Author: larsmagne23

Blandman (1992) #1 by Fred Schiller, Bill Maus and Bob Hanon.

Maus and Hanon were the art team behind the less-than-fabulous X-Farce book Eclipse had published earlier that year.

The artwork’s pretty much the same… kinda spindly and with very little contrast between the characters and the background, making each page somewhat indistinct. Especially with all the text floating around.

“Blandman” is a reference to Sandman, and this book isn’t, to my delight, a straight-up parody of Sandman, but instead a rather high concept meta story: The Vertigo comics were selling less, so DC Comics had put them in a home. To get out of there, they have to increase their sales, so all the characters set out on various quests.

And to my surprise, I found the whole thing rather amusing. I mean, I didn’t roll around on the floor and laugh until I threw up or anything, but it’s well done. And Schiller manages to get some pretty good digs in at a lot of people, like the Image creators and the British invasion.

The characters even visit Eclipse, but they turn out to be outstanding in their field.

The Punster! Sorry, those are bad jokes, but they’re perfect in context.

And Jim Lee (I think) learns how to draw without over-rendering.

Not everybody agreed that this was an amusing book:

29. Blandman (Eclipse, 1992) DUD Writer: Fred Schiller/Artists: Bill Maus & Bob Hanon How the mighty had fallen – in the mid-80s, Eclipse produced groundbreaking titles like Miracleman. By 1992, they were vomiting out shitty Vertigo parodies like this. Godawful in-jokes (and not funny ones either). Horrible in every way.

This comic doesn’t seem to have ever been reprinted.

Huh. That’s an ad for the P. Craig Russell adaptation that was never published, and that Russell said “was the most distressing episode Of [his] 20-year career”. It was never published by Eclipse, because Eclipse removed him from the project (by request from Clive Barker, apparently) and hired another artist. But that wasn’t published either, because Eclipse went bankrupt. So seeing them take orders for the book, without even mentioning that it’s not even made yet, kinda makes you go “hmm”.

In 2009, another publisher combined the two artists’ artwork somehow and published the result. I haven’t read it.

Parts Unknown (1992) #1-4, Parts Unknown II: The Next Invasion (1993) #1 by Beau Smith, Brad Gorby, Randy Clark et al.

This is the second of Eclipse’s last attempt at launching a new line of comics, FX. We were promised action and more action.

Hey, that’s nice rain. Kinda Sam Kiethish?

It’s printed on cheap, offwhite paper.

Anyway, this book is about an alien invasion, and like the first FX book, Blood is the Harvest, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It sets up drama what with the cops being ex-alcoholics, but doesn’t do much with it.

That’s it.

The artist has a tendency to drop the backgrounds leaving the characters to swim in a pool of white.

The villains are really villainous.

But the main point of the series seems to cram as many threatened rapes in as possible. A couple pages follow of the alien terrorising the woman… before she’s saved by some humans, of course.

So much rape.

So very much rape.

That’s basically the first four issues of this series, and it ends with our heroes blowing up the villains, but some escape, and then we get the followup series a year later.

OK, we’re now in 1993 and here we WHAT THE FUCK!?!?! THERE”S FOUR MORE SERIES I”VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE IN THAT “ON THE RACKS”!?!?1!

*time passes for research and shopping*

The four series listed after Rawhead Rex turn out to be comics published by Claypool, but “distributed” by Eclipse. The Eclipse logo is on the covers, so I guess I’ll just have to cover them in this blog series. Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to blog.

I had hoped to be finished with this blog series this week, but I guess I’ll have to wait until they arrive and then read them and write something about them, so that’s another two weeks. Oh, well.

Anyway, there are other interesting things on this page. There are only two other comics listed, Rawhead Rex and an issue of Beanworld. If we accept that Claypool comics isn’t just a front set up by Eclipse to publish comics without having the courts seize the money…

… which is probably true, but it’s odd how so many of the people who contribute to these comics are Eclipse mainstays…

… all the other entries there are trading cards. There are six sets listed, including the Congressional Medal of Honor Trading Cards. That’s mind-boggling.

Oh, I lied, there’s also Todd McFarlane’s Spawn Pogz.

But there’s more! yronwode quotes Ken Pierce saying “Don’t publish blank paper: Make every page an ad for another page” in the indicia. Wise words.

