Comix

It’s 1986. It’s the end of the world and time/space agent Ravian has to find his way through a flooded New York to find his nemesis, the mad scientist Xombol, before he changes the future forever!

Considering New York didn’t flood thirty eight years ago because an arsenal of hydrogen bombs accidentally exploded at the North Pole, not only melting the ice caps but also setting lose a wave of seismic and volcanic activity, maybe Xombul did manage to change the future?

Or more likely, this was originally written in 1968 so 1986 was a safe near future year to set the story in. After all, it was just the first full length story for the new Valérian series created by Pierre Christin and J. C. Mézières in Pilote. Who knows if it would be a success or how long it would last, right? Fast forward a fifteen years ago and a young Martin was reading this in the local library one or two years before it would be 1986 for real and he found himself wondering if and how Christin and Mézières would fix this…

Spoilers: they did, but that’s a story for another time. All I’ll say here is that Valérian was popular enough that it would become a problem for the series by the early eighties and that it was resolved in a very comprehensive manner, completely revamping the series as it had been. But all that’s still in the future at this point.

Het Woede Water (original: La Cité des eaux mouvantes, The City of Shifting Waters) is a fairly straightforward story. In a previous adventure, Ravian had had to catch Xombol who had taken a time machine and travelled to the Middle Ages. It’s here that Ravian also met Laurentine and took her with him to his future. Now Xombol has escaped, yet again stolen a time machine and travelled back to 1986, as the disaster that ended civilisation for four centuries was still in progress. He arrives at the time travel station in the cellar of the Statue of Liberty, just in time for it to collapse due to the storm battering New York, to be rescued by a gang of plunderers led by one Sun Rae, a Black flute playing gang leader/intellectual. Everybody else has long abandoned the city.

Some picaresque adventures in the ruins of New York later, he, Laurentine and Sun Rae are captured by Xombol’s cyborgs and transported by atomic hovercraft to a secret government lab in Yellowstone park, by way of Washington DC — any Americans wanting to tell me if that’s a logical route? There they manage to escape again with the pet scientist Xombol rescued, have some adventures in what’s left of civilisation around Yellowstone before going for the final confrontation with Xombol. They manage to stop him and in a neat bit of symmetry realise the images shown at the start of the story were actually taken from the space station Xombol had moved to…

It all reads like a good sci-fi b-movie, especially the first part, set in New York. There are anachronisms of course: the Empire State Building is referred to as the tallest building, Sun Rae and his gang look like late sixties hippies rather than anything you’d find in the real 1986 New York, but those are quibbles. Both Christin and Mézières had live in the US before they’d went to do comics: the first as a teacher of French literature in Salt Lake City, the latter because he wanted to be a cowboy. Their version of America therefore doesn’t look inherently strange. One minor detail I wonder about is how many readers would’ve had a clue about the real Sun Ra: was this Christin paying homage to one of his jazz idols?

As a child I ate this all up; this was the first I’d read of Ravian and it hooked me for life. The series would continue until 2019, after which both Christin and Mézières retired from it, the latter passing away in 2022, while Christin only died early this month. Valérian and especially Mézières’ artwork was incredibly influential; it’s alleged the Millennium Falcon was based on the spaceship used in the series frex. Why the Dutch publisher found it necessary to change the title to Ravian I have no clue.

Cat Girl will never look as cool inside this book as she does on the cover of it. Leave all your preconceptions about sultry cat ladies behind; this is a very different cat heroine!

Cat Girl is Cathy Carter, whose father was a somewhat bumbling private investigator. One day while she was in their attic to look over hetr father hard at work guarding a nearby insurance building from a suspected break-in, she stumbled over a casket her father’s African friend had sent and found a cat suit. She put it on, went on to the roof to look over her father and saw him being beaten up by a couple of thugs. With all the grace and instincts of an actual cat, she didn’t hesitate and immediately jumped over to save him.

That’s how she debuted in the first issue of weekly girls comics magazine Sally, in June 1969. She would continue her adventures there in weekly installments of two and a half pages until Sally was merged with Tammy, then continued there until 1971. Because the UK comics industry was even more amateurish than its US counterpart, its writer remains unknown, but the artist is Giorgio Giorgetti. Giorgetti was an Italian who migrated to the Uk after the war to become an hotelier but ended up being an IPC cartoonist. He sadly passed away in 1982 due to cancer.

