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Here’s the best thing I got on my Free Comic Book Day (which I spent exploring semi-local stores I’d never been to in the informed company of Robot 6’s Chris Mautner): Barbarella, the second Grove Press edition, with Jane Fonda on the cover.

These days the late creator Jean-Claude Forest is in the unique position of having a later, more ambitious work in print — 1979’s You Are There, drawn by Jacques Tardi and released in English by Fantagraphics — so it seems just the right time for me to stumble upon these name-making early ’60s originals, which I’d never read; Heavy Metal serialized and collected the 1977 third series of the franchise (Barbarella: Le Semble-lune) as Barbarella: The Moon Child, so that was the extent of my exposure. I still haven’t finished the book, but I love the way Forest draws the character with these really heavy-outlined eyes, which I know is based on the look of Brigitte Bardot, yet it gives her this slightly weary quality, like she’s seen some truly awful shit in her adventures in space, sinister stuff that’s still lurking around in the panel gutters, but it’s not gonna stop her, it’s not gonna push her life around.

I also picked up a big moldy bag of Star*Reach back issues, #1-7 for $8.00, half-expecting moths to fly out. It was hiding in one of those shops that’s apparently a converted living room, lined on ever wall with bowing shelves of dusty, warping softcovers with clusters of comic books packed in between. There’s treasures in those walls, provided you define “treasures” as “the 1992 Millennium publication of Weird Tales Illustrated, featuring Harlan Ellison, P. Craig Russell and Tim Vigil, not on the same story, though.” But nothing beat Star*Reach, not at those prices.

Art by Masaichi Mukaide

The brainchild of Marvel/DC writer Mike Friedrich, Star*Reach represented a small but critical development in North American comic books – arriving in 1974, just past the initial wave of undergrounds and three years prior to Heavy Metal, the series exploited Friedrich’s contacts in superhero comics and various strains of fanzine culture to form an ongoing anthology of ‘mature’ genre work (involving topless ladies on the front or back covers of the first three issues, naturally) with more of a mainline-informed illustrative style than the horror/sci-fi undergrounds. It was labeled “ground level” comics, and sold catch-as-catch-can through the crumbling head shop market, the infant comic book direct market, personal subscriptions and direct mail advertisements. Fleeting or re-purposed work by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano mixed with early stuff by Howard Chaykin, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, and young Canadian scriptwriter Dave Sim. Issue #7 from 1977 boasted a contribution by Sitoshi Hirota & Masaichi Mukaide, possibly the first-ever commercial English-language release of manga in the United States, although I don’t know if the piece was actually amateur work specially prepared for American submission. Mukaide wound up sticking around at Star*Reach and its sibling titles, then re-teaming with Friedrich after it all shut down in ’79 for an enigmatic Japanese-published collection of comics apparently aimed to tantalize Western readers; it was titled simply Manga, and manifested at some undated point in the early ’80s, after which editor Mukaide seems to have vanished entirely.

Such are the mysteries and rewards of Free Comic Book Day. I also bought a 3-D Clive Barker comic for a dollar, because I heard 3-D was here to stay. In the interests of resistance, here are some more expensive comics that sit flat on the page.

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FOOTBALL RIOT AT SMURF VILLAGE – not an uncommon sight, I hasten to add. Those lovable (and almost certainly delicious) blue creatures may be best remembered in the U.S. as a mega-merchandising juggernaut accompanied by a five million-episode television cartoon, but those old ’60s/’70s albums by creator Peyo and co-writer Yvan Delporte (editor-in-chief of originating magazine Spirou for some of that period) were lean, tight little comics, marked by a rather jaundiced view of societal stability. The Smurfs are always fighting, be it from Flanders/Wallonia-inspired linguistic differences (Smurf of One and Smurf a Dozen of the Other, seen above), catastrophic and possible inherent flaws of the democratic system (King Smurf) or an old fashioned insect-borne rage contagion (The Black Smurf, or sometimes The Purple Smurf if your region cares to head off a particular allegorical construction); if this is supposed to be some kind of anarcho-socialist utopia, its maintenance costs are transparent indeed!

