Category: Horror Stories

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Showcase Presents the Spectre volume 1


By Gardner F. Fox, Bob Haney, Michael L. Fleisher, Paul Kupperberg, Murphy Anderson, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-3417-1

The Spectre is one of the oldest characters in DC’s vast stable, created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily in 1940 and debuting via a 2-part origin epic in More Fun Comics #52 and 53. Moreover, just like Siegel’s other iconic creation, he soon began to suffer from a basic design flaw: he’s just too darn powerful.

Unlike Superman however, this champion of justice was already dead, so he can’t really be logically or dramatically imperilled. Of course in those far off early days that wasn’t nearly as important as sheer spectacle: forcibly grabbing the reader’s utter attention and keeping it stoked to a fantastic fever pitch.

Starting as a virtually omnipotent ghost, the Grim Ghost evolved, over various returns, refits and reboots into a tormented mortal soul bonded inescapably to the actual embodiment of the biblical Wrath of God.

The story is a genuinely gruesome one: police detective Jim Corrigan was callously executed by gangsters before being called back to the land of the living. Ordered to fight crime and evil by a glowing light and disembodied voice, he was indisputably the most formidable hero of the Golden Age.

He has been revamped and revived many times, and in the 1990s was revealed to be God’s Spirit of Vengeance wedded to a human conscience. When Corrigan was finally laid to rest, Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan and latterly murdered Gotham City cop Crispus Allen replaced him as the mitigating conscience of the force of Divine Retribution…

However the true start of that radically revised and revitalised career began in the superhero-saturated mid-1960s when, hot on the heels of feverish fan-interest in the alternate world of the Justice Society of America and Earth-2 (where all the WWII heroes retroactively resided), DC began trying out solo revivals of 1940’s characters, as opposed to their wildly successful Silver Age reconfigurations such as Flash, Green Lantern, Atom and Hawkman…

This sublime and colossal Showcase selection collects and documents the Man of Darkness’ return in the Swinging Sixties, his landmark reinterpretation in the horror-soaked, brutalised 1970s and even finds room for some later appearances before the character was fully de-powered and retrofitted for the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe.

As such this mammoth monochrome tome (624 peril-packed pages!) contains Showcase #60, 61 and 64, The Spectre #1-10, team-up tales from The Brave and the Bold #72, 75, 116, 180 & 199 and DC Comics Presents #29, the lead strips from Adventure Comics #431-440 and one last hurrah from horror-anthology Ghosts #97-99, encompassing the end of 1965 to the middle of 1983.

As previously mentioned, DC tried out a number of Earth-2 iterations (Starman/Black Canary – with Wildcat – in The Brave and the Bold #61-62 whilst Showcase #55 & 56 spotlighted Doctor Fate & Hourman with a cameo from the original Green Lantern), but Schwartz and Fox only finally achieved their ambition to launch a Golden Age hero into his own title with the revival of the Ghostly Guardian in Showcase – but it was hard going and perhaps benefited from a growing general public interest in supernatural stories…

After three full length appearances and many guest-shots, The Spectre won his own solo series at the end of 1967, just as the super-hero craze went into a steep decline, but maybe Showcase #60 (January/February 1966) anticipated the rise of supernatural comics by re-introducing Corrigan and his phantom passenger in ‘War That Shook the Universe’ by Earth-2 team supreme Gardner F. Fox & Murphy Anderson.

This spectacular saga revealed that the Heroic Haunt had vanished two decades previously, leaving the fundamentally human Corrigan to pursue his war against evil on merely mortal terms until a chance encounter with a psychic investigator freed the ghost buried within him.

A diligent search revealed that, twenty years previously, a supernal astral invader had broken into the Earth plane and possessed a mortal, but was so inimical to our laws of reality that both it and the Grim Ghost were locked into their meat shells – until now…

Thus began a truly spectre-acular (don’t groan – that’s what they called it back then) clash with the devilish Azmodus that spanned all creation and blew the minds of us gobsmacked kids…

Issue #61 (March/April) upped the ante when the even more satanic Shathan the Eternal subsequently insinuated himself into our realm from ‘Beyond the Sinister Barrier’, stealing mortal men’s shadows until he was powerful enough to conquer the physical universe. This time The Spectre treated us to an exploration of the universe’s creation before narrowly defeating the source of all evil…

The Sentinel Spirit returned in Showcase #64 (September/October 1966) for a marginally more mundane but no less thrilling adventure when ‘The Ghost of Ace Chance’ took up residence in Jim’s body. By this time it was established that ghosts needed a mortal anchor to recharge their ectoplasmic “batteries”, and the unscrupulous crooked gambler was determined to inhabit the best frame available…

The try-out run concluded, the editors sat back and waited for sales figures to dictate the next move. When they proved inconclusive Schwartz orchestrated a concerted publicity campaign to further promote Earth-2’s Ethereal Adventurer.

The Brave and the Bold #72 (June/July 1967) saw the Spectre clash with Earth-1’s Scarlet Speedster in ‘Phantom Flash, Cosmic Traitor’ by Bob Haney, Carmine Infantino & Charles “Chuck” Cuidera. This sinister saga saw the mortal meteor transformed into a sinister spirit-force and power-focus for unquiet American aviator Luther Jarvis who returned from death in 1918 to wreak vengeance on the survivors of his squadron – until the Spectre intervened…

Due to the vagaries of comicbook scheduling, Brave and the Bold #75 (December 1967/January 1968) appeared at around the same time as The Spectre #1, although the latter had a cover-date of November/December 1967.

In the Batman team-up title – scripted by Haney and drawn by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito – the Ghostly Guardian joined the Dark Knight to free Gotham City’s Chinatown from ‘The Grasp of Shahn-Zi!’: an ancient oriental sorcerer determined to prolong his reign of terror at the expense of an entire community and through the sacrifice of an innocent child, after which the Astral Avenger finally, simultaneously, debuted in his own title…

The Spectre #1 featured ‘The Sinister Lives of Captain Skull’ by Fox & Anderson, and divulged how the botched assassination of American Ambassador Joseph Clanton and an experimental surgical procedure allowed one of the diplomat’s earlier incarnations to take over his body and, armed with mysterious eldritch energies, run amok on Earth.