With each installment of Cat Girl being barely two and a half pages long, running for six to ten or so issues, the stories are stripped to their essentials. What with each part having to end on some sort of cliffhanger as well, it’s a testament to the qualities of both the unknown writer and Giorgetti’s drawings that they read as coherent as they do in this collection. Each story starts with Cathy’s dad getting some sort of job offer and Cathy deciding to help him. Thanks to her cat instincts and abilities it’s never long before she finds a clue to solve the crime, or tracks down the crooks responsible. But these can also land her in trouble, for example when her instincts force her to flee from a couple of guard dogs in one story. The crooks in these stories are ruthless: in her first case she’s caught, wrapped in a net and thrown in a river to drown; in another put on top of a chimney stack to slowly roast to death. She saves herself in that one by howling like a cat, attracting every feline in the neighbourhood and alerting people to her plight…

As I said at the start, Cat Girl is not an especially cool or sexy superheroine. Giorgetti consistently drew her acting as a real cat, in the way she moved and behaved. It’s all done in a similar way as to how e.g. a Ditko would draw Spider-Man in action, moving in a way that invoked the animal he was named after. Giorgetti also has a sense of humour about it, as Cathy gets into a literal cat fight with another girl wearing a cat suit and then has to take a job in a local panto as Dick Whittington’s cat!

Like dozens if not hundreds of other British series, these Cat Girl stories were trapped in mouldering back issues of Sally and Tammy for decades before Rebellion published this anthology in 2022, having bought the rights to all IPC properties they could get their hands on. Part of the Treasury of British Comics imprint, the Best of Cat Girl also has the Cat girl story from the Tammy and Jinty Special 2020, which introduced a new Cat Girl. The costume is slightly redesigned, losing the whiskers but keeping the tail. The story’s by Ramzee and Elkys Nova and I wouldn’t mind them doing more of this modern Cat Girl.

Rick Flag’s unknown son is kidnapped by one of his old team mates turned zombie master in this double sized extravaganza told by John Ostrander, Kim Yale, Luke McDonnell, Geoff Isherwood, Grant Miehm and Karl Kesel.

It’s a tribute to all involved that this story, which leans heavily on knowledge of not just all previous 49 issues, but also on that of the original Suicide Squad, was so readable even to a new reader like I was at the time. The Suicide Squad had been a classic The Brave and the Bold feature. The Jack Kirby created Challengers of the Unknown had set a vogue for four person adventure themes and over the years DC would introduce Rip Hunter and his team (time travelling Challengers), Cave Carson and co (cave digging Challengers), Seadevils (underwater Challengers) and the Squad itself (paramilitary scientist Challengers). They got six appearances in The Brave and the Bold but didn’t do much and were forgotten until Rick Flag was brought back in a Superman adventure as one of the Forgotten Heroes. That’s where I knew him from.

I bought this new when my local comic shop started carrying it as it expanded the American comics it carried. It was the first ever Suicide Squad issue I bought. It took me a couple of issues to get used to the series. Issue 53, which started the Dragon’s Hoard story that ran for several issues, was the one that hooked me. A story not unlike the one that hooked me on Captain America, with multiple dangerous groups fighting over the same treason and the Squad caught in the middle. If issue 50 left me a bit confused and unsure about the Squad, it was still good enough to let me keep buying it. and once issue 53 hooked me completely, I kept buying until the end and started buying the back issues, filling in pieces of the puzzle that issue 50 had presented.

What made suicide Squad so good was the simple fact that John Ostrander and Kim Yale were the sole writers for the entire series and had a coherent vision of it from the start. The Squad fit in with the more cynical nature of the Post-Crisis, mid-eighties DC Universe. You had an ambitious bureaucrat/politician, Amanda Waller, looking for a way to get ahead in the Reagan administration, coming up with a plan to use convicted supervillains on missions for the government. You had a good mix of actual heroes like Rick Flag, Bronze Tiger and Nightshade riding herd on a mix of outright villains and amoral scum like Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, the Enchantress and others. They weren’t shy about killing off characters either, with every mission leaving at least one member dead behind (the odds increased whenever a Firestorm villain was involved). By issue 50 the Squad had been exposed, cut loose from the government and now operating as out and out mercenaries.

A fun series that quickly became one of my favourites. In general I liked that whole dark corner of the DC Universe the Squad operated in. One of these days I should write more about it.

Mike W. Barr and Terry Dodson proving you don’t need to be Japanese to come up with gender bender stories, but as an US comic it features a lot more violence and lot less of checking out your new boobs.

