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.

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.

SuperF*ckers: Secretly James Kochalka’s best comic? Nah, that’s not a secret. An enormously high-spirited piece of super-teen vulgarity, this 2005-07 Top Shelf series held itself out as issues #271, 273, 277 and 279 of a long-running Legion of Super-Heroes-type series (which supposedly started out as an actual Legion pitch to DC), all of which happen to be ‘downtime’ issues that assume you’re familiar with the extended cast and various simmering subplots. Luckily, all anyone wants to do is lay around, play video games, use drugs, start fights, talk dirty and try to fuck each other; it’s like a sunnier take on The Boys, where many of the characters are gross and terrible but nobody suffers really irreparable harm because hey—it’s a superhero comic. This 144-page collection adds on an all-new fifth issue, Jack Krak #1, a spin-off for the team’s loudmouthed temporary leader that amusingly serves to revisit a bunch of series tropes even someone who’s, say, read no more than four random issues might recognize. Superhero style! Preview; $14.95.

Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators: I don’t usually mention items Diamond happens to be “offering again” on a given week, since I probably somehow covered them the first time, but I think I’ll make a big, big exception for this excellent 2006 Fanfare/Ponent Mon anthology, unfortunately somewhat notorious for being hard to track down. No more! Probably the most expansive example of participant/co-editor Frédéric Boilet’s notion of nouvelle manga, the project devotes its 256 b&w pages to eight stories from residents of Japan about the area in which they live or come from, and eight stories from French visitors about areas they are assigned to visit. A big storm happens to arrive while the French artists are traveling, affording their contributions an extra linkage.

Truthfully, no new form of comics emerges, but to me the particulars of the failure are fascinating. Many of the French artists process their experiences through clever or striking formalistic techniques, such as running the story backwards all the way into the artist’s youth, positing 1920s Kyoto artists as allegorical stand-ins for the Atelier des Vosges workshop in which many of the (French) artists worked, or having the germ of an idea for a logo narrate and accompany its disgusting, craven artist. The Japanese artists, in contrast, focus almost entirely on matters of pacing, panel breakdowns, in-panel visions — manipulations of the fundamental stuff of straightforward comics narrative. I wonder how much of this divergence is attributable to ingrained values: perhaps the nerves of a relatively marginal Western art with plenty to prove demanding a top-to-bottom inquisition of the form, while established, long-popular manga flowing through a relaxed idiom, everyone on the level of how a comic operates, variations keyed to pacing and plotting and drawing.

Another treat – the lineup of contributors is even more noteworthy now than three years ago: Boilet, Joann Sfar (Dungeon), Emmanuel Guibert (Alan’s War, The Photographer), Nicolas de Crécy (Glacial Period), Fabrice Neaud (the recent online translation of his 2000 short Émile has doubled his total stories in English), Aurélia Aurita, Étienne Davodeau, David Prudhomme, François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters (Les Cités Obscures), Little Fish, Kan Takahama (Monokuro Kinderbook), Daisuke Igarashi (Children of the Sea), Kazuichi Hanawa (Doing Time), Jiro Taniguchi (Hotel Harbour View, The Walking Man), Moyoko Anno (Happy Mania, Sugar Sugar Rune) and Taiyo Matsumoto (Tekkonkinkreet, GoGo Monster). Have a look; $25.00.

Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965: This is the new graphic novel by Joe Kubert, a 200-page war comic, fictional but pertaining to the two-day battle at the titular site. I believe the art is entirely pencil work, although DC’s solicitation notes that it’s in color. I’ll look at anything Kubert’s doing — next up is an all-ages anthology series created with his sons; $24.99.

Hellboy in Mexico (Or, a Drunken Blur): Dark Horse seems to have decided that this is a Cinco de Mayo special — apparently there’s a Spanish-language variant cover, just the cover — but all you have to know is that this is the new Mike Mignola/Richard Corben teaming, and old fashioned done-in-one as Hellboy sometimes does it. Preview; $3.50.

Black Kiss: Oh look – it’s Star*Reach veteran Howard Chaykin! This is a new Dynamite hardcover collecting his infamous 1988-89 Adults Only supernatural LA noir, which, a bit like Barbarella, isn’t nearly as explicit as its reputation suggests. Mostly it’s a good excuse to enjoy Chaykin’s super-dense approach of the time in grotty b&w, “overseen by Chaykin and remastered for today’s discerning comic book consumer!” Sez the publisher. Samples; $24.99.

Dreadstar: The Beginning: Oh look – it’s Star*Reach veteran Jim Starlin! This is a new Dynamite hardcover collecting the early parts of his big space opera in b&w and color, encompassing various pieces from Epic Illustrated (#1-9, 12), the 1981 Eclipse Graphic Album (#5) The Price and the 1982 Marvel Graphic Novel (#3) Dreadstar. Samples; $29.99.

