You know what would make a great Christmas present? A publisher announcing they’re going to collect this great, lamentably short-lived series.

In 2003, after Yeah!, his all-ages series with Gilbert Hernandez, was canceled and the one-shot Spider-Man comic for Marvel came and went, Peter Bagge attempted one more volley in the world of mainstream publishing with Sweatshop, a monthly series that covered the trials and travails of a hapless group of worn-down cartoonists who worked as “interns” for Mel Bowling, creator of the sub-par daily newspaper strip Freddy Ferrett.

A lot of familiar Bagge archetypes reside in this comic. Bowling is clearly created in the Brad Bradley/Murray Wilson category of reactionary, loudmouth father figures, someone more eager to share his opinion than listen to someone else’s. The cast is further rounded out by Mel’s long-suffering, pushover sister Millie; the constantly grousing, put-upon Nick; the nerdy Alfred, who dreams of superhero glory; and Carrie the sweet, ever-optimistic indie girl.

Setting his story within the confines of the comics industry may seem like navel gazing at first glance, but Bagge avoids easy jokes about comic conventions and smelly, socially awkward fans to offer a narrower, more sharply observed satire. He gets to mock various styles of comics by running one-page samples of the interns self-published work for example. It also allows him to poke some gentle fun at well-established figures like Neil Gaiman (who gets his pants set on fire) and Patrick McDonnell (who gets an award shoved down his throat).

Bagge’s writing is in fine form here; the charcters are broad enough to allow for a good bit of slapstick and bug-eyed reactions, but sharply drawn enough to seem more like individuals than types. Even better, Bagge brought in a bunch of his friends and compatriots from the alt-comics world to help him work on the comic,  including Johnny Ryan, Stephan DeStefano, Stephanie Gladden and Bill Wray.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t last very long. Sweatshop failed to pick up much of an audience, DC didn’t market it well and the series was cancelled after the sixth issue. With Fantagraphics releasing the collected edition of Yeah! earlier this year, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope that Groth and company — or some other publisher, I’m not picky — will attempt to collect this series into a slim trade paperback. While back issues are easy enough to find, it would be nice to have the entire thing sitting in one volume on the bookshelf.

Mystery Incorporated

You knew we were going to get to this series sooner or later, right?

Horus

After Big Numbers, Alan Moore’s other big uncompleted work (yes, there’s more than one) is arguably 1963, a six-issue homage/parody/pastiche of classic Silver Age Marvel Comics he did under the Image Comics umbrella back in 1993 with Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette.

As you’d expect, the superheroes that graced these covers and stories bore arch similarities to those created by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. Mystery Incorporated, for example, is the Fantastic Four with slightly different powers. The Fury serves as an analogue for Spider-Man, right down to ever-present angst. U.S.A. is Captain America, Horus is Thor, and so forth and so on.

But Moore and company were not content to merely ape the characters; 1963 mimics the tone and style of early Marvel comics with an almost unerring accuracy at times, from the soap opera romantic subplots, to the fretting over the red menace of communism to the Irish cop stereotypes. The creators even produced phony letters page and ads. Moore even mimicked Lee’s hucksterism, urging readers at one point to go out and buy his book, How I Created Everything All By Myself and Why I Am Great.

As the title of that book might suggest, 1963 was full of sly humor and winking nods to not only Marvel but the comics industry and American culture in general. The Doctor Strange character, for example, is flummoxed by a woman from the future’s PC doublespeak. The Tomorrow Syndicate’s voyage into hyperspace has loads of references to indie comics characters. Moore even breaks the fourth wall as the mysterious villain in the Hypernaut’s adventure is able to literally turning the panel in order to gain the upper hand.

From Tales of the Uncanny

The series is also notable for the number of talented folks that helped produce it. In addition to Moore, Bissette and Veitch, it featured the work of Don Simpson, John Totleben, Dave Gibbons, Jim Valentino and, yes, even Chester Brown himself (on the Hypernaut tale).

1963 was supposed to culminate in an “Annual” issue that would feature a showdown between the Image characters and the 1963 group, providing a sort of compare/contrast commentary on the superhero comics of yesteryear and those of the then “modern” 1990s. Jim Lee was supposed to draw the issue, but decided to take a sabbatical instead. By the time he came back, Rob Liefield was out, and things were starting to fall apart. Moore found himself drawn to working on other Image comics like WildCats and what would eventually become his ABC line.

The final panel from Tomorrow Syndicate

Things got more acrimonious in 1996 when Moore cut off all contact with Bissette, apparently regarding something the Swamp Thing artist said or revealed during a lengthy interview in the Comics Journal. In 1998 Moore, Veitch and Bissette split up the rights to the various cast members, with Bissette walking away with the Hypernaut and a few other characters.

Even then, attempts were made to collect and finish 1963. In a big two-part interview for CBR, Bissette discussed a number of attempts by the three parties, even with Bissette and Moore avoiding any direct contact ,only for things to fall apart time and again. At this point it seems like there’s little to no chance the original series will ever be collected, although Bisette has announced plans to spin off his characters into their own adventures, to be published by About Comics. It seems a shame. Although certainly one of the minor works for all three creators, 1963 remains a bonafide hoot and could easily be appreciated by a new batch of readers.

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.

Born and raised in Texas, Mack’s comics are infused with the Lone Star state’s own unique blend of rugged individualism and suspicion of authority. Though seemingly distrustful of organized religion, his comics are infused with the subject matter, though he seems more interested in the Gnostic side of things, focusing on ancient sects that didn’t quite make it, and especially on modern religion’s antecedents in Roman and pagan mythology and rituals, especially those that involve making the beast with two backs. Dionysus pops up frequently and Jungian archetypes abound.

Hand in hand with that is White’s interest in conspiracy stories, be it JFK, Lennon, Waco, the Illuminati or just general government cover-ups. Nothing is what it seems in White’s world. Every business is a potential front, every person can be a shadowy government operative or double-agent (even the innocent-seeming protagonist) and the apocalypse — sometimes beneficial, sometimes menacing — is always just around the corner.

Heavily influenced by the classic underground comics era of the 1960s, yet drawn in a style that strongly evokes EC, White’s comics are, in case you were wondering, often (but not always) a bit tongue in cheek. Part of the pleasure of his work is trying to figure out just how seriously we’re supposed to take it. His story “This Is MK-Ultra Baby,” about a rock star named Dion who returns home to settle some old scores only to find himself at the center of a global conspiracy, is just presented in just sly enough fashion to suggest that White is pulling our leg a bit. That’s not the case however, with “Cindy the Tattooed School Teacher,” a rather harrowing tale about a mysterious woman who takes over a small, backwoods church with an eye on obtaining a much larger parish. It’s played completely straight and has an eerie, unsettling overtones toward the Branch Davidians and other religious cults.

After appearing in numerous anthologies (and releasing the sitcom meets freakshow one-off, Mutant Book of the Dead), Fantagraphics gave White the shot at his own seriesin the ’90s, Villa of the Mysteries, where the above-mentioned stories can be found. Sadly, it only lasted three issues. Villa was one of the first alt-comics to fall to changing tastes in the periodical format and was canceled, along with a few other comics like Walt Holcombe’s Poot. However, while Holcombe’s work has been collected, White’s hasn’t. He’s kept busy, and can be found in anthologies like Hotwire and The Bush Junta. But I’d like to see the bulk of White’s work, Villa and more, combined into a book. Certainly there are enough conspiracy junkies out there willing to pick up a copy.

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.)

Anyway, the Gargoyle was a C-list character on a C-list team, better known as The New Defenders (though he was also a member of the old Defenders for a while). Created by writer J.M. DeMatteis and artist Don Perlin, the Gargoyle was an elderly man, a.k.a. Isaac Christians, who was trapped in the body of a monster; an inadvertent superhero who, despite his ability to fire “bio-mystical” energy bolts,  seemed more interested in trying to work things out through a healthy discussion rather than fight. It was no doubt many of these aspects that kept the character from gaining wider readership, but those same traits endeared him to me.

Obviously DeMatteis was a fan of the character as well, since, after passing the Defenders torch on to Peter B. Gillis, he wrote a four-issue miniseries delving into the Gargoyle’s back story, with art by Mark Badger.

Now, a bit of a confession is in order. At the time, I was a huge fan of DeMatteis’ work. I mean huge. To my 14-year-old self Moonshadow was on a par not only with Maus or Watchmen but Vonnegut. Blood: A Tale was nothing less than genius. To say he was an influence on my writing would be an understatement.

I’ve since tempered my love a bit. As the years wore on DeMatteis’ tics (the constant asides, the overwriting, the New Age spiritualism, the over-the-top sincerity that often spilled into sentimentalism) became more obvious, pronounced and … irksome to me. All that being said, I still look upon his best work (Brooklyn Dreams, the aforementioned Moonshadow) with fondness, and if Gargoyle doesn’t quite measure up to those works, it — like a lot of DeMatteis’ writing at the time — helped shape my teen-age sensibilities and interest in comics as much as Little Nemo or Peanuts did.

The miniseries has Christians coming a cropper of the original Gargoyle, whose spirit is now housed in Christians’ human body. Christians switches bodies with him, largely in the hopes of re-connecting with the spirit of his long-lost (and recently deceased) love Elaine. Of course, the original Gargoyle was pulling a double-cross all along, and it’s up to Christians and a centuries-old druid to stop the monster from turning humanity into a bunch of weird-looking pagans. Along the way there are lots and lots of flashbacks into Christians’ past as we learn about the guilt and shame that drives him, along with his need for closure with Elaine (confronting his inner “demons” as it were).

