The Bronze Age Of Blogs

Top Cat

2010-01-17T04:22:00.001-08:00

Loved, loved, loved Top Cat as a kid. Even if he was renamed Boss Cat in the UK ( for fear of it being confused with Top Cat cat food! ) I think it was basically the fact that it was a cartoon about a small-time crook and a street gang that sold it to me, even at that age. ( And Boss Cat, of course, makes him sound even more like a gangster ). It also subtly, or maybe not so subtly, told kids that grown-ups/authority figures were generally fools and idiots. And don't tell me the animators weren't completely aware of that.
Gold Key, Dell & Charlton all had a go at publishing Top Cat comics. This story is, I think, from Gold Key or Dell, looking a little too old for Charlton's run. Regardless, it's a fun piece, even if it seems as if the uncredited scripter has never actually seen the show. Neither T.C. or Benny The Ball talk or behave like we're used to here; I mean Top Cat? Willingly clearing up trash? Handing back a treasure map because 'honesty demands it'? Man, talk about neutering the poor guy. Anyway, if I were you, I'd read this quick before Officer Dibble gets here, or to put it another way: mmmokay boys blue blur blur!!

Solomon Kane : Skulls In The Stars

2010-01-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

Man, I can't wait for this movie. Just watched the trailer over on youtube, and it looks pretty damn good. It's dark and moody, almost monochrome, just as Kane should be. James Purefoy kind of looks right, and at least he isn't some Hollywood pretty boy, plus they've actually given him the Devonshire accent he should have. There is that old ' hero done bad / looking for redemption ' plot ( which they're also using for Jonah Hex ) but I guess for movie audiences, Kane can't be as dark & unrelenting as he is in the original stories, at least not without a ' movie ' reason. Civilians, natch, will obviously say it's just Van Helsing, not realising that particular piece of nonsense ' borrowed ' our favourite puritan's look, and ignored his actual personality, which is why Van Helsing is as empty and souless as it is, and why this movie might just work. Anyway, I'll be first in the queue. Just so long as he says: " Men shall die for this. "

Here's the dour one's first comic book appearance, courtesy of the first issue of Monsters Unleashed. It's adapted by ( natch ) Roy Thomas, and illustrated by Ralph Reese in his best, strangely underground style, bringing Kane and his grim, dark world perfectly to life. Kane should always be done in murky black & white for my money. Even more than Conan or Kull, his is a place of despair and horror, where life is short and brutal, and the best you can hope for is an easy death. This is also one of many stories where Solomon sets himself up as judge, jury & executioner, ( or as he would put it ' The Hand Of God ' ). Wouldn't have him any other way.

KISS

2010-01-12T11:38:00.000-08:00

Marvel Comics Super Special 1 starring KISS was unleashed in 1977, and though it doesn't quite beat Marvel Premiere 50 starring Alice Cooper for Greatest Rock Comic Of The Bronze Age, it does come a really, really close second.

Hands up, I'm not a card-carrying member of the KISS Army. We never really heard their music in this country on the radio until Crazy Crazy Nights, and by that point they were just another hair metal band. I do remember being fascinated by the occasional photo of the group that made it over here in the '70's. At that point, and particularly to a little kid, they looked like the greatest thing ever, like Marc Bolan and Howie Chaykin had had kids. Trouble was, I really expected them to sound like the greatest thing ever too, like the most insane, most intense, loudest, rockin'est band in the universe. So years later, when I finally got to hear them and they were, well, just another rock band, it was a bit of a disappointment. Quite like I Was Made For Loving You tho'. ( This is the point where you go: Pete! That's their worst track!! )

Anyway, the KISS Super Special was the brainchild of Steve Gerber, and he was on a real mission to raise the game in terms of dragging Marvel into the colour magazine market. Here's Steve a year after the book came out discussing it: I'm not going to try and defend the content of the book in terms of the art or this particular story that was written for it. There were good things about it, there were bad things about it. In a strange way, given the nature of the project, it's probably some of the straightest superhero material I've written for Marvel in the past three years. What was important, paramount, to me about the KISS book was the concept of doing a book in that format with that marketing strategy. If it could be duplicated with other publications, not necessarily movie adaptations or presentations of rock n' roll groups, I think Marvel - or whichever publisher is smart enough - might eventually be able to abandon the 35-cent books almost entirely in favour of a small line of magazines - say six different magazines - that would make more money for them while producing better quality material.

Which happened a couple of years later with Epic of course, but Steve got in there first, and everybody thought he was nuts for doing it. The book went on to sell nearly half a million copies, and was a virtual sell-out. According to Gerber, for a while there was a draw at Marvel's offices for fan mail for the KISS book, and another for the fan mail on all the other Marvel books. Obviously, it sold mostly on the band's name, but as Steve went on to say: But a crappy looking book might not have sold as well. The fact that it was a classier publication in terms of paper stock and printing and so on certainly helped it. People could look at it and say, " This is worth $1.50. I'm going to plink down that much and take it home with me. "

But is it any good? Hell, yeah. As Gerber says, it's mostly a straight super team origin story, even if the superhero's do look more than a little bit pervy. Steve has fun with each of the band's stage persona's, Gene Simmons coming off best as a demon in waiting, eager to go over to the Dark Side. Though Ace Frehley is fun too, as a philosophy spouting space cadet.
The wizard who gives the group their powers and new identities is a typical Gerber creation, all downbeat realism and parody, and is the only real sore point for me, as he seems to have wandered in from Howard The Duck and, as the rest of the story is played relatively straight, sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.
There's some nice linking scenes with the rest of the Marvel Universe, particularly the grouping of The Defenders Steve was scripting at the time, and his version of Doc Doom is a revelation, acting exactly as you expect him to right up until the end, where he does an absolute about turn and makes you look at him in an entirely new light. No mean feat for such a familiar character, and yet more proof of Gerber's genius.
The art is solid, although in places it does look like any other Marvel book of the period. Maybe suffering from too many cooks, with contributions from Alan Weiss, John & Sal Buscema, Al Milgrom & Rich Buckler, most of whom were clearly chosen for their classic Marvel style. I've never liked Milgrom's finish, and I think if Weiss had done the whole thing, or even if they'd got Tom Palmer to ink it, it would've been monumental.
But that's nitpicking. Even if you hate KISS, it's a classic just because it exists. That fact it's as much fun as it is, is a bonus. And don't forget it is printed in REAL KISS BLOOD!!!!

Dax The Damned

2010-01-11T00:45:00.000-08:00

Hola mi amigos, back from Spain ( where, as it turns out, the rain does fall mainly on the plain ). Which is all the excuse I need to post this: Dax The Damned ran in the early issues of Eerie, and was of course illustrated by Spanish master Esteban Maroto. It was technically a reprint, originally appearing in Spain under the title Manly, and was heavily rewritten by Budd Lewis for American audiences. But whatever you call it, it's classic fevered Maroto, similar to Phillipe Druillet's Urm The Mad. with a ' hero ' that's little more than a plaything of fate, and is full of despair & hopelessness. Like in this segment, which is kind of The Seventh Seal in comic form: Only an artist from a catholic country could be this magnificently depressing.

Dirty Job

2010-01-03T01:23:00.000-08:00

Off on my hols for a coupla' weeks, so here's an absolute masterpiece to be getting on with.
This strip, from the Feb 1972 issue of Our Army At War, was written by the late great Bob Haney and illustrated by the equally late great Alex Toth, and might just be the best thing either man ever did. There's really not much you can say about it, other than ' Wow. '

Super DC Calender '76

2010-01-01T01:53:00.000-08:00

And here's another fantastic calendar it never occurred to me at the time I could actually buy. This is most of the whole piece I could get ahold of, ( there's a Wonder Woman one I'm sure ) with Neal Adams & Dick Giordano clearly having a ball with DC's best characters.

Not actually sure this piece belongs here, but it's so great, what the hell.

Mighty Marvel Calenders

2009-12-31T06:09:00.000-08:00

What better way to get ready for the new year than with a look at some of these beauties.
Yet more proof, were any needed, of what an absolute doofus I was as a kid. It simply never occurred to me that all those great things I saw advertised in Marvel's ad pages could be mine. I used to see things like these fantastic calendars and wish I could get 'em, but you had to have american money! Where could I get that?
Anyway, these things are, of course, treasure troves of exclusive art, like this strange composite of The Avengers here. is it a re-drawing of some classic Buscema poses, or is it the real thing?

Or this Bee-ootifull Romita original. So weird to see Luke Cage, and especially Conan, grinning like loons alongside everybody else.

October is Halloween, so by law, every pic for that month had to feature the Marvel monsters. Here's Marvellous Mike Ploog's superb Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Man-Thing & Werewolf By Night.

I'm always fascinated by the bizarre choices Marvel used to make of which characters to show off on their promo stuff. Doc Doom and The Vision is a little odd, isn't it?

Here's Jazzy John's masterful cover to the '76 calendar. I think the only other Bicentennial thing Marvel did that year was Kirby's Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, which is odd. Beautiful cover though, as I say.

But here's more nationalistic flag-bearing with George Washington crossing the Delaware alongside The Avengers. I'm not suggesting Hawkeye isn't as true-blue as, say, Cap, but I just don't see him volunteering for this little trek. He'd be spending the Bicentennial in some bar somewhere, wouldn't he?

Another Halloween fest here, this time from Frank Brunner, with Drac, Manny & Wolfie re-enacting The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, years before Tim Burton.

And here again, is another strange grouping. Apart from the fact a few of these guys became Defenders, what on earth do they have in common? Not to mention Shang-Chi possibly wanting to celebrate the chinese new year, if anyone bothered to ask his opinion. And I still, nearly every day, have to pinch myself to believe that Marvel ever got away with a character called The Son Of Satan.

On to '77 though, with this wonderful cover that looks like Kirby inked by Romita. Though I'm willing to be corrected on that, there's no way, f' instance, Jack drew that Spidey.

Here's a rejig from that year of Doc's first story, originally by Ditko of course, this version, equally obviously comes from Gene The Dean.

And talking of The Defenders ( as we sort of were ), here's Our Pal Sal's reinterpretation of their first adventure. As much as I love Gerber's Defenders ( which is to say, a whole hell of a lot ), I also can't get enough of these early Thomas / Englehart issues. It was just about the only time I ever really liked Subby, and the idea of a group who genuinely don't get on was irresistible.

More Colan here, with a brilliant scene encapsulating everything that was great about his & Marv Wolfman's Tomb Of Dracula.

And finally, from the 1981 Spidey calendar, heres' John Byrne's illo of all of the webbed wonder's Team-Up buddies. I'd say name 'em all, but that'd be too easy.

Tomorrow: The DC calendars. (Which I also never realised I could buy!)

Howard The Duck In: The Sleigh-Jacking

2009-12-20T03:14:00.000-08:00

Wondering what Howard & Bev are up to this holiday season? Well, let's head on over to a snow covered Cleveland and find out. This section of the Howard The Duck newspaper strip appeared in 1977, and although it's not quite as sharp as some of the earlier stories ( like the one where Bev inherits a massage parlour owned by pensioners ), it's still prime Gerber and prime Mayerik. Plus it's always nice to see these characters again. Oh, and there's an elf with a gun.

Bucky's Christmas Caper

2009-12-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

Been waiting to post this all year. Bucky's Christmas Caper hails from 1967, when it ran in syndicated daily newspapers for three weeks leading up to that yuletide. It belongs to Wally Wood's 'little people' humour style, similar to Goody Bumpkin or Pipsqeak Papers, and is truly wonderful. The lead character, Bucky Ruckus, is of course Woody in disguise, and his name comes from a tiny farming town in Ohio called Bucyrus, which Wally and then wife Tatjana once drove through while on holiday. Woody thought the name hysterically funny, and swore to use it as a character one day. As somebody once said, it's a shame Wally Wood never had kids, as this is the perfect bedtime story for Christmas Eve. I was gonna save it for nearer Xmas but what the hell, here it is today. Happy Crimbo everybody and enjoy.

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag

2009-12-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

As all right thinking people know, by far the best way to get your comic fix at Xmas is in the form of a Giant Treasury Edition, and Marvel did three of the best ones with these beauties. Yeah, these are really just big reprints, but man were they cool. The first Deluxe Edition Of Marvel's Mightiest Heroes comes with a bit of an odd cover. You expect The Hulk to be growling all year round, but you'd think Benjamin J. Grimm could muster up a seasonal smile. Not to mention Cap. Cheer up, fella's, it's Xmas!

Pretty sure I had every one of these babies ( or maybe Sean did and I just read his copies a lot ) so 'scuse if I get anything wrong here. Relying on 30 year old memories ( and The Grand Comic Book Database! ) is always more fun anyways.
The Grab-Bags, on reflection, are more than a little odd, certainly in the choice of stories they re-introduced. They seem like a weird mix of undisputed greatness and...hey, what's that doing here? Cutting between tales of Marvel's superstars while making room for the minor leaguers, they certainly did what it said on the tin. The first one, for instance, released for Crimbo '74, plays it safe with the big names, like Spidey & The Torch taking on The Sandman in one of those early Team-Ups that all blur into one in my memory. Though this tale does have the unusual twist of our heroes going easy on Sandy as he just wants to deliver a present to his ailing mum. Makes you feel all warm inside, don't it?

Then there's one of Wally Wood's many finest hours, and apparently Stan Lee's favourite Marvel comic of all time: Daredevil 7, where DD takes on Subby, and gets his ass handed to him on a plate for his trouble. One of the true greats of the early Marvel's, this issue sold me on Hornhead for life as, no matter how many times Namor kicks him to the ground, the hopelessly outclassed DD keeps getting back up for more.

