The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1722: Warlock 5 #2, 1986

That cover just screams 80s, doesn't it?

Another piece from Aircel today, but I really don't know what's going on. Given that this is only the second issue of the series, we either get a lot of exposition in the first issue, or we're dropped in in media res and have to figure out what the hell's going on. I did try, but it was not easy.

There's magic, and firearms, and zombies, and robots, and an apocalypse. And all of those things are clad in a very 80s, Mad Max aesthetic. Aside from that, no idea. And since this is the only issue of the series currently in the collection, it'll have to stay mysterious.

And though it might scream 80s, the cover is fucking glorious, isn't it?

"You android asshole! You've totally screwed us now!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1721: Maelstrom #1, 1987

Here's the thing about Aircel Comics: they make me feel somewhat uncomfortable. Barry Blair's art errs on the side of looking far too young for the situations (and states of dress) that he puts his characters in, despite those characters being of age in story. Most of the time. So despite their status as one of the largest Canadian publishers that's ever existed, I don't tend to go after their stuff because I'm really not sure it's okay.

That said, this comic has nothing to do with Mr. Blair, and is in fact a kind of funny sword and sorcery tale that has intrigued me. I'm always interested when you've got a main character who has no desire whatsoever to be a main character. As far as I can tell, Maelstrom simply wants to do his job (executioner) and get paid. But he appears to be getting drawn into a magical war, his axe having been enchanted in his last encounter, while all he wants is to find a place to chop off some heads. Deserving heads, of course.

I've got a couple more issues of this series, and if they turn out to be good I may see about finding the rest. Fantasy comics are not always my jam, but if they're well done, and have a sense of humour about themselves, I'll give them a go. Actually, that pretty much holds for every genre.

"If only we didn't have to abide by silly rules and traditions."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1171: Casanova #5, July 1991

Erg.
More of the same. Casanova's so hot that he even seduces a young bride on her wedding night. These stories would be so much more enjoyable if the women were every bit as conniving and horny as the men. Then there'd be some intrigue.

That said, Ricard's a very talented artist. His men are of a realistic bent, but the women verge on a slightly more iconic style, almost as if we're seeing not a woman, but something more symbolic, interacting with Casanova. More pessimistically, we could also attribute this slight abstraction of the women to the ever-present male gaze, and its reduction of women to objects.

I try to err on the optimistic these days, but there's good arguments for both sides, I think. Is this possibly a way we can recuperate the products of the male gaze, such as this comic, in that we can choose the way we interpret the stylization of the women in the comic? Rather than reading them as reduction to object, can we instead elevate them, in a sense, to that status of the mythic hero Frye talks about, superior to others and environment? There's so much less detail on the women that they almost look as if they've been pasted on top of the drawing of the background underneath. This stylization almost seems to give them a dimensionality. It doesn't remove from the story the problems of Casanova and his apparent ability to bed any woman, iconic or not, but from a purely visual, or pictorial, point of view, we could see these as portraits of a flawed man interacting with more perfect beings.

Again, I try to err on the optimistic. But there is something to be said for the frame of mind with which we approach a text. I encourage my students to bring their own experiences to the interpretation of a text, that we really have no way of understanding a text except through the lens of our experience. So surely that means that we can, to a certain extent, decide which of our experiences we will bring to a text. Is this perhaps the idea of a resistant reading of a misogynistic erotic comic?

That's a lot more thought that I imagined this comic would engender.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1170: Casanova #1, March 1991

I have a few issues of this series, enough that I might try to track down the rest, though finding back issues of adult comics is a very tricky business. Most people are embarrassed to sell them, let alone embarrassed to buy them. But I've always thought that every genre must have something to offer us, otherwise why would it become a genre?

Casanova's a pretty good series. The art is impeccable. Everyone is just beautiful. It's lovely to have the colour cover, as well, as Ricard's colours are masterfully handled. (I'm assuming it's Ricard, as he's credited with the cover illustration, and there's no listed colourist. Whoever it was did a wonderful job!) There is the usual problem I find with European imports of this era: the women are generally pretty vapid. Granted, in this issue, they're every bit as voracious for sex as Casanova himself, but really they're there to be tallied as conquests for the men in the series.

