Category: Cartooning Classics

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Scorchy Smith: Partners in Danger


By Noel Sickles (Nostalgia Press)
ISBN10: 0-87897-029-0 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

This is a big year for comics and strip anniversaries. Here’s one of the very best; but good luck and deep pockets to you if you decide to act on my fervent recommendations…

For one of the most influential and well-regarded comics strips of all time, aviation feature Scorchy Smith is also one of the most enigmatic and unreachable. A surprisingly long-lived proposition running in total from March 17th 1930 to December 30th 1961, the strip took off in the heyday of adventure comics and employed a pretty impressive roster of story-makers – officially ten in total including Bert Christman (The Sandman), Frank Robbins (Johnny Hazard) and George Tuska (Buck Rogers). However, it achieved its zenith in the mere three years pioneering cartoon visionary Noel Sickles steered its course.

Noel Douglas Sickles (January 24, 1910-October 3, 1982) had a very short and barely acknowledged career as a newspaper cartoonist. He worked as a jobbing illustrator in the features department of the Associated Press – an organisation that provided top-rated news items but only cheap (if high-quality) filler material such as cartoons, ads, comic strips, recipes, horoscopes, puzzles: All the pages a local newspaper might need but couldn’t afford to produce themselves…

In 1934 Sickles took over the inexplicably popular aviation strip Scorchy Smith from animator & political cartoonist John Terry, after the creator/originator contracted rapid-acting terminal tuberculosis. The publishers required Sickles to emulate Terry’s style, which Sickles diligently did (with his first credited strip on April 2nd 1934) until Terry’s death. At that point he was invited to make the strip his own and – a driven experimenter – he replaced Terry’s scratchy, cross-hatched, intensely feathered methods with a moody impressionism that used volume, solid blacks and a careful manipulation of light sources to tell his tales. He also traded standard proscenium arch layouts for impressionistically styled (if not actually expressionistic), cinematic composition which made backgrounds and scenery an integral part of the story-telling process.

An exceedingly straight action/drama serial about a pilot for hire based on the public persona of Charles Lindbergh, the high-flying exploits of named star Scorchy Smith catalogue the travels of a stout hearted, valiant Knight of the Skies, complete with trusty sidekick, “Heinie”, flying about and Doing Good. That’s it.

Sickles famously never worked to a plan when writing the strip, he just made it up as he went along to avoid boring himself. For an extended exploration of his chimeric art process you should read R C Harvey’s Meanwhile…: a superb biography of Sickles’s friend and studio-mate Milton Caniff, who sat across from the innovator taking notes and making his own inspired style revolutions…

Stories abound that the two frequently collaborated. Certainly, Caniff admitted to helping out with deadlines and story-polishing, but the bold visuals were always the product of a driven and dedicated seeker of artistic truths. The Chiaroscurist style developed by Sickles was adopted by Caniff, although he largely eschewed the lavish use of photomechanical dot-screens Sickles applied to create different flavours of Black in his monochrome masterpieces.

Reprinted in this slim tome are three thrillers from that brief period. ‘Lafarge’s Gold’ (10th October 1935 – January 30th 1936), ‘New York, N. Y.’ (January 31st 1936 – March 18th 1936) and ‘Desert Escape’ (March 19th 1936 – August 14th 1936) all come from the very end of Sickles’ strip career, with a pretty girl swindled out of a goldmine, big-city conmen, and Tuaregs and the Foreign Legion providing admittedly lacklustre narrative maguffins. However, the bravura vivacity and artistic flair employed by Sickles to tell these tales elevate the B-movie plots into breathtaking high art drama by the sheer magnificence of the drawing and design.

Over his tenure, the great experimenter pushed the minor strip’s syndication to over 250 papers, so he asked for a raise. When he was refused, he quit, with his last episode published on October 24th 1936. Noel Sickles left the restricted and drudge-work world of newspaper strips, chasing the greater challenge of higher education. He eventually settled into the more appreciative and challenging magazine illustration field, making new fans in the Saturday Evening Post, Life and Readers Digest. His few months in narrative story-telling changed our entire industry, not so much with what he did, but by the way he did it and who he shared his discoveries with. He is an unsung immortal, and his brief output deserves a commemorative, retrospective collection more than any other creator that I can think of. Until the precious few previous collections are rereleased – and preferably in digitised formats – lost gems like this will have to suffice.
© 1936 The A. P.

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Hägar the Horrible: The Epic Chronicles – Dailies 1980-1981


By Dik Browne (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78116-715-1 (HB)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Perfect Traditional Plunder-fun… 8/10

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Although very much in decline these days, for nearly 200 years cartoon strips and gag-panels were the universal medium of wit, satire, mirth and cultural exchange. Latterly we purveyors of primarily sequential narrative have exhibited an unhappy tendency to become protective and parochial about our own particular specialism within the greater art form. How many times have we heard an artist or writer working on a hot new comic book property revelling in sales of 50 thousand monthly copies, almost simultaneously disparage strips such as Dilbert, Dick Tracy or Garfield whose daily readership can be numbered in millions, if not billions?

Let’s all just try to remember that tastes differ, and that we’re all just making lines on a surface here, and most especially that TV and Computer Games are the real enemy of our industry, shall we?

OK, rant over.

Mainstream cartooning is a huge daily joy to a vast and often global readership whose needs are quite different from those of hard-core, dedicated comic fans, or even that ever-growing base of intrigued browsers dipping their toes in the sequential narrative pool. Even the stuck-up stickybeaks who have STILL pointedly “never read a comic” have enjoyed strips or panels, and in this arena Britain has seen not only a golden bounty of home produced material but also imported some of the very best the rest of the world has to offer.

Richard Arthur Allan “Dik” Browne was a native New Yorker born in 1917 who studied at Cooper Union and apprenticed as a copy boy and art-bod for the New York Journal America before joining the US Army. His wartime duties in the Engineering Corps included strategic map-making, but whilst in service he also created the comic strip Jinny Jeep about the Women’s Army Corps, which set the tone for his peacetime career. As a professional cartoonist and illustrator, he worked for Newsweek and in advertising after mustering out, gaining a reputation as a superb logo designer (The Campbell Soup Kids, Chiquita Banana and the Birdseye Bird number amongst his most memorable creations).

Dik also dabbled with comic books – a few Classics Illustrated Junior issues – and produced children’s books, before teaming up in 1954 with Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker to draw hugely successful spin-off strip Hi and Lois. Whilst illustrating that family comedy – and deviously training his sons Chance and Chris to take eventually over his cartooning duties – Browne devised another strip that he would write as well as render.

Hägar the Horrible debuted through the King Features Syndicate on February 4th 1973 and quickly became a global hit. The strip is a fixture of 1900 papers in 56 countries and a dozen languages with the characters migrating to books, comic albums, games, animated movies, toys and more. Dik Browne retired from cartooning in 1988 and died from cancer on June 4th 1989. Chance continued Hi and Lois whilst Chris, assisted by Gary Hallgren, wielded pen, waved sword and wore the chief’s horned helmet on Hägar until his own death on February 5th 2023…

A certified classic of World Cartooning, Hägar the Horrible is the ongoing subject of comprehensive collectors series. This one – the sixth monolithic hardback compendium of a treasured and much missed series – is a personal favourite, covering 7th July 1980 – January 2nd 1982, with the hard-drinking, voracious sea-roving Viking and his scurvy crew trekking out to far climes before perennially staggering home to their quirky families in a never-ending stream of sight gags, painful puns and surreal situations.

We open with a passionate reverie from a close associate and fellow star cartoonist in the Foreword by Lynn Johnston before Chris Browne shares memories of one of his dad’s most imaginative and appealing children’s books (The Land of Lost Things, co-created with Mort Walker) in ‘The Lost World of Dik Browne’. Then, before the cavalcade of comic calamity commences, readers old and new are regaled with a handy chart of the Hägar Family Tree, reintroducing the great man and his doughty dependents: Helga the long-suffering wife, studious son Hamlet and troublesome teenaged daughter Honi. Also making an appearance are faithful canine Snert, stroppy house-duck Kvack and the hero’s faithful if intellectually challenged sidekick Lucky Eddie…

The magic of these daily strips’ stream of japes and capers is that they constantly revisit established themes and hot-button topics. Over hundreds of pages that follow you will see Hägar’s perpetual struggle to bring home the bacon (and wine and gold and textiles and…), spar with Helga as she fruitlessly struggles to civilise her barbaric oaf of a man, and Honi’s torment as she pines equally for seedy musician Lute and noble knight Sir Philip Courtright whilst testing out other matrimonial options; and alternatively considers a career as an axe-swinging Valkyrie…

Bookish Hamlet is always there to disappoint and delight his gregarious, bellicose dad; Snert and Kvack frequently outwit and appal the humans who share their home whilst Lucky Eddie and the mismatched crew of incompetent sea-reavers follow the red-bearded rascal into battle against foreign armies, daunting dragons, a coterie of assorted clergy and the unwelcoming elements, content in the knowledge that somehow, somewhere they will find more booze…

Enticing, irrepressible, outrageously old-fashioned, utterly unreconstructed, hilarious and yet deeply satisfying, Hägar the Horrible is a masterpiece of the strip cartoonists’ unique art form and one guaranteed to deliver delight over and over again to young and old alike.
Hägar the Horrible is © 2014 King Features Syndicate ™ & © Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. All strips © 1980 & 1981 King Features Syndicate. All rights reserved. All other material © 2014 their respective authors.

