Reprint This!

Reprint This! Update on Flex Mentallo

2011-01-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

Everybody online has beat me to this, but Flex Mentallo, featured here back in August of '09, is currently scheduled for a new hardback collection in the fall of 2011. Commentary is ongoing at several good blogs, including Johanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading and Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool.

Sugar & Spike: DC Comes to its Senses, Then Remembers That it is DC and Screws Up Again

2010-12-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

For about ten seconds, all was right in the universe. Next summer, DC Comics is going to reprint the first ten issues of Sheldon Mayer's amazingly funny and cute Sugar & Spike.

Unfortunately, reality soon set in. They're doing it as a pricy, sixty dollar hardcover in their Archives line. Amazon listing.

I think somebody at DC missed the bit about these being kid's comics. The really crazy thing is that they have recently started up a line of 100-page $8 books reprinting recent superhero comics, and that's a line that makes sense for the material, even more than those big, thick Showcase Presents books. Look, Sugar & Spike is wonderful and silly, but it is for children. Sixty-dollar hardcovers are not. Get your heads together, DC!

Fantagraphics Announces Barnaby for 2012

2010-12-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

Here's some nice news from Fantagraphics. Just the other day, I was selling a customer on how she needed to buy a copy of The Carrot Seed on account of the nice cover artwork by Crockett Johnson, and now one of our favorite US-based publishers announces a complete run of the artist's celebrated Barnaby, which ran in newspapers from 1942-1952. Says Eric Reynolds over at Fantagraphics:

"This is a dream come true for us at Fantagraphics; Barnaby has literally been at the top of our wish list (or mine, personally, at least) for over a decade. The series will collect the strip's original run of dailies (, from April 1942 through February 1952, including the Ted Ferro and Jack Morley run from January 1946 to September 1947, for which Johnson consulted on before coming back to the strip for good until it's end in 1952."

Of course, we have to temper our enthusiasm just a hair when the announcement goes on to include a request of collectors for best-possible-quality copies of the first nineteen months of the strip. I think that's the same damn issue that's delayed their projected Pogo reprints for more than three years. Here's hoping the first book of Barnaby will indeed be on the shelves in April '12, in time for the strip's seventieth anniversary!

Additional, superior reporting available from Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, who broke the story and Heidi McDonald at The Beat.

Crash and Burn: What the heck is happening with British reprints?

2010-09-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

Downright depressing news from lots of places, but what has spurred me into action is a new report from the otherwise always-a-pleasure-to-read Steve Holland at Bear Alley. Looks like we're coming up on a winter of discontent, and many hoped-for projects have been postponed, delayed or canceled outright.

Doctor Who: "The Crimson Hand": I've been watching this develop for several months now, and the news gets worse all the time. After twelve collected editions of the Doctor Who comic, a license dispute between the BBC and Panini has scuttled the third and final edition of Tenth Doctor episodes and left the whole line up in the air.

Panini collected all of the terrific Fourth and Fifth Doctor stories, all the weird Sixth Doctor ones and all the amazingly good Eighth Doctor ones. There weren't quite enough Ninth Doctor stories, but they did release a 100-page magazine with all those, and they released one in a proposed series of Seventh Doctor books, some of which at least were drawn well. (The late 80s and early 90s were a... troubled time for the comic.)

The Tenth Doctor's adventures were compiled in a pair of books called "The Bride of Sontar" and "The Widow's Curse." The storylines were meant to be wrapped up in "The Crimson Hand," but DWM's editor Tom Spilsbury confirmed on the Gallifrey Base Forum that the book never went to print. Spilsbury has, understandly, been tight-lipped about the rumors that have been spreading about why it was canceled and whether we might see it in the future, but there's a wide gap between "understandable" and "preferable" when you're a fan.

For my money, the strip has been weaker since the property returned to TV, but that's not to say it's at all bad, and that last Donna Noble comic, "Time of My Life," was so terrific that there wasn't a hat size to fit it. I don't buy Doctor Who Magazine, but the consensus among fans is that this last chunk of Tenth Doctor stories really was fun and special. I was really looking forward to Panini's collection of them.

Century 21: I reviewed the fourth volume of these reprints over at my Bookshelf blog last month, concluding that their production was going to keep me from preordering any more of them. An anonymous commenter suggested that Reynolds & Hearn was having some business trouble.

In a post earlier today, Steve (who, unlike me, enjoyed the reprints, which included wonderful artwork by the likes of Ron Embleton and Frank Bellamy) confirmed that Reynolds & Hearn has liquidated and resolved to close the company, leaving the proposed fifth volume up in the air. Whether another company which has acquired their publishing list does put "They Walk Among Us" back on the schedule has yet to be determined.

Titan Books: Charley's War, James Bond, Battle Picture Weekly, Action, Misty: But the real personal heartbreak comes from learning that internal business at Titan has left a whole pile of long-anticipated classic comics in limbo. There have been problems here for some time; Diamond did not ship the most recent volumes of Charley's War (from last year, vol. 6) and James Bond (from the spring, vol. 17) to my comic shop, and has no additional stock to meet my store's request, so I'm waiting for Titan to make an "offered again" opportunity for Bizarro Wuxtry to reorder them.

In the meantime, Titan has been soliciting one Battle collection after another, without actually producing any of them. Every few months, Previews will list another title and it will get ordered and everybody will wonder what the heck has happened to all the previous titles that they've offered. For those without long memories, these include:

Johnny Red Vol. 1: Falcon's First Flight
Darkie's Mob
The Best of Land Battle
Rat Pack Vol. 1
Major Eazy Vol. 1
The Best of Action Vol. 1
The Best of Misty Vol. 1

None of these have been formally canceled, although Holland does believe that the company's Roy of the Rovers line is dead. Darkie's Mob, by John Wagner and the late Mike Western, hasn't been officially kicked to 2011 yet, but nobody's optimistic enough to suggest that it will actually arrive before Christmas. And the seventh volume of Charley's War, which I believe deals with the infamous "monocled mutineer" Percy Toplis, is still scheduled for next month. Shame I can't read volume six first.

Oh yeah, and Fantagraphics pushed the first Pogo book back again, to December. That's not British, but it's intended as a Christmas gift, so I'm steamed about it.

Hopefully the next time I find some reason to update this blog, it'll be with good news...!

Reprint This! Update on Major Eazy

2010-08-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

The great war series Major Eazy by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra has been my personal favorite strip from the pages of Battle Picture Weekly, and was among the original features listed here hoping for a reprint. (See the original article.) A handful of episodes showed up in Titan's Best of Battle trade paperback last year, and we've been waiting for more.

The current (August 2010) issue of previews at last includes a solicitation for a hardcover collection of the series. It reads as follows:

From the pages of Battle, Britain's best-loved war comic! Major Eazy is a maverick soldier in a dirty war, caught up in the Allies' invasion of Italy in 1944 and determined to see justice done. Even when that means taking on villains on his own side, he doesn't pull any punches! More movie star than military, Eazy was the most laconic British officer ever to grace the pages of a comic.

The book, hopefully first in a series, is scheduled for release October 27 with a $19.95 retail price.

Announcements and things in the wake of Comic-Con

2010-07-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

I've been setting aside a few announcements over the last couple of months that I thought were interesting. In the wake of some new good news, I'm putting these in one place to reference. Honestly, things have been pretty slow on this front lately, with no new licenses announced from among the few dozen I've mentioned in this blog previously. That said...

Drawn and Quarterly announced a series of annual collections of Doug Wright's Nipper. Obviously, Seth thinks more of this guy's stuff than I do, but I'm curious to sit down with some of it at some point.

Dark Horse has a mammoth 496-page collection of Dave McKean's Cages as well as a new edition of Jill Thompson's Scary Godmother.

Fantagraphics finally - boy, this is overdue - has a September 2010 release date for the first in their long-anticipated collections of Walt Kelly's Pogo. Also, they've got a second hardcover collection of Linda Medley's Castle Waiting, which my wife enjoys more than me, in December. They've also got a series of collections of the classic Mickey Mouse adventure strip coming in 2011.

Reprint This! Update on Rian Hughes

2010-04-19T04:34:00.000-07:00

In April of last year, I proposed that what we really needed on bookshelves was a nice set of Rian Hughes' work for 2000 AD. It turns out that the good folk at Rebellion have met me halfway on the project and, this month, released all of Hughes' splendid episodes of Robo-Hunter.

To give a little background, Robo-Hunter, as told by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, concluded in 1985. Seven years later, the property was revived by Mark Millar and a rotating team of artists. Two one-off episodes were also contributed by writer John Smith. These episodes proved to be very unpopular with readers, and when Peter Hogan took over as writer, most people didn't notice, despite the fact that Rian Hughes illustrated all but one of the fourteen episodes. I've written extensively about the underrated magic of Peter Hogan's tenure and it won't take you long to find a Thrillpowered Thursday or a dozen or so message board threads where I've raved about them.

Last year, Rebellion issued a big phonebook omnibus of Robo-Hunter tales. This was solicited by Diamond to American comic shops but the distributor later canceled the orders, leaving those of us who wanted it to buy it from England. The second volume was not even solicited here, but the first reports on the book came out last week. Frankly, I was expecting a slightly thinner volume than the first, just concluding the Wagner/Grant/Gibson canon of stories, but Rebellion has pulled a nice surprise on us.

Nobody was expecting the Mark Millar run to be included, and of course it is not. Despite some occasionally nice art by Anthony Williams and Simon Jacob, his run is universally derided as a point-missing waste of paper. However, they did include one of the two Smith-written episodes, with art by Chris Weston, and all fourteen Peter Hogan episodes - that's thirteen episodes drawn by Hughes and one drawn by Jacob. The stories are silly, whimsical detective adventures and Hughes draws the hell out of them, designing a strange, timelost world of atomic-age architecture and zap guns. Their inclusion is just about the greatest news we've ever had, and it's downright criminal that Diamond didn't want to carry this book. (And that it has completely snuck up on buyers without a word of hype!!)

That's something like seventy pages of Rian Hughes awesomeness that many people have never seen, just waiting for you in a book that's also got something like 250 pages of Ian Gibson at his greatest. Here, I even found it on Amazon UK for you. Run, don't walk!

Reprint This! Update on Doonesbury

2010-04-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

It isn't quite the news that we're looking for, but the publisher Andrews McMeel has announced an October 26 release date for 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective. Here's the press release for the book:

Andrews McMeel will publish 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, a massive anniversary collection packaged by the same team that did The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and The Complete Far Side. The book will street on October 26th, the 40th anniversary of the appearance of the first Doonesbury strip. To give some idea of the scale of cartoonist G.B. Trudeau’s body of work, the 1800 strips reprinted in this massive hardcover volume are only around 13% of the over 14,000 strips Trudeau has penned since that first strip in 1970.

The strips and accompanying features in 40 examine the characters of the strip in depth. Trudeau contributes 18 original essays, including an introductory piece and contemplations of individual characters and groups of characters. A four-page fold-out centerfold charts the character’s connections in a “family tree.”

The 664-page, 9-3/4” x 13-1/2” hardback will retail for $100. First printing is 100,000 copies.

Doonesbury is currently syndicated in over 1,400 Sundays and daily newspapers.

It's certainly not as ideal as a full collection would be, but it's a good start, and the eighteen essays sounds like good reading. Maybe Santa Claus will be nice to me.

For more reading, see this blog's original feature on Doonesbury, from back in 2007, and also Walden College Library, my blog about the reprint collections already released.

Reprint This! Update on Missionary Man and more

2010-03-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

See, I was just saying I wasn't going to abandon this blog and here, five days later, I'm back with a very important update.

2000 AD's graphic novels editor Keith Richardson was the special guest on the latest edition of the Everything Comes Back to 2000 AD podcast, and he went into more detail about the forthcoming year's worth of books in the US and the UK. Of prime importance to this blog's mission statement, the fantastic Missionary Man, written by Gordon Rennie with artists including Frank Quitely, Simon Davis, Alex Ronald and many others, is due for a reprint in the forthcoming Simon & Schuster line of books in April of next year in the US, with a British collection coming some time afterward. My original post about Missionary Man can be read here.

You can listen to the 70-minute conversation by saving this link:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/geeksyndicate/ECBT2000AD-21.mp3

Richardson has clarified many points about the forthcoming line. As mentioned last time, Simon & Schuster is planning to release their books towards the US mass market, meaning, if they can overpower the buyers of big chains with their thrill-packed offerings, you'll be able to see these books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble and other big stores, and not languishing in some Diamond warehouse or other, ignoring the requests of comic shop owners who've ordered them. In the meantime, the established, terrific, line in Britain will continue as before.

So here's the lineup for American stores:

June 2010:
Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files 1, reprint of the British edition with a new cover
D.R. & Quinch: Not quite a reprint of the British edition. This time around, the 1987 Agony Pages by Jamie Delano and Alan Davis will be in color, plus it will include a couple of pages of Alan Moore’s scripts as a supplement.

July 2010:
Death Lives: A mammoth collection of various Judge Death outings, including episodes drawn by Brian Bolland which have been reprinted many times previously, and by Greg Staples, whose 1996 story "Dead Reckoning" has only been reprinted in magazine form once.
The ABC Warriors: "The Meknificent Seven" – Apparently a substantial upgrade from the last American edition. This one should include a bonus story, in color, by Alan Moore, Steve Dillon and John Higgins which has never been reprinted, and hopefully include the prologue and epilogue from Titan's early 1980s collection.

August 2010:
Harry Twenty on the High Rock: As mentioned last time, this is the first book collection of the highly-regarded classic by Gerry Finley-Day, Alan Grant and Alan Davis.
Judge Dredd: "The Mega-City Masters" volume one - This is an artist-led compilation with work by Brian Bolland, Cam Kennedy, Kevin O’Neill and others.

September 2010:
The Ballad of Halo Jones
Nemesis the Warlock volume one - These are reprints of the existing Rebellion collections, with new covers.

October 2010:
Judge Dredd: "The Mega-City Masters" volume one - This is a writer-led collection with work by John Wagner, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar.
Zombo: "Can I Eat You Please?" - Simultaneous release in the US and UK for this, the first collection of Al Ewing and Henry Flint's wild death planet adventure, the second series of which is running in 2000 AD right this minute.

November 2010:
Slaine: "Warriors’ Dawn," probably a straight reprint of the most recent Rebellion collection.
Hewligan’s Haircut: This hasn't actually been available in quite some time, but this new edition is being released, amazingly enough, to tie in to the Gorillaz' American tour this month!

December 2010:
The first year of the line wraps up with Judge Dredd Complete Case Files 2, again a reprint of the existing Rebellion book with a new cover.

Continuing the existing line, the next several months of releases in the UK and to American comic shops, where applicable, look like this:

April 2010:
Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files 15
Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Volume 2

May 2010:
Rogue Trooper: Tales of Nu-Earth Vol. 2

June 2010:
Judge Dredd: The Restricted Files 02
Leviathan (paperback)

July 2010:
Al’s Baby
The Stainless Steel Rat

August 2010
Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files 16, including the epic "Judgement Day"
Harlem Heroes

September 2010
The ABC Warriors: "The Volgan War" volume 3
Judge Dredd: Tour of Duty volume 1 - The Backlash

October 2010
Fiends of Eastern Front – both the original serial by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra and the sequel by David Bishop and Colin MacNeil
Zombo, published simultaneous to the American edition

November 2010
Meltdown Man - the complete cult classic by Alan Hebden and the late Massimo Belardinelli
Durham Red: "Island of the Damned" by Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra. So this month will see one really thick book (50 episodes) and one skinny one (12 episodes).

December 2010
Chopper: "Surf’s Up" is the title of a collection of what could be all of Chopper's solo adventures following the "Oz" epic from Judge Dredd Case Files 11, with stories by John Wagner, Garth Ennis and Alan McKenzie.
Mega-City Undercover volume two, incorporating stories from the Dreddworld series Low Life and DeMarco P.I.

January 2011
Judge Dredd: Tour of Duty volume two: Under New Management

February 2011
Judge Dredd Complete Case Files 17

March 2011
The Taxidermist - Three Dreddworld stories by John Wagner, with art by Cam Kennedy, Ian Gibson and Trevor Hairsine. One episode in the Gibson-drawn story introduces a minor character named Agnes "Lazer Gaze" Boulton and is, in fact, the funniest thing ever drawn.

It is indeed a terrific lineup of fantastic books. Rather than turning Reprint This! into another outlet for constant 2000 AD information, I hope curious readers will keep an eye on my other blogs, Thrillpowered Thursday and The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf, for more information on them. And thanks to Rich and Flint for running such a fun podcast, to Radiator for keeping the forum updated with the forthcoming thrills thread, and to Rebellion's Keith Richardson for answering fans' questions and keeping us all up to date with what's to come. Florix grabundae!

Reprint This! Update on Battle Picture Weekly

2010-03-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Battle Picture Weekly was, of course, one of the best and most important comics ever published. It wasn't just a simply entertaining, well-written and drawn collection of great war stories, it was a critical building block in the development of modern comics. Since without it, you'd never have had a 2000 AD, I've always been interested in it, and any chance to see these terrific stories is one worth taking.

The series and serials in BPW were drawn by some of the best artists working in Britain at the time, including Eric Bradbury, Joe Colquhoun, Carlos Ezquerra, Cam Kennedy and Mike Western. Many of the stories were devised by Pat Mills and John Wagner, and while they only scripted a few themselves, they assigned others to the likes of Gerry Finley-Day and Alan Hebden. They all developed storylines, sometimes sharply different from each other in tone, with vulnerable anti-heroes, radically different from the indestructible leads in American war comics. Reading just one issue of BPW after an identikit Robert Kanigher DC adventure is the greatest breath of fresh air in the medium.

Titan Books, which has been collecting Battle's most lauded strip, Charley's War, for several years now, landed the reprint rights to several old IPC properties what seemed like an eternity ago, and late last year finally released the first of their new Battle collections. The Best of Battle is similar in feel to their two Roy of the Rovers samplers, three hundred pages of reprints in a slightly oversized format with a paperback cover. The book contains the first 3-5 episodes of eighteen different series. Each comes with an introductory page and a short blurb written by either Mills or BPW's one-time editor, Dave Hunt.

I think the format is a good one, as far as samplers go, but it looks to me like Titan was a draft or two shy of assembling something really special. The most aggravating example is Hold Hill 109, a six-part serial by Steve MacManus and Jim Watson. Four of the six episodes are included in this book, which is nice, but what are the odds that Hold Hill 109 will ever be reprinted anywhere else? Between Charley's War, Johnny Red and Darkie's Mob, there are 12-13 episodes which are either already available in Titan collections or are due for release within a few months. Couldn't eight of those pages be given up to see all of Hold Hill 109?

I'm also a little surprised that Battle Action Force isn't even mentioned in the book. Admittedly, even with the nice artwork by John Cooper, the toy line tie-in, sort of a parallel antecedent to Hasbro's G.I. Joe line of the 1980s, was the sign that the comic's brightest moments had passed, but it still has a huge number of fans. Evidently there's some rights issues at work, as Palitoy still owns those characters like Baron Buckethead or whoever it was they were fighting prior to Cobra Commander, but considering just how important the Action Force was to Battle's later days - Johnny Red and Charley's War wouldn't have made it to their ends without Action Force sales propping up the comic - I think it should have been mentioned.

