Category: Fantasy

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Jeremy Brood part 1: Relativity & Fantagor Presents Brood


By Richard Corben & Jan Strnad with additional designs by Stan Dresser (Fantagor Press/Longhorn Book Distribution)
ASIN: B0006F7UMU            ISBN: 978-0-96238-410-3

Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest proponents and pioneers of graphic narrative: a legendary animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist who surfed the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in pictorial storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision. Renowned for his mastery of airbrush and anatomical stylisation – producing works of captivatingly excessive overwhelming eroticism – and infamous for delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales, Corben’s epic storytelling, violent, cathartically graphic and often blackly hilarious triumphs through the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in making comics a mainstream medium and art form for mature readers.

Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. Although most acclaimed for interpretations of classic horror literature, he is equally adept at capturing the alarming nuances of technological terror and cynical political intrigue in shocking science fiction tales such as the truncated epic spotlighted here.

In 1982 he began, with long-time collaborator Jan Strnad, a proposed series of European style square-bound albums starring a troubled star traveller, but it sadly fell victim to an economic downturn before it could find its feet. This taste of a tantalisingly uncompleted greater epic began in Jeremy Brood: Relativity and was brought to an abrupt finish in the magazine Fantagor Presents Brood (Fantagor #5, 1983). The tale has since been collected in a book in 1989 and subsequently re-released in 1998.

The original chronicle begins with a fascinating glimpse at the artist’s working process in his picture-packed ‘Illustrators Notes’ before the full Technicolor experience opens with spare-faring civil servant Brood and his horny but frustrated co-pilot Charlene receiving a sub-space transmission from Earth.

An agent on the planet Eden has sent a distress call and they are to divert there at top speed. Their civilisation is at a cultural crossroads and needs nudging in the right direction – or so planetary sociologist Bernard Finchley claims.

However due to the relativistic nature of near-light speeds, the message is three years old by the time it reaches them and their short trip to Eden will take two centuries in local time…

When they at last arrive, the promised paradise world is a hot, dry desert but, following protocol and armed with the latest tapes of the language, Brood dons a disguise and makes his way to the nearest city, leaving Char and the ship as back-up in case of trouble.

It finds him anyway and the Earthman is attacked by barbaric grotesques and has to get physical with the brutes…

In the intervening years Eden has fallen into religious fanaticism, and as Brood enters the devastated city he is found by an aged cleric who draws him towards a vast gathering. The worshippers are about to sacrifice another nubile virgin maid to Holobar – an increasingly rare occurrence as most girls wisely “disqualify” themselves at their very first opportunity – in the hope that the prophesied saviour will appear to deliver them from their oppressive all-conquering deity. As Jeremy watches in secure anonymous horror, his ancient guide Narrl hurls him into the middle of the ceremony and urges him to deflower the alien maiden or be torn apart by the mob…

Repressed WASP Brood used to have trouble getting sufficiently amorous even with his black girlfriend in the privacy of their spaceship – and she was actually the same species – so this horrific situation almost ends in disaster until the old wise man smashes the stone mask on a huge idol above the altar. Underneath, the monolith has Brood’s face…

Shocked, panicked and realising he’s been set up by a man dead for centuries, Brood at last accomplishes what he was dispatched for, encouraged in equal measure by the willing female under him and the screaming fanatics surrounding him.

Meanwhile miles distant, desert brigands mount a lethal assault on the grounded starship…

Safe for the present, Brood and his new bride Brynne are filled in by the devious alien Priest – who is also Narrl’s brother. The old connivers are the great grandsons of Finchley and a native girl, and their family has been working to build a counter-religion and messiah-cult based on Brood’s eventual arrival in the expectation that his Earth technology will allow them to overthrow the oppressive, draconian fundamentalist followers of Holobar …

Jeremy can’t think about his proposed role as rabble-rousing rebel: he’s lost radio contact with Char, and is forced to trek back to the ship. En route, however, Narrl tries to kill Brood, revealing himself to be a traitor seeking to destroy the saviour and crush the people’s hope of redemption forever. Eradiating his betrayer Brood pushes on, only to discover he is now the only Earthling on Eden…

Fantagor Presents Brood came out a year later: a special edition of Corben’s own occasional and self-published art magazine which ran a conclusion of sorts in full colour, supplemented by a black and white reprint and a new unconnected monochrome fantasy tale.

(In case you’re wondering the reprint was Razar the Unhero’ written in 1970 by Herb Arnold as “Starr Armitage”: a dark and sexily violent spoof with a deprecating edge, deliciously lampooning the Sword and Sorcery epics dominating paperback bookshelves of the day. The new tale was ‘Ogre II’, a tragic comic monster love story sequel to a yarn that ran in Warren Publishing’s 1984 #4.)

Jeremy Brood however starred in the rocket-paced all-action shocker ‘The Big Shriek!’ which picked up moments after Relativity ended…

As Jeremy buries what remains of Charlene, hordes of airborne dragon-riding Holobar zealots pass over his head heading towards the city and the (presumably) impregnated Edenite Madonna, determined to end the heretical resistance forever…

Soon the city is under shattering bombardment and all looks black until the infuriated Brood storms in, crashing his barely airworthy ship into the central square and briefly driving back in the attackers.

Retreating to the temple, Brood and Brynne prepare for their inevitable end, but the cunning far-seeing and ruthless Bernard Finchley and his devoted disciple Priest had arranged a last-ditch contingency plan, with no thought at the horrific cost their centuries-separated dupe Jeremy would be forced to pay…

Moody and trenchant, laced with sparkling irreverence and cynicism, this parable could and should have found time to fully flower but the times and trends were against it. However Corben and Strnad’s sublime acumen in depicting humanity’s primal drives and inescapable failings has never been better exemplified, and at least the 80 or so pages that were complete are still available in one single edition should you care to check out yet one more book no comics or fantasy fan should be without.
© 1982, 1983, 1989 Richard Corben and Jan Strnad. All rights reserved.

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Dead Air


By M. Dalton Allred with Laura Allred (Slave Labor Books)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000GLP8JG

Major comicbook creative force M. Dalton (‘we call him “Mike”’) Allred’s many comicbook writer/artist triumphs include Madman, The Atomics, and Red Rocket 7 as well as notable collaborative runs on Marvel’s X-Force and X-Statix with Peter Milligan and Vertigo thriller iZombie with Chris Roberson, but unlike almost everyone else in the industry to reach an exalted status, most of his early work was – and remains – extremely readable…

After switching from a career in the media to funnybooks, he commenced his unique brand of tale-telling (aided as always by wife Laura) with a dreamily paranoid, visually symphonic suspense shocker very much in the mould of classic 1960s Rod Serling Twilight Zone mystery tales.

Originally designed as a black and white 4-issue miniseries, Dead Air was instead released by independent publisher Slave Labor as a complete Original Graphic Novel and reintroduced comics to the thrills of uncanny, inexplicable paranoiac peril through the channelled artistic sensibilities of modern design legend Patrick Nagel (upon whose remorselessly pared-down stylisations Allred based his own early drawing).

Following The End of the World, the poignant personal horror begins in ‘Shapes of Things’ as, in the small American town of Roseburg, Oregon, radio DJ Calvin Lennox stares at the blue glow coming from over the mountains and wonders…

One night all communication with the outside world was completely lost. All the TV channels blinked out to static and there was nothing but dead air on the radio. Soon Mayor Leroy Black had declared Martial Law and instigated a curfew: nobody out and nobody in, and order viciously imposed by the sheriff’s bully-boys.

Everybody knew it had to have been the long-deaded nuclear war, but Lennox didn’t care. His wife Sydney and their two boys Michael and Connor were miles away in Eugene when the disaster – whatever it actually was – had struck, and Calvin was going crazy trying to get to them.

Asking Black to let him leave only resulted in a savage beating, so Lennox carefully laid plans with lifelong pals Charlie Custen, Warren Goodrich and Kevin Zelch to escape from the captive population, all the while barely holding off the bubbling madness, desperation of loss and agony of not knowing…

Their moment came in ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ as the determined quartet made their break with the unexpected assistance of an unsuspected ally. The attempt led to a desperate car-chase and an exchange of gunfire which permanently scarred the frantic family man and badly wounded Warren, but soon they were all on their way, riding on an open empty highway that was somehow, subtly… wrong.

