The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1702 - 1707: Catching Up

One of the things I've been talking with my therapist about with regard to my ADHD is, of course, tools to help one muddle through with this kind of mind. One thing that works for me, though I rail against it, is a schedule. I once joked to my wife that I had driven myself crazy by loving chaos but actually requiring structure.

This blog was one such, and I think it's important for me to make it so again. So, a catch-up, and then I'll start blogging again.

This week's theme was "Brown." I typed it into my database, and these were some of the comics that it suggested.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 790: Metallix Free Comic Book Day #1, April 2003

A blast from Free Comic Book Days past today. Metallix is an interesting premise, in that it's a superhero team book but the superpowers are shared amongst the four members of the team. What I mean is that only one character at a time can wear the supersuit, and each brings their own unique abilities to the enhancements granted by "Metal X." It's actually pretty cool, and I really want to track down the rest of the series to see how it all plays out. The team is set up as an industrial troubleshooting team, and in this issue we see them taking down saboteurs in a Central American country. This is a little troubling, as there's a good chance that the saboteurs are actually people from the country fighting to keep industry from destroying the environment, but there's no hint of motive behind the saboteurs, just explosions and gunfire. It's a bit of a gap in the storytelling, really. Even the most mundane of crooks always seems to have a reason, and it's only the truly terrifying, and rare, villains that do things with no reason whatsoever.

That aside, the comic reads quite nicely, and that's because it's produced by a group of veteran creators, all old school (well, 70s and 80s) Marvel guys. And the comic bears this out. The art style really looks like it could have come out of Marvel in the mid-Eighties, which is perhaps another reason I enjoyed it so much. It's got that old Avengers/New Mutants look going for it. There are three other preview features in the comic, none as long as the Metallix story, and I'm curious as to whether or not these comics were an interlinked universe, or if each existed in their own continuum. There's no hint either way in this comic, but I get the feeling, especially based on the credentials of the creators, that what we're looking at is a shared universe. I will, again, have to track things down a bit to figure that out.

Well, I'm off for a septoplasty operation today. I've never had a general anesthetic, so I'm a little bit freaked out. But I'll see you back here tomorrow, probably in a bit of pain, but ready for more weird comics from the second quarter of the collection. To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 415: Anna & Froga/Moomin Valley Turns Jungle, May 2012 ("Hey Kids! Comics!" Week, Day 3)

Today's selection was a giveaway for Free Comic Book Day 2012. There was a time in the short history of FCBD that stores would set out tables full of comics, and you could just take what you liked. It's now become a buy one get one sort of situation, which I'm totally against, but having not been a comic shop owner for quite some time now, I've no say in how these things progress.

"Anna & Froga" is an odd little comic. Froga's a bit of a dick, and from the brief couple of stories in this issue, I can't really see why Anna is his friend. Unless she's a dick too, but we haven't seen that in the stories contained herein. There are, as with most good children's writing, some pedagogical moments happening here (i.e., don't eat gumballs from the ground, don't take advantage of the friendship of a tuna - you know, common lessons we all need to learn), and Anouk Ricard's deceptively simple art style gives the stories not only the thematic feeling of childhood, but also the visual feeling.

The B-side (or is it a double A-side) of the comic is a reprint of the Moomin comic strip. I've been aware of these stories for a couple of decades. Back when I was active on the Barbelith discussion forums, someone recommended the Moomin children's books to me. I never did get around to reading them, but every now and again these reprints crop up in a FCBD offering, and I think that perhaps I ought to read them. Which, really, is what FCBD ought to be about. My understanding of it at the beginning, and I had my store for the first FCBD, was that it was designed to bring in readers, and to expose jaded readers to things they hadn't read before. Now, sadly, it's more a marketing tool for big summer crossovers from the Big Two, and an incentive program for comic stores (well, not all of them, but a lot).

