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So some oddball things I picked up in a collection late last week: six issues of Thrasher Comics, a short-lived series that ran from 1988 through 1990 and publishing in conjunction with the still-extant skateboarding publication Thrasher Magazine:
It’s a black and white anthology with color covers, with mostly weird and “edgy” contents that never really cross over into “adult” material, though the cover to issue 5 is, um, something else:
It has a real underground comix feel, like it should have been published sometime in the 1970s instead of, like, 19-freaking-90. Helping that feeling along is the fact that comix legend Spain Rodriguez was a regular contributor with the “Granny McGurk” feature:
And while some of the contents were…amateurish, there’s certainly an energetic weirdness at work, such as this bit from L.E. Coleman’s “Alley Gator,” another recurring strip:
And I think there’s some disturbing joy to be had in this attempt to out-Wolverton Basil Wolverton, taken from “Betties from Hell” by Johnny Childish:
This uncredited piece, taken from the inside fron cover of issue #9, reminds me a smidgen of some of Robert Williams’ underground work:
I’m pretty sure that is in fact not Williams, but this page from #5 is the Spain-est drawing that’s ever been Spained:
The covers are fun, especially with the Rick Griffin vibe I get off this one:
And dig the Heavy Metal-esque sci-fi cover for #8, which…doesn’t seem to have much to do with skating, does it?
EDIT: um, actually, it’s a wraparound cover with sci-fi skaters on the back…look, no one said I was bright:
Anyway, the Thrasher comics experiment didn’t last long, with #9 and its slightly more straightforward cover being the end of the series:
This is one strange comic, and apparently in short supply, judging by some of the prices I’ve seen online for these. The copies I received were…well-loved, mostly in Fair to…well, Fair Plus condition. Quite the range. Had no trouble already finding a buyer for them, so save those emails asking to get these from me, as they’re already gone! Sorry!
However, if you like undergrounds, and wild artwork (sometimes more enthusiastic than professional, which is fine!) keep an eye out for these. Thrasher Comics is something of a forgotten…well, “classic” seems like too strong a word, but it’s certainly worth checking out.
So the other day my former boss Ralph brought in another box of comics for me to sell in my store on his behalf. He had emailed me a list of the books ahead of time, and as I was perusing it I spotted a title I didn’t recognize. “CCA Comix” was the name, and by the use of the term “comix” I presumed it was some kind of underground.
When Ralph showed up, I asked about the CCA Comix, which I had thought maybe, because of those initials, it was a book critical of the Comics Code Authority or somesuch. But no, what it was, was this:
…a short comics pamphlet on the importance of tree conservation and the usages for paper, particularly for the purposes of packaging. The “CCA” in the title stands for “Container Corporation of America.”
When Ralph was telling me about the comic, he described the art as a cross between Ernie Bushmiller and Robert Crumb, at which I point I said “yes, I’ll be keeping this.” And looking through it…I think that’s a fairly good description, though maybe more George Hansen than Crumb, if I may split hairs a tad. The actual art is by Bob Zoell, a creator of fine art of some note.
This panel stuck out to me right away, being the fan that I am of self-referentialism:
This is the first page of the comic, for a more representative sampling:
What’s wild about this comic is that Ralph had said he couldn’t find a trace of it in a price guide or online. I looked in the Grand Comics Database and it wasn’t there (so I suppose I, as a card-carrying but not terribly active contributor to the site, should fix that). I even used the Internet Wayback Machine to check the old ugcomix.com site to see if it was listed there (even though this is more an educational giveaway comic that looks like an underground than an actual underground) and didn’t spot it there either.
I meant to ask Ralph if he’d checked one of the newer underground price guides in addition to the original Jay Kennedy guide from the early ’80s (yes, the prices are out of date, but the info is usually still good). I’m guessing he had, but I wanted to double-check. Anyway, neither of us searched The Entire Internet looking for this, so if someone spots a reference to this comic out there in the wild, please let me know.
EDIT: Reader John added a link to this PDF in the comments, featuring the following blurb from a 1977 industry newsletter:
Interesting that the copyright date in the comic itself is 1975, but here it is being plugged in late ’77. Took a while to print? Maybe they had a bunch still sitting around after that initial ’75 distribution? …And yes, they spelled it “Slugo.” How dare they.
