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.)