Author: larsmagne23

Bedlam (1985) #1-2, Fearbook (1986) #1 by Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et al.

Of all these reprint microseries Eclipse Comics did in 1985, this is one of them. But it’s a bit unusual:

For one, we’re told where the original stories appeared, which almost none of the other ones kept as a secret. Secondly, it’s two artists, and these are not collaborative pieces. Fifthly, these are not from the late 60s and early 70s, but from the late 70s and early 80s.

But most importantly, c), they’re rather good.

Most of the pieces aren’t stories per se, but rather vignettes that hint at a story.

Some of the stories are not in the artist’s usual style, as this not-so-messy Veitch bit.

And there’s some simple gags.

But most of the pieces are firmly horror-based with lots of hyperviolence and requisite gruesome fates. That’s Veitch, I guess…

Somehow, they allegedly got Steven Spielberg to contribute a blurb in the second issue.

This Bissette thing from 1980 foreshadows his attempt at making a series about dinosaurs early in the 90s.

The infamous Nutpeas! Peanuts parody, which is not signed by anybody, but has to be by Rick Veitch, I think. Very unlike his normal style.

And here’s the only collaborative piece. John Totleben was also involved somehow.

So what’s that all about, then? Why not just do one comic per creator instead of mixing it up this way? Both Veitch and Bissette had worked on Swamp Thing by this point (I think), so there’s probably some crossover in the fan base… And I think the mix really works: These are fun, brisk reads.

And then there’s Fearbook.

If Bedlam was a pleasant surprise, Fearbook is a bit of a letdown. It’s slightly earlier work, and Bissette’s artwork’s fine, but the stories have nothing of the inspiration of the first book.

Most of them are written by Jane and Bob Spine, which made me wonder even more just exactly what this was…

Most of the stories are solidly in the EC tradition with a pat twist ending and some lame word play.

The best piece in the book is the only one with artwork by Rick Veitch. It’s a not very original time loop thing, but it’s well executed.

Hm! One of the stories says that it’s produced by the Joe Kubert School?

I was thinking that I was going to do some research here, because Eclipse tends to be tight-lipped about where they source their reprints, but fortunately Bissette pops up and gives us a detailed rundown on how this all happened.

tl;dr: Bissette and Veitch were at that school, and one of the assignments were to illustrate a short horror story for a magazine published by Scholastic. And after graduating, Bissette continued to work for them. These were geared towards young teenagers, which explains the relative dearth of shocking things happening.

Miracleman (1985) #1-24, Miracleman 3-D (1985) #1, The Miracleman Family (1988) #1-2, Miracleman: Apocrypha (1991) #1-3 by Alan Moore et al.

I recently read the Marvel editions of the entire Miracleman saga for some reason or other, so I’m not going to re-read it again. Sorree! Besides, it’s Eclipse’s most famous comic book, and everybody’s already read it, so there’s not that much point in me wittering on about it as well.

So this post’s going to be short, eh? Nope. Instead of writing (much) about the main Alan Moore saga, I’ll do the backmatter and the other comics that followed Miracleman. Perhaps there’s something of interest to talk about there!

Eclipse experimented with printing their cheapest comics in Europe around the time to bring the costs down, and in addition this book was also co-published by Quality Communications. Well, they were reprints of stories that had appeared in Warrior magazine from Quality, but I think these were also published in the UK at the time, so there was… gang-pressing or something going on. I forget the details and it’s too late now to do research since I’ve already finished with this paragraph.

Eclipse inherited the American Miracleman project from Pacific Comics when Pacific went bankrupt. I have no idea whether the printing project was part of that or not…

The indicia says that it’s printed in Finland, and “NOT FOR SALE OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA” which seems to support my conjecture, which makes research even less necessary, right?

Anyway, the European printing venture was a disaster, with many copies of Miracleman being chewed up during transport over the ocean(s). I think Miracleman #1 was the only comic that was done in Europe when all’s said and done? (New DNAgents #1 was supposed to be, too, but Eclipse pulled out after Miracleman #1.)

Anyway, Miracleman (or Marvelman as he was called in the UK) was another one of the many young children’s comics Alan Moore decided to deconstruct and turn into kinda gruesome comics for slightly older children, here represented by the reader looking deeeeply into Miracleman’s eyes. What horrors lurk there!

Dez Skinn (who had bought the rights, he thought, to Marvelman) writes an introduction. The story of who owned what turned out to be not as straightforward as that, which is why Miracleman lay fallow for 20 years after Eclipse ceased publication.

#2 moves to Canada.

Alan Moore is strangely absent from the editorial pages. The letters pages are all done by an ever-shifting number of Eclipse editors, and this is Alan Moore only thing he contributed outside the main storyline. It rather leaves you the impression that he’s only reluctantly participating in this venture.

The series was originally printed in black-and-white, and the results of the colouring job often leaves you with a rather muddled and confused impression of what’s going on.

