kammerer - pencils

eddie campbell (or, "the mission and the meaning of the mission (is comix)")

Has always been an influence on me, before I even knew who he was.  I knew Bacchus, first, as a teenage reader of Dark Horse Presents, and only cottoned onto the artist behind that mad saga much, much later, on the far side of a chasm where my teen years are housed, half-recalled & water damaged...  and even further, realize that I had seen Eddie's LINE in cognito, in collaboration, endlessly, with other artists hither & yon, from when he was doing the 80s indy scene.  I still pick up scraps from those years today.  I'm probably the only Eddie Campbell reader in Chicago with a copy of the Ace Rock'N'Roll Club.

Chi's a pretty cool town.  A few months ago my husband, who's only read what Eddie Campbell I've shown him*

* Single page strips that endlessly amuse me from his Alec archive of self-reflection, mainly to do with home life, anecdotes & Real Life stuff, which is about as far from Bacchus as it gets.  I was into Eddie first for his fantasy, but in the long view the only Bacchus I have these days is the colour special he did with Teddy Kristensen painting the whole thing, and it's SIGNED by Eddie, which wasn't even a thing I sought; I got it by accident, off an ebay purchase 10 years ago that I only permitted myself--

(the control on my addiction to comix, y'see, was only letting myself buy comix i found In The Wild, in stores or in random nooks in bookshops, little free libraries, library book sales, yard sales, etc--  NO INTERNET PURCHASES, was the hard line up until covid came knocking.  now i control my addiction with an ingrained sense of poverty & the fragility of life & the Transience of All Things, since i have rebuilt my entire comix collection Three Separate Times in my life and have had three near-death experiences.  this, the third collection, is the last one.  the final cut, if you like, the hard edit on what i think the best & most influential comix of my life.  this is the library that survived, and i will pass on, as an inheritance, to someone whom i hope shall not squander the precious knowledge entombed therein.  if you can grok these books you have everything you will ever need to put lines to paper for yourself, guaranteed)

--an ebay purchase which I only permitted myself because my last copy of the Bacchus Colour Special, aka 'The Bottle' got lost, somehow, in my move to the 405 4th studio, where I undertook teaching myself how to make comix all over again as I sweated it out night after night in a dirt bar that also happened to have the best damn pool tables in Atlanta.

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell, and comix, and how Eddie's comix have guided me as a person about as much as Grant Morrison influenced my pop cultural adoration of metafiction & the intellectual, literary gameplay comix could result in, etc, insert endless name-dropping cocklobbering daisy chain of hero worship here [goatse.cx]

Short version is, Eddie influenced me as an Ahhhrtist as much as on the human, literary, level as any scots bastard ever.  Eddie is a player in the comix marketplace on the level of the heavies, has been his whole life (even when he thinks / thought otherwise) and his sense of line & his bravery as a scribbler are second to bloody none.  I love him for his abstraction, his carefully chaotic swings at using two values to represent kalaidoscopes of colour; for being a Colour Artist & fine painter who learned how to do every bit of that in Black & White, in minute abstracted & rigorously swiftly & beautifully resolved experiments in what an artist can do with tiny boxes, lines on paper, & the interaction of word / image.  

He's the real goddamned goods, and better at Talkin' Art than Scott bloody McCloud & Eisner & who else is there, really, when you're talking heavies, because Eddie Campbell is also old as fuck and I express this as someone freshly old as fuck, and at least as experienced with the ups & downs of bar life, hanging with total poolroom genius wasters...  Minus, perhaps, the extra 30,000 miles of wear on SOMEbody's liver.  Who were we talking about again?

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell.  But then I'd have to apologize for biting his style, above.  And I do like that picture, despite all the terribly critical biting things I might could venture--  the fact that I can't mimic Eddie's lettering b/c it's mostly done w/ crowquill nib & i am not lettering with anything other than a felt tip, fuck ya'll very much, i DID my time cleaning nibs & lettering with them and eff all that fine motor control, son, because i possess it no longer  --I do think it's a good likeness, Eddie Campbell to the life, and I was barely trying.

The zip-a-tone really makes it.  Letraset, little black sticky dotty things, whatever you gotta call it.  My favoured brand was Letraset.  They went outta business in the states; I think they merged with a Japanese backer & in some form persist there today, largely kept afloat by the manga industry.  But enough anecdotal, shoppy meanders.  The zip-a-tone is what makes it. 

 

The zip-a-tone is mainly why I thought to post this, today.  This zip-a-tone was given to me by my mother, and may date to her stock from pasting up newspaper adverts for the [Dogwater] Star, her hometown newspaper.

This stuff aged like finest vinegar, as you can see-- it's brittle & doesn't want to stay adhesed to anything other than other acetate; it's gotten that lovely yellow you get from decayed spirit gum that's had exposure to a surface easily affected by humidity (such as xerox paper).  It's fascinating stuff.  You can get lovely moire patterns from it by layering, as demonstrated here.  You can scratchboard it with an exacto to create nifty photorealist gradiants...  Zip-a-tone is the BOMB.  Eddie was, to me, the expert with this shit; at a certain point in an artist's life you collect these obscure scraps & they become precious.  I think Eddie ran out a few years ago; like, within the last administration.  He had that much!

I gave my collection of my mother's letratone... 

--gathered over the decades & only slightly supplied by me, as when I first ran away from home I bought up all the stock there was to be had in Auburn, and their people didn't even know they HAD it:  tucked away on shelves only accessibly by footstool.  I recognized the logo and had to ask someone to get it down.  They sold me the entire batch for two twenties.

Girl at the counter didn't even know what it was.  She asked why I would spend so much money.

Most of that letratone got used by me & my art partner, Josiah, over the late 90s & early 2000s as we both tried & flailed to get noticed / published / do it ourselves, a la Sim, in fucking Auburn, Alabama, then Richmond, Virginia.  We probably picked the wrong time to do any of this, because clearly we caused 9/11.

Anyway, after all the carcinogens died down and nobody knew who or what we were bombing or who we were putting bags over the heads of, the art partnership came to a mutually conciliatory divorce and I was on my own, in Atlanta, and after 4am I would finish cleaning up the daily spills and leave my coworkers to the afterparty, go home & practice making comix.

"...instead of bitching" (#41) was a simple exercise in grinding out a windowpane.  I figured, three panels, three art styles as near as can be imitated, using only felt-tip & ink & a blunt / rough brush.  No laming out with markers on the shading like I had been, where the graytones had almost become a crutch & my linework was suffering.  I think that was the motivation, as near as I can recall.  Eddie's not the panel I'm most proud of-- that would be the Brandon Graham pastiche, where I got his line DOWN; the Carla Speed McNeil imitation is half-rate & too busy, and I don't care for my bald spot in panel 1 at all; it's a terrible composition & unless you knew from previous strips you'd have no idea that there was a bare lightbulb on a weird articulated arm of entwined plastic lei flowers on my desk, nor that that was what that was meant to be.  

