Comix

This is a 1992 science fiction series so the Simon Bisley cover is de rigeur even if the inside art is as different as it gets.

The first in a ten issue miniseries and the first ever Grendel story I’ve read. Bisley’s cover is what drew my eye but the interior artwork by Patrick McEown, of which more later, is what got me to buy this series.

The story is simple. We open with a hover motor and sidecar fleeing through the desert. Riding it are a man dressed in black, wearing a black mask with white eyes and a boy in a hoodie. We don’t know who or what they’re fleeing until we go to what looks like a simple chalet but which hides a much larger complex below to see various murdered soldiers and we learn that somebody has kidnapped the heir to the Grendel-Khan. An elite group of soldiers dressed in red body armour is sent off in pursuit on their own hover bikes. They ambush the black clad man and the boy but are killed by him. After they reach Chicago they run into a gang that hates Grendels and think the man is one. He kills them in hand to hand combat and they continue their journey, to New York.

We don’t know why this man has kidnapped the heir or what his goal is or even where they’re going to. Any context we get is from the people responding to the kidnapping, a nameless woman who clearly seems to be some of leader and her assistant Heath. We also meet the woman’s daughter, Crystal, who is kept in the dark as to what happened. But the real context is given in the text box of the front inside cover, that starts with “Chapter 41: Devil in the Desert”, giving us the title of the story and which explains the setting. It’s the 27th century: the late Grendel Khan Orion Assante unified the world. His heir, the boy is Jupiter, who has been cloistered away in that complex we saw, in the Dakota Black Hills, held captive by his stepmother, the reigning regent Laurel Kennedy Assante, the woman trying to get Jupiter back.

But wait a minute. Chapter 41? But isn’t this the first issue of this miniseries?

Well, yes, but this was supposed to come out as the 41st issue of Comico’s Grendel series. Matt Wagner had startedGrendel at Comico as a three issue black and white series: the adventures of gentleman villain Hunter Rose. Wagner reworked this story after the series cancellation in backups to his other big Comico series: Mage but then was done with Grendel, or rather, Hunter Rose’s Grendel. Grendel became a persona that other people could take over and use, or be used by and the second Grendel series explored this, with various new characters picking up the role. Unlike the earlier stories, Wagner would only write, not draw the series, getting new artists for each story arc. By issue forty Grendel has basically taken over the world and Wagner had reached the end of what he wanted to with it. ut then he thought off the story that would become Grendel: Warchild… The idea had been to hand over Grendel entirely to other creators, creating a second series called Grendel Tales, then continue Grendel with issue 41 some months later, but then Comico went bankrupt..

It took two years for everything to clear up and Grendel: Warchild would end up at Dark Horse instead. I’m not sure exactly how much of this issue had been drawn already, but Amazing Heroes Preview Special 11 from Fall 1990 had one McEown page featured in its Batman vs Grendel article. Patrick McEown is an interesting artist. At the time his artwork reminded me of European science fiction artists like Enki Bilal or even Moebius, but now it feels more mangaesque to me? Especially the fight scenes, which are both brutal and funny at times. McEown hasn’t done much else either before or after Grendel: Warchild, having mainly worked on various Aircel series in different roles. A pity, because I like his art.

Of all of Grant Morrison’s stories, not even The New Adventures of Hitler got them in as much problems as this. Parliamentary questions were asked. All because it’s a comic about killing Margaret Thatcher…

In 1989 Grant Morrison had just begun their conquest of American comics, having started writing Animal Man the year before and having just taken over Doom Patrol from Paul Kupperberg, both on the strength of their work in the UK, notably Zenith. At the time they were also still writing for UK publishers, with the aforementioned The New Adventures of Hitler in pop culture magazine Cut and with St Swithin’s Day serialised in the anthology comic Trident, from Trident Comics. A story in four parts with art by Paul Grist, it would be released by Trident in a collected edition in 1990 and seven years later by Oni Press for the American market. The last one is the edition I have. St Swithin’s Day is the story of a nameless nineteen year old teenager plotting to assassinate Margaret Thatcher with a gun he found after a bank robbery. The story follows him a few days before she’s due to visit a school on July 15 (Saint Swithin’s Day). He steals Catcher in the Rye from Foyles bookshop to because “he wants them to find it” in his pocket afterwards. He also gets the collected works of Rimbaud for the same reason. It’s the sort of pretentious facade an intellectual nineteen year old would come up with. A little later he talks about how he doesn’t want to go back to his old room at his mother’s, with the Tolkien posters on the wall from when he was fifteen. Morrison has said that St Swithin’s Day partially autobiographical and based on these things I can see it.

Our protagonist then spends the day in Winchester, holed up in a cafe ogling a lone girl before having a conversation with an imaginary friend (also a girl). Depressed when the real girl’s date shows up, he leaves and spent the night sleeping in a work cabin, then the next day drops all his stolen book and stolen Walkman in a canal, deciding not to give “them” the pleasure of analysing him. The night before his assassination attempt, he breaks into Highgate Cemetary and dances in front of Karl Marx’s grave, to the tune of The La’s “there She Goes”, which is very, very of its time for when this was originally published.

