Comix

So I was googling the other day for Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s ill fated Void Indigo series for Epic Comics as you do and found a review from somebody who had started a project to read every comic Epic ever published. What’s more, that’s not the only company Lars Ingebrigtsen has done this for. He has done similar projects for:

• Aardvark-Vanaheim and Renegade
• Eclipse
• Fantagraphics
• Kitchen Sink
• Pacific Comics
• Vortex

As well as projects documenting the work of Elaine Lee and the alternative eighties RAW crowd. Every one of these projects require a level of obsession and sheer graft that’s hard to imagine, making my own pet projects seem reasonable by comparison. Hats off for Lars for doing this. It can be hard to find any discussion of pre-internet comics online, especially from now defunct publishers and he not only reviews them, he also provides context by looking at contemporary fanzine reviews and such. Very helpful indeed when I was interested in why Void Indigo only lasted two issues.

One of his projects deserves a special mention: Kwakk.info, a “research site for magazines and fanzines about comics” which allows you to search the content of a rather large selection of English language comics zines. Again, this has already proven its worth to me because I needed to find some information on Michael Thibodeaux, somebody obscure enough to not have even a Wikipedia page stub. Just knowing where to read an interview or review means I can dive into my own pile of yellowing fanzines to read it rather than having to first flic to all of them to find it.

It took me just one issue to fall in love with Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America. This was the issue.

Part two of the Bloodstone Hunt opens with Cap descending into a subterranean cavern to find the source of an annoying little transmission. Running and diving his way through a series of traps, he comes in a ritual chamber that has the skeletons of “three dead men, one dead woman, one dead dolphin”. Descending even further he finds the source: a crate containing the equally dead Ulysses Bloodstone and a very alive Diamondback. He quickly takes her back to Avenger island, where we just have time to realise John (son of Jonah) Jameson is the new Quinjet pilot before a quick radation meter has been rigged up using Bloodstone’s skull and it’s off to South America to find the first of the fragments of the jewel that gave Bloodstone his powers. They get there, are immediately taken prisoner by an unknown Inca tribe and find Baron Zemo and his stooges — Batroc, Zatran and Machete — all trussed up on a ceremonial sacrifice wheel. Whew. All that and an US Agent backup that has him going up against the Scourge.

That really was the perfect comic for fifteen year old Martin, who never liked a superhero comic better than if it had loads and loads of unknown characters. The whole Bloodstone Hunt was basically an excuse for Gruenwald to do an Indiana Jones style adventure serial set in the more obscure parts of the Marvel Universe, with each issue ending on a cliffhanger, natch. The very next issue they’re off to the Bermuda Triangle, diving into a wrecked airliner (probably the one which got Skull the Slayer his origin), getting into an underwater fight with Zemo’s henchmen and that leading to (of course) a shark attack. The next issue: Egypt and The Living Mummy. Then finally, Tokyo where a yazuka gang has the final piece. Fifteen year old me ate that shit up. Kieron Dwyer’s art didn’t hurt either, nor did M. D. Bright’s on the US Agent backup.

What made it even better, but that would only become apparent in the issues directly after this, is that The Bloodstone Hunt saw the debut of a major new Captain America villain: Crossbones, who later turns out to work for the Red Skull, Cap’s greatest enemy. And who may also share a past with Diamondback, as established in the very next issue. For somebody who until this point had barely read any Captain America stories, as few had been published in the Netherlands, all of this made me fall in love with Cap and especially Gruenwald’s idea of who Cap was. It was his writing that made Captain America my favourite Marvel hero.

Gruenwald of course stayed on the title until it was cancelled under him for Heroes Reborn. You could argue that even at the time I started reading it, he had already written his best stories (Serpent Society, the Scourge of the Underworld, the replacement of Cap by a rightwing zealot), but to me the run from #358 to #386, with first Kieron Dwyer and then Ron Lim on art duty is the classic Captain America.

Just as the Cold War was finally ending, here come Alan Grant, John Wagner and Mike McMahon to remind us how very different, very bad it could’ve ended.

Twenty years after the nuclear war ended, Ulysses S. Pilgrim is awoken from cryogenic suspension to find out what’s left of America. It will take him four issues to discover that he is indeed The Last American. You might think you’re in for a fun post-apocalyptic romp, but every time the story seems to veer that way it sucker punches you to drill home the message that nuclear war is no fun.

Nuclear annihilation was a very popular theme running through eighties pop culture, as fitting for the decade that was arguable the most dangerous of the entire Cold War. Forget the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, we came much closer to the brink in 1983, multiple times.