If readers would forgive the regular quibbling of a Monday morning quarterback, the book is truly a fine introduction to Battle, and one which will certainly get new readers excited about the other material Titan has planned. Six volumes of Charley's War are already out, the first collection of Johnny Red should be with us by the end of the month, and a complete Darkie's Mob - all 44 episodes - is solicited in the current Previews for later in the spring. The book also promises that collections of two of my favorite Battle series, Major Eazy and Rat Pack, are on the horizon.

The only other quibble that I have is that getting accurate shipping dates and advance plans from Titan is really like pulling teeth. Most of their books seem subject to interminable delays - where the devil is the third volume of Jeff Hawke, guys?! - and so it's impossible to guess exactly when we'll get the follow-up volumes that I've been craving. It's simply bad business to serve up an appetizer as tasty as this and shy away from the main course!

Read more of what I've written about Battle Picture Weekly at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of The Best of Battle:

Steve Holland at Bear Alley
Bart Croonenborghs at Broken Frontier
John Freeman at Down the Tubes

In other news, artist Steve Lieber was nice enough to drop me a line about his Image Comics series Underground, written by Jeff Parker. It's a five-part series about a park ranger in Kentucky trying to save a fragile cave system from developers in a town which badly needs the tourist business, leading to an ugly cat-and-mouse game. Underground doesn't seem to have shown up on many bloggers' radars, but it's a fine adventure with sympathetic characters and some really nice artwork. Image is releasing a collected edition of the miniseries on April 21.

Over at Dark Horse, underground pioneer Denis Kitchen is the subject of a forthcoming retrospective. The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen is a 200-page hardcover collection with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. Apparently, Kitchen was planning a similar project back when he was running the late, lamented Kitchen Sink Press in the early nineties, but it never came to fruition. The book's sure to be anticipated by fans of underground comix and goes on sale June 23rd.

There is some big news, equally confusing and wonderful, from Rebellion, publishers of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, 2000 AD. Seems they have signed a new deal with Simon & Schuster to distribute their line of graphic novels in the US. This deal looks like it's meant to target American mass market retailers - and not the direct market - with two collections every month, starting in the summer.

To be honest, there's little in the line to excite longtime 2000 AD fans like me, who've bought this material in multiple editions already, but putting the material out there for new readers to finally sample at every bookstore in America sounds like a very good thing indeed. The exception to that sentence is Harry Twenty on the High Rock, a 1983 serial written by Gerry Finley-Day (and an uncredited Alan Grant) with art by Alan Davis, who's contributing a new cover to the book. While it's been dusted off for magazine reprints, this serial has never been collected in book form before, and should be out in August.

Rebellion is also continuing their long-running line of collections which are available to British booksellers and, occasionally, to the American direct market via Diamond. August will see the release of the classic Harlem Heroes by Tom Tully, Dave Gibbons and Massimo Belardinelli, perhaps also including the sequel series, Inferno, along with the sixteenth in the series of Judge Dredd Case Files.

On that note, I would like to thank readers for reading Reprint This!, and hope you'll understand that I've decided against continuing in the present format. I really seem to have exhausted the supply of good feature ideas for reprints that I would be genuinely excited to see and purchase at this time, and I've kind of been noticing that the "reprint news" summary like this one has been feeling more like work. I will continue using this blog to spotlight news and announcements that appeal to me, and have no intention of abandoning it, but I am removing the "deadline" element of it, so that I can continue sharing exciting news when it's fresh, rather than having a chore. Thanks for reading!

Reprint This! Nobody Wants Me to Talk About Nuts

2010-02-12T15:38:00.001-08:00

Exciting news, friends!

Back in September, I was forced to postpone my in-progress feature suggestion for a new edition of Gahan Wilson's Nuts because my fellow collected-editions-advocate, Chris Mautner at Robot 6, beat me to it. So I decided to reschedule it for the month after I did a writeup for the big Playboy book, not knowing specifically when that would come, which I published two days ago.

Today, I was reading this very good interview with Wilson over at the Stranger, "Seattle's Only Newspaper," and found this exciting announcement from the artist:

"And then there is another thing coming up from [Fantagraphics], which I'm very happy about, which is a National Lampoon... They had a little section in the rear of the magazine, which was called The Funny Pages, and they had the more regular artists do little comic strips. And so I had this full-page thing, which was called Nuts. ... It dawned on me that one of the most really challenging, horrific adventures we go through is very early childhood. ... If you watch kids, they're humans. So they're really trying the best they can to understand and cope with this fantastic, mysterious thing—being alive. And they don't know anything about it. It's all a mystery to them—it's a mystery to all of us—but it's a total mystery to them. I mean, starting from how do you keep upright, things like that, to all kinds of complicated things happening in their presence and they can't figure out what is going on. But they have to somehow or other, they want to appear that they're functioning right and so on. So that's what my National Lampoon strip was about. There was a collection of it, oh, I don't know, 20 years ago. But the magazine closed—I wish some magazine like that still existed; we could use it—and so this will be The Complete Nuts. And so Fantagraphics will do their usual beautiful job. And I'm absolutely delighted. That'll be coming up next year."

So there, Reprint This! will take off the March feature because clearly nobody wants me to write up a feature on Nuts. They will either beat me to it or preempt me entirely. No complaints here! I'll resume March 10 for the monthly news-n-review column.

Reprint This! Update on Gahan Wilson

2010-02-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Be careful what you wish for department: I've loved Gahan Wilson's work for many years. He's an amazing talent, and while you may never find a consensus as to precisely when Playboy was no longer really worth the effort, it's clear that the cartoons have been the best thing about the magazine for many years, and Wilson's the best of those.

Fantagraphics has pleased me greatly by releasing this fantastic collection of all of Wilson's gleefully surreal and macabre work for Playboy. It is one hell of a presentation. It's three hardback collections in a slipcase with a plexiglass backing. The back cover of each volume features a different hilarious photo of the 79 year-old artist's face and hands pressed up against glass; boxed in the slipcase, it looks like he's been crammed into the box and is praying for release. Each book has a die-cut cover and, while arranged chronologically, is divided into sections by inserted pages repeating the die-cut of the cover.

This can't have been a cheap book to produce, and the price tag confirms it: $125 is a lot to pay at retail. It's worth every penny, as, apart from the bells-n-whistles of the presentation, it does contain every single drawing that Wilson did for Playboy, along with short stories, appreciations by Hugh Hefner and Neil Gaiman, and an interview with the artist by Gary Groth. It's nearly 1000 pages long, the cartoons are printed at their original publication size (that is, mostly one to a page), and it's all done on just about the nicest paper available. It's a book that just oozes quality.

And yet... there's a part of me that wishes there was a little less to it. Don't misunderstand me; Fantagraphics has created an amazing tribute, and I'll treasure my copy, but $125 is a really tall order. The presentation and the supplements are wonderful, but I can't help but wish that Fanta made this material available in a series of inexpensive softcover volumes as well. I feel at least a little strongly that great comics should be available to as wide a range of buyers as possible. Then again, I thought that about the thematically similar complete hardcover editions of Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side and Don Martin's work for Mad and nobody's put out anything resembling mass market editions of those, so I'm not holding my breath. Thanks for realizing one Reprint This! request, Fantagraphics, but could you make sure the next one you fill is just a little more affordable?

Read more of what little I've written about the artist at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons:

Jeet Heer at Comics Comics
John Hogan at Graphic Novel Reporter
Laurel Maury for the San Francisco Chronicle
The Comics Panel at the Onion AV Club

Every month, I pick out a few upcoming collected editions that sound a little neat, and pass those along to readers in what surely must be the least objective "collected editions" news around. For example, you'd do well to talk to your local comic shop about Dark Horse's April offerings. For one, they've got a hardcover collection of all of Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's Beasts of Burden stories. I've read a couple of these and they are really quite good. The series is about a menagerie of dogs and cats who defend a small community against weird supernatural grotesqueries, and I guarantee you that the last page of the second issue will send the meanest chill up your spine you've ever felt. They're also issuing a paperback edition of Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons' complete, 600-page Martha Washington series. Actually, I don't much care for this title at all, but 600 pages of Gibbons drawing anything sounds good for only thirty bucks.

But the really, really cool thing is this: A long time ago in a market far, far away, Dark Horse had issued full reprints of Marvel's old Star Wars series, the one by Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino and Walt Simonson, among others, but it was at a disagreeable price point and I never bought them. But in June, Dark Horse is doing them in their successful omnibus line of reprints, and you'll be able to get the first 26 issues of the series in one volume for only $25. Good job; I will probably buy that!

I will also be passing on IDW's forthcoming Li'l Abner series, but I'm glad to hear about it. The comic strip by Al Capp ran for forty years, leaving behind a downright odd film adaptation that featured both Julie Newmar and Billie Hayes, a tie-in soda called Kickapoo Joy Juice which, as Ski / Mountain Dew clones go, was just fine by me, and an amusement park called Dogpatch USA which still sits abandoned in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, attracting explorers and Airsoft players. Some years ago, Kitchen Sink embarked on a complete reprint of the series that never finished, and, to hear my dad tell it, didn't get to the strip's really good years that started in the late 1950s. My dad probably likes Li'l Abner more than you, mind. Anyway, it's another addition to IDW's "Library of American Comics" imprint, a big line which nobody can afford but which we're glad to see available anyway.

I don't know whether you've tried to read Marvel or DC's forthcoming solicitations, but it's been getting harder and harder to separate the gems from the dross, in part because, as an eyeball-bludgeoning glance at the graphic novel shelves at Borders will confirm, the companies are hell-bent on rereleasing everything that they publish in these flimsy, 144-page things which retail for $14.99 and which get battered all to heck on the shelves. Nevertheless, somewhere in those fields of crap, if you look through DC's summer notes - they will be offering eight separate hardcovers detailing the thousands of pages of their current "Blackest Night" storyline - you'll see that the publisher is releasing a second Showcase collection of classic Doom Patrol episodes by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani. The first volume was easily one of the highlights of the line, and if you enjoy high-concept adventure stories, you'll probably get a kick out of these crazy sixties comics.

Lastly this time (yeah, it's a short one), we're still waiting on confirmation about what the forthcoming two volumes of Judge Dredd Restricted Case Files will contain, but the big news from Rebellion is the formal announcement of two July books: The Stainless Steel Rat and Al's Baby, two titles drawn by Carlos Ezquerra which I have wanted to see reprinted for such a long time. Place your orders now, friends, and tell everybody you know. The Stainless Steel Rat, based on three novels by Harry Harrison, is 36 episodes of twist-filled, high-concept, con-artist sci-fi from the early eighties, and Al's Baby is 33 episodes of hilarious mob-comedy about a hitman who cannot convince his wife, the godfadda's dotta, to have a baby, so he's got to carry one himself to avoid a pair of concrete boots. Cross-dressing, getaway cars, first trimester cravings, high explosives, labor pains and sleeping with the fishes, it's all here and it's very funny. Spread the word!

That's all for this month! See you in March!

Reprint This! Moonchild

2010-02-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

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 MOONCHILD, a 1978 horror serial by Pat Mills and John Armstrong. This 13-part serial originally ran in the pages of Misty and is fondly remembered for its wonderful, slow burn of a buildup to a a great little conclusion. It's a great story which gets around the horrific things that a kids' comic probably couldn't get away with at the time by presenting excellent characters that rise above the usual girls' comics archetypes.

For several decades, Britain had a thriving industry of comics aimed at girls. These were enormously successful, and each of them sold better than 100,000 copies a week. Most of them were launched in the 1950s and ably tackled most of the expected tropes of girls' fiction, including rotten schoolmasters, wannabe ballerinas with broken ankles, evil uncles crushing your plans to join the school swim team, horses, girls who wanted to own horses, girls who dreamed of horses, and evil uncles cheating girls out of the inheritance they were going to use to buy horses. There were a lot of evil uncles in the pages of Judy, Tammy, Jinty and the like. And horses.

Misty was among the later girls' titles and there were all kinds of evil uncles in it, although comparatively few horses. There were also Bast-worshipping cults who wanted to turn plucky young heroines into cats, and abandoned tower blocks which sent plucky young heroines to a parallel universe where the Nazis won, and haunted paintbrushes which contained the emotional echoes of a 19th Century nanny who tried to communicate with a plucky young heroine who suddenly found herself painting in the style of the unfortunate ancestor of a local MP, evil garden gnomes and butterfly collectors, and a whole hell of a lot of horror and death and gruesome twist endings. Misty wasn't your typical girls' comic at all; it was the one you didn't want your parents to know you were reading.

Most of the boys' comics of the day featured character-led stories which, if successful, carried on for several months or years. While there were exceptions in the girls' comics, like the famous Four Marys which ran in Bunty for more than 40 years, most of the strips you'd find in them were shorter serials. A typical issue of Misty would usually have three one-offs and four installments of serials that ran from about six to eighteen weeks.

Moonchild is probably the most celebrated and best-remembered of the Misty stories. It's a fairly obvious cash-in on Stephen King's Carrie, but it's great fun. Pat Mills was launching lots of comics in the '70s with an obvious starting point; Hook Jaw was Jaws, both Dredger and Judge Dredd have Dirty Harry as ancestors, and so on. Moonchild loses almost all of Carrie's puberty-as-trauma subtext in favor of a gentler depiction of ESP as a natural family gift, but the story's construction is very clever, with a slow and deliberate buildup to our heroine's explosive smackdown of the school bullies who have betrayed her.

The serials in Misty don't really lend themselves to single-story collections the way that the much longer, character-driven stories from boys and sports comics did. Moonchild, even with all its twists and bully-driven plotting, is not even 60 pages long, far too short for a good collected hardback.

I fear that the art is another strike against it. John Armstrong was an extremely successful artist whose young ballerina strip, Bella, had run for almost a decade in the pages of Tammy, but I think that this charming art really looks very dated, and isn't likely to find too many fans today. There's a little more to it than these samples can provide, a real sense of movement and balance across the pages, and great characterization in the faces. Yet it's so far removed from what passes for good art in girls' horror comics these days - I mean, have you seen that godawful Twilight comic?! - that I doubt today's young fangirls would give it a second glance.

Titan Books has the reprint rights to Misty, but a proposed hardcover "best-of" collection has barely made it out of the rumor stage. I'm sure assembling the book must be a chore, with its unusual mix of short serials and one-offs, without a single well-known artist to hang promotion around. Whatever Titan comes up with, I think that Moonchild could certainly form the backbone of a nice 200-page "best-of" teamed with two other serials and nine or ten one-offs. I hope they've got something like that in mind!

There are some more details about Misty at Mistycomic.co.uk, a pretty good fan site which contains complete details of the comic's long publication history through multiple mergers and closures. Give 'em a visit!

Reprint This! Update on Bloom County

2010-01-10T05:04:00.000-08:00

I listen through my CD collection in an obsessive-compulsive manner that nobody would understand, and one morning this week, an ABC compilation called Absolutely came up in the rotation. You remember ABC, right? British new-wavers led by Martin Fry, best known for their top 5 hit "When Smokey Sings," remember? Well, they had another song, which just dented the Billboard chart at # 89, called "That was Then But This is Now," and it's the most Reaganesque song you ever heard. I recalled that there was a lot of British pop music that explored life in the ugly end of the Cold War, with thousands of nuclear missiles ready to scream overhead as Reagan stared down ~~Brezhnev~~ / ~~Andropov~~ / ~~Chernenko~~ / Gorbachev, the best of it done by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. And it is all so incredibly dated. Yet a sequence in this first nice collection of Berke Breathed's Bloom County has Milo and Binkley wandering into the Oval Office on a 1981 school tour of the White House, prank calling the USSR and nearly starting the Third World War, and it's positively timeless. How the heck did that happen?

Fans of Bloom County - they are legion, and Breathed jokes that they camp on his lawn - have been clamoring for a complete collection of the Reagan-era strip ever since it ended. And it was a very Reagan-era strip. John Lennon was murdered on the night that Bloom County debuted, and it ended about seven months after George Bush was inaugurated. Prince Charles and Diana were regular characters for a time, as was a caricature of Ted Turner, under the name Ashley Dashley, who was then making waves with his ahead-of-the-curve Superstation TBS. The Moral Majority, endlessly tiresome even to me as a middle schooler, is represented by Otis Oracle, who yearns for the days of Ozzie and Harriet, and if the belicose antics of the modern Tea Party movement sound familiar, it's because Major Bloom was spewing all that vitriol at his grandson Milo on the funny pages about thirty years ago. Yet it all seems incredibly fresh and exciting, and, more often than not, completely hilarious.

Bloom County has been collected before, of course, but never properly. Perhaps a quarter of these strips made it into a book called Loose Tails which sold by the truckload in 1983; a later book called Babylon found space for another hundred or so from this era. This scattershot approach gave readers glances about the odd, unfocussed early days of the strip, but hardly a chance to see it develop, as we now can.

It's really fascinating to see so many now-forgotten characters thrown into the mix in the hopes that some of them might stick. Breathed, who contributes several dozen footnotes throughout the book, is quite honest that he had no clue what his strip was actually going to be about. Until the cast that became the regulars coalesced, it went off into wild directions and dozens of characters drifted through, including a basset hound named Rabies and a pretty shameless ripoff of Doonesbury's Uncle Duke called Limekiller.

In fact, there's quite a lot that's pretty shamelessly ripped off from Doonesbury, enough to earn Breathed some long-lasting enmity from that strip's creator, Garry Trudeau. The most egregious is a recurring gag with Milo's bathroom mirror talking back to him about his self-doubts, which came straight from Mike's dorm room in 1970-72, but it's more than that; the pacing, the timing and the tone itself come from Doonesbury. Happily, Breathed has never made a secret of his admiration for Trudeau's strip, and has apologized, quite charitably and humbly, for his excesses. I can name a half-dozen people who work in the arts who could learn a good deal from Breathed's behavior.

Anyway, as imitations of Doonesbury go, Bloom County was by far the best of them even before Breathed found his own voice, by which time it was essential reading. Even though that time is towards the end of this book, around the point where Ashley Dashley is phased out and Opus phased in, it's still a very nice collection, which IDW has done a fantastic job producing. It's an oversized hardcover, the first of a planned five, which reprints every single daily and Sunday strip in order, along with annotations, footnotes and supplementary features. The retail price is a little high at $40, but it's a terrific book, on very nice paper, and everybody involved did a standup job. It's definitely one of the highlights of recent collected editions, and anybody who likes comics should find a place for it in their library.

Hmmm. I wonder how well Spitting Image holds up...

Normally, I suggest that you read more of what I've written about the creator or character or publisher at A Journal of Zarjaz Things, but in this case I have not.

Read other reviews of Bloom County volume one:

Greg McElhatton at Read About Comics
Chris Mautner at Robot 6
Scott Cederlund at Pop Syndicate
K.C. Carlson at Westfield Comics
Mike Russell at Ain't it Cool News, also including an illuminating interview with the book's editor, Scott Dunbier.

