Children Of The Stars: The Conclusion

As promised, here's the final two parts of Charles Vess' early masterpiece, from the pages of Epic Illustrated. Melancholic, dark and beautiful. As I said before, like a fairy tale you only half remember from childhood.

Children Of The Stars

Children Of The Stars ran in the early issues of Epic, and following the earlier Jack Tales, it was Charles Vess' opportunity to show us what he could do, and make lifelong fans of us.
I remember lending these issues to a non-comic reading friend at school, and him saying Children Of The Stars was the best thing he'd ever seen.
What he was responding to, I think ( apart from the gorgeous artwork ), was what's great about Vess. His stories always feel like real, proper fairy tales, the ones that you half-remember from childhood. It's easy to do this sort of thing with, for example, creature from list a, plot device from list b and so so on. Many, many fantasy stories are perfectly acceptable, but you can't quite shake the feeling the writer doesn't mean it.
To make it actually feel like a story your grandmother might've told you when you were little is extremely rare. Children Of The Stars feels exactly like that.

Lee Marrs' Pit Stop

You should've thought of that before we left.

Ernie Colon's The True Game

From the 2nd issue of Epic, here's the massively underrated Ernie Colon with a pitch black satire on the world of big business. What I like about this piece, apart from Ernie's always slick and stylish art, is the 'company speak' everybody in the story communicates in.
Like, I'm sure, some of you, I've spent a great deal of my working life around people who use phrases like 'going forward' or 'drilling down', or who describe some completely ordinary middle management type as having 'vision'.
The new one at the moment is 'squash' as in: 'We need to squash into that situation in order to drill down to the right kind of pebbular level... going forward.'
People who talk like that, I've long believed, have no real vocabulary of their own, and don't even really know what they're saying.
And underneath the thriller element of The True Game, Ernie Colon clearly agrees.