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…and I’m a year older.

My birthday was last weekend, so I thought it’d be fun to page through some comics from around the blessed date; ’81 was an odd and busy time in comics, days where Creepy, Heavy Metal and RAW shared space in the form as the Direct Market grew. One magazine-styled creature of the new distribution was Eclipse, a b&w comics periodical from the publisher of the same name, not yet three years from its release of Sabre, the Don McGregor/Paul Gulacy comics album famously targeted at comic book specialty retailers. Above you see the star of the show, from the July 1981 issue #2: Marshall Rogers, then fresh off a McGregor-written album of his own, the staggeringly portentous Detectives, Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green.

Ah, those precision headlights and draftsman’s rays – like François Schuiten and Tsutomu Nihei, Rogers was exposed to architectural composition before he became professional in comics, and his inevitable cityscapes are the stillest and coldest of the group. This panel is apparently intended to contrast with a lonely desert vista at the top of its page, but Rogers’ hills and plants are so sharp and precise you’d think you could cut your finger on the page, causing “the strip” to register as less a response to the wilds than an explosion of organic growth. Which could just mean a cancer, but what control!

Rogers was in every issue of Eclipse, mostly (as above) via the Steve Englehart serial Coyote, though to my mind the same team seemed far more relaxed and effective in Slab, a self-contained piece from issue #1 initially written as a Superman/Creeper story for DC Comics Presents and revamped by Rogers into something else entirely, chock-full of gleaming sci-fi structures and oddball character designs (the Creeper becomes a talking cartoon bird, for instance), then re-scripted atop by Englehart when appropriate, tongue presumably in cheek.

Still, this speaks to the makeup of Eclipse, a self-positioned mainstream-underground bridge running through comics retailers, mixing Marvel/DC veterans with Trina Robbins and Harvey Pekar and mystery prose/Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins, everything very sedate and straightforward, the occasional appearance by the likes of Kaz notwithstanding – you could have told me half this stuff was drawn in 1975 and I’d have believed you. That’s not exactly a criticism, but it maybe speaks to the ease with which publisher Eclipse felt its way into the delicate market, certainly without a lot of money. The magazine ended with issue #8 in 1983 to convert into a color comic book, Eclipse Monthly.

Meanwhile, no less a well-financed comics entity than Marvel was releasing issue #6 (June 1981) of Epic Illustrated, a big fat color magazine squarely positioned as a reaction to Heavy Metal. An establishment response, but god damn if those early issues in particular didn’t throw themselves into the work, oozing with paints, seared with airbrushes, and occasionally teetering on the brink of comprehensibility. Granted, much of this particular issue is taken up by Ken Steacy’s adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s Life Hutch, one of those arch separations of copious words and illustrative pictures I mentally associate with Byron Preiss (maybe I should be thinking Jim Steranko), but even that seems of a restless piece with a five-page Rick Veitch epic — intended as a  double-sided foldout and reprinted as such in his 2007 Shiny Beasts collection — concerning the psychic fusion of a starship and a dude with hoses in his eyes forming a gigantic nude humanoid space weapon that has cosmic sex with a feminine Earth protector/science goddess and boils the flesh off corpulent galactic warmakers.

That’s not the melted face above, mind you; Mike Saenz was still a few years off from the digital inquiries of Shatter and Iron Man: Crash when he and writer Roy Kinnard (who’d scripted him Creepy that year too) did Flash Sport, a typical ‘guy controlled by awful people in a deadly game’ scenario unique for its video game subtext: two bratty kids putting Our Man through violent paces for laughs. An appropriate context for the computer-inclined Saenz, triumphantly depicting a bad little boy’s getting shot open all over the page at the story’s close. And then there’s Kultz, a veritable double-down by Stephen R. Bissette & Steve Perry in which the rowdy trash film-loving teen consumers at a futuristic mega-mall fall prey to a terrible film that feeds their energies back to them until they tear each other to pieces at the surreptitious behest of the store management. You might not want to take it as an allegory for the Epic Illustrated situation, but maybe it works as a nightmare of corporate control of underground and foreign energies obliterating the young and enthusiastic – a real hazard.

Yet when I look at these rackmates of 1981, it’s the Marvel magazine that seems hungry and dated and reckless – inspiration and desperation in the face of competition, while the smaller magazine shows prudence and care, that old craftsman’s quiet. Of course, they shared contributors: P. Craig Russell, Jim Starlin. They both afforded their talents ownership of their original works. They were both very traditional in the face of RAW – but their differences are fascinations of the pliable era. And anyway, reading magazines from when I was born breaks up the monotony of googling my name and gazing into mirrors.