And finally, the main text itself is very strange. “Some comic book fans: Portraits drawn from life”. It’s all about people getting divorced.

Does that have something to do with yronwode writing a CBG column in September of that year:

However, if you just look at the first letter of each line, with capital letters marking the start of each new word, you seen realise that there’s a message forming – the sixteen lines above give up ‘Those Who Read Code,’ and the full text reveals this:

Those Who Read Code Can Get The Real News Dean Has Left Me For A Woman Named Jane Kingsbury Who Has Bone Chips In Her Brain – Cat

Mullaney and yronwode were in the middle of a divorce, which may explain things..

What? What? Oh, we were reading a comic book called Parts Unknown? Right? I think?

Anyway, the second series is printed on nice, white paper, and they’ve gotten a new inker in, John Sartra.

And, yes, it all looks a bit more “Image” now. There’s even an explicit McFarlane reference.

The comic is still about what the comic is about.

And then we’re promised a next issue, and that didn’t happen, because Eclipse went bankrupt.

I think this might be cat ⊕ yronwode’s last text in any Eclipse book? (I’m not quite sure, because I haven’t read the other 1993 books yet.) And it doesn’t say who wrote it, but from the biographical details, it has to be her.

She reminisces about her early years in the business, doing work for Ken Pierce, who… sounds like a character, is that anecdote is typical.

But back to Parts Unknown… the artwork’s OK, even if the storytelling isn’t particularly well developed. But I found the entire thing tedious in the extreme, which is why I was really surprised to see that not only has this series been collected, sequels have also been published by several companies, apparently.

Perhaps people just like to see inter-species rape teased:

This review can’t be backed up by cold hard facts because i can’t find a product description of it on the comic itself, or anywhere on the internet. My guess is the company that made it are trying to hide it’s shame. But this being the second issue of the series I was a little lost reading it. Not that I’m not lost anytime i read one of these crappy comics that were put on my shoulders by the evil fates that watch over me.

This story was written by Beau Smith and Penciled by Brad Gorby.(If i had to guess what they are up to now, i would assume running from the nationwide manhunt for multiple multiple rapes.)

Can’t tell whether that’s a positive review or not!

Not!

Blood is the Harvest (1992) #1-4 by Clint McElroy, Luciano Quieroz, Dennis Cramer et al.

This is the first of Eclipse’s new FX (or F/X, as they sometimes called it) of comics. The ads promised “all the action of today’s hottest films”. Let’s see whether this sizzles or fizzles.

Back in the olden days on 1987, when Eclipse published a lot of action/adventure comics, they were all in colour and on kinda nice paper. These comics are neither, but the artwork isn’t bad. It’s a bit too messy for its own good, but it’s OK.

Excellent taste in movies.

From the second issue, all the FX books carry scratch and sniff, I mean, scratch and win lotteries. So you’re supposed to scratch first the top line to see what you’re playing for, and then scratch no more than three boxes, and if the words match, you won.

Is that how these things usually work? I’m not very er knowledgeable in this area…

Among the things you can win are a trip to Hollywood, $500 in Eclipse comics (I’m guessing), original art from these comics, graphic novels, subscriptions to the Comics Buyers Guide and Wizard, and something called “ComiCovers”, and for the common people: One Eclipse comic book.

Most of these FX comics I got from Ebay, and they haven’t been scratched. Sad. So I gave it at try (even if the prizes might just be ever-so-slightly expired), but I couldn’t make a dent in them with my nail. So I got a screwdriver, but all that did was scratch the paper itself.

I guess whatever glue/substance they’re using here has just become bonded to the paper over these 25 years…

But, my, what a change in Eclipse: Three years earlier, they were publishing things like Brought To Light, from top shelf creators, and getting attention from the national press for bringing mature themes and politics to comics.

And now they’re doing scratch lotteries to sell pulp.

Somebody should adapt the Eclipse story into a tragic opera.

Aaaanyway. This comic is “all vampire action”, and it’s about a gang of mercenary vampire hunters. It doesn’t go for all out drama, but instead putters along quite well, doing witty repartee whenever the occasion offers itself. The storytelling isn’t all that accomplished, though: The pages don’t read that well, and it was just a chore remembering who all these people were.