Those “megacyclic energy” abilities enabled the revenant to harm and potentially destroy the Ghostly Guardian and compelled the Spectre to pursue the piratical Skull through a line of previous lives until he could find their source and purge the peril from all time and space…

With issue #2 (January/February 1968) artistic iconoclast Neal Adams came aboard for the Fox-scripted mystery ‘Die Spectre – Again’ wherein crooked magician Dirk Rawley accidentally manifested his etheric self and severely tested both Corrigan and his phantom partner as they sought to end the double-menace’s string of crimes, mundane and magical. At this time the first inklings of a distinct separation and individual identities began. The two halves of the formerly sole soul of Corrigan were beginning to disagree and even squabble…

New scripter Mike Friedrich joined Adams for #3’s ‘Menace of the Mystic Mastermind’ wherein pugilistic paragon Wildcat faced the inevitable prospect of age and infirmity even as an inconceivable force from another universe possessed petty thug Sad Jack Dold and turned him into a nigh-unstoppable force of cosmic chaos…

‘Stop that Kid… Before He Wrecks the World’ was written & illustrated by Adams and saw a similar trans-universal malignity deliberately empower a young boy as a prelude to its ultimate conquest, whilst #5’s ‘The Spectre Means Death?’ (all Adams again) appeared to show the Ghostly Guardian transformed into a pariah and deadly menace to society, until Jim’s investigations uncovered the emotion-controlling Psycho Pirate at the root of the Spectre’s problems…

Despite all the incredible talent and effort lavished upon it, The Spectre simply wasn’t finding a big enough audience. Adams departed for straight superhero glory elsewhere and a hint of changing tastes came as veteran illustrator of horror comics Jerry Grandenetti came aboard.

Issue #6 (September/October 1968) saw his eccentric, manic cartooning adding raw wildness to the returning Fox’s moody thriller ‘Pilgrims of Peril!’ and Murphy Anderson also re-enlisted to apply a solid ink grounding to the story of a sinister invasion by a quartet of phantom Puritans who invaded the slums of Gateway City, driving out the poor and hopeless as they sought lost arcane treasures. These would allow demon lord Nawor of Giempo access to Earth unless The Spectre could win his unlife or death duel with the trans-dimensional horror…

As the back of issue #7 was dedicated to a solo strip starring Hourman (not included in this collection), The Spectre saga here – by Fox, Grandenetti & Anderson – was a half-length tale which followed the drastic steps necessary to convince the soul of bank-robber Frankie Barron to move on. Since he was killed during a heist, the astral form of aversion therapy used to cure ‘The Ghost That Haunted Money!’ proved to be not only ectoplasmically effective but outrageously entertaining…

Issue #8 (January/February 1969) was scripted by Steve Skeates and began a last-ditch and obviously desperate attempt to turn The Spectre into something the new wave of anthology horror readers would buy.

As a twisted, time-lost apprentice wizard struggled to return to Earth after murdering his master and stealing cosmic might from the void, on the mundane plane an exhausted Ghostly Guardian neglected his duties and was taken to task by his celestial creator.

As a reminder of his error, Penitent Phantasm was burdened by a fluctuating weakness – which would change without warning – to keep him honest and earnest. What a moment for the desperate disciple Narkran to return then, determined to secure his elevated god-like existence by securing ‘The Parchment of Power Perilous!’…

The Spectre #9 completed the transition and opened with an untitled short from Friedrich (illustrated by Grandenetti & Bill Draut) which saw the Man of Darkness again overstep his bounds by executing a criminal. This prompted Corrigan to refuse the weary wraith the shelter of his reinvigorating form and, when the Grim Ghost then assaulted his own host form, the Heavenly Voice punished the spirit by chaining him to the dreadful Journal of Judgment: demanding he atone by investigating the lives inscribed therein in a trial designed to teach him again the value of mercy…

The now anthologised issue continued with ‘Abraca-Doom’ (Dennis J. O’Neil & Bernie Wrightson) as The Spectre attempted to stop a greedy carnival conjurer from signing a contract with the Devil, whilst ‘Shadow Show’ by Mark Hanerfeld & Jack Sparling detailed the fate of a cheap mugger who thought he could outrun the consequences of a capital crime…

The next issue gave up the ghost and The Spectre folded with #10 (May/June 1969), but not before a quartet of tantalising tales by writer or writers unknown showed what might have been…

‘Footsteps of Disaster’ with art from Grandenetti & George Roussos, followed a man from cradle to early grave and revealed the true wages of sin, whilst ‘Hit and Run’ (probably drawn by Ralph Reese) proved again that the Spirit of Judgment was not infallible and even human scum could be redeemed…

‘How Much Can a Guy Take?’ (Sparling) offered salvation to a shoeshine boy pushed almost too far by an arrogant mobster, and the series closed with a cunning murder mystery involving what appeared to be a killer ventriloquists doll in the Grandenetti & George Roussos illustrated ‘Will the Real Killer Please Rise?’

With that the Astral Avenger returned to comicbook limbo for nearly half a decade until changing tastes and another liberalising of the Comics Code saw him return as the lead feature in Adventure Comics #431 (January/February 1974) in a shocking run of macabre, ultra-violent tales from Michael L. Fleisher & Jim Aparo.

‘The Wrath of… The Spectre’ offered a far more stark and unforgiving take on the Spirit Sentinel and reflected the increasingly violent tone of the times as a gang of murderous thieves slaughtered the crew of a security truck and were tracked down by a harsh, uncompromising police lieutenant named Corrigan.

