Mikester

No, it’s not safe for work:

So here are three things I picked up for myself this week:

Oh, okay, silliness aside…the new Journal has a great interview with Johnny Ryan, a brief but interesting interview with Golden Age artist Lily Renee (including reprints of some of her stories, featuring Senorita Rio and “The Werewolf Hunter”), and the lavishly-illustrated, cover-featured interview with Joost Swarte which I haven’t read yet, but c’mon, it’s gonna be a good read, too.

The new Acme Novelty Library is, as usual, filmed in Depress-O-Vision, flawlessly cartooned and emotionally uncomfortable, and, as always, highly recommended. And the new Star Wars book is…well, it’s a Star Wars book. Don’t you judge me.

Other new books this week:

Batman/Spirit – I wasn’t planning on buying this, but, heck, I figure I’m going to be buying Darwyn Cooke’s forthcoming Spirit series, so I might as well pick this up, too. I know there was some trepidation regarding Jeph Loeb’s involvement in this one-shot, but, eh, any minor rough spots in the dialogue are easily ignored in favor of the gorgeous, gorgeous art.

Batman #659 – Cliché-fest, at least given my brief glance through the book. At any rate, I didn’t see anything in the comic that made me want to pick it up. I think I’ll be skipping this fill-in story until Grant Morrison returns.

Nextwave #10 – Warren Ellis makes Forbush-Man scary. There’s a sentence I thought I’d never type.

Talent #4 – Nicholas, the man possessed by a series of spirits killed in a plane crash only he survived, finds himself inhabited by the ghost of a hitman, tracking down another hitman who may hold the secret behind the crash. This series, as it has from the start, remains fast-paced and interesting, a fun exploration of a clever idea.

Onslaught: Reborn #1 – I already made my opinion known on this comic, here on the site, but I try to keep it to myself at the store. I took some grief from folks who wondered why we even bothered to carry it in the first place…imagine the shock in their faces when I told them that, hey, Liefeld sells comics. Well, Marvel comics, anyway. Usually. I hope.

I should be doing a New Comics Day rundown, but I got behind and, well, what can you do? So instead, here’s something we were chatting about at the shop…comic book “Easter eggs.”

One of the more famous ones is the message Barry Windsor-Smith snuck into issue #8 of Conan the Barbarian (August 1971). Here’s the panel in question:

And here it is, nice ‘n’ big:

Given the number of panels in this issue filled with piles of coins, you could hardly blame the guy.

Now the Overstreet price guide always lists Ka-zar #1 (Aug. 1970) as a “hidden profanity cover,” and, if you sorta squint at Zabu’s back, by the tree, you see this:

Actually, blowing it up to that size obscures the naughtiness…it looks more like the word in question at its normal size.

The cover for the 1988 Spectre annual by Art Adams is filled with hidden cross-company characters, such as the Thing (along with other Fantastic Four members):

…and the Marvel version of Hercules:

…the Creature from the Black Lagoon (cleverly drawn to look as if he were wearing a collared shirt):

…Spock:

…Wolverine (along with several other X-people):

…and none other than the famous Sam & Max, Freelance Police:

And pal Kevin pointed this out to us at the shop, from the cover of U.S. 1 #4 (Aug. 1983) by Michael Golden…a little chicken man among the other chickens, by the UPC code box:

I think it’s just a generic chicken guy in glasses, while Kevin is convinced it’s Super-Chicken in his civilian identity of Henry Cabot Henhaus III:

(Image from Dave’s Un-Official Super-Chicken Page…auto-playing sound at link.)

There are plenty more comic book Easter eggs, hidden messages and the like, out there in the wild, but these are just a few that came to mind right away. Well, there are also the hidden messages in many issues of the Marvel/Epic run of Groo the Wanderer (which usually read “this is the hidden message” — one of these even made it to the Groo poster release at the time).

Any other funnybook “hidden messages” that you can think of? Leave ’em in the comments, if you’d like.

EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot this, from Saga of the Swamp Thing #19 (Dec. ’83)…in this panel of Un-Men drawn by Steve Bissette and John Totleben:

…you can see Gumby, Spider-Man, and what appears to be E.T.:

…and the green guy above E.T. looks familiar, too, but I can’t quite place him.

Lots of good Easter eggs in the comments section…some I remembered, some I didn’t. Please feel free to keep adding to the list!

Found on the eBay…a Nancy & Sluggo puzzle set:

Also found on the eBay: pin-up art of Christina Aguilera in the slave bikini outfit that Princess Leia was wearing in Return of the Jedi. Now that’s a specific interest.