And while in America you could still sort of pretend that the worst that could happened would be a couple of hundred million deaths and the survivors having to fight off mutants and bandit gangs, over here in Europe we full well knew that it would be the end of everything. If you’d survive the initial exchange, you’d die of radiation poisoning soon after; if not that, than through illness or starvation. It’s that nihilism, that certainty that The Last American captures so well.

Which is no surprise considering Grant, Wagner and McMahon were all British and should’ve been fully aware of what a nuclear war would mean to the UK. As a series, it really is relentlessly grim, with little even of the black humour Wagner and Grant put in their Judge Dredd stories e.g. McMahon’s art is gorgeous as usual, but it’s still oppressive for all its beauty.

Originally the series was supposed to come out in the mid-eighties, but McMahon fell ill and only recovered in 1990. Somewhat serendipitously it means it was a fitting coda for the end of the Cold War.

Sometimes you luck out when you see a cool looking cover in a bargin bin and end up buying a Jim Aparo drawn issue of Charlton’s The Phantom.

This is actually some of Aparo’s earliest work, from just before he became a mainstay at DC Comics. He had actually attempted to join EC Comics in the fifties, but had been rejected and did advertising work until Dick Giordano brought him to Charlton. When Giardano moved on to DC, so did Aparo.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Aparo’s art: I disliked much of his work in the eighties and nineties on Batman and the Outsiders and the core Batman titles. Yet his earlier work on Brave and the Bold and especially Aquaman I love, possibly because I read much of it in black and white Dutch reprints. Certainly the colouring in the deluxe Outsiders series did his art no good. Or maybe it was the improved paper quality that ill suited his artstyle. His art here is gorgeous though, with no qualifications. I like his Phantom, a bit beefier than I’m used to.

Not that I’ve read many Phantom stories. As you might know, The Phantom started out as a Lee Falk created adventure newspaper strip, about “the Ghost Who Walks”, a vigilante in a fictional African country who has been keeping the peace for centuries, withthe mantle of the Phantom being handed over from father to son for generations. He got a few serials back in the days, the inevitable radio show, a nineties blockbuster movie when Batman was the rage and Hollywood though any old pulp hero would be as big. As well as a lot of comics adaptations over the years. For some reason The Phantom was incredibly popular in Sweden and they did their own version there. Here in the Netherlands he never quite made it. There have been a few reprints of American comics over the years but that was it.

Over the years bought some of those when I found them secondhand, mainly because he was another superhero than for any intrisic interest in the Phantom as a series. The notion of a great white protector of an African country is rather old fashioned and somewhat orientalist after all. On the other hand, the idea of an unbroken lineage of superheroes 21 or 22 generations long is great. Just the setting is a bit sus…

An amnesiac is washed on shore near a small village, where a kindly doctor nurses him back to health. After he recovers he discovers he’s the target in a massive complot and may be involved in the murder of the US president. His name? Not Jason Bourne.

I’m not saying that Jaan van Hamme and William Vance looked a bit too closely at Robert ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (1980) for their adventure spy thriller series XIII (1984) but it wouldn’t be the first comic inspired by a popular novel or movie, eh? It’s practically a tradition to take something popular and create your own twist on it and van Hamme and Vance certainly did. Over the course of twenty albums they set up and then unravelled the mystery of XIII’s true identity, his role in the murder of the president, the conspiracy behind this murder and once that was all resolved, dove into the older history of him and his family.

Hugely popular in Europe, the series survived the departure of its writer, van Hamme, who felt he had done everything he wanted with it and its artist, Vance, forced to retire from it due to medical problems. It spawned not only a spinoff series, but also a computer game and a French television adaptation. For me, it was one of the few European comics I kept reading when I was obsessed with superheroes for a couple of years.

Both van Hamme and Vance were well established when they started XIII. The first had already had been succesfull with the fantasy viking series Thorgal, drawn by Polish cartoonist Grzegorsz Rosinski and had also written the critically acclaimed Histoire sans héros (Adventure without Heroes), drawn by Dany, as well as more mainstream fare like the short lived Arlequin, also with Dany, which was the first series I read of him.

William Vance had broken through as the artist on the Bob Morane series of sci-fi thrillers as wellas Bruno Brazil, a more harder edged crime and spy thriller series which ran in Tintin. His passion however lay more with historical series. Westerns like Ringo, medieval series like Ramiro and Roderic but especially Age of Sail series like Howard Flynn and Bruce J. Hawker, his pet project. Sort of ironic then that his most well known series is a hard boiled modern thriller. But honestly, while he’s never a bad artist, his work on XIII is a cut above most of his older work.