Reprint This!

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Reprint This! Update on The John Stanley Library

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!

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Reprint This! Five Short Suggestions

THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS

Together with its more commonly-seen counterpart, Marvel's FOOM, this professionally-assembled "fan"zine brought together interesting news features, interviews and otherwise-unseen production art, giving a fascinating look behind the scenes of the publisher in the 1970s. I only had two issues as a kid, one of them a special issue spotlighting the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV show, but I enjoyed the heck out of them. Back issues are both ridiculously scarce and jawdroppingly pricey, particularly the high-demand one looking at the Legion of Super-Heroes.

This is the sort of thing that, if DC doesn't really want to bother repackaging, they could certainly license it out to TwoMorrows or somebody, who have shown, with all of their archiving of classic fanzines, that they could do a great job with it.

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!)

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Reprint This! Update on Thunderbirds

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!

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Reprint This! Grimly Feendish

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 GRIMLY FEENDISH by Leo Baxendale. This 1960s strip had a huge impact on kids who saw it at the time. Feendish was a super-crook, a master criminal who was usually accompanied by bats and spiders and other creepy-crawlies, and when he wasn't confounding the forces of law and order represented by Eagle-Eye, Junior Spy, he was usually being thwarted by Britain's shopkeepers, who had installed special devices and traps to defend themselves against the ghoulish villain always breaking into their stores...

There's very little that I can add to the imagery which I've found to illustrate this article. One part James Bond villain, one part Dick Dastardly and two parts Uncle Fester, Grimly absolutely delighted kids in the 1960s, because kids know there's a great deal more fun to be had being downright rotten than nice.

Baxendale seemed to really understand the gleeful, subversive side to giving children comics which flat-out contradicted every social lesson they'd been told. You'd expect no less from the creator of The Bash Street Kids, and while I'm no expert on any of this material, I know a classic gag strip when I see it.

The rotten Mr. Feendish first appeared in the kids' anthology Wham! in 1964 and spent the better part of four years confounding Eagle-Eye before that strip ended. He also got his own headlining strip which ran for a good while in the similar Smash!, apparently concluding around 1969. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a proper stripography for Feendish's days in Smash!, or any other appearances in the Odhams / IPC annuals of the day, but it looks like he was around quite regularly for a time. (Wham! itself looks to have been a terrific comic, which also featured Ken Reid's Frankie Stein, a strip that folk-in-the-know speak of with gleeful reverence.)

At any rate, there's clearly a lot of material out there, and I think both today's kids and comic fans would love to see it again. I think some enterprising publisher could certainly compile a 160-page collection of this stuff for the children's market, and if they take the extra step of including the material in its original publication order, noting its original appearance and giving proper credit to Baxendale, then they'll satisfy the archivist geeks among us as well. Kids still like reading about rotten crooks - the millions who were into those Unfortunate Events books were all secretly cheering on Count Olaf, you know - and so I hope some enterprising publisher like Titan looks into bringing back Feendish for a new generation, and soon!

Monday, August 10, 2009

Reprint This! Update on The Actress and the Bishop

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!

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Reprint This! Flex Mentallo

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 FLEX MENTALLO by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Of course, this is another case where the rights owners know all too well that there is demand, from readers and creators, for a collected edition, but they're a little reluctant to try putting this back into print because of what happened once before...

Flex Mentallo was a supporting player who first appeared in a storyline that Grant Morrison concocted while he was writing the amazing Doom Patrol for DC in the early 1990s. The character was a pastiche of the old Charles Atlas ads, used as a parody of childhood fantasies built around comic books. In 1996, he appeared again in a four-issue series that Morrison and Frank Quitely created for DC's Vertigo imprint. The story is a complete gem, one which really cemented Morrison's reputation as one of comics' finest oddballs.

The miniseries is an overlapping story about a guy named Wally Sage, whose childhood superhero creations have escaped into the "real world," and Flex Mentallo, a circus strongman with a great attitude and an even better physique, who's tracking down evidence that his former colleague "The Fact" is operating in his town. Along the way, he learns that the superheroes who used to inhabit Sage's world never really went away. And Sage, he's dying from a deliberate drug overdose, and wants to spend his final moments on the phone with a suicide hotline talking about comic books.

But of course, it's not really "about" that at all...

The comic is really an extended musing on childhood fantasies and wish-fulfillment, while at the same time looking at the evolution of superhero comics. While telling one story, each issue takes a slightly different viewpoint, looking at the narrative from the eyes of comics' Golden Age, then the Silver Age of the 1960s, the unpleasant "grim-n-gritty" world of the eighties, and finally the bright new dawn that Morrison envisioned for the 21st Century, which has seen the triumphs of his All-Star Superman, New X Men, Seaguy and Seven Soldiers, among others. If you enjoyed any of these later titles, then Flex Mentallo is really required reading. That's assuming you can track down copies of the four funnybooks from your local dealer's back issue bin.

At this point, it's customary to explain to people what the holdup is, already. Well, the Charles Atlas Company was made aware of the comic by a well-meaning fan who wanted a copy of the "insult that made a man out of Mac" pamphlet and told them about the comic, and they promptly sued DC for infringing on their trademark. In Charles Atlas, Ltd. v. DC Comics, Inc, they asked a judge for a summary judgement against DC, and so the judge asked each party for all their statements.

DC included, in their statements, a note that the four issues were out of print, that they had no intention to use the character again, and no plans to reprint the comics. The judge ruled against Atlas, agreeing that this was clearly a protected parody, but it is thought that DC's statement that they would not reprint it might open them up for new litigation should they do so. Acting in bad faith and all that.

Until DC and Atlas sit down and work something out, Flex Mentallo will be a lost property. That's a real shame; Morrison's wild ideas and multi-layered narrative makes for a wonderful, immersive reading experience, and of course Quitely's art is gorgeous. It's a comic that everybody should have the chance to see.

If you would like to read more about Flex Mentallo, Gregory Dickens wrote a fine, detailed review of the series over at PopImage. You might also enjoy Chris Mautner's column at Collect This Now!. Mautner says pretty much everything I had to say about it, prompting me to delay cobbling together this short feature (originally scheduled for April) for a few months.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Reprint This! Update on Humbug

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!