EC - Starchie (Elder)

Starchie
art by Will Elder, story by Harvey Kurtzman
Mad #12 (1954)

Kurtzman and Elder turn their satirical eye towards the Archie comics line in this issue, playing off the "typical teen-ager" wholesome comics selling point of the line by having the characters engaging in all manner of "typical" behaviour including brutal violence, drinking and crime.

A lot of weird little gags in this one, and Elder really outdoes himself on the background details (including literal "chicken fat". Is this the origin of the term?) and in general combining his style with the Archie house style. Surprisingly that depiction of the girls isn't actually much more exaggerated from how they were often shown in actual Archie comics.

Of course, Kurtzman and Elder would return to the Archie well again a few years later with the even more outrageous Goodman Beaver story "Goodman Goes Playboy" for HELP, and that time it would raise the legal attention of Archie.

Basil Wolverton's Gateway To Horror #1 [1988] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Basil Wolverton's Gateway To Horror #1 [1988]

Dark Horse went to the Wolverton well frequently in their first decade, including two specials which reprinted some of his 1950s work for Marvel. Unfortunately the reprints were in black and white, something I'm normally all in favour of, but Wolverton's bizarre nightmarish creations always seem to be ideally suited to the lurid colouring he expected the work to be printed with.



This was the second of the specials, reprinting four Marvel stories, two of which Wolverton wrote and drew and two written by Dan Keyes (who later went on to write the science fiction classic FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON). Steve Bissette supplies the cover, a great combination of some of the insane imagery that Wolverton supplied in these and other stories into a new, even crazier, image.

"Gateway to Horror" opens the book with a tale of two men following a map to a lost mine in their jeeplane (yes, a jeep/plane hybrid oddly just thrown in without any real explanation. The story would have worked the same with just a jeep or just a plane). They find an old cabin where they're infected with a gravity increasing liquid, as they find they've stumbled on an invasion from an underground civilization. So they blow up the tunnel, but have no evidence to prove their story, leaving the surface world unsuspecting of the invasion plans.

"Where Monsters Dwell" had its splash image re-drawn by another, unknown artist. A reporter who has been writing stories mocking a crazy scientist gets sent to a strange dimension full of odd creatures and where humans mutate on arrival (the scientist apparently had a lot of enemies). Great depictions of the alien dimensions and the beasts there, and clever twist at the end.

"One of Our Graveyards is Missing" is the first of the Keyes written stories. Very short and simple, and not really that logical, but some good artwork. A graveyard vanishes in a small town. The police look for suspects and find a stranger who reveals that his alien race needs bodies for experiments. Sure, that makes sense...

"They Crawl by Night" is also written by Keyes, and is the best story in the issue. Just pure craziness in a Kafka sense, where a man already in an insane asylum goes even more off his rocker when he sees strange crab creatures. Of course no one believes him until it's too late. Just wonderful stuff, and Wolverton's art is excellent throughout, just disturbing in so many ways.

The issue also includes extensive notes on the background of the stories.

Pretty Pictures on the Interweb

With guests like these... - Back when Jim Keefe was doing the Flash Gordon comic strip, he would get in some guest artists. Must be nice to have your substitutes include Al Williamson, Joe Kubert and John Romita. Some of those guest strips are available on Keefe's site.

Homer Arkwright? - One of the creepiest things you'll see on the web, Bryan Talbot drawing a realistic version of Homer and Bart Simpson for a proposed (and rejected, sadly) parallel world SIMPSONS story. Lots of other great stuff in the galleries on that site.

Not so Rough on the eyes - Bob McLeod has a section on his site devoted to his magazine ROUGH STUFF. Any site which includes work I haven't seen before by Alex Toth, John Totleben, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Gene Colan, Steve Bissette, Gil Kane, Craig Russell, Jerry Ordway and others is okay by me.

A Bear in Asgard - Some pretty stunning work from Tim Truman for his ODIN: THE WANDERER project that he works on between other assignments.

Usagi Yojimbo #27 [1991] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Usagi Yojimbo #27 [1991]

This was one of the first issues of USAGI that I bought. The cover, of Usagi fighting an octopus, is still one of my favourites.

The lead story this issue is the 20-page "My Lord's Daughter", by Stan Sakai, of course. A bit of a departure from the standard Usagi story, this one has Usagi recounting an adventure where he fought hordes of demons, a shark and an octopus.

I love that little octopus variation of the usual Sakai death-skull thought balloon.

The escapades continue with a giant insect and then a demon in a quest to rescue a princess, after which we find out that this was all a story that Usagi was telling to entertain some kids. And he promises them another tale of his encounter with the "cheese-dip wanderer". Still waiting for that...

