Author: larsmagne23

Axa (1987) #1-2 by Enrique Romero, Chuck Dixon et al.

What’s this then? Axa? Isn’t she a British comic strip figure?

Heh heh. I like the reverse perspective on the inside front cover.

But anyway, yes, indeed, Axa is the character created for the British tabloid The Sun. Romero had previously illustrated Modesty Blaise for more demure newspapers, but with Axa Romero apparently was instructed to create a series with maximum tits and ass (both of which he is adept at drawing), so he created a post-apocalyptic heroine who runs around naked in the wilderness most of the time.

That’s OK in British newspapers, but this was too risque for the mainstream American comics market, so Ken Pierce Books (who had been collecting the comic strip in trade paperbacks) published a more toned-down version in 1987, written by American writer and Eclipse mainstay Chuck Dixon.

Eclipse had had a long association with Ken Pierce, with editor-in-chief catherine ⊕ yronwode working as his assistant in the 70s, and later with Eclipse distributing some of his books, and selling most of his books by mail order. I haven’t covered the Ken Pierce books in this blog series at all, because they’re somewhat out of the remit, but I changed my mind on this series. It’s got the Eclipse logo, after all, and is very… Eclipse-like.

I haven’t read any Axa strips in, oh, decades. In the 80s, they were lethargically reprinted in European anthologies (a lot of them), but never seemed to get much respect. Might have been all the obvious pandering: At any point in any storyline, Axa’s scanty clothes would go missing. But if I remember correctly (and I may very well not), the stories just weren’t much cop, either.

So I have no idea whether Dixon is just following the “official” backstory here, or is trying to give the characters some more depth than they had originally.

Romero has some difficulty in drawing action/drama scenes, because his go-to poses all seem to come from porn magazines.

Hm… The villains in the first issue are called ‘The Engineers’, but whenever they’re mentioned, the lettering looks kinda wonky. I wonder whether they were originally called something else, and then changed after the book had been lettered?

Oh, Pierce had published more than 100 books by this time? I don’t think Eclipse distributed them all… That’s quite a range of comic strips, from Buck Rogers to Modesty Blaise.

Looking at lists like this makes me want to read them all, but that’s probably not a good idea, time management wise.

In the second issue, Dixon provides another introduction of the Axa universe, which is… rather… superfluous. It’s not a very complicated setup.

By the way, the first issue was presented as being published bi-monthly, and then four months later, the second issue says that it’s a quarterly.

“It is our duty to watch.” I wonder whether Dixon was making a comment on the genre.

And then it’s over, announced by the traditional cliffhanger ending and “NEXT”.

These comics apparently didn’t make much of an impression in the US in this format, either, but they’re OK reads, really.

Here’s Gary Groth on Axa, sort of (during his rant about how awful Eclipse is):

t would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I mean, it looks like Eclipse will publish anything that looks like it has even the slightest chance of turning a buck.

[…]

Or standard T&A offal like Axa and Alien Encounters. (The whole point of Axa, by the way, as seen on virtually every page of the Ken Pierce reprint series distributed by Eclipse, was to contrive ways to rip the heroine’s shirt off. Eclipse has announced that its Axa color comic would clean up its act with a PG version. In other words, the whole sleazy raison d’être of the strip has been skewered. If there’s such a thing as corrupting the integrity of a sleazy idea, Eclipse has done it.)

Zing!

Naive Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas (1986) #1 by Sean Deming, Gerald Forton, Danny Green et al.

What’s this then?

This is the only comic book comic published by the Independent Comics Group, which may or may not have been just an imprint of Eclipse comics. All the other books they published were called things like The Official Hawkman Index. These books were solicited by Eclipse, so I it’s unclear why the Eclipse/IDG split was a thing.

As you can see, not a mention of Eclipse here, but the address (and editors and printers and everything) is the same as on Eclipse comics, so it probably didn’t fool anybody, if that was the point. And I wasn’t going to cover any of the IDG books in this blog series, but I changed my mind. So here we go…

This is in 1986, and the black and white boom (which would decimate the US independent comics business a year later) was getting into full swing. That boom had its origin with Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, but didn’t become a phenomenon until Eclipse published Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamster, and publishers realised that they could publish anything, not matter how wretched, as long as it was in black and white, and retailers would buy tens of thousands of copies of it as “investments”.

