Reprint This! Update on One Pound Gospel

Viz released the last episodes of Rumiko Takahashi's One Pound Gospel in English for the first time this month. This series, with three or four new installments released every couple of years over a two decade run, has long been overdue for a proper digest edition with the artwork in its original configuration. In the mid-90s, Viz released three collections in their old graphic novel format, but let those go out of print. Now the series, which finally concluded in 2007, is available in full in four digests.

It's an incredibly cute and occasionally hilarious comedy about a weak-willed boxer named Kosaku who cannot stop his unhealthy eating habits, and can't get over his doomed crush on an attractive young nun who sees a spark of potential in him. Kosaku kind of radiates between a hopelessly ingratiating dimwit and the great underdog hero for whom you'll enjoy cheering in the ring, and his supporting cast, notably his long-suffering coach, provides endless fun. Sister Angela, meanwhile, has her own (quite small) supporting cast, notably the mother superior who understands neither boxing nor Sister Angela's support of this clumsy young fighter.

It's a delightful comedy of errors and manners, with excellent artwork and hilarious moments. Possibly the best is a great five-part story in the third volume, in which everybody misunderstands everybody else and a rival boxer with an awful intestinal problem that keeps forcing his matches with Kosaku to be postponed conspires to make everybody's situation unbearable. It's really great stuff, and you should definitely look into it!

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

Read other reviews of One Pound Gospel:
Ai Kano at Animanganation
Greg McElhatton at CBR
Pop Culture Shock
Greg Hackman at Mania.com
Connie at Slightly Biased Manga

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In related reprinting news, Pat Mills is interviewed about the classic Charley's War, which he wrote for Battle Picture Weekly in the early 80s, over at Comicon.

Titan is planning two Modesty Blaise books for 2009: The Lady Killers in April and The Scarlet Maiden in October.

Here's some more information about the forthcoming collections of Steve Ditko's The Creeper and Sergio Aragones' Bat Lash, planned for June and July 2009:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE CREEPER TP
Writers: Steve Ditko, Don Segall, Dennis O'Neil, Bob Haney, Len Wein and Michael Fleisher
Artists: Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Mike Peppe, Jack Sparling, Dick Dillon, Sid Greene, Irv Novick, Ernie Chua, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Mike Royer
Collects: SHOWCASE #73, BEWARE THE CREEPER #1-6, THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #80, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #70, DETECTIVE COMICS #418, 447 and 448, THE JOKER #3 and 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL #7
$9.99 US, 296 pages

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: BAT LASH TP
Writers: Sergio Aragones, Dennis O'Neil, Nick Cardy, Len Wein and Cary Bates
Artists: Nick Cardy, Mike Sekowsky, George Moliterni and Dan Spiegle
Collects: SHOWCASE #76, BAT LASH #1-7, DC SPECIAL SERIES #16 and stories from JONAH HEX #49, 51 and 52
$9.99 US, 240 pages

(Originally posted December 19, 2008, 12:35 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! Sugar and Spike

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

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

One missing gem is SUGAR AND SPIKE by Sheldon Mayer, the longtime DC Comics editor who worked on everything from their superhero to comedy titles back in the 1940s and 1950s, and who would later co-create the wonderful adventure series Black Orchid. In the days when an American comic book company couldn't be successful without a very broad range of titles for all interests, Sugar & Spike was a huge hit, and one that Mayer closely guarded. The series ran for more than thirty years, and he was the sole writer and artist of every story.



Sugar and Spike were a pair of babies who toddled around trying to make some sense of the incredibly bizarre world of grown-ups. They communicated in their own "baby talk" language with all infants, whether human or animal, and had oddball little adventures interacting with things they couldn't quite explain. One of the hallmarks of the series, outside of the silly slapstick that drove the funny plots, was the strange wordplay. None of the babies, for example, knew the word "door," but they knew it was a thing that would swing, and so doors would be referred to as "swingy things."

A tremendously popular strip in its day, DC was glad to indulge its creator's wishes and so Sugar and Spike was, unlike most kid-friendly trademarks, not merchandised very much, and no other artists ever worked on it. There was, briefly, an TV cartoon; it was a low-budget, limited-to-no animation offering which appeared as part of a program called Video Comics on Nickelodeon when I was in elementary school. (LJ's dramaqueer might remember it, even if nobody else saw it.)



Apparently, Sheldon Mayer suffered from cataracts which made it increasingly impossible for him to draw the strip. With sales of this kind of material sagging in the early 70s anyway, DC shelved the book. After Mayer recovered from surgery, he resumed drawing it, but few of these were published in the US, but instead they showed up in various South American and European countries where the series was still quite popular. There are apparently about fifteen years' worth of Sugar and Spike which few readers in the States have seen. In the early 1980s, some of these were used in a few issues of the digest-sized anthology Best of DC, sometimes in the company of Mayer's teen-comedy Binky (an Archie knockoff) or Arnold Drake's Stanley and His Monster, other fun sixties strips whose time, DC felt, had mostly passed.

I have absolutely no idea how much Sugar and Spike material is out there. The few websites that are out there (such as this one) aren't much help in tracing the international editions of the comic. But good heavens, DC, if ever a book was made for your Showcase Presents line, it's got to be this one. Considering that many of the later editions of its 98-issue American run leaned heavily on reprints, they could probably compile everything in just three of those 500-page books before even starting on all the material first published overseas.

DC's made a pretty good case for using the Showcase line to spotlight all the genres other than superheroes that they used to do well, with good representation from the war and horror lines, and one or two Westerns. But they haven't even started touching the really fun comedy stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. This is long overdue, and Sugar & Spike should spearhead it. It will go over well with amateur historians, with kids who will just eat this stuff up, and with anybody who will get a kick of some really solid cartooning. So how about it, DC?

(Originally posted December 01, 2008, 12:32 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

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!

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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

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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

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!

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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

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 COBRA by Buichi Terizawa. It's true that the series is more than a little dated, but for crazy outer-space shoot-em-up action from a post-Star Wars mindset, this punchy seventies space opera perfectly blends escapist action with that decade's macho swagger and an eye for the ladies.



Cobra had been an infamous space pirate and fugitive, one of the galaxy's most wanted. In order to get out of everybody's sights and let the heat die down for a few years, he had face-changing surgery and bought a new set of memory implants. Some time later, the implants fail and he remembers his old life, and the powerful psycho-gun he wears on his right arm. As soon as he begins regaining his memories, he immediately gets into trouble, meeting, in short order, one of three sisters who has one-third of a treasure map tattooed on her back, and the criminal kingpin Crystal Bowie, a cyborg immune to Cobra's psycho-gun.


NEW HARBOR!
Sorry, inside joke.

Cobra first appeared in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1978, perfectly times to catch the attention of every ten year-old in Japan who was buying Star Wars toys. The original series ran until 1984 and was collected in a series of twenty digests. There was the requisite animated adaptation, which ran for one season in 1982-83, and a feature film, and then the character was retired for two decades, emerging in 2005 for a new series in the twice-monthly Super Jump. This serial ran for about two years and was compiled in eleven digest editions. Between the two, Terizawa apparently worked on several other series of limited interest, including Goku Midnight Eye and Gundragon, focusing on tough guys, technology and half-dressed women.

Cobra was briefly published in the US by Viz under their old strategy of releasing Japanese stories in the American comic format. Resized, the artwork flipped and relettered by somebody who didn't need to be in the business of lettering, the pricy books ($3.99 when the rest of the market was under $2) limped to a ninth issue before being cancelled. As far as I can tell, Cobra was not among those titles which made their way into the old, oddly-shaped $15 graphic novels that Viz used to publish, and certainly not in the proper-sized digests with which they've since found success.

But I honestly think Viz is missing out on not looking back at Cobra. The overwhelming bulk of the stuff they successfully publish in the US is, let's face it, disposable pop fun for younger readers. It's true that "space adventure" is currently not the most popular genre among kids - martial arts and "Twilight" are this year's models - but it's bound to be resurgent sooner rather than later, and a nice library of wild action, spaceships and silly science will certainly find its audience quickly. So how about it, Viz?



(Originally posted November 03, 2008, 08:05 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

Reprint This! The Daily Star Judge Dredd strip

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 JUDGE DREDD newspaper strip which originally appeared in the pages of The Daily Star. Various teams worked on the series, initially John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ron Smith, and later Ian Gibson. Three samples from the Wagner-Grant-Gibson team are included here. The strip ran for about sixteen years under various teams, concluding in the late 1990s, but it's the first few years of material which is most crying out for a reprint.



Judge Dredd was, of course, created by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in 1977 for the pages of Britain's new sci-fi comic anthology 2000 AD, debutting in the second issue. He's a gruff, impartial, impatient policeman-plus who patrols the mean streets of the lunatic future megalopolis of Mega-City One, located on what's today the eastern half of the US. Thirty-one years and 1600 issues later, Dredd is still going strong, with a very nice reprint program going to keep his regular weekly adventures in print. But Dredd has appeared in several other outlets over the years. In 1981, the Daily Star commissioned a weekly episode of the strip. These were produced by Wagner, Grant and Smith and many, but not all of them, were collected in an annual series of five slim Judge Dredd Collections published by Fleetway, and many of these were then recompiled into a hardcover Judge Dredd Mega-Collection in 1990.

After a few years, Dredd was transitioned into a regular Monday-Friday continuity slot, typically telling tales across nine to fifteen weeks. Gibson began alternating with Mike Collins in 1988 before Collins became the regular artist. In time, the strip lost its regular team and a large number of different writers and artists contributed - Andy Diggle, Gordon Rennie, Mark Millar and Carlos Pino all put in time telling stories of Dredd and his world.



The weekly Star Dredd was pretty entertaining, but the daily version is the real treat. Admittedly I'm incredibly biased - even moreso than usual - because it combines two of my favorite things about comics: reading daily strip sequences and Ian Gibson's artwork. Readers never got the idea that Wagner and Grant were just hacking this out while saving their best ideas for 2000 AD. There's a great one that deals with the stupid Mean Machine Angel trying to convince some criminals who have built robot replicas of his dead criminal family that no, really, there never was any lost Angel Gang loot; they really did spend it all. Another features the talking horse from the classic "Black Plague" story getting Dredd's help to deal with some Cursed Earth slavers, and it's all done with that classic tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top mix of black comedy and violent melodrama that nobody does better than John Wagner.

Rebellion has been doing some really wonderful collected editions of 2000 AD series, but the slightly smaller dimensions of these books wouldn't flatter the material as well as something a little larger. Titan Books has, of course, been earning praise for their large-format collections of classic British newspaper strips like James Bond, Jeff Hawke and Modesty Blaise. I suggest that something in that format, with supplemental interviews and background material, as well as a complete "stripography" in the back, would be exactly what the daily Dredd needs. With a decent page count, Rebellion could conceivably reprint all the Wagner and Grant episodes in two books before evaluating whether to continue with the other material. I'm enough of a completist that I'm all in favor of seeing everything, but two's a good starting point. How about it, Rebellion?

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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

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 BLACK ORCHID by Sheldon Mayer and artists including Tony DeZuniga and Nestor Redondo. The superhero character appeared in DC's anthology titles and as a backup feature from 1973-1976 before lapsing into obscurity, but collectors who've kept an eye out for her eleven episodes have been rewarded with a very unusual and very clever strip.



Black Orchid was a very novel idea for a series in its day. The character's background and even her real name were kept from the reader. The series dispensed with a standard cast and location, and even a "secret identity" like pretty much all superheroes of the time maintained. Each episode's focus was on whatever new criminal organization or scheme that Black Orchid, with her powers of flight and superhuman strength, had decided to bring down. This was very much a concept ahead of its time, and its stories are told with energy and often very clever plotting.

Whoever she was behind the mask, Black Orchid was one of the last characters created by Sheldon Mayer. By 1973, he had already been with DC Comics or one of its antecedents for over thirty years, and had a hand in editing or writing many of its Golden Age classics. In 1956, of course, he created Sugar & Spike, a title that ran (off and on and not always domestically) for better than thirty years, and one certainly due its own Reprint This! entry as well. He was also the editor of DC's venerable horror anthology House of Mystery for about two decades. Black Orchid was one of his last regular adventure titles, and even though it really didn't find favor with the audience of its day, it has many fans who fondly remember her brief appearances in comics.

It is probably worth noting that Neil Gaiman resurrected the character as part of DC's long-running strategy of keeping corporate trademarks active by letting new talent pitch new ideas with them. His three-part Black Orchid miniseries, with art by Dave McKean, created a new iteration of the character who later got her own series at the Vertigo imprint in the early 90s, but, frankly, all that mess was good for was letting a new audience know that Sheldon Mayer's good stuff was available in back issue departments.



Black Orchid first appeared as the lead feature in three issues of Adventure Comics (# 428-430) before taking a recurring place as a backup feature in The Phantom Stranger. Mayer apparently wrote only a few of these backup episodes, with the rest penned by writers who included Michael Fleisher. These used to be in pretty good supply, and priced low in better comic shops, but I've seen those prices rise as I've tried to fill the gaps in my set.

A Black Orchid collection is long overdue, and wouldn't be that difficult for DC to compile. Her eleven episodes (if I've counted right) could be printed in a 120-page paperback. It might not be quite the license to print money that an Angel and the Ape book would be, but it's a wonderful title which deserves to be seen again, and a fine sampling of DC's more unusual fare from the era. You're long overdue in bringing Mayer back into print, so how about it, DC?

(Originally posted October 03, 2008, 05:00 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)