Comix

Back in the seventies and eighties Dutch kids got to read Joost Swarte comics for free at school.

A bit of a cheat as Jippo wasn’t a comic so much as a magazine that also featured comics. It and its stablemates Okki (for children just starting primary school) and Taptoe (for the oldest primary school students) were edutainment magazines sold directly to schools, orginally started as proper Catholic publications but by the seventies this was long gone. Of the three, only Okki is still being published; Jippo only lasting to 1984, Taptoe to 2016. Because there was a bit of a gap between Okki and Taptoe, in 1974 Jippo was created for children in the middle years of primary school. Joost Swarte was there from the start with his series Katoen en Pinbal.

Katoen en Pinbal was a comedy series about the clown in Pierrot costume Katoen and the dog in tuxedo Pinbal, who get into various adventures, as in this issue where they are in the middle of a story in which they got suddenly incredibly rich and no longer like it. If you’ve seen any of Swarte’s more adult work, this is pretty much a version aimed at children. Some of it has been translated into English by Fantagraphics; it’s worth checking out if you like Swarte.

All these three magazines were a lifeline for a lot of Dutch cartoonists like Swarte for decades. Not only did it provide a steady paycheck for those featured in it, certain authors like Fred Julsing did some of their best work for them. As a kid I read all three of them because my school had a subscription, even after I graduated, through my younger siblings. Though I don’t necessarily consciously remember much of the comics in them, I’m sure it has been influencing my taste at least subconsciously…

The only superhero whose father was a Nazi death camp commandant he would follow in the footsteps of by massacring a village during the Vietnam War.

Created by Joe Gill and Pat Boyette for Charlton Comics in 1966, Peacemaker is Christopher Smith, “a diplomat who loves peace so much that he’s willing to fight for it”. That sort of made sense in the glamorous sixties spy thriller world he operated in. When Charlton went under in the 1980s, DC bought the rights to most of their Action Heroes, including him, as a present for their then editor in chief Dick Giordano, who had had the same role at Charlton in the sixties. Nothing was done with him until Paul Kupperberg brought him back in Vigilante for two stories in issues 36-38 and 42-43. Now he was still fighting for peace, but obsessed with terrorists and more than willing to kill whoever got in his way, which included the then Vigilante, who he killed the very first time they met.

Paul Kupperberg had taken over Vigilante from Marv Wolfman from issue 20. Under Wolfman Adrian Chase, the titular hero had not been a well man already, obssesed with his quest for vengeance agains the sort of criminals that had murdered his family, but Kupperberg upped the stakes drastically. Int he first part of Kupperberg’s run Chase quits being the Vigilante only to see two others take up the mask, the second one being the one who got murdered by Peacemaker, leading to Chase to return to the role. It doesn’t do his mental health any good and the series ends with issue 50 and his suicide…

Peacemaker’s appearances therefore fit in quite well, having become convinced that the souls of the people he killed reside in his helmet. His appearance also transforms the series from a straight out crime series to a more Tom Clancy-esque spy thriller one. Chase is outed as the Vigilante and becomes an agent of the same agency Peacemaker nominally works for. For some reason that was the sort of story Kupperberg found interesting at the time, both in his work on Doom Patrol a bit earlier and in Checkmate a bit later. Together with John Ostrander and Kim Yale on Suicide Squad he was one of the architects of the dark underside of the DC universe post-Crisis. Peacemaker fits right in.

Peacemaker 01 was the first of a four issue miniseries and the first time his new origin was told. Unlike previously, he no longer hears the voices of the people he killed, instead he hallucinates the presence of his father, clad in SS uniform, who constantly berates him for being weak and too kind, goading him on to be more ruthless and kill more. Both in the story itself and the briefings at the end of the issue we learn his father was an Austrian weapons merchant who in 1951 committed suicide after the Soviets revealed he had been a camp commandant responsible for the murder of 50,000 Jews. His mother took the young Christopher to America, her home country but he was already damaged by his father’s actions. Expelled from several schools for antisocial behaviour he joined the army at eighteen, just in time for ‘Nam, where he committed his own war crime in a My Lai style massacre. Sentenced to life in prison, under Nixon he was selected for a programme to create anti-terrorist supersoldiers, but with the chaos of his resignation the project was terminated and he just vanished, only to re-appear as the Peacemaker.

It’s an interesting origin to say the least, a bold move to make him the mentally ill war criminal son of a Nazi mass murderer. It’s far more interesting than the overall plot of the miniseries, some nonsense about a Fu Manchu like supervillain wanting to use terrorism to collapse the USSR and or most of Europe to create his own state. Even for that post-Watchmen grim ‘n gritty ear of DC deconstructionist superheroes this is way over the top. Somehow it worked though. Tod Smith’s art, inked by Pablo Marcos, helps here in that its rough, no-nonsense style suits the crudeness of the story. I’m not sure if you can call this series and this origin good, but at the very least it’s not dull.

That time Jack Kirby did a random issue of Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter and didn’t even get to do the cover.

Not that Dick Giordano is anything to sneeze at, but it’s still strange to have Kirby do the interior but not the cover. This is from 1975, at the tail end of Kirby’s involvement with DC, the only issue of the series he worked on. DC had brought Kirby in back in 1970 with a lot of fanfare, but after his New World series were all cancelled they really didn’t have much of an idea of what to do with him. He created several other series like Kamadi and OMAC but none of them really caught fire and by the end he was doing stuff like this. Doing a martial arts comics is not really his forte if we’re honest. Richard Dragon here just looks like one of his working class thugs in jeans and wifebeater.