But hang on, what's the Black Widow doing in here? Don't get me wrong, if Natasha Romanoff was real, I'd marry her, but a major leaguer? Not a chance. Still, Gene Colan's drawing it, so what the hey.

And finally, there's this two-parter, where both the F.F. and The Avengers take on Ol' Greenskin. Obviously, we needed a huge great superhero fight in the inaugural Grab-Bag, but I never thought much of this story, especially with George Bell's ham-fisted looking inking job over The King's pencils. Surely there were better slug-fests to pick from, even at this early stage.

The next Xmas treat came in '76, and came with easily the funniest cover of the three books. Of course you'd get Spidey to come to your xmas party, and at a pinch, Doc Strange might show up to do a magic show. And sure, I guess if you were nice to The Hulk and explained it to him really slowly, he might agree to dress up like Santa ( remember Bambi the deer in The Defenders? Hulkie can be calm sometimes ), but a righteous dude like Luke Cage? At some W.A.S.P kids house on Xmas day? When there's poor kid's in the ghetto who ain't got nothin'?! Sweet Sister! No way, baby! And Nick Fury? In his bondage outfit smoking a huge fuck off cigar? What parent in their right mind is gonna let that guy over the doorstep?

Even funnier though is the back cover, as Santa ( or is it Stan? ) sends our heroes out on their Christmas mission to spread good cheer to the world's Marvelites. I love these covers more than life itself, they just epitomise everything that was great about Marvel when we were kids.

Things start weirdly with this issue of Fury's own book, drawn by an artist I still, after all these years, can't be doing with: Frank Springer. I don't remember this story at all, but a quick trip to the GCBD reveals that our Nicholas narrowly avoids an attempt by The Hate-Monger to spread germ warfare across the globe. Fury apparently does this with the off-camera help of one S. Claus. I think we should move on rapidly.

Next up is an equally bizarre Luke Cage where our Lucas gets to utter Christmas! actually at Christmas! coming up against an even more looney tune villain than most who runs some kind of ghost of christmas past, present & future schtick past our bemused hero. Always liked that scene tho' where Cage admits to having to sell papers on Christmas Eve as a kid to: Make Christmas Day that much shinier. That's what was great about Cage, you never forgot how poor he actually was.

Then there's a real early Spidey, reprinted itself from a reprint, Marvel Tales 19, and not the issue of his own book it originally came from. But hey, it's Ditko, maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

The random placing of the big stars of the line continues with this Hulk story. Interestingly, in both these tales ( according to the GCBD ) each hero spends most of the time hallucinating like motherfuckers. Too much punch, guys?

And to finish things off, here's Doc again, but from his blue face period, which I never understood for a minute, but absolutely appreciated the barking mad weirdness of. Plus there's Eternity, easily the bad guy most likely to make you question your very concept of reality. And you don't get much more Christmassy than that.

On to 1976, and sadly the last Grab-Bag jamboree of fun is here, with a truly wonderful cover from Gil Kane & Joe Sinnott, with back cover to match.

It also had one of the greatest comic strips ever: 'Tis the season, a bridging story that is about nothing more earth-shattering than The Avengers and The F.F. having a snowball fight. Only in the '70's could you get away with something like this, and it makes me smile even now just to think of it.
Another so-so issue of Team-Up opens proceedings proper, principally to get big hitters Spidey & Benjy in there.

But that's more than made up for by this:

With one of the greatest splash panels of John Buscema's or anybody else's career. And at Treasury size it looks even better. I think Rascally Roy was the best writer The Avengers ever had, and I think this story proves it.

Next up, the criminally underrated Marie Severin treats us to a comedy of errors, when Ol' Greenskin tries to hitch a ride off Earth with The Surfer. Hilarity and broken bones ensue.

And finally, DD makes his second xmas appearance, from Gene Colan's epic run on the book, at this point with Gerry Conway scripting. It's a time filling issue, as Matt & Karen split up for the millionth time, so that Conway can get DD together with The Widow and they can move to 'Frisco. Still, I could read Gene Colan drawing a story where DD does origami, and The Ox absolutely rocks here.

This is probably the best of the three Edition's, mostly because of the snowball fight story and Avengers 58, but like I say, even The Savage She-Hulk would look like the greatest comic ever at this size. Even though, as you've probably guessed from my ramblings, not all of this stuff has stuck in the memory completely, I do know that these were some of the best Xmas prezzies I ever got, and leagues ahead of the british annuals, as great as they were. Bring 'em back!

Les Dawson Is Superflop

2009-12-13T09:47:00.001-08:00

Just a quickie. Les Dawson, for the benefit of our american viewers, was a TV comedian in the '70's and '80's, much given to one-liners regarding his horrific Mother-In-Law. Although basically a stand-up, he had loads of sketch shows on the BBC, including a not very funny one where he went into his garden shed to change into a lame superhero called ( oh the hilarity ) Superflop. None of which would concern us, were it not for the fact that, like most other comedians of the time, he got his own strip in Look-In, drawn by none other than the great Brian Lewis! Yep, Brian 'House Of Horror / Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires' Lewis. This strip isn't even remotely amusing, but it is, like all of Lewis' work, absolutely perfectly illustrated. Wish I could see more of his humour work.

Darkie's Mob

2009-12-13T01:11:00.000-08:00

I was never that into the british war weeklies back in The Bronze Age. Mags like Valiant and The Victor, although I bought them occasionally just seemed, well....kind of old fashioned. Full of strips that were rooted in a late '50's idea of what comics should be, they simply weren't as sexy as the american comics. Even Battle, John Wagner & Pat Mill's war anthology that began in 1975, had it's fair share of plucky Tommy's taking on Jerry under fairly dull artwork ( or so it seemed at the time. ) But there were glorious exceptions. Battle was a conflicted beast, midway between the traditional boys comic feel of The Victor and the all-out anarchy of Action, ( and by extension, paving the way for the insanity of 2000AD ). As well as the brutally realistic Charley's War, and the anti-establishment japes of Major Eazy, Battle also mined it's own field in visceral, fuck you war strips: Like Darkie's Mob.

If Major Eazy was british comics' answer to Kelly's Heroes, then Darkie's Mob was surely it's version of Apocalypse Now. As brutal, vicious, unrelenting & uncompromising as it's lead character, Darkie's Mob was the legend of Captain Joe Darkie, a hate-fuelled, stone-cold rat bastard of a hero who, through fear and intimidation, molds a squad of stragglers in the Burmese jungle into ' the most savage fighting force the japanese have ever known. '
But Darkie is not entirely what he appears to be, and the revelation of his mysterious past is part of what drives the story. Like a lot of war mags at the time, there is a breathtaking amount of casual racism, ( I doubt you'd even get away with the title these days! ) but here it kind of fits. Joe ain't a good guy by any stretch of the imagination, making Sgt's Rock & Fury look like loud-mouthed fakes every blood-drenched step of the way.
Titan are about to release collected editions of both Darkie & Eazy, and I'm gonna be snapping 'em up, but for now, here's the opener. Don't fear the japs! Fear Me!

John Buscema

2009-12-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

Big John Buscema was born today. I've only realized in the last couple of years quite how much I took Buscema for granted while he was working. As Stan quickly figured out while he was casting around for a replacement for Jack, The Big Man could draw anything, plus he was really quick. And just like Kirby, he was so good, all the time, that I ( and I assume, more than a few fans ) got used to how great John was without even thinking about it. I don't ever remember anybody saying: Did you see The Avengers this month? The art was brilliant. Of course it was, it was Buscema. It's like saying Have you seen the sky today, it's blue.
John drew just about everything during his career, of course, including all these guys.

But come on, it's Buscema day. Which means it's Conan day!

Right there is the single greatest illustration of Conan ever done by anyone ever, and I'll split the skull of any Stygian dog who disagrees. As much as I love the Barry Smith issues, no one has ever, or will ever, do The Cimmerian better. I know there's some fine work done over at Dark Horse, but I don't care. Conan looks like that. That one shot tells you everything you need to know about this guy, and he isn't even doing anything.
Big John hated doing superheroes, but he loved drawing Robert E. Howard's greatest creation. It was his chance to be Hal Foster. If Foster had had balls the size of coconuts.
Raised on Prince Valiant, this was Buscema's chance to create that kind of world for himself, and to immerse himself in it. Freed from what he saw as the drudgery of trying to remember which superhero wore which costume, he could go wild in Conan's pre-historic world.
As he said: That ( book ) I enjoyed. Because I don't have the restrictions of the goddamn automobiles and skyscrapers. I can create anything that comes into my imagination. That's why Conan appealed to me. I had a lot of freedom in those books. I could do anything with the buildings and create costumes. Again, I don't like drawing mechanical things. I just don't enjoy it.

And talking of things mechanical, if my damn scanner hadn't died on me, today I'd obviously be posting the whole of a Buscema Conan. One of the truly great ones, like A Witch Shall Be Born or The Tower of The Elephant, or even the far better than it had any right to be What If Conan Lived Today? So consider this a taster for a bigger piece to come, with a brief look at some classic Buscema pieces.
Here, for instance, is Conan enjoying his second favourite pastime.

Weirdly Jack Davis-esque Conan there.

John's rough's were, of course, beautiful. Like these three.

And is this Valeria?

And here's another couple of great pieces.

In an interview with Roy Thomas, years after the fact, when Buscema couldn't remember a single thing about the plethora of superhero books he's spent his career drawing, he still had this to say about Cimmeria's favourite son: I loved the Howard books. I fell in love with them as soon as I read them and I was chomping at the bit and I wanted to do them so badly....I enjoyed every Conan we worked on. As long as it was Conan, I loved working on it.

So read some Conan today, ok? Don't make me send the big guy round.

Nomad - The Man Without A Country

2009-12-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

We're back! Well, sort of, still haven' t got the ol' scanner fixed properly, but it's been ages since I posted something, an' here's a doozy! Nomad!

I never much cared about Captain America. He always seemed to be one of those middle-aged, slightly dull characters who were fine as part of a group, or in a guest spot, but who I could never get into enough to regularly buy his book. Which is not to say I didn't buy it, it just never bothered me much if I missed an issue. But I really liked him when Steve Englehart wrote him, particularly when he wasn't Cap at all, but 'Today's Most Together Hero' Nomad-The Man Without A Country.
Stainless Steve had been beavering away, scripting Cap's adventures for a year or so, producing solid, but not spectacular work on the book. But he had a plan. Like most Americans at the time, he was shocked at the way the country was going, and the way it's so-called leaders were behaving, and wanted to reflect that in the nation's most visible Defender Of The Faith. And this shows yet again the magic of The Bronze Age to any nay-sayers left in the house. Over to Steve: They said, " Take this series and do what you will with it. " If I want to write eight months of Captain America without Captain America in it, " sounds weird to us, but ok, if you can do it, give it a shot. "
It all started when a villain called The Viper ( a bad guy who'd previously been an ad-man, an idea that could only've come from Steve Gerber ) hatched a plan for revenge on Cap and his right-on partner The Falcon. To wit: Using the power of advertising against Liberty's Legionnaire by turning the country against him, making Cap out to be nothing but a violent, publicity-seeking gloryhound. The plan worked spectacularly, and even though ol' Vipey was soon slung in jail for his pains, sleazy ad exec Quentin Harderman ( head of the Committee to Regain America's Principles, acronym fans ) soon took up the baton, framing our man for the murder of another third-division villain The Tumbler, and replacing Cap in the nation's hearts with a new hero, the beefy bully-boy Moonstone.

Throughout all this, Cap wandered through his own book, dazed, confused, and extremely pissed off, sure that his glowing record would stand him in good stead, and that the American people would, in the end, stand by him. Cap, you sap.

Meanwhile, The Falcon was gettin' a good thang goin' on with black militant hot mama Leila Fox, and was regularly quitting the partnership over some imagined slight or another. Cap was never better than when he was with The Falcon, by the way. Leaving aside the fact that I just like buddy-superhero teams, Falc's coolness seemed to rub off onto dull ol' Steve Rogers. Not to worry, though, 'cos Steve was about to become very cool indeed.

Natch, at that tender age, I had no idea of the political undertones going on in these stories. I just enjoyed seeing a generally cocksure hero having his world pulled out from under him on a regular basis. Anyway, it all came to a head in Cap & Falc 175, where the whole thing is revealed to be part of an attempted military coup of the United States by an organization calling itself The Secret Empire. The coup fails, natch, and Moonstone & Hardeman are exposed on The White House lawn ( so to speak ), but the mysterious leader of The Empire, No.1, flees right into the Oval Office, where Cap's faith in the American government is shattered once and for all. Just like, presumably, Englehart's.

Yep, this was Watergate, and yep, the bad guy was Tricky Dicky. Who'd'a thunk?
So where does a guy who drapes himself in the american flag go after this?!! Well, he chucks it all in, obviously. As Englehart says: I was writing a man who believed in America's highest ideals at a time when America's President was a crook. I could not ignore that.
So, for the next few issues, there was no Cap, just Steve Rogers glumly assuring everyone that this was it, Captain America was gone, never to return. Falc, for one, took the news extremely badly, and went off in a huff yet again. Long-time squeeze Sharon Carter, however, thought it was the best news she'd heard all year.

