Reprint This! Update on One Pound Gospel

Viz released the last episodes of Rumiko Takahashi's One Pound Gospel in English for the first time this month. This series, with three or four new installments released every couple of years over a two decade run, has long been overdue for a proper digest edition with the artwork in its original configuration. In the mid-90s, Viz released three collections in their old graphic novel format, but let those go out of print. Now the series, which finally concluded in 2007, is available in full in four digests.

It's an incredibly cute and occasionally hilarious comedy about a weak-willed boxer named Kosaku who cannot stop his unhealthy eating habits, and can't get over his doomed crush on an attractive young nun who sees a spark of potential in him. Kosaku kind of radiates between a hopelessly ingratiating dimwit and the great underdog hero for whom you'll enjoy cheering in the ring, and his supporting cast, notably his long-suffering coach, provides endless fun. Sister Angela, meanwhile, has her own (quite small) supporting cast, notably the mother superior who understands neither boxing nor Sister Angela's support of this clumsy young fighter.

It's a delightful comedy of errors and manners, with excellent artwork and hilarious moments. Possibly the best is a great five-part story in the third volume, in which everybody misunderstands everybody else and a rival boxer with an awful intestinal problem that keeps forcing his matches with Kosaku to be postponed conspires to make everybody's situation unbearable. It's really great stuff, and you should definitely look into it!

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Read more of what I've written about Rumiko Takahashi at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of One Pound Gospel:
Ai Kano at Animanganation
Greg McElhatton at CBR
Pop Culture Shock
Greg Hackman at Mania.com
Connie at Slightly Biased Manga

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In related reprinting news, Pat Mills is interviewed about the classic Charley's War, which he wrote for Battle Picture Weekly in the early 80s, over at Comicon.

Titan is planning two Modesty Blaise books for 2009: The Lady Killers in April and The Scarlet Maiden in October.

Here's some more information about the forthcoming collections of Steve Ditko's The Creeper and Sergio Aragones' Bat Lash, planned for June and July 2009:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE CREEPER TP
Writers: Steve Ditko, Don Segall, Dennis O'Neil, Bob Haney, Len Wein and Michael Fleisher
Artists: Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Mike Peppe, Jack Sparling, Dick Dillon, Sid Greene, Irv Novick, Ernie Chua, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Mike Royer
Collects: SHOWCASE #73, BEWARE THE CREEPER #1-6, THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #80, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #70, DETECTIVE COMICS #418, 447 and 448, THE JOKER #3 and 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL #7
$9.99 US, 296 pages

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: BAT LASH TP
Writers: Sergio Aragones, Dennis O'Neil, Nick Cardy, Len Wein and Cary Bates
Artists: Nick Cardy, Mike Sekowsky, George Moliterni and Dan Spiegle
Collects: SHOWCASE #76, BAT LASH #1-7, DC SPECIAL SERIES #16 and stories from JONAH HEX #49, 51 and 52
$9.99 US, 240 pages

(Originally posted December 19, 2008, 12:35 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Sugar and Spike

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is SUGAR AND SPIKE by Sheldon Mayer, the longtime DC Comics editor who worked on everything from their superhero to comedy titles back in the 1940s and 1950s, and who would later co-create the wonderful adventure series Black Orchid. In the days when an American comic book company couldn't be successful without a very broad range of titles for all interests, Sugar & Spike was a huge hit, and one that Mayer closely guarded. The series ran for more than thirty years, and he was the sole writer and artist of every story.



Sugar and Spike were a pair of babies who toddled around trying to make some sense of the incredibly bizarre world of grown-ups. They communicated in their own "baby talk" language with all infants, whether human or animal, and had oddball little adventures interacting with things they couldn't quite explain. One of the hallmarks of the series, outside of the silly slapstick that drove the funny plots, was the strange wordplay. None of the babies, for example, knew the word "door," but they knew it was a thing that would swing, and so doors would be referred to as "swingy things."

A tremendously popular strip in its day, DC was glad to indulge its creator's wishes and so Sugar and Spike was, unlike most kid-friendly trademarks, not merchandised very much, and no other artists ever worked on it. There was, briefly, an TV cartoon; it was a low-budget, limited-to-no animation offering which appeared as part of a program called Video Comics on Nickelodeon when I was in elementary school. (LJ's dramaqueer might remember it, even if nobody else saw it.)



Apparently, Sheldon Mayer suffered from cataracts which made it increasingly impossible for him to draw the strip. With sales of this kind of material sagging in the early 70s anyway, DC shelved the book. After Mayer recovered from surgery, he resumed drawing it, but few of these were published in the US, but instead they showed up in various South American and European countries where the series was still quite popular. There are apparently about fifteen years' worth of Sugar and Spike which few readers in the States have seen. In the early 1980s, some of these were used in a few issues of the digest-sized anthology Best of DC, sometimes in the company of Mayer's teen-comedy Binky (an Archie knockoff) or Arnold Drake's Stanley and His Monster, other fun sixties strips whose time, DC felt, had mostly passed.

I have absolutely no idea how much Sugar and Spike material is out there. The few websites that are out there (such as this one) aren't much help in tracing the international editions of the comic. But good heavens, DC, if ever a book was made for your Showcase Presents line, it's got to be this one. Considering that many of the later editions of its 98-issue American run leaned heavily on reprints, they could probably compile everything in just three of those 500-page books before even starting on all the material first published overseas.

