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I bought the
first issue of
normalman back in the early days of my “hey, I just found a comic shop and I really want to try comics by people other than Marvel and DC” phase, mostly because, well, it looked like it would be funny.
And it was! This probably remains my favorite work by Jim Valentino (then, only “Valentino”)…fun, goofy comics about the one guy without powers on a planet filled with superheroes and villains. I recognized the subjects of the parodies on each cover, even if I didn’t specifically know a whole lot about all of them at the time. A couple of friends of mine were also reading the series, and we had a good time talking about some of the gags in the book (such as the ongoing, issue-after-issue roll-call of the Legion of Super-Heroes parody, and the highly*-entertaining-to-a-bunch-of-teenagers Man-Man, with his Ganja-Breath.
Normally, I don’t try to buy collections of comics I already own, though looking at the shelves I can see that despite repeatedly claiming so, I’ve done it more than a few times. It’s hard to resist a nice-looking trade paperback sometimes, especially if the better paper and clearer reproduction improves on the original. The original series was in full color, wrapping up in a 3-D annual, and, well, I don’t have anything really against 3-D as such, but I tend to prefer my comics in two dimensions, and not read through a pair of cardboard glasses with colored lenses. The trade is in black and white, and I think the content suffers a bit as such…the color of the original series was part of its charm, I think. However, the tradeoff is that I can now more easily read the story from the 3-D annual without trying to figure out where I put my 3-D glasses this time, instead of just keeping them in the bag with the comic like a reasonable person.
I wasn’t really seeking a collection of this series or anything. It just so happened that, at some point in the early ’90s, we were putting together a wholesale purchase from Slave Labor Graphics at the shop, and I happened to see this book in the catalog. “Huh, I’d never seen that collection before, that’ll be neat to have” I thought, and added it to the order on a whim. And here it is, still on my shelves, a couple of decades later. Almost right away there were some issues with the book, with the first few pages beginning to come loose from the spine, which bummed me out a bit. Otherwise, it’s still a nice package…
…which has been totally supplanted by The Complete normalman, released by Image Comics in 2007 and including all the normalman-related material published after the first book’s release (like the normalman 20th Anniversary Special). Doesn’t seem to have Max the Magnificent however, which features not only Max, who’s popped up in normalman, but also an appearance from Captain Everything, so you normalman completists will still need this.
Anyway, that newer collection is pretty tempting, and still available from Diamond. That’ll be neat to have.
* Obvious pun obviously intended.
So I was just poking through the Vast Mikester Comic Archives when I took note of the cover date on this comic.
Barring the usual cover-date-usually-a-month-or-three-off shenanigans usually involved in comics (though this was a small press book, and may actually have come out in April), this comic is now 20 years old.
The series is cartoonist Jeff Nicholson’s parody/homage/take-off on the Japanese giant-hero-versus-monsters TV show Ultraman, and unfortunately, this is the only issue of the series I own, so I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it. (You can read a more extensive appreciation of the series here.) Not sure why I wasn’t following it, exactly…Nicholson’s stories in this issue were amusing, and it wasn’t like I was shunning indies or black-and-white titles or anything. Probably just a case of “I can’t read everything” more than anything else.
But the reason I did buy this issue was due to it containing a back-up story by Yummy Fur‘s Chester Brown, in which his bunny character visits Japan and finds himself in the midst of one of Ultra Klutz’s monster battles:
Brown’s art seems a little more rough than normal, but still it’s an enjoyable short. And I’d completely forgotten about the fact that there’s a three-page
Dishman story in here as well. Yes, Dishman. Read about him at the link, there. (Someday I need to find the rest of the Dishman mini-comics to round out my collection.)
Anyway, I don’t really have a “review” as such of this comic….like I said, I grabbed it off the rack for the Brown back-up, was reasonably entertained by the rest of the book, and then stored the comic away. Plus, as far as I can remember, this is probably the first time I’ve read the comic since my original reading of it all those years ago. Mostly, I’m just amazed that, well, here’s something I just bought on a whim for a few minutes of entertainment…and here it is, still in my possession, two decades later.
