The Things You Find on the Internet…

At various times on this blog—usually in relation to the Tales of Development Hell projects I’ve written about—I’ve mentioned that I used to work for a New York publishing company called ibooks, inc., owned and operated by Byron Preiss, who passed away in 2005. Before running a publishing house, he made a name for himself as a book packager—developing and providing completed projects (novels, graphic novels, children’s books, etc.) for houses that paid for the rights to publish them—and as a staunch supporter of using comic books as a teaching tool to encourage kids to read. Along those lines, in 1971 he teamed up with comic-art legend Jim Steranko for “The Block”: an antidrug comic distributed to public schools.

Interested in reading it? Then head on over to the site Seduction of the Innocent, where you can find “The Block” posted in its entirety. Just keep in mind it’s a story very much of its time. But the art is classic Steranko.