Meanwhile, that leather-clad dominatrix Madame Hydra was back in town, and setting up a new version of The Serpent Squad with every reptile-themed villain she could find. Breaking The Viper out of protective custody for seemingly no reason whatsover, she then killed the hapless bad guy, stealing both his name and his uniform ( hope she washed it first! ), before setting up shop with The Cobra, Princess Python & The Eel ( who turned out to be The Viper's brother. What're the odds? ) Hey, didn't they miss one there? I'm sure there's another snakey villain...well, whatever.
In the meantime, Hawkeye had shown up, disguised as The Golden Archer ( maybe, like Fred Hembeck said, he was bucking for a sponsorship deal with McDonalds ) and demonstrated to Steve that, although he wasn't Cap anymore, that didn't mean he couldn't be another hero. Thinking Sharon would be thrilled, he couldn't wait to break the news. Man, you really don't know chick's, do ya?

And so began four ( was it only four?! ) of the most exciting issues of Captain America I, for one, had ever read at that point, as Steve became Nomad!! It was a good costume, it was a great name, and for a little kid, it was a fantastic concept. Not that Nomad started out covered in glory. His first outing, he ran into the new-improved Serpent Squad, and, well, tripped over his glitzy new cape and fell on his dimpled chin. As Viper said, I always knew I'd see somebody do that one day.
Answerable to no one but himself, and no longer needing to provide a symbol for the nation, Nomad fascinatingly floundered, seemingly unwelcome wherever he went.

As in the next issue, where those pesky Serpent's team up with Namor's old enemy, Warlord Krang ( waitaminnit, he's not named after a snake. Oh, he's got The Serpent Crown with him. Ok, you can be in our gang, Krang. )
Krang & chums have a frankly barmy plan to raise the lost city of Lemuria from the ocean depths by kidnapping the head of Roxxon Oil, again for no readily sensible reason, and after getting the obligatory ass-whipping from a passing Subby, Nomad is off to stop them. He does, eventually, succeed in capturing everybody bar The ( New ) Viper & The Cobra, but Roxxon Oil's security team ( who presumably get outfitted at the same store S.H.I.E.L.D agents go to ) didn't need his help anyway, and tell him so.
Nobody, but nobody, seems to want Steve's new alter-ego around! Man Without A Country is right! Geez, how's a new superhero supposed to make his rep? Even old buddy Falc doesn't want to pal up with The Nomad.

Although this scene is a classic Marvel cheat cover, and never actually happens in the story, the point is still valid. Used to people cheering Cap's every move, Nomad, by comparison, is shunted aside by cops & crooks every time he shows up. It's a sobering experience for our new hero.
Anyway, with Krang's useless plot, maybe Stainless Steve was making a point here about terrorists who don't actually have a real cause, just the spreading of violence. I'm not sure, but it's a cracker of an issue.

The next one, though, is the corker. 'Inferno' is the most blatantly political episode, as the cops ( sorry, the pigs ) trap Viper & Cobra in a burning house, while Nomad tries to reason with the increasingly insane Uberbabe, and get the, by now terrified, Cobra outta there. As Viper extols the virtues of Nihilism and the beauty of an epic death, wishing only to inspire others to the legend of her story, the strips political edge is thrillingly to the fore. Over to Englehart: The Serpent Squad...represented The Symbionese Liberation Army, a domestic revolutionary group of the time. I was excited about writing an ongoing journal of contemporary American reality-but soon realized that as immediate as comics were, they weren't immediate enough to stay up with current events.
Nevertheless, this is a blistering issue, and the fever dream madness of Frank Robbins art suits the hothouse pressure cooker of insanity perfectly. ( Even though, like all of you, I hated it at the time. )

Meanwhile, of course, Englehart had cleverly got around the problem of having the star of the book not appearing in costume, by having various Cap replacements trying out for the gig, including a dumb jock and an even dumber biker. By this issue, Roscoe, the hero-worshipping kid who worked at the gym Steve Rogers worked out at, had convinced Falc to take him on as a partner, and Sam had reluctantly agreed. What a time for The Red Skull to show up!

By the next issue, Steve / Nomad had finally got around to wondering what his old partner was up to, and after a fight with that month's spectacularly lame ( and thankfully fleeting ) villain The Gamecock, catches up with both Falc and the new ( and late ) Cap. The Red Skull, in a rage over this kid adopting the look of his most hated enemy, had gone all out and medieval on the new team's asses.

Gruesome stuff, indeed. But it settles Steve's mind for him in no uncertain terms..

And that was it for The Nomad, the best idea anyone'd had in years for Captain America. Englehart carried on for a few more issues before moving on, perhaps knowing you couldn't really follow such a multi-layered, exciting storyline. As a kid, it worked just 'cos Nomad was so cool. As an adult, it works 'cos there's so much going on, and so much to think about. The definition of great comics, in fact. And yeah, I know other characters have called themselves Nomad since, but there's really only one man Without A Country as far as I'm concerned.

Hanging On The Telephone

2009-11-11T09:11:00.000-08:00

I know exactly how Ray Palmer feels right now. Regular BOABers may've noticed the lack of posts lately. This is because I've spent the last week or so trying to get my Dad's service provider to sort out his non-operational phone line. Said provider are Pipex / Toucan ( I know, you're all saying: Nooo! Pete! why'd 'ya go with that shower of monkeys?!! ). Anyway Pipex /Toucan spell customer service "Fuck you" and are literally doing nothing to fix the problem, so not only is Doree senior going to cancel his account with these saps, I am too. The reason I'm boring you with all this is that, obviously, this means that posts may be even more intermittent for the next couple of weeks, while I find a new supplier. ( And if anyone can recommend one that actually fixes a problem when you ask 'em to, I'd be grateful )
Anyway, just to let you guys know to hang in there, as I plan to be posting back on a regular basis again ASAP. I enjoy doing this blog too much to be stopped now! There's something to be said for a dictatorship, I bet the damn phones work in Latveria....

Romero's Modesty & Axa

2009-11-10T11:19:00.000-08:00

I know we already covered Axa, Enrique Romero's great warrioress of the wasteland / good girl / sword & sorcery newspaper strip ( which unaccountably ran in that bastion of quality, The Sun ) but I just came across these, and thought they needed sharing. Besides, when one is tired of half-naked barbarian babes draping themselves over the post-apocalyptic landscape, one is clearly tired of life itself.

After Axa was unceremoniously cancelled, Romero went on to take over the reigns of the UK's other great newspaper heroine Modesty Blaise. Here's the gals meeting up.

While here's an even better version.

And a couple of Gee-Orgous studies of Mod.

And finally, here's Romero pretty blatantly living out a few fantasies. Apparently, you can get an Axa game on your mobile now, which is about as bizarre as it gets. Still no sign of a movie tho'.

This One'll Kill You, Batman!

2009-11-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

Y'know, there hasn't been nearly enough Batman around here lately, so let's remedy that with one of my faves. Even though I like the moody, twisted, damn near psychotic anti-hero we have now, and even though I liked both Batman Begins & The Dark Knight, Bats doesn't actually seem to be much fun anymore.
Each generation gets the Batman it needs, ( though quite why The Silver Age needed The Reverse Batman or The Zebra Batman is beyond me...) and in the 21st century, I guess we need a barking mad, hate fuelled Caped Crusader with no social skills whatsoever. But the Batman of today, as much as I appreciate him, just isn't MY Batman, y'know?
MY Batman is Bob Haney's Batman, and Denny O'Neil's Batman, and even Frank Robbins' Batman. I liked it when he strolled down the street on a hot summers day, in full costume, checking out the babes ( as he did in one memorable Brave & Bold ). I liked that everybody in Gotham knew him, wasn't freaked out by him, and treated him like just another citizen. I liked it when he was The World's Greatest Detective, and was on first name terms with every mortuary attendant or forensics scientist in the police department. It's what was great about The Bronze Age, you were right between the silliness of The Silver Age & the grimness & depth of The Modern Age, and you could skip between both. Like here, in Bat's one zillionth face off against The Joker.
It's a tight, fun script from Denny, and the art, from Irv Novick & Dick Giordano is brilliantly cartoonish and almost enters the realm of characiture. In many panels here, Ol' Pointy Ears looks decidedly unheroic and ludicrous, all adding to the gag. And the scenes where he laughs are deeply, deeply disturbing. As much as I like the fun Batman, you don't actually want him laughing.

Steve Ditko

2009-11-03T12:42:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I forgot Steve Ditko's birthday yesterday. Would'ja believe I was being deliberately obtuse and mysterious, in keeping with Shadowy Steve himself? No, huh?
Well, anyway, as we know, after leaving Spidey, Dichotomous Ditko spent a lot of The Bronze Age producing work that got steadily stranger & stranger, from The Hawk & The Dove and The Creeper to Mr. A. This strip, from the 4th issue of Imagine and scripted by Paul Levitz, isn't the weirdest thing he ever did ( Mr. A holds that honour ), but it's certainly up there. For openers, it may be the closest Straightlaced Steve ever got to being a hippie. It's unbelievably pretentious in a way only '70's comics can really get away with, and in places looks like a lost episode of Dr. Strange. Wherever you are, sir, a belated happy birthday. ( Like he's actually reading this, or is even in this dimension... )

The Origin Of Superman

2009-11-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

We've all read Superman's origin a million times, but I really like this version from 1973, by the powerhouse team of Carmine Infantino, E.Nelson Bridwell, Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson. This is from the one-shot Amazing World of Superman, released to coincide with the opening of the Superman park in Metropolis, Illinois.
( Did it open? Was it as great as the Neal Adams illo's show? Anybody know? )
The last two pages do kind of rush things towards the end, but before that, there's some really nice scenes with the Kent's, and of course, the destruction of Krypton is always worth watching again. I remember being really stupidly offended by how they did Krypton & it's citizens in the first Superman movie, but now it seems really odd to see Jor-El drawn in that classic Silver Age style. As all right-thinking people know, the 'Swanderson' team did the best Superman by far, and were the very definition of slick, polished artwork. And this strip was actually Curt Swan's personal favourite of all the Supes stories he did.

The Great Pumpkin

2009-10-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

Leave it to all those other sites to post blood-curdling tales of terror. Here at BAOB we know what Halloween's really about. It's about sitting out all night in the cold waiting for The Great Pumpkin to appear. I remember as a kid being completely fooled by Linus' annual visits to the pumpkin patch. I thought America really did have a mythical figure who rose out of the ground every year and dispensed toys. After all, the USA had The Easter Bunny which we don't really have, so why not a pumpkin?
Of course, what this particular portion of The World's Greatest Comic Strip was really about was Linus' gullibility. Various people with way too much time on their hands have chosen to view The Great Pumpkin as a parable on Christian Evangelism, or even on the subject of faith itself.
I'm sure that Schulz wasn't unaware of that, but I'm equally sure he just liked a good running gag.
Here's some of The Big Guy's non-appearances from The Bronze Age.

The Monster Of Dread End

2009-10-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, technically this is a Silver Age tale, but we can bend the rules occasionally. And anyway, if you can't read at Halloween the creepiest, flesh-crawlingest horror comic ever done ever, when can you?
The Monster Of Dread End appeared in Dell's Ghost Stories in 1962, was written by John Stanley and illustrated by Ed Robbins, and seems to come from Hell itself. No matter how many times I read it, it still scares the living crap out of me. You can look at it all logically, and say it's kind of Lovecraftian. You can say the fact that the creature appears to be dead but obviously isn't, or the fact that you never see all of it ( or do you? ), or even the fact that there's no explanation for it all adds to it's terror. But I think it's more than that. Somehow, Stanley & Robbins tapped into something primal on this story. Maybe it's the childhood fear of things under the bed or in the wardrode, I don't know, but in some way I'm not able to intellectualize, The Monster Of Dread End creeps me out like nothing else. See if it does the same to you...

The Wrath Of The Spectre

2009-10-28T00:42:00.000-07:00

The Spectre has, of course, been around since the '40's, when he was first created by Jerry Siegel. ( I love the fact that Jerry Siegel created The Spectre after creating Superman. I mean, what was he thinking? ) But The Spectre's finest hour was probably this short run in the pages of Adventure Comics.
It was a brilliant, ghoulish series that raised a few eyebrows at the time for it's violence
and, so the story goes, was inspired by an incident that happened to editor Joe Orlando. According to Jim Aparo: Someone had told me that Joe had told him that he had been mugged in the city, and the mugger got away, and Joe was infuriated over it and was looking for revenge.
Over to Joe: I might have used it to justify why I was doing that. As a kid, I liked the Superman who took the criminal up really high and said, 'Listen, buster, you tell me what's going to happen or I'm going to drop you'. That's why I read Superman. I don't like any super-heroes who are wimps. Because that's not fulfilling the job they're supposed to be doing, which is, when you've lost all recourse through legal channels, to use force. That's what a super-hero's about.
And that's absolutely what The Spectre's about here.
Scripted by comics greatest misanthrope Michael Fleisher and with art at the peak of his game from Aparo, each issue is basically the same nasty morality play. The bad guys do something unspeakably rotten, and The Spectre finds them, and kills them in the most creatively baroque, gruesome way Fleisher & collaborator Russell Carley can come up with.
That's really it, and you can't read too many of them in one go, but taken individually each story is a perfect rancid little gem.
There is some attempt at continuity later on, in the form of a faintly ludicrous romance between The Spectre's earthbound alter-ego Jim Corrigan & sexy socialite Gwen Sterling, ( he's a ghost, darlin'! ) and a sub-plot where a Clark Kent-ish reporter tries to find out why all these criminals keep dying in bizarre ways. ( Nice touch when Corrigan actually calls the guy Clark Kent. Post-modernism will eat itself! ) But it's really the gruesome acts of vengeance that stick in the memory. And unlike the EC's which obviously inspired a lot of this, the death's aren't always simple poetic justice ( like the hairdresser cut in half by a pair of giant scissors ), but more often things that come completely out of left field. Like my all-time favourite, where The Spectre turns a bad guy into wood, then runs him through a saw mill!
And the art is some of the best of Jim Aparo's career. His work of this period always seemed to me to be so complete, and so perfect, it was like a machine did it. Absolutely nothing is wrong or out of place, and there isn't a weak panel in the whole series. His art also had the 'cool' factor, something indefinable that only Gil Kane's could match. Every one of his characters somehow just looked unspeakably cool, like the greatest Rat Pack movie never made.
There's no real depth to this series, it does exactly what it says on the tin, but it's got something better. A raw, nasty energy. As Fleisher said: You can't read it without being affected by it's power. It violated many of the conventions ( in comics ) that people accepted. And in violating those conventions, because I wasn't interested in them and hadn't been educated in them, I created something that I think had a very unusual bite and energy to it. But at the same time, it was like a work of primitive art. It lacked a certain refinement.
Of course, it's a series that's not as shocking as it once was, but there's still that pure, unbridled hatred to it...