So in Monday’s post, where I was talking about variant covers in the “real” non-comics world, I brought up the multiple foil covers used for the Raiders of the Lost Ark novelization. I did say at the end of the post I didn’t think many people were actually buying all the different covers to be completists, but I’m sure it’s not nobody.
Well, Turan swooped in with some bookstore-sellin’ experience, to inform that book publishers weren’t producing multiple covers for their titles as a means of encouraging multiple sales. It was more for encouraging displays from sellers, or for offering more options possibly to attract different demographics by using different cover images/designs.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and my comics retailing hammer may have been aimed at those old Raiders books. To be fair to me, I didn’t necessarily say that book publishers were doing multiple covers for the same reasons comic publishers seem to do so…at least, maybe not back then. But discussing those books in close proximity to comics probably implied as such, for which I apologize. But I’m sure there are still book collectors out there snapping up all variations of a new book’s release. C’mon, have you met book collectors?
Anyway, back to the comics…while I’ve been hitting the “variants are there to get multiple sales from the same customer” nail fairly hard around these parts, Turan does bring up other possibilities that I haven’t really considered. There is always the possibility of a comic publisher trying to attract a buyer that may not care for one cover, but definitely like another. I have over the years had customers walk up to the counter buying a comic they wouldn’t normally because of a specific image used on one of the many variants. In fact, a certain still-extant comics blogger of some note may have bought a variant cover or two simply because it had an unnamed swampy gentleman thereupon. So, basically, I should’ve pointed out this reason for variants long ago.
As for variants being issued to inspire creation of in-store displays…well, sure, comic stores could do, and have done, that. I don’t know if that was the explicit intent of comic publishers, but more a natural extrapolation by more clever shops to take advantage of the material offered. I mean, who knows. And again, this is something I’ve sort of done in the past…I mean, I try to display all covers on my racks anyway, but I haven’t gone out of the way to make a specific separate display of just variants in a long time (we did way back when with the 1990s X-Men and Spider-Man #1s). I don’t know if my racking these books like this counts:
…but boy, it almost got me to buy both covers. I do have to admit I was very tempted to display these covers on opposite sides just to annoy everyone, but cooler heads prevailed.
• • •
To follow up on some other previous posts, I received my newest shipment of weekly Marvel comics from their new distributor Penguin Random House. As I’d expected from how some replacement damages were shipped to me last week, PRH has responded to widespread criticism of their piss-poor packaging and the excessive damages of comics that resulted.
Like Lunar (DC’s distributor) PRH is now packaging their books inside a cardboard box, surrounded by bubble wrap inside another cardboard box. Frankly, the outer box isn’t quite sturdy enough (or large enough to allow for more wrap) to my tastes, but it’s definitely a step up from the last couple of weeks. I did experience some damages, but they were fairly minor dings on six comics, and to be honest I don’t know if these came from their time in transit or before (or as) they were packed in the boxes.
Also, replacements for all of my damages from last week (and there were a lot) arrived early this week. (I initially thought I was missing one, but that’s only because I didn’t recognize the variant cover as being a certain title. AGAIN WITH THE VARIANT COVERS.)
Here’s hoping things continue to improve, and that a certain other distributor who shall go unnamed here will begin to feel at least some pressure to step up their own game. To be fair, I only received two damaged books from them this week, but in the past that just meant I was due for a real problem the following week. We’ll see.
Now I hadn’t heard about this, but on this week’s episode of the Longbox Heroes podcast (being listened to even as I type this), apparently there have been other odd problems with PRH…such as filling an entire order of a book, not with the regular cover, but with the 1/25 or 1/100 ratio variants, which is pretty wild (and possibly quite the windfall for the less scrupulous retailers). I haven’t experienced that particular problem yet, thankfully.
• • •
And now, some good news…the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is finally g
oing to series, airing on the free TV app Tubi:
As has been noted, the styles of “Characters Created by Gilbert Shelton” and “Characters Not Created by Gilbert Shelton” do, um, clash quite a bit, but given the premise of the series (the Freak Bros. are spirited away from their ’60s/’70s stomping grounds into the world of today) that seems only fitting. I’ve seen a few of the shorts they did with this voice cast (which is great, by the way) on YouTube, so I’m looking forward to some full-length episodes.