Don’t mind me, I’m just counting the weeks until the (apparently) late August debut of the new English-language North American line from NBM/Papercutz, albeit (apparently) to be published at the same smallish 6.5″ x 9″ dimensions as NBM’s Dungeon paperbacks. Still: vintage Franco-Belgian stuff for $5.99 (unless you want the same-sized $10.99 hardbacks) sounds like an okay enough side-effect of the continuing march of movie franchise continuations, here a live-action/CGI whatsit from the director of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and two of the screenwriters of Shrek 2, coming soon, 2011. Starring Neil Patrick Harris as Johan, so you know they’re going all way back into the 1950s Belgian kiddie komiks, by which I really mean the 1976 animated movie The Smurfs and the Magic Flute, co-directed by Peyo himself, having worked in animation during WWII with several future principals of the mighty Marcinelle school of Belgian comics art. Teenage Peyo wasn’t immediately accepted into Spirou with Franquin and Morris and such, which makes it a little ironic that the Smurfs’ international assault left Peyo’s clean but rather dispassionate iteration of the period’s style its sole lingering image in a lot of places, the U.S. not the least of them.

Comics and movies, folks. What else do we have?

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I just think adding superheroes to something instantly makes it more interesting. I have a friend who says every movie should either be a Spider-Man movie, or at least have Spider-Man in it. [Laughs.] I thought it was such a brilliant quote. It kind of is true, in a weird way. Have you watched a low-budget British movie, you know, about a guy who’s unemployed trying to make ends meet, and how does he feed his family now that the coal mine’s closed? If you suddenly had Spider-Man in it, you’d be a little more interested. [Laughs.] If that guy had super powers or a costume or something. On some craft level, I think there’s an element of truth to that. I just find that superheroes instantly make a story more interesting.

-Mark Millar, to the AV Club

This happened once. From 1966, the year of Batmania and The Monkees, I give you:

That’s right, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. It’s real, it’s here, you can Netflix it. One hour and twelve minutes. And if you don’t nod your head a little bit when the guitar line kicks in as he swings that cape around toward the camera then buddy, you know a different Silver Age than I.

And yes, according to legend, director Ray Dennis Steckler — best known for 1964’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, but prior to that a cinematographer on legendary writer/producer/director/star Timothy Carey’s brain-searing, Frank Zappa-scored The World’s Greatest Sinner — was supposed to be making a perfectly normal ultra-low budget suspense picture, except after a while he got bored/panicked with the project’s development and, as I’d hope we’d all do in that situation, put together a pair of superhero costumes from stuff off the rack at Sears and finished the shoot in style. Someone has a gorilla suit? BOOM – action scene. A parade scheduled that week? They crashed the parade in costume and stole the footage for a set piece. However, the corollary legend, that Steckler didn’t want to pay to fix a fairly evident grammatical error in the title, is apparently not true – it was a little chant one of his kids started saying, so damn it, that was title.

Rat Pfink a Boo Boo is a lot like Kick-Ass, in that they’re both about superheroes in a ‘real’ world that obviously a total fake. But Steckler’s picture accomplishes this by purely cinematic and almost certainly accidental means, in that it ‘answers’ the completed footage of the crime movie it was supposed to be with acutely improvised capes ‘n tights antics, sprinkled with barely-relevant home movie footage cut A Hard Day’s Night-style to songs by leading man Ron Haydock, a rockabilly crooner supporting himself by writing scores of disreputable adult novels (and a few comics scripts for Warren magazines on the side, under the pseudonym Arnold Hayes). All boundaries between reality and fiction and art and assemblage are obliterated by the movie’s frantic lunge toward saleability, and by its effort it exhausts itself into a shambling heap of genre suggestion – if the Batman show was a slickly professional, comparatively desexualized variant cover of, say, Mike & George Kuchar, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo doubles right back to source material, the old Batman serials, transmitted in the form of a child’s daydream, half-understood real world anxieties careening into romper room escapades set to whatever’s on the radio nearby, pretty much. Like, there’s no sync sound or anything.

Wasn’t that last shot the end of The Warriors? I don’t think this has quite the same appeal – actually I suspect most people will find it to be lethally inane if not completely unwatchable, but there’s something to be said for a hard-headed exploitation film that does literally everything wrong, to the point where its very commercial intent is called into question. Pair it up with straight-arrow bullshit like Jerry Warren’s The Wild World of Batwoman from the same year and the difference is plain – Steckler is coming from a deeply goofy, weirdly personal place, committing to film the most inexplicable longbox find of your entire convention season.

