Author: larsmagne23

Strike! (1987) #1-6, Strike! vs. Sgt. Strike Special (1988) #1 by Chuck Dixon, Tom Lyle, Romeo Tanghal et al.

Another 4Winds production, but this time Timothy Truman doesn’t seem to be involved. Instead it’s written by Airboy writer Chuck Dixon and features another revamped 40s public domain character.

As with many of these revisions at Eclipse, the question is “how do you make a super-hero relevant these days?” Answer above.

That is hittin’, man.

What’s not hittin’ is Tom Lyle’s artwork, which is extremely Standard mid-80s Superhero. It’s not very exciting, and I don’t even feel inspired to rag on it.

Most of the first issue deals with retelling the Sgt. Strike origin story, and it involves Tunguska, Nazis, CIA and just about everything you’d expect. Perhaps more stuff than you’d expect, even.

Dixon explains that the character originated with a novel idea for selling cereal: A US mid-western company in the 40s decided that including comics with cereal would be a good way to sell more cereal, and a separate line of comics was spun out from that.

The storyline doesn’t really start until the second issue, and Our Hero comes up with a really odd way to make money… start brawls in pubs? I didn’t quite get the logic. But, on the other hand, the fight scenes are more amusing than they usually are, so what the hey.

Not the first hero who have made that point.

Dixon continues with his history of the comics, and retells in perhaps too-great details the plotlines of some of the 40s comics. Some people really enjoy recapping plots. But then we get a reprint, the first of five:

Er… that drawing and that physique looks extremely un-40s.

And that’s a Doc Ock tentacle from the 60s? WTF?

Is this another postmodern mock revival thing like Timothy Truman has done in his Prowler series just a month earlier? Two fake revisionist super-hero comics made at the same time by the same people?

I guess they had fun one drunken night or something after re-reading Watchmen too many times. Well, that explains the rather unlikely story of the cereal marketing stunt.

I like these kinds of shenanigans, but couldn’t they have found somebody who’s better at emulating 40s stories so that the joke would have made it past the first page of the reprints? It’s a missed opportunity.

This all puts a new spin on the grim proceedings of the main feature. Is this psychotic CIA agent meant to be funny? Are the short shorts?

The next issues’ “reprints” have an artist that does the rendering a bit more 40s, but the physique is positively 90s, and the mecha Japanese robot is another tell, I guess.

Our Hero goes after a villain (to steal drug money), but he goes after his childhood friend (who had turned drug dealer), leaving him to be killed by the Colombian mafia. Is Dixon making the point that vigilantes are psychos, or does Dixon think that’s a reasonable, healthy thing to do? I don’t know, and I don’t really care.

The best of all Tarzan knock-offs.

Are those the Qys from Alan Moore’s Miracleman? I guess Dixon was an even bigger fan than I imagined…

Strike! is hot! But it doesn’t sell well.

That’s Sgt. Strike’s moronic sidekick, as Dixon described him…

And, yup, in the sixth issue Dixon spills the beans: He’d just made the entire thing up. None of the letters he printed seemed to indicate that any of the readers saw through the joke at the time… and if they had, Dixon could have printed them all in the final issue and let everybody have a laugh.

*gasp* The final “reprint” is drawn by Daniel Clowes! His post-Lloyd Llewellyn/pre-Eightball Bernie Kriegstein mode! Looks great!

And the story is the most unhinged of them all, and is definitely the best thing in this series.

And then we’re told that this series continues in this new #1:

By this time, Strike! no longer takes place on Earth: Our Hero has been kidnapped by aliens and he has to fight some other aliens For The Sake Of Our Universe. It’s a rather jarring transition from where it was a couple of issues ago, but whatever.

You can’t handle the bull! It’s hittin’!

And then we’re told that this continues in Total Eclipse, which I guess I’ll get to in a few weeks.

As late-80s revisionist meta super-hero comics go, it’s one of them.

I wonder whether anybody later picked up a random issue and was a bit puzzled about the concept…

Yup:

There are lots of details there, but I haven’t been able to verify any of them after some determined web searching. No “All-Thrill Comics,” at least from that time period. No books called “Prairie Crimebusters” or “All Kid Comics.” No company called “Happy Comics.” No “Jolly Farmer Food Company.”

Strike! doesn’t seem to have been collected or reprinted.

Man of War (1987) #1-3 by Bruce Jones, Rick Burchett et al.

This wasn’t announced as a mini-series, but since it’s a Bruce Jones series, and he has a tendency to write smaller, complete stories, I assumed it wasn’t meant as a continuing story.

It’s Bruce Jones, so there’s at least a couple of screaming, pleading women being killed each issue.

But Jones also does the strong female character bit, so I guess it evens out?