While Eclipse were an important player here, they did try to keep things professional while publishing as many comics as possible. So here we have yet another one of these adjective-adjective-adjective-animal comics, but the artwork’s by Gerald Forton and looks quite nice. I can’t even guess at why they published it through the IDG imprint (which was nothing else but indices)…

Oh, yeah, the koalas live in Australia, so the first few pages are upside down.

But when they go through the dimensions and end up in the US, the artwork goes right side up.

And, yes, that’s a typical joke.

The aforementioned Hamsters make an appearance for a few pages, but don’t really have much of an impact on the plot, which there is a surfeit of.

(I like that they do the “courtesy of Eclipse Comics” wink wink thing.)

Perhaps this is why they did it though IDG? Throughout the Hamster invasion, there’s a lot of references to continuity, and perhaps that’s a parody of what the indices read like? Hm… Now I want to see one of the index series. OK, I just ordered the Justice League one, and it may or may not be the next article in this blog series.

Forton draws the koalas and the hamsters pretty indistinguishably.

I thought that was a good joke!

It’s a weird book. The first third is all slapstick and hi-jinx, and the last two thirds are about overthrowing a tyrant in an Arab country. There are some funnier bits in there, but there’s pages and pages of stuff like the above, which doesn’t really register as a parody of anything.

And we get some paper dolls, as we should.

It’s not easy finding any reviews of this book… Here’s a TMNT list:

Of all the funny animal stories on this list Naive Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas is probably the silliest – and that’s not being disparaging.

Army Surplus Komikz Featuring: Cutey Bunny (1985) #5 by Joshua Quagmire, Michael Lee, Dave Garcia et al.

Hey, what’s this? OK, if you’re interested in Cutey Bunny you can just skip the next few paragraphs, because I’m going to witter on about this blog series for a while.

I’ve tried to do this blog series real uh method: I’ve been reading the comics Eclipse published chronologically (well, based on when the first issue of any series was released), and I based that on the work of the nice people at comics.org, who have collated the information.

However, there’s two problems with that approach: The first is that comics.org only lists comics (duh), and Eclipse published other things that I want to cover in this obsessive blog series. The other is that Eclipse co-published/distributed a number of books that comics.org didn’t list as being “Eclipse” comics, but I want to do those, too.

So after having almost finished off this blog series (I wrote the previous entry three weeks ago; it’s the Rawhead Rex post that’ll be published a week from when this blog post is published, and two months after I’m writing this blog post (WE SEEM TO BE TRAPPED IN SOME KIND OF TIME WARP)), I did a mop-up session after having finally discovered catherine ⊕ yronwode’s web site (cleverly disguised), and I ended up getting this extra stack of stuff:

Which are primarily comics distributed by Eclipse, but also a couple of non-comics books that I had initially missed.

*phew*

Wasn’t that fascinating? What? No? Rude.

So let’s see whether I still remember how to do this Eclipse blog thingie… it’s been so long…

Oh, Joshua Quagmire. I remember liking his comics quite a lot from when I was a teenager, but his comics were rather difficult to come by. I vaguely remember (and this may be totally false) that he kinda talked more about publishing comics than actually publishing them. And he famously got into some kind of disagreement with Critters editor Kim Thompson that led to Quagmire withdrawing Cutey Bunny from that anthology, and gave Thompson a very non-funny story about children dying in a nuclear holocaust instead, if I remember correctly.

So above Quagmire talks about the proliferation of X-Men comics and parodies and makes fun of that phenomenon, and then… says that this is an X-Men parody. Sort of. Only not?

And he also helpfully explains that Eclipse isn’t publishing this comic, even if the Eclipse logo is on the cover, but actually explains what it means to be “distributed” by Eclipse, which I had kinda wondered about: Eclipse carried the book on their solicitation form, so the real distributors can order the book through Eclipse (I guess). So money goes from the comics shops to the distributors to Eclipse and then hopefully to Quagmire. Makes sense.