Anyway, I’m confident that any of the fine artists listed below would be proud to have their work deemed the Rat Pfink a Boo Boo of comics of 2010. Immortality isn’t pretty, but it lasts.

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I’ve never really noted him for weird, curvy architecture, but this is something from Howard Chaykin, as inked and colored by George Freeman, script by Peter B. Gillis, from Warp Special #1, 1983. It’s one of several items I picked up from our own Frank Santoro at MoCCA, also including Don McGregor’s & Marshall Rogers’ 1980 Detectives, Inc., which I confess mainly caught my attention because the Journal reposted that vintage review in which Kim Thompson absolutely destroyed it. I also bought a bunch of Wallace Wood reprints off of Dan… I think MoCCA’s something about the small press? These were all pretty small, I guess…

Here’s a more representative page, which still looks to me a bit closer to the kind of work Chaykin is doing now than the really dense style of American Flagg!, which would begin almost immediately after First Comics released this little item – Warp was among the publisher’s first releases, notable for being based on a series of science fiction plays originated in the early ’70s by Stuart B. Gordon & Bury St. Edmond (amazingly, the then-running Elaine Lee/Michael Wm. Kaluta Heavy Metal feature Starstruck was also based on a play), though it’s now thoroughly overshadowed by the publisher’s later works.

It’s a bit silly to compare Chaykin’s contributions — naturally, he’s going to put more ingenuity into his own showcase series as opposed to a special issue of a different title with the same publisher — but it’s still easy to see (and appreciate, sure) this particular work as an energetic opening up of some  pedestrian scripting, while the Chaykin of Flagg!, in control of more elements of production, appears attuned to what I see in the likes of Detectives, Inc., a not entirely well-aged desire to pound some sophistication into the comics form via more elaborate page layouts and much, much more writing, just loads and loads of text. What’s enduring about Flagg! on a formal level is Chaykin’s aptitude for blending those impulses — words, panels, sound effects — into a unified presentation, so that what used to seem merely heavy became cacophonous, and then became representative of the world that was the site of its author’s satire. Warp was undoubtedly the appetizer before the main course, but it’s worthwhile seeing an altogether airier, perhaps collaboration-friendly style abounding.

And now, more.

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For reasons far too exciting to reveal on the internet, I spent part of my Easter Sunday reading the new Titan Books edition of Tank Girl: The Odyssey, initially published by Vertigo in 1995. That was also the year of the infamous movie adaptation – indeed, writer Peter Milligan also scripted the Official Comic of the Movie around the same time, with artist Andy Pritchett. But The Odyssey boasted a little something extra: franchise co-creator Jamie Hewlett drawing 96 pages of story, which I believe still ranks as the longest sustained comics narrative he’s ever done.

Appropriately, it’s in many ways a comic about resurrection – most immediately by the fuzzy quality of the “remastered” art, which looks different enough from the bonus strips in the back that I wonder if there was some problem with the source materials. The story is also troubled, but in a more appealing way; Milligan notes in a new introduction that his script acted to invoke Ulysses — specifically its recurrences of mythic archetypes on the din of the everyday — as a means of imposing some personal sense and structure on Hewlett’s & Alan Martin’s also-loud and rather closed-off Tank Girl aesthetic.

But an established, popular comic strip comes with specific expectations, and Milligan’s initial crack at the first issue was heavy enough with Homeric and Joycean allusions that an editor urged him to scale things back on rewrite. This is symbolized in-story by Tank Girl getting annoyed with the “filthy rotten modernist omniscient voice” in the captions and shooting it to death; the character thereafter narrates in her own words. I guess it isn’t too surprising, then, that the book as a whole comes off as not all that different from a collection of Martin/Hewlett shorts – it’s a work of vignettes, some of them pretty funny and excellent, and roped tighter to each other than usual for Tank Girl, but still never accumulating into something greater plot-wise, all (fairly shallow) literary nods aside.

