Comics Studies – and Media Studies as a whole – is an incredibly niche area of academia, one usually wrapped up tight in small runs by university presses or the occasional, amusingly tongue-in-cheek essay in The Believer. Interested readers can certainly find it if they want it, and more astute readers can dive deep into books on subjects as diverse as Calvin & Hobbes or the album Let it Be by The Replacements.
Deep essays about the gorilla in popular culture or biographical accounts of long-dead comic book editors are not exactly at the forefront of your average comic reader’s mind, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be.
This brings us to Blab!, a long-running (but niche) anthology of alternative comix and, more specifically, this week’s Blab! Vol. 1 from Dark Horse.
Blab! is a surprising and rewarding collection of comics and essays touching on subjects that readers didn’t exactly know they were curious about. Those gorillas, for one, in an essay by series creator Monte Beauchamp, sandwiched between vintage comic ads and a gallery of gorilla imagery dating back to the 1700s. That ill-fated comic editor? Robert Wood, co-editor of the Comic Code-targeted Crime (Does Not Pay), whose descent into drink and violence is documented in a strip by Noah van Sciver.
The volume is a wealth of well-researched and wide-flung neo-academia, a sort of comic-book historian’s casual reading. That might sound stuffy – and I’m not going to say that a reproduction of Watson Heston’s 1890 anti-church tract The Free-Thinkers Pictorial Text-Book isn’t stuffy, by any means – but the truth is that this isn’t simply a book for those of us concerned with the minutia of pop culture. It’s a book that reaches out to any curious reader of Superman, any reader who has (knowingly or unknowingly) been affected or influenced by the rich history of media.
Dark Horse Comics
The talent lined up here is stellar, with the cover and interior work by notable pop artist Ryan Heshka worth the price of admission alone, but it’s the unique presentation of all this information that sells the book. Utilizing the very “low” media which it dissects and examines, Blab! makes a firm argument for its legitimacy. It’s a welcome new resource to strike back at any of those stolid academics raising their noses up at anything lesser than Maus.
One can hope this new format, new publisher, and new presence brings Blab! into more curious hands.
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