Ah, yes. That’s Joshua Quagmire as I remember him: Pages that manage to be totally chaotic without having weird layouts. There’s nothing on these pages for the eyes to latch on to; it’s all a swirl of characters and speech balloons and captions. That would normally be a major handicap, but I feel that that might be a conscious choice by Quagmire: His humour is based on chaos, and the artwork underscores the feeling of being out of control.

Heh. Costume design by Lela Dowling.

Anyway, Quagmire pours on the asides and bad jokes and visual gags and hopes that cumulatively it’s hilarious, even if the individual jokes aren’t that hot. When I was fourteen I loved this stuff to bits, but now it mostly leaves me exhausted. (On the other hand, I’ve spent the last few days at a music festival, which may explain the exhaustion.)

Captain Huey’s super-hero logic is impeccable.

As the book itself points out several times, there’s isn’t much of a plot. It has an improvised feeling that’s really endearing.

Huh. C.C. Beck writes in.

There’s a backup feature, that’s apparently a continued story about some gophers in space (all called Al), and it’s even more chaotic than the lead story.

Nice.

Eclipse didn’t continue distributing the book (for reasons that I’ve been unable to determine). Aardvark-Vanaheim almost picked up the book, but that deal also went south for unknown reasons.

Cutey Bunny got at least one more issue (from Rip Off Press).

Quagmire is still making comics.

But what did the critics think? Here’s Gene Phillips from The Comics Journal #81 (about the first Cutey Bunny issue):

Quagmire misinterprets the lessons of Mad—for Quagmire’s characters continually remark on the fact that they are characters in a story, or on their foreknowledge of events that have yet to happen. Once or twice this would be cute, but Quagmire runs Æhe device into the ground. Still, if in future efforts he can resist the temptation to “tell all” in this fashion, he might mature into an estimable talent (one recalls how Cerebus started out as little more than parodies and in-jokes).

File this one under “Guilty Pleasures” if you must—but Quagmire’s Komik is one of the few funny-animal comics that deserves the adjective funny.

Here’s Dale Luciano in The Comics Journal #88, about #2:

It’s funny stuff, even inspired in its own modest way. Whether Quagmire has any inclination to transcend affectionate parody-satire and attempt something more ambitious within the Cutey Bunny framework remains to be seen. As noted, the book has modest enough has long been my contention that there are far too few ‘Road Movies’ in the world,” writes Quagmire, “And so it ‘was to somewhat alleviate this deplorable condition that we set about to produce this issue… ‘ ‘—but there’s so little opportunity any more to enjoy this variety of intelligent, unpretentious slapstick that Cutey Bunny is welcome indeed.

Invasion of the B-Girls (1992) by Jewel Shepard.

I’m writing this two months after the previous entry in this blog series, but you won’t have noticed, since that entry was three months ahead of schedule. And the reason I’m all out of sequence here is that the first copy of this book I bought was somehow lost by the mail forwarding service I’m using (the only book they’ve ever lost out of hundreds), so I wondered whether they’d silently just censored the package. (It’s happened to me before with a different service.)

So I had to buy another copy, and that took months to arrive, since I didn’t use any forwarding service.

*sight*

Confused? You should be. Let’s see if I still remember how to do this stuff…

Oh, my copy of this book is signed by author Jewel Shepard. I wonder if they all were?

Shepard seems to be well-connected, and got all those actors together at the same time to do the photo shoot for the cover, I think? I first assumed that it was a composite, but I can’t see any tell-tale pixels…

ANYWAY! This book isn’t what I thought it was going to be at all. By this point, Eclipse Comics had released some pretty exploitative projects like the True Crime trading cards, and since they’d done titillating violence there, I assumed that this was the same, only with sex.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Shepard sets the tone immediately in the introduction: This is a book about how the movie industry and its fans treat women who act in B movies, and it’s not going to be a book of puff pieces.

The structure is very straight-forward: It’s one interview after another with various female actors in the Paris Review mode, i.e., a straightforward-seeming transcription of a conversation. With some pictures of the actors in question here and there.