However, it does make for a striking piece of metafiction: eternally recurring mythic-literary structures as an apologia for comic book work-for-hire, from a writer often known to calm his voice for franchise assignments. “I’ve probably got loads more stories to have told about me, by all sorts of different peoples,” remarks Tank Girl in the midst of an explicative caption denouement on locating the epic in our everyday lives; clearly, it’s also about accessing bits of relevant culture — including the more freshly-relevant stuff of movie-ready comics — to inform the present.

Yet Milligan is neurotic – he inserts himself into the narrative as a character called O’Madagain, red shirt-clad to ensure his archetypal status as eventual cannon fodder, and increasingly assertive on the story, destroying a cyclops with eyes blessed by God and deflecting hails of bullets with his bare hands. He has sex with Tank Girl, in the tank, in the midst of a project unusually laddish in attention paid to female characters’ nude bodies. It’s all a put on, literally – eventually O’Madagain’s wig falls off and his corset pops and then he craps his pants and admits that all this fictionsuiting is a rather pathetic attempt to distract himself from the suspicion that he’s a pitiful sad sack and, impliedly, that he’s accessing culture for masturbatory, prestigious ends. And he’s not even the originating creator – Hewlett also appears in the story as O’Hell, a tag-along who’s secretly Tank Girl’s father. These circumstances lead to perhaps the only instance of a confronting-their-creator story in the history of collaborative English-language comics where the artist functions as the confronted author. It’s not exactly Animal Man – Hewlett grovels before a naked Tank Girl, shouting that she’s the only decent thing he’ll probably ever create, begging to ride her coat tails just a little more. She shoots him in the heart, and as far as I know that’s the last of her comics he ever drew.

“You might not like what I’ve become. I might not like what I’ve become. But that’s life.” At its broadest, where it works best, it’s all about culture resurrected and enduring, not so much in the ‘superheroes are our modern myths’ sense but in that it’ll always be a few steps ahead toward divinity than us mucky, dumb animals. Sure, Milligan & Hewlett are playing a little — the enclosed head shot assures us that Peter Milligan isn’t really withered and toothless, while the in-story Hewlett’s tiny eyes and blue hair can’t help but evoke 2D of Gorillaz — but in suggesting humankind as lustful, confused things that aren’t evolving to jack shit, staggering among continuing figments of narrative, they predict that even the most owned among it will inevitably break free from control, and tread away.

And now, upcoming purchasable items with prices affixed to the end.

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Last week I picked up another fine artifact from the centuries-spanning Fantagraphics empire, this time on the sound recommendation of Milo George – Doofer: Pathway to McEarth, a magazine-sized 1992 comic book primarily written and illustrated by the late Paul Ollswang, working with Taft Chatham & James Carpenter, all authentic “Oregon Hippes,” goes the back of the book. I’d say they don’t make ’em like this anymore, but they barely made ’em at all back then, unless I’ve missed some rich vein of socio-political-sci-fi satire-by-way-of-’60s-underground-homage-by-way-of-early-20th-century-Sunday-funnies running circa the Image Revolution. This actually might be the all-around least fashionable comic of ’92, which naturally makes it an eminent candidate for revisitation.

And what a strange and compelling thing it is: an ostensible prelude to a four-issue miniseries titled McEarth, Fast-Food Planet (never published in any form, as far as I know), the book compacts a hodgepodge of verbally fussy, philosophically digressive pun-laden strips from as far back as 1982 with a text-heavy comics ‘documentary’ on the mundane-fantastical Doofer, OR, from the pages of Fantagraphics’ own Graphic Story Monthly, sealed up with radio commentary from high above space-time and cruised-through by town mayor Obie Jacoby, a possible Ollswand stand-in. We’re told with winning prescience that by far-off 1997 an “information revolution” had united Earth into an interconnected mind that somehow got collectively dumber, and a tipping point was reached with the introduction of “Google-Ooh’s”(!!), the advertising jingle for which became a terrorist weapon capable of holding a listener forever in its catchy thrall, not very much at all unlike the titular amusement of the late David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

But while Doofer is likewise dense with concern for the overload of manufactured narratives that is its parodic future, it’s more than happy to hang above the real strife, positioning itself as a fond, scatterbrained account of something that used to bedevil blinkered humans as well as less pliable funny animals, like fast-talking heron Slocni and ex-Weather Underground pup Rube, who grow misty over the revolutionary potential of the ’60s while under educational film surveillance. They seem even older, in that Ollswang (who credits Carpenter with “all of the difficult drawings”) works in a mannered, cohesive style suggestive of some lost-to-time gang of Hearst players dragged into a twilight of crosshatched silhouette. And dig the lettering!

