Author: larsmagne23

Comics Express (1989) #1-2 edited by Don Chin.

Eclipse had previously distributed a lot of books that reprinted newspaper comic strips (mostly published by Ken Pierce), but hadn’t really been involved with doing reprints themselves.

The editor here is Don Chin, the Black Belt Hamster writer. I guess Berke Breathed’s Outland is the major attraction here: He’s got the cover and lead-ins on both issues.

And his pages are printed sideways to give them more room. These are standard-sized American comic books, but are 64 pages, so it feels like a handsome little package.

While newspaper strip reprints have never really taken off in the direct market (but are huge sellers in the bookstore market), there’s one long-running monthly that’s been doing reprints since the 80s: Comics Revue. Looks like it’s still going, but it’s now a bimonthly. If I remember correctly, it has more of a focus on adventure serials, while this comic is humour only.

But it’s a pretty nice selection. Chin avoids all the boring old standards and reprints strips that were pretty fresh at the time, like Bud Grace’s Ernie. Which was a lot weirder and funnier back then than it ended up later.

The comic is pretty well designed and put together, but there’s the occasional sloppy production work, like on the page to the left above…

It’s not all nationally syndicated strips: There’s also Norman Dog, which I assume mostly ran in alternative weeklies?

The New Breed are one-panel strips from a large variety of artists? Most of these aren’t very funny, but it’s not awful.

Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe is blisteringly unfunny, but he does have a nice line.

Jerry Van Amerongen tries to do The Far Side, and fails.

Dan Piraro kinda succeeds, and he’s still doing pretty much the same schtick to this day.

Huh. Did Comics Express publish a bunch of reprint collections as well? Or was it just a mail order outfit?

Anyway, as newspaper comic strips reprints go, I think it’s artistically quite successful. The strips included make sense to have together: They share a similar kind of humour, but have enough variety to make it a pleasant reading experience.

After Eclipse dropped the book (or whatever happened), Fictioneer took it over and published 24 more issues.

The Complete Pogo Comics (1989) #1-4 by Walt Kelly, Much Ado: The Pogofenokee Trivia Book (1990) by Mark Burstein.

Eclipse had reprinted some Walt Kelly material earlier in standard comic size, but after the success of the Krazy Kat reprint, they chose the same format for their major Kelly reprint effort. (Squarebound album sized, around 60 pages.)

Editor Burstein lays out the programme: Eclipse is going to reprint all the Kelly Pogo material from the comic books of the 40s (before Pogo became a newspaper strip), and this is going to take 21 volumes. They only got to four volumes (in 1990) before stopping, so I’m guessing that these books didn’t sell that well.

Maggie Thompson does the introduction in the first volume, as she had done in the previous reprint efforts.

She also notes that some may find the depiction of the human characters in these comics offensive, and that Kelly dropped them (and in particular, the boy Bumbazine) pretty quickly.

The indicia doesn’t say who’d done the recolouring, but I find it quite attractive for a children’s book like this. That topmost panel looks like something out of a colouring book.

Pogo looks very different in the earliest issues from the cuddly creature he would later become. His features seem to go through a random walk before settling down after a year or two.

And Albert is much meaner in the first stories than he would be later. Always with the eating of people and creatures.

You–you cannibal!

Indeed! Albert would continue to swallow people inadvertently throughout the years, but it’s all done for laughs, while in these stories, clearly aimed at young children, his actions have a nightmarish quality about them.

The first stories are three rows of panel to a page, and are very breezy reads. Kelly switches to four rows and adds a whole lot more (insane) dialogue, so it feels like he’s going for an older audience than he was in the beginning.

The reprints from Animal Comics also include some slightly less Pogoish characters on the covers.

The reproduction is mostly very good, but some pages have a more smudged look, so I guess it’s reprinted from the printed comics and not the original artwork? The introduction doesn’t say.

I mean, what can I say? These are very funny Walt Kelly works, and I haven’t read most of these before, so I’m very happy. But it was a shame that the series was cut short before they got more volumes out. It’s a simpler, even funnier version of Pogo than what we’re used to from the newspaper strips.

Hermes Press started all over again with the reprints of these comics in 2013, but I haven’t seen those. They’re up to six thick volumes that perhaps covers all of the 21 projected Eclipse volumes? I’ve ordered the last few of these, because reading these really whetted my appetite. And I see that the first volumes of the Hermes series now go for several hundred dollars on ebay… *sigh*

PRINT MORE OF THEM.

And here’s a slim little volume of Pogo trivia.

It’s a reprint of a self-published book by the series editor.

We get a few illustrations like this…

But mostly it’s what the title says: It’s a book of trivia. Pages and pages of facts.

Everybody needs to know these things!

Most of the book is structured like a quiz session, but I guess the number of people who’d be able to answer these questions is… er… low…

The Black Terror (1989) #1-3 by Beau Smith, Charles Dixon and Daniel Brereton.

When the “prestige” format (48 page, squarebound) was introduced in the mid-80s, it was used to signify projects that were particularly ambitious: As a way to signal to the comics-buying audience “this is a special project”. So, of course, everybody else started pumping out their normal run-of-the-mill material in that format.