So I found this CD at my local book/music/coffee shop yesterday:

Whenever the primary delivery system for recordings shift from one format to another (in this case, from LPs/cassettes to CDs), there are always a few things that slip through the cracks, never to be seen again. I assumed The Steve Martin Brothers was going to be one of these forgotten relics, lost to history.

So imagine my surprise, flipping through the comedy CD section and suddenly coming across this album. Really, it was the last thing I’d expected to see.

The Steve Martin Brothers got lucky…some small label somewhere managed to talk Warner Bros. into leasing the rights to this album to them so they could get it out there for poor saps like me who had a Steve Martin Brothers-shaped hole in their collections.

But how many more recordings are out there are long forgotten, buried in the archives of a monolithic entertainment corporation, or lacking in any ownership to provide for their caretaking? How many of those recordings exist only in formats that are incompatible with modern technology, where the tech required to play them are becoming, more and more, expensive specialty items?

And all this thinking, as per usual, leads me to the comics industry.

The analogy isn’t exact, I know. But I got to wondering about all the work produced over the decades’ long history of the comics industry, and how so much of it now is forgotten, unread save by a few hundred (or certainly in some cases, a few dozen) collectors, if it’s remembered at all.

In the cases of Marvel and DC, chances are at least fair-to-middlin’ that some of their more popular older material will get reprinted, what with the Essentials and the Showcases and the Masterworks and the Archives. Even Archie has some reprints of their own older material, in their digests and the occasional softcover.

But for the off-brand stuff? Not so much of a chance…it makes me sad to think that some cartoonist, long ago, worked hard on his Spunky the Monkey strip to get it in before the deadline, saw it go into print once, and then it was consigned to the dustbin of history as the disposable entertainment it was.

Like I said, there are collectors still looking for this stuff, but where obsolete recording formats have expensive specialty equipment standing in their way, old comic books have 1) relative scarcity and 2) generally higher “collectors” prices blocking new readership for old stories.

This is just me being all weepy about old comics and the creators who put so much work into them (okay, to be fair, some put a little more work into ’em than others), only to see their hard work presented to the public once, then tossed aside, forgotten. I realize that the alternative is that everything ever published stays in print and available forever, which is of course not a realistic option. But I’d hoped that at least, say, Scribbly and Herbie (just to pick two examples) would have seen some kind of extensive reprinting by now. There’s always the digital option, I suppose, with online archives (legal and otherwise) of comics that are otherwise unavailable.

I’ve covered this topic before, I realize, but I got to thinking about all that lost work and I had to get it off my chest yet again, so thank you for indulging me.

So, in honor of the reissue of The Steve Martin Brothers, the CD I never expected to see, and to end this post on a more “up” note, I want to ask you folks: What comic book reprint/reissue surprised you the most? What funnybook stuff did you expect would never see the light of day again, and yet…one day, there it was, on a bookshelf right in front of you, large as life.

It’s hard for me to choose one, but I think maybe DC’s Showcase Presents Haunted Tank is right up there. What’s your pick?

Dave Cockrum, co-creator of the modern version of the X-Men (and the creator of Nightcrawler) has passed away. Tom Spurgeon has an informative tribute to the man’s life and work.

Here’s another for the “this is a fetish for someone” file:

At the store, I read through our preview copy of Onslaught Reborn, due this coming Wednesday. And all I can say is…why does Marvel Comics hate my eyes?

Okay, my smart-assery aside, Rob Liefeld does seem like a nice guy, and he was enough of a sport to make a video diary entry addressing his infamous Captain America pic. But all that congenial self-criticism over his own drawing doesn’t mean a darn thing when a glance through Onslaught Reborn shows that nothing has apparently been learned.

I don’t like saying this. I don’t like being yet another person piling on Rob Liefeld, but honestly, this comic is pretty rough going.

I will say two positive things, so I feel less like a jerk: one, this comic will probably sell relatively well, since Liefeld can still move Marvel publications — so, you know, what do I know; and two, the splash page made me laugh, as Liefeld and writer Jeph Loeb succinctly sum up the recent House of M/The 198 Big Event brouhaha with one big ‘n’ dopey full page drawing.

Mike (seeing customer he hasn’t seen in a while and has shopped at the store since childhood): “Oh, hey…good to see you again! So, visiting for the holidays? Are you going to school out of town now?”

Customer: “I am visiting for Thanksgiving, but I’ve been out of school for a couple years now.”

Mike: (drops dead of old age)

EDIT: In case you haven’t seen enough of Harvey Comics over the last week or so at this here site, please enjoy my contribution to Yet Another Comics Blog’s ongoing Monkey Covers shenanigans.

