Mikester

Here’s another item picked up for me at a San Diego Comic Con from some years back…the Hellboy Convention Sketchbook, copyrighted 2001:

Digest-sized, 24 black and white pages plus covers, hand-signed in pencil on the first page by Mike Mignola, numbered 652/1000. Each page features a single illustration of Hellboy.

Mostly I’m just posting these Hellboy items to make Hellboy Fan #1 Employee Aaron jealous.

But partially I’m posting them because I’m having some slight back trouble again…not as bad as last time, thankfully, but sitting in front of a computer and typing is not the most comfortable thing at the moment. So please excuse my Low Content Hellboy Week as I recuperate.

…it occurred to me that I never showed these to you, a couple of Hellboy promo cards a friend of mine picked up for me at the San Diego Comic Con about ten years ago:

They’re blank on the back for autographs and sketches, which my friend also happened to get for me. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola slapped his John Hancock on the back of one card, and on the back of the other, he did this:

Pretty neat, I think.

So this comic came out last week:

…which also happened to be the same week this comic came out:

We sold out of the former. We have yet to sell a single copy of the latter.

The theological implications are staggering.

So there I was, helping a customer track down some back issues, when suddenly he asks me, “So…this is kind of a strange one, but do you have any…Mighty Mites?”

“Do I?” sez I, and I direct the gentleman not to our miscellaneous M section, not to our “black and white indies of the 1980s” section, but, by God, to our honest-to-goodness for real “Mighty Mites” section.

As I was going through these with the customer, I opened up one issue to check on its publication date for him…this issue, Mighty Mites Vol. 2 #2 (September 1987) in fact:

And what do I happen to find within?

A SWAMP THING PARODY I DID NOT PREVIOUSLY KNOW ABOUT:

“Sump Thing” shows up as an antagonist for the Mighty Mites, and along the way there are brief cameos from other stars of the 1980s black and white indie boon…like the Miami Mice, Boris the Bear, Cerebus, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so on. However, there is an extended guest-appearance by another star of the ’80s scene, who pops in to save the day:

Yup, that’s Mr. Monster, drawn (and presumably dialoged) by Mike Gilbert, and lettered by regular Mr. Monster letterer Ken Bruzenak (and appear courtesy Eclipse Comics…thanks pals!) So that makes appearances of two characters (or parodies of characters) of interest to me that I had not known about for over 20 years. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

Coincidentally enough, the customer bought pretty much every issue except that particular one with the Swamp Thing parody. I swear I didn’t plead with him to not buy it.

Of extra interest to Swamp Thing fans is the included riff on the “battle” Swamp Thing and his allies had with…well, the giant Embodiment of Evil from issue #50. Like Swampy and pals in that issue, the Mites find themselves trapped within Sump Thing’s body, attempting to explain to the creature what its purpose is. Sort of a moot point, since (SPOILER) Sump Thing gets totally smoked by Mr. Monster’s big guns.

Yours truly, unshaven, in his red shirt, with his Red Lantern ring, taking pictures of old Star Wars action figures from the backroom using his makeshift “art studio” (two magazine boxes arranged to make a white background).

This is how the eBay magic happens, people.

(Photo by Employee Aaron, who will pay for this someday.)

At long, long last, the entire “Metamorphosis Odyssey,” Jim Starlin’s serialized space opera from the early issues of Epic Illustrated, is now under one cover. Well, it had been reprinted before, but…um, not very well, shall we say, and let’s leave it at that. But this version includes the color on the pages that originally were in color, and hasn’t also been relettered with extra typos, so there you go.

“Metamorphosis Odyssey” was one of my favorite stories as a teenaged Mikester…a sprawling space adventure with lots of oddball characters and a slightly whacked-out cosmic plot and with a solution to the heroes’ problems that is, perhaps, a tad on the extreme side. (You can read the plot summary here if you want to know what I’m talking about.) Anyway, it’s nice to have it all under one cover, since I’m too lazy to dig out the Epics whenever I want to reread it.

The book also includes the two graphic novels The Price (introducing Dreadstar supporting character Syzygy Darklock) and Dreadstar, as well as the one-off story from a later Epic introducing Willow. The stories are as they originally appeared…any black and white pages in the stories aren’t colorized, and The Price is the original version, not the slightly censored version that appeared in Dreadstar Annual #1. Yes, that means there’s no smoke obscuring your cat-god penis, in case you were concerned. And I know you were.

I keep hoping Starlin will return to the Dreadstar universe someday, if only just to wrap the whole thing up once and for all, but in the meantime, I’m glad I finally was able to get a collection of that serial. And to think the only reason I got into Dreadstar in the first place was because Berni(e) Wrightson did a back-up story in issue #6, causing me to pick it up, and I ended up enjoying the lead story as well.

Oh, and someone tell Dynamite it’s “Vanth Dreadstar,” not “Vance” — easy enough mistake to make, but still.

• • •
In other news:

• Matt Digges tells his side of the story re: Free Comic Book Day. Includes a comic strip!
• As I originally noted here, some of my fellow Bureau Chiefs, the folks what are behind Fake AP Stylebook, went to a conference in Massachusetts, and Dave and Andrew were Bad Enough Dudes to bring back photos and reports of their experiences.
• Who gets the chicks? Hank McCoy gets the chicks. And how.