No time for greetings,
did you hear the news?
Save your pennies,
prepare to sell your bodies, souls, lifeblood, life…uh…seed, anything you can
for next year because Marvel, Dark Horse and Fantagraphics are together
conspiring to take all your money and mine, collectively wiping us out with a
plan so fiendish and diabolical it would be shocking if it wasn’t just so
perfect.
Marvel has finally
worked out some copyright mojo and have announced that the near mythical Shang Chi: Master of Kung-Fu series from
the ‘70s-‘80s will finally be collected
in a series of four omnibus editions. This really is the holy grail of Marvel
collections (Rom aside) and for
decades the series has sat uncollected due to the inclusion of Sax Rohmer’s Fu
Manchu character as the book’s antagonist. No word as yet as to how the rights
were untangled, but give me a name, Marvel, and a bouquet of roses shall be
express delivered to this particular legal wizard.
Dark Horse has worked
out some similar copyright wizardry, announcing the arrival of The
Moebius Library next year, meaning that all those strips I talk about every
week in the Heavy Metal recaps and
many, many more will be bound together in a collection of premium hardcovers.
No word yet as to how the copyright was cleared up here either, but again thank
you oh wondrous comic book legal people!
Finally, Fantagraphics
has The
Guido Crepax Library on the way. The first of ten hardcovers actually arrives
the first week of November and is sure to give this Italian pioneer of erotic
comics and sorcerer of comic book page layout the translation and treatment he rightly
deserves. If you aren’t familiar with Crepax’s work, there are over 100 page
images included at the above link. At his best, he captured not only the hazy,
askew sexiness of an erotic dream but was more densely cinematic with his pages
than possibly any other comic artist ever.
2016: A fine time to be
financially poor, for we shall be rich in comics excellence.
COMIC OF THE WEEK : CHICAGO
By Glenn Head
Published Fantagraphics
Glenn Head’s
magnificent “comix memoir,” Chicago,
opens with the following quote from George Orwell: “Autobiography is only to be
trusted when it reveals something distasteful.” It’s a message Head seems to
have taken to heart, depicting himself utterly warts and all and has created a
riveting memoir that should be on every single art student’s Must Read list.
Beginning in June 1977,
we find teenaged Glenn Head living in the lap of suburban luxury in Maddison,
New Jersey. His father works on Wall Street and has given Glenn everything he
ever wanted or needed, but Glenn chafes against this upper Middle Class
lifestyle and the boredom of suburban life and wants out to pursue his artistic
dreams. Enamoured of the underground comix scene and packing both a modicum of
talent and an ego the size of a Robert Crumb girl, Glenn’s off to a Cleveland
art school, paid for by his concerned father who may not understand Zap Comics
but wants his son to be not only happy but to have the best education possible to
achieve his dream of becoming a successful comics artist.
Once at art school Head
quickly alienates everybody, teachers and fellow students alike. His attendance
and lifestyle become so strange and erratic that he’s suspected of having
mental health issues. Finally deciding that school can’t teach him anything
worth learning and harbouring a dream to cartoon for Playboy, a deluded, arrogant Head, without telling anyone, packs up
yet again and hitchhikes to Chicago with literally no money in his pocket and
no place to stay, determined to make it in the comics biz.
Head depicts his young
self with absolute ruthlessness, presenting all his teenaged self’s arrogance,
ignorance, ingratitude and foolishness. Young Head is constantly oblivious to
the dangers he regularly puts himself in and is so clueless about Chicago he
actually seems surprised when a chilly wind hits. Chicago very quickly becomes something almost akin to a survivalist
tale as Head scrambles to keep himself fed, rested and safe.
The late ‘70s are
beautifully realised, from its fashions to its food choices to its automobiles
and buildings. With his authentic underground comix style, Head re-creates a
kind of comics verisimilitude in that Chicago
could easily sit next to other comics created during the period and on a casual
flip-through, you’d swear the book itself was a product of the ‘70s. Highlights
include visits to the Playboy offices, dinner with Robert Crumb and a chance
encounter with Muhammad Ali that has to be seen to be believed.