The trade collects the whole series, including three scripts that were abandoned when the series was cancelled, that Aparo finally got to draw in the '80's. They're not as good as the first stories, but hey, any Jim Aparo is welcome.

Berni Wrightson

2009-10-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

It's Berni Wrightson's birthday today, and here's a caustic corker to celebrate. Berni is to our generation what 'Ghastly' Graham Ingels was to the '50's, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody (with the obvious exception of Ghastly) does horror better. Here's Berni's tribute to his spiritual mentor, sadly the only piece he did for Epic Illustrated. There's not much to say about this piece, other than that it's damn near perfect, up there with Wrightson's adaptation of Creepshow. Horror comics simply don't get better than this. Remember to flush now.

Tarzan Weekly

2009-10-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks are due once again to Brill Bronze Age Buddy Graham for forwarding me these scans of the UK weekly Tarzan comic I couldn't remember the title of. ( Tarzan Weekly, doofus! And hey, let's bring back 'Brill' as a slangword )
I absolutely had that first issue there with it's classically british cover ie. shove everything in there, including the fact there's a FREE GIFT INSIDE. You always got slightly lame free gifts in first issue's in the UK ( 2000AD gave away a mini frisbee with their premiere appearance ) and lemme tell ya, that jungle survival kit sure came in handy in the wilds of the Clements housing estate.
I also remember it was printed on really flimsy paper. Remember the paper that Captain Britain was printed on? It was cheaper than that, so I doubt many copies survived in good condition.
Here's the back page of that first issue, courtesy of Russ Manning. Like I said before, has Tarzan ever looked righter?

Graham reckons it lasted about 20 issues before going monthly, and then rapidly disappearing, but as he says, british comics generally didn't continue numbering after the first couple of releases, so who knows? While I try'n find out, here's another great, great cover by Russ.

While here's Dan Spiegle on Korak. Even though it's obviously Dan, it could actually pass for a great british strip of the time, like Adam Eterno or The Leopard From Lime St. tho' obviously the grid design is american and therefore more interesting than our slightly staid formula of that period.
Incidentally, the Deathless Dialogue award goes to that copper: " Only Lord Pelham I know of would be the one from Pelham Manor " Man, Columbo's got nothing to worry about with you around, pal, has he?

According to David & Graham Tarzan Weekly, as well as Spiegle & Manning, boasted in it's pages the likes of: Dave Stevens, Mike Ploog, Alex Nino & Pat Boyette. Plus Korak was written by Mark Evanier, all of which means I'm gonna be scouring ebay for some of this stuff immediately. This looks like treasure trove / must get of the week to me.

Frank Robbins

2009-10-22T10:57:00.001-07:00

I don't think anybody polarized opinion more during The Bronze Age than Frank Robbins. Amongst my comic reading friends at the time, pretty much everybody absolutely loathed his work. Me, I liked it, if only to annoy those selfsame friends.
At least, I liked it up to a point. If I knew Frank was doing a book regularly, like say The Human Fly or The Invaders, well ok, that was fair enough. I had the choice there. It was when Marvel cheated that used to annoy me. Y'know, like getting Gil Kane to do the cover of a book you bought regularly ( 'cos I'd buy the phone book if it was illustrated by Gil ) then sneakily getting Frank in for that one issue to do the inside.

So why didn't some people like Frank's art? Here's a few quotes I'm sure we all heard at the time: His people look like they're made out of rubber! or The human body can't make those kind of contortions! or howabout Everybody looks like they're covered in slick black grease! or even the ever popular His art is just so damn ugly!
Even Frank's biggest fans would have to agree with at least one of those, and I'm as guilty as anyone else, there were times I thought his stuff was hideous, but y'know what I think it was, really?
I think the real issue was the kind of assignments he was given. Let's look at his great newspaper strip Johnny Hazard for starters.

Now, in anybody's eyes that is brilliant work. Sure, it reeks of Milton Caniff, but what cartoonist of Frank's generation wasn't a Caniff disciple at one point or another? Even if you don't like the style, you can't argue with Robbins' storytelling chops or his sense of design.
Of course, It was when he hit Marvel that the naysayers came out in force, me included. But don't forget, both Stan & Roy were thrilled to have him there. Here they are at a con in '74, just as Frank had been inducted into The House of Ideas.

From left to right, that's Frank, Joe Simon, Phil Seuling, The Rascally One & Mrs. Rascally Jeanie Thomas. And here's another shot of Stan, Frank & Joe.

Here's the thing, Frank was an arch stylist and a uniquely individual artist. What he wasn't was a superhero artist, at least not in The Mighty Marvel Manner like, say, the Buscema's. Take a look at his Cap & The Red Skull.

Brilliantly frenetic, yes. Almost a fever dream parody of the Marvel style, in fact. But not really that style. Not what we were used to. We wanted our heroes to look like heroes, dammit, not coke addicts in the throes of withdrawal. Or how about Frank's contribution to Steve Englehart's classic Nomad phase of Cap.

I love that panel now. At the time, I know for a fact I hated it. Nomad was the best, coolest idea anyone'd had in ages for Cap, and here was Frank Robbins ruining it!

But in a sense it wasn't his fault. He was obviously trying his best to adapt his idiosyncratic style into material that didn't suit it. Take that issue of Marvel Premiere there. Alfredo Alcala should've done it, or Mike Ploog at the very least.

Frank did a great, surreal job, but he just wasn't the right artist for the project. And I'd've said the same if Big John or Jim Mooney had got the job. I'm not saying Robbins couldn't do horror. Just that it didn't feel right. Or howabout the regular series he did, The Invaders. With hindsight, I can see how much fun Roy Thomas' love letter to The Golden Age was, ( tho' I suspect it was more fun for Roy than the readers ), but at the time, it was second only to The Human Fly for me and my friends in the area of 'last book in the shop you'd buy & then only if there was nothing else.'

Never particularly cared one way or the other about Cap, and wasn't even vaguely into the original Human Torch & Toro. Liked Subby, but he was much more fun over at The Defenders, where he stormed off like a petulant teenager each and every issue. Oh, and Bucky was interesting 'cos technically he was dead. But no, just didn't care. And as much as I enjoyed pissing my friends off by admitting to Robbins love, I didn't like him enough to invest in a series by him, particularly with characters I didn't give a stuff about.
Always liked that issue of Ghost Rider Frank did though, the one with The Phantom Eagle, even if it did come with a classic 'cheat' Gil Kane cover.

Interestingly, over at DC, Frank seemed to get a little more respect. He wrote tons of great Batman stories, of course. Though again, his version of The Caped Crusader was just too wrong-headed for me.

Like all of his characters, Bruce here seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown, yet another thing fans didn't like about Frank's art. His people were always frantic and sweaty, even when there was nothing to be frantic and sweaty about. And again, Bats looks like he's completely made out of rubber, even before he puts his cowl on.
But, on the flipside, there's his work on The Shadow, where's the Caniff inspiration is to the max. For instance, here's one of the all-time great covers ever done by anyone.

An absolute masterpiece of design and style. And here's Frank showing how good he is at sweaty Nazi's & sexy chicks.

He drew kinda foxy women, it must be said, even if they moved in ways only a russian gymnast would find appealing.
I think for all the work Frank did throughout The Bronze Age, where his style really worked was in the humour pieces. He was a cartoonist, as opposed to an illustrator, and in the pages of books like Plop! the insane bodily contortions actually worked.

I still don't think I could say I loved Frank Robbins' work, not like I love Chaykin's or Cardy's, to name but two, but I certainly don't recoil from it like I might've back in the '70's. It's bizarrely fascinating in a way, and if Twomorrows feel like doing a book about the guy, I'll be there, tripping over my legs going in six different directions to get it.

Russ Manning's Tarzan

2009-10-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

Everybody says Joe Kubert did the best Tarzan, with Burne Hogarth's version drawing nearly equal praise. But the few times I got to see it, it was the Russ Manning one that did it for me. Not that I knew it was Manning at the time: I have vague memories of a british weekly Tarzan comic in the mid '70's, black & white, with a Korak back-up. It was a short lived book, and the art style was so clearly american, that it was obviously a reprint.
But the drawing was so memorable & clearly defined, that it's stuck with me ever since. All I really remember about the story was a scene of Tarzan standing at the gates of a huge lost city (which could be any Tarzan story, right?) But I'm convinced it was Russ Manning I was reading, the style is just too strong for it to be anybody else. Whether it was reprints of the work he did for Dell, or of the newspaper strips, I don't know, but his is the Tarzan that comes to mind when I think of the Jungle Lord.
Here's some of the newspaper work. There's interesting touches of Gil Kane in Manning's style, but not enough to counter it's originality, and it's the kind of craftsmanship you don't often see anymore. You know you're in good hands with an artist like this.

Captain Scarlet

2009-10-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Had to show these off 'cos they're just beautiful. These are, of course, great british cartoonist Ron Embleton's stunning Captain Scarlet illustrations that used to run over the end credits of the Gerry Anderson produced TV show.
The good Cap, for those who don't know, belonged to a vaguely fascistic organization called Spectrum, protecting the Earth from the dread menace of a bunch of invisible martians called The Mysterons ( all together now: We Are The Mysterons! ) I actually found it quite a dull show, even though I loved Anderson's other puppet epic Thunderbirds, mainly 'cos Cap could regenerate himself after injury, making him virtually indestructible. That kind of thing limits the stories you can tell, and made him a fairly boring hero. Liked Captain Black, the bad guy who always looked like he'd been awake for a whole year, but the good guy? Nah.
But these illo's more than made up for any shortcomings in the show, being more exciting than anything that had happened in the previous half-hour. Every week I used to think: Where can I get those pictures?!!

Superman's Secret Revealed!

2009-10-18T00:40:00.000-07:00

So I've just started wearing glasses for the first time ever. Having been offered a free eye test via work I figured, what the hell, there's nothing wrong with my eyes, but at least it's a free hour out of the day. When I mentioned the headaches I'd been getting for the last six months, however, I was reliably informed by my optician that : "That's 'cos you should be wearing glasses, you bonehead" (I know, an optician that talks like Nick Fury, what're the odds?)
All of which spectacle shenanigans puts me in mind of Superman 330, one of the dumbest comics ever done, and a great example of what Mark Evanier calls Krypto-Revisionism. It's a comic that annoyed me intensely as a child, but as an adult I think it's an endless well of comedy.
This epic, written by Al Schroeder & Marty Pasko, and illustrated (obviously) by the great Curt Swan, attempts to answer once and for all the musical question that even non-comic fans always ask, ie: Howcum nobody ever realises that Clark Kent is just Superman wearing glasses?
Well, after some obligatory nonsense with that issue's third-division villain The Spellbinder, Kal-El starts asking himself that very question.

Love those stylish PJ's, Supes! Anyway, after asking The Daily Planet's staff artist to do a couple of sketches of Clark and The Man Of Steel, our hero is a step nearer to the answer.

Until finally, all is revealed...

Yep, that's right. Superman has, for his entire career, been hypnotizing the entire world (and presumably any other planet's he happens to go to) into seeing Clark as the frail, needy nerd he pretends to be. Not only does this work for anybody looking directly at Clark, but it also works if you see Clark on TV, or even in a photo. And if you want to get all post-modern about it, it also works for us, the reader! Supes has been doing this for years without realising it, by the way. You have to give 'em credit, this strip tries to cover any nitpick anybody could possibly come up with, like that "I guess I was never powerless long enough for the trance to fade." bit. These guys are backpedalling so frantically, they've left Metropolis and are halfway to Gotham already.
I can vividly remember flinging this comic across the room the first time I read it, with a cry of "That's ridiculous!" And it is. That's what I mean by Krypto-Revisionism. It's the super power we all have to just refuse to accept something the writers push at us. I don't mean not liking a particular plot line, I'm talking about when a writer does something so blatantly ludicrous (or in this case desperate) that the reader just can't bring themselves to accept it.
That Nick Fury story, for instance from a couple of days ago, where it's explained why The Colonel never seems to get any older. In the fantasy world we're dealing with, that's plausible, I can go with that. But this story, now as then, is just stupid.
And if remember rightly, everybody in fandom agreed with my reaction, exercised the power of Krypto-Revisionism, and as one, went:"Nope!"
Having not read many new Superman books in the last few years, I'm not sure if DC ever used this idea ever again, or if they just quietly forgot about it. I suspect the former. These days, EVERYTHING has to be explained, and tied in, and retconned to within an inch of it's life to make sense. With the result of course, that almost none of it makes sense.
And I think it all started here...