Honestly, it’s all a very emo affair, but one of the things that makes the comic work for me is Badger’s art. Never a conventional Marvel artist, Badger’s style eventually verged about as close to abstraction in works like The Score, the Martian Manhunter mini-series (another collaboration with DeMatteis) and Instant Piano, and still tell a story. Here he’s just representational enough to keep from annoying the fan boys. When dealing with the interpersonal relationships, Badger keeps things relatively normal. But whenever the action starts, Badger lets his panels literally explode in a variety of Ditko-esque swirls, slashes, zig-zags and diagonal lines. It’s rather thrilling stuff and makes me wish that mainstream comics had been more encouraging to idiosyncratic artists like Badger.

If I’m being honest, there’s a strong nostalgic drive on my part in wanting to see this series (which, as far as I know, has never, ever been collected) reprinted in a trade. Despite its flaws, however, I like to think Gargoyle holds up rather well, both in the art and story department and deserves a closer re-examination.

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.

New Adventures of Hitler

Morrison’s story is based on a (extremely dubious) claim made by Adolf Hitler’s sister-in-law Bridget Dowling that the future leader of the Third Reich had lived with her, her husband, Alois, and their young son in Liverpool, England, for a brief time between 1912 and 1913. Morrison’s story runs with that premise and imagines a shiftless and down on his luck Adolf roaming through the Liverpool streets, consulting with fortune tellers and generally embarrassing his family, who consider him a slacker doomed to forever sponge off relatives while dreaming of grandeur.

Now, lest you have any fears at this point that Morrison portrays Hitler in anything resembling a sympathetic manner, allow me to put them to rest. The Hitler portrayed here is little more than a hallucinating (early on in the story he opens his closet to find Morrissey there singing “Heaven Knows I”m Miserable Now”) madman and buffoon, albeit a dangerous one since, for all his bizarre behavior and paranoia, he quickly grows to understand how to best exploit people’s basic needs and fears in order to serve his own mania for power and make the world fit his view of how things should be. No, this story is not some awkward attempt to “understand” the most hated man in the world but more of a warning to modern readers about how Hitler was one man in a long line of certain types of people are always ready to take advantage of the rest of us if we allow them to.

The political allusions are obvious and somewhat ham-fisted. At one point, for instance, a giant image of Margaret Thatcher peers through a window as John Bull, the British version of Uncle Sam, tells Hitler how the country needs a “mad, vicious bitch in the driving seat.” But if Morrison’s text stumbles on occasion, Steve Yeowell’s surreal art is more than ready to do the heavy lifting. While alternating between a basic four and six-panel grid, Yeowell, along with colorists Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle, fill this universe with an almost-oppressive psychedelic design that only serves to heighten the surreal atmosphere. Bright paisley and garishly flowery wallpaper overwhelm the rooms to the point where they run over the furniture and even at times the people. Brown and grey watercolor washes sweep across the panel allowing for not a single bit of vibrancy. It is one of the most original and stunning coloring jobs I’ve ever encountered in a comic.

Hitler was serialized twice in the U.K. back in 1989 and 1990 but has never been collected since and it’s not too hard to figure out why. The comic initially ran in a Scottish comics magazine entitled Cut, where it immediately got into trouble as one of the editors threatened to quit and national tabloids swooped in to cover the controversy. It then ran in the U.K. comics magazine Crisis (a spin off of the ever-popular 2000 AD anthology magazine) in issues 46-47, where it almost immediately garnered controversy again, as people falsely accused Morrison of either using the Holocaust and Hitler to garner attention or, worse, being a neo-Nazi.

Neither is true of course. While The New Adventures of Hitler may not be as exemplary a work as Flex Mentallo, it remains a compelling, fascinating and occasionally disturbing read, a fine example of Morrison’s early work, with hints of the sort of material he’d explore in books like Doom Patrol and The Invisibles. Up till now the only way to read this comic was to either try to track down old issues of Crisis or download a pirated version. I ended up taking the latter route, but I’d prefer and gladly pay money to get my hands on a collected edition.

I know what you’re thinking. “Didn’t DC already collect Jack Cole’s run on Plastic Man?” The answer is well, sort of.

For those who don’t know, Jack Cole is considered one of the true greats of the Golden Age era, alongside folk like Will Eisner and Jack Kirby, and with good reason. After spending a number of years at Lev Gleason’s studio on characters like The Claw and the original, boomerang-throwing Daredevil, he created the rubbery, shape-shifting superhero in 1941 for Quality Comics.

Though it started out as a somewhat conventional superhero comic (albeit it rather gruesome as villains met some rather ugly ends), it rather quickly became one of the most visually inventive and utterly dynamic comics on the stands. Influenced no doubt by his friend and occasional boss Eisner, Cole constantly switched up his page layouts, and filled Plas’ world with a host of garish, cartoonish caricatures that would give the cast of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy a run for their money in the ugly department.

He left the series in 1954  for the more lucrative career of gag cartooning for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and, eventually Playboy. Plastic Man limped along without him until 1956, when his comics were finally cancelled. In 1958 Cole got the much envied spot on the newspaper funnies pages with his fitfully amusing family comic strip Betsy and Me. It only lasted a few months, however, as Cole — for reasons that are still a mystery — committed suicide soon thereafter.

So much for the history lesson. Since his passing, Cole’s stature has only grown, but attempts to collect his work has been fitful at best. Fantagraphics has put out books collecting the Betsy strip and some of his pin-up art, but the most comprehensive attempt so far has been from DC, which, starting in 1998, collected his influential run of Plas stories as part of their ultra-hardcover DC Archives line.

Unfortunately, they only got as far  as Volume 8, whether because of poor sales or due to a corporate decision to rethink the whole Archives line is unclear (at least to me). To make matters worse, that final volume ends in April of 1948, leaving a good six years of material uncollected, much of it featuring some of Cole’s best work on the title, when he was at his zaniest and most unrestrained. Later sories like “Sadly Sadly” and “The Plague of Plastic People” feature Cole at his most manic and in many ways hint at the sort of shenanigans Harvey Kurtzman would soon get up to in Mad.

The DC Archive line has been roundly criticized for its garish coloring and scan quality, a criticism I can understand (the stories vary in quality from crisp and lovely to blurry and indistinct), though ultimately it doesn’t bother me as much as I imagine it does some of the more devout historians.

So, since I’ve got those first set of volumes and would hate to break up the set, I guess what I’d like to see is DC finish what they started and complete their Plastic Man run, though preferably in a somewhat more affordable, less high-glossy format. Barring that though, even a simple “Best of Plastic Man” collection would be greatly appreciated. Moreover, let’s bug Hugh Hefner to release a definitive collection of Cole’s Playboy work, and have someone collect all those Daredevil and other stories Cole did. In this alleged golden age of reprints, Cole has been ill-served and it’s about time someone – especially DC — rectified that situation.

For more information about Jack Cole and his work, visit the Cole’s Comics blog.

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.

Nananan’s work is not completely unknown to North American manga readers. A couple of her short stories have appeared in two seminal “alternative” manga anthologies: Viz’s Secret Comics Japan, and Fantagraphics’ Sake Jock. More significantly, the “nouvelle manga” publisher Fanfare/Ponent Mon published her one-volume tale Blue, about a lesbian affair that develops between two schoolgirls, way back in 2004.

Remember to read right to left

Like many josei (or adult women’s) manga, Nananan’s work focuses on urban, single women looking for love, friendship and success. What distinguishes her from most of her colleagues (at least the ones that have been published on these shores) is her acute realism, eye for small details and knack for understatement. At first glance, her work can seem deceptively placid and almost inert, but a closer reading quickly reveals the raw, painful emotions that lie just under the surface.

Also known as Strawberry Shortcakes, Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries is the tale of four young, single women living in Tokyo: Touko and Chihiro — both roommates — and Akiyo and Suzuki. The book jumps back and forth between the four ladies’ lives which, except for the two roommates, don’t have much to do with each other on the surface. What the quartet all share, however, is a desperate, almost existential loneliness and a hungry longing for love and acceptance. Touko, coming off of a bad break-up, is an overworked, bulimic shut-in. Chihiro is an overager country girl looking to prove herself in the big city but suffering from a terrible insecurity. Suzuki is stuck in a dull existence, eager to find Mr. Right, but unwilling or unable to initiate any forward momentum in her love life. Akiyo is a call girl, passionately in love with a former childhood friend but terrified to reveal it for fear of rejection.

Nananan tells all of these stories in her usual minimalist style. Her razor-thin line never does more than delineate forms, any sort of cross-hatching or shading is completely verboten. Only the occasional greytone is used to suggest depth and solidity. She rarely draws her characters facing the reader head-on or in full body poses, preferring to offer tight profile close-ups, only to quickly cut to their feet or an unoccupied corner of the room, as though after putting them through their paces she can’t bear to watch her characters suffer. Indeed, many sequences frequently interpose large all-white or all-black panels where the characters reveal their innermost longings, as though what they have to say is too raw and hurtful to be revealed and has to be separated from the actual story.

All of this merely serves to accentuate the cast’s emotional fragility, heighten the tension and give greater gravitas to seemingly minor moments. When Akiyo, for example, stumbles her foot across a bottle of nail polish in her would-be lover’s room it’s a horrible, shocking moment, because we and she realize that her friend already has a lover, and that he’s not interested in her in that way.

Sweet Cream isn’t a perfect book — Suzuki’s stasis seems paltry compared to the emotional anguish the other three women go through and the book feels uneven as a result — but it remains an affecting, at times devastating examination of the isolation and emotional desolation that modern women go through. Some aspiring manga publisher (perhaps Fanfare? Viz? Fantagraphics?) needs to take it upon themselves to ensure that this book, as well as Nananan’s other works, finally reaches an American audience.

Note: The images are taken from a photocopied version of the book sent to me by CPM way back when they initially planned on publishing it. As far as I know, it’s one of the only versions — perhaps the only version — of the book in English to date.