Right, so Quality published a Marvelman Special, which was also printed in the US, but in 3D?

After the shipping problems, Miracleman #1 became the subject of speculator frenzy, but apparently not extremely rabid. “some dealers are already charging $1.50 for the book.” Where’s mah pearls!

The letter writers are a rather odd mixture of super-hero fans and more indie-minded people, but there you have somebody complaining about J’onn J’onzz retrofitted origin story to compliment Alan Moore on his more elegant way of doing it.

After six issues, Eclipse ran out of reprints and Chuck Beckum was supposed to continue illustrating Miracleman. I read the series as it was published back in the 80s, and my recollection was that Beckum did a whole number of issues, and I was not looking forward to sifting through those issues…

Huh. Eclipse published all their 3D comics in black-and-white editions, too? Signed and limited to 100 copies? I’ve never heard or seen of those: If they exist they must be some of the rarest alternative comics of the 80s…

Yes, that’s Chuck Beckum all right. He’s not the most inspiring of artists, in my opinion.

With this issue, Eclipse started running backup features of very variable quality to pad out the pages. Here’s Steve Moore and John Ridgway .

By this point, the Quality logo has gone, and we get a sudden fill-in issue:

Editor yronwode explains that they had to do a fill-in issue because their offices had been flooded. Which sounds… odd… since they didn’t do this with any of their other comics around this time.

In any case, we get some old Mick Anglo Marvelman stories from the 50s and 60s, and they’re kinda fun. I mean, they’re not good or anything, but the extreme mundanity mixed with the sci-fi trappings is amusing.

And we get a Chuck Beckum pin-up.

And to pad out the fill-in issue, we get introduced to a new, dire-looking super-hero book called The New Wave. It’s a very confused little story, what with them all bickering like a parody of a bickering super-hero group comic.

Ah, yes, this was very controversial. It’s Eclipse’s third comic that has a woman giving birth, but this time it was more high-profile. After all, Miracleman’s America’s #1 Super Hero (!).

But where’s Chuck Beckum? Yes, he’s gone after just illustrating one issue (and doing a few pin-ups). Instead Rick Veitch steps in and draws the childbirth. (Well, and the rest of the book.)

No explanation for the departure is given, and it paints that fill-in issue with yronwode’s explanation in a kinda peculiar light. Did they have that pause because they were looking for a new artist? Or did something else happen?

The most regular back-up feature was Axel Pressbutton by Steve Moore (again) and Mike Collins et al. The first one was rather confused, but the second one had a twist on time travel that was most amusing.

The reactions to the birth scenes roll in, and not everybody liked it.

Rick Veitch’s version of the baby looked a lot like Winston Churchill, but that was only because he’d used A Child Is Born as a reference, and the baby there looked a lot like Winston Churchill, is what I think she’s trying to explain here.

And then the final Alan Moore arc starts, with John Totleben doing the artwork. The issues at this point typically trickled out about twice a year, and each issue only had 16 pages of Miracleman.

But with artwork like that, I guess it takes as long as it takes. It’s rather inhuman in its perfection.

The editor explains that Totleben had eye problems, which is apparently the cause of the erratic schedule.

So Eclipse piles on the backup features even more, so we get more old Marvelman reprints…

And this completely incongruous strip by Doug Moench and Jim Sullivan, which would have fit perfectly in Alien Encounters, but has nothing to do, aesthetically or thematically, with Miracleman. Perhaps it was just something Eclipse had lying around the office?

Eclipse are still pretending that Miracleman is published bi-monthly, for some reason or other… There was a one year gap between the last two Totleben (and Alan Moore) issues.

Because then Neil Gaiman and Chris Buckingham took over the book, and stayed with it until Eclipse went bankrupt. But only lethargically, with an issue showing up now and then.

The book at this point is about what a world with a god-like creature at the helm would look like, and the letters pages are full of discussions about god and stuff. Here’s editor Greg Baisden’s response to a letter as an example.

Buckingham is a chameleon artistically. Here’s he’s doing Jamie Hernandez…

And here’s Mark Newgarden. I mean Andy Warhol.

Critic Ng Suat Tong shows up in the letters pages with a defence of religion or something. But otherwise few famous people.

Baisden promises to discuss religion less, and then he left and was replaced by a new editor. Also during these latter years, the paper quality and the covers and the printing methods seem to shift from issue to issue, with some cardboard covers, one issue on shiny paper, one with a weird new colour separation method, etc. I guess Eclipse were at the move-to-a-printer-we-don’t-owe-money-with phase economically…

I’m just guessing!

A reader reacts negatively to Andy Warhol being in a comic book. “Some people are still straight, y’know.” Huh. I did not.

And then Miracleman ends. Here’s some sketches.

But wait, there’s more.

First there’s the 3D special which reprints old Mick Anglo stuff, but with a framing story by Alan Moore and Alan Davis: Two janitors watch old Miracleman movies.