The series starts off as one thing…

… and then suddenly we’re in sci-fi land with time travel, aliens, super-heroes and exposition. So. Much. Exposition. Jones is usually better than this.

Jones apparently sets up a very TV-series like structure: Our Hero can change into a super-powered body, but every time he does, it brings him closer do death! Gasp! It’s cannot be! But you can totally see that as the plot of an 80s sci-fi TV series, right? Every week he goes to a new town and saves somebody and grapples with his mortality.

Jones tried to get into the TV biz, I think, so I wonder whether that’s from a TV pitch.

But, of course, this is a three issue comic book, so we don’t get the travel-from-city-to-city bit. Instead we get a pretty much irrelevant Jack the Ripper sub plot.

I haven’t really said anything about Rick Burchett’s artwork, because there isn’t really that much to say, I think? It’s above average “realistic” standard US mid-80s mainstream comic book art. It reads fine, but it’s not very exciting. I like the difference between the hapless version of Our Hero and the heroic version.

Oh, so topical. Reagan and Gorbachev.

And I guessed right: The third issue wraps up the storyline pretty well and ends on a pretty amusing note. But getting there was sometimes pretty painful, even if individual scenes were fun.

Man of War has never been reprinted or collected, and I can definitely see why. But it’s OK.

Silverheels (1987) #1 by Bruce Jones and Bo Hampton.

Silverheels was originally published by Pacific Comics as a regular-sized comic book series in 1983, but it cancelled after the third issue due to low sales. So Jones and Hampton finally finished it up four years later and Eclipse published it as a graphic novel.

And it’s a lovely album. It’s printed on slick, shiny paper and printed with deep blacks and vibrant colours that shows off Hampton’s beautiful pages to great advantage. It’s a mixture of pen-and-ink with colours and fully-painted pages, I think, and is among Hampton’s lushest artwork.

And I wonder whether he’d been peeking at Liberatore’s Ranxerox (which was serialised in Heavy Metal in the US), because some of his nastier blond(e) guys look rather Liberatoreish. And, yes, they’re called “nazites”. Because Bruce Jones.

Hampton obvious relies a lot on photo reference, but still his faces sometimes go all weird. Here this guy goes all insectile for a couple of panels.

That’s a beautifully composed page, eh? And fortunately author Jones knows when to stay out of the way and not slather a bunch of words needlessly over these pages.

And suddenly! We get one panel that’s blown up across two pages. It’s a nice panel, but it seems rather random…

If Hampton has one weakness, it’s that not all his action pages work out. He tries to be cinematic, which is seldom a good idea in a comic book.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention much about the storyline, right? Well, never mind, because Bruce Jones mostly forgot to write it.

I mean, it’s… there, I guess, but it (and the dialogue) don’t really hold up well compared to the artwork. And the ending is a bit of a groaner, but Jones likes those, so I guess he did that on purpose.

But all in all: It’s a lovely, quick read. Unless you just sit there and stare at the pages.

The weird thing about this book is that it’s never been reprinted. And you can still buy copies of it for $8, in perfect condition, from Amazon, so they must have printed a buttload of these.

It’s difficult to find reviews of this book, but here’s one:

As always the lush painted art of Scott Hampton is utterly entrancing, and great story-telling is timeless so this book is one you’ll delight in over and over again.

Real War Stories (1987) #1-2 edited by Joyce Brabner.

Real War Stories is the first publication in what would become a signal part of Eclipse’s output over the next few years: Activist political comics (and trading cards). They didn’t publish a lot of these, but these publications got a lot of attention, and if I remember correctly (I read them all at the time) they’re all really good. Let’s take a look and see whether if my memory’s on the fritz.

Huh, I have the second printing of the first issue. Which I guess means that it must have sold pretty well, which is amazing for an anti-military comic book.

Anyway, this first issue is the creation of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors who apparently hired Joyce Brabner as the editor. Brabner didn’t have huge comics editing experience at the time, but she’s a good choice.

Most of the stories in the first issue are personal accounts of people who’ve been in the military, so these are “as told by” stories that are then written by somebody else. A typical example is the first story, told by Tim Merrill to Mike W. Barr, and with artwork by Brian Bolland and Mike Farmer. It’s told very straightforwardly and the artwork is just as good as you’d imagine when you read those two names.

I thought that this was going to be a regular anti-war comic, but it’s an anti-military comic book. Many of the stories are about how awful it’s to be in the military because the other people there are such raging assholes. (That’s in addition to it all being a dysfunctional fuck-up of an organisation and all the dying and stuff, of course.)

It’s really refreshing. None of that “respect the soldiers” stuff.

I’m guessing this was the most controversial scene in the book, and it doesn’t even involve killing.

Alan Moore (with Stan Woch, John Totleben and Steven Bissette on art) does the most formally interesting piece because of course he does.

