How to stuff a wild beach towel.
And now, for no good reason whatsoever, a couple of Kitchen Sink-produced beach towels from the early 1990s, still solidly sealed into their original packaging and rescued from the previous place of employment:
Cherry (née Poptart) by Larry Welz:
…and Omaha the Cat Dancer by Reed Waller and Kate Worley:
Here’s a shot of the tag included with each towel:
Since these were sealed, I “borrowed” these images I found elsewhere to show you the full pics on the blankets…I’ll try to find a better Cherry one at some point:
Neat, huh? And yes, before you ask, they’ve already sold.
I was looking in Diamond’s online catalog to see what other beach towels were offered over the years. Along with the expected (Bettie Page) and the on-point (toss-up between “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “Yellow Submarine”) and the “sure let’s sell this in the comic book marketplace” (an Orange County Choppers towel?), was this sadly-cancelled item from 2001:
Well, that would have certainly lived up the church’s beach picnic social.
And by “couple” I mean “three, more or less.”
Okay, just a couple of things today:
1. Don’t forgot to contribute your 2024 comic industry predictions here, so long as you follow those important rules listed there!
One additional rule I’m going to have to add is to please keep extra non-prediction posts out of that comments section. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but let’s keep it uncluttered! Thanks, pals.
2. Look, if you haven’t gone to kwakk.info in a while, it’ll do you some good to pop back in. This is the fanzine text search index, including Amazing Heroes, Comics Journal, and many more! I hope this site is allowed to remain online by the various copyright holders, as it’s such a valuable resource.
I have many of these fanzines myself, but when I need to refer to an article from one of them I’ve had to depend on my slowly fading memory as well as just plain ol’ digging through them page by page. This site certain makes research easier.
3. I don’t think I even knew a Zatanna movie was even planned in the first place. Sounds like another casualty of the James Gunn DC Media regime, as the focus is on the projects under his purview, which the Zatanna flick was not. Ah well.
Still not convinced the Gunn films are going to fare any better in a movie marketplace that seems increasingly less impressed with superhero product. Particularly DC films, though Marvel seems to be having its own uphill battle with its properties (with a couple of notable exceptions, yes).
Related: I didn’t realize the Aquaman sequel opened last weekend. Not the strongest start, but the first didn’t come charging out of the gate, either. Seems unlikely it’s gonna hit the billion dollar mark too, though.
NOW MORE THAN EVER.
Happy Holidays to all my readers!
Sometimes having a full run of Amazing Heroes pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.
Joe asks if Bloodshot #1 (discussed last time) shipped the same day as Superman #75, which you may recall is the “Death of Superman” issue mentioned so rarely around here.
And I’m afraid I have to say…I don’t recall. My memories of Death of Superman Day revolve primarily around “oh shit look at that line out front” so any recollection of other titles released at the same time have fallen to the wayside. But they were released around the same time, but whether it was the same time, I can’t tell you. The Comics Database has an exact date for the Superman book, bit that Bloodshot does not. Ah well.
It did remind me of the much-ballyhooed
As an aside, I looked at the “Coming Distractions” for that period in Amazing Heroes, which gives the on-sale date for Spider-Man #1 as June 19th, but for Aliens Vs. Predator #1 it simply says “ships in June.” So, I can’t confirm they came out on the same day, but there’s a chance they did and my memory hasn’t completely degraded.
In both cases, Bloodshot #1 and Aliens Vs. Predator #1 ended up selling fine, even if in the case of AvP I think it may have been from customers seeing #2 on the rack and wondering what happened to #1. But perhaps I’m inventing that memory. As I’ve said many a time, had I realized that 1) I’d still be in the business 2 1/2 decades later, and 2) that I’d be writing about my experience sin the biz constantly, I’d have taken better notes.
So we’re leading into Christmas weekend, and you’re not reading this, you’re out there fighting the crowds doing your last-second shopping or you’re trying to get everything done at the house to make it festive or you’ve bunkered up trying to avoid all this nonsense. However you spend the holiday, I hope it’s a safe and happy one. I may post something on Monday for Christmas, we’ll see how my Christmas Eve goes.