And they’ve chosen some pretty wacky examples, like this with the frustrated detergent creator. Things go awry as you can imagine, and it involves a lot of bubbles.

I’ll say! Eh? Eh?

Then there’s two issues of Miracleman Family, which is all Mick Anglo reprints, but without a framing story. I wondered what the politics of these boys’ stories were, and I went “hmmm!” in this one where Young Miracleman apparently becomes a unionbusting scab!

But then it turned out that the workers had just been duped by an evil factory owner, i.e., a capitalist.

I think this panel works best without any comments.

Finally, we have three issues of Miracleman Apocrypha, where all the stories are created by people who are not Alan Moore nor Neil Gaiman.

The schtick here is that Miracleman reads comics about the Miracleman family to get a grip on what the people in his world relate to and understand their new reality. So it’s slightly metafictional: Are we to interpret these stories as straight-up normal “here’s some people having fun with the Miracleman characters!” or the more complex “here’s people imagining what people living in Miracleman’s world would write about Miracleman”?

Which makes a huge difference in how you, the reader, would interpret the stories, right?

Because if it’s the first, James Robinson and Kelley Jones’s Kid Miracleman story is downright indefensible. Here’s the story: Kid Miracleman rapes and kills a woman. Graphically. The end. If it’s the first interpretation, then Robinson thought to himself, “huh, it would be really cool to have Kid Miracleman be even nastier than Alan Moore depicted him! How ever will I top Alan Moore!”

If it’s the second, you can almost see this as interesting: “People in Miracleman’s world live in a utopia, but still they feel compelled to create vile comics where Kid Miracleman is depicted as raping and killing women. What does that say about that world?”

On the third hand, writers write what they want to see on the page, and Robinson wanted to serve the readers this shit burger on one level or another, so, like, fuck him.

The one where Miracleman’s wife is a scolding shrew (Sarah Byam/Norm Breyfogle) is tiresome, too, but it’s not all bad:

Dick Foreman/Alan Smith/Pete Williamson’s story about a janitor in Miracleman’s palace is amusing, even if it’s a story that’s been done so many times before.

Alex Ross looked at the wrong model sheet, I think. Instead of Aryan superhuman he looked at the Scooter publicity pictures, don’t you think?

Val Mayerik is somebody that I haven’t kept up with, but his art style has definitely developed since the early 80s.

Melinda Gebbie provides a pinup, which is fun.

Or “Gebbe”, as Eclipse calls her.

A reader writes in to say that he’s appalled by Robinson’s rape story… for all the wrong reasons. “WON”T ANYBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” He only found it “perhaps even a little gratuitous”. Give me strength.

Eclipse managed to publish the first part of the next story cycle before going under, but it’s never been completed. About once a year, there’s rumours of Neil Gaiman and Chris Buckingham completing it, but nothing seems to be happening. If something happens, it will apparently be published by Marvel Comics, who now owns the property lock stock and barrel.

The Comics Journal #172 has the news about Eclipse’s demise, and here’s the bits about Miracleman:

Campiti and Toren Smith are not the only creditors attempting to collect money from Eclipse. Yronwode told the Journal that she suspected several other freelancers had not been paid over the last few years.

Two such creators are Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, whose Miracleman was Eclipse’s most popular title. “I got paid two, maybe three royalty statements in my four and half, five years working with them,” Gaiman told the Journal. “And each time it would begin with me sending faxes and end with grumpy upsets on their part, and eventually I would get a check out of them. I haven’t spoken to Dean since the very beginning of this year.

I think that what is symptomatic of the Toren Smith case is symptomatic of what happened with Miracleman: basically, there’s some very, very creative accountancy going on, with no royalties being paid unless they have to be.” Gaiman said that although he is unsure how much he is owed, he has definitely not received any payment for the HarperCollins edition of his Miracleman collection, The Golden Age. “And probably never the Eclipse edition,” he added. “My guess is, were I to audit Eclipse, I would probably find a great deal of money they owe me, but as it is, I can fall back on my immediate and obvious creditor IDC Comics, publisher of Gaiman’s Sandman.”

Gaiman also told the Journal that it is his understanding that every creator who has worked on Miracleman is owed something. “Alan (Moore, the series original writerl hasn’t been paid any royalties since #1, Mark Buckingham, the artist during Gaiman’s tenurel is owed for at least the last issue, #25. As far as I can tell, none of the artists have been paid any royalties: Gary Leach, Alan Davis, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Chuck Beckett….” he said.

[…]

When asked if he is owed money by Eclipse, Moore replied, “Well, I never saw any royalties (from Miraclemanl, and from what I hear it was one of their bestselling books.”

Well, that puts rather another spin on the whole “why is it never on schedule” question: If Eclipse were stiffing the creators, you can see why they wouldn’t make it their first priority to get the material to Eclipse.

The Unknown Worlds of Frank Brunner (1985) #1-2 by Frank Brunner et al.