And it’s really effective too, because he had me in tears by the end.

Brabner and Rebecca Huntington does a story about a woman who enlisted to join the music division of the army (er, or whatever it’s called) but ends up as an MP and constantly harassed be those around her. It’s text-heavy, but effectively told: Brabner keeps the words of the woman who tells the story front and centre.

We also get advice on what we can do to do something about “it”.

And some facts.

One story that’s not told by anybody in the military is this one by Steve Leialoha. He was a conscientious objector and spent two years in the California Ecology Corps. It’s an interesting story, and his artwork is, as always, so interesting to look at.

Brabner tries the script of the comic she’s just written out on some soldiers going to El Salvador (drawn by Tom Yeates and Mark Johnson), but it doesn’t really get through.

Apparently the first issue had resulted in the Department of Defense sued CCCO to try to stop the distribution of the comic book, and a Lieutenant Colonel John Cullen claimed that there was no such thing as greasing, so I guess I guessed right when I thought that was going to be the one controversial sequence in the book.

The second issue, released four years later, is very different from the first issue. It’s still edited by Brabner, but it’s not sponsored by CCCO, and it’s no longer first-hand accounts from people with experience of being in the military. Instead it seems like it’s mostly fact bombs culled form the archives of Citizen Soldier, which is an organisation that helps people with problems with the military out.

So we get infobombs disguised as comics. Bill Sienkiewicz gives it his best shot, so we get something that’s really readable. And look at that evil face! So evil!

Unfortunately, that’s the standout and the rest are either angry declamations like this Brabner/Wayne van Sant thing…

… or just illustrated verbal diarrhoea like this Greg Baisden/Steven Destefano thing. Destefano does his best with the Alice in Wonderland thing, but this could just have been an essay instead and it’d have read easier.

And some stories veer way off the subject, like this Brabner/Dennis Francis story that’s more about general racism than the military.

Both of these issues are 48 pages long, but the second issue is printed on nice, shiny paper that really makes the colours pop. That’s really handy for the Sienkiewicz piece and this one drawn by Mark Badger. Whatever happened to him? It’s so Mattotti! Nothing can ever be Mattotti enough.

And the story, which rounds out the issue, is by Mark W. Barr, and is about how his father died as the result of poisoning due to not being given protective clothing while handling chemicals in the navy, so it’s almost a first-person account and is the closest to the stuff in the first issue.

Pretty much everything.

So here’s what I think: The first issue is incredibly powerful. The second issue is very dry.

Rich Kreiner in The Comics Journal 128:

Real Stones is a carefully, even lovingly, crafted package edited by Joyce Brabner and produced under the auspices of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.

Toward the announced ends of the sponsoring organization, Real War Stories includes a wide variety of tales from different lands, different times, with differing perspectives, aimed at providing alternative views Of the military for a recruitment-aged audience.

It’s an effective use of the medium, one that I feel better and better about every time I see another slick, patronizing advertisement for the armed services. The care and craft of the project as a whole is obviöus from the very first. Bill Sienkiewicz’ dramatic and complex cover features a military massacre drawn in a crude, childish style, making it immediately plain that Real hr Stories is not going to be Sgt. Fury with more black soldiers. The composition is immediate, effective, and, probably unintentionally, a sly comment on the medium’s juvenile tradition.

‘”The Elite of the Fleet,” in many ways the book’s most successful and “mainstream” piece, leads off. It is a tight and straightfoward rendering of “the story of Tim Merrill, as told to Mike W. Barr, writer, and Brian Bolland and Mark Farmer, artists,” and recounts Merrill’s enlistment in the Navy, his progressive disillusionment with the military, and his campaign to educate and liberate himself through attaining the status of conscientious objector.

[…]

Real War Stories purposefully delivers its message to its intended audience without condescension or insufferable dogmaticism. As such, it’s a real success, a comic book that could make a difference.

These comics haven’t been reprinted or collected, which is a shame.

The Prowler (1987) #1-4, Airboy Meets the Prowler (1987) #1, The Revenge of the Prowler (1988) #1-4, The Prowler in White Zombie (1988) #1 by Timothy Truman, John K Snyder III et al.

This book is written by Timothy Truman (of Scout fame) and with artwork by John K Snyder III (of Fashion in Action slightly-less-fame). I’ve been positively surprised by the Truman comics I’ve had to read for this blog series, so I approached the little stack of comics without any trepidation.

This is part of Truman’s 4Winds initiative, which is a group of comics created by him and his friends, and published by Eclipse. This is the first #1 to have that on the credits page, I think.

We start off with a ninja climbing up the face of a house, breaking in and then…

… he’s doing laundry! That’s the way to start a series off on a good foot. So this is going to be a humorous actions series a la Hotspur?