Thanks for reading, pals.
Like they all aren’t facetious.
Back to the Most 1990s Comic discussion…as a reminder, my personal pick for the title is X-Force #1 for both artistic and marketing reasons. But, you folks have brought up some good contenders, so let us continue with Tom W and Marvel’s The Age of Apocalypse event (1995):
In my very long-ago pre-internet days, I did a little write-up on the announcement of this event for one of the BBSes I frequented. I can’t recall exactly what I said, all these years later, but I vaguely recall saying something along the lines that this was a drastic attention-getting stunt to grab the readers they could during what was a very apparent industry downturn from the salad days of just a couple years prior. Or if I didn’t say that, I should have.
This was one of those “alternative timeline” stories, where via some time-traveling shenanigans the Marvel Universe finds itself drastically changed, and all the regular X-titles were replaced for a few months by mini-series set in this milieu. For example, Wolverine became Weapon X, Generation X became Generation Next, and I’m not sure what was turned into Gambit and the X-ternals but that series was there too.
Tom describes the comics as containing “characters that are naught but grimaces and cool, endless splash pages of distorted, indecipherable anatomy [and] barely-there plotting” which may be the case, but it certainly sold well at the time and sold out of the back issue bins for quite a while thereafter. They don’t move quite as much now, but the chromium-covered X-Men: Alpha and, to a lesser extent, X-Men: Omega, which bookended the event, still sell fairly well.
As an embodiment of 1990s Comic Sins, I’m not sure how to categorize this. It is, as Tom noted, an attempt to latch onto then-current trends of comic book storytelling popularized by Image and its other imitators. My initial sarcastic idea was to put it in the “Hello, Fellow Kids” category, but to be honest, Marvel’s own form of 1990s excess was at this point well into its own unique style. And, y’know, it wasn’t all completely terrible, to be fair (here’s Chris B for the defense). So maybe let’s file this under “Forget Everything You Know” for its parallel universe stuff. But I’m open to suggestions.
Roel notes a few contenders, but let’s go with the one he specifically emphasized, and that’s the slightly infamous Extreme Justice (DC, 1995-6)…also noted by Rob S farther down in the comments:
As Roel says, “it looks like DC Comics badly cosplaying Image Comics,” which makes me want to place it in the aforementioned “Hello, Fellow Kids” category. More so than pretty much any other Marvel or DC book I’ve seen, Extreme Justice tried to emulate the, as it says on the tin, “extreme” art style that all of Today’s 1990s Youth were into, and cargo cult-style hoping that would draw in the big numbers that Image was, or at least had been, receiving. It only lasted a year and a half, so clearly it didn’t.
I’d only read a couple of issues of this series myself, and that was more than plenty. The most egregious of this title’s transgressions was its reworking of Booster Gold, who’d been generally a genial and occasionally goofy character, into whatever that is pictured on the cover I posted above. He was refitted with an armored costume, which I remember had one reviewer asking “if you’re going to be armored, why would you leave the top of your head exposed” which seemed like a good question to me.
This was a real try-hard of a book, and I’m not going to blame the creative team as they were likely following an editorial edict to “MAKE THIS COMIC KEWL.” In fact, the previously used “Kewl Style” category is probably where this should land, even if that doesn’t seem strong enough. The near-manic desperation of it probably overlaps with my somewhat facetious “Hello, Fellow Kids” category, so let’s give it that one too I mean, why not.
Joseph brings up Valiant’s Bloodshot #1 (Valiant 1993):
…which he compares to the slightly-fancier-covered (and already discussed) Turok Dinosaur Hunter #1 from the same company. This would probably just go into the general 1990s Sins “Gimmick” category, with its chromium card glued to the cover there. But as 1990s comics go, this isn’t…quite the offender as other titles have been, or at least it isn’t seen in quite the same like as that Turok first issue.
According to the Valiant Fans site, it had a print run of about 850,000 copies, which some publishers would push their favorite auntie into an industrial shredder to get those kind of numbers now. But that’s only about less than half of Turok #1, which feels slightly more ubiquitous. Not that Bloodshot #1s aren’t hard to come by (I think I have three in my store right now), but if I recall correctly sold quite well at the time and continued to sell as back issues afterward.
So I’ll probably stick with the “Gimmick” category for this one. As 1990s comics go, this wasn’t quite the burden on the marketplace as others have been.
JohnJ brings up the dreaded “Chesty Cap” image drawn by Rob Liefeld:
JohnJ mentions not being able to find the cover this is from, but it’s actually from an ad if I recall correctly, that ran on some back covers here and there. An ad for what, exactly, I don’t know…a convention or a mail order house or some damned thing, I don’t particularly feel like delving too deep in Liefeldity right now. (But this cover is pretty close.) Also, apparently there’s a new explanation for why the drawing…looks like that going ’round, decades after the fact, but again don’t really want to entertain RL too much.
The actual Captain America comics Liefeld briefly worked on didn’t feature anything quite as extreme as the above image. Not saying they were good, but they at least weren’t as epically…let’s say “fanciful” as that pic.
Now in its own way this is about as iconic a representation of what 1990s comics were all about as any actual comic you can think of. It’s not a specific comic, though, so I should likely exclude it from categorization. I’m not even sure what category I’d put on it if I did. “The Rob Liefeldest,” perhaps?
So that’s it for that this time around. I’ll address more of your suggestions soon…but in the meantime don’t forget to give me your 2024 comic industry predictions!
“I never make predictions, and I never will.” — Paul Cascoigne.
Yes, it’s That Time yet again, where I come, virtual hat in hand, asking you, the Progressive Ruin reader, to put your prognostic powers to the test and give me your best predictions for the comics industry for 2024. All I ask is that you follow these very simple rules:
1. Don’t read the other predictions before entering your own.
2. Don’t criticize other people’s predictions.
3. Don’t predict any real person’s death.
4. Limit of three predictions per person! VERY VERY IMPORTANT! You can only do one or two if you’d like, but NO MORE THAN THREE PLEASE!
Next month I’ll start looking at your (and my!) predictions for 2023, so we’ll see how we all did. I mean, did Miracleman finally come ba–oh, wait, it did. Anyway, please drop your UP TO THREE AND NO MORE predictions in the comments to this post.
Every year, you folks come up with some good’uns, and the occasional jokey one (which I don’t mind, just don’t go too overboard), and it still remains fun for me to do, even if it’s a lot of work! And I hope it’s fun for you to read. Thanks as always for participating if you do, and we’ll meet back here in January 2025 to check the results!
Watching for parodies.
Okay, this week on the site is a little wonky, given some early morning medical stuff I’ve got going on, so this may be the last post here ’til next Monday.
Anyway this week the new issue of Kevin Smith’s Quickstops came out, and I’ve been enjoying these. I saw this cover and thought “that’s pretty funny,” I’ll get this version:
…and then I saw the other cover with the Watchmen parody, and the decision was made for me:
As as longtime appreciator of Watchmen ephemera, this is right up my alley, but it reminds me that there have been other parodies and references that I passed up at the time and sorta/kinda regret doing so. Like this one from 1987:
Not that I need to add another weird wrinkle to the old comic collecting I still do for myself, along with old fanzines, those last few Seaboard/Atlas comics I need, Popeye comics, and Nancy and Sluggo stuff. But, you know, what the heck.
Speaking of new comics for the week, you got your copy of this, right?
The Venn diagram of “high brow” and “low brow” forms a single circle for this comic. That’s meant as a compliment.
The Final ’80s Countdown, Part Twenty-Four.
