Saturday, June 10, 2006
Comic Art
Where better to start our little comic romp through the elements that at "the beginning" - hydrogen, the lightest element - one proton, one electron that's it. If you are really interested, here's a brief audio bit on hydrogen (realplayer required). Here's the Webelements page on hydrogen and here's the Periodic Table of Comic Books page on same.But, in the end, who cares, this is about comics. What you see here is the nearly obligatory Metamorpho bit - I mean the guy could turn into any element, so it's fairly natural that he would show up here.
Now, this is a 1930's page from Wonder Woman. I am not sure you can read the dialogue on this small reproduction, but it is marvelously hokey and refelctive of the common understanding of atomic structure at the time When this was writen, quantum theory was not more than about 10 years old and people still thought of sub-atomic particles pretty much like billiard balls.These early images are one of the reasons I have never been a major Womder Woman fan - she is highly unattractive (not anymore mind you, but when I was a kid...) some of that was driven by the Comics Code which did not want her too attractive, but some of it was just poor art. Forget the body and look at the face, it is sort of misshapen and those pouty lips - Ugh!
Now this may be one of the most exciting images we will see in this entire series - its from The Watchmen. This is one of the most important comic mini-series ever written. It has sold tons, but not like the super sellers. But it virtually changed the face of comics by finally and completely making the heroes utterly and fully human - alcoholics fallen on hard times, sex addicts and the like.This image is probabaly the reason I decided to start with hydrogen in this current series, the opportunity to put up something from The Watchmen is just too good.
Related Tags: comics, comic books, chemistry, hydrogen, Wonder Woman, Metamorpho, The Watchmen