This is yet another Eclipse revival of a 40s public domain pulp/super-hero comics character. They’d had a lot of success with Airboy, but less success with Sgt. Strike (which was a meta-revival in that the original didn’t exist (or was that The Prowler? There were so many of them that I lost track)). This one is apparently real (i.e., there was a Black Terror in the 40s), and they’ve taken the standard post-Dark Knight approach to modernising him:

Now he’s dark and broody and hyper-violent. Perhaps he was that way before? I have no idea.

The artwork by Brereton is impressive, I guess.. He’s good at placing light sources and adding little yellow splashes (like blond(e) hair) to his dark browns and blues and purples. He’s not really that good at storytelling: At letting us in on where the characters are located next to each other, or even who the characters involved in a scene are. Instead it’s just *shift* *shift* *shift* between panels, and at the end somebody’s in a pool of blood.

The plot… I’ve read worse things. It’s an alternate history thing where the Capone family is still huge, and there’s intrigue between a secret police organisation, the FBI and the mob. But it’s rather difficult to care, because it’s all so… silly.

Yes, that’s a CD ROM that, when you read the data, erases your computer. That dude should definitely switch auto-run off! But who am I to counsel computer forensic experts.

While the Black Terror kills quite a few people over the few pages, he doesn’t actually torture anybody, so I guess it’s a bit behind the curve on “gritty” comics characters. Above he only scares the villain into thinking he’s going to use the saw on him.

There romance, too, of course. Isn’t that sweet? (They fuck on the pages following.) It’s difficult to say whether this is meant as a parody on tough-guy movies/comics or whether it’s the real thing, and I guess that’s true for most of the book. I may have read it completely wrong: Perhaps it’s really a hilarious satire, but…

I doubt it?

One little note about the storytelling: Brereton (or whoever did they layouts) uses this kind of half page all the time. The eye really wants to go from the top left panel to the top right panel, but that’s the wrong order. This subsection of the book is meant to be read vertically, left to right. It’s kinda odd, especially since there’s nothing about the placements of the speech balloons that direct they eye, either.

The authors are apparently really tough, hard guys. And again, I can’t tell whether this is meant to be funny or not. So I guess if it’s supposed to be funny, it fails, and if it’s not, it’s pretty embarrassing?

For a few panels in the third issue Brereton goes slightly more abstract and gives everybody clown noses.

I can’t not show you the ending, but SPOILER ALERT!

“Be seein’ you.”

“Not if I see you first, McGuire.”

“Not if I see you first.”

It’s the repetition that sells it! I mean, that made me start laughing, so if it’s a parody, there’s one successful page.

So let’s see whether the interwebs has anything to say about it…

Er… this guy does my least favourite thing, which is writing a recap of the book. But:

If you are a fan of Brereton’s artwork, or a fan of crime comics with a ‘retro’, Noir-ish aesthetic, then ‘The Black Terror’ is worth getting.

Beau Smith himself writes about it:

The three issues series did pretty good for a book that carried a $4.95 cover price. Each issue sold an average of 55,000 copies to the direct market. The part that thrilled us the most was that The Black Terror story was well received by the readers. Critical acclaim for the book traveled well through word of mouth and the icing on top of this piece of cake was that Dan won the Russ Manning Award for his work on the book. We were all really happy for Dan. Needless to say, his career in comics continued to rise after The Black Terror. Dan has gone on to do high profile work for other publishers as well as his own creator-owned work such as The Nocturnals.

Perhaps it wasn’t needless to say? But 55K copies is a very respectable number.

I only have frustrations in that the series has never been collected. Without any conceit I feel that The Black Terror: Seduction Of Deceit not only stands the test of time, but I honestly believe that it is in the same league of The Dark Knight and The Watchmen. I know that’s pretty big talk, but I really do believe it. The Black Terror was a break-through series for superhero crime noir. If you read it, I think you’ll agree.

I’m sure.

Well, anyway, it still hasn’t been collected, for reasons I think are pretty self-evident, but you can pick up copies at cover price on Amazon, just 25 years later.

Tapping the Vein (1989) #1-5 adapted from stories by Clive Barker.

And another chapter in Eclipse’s history begins: Books by and adapted from work by Clive Barker. Over the next few years, Eclipse would publish around 15 books related to Barker; most of them adaptations of his short stories (from The Books of Blood), but also sketchbooks and… other things? I’m not quite sure; I haven’t read them yet.

So how did Eclipse corner the market on Clive Barker? I had assumed this happened through the Steve Niles connection: In Fly In My Eye, Niles has announced several Barker adaptations, so he had presumably secured the rights. Then he stopped publishing himself, took Fly In My Eye to Eclipse, and all these Barker books appeared there.

But Niles isn’t mentioned at all in the first issue here. Instead it says that the “project originator” is Chuck Wagner.

Anyway, the idea here is to adapt two of the short stories from Barker’s Books of Blood short story collections per issue. The adaptations vary from 30 pages (as seen above; P. Craig Russell’s adaptation which opens the first issue is the longest one) to 24 pages. So each issue is around 56 pages, and it’s in the squarebound “prestige” format used to signify upscale comics at the time.