I guess it makes more sense to regard the onslaught of artist-focused microseries from Eclipse in 1985 more as a single series with ever-changing focus instead of an attempt to flood the market, which I thought they were at the time. There’s basically a new microseries every month or two, and the issues are released with a two week gap between them, so in total they only vaguely add up to more than a single monthly series…

As usual, this microseries reprints a bunch of early-70s work from an artists that’s quite well known now, and as usual, the editor neither mentions when the work is from now where it was originally printed. But at least the writers are mentioned this time, and that’s a strange bunch. Phil Seuling? Buddy Saunders? Aren’t both of them comics retailers?

The first story is kinda original: It has three different endings, but the storytelling is so choppy that neither of the endings seem to make much sense.

Brunner’s artwork’s quite nice, even if it’s a bit on the amateurish side here (look at the angles on that tractor in the first panel above).

His forte is drawing pretty, but spooky people. These stories were originally printed in black and white, but were coloured by Brunner himself for this edition, and he stays pretty muted with lots of browns, greens and oranges. A very 70s palette, which suits the material well.

The comics.org database claims that half of these stories are from various Warren magazines, but wasn’t that the mascot from a different anthology? The Web of Horror? Which was pre-Warren, I guess… So perhaps they’d already been reprinted by Warren?

The stories are all… uhm… Like this.

The newest piece was done in 1975 for one of the Star*Reach magazines, and has the most assured layout. And you have to love that freak-out posture of that bearded old guy there.

I think Brunner moved into animation in the 90s.

Tales of Terror (1985) #1-13 edited by cat ⊕ yronwode

This is the companion title to Alien Encounters, so read that one for the explanation on how it relates to Bruce Jones’ Twisted Tales.

Steven Bissette was inspired by Eric Vincent’s cover painting for the first issue to write a really creepy story illustrated by Mike Gustovich. It’s… more… than you’d expect from an anthology like this, what with the paedophilia, incest, cannibalism and the er bees, and it more reminiscent of stuff Bissette would later publish in his Taboo anthology.

Like Alien Encounters, the contributors are mostly not household names. Or let’s just be honest: There’s a lot of amateurish and unpleasant-looking artwork in here.

Several of the pieces try to get away from pure fantastic horror and do more reality-tinged horror stories, like this one by Mark Wheatley. This inevitably means that you get a lot of violence towards women (gratuitous and not), as well as sexual threats to women and girls.

It’s not all dreary stuff, though. This little ditty by Eric Vincent, about a neat freak who rises from the dead… and is still a neat freak afterwards is fun.

And good artwork definitely helps. Here’s Attilio Micheluzzi bringing some Italian style to the pages. And “KER-SOCKO!” That’s a very underutilised sound effect in comics. Get on it, creative people.

The contributors are mostly American, I think, but the occasional Brit also shows up, like in this very stylish David Lloyd thing. The story isn’t very exciting, though, and that’s a problem throughout these issues that I’ve had since I was a teenager. While the work in Twisted Tales made a huge impact, I have barely any recollection whatsoever about the material in Tales of Terror: It’s mostly unremarkable.

Except this three-pager by Mindy Newall and Ron Lightburn that made an impression. It’s such a weird and horrifying little mood piece.

Apparently Eclipse ran an anti-drunken-driving campaign piece on some of their comics, and a reader writes in to tell you that he’s one of the good drunken guys with a car who was totally unfairly given a ticket for driving while drunk.

It takes all kinds… Or does it? Does it really?

Bruce Jones pops in for a couple of new stories, and while they don’t have the same sparkle as his older stuff, it’s got as much tits and ass as it had.

Wow! Carol Lay does two stories here in a style I’ve never seen her use before. It’s not like her “mature” half-face/half-teeth style, and it’s not in her Good Girls style.

The drink’n’drive theme continues with this Chuck Dixon/Carol Lay strip… Is the editor soliciting for these stories to troll the letters column?

Hey! Early Sam Kieth! (Written by Paul Alexander.) Kieth is always fun to read…

And Scott Hampton’s art always looks lovely, even if this story is a bit on the unexciting side.

Another reader who’s a drunken driver writes in an compares the oppression people who drink and drive to racism.

Americans, eh?

Canadians get in on the fun by requesting more naked little boys in addition to naked little girls. Fair is fair.

My guess would be that this may be a satirical way of saying to Eclipse “hey, how about letting up with all the underage rape, huh?” But I’m a glass-half-full-of-a-wonderful-lifegiving-fluid kinda guy.

Wow! Rick Geary does a topsy-turvy slightly unsettling page. Has Geary even collected these bits and bobs? He turned up in quite a few anthologies around this time…

The already iffy quality takes a downward turn about issue ten, but people like John Bolton still makes the occasional appearance. It’s a horribly overwritten tale with a trite twist ending, though.

But most of the artwork’s like this: Barely competent and super-boring.