That’s so woke! (*sigh*)

For the fourth month running, we have Eclipse listing Miracleman #23 and Show Business (which was never published) as being “On The Racks”…

Plot twist!

Eclipse were heavily into having letters pages in the mid-80s. It’s a way to reach out to a fan base, but it’s also a way to fill pages. For the FX line, they fill some pages by running excerpts from the other FX books. Since there are only three, they had to do some reruns, reprinting the same pages. Which is just plain weird.

Oh, that’s how they sold the 12 pack cards! As 36-packs! And there are random cards in each pack, so you have to buy a lot of them to get all the 110 cards. For instance 36 of them. Which comes to $32.

Man, that’s a nice return on so little effort.

Oh, yeah, I just wanted to give you an example of the witty repartee.

But you have to admit, that’s a really, really good ending.

This wasn’t announced as a four issue series, and the ads for it let you buy five issues, so I wonder whether they cut it short or what.

That’s… not a good job on that Clive Barker ad. I think perhaps it was originally a colour ad, and they just… made it black and white through a not very good process.

Quieroz went on to work for DC Comics. McElroy seems to have written a few comics after this one, but then dropped out of the business, apparently.

Metaphysique (1992) #1-2 by Norm Breyfogle.

Perhaps the right way to think about Eclipse’s 1992 is a return to what had worked for Eclipse last time they’d had serious money problems. In 1986, after a flood wiped out their back issue stock, they went all in on the black & white boom, pumping out a large number of titles, including parodies (which we’ve just seen with X-Farce). They also had successes with a number of action/adventure series (and now there’s Mad Dogs).

They also published a large number of “micro-series” reprinting old fantasy and horror comics, and what do we have here? A two issue reprinting some old Norm Breyfogle comics.

This one has a framing story (well, not really a story, but still), so there’s some new work. But as you can see, as opposed to those old fantasy reprints Eclipse did, this one is in black and white, and on non-white, cheap paper. (The mid-80s reprints were all in colour and on nice paper.)

As is the norm with these things, we get a bunch of unconnected stories, done in a variety of styles (since these probably were made over a long period of time). The framing story seems to hint at some unity in terms of theme, but I couldn’t really detect any.

I wonder whether this was originally a colour comic? It looks like it was made for a magazine sized anthology, based on the aspect ratio, but, as usual, there’s nothing that says where these pieces are from.

Most of the stories aren’t in that lush style, unfortunately, but instead in this. But at least he has his characters protest when the as-you-know-Bob-ing gets too much.

It’s not always easy to tell whether this kind of stuff is meant to be so over the top that it’s funny, or whether it’s just… the way it is.

Oh, is that the rationalisation drunk drivers use? I’ve wondered.

A couple of the stories definitely go for humour.

Hey, that’s a real purdy drawing thar.

Breyfogle went on to greater fame as an artist on Batman comics, but he returned to the Metaphysique character, too.

Mad Dogs (1992) #1-3 by Chuck Dixon and Victor Toppi.

Eclipse’s 1992 trundles on with a new action series from Eclipse veteran Chuck Dixon and Eclipse newcomer Victor toppi.

I’m not familiar with Toppi’s work, but from the looks of it, I’d guess that perhaps he’s an Argentinian who’s worked in Italy, or vice versa? The latter sounds kinda backwards, but “Toppi” does sound Italian. Anyway, Dixon had previously worked with several Argentinian artists at Eclipse, so… Perhaps? OK, I’ll do some research at the end of this blog post.

You have to hand it to Dixon: He introduces his main protagonist and the concept very efficiently. The page to the left is the first in the book, and on the second page we have two people who know each other very well stating out loud everything we need to know (but they already know). It’s efficient, but it’s it bit eye-roll-inducing.

The concept is: It’s a dirty world, so we need totally out-of-control semi-cops to take down the really bad people.

Most of the first issue is taken up by introducing the team. I found it a strange choice (since this is a three-issue mini-series), but Dixon had a lot of fun with things like this:

These cops as bad. So bad.

Not only are they bad, they live irony.

The semi-cops will be able to finance their capers by impounding all the money they encounter (from the bad guys, of course). That’ll never fly in the real world! This is so unrealistic!

So it’s the basic Fascist plotline, right? Right.

