The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2096: Tor 3-D #2, August 1986

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1938: Sabre #3, December 1982

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

 

 I've not read the seminal Sabre graphic novel, ostensibly the first such publication in the modern era, so I did a bit of background reading. It didn't help much, as I didn't want to spoil too much for myself, so I'm not exactly sure how Sabre and his pals have ended up in captivity by the totalitarian regime that has taken over the U.S.

Isn't it amazing how many pieces of fiction, from throughout the last hundred years or so, have warned of just this thing?

Today's featured creator, Billy Graham, has been dead longer than my kid has been alive. It's not a shocking thing, by any means, but it does give a nice sense, for me at least, of the historicity that is involved in considering the contributions of Black artists to the comics medium. As with many artists in the 70s, Mr. Graham cut his teeth on Warren's black and white magazines, illustrating a number of pieces in the original run of Vampirella. I've got a collection of the first 12 issues on my shelf, and I'll have to remember that Mr. Graham is in there when I get around to reading it. His work in this issue of Sabre is fucking brilliant. From a dream narrative to a government office to a dank dungeon, every page captures the atmosphere that one would expect to find in such a setting, and the characters react in very believable ways to their situations. I've a couple more issues of this series in the collection, and I really ought to get off my butt and get the rest of the series. It's really good.

I also would like to just take a moment to mention Don McGregor. I've been intrigued by his comics for a while, and he's one of the names to come from 70s Marvel that, along with my fave Steve Gerber, is hailed as a deft and original comics writer. But Mr. McGregor, through his comics, is also demonstrating something that I think is really important, especially given the time in which a lot of his work was published: he's a good ally. Just in this series, we have a Black leading character, a homosexual couple, and, according to sources, the first gay kiss in mainstream comics. Beats out Apollo and the Midnighter by a few decades. This comic is dedicated to Mr. McGregor's son, with the epigraph reading, in part, "with the hope that the fight for dignity and honor will be easier in the future." Given the characters populating this series, the ideas of dignity and honour carry slightly more weight than they might in a comic featuring a team of monochromatic superheroes. Have a look at Mr. McGregor's output over the course of his career, and I think you'll see that this is someone who pushed for diversity and representation in his work right from the very beginning, and really we shold be considering him an important role model for the comics community.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I don't have any other Billy Graham-related articles on the blog, but here's a couple more about Don McGregor's work. His Killraven is totally worth checking out.

And having mentioned the gay couple in Sabre, I'll always take an opportunity to talk about queerness in comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1626: Mai, The Psychic Girl #17, January 1988

I have this role-playing game called Feng Shui. From the ever creative mind of Robin D. Laws, it's a Hong Kong action movie RPG. In my limited knowledge of the genre, I think that means it's a little bit like Big Trouble in Little China. I really have no idea. But one of the gaps in my cultural lexicon.

But after today's issue, I realized that I have a parallel in Japanese comics. Though decidedly different media and nation, there's an over-the-topness to the violence, even though it still looks realistic sometimes, and a drama to the destructive powers that humans have harnessed. Hardly surprising from a nation that has better firsthand knowledge of those powers than most. But there's also the same over-the-topness afforded moments of drama or comedy. Like the writers, be they film or manga artists, are interested in slowing down everything so that we can scrutinize each moment more clearly.

The second half of a car chase today, lots of explosions and crunching glass. I've decided that Kenmochi, one of the "henchfolk," as Olaf so plainly put it, is one of my favourite characters. He's morally ambiguous in his employment for Mr. Kaieda, but the dude stops at nothing to get the mission done, and seems to have a heart. The development of the characters through this very bizarre narrative has been handled subtly, but well.

And though I may have cause to say or think it again over the next couple of weeks, Turm Garten is a stone cold psychopath.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1625: Mai, The Psychic Girl #16, January 1988

Sorry it's been a bit. Things have been heavy here.

I am absolutely loving this series. The art, the story, everything is just great. Turm Garten is a terrifying character. The attention to character development in the series is really great. Ostensible foe Kaieda is revealed as a multi-faceted individual, as are Mai, her dad, her protectors and friends, and even some of the henchfolk (just finished A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix. Henchfolk.). The immersion into the setting that this accomplishes is utterly brilliant, giving us the sense of a world that is far less black and white than the usual super-powered narratives of North American comics. Though Turm is evil as fuck, no two ways about it.

I was mentioning to Tara the other day the amazing amount of visual background detail in the series, as compared to the relatively-stylized depictions of the characters. McCloud's iconic abstraction, and other theorizations of that, hold up here. We identify with a detailed and realistic setting, since that's literally what we live in. And although the characters are all visually distinct, they're not drawn photorealistically like the backgrounds, so we are more able to layer ourselves over top of them.

I find myself in a situation that has happened a couple of times during the project where I'll finish reading an issue and I know I have the whole series in the collection, so I just want to devour it because it's so compelling. The fact that I haven't is really a testament to my newfound powers of patience. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. But if you want to read an excellent tale of psychic young women and the men who fool themselves into thinking they have control, check out this story. Not sure if it's been collected, but it was pretty easy, and cheap, to find all 28 issues.

"If you obey me, we will surely become good friends!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1617: Mai, The Psychic Girl #8, September 1987

I'm starting to see why numerous directors have thought about bringing this story to a movie screen. It's not your run-of-the-mill kid with superpowers story. Mai makes some huge mistakes, and suffers some very real tragedy, all in the space of a few days. There's a wonderful sense of the deep history of the government's use of psychics, even if we haven't been told virtually any of it. There's some expert world-building, on par with John Wick, that is going on here. The hyper-kinetic style of the series would also lend itself to condensing these 28 issues into a 2-hour film. I think it would get going and then just never let you settle down, much like the latest Mad Max film. 2 straight hours of adrenaline.

Though for me it's going to be 28 20-minute increments of adrenaline. Which I think it probably better for me in the long run.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1611: Mai, The Psychic Girl #2, June 1987

I feel like I missed something. All of a sudden Mai and her Dad are on the run from The Wisdom Alliance, whose name I don't recall from the first issue, but it's in the "The Story Up to Now" section, so I guess I'll just go with it. I find that, sometimes, this is a problem in manga - it's a problem in translation in general, really. You're just not always going to get all of the information because some of it is simply culturally bound.

Not a bad issue, though the thing about manga is that there's not always a lot of action in each chapter. Mai hangs out in hiding while her father does some...stuff. There's a beautiful sequence in which Mai uses her powers to manipulate cherry blossom petals, and it's something I would absolutely love to see as live action. A quick check shows that such people as Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola have been interested in adapting the story, but nothing has managed to get off the ground.

We do get to meet some interesting antagonists in this issue, and Mai's father is revealed to be some kind of amazing martial arts expert. I'm sure it'll all be explained. Maybe.

"I haven't talked to you since those weirdos followed us from school yesterday."

Other Things You Might Like Reading

More manga reviewed in the 40 Years project: https://giantboxofcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/manga

Comics from places other than North America: https://giantboxofcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/non-North%20American%20comics

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1610: Mai, The Psychic Girl #1, May 1987

I grabbed up a large portion of this series for about 6 cents each last year, and managed to track down the balance of it not too long afterward. So it's time to actually read it and see if it was worth the few bucks it cost me. Spoiler alert: it definitely was.

Mai, along with the concurrently published Area 88, was one of the first manga series to be presented to North American audiences, albeit adapted to a format comics readers were used to. It would take a few more years before the right-to-left tankoban became the format of choice. When I picked it up to read, I wasn't sure what to expect, though given my experience with manga and anime, I should have known. Mai reads like many manga I've read, and many anime I've watched, in that it blends, not quite seamlessly, a serious conspiratorial story with light, slice-of-life vignettes. Mai, who appears to know she's got psychic powers, is also simply a 14-year old girl, who worries about what her friends think of her, about boys, and about school. She uses her powers to play silly pranks (like stopping a baseball as it flies toward home plate), but the darker aspects of the story reveal that she is actually one of the most powerful psychics on the planet. I don't think she knows that yet, though.

The art is gorgeous, as is much manga art. There's something to the simplicity of the characters and the complexity of the world they inhabit that is just beautiful. It's rare that I find manga art that I don't find immediately aesthetically gratifying. As for the story, it's been set-up so far. I'm sure once the dark and the light start to mix, we'll have a pretty satisfying action story. But I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.

"Why am I having this nightmare? It's sooo bizarre, so strange."