FCBD is coming up in less than a month, and I strongly recommend heading out to your local comics store and trying out something new. You might be surprised by what you read. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 124: Atomic Robo / Neozoic / Bonnie Lass Free Comic Book Day, 2012

Continuing my excavation of the miscellaneous "A" section of the Storage collection, I came across this gem. It's from Free Comic Book Day 3 years ago, and I honestly don't remember having read it. It's one of the problems I find with FCBD occasionally, that I'll come home with a stack of comics and, after a week or so of not reading them, I'll catalogue them, bag them, and store them. Which is, actually, what makes this project so much fun!

The lead story, "Atomic Robo," is brilliant. It comes out of an already running series, so there's little in the way of explanation in the story itself. So when Dr. Dinosaur, a hyper-intelligent dinosauric mad scientist villain appears, I was soooo not ready. And, at the same time, immediately sold. I'll perhaps have a look for other issues of Atomic Robo this afternoon. Couple this with a super-intelligent robotic protagonist and a supporting character who titles himself a "wizard of spreadsheets," and you've got a funny, exciting, and beautifully-drawn comic. Oh, did I mention Futuresaurus Rex, a Tyrannosaurus that is super-evolved to the point that it evolves spontaneous rocket launchers? Yeah. It's that good.

The other two features, which I'm afraid I'll wax a little less poetically about, are equally lovely, but I didn't find them quite as immediately enthralling. "Neozoic" offers a parallel reality in which the dinosaurs evolved along with humankind. It seems grim and gritty, though there's a child who can psychically communicate with dinosaurs, leaving the door open for occasional cuteness. Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for something that seemed to have some fairly serious undertones this early on a Sunday morning. "Bonnie Lass," on the other hand, looks promising, but the story in this issue doesn't really do much to pull me in. Should I perhaps find the previous series in a dollar bin, I could see picking it up, out of curiosity (mainly because I've never heard of Red 5 Comics before, and their production values seem to be really wonderfully high).

FCBD is a weird thing, which I think I've mentioned before. But occasionally it allows one to step out of the comfort zone and discover something really amazing, which just goes to show how much amazing work is being done in this medium that I love so much.

I'm off to the comic shop today for my bi-weekly fix. Maybe something that I find today will make it onto the blog tomorrow. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 119: The Adventures of Paul Free Comic Book Day Edition, 2005

To select today's comic, I opened up my database and looked for things that were not part of a series. I came across something that's not even really a comic. Or rather, it is a comic, but was never actually published as a periodical. Michel Rabagliati's Paul books owe much more to the European tradition of comics than they do North America, even though the artist is Montreal-based. This sample of Paul's adventures was released as part of Free Comic Book Day in 2005, and offers a nice taste of the range of Rabagliati's tales and deceptively simple art style.

Free Comic Book Day is a fairly great day for me, though it's become less and less about the proliferation of comics and more and more about the advertisement of comic shops. Not that I'm necessarily against that idea, but when one or two comics are free and you have to pay for the rest, even though they're ostensibly "free" comics, I think it's defeating the point. I never charged for comics on the first FCBD, and my local comic shop didn't on any of the others. And it's such a great chance to pick up stuff that's completely outside of what one might normally buy. Such as this Drawn & Quarterly sampler. I was enamoured enough with Rabagliati's tales from this comic that I did eventually pick up one of the Paul books when I came across a copy. I was not disappointed. The trouble is, with stores charging for the comics now (and yes, I know it's only 25 or 50 cents, but when I'm spending $60/month on comics anyway, and when four or five "free" comics equals one of the ones I really care about getting, you have to be wary of the cash), I'm loathe to pick up something I'm unfamiliar with. That said, there's still plenty of choice, and it does make me more discriminating about what I'm going to get on FCBD.

Rabagliati's art and writing are very fluid. The stories read as autobiography, and probably partially are, but we of course are not reading a series called The Adventures of Michel. It's impressive that M. Rabagliati can convey that sense of the autobiographical even when we're explicitly aware of the fact that the focal character is a fictional one. It could be the first person narration that generally starts off the tales, or the fact that we're seeing different moments from the life of the same character. Whatever it is, the stories are injected with personality, and person-ness, that is consistent across different stories in different time periods. And it's that that makes the comics read like they are stories from life, rather than fictions. Though they're all stories, really, even the ones from life.