When the bandits were exposed, the cop unleashed a horrific green and white apparition from his body which inflicted ghastly punishments that horrendously fitted their crimes…

With art continuity (and no, I’m not sure what that means either), from Russell Carley, the draconian fables continued in #432 as in ‘The Anguish of… The Spectre’ assassins murdered millionaire Adrian Sterling and Corrigan met the victim’s daughter Gwen. Although the now-infallible Wrathful Wraith soon exposed and excised the culprits, the dead detective had to reveal his true nature to the grieving daughter. Moreover, Corrigan began to feel the stirring of impossible, unattainable yearnings…

Adventure #433 exposed ‘The Swami and… The Spectre’ as Gwen sought spiritual guidance from a ruthless charlatan who promptly paid the appalling price when he finally met a real ghost, whilst in #434 ‘The Nightmare Dummies and… The Spectre’ (with additional pencils by the great Frank Thorne) saw a plague of department store mannequins run wild in a killing spree at the behest of a crazed artisan who believed in magic – but couldn’t imagine the cost of his dabbling…

Issue #435 introduced journalist Earl Crawford who tracked the ghastly fallout of the vengeful spirit’s anti-crime campaign and became ‘The Man Who Stalked The Spectre!’ Of course once he saw the ghost in grisly action Crawford realised the impossibility of publishing this scoop…

Adventure #436 saw Crawford still trying to sell his story as ‘The Gasmen and… The Spectre’ set the Spectral Slaughterman on the trail of a gang who killed everybody at a car show as a demonstration of intent before blackmailing the city. Their gorily inescapable fate only put Crawford closer to exposing Corrigan, after which in #437 ‘The Human Bombs and… The Spectre’ (with pencils from Ernie Chan & Aparo inks) found a kidnapper abducting prominent persons – including Gwen – to further a merciless mad  scheme of amassing untold wealth… until the Astral Avenger ended their depredations forever…

In #438 ‘The Spectre Haunts the Museum of Fear’ (Chan & Aparo again) saw a crazed taxidermist turning people into unique dioramas until the Grim Ghost intervened, but the end was in sight again for the Savage Shade and #439’s ‘The Voice that Doomed… The Spectre’ (all Aparo) turned the wheel of death full circle, as the Heavenly Presence who created him allowed Corrigan to fully live again so that he could marry Gwen.

Sadly it was only to have the joyous hero succumb to ‘The Second Death of The… Spectre’ (#440, July/August 1975) and tragically resume his endless mission…

This milestone serial set a stunning new tone and style for the Ghostly Guardian which has informed each iteration ever since…

From midway through that run, Brave and the Bold #116 provided another continuity-crunching supernatural team-up with Batman in a far less graphically violent struggle against the ‘Grasp of the Killer Cult’ (Haney & Aparo). When Kali-worshipping Thugs from India seemingly targeted survivors of a WWII American Army Engineer unit, Detective Corrigan and the Dark Knight clashed on both the method and motives of the mysterious murderers…

DC Comics Presents #29 (January 1981, by Len Wein, Jim Starlin & Romeo Tanghal) revealed what happened after Supergirl was knocked unconscious after a cataclysmic battle and sent hurtling through dimensions measureless to man. When her cousin tried to follow, the Ghostly Guardian was dispatched to stop the Metropolis Marvel from transgressing ‘Where No Superman Has Gone Before’…

By the early 1980s the horror boom had exhausted itself and DC’s anthology comics were disappearing. As part of the effort to keep them alive, Ghosts featured a 3-part serial starring “Ghost-Breaker” and inveterate sceptic Dr. Terry 13 who at last encountered ‘The Spectre’ in issue #97 (February 1981, by Paul Kupperberg, Michael R. Adams & Tex Blaisdell), where terrorists invaded a high society séance and were summarily dispatched by the inhuman poetic justice of the Astral Avenger…

Now determined to destroy the monstrous revenant vigilante, Dr. 13 returned in #98 as ‘The Haunted House and The Spectre’ found the Ghost-Breaker interviewing Earl Crawford and subsequently discovering the long sought killer of his own father. Before 13 could act, however, the Spectre appeared and stole his justifiable retribution from the aggrieved psychic investigator…

The drama closed in Ghosts #99 as ‘Death… and The Spectre’ (Kupperberg, Michael R. Adams & Tony DeZuniga) found the scientist and the spirit locked in one final furious confrontation.

This staggering compendium of supernatural thrillers concludes with two more team-up classics from Brave and the Bold beginning with ‘The Scepter of the Dragon God’ by Fleisher & Aparo (from #180, November 1980).

Although Chinese wizard Wa’an-Zen stole enough mystic artefacts to conquer the world and destroy the Spectre, he foolishly underestimated the skill and bravery of the merely mortal Batman, whilst #199 (June 1983) ‘The Body-napping of Jim Corrigan’, by Mike W. Barr, Ross Andru & Rick Hoberg, found the ethereal avenger baffled by the abduction and disappearance of his mortal host.

Even though he could not trace his own body, the Spectre did know where the World’s Greatest Detective hung out…

Ranging from fabulously fantastical to darkly – violently – enthralling, these comic masterpieces perfectly encapsulate the way superheroes changed over a brief twenty year span, but remain throughout some of the most beguiling and exciting tales of DC’s near-80 years of existence. If you love comicbooks you’d be crazy to ignore this one…
© 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1983, 2012 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved

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Tales from The House of Mystery


By Jack Oleck, illustrated by Berni Wrightson (Warner Paperback Library)
ISBN: 0-446-75226-6- 095

When superheroes entered their second decline in the early 1970s, four of the six surviving newsstand comicbook companies (Archie, Charlton, DC, Gold Key, Harvey and Marvel) relied increasingly on horror and suspense anthologies to bolster their flagging sales. Even wholesome Archie briefly produced Red Circle Sorcery/Chillers comics and their teen-comedy core moved gently into tales of witchcraft, mystery and imagination.

DC’s first generation of mystery titles had followed the end of the first Heroic Age when most comicbook publishers of the era began releasing crime, romance and horror genre anthologies to recapture the older readership which was drifting away to other mass-market entertainments like television and the movies.

As National Comics in 1951, the company bowed to the inevitable and launched a comparatively straight-laced anthology – which nevertheless became one of their longest-running and most influential titles – with the December 1951/January 1952 launch of The House of Mystery.

When a hysterical censorship scandal led to witch-hunting hearings attacking comicbooks and newspaper strips (feel free to type Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, April-June 1954 into your search engine at any time) the industry panicked, adopting a castrating straitjacket of stringent self-regulatory rules and admonitions.

Even though mystery/suspense titles produced under the aegis of the Comics Code Authority were sanitised, anodyne affairs in terms of Shock and Gore, the appetite for suspense was still high, and in 1956 National introduced sister titles Tales of the Unexpected and House of Secrets.

Supernatural thrillers and spooky monster stories were dialled back into marvellously illustrated, genteel, rationalistic fantasy-adventure vehicles which nonetheless dominated the market until the 1960s when the super-hero returned in force – having begun a renaissance after Julius Schwartz reintroduced the Flash in Showcase #4, 1956.

Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom and a host of other costumed cavorters generated a gaudy global bubble of masked myrmidons which even forced the dedicated anthology suspense titles to transform into super-character split-books with Martian Manhunter and Dial H for Hero in House of Mystery and Mark Merlin – later Prince Ra-Man – sharing space with anti-hero Eclipso in House of Secrets.

When the caped crusader craziness peaked and popped, Secrets was one of the first casualties, folding with the September-October 1966 issue. House of Mystery carried on with its eccentric costumed cohort until #173 and Tales of the Unexpected to #104.

However nothing combats censorship better than falling profits, and at the end of the 1960s the superhero boom busted again, with many titles gone and some of the industry’s most prestigious series circling the drain too…

This real-world Crisis led to the surviving publishers of the field agreeing to loosen their self-imposed restraints against crime and horror comics. Nobody much cared about gangster titles at the time, but as the liberalisation coincided with another bump in public interest in all aspects of the Great Unknown, the resurrection of scary stories was a foregone conclusion and obvious “no-brainer.”

Thus with absolutely no fanfare at all House of Mystery and Unexpected switched to scary stories and House of Secrets rose again with issue #81, (cover-dated August-September 1969); retasked and retooled to cater to a seemingly insatiable public appetite for tales of mystery, horror and imagination … Before long a battalion of supernatural suspense titles dominated DC and other companies’ publishing schedules again.

Simultaneously and contiguously, there had been a revolution in popular fiction during the 1950s with a huge expansion of affordable paperback books, driving companies to develop extensive genre niche-markets, such as war, western, romance, science-fiction, fantasy and horror…

Always hungry for more product for their cheap ubiquitous lines, many old novels and short stories collections were republished, introducing new generations to fantastic pulp authors like Robert E. Howard, Otis Adelbert Kline, H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth and many others.

In 1955, spurred on by the huge parallel success of cartoon and gag book collections, Bill Gaines began releasing paperback compendiums culling the best strips and features from his landmark humour magazine Mad and thus comics’ Silver Age was mirrored in popular publishing by an insatiable hunger for escapist fantasy fiction.

In 1964 Bantam Books began reprinting the earliest pulp adventures of Doc Savage, triggering a revival of pulp prose superheroes, and seemed the ideal partner when Marvel began a short-lived attempt to “novelise” their comicbook stable with The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker and Captain America in the Great Gold Steal.

Although growing commercially by leaps and bounds, Marvel in the early 1960s was still hampered by a crippling distribution deal limiting the company to 16 titles (which would curtail their output until 1968), so each new comicbook had to fill the revenue-generating slot (however small) of an existing title. Even though the costumed characters were selling well, each new title would limit the company’s breadth of genres (horror, western, war, etc) and comics were still a very broad field at that time. It was putting a lot of eggs in one basket and superheroes had failed twice before for Marvel.

As Stan Lee cautiously replaced a spectrum of genre titles and specialised in superheroes, a most fortunate event occurred with the advent of the Batman TV show in January 1966. Almost overnight the world went costumed-hero crazy and many publishers repackaged their old comics stories in cheap and cheerful, digest-sized monochrome paperbacks. Archie, Tower, Marvel and DC all released such reformatted strip books and the latter two carried on their attempts to legitimise their output by getting them into actual bookshops to this day.

Released in 1973, when the horror boom was at its peak, Tales from The House of Mystery was another attempt to breach the bookshop barrier. A prose anthology by veteran comics scripter Jack Oleck, the compendium adapted and modified, for a presumed older audience, eight short scary stories from the comics, each magnificently illustrated by DC’s top terror artist “Berni” Wrightson, who also provided a moodily evocative frontispiece starring the comic’s macabre host Cain and the stunning painted cover above.

The wry, dry shock-ending mini-epics begin with ‘Chamber of Horrors’ wherein a violently paranoid young man gets the notion that the newcomers in town are a family of vampires, after which ‘Nightmare’ reveals the uncanny fate of an obnoxious American vacationer who was determined to ruin a day-trip to Stonehenge for all those gullible over-imaginative fools on the tour bus…

‘Collector’s Item’ related how two old friends sharing a passion for coin collecting met a ghastly fate after squabbling over some particularly impressive specimens from ancient Judea, and ‘Born Loser’ proved that for some poor schmucks even magic wasn’t enough to escape a shrewish wife and the consequences of murder…

‘Tomorrow, the World’ detailed the efforts of a concerned psychiatrist who was unable to shake the convictions of his hopeless patient that a coven of witches and warlocks was about to conquer the world for Satan, whilst the bittersweet romance of ‘The Haunting’ revealed a shocking truth about the house acquired by devoted newlyweds Joel and Peggy.

Voodoo and reincarnation proved the lie to the maxim ‘You Only Die Once’ after a French plantation owner thought he had gotten away with murdering his coldly disdainful wife, and this brief box of dark delights ends on a savagely ironic and even cruel note as well-meaning social workers and doctors cure a desolated lame orphan of his foolish belief in a happy fantasy land by an ‘Act of Grace’…

By today’s standards this octet of occult thrillers might seem a little tame or dated, and the experiment clearly had no lasting effect on either comics or book consumers, but this little oddity is still a fascinating experiment that will delight comics completists, arch-nostalgics and fantasy fans alike…
© 1973 National Periodical Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire


By Doug Petrie & Ryan Sook (Dark Horse/Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-200-5

A hunger to be frightened is printed on our genes and courses through our surging blood. Psycho-killers, ravening monsters, unsuspected epidemics, funfair rides, overdue bills and a host of other things – daft and not – all trigger our visceral, panicky fright, fight or flight response and thus always feature highly in our mass entertainments.

These days however the slow-building tension and cerebral suspense of the printed genre has been largely overtaken and superseded by the shock-values and sudden kinetic surprise action of both small and big screens with the entire oeuvre also doused in a hot sauce of teen alienation, unrequited love and uncontrollable hormones – all making for a heady (if often uncomplicated and flavourless) brew.

That transition was very much the result of a landmark American TV show and assorted media spin-offs which refocused the zeitgeist. However Dark Horse Comics’ clever, witty graphic interpretation of the cult global mega-hit TV franchise Buffy the Vampire Slayer is what interests me most, so here’s another look at the still-active illustrated narrative iteration to revel in and reel over.