Then it turns heavier and it turns out the ninja lad is being groomed as the sidekick of an old 50s vigilante. So this is one of those deconstructed super-hero books that was all the rage in the mid-80s? Complete with homosexual panic (a la Rick Veitch with The One/Bratpack/etc)?

Truman explains how The Prowler was created as a collaboration between him and III.

And lets us know that he’s aware that there are other recent comics that The Prowler may be compared to. Which I totally just did, so good call there.

But it never seems to really go anywhere interesting. Is the old guy a fascist bonkers guy (a la Dark Knight) or insane or what? The answer is “or what”, because while the book seems to hint at all these plots, you get the feeling that none of them have really been thought out: It’s just surface appropriated from books where the creators had put more thought into it.

The backup features detail the origin of The Prowler (drawn very stiffly by Graham Nolan and written very verbosely by Michael Price).

It’s not that these are completely without interest (how often is the 50s hero pro-union), but these are tedious to read. The artwork emulates 50s comics pretty well, except that it’s not really very good, is it? I found myself skipping these when I got to the sixth instalment or so.

Here’s the “house ad” for the 4Winds line. Nice.

Oh, yeah, in the book The Prowler was a real superhero in the 50s, but there was also a series of movies, so we get text pages detailing all this backstory. (*cough* Watchmen *cough*) The thing is… when you want to go all metafictional on the reader, you have to convince the reader that there’s something of interest to be had by participating in the game. There must be a sense of mystery that you want to tease out, and that reading supplemental text like this will bring depth to the project.

But I have absolutely zero (0) belief that there’s anything more here than meets the eye: It’s a genre exercise with a very, very, very small dusting of postmodernism on top, so while these pages may have been a lark to put together, they’re not much fun to read.

“Generic.” I think these letters pages were composed by Michael Price, and it’s hard to tell what he’s trying to do. Is he making fun of pompous asses, playing a high-falutin’ schtick, or is that just the way he writes?

And then The Prowler series is over without any warning, but we then get an Airboy crossover that pretty much continues where the series left off. It’s weird that they didn’t mention this in the last Prowler issue, instead of talking about backup features for issue 10…

For a couple of months, Eclipse would indicate the various “lines” they were publishing. So A for Airboy, S for Scout and 4W for 4Winds. Let’s see what’s on this week…

So 4 4W, 2 S (+ Scout) and 2 A (+ Airboy). Eclipse stopped doing this pretty swiftly, so I guess people might just have found it confusing…

The old vigilante hatches a nefarious plan to bring his protege into contact with Airboy! For reasons!

And it involves him… sending him out for laundry in a part of town where Airboy drives past just at the same time and a woman is kidnapped around the corner. That is pretty fiendish plotting, I must say.

As crossovers go, it’s more meaningful than most.

And then there’s another four-part series, Revenge of the Prowler. No explanation in the chatty editorial pages, but my eyes are glazing over at this point.

It turns out that Ninja Boy Wonder has been totally traumatised by his experience in the first four issues, so he’s now doing better artwork (which is painted by the colourist Julie Michel). Yes, he’s an art student.

But then some old friends visit the old guy and they have to crush a child porn ring, so Ninja Boy Wonder forgets all about his post-traumatic stress disorder and knuckles down and goes after those bastards. As you do.

Did I mention that Price’s writing style on the letters pages can be a bit on the grating side? It helps if you read them in the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy’s voice, I find.

Ah, torture. The tool of all heroes to come. So gritty.

In the second issue we get a flexidisc. Truman did this with Scout, too, where we got two songs from his country band. Here the first side is a cod-40s orchestral number, and the B side is Truman doing a very electronic motion picture thing, perhaps influenced by John Carpenter. Both are better than the Scout flexi.

They still haven’t given up on the meta stuff, so we get an excerpt from the 50s Sunday strip version of The Prowler. It’s a good idea. The problem is that it’s tedious as fuck.

Hey! I want a helicopter hat! That’s what it is, right?

Hm. Have I neglected to talk about Snyder’s artwork completely in my general annoyance over this comic? It’s improved a lot over the short time since his Fashion in Action stuff. Panel-to-panel it’s very readable, and his more chunky inks and black spotting (perhaps influenced by Frank Miller and maybe a smidgen of Howard Chaykin) is very pleasant to look at.

And is that also a bit of Keith Giffen? Actually, what it reminds me most of is Jeff Lemire, who started a couple of decades later. Was Lemire a III fan?

In the final issue, we’re told that Truman is working on a Prowler graphic novel, but that didn’t happen.

We also get some very non-realistic-looking dailies.

And more news items. I sure do hope these were fun to make, because they bring nothing to the reading experience. And I hope at least somebody had fun during the Prowler experience.