And here I am, just a few lines of this post back, thinking about looking for more comics to buy to plug holes in the ol’ collection. We really are slaves to our possessions, sometimes.
But on the other hand, all those comics are helping to feed this here website, so it’s not all for nothing, I guess!
I picked up a copy of this black and white small press anthology magazine in those long-ago days prior to my entry into the funnybook selling business. In fact, if I recall correctly, this magazine was in a stack of books being offered “FREE with $10 Purchase” (or something like that). Anyway, I grabbed it partially because of my interest in sampling a lot of the black and white indies at the time (and the ’80s were a real heyday for that sort of thing), but mostly because I saw
Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell‘s name on the cover.
As it turned out, this wasn’t Feazell’s usual stick-figure style…actually, it was a story that had been drawn back in ’81:
However, there was a stick-figure style story elsewhere in the anthology (The Stick Dick in “Vengeance Day” by Eric Mayer), as well as a Morty the Dog story by
Steve Willis and a Mightyguy lead story by
Tim Corrigan. The magazine contains mostly short humor strips like the above (though the Feazell strip is more “slice of life”), and there is one horror strip that seems somewhat out of place. But overall, this is an entertaining mix of cartooning styles, some more polished than others, but all demonstrating an honest, homemade expressiveness that your typical 30-part superhero crossover punch-em-up can’t match.
The black and white boom of the 1980s did result in a lot of junk, but it did occasionally come up with a bit of enjoyable oddball weirdness like Czar Chasm, and I kind of miss that.
I remember an extensive preview in
Amazing Heroes catching my attention for this graphic novel (by Kevin Juaire, David Campti, Ron Lim, Michael Whitherby, and others) and subsequent series. In a way, it was kind of a proto-
Astro City, throwing the reader into a generational superhero saga with just a touch of poignancy and a focus on how superheroes and “the real world” interact. This initial installment focuses on Victor, one of the last original heroes still active, and his encounter with the villainous son of a former comrade. Here’s a quick shorthand sequence of how Victor experienced the passage of time and changing attitudes:
This came out during the period of reimaginings of superheroes in “realistic” terms, trying to play out the implications of superheroic activity and relationships to their logical ends.
Watchmen and
Marvelman and even Mark Gruenwald’s
Squadron Supreme series were part of this movement, if not outright defining it, and
Hero Alliance kind of falls within this spectrum. Maybe more toward
Squadron Supreme‘s more “traditional superhero” end than the “dismantling of the genre” end of the Alan Moore works, but it’s definitely an attempt at a more mature superhero story.
The follow-up monthly series from Innovation unfortunately didn’t keep my interest for all of its short run (I only bought 11 of the 17 issues), and it did have maybe a few too many cheesecake-y covers, which wasn’t unusual for this particular publisher. But for a while there, Hero Alliance was an interesting series, and a reasonably successful experiment in an alternate take on superheroic funnybooks. I wouldn’t mind seeing this reprinted in a volume or two for modern audiences, someday.
This 24-page, magazine-sized, black and white comic is Steve Lafler’s second publication, as per his introduction on the first page. Our titular aggressive feline is featured in a couple of stories within…here he is in action:
…though half of the book is devoted to other characters and features, such as “Angry Young Carrot,” “Crazy Eddie,” and “Naked Avenger,” as well as a page of poems by Steve Beaupre.
I spent a lot of the eighties and the early nineties being a Steve Lafler completist, or at least as best as I was able. I think I’m still missing a couple of the Dog Boy comics he published under his Cat Head imprint, but I’ve got his short-run and one-shot books like Femme Noire and Out the Next and a complete run of his Buzzard magazine, and so on. When Bughouse came out in the mid 1990s, it didn’t really do anything for me and, for whatever reason, I just sort of fell out of following his work after that. But I still have fond memories of getting big laffs from Dog Boy and Benb and his other crazy comics, so thank you for that, Mr. Lafler. And the man is still producing plenty of comics, which you can learn about at his official website.