George Tuska

2009-10-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Just heard we lost George Tuska yesterday. It's always a shame when one of the elder statesmen pass on. As Stan himself once famously said to an interviewer: If you have any questions for the guys who started it all, you'd better ask them quick! And that's the sad truth.
George was already a working pro when he joined Will Eisner's studio in the '40's and worked alongside Lou Fine and a very young Jack Kirby. ( All immortalized in Will's book The Dreamer, of course, including the bit where Tuska punched out Bob Powell, a story George was apparently embarrassed by every time a fan brought it up. )
But we knew Tuska in The Bronze Age too, obviously. For starters, he drew Iron Man for almost as long as Gene Colan ( ie. forever ), but what made me a Tuska fan was his work on Luke Cage. For a guy who seemed the epitome of white bread americana, he sure could draw the Christmas out of a blaxploitation strip, and he's a big reason why Lucas was one of my favourites throughout the '70's.
These two issues are my favourites, ish 20, the conclusion of a two parter where Cage tries to take down a slimy heroin dealer, that bursts with action, and absolutely fits the strip's remit of being comics' answer to Shaft.

And this classic, inspired by then TV show Kolchak:The Night Stalker, where Luke hunts a vampire, and I'm fairly sure, doesn't sit down or pause for breath for as much as a single panel.
Tuska was great at the body in motion, as alternately ungainly as Frank Robbins and as action packed as Kirby, and here Cage leaps all over the page. Wish I still had this issue so I could post the whole damn thing.

In many ways, George owned Luke Cage for the time he was doing the book, and his is the version I always think of. Here's some great single illo's of the toughest guy in Harlem.

Sweet Sister! This one seems to follow the last one!

And finally, here's a brilliant piece with Cage taking on Ol' Shellhead AND Black Goliath. Fan-Freakin' Tastic.

God bless, George, and good journey.

Joe Sinnott

2009-10-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

Everybody's favourite inker, Joltin' Joe Sinnott, is 83 today. Just in case you didn't know, The Joltin' One has a fantastic website out there, chock full of tons of great artwork, and tons of great photos of Joe with, well, just about everybody. Including these guys.

We didn't get to see much of Joe's original work in The Bronze Age ( The Treasure Chest stuff would never've made it over to Britain ), so this Lovecraftian tale of terror, The Last Of Mr. Mordeaux, doesn't quite fit into our remit, as it's from 1952. But I have a get out clause, and it comes with a nice story. I read this Lee/Sinnott tale in one of those '70's reprint horror titles like Dead Of Night or Tower Of Shadows, y'know, one of those books you never bought, unless it had a Kirby or a Kane cover.
Anyway, also on Joe's website is a list of various comics that he doesn't own, that he'd like. Issues with his work in them that he's lost over the years. Amazingly, this story was one of 'em, so I sent my raggedy old copy off to Ol' Jolt' and received a very nice thank you in reply. It's a small thing, but how often do you get to do something nice for one of your childhood heroes like that?

Hamlet On A Rooftop

2009-10-14T01:12:00.000-07:00

Only Will Eisner would adapt Shakespeare for fun. Hamlet On A Rooftop appeared in Will's seminal bible for aspiring cartoonists Comics & Sequential Art, but I'm almost certain it appeared in a few other places before that. As you'd expect, it's a masterclass in page construction, characterization & storytelling. Will is obviously the stage director of this performance, but he's the actor too, choosing where to break up the bard's text, panel by panel, making sure you read it at the pace, and with the inflection, he wants you to.
Every writer/artist does this, of course, but it's never more obvious than in this piece. I saw an interview once with Frank Miller, who said a cartoonist has to be really smart to slow the reader down, whereas a movie director just has to leave the camera running. Will Eisner was really smart.

Wizards

2009-10-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

Ralph Bakshi once called Wizards his attempt to make a kids movie, which just goes to show how marvelously screwed up he is as an artist. Wizards has fairies, pixies and elves, sure. It also has scathingly unsubtle religious satire, nihilism by the bucket load, and a huge side order of Nazi's.

Often it's like watching two films at once, where a bunch of subversive stinking hippies has broken into the editing suite at Disney and inserted their own footage, seemingly at random.
It also has many connections to the comic world, not just in it's underground stylings, but also the fact that Mike Ploog contributed huge amounts to it, as well as the great trouble it takes to rip off both Wally Wood AND Vaughn Bode.

In a post-apocalyptic future, humanity is long dead, leaving space for the forgotten people of fairyland to return and live in harmony over what's left of the world. Except for the fact that the radioactive mutants are still around too.
Ten million years after the holocaust, twin wizards are born. As they grow up, Avatar (the good twin) and Blackwulf (the evil one) fight for control of what's left of the world ( in a series of Ploog illo's, rather than full animation) Eventually, Avatar wins and Blackwulf is banished to the blasted land of Scortch, to rule over the mutants, while the good lands of Montagar are benignly looked after by Avatar.
So this is a fairy tale, of sorts, but one turned right on it's head. Nothing quite happens the way it should in this 'kids film'.
The main antagonists introduced, we cut to 1000 years later, as Blackwulf sends robotic assassins out into the neighboring countries, to kill anyone still practicing magic. Blackwulf. see, firmly believes in the power of technology, particularly pre-holocaust technology, which he has his demonic minions scouring the ruins for. Avatar's side of the world, meanwhile, full of the aforementioned pixies, elves & fairies, has outlawed any kind of science or machinery, and apparently lives in blissful harmony with the natural world.
Wizards is actually full of talk about the perils of The Machine, as in one scene where a village of fairies is being wiped out, (a village that looks suspiciously like a jewish ghetto). A fairie mother explains to her soon to be killed son why they can't fight back, as the tanks roll in: They have weapons and technology. We just have love.

Following one of Blackwulf's hitmen, the blatantly Bode-esque Necron 99, we meet up with Avatar again, by this time a cigar smoking dirty old man vaguely reminiscent of Frank Thorne. Avatar has sent his barbarian elf buddy Weehawk (who's basically Wally Wood's Odkin from The Wizard King crossed with Hogun The Grim) out into the wilds to see what Blackwulf's up to.

Unfortunately, Weehawk runs into Necron 99, and fails to make it back to Montagar in time to stop the murderous droid kill the president of the good lands, leaving Weehawk, Avatar & his Mae West-esque fairy babe Elinore in a bit of a post-apocalyptic pickle.

Meanwhile, Blackwulf has been trying to find something that can motivate his fairly useless goblin army to go to war for what's left of the planet. And, at last, all that scrabbling around in the ruins has borne fruit. Having killed all the leaders of the good lands, Blackwulf is finally ready to mount an invasion, and now he's got the very thing that'll get the mutant population of Scortch all fired up and ready to kill. To wit, an ancient movie projector with footage of the Nuremberg rallies!

Remember, this is a kids film.

Back home, Avatar has reprogrammed Necron 99, rechristened him with the wildly optimistic name of Peace, and much against his better judgement, is off leading a quest with Weehawk & Elinore to locate Blackwulf's dreaded 'Dream Machine' and destroy it.

As you can probably tell, Wizards is a wildly inconsistent film, with quite a few flaws (particularly the reverse rotoscoping Bakshi uses for the final battle, which sadly doesn't work at all), but it's that very inconsistency that makes it so much fun. It veers from beautiful, childlike fairy tale-ness to insane, ultra grown up black satire, often in the same scene. And though Bakshi freely steals from pretty much the entire history of comic book fantasy, at least he admits it. (At one point, Avatar swears an oath to the effect of: By Morrow, Krinkel & Frazetta!)
And although the constant use of Ploog's static, though stunning, illustrations betray the low budget, it's still full of more ideas than any animation with ten times the money. Like all of Bakshi's films, there's a real darkness to Wizards, that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable watching it, but y'know, sometimes it's good to see something that doesn't want to be your friend. Plus there's the audaciously brilliant ending, as Blackwulf & Avatar finally face off, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. I won't spoil it if you've never seen it, but rest assured, your jaw will drop.
Oh, and there's everybody's favourite scene right here:

They've killed Fritz! They've killed Fritz!! Those lousy stinkin' yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity filled vermin! They've killed Fritz!!!
The whole thing's on Youtube if you want to see it...

Jim Starlin

2009-10-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

And today is Jim Starlin's birthday. Jim was kind of the goth of The Bronze Age, being almost completely obsessed with death & destruction throughout his career. From Warlock witnessing his own demise, to Aknaton mercy-killing an entire galaxy, to Captain Marvel's sad end, and all the way up to Thanos falling in love with Death herself, The Grim Reaper stalks through Starlin's work like, well like Death I guess.
I never found Jim's morbid fascination remotely gloomy though, maybe because his drawing style is always as reader friendly as it is odd and disturbing. ( A neat trick! )
Here's what might be the ultimate Jim Starlin story, from the debut issue of Star*Reach. It's powerful, poetic and strangely beautiful stuff, full of loads of patented Starlinesque touches, not least of which being the kind of creatures that only Jim can give us. There's also the occasional nod to Ditko, obviously a huge influence on the young Starlin.
Somebody ( possibly Jim himself ) once referred to his style as 'Detroit Cosmic', and that describes it perfectly. He deals with real stuff, just in a whole other universe. Also love the way, as he gets older, he looks more and more like Aknaton.
Time to gloom out. Here's...The Birth Of Death!

Howard Chaykin

2009-10-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

It's Howie Chaykin's birthday today. Y'know it amazes me when I hear people say how they've been into Chaykin as far back as American Flagg or Black Kiss. As great as those books undoubtedly are, I always feel like saying, yeah, but what about Monark Starstalker / Iron-Wolf / Dominic Fortune / Solomon Kane / Cody Starbuck etc etc etc. He's always been this great!
Alas, I couldn't make it to Brum Con this year where Howie's a guest, but Sean (Philbo) Phillips is obviously going. We were trying to find the obscurest thing to take for Chaykin to sign, and I think Sean won, curse him, with a british hardcover annual reprint of the Star Wars adaptation. Hope you got it, kid.
Here's Howie on peak form back in The Bronze Age with a piece written by Jim Starlin, so you know you're in for a good time. Even on other people's characters, these guys rock, and this is one of the few times outside of Steranko's run that Nick Fury was done absolutely, 100% right.
Plus you get Chaykin's patented decadent nihilism and "visceralness". Is that even a word? It is now.

Hot Stuff, The Little Devil

2009-10-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

Dunno about you, but I'm fascinated by the comics I read when I was a really little kid, mainly because I have such dim memories of them. The real interesting thing is how different they seem as an adult. For instance, take this scene from F.F. 7, which I originally read in black & white in The Mighty World Of Marvel. For years, I remembered this scene, seeing it in my minds eye as this huge, complicated piece, whereas in reality it only takes up three panels. Of course, as a very small child, with a smaller level of understanding, it was a massively complicated scene. It's why, sometimes when you read old stuff you loved as a child, it doesn't seem quite as great as you remember it.

What's even more interesting is the stuff you only remember vaguely, almost at a gut level. Like Hot Stuff. Hot Stuff, The Little Devil was published by Harvey from 1957 all the way up to 1982, and was ostensibly written & drawn by Warren Kremer ( though apparently Ernie Colon did some too. Man, would I love to see them! )
I have no idea which issues of Hot Stuff I read as a child, but I know I did read 'em, 'cos the image of that little demonic kid with an asbestos nappy has stuck with me ever since. I also remember reading Richie Rich, Wendy The Good Little Witch & even Casper, but I've no idea if I actually liked 'em, beyond the beautifully 'simplistic' artwork. At that age you'll read anything that's available. ( Anybody else used to get told off for reading at the dinner table? ) Pretty sure I liked Hot Stuff though, I mean he was a devil, after all. Sure, he occasionally did nice things, basically to annoy his family, but at least he wasn't a simpering goody-goody like Casper. He was cool, before I even knew what cool was. He was the Wolverine of Harvey Comics.
Take this cover, for instance:

How hard d'you think it was for the letterer not to write "Who THE HELL are you?" there. Pretty damn hard, I reckon.
And what about a comic actually called Devil Kids? In this day and age, where you have to call a book Essential Marvel Horror and not Essential Son Of Satan for fear of offending anyone, Devil Kids is almost beyond belief.

That green witch there is another gut level memory. No idea what she's called, but she's so familiar it's ridiculous. I guess the things you see as children make such an impact, they become ingrained in your unconsciousness.
Check out this pair of covers too. Hey kids! It's ok to smoke! Hot Stuff says so!

And hang out in grimy pool halls. "Hey kid, you nudged that pink. Two shots to me". Oh yeah, you want this pitchfork up your ass, white boy?

Here's Hot Stuff in action. Man, how creepily familiar is all this?

The Art Of The Brothers Hildebrandt

2009-10-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

Released in 1979, The Art Of The Brothers Hildebrandt was one of those gorgeous landscape format book-length portfolio's that seemed to come out once a week throughout The Bronze Age. Tim & Greg Hildebrandt took the publishing world by storm in 1976 with their run of calenders for Lord of The Rings. Now, I'm no Tolkien fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I knows what I like, and great art is great art. Like here, with the bro's interpretation of The Fellowship Of The Ring.

And here's Bilbo At Rivendell.

While this, obviously, is Gollum.