'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)

Chicken George, from 'Fourteen'

1) Fourteen by Kazuo Umezu. Umezu is regarded by many both here and in Japan as the king of horror manga, and with good reason. Few cartoonists are willing to work on such a primal, surreal level and pull as few punches as he does. His masterwork, The Drifting Classroom, still packs a visceral wallop even after repeated readings.

There’s been quite a bit of Umezu published in North America recently (Classroom, Cat-Eyed Boy, etc.), but not nearly enough to suit my tastes. Manga like My Name is Shingo and Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil remain unfairly ignored by folks like Viz. The one Umezu series I’m aching to see translated however is his last work Fourteen, (Umezu retired from manga after completing it). Fourteen is about nothing less than the complete and utter end of the world, brought about in large part by man’s utter disregard for the planet, but also by a mad scientist with a chicken head. Set in the year 2121, when pollution runs rampant and the planet is far too overpopulated, a hybrid man/chicken embryo grows out of a vat of bio-engineered foodstuffs. Calling himself Chicken George he vows revenge on all of humanity for their ecological crimes and starts by letting loose a zoo of deformed animals on a group of children and families. From there it gets really weird, as mankind suffers from insect attacks, volcano eruptions, birth defects, kids with green hair, toxic waste and air so bad that it melts people’s faces off. Epic in just about every sense of the word, Fourteen is Umezu at his most unrestrained, brutal and downright crazy. No doubt this fact bars some publishers from attempting to publish it, but a comic this insane and eerie deserves to be shared with Western horror  fans, if only to soak in the scene where the professional wrestlers that rip each other’s hearts out while in the ring before one sodomizes the other?

2) Museum of Terror by Junji Ito. Ito is no stranger to American readers, as his books Uzumaki and Gyo remain easily available in stores and are mentioned whenever the subject of horror manga creeps up. Dark Horse even put out a couple of volumes of his Museum of Terror series a few years ago, which collects all the various short stories he’s done over the years (the first two are especially notable as they contain the utterly creepy “Tomie” series). However, they stopped rather abruptly at Vol. 3, completely neglecting at least seven or so other volumes in this series. That seems almost criminal to me as Ito is truly one of the horror greats (his story “The Bully” in Vol. 3 remains one of the most deeply unsettling comics I’ve ever read). Certainly the popularity of books like Uzumaki would suggest that more of his work would find a receptive audience here.

3) Neo Faust by Osamu Tezuka. As the title suggests, Neo Faust, one of Tezuka’s last, and sadly unfinished, works, is a modern retelling of the classic Faust story of a man selling his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge. Here, a scientist on the verge of suicide is given a chance at a new life by a strange sorceress. Accepting her offer, he is thrown back several decades to 1958, transformed into a handsome young man, and given amnesia. From there he sets on a path of dark decadence and degradation, as he attempts to create life itself in the most Frankenstein-like manner possible. The little birds on my shoulder tell me that even unfinished it remains one of Tezuka’s darkest and most gruesome stories ever, which makes me all the more curious to check it out.

From 'Nijigahara Holograph' (remember, read right to left)

4) Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano. Asano is probably best known on these shores for his twenty-something slice of life manga Solanin. But many in the know claim that Holograph is his best work to date. A psychological horror story featuring a cast of deeply disturbed characters who interact with each other over the course of a decade (and presented out of chronological order) , Holograph features “attempted rapes, murders, extortion, sexual deviance, and a freakish explosion in the butterfly population,” according to Mangascreener. It’s surreal nature combined with sharp character observations have won plaudits from those who have read it. The fact that it’s already easily available in scantillation form makes it seem like a perfect candidate for publication.

From 'Ashura'

5) Ashura by George Akiyama. Set in medieval Japan during a terrible famine, Ashura caused a stir when it was first published in 1970 for its depiction of cannibalism, most notably in its opening sequence, where the title character’s mother, in a fit of hunger-induced madness, attempts to eat her progeny by throwing him on the fire. That scene alone got it banned in many prefectures. The series’ blend of black, cartoonish humor and stark horror and seems perfectly aligned for modern sensibilities. Hopefully that, along with the fact that Toei announced earlier this year that it plans on adapting the work into anime, will inspire an American publisher to take a chance on it.

6) Garden by Usamaru Furuya. Not every story in this anthology by the author of Short Cuts qualifies as horror per se, but I’m including it here because of the final story, “Emi-chan,” which, according to Adam Stephanides, takes up about half of the book. Split into a series of 16-page chapters, the story is starts with a young teen-age girl who comes across a dangerous murderer and sexual deviant in a dark forest and takes off from there, apparently getting more grisly with each chapter.

The catch is that each 16-page chapter is sealed shut, so that you literally have to take a knife to the book in order to find out what happens next. It’s this inspired bit of interactive formalism, forcing the reader to become complicit in the increasingly grim story, that makes me add this to my list. The story’s graphic nature and the fact that it involves sexual abuse of underage girls more than likely means that no American publisher would dare touch it. Still, one can always hope there someone out there willing to take that risk.

Thanks to Joe “Jog” McCulloch, Ryan Sands, David Welsh, Matt Brady and everyone else who recommended titles to me. Your help was much appreciated.

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.

On the off chance you may not be familiar with the Shadow I’ll provide a quick synopsis. His origin varies (and has been altered numerous times over the years) but basically he’s a rich socialite who garnered the ability in some far-off, mystical Eastern land to “cloud men’s minds” and turn invisible. He doffs a black trench coat and hat (along with natty red scarf) to fight crime, which he mainly does by repeatedly shooting at them until they’re dead. He’s mainly known for saying stuff like “the weed of crime bears bitter fruit” and cackling maniacally. Oh, and he often employs a vast array of agents to help him in his efforts to slaughter criminals. (And if you really want to know more I recommend turning to Wikipedia at this point.)

Anyway, there’s been a number of attempts to get revive the character, especially in comics. The specific Shadow series that I’m talking about today though was actually a spin-off of a four-part mini-series by Howard Chaykin. Rather than attempt to tell tales set in the classic pulp era of the 1930s, Chaykin tried to bring the character into modern times in his own indomitable fashion. Namely, he handed him an uzi, added plentiful dollops of sex, kink and blood, threw in some sharp social commentary and was off to the races.

Blood & Judgement (as the collected version was called) was popular enough to warrant a monthly title, but Chaykin apparently wasn’t interested in being tied down, there were other DC characters that needed revamping. Enter writer/editor Helfer, who would eventually helm DC’s Paradox Press line, as well as edit the “bwah hah hah” era of the Justice League. Helfer was initially joined by then-hotsy-totsy-artist-of-the-day Bill Sienkiewicz, who, like Chaykin, found a way to offer his own unique interpretation of the character without going too far beyond the boundaries of “Shadowness.”

Already things were a bit off-kilter though. Not content with the new cast of characters Chaykin had whipped up, Helfter added a few of his own, many of whom, like Twitchkowitz, a nervous, nerdish fellow with a passion for pharmaceuticals, seemed bizarre even by Blood & Judgement’s standards. Helfer didn’t seem to have much interest exploring the Shadow’s character or ethos the  way Chaykin did either. All of the sex stuff got dumped immediately. And while no one would ever accuse Chaykin of lacking a sense of humor, Helfer seemed at times seemed more interested in delivering a good joke than in delivering classic pulp thrills.

Those aspects would become much more pronounced once Kyle Baker took over the art chores in issue number eight:

Baker was pretty new to the comics scene when he started on the Shadow. Seminal works like Why I Hate Saturn were still down the pike. He had completed The Cowboy Wally Show, but Doubleday wouldn’t release that for several months yet. So for many comics readers Shadow was their first introduction to Baker’s work, and it would give them the opportunity to see him grow as an artist as well.

It became clear pretty quickly that neither Helfer nor Baker felt any reverence for the Shadow or his milieu. Indeed, he quickly became portrayed as something of a psychopath, little different from many of the villains he fought, and often treating his minions like trash. And while bullets were still fired in abundance and blood flowed freely, the series itself turned from high, action packed (while slightly campy) melodrama into something of a black comedy, a dark, slapstick farce that not only mocked its protagonist, but just about everyone else in the cast — and the whole romantic notion of the anti-hero to boot. There’s very few identifiable or likable characters here, which perhaps, makes their interactions all the more amusing.

Baker stuck to a eight panel grid throughout his entire run on the series, cramming each panel with loads of detail and Mad magazine-like asides. He frequently alternated between drawing his characters in a realistic style and then reverting to cartoonish exaggeration, depending upon their emotional state. Baker was clearly going for the funny bone as much as he was the jugular. The cast often moved at 45 degree angles, their backs bent into a question-mark shape. Their tosos frequently seemed too large and square for their spindly legs and arms. They also all seemed to be wearing shoulder pads for some reason, but then again, it was 1988.

A master of facial expressions, Baker frequently offered tight close-ups that highlighted his gift for depicting enraged characters with their mouths open ten times their normal width and their clenched fists raised to the sky.

For his part, Helfer juggled increasingly loopy, labyrinthine plots that frequently seemed to take on (and subsequently murder) characters every issue. Despite it’s density, however, the stories never once seemed capable of tipping over into incomprehensibility or insufferability, even as they started including elements like an impossibly obese Irish women, a dangerous group of teenage video arcade junkies and a murderous gorilla.

The whole thing reached a fever pitch in issue number 19, in which the recently deceased Shadow was resurrected by having his head (which had been severed from its body by a helicopter blade of all things) mounted onto that of a cyborg body.

And that was the end. The series was canceled after that and DC tried again with The Shadow Strikes, a more tried and true title set during the Depression. The rumor mill continues to speculate that Shadow copyright owners Conde Nast didn’t like what Helfer and Baker were doing with their potential cash cow one bit and pulled the plug on the series as soon as possible. For his part, Baker has always maintained that the series was canceled due to poor sales and nothing more.

