“Greyshirt: How Things Work Out” by Alan Moore & Rick Veitch, UK/USA, 1999


Greyshirt: How Things Work Out, script by Alan Moore (UK) and art by Rick Veitch (USA), in: Tomorrow Stories #2, Wildstorm Productions, America’s Best Comics imprint, USA, November 1999. The Greyshirt character is a pastiche of Will Eisner‘s The Spirit.

“In one of the Greyshirt stories in Tomorrow Stories, we did something very peculiar with the panel layouts. We had an apartment building, the same building, upon ever page. There are four horizontal panels on each page. Then, to add another element, we made it so that the top panels are all taking place in 1999, the second panel down on each page is taking place in 1979, the panel beneath that takes place in 1959, and on the bottom panel of each page, you’re seeing the bottom of the building as it was in 1939, when it was a fairly new building. We’re able to tell, by some quite complicated story gymnastics, quite an interesting little story that is told over nearly sixty years of this building’s life, with characters getting older depending upon which panel and which time period they’re in. There’s something that you couldn’t do in any medium other than comics.Alan Moore (as cited on The Great Comic Book Heroes website), 2001.

Dear students, this story was later published in the collection Tomorrow Stories book 1 (soft cover) by DC Comics.

Copyright ©2004 DC Comics/Moore/Veitch

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“Batman: Once Upon a Time…” by Len Wein & Walter Simonson, USA, 1981


Batman: Once Upon a Time…, tribute to Charles M. SchulzPeanuts (adaptation of Snoopy’s novel), by Len Wein (USA) & Walter Simonson (USA) in: Detective Comics Vol. 1 #500, DC Comics, USA, March 1981.

Between “August and September of 1969, Charles M. Schulz devoted a few weeks’ worth of strips to Snoopy’s novel.” In 1981, Len Wein wrote a Batman “two-pager with art by the great Walt Simonson. The story has no dialogue. It only has captions. The captions? All lines from the aforementioned Snoopy novel!!” Brian Cronin, Comic Book Resources, 2010.

Peanuts strips: Copyright ©1969 United Feature Syndicate/Charles M. Schulz

Batman story: Copyright ©1981 DC Comics

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