©2020 Ken Quattro PROLOGUE: Comic book history has mostly been viewed from the perspective of the male reader. As a consequence, male comic fans, (and I include myself) have a blind spot. If a comic or a genre falls outside our realm of interest, we discount it. Romance comics rank at the top of that ignoble list. The artists who…

©2020 Ken Quattro   Aurora Plastics products comprised a major part of my childhood. I had an Aurora N-guage model trains set, and Aurora slot car set, and I built a ridiculous number of Aurora models during my youth. Model planes, model cars, model ships. When they came out with models based upon historic sporting events–Babe Ruth hitting his 60th…

©2020 Ken Quattro “Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! `I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’”   Lewis Carroll found a way of expressing the absurd lengths one goes once a journey is undertaken. It’s like he knew me.   It began simply enough. I found a giveaway comic up for auction…

©2019 Ken Quattro New Yorkers like to claim that it’s their water that makes their pizza and bagels taste better than anywhere else. I’m not about to get into that debate, but I will say there must be something in their environment that produces comic creators. Of course, the proximity of the comic book industry to the NYC schools has…

Will Eisner was the Colossus of Comics. With a career that began at the inception of the modern American comic book era back in the 1930s and spanned the history of the medium into the 21st Century, he both preceded and outlasted most of his contemporaries and was still producing quality work right up until the day he died in…

“The truth is never pure and rarely simple.” — Oscar Wilde Welcome! Or, if you’ve stumbled across me before, welcome back! My name is Ken Quattro and I am THE COMICS DETECTIVE of this blog’s title  and simply put: I study, research and write about the history of the comics medium–comic books, comic strips and everything related to them. I’ve…