Decoy - Storm Of The Century [2003] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Decoy - Storm Of The Century [2003]

This is a collection of a 4-issue series from 2002, plus some other stuff, created by Decoy creator Courtney Huddleston with writer Buddy Scalera and inker Mostafa Moussa, which was a follow-up to a 1999 series and some one-shots from Penny-Farthing Press.

 

The only other Decoy story I read was a 2002 crossover issue with Mike Kunkel's Herobear series, HEROBEAR AND THE KID AND DECOY - FIELD TRIP #1 [2002], which was intended to be two issues, though only one came out. I liked that enough that when I came across this book (with a Kunkel introduction) a few years later I picked it up. It wasn't immediately obvious from the cover that it's the second book in the series, and the Joe Chiodo cover isn't really indicative of the art inside.

This was a pretty uneven book. The first little bit makes no concessions to those of us coming into the story late, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense to a new reader. It picks up a bit in the middle, after a bit of exposition, so I got that Decoy was a shapeshifting alien, estranged from his warlike species, somehow linked with a young cop. It was pretty fun for a bit there, then kind of just finishes without a proper ending. 

Didn't really find a lot of attempts at humour in the script very effective. I did like the art for the most part, but I think I'd have liked it better with a flatter colouring style, with a lot less texture that distracts from the linework.

After the main story there's an origin story for Decoy which has a lot of details that would have been good to know in advance. I'm not sure how much of that is recap of earlier comics and how much is original to this. It's by different creators than the main story, with a very different style.  There are also a dozen pages of pin-ups by various artists active in the indy scene of the time, and a storyboard-style story "Crossing Guard" by Huddleston for a non-existent cartoon.

Looks like there have only been a single one-shot continuing the story since this, which might include the origin story printed here, and some short story collections by other creators.

While I wasn't totally happy with this, I would probably pick up the original mini-series and various one-shots or a collection of them if I came across them. There's something here I like. I also see that there might have been some sort of convention special containing the full HEROBEAR/DECOY crossover. Not sure I'd be able to find it easily, but it's something else to look for.

Barbara [2012] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Barbara [2012]

This is an English translation of Osamu Tezuka's ばるぼら, originally serialized in Japanese from 1973 to 1974. At fifteen chapters and just over 400 pages it's one of Tezuka's shorter works.

It's the story of a writer, Yosuke Mikura, who comes across a strange woman named Barbara at a Tokyo subway station. When he takes her home it starts off a bizarre series of events, as she acts as both a muse and a distraction, sometimes saving him from his own foibles and sometimes leading him on odd journeys.

This is one of those books that I've had for a few years, started a few times, but never got more than a few chapters in before it would go back on the shelf. You have to be in the right headspace for some of Tezuka's more experimental comics, and I guess I never was.

Managed to finish it this time, and I will say, it never goes where you'd expect it to go. It has a lot of interesting twists, and can be quite funny at times, but always a bit strange. I usually attribute a lot of that feeling to my own cultural ignorance. And not just Tezuka's Japanese culture, as the back cover mentions the influence of a French opera, Tales of Hoffman. and I'm too lazy to even read the wikipedia summary of that. But in this case, as in a lot of Tezuka's single volume adult works, I think he's just some kind of weirdo.  But a talented one.

In addition to the comic, this has an introduction by Frederik L. Schodt, which I'll probably read someday when I decide to re-read the book.

Johnny Hazard Quarterly #4 [1987] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Johnny Hazard Quarterly #4 [1987]

The JOHNNY HAZARD comic strip created by Frank Robbins ran from 1944 to 1977, with separate daily and Sunday storylines.  It's an aviation based adventure strip which Robbins began coming off a run on another aviation strip, SCORCHY SMITH, and continued until his retirement.

This reprint series from Toronto's own Dragon Lady Press focused on the Sunday pages, with about a year's worth of pages every issue, starting with the second year of the strip in #1. I'm not sure if there had been a prior reprint of the first year shortly before that or it was skipped for another reason. 