As I mentioned above, nothing more was seen of Doofer, although Ollswang put out two issues of a separate series titled Dreams of a Dog with Rip Off Press, along with various anthology contributions and small works. I can’t say the saga had much (really any) time to take off, but what we’ve got is endearing in its off-handed ambition wedded to a distinctly regional flavor and, sure, a definite nostalgia for things, cast more as fuzzy recollections from well outside of dictated history. So, out of style.

Now for some current well-hyped selections. “It’s gonna be okay – & everything is going to be made completely out of electricity!!”

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From A Drifting Life

No messing around – the book I’m most excited to see this week is Drawn and Quarterly’s annual Yoshihiro Tatsumi release, Black Blizzard. I’m always glad to see further Tatsumi in English, although I wonder if my enthusiasm for the the raw nerve agony of his in-the-thick-of-it gekiga work is especially transferable. I’m reminded of a short, critical piece Bill Randall, my choice for the best manga critic writing in English, did on D&Q’s 2008 story collection Good-Bye; he cites the deluxe format lavished on the work by its North American publisher, a real whiff of prestige given to obscure-in-their-time comics, mostly forgotten in Japan and “as subtle as pissing in someone’s face.”

Yes! Exactly! That’s why I like Tatsumi’s work: it’s unrefined, maddeningly dank stuff, the work of an early comics pioneer staggering bleary-eyed into a terrifying, uncertain future and lashing out nervously at every envisioned hell in a titanically blunt manner. One of the best things about 2009’s autobiographical doorstop, A Drifting Life — as lulling and-this-and-this-and-this-and-this a steady rolling comics memoir as one can imagine — is how it contextualizes Tatsumi’s status as a comics innovator as coming much earlier: a post-war, post-Tezuka appreciative reaction from longing for bigger, stronger comics, mostly ‘darker’ genre things like crime and mystery stories. Only at the very end of the book (which is apparently still continuing in Japan) do we get a hint of where Tatsumi’s dramatic picture obsessions might take him, and from that we can infer a most idiosyncratic development from slightly-more-mature genre comics into punch-to-the-mush city terror and perpetually radiating war.

Funny how American and Japanese comics seemed to link up just a little bit in the ’50s – two takes on a medium gradually maturing by way of increasingly harsh genre comics, albeit with manga a little ways behind. I think a close examination of some actual Japanese work of the time will nicely emphasize the substantive differences in formal approach, not the least of which was Tezuka’s fascination with cinematographic principles, inspiring I think an especially potent visual emphasis on early manga that facilitated the decompressed, atmospheric style Tatsumi develops (as a character) in A Drifting Life. Or, if comparative studies isn’t your thing, at least the speculation can become more informed as to how Tatsumi’s own crime/mystery/adventure comics mutated into… Yoshihiro Tatsumi as introduced to North American readers, as opposed to the sleeker genre stuff of peer Takao Saito’s Golgo 13, which started up in 1969 – the same year as the work collected in The Push Man and Other Stories.

This is why Black Blizzard may prove to be the most valuable ‘classic’ release of the year, even though some will regard it as plain juvenilia. It’s an old crime comic from a young Tatsumi, who blew through its 100+ pages in the space of 20 days in 1956, while also working on the monthly proto-gekiga anthology Shadow. A pianist is falsely imprisoned for murder, and escapes while shackled to a more dangerous man, all in the midst of highly inclement weather. Expect many slashing diagonal lines and cinematic techniques, and a perfectly handsome $19.95 softcover treatment. A few sample pages are here.