DC's made a pretty good case for using the Showcase line to spotlight all the genres other than superheroes that they used to do well, with good representation from the war and horror lines, and one or two Westerns. But they haven't even started touching the really fun comedy stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. This is long overdue, and Sugar & Spike should spearhead it. It will go over well with amateur historians, with kids who will just eat this stuff up, and with anybody who will get a kick of some really solid cartooning. So how about it, DC?

(Originally posted December 01, 2008, 12:32 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Update on Herbie

I finally finished the first of Dark Horse's Herbie Archives. It was released earlier in the fall, and while the price point is a little steep at $50, a near-mint condition copy of any of the ten issues reprinted in it will set you back at least $20, so it works out pretty well in the end. Herbie was a very weird kid's comedy book, starring "a little fat nothing" of a son who drives his father to screaming distraction with his apparently sedentary lifestyle. His dad doesn't realize that Herbie is in fact the most powerful person on the planet, who can talk to animals, travel in time and clobber the Loch Ness Monster, and who hobnobs with Winston Churchill, Mao Zedong, the Beatles and U Thant.

Herbie Popnecker was created by Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney. Hughes was the editor of ACG, a small comics company that didn't make it through the sixties. Herbie appeared sporadically in some of their sci-fi anthology books before getting his own title, which ran for three years. Hughes and Whitney died many years ago, but their bizarre little fat nothing of a character has been winning over new fans ever since.

I'm very pleased with the quality of the collection. Dark Horse is planning to reprint the full run in three hardbacks, the second of which is due next month and the third in the spring. They don't include some of the other gag strips which originally appeared in the books, but they do include many of the cute house ads for the next issue of the comic. They shot from really nice copies of the comics, with minimal restoration of the color, but it looks far better than certain scans which can be found at torrent sites. It is certainly worth your time, and I strongly encourage readers to give it a try!

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Read more of what I've written about Herbie at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of Herbie:
Hilary Brown and Garrett Martin at Shazhmmm
Adam at Rack Raids
Mike Sterling at Progressive Ruin
Kristy Valenti at comiXology
Variety

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In related reprinting news, DC has apparently made some neat plans for next summer. While they haven't formally announced anything, a look at Amazon shows that they are planning at least three volumes in a slightly rejigged Showcase Presents series.

You're probably aware that the Showcase Presents books reprint around 500 pages of classic comics for $16.99. But DC has offered many well-remembered characters who never made it to that many pages in their original iteration. So next summer, DC will release three thinner Showcase books - each around 300 pages for $9.99. These will reprint The Creeper by Steve Ditko, Bat Lash by Sergio Aragones and Nick Cardy, and Eclipso by Bob Haney and Jack Sparling, apparently with some rare fill-in work by Alex Toth. Each will come out the same month as the traditional 500-page book. Good show, DC - I will buy all three!

(Originally posted November 21, 2008, 08:35 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Update on Black Jack

I finally had a chance to read the first of Vertical's new collections of Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka, and I am really pleased with the work they've done. If you've not been paying attention, this is one of Tezuka's best known series, an over-the-top but nevertheless very effective melodrama featuring a surgeon-for-hire called in to assist with the most bizarre medical cases on the planet. It originally appeared in the pages of Shonen Champion in an eleven-year run from 1973-1983.

In 1987, Tezuka's Japanese publisher compiled Black Jack in an incomplete series of seventeen oversized volumes. (This replaced an earlier, 20-odd volume collection; that's kind of standard operating procedure over there, but it makes tracking down books awful confusing. Mercifully I don't often indulge in that habit!) A handful of the episodes, I am not certain how many, were excised at Tezuka's request for various reasons. Well, the first of the new English-language editions was released in September. In paperback, as I understand it, this is a straight adaptation of the seventeen Japanese editions from Akita Shonen. But there's a bonus treat for people who'd like to support their local comic shops. The first three volumes will also be available in very limited edition hardcovers available to the direct market (1500 of the first book and 1200 of the next two) which each contain one of those otherwise unavailable episodes. So this isn't just their first English language appearance; it's their first reprint appearance ever.

At any rate, the publishing plan is for one new volume of Black Jack every other month from now until the summer of 2011. You can advance-order the first six from Amazon or stop by your local comic shop, who'd appreciate your bizness.

I'm very pleased with the quality of the collection. Vertical's run features the pages in the original orientation, with translator's footnotes to explain Tezuka's use of wordplay and puns in character names. Vertical's books simply look better than the comparatively cheap production of digests from other publishers, with better paper and cover stock. It looks like a quality production, and it certainly suits the classic material. Black Jack is really a great comic, full of inventive situations, wildly imagined diseases and bizarre, grisly accidents, and I strongly encourage readers to give it a try!

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Read more of what I've written about Tezuka at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of Black Jack:
David P. Welsh at Flipped
Jog the Blog
Dave Merrill at Let's Anime
Deb Aoki at About.com
Tangognat, Agent of L.I.B.R.A.R.Y.

Enter a contest to win the first two volumes of Black Jack at Precious Curmudgeon.

(Originally posted November 17, 2008, 15:02 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Cobra

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is COBRA by Buichi Terizawa. It's true that the series is more than a little dated, but for crazy outer-space shoot-em-up action from a post-Star Wars mindset, this punchy seventies space opera perfectly blends escapist action with that decade's macho swagger and an eye for the ladies.



