So I started drawing a blank for what I wanted to talk about
this week. Lately I have been immersed in Gwandanaland Comics. They are a small
company who specializes in reprinting material that is in the public domain. I
have included a few pictures of the collections that I have ordered. I have
sent two collections onto fellow contributor Lee for his enjoyment after I read
them. 
As this is all public domain material so anyone can
essentially work with the material. Many companies have in fact obtain copies of
the material and cleaned up the pages and published them as hard cover
collections. Often recoloring the books.
While a great way to enjoy these comics it also takes away from the book
having that feel of being the actual comic. Especially the coloring as it is
way better in many collections, which is both a good thing and is like
colorization of old black and white films is a bad thing. Something is lost and
gained at the same time.
This format has the feel of almost sitting down and reading
the comic itself. Every page is not always crystal clear, but it has been great
fun for me to read books and material I have never heard of before and no one
else would ever have collected this material. Even better they can create
almost any collection that you want within limits. Take the Jane Martin War
Nurse collection. I was not interested in all of it, I was more interested
later in the series as the art and stories got better. I learned at that point
that two different female artists worked on the series. I have also learned
some female writers did comics but used a male name for purposes of
publication. It becomes a history lesson
as well as entertainment.
Often when possible the collections will include the ads
from the comics. The ads from the 40’s and 50’s are almost as entertaining as
the comic themselves. Dated to be sure,
but also a reflection of the way society viewed itself at that time.
What was very cool is that they produced an artist edition
version on Nyoka the Jungle Girl. I own the art for the full seven pages and
found a local person who was able to produce high quality scans of the pages. I
sent the scans to Gwandanland Comics and they produced a book with the color
pages and the original art plus some extras to make the book big enough to publish.
Lance is the central contact point and he is cordial
friendly and very helpful in explaining options. You can buy the books on
Amazon or pay them direct – cheaper but slower mailing time. They only produce
books when ordered as they have a huge catalog to choose from and are
constantly adding material. Recently they had to delete material as they found
some material that appeared to be public domain was in fact copyrighted. I asked about how they could publish all the
Charlton material they publish when DC had purchased Charlton characters. I was
told Charlton published their material without a copyright. While the
characters are owned by DC the Charlton material is public domain.
There is such a wide variety of material. Some is dated and
some of the writing and art are weak, but there is also an amazing amount of
beautiful art and fascinating stories. A lot is pure fun and enjoyment. It gets
crazy at time as before the comic code the companies were pushing the envelope.
Gwandanaland has a series of collections call Wertham’s Weapons that publish
most of the comics that were referenced in the infamous Seduction of the
Innocent.
The material here has captured most of my reading time at
this point. It has the plus of telling complete stories often in eight pages.
You can easily see how it might be expanded into 20 pages or more but I sometimes enjoy not having every comic book story I read be a Homeric epic.
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