Friends and folks, I'll be blunt and honest with you: I have not been paying attention the last few weeks to the news and rumors about reprints that I should have. Guess I've been too busy watching Rockford Files or something. Anyway, one very important thing that did come out since the last news roundup in November was the release of Fantagraphics' spring and early summer catalog, which has all sorts of interesting news in it. This news is all more than a month old, but just in case you're relying on me and my opinions for this sort of thing, here are some highlights:

The eighth volume of the collected Love & Rockets in its 2008 trade dress style, Penny Century, collects a whole pile of Jaime Hernandez's Penny-centered episodes, carrying the story on through the older Whoa Nellie! and Locas in Love volumes and expanding on them somewhat. Gilbert Hernandez's The High Soft Lisp is in the older style dress and collects all the previously uncompiled Fritzi episodes. These are apparently both due in April.

If you're looking for a good entry point to Robert Crumb, they've got a new Book of Mr. Natural compiling twenty years' worth of material for twenty bucks in April.

There should be two Complete Peanuts this year: 1975-76, with Freida and her naturally curly hair on the cover, and 1977-78 with Peppermint Patty on the cover.

Willie and Joe: Back Home: Late '40s-early '50s work by Bill Mauldin in another lovely hardcover, definitely worth considering.

Four years of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. Yeah, all of us still waiting for Fanta to start up Pogo will have to wait until at least September at the earliest; in the meantime, the first volume of Nancy is due out, and so is a volume of Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer. I'll probably be passing on both, but I am certainly glad to see so many interesting archival projects going on.

While those two rank as "probably not, but thanks for doing 'em"s, I really am glad to hear about a print version of Drew Weing's webcomic Set to Sea. $17 for the hardcover and worth every darn penny, this is definitely one you'll hear more about from me in the summer!

IDW's King Aroo collection should be out any day now. Man, I hope this is as good as I've been hearing! IDW is also reprinting Al Capp's Li'l Abner among other classic American comic strips, and the first volume of that is due in March.

DC, meanwhile, announced something genuinely odd for the summer: a pair of books reprinting the 1978 special Superman vs Muhammad Ali, in which the Man of Steel and the Sting-Like-a-Bee Guy team up to whup some alien ass. The 72-page story, by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, has long been a favorite with lovers of '70s kitsch, although the seven year-old me who took everything too seriously thought it was stupid when it was first released. Anyway, long out of print, the book's coming back in two editions, one with a big Neal Adams sketchbook and one which duplicates the original, ovesized tabloid dimensions.

Speaking of DC, it looks like they've pushed back that Steve Ditko Creeper collection yet again, and we might see it towards the end of June.

In May, Top Shelf is releasing a 144-page collection of Kathryn & Stuart Immonen's Moving Pictures, a strip set during World War Two, and the ugly relationship that develops between a German officer and a museum curator as the Nazis plunder Europe's art treasures. It sounds really interesting, and you can read more and see some sample pages over at Robot 6.

Dark Horse is bringing out a third volume of Chris Onstad's Achewood in those really lovely books they've been doing. I'm not a fan of the strip, if you believe such people as me exist, but I betcha that A Home for Scared People will be one of the best-looking books of the year.

I've got into the habit of writing up Rebellion's planned releases as my last blurb, and that's probably because I just like saving my favorites for last, I suppose. The company has four releases planned for February and March. These include a phone book-sized collection of Rogue Trooper (400 pages by Gerry Finley-Day, Dave Gibbons, Colin Wilson, Cam Kennedy and Brett Ewins), the first in at least two volumes of Judge Dredd Restricted Files, reprinting several one-off adventures from the pages of old 2000 AD Annuals and Specials, and the fifth volume of Slaine. Entitled "Demon Killer," this one should collect a pile of stories by Pat Mills with art by the likes of Nick Percival, Glenn Fabry and Dermot Power.

While these three books are available to American comic shops via Diamond, the distributor is not offering the fourth Button Man volume by John Wagner and Frazer Irving. Fans who'd like to read this collection will need to order it from a British bookseller or Amazon.

That's all for this month! See you in February!

Reprint This! Jack Ziegler

2010-01-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 2009 Year in Review

2009-12-15T01:45:00.000-08:00

This has been a fantastic year for getting great old properties back in print. Between IDW's line of hardcover reprints of classic newspaper comics, at least twenty essential collections of 2000 AD strips, Drawn & Quarterly bringing us the fascinating world of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's experiments in gekiga, Fantagraphics releasing everything I want yet cannot afford in big, beautiful editions and DC bringing back the hotdamned essential Bat Lash to their Showcase line, I have bought way more reprints of old comics than new ones, and I am probably not alone. But, as Graham Chapman once warned us, "this is no time for complacency!" While looking over the last three years of Reprint This! features, I myself noticed no fewer than two dozen things which were not on top of other things, or, I mean, not yet reprinted. So here's a look back at everything that Reprint This! has featured, and whether exciting announcements have been made or we're still, tragically, left crossing our fingers.

The Amazing World of DC Comics,
Ambassador Magma,
Angel and the Ape and
The Angry Planet: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Armitage: Three of Armitage's earliest stories were reprinted by Rebellion in supplements bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine in 2009.

Axa: No news or rumors from any publishers on this feature.

Axel Pressbutton and
Barbarella: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Black Jack: The ninth volume in a planned series of 17 is due for release in February 2010.

Black Orchid,
Cat's Eye and
Cobra: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Steve Ditko: Killjoy / Odd Man: Fantagraphics has started a series reprinting 1950s Ditko work from various publishers, but there have been no announcements regarding his 1970s work for Charlton and DC.

Doctor Who Adventures: An editor for this magazine stated on the Doctor Who Forum in November that they have no plans to collect these comics.

Doonesbury: There have been no rumors about a proper, archival collection of the series, but the latest book, Tee Time in Berzerkistan, reprints a few hundred recent strips and was released in November.

Flex Mentallo and
Grimly Feendish: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Herbie: Has been collected in its entirety in three hardcovers from Dark Horse.

Rian Hughes' 2000 AD work,
The Inferior Five and
Takao Saito's James Bond: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Johnny Red: Volume one of this series is due in the spring from Titan.

Josie & the Pussycats: No news or rumors from Archie Comics on this feature.

Judge Dredd in the Daily Star and
Jungle Emperor: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Major Eazy: Volume one of this series is expected in the summer of 2010 from Titan.

Marvelman: Marvel has obtained the rights to the 1950s series; no announcement has been made about the 1980s version written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.

Missionary Man,
Nero Wolfe and
The New Adventures of Hitler: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Oh Wicked Wanda!,
One Big Happy,
Ponytail and
Pussycat: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Rat Pack: Volume one of this series is expected in the summer of 2010 from Titan.

Robot Archie,
Sapphire & Steel and
Scream!: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Shade the Changing Man: No news or rumors from DC Comics on this feature.

The Stainless Steel Rat: It's strongly rumored that Rebellion is planning a complete reprint in the summer of 2010.

Steed & Mrs. Peel: No news or rumors from any publishers on this feature.

Sugar and Spike: An episode was reprinted in Abrams' recent Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, but DC has not announced anything more for this feature.

Super-Hip and
Third World War: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Thunderbirds: Ongoing reprints of all the Gerry Anderson properties are continuing in a series of large paperbacks entitled Century 21. The third and fourth volumes are due out in 2010.

Tippy Teen and
UFO Robo Gurendaiza: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Urusei Yatsura and
a restored, black-and-white V for Vendetta: No news or rumors from any publishers on these features.

Gahan Wilson: The complete reprinting of Wilson's Playboy cartoons is due very soon and, I hope, will be reviewed here next month.

The World's Greatest Superheroes: No news or rumors from DC Comics on this feature.

Zenith: No word from the publisher on this feature. Rights issues exist.

We also had a few disappointments from properties that we had hoped to see in 2009 but did not emerge. The worst offender was certainly Fantagraphics' Pogo. The publisher announced in February 2007 that they had the rights and that Jeff Smith would be designing their books. They've since announced their catalog for the first half of next year and Pogo's still nowhere to be seen.

Other publishers, however, have been pretty far behind expectations in getting the work we'd hoped to see to us. Drawn and Quarterly has pushed back the first collection of Thirteen Going on Eighteen into next year. Top Shelf's Marshal Law omnibus is almost a year late. Titan postponed the 1954-55 first volume of Roy of the Rovers indefinitely, choosing to focus on 1980s material, and still hasn't made a formal announcement about Misty.

Still, 2009 must be remembered, overall, as a terrific year for reprints. There was a lot of surprising, fun stuff on shelves this year, including Bat Lash, Bloom County, Humbug, Rip Kirby, Ro-Busters, Sam's Strip and Swallowing the Earth, and 2010 looks to be really great as well. With that in mind, here are ten books, all either formally announced or heavily rumored, that Reprint This! is looking forward to seeing in the next twelve months:

Al's Baby by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, from Rebellion
Ayako by Osamu Tezuka, from Vertical
The Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse, from Top Shelf
Captain Marvel and the Monster Society of Evil by CC Beck and Otto Binder, from DC
Dial H for Hero by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney, from DC
James Bond: Nightbird by Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak, from Titan
King Aroo by Jack Kent, from Titan
Penny Century by Jaime Hernandez, from Fantagraphics
Secret Agent X-9 by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond, from IDW
The Stainless Steel Rat by Kelvin Gosnell and Carlos Ezquerra, from Rebellion

I've got a couple of dollars under my mattress for each of these, so you publishers get to work now!

Happy Holidays, everybody!

Reprint This! Update on The Stainless Steel Rat

2009-12-06T04:55:00.001-08:00

Exciting news from the good droids over at Rebellion. Amazon fishing in the UK has brought to light a listing for The Stainless Steel Rat, Kelvin Gosnell and Carlos Ezquerra's adaptation of the Harry Harrison novels. The series - 12-episode retellings of three of the books - originally appeared in the pages of 2000 AD in the early '80s.

The Amazon listings have been very accurate for 2000 AD collections over the years, and while a formal announcement has yet to be made, this sounds pretty solid. The collection should appear in July of next year.

Other 2000 AD collections in the Amazon pipeline include a second big Robo-Hunter omnibus, along with complete collections of Al's Baby and Harlem Heroes. Thumbs up to "Dash Decent" from the 2000 AD message board for the find!

The Stainless Steel Rat entry.

Reprint This! will return on the 15th for a year-in-review recap.

Reprint This! Barbarella

2009-12-01T01:54:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! Update on Showcase Presents

2009-11-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

By now, I think everybody knows about DC's line of big, black-and-white reprints, Showcase Presents. By taking a warts-and-all approach to archiving the company's Silver- and Bronze-age material, they've made great chunks of their past available in a convenient format for the first time ever. In doing so, they've allowed audiences to reevaluate hidden treasures (both Bat Lash and Enemy Ace turned out to be even better than hoped), while also showing that certain blasts from the past really weren't worth the effort (try the third, overwrought, volume of Justice League of America if you must, or the insanely repetitive War That Time Forgot).

Unfortunately, one of the company's recent releases, Eclipso, falls in the latter category. This collection is only about 300 pages long and I still couldn't finish it. The series, created by Bob Haney and Lee Elias, originally ran in the anthology title House of Secrets from 1963-66. It has some notoriety for a handful of episodes drawn by Alex Toth, but even those can't elevate the material. It concerns a peace-loving friend of humanity, scientist Dr. Bruce Gordon, who got into a fight with a witch doctor in the Pacific and was scratched by a black diamond. Now, whenever there's an eclipse, Gordon dons a ridiculous leotard and funny hat and becomes Mr. Hyde, or, I mean, the Incredible Hulk, that is, Eclipso. It's an unbearably simplistic and repetitive adventure story, with by-the-numbers plots that wouldn't pass muster on a Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon from the period. Toth's episodes at least look the best, but the bulk of the book is drawn by Jack Sparling, and it is some pretty ugly work. These are comics which can very safely be avoided.

Well, even though Eclipso isn't to my taste, DC has done a terrific job in packaging his exploits. While most of the Showcase line brings you about 500 pages of comics for around $17, this is the second in a little sub-line that has been termed "Skinny Showcases." These are ideal for shorter-run characters like Eclipso, who do not have as much material as the A-list stars, but maintain a following nonetheless. These have a smaller page count - around 300 pages - for just ten bucks. Even though I didn't care for the material myself, the package and the price point makes it a great bargain, and I'm pleased that DC will be using it again in the spring with the release of Dial H for Hero, a 1966-68 adventure series by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney.

DC releases about one Showcase Presents volume a month, most recently the second collection of The House of Secrets, focussing on the early 1970s incarnation of the book as a horror anthology. Upcoming in the line are DC Comics Presents: The Superman Team-Ups, a third collection of Wonder Woman, the early 1970s Secrets of Sinister House, a third volume of World's Finest and the Dial H for Hero book mentioned above. The long-overdue Suicide Squad, originally solicited two years ago, has re-emerged on Amazon with a June 2010 release date.

Read more of what I've written about the DC Universe at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of Showcase Presents Eclipso:

RKB at Pigs of the Industry
Jon the Crime Spree Guy at Central Comic Zone

These are the only reviews I've seen for this book. If you've reviewed it, let me know and I will link to it here!

In other news from the last month, DC has a pair of interesting projects coming in the spring. They're doing a collected edition of their incredibly fun oversized Wednesday Comics, with the pages shrunk to a little more manageable 11x17, and with the pages arranged so that each storyline will become its own 12-part chapter. They're also repackaging the first twelve issues of the excellent Losers series by Andy Diggle and Jock into a single collection - they had previously been released as two trade paperbacks - in anticipation of the feature film adaptation. That will be in theaters in March, and the new collection on shelves in February.

DC's also been publishing these pretty nice omnibus collections of Jack Kirby's work for the company, work that's probably due one of those nice little updates like I did for the Showcase line above, to be honest. Anyway, if I've counted right, there are eight out there now, and the ninth, reprinting a big chunk of the 1940s Newsboy Legion series, is due out in March.

Speaking of Kirby, of course you know his biographer and friend Mark Evanier is, with Sergio Aragonés, one-half of the team behind the delightful Groo the Wanderer. Back in June, I mentioned a Groo Treasury, which was planned for October from Dark Horse. Well, October came and went without it. Mark confirmed, at the Marvel Masterworks Message Board, that Dark Horse has been sourcing better-quality films of some of the earlier material. The book has been postponed and will be resolicited when it is ready to go.

IDW has tentatively scheduled the first three of their Archie reprint books for next summer. As we've mentioned before, these are not the same as the near-monthly line of hardcover, chronological archives that Dark Horse is starting up. These include a "Best of Dan DeCarlo" collection in May, followed by a look at the 1946-48 period of the newspaper strip in June, and least promisingly, a run of the mid-1960s Pureheart the Powerful superhero material in July.

Fantagraphics has announced that they'll be releasing a series of Golden Age anthologies edited by Greg Sadowski. There are six books in the series, and they'll presumably be scheduled from 2010 through at least 2012. They include collections of Alex Toth, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole and Dick Briefer, along with anthologies of forgotten horror comics and rare work from the EC Comics regulars.

Over at Down the Tubes, John Freeman has posted details about the third in Reynolds & Hearn's Century 21 collections of classic Gerry Anderson strips. Seems I was mistaken in assuming this book, entitled Escape from Aquatraz, is a Stingray-only collection. Like its predecessors, it collects work from several different series by Ron Embleton, Frank Bellamy, Ron Turner and others. It's due in British stores later this month, and a fourth book, which Steve Holland reports as being titled Above and Beyond, is planned for the spring.

Lastly this time, well, I got my hopes up that Rebellion and Diamond would have stopped butting heads, since the comic shop supplier is, as mentioned last month, planning to distribute both of the British company's December offerings to the American direct market. Unfortunately, fans interested in the two January releases will have to buy them from other sources, because Diamond's skipping them again. They both sound very much worth it: the second in a series of four hardback collections of the massive ABC Warriors "Volgan War" epic (the first of which was reviewed last month over at my review blog) and the most recent set of Strontium Dog stories, "Blood Moon." Wherever you track them down, they're sure to set all your thrill-circuits buzzing!

That's all for this month! See you in December!

Reprint This! Scream!

2009-10-31T02:31:00.000-07:00

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.

When it comes to British comics, here at Reprint This! we normally talk about individual features, rather than entire anthologies where the material was first seen. However, there are so many missing gems from the entire run of the 1984 comic SCREAM! that, to be blunt, the whole enterprise deserves to be seen again. For fifteen issues, host "Ghastly McNasty" gave kids some genuinely memorable little frights in a horror comic the likes of which Britain never saw again.

Scream!, which warned readers that it was "not for the nervous!," was an anthology comic from IPC that used much of the talent from the publisher's stablemates 2000 AD and Eagle. Each issue presented a new installment of five regular features, along with one-off frighteners and a reprint of Graham Allen's silly comedy "Fiends and Neighbors," which originally appeared in Cor!! in the early seventies.

Many big names from the period were regular contributors. Apart from one-off stories brought to you by the likes of Steve Parkhouse, Barrie Tomlinson, Jim Watson, Cam Kennedy, Simon Furman, Steve Dillon, Look-In veteran Angus Allen and the late Jose Casanovas, every issue started with a really great Dracula serial, where the villain moved to England and carried on a war with vampire hunters. The Dracula File was written by Rogue Trooper's Gerry Finley-Day, and illustrated by Cursitor Doom's Eric Bradbury. The artwork was just gorgeous, and the story was a really entertaining rollercoaster of ancient curses, last-minute escapes and implausible shocks, huge fun from start to finish.

You also had paranormal investigation with The Nightcomers by Tom Tully and John Richardson, in which a brother and sister reunite twenty years after their parents died looking into a haunted house, and Terror of the Cats, written by John Agee and by Simon Furman, in which a small village is under siege by maddened housepets and feral strays. But the ones that everybody remembers are Monster and the gleefully malevolent Thirteenth Floor.

Monster has a little more notoreity, thanks to its odd, footnote appearance in Alan Moore's bibliography. Apparently, he was given the first episode to script, setting up a strange, really creepy tale of suburban horror. The first installment is told in flashback, as a young kid - twelve year-old Ken Corman - buries his cruel father, who was killed by an unseen resident of a locked upstairs room. The artwork, credited to "Heinzl," is a little pedestrian, but it's one heck of a great setup, and one of Moore's unheralded triumphs. The story proper begins in episode two, as John Wagner and Alan Grant take over, with much better artwork by Jesus Redondo. What follows is a little more conventional than what Moore promised, but still darn entertaining. In the attic, Ken finds his hideously deformed, superhumanly strong uncle Terry, locked away from prying eyes. The two of them go on the run, for an extended chase epic that lasted several months after Scream!'s untimely demise.