Cobra had been an infamous space pirate and fugitive, one of the galaxy's most wanted. In order to get out of everybody's sights and let the heat die down for a few years, he had face-changing surgery and bought a new set of memory implants. Some time later, the implants fail and he remembers his old life, and the powerful psycho-gun he wears on his right arm. As soon as he begins regaining his memories, he immediately gets into trouble, meeting, in short order, one of three sisters who has one-third of a treasure map tattooed on her back, and the criminal kingpin Crystal Bowie, a cyborg immune to Cobra's psycho-gun.


NEW HARBOR!
Sorry, inside joke.

Cobra first appeared in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1978, perfectly times to catch the attention of every ten year-old in Japan who was buying Star Wars toys. The original series ran until 1984 and was collected in a series of twenty digests. There was the requisite animated adaptation, which ran for one season in 1982-83, and a feature film, and then the character was retired for two decades, emerging in 2005 for a new series in the twice-monthly Super Jump. This serial ran for about two years and was compiled in eleven digest editions. Between the two, Terizawa apparently worked on several other series of limited interest, including Goku Midnight Eye and Gundragon, focusing on tough guys, technology and half-dressed women.

Cobra was briefly published in the US by Viz under their old strategy of releasing Japanese stories in the American comic format. Resized, the artwork flipped and relettered by somebody who didn't need to be in the business of lettering, the pricy books ($3.99 when the rest of the market was under $2) limped to a ninth issue before being cancelled. As far as I can tell, Cobra was not among those titles which made their way into the old, oddly-shaped $15 graphic novels that Viz used to publish, and certainly not in the proper-sized digests with which they've since found success.

But I honestly think Viz is missing out on not looking back at Cobra. The overwhelming bulk of the stuff they successfully publish in the US is, let's face it, disposable pop fun for younger readers. It's true that "space adventure" is currently not the most popular genre among kids - martial arts and "Twilight" are this year's models - but it's bound to be resurgent sooner rather than later, and a nice library of wild action, spaceships and silly science will certainly find its audience quickly. So how about it, Viz?



(Originally posted November 03, 2008, 08:05 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! The Daily Star Judge Dredd strip

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is the JUDGE DREDD newspaper strip which originally appeared in the pages of The Daily Star. Various teams worked on the series, initially John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ron Smith, and later Ian Gibson. Three samples from the Wagner-Grant-Gibson team are included here. The strip ran for about sixteen years under various teams, concluding in the late 1990s, but it's the first few years of material which is most crying out for a reprint.



Judge Dredd was, of course, created by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in 1977 for the pages of Britain's new sci-fi comic anthology 2000 AD, debutting in the second issue. He's a gruff, impartial, impatient policeman-plus who patrols the mean streets of the lunatic future megalopolis of Mega-City One, located on what's today the eastern half of the US. Thirty-one years and 1600 issues later, Dredd is still going strong, with a very nice reprint program going to keep his regular weekly adventures in print. But Dredd has appeared in several other outlets over the years. In 1981, the Daily Star commissioned a weekly episode of the strip. These were produced by Wagner, Grant and Smith and many, but not all of them, were collected in an annual series of five slim Judge Dredd Collections published by Fleetway, and many of these were then recompiled into a hardcover Judge Dredd Mega-Collection in 1990.

After a few years, Dredd was transitioned into a regular Monday-Friday continuity slot, typically telling tales across nine to fifteen weeks. Gibson began alternating with Mike Collins in 1988 before Collins became the regular artist. In time, the strip lost its regular team and a large number of different writers and artists contributed - Andy Diggle, Gordon Rennie, Mark Millar and Carlos Pino all put in time telling stories of Dredd and his world.



The weekly Star Dredd was pretty entertaining, but the daily version is the real treat. Admittedly I'm incredibly biased - even moreso than usual - because it combines two of my favorite things about comics: reading daily strip sequences and Ian Gibson's artwork. Readers never got the idea that Wagner and Grant were just hacking this out while saving their best ideas for 2000 AD. There's a great one that deals with the stupid Mean Machine Angel trying to convince some criminals who have built robot replicas of his dead criminal family that no, really, there never was any lost Angel Gang loot; they really did spend it all. Another features the talking horse from the classic "Black Plague" story getting Dredd's help to deal with some Cursed Earth slavers, and it's all done with that classic tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top mix of black comedy and violent melodrama that nobody does better than John Wagner.

Rebellion has been doing some really wonderful collected editions of 2000 AD series, but the slightly smaller dimensions of these books wouldn't flatter the material as well as something a little larger. Titan Books has, of course, been earning praise for their large-format collections of classic British newspaper strips like James Bond, Jeff Hawke and Modesty Blaise. I suggest that something in that format, with supplemental interviews and background material, as well as a complete "stripography" in the back, would be exactly what the daily Dredd needs. With a decent page count, Rebellion could conceivably reprint all the Wagner and Grant episodes in two books before evaluating whether to continue with the other material. I'm enough of a completist that I'm all in favor of seeing everything, but two's a good starting point. How about it, Rebellion?

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Before I leave you this week, I do have a couple of other notes about some reprints my readers might find interesting.

I first heard of Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas's 1960s feature Sam's Strip - a comic strip about comic strips - in Walker's book Backstage at the Strips, a great book which I obtained and read years ago and did not realize was missing from my shelves until a couple of weeks ago when I went looking for it. Anyway, Fantagraphics will have a complete collection of this oddball and charming strip, which ran for less than two years, on your shelves in December. Read more about Sam, and the current fad of prestige reprints, over at Westfield Comics.