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Kids Are Still Weird – and More Observations From Parenthood


By Jeffrey Brown (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-344-8 (digest TPB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-345-5

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Fabulous Family Fable … 9/10

It’s never too late to find a treasure or have a good time. Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown certainly knows that, as a glance at any of his painfully incisive autobiographical mini-comics, quirky literary graphic novels and hilarious all-ages comedy cartoons will show.

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1975, Brown studied Fine Art at the Chicago Art Institute but abandoned painting to concentrate on comics. His intense, bizarrely funny observational strips garnered him fans amongst in-the-know consumers and fellow creators alike: all finding something to love in such varied fare as his 4-volume “Girlfriend Trilogy” (Unlikely, AEIOU and Every Girl is the End of the World For Me and opening shot Clumsy), Bighead, A Matter of Life, Little Things, Funny, Misshapen Body, Undeleted Scenes, Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations, Little Things or Sulk. If he’s new to you and you’re looking for a new multi-ranging talent to follow, other career treats include the Lucy & Andy Neanderthal series, slyly satirical all-ages funny stuff for The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror, Marvel’s Strange Tales, Incredible Change-Bots, and similar visual venues.

Happily, unlike so many creators with such an eclectic oeuvre, Brown also achieved a measure of mainstream success thanks to a keen artistic sense and lifelong love affair with the most significant popular arts phenomenon of the last 45 years. In 2012 Brown created a breakout best-seller with an hilarious exploration of soft, nurturing side of the Dark Lord of the Sith. Wondering what might have been, Brown had the most dangerous man (more or less) in the Empire spend a little quality time with his missing offspring.

The hilarious pre (Jedi) school experiences of Darth Vader and Son (as would have been seen in Star Wars – Episode Three and a Half) were followed by Vader’s Little Princess, Star Wars: Jedi Academy and more, investigating deliriously daft and telling snatches of Skywalker domesticity – like baseball practise with light sabres – and was utterly irresistible.

No fan of the all-conquering franchise could possibly do without those deliciously sweet treats and those superbly subversive cartoon confections fully inform this stunning collation of similar kiddie hijinks which exploit the best thing about being a cartoonist with children… ready-made, constant gag ideas just waiting to be shared…

A follow-up to 2014’s Kids are Weird, here Brown and wife Jennifer reveal more things Oscar – and his little brother Simon – do and say that make sense to them but cause hidebound adults to gasp, splutter, spit-take and reach for notebooks. It’s a world of froot loops and green poops, toys (soft and so not) and declamatory statements, books read and trips misremembered and a package of experiences designed to prompt the response “yeah, but mine went…”

Both delicious and agonising in their forthright simplicity, these non-sequential pictorial snippets reveal how we’ve all been there, or somewhere quite near. Packed with joyous wonder, Kids Are Still Weird is a magical delight for all engaged in raising the next generation and an intoxicating examination of what makes us human, hopeful and incorrigible…
© 2024 Jeffrey Brown.

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Everything’s Coming Up Beatrix – A Breaking Cat News Adventure (volume 6)


By Georgia Dunn (Andrews McMeel)
ISBN: 978-1-52487-974-7 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-5248-9062-6

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Categorically Unmissable… 9/10

There’s a burgeoning trend amongst certain men – mostly loitering on the internet – to think their threat of replacing women they can’t “get” with sex-bots that don’t exist is in some way a deterrent to being turned down by people they don’t have the ability to ask nicely in the first place. These uncouth, mis-evolved oafs also warn that if the “females” don’t wise up and lower their standards they will be stuck with living with cats…

Guys – and I’m using the term in the least pejorative manner I can muster – wise up, yourselves. Neither of those propositions are unwelcome outcomes. Cats already rule the world and you just can’t compete.

On any level.

In 2016, illustrator and cartoonist Georgia Dunn found a way to make her hairy housemates (the ones with more than two feet) earn their keep after watching them converge on a domestic accident and inquisitively, interminably poke their whiskery little snouts into the mess. That incident led to Breaking Cat News: a hilariously beguiling webcomic detailing how her forthright felines operate their own on-the-spot news-team, with studio anchor Lupin, and field reporters Elvis (investigative) and Puck (commentary) delivering around-the-clock reports on the events that really resonate with cats – because, after all, who else matters?

On March 27th 2017, a suitably modified (for which read fully redrawn and recoloured) version began newspaper syndication, alternating with new material designed expressly for print consumption. As the strip and cast grew, print publication led to books like these – also a far more enticing prospect than any night out with the boys…

If you’re a returning customer or already follow the strip, you’re au fait with a constantly expanding cast and ceaselessly surreal absurdity, but this stuff is so welcoming, even the merest neophyte can jump right in with no confusion… other than that which is intentional…

Be warned though, Dunn is a master of emotional manipulation and never afraid to tug heartstrings. Always keep hankies close. You too, lads…

In this volume, the strip’s spookier whimsy-corners are revisited, and the year’s seasonal markers (a mainstay of most newspaper comic strips for more than a century) are gleefully addressed as the news-mews crew and other occupants of the ancient (by US standards!) house pop up in short gags and extended serial dramas, beginning with a passionate yet hilarious cartoon polemic encouraging everyone to defend libraries, librarians and reading itself in today’s dangerously post-literate America.

Returning to episodic riffs in celebration of ‘Fuzzy Blanket Season’, we see the Dunn’s toddler – under the guidance of the scoop-starved kitties – cope with the loss of plushy pal Pengo. His return from the washing machine leads to learning all about the dangers of peanut butter before the felines face another crunchy leaf crisis and anticipate impending Halloween treats through the eyes of the new baby.

The jaded kitties clue in viewers to the best comestibles, carry on the search for legendary cryptid “The mailman” and celebrate the joyous resurrection of ‘The Space Heater’, with a “camp in” and some scary tales…

An extended frightening yarn – which does end happily, my nervous darlings – finds three-legged Puck indulge his passion for climbing and get lost in the house’s superstructure. When he is in danger of suffocating, ghosts of previous pets and the old lady who originally owned the place augment the frantic, still-breathing searchers…

The story of the were-floof segues into more spectral surprises – such as the advent of Count Puckula – before order of a catly kind is ultimately restored, leading to riffs on feline trophy-taking, coiffure gaffes and monsters under beds. When  Christmas and New Year’s come, the cats are ready even if The People aren’t, and no decoration or fancy edible is safe. At least wrapping paper is a gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving and…

January sees a big expose on ‘Shelves, the Silent Killer’, more “facts” about snow – and groundhogs – as well as sweaters, colds, why the People bathe, and contagious cat clumsiness. Food items are always newsworthy, and a protracted debate on the point of lettuce leads to fun with temporary foster kitten and agent of chaos Beatrix…

Time marches on to St. Patrick’s Day, which is co-opted by adherents of feline patron saint St. Gertude to launch new holiday ‘St. Catty’s Day’, complete with a bundle of new traditions. Eating corned beef might not make the final cut, though…

Another high point comes with the launch of affiliate BCW, but is the world ready for Best Cat Wrestling and glam-costumed kitty luchadores? If not there’s always cake and reading. That’s what new cat Sophie prefers, much to outside cat Tommy’s disappointment. It almost makes up for The Woman running out of coffee and English period detective dramas.

By the time Peep Toad season starts, Beatrix is moving on to her forever home – a book shop – and social media goes into  underdrive. At least old pals like the “gypsy” cats are happy to provide entertainment to the news-starved, and there is always cat yoga, home-tanning, sock-hunting, new toys to review and the start of baseball season…

As always Rolling News episodes revisit favourite themes like things that don’t need to be on shelves, climbing into bags, kibble, packaging helping The People eat, sleep and exercise…

Closing festivities is another selection of activity pages considered as Breaking Cat News: More to Explore providing full painted and fully-detailed tips and plans on how to ‘Make your own Bookmarks!’, ‘Make a Little Book!’ and ‘Build a Reading Fort!’

Outrageous, alarming, extra-especially courageous and always charming – and certainly often far too autobiographical for comfort – the romps, riffs and occasional sad bits about a fully integrated multi-species family is a growing necessity of life for many folk – just like most men simply Are Not. Smart, witty, imaginative and deliciously whimsical, Breaking Cat News is fabulously funny, infinitely re-readable feel-good fun rendered with artistic elan and a light and breezy touch to delight not just us irredeemable cat-addicts but also anyone in dire need of a good laugh.
Everything’s Coming Up Beatrix © 2023 Georgia Dunn. All rights reserved.

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Bloom County: Real, Classy, & Compleat 1980-1989


By Berkeley Breathed (Little, Brown & Co./IDW)
ISBN: 978-1-63140-976-9 (HB/Digital editions)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in far less enlightened times.

Oh Joy! Oh Joy! More American elections!

This review is a blatant deception. As usual, I’ve cited a specific release you should have – especially if you’re a hedonistic sucker for the comfortingly tactile and simultaneously intoxicating buzz of a sturdy, well-bound block of processed tree, glue, stitches and inks containing wonderful stories and images – and it’s worth every penny. Actually, though, I’m really telling you to take a look at one remarkable creator’s entire output…

For most of the 1980s and half of the 1990s, Berke Breathed dominated the American newspaper comic strip scene with his astoundingly funny, edgy-yet-surreal political fantasy Bloom County (8th December 1980 to August 6th). All his stuff is fully available digitally – so don’t dawdle here with my reviews, just get them now!