In Eclipse’s heydays, they published virtually nothing but 32-page floppies. These usually had something in the neighbourhood of 20 story pages, leaving a lot of space for letters pages and ads. These issues are, weirdly enough for a company in economic problems, chock full of story pages. They could easily have wrung another issue out of this series…

Toppi’s artwork is very Italian. Classically Italian, I’d even say, but that might be confusing. There’s a special hard-boiled noir style beloved of Italian comics artists from the… sixties? and on. Reading European comics anthologies for boys in the 80s, it was always a nice thing to encounter.

I like Toppi’s hatching, with all the identical width lines going here and there, shaping the face. Toppi uses tone very sparingly, just blotches for extra grittiness like in the panel above in the background.

However, he doesn’t really do action that well. First of all, it’s trey confusing. The tall panel almost looks like it has the guy to the left poking in from a semi-panel, but he’s there, just very tall. Who’s beating up who takes a “hm, that guy’s in a t-shirt, so I guess he’s the cop” ponder. And it’s not helped by Toppi going super-deformed on everybody’s faces when they’re having an action moment. T-shirt-guy’s mouth in the bottom right corner is just bizarre.

Dixon, on the other hand, is in full command of current Chinese slang. “Gaijin”. That’s so a Chinese word. Or one of them there countries.

So, Dixon has the basic Fascist law and order thing set up, but when he got to this point, where one of the semi-cops is threatening to deport the villain’s girlfriend, I wondered whether Dixon was really making a satire of the genre.

But, no, the semi-cop really has a heart of gold, just like normal.

Oh! So Eclipse were launching a new line a bit later in 1992. “All the action of today’s hottest films.” It’s weird that Mad Dogs isn’t part of that line, because it seems like it’d fit perfectly. But perhaps they only came up with that idea after Mad Dogs had launched?

On the coupon there, you can order issues 1-5 of The Retaliator and Blood is the Harvest. Only four of each were published, so I guess some readers had to get a refund. (Tee hee.)

Oh! A new Aztec Ace series! It never happened, but you can order the three first issues anyway. More refunds! (Tee hee.)

So let’s have a look at what the On The Racks column looks like in 1992. You have the first three FX action comics, two parody comics, a book by Mark Evanier (that was never published), a Clive Barker adaptation, Miracleman #23 (which has been announced as being on the racks for several months now, I think), this issue, and a Fly In My Eye anthology. So all the new stuff (that actually appeared) is action-oriented floppies and parodies. It’s a huge change from a couple of years earlier.

OK, I just had to include that insane splash page. Look at those mouths! Just look at them!

This isn’t a very good comic, but Dixon knows how to tell a story professionally: It has good flow and touches upon all the required clichés. And I like Tippo’s artwork, so this certainly wasn’t a chore to get through or anything, but it’s not… a particularly exciting comic book.

OK, I was going to do some research…

I found something, and here’s what Google Translate says it means:

Victor Toppi (1956-1992) studied with Pablo Pereyra, later playing as an assistant to Ricardo Villagrán in the series he did for Columba during the seventies, such as Mark, Or-Grund or Rondstad, then making his own Unitarians, the series Wolf and later Wotan, with a script by Armando Fernández, Thalerg (with Amézaga) and Atila with pencils by Carlos Leopardi. Also important was his record production for whose magazines he did among other titles “Génesis” (Corto Maltés, 1978), “Chronicle of three wars (Pif-Paf, 1979),” Parallel worlds “,” Etorix “, (Gunga Din, 1981) produced by the Studio Nippur IV and signed by the, “The visitor” (Tit-Bits 1991) with a script by Ricardo Barreiro, “Funland”, “The rules of the game” and “The perfect policeman”. Between its works for the outside they emphasize those realized for Italy and the United States, in this case Mad Dog (1991) with script of Chuck Dixon.

Err…. Oh, he really is a veteran comics maker, and died the same year this was published? And he was an assistant to Ricardo Villagrán, who Eclipse had published several times before. And there is an Italian connection.

This comic book has apparently never been collected or reprinted.

X-Farce (1992) #1 by Don Chin, Bob Hanon and Bill Maus.

Let’s party like it’s nineteen eight six!

For several years, Eclipse had been focusing on more expensive comics formats: Graphic novels and “prestige format” $6 fully-painted adaptations. That seemed to wind down a bit during the last half of 1991, and Eclipse started launching new series of (cheaper) floppies.

