Welcome, one and all, to the far-flung future of– –1965!
If you don’t like the colour issues of Zot!, comics are not for you. Scott McCloud’s first significant comics project, it all starts with the titular hero from a parallel Jetsons future like Earth full of jet packs and flying cars, crash lands through a dimensional gate into the very ordinary life of bored teenage girl Jennie Weaver. Much later, after Zot! had been rebooted as a black and white title, this very ordinary life would become the focus, a critically acclaimed portrait of adolescence, but for the first ten issues it would be colourful high adventure all the way.
Back in the 1990s I was a regular at two comics shops: Het Perron, a traditional, mostly European orientated shop that had also started carrying American comics and Henk Lee’s Comics & Manga Store in Amsterdam. The first I went too every weekend I was visiting my parents, the second I went to every Thursday, new comics day. Henk Lee had his shop in the middle of Amsterdam’s Chinese district on the Zeedijk, at first as part of the Chinese supermarket his family already owned. I’d found out about him through an ad in one of the first US comics fanzines published in the Netherlands, Comic View, where he promised low prices and rare comics for cheap if you got a subscription. Back then Zeedijk was still somewhat of a junkie hangout, so it was a bit of an adventure for a provincial boy like me to make that first trek there…
Over the next decade I would buy most of my comics from there; I can still remember the smell of spices that hung over the store when it was still part of the supermarket. I’d soon established a routine of going in every Thursday, get the new batch of comics, then go to one of the Thai restaurants in the neighbourhood for dinner, occasionally strolling into the Red Light District by “accident”. What set Henk apart was not just that he carried new comics, as many other shops had started doing, but that he had a well stocked back issue section. Most shops just had random issues of whatever they had ordered new and some crap that had been floating around the Dutch comics circuit for years, but Henk actually imported them directly from America. Which is why I could get the first 18 issues of Zot! in one fell swoop. I already knew Zot! from mentions in the fan press, had already read Understanding Comics, so once these were available at Henk’s I immediately bought them.
The first issue is a masterpiece in how to get your readers excited. We get a few pages of Jennie moping about having had to move to the suburbs because of her parents jobs and her brother Butch teasing her, before Zot crashes into their lives, pursued by killer robots from Sirius who are after the key to the doorway at the edge of the universe. Jennie helps Zot defeat them, he returns through the gateway when she finds the key and ends up falling through it herself, together with her brother. Some exposition and touring of Zot’s future world of 1965 later, back to the action as a de-evolution cult attacks and Butch gets turned into a monkey…
Everything about this bops. The writing and art is great, while the lettering by Todd Klein, who designed the logo, and the colouring by Tom Zuiko is top notch too. McCloud would go on to do a lot of great, interesting comics but none quite as fun as these first ten issues of Zot!.
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