Lukasz is one of four disciplines of the Archimage, fighting the minions of Boneyard through a centuries long war. Each time he’s killed or otherwise dies, he jumps into another random body, completely wrecking the lives of whicever poor soul he possesses as well as that of their family and friends. Having done so for a hundred times or more he long since has stopped worrying about it, justifying as the cost of the war he must wage to stop the evil Boneyard. The details of the war or why Boneyard is so evil are a bit unclear, though he’s certainly not above kidnapping and murder. It’s halfway through the issue that Lukasz is killed for the second time in the story, as Archimage and his men are betrayed and most die while Archimage himself is kidnapped. Once again Lukasz jumps bodies but for the first time it’s a female boy he ends up in…

Now this being a 1993 vintage comic don’t expect too much in the way of a trans friendly narrative here, though Lukasz’s struggles with his new body continue to make up a part of the series. Not just how he feels about his body, but also how other see him now. What with it being a nineties series, rape or at least the threat of it plays a large part in this. There’s also the question of the family Lukasz left behind this time: as a man he has walked out countless times on lovers, family, children; as a single mother now it’s more difficult…

When Malibu — flush with the money it got for publishing the first Image titles before they became a proper publisher — launched the Ultraverse in 1993 it was incredibly exciting. Unlike Image, this new superhero universe was writer driven (including Mike W. Barr, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, James D. Hudnall, Gerard Jones, James Robinson and Len Strazewski) but was also created as a coherent world from the start, rather than as with Image where each of the founders went with whatever interested them at the time. Even so, not every series was a winner for me and Mantra was one of those with which I didn’t click. Neither the overall plot nor the idea of a man trapped in a female body appealed to me to be honest. I only bought the first couple of issues of Mantra when they first came out, though also got a few more from the back issue bins. Not a bad series, just not one I liked all that much.

Imagine as if you started watching a kung-fu movie never having seen one before, just as the climactic fight scene at the end starts and you have no clue who any of these people are or why they fight. But at least the fights are very cool.

Which I guess is why I bought this, one of those weird, anomalous comics you get because you probably won’t see it ever again if you don’t. Probably at that time when I was really into Dough Moench & Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu which I was buying from a market stall as black and white Dutch reprints. Anything that scratched that same itch I’d snatch up.

Oriental Heroes is an interesting title, part of the short lived Jademan Comics line. Originally a Hong Kong publisher owned by Tony Wong, who created Oriental Heroes back in 1970 and his company on the back of its success. It’s still being published today though he is no longer involved. Hugely successful in Hong Kong, Wong decided in 10988 to try his luck on the American comics market, turning Oriental Heroes and three other titles (Blood Sword, Drunken Fist and Force of Buddha’s Palm into proper US style comics, with Mike Baron and Roger Salick providing scripting/adapting duties for them at first. The latter two, like Oriental Heroes were also created and drawn by Tony Wong, who must’ve been the most productive comics publisher who ever lived if he did all that and run his company at the same time.

As you may guess from the titles, all four are kung-fu series. Oriental Heroes is set in contemporary Hong Kong and the overall plot as far as I could make out is the fight between a loose band of good kung fu artists and the evil Global Cult, who uses “an army of kung fu assassins to protect its illegal drug, gambling and slavery operations”. In episode 16 the two sides clash, which is unsuprisingly structured like a kung fu movie, with lots of individual battles between the two sides’ heavy hitters. Lots of punching and kicking of course, but there are also a lot of special techniques each given its own powerful name. In English it’s all slightly awkward but it works nevertheless.

Jademan comics lasted until 1993, when it ceased publication on all its titles, promising to return with new ones but that never happened. Either they were another victim of the superhero boom and burst of that time or developments in Hong Kong put a stop to their American adventures, as Tony Wong had been ousted from his company not long before. Apart from the original four Jademan also published two other kung fu books, Iron Marshal and Blood Sword Dynasty, all of which lasted until the end. They also put out an anthology book that was more like a regular manga/manhua style magazine and a horror anthology but neither lasted long. An interesting experiment to sell manhua to America at a time when country was barely even aware Manga existed.

An interesting footnote is that, according to a news report in The Comics Journal 120, the coming of Jademan in 1988 caused a bit of controversy. Not only was the company promising steep discounts to distributors if they bought enough, it seems two distributors even bought shares in the company, on “a personal base”. Both Bud Plant and Diamond distributor’s owner Steve Geppi bouhgt shares at the time, but both said that was done as a gesture of goodwill…