Also, had a pretty good suggestion at his Let's Anime blog: the long-running 1970s-80s crazy future ESPer action of Chojin Locke. I'd like to see more of that, too!

And, I probably didn't do Richard Bruton justice when I mentioned The Uncollecteds a couple of months back, but if you enjoy people talking about rare old comics that need new editions, you'll really like this series over at Forbidden Planet's blog, so check that out!

(Originally posted October 21, 2008, 05:43 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Black Orchid

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is BLACK ORCHID by Sheldon Mayer and artists including Tony DeZuniga and Nestor Redondo. The superhero character appeared in DC's anthology titles and as a backup feature from 1973-1976 before lapsing into obscurity, but collectors who've kept an eye out for her eleven episodes have been rewarded with a very unusual and very clever strip.



Black Orchid was a very novel idea for a series in its day. The character's background and even her real name were kept from the reader. The series dispensed with a standard cast and location, and even a "secret identity" like pretty much all superheroes of the time maintained. Each episode's focus was on whatever new criminal organization or scheme that Black Orchid, with her powers of flight and superhuman strength, had decided to bring down. This was very much a concept ahead of its time, and its stories are told with energy and often very clever plotting.

Whoever she was behind the mask, Black Orchid was one of the last characters created by Sheldon Mayer. By 1973, he had already been with DC Comics or one of its antecedents for over thirty years, and had a hand in editing or writing many of its Golden Age classics. In 1956, of course, he created Sugar & Spike, a title that ran (off and on and not always domestically) for better than thirty years, and one certainly due its own Reprint This! entry as well. He was also the editor of DC's venerable horror anthology House of Mystery for about two decades. Black Orchid was one of his last regular adventure titles, and even though it really didn't find favor with the audience of its day, it has many fans who fondly remember her brief appearances in comics.

It is probably worth noting that Neil Gaiman resurrected the character as part of DC's long-running strategy of keeping corporate trademarks active by letting new talent pitch new ideas with them. His three-part Black Orchid miniseries, with art by Dave McKean, created a new iteration of the character who later got her own series at the Vertigo imprint in the early 90s, but, frankly, all that mess was good for was letting a new audience know that Sheldon Mayer's good stuff was available in back issue departments.



Black Orchid first appeared as the lead feature in three issues of Adventure Comics (# 428-430) before taking a recurring place as a backup feature in The Phantom Stranger. Mayer apparently wrote only a few of these backup episodes, with the rest penned by writers who included Michael Fleisher. These used to be in pretty good supply, and priced low in better comic shops, but I've seen those prices rise as I've tried to fill the gaps in my set.

A Black Orchid collection is long overdue, and wouldn't be that difficult for DC to compile. Her eleven episodes (if I've counted right) could be printed in a 120-page paperback. It might not be quite the license to print money that an Angel and the Ape book would be, but it's a wonderful title which deserves to be seen again, and a fine sampling of DC's more unusual fare from the era. You're long overdue in bringing Mayer back into print, so how about it, DC?

(Originally posted October 03, 2008, 05:00 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Update: Gahan Wilson is coming

I first wrote about Gahan Wilson's work for Playboy back in July. This weekend, Playboy updated their site with a new Halloween-themed slideshow of classic macabre Wilson panels, and let slip that a mammoth complete collection of his Playboy work is planned for release in 2009, in conjunction with Fantagraphics.



"Looking for your favorite Gahan Wilson cartoon? Wondering when it appeared and in which issue? For the first time ever, coming in the fall of 2009, Playboy and Fantagraphics Books will publish a deluxe hardcover edition with three slipcased volumes that contain every one of Gahan’s Playboy cartoons."

More details as I get them!

(Originally posted September 15, 2008, 13:49 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 1970s giant robot comics, generally

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

If you were to make a guess at the history of Japanese comics based on what gets sold at your local Barnes & Noble, you'd probably be forgiven for guessing that this nation's industry started around the time Dragon Ball was running, because very little material from the 1960s and 1970s has been successfully sold here. What little that we have got is very good stuff - for example, Vertical has, as I've mentioned from time to time, been releasing a fair amount of Osamu Tezuka comics in very nice editions - but I would argue that it's very hard to get an honest assessment of the medium when so little of the stuff aimed at kids in the 1970s has made its way to our shores.



Honestly, just about every Japanese title that I enjoy started life as a comic and was quickly sold to television producers for an animated adaptation. But there are plenty of instances where the reverse was true. In the 1970s, many of the big names in Japanese comics were hired by production companies to develop TV properties, which were later turned into tie-in comics by those artists and their studios. Actual research on this subject in a format that I can access (and read) is kind of thin on the ground, you'll understand, but it looks like most of Shotaro Ishinomori's 1970s output went this route, as did Reiji Matsumoto's Danguard Ace, and a whole pile of unbelievably entertaining cartoons created by Go Nagai.

Nagai's UFO Robo Gurendaiza was possibly, to my mind, the very best of these. Sold throughout the world under the names Grandizer and Goldrake, this is a big, goofball, hugely enjoyable cartoon about a fellow, called, depending on the translation, Duke Freed or possibly Orion Quest, who pilots a giant robot to save humanity from space aliens, who attack Earth with a new beastial-looking robot each week. The evil aliens are led by a spectacular villain whose face periodically splits in half and then a five-inch high woman steps forward to cackle at her underlings. I'm sorry, but that's just about the greatest villain ever.

