Comix

All Diamondback wants is a nice evening on the town with Captain America. Standing in her way is an army of the worst villains the Marvel Universe has to offer. Can she prevent Cap from going after them for one night?

An easy issue to write about this time as I’m still poorly. This is one of my favourite Captain America issues, a done in one story that’s quintessentially Gruenwald even though it’s nothing like anything else he ever wrote for Cap. Ever since issue 358 Cap and Diamondback had been going through one adventure after another and this issue starts as they’re finally home. Cap wants to leave but Diamondback isn’t having it. After a brief discussion about what they are too each other, settling on friends and having established that Cap has no social life whatsoever, she sweets talks him into a friendly date that night.

Now you have to remember that at this stage of Gruenwald’s run on Captain America, he’s Cap nearly 24/7, his civilian Steve Rogers identity nearly abandoned. The man lives in Avengers headquarters, has no other job than being a superhero and no time for a social life. He doesn’t even have clothes fit for a date anymore and has to ask Jarvis for advice on what to wear. Diamondback meanwhile gets her best friend, a certain Black Mamba, to help her get in top shape for the date. The most important thing being a new hair colour as Cap wouldn’t “look right going out with a girl with magenta hair”…

Both spruced up nicely and revealing their civilian identities to each other for the first time, they set out for a night on the town: dinner at a nice Mexican place, followed by a magic show and a nice stroll through the neighbourhood where Cap grew up, not too far from where Diamondback spent her childhood. Sounds idyllic, but this wouldn’t be a superhero story without supervillains…

As they take a taxi to the restaurant, there’s a traffic jam because the Gamecock is holding a woman hostage nearby. The show at the magic club is interrupted by the arrival of Trump (no, not him) trying to rob the place. Their nice stroll afterwards is interrupted by a lovers spat between Poundcakes and Jackhammer. Yes, the very worst villains the Marvel Universe has to offer and there are reasons you never heard from them. That Scourge never got to any of them is a miracle. Luckily for Diamondback, though it comes close, Cap never has to interfere as they have a trio of guardian angels watching over their date: Black Mamba, the Asp and Anaconda. Diamondback’s friends from the Serpent Society took it on their selves to make sure her date was a success, not knowning who she was dating…

The art in this story is by Ron Lim, inked by Danny Bulanadi. Lim had taken over from Kieron Dwyer with issue 336 and would remain until 386, with Bulanadi having been the inker already and staying on after he left. Gruenwald’s Cap would sadly never look as good as it did after Lim left. The artwork was decidedly inferior under Levins and his successors. But this issue not only has Lim on the main story; the backup art is by Mark Bagley. In it we have Diamondback struggling with what her attraction to Cap means. If she wants to get serious, it means giving up her career as a supervillain and going straight. Can she do it and give up her lifestyle and easy money?

This what I mean by a quintessentially Gruenwald Captain America story. You have the dredging up of deservedly obscure villains on one hand and the socio-economical consequences of wanting to date a superhero on the other. If you want a grasp of what his writing is like, this is the issue to try.

A story about the everyday life and adventures, the “love” and “capitalism” of a girl who was born, raised and “normally” wrecked in a boring town called Tokyo

Kyoko Okazaki was one of the most influential mangaka of the late eighties, but sadly a traffic accident in 1996 left her unable to work. Specialising in slice of life, psychological driven stories, Pink is one of her most famous works. Written and published in 1989, at the height of the Japanese Bubble, Pink is the story of a 22 year old office lady who moonlights as a sex worker at night to be able to afford the meat with which she feeds her pet crocodile.

There’s more to Pink than this of course. As the opening sentence of Okazaki’s afterword reproduced above states, this is a story about love and capitalism, written at a time when Japan’s love for capitalism was at a fever pitch, just a short time before the bubble would burst. Yumi is representative of a generation of girls who came of age during the bubble and started their careers when it was still expected they would drop out in a few years to get married and have children. She actually comes from a rich family who still pay her rent. The only reason she has to have a job and work as a sex worker is to buy things and most of her money is actually spent on that pet crocodile. Which needs to be fed or it will feed on her.