One strange, or off-putting at least, thing is the ending of the issue. I think this story must originally have been published in a single volume, rather than as a two-issue story. And I think this because the story simply cuts off, midway through a conversation. In past when I've lectured about reading collections of serially-published comics, I've noted that every 22 pages or so, there's a climactic moment. It can feel repetitive unless you're aware of the periodical publication schedule of the original comics. This is kind of the reverse of that, in that there's no climactic moment (though there are a few throughout the issue ;D) at the end of the comic, no hook to draw us back next time. What I have found out, though, is that the series was published every 2 weeks, so at least there wasn't that much of a wait for the second half.

Speaking of, I don't have it. The second half, that is, of this story. We'll be doing another single issue of the series tomorrow, and I do have some complete storylines, but I'll save those for another time. And you never know..I might find the rest of this by some strange happenstance this weekend. That would be neat.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1168: Arthur Sex #3, July 1991

We're going to do some adult comics over the next few days. The more salacious of the covers will, of course, be behind a jump.

But not this one!

I think the weirdest thing about this comic is that there is no credit for the writing or art anywhere in the issue. The closest we get is the original publisher, Editorial Astri, S.A., a Spanish publisher. All the reprint credits are there, but nothing for the original creator(s).

That aside, I was strangely reminded of Spenser's The Faerie Queene when reading this. I think there must have been a bit of the erotic swirling around in old Edmund's head as he was writing his great English epic. Even from a purely knightly point of view, the tale of one chivalrous gent meeting another and the two rescuing a helpless damsel together would fit exceedingly well into Spenser's extended meditation on Arthurian myth and chivalry.

Of course, the two knights engage in some less-armoured adventures with the lady as well, and they all seem to have a lot of fun...well, until the "Unicorn" (actually a centaur with a remarkably large phallus) shows ups an woos the lady with his...um...wiles(?).

Pretty harmless stuff, really - it'd be nice if the ladies showed a bit more agency, but that's sadly the state of many erotic comics from this period. It's not that the women are explicitly looked down upon, but they just don't seem to contribute anything (aside from their bodies) to the forward momentum of the narrative.

Which, as I write it, sounds a lot like patriarchal sexist culture, really.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 724: Darkewood #3, 1988

I am of two minds about this comic.

First, it's so very clearly an adaptation of a D&D, or other fantasy RPG, adventure, which makes me love it. One of the main characters is a swashbuckling bard, and as someone who plays a bard currently in a game, it spoke to me in a lovely way. Second, there's a point in which the protagonists are confronted by a group of trolls, and it was awesome to see that both male and female antagonists were dressed just as skimpily as one another. I thought perhaps it was a relatively egalitarian comic, with regard to clothing/armour.

Until I got to the end of the comic and realized that every female character we encounter is basically wearing a bikini. And, aside from a few trolls, every male character is fully-clothed.

*sigh*

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 721: Dragonring #1, 1986

There isn't a lot of writing online about Barry Blair and Aircel Publishing. I keep seeing vague references to criticisms of Blair's art, based on his predilection for illustrating characters as quite young and androgynous, and then putting them into sexual situations. I can see it in the few Aircel comics I've read by him, and it brings up the notion of the sexuality versus the sexualization of underage people. It's certainly not something I want (or feel qualified) to get into here, but it's worth noting the difference between those two things. Many kids grow up feeling embarrassed by sex, and feeling thoroughly put off by what happens to them during puberty and adolescence. Were we to educate more fully about facets of sexuality during their formative years, these sorts of things might not be quite as awkward. On the other side, sexualizing children (that is, layering one's own sexual desire on an underage person) is not okay. Did I really have to say that? But that leaves us with wondering where Blair lands on that spectrum. As I noted, I haven't read a lot of his work, but perhaps as I see more of it, I'll be able to make clearer conclusions. Hopefully they'll not be gross.

Dragonring is intriguing. As I've been making my way through this quarter bin collection, I've found a few gems that I think I may pursue. Dragonring is one of them. Guang Yap's creatures are Lovecraftian in the extreme, and the pulp adventure style of the story (complete with kid sidekick and bumbling comic relief) is quite good. The GCD tells me that, over 2 volumes, there's 18 issues, which gives the story ample time to develop. And, hopefully, I'll be able to find them for every bit as cheap as I found this one.

