THE STANDARD COMICS ENCYCLOPEDIA -- coming soon to an online store near you.
I began commissioning comic art in 2010 and quickly settled into pieces featuring old public domain superheroes with the idea that "Standard Comics" (a real company until the 1950's) bought all these characters and published them together in a shared universe. Eventually my own creations crept into the mix. Basically, the idea was that each of the fake covers or interiors to these imaginary comics were a sort of window into another universe where the heroes of "Standard Comics" were as famous as those at DC or Marvel.
In a small way, I think the idea is reflective of this thought from Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges:
"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."
Examples can be seen in my ComicArtFans gallery:
http://tinyurl.com/kx7jobl
The next logical step, apparently, was to prepare a version of DC's "Who's Who" or Marvel's "Official Handbook", the "Standard Comics Encyclopedia" chronicling the adventures of said characters. So, soon I will have a series of entries on the adventures of characters that don't exist. Borges all the way!
To date, I've done three of these, the excerpts from the "Encyclopedia":
http://tinyurl.com/q8gwe42
Props to the artists who provided images; Generous Gerry Turnbull for designing the look of the book and assembling the entries; as well as Kevin Moorhead for writing some entries.
With modern Print on Demand services like Ka-Blam! and IndyPlanet, it's now feasible to actually, you know, print a hard copy. So, "soon" (i.e. 2015-ish) this "abridged" version of the "Standard Comics Encyclopedia" will be available for your reading pleasure. Or my endless narcissism, whatever.
When I wrap up the entries, I'll let you know!
