publishing

“Tongue-lashed” sounds dirtier than I meant it.

filed under Categories indies, jab, publishing, zines 11 Comments

Sorry for skipping days here and there lately…just have a lot of stuff going on, on top of my aged body just being too tired to blog at the late hours that usually are the only time I have for such activity. So, let me get a few topics out of the way today and maybe sometime next week I can get back to the Final ’80s Countdown.

First off, it’s here, it’s here…or rather, they’re here, a sample of the very bullet and casing used to shoot them holes right through the much-discussed-on-this-site Jab #3.


And there they are, direct from Jab #3 contributor and “Too Much Coffee Man” creator Shannon Wheeler his own self. The accompanying note reads “Never let me see you near my girlfriend again!” and the temptation was to just hide this item somewhere in my collection, unexplained, and leave some serious questions behind for anyone eventually handling whatever passes for my estate. But no, here I am blabbing about it on my comic book weblog, which of course has immense worldwide reach so all my secrets are revealed. Ah well.

But big thanks to Mr. Wheeler for offering up this peculiar bit of comic book history (and also for kindly answering my questions about the whole Jab #3 project). Also, I need to add links to the older Jab posts so they get the whole story if they come upon my writings via Google or Ask Jeeves or whatever.

• • •

Next up, reader Cassandra asked if I could post a link to William Messner-Loebs’ GoFundMe, and yes I can! That poor guy and his wife have had a real time of it for years now, and I most sincerely hope they can get themselves into a comfortable, stable place.

What would be nice is if more of his comic book work were in print and providing him at least a little money. Like, was any of his Flash work collected? A recent DC Pride one-shot had that one story of his with the Pied Piper, but beyond that there wasn’t a lot of comprehensive reprinting of his run, far as I can tell. I don’t think even #50 was reprinted anywhere, and that was kind of a hot issue at the time.

A chunk of his Wonder Woman made it into a trade that could stand reprinting. And how ’bout a nice big archival hardcover of Journey? Or maybe a new printing of Epicurus the Sage? Or just giving him new work if he wants to do it?

Anyway, help him out, even if it’s just spreading the word.

• • •

Sean asked about Pee Wee Herman (RIP the great Paul Ruebens) in comics, and the first thing I thought of was this:


…which, if memory serves, was a kinda/sorta parody of Pee Wee, maybe…it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it’s something like that. Anyway, there you go.

• • •

Longtime reader Michael G. came by the shop in person and admonished me, tongue-lashed me in the cruelest manner, for my lack of content this week. But to show me all is forgiven, he gifted me with some Dave Sim Cerebus trading cards, which are, of course, the Dave Simmest, but you’d be disappointed if they weren’t:


Yup, they’re Swamp Thing-ish…the other cards are nice too, but look, I’m too tired to keep this post going for too much longer, so let’s just throw out one more scan here and call it a night.

• • •

As promised, one more scan, this time from my fanzine collection:


This ‘zine is from 1965, which means Spider-Man had only been around about three years. Weird, huh?

Just trying to not make anyone mad here.

filed under Categories mad magazine, publishing 18 Comments

So a little while back I was at the local grocery store, doing my weekly hunting and gathering as my Paleolithic ancestors once did, when I paused at the magazine section.

I used to love the magazine section of grocery stores. While my dad shopped, I, as a young Mikester, would hang out near all the books and magazines trying to pick which one I’d be able to talk my way into including with the evening’s haul. I was generally successful, as both my parents, like me, were voracious readers and we’d usually come home with a book or magazine(s) or both for them as well.

And the magazine sections used to be huge, or at least they appeared to be so to me in the 1970s/early 1980s. So many choices, so many weird and wonderful mags, and this was the era when you could still find comic book publications. Not so much the comic books, though there was a limited selection at some shops, but, like, the Marvel magazines were a little more common. That’s where I first spotted Pizzazz, for example, eventually getting a subscription (only for it to be cancelled shortly thereafter, with Amazing Spider-Man replacing the rest of the sub).