I’ve watched a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but they mostly do movies from the 50s and 60s, and these actors are younger than that, so I’ve seen none of the movies they talk about. Assault of the Party Nerds sounds great!

Some of the pictures are somewhat racy, but it’s mostly pretty demure, so I wonder whether the typical reader would be disappointed here…

But I’m not! Since this is the last book I’m covering in this blog series, I had planned to just skim it and get the blog done already, but instead I ended up reading it all. It’s a fascinating book, and Shepard is a great interviewer. Perhaps as a fellow actor she’s able to establish a rapport immediately, but it’s more than that. She lets them talk about whatever they want to, but also guides them to the subject of this book, so we get a lot of stories about sexual abuse.

So who was the stand-up comedian on Bachelor Party that tried to rape Monique Gabrielle?

And just about everybody in this book has stories like this to tell, but I guess it’s 25 years too early for #MeToo…

Some of the interview subjects, like Haji, are… characters.

And the casting couch situation wasn’t better in the 50, as Kathleen Hughes tells it:

Sheesh.

Most of these women have had pretty depressing careers doing shitty movies, like Jillian Kesner here, and employ various strategies to getting a handle on it all. Shepard admirably doesn’t shy away from asking the real questions, and shows the subjects to be thoughtful, if sometimes defensive. Kesner is an outlier here, though: Most of them are more light-hearted.

Let’s get real.

Kelli Maroney got a role in a Woody Allen film, but some b-movie director refused to let her go and do it, because they were shooting some shitty thing.

Anyway, I’m just going to stop quoting things from this book now, because there’s so much quotable stuff in here.

It’s a riveting book, well-written and interesting. At least if you’re interested in the movie business.

Shepard has also written an autobiography, which I’m now contemplating buying, and can be found on Twitter.

I was unable to find a single review of this book on the Interwebs, so I’m going to go ahead and assume that it pretty much sank without a trace upon publication.

Hot Pulp (1993) edited by David Caplan.

This is a collection of porn from the 30s.

Sorry, I mean, stories from 30s men’s magazines.

The editor explains (in this LaTeX-typeset introduction) how this little book came to be: He bought a sack of depression era pulps, and now he’s presenting a representative sampling.

And this isn’t very racy stuff. Nothing above the legs or below the tits is ever described, or even hinted at much, so this is less racy than early-30s Hollywood movies, really. Stronger censorship by newsstand distributors back then, perhaps?

There’s a lot of varying descriptions of various breasts, though.

The most striking thing about these stories is that they’re generally well-written. I don’t mean plot-wise or anything, but on a paragraph by paragraph basis. It’s mostly very professional, and much better writing than what I remember from my few forays into 30s sci-fi/fantasy short stories.

The content of the stories is slightly woman hostile. For instance, in this story, Lila is being working a guy into a frenzy to pressure him into marrying her.

So they enter into a bet where she’s being a stowaway on a boat. She hides in a “dark-skinned” “swarthy” man’s cabin, and is pressured into having sex with him. (Which she does.) And then it turns out that he’s a jewel thief, and she turns him in (and lies about what happened), and her object of attention is so impressed (and maddened by lust) that he finally proposes. The end!

I guess you could do a feminist reading of that story: She gets away with it, and marries a really rich guy and becomes a millionaire.

The stories are the main content in this book, but we also get a handful of “art studies” (i.e., naked women with strategic cover-ups).

And a smattering of covers.

I hate retelling plots, but one of the stories is just so bizarre!

Russell visits Paris, and bemoans how floppy the breasts of the dancers at a club is. Pierre shows him around, and Russell is very taken by a 17-year-old singer (with small breasts), and wants to get it on with her, but that doesn’t go anywhere. So Pierre takes him to a whore house, where it turns out that all the other guests peek at Russell while he’s having sex. Russell finds out, gets angry, buys the whore house, fires the prostitute he had sex with, and then announces to Pierre that he’s marrying the prostitute.

The end.

It’s a sort of feverish miasma of a story, but written so straightforwardly that the insanity doesn’t really hit you until it’s over.