Once the company secured the strip licensing rights, they began producing an engaging regular series, a welter of impressive original Graphic Novels, numerous miniseries, spin-offs and specials. Moreover, long after the beloved TV show finally died, from 2007 onward comics delivered creator Joss Whedon’s un-produced continuity-canonical Season Eight and beyond to the faithful fans and followers.

In case you’re young or just terminally clueless: Buffy Summers was a run of the fashion mill bimbo-ised Californian Valley Girl and hip teen cheerleader until she suddenly metamorphosed overnight into a monster-killer: latest inheritor of a mystic, unpredictable genetic lottery which transformed mortal maids into human killing machines historically known as Slayers.

After moving to the small Californian hamlet of Sunnydale – secretly situated on the edge of a mystic portal The Hellmouth – she and a close band of friends battled devils and demons and every sort of horror inexorably drawn to the area and all of whom, what and which considered humanity a snack and our world an eldritch “fixer-upper” opportunity…

Scripted by prominent screenwriter and producer Doug Petrie (in his time a writer, director and co-executive producer on the Buffy show) and sublimely illustrated by Ryan Sook, Ring of Fire was released in 2000 as a slim, full-colour, all-original graphic novel which firmly established the artist as a major comics talent.

I’m concentrating here on the Titan Books British edition and – if you’re asking – the tale is set during TV Season 2 (which ran from Autumn 1997 to Spring 1998) when Buffy’s mysterious vampire boyfriend Angel had reverted to a soulless slaughterer of innocents.

His latest victim was High School computer teacher Jenny Calendar, who moonlighted as a gypsy witch and practising technopagan. She was also the one true love of Buffy’s mentor Rupert Giles, a Watcher of the venerable cult tasked with training and assisting Slayers in their anti-arcane endeavours.…

The suspense unfolds one dark and stormy night twelve miles off the coast in ‘The Rising’ as a Japanese cargo ship transporting ancient Samurai armour weathers staggering waves and a visit from a ghastly vampiric horror calling himself “Angelus”…

The 500-year-old war suit once belonged to warrior demon Kelgor, who tied his power to it and raised an army of undead killers in 16th century Japan.

Now all Angelus and his less-than-willing allies Spike and Drusilla need to bring on the necromantic End of the World designated “The Ring of Fire” is the corpse of Kelgor himself (hidden by Watchers half a millennium ago) – and they’re expecting the Slayer to find that for them…

Cool vampire villain and über-predator Spike eventually became a love-interest and even a moodily tarnished white knight, but at the time of this collection he was still a blood-hungry, immortal immoral jaded psychopath – every girl’s dream date – even though he was severely wounded and confined to a wheelchair. His eternal paramour was Drusilla: a scarily demented precognitive vampire who originally made him an immortal bloodsucker. She thrived on new decadent thrills and revelled in baroque and outré bloodletting…

With Giles all but paralysed by grief, “Scooby-Gang” stalwarts, Willow, Xander and Oz are left to search the reference files for information. As their painstaking study bears dark fruit Giles is ambushed by Angel and Dru at Jenny’s grave. Buffy is there to rescue him, but that just gives Spike the opportunity to follow the merely human vampire hunters and activate the Samurai’s blazing revival spell…

Rushing to their side Buffy manages to (mostly) destroy the freshly resurrected Kelgor, but as she pursues the Slayer is arrested by Federal spooks who know exactly who and what she is…

Frustrated but not thwarted the vicious vampire trio are at each others throats until Dru realises that there is still a little life in Kelgor’s remains. Moreover, the demon is offering to share his centuries old back-up plan with them.

Hidden with the scattered remains of ‘The Seven Samurai’ graves throughout the state is the secret of true resurrection, and if they gather the contents of those hidden toms, all their wicked wishes can still come true…

Meanwhile, locked in a covert police detention centre Buffy faces exposure to the world and worst yet, her mother…

Giles is gone: fallen far off the deep end and reverted to his old, manic persona of “Ripper”, but that’s not a bad thing since he knows the people who arrested Buffy aren’t government agents… or even people.

However before he can get to her, back-up Slayer Kendra busts her imprisoned predecessor out.

(When Buffy once briefly died the next Slayer was activated, and even though the Blonde Bombshell was subsequently revived, Kendra, once here, wasn’t going away…)

The manic action ramps into high gear as the Japanese hell-lord is finally fully reconstituted and forms an alliance with Dru, leaving Angel and Spike twisting in the wind even as the “Feds” are exposed as opportunistic demons trying to secure the resurrection spell for themselves in ‘Kelgor Unbound’.

They are ultimately frustrated in that diabolical dream as Ripper has taken off with it, crazily hellbent on bringing back his Jenny…

…And across town Buffy, Kendra and the gang are too late to stop the final ritual. Dru and Kelgor exultantly awaken a colossal flame-breathing devil bird to expedite their conquest of humanity and, forced into a tempestuous alliance with Angel and Spike, the vastly overmatched Buffy and Co need more magic than Willow can conjure.

They need Giles back or the world is lost…

Visually engaging, sharply scripted and proceeding at a breakneck rollercoaster pace, this smart and furious action-fest perfectly captures the brittle, intoxicating spirit of the TV series and remains an easily accessible romp even if you’re not familiar with the vast backstory: a creepy chronicle and torrid thriller as easily enjoyed by the most callow neophyte as by any dedicated devotee, and this compulsive chronicle also includes a quirky introduction by author Petrie and a fascinating sketchbook/commentary section by editor Scott Allie, liberally illustrated with production art and preliminary designs from Ryan Sook.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ & © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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Mesmo Delivery


By Rafael Grampá with Marcus Penna, translated by Júlio Mairena (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-465-3

In an industry and art form that has become so very dependent on vast interlocking storylines, an encyclopaedic knowledge of a million other yarns and the tacit consent to sign up for another million episodes before reaching any kind of narrative payoff, the occasional short, sharp, intensely stand-alone tale is as welcome and vital as a cold beer in the noon-day desert.

Just such a salutary singleton was Mesmo Delivery, first solo English-language release of singularly gifted writer/artist Rafael Grampá who originally devised the macabre and gritty thriller in his native Brazil in 2008.

