I’ve been re-reading Silver Age Marvel Comics and writing retrospectives about the themes and narrative mechanics I’ve found. I’m particularly interested in discovering how the craft of storytelling evolved over the years during this formative time period.

Most recently I wrote about issues 4 and 5 of The Amazing Spider-Man, and how they deepened Peter Parker’s character. You can find the long-form retrospective here:

https://arcticinkcomics.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-amazing-spider-man-4-5-1963.html

#comics #marvel #spiderman #comicshistory

Oh, wow.

George Herriman was probably the most influential comics artist of all time. He was the first to experiment with layouts and panel shapes, at a time when speech bubbles were still a new idea. And he invented much of the visual language that would be later copied by film.

Sadly, he lived his entire life in obscurity, never opening up to anybody, because he was a mixed-race man in 1900s America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXjlx-1h6yQ

#comics #ComicsHistory

So fun fact: I own the original art for the Death's Head one-page story "High Noon Tex". I'm in the middle of moving, and my friends at the local comics-and-collectables shop offered to let me keep anything exceptionally valuable in their storage. Within hours of me dropping it off yesterday, @strangefour sent me a link to this and asked if I had any forensic insights:

#Marvel #DeathsHead #Transformers #ComicsHistory #comics #Hasbro

https://youtu.be/RHGM6BtiQSE