Fortunately, there’s ads for books that tell you all the true facts about sex.

Finding any reviews of this book is difficult, of course, but there’s this from Amazon:

Often sold under the cover, these stories feature nubile young women engaging in activities that necessitated the removal of clothing, whether it be skinny dipping in the woods or cat fights in Paris. Not really explicit by today’s standards, these stories can still “do the trick” if you catch my drift.

True Crime Comics (1993) #1-2, True Crime Comics Special (1993) #2 by Dan Spiegle, Valarie Jones, Jenny Proctor, Dave Robinson et al.

None of the series Eclipse launched in 1992 survived into 1993. True Crime is the only new series Eclipse started in 1993, but Eclipse did distribute (and or co-publish) four new monthly series from Claypool (and a couple of graphic novels), so it’s not like they were totally devoid of comics that year.

Veteran artist Dan Spiegle draws all the stories in True Crime (and the one published special). Spiegle had been published by Eclipse before in various series written by Mark Evanier, and it’s great to see his artwork again now.

He’s such a professional, which makes a change from the artists Eclipse published in the 1992 launches. He’s great at anatomy, does clear, but not boring layouts, and just, like, does the work. The backgrounds are all there; the suits are all there.

The story being told here (John Gotti getting to be a made man) is told somewhat choppily. I can see why they’d do it that way: Have one scene that flows naturally, then jump cut to another, and then repeat. You avoid having this short, 13 page story read like a recap, but still you cover a lot of ground.

This True Crime comic is an outgrowth of Eclipse’s true crime trading cards business. Those cards had gotten a lot of press, and been banned here and there, and therefore became a lucrative business. One criticism levelled at the cards was that they glorified crime, and editor catherine ⊕ yronwode got all offended in response, of course.

But of course they did, and of course this comic does, too. Being a made man is totally cool! is what I got from this story, and being impressionable, I’m now going out to find an Irish mobster to shoot.

We also get thrilling crime facts.

Valarie Jones’ story about “THE FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER” (as the cover says), Aileen Wuornos, doesn’t fare as well. Jones tries to get as many details as possible down into the book, and she does explain what happened cogently (I think; I was unfamiliar with the story), but it’s not good comics.

Oh, it’s not the first female serial killer in history? THE COVER LIES! WHAT A CRIME!

This is the first issue, but they had letters about the True Crime trading cards, so they run those on the letters pages. People write in with some pretty strange questions.

Wow. One of the killers they covered on a trading card, Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, sued Eclipse for almost $7 million, but I assume he didn’t win. Or perhaps it became a moot issue when Eclipse went bankrupt after being sued by Toren Smith for non-payment and falsifying their royalty statements.

In the second issue, Proctor and Robinson once again cover the Mafia, but this time from the point of view of a couple of cops.

They plant a bug in a house. The end.

It’s not a very thrilling story.

The second story is by Valarie Jones again, about Amy Fisher, who I had actually heard about, but knew nothing. And again, it’s overflowing with data.

And then we get two text pages about Fisher, or rather about Fisher’s portrayal in the media.

Wow. By 1993, Eclipse Comics really were more of a card selling business than a comics publisher, weren’t they?

Wut? I don’t have that comic! I only have True Crime Special #2, which is about those wacky Waco Branch Davidians. What happened to the George Reeves special? Where we’re going to learn who killed him? (Did somebody kill him?) DID I MISS ANOTHER BOOK!?

Anyway, this is written by Proctor and Robinson and imaginatively illustrated by Spiegle. This time they have 26 pages to do the story, but instead of letting it breathe, they really want to get a lot of details in. But it’s weird how fast they managed to get this published. The Waco thing wasn’t over until April 1993, and the indicia says that this was published in August 1993. That sounds really fast. Perhaps too fast, and the indicia is just, like wrong…

David Koresh seems like a tool.

But the authors don’t seem to hold the ATF in very high regard, either.

It’s not a very compelling reading experience.

A reader asks why Eclipse is publishing all these things, and yronwode responds with a personal story about losing her firstborn child. And then, after making a somewhat convincing argument, she says: “Trying to legislate me (or the television, or the magazine) out of existence will not help solve your problem.”

