The Stop Button

Today, a full month later than I’d hoped but a couple weeks before I feared, I’m dropping The Comix Section #1, an e-zine of comic book criticism. If you have a good color printer, lots of ink, legal-sized paper, and a powerful stapler, it can also be a paper zine. It was meant to be a paper zine and flipped when read, with one side containing a readthrough of the DC Comics Will Eisner’s The Spirit Archives and the other a wide variety of floppies starting in the mid-1970s.

There’s a story to the variety, but I’m approximately twenty-four hours behind when I actually thought I’d be making this post, and even last night, I didn’t have it in me.

I don’t even have a full listing of the contents in me at this point, but you can see the table of contents below.

There are a bevy of download versions, which took up much of the additional prep time and is hopefully something I can automate next time.

The issue is available as a PDF or a CBZ, both full quality–oh, forgot: The Comix Section is fully “illustrated” (photos of the issues and, more significantly, the Spirit)–and compressed. The compressed should be fine. Again, lots of versions if it’s not. Or you want to try printing it out.

Download PDF 142.6 MB

Download CBZ 142.6 MB

Download CBZ (full quality) 438.3 MB

Thirty-one Spirit stories reviewed, a full-page from each of them. Eighteen DC seventies books (maybe eighteen; I actually won’t get this posted if I stop and count): Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and All-Star Comics Starring the Justice Society of America Featuring the Super Squad. Spoiler: the first year, Spirit is better, but even with the frequent, complicated, but unequivocal yikes of Ebony in Spirit, it’s often less creepy than the DC stuff.

I’ve got a fancy dedication planned for some point (at this rate, the project will take eleven years). Lanark took thirty, but it was fiction, so I feel like I’m solid. But for now, I want to shout out Vernon (who’s reading this) and Katie (who isn’t but will read the collected CS someday, all 500k words of it–again, extrapolating from this single issue). Invaluable assistance through the process, with Vernon actually making it possible. My thanks.

I hope you’ll check it out, though if you’re here for the movies or TV, I don’t think it’ll be for you unless you’re intellectually curious about comic books. Even if you’re into comics—well, the Venn diagram of Will Eisner and Jim Shooter—honestly, comics is the only reality where they can overlap so much.