Wagner and Grant, working with Jose Ortiz, were also responsible for The Thirteenth Floor, in which a malicious supercomputer installed in a tower block "protects" its residents by using a hidden "virtual reality" holodeck thingy on its secret thirteenth floor to "put the frighteners" on anybody from the outside who's bothering them. Unfortunately, Max the computer, whom everybody secretly rooted for no matter how nasty he was, turned out to be really good at his job, and so loan sharks and vandals kept turning up dead from heart attacks. Max's next step was to hypnotize a resident into dumping the bodies somewhere away from the building, but both his programmer and the police guessed that there was something strange going on...

While Max himself, the cold, silky-voiced devilish anti-hero, was clearly inspired by HAL 9000, his strip was very much a product of its time, and hit that cultural milepost where films like Superman III, War Games and Electric Dreams were playing on the era's fears of early PCs taking over the world. In time, Max the computer moved on to other assignments, including watchdogging a department store and working for Her Majesty's Secret Service, and his bodycount dropped sadly, but it was still great fun. In all, the series ran for about four years.

While The Thirteenth Floor was a long-running hit, Scream! itself was not. A combination of low sales, upset mothers and industrial action at IPC saw the weekly comic killed in under four months, one of the shortest lifespans of any of these newspaper anthologies. Sadly, this wasn't a case like Thunder or Tornado, where the lackluster contents explained away the short run; every issue of Scream! just oozed quality. Officially, Scream! was merged with Eagle, but only Monster and The Thirteenth Floor made the transition. Max's adventures lasted into 1987, and Ken and Uncle Terry's continued for a few more months.

In 2007, a small outfit called Hibernia published a little short-run reprint of the first eleven episodes of The Thirteenth Floor, and that seemed to get a little talk about the strip for the first time in a while. What's really needed, however, is a straight reprint of Scream! in its entirety. The whole fifteen issue run could easily fit in one bumper volume. Even with advertisements, the package would be a little slimmer than a Marvel Essential. Do it up on nice paper and keep the original dimensions, and I think this is a worthwhile project. If somebody like Titan gets going with this, why, we could see it on shelves in time for next Halloween! Doesn't that sound wonderful?

Special thanks to Malcolm Kirk for helping out with some credits for this entry. Also, the Scream! fan site, Back from the Depths, is huge fun and includes a few samples of these episodes. Check it out, and tell 'im your old pal the Hipster Dad sent you!

Reprint This! Update on The John Stanley Library

2009-10-10T02:16:00.000-07:00

Drawn & Quarterly have released the first two books in their John Stanley Library, a planned multi-volume series reprinting much of the beloved cartoonist's work for Dell in the 1960s. Drawn & Quarterly have apparently obtained the rights to all of Stanley's Dell work except for Little Lulu (a multi-volume collection of which has been in stores for some years now), and the first two books in the series are available now.

Finances have forced me to leave the first of the Nancy books on the shelf for now, but I did pick up the first collection of Melvin Monster, which was released in the summer. It's a $20 hardcover which collects all the stories from the first three issues of the title. The series is sort of the spiritual antecedent of Akira Toriyama's Cowa, set in a small suburban town populated by monsters and beasties, but just next door to an oblivious middle American city. Melvin is the exasperating son of two gruesome parents, Mummy and Baddy, who wish only the worst for their offspring, but he confounds them by wanting to do insensible things like go to school and not get eaten by his pet crocodile.

The strip would be huge fun in anybody's hands, but Drawn & Quarterly has really made this book shine. It's designed by Hipster Pad fave Seth, who was apparently looking to emulate those half-forgotten books you used to find on odd old relatives' shelves. I think he really tapped into a something neat here. The book looks a little more, shall we say, prestigious than the material might warrant, but it really evokes its time all the same. The plan is to reprint Melvin in three $20 editions, each collecting three issues of the original comic. The slightly larger Nancy book lists for $25 and the 336-page first volume of Thirteen Going On Eighteen, due later this month, retails for $35. Second volumes for each of these titles are expected in 2010.

Normally, I suggest that you read more of what I've written about the creator or character or publisher at A Journal of Zarjaz Things, but in this case I have not.

Read other reviews of the Melvin Monster book:

KC Carlson at Westfield Comics
Rod Lott at Bookgasm
Jason Sacks at Comics Bulletin
Frank M. Young at Stanley Stories

In other news from the last month, following the success of recent hardcover repackagings, DC has added an annual collection of Bill Willingham's Fables to their lineup, with the first edition released earlier this month. The six-issue trade paperbacks have been perennial sellers for Vertigo, so going the deluxe hardcover route has been a foregone conclusion. You can read Willingham's introduction to the new collection at Vertigo's blog. Although, I honestly have to say that DC could easily release two or three a year to get started. With close to 90 issues of this ongoing series, it will be a long, long while before this line of hardcovers gets concluded.

Webcomics! There are far too many out there for me to keep up with what might, or might not, ever get a collected edition, but when something as entertaining as Randall Munroe's xkcd gets a bookshelf treatment, it's a given that I'll be telling you about it. Here you go, eighteen bucks, with a portion of the sale going to charity.

A very strong rumor from last month's Anime Weekend Atlanta: Vertical, who've been publishing all those lovely editions of Osamu Tezuka comics, are planning a 2010 release of Ayako, a dark, if not downright depressingly bleak, postwar family drama which originally ran in 1972-73.

Meanwhile, Dark Horse, who proved with their three Herbie Archives that they know how to manage the repackaging of somebody else's old comic books very well indeed, have struck a nifty-sounding deal with Archie Comics. 2010 will bring you the first in a series of nice leather-bound $50 volumes reprinting every story, chronologically, across four lines, one each for Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica. And here's the wild part: they're planning to release a new book every month. I'm sure that's the best way to get all this old stuff republished quickly, but I also think that I don't have $600 a year to spend on old Archie Comics.

I was either ignorant of or dismissive towards the superhero titles from Marvel UK in the late '80s and early '90s, but with a creative team like Dan Abnett, John Tomlinson and Gary Erskine, I think Knights of Pendragon, the story of a present-day incarnation of the knights of the round table, might turn out to be interesting. The series ran for 33 issues from 1990-93, and John Freeman has reported that Panini's releasing a collected edition of the first nine later this month. It has a new cover by Erskine, and you can read more about his contributions over at Scotch Corner.

Rumor has it that the "Skinny Showcase" line from DC has been successful enough to warrant a third volume. The sixties feature Dial H for Hero is tentatively scheduled for the spring. Fans of the line have probably noticed by now that the cover price for the regular Showcase Presents editions has gone up by a buck. 500-odd pages for $18 is still a pretty good price. Marvel has been a little tight-lipped about their similar Essential line. Surely the third Moon Knight collection, due in December, won't be the last, but the company does not seem to have announced anything definite.

Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon found this fascinating one: WW Norton is publishing a mammoth collection of Herblock's editorial cartoons. The $35 hardcover will contain 250 images in print, with a more expansive collection of 18,000 on an accompanying DVD. Wowza. Paging Mike Luckovich, get your originals cleaned up...

I discovered Erika Moen's delightful webcomic DAR last month. The artist assembled a collected edition of the work earlier in the year, but it was delayed several times thanks to problems with bluenosed printers who didn't appreciate the sometimes explicit nature of the bawdy, no-holds-barred comic. Joanna Draper Carlson has a full interview with Moen at her website this week; you can order the book direct from Moen at DAR's site.

Lastly this time, Rebellion has had some disappointments this year in actually getting Diamond to solicit their wonderful collected editions of 2000 AD, so we are pleased as punch to see that two have made it into the distributor's latest catalog, and could be in US stores by the end of the year. Continuing their line of popular "phone book" reprints of 300 or more black-and-white pages, these are the first volumes of my all-time favorite comic Robo-Hunter by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, and Anderson: Psi Division, written by Wagner and Grant, and with several artists including Gibson, Brett Ewins and Barry Kitson. Rebellion has shown with their complete, warts-and-all collections of Ace Trucking and Ro-Busters that they can really do a great job of collecting both the main series along with ephemera and easily-forgotten one-offs, so I'm hoping that the Anderson book contains the remarkably weird and wonderful "Mind of Edward Bottlebum," which previous collections of the character have routinely skipped.

That's all for this month! See you in November!

Reprint This! Five Short Suggestions

2009-10-01T02:51:00.000-07:00

NERO WOLFE by John Broome and Mike Roy

For just over a year, from 1956-57, there was a daily Nero Wolfe comic strip. While credited to Wolfe's creator Rex Stout, it was actually drawn by Mike Roy and scripted by Silver Age DC Comics superstar John Broome, best known for his writing the resurrected Flash and Green Lantern adventures in the sixties.

Stout reportedly wasn't very taken with the strip, and while this sample shows that Broome correctly noted Mr. Wolfe's eccentric schedule, he otherwise got much of Wolfe's fussiness wrong. The fan group "The Wolfe Pack" assembled a PDF of many of the strips, which you can view at their website, but several of the strips are unfortunately in very poor quality. One of these days, I may have to trek up to Athens and spend the day in the UGA Library printing pages from fifty year-old papers to read 'em myself. Or somebody like IDW could just put a nice book out for me...

ONE BIG HAPPY by Rick Detorie

Perhaps one of the least likely suggestions I've come up with for this feature. NBM released some collected editions of this popular daily feature in the late 90s, but none of them apparently sold very well, and I think this very overlooked daily has probably missed its chance to be a major breakout.

Readers know that there's a lot to it beyond the silly puns and wordplay; Ruthie and her older brother Joe are just about the most perfect little kid double-act on the modern comics page, every bit as weird and oddball as my own two children. If you're one of the many who lost touch with One Big Happy over the years, I suggest it's absolutely worth another look.

PONYTAIL by Lee Holley

Holley worked as an assistant to Hank Ketcham in the late 1950s before starting this incredibly cute daily panel comic about a freewheeling teen girl. I have not seen very much of this comic, which ran for twenty-eight years and is well-remembered by comic aficionados both for Holley's wonderful, loopy inking style, and for its sweet, nostalgic depiction of small-town teen life, with malt shoppes, pizza joints, hot rods, lettermen's jackets and jalopies. Either IDW or Fantagraphics would do well to look into this classic.

Sherm Cohen has been posting scans from Dell's 1960s Ponytail comic book over at Cartoon SNAP for the last month or so. You can also read one of the backup strips from that comic over at my own Zarjaz Journal from last year.

SUPER-HIP by Arnold Drake and Bob Oskner

Don't say I never gave you anything, Johnny Bacardi, because this one's for you! In 1950, when comic books were downright ridiculously weird, DC (or, more accurately, National, the company that would become DC in time) used to publish comedy titles "starring" movie stars like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. The Bob Hope comic was among the longest-lasting of these, but by 1965, even it had shown its age. So to keep things all groovy and relevant for the kids, Arnold Drake and Bob Oskner turned the book into a demented melange of superheroes, wacky monster comedies and with-it Carnaby Street Swingin' London cool. Enter, with issue # 95, Bob Hope's nephew Tadwallader Jutefruce, the secret identity of the flying, guitar-playing, shape-changing Sultan of Swingers, Super-Hip!

I only have one of these issues, and it's one of the nuttiest comics I own. They're actually scarce as all get-out, because Silver Age collectors, only interested in superhero continuity, never thought twice about the Bob Hope comic, and often had no idea that DC's most genuinely odd creation was fighting vampires and squares within its pages. DC long ago lost the license to reprint the Bob Hope comic, and I imagine his estate would probably charge a penny or two for reupping the license rights, but it would seem that in the last fifteen issues of The Adventures of Bob Hope, Bob only appeared as a host character.

Actually, I wonder whether the trademark on Super-Hip has lapsed. Normally, a publisher has to use a character somewhere, somehow, every few years to keep the trademark active, but Super-Hip hasn't appeared in any comic book for four decades. If so, any enterprising publisher could tweak the "Bob Hope" image and call him "Ted" or "Bill" or something and otherwise reprint these outright, couldn't they? Well, if anybody does, I hope they just remember to cut Drake's and Oskner's estates a royalty check or two. They were great talents, and their offbeat little creation should, in a just world, be earning a little money from people like me who'd love to snap this up. (Of course, if DC still owns Super-Hip, we're probably in for a long wait. They still haven't said a word about Angel and the Ape, The Inferior Five OR Sugar and Spike, the cads!)

Reprint This! Update on Thunderbirds

2009-09-10T02:56:00.000-07:00

The archivist, everything-in-order side of me doesn't approve of them, but Reynolds & Hearn has released the first two volumes in a series of large-format reprints of Gerry Anderson tie-in comics. These feature the lovely artwork of Ron Embleton, Mike Noble, Frank Bellamy, Eric Eden and others, with adventures from the comic versions of Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and others. These originally ran in 1965-69 in the pages of the anthology TV Century 21 and its sequels and spinoffs. The first volume features an introduction by Chris Bentley, who makes a strong case for including this comic alongside Eagle and 2000 AD as the three most important and influential of British comics.

As a sampler, these are very good books. I finished the first one and enjoyed most of the ten stories in it, though I was disappointed by the reproduction of the Stingray adventure "Haunting of Station 17." I realize that reprinting double-page spreads is a challenge, but it's always a bummer to see artwork and word balloons disappear into a book's gutter. It's made worse when it's such lovely painting by Ron Embleton, and when the pages have an outside margin of about an inch. These could surely have been laid out with a greater inside margin to prevent that happening,

Otherwise, the book is a very good sampler of the comic, with a mix of short stories and the longer epics. It leads with a really interesting Fireball XL5 story which crosses over into both Stingray and Lady Penelope, which instantly disproves the old thought that a similar crossover in Battle Picture Weekly was British comics' first - TV21 beat them by thirteen years! My favorite story in the book was another Lady Penelope serial, drawn by Frank Langford. This, and many of the other stories here, were scripted by regular Gerry Anderson TV scribe Alan Fennell, but there's an interesting Zero X story about a planet of skeleton monsters written by Angus P. Allan, who went on to write the majority of the strips in Look-In during the 1970s and 1980s, which is worth a read. There never was a Zero X TV series; this was the ship that International Rescue and Spectrum had to keep getting out of trouble.

At any rate, Reynolds & Hearn released two volumes of this series in the spring. A third, "Escape from Aquatraz," and apparently focussing just on Stingray episodes, is due before Christmas. I would have preferred straight reprints of everything in their original order - I don't suppose we'll ever get such a thing - but whether you just want to kick back with some nostalgic, escapist fun or would like to reappraise some artwork that was even better than you thought it was, you should certainly check these out.

Read more of what (very little) I've written about Ron Embleton at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

I have not any real reviews for this book, only previews. If you see a review of it, or post one yourself, let me know and I will list it here.

In other news this month, I do like to make updates when something from the Reprint This! wish list makes it back into print. Rebellion has made this reader at least a little happy by issuing a new, limited edition collection of the first storyline for the grouchy, future detective Armitage by Dave Stone and Sean Phillips. The reprint appears in the freebie "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine # 287, and it's available in US shops now. If you're going digital, you can purchase PDFs or CBRs of this Megazine and the reprint (130 pages in all) from Clickwheel for just $3.99.

It's been strongly hinted that a follow-up edition, featuring some of the Charlie Adlard-drawn episodes, might appear in another Meg before the end of the year. Hopefully all the time spent adding these episodes to the company's digital archive will count towards a proper bookshelf edition before much longer!

I haven't thought of it in years, but when I was a kid, Dik Browne's Hägar the Horrible was one of my family's favorite strips. There have been dozens of paperbacks over the years, but it's finally getting the archival hardback treatment from Titan. The first collection, featuring all the strips from 1973-74, is due in November. Titan's look back at the British wartime strip Jane is finally back on the schedule as well. It was anticipated some months ago but delayed due to production issues. Still no sign of their long-overdue Best of Battle book, sadly.

A few months ago, I passed along the rumor, originally reported by Chris Duffy at the mostly-defunct "Comic Books Are Interesting" blog, that the obscure King Aroo, a delightful, surreal, pun-filled 1950s strip by Jack Kent, might be due for a collection. Publishers Weekly this month confirmed that IDW does indeed have a collection planned for 2010. It's part of their "Library of American Comics" imprint, and other strips selected for 2010 releases include Blondie and Secret Agent X-9. The latter strip was scripted by Dashiel Hammett, the godfather of American detective fiction, and drawn by Alex Raymond, and I've been curious to see it for many years now. Preceding all of these, however, is a collection of a later Raymond strip, the detective drama Rip Kirby, which began in 1946. IDW plans five volumes compiling all of Raymond's work on the title before his untimely death in 1956; the first of these fifty-dollar hardcovers is due late next month, and a second in March of next year.

I enjoyed the volume of Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's Action Philosophers that I read. I read at The Comics Reporter just yesterday that Evil Twin Comics is releasing a big collection of all three volumes, along with four bonus stories, later in the year. It's wacky, biographical fun, very well drawn, and a great gift for the know-it-all academic type in your life.

The two "Skinny Showcases" from DC that I have mentioned before are both out. Bat Lash, reviewed the other day at my Bookshelf blog and Eclipso are each about half as thick as a usual Showcase for around half the price. Two other anticipated "Skinny Showcases" are off the table for now: the Ramona Fradon Super Friends was cancelled without explanation at the beginning of the summer, and The Creeper was axed in favor of a hardcover, color collection of all Steve Ditko's episodes, including the late 1970s ones from the World's Finest anthology which were not planned for the Showcase. That's due in 2010.

This month's Marvelman update: Kurt Amacker interviewed writer Alan Moore last week, and he certainly seems to think that a collected edition of his old series is in the works. Even if, Alan being Alan, he'd like Marvel to publish the book without his name on it.

Finally this time, assuming Diamond can be trusted to deliver them, Yen Press's brand-spankin' new editions of Kiyohiko Azuma's oddball, addictive family comedy Yotsuba&! should be in stores today. They've reissued the first five volumes and brought out the first English-language edition of the sixth, with at least two more scheduled for 2010.

That's all for this month! See you in October!

Reprint This! Grimly Feendish

2009-09-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

Reprint This! Update on The Actress and the Bishop

2009-08-10T03:23:00.000-07:00

You know what you probably don't have nearly enough of in your comic boxes and shelves? Sequential art by Brian Bolland. It's possible you have a copy of The Killing Joke, and a smattering of Judge Dredd episodes, and you might have decided that his artwork is good enough to overlook the dated and dull script of Camelot 3000, but since Bolland elected to concentrate on cover art so many years ago, actual strip work has been hard to come by.

In the late 1980s, Bolland contributed a pair of three-page strips to the anthology comic A 1. They star a mismatched duo called the Actress and the Bishop and were told in rhyming couplets and they are quite wonderfully silly, and of course the artwork was completely lovely.

About fifteen years later, Bolland finally finished a 17-page followup to the initial episodes. Called "The Thing in the Shed," it is a delightfully loopy little story which bounces from suburban dread to missing pets to Biblical recreations to cowboy adventure. Bolland invented the perfect little format to draw whatever the heck he wants to, as either the frumpy, comical Bishop or his gorgeous, frequently naked housemate Actress remember or imagine, in their rhyming narration, old books or lost loves.