At the top of his game and swamped with dazzling awards like Pulitzer prizes, Breathed retired from strip work to concentrate on a series of lavish children’s fantasy picture books – such as Red Ranger Came Calling and Mars Needs Moms! They rank among the best America has ever produced. Get them too.

His first foray into the field was 1991’s A Wish for Wings That Work: a Christmas parable featuring Breathed’s signature character, and his most charmingly human. Opus is a talking penguin, reasonably well-educated (for America), archaically erudite, genteel, emotionally vulnerable; insecure yet unfalteringly optimistic (think Alan Alda in a tux and fat-suit). His two most fervent dreams are to be reunited with his absent mother one day, and that in the fullness of time he might fly like a “real” bird…

Between 2003 and 2008, Breathed revived Opus as a Sunday strip, but eventually capitulated to a career-long antipathy to manic deadline pressures in newspaper production and the often-insane, convoluted contradictions of editorial censorship. It seemed his ludicrous yet appealing cast of misfits – all deadly exponents of irony, sarcasm and common sense residing in the heartland of American conservatism – were done and gone for good.

Ultimately, however, the internet provided a platform for the opinionated artist to resume his role as a gadfly commentator on his own terms. Since 2015, Bloom County has returned to mock, expose and shame capitalism, celebrities, consumerism, popular culture, politicians, religious leaders and people who act like idiots. He does it at his own pace (only seven strips in 2023!) and became guardian of America’s artistic soul when he began – with permission – to incorporate Bill Watterson’s immaculate clowns Calvin and Hobbes into his outings.

These post-2015 efforts, unconstrained by syndicate pressures to not offend advertisers, are also available in book collections. You’ll want those too, and be delighted to learn all that Bloom County treasure is available in digital formats – fully annotated to compensate for the history gap if you didn’t live through events such as Iran-Gate, Live-Aid, Star Wars (both cinematic and military-industrial complex versions), assorted cults and televangelists experiencing less that divine retribution and the other tea-cup storms that have made us Baby Boomers so rude and defensive…

Once more, I’m recommending an entire canon of work rather than a specific volume, but Bloom County, Outland, Opus and – oh, heaven, unbound! – the triumphant second coming of the Bloom County crew of recent years are absolute classics of comics creation: political, polemical, sardonic, surreal, groundbreaking, witty, acerbic, frequently angry and always, ALWAYS cripplingly funny.

I barely survived those years and can honestly admit it’s probably the best treatise of modern history and social criticism you will ever see.

Set firmly in The Heartland – what we’ve all accepted as Trump’s fact-resistant, rationality-immune base territory – the strip pitilessly lampoons fads, traditions and icons through the lens of youngsters and a menagerie of astute talking animals living in or around the Bloom Boarding House. Also adding to the confusions are bastions and bulwarks of American society: horny ambulance-chasing jock lawyer Steve Dallas, Vietnam survivor Cutter John, liberal feminist school teacher Bobbi Harlow, New Age hippie Quiche Lorraine, corrupt Senator Bedfellow, and many more lampoonable archetypes, like fundamentalist Christians and Donald Trump…

The true stars though are the kids and beasts who perpetually vex, perplex and test them, asking questions and taking radical action to set the old order “all higgledy-piggledy” – such as their creation of a third force in politics: The Meadow Party that has (unsuccessfully, thus far) fought every presidential election since 1980…

Hilarious, biting, wildly imaginative and crafted with a huge amount of sheer emotional guts and empathy, these strips are simply incomparable. If you love laughter, despise chicanery and crave unique characters and great art, this is a universe you simply must inhabit.

… And while you’re at it, get those other books I mentioned. It can’t be Christmas without them. When the family have almost ruined the holiday, of if you find yourself somewhere other than where you’d want or expect to be, this is what you want to restore your spirits. Kids too.
© 2017, 2020 Berkeley Breathed. All Rights Reserved.

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Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1968 – 1969


By Whitney Ellsworth, Joe Giella, Al Plastino & various (IDW)
ISBN: 987-1-63140-121-3 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

For more than seven decades in America the newspaper comic strip was the Holy Grail cartoonists and graphic-narrative storytellers hungered for. Syndicated across the country and often the planet, winning millions of readers and accepted (in most places) as a more mature and sophisticated form of literature than comic-books, it also paid better, with the greatest rewards and accolades being reserved for the full-colour Sunday page. So it was always something of a poisoned chalice when a comic book character became so popular that it swam against the tide (after all weren’t the funny-books invented just to reprint strips in cheap, accessible form?) and became a syndicated serial strip. Superman, Wonder Woman and Archie Andrews made the jump soon after their debuts and many features have done so since.

Due to war-time complications, the first newspaper Batman and Robin strip was slow getting its shot, but when the Dynamic Duo finally hit the Funny Pages the feature quickly proved to be one of the best-regarded, highest quality examples of the trend, both in Daily and Sunday formats. Yet somehow the strip never achieved the circulation it deserved, even though the Sundays were eventually given a new lease of life when DC began issuing vintage stories in the 1960s for Batman 80-page Giants and Annuals. The exceedingly high-quality all-purpose adventures were ideal short stories and added an extra cachet of exoticism for young readers already captivated by simply seeing tales of their heroes that were positively ancient and redolent of History with a capital “H”.

Such was not the case in the mid-1960s when, for a relatively brief moment, mankind went bananas for superheroes in general and most especially went “Bat-Mad”…

The Silver Age of comic books revolutionised a creatively moribund medium cosily snoozing in unchallenging complacency, bringing a modicum of sophistication to the returning genre of masked mystery men. For quite some time changes instigated by Julius Schwartz in Showcase #4 (October 1956) had rippled out in the last years of that decade, affecting all of National/DC Comics’ superhero characters but had generally bypassed The Gotham Gangbuster. Fans buying Batman, Detective Comics, World’s Finest Comics and latterly Justice League of America would read adventures that in look and tone were largely unchanged from the safely anodyne fantasies that had transformed a Dark Knight Detective into a mystery-solving, alien-fighting costumed Boy Scout just as the 1940s turned into the 1950s.

By the end of 1963, however, Schwartz having, either personally or by example, revived and revitalised the majority of DC’s line (and by extension and imitation, the entire industry) with his reinvention of the Superhero, was asked to work his magic with the creatively stalled and near-cancellation Caped Crusaders. Installing his go-to team of creators, the Editor stripped down the accumulated luggage and rebooted the core-concept. Down – and usually out – went the outlandish villains, aliens and weird-transformation tales in favour of a coolly modern concentration on crime and detection.

Even the art-style underwent a sleek streamlining and rationalisation. The most apparent change to us kids was a yellow circle around the Bat-symbol but, far more importantly, the stories had changed. A subtle aura of genuine menace had crept back in.

At the same time Hollywood was in production of a television series based on Batman and, through the sheer karmic insanity that permeates the universe, the studio executives were basing their interpretation not upon the “New Look Batman” currently enthralling readers but the rather the addictively daft material DC was emphatically turning its editorial back on.

The Batman TV show premiered on January 12th 1966 and ran for three seasons of 120 episodes, usually airing twice weekly in the first two. It was a monumental, world-wide hit and sparked a wave of trendy imitation. Resulting media hysteria and fan frenzy generated an insane amount of Bat-awareness, no end of spin-offs and merchandise – including a movie – and introduced us all to the phenomenon of overkill. No matter how much we might squeal and froth about it, to a huge portion of this planet’s population Batman is always going to be that “Zap! Biff! Pow!” buffoonish costumed Boy Scout…

“Batmania” exploded across Earth and – almost as quickly – became toxic and vanished, but at its height led to the creation of a fresh newspaper strip incarnation. That strip was a huge syndication success and even reached fuddy-duddy Britain, not in our papers and journals but as the cover feature of weekly comic Smash! (from issue #20 onwards).

The TV show ended in March, 1968. As it foundered and faded away, global fascination with “camp” superheroes – and no, the term had nothing to do with sexual orientation no matter what you and Mel Brooks might think – burst as quickly as it had boomed. The Caped Crusader was left with a hard core of dedicated fans and followers who now wanted their hero back…

However, from the time when the Gotham Guardians could do no wrong comes a second superb compilation re-presenting the bright and breezy, sometimes zany cartoon classics of Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder, augmented by a wealth of background material, topped up with oodles of unseen scenes and background detail to delight the most ardent Baby-boomer nostalgia-freak. The fun-fest opens with more informative, picture-packed, candidly cool revelations from comics historian Joe Desris in ‘A History of the Batman and Robin Newspaper Strip: Part 2’: stuffed with behind-the-scenes set photos, communications between principal players like Bob Kane and the Producers, clippings, glorious unpublished pencils from strip illustrator Joe Giella as well as newspaper promotional materials, followed by pictorial essays on ‘Newspaper Strip Trivia’ and ‘Batman/Superman Crossovers’, more unpublished or censored strips and a note on the eclectic sources used to compile this collection before the comics cavorting continue…

Dailies and Sundays were scripted by former DC editor (and the company’s Hollywood liaison) Whitney Ellsworth and initially illustrated by Kane’s long-term art collaborator Sheldon Moldoff, before inker Giella was tapped by the studio to produce a slicker, streamlined modern look – usually as penciller but ALWAYS as embellisher. Since the feature was a 7-day-a-week job, Giella often called in comic book buddies to help lay-out and draw the strip; luminaries like Carmine Infantino, Bob Powell, Werner Roth, Curt Swan and others.

