What's New #1 [1991] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

What's New #1 [1991]

This is the first of three (ignore that "No. 1 of 2" on the cover) collections of Phil Foglio's humourous gaming related comics from the pages of hobbyist magazines featuring a cartoon version of himself along with his companion Dixie Null. The first two issues were published by Palliard Press. I think, but haven't verified, that a second edition of this book was published by Studio Foglio. There are definitely two editions of the second book, and then the third and final book was only published by Studio Foglio.

The book opens with a new 8-page story, "Roll Models or How They Met", providing an unneeded but highly entertaining origin story for our hosts, and definitely the highlight of the book. We then jump back a decade to the May 1981 edition of DRAGON MAGAZINE, where Foglio launched an unassuming single page black and white strip with a series of quick jokes about gaming, intended as a one-shot. This continued in every issue of the magazine for three years, with an upgrade to colour starting on the eighth strip and expanding to two-pages (sometimes longer) with the tenth. This book has the first two years of strips. The next year and another new story are in #2, while the third book has the strips from a revival in another magazine, THE DUELIST.

This is some great stuff. I'm only casually familiar with gaming and the associated culture and I loved it. I'm sure a few of the more subtle bits went right over my head. Or maybe not, since Foglio's note at the end on the origin of the strip mentions he created them without ever playing a FRPG.

Apart from the new intro, done by a far more seasoned Foglio, my favourite bit was the gamer gift guide ostensibly designed for non-gamers and the strip about how gaming prepares you for real life. "They're letting anybody into the Thieves' Guild these days!"

The only real complaint is that the margins on the book are a little tight for the binding, thanks to the magazine dimensions they were drawn for. The edges of the strips disappear into the spine. This is less of a problem in the Studio Foglio editions of the other two books I have, so I've always been on the lookout for the reprint of this book, if it exists. Or maybe just hoping for a collection of all three books and any subsequent stories (the third book mentions a return to DRAGON MAGAZINE, but if that happened and if those were ever collected I do not know).

(looking around some more, doesn't look like a second edition of the first book was ever done, and there was a second DRAGON run that went on for quite a while, never reprinted but most of the strips from every run appeared as a webcomic, no longer on the official site but archived here)

TV - The Prisoner (1967-1968)

So, I've got a long and convoluted history with the short run British TV show THE PRISONER (created by George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan), which ran for just 17 episodes from 1967 to 1968.

After hearing about it for a few years, it was actually going to be broadcast on a local channel when I was 16 in 1986. For various reasons dealing with schedules and my most annoying high school classmate being overly enthusiastic about it I only ended up watching a few weeks of  it (in retrospect, I should have just told him I stopped watching it while continuing to watch it).  In the years since there was always something coming up whenever a chance to watch it would come up, from missing tapes at the video store  or library to power outages to broken VCRs to scratched discs. In most of those cases I could have missed a few episodes and still watched the ending, but at some point I convinced myself I had to watch them all in order the first time through or not at all. Of course at any time in those years I probably could have just bought a set of tapes/discs, but my interest and the price just never balanced out on the right side of that equation.

(Oddly somewhere in there I did acquire a set of Dean Motter's sequel comic book series, though I never got around to reading it past the first issue. Also read most of Jack Kirby's unfinished mid-1970s adaptation of the first episode. Curious about Gil Kane's unfinished version, done after that, too. Wish they'd release those in an affordable mass market edition as opposed to the expensive original art facsimile edition)

And of course for the last five or so years it's been trivially easy for me to watch the show, but somehow I never got around to it. And it's not like I haven't watched a lot of junk TV that I knew I would like a lot less in that time. Anyway, I finally got around to it over the last three weeks, one episode most days.  For the most part I liked it, definitely came out feeling less like I'd wasted my time than with many shows (yes, I'm talking about LOST, always assume I'm taking a shot at LOST...).  I mean, there are some truly awful episodes towards the end, before the two-part finale, but even those had a few stylistic touches that made me not regret watching them. Except maybe "The Girl Who Was Death", which I'm pretty sure was a script from GET SMART that accidently got sent overseas.

(actually, just reading up on it, I see it was apparently an unused script from Patrick McGoohan's previous show, DANGER MAN. Which makes me much less eager to try watching that series, which I had been considering. Seriously, if it wasn't just the finale left after that I might have given up)

Anyway, conclusion is you should probably watch it, but if you're not determined to watch all of them you can very easily just pick the top half and watch the following:

Ep. 1 - Arrival

Ep. 2 - The Chimes of Big Ben

Ep. 3 - A. B. and C.

