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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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