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So I was going through this collection when I spotted this paperback cover and I said to myself “that’s certainly a head drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith.”
This isn’t a paperback collection of comics, but rather one of a series of prose adventure novels with, as one might guess, a kung-fu theme. As I’ve not read any of these, I am unqualified to comment on the quality of the writing, but a random flip through the book reveals the lines
“Behind Kak he saw the albino and The Moor whirling to the death.”
and
“His fist flopped through the folds of K’ing’s pants.”
…so there you go.
For more details about this series, including scans of all the covers (plus the British editions), here is a message board discussion on the topic.
At one point in that discussion, someone suggests that the author of this series, Marshall Macao, is Ron Goulart writing under a pseudonym, but Goulart himself says this is not the case.
The back cover:
There’s really nothing quite like Windsor-Smith’s drawing of a face from that angle, is there? (Well, aside from Dave Sim drawing a face at that angle.)
Also, seeing the “Barry Smith” credit reminds me of this story (about a third of the way down the page) that I told you all, long ago.
Recently acquired in a collection, a somewhat rough copy of Vaughn Bodé’s Bodé’s Cartoon Concert:
Reprints, in black and white, strips from the adult magazine
Cavalier (but different
Cavalier strips from the ones reprinted in the
Purple Pictography one-shot from Fantagraphics/Eros Comix, as far as I can tell).
The back cover:
And yes, it’s very naughty. The stories are short, presented one panel per page, kind of like some of the
Mad Magazine paperbacks, only with more nipples. Kind of amusing to think this paperback was published under the same company name that once was emblazoned on every Disney and Warner Brothers cartoon comic book.
When this book was published, I was only four years old, and my interest in underground comix was still at least, oh, two or three years away from coming into full bloom. So, I don’t know how this was marketed, or displayed, or what. I presume this was an attempt by an established publisher to capitalize on the underground comix movement (much like Marvel’s Comix Book), but I have a hard time seeing this racked along with popular fiction in supermarket bookracks. I’m supposing it was targeted at bookstores near colleges, or maybe just shelved in whatever “adult interests” category your larger bookstores had.
Then again, this was the early seventies, and maybe people just weren’t so, you know, uptight, maaaaan. Basically, I’m picturing that the streets were filled with naked people, flowers in their hair, smoking dope, and freely sharing their underground comix with their whole families. …Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong.
Here’s another paperback acquired in the same collection as the Batman TV show tie-in book I recently featured here: a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents reprint paperback from 1966:
I hadn’t known this even existed. It reprints the story in black and white, about two panels per page. I couldn’t scan this bit (and the book is already sold, so I can’t double-check it) but one of the text pages inside described this as “camp adventure,” or words to that effect. To be frank, I’m no T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents connoisseur, but I always got the impression it was played more or less straight. Was it knowing high-camp comedy/satire all this time? …Or maybe it was camp because it was unintentionally goofy
while still being played straight (case in point: the covers above). Or are superheroes just
intrinsically camp, because, you know, c’mon. Or am I reading too much into a blatant coattail-riding of the
Batman TV show’s success with its camp formula? At any rate, I know a few T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents fans who wouldn’t care for that characterization.
Let the hair-splitting begin!
• • •
Speaking of that
Batman book, reader Pietro sent me a photo he took at a flea market in his home country of Italy, featuring an Italian version of what he believes to be the same book:
Pietro notes that the title translates as “The Three Cruel,” which is grammatically odd if still pretty awesome. Thanks for the picture, Pietro!
• • •
So I was in a Twitter conversation about
Superman: The Movie and
Superman II with
Daniel and
Max, and as these things usually go with me, the topic of Swamp Thing found its way into the mix. As a result, Daniel generated this fine piece of Swamp art:
The world is just a little bit more beautiful today.