Ep. 5 - The Schizoid Man

Ep. 7 - Many Happy Returns

Ep. 9 - Checkmate

Ep. 10 - Hammer Into Anvil

Ep. 16 - Once Upon a Time

Ep. 17 - Fall Out

And honesty, you can probably drop out either "A. B. and C." or "The Schizoid Man" if time is tight. But not both, you need at least one.

And if possible space them out a bit more than I did, maybe two a week maximum. That's what I'll probably do for a rewatch eventually. That makes a pretty entertaining modern day season of a TV show which definitely doesn't feel like it's over fifty years old.

More spoilery stuff follows, only for those who have watched it or never will.

I think the furthest I ever got before was  the episode, "Dance of the Dead", so everything after that was new. I'm not surprised, that was maybe the second worst episode, and I probably wasn't inclined to jump through hoops to continue after that, and was looking for an excuse to drop it. Almost did this time, when the effort to watch it is trivial. And that would have been a shame, because my god, the next two episodes are so good. "Checkmate" was probably the best since the debut, fully realizing all the potential I saw in the series, and then "Hammer Into Anvil" blew that away, showing the series has potentials I didn't even dream of. Maybe one of the best hours of dramatic television I've ever seen. 

Of course, the series never got anywhere near that again, with a series of episodes that are at best filler until we get to the concluding storyline.

Now, that conclusion, I wish I'd been able to come into that cold, but I've had over 30 years of cultural osmosis about it clouding my head. With that in mind, I'd have to say I kind of liked it, admired parts of it, thought it had a lot of potential, could have been better, was an utter mess. I'm conflicted, is what I'm saying. I suppose the only real way to interpret it is as an allegory, but that's unsatisfying. I find it kind of interesting that the interpretation I keep coming back to involves using mostly aspects of the show that really only pop up in episodes that I didn't like and plan to skip in the future. I mean, if we accept that the world we're in has aspects of technology that involve complete mind transference and an almost complete and total ability to selectively wipe out and restore memories than it seems obvious that our escaping quartet, No. 6, the returning No. 2, young No. 48 and the butler, all have modified duplicates of the same mind, the person running the Village as a grand experiment, presumably the actual No. 1 (with the ape-masked laughing No. 1 with 6's face being a failed version or there to shock or divert No. 6). I'll be curious to see if I feel the same way whenever I re-watch it without the episodes that utilize those elements.

Well, that's probably enough about a 55-year old show. Maybe more when I've read the comics. Be seeing you. Damn, that's a cliched way to end it. Would you believe "Missed it by that much..."?

The Golem's Mighty Swing [2001] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

The Golem's Mighty Swing [2001]

This book features a 100-page story by James Sturm about a travelling baseball team in in early 1920s America, the Stars of David, which traded on the gimmick of being Jewish players in an era where many people in small-town America would never have seen a Jewish person. A fictional story, but based on real baseball history.

The story is told by the manager of the team, Noah Strauss, a short-timer in the major leagues now leading a team of Jewish players (and one black man passing as Jewish) through a grueling schedule of play and travel from town to town where they're greeted with at best curiosity and often outright racist violent hostility. 

Eventually, needing an extra financial boost, he reluctantly agrees to a slick promoter's idea to costume his large black player as a mythic "Golem" to play off the attitudes of the audiences, which forms the crux of this story.

A very entertaining book, does a great job setting up situation and characters and bringing everything to a resolution. I thought the bits of actual baseball play were surprisingly good, given how I feel about most sports comics. I'm kind of surprised they haven't made this into a movie in the last two decades.

The book has been in print in several editions since it was published, and also packaged with two other bits of fiction set in the same period by Sturm in JAMES STURM'S AMERICA: GOD, GOLD, AND GOLEMS. Sturm also wrote another comic about baseball in a slightly later era, a biography of Satchel Paige.

Punisher - River Of Blood [2005] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

The Punisher - River Of Blood [2005]

Joe Kubert was one of the most important and influential artists of mainstream American comics, but mostly at DC. He did very little work in the Marvel Universe proper. He did a handful of stories in various genres for Marvel in the 1950s and then not again until the early 1990s, when his sons Andy and Adam started working there and he inked over them a few times on some Ghost Rider and Punisher stuff (and did solo artwork on a few Ghost Rider backups). Marvel's creator-owned Epic line also saw a few Kubert projects in the 1990s, and he did a handful of covers over the years as well.

But the big Marvel Universe Joe Kubert work was a 1994 run of PUNISHER WAR ZONE #31-#36, where he drew and did covers for the "River Of Blood" story written by Chuck Dixon. This collection of the story followed just over a decade later.