Other Things You Might Like Reading

A totally mad fantasy manga from Viz: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1252: Bastard #1, 2001

Fantastic Golden Age reprints from Eclipse: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1304: Mr. Monster's Super-Duper Special #5, January 1987

Weird, Weird Advertisements

Back with some more strange ads from comics from the middle of the 20th century. Seriously, people are going to look back at that century and be flummoxed one day.

I hope.

Anyway...

This first one is from Pep #226, and it's so great. I kind of which I had these. I would wear them over my existing facial hair.

Brilliant. I love the mismatch of the hair colours - they don't care. You'll have sideburns! It's a matter of the drapes not matching the little lace doilies on the coffee table.

I have forgotten where this next one came from, but it's almost certainly an Eclipse comic, maybe one of the issues of P.J. Warlock I read a little while back. It's an anti-SDI comic from the early 80s, demonstrating, somewhat heavy-handedly, the problems with Reagan's Star Wars initiative. It reminds me of the National Social Welfare Assembly comics I posted a while back, though perhaps more overtly political in nature. Unsurprising, for Eclipse.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1441: Aztec Ace #13, May 1985

I have actually managed to find the final issue of the series, so I'm rapidly approaching the end. Things are a bit strange, though that's not saying a lot in the context of this series. It's a very strange series. But it may also be one of my favourite series I've read. There's so much here that prefigures a lot of the Morrison stuff I glommed onto in the 90s, mixed with a nice dash of pulp adventure. I feel like Ace's adventures in time would be somewhat similar to the adventures of the 20s Invisibles in Morrison's epic.

Today's issue was a lovely metatext, both a love letter and a deconstruction of superheroes. This is a little while before Watchmen, and manages to both demonstrate the problems with the superhero, a la Watchmen, but also manages to show why they're such beloved characters: they offer us a site of belief. That's really all it is. Superheroes replace the more flawed religious constructions upon which our culture is built, refining away the bad ideas (I don't know too many hateful superheroes), and keeping the good stuff.

Many say that it's time that humanity outgrew the numerous faith traditions we've clung to for millennia, but we still need something to believe in. I think that's something very human. So why not superheroes, a myth that we ourselves can contribute to?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1422: Aztec Ace #1, March 1984

I've set myself something of a clock in reading this issue today. Aztec Ace runs 15 issues, and I was fortunate enough to nab the first fourteen for very, very cheap one fine day. I have, of course, since been unable to find the 15th issue at any of the comic shops in Calgary. And if I keep reading the series, I've 14 days to find it.

*sigh*

Though, really, of all the stressors in my life, that's the most pleasant one.

Another thought that occurs is that the cover date for this comic is  when I turned 10 years old.

I like this comic a lot. It reminds me of Grant Morrison, in the weird trippy multiple time lines and non-linear understandings of reality, and comes from a writer (Doug Moench) whose work I've always found to be really solid. I'm excited to see a series in which he's given free reign over the story he's telling. And to be telling that story using an Indigenous South American man as the focal character is pretty great. Regardless of whether or not I manage to find the final issue, I think I'm going to enjoy this story.

More to come...(really, this time.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1404: P.J. Warlock #1, November 1986

Hi. Welcome back. I hope a few people are still checking in here.
As I noted a few weeks ago, I had a serious mental health break. It's still ongoing, but I'm trying to introduce some structure back into my life to cope with it, and I think blogging a comic every day is a nice way to start.

Over the last few days I've been reading what I like to think of as auteur comics from the 1980s. Rather than the undergrounds, these are comics published by indie publishers that grow out of the underground (like Eclipse, Pacific, First) that feature the work of single creators. In some cases, the artist does everything, from the usual writing and drawing to lettering, editing, and colouring. The Tim Conrad, Arthur Suydam, and Bruce Jones comics from the last three days, however, are very different from today's selection. I looked up Bill Schorr to see what else he's done, and according to Wikipedia, this is the only comic series he's done. He's highly regarded as a newspaper strip artist and political cartoonist, but this is his only comic book. From issue 1, I'm getting the sense that it's where Mr. Schorr decided to purge his Dad humour. P.J., being 1400 years old, is an expert in the subject.

The art style puts me heavily in mind of Vaughn Bodé, especially once the female damsel is introduced. I recently picked up the first issue of Junkwaffel, so perhaps once I'm done with Mr. Schorr's series (only 3 issues), I'll delve into some old-school Bodé. I also think that P.J. and Cheech Wizard would probably have a good time hanging out.

Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1343: Seduction of the Innocent #1, November 1985

Another pre-Code horror reprint title that I didn't know I had. I'm curious if there are others lurking in the collection.

These are all pretty good stories, but there's a couple of standouts. "Alice in Terrorland" was a nice little discovery. Editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are another of my collections, though it is a somewhat less-pursued hobby. I always love to see the ways in which Carroll's immortal creation is repurposed and redeployed, this time as a series of interdimensional invaders, with gorgeous Alex Toth art.

The other great story was "Doom in the Depths," an older-styled piece, reminiscent of the Flash Gordon movie serials. This time, however, it is into the hollow Earth that our intrepid adventurers journey, ticking another box on my checklist of tropes I love. I'm 7 issues away from having the complete original run of Mike Grell's The Warlord, and once I've tracked them down, we may end up spending a good portion of a year in the hollow Earth land of Skataris.

I think one of the nicer aspects of many of these reprint comics is that the people who put them together have an obvious passion for the work. There is invariably a text piece, offering a detailed background of not only the stories in the issue, but the original publishers and the artists involved in the story's production. I've said it a couple of times in the last little while, but I'm amazed that it's taken me this long to "discover" them. And I understand the passion people seem to have for these stories. They're just really, really good.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1304: Mr. Monster's Super-Duper Special #5, January 1987

A really great pulp science fiction adventure today, featuring a flying saucer, a relatively useless female character, plucky aliens, and, of course, a very manly hero.

I'm being facetious of course, though the story does have many of the classic tropes of early pulp science fiction. What we have is simply a very cool old school sci-fi adventure from an era that predates human exploration of space. These kinds of stories are always interesting as there's just so much speculation as what things will be like, and what we will encounter. While we understand space as infinite, it seems to me it was far more so narratively before we had some idea of what was out there.

Well, not hat we really know, but you know what I mean.

I'm glad to have discovered the art of Bob Powell. His characters are super-dynamic, though given the scarcity of reprint comics like this one, it might be a challenge to track down more of his works. Which, honestly, sounds like a lot of fun.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1270: Zot #4, July 1984

I read the collection of the latter part of this series a few years back. It was wonderful, but I always harboured some curiosity as to what the pre-revamp Zot! was like.

Now I know, and I totally get why Scott McCloud shifted directions. It's not so much that Zot!'s not good, just that it's kind of usual. There was only one moment that really leapt out at me in this issue, and it was when Dekko, the villain of the piece, starts having a breakdown - the way McCloud uses the page and panels to depict this breakdown is quite amazing. But the rest of the comic was a bit flat. Zot is a superhero from another version of Earth. These are his adventures, accompanied by Jenny, a girl from our Earth. The series gets much more interesting when Zot decides to come and live on our Earth when Jenny goes home.

I'll get to the graphic novel one day. It's a weighty tome, definitely a commitment of time. When do we get more of that, btw?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1269: Zooniverse #2, October 1986

Another comic in which I had no idea what the heck was going on. It's space, there's aliens, and a courier, and some guys trying to get to their ship.

The art has a kind of cool Ian Gibson vibe, and was probably being done around the same time Gibson was big in 2000A.D.

That aside, it's really hard for me to say anything about this one. I honestly wasn't even sure who I was supposed to be rooting for, or at least focalizing through. And then things got all, if you'll pardon the scientific jargon, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 759: Siegel and Shuster: Date Line 1930s #1, Novebmer 1984

To be remembered as the creators of Superman would surely be enough legacy for most, but in the case of Siegel and Shuster it would be a disservice to a couple of talented comics creators to not acknowledge their other works. Both spent much time during the Golden and Silver ages plying their trade, even after their mishandling by DC Comics, and well after they left their most famous creation to other creators.

What makes this comic so interesting is that we see what they were getting up to before the Man of Steel. Everything they produced afterward, purposefully or no, lives in the shadow of Superman. It's virtually impossible for any mainstream comic, and certainly any superhero, to step out from that shadow. But the work in today's comic, produced in the 4 years before they sold Superman, offers tantalizing glimpses of other features that, had fortune functioned differently, might have been the one to propel these two to stardom. Many of the strips are single-page features, designed for serialization in a projected Popular Comics periodical. For the more dramatic features, this means we get a scant introduction before the "To be continued" box at the bottom of the page. There is another issue of this series, so perhaps some of the features continue. The most interesting strips are certainly the ones revolving around weird science and weird scientists - you can see where Siegel and Shuster's passions really lie. The comedy strips are well-crafted, but perhaps the intervening 80 or so years has aged the humour to a point that I don't really get it.