Warren was the one who spotted it.

Everything looked fine, with no sign of atomic – or any other physical – destruction, but the road no longer had any turn-offs or exits…

Freaked out, the fugitives continued on and began to notice that the scenery, landscape and mountains now seemed altered and oddly different. It was like they’d been transported to another world….

With reality reeling, they stop to assess their situation and, after some discussion, decide to push on and find Sydney and the kids. Switching to the motorbikes, they travel on – far, far further than the normal distance to Eugene.

The horror starts to hit home in ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ when the interminable highway is interrupted by a beach and sea-shore miles from where it should be. Nonplussed, Calvin breaks into an empty lighthouse and sees his destination just over a ridge. Somehow Eugene was just there, but there was something not right about the city’s edges and outskirts…

Baffled and combative, the freaked out friends move on to find a familiar city filled with forgotten childhood treasures but utterly devoid of life. As they separate to explore, Calvin discovers he can now see through John’s eyes just as a glowing blue cloud begins to dissolve all the buildings…

Only Warren and Calvin escape the all-enveloping mist and the heartsick, bereft family man is filled with a terrifying partial understanding as he turns their vehicle back towards Roseburg for the incredible answers to all mysteries in ‘A Sort of Homecoming’. Even then only Calvin Lennox makes it, to finally confront the agent of all his woes and find the answers he’s been seeking…

Stylish, wry, moving, quirkily lyrical and inundated with iconic islands of popular culture, Dead Air is a beguiling puzzle picture and decidedly different love story which still packs a punch for fantasy fans and comics lovers to enjoy over and over again.
© 1989 M. Dalton Allred. All rights reserved.

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The Wild West Show


By Joe R. Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, Neal Barrett Jr., Sam Glanzman, Doug Potter & many and various. Edited by Richard Klaw (Mojo Press)
ISBN: 1-885418-04-3

Once upon a time, not that very long ago, nearly all of fiction was engorged with tales of Cowboys and Indians.

As always happens with such periodic popular phenomena – such as the Swinging Sixties’ Super-Spy Boom and the recent Vampire/Werewolf Boyfriend trend – there was a tremendous amount of momentary merit, lots of utter dross and a few spectacular gems.

Most importantly once such surges have petered out there’s also generally a small cadre of frustrated devotees who mourn its passing and, on growing up, resolve to do something to venerate or even revive their lost and faded favourite fad…

After World War II the American family entertainment market – for which read comics, radio and the burgeoning television industry – became comprehensively enamoured of the clear-cut, simplistic sensibilities and easy, escapist solutions offered by Tales of the Old West; already a firmly established favourite of paperback fiction, movie serials and feature films.

I’ve often pondered on how almost simultaneously a dark, bleak, nigh-nihilistic and oddly left-leaning Film Noir genre quietly blossomed alongside that wholesome revolution, seemingly for the cynical minority of entertainment intellectuals who somehow knew that the returned veterans still hadn’t found a Land Fit for Heroes… but that’s a thought for another time and different review.

Even though comic books had encompassed Western heroes from the very start – there were cowboy strips in the premier issues of both Action Comics and Marvel Comics – the post-war years saw a vast outpouring of anthology titles with new gun-toting heroes to replace the rapidly dwindling supply of costumed Mystery Men, and true to formula, most of these pioneers ranged from transiently mediocre to outright appalling.

With every comic-book publisher turning hopeful eyes westward, it was natural that most of the historical figures would quickly find a home and of course facts counted little, as indeed they never had with cowboy literature…

Despite minor re-flowerings in the early 1970s and mid-1990s, Cowboy comics have largely vanished from our funnybook pages: seemingly unable to command enough mainstream commercial support to survive the crushing competition of garish wonder-men and the furiously seductive future.

Europe and Britain also embraced the Sagebrush zeitgeist and produced some pretty impressive work, with France and Italy eventually making the genre their own by the end of the 1960s. They still make the best straight Western strips in the world.

Happily however an American revolution in comics retailing and print technologies at the end of the 20th century allowed fans to create and disseminate relatively inexpensive comicbooks of their own and, happier still, many of those fans are incredibly talented creators in other genres. A particularly impressive case in point is this captivating lost treasure from independent creator-led outfit Mojo Press, which published some amazing and groundbreaking horror, fantasy, Western and science fiction graphic novels and books between 1994 and their much-lamented demise in 1999.

Released in 1996, The Wild West Show was Mojo’s sixth release, a black and white anthology which celebrated the classical iconography of the genre whilst gleefully playing fast and loose with the content and running roughshod over the traditional mythology of the medium.

After the informative and educational ‘Two Fists, Four Colors and Six Guns’ – a history of Western comics by Scott A. Cupp – the wide-screen wonderment begins with Joe R. Lansdale’s beguiling short story ‘Trains Not Taken’ (adapted by Neal Barrett Jr. & John Garcia) as American Ambassador-to-Japan Bill Cody strikes up a casual conversation with businessman James Hickock on a Iron Horse trip to the Dakotas.

Among the many topics are the captivating single woman both find impossible to ignore, the Japanese/American union and recent massacre of a combined US Cavalry/Samurai force by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull,

The tragic loss of both Custer and Yoshii and other matters of great import pass the time, but the weary Hickock is too distracted to concentrate fully. His mind is filled with the troubles of his aging alcoholic wife and the disturbing dreams of another life: one where he was a buffalo hunting scout and deadly gunslinger. But those are just frustrating fancies of trains not taken. It’s all too late now – or is it…?

Lewis Shiner’s ‘Steam Engine Time’, illustrated by Doug Potter, is another glorious genre-bending snippet set in Austin, Texas in 1898, where an anonymous lad with a dream and a guitar tried to get the white folk interested in his new kind of music. Even though the far-more-welcoming Negroes in the Colored Quarter hadn’t heard of “The Blues” they accepted his unique squalling and bizarre pelvis-led dancing and understood his impatience. The kid wished that somehow he could get electricity into his guitar. Someday, maybe…

Veteran comics craftsman Sam Glanzman then turned in a silent masterpiece of action and bleak, black humour in ‘I Could Eat a Horse!’ after which Paul O. Miles and artists Newt Manwich & Michael Washburn adapted Donn Webb’s hilarious saga of a far from ordinary sidekick in ‘Cowboy Dharma’, whilst Norman Partridge & Marc Erickson revealed the West’s affinity for grotesque horror in the terrifying tale of The Head – but not much else – of murdering bandito Joaquin Murrieta in ‘For Neck or Nothin’…

Short and bittersweet, ‘Custer’s Last Love’ is a smart parable of the battle of the sexes from Steve Utley & Kevin Hendryx, and the whole shooting match ends on a lyrical high with the fact-based historical drama of settler Maggie Gosher whose ‘Letters from Arizona’ in 1889 are here transformed into a powerful and memorable strip by Joe Preston, John Lucas & Martin Thomas.

The Western tale has long been a part of world culture and perhaps that fact has relegated the genre in too many minds to the status of a passé fascination of a bygone generation. However these fresh looks at an overexposed idiom prove there’s still meat to found on those old bones, and cow-punching aficionados, fans of nostalgia-tainted comics and seekers of the wild and new alike can all be assured that there’s a selection of range-riding rollercoaster thrills and moody mysteries still lurking in those hills and on that horizon…

Black hats, white hats, alternate worlds, great pictures and macabre twists – what more could you possibly ask for?
The Wild West Show © 1996 Richard Klaw. All material contained herein © its respective creators. All rights reserved.

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Usagi Yojimbo book 2: Samurai


By Stan Sakai (Fantagraphics)
ISBN: 978-0-93019-338-1

Usagi Yojimbo (which translates as “rabbit bodyguard”) first appeared as a background character in Stan Sakai’s anthropomorphic comedy The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy, which launched in furry ‘n’ fuzzy folk anthology Albedo Anthropomorphics #1 (1984), subsequently appearing there on his own terms as well as in Critters, Amazing Heroes, Furrlough and the Munden’s Bar back-up in Grimjack.