Oh right, new comics:

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From "Chi's Sweet Home"; art by Konami Kanata

Yes, kitty. Lots of manga indeed.
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Following up on last week, above we see artist Richard Corben working from a story by the late Harvey Pekar, as presented in 2006’s issue #2 of the first Vertigo iteration of American Splendor; a second series followed in 2008. Collectively, those eight issues were the last of Pekar’s work to see print in the comic book format — although they followed a prominent bookshelf-ready Vertigo release in 2005’s The Quitter, drawn by Dean Haspiel — and often had the feel of a valedictory effort, with a occasional propensity for teaming Pekar with hopefully simpatico ‘name’ artists, like Gilbert Hernandez or Darwyn Cooke.

Corben illustrates a five-page Halloween story which, in true Pekar fashion, ambles into a small domestic drama about searching for a lost pair of glasses the day after a party. The effect of this subject matter on the art is interesting; stripped of any overt supernatural or fantastical image potential, extra attention is drawn to how Corben’s stylized figures hang weightily in space, initially standing in claustrophobic rooms draped with midnight holiday shadows (see left), but then moving outdoors with Pekar’s narrative into white-heavy space, cold and aloof (perfect for hiding misplaced items) and quietly threatening, like sharp leaves and twigs surrounding grumpy vulture Harvey above, externalizing his eternal anxiety ($150!!) as nature itself threatening him with yet another poke. That’s just how Harvey’s world could seem in these comics, mundane to some but likewise potentially transformative for collaborators, in that we might suddenly see nothing but ably wrinkled humans scanning their model-like world, a vulture by a tree, wondering what to do, or maybe pondering which created which, man or world? Writer or artist?

Other artists, and worlds, of course, might resist. Witness Eddie Campbell, as crucial a practitioner of autobiographical comics as Pekar, but full of fancy and romance and fiction, sharply apart from the self-consciously unadorned vignettes and monologues and encounters of the comic book American Splendor. Above you’ll see the bottom half of the second and final page of a Pekar/Campbell collaboration, from the same issue as the Corben story. Harvey has bought some pierogies at the store, and become engaged in a chat with a bagger on trombonist Jiggs Whigham, whose father was a policeman. Our Man reminisces about the old Famous Funnies series Juke Box Comics, in which real popular musicians would get into adventures. Suddenly, the final ‘panel’ is protruding downward from the talking heads above, and Benny Goodman is racing around Pekar’s narrative in a wordless escapade, anticipating the (literally) extra-narrative, occasionally extra-mortal antics of Campbell’s 2008 The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard with Dan Best.

But make no mistake – this might look like crime fighting, but it’s as much a jailbreak. From Harvey Pekar.

Additional splendor of every construction and connotation follows:
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Nothing beats a good ol’ local comics convention, so my Sunday morning was fucking invincible. It was one of those longboxes-atop-longboxes things, held in a local campus gymnasium so remote on school property a cosplayer took it upon himself to direct eager patrons in. The basketball hoops were still hanging; it was hot. To your left is my prime find, probably not the kind of revelatory funnybook (re)discovery that might open your eyes, heart, etc., but still: Fantagor #1, first Last Gasp edition, 1971, $5.00.

It’s Richard Corben, of course; I’ve been in the mood since reading an appreciation by critic David Brothers (very much worth reading for a perspective premised largely on Corben’s recent, front-of-Previews comic book work) and then belatedly discovering that the artist has returned to comic book self-publishing via Odds and Ends, a 32-page b&w compilation of assorted items, paramount among them a 20-page sequel to 1994’s color Corben release From the Pit. We can certainly draw a line straight back to Fantagor, the artist’s original (initially self-published) showcase series, although writer Starr Armitage and artist Herb Arnold also appear, foreshadowing the anthology format in which Corben would plant himself for many years – the seductive quality of narrating a comics artist’s path across the development of the form ensures that the younger Corben is typically identified as an ‘underground’ cartoonist, which is accurate, but it’s also true that his Warren magazines debut came in 1970 (Creepy #36), the same year as his initial contributions to Last Gasp’s Skull Comics and Slow Death, and only two years after his earliest fanzine appearances in Voice of Comicdom. In this way Corben bridges the gap between the EC (or thereabouts) horror-influenced faction of the undergrounds and the arguably more direct continuation of the aesthetic via Warren, while indeed anticipating the shift of the Warren magazines toward a less traditional ‘horror’ focus as the ’70s continued.