Sounds like a sensible thing to do to get the cash flow back up: Around this time, rumours had started circulating about Eclipse not being able to pay their bills on time, and creators (like Neil Gaiman) had started withholding their work until they got their next check.

So who does Eclipse bring in to get things flowing again? None other than Don Chin, the person who wrote the allegedly best-selling Eclipse comic book, Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and was instrumental in getting the black and white boom going in 1986. (Followed by the bust that nearly wiped out US alternative comics in 1987.)

So here we have a parody of Rob Liefeld’s X-Force comic book, which had recently launched to huge sales.

Liefeld is an easy mark for parody. He’s so distinctive: All those little lines, everybody looking constipated and shouting at the same time, those tiny feet, all those pouches…

And the artists here basically do nothing with all that. Except for the large shoulders on Cable TV (he’s a parody of Liefeld’s Cable character; get it?), there’s basically nothing in the artwork that references Liefeld.

I haven’t read Liefeld’s X-Force (because I didn’t read super-hero comics for a couple of decades back there; so snooty), so I have no idea whether it’s a good parody of the X-Force origin story or not. I mean, it’s possible.

But it’s all so lazy. Deadpool becomes Cesspool, Boom Boom becomes Shboom Shboom, etc. She has the most successful scene in the book, though: It’s a nice bit of silliness.

But, basically, this really is the black and white boom all over again. It’s a comic that doesn’t have much reason for existing except as an easy cash grab.

I hope it helped.

The best page in the book is probably this Todd McFarlane parody, though.

But perhaps that’s just me being a total grouch. The same creators delivered a followup-up one year later from Parody Press.

I’ve been unable to find anybody on the web admitting to having read this, so I don’t know how it was received.

If I count right, there’s three or four more of these parody comics to follow over the next few months in 1992 from Eclipse. Hard times.

Crime and Punishment Trading Cards (1992) by Bruce Carroll and Bill Lignante.

I don’t know what format these cards were originally sold in, but I’m guessing that the were sold in 12-packs (like the comic book creators) and not in one big gulp (like most of the previous ones).

The person I bought them from (on ebay) has helpfully put the set into a plastic box.

So what’s this then?

It’s a card series about a handful of trials! It’s even weirder than the other Eclipse trading cards. For instance, the Sirhan Sirhan trial goes for 22 cards. I can just see the kids desperately trading for the 19th card just to know what Sirhan’s lawyer said towards the end of the trial.

We get some very famous trials, like Charles Manson and Patty Hearst, and trials of people related to those cases.

I guess as gimmicks go, this… is a gimmick. But I have to wonder whether these sold at all. The previous sets had a much simpler hook: They were basically one person/one card, while these are extended essays over a bunch of cards, and that’s not even a conversational piece.

And the artwork is uniformly uninteresting.

There’s five limited edition bonus cards. My set only had two of these! Oh noes!

This news story from The Comics Journal 148 by “MCH” (I should look that up in the TCJ indicia) has a story that seems relevant.

It’s about a different set of trading cards, True Crime:

More than three months before they were scheduled to ship, Eclipse’s True Crime Trading Cards became the topic of intense media coverage. At one point in early February, the Eclipse staff set production work aside to respond to charges that the cards were exploiting crime victims. Entertainment Weekly started the mania with a short news item about the cards in its Jan. 31 issue, based on an Eclipse press release. The item claimed that the cards “both inform and exploit the current fascination with murderous rampages” and concluded, “Kinda makes one nostalgic for when cards just sported heroic sluggers.”

[…]

As the story snowballed, Yronwode, Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney and True Crime writers Valarie Jones, Peggy Collier and Max Allan Collins spent a week trying to get the story straight in interviews with newspaper, TV and talk,radio outlets across the country. Dean Mullaney’s New York-based brother (and Eclipse chairman) Jan Mullaney took the cause to New York media, including the Today show. “An Associated Press was very hostile.” Yronwode recalls. “She was screaming at me on the phone, saying •how can you defend what you’re doing?’ As the days wore on, we sent information on our cards and on the history Of non-sports cards to all the callers. The radio callers and the coverage became about 50% favorable.”

