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JennyN
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(Date Posted:09/16/2005 1:49 PM)

I've just finished reading #47 of ALTER EGO (April 2005), which appears to be a magazine dedicated to superhero comics and their creators. Now normally nothing could interest me less, but I pounced on this particular number when I found it in a back-issues box because almost half of it is dedicated to Matt Baker. Who is? One of the best and most prolific artists drawing for American romance comics in the late 1940s to mid-1950s (and incidentally one of the first African-Americans to work in this field). He clearly adored women, and adored drawing them - his illustrations are fluid and expressive and never condescend to his subject.The reason I'm posting about this here is that Matt clearly had a hand in bringing this issue of ALTER EGO about. A large part of their Matt Baker dossier is made up of an interview with one of his half-brothers and a nephew (Baker himself died young, in 1959), and I belived it was Matt who was originally contacted by the nephew last year, via an e-mail saying that he had quite a lot of Uncle Matt's work in storage and would anyone be interested in it? (The post wound up on the Web, which is where I came across it). Matt obviously pointed him to the right people, becausethe interview is terrific: the two men explode a lot of the myths around Baker - which grew up because there was very little hard information available - and fill in some wonderful background on the US comics scene before TV and the Comics Code between them started its long slow decline. The article is also illustrated with many examples of Baker's art, some never before published.Personally, I've been a Matt Baker fan ever since I bought ROMANCE WITHOUT TEARS (Fantagraphics) a couple of years back - it's beautifully produced, with an introduction that for once takes the romance comics phenomenon seriously, and full-colour reproductions of 13 stories by Baker and others. You can alsofind examples of his art in reprint collections such as TEEN ANGST and TORRID AFFAIRS - even though you do have to put up with cheap newsprint paper, uncomprehending comment from the "editors" and inaccurate information about the artist. What I'm hoping for now, though, is that the ALTER EGO article prods someone into doing a full Matt Baker retrospective. If it does, Matt T. can certainly take some credit for it!ps: For anyone who's interested, you can buy ALTER EGO throughhttp://www.twomorrows.com
matt-thorn
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(Date Posted:09/27/2005 12:55 PM)

Wow! I wasn't expecting to find a post about this here. Yes, I was the one contacted by Mr. Baker's nephew, whose name is also Matt Baker. I was puzzled when I opened his mail, because I assumed at first that it was from an old college friend of mine whose name is also Matt Baker! Too many Matts! I think the nephew contacted me because of my Romance Comics page, but it worked out very well. But I still haven't seen the Alter Ego issue in question! I should ask the editors to send me a copy.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Thorn

Department of Comics Production

Kyoto Seika University
 Welcome to The Collection of Flashlights!Wolf-eyes ,your eyes break the darkness!
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