Whether it was poor sales or a unhappy copyright owner, the fact remains neither DC nor Conde Nast seem to be in that much of a hurry to get this material back out to the public. And that’s a real shame because even though back issues are cheap and not too hard to find, a trade collecting this work (and ideally, including Sinkiewicz’s run as well as the one issue drawn by Marshall Rogers) would, I think, bring about a new appreciation for what Helfer and Baker did. By refusing to be beholden to nostalgia or the then popular “grim and gritty” ethos, the two were able to create a manic, inspired and downright hilarious comic that is quite unlike anything that was being published at the time or has come down the pike since.

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?

It’s kind of frustrating and more than a bit confounding. Here is an artist who, if you believe all that’s been written about him (and there’s been quite a lot written about him over the years), was one of the finest and most influential storytellers to come out of the comics medium (despite, it should be noted, the fact that he was working on an already well-established licensed property). He is beloved the world over (that’s not hyperbole, he really is). He has had streets and asteroids named after him. Virtually every funny animal and all-ages comic (and beyond) that’s come down the pike since bears his mark. Certainly every Disney comic since then follows his basic blueprint. George Lucas and Steve Spielberg have cribbed from him. That whole DuckTales TV show was based on his stories.

One of his few contemporaries equal in stature, John Stanley, has been undergoing a renaissance of late thanks to handsome editions from Dark Horse and Drawn & Quarterly, but Barks remains, in my opinion, ill-used and ill-treated, at least in his home country, if not abroad.

It’s not as though attempts to collect his work haven’t been made before. The best known is probably the Carl Barks Library, published by the long-extinct Another Rainbow back in the 1980s. These enormous, slipcovered volumes collected Barks’ work in black and white. They were rather costly at the time and have become even more so now,  assuming you can actually track down a volume or two off of eBay they’re scarcer than hen’s teeth.

Gladstone attempted a more affordable version of the Library in the ’90s, this time in color. These were slim, comic book sized arranged according to the various titles Barks worked on (Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, etc.). At the time I found the series to be somewhat flimsy in appearance — I wanted something that would sit sturdily and nicely on my bookshelf. Now I’m sorry I didn’t attempt to collect them at the time, as they’ve since become, again, rare and gone up in price (though not completely unaffordable).

Since then, the only way to experience Barks’ work is through reprint anthologies. Gemstone, Steve Geppi’s publishing company, made a final go of things in 2006 with two volumes of The Greatest Duck Tales Stories, which reprinted Barks tales that the TV directly adapted from, before they lost the Disney license altogether. They’re decent enough books — a good intial primer for newbies and kids — but I’m looking for something more authoritative and definitive, that makes good use of modern printing technologies.

Really, what I’m looking for is something along the lines of The Collected Works of Carl Barks, a lavish series from Scandinavian publisher Egmont that was published a few years back in Europe. It contained every single story Barks did, even those where he only served as writer or artist, along with tons of supplementary material  Gemstone had plans to release an American version of the collection, but it never made it past the Amazon.com preorder stage, as Gemstone lost the Disney license soon after.

Egmont’s garish, overly-PhotoShoped coloring job has been widely criticized, but it still remains the shining city on a hill for North American Barks fans who would like to his work receive the treatment and respect it deserves. I don’t know why his work hasn’t been collected in such a fashion yet (I suspect there are legal reasons) but some publisher somewhere needs to get a new collection of Barks’ Duck stories out to he public and soon. He’s late enough to the party as it is.

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!)

I know what you’re thinking, but Skin takes place in a time before neo-Nazis basically took over the whole skinhead ethos, when they were more a group of young toughs who liked to shave their head rather than a bunch of racists. Their attitude — and the attitude of the book in general — is more punk rock than David Duke.

From 'Skin'

Now thalidomide, in case you don’t know, was a drug that was given as a sedative and all-around wonder drug until they realized it caused severe birth defects. It never was used much in the United States, thanks to the efforts of FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, but more than 10,000 children in Europe and elsewhere were born with deformities or other problems.

Martin Atchinson, the main character of Skin, is one such victim. Nicknamed Martin Atchet by his mates, Martin is possesses two useless arms, which he is very obviously self-conscious and upset about, but he tries not to let it prevent him from having a good time, which usually involves getting drunk and busting someone’s head open.

And, in case you haven’t guessed it by now, Skin isn’t some Hallmark tearjerker of the month where the victim is so noble that he inspires us all to better our lives. Martin’s a bit of a jerk, honestly, He gets into fights, is angry at everyone and everything around him and insults and attempts to molest the one girl who shows him some sympathy (she’s cross-eyed so she sort feels his pain you see).

From 'Skin'

This is an extremely short (only 48 pages) story and McCarthy and Milligan (along with Carol Swain, who provides the fantastic coloring job) don’t mess about too much with plot and character development. Just by the time you’re settling in and getting accustomed to Martin and his world, you’re at the denouement and the book’s over. As a result, Skin has feels more like a modern-day EC story than the sort of pre-Vertigo material that was popular at the time.

This is also an extremely angry work, and its brutality still carries something of a concussive force after all these years. Milligan’s prose, though it hurries along a bit too much, remains sharp and to the point and captures Martin and his milieu rather well.

The real reason to read Skin, however, is to drink in McCarthy’s visuals. Eschewing panel borders entirely, he lets the images flow into the other, with Swain’s psychedelic, at times gritty, color scheme giving the book an almost fable-like atmosphere. It’s a real tour-de-force performance and reminds me just how underrated and under appreciated McCarthy is by comics fans.

Looking at most modern mainstream comics today, where arms get pulled off with alarming frequency, little girls get crushed in collapsed buildings and Wolverine gets eaten alive by an inbred Hulk before clawing his way out of the brute’s body — all in luscious detail and full color — it seems odd that something like Skin would ever generate such trepidation among publishers. It was a simpler time I suppose, when it was thought that comics should just stick to happy thing and not concern itself with “serious” matters.

We know better now. Or at least we should. One way to show that we do would be to get this book out in the public once more.

My thanks to Joe McCulloch for loaning me his copy of the book.

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.)

Now is actually an excellent time to be talking about Al Columbia, as the mercurial cartoonist ahas not just one but two books coming out, from Fantagraphics and IDW respectively. Considering that his last solo outing was released in 1995 (that’s not counting various anthologies and the two-issue comic he did with Ethan Persoff, The Pogostick), one can be forgiven for saying it seems like the damn has broken.

Those who aren’t very familiar with Columbia’s work may know him best as the guy who “ruined” Big Numbers, the Alan Moore/Bill Sienkiewicz collaboration that was going to be the bee’s knees back in the heady days of 1990. Only 19 years old, Columbia was hired as Sienkiewicz’s assistant, and then ended up taking over the art on the project when Sienkiewicz opted to bow out after the second (or maybe third, it’s not really clear) issue. Columbia started working on the fourth issue, but due to pressure of production, the scope of the project and the realization he’d have to mimic his mentor’s art style for a considerable length of time, he had some sort of nervous breakdown, tore up the original art, and disappeared for a bit. Big Numbers was never finished.

At least, that’s one of the rumors. There are others floating around.

From 'Tar Frogs'

When Columbia did resurface, it was 1994, with the first issue (though, perhaps in a winking nod to Image, it was presented as “Issue 0″) of The Biologic Show. By this point, any lingering traces of Sienkiewicz’s style had faded into the background. Realism gave way to a cartoonish grotesquery. The stories collected in that first issue flow in a surreal, unsettling fashion, with a decided emphasis on mutilation, and vivisection.Eyes constantly leered. Teeth always seemed to be bared.

Not everything in that comic work, but the best entry by far was “Tar Frogs” a “Pim & Francie” story featuring two elfin children who come acropper of the mean old man next door. The story starts out with the boy dissecting a dog’s eye and only gets more unsettling from there. Influenced by filmmakers like David Lynch no doubt, “Tar Frog” doesn’t follow a overt narrative logic as it does shift from one bizarre episode to the next, each building upon the other in a nightmarish frenzy. Certainly it’s a useful story to read if you ever wanted to know why cartoon characters always wear those white gloves.

From 'Tar Frogs'

Columbia upped the ante with the next issue, No. 1, which featured Pim and Francie yet again (Columbia re-uses the same cast of characters, like the innocent fool Seymour Sunshine, constantly. They seem to inhabit the same universe and death is merely a commercial break until the next episode. Indeed, the new Fantagraphics book stars Pim and Francie). Here, the pair are menaced by a knife-wielding two-headed girl (again, another reoccurring character). The duo get separated and Francie ends up in a car with a possible pedophile while Pim comes across a wolf-boy known as Knishkibibble who, in the sequence below, starts to change shape:

It’s here we start to see a lot of the tropes Columbia would use regularly in his work take shape: Children in danger. A blending of supernatural and real-life horrors. Serial killers. Transformation. Reptile eyes. Disturbing smiles. A unhealthy interest in knives. The slow realization that all is not well. In Columbia’s comics, monsters lurk down every alleyway, and there is no escaping them. Columbia’s universe isn’t merely uncaring or godless. It’s predatory.

Apparently something of a perfectionist (another rumor) he quit the Biologic Show after that “first” issue and began contributing the occasional short piece to alt-anthologies like Zero Zero and Blab. His first entry showed up in Zero Zero #4 and was a beaut. Entitled I Was Killing When Killing Wasn’t Cool, it was both a distillation of his work to that point and a sign of how far he could take things.

Here, Columbia abandons his rougher style for a something more tightly controlled. Aping American animation style of the early 20th century, especially the Fleischer Brothers, everyone suddenly became a lot softer, rounder and cuter, which, of course, only served to make the surreal violence that more horrific.

Columbia would pretty much stick to this style for his comics from here on out, although he’d incorporate PhotoShop tricks and computer text occasionally.

