The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1944: Amazing Adventures #31, July 1975

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I feel like if you're a comics fan and you don't know the art of P. Craig Russell, then you need to do yourself a favour and educate yourself. Today's featured creator is one of the most dynamic and innovative comics artists out there. No one lays out a page like Mr. Russell, and no one tells a story in the way he can. And, according to his wiki entry, he was the first comics creator to openly come out as gay. I can't access the article in which this is stated, but I'll give the wiki the benefit of the doubt.

I'll say this: even if you didn't know he was gay, you'd have an inkling after reading this comic. There's so much more attention lavished on the male bodies than on the female ones here. That's not to say that the women aren't present in the story, just that the men are prominent in the story. This is an early series for Mr. Russell, and as he moves through the 80s and 90s I find his work becomes slightly more stylized, but also more confident. His adaptation of Wagner's entire Ring cycle is a beauty to behold, though it's sometimes a bit of a slog. Maybe I'm just not an opera fan.

While there isn't any explicit homosexuality in this comic, given it's a mainstream comic from teh mid-70s, there is a remarkable amount of homosociality. Mr. Russell's art illustrates the story and words of Don McGregor, whose work I've spoken highly of in the past. Mr. McGregor, to me, demonstrates an interesting precursor to ally-ship in a very specific forum. His comics celebrate diversity in ways that I don't think any other comics were at the time. Both of these creators really bear some attention, more than they have been given, I think.

One other thing came of my reading this comic - I think I'm going to have to track down all the issues. I've only ever read the entirety of the Killraven saga in the Marvel Essential series, which reprints in black and white. While you still get the story, it's hard to really appreciate the beauty of the setting and the characters without some colour. That's my feeling, anyway. So Amazing Adventures joins the original run of Man-Thing on my list of old comics that I just need to get.

More to follow.

 Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a few other bits of Mr. Russell's work in the project. He always brings a remarkable beauty to whatever publication he's involved in. 

And Don McGregor is really a great writer. I think he's worth checking out.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 19: Epic Illustrated #4, Winter 1980

So I actually read the feature article in today's magazine. It was about the next evolution of comics, the graphic novel, and the various early attempts at the format. Most interesting was reading this from a pre-Maus perspective. Each time writer Archie Goodwin gestured to that unknown work in the future that would cement the idea of graphic novel, all I could think was "Just wait a couple of years!" He does, however, offer a list of interesting works, some I know and others I don't, that might be worth looking into.

For interest's sake, Gil Kane's Blackmark and Ken Steacy and Dean Motter's The Sacred and the Profane (serialized in Star*Reach) are the two that stood out to me most. I'll have to keep an eye out.

The magazine continues to have a remarkable graphic pedigree. The inclusion of Starlin and Russell in the magazine almost guarantees it's going to look great. Throw in some Veitch, some Hempel, some Steacy, and you've got a beautiful thing to look at. Are the stories maintaining the same level of excellence? Maybe. The stories are entertaining, and in some cases quite beautifully wrought, but right now two of the three main pieces running through the magazine (Elric and Almuric) are adaptations of other works. Only Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey is an original lengthy contribution. This is not to say that the adaptations aren't good, and aren't important. One of the best ways we see the effect of a piece of imaginative fiction is when it's adapted into another medium. Stories have different things to tell us dependent on the medium within which they're presented. Thank you, Marshall McLuhan. But I think I'd like to see more original work. The shorter pieces that pepper the magazine are all very good. They actually could be considered as being graphic ancestors of today's microfictions. I'm hoping to scan one or two of them in the near future and put them up here. Hopefully no one'll mind.

See you next week!

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 18: Epic Illustrated #3, Fall 1980

While the stories are still strong, and the quality of the art and writing are pretty good, there's something missing from Epic Illustrated that I see in the early issues of Heavy Metal with which its competing. There's something vital about the European science fiction and fantasy that elevates it just a bit above this more North American version of the adult fantasy genre. The article I noted last week suggests that European fantasists go in one of two directions: either into myth and fairy tale, and the more traditional fantasy, or into the future, and a world of technology so far advanced that it acts like magic in the narrative context, and therefore the stories are fantasy and not science fiction.

I think the stories that one might call science fiction in Epic are actually science fiction, rather than technologically-inflected fantasy. I wonder if this is because in North America we're brought up to be very rational in our beliefs. This is perhaps one of the detriments of the hard separation of Church and State. Such a thing is more fluid in many European countries, giving the imaginative literature more scope to accept the irrational as simply a part of the everyday. The stories in Epic Illustrated almost implicitly ask you to believe that what's happening in the story is scientifically explainable. The Heavy Metal stories don't care if you don't understand. You don't need to.

Though I'm not a fan of the Elric stories of Michael Moorcock, it's lovely to see an adaptation of one of them here from P. Craig Russell. I don't think I've ever seen anything he's done that I haven't marveled at, even if I didn't read it. Certainly one of our great comics artists.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 17: Epic Illustrated #2, Summer 1980

A solid second issue, though perhaps not quite as strong as the first. The inclusion of some of P. Craig Russell's operatic adaptation is nice, as is the continuation of "Metamorphosis Odyssey." I'm not as keen on the R.E. Howard adaptation in this issue - Esau Cairn is far too "manly" a protagonist for my liking.

The stories are quite novel in that it's hard really to say what's coming next. Sometimes a fantasy story will morph wholesale into science fiction, and then back again. Or main characters are killed and the story end with them, and we're left not knowing what's just happened, really. There's also a fair bit of overt environmental and social critique going on. Archie Goodwin and Michelle Brand's "Sinner" questions excesses of both technology and faith quite nicely, though their conclusion is a little pessimistic for my liking.

Epic is overall a pretty readable magazine. The stories are cool, and some of the text articles are quite interesting. I haven't been reading them all as part of the project. It is about comics after all. But there's an article in today's comic, outlining the history of fantasy in European comics, that's looks really neat.

More Epic in a mere week! See you then!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 740: Marvel Fanfare #10, September 1983

Marvel Fanfare was, when I was first collecting comics, that book that sat off to the side from others, different because of its production quality and its purporting to tell stories a little more mature than the standard Marvel comics. I never really paid it much attention until a couple of issues made their way into the collection years back and I finally had a chance to read it.

At which point I realized it's pretty much a standard Marvel comic from the early 80s.

That said, the back-up in this issue is P. Craig Russell illustrating a story from The Jungle Book, and though Kipling's a bit dodgy sometimes, Russell's work is always worth seeing. The lead story, "Widow," however, is a kind of boring origin story for the Black Widow that appears to serve as set-up for the story in the next issue. Which I don't have. What I did like about the story is that this is the Widow in my favourite of her outfits. I wasn't a fan of the short-haired look that dominated the later part of the decade and much of the 90s. And this is definitely the version of the character that inspires the Scarlett Johansson version of the character. That could be her up on the cover there, really.

I'm feeling a bit aimless in the project again. Perhaps it's time to go back to alphabetical reading, though I'm just not feeling the Alpha Flight right now. Guess I've got a day to figure it out!

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 251: Elric #0 - One Life, 1996

There was a time, shortly after I discovered The Sandman, that I would voraciously track down all the Neil Gaiman writings I possibly could. There's a remarkable amount of stuff out there, comics and otherwise, with his name attached to it, not all of it good. The whole "Wheel of Worlds" thing from Tekno Comics is really pretty mediocre, and they really push Gaiman's name on it, even though he basically just gave them the idea and let other writers tell the stories. But I'm betting that having his name on those comics really helped sell them.

The case is probably the same with today's selection. One Life is based on a story that Gaiman wrote as a prose piece, and is adapted for comics by P. Craig Russell. This is much like the majority of Alan Moore's output for Avatar Press, in that Moore wrote the original stories, but someone else adapts them for comics. It's sort of a weird subset of the industry, but one that occasionally produces real gems. One Life is close, but mostly because of the stunning beauty of Russell's art. As far as Gaiman stories go, it's not his greatest. It treads on literary/biographical grounds that I'm not sure Gaiman is particularly adept at, though it does provide a nice picture of a young boy becoming a teenager and parsing his experience through the works of Michael Moorcock - something that, perhaps, a number of the British comics writers of Gaiman's generation can relate to.

But Russell's art, as usual, is amazing. I can't even tell you what the first P. Craig Russell comic I read was. It might well have been The Sandman #50, a gorgeous story about mythic Baghdad, but it might just as well have been something else. His is one of the most distinctive styles in comics, and is unique in that he doesn't appear to have acolytes whose style mimics his. I can look at particular artists and think "Oh, he draws like Mike Mignola" or "She draws like Rick Burchett," but I've never looked at a comic and thought, "Hey, that looks like P. Craig Russell," unless it was, of course, P. Craig Russell. I'm not sure why this is, unless it's because his work is so intricate, so precise, that to copy him one would have to duplicate him, rather than simply be inspired by him. Perhaps it's time I kept a lookout for those who have been inspired by Russell, though that would necessitate my reading contemporary comics, for which I'm losing my enthusiasm.

The only other thing I'd like to say about this comic is that it's also part of an odd little genre that tells stories about the British school system, which, if I've learned anything from comics, is completely different from the North American system, and is populated by sadists and child molesters. Or perhaps that's just the British system from Gaiman's point of view, because off the top of my head the only other story I can think of in this vein right now is the one that introduces the Dead Boy Detectives in the pages of The Sandman. Perhaps Gaiman just did not enjoy school.

I may, tomorrow, just do what I did today: simply open up one of the miscellaneous sections of my storage collection and pull out a random comic. It's been ages since I read One Life, so that was kind of nice. I wonder what I'll find tomorrow. See you then.