Jay Hosler's CLAN APIS returns in colour as WAY OF THE HIVE

Great news that Jay Hosler's excellent CLAN APIS book is being republished next year from from a major publisher, in colour and with a new less latiny title THE WAY OF THE HIVE. I've long been a huge fan of the book, wrote about it on the early days of this weblog. In fact, shortly after writing that post I went out and got the rest of the original series, despite already having the collection, so when I get this new one it'll be my third copy of the series. Happy to have it. The colour looks really good, check over here for more samples.

Joe Sinnott, R.I.P.

Sad to hear about the passing of comic book artist Joe Sinnott.  While I was mostly a DC reader as a kid, one Marvel book I read for quite a while was FANTASTIC FOUR. In retrospect, a lot of that had to do with the steady hand of Sinnott's inks over a variety of pencillers, from George Perez to Keith Pollard to John Byrne to Bill Sienkiewicz.  Later on of course I'd discover that a lot of what he was bringing to the work was what he learned on his long collaboration with the creator of the book, Jack Kirby, and without a doubt the best pages of FF that Kirby did were the ones inked by Sinnott. Over 1000 of them, so that's quite a bit to pick from. Also loved their other work together, including some great Thor, Captain America and Silver Surfer stories and numerous covers. I also always loved him over other artists, so up top are two of the more unusual examples, Sinnott over Curt Swan on his signature character, Superman, and over Sergio Aragones on a Fantastic Four story.

And here he is on some more familiar ground, Kirby pencils, but on images you might not have seen. The FF cover is an unused 1960s Kirby cover that he inked later, and the New Gods sketch is from the 1970s. The Satan's Six page is a creator-owned feature by Kirby, probably drawn in the 1970s and published in 1993.

The only Kirby originals I've been lucky enough to be able to take an extended look at up close were pages inked by Sinnott, a pair of 1960s FF pages and a 1970s cover. They were even more impressive in person, just so flawlessly smooth and precise, capturing the power in Kirby's work while also capturing subtle details in the facial expressions and fully rendering the backgrounds in a way that doesn't overpower the foreground.

From The Warp of Dennis O'Neil

Sure, there's a lot of Batman, Question, Green Lantern, Daredevil, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman and others of that ilk in Dennis O'Neil's oeuvre that you'll hear a lot about, often from me, but here are a few others from O'Neil's over half-century in comics.

Frank Miller draws O'Neil's story "Philistine" in BIZARRE ADVENTURES #31 [1982], a short lived anthology title from Marvel that O'Neil also edited. Miller and O'Neil's paths would cross often in comics, with O'Neil writing the first Batman story Miller drew and two memorable Spider-Man annuals, O'Neil editing most of Miller's first run on Daredevil, including Miller's transition to writing the book in addition to drawing it, working together on a short bit on Will Eisner's The Spirit "jam" story and O'Neil editing the "Batman Year One" story.  The theme of this issue was "Violence", and this story delivers with a clever conceit of a silent traveler in an art museum where the pieces come to life and attack him while the curator narrates.

Speaking of Will Eisner's creation, as briefly mentioned before, O'Neil wrote the character two more times in addition to the "Spirit Jam" contribution, when DC was publishing new stories of the character. In THE SPIRIT #13 [2008] we have "Family Treasure" with art by Ty Templeton, very much an old-school Eisner take on the feature, with the Spirit helping a woman who is trying to find a hidden inheritance from her uncle ahead of some thieves. O'Neil would come back to the character one more time for a more frantic take with Bill Sienkiewicz artwork a few years later.

THE UNEXPECTED #195 [1980] features "Deadly Homecoming", a long 25-page Madame Xanadu story with artwork by Johnny Craig, about a pair of soldiers making along delayed return from Vietnam, but may have brought something more sinister back with them. It's a nice sort of Twilight Zone story, or maybe like an old EC story with room to breathe (which is appropriate, given the artist).

While working for Marvel early on, O'Neil also picked up some work for Charlton, using the pen-name "Sergius O'Shaughnessy".  One of the most memorable is "Children Of Doom", a full-length story drawn by Pat Boyette in CHARLTON PREMIERE #2 [1967].  Set after a global catastrophe that killed most of humanity and left some of the survivors with mutant powers. A very thoughtful story with a lot of levels, and really elevated by Pat Boyette's artwork, which uses a lot of black and white sections to good effect (apparently this was partly a production issue as the story was a last minute substitute for another one that fell through, but whatever the reason it works visually).

SPACE ADVENTURES #2 [1968] is another Charlton story by "Sergius", and actually a sequel to a story published the previous year in SPACE ADVENTURES #60.  Yeah, that's Charlton for you. The three part story is illustrated by Jim Aparo (the page shown), Steve Ditko and Pat Boyette, three remarkable artists that Charlton somehow got with their low page rates and didn't do justice to with their sub-par printing. The story involves Paul Mann, a reporter who gets mixed up with warring time-travelers from the year 4000 AD.  Quite memorable, and each of the artists gets a few points to really shine visually.

REAL WAR STORIES #1 [1987] was an anthology edited by Joyce Brabner for the Central Committee For Conscientious Objectors and published by Eclipse, presenting various biographical and journalistic stories about war and its effects on actual people. O'Neil wrote and Steve Leialoha drew "The Decision - Andy Mager's Story" based on the case of a man who was tried and convicted for refusing to register for the draft. O'Neil's biography in the back reads "I've written a lot of comic book stories - something over 700. The one included here is a kind of atonement for some others I'm not proud of".

O'Neil co-wrote a novel, DRAGON'S FISTS, in 1974 with Jim Berry, introducing the character Richard Dragon. The novel was later adapted by O'Neil for a comic book series at DC and then continued after that, with the character eventually becoming a regular supporting character in various books. RICHARD DRAGON, KUNG FU FIGHTER #5 [1976] is the first issue after the adaptation of the novel, drawn by Ric Estrada and Wallace Wood, and is notable for introducing Lady Shiva, who became a regular in the book and a major supporting character in other DC books years later. It's a pretty fun series, overall, a bit uneven at times (especially as the page count gets down to 17 pages an issue).

Azrael was probably the character O'Neil wrote the most in his career, starting with the co-creation of the character in 1992 with Joe Quesada, when he was introduced with the intention of temporarily taking over as Batman the next year. After that storyline (edited and partly written by O'Neil) was done the character got a solo series, which O'Neil wrote for 100 issues, three annuals and three specials, which is probably close to, if not more than, the amount of solo Batman O'Neil wrote.  I read the series on and off, tending to drift away when it got too entwined with the Batman books, but usually enjoyed it. AZRAEL ANNUAL #1 [1995] (drawn by David Ammerman, with a framing sequence by Barry Kitson, the first regular artist on the series) might be the highlight of what I've read of the series. It provides some backstory and contextualization for the first appearance of the character, exploring the last mission of his father, the previous Azrael. It neatly explains a few anomalies in the original story so well that I was always curious if the revelation in this issue was planned from the start. 

O'Neil wrote ten of the twelves issues of the mid-1970s comic book incarnation of Walter Gibson's pulp vigilante character The Shadow. Half of them were drawn by Michael Kaluta and got re-printed in the 1980s, but the rest didn't, THE SHADOW #10 [1975] features "The Night of the Killers" with art by E. R. Cruz has the Shadow go after a family of killers who have injured one of his helpers.  I remember back when I first read some of these stories I went back and read some of the original pulps, and these seemed very true to the spirit of those. O'Neil also write a Batman crossover with the Shadow in this era, which sadly hasn't been reprinted, and returned to the character with Kaluta (inked by Russ Heath) for a long story at Marvel in 1988.

CHAMBER OF DARKNESS #5 [1970] has the short story "The Beast from the Bog" drawn by Paul Reinman, about an old couple who encounter an alien creature in a remote swamp. A nice echo of the monster stories that were Marvel's bread and butter for a while a decade before, with a then-modern twist.

In his early days at Marvel, O'Neil mostly wrote for the teen books like MILLIE THE MODEL and westerns, like this story from RAWHIDE KID #54 [1966].  "The Passenger" is drawn by Don Heck and Bill Everett and features a fancy pants journalist on the Mississippi who encounters some river pirates determined to blow up a settlement across the river. It's kind of silly, mostly set up to reveal what famous historical figure the journalist is.

O'Neil's career intersected with Steve Ditko a few times over the years, in addition to some of his most memorable work being done on characters Ditko created.  Early on, O'Neil scripted the last few Doctor Strange stories that Ditko wrote and drew over at Marvel. Then over at Charlton they worked together on a handful of stories, including a chapter of the science fiction epic above and this horror story. At around the same time O'Neil was also scripting BEWARE THE CREEPER over at DC. In the 1980s they worked on an IRON MAN issue together, which is a whole other story.  Anyway, GHOSTLY TALES #69 [1968] features "Music Of Murder" drawn by Ditko and written by "Sergius" (credited in a later letter column), a story of witchcraft set in late 19th century England (and featuring a cameo by a notable detective of that era). It's a fun little example of the genre, with a lot of humourous asides and little gags featuring the host Mr. Dedd in a slightly more active role than in most of his stories. (more on O'Neil/Ditko collaborations)

Bat Lash was a roguish western character introduced by Sergio Aragonés and Nick Cardy in an issue of SHOWCASE before getting his own book for seven issues. O'Neil came aboard to do scripts over Aragonés' stories on the regular series.  BAT LASH #7 [1969] concludes the series on a high note, with Bat encountering a young man who, unknown to either of them, is his long lost brother. A nicely constructed little story that plays up the melodrama of the situation. And man, just look at that Nick Cardy art. O'Neil would return to the character once in the 1970s for an entertaining story.

Dennis O'Neil, R.I.P.

Very sad to hear about the passing of Dennis O'Neil at age 81. O'Neil was a key creator in American comics going back to the mid-1960s, doing a lot of celebrated work in long stays as both writer and editor at DC and Marvel, as well as some early pseudonymous work at Charlton and a few other places.

He was pretty prolific at DC in the late 1970s, so I probably read a bunch of his stories early on, but the first one I remember clearly was DYNAMIC CLASSICS #1 from 1978, a reprint title from the short-lived "DC Explosion" which ended up being a one-shot thanks to the subsequent "DC Implosion". It features a reprint of the 1970 story "Secret Of The Waiting Graves", the first solo Batman story O'Neil wrote, as well as his first collaboration with artist Neal Adams. By this time the O'Neil/Adams work had long been the template for the newer Batman stories I was reading, but the quality of this one, combined with the presentation in this series as a historically important story made it quite memorable. So did teaming it up with the first chapter of the Simonson/Goodwin Manhunter, man did this book make you want more, which sadly wasn't quickly forthcoming.

I probably next began to notice O'Neil's name on some of the digest comics I was buying from DC at the time. An O'Neil credited story would almost always be a highlight of any issue it appeared in. The most key of those was a collection of a good chunk of the O'Neil/Adams run on GREEN LANTERN from the early 1970s.  It was quite a rarity back then for the names of creators to be featured so prominently on the cover of an American super-hero comic, and the stories definitely lived up to the hype.

It was around this time that O'Neil moved over to Marvel for a while, and while I was more of a DC fan at the time, I do remember really liking some of the Spider-Man comics that O'Neil wrote in the early 1980s, especially a pair of annuals he did with Frank Miller, which I'd probably still rank as my favourite post-Ditko Spider-Man stories.

So among my early comics, those were among the ones I would re-read frequently, and I'd note O'Neil's name in any others I had, a GREEN LANTERN here, a WORLD'S FINEST there, and some editorial credits as well.  After I stopped buying comics for a few years when the newsstand sources dried up I finally started making regular trips to comic stores around 1988, and among the delights I found was that in the interim DC had graduated from digest reprints to their deluxe full-sized "Baxter paper" reprint line, and I was lucky enough to get most of the issues of GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW reprinting the rest of those stories I sampled in the digest, in much better form, and all of THE SAGA OF RA'S AL GHUL, which scratched that longtime itch that DYNAMIC CLASSICS had given me (and as a bonus I also got the reprint of the Manhunter story in that series of reprints). Well, that pretty much made it clear I was a Dennis O'Neil fan.

After a few months back in comics, I was mostly buying back issues, sampling some new releases, but nothing had really clicked as a regular on-going purchase yet. But with O'Neil on the brain his name really popped off the very striking cover to THE QUESTION #21. That clicked, instantly and completely. Tracking down all those earlier issues and making sure I got each new one made regular trips to the comic shop a requirement, and helped me find a lot more.

(I documented one of my many re-reads of THE QUESTION in an early series of posts on this weblog, including listing all of O'Neil's Recommended Reading List from the letter columns)

From there it just expands. Pretty soon I was also aware that O'Neil was the Batman editor of the time, as well as occasionally writing the character, and I was pretty all-in on the Batman books for a while. I also found out more about the past, and started picking up things like his 1980s DAREDEVIL run, some 1970s SUPERMAN issues with Curt Swan and a lot more. As reprints shifted from single issues to actual books, I discovered even more of his earlier work, and there were so many little things to discover. And I loved a lot of his later work. I'll try to highlight a few of them in another post soon.

Anyway, Dennis O'Neil was undoubtedly my favourite writer in comics among those who don't draw their own stories, and close to the top even without that qualification. As you can see from this particular section of my collection, there's a lot to discover.