His interest in animation extends to his layout of the story, as he breaks everything down to a tiny panels and frequently slows the motion down to heighten the tension. His interest in unnerving the reader continues unabated as well, however, as Seymour Sunshine and the now pint-sized Knishkebibble take on a killer, only to discover a more nefarious character literally hiding in the mirror.

From 'I Was Killing ..."

As Tom Spurgeon best put it:

[The story is] remarkable not just for Columbia’s typically jaw-dropping display of once-in-a-generation art chops, but because he allows the reader to slowly realize, like the best horror films, that the adventure you are currently enjoying is going to end in ways too terrible too imagine, your face to be rubbed into black, relentless evil that makes you small before it does you in as painfully as possible, a spiritual snuffing as well as physical killing.

Indeed, what makes Killing — and Columbia’s work in general — so stellar is not merely the artist’s interest in the grotesque or severed limbs as much as his ability to set and sustain and genuinely creepy mood, something that his meticulous drawings only serve to enhance.

Besides old cartoons, Columbia also seems to have an interest in folk tales, as evidenced by stories like The Blood Clot Boy, which appeared in Zero Zero #16.

Here Columbia takes all the gruesome elements of your average fable — the dark things that Disney tends to try to gloss over — and increases their visceral impact considerably, though he leavens things somewhat by providing a loquacious, wry narrator to help detail the proceedings.

But by far Columbia’s best work during this period remains The Trumpets They Played, which you can find in a copy of Blab #10. The story is Columbia’s interpretation of The Rapture/Book of Revelations, with Seymour and  Knishkebibble facing off a host of horrifying Biblical monsters, including the seven-headed Beast of the Sea. Columbia packs his tiny panels with as much detail as possible, most of them filled with what would normally be cute creations doing horrible things. At one point he shows a baby in an empty room playing with a loaded gun (and yes, it ends just like you imagine it might). He then pulls back to the adjoining room to show a long-nosed man copulating with … something. Then he pulls back even further to an eventual full-page spread that shows the whole city engaged in one type of depraved “end of days” debauchery or another.

Seymour and Knishkebibble attempt to escape all this, but, as I said before, there is no escape in Columbia’s world. The horror and eventual end can only be delayed. Which in this case means Nazi-like rallies and mass executions.

The frustrating thing about all this great work is it has yet to be collected. Neither of Columbia’s two new books, to the best of my knowledge, collect or reproduce any of the material mentioned above.

That seems a real shame. These comics remain some of the most striking and influential work produced in the 1990s. You can see elements of his work, not just in horror-themed tales like Squirrel Machine but in more benign material as well.

I can’t even begin to guess at the reason this work has taken so long to get collected. Whatever the cause, I hope we don’t have to wait too much longer — Columbia’s career, as sporadic as it is, deserves the type of critical evaluation and reconsideration a nice “done in one” book would encourage. His work is dark, certainly, but no less striking or beautiful because of that.

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.

Even if you don’t recognize Wilson’s name, chances are you’ve seen his cartoons, either in the occasional Playboy (where he’s been a regular staple for decades now, hence the Fantagraphics collection) or perhaps the occasional issue of the New Yorker or some other magazine. He’s also written children’s books and even the occasional novel. He’s mainly known for his decidedly dark sense of humor and a genuine appreciation of the macabre.

Nuts, however, isn’t really concerned with ghoulies, ghosties or long-legged beasties. No, it’s focus is decidedly on childhood, and the all-too real terrors and humiliations that are contained therein.

Originally serialized in National Lampoon magazine back in the 1970s (for those of you unfamiliar with the Lampoon, it was The Simpsons of its day, but in print form), Nuts was a small, six-panel strip that focused on a kid known simply as “The Kid,’ (though it didn’t take a mind-reader to figure out the tyke was a stand-in for Wilson himself).

The first panel usually began with Wilson directly addressing the reader, saying “Remember when …” But this wasn’t some treacly, Vaseline-smeared on the camera look at life in olden days. Wilson had apparently little use for nostalgia and its distorting effects. No, what Nuts was preferred to reminisce about was all the horrible anxieties and fears that plagued him in his early years. Nuts is about the slow discovery that life is a series of endless frustration and disappointments. In one strip after another, The Kid endures trauma after trauma, be it a hellish summer camp, wasting money on a submarine model that doesn’t work, going to the dentist or visiting a deathly ill relative.

It’s not all bad times of course. Sometimes you get to get a chocolate sundae at the family drug store, or your dad comes home drunk the day you hand in a bad report card.

All these tales are told with Wilson’s usual flair for exaggeration and sense of mischief, albeit grounded in a strong desire to honestly depict the roller-coaster of emotions The Kid frequently goes through. There’s one tale in particular, that is both a highlight and a typical example of what I’m talking about. In it, The Kid gets the one Christmas present he wanted more than anything else — a little circus set. Before he can enjoy it however, he has to head over to his rich cousin’s house, where he discovers that the smug bastard has received an even larger and more impressive circus set for the holidays.

Look at the kid’s expression in that first and third panel. I don’t think anyone’s been able to capture sheer disgust and bile as well as Wilson does here. If that image doesn’t make you hunger to read more than I don’t know what else I can do to persuade you.

Nuts takes place in a world geared solely towards adults, not kids. It was a place where those under 18 had to maneuver carefully and where a wrong turn could easily result in a bizarre misunderstanding or worse (at one point the Kid tells his parents about the guy he met at the movie theater who talked about Oscar Wilde and “acted funny”). That world doesn’t really exist any longer, at least not in America. We have tailored our culture to fit to kids’ tastes and interests — the better to maintain our precious hold on our own immaturity and nostalgia for our youth. There’s a reason why even people who don’t have kids know who Hannah Montana is.

And yet there’s no doubt plenty of material in Nuts that the kids of today would recognize instantly. My own son and daughter would no doubt be very familiar with the Kid’s constant sense of confusion, frustration and deep-seated fears. even though they may never have attempted to express it in words. Some experiences are universal. And Nuts captures the worst aspects of childhood better than any comic I know. And it’s real funny to boot.

My thanks to Bill Peschel for the loan of his book.

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.

The manga, by Eiji Nonaka, centers, at least  in its initial volumes on the ever-optimistic Takashi Kamiyama, who, through a series of misunderstandings, ends up enrolling in Cromartie High School, the toughest school in town, and chock full of muscled thugs who would beat you senseless just for snoring too loud.

Just how tough are they? Tough enough not to eat just one, but an entire box full of pencils (remember to read right to left).

The comic is ostensibly a parody of the type of tough-guys-in-high-school shonen manga that are apparently rather popular (Slam Dunk features trace elements of this genre). But you don’t have to be  familiar with what Cromartie is mocking to enjoy it. This is a deliciously absurd manga, similar in some ways to Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle, though decidedly more deadpan.

Take for example, its ever-expanding cast of characters. Takashi is shunted aside rather quickly to make room for an even odder assortment of characters, including a mute Freddie Mercury lookalike, a gorilla, and a robot who seems to be unaware of his mechanical nature.

A lot of the humor in the series comes from the characters’ utter obliviousness –like not realizing that Mechazawa is a robot, for instance. Nonaka will often play up the the situation by making it seem like one of the characters is about to have the light dawn on him only to say “you’re shirt’s unbuttoned” or something like that. (There’s also always at least one character who’s flummoxed by everyone’s cluelessness, but never speaks up, perhaps out of fear of embarrassment.) It doesn’t sound like much to hang a comic on, but Nonaka’s deadpan style, plus his ability to tease out a punchline, make just about every joke sing, especially in the early volumes.

Cromartie is also a frequent exercise in frustration, as various students constantly find themselves upstaged by random events or their fellow students’ afore-mentioned stupidity. Witness, this poor fellow, who only wants to let his friends know what to call him:

It’s that kind of manga (and no, we never do discover his name).

When not being thwarted time and again, the Cromartie cast frequently engage in lengthy, roundabout, obtuse discussions, perhaps in order to avoid noticing whatever odd, surreal events may be taking place at the moment. Take the Four Great Ones, a quintet of tough guys who dress like members of KISS but spend their time sitting around a table arguing why they have five members.

I could go on, talking about the gang leader who secretly yearns to be a comedy writer or the thug who lives to post on Internet message boards, but I think you get the idea. This is a really funny manga that doesn’t deserve to languish in unfinished obscurity. The sad thing is that ADV was getting very close to completing the series, having published 12 of the 17 volumes. Won’t some kind, considerate publisher consider getting those few remaining books (and maybe perhaps a few other of Nonaka’s works) out to the U.S manga-buying public? Pretty please?

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.

Soldier X‘s roots lie in a 2001 revamp of the long-running Cable series. Back in those early “Nu-Marvel” days, the ’90s nostalgia that has since swept superherodom was far far away, and characters like Cable couldn’t shake the stink of shoulder pads and endless crossovers from the bad old days. Writer David Tischman’s solution, beginning with Issue 97, was to give the hero also known as Nathan Summers new relevance by taking this soldier from the future and making him a soldier in the present, teleporting into various real-world hotspots and intervening on behalf of the innocent and oppressed. This, Cable claimed (or at least the narration claimed on his behalf), would help the world avoid the nightmarish future Cable himself came from. Joining Tischman in this endeavor was artist Igor Kordey, a Croatian veteran of the Balkan wars whose personal experience and rough-hewn, inky art gave an air of authenticity to a project that could seem like exploitation in lesser hands.

But this new direction — anticipating though it did Marvel’s linewide move toward the militarization of superheroes later in the decade — lasted all of two critically acclaimed but poor-selling story arcs, the latter of which, a story about attempts to use sci-fi cloning and biowarfare to tip the balance of the ethnic conflict between Albanians and Macedonians, was co-plotted by Kordey himself. Then Tischman left — decamping for DC, if I recall correctly — and Kordey’s fellow Croatian Darko Macan took the helm with Issue 105. That’s when things got weird.

Beginning with Kordey’s co-writing credit on Tischman’s final issue, #104, suddenly the book began directly addressing the futility of using violent conflict to solve violent conflict — a stunningly direct rejoinder to the “realistic” approach Tischman instituted. Key to the book’s new mission was an explosive increase for Cable’s telekinetic and telepathic powers: Having purged his body of the techno-organic virus that had long plagued him in a Tischman/Kordey issue that took place during Marvel’s “‘Nuff Said” silent-comics stunt month, Summers reached nearly Phoenix-like power levels, which alternately prevented him from using his powers lest they get out of control, or caused them to erupt despite his best efforts, threatening friend, foe, and noncombatant alike. As the story goes, this leads Cable to question the very nature of his newfound mission: “I destroy buildings, I raze mountains, and what have I accomplished? Nothing.”

When Macan took the writing reins in #105, he used the Cable series’ three remaining issues as self-contained set-up stories for the Soldier X series to come: #105 showed Cable losing control of his telepathy and accidentally mindwiping an arena full of spectators at a lethal mutant fight club in Rio; in #106 (featuring fill-in artist Mike Huddleston) his massacre of murderous nuclear arms smugglers in Kazakhstan enabled sinister anti-Cable forces to frame him for the murder of a S.H.I.E.L.D agent; and in #107 we meet Jackie Singapore, the megarich mutant slated to be Cable’s new big bad. Then the series was retitled Soldier X (similarly, Deadpool became Agent X, under Jemas’s rationale that normal people don’t know who Cable and Deadpool are, but they do know what a soldier and an agent are) and relaunched with a #1, and Macan and Kordey were truly off to the races.

Soldier X announces its intention to aim for the heart of Cable’s dual role as superhero and soldier right from its first issue. On the surface it’s one last scene-setting one-shot, reintroducing Cable’s intrepid-reporter confidant Irene Merryweather (in a framing story set an unexplained two years in the future, no less) and Yoda-knockoff mentor Blaquesmith. But it prominently, and with little explanation or reason why, co-stars a pair of time-displaced warriors from centuries past (an Egyptian charioteer and a Polish hussar), now stranded in modern-day Egypt. The Hussar describes their plight thusly:

Wars, right?! Again and again in all times and all places! And what if it is always the same war?! One never-ending war, the blood wind blowing through the tunnels of time? And us, soldiers, getting caught in its draft, fighting in one war–finding ourselves in another?

But when Cable questions this possibility, the pair offer a different perspective: “Well, perhaps we only dreamed our previous lives,” admits the Hussar, to which the Egyptian adds, “Or perhaps we are simply madmen, visiting the graves of people we pretend we knew.” The eternal nature of conflict, the absurdist nature of the way people are caught up in it, the embrace of dreams and madness as maybe the only way to make sense of it all — there’s Soldier X in a nutshell.

This leads to the book’s one and only full story arc, starting in issue #2. Blaquesmith, a flippant little hedonist who might remind today’s readers of Ed Brubaker’s Master Izo character in Daredevil, assigns Cable the task of rescuing a Russian peasant girl with a mutant healing power. When Cable travels to her backwater village, he discovers an array of equally unpleasant persons vying for control of her gift. Her domineering religious-fanatic mother seems to be suffering from a martyrdom-centric version of Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, pushing her daughter’s gifts to their limits in hopes to go down in history as the mother of a saint. The local clergyman seems more legitimately moved by the possibly divine nature of her gifts but equally indifferent to her suffering. Her cowardly father encouraged her exploitation because of the gifts of money and vodka that the faithful tended to throw his way, but fled either to seek help when things went too far or to escape the Armenian mafia who became outraged when they learned they weren’t getting a cut of this action. The girl herself, named Magdalena in a fashion typical of Soldier X‘s subtlety level, recovers from death by leeching off some of Cable’s extraordinary power, then becomes a selfish, creepy parasite herself. The aforementioned Armenian mafiosi, a callous collection of lollipop-sucking sociopaths, eventually show up too, as does the real star of the show: Geo, another metal-armed mutant who’s been blowing up American fast-food franchises in a battle against globalization and, of all things, “complacency.” His deranged, all-caps monologues about his quixotic battle to live free of any kind of control — mixed in with a grudge against Cable for landing any mutant with one metal arm on the most-wanted list — are hilarious, yes, but they also provide a stark contrast with Cable’s pseudo-Eastern Askani religion, filled with platitudes about accepting one’s fate; they’re among Macan’s best moments in the series.

Kordey, for his part, gets to shine when showing Cable’s increasingly outlandish abilities. Kordey’s the kind of artist you could see showing up half a decade later to illustrate some First Second graphic novel about the Tamil Tigers or the janjaweed militias, but instead he ended up at Marvel, and the fact that he could handle both the realistic ethnic-conflict trappings that remained from Tischman’s run and the spectacular superheroics required by Cable’s power upgrade with equal aplomb, often at the same time, is a testament to how perfectly this assignment suited him. His Cable flies, he hovers, he heals the dead, he gets shot full of holes and recovers like an old-school Wolverine, he does battle in an abandoned factory called Saint Lenin “where a mad artist used to work on blending Orthodox and Communist iconography,” he engages in an increasingly pointless series of slugfests with Geo, he transforms a man into a bat, and in the series’ single most memorable image, he grows into a giant to frighten off the rampaging peasants who’ve torn Geo to shreds. It’s the superhero as absurdism, a series of cascading visual and narrative non sequiturs meant to reveal the ridiculousness of the notion that a man could prevent his own violent future by wreaking violence in the present, and it’s glorious to behold.

See what I mean?

I don’t suppose you need me to tell you that this was not what almost anyone, least of all Marvel, was looking for. Following the conclusion of the Russian arc, the Macan/Kordey team (with editor Andrew Lis seemingly playing a key support role) squeaked out a couple more issues that bear the air of knowing their time was at an end. Issue 7 reveals that Blaquesmith was actually just an impostor hired by the now-moot archvillain Jackie Singapore, but who is now so impressed by Cable that he’d like to become his disciple. Issue 8 flashes forward 2,000 years to a world governed by Cable’s Askani philosophy … where, of course, most people are just as violent and small-minded as ever, and where the only real act of superheroism is to volunteer to die in the place of another. Lots of loose ends are left dangling, from Singapore’s dog-that-never-barked act to fake-Blaquesmith’s rushed reveal to a go-nowhere subplot involving a pair of ne’er-do-well S.H.I.E.L.D. agents assigned to take Cable down to the disappearance from the title of the Tischman-introduced antagonist Goldberg to the reasoning behind the Irene Merryweather framing story’s two-year jump. The fourth wall is broken with impunity, from recap pages in which characters directly address the audience and say “this is the recap page,” to a splash page of characters from throughout the Kordey era mourning Cable’s death whether or not they themselves had died during the series, to a final splash page of the creative team waving goodbye to us, even to direct mockery of the linewide recap-page edict itself.

And then they were gone. Kordey soon left Marvel altogether in a storm of criticism and recriminations over his work on Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and though I’m not 100% sure, I believe this was Macan’s last Marvel work as well. The series continued in fairly perfunctory, more traditional fashion for another four issues before the plug was pulled, not unlike how New X-Men lurched on for a brief while like a chicken with its head cut off after Morrison’s abrupt departure. But it’s what Kordey and Macan left behind that matters: a document of the rise and fall of a strange and freewheeling era at the North American comics industry’s biggest company, as radical a reimagining of one of that company’s core concepts as the far more ballyhooed work of Morrison and Quitely or Milligan and Allred, and as strangely lyrical a superhero comic as you’re ever likely to find.

It belongs on your bookshelf.

(For more on the series, see Joe “Jog” McCulloch’s excellent essay at the Savage Critic(s).)

Wasteland #9

Ah DC comics, circa 1987. A wild, heady time. Pre-Vertigo. Pre-Sandman. Watchmen was just wrapping up. Grant Morrison would soon start working Animal Man. Kyle Baker and Andy Hefler were doing crazy things with The Shadow. And the company that Jack and Joe built was flinging whatever it could to the wall to see if it stuck. (anybody here remember Haywire? Or Sonic Disruptors?)

Wasteland was a one of the things they threw. It was ostensibly a horror comic, though it rarely showed much in the way of blood or gore, and generally avoided traditional horror tropes. There were no serial killers here, or zombies or vampires, and no twist endings of the sort patented by TV shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Which is not to say that it couldn’t be incredibly disturbing.

Wasteland #10

Each issue of the comic contained three stories by either John Ostrander (of Suicide Squad fame) or Del Close. Sometimes they collaborated. The pair, at least in the beginning, had a rotating cadre of artists that they relied upon that mainly consisted of David Lloyd, William Messner-Loebs and Don Simpson, with folks like Ty Templeton and Tim Truman occasionally filling in. One time they even got Joe Orlando.

Now while Ostrander may well be familiar to you, chances are Del Close is not. The late Close was an actor (you may remember him as the crazy preacher in the remake of The Blob) best known for his work in improvisational theater. John Belushi, Bill Murray and Andy Richter were among his students. When he died his last words were supposedly “I’m tired of being the funniest person in the room.”

None of which really explains what he was doing in comics or how he hooked up with Ostrander, but still, nice anecdote. And his contributions to Wasteland were usually just that, autobiographical anecdotes, pages allegedly ripped from his often strange, varied life. Like the time he took an auditing session with L. Ron Hubbard. Or the time he put cole slaw in his underpants as a theatrical experiment. Or when he filmed Beware of the Blob! high as a kite on drugs because his cat had torn his cornea open the night before.

The end of his stories would always have a little footnote at the bottom insisting that each tale of his was 100 % true. Or at least mostly true. It soon became something of a running joke.