It all came about like this: Ballantine Books art director Ian Summers had been given the task of finding an artist to illustrate the first Tolkien calender, He had three professional illustrators set, all great, but none quite right for the project. Then in February '75, his receptionist tells him there's two guys out in the lobby waiting to see him. Responding that he doesn't see anybody without an appointment, he's told: "Ian, honey, I think you really ought to see this."
From Summers introduction to the book: "Before my eyes were a pair of identical twins...Greg's pants were so covered in paint they looked as if they would stand up by themselves. Tim was much neater. Each of the brothers carried a large black plastic bag. Greg said something like,"Pictures, man, we make 'em-Tolkien pictures." I suggested they make an appointment with me to show their work and bring their portfolios with them. Tim explained that their portfolios were indeed with them, and they proceeded to empty the contents of the black plastic garbage bags on the floor of the reception area....My eyes popped and a chill travelled up my spine signifying what has been called the 'eureka response'. In fact, I even said "Eureka!"
Here's some more of the kind of thing Summers saw. This is The Return Of Gandalf.

And here's The Healing Of Eowyn. What I like about this stuff most of all, is that it really does look like medieval art, which was surely Tolkien's intention.

Oh, and here's Smaug. Always room for a dragon or two here, y'know.

Another fantasy epic that ran through The Bronze Age was Terry Brook's The Sword Of Shannara, and Tim & Greg illustrated that too. Here's the cover to the first volume.

While here's the Fellowship again, whoops, I mean here's The Seekers Of The Sword.

And here's a self-portrait, fairly obviously titled Twins.

And finally, this is the first time I ever saw The Hildebrandt's work, and my favourite, the poster for some long-forgotten sci-fi flick. According to Summers intro, this piece was done in the staggering time of three days, both brothers working both simultaneously as well as painting in shifts, meaning that it was a twenty-four hour process to complete it. Just think about that for a second, these two guy's style's & techniques are so similar, they can both do the same picture at the same time, without anyone being able to tell the difference. And apparently, they do it all the time. That's just incredible.

Richard Corben

2009-09-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

It's the birthday today of The Mighty Richard Corben, legendary of course for his fantastic photo-realist artwork full of huge, great, pendulous swinging....well, actually pretty much everything in a Richard Corben strip is huge, great, pendulous and swinging.
Let's look at a couple of humorous pieces today: First off, here's something chucklesome from the August 1975 issue of Creepy. Who would'a thunk the universe would end...like this!!

And from Fantagor, here's a typically Corben-esque take on The Garden Of Eden myth, full of loads of huge, great etc. etc.

And what about this accompanying illo for the above story, one of the all too rare collaborations between Rich & Vaughn Bode. Why didn't these two ever do a series together?

All The King's Man

2009-09-29T10:33:00.001-07:00

Here's a slightly odd piece, courtesy of Sal Quartuccio's Hot Stuf'. Sonny Trinidad is one of those Phillipino artists who kind of got lost in the rush next to giants like Alcala or Nino, but I always like the 'busyness' of his linework. This is a great example of that, with crowded layouts that amazingly work, and touches of Alcala, Nebres and even Buscema throughout. There's a couple of strange things about this strip tho', the first of which is the bizarre, stilted dialogue & captions. It feels like it was translated, and translated badly. Also it feels like a prologue, or at least a portion of a much larger story. When you get to the last page, check out the little 'fini' accompanied by a head shot of Lenka, our Red Sonja-esque heroine. I suspect this is a Fillipino serial that our pal Sal bought up a portion of, maybe with aims of printing the whole thing. It's good stuff, whatever it's source.

The G.I.Joe Super Adventure Team

2009-09-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

I don't normally disparage Bronze Age ads, but this one always bugged me. And everytime I come across it in a back issue it irritates me all over again. I understand that you can't give Atomic Man the exact same powers as The Six Million Dollar Man for fear of hordes of lawyers coming down on your back, but think about it: Surely, if you've only got one atomic leg that can run 200 miles an hour, doesn't that mean that your other leg would end up A BLOODY STUMP trying to keep up? Honestly, that annoyed the hell out of me.

I don't think G.I. Joe actually made it to the shores of Blighty in the '70's. I could be wrong, but as we already had Action Man doing much the same thing for Queen & Country I can't imagine Brit kids would've been interested. As for me, I'd rather spend my money on comics anyway.

Here's Bulletman The Human Bullet ( fresh from The Dept. of Redundancy Dept. ) doing his bullettastic thing in another ad from the same period. Who drew these things, anybody know? There's a bit of Romita, a bit of Leiber, and even a bit of Giacioa in there. It's like a weird mix that makes no sense. A bit like Bulletman's costume, which more closely resembles Condom Man. Were there any more of these? I'm starting to like 'em...

What The Hell Is Wrong With Me?!!

2009-09-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've talked about this briefly before, but I'm gonna mention it again 'cos, well, I think it's funny.
Looking at that Sabre post reminded me of this particular affliction that seems to affect only comic fans: I've suffered from it my entire collecting life, and it still bugs me. I am, of course, talking about getting slightly different versions of the same material.
I got that Sabre run about a year & a half ago at a second hand book/comic shop here in sunny Norwich, BUT I only bought issues 3 to 14 ( when the run ended ) and not the first two issues, which reprint the original graphic novel, in colour.

At the time, the collector in me was wrestling with my common sense, and urging me to get those issues. Bravely, I resisted. Firstly, they were prohibitively expensive for material I already had, and secondly THEY WERE MATERIAL I ALREADY HAD.
The other day, I popped back into that shop, and sure enough those two issues are still there.
(You'd think, if you hadn't sold something in a year and a half, you'd get the message and lower the price, wouldn't ya?) Anyway, I still refuse to buy 'em. Yeah, it does mean I don't have a complete set of Sabre, which as I'm sure you all know, is the most irritating itch in a comic fan's life. And, if I did buy 'em, I could easily justify it in all kinds of ways: There's a couple of new Gulacy covers, it's in colour so that's slightly different, there might be a back up or two, there's bound to be a new introduction from McGregor, the letter pages are always good in Sabre, and on & on.
But no, dammit, I'm NOT gonna succumb! This is ridiculous! How many copies of the same thing do I need?! Take Gil Kane's classic newspaper sci-fi epic Star Hawks, for instance. I've got this book, lovingly produced by Uber Kane fan Daniel Hermann, and ok, it's got a few production faults, but it's the whole series. I own the whole series of Star Hawks.

So why oh why, if I'm at a convention, and I see either of these two books do I want them?!

Well, Pete, you get a couple of new Gil covers, and anyway, they're just nice to have and...NO! NO! THE MADNESS HAS TO STOP SOMEWHERE!
I've got shelves full of Essential's & Showcase's, and as an English comic fan, who originally read most of this stuff in black & white anyway, I don't mind the lack of colour. You can get a better feel for the artwork and inking. But I still want half of the original's reprinted in those books. Still want the Epic Killraven graphic novel, still want Shazam! No.3, still want a complete set of Tales Of The Zombie. Why?! It's in BLACK & WHITE!! I'VE ALREADY GOT IT!!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?!!

Sabre: An Exploitation Of Everything Dear

2009-09-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

"At his worst, he could be overwritten and almost incoherent in his pretensions. At his best, he brought to comics...a literary style and philosophical ambition, and a maturity even in Comics-Code approved stuff, that's rarely been matched. He makes Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore look like...well, like comic book writers."
The Masked Bookwyrm

"Too many words, Don!"
Gene Colan

People either love or hate the work of Don McGregor. As you may've guessed, I'm somewhere in the middle. Like the above quotes intimate, people have a problem with McGregor for several reasons: His work is oftimes ludicrously florid, breathtakingly pretentious, and insanely dense & verbose. You can't skim through a Don McGregor book; You open up one of his stories, you're there for a while.
Sabre, the graphic novel published by Eclipse that was a big part of starting the whole direct sales movement, is a prime example of McGregor Mania, and even as a fan, I have mixed feelings about it (see previous post, back issue fans!)
A couple of years later, Dean Mullaney of Eclipse gave Don and his creation another spin, in a regular series, firstly reprinting the graphic novel in colour, then heading full pelt into a sequel: An Exploitation Of Everything Dear, and you know what? I think it's better.
Here's the cover to the first installment, full of the kind of dialogue that'll make Don haters wince in pain. (And this is just the cover!)

I'll admit, it makes me chuckle in a kind of "Only Don McGregor..." way, and the lettering is unbelievably amateurish for a professional book, but it's a great cover. In fact, most of the covers on this series are great, done as they are by Kent Williams. It's a shame he couldn't do the insides too.

The interior art is actually by Don's frequent collaborator Billy Graham. Now, as a kid I hated Billy's work (which is why I never got round to reading their Black Panther series properly), but I've since grown to appreciate his style, though I still feel he really shone with a good inker. Like in the first couple of issues here, where he's paired with George Freeman.

Anyway, the last time we saw Sabre he was walking away from his pregnant lady love, the test-tube created Melissa Siren. This time around, he's been captured by the fascist police state now in charge of America and flung in a cell, awaiting execution. His old adversary/best pal Blackstar Blood is trying to help him break out, and we're also introduced to fellow prisoners, and gay couple, Deuces Wild & Summer Ice.
In this first issue, we also get to meet the new bad guys, Joyful Slaughter, a spendidly venal good ol' boy who's running for President, and who sees Sabre's death as a perfect political showpiece, and his sidekick, animatronic assassin The Lounge Lizard, who smokes a pipe and wears a silk dressing gown while dismembering rebels.

Joyful is a great villain, all fake bonhomie & psychotic tendencies. The Lizard sadly, is a bit of a non-character. Maybe it's the way Graham draws him, but I just didn't feel the same menace I did from his predecessor Grouse, from the original story. That scene between Sabre & Joyful also points out another thing that irks McGregor's detractors. It's the way his characters will suddenly go off on long winded tracts about the meaning Don wants to impart from the story, and I guess sometimes it does feel slightly shoehorned in. But then, on the other hand, Sabre does talk like that all the time.
There's also the names Don comes up with for his characters, some people hate that. Yeah, it is a little wearing I suppose, but then Dickens did it, so why not? For those who care, about halfway through the run, it's explained that in this future world, it's the fashion for people to rename themselves in such a florid way.
But above & beyond all that, what I like about this series, especially compared to the original, is that here the characters do feel like real, breathing people. No, nobody talks like this, but in the world of McGregor, it's such a total package, where you're clearly not in the real world, you can kind of go with it.
Anyway, Sabre, Deuces & Summer escape from Joyful & his cronies, and head across The Rockies, our hero hell bent on reaching Melissa before the birth of their baby. Meanwhile, we're treated to several scenes of Melissa waiting for her man in the company of Willoughby, the Woody Allen-esque schlump who used to be on the bad guys side. Along the way, we also get this nice flashback about how the two first met, and at last, we start to feel like, yes, this is a real couple, and yes, they do love each other.

Moving on into the radiation soaked Oklahoma, Sabre & companions discuss, at great length, how it all went wrong in this Land Of The Free & Home of The Brave. Again, this is a little wearing, but I think even Don realizes this, as he repeatedly has Deuces & Summer tell Sabre to shut the hell up. Why I'll defend McGregor to the skies, even with all the stuff that annoys me nearly as much as everybody else, is when he hits upon heart-rendingly poignant scenes like this, where an old couple have died, hand in hand in their radiation suits.

Deuces and Summer work ok as supporting characters, though there is the feeling that Don is trying just a little too hard to make them personifications of opposing viewpoints (Deuces the 'man' of the relationship, as tough & can do as Sabre, and Summer the shrill, moaning 'woman' who eventually comes into his own)
Finally reaching the rebel stronghold (really just a collection of shacks) we're introduced to another great tough woman, in the tradition of Killraven's Mint Julep & Volcana Ash, the viper mouthed Midnight Storm. Midnight is a rough, tough hero like Sabre, except she stays and defends her people, instead of gallivanting around like Sabre does. That's the way she sees it, and is willing to let our otherwise preoccupied hero know about it.
I suspect these two might be ex-lovers, but at this point, Midnight's animosity is unexplained.
This rest of the series is a tour-de-force, as Joyful, The Lounge Lizard, Blackstar and a small army invade the village, laying waste to all and sundry. McGregor's experimentalism is in full flight, as he spans most of three issues detailing the battle from various angles and character viewpoints, that in real time would probably take only ten minutes to elapse.

And then there's ish 7, which is where we've been leading up to all this time.

It's a great issue, not least because Melissa giving birth is by no means a shock tactic, or a sales gimmick, but a vital ( the vital ) part of the story. According to the letters pages, several distributors were unwilling to stock this issue at the time, but it just works (and why wouldn't it?) and it's an issue that confirms the Don fan in me.

(Love how Sabre holds his baby just like Kunta Kinte in Roots. I don't know if the inference is deliberate, but it works for me) By the last couple of issues, everybody's 'arc's' converge in the tiny shack where Melissa is still giving birth. Willoughby, in an uncharacteristic act of heroism, buys it, Deuces & Summer prove their worth (to themselves if to nobody else), and the final face-off, refreshingly, isn't between Joyful & Sabre, but Joyful & Blackstar.

It all ends semi-happily, for Sabre & Melissa anyway, who don't actually seem to give a stuff for anybody but each other and their (by now two) babies.