Picked up and translated by Dark Horse two years later, this stark and spookily effective grindhouse/trucker movie amalgam offers dark chills, gritty black humour and eerie, compulsive mystery in equal, intoxicating amounts. And it all starts, unfolds and ends here. No muss, no fuss, no busload of tie-ins.

Aging, raddled Elvis impersonator Sangrecco is a very odd deliveryman working for a rather unique haulage business. For a start he can’t drive, which is why hulking, gentle cash-starved ex-boxer Rufo has been temporarily hired by the boss to operate the truck on a run through very bleak bad country.

Rufo doesn’t ask questions. He just drives the big container rig with its mysterious, unspecified cargo that he’s not allowed to see to God knows where, listening to the obnoxious, pompous Sangrecco mouth off about his many, unappreciated talents.

Things take a bad turn when they break at the isolated Standart Truck Stop. The Elvis freak is too lazy to even fetch his own beer, and when Rufo takes care of business and grudgingly tries to pay, a sleazy pack of locals trick him into an impromptu street fight on a cash-bet.

The ploy is a set-up and when Rufo proves unexpectedly tough the prize-fight gets too serious and results in a fatality – possibly two…

Street-fighting head tough Forceps then convinces his “townie” cronies and the other onlookers that they need to get rid of all the witnesses.

…Which is when old Sangrecco reveals what his speciality is…

Stark, brutal, rollercoaster-paced and rendered with savage, exhilarating bravura, this thundering, down-and-dirty fable grips like a vice and hits like a juggernaut, providing the kind of excitement every jaded thriller fan dreams of.

Also included in this slim, scary and mesmerising tome is an effusive Introduction from Brian Azzarello, pin-ups by Mike Allred, Eduardo Risso, Craig Thompson and Fábio Moon and a stunning 16-page sketch, design and commentary section ‘Making of Mesmo Delivery’.

Since Mesmo Delivery, Grampá has gone on to shine with his deliciously eccentric Furry Water as well as on such established titles as Hellblazer, American Vampire, Strange Tales and Uncanny X-Force amongst others, but this superbly visceral, raw storm of sheer visual dexterity and narrative guile is an ideal example of pared back, stripped down, pure comics creativity that no mature lover of the medium can afford to miss.

Mesmo Delivery ™ and © 2008, 2010 Rafael Grampá. 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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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Dust Waltz


By Dan Brereton, Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea (Dark Horse/Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-057-4

Terrifying things are in our blood. Scary monsters, rabid maniacs, Armageddon, being stuck at school: all trigger our visceral, panicky fright, fight or flight response and thus always feature highly in our mass entertainments.

These days the slow-building tension and cerebral suspense of the genre has been largely overtaken and by shock-values and surprise action, with the mix liberally doused in a hot sauce of teen alienation, unrequited love and uncontrollable hormones – all making for a heady brew indeed.

This transition was very much the result of a clever, witty, breakthrough TV show and the long-lived comicbook tie-in which refocused the international zeitgeist, so here’s another look at Dark Horse Comics’ interpretation of the cult global mega-hit TV franchise Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dark Horse won the strip licensing rights in the USA, subsequently producing an engaging regular series, a welter of impressive miniseries, original Graphic Novels, spin-offs and specials. Moreover, when the beloved TV iteration finally died, from 2007 on comics delivered creator Joss Whedon’s un-made continuity-canonical Season Eight and beyond to the faithful fans and followers.

In case you’ve lived in a bubble all this time: Buffy Summers was a clueless Valley Girl and hip teen cheerleader until she suddenly turned into a monster-killer: latest inheritor of a mystic, unpredictable genetic lottery which transformed mortal maids into human killing machines: Slayers.

Living in the small California hamlet of Sunnydale on the edge of a mystic portal – The Hellmouth – she and a close band of friends battled devils and demons and every sort of horror inexorably drawn to the area and who/what/which considered humanity a snack and Earth an eldritch “fiver-upper” opportunity.

The Dust Waltz, scripted by graphic horror maestro Dan Brereton and illustrated by Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea, was the initial comics offering, released in 1997 as a slim, full-colour, all-original graphic novel which firmly established the tone and timbre of the forthcoming series. The following year Titan Books reprinted the tale for the British market and – if you really need to know – the tale is set during TV Season 2 (which ran from Autumn 1997 to Spring 1998)…

It all begins in ‘Promenade’ as a brace of ancient vampiric horrors slowly cruise towards California and a showdown in sleepy Sunnydale, whilst at the local High School Buffy is still insolently resisting the stern admonitions of mentor Giles, a Watcher of the venerable cult tasked with training and assisting the Slayer in her anti-arcane endeavours.

A merciful interlude is offered when the Watcher invites Buffy and her gang – Willow, Xander and Cordelia – to accompany him to the Baytown Port to meet his niece Jane, imminently due to disembark from a world cruise.

It also offers the squad their first, albeit unsuspected, glimpse of Vampire “Old Ones” Lilith and Lamia, who have travelled to the Hellmouth with their puissant, bloodsucking Champions to indulge in a savage ritualistic combat dubbed the Dust Waltz…

Events kick into high gear that night when Buffy, on monster patrol with reformed vampire boyfriend Angel, encounter and destroy one of those ancient Champions.

Deprived of her weapon in the ritual, Lilith decides that Angel will be his replacement – whatever it takes…

In ‘Moondance’ the tension intensifies Buffy hunts for the vanished Angel, with Jane tagging along in defiance of Giles’ wishes. The Bloody Sisters have brought all manner of beasts and creatures with them, however, and soon the gang is captured and dragged to the Hellmouth even as the Watcher frantically tries to discover the true purpose of the dark ceremony…

Buffy however is far more direct and simply marches straight into the monsters’ midst to deal with the threat and free her friends “slayer-style” in the blistering action-packed eponymous conclusion ‘The Dust Waltz’.

Of course even after trashing the vampire hordes there’s the small problem of un-summoning the colossal elder god the battle has aroused…

Visually engaging, sharply scripted and proceeding at a breakneck rollercoaster pace, this smart and straightforward action-fest perfectly captures the brittle, intoxicating spirit of the TV series and remains an easily accessible romp even if you’re not familiar with the vast backstory: a creepy chronicle and torrid thriller as easily enjoyed by the most callow neophyte as by the dedicated devotee – and besides, with the shows readily available on TV and DVD, if you aren’t a follower yet you soon could – and should – be…
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ & © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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The Wasteland


By Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000UE4MBE

During the anything-goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat the upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned funnybooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned childhood flirtation.