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

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A few days ago Robot 6 directed me to probably my favorite piece of comics publishing hype in a while, a short interview with Stephen King promoting the new Vertigo series American Vampire—King is scripting a back-up feature for issues #1-5, his first-ever original work for comics (as opposed to the various adaptations of his prose over at Marvel). Specifically, I was fascinated by a short bit concerning the comic’s editing process and how it bumped up against King’s take on the form:

One example:Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they’re thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’” So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it’s a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character’s thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”

This is great for several reasons, not the least of them being the mental image of our ky?-level candidate folding his legs and meditatively accepting instruction; I mean, forgive the presumptuousness, but I think that Stephen King maybe, probably, almost certainly could just petition his editor for a special thought ballooning exception, but he won’t, because he wants to understand how comics are done. Indeed, King was brought on to the project after its initialization, and is duly credited below primary writer Scott Snyder and artist Rafael Albuquerque on the cover, in keeping with a supplementary scribe’s status—by all visible indication, he’s going native.

But that got me thinking—which tribe? And what’s their damn problem with thought balloons (as I call ’em)? It’s helpful to take closer look at what’s being said, and—since the comic in question was released just today—what’s being done.
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Art by Torajiro Kishi, from Devil #1

Isn’t it always? To your left is a panel from issue #1 of a mostly unheralded experiment in cultural interplay: Devil, a four-part, Dark Horse-published comic book miniseries created for the North American market by mangaka Torajiro Kishi and anime fandom favorite Madhouse Studios. Both entities are credited on writing and art, with Madhouse acting collectively, like in that one segment of the Batman: Gotham Knight dvd where everyone apparently had their names removed. Issue #2 is due this week, and from the looks of it I’m expecting more of the same prolix exposition and stilted dialogue — interestingly, nobody is credited with an English translation or adaptation — married to a distinctly flat visual style.

That latter aspect is what’s most interesting to me, and possibly to the creators. Kishi is best known (if at all) in North America for his full-color lesbian sex comic Maka-Maka, which picked up some good notices from Dirk Deppey (scanlated form) and Chris Mautner (2008-09 Media Blasters publication, two volumes). And while it’s tempting to observe that Kishi’s arrival on the American scene has transformed ladies kissing into smoking badasses and blazing guns and MUTANTS and VIRUSES and sperm! that makes! people! explode!, the artist himself has described the American comic book approach as “uniqueness in shadow and flattered colors,” in contrast to manga’s “detailing the lines.” Also:

I feel myself more as a creator than an artist. As a creator, I try to keep my focus on the message, and I change/adapt the style, depending the type of the story and the message… I believe that it is more important for the creator to have flexibility in his visual style in order to interpret and deliver the main theme and story of the project, rather than stick in one single style, or to try to protect some kind of ‘visual signature.’ Otherwise, I am afraid that the story itself may end up confined by my personality and patterns.

It’s worth going through the whole interview; I was especially piqued by Kishi’s decision to ensure that every issue has some conclusion to it, given that the ‘decompression’ often discussed a few years ago in collection-focused comic books seemed of a piece with action manga serialized in magazines. In necessitating rising and falling action as serving the story, in adapting his style to a ‘comic book’ approach, Kishi appears to associate broadly Western pop comics style with density, even going so far as to state that American comics are made for readers “who really want to get into the story,” which, from the tenor of the rest of his comments (and frankly the comic itself), relates visual compression with absorption – shadows and colors causing the eye to hang on the page, forcing consideration of the ‘text’ by non-writerly means.

Devil is still a pretty airy, fast-paced comic, though, and a very predictable story (so far) about a cigarette-smoking dude who doesn’t play by the rules in battling a terrible infestation turning people to monsters. As much as I appreciate Kishi’s perspective as looking in on American genre comics from probably a more visually-intensive scene overall, the experiential association I make is with the second credited author, Madhouse, which occupies a special historical place in appealing to a certain generation of anime viewers through accessible, violent works like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, Yoshiaki Kawajiri pictures that still form the aesthetic basis for U.S.-Japan animated collaborations today — always lots of action, fantasy, even as anime in Japan becomes more and more of an ultra-specialized niche — and reflected a lot of the manga available in English translation at the time, sci-fi and shooting, often published by… Dark Horse.

In this way, the project is both up-to-the-minute and very old-fashioned, in both form and content, an every-issue-an-experience comic book comic that poses like the old anime that wagged the dog of manga. What nostalgia! What a letdown! You know who’s the target audience for this? People like me, exactly my generation of catholic nerds! I wonder if any of the Madhouse old-school are involved on that end? Like, maybe it’s Rintaro working in full script and the plot’s a huge allegory for the production of Yona Yona Penguin.