Five bucks was a popular price at the basketball con (as I have renamed it); I also picked up that enormous Treasury edition of Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dave Sim’s Collected Letters 2, because you know entertainment’s right around the corner when the first two words in a book of correspondence are “Gary Groth.” I felt so great I almost did a victory layup. Although, actually, I ran cross country in high school; I don’t really know what a layup is. And I can’t even jump these days without my ankles shattering. My presence on the internet may be diminishing, but make no mistake: I’m rapidly expanding in other ways.

A note on new comics methodology: I’m writing all this on Sunday night, because it turns out I won’t have online access until Friday. As such, this week’s selections are based on Midtown Comics’ list of 7/14 releases to Midtown Comics locations, which may differ in certain ways from Diamond’s own list of releases (updated Mondays), although neither list is foolproof, or a guarantee that your shop ordered anything besides X-Force diorama statues. But anyway:

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This past Sunday was Independence Day in the U.S., which means UPS had Monday off, which means new comics don’t arrive until Thursday, so Diamond didn’t update their release list until yesterday – hence the ’24 hours later’ status of this post (again). It’d be cliché to insist I spent the extra time reflecting on American comics, so instead here’s Michael Jackson as drawn by Suehiro Maruo, from 1991’s The New Comics Anthology, edited by the late Bob Callahan. This was very possibly the artist’s first comics work to see print in English, predating Blast Books’ 1993 release of Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show or Maruo’s infamous Planet of the Jap contribution to Blast’s 1996 Comics Underground Japan anthology, and it stands in a unique context. If the 1980 debut of RAW marked the beginning of the ‘alternative comics’ era — and believe me, there’s alternate choices — then ’91 serves as its natural bookend, since that’s when the final, transformed, bookstore-distributed digest RAW appeared. That was also the year of Kitchen Sink’s first latter day Twisted Sisters anthology, a term used for marketing on the cover of The New Comics Anthology, which endeavored to designate ‘new’ comics as loosely categorized trends. Maruo found himself categorized with new ‘punk’ comics of Gary Panter inspiration, as opposed to the historically-informed ‘vaudeville’ of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge, although I think 20 years of ensuing exposure to the artist’s work have revealed him to be a wry traditionalist of his own, of a more direct lineage with early Garo artist (and Doing Time author) Kazuichi Hanawa, to say nothing of a prior century’s printmaking. Indeed, the comic above draws an amusing analogy between MJ’s Bad-era costuming and your typical Japanese boys’ school uniform as seen in many a Showa fetish Maruo epic; in the end he spins so fast his head explodes, which matches the rather goofy horror comic disposition of several Maruo shorts.

This, of course, is another function of criticism: providing a continuum of revised understanding of foreign works, filling in absent context and discussing historical positioning, often to challenge the received wisdom about an otherwise aloof, potentially language-barred artist, a constant hazard online today in the midst of enthusiasm for foreign language works. Maruo’s work was the only New Comic from Japan, and thereby suggested assumptions about the state of Japanese alternative comics from his idiosyncratic example, one that today stands out more for its unique aesthetic departures, much in the way that mainline manga used to be often sold in its heaviest, most detailed, violent sci-fi form, there perhaps to make it seem more in line with American expectations for popular comics.

For more in expectations and delay, here is your American Thursday:

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So the other day I heard that Adam McKay — Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder, former Saturday Night Live head writer and director of various Will Ferrell theatrical vehicles such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers and the imminent The Other Guys — was apparently close to signing on as director for a movie version of the Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson-created superhero beatdown comic The Boys, so naturally I thought: didn’t this guy write a comic himself somewhere? Way back in the mists of time, when we all were so young and prone to arguing whether it was the 21st century yet?

Absolutely: years before McKay had directed a feature film, he and SNL/Conan O’Brien veteran & TV Funhouse creator Robert Smigel scripted X-Presidents, a 2000 Villard Books expansion on one of the old SNL cartoon shorts, where Ford, Carter, Reagan & Bush get superpowers during a celebrity golf tournament and do battle with America’s enemies, like Manuel Noriega, or Reptilio. It’s a pretty funny book, formatted like a trade paperback collection of comic book issues, and dotted with as many artists (three pencillers, an inker and his studio and a letterer/colorist working from the original animation designs) as a typical superhero run of the day. Lots of fake ads, of the vintage sort you’d see in Acme Novelty Library, but this came out before the Jimmy Corrigan collection, or Clowes’ David Boring, so it seems to have missed out on the visibility granted soon after to bookshelf-format comics.