In some ways Pink, especially with Okazaki’s art, reminds me more of 19902s alt-comix cartoonists like Julie Doucet, Seth or Chester Brown than ‘regular’ manga. This could’ve been published by Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly in 1995 and not look out of place. Instead it only came out in English in 2013, from Vertical, a Kodansha subsidary. As a one volume manga it’s a quick but satisfying read. The only quibble I have with the edition is that the translator is nowhere credited.

I actually only got this manga today, having ordered it because LowercaseJai’s video analysis of it made it look interesting. Because I’m actually suffering from a nasty cold and barely able to string two sentences together, I thought I would embed the video to explain why this is such a good, interesting and important manga.

An attempted coup by barbarian invaders crash lands an artificial mini planet on Earth, 250 million years BC in this mixture of Von Daniken and Star Wars.

Yesterday’s entry reminded me of another 1979 science fiction series with an artificial world traveling the galaxy and a Spanish artist. this time though the journey is involuntary and takes place “250 000 centuries ago”. On Axi, war and violence have been eradicated centuries ago. But then the barbarian Zorks under their evil leader Zorka attacked, were promptly defeated by the Axi defence shields and captured. Turned over for rehabilitation by professor Orloz, they are transported to Thulia, a giant artificial planet in orbit around Axi. But what Orloz and his assistants Rodion (the hero) and Lilya (the girl sidekick) do not realise is the enormity of Zorka’s thirst for power. He quickly gets hold of some antique laser weapons from a museum and forces Orloz to hand over control of Thulia by threatening to murder its inhabitants. Unfortunately during the ensuing fight the control systems get damaged, Thulia leaves orbit and drifts helplessly into the Galaxy only to end up on Earth at the end of the first story.

All of which sets the stage for the adventurs of Rodion, Lilya and prof Orloz on what’s clearly a Jurassic Era Earth considering the presence of brontosauruses, despite the fact that is supposedly 250 million years ago and that era only started 200 million years ago, but who cares eh?

Certainly Roger Lecureux didn’t when he wrote this, considering one of the later stories featured the threat of a Phorushacos, a flightless bird from the Mycene, long after the dinosaurs went extinct. We’re on “prehistoric Earth”, not an entirely new setting for Lecureux, whose much better known Rahan was also set there, but in a more scientific rigorous one. Here all the setting is there for is to provide monstrous menaces for our heroes to overcome in their flight to freedom from the tyranny of Zorka.

With Alfonso Font on art duty, these monster fights at the very least look good. Font is equally adept at drawing realistic, lived in looking high tech space ships and cities as he is at drawing prehistoric animals while not neglecting his characters either. I’ve always liked his art style and De Bannelingen van de Aarde was the first time I saw his art. The title of the series roughly translates as “the Exiles on Earth”; in Dutch three albums were published in 1980-1981. As far as I know, to little success.

The series was originally published in France as Les Robinsons de la Terre, in the weekly comics magazine Pif Gadget for a total of twenty two episodes of usually ten pages. The Dutch version was incomplete, stopping halfway through and at a cliffhanger. (Interesting to note is that Pif Gadget started off as Vaillant, a magazine for the communist youth movement in 1945). In France the series wasn’t successful either, with only one album collection published in 1980.

I can understand why. The stories are competent, but formulaic and while the art is great it’s not sufficient to make this a series you got to read. It’s entertaining but nothing more than that, a minor work in the oeuvre of both Lecureux and Font.

If you want to boldly go where no one has gone before, seeking out new worlds and new civilisations, why use a poxy space ship when you can take an entire planet, asks Gigantik?

This is something that you can really only do in comics, just use an entire planet to explore the Galaxy with. Blew my mind reading these as a child, the idea of exploring the universe while still enjoying all the comforts of home. José Maria Cardona’s art, whose style is not dissimilar to Alfonso Font’s here, helped a lot with this. He made Gigantik look very attractive indeed, portraying it as a combination of research center, holiday resort and nature park.

The series was set a century from its first publication, 2078, when the Solar System had been completely explored and several planets had been settled as well. Space travel is common and easy enough that a trip from Mars to Earth only takes a few days and space piracy is actually possible. Which is what drives the plot for this first Gigantik story, as astrobiologist Bruno Castor — who had been stufying the native Martian wildlife — prepares to join the Gigantik expedition in place of his brother, who died in a space accident. The Claw, one of the most infamous space pirates, wants to use Bruno to infiltrate the project and take it over to become the ruler of the Solar System. To that end he kidnaps Bruno and Mireilla Anderson, the grand daughter of the leader of Gigantik’s scientific council, to blacvkmail the latter into handing over the planet. Bruno and Mireilla, with the help of their trusty robot sidekicks Bulldozer and Peanut, however manage to foil his plans.