One quick memory I had specifically of the Marvel mags at the grocery store was when I spotted the Hulk mag on the shelf. I must have declared out loud to myself “hey, it’s Hulk” or something to that effect as an adult walking by, a really old guy, probably at least in his 40s, replied to me by cheerfully growling “HULK!” and, like, lifting up his arms, fists clenched, and stomping by Lou Ferrigno-style.

Anyway, I loved me the magazine sections way back when. The exotic allure of them has declined somewhat in my later years, as my employment has generally revolved around managing shops that were essentially all magazine racks. But that didn’t stop me on my recent visit to the grocery store, as I gazed upon the one section over which I used to obsess.

Much smaller now, of course, not just because my size relative to the rack has increased, but it’s just plain physically smaller. Not so many paperbacks, not so many magazines, not as much wild varieties of publications (wither CB Citizens’ Band? Wither UFO Report?).

But still present, in some form, is Mad. As a kid, Mad was an easy sell to take home as my dad read it when he was a kid, and realized a true and proper education included exposure to The Usual Gang of Idiots. Of course, today, the actual Mad magazine exists only in comic shops (like my own), but special publications are still offered to more general outlets. Like, say, grocery stores, where I spotted this item on the shelf:


Magazine-sized, squarebound, a mix of color and black and white interiors, featuring mostly the direct spoofs of sci-fi movies (like Star Wars, natch, and 2001: A Space Odyssey) along with other articles making fun of same. Out of nostalgia (both for Mad and for “buying something from the grocery store magazine rack”) along with a desire to have some of these parodies available to me in a slightly more permanent format, I threw it into the cart. Because I’m an adult now and I can buy dumb things if I want to. Usually. If I have the money.

An interesting thing I noticed in this publication is something I hadn’t noticed in Mad before. Well, okay, it’s not like I’ve been keeping tabs on this or anything, but I noticed a little editorial rejiggering of one of the spoofs. A spoof I am very familiar with, having read it when it originally came out about a million times. Let us go back to the heady days of Cover Date January 1978 (probably more like around Fall ’77) and take a peek at Mad #196, parodying one of the biggest and most influential movies in Hollywood history:


Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. And the parody itself is beautifully illustrated by Harry North, Esq. (and surprisingly not by the usual Mad movie parodist Mort Drucker), with some solid jokery by stalwarts Larry Siegel and Dick De Bartolo). However, one gag in the original…let’s say it didn’t age well:


Yes, I censored it slightly, don’t yell at me, people inclined to yell about this sort of thing. Anyway, the gag is playing off the public perception of some that Threepio’s…prissiness reads as “gay,” and this panel is leaning into and exaggerating that idea, complete with The Gay Stance. The derogatory use of that specific word was probably seen as okay because 1) it could be read as poking fun at that perception, and 2) as Bully‘s pal John mentioned to me when he helped me track down that original panel, the term had been used in All in the Family and was probably thought to be fair game.

Still, the joke can come across as homophobic (and while Artoo, from inference, may be a dick in the movies, I think we all prefer to assume he’s not that much of a dick), and that particular use of that term has, as we’ve hopefully grown more aware of and sensitive to the needs of others, become not acceptable.

As such, here’s how the panel appears in the 2023 publication I’ve purchased:


Okay, the joke…hmmm, surface level, still not great. And we’re farther away from the “Threepio is obviously gay” idea that was once so widespread, piggybacking on the Star Wars phenomenon itself, and thus losing that context to inform the panel. And Artoo still comes across as a real jerk.

But That Word is gone, because in today’s culture just casually throwing it out there for a gag like this, is Not Cool, Dude. Not a great joke, particularly removed from the wider cultural context which, frankly, didn’t help it all that much in the first place, but at least now it won’t read as just straight-up offensive. It’ll just be normal levels of offensive.