Worse, Kirby is the third artist in three issues, following Leo Durañona on issue 1 and Jim Starlin on two. It’s only with the next issue that the series would get Ric Estrada as the regular penciler, who would stay until the last issue. The writer for the entire run is Denny O’Neil, “based on a novel by Jim Dennis” (actually a pseudonym for O’Neil and James R. Berry). Richard Dragon Kung-Fu Fighter was DC’s equivalent to Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, but the source material was worse.

Richard Dragon himself for a start is a white dude, unlike MOKF Shang Chi, who got taught by one of those wizened old masters that was all the rage in kung fu. For some reason, this time it’s a Japanese master, O-Sensei, who teaches Richard the Chinese martial art of kung fu, but that’s a minor quibble. There is an overarching plot about an evil pupil and his revenge which takes all eighteen issues to resolve. It never received the same heights as MOKF or even Iron Fist, but seems to have been a fairly decent series.

It’s certainly has had an outsized influence considering its short run, partially due to O’Neil reusing his characters in other series. Richard Dragon debuted two characters who became much more important than the protagonist in the wider DC universe: the villain Lady Shiva and Bronze Tiger, who’d become an essential part of Suicide Squad. Richard himself would show up in O’Neil’s Question series as a mentor to that series protagonist.

Created in 1967 after R. Diggs had seen Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), The Life and Loves of Cleopatra is prove positive horny fanfiction is not a modern invention.

According to the foreword in this 1991 Rip-off Press reprint, this was never intended for publication originally since it was far too filthy to not fall foul of obscenity laws. It was purely made for his own pleasure and maybe that of a few close friends. Somebody snatched it though and started selling duplicates. Fast forward a few years and Diggs met Don Donahue of Apex Novelties, who published a lot of the riskier underground titles and would also publish Cleopatra.

Originally published in oblong format, this reprint puts two of the original pages on each standard comics sized page. Each half page has a drawing with some accompanying text, the text telling the story of Cleopatra. The drawings themselves need no narration, being mostly Cleopatra in various compromising situations. The art is great and Digg has a sense of humour about it all which explains why it was popular. Not necessarily a book you want to read one-handed though.

Because the story only runs to fifteen pages, the book is rounded off by three stories featuring one “Easy Lickens”, your typical sex crazed blonde nympho. Each story has her trying and mostly failing to find a man who can satisfy her, going so far as to tie herself up so she can be molested in the park. These are okay, not that funny and a bit cliche.

I got this at a local con only a few weeks ago because I came across it in a bargain bin and I liked the cover. Not an essential underground comic, but nevertheless glad I did come across it.

Alan Grant and Simon Bisley bring a bit of British class to the DC Universe, with the help of Keith Giffen, using their understated 2000AD honed style humour.

So Lobo eh? Exactly the sort of over the top parody of a cool, violent antihero that appeals to sixteen year old comics nerds as a cool, violent antihero. Got his start as a villain in Roger Slifer and Keith Giffen’s Omega Men, DC’s eighties science fiction superhero series set in the Vega System. He bounced around a bit and got a steady gig in L.E.G.I.O.N., the post-invasion series that was basically Hill Street Blues meets Legion of Superheroes, in space. But it was with the first Lobo miniseries, also by Giffen, Grant and Bisley that he really became popular. Lobo’s Back was the followup to that, but you don’t need to know anything about him to understand it.

The plot is simple: Lobo’s bored and out of cash so is looking for an easy way to make money. He bumps into an old mate and when he trades him in for the bounty on his head, he runs into an old flame, who hires him for a job on Dooley-7, to bring back a ‘client; named Loo. A few pages and a lot of gratuitous but cool fight scenes later and he has found him. In a fight to the death Lobo looks to have the upper hand until Loo’s brother, Feces, kills him in a surprise attack…

The rest of the series is Lobo fighting his way through an afterlife that’s a mix of a generic sort of heaven with some public domain, non-descript pagan elements to get back to life. He wants to be reincarnated into his own body. Heaven’s bureaucracy doesn’t allow that. Quite a lot of gory, senseless violence and several failed reincarnations (as a woman during the Blitz, as a squirrel just before he actually died) later he gets his wish. The end.

At the time Lobo was exhibit number one in the degeneration of modern comics, of how the post-Watchmen, post-Dark Knight grimdark trends were ruining superhero comics. Rereading this that’s just obvious bollocks. Even back then I couldn’t take these, the first Lobo series I read, serious nor were they ever intended to be taken serious. This is cartoon violence, Loony Tunes violence. There’s no real deep satire to it, it’s just Giffen and Grant enjoying themselves, with Bisley’s art — grotesque, gory, in your face, a sort of milder Kevin O’Neill –selling it all.

DC would bring out a slew of miniseries and specials with Lobo, usually written by Grant and Giffen before doing a regular series, which was a bit of a mistake to be honest. He’s not the type of character that can keep a regular series going after all, but something you should take in small doses. But that was nineties comics for you: if it paid to do it, it paid to over do it until the little fuckers get sick to the back teeth with it.