This is the big "Punisher vs. The Russian Mob" storyline, starting of course in New York, where Punisher's war against the heroin trade brings him up against the Russians, and he finds an ally in a giant Russian named Dragunov who shares his love of guns, revenge and shirts with their logos on them (a dragon, in the case of Dragunov). Their pursuit of a particular Russian who Dragunov has a personal grudge with eventually leads to Europe and escalates to the nuclear, as such things do. If you know Kubert's career it won't surprise you that it reaches a climax in Sarajevo (Kubert would do FAX FROM SARAJEVO a few years later, based on an on-going correspondence with a friend in the city during the conflict there).

Obviously the Punisher isn't really my thing, and when it is it probably won't be from a writer like Dixon, so I'm mainly here for the art, a nice solid example of a legendary artist working in slightly less familiar territory (although as we go into the actual war zone in later issues there are unmistakable comparisons to Kubert's decades of work on DC's war books). For that it's worth getting  

And, just for fun, here are a few other cover examples of Joe Kubert in the Marvel Universe:

Owly - Just A Little Blue [2005] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Owly - Just A Little Blue [2005] 

This is the second volume of Andy Runton's series of books, five volumes of about 120 pages each were published in black and white digest format from 2004 to 2008 by Top Shelf. Runton later did two large format colour children's books with the character, and more recently the original books have been reprinted by Graphix, now in colour. More on that later...

As you might expect, the series is about a young owl, living a life of almost unbearable cuteness, along with his best friend Wormy (you can probably guess what animal he is...).  The stories are largely wordless, except for a few labels and sound effects, with everything having to be interpreted through the actions of the characters or some pictogram representations of their thoughts and words.

As I said, it's all very cute, maybe too cute for me in most circumstances, but when I'm in the right mood it can amuse me. I have the first two books in print, and all five of them in digital editions.

In this particular issue, the story is about Owly deciding to build a birdhouse for a family of bluebirds. Various complications ensue, teaching lessons of sacrifice, trust and heroism. It's fun to read, using different mental muscles from most other comics to interpret the actions, making for a lot more involving read than you might expect.

As I mentioned, new editions of the series began recently, four of them published since 2000, the last due out next year. The most noticeable change is that the stories are in colour now, and that looks really nice. 

The other major change I'm less sure about. 

They add a fair number of descriptive captions and dialogue to the images, which pretty much just replicate what I was already doing on my own. I really don't know. Maybe those really help people less familiar with comic book storytelling? I never recall hearing about anyone having a problem understanding the series, and in fact the challenge of figuring it out for yourself seemed to be part of the charm, but then most of what I heard about it came from people steeped in comics vocabulary from a young age.

Good Miracle Monday

A quick reminder to remember to set a place at the table for Superman tonight, the classic Miracle Monday tradition, as seen in this story from SUPERMAN #400 [1984] by Elliot S! Maggin and Klaus Janson.

Next year in Metropolis!

And if for some reason you've never read them, pick up Maggin's two Superman novels, LAST SON OF KRYPTON and MIRACLE MONDAY, now available in new editions self-published by Maggin.

(Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster)

George Pérez, R.I.P.

Sad to note the passing of George Pérez at age 67 after an extended illness. 

I think the first time I really noticed his work was in 1980, when I started reading AVENGERS with this issue. Really enjoyed the book for a few months there.

This is around the time that he left Marvel to work for DC, which suited me fine as more of a DC reader. He and Marv Wolfman launched NEW TEEN TITANS within a few months, I think the first time I started reading an on-going book that lasted from the first issue. Because of varying schedules, there were a few months there where he drew the new issues of JLA, AVENGERS and NEW TEEN TITANS. Quickly became one of my favourite books, and was up there for quite a few years. pretty much until newsstand availability of comics dried up locally. A few years later when I started going to direct market stores one of the first things I did was find out what Pérez was up to, which turned out to be WONDER WOMAN, and a return to TITANS just announced. Picked up a lot of back issues of WW to catch up, and really like that run. Enjoyed the too-brief return to TITANS as well.  

Lots of his work and details on his life available on-line.  Here are a few favourites you might not see on other sites:

From the run of "Dial H" where readers designed the various one-shot characters. Pérez did a few of the covers, which must have been an extra special treat to the readers who submitted those characters.

A nice illustration for a benefit book which captures a lot of the best qualities of his work.

A page from that first AVENGERS issue I picked up. Love his version of these characters.

An unusual art combo as Pérez inks over Sergio Aragonés.  He did a few other more short stints as inker over more traditionally compatible artists, including some really nice work over José Luis García-López and Curt Swan.

This was the first of his run of WONDER WOMAN I picked up, and maybe still my favourite cover of many great ones on that run.

From a goofy little short written by Joe Cavalieri from Pacific's VANGUARD ILLUSTRATED #6 [1984].

A nice science fiction frontispiece from MARVEL PREVIEW #20 [1980] for a reprint of an early story he did from 1975, "War Toy", with Tony Isabella and Rico Rival.