Here we are, in the Final Four of the top vote-getters from my entirely unscientific poll held lo these many years ago. Behold, one of my personal favorites:
Tales of the Beanworld (Beanworld Press/Eclipse (1985-1993)
Under most circumstances the phrase “most unique” is, oof, a cringeworthy nonsensical usage. If something is already unique, then it’s by definition one of a kind and unusual, it can’t be more of that. It’s like something is “extra infinite.” However, occasionally exceptions must be allowed, and in this case, I believe referring to Tales of the Beanworld as “the most unique comic ever published” is an allowable description.
Where…hmm, where do I even start. There is a page you can look at to give you a general overview of just what Beanworld is (and the comic’s creator, Larry Marder, is pretty good about giving you the background you need to know in each issue and graphic novel). But in short:
The comic takes place primarily on what appears to be a small island, dominated by a large tree (or tree-like being) in its center. It is populated by “beans,” many of whom are identical though occasionally one (or several) will “break out” into a specific personality or type (such as an inventor). They are protected by the non-bean-like hero Mr. Spook, along with his trusty fork (seen in the pic above).
The beans and Mr. Spook live in a cyclic existence with the Hoi-Polloi, beings that live deep beneath the “water” (AKA “the Four Realities”). When the central tree (Gran’Ma’pa) occasionally drops off a piece of itself, the beans, headed by Mr. Spook, must take it to the Hoi-Polloi for them to crush and convert into smaller pellets that they use for gambling, but the beqns use for food. This is a dangerous endeavor that requires the beans to be armed with little spears and such.
This is the very, very basic setting for the comic, and the stories arise from some disruption or change to the status quo of the presented world. What happens with a spider invades the island? What happens when one of the beans “breaks out” and becomes an artist? What happens when new beans arrive? What happens when other things from outside Beanworld arrive (see again the cover above)? As strange as the book may appear, as outside the usual comic book experience as it may be, it is very easy to find yourself involved in the goings-on…
…especially frustrating since the series ran only 21 issues originally, ending in 1993 with sporadic new material afterwards. And sometimes that new material spends a lot of time explaining how Beanworld works again. I know there have been life happenings for Mr. Marder that take precedence over this work, so I’m not complaining, honest. But the story does seem to have an ending in its future, with some tantalizing events hinted at by Marder, so I hope he gets the chance to wrap it up in the way he wishes.
New post-Eclipse material has shown up at Rob Liefeld’s Maximum Press (in the full-color Asylum anthology series), an issue of Myspace Dark Horse Presents, and a color special from Dark Horse. There are also some one-pagers presented in Giant-Size Mini-Comics #1 (Eclipse 1986), some feature beans, some may or may not be tied to Beanworld continuity. Also someone around here in my still-in-disarray comics collection I believe I had one of Marder’s mini-comics, starring the Big Fish, acquired from the man himself at an indie comics con I went to a couple of decades back.
Now, Beanword has been reprinted a few times, including four paperbacks from Eclipse Comics going up to issue #16. In the 2000s, Dark Horse published a series of five hardcovers, the first three reprinting previous Beanworld material, and the last two featuring all new stories. There were also two thick paperback omnibuses, also from Dark Horse, the first reprinting the original 21 issues, and the second containing the later material, including both of the new stories from the last two hardcovers. It may not surprise you to discover that only the volume 4 hardcover is currently available to order from Diamond, while Penguin Random House has both Omnibuses and that fourth hardcover. (Should note that the mini-comic stuff doesn’t appear to be reprinted in these books.)
As I’ve chronicles on this site in the past, the beans have made appearances in other books, with one of them being Totally Canon and part of that character’s development. First, the beans appear in Scout #17. And then, one of the beans, the artist Beanish, ends up part of the “Total Eclipse” crossover event, where he meets up with best pal Miracleman:
The greatest comics panel ever published? It’s certainly up there.
Should also note that there was a “Munden’s Bar” back-up in Grimjack #42 drawn by Marder (and written by John Ostrander and Del Close), but was not a tie-in, as I recall,
And that’s Tales of the Beanworld for you…certainly one of the best from the ’80s and an old fave of mine as well. But which 1980s title did I actually vote for in this event…hang in there and you’ll find out soon enough!