In her handouts, Yronwode noted that current-affairs trading cards have actually been around longer than baseball cards, and that Eclipse’s line includes serious examinations of the savings-and-loan scandal, the Iran-Contra affair, and the Kennedy assassination.

“The worst thing,” Yronwode said, “is that a Christian ministry group asked its members to mass-write and mass-call us. They’re inundating us with impassioned letters, promising to do everything from pray for us to boycott our products. When I talk to them and tell them what these cards really are, they sometimes act ashamed that they were so misled. One thing this has done is reimpress me with how willing people are to be used by other people. It reminds me of people in the media last year telling how Saddam was like Hitler.”

That’s the set I thought this was! I bought the wrong one!

Ooooh:

Lignante is also a cartoonist and courtroom artist. For the past 25 years he’s illustrated courtroom scenes for ABC News, covering the trials of Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Angela Davis and John DeLorean.

Those drawings, which used to just “sit around the house for years,” are on packs of trading cards published this month by Eclipse Enterprises in Forestville, Calif.

Called “Crime and Punishment,” they come 12 to a pack and feature dramatic courtroom scenes, accompanied by writer Bruce Carroll’s text on the back. (They’re available at Golden Apple in Los Angeles.)

Lignante says that when attempts to get his courtroom illustrations compiled into a book didn’t work out, he tried trading cards.

Now it all makes more sense. It’s the artist’s project, and he already had all the artwork ready to go, so I guess the investment was minimal for everybody involved.

Famous Comic Book Creators Trading Cards (1992) edited by cat yronwode.

I’ve written about several other “trading card” collections from Eclipse Comics in this blog series, but these are the first cards that are like actually trading cards. All the previous ones have been 36 cards in a box. Not much trading there.

But these came in 12-packs, so you perhaps had to actually do some trading to get them all? I think I saw an yronwode editorial where she said they’re doing the cards in this format because YOU DEMANDED IT. I guess it’s more fun this way.

Non-trading cards are just… cards…

Looks like a shiny foil pack. I’ve never seen any of these myself, so it’s all new to me.

The person I got these from (via ebay) has helpfully ordered them by serial number in these… er… card folders? Sorry for not being all courant up in your terminologies.

The first striking thing about these cards is that American comic book people apparently have little in the way of a sense of colour. And that whoever dropped in those halos and eye-gouging backgrounds made things a lot worse.

Oh, and that Bill Sienkiewicz looks broody enough to outweigh all the other people.

Some people look really great, though. Even if the saturation is like gonzo.

But we haven’t discussed the back of the cards! They have all sorts of stars. Birth day, birthplace, whether they’re left- or right-handed (!) and where they went to school. I’m guessing that this format is taken from sports cards? Perhaps?

After that we basically get a career recap, heavy on the bibliography.

Some of the pictures on these cards are just mind-bogglingly bad. Couldn’t they have gotten a better one of Al Williamson?

Anyway, I surmise (from my spelunking down ebay to buy these) that the main point of these cards was to have something you could ask these people to sign at conventions. I saw somebody sell a complete signed set, which I guess also means that everybody were alive at the time these cards were published?

The selection of creators is slanted towards people working in super-hero comics, with a selection of people working in more genre-y indie comics. We don’t get anybody from the art comics world or even famous people like the Hernandez brothers from the more alternative world. We do get a couple of more underground aligned people like Howard Cruse, though.

My set has 109 cards, and I don’t know whether that’s all the cards in existence or whether there were more.

The signed cards seem to go for around $10 a pop.

Some people were amused:

Eclipse Enterprises honored the industry in 1992 with their Famous Comic Book Creators trading card series and made such opportunities available to the general public. Some legends like Will Eisner and Jack Kirby appeared in more conservative attire, opting for sweaters, while some younger go-getters left less of their bodies to the imagination. I can only speculate about what circumstances might have led to Eclipse acquiring the photos for its more topless images, but the 110-card set spanned decades of fashion choices and mustache styles.

