Comix

Joost Swarte! Mark Smeets! Bill Bodéwes! Harry Buckinx! Ever Meulen! Peter Pontiac! Aart Clerkx! Evert Geradts! ‘Tante’ Leny Zwalve! A cornucopia of Dutch underground artists you very likely won’t have heard of, except maybe Joost Swarte on display in this 1977 Kitchen Sink oneshot.

I got this at the Haarlemse Stripdagen in 2022 together with half a dozen other great underground comix from two elderly gentlemen selling their collection.

Underground comix are hard to define and really only existed for a decade and a half. Created, published and distributed outside of the existing commercial comics industry, the underground started off with a few pioneers self publishing their comic strips in the early sixties. By the end of the decade several publishers (Rip-off Press, Last Gasp and Kitchen Sink e.g.) were active and there was a distribution system centered on the socalled head shop. The underground comix movement always had firm ties to the whole sixties counter culture though it wasn’t quite part of it. It did however share its fascination with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, though mostly the first two. Even if often prurient, underground comix offered a freedom denied to the staid commercial comic, nobbled as it was by the Comics Code. As hippie idealism died off in the cold light of Nixon’s America and drugs repression put head shops out of business, the underground comix boom slowly collapsed but not without having inspired generations of new comics artists.

Sad to say, in the Netherlands at the time American comics were largely ignored, seen as pure pulp with no merit. The Franco-Belgian tradition was dominant and except for Disney there wasn’t really any place for American artists in the Dutch magazines. Even so there was what you could arguably call an underground movement by the late sixties and early seventies, partially coming out of rock zines like Aloha and with some ties to the radical hippie movement. It was through Olaf Stoops’ Real Free Press that American underground comix would be imported and more, it would also publish Dutch translations as well as original work from Dtch cartoonists. All of which led to the creation of Tante Leny Presenteert in 1971, created by Leny Zwalve and Evert Geradts.

Whether this was the “first Dutch underground comic” as the introduction page in Dutch Treat has it is debatable because at roughly the same time Joost Swarte had published his Modern Papier zine, which would later merge with Tante Leny and there had been some Real Free Press publications already if I’m not mistaken. (So much of the history of Dutch comics has not been written yet though so it can be hard to tell at this late date.) But it was certainly the longest running, ending in 1978 with twentyfive issues. And the people it published were some of the most influential cartoonists of the seventies and beyond.

Dutch Treat, as you can see from the table of contents, offers a good overview of the most important talents the zine published over the years. My personal favourites here are Joost Swarte with his darkly ironic clear line style and Peter Pontiac, here represented with a four pager showing off his gritty, realistic style of drawing. Also excellent is Evert Geradts’ “Crump meets Disney” big nosed art work. On the whole, if you want a good overview of what the Duitch underground scene was like, this is a great introduction.

The second issues of Starslayer, Mike Grell’s attempt to rekindle the success he had with Warlord for DC by essentially creating Warlord… In Space. But that’s not important right now as this is also the debut for Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer!

I actually didn’t know I had this until after I moved and started cataloguing my comics the other day — using the Grand Comics Database‘s free service to do so. One of those issues I picked up at a comic con or comic shop’s back issue bins sometime in the nineties. My first issue of this series was number four, picked up because I had been a Mike Grell fan ever since I saw Warlord reprinted in the Dutch Batman comics. That issue had a fan letter from none other than Bill Mantlo praising The Rocketeer, as well as a few others gushing about it.

The Rocketeer would run in issue two and three of Starslayer before it continued in Pacific Presents 1 and 2. For what was basically Stevens first feature, he hit a homerun. Never particularly prolific it would take years and several publishers before the story started in this issue would be completed. Nevertheless, it was popular enough to be made into a movie in 1991. What struck readers was not just Stevens’ incredible art, on a par with e.g Steve Rude, but the setting and how he mixed and matched famous real life people with equally famous pulp characters. The Rocketeer’s girlfriend is Bettie Page; the one after the rocket pack is Doc Savage. Back in 1982 this sort of thing was unheard of.