And last but least, we have Prowler in White Zombie, which is an adaptation of a 50s film he starred in. (Wink wink nudge nudge.) It’s written by Price and drawn by Gerald Forton with Graham Nolan.

Forton is a good illustrator, and makes the evil guy look his part.

Of all the Price-written bits, this book was the hardest to parse. Is it meant to be a farce? That inset panel where the character looks at the audience after The Prowler said something particularly stupid is funny, but is that really what’s going on?

Because there’s so little fun in the rest of the book. There’s pages and pages of this, and that repartee just isn’t very witty.

And that’s it! There were no more Prowler books, and now I’m not looking forward to reading the remaining 4Winds books.

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform published an 180 page collection of some of this stuff under the name Leo Kragg: Prowler in 2013. I don’t know what’s included, but perhaps… the stuff from the eight “main” books?

Captain EO 3-D (1987) #1 by Tom Yeates et al.

I thought I didn’t have to read any more 3D comics, but I had forgotten this one.

It’s an adaptation of a 3D movie by Francis Ford Coppola? Oh, it was shown in various Disney amusement parks, and starred Michael Jackson at the height of his fame.

So of course Eclipse tried to get as much money out of the adaptation as possible, which I think is very sensible. It was also released in a larger edition only sold via Disney, but I’ve got the smaller version (i.e., normal comics size). It was probably the most expensive item I bought for this blog series, so Michael Jackson still has fans…

Anyway, the adaptation is by Tom Yeates, who is a very good artist, so I was curious how this would look. And it looks pretty great. Yeates’s artwork works very well in 3D: It’s detailed, but not fussy, so my eyes had it pretty easy when trying to pick out the levels and make it all snap to 3D.

And when comics are drawn for 3D, it’s so much better than when it’s converted as an afterthought. Yeates places his objects on the page for maximum 3D pop. That spaceship was hovering way out of the page.

This may be the best 3D book that Eclipse published, I think.

As for the storyline… Well… Michael Jackson, I mean Captain EO meets an evil ruler and then convinces everybody to get along by dancing. It’s fine by me. They manage to squeeze in some gags along the way.

I haven’t seen the film, of course, but I think Yeates probably did it justice. He doesn’t overwhelm it with exposition, but just shows us all the fun bits without having the characters explain everything to us. It’s good storytelling.

His Michael Jackson could perhaps have been more Jackson-like. I mean, it looks like Yeates traced his face and costume right from a photo, but it still isn’t… all there. But it’s fine.

So it this a lost masterpiece of some kind? No. But as a Michael Jackson 3D memorabilia comic book it’s better than it has any reason to be.

As expected, I couldn’t really find much in the way of reviews of this book, the there’s this:

Gloriously flamboyant, massively OTT, but as great a piece of drawing as came out of the over-egged Eighties, Captain Eo is a truly intriguing book that might just grab any jaded reader who thinks there’s nothing new or different left to see…

The Liberty Project (1987) #1-8, Total Eclipse: The Seraphim Objective (1988) #1 by Kurt Busiek, James W. Fry et al.

Eclipse was pushing this series hard in the in-house ads around this time, and I was a bit intrigued. One of the tag lines were “The X-Men done right” or something like that, which is a pretty big boast.

But what we have here is a Suicide Squad kind of setup: A researcher sets up a super-powered group by scouring the prisons for promising super-villains, and promises them freedom(ish) in exchange for doing what he says. It’s a tightrope to walk: If the villains are too psychotic, it doesn’t make for a happy-go-lucky superhero team book, and if they’re not villains at all, it all fizzles. I think Busiek and Fry gets it pretty much right: They go rebellious characters and not very… evil ones.

And they establish all the requisite distinct characters a group like this has to have, and they do it very economically so that they can get the show on the run.

Oh, that Cimarron.

I know, it doesn’t break any new ground, but as super-hero comics go, these are definitely above the pack. The issues have an easy flow and the humour is balanced well against the action and the small stabs at intrigue.

*gasp* Did they disband in the very first issue!??! Read the next one to find out!

Busiek explains that the series originated as a pitch for Captain America over at Marvel Comics, but when that was turned down, they made it into a freestanding series and pitched it to many companies, and Eclipse made the best offer.

Busiek says that he’s got an outline for more than thirty issues.

I wonder how much the Eclipse people were thinking about establishing a shared universe between their more superhero/adventure comics. We get references to DNAgents, Airboy and The Masked Man, for instance. And Miracleman, who was invented by an old lady in England.

Yes, there are hijinx, but Busiek manages to get some character development in at the same time. It’s very… competent.

No sex, even if it’s no longer a Marvel pitch.

Pop culture references abounds, and some have perhaps not aged as well as others.