Sakai was born in 1953 in Kyoto, Japan before the family emigrated to Hawaii in 1955. He attended the University of Hawaii, graduating with a BA in Fine Arts, and pursued further studies at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design after landing in California.

His early forays into comics were as a letterer, most famously for the inimitable Groo the Wanderer, before his nimble pens and brushes, coupled with a love of Japanese history and legend and hearty interest in the filmic works of Akira Kurosawa and his peers, all combined to turn a proposed story about a human historical hero into one of the most enticing and impressive fantasy sagas of all time.

And it’s still more educational, informative and authentic than any dozen Samurai sagas you can name…

The deliriously peripatetic and expansive period epic is nominally set in a world of sentient animals (with a few unobtrusive human characters scattered about) and specifically references the Edo Period of Feudal Japan: the early 17th century of our reckoning.

It simultaneously samples classic contemporary cultural icons from sources as varied as Lone Wolf and Cub, Zatoichi and even Godzilla whilst specifically recounting the life of Miyamoto Usagi, a Ronin or masterless wandering Samurai, eking out an honourable living as a Yojimbo or bodyguard-for-hire.

As such, his fate is to be drawn constantly into a plethora of incredible situations.

And yes, he’s a rabbit – a brave, sentimental, gentle, artistic, empathetic long-suffering, conscientious and heroic everyman bunny who just can’t turn down any request for help or ignore the slightest evidence of injustice…

This sublime second monochrome compilation (which originally appeared in Fantagraphics’ Usagi Yojimbo volume 1, #1-6, from 1989), begins with an effulgent Introduction from fellow legendary Groo-grifter Mark Evanier before the comedic adventure seamlessly transformed into epic drama, in an ambitious 9-chapter serial which solidly set the scene for decades to come.

‘Samurai!’ started with the Ronin again meeting money-mad bounty-hunter Gennosuké after a deadly duel of honour left a warrior named Gunichi a bloody corpse at the Yojimbo’s feet. Pressed by the newly-arrived and curious Gen, the moodily moved and uncharacteristically loquacious rabbit began sharing some of the events of his boyhood…

Once, Miyamoto Usagi was simply the son of a small-town magistrate, dispatched with his friend Kenichi to train at the prestigious DogoraFencingSchool in Sendai.

As the boys made their journey they encountered a lone, aged warrior beset by a pack of bullies from that self-same school, determined to prove their institution’s martial superiority. Despite all efforts to placate the hotheads old Katsuichi was eventually forced to reluctantly slay the toughs. The stunned witnesses began to bicker. Whilst Kenichi wanted to follow orders and go on to the – clearly honourless – DogoraSchool, little Usagi chose to seek out the old man and make him his Sensei…

The old man was finished with teaching but eventually saw something in the defiant, determined little rabbit and grudgingly accepted his exceptional young charge…

Usagi spent years learning the Way of Bushido from his stern, leonine master: not just superior technique and tactics, but also a philosophy of justice and restraint that would serve him all his life…

The revelations of Usagi’s boyhood training continue in short, revelatory vignettes as the elder Yojimbo and his surly companion continue towards shelter, highlighting the peculiar relationship of Sensei and Student. At the disciple’s first tournament the scurrilous, vengeful Dogora adherents plan to “accidentally” cripple the boy and thus humiliate his teacher, but don’t reckon on his innate ability.

After besting the entire FencingSchool contingent in duels with wooden swords – or Bokken – the boy at last faces his old friend Kenichi and triumphs.

His prize is a Wakizashi “Young Willow” and Katana “Willow Branch”. The short and long swords are the soul of a samurai, marking his graduation to martial maturity, but Usagi is blithely unaware of what his victory has cost his childhood companion…

Mere months later, the graduate warrior was challenged by a masterful, mysterious swordsman who was a bodyguard to the Great Lord MifunÄ—. Their duel was interrupted when a band of Dogora assassins attacked, determined to avenge their school’s humiliation by a single stick-wielding student. The cowards were no match for the steel of Usagi and the mighty Gunichi, and the victors parted as friends, with the bodyguard promising to recommend the rabbit for future service to his Lord.

Still assessing his options the young Samurai then encountered Kenichi once more. The disgraced youth had left the DogoraSchool and was trying to drink himself to death, but when he and Usagi heard that their home village was threatened by bandits the former friends reunited to save their loved ones…

By holding Usagi’s childhood love Mariko hostage, the brigands had successfully neutralised his magistrate father and were stripping the hamlet of all its provisions and meagre treasures when Usagi and Kenichi challenged them.

None of the villains survived the vengeance of the outraged villagers.

In the aftermath although Mariko clearly wanted Usagi to stay, she said nothing and the Samurai left to join Lord MifunÄ—’s service. Kenichi stayed…

The young warrior rose quickly as MifunÄ—’s vassal and was soon a trusted bodyguard, serving beside the indomitable Gunichi. It was a time of great unrest and war was brewing. In his third year of service the Lord’s castle was attacked by Neko Ninja assassins. Although the doughty warriors managed to save their master, his wife Kazumi and heir Tsuruichi were murdered. Realising ambitious rival Lord Hikiji was responsible, MifunÄ— declared war…

The struggle ended on the great Adachigahara plain when MifunÄ—’s general Todo switched sides and the Great Lord fell. At the crucial moment Gunichi also broke, fleeing to save his own skin and leaving the helpless Usagi to preserve the fallen Lord’s head – and Honour – from shameful desecration…

The story came full circle now, when after two years as a purposeless, masterless Ronin, the wandering Yojimbo met Gunichi again…

After that epic origin yarn, Sakai returned to short, pithy vignettes to cleanse the dramatic palate, beginning with a delicious traditional horror story. In ‘Kappa’ the wanderer encounters a deadly marsh troll at dusk and barely escapes with his life by offering the foul beast some wild cucumbers he has picked. Exhausted, the Ronin finds shelter with an old woman for the night, but when she hears of his adventure she becomes hysterical.

The cucumbers were planted so that her own son – returning that night – would have something to buy off the voracious Kappa…

Horrified by his inadvertent error, Usagi dashes back to the marsh to save the son, but even after overcoming the monster shockingly learns of one final sting in this tale…

Soaking a sore back in a hot spring the wanderer befriends a newly hatched tokagé lizard (ubiquitous, omnivorous reptiles that populate the anthropomorphic world, replacing scavenger species like rats, cats and dogs in the fictitious ecosystem), but is caught off guard and ambushed by bandits. Luckily the uniquely fire-breathing ‘Zylla’ comes to his assistance, prompting the wary warrior to wonder if the lizard might be a minor deity…

This second monochrome compilation concludes at the ‘Silk Fair’ where the wanderer saves a silk-worker from marauding bandits and stays to liberate all his oppressed fellows from a miserly merchant ruthlessly exploiting them…

The Lethal Lepus has changed publishers a few times but has been in continuous publication since 1987 – with over 29 graphic novel collections and books to date. He has also guest-starred in many other series (such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its TV incarnation) and even almost made it into his own small-screen show but there’s still time yet and fashions can revive as quickly as they die out. There are high-end collectibles, art prints, computer games and RPGs, a spin-off sci-fi comics serial and lots of toys. Sakai and his creation have won numerous awards both within the Comics community and amongst the greater reading public.

Fast-paced yet lyrical, funny, thrilling and simply bursting with veracity and verve, Usagi Yojimbo is a monolithic magical saga of irresistible appeal that will delight devotees and make converts of the most hardened hater of “funny animal” stories.

Sheer comicbook poetry by a Comicbook Sensei…

Text and illustrations © 1987, 1989, 2005 Stan Sakai. Book editions © 1989, 2002 Fantagraphics books. All rights reserved.

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Essential Thor volume 5


By Gerry Conway, John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Don Perlin, Vince Colletta, Jim Mooney & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-5093-0

Whilst the ever-expanding Marvel Universe had grown ever-more interconnected as it matured, with characters literally tripping over each other in New York City, the Asgardian heritage of Thor and the soaring imagination of Jack Kirby had most often drawn the Thunder God away from mortal realms into stunning, unique landscapes and scenarios.