This copy of Mean Cat turned up in a very large collection we acquired at the shop in the late ’80s, from a collector who didn’t do very much to protect his comics from the elements. For example, by not bothering to invest a couple of bucks in some comic bags, his entire run of Iron Man had a half-inch of water damage at the bottom of each issue. You can probably see the water spotting in my scan above, though the paper of the cover is heavily tanned as well, particularly on the inside. There was a copy of Guts (another early Lafler book) in this collection, but seeing as then-coworker Rob was also a Lafler fan, he and I split the acquisitions and he took the Guts, and I took this goodie. (Come to think of it, Rob’s kind of been out of the comics world for a while…I wonder if I can get it back from him? If he even still has it.) (This is a terribly selfish geek-thing to think, by the way.)
I’ll be taking another weekend break from my journey through my collection, but I’ll be picking up again on Monday if nobody objects or shows up on my doorstep with rakes and torches. Thank you all for reading and, hopefully, enjoying my show-and-tell.
§ January 27th, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives Comments Off on Kandykorn-Jackhammer #1-#3 (Pneumatic Press, 1990-1).
This was a local ‘zine published by artist/writer/mad genius Johnny Brewton, featuring his work as well as contributions from the remarkably various and the most definitely sundry from across Ventura County and distant parts beyond. It was a potpourri of cartoons, fiction, interviews (with the Jeff Dahl Group and Bob Forrest), reviews, clip art, poetry…basically, if it could be printed on a page, it was fair game for the magazine. The second issue even had an additional mini-comic stapled to the inside back cover.
Brewton would later move on to the X-Ray Book Company, a publisher of high-end, limited edition books and art pieces. One book he published had a swell cover by Jaime Hernandez, and another had some copies hand-signed by Hunter S. Thompson! Pretty neat.
Somewhat less neat is the following cartoon, which appeared in issue #3 of Kandykorn-Jackhammer. Yes, it’s a contribution from a 21 or 22 year old version of yours truly, your pal Mike, upon whom Johnny took a great deal of pity and willingly wasted one valuable page on my amateurish scribblings, which by all rights I should be too embarrassed to show you:
Behold the obvious jokes! The terrible hand-lettering! The inkjet-printed computer lettering! The
head mirror! (Actually, I still kinda like how that doctor came out.) And isn’t that cute, I actually put a little © on it, like someone was going to steal it.
Well, maybe it’s not that bad, and it was a precursor to my brief stint as a mini-comics creator under the Full-Frontal Harvey publishing banner. But I always did appreciate Johnny’s inclusion of my comic, and I was quite happy to see it in print, and certainly proud to have been at least a tiny part of this interesting project.
And before you ask…no, that first issue did not have nude pictures of Ed Asner as promised on the cover. Nor did the other two issues. Sorry to disappoint.
This black and white British magazine fits early into Alan Moore’s Marvelman/Miracleman continuity, after the events in “Zarathustra” (from
Warrior #11, reprinted in
Miracleman #3). A four page wraparound story, by Moore and Alan Davis, shows a two-man clean-up crew moving in to tidy up a secret government installation devastated by some Marvelman-created mayhem, and discovering a library of videotapes:
We then get a handful of original 1950s Marvelman stories from Mick Anglo’s studio, including “Invaders from the Future,” a rescripted version of which was used in Eclipse Comics’
Miracleman #1 (providing an innocent contrast to the grim ‘n’ gritty revamp that followed, as well as simply introducing the character to an audience that may not have been familiar with it). In the context of the Moore’s modernization of the character, these are some of the falsified adventures used as “programming” for Marvelman and his superpowered compatriots.
Rounding out the mag is a story starring the more-lighthearted Big Ben character, which is also presented as a video being watched by the cleaning crew.
Eclipse Comics did reprint this special (sans the Big Ben story) as the Miracleman 3-D Special in 1985.