That’s a very nice straw man argument you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something… were to happen to it.

But let’s get researching about that Reeves comic.

Oh! It was never published:

The idea was to produce the George Reeves story in color, a deviation from the normal B&W comic books this line was noted for. According to Cat Yronwode the one and only way to treat George Reeves with the highest respect was to produce the issue in color. However, in order to break even on the project Ms. Yronwode required a minimum 16,000 copy commitment from the distributor before going to print.

[…]

July 16, 1993 issue of CBG announced Eclipse Books had indeed reached the break even point of 16,000 copies due to the phenomenal response of caring fans and retailers. It also announced a colorist was currently hard at work on the project and the book would ship in time for the San Diego Comic Book Convention in August.

But then Eclipse went bankrupt before they had a chance to publish it. They even had Neal Adams doing the cover.

It’s never been published, apparently, and these comics have never been reprinted.

Spittin’ Image (1992) #1 by Fred Schiller, Ben Herrera, David Williams, Tom Simonton, Terry Dodson, David Ammerman, Dan Schaeffer et al.

This is the fifth and final parody comic book Eclipse published in 1992, and it’s the third written by Fred Schiller. All of Schiller’s books turn out to be about the same thing: The comics business. Perhaps I should have done just one blog post about all three, but I didn’t know! Sorry!

So, once again we have comic book characters discussing things about their comic books. Here we have some Marvel Comics characters who’ve just realised that their artwork has gone to heck (Don Heck) after Marvel’s most popular artists had all left and gone to form Image Comics.

Schiller keeps the parody names (Jim Lee/Jungle Gym Lee) consistent over all his three comics, which is something, even if those aren’t particularly brilliant names…

I laughed out loud at that joke. Trey silly.

As you may have noticed from the top of this blog post, there’s a ton of artists credited, and this book uses that to its advantage. When we shift between comic book properties, they rotate in new artists who emulate (i.e., parody) the target in question.

I liked this dig at trading cards.

Suddenly! Double page spread!

It’s not a particularly original criticism of the Image style: All flashy spreads with little storytelling, but this is an amusing book.

Definitely the best of the bunch.

As usual with Eclipse comics from this era, finding anybody even aware of the books even existing is difficult, but I did find a review of sorts! Here’s the Google Translate version:

What surprises at first glance with Spittin ‘Image is, past the number of artists who worked on this comic, that the drawings are solid and pleasant (apart from the parody of Rob Liefeld’s style). The second surprise is that … it’s not especially funny! A height for a parody!

Admittedly, two or three smiles appear on the face of the reader at first, but the whole is rarely fly. No gags to bang your knees. While the plot has the merit of not going in all directions and keep a thread, with a nice catch, the author seems to lack perspective or imagination.

And that’s the end of 1992.

Illegal Aliens (1992) #1 by Clint McElroy, Mark Near, Bill Maus and Bob Hanon.

This is the fourth parody comic Eclipse published in 1992, and the artwork is by the same team that did two of the other ones.

It the one with the best artwork of the three, for some reason. It’s not like they tried to emulate other artists on the other two books they did, but this feels freer and more relaxed.

Hey! Three franchises in one panel!

The concept is that the old movie monsters want to get back at the new monsters…

… i.e., Predator and Aliens. Was this before that thing was a franchise of its own? If so it’s rather prescient of the authors. Writer McElroy even trademarked “Illegal Aliens”, so he must have thought it had some legs…

He doesn’t seem to have written any further comics in this vein, though.

It’s somewhat amusing, but not very memorable.

As usual with the comics Eclipse published in 1992, I can’t find anybody willing to admit to having read this book.

Loco vs. Pulverine (1992) #1 by Fred Schiller, Steve Donnelly and Gary Yap.

All the new comics from Eclipse in 1992 are either action/adventure type things or parodies. So this must be a parody.

Yup. It’s about Lobo challenging Wolverine to a wrestling match, and hilarity ensues.

Well, OK, some slight mirth ensues.

But I do think that Gary Yap’s artwork is intriguing. It’s like a mixture of things I can’t quite put my finger on… It’s like Matt Howarth crossed with Ted McKeever, with a dash of Rick Geary, only in the 70s. It’s very peculiar, and I think it’s rather attractive.

As with Schiller’s other parody book from Eclipse in 1992, Blandman, this isn’t really that much of a parody of the titular characters as it is a more freeform commentary on comics publishing in the US at the time. It’s true; Marvel Comics pushed Wolverine heavily at the time.

But while I find the antics kinda amusing, I perhaps think that Blandman was a bit better thought out. It seemed to have more of a concept behind it, while this one doesn’t really seem to go anywhere, despite having a solid story structure. Or perhaps it’s just that the jokes aren’t good enough.

And, of course, we get to visit some other random comics, like Cerebus. Yap doesn’t do a very good Sim, but he does do a good Liefeld a few pages later.

The cover is a reference to the Muhammed Ali/Superman thing, I guess? See if you can recognise all the people Yap bothered to draw!

As usual with these late-stage Eclipse comics, I can’t find anybody on the web that talks about them, so I can’t really gauge whether they were well-liked or not. The pre-common-availability Internet is a murky past.

Retaliator (1992) #1-4 by Valarie Jones, Tom Simonton, Gary Yap, Jim Brozman et al.

This is the third and final series in Eclipse’s new line for 1992, FX.

Oh, this is written by Valarie Jones? (Er, wasn’t she called Valerie earlier? I may be mistaken.) One of the other FX series was written by Beau Smith, and what they have in common is that they’re both employees at Eclipse. Well, I guess it’s cheaper to have staff write your comics, and Eclipse were in dire financial straits at this point.

We were promised (in ads) that the FX series would be full on action, and this certainly looks like it’s going to keep that promise. But that artwork doesn’t really look well suited for some of that ultra violence: It’s full and cartoonish instead of “edgy”.

But it’s certainly bloody enough.

Hm… Now I know what this artwork reminds me of. It’s like if Spain did the layouts and the inks and S. Clay Wilson did the pencils. The characters look stiff and awkward, but it has Wilson’s messiness, somehow. The combination is really kinda… offputting?

Look at that pose. I wonder whether the artist used action figures as his models.

Anyway, this book is about a guy who runs around killing people who abuse children, so I thought this was going to be akin to Mad Dogs, which Eclipse had published a few months before starting the FX line. That one is a typical “cops going rogue to kill some bad guys”, played straight.

This one is something different. Yes, you have the vigilante action, but we quickly learn the titular Retaliator isn’t quite… well, and that this is less fist-pumping *yeah* action, it has a bit more depth than that.

But what the fuck is going on here? Is he putting on a shoe? Taking it off? Changing shoes? WHAT?

That they didn’t use Simonton’s artwork on the covers isn’t surprising. Instead they got future superstar Tim Bradstreet to do extremely well-rendered and moody ones.

Of course the editor kills the story. The series has its share of clichés…

But after a couple of issues of killing and police procedures, everything goes all sad. Did Jones work as a social worker before becoming a comics editor or something?

I think Jones has fun with all the Rand and Nietzsche references.

The fourth and final issue is plain weird. It’s told as a flashback without much of a reason, and the entire flashback is drawn in this very basic, sketchy way. I guess it symbolises people memories being sketchy! So deep!

Or perhaps the artist couldn’t be bothered drawing the issue properly, so he halfassed it even more.

The series was originally announced as having at least five issues, so perhaps they cut it short when they weren’t paid by Eclipse, or perhaps the sales were just too lousy? I’m just guessing here; I know nothing.

The storytelling in the final issue is extremely choppy, but Jones does reveal the vigilante thing to be a totally evil Fascist thing, so it’s got that going for it.

Even the printers did a horrible job on the final issue, leaving several pages bleached and even uglier than they would otherwise have been.

To no ones great surprise, this book has never been reprinted. Slightly more surprising is it that I’m unable to find a single person writing about it on the web: Not even a drive-by Amazon comment.

So I’m guessing it wasn’t a major hit at the time.

So much guessing.