In between those tales, Ostrander would tell psychologically unnerving stories that frequently edged over into political and social angles and often into outright satire. The first issue featured a drug that would give you the greatest high ever, but would also kill you instantly. Another used the old Matrix “brain in a jar” trick but with a witty Hollywood twist.

But Ostrander would just as frequently eschew fantasy and sci-fi tropes for something more slice of life. In “Heebee Geebeeies,” a woman wonders if her husband is a child killer. In Embryo, about a man with a monster for a dad that ends with him smothering his elderly father in the hospital. And in “Dissecting Mister Fleming” a father proves his love for his son by eviscerating his science teacher.

Lloyd, Simpson and Loebs did some of their best work on this series. Their art is full of life, tension and wit. It’s kind of sad to think that this is the only home DC could make for such talented, idiosyncratic artists (Loebs’ writing career for DC aside).

Eventually the series started to get too jokey and flippant. A lot of the discomfort and terror drained away as reoccurring characters like the Dead Detective (he’s got a bullet in his head but he’s still aware and lots of surreal things happen to him) kept cropping up. I started to miss the darker stories. When the series finally closed with issue #18 I had long since stopped reading it.

So no, I don’t suppose I really need a complete, hardcover, embossed, slipcased Wasteland collection. Still, a nicely packaged greatest hits would do nicely. Certainly with Ostrander suffering from medical problems, any money that can be thrown his way, would be nice. More to the point, in its hey day this was a terrific series, to the point where I’ll still find myself contemplating some of its more notable stories twenty years later. It’s about time some more attention got thrown its way.

Francesca Ghermandi is one of the people whose packages I cherished when they used to come to me. I think she wrote me twice, and as a result, I have copies of Helter Skelter and Hiawata Pete, both in Italian, both absolutely brimming with amazing cartooning. These would be great candidates for that Robot 6 column where they demand books get translated, and boy, I’d sure love to read them someday. For now, I just look at the pictures.

In with these is a plastic comb notebook with a clear cover and photocopied pages of the first several chapters of Pop. 666, then called Suburbia. It only had one chapter in English, the one published by David Mazzuchelli in Rubber Blanket, the rest was not translated. Like the hardbound cartoon books Francesca had sent me, however, the strange and grotesquely beautiful world she drew sucked me in. I really wanted to publish this stuff in Dark Horse Presents. I don’t know why it didn’t come to pass, maybe I couldn’t get anyone else to see what I saw. There is no date on the letter, Francesca could have sent the same packet to Fantagraphics right about then. The timing makes sense. They started serializing the story off and on in their anthology Zero Zero beginning with the 19th issue in the summer of 1997. They eventually printed all 90 pages, but unlike some of the other strips from the magazine, Pop. 666 has never gotten its own collected edition.

I’m not sure who came up with the title Pop. 666, but it calls to mind the title of Jim Thompson’s western novel Pop. 1280. Thompson is one of the best of the hardboiled school, having written classic genre pieces like After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, inspiring many a modern crime writer and filmmaker. Thompson’s book is about a sheriff at odds with his town, the kind of squalid community where all life is a give-and-take proposition. These people are damned by their own evil deeds, they are the future populace of hell. Pop. 666.

Ghermandi and Semerano’s story is set in an unspecified slum village out in the middle of nowhere. As the tragically lost and soon-to-be-dead married couple who accidentally arrive there in the first chapter let us know, you’ve got to be plenty off the beaten path to land down in this sub-Dante inferno. Despite this being a junkyard society for the homeless, the folks in the area are muscled by a fat, one-eyed lout named Rocco. There may be no landlord, no deeds of ownership, but Rocco collects taxes all the same. He would rule the area completely if not for two things: the sinister Snake Eyes who refuses to pay this sweaty hood tribute and the fading movie star Hilde Historietta. Fear and love, many a villain and many a hero have fallen into the fire because of those two emotions.

All of this is pretty much set up in the first two chapters, and the storytellers take us through a labyrinth of weird twists and creepy scenarios from there. Social workers with a mean streak, mad scientist labs, vain television hosts–all of these get sucked into the overall plot. When life is on the skids, there are those who just lean into it and those who try to drive their way out. Some get run over, some step on the gas. In Pop. 666, fortunes change at moment’s notice, and events are never anything short of bizarre.

If Pop. 666 were a movie, it might actually be too bizarre for its own good. No matter how wicked the special effects, the filmmakers would run the risk of making it seem like it’s weird for no reason. They’d end up with something like Dan Ackroyd’s Nothing but Trouble rather than Jeunet’s City of Lost Children or von Trier’s The Element of Crime. Comics have always had the benefit of being their own self-contained worlds without having to rely on any fleshy things or real world stumbling blocks to build on. It’s all paper and pen, and with a clear vision like Francesca Ghermandi’s, the world is complete and need no justification to seem believable. In his profile of the cartoonist, Paul Gravett mentions both Tex Avery and Chester Gould, both of whom provide pointers to Ghermandi’s sense of slapstick and monstrous mugs. Her flare for tarnished glitz also reminds me of her fellow Italian, Federico Fellini, whose later cinematic portrayals of the dimming glamour of the performing life may have influenced Hilde Historietta. Maybe some David Lynch, as well? The 1950s monster movie tropes and the strange snouts Ghermandi gives a lot of her characters also recall the skewed work of Charles Burns. Her ink lines are as fluid as Burns’, flowing naturally into rounder shapes, avoiding harsh angles. (No surprise, then, that she would invent Pastil, the girl with the aspirin tablet for a head.)

Fantagraphics has been promising Ghermandi’s latest book, Grenuord, for a while now. Last explanation I read was that it was taking Kim Thompson longer than expected to translate, and since the third issue was published in 2006, we’ve been patiently waiting for the rest to be translated and one big book to be released. While this production continues, might I suggest a repackaging of Pop. 666 in the meantime? This weird and creepy sci-fi horror crime comic is a loopy piece of work, and it deserves to be experienced by more readers and might even lead the way to reminding some about Ghermandi in anticipation of Grenuord.

I mean, stranger things have happened. And if they did, it was probably in a Francesca Ghermandi comic.

La Revolte d'Hop-Frog

Every so often I like to use this column to focus not just on the various American comics that have languished in uncollected obscurity for far too long, but to also examine great works found in other comics-loving countries like France and Japan that for reasons both frustrating and inscrutable have yet to arrive on our shores.

So this week I’m looking across the Atlantic to a 1997 graphic novel written by David B and drawn by Chris Blain, both French. Both names should at least ring a bell with the discerning indie reader, David B. having won well-deserved plaudits for his extraordinarily haunting memoir Epileptic, while Blain found his name on a number of top ten lists last year with First Second’s release of his revisionist Western Gus and His Gang.

La Revolte d’Hop-Frog is a Western as well, though it bears little resemblance to Gus, however, or to any Western I’ve ever seen or read. It’s more like The X-Files set in 19th Century Texas. Oh, it has plenty of gunfights for sure. And cowboys. And tons of Indians. The central plot, however, revolves around a number of talking teapots, guns, lamps,stoves and other inanimate objects gaining sentience and declaring all-out war on their previous owners.

Panel from 'Hop-Frog'

The book opens with a picturesque shot of a rail path skirting somewhere through Texas, circa 1880. Suddenly, the wooden railroad ties start talking to each other. Then they rise up out of their dirt beds and start walking, or rather hopping, off to join “the others.”

Sequence from 'Hop-Frog'

Clearly, we are not in traditional John Ford territory.

Meanwhile, in a nearby sleepy Texas town, Hiram Lowatt, Northern reporter for a periodical known as Secrets of Nature, has arrived, accompanied by his friend and servant Placido, a rather taciturn Comanche. He gets made fun of by the locals for his fringed jacket.

Elsewhere, a group of local Native Americans are planning a rebellion of some sort, as their leader believes a great uprising is coming that will usher in a new golden age. (I should note here that my French is absolutely horrible and for the most part I pieced together what the characters were saying via a humongous French-English dictionary).

The locals, meanwhile, think the Indians are responsible for a series of mysterious slayings that have been taking place out on the prairie. That isn’t true, of course, and Lowatt pretty much immediately suspects supernatural foul play. Although he must kick a bit of ass before he can set about proving his theories.

Panels from 'Hop Frog'

Anyway, it turns out every single inanimate object, from the lowly fork to the massive armoire, has come to life and opted to engage in a mass revolution, slaughtering humans as payback for what they regard as unjust treatment. They are led by a small yellow and white pot called Hop-Frog. He likes to name his fellow objects by picking names out of books.

Sequence from 'Hop-Frog'

It’s all very silly and comical, to be sure. And B. and Blain get a good deal of humorous mileage out of showing clocks and bric a brac attack their owners (the armoire, having killed everyone inside a house, wants to get out, but can’t until the crowbar, pick axe and other tools widen the doorway for him). But there is also a surprisingly good deal of horror and even tragedy wound up in this tale as well. Hop-Frog is ridiculous, yes, but he’s also a bit terrifying as well.

That shouldn’t be too surprising if you’re familiar with these authors’ other works. For all its bizarre juxtapositions, we haven’t strayed too far from traditional David B. territory. His short stories, particularly those produced in Mome and his recent book, Nocturnal Conspiracies, show an artist obsessed not just with dream-like images and narratives, but also with the notion of intrigue and machinations. In Epiliptic he portrays himself as a child as being obsessed with ancient wars and revolutions. This is just an absurdist rendering of that obsession.

Blain work here is stylistically quite different from what he later produced for Gus and books like his Isaac the Pirate. I’d almost call it borderline Fauvist since it seems to be influenced as much by traditional painters like Matisse as it is by contemporary cartoonists. The net effect, however, decidedly helps give it’s dreamlike tone, and balances the comical aspects of the story with the more dramatic sequences.