Yes, there is a fair bit of Star Wars inspiration in here, not the least with the bickering robot sidekicks, but the Claw too is a sort of K-Mart special Darth Vader. Probably inevitable as this series was conceived in 1978/79. Gigantik was created by Victor Mora, Spanish like the artist José Maria Cardona, for the West-German comics magazine Zack which at that time had ambitions to become a pan-European magazine. For a short while in 1979-1980 it would be also published in Dutch as Wham! and in French as Super-As. Printing the same magazine in multiple languages can be cheaper than in just one; to swap language you apparently just have to swap the black printing plates; the other colours can remain the same and higher print runs means cheaper printing costs. With Zack having gotten its hands on both new series by established authors as well as several older fan favourites taken over from other magazines you’d think it could’ve done well, but sadly the whole venture lasted only a year.

Gigantik outlived the magazine: seven albums were published in Dutch, from 1979 to 1984. In retrospect Gigantik is a minor classic of what you might call the “Spanish School” of science fiction comics. Victor Mora of course was also the writer of Dani Futuro.

Here’s a comic for which I have the original art but I don’t think I have the issue in which it appeared. Also, it took me twentyfive years to actually hang this on my walls.

And I had to move house three times before I could!

Back in the previous millennium, in 1999 to be precise, I had the magical combination of income and free time needed to dive deep into comics fandom. I had been going to Dutch cons for some years, but these were mostly an opportunity to score some cheap comics. By the mid-nineties, thanks to Usenet and the Comix-L email list my tastes had broadened and I had gotten into small press and self published comics. Somehow I heard or read about the annual Caption comics convention held in the Oxford Uni halls and decided I would go to the 1999 edition: SpaceCAPTION99.

Caption was an explicitly small press orientated convention, started in 1992 by Adrian Cox, Damian Cugley, Jeremy Dennis, and Jenni Scott, who were still organising it in 1999. Held over the weekend in the hallowed halls of the Oxford Union Society, it was a small affair, a hundred or so people? As I remember it there were maybe a few stands with people selling their own stuff, as well as maybe one dealer with some esoteric stuff — I remember buying some Jack Chic Crusaders comics about the comic apocalypse. There were a fair few comics creators like Dave McKinnon, Terry Wiley, Andy Konky Kru, Lee Brimmicombe-Wood and Bryan Talbot. The latter gave a talk about how his then recently finished Tale of One Bad Rat was created and which techniques he used to make it as accessible as possible for non-comics readers.

The con also held an auction of various things, including original artwork, which is were I bought this. No idea what I paid for it at the time, but it can’t have been that expensive. The pages looked nice, it earned the convention a few quid for next year and I vaguely thought it would be nice to hang up on my wall. Similarly I bought a great looking Lee Brimmicombe-Wood page showing a space ship in transit across the moon and a page from some superhero story by Adrian Dungworth and Mary Green.

Once home none of these made it to my walls, living at the time in a small, cramped student flat already filled up with bookcases. Instead they disappeared in my parents’ attic, where they stayed for a decade and a half until my father got fed up and shifted all my comics crap to me. At that time, having moved twice and in the first house I’d actually bought I still didn’t have room to hang them, for the same reasons. But the beauty of the overinflated housing market in the Netherlands meant I could trade in my far too small flat in Amsterdam for a obscenely big house in the provincial town my parents live in and now I do have room. So yesterday I finally hung these pages up in my living room.

In the process I discovered that this art was created by Nick Abadzis, best known these days for Laika and Hugo Tate. It’s a simple story about discovering Space: 1999 as a child and how he’s occasionally reminded of it as 1999 approaches. According to the sticky note still attached to the back of one of the pages, this story was done for the Caption booklet this year and Nick had donated the artwork to the con’s auction, hoping to raise some dosh that way. Well, according to the surviving photo album, the auction raised over a thousand ponds, so it must’ve served its purpose. As for the booklet, I may still have it but it will be somewhere among all the other convention bumf moved from closet to closet as I moved houses…