Anyway, yeah:  for a while my desk just had a fucking light bulb directly over my head.  Which would be ironic because during this phase of my life I was not particularly creative nor bright.  I knew why I & Josiah had failed, and it wasn't because of Jo.  It was probably because of the unresolved homosexual attraction, unrecognized on my part, happily, because if I'd known I'd had a thing for him we wouldn't have partnered up to make comix in the first place.  We weren't very good at it, generally, we were enthusiastic amateurs.

I mean, my enthusiasm had to be pretty boundless, in those days, because I ran away from home to Make Comix, the way some idiots run away from home to become Rock Stars, or Join Circuses, or Go L.A.-- I mean, there's me, Al Columbia & Brandon Graham, there's gotta be other malformed idiots who started this way.  There I was--  holy shit, there I still am, in my memory palace: the comic shop I used to brazenly steal from back in 97, the one that got burned out for the insurance money; there I am, idly nudging the char from a roof support with my duct-taped jump boot  --rifling through quarter bins back when there .25 bins were a thing, bruh, and there was Eddie Campbell, this fuckin' internationally recognized comix artist whose rep I mainly knew anecdotally, through copies of Amazing Heroes or 'From Hell' hitting Taboo, or... 

Wait, this Campbell cat, didn't he do Bacchus, in Dark Horse Presents?  Did I already say that?

Hey, I think I forgot to finish a sentence, back there.  I gave my mother's collection of letratone, to which I'd also contributed, to my husband.  Kind-of not-really as an engagement present.  It's an heirloom.  Y'know.

Since this endlessly nested reverie has (at last!) reached the weed-fogged borders of Old Beardy's Ideaspace, I suppose it's appropriate to re-visit this cameo by Moore, whom I dreamt dropped into my first "apartment".  (really just a single room, converted motor hotel space that flooded annually; an apartment I inherited from the only other terminal nerd I knew in Auburn, a total loser named Shakin' Blake who creeped on teen girls & eventually got kicked out for not being able to pay rent on that shithole because he'd lost his job at KFC, so him & his Billy Idol cds and his reeking mildewed collection of longboxes--  Shakin' Blake, James, in case you're still reading, is who I blame for my knowledge of 90s GL  --got chucked into the street, so I inherited: a fridge that did a cool imitation of a block of ice; an air conditioner which drooled, loudly; a disgusting sink; and an oven that never worked)  First "apartment" i ever paid rent on, the first lease to ever bear my name.  Bulldozed immediately after I moved out, December 31st of 1999.

That was the first studio I made comix in, and that's where Josiah made his first comix.  You can see it in the first panel:

Not terribly well-drawn, but the compositions work.  It's early in the Greetings from Crooked Corner run of autobio comix that I shan't bore you further with, as they are crap.  But yeah.  Eddie fuckin' Cambell figured heavily in my appreciation of the form, as much as this beardy ol' fucker with his lugubrious Northampton drawl.  I first experienced their work together in that apartment.  It's in some annex of the memory palace, maybe a hallway over from the Big Wreck that rattled my chronology.  Pretty sure I must have been listening to Moore's spoken word performances around the time I had this dream.  The Birth Caul is my favourite thing either Campbell or Moore have done, collaboratively, after From Hell.  It's a magnificent bit of work, especially as a Single Issue of Comix, which is most definitely not what it began as.

Eddie MADE that thing, two-handedly wrestling Moore's marijuana free-associative flight into such robost, sculptural shape.  It's a massive bit of comix-as-art and it's philosophically chewy in a way I find only Eddie Campbell really delivers, for me, at the end of the day.  He gets how people think, and talk, and how it all sort-of ties together.  "Memory is a big ol' plate of soup," as Campbell once endearingly put it.

I'm starting to get what he means.

So it was a pretty wild thing when my husband--  hey, did you remember where originally I left off?  half of fuckin' Anna Karenina ago?  blitherin' in my infuriatingly dissociated way about showing Siegfried some of Campbell's Alec comix?  --my husband attended CAKE, two months ago (the altcomix expo here in Chi, apologies for all the stumbly parantheticals, it's just my style, which is why I don't make autobio comix, it's the sorta thing only works in standup or blogging) because he's scouting for next year & our table there.  Did I mention we're doing that?  We're doing that.  And who does he stumble into?

Siegfried comes home & asks, "Eddie Campbell makes comics."  And I'm like "That's not a question."

Sig says, "Yeah.  He was just walking around, chilling."  And I'm like "Apropos of being fucking cool."

Anyway.  Eddie.  Man.  Don't get me started.

We could have a conversation.

jobs (a post-it nope)

Woke to a dream of dicking off at work.

There I am, washing bloody dishes.  Everyone stands at the back window, gawping at the sunset.  I stop drying silver and go to work the switches, which stick, shy of full contact; the descending dim falls away and I'm given to wander.  So I wander out of the kitchen, into main dining, which-- I'm dreaming about the covid lockdown, here, and three jobs back --is all open air, surrounding the decaying house.  The wheelchair ramps are half-rotted, soft wood buckling beneath my feet.

I sneak up to Dominic Monaghan, who's apparently one of our new servers.  Charlie, from fuckin' Lost.  This is a really low-rent dream.  Playfully I snap my towel at him--  this was something I noticed our new cook doing, this past week, reviving memories of when I was a grabasser at any-and-every gig  --and it cheeses him off.  He starts talking trash about my double standards.  I pretend to be mollified, but my mockery is muted by pain in my right hand.  It occurs to me Charlie here has bandaids on his fingers in the same places I'm experiencing pain.  I ask him what happened.

"I turned a bloody doorknob, if you must know, and the rusty bastard didn't spin.  Laid me open."

My boss, Emily-- who I've developed something of an internal distaste for on account of her promising a raise at six months, then backsliding & gifting me an 8oz bottle of olive oil instead  --appears as if by magic, perhaps irritable to find me here, seated at a staff table next to a waiter who's ignoring the massive reservations milling about all 'round the grounds.  He promises to get back to work.  I do not, instead preferring to extract the-- what are these, cactus? --needles bloodlessly from my fingers.

The thin bladelike tines slide out of my flesh as cleanly as slivers of glass.  Charlie gives me a curious, perhaps sympathetic look, and fucks off.  As do I.

Woke and read some more 'The Power Fantasy'.  Got to the backmatter & realized Gillen's done a Watchmen riff.  I look that up.  Gab at an internet friend--  as distinct from the meatspace variety, yes  --and then...  And then?

Welp, today, unlike yesterday, I am scheduled off.  Yesterday I called in sick.  Because fuck that place.  Spent the day with my husband, because that's actually important.  We don't have days off together now.  Stumbled across some new-to-me comix in a l'il free library.  Read another chapter of 'Vineland', a chapter wholly about Frenesi, the ex-activist, ex-mom, turned gov't informant, and thought about my mother & her association with the Weather Underground.  Talked to Sigfried about that stuff some.  We went to a park, he had a swim, we documented some butterflies together.  All in all a lovely unscheduled holiday.

What I'm not mentioning:  the physical fatigue from the weekend at work.  The chronic aches & pains, mostly localized along the right side of my body:  my right foot, which is still healing from me bloody working on it while injured; my right knee, which nowadays bitches when I take the stairs too aggro, and I try not to think about the inch-wide white scar outboard it where I literally caught a nail in the joint as a toddler; my right shoulder, which I landed on during the wreck that cracked my skull; my right hand, which was split & skinned & sewn together again b/c bike accident; my right elbow, which was the preferred point of articulation to land on, back when skateboarding seemed cool; and the right side of my jaw, which I've come to unconsciously clench until my chipped & fractured molars make sounds of distress not unlike tree trunks scraping together in a hellwind.

Hey, I'm not insured.  My job offers insurance.  Which is great if I feel like deducting money I'm not making to pay for injuries which, historically, they haven't paid for.  They didn't think to deal with Northwestern back when I got some stitches in the-- you guessed it  --right side of my scalp, from mis-gauging my distance from the dumpster & laying my head open, on a trash run.  Now Northwestern, who's never sent an actual physical bill to my actual physical residence, has turned me over to a collections agency.  I've mentioned this to my bosses, a couple of times, and they've done sweet f.a.

So maybe I don't trust these guys to give me insurance.  So maybe calling in sick doesn't wrinkle my conscience.  Much.

Still, when I start dreaming about a gig, it's time to fuckin' quit.

Anyway, back to my Real Job.  Drawing.  Let's see if I can accomplish some shit today, and post it.

memory (a post-it nope)

you know & i know no-one is reading, so:  this is a safe space, right?

facts:  my memory blips aren't getting better.  i've drawn things i don't remember, and i've written things that don't cling to the gumline of my stupid-ass mind.  that bothers me-- but since you don't exist, who's to know or care.  a couple days ago, i had just arrived at work, and i couldn't remember whether i'd just locked up my bike less than five minutes previous.  a month and change ago, i walked home after having forgotten i rode my bike to the store & left it locked there

what's the point of writing this stuff down, and re-reading, if the mechanisms of self-reinforcement don't function as previously understood?  why am i making lines on paper if this stuff isn't going to stick?

you can say history, or the value of art, or whatever, but i know--  and even not knowing you, i know you know i know this shit  --that history is a faulty-ass machine for generating vast omissions, and art can't have any sustained value in a system that doesn't see any purpose in remembering the preterite

that's cynical & self-pitying, fer shure.  which ain't the game for me, right now.  i'm just irritable because my hands hurt & i don't have any real confidence in my ability to make art, and capitalism is just a capitalized -Ism that's never meant anything real to me.  art is what i know how to do.  art is what i chose.  the memory thing is depressing, but no more depressing than any of the Real Shit i'm not going to type here, because i don't WANT to remember some stuff

hey.  not giving up.  just admitting it's hard to give a fuck, this morning

"you gave us some raggedy shit"

this india ink is a quarter century old

 

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - August 2o25

 Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade, MONTH TRES. ]

CyberRAD #1-7 + vol. 2 #1 + vol. 3 #1-2 (1992-1993) "creation", story & layouts by Neal Adams, w/ dialogue by Peter Stone & Neal Adams; pencils & inks by Terry Shoemaker (issues 1-3) & Richard Bennett (every single issue); colours by Cory Adams; lettering by John Costanza (issues 1-5) & Ken Bruzenak (everything else)

This feels like it was basically invented to be a showcase for Richard Bennett's art.  Like, it has the stink of Neal trying to keep up with the yoots of today-- 'Jason Kriter: Toyboy' only lasted thru the year of 1986, and that was basically it for Continuity's sole "kid's book"  --so what CyberRAD provides is, instead of a richie rich kid trying to foil his millionaire dad's gun-running schemes, you have a punk rocker trying to figure out why he woke up as a T-1000, on the run from his shadowy gov't keepers & their chrome-plated enforcers, eventually assassinating himself in the middle of a live show, in front of his friends & family.

The first eight issues comprise Continuity Comics' second graphic novel, after Bucky O'Hare.  I've never seen a copy of the trade paperback, but the internet insists one exists, so sure.  I'm glad continuity collected SOMETHING besides Bucky.  The third graphic novel was, allegedly, to be a Bernie Wrightson graphic novel, an adaptation of the classic film 'Freak Show', but Continuity advertised 'Freak Show' for a solid decade and never published page one.  I think maybe Continuity had bought the rights from Heavy Metal / Tundra and were just sitting on it, waiting.

Anyway.

I've bitched elsewhere about how CyberRAD was shanghaied from his own series by Shaman, who essentially conscripts our hero in the middle of his own torture & dissection at the hands of his mad scientist father, to go save Megalith's shapely olympian buttocks from 'Deathwatch 2,000'.  It's totally unnecessary & hallucinatory, the way Otto Preminger's Skidoo is hallucinatory.  

By which I mean it's someone who never did drugs (or much armchair research) depicting altered states of consciousness.  Neal had a pathological fixation on allegorical depictions of psychological states-- he liked a dream sequence, he liked a melting Dali clock, he liked a goofy-ass 'toon where Tom & Jerry huff ether & chase one another in shortbus motion.  If Neal Adams hit a dead end on a story, his solution was always an Imaginary Sequence-- but Neal never read 'The Doors of Perception' any more than he listened to The Doors, so the trip cinema he strove to achieve, as often as not, was little more than pastiche-- and never, ever inspired pastiche.  It would just be rip-off.  'Crazyman', in its final series arc, was a "tribute"-- read: shameless cannibalization of  --the infamous finale of 'The Prisoner'.

Anyway!

CyberRAD ended.  Not where it should have ended, not where it could have ended, not where it was "meant" to end.  But it defnitely ended what was one of a handful of short runs of comix that published on a semi-regular schedule.  All seven issues of Jason Kriter: Toyboy were published the same year, 1986, and almost every issue of CyberRAD dropped over the course of 1992-1993.  No mean feat, from the House of Continuing...

And Richard Bennett, age 23, was probably the main engine behind that accomplishment.  There's a lot to recommend about this book, honestly.  The cover & print gimmicks were strong with CyberRAD, but unlike most every other Continuity book, the gimmicks added value to the content.  The gimmicks enhanced the storytelling.  The fold-outs, and glow-in-the-dark covers, and "secret" imagery were all there to add extra visual FX to a dumb, motherfuckin' loud movie.

It's pretty obvious Neal saw Terminator 2 & said "Must cash in."  Unlike other shameless gropes to qualify for pop-cultural cachet--  Samuree, say, or KnightHawk --CyberRAD manages to be louder & bigger than its inspiration.  I mean, let's be honest: The Terminator's been played out ever since the original, and even that movie couldn't be less interested in themes of what it means to be human or robot.  James Cameron did not read R.U.R., and (probably) neither did Neal Adams...  But like our titular Cyber Radical, Adams & Stone & Shoemaker & Bennett stumbled headlong through a construction site under heavy fire from critics and managed to make it all the way to the big blowout final scene.  I'd say they succeeded, because these comics were stocked in every mall bookstore I set foot in over the course of 1992-1993.

So the font choices for the first five issues kinda suck.  So the main character's mullet defies physics. So the fashions are dated as a George Michael video.  Still, not for nothin':  CyberRAd remains easy to find on ebay.  You could do worse than buy in.

[ next up: 1986!!! ]

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - July 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome BACK to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade!

That's right:  MONTH TWO.  Buckle the fuck in. ]

Armor & The Silver Streak #1-8 (1984-1990) - "written" & "illustrated" by Neal Adams; dialogue by the son-in-law, Peter Stone; inks & professional polish by Rudy Nebres; guest-starring Bart Sears, Trevor Von Eeden, Brian Apthorp, and even Kelley Jones

This one is legendary.  It was supposed to be four issues.  "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak", that is.  But, as it hit the stands, something kept... happening.  We'll address that in a moment.  Maybe; I might need more than a couple.

What's longer than a moment?  An interval?  That sounds nebulous enough for Continuity.

We'll address "The Secret Origin" in an interval.

What *I* want to address, up top, is how fuckin' goofy this sad sack of space opera is.  The alien designs are straight-up 70s, post Star Wars, full-on Barlowe's Field Guide To Extraterrestrials design wank.  There's nothing you could call 80s about any of it, unless you're talking about the character of Armor himself, kitted out head-to-toe with martial arts weapons that're almost entirely japanese in origin.  Whatever Neal's original intentions were when he debuted his "The New Heroes" portfolio, by the time he's paying a printer's bill, Armor's own series has become a full-fledged Sci-Fi cashgrab.

Cynical?  You say that like you've never read a Neal Adams comic.

There's nothing in "The New Heroes" portfolio to suggest The Silver Streak & Armor are brothers.  Apart from their shared name.  They became brothers, by the time they featured in Revengers #2, which (one assumes) was in production alongside Armor & the Silver Streak #1.  But it's hard to say?  Because a hallmark of Continuity is a tendency to burden a single title--  such as 'The Revengers'  --with the necessity of launching one flotilla after another of supporting titles.

Example: from Ms. Mystic we got Shadowhands, which would be reverse-engineered into Samuree, and Urth 4, sensibly re-trademarked as Earth 4.  Well, maybe that's a terrible example.  Almost sounds like Neal didn't quite have his shit finessed.  Whatever.  It was Pacific Comics.  Do over!

From Continuity Studios for real:  with the launch of the Zero Patrol, we got Megalith and Shaman.  Five page, self-contained backups.  Of the two, only Megalith's could be considered a legit push, since I don't for one damned second believe Neal saw commercial potential in Shaman; he spent the entirety of Continuity Comics' span as a publishing entity scrambling to discover a single practical use for the horsehair-mohawk-that-walks-like-a-man.  Shaman's not that dissimilar to Dr. Strange in that he isn't a compelling character, he's a hairstyle with a handwave function for unwieldy plot.

Typical.  In attempting to make a point, I'm drifting away from my actual point.  Okay.  Here:

From The Revengers flows Megalith, Armor & the Silver Streak, as well as the goddamned Hybrids; from Hybrids you get Valeria the She-Bat and (am I the only one fist-pumping?) Knighthawk.

Continuity's deck of characters is like an STD that never stops suppurating.  That's the point.

It's rude--  downright unfair, really  --for me to assume that I have any insight into what Neal's master plan was.  I do simply because there's little evidence to the contrary.  Armor & Silver Streak are brothers, we are told via omniscient narrator caption, and their parents are either abducted or dead...  Yet abducted-or-dead was also the fate of Jacqueline, a.k.a. Scarlet, a.k.a. the Scarlet Streak, so named because her hair has one.  Jacqueline did not exist in 'The New Heroes' portfolio, and feels like a very post-post-hoc addition to the team dynamics of The Revengers.  A stylin', hard-rocking, blade-wielding chick to leaven the all-dick energy of a makeshift team of make-do heroes.

(No, I have not forgotten about the honorary Revenger, Samuree.  But it would be easy to.)

Jacqueline a.k.a. Scarlet might even-- and it pains me to admit this, because it's giving undue credit to Peter Stone --be an invention of someone other than Neal.  As in, "Neal, did you forget about the sister in issue #1?" and Neal being like, "Whose sister?"  And then Peter pushed a character sheet bearing Kevin Nowlan's signature across the desk.

Pure supposition.  Flim-flam.  I don't have the foggiest, and neither do you.  That's the magic of these books.  The reader looks at them and has to inquire why?  Why is there a banner atop every Continuity title strictly to recycle the logo of the character(s) featured in any given ish?  Why does Armor #1 have that little i.p. push at the very top for ARMOR & THE SILVER STREAK, directly atop Armor's chunk-as-fuck logo?  Why did The Silver Streak cease to receive that redundant li'l push on the very title that contains his Secret Origin, with issue #5?  Why was his name stripped from the covers, despite the fact that every issue of "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak" maintains a splash-page appearance of his dopey-ass, Ice Capades-looking logo?

The answer would seem to be popularity.  Nobody ever wanted The Silver Streak, nobody thought he'd make a keen toy, nobody cared about his confusing (& dubious) family relationship(s), nobody even cared to ask why he's a straight-haired Cali blonde while his brother's all brunette & curly.  All anyone knows is Neal insisted.  If you do Armor, the Silver Streak must ride along.

So we all rode bitch, on a Secret Origin of initially four parts that spiraled off into...  what, ten installments?

This could have been understandable, if Jacques Keaton (a.k.a. Silver Streak) had equal time in his own Secret Origin.  That's two whole characters who need explaining!  But Jacques was fated never to be a main character.  The main character is Jack Keaton (Armor).  If Jack loses a hand like Luke Skywalker, Jacques will be there to demonstrate how both his mitts detach.  If Jack loses an eye and has it replaced by a ruby thoughtfully donated by a space computer, Jacques will be there to gawk, awkwardly, and the words To Be Continued will be appended to the base of the page, and then we won't find out any more about The Secret Origin of Armor & That Lesser Character for at least three years, while Neal hustles together some fill-in issues, all the while making big loud promises to draw the epic conclusion.

Hey, let me be fair.  Maybe Neal did.  I haven't gotten to issues 11-13 yet.

You want me to talk about something else now, don't you?

Tough.

Armor #9-13 (1991-1992) written by blabbadyblurfenhurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr1r1r1NO CARRIER

[ ed. note:  we may be experiencing difficulties.  not technical ones.  technically not difficulties at all.  just, coping.  these comics are a lot to cope with!  holy nutsweat, batdog ] 

I SAID, written by Peter Stone, pencilled by Frank Springer & Brian Apthorp; inked by Rudy Nebres and STAN DRAKE, also, Ken Bruznenak, what're you doin' here?  i thought you were at DC...  coloured by John Floyd, Eva Grindberg, & David Marcus, you a baller

Let's get the compliments out of the way.  The covers stop sucking once Nowlan walks on.  The cover design is finally, rationally, refined & the fonts modernized, somewhat.  The books start to look GOOD, with an obvious debt to Giffen, McGuire & Hughes' JLA / with maybe a side helping of Love & Rockets.  Like I'm saying these are actual contenders for GOOD COVERS, something this series has seriously been lacking.  And I'm not even getting to sucking the dicks I want to suck because I have to complain about the covers, and the content, of issues #9-10.  The covers are terrible because Neal made these the covers:  the covers are terrible because there are gratuitous clowns.  Now mind you the clowns are all being violently dispatched by young Jack Keaton, Armor, a Ten among galactic gladiators, a teenager with an alien, artificial hand, and an alien internet uplinked crystal in his right eye socket:  these clowns don't have a chance.  In theory this cover is great, perhaps even one of the greatest covers Neal Adams has ever had a hand in: it's certainly dynamic as a dervish dance, and all the central figurework is done by My Man, Kevin Nowlan, so we're talking carnage.  Clowns cowering in fear for their lives.  Clowns strung up and left to discharge their bowels one last dark time.  It's not a pretty scene.  So in theory this cover should be great!

But then Neal follows it up with some weird hacked-out last minute shit where Armor is being clockwork oranged by Kracky The Klown, who is all up in the comic reader's grill with his greasepainted melon skull leering out, shouting--  Neal Adam's abominable hand-lettered yakking crammed unpleasantly into every square inch of negative space to either side of our central figures of Armor, who's literally having his eyeballs forcibly exposed, & Kracky, shouting  --WELCOME TO KRACKY'S KRACK HOUSE!  It's All It's Kracked Up To Be!

This has the reverse effect intended, of making me want to read it.  In fact it makes me hate the previous cover, for having ever allowed clowns into my life.  I am sad and alone and it was Neal Adams who made me this way.  I want to repent of my sins.  I can't live with my conscience like a dog pillow saturated with piss.  This comic is clown scabies, and it has retroactively infected the previous cover with clown scabies.  I bought these, god damn my soul.  I LET CLOWNS INVEIGLE MY LIBRARY'S PROSTATE

Ahem.

What I am saying there are a couple of things we regret, before the covers actually show up to throw down on the newsstands alongside Kevin McGuire & Adam Hughes, or Los Bros.

The comic goes for it, in the final stretch.  We just had to get past a story starring way the fuck too much Silver Streak, learning he has the superpower of eavesdropping through a fucking window, getting his ass kicked by clowns.  Fuckin' clowns clowned the fuck all over Silver Streak and Armor, then engaged in wacky heavy-handed messaging hijinx about the hyporcisy of the Reagan era's War On Drugs, all the while krackin' wise about how the people selling the drugs are also running the rehab clinics, mannn.  And I'm pretty sure Kracky gives a cop a tugjob, on teevee, in the final three pages of the book.  I mean these issues really haul back and kick my will to live square in the nuts.

But the last three are really good looking books.  Damned good art, great colouring, solid package.  It's like the comic it was always meant to be...  for the last three issues, before the series got eaten by Neal Adams' Event Crisis Overdose.

Yeah.  But first:

[ next up: MEGALITH'S GROIN! ]

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - June 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade! ]

Echo of FuturePast #1-9 (1982-84) - written & illustrated by Various + Neal Adams

Y'know what I've never noticed in a comix anthology before?  Excess language in the indicia to the effect that "Any similarities to real people and places in fiction AND SEMI-FICTION is purely co-incidental."

I have a wealth of questions.  Like:  Semi-fiction?  Is that like semi-erect?

Also:  Am I going to regret this?  Or only semi-regret it?

Yeah, this is a weird way to open up criticisms of an anthology comic.  Who reads an indicia?  

Us 80s babies, that's who.  In the 80s, almost every publisher who wasn't DC or Marvel would stuff some tiny print gag into the publisher's legalese-- if it was an indy or underground work, and you were the sort of nerd who reads ingredients lists on cereal boxes, there was a wealth of dopey jokes to be discovered.  Rip-Off Press, Strawberry Jam Comics, even Fantagraphics loved to make tiny snark in their tiny legal text.  

Now I'm not suggesting Neal Adams knew how to make jokes...  But it seemed like there were maybe two too many words in the indicia, so I gave it a scan.  Whereupon I hit the wholly needless qualifier, "AND SEMI-FICTION" and was like, doubleyou tee eff, Neal.  Like, dude had to pay a typesetter to lay out the indicia, every issue.  He could have shaved Nths of a penny off every ish if he'd just trimmed that sub-clause.  But he made his people put it in.  It's on every issue of Echoes-- and having verified that lunacy, I had to doublecheck Megalith™, Ms. Mystic™, Armor™ & Silver Streak™, etc.

Every book, every box of legal text, that meaningless, superfluous modifier:  "AND SEMI-FICTION".

Colour me semi-incredulous.  Surely a lawyer didn't tell Adams he would be in a hot cauldron of hot lawsuits if he didn't CYA each & every issue of Continuity Comics.  Surely that was Neal Adams' own insistence.  But why...?  I haven't the foggiest as to why.  Like did Neal think, "At some point my hollow earth obsession will be revealed, exposing Neal 'Man-Bat' Adams as a secret curator of The Truly Truthiest Truths, so let's dub this Serialized Graphic Entertainment for the Mature Readers crowd a piece of SEMI-FICTION!  After all, I'm going to make a wild pitch to school systems & parents & sketchy educators everywhere to provide kids with Continuity Comics™, with my boy Megalith™ perched astride a weight bench, hawking Continuity Comics™ as an aid to literacy!"  Possibly maybe.

Like the typesetting bill for the house ads in these books must have been some national debt shit, already.  Every character had a ™ hanging off their name like the metafictional equivalent of a skin-tag.  What's an extra two words in the indicia?

Hey, kids, comics!  This anthology is notable for, let's be charitable, two items.

First is Larry Hama & Michael Golden's 'Bucky O'Hare', the best funny-animal breakout of genre-blending violence in the 80s since Eastman & Laird.  Some of the first few pages of art are maybe too busy, but past that first instalment Michael Golden is on goddamned fire.  There's not one single part of one single page that feels phoned-in.  This is committed comix.  I'm not precisely sure how this piece of quality wound up in Continuity's shop, but I'm guessing Hama & Adams had a mutually beneficial agreement.  So, a Get all around.  Bucky O'Hare™ had more longevity in licensing terms than Captain Power™, that's for goddamned certain...

Did I get a single Bucky O'Hare toy for christmas?  Hells naw.  Did I ever see the cartoon?  Never.  Did I receive every poorly-articulated Captain Power figure, and accessory, and VHS cassette?  Confoundingly, yes.  My parents were poor anti-war hippy-dippy refugees from the 60s, stranded in Reagan's america, so they braved the malls and bought the latest military-entertainment fad in its entirety for their addled, barely-literate crotchspawn.

So the only time I saw Bucky O'Hare was in the spinny rack, if I could reach high enough to pluck Echo of Futurepast.  These comix were weirdly reactionary in a way that only makes sense if you knew Larry Hama was the kind of Marvel employee who'd bring an uzi to work in his suitcase.  Like, Bucky O'Hare isn't written for kids in the slightest.  It's all down to Michael Golden's lines & design, then as now.  That's the glory, that's the gold.  So it's good to finally get to read this stuff, forty-odd years late.  I mean, it's really good.  For a kid's comic not-for-kids.

But--  you may ask, though I'll never know, interactivity online being what it is  --what's the SECOND notable item in this anthology, of which I have already said several small mountains of nothing?

Why, it's Neal Adams.  Anybody who knows Continuity knows it's all the Neal Adams show.  Neal's the humble household name behind Man-Bat, and Ra's Ah Ghul, and Deadman, and Green Arrow's teenage sidekick Speedy's dramatic drug addiction, and Superman versus Muhammad Ali!  Neal's the ad hack/genius whose character design skills are renowned throughout the industry, and whose pyrotechnic reputation is only slightly dampened by his fragmentary & inscrutably leaden touch with dialogue!  If you don't know who Neal Adams is, you're just not paying attention to Neal Adams!!!

So:  the second notable item is...  some recycled Neal Adams.  Sometime in the late 70s / early 80s, Neal made a comic to go with a record.  It was a thing everybody did back then:  make a book to go with a record.  In this instance, it was a Frankenstein / Dracula / Wolfman cash-in.  Neal being Neal, he never threw anything aside, so when his Frankenstein / Dracula / Wolfman comic didn't make it to the masses--  I think the publisher, Power Records, either dropped the project, or it folded  --he opted to palette-swap some details in his Universal Monsters rip-off to prevent being sued.  Dracula ends up blonde with mutton chops & wears a bright orange suit with a skyblue cape.  Frankenstein's monster is balding and... Frankenstein's simp nephew inherited him?  And the wolfman, in a delicious twist, is a standard model hammer horror victim, a pneumatically buxom blonde chick who faints a lot.

None of this is played for laughs, exactly.  It's all played as straight as anything in a Neal Adams comic-- which is to say, as dialed up and tweaked out as any piece of exploitation cinema.

Bucky O'Hare & Neal Adams' Frankenstein are the twin pillars of Echo of Futurepast, appearing in half the issues of the anthology's too-brief run.  There are other draws:  Alex "godmode" Toth & Jordi Bernet doing 'Torpedo' in Full Colour (swoon); and some fashionably dystopian euro-comix like 'The Damned City'.  But these late-in-the-day side acts don't draw a crowd, presumably due to the anthology's other headliners.  Readers never wanted Arthur Suydam doing grossout sex comedy riffs with warty giants-- I mean, ugh! --or Jean Teulé's 'Virus', or Lindley Farley's 'Tippy-Toe Jones'.  Look 'em up for yourself.  Tell me I'm wrong.

Nine issues in two years, annnnd curtain.  Neal opts out of the anthology game in favour of Continuity going fulltime superhero drek.

Echo... is never quite as interesting an anthology as Marvel's Epic mag was, and it's never as entertainingly scattershot as Metal Hurlant-- even though Echoes is thirstier'n either one!  Ultimately Echo is unabashedly Neal, humblebragging his personal tastes & swingin' dick industry connections, straining and failing to compete with reputable, sexier anthologies.

It's a goddamned mess, and it ended too soon, and I'm still trying to figure it out.  Like childhood, rilly.

Cinco por Infinito! a.k.a. Neal Adams' Esteban Maroto's The Zero Patrol #1-5 (1968-70/1984-89) - created & written & illustrated by Esteban Maroto; remixed by Neal Adams; coloured by Polly Law, Sherri Wolfgang, Paul Mounts & Eva Grindberg

These are really great.  Neal doesn't fuck with the art much on the first couple issues.  In the main his contributions are in the re-editing / dialogue and the covers--  the covers are ALL great examples of Adams own skills as an action illustrator.  Overall he doesn't even manage to dumb the story down much, aside from the humour, which is probably best described as used car dealer wit.

Of course there's your usual groovy barbarian space princess stuff, Flash Gordon flavoured romps on worlds that look impatient for Barbarella.  That Adams picked this to translate is indicative of his tastes & personality on multiple levels.  It's a strikingly horny comic full of swinging chicks who don't believe in bras, and square-jawed men of action (with the token scruffy longhair), and it's very, very Op Art / Visual Appeal.  I'm sure the original strip is sexist as hell:  it was the 60s.  Being recycled sci-fi from the 60s meant the retro aesthetic only enhanced the psychedelic, chiaroscuro inkstyle, which owes no small debt to Alberto Breccia.  I mean it's Good Shit:  Neal knows it's good shit, and he can't do much to fuck it up, so he doesn't!  The colourists he selected are all damned fine; a particular standout who I've never heard of before is Polly Law, who does some sublime watercolour & airbrush work that ranks with the palette of Jordie Bellaire.

As I continue with this thing I'd sincerely like to learn more about the women working in the colouring dept of Continuity Comics.  During research I stumbled across an assertion from Trevor von Eeden (who did a little time on most of the major titles:  Megalith, Toyboy, Ms. Mystic, Urth 4) to the effect that Lynn Varley started her colouring career at Continuity, as one of their staff.  Being a colourist at Continuity in the earliest days meant the individual was a girlfriend of some poor schmuck stuck drawing Neal's capeshit.  That was the relationship between von Eeden & Varley, until Frank Miller skulked in, twirling his weasel mustache, to spirit Varley away to slave over cels of Ronin & The Dark Knight Returns.  The fink!  I guess Miller felt mighty white about it because later he offered Eeden a job drawing some stuff, but Eeden was like "I'm good."

Not a lick of the above says anything about the WORK these women were accomplishing, keeping Continuity coloured-- one of the principle reasons I'm pursuing this project is to study the hand colouring on these books, as Continuity was producing some of the best-looking books on the racks,  starting here & carrying on throughout Echo of Futurepast.  It's a damned shame there's so little written about the production end of these comix, beyond the catty mockery Continuity received at the hands of Brian Hibbs & The Comics Journal.  There's got to be a ton of good backstage chatter about who inked what when, and under what deadline conditions...!

Anyhoo:  Zero Patrol was a cool book, and I didn't expect it.  I think Neal was using it to prove colour printing tech for furture books, like Megalith & Shaman, both of which were being pimped with backup comix drawn by crazyman Adams hisself.  Groovy all around.

Revengers™ featuring Megalith,™ Armor™ & the Silver Streak™ #1-4 (1984-85) - written & illustrated by Neal Adams & probably two or three of his flying monkeys

It hits different, this book, this year.

Not because there's any substantive difference between now & the last time I browsed--  last year.

As my husband will cheerily confirm, it's still an ugly book.  The art is ugly.  The lettering is kludge incarnate.  And the syntax of the dialogue could splode the tread on a halftrack like a landmine, if you leaned a smidge too hard.  These are comix that are hard to love.

For instance:  issue one of 'Revengers™ featuring Megalith™' is, near as I can figure, 100% Megalith™ #1.  It's actually your meat & potatoes issue number one origin ish.  About the only things that don't get explained are:  (1) where Joe Majurac's stylin'-ass costume came from, between panels, and (2) why the Canadian military looks exactly like the United States military.  My answer to both?  Cutbacks.

Revengers™ featuring Megalith™ #2 gets re-titled Revengers™ featuring Megalith,™ Armor™ & the Silver Streak™', because Neal is a pressure cooker of marketable ideas which must be fussily established and huffily hustled past-- unless you're talking about the secret origins of Armor™ and the Silver Streak™, in which case be prepared to spend 7 grimly distracted issues learning about the ins-and-outs (mostly outs) of gladitorial space slavery, educational betterment torture & superheroic bodily mutilation body modification.  That little publishing epic-- which never saw completion, by the byeeeee --precedes both Megalith™ & the Revengers™ doing their saucy little strut down the catwalk of Hot Titles.

But am I reading this shit strictly chronologically?  Fuck to the naw, I like it raw.  Of all Continuity's dumbass books, the only one I actually dug was Megalith.  It's a good name, both for the character & the comic.  Nothing to improve upon.  I like the Megalith name so much, I'm going to cold stop the ™ schtick, because it's a cheap, pointless shot to take.  Like, Megalith is simply Flex Mentallo, minus Grant Morrison's metatextual wit.  He's so strong he bends reality & physics, and he does it for his mom & dad, whose first names I'm not sure we ever learned before their sorrowful but essential disappearance from continuity.

That is to say, Continuity Comics continuity.

Let me explain some Continuity Comics continuity:

Technically Megalith's parents aren't in issue #2.  A space alien pretends to be his mom, only to be revealed & swiftly vanquished by the arrival of Jack & Jacques, those unlucky Canadian-born alien abductees turned space gladiators, who somehow returned to earth between issue #7 of Armor™ & issue #2 of Revengers™-not-Megalith's-official-solo-title.  Which only sounds confusing, if you're paying attention to publication dates, since Armor #7 was published in 1990, and Revengers #2 was 1985.  And really, what could be confusing about that?  Especially with issue #3 opening in media res with some toyetic villainy that takes a third of the ish to establish, before cutting back to the scene of the cliffhanger that concluded last ish-- a cut which, helpfully, reminds the reader that the carnage Megalith & his fresh besties are standing in was the remains of an alien invasion from... the previous year?

Why it's important to know that Joe Majurac's parents' farm was destroyed by an alien invasion is never quite made clear, since young Megalith left the farm at 13, and didn't return until he was 17, by which time our glorious Growing Boy looks an extremely non-GMO hormone-fed thirty-two.

All this hand-waving mystery is even further undercut by the fact that, for all the shapeshifting, mind-controlling aliens flitting the fuck around the Canadian border, extraterrestrials aren't actually big players in the Continuity realm.  Nuclear-powered wizards, vile capitalist stooges and prehistoric monsters from the hollow core of the expanding earth:  that's where all the actual accursed dick energy in Continuity's continuity stems from.  I'm sure it's all perfectly comprehensible if one reads the 'Deathwatch 2,000™' and 'The Rise of Magic™' crossovers chronologically.  Right, Neal Adams' impoverished ghost?

"...."

Don't answer too fast, you ectoplasmic crank.

Annnnnnyway, yeah.  Megalith has a bitching costume, and a positive attitude, and barely any tragic backstory.  He can catch bullets barehanded and HURL THEM BACK WITH PENETRATING FORCE, he can flex so hard his muscles can stop projectiles from completely rupturing organs (but they'll still break skin), he's so strong he can deadlift himself free of gravity, and he really loves his poor farmer parents who gave him great investment advice while he was being prison-trained by sneaky krauts & commies to compete in an olympics.  He has a secret mountain base, he wears white pants, and they never get dirty!  He's basically the best, and I'm really hoping one day he'll figure out where his parents went or at least why that busty zip-a-tone whore Ms. Mystic™ gaslit him into thinking they were dead in issue 0 of 'Megalith-just-Megalith' vol. 2 (a.k.a. 'Deathwatch 2,000™' chapter 1).

Like I say.  Megalith hits different.  Especially when you've found enough issues to read a proper chunk, which wasn't a thing that happened where I grew up.  These books published on such an inconsistent schedule that you couldn't FIND four sequential issues, let alone piece out that there's no story.  Shit just happens in these books.  If you're a fan of cause-and-effect, then reading Continuity is like falling down a manhole only to wake up in the mushroom kingdom with a turtle twerking on your face.

Hey.  Kid.  Comics!

Samuree: Year One #1-9 (1987-91) - written by Neal Adams, Elliot Maggin, and Peter Stone (mostly Peter Stone); illustrated by (deep breath!) Neal Adams, Mark Beachum, Rodney Ramos, Mark Texeria, Dave Hoover, and Steve Geiger (who you must remember as the talent who brought the classic Marvel graphic novella Sectaurs® to four-coloured life)

I want to know why Tom Savini is featured so prominently in these.

The Revengers™ crossover is whatever.  I guess Samuree is an honorary Revenger™?  I mean, The Revengers™ needed a chick to round things out, and it wasn't like Jacqueline had her own book.  She didn't even have a superhero name, much less a ™ to attach to one.  She barely had a costume!  She had some sorta, uh, space armor, and some punky disco clothes, whenever she wasn't just lounging around the house with her step-brothers in violet lingerie.  It looked like more of a pain to draw than Armor's armor-- Jacqueline's space armor, not her violet onesie.  Shee had these Krull-style swastika-shaped blades, as well, which can't have been even remotely weird for any Crusty Bunker working on these books...

Point is, move over Jack & Jacques' sister: Samuree is the onesie fans remember!  She had a good old fashioned all-american katana, and a sai, and a headband, and thigh-high leather boots with stilleto heels, and no room for underwear.  Like she is vacu-sealed into those jazzercise togs, you don't even know.

So.  There's Tom Savini in four issues of this, mostly one-panel cameos, heavily photoreferenced-- except for the one panel that's clearly a touched-up xerox  --and Neal, as we've already established, is really anal about legal text.  Like there's a whole "resemblance to persons fictional & semi-fictional" thing in the indicia, remember?  Since Tom Savini is a wholly non-fictional entity, I have to assume Neal, at some sci-fantasy convention just dripping with nioctine, made contact with the man.

