Too Busy Thinking About My Comics II

Bob Burden’s mighty Flaming Carrot visits Gotham City, from the UKCAC 89 booklet.

Gary Leach’s wonderful “The Bat-Mite Returns”, from the UKCAC 89 booklet. Surely this is by far the best homage and satire of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns?

Alan Davis and Mark Farmer depict The Batman and The Reaper knocking lumps out of each other, from the UKCAC89 convention booklet.

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

Hemingway

(Panels by Jim Aparo, Mike W Barr et al, from The Brave And The Bold #177, 1981)

Ad for Grant Morrison & Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, from the back page of Amazing Heroes #171, 1989

The Joker, as drawn by Brian Bolland for the cover of 1988’s FA #103. It was, of course, the year of the release of his and Alan Moore’s “The Killing Joke”.

“What is robbing a bank to founding one?”

 Brecht

(Panels by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson et al, from Batman #8, 1942

“She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here.  Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives.  Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other’s abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool’s gold for decades on end.  But all the real horses were out of the barn.”

 Stephen King, Lisey’s Storey

 (Panel by Kevin Nowland & Jan Strnad from Batman: Black And White #4, 1996)

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies

(Picture of Batman, of course, by Moebius, from Batman: Black And White 1996)

“In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and misery of others … for they constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.”

 Charles Caleb Colton

 (Page by Darwyn Cooke, from his “Batman: Ego” 2000)