Back from the fun and excitement of a two-month respiratory virus. (One month battling it, another one recovering from it.)

I've decided to move my 19th century children's stuff to a companion blog, which I call Finding Its Form: The Evolution of the Modern Comic Book.  Feel absolutely free to mosey on over and give it a shot, though for the moment the sole entry is a reposting (from here) of "Aesop's Fables (1884): the modern comic page on its way."

This way, I can keep Lee's Comic Rack focused on Charlton, Bill Molno, Dell, and the occasional Classics-Illustrated-knockoff post.  I think things were getting a little too cluttered around here (despite my slow posting rate of late!), what with having to juggle what are essentially two formats.

So, two blogs should do it.  More than do it, as they say.  Here, by the way, is a page from the Nov., 1887 issue of Babyland.  It's something we might expect to see a half century later, when comic books were old news.  But in 1887?

Thus, my interest in 19th century children's magazines and magazine-style books, of which there were zillions.  (Tell that to the eBay dealers jacking the prices sky-high on these things on account of the current "Victorian" craze.)  Anyway, I strongly believe that, with pages like the above, we're seeing the modern comic book come into being.  The details of that evolution are too complicated to simply summarize, so I'll let Finding Its Form: The Evolution of the Modern Comic Book do the talking.  Many thanks to Bev for helping me with the title (the portion that precedes the colon).

The earliest modern comic books aren't exactly what we might have thought they were, but that's the fun of historical research--namely, finding out how wrong we are about the past.  When we let it tell its own story, it always has tons of things to teach us.

Back to this blog--In no time at all, I'll be putting up some more Bill Molno art-spottings (I guess I can use that as a noun) in Dell and Gold Key.  I've been sitting on these for a while, as it's pretty intense work putting all the images together (finding the right ones being 95 percent of the work).

So I hope you'll check out my new (seven visits, to date!!) blog and stick with this one as I pick things up anew.  Bev and I were sick all January with a nasty respiratory virus that put the "long-term" in "long-term"--the dang thing took a month to leave our systems, and then it took us another month to fully reenter the world of the living.  Having "lost" 1/6 of a year, I'm having a hard time believing April is just around the corner.  I'm sure Bev is, too.

Our ten cats, as ever, couldn't care less....

Lee