Collect This Now!
Collect This Now! | Sweatshop
You know what would make a great Christmas present? A publisher announcing they’re going to collect this great, lamentably short-lived series.
- December 23, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect this now! | 1963
Mystery Incorporated
You knew we were going to get to this series sooner or later, right?
- November 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! | Mack White’s Villa of the Mysteries
Villa of the Mysteries #2
CIA conspiracies. Carny shows. Obscure pagan rituals. Snake handlers. Brainwashed assassins. Nudist nuns. Roman gods. Psychedelic western landscapes. Very short men with very, very large penises.
Such are the essential elements found in the comics of Mack White, who, for the past couple of decades, has created some of the most bizarre, paranoid and succulently pulpish comics around.
- October 10, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Collect this now: The Gargoyle
So does anyone out there remember the Gargoyle?
I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. Even in an era where every comic character is allegedly somebody’s favorite, and even though he put in a couple of appearances in various Civil War: The Initiative books, it’s not like the Gargoyle has that huge of a fan base.
(By the way, just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about this character. Or this one.)
- August 19, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect this now! The New Adventures of Hitler
The New Adventures of Hitler
The imminent arrival of Flex Mentallo — a comic book few old-school Vertigo readers (myself included) ever expected to see collected in a fancy-dress trade — has heartened Grant Morrison fans and lovers of lost comic causes everywhere. If that comic can finally see the day, perhaps there’s hope for all sorts of beloved but forelorn projects. With that in mind then, let me present to you another Grant Morrison comic that has lingered unfairly in obscurity ever since its The New Adventures of Hitler.
Lest you think that title is some sort of ironic joke or that the book doesn’t actually involve the person mentioned in the title, much in the same way Joyce’s Ulysses isn’t about the Greek hero (at least not on the surface) let me assure you, this is a comic book about the Adolf Hiter.
- July 15, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now: Jack Cole’s Plastic Man
I know what you’re thinking. “Didn’t DC already collect Jack Cole’s run on Plastic Man?” The answer is well, sort of.
- March 11, 2011 @ 10:30 AM by Chris Mautner
Collect this now! Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries
Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries
One of the first casualties in what became the bottoming out of the American manga market was CPM, also known as Central Park Media. A multimedia company known for releasing such fan-favorite anime like MD Geist and the tentacle porn extravaganza Urotsukidoji. Having dipped their toe into the manga waters in the mid-2000s, the line released a host of titles like Plastic Little and Geobreeders, as well as a host of yaoi books through their Be Beautiful line. The whole thing — well, the whole manga thing — came crashing down around 2005-6 when the company discontinued their the line. The rest of the company slowly imploded and eventually went bankrupt in 2009.
Whenever any publishing company like this goes belly up, there are a number of planned and promised titles that never get to see the light of day, and CPM was no exception. The most egregious manga of theirs that never saw the light of day, and one that many serious manga fans were anticipating, is today’s CTN pick, Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries by Kiriko Nananan.
- November 19, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Six by 6 Now | Six horror manga that need to be translated
'Fourteen' by Kazuo Umezu
Horror comics fans have plenty of material to choose from when looking for a good, scary read this Halloween. Even if we just confine ourselves to manga (since, as we all know, the Japanese cartoonists excel at scaring the pants off their readers), there are plenty of options, from grand guginol pieces like MDP-Psycho or Ultra Gash Inferno, to more traditional, semi-bloody, spooky fare like Presents or Mail. Still, there are plenty of great, terrifying, mind-blowing manga that would delight the hardcore American horrorist if only some enterprising publisher would make an attempt at publishing them. Here are just six titles that I’d like to see translated and released in book form some time in the near future:
(Note: A potentially NSFW image lurks beneath the jump)
- October 29, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! The Shadow
Shadow #9
In my debut CTN column, I raved about Justice Inc., a two-part prestige format series DC put out in the late 1980s, written by Andrew Helfer and drawn by Kyle Baker. The book starred a long-forgotten pulp hero known as the Avenger. That comic was actually a spin-off of another comic Helfer and Baker were doing at the time, which was also based off of a pulp hero, although in his case he was far from forgotten. I’m talking, of course, about The Shadow.
- October 15, 2010 @ 12:30 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! The Complete Carl Barks
Someone please explain to me why, in this golden age of reprints, when every 20th century cartoonist under the sun and their dog is getting the lavish, fancy-shmancy book collection treatment, do we still not have a decent, definitive collection of Carl Barks’ work?
- June 18, 2010 @ 01:15 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! | Skin
Even though we live in a golden age of reprints, there are still deserving comics that, for one reason or another, fail to get collected, translated, or reprinted in nice, shiny, new books. This monthly column is dedicated to those books that, we feel, need another round in the spotlight.
The welcome return of artist Brendan McCarthy to the world of comical books with Spider-Man: Fever got me thinking about how most of the comics he’s done (mostly with Collect This Now’s patron saint Peter Milligan) are sadly out of print. That’s a shame, as his bibliography contains a lot of great work that deserves re-examination, including Rogan Gosh, Paradax and the topic of today’s column, Skin.
One of the more interesting things about Skin actually is that it had a bit of trouble getting published initially. Originally Skin was supposed to be published in 1990 in Crisis, a spin-off of the classic British anthology series 2000 AD. The printers refused to handle it, and the publisher got cold feet, and it didn’t end up seeing the light of day until 1992, when Kevin Eastman’s Tundra press released it with little fanfare.
What made so many of these fine folks reluctant to print the comic? Well, for one thing, it could have been the subject matter. You see, Skin is about a Thalidomide baby. More specifically, it’s about a Thalidomide kid who’s a skinhead, has sex with hippies and eventually ends up getting revenge on the people who made the drug by going after them with an ax. (oops, spoilers!)
- April 16, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! The short stories of Al Columbia
From Columbia's 'Amnesia'
Perhaps it’s because we tend to think of it as a very narrowly defined genre with certain expectations and limitations, but generally when we hear the term “horror comics” we tend to think of Tales From the Crypt or The Walking Dead and not so much anything from the art comix crowd.
And yet I hope it’s no slam against Al Feldstein or Robert Kirkman if I say that within the indie scene a number of talented cartoonists have produced some brilliant and truly terrifying work. Josh Simmons, for example, has been steadily building an impressive repertoire of horror-based work with books like House. Certainly Hans Rickheit’s surreal/grotestque The Squirrel Machine falls more easily under the “horror” label than just about any other.
But there’s one alt/indie cartoonist whose work stands head and shoulders above everyone else in the “ye gods, that’s frightening department.” Although he hasn’t produced (or at least published) a huge body of work, what has been released over the past fifteen years has been of such stellar, nightmarish quality as to astound readers lucky enough to stumble on it and influence a number of artists. I’m speaking of Al Columbia.
(Note: Disturbing images and swear words lurk below the jump. You’ve been warned.)
- October 26, 2009 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! Nuts
This weekend is the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. One of the featured guests at this year’s expo is Gahan Wilson, considered by many to be one of the finest gag cartoonists alive today.
Wilson is going to be at the show to promote the massive, three-volume collection of Playboy cartoons that Fantagraphics is going to be publishing later this year. That’s an amazing, praise-worthy collection project, but while I don’t want to appear greedy, there is one other comic of Wilson’s I’d like to see collected.
- September 22, 2009 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! Cromartie High School
The slow, sad beak-up/implosion of ADV depressed me to no end, since it meant that two of my favorite manga series were going the way of the dodo, possibly never to be in print or completed again (yes, it is in fact all about me and my sense of entitlement).
Yen Press picked up the ball with one of those series, the charming Yotsuba, which I believe hits stores this week.
But there’s another great manga that Yen or some other still thriving publisher would do well to get the North American publishing rights for. I’m speaking, of course, about Cromartie High School.
- September 8, 2009 @ 02:30 PM by Chris Mautner
Collect This Now! | Soldier X
When Chris Mautner asked if I’d be willing to take a crack at writing the “Collect This Now!” column during my guest-blogging stint, I said yes precisely because of this book. And when I informed him of my intentions, he said he was glad, because Marvel hadn’t yet been tackled in the column.
This stands to reason, given that we’re now seven years or so deep into Marvel’s “collect-everything-we-publish” plan — what’s left to collect? The answer is Soldier X. Written by Darko Macan and illustrated by Igor Kordey, this short-lived, Cable-starring series is wild, weird and wonderful, even by the far-out standards of the late Bill Jemas era. That’s probably what dooms it to TPB-less obscurity, but it’s also why I’m still so fond of it.
- September 2, 2009 @ 08:48 AM by Sean T. Collins