Fry’s artwork is competent, clear and moves the storyline along, but I don’t find it very exciting. It’s standard 80s superhero stuff. But as the series progresses, he gives the figures a more exaggerated look, almost as if he’s predicting the 90s Image look with super-small waists and all feet hidden. He just needs some pouches around the thighs and he’s there.

The sixth issue is a fill-in issue with artwork by Richard Howell (the guy behind Portia Prinz of the Glamazons. It’s a crossover with Valkyrie (from the Airboyoverse) and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Liberty Project storyline. I guess it makes some sense to create a totally freestanding issue so that when you do the collection, you can just drop out the issues not drawn by the regular artist. If you want to.

Howell’s anatomies are sometimes a bit abstract.

A reader asks whether there’s going to be a lot of crossovers and Busiek says “probably”, but never with Heap. Ever.

Up until the seventh issue, the schedule had been monthly, but before the eighth (and final) issue, there’s a five month gap, and every thing is changed.

Instead of having a fun-loving (slightly angsty) super-hero team, suddenly everybody in the world hates them and everything is super-grim and…

… then the series is cancelled. It’s such a weird way to end the series: There’s no backmatter to explain what’s going on, and Busiek had been very chatty in previous issues. But why end things on such a sour note, anyway? The issue is just a slog to go through.

And speaking of slogs, the mega-crossover series Total Eclipse was published in 1988, and spawned one spin-off title: The Seraphim Objective.

Which, amusingly enough, starts with Heap, the character that Liberty Project will never cross over with.

Most of the pages are like the ones above: We get a voiceover from a character or another that provides incredibly tedious exposition.

The inker and or colourist has a lot of fun pretending they’re doing a Rand Holmes book, at least.

I’m glad that somebody had fun while doing this, because it’s no fun to read.

But the Liberty Project never meets Heap, so I guess the gag paid off.

The series (including the Total Eclipse spinoff) was collected by About Comics in 2003 (in black and white, apparently).

The promise that “The Liberty Project will return!” didn’t turn out to be accurate.

The Sisterhood of Steel (1987) by Christy Marx and Peter Ledger.

I think I read a couple of issues of the Sisterhood of Steel series from Epic Comics in the 80s before I dropped it. I don’t recall anything of that series, but Marx provides us with an introduction to the characters.

The problem is that half of these characters aren’t in this book in any significant sense, and the rest are introduced perfectly well within the story, so it’s one of many strange decisions taken when this book was made.

Another is the paper used. I’ve never seen anything like it in a comic book. It’s almost vellum-like… or perhaps it’s meant to emulate parchment… In any case, it’s translucent and uneven and apparently extremely absorbent, because the inks and colours have that “sucked into the paper” look. That’s not a bad thing; it’s probably a deliberate choice, giving the book an oldee-tymey feel. But then again…

All the text is typeset, and typeset awkwardly. Especially in narrow speech and thought balloons, it looks horrible. The wide spacing between the lines is a very strange choice. And since the rest of the book is so carefully oldee-tymey-pheeley, it’s just a constant jab to the eyes reading these balloons.

So that’s that for the book as an object. What’s the storyline and the artwork like?

It starts off like all books should, with a discussion about menstruation, so I thought this was going to be fun and entertaining. The interiors and the exteriors also start off drawn very competently, with many nice design touches to all the chotchkeys around the rooms.

The faces, though, vary wildly, with facial features swimming around within the facial outlines.

And as promising as the first couple of pages were, reading the rest was a nightmare without end, without surcease.

I mean, until the dénouement.

The book goes so completely off the rails that it’s hard to know where to start. Part of the book is all about the torture of that poor woman a couple of pictures above, and the rest is about how the woman above trains as a ninja. There’s no structure to the book. It doesn’t build any sort of tension (although it manages revulsion a couple of times). After reading these 70 pages, I feel like I’ve just read a ten page introduction and perhaps the adventure is going to start now?

There’s a couple of text pages at the end that explains what a terrific artist Peter Ledger is (I think we had to have that explained to us), and also a bibliography of Ledger and Marx. And an explanation of what the first Sisterhood of Steel series was about.

Neither the Epic series nor this graphic novel have been reprinted.

Let’s see what web people think about it.

Here’s one:

Still, the graphic novel remains a reading experience that’s every bit as exciting as the series that preceded it, in some instances taking things to a new level of brutality. Its conclusion, however, is likely to leave readers heartbroken – it ends with a cliffhanger which was clearly meant to be followed by more stories. Unfortunately, this never happened, and The Sisterhood of Steel remains unfinished to this day. But even unfinished, both the series and the graphic novel are highly recommended.