Over the years, Mad hadn’t necessarily had the…greatest track record with jokes involving the LGBTQIA community early on, punching down more often than not. I believe, though, they’ve avoided reprinting much of that material. But the Star Wars parody is…well, it’s the original Star Wars parody from Mad, it can’t be easily buried. And sometimes things just don’t age well, so if they wanted to keep reprinting the Star Wars parody, well, someone made the decision to take out the slur.

Like I said, I don’t know if this was as widespread practice with Mad‘s reprints, or it they purposely avoided that content until they couldn’t.

About twenty years ago Mad put out a special that included all the Star Wars parodies at that point. I had a copy of that, but no longer, and I believe That Word was still intact. If anyone can confirm, or if they know of other examples of Mad fiddling with jokes from back then that don’t hold up now, please let me know.
 
 
 
 

thanks to Bully, the Little Shocked Bull, for production help. DON’T LOOK, BULLY

Who signed off on this?

filed under Categories dc comics, publishing 6 Comments

So every once in a while I take a look on the eBay for 1996’s Flex Mentallo #3:


…not because I need a copy (I bought mine way back when it was new), but out of perverse fascination with how the book gets listed. Specifically because of this cover detail:


…featuring the signatures of the book’s writer and artist, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Not actual signatures, mind you, but part of the actual cover image. If you look closely, you can see the comic book coloring details in the “penlines” of the signatures:


But if you only ever see the one copy of this comic, and didn’t, say, unbundle a giant pile of them after arrival from Diamond to put them on the shelf and seeing the dozens of copies with identical autographs on each one, then at first glance maybe, just maybe, you might thing you had some genuine hand-scribblings.

Such as the person who listed this item for sale:


Currently it’s just the one listing, which is unusual given that in the past I could usually find four or five at any given time. Maybe folks are learning, maybe I just caught eBay at a good/bad time, maybe enough buyers have complained in the past, I don’t know.

Which does have me thinking about buyers who did purchase one of these off eBay as a “signed” item, believing to this day that they have a rare collector’s item. Ah, well. I don’t remember anyone thinking this when they were buying the item new off the rack (because they could see with their own eyes that every copy had identical “inscriptions”). I do recall having to explain once or twice over the years when buying collections that these weren’t actually hand-signed.

To be fair, this isn’t a common cover design element, so I can’t blame people for being momentarily fooled. And I wouldn’t put it past Morrision and/or Quitely if that wasn’t a planed prank on their part, still playing out all these years later.

Some spirited effort.

filed under Categories publishing 4 Comments

Okay, when I was talking about Tom Yeates, cocreator and artist of Timespirits, and how he sneaked into someplace or ‘nother for research on a story for the book.

Well, I dug through my archive of The Comics Journal issues from around the period the comic was being released, and lo, in Comics Journal #102 (September 1985), there was the article. It was a sidebar to the main article about the differences between writer Steve Perry and Yeates (discussed in detail on this site), and had I been thinking, I would have started my dive into my Journals with that issue, but nooooo.

But here’s the bit from the issue, talking about how Yeates found his way into this retreat for the rich and the political to get reference for his comic. Still a completely wild thing:

Also from that issue of Comics Journal, similar to what they ran regarding editorial changes in Sisterhood of Steel, there was a page of changes made to that issue of Timespirits #6. Yeates was pushing the more political aspects of the story, but Perry rewrote to ease up on that particular tone:


I’d be interested in seeing a full deluxe collection of this series, maybe somehow presenting both versions of these rewritten pages. At any rate, I’d love to have a nice reprinting of Yeates’s beautiful art.

Also, I’m surprised this bit of business regarding Yeates’ infiltration of the retreat has stuck in my head all these years. Especially since I wasn’t a Timespirits reader at the time, but I was a voracious Comics Journal reader. And the stories behind the making of this comic were interesting in and of themselves.

Void Indiupdate.

filed under Categories publishing 3 Comments

Okay, a brief follow-up on the morning’s Void Indigo post. As suggested in the comments, Steve Gerber did have on the old version of his site with a document outlining the stories for issues #3-6. You can also find an uncompleted bit of business for the Ultraverse title Sludge, as well as his unpublished Howard the Duck script. (Just go to his site via the Wayback Machine…you’ll find Howard and Sludge under “Scripts,” and for the Void Indigo outline (and a script for #2) you’ll find a link in the “Bibliography” section.)