An Exploitation Of Everything Dear is a pretty great series in the end, with some real soul to it. Although McGregor nay-sayers may not find anything here to change their minds either. Sometimes, he's so obtuse, you feel like you're missing the meaning of everything he's trying to say, and looking for stuff that isn't there.
But like I say, the heart I felt missing from the original book is here in abundance, not least in the fantastic letters pages, where Don's love for & care in his work beats strong, just like in the old Killraven days. You just don't see letters pages like that anymore. Plus there are some great backups with Melissa, Blackstar & Willoughby.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm prepared to accept the pretension, the speeches and the poetry,' cos I like the heart. And there was more to come...

Stalker

2009-09-21T23:41:00.001-07:00

Stalker was another fantasy book that DC released to great ballyhoo in mid '75, only to last a mere 4 issues. It was one of the first professional sales of fan turned pro Paul Levitz ( who, of course, later became top banana at DC ), and like Atlas' The Destructor, was yet another masterful collaboration between Steve Ditko & Wally Wood.
Unlike most of the other sword & sorcery strips released in the wake of Conan, Stalker wasn't just another hack n' slash epic, but something a little different, a little stranger.
As opposed to every other fantasy hero, Stalker isn't after revenge for the murder of his family or tribe, but is trying to make up for the One Big Mistake he made which ruined everything.
It's also a great costume, simultaneously suggesting Robin Hood and a demonic court jester.
In terms of the art, Steve & Wally are on top form on this lost classic. Woody was always more into the fairy tale kind of fantasy anyway, and though seeing a Ditko Conan would've been wild, I doubt it would've suited his style as much as this did.
If I tell you any more, it'll just spoil it, so here's the brilliant first issue.

It's Monday Morning, Chuck, Up An' At 'Em!

2009-09-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

Lady Daemon

2009-09-17T12:14:00.001-07:00

I just can't resist it. Let's read some Classic Cheesy Claremont. Lady Daemon is from the Lethal Ladies issue of Bizarre Adventures and actually, it's reasonably free from 'tics', proving he could write a good story without all that nonsense. Even Chris' predilection for making all his characters speak in a cliched celtic lilt makes sense here for once, as these characters are actually Scottish.
And the art, courtesy of Michael Golden & Terry Austin is, of course, brilliant. When they used to talk about comics being 'black & white in colour' this is the kind of thing they meant. The use of photos doesn't quite work, but hey, this was years before photoshop. And I guess, if you were in a nitpicky mood, you could mention that the death card in the Tarot pack doesn't actually mean real death, but who ever gets magic right in comics anyway? Only Steve Ditko.

Doc Savage

2009-09-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

Pulp heroes were all the rage during The Bronze Age. Once Marvel took a chance on Conan, suddenly all those old characters from the '30's, characters most of us had never heard of before, suddenly became very hot property, with the race for rights very much on. DC, late in the game as usual, managed to get The Shadow and the lesser known Justice Inc. But Marvel got Doc Savage. Doc, of course, is one of the original superheroes, as well as one of the strangest. The Shadow was a mysterious, vengeance dealing figure of the night, while Doc was a billionaire scientist / adventurer, trained since childhood to fight crime, with a whole warehouse full of vehicles, weapons & gadgets to help him in his mission. Batman, obviously, was inspired by both these guys. Even if creator Lester Dent once described Doc as a cross between Sherlock Holmes & Tarzan.
Marvel published 8 rip-roaring issues of Doc Savage, mostly written by Doug Moench and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, and they're great, great fun, if a little repetitive.

Kinda like James Bond ( yet another hero Doc inspired ) each story runs along the same basic lines. We start with the breathtaking splash, that, if the cover didn't hook you, this certainly will.

Then after a brief prologue introducing us to that issue's threat, we head straight for the 86th floor of New York's highest skyscraper, where Doc's aides, The Amazing Five, are hanging out.

I never could quite figure out why Doc needed FIVE helper's on his missions, that just seemed greedy. Holmes only needs Watson after all. Nor why the guys clearly had nothing better to do than sit around waiting for their bronze skinned buddy to deign to come out of his lab and speak to them. The team, of course, are as happily two-dimensional ( in a good way) as Doc himself is, at least in the comic version. We always get a bit of comedy between Ham & the Ben-Grimm like Monk here too, arch enemies but lifelong friends. And I always liked miserable old Renny, who could punch through doors (tried it meself once!) And Johnny's fun, if little more than a running gag, but Long Tom never really made that much of an impression, at least here. As I say, they're a two-dimensional bunch, but it's that very simplicity that makes Doc Savage for me. It all kind of feeds into the childhood fantasy of being with your best friends, in your secret hideout, with all the toys & gadgets you could ever want, having nothing to do but go on adventures.
Anyway, generally a beautiful babe turns up at the 86th floor and explains that issue's adventure to us & the gang. Doc, natch, is off in the lab or his private gymnasium, listening in and waiting for the perfect time to make his dramatic entrance.
As soon as he does, a final piece of the plot is explained ( usually to Monk ), then Doc does a bit of trilling ( something I never understood, even to this day. How exactly does he make that noise? Is it a whistle? A hum? What? ) Then the chase is on! Off to The Hildago Trading Co. for The Autogryo, or The Helldiver, or whatever other vehicle will actually carry them all, Doc so ready for action, he doesn't even have time to sit in the car.

Pretty soon, it's monsters, escapes, captures, fights, and 100 mph, breathless excitement all the way, as the gang travel the world, eventually exposing the bad guy in kind of a Scooby-Doo stylee, before everything explodes and they make it out in the nick of time.

As I say, Doc is, on reflection, a deeply weird hero. Humourless, perfect in every way, followed unquestioningly by The Five, he shouldn't work at all. But he does. Again, it's that boyhood fantasy where you're just naturally brilliant at everything and everybody thinks you're great. The scenes where he's doing ridiculously complicated gymnastics while conjugating square roots, or beating up ten henchmen at once, make you feel absolutely like a kid again, wishing you could do that. And like Bond, you never once feel like he's in any danger or there's anything he can't handle.
Moench, I think wisely, stayed away from that whole 'operating on criminals to make them decent members of society' thing that's in the books, though everything else is in there, including the fact that Doc never kills, which is nice of him.
He also brought in Doc's ballsy, straight talkin' cousin Pat, who bounces off the stoic superman perfectly, and she should've been in more stories. ( But then I guess, they'd need another couple of planes to carry everyone around in. )

Every once in a while, talk of a new Doc Savage movie surfaces. And even though the Ron Ely version is, of course, truly appalling, it does raise an interesting point. Could you make a pure Doc movie these days? Moench got away with it here, but this kind of innocence and simplicity is extremely hard to do, especially nowadays. That's why the original movie was camp, just like Flash Gordon was camp. This intro from the book sums up Doc's appeal, and any filmmakers problem, better than I can. It's certainly everything I love about Doc Savage.

Chris Claremont

2009-09-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm ready. I'm currently writing this post from the safety of an adamantium bunker buried six miles underground at an undisclosed location. I'm wearing protective headgear and I'm armed to the teeth. I'm finally ready to tell you why I have a problem with Chris Claremont.
Firstly, lemme start with saying it's just The Claremeister's Bronze Age work we're talking about here. If Chris has written The Great American Novel in the last couple of years, sorry, but I missed it.
Secondly, I have to preface by saying that, as a plotter, I think Claremont's fine. Of course I enjoyed his deservedly classic X-Men run with John Byrne just like everybody else. Along with Frank Miller's Daredevil, it was one of the main reasons I kept reading mainstream comics at a time I might otherwise have given up.
BUT it doesn't alter the fact that Chris is the most irritating writer I've ever read.

Like I say, that whole run on X-Men, that defined our mess of merry mutants ( and particularly Wolverine ) for years to come was one of the best ongoing serials in comics at the time: The Hellfire Club, Mutant X, Dark Phoenix, Alpha Flight, Days Of Future Past. The whole thing as exciting and action packed as comics could be. But that's the plots.
It's the dialogue that gets me. And more importantly Claremont's bag of writer's tics.
Maybe I just notice it more with him, maybe every writer has stock phrases and setups he uses for every occasion, but Chris sure has a bundle of 'em he's willing to share.
Let's look at the one that drives me absolutely bug-fuck crazy: I don't know the literary term for this, but I'll show you a few examples and you'll see what I'm saying.

See what I mean? He sets up a proposition in one caption, then caps it off with that same type of punchline in, well, it seems like every single damn story. I'm sure it's supposed to be deadpan or cool or something, but it's just incredibly annoying. I think it all started with a panel in X-Men where Nightcrawler was falling off a cliff, or had to teleport farther than he'd ever done before, or something. It went: He teleports farther than he ever has before. ( pause / seperate caption ) The effort nearly kills him.
I thought it was cheesy then, and everytime I've seen it since, it's like fingers on the blackboard of what I laughingly like to call my soul. And he does it ALL. THE. TIME. It's a tic. And worse, it's a lazy tic.

Here's another one:

Again, Chris uses that line all through The Bronze Age, regardless of which character is speaking. It's the same thing that annoys me about Tarantino. All his characters speak exactly the same way regardless of who they are. It's really, really lazy writing. I can't--I won't--face that again.

You're still staring at me like I've grown antlers. Still not feeling the fire. Ok, a smaller point, that I can live with 'cos I know it's down to me and my lack of tolerance, is Claremont's sheer cheesiness. Before X-Men, Chris & John worked on Iron Fist, another great character. And it's a really good, involving, exciting series. But the way the characters talk to themselves is so cheesy.

Who would ever refer to themselves in the third person as 'Young Dragon'? Do you guys secretly call yourselves 'Middle-Aged Comic-Book Fan' 'cos I sure as shootin' don't. It's just painful. And here he is, doing the same thing with Ms. Marvel.

Stop it! NO ONE, Kree or human, calls themselves 'warrior' EVERY TIME they think a thought! I know, I know it's me, but I just really hate it.

And I don't need to know every emotion and every thought a character is experiencing in every panel either. I know Chris kind of made an art of that, particularly in X-Men, but it got really old, really quick for me. Everybody, and I mean everybody, was touchy-feely and in touch with their emotions, and was more than willing to share them with the world at large. Everybody? Really?! It became like the superhero equivalent of 30 Something, just reams & reams of thought balloons full of emotional minutia. I felt like I was being spoonfed story points. At first it was refreshing, but he just stuck with it too damn long. It became a cliche, and all his characters became the one Chris Claremont character.

How many panels have you read EXACTLY like that?
And I also know, and accept, that all of this is down to a matter of personal taste. All of these things that drive me crazy about Claremont's writing, I'm sure no one else even notices, but I just can't get past 'em, dammit. I honestly think he's a very lazy writer, happily stuck in a rut, repeating himself over and over ( at least he was in The Bronze Age ). A really good plotter, if only he'd sort out his dialogue.

Here's one last example, which I hope shows what I'm saying. In Marvel Preview 11, Chris & John took over the character of Star-Lord from Steve Englehart, who'd scripted the origin in ish 4. Now, Marvel Preview 4 is one of my favourite comics ever, and Star-Lord a character with bags of potential, but that honestly doesn't matter in this instance. (No really!)
What does matter is the introduction to Star-Lord's second appearance. In his origin, this character was an absolute unredeemable arsehole. By the second time round, he was ( you guessed it ) in touch with his emotions and happy to tell all and sundry about them, like some intergalactic passive / aggressive holistic therapist. Here's editor John Warner from that introduction: We also set the story some bit of time after Starlord's first appearance. We did so because both Chris and I felt uncomfortable with Quill being quite as twisted as he was in the first story.

In other words, rather than try and work with an unsympathetic character by another writer, and try to change him gradually while still being true to what's gone before, let's go forward enough in time so he can be a totally different character. A touchy-feely Chris Claremont character, exactly like all the others. Lazy.

' You're my friend. Something that Peter Quill never had. ' BLEEURGH. You two wanna get a room? So that's why Chris Claremont irritates me. BUT it is just comics. As I've said in other posts, I don't waste my time getting angry about this stuff, too old and ugly for that. And if you think Claremont rocks, fair play to you. And anyway, I bought Essential Ms. Marvel and Essential Iron Fist, and I'm sure I'll buy Essential X-Men. In fact, I love that Iron Fist run, so he must have something I like, but he's so irritating!!! I could go on, and mention how Claremont loves to go on (and on) about his Irish heritage, what with Ship skin-crawlingly referring to Star-Lord as 'M'Love' and every other character in every other comic doing much the same, but I feel like I'm losing the room here and maybe I should try a few magic tricks or something, get you back on my side. As I say, I know all this is nitpicking at best, but I JUST CAN'T GET PAST IT. Am I the only one? C'mon, I can't be, can I?

Frank Hampson's Spider-Man

2009-09-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

Ages back, I was talking about bizzarro Marvel UK book The Titans, it's strange landscape format, and the posters it used to run, including: two very odd pictures by legendary Dan Dare artist Frank Hampson. I managed to get hold of Frank's second piece, a very Dare-esque poster that looked like a rejected sample, alongside some hastily scrawled nonsense attempting to tie it into The Marvel Universe.
The first piece Frank did was a Spidey poster that I remember hating as a kid, 'cos it looked a) too real and b) not drawn in 'The Marvel Style'. Anyway I couldn't get a copy to show what I meant at the time. Well, thanks to oversear of boredrigged.blogspot.com, we can all now see this thing! ( And apologies for not checking your comment sooner, oversear, only just got round to going back through all the old comments pages ) Here it is:

Sorry Frank, you were one of the greats of British comic art, but it's actually worse than I remember it...