A man is hired to transport someone to an island that that person has just inherited. There's a weird temple, filled with odd characters, and there's monsters underneath it. And it's set in China. Couldn't really get more pulp if it tried.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 701: Bloodlines #1, 1987

Aircel is a strange little publisher, though I have to have some affection for it because it hails from just down the road from where I lived in Ontario. Their long-standing commitment to indie publishing in the mid to late 80s is quite laudable, though I'll admit that I've never really taken to any of their titles that I've read. The company was co-founded by Barry Blair, infamous for his erotic work that verged many times of the inappropriate.

Bloodlines (or Blood Lines) is interesting. It's pulling references from many great works of literature, chief amongst them Dante's Inferno. The setting is in some ways a city and in some ways that hellish landscape of Dante and Virgil's descent, and I haven't quite figured out the connection to the epic poem yet. I may never, as there were only 3 issues of the series published, I only have one, and I have no way of knowing if the story was ever completed. Aircel underwent significant changes in the late 80s and early 90s, and became a producer of erotic comics, letting slip many of the fantasy-based comics for which they had become known.

As with Mythos from a few days ago, this series is obviously a labour of love by the creator, and not one intended to bring in any significant financial restitution. And when more pressing matters (y'know, rent, food, stuff like that) take priority, creative endeavours can unfortunately fall by the wayside. Witness my series of Flash read-through posts.

Walton's artwork is a bit crude, or at least seemed so to me to begin with. But there's a scene that takes place in a police chief's office, and one the figures in this scene, a woman leaning up against a desk, her head hanging in defeat, conveys such a lovely sense of emotion that I realized that the art style is not unpracticed, but highly stylized. That said, his style has developed significantly over the last 30 years, as can be witness here.

Some more dollar bin goodies tomorrow. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 136: Elflord #1, 1986

I slagged off Aircel Publishing a couple of days ago when I was comparing them to Sirius Entertainment, so I figured it was only fair for me to read and review an Aircel comic. I do so sheepishly, because Elflord was actually pretty good. I can't claim any deep knowledge of comics in the fantasy genre, though it seems I've reviewed quite a few of them over the last month or two. There's always the problem of the world-build versus the story. With a comic set in contemporary times, you only have to do a little bit of world-building, just enough to demonstrate the differences between the reader's world and the character's world. Then you can jump right into the story. Not so with fantasy. A fantasy story is, by and large, set in an unfamiliar setting, and as such the world needs to be established so that the actions of the characters make sense within their narrative. This issue of Elflord, being the second series to bear this title, offers a text piece at the beginning of the comic that fills in some story details. I was still unclear as to why there seemed to only be elves in this world, the common trope being that elves exist in a fantasy world populated by many demihuman races (is demihuman racist?). This was compounded about halfway through the issue when a human pops into existence, claiming to have travelled from another world.

See what I mean about the world-building? Fantasy titles are the sorts of comics that benefit from the zero issue, in that one might offer a comic that lays out all the ground rules first, before the story proper begins.

Barry Blair's art is interesting. According to his Wikipedia page, later in his career he was considered somewhat controversial for the childlike nature of his characters that often coincided with nudity and erotic situations. I was struck in this particular comic with the androgynous nature of Windblade, an ostensibly-male young elven wizard whose depiction is very feminine throughout the story. While I've not investigated the matter fully, this obituary of Blair (who died in 2010) also makes reference to some of the controversy.

This all aside, Elflord was a pretty entertaining read. The questions I have about the world are enough to potentially bring me back to it, which is a nice little hook, and unlike a lot of indie fantasy comics from the same era (see my earlier Adventurers reviews), the dialogue is actually pretty smooth and well-rendered. I have a few more issues of this series in the collection, which I'll get to eventually, but tomorrow we start a 2-week theme of dollar bin comics. I've gone on about them at length, so I thought it was time to really delve into some of the treasures (and not-so-treasures) I've found in my journeys. See you then!