Oh, here’s Marx herself:

If you take a look at how I handled strong, women characters in The Sisterhood of Steel, you’ll find I’m guilty of having a woman who was hideously victimized–captured, humiliated, enslaved, tongue cut out, raped, and finally left to die. I had a bunch of virgins get their throats cut so a mad king could ascend to “godhood”. Obviously, I had reasons for doing that within my overall storyline. That was counterbalanced by a lot of very strong women fighting, winning, losing and living life on their own terms. Objectively, what you don’t find a lot of in my series were likeable male characters, not because I don’t like men, but just because of the particular kind of story I was telling.

Hm… Didn’t find anything else that’s interesting.

Hotspur (1987) #1-3 by John Ostrander, Karl Waller, Ben Dunn et al.

1987 was a busy year for Eclipse. They published 52 first issues in that year, which makes it their #1st year. One major part of that was the black and white boom that went bust in the first few months of the year, but another contributing factor was Timothy Truman.

This book doesn’t have the “4Winds” label anywhere on it, but I think it can be considered to be the first of the mini-wave of mini-series and books instigated by Timothy Truman (either as editor or co-creator; both on this book) and his friends (like John Ostrander and Charles Dixon).

And I’ve read none of these books, but I find myself looking forward to reading them, because I was really surprised at how entertaining Truman’s main series Scout was.

So what do we have here? Serious barbarian swordplay action adventure yada yada?

No! Well, at least not the serious part. This book takes all the fantasy/barbarian/magic conventions and runs them through a shredder and glues them back in an amusing manner. So Our Hero is an actor, of course.

Who’s magically transported to another planet that he has to save because… because… It’s too complicated to get into here, but it’s funny.

I’m not familiar with Karl Waller’s work, but it’s fine, I guess. Nothing that really stands out, but it the storytelling is solid.

The first issue has some character design sketches by Truman.

But he does do some very appealing creatures and monsters. And by appealing, I mean “amusingly creepy”.

“You ahemed?” I liked “you ahemed”.

The last two issues were mostly drawn by Ben Dunn, and it’s stilted and not very interesting to look at. The storyline continues on its merry way, in a almost-being-obnoxious manner, but staying just on the right side. It all takes a genuinely surprising turn and keeps you off balance, and you just have to surrender to the sheer buoyancy of it all.

The editor explains that Waller fell ill, so he couldn’t complete the series. Why they didn’t just postpone the issues instead of substituting a new artist isn’t explained. I mean, it’s a three monthly issue mini-series: The second issue had to be in the can before the first issue was at the printer…

I feel like that’s a question we all should ask ourselves when we go about our daily lives. WWDFD?

Ben Dunn takes it all into a cartoonish territory for a panel here and there, and that’s just fine.

Aha! 4Winds! I knew it had to come up at some point.

Comicmix collected the series in a single volume in 2016, so it should be available everywhere. I was unable to find any reviews of the book, so I guess it didn’t make much of an impression.

I only hope that the rest of the 4Winds books are as good…

California Girls (1987) #1-8 by Trina Robbins et al.

Robbins had done comics for Eclipse before, but it’d been a while. She serialised Sax Rohmer’s Dope in the Eclipse anthologies at the start of the decade, but in the meantime she’d done more child-focused comics, like the Meet Misty mini-series she did at Marvel (and which I very dimly remember I read at the time).

Many readers point out the similarities between the series, and if I remember correctly, I think Misty was pretty much like this, too: A group of teenagers having hijinx that deliberately (on Robbins’ side) don’t involve very high stages. The main difference is that the protagonists here are identical twins, so Robbins derives a lot of plotlines and gags from that setup.

But perhaps the main draw for the younger readers of this book is that it’s an audience participation book. Robbins invites readers to submit designs for the clothes the characters wear. It’s not exactly a new idea. Bill Woggon was probably the main proponent of this way of getting readers involved with his Katy Keene series. And, of course, later Barb Rausch would also be heavily involved, and Rausch is Robbins’ friend, so it all ties together, and you don’t even need one of those boards in a dimly lit basement where you connect the players with red conspiracy thread.

ANYWAY.

The unique thing with this book is that the centre spread is made from the same paper stock as the cover (so it’s nice and glossy and thicker), and it’s in colour. So the inevitable paper dolls look better here than in most of comics in this genre. (Robbins had published two collections of paper dolls before, mainly reprinting pre-war stuff, if I remember correctly.)

Every issue has a Designer of the Month.

While I guess you could say that the plots are generally not dissimilar from Archie, they do have a more modern outlook. And breaking the fourth wall is always fun.

It’s not a very pun-heavy book, but when Robbins wants to, she can get the snappy repartee going. Even if some of these jokes aren’t er 100% original, I think the selection is pretty great, and I can totally see myself finding a page like this irresistibly funny if I were 12.

Robbins is a child of the 60s, of course, so you get a few nods towards trying to make the world a better place, but the stories are very lighthearted.