The site was retooled after Gerber’s passing. It retains Gerber’s own postings, but I don’t know if the scripts and such are still available there.

Void Indigone.

filed under Categories marvel, publishing 17 Comments

Okay, you characters in the comments from Wednesday’s post got all Void Indigo on me, so I thought I’d look into that situation a bit further.

Void Indigo was a graphic novel and short-lived comic series by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerick, released in the mid-1980s under Marvel’s Epic imprint of mostly creator-owned material. Here’s what the cover to the initial installment, released in sequence in Marvel’s graphic novel line between Rick Veitch’s Heartburst and…Dazzler: The Movie?


It made…quite the stir when it was released, for its violent content, upon which I cannot report as Void Indigo remains a blind spot in my Gerber reading. And due to its truncated nature, I never sought it out, since I figured “it never finished, why bother?” But one shouldn’t be so cavalier about dismissing a Steve Gerber script, especially since we’re not getting any more, so someday I’ll get my hands on these and check them out myself.

My expectation is that, by modern standards, the “shocking” content will be less shocking to current eyes (as noted in one of the responses to Wednesday’s post), but I would like to see it myself.

Since I had my 1980s Comics Journals out, I flipped through to see if I could find their article on the whole situation, and lo, there it was, in #95 (February 1995). Here I have a scan of the just the first part of the article, as it goes on for another half-page:


Apparently lateness was being pushed as much of a reason for cancellation as whatever horrible, soul-searing content within the comics themselves. Low sales at would-be-a-huge-hit-today numbers were also a problem. The article mentions later that the customs seizure basically amounted to nothing, as with the book’s cancellation the problem had solved itself.

There’s also a note in the article about Marvel not taking returns on the two issues of this aborted series, saying everyone was sufficiently warned about the book and thus shared the risk is carrying the thing. Which is absolutely bonkers, and I don’t know if they eventually relented or not. I’ll have to search further up in The Comics Journal‘s numbers to see if there’s a follow-up report.

On top of all that, there’s a retailer…actually, the owner of a comic store…actually actually, the “President” of the company, so I’m changing my title at my shop straight away…who expressed a “moral objection” to carrying Void Indigo. So, damn, I have to read this comic now. Just what is going on in this thing?

One additional note: I remember, at the previous place of employment, in a box of papers and other promo materials, there was a Void Indigo thing, apparently released by Gerber his own self, that was either a script for the unreleased #3, maybe outlines for future issues, something. But it was definitely a stack of stapled paper with otherwise unavailable Void Indigo content. What the provenance of this item was, and where it may be now, following the shut-down of that shop and the scattering to the winds (or to my former boss’s storage, or even to my own backroom) of much of that stuff. Wish I could tell you more about it, or that I even looked inside, which I didn’t since I hadn’t read the other entries in the series, so reading later installments wouldn’t have done me any good.

What makes me wonder, though, is that the article says Gerber was behind, so I don’t know that there was even a script for #3 ready. Unless, of course, he finished it later to try to sell the book elsewhere, but…I don’t know, seems very unlikely. I guess that mysterious stack of paper will remain mysterious ’til I track it down.

So, Void Indigo…I’m betting folks would hardly bat an eye at the content today, or at least it wouldn’t be any worse that Crossed or Faust or Eo…you ever see Eo? No, not the Michael Jackson thing, the Tim Vigil comic? Boy, if that retailer above had a moral objection to Void Indigo, he’d probably renounce all worldly possessions and join a monastery if Eo was shoved into his hands. Assuming he didn’t catch on fire.

I guess I’m now on a quest to find Void Indigo. This is terrible. My site is making me buy more comics. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, I’m supposed to be making you all buy more comics from me. This isn’t fair.