Russell’s work is atypical for the series. All the other works are fully pained, while he uses his normal inked line technique here. He also does the adaptation himself, while most of the other ones are done by editor Fred Burke and/or Chuck Wagner. But it’s a great way to start: Russell’s artwork is well suited for this story, which is way less grisly than the stories that follows.

Clive Barker was a big deal at the time, and was seen to spearhead a disruption within the horror community by bringing in a fresh, more literary and punk attitude, kinda paralleling what had happened the decade before with science fiction and Octavia Butler and Sam Delaney (i.e., the progeny of Harlan Ellison).

So typically enough, the protagonist of the first story is a male sex worker, which is a kind of statement in itself from Eclipse.

I really like the design of these books. As Barker’s stories are, well, horribly shocking, you need a breather between them, and I like the way the design provides that.

And I also like the way that these books are “silent”. There’s no editorials or chatter about how wonderful Clive Barker is; it’s just the unrelenting stories.

Scott Hampton illustrates the second story, and it’s… grisly.

Both Hampton and Russell had published plenty of stuff with Eclipse before, and I think that goes for most of the artists involved here. But they’re also pretty big names, which makes me think that Eclipse had to have a pretty major budget for this series.

Burke and Wagner does the adaptation of the vast majority of the stories, and their approach is, basically, to fit as many of Barker’s words as possible onto each page. Fortunately, Barker’s words are very readable, so these are still readable, moody, scary comics, but it’s not… good comics. If it hadn’t been for the wonderful artwork on many of these stories, it would have been a less than thrilling reading experience.

Klaus Janson, most well-known for inking Frank Miller and doing artwork on Batman, is a case in point. Coming from a super-hero background, he does the funny bits well, but doesn’t really help much out with making this caption-heavy style flow well.

“Plainer than ever.” *stare* Yeah, this may be a book heavy on gore, but Barker’s sex stuff isn’t really depicted.

This is as explicit as it gets, in John Bolton’s lovely rendering.

This is from In The Hills, The Cities, which is a story I remember very well from when I read it as a teenager in the 80s. That is, I remember the centrepiece of the story: The vast figures made of people. Which made me really excited to read this, because when reading it, I just couldn’t figure out how Barker meant them to look. It’s such a mind-boggling concept, but Barker made it work in the short story.

So does Bolton do a great job?

Noooo! That’s not what they look like! Gah! Well, at least not in my head, but I’m not sure I had a concrete vision in my head, either.

But… not like that…

Bolton does some closeups later that look way better, though.

Denys Cowan and Michael Davis does what’s probably the most muddled artwork in the series, and as it’s also the grisliest, I found myself skipping over some pages. So tender hearted, don’tchaknow. But it’s also way over-written, and doesn’t really hang together, so…

Bo Hampton does his adaptation all by himself, so I was wondering whether he’d drop the exposition heavy style.

And there’s way less verbiage, but it’s basically still in the same style. It’s also a very odd story (even as Barker stories go), but Hampton tells it with aplomb.

This one also has one of the few ads in the series, and you can see the Barker/Eclipse publishing initiative taking off here. In addition to selling the first two issues of Tapping the Vein, there’s also a Books of Blood portfolio (which I won’t be covering) and Clive Barker, Illustrated, which is a collection of illustration (which I will be covering).

The fourth issue has a die cut cover, revealing what those heads really are.

But other than that, it seems to signal that Eclipse wanted to save money, because the “name” artists get a lot less “name”. So here we have Steven E. Johnson, Alan Okamoto and Jim Pearson somehow, all together, trying to draw people running. And failing to do so. It’s a shame, because it’s a pretty good story, but it’s a chore to read.

Stan Woch/Mark Farmer fare better with their, er, fare. I like Woch’s artwork in general, but it’s really his inking I like best, and… that’s not what we’re getting here.

Huh? In issue five, Steve Niles is listed as a “project originator”, so was my original guess on how this series started right after all?

Hector Gomez does lovely artwork for the rather horrific story about dastardly deeds in the jungle.

Reading all these in a row reveal that Barker’s primary tick, and what made these stories seem so fresh and different back then, is that basically he has one story structure: Introduce a horrible situation, let it grow increasingly awful, and then end it with an gruesome atrocity. The end. Having the nice people lose is so much more mature than having them win, you know? Right? Right?

Then we get one last “name” artist, Tim Conrad, and then the series is over. Steve Niles did the adaptation on this one (and co-er-did on the previous one), and they’re much better (as comics) than the Burke/Wagner efforts. Instead of spelling everything out, he lets the artwork breathe and lets it tell us (some of) the story through the characters. It’s a breath of fresh air.

So Tapping the Vein ends here, but the Barker adaptations don’t stop comic. Eclipse would publish six more Books of Blood adaptation, but these are all free-standing volumes that, I hope, will give the adaptations more room to breathe.

And use fewer blocks of text. We’ll see.