In those days, monochrome Dailies and full-colour Sundays were mostly offered as separate packages and continuity strips often ran different stories for each. For Batman the strip started out that way, but by the time of the stories in this volume had switched to unified 7-day storylines.

Riding a wave and feeling ambitious, Ellsworth & Giella had started their longest saga yet in July 1967, combining the tales of ‘Shivering Blue Max’ with ‘“Pretty Boy” Floy and Flo’, wherein a perpetually hypothermic criminal pilot accidentally downed the Batcopter and erroneously claimed the underworld’s million dollar bounty on Batman and Robin.

Our heroes were not dead, but the crash caused the Batman to lose his memory and, whilst Robin and faithful manservant Alfred sought to remedy his affliction, Max had collected his prize and jetted off for sunnier climes. With Batman missing, neophyte crimebuster Batgirl then tracked down the heroes – incidentally learning their secret identities – and was instrumental in restoring him to action… if not quite his fully-functioning faculties.

However, when underworld paymaster BG (Big) Trubble heard the heroes had returned, he quite understandably wanted his money back, forcing already-broke Max back to Gotham where he gullibly fell foul of Pretty Boy whilst that hip young gunsel and twin sister Flo were enacting a murderous scam to fleece a horoscope-addicted millionaire…

The tale picks up here on January 1st 1968 with Batman held at gunpoint, patiently trying to convince supremely suggestible, wealthy whale Tyrone Koom he is not there to assassinate him as the tycoon’s new astrologer Madame Zodiac (AKA Flo Floy) was insisting she had foreseen. When her minted dupe proves incapable of murder, Flo/Zodiac takes matters into her own hands by knocking out the mighty manhunter, but despite all her and her brother’s arguments, the millionaire cannot be convinced to pull the trigger…

Instead, befuddled Koom – still thinking the masked marvel wants him dead – has Batman bundled off to an isolated island where a fully-automated, exotic palace of wonders will act as the Caped Crusader’s impregnable prison for the remainder of his life. With the hero as good as dead Pretty Boy & Flo plan to claim BG’s million dollar bounty, but have not reckoned on Blue Max horning in…

When the pilot collides with Robin (tracking his senior partner by Bat-Radio) the erstwhile enemies reluctantly join forces but cannot prevent Batman’s banishment. Moreover, in the frantic melee, the Boy Wonder suffers a broken leg. Meanwhile, lost in an endless ocean, Batman slowly adjusts to life of enforced luxury on palatial penitentiary island Xanadu, unaware that life at home has become vastly more complicated for Robin and Alfred. Not only do they believe the Cowled Crimebuster dead but Max has ferreted out their secret identities and blackmailed them into cooperating in his vengeance scheme against Pretty Boy. Max plans to prevent the young thug collecting the reward by impersonating Batman…

Events spiral to a grim climax when Max finally confronts his criminal enemies and Koom realises he’s been played for a fool. The dupe’s guilt-fuelled final vengeance ends all the villains at once, but not before Pretty Boy presses a destruct button that will cause Xanadu to obliterate itself in an atomic explosion.

Thankfully Superman and especially Sea King Aquaman have been mobilised to help find the missing Masked Manhunter but the countdown – although slow – is unstoppable…

During this sequence the severely overworked Giella bowed out and a veteran Superman illustrator took over the pitiless illustration schedule. Alfred John “Al” Plastino was a prodigious artist with a stellar career. He had been active in the early days of comic books, with credits including Captain America and Dynamic Man before serving in the US Army. His design talents were quickly recognised and he was seconded to Grumman Aerospace, The National Inventors Council and latterly The Pentagon, to design war posters and field manuals for the Adjutant General’s office.

In 1948 Plastino joined DC and quickly became one of Superman’s key artists. He drew many landmark stories and – with writer Otto Binder – created Brainiac, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes. From 1960-1969 he ghosted the syndicated Superman newspaper strip and whilst still drawing Batman, also took over Ferd’nand in 1970, drawing it until his retirement in 1989. He was extremely versatile and apparently tireless. In 1982-1983 he drew Nancy Sundays after creator Ernie Bushmiller passed away and was controversially hired by United Media to produce fill-in episodes of Peanuts when Charles Schulz was in dispute with the company. Al Plastino died in 2013.

With a new policy of introducing guest stars from DC’s pantheon, Plastino was the ideal artist successor and as the assembled champions desperately sought to find and save their missing comrade, a new tone of straight dramatic adventure largely superseded the campy comedy shenanigans of the TV series.

The search for Batman had been continually hampered by the Man of Steel’s strange weakness and loss of powers, but now that the Gotham Gangbusters were reunited they concentrated their efforts on finding out why. The deductive trail soon led to bone fide mad scientist ‘Diabolical Professor Zinkk’ (originally running March 19th to August 6th) and saw the Dynamic Duo tracking down a mercenary maniac who had found a way to broadcast Kryptonite waves and was oh-so-slowly killing Superman for a big payout from Metropolis’ mobsters…

This is a cunningly convoluted, beautifully realised and supremely suspenseful tale with the clock ticking down on a deranged and dying Metropolis Marvel as Batman & Robin hunt rogue radio-physicist Zoltan Zinkk to divine the method by which he brings low Earth’s greatest defender. It culminates in a savage, spectacular and truly explosive showdown before the World’s Finest heroes finally triumph…

Another tense thriller then sees Aquaman return to share the spotlight, beginning with determined “dolly-bird” Penelope Candy perpetually plaguing news outlets and even pestering the Gotham Police Department in a tireless quest to be put in touch with Batman. The man in question is blithely unaware: Bruce Wayne is dealing with a small personal problem. In his infinite wisdom he intends for Robin to temporarily retire whilst young Dick Grayson completes a proper education! To that end has engaged a new tutor for the strongly-protesting Boy Wonder…

With that all acrimoniously settled, the Caped Crimebuster roars out into the night and is filmed falling to his doom in a river trying to save apparently suicidal Penny Candy…

At first the heartbroken sidekick doesn’t know Batman is still alive but has actually been drawn into a Byzantine scheme devised by Penny to find her missing father. Oceanographer Archimedes Candy disappeared after working with Aquaman on a serum allowing humans to live beneath the sea. Penny is certain someone has abducted the researcher and, after Batman contacts Robin, they have the junior crimebuster send out a radio alert for the Sea King, before impatiently trying the potion together. ‘Breathing Underwater’ (August 7th – December 15th), they set off on a sub-sea search for the missing sea scientist…

Of course Penny’s fears of foul play are justified and before long she and Batman are reunited with Dr. Candy. Sadly, that’s as captives of nefarious international smuggler Cap’n Wolf and they are nearly done to death by being abandoned on a mountain in the airy atmosphere they can no longer breathe before Aquaman arrives to settle matters.

Even as Batman makes his way home, the next adventure has started. Gangster fugitive Killer Killey devised the world’s most perfect hiding place and in ‘I Want Bruce Wayne’s Identity!’ (December 15th 1968 – May 30th 1969) abducts the mild-mannered millionaire so a crooked plastic surgeon can swap their faces and fingerprints. The scheme is hugely helped by the fact that Dick has been packed off on a world cruise with tutor Mr. Murphy and his daughter Gazelle whilst Alfred has used accumulated vacation time for an extended visit to England.

When Killer captures Bruce and discovers he also has Batman, the mobster is truly exultant. However the plan goes awry as the victim escapes the death-trap which should have resulted in the authorities finding “Killey’s” drowned body, and the subsequent relocation into Wayne Manor becomes a fraught affair.

Perhaps the villain would be less troubled if he knew that although alive, the real Wayne has once again lost his memory…

Moreover, unbeknownst to anyone, neophyte crimebuster Batgirl already knows Batman’s other identity, and her suspicions are aroused by the state of the mansion and behaviour of Bruce and his new girlfriend…

As events escalate and spiral out of control, Killer – still safely hidden behind Wayne’s face – starts to crack: stupidly antagonising the one person he thought he could always rely on…

This volume’s comics cavortings end with the opening shots of ‘My Campaign to Ruin Bruce Wayne’ (which ran from May 31st – December 25th 1969) but as only seven days of that tale unfold in this volume I think we’ll leave that for the next volume and simply say…

To Be Continued, Bat-Fans…

The stories in this compendium reveal how gentler, stranger times and an editorial policy focusing as much on broad humour as Batman’s reputation as a crime-fighter swiftly returned to all-out action/adventure once Batmania gave way to global overload and ennui. That was bad for the strip at the time but happily resulted in some truly wonderful yarns for die-hard fans of the comic book Caped Crusader. If you’re of a certain age or open to timeless thrills, spills & chills this a truly stunning collection well worth your attention.

Batman: Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1968-1969 was the second in a set of huge (305 x 236 mm) lavish, high-end hardback collections starring the Dynamic Duo/Trio (and pals!), and a welcome addition to the superb commemorative series of Library of American Comics which has preserved and re-presented in luxurious splendour such landmark strips as Li’l Abner, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Bringing Up Father, Rip Kirby, Polly and her Pals and many other immortal cartoon icons.