"The Thing in the Shed" first appeared, I believe, in 2005's Bolland Strips!, a wonderful hardback co-published by Knockabout and Palmano Bennett which collects all, or just about all, of the oddball little shorts that Bolland has scripted and drawn over the years, either for himself or for small publishers. But for newer readers, the Georgia-based publisher Desperado has just released a wonderful little 32-page Actress and the Bishop one-shot comic, so for just $3.99, you get all of the duo's appearances, along with a couple of pin-ups. Sure, I normally spotlight bookshelf editions in this blog, but since there's so little of these characters available, a traditional comic book is a perfectly good way to get everything, and cheaply.

Desperado does not currently have this title available in its online store (and if they do, their postage rates are a little high for a single issue), but any good comic shop can order it for you, if they don't have it in stock already. Stop by your local funnybook store on the way home today - and tell 'em Reprint This! sent you!

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

Read other reviews of this book:

James Hunt at Comics Daily
Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool

In other news from the last month, there was a very brief flurry of excitement over Marvel Comics' announcement that they had acquired the rights to the British superhero Marvelman from his creator Mick Anglo, until it became evident that what they had were the rights to tell new stories with the character, and to reprint his original 1950s adventures, which even devotees of old British comics like me find to be pretty dated and dull. Marvel is said to be still working out details to pave the way for the 1980s series written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Certain trademarks created for and exclusive to the 1980s series, owned by Todd McFarlane and by Dez Skinn respectively, still stand in the way for this series to be reprinted. I decided some time ago that I would update this blog on the first with a feature, and on the tenth with a general news roundup, with a "breaking news" update, should any of the features get called up for duty. Suffice it to say that I'm still not anticipating writing a "breaking news" update on Alan Moore's Marvelman any time soon, though I certainly hope that I'm wrong!

Speaking of Marvel and Alan Moore, the publisher has released a giant Captain Britain omnibus edition that massively expands the material in the existing trade paperback collection of material written by Moore and drawn by Alan Davis. The existing book just reprints the Moore material, even though he came on board after several episodes that were scripted by Dave Thorpe which established the "Jasper's Warp" storyline. As a result, that book is a little patchy and hard to follow at first. The collection also carries on, after the end of Moore's tenure, and reprints several episodes from Captain Britain's mid-eighties Marvel UK title that were written by Jamie Delano.

You know, I was expecting more announcements from San Diego, but I really didn't see anything huge as far as reprints go. I suppose the possibility of Marvelman was the biggest one for most folks. On the other hand, Fantagraphics did tell everybody that they're finally planning a spring 2010 launch for their long-delayed Pogo reprint line, and they also announced a forthcoming archival project for Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. Interestingly, the publisher is apparently not planning to delay their Nancy books looking for print-ready copies of the rare strips from the first few years; they'll be starting with volume two and release the first book sometime down the road. Most everything else I heard was hyping new projects and not reprints, however.

As far as actual solicitations go, DC has finally decided to put together a second volume of the 1990s Shade the Changing Man by Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo. It's said to contain issues 7-13 and is scheduled for November. Milligan is currently scripting Hellblazer for their Vertigo imprint, and the first collection of his work there is planned for October. The big news, I'd say, is that DC has finally solicited the long overdue collection of the classic 1940s Captain Marvel storyline "The Monster Society of Evil," in time for Christmas.

Also in the latest solicitations, IDW has a pair of highly-anticipated books. The company is rolling out the first in their planned series of five Bloom County archival hardcovers in October, along with the late Dave Stevens' much-loved The Rocketeer, which will come, as speculated, in two different hardcover editions. There's a $30 book which reprints all of the character's adventures, and also an oversized, deluxe $75 version which will contain an additional hundred pages of sketches, pinups and other supplemental material.

That Woody Allen comic strip I was mentioning, with the Buckminster Fuller introduction? It's real. No kiddin'!

Lastly this time, Bear Alley Books has released details of their third and fourth collections: a complete run, across two volumes, of Johnny Future by Alf Wallace and Luis Bermejo. 51 episodes of this superhero strip originally appeared in the British anthology title Fantastic, alongside a host of Marvel superhero exploits, in the late 1960s. The books will feature new covers by Garry Leach.

That's all for this month! See you in September!

Reprint This! Flex Mentallo

2009-08-01T01:03:00.000-07:00

Reprint This! Update on Humbug

2009-07-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

This week, I finally finished Fantagraphics' quite amazing reconstruction of Humbug, the short-lived (1957-58) humor magazine that several members of the Original Gang of Idiots tried to finance themselves in the wake of Trump's cancellation. Reprints of this material, which ranges from everything from comics to one-act screenplays, has been hard to come by for decades, and fans of the creators, who include Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Arnold Roth, Al Jaffee and others, have been looking forward to a collection like this for simply ages.

Fantagraphics' team of designers spent months reconstructing the original eleven issues of Humbug. Very little of the original artwork was available, meaning that in many cases they had to start with scans of the magazines themselves. These were less than ideal: in order to keep costs low, Humbug was printed on the cheapest, most awful paper available. But all this work was worth it, because the finished product is jawdropping. The package includes a pair of lengthy articles about the restoration, along with a mammoth interview with Jaffee and Roth. Collected as a pair of hardcover books in a slipcase, this is going to really require anybody hoping to knock this off the mountain of "best reprints of the year" to bring one heck of a product to the table.

As for the contents, yes, some of it's dated. I mean, these are fifty year-old satires, and many of its targets have faded into obscurity. A letters page stink after Humbug turned both barrels on Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had me scratching my head until I looked him up. Well, good for Humbug! Otherwise, provided you can recall the days of Sputnik-panic, Humbug's comedy remains pretty timely. Action movies rely on exactly the same cliches that they did a half-century ago, and Consumer Reports is still as anal-retentive as it was back then. You may not bust a lung laughing every tenth page, but it's pretty good for cover-to-cover chuckles, and all of the artwork is terrific.

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

Read other reviews of this book:

Mark Evanier at News from ME
Christopher Hermitage at Blog to Comm
Rick Klaw at San Antonio Current
Rod Lott at Bookgasm
Chris Mautner at Comic Book Resources

In other news from the last month, well, there's not a lot about. Seems like most publishers will be waiting until the San Diego Comic-Con to make announcements this summer, but here's another thing or two that I've spotted. Actually, one thing that will be formally announced at San Diego is Viz's new "Shonen Sunday" imprint, the home of their forthcoming quarterly collections of Rumiko Takahashi's Rin-Ne and several other titles.

Marvel has solicited a mammoth new hardback volume of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' celebrated Criminal. This 400-page book will reprint the first three paperback trades in one collection, and retails for $50. I haven't found the time to try it myself, but Criminal comes strongly recommended by several friends, and I do like Phillips' artwork a lot. This hardback will cost only $8 more than the three books bought individually. Hmmm. I should borrow the first of those trades and see about making the investment!

Speaking of DC, while the first of the publisher's "Skinny Showcases," highlighting Bat Lash, was released this week, it looks like they've changed plans for the mini-line a little. Word has it that the planned volume for the Creeper has been cancelled in favor of a hardback edition, scheduled for later in the year, which will reprint all of Steve Ditko's work on the character, in color.

A couple of days ago, IDW released advance word that they'll be tackling a mammoth archiving of Archie material from the 1940s and 50s, spotlighting early work by Bob Montana, Stan Goldberg and Dan DeCarlo. I was kind of curious why the Archie publishers don't just do this themselves, but they're kind of built around one sort of reprint, and not the archival stuff that IDW has been perfecting for the last couple of years. Go ahead and sign me up for the DeCarlo books, IDW. No word, incidentally, on whether spinoff material like Josie and the Pussycats is part of the deal.

Last month, Titan made my day by announcing that Johnny Red is getting the first of what we hope will be a series of hardcover collections. This month, they've solicited the sixth in their series of Charley's War volumes, featuring another thirty or so never-before-reprinted episodes by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun. It should arrive in September. Also, they surprised me by jumping on the "long-running American comic strip" bandwagon and announcing a Wizard of Id series, also for September. That was one of those strips we used to get in Atlanta years ago and was later dropped, so I concede some nostalgic curiosity. Oh, that little king. He's so tyrannical!

Lastly this time, Rebellion have quietly pushed back the ninth Nikolai Dante collection, "Amerika," from September to November, so that they can include the forthcoming "Lulu's War" storyline from the prog. The story will start in September's prog 1650 and run for about six weeks, and then be reprinted along with the last four Dante stories.

That's all for this month! See you in August!

Reprint This! Third World War

2009-07-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

Reprint This! Update on Sam's Strip

2009-06-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

Sam's Strip was the third newspaper comic devised by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, the team better known for Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey. It ran for a little less than two years before the creators, unable to make much headway selling it, pulled the plug. It really is an odd little strip. Sam is a well-meaning grouch who's very much aware of the fourth wall separating his four panels from the rest of the newspaper funnies, and periodically interacts with his peers, with cameos by everybody from Charlie Brown to the character who'd later become Grandmama on The Addams Family.

Naturally, the strip became a fast favorite of comics afficionados, who enjoyed the in-jokes and what we might term as "metatextual commentary" if this blog was any more po-faced than it actually is. With regular asides to the readers, light commentary on current events and trips to a prop closet stocked with a variety of word balloons, Sam's Strip was lost on many comics page editors, and the strip never had more than 60 client papers.

Well, it might have been a failure in its day, but Sam's Strip has grown into a cult classic over time. Fantagraphics recently released a very nice paperback edition which compiles the series in its entirety. It includes annotations to explain some of the topical references of the early 1960s and commentary by Jerry Dumas. This may not be a book worth going too far out of your way to sample, but if you enjoy newspaper funnies, then this might be a very nice addition to your bookshelves. Give it a try!

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

Read other reviews of this book:

Chris Barat at News and Views
KC Carlson at Comics Worth Reading
Allan Holtz at Stripper's Guide
Chad Nevett at Comic Book Resources
Andrew Williams at Den of Geek

The biggest news of the last month comes from the good folks over at Titan, who have finally confirmed the rumors - hardback editions of the terrific Johnny Red are in the works. The long-running series by Tom Tully and, initially, Joe Colquhoun, ran for a decade in the pages of Battle Picture Weekly. This is a big favorite of mine, and one of BPW's best series. I've been rereading the John Cooper-drawn era lately and it's a consistently wonderful strip which you should all check out. The first in what we hope will be an annual collection is due in September.

The second biggest news of the month - and any other month, it'd be the biggest - is that Steve Holland of the wonderful Bear Alley blog has formally announced he's going into the publishing business with Bear Alley Books, looking at doing small print-run, complete editions of classic British comics, done right. Holland has the knowledge and the commitment to make certain his collections are as comprehensive and good-looking as bookshelf editions can be, and I wish him all the success in the world with his new venture. First up from Bear Alley, later this summer: complete collections of the time-travelling war yarn The Phantom Patrol, with art by Gerry Embleton, and the excellent late sixties occult thriller Cursitor Doom, with art by Eric Bradbury and Geoff Campion. Steve's commissioned new covers by Chris Weston and John Ridgway for the titles.

In other news, as if you didn't have enough books to buy this year, the long-rumored Groo Treasury has finally been scheduled by Dark Horse. This 336-page collection of the earliest episodes of the comedy strip by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier is due in October, which is nice, because I was not keen on filling up on those little 80-page collections of the old Epic Comics series. That'd get a little expensive.

DC has announced they're releasing what might be the first-ever collection of Mike Grell's weird 1970s swords-and-lasers fantasy The Warlord, a title I enjoyed for about seven weeks when I was twelve, in their Showcase Presents line. The 528-page book, scheduled for September, reprints the character's debut in the anthology 1st Issue Special and the first 28 issues of his own book. If I was still in touch with a couple of guys I went to middle school with, I'd let them know, but I'm not, so I'm telling you.

So ten days ago, I was talking about how somebody needs to release more old Osamu Tezuka comics in the US. Well, the company Digital Manga Publishing is way ahead of me; there's a complete, done-in-one omnibus collection of Tezuka's 1968-69 serial Swallowing the Earth due in July! Great news, I am looking forward to seeing it. For more Tezuka, the wonderful Helen McCarthy is putting the final touches on a big, image-heavy coffee table biography of Tezuka for Abrams, the company that brought you Mark Evanier's wonderful tribute to Jack Kirby last year. The book is due out in October. And speaking of Abrams...

In another example of what's either a late April Fool's gag or definitive proof that everything that ever appeared in a newspaper is going to end up in a hardcover collected edition before much longer, Abrams is bringing out a collection of Stuart Hample's Woody Allen comic strip. No, I never knew there was a Woody Allen comic strip, either. It ran in the 1970s. The book is entitled Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip and is due out in November. With an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Oh, now I know this is a gag!

Finally this time, a couple of interesting Judge Dredd collections from Rebellion are in the pipeline for November. The 14th volume in their Complete Case Files series will include all the 2000 AD strips up to prog 700, including the epic "Necropolis" and all of its lead-in stories, drawn by Carlos Ezquerra. The collection won't include the separate serial The Dead Man, which ran for a few months prior to "Necropolis" and dumped readers on their heads with the beautiful revelation that the two strips were intricately connected. Happily, The Dead Man is getting its own trade collection alongside CCF 14, so new readers can enjoy all of its beautiful John Ridgway artwork and read it at the same time as the main Dredd strip.

That's all for this month! See you in July!

Reprint This! Ambassador Magma

2009-06-05T05:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Obviously, the Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka is a big favorite here at Reprint This! headquarters, and the good folks over at Vertical have done a lot in the last year or so to increase his presence on English-language bookshelves, adding his classic series Dororo and Black Jack to their lineup. This is really just scratching the surface of all the wild array of comics he worked on over his forty-year career. One missing gem is AMBASSADOR MAGMA, a terrific comic in which humanity gets caught in the middle of a war between a galactic conqueror and his army of dinosaur-like monsters, and a kindly wizard and his trio of super-powered robots.

Ambassador Magma's central characters were the Murakami family, news reporter Atsushi, his wife Tomoko and his son Mamoru. In the first episode of the comic, the villainous Goa transports their home back to prehistoric Earth in a demonstration of his power, demanding that Murakami tell the world to surrender or be destroyed. Young Mamoru snaps pictures of Goa before he returns them to the present day. As he's developing the photo, a rocket lands outside and transforms into a fifty-foot robot called Magma, who takes Mamoru and the camera to a remote volcano. There, the wizard Earth confirms that his old enemy Goa has returned and enlists the Murakamis as his new allies.

The series is remarkably fun wish-fulfillment for kids, particularly when Earth creates a new "boy robot" called Gam in Mamoru's image as a surrogate son for Magma and his wife Mol. Gam is just about the greatest best friend character in all of comics: a super-powered buddy who can turn into a rocket and take you anywhere, and then beat up legions of evil henchmen with his magma-fueled super strength. In each of Ambassador Magma's first two lengthy comic storylines, the heroes confront alien duplicates along with an array of terrifying giant monsters as Goa crafts new plans for his conquest of our planet.

Ambassador Magma first ran in the monthly magazine Shonen Gaho from May of 1965 until February 1967, by which time a well-remembered live-action TV series was running. After Tezuka concluded his work on the comic, his studio continued it for another six months, along with a companion tie-in feature (six-page illustrated episode recaps, apparently) that ran for a year in the pages of Shonen King. The TV show, known in the US as The Space Giants, is a downright terrific program. It beat the better-known Ultraman to the air by about a week, and made the most of its shoestring budget by telling its stories in four-part serial format so that they wouldn't have to build so many sets and monster costumes. This resulted in stories that have aged very well, with believable characters and downright fascinating imagery. If Ultraman was Japan's Thunderbirds, low on plot but high on spectacle and explosions, then the TV Ambassador Magma was its Doctor Who, where intricate storylines and character development made for a far more rewarding experience. When The Space Giants finally got a decent run in American syndication more than a decade after it finished in Japan, it gained a huge audience of kids who would have sold their younger brothers for some merchandising, but practically nothing was available back then, least of all the original comics.

In fact, the program seems to be caught up in one of those interminable trademark disputes between a company which has no visible intention of making any money from it, other than suing anybody else who tries, and people who've made efforts to obtain a license to make comics with the better-known American name on it. This probably shouldn't impact any potential English-language release of the original comics, which should be called by the original title anyway and not get embroiled in the squabble over trademark, but it's a real shame that the characters have faded from the public view since nobody other than us nostalgists have seen the gang except in passing for better than twenty years.

Many, many moons ago, I did some research into the production of the TV series and my job would have been a lot easier had SciFi Japan been around. There's a terrific guide written by Bob Johnson on their site now which focusses more on the program, but also has some background about the comic and the various configurations of the reprints available in Japan. I'm of the opinion that the whole series could easily be collected into a pair of large-format volumes, and they'd make a great companion to Vertical's Black Jack books. So how about it, guys? Then you could get started on Jungle Emperor and Vampire and Cyborg Big X and Princess Knight and Amazing Three and...

Reprint This! Update on Starman

2009-05-10T04:05:00.000-07:00

I finished reading the second of DC's new Starman Omnibus collections, and I have to say that this is emphatically the right way to do a collected edition of a modern book. The fifty-buck hardcover reprints thirteen issues of James Robinson's superhero series, along with the first of the series' annuals and three issues from the anthology Showcase which feature the supporting players, along with considerable background details, commentary and sketches from the artists, who include Tony Harris, Guy Davis and Steve Yeowell.

If you've never had the pleasure of reading Starman, I really believe this is among the two or three best American comics of the '90s. It's the story of Jack Knight, a reluctant second-generation hero and the sixth to use the name, who defends the beautiful art deco metropolis of Opal City from bizarre crime. It's a book more about family and heritage and honor than it is fisticuffs and the usual superhero shenanigans. Robinson occasionally displays a tin ear for dialogue, but his narration is really captivating, and it's easy to get caught up in the grand sweep of Opal and her champions.

A detour to New York City to consult one of the DC Universe's original heroes, the Sandman, is so note-perfect that the publisher should use it to teach new writers how to craft an engaging crossover, and a later story which pits Jack and two unlikely allies against a demon in a poster is surprising at every turn, with a clever conclusion that will have a lasting, fascinating impact on future stories. It's definitely a title worth reading, and thumbs up to DC for creating such a nice package. They plan to publish the complete 81-issue series and all of its side stories and supplements in six of these omnibus volumes.

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

Read other reviews of this series:
Van Jensen at ComicMix
Randy Lander at Inside Joke Theatre
Greg Oleksiuk at PopMatters
Jason Sacks at Comics Bulletin
Paul W. Smith at Den of Geek

In other news, perhaps the month's biggest announcement has come from Alan Moore, confirming the rumors that Top Shelf will be issuing a complete edition of his "published-in-many-places" comedy The Bojeffries Saga. This new collection will include a new 24-page story that artist Steve Parkhouse is said to be tackling now. Moore's announcement came in the second part of the mammoth interview that Pádraig Ó Méalóid conducted for The Forbidden Planet Blog.

