Damn, but Richard Corben draws some dark, dark shit.
What immediately struck me about this comic as I took it out of its bag was the amazing condition it's in. I've no record of where I got this issue, though due to the tag of "garage" in the notes in my database, I can tell that I've had it at least since 2008ish, if not longer. I'm always surprised to find a comic in this good shape and this old. It means that it's probably been stored properly since it was released, so it was probably part of a collection, or old stock from a store.
The stories are, of course, fantastic, though the cover story was a bit too narratively similar to a story from the previous issue. I can't imagine that this slipped by a writer like Jones, and perhaps the whole point of the series is to tell stories literally in the vein of the old ECs, and see what one could do with that format. It's a bit like when I read poets who mess about with the sonnet format. It's very rigid, but within that rigidity one can achieve amazing things. The 12-bar blues are a similar idea.
The other thing that really makes these comics quite different from those that inspired it is the amount of nudity. But the cool thing is it's not just female nudity. There's a shot in story "Off Key" in which a young lady slips her husband's jeans off and we get a full shot of a rather nicely-rendered bottom. It's a small thing, but what it allows, in this and in some of the other stories, is for us to see the nudity not as exploitative, as it would have been if only the women were unclothed, but as a part of the story. The couple in this story are having a private weekend away. I don't know about many of you, but when my wife and I have a private weekend away, there's very often nudity involved! I guess the short version is that the nudity and sexuality in these stories is there for verisimilitude, rather than simply to titillate. Which it also does, by the way.
More to come...
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