The cartoon ran for three seasons and left behind a pile of wonderfully fun merchandising, ranging from Mattel/Popy's beautiful two-foot tall plastic robot down to four-inch die-cast jobs and coloring books, and a comic adaptation churned out by Nagai and his studio, which I believe ran for one year in the pages of a monthly anthology title and was collected in three digests in 1976-77.



Admittedly, Gurendaiza might not be the best example for "new old comics for kids." There's an eye-popping bit in the first volume where the stereotypical potato-headed perv fantasizes about turning into a wolf and ravishing the comely young farm lass who only has eyes for Duke. I'm not sure how that'd play in Peoria. But even accepting that these are tie-in comics produced under contract to accompany a TV cartoon, this is still really fun stuff, vibrant, weird and exciting.

That said, if we're honest, a lot of those clunky old shows really are old and clunky. The nostalgia factor for Mazinger and Getta Robo and Gaiking and Danguard Ace and Raideen and Combattler and Voltes V and Fighting General Daimos and all those others is fueled by the merchandising more than anything else. Maybe the comic adaptations are good and maybe they aren't, but I'm telling you, children under ten still love this stuff absolutely. You give my kids two of those big Popy robots - sold in the US as "Shogun Warriors" - and they'll batter each other for hours, just like millions of Japanese kids were doing thirty years ago. Give 'em some good comics to go along with 'em and you might as well be printing your own money. So how about it, Viz? Feel like making some cash off some old school stuff now that Dr. Slump is coming to an end?



(Originally posted August 12, 2008, 13:39 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Gahan Wilson

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

There have been several collections of Gahan Wilson's work over the years, including a pair from Playboy Books in the 1970s. I'm thinking there should be a lot more Wilson on the shelves. A new collection of his National Lampoon strip, Nuts, would be great, but I'd also like to see a complete collection of his Playboy panels.




Long-winded text isn't really necessary here. I've scanned six of the better Wilson panels which I kept from some Playboys that I disassembled for collages and interviews some years back. These aren't necessarily his best, but they'll give you some idea what his work is like.




The problem, in this case, would be the size of any complete collection. Wilson was a regular Playboy contributor from the mid-70s at least until 2002, when I lost interest in the magazine. At a panel a page, that's a minimum of 330 pages and I'm probably guessing low. I think it's certainly doable, and I'd love to see it, but can Playboy be persuaded that there's a market for a nice hardback of that size? I certainly hope so!



(Originally posted July 14, 2008, 08:48 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

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(Update 9/08: Fantagraphics plans a complete Wilson Playboy collection.)

Reprint This! More on the Titan reprint line

Amazon fishing has revealed a few great new books coming later this year...

In August...


The Bumper Book of Roy and the Rovers
I didn't see this one in Diamond. It's apparently a greatest hits drawn from the 1958-1971 Roy annuals. There are two other Roy books forthcoming: a Best of the '80s edition which was solicited in Diamond, and a 1954-55 complete edition, which wasn't.

In September, Modesty Blaise: Green Cobra. This was solicited by Diamond last month, and is the 14th book in the series.

For her 20th anniversary, The Cream of Tank Girl hardcover edition (208 pgs), due in October...

Also in October, a great big 320 page Christmas cracker: The Best of Battle (320 pgs). And speaking of Battle...


Charley's War Book Five (112 pgs)

No sign yet of Action or Misty material, which I suppose may be coming in 2009...

(Originally posted May 22, 2008, 14:54 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Robot Archie

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is ROBOT ARCHIE by George Cowan and Ted Kearnon. This was a British adventure strip which weathered a few format changes over the years to emerge as one of the most well-remembered British comics of the 1960s.



Robot Archie was the superpowered associate of Professor Ritchie, whose nephew Ted and best friend Ken would use to sort out a number of threats, rannging from bank robbers to saboteurs to alien menaces. Imagine a cross between America's Jonny Quest and Japan's Giant Robo, particularly in its 1960s iteration, and you've got a fair idea of what this strip's about. Lots of derring-do with a pair of morally upright young people, and their egotistical, super-strong robot saving the day.

This is clearly, more so than most of the series I've mentioned in this tag, a strip for younger readers. The artwork, all uncredited but mostly believed to be the work of Ted Kearnon, is very good, and the plots are pretty solid for what they are, but this is really wish-fulfillment stuff at its core, and not particularly complex or nuanced. It's just a basic action-adventure story for ten year-old boys, and for what it does, it works very well.

Robot Archie had a pretty long run for a strip of its kind. It ran for about sixteen years, making an impact on enough readers for the character to be remembered by many creators. Alan Moore used an Archie analogue briefly in Captain Britain, and another version, called Tom Tom the Robot Man, is a recurring character in Paul Grist's Jack Staff. Grant Morrison resurrected Archie in his strip Zenith as a techno-rave robot obsessed with dance music of the late 80s. Most recently, he was seen in Leah Moore and John Reppion's Albion series from 2005-06.



Any proper reprint of Robot Archie would have to be a lengthy one. The character's first appearance was as The Jungle Robot in the first issue of the anthology comic Lion in 1952. This story ran for six months and was concluded, but Archie was revived in 1957. The relaunched strip ran in almost every issue of Lion from then until the comic's cancellation in 1974, along with a host of ancillary specials and annuals which continued for at least another three years. Reprint volumes appeared throughout Europe, with a Dutch version, written and illustrated by Bert Bus, running into the early 1980s. Archie, de Man van Staal was resurrected for a new one-off book in the Netherlands in 2004, but the book failed to launch a new series.

Even with episodes only 2-3 pages each, that remains a heck of a lot of material to reprint even before you consider whether to collect the Dutch episodes. Titan is certainly the first name that comes to mind when considering new publishers. They've had some success with other titles from the period (although the lack of follow-up volumes for The Steel Claw and The Spider / King of Crooks remains a little worrying), but Robot Archie, perhaps more than other titles in their portfolio, has a little shot at appealing not merely to nostalgists but to today's kids. There is certainly more sophisticated fiction out there to appeal to under-tens, but maybe if you catch 'em young, the simple whimsy of Robot Archie could find a new audience. So how about it, Titan?

(Originally posted May 19, 2008, 20:29 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

OBNOXIOUS! WHO IS THIS POPNECKER?

Jackie Kennedy's heart MELTED AT THE SIGHT OF HIM!



Lady Bird Johnson was his PUPPET ON A STRING!



He wore a turtle shell, made dragons gag and BOPPED THINGS WITH THIS HERE LOLLIPOP!



I'm talking about Herbie, the Fat Fury, an incredibly funny comic published by ACG in the sixties. Earlier this month, Dark Horse announced that Herbie Popnecker was finally going to get a proper reprint series, which had all the comic bloggers applauding, but it occurs to me that many of my readers just don't know why this news is so damn good.

Herbie is often overshadowed by the reputations of other comedy titles. He was never licensed for TV cartoons and his publisher, who also presented the superhero exploits of Magicman and Nemesis, never obtained the hip cache of Marvel among collectors. It doesn't look like a typical comedy book of the sixties, and unlike Harvey's Richie Rich, who, at his peak, was appearing in three titles a week, Herbie's every-other-month book never had the chance to dominate drugstore comic racks. So his exploits have always appealed to a comparatively small crowd, one which I only joined last year.

The character, created by Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney, first appeared in 1958, and made sporadic appearances in ACG's anthology titles before getting his own book in 1964. Herbie is the most powerful being on the planet - a juggernaut of strength, irresistable to women (save for the ones he's actually interested in dating), possessing uncanny powers which are unlocked by supernatural lollipops. Everybody on the planet, throughout history, is aware of Herbie's might, with the exception of his blissfully ignorant parents. His dad laments this "fat nothing" of a son, to which Herbie can only shrug.



If you recall the classic Monty Python sketch about Mr. Neutron, the most powerful and dangerous man on the planet, spending his days in the suburbs considering the outcome of a prize of all the ice cream he can eat, you've got a good start on how surreal, bizarre and often hilarious these stories are.

A recurring gag features Herbie travelling back in time, thanks to the power of his time lollipops, which give him a flying grandfather clock to zoom into the past. He's usually recognized and greeted by somebody along the way - General Custer and a Lakota might pause from the battle at Little Big Horn to shout hellos as Herbie flies overhead.



Despite the recurring gags, Herbie was a constantly inventive and unpredictable book, with zany plots spinning out in any direction. The character himself is oddly appealing, with his unusual, terse speech patterns, dropping the subjects from his sentences or beginning a thought and letting it tail off. And the occasionally topical stories, with presidents summoning Herbie to the White House to deal with some threat that only he can stop, can't fail to please. It's surreal, off-kilter and just really entertaining.

That's why I'm so incredibly pleased that Dark Horse is starting its reprint line. One of the members of a collected edition message board which I frequent believes that Dark Horse can collect all of Herbie's appearances in three volumes. Normally, fifty bucks is too much for me to justify spending on one book, but as each of these will reprint about nine comics, which start for around $20 each for fine condition copies, then I'd be more than happy to upgrade from my scans. And so should you! Trust me, friends, if you want some wacky fun comics to read, make yours Popnecker.

Besides, Elizabeth Taylor does not go ga-ga for just ANY man.



(Originally posted March 18, 2008, 09:54 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Update: Dark Horse Announces Herbie Collections!

Mike at Progressive Ruin calls this "the greatest comic book news of all time." He's not far wrong. Herbie was included as one of the five strips in the Reprint This! coda and is delightfully bizarre. I'm very glad to have the chance to buy bookshelf editions of these...



Writer: Shane O' Shea
Artist: Ogden Whitney
Genre: Humor

Make way for the Fat Fury! The unlikeliest superhero of all time makes his mark in this new Dark Horse archival series. Coming from the strange, wry imagination of classic comics scribe Richard Hughes (writing as Shane O'Shea) and artist Odgen Whitney, Herbie Popnecker looks like a plump lump, but with his collection of supernatural lollipops, there is pretty much nothing that he can't do.

* Herbie Archives Volume One is the first of a new archive series collecting the finest works of 1960s comics publisher ACG.

* Herbie Archives Volume 1 collects the earliest appearances of Herbie, as he battles monsters, bends time and space, and gets the better of Fidel Castro! Herbie is a delightfully weird, all-ages barrel of laughs!

Publication Date: Aug 20, 2008
Format: Full color, 224 pages, Hard cover, 6 5/8" x 10 3/16"
Price: $49.95
ISBN-10: 1-59307-987-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-59307-987-1

SOLD.

More on Herbie in these pages soon!

Reprint This! Update: Johnny Red, Major Eazy and the Rat Pack all called up for service!

Titan has announced that they have acquired reprint rights to more of the Battle material, specifically noting Johnny Red, Major Eazy and Rat Pack, my three favorite strips from that classic comic, as among the strips which will be reappearing soon. The major new reprint series will begin with the long-running soccer strip Roy of the Rovers as the spearhead, and also incorporate material from the comics Action, Buster, Tammy and, possibly most excitingly, Misty! Here's the announcement, from Down the Tubes.

Further brief reading:
The Bookseller
Bear Alley
The Comics Reporter

MistyComic.co.uk reprints the Down the Tubes announcement, but there's no further news yet from Roy of the Rovers.com, Captain Hurricane's Best of Battle or The Sevenpenny Nightmare, who are probably waiting for specifics as to what's to come. More details as they become available!

See the Reprint This! articles on:

Johnny Red
Major Eazy
Rat Pack

(Originally posted March 01, 2008, 05:17 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Sapphire & Steel

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected two dozen titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is SAPPHIRE & STEEL by Angus Allen and Arthur Ranson. The title characters are agents of an unknown agency with incredible powers. They're not human. In the TV series that spawned them, they never explained what they were or where they came from, just that they appeared when something went wrong with the flow or order of time and required their presence to correct things.



Sapphire & Steel was the creation of PJ Hammond, who wrote 28 of the British TV series' 34 episodes. It starred David McCallum and Joanna Lumley and was notable for its minimalist sets, casting and special effects, telling its bizarre tales of other-dimensional hauntings and violence with a strange, deliberate pacing that recalled stage plays . Imagine Henrik Ibsen and MR James collaborating on a Doctor Who episode and you're about halfway there.

There used to be this incredibly fun comic called Look-In which featured comic adventures of practically everything which ran on Britain's commercial stations in the 1970s and 1980s, with a lineup of strips including (and I cribbed this list straight from The Look-In Picture Strip Archive) American imports like Charlie's Angels, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Knight Rider, Logan's Run and The Man From Atlantis, along with British productions like Space: 1999, The Tomorrow People, Sapphire & Steel, Timeslip, Robin Of Sherwood, Dick Turpin, Worzel Gummidge, The Famous Five, Catweazle, Freewheelers and Smuggler. Most of these strips were scripted by Angus Allen, one of the unsung heroes of British comics, along with several other writers and artists well known to anyone with an interest in the genre, from Gerry Anderson's old collaborator Alan Fennell to John Burns and Jim Baikie, who still put in work for 2000 AD.

Look-In ran for more than twenty years, with all the Sapphire & Steel episodes (76, comprising 14 adventures) appearing over two long runs from 1979-81. No, they aren't as good as the TV series which, while dated, still retains its remarkable power to scare the bejeezus out of under-tens, as my own kids' nerve-racking encounters with it in 2006 demonstrate. But it's still a super, unpredictable comic, with some downright weird and successful art choices by Arthur Ranson. The whole run could fit comfortably in a nice, 160-page hardback. Maybe Carlton Books, who put together that collection of TV21 Thunderbirds episodes, along with some "best-of" collections of British girls' comics like Jackie and Girl, could find a market for this*? So how about it?



The Look-In Picture Strip Archive is certainly worth a look. Its incomplete S&S archive satisfied me until I obtained a complete set of scans. They really would be improved by adding more material (they only have 36 of the 216 Tomorrow People episodes), but it's still a good source for examples of some other rare comics that need to be reprinted. Give 'em a visit!

And special thanks to my anonymous reader who prompted me last week to write this entry... whoever y'all are!

(Originally posted February 18, 2008, 19:20 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

* ETA: Once again, my lack of knowledge about what's available in the UK confounds me. Turns out there is actually a "Best of Look-In" book from Carlton, which contains a three-part Sapphire & Steel story. It was released in September 2007. So there you go, Carlton's already ahead of me here. Now get the rest of the stories out, guys!!

Reprint This! 25. Coda

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

I decided to do this series of articles based on an earlier, three-part feature, but chose to keep it limited to 24 titles for the sake of personal convenience and to make sure I had an end in sight as I did my daily writing. But there are plenty of other great comics that deserve to see the light of day as well. Here are five others which would be great to see again... which I'd certainly buy if only my local comic shop could order them from somebody!



HERBIE by Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney

I don't know nearly enough about this series, which is incredibly odd and readable, save that you do not wish to mess with the ultra-powerful Mr. Popnecker, else he'll bop somebody with that there lollipop. Herbie first appeared in American Comic Group's Forbidden Worlds in 1958, and made periodic appearances before getting his own title in 1964. ACG went out of business in 1967. Back issues are incredibly scarce and start at around $20 for good condition copies. There's no telling who might have the rights to Herbie, suggesting that any compilation would probably be a long time in coming. However, an episode was reprinted in 2005's Art Out of Time and there were a couple of mid '90s black and white reprints with new art from celebrity fans like Bob Burden and John Byrne, so I reckon somebody must know. (edited to add: LJ's spook_town informs us that the rights to ACG's library may currently belong to Roger Broughton. So, D&Q, Fanta, y'all go invite him around for drinks, okay?)



JAMES BOND by Takao Saito

Yeah, that's the same scan everybody's got. That's why we need a reprint. In 1964, Gildrose licensed four James Bond novels to Shokakugan, and Takao Saito, who'd later create Golgo 13, adapted them in monthly installments for Boy's Life. The stories were: Live and Let Die (9 parts, 1964-65), Thunderball (7 parts, 1965-66), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (9 parts, 1966) and The Man With the Golden Gun (8 parts, 1966-67). Single-volume editions were later issued and are highly prized by collectors.



JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS by Dan DeCarlo

All of it. Not a "best of." By DeCarlo. With his name on it. And while I'm at it, I'd like a pony.



THIRD WORLD WAR by Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra, Sean Phillips, John Hicklenton, Steve Pugh and others

Okay, so there are probably more representative images from 3WW that I could have used, but none of them would raise the eyebrows of my gamer geek girlfriend. It ran in the pages of Crisis from 1988-90. I maintain some small hope that Rebellion will announce a two-volume collection before we get too old and gray. This is certainly the most likely of these five, and I only moved it to the coda because Ezquerra got a couple of spotlight articles already.



PROPER V FOR VENDETTA WITHOUT THAT #$@&*! COLORING by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Thinking that the first two-thirds of V for Vendetta is supposed to look like anything other than the above is like thinking that Humphrey Bogart is supposed to be wearing an ochre yellow jacket in Casablanca. And I'm missing five issues of Warrior, where it first appeared, so my set's not complete. Unfortunately, DC has the rights to V, and DC and Alan Moore don't get along anymore, so we'll probably see a complete Dan DeCarlo Josie before we ever see this restored to its proper, beautiful black and white.

* * *

That's that for Reprint This! as a regular feature, but I'll still use the tag from time to time when something occurs to me and I want to see an old favorite on bookshelves again, or when some publisher does the right thing and announces something good is coming up. As was mentioned some weeks ago, Vertical's bringing Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack to us in a new English edition and Thunderbirds was already out in a UK-only collection nobody'd heard of, so that's two down and 27 total to go. If one of your favorites is somewhere on this list, link to it, talk about it and let publishers know. Every bit of buzz helps!

(Originally posted January 24, 2008, 09:03 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 24. The World's Greatest Superheroes

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected a couple of dozen titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

At last we come to the final installment-of-this-length of this series, and not before time. This entry is a subject near and dear to my nostalgic heart. I've shied away from most superhero titles in this feature. I guess it's part of my growing disinterest in capes-and-fisticuffs fiction, but also because Marvel and DC seem like they're on a track to reprint all their superhero stuff before long anyway. However, there's one title they might overlook. When I was a kid, THE WORLD'S GREATEST SUPERHEROES was, for a couple of years, among the most important parts of my day, but it doesn't look like it's set for a reprint anytime soon. This newspaper strip, written initially by Martin Pasko and illustrated by George Tuska and the often-maligned Vince Colletta, was a serialized adventure pitting DC's superhero crew against a number of nefarious villains.



The World's Greatest Superheroes, which began in 1978, could be compared to a daily strip version of DC's long-running Justice League of America comic, in which some of Earth's mightiest defenders, operating from an orbital satellite, match wits against evil supervillains. The first serial featured Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman against the immortal Vandal Savage. The second sidelined Aquaman, and Batman and Robin joined the others in a battle with Dr. Destiny, master of dreams. The third and fourth serials also featured Black Lightning.

In mid-1979, the series was retitled The World's Greatest Superheroes Present Superman, and the Man of Steel got the strip, now written by Paul Levitz, all to himself for a few more years. I lost track of it when my dad stopped going into his office every day and bringing a copy of The Atlanta Constitution home. Nor would my folks change their subscription from the afternoon Journal to the morning paper, despite all the good comics like Peanuts running in the morning. In 1983, the strip went to Sundays-only, and it was cancelled in 1985.

When I was a kid, I was incredibly aggravated that the strip became a Superman-only serial, because I enjoyed the other characters, especially Wonder Woman and the Flash. At the time, I figured that they reworked it due to the Christopher Reeve Superman film, which was released at Christmas, 1978. Since I tracked down some scans of the series online, and got hold of some 1980 episodes from the UGA library, I'm still certain that's the case, but I'm also struck by how unusual a drama serial with multiple characters feels. Pasko must have found it a great challenge to hop back and forth between the heroes in their individual situations with only three panels a day. In the first serial, Wonder Woman gets caught in a trap at the Empire State Building, and then the action shifts to the Flash in the Arctic, and then to Superman in Egypt. Two months later, Wonder Woman is still tied up in New York City!

In 1980 or so, DC released a digest-sized collection of the first serial, with the panels rearranged to fit two or three per page. Evidently it didn't sell well enough to follow up, so these stories haven't been seen in more than 25 years except by afficionados. Serial newspaper strips are incredibly fun to read in collected editions, though. Titan's been proving that with their addictive James Bond 007 and Modesty Blaise books, with Jeff Hawke newly joining their lineup. Marvel US is thought to be planning a collection of their Stan Lee-scripted Spider-Man strip later this year - there's an edition already out in England via Panini. Marvel always seems to execute the good ideas before DC can get theirs ready, so even if DC got started now, it would be months before we could see any such collected edition. However, these are incredibly fun stories which are sure to spark fond memories from readers, and the growing market for trade collections and reprints would surely have room for these strips. Presented right, as, say, a three-volume collection, you'd have a winner... or it might even work as a Showcase Presents. So how about it, DC?



Many thanks to Jared Bond for providing these nice scans from the series. Most appreciated!

Next week, Reprint This! wraps up with five other features I'd like to see again, but didn't feel like subjecting everybody to longer essays about for one reason or another.

(Originally posted January 18, 2008, 06:10 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)