I think instead of doing a single post per adaptation, I’ll just gather them all in one post…

The Tapping the Vein stories were collected in one single volume in 2003 by Checker Comics, and single stories have been released in artist-specific anthologies.

Let’s see whether I can find anybody talking about the adaptations…

Oh, here’s P. Craig Russell from The Comics Journal #147:

Fred (Burke of Eclipse) had suggested to me that we’ll probably Olrn with a shot Of him as a hustler in a leather jacket leaning against a brick wall, as he’s described. But I had a different idea, which was that he’s a man basically without a soul. And the first time you see this statue that comes to life, the first time he sees it, it’s wrapped in sort of a fetal X)Sition in the bottom of a tub of water. I wanted to make a visual analogy between the two characters and one of the early lines in the story talks about how he worked at night and slept by day, burrowing into the sheets and mummifying himself. That seemed to tie in with this ancient statue found in the ruins. So I decided the opening shot should be him mummifying himself. Wrapped up in the sheets in this fetal position that W’ould make a visual reference to the first time you see the Statue. So that’s all you see on the first page — this mummified-sheet-wrapped-fetal-positioned man.

And then he goes on to explain how he’d expanded some sections and cut others. Sounds very thoughtful…

Oh! There was going to be another Russell adaptation:

Oh, boy. This was the most distressing episode Of my 20-year career. I guess I can take that as proof that my life has not been hard. It has been an upsetting year. I was doing an adaptation of “Age of Desire” for Eclipse. I was designing the book from page one/inside cover to the back cover. A straight-through story. Everything would have contributed to the story. I was having difficulties from the very beginning convincing them of the way I was laying out the story, but getting a tentative go ahead. I wrote and did my thumb nails for what would be about a 49-page story. And was paid. So I figured, well, this has been accepted.

I took a couple months to finish some other %ork and then started working on it. I had about a third of the book penciled before I heard any news that they had problems with the way I had done my adaptation. They had a whole list of things they wanted to talk to me about. A couple of them were some good ideas editorially, I had talked to Fred Burke about them and they could have been added. Fred was originally afraid that I was not putting in everything that needed to be put into the story. I agreed, but there are some things you have to edit out if you only have so much space. You try to maintain the flavor of the ideas and hit the highlights and save space for the climax. So, I said if I could have more space I’d be glad to add this in. Originally, I’d heard through Fred that Dean (Mullaneyl was encouraging him to make the books as long as he wanted. To do a 64-page book. But suddenly they didn’t want any extra material, which was odd.

[…]

And you turned the page and now there are two full pages Of flames filling it, and just these words slowly coming in: “Give me your heart… give me your heart. give me your heart… I can hear your heart… give me your heart” just swirling through the flames and when you turn the page again they slowly flicker out.

PAETH: What was Eclipse’s reaction ro it?

RUSSELL: Well, Cat Yronwode had a hemorrhage over that. That was the main point to her — that this completely subverted Clive Barker’s meaning of what the story is about.

[…]

At this point I still had such faith, babe in the woods that I am, in what I was doing and the integrity of it all fitting and working together in the final product that I said, “why don’t you just show it to Clive?”. I was sure he would look at it and say it was fine. I was just pushing to show it to Clive.

He found it “sadly inappropriate.” He was not happy with it.

Well, that’s a shame, because Russell’s piece in Tapping the Vein is probably the best one…

Well, what about reviews? Here’s one:

Chuck Wagner and Fred Burke’s comic book adaptation of Barker’s short crams in as much of the original story as possible, quite literally shoe-horning the rampaging action and jumping viewpoints into the less adaptable medium of a graphic novel. Wagner does well with this undoubtable challenge. However the conversion is far from perfect, leaving much of the pictorial version lacking in atmosphere, impact or indeed the all-important imaginative flare. John Bolton’s illustrations are also far from accomplished, missing the mark with the depictions of the demons as well as generally delivering too much of a sketchy and rushed depiction of the storyline. This is a damn shame for such an otherwise exciting and inspiring tale.

Literally shoe-horning. Quite. And he’s talking about the Klaus Janson-illustrated story… But I do agree.

Oh, here’s the Bolton one:

For this second graphic novel adaptation in this second ‘Tapping The Vein’ volume, Chuck Wagner and Fred Burke have once again dissected one of Barker’s monstrously imaginative shorts, taking the bare bones of the short and ingeniously cramming it together into the comic strip format. John Bolton’s illustrations are absolutely superb, somehow visualising the goliath giants in an illustrative format. What seemed almost the impossible to adapt into a graphic novel, has turned out to be an absolute triumph. A truly spectacular short that is done absolute justice by this well envisaged adaptation.

So there you go. I’m excited to read the other, longer adaptations, and I hope that they’re not done in the Burke/Wagner style.

The Hobbit (1989) #1-3 by Charles Dixon and David Wenzel.

I sarcastically quoted a guy on Amazon that said the Licence to Kill adaptation was great, except for details like the storytelling?

I think that’s going to my take on this: It was a really enjoyable read, but it’s down to the source material, and not really what Dixon and Wenzel has done with it.