The editor takes time to give practical advice to a reader that sent in some drawings about how comics are made (mostly about page aspect ration). That’s nice.

Eclipse announces that Tales of Terror is ending because Twisted Tales is starting up again, and Eclipse didn’t want to fight with itself for “the availability of top artists”. Uh-huh. Sure.

But what did the critics think?

Here’s Bill Sherman in The Comics Journal #107:

Today, what was considered outlandish in the underground has become less startling in the alternatives. Consider the material somewhat routinely handled in Eclipse’s Tales of Terror; sexual abuse of children, bestiality, rape—and this from the publisher of Tales of the Beanworld! Eclipse’s title is, of course, an attempted follow-up to Twisted Tales, former Warren scripter Bruce Jones’ short-lived showcase of amorality. Without Jones’ consistent editorial personality (one part Feldstein, one part Larry Flynt), Terror has shown mixed success to date in its handling of horror themes: when its writers and artists are on the mark, the book can stand up to any of its forebears; when not, it’s like reading a mainstream comic-book company’s “mystery” book, bowdlerized twist-ending spook stuff about as challenging as something from the Arrow Book Club.

Most of the contributors to Terror, with the exception of half-known pros like Bill Pearson (present in the first issue of Warreds Creepy), are members of the Kubert School generation: promising and not so promising newcomers on the edge of making comic-book work their career.

Hey, he confirmed my suspicions, so he must be right.

Brian Bolland’s Black Book (1985) #1 by Brian Bolland et al.

As with the previous book in this blog series, this is also early work from a then-currently hot artist: Brian Bolland. For most of 1985, all new series from Eclipse were basically reprints of early horror work from hot artists, or books that had arrived from the UK via Pacific Comics (i.e., Miracleman). This one is both: It’s put together by Dez Skinn/Quality, and it’s a reprint of old horror comics.

And as with the John Bolton book, Eclipse neglects to specify when and where these comics were originally published, but it seems like they’re from the British House of Hammer magazine, and created around 1977.

The cash flow situation at Eclipse, which I had assumed must have gotten a boost from taking over Pacific, must have been horrible for them to concentrate this much on keeping afloat with all these reprints. But I have no idea, really. Dean Mullaney should write a history of Eclipse or something…

Anyway!

The first story is written by Steve Parkhouse, and is quite entertaining.

Bolland was an accomplished artist (at least in the inking dept.) even then, but hadn’t yet quite perfected his inhumanly, er, perfect inking style. Still pretty neat.

The second story is written by Steve Moore and the artwork is co-credited to Trevor Goring. Still looks quite Bollandish, right?

The story, unfortunately, is unreadable codswallop.

Some of this material was reprinted in “The art of Brian Bolland”, released some years back.

Brian Bolland, of course, went on to great fame, especially for the work he did with Alan Moore at DC Comics.

But what did the critics think? Here’s Bill Sherman in The Comics Journal #105, who conveniently covers both the John Bolton and the Brian Bolland books:

The new color (this being an American rewvorking of British material) only occasionally obscures the artwork, an improvement over earlier Eclipse mpackagings (Nightmares, for instance) that were as readable as the worst World Color press misregister.

Heh heh.

Oh! It turns out that all these stories are indeed adaptations, but not of books: Of Hammer and Amicus films. That is pretty weird: Not even mentioning that fact…

In the film, that attraction is best visualized in sequences showing the vampires performing magical circus acts With a grace that is simultaneously sinister and fairylike, aided and abetted by a soundtrack and camera speed that accentuated the villains’ otherworldly nature. Bolland’s version Of the carnival (scripted by Steve Parkhouse) by comparison comes across flat and uninteresting, well-rendered but stiff.

Hm… OK… the reviewer mostly sticks to detailing facts about the adapted films, which isn’t very interesting.

Women and the Comics (1985) #1 by Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode

Eclipse had been running ads for this book since at least 1983, but the edition I have is from 1985, but makes no mention of it being a revised edition. On the other hand, Eclipse had a tendency to run ads for books long before they were completed, or were never completed (viz. the aborted Ditko book earlier).

Eclipse mostly stayed out of this aspect of comics publishing, and only published one other book in this general area: Will Eisner’s book on cartooning.

Robbins and Yronwode explain in the introduction why they wrote this book (which gives a broad overview of women who worked in American comics), and it’s anger an annoyance. Which are perfectly valid reasons: Jerry Robinson devoted half a page of his comics to female cartoonists, which is something of an insult.

So what we get here are brief biographical sketches of female artists (and writers) along with some rather cool artwork. The authors cover such a great number of artists that there’s no room for any in-depth analysis of anybody’s careers, but it’s a breezy, interesting read.

They also pick a lot of fun and handsome artwork.

Some is absolutely gorgeous.

Hey, I want to read more of that strip…

We also get some glamour shots of the artists. Well, OK, even if that’s a bib, it’s still a great 30s pose.