The pages are in black and white, looking really sharp for the most part, probably from syndicate proofs. The first half of the book is presented in a landscape three-tier format, which I think is the most complete version (10 panels per strip). The second half switches to a portrait four-tier format, which I think drops a panel (9 panels per page).

This issue starts in mid-1948 and ends in mid-1949, with two full stories. "Port of Missing Ships" sees our hero's plane drifting into the legendary graveyard of ships in the Sargasso Sea, accompanied by the beautiful Lisbeth Manning and sidekick Cut-Out Keeley. There they find pirates led by Judge Beech Comber and have to make a daring escape involving gunfire, explosions and a modified plane

After that comes "Sucker Fish For Supper", after our heroes are picked up by the submarine of recurring villain Baron Debris, who involves them in an elaborate heist aboard a cruise ship.

A lot of  fun stuff, Robbins is a great artist in the classic Caniff style, with a great eye for details, always keeping the twists coming in the storyline and lightening it up with frequent humour and slapstick fun.

Every issue of the series featured a brand new cover by Alex Toth, with colours by Murphy Anderson Visual Concepts. As a bonus this time, we get a preview of Toth cover to the never-published fifth issue, as the series ended here, which indicates the next storyline would involve dinosaurs.  Just another day on the job for Johnny Hazard...

Silverheels [1987] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Silverheels [1987]

This is a science fiction story in four parts by Scott Hampton, Bruce Jones and April Campbell, published by Eclipse as part of their "Graphic Album Series".

Y'know, I always thought this was an original work, but checking before writing this I find it was originally a series from Pacific in 1983-1984, which lasted three issues. I know Jones wrote/edited multiple anthology books for Pacific, some later picked up by Eclipse, but didn't know about this. The Silverheels story was the lead in every issue and there were various backups. This book collects the three existing stories and adds a fourth longer story to finish it up.

The story is about Silverheels, a member of a Native American tribe called the "'Pachees", who are oppressed and subjugated by the pale blond-haired "Nazites", held in compounds which the Nazites keep secret from the aliens who have invited humanity to join the Intergalactic Council. Silverheels has vague telepathic dreaming powers which make him an outcast to his own people, and manages to escape into a Nazite base just as a group of candidates are being taken to space by the Council to see who will represent Earth as Lawkeeper. Silverheels manages to make himself a candidate among the master race types the Nazites have put up.

There's a whole lot of exposition early on, which is clumsy, but the story is okay, a bit muddled, but gets the job done. The big attraction is Scott Hampton's art, which looks gorgeous. Very much Frazetta style lush illustration work, maybe a bit photo-reference heavy, and with aliens who look a little too much like Star Wars background characters, but effective for all that. 

I think it might have printed a little darker than it should have, sometimes it's hard to make out what's going on, and there are a few other production issues, like the first page is clearly meant to have a Silverheels logo after the caption finishes with "I am...", probably did in the original comic, here the sentence just dangles. A few other pages suddenly have larger lettering, so I'm guessing were blown up from the original.

Agent 13 - Acolytes Of Darkness [1990] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Agent 13 - Acolytes Of Darkness [1990]

This is the second of two Agent 13 comics published by role playing game company TSR, coming two years after the 1988 release THE MIDNIGHT AVENGER. The character first appeared in novels by Flint Dille and David Marconi, with Dille and Buzz Dixon adapting the prose to comics and Dan Spiegle supplying the artwork.

And yeah, the Spiegle part is the only real reason I own these two books, purchased fairly cheap a few years after the fact. I'm a big fan of his work, and it seemed worth it to try out a big chunk of it (108 pages over the two books) given a larger and more deluxe treatment.

The concept itself is pretty much a collection of genre clichés. It's late 1930s, the lead-up to WWII, and it turns out the Axis powers are secretly being controlled by a mysterious ancient organization known as The Brotherhood. An agent trained by The Brotherhood, you can probably guess his number, turns on them and enlists some agents on a globe-trotting war to foil their plans, including regularly punching them with his "13" ring, marking them as his victims. So there are bits of Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Phantom and other pulp influences.