DC pioneered new, more mature-oriented niche imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but undoubtedly some of the most intriguing treats came out of their Piranha Press line, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this off-key, adult special projects imprint, both the resultant releases and reader’s reaction to them were passionately mixed.

It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan, but the delivery is always problematic.

Is the problem resistance to the medium? Then try radical art or narrative styles, unusual design or typography, and use talent from outside the medium to fill your books: you get some intriguing results, but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating those readers already on board…

This superbly eclectic and overwhelmingly effective collection partially mitigated that risk by using new creators with an already established pedigree outside the comics industry and material which had found a fan-base elsewhere in publishing…

It’s also was one of the best and most wickedly addictive books Piranha produced…

Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman had worked together since college, producing self-published illustrated stories which they sold direct to local bookstores. This led to a macabre and deliciously dark panel-gag series published in the L.A. Reader and movie magazine Fangoria and the creation of stunningly off-kilter, ironically post-modern and media-celebrated cartoon-fiction analect Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, which winningly combined outré, edgy domesticity with the aesthetic sensibilities of Jean Paul Sartre, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Charles Addams, Aubrey Beardsley and Gahan Wilson. It was not your average comicbook…

The Piranha Press experiment was always a tenuous dream in a cutthroat business, and though BSFUC was undoubtedly its greatest triumph – 41 delirious issues, some specials and a “Best Of” collection – the imprint was radically restructured in 1992 and Dave and Dan moved on and out to Hollywood.

Before they finally left, however, the company published also The Wasteland: a compilation – with some new material – of that aforementioned gag feature…

Produced as a single captioned panel, the strip offered the trademarked weird ideas and compelling, alluring prose rendered (sur)real via lovely, sketchy, scratchy, frantically evocative monochrome illustrations with the same skewed worldview, supplemented with a heaping helping of mordant Gary Larson wryness added to the mix.

There’s no point my trying to relate the contents of this superb, tragically out-of-print but mercifully still available tome: 128 pages of graphic imagery blending the cute with the grotesque, the mundane with the bizarre and the unexpected with the cheerily distasteful which you just have to see to believe.

All I can do here is tease you with a few atypically typical sample subject-lines such as ‘Men without Women meet Dogs without Snouts’, ‘The Little Cyclops Puppy Nobody Would Play With’, ‘Cheerleaders on Fire’, ‘Lover’s Hop, for the Less-than-Devastated’, ‘The Substitute Executioner’, ‘My Dinner with Medusa’, ‘Jump-Starting the Dog’, ‘We Got Along Swimmingly Once I Learned They Hated Me’, ‘A Day at the Nun Jousts’ ‘Rudolph the Red Light Reindeer’, ‘Zero-Gravity Autopsy’, ‘The Gas Chambermaid’ and ‘Rumble Monks’, and rest assured that some of you will now be unable to rest until you experience the sheer creative anarchy for yourselves…

Happy Easter, comic fans…
The Wastelands © 1989 Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman. All Rights Reserved.

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Clubbing


By Andi Watson & Josh Howard (Minx/Titan Books edition)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-580-4

In 2007 DC comics had a worthy go at building new markets by creating the Minx imprint: dedicated to producing comics material for the teen/young adult audience – especially the ever-elusive girl readership – that had embraced translated manga material, momentous global comics successes such as Maus and Persepolis and those abundant and prolific fantasy serials which produced such pop phenomena as Roswell High, Twilight and even Harry Potter.

Sadly after only a dozen immensely impressive and decidedly different graphic novels Minx shut up shop in October 2008, markedly NOT citing publishing partner Random House’s failure to get the books onto the appropriate shelves of major bookstore chains as the reason.

Nevertheless the books which were published are still out there and most of them are well worth tracking down – either in the US originals or the British editions published by Titan Books.

One of the most engaging was Clubbing, from Andi Watson & Josh Howard, which stylishly and wittily blended teen rebellion and shopping-culture insouciance with murder-mystery and supernatural horror in an audacious and winning black and white, cross-cultural romantic romp in Wordsworth Country…

Charlotte Brook has been a bad girl. London’s most self-absorbed fashionista, social butterfly and shopping diva, “Lottie” got caught using a homemade fake I.D. to get into an out-of-bounds West End nightclub and ended up coming home in a police car…

Her outraged but rather disinterested parents simply bundled her off for the summer to the wilds of the Lake District where her dull grandfather and good old Grandma Aggie are going to put her to work in their new Golf resort.

Faced with the dire prospect of months of rain, no Wi-Fi coverage, Golf, Women’s Institute do’s, old people, hicks and yokels, golf and mud and golf, Lottie is far from happy, but as always Aggie’s ubiquitous cakes and cuppas go some small way towards assuaging the agony.

Granddad Archie Fitz-Talbot‘s time is constantly taken up with the on-going and behind schedule conversion of his posh old country club into a major modern sport and leisure venue and, after only one wind-blown, rain-sodden tour in the most fabulous outfit from her stylishly inappropriate wardrobe, Lottie realises that she’s actually in hell.

Her poor beloved shoes are all doomed too…

The local teens are a dire lot, rough, rude and pretentious; more interested in gore, blood and faux Satanism rather than music and fashion – like any self-respecting Goth should be – and as for the nice young man Aggie is trying to set her up with, Lottie wouldn’t be seen dead with a guy who loves fishing and golf no matter how good looking he is…

Howard is the least of her problems. In their affable, comfortable way, Archie and Aggie are determined to torture her to death: they feed her wholesome stodgy food, drag her all over the place on walks and trips through the beautiful countryside, take her to W.I. galas and, horror of horrors, ask her to work in the gift-shop with ghastly golf pro Tom Hutchinson – at least until she accidentally burns it down…

Things get decidedly strange after Lottie clashes with officious wizened-ancient employee Mrs. Geraldine Gibbons over towels in the gym, and again at a W.I. cake-baking contest. The old biddy has a real bee in her bonnet and babbles on about secrets and hidden truths and is clearly bingo-wing bonkers…

Lottie begins to suspect otherwise when she and the slowly growing in coolness Howard find the old bat’s strangely mutilated body in a water-hazard on the Links…

Some of those sinister secrets start to emerge when the shaken teen then discovers old Archie is a bit of a player – Urgh! wrinklies indulging in illicit lurrve – and might need to get rid of the occasional octogenarian bit of rough, but something just doesn’t add up and before long Lottie and Howard are grudgingly, disbelievingly swept into a bizarre and baffling mystery with demonic cults, a horrific monster menace from beyond Reality and staggering personal implications for Lottie and her entire family…

Clubbing is a sharp, witty, subtly funny and intriguing coming of age horror-thriller-comedy which follows all the rules of the teen romance genre yet manages to inject a huge helping of novelty and individual character into the mix: a perfect vehicle for attracting to our medium new and youthful readers with no abiding interest in outlandish power-fantasies or vicarious vengeance-gratification – and yes, that does mean girls…

This snazzy so-British reading rave also includes ‘Lottie’s Lexicon’: a cool guide to speaking young Londoner, full creator biographies and three tantalising preview segments from other tempting MINX titles.

