Reprint This!

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!

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Reprint This! Third World War

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 THIRD WORLD WAR by Pat Mills and a variety of artists, including co-creator Carlos Ezquerra, John Hicklenton and Sean Phillips. Borrowing from the listing I wrote for the Touched by the Hand of Tharg fan site, the series "concerns a near-future where corporations have grown so powerful that they can conscript soldiers to assist them in clearing the native populations of south and central America from regions necessary for their economic stranglehold over Western consumerism. "

Third World War was one of two series chosen to launch the twice-monthly anthology comic Crisis in 1988. The plan was to present a pair of 14-page color episodes in each issue, and these would later be shrunk and compiled in the smaller American comic format. It gave Carlos Ezquerra the opportunity to work in full color for the first time in his career and so, already unsatisfied with the long-term plans to conclude his ongoing series Strontium Dog in 2000 AD and now having the chance to work with Pat Mills, the artist jumped on board.

It's a real shame that it's not a better series, but it's certainly a polarizing and fascinating one. As I said over at Hand of Tharg, "Truly, it's hard to disagree with the points raised in this series, especially as companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks continue a stranglehold on the marketplace, but it's done with such po-faced pretension that the final product is incredibly disagreeable. Mills depicts Christian characters, not for the last time, as two-dimensional retards, and the 'open-minded' heroes, Eve and an eco-terrorist named Paul, who would later resurface as the titular character in 2000 AD's Finn, are only open-minded insofar as they reject conventional society in favor of paganism and rebellion."

There's a lot more to Third World War than most American readers saw. Ezquerra only stayed with the series through its first phase, set in Central America, and opted for a return to Judge Dredd rather than illustrate the wild adventures awaiting Eve when she returned back to a very ugly, near-future Britain where economic collapse has sent most of the nation's youth to find the only work available, as gunmen for corporations. Without a consistent artist, the strip as a whole suffered, but individual installments by Hicklenton, Phillips, Glyn Dillon and others were fascinating. Joined by co-writer Alan Mitchell, Mills put Eve through the ringer in a long battle of wits against a drunken police inspector obsessed with her.

It's tempting to use my blog as a platform to prop up unavailable comics as really being gems of overlooked brilliance. Third World War is not one of those. It's highly flawed and very dated, but that's actually what makes it so very interesting from a present perspective. Pat Mills has long been an iconoclast of a writer, bucking convention and presenting antiheroes as protagonists. This was the first time, though, that he really threw caution to the wind and really railed against the social injustices that he perceived. It's Mills without restraint, as the editors of Crisis stepped back and let him have his platform. The result is never subtle and it almost every page screams "right on!" like an undergraduate on a free speech platform, but every page is equally fascinating, and the artwork is often just amazing.

Plus, you know, it makes you think.

Third World War originally ran for 49 episodes, each about 14 pages, throughout the first 53 issues of Crisis. With nearly 700 color pages in total, this looks like a good bet for a three-volume paperback collection. I've been crossing my fingers that Rebellion would begin licensing the material from Crisis, and give it the same high-end treatment that they do with 2000 AD's stories. It's long overdue, but what do you say, Rebellion? Why not put this back into print for a new generation to consider it?

Monday, June 15, 2009

Reprint This! Update on Sam's Strip

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

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

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

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

Read other reviews of this book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, June 5, 2009

Reprint This! Ambassador Magma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Reprint This! Update on Starman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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