By the time of this fifth Essential monochrome compendium, an unthinkable Changing of the Guard had seen the King of Comics jump ship from the House of (His) Ideas to arch-rival DC where he crafted the unfinished Magnum Opus of the Fourth World series as well as a number of other game-changing concepts.

The Thunder God suffered a sharp, sudden loss of imaginative impetus, however, which left the series floundering, despite the best efforts of (arguably) the company’s greatest remaining illustrators, Neal Adams and John Buscema. More than any other Marvel feature, The Mighty Thor was the strip where Kirby’s creative brilliance had always found its greatest release in cosmic wandering and questing exploration of an infinite and dangerous universe.

His dreaming, extrapolating and honing of a dazzling new kind of storytelling and graphic symbology, wedded to soul-searching, mind-boggling concepts of Man’s place in the universe – and all within the limited confines of a 20-page action adventure – was an impossible act to follow.

Although his successors mimicked the trappings of that incredible conceptual juggling act, the heart, soul and soaring, unfettered wonder just were not there any longer – nor would they be until 1983 when Walt Simonson assumed creative control with #337 (see Mighty Thor: the Ballad of Beta Ray Bill).

By the time these monthly episodes (from issues #196-220, February 1972 to February 1974) saw print, the Thunder God and his Asgardian companions were slowly devolving into a muddled, self-doubting band of fantasy spacemen roving the outer limits of the Marvel Universe under the earnest but uninspired governance of young science fiction novelist Gerry Conway and a dedicated, talented but still somehow inappropriate string of artists.

The previous volume had seen Asgard again imperilled by mystic monstrosity Mangog with Thor and friends dispatched on another extended odyssey to the ends of the Universe in search of succour and water from The Twilight Well. In his righteous rage Odin had previously banished God of Evil Loki to a fantastic world, momentarily forgetting that once there the Prince of Evil could awaken the most vicious, unbeatable monster in the universe…

Now the Thunderer, with Warriors Three Fandral the Dashing, Voluminous Volstagg and Hogun the Grim, found himself lost ‘Within the Realm of Kartag!’ (illustrated by John Buscema & Vince Colletta): facing slug-men and bewitching temptress Satrina even as the All-Father and the hosts of the Shining City struggled to hold Mangog at bay. Meanwhile on the planet Blackworld Lady Sif and her muscular shield-maiden Hildegarde were undertaking another Odinian quest and found themselves caught up in a time-bending nightmare…

Thor #197 saw the heroes overcome all odds to find ‘The Well at the Edge of the World!’ meeting the conniving, all-powerful Norns and recruiting the colossal Kartag for their desperate return to shattered Asgard.

On Blackworld Sif and Hildegarde encountered monsters and men making uncontrollable evolutionary leaps towards an unguessable future, but found an unlikely ally and guide in aged sailor Silas Grant.

The male heroes returned to find Asgard in flaming ruins and the cataclysmic confrontation with the Mangog nearing an apocalyptic end, whilst on Blackworld Sif, Hildegarde and Silas met alien Rigellian Colonizer Tana Nile and the horrendous creature behind the evolutionary jumps. Simultaneously the battle in Asgard reached a horrific climax when Mangog was at last defeated ‘…And Odin Dies!’

Issue #199 saw the ravaged home of the gods adrift in a dimensional void, allowing Thor – clutching to a desperate last hope – to cocoon his deceased father in a timeless forcefield, preventing Dark Goddess Hela from claiming his soul. However she wasn’t the only deity hungry for the All Father’s spirit and ‘If This Be Death…!’ revealed Grecian netherlord Pluto invading the broken realm to take Odin into his own dire domain.

…And, on Blackworld, Tana Nile hinted at the origin of the monstrous Ego-Prime and how it can force such terrifying uncontrollable time-warps…

Back in free-floating Asgard, things went from bad to worse as brave Balder‘s beloved Karnilla deserted him just as invincible Pluto defeated Hela and aimed a killing blow at Thor…

The denouement was aggravatingly delayed as anniversary issue #200 hit the pause button to flashback to an earlier age. ‘Beware! If This Be… Ragnarok!’ was crafted by Stan Lee, John Buscema & John Verpoorten and spectacularly depicted the fall of the gods through the mystic visions of Volla the Prophetess, with only a bridging Prologue and Epilogue by Conway & Buscema revealing the Norns saving Thor’s life just in time for the concluding battle against Pluto in #201 (with Jim Mooney providing lush finished art over Buscema’s layouts).

When Hela relinquished her claim to the father of the gods and Odin enjoyed a miraculous ‘Resurrection!’, on Earth absentee Asgardians Heimdall and Kamorr began seeking out mortals for a another Odinian master-plan even before the battle with Pluto was fully concluded. As they scoured Midgard, on Blackworld Ego-Prime advanced the civilisation into atomic Armageddon and Sif barely transported her companions to Earth in time to escape the thermonuclear conflagration.

Luckily Thor, Balder, and the Warriors Three were in New York City to meet the refugees, since the deadly, now self-evolving, Ego-Prime had followed them…

Thor #202 boasted ‘…And None Dare Stand ‘Gainst Ego-Prime!’ (Buscema & Colletta) although Silas, Tana Nile and the assembled Asgardians tried their best as the now-sentient shard of Ego, the Living Planet rampaged across the city making monsters and shattering entire streets, whilst Odin calmly observed the carnage and destruction and Heimdall and Kamorr gathered their human targets for the concluding ‘They Walk Like Gods!’, wherein all Odin’s machinations were finally revealed as Ego-Prime inadvertently created a new race of 20th century deities. Sadly the All-Father’s long and single-minded scheme appalled his son and weary, war-torn subjects, whose understandable rebukes led to them all being ‘Exiled on Earth!’ in #204 (Buscema & Mooney) and soon targeted by terrifying satanic tempter Mephisto…

Soon only the Thunderer was left to oppose the devil invading his private hell and liberating hundreds of demon-possessed humans from ‘A World Gone Mad!’ (Colletta inks), after which the Earth-bound godling clashed brutally but inconclusively with the uncharacteristically amok Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man just as Thor’s greatest enemy resurfaced in #206’s ‘Rebirth!’

Tracking the escaped Creel to Rutland, Vermont during their annual Halloween festival, Thor, Sif and Hildegarde clashed with the malevolent Loki and his all-powerful ‘Firesword!’ in an action-heavy duel elevated by a plethora of comic creator cameos with the divine Marie Severin adding her caricaturing brilliance to Buscema & Colletta’s workmanlike illustration. Another extended sub-ploy opened here as Sif vanished, spirited away by the love-lorn Karnilla to the ends of the universe…

Sci fi themes took the lead again in Thor #208 as ‘The Fourth-Dimensional Man!’ manifested, stealing the Thunderer’s ambient Asgardian energies to save his own world from disaster. Sadly they were insufficient and the malevolent Mercurio needed to tap his source directly resulting in battle without mercy as Thor’s noble spirit gradually gave way to the despair of exile and constant loss…

Incessantly searching for Sif, Thor stopped in London (not one any Briton would ever recognise though) in #209 long enough to accidentally awaken a sleeping alien dormant since the building of Stonehenge. The resultant clash between Thunder God and “Demon Druid” devastated much of England in ‘Warriors in the Night!’ before being ambushed in Red China by Mao’s soldiers in #210 ‘The Hammer and the Hellfire!‘ (Buscema, Don Perlin & Colletta). They were merely the action appetiser, however, since ultimate Troll Ulik had decided to conquer both his own people and Earth and moved pre-emptively to remove his greatest foe from the equation…

With New York invaded by Troll warriors, #211 revealed ‘The End of the Battle!’ (Buscema, Perlin & Colletta) as the fighting mad Asgardians routed the underworld insurgents just as an insane Balder returned to warn that Asgard had been conquered. With the Realm Eternal emptied of gods and occupied by sleazy lizard-men, Thor and his companions were soon hot on the trail of their missing race. Guided by saurian rogue Sssthgar and his serpentine horde, they undertook a ‘Journey to the Golden Star!’ in #212 and discovered their liege and kin meek chattels on a slaver’s auction block…

Scripted by Len Wein over Conway’s plot, ‘The Demon Brigade!’ saw Thor betrayed by the Lizard Lord and embroiled in a war between slaver races before discovering Sssthgar’s secret and freeing his father. He also obtained a lead to the whereabouts of Sif and Karnilla, consequently plunging his small dedicated party of heroes recklessly ‘Into the Dark Nebula!’ (by Conway, Sal Buscema & Mooney) to rescue the missing maidens from the asteroid miners who had purchased them.