Comico Comics promo poster (1986) – art by Ken Steacy

Here’s a look at the foil design:

Our new comics day was pretty busy, thanks to everyone trying to get in before the Thanksgiving holiday…however, the dreaded “Black Friday” will probably not be too big of a deal for us. My experience is that the big “Black Friday” sales that you’ve been hearing about on the news are more for malls and “big box” stores like Walmart and Best Buy. Small businesses, at least in our area, don’t get that bump in business until later in the shopping season, after customers are tired of dealing with crowded malls and work their way outward into the outlying areas, desperately seeking out present ideas.

So, no, I’m not expecting this Friday to be any busier than normal. (And yes, in the past we’ve tried to attract business with special post-Thanksgiving sales and special deals, but no dice.) Ah, well, that’s okay…I’ve got store stuff to catch up on from not being open on Thursday.

Anyway, from New Comics Day this week…there’s this one customer, and I swear to God this happens every week, who picks up his weekly books, flips through them on his way to the register, and makes sure to point out to me (for example) “Hey, did you see that [shocking revelation from the end of the story] happened in this issue?” This is sometimes accompanied by his waving the page in question in front of my face. And I always respond to him in the same way: “No, I haven’t read that issue yet.” And he did it to me again this week. I need to start hiding in the back room when he comes in.

As for a couple of the comics themselves:

Planetary Brigade Origins #1 – as the title implies, it’s the “origin” of the Planetary Brigade superteam, told in the typical light and witty style of Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, accompanied this time by artist Julia Bax. Like its parent title, Hero Squared, this comic cleverly and gently skewers (with love, not contempt) the cliches typical of the superhero genre, while not letting the satire overwhelm the actual superhero adventure. It’s a tough balancing act, but one Giffen and DeMatteis have mastered and is always a pleasure to read.

Enigma Cipher #1 – fast-moving action/suspense, as students from a college class studying a WWII-era Enigma coded message suddenly start turning up dead, and one last student struggles to stay one step ahead of her pursuers. It’s a plot-type that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen an action movie (the “we must get the disk” plot, I like to call it, after some computer espionage flick I saw years ago), but Andrew Cosby, Michael Alan Nelson, and Greg Scott do a good job keeping up interest in the story and maintaining reader sympathy for the student-on-the-run.

JSA Classified #19 – takes the classic “organ-harvesting” urban myth, and applies it to superheroes. Again, we’ve seen the “stolen body parts of superheroes” thing before, but not quite to this extent, and not with that urban myth aspect, which, I think, is quite clever. And on top of that, they managed to find some use for a couple of those “Bloodlines” characters that have been floating around for a while. I should note that I read the heavily-medical aspects of this story wondering what our resident medical comics weblogger Polite Scott would have to say about some of the details of this story. In fact, I now think that when I read any comic stories involving medical issues. See what the comicsweblogosphere has done to me?

In other news:

• Mark Evanier has the sad news that comics historian Jerry Bails has died. In fact, just calling him a “comics historian” doesn’t do him justice…that we have any history of the medium is thanks primarily to the inspiration of Mr. Bails’ early fandom efforts. Please read Mr. Evanier’s post for more details on this man…and like he says, we’re sure to see an issue or three of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego magazine devoted to Bails’ life. (A friend of mine was in contact with Mr. Bails a couple years back, and at the time I had spent a lot of money obtaining one of Bails’ old fanzines…when my friend related the amount I spent on these three mimeographed pages to Mr. Bails, he was…well, either amused or bemused, one of the two!)
• Augie De Blieck, in his column this week, wonders why there aren’t more books on comics culture from fandom folks…and points out my site, along with the great and powerful Dave’s Long Box, as prime contenders for translation from web-to-paper. Thanks, Augie! And, hey, any publishers out there…I’m game if you are! (I sort of touched on this a while back, as I lamented the ephemeral nature of my site. Someday, once I load up on the necessary amount ink, I’m going to print out a copy of my site, just so there’s at least one physical copy of it in existence!)
• Apparently there’s a Kirby “meme” going around (which started here) in which you pick which character had the best Kirby design. Jon tagged me, and, alas, I must duplicate the answer of the person who tagged Jon – the ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing is my favorite Kirby design. Monstrous yet sympathetic, terrible but lovable, tragic and funny…Kirby never topped this design for sheer versatility. For more of my thoughts on the character, I refer you to what I wrote for Comic Book Galaxy a while back.
• Tim O’Neil does what I wanted to do with one of the pictures from yesterday’s End of Civilization post, but didn’t have time. Well done, sir, well done.