As Thatcher visits the school, he manages to get close to her, gets her attention and shoots, but with an imaginary finger gun. Struck down and beaten up by the cops protecting her, the last page is of him on an old fashioned train with windows that can open, in the summer.

Now obviously this isn’t really a story about wanting to murder Thatcher, even if quite a few people would’ve wanted to kill her at the time. (In one of his imaginations of what would happen if he did kill her, the protagonist imagines street parties, which is indeed what did happen in certain places when she did pop her clogs much too late…) It’s rather a psychological portray of a sensitive teenager wanker, whose father had died sometime before the story opens, running away from becoming an adult, his mother pressing him to take a job. Nevertheless, The Sun got hold of it, whipped up a small moral panic, some Tory asked questions in parliament and Trident used all this as free advertising… So it goes.

Star*Reach 07 is not important because of its gorgeous Barry Smith wraparound cover. Nor even because it has an early Dave Sim story. But because it contains the very first manga published in English.

In the mid-seventies the American comics industry was going through one of its periodical doldrums. The silver Age of superhero comics was over and they had become slightly stale and formulaic again. While there was some room for more experimental stories in the weirder parts of the Big Two, that room was limited. Sales were down too as the newsstands were slowly dying, as they had been for decades. Meanwhile, the underground comix revolution had petered out too, partially due to the crackdown on head shops and other alternative distribution points for them. Partially also because too many imitators just went for quick drugs jokes and t&A instead of anything interesting.

Enter Mike Friedrich. One of the first fans to become a comics professional, Friedrich had written for both Marvel and DC, but by 1974 was fed up of working for them. Instead, he set up his own magazine, Star*Reach, positioning it as inbetween the underground and the “over ground” of mainstream comics: ground level comics. Where artists would have creative freedom and own their stories. The first issue came out in my year of birth, 1974, the last in 1979 for a total of eighteen issues. In many ways it pointed the way for the direct market revolution of the early eighties and the work of publisher like Eclipse, first and Pacific Comics.

Most of the people published in Star*Reach were sort of Friedrich’s contemporaries from the mainstream. Young artists like Walt Simonson, Howard Chaykin, Frank Brunner, Mike Vosburg, Jim Starlin and even Dick Giordano. Lee Marrs meanwhile represented the underground tradition. What you got as reader was not that different from what was on offer from the mainstream. It was all genre work, science fiction, horror and fantasy, just with more violence and nudity than you could get away with at Marvel or DC.

Issue 7 was published in 1977 and is typical. It starts off with the Dave Sim story about an astronaut meeting god, which is actually penciled by Fabio Gasbarri instead of Sim himself. There’s a Johnny Achziger scripted story about the Gods of Olympus with Joe Staton art, a Lee Marrs story like there was (almost) every issue, something by Jeff Bonivert and a Steve Englehart and Mike Vosburg thriller to round out the issue. And without fanfare, a short samurai story by Satoshi Hirota and Masaichi Mukaide, which may be the very first manga ever published in the US or even in English. Not that you would know that except for the names in the credits; the art and story are not dissimilar to the sort of thing Star*Reach published anyway.

There was a reason for this. Masaichi Mukaide was that rarest of breeds, a Japanese artist who was a fan of and inspired by American comics. Because republication of these in Japan was rare, he read them in English. Along the way he came across Star*Reach and decided to submit to it, striking up a mail correspondence with Mike Friedrich. Several other stories of his would be published in other issues as well. This also led to the first ever attempt to create an English language Manga magazine a few years later, called, erm, Manga, in which Friedrich and several other Star*Reach affiliated creators were involved as well. Mukaide was the editor of this, one of the first attempts to bring manga to an English speaking audience:

The stunning roster of authors makes the unique publication more impressive: Hiroshi Hirata, Yosuke Tamori, Yukinobu Hoshino, Katsuhiro Otomo, Keizo Miyanishi, Noboru Miyama, Yoji Fukuyama and Noriyoshi Orai (illustration). In addition, Hajime Sorayama was featured on its cover. The back cover was illustrated by Hiroshi Hirata. Chiki Oya was in charge of coloring the illustration indicated.
[…]
During the editing process, people who were introduced to Mukaide by Friedrich were highly involved. They included Lee Marrs, who debuted with an underground comic, Steven Grant, who later worked for Marvel and DC, and Larry Hama, who worked as an actor, musician, writer and artist.

As adapters, their duties were correcting parts unacceptable to American readers because they were too Japanese. For instance, take Keizo Miyanishi’s “MidSummer Night’s Dream,” which depicted the night Hikaru Genji met a mysterious woman. The original didn’t have much dialogue and narration, so Marrs added lots of it.

Manga is actually available at Mangadex if your morals are loose enough. Both Mukaide’s Star*Reach stories and it are ultimately just curiosities, early attempts at creating manga for an American audience, but no less interesting for this. An indicator of how much of a ‘prehistory’ there is to the official history of manga publishing in America.