So I got a copy of Rowlf #1 at the shop a while back in absolutely beautiful condition. It wasn’t Near Mint, but whatever minor flaws it had did nothing to detract from the visual appeal of this cover…the second printing, by the way, as the first print had a different image. It’s certainly the first image that popped into my head when I heard that Richard Corben passed away this week at the age of 80.
The first time I encountered Corben’s art was in an early ’80s issue of Heavy Metal, at a time when I was clearly too young to be looking at this magazine. Lush, fully painted art while still being cartoonishly exaggerated…it was some of his fantasy work, in the same arena as, say, Frazetta and Vallejo, but where they were more in the realm of representational illustration, more or less, here was that weirdo Corben basically doing Tex Avery, with the Wolf’s eyes bugging out of his head and his tongue dragging on the floor. It was a strange mix of styles I hadn’t seen before and had rarely, if ever, seen since.
He’s an underground comix legend, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone reading this. When people come to my store looking for undergrounds, more and more often they ask to see my “Crumb comics,” which can mean anything from actual Robert Crumb comics to Freak Brothers to, well, whatever you can think of. I’ve suggested before that “Crumb comics” may be well on its way to becoming a generic term for undergrounds. That said, the second most mentioned name from those looking for undergrounds is Corben. In fact, if anything, any Corben I get in tends to sell faster than my Crumb (I mean, actually by Crumb) books. A largish collection of Corben I took in earlier in the year was gone within just a few weeks. Demand is still high for his work, and his name still looms large among a certain segment of comics fans.
In recent years he seemed to be more active working for Marvel and DC, which, well, one has to go where the money is, but his work for these companies was no less idiosyncratic than his independent projects. The Hellblazer run he did over Brian Azzarello’s scripts, and worked with that same writer on a Hulk mini, and did some horror books for Marvel and Dark Horse…that garnered him some all new fans, certainly, who’d never seen Den.
He was a strange and unique talent, and I’m sure we’re all sad to see him go, but glad he shared as much of his imagination with us that he did.
So long, Richard.
Yet another comic book-related record made it into my hands this week…I managed to find a copy the Omaha the Cat Dancer picture disc for dirt cheap on the eBays. Here’s the beautiful front cover:
…and who needs any stinkin’ liner notes when you can just print all the info on the record itself?
This is the original plastic envelope in which the album came, and I’ve already been told that’s not a good longterm storage option for vinyl, so I’ll get it into something else soon.
Released in 1988, and is credited to the band The Shakers, which features Omaha’s creators Kate Worley and Reed Waller as members. It’s not a bad album…, 11 tracks in all, kind of blues-ish, kind of rock-ish, kind of ballad-ish, with some catchy tunes and clever lyrics. Speaking of lyrics…the “info” side of the disc notes that if the lyric sheet wasn’t included with the record, check at the store’s front counter to see if they have it. Alas, my record did not come with said lyric sheet, and I checked my front counter and it wasn’t there either, so I guess I’ll do without.
Now, I wasn’t a reader of Omaha the Cat Dancer, though I was certainly aware of it (and its fairly convoluted publishing history). I remember it, and its collected editions, selling relatively well for us at the previous place of employment. I think it’s…well, I don’t want to say “mostly forgotten,” but I bet we could use a new release of the material for the current marketplace (and some of the sexually explicit content in the series may not seem so outré decades after its initial publication).
I did pick up the two-part Images of Omaha series from 1992, published to raise money for Worley’s medical care. That featured a lot of work from several creators I liked (Cerebus cover on #2!). And maybe someday, if that theoretical new edition of the original comics ever rolled around, maybe I’d try to sample it this time. Of course, I say that about every series I missed out on, so who do I write to in order to get an additional century or two added onto my lifespan so I can finally catch up?
Thus does the “records released by/in conjunction with comic book companies” collection expand even further (after that Tim Truman platter). Always keeping my peepers peeled for more!