A cool little peek at a very important part of comics history.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 736: The Spiral Path #2, July 1986

I was surprised by the outcome of this comic. The two protagonists that we meet in the previous issue, Caed and Bethbara, meet a tribe of little people and are subject to a hallucinatory experience with the elder woman of the tribe. At which point Caed finds himself on the battlefield with Artuk the dead king, and ends up taking his place. Whereas Bethbara, after ascending into the sky, becomes a queen and, seemingly, is set in opposition to the new king of the dead. Very much not where I saw the two characters going, which is always a lovely treat in a story like this one. Parkhouse is pulling on some very deeply mythic language and imagery in this series, and his combinations of North American and British legend and myth is simply wonderful. He treats each with respect, and reminds us that there are undeniable similarities in the systems of belief that have stirred the great civilizations that arose in both of those places. The final page of the story teases that a sequel, The Silver Circle, "may appear at a later date," but from what I can tell that later date has not yet arrived. I can only hope.

I recommend this one, if you can find a copy of the two issues. Lovely art, cool story, and definitely a deep read. I feel like I'll be coming back to this one, one day.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 735: The Spiral Path #1, July 1986

As I noted a few weeks ago, I picked up a box of indie comics on the cheap, and found some real treasures (both of the excellent and execrable kind) contained within. Having made my way through some of that box, I found a few series that I thought were worth pursuing, so I returned to the scene of my previous purchase and made another, this time with some method to the madness. I was fortunate to come across in these quarter bins a few complete runs of old school comics (Jon Sable#1-20, Aztec Ace #1-12), and a couple of complete series. Today's comic (and tomorrow's) are examples of these.

The Spiral Path is a cool little fantasy comic, reprinted from the seminal British comics weekly Warrior, and written by Steve Parkhouse, the man responsible for many of my favourite old school Doctor Who comics. It's cool because it is meshing, somewhat seamlessly, the aesthetic of ancient Britons and ancient North Americans - it works nicely, given the correspondences between Druidic belief and Native American belief. I'm a little concerned that this might qualify as appropriation of a culture that still believes in many of its ancient ways, though the other side of that is that many ancient practices are used as settings of fiction. I suppose the difference is that not all of them have been the target of such a protracted attempt at erasure as Native American belief has. On the plus side, then, this comic is celebratory of such beliefs, casting them as a defense against the power of death.

Is it odd that I'm feeling the urge to put a positive spin on everything I see and hear these days?

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 710: 3-D Alien Terror #1, June 1986

Reading this first thing in the morning may not have been my best idea ever. Not that the stories were bad at all. But trying to get sleep-fogged eyes to focus on that red/blue 3D effect is slightly nauseating. Not a good combination with breakfast.

Once I got over that, however, the stories were awesome. The lead is a cool little send-up of EC Comics and The Twilight Zone that was just wonderful. The next story, 3 pages, was utterly fucking chilling. And the two that round out the collection were nicely creepy. The horror and sci-fi stuff coming out of Eclipse at this time, mostly from the pen of Bruce Jones, was amazing. I love all the titles he produced for them, and I'll definitely go out of my way to get them. I was very lucky that this one showed up in my quarter bin haul.

If you're looking for a nice collection of horror and science fiction short stories, Jones' Twisted Tales, Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones, and Alien Worlds are really and truly excellent.

To be continued.
(I'm trying out something new.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 702: Clint #2, January 1987

Really awful comic that consisted almost entirely of jokes at the expense of transvestites, with a few jokes at the expense of East Asian people thrown in for good measure. I've never read any of the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamster comics before, but if this is anything to go by, I'm not looking forward to it. I get that it was the 80s. But this is unacceptable regardless.

More interesting than anything in the comic was the really excellent editorial by catherine yronwode on the inside front cover, decrying the claims of a resurgence of the Wertham-style crack down on comics for their violent and sexual natures. yronwode produces a list of the far more pressing matters, mostly to do with corruption at a national political level (eerily appropriate), and cautions hysterics to keep in mind that there are far more urgent matters to attend to than whether or not a comic book shows boobs.

That aside, a disappointing comic for this morning. Onward.