Rich Kreiner writes in The Comics Journal 155:

The texts are uniformly interesting. Length proves wholly indadequate for certain creators — Kirby, Schwartz — and far too long and indulgent for certain rookies. It’s good to see credits assembled — for Frank Springer, for instance, whose diverse Work includes Dell’s Brain Boy and DC’s “Dial H For Hero” as well as Evergreen Review’s “Phoebe Zeit-geist. ” There’s a mix of trivia (“Artists were so distracted by his work that Reed (Crandalll was told not to bring it into the Eisner-lger shop. “) and truth (Bill Sienkiewicz’s full name) in which no Eclipse project goes unmentioned. But when, as with Ron Frenz, did we begin dignifying shameless imitation (in this case in Thor) as ‘ ‘recapturing some of the grandeur and dynamism from Kirby’s run”?

Visually, the cards have their high points. Harvey Pekar’s downturned mouth, tilt of head, and wild hair embody that indomitable punk virtue of not giving a damn about what you think. Credit Todd McFarlane with a bit of calculated wit in his bare-chested, bat-swinging pose in honor of the famous Jose Canseco baseball card. Finally there is something haunting about seeing cards 95 and 96 back to back: the clear photographs of Bill Finger — casual, in white cap and tee-shirt — and Bill Everett — posed, pipe in mouth, hair tousled, lifting his gaze to you from what ought to be grand architectural plans of some sort.

Uniformly interesting? Sarcasm, man.

Wilderness: The True Story of Simon Girty (1992) by Timothy Truman.

Ye gods! Another Truman book!

This seems to have a convoluted publishing history. This was apparently first self-published by Truman (under the 4Winds moniker) in 1989 in two volumes. Eclipse then allegedly published a collection edition in September 1992… but I can’t find any evidence that that actually happened. Eclipse had a tendency to announce that they would publish something, and even sell it via mail order, long before they actually did, and sometimes they dropped it silently from their schedule.

So comics.org and Amazon both claim that Eclipse did publish it, but neither include any pictures of the book, and the one seller on Amazon wants $1K for it. So perhaps it never existed.

The edition I have is from 1998 and is from ACG Books, which looks pretty much like a semi-facsimile edition: It has a lot of ads for other Eclipse comics in the back, but there are no Eclipse logos anywhere. So somebody has been using whiteout.

Aaaanyway! This is yet another one of Truman’s book about the late 1700s in the Trans-Allegheny region. He’d cover this from a different angle in Straight up to See the Sky, but this centres on one person only: Simon Girty, who was (is?) apparently a controversial figure. Jack Jackson, appropriately enough, since he’s done several historical comics, provides the introduction.

This book is very much a polemic, but Truman is arguing against things I’ve never heard about… because I know nothing about this part of history. But I can well believe that the common American take on a guy who went to fight for the British and the Native Americans as being, er, somewhat adversarial.

Truman explains his approach in this book: He quotes extensively from letters written at the time, and synthesises from wildly different accounts what he believes must have happened. And, also, that he’s done so much research, dude.

And the book gets underway in a very promising way. Truman would adapt Tecumseh! a year or two later (which touches on many of the same themes again), but the artwork there was rather uninspired.

But this book is obviously a passion project for Truman, and he doesn’t stint on his artwork.

And if only the entire book was like this: Moody, deadly serious, panoramic, intense, REMEMBER TO LOOK IN THE THESAURUS FOR SEVEN MORE OF THESE WORDS.

It’s not perfect. I mean, Truman has never really mastered the challenging, er, challenge of drawing children. He basically draws an adult head, but fatter and with fewer lines.

And Truman concentrates so hard on bringing mood that he doesn’t always focus on telling the story.

And sometimes he goes *so* *hard* in for *intensity* that we’re off to self parody town. I could help snickering a bit over that page. It’s just too… much.

But, I mean, nicely draw, man. Love Truman’s dirty, smudged line.

Well, that’s all very well and good, but once we get a bit further into the book, things get more complicated and Truman really lays the verbiage on. He also has sudden insights into Girty’s thoughts, and Girty’s thoughts are, strangely enough, as portentous as Truman’s captions: He’s “fascinated by the subtleties of their words and movements”. Sure!

“Girty felt useful, he felt needed.”

Girty participated in so many battles and wars, and it seems like we get a presentation of… way too many people in each of these. While this book started off well, the latter half of the first part is basically like reading an illustrated recap of too many history books. We also get captions that are thinly veiled critiques of… something?… that I’m not quite aware of what they other people say happened. It’s frustrating reading a polemic when you don’t know what the other side says.