Drug Fiends Of The Martian Moon

2009-09-13T02:37:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting pairing; Trina Robbins & Steve Leialoha on a one-off strip for Imagine.
As a kid, I hated Trina's artwork on the occasions I came across it. Too stiff, too mannered, not the regular Marvel style I was used to at all.
Naturally, over the years, I've changed my mind, just like I did about Frank Thorne, Frank Robbins, Alfredo Alcala and so many others.
Trina later did a great strip for Epic called The Woman Who Loved The Moon, which needs to be posted here, and later still, an adaptation of Sax Rohmer's Dope for Eclipse. This piece resembles Dope in a sense, as it feels like a throwback to pulp magazine sensibilities, with it's deliberately anachronistic aliens & storyline. It's the future as seen from the '30's. It's also ( like most of Trina's stuff ) kinda sexy, with it's lesbian subtext that's not really very 'sub' at all.

Steve Gerber

2009-09-08T13:10:00.000-07:00

Why do I think Steve Gerber was so great? Well for starters, there's that scene where Doc Strange says to Nighthawk: " Am I making myself sufficiently ambiguous? "
30 odd years later, I still love throwing that into conversations.
When I was a kid, I followed Steve throughout his great Bronze Age quartet of books ( Howard The Duck, Omega The Unknown, Man-Thing & The Defenders ) as well as the occasional side trip he took, like The Son Of Satan or Tales Of The Zombie. However, I'm the first to admit I often had a hard time with his work. Often, reading something by Steve made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, like I was reading something I shouldn't really be looking at. It was so weird. Equally, as a kid, you might have to gird yourself a little before taking on a Gerber script. Basically because you knew you were gonna have to put in a little work. This wasn't Spidey being chased around by The Spider-Slayer or a simple slug-fest. You were gonna enjoy a Gerber book, sure, but you were gonna have to think a little too. But it was always worth it.

Let's look briefly at each of the main books:
The Defenders was always my favourite Gerber book, even though I don't generally like team books, and taken individually, I never much cared for Dr. Strange, The Hulk or Nighthawk. But put 'em together, and put 'em together with Valkyrie especially, and you have the best team book of the Bronze Age by far.

What made Steve great was simple: he always wrote about outsiders. Not in the way that has since become a cliche thanks to every moaning mutant on the stands, but genuine, bitter & twisted outsiders who have no choice but to seek the comfort of their own. The Defenders were so unpopular in The Marvel Universe, all the other characters thought they were bad guys.
In fact, The Defenders were clearly the unpopular gang at school. Nighthawk was the rich kid with a troubled childhood who everybody hated 'cos they all assumed his life was a bed of roses. The Hulk was the overweight, bad tempered kid with anger management issues and an inability to communicate. Valkyrie was the angry tomboy who just wanted to be left alone who everybody thought was a lesbian. And Doc was the weirdo bookworm whose place they all hung out at 'cos he had the best record collection in the world.

And apart from all that, it was just brilliantly insane fun where you genuinely had no idea what would happen next: Nighthawk's brain, The Headmen, The Sons of The Serpent, Val in prison, Nebulon & The Bozo's, even The Elf, a gigantic pie in the face that Steve strung us along with for a year. Not to mention all the great guest stars. No comic was ever so effortlessly simultaneously fun & intelligent, until...

Steve's signature book, and one that every time I reread an issue, astounds me that he got away with it. Howard is, of course, the ultimate outsider, as well as the ultimate little guy railing against an unjust society. A funny animal transplanted into the real world with infinitely more finesse than the underground comics he bears a passing resemblance to. I guess you either like Howard ( the book and the character ) or you don't, but I think it speaks a lot for The Bronze Age that such a book was even possible. Strange to think now that we accepted it without batting an eye, as Steve ( and his feathered alter ego ) took a journey across '70's America laying waste to fake politics, false religions & insipid media along the way. Howard is a fantastically angry book, sure, but it's also, behind all the gags, a brilliantly humanistic book. Only bruised romantics can be this virulently sarcastic & cynical. It was real and true, and fantastical and hysterical, and one of the greatest comics ever. Moments to treasure: Howard facing up to that month's baddie ( The Beaver ) for the obligatory comic-book fight scene, then simply walking away from the fight out of ennui. Howards interior voices during his stay in the asylum. The whole of ' The Night After You Saved The Universe '. Howard's realistic ( ! ) love for Beverly. Beverly herself, surely one of the greatest, most three-dimensional female characters in comics. And what about: "He died a caterpillar. The kid died a butterfly."
Anyone doubting Gerber's greatness, check out this scene, where Howard becomes one with Cleveland:

That line with the old man and his grandson has stuck with me since the first time I read it, and I still think it's one of the saddest, most poignant, truest things I've ever read.

But even when Steve wasn't working with his own creations, even when he was given a poisoned chalice like Man-Thing, he still managed to produce gold.

No one before Gerber or after him, has ever managed really to make this strip work in any meaningful way but, just as he did with Tales Of The Zombie, Steve turned a mindless, shambling non-entity of a character into an unmissable experience. Using Ted Sallis' slimy alter ego as a kind of silent narrator, Steve simply sidestepped the strip's inbuilt limitations and just went ahead and told the stories he wanted to tell. Man-Thing's swamp became a theatre of the soul, where people passed through and laid their lives bare for the readers morbid delight. Who else told tales of failure and death like 'Night Of The Laughing Dead'? Or lamented the end of the hippie ideal in 'A Candle For Sainte Cloud'? Or failed to cope with the 20th century and descended into madness in 'Song-Cry Of The Living Dead Man'? Or layed bare the reality of censorship in the incredible 'A Book Burns In Citrusville'? Who else would even attempt it, let alone get away with it?

Of all of Gerber's Bronze Age work, Man-Thing is the one that tends to get lost in the shuffle, yet in many ways, it's the purest of his books, almost an anthology series, and always worth reading and rereading.

And Omega is probably the one that annoys most people. Omega is many things: A post-modern Captain Marvel ( with James-Micheal Starling standing in for Billy Batson ). A deconstruction of the superhero itself. A mystery that'll never be answered. A surprisingly gritty ( for the time ) tour through the mean streets of the city. And in James-Micheal & Omega's parallel journeys through Hell's Kitchen, another vivid description of what it's like to feel a total outsider.
Omega is an alien, but so is James-Micheal. Neither of them have a clue how to cope with this strange new world they find themselves in, and I, for one, don't care about the mystery surrounding their connection. I don't care if they're each other's future selves, or clones, or robots or whatever. That doesn't matter. It's the feeling of aloneness, of being in a terrifying new place where no one's explained the rules that counts.
And it's such a rich, detailed strip that rewards endless rereading. Notice how Omega only ever fights third division villains, as befits both his locale and status in the superhero world. ( In fact, he isn't a superhero. He never really wants to fight ). Or James-Micheal's pubescent crush on the M.J. like Amber, brilliantly subtly written. Or the way that Gerber so perfectly places the reader into the sheer hell that is school, where people actually die ( and unlike every other comic, never come back ). Or scenes like this:

Omega, behind all the fight scenes, is actually a book about the small things in life, good and bad, and the fact that it'll never be finished with all plot threads tied up, matters not a jot to me. Sometimes, the journey is better than the destination. And again, like all of Gerber's work, there's a human edge to it. These people matter. For all the weirdness, the surrealism and insanity, what made Steve Gerber great was simply that. Even outsiders matter.
And I haven't even touched on the time The Son Of Satan met both God AND Adam.
Still not convinced? Tch. Bozo.

Archire Goodwin & Walt Simonson

2009-09-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

Archie Goodwin was born today. Archie is my favourite comic book writer ever ( with Steve Gerber a very close second ), so I make no bones about talking about him, as I think people have forgotten just how great he was. Archie was a story man first, last & always and he always, always delivered. He was also, of course, a great editor. In fact, writers & artists would regularly work for companies simply 'cos he was there, knowing they'd always get treated fairly by him. Equally, as soon as he left a company, nearly everybody went with him. There are apocryphal stories of various sleazy publishers attempting to poach Archie, and his reputation, in order to attract better talent. They wouldn't treat anybody any better, understand, they'd just assume simply having him there would deflect attention from their low pay & bad practices.
The first time I became aware of Goodwin's greatness was while he was editing Epic Illustrated. Not only was it a great mag, with great art, but Archie clearly went out of his way to get new talent he liked in there. He'd regularly write stories specifically for artists on the basis of their portfolio's, and get them in Epic, as well as regularly buying paintings, and writing text pieces around them as well. Go back through those old Epic's, you might be surprised how much of it is down to Archie.
One of the dream team's of The Bronze Age was, obviously, Archie & Walt Simonson ( whose birthday I shamefully forgot last week. See how it all ties in? I don't just throw this shit together, y'know... )

Goodwin & Simonson's greatest hour together has to be their legendary, ground-breaking Manhunter, one of the greatest superhero pieces ever done by anyone, anywhere, at any time. If I achieve nothing else with this blog, I'll get everybody who's never read Manhunter to read it. Go ahead, scoot over to ebay and get a copy. I'll wait.

Just after they won every award going for that piece, the pair contributed The Temple of The Spider to the 2nd & last issue of Atlas' Thrilling Adventure Stories, and it too is brilliant. Walt's gorgeous, decorative style is in full flow here, bringing manga to the US long before anybody else had heard of it. There's a hint of Eisner here, but really I always thought Walt was kind of like Nino, just such a completely individual stylist it could only ever come from him. Archie too, as usual, contributes an airtight script. Note also how, unlike a lot of writers at the time, he lets the art and the artist breathe, trusting Walt to tell the story without redundant caption's or purple narration, and he actually did that most of the time. Sheer greatness.

Gene Colan

2009-09-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'm such a dope. Not only did I miss Walt Simonson's birthday yesterday, but I even missed Gene Colan's on Tuesday! Blame it on the sunshine, blame it on the boogie. Next week there'll be something from Walt to cover up such a shocking lapse, but for today, here's something special from The Dean.
A few years back, the always excellent Twomorrows put out this Colan biography Secrets In The Shadows ( still available and still indispensable ). But at the time, you could also get a copy direct from Gene, via his website.

Gene was also selling this little gem, full of odds, sods, sketches and writings from his lengthy career.

What made it even sweeter was that if you bought both books direct, you'd also get a one off head shot of the character of your choice, free, gratis and for nothing, pencilled by Colan. Guess who I asked for?

And, as I bought both books, I got two sketches. As great as the DD one is, the Widow one is even better. I suspect not many people ask Gene to do Natasha, 'cos he seriously went to town on this one.

I always loved that run on Daredevil where Matt & Nat moved out to San Francisco ( purely, I think 'cos writer Gerry Conway was living there at the time ), and I'll cover it fully soon as I get some decent scans done, but guess what? Looks like Gene liked those stories just as much. Here's a beautiful piece from Secrets.

As I may've said one or two million times before, the thing that makes Gene Colan so great is not just the absolute, sheer, insane incredibleness of his artwork. It's the fact that no one ever tries to copy him. Because it's just too damn difficult.
Here's another great piece from The Gene Colan Annual, condensing DD's origin into one extraordinary splash.

As Matt himself might say, the defence rests.

The Answer

2009-09-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

The Answer was the very first story in the very first issue of Epic Illustrated, Marvel's answer to Heavy Metal, and was, I'm assuming, something of a 'playing it safe' exercise for publisher Stan Lee and editor Archie Goodwin.
After all, no one knew for sure if the comic reading world would accept The House Of Ideas branching out into the world of 'adult' fantasy, so I guess they hedged their bets with this strip. With an original script ( for the first time in ages ) from Stan, and with sublime artwork from John Buscema & Rudy Nebres, and with colour from a very young Rick Veitch, The Answer features Galactus and The Silver Surfer basically just hanging out. Which is nice.
It's a strip that didn't meet with universal approval, as the next issue's letter pages made clear. One writer called it ' the sort of story a ten-year old would write if he tried to write " science fiction " and questioned what ' a genuine muscle-bound superhero is doing is this magazine at all '
And yeah, it is full of the kind of ludicrous pretentiousness Stan is legendary for, but you know that's what you're gonna get with Stan, so why bleat about it?
Plus here's Big John & Rudy revving up for their spectacular job on Warriors Of The Shadow Realm. This strip really is just about those two artists ( and Rick ) blatantly showing off, like, look what we can do with good printing and decent paper! And why the hell not, say I. Anyway, Galactus rarely looked this imposing, regal and yes, lonely, since the days of his original appearances. ( I don't need to mention what a disappointment that F.F. movie was, do I? Thought not. ) Of course, this wasn't the last time The Big Unfriendly Giant turned up in Epic, but it'll do for now....

Marvel Team-Up

2009-08-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's not anything to do with Bronze Age comics, but come on, DISNEY HAVE BOUGHT MARVEL?!! Is that...Is that...that's like the weirdest damn thing....It's like the craziest script that nobody would possibly ever come up with! I mean, where's Bob Haney when you need him?
Like probably all of you, my gut reaction was sheer, unadulterated horror and disgust. Then my second thought was: MarvelLand? That might be cool. Then my third thought was: Hey, maybe comics will start chasing the kid audience again. That'd be really cool. Sales'd go up, and people might actually become literate again. But the truth? One business has bought another business. In reality it probably won't change a thing. No one at Disney is about to worry about the level of Ultra-Violence instead of actual story in comics ( though certainly the comics should start doing that, 'cos it's incredibly boring and just one of the reasons I prefer the Bronze Age ).

Actually, I have no idea what I think about this, but the next few years might prove interesting, at the very least. In the meantime, here's the legendary Carl Barks with his version of Joe Quesada when he heard the news.