Following up on my Swamp Thing post, I should note that there are further reports about what may or may not have happened regarding the show’s cancellation. First it was “somebody messed up the tax credit,” then it was “they weren’t getting enough tax credit,” and now it’s “powers-that-be thought the show was a stinker and cut their losses.” The show’s getting plenty of good reviews now, but it’s probably too late for them to change their minds. Anyway, I have no idea what the full, real story is, but in the meantime, one of the My Little Ponies, a “community manager” at DC Universe, tries to keep things upbeat, as is the way of said ponies.
ª ª ª
More Swampy follow-up: after noting
here and discussing further
here that DC’s digital versions of certain Swamp Thing issues feature incomplete artwork or missing captions, BobH asked if the same problem was still in the print edtion. And yes, after getting
Swamp Thing Book One TPB back in stock, I was able to check and…the color-hold image is missing from the reprint of #21, and the “and meet the sky” caption is still missing from the end of #24. Don’t worry, everyone, I’m sure they’ll have this fixed by ther time
Swamp Thing Season Two shows up on DC Universe.
ª ª ª
Hey, look at this thing that showed up in a collection on Thursday:
And here’s the back cover, because why not:
I immediately recognized this as an Ods Bodkins book, featuring the work of Dan O’Neill, but quickly realized it was one I already had, albiet in the diffeof trent edition. It was, in fact the first edition, from 1969, of Hear The Sound of My Feet Walking..Drown The Sound of My Voice Talking. I discussed the book, or at least my edition of same, a couple of times on the site, including way super-early on, back when people read blogs. And I brought it up again a mere 12 years later when I decided my site needed a nice big scan of the cover.
It’s quite a bit larger than my copy (it’s about the size of one of those treasury edition comics) and there appears to be a page half covers in red ink. Not “oopsie we splashed some red ink on this page,” but literally “here, have a giant solid block of red for just that one page for some reason.” I’ll need to take a closer look and see what’s up with that…or just straight up keep the book, since I love “Ods Bodkins.” …Yes, I’m the guy.
• • •
So about the Will Eisner “Spirit of Comics Retailing” award
my shop was nominated for…well, you can read the whole tragic tale
here on my store’s Facebook page. If you eschew Facebook, and if so I salute you, the short version is: got the paperwork a while back, decided to hold off dealing iwth it ’til my eyes were a bit better, checked the due date, waited a bit, eyes are reasonably better, got out the paperwork again, realized I misread or misremembered the due date and now it’s too late to enter. Well, great.
On the other hand, if I tried to complete the paperwork and take the necessary photos and make the necessary video for the award application on time, I would have had to done with eyes that on a good day were barely adequate for my regular day-to-day stuff, and occasionally completely obscured leaving me with hardly any vision at all. So, let’s call this a “mixed blessing,” and should someone make the horrible mistake of nominating me again next year, hopefully my eyes will be back in business for good and I can give the award whatever attention I can manage.
And like I said in my Facebook post…my eyes are finally getting better. Both eyes. At the same time. Not “one eye’s mostly okay, the other completely blind” or anything like that. This is the first time I’ve had reasonable, though still a bit to go, vision in both eyes at the same time in over a year. Barring any more surprise sets (crossing my fingers ande my corneas) everything should be good sooner rather than later. Yes, I realize I’m jinxing it.
I can’t really call myself an “Eisner nominee” since I won’t be in the running, but it’s nice that someone thought well enough about me to throw my name into the hat. I’m not the biggest or most media-present store out there, but I am a guy who likes to sell comics, has a store full of them, and has done this for a long time. That I still get to do it is certainly an award in and of itself.
• • •
Don’t forget…I’m still
taking your funnybook-related questions and post topics! I’ll probably start on them next, so be sure to tune in on your Internet Radio Box for that.
§ April 20th, 2019 § Filed under undergrounds Comments Off on Just thought I’d share a picture of this CD from my collection with you all today.
Purely for the comic book connection of the Freak Brothers, of course:
So pictured above are four issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. that I purchased from a gentleman at my store on Thursday. They’re not in very good shape…they’re intact, but they are very worn. I’ll generally buy most underground comix regardless of condition — well, within reason — just because undergrounds can be hard to come by, and I always have customers for them.