I read The Hobbit when I was like 12, and I thought it was a jolly good fantasy book for children. It didn’t make me into a Tolkien fanatic or anything. Dixon tries very hard to preserve what made The Hobbit special, and doesn’t expand on the story in any way I can discern (which the recent Hobbit trilogy of films certainly did), or other adaptations I’ve read, that condense the storyline. It’s a short book, and this adaptation is 130 pages, so with some judicious editing, you should be able to give a pretty comprehensive version of it.

And they cover it all. They don’t spend hours on the party scene like the recentish film, but with eight pages they do a very reasonable comics version of the scene.

Other things… not so much. Presumably because of space considerations, and because they didn’t want to edit anything out, other characters and locations are introduced and are then over with within a page or two. This makes some sections feel quite choppy.

These comics were originally produced in the “prestige” format, which are squarebound normal US comics sized 48 page books. It’s a nice format, but as is often the case with these books, the inner margins are uncomfortably small so that you can’t read some of the speech balloons without cracking the spine.

Wenzel’s take on these characters isn’t outrageous, but it’s certainly weird to see that face on Bilbo. Ah, the power of movies…

The approach Dixon and Wenzel have taken to the material is to expand some iconic scenes into real comics, like the riddle-off with Gollum.

Other scenes are very compressed, with tons of text explaining both what we’re seeing and what’s left out.

Some of these pages are incredibly dense, like when Gandalf gets into Beorn’s good graces. But it works? It’s like a fairy tale structure (presumably from Tolkien himself), but it’s all done on a single page. I mean, it’s a nice page, but this could easily have been five pages.

Wenzel doesn’t really throw many gags into the artwork, but they’ve got some mirth to them. Like the way Thorin’s dragged by the elves up there… I find it amusing, anyway.

And there’s maps! There must always be maps in Tolkien books.

Pages like the ones above shouldn’t work. They are basically slightly illustrated excerpts of the text from the novel, but somehow I wasn’t bored or impatient while reading them…

But there is a definite problem with the action scenes. The dragon goes into action, and here’s how we’re introduced to that: There’s really no added tension here, and that pretty much goes for all the action scenes.

So: I would have loved this book if I had read it when I was 12. I would have found it almost as good as reading the original thing.

To no great surprise at all, this has been translated into ALL THE LANGUAGES, and has been reprinted in English many times. The last edition is an expanded edition, and I was thinking that perhaps they’d finally doubled the size to make it more of a comicsey reading experience… but apparently only six pages were added.

This review sums the adaptation up quite well:

The ending was what really mattered. It was Bilbo’s ending; it is not about the tragic death of a dwarf who went slightly mad, and then redeemed himself; it is not about a boatman who slayed a dragon, and became a renowned hero: it is about a Hobbit. This is Bilbo’s story and no others. It is a story about a fearful Hobbit found the courage to trick a dragon and save his friends. And that all that matters. This evoked the story much more than that heap of shit Peter Jackson shitted out last Christmas. This stayed true to its roots. And the game of riddles was even better.

James Bond 007: Licence to Kill (1989) by Mike Grell, Richard Ashford, Chuck Austen, Tom Yeates, Stan Woch et al.

Man! That’s the most 007 cover of a comics album ever. They’re not underselling that it’s an official Bond adaptation, exactly.

If I have my chronology right (and I may very well not have), Mike Grell had published the first issue of his own Bond story, Permission to Die, before this adaptation of the current Bond film was released. That one wasn’t a complete failure, so I had some expectations for this one.

But… it turns out that the only thing Grell did on this was the breakdowns. So he watched the film and then did the layouts, and then left his minions to finish the book?

Nobody involved knows how to draw Timothy Dalton. For a minute I was wondering perhaps whether he wasn’t even cast when they drew the book, so they just had to draw a generic Bond-like person, but, no, this is Dalton’s second book.

While Yeates and Woch are both pretty good action/adventure artists, Grell’s adaptation (whatever he did) is painful to read. Now, I was out with a cold some months back, and I watched a lot of Bond films while feverish, but I do remember this film, and I think that if I hadn’t, I would have been able to guess what’s supposed to be exciting and not. Above Bond jumps from a helicopter and ties a wire around a prop plane’s tail, and that’s a fun scene in the film. Here it’s… nothing. It’s “whaaa…”

I don’t remember the Bond villains’ bon mots being this bad, either, but that might just be the fever talking.

Bond’s face transmogrifies every other panel into some other character, making it hard to follow sometimes.

But for one, glorious panel during this random walk through facial features, one of the artists manages to draw a face that almost resembles Timothy Dalton! What are the chances!

Reading this book is as entertaining as reading the Wikipedia recap of the plot. There’s no tension, no interesting characterisation, no fun, and nothing makes much sense. I think Grell tried to get all the scenes from the movie into this 46 page comic book, and gives us four panels of Hong Kong cops before they’re somehow killed. And the entire book is like that. It’s an annoying read.

And then we get two pages from the British editor Dick Hansom (who, I’m guessing, is the one who managed to trick the people who own the Bond films to give Acme/Eclipse the rights for the comics adaptation) about how great Dalton is.