I acquired this particular magazine shortly after the launch of Eclipse’s Miracleman comic, as it had been sitting on the shelf at the comic store for several months and, being quite taken with the comic and character, finally decided I needed to have it. It’s been 25 years, so I don’t remember the exact timing, but I think I may have bought and read the magazine before the Eclipse reprints reached that point in continuity. It must have been a tantalizing glimpse of events yet to come, if in fact that was when I bought it. I do remember that owning this magazine is the reason I never bought the Miracleman 3-D Special, since, hey, I already had it, and didn’t need to wear the special glasses to read it.
Speaking of glimpses of things yet to come:
Warrior #4 contains the story “The Yesterday Gambit,” which is unique in that it’s the only Alan Moore
Marvelman story not (yet?) reprinted in the U.S. Also, it takes place
much later in Marvelman continuity, hinting at events that wouldn’t arrive in the Marvelman storyline for a few years to come. In fact, the original
Marvelman run in
Warrior would never reach that point…it wouldn’t until Eclipse Comics finished reprinting UK-published material and started running first run work created by Moore and his collaborators. Specifically, “The Yesterday Gambit” takes place during the events of issue #15, published in 1988. However, instead of reprinting the original story, Moore and artist John Totleben take a handful of panels to essentially retell that adventure’s events.
The story itself is about Marvelman and a Warpsmith (a teleporting alien) traveling through time and trying to find sufficient energy and power for their final battle against a reawakened and totally evil Kid Marvelman. This is where the “tantalizing glimpse” aspect of the story comes in, because if I’ve figured the timing right, this story basically interrupted the adventure in progress from previous issues of Warrior…which just happened to be Marvelman’s first clash with the corrupt Kid Marvelman.
In essence, Marvelman clashes with past versions of himself, which allows the Warpsmith to gather the energy from those battles to bring back with them to the Kid Marvelman battle in the future. You know, writing it all out like this sounds completely convoluted and just a little nuts, but it all works in context, I swear. Anyhoo, one battle is drawn by Paul Neary, the other by Alan Davis (his initial work on the character), and the framing sequence for the whole thing is by Steve Dillon. Here’s a panel from the end of the story by Dillon, where Marvelman and the Warpsmith have returned to their own time to resume the Kid Marvelman battle:
And the story ends right after that, leaving the fans hanging for six years. And you folks who read
Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk thought you
had it bad. Well, you
did, but not for reasons of delay. Er, anyway.
I didn’t buy Warrior #4 in the shop…I wasn’t even aware* that there was an unreprinted Moore Marvelman story until relatively recently, so I had to depend on the eBay to bring it to me. And I’m not bothering with the usual Amazon links on this, since I didn’t find Warrior after spending, oh, a whole 30 seconds looking for it, and the Special is under a handful of different names at prices ranging from $35 to (egads) $90. I paid $2 for mine, which is probably about right. And if you have to have the story, the U.S. 3D version should be relatively inexpensive. Oh, and I paid around $9, including shipping, for the Warrior mag, in case you’re wondering. And I know you are!
* Or perhaps forgotten, because now that I think about it, it may have come up in the letters page at some point, and I’d just forgotten about it as the years passed and Miracleman remained a defunct title out of sight, out of mind.
§ January 25th, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives Comments Off on Comic Book Confidential #1 (Sphinx Productions, 1988).