The things I find by absolute chance.

filed under Categories publishing 12 Comments

So I’d been poking through some of my run of The Comics Journal, just kinda lookin’ at stuff, when by complete chance I came across the following bit in regard to Sisterhood of Steel (discussed just this past Monday).

Despite my disclaimers last time that I didn’t know very much this title, I did know this about it, about the time the series was happening. In issue #101 of TCJ, Christy Marx, writer of Sisterhood of Steel, wrote in to talk about changes she was compelled to make to issue #4, pictured here:


…while wondering in the letter why it had to be done, if the Epic imprint was intended for mature audiences? (She also listed a number of euphemisms for breasts and testicles that she was not permitted to use, but “shit” apparently was okay.) Thought this was an interesting artifact of the period, in that early era of the Big Two testing the waters as to what they felt they could or could not do under the “for mature readers” label.

This is around the same time there was a big hoohar over comics ratings which, hoo boy, I’m not sure I’m ready to get into that whole thing. Will it help/hurt sales? Will it make it easier for The Usual Suspects to target certain books? This was also a period of fear that The Powers That Be were going to come down hard on comics content, wondering if a new Frederic Wertham was going to turn up. (Someone tried, if I recall correctly, but didn’t have quite the impact as Wertham did.)

Marvel itself was experiencing some distributor pushback against the for-mature-readers Moonshadow (as noted in Marx’s letter, and cited as a probable reason for the Sisterhood changes). And a few years prior there was some obscuring of a being’s naughty bits in the Dreadstar Annual‘s reprinting of Jim Starlin’s The Price graphic novel from Eclipse Comics.

Like I said, just thought this was interesting. Given what appears in even your standard issue Marvels and DCs, a lot of this concern over content may seem a little…quaint. But the journey from those early days of the Direct Market with DC and Marvel pushing at their respective envelopes, to superheroes facing off a naked blue man and his fully on-view wedding tackle in a Major Event Book, was a bumpy one. And still ongoing.

The “Archie” mentioned in the image was editor Archie Goodwin.

Just in time for me to have bought all those ROM back issues for the store, too.

filed under Categories marvel, publishing 21 Comments

Well, this was as real week for “that’s the last thing I expected to hear”-type news, starting with the stunning return of failed-toy-but-reasonably-successful-comic-character ROM Spaceknight to Marvel Comics!

Now as far as anyone can tell, this “return” seems to be limited to reprinting the original material, in this case in those large Omnibus editions and at least one facsimile edition in the form of a reprint of issue #1. Also included will be those crossover issues that, previously, had been on the reprint-banned list and skipped over in trade collections for other characters. For example, an issue of Power Man and Iron Fist will be in Omnibus #1. (Which has me wondering…Peter David put an unarmored, totally human ROM in an issue of Incredible Hulk…will this Not Approved by the License Holder appearance get into an omnibus?)

At any rate, this is exciting news, with the license holder apparently discovering with the attempted ROM comics revival at another publisher a few years back that the ROM people want is the Marvel version. And my recommendation…if you want these, get your preorders in as soon as possible and buy them right away. No idea how long Marvel has the license, or under what restrictions (like how often can they reprint these books). I don’t know if waiting for cheaper “Epic” paperback collections would be wise.

And I don’t know if Marvel would be allowed to reissue some of their other trade collections that previously omitted any ROM appearances. Most notably, there’s an issue of Incredible Hulk that prominently featured the Spaceknight, #296 from 1984, that when reprinted had all of ROM’s appearances in the story replaced with text pieces explaining what happened without mentioning the character by his at that point unlicensed name. Be nice to have that fixed.

After the ROM announcement, people responded with “wow, now do the Micronauts,” and lo, Marvel done did the Micronauts. Like ROM, these comics will also be issued in the large Omnibus hardcover format, preceded by a facsimile edition of the initial Micronauts comic book. Most of the comments I made about the ROM reprints above can be applied to the Micronauts as well. Order early, order often!

I don’t think the Micronauts popped up in other Marvel comics as much as ROM did, but there’s at least the X-Men/Micronauts mini-series so hopefully that’ll make it in. Also, it’s actually pretty good.