Robbins has a certain stiffness about her artwork, but I think this book has her most free-flowing and goofy artwork. I mean, that play fight up there isn’t extremely anatomically correct, but it’s fun and playful.

She really gets into exaggerating her characters for fun and action here, way beyond what I can recall her doing before this, and I think it reads wonderfully. This series also represents a pretty large chunk of her published artwork: At eight issues, it’s the longest series she’s done? And perhaps the monthly schedule meant that she felt free to let loose more with her artwork.

Comics are mostly read by old people, of course, so it was really great reading the letters column in these issues. There’s a bunch of kids writing in, and really young kids, too. It’s fun to see that they actually connected with this comic book. You have to wonder how they found it amidst the oceans of comics in damp unfriendly comics stores at the time…

Here’s from a new interview with Robbins in conjunction with IDW reprinting Dope:

Dueben: You serialized Dope in Eclipse Magazine and Eclipse Monthly over a couple years. You did a few projects with Eclipse over the years.

Robbins: They were great. They were really inclusive and they were willing to take chances. I have nothing but the fondest feelings towards Cat [Yronwode] and Dean [Mullaney]. I worked with Dean later. He was my editor when I did the collected Miss Fury and he did a gorgeous job on that book.

In a desperate attempt to revive comics for girls in the eighties I had gotten Jim Shooter to let me agree to do a six part miniseries for Marvel, Misty. It failed miserably simply because it just didn’t get any distribution at all. In those days if you wanted to buy a comic, you had to go into a comic book store which was wall to wall boys and they didn’t want to carry anything for girls. Though I used to get manilla envelopes stuffed with letters from girls who loved Misty. They said I love your comic but I have such a hard time finding it. When that ended I went to Eclipse with a proposal to do a comic for girls and they took the chance. We did eight issues of California Girls and it finally failed for the same reason–the comic book stores simply wouldn’t carry it. Dean and Cat were always taking chances. They were really good about that.

Robbins states that she’d prefer to publish the book in colour, but that Eclipse just can’t afford to at the current sales level. And, yes, I think Robbins’ artwork would look even more attractive in colour. There’s so much wide open white space on these pages that screams out for somebody to slap some colour onto them.

With the fourth issue, the monthly pace of publishing was probably starting to take a toll. From that issue on, about half of each issue (i.e., one or two stories, because each issue is three or four stories) is pencilled by somebody else. But Robbins still does the writing and the inking. Above we have Joshua Quagmire who doesn’t really try to follow the model sheet at all.

Carol Lay sticks closer to Robbins’ designs, but it still looks way different. But nice.

But best of all are the stories pencilled by Barb Rausch. They look more glamorous than Robbins’ pencils, but they characters remain very recognisable. And she’s even better with physical comedy.

Of course, when readers send in their designs, it wouldn’t be nice to make fun of the designs in the stories. It only happens here, with a design from Ken Steacy. Since he’s a comic book artist, too, I’m assuming this is an in joke of some kind.

We get an announcement that California Girls switches to a bi-monthly schedule because it was just too much work for Robbins.

The girls go to Hawaii and we get a sweet story about dolphins and the dangers tuna fishing represent. It ends with a recommendation to only buy white tuna, since dolphins don’t hang around those.

Instead of a bi-monthly schedule happening, there’s a four month pause before the final issue, which contains fashion contributions from Mario Hernandez, with an accompanying co-plotting credit.

And we also get tips on how to jazz up our old sweats.

And, as usual in the final issue of a series, we’re told that California Girls totally isn’t cancelled or anything.

A new competition is even announced, as well as a California Girls Paper Doll book. The latter wasn’t published until a year later, and I’ve been unable to find out why California Girls was cancelled, but I’m assuming low sales.

Which reminds me of Trina Robbins’ autobiography, which was published last year and that I read a few months back. I really enjoyed reading it, especially about her boutique in the Village back in the 60s, and all the clothes she designed and sold. I wish it had more stuff about things like California Girls, which (I think?) was barely mentioned. But this is bizarre:

There was so much room to go into the chronological details of Robbins’ publishing career, but instead just five pages are devoted to Wimmen’s Comix. Fewer still to It Ain’t Me Babe and other fairly legendary titles. That’s less space than is given to Jim Morrison, and fewer than to making clothes for celebs on the Sunset Strip.

The gist of the criticism is that 1) comics are interesting and 2) clothes aren’t, so if a comics artists writes an autobiography, it should be all about the comics and not about the clothes.

And while I, too, would have wanted to read more about the comics she made (because I think they’re good), that’s not the book she chose to write. The book she did write is pretty good, though.

As for California Girls, it has never been collected or reprinted, which I think is a real shame. A colour version of this would make a really handsome book. They could include fold-out paper doll sheets. It’d be cute.

Hop to it, publishers!