By Paul S. Newman & Dan Barry (Marvel Music)
ISBN: 0-7851-0086-5
No, I’m not kidding.
Enterprise and quality should always be applauded and during the desolate 1990s when sales were dwindling and new markets were desperately needed Marvel went looking for fresh fields to create comics in (as opposed to now when the company claims to be a media franchising outfit that just happens to print funny books – and if you dispute that check out their financial reports and see just how far down the list of products publishing comes).
In the search for fresh markets back then Marvel tapped religion (please don’t make me talk about their Christian Comics line) and popular music to augment their home-grown stable of stars and the prodigious line of toy, cartoon and film licenses, with admittedly, mixed results.
Still and all, a good comic read is a good comic read so this astoundingly impressive general adventure package which just happens to have an Achey-Breaky country singer as the star should come as no surprise to long-time fans and collectors. After all, the immediate post-Golden Age of American comics was littered with product based on the “real-life exploits†of celebrities such as Judy Canova, Alan Ladd, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and many others.
As high profile franchises they were handled by top artists and writers. Buster Crabbe and John Wayne Adventures frequently featured Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, Roy G. Krenkel, Joe Orlando, George Evan and Harvey Kurtzman. Dell’s Roy Rogers has issues by the great John Buscema, Pat Boone… No, here, at least, I’m kidding.
The music is side-lined by “King of Comic Book Writers†Paul S. Newman (possibly the most prolific scripter in the business; creator of Solar, Man of the Atom, Turok, Son of Stone and writer of both comic-book and newspaper strip Lone Ranger as well as stories for a host of other companies) and Dan Barry, an artist who quit comics such as Captain America, the Heap and Airboy for the strips Tarzan and Flash Gordon before returning in the 1990s to write and draw Indiana Jones for Dark Horse. Here they spin a couple of traditional yarns, dotted with sly humour, featuring plucky kids encountering a haunted US cavalry fort and a time-jaunt to the court of Edward I of England (that’s Edward Longshanks, 1239-1307, history buffs), ripping yarns that can suspend common sense enough to provide the maximum thrills and spills.
The basics of good comics often get subsumed nowadays by flash, dazzle and “Big Thinking Conceptsâ€, but sometimes the old ways are really the best. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find a retailer with the nerve to stock such an uncool item as Billy Ray Cyrus, but I hope you do because it’s what comics are all about: using compelling pictures to tell a story well: something that’s increasingly a lost art.
© 1995 Billy Ray Cyrus. All Rights Reserved.