The third, slightly less surprising news, is Image Comics announcing they’re shifting their distribution to Lunar. I mean, “less surprising” in that I figured another biggish publisher would split from Diamond and move elsewhere eventually, and that Image was one of the likely suspects.

Like with Marvel, Image will still be available through Diamond, but likely at a worse wholesale discount. This is a pretty significant hit to Diamond, I would think, and one I thought would be a fatal blow. But, given that apparently a number of retailers have stuck with Diamond for their Marvel business, despite it costing more, I imagine the same will occur with Image. So, you know, Diamond’s not done yet. But I can picture a day, maybe years from now, when the company will be “Your #1 Source for Sexy Anime Bikini Girl PVC Statues, and Only That!”

It will be nice to have a couple different sources for reorders, in case one of the other is out of stock on something. And the distributor competition has been good for Diamond, in that my shipments are relatively error free compared to, well, the last couple of decades. I know that’s not the case for everyone, as when I mentioned this on the Twitters I heard from another retailer that the missing/damaged books in his shipments have been just as bad, if not worse. As such, I’ll just consider myself lucky, and hope they’re not building up to a shipment where all my boxes are delivered on fire or something.
 
 

image from Incredible Hulk #418 (1994) by Peter David, Gary Frank and Cam Smith

Purge Code Authority – All Words Are Legal.

filed under Categories publishing 23 Comments

So in talking about nudity in the Planet of the Apes film and comic I somehow neglected to awkwardly squeeze in my old joke about the French sex farce installment of the franchise Do the Carpets Match the Apes? Ah well, maybe next time.

Anyhow, last time I was talking about how the comic book softened the language just a tad for the last lines of the original POTA, and that the particular phrase would not make its first Comics Code-approved appearance ’til an issue of Justice League in the 1980s. There was a question in the comments from “S” wondering if I meant the word “damn,” leading to this coming clarification.

“Damn,” as we know, has a long history in the funnybooks, though I feel like Marvel kinda avoided using that and “hell” throughout the ’80s, despite leaning hard on them in the ’70s. I do wonder what the first appearance of both would be in comics?

What I was referring to was a slightly stronger epithet, as Taylor says here in the clip from the film. He says “damn” first, then the term I was specifically referencing. NOTE: this spoils the end of the 1968 Planet of the Apes, so if you somehow haven’t seen it yet, please don’t let me be the one who ruins the surprise. BEHOLD THE CLIP.

And as presented in issue #6 of Adventures on the Planet of the Apes (again, reprinted from the black and white magazine), a somewhat bowlderized, certainly less scene-chewing, version of the same event:


That’s the difference of which I was speaking. One invokes God, the other does not.

And here, from Justice League International #12 (1988), is what I believe to be its first use in a Code-approved book:


I presume separating it out in different word balloons helped lighten the impact to let it slip through.

As long as we’re on the topic, the first Code-approved use of “shit” (almost certainly by accident…someone in the Comics Code offices probably just assumed everything was good and rubber-stamped this approval, if anyone bothered to submit it at all) was DC’s adaptation of Star Trek: Generations (the newsstand/”standard” format edition).

First Code-approved version of “pissed off” was, I think, 1989’s Justice League International #23 (Justice League, always pushing that edge!), which I pointed out just a few months ago.

“Asshole” didn’t make it into a Code-approved book, I’m pretty sure, but it did pop up in the first issue of Final Crisis, which was a big DC event book and a weird place for it to appear. (I can’t spot it in the digital version, and my print versions are currently in reorganization limbo, so I’ll have to follow up later.)

I’m sure “ass” all on its lonesome appeared in a Code book at some point, because it sure turns up all the time in superhero comics now. I don’t think “dick” (as in “that guy’s a…” not “whoa, look at the size of that…”) got the CCA stamp at any point, but I think it’s been in the mainstream superhero books of late on rare occasions.