Fantagraphics has unveiled a little more about their forthcoming collection of Gahan Wilson Playboy cartoons. It's still on track for an October release. The three-volume slipcased hardcover is going to set you back a tidy $125, which means I'm putting $10 a paycheck in the kitty for this starting now. The book will feature introductions by Neil Gaiman and Hugh Hefner, and not only every cartoon that Wilson's contributed in his fifty-one year tenure with the mag, but his fiction and accompanying illustrations as well. The behemoth will clock in at more than 1000 pages. Can't wait, even if my accountant might want to have a word or two with me about it.

Speaking of Playboy, Dark Horse's collection of the two issues of the Hef-published Trump, mentioned here back in January, has been delayed and is due out in mid-August. This will feature classic work by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Wally Wood, Mel Brooks, Max Shulman and many others. Incidentally, my son finished the first half of Fantagraphics' Humbug, the magazine that followed Trump, and not only proclaims it to be awesome, but also wants it noted that he's the only modern-day tween to have read it.

In what sounds like it was a late April Fool's Day joke which went a little far, it's been strongly rumored that IDW is preparing a collection of Jack Kent's long-running newspaper strip King Aroo for later in the year. The strip ran for an impressive sixteen years before winding down in 1965, but it's incredibly obscure because only a single paperback collection was ever issued, in 1953, and because it only appeared in a handful of papers for most of its run. Some of the sample strips available online show it to be an incredibly charming and silly strip, reminiscent of Pogo with its puns and quirky characters, and while I'm curious to see more, I think IDW has something of an uphill climb selling this almost unknown character to a modern audience.

Speaking of Pogo, most recent word on the grapevine is that we'll be waiting until sometime in 2010 for the new line of Fantagraphics collections to get going.

And speaking of IDW, whether they are going to do something with King Aroo or not, they are planning a reprint of Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta's 1980s SF serial Starstruck with new coloring.

Over at DC, it looks like Peter Milligan's well-regarded '90s take on Shade the Changing Man is finally getting some long-overdue attention. A collection of the first six issues was released many moons ago, and it's finally getting a second later this year. Personally, I find Shade to have aged very badly, but I'm still looking forward to this earlier stuff from the run. But before that, DC is prepping hardcover collections from some of the other titles in their run, similar to the Starman books, including Fables and Alan Moore's Tom Strong. And they've finally solicited the Eclipso "Skinny Showcase" I've been talking about for August:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: ECLIPSO TP
Written by Bob Haney
Art by Lee Elias, Alex Toth, Jack Sparling and Bernard Baily
Cover by Bernard Baily
One of the strangest comics villains ever stars in this volume collecting HOUSE OF SECRETS #61-80! On an expedition in the South Pacific, scientist Bruce Gordon’s dark side is unleashed after being exposed to a black diamond. Transformed into the powerful Eclipso, he embarked on an evil rampage as his good side attempted to reassert control.
Advance-solicited; on sale August 26 • 296 pg, B&W, $9.99 US

If you're enjoying Drawn & Quarterly's collections of the Moomin comic strip, and who in their right mind isn't?, then you might want to check out some reissues of the classic Moomin picture books that Tove Jansson did in the 1960s and 1970s. The publisher is starting up a new line of children's books called D+Q Enfant devoted to "lost classics and new soon-to-be classics" which will include the old Moomin series. Fine, give me another reason to want to have another kid before too long.

When I featured a blurb last month about our friends at Titan Books, I didn't have any news about Roy of the Rovers. Well, there's a new set of 1970s strips due in June - 208 pages of "scorching soccer action" from the period that introduced the hotheaded character Paco Diaz and took a hardline stance against hooliganism in the stands. Down the Tubes also points out that Titan's long-delayed Best of Battle is finally scheduled for next month as well. Fingers crossed!

That is all for this month. I would like to thank everybody for reading and all the nice e-mails, and also let everybody know that June's updates will be a little delayed. Look for the feature article on the 5th and the news update on the 15th. Happy reading!

Reprint This! Steve Ditko

2009-05-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Artist Steve Ditko has earned accolades, praise, the thanks of a grateful comic-lovin' world and even a Jonathan Ross-helmed documentary for the BBC on the strength of his work. One of comics' most notorious recluses, the quiet artist was blowing kids' minds in the sixties with his work on characters like Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, the Creeper and the Question, all of whom he created or co-created. In the seventies, his workload didn't slow down much, even if his profile was a good deal lower than previously. For the publisher Charlton, he drew hundreds of pages for their horror titles, while continuing to occasionally draw more conventional adventure stories. The stuff he was doing was sometimes outlandish or utterly unconventional, but it all shares two common traits: it all looks terrific and it's all out of print and quite difficult to find.

Marvel has released some of the artist's work for them in a large-format collection entitled Marvel Visionaries: Steve Ditko, but most of his work for DC and Charlton has not been seen since it originally appeared. Since DC owns almost all of the output from Charlton (everything, I understand, save the small amount of material which the creators themselves re-purchased, such as the superhero comic E-Man) and has even incorporated some of their more successful trademarks into their own continuity, I don't believe there's really anything stopping DC from assembling a package of some of these strips. (Reader Martin Wisse suggests that much of this material might also be held by Roger Broughton's company; Devlin Thompson told me that months ago and I should have remembered.)

Killjoy, for example, was a completely bizarre character who "starred" in a pair of delightful eight-page episodes. Almost nothing about the character was shown or revealed; the focus was on the villains who were whining and protesting that nobody had the right to interrupt their evil schemes. You wouldn't expect to find satires about government and corporate obstinance in the back of a children's funnybook in 1973-74, but there they were, a pair of wonderful, high-concept comedies masquerading as something about superheroes. They'd be forgotten if scans hadn't shown up over at The Groovy Age last year, although reprints of the two stories did show up in a small press collection called The Ditko Package in 1989.

In fact, there are several small press collections out there, not the least of which are the ones that Ditko's company has had a hand in. But none of these have had the ability to work with several different publishers to assemble something more consistent. Of course, even his major work is not readily available in a simple format - I don't believe you can just buy a single book with all of his Dr. Strange episodes without getting a lot of later, inferior work in the same package, for instance - but a broad anthology might be possible, and show off a lot of interesting material in one place. Blake Bell's wonderful site Ditko Looked Up includes a fascinating stripography which mentions several books I've never seen. He drew the final issue of something called Morlock 2001 and the Midnight Men for Atlas/Seaboard, for instance, as well as a couple of issues of Tiger-Man for that publisher, and four issues of Stalker for DC in 1975. Other work was a little sporadic at the time.

Apart from the horror comics and Shade the Changing Man, which I wrote up in an earlier Reprint This! and which deserves its own collection, and twelve episodes of Starman which appeared in the pages of Adventure Comics, there were unusual things like the first issue of Man-Bat, three episodes of the Kirby-created Demon and contributions to DC's SF anthology Time Warp. But best of all these things, from my perspective anyway, was the fantastic Odd Man.

I was about seven, and already a voracious comic reader, when DC started running house ads announcing the huge new expansion coming to their lineup. Called "The DC Explosion," one of these ads showed a group of characters who'd be getting their own titles or back-up series. The thunderously bizarre Odd Man was among the crowd in this one ad (you can see it at Fanzing's article about the debacle), and I was determined to see his story, and so I started scouring the Eckerd Drugs and 7-11s and Majik Markets for the issue of Shade the Changing Man which would feature the character. It was never released. As many of you know, the DC Explosion rapidly backfired into what we call the DC Implosion, and the contents of Shade # 9 were junk-published internally by the company for trademark protection.

I thought that was it for the Odd Man for almost fifteen years until I learned that Detective Comics # 487 published the story, or, as it turned out, a revised version of it, apparently with the cliffhanger ending jerry-rigged into an conclusion. I looked in every comic shop, junk store and flea market in north Georgia for this book, and could have assembled a complete decade's run of Detective except for # 487 until I finally heard about that new-fangled eBay thing that folk were talking about, and got an account just to buy this comic. And lots of other junk, but that came later.

At any rate, there remains a heck of a lot of great Ditko artwork out there which has never been republished. Unfortunately, some of the Marvel material includes licensed properties like Micronauts and Rom, to which the publisher no longer has the rights. But it's long past time to get started on a proper retrospective of this great artist's work. Sure, you're probably not going to coax a quote out of him for the back cover, but how about it, DC?

Update on Indiana Jones

2009-04-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

In 1981, Marvel Comics got the license to release a three-issue adaptation of the hit film Raiders of the Lost Ark. The comic turned out to be pretty terrible, even if goodwill and curiosity turned the three-parter into a commerical hit. You know how Indy figures things out silently in the movies, and acts without telling people what he's up to? That's not how Indy works in that comic. Anyway, Marvel continued their license and released a pretty successful series of follow-up stories under the title The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones from 1983-86. This was a pretty uneven title, but it was occasionally very entertaining. The book seemed to suffer from the lack of a consistent creative team, but even if some of the contributions were a little underwhelming, you can tell from rereading the stories that veterans like John Byrne, Denny O'Neil, Howard Chaykin, Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie all enjoyed working with the character, and doing something a little different than the typical Marvel title.

Dark Horse has been Indy's comic home for several years now, and last year, they landed the rights to the old Marvel series, which had lapsed. The publisher has a really interesting reprint line, principally used for their licensed properties like this, Aliens or Buffy, which repackages about 350 pages in color for $25 in a format a little smaller than a standard American comic. Dark Horse had already released two of these Omnibus editions for their own Indiana Jones miniseries in 2008. This is the first Omnibus to reprint the Marvel series, and it collects the three-part Raiders adaptation and the first 12 issues of the ongoing series. Despite some genuinely awful coloring (as noted with examples in February at my LiveJournal), the comic has aged pretty well for something with so many thought balloons on the page, and the creators put Indiana through some pretty thrilling and fun paces. It's certainly worth checking out!

I have not seen any substantive reviews of this book. If you see any or have written any, drop me a line and I will list them here.

In other reprinting news, Yen Press has announced the release dates for the next three volumes of Yotsuba&!, the addictive family comedy series by Kiyohiko Azuma which had previously been published by ADV Manga. Volume six is due out in September, with the next two following in December and in April 2010.

There have been rumors for ages that DC Comics will one day be releasing a complete collection of the 1940s Captain Marvel storyline "The Monster Society of Evil," a much-loved serial that ran for several months and was recently revisited by writer/artist Jeff Smith in a very fun new version. Looks like we'll finally be seeing this classic in December. The Amazon listing is right here if you'd like to pre-order it.

In other DC news, looks like they've finalized plans for their Showcase Presents volumes through the end of the year, in a mix of $17 regular 500-page books along with ten buck 300-page "Skinny Showcases" in the summer, although it does appear they are slowing the number of titles released to allow people to actually catch up to them. Titles include Super Friends in May, The Creeper in June, the long-awaited Western adventure Bat Lash and the fourth collection of 1960s Batman in July; Eclipso in August; Warlord in September; House of Secrets volume two in October; DC Comics Presents the Superman Team-Ups in November; and the third volume of Wonder Woman in December.

News of some other new releases from the good fellows over at Titan have crept out. October should see a sixth collection of Charley's War along with new sets of stories from Dan Dare ("Safari in Space") and Modesty Blaise ("Death in Slow Motion," with the previously-announced October collection, "Scarlet Maiden," moved forward to August). No announcements yet about a third set of Jeff Hawke adventures - the second collection was reviewed last month over at my bookshelf.

Viz has not formally announced it yet, but it looks like they've got a plan for Rumiko Takahashi's InuYasha that I can get behind. The series, her longest-running but, to my mind, the least compelling, recently concluded and the 56th digest collection was issued in Japan in February. I picked up a few of these cheaply, but the prospect of having 56 of the darn things on my shelf was a little unappealing. Fortunately, it looks like they're going to begin issuing the series in their "VizBig" line, which collects three digests in a thick package priced about the same as two of the smaller ones, starting in November. They've already had some success with Dragon Ball, Rurouni Kenshin and Fushugi Yugi in this format, and I'm much more likely to follow InuYasha to its conclusion if I can spend less money on it, and not have to devote shelf space to 56 little books.

Finally this time, Rebellion looks to have settled on October for release of the fifth Sinister Dexter collection - the fourth volume was just issued in England - and the first proper collection of the excellent Judge Dredd epic "Mechanismo." This should include the first two arcs, with artwork by Colin MacNeil and Peter Doherty, which were once compiled by the previous book publisher Hamlyn in an incomplete package, but ideally this one will also include the never-before-reprinted third arc, with art by Manuel Benet.

See you next month! Thanks for reading!

Reprint This! Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection

2009-04-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

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 reason that Rian Hughes is not on enough bookshelves is that the guy didn't - for some mad reason - spend very many years working in comics. He's found greater flexibility and reward working in design than in sequential art, and that's great if you collect XTC albums and want them to look good, but it's a real downer if you like great-looking comics. Fortunately, most of Hughes' comic work was compiled by Knockout in their fine 2007 collection Yesterday's Tomorrows, which I reviewed last month over at the Bookshelf. That volume does include one of his pieces for 2000 AD, the Grant Morrison-scripted Really and Truly, but that's only about a third of his otherwise unreprinted strips from that comic. If you're sitting comfortably, I'll tell you exactly how Rebellion needs to put together a simply excellent volume that will put all of Hughes's 2000 AD work in a single tome.

Tales from Beyond Science was Hughes' first series in the venerable British weekly. It was a little anthology series in which strange fortean tales are related by some elderly gentleman from the comfort of his club, and all the stories are very fun. Six episodes appeared in the spring of 1992, and were followed by two others in special editions. Half of these were scripted by Mark Millar, and while I'm generally no fan of his work, it would be churlish to suggest there's anything wrong with these early efforts, which are remarkably creepy and effective. You can certainly catch the lingering fumes from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol influencing Millar, who told stories about strange government agencies, radios to the dead and missing chunks of time, but with Hughes bringing his own unique sensibility to the presentation, the stories feel very unique and unlike anything else in comics. Alan McKenzie and John Smith each also contributed two stories apiece. McKenzie's are a little whimsical, Smith's more grounded in modern horror, but they're all winners, and it's a genuine travesty that the series wasn't continued after this wonderful beginning.

Really and Truly arrived in the summer of 1993. This eight-part story is a psychedelic rollercoaster about drug smuggling, only it features a fabulous car, a dust-covered Russian cosmonaut, sumo gangsters and giant flying houses. It's like a sixties Saturday morning cartoon blown up to widescreen. Morrison boasted that he wrote the whole shebang in a single night while tripping on E. If we're brutally honest, it sort of shows, but Hughes makes the script's deficiencies look like brilliant ideas. The experience of reading Really & Truly is spiced up with its very clever lettering and unconventional design choices. It's certainly a very nineties strip, and unquestionably dated, but the same can't be said of Hughes' next, and thus far, last contribution to 2000 AD...

I've talked about Hughes' time on Robo-Hunter at pretty good length before, including an article at my Thrillpowered Thursday blog. To recap, the writer Peter Hogan was brought in to salvage the John Wagner / Ian Gibson classic after it had fallen into some disrepair at the hands of some other, lesser, talents. Hogan wrote five stories of varying lengths, four of which - thirteen episodes - were illustrated by Hughes.

Friends, I'm telling you, comics just don't come better than Ian Gibson Robo-Hunter. But Hughes, he's up there, too. Peter Hogan really knocked these stories completely out of the park. They're whimsical, silly, incredibly inventive and clever, and Rian Hughes was absolutely the best man in England not named Gibson to illustrate them. He created a wonderful world for Sam Slade and his nutty associates to run around in. It's a slightly decaying technopolis populated by bubble-headed droids who've walked straight out of 1950s advertising calendars, armed with space-age zap guns, widgets and gizmos. For lighthearted, unexpected, whimsical detective adventures, this strip is the business, and if you have never seen it, you are missing out.

So that's the story: Hughes' work for the prog comes to 29 episodes, plus six cover illustrations and a star scan on the back of issue 842. Rebellion typically issues collections based on the many ongoing series from their titles, but there are a few precedents for a creator-centered work. Both Alan Moore and Frazer Irving have had releases devoted to their work, and I suggest to you that Rian Hughes certainly deserves similar consideration. They should also see what he'd charge to draw "La Revolution Robotique," but that's another pet obsession of mine. So how about it, Rebellion? Feel like making the world beyond science a glorious reality?

Reprint This! Update on Grant Morrison's "The Flash"

2009-03-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

About twelve years back, one of my favorite comics writers, Grant Morrison, co-wrote a memorable nine-issue run of DC Comics' The Flash in conjunction with his then-partner, Mark Millar. It was an exciting, engaging run of very good comics, and DC has finally put it back in print. And they've bumbled it completely.

DC decided to to reprint the nine issues across two trade paperbacks, padding out the second with a three-parter that Millar wrote himself. So if you, dear reader, would like to read all of Morrison's nine comics, you have to buy two books. Worse, there's still a fair chunk of story missing. Morrison's run comprises a pair of three-part adventures, with three "one-shots" between them. The last of these "one-shots," however, is actually the last part of a three-episode crossover with the other DC titles Green Arrow and Green Lantern. DC's collection doesn't contain any backstory or recap of what happened in those comics; you'll have to scour the back issue bins to find them.

So, to recap: a proper Morrison Flash reprint should have contained eleven issues. These would be the nine that he co-wrote and the two crossover issues. Instead, DC reprinted twelve issues: the nine Morrison wrote and what is to my mind an unrelated three-parter, and they did it in two books when it could have fit in one. What a shambles; you'd do well to avoid these collections until somebody at DC gets their head screwed on right and does it correctly.

Read more about what I've written about Grant Morrison at A Journal of Zarjaz Things

I have not seen any substantive reviews of this book. If you see any or have written any, drop me a line and I will list them here.

In other reprinting news, the good folk at Down the Tubes have mentioned some interesting news from English publishers Reynolds & Hearn: A little later this month, they're releasing a pair of paperback collections which compile a random assortment of strips based on old Gerry Anderson properties, including some of the Thunderbirds material I've mentioned once before in this feature. Other series in the books include Fireball XL-5, Lady Penelope and Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons, along with Zero-X, which Wikipedia tells me was a spacecraft which crosses between the continuity of a couple of these Supermarionation shows.

The comics feature work from the likes of Frank Bellamy, Mike Noble and Ron Embleton, and originally appeared in the anthology TV21. Amazon ordering links: volume one and volume two.

Back in October, I mentioned that Fantagraphics has a complete collection of Sam's Strip by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas due out soon. This arrived in most comic shops last week, or you can order the $22.99 softcover from the publisher now. Chad Nevett reviewed the book last month for Comic Book Resources.

Finally this month, IDW announced at February's WonderCon that they'll be bringing out a complete edition of Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer. There will be a standard hardcover and an oversized deluxe edition with several pages of previously unpublished drawings, both of which will contain all of the original episodes, and they're due out in October. Editor Scott Dunbier and new colorist Laura Martin talked about the project at Comic Book Resources.

See you next month! Thanks for reading!

Reprint This! Cat's Eye

2009-03-01T02:32:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! Update on The Freak Brothers

2009-02-10T05:34:00.001-08:00

First things first: a welcoming wave to Chris Mautner over at Comic Book Resources, whose new column Collect This Now! has jumped on the Reprint This! bandwagon. It's always nice to have more people shouting at publishers with you. That said, I've got my next six features sketched out, so don't write about anything I'm planning to, would ya?