Krazy & Ignatz 1916-1918: Love in a Kestle or Love in a Hut: Oh look – it’s RAW veteran George Herriman! This is a new Fantagraphics softcover collecting the earliest Krazy Kat Sunday pages, thus looping this most venerable Golden Age of Reprints project around to material Eclipse covered one year at a time back in the late ’80s (the Fanta effort began with 1925, where Eclipse left off). I think this one should include three of the ’80s volumes, thus topping out at 160 pages, with the original supplements preserved, but also updated annotations and a new Chris Ware design. Samples; $24.99.

Rip Kirby Vol. 2: Alex Raymond, IDW, 1948-51, 320 pages. I wonder if Dave Sim’s gonna check this out? Hmm; $49.99.

glamourpuss #13: Cool, I said his name and he appeared! Hey, Star*Reach veteran #3; $3.00.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years: I can only presume those Marsh Tarzan books are doing alright for Dark Horse, since not only is a sixth edition of those on its way but here’s a 120-page hardcover collecting the artist’s 1952-53 work on another Burroughs creation, written by Paul S. Newman, from the pages of Dell Four Color (#375, 437 & 488). Preview; $29.99.

The Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives Vol. 2 (of 2): Also from Dark Horse, this is a 228-page hardcover purporting to collect the rest of Windsor-Smith work with Roy Thomas on the character, although be aware of the “updated” colors carried over from the prior softcover releases. Preview; $49.99.

Eerie Archives Vol. 3: Dark Horse is trying to break your back. Vintage issues #11-15 – Neal Adams, Joe Orlando, Jeff Jones, Wallace Wood, Johnny Craig, Gene Colan, Angelo Torres, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson, more. Actually, two of these issues were sort of patched together from contents of earlier issues of Creepy, and I don’t know how that’s handled in here; $49.99.

Twin Spica Vol. 1 (of 16): Your manga debut of the week – a 2001-09 series from artist Kou Yaginuma, concerning high school kids of the near-future training and yearning for the stars, in spite of Japan’s disgraced space program, which suffered a terrible calamity years before. Noteworthy for blending soft, super-cute art and oozing emotions with a fairly ‘hard’ sci-fi disposition. From Vertical. Sample chapter; $10.95.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei Vol. 6: Meanwhile, I’m way behind on this Koji Kumeta continuing manga — vol. 21 is due in Japan in a few weeks — but I trust it’s still an interestingly perverse experience in English adaptation, given that many of its chapters act as satires of current events of the day on top of relying on migraine-inducing verbal humor, necessitating many pages of annotations in the back and assuring an oddly distanced reading experience. Yet there’s something about Kumeta’s flatly stylized, sometimes striking art that invigorates what dark, downbeat humor seeps through the story itself (as opposed to the translation notes); $10.99.

The Secret History #8: On that note, how about a French comic? Sometimes people wonder aloud what divisive early ’00s Marvel artist Igor Kordey is up to these days; the answer is “European genre stuff like this,” a Jean-Pierre Pécau-scripted saga of hidden mysteries and long game players in the shadows of human development. Publisher Archaia has a fat hardcover out now collecting #1-7 (not all of them Kordey-drawn), but note that all releases are shrunk to comic book size. Vol. 18 just hit French stores the other week; $3.95.

King City #8 (of 12): Nice Image comic selection #1 – more from Brandon Graham’s swirling city sci-fi; $2.99.

Orc Stain #3: Nice Image comic selection #2 – more from James Stokoe’s wrinkled safe-cracking anti-hero fantasy, as an orc who can see the faults in anything keeps his magic eye moving. Preview; $2.99.

I, Zombie #1: Oops, I guess there are one dollar comics out this week. Not in 3-D though, so history will plow them into the Earth. Um, this is a new Vertigo series, hence the cheap introductory price, all about a zombie girl who devotes herself to fulfilling the final wishes of the owner of the brain she has to eat every month, since thoughts get into your head when you eat a brain. Written by Chris Roberson, with art by Michael (and I presume Laura) Allred. Here’s a not-in-the-comic prelude; $1.00.

Spider-Man: Fever #2 (of 3): Brendan McCarthy into the spider-dimension with Dr. Strange. Preview; $3.99.

The Boys #42: This is still here, in case you’ve had second thoughts about dropping it. Preview; $2.99.

Batman and Robin #12: Reminder – not ending here, Grant Morrison will be back for #13 with artist Frazer Irving. For now, we’ve got capable artists Andy Clarke & Scott Hanna (with Dustin Nguyen chipping in some layouts), the former of whom did some recent-ish work with Peter Milligan on Batman Confidential (#31-35) if you want more Bat-selections. Preview; $2.99.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale: Finally, since I think it’s worth keeping up with the deluxe comics large prose publishers put out, here’s a W.W. Norton presentation of a 256-page memoir by author and picture book illustrator Belle Yang, delving deep into the life of her father and his family in WWII-era Manchuria as set against her collegiate struggle with an abusive boyfriend. Select pages can be perused on Google Books; $23.95.

Labels: Jean-Claude Forest, Masaichi Mukaide, Mike Friedrich, This Week in Comics