Comix

Sometimes it’s not difficult to guess what part of a particular assignment interested the artist the most:

Anita en Sugar Jones was the lead feature in seventies Dutch girl comics magazine Anita. It starred Anita, the magazine’s ‘face’ as the assistant to glamourous but vain and egocentrical pop star Sugar Jones. Each episode would have Sugar come up with some scheme to get rich or famous or both and have Anita deal with the fallout. As is immediately clear from this first page, the star of the show is Sugar: both in looks and character she’s far more interesting than the frizzled haired, slightly boring goody two shoes Anita.

Anita at that time never credited the people who worked on their comics, but I knew that these magazines were usually filled with reprints from British IPC series. The artwork meanwhile looks decidedly Spanish. As you may know, Spain in the sixties and seventies produced a huge number of very talented comics artists, whose talents were ‘wasted’ by having to draw rote formulaic features for IPC and other British publishers. Though there are obvious differences between the various artists, their style is always recognisably lusher than their British counterparts, somewhat sexier and looser than the usually stiffer British cartoonist working on these titles.

It turns out my instincts was right: the original British version, simply called Sugar Jones was created and drawn by Rafael Búsom. What’s more, if Claire Napier is right in her review of the Sugar Jones collection published by Rebellion is correct, its co-creator was none other than Pat Mills! (he denies it though.) Regardless, the underlying themes of “class warfare and worker status” that Napier identifies in her review are pure Mills. Her description of the typical Sugar Jones story certainly makes me want to buy the collection:

Every strip Sugar gets an idea, often or always about how she can gain—men, contracts, cache, cash—and Susie sets out a reason or two why pursuing that plan would be harmful to others. Sugar doesn’t care; Sugar goes for it. Susie, with a little help from whoever else is in the strip this week, thwarts it and all of the people poorer and more authentic than Sugar bask in the joy of collaboration, justice and geniality. These are extremely jaunty, momentary reads, perfect for a pause with a beverage or between naps in the sun. They’ve got conviction, tremendous aesthetic value, and no apparent hate in their heart.

A visual treat and with its heart in the right place if somewhat dated attitudes here and there, what’s not to like about Sugar Jones?

Imagine. You’re the designated successor to the world’s greatest superhero. But you’re a failure and just before he dies he holds a lottery granting powers to 1,000 random people. Now you have to deal with this Legacy.

It’s an interesting situation, having a Superman like figure die, leaving behind his disowned protege and a thousand people with newly acquired superpowers, some of which are usefiul, some of which not so much or downright horrifying. And because they were chosen at random, there’s no guarantee that any of them will use these powers for good. A setting which you can do a lot of interesting stories with, as governments and other powers scramble to adjust to this new world. Legacy meanwhile not just has to deal with fulfilling his mentor’s role, but also learning to do so without his guidance and while he is now also responsible for guiding dozens if not hundreds of neophyte heroes…

Certainly something that piqued my interest when I read about it in Comics Scene 39 back in 1993. Sadly, Legacy 02 was the only issue I ever found from this series, nor did I ever see any of the other promised titles that were to come from Majestic.

There’s a good reason for this: that this was published in 1994 is a clue. That was the year that everybody and their aunt was setting up a new superhero comics universe. After the success of first Valiant and then Image in breaking the Marvel/DC duopoly, other publishers tried to do the same. There was Malibu starting up the Ultraverse thanks to their Image publishing money, Dark Horse with Comics Greatest World and seemingly dozens of other, new publishers doing the same. It would all end in tears of course.

The market was too small for all of them, so within a few years most of these publishers had vanished again, the more established ones had scaled back and dozens if not hundreds of comic shops had gone bankrupt in the aftermath. Then Marvel decided to buy its own comics distributor, went almost bankrupt themselves and in the process screwed up the direct market for a good decade if not longer.

In that climate a small upstart publisher like Majestic was doomed to failure. Legacy 02 was actually the last issue they ever published; the only other title they managed to bring out, S.T.A.T lasted only one issue. It probably didn’t help that they launched Legacy with a zero issue brought out as a trading card set, chasing two crashing trends at the same time…

A pity, as this wasn’t a bad issue. The artwork is by Tom Morgan, who has done far worse for bigger publishers and Fred Schiller’s script is decent enough. The plot is run of the mill superhero fodder: Legacy and his friends end up fighting the S.T.A.T government team over a misunderstanding set up by a villain working behind the scenes, in a crossover with that title. The standard Bronze Age Marvel setup. This could’ve been a minor cult classic had it come out at a different time and had been marginally less cynical in its publishing scheme.

What if you created a biographical comic following one woman from her birth to her death? And because she obviously doesn’t understand language as a baby, all the dialogue will be gibberish at first?

Chester Brown does love to set a challenge for himself, but Underwater turned out a bridge too far. Autobiographical stories about learning to wank? Fine. Having a protagonist with Ronald Reagan for a penis? Great! Issues upon issues of indecipherable text? Not so much. The art may not have helped either, with all the characters bald and barely looking like human in that first issue. Underwater lasted eleven issues before he abandoned it for the easier challenge of creating a series about Canadian folk hero Louis Riel.