With the Code dead, we’re not going to get to watch more naughtiness still slip through its net (like a “hey, fuck you, Wolverine!” in Uncanny X-Men #Reboot+), but maybe more past examples will show up. I would be curious as to what the earliest examples were of each word appearing in a Code-approved (or at least otherwise standard mainstream superhero comic, either Pre or Post-Code).

I hope I don’t come across as some pearl-clutcher, aghast at such salty language appearing in Little Billy’s comics. Honestly, I’m just amused by how standards change over time, or (in the likely case of the Trek comic) just get bypassed entirely on occasion. It does make it harder for me to just tell a parent “oh sure that comic’s fine for your kid!” only to have that parent march up to me a few minutes later and point out someone in the story shouting “oh hell, my damn balls!” or whatever.

Not that it was easy before, like that one mom who objected to reprints of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man comics because the women were “too sexy.” …Um, are we talking about the same Steve Ditko here…?

The nexus between price and value.

filed under Categories publishing, retailing, this calls for hyperspeed, this week's comics 15 Comments


Nexus by Mike Baron and (usually) Steve Rude has been one of my favorite comics for a long time, dating back to almost, but not quite, the beginning of the series. I started reading Nexus (and Baron’s other book, Badger) when First Comics started publishing them. Fortunately, this was relatively early in both titles’ runs, so picking up the relative handful of previous issues published by Captial Comics wasn’t so onerous a task. However, I did pick up First’s trade paperback reprinting the original three Nexus black and white magazines, instead of buying all the originals. (I did eventually get the third magazine, because of the included flexidisc.)

So anyway, I’ve been a fan for a long time, and look forward to any new material featuring Nexus. After a bit of a dry period, we got some serialized stories in the 2011-4 run of Dark Horse Presents (reprinted as the Into the Past TPB), the Nexus Newspaper Strips TPB (which I think reprints material produced through Kickstarter or something similar, someone correct me), and there was also that 3 or 4 issue run (depending on how you count it) published in 2007 or so by Rude himself.

And then, this past week, we got a new Nexus graphic novel, Nefarious. It’s written by Baron, and illustrated by Richard Bonk, who does a good job, I think, and you can see sample pages over at Dark Horse’s site.

The story is relatively simple…Nexus gets accidenntally stranded on what amounts to being a prison planet without his powers. And, as it turns out, the prisoners may not deserve to be there. It moves quickly, with Nexus gathering allies (and encountering one strange old “friend” that I hadn’t expected to see again) and, probably not a spoiler, going after the person responsible for these unjust imprisonments (and worse).

It feels like classic Nexus, like the pre-First era, in that events are almost…dreamlike in their progression, no time is wasted on long exposition or explanations. Sometimes it is to the detriment of the narrative (like, I’m not sure entirely what happened when Nexus had to prove his identity to a pair of aliens early on…maybe I’m forgetting something from the original series involving that particular race), but overall it’s a fun read.

My main issue with this release is the format and cost. While it’s marketed as a “64 page hardcover” the story itself is 54 pages, with 8 pages presenting black and white copy-free artwork from that story, and a final page with an ad for the newspaper strip book. I know this is a format Dark Horse has used in the past, like with some standalone Hellboy stories (such as 2016’s 56-page Into the Silent Sea for $14.99), but $17.99 for this book seems…just a little too much. Maybe there are publishing and/or economic reasons for not just releasing this as a staplebound one-shot for, I don’t know, $6.99, where it would likely have stronger sales off the new comics rack.

I’m sure “longer shelf life” is a big part of it, and getting it into bookstores, too. But it was bit of a sticker shock when I saw that price. I’m not trying to pick on the Nexus book here, as this format at $14.99 I feel like was pushing it. $17.99 just seems like going a little too far, even with consideration for inflation and such. As a store owner, I have to consider perceived value, what prices would my customers consider reasonable for certain items. This has been a problem as comic periodical prices slowly creep up and up, but graphic novels have, at least, seemed to maintain that price/perceived value balance, more or less. It simply seems to me that this Nexus book is too far on the “less” side, which does a good comic a disservice.