If you love the era, the medium or even just graphic narrative, these are great comics reading, and this is a book you simply must have.

… And maybe one day the compilers will get around to making them all available in digital edition too…
© 2014 DC Comics. All rights reserved. Batman and all related characters and elements ™ & © DC Comics.

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Star Hawks volume 1


By Ron Goulart & Gil Kane, & various (Hermes Press)
ISBN: 978-163140-397-2 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

During the later 20th century, comic book publishers worked long and hard to import their colourful wares to the more popular and commercially viable shelves of bookshops, until eventual acceptance came via the hybrid form we know now as graphic novels. Newspaper strips (and periodical humour/satire magazines like Mad) had, of course, been regular fare for these sales points since the 1950s.

By dint of more accessible themes and subjects, simpler page layouts and just plain bigger core readerships, comedy and action newspaper serials easily translated to digest-sized book formats and sold by the bucketload to a broad base of consumers. Because of this, the likes of Peanuts, B.C., Broom Hilda, Flash Gordon, Mandrake and so many others were an entertainment staple for cartoon-loving, joy-deficient kids and adults from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the final accounting comedies and gag books far outweighed dramas. By the TV-saturated 1970s the grand era of newspaper adventure strips was all but over, although some few dynamic holdouts persevered. There were even some new gems still to come.

One such was this astonishingly addictive space opera/police procedural which debuted on October 3rd 1977. The strip was created by novelist, comics scripter and strip historian Ron Goulart slightly in advance of science fiction’s revival and resurgence which culminated in the release of Star Wars (and later continued by the legendary Archie Goodwin who all-but-sewed up the sci-fi strip genre at that time by also simultaneously authoring the Star Wars newspaper serial which premiered in 1979)…

Star Hawks was graced by the dazzlingly dynamic art of Gil Kane and blessed with an innovative format for such fare: a daily double-tier layout allowing far bigger, bolder graphics and panel compositions than a traditional single bank of three or four frames.

The core premise was also magically simple: in our future, humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and inhabits many worlds, moons and satellites… and wherever man goes there’s crime and a desperate need for policemen and peacekeepers…

As revealed in his picture- & photo-packed Introduction ‘In at the Creation’, Goulart began with working title “Space Cops”, which was eventually editorially overruled and superseded with the more dashingly euphonious and commercially vibrant Star Hawks. He goes on to describe resistance the strip suffered from its own syndicate, delays that meant it only launched after Star Wars set the world on fire and how he was ultimately edged out of the creative process altogether…

A brace of mass-market digest paperbacks were released whilst the strip was still running, and at the end of the 1980s, 4 comic book-sized album collections came from Blackthorne Publishing, but these are all now out-of-print and hard to acquire, so let’s be thankful for this first sturdy hardback archival edition…

Printed in landscape format with each instalment fitting neatly onto a page (and almost original publication size), this stirring tome of clean, crisp monochrome art is tight and taut: steaming straight in with the premiere episode. Here we meet villainous Raker and his sultry, sinister boss: child-of-privilege Ilka. They are scouring the slums and ruins of alien world Esmeralda for a desperate girl plagued by dark, dangerous visions…

Enter Rex Jaxan and burly Latino lothario Chavez: two-fisted law-enforcing police officers on the lookout for trouble, and who promptly save the lost lass from slavers only to become embroiled in a dastardly plot to overthrow the local Emperor by scurrilous arms merchants. Also debuting in that initial tale is the officers’ boss Alice K. Benyon – far more than just a sexy romantic foil for He-Hunk Jaxan, and an early example of a competent woman actually In Charge (even if she does it in slinky form-hugging outfits)…

The debuting standbys also include awesome space station “Hoosegow” and Sniffer, the snarkiest, sulkiest, snappiest robo-dog in the galaxy. This mechanical mutt gets all the best lines…

Barely pausing for breath, the star-born Starsky and Hutch (that’s Goulart’s take on them, not mine) are in pursuit of an appalling new weapons system developed to topple the military dictatorship of Empire 13: the “Dustman” process (beginning on November 15th 1977). Before long, searches for the illegal and appalling WMD develop into a full-on involvement in what should have stayed a local matter; and inevitably civil war…

The next sequence (March 17th to June 19th 1978) opens with the jubilant boys investigating stupendous resort satellite Hotel Maximus, with Alice K. along to bolster their undercover image. On Maximus, every floor holds a different daring delight, from dancing to dinosaur wrangling to Alpine adventure – but the return of malevolent Raker heralds a whole new kind of chaos as he is revealed as an agent of pan-galactic criminal cartel The Brotherhood.

Moreover, the Maximus is the site of their greatest coup – a plot to mass mind-control the universe’s richest and most powerful citizens. So pernicious are these villains that the Brotherhood can even infiltrate and assault Hoosegow itself…

Foiling the raiders, Jaxan & Chavez quickly go on the offensive, hunting the organisation as a new epic begins on June 20th (which frustratingly leaves this initial collection paused on a tense cliffhanger). The investigation takes them to pesthole planet Selva: a degraded world of warring tribes and monstrous mutations, where ambitiously dogged new recruit Kass seeks to distinguish himself, even as on Hoosegow the Brotherhood is deadly and persistent with new leader Master Jigsaw executing his plan to destroy the Star Hawks from within…

Wrapping up the starry-eyed wonderment is the first part of Daniel Herman’s biographical assessment ‘Gil Kane: Bringing a Comic Book Sensibility to Comic Strips’…

The Star Hawks strip ran until 1981, garnering a huge and devoted audience, critical acclaim and a National Cartoonists Society Award for Kane (1977 Story Comic Strip Award). It is quite simply one of the most visually exciting, rip-roaring and all-out fabulous sci-fi sagas in comics history and should be part of every action fan’s permanent collection. These tales are a “must-have” item for every thrill-seeking child of the stars and fan of the classic space age…
© 1977, 1978, 2017 United Features Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon volume 3


By Mac Raboy & Don Moore (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1569719787 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

By almost every metric, Flash Gordon is the most influential comic strip in the world. When the hero debuted on Sunday January 7th 1934 (with equally superb Jungle Jim running as a supplementary “topper” strip), it was a slick, sophisticated answer to Philip Nolan & Dick Calkins’ revolutionary, ideas-packed, inspirational, but quirkily clunky Buck Rogers (which had also launched on January 7th – albeit in 1929), with two fresh elements added to the wonderment: Classical Lyricism and Poetic Dynamism. The newcomer became a weekly invitation to stunningly exotic glamour and astonishing beauty.

Where Buck merged traditional adventure with groundbreaking science concepts, Flash reinterpreted fairy tales, hero epics and mythology, draping them in the spectacular trappings of contemporary futurism, with the varying “rays”, “engines” and “motors” of modern pulp sci fi substituting for trusty swords and lances. There were also plenty of those too – and exotic craft and contraptions stood in for galleons, chariots and magic carpets. Look closely, though, and you’ll see cowboys, gangsters and of course, flying saucer fetishes adding contemporary flourish to the fanciful fables. The narrative trick made the far-fetched satisfactorily familiar – and was continued with contemporary trends and innovations by Austin Briggs and Don Moore before Mac Raboy, (with Moore and Robert Rogers) took over the Sunday strips in a tenure lasting from 1948 to 1967.

The sheer artistic talent of Raymond, his compositional skills, fine linework, eye for clean, concise detail and just plain genius for drawing beautiful people and things, swiftly made this the strip that all young artists swiped from literally all over the world. When original material comic books began a few years later, many talented kids used Gordon as their model and ticket to future success in the field of adventure strips. Almost all the others went with Raymond’s stylistic polar opposite: emulating Milton Caniff’s expressionist masterwork Terry and the Pirates (and to see one of his better disciples check out Beyond Mars, limned by wonderful Lee Elias).

Flash Gordon began on present-day Earth (which was 1934, remember?) with a wandering world about to smash into our planet. As global panic ensued, polo player Flash and fellow passenger Dale Arden narrowly escaped disaster when a meteor fragment downed their airliner. They landed on the estate of tormented genius Dr. Zarkov, who imprisoned them in the rocket-ship he had built. His plan? To fly the ship directly at the astral invader and deflect it from Earth by crashing into it!

Thus began a decade of sheer escapist magic in a Ruritanian Neverland: a blend of Camelot, Oz and a hundred other fantasy realms promising paradise yet concealing vipers, ogres and demons, all cloaked in a glimmering sheen of sleek scientific speculation. Worthy adversaries such as utterly evil yet magnetic Ming, emperor of the fantastic wandering planet; myriad exotic races and shattering conflicts offered a fantastic alternative to drab and dangerous reality for millions of avid readers around the world.

With Moore handling the majority of the scripting, Alex Raymond’s ‘On the Planet Mongo’ ran every Sunday until 1944, when the artist joined the Marines. On his return, he forsook wild imaginings for sober reality: creating gentleman-detective Rip Kirby. The public’s unmissable weekly appointment with wonderment perforce continued under the artistic auspices of Austin Briggs – who had drawn the monochrome daily instalments since 1940.

In 1948, eight years after beginning his career drawing for the Harry A. Chesler production “shop”, comic book artist Emmanuel “Mac” Raboy took over illustrating the Sunday page. Moore remained as scripter and began co-writing with the new artist.