There’s perhaps two criticisms to be levelled at the book: First of all, the organisation of the text and the accompanying illustrations is frustrating. Constantly throughout the book, I’m reading a description of an artist, and then I look around the page to see an example, but all I find are different artists. So I flip to the next page, no; the previous page… YES! The other thing is that there are no footnotes. It would have been nice to know where the authors sourced their facts and anecdotes from. If this had been a Wikipedia page, there’d be a [CITATION NEEDED] at least once per paragraph.

On the other hand, this isn’t a scholarly book. It’s here to enlighten and entertain, which it does.

DC was DC even before it was DC, apparently.

This little titbit was amusing: Al Capp is infamously reactionary, but he was so outraged that the National Cartoonist Society wouldn’t let Hilda Terry in that he walked out and boycotted the organisation for six years.

Trina Robbins is, of course, a cartoonist herself, and when the book reaches the modern age, it has to include her, too. But writing about one of the authors in third person is kinda awkward…

Anyway! Fun read, and well made. But what did the critics say?

Let’s search the Comics Journal archive!

Here we go; an article called “More Sexism in the Comics” by RC Harvey:

The list is now considerably longer than Walker’s provocatively meager 20. (Robbins graciously notes that Walker helped in providing information for the particularly on Gladys Parker; and the Museum of Cartoon Art subsequently mounted an exhibit Of women cartoonists that included many more than 20.)

The list is long but it includes few women cartoonists of the stature of Winsor McCay, Sidney Smith, George McManus, E.C. Segar, Harold Gray, Chester Gould, Miltoh Caniff, Al Capp, Alex Raymond, Harold Foster, Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz—cartoonists whose worked shaped the medium or whose creations became part of the American culture.

He then goes on to concede that there were some great female cartoonists, and the rest of the review he’s quite complimentary to the book, which is not what I had expected at all. I had kinda expected some of the older comics historians to be outraged at the project, but perhaps they wisely kept their traps shut.

The book is apparently long out of print, but Robbins did a solo book a year later called A Century of Women Cartoonists, which features a more selective and less exhaustive selection of artists.

John Bolton’s Halls of Horror (1985) #1-2 by John Bolton et al.

This micro-series reprints comics drawn by John Bolton (who was a somewhat big deal at this point) previously published in a British magazine:

It’s not specified what magazine this is, because that would be too easy. A bit of googling indicates that the publication in question might be The House of Hammer, and it’s from 1977, so years before the British comics explosion.

Dez Skinn (editor of Warrior magazine), where that aforementioned explosion would later take place is involved with this publication somehow. At first I thought the “adapted” meant that these stories were adaptations of a different work, but that seems rather unlikely. Especially as no author is named. So Skinn prepared these comics for publication?

Here’s the setup for the framing sequences: We’re (by our proxy up there) invited to join a special club: A club where only monsters are allowed. But don’t worry, a friendly vampire will protect us.

And once in that club, the vampire tells us stories of various monster… this is the werewolf one, I guess. (It’s been several minutes since I read the comic, so I’m not quite sure.)

Bolton’s layouts are sometimes a bit on the confusing side, and the some of the artwork hasn’t survived being miniaturised for US publication.

But he was pretty good at some things even back in 1977. (If that’s when these are from.)

Oh, I forgot to mention that Steve Moore wrote most of these stories. They’re not very good.

It’s basically random monster stuff, with one trip back to olden days when people used to fight dinosaurs.

Like this flesh-eating brontosaurus.

I think the most successful couple of pages are the ones from the club where there’s a stripper who strips very very thoroughly.

And then it turns out that the greatest monster of them all is… Humans!

There was some additional space at the end of the second issue so they added a little tale of priests and demons. It’s uncredited, but that does look a bit like Bolton.

John Bolton continued to work in comics, and has mostly done horror comics, I think, and most of them are painted instead of pencil and ink as here.

I think we’ll revisit Bolton later in this blog series when we come to the Clive Barker adaptations.

Alien Encounters (1985) #1-14, 3-D Alien Terror (1986) #1 edited by catherine ⊕ yronwode

Eclipse inherited two Bruce Jones-written anthologies from Pacific when they went under, but apparently Jones and April Campbell (the co-editor) didn’t want to continue the series:

The anthologies were major sellers for Pacific, and naturally Eclipse would want to keep them going, but Jones and Campbell owned the trademarks to the anthologies, so Eclipse did the next best thing: Relaunched them both under different names. Alien Worlds became Alien Encounters, and Twisted Tales became Tales of Terror.

The reason those anthologies were so successful for Pacific is basically: Bruce Jones. He had an enthusiasm for these short horrific tales that’s contagious, and he’s genuinely inventive. And he managed to get artistic contributions from some of the most famous cartoonists in the business.

So it’s no surprise that Alien Encounters is a disappointment.

Some of the artwork’s still fine, like Mike Gustovich above, but the writing veers between trite and puzzling. Eric Dinehart is on the puzzling side: I liked the elegiac beginning of this tale, but the latter half was all semi-rape.