A reader on Amazon gives it five stars and says:

The only negative I can give is the storytelling. If you’ve seen the film(or read John Gardener’s novelezation), you will understand what’s going on, but if you’re a newcomer, you will not understand anything, as the story jumps around too quickly, leaving very important plot translations and details. It feels more like an artistic review rather than a complete retelling. Overall, though, excellent for fan of Licence to Kill!

Overall, except for the storytelling, it’s excellent. Well said, Amazon reviewer.

I was unable to find anybody else who’d bothered to write about it, and it doesn’t seem to even have been reprinted.

The Science Service (1989) by Rian Hughes and John Freeman.

So this is the format Acme was talking about in Stormwatcher: The pages have slightly-smaller-than-standard-comic-size, but there’s a hardback cover and a cloth effect binding, and it’s 32 pages, and it’s in duotone. And printed in Belgium. Was this format a thing in Belgium at some point? The only other thing I can recall that reminds me of this physically is Gary Panter’s Invasion of the Elvis Zombies. And the indicia there doesn’t say where it’s printed.

Anyway, this book doesn’t have the logo of either of its publishers on the cover. Instead it says “Atomic Comics”, which is an imprint of its British publisher Acme, but it’s “released” by Eclipse Comics, which I take to mean that they coughed up the money to pay the printer? Or perhaps just sent the solicitation to the US distributors?

Hughes draws in a punky UK angular style influenced by Franco-Belgian “clear line” artists: Everything is retro-futuristic and nicely two-dimensional

The dialogue is a bit more difficult to determine what’s going on with. “Sticky wicket” and “play the white man” seems to be hinting at that this is imagined as a sci-fi story written in the 50s, but then nothing else really seems to carry that idea through.

Which is a common thing: Nothing’s really makes much sense in this environment. The plot is about some rubber face technology that must be stopped, and for some reason the tv presenter is a person with a wolf head. The action is choppy as hell; there’s no flow to the dialogues or scene changes. In addition, I thought that “Danny Raye”…

… and “Danny Rae” was a plot element of some sort, but they just misspelled it the first time?

So the adopted daughter of this guy was hanging out with this guy’s friend? Why? Or is he just talking about his adopted daughter’s friend, who dud like to imitate heroes (using masks), but he’s dead now, so that’s what he’s getting at? But if he knows he’s dead, why does he say “I should leave this stuff to Danny Rae”?

In short: While the artwork’s nice, the story is undigested twaddle. There are no deeper meanings to anything; it’s just so badly constructed that the brain starts making up connections where none exist.

And it ends with some grandstanding that, from the logic of the book, can’t possibly have any significant effect on anything.

It all feels a bit pointless.

It’s a very nice format physically, but perhaps people back then weren’t that excited to pay 3x more than a normal comic book for the same contents. Comics readers used to be really cheap.

Hm… This page claims that this book was the last in the Atomium 58 series, which was published in France? And the book does have that logo… and Magic Strip is mentioned… So is this a reprint? This page mentions it being printed by the published Magic Strip, so I guess so?

This story was allegedly included in a recent collection of Hughes work in the UK.

Friendly Dictators Trading Cards (1989) #1 by Dennis Bernstein, Laura Sydell and Bill Sienkiewicz.

After the disappointing Iran-Contra Scandal “trading” cards, I was leery about this Eclipse publishing initiative. But, hey, this has artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz, so how bad can it be?

As with that first collection of cards, this is also 36 cards in a cardboard box. The authors describe the concept here: It’s a collection of er not-very-good leaders that the US has supported (and often instated) in countries all over the world. (And it’s not a collection of all bad leaders in the world; just the US-supported ones, so we don’t get cards about Mao or Stalin.)

The artwork for all the cards is by Bill Sienkiewicz, who had already been involved with many of the other political comics published by Eclipse (most famously Brought To Life, but also Real War Stories).

Each Iran-Contra cards was focused on a single person and how he (99% men) related to the scandal. These cards take a much wider view: They do talk some about the personal failings of the dictator in question (like, er, rape and torture and stuff), but they also give a very brief history of the history of the country the asshole was fucking over.

The Iran-Contra cards were probably meant to be read sequentially, but these cards are totally without sequence, and references are to higher-numbered cards as often as lower-numbered ones.

They’re much better written than the first collection. It’s written in a kinda of lively, but reasonable voice: It doesn’t shy away from displaying outrage, but it’s far, far from being a continuous rant. This makes reading this paradoxically pleasant: It stokes you into a simmering anger.

But let’s look at some of the artwork. Most of the cards are quite faithful renderings of photographs, I would guess. But sent through the Sienkiewiczer.

Others are more fanciful, like this Papa/Baby Doc pair. This card references the text more directly than most: Papa Doc rewrite a Christian prayer to reference himself.

Here we apparently have the ouster of Stroessner depicted instead of the dictator himself?

And here we have Pinochet doing a jig on Allende’s grave. I wonder whether the writers gave him any pointers or whether Sienkiewicz came up with this stuff on his own.

“Democracy’s the breeding ground of communism.”

The first sixteen cards are all about South and Latin America. I was starting to wonder whether we wouldn’t move out of the Americas at all, but the last sixteen cards are from all over the world, which is a relief.