I only got this first issue, probably a year or two after it had been published (in 1994). In the mid-nineties I moved to Amsterdam to go to college there. Not unsurprisingly, that was also my taste in comics broadened out from just reading superheroes. Partially this was due to me subscribing to the Comix-L mailing list, but that’s a story for another time.

The nineties were also the “golden age” of Canadian autobiographical cartoonists: Julie Doucet, Seth, Joe Matt and Chester Brown and I started reading all of them. Yet, as it was for most people, Underwater was still a bit too avant garde for me…

Mike W. Barr’s detective team gets a little competition from none other than Ellery Queen in solving the murder attempt on a mystic channeling the spirit of an Atlantean sorcery 10,000 years dead — who claims he is the one trying to kill her!

Mike W. Barr was a big Ellery Queen fan as the editorial page explains and with 1989 being the 60th anniversary year of the first Queen story published, he asked for and got permission to use him in this story, apparantely the first new Ellery Queen mystery in fourteen years.

This is the sole issue of The Maze Agency I own. I’ve never seen another issue pop up, either new or in the back issue bins, though it had a relatively healthy twentythree issue run first at Comico and then at Innovation from 1988 to 1991. There have also been several reboot attempts. It’s a bit of an oddity, a proper, classical detective series which actually tries to create fair mysteries for the reader to solve, when most American detective series are of the hardboiled variety. Mike W. Barr is probably still best know for his Batman work in the eighties (alongside Camelot 3000), especially Batman and the Outsiders, so he wasn’t quite new to writing murder mysteries. The artwork here is by Adam Hughes, present on the first nine issues.

I only knew about this because Comics Scene had done an interview with Barr about his current projects at the time. Comics Scene was a glossy comics and animation magazine in the vein of Fangoria or Starlog, with half of each issue devoted to animation as well as comics based movies and tv, the other half to interviews with comics creators and other comics news. My local comic shop started carrying it at roughly the same time as it started selling US comics and it was one of the few ways I learned about new and upcoming projects. I’ve always had a soft spot for it ever since but in the nineties it lost out to the wave of comics as investment huckster zines like Wizard. Unlike those though it was smart enough to see that the mid-nineties superhero boom would inevitably crash and honest enough to warn its readers about it.

Innovation, The Maze Agency‘s publisher for most of its run, was an interesting company. Founded in 1988 by David Campiti it became a fairly major player in the few years between the decline of the old school indepedents like Comico and the rise of Valiant and Image. Ironically, given its name, it had its biggest success doing comics of various nostalgic media franchises like Lost in Space as well as long, (twelve issue) adaptations of several Anne Rice novels. The Maze Agency wasn’t the only series it had taken over from a defunct company. They also continued various superhero titles from publishers that went bankrupt during the black & white comics bust. Sadly, they in turn went bankrupt in 1994.

Jim Lee joins the team and makes them sexy again.

The very first American Uncanny X-Men issue I ever bought and also the debut of Jim Lee as the penciler. If only I had been more careful with this issue I could’ve sold it and retired on the profits… I had started reading superhero comics in 1987 and had been buying the Juniorpress version of the X-Men, roughly a year behind the original, since 1988. And then in the summer of ’89 my local comics shop started experimenting with selling new American comics so I started buying those. Frustratingly, they did stop doing so for a few months which meant I missed a few key issues from that time…

This issue came at the tail end of the whole “X-Men Down Under” arc, when the team was already falling apart again. In a few issues they would all be gone and the next year or so would be spent in yet another “rebuilding the X-Men” project. ironic, considering sending them to Australia had been intended as a fresh start as well. I’ve said it before that Claremont at this late stage was stuck in a rut, never letting his characters catch a break. The ‘mistake’ I made there of course was reading a year’s worth of stories in one go: then this is a tedious slog. Read as intended though, issue by issue as it came out it kept me on the edge of the seat. With Claremont you never knew what would come next, just that it would rarely be something good to our heroes…

But still, Claremont was running out of gas. Australia hadn’t quite worked out, something new was needed. In the past Claremont was always at his best when he had a good artist to bounce off of: John Byrne, David Cockrum, Paul Smith each in turn had revitalised the series. Jim Lee could do that too.

But it took some time. Issue 248 was only a fill-in; Silvestri was back the next issue and would remain until #256, when Lee would return for a three issue stint. He would only take over as the regular artist with #268, twenty issues after his debut. Starting from that point on, the series did have a new energy to it, though ironically it would ultimately lead to Claremont’s departure. But that was still in the future at this point.

Even as ‘just’ a fill-in that debut had a real imapct, at least on fifteen year old me. I liked Marc Silvestri well enough and his slightly cartoony, scratchy drawing style, but Lee brought something he lacked: the horny. Just look at Havok’s chiseled abs and Dazzler’s casual sexiness there. That was a lot for a nerdy teenager like yours truly. It’s no wonder Lee got so popular, so quickly. It’s also no wonder he even got Marc Silvestri to change his style; just look at his work on Cyberforce later…

As a story, uncanny X-Men #248 is just another day of misery for the X-Men, but artwise then it was a revelation. A turning point in the series history, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time.