This 16-page black and white comic was a promotional item for Ron Mann’s documentary about comic book creators
Comic Book Confidential, and features a cover and first page by
Yummy Fur‘s Chester Brown. Here’s one panel from that first page:
Most of the rest of the comic is comprised of very brief biographies and samples of art for all of the film’s interviewees, plus one representational quote apiece:
I’m not certain how these were distributed, as I’ve never seen it in the wild. Presumably stacks of them were placed at various locations where they were likely to grab the attention of the film’s target audience (comic shops, indie record stores, Protestant churches, etc.), and the inside front cover of my copy here has a sticker with information on where you could see the film:
I happened to find this in a dollar box at a convention, a bit late to attend that particular screening, wherever it was. In fact, despite knowing about this film since its release, despite having had a copy of the
movie poster on my wall for a few years, I’ve never actually seen the film. Not on purpose…I was always open to seeing it, but for one reason or another I never got around to it. Checking the Netflix, I see that it’s supposed to be added to their “Watch Instantly” streaming library on February 1st, which is pretty good timing since I just happen to be thinking and writing about this film at this very moment. Thus, added to the queue, and maybe I’ll have a word or two to say about it here after I finally see it.
Couldn’t find the comic on Amazon, but, left to right, here are ads for the DVD, streaming Video on Demand Blu-ray and the old Voyager CD-ROM:
§ January 22nd, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives Comments Off on Space Ghost Coast to Coast "Vol. 1 No. 2" (Cartoon Network, 1994).
This is an eight-page, full-color, slickly-printed promotional comic advertising the then-new
Space Ghost Coast to Coast comedy/talk/cartoon show on Cartoon Network, and I have no idea how I got this in my collection. I don’t remember acquiring it, I don’t remember seeing it “in the wild” and deciding to add it to the collection, I don’t remember it being given to me. And yet, there it is, in all its shilling-ness. I also don’t have any idea why it’s #2, unless it’s an oblique reference to one of the Space Ghost comics
that came before.
The story (writer and artist uncredited) gives the origin of the Coast to Coast talk show, presenting Space Ghost as a superhero whose enemies have all been caught, his friends all moved on (sidekicks Jan and Jace gone to college, space monkey Blip on an extended leave to be with family). He’s adrift in life, listless and without purpose:
…Until he discovers while studying broadcasts from Earth that a horrible disaster is looming:
Oh, Space Ghost, if only you’d come back and take care of our
current talk show problems.
The inside back cover has a description of the show, noting the fictional crew (“Musical Director …………… Zorak”), the premise of the series, and a list of promised future guests. The back cover has Space Ghost requesting that you, the reader, contact your cable operator if you’re not already receiving Cartoon Network.
I didn’t find any copies on either eBay or Amazon during my brief investigations at either site, so I’ll just put up an ad for the DVDs for the Coast to Coast show:
EDIT: link dead
This was a pretty good show, I thought, if occasionally very uncomfortable when one of the live-action guests didn’t get into (or, alternatively, plain just didn’t get) the gag of being interviewed by a cartoon character…except that Bee Gees episode. That was awesome.
Revised 5/2022
§ January 21st, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives Comments Off on "GJDRKZLXCBWQ" Comics (Glenn Bray/Basil Wolverton, 1973).
This mini-comics digest features several full page gag illos of the sort Basil Wolverton was so famous for – portraits of nightmarish grotesqueries:
…as well as a handful of very short (two or three panel) gag sequences.
Don’t have a whole lot to say about this particular item, other than “drink in the beauty of that cover.” I’m pretty sure my initial exposure to Wolverton was via Mad Magazine, either from the concluding panel of “The Face upon the Floor” (reprinted in one of those Mad comic facsimiles inserted in the specials) or from one of his rare full articles in a ’70s Mad. However I first learned about him, I would generally pick up any comics that would reprint samples of his work, from the Eclipse Mr. Monster that would sometimes present a classic horror tale of his, or Fantagraphics’ several reprint books (such as Powerhouse Pepper or that Wolvertoons collection).
This item turned up in the same underground collection Das Kampf did, and as I said about that comic, mini-comics and comics digests always catch my eye. A mini-comic by Wolverton? Definitely a keeper.
Surprisingly, I found someone on Amazon selling this for $20, which I don’t think is entirely unreasonable. I wonder if anybody else is trying to sell it there, but misspelled the name? Wouldn’t be hard to do.
I still have a few more scarce-ish items from my collection in the hopper for display on my site. Hopefully you’re not sick of these yet!
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