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RIP - Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. Remembrances

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Yoc:
Nicely said guys.  Thank-you for sharing your thoughts and memories.

-Yoc

OtherEric:
A very nice banner, Yoc.  Thank you.

narfstar:
I of course remember the many comments Jim made to contribute to ongoing comic discussions. But what I most remember is handling some of the rarest and most valuable comics that I will likely ever hold. Jim knew that those precious gems were being lowered in condition and did not care. He wanted the comic wanders shared. Selfless contributor he was.

Yoc:
Here's a recent post on Facebook from Dr. Michael J. Vassallo (DOC V),
about JVJ that he's graciously given me permission to share here.
Michael is a preeminent expert on Timely Comics and all things Martin Goodman published.
Co-author of 'The Secret History of Marvel Comics' (2013) with Blake Bell.

===
Doc V:

--- Quote ---I first became friends with Jim through Bob Beerbohm, who back in the late 1990's insisted I reach out to him as our researching lines were intersected at Timely/Atlas, and Jim was known as the father of Atlas indexing, having amassed a near complete collection of all titles and issues.

Jim had a long history in fandom going back to the 1960's, contributing to APAs and in that particular community of researchers and indexers of the pre-internet days. I was never part of that community. I came in two decades later and worked alone, struggling for years, indexing my own Atlas collection, while to duplicate Jim's feat of building the entire output and having all its data recorded.

But I was a novice. Jim's vast knowledge was accumulated at a time when thousands and thousands of books across all companies could be had for a few dollars each. He was able to build an encyclopedic mental ability to spot artists on sight, as well as to distinguish obscure penciler/inker combinations, teaching me how an artist's style can change over time, and to be able to spot an artist, you have to go back to their beginning and follow them forward. I used what he taught me to be able to spot Gene Colan's Timely work on sight, it looking nothing like his work just 5 years later. But in sifting through it all, you can see the incremental changes. THis is also how I approached the work of Christopher Rule and George Klein. I remember asking Jim to please show me a panel of "pure" George Klein, pencils and inks. Once seen, it was a revelation to me how easily I could spot him, pencils "or" inks, anywhere.
Jim often worked in partnership with his close friend, Hames Ware, another master of art spotting, someone who possessed more knowledge of 1940's humor and funny-animal artists than anyone in the world. Hames knew the memberships of every comic shop that existed in the late 1930's and early 1940's, and could identify nearly every artist. Hames was an editor on Jerry bails' original Who's Who. He knew the staffs of the animation studios cold, and could match animation artists moonlighting in the comic book industry immediately. Together, Hames and Jim were the Mount Rushmore of 1940's and 1950's comic art knowledge. They were the absolute peak. The greatest.

In 1998 I e-mailed Jim on the urging of Bob. I asked Jim a slew of questions about the late 1940's Timely bullpen, explaining that the story art was mostly unidentifiable to me. Jim's response was to laugh and agree with me. While he could pick out artists here and there, the vast amount didn't seem to match up to anyone elsewhere in the industry.

After much back and forth e-mailing, exchanging scores of photocopies in the mail (this was pre-easy image sharing online) JIm asked me whether I was interested in working on a Timely project he and Hames were planning, a deep study of the earliest Timely humor comics, something no one had ever really done before. I jumped at the chance! The way it worked was Jim would index the first 20 issues of Krazy Komics, Comedy Comics and Terrytoons, then send the 60 books on the Hames, who would do the same. Hames then sent the books to me, and I did the same. After about 6 months, in several rounds of e-mails, we then compared all of our notes and came to some definitive decisions on what we saw and what we thought.
The entire process was an eye-opening revelation to me. Hames was able to spot animation artists, Jim was zeroing in on known Timely staffers and I was able to actually contribute against their much vaster knowledge, they agreeing with many of my ideas and art spotting choices. I was able to bring to the table a better idea of how the Timely bullpen was run, gained from a score of interviews I had conducted with Timely staffers in the early 1990's. So I accumulated scores of pages of notes and printed out e-mails as the both of them speculated and ruminated on Timely artistic history.

Flash forward another 10 years and I was in charge of compiling credits for Marvel's Timely Masterworks program. I recruited both Jim and Hames to help me. Armed with full runs of Timely hero comics images, the three of us went through every issue of every Timely comic being reprinted, in the same round-robin method, coming up with the most accurate assessment of the credits ever done. As this was going on, I realized that there was so much comic book art history being bantered back and forth, that I had to print out all of it so it wouldn't be buried in thousands of e-mails I'd never look through again. I'm glad I did as it would be nigh-impossible to do so now, especially since much of the 1990's, early 2000's e-mails are gone.
I have thousands of pages of correspondence with Jim and Hames. 7 years ago, Jim decided to send me much of his early Timely research. It consisted of notes he took with Hames decades ago when they had a short window of opportunity to view a near-complete Timely hero collection. The notes are hand-written, typed, and on scores of index cards. he felt they should be in my hands, and to correct and update them as I saw fit. They raced through the books, quickly art-spotting on the fly. A lot of it were guesses, corrected much later by ourselves in the 2000's, but they are an invaluable window to how their minds worked. This material and what I've subsequently been able to do myself, is the world's largest repository of Timely knowledge in the world

Jim was a member of this group and early on a frequent contributor. I believe he was also on the earlier mailing list version of the group. I loved our online battles and arguments here. It was just so much fun. As his personal life got complicated, and his health deteriorated, I saw him less and less on social media. He did post about his health and I realized things were serious, but time just moved on. His last post about a month ago was a ring of finality, so I knew the end was coming.

I will miss Jim (and Hames) a great deal. They cannot be replaced. That kind of scholarship, built over decades and ten of thousands of comic books and tens of thousands of hours studying them, cannot be duplicated in the age of manufactured commodities and slab prisons. His work is all around me here and is imbued in everything I do going forward. And I thank him for that.
--- End quote ---

A gallery of pics he shared in the same Facebook message:
http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/images/forum message pictures/JVJ_pics/DocV-JVJ letters1.jpghttp://digitalcomicmuseum.com/images/forum message pictures/JVJ_pics/DocV-JVJ letters2.jpghttp://digitalcomicmuseum.com/images/forum message pictures/JVJ_pics/DocV-JVJ letters3.jpghttp://digitalcomicmuseum.com/images/forum message pictures/JVJ_pics/DocV-JVJ letters4.jpg
Many thanks to Doc V for letting us share his post here with everyone.
-Yoc

Yoc:
The Comics Journal have posted an obit for JVJ at this link:
https://www.tcj.com/jim-vadeboncoeur-jr-1946-2023/

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