The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1994 - 1996: Kaboom #1 - 3, Sept. - Nov. 1997

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I decided to do these three comics together for two reasons. First, I'm falling terribly behind on my blogging, and this is an easy way to get back on track. Second, it's basically a single story told over three issues, so it's easier to talk about it all at once.

Kaboom is a part of the Awesome Universe, like Fighting American and The Coven, that isn't directly controlled by Alan Moore. I'd left it for a little while to read because I was worried that it wouldn't hold up to the standard set by Moore's work in this setting, and by some of the other writers/artists who contributed characters and stories to the shared universe. It was a pretty good series, but not a great one, I'd say. Jeff Matsuda's artwork is super-kinetic, very much like reading an anime adaptation or a manga. There's a few artists whose work really nicely demonstrates the influence of Japanese comics on North American production, and Mr. Matsuda is definitely one of them.

As for the story, it's a pretty standard origin piece. Teenager gets powers, turns out there's people who want to kill him as a result. But as I say, Mr. Matsuda's art gives it a bit of a boost, including some really great, and weird, designs for The Nine, agents of Scarlett, the villain who wants to remove "the mitts" from Geof Sunrise's hands. Shenanigans ensue.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Mr. Matsuda's work has  shown up a couple of other times in the project.

Mr. Loeb, however, has shown up quite a lot.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1870: Awesome Holiday Special, December 1997

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In much the same way I wrote a series on the minor works of Steve Gerber, I think it would be worthwhile to do the same for Alan Moore. He's had so many series that just never went anywhere, and for the most part they were going to be amazing. There was a recent interview with Leah Moore in which she described her father's deep love for superheroes and the damage that was done to this love by his time in the comics industry. It's actually quite sad that someone who so obviously loves superheroes so much got treated the way he did by virtually every major superhero publisher in North America. No wonder he's so bitter.

The reason I bring this up is that there's a Youngblood story in today's issue that is the prelude to the 2.5 issues we end up getting of his reboot of the team. As I was reading the story, told in the voice of team leader Jeff Terrel, Shaft, I was amazed at how Moore's voice in the story was so different from his voice in any of his other stories. I know this seems like an obvious thing to point out, but a lot of writers have one voice when they write - their own - and they simply layer it over whatever character they're writing. But one of Moore's great gifts is to give each character their own distinctive voice, to the extent that I'd be hard-pressed to point to a comic that is actually written in Moore's own voice. Like Foucault said, the author isn't a person, it's a function, and at the best of times that function includes an erasure, or subsumption, of the author's own voice.

But there's more than just Moore in this issue. I have to say, at the end of the comic, I was left smiling and feeling pretty good, which is exactly what one wants from a holiday comic. I'm actually surprised that I haven't read this one already, but I'm glad that I was able to leave it until I was reading Fighting American. The FA story in this issue is about S.P.I.C.E., written and drawn (almost exclusively in full page panels) by Mr. Liefeld. It's not bad, but not great, but also takes place after the Rules of the Game series I just finished, as FA is in the process of putting the Allies back together.

What else? Both the Coven and Kaboom stories were good enough to make me want to track down their respective series. Honestly, I'm not that far off from having everything that Awesome produced, and, as I've said before, I just love the hell out of this universe. Back to FA's final Awesome outing tomorrow. Then maybe Youngblood?

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Though I missed it this year, I'm usually pretty good about reading holiday-themed comics (though apparently I have two different tags for them?)

And if I'm going to dive into Youngblood, you can find what I've previously said about them here and here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 760: Extreme Hero, 1994

What is it about Extreme/Maximum/Awesome that keeps pulling me back in? I mean, I guess there's the occasional good creator that is somehow convinced by Liefeld to work with him until the inevitable financial disaster. And perhaps, just perhaps, there's something about the ridiculously hyper-masculine aesthetic that I find fascinating, and slightly titillating. Though when we come to the 8 or 12-pack stomachs, I think perhaps these comics artists need a bit of an anatomy lesson.

This is a sampler that was distributed with the now-defunct Hero Illustrated, one of the numerous comic industry magazines that offered "news" to fans in the 90s. And anything new from Liefeld and co. in the 90s was news. As far as I know, none of the series in this sampler made it beyond maybe issue #3. Liefeld, as is well known in the industry, is insanely bad at business. I mean, really, who fucks over Alan Moore when he's writing one of your comics? Who does that? He, for some reason, booted Joe Casey from an excellent run on Youngblood, managed I think one issue that he decided to write and draw, and then the comic folded.

Anyway, the short stories in here are exactly what you'd expect. The art is okay, though very 90s Image. The stories are blunt. It's meant to entice us into reading the regular series, but the problem is that the regular series never appear. *sigh*

I'm hoping one day that I'll stop being so annoyed with Liefeld and 90s Image. But I don't know if it'll happen.

Onward!