Chicago is almost impossible to put down. I read it in a single
intense session, grimacing the whole way through, stomach in knots, half of me
wanting Glenn’s hubris-born comeuppance to be swift and harsh, half of me
wanting him to just return home, embrace his long-suffering father and get his
shit together. It’s a ballsy book with a scary ring of truth about it, a
hideous warning about the traps awaiting the artistic ego, a rollicking trip
through the late ‘70s and a brilliant recreation of a very different publishing
and creative climate. Marred only by a jarring time-jump, Chicago is still yet another contender for your bulging annual Best
Of list.
WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : ACHE
By Mike Walton
More dental-based
horror this week, a week I learned I have to have a tooth pulled – weird that I
just featured Sloane Leong’s Clutch
in this very space…I wonder if subconsciously I suspected some bad dental
news. Anyway, Ache comes from False
Positive, a site filled with webcomics by the very talented Mike Walton. I
wish Mike’s site had less ads flashing at me and a more user-friendly layout
(scrolling pages rather than clicking through), but his
comics are easy on the eye even if his site is not.
The story of a man who
attempts to extract a sore tooth himself but gets way more than he bargained
for, Ache is a perfect little
pre-Halloween warm up for you.
COUNTDOWN TO MOZ
METAL: HEAVY METAL MARCH 1978
I feel as though I’ve been writing about
Richard Corben’s “Den” forever, so it’s somewhat bittersweet that this serial
ends in this March ’78 issue (barring an epilogue next issue), with an
explosion and the kind of nonchalance from its protagonist worthy of a Robert
E. Howard character. “We are alive and well,” Den says, “That is all I care
about now.” It’s astonishing that Corben remains as prolific as he does almost
forty years later, and his art hasn’t skipped a beat. So much of “Den” (for me
anyway) has been about Corben’s intricate and psychedelic skies, so it’s
fitting that out hero flies off on his ginormous winged lizard into a sunset
all the colours of a swirling, retro Batik dress. We’ll say our proper goodbyes
with the epilogue next week, but “Den” is still an astonishing achievement.
Mora and Garcia’s “The
Winter of the Last Combat” has its second and final chapter, with Mora’s
elegant black and white art recalling the photo realism of Arthur Ranson and
bringing to wonderfully gloomy life this story of a crusader now “disgusted by
men and the God in whose name they pillage and murder.” Gloriously existential,
our fever-plagued hero makes his way through landscapes both hallucinated and
real, muttering that “there is nothing except man, man battling against others,
against the world…man questioning himself eternally about what it all means.”
This is, naturally, excellent and brooding Euro comics.
Onto the letters
column, where it’s heartening to see that it wasn’t just your humble reviewer,
writing from the next century, that found December 1977’s issue to be rather
lack lustre. Reader R. Gomez, clearly angling for my job, offers, “…the flow of
ingenuity seems to have been shut down to the merest trickle.”
But not so fast, Gomez!
Philippe Druillet’s “Urm” has its second part here and remains a roaring return
to form for its creator. Druillet’s splash pages are worthy of wall-hanging,
his layouts symmetrical, his panels beautifully balanced in their use of
comic’s space. Not much plot this issue, but with art this sinister yet
gorgeous, who cares?
The legendary Gray
Morrow’s fantastical “Orion” debuts in full colour, having originally appeared
in black and white in Wally Wood’s Image-before-Image anthology comic, Witzend. There’s also more “Barbarella,”“1996,”“Airtight
Garage,” the beautifully dreamy, “Underground Comic” by Stuart Nezin and even a
self-portrait by Charles Vess to round out this issue’s substantial highlights.
COMICS VIDEO OF THE
WEEK : TRAILER DEATHCO
The French, once again
proving themselves number one, have released Atsushi Kaneko’s Deathco in their native language.
Publisher Casterman has also put together this trailer, giving the inky,
over-the-top violence of Kaneko’s latest work the kind of motion comics
treatment I usually roll my snooty eyeballs at. It’s Kaneko though, okay? Look
at how crazy his latest work is!
I picked up the first
two volumes of Deathco in Japan and
once again it makes me terrifically sad that nobody seems to want him in English.
I don’t understand. An assassin’s guild, a teen girl killer protagonist with a
pet bat who floats around by hanging onto a bunch of black balloons, and more
casual mayhem than I can recall seeing in the first hundred-odd pages of
anything, it’s an utter mystery why his work is continually ignored by US
publishers.
*sigh*
Please take a look at
this festival punk de violence et
d'hemoglobine and just see if you don’t agree.
See you next week. Love your comics.
Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment