"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - May 2o26

Last month managed to go a full month w/ my April stack titled 'March'.  Bloody brain damage.

King Tiger - Comics' Greatest World: wk. 3 (1994) - written by Mike Richardson & Randy Stradley, and illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Here we go:  action comix, wuxia style, by P.C.  A thing I had forgotten exists!  Brief, but a lovely little fight comic.  I coulda gone for a full-length run of this.  Didn't know there was a two-issue follow-up in '96...   At any rate.  If there's a single drawback in this ish, it's how Chadwick never clearly renders the tats on K.T.'s wrists.  Not that it matters.  Just curious.  The binding magic circle King Tiger draws in this ish is fab.  Grant Morrison browsed these, I feel like.  What my parents' generation useta call eyeball kicks...  A wild li'l 16-pager.

The World Below (1998) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Never read, this is yet another entry in the scintillating saga of ebay orders which turfed out because the seller misplaced the item.  Seems to be happening with Chadwick, lately.  Still haven't gotten my DHP #18.  At any rate teething to read these.  This is a placeholder.

The Autumn Kingdom, vol. 1 (2o25) - written by Cullen Bunn & illustrated by Christopher Mitten

Freshly arrived at the shelves of the Edgewater branch of Chi's library system.  Random selection on the strength of the title / cover design.  Should have browsed it first.  Not enchanted by the narrative choices:  fantasy author father's kids discover the occult "truth" about themselves & how they relate to their father's fiction.  Namely, they relate to it with big silly swords and friction-free battles with Mignolaesque monsters.  (Apparently Christopher Mitten was a BPRD artist?)  I didn't properly read so I sha'n't be cruel.  This book was not for me.  Returned.

Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (2o25) - written & illustrated by Mike Mignola (& coloured by Dave Stewart!)

Not done here, but completed the titular tale.  'Bowling With Corpses' is the first Mignola comic I've enjoyed w/out reservation since 'The Screw-On Head'.  Absolute joy.  Thanks for un-retiring, Mike!

I suppose it bears saying, but I tapped out of Hellboy & BPRD when the big art changes began.  I didn't want to read anybody else doing the main Hellboy tales.  Obviously I've gone back since & done the Corben stuff--  a major oversight, on my part  --and I've read the first half of 'Hellboy In Hell'.  Hard to see such lovely art and admit I aged out of the character, but I suppose it was inevitable.  Hellboy began printing when I was in high school, for chrissakes.  BPRD became an ongoing when I first landed in Atlanta!  Some stories age like dandelion wine:  certain ongoing comix do not.

All of which to explain:  the commercial success of HB was what killed the comic, for me.  Mignola felt unable to provide interior art on a schedule commensurate with the franchise expansion, so he stepped away and gave the book to Fegrado for a bit.  Which was bad enough, as the existence of the book, its very foundations, were in Mignola's ability to enjoy the medium.  He became super OCD about his own polish, after the movie-linked sales surges.  And, to be honest?  I didn't want to see Fegrado aping Mignola--  I need Fegrado to be Fegrado.  As for BPRD, the title ran off Guy Davis--  speaking of artists I've been following since high school.  A franchise can't frustrate its primary visual creators and stay gold, in my experience.  So I dipped on everything.

But selah to all that.  Bowling With Corpses is a fresh start, for me & Mignola's thing, that magic he's been pulling off since the Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser adaptations with Chaykin.  For me, that's when Mignola's aesthetic clicked.  Man's had me hooked ever since.  This new thing is the purest distillation of the creative ecstasy Mike expresses via his deeply atmospheric pacing.  Nobody draws skulls, clocks and mounds of dusty manuscripts like ya boy!

Buff Soul (2o22) - written & illustrated by Moa Romanova

A library pick purely based on aesthetics.  Decadent!!!  The story is a charmer.  A lovely portrait of friendship & party-lifers, and recognizing priorities.  I'll check out more Moa, for sure.

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt - Watch (2o2o) - written by Kieron Gillen & illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard

At some point it became a project to read as many Watchriffs as I could get my hands on.  This riff had eluded me, until now.  I like that this is a Big Gay Comic about capeshit.  It amuses me that the artist is doing an Eddie Campbell impression.  It's in the mail & on the way.  It should be a kick.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy, David Hine, & Shaky Kane (uncredited)

Refreshing my reading.  This time it's the business.  Finally, at last, I'm familiar enough with the story to be impressed with the plotting & pacing.  Unlike other John Smith jams, this one is structurally a stone cabin:  every piece has its place, and all together they form a structure that refuses to tumble.  If there's a drawback it's needing to keep notes, because the cast is bloody massive.

Since the last time I read thru, those horsechoker editions of 'The Boys' came across my desk.  I'm finding it a little hard to not think about that stupid, stupid comic, and the stupid, stupid, stupid teevee version.  Because everyone talks about how Watchmen was grownup, serious, etcetera-- but what always stuck with me, from my earliest exposure, was how British and bloody-eyed the tale is.  There's some grotesque violence spilling off the page in that book-- but Watchmen, for all its cred as an adult tale of sex and violence, contains strikingly little of either eyeball kick.  If you wanted that (and every teenage boy did, even us gayboys) then you had to march on over to Marshall Law.

But Marshall Law is a revolting-looking book.  No disrespect to Kevin O'Neill, who's a titan, but ugh.  The bodies and the blood are both repellant.  So if it's eyeball kicks and gratuitous, perverse chuckles you wanted, well-- we all kind of had to wait for Ennis and The Boys to happen.  Didn't we?

Turns out we didn't.  Because there was 'The New Statesman'.  A book with nothing nice to say about superheroes, or american politics, that idiotic national pasttime which has somehow come to engulf all of culture, art, and sport.  A book which begins its action proper with a hate crime, and the hateful reaction engendered by it.  A book that does not like power fantasies because of the power imbalances baked in.  You have to be disenfranchised and marginalized and Know It to enjoy american politics and pretend the commentators believe their own chirpy commentary.

This is a book about lies of all sizes.  Theirs, and ours, and the world's.

Here we have a power fantasy comic by a gay writer, about being gay, angry & depressed by the status quo.  'The Boys' couldn't manage that, not least because Ennis can't stop laughing about how embarrassing queer sex must be for the queers.  This is not to say 'The New Statesmen' is humourless; merely that the laughs are grim'n'gritty laughs, for an audience who feels none-too-secretly bruised by the ceaseless politicization of their sexuality.  Here we have a book all the colours of bruising.

The first, foremost moment of fantasy in 'The New Statesmen' is of a queer american victim-- who will never admit he has been victimized --taking out a swath of white christian fundamentalists, in full view of the world.  It's the second fantasy, in truth, second string to the actual first fantasy, that of a closeted, queer brit who once did something publicly terrible he can't quite remember.  He wants to be Out, to Love, but he's too secretly crazy and filled with rage to have that happiness, and so he accepts his lot, as a bought-and-sold instrument of Empire.

If there's an allegory in there, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the writer's personal position on these matters.  Or his position in the culture, working with patient fury (as he once did) to gain entree into American comix, staffed directly behind Morrison & Millar, all of them with eyes further up the line, observing Ennis cutting in somewhere after Mills, all of them at the gate, jealous eyes on Gaiman catching up with Moore as Wagner helps sort the baggage claims at customs.

In this reading, if I find a fault with any of this, it's that there aren't enough women being permitted to make a point about all the bullshit and hypocrisy.  The sexism in this book is no less than the sexism of Watchmen--  sexism is a very apt Point, in both Watchmen & The New Statesmen  --but it's not one that's made particularly compellingly, with real heart.  The sexism is more reportorial than rage-based, more passing observation than rejoinder.  The women in these stories are Used, are Useful, but they are not the subject, and their gender is secondary to their sexual utility in the dramatic webs woven.

But who wants a perfect book?  It's in its imperfections that 'The New Statesmen' is superior to Watchmen, because it's not pretending to perfection; this fantasy about power is as imperfect as the world it chronicles, and it is with no great satisfaction that I observe that the world in these pages is thuddingly closer to our present than the alternate history provided by Moore & Gibbons.  John Smith was lobbing bricks, and their gravity landed in the zone of Truthiness we Americans, regretfully, inhabit.  A stark, grubby shithouse of a comic, this.

I need to read it again.

Rice Boy (2oo6-o8) - written & illustrated by Evan Dahm

On my husband's suggestion.  What a delightfully expressive style Dahm has.  The line I liked on Doug TenNapel--  whom, I was not aware until this morning, is an outspoken homophobe; I had wondered why TenNapel had all but vanished from the popular comix landscape  --has a better home here.  This is a book drawn & inked by hand, carefully & lovingly with brush.  You'll not find better cartooned dropshadows anywhere.  I'm still reading, right now, about a third of the way through, so I can't speak to the story beyond being charmed as hell by the whole thing.  It's a nice fantasy landscape Dahm has hewn out, and the colours are rich & vibrant & earthy.  Quite a lovely change from the grimness of 'New Statesmen'.  Looking forward to finishing this, on such a gorgeous and calm day off.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - April 2o26

Concrete, vols. 4-7 (1994-2004) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Den: Neverwhere, Muvovum, & Children of Fire (1978, 1983, & 1989, respectively) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

Why even have notes, if I'm not gonna make notes on these?

Den's a weird comic.  It first began life as a short film, which I've never seen, before today, but have felt indicated via the text.  Repeatedly.  Which is the first weird thing about Den:  it's nodding to its own origins, outside comix.  The second weird thing is it keeps asking:  what the fuck IS this comic, really?

It's only a weird query, inasmuch as there's No Answer.  The closest we can get is, "Den is Den."  Whether you're talking the series proper, or its own satirical post-script, 'Denz', the series is Corben's instincts, at work & play. 

And here's the weird-er, weird-est part--  Den's a queer text.  It's a queer text by a hetero:  a heterodox doc, if ya like...  And me gusta, certainly.  When the Corben library was announced, and I found out Jose Villarubia was in charge of the restoration, I was dubious.  Because Villarubia, lovely as his work can be, is not the original colourist.  I was suspicious.  But Villarubia's not just maintained the faith, he's improved upon the original printings by presenting the cleanest, least censorious version of the work I've seen.

Sure, the colours.  Everybody talks about Corben's colours.  But I'm here for the full-frontal dudity.  Den, the character, isn't attractive.  Most of Corben's faces & bodies aren't sexually appealing-- to me.  But in terms of actually presenting the body in motion, in action, under the influence of momentum & gravity?  Unless it's Muybridge, you're not liable to see this degree of accuracy on paper.  From tumescence to free-floating flaccidity, the constriction of cremaster muscles are observed, testicles descend & retreat, cocks roll lazily, and buttocks tense.

Hey, kids: comix.  

And most of that doesn't happen during sex scenes.  The sex scenes are relatively chaste, really.  The only actual penetration committed to paper, in the majority of instances, is with either blade or claw.  The biggest cock in the second volume, Muvovum, isn't Den's, it's his arch-enemy, Tarn.  As in his enemy morphs into a giant purple people-eating cock.  Spoilers!

If that scans as less-than-queer to you, then you're definitely not the audience for the third volume, 'Children of Fire', when Den basically disappears from the narrative and all the focus turns back onto The Red Queen, the power-mad & physically intimidating villainess of volume 1--  who had a HELL of a fight scene, in v2, where she breaks all the limbs of an old man, bites off one of his fingers, and kicks him out a window.  Volume 3, which dials the Den Saga back to the year dot, doesn't really go out of its way to cater to the original fans.  Den is a desiccated husk of an old man, and The Queen is re-cast as his caretaker & guardian, a spacefarer going by the name Kil.  'Children of Fire' tracks Kil's evolution into the Queen and suggests something deeply genderbent about everything we've seen heretofore.

None of this is explained elegantly.  This is Corben, after all, and nobody can convincingly argue to me that he's a Writer.  He's an ascended fanboy.  He's one of the o.g. fanboys of my parents' generation, point of fact.  His fan fixations aren't mine--  Corben read all of Robert E. Howard, attempted adaptations of almost every Poe or Lovecraft story you care to name, and he loved the John-Carter-of-Mars series.  Madly.  Corben was chasing his own fixations when he got hired on to colour the Warren reprints of The Spirit, and he rode that pack of fixations like baying hounds--  the same fixations which led him to film 'Neverwhere', over time, led him to be obsessed with the pop androgyny of the 80s, same as all were:  Annie Lennox's buzzcut + Kathy Acker's bodybuilding were as culturally ubiquitous as Patrick Nagel prints.

Which is where I'm at, presently, in my reading:  1989.  Year of the Twin Peaks pilot.  Scene of the crime, as 'twere, for my generation to figure out what the crimes against women exactly were.

And there's still two volumes to go.  Den has only begun to warp.  The Big Story will fold-- like origami produced by some blind seer --into itself, in suggestive shapes, inchoate.  Corben kept returning to Neverwhere and asking, "Well, what was that about?" only to produce another, stranger, more gnomic variant on the initial work.  Not because he was huffing Borges & reading french po-mo homos.  Because the entire time he was handcrafting this art, Corben was bluffing his way to market, making & selling these books through his vanity press imprint, Fantagor.

I cannot underline enough:  these are some strange-ass books.  Especially to emerge from '89.  Because 'Children of Fire' was when Corben was serializing Den as a newsstand comic.  Den!?!  A title most famous for being unafraid to depict the male form, re-formatted with a female (but never effeminate) protagonist who wears clothes, like some beachgoing normie!  Of course it's Corben, so the dimensions & proportions of the fantasy are, as ever, fantastical, and consequently threats of sexualized violence are never far away-- but the threats are never given a chance to land, because Kil, not yet the Queen, is definitely more violent & dangerous than Den had ever been.  

O, my trash friends & friends of trash, there are fight scenes.  These are fight scenes to buy a graphic novel by Richard Corben for.  Action like you like it!

Is Kil likeable?  Not as such.  Den's hardly likeable himself.  He's literally a Masculine Fantasy.  But this revised Queen is interesting, in all the ways Den is not.  She's in tune with, in ownership & in control of her body, her sexuality, & her identity-- in all the ways David Ellis Norman is not.  (Have I mentioned how often our acronymic, titular character is sexually assaulted?  Have I mentioned how many times he's been raped?  Nobody ever seems to.  Perhaps I should.  At least the end of v1, which ends with our novice, blundering hero being both raped- and rescued -by women; v2 gives Den close to the full hentai treatment, whereas the worst thing to happen to a female character--  Muuta, disney princess of v2  --is being swallowed whole by a massive parasitic cock.  (Pause for emphasis.  Throat-clearing sfx.)  I wonder why more peeps don't get into the weeds about this stuff...)  Corben, never the most subtle of creators, works harder than most Accredited, Acclaimed, Award-brandishing Writers of Comix to show us, not tell us, who the Queen is.  What's revealed is Kil: a survivor, a striver, an otherworldly--  chthonic, even  --figure of myth.  Corben doesn't tell us much of any of that with dialogue.  Yes, he typesets a lot of text.  His best characterization is, inevitably, illustrative.

A woman arising from the ocean, powerful and athletic, cradling a body so wizened it's virtually a cadaver.  

That's the cover:  that's the story.

You can quibble with my Big Queer Reading.  Because obviously there's a lot of eggy symbolism, and squicky talk about "genetics" from an implicitly matriarchal, eugenicist, spaceclone race, etc.  Which Kil defies, throughout-- matriarchy isn't her destiny.

Now, conquest, maybe...

Den doesn't exist in 'Children of Fire'.  In his stead there's Mal, a frighteningly skeletal figure who eventually cakes up enough--  courtesy of "radiation" and a Neverwhere diet  --to become Den's ringer, in this sci-fi ancestor to a fantasy t&a, beans'n'frank comic that's essentially inexplicable & scripted by the creator's id.  The plotting is on some Dave Sim shit, in terms of a career arc where a creator is tethered to an Ikonic Comic Character: retroactive justification heaped upon retroactive justification, all for making a Carter of Mars fan film in his youth...  Resulting in some very un-Sim self-examination, perhaps.

It's obvious to me that as time did its work on Corben, and Corben did work on himself--  along the way he became a bodybuilder, his own model for Den  --he discovered the Queen to be more compelling & capable than his naive boy-in-barbarian-drag, and so re-configured the Entire Work to focus on her, and her role in redefining Den.  The books all still have Den's name on them, but taken as a whole, it's not about him.  It's about Neverwhere, and why Neverwhere was never quite where he left it, before he returned.

Because, like his Queen, like Den, Corben always returned.  Always in different skin.

Marvel Super Special #33: Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - scripted / adapted by Bill Mantlo, illustrated by Mark Texeria & Armando Gil

Den: Dreams & Alarums (1992) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

Den: The Price of Memories (1994-97) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - March 2o26

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

These left an imprint.

The cover copy for volume 1 of this 7-volume library, repackaged & published in the early 2000s, sez "Classics and little-seen stories from the legendary series".  Which is a little funny, because by the time these books were published, the Dark Horse imprint Legend was exactly one decade in the rearview.

Yesterday I found out Mike Richardson has been pushed entirely out of Dark Horse, and the publisher has been eaten by another of the ever-circling bigger fish.  Some leviathan or other will munch them all, eventually.  To me, it won't matter much, because the big money can't buy my love.  And I quite loved--  still quite love  --Concrete.

Last month the annotations were sweetly silent for ya'll, so if you'll pardon the digression, I'ma go down a rabbithole into the world below: memory.

Concrete was one of a holy trinity, no, quartet...  Maybe quintet?  of comic books that I cared enough about to discover for myself.  I was already a little hooked on Cerebus, in the late 80s, early 90s--  I was a high schooler, what d'you want? --and I was definitely addicted to Eastman & Laird's Turtles--  even though it was something of a chore to find the Real Turtles, and not the TV Turtles, on account of living in Dogwater Alabama, where all the commercial world could be found if only you ventured a county or so over to the nearest Wal-Mart, where Spawn & Youngblood were being packaged up in heat-sealed plastic bundles; god help your degenerate bones if you wanted an actual comic book SHOPPE --and some dumb how I'd even wound up addicted to Bob Burden's The Flaming Carrot-- of all the damn books --but the easiest "indie" comic in the world to find and stumble into, at that precise moment in my narrative, was Concrete.

What would the fifth wheel have been?  The Tick, prob'ly.

(Sometimes I call my narrative My Troubles With Comics, in homage to R. Crumb.)

((My Troubles With Comics was a sub-serial of autobio comix within a webcomic I used to do, titled 'Welcome To Crooked Corner'.  It chronicled the first and only time I was suspended from school, for "trafficking pornography", which meant I'd loaned the H.P. Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal to a friend in art class and his mom found it and narc'd me out to the school.  The comic contained t&a, you see, to say nothing of Alberto Breccia and other adult horrors...  But none of this had happened yet.  And we are still figuring out how many b&w comic books I was hooked on in 199_, so selah.))

Concrete used to be one of the more popular, and marketable, black & white comics of my adolescence.  That sounds weird to say today, but back when advertising was more complex and difficult AND expensive to create, Concrete had risen to the top of a developing boom in publishing.  It was a black & white book created by one guy (give or take the letterer) and had survived the indie glut of the late 80s by dint of being pretty much the mascot of DH's premier anthology, Dark Horse Presents.  Which was reason #1 for Con's popularity, in a nutshell: its fungibility.

Concrete was a full-length comic, an ongoing series, but Concrete was also a VAST, seemingly bottomless well of short stories & whimsical riffs-- within Concrete's own series there was a sub-serial called 'A Sea of Heads' that showed up as much as the 'crete stuff  --and the character was iconic enough to be a toyetic mascot for its main publisher, acting as much as a pitchman for Dark Horse's stable of properties as for DHP.  And Concrete was everywhere.  You could find Paul Chadwick's bouncing baby at any major comics convention; Concrete was in Wizard, and The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter, and Comics Insider...

But why did I like it?  Pop prevalence notwithstanding.  It's all very well to be addicted to pop culture trash.  I grew up hooked on the Beatles, for chrissakes, listening to tales of record pyres; you can get hooked on a thing purely for its cultural cachet and not GET it, y'know.  Like, everyone was "into" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...  But how many people actually *read* the o.g. Turtles, and Grokked It?  Significantly less than you'd think.  Comix people read Thee Turtles, whereas TMNT were everywhere for the casuals.  The Turtles made a certain kind of pop sense because it emerged from a stew of influence whose top notes were martial arts and anthropomorphic funny animals.

Concrete, in contrast, was a book about...  a disembodied political speechwriter with an affinity for environmentalism.  A comic containing only one Fantastic element, an alien abduction, which never recurs.  Concrete was a book about figuring out how to be human, in a culture that didn't value humanity.  And it was--  to me, at least  --an art comic.  It was a comic you read for the art.

It was a comic I read for the art.  Concrete was an Art Comic.  The black and white was my life's blood.  There were a LOT of b&w books to be found, in my youth, veritable oceans of content left over from the boom & implosion of the marketplace in the wake of the Turtles finding a foothold.  But there weren't that many books that looked as Sharp, or as Pop-Influenced, in their black & white rigor.

I'm pouring out a 40 in pure verbiage here because you wouldn't think it to look around, now, but Paul Chadwick did a little to change the indie comix landscape in North America--  as much as Barry Windsor-Smith, or Dave Sim, or Los Bros Hernandez, or those terrible turtle boys.

Let's pause here for an admission.  A confession, truly:  I wanted so bad to rip it off.

I probably spent as much time trying to imitate Paul Chadwick's clarity of line & control of feathering as I did practicing my Frank Miller dropshadows.  Saturdays were spent at my aunt's house, poring over comics bellydown on the hardwood floor and tracing off my fucked-up pencils onto typing paper for inking.  It was Saturdays when I could convince my aunt to drive me to one of two comic shops, where doubtless satan was waiting to sell me magazines designed for single-handed enjoyment, and god smile on her bitter christian soul, she did, with little reluctance.  I guess if the options were godless rock'n'roll and heathen lit, well, at least the comix shops didn't have Perry Farrel's obscene poster of Ritual de lo Habitual hanging over the cash register.

If I had to pin down the exact moment I fell in Love with 'Crete enough to want to steal its main conceit, it was probably when my aunt was having her hair done.  There was a hobby shop at the entrance to the shopping plaza where her stylists worked, so whenever I got bored of leafing through Details magazine and trying to piece together the Wild Palms comic, I'd wander up.  The hobby shop had only a handful of comics, all trade paperback collections--  The One, by Rick Veitch (who?) and Snarfquest by Larry Elmore, and (maybe?) a Sandman like 'The Doll's House'.  But then there were these two issues of 'Concrete', singles, totally out of place amidst the lead figurines and Dragonlance novels.  'Concrete: Eclectica'.  I didn't know what they were, besides issues of my favourite book.

See, what they were?  Was colour.

Concrete, as I said, was a b&w book.  Black & white was why I lived & breathed.  I'd gotten 100% hooked on 'Crete the same way I got hooked on Cerebus--  I bought an issue in the middle of everything with no context for any of it.  My first Cerebus was a Flaming Carrot crossover, at the ass-end of Church & State book II.  My first Concrete was issue #9, the one where he grows horns.  It's a weird as fuck book, if you don't know the characters.  It spends almost the entire issue indoors, with the titular character bound to a chair, starving himself & tripping out.  If you're entering it context free, it's a bizarre In to a world of near-infinite potential, and reward.  So that's what hooked me.  It looked goddamned amazing, and it didn't do what comix had taught me to expect.  The story is very static, containing barely any action worth mentioning.  It's almost entirely an intellectual exercise, as a story.

The 'Eclectica' pieces?  I'm going to be honest, I don't remember them, today.  The essentials have evaporated.  All I remember is the shock of seeing Concrete in full colour for the first time--  if one disregards the cover art for everything Chadwick had drawn, or all the DH house ads, or the luxuriantly gardened painted posters of Concrete that had started to show up in shops.  It wasn't just 'Crete in colour, it was Concrete in computer colour, then still an innovation.  The stories were oddments, stuff Chadwick had dashed off for one project or another that didn't fit in, precisely chronologically, with the greater series which was--  then  --only beginning to be collected.

I do remember there was something luminous and uncanny about seeing 'Crete in colour, and that led me to scribbling my own ideas for a rip-off series.  Something I wouldn't attempt for years, and when I did attempt it, saw as only grotesque & misconceived.  But it got me started on Making, and not just Consuming, comix.  Chadwick, like Byrne, Sim, BWS, Moebius and all the others, got me started.

The aborted rip-off comic?  'A Lunar Body'.  Like, even the title is a bit of a stylistic lift from Chadwick--  he liked to title the individual issues subdued stuff like "A Remarkable Life" or "A Stone Among Stones".  My thing was going to be kind of a Carter of Mars riff where a dude goes to sleep and wakes up in a weird new body, in outer space, and has to re-orient himself in order to survive.  Not spectacularly well-conceieved, my concept guttered out after a few pages of TOO MANY narrative captions.  There was no-where to go with it because my core character was, of course, me.

Anyroad.  Concrete:  it's what my foundations were set in.

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1945-47, vol. 10 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1947-48, vol. 11 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Concrete Colour Special (1989) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Concrete: Eclectica (1993) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Dark Horse Presents #16 & 18 (1986) - featuring 'A Sky of Heads' by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - February 2o26

And so we return and begin again.

Maybe less annotations & notes this month?

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 49-52 (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Beast of Chicago (2oo3) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Black Dahlia (2o18) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 57-60 (1957) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Total THB vol. 1 (1994-95) - written & illustrated by Paul Pope

Evita (2oo2) - written by Héctor Osterheld, illustrated by Alberto & Enrique Breccia 

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 96-99 (1963) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder compendium I: containing 'The Lindbergh Child', 'The Terrible Ax-Man of New Orleans', & 'The Madison Square Tragedy' (2oo8 / '1o / '13) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield (1999) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1931-33, vol. 1 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Children of the Voyager #s 1-4 (1993) - written by Nick Abdzis & illustrated by Paul Johnson

Strange Days #s 1-3 (1984) - written & drawn by a murderer's row of punker Brits, including but not limited to Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, and whoever else was passing that godlike bomber 'round.  these are not comix for sober people

Paradax: Remix (1987) - written by Peter Milligan & illustrated / re-painted by Brendan McCarthy

The Lives of Sacco & Vincente (2011) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Mystery of Mary Rogers (2001) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Annihilator: Rainbow of Death vol. 1 (2026) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons

Dream of the Bat (2007-26) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons & Patrick Keck

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - January 2o26

Hello there.  New one.  Read along.

I try to keep a list.  One per month, ideally, although during holiday season posting tends to slip.  Anything new, anything old: if it's words + pictures, it gets noted.  (Datestamps) indicate year of creation / serialization / collection, as accurately as possible.  I should track publisher info in these...  But I haven't been, as that's not a principle creative / creator-specific element.  Sometimes I note colourists or letterers, but by & large if I mention those aspects it goes in the body of the "review".  As each month advances, the list gets updated but does not get bumped to the top; if you're tracking these you'll either have to scroll through my boring blah-di-blah to find it, OR bookmark the entry.  I recommend bookmarking, because things slip my mind.

Girls' Last Tour vols. 1-6 (2o14-18) - written & illustrated by Tsukumizu

An excellent series.  Cunningly staged dérive.  Scribblecore sci-fi heartbreaker.

Flex Mentallo (remastered colour) (1996) - written by Grant Morrison & illustrated by Frank Quitely

Didn't get more 1996 than this.  In many ways the perfect GM / FQ project.  All-Star Superman had low points, weak issues.  No dogpaddling bollocks here, just 4 issues of peak performance, superdense, maximum effort from all involved.  Only wish it was in the '96 colours, instead of the 2o12 sadfilter remix, plainly inspired by the insipid Incal job.  What the fuck was up with desaturation being the mark of the twentyteens, hunh? 

Wolf vol. 1 (2015) - written by Ales Kot & illustrated by Ricardo López Ortiz

Library filler, waiting between books.  Not what I come to Kot for.  It's genre bluffing.  The watered down take is it's an exmilitary Constantine in L.A.  It could have maybe been more.  Its biggest sin is it isn't a substitute for Desolation Jones.  Doesn't work too hard to compel me.  Ortiz's backgrounds are beautifully executed digital creations; I only wished I liked how the artist handles faces.  Their Zero issue was pretty cool.  I was less into this.

Hellboy In Mexico (2016) - written by Mike Mignola & illustrated by Richard Corben

Already read these, last December.  Demanded a re-visit.

The Best of The Spirit (194o-5o) - written & illustrated by Will Eisner & paid art assistants

More than a character:  The Spirit is a time & space I return to.  The eternal city, with its logotecture & Eisnershpritz, its bountiful substratum of caper & crime:  it's a space I like to haunt along with Danny Colt.  The way Eisner draws eyes, the way he folded and draped fabric, the easy clarity with which he captured light through a window....  A timeless style and a style out of time: the Spirit of an ageless age.

More Weight: a Salem story (2o25) - written & illustrated by Ben Wickey

Easy to see why this made so many best of lists.  It's been the best of this year.  Began it last night and have been dashing alongside, a little winded by now, but it's one of those days that started off negative one and the windchill has the general temp well below that, so I've all the isolation & reserves of quiet one needs to make this kind of sprint.

This book put me much in mind of my mother as it does the present moment.  I'll bore you with explanations of neither.  Suffice it to say this is a most Applicable book about the american experiment and what the test results look like, from our weird, diminished vantage point here, at the end of this thing.  It's a crushing book.  If you lay down with your chin upon your chest and the book staring you in the eye like one of Fuseli's demons, you'll rise with a righteous dent in your heart.

More Weight is a fucking banger.  A lot of people set out to imitate Alan Moore.  This book does the rarest of tricks:  it exceeds and excels at Moore's game, which was never exclusively Moore's-- it excels at literature.  It's as clever as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Pynchon, with twice the feeling of them both combined.  And let's not neglect the art:  Ben Wickey is one of the Greats, moving between styles and palettes with sublime confidence.  The cartooning is deft and the colours are Alive and between them and the keen intelligence guiding the production it's so self-assured I'd call Wickey's work "olympian", if not for the humility and wry humour radiating throughout.  The author doesn't see himself Above Things, does not attempt to act holier-than-thou or contemptuous of the subject.

A very humane, human work, in addition to being a king hell opening act on the stage of this dread year 2026.

The Giant: Orson Welles, The Artist & The Shadow (2o25) - written & illustrated by Youssef Daoudi

Perfectly serviceable.  Enjoyable if you appreciate Welles.  Maybe not what I wanted out of a bio-comic, having just emerged from 'More Weird'.  It reads... light.  Sincerely wish Welles' adaptation of 'The Trial' got more mention than a bloody reduced reproduction poster.  I would've liked to have seen Youssef Daoudi's version of Anthony Perkins.  Anyroad.  Good caricatures.  Fun linework.  Feels more like a DVD documentary than a graphic novel.  If I say any more I'll just start flaying the corpse.

Dick Tracy (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Blackthorne reprints!  Coming soon!

sometimes i want neither nits in my grits nor grits amidst my nits

Eagerly anticipating new Al Columbia.  Mirror Mirror II is on its way to me.  The Gfrörer will be welcome too of course, everything in this volume will be, to me.  French, Barker, Koch, Simmons....

In the decade passed, a lot of trendy summer comixfags were agog about certain Big Buzzy Names like mould map and Kramer's Ergot--  hipster Raws, the lot of 'em  --Mirror Mirror has been the artcomix anthology that's endured, for me.  It takes its time, and it drops when it drops, and it's not counting on people who love the internet to give a fuck:  it's there for people who love COMIC BOOK ART.  If we arrive at Mirror Mirror via the internet that's all to the good but that's not what the book is being put out there for.  It's being published to be comics, and it's consistently stunning and excellent at that: Art- does not need to be prefixed to the word Comics, because art is the totality of the work presented: art which happens to be innate TO comics.  Mirror Mirror is a lovely little curated space, each issue.  There's 4.  I'm looking forward to much, much more.

This anthology was published in 2017, and I have waited a decently long time to read it.

I wait a long time to appreciate certain bits of art.  I don't let capitalism steer my ability to love art.  I made myself rules, long and forever ago, about how to appropriate Things which I love, for my many, many libraries--  rules, because I am obsessive-compulsive, and if I permitted myself, I would be buried in a hoard of books to rival the comingled hordes of my bibliophile parents: a veritable deadly tumult of collapsed shelves.  There must be limitations.  You can't move all that pulp.  Yet I love and require physical books, so I don't buy a thing off the fucking internet, generally if-at-all, because the rarest treasures are best appreciated when encountered in the wild.

If it's in a shop somewhere and you weren't looking for it, then it's Even Better.

What tipped me into buying Mirror Mirror II off the fucking internet, at last, was the realization that Al Columbia has a SWATH of pages in there, 10 in all.  That's a massive drop from an artist who only surfaces in print every other decade.  Columbia has been haunting me ever since I first encountered 'Tar Frogs' in Deadline Magazine.  (Have I mentioned I love anthology comix?)  I bought Biologic Show #1 when it was first published by Fanta, because some pervert in a basement comic shop in Dogwater, Alabama ordered 3 copies.  The first time I dropped acid in my teenage room, waiting for the vascular pulse of the norwegian wood to synch up with Danny Hyde's remix of 'Gave Up', I re-read 'Tar Frogs' and 'Biologic Show' back to back, staring dowwwn into the panel where Pim peels back the cuff of his cartoon Mickey Mouse glove to glimpse the squamous flagellum of his repression.  Ugh.

There was something compellingly bent about Columbia's art, something twitching with danger, and I felt some form of Recognition--  same reaction I had to Clive Barker, same reaction I had to William S. Burroughs --a recognition so deeply personal that when I ran away from home in the dead of night, The Biologic Show #1 was one of a handful of comix in my go bag.

I didn't learn anything about Columbia-the-man until this past year, when I finally listened to his two very raw Inkstuds interviews.  (That archive's down, or I'd throw a link up.  Sorry.)  I try not to learn too much about the artists I feel syzygy with because it muddies my essential Perception of them:  I stop Seeing their work and I start Interpreting, instead.  Sometimes I want neither nits in my grits nor grits amidst my nits.  So anyhow, I listened, and discovered my affection in part may stem from a sense that if my life had gone differently, I'd have veered a little more along Columbia's own awkward, faltering route.

It's no small thing, accepting a role in Art's life.  Because it's not the art Life, the way that shit's sold to you.  Reality is, your time, your life, belongs to Art.  So I don't kvetch about how Columbia's approached the release of his work; that he releases it at all, that he sells bits and shavings off his own compulsive psyche, is a marvel.  It's no small thing, negotiating your worth in the chattel market and keeping sane.  So too, are the number of Columbia's pages in Mirror Mirror II no small thing.

The best comes to those who wait.  I feel like these ten pages will be a Best on par with the Amnesia drop.  I still haven't found that In The Wild, either...  But I'm not resorting to ebay just yet.

2025 was a very good year (for comics)

That's it.  That's the post.

Nah, rilly.  Like, I've enjoyed the hell out of some.  Went on a thorough dive of John Smith's work, majorly got my Neal Adams on, had a coffee & chat with Blaise Larmee, caught up with ev-er-y-thing the south's public library system denied me, and added new Al Columbia to my collection for the first time in years...!  And then there's the li'l free libraries of Chicago, gifting me Raymond Briggs' 'When The Wind Blows' and 'The Sky Is Blue With A Single Cloud' by Kuniko Tsurita.  What else?

I finally got to read the concluding issues of some Unfinished Symphonies that've been hanging fire in my mind for the greater part of thirty to forty years.  Like, I have every issue of 'night life' by Derek McCulloch & Simon Tristam now.  Read all of 'Exquisite Corpse' by the Pander Brothers.  Completed reading 'The Puma Blues' by Stephen Murphy & Michael Zulli.

There's a lot of stuff rolling into my In stack.  A lot of Corben coming.  Some new manga, some ancient.  Doing a few best-of-the-year books from various lists--  Lee Lai's 'Cannon' is SHARP stuff.

Gave away quite a few, too.  All of 'Kaijumax' by Zander Cannon went to a co-worker.  'Tis the season!  Passed my singles of 'Rare Flavours' along to a fellow comicker I'd like to jam with, one day.  And I've plain lost track of everything I donated to l'il free libraries, but there were goodly comix scattered & sown in the fertile plains of Chi, O my bruddahs.  This is a Pulp Towne.

Did I accomplish any of my personal goals?  Not as such.  I'm hackin' at comix.  Got some projects ready for the next stage.  Got some brewing.  Planning & penciling, planning & penciling.  You know how it is.

for chistmas, my true love gave to me:

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" Holy Daze Special, Batwank!!! - October / November / December 2o25

[...putting the continuity comix incoherence crusade aside for a sustained, healthy moment...]

The Summer Hikaru Died vols. 1-5 (2o21-2o25) - The anime version is dogshit, but this, this is great.  Gonna read as long as it runs.

Tom Strong Compendium (1999-2oo6) - Begins with love.  Ends with a lack of imagination.  2/3rds readable, 1/3rd slog.  A semisuccessful exercise in worldbuilding that defaults into genre boredom.  For me one of the most stinging casualties of the Wildstorm buyout by DC.  Lee did Moore dirty and this book died on the vine as a result.

Adventureman vol. 1 (2o2o) - Wtf is this self-aware wannabe ironyboy winky business.  No.  We already have Casanova, if we need hard genre tropes.  You want an Adam Hughes cheesecake book, just buy an Adam Hughes cheesecake book.  Nobody cares what you bust to, fan-worm.  I won't judge you for busting.  Unless you're busting to this.

November vols. 1-4 (2o19) - Rocksolid.  Charretier is the bomb.  I want to read more of her comix.

The Nice House By The Sea vol. 1 (2025) - I liked 9/10s of The Nice House On The Lake, and then the ending was just "We're gonna hit the reset switch like it's a clit" then we're told there's going to be another "season" because comics are done in Seasons, now, and I kind of fucking hate the way the television model has tainted everything.  I'm not even sure this book needs to exist as a comic, considering James Tynion IV clearly WANTS to be in teevee, and make spinoffs...!  This particular comic's initial sexiness is down to how it looks like an HBO show in comic form, which is some disappointing shit.  Because, look, I loved the first season of Westworld.  What ruins Westworld is that it keeps fucking going.  Yeah, I got some sour grapes.  But read and tell me I'm wrong.

Batman vol. 3: Death of the Family (2014) - Snyder is such a tryhard.  I wish I could understand his popularity.  It's a mystery.  It's the only mystery.  There's no goddamned mysteries in these bat-comix, unless it's how Joker + Marilyn Manson was a hot mod NRG back in the twenty-teens.  This edgelord shit is embarrassing.  Also why the fuck is Jock's art so lazy.  He's already using a computer!

Milk Wars (2o18) - This could have been something.  But it wasn't.  Mainly notable for forcing me to explain Danny The Street to my husband.  The art had its moments.  I guess I'll pour a 40 out on the curb for Young Animal.  DC gave it a sincere shot.  Gerard Way is like one of those little stinky fertilizer sticks you push into the soil of the potted plants DC keeps in the lobby of their L.A. office.  He keeps the flora alive, if not exactly well-fed.  It sucks that he gave up working on His Own Comic, Umbrella Academy, so he could make an inferior teevee adaptation of his own work, and do this.  It's no wonder he looks like Neal Young now.  Can you stage an intervention for mutton chops?

Dai Dark vols. 1-2 (2o19-2o2o) - The artist likes H.R. Giger's work, intensely & unironically, beyond Alien & Species, beyond Brain Salad Surgery & the Giger Bar, this is an artist who spent a lot of time reading, like, all the Necronomicon collections and drawing in ballpoint on printer paper.  Sturdy, fun, dumb comic.  This is straightup shonen energy and I like it like I liked o.g. Trigun.  I'll read these as long as they make 'em.  If there's a downside, it's that the art is getting chunkier & scribblier as it goes on.  I've started seeing pencil lines alongside the inks, for everything-- including word bubble placement!  A curious sloppiness.

DanDaDan vols. 1-3 (2o19-2o21) - I am team Turbo Granny.  She is a chaotic force for good and casually diabolical.  I guess yokai stuff is my jam generally.  Plugs into my folk horror tendency.  There's nothing horrific about this book, but the character design is fab and the artist draws the fuck out of everything.  Easy to see how they came from Chainsaw Man.  The ride pays for the price of a ticket, if you're reading these from the library.  Pretty cracky.

Dimwood by Richard Corben (2024) - Exeunt as you came in, I suppose.  There are some of what you might call Corben's classical themes here.  Hypersexualized male physique.  His legendary enthusiasm for busoms.  There's also (let's be kind) some very wonk drawing.  Of Corben's curious mode of wonk, where he is actually using model reference.  He makes his own strangely shaped heads for his strangely shaped characters, so when he does odd perspectives of the mashed-down and exaggerated planes of faces it's deeply...  unsettling.  There's also some really clever page layouts & action setups, all the visual storytelling you expect from the Lege that gave us a bazillion horror comix and some of the more baller Hellboy spin-off stuff...  The story?  It's tropes on tropes, in a way that doesn't make much sense, there's no emotionally satisfactory payoff, and the story repeats its own action twice too many times.  It didn't have to be 120 pages.  It could have been 80.  But hell, it's one last entry from the man hisself, and it's a family affair.  Everyone helped with the colouring and inking and pre-production.  That brings a little tear to the eye, albeit a tear complicated by the amount of heaving busoms there are in this throbbingly horny-yet-repressed comic a-bulge with grotesque subtext.  I'm def. glad to have seen some colours that aren't Villarubia's--  it's nice to see Richard doing his obsessive Thing with line thickness and layered, delicate graytones one final time.  All that said I'm probably never going to re-visit this particular work.  I'll hit Hellboy again, for sure.  Maybe that deeply problematic Hellblazer comic Azzarello did where Constantine gets himself committed to an american prison.  (Checks library.)  Got it on hold now, in fact.  I'll probably try to properly Read the Den saga.  Isn't 'Murky World' part of that...?

re-read: John Constantine, Hellblazer #51 (1992) - An all-timer.  Sean Phillips at his blocky best, and John Smith spot-welding the pre-vertigo DCU mature readers' title together.  There's a bit of incidental dialogue where John reminisces about the time he & Willoughby Kipling took on the Lapsed Martyrs in Bangkok-- Willoughby Kipling being the Richard E. Grant version of Constantine from Morrison's 'Doom Patrol'.  I quite like that panel.  It serves no real dramatic purpose other than to suggest that the D.P. and Constantine aren't that far from one another, on the display racks.  One of my favourite things about this ish is the suggestion that if you're ever possessed or dealing with malevolent spirits, the worst possible move you could make is asking J.C. for help.  Working with Johnny Con-job is as like as not to transmogrify your soul into Satan's own underpants.

The Color Of The End: Mission In The Apocalypse vol. 1 (2023) - I dunno what's with the subtitle trend in manga these last few years, but it's superfluous.  Redundant, even--  he said, making a point for no-one, no-where  --but that's pretty much the sole flaw here.  The art's impressive, the graytones spectacular (when's the last time you saw an artist actually using graytones to Exciting! Visual!! Effect!?!) and the tale itself is an ambient joy.  A couple decades ago, when I was re-reading 'The Time Machine' by Wells, it occurred to me that my favourite form of SF is The Walk:  The narrator discovers the world of the future at the same pace as the reader; they're both on the same amble, matching pace, so the reader makes the same assumptions & errors in judgment as the narrator.  This book does that, more or less.  It's a contemplative thing.  Sadly, like much of contemporary ambient music, The Color Of The End is not treading new ground, and the wistfulness therein makes me less engaged in discovery.  C.o.t.E. is a mood piece, but I'm less in the mood.  It's not the book's fault.  Maybe it's having survived covid, or having lost (estranged) family along the way, that's to blame.  At one volume I'm okay.  Still, I'd like to taste some other SF manga in this mode.  I hear 'Girls Frontline' is a Walk in a similar vein...

Hello, Sunshine (2025) - Keezy Young is a new name to me, but the art & storytelling are straight-up Michael Lark circa Terminal City.  Better, really.  Better because the tale isn't borne from nostalgic futurity, but from the stuff of teen misadventure & themes of personal horror.  The cartooning is sharp as hell, the colours are crisp and flat as your memories of being into the wrong people at the wrong time.  It's provided some legit startles, which, hell-- when's the last time a horror comic was immersive enough to do that to me?  Tidily realized characterization and charming as birdsong.  A keeper.  My husband will love this.

"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... ]