Trident Comics.
I made a passing reference to Trident Comics a couple entries ago, and thought I’d clarify a bit. Trident was actually a pretty good publisher…didn’t last very long, alas, but managed to get some memorable books out there. I bought most of their output (I passed on Saga of the Man-Elf or whatever it was called). There was one very well-drawn (and well-lettered!) issue of Burglar Bill by Paul Grist; the very funny Lucifer by Eddie Campbell and Phil Elliott, featuring a vagrant that suddenly becomes in charge of Hell; the Trident anthology book, featuring work by Elliott, Campbell (Bacchus stories), Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and many others; The Shadowmen and Strand, which might have become very interesting had they lasted longer; and of course the aforementioned Saviour by Millar, which I understand was a nosehair away from being revived at Vertigo. Ah, well…I would like to have seen how the story ended.
And then there’s St. Swithin’s Day, Trident’s only color comic I believe, which features Grant Morrison and Paul Grist’s last word on teen angst. Good stuff…reprinted later by Oni Press if you can’t find the original.
Interesting thing about the Bacchus stories in Trident…they were part of a series of stories featuring Bacchus travelling with a group of people by boat, relating stories of the characters of Greek myth in his own inimitable way. There was a minor continuity to these stories, which were also being published in Atomeka’s A-1 anthology and in Dark Horse Presents…but they were darn hard to piece together given the way they were published. They are now collected, in proper sequential order, in Bacchus Vol. 3 – Doing the Islands with Bacchus from Eddie Campbell’s own company.
I suddenly find myself nostalgic for Campbell’s The Eyeball Kid. I wonder if there’s a word for that.