It mostly seems to be forgotten, which is too bad; there’s some decent (if occasionally obvious ha ha old comics) laughs, sometimes approaching a Michael Kupperman-type surrealism of decontextualized shared culture. It lacks Kupperman’s elegance with the form, though – Smigel readily admits it was basically a means of realizing an X-Presidents movie script without having the money for a feature film, which kind of shows, and maybe that’s another reason why it hasn’t quite stuck in the minds of comics devotees.

But all of us will be forgotten one day, as will the following list of purchasable funnies:
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NOT EVEN A PICTURE THIS WEEK! ONLY FORTHCOMING COMICS! PLEASE CLICK FOR FORTHCOMING COMICS! SELECTIONS TO FOLLOW!

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Nothing in this comics world is more compulsively readable than random Steve Ditko comics, and here’s a recent favorite: The Big Man, from the 1986 Renegade Press release Murder #1. Simplicity in action – an anxious toymaker gets back at his nasty business partners by building a super-costume that transforms him into an enormous guy at will.  Then he crushes his enemies with enormity. “An envious mind, maybe a tiny mind with a big hate. A victimized mind seeking redress, etc. etc. etc.” muses a detective, whose function is mostly philosophical elaboration; the villain dies in a costume malfunction. So basically it’s The Incredibles, if The Incredibles was 115 minutes of Syndrome handing out critical beatings.

Murder was one of frequent Ditko cohort Robin Snyder’s anthology projects with Renegade, loosely arranged under the banner of Robin Snyder’s Revolver, as in ‘revolving’ artists and themes, although only the first six issues were numbered under the Revolver title – then came three issues of Ditko’s World: Static, an issue of Ernie Colon’s Manimal, three issues of Murder and a reprint-heavy Revolver Annual subtitled Frisky Frolics. Ditko showed up in almost every issue, as well as various artists and writers associated with the Warren magazines, which had folded a few years prior in 1983; indeed, some of the content is reprinted from Warren publications, while it’s possible the assorted Bill DuBay and Jim Stenstrum pieces (scripts?) were intended for Warren during their time with the publisher. To your left you’ll see Jim Stenstrum’s Tales of the Siberian Snowtroopers #1 (Revolver #6, reprinted in Annual #1), drawn by future Image co-founder Erik Larsen, who otherwise contributed a few illustrations to the extended Revolver project. If the story wasn’t intended for Warren, this would mark the only original, non-Warren comics work by Stenstrum, a specialist in keen violence and sarcastic heroism of the sort that would eventually spark a pre-Image comics revolution in America, the ’80s British Invasion fed by a growing 2000 AD and Warrior, as I’ve indicated in this space before. Here, it seems several time periods exist at once, although I wouldn’t call Stenstrum ‘ahead-of-his-time’ in the ’70s – internationally he was perfectly of his time, while many American genre comics hung a few steps back.

But now, onto the sequels, collections and follow-ups you dare not miss:

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Last week was a slow one for me, comics-wise. My main pleasure was this – finally tracking down a copy of issue #7 of Viz’s old release of Cobra, a Buichi Terasawa manga from the late ’70s/early ’80s about a secret agent-type space hero with a cannon for an arm. This was during Viz’s period of releasing portions of manga series as perfect bound miniseries (at higher prices – Cobra ran $3.25 per issue) which would then sometimes get collected as softcover books, though not in this case. This was also a time of fairly aggressive framing of ‘manga’ as akin to Western comics, so a lot of chest-beating action stuff or fantasy work got translated, all the better if it had some awareness in anime fandom, which Cobra did among miscellaneous sci-fi fans (already aging a bit) who maybe traded tapes of the 1982-83 television anime.