The second original volume looks and reads somewhat differently again. Truman has suddenly discovered zip-a-tone (or something) and swathes all the pages in it. I mean, it looks great, but it’s weird shifting art styles like that. The lettering is also bigger, which made me wonder whether Truman had also started drawing in a smaller format, but I… don’t think so? Things look muddier here than in the first part, so, if anything, it looks even more reduced.

Nice parallel!

Much of the second part is unfortunately anecdotes like that. Girty’s story doesn’t have much of an arc after a while, but I guess life’s like that. But we get a lot of these things that don’t really make that much sense and aren’t that interesting. I’m guessing that a lot of stories about Girty exists, and Truman just wanted to put them all in and put his own slant on them to explain how they make sense after all.

In the afterword we get to know what happened to all the people…

… and a list of all the people Girty saved from being tortured to death by the Native Americans…

… and a very long bibliography.

I felt rather impatient reading parts of this book, but you can’t deny Truman’s passion for the subject, which can sometimes be infectious.

Here’s Truman in an interview:

The more research I did, the more I saw how unfairly he’d been treated by American history. So I became determined to tell a more truthful history about the man. As a result of the work I did, many other people began reexamining his reputation and his place in history. His relatives in Canada and the U.S.A. even made me an honorary “cousin.” So I’m very proud of the Wilderness graphic novels, to say the least.

Hm… I can’t find any real reviews of this, but here’s one from Amazon:

Nevertheless his artwork is good and I believe the history was sound. Nevertheless I was left with the impression that the story was not only choppy, it was incomplete. Perhaps the book was, in fact, geared toward younger readers and some of the more graphic incidents–incidents of torture and mutilations that Girty may have participated in–are largely skimmed over. Then again, the author may simply be meticulous in his interpretation of history and doesn’t want to speculate on things in which there are no living witnesses.

And another:

Like Truman’s “Straight Up To See The Sky” I have searched for a copy of this book for aprox 17 yrs! Also like the afore mentioned title I came just short of giving it a 5-star rating. The reason why I could not is, also like the other title, there is the episode with Joseph Brant where Brant supposedly sinks to his knees and begs Girty’s forgiveness for a past confrontation. I have long studied the life of Joseph Brant, and I even reenact with the recreated Brant’s Volunteers (so I might be a wee bit biased), basing my persona on of all people Simon Girty(!!), but in all that time I have not found one eyewitness report that validates this episode, nor have I seen it in the character of Brant. In fact the opposite is true. Brant even refused to bow to George III when he visited England in 1776.

Having said that however, I would indeed recommend this book to anyone interested in Simon Girty or the frontier of the 18th century.

So there you go. This book is unfair to Joseph Brant! He slashed Girty’s face in a drunken stupor, but he would never apologise for it.

Allan W. Eckert’s Tecumseh! (1992) by Timothy Truman adapted from a play by Allan W. Eckert.

What’s this then? Another Truman graphic novel?

Yes. We’re still in very much within Truman’s major area of interest: Frontiers life and Native American history, but this time it’s an adaptation of an outdoors play by Allan W. Eckert.

Eclipse has published so many overwritten adaptations of things that try to shoehorn as many words as possible onto each page, but Truman is more successful in creating a real comic.

The dialogue that he does keep isn’t… er… very good, though.

And aren’t we all just bored to death with having a really, really, really ugly person that’s going to turn out to being totally evil and mad? It’s positively Greek.

You gotta love that very-not-impressed expression of the woman in the last panel there, though.

There’s plenty of captions here telling us what would take too long to show, but they weirdly veer from third person to first person without any rhyme or reason.

And this isn’t Truman’s best artwork. Many of these pages I wouldn’t have been able to guess was Truman at all, as he often abandons his scratchy, dirty, visceral line for the one that looks like it’s from a 50s Classics Illustrated.

But some panels are more recognisably Trumanesqe. And, yes, surprise, it turns out that the ugly guy was evil.

Excellent foreshadowing!

I wondered whether this was based on a true story, and the page that explains how this graphic novel came to be doesn’t really explain. Semi-historical, perhaps?

Truman says that he’s done something called Wilderness “in a non-traditional format” before Tecumseh!, which makes me wonder just what format that is.

And since that was apparently published before this volume, perhaps I should just read that next. (My notes had it the other way around. Stupid notes!)