Reprint This! Gahan Wilson

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

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

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




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




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



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

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

Reprint This! More on the Titan reprint line

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

In August...


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

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

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

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


Charley's War Book Five (112 pgs)

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

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

Reprint This! Robot Archie

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

OBNOXIOUS! WHO IS THIS POPNECKER?

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



Lady Bird Johnson was his PUPPET ON A STRING!



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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

Reprint This! Update: Dark Horse Announces Herbie Collections!

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



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

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

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

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

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

SOLD.

More on Herbie in these pages soon!

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

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

Further brief reading:
The Bookseller
Bear Alley
The Comics Reporter

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

See the Reprint This! articles on:

Johnny Red
Major Eazy
Rat Pack

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

Reprint This! Sapphire & Steel

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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