These particular Freak Bros. were of interest, though, as they were published in the United Kingdom…if you look closely, you can see the UK price on the covers, and maybe the Knockabout Books logo and/or text there. Sometimes the price was printed as part of the cover, and sometimes it was a small round sticker affixed directly over the original cover price, as was sometimes done in the U.S. Whether in this instance it’s covering a U.S. price or another UK price, I do not know. The copyright info on the inside covers also reflect their UK origins.
Wish now I’d taken more (and better!) pics of these items beyond just a representative image to throw on the Instagrams. But I still have ’em at the shop, should you like to drop in and inspect these items in person, hint hint. C’mon, it’s not that far of a drive, if you’re, y’know, on the same continent.
So there you go…my “weird thing that walked in the door” for the week. …Did I tell you about the weird thing from last week, this Li’l Abner comic with the amazing cover? Well, check out the pic of that, too, and that’s all I have of it now, beyond my fond memories, because that cover sells itself, and brother, it sold.
A few days back, a gentleman popped by the shop with a small handful of undergrounds…a couple copies each of Zap #9 and #10, three San Francisco Comic Book #5s, one or two other items. Some of them weren’t in great shape, but I always have demand for undergrounds, Zaps in particular, so I was willing to dole out a small bit of money even for the somewhat water-damaged copies. …Some of which, by the way, I was able to turn around and sell later that afternoon.
Anyway, after purchasing the comics from this person, he tells us that he has a few hundred more comics of similar vintage back home if we were interested. “Why sure!” we replied, and a day or two later the rest of his collection was in our possession.
And when he said he had a few hundred more, we didn’t realize that a couple hundred of those would be more copies of San Francisco Comic Book #5:
Well, okay, I exaggerate slightly, but that was a pretty sizable pile of SFCB, as I’m going to call it instead of typing that out again. There was also a nice stack of
Zaps, such as these #9s:
…which, as you can probably see, are a little worse for wear, but I’m sure we can sell them. As Ralph (remember Ralph? This is a song about Ralph), owner of the Old Comics part of our business, put it, “everyone looking for undergrounds asks for
Zaps. And
almost everyone asks for Freak Brothers,” which, alas, this collection did not contain. But, yes,
Zaps are the single most requested underground at the shop. For a while there, we had some very nice copies of assorted
Zap issues going for some premium prices, but the vast majority of people asking for these aren’t looking for collectibility or investment…they just want to read the darn things, and a bunch of “affordable” copies are exactly what we can use.
There were other Zaps in the collection…again, multiple copies of them, in varying conditions, mostly from the middle of the run. There were various other undergrounds, plus a bunch of more mainstream comics from the ’80s and very early ’90s that filled out the boxes, generally fairly common stuff in worn condition, thrown into the deal after we paid actual money for the stuff we could use. Nothing terribly exciting, save for a beat copy of an issue of Infinity Gauntlet that we gave to a customer gratis so he could complete his run and read the series.
Not quite on the scale of the immense collection of undergrounds we acquired a few years back (that we’re still going through, when we find the time), but it’s always nice to recover books like these from wherever they were being hidden, and getting them into the hands of more people who can appreciate them.
§ January 13th, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives, undergrounds Comments Off on Das Kampf (Bagginer Productions/Vaughn Bodé Productions, 1977).
Das Kampf is a digest-sized collection of cartoonist Vaughn Bodé’s musings and commentary upon war, in the format of a caption beginning “WAR is…” accompanying a single panel illustration. Here are a couple of samples:
According to the printing information on the back cover, the original edition from 1963 had a print run of about 100 copies, run off a mimeograph machine.
This site has an image or two of the original version. (Also, the original 1963 publication would seem to contradict the assertion I’ve seen here and there that
Das Kampf‘s “War Is” gag format was a parody of the
Love Is… comic strip, which began in 1970.) The version I own, “the 1st comic publication” as it is described on the back cover, had a print run of 3,000. It was published in 1977, two years after Bodé’s death.
I acquired my copy as part of a largish underground comix collection bought by the store a number of years ago. Being something of a Bodé fan, and always on the lookout for odd-sized mini-comics/digests for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I decided to keep this particular item for myself. I’ve not seen another copy of this come through the shop, though a quick Googling seems to turn one up one or two for sale. Amazon has none available, but I’ll put on those product link thingies here anyway, just in case someone there decides to part with a copy of it someday:
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