Of course, Cobra ran for 18 volumes in Japan, so Viz’s 12 comic books didn’t get very far into the story. Terasawa would eventually develop into an illustration-oriented, rather cheesecake-y comics artist, but this ’70s stuff bears a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s stamp, in that he started out apprenticing in Tezuka’s studio. This was all part of a plan to somehow become a film director — he did eventually direct some of the anime based on his own comics — which contrasts a bit in approach with the movie pitch comics of today. This is an older kind of comic, even in terms of English adaptation – Marv Wolfman is credited with such, as another means of familiarizing North American audiences with Japanese comics. He has a small essay in issue #7 about discovering the old Cobra tapes while watching anime with Chris Claremont and James D. Hudnall, the latter a prominent figure in manga-in-English, having been (among other designations) one of the souls present for Naoki Urasawa’s first appearance in English in the form of the urban military action series Pineapple Army, though Urasawa (still years off from Monster) was best known as a popular sports mangaka, and anyway was working from scripts by Kazuya Kud? of Mai the Psychic Girl, whose presence I imagine was the real draw (if indeed there was any; the series didn’t run for too long).

And yes, I know I can just buy all these old comics off the internet — issues of Cobra aren’t particularly rare —  but hunting around for missing pieces is part of the fun for me. Many of the following selections are, however, very self-contained or now easier and more collected than ever:

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Monday was Memorial Day here in the U.S., which means UPS had the day off, which means comics (including new Shaky Kane) don’t arrive until Thursday, which means Diamond didn’t release their finalized new comics list until this afternoon, which means I’m here 24 hours later than expected. Given the benefit of an added day of contemplation, I realized that this would be the first New Comics Day since the middle of May to feature no Joe Kubert comics — no gigantic Sgt. Rock in Wednesday Comics, no inks over son Andy’s pencils in DC Universe Legacies #1 — so I took it upon myself to post the above image, a pencils & paint depiction of combat from the artist’s Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965, a drastic severing of sides of the brain in the body comics.

I haven’t heard a lot about the book online – I imagine it looks and quacks like some of Will Eisner’s later work, if you manage to claw under the shrink wrap, but it’s really a far odder, conflicted work, paring Kubert’s drawing down to its barest and most nakedly expressive, even more so than his 2003 Yossel: April 19, 1943, a fictional sketchbook autobiography from an alternate life. There he marked out places and faces and scenes; here he depicts action for just under half of the book, but without the panel borders that might impose a tighter notion of pacing, or restrain his slashing lines from almost reaching into adjoining scenes. The given sensation is less depiction than recollection, scenes still woozy behind the eyelids of someone who knows how to draw these things so damn well he can work as if by prolonged fit of instinct. It’s not ‘finished’-looking art, no. Sometimes it doesn’t even behave as if finished – I had trouble just telling characters apart at times.

But, I never didn’t know how they felt. Look at those faces. Bodies. In loosening his war comic style, Kubert’s excitement segues into terror, and froths with agony.

Also, look at those captions: white and digital in keeping with DC’s house style, and, in several instances depicted here, defiantly failing to match Kubert’s penciled guidelines, which somewhat unnervingly remain on the page. And the lettering/production is in fact the work of another person — Kubert cohort Pete Carlsson — although it’s Joe writing the transcript-style dialogue, and the ultra-dry, stolid narration, not that either mode sounds particularly different. To say the words and pictures in this book jar isn’t halfway enough – they don’t even seem to occupy the same space. It’s like the drawings were a comic somebody found, and then a narration was constructed around it, as if to make sense of it.

It’s a fictional story, albeit hewing very closely to the activities of the eventually-designated Detachment A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Vietnam in 1965, leading up to the actual Battle of Dong Xoai in June. Fascinatingly, an included 40+ pages of text-based supplements are apparently not supplemental at all – they’re Kubert’s source material, a newsletter put together by surviving members of Detachment A-342, through which you can observe how events have been compressed or combined in the story proper. And, just as the newsletter is largely unconcerned with conveying the personalities of the men involved in favor of hard procedure and incident, Kubert’s invented dialogues serve as almost purely transitional between alternately choked and purplish spreads of info-rich narration. And, of course, those leaping drawings.

I realize my interest in this book is a little esoteric; I couldn’t flatly recommend it without some major caveats pertaining to its clash between text and drawing, the latter more overpowering than ever. Yet – that’s the beauty. This is a heavily fact-based work of fiction, broken down and adapted and put on the page, as logic would dictate, but the art nonetheless feels like it existed first, because it is expressive and personal, and primal to battle, and it called for facts and text to tease it into a slightly heavier place of recognition so we can know which uniforms are worn and how the scenes should doodle in. Push it back, loosen it up a little more, in the second half of the book where the shooting starts, and suddenly it’s soldiers everywhere.

Anyway, as for my fellow latecomers:

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