They had some extra pages this issue, so the back of the book has two pages of background on the story, including the original AMAZING HEROES swimsuit pin-up that inspired the story, a one-page plot outline including some character sketches (one not actually used in this story and the other greatly changed by the final story) and five pages of thumbnails, including an encounter with a kappa which didn't make the final story. A nice backstage look.

As usual for the Fantagraphics run of USAGI, there's a funny animal backup story in here, the 5-page "The Food of the Gods" featuring Mel White's Coyote. Pretty decent humorous fantasy story with a clever ending. The only other story by White I know is another Coyote story in CRITTERS #38.

And that's not all! There's also a 4-page letter column, with several pieces of great fan art, including a Usagi/Groo/TMNT sword fight.

EC - Master Race (Krigstein)

Master Race
art by Bernard Krigstein, story by Al Feldstein(?)
Impact #1 (1955)

"Master Race" is one of the most famous EC stories of all. As has been related in many places, Krigstein asked and received permission to expand the original six page story to eight pages (hence CRIME SUSPENSTORIES #26 having a cover clearly meant for this story by Jack Kamen, with another one by Jack Davis for this issue). Krigstein pulls out lots of tricks to make it a more effective story, most notably the unique way of showing movement of the train with a repeated images, and using multiple small panels to control the pacing

The story itself is also very effective. From what I gather, even at this late date a decade after the end of WWII, images of what exactly happened in Europe, the concentrations camps, gas chambers and mass graves, weren't exactly common in American popular culture, so this chronicle of the rise of the Nazis, documenting their crimes and downfall, while still bold and chilling now was much more so then. It's also, if you don't know that much about the story going in, one of the best twist ending reveals in EC history.

Read more about the story in Martin Jukovsky's essay.

BATTLER BRITTON by Wilson/Ennis

Battler Britton was a British war comics character published back in the 1950s and 1960s in titles like AIR ACE PICTURE LIBRARY. Last year DC licensed the rights to the character for a 5-issue series drawn by Colin Wilson and scripted by Garth Ennis, with great painted covers from Garry Leach. I really don't care for Ennis (including what I read of his WAR STORY one-shots a few years back, which had some great artists), so despite liking what I've seen of Wilson's "Dans l'Ombre du Soleil" and Leach's covers I didn't pick up the series until I saw a complete set for sale at $1 an issue recently.

I'm glad I got them all in one shot, since I wouldn't have picked up any more after #1 if buying them as the came out. Fortunately it got a bit better as it went on, and ultimately was worth what I paid.

The mini-series presents a single generically named storyline titled "Bloody Good Show", featuring Commander Robert "Battler" Britton in 1942 in North Africa, given charge of the training of a group of American pilots, including the American major named... wait for it... "Tex". They have an antagonistic relationship, of course, but ultimately wind up both grounded will inside enemy lines and have to work together when they discover a deadly German secret.

The best part of this book, by far, is the artwork. Wilson lovingly renders the planes in mid-air combat, doing a good job of showing the wear of combat on them and leading up to the spectacular explosions. He also does well with the uniforms, firearms and desert setting. Leach tops it all off with some nice covers, including a wraparound one on #5.

The story, though, is pretty much one of the generic war comic stories that's been around for over 50 years. It was told in anywhere from 8 pages to 50 in full sized American comics, and 60 pages in British digests (which translates to about 40-50 pages of a full-sized comic. Ennis is given about 110 pages to play around with, and adds nothing new. The characters are no deeper, the situations no more complex. Sad that he's one of the only ones doing straight war comics for major publishers this decade, with such little ambition (Kubert's recent SGT. ROCK series looks a bit better, I'm looking forward to reading it when it's collected).

It's kind of sad that the best story told in this 5-issue series was Ennis' one paragraph summary of his favourite classic Battler story, "False Glory" from AIR ACE #406 [1968]. If only he had tried to tell a story half as original and clever.

Surprisingly there's going to be a collection of the series out soon, if that tickles your fancy.

Art Saaf, R.I.P.

Mark Evanier reports on the passing of Art Saaf, a comic book artist whose career stretched from the early 1940s to the late 1970s (with a long gap when he worked in advertising in the middle there). I've only seen a handful of his stories, mostly from his work for DC in the 1970s (where the inking wasn't always complimentary), but liked what I saw. Unfortunately not too much of his older work has been reprinted.

Shown above, from Seduction of the Innocent #5, a 1986 reprint of a 1952 horror story, from Our Fighting Forces #118, a 1969 "Hunter's Hellcats" story pencilled and inked by Saaf and from Supergirl #10, a 1974 story featuring Supergirl meeting Prez, Teen President.