And we even get some people that I had forgotten all about, like Sitiveni Rabuka in Fiji in 1987 (which was the most recent CIA-led coup at the time, I think).

U.S. Denies CIA Involvement in Fiji Coup. *gasp* Then I guess this is gross misinformation! The CIA would never lie to the public.

Hm… I just googled. This one seems like the CIA haven’t admitted being in on yet. I guess the statute of limitations may not have expired for everybody involved yet?

Here’s Rich Kreiner, writing in 1993 in The Comics Journal 155:

The individual cards are a suitable vehicle for the individual profiles. Unfortunately, word limitations have complicated these indictments, making them overly concise and uneven. petty crimes are mixed with heinous atrocities. Drama is crosscut by details (though sometimes quite fascinating detail: Zaire’s Mobutu “is perhaps the only world leader who could pay his national debt from his own bank account. “). The recitation of offenses is relentless, card after card after card. We lose the ability to focus on the individual monsters and instead mourn for whole countries. In the end, we are forced to consider the evil detailed here as intrinsic and fundamental to human nature.

Luckily the art argues effectively against this depressing generalized conclusion. Bill Sienkiewicz reveals that these dictators are actually beasts that pass for humans only by genetic technicality. To this end, Sienkiewicz unleashes his full array of graphic style, giving us an assortment of mediums and looks: cartoon, caricature, selective realism, ornamentation, simplification, rhetoric, narration, propaganda, subtlety, low humor, and genious distortion, Sienkiewicz’s work here is not as powerful as the political art he created with author Alan Moore in the Brought to light graphic novel. These distinct cards, lacking narrative unity, dramatic flow, and Moore’s prose, do not provide as devastating an impact.

Still, many Of the portraits are inspired: the golden glow of the charismatically handsome Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador, the vaporous head of South Africa’s Botha, the eerie luminescence of Mobutu. As he has evolved as an artist, Sienkiewicz has come to rely less and less on comic art conventions, less and less on the medium’s graphic shorthand; everything seems freshly invented in longhand. The set has its share of clinkers — mostly those which belabor facile associations — yet the relish with which Sienkiewicz attacks his material is exciting and invigorating.

They appear to be pretty popular:

“[my ex-housemate] used to do tarot readings with my friendly dictator cards. It was a RIOT. “Ah, your center card is Hitler. You’re highly artistic and creative, but you haven’t yet been given the recognition you deserve. Don’t worry, soon your talents will emerge, and the love that only your mother gave you will wash over you like a fountain!”

And you can find the entire set here.

Stormwatcher (1989) #1-4 by Ian Abbinett, Alan Cowsill, Andrew Currie et al.

What’s this then?

Ah, it’s another British import. It’s “published” by Acme Press, but “released” by Eclipse.

And it’s a comedy barbarian thing. The artwork’s pretty good, although the artist only puts in background in every nineteenth panel.

The plot is a classic: An old guy has to get the old gang together to fight … something… So he leaves and goes on a quest to gather all the people. It’s an old trope and it’s an old-fashioned way to introduce the characters… but if you’re doing a four issue series, the danger is that the series will be over by the time you’ve got all the characters together, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen here.

I’m guessing (based on the humour) that the writers are very young. I mean, it’s not wince inducing or anything, but it’s all pretty obvious.

The artwork’s pretty accomplished, though, so perhaps he’s more experienced?

“A second issue to fill…”

The (British) editor explains that, indeed, the authors are young, but so is the artist? And this was originally going to be published by Harrier Comics in the UK, but they eventually passed on it, which is why it ended up at Eclipse.

And the first issue was rewritten and redrawn? Then I’m curious as to what the second issue looks like…

A Dave Sim joke: Very of its time. And “I went to this nightclub with a blonde” is probably not what he’d say today.

Hey! The artwork in the second issue doesn’t look any worse than the first issue. In some ways it’s better? It has more of a scratchy organic feel to it. Still no background, though.

While the writing on the first issue (which is apparently the newest one) was clear and concise, this issue is (story wise) a bit of a mess. And the writing is just so… choppy. Things happen without much structure and it’s hard to remain interested. If the first issue was even more messy, I can see why they redid it.

And the humour is even younger.

We were promised (in the first issue) back-up features that would explore the characters more in depth, but instead we get a something by Carl Stevens, Jacob Monroe and Mr. Kurtz, allegedly. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the main feature, I think, but it’s hard to tell, because it’s more concerned with doing schtick than a story. Which is fine by me.

But Dave Sim and an aardvark does make an appearance here, so… er… So there.

They try for a madcap pile-on humour effect, but none of the jokes are that good. It feels like a fanzine piece.

We’re promised a new concept in graphic novels… a hardback 32 page comic book for $6. I think Acme/Eclipse managed to get two of these out? We’ll be covering them later in the blog series, of course.

Suddenly, near the end of the third issue, the artist discovers Richard Corben, and everything starts looking distinctly as if he’s just tracing old Den stories.

That jumping pose is a classic Den pose.