Which elicits a vivid skit in my mind of Savini reeling back from a frothy Neal, jabbering a mile-a-minute in his syntactically-challenged runon way:  "Heyja evah read 'Superman versus Muhammad Ali'?  Nobody was doing photorealism in comix before me!  I could make you a household name.  Y'like ninjitsu?  Those turtle boys are making a killing!  Only problem is, Eastman & Laird, there's no SEX in that book!  Now lookit," [shoving a hardcover, spiral-bound, black leather portfolio into Savini's hands, the Continuity Comics logo glinting silver & gunmetal blue; Neal promptly yanks the portfolio out of Savini's hands before he can look inside] "Lookit, a lady ninja!  Nobody's ever done that!  Right?  Samuree:  Mistress of the Martial Arts, trademark, what a humdinger, hanh?  Truly!  A title that zips!  You're in movies, right?  Sure!  Kids love zombies.  Who doesn't love movies?  I'm alllll about the kids.  Just between you me and the open bar, Samuree has cameltoe like you only see in magazines held with one hand!  Tom, earnestly, I think you'd be great in this book, sincerely:  Samuree, co-starring Tom Savini, god of grossout!  All you've gotta do's sign this release says you're semi-fictional and we could print tomorrow..."

What, the story?  I think Tom Savini is at this dinner, and then zombies in gimp suits show up and ruin the evening, and then the Revengers bop in right as Samuree is doing some ninja splits, subduing armed guards with her vagina, how all-american superheroic masters of the martial arts do.  Then Samuree has a flashback to being a blonde orphan on Epstein's an island, and I guess some PTSD really flips her shit out because then she fights the Revengers?

Hold on, I got to hit this blunt.  FFFFFFFFPPPPPPpppppp shiiiiiiiiiiit yes.  Comix, bruh.

Anyway.  Tom Savini is in these.  I wonder if Adams cut him a cheque.

The Rise of Magic™: Shaman™ #O (1993) - written by Neal Adams (with a 5 page intro) & illustrated by artgod Alex Niño

It's 16 pages, I hear.  A promotional only piece.

The deadass-end of Continuity Comics, this book was.  Shaman was introduced in Neal's legendary Continuity Portfolio®.  [ed. note:  Last observed in Tom Savini's corn syrup & spirit gum spackled hands, above, in 1978.]  Shaman™ made his official entry into print with Zero Patrol #3, in 1984.  He'd show up anytime Neal wanted a Doctor Strange analogue to do some wiggy, gimmicky, fourth-wall-breaking shit on the page.  There was absolutely nada demand for him, except from his creator.

Now, it seems, there is.  Or at least Alex Niño's fully-painted art.  I've tried to order this book twice already, and both sellers flaked.  One couldn't find it in their stock-- at which point I'm like cool listing, bro.  The second seller was some n00b with a storefront of wack trading cards & a meagre handful of comix they bought back when they thought they were "into" comic books; that scenester has apparently forgotten they even HAVE an ebay booth, so they haven't gotten back to me about cancelling my order, three days later.

Third time's the charm!  Maybe!  I've ordered it again, alongside the non-Revengers Megalith™ #1 by Mark Texeria, and a couple issues for filling in holes in my run of Armor™ & the Silver Streak™ (& their oft-forgotten foster sister, Scarlet™).  So who knows, maybe I'll re-write this "review" and fill in some vital details regarding Shaman™'s role in fighting off (em kcuf) Cigam K'Calb™, dog ot reaws i, in The Rise of Magic™--

But fuck me backwards, I still don't understand Shaman™'s role in CyberRad™'s entry to The Deathwatch 2,000™ because of how Shaman talks about it:  "Strewth, the Deathwatch 2,000 is launched upon us, like flaming gobbets of semen fired from the ululating urethra of Dagon.  Today we feast upon meteor bukkake, my brothers!"

Seriously, that's how he talks.  I'm not making fun.  I don't have to read this book to know that.  Zero Patrol #3, his first words are BY THE BALLS OF DAGON.  When he opens CyberRad vol. 2 #2, guess what he's saying?  BY THE BALLS OF DAGON.  Neal has a hard-on for the balls of Dagon, he's not letting an appearance of Shaman go past without his probably-actually-trademarked catchphrase.

CyberRad™ wasn't exactly the title to introduce a magickal-mystical badass of Shaman™'s stature, and that's actually where the Big Push to promote this z-tier apocalyptiwizard with his biker 'stache began-- but hell if I understand the first thing about either of these sprawling line-wide "crossovers".  Because our three-body-problematized Shaman is simultaneously giving astral mouth-to-mouth to Ms. Mystic--  who seems to need a hell of a lot of rescuing in her own book, if you'll pardon the editorial aside  --at the same time as he's literally tearing CyberRad loose from his own storyline, where everybody's favourite 80s teenage cyborg is in the middle of being dissected in a lab...!! 

All I actually know is those two crossovers ATE THE ENTIRE PUBLISHING LINE, and the print runs were so stupidly vast that either Deathwatch 2,000™ or The Rise of Magic™ are usually the very first thing one finds in back issue cheapo bins.  But you never find ALL of them in quarter boxes.  Leaving the weird collector with what feels like the Schrodinger's catbox of comix: this vast litter of not-dead, not-alive, half-collapsed waveforms of i.p.s, flailing as their entire printrun ends in bankruptcy.  It's a Pompeii in print form, and I'm looking at it.

At some point in this dumb fuckin' project I will have enough of either Deathwatch, 2,000 or The Rise of Magic, or both, to be able to sit down & take notes--  a businessman who cosplays as a Dragon™ from the expanding hollow earth® tries to dick Megalith™ down, but the Revengers break it up, then some demon crap happens, like who gives a shit what the reasons are, this is a universe where nuclear power is the exact same thing as witchcraft, i am NOT kidding

...But! For now the crossovers loom at the shallowest topmost ridge of this archeological dig, whereas I've dug straight down [to 1982, Pacific Comics ((requiescat in pace)) & the dodgy origins of Ms. Mystic™] and am now working a broad spiral back up, like some sort of mole with a lesion on its temporal lobe in Minecraft--  a game I have never played, only studied, over my sexy husband's shoulder, much as I have never read Shaman #0, having only discovered it on The eBays, on The Interwebz.

Which overall says a fuck of a lot more about Neal Adams' marketing prowess than I could ever possibly document with my feeble bloggery-pokery.

Have I mentioned Peter Stone, the "writer", credited throughout these books as a sort of pigeonshit-streaked bulletproof windshield for Neal Adams' ego, has been recently promoting the Continuity Character stable?  Like he was doing a lot of hype & press for Neal, in memorium, supposedly, but from an armchair perspective it sure sounded like promotion for his substack.

My vapourwave sense is tingling.  Is Shaman, somewhere, yet alive?

BY THE BALLS OF DAGON, MORE BUKKAKE!!!

[ next up, Jason Kriter: Toyboy™, guest-starring Trevor von Eeden, & the ever-popular CyberRad™, introducing the hyperpenciled stylings of one Richard Bennett, badass latecomer to the Image Comics stable & later, Wildstorm Studios.  But first I have to ignore the dosages on this bottle of sleeping pills... ]

dream - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.