Anyway, once upon a time, you could buy The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers at Sears. No kidding. The old Sears outlet store at Belmont Hills shopping center in Smyrna, Georgia had a small section of clearout books and magazines. It was there that we found the old collection of the X-Men "Phoenix Saga" for about three bucks, and a handful of these lunatic comics which were certainly not aimed at eleven year-olds. Frankly, I was afraid to have them in the house. I read a friend's copies, and never really warmed to them at the time, on account of drugs, in Reagan's America, being the devil's business.

Well, if your mind is a little more open than mine was in 1982, then you'll be incredibly pleased to know that one of America's funniest comic series has been compiled in a mammoth, 624-page edition by Knockout Press, sporting this lovely Rian Hughes-designed cover. This is said to contain every single appearance by Gilbert Shelton's trio of goofball ne'er-do-wells, who move from one dingy San Francisco apartment to another, when they're not running a bus to New York, starting a commune, being hijacked by terrorists or becoming leaders of the planet's most powerful religion. Shelton has not done nearly enough work in comics; these stories feature some of the funniest plots I've ever followed, with one lunatic right turn after another building situations into a spectacular pyramid of chaos. He and his co-writers (Dave Sheridan and Paul Mavrides are also credited) have a masterful sense of making their stories appear to be stream-of-consciousness silly, but in some of the longer tales, most notably "The Idiots Abroad" and "Grass Roots," every little piece that appears is vital to the overall plot, and the spiralling catastrophe that follows. This is really great stuff.

Knockout's presentation is really impressive. It's a little thicker than a Marvel Essentials, printed on glossy paper with a dust jacket. It contains two color sections and includes all sorts of bonus material, including posters, magazine covers and a series of hilarious cutaway diagrams of the various superstructures and amusement parks said to be part of the Rip Off Press empire. In all, the book is just a jawdroppingly good presentation of some fantastic comics. You should get a copy for yourself today.

Read a little more about this volume:

The Rag Blog has some prerelease hype
Alex Fitch interviews Shelton at Panel Borders
Other than these, I have not seen very much in the way of proper reviews of the book in hand. Most of what I found were copies of the original announcements and notifications of Shelton's British book-signing tour. If you reviewed this book, drop me a line and I will link to it here.

Each month, I like to pass along a little news about reprint projects I find interesting, as I find announcements of them. This month, IDW led into the big, NYCC weekend with this word about a really great new series...

IDW Publishing is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of The Bloom County Library. Beginning in October 2009, each of the five volumes will collect nearly two years worth of daily and Sunday strips, in chronological order. This will be the very first time that many of these comic strips have been collected, and the first time in a beautifully designed, hardcover format. The books will be part of IDW's Library of American Comics imprint, and designed by Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney.

"Fans have pestered me for years," said Berkeley Breathed, "for this ultimate Bloom County collection in that polite, respectful badgering way that only fans can manage. Thank God I can now tell them something better than just 'please remove your tent from my lawn.' I can say, 'It's coming!"

Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed newspaper strips of modern times. Premiering on December 8th, 1980 — a month after the election of Ronald Reagan as President — the strip brought to the comics pages a unique amalgam of contemporary politics and fantasy, all told with hilarious humor and wit.

The beloved and quirky denizens of Bloom County include Opus, Steve Dallas, Bill the Cat, Milo Bloom, Michael Binkley, and Cutter John. Breathed was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987 for his work on Bloom County. The strip was published in an astounding 1200 newspapers.

The phenomenon that was Bloom County spawned a merchandizing bonanza, as well as two spin-off strips, Outland and Opus. The first paperback collection of the strip, Loose Tails, sold over one million copies. Bloom County paperbacks cumulatively sold over six million copies. At the height of the strip's popularity, Breathed walked away on August 6th, 1989.

IDW Publishing Special Projects Editor Scott Dunbier conceived the series. "I'm absolutely thrilled to be editing the Bloom County Library," said Dunbier. "This is a series that I can't wait to hold in my hands."

The Bloom County Library will also contain a series of "Context Pages" sprinkled throughout the volumes. These pages will provide perspective for the reader, presenting a variety of real-life events and personalities that were contemporary at the time of original publication.

At the con, probably the biggest news came from Yen Press, who announced that they'd be picking up the license for Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!, which ADV has been ignoring for more than a year now. Volume six will be released in the fall.

In other reprinting news, DC's latest solicitations reveal several interesting books coming in the spring. Here are four that caught my eye:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUPER FRIENDS VOL. 1 TP
Written by E. Nelson Bridwell and Dennis O'Neil
Art by Ric Estrada, Vince Colletta, Ramona Fradon, Bob Smith and Kurt Schaffenberger
Cover by Alex Toth
The superstars of the 1970s animated adventures star in this new, bargain-priced volume collecting SUPER FRIENDS #1-24!
Advance-solicited; on sale May 27 • 448 pg, B&W, $9.99 US

STARMAN OMNIBUS VOL. 3 HC
Written by James Robinson
Art by Tony Harris, Gene Ha, Dusty Abell, Phil Jimenez, J.H. Williams III and others
Cover by Tony Harris
In this third volume Opal City is terrorized by Dr. Pip, an eccentric bomber. Plus, Starman teams up with Batman to save the life of Solomon Grundy. Collecting STARMAN #30-38, STARMAN ANNUAL #2, STARMAN SECRET FILES #1 and THE SHADE #1-4.
Advance-solicited; on sale June 17 • 432 pg, FC, $49.99 US

BAYOU VOL. 1 TP
Written by Jeremy Love
Art and cover by Jeremy Love
"BAYOU, which tackles racism and violence in 1930s Mississippi, is as hypnotic as it is unsettling." — Wired
The first book from the original webcomics imprint of DC Comics is here! South of the Mason-Dixon Line lies a strange land of gods and monsters; a world parallel to our own, born from centuries of slavery, civil war, and hate.
Lee Wagstaff is the daughter of a black sharecropper in the Depression-era town of Charon, Mississippi. When Lily Westmoreland, her white playmate, is snatched by agents of an evil creature known as Bog, Lee's father is accused of kidnapping. Lee's only hope is to follow Lily's trail into this fantastic and frightening alternate world. Along the way she enlists the help of a benevolent, blues-singing swamp monster called Bayou. Together, Lee and Bayou trek across a hauntingly familiar Southern Neverland, confronting creatures both benign and malevolent, in an effort to rescue Lily and save Lee's father from being lynched.
BAYOU VOL. 1 collects the first four chapters of the critically acclaimed webcomic series by Glyph Award nominee Jeremy Love.
Advance-solicited; on sale May 27 • 8.375" x 6", FC, 160 pg, $14.99 US

PREACHER BOOK ONE HC
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by Steve Dillon
Cover by Glenn Fabry
"Features more blood and blasphemy than any mainstream comic in memory. Cool." — Entertainment Weekly
Available for the first time in hardcover, preacher Jesse Custer begins his dark journey to find God, in this volume collecting PREACHER #1-12, plus pinups from PREACHER #50 and #66. After merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan preacher Jesse Custer has become completely disillusioned with the beliefs to which he had dedicated his entire life. Now possessing the power of "the word," an ability to make people do whatever he utters, Custer begins a violent and riotous journey across the country. Joined by his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip and the hard-drinking Irish vampire Cassidy, Custer loses faith in both God and man as he witnesses dark atrocities and improbable calamities during his exploration of America. This new collected edition features an all-new introduction by series writer Garth Ennis.
Advance-solicited; on sale June 24 • FC, 352 pg, $34.99 US • Mature Readers

Super Friends is interesting because of that very nice price point - definitely one to grab for the under-tens in your house, and cheap enough to give to 'em with a package of crayons. Starman is quite probably the best mainstream American comic of the '90s - it's that or Morrison's Doom Patrol anyway - and this complete repackaging is just gorgeous. The Bayou collection is a nice vote of confidence from DC towards its webcomic initiative, and while I still, blasphemously, think Preacher would have been improved by hinting and not showing its excesses, this looks to be an interesting repackage of the title.

Finally this time, MI-6.co.uk reports some good news from Titan:

Fans of the comic-strip James Bond adventures will be thrilled to learn that the final two compendiums from Titan Books are on the way. Once released, Titan will have published all 52 of the classic stories since their original syndication in newspapers from 1958 to 1983, including seven adventures not released in the UK.

The penultimate title and sixteenth in the Titan Books collection will be "The Girl Machine", due for release on 30th June 2009 in the UK and USA. Previously skipped over in earlier releases, "The Girl Machine" will include the titular adventure as well as "Beware Of Butterflies" and "The Nevsky Nude".

All three stories were drawn by Yaroslav Horak and written by Jim Lawrence and were first published in the Daily Express between 1973 and 1974 and have not been seen since their original syndication.

The volume will also contains a brand new introduction by one of the Bond cast and a host of exclusive feature material.

The final and seventeenth collection from Titan will take its title from 1976 strip adventure "Nightbird". Rounding out the series, the volume will also include "Hot-Shot" and "Ape of Diamonds". The reason these stories were skipped over earlier in the series is often rumoured to be connected to rights issues, but this is incorrect. The real reason the strips were passed over in 2007 will become apparent when the volume is released in early 2010. All three adventures were written by Jim Lawrence and drawn by Yaroslav Horak.

More next month!

(Originally posted Feb 10 2009 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Pussycat

2009-02-02T04:36:00.003-08:00

General updates for January 2009

2009-01-16T02:30:00.000-08:00

I don't have one of my newer-styled updates for you this month (and after I went to all the trouble of designing a format for it, too!), but I have collected a little reprint news which I think my readers might enjoy, and here it is...

The publisher Drawn & Quarterly won some plaudits last year with the announcement of a plan for a major reprinting of John Stanley's work. The first of these has been solicited for March:

JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY VOLUME 1: MELVIN MONSTER HC
(W/A) John Stanley
John Stanley is celebrated as one of the great children's comics writers for his work on the Little Lulu series. In fact, the Lulu work is a small part of his output; he drew and continued to write many other comics-notably his work on the 1960s teen comics from Dell and his monster comedy strip, Melvin Monster. Drawn & Quarterly is launching an extensive reprinting of Stanley's work in handsome volumes designed by Seth. The first in this series is the two-volume Melvin Monster collection featuring all ten issues about the oddball monster boy who just wants to be good, go to school, and do as he's told. Stanley's reputation as a great storyteller and visual comedian is richly deserved; few Golden or Silver Age comics stand the test of time the way these comics do.
HC, 8x11, 184pgs, FC SRP: $19.95

You can enjoy a PDF preview of Melvin Monster over at D&Q's site.

While there is no formal solicitation yet, the second volume, planned for the summer, will reprint Stanley's work on the Nancy comic book. Both volumes feature gorgeous design by Seth. Speaking of Seth, D&Q also has a collection of his strip George Sprott, 1894-1975 planned for May.

Also, Fantagraphics has released its spring and summer catalog, and you can see it here. More Peanuts, Popeye, Hernandez Brothers, Fletcher Hanks and the Peter Bagge strips from Reason? Yes, please!

Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter has the story/non-story of a possible delay in a forthcoming collection of Brian Sendelbach's Smell of Steve.

Rebellion hasn't formally announced them yet, but it looks like August will see the first collection of 2000 AD's Defoe by Pat Mills and Leigh Gallagher, in which a 17th Century tough guy defends Charles II's England from the zombie hordes of Oliver Cromwell, as well as the 1970s classic Flesh, in which cattle ranchers from the future set up shop in prehistoric Earth to harvest dinosaurs and things spiral spectacularly out of control. Mills wrote a fair chunk of Flesh, with art chores by a number of creators, including Carlos Pino and Massimo Belardinelli.

Finally, here's something very interesting coming in June from Dark Horse:

PLAYBOY'S TRUMP! THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Written and art by Harvey Kurtzman and various.
Launched in January 1957 by Harvey Kurtzman and Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, Trump partnered Kurtzman with many of his "usual gang of idiots" from his time at Mad -- famous humor artists such as Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, and Wally Wood. They were joined by such dynamic humorists as Arnold Roth, comedians Mel Brooks and Doodles Weaver, and TV writer and novelist Max Shulman (creator of the character Dobie Gillis, who appeared in dozens of stories, a movie, and the popular TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis). Though it lasted only two issues, this first effort after Kurtzman's historic split from Mad was the breeding ground for the magazines Humbug and Help!, and would ultimately lead to the more than thirty-year run of Kurtzman and Will Elder's landmark character Little Annie Fanny in the pages of Playboy magazine.

Trump! reprints the only two issues of the magazine, released in January and March of 1957. Trump! features the contributions of the following artists and writers: Harvey Kurtzman, Harry Chester, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Wally Wood, Arnold Roth, Russ Heath, Mel Brooks, Doodles Weaver, Max Shulman, and many others.
144 pages, $19.95, in stores on June 17.

That's all for this time. I'll try to do a better job of remembering my features instead of spending all my blog time revising old entries, and we'll see what's new... in a couple of weeks.

Reprint This! The New Adventures of Hitler

2009-01-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

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 NEW ADVENTURES OF HITLER by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell. This instantly-controversial 48-page story, set in 1912 Liverpool and featuring the luckless painter who'd later become the planet's most infamous man slowly losing his mind in a strange adventure with bicycles, bulldogs and 1980s pop stars, has been serialized twice. Each time it prompted an outcry from journalists on slow news days and commentators who thought little of Morrison using controversial topics to get his own name in the press.

The New Adventures of Hitler was an incredibly surreal story set in the early 1910s in which Hitler, then an aspiring painter, lodged in a Liverpool bed & breakfast for a few months. There, he lost his mind amid a torrent of 20th Century British iconography, with strange cameos by Morrissey and Margaret Thatcher, as he was ordered to search for the Holy Grail. The use of real characters to tell a story about a magical, fairytale Britain populated by some of its most iconic faces and names would have only been slightly eyebrow-raising, but using Hitler as the protagonist was a bold, risky move. It infuriated many readers, along with plenty of people who would have never purchased the magazines where the serial ran anyway, but who read stories about the controversy, fueled by certain British newspapers. These were interesting examples of how the late '80s trend of media reporting on "adult graphic novels," led by the mainstream success of Maus or Watchmen, would occasionally be sidetracked by reporters looking for a sexy angle to spice up stories.

Grant Morrison had already made a name for himself as one of the most popular and celebrated writers in American and British comics when the series premiered. With ongoing mainstream work for DC and for 2000 AD, he undertook some experimental work for smaller publishers in the late 1980s, including the similarly controversial St. Swithin's Day, in which an unemployed kid goes to London to assassinate the prime minister, for the now-defunct Trident Comics. Steve Yeowell had previously worked with Morrison on Zoids, Zenith and a one-issue fill-in on Doom Patrol. Here. his artwork is given a remarkable sheen with some really novel coloring that incorporates patterns, mosaics and other cut-out images, heightening the dreamlike, haunting feel of the series.

The series first appeared as twelve weekly four-page episodes in the Scottish magazine Cut in 1989. Cut was an arts and culture magazine of some notoreity, although there appears to be little information about it online today apart from references to the ensuing controversy. The next year, the story was reprinted across four issues of 2000 AD's twice-monthly sister title Crisis, each compiling three of the original weekly episodes.

At only 48 pages, the work is a little slim, but it occurs to me that St. Swithin's Day is similarly out of print - it was last collected by Oni in 1998 (and somebody who borrowed my copy of that never returned it) - and the two of those would make a nice edition together. Round it out with a decent essay or two, and some notes about the two series' controversial appearances, along with an interview with the writer and some sketches from Yeowell and Swithin's artist, Paul Grist, and you've probably got a pretty good 120-page book. I recall that Yeowell drew the young Hitler again in a 1990 cover illustration for Amazing Heroes which featured a Morrison interview, so that could be included. I'm not sure who could tackle such a project, nor whether Morrison, who (I'm totally guessing) might own the rights to both series, would back it, but I do feel strongly that the work of major writers in comics should remain in print for new readers to enjoy, so I certainly hope that some publisher looks into such a project. How about it, somebody?

(Originally posted January 01, 2009, 12:19 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Update on One Pound Gospel

2008-12-19T18:36:00.000-08:00

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!

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

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

2008-12-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! Update on Herbie

2008-11-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

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!

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

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

2008-11-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

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!

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

2008-11-03T17:06:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! The Daily Star Judge Dredd strip

2008-10-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

Reprint This! Update: Gahan Wilson is coming

2008-09-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

Reprint This! Gahan Wilson

2008-07-14T16:41:00.000-07:00

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

Reprint This! More on the Titan reprint line

2008-05-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

OBNOXIOUS! WHO IS THIS POPNECKER?

2008-03-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2008-03-01T16:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 25. Coda

2008-01-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 24. The World's Greatest Superheroes

2008-01-18T16:25:00.000-08:00

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.)

Reprint This! 23. Armitage

2008-01-11T16:24:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 22. Urusei Yatsura

2008-01-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

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.

Three more entries to go in this series, and I've gotta say, I'm winding down, and really running out of new ways to say "This is really great, somebody should reprint it," and I want to have this feature finished before the end of the month. So Rumiko Takahashi's fans will, I hope, forgive me if I don't do URUSEI YATSURA, her first continuing comic series, justice. You'd think this would be a no-brainer for Viz, who have repackaged almost all of her other series for US distribution, but the poor sales of an earlier effort still have an impact on this property.

Briefly, because I'm winding down here, Urusei Yatsura is a sprawling, silly gag strip in which aliens from the planet Uru stop by Earth. A dimwitted teen named Ataru Moroboshi, who hopelessly chases girls with tongue a-droolin', inadvertently proposes to their princess, a cute girl named Lum. She wears a tiger-striped bikini, has an incredibly short temper, has fallen passionately in love with Ataru, and works out her issues of jealousy by electrocuting Ataru often enough for him to go off the idea. The aliens decide to stay in Tokyo indefinitely, or at least until Lum and Ataru agree on a wedding date. Since Ataru has no intention of ever doing such a thing and giving up his flirting, this might be a while. Wacky hijinks follow, especially as many of Lum's friends and family show up to find out what's happening on Earth, and like it enough to set a spell and cause havoc.

Urusei Yatsura first appeared in the pages of Japan's Shonen Sunday in 1978. If I understand correctly, it had a number of short tryout runs of six or eight weeks for its first two years before it finally joined the regular lineup in 1980. It ran weekly until its conclusion in 1987, spawning a TV series, several video games, feature films and direct-to-video releases. As with most Japanese series, the weekly output is enormous, and the series was repackaged in a number of formats, most commonly a series of 34 digests, each about 180 pages. Urusei Yatsura is still phenomenally popular in Japan, and Lum a heavily-licensed icon who appears on pachinko machines and ads for electric companies, and the series has stayed in print through a variety of differently-formatted editions. The original run of 34 books begun a hugely-promoted re-release last year with new introductions and artwork contributions by other Japanese artists; about two-thirds of these new volumes are back in print.