Raboy’s sleek, fine-line brush style – heavily influenced by his idol Raymond – had made his work on Captain Marvel Jr., Kid Eternity and especially Green Lama a pinnacle of artistic quality in the early days of the proliferating superhero genre. His seemingly inevitable assumption of Flash Gordon’s extraordinary exploits led to a renaissance of the strip and in a rapidly evolving post-war world, it became once more a benchmark of timeless, hyper-realistic quality escapism which only Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant could match. This third 260-page paperback volume – produced in landscape format, printed in stark monochrome and still criminally out-of-print and long overdue for a fresh edition – opens after a gripping and informative appraisal of Raboy in Bruce (Incredible Hulk, Arena, Silverheels, Ka-Zar the Savage) Jones’ Introduction ‘The Body Aerodynamic’. Then it’s blast-off time. again…

Sequence 68 ‘Missiles from Neptune’ began on January 19th 1958 and closed the previous cliffhanging volume barely weeks in. It resumes here with the episode for February 30th and carries on until March 9th, revealing how the oppressive Tyrant of Neptune seeks to impress and cow into submission his already-captive populace by testing deadly new Weapons of Interplanetary Destruction against hapless planet Earth.

The callous campaign prompts Flash to go and discourage him, but after superbly succeeding the conquering hero is lost in the interplanetary void and forced to build a survival nest inside an asteroid. His ingenuity as a ‘Robinson Crusoe in Space’ (16th March – 27th April) once more demonstrates the compelling power of straight, hard science storytelling (especially at a time when America was locked in a space race of its own), but it’s back to fantastic empires and extragalactic terror for his next exploit as Earth is menaced by ‘The Z Bomb Cloud’ (4th May – 15th June).

Long after a far-distant civilisation destroys itself, the deadly fallout of its doomsday weapon drifts into Earth orbit, threatening all terrestrial life. When Zarkov’s desperate plan to intercept the cloud goes wrong, someone must sacrifice themself to save us all…

Obviously, just this once it isn’t Flash, but the potent drama peaks with appropriate tragedy and sentiment anyway, before sequence S071 taps into the sheer burgeoning wonderment of the era as Flash and Dale help big game hunter Brian Farr prove the existence of uncanny unseen cryptids he calls ‘Stratosphere Beasts’ (22nd June – 17th August). These invisible beasts apparently dwell far above Earth’s highest mountain tops, so the endeavour takes the humans to the top of Everest where the unknown isn’t the only trial they face…

From 24th August to October 12th S072 told how the ace space pilot was embroiled in a commercial show-race to the outer planets. However, the ‘Rocket Derby’ is apparently less about proving whose ship is best and more about rich, spoiled obsessive competitors Morgan Bates and Babara “Bobcat” Kathryns realising how close hate is to love…

Along the way, Dale is dragged into the competition after hearing macho males telling Bobcat that space is no place for women, even as hired gun Flash suffers numerous sabotage attempts. It’s almost like there’s an unknown fifth element acting on their own agenda…

It’s back to dramatic basics for ‘Moon Wreck’ (S073, running from 19th October to December 14th) wherein Gordon attempts to rescue an arrogant playboy and his latest dalliance from a self-inflicted crash and subsequent marooning on Luna. The pilot’s every valiant effort is hampered by the autocrat’s privilege, greed, stupidity and cowardice, vain starlet’s Elyse Elan’s venality, and the deadly environment they both refuse to take seriously…

Gordon’s piloting skills land him in more trouble in ‘The Ship of Gold’ (S074: December 21st 1958 to January 2nd 1959) when he captains a transport of mining machinery and tons of cash to Mars, only to have the ship stolen out from under him with Dale trapped aboard. The evil mastermind is old college colleague Nicky Hamilton, but when the boastful villain abandons current girlfriend Jet in a ruthless attempt to loose Flash in the airless wastes of Titan, he seals his own fate and accidentally exposes a major threat to Earth in succeeding saga ‘The Skorpi’ (February 8th – April 5th)…

Left for dead, Flash and Dale fall through Titan’s surface to discover an insectoid alien invasion force. Skorpi can become copies of humans and are well advanced in a plot to infiltrate Earth, but aren’t quick enough to outwit Flash, especially once he befriends captive telepathic ET Brunn. His gigantic kind are Gorgins and with their allies The Dhreen have been battling Skorpi for 30,000 years. Together, the new pals whip up a plan to defeats this particular incursion…

Brunn then adapts a ship to Faster-Than-Light drive and accompanies Flash on a ‘Flight for Help’ (S076: April 12th – June 7th), beseeching Dhreen’s Council of Elders for military aid. Instead, the embassage is covertly targeted by their other client vassals – like Brunn’s own Gorgin race – who fear their share of aid will be diminished if the benign overlords help yet another endangered species…

Plots become assassination attempts, but only accidentally expose Skorpi infiltration, leading Brunn and Gordon to further corruption, exile and ultimately capture by a hidden race who dwell unsuspected in a ‘City of Glass’ (S077: June 14th to August 23rd). Condemned to death for breaking the metropolis’ sacrosanct isolation, the wanderers are only saved by lovely, sympathetic Flara, who aids the human’s escape back to the Solar system but keeps adorable Brunn by her side…

The Earthman only makes it as far as the second rock from the Sun and S078 (August 30th – November 1st) radically changes pace for a ‘Venus Mystery’ wherein human colonists face disaster as their Bajo crop is targeted by “swamp devils”. In an early lesson in green land management, crash-landed Flash aids ecologist Dirk Van Meer in proving to the furious farmers how badly wrong they have got things, what is actually to blame for all the chaos and carnage and how to fix it…

Immediate emergency over, Flash finally reaches Earth to find Zarkov impatiently waiting. Before he can catch his breath the steadfast starman is dragooned into a dangerous new experiment with cyberneticist Dr. Else Neilson having him ride along as a fallback option as she “road-tests” her ‘Robot Spaceship’ (S079: November 8th 1959 to 17th 1960). Fully automated – and what we’d call AI – the ship has human safety as its core drive, but of course, human and mechanical opinions on what exactly that means differ extensively…

Thanks in large part to Flash Gordon, spaceship technology has rapidly advanced and he is selected to pilot the first human-built FTL drive ship. The Columbus will ferry ‘The Star Miners’ (S080: January 24th – March 27th) to another star system, reap mineral wealth and set up a colony. However, the directives of chief advisor Dr. Zarkov are constantly challenged and ultimately overruled by gang-boss Mr. Birk, who can only think of glory and a big fat bonus promised for prompt completion and delivery…

Arriving on unexplored planet Karst, Zarkov again urges patience and caution, but is first sidelined and then arrested once Flash undertakes his secondary mission of exploration. By the time the hero returns the entire expedition is close to extinction and only drastic measures can save them all…

On returning to Earth, welcome shore-leave ends in catastrophe when Flash is shanghaied by “entrepreneurs” Roni and Captain Graz: kidnapped into space and ordered to pilot their ship or die. They need someone able to deliver potentially ‘Deadly Cargo’ (S081: April 3rd to June 12th) and navigate through the asteroid belt to mineral-rich big rock Juno, where a huge diamond strike has created urgent demand for explosives. It’s also a race setting competitive old rivals at each other’s throats and costs plenty of nefarious lives before Gordon gets ramshackle freighter Pollux down (relatively) safely…

Subsequent attempts to get off Juno turn wild and dangerous in ‘The Soil Divers’ (S082: June 19th – August 28th) when Flash is suckered into an ongoing resource war on the mining asteroid. Scientist Ben Corelli has devised a means of passing through solid matter, but fallen under the spell of avaricious faithless Roni and her new heavy Snapper Kaye, sparking violent conflict amongst those desperate diggers stuck using old methods of extracting mineral wealth. Soon, the attempts to seize Corelli’s breakthrough tech leads to murder and worse…

A self-aggrandising, fame-hungry documentary filmmaker obsessed with his legacy makes trouble for Dale – and therefore Flash – next. Charles Q. Charlston brings ‘Dead Worlds’ (S083: September 4th to November 20th) and lost civilisations to the masses, but has no qualms or scruples about breaking all the rules of space conduct: cheating, lying, stealing and even killing to ensure his own glory… until Gordon steps up. He and Dale are then called to the ringed planet and a reunion and to assist Brian Farr, now ‘Game Warden on Saturn’ (S084: November 27th 1960 to February 19th 1961)…

His job is currently complicated by the system’s most successful poacher – cunning sadist Von Brandt – who seeks the joy of hunting and intends making millions selling the skins of a rare indigenous lifeform. He’s also happy to excise interfering busybodies for free…

A maritime tang and epic approach flavours ‘The Trail of Orpheus’ (S085: February 26th – May 28th) when Flash joins oceanologists Henry and Veronica Weeks on a submarine to map the unique and spectacular “Devils Spring” environmental phenomenon making the watery world so hazardous to rocket ships. Their undersea voyage reveals fantastic truths about the past rulers of the planet and changes the solar system forever…

It’s a welcome return to space opera and pulp overtones as S086 sees an orbital agriculture satellite accidentally invaded by space gremlins and transformed into a ‘Death Farm in Space’ (June 4th to September 3rd) until Zarkov and Flash investigate and act, all followed by comedic whimsy as a band of backward-looking human bandits revolt against ecological progress in ‘Desert Prince’ (S087: September 10th to December 10th)…

When Earth loses the final dusty miles of once-barren Sahara to water reclamation projects, reactionary tribal chieftain Al Maarri refuses to take up farming and instead leads his raiders on a wave of sorties. The campaign of resistance culminates in his stealing a rocket ship to carry his entire bandit horde and their families to Mars where civilisation is scarce, law is poorly enforced and beautiful sandy wastes are abundant. Soon, armed with modern weapons, he’s making life difficult for genuine colonists, forcing under-resourced Flash to solve the problem creatively. That means infiltrating the tribe with the assistance of the long-suffering wives, children and oldsters the rowdy raiders forcibly dragged along with them…

Law & order was the theme of the next tale as readers gained insights into future traffic management solutions in the crowded orbital paths above Earth. The revelations came thanks to Flash visiting old pal “Ape” Rice, an officer of the ‘Spaceways Patrol’ (S088: December 17th 1961 to April 1st 1962).

Sadly, it’s not a friendly visit: Gordon works for the World Space Patrol and is on an official inspection of the Police satellite. Silly cultural satire – observing how dumb the private citizens “driving” in space are – quickly gives way to taut drama when recently-ousted national despot Generalissimo Sanre and his entourage seize the station through subterfuge, planning to blackmail the world with its arsenal of atomic weapons…

With only Flash and Ape free to act, tragedy inevitably follows the deadly fight that ensues before the planet is free from the threat of global tyranny…

The same blend of expansive wonder and human frailty permeates the saga of a blonde, blue-eyed hero found in a block of arctic ice – a tale told in full in S089, spanning April 8th through July 15th 1962. Incidentally, The Avengers #4 was released on January 3rd 1964, reintroducing Captain America to the world. I’m just saying…

Here, the ‘Living Fossil’ is found by researchers testing magnetic fields in Greenland and only involves Flash when defrosted berserker Ragnor goes on a rampage that brings him to the airfield Gordon is trying to land on. A renewed assault traps the Viking aboard (with Flash and a crew that includes handy Scandinavian scholar Eva) on a flight to Venus: a world far more in keeping with the barbarian’s culture of warriors, trolls, goblins, dwarves… and dragons…

This third astounding visit to a historical future closes with another technological nightmare and disaster-movie precursor spanning July 22nd to October 14th 1962. ‘Falling Moon’ (S090) reveals how massive artificial satellite Deepspace-One – jumping-off point for all outgoing Earth space travel – is struck by a meteor. Deflected and doomed, it slowly falls, leaving Flash only five hours to evacuate its resort contingent and find a way to save Earth from impact and atomic fallout…

As the adventures never ended, we close the collection with the opening of another exploit and pause on a moment of cliffhanging suspense. ‘Sons of Saturn’ (S091: in its original entirety running from October 21st 1962 to January 20th 1963) stops here with the December 9th episode. Prior to that point, a hitherto unsuspected super-civilisation thriving in the clouds of the Sixth Planet is revealed when an Earth probe provokes the current dictator to determine human nature and resource by sending super-criminal outcast Baldr to plague, punish and test them. That results in the indestructible giant breaking into Flash’s ship and going on a rampage…

To Be Continued…

Each week as he toiled on the strip, Raboy produced ever-more expansive artwork filled with distressed damsels, deadly monsters, incredible civilisations, increasingly authentic space hardware and locales, and all sorts of outrageous adventure that continued until the illustrator’s untimely death in 1967. Perhaps it was a kindness. He was the last great Golden Age romanticist illustrator and his lushly lavish, freely-flowing adoration of perfected human form was beginning to stale in popular taste. The Daily feature had already switched to the solid, chunky, He-Manly burly realism of Dan Barry and Frank Frazetta, but here at least the last outpost of ethereally beautiful heroism and pretty perils still prevailed: a dream realm you can visit as easily and often as Flash, Dale & Zarkov popped between planets, just by tracking down this book and the one which follows…
© 2003 King Features Syndicate Inc. ™ & © Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Leonard & Larry 3: Extracts From the Ring Cycle at Royal Albert Hall


By Tim Barela (Palliard Press)
ISBN: 978-1-88456-805-3 (Album PB)

We live in an era where Pride events are world-wide and commonplace: where acceptance of LGBTQIA+ citizens is a given… at least in all the civilised countries where dog-whistle politicians, populist “hard men” totalitarian dictators (I’m laughing at a private dirty joke right now) and sundry organised religions are kept in their generally law-abiding places by their hunger for profitable acceptance and desperation to stay tax-exempt, scandal-free, rich and powerful.

There’s still too many places where it’s not so good to be Gay but at least Queer themes and scenes are no longer universally illegal and can be ubiquitously seen in entertainment media of all types and age ranges… and even on the streets of most cities. For all the injustices and oppressions, we’ve still come a long, long way and it’s and simply No Big Deal anymore. Let’s affirm that victory and all work harder to keep it that way…

Such was not always the case and, to be honest, the other team (with religions proudly egging them on and backing them up) are fighting hard and dirty to reclaim all the intolerant high ground they’ve lost thus far.

Incredibly, all that change and counteraction happened within the span of living memory (mine, in this case). For English-language comics, the shift from illicit pornography to homosexual inclusion in all drama, comedy, adventure and other genres started as late as the 1970s and matured in the 1980s – despite resistance from most western governments – thanks to the efforts of editors like Robert Triptow and Andy Mangels and cartoonists like Howard Cruse, Vaughn Bode, Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs. Gerard P. Donelan, Roberta Gregory, Touko Valio Laaksonen/“Tom of Finland” and Tim Barela.

A native of Los Angeles, Barela was born in 1954, and became a fundamentalist Christian in High School. He loved motorbikes and had dreams of becoming a cartoonist. He was also a gay kid struggling to come to terms with what was still judged illegal, wilfully mind-altering psychosis and perversion – if not actual genetic deviancy – and an appalling sin by his theological peers and close family…

In 1976, Barela began an untitled comic strip about working in a bike shop for Cycle News. Some characters then reappeared in later efforts Just Puttin (Biker, 1977-1978); Short Strokes (Cycle World, 1977-1979); Hard Tale (Choppers, 1978-1979) plus The Adventures of Rickie Racer, and cooking strip (!) The Puttin Gourmet… America’s Favorite Low-Life Epicurean in Biker Lifestyle and FTW News. Four years later, the cartoonist unsuccessfully pitched a domestic (AKA “family”) strip called Ozone to LGBTQA news periodical The Advocate. Among its proposed quotidian cast were literal and metaphorical straight man Rodger and openly gay Leonard Goldman… who had a “roommate” named Larry Evans…

Gay Comix was an irregularly published anthology, edited at that time by Underground star Robert Triptow (Strip AIDs U.S.A.; Class Photo). He advised Barela to ditch the restrictive newspaper strip format in favour of longer complete episodes, and printed the first of these in Gay Comix #5 in 1984. The remodelled new feature was a huge success, included in many successive issues and became the solo star of Gay Comix Special #1 in 1992.

Leonard & Larry also showed up in prestigious benefit comic Strip AIDs U.S.A. before triumphantly relocating to The Advocate in 1988, and – from 1990 – to its rival publication Frontiers. The lads even moved into live drama in 1994: adapted by Theatre Rhinoceros of San Francisco as part of stage show Out of the Inkwell. In the 1990s their episodic exploits were gathered in a quartet of wonderfully oversized (220 x 280 mm) monochrome albums which gained a modicum of international stardom and some glittering prizes. This third compendium compiled by Palliard Press between 1996 -2000, follows Domesticity Isn’t Pretty and Kurt Cobain & Mozart Are Both Dead, whilst paving the way for last volume (to date) How Real Men Do It.

As previously stated, as well as featuring a multi-generational cast, Leonard & Larry is a strip that progressed in real time, with characters all aging and developing accordingly. The strips are not and never have been about sex – except in that the subject is a constant generator of hilarious jokes and outrageously embarrassing situations. Triumphantly skewering hypocrisy and rebuking ignorance with dry wit and superb drawing, episodes cover various couples’ home and work lives, constant parties, physical deterioration, social gaffes, rows, family revelations, holidays and even events like earthquakes and fanciful prognostications.

Following an Introduction from Animation historian Charles Solomon and Lief Wauters potted history of the strip ‘The Life and Times of Leonard & Larry’, a ‘Leonard & Larry Timeline’ provides a crucial curated recap in copious detail, including reintroducing the vast Byzantine, deftly interwoven cast, with past highlights and low points and reminds readers that this strip passes in real time and the players are aging just like we are…

Star couple Leonard Goldman and Larry Evans live together despite vast family circles and friend groups all apparently at odds with each other. The feature also prominently and increasing plays with fantasy as dream manifestations – or are they actual ghosts? – of composers Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his bitter frenemy Johannes Brahms plague cast members: acting as a vanguard for even odder occurrences to come…

This family saga is primarily a comedy of manners, played out against social prejudices and grudging gradual popular acceptances, but it also has shocking moments of drama and tension and whole bunches of heartwarming sentiment set in and around West Hollywood.

The extensive Leonard & Larry clan comprise the former’s formidable unaccepting mother Esther – who still ambushes him with blind dates and nice Jewish girls – and the latter’s ex-wife Sharon and the sons of their 18-yeat marriage Richard and David. Teenaged Richard recently knocked up and wed equally school-aged Debbie, making the scrappy couple unwilling grandparents years (decades even!) before they were ready. The oldsters adore baby Lauren but didn’t need to relive all that aging trauma when Debbie announced there would soon be an older sister…

Maternal grandparents Phil and Barbra Dunbarton are ultra conservative and stridently Christian, spending a lot of time fretting over Debbie and Lauren’s souls and their own social standing. They’re particularly concerned over role models and what horrors she and her brother Michael are being exposed to whenever the gay guys babysit. Their appearances are always some of funniest and most satisfying as the deviant clan expands exponentially in this volume…

David Evans is as Queer as his dad, and works in Larry’s leather/fetish boutique store on Melrose Avenue. That iconic venue provides loads of quick, easy laughs and many edgy moments thanks to local developer/predatory expansionist Lillian Lynch who still wants the store at any cost. It’s also the meeting point for many other couples in Leonard & Larry’s eccentric orbit. Their friends/clients enjoy greater roles this time, offering other perspectives on LA life.

Flamboyant former aerospace engineer Frank Freeman lives with acclaimed concert pianist Bob Mendez and is saddled with an compulsive yen for uniforms. It comes in handy again when Bob’s sex-crazed celebrity stalker Fiona Birkenstock breaks jail to re-kidnap him – at least until she switches affection to a certain celebrity judge sentencing her…

Larry’s other employee is Jim Buchanan whose alarming dating history stabilised when he met a genuine cowboy at one of L & L’s parties. Merle Oberon was a newly “out” Texan trucker who added romance and stability to Jim’s lonely life. Sadly, it got complicated in other ways once Merle became a Hollywood soap star and his agents, managers and co-star convinced him his career needed Oberon back in that closet…

Jim, by the way, is the original and central focus of the overly-critical dead composers’ puckish visits…

Also catching attention this time are heated discussions on the supernatural as the ghost composers graduate from dream-based plot device to active participants, playing pranks on many more of the minor cast members. Their games re balanced with ever-kvetching aging-averse Larry painfully adapting to being a doting grandad/perennial babysitter. Jim and Merle meanwhile engage a psychic to exorcise their haunt housemates, blithely unaware that she’s an undercover tabloid hack looking for a juicy exposé…

Younger players take centre stage, offering the author opportunity to spike not just anti-gay bigots but take on good old-fashioned racism too, even delivering a gleefully potent poke at American fundamentalism when the “Christian Coalition” relentlessly pursues good old white, Texan celebrity Merle to be the face of their next “decency campaign” and just won’t take no for an answer…

A surprisingly hard-hitting – if deviously velvet-gloved – storyline sees Jim discovering he was adopted: in fact the child of an unwed catholic girl exploited by the Irish Church’s baby-selling scandal (you really should look up Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes). Reeling and despondent, his downward spiral is resolved by Merle who secretly arranges a trip to Ireland and a family reunion no-one wanted but everyone benefitted from…

David is Larry’s gay son and not expected to cause chaos and consternation, but that ends when he and his bestie Collin help their lesbian roommate Nat get pregnant and our freaked out oldster contemplates becoming a grandfather yet again…

That hilariously potent arc is compounded when ex-wife Sharon attends one of their frequent dinner parties and gets off with the still-sore former spouse’s only straight acquaintance (classical violinist Gene Slatkin). The liaison sparks incomprehensible jealousy and primeval macho ownership behaviour in Larry, but it’s so much worse when he learns the result is geriatric pregnancy and his becoming an unpaid baby sitter for another family addition…

Extended saga ‘The Baby Shower’ finds the entire conflicted and in many parts intolerant extended family in one room and scoring points As first Sharon and then Nat go into labour it sparks fourth wall shenanigans as Larry again has a meltdown and flees from the hospital, archenemy Mike the midwife, all semblance of parental responsibility and general biological “ickiness”.

The feature provides plenty of moments of wild abandon too, such as when Larry loses a friend’s beloved dog and finds an enormous python with a very full stomach, fun with tarantulas and a startling dream sequence wherein grandkids (7-year-old Lauren and 3-year-old Michael) take over “creating” strip a few times, ultimately confirming grampy’s crazed conviction that he’s nothing but a character in a comic strip crafted by a sadist. Further hallucinogenic riffs – including cowboy antics and a rebellion of Barbie dolls – leads finally to a major emotional growth spurt and Larry’s return to the hospital just in time to join the happy events…

Leonard & Larry is a traditionally domestic marital sitcom/soap opera with Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz – or more aptly, Dick Van Dyke & Mary Tyler Moore – replaced by a hulking bearded “bear” with biker, cowboy and leather fetishes and a stylishly moustachioed, no-nonsense fashion photographer. Taken in total, it’s a love story about growing old together, but not gracefully or with any dignity. Populated by adorable, appetising fully fleshed out characters, Leonard & Larry was always about finding and then being yourself and remains an irresistible slice of gentle whimsy to nourish the spirit and beguile the jaded. If you feel like taking a Walk on the Mild Side now this tome is still at large through internet vendors. So why don’t you?
Excerpts from the Ring Cycle in Royal Albert Hall © 2000 Palliard Press. All artwork and strips © 2000 Tim Barela. All rights reserved The Life and Times of Leonard & Larry © 2000 Lief Wauters.

After decades of waiting, the entire ensemble is available again courtesy of Rattling Good Yarns Press. Sublimely hefty hardback uber-compilation Finally! The Complete Leonard & Larry Collection was released in 2021, reprinting the entire saga – including rare as hens’ teats last book How Real Men Do It (978-1955826051). It’s a little smaller in page dimensions (216 x280mm) and far harder to lift, but it’s Out There if you want it…

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Spain: Rock, Roll, Rumbles, Rebels & Revolution

Version 1.0.0

By Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez (Burchfield Penney Art Center/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-782-2 (TPB)

Manuel Rodriguez was one of the most bombastic and well-known pioneering lights of America’s transformative Underground Commix movement: a mainstay of the counterculture which subversively reshaped the nation’s psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. However, although always a left-leaning radical, infamous for his raucously hyper-violent, audaciously sexual urban vigilante Trashman, Spain was also a quietly dedicated craftsman, historian, educationalist and graphic biographer.

Born in Buffalo, New York state in 1940, the Hispanic kid spent a lot of time with notorious biker gang The Road Vultures and these experiences, as much as his political upbringing and formal education at the Silvermine Guild Art School in New Canaan, Connecticut (1957-1960), moulded and informed his entire creative career.

In the 1960s he became a regular contributor to landmark alternative magazine the East Village Other, which not only utilised his burgeoning talents as illustrator and designer but also commissioned, in 1968, his groundbreaking tabloid comic book Zodiac Mindwarp. That insert proved so successful that EVO subsequently sponsored a regular anthology publication. Gothic Blimp Works was a turning point and clarion call in the evolution of underground publishing.

However, the excessive exploits of Trashman – “Agent of the 6th International” – against a repressive dystopian American super-state were only the tip of the creative iceberg. Ardent left-winger Spain founded the trade organisation the United Cartoon Workers of America whilst contributing to many of the independent comics and magazines which exploded out of the burgeoning counterculture movement across the world. Manuel Rodriguez was also an erudite and questioning writer/artist with a lifelong interest in history – especially political struggle and major battlefield clashes, and much of his other work revealed a stunning ability to bring these subjects to vibrant life.

The breadth, depth and sheer variety of Spain’s work – from gritty urban autobiography (American Splendor, Cruisin’ with the Hound: the Life and Times of Fred Toote) to psycho-sexual sci fi (Zap Comix, Skull, Mean Bitch Thrills) is a testament to his incredible talent but the restless artist also found time to produce a wealth of other cartooning classics.

Amongst his dauntingly broad canon of comics are literary adaptations (Edgar Allen Poe, Sherlock Holmes’ Strangest Cases), historical treatises (War: The Human Cost) and biographies (Ché [Guevara]:a Graphic Biography, Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man who Saved America [Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler]) as well as educational and design works such as You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience and Nothing in This Book Is True, But It’s Exactly How Things Are (both with Bob Frissell).

He also produced the ongoing comics serial The Dark Hotel for American current affairs, politics and media news aggregation website Salon.

In 2012 Spain finally lost a six-year battle against cancer and this superb book – actually the Exhibition catalogue for a career retrospective at the prestigious Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College – celebrates his tumultuous life and spectacular contribution to the art form of graphic narrative with a compelling series of essays as well as a superb selection of the great man’s best pieces including some little known lost treasures.

The appreciation begins with ‘Stand Up’ by Anthony Bannon (Executive Director, BPAC), before the biographical ‘Grease, Grit and Graphic Truth’ by Edmund Cardoni (Executive Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center) explores Spain’s past, whilst ‘Keep the Flames of Buffalo Burning’ by Don Metz examines his lasting effect on comics and society.

However, the true value of this chronicle is in the 60+ covers, designs, story-pages, roughs, panel excerpts and strips both vintage and recent, monochrome and full-colour which demonstrate the sheer talent and drive to communicate that fuelled Spain for his entire life.

The Partial Spain Bibliography 1969-2012 and Selected Spain Exhibitions only hint at the incredible depth and lasting legacy of his career and I’m praying that some enlightened publisher like Fantagraphics or Last Gasp is already toiling on a comprehensive series of “Complete Works of…” volumes…

Stark, shocking and always relevant, the communicative power of Spain is something no true lover of comics can afford to miss….
© 2012 Burchfield Penney Art Center. All rights reserved.