The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 26: The First Kingdom #1, 1974

It's been half a year since I did a Friday magazine. It's been a busy few months, and something had to give, unfortunately. I'm feeling a bit more on top of things lately, so I'm going to try to get ahead on these and make them more regular. Let's shoot for bi-weekly, for now, shall we?

The First Kingdom was amongst the magazines that I procured with my large Heavy Metal purchase in 2012. I didn't know anything about it, but educated myself as to its genesis thanks to the mighty Internet. Jack Katz began this story in 1974 and finished it in 1986 with the 24th installment. The First Kingdom is a sprawling, generational future history story, set after the inevitable nuclear war that seemed to be just around the corner throughout the 70s and 80s. It reminds me, as much as I'm familiar with them, of those big, epic fantasy series, like the George R.R. Martin ones, or Robert Jordan. There's all kinds of people and names that you know you're going to be expected to remember in someone's lineage 10 issues down the line. This feeling is intensified by the style in which the story is told. Having read this first issue, I wonder if Don McGregor didn't have it in mind when he did the Killraven comics. In the introduction, Katz himself calls it a "novel in which the characters live in front of you," and cites Hal Foster's Prince Valiant as an inspiration. There's definitely more of the novel to this graphic novel. That said, the characters do speak, though in an unbounded way. Katz does not do speech bubbles. The one off-putting thing for me about the text, however, is that it's all typeset. Narration is in block, dialogue in lower case, but still typeset. I'd never really thought about it before, but the organic look of a font is a way that we equate the text we see upon the page with a spoken voice. And if that text is typeset, the whole thing sound like a robot.

To me, at least.

But perhaps that really works, almost as if we're experiencing this narrative through some holographic future technology that allows us to relive the beginnings of this civilization. They just can't get the voices right?

Did I say that it's pretty cool?

It's pretty cool. If you can get your hands on a copy, it's worthwhile. It's just different enough from the usual comics fare that I think anyone would be entertained by it.

Onward.