As for Starslayer, as Grell himself put it, it was intended as the exact opposite of Warlord: instead of a modern man flung into a barbarian world, it stars a barbarian transported to the far flung future, from his own Celtic era fighting Roman oppression to a time when the Sun has gone nova. It is his job, together with Tamara, the scientist who plucked him from his time, to prevent the total destruction of Earth and the Solar System.

The series lasted only six issues at Pacific Comics before Grell jumped ship to First. By the eight issue Grell had stopped doing the artwork for it; by the ninth he had handed over the writing to one John Ostrander. Ostrander, together with new artist Timothy Truman, would wrap up the story and take the series in a new direction. Ironically, just as with the Pacific Comics version, at First too Starslayer would have a backup feature overshadowing the main story, as with issue ten Ostrander & Truman’s Grimjack would start running. ultimately Starslayer lasted 28 issues for a total of 34 at First. Grell himself would come back and do a ‘directors cut’ of the first six issues in the nineties for Acclaim/Valiant.

Pacific Comics was one of the original independent publishers made possible by the creation of the direct market in the late seventies and early eighties. It was originally a distributor of comics to comic shops and saw its chance to publish it own series. Active from 1981 to 1984, it published various high profile creator owned titles. Apart from Grell, there was also Jack Kirby doing various superhero titles, Sergio Aragonés debuting Groo the Wanderer as well as Berni Wrightson, Bruce Jones and Arthur Suydam. For various reasons, mainly due with the collapse of the distribution sid, the company went bankrupt in 1984, most titles ending up at rival independents like Eclipse or First.

Tales of the Kung-Fu Warriors #12 is one of those comics you buy purely for the cover.

Welcome to a new feature in which I show off a random comic from my collection every day, now that I finally have access to them again. We start with one of the most obscure issues in my library, something I must’ve picked up at some random con or comics shop purely based on the strength of the cover and recognising the character on the left. The issue itself is from June 1989 but I got it sometime in the early nineties as far as I can tell. At that time, the cover artist, Daerick Gröss, had become a minor “hot” artist, due to his work for Innovation on the Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat and Forbidden Planet adaptations. Gröss was already forty when he started doing comics in 1988; judging from his Wikipedia entry his career was largely over by the late nineties. He passed away last year.

In 1991 he had gotten his own series at Heroic, Murciélaga She-Bat, also featured here, which was enough for me to pick this up. At the time I always liked to find obscure superhero titles regardless of quality. Not that this was bad: just one long battle between Gams, with the striking legs and She-Bat, continually on the defence. Well drawn and laid out, it’s the best story in the issue. Gross definitely is the best artist in the issue, though none of the others are bad, just mediocre at best.

There are four more stories in this issue. Silk, by Vincenzo Tripetti, is about an MMA match between Silk and a cheating Soviet athlete, when that just still barely possible as a plot. Fun thing is that she wasn’t cheating for the glory of the USSR but because she was hired by a crooked promoter. Steven Ross’ Dragon Dancer for some reason has machine lettering instead of proper lettering like the other stories and is incomprehensible. Just could not read it properly, also due to the lettering.

Moonlight Cutter, by Dale Berry, is a standalone story about a samurai with a sword that can cut ghosts. Moody and fun it’s the second best story in the issue. Finally, Kung Fu Dog is a Neal Yamamoto funny animal story about two dogs in search of David Carradine. Rounding off the issue were various ad pages choked full of ninja and kung fu stuff and a back cover ad for another CFW title, Shred, featuring a gimp masked leather clad skate boarder (who also cameos in the She-Bat story). As a whole, Tales of the Kung-Fu Warriors is from a time when you could still make a living from doing low effort “sub culture” comics like this; judging from the editorial it used to be a magazine converted to the comics format and it certainly reads that way. A glimpse in an entirely different comics culture far away from ‘mainstream’ superheroics.