Bruce Jones had a wide range of styles, but the anthologies were still coherent. The best bit in the first issue, by Ken Macklin et al., is so different in tone from the rest that it rather makes you wish that the entire issue was more like this.

But instead it’s like this Buzz Dixon/Mike Hoffman thing.

I wonder how old some of these artists that yronwode roped in to this anthology are… Kevin Farrell above. My guess would be “very young” but not exactly aspiring.

The response on the letters page is overwhelmingly negative. The first issue is one of the worst issues (until we reach the end, when things become tedious beyond belief), so it’s not very surprising. But it’s nice of yronwode to print these negative takes on the things she’s publishing.

Jones has been frequently criticised for writing misogynistic stories, and if there’s one thing these hacks have continued, it’s in that brave tradition. This Buzz Dixon/Larry Elmore thing is basically “ain’t women horrible even as robots amirite?” Unfortunately Buzz Dixon is the most prolific (or cheapest?) writer here, so he pops up in almost every issue, and all the stories are (to use a technical term from Deleuze) totally fucking lame.

It’s not like the Brit imports they run are any better, though. Here’s an incoherent contribution from “Pedro Henry” (i.e., Steve Moore) and Jim Baikie that ends with… that woman chained to the wall about to get raped? So much fun!

If there’s any pleasure here to be had, it’s from the higher-class artists that start making appearances. Perhaps Alien Encounters sold well enough after a while to pay for better talent? Here’s the always pleasurable Attilio Micheluzzi, who also did a handful of stories for Twisted Tales.

And a Tim Conrad piece, which unfortunately seems a bit rushed off. But it’s way better than the surrounding dross.

I know one shouldn’t peeve about comics that aim for nothing but stupidity, but going to a new planet, landing and then saying “The surface is barren!” is…

OK, I’m not going to peeve.

Heh heh. “Great Druillet!” That’s Timothy Truman. Well, that raises my hope for Scout, which I’m probably be getting to in a few days, but have never read before.

A reader writes in and says “well, how come there’s so many half-naked women here? Aintcha a feminist?” (I paraphrase slightly.) To which yronwode answers “sure! But I’m not one of those booooring feminists who don’t like sex! And besides boys like half-naked women and I’m selling to boys! And besides nobody has submitted any half-naked men!” (I’m paraphrasing extensively; click above to embiggen.)

But apparently she may have been more rankled than she let on, because the first story in the next issue is a Richard Corben/Simon Revelstroke (which reminds me: is that a pseudonym for Corben?) jam:

Not only half-naked men, but very naked men throughout all the pages of the story. Good on ya, yronwode.

The story is in “magazine” aspect ratio, so I wonder whether it’s a reprint from somewhere, or whether yronwode pulled it from a different project and plopped it into Alien Encounters for yuks.

It’s not bad, either.

I think there’s about three stories in the remaining issues that have the same punchline: “There’s something gay going on! Eek! Or Tee hee!” Sort of “gay panic” storylines.

Brit David Lloyd drops by with a very moodily drawn little story that’s much better than the average set by the other contributors.

And then Bruce Jones stops by and contributes three stories. I was excited, but… they didn’t really have the same sparkle as the earlier stories. And less inspiring artwork: Here’s Lee Weeks in the best panel in the story.

This story, Nada, really confused me. It’s written by Ray Nelson with nice artwork by Bill Wray, and the plot is the plot from John Carpenter’s They Live. Which one came first? Hm… They Live was released in 1988 and this book is from 1986. Hm…

Oh! Ray Nelson wrote the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning”, which is the basis for both this comic and They Live. I think perhaps they could have mentioned that it was an adaptation…

Carpenter’s version’s funnier.

Hey! Rick Geary! You can never have enough Rick Geary.

The best Bruce Jones contribution is this one about a guy who paints covers for sci-fi comics. It’s very meta, and the punchline is the cover of the next issue of Alien Encounters. As the page says: “No, we’re not kidding!”

Jim Sullivan (who also had a story in Alien Worlds) does the artwork for this Bruce Jones ditty in #8, and it’s shot from his pencils and sensitively coloured by Steve Oliff. It’s fun, and it’s pretty pretty. The issue is printed on thin, off-white paper, which isn’t ideal, though.

And yronwode explains the next issue that it’s a printer’s mistake.

As the series gets to #10, things seem to be winding down. Jones disappears again and nothing much interesting happens, really: Just one dreary unimaginative thing after another.

I did find this Tom Sutton thing (adapted from a Ray Bradbury short story) intriguing just because it looked so much like a Warren magazine throwback that I started wondering whether it was a parody or something, but apparently not.