All that said, it's readable enough. Kind of scattershot, there seem to be a lot of things missing that are probably explained in the novel, but it does the job of setting up various exotic locales and set pieces for Spiegle to come in and do his classic adventure strip style renderings for. There are a few dozen Spiegle comics I'd recommend you read first, but if you have all of those, this is worth picking up.

Because this is TSR this also includes a bound-in game, which is just a map of the world as the board, some cardboard squares to cut out for tokens and six pages of instructions which are great if you suffer from insomnia.

The incongruous cover is by Paul Gulacy, I'm sure hoping the James Bond people would come across it in the bookstore and hire him.

The Last Heroes [2004] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

The Last Heroes [2004]

Created by Gil Kane and Steven Grant, EDGE was a planned four issues mini-series published by Malibu's Bravura imprint in 1993-1994. Because of financial difficulties with the publisher, only three issues came out at the time. A decade later this hardcover book was published by ibooks, reprinting the existing issues, adding the unpublished fourth. It doesn't really end, though, since as Grant mentions in the afterword the mini-series was the first of a planned trilogy, the remainder of which wasn't done by 2004, and I'm pretty sure not since.

I think this is the last feature of note that Gil Kane created. He remained active in comics with some short runs and fill-ins on existing characters until he passed away in 2000. It's also the last major work of his that he inked his own pencils, which is always a treat. Sometimes he got inkers with a heavy hand.

Overall, I'd say this is disappointing.  Kane's artwork looks really nice, but I found the story hard to follow, all the characters kind of bland and cliché. A lot of times I was unclear on whether I was reading a flashback or a current scene, and for someone who's read as many comics as I have there were an alarming number of pages where I read the word balloons in the wrong order.

There's definitely the germ of a good idea in here, and maybe it would have been realized if the series had gone the full twelve issues, but it's not obvious here.

So not sorry I have it, as a Kane fan, but can't really recommend it otherwise.

Leave It To Chance - Monster Madness [2003] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Leave It To Chance - Monster Madness [2003]

Created by Paul Smith and James Robinson, LEAVE IT TO CHANCE features the adventures of Chance Falconer, the only child of widowed Lucas Falconer, the protector of the town of Devil's Echo against paranormal threats. At age 14 she's shocked to discover that her father won't take her on as an assistant, insisting the Falconer heroic liniage only passes to the male heir. She rebels at that outdated thinking, and constantly gets into adventures, aided by her pet dragon and other friends.

The series was published for 13 issues from 1996 to 2002, following Smith and Robinson's 1993 collaboration on THE GOLDEN AGE at DC. The first twelve were under Jim Lee's Homage banner (as it moved from an independent company to a Wildstorm imprint at Image to a DC imprint) and the last, after a three year gap, by Image. Image also released three large European style hardcovers in 2002-2003, collecting the first eleven issues. This is the third of them, with #9 to #11 of the series.  By this point George Freeman had been brought on as the inker.

The book opens with the two-part "Monster Madness", where a spell brings some movie monsters from a revival theatre to life, and they begin to terrorize the town. Paul Smith's versions of the classic monsters are a delight, and the story has some interesting twists and possibilities for the long-term plans for the series.

The next story is "Dead Men Can't Skate", and features Chance attending a hockey game with her father, their butler, their housekeeper and her dragon. Just a regular day out, which ends up with a dead player coming back to life, with an early invocation of the "Air Bud rule", that the rules don't say a dead man can't play (yes, I checked, AIR BUD was 1997, the original comic was 1998).

Pretty enjoyable stuff, although I'd say of the three LEAVE IT TO CHANCE reprint books this is my least favourite. Not bad, just the first two are much better (for the record, #2 is probably #1, and #1 is #2. If they ever release #4, that'll be #3, making #3 ranked #4.  And although the statute of limitations on wishful thinking it probably expired, I still hold out hope that they'll get back to it, and that it'll be so good that #5 will be #1, #2 will be #2...).

For the series as a whole, Smith's art (with or without Freeman's inks) is just so clean and slick, a delight, with perfectly expressive characters and a real sense of place in Devil's Echo. And I run hot and cold on Robinson, but this is by a wide margin my favourite of everything I've read from him.