Well, that’s odd, but if you’re going to rip somebody off, I mean develop artistically by absorbing the influence of others, you could do worse than Corben.

The fourth issue is mostly fight scenes, so having Currie draw them as if he were Corben is rather nice.

The Harrier editor drops by to explain why they didn’t publish Stormwatcher: They tried, but after soliciting the first issue, they got less than 1600 copies ordered. The weird thing is that they say that that would still not be losing money for them.

Currie gets some nice dusty, shadowy effects going on in the final issue, which ends just after they’ve gathered all the gang, and nothing much is accomplished.

*sigh*

The backup story ends in a similar manner, but slightly funnier.

So this is a comic by young comics makers, and it’s not successful, but I’ve certainly read a lot worse comics. It’s got charm.

Andrew Currie is still working in comics and looks to be very successful.

The Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards (1988) by Paul Brancato and Salim Yaqub.

I’m a bit out of sequence here: These cards were released six months earlier than where I’m at in the Eclipse chronology in this blog series. I originally weren’t going to do the trading cards (as this is a blog about comics), but it seemed a shame to skip this part of Eclipse’s history, as it’s more significant than I originally thought.

So, while waiting for these cards to arrive from ebay, I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself…

Anyway! I don’t doubt editor cat ⊕ yronwode’s political commitment, but the sheer number of these “non-sports trading cards” that Eclipse eventually released, it seems likely that there’s a substantial commercial reason for these cards to exist as well.

These are the first of these cards (and are perhaps the first time this format was used to talk about current events?), and it’s basically a box of 36 cards (which makes the “trading” bit somewhat of a misnomer), and each of these cards has a drawing of a person in the front…

… and tells the story of the person (as it pertains to the Iran-Contra scandal) on the back. The language Brancato uses is dry and the artwork is mostly very straight-forward. So what’s up with this? What’s the impetus to talk about this shitload of assholes in this format?

The cards are numbered, and reading them in sequence seems to be the intended way. They often refer back to other people we’ve read about on previous cards, but there’s also some references to “later” people.

The artwork is mostly not very imaginative, but there’s the occasional fanciful depiction, too.

Virtually all of these cards talk about a specific person: This is the only card that’s about an organisation.

This was released around the time of Brought to Light and deals with many of the same people. So one graphic novel and one set of “trading cards”: I guess it kinda makes sense as a package to spread awareness of the outrage going on.

But these cards are so dull. The artwork isn’t very exciting, and by focusing on people to this extent removes any chance of creating anything like a driving narrative or some tension to the reading experience. I guess you could have these cards out on your coffee table as a conversational piece (“Those guys are such douche canoes!” “They sure are!”), but it’s like reading a Wikipedia article spread out over 36 cards. The only thing that’s missing is the [citation needed] after every sentence and you’re there.

A single woman makes an appearance on these cards: Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s secretary.

And we’re instructed that the Iran thing “marked the downfall of [Reagan’s] popularity”. Uh-huh. Right. Sure.

So, it’s an interesting artefact. I mean, it’s interesting that it exists: It’s not interesting to read, and now I’m dreading reading the other trading card sets I bought.

But what did the critics think of it? Here’s Rich Kreiner, writing in The Comics Journal 155, five years later when the fad was over:

The primogeniture of the infocards is 1988’s IranContra Scandal set (Eclipse $8.95), written by Paul BranCato, with additional research by Leonard Rifas and art by Salim Yaqub. Here, through high crime’s reportage and misdemeanor gossip, we can relive the despicable acts of the mercifully forgotten (Fawn Hall) and the still infamous (King Fahd, the Medellin Cartel) as America’s shadow government breaks national and international law and generally offends basic human decency.

Brancato’s prose, delivered in 250 chunks, is straightforward and informative, perhaps too worldly-wise to kindle (or rekindle) legitimate outrage over crimes now pardoned, applauded, or at best, lost in ongoing labyrinthine investigations and prosecutions.

The material resists the format; with one card devoted to one person or event, there is a disproportional equivalency to all co-conspirators and conspiracies. The cards are arranged vaguely chronologically, yet threads thåt bind events and personalities early and late inevitably grow entangled. Unless one arrives with a fair and generalized perspective on the scandal, the 36 cards’ worth of information is fragmented and fractured.

Yaqub’s artwork consists for the most of flattened caricatures in sickly colors, mostly yokings of portraits and props that are suitably though superficially acid. Seldom do they vitalize their subject matter with vivid insight: Bush struggles to close a door against skeletons, Reagan, as a ventriloquist’s dummy, sits on a faceless fat cat’s lap. The visual successes suggest how much might have been accomplished with more striking portrayals: the dissembling middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar relaxing among urinals; the bulging eyes and pursed lips of William Casey emerging from a blueish background, looking for all the world like a bottom feeding fish emerging from a hole. One disturbing impression is that nonAmerican criminals often appear genuinely evil and threatening, while our own domestic thugs are generally presented as mere buffoons.

I think he means “delivered in 250 word chunks”. Because there are 36 chunks. I mean, cards.

Apparently Brancato wrote several of these trading card sets. *sigh*