Even if the comic inside is utter crap, you always get something worthwhile with a Gil Kan cover-up.

In one of his “Mark’s Remarks” columns in Marvel Age, Mark Gruenwald had a list of not quite serious professional comics jargon. The two I remember were “weeding the grass”, cancelling old series to make way for new projects and “cover-up”, when you have a good artist do the cover for an issue to cover for the much weaker artist doing the insides. Boy was Gil Kane used a lot in that role at Marvel in the 1970s. Not always even for bad artists. He also did a lot of covers for various reprint titles of pre-Marvel, Atlas monster stories that usually had Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko art. DC must’ve used them in this role as well when he worked there in the 1980s, considering this issue of The New Adventures of Superboy.

The art inside is by Alex Saviuk who isn’t a bad artist by any means but I can understand why if you can have a Kane cover, you take it. Saviuk himself was only a guest penciler for the three issues this Sunburst story ran (#45-47); Kane’s cover run went from #41 to #49. This is the only issue of the series I have and I only have it because of the Kane cover, proving that a cover-up works. I also like the idea of Sunburst, who I’d first seen getting killed in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but the cover was the main reason I picked this up.

If you’re familiar with Gil Kane’s art, you recognise it’s his work immediately even without his signature. The way Sunburst stands, with his right hand out stretched in front of him, his left slung out to the side, legs slightly bend, one slightly lower than the other, is a clear giveaway. The same goes for Superboy, repelled by Sunburst’s energy blast in mid flight. The outstretched, elongated right leg with the left leg raised up, lower leg tucked in under the knee is typical Kane. Hell, even the guns are: modern fire arms but they look like sci-fi blasters in a way only Kane (and maybe Carmine Infantino) drew them.

With any cover-up you run the risk of disappointment with the art inside but if you bought it DC had gotten its sixty cents, right. In this case, Alex Saviuk’s art here is disappointing, nowhere near the level he displayed on his later run on Web of Spider-Man, which is where I first encountered it. Look at Saviuk’s cover work there and these are great, much better than what he drew inside here.

Covers are there to sell comics, especially when most comics were still sold on the newsstands. Kane, with his dynamism and eye for composition is the ideal artist to do so. It would be great if somebody published an artbook of his Marvel and DC covers.

From the days before all furries had migrated to Deviantart and you still had to buy this sort of comic in your local comic shop.

I have no idea why my local comic shop got this particular issue of this particular series back then. As far as I know there wasn’t a cluster of furry comics fans frequenting it, nor do I remember seeing any other furry comic there ever. My guess is that because they had only been selling US comics recently, the owner tried out some things to see if they sold. And since I picked this out of the bargain bin a few years later, it clearly didn’t.

I know why I bought it and so should you if you look at the people listed on the cover. A sketches gallery featuring art by Norm Breyfogle, Guy Davis, Paris Cullins. Matt Feazell, John K. Snyder III and Tim Vigil among others? That’s worth picking up, if perhaps not at full price. That it’s all art of a sexy black cat lady helps of course.

Ms Chevious, the star of this issue was created by Randy Zimmerman and Sue van Camp, who also did the cover here. According to the short history provided in the introduction, she was intended to be the foil to the star of Zimmerman and van Camp’s attempted space trucker series starting J. B. Space that he had thought off in the mid-eighties. Her creation led to them retooling their ideas and instead they settled on a broader series, Tales from the Aniverse, with J. B. Space no longer being the sole protagonist.

Tales from the Aniverse was originally published in 1985-1987 by Arrow Comics. Arrow was one of those mid-eighties publishers which died in the great Black and White Bust of 1987, when the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had “inspired” a host of wannabes into setting up their own publishers, flooding the market and killing off a great many comic shops and publishers in the aftermath. Or so I thought, but a quick look at the Grand Comics Database showed that something calling itself Arrow Comics had a book out as recently as 2023.

In any case, Tales from the Aniverse lasted six issues there, then moved to WeeBee Comics for another two as The Aniverse before that publisher died. The third and so far last series, of which this was the second issue of two was published by Massive Comics Group, which despite its name only has one other issue to its name. it looks like this was something Zimmerman himself had set up to publish Tales from the Aniverse. He had plans for more: there was an ad for a terribly generic looking superhero title called The Superials in the back this.

The stories in this issue all feature Ms. Chevious as you’d expect and are decent if you like furry science fiction I guess. This is no Dalgoda but they are perfectly cromulent stories. The main attraction for me were the sketches and there’s a nice mix of proper furry artists (van Camp and Zimmerman, Steve Martin John Spiedel) with more well known ones like Breyfogle.

Furry comics were once a fairly big, if specialised bit of the direct market: even Fantagraphics published them. These days most of it seems to have moved online I think, with a few exceptions like Usagi Yojimbo. Zimmerman, according to the Wikipedia entry was still doing Ms Chevious stories as late as 2009; sue van Camp seem to have moved into being a role playing/computer games artist in the nineties.