Reprint This! Update on Herbie

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

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

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

---

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.)

OBNOXIOUS! WHO IS THIS POPNECKER?

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



Lady Bird Johnson was his PUPPET ON A STRING!



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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

Reprint This! Update: Dark Horse Announces Herbie Collections!

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



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

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

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

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

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

SOLD.

More on Herbie in these pages soon!

Reprint This! 25. Coda

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

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



HERBIE by Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney

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



JAMES BOND by Takao Saito

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



JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS by Dan DeCarlo

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



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

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



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

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

* * *

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

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