The laziest way to start the next year of comics blogging.
Thanks, gang, for the positive response to my 20th anniversary post, both here and elsewhere. And thanks to most of you for not making fun of my appearance in the Youtube video, Andrew. Ah, just kidding with ya, I knew my face was goofy when I took it.
But anyhoo, I was going to dive back into the 1990s comics thing, and I promise I’ll get back to the 1980s comics thing next week, but I thought I’d respond to a couple of recent comments before they’re lost to the mists of blogging time.
First, Donald G mentions
“May you be here for many more and not disappear like so many others.”
I’ve talked about this before, but it’s likely been, oh, a decade or more, so it probably won’t hurt to address it again. Barring accident or sudden health issues or something, like a big cartoony piano being hauled up the side of a building suddenly snaps its rope and it comes crashing down, accordionizing me beneath it, I promise if it comes time to shut off the lights here, I will let you know. I won’t leave y’all hanging.
I’ve seen a lot of blogs over the years where the last post reads something like “sorry, been busy, will post again soon!” and the entry is marked like five or six years before the current date. It was prevalent enough to where when I when post something like “sorry gang, no post today, will be back later” I’d add something like “no really, I’m coming back, I’m not like those other blogs.”
I used to post every day, because I read something once long ago that you should post every day to maintain your readership, get people used to the idea that Regular Content would appear on your site. Well, maybe doing that in the early years helped build an audience, but now I’m on a more…sporadic schedule (usually Mon-Wed-Fri, but not always) and that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything. I mean, someday the schedule may get even looser…once a week, three times a month, something like that, but don’t worry, I don’t plan to scale it back that far anytime soon.
BUT…scaling it back is likely inevitable. As long as I’m in the comics business, I plan on keeping this site going (so if you want this place to continue, the obvious solution is sending lots of money to my store). But it may be as free time decreases, or the simple desire to post as much wanes, new content here will diminish. I can’t see ever not wanting to talk about comics, so the site staying open so I can continue to pontificate at excruciating length at least once in a while.
Like I said, that’s a long, long way off before I do anything like that, at least three or four months, so don’t worry about it. One of the ultimate goals for this site is to create an index page, with links to specific posts or categories of posts, so that even when I decide to stop the blog or slow it to a crawl, it can remain a more easily-searchable resource. I used to have in the site’s sidebar links to posts of note…it would be sort of like that, only perhaps a little more comprehensive.
One thing I won’t being doing if/when I bring the site to an end is “Scorched Earth.” This was a post I thought about doing very early on, before I realized this site was going to become a lifelong task. It would be the final entry here, where I stopped being polite and started getting real, just laying into the people who annoyed me, crushing my enemies, speak truth to power, etc.
But if I’ve changed at all in the last couple of decades, it’s that I’ve mellowed out a bit. I don’t get quite as worked up over the whole “Someone Is Wrong on The Internet!” thing as I used to, mostly just shaking my head at the absurdity of it all. Besides, I’ve outlived most of my enemies, at least here on the Information Superhighway, so the burning need to do a Scorched Earth post has diminished over the years. …Wait, I just thought of that one guy. OOOOH I hate that guy. NEVER MIND, SCORCHED EARTH IS BACK ON.
The TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ version: I’ll tell you when I’m stopping the blog. Unless I’m hit by a train or something, in which case someone else can tell you.
Here’s a quickie link to something amusing you folks might like. I know I did! Matthew Murray gives us the mini-comic Juchebert for free, free, free, in which Dilbert strips are mashed up with North Korean propaganda slogans. Very strange and amusing, and you can download it your own self here.
Lastly, customer Sean asks, among other things, if I’d rank the various Swamp Thing runs. Well, I did, a while back, in these two posts: 1 2. It’s been nearly seven years, probably pointing folks to them again wouldn’t hurt. Anyway, this is the sort of thing a big ol’ index page would come in handy for.
Thanks for reading, pals, and it’s back to Business as Usual Monday!