Oh, yeah, this was pretty creepy. It’s a story about a 14-year-old boy and his very living sex toy, courtesy of Beppe Sabatini and Gray Morrow. Which made me wonder whether it was translated from an Italian magazine…

This one by Rafe Negrete explicitly says that it was translated, but not where from. It’s very pretty, but, er, the story has a dolphin that commits suicide by spending a night outside his swimming tank.

*scratches head*

Oh, yeah, another one of those gay panic stories, but with very attractive artwork by Scott Hampton.

Timothy Truman wrote this story about Very Strange Soldiers that fight wars and then it turns out spoilers that they’re just toys… which is a story that Bruce Jones did in an issue of Twisted Tales.

Now I’m depressed at the thought of having to read Scout in a few days.

This is the only complete artwork by Steve Oliff I’ve seen, I think? He did the colours to a huge number of Pacific and Eclipse books, and here he’s apparently experimenting with computer art. That’s not much of a story, but I guess he’s having fun.

Yronwode clears up the reprint mystery: It’s from Zona 84, a Spanish magazine. Eclipse and Toutain apparently have a deal where they can reprint each other’s stories?

And then Alien Encounters is cancelled. Yronwode says that it’s because Alien Worlds is making a return (as a yearly book), and “it doesn’t make much sense for Eclipse to compete with Eclipse over the availability of good artists”, which makes no sense. There’s quite a few comic book artists out there. So my guess is that Alien Encounters was cancelled because of low sales, and I’m not the least bit surprised.

Because the final five issues were a chore to get through.

But there’s a 3D special. The 3D was pretty nice (by Ray Zone as usual) and this Mark Evanier/John Pound story was fun. The other stories were pretty unremarkable, so I won’t. Remark on them, I mean.

So there you go: I give Alien Encounters the rating Mostly Unremarkable. I’ve just read these issues, and I’d be hard-pressed to remember any of them beyond a vague feeling of resentment.

Nightmares (1985) #1-2 by Paul Gulacy, Doug Moench, Don McGregor, et al.

These two comics were published on a biweekly schedule (that is, 14 days apart) and reprints two serials published in Eerie Magazine (published by Warren) in the late 70s.

It’s a rather strange thing to do, but Eclipse did a lot of this stuff that year.

All the artwork is by Paul Gulacy, but the first serial (a damp, southern one (with added nuclear waste disposal conundrums)) is written by Don McGregor. It was originally printed in black and white and at magazine size, so it’s been shrunk and coloured (by Steve Oliff).

And some of it survives the transition very handsomely. I guess the originals were done in grey washes? So the colour Oliff adds gives it a slick sheen, reminding me a bit of Richard Corben, perhaps.

The lettering doesn’t fare so well. Many of these overwritten captions are a bit on the unreadable scale. Let’s see… “wander uncomprehending? in an? eternal? monogloid! twilight”. Yikes. Perhaps it’s better not to try to read the text.

DON”T READ THE TEXT.

The other story is written by Doug Moench and is a take on The Wicker Man (no, not that version; the British one): Guy arrives in town and all the townspeople are downright sinister!

The should see a minister.

Both stories are told in vaguely eight page chapters, and both stories are spread out over both issues. Which is also a weird choice, I think: Why not just devote each issue to one story?

Oh, well.

Gulacy’s artwork’s nice, but this is not these writers’ best work.

Heh. The back covers feature an anti-drink-and-driving campaign? They’re reaching out to the kids with that modern video game, I guess.

Killer… Tales by Timothy Truman (1985) #1 by Timothy Truman et al.

I couldn’t quite place Timothy Truman’s name: It’s possible that I’ve never read any of his books. But he was apparently kind of a big deal in 1985: He was the artist on Starslayer and the creator of Grimjack, both at First Comics, and both moderately successful, I guess.

This book is not one of those. The first story here is written by Gardner Fox, who’s was an old veteran at DC Comics, writing pretty much anything there. I didn’t much connect his name with sword and sorcery, though, but that just goes to show how much I know. I mean, just look at those names on that single page: Daral, Azal, Salmaril, Kordonor, Ol’din, Sayera, Elfa, Skaatha!

It’s like those names were created by some kind of sword and sorcery-fed Markov chain. I mean, “AI”, as it’s called today.

So, er… Why? Why would Eclipse print this?

Oh, I see. Yes, snakes are very popular with kids.

Truman explains how the book came together. He was working for game specialist TSR doing various things (some of which are printed after the main story), and got in touch with Fox, and Fox sent him the script. “The kind of stuff I was raised on. The fun stuff.” He contracted with Pacific Comics to publish it, but they went belly up.

And then cat ⊕ yronwode got in touch and asked him whether he had “obscure or unprinted work”…

And then we ended up with this being published, which was the start of Eclipse’s publishing strategy for the next year or so: Single artist collections of obscure stories and artwork published as standalone comics or two-issue series.

My guess is that this was more a question of economic prudence on Eclipse’s part than any burning passion to get stuff like the above into the hands of a captive comics audience. Obscure and unprinted work is probably cheap to obtain.