Track them all down and enjoy a genuinely different kind of comic book…
© 2007 Andi Watson and DC Comics. All rights reserved.

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Supernatural: Origins


By Peter Johnson, Geoff Johns, Matthew Don Smith & various (WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-754-7

Comicbooks have always enjoyed a long, successful affiliation and nigh-symbiotic relationship with television, but in these days when even the ubiquitous goggle-box business is paralysed and endangered by on-demand streaming, too many channels and far too much choice, the numbers and types of program that migrate to funnybooks is increasingly limited.

Excluding kids’ animation shows, cult fantasy adventure series now predominate in this dwindling arena and one of the best to make that transition to the printed page was the epic monster-fighting saga of two brothers literally on the road to Hell as they tracked down unnatural horrors, mystical malignancies and all the unexplainable things that treat humanity as fair game and delicious delicacies…

Over eight seasons since 2006, the TV series Supernatural has followed Sam and Dean Winchester whose lives were forever changed when a yellow-eyed demon killed their mother.  The horrific event drove their distraught father into a life of eternal wandering: stalking and killing the impossible beasts and horrors he now knew lurked in every shadow.

Years after growing up from a baby on the road to hell, Sam got out of the life and tried to live a normal existence but was eventually dragged back when disaffected, alienated brother Dean called to say that their father had gone missing. It happened right about the time Sam’s girlfriend was killed by a fiery demon…

This impressive official prequel to the TV show follows the dysfunctional Winchester family in the days, months and years after the boys’ mother floated up into the air and spontaneously combusted, leaving father John with unanswerable questions, a hunger for vengeance and two unnatural kids to raise…

After Mary’s death, John packs little Dean and baby Sam into his car and goes into a spin of booze and bar-fights, until he meets palm-reader Missouri Mosley. The prognosticator offers veiled answers and a glimpse into a world of mumbo-jumbo which is proven to be impossibly real when an unseen monster kills Mary’s best friend Julie, who had been babysitting the traumatised boys. Lodged in her ghastly remains was a huge rune-carved fang from no creature ever born on Earth…

Armed with only hints into the true nature of the world, the former marine begins a quest for the tooth’s owner and in Tempe, Arizona meets prickly, reclusive outré scholar Fletcher Gable who identifies it as belonging to a Black Shuck… a Hellhound.

Sending Winchester on to a reported sighting of such in California, the savant offers a further gift: a blank journal in which to record all the notes, photos, clippings, drawings, thoughts and experiences that will inevitably occur now that father and sons are irrevocably set on their particular road to Perdition…

The wise man and his latest student are both painfully unaware that Winchester is himself being hunted…

When Mary’s formidable brother Jacob comes looking for the boys and fearing the worst (although he has no idea of what the can worst actually be), he too becomes embroiled in the quest – to his eternal regret – and only the arrival of the mysterious shadower saves John from becoming the latest casualty of the hellhound…

“Hunter” – more a job description than his name – helps Winchester clear up the mess and cover up the evidence before introducing the now-doubly bereaved and shell-shocked single parent to the full horror of the hidden world of the Supernatural. It’s 1983 and all Hell’s breaking loose…

Soon Winchester is part of an amorphous hidden association of loners known as Hunters: mortals who’ve lost loved ones, seen the truth and had the guts to look for payback…

Partnered with his brusque and enigmatic mentor, John Winchester is still looking for a golden eyed demon and a hellhound with a missing fang as he tackles his first monster – a leaping carnivore known as a “Heeler” with Hunter and another clean-up man named Ichi.

However by the time the trio return to the grimly unique bar known as Harvelle’s Roadhouse where Sam and Dean have been waiting under the lethally efficient care of waitress Ellen, John is a full-blooded monster killer. Good thing too, as Ichi isn’t friendly or human anymore…

Thus begins the perilous pattern: John and Hunter dumping the kids on someone blithely oblivious or horribly in on the secret for a few days whilst they take care of business and that journal filling up with accounts of incredible horror.

Winchester is a fast learner and, after meeting a resurrected priest who gives him a few precious tainted moments with Mary’s spirit, he and his extremely hands-on senior partner revisit Fletcher Gable with some useful intel on the rune-carved fang. Before long they’re heading to one of the spookiest locations in American geography for an appalling gauntlet of terrors, a confrontation with the hellhound, its master, inevitable betrayal and an explanation for all that the bereaved father and his sons have endured…

Dotted with moving, telling “flashbacks” such as the moment in 1991 when even tough, independent and lethally dangerous Dean had enough and tried to run away, abandoning his dad and little brother to an interminable legion of monsters, this initial chronicle also includes a short tale of the boys by Geoff Johns, Phil Hester & colourist JD Mettler.

‘Speak No Evil’ harks back to a day in 1989 when the taciturn Sam asked his big brother just how their mother died. He might even have received an answer if a demon hadn’t smashed through the motel window just then, locked in a death grip with their father…

This rip-snorting, tense and moody thriller lives up to the demands of the dedicated TV following and still fulfils all that’s demanded of a horror comic for readers who haven’t followed the torturous trail of the Winchesters, and this chilling compendium even offers in-process views of covers by Tim Sale and pin-ups, working drawings and sketches by series illustrator Matthew Dow Smith.

Punchy, powerful and spookily addictive…
Compilation and sketchbook © 2008 Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Supernatural and all characters, distinctive likenesses and related elements are ™ Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc.