The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1045: The Savage Dragon (1993 Series) #3, August 1993 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 5)

Not gonna lie: got caught up in a pretty major reshuffling of my comics

It's not quite done, but enough that I can let it lie for a bit.

I don't really get Savage Dragon's longevity. It's not a bad comic, but it's certainly not a great one. Larsen's art is pretty dynamic, but his stories aren't as gripping as I'd like. Of course, I'm making this claim based on having read maybe three whole issues of the series in my life. But that's the thing: I've never felt drawn into it on any of those occasions.

Maybe it needs to be consumed in larger portions.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 628: Backlash #3, January 1995

Backlash continues with exactly the sort of shenanigans you'd expect from an Image/Wildstorm comic at the end of the 20th century. Guest star Savage Dragon is joined by Zealot, Emp, and Void of the WildC.A.T.s. As I was mentioning yesterday, this is a remarkably well-integrated superhero universe, and I feel like the guest spot of the WildC.A.T.s is a bit like how Superman ends up guest-starring in most new DC titles, or Spider-Man in Marvel titles.

Anyway, this whole issue is pretty much a fight sequence. The fact of this betrays one of the primary problems with early Image comics as far as I'm concerned. Having an entire comic be a fight sequence is just bad storytelling. Since one is limited to a single issue per month, a well-constructed story is going to offer not only action, but also plot development, characterization, and, most importantly, variety. This comic doesn't really do that. Yes, the fight is exciting, though there are some strange notions in Brett Booth's art of how the human, or semi-human, body actually works, but we get very little characterization of our focal character - he spends about half the comic being unconscious while Dragon takes on the villain, and then half the comic fighting Dragon when he tries to arrest him. Maybe that shows that he's kind of a badass, but I think we already got that from the rippling muscles and constantly gritted teeth.

So I guess we'll see tomorrow where things go. And that's actually another of the problems I have with these Image comics - they're entirely predictable. This comic is going to continue to be about a character (or characters) that are grim 'n' gritty, and there'll be espionage and action, but they never quite ask those same kind of questions that the superhero comics of the other publishers do. It's like every character in the universe is Wolverine.

*sigh* Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 627: Backlash #2, December 1994

I had a quick look just before starting this post, and of the 626 previous comics I've read, only 12 are from Image.

I missed the Image renaissance in the early 90s. I'd discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll (I'm being quite literal here), and comics had fallen by the wayside. I'd become bored of them by that point anyway, though I think if I'd concentrated more on Animal Man, and less on Uncanny X-Men, if I'd given that weird new series Sandman a go, I might have stuck with it. It took until about 1995, and a friend handing me Sandman: Season of Mists, for me to realize what I'd missed out on. Of course, not long after, I also found out about the Image controversy, and about the rest of what I'd missed out on.

Now, I do, every now and again, try to give the early 90s Image titles a go. They had so many talented creators working for them, I can't help but think that somewhere in that collection of zeppelin-sized breasts and muscles made out of airplane cable, there must be something good. Gerber and Manabat's work on Cybernary is pretty sweet. And early Jim Lee stuff is pretty good, though he really doesn't seem to have evolved as an artist, at all, over the last 20 years. The guest-written issues of Spawn are excellent for the most part. But, by and large, and this is becoming an increasingly unpopular opinion in our 90s nostalgia-fuelled days, the comics are just bad. The fact that Image comics have featured twice in my "Horror from the Dollar Bin" posts does say something.

I've had a pretty nice-sized run of Backlash for a long while now. I think they were amongst the comics I picked up when trying to get stock for my store way back when. I've got numbers 2 -9 consecutively, which I may give a go over the next few days. It's grim, it's gritty, it's got that stylized/realistic aesthetic that early Image loves. But what it has done for me is consider the Image Universe and its composition. Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon guests in this issue, and the major villains are the Daemonites, a group of alien beings that permeate all of the Image superhero titles. This universe is very much a series of interwoven stories, much more so than their more famous predecessors, and despite the art and stories being slightly sub-par, there's something very, very cool going on with the shared narrative of this universe. Perhaps this will give me a better vantage from which to consider Backlash as we continue with his story over the next little while.

Onward.