ground-breaking book Panel By Panel and it's very distintive cover, but how many people have ever seen the concept sketch?  Published in 1979, Panel By Panel was the first, and still one of the best, books devoted to the history of comic books in Australia.  Since then other books have come along, notably Comic Books in Australia and New Zealand in 1994 and Bonzer: Australian Comics 1900s – 1990s in 1995.  Ryan was first though and his research is still the yardstick that many people measure themselves upon.  He communicated with many artists and writers and spent years tracking people down.  Just prior to his untimely death in  December 1979 he was still tracking people down and making arrangements to speak and correspond.  There was a personal cost to his research though, but that's a post for another time. When Cassell, the publishers of Panel By Panel , approached Ryan about the book he had a definite idea of who he w

Somehow I'm thinking this one slipped past DC Comics back in the day.  "Holy Fat Saggy Arseholes Batman!"

Happy Birthday Batman! Detective Comics #27, Batman's first appearance, was released to the newsstands, on this day in 1939.  Many fine writers and artists have followed the path forged by Bill Finger and Bob Kane over those 75 years, but my all time favourite Bat-Artist has to be the incomparable Norm Breyfogle. So, here's just two of the thousands of Norm Breyfogle Batman illustrations to celebrate Bat's 75th!