Hmm, I don’t think a lot of those last words made sense, particularly together. How about some other selections?

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Art by Sean Phillips, from Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood

I was rooting around the other day for back issues of Third World War, that gently diplomatic Pat Mills/Carlos Ezquerra strip from Crisis — the short-lived, politically-engaged sibling magazine to 2000 AD, initially set up so that its contents could be collected into strip-specific comic books and sold in North America — when I came across on old collected edition of the feature to the left: Devlin Waugh, which turned out the most interesting comic I picked up last week. As the caption indicates, that’s Sean Phillips providing the art; he’s known best these days for his Criminal series with Ed Brubaker, but he’s got a good deal of British work behind him, dating back to the late ’80s. I actually don’t think I’d ever seen this painted style, 1992 vintage, which he switches up with the occasional buckle of monochrome line art panels a bit more reminiscent of his current look. There’s also a smearier look for violent scenes, some photographic elements for television monitors… a pretty versatile, cocky outlay.

The writer is John Smith, among the most prominent British sci-fi comics types to have never quite registered with Vertigo or thereabouts. He’d wanted to take over Hellblazer after originating writer Jamie Delano left, but Garth Ennis was taken on instead; a single issue of Smith’s material (#51) was released, drawn by Phillips, a regular cohort, as a taste of what might have been. He then worked on a big showcase revival of Dr. Fate, which wound up knowing a troubled life as Scarab, an eight-issue 1993-94 Vertigo miniseries. That was the year after this debut Devlin Waugh strip, Swimming in Blood, which was apparently a huge success with readers of the Judge Dredd Megazine. Indeed, the character Waugh is both a denizen of Dredd’s world and cut from the same cloth as that famously droll take on costumed action hero rhythms, but instead of a dutiful authoritarian he’s a ruthless aesthete, a Vatican assassin sent to quell a vampire uprising in the undersea prison Aquatraz, only to preen and flex and admire his collection of watercolors (which he has taken along) and demand apologies from the beleaguered staff for wholly perceived slights. Only after dozens of pages does he take action, leading to his own transformation into a vampire, his blood lust calmed through sheer force of superior breeding, at which time a pointed anticlimax arrives.

It’s a curious, fascinating work, stuffed with literary nods (“Interzone Pest Control,” tee hee) and odd flourishes, like parenthetical captions supplementing narrative captions for lyrical effect, maybe the only prominent, semi-recent use of parentheses by an action comics writer outside of Brian Michael Bendis. It’s from 1992, though, and it feels like that to me – Phillips’ muscular characters bring to mind a lot of the roided-out superheroes I was reading at that time, but fucked around with from the careful tension between writing and art. His massive he-men grimace and flex like any Image revolutionary, but Smith’s story gives it specificity; of course Devlin Waugh poses and struts around, because that’s his sense of beauty. The easy spoof of muscular art is to say that it’s all posturing and no real action, but Smith makes it clear that Waugh can throw down, just as Phillips shows his drawing board versatility – the real joke is that Waugh is a creature of ultra-refined id, and prefers to just pose, because that’s his aesthetic, his veritable meta-attitude. Even as the story threatens to linger on past its welcome, much like its ‘hero,’ Smith & Phillips assure us it’s all in the best, most considered taste.

This really got me going; I haven’t even gotten into the overtly camp and homoerotic elements, which wash the whole thing over. I immediately got to looking for more, and (inevitably) discovered that the collection I’d read had been subsumed into a larger collection of Waugh strips, two softcover volumes (Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood & Devlin Waugh: Red Tide) released as part of the very short-lived mid-’00s DC/Rebellion publishing alliance. This led me to glance again at my Third World War issues and realize that Smith & Phillips had also worked on an early Crisis serial, The New Statesmen (the originating artist of which was Jim Baikie), which was also released in North America in both comic book and bookshelf formats in the early ’90s.

One thing just leads to another. I can’t hang on to money in comics, and I don’t even publish the fucking things. I… what? You want more, NEW options for expenditures this week? Good! GOOD.

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