We'll hit up something else from outside the mainstream tomorrow. The "A Miscellaneous" section of my collection has some cool stuff in it. See you tomorrow.

(Edit: I lost numbering here. Was originally published as Day 120.) 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 67: Dark Circle Comics #1, June-July 2015

As I said yesterday, today's comic is a Free Comic Book Day find. I'd heard a week or so ago that Archie Comics was relaunching a few of their old superhero properties, so I was excited to see a preview issue on the table at the local comic store this morning. Archie's recent output has been thoroughly impressive of late, so I had no reason to think that their superhero relaunch would be any different.

That sounds like a lead up to my totally bashing this comic, but it's not.

The trouble is, with such a small preview (portions of 2 stories and character designs for one), it's hard to tell whether or not the titles will be good. Let's be clear, they've got some high-level talent working on the books. I am absolutely in love with Dean Haspiel's design for The Fox, and Michael Gaydos' gritty art on The Black Hood suits the tenor of the tale perfectly. But we don't see much happen, which makes an evaluation fairly difficult.

The Shield intrigues me the most, though. This character is an archetype who rises periodically throughout the history of the United States, which really meshes nicely with my current American Literature exam. Unfortunately, she's the only one who doesn't get a snippet of story in this comic. I may have to check out these three initial titles, if only for the first couple of issues, on the strength of the Archie output of late, but with Secret Wars dropping next week it's going to be hard to spread the comic book wealth around.

So far this is the only one of my FCBD comics I've read. Did you pick up anything that really leapt out at you? Or did your local store do anything interesting?

Sorry, short and sweet today. Back to The Score tomorrow, I think.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 56 - Hero Premiere Edition #6: 1963: Horus, Lord of Light, 1993

If there's one thing I love, it's free comics. One of the reasons I've come to love Free Comic Book Day slightly less is that a lot of stores that participate in it now only distribute free comics is you buy something from them. This, to me, is intrinsically against the idea that spawned Free Comic Book Day, but then I'm an optimist if nothing else.

And this insert from the comics magazine Hero Illustrated isn't really a free comic. The original purchaser would have paid the cost of the magazine with which it was included, and I likely paid a dollar for it from some dollar bin. But, as an insert comic, it's not an expected part of the magazine with which it was packaged. Wizard Magazine would do this sometimes too, and very often it was original content, not reprint content as this particular issue is.

That said, though the premiere edition of 1963 #5 doesn't contain the whole story, just a taster to get you in the mood, it does contain an interview with Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette about the formation and formulation of the 1963-verse, and those particular artists' reasons for becoming involved in the project.
It also gives me a nice taste of the wonder that is 1963. It's one of the great tragedies of 90s superhero comics that the final part of this series, the legendary Double Image special that would have pitted the optimistic characters of 1963 against the gritty Image heroes, never materialized. In much the same way that Moore's final issues of Supreme, and the giant conflict between Daxia and the Supremacy never came about, we can probably blame the lack of Double Image on the terrible business practices of Rob Liefeld. But that's a conversation for another time, and after much more research.

This ashcan makes me want to re-read the series, though, so that might come up in the next few weeks. We'll see. The other nice thing about it was that it's an ashcan, and so took a bit less time to read on a busy morning.

See you tomorrow.

Some dates for your calendar.

Some interesting comic book-related events for this year.

April 18 - 19 Toronto Comicon Fan Appreciation

May 2 Free Comic Book Day
(Seriously, this is one of my favourite days of the year. Do yourself a favour and get out to the local comic store on this day and see what's out there.)

August 28 - 30 Fan Expo Canada

September 27 Word on the Street
Not specifically a comic book event, but Drawn & Quarterly are often there, as well as some independent comic publishers.