The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1285: Vortex #9, May 1984

Ty Templeton's "Killing Dragons" has an excellent denouement, which I won't spoil here just in case anyone ever wants to go out and track this issue down. It's a thoroughly satisfying ending to a story.

The other standout for today is Dan Day and Jim Waley's "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust," a grim tale that very nicely encapsulates what it was like to live in the last years of the Cold War. I try to explain to people younger than me that the rhetoric of the day was that we'd all likely die within the decade from a nuclear war. As the 80s grew old, the possibility of it loomed less direly, but it was still there. That was a dark decade, which is perhaps why it's having a bit of a renaissance these days.

No more Vortex, unfortunately, but a couple of other comics from the publisher. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1284: Vortex #8, April 1984

1 - Trina Robbins' "Queenie Hart" is so. Good. Will have to start reading more Trina Robbins.

2 - Steve Leialoha's "Corrective Surgery" was really weird, and beautiful, and off-putting, and great.

I'm going, it seems, to have to track down the rest of the series. These last few days of comics have been some really wonderful science fiction, and that's not one of my favourite genres to read. But these stories are, importantly, very varied. I never feel like I'm reading an entire anthology book of the same story over and over again. Some are funny, some are serious, and some are just weird. It's easy to see how something like Vortex grows out of the undergrounds, and publications like Andromeda. In some ways it's like the undergrounds "genre-fied" in the late 70s. Something like this title, or Andromeda, are the science fiction bastions, the sex of the undergrounds is focussed in the adult comic industry, publishers like Fantagraphics give a home to the more literary parts of the underground.

Having these kinds of specific venues for specific genres is great, but there's also something to be said for genres feeding off one another, and that's something that is lost in this diversification. Or, at the very least, it's something that becomes more muted.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1283: Vortex #5, September 1983

How about we read some independent Canadian science fiction from the early 80s?

Okay.

Vortex is a cool series. Beside the fact that so many big names cut their teeth here (Ty Templeton and Ken Steacy in this issue alone), the stories are thoughtful and entertaining, well-written and well-illustrated. The addition of ads for the comic shops I used to frequent as a young one is a lovely pinch of nostalgia added to a satisfying read.

In today's issue, the standout story for me was "T-Wreks" by Ken Steacy. The cover up there does a nice job of emblematizing the tale, and the story itself spoke to a younger version of me that had very similar fantasies as the narrator of this story. I still see construction vehicles as stand-ins for dinosaurs. And when I finally learned to drive one, it was just like what driving a dinosaur would be like. Well, it was to me.

I'm going to stick with this series, and with some of the others published by the similarly-titled publisher. I anticipate enjoying them a great deal.

More to come...