They found their quarry besieged by the 4D Man and his army, who were intent on acquiring a malign, sentient source of infinite power, but events took an uncanny turn when ‘The God in the Jewel’ (John Buscema & Mooney) absorbed the women into its crystalline mass and took off, intent on dominating all life in the universe…

Forced to become allies of convenience, the Asgardians and Mercurio strove together ‘Where Chaos Rules!’ to free the women and stop the rapacious gem-god, but even after eventual victory found them tenuous comrades, Thor’s trials were not done.

Returning in triumph to a mysteriously rebuilt Asgard in #217, the wanderers found ‘All Swords Against Them!’ (Sal Buscema inking brother John), as impossible doppelgangers of Odin, Thor and the rest greeted them with murderous hostility. Whilst the Thunder God furiously battled to unravel this latest mystery, in another sector of the universe the all-conquering Colonizers of Rigel were put to flight and abandoned their worlds to an all-consuming force of sheer destruction…

Thor #218 proved there was no rest for the weary as the victorious Asgardians again took ship for deep space to prevent the Rigellians’ doom from reaching Earth. ‘Where Pass the Black Stars There Also Passes… Death!’ (J. Buscema & Mooney) found the hard-travelling heroes discovering a nomadic race of colossal, decadent star-farers who fuelled their unending flight by recycling thriving civilisations into food and power.

In distant Asgard, Hildegarde’s young sister Krista was slowly falling under the sway of sinister seductive evil even as her hereditary protectors were a cosmos away, infiltrating one of the Black Stars’ cosmic scoops and encountering a race of mechanical slaves in

#219’s ‘A Galaxy Consumed!’ (inked by Mike Esposito) before this volume’s story-portion ends with #220, wherein the slaves and their charismatic messiah Avalon are at last freed and untold galaxies subsequently saved from callous consumption in ‘Behold! The Land of Doom!’

This collection also includes fact-filled Marvel Universe Handbook pages on Pluto, Tana Nile, and Mercurio, the 4-D Man.

The Kirby Thor will always be a high-point in graphic fantasy, all the more impressive for the sheer imagination and timeless readability of the tales. With his departure the series foundered for the longest time before finding a new identity, but his successors did their honest best to follow in his Brobdingnagian footsteps.

The tales gathered here may lack the sheer punch and verve of The King but fans of cosmic Fights ‘n’ Tights fantasy will find this tome still stuffed with intrigue and action, magnificently rendered by artists who, whilst not possessing Kirby’s vaulting visionary passion, were every inch his equal in craft and dedication, making this a definite must for all fans of the character and the genre.

©1972, 1973, 1974, 2011 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny


By Justine & Ron Fuentes and Thomas Yeates (Graphic Universe)
ISBN: 978-1-58013-317-3

The heroic tales and beliefs of ancient cultures have for centuries formed an integral part of children’s educational development – and a good thing too. These days though, those magnificently inspiring and unforgettably visual yarns are as likely to be disseminated via graphic novel as through the sparsely illustrated prose books which had such a formative influence on my early days.

Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny was released in 2007, one self-contained chronicle in a large series which similarly retold through sequential narrative many other myths and legends such as Jason’s Quest with the Argonauts, the Labours of Hercules or the Saga of King Arthur.

Illustrated by the brilliant Thomas Yeates (Saga of the Swamp Thing, Time Spirits, Zorro and more) and adapted from traditional sources by Justine and Ron Fontes, the tragic tale of the World’s first feminist and a ferociously independent woman opens in heaven as the gods of Olympus observe a king railing at his wife, furious that she has given him a useless daughter instead of the son and heir he needed.

Ordering the infant to be ‘Abandoned’ on an exposed hillside, he thinks of her no more, blithely unaware that the baby has been found and adopted by a she-bear…

Nurtured and reared by her ursine protector the child grew strong and tough and exceedingly swift. Nothing could match her speed.

One day, years later, she was ‘Found’ and adopted by hunters who civilised her and gloried in her might and skill with a bow. These simple folk had no time for traditional women’s work and Atalanta grew with no knowledge of a woman’s traditional role in Greek society. She could not spin wool, weave or sew and knew nothing of cleaning or keeping a man’s house in proper order. Moreover she had no time or need to idly make herself pretty for a man…

As she grew to womanhood she often pondered her role and fate. Eventually she was advised by her adopted family to consult an oracle and journeyed to Delphi to seek ‘Answers and Adventures’ from the oracle of Apollo, where her shocking manner, dress and attitudes scandalised the refined citizens.

Sadly the responses of the closeted, drugged seer were far from helpful. The Oracle merely mumbled “avoid husband… can’t avoid… keep life… lose self” and the interpretations and rationalisations of the male priests were little better.

Atalanta returned to a life of hunting and lived day to day until an invitation came to enter a great competition to destroy a fearsome boar ravaging distant Calydon, kingdom of Oeneus and his son Prince Meleager.

Invitations had gone out to the greatest heroes of Greece and en route Atalanta met fabled Jason, and many Argonauts including Castor and Pollux, Theseus, Nestor, last survivor of the Trojan War, and Telemon who was once companion to Hercules himself. All hungered for glory and readily accepted her amongst their company as they discussed the fearsome beast they were to fight against.

Legend had it that the boar was a divine punishment sent by Artemis to punish a slight accidentally perpetrated by Oeneus, but as the champions talked the huntress realised many of the heroes also thought of her as a beguiling quarry…

The hunt for the boar was a disaster. Although she easily outdistanced her companions and drew first blood, many heroes died that day and when Meleager finally slew the beast he wanted Atalanta to share in the triumph. Her skill had indeed led to his killing stroke, but his jealous uncles refused to let a woman share in his glory and a fight broke out.

Besotted with her – and she with him – the Prince slew his uncles in a rage and called upon himself the final, fatal vengeance of the gods as well as his own mother.

Heartbroken and uncomprehending of the sheer spitefulness of celestials, Atalanta returned to the wilds, convinced that her love would ever doom any man she favoured…

Her legend grew however and in a far away kingdom her father pieced together the details and realised the celebrated huntress must be the daughter he had tried to kill. Seeing an opportunity he invited her into his household and the dutiful, curious young woman complied.

It was a disaster. She hated the rules and confinements of a palace princess and her sire only saw her as a means of gaining power, wealth and prestige. When he proffered the famed huntress in wedlock, many suitors came forward. Although the horrified, prophecy-haunted Atalanta knew that any man she married would die, she soon realised her greedy father did not care…

Thus she desperately devised a cunning competition to warn the fools away, demanding that only a man who could catch her would have her hand. To deter them further she insisted that any who failed must die but she had greatly underestimated the arrogance, greed and lust of princes…

A beautiful suitor named Hippomenes did get the message however and acted only as judge for ‘The Race of her Life’, watching the beautiful girl easily outdistance and thereby doom a host of potential husbands. Seeing her run though, he too was smitten and began his own campaign to win the lonely, tragic princess.

A great grandson of sea-god Poseidon, he made Atalanta feel she could beat her oracular curse and then petitioned love goddess Aphrodite to aid him in beating the unbeatable girl in a second race…

Equipped with the gleaming Golden Apples of the Hesperides, the wily youth distracted the fleet huntress enough to cross the finishing line first and won ‘A Bride After All’ but in his elation Hippomenes forgot to properly thank Aphrodite and the outraged deity promptly planned an awful vengeance for the slight.

At the moment of her greatest joy Atalanta learned the true power of prophecy when Aphrodite tricked the happy newlyweds into desecrating a shrine to Zeus’ mother Rhea for which sacrilege she furiously transformed them into a lion and lioness.

For the rest of eternity the lovers would remain together, keeping their lives but losing their selves, becoming the divine beasts pulling Rhea’s chariot across the world…

All religious stories are devised to explain away contemporary unsolved questions, unknowable mysteries or established social structures.

The liturgical history lesson retold here was one proudly patriarchal people’s attempt to rationalise their lives whilst explaining how and why such laws and customs exist and, although grossly simplified here, works in an engaging manner that should certainly tempt readers to go and find out more.

Engrossing, dynamic, pretty and blessed with a light touch, this splendid introduction to mythology is designed for kids with a reading age of nine or above – that’s Year 4, I suspect – and also contains a full ‘Glossary’ of characters and concepts, suggested ‘Further Reading, Websites and Films’, background on ‘Creating Atalanta: The Race Against Destiny‘, creator biographies in ‘About the Author and the Artist’ and an ‘Index’.

Packaged as full-colour, 48 page, card-cover booklets, they were designed to introduce youngsters to the magical riches of human history and imagination.

Although this particular saga retells a rather tragic and indubitably unfair tale of sexism, oppressive destiny and the costs of attempting to defy fate, it does read very well as sequential narrative in its own right and serves not just as an educational aid or social warning but as a smart way to get your youngsters into comics.
© 2007 Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Bone: Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails – the Adventures of Big Johnson Bone, Frontier Hero


By Jeff Smith, Tim Sniegoski & Stan Sakai (Cartoon Books)
ISBN: 978-1-88896-306-9

Jeff Smith burst out of relative obscurity in 1991 and changed the comics-reading landscape with his captivating all-ages comicbook Bone. The compelling black and white saga intoxicated the market and prospered at a time when an endless procession of angst-ridden, steroid-breathed super-vigilantes and implausibly clad “Bad-Grrls” came and went with machine-gun rapidity.

Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio, Smith avidly absorbed the works of Carl Barks, Charles Schultz and especially Walt Kelly from an early age, and purportedly first began producing the adventures of his Boneville creations at age ten.

Whilst attending OhioStateUniversity he created a prototype strip for the College newspaper: ‘Thorn’ was another early incarnation of his personal universe and a valuable proving ground for many characters that would eventually appear in Bone. A high school classmate became a Disney animator and Smith subsequently gravitated to the field before striking out on his own, having mastered the graceful gentle slapstick timing and high finish style which typifies his art style.

He founded Cartoon Books to self-publish 55 delightful black and white issues: a fantasy-quest yarn that owed as much to Tex Avery as J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as his personal holy trinity, Barks, Schultz & Kelly. The thrilling and fantastically funny saga progressed at its own unique pace between 1991 and 2004 and since then has been collected into nine volumes from Cartoon Books (with two further collections of prequels and side tales), reissued in colour by Scholastic Books and even reprinted in Disney Adventures magazine.

Fone Bone is the strange, amorphous, affably decent little hero, a thematic blend of Mickey Mouse and Asterix, who had been run out of the town of Boneville along with his tall, not-so-bright cousin Smiley due to the financial and political irregularities, misdemeanours and malfeasances of their dastardly, swindling relative Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone…

After an incredibly journey the trio ended up in LostValley: an oasis of pastoral beauty hidden from the rest of the world. Along the way Bone was adopted by a dragon he doesn’t believe in, stalked by ghastly rat monsters and befriended by many talking animals and people…

At series’ end, Smith issued a monumental one volume compilation (more than 1300 black and white pages) which Time magazine dubbed “the best all-ages graphic novel yet published” and one of the “Top Ten Graphic Novels of All Time.”

Smith has won many awards including 11 Harveys and 10 Eisners. In 2011, a spectacular 20th anniversary full-colour edition of the Brobdingnagian single volume was released, stuffed with extras and premiums. If you’ve got the dough, that’s the book to shoot for…

The core series also spawned a few prequel series such as dark origin tale Rose and this far-lighter yarn introducing the Bone cousins’ pioneering ancestor: a rootin’ tootin’ rip-snorter of a trapper and loud-mouthed, itinerant Frontier Scout named Big Johnson Bone who found and saved an idyllic valley from an all-consuming threat and made the place safe from marauding monsters. Since there are plenty of versions to opt for, purist that I am, I’ve again plumped for an original monochrome Cartoon Books collection.

Originally appearing as back-ups in the original comicbook and the one-shot Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails between 1998 and 1999. these tremendously intoxicating tall tales were first gathered together in 2000 and remain one of the best and most entertaining all-ages comics sagas of the modern age.

Once upon a time a distant land was filled with huge, scary, fiercely rapacious rat creatures with magnificent tails…

Scripted by Tom Sniegoski and illustrated by Smith, the eponymous 3-part epic ‘Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails: the Adventures of Big Johnson Bone, Frontier Hero’ opens with the boastful lone scout – except for his mule Blossom and Mr. Pip, a dolorous, depressive, nagging monkey he won in a card game – getting snatched up in a real rip-roarer of a twister and whirled across the landscape to be unceremoniously dumped in a beautiful, unspoiled valley…

Actually it’s not completely perfect: there are a vast number of stupid but rapacious monsters eating all the local fauna. After giving two of the surly critters a sound drubbing, Johnson finds the last few animal kids still unconsumed by the long-tailed, giant ratty beasts. Lily the bearcub, Pete the Porcupine, Ramona the fox kitten and Porter the turtle then ask the big-hearted little guy for help in getting their mummies and daddies back…

The kits, cubs, pups and tads already have a protector of sorts but Stillman is a very little dragon, lacking in size, power and confidence as he can’t breathe flame because it gives him indigestion and makes him puke. He’s a dab hand at throwing rocks though…

Stillman says that a proper protector from the High Council of Dragons is on the way, but has no idea how soon the saviour will arrive.

Some distance away Maud, queen of the rat creatures, has problems of her own. It’s really hard to stay happy and well-groomed when your son is as big as a mountain, dumb as a rock and hungrier than all the rest of her stupid, stupid subjects combined. The big darling might be a hundred feet tall, but he has such a sensitive tummy and is a martyr to bilious attacks. With a kid like Prince Tyson it’s no wonder she has to kill so often.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “mad as a bag of rats”? Maud is the bag they were taking about.

When she hears from her chastened subjects of tough, two-fisted mammals falling from the sky, stopping her subjects from rightfully expanding her territory and just plain refusing to be eaten, she decides to send a party to capture them – which coincidentally is just what Johnson Bone has decided to do to her…

The rat things attack first however but only get another fierce trouncing for their troubles. In fact the old scout might well have ended it all then and there had not Stillman joined in with an extremely poorly thrown stone…

Taking advantage of Bone’s temporarily stunned state, the rats scoop up Lily and Pete and amscray pronto, leaving the slowly recovering trapper with but one thought… those giant varmint pelts would be worth a fortune back home…

As soon as his head clears Johnson is off in pursuit, tracking the rat things to Maud’s cave, where the accounts of what the sky-dropped mammal does to rat beast tails has the entire tribe in a tizzy. In a fit of regal rage Maud sends everybody to kill the invaders…

When the opposing forces clash, despite routing the ordinary man-sized rodent rogues, even the dapper trapper is daunted when Tyson snatches up him and Ramona and swallows them whole…

Left behind, Blossom and snooty Mr. Pip are in a world of trouble until the wily monkey tries to romance Maud, whilst inside the cavernous Tyson Bone is still alive and kicking and he’s even found most of the animal kids’ missing parents alive and as yet undigested. Elsewhere Stillman has discovered his inner firedrake – much to the rat creatures’ dismay… and that’s when the wily explorer in Tyson’s tum gets a hankering for a good old hootenanny and roaring bonfire barbeque…

A stunning blend of slapstick and wry laughs for young and old alike, this gloriously over-the-top, tall tales prequel and modern “Just So” story is a pure cartoon delight of all-ages action and comedy adventure, but this terrific tome has even more fun in store.

Again scripted by Sniegoski, Riblet introduces a real problem child to the valley’s animal population in a fabulously arch yarn illustrated by the amazing Stan Sakai.

The other cubs and kits don’t like hanging out with Riblet. The baby boar is a bully: mean, rough and developmentally challenged, he just doesn’t play well – or safely – with the other kids. So when a couple of starving rat creatures capture him, thinking ‘A Little Pork Would be Lovely’ they have no idea of the trouble they’ve made for themselves…

In ‘Bringing Home the Bacon’, the suddenly liberated kids celebrate their good fortune and nobody tries that hard to get him back even as Riblet begins working his unique charms on his unlucky abductors, revelling in his favourite ‘Fun & Games’ even as the hungry horrors learn the logic of ‘Losing One’s Appetite’ and resort to ‘Something Drastic’ even as the kids begin to feel the tiniest pangs of conscience…

Fast-paced, trenchant and wickedly uproarious, Riblet is a smart, beguiling counterpoint to the sometime saccharine sweetness of the Valley Forest’s frolicsome animal kids and a sheer ribald riot in its own right.

Bone is a truly perfect cartoon tale and one that appeals with utterly universal appeal. Already it is in the rarefied ranks of Tintin, Pogo, Rupert Bear, Little Nemo and the cherished works of Schultz, Kelly and Barks, and it’s only a matter of time before it breaks out of the comic club completely and becomes kin to the likes of The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, the Moomins and Oz.

If you have kids or can still think and feel like one you must have these books…
© 1998, 1999 and 2000 Jeff Smith. All rights reserved.

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Isis & Osiris: To the Ends of the Earth – An Egyptian Myth

Isis
By Jeff Limke & David Witt (Graphic Universe)
ISBN: 978-1-58013-320-3, 978-0-82256-570-3

The heroic tales and beliefs of ancient cultures have for centuries formed an integral part of children’s educational development – and a good thing too. These days though, those magnificently inspiring and unforgettably visual yarns are as likely to be disseminated via graphic novel as through the sparsely illustrated prose books which had such a formative influence on my early days.

Isis & Osiris: To the Ends of the Earth was released in 2007, one self-contained chronicle in a larger series which similarly retold through sequential narrative many other myths and legends such as Jason’s Quest with the Argonauts, the Labours of Hercules or the Saga of King Arthur.

Packaged as full-colour, 48 page, card-cover booklets, they were designed to introduce kids to the magical riches of human history and imagination. This particular epic retells one of the oldest stories of our species, revealing a story of love, hate and the devotion of marriage, as well as describing the invention of Egypt’s infamous burial ceremony and system of justice.

The story begins in the most ancient of days as the divine Isis begins a holy ritual with the royal infant Dactyl, simultaneously regaling him with a tale of ‘A Party to End all Parties’. At that long-ago festival her beloved and revered husband Osiris was betrayed by his jealous, ambitious and infinitely wicked brother Set.

The dark plotter had brought a lavish and ornate stone sarcophagus carved from solid rock to the celebration and proposed a party game: whomever the beautiful bier best fitted would win it forever. Everybody tried and failed to settle into it until noble, jolly Osiris at last lay within, at which time it magically sealed itself, trapping the king of the gods within ‘A Stone-Cold Prize’…

His fate sealed, Osiris and the sarcophagus were hurled into the mighty Nile River by Set’s servants, to vanish from sight as the triumphant usurper assumed control of the world. Heartbroken but determined, Isis became a ‘Goddess Interrupted’ as she roamed the Earth for years, searching for her lost husband.

The Nile was the source of all life and Osiris’ magical passage had wrought wondrous changes and transformations Isis could track as she wearily walked the world. Eventually Isis arrived in the land ruled by Queen Astarte where she was made most welcome even as she saw the stump of a huge Tamarisk tree and felt the presence of he long-lost love.

The mighty growth was so impressive that the King had ordered it to be carved into a glorious imperial column for his palace, and when she travelled there Isis knew her quest was ended.

Arriving at our story’s starting point, the divine goddess, in her gratitude, was attempting to bless Astarte’s infant son Dactyl with her heavenly gifts when the suspicious queen inadvertently burst into her chamber and interrupted the benison. This contravention of the law of courtesy cost the mother and her son greatly…

Angered and impatient, Isis shattered the ceremonial column and released the hated sarcophagus from within it, before commandeering a boat and crew to take her beloved back up the Nile to his stolen kingdom.

‘A God Comes Home, a God Goes Missing’ found the reunited couple preparing to celebrate Osiris’ resurrection, with amazing new gifts for the people – such as farming tools and wheat – aided by their hawk-headed son Horus and Set’s jackal-headed boy Anubis. As they busied themselves, nobody saw a giant boar steal in and remove the still-slumbering Osiris…

When she discovered him missing the goddess exploded in fury, unleashing her wrath against the people until fair-minded Horus calmed her down and restored her reason.

By the banks of the river, the boar resumed his true shape and spiteful, jealous Set, determined never to lose or share the worship of mankind, cut his brother into many pieces and scattered them ‘To the Ends of the World’…

Shattered and disconsolate, Isis is comforted and encouraged by Set’s wife Nephthys, who urges her to find the strength to search for her husband again. With the aid of her sister-in-law, Anubis, and Horus, Isis once more roams the earth until all the scattered segments of Osiris are found and reconstituted. All but one…

With a vital fragment missing, Isis has a potter construct a clay replacement from the earth her husband had previously blessed, and undertakes a new ceremony to recombine, reunite and reanimate the pieces. By ‘Making a Mummy’ she and her priests totally heal the withered husk and bring Osiris back to vibrant life.

His journey to the Land of the Dead had greatly changed the mighty ruler and, restored to health and power, he has accepted a great burden. Henceforth he will judge all those going to the afterlife with a set of scales balancing the evil in men’s hearts against the weight of a heavenly feather…

All religious stories are devised to explain away contemporary unsolved questions and unknowable mysteries. The liturgical history lesson retold here was one people’s attempt to rationalise the course of their lives as farmers whilst explaining how and why their laws and customs began and, although grossly simplified here, works in an engaging manner that should certainly tempt readers to go and find out more.

Engrossing, dynamic, pretty and blessed with a light touch, this splendid introduction to mythology is designed for kids with a reading age of nine or above – that’s Year 4, I suspect – and also contains a full ‘Glossary’ of characters and concepts, suggested ‘Further Reading, Websites and Films’, creator biographies in ‘About the Author and the Artist’ and an ‘Index’.

They also read very well as sequential narrative in their own right and would serve not just as educational aid but as a smart way to get your youngsters into comics.
© 2007 Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Lola – a Ghost Story


By J. Torres & Elbert Or (Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-1-934964-33-0

These days young kids are far more likely to find their formative strip narrative experiences online or between the card-covers of specially tailored graphic novels rather than the comics and periodicals of my long-dead youth.

In times past the commercial comics industry thrived by producing copious amounts of gaudy, flimsy pamphlets subdivided into a range of successfully, self-propagating, seamlessly self-perpetuating age-specific publications. Such eye-catching items generated innumerable tales and delights intended to entertain, inform and educate such well-defined target demographics as Toddler/Kindergarten, Younger and Older Juvenile, General, Girls, Boys and even Young Teens, but today the English-speaking world can only afford to maintain a few paltry out-industry, licensed tie-ins and spin-offs for a dwindling younger readership.

Where once cheap and prolific, strip magazines in the 21st century are extremely cost-intensive and manufactured for a highly specific – and dying– niche market, whilst the beguiling and bombastic genres that originally fed and nurtured comics are more immediately disseminated via TV, movies and assorted interactive games media.

Happily, old-school prose publishers and the newborn graphic novel industry have a different business model and far more sustainable long-term goals, so the magazine makers’ surrender has been turned into a burgeoning victory, as solid and reassuringly sturdy Comic-Books increasingly buck the pamphlet/papers trend.

Some of the old-fashioned publishers even evolved…

Independent comics mainstay Oni deftly made the switch to sturdy stand-alone one-offs at the end of the last century, publishing a succession of superb illustrated tales splendidly pushing the creative envelope whilst providing memorable yarns that irresistibly lure young potential fans of the form into our world…

That looks quite creepy in type-form but that’s okay – this is a beguilingly spooky story and you should be on your guard…

Aimed at readers of seven and above, Lola – a Ghost Story follows young Canadian Jesse as he returns to the rural Philippine farm where his parents grew up. It’s not his first visit, but it is the saddest. They’re going back for the funeral of his grandmother…

In the native Tagalog language Lola means “grandmother” and Jesse’s was pretty scary. She was old and ugly, had a hump on her back and – he thinks – tried to drown him when he was a baby.

She also saw dead things and monsters and the future… just like Jesse does.

Despite all this he loved her very much and really doesn’t want to accept that she’s gone forever. After hours of exhausting travel Jesse and his folks at last arrive at the old farmhouse which has seen so much tragedy. The visitor fulsomely greets his uncle and cousin Maritess, but doesn’t acknowledge her brother JonJon.

The kid’s acting like a jerk as usual, and besides he’s been dead for over a year and no-one else can see him…

Soon the family are gathered together: eating, remembering the departed and telling stories of Lola – like the time she saw the giant devil-pig and saved the entire family from financial ruin – but Jesse is still ill at ease. Even though everyone here believes his grandmother had second sight and blessed gifts, the sensibly modern boy can’t bring himself to believe the things he sees are real…

Maritess believes though and she suspects what Jesse won’t admit even to himself…

After JonJon teases him some more and taunts him with the giant bestial, cigar-smoking Kapre lurking at the window, Jesse finally drops into an exhausted, nervous slumber.

The funeral next day is horrible. Everybody is sad, the church is filled with so many shockingly damaged spirits and Jesse is afflicted with a vision of being trapped and burning which makes him run terrified from the ceremony.

Still traumatised that evening, he finds JonJon’s old toybox on his bed and Maritess guesses what has happened.

She tells her cousin the story of the bloodsucking Manananggal which attacked Lola’s mother causing her unborn daughter’s hump-back and magical sight. Such gifts and curses usually skip a generation and Maritess always assumed she’d be the one to get the sight, but now that it’s clear Jesse is the one to inherit she’s determined to give him all the help he needs.

The box is full of JonJon’s toy cars, and after playing with them Jesse and the dead boy romp over by the farm wall – the one where nobody is allowed to go anymore…

Jesse’s uncle isn’t doing very well: all the tragedies have made him very sad and he’s drinking an awful lot.

There are other problems bothering Jesse. The entire family have stories about his grandmother and it’s clear that she was brave and determined and fought monsters all her life: is that, then, why she tried to drown him when he was a baby?

As Maritess tells her Canadian cousin about the time young Lola saved her school friends from a predatory Tiyanak – a baby-shaped carnivorous monster – and he prepares to ask her if she thinks he might be evil, her father comes in very drunk and shouts at him for leaving JonJon’s cars in the garden.

They are all he has left to remember his son and the boy’s favourite one is already missing. Jesse knows which one it is… the striped one JonJon calls “Zebra” which he wouldn’t share with him last night by the wall…

Uncle Tim hates the wall. It had something to do with his son’s death and Jesse knows he’ll get into trouble if he goes over it. But Uncle is so sad. He misses his boy and really wanted to bury Zebra with JonJon, but it’s gone and the man is so drunk and angry all the time now…

Jesse’s fear that Lola saw something evil in him is assuaged by Maritess who thinks he should use his gift to help people – just like just their grandmother used to -  so when JonJon appears again, Jesse climbs the hated wall and vanishes into the wild unknown beyond…

With Jesse’s first good deed successfully accomplished JonJon can rest and Uncle Tim is at peace. The troubled psychic is even a little less disturbed by his power and his apparent destiny, but that all changes on the trip back to the airport when Jesse sees something utterly horrifying…

Evocative, compelling, gently enthralling and with a genuinely scary shock ending, this superb kid’s chiller is filled with a fascinating new bestiary of monsters and boogey-men to bedazzle Western eyes and imaginations, but mostly relies on captivating art and top-notch storytelling to draw readers in. I loved it and I’m actually praying there’s a sequel in the pipeline…
Lola is ™ & © 2009 J. Torres. All other material © 2009 Oni Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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The Guild


By Felicia Day, Jim Rugg & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-549-0

The Guild is a US comedy show which first appeared on the web in 2007, brainchild of actress and author Felicia Day. The quirkily smart, geeky-outsider fantasy revolves around Cyd Sherman, a musician who is more than usually prone to problems in the real world and escapes the dreary horror of it all by joining like misfits in a cyber-spacey online gang (or “Guild”) in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG) called unsurprisingly “The Game”.

The live action episodes revolve around the interactions of Cyd and her associate ‘Knights of Good’ – all of whom find themselves more at home in an artificial universe of magic, myth, monsters and really mean people rather than mundane reality – although of course there are plenty of impossible tasks, unpalatable hardships and actual mean people here too.

You can check out the show – six seasons thus far – on Day’s dedicated YouTube channel Geek and Sundry…

We don’t do shows here, but since the material clearly overlaps with that old fashioned fantastic universe of comics, Dark Horse Comics approached Day in 2009 in search of a canny cross-fertilisation. The result was a 3-issue miniseries and a short story which appeared on the publisher’s own digital dimension in MySpace Dark Horse Presents #27. That pithy 2-page debut/introduction (illustrated by Jim Rugg and painted and coloured by Juan Ferreya & Dan Jackson) is included here at the conclusion of the main storyline.

On screen the seductive soap opera story is ongoing and began with the characters already in place and interacting, but The Guild comicbook gave Day the chance to work with an unlimited visual budget (that’s the advantage of comics: a monologue in a bedroom costs as much and as little to draw as all the hordes of hell unleashed and riding winged monkeys up the Champs–Elysées) and thus inspired her to reveal the secret origins of her outré comrades in a winning, hilarious and deftly moving prequel tale.

Cyd plays far less than second fiddle at the back of a sub-par orchestra and is very fed up with her crappy life. She knows that she’s a failure at everything and a disappointment to everybody.

Although she has a boyfriend and fools herself that it’s love, deep down she knows that Trevor is a manipulative, exploitative, controlling jerk only using her as roadie, housekeeper, bedwarmer, manager, press-officer, writer and arranger of the music he claims as his as he tries hopelessly to break into the rock biz.

She even goes all over town pinning up the flyers she designed for his third-rate band’s gigs…

Cyd first learned about the manic world of consensual alternate realities when she was pinning up a poster in a comicbook and gaming store and, on the insistence of the therapist her dad is paying for, one day tried to break out of her dis-comfort zone by making new friends – if only by becoming a completely different person in a role-playing alternate universe…

After yet another ungrateful disappointment from Trevor the Rock God, she sat at her keyboard and became Codex, a mystic healer in the captivating fairyland of The Game…

Soon she was exulting in graphic slaughter, thievery and high adventure, meeting loads of wild people all revelling in being someone or something other than they were…

And as she learns and evolves in fantasyland, Cyd makes true friends and proper foes, forming her own guild of like-minded questors. They’re all real even if they aren’t actually there, and their effect on Cyd even leads to a satisfactory showdown with the increasingly unbearable Trevor…

Sharp, clever, moving and painfully funny, this an engaging introduction to the milieu and characters of the show and if I’ve skimped on detail you’ll thank me when you marvel at the captivating interactions of the beguiling cast of adorable misfits and wonder at the astonishing facility of illustrator Rugg as he makes both grim reality and miraculous meta-world come to life – each in its own unforgettable manner…

With covers and supplemental artwork by Georges, Jeanty, Dexter Vines & Tariq Hassan, Matthew Stawicki, Kristian Donaldson, Cary Nord & Dave Stewart, Rugg & Dan Jackson, Juan Ferreyra, Paul Lee, Jason Gonzalez and Jon Adams, working designs and a sketchbook collection from illustrator Rugg, complete with commentary by editor Scott Allie, plus a Bonus Section of tryout pages by a crazed band of artists including Zack Finfrock, Indigo Kelleigh, Kevin McGovern and Ron Chan, this slim, fanciful and thoughtfully funny fantasy offers a wry counterpoint to both gaming bombast and comicbook blood and thunder whilst defending your right to another life, liberty of imagination and the pursuit of fairy gold…

If you need the odd, gentle laugh in your hectic, horrible life The Guild might be just the tonic…
The Guild © 2010 The Guild. All rights reserved.