David B. and Blain did one only more book starring Hiram Lowatt, Les Ogres, which I have not had the opportunity to glance at, let alone read. Certainly, based on what I’ve been able to translate here, the pair would seem like perfect additions to First Second or NBM’s growing Eurocomics stable. I mean, it’s about pot-bellied stoves and brooms attacking people in the wild west. What’s not to love?

Panels from 'Hop-Frog'

Rubber Blanket #1

One of the most hotly anticipated books of the year, at least among the indie crowd, has got to be David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. The book has been earning a plentiful number of plaudits, but part of the interest is surely the fact that Mazzucchelli hasn’t published a book in almost 15 years and hasn’t had a strip published since 2001.

With all the fanfare surrounding the book, however, it seems odd that up till now no one has attempted to collect the three oversized issues of Mazzucchelli’s seminal self-published series, Rubber Blanket. While the three issues aren’t necessarily hard to find, securing them can prove to be a bit pricey. More importantly though, Rubber Blanket was a seminal series, both in Mazzucchelli’s development as an artist and in the indie comix scene of the early 90s.

For those who need a bit of background: In the late 1980s, Mazzucchelli was one of the hot new stars of the Marvel/DC world. Having proved himself on titles like The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones and Legends of Arzach, he quickly became a fanboy favorite for his work with Frank Miller on two still-beloved series: Daredevil Born Again and Batman: Year One.

Batman: Year One

The comic book world, or at least a sizable portion of it, was surely in his grasp, but he abruptly turned his back on the superhero world. Burned out from the strenuous schedule of working on a monthly book, frustrated with the limitations of the genre and wanting to focus on more personal projects,Mazzucchelli bid adieu to Bruce Wayne and Matt Murdock and said hello to Rubber Blanket.

Opening panels from 'Near Miss'

The first issue, published in 1991, shows just how far afield Mazzucchelli’s sensibilities had gone since his initial days at the Big Two. If the cover didn’t give it away, certainly the larger size was an indication that things had changed. The first story, Near Miss, is a surreal, allegorical tale of a man whose paranoia over the planet just missing being struck by an asteroid sends him out in the desert, telescope in hand. Gone is the thin, stylish naturalism of his earlier work, replaced instead by a thick, almost rough, expressionist line.

The stories in that first issue don’t have tidy endings either, or really end at all — they often just come to a halt. Dialogue is frequently elliptical and the characters’ relationships to each other can be nebulous (“Are you my son or my brother?” a woman asks of a visitor in the final tale.) But the book is filled with striking images — a man pouring a box of old photographs into a newly dug grave, a woman with a trilobite fossil embedded in her stomach — that drive the story onward. Mazzucchelli is clearly not interested in playing it safe. What is surprising is how assured and confident the comic is considering its exploring, experimental nature.

Panel from 'Smiling Jack'

The second issue saw Mazzucchelli trying on even more varied styles, a shout-out to the classic “underground” comics here, an autobiographical tale there — even a straight-up, unironical gag strip. But the hallmark of the issue has to be Discovering America, about a young man whose attempts at mapmaking parallel between his romantic delusions. Mazzucchelli adds a second color here to very nice effect:

From 'Discovering America'

By the third issue, the pieces seemed to be falling into place, at lest in as far as readers could reasonably what sofr to work to expect from this new David Mazzucchelli. The third issue also contains hat is easily the best story of the series, Big Man.

Big Man is basically an Incredible Hulk story, though I’m doing the work an big disservice by summing it up like that (though hopefully whetting your appetite as well). It’s about a giant who literally washes up to a small rural village. The people are at first wary of him but he earns their trust. Then the police show up and everything gets shot to hell.

Within this simple, fable-like structure, Mazzucchelli manages to wring a considerable amount of emotion and sympathy, not just for the title character, but the townsfolk around him. It’s a stunner of a story and in a way, a culmination of everything he had been working towards in Rubber Blanket thus far.

I should note at this point, that Blanket featured more than Mazzucchelli’s work. He regularly used the book as an opportunity to showcase the work of other artists, most notably Ted Stearn, who went on to do two series for Fantagraphics featuring his wan funny animals, Fuzz and Pluck .

Though RB only lasted three issues, Mazzzucchelli had even greater things ahead of him, most notably his stellar adaptation (collaborating with Paul Karasik) of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a graphic novel that frequently ends up on the short list of “best comics ever made and I’m not kidding boyo.”

Between Glass and Blanket, Mazzucchelli became a huge influence for a lot of cartoonists coming to the fore at that time. You can see it Adrian Tomine’s early mini-comics for example. Although his bibliography has been sporadic up till now, his comics have brought a sense of sharp design and near-limitless possibilities to the indie comics scene. It seems almost ridiculous that no one’s attempted to collect these stories in book form yet. Let’s hope the success of Polyp encourages Pantheon to get its act together, and soon.

Panel from 'Big Man'

Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates

To all those who have been enjoying this column and wondering where it went, I apologize about the long hiatus. I have no excuses other than it’s been a bumpy year. In any event I shall try to keep things proceeding from here on out at a more regular pace. It might not be weekly, but it won’t be bimonthly certainly.

Anyway, for the return of Collect This Now, the column wherein I pick long-neglected comics and make a case for them to be reprinted, I’ve picked the mother of all lost causes. You can pray to St. Anthony all you like but you’ll see gold-embossed Miracleman Omnibus with a foreword by both Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane before you’ll ever set eyes on the trade paperback of this puppy, thanks largely to the Walt Disney company.

Wherefore you ask? What possible reason could the Disney Conglomerate (Inc.) have to prevent this material from ever being printed again? And is it possible that if I click on the link below I will encounter images that are most definitely Not Safe for Work?

Mmmmmmmmm ….. could be.

So yeah, there’s that.

And yes, we’re in smartass, underground, sophomoric, “ha-ha, Mickey Mouse has a penis” territory, but there’s a lot more to the story (and the comics themselves) than that.

The Air Pirates (yes, it was the name of an actual group of people) were a group of underground cartoonists led by one Dan O’Neill, but also including Shary Flenniken, Bobby London, Gary Hallgren, and Ted Richards. Bound loosely together by a love for old comic strips, the group, encouraged by gadfly O’Neill, decided around 1971 to take on Disney’s then-most famous icon. Rather than offer up a over the top, Mad-style parody, a la Mickey Rodent, O’Neill and friends (minus Flenniken, who declined to participate) decided it would be much better — and antagonize the company that Walt built even more — if they just went ahead and used the original character instead of calling him Rickey Raus or what have you. Everyone knows who they’re making fun of, why even bother pretending?

Perhaps they might have gotten away with it if had it just been one stand-alone issue, but when the second issue came out soon after the first it was clear that O’Neill meant for this to be an ongoing, serialized story, that he was going to try to do his own Mickey Mouse comic independent of Disney, a notion which, naturally, the company didn’t exactly take a shine to. It didn’t help matters much that O’Neill seemed to be spoiling for a fight, to the point where he had the son of a Disney board member smuggle copies into a board meeting.

I’m not going to delve into the sordid history of the inevitable lawsuit that ensued here except to say that it was extremely lengthy and colorful and remains to this day a seminal case in copyright law. Instead I’m going to attempt, in the short amount of time and space allotted, to talk about why this book should see print again. For those interested in the sordid details I heartily recommend Bob Levin’s excellent The Pirates and the Mouse, which goes into much greater detail and insight into the personalities involved than I can here.

To an extent, the Air Pirates comics suffer from all the sins that clung to underground comics of the ’60s and early ’70s. They were sexist. They didn’t make much narrative sense. And yes, as noted earlier, they indulged in the sort of “x-rated action and drugs fer laughs” stuff that gets tired rather quickly.

But the Pirates’ enthusiasm for their material goes beyond the simple desire to irk a bunch of stuffed shirts in a major entertainment company (not that there isn’t something to be said for having that as your long-life goal). In addition to their love for the work of folks like Segar and Herriman, the cartoonists were obviously devout fans of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey newspaper strip that ran a staggering 40-plus years, from 1930 to 1975.

Those strips, at least the early ones, saw Mickey as not some simpering, brainless icon but as a man of action who battled all sorts of nefarious characters like the mysterious Phantom Blot. The Air Pirates comics, sex and drugs aside, feel like an honest attempt to continue in that vein, to show that Mickey doesn’t have to solely be a neutered pitchman but can easily become a living, interesting character in a universe that’s thrilling and entertaining.

What’s more, there’s some really fantastic cartooning going on in these comics, particularly from Hallgren, whose Tortoise and the Hare sequences are crammed with detail, invention and a childlike sense of playfulness that many underground comics of the time (at least the ones I’ve read) severely lacked.

But O’Neill is no slouch either. In addition to his Mouse tale, he provides a “Silly Sympathies” spin-off involving a horny bug who converses with about the nature of Jesus’ love (apparently Jesus wants you to be dead and frowns upon masturbation). Despite his slap-dash, rough-hewn style, O’Neill here manages to evoke both Herriman and the old-time look of those early animated cartoons.

In a weird way, these comics are closer in spirit to the original Silly Symphony and Mickey Mouse animated shorts than anything that runs on the Disney Channel today. The Mickey portrayed in cartoons like Plane Crazy was much more of a mischief-maker and closer in spirit to Gottfredson’s version than the kid-friendly . The Air Pirates captures that initial. devil-may-care essence extraordinarily well. These comics have a manic verve and spontaneity that I doubt today’s Disney could easily reproduce (assuming they were even interested in trying).

Today your best bet to reading any of these comics is to buy Levin’s book or track down a bit torrent copy online (and we certainly don’t approve of such things around here). It’s hard not to see that as a real shame. Ultimately, the Air Pirates  comics are simply too historically significant, too outrageous, too weird, too outlandish and too goshdarned good to have them never see print again.