Urusei Yatsura would appear to be a good introduction to Takahashi's work since it is very broad and very silly, without much continuity or ongoing plotlines. But this might actually work against it, as her more popular series in the US have been the longer, serialized stories. Back when Viz was producing traditionally American-sized comic reprints, they released a few Lum miniseries in that format, and some of these were collected in their older, odd-sized $14.95 line of graphic novels. But while they eventually repackaged Maison Ikkoku in the more familiar, less expensive digests, and restarted Ranma 1/2 and InuYasha in those lines, Urusei Yatsura was left behind due to low sales, with the bulk of the series untranslated. But really, Viz, it's been years and it's time to do the series right and promote it to a new audience. Besides, it's looking like y'all will be running out of Dr. Slump and Golgo 13 books to take my money in a few months' time, so you'll need something new on the shelves I want to buy. So how about it, guys?

Background on the series' publication was pilfered from the good folk over at the wonderful Takahashi fan site Rumic World. Visit them for more information! And while this is entry's about the comic series, have a pinup from one of the animated adaptations fer yer Livejournalling pleasure. Be back Friday for another entry as I wrap up this feature.

(Originally posted January 04, 2008, 02:50 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 21. Tippy Teen

2007-12-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

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.

I batted a couple of titles and ideas back and forth when nailing down my final list of 24. One, Marshal Law, was removed when a new collection was announced before I could feature it here. So for a couple of days, its slot was taken by THE COMPLETE DAN DeCARLO JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS. But then I thought, "Hellfire, you're already asking for Marvelman, would you like the Fountain of Youth while you're at it?" Besides, when I was doing the scanning, I didn't actually have any DeCarlo Josie, though I do now, so it got moved to the epilogue feature which'll follow this up.

So she may be a third-stringer in my lineup, but that's okay, because Samm Schwartz's TIPPY TEEN was kind of a third-stringer in real life. Quite plainly an Archie cash-in, her short lived series is nevertheless incredibly charming, goofy, mod and with-it, daddy-o! I think some of the early Archie Comics credits are still disputed, but Schwartz generally gets the accolades for turning Jughead into one of the most popular characters there, and was in charge of some of the secondary titles in the late 1950s and early '60s. Then he moved to Tower Comics and created this delightful little universe.

You probably haven't heard of Tippy Teen before. I hadn't, until our buddies at Mister Kitty did a writeup about her on their Stupid Comics site last year. I was immediately taken by the character names and the swingin' 60s stylin'. You know, Archie reprints are a dollar a dozen, but odds are, since there's just so damn much of the stuff, you're usually going to run into lots of rotten 1980s work by drones copying old house styles and briefly hooking random characters into much uglier fashions and fads. Since Tippy Teen only lasted a few years in the late sixties, you're guaranteed that every issue contains thematically similar mod, groovy jargon and sensibilities.

Tippy inverts the Archie formula by having one lead girl juggling a pair of dueling boyfriends, neither of whom is really developed all that much. Her best friend is called Go-Go, and her spinoff book Go-Go and Animal sports one of the greatest names for a comic book in history. There was also a comic-sized tabloid magazine called Teen-In which featured Tippy strips along with amazing facts and trivia about period pop acts like the Cowsills and Sonny & Cher.

But there's more to Tippy Teen than just some cute period slang and with-it clothes. I'm not sure how much of Tippy Teen is Schwartz's work and how much his various collaborators working in a standard style (Toonopedia suggests that Dan DeCarlo and Bob White were also involved, among others), but this is just some wonderful cartooning here. A few scans here don't do it justice, but I have two issues and I passed another two on to Mister Kitty for their archives and they're all incredibly entertaining on several levels. The casual, fun style is just gorgeous, and feels natural, rather than a "house style."

Anyway, the Tippy Teen world was about one-half of the output of a short-lived company called Tower Comics, which hired Schwartz away from the Archie company, MLJ. Tower Comics was an imprint of Tower Books formed in 1965 to grab some of the growing market, and is best known for a superhero series called THUNDER Agents, which was sort of a cross between the Fantastic Four and the Man from UNCLE, if you can imagine such a thing. Tower had their superhero books, all part of the THUNDER Agents' world, and their teen books, all part of Tippy's world, but neither were very successful and the imprint was folded in 1969. Tower's books were twice as expensive as Marvel and DC's, and MLJ's for that matter, for twice the content. But value for money isn't relevant in a world where purchasing decisions were often made by parents at drugstore spinner racks, where the cheaper product was going to win out every time. Took DC another decade to figure that one out.

Anyway, there were 46 issues in total of Tippy Teen and her spin-off titles. The entirety of them could be reprinted in three thick editions. I have no idea who'd consider reprinting them. In the 1970s, an outfit called Atlas Comics tried to cash-in on Marvel's newsstand success and they reprinted some Tippy stories under the name Vicki, but otherwise she's not been seen in close to forty years. But I tend to think that if a couple of books, marketed to young girls but comprehensive enough to satisfy collectors, were available, they could certainly do well. The fact that my own daughter is a voracious reader of all things Betty & Veronica is proof that a market still exists, and any good publisher could make a strong pitch towards tweenagers while equally targetting completists by including all the strips, with as much source credit as is possible. The material is quite honestly good enough to make it worth a try.

(Originally posted December 26, 2007, 11:48 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! - oh, wait, you have... ummm... anyway, this is the 20th installment...

2007-12-18T16:18:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 19. Steed & Mrs. Peel

2007-12-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 18. Shade the Changing Man

2007-11-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

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 title that's been missing in action for years is Steve Ditko's SHADE THE CHANGING MAN, an eight-issue series from Ditko's mid-70s return to DC Comics. While the publisher would later find new uses for the character and incorporate him into their mainstream superhero universe, the original run was a stand-alone science fiction epic, the action split between Earth and the other-dimensional planet of Meta, populated by characters in angular, colorful clothing with bizarre weaponry and armor. Easily one of the strangest series from a major publisher at the time, Shade is fondly remembered by readers with an eye for the odd.

Rac Shade was an agent in Meta's secret service, and Mellu his fiance. While investigating a political scheme at the behest of Meta's president, Shade was framed for the attempted murder of Mellu's parents, who are left crippled by the explosion. Sentenced to death, Shade escapes and finds a special vest, meant for miners in another dimension, which uses a powerful force field to protect its wearer.

That little summary simplifies matters greatly, and doesn't hint at how very weird this series is. The treasonous plot against Meta's government is controlled by something called "Sude," the Supreme Decider, which is a huge sphere with a face painted on it and big robotic arms. None of the insurgents stop to wonder who might be in the sphere, they just take their orders from a great big tinkertoy. After defeating a criminal called Khaos, Shade falls into a "color coma." People wear purple and yellow robes with big, bushy red beards and are thought to be inconspicuous. When Mellu cracks and leads a team of agents to bring Shade to justice, she loses it so spectacularly, you wonder whether she could even make it washing dishes, never mind be a trusted government agent. And frankly, the hallucination-generating vest is incredibly weird. No wonder the Metan authorities banned the thing.

Steve Ditko is, of course, best known as the creator or co-creator of such characters as Spider-Man and Dr. Strange for Marvel, and the Creeper and Hawk & Dove for DC, along with several superheroes at a now-defucnt rival publisher, Charlton, such as Captain Atom and the Question. Ditko is also well-remembered for the self-published series Mr. A. One of the finest draftsmen in the field, and an inspiration to so many other artists, it's not surprising that Shade the Changing Man is visually compelling on every page. However, it was a very difficult series to follow, albeit quite rewarding. Ditko's use of flashbacks throughout the issues to explain the backstory makes it tough to assemble the chronology, particularly if you missed an issue. The comic was assembled "Marvel-style," with Ditko creating the art based on his plot and then giving it to writer Michael Fleisher (best known for his mid-70s work on The Spectre) to dialogue, and the scripting occasionally feels stilted and unnatural.

Shade's refusal to give a quarter to its audience resulted in low sales, and after eight issues (published every other month), the title was abruptly cancelled during a major contraction of the publisher's line. (This was the "DC Implosion" which has proven an irresistable topic of gossip and speculation for fans over the last three decades.) A ninth issue was completed and on the printer's door before the axe fell. It was only ever published in a low-print run house anthology book to protect the trademarks.

Shade wasn't appreciated at the time, but as interest in Ditko's work and career grows, it is a huge shame that DC has not brought more of his work into print. Admittedly, Shade is a fairly obscure character with none of the superhero universe appeal of the Creeper or the Question, who will probably be collected before Shade gets a shot, but I'm holding out for a neat little 160-page color collection of this neat little title. Heck, make it 176 pages and you can add not only the covers and a short essay by one of Ditko's fans, but also the eight-page Odd Man backup story that was intended for the ninth issue and later appeared, truncated, in an issue of Detective Comics that took me forever to track down. So how about it, DC?

(Originally posted November 27, 2007, 12:14 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 17. Missionary Man

2007-11-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Reprint This! 16. Rat Pack

2007-11-09T16:12:00.000-08:00

Edited to add: (3/1/08) Titan has announced that they have acquired reprint rights to more of the Battle material, specifically noting Johnny Red, Major Eazy and Rat Pack 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. More details as they become available!

Reprint This Update on Black Jack

2007-10-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

Tezuka's Black Jack Returns

By Kai-Ming Cha -- Publishers Weekly, 10/29/2007 1:54:00 PM

Japanese pulp fiction and classic manga publisher Vertical Inc. announced plans to publish Black Jack, legendary mangaka Osamu Tezuka’s popular series about a genius surgeon, in its entirety beginning in fall 2008.

Black Jack originally ran in Japanese publisher Akita Shoten’s magazine, Weekly Shonen Champion,from 1973 to 1978. The series is approximately 12 volumes. According to Ada Palmer, founder of the Web site Tezuka in English, which is devoted to introducing Tezuka to an English speaking audience, Viz Media published the first two volumes before licensing conflicts with Tezuka Productions forced Viz to cancel the series. A new Black Jack anime—which included the collaboration of Tezuka’s son—recently finished airing on Japanese television after a two-year run. An older version of the Black Jack anime, originally created in the 1980s, was made available unofficially by fans over the Internet and is now available on iTunes.

The series stars title character Black Jack, an unlicensed but gifted surgeon who saves peoples lives, often against all odds. The series is a childhood favorite of Vertical editorial director Ioannis Mentzas. "[Black Jack] is probably the most influential book of my early years,” explained Mentzas, “and I've heard that sentiment from many Japanese." Mentzas added that the character’s appeal lies in its psychology. "Black Jack reflects the glory and squalor of early adulthood,” he said. Mentzas believes that the series will draw an audience in the late teens to early 20s. "I think any high school or 20-something person of the slightest intellectual bent will identify with BJ."

According to Palmer, founder of the Web site Tezuka in English, which is devoted to introducing Tezuka to an English speaking audience, Black Jack is the second most popular character in Japan. "Black Jack is Tezuka's most exciting adult character,” Palmer said, citing the Japanese medical and technology company Hitachi, which recently licensed the Black Jack character to be the spokesman for its medical equipment.

Palmer, whose site attracts an international crowd, said that most English-speaking anime and manga fans don't read Tezuka and aren't usually familiar with works like Buddha, which were formerly marketed to the Japanese literature-reading audience. Because of Viz’s earlier release of the Black Jack manga and the circulation of the anime series, Palmer said that Black Jack is better known among American manga and anime fans and has the potential to broaden his appeal.

"Black Jack is clearly the one that will sell the best in the U.S.,” Palmer said. "This is the title that will make or break his reputation in the U.S."

I first wrote about Black Jack in July. Good work, publishers! What is next?

(Originally posted October 31, 2007, 13:11 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

The Black Jack entry

Reprint This! 15. Oh, Wicked Wanda!

2007-10-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

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 of the most memorable comic strips I've ever run across was Frederick Mullally and the late Ron Embleton's OH, WICKED WANDA!, which detailed the machinations of a domineering, super-rich European heiress and her schemes of global domination. It's a strip most of you might have seen glimpses of once or twice, but very few people actually read, what with all the glorious amounts of sex and nudity to distract you from the storyline...

Around 1982 or 1983, I was in middle school and discreetly reading my dad's quarter-century run of Playboy when a formidable stack of new material made its way into the house. Dad had taken on a co-worker's collection of 1970s Penthouse mags when his new bride demanded that he dump them. Well, it didn't take long at all to determine that Penthouse was not in any way appealing, in pictures or in words, except for this remarkable, mind-blowing eight-page comic in the back of most of the issues.

Oh, Wicked Wanda! debuted in 1973 and spent the next eight years engaging in a savage satire of seventies politics and sexual conquests. Our heroine, Wanda von Kreesus, a brunette Amazon who was most often seen in a leather outfit with red thigh-highs and a riding crop, had inherited a Swiss bank in which most of the world's governments had deposited vital secrets. The series involved her various manipulations and schemes to take over the world, assisted by her young lover Candyfloss and a small military strike force made up of lesbians from many nations.

Wanda's adventures put her up against various world politicians, along with media celebrities, who were depicted in savage caricature and odd pseudonyms. Most commonly and mercilessly mocked was Ted Kennedy, who seemed to pop up every month standing in a swimming pool or a pond or a puddle and holding a steering wheel. After OPEC's actions triggered international inflation during the 1973 oil crisis, Wanda was often at work playing Ford and Brehznev against each other before the backdrop of Middle East politics.

Little of this, of course, made much sense to a thirteen year-old whose eye was first caught by Ron Embleton's artwork, and the gorgeous naked women on display. But I was curious enough to start learning what the hell was going on in the 1970s to make everybody act so crazy, and if you're familar enough with the news and events of that decade, then Oh, Wicked Wanda! genuinely shines as a brilliant piece of satire, easily on par with such period gems as Howard the Duck and the Doonesbury of the day. The typical panel composition, with little sidebar conversations among bystanders or Hollywood celebs or the writer and the artist, also evokes Jack Davis or Mort Drucker's work for Mad.

The strange thing is that Wanda is probably so easily dismissed as a sex strip that the remarkable humor, in equal parts bawdy, political and subtle, is completely overlooked. But the sex probably works against any possible reprint value the strip might have, even among publishers who specialize in adult material. Wanda and Candyfloss were probably the first lesbian couple that thousands of people ever read about, and it was arguably just as many people's first exposure to a BDSM lifestyle, but by modern standards, the series is far too tame to have any mileage as a "top-shelf book." Sure, there is full frontal nudity, but nothing explicit, and characters are always seen just before or after they've done the dirty, so a publisher like Eros Comix wouldn't see any value in it. On the other hand, there's more nudity and adult content in Wanda than any non-porn series outside of Playboy's Little Annie Fanny (the success of which certainly inspired Penthouse to commission an ongoing strip of some kind), and it's impossible to claim that the content is incidental to any reader's enjoyment of the comedy and the politics. There's also the problem that the original artwork is long since gone, and from what I understand, Penthouse's archives are in nowhere near the good shape that Playboy's are.

Looking back, it really did feel like an awkward fit in Penthouse even when it was running. Even from today's perspective, the magazine, in the 70s, just felt sleazy, dark, intense and secretive and totally lacking the joie de vivre that a healthy sex life brings. Oh, Wicked Wanda! was vibrant and silly and playful; the adult overtones are masked by the same veil of fun that you see in Bettie Page's smile. That suggests to me that Dark Horse, who have published a few collections of Page photographs by Jim Silke and her other fans, might be the right publisher for the series. Dark Horse also compiled the complete Little Annie Fanny in two volumes, though I expect they did so because of the sales potential of Annie's celebrated creators and artists (Kurtzman, Elder, Jaffee, Davis, etc) as much as the desire to have Annie back in print. It's certainly worth looking into again, and I hope somebody does!

(Originally posted October 26, 2007, 11:01 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! 14. Marvelman

2007-10-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

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 title that is near the top of everybody's reprint wish list is the lawsuit-laden, litigation-heavy story of MARVELMAN. This series, originated by Alan Moore and Garry Leach, originally appeared in the black and white British anthology title Warrior before evolving into a color American comic. But it was based on a much older property, and the companies that published Marvelman in the 1980s have all had their assets and intellectual property rights divided among so many squabbling parties that this, of the 25 series I propose in the Reprint This! feature, may be the least likely of them all to ever reappear, despite the public desire to see it again...

The character of Marvelman was created in late 1953 by Mick Anglo, a writer for a British publishing company called L. Miller & Son. They had been repackaging American comic stories of Captain Marvel - the superhero who shouts "Shazam!" - for the British market, but found themselves in a fix when Captain Marvel's original publisher, Fawcett, shut down. Anglo devised Marvelman and some associates as quick replacement characters for the popular feature, and their new adventures, in a variety of comic titles, continued through the 1950s, with reprints continuing the titles until their cancellation in 1963.

Twenty years later, a revamped, modernized Marvelman was included among the offerings in the first issue of Warrior. Written by Alan Moore and with art by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, the new series appeared in the comic's first 21 issues. This is the series that everybody wants to read again. Placing larger-than-life characters into something like the real world and considering the ramifications of their superpowered struggles has since become almost old hat in superhero fiction, but Marvelman did it first and arguably did it better than anybody since.

Detailing the left turns and road blocks in this series would take too long, and it is all laid out in other sites like Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that, for a number of reasons, Marvelman ceased appearing in Warrior after its 21st issue. At the same time, the rights for an American reprint book, retitled Miracleman to avoid even more litigation from a certain US publisher, were purchased by Eclipse Comics. They reprinted - if I understand correctly - 20 of the Warrior episodes, colorized and shrunk to fit the smaller US page size. When they completed the available episodes, Alan Moore, with new artists Chuck Austen and John Totleben, resumed the series for their new American publisher. Miracleman was a huge hit for Eclipse, and reached a natural end with its sixteenth issue. It was revived in the early 1990s by Neil Gaiman - to whom Moore transferred his share of the rights - and Mark Buckingham, but the closure of Eclipse Comics in 1993 left the story incomplete, and a flurry of lawsuits from contesting parties making claims on the property has meant that the celebrated series can only be found in back issue boxes.

So on the face of it, a Marvelman/Miracleman reprint would be the simplest thing ever: one book containing all of the episodes from Warrior in their original black and white, a second book containing Miracleman # 7-16, and a third containing Neil Gaiman's run. With back issue prices just this side of ridiculous, there's clearly demand. But the lawsuits to which I keep referring have shut this series down. There isn't anybody who wouldn't like to see Marvelman again and read what all the fuss is about, and enjoy rare work by Moore and Gaiman, two of modern comics' most celebrated writers, but many of those anybodies suggest that they have a claim towards sharing in the profits of such an enterprise.

Just to further complicate matters, the original series briefly included an appearance by a British super-agent called Big Ben, created by Warrior's publisher, Dez Skinn with the intention of debuting in Marvelman before being spun off into his own series...

Just this month, a promotional image for a proposed Big Ben television cartoon made the rounds of the comic blogs. If that takes off, how's that going to affect any Marvelman volume that features the character, I wonder?

(Originally posted October 17, 2007, 11:43 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)