Category: Mature Reading

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Haunt of Horror: Lovecraft


By H.P. Lovecraft adapted by Richard Corben with Jeff Eckleberry (MARVEL MAX)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-3287-5 (HB/Digital edition)

Richard Corben was one of America’s greatest proponents of graphic narrative: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist, who sprang from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in graphic narrative storytelling with his own unmistakable style and vision.

He is equally renowned for his mastery of airbrush, captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales. In later years he has become an elder statesman of horror and fantasy comics lending his gifts and cachet to such icons as John Constantine, Hulk, Hellboy, Punisher and Ghost Rider as well as new adaptations and renditions of literary classics by the likes of William Hope Hodgson, and the master of gothic terror Edgar Allan Poe.

Corben never sold out and American publishing eventually caught up, finally growing mature enough to accommodate him – due in no small part to his own broad and wickedly pervasive influence…

Born in Anderson, Missouri in 1940, Corben graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 1965 and found work as an animator. At that time, the neutered comic books of the Comics Code Authority era were just starting to lose disaffected, malcontent older fans to the hippy-trippy, freewheeling, anything-goes publications of independent-minded creators across the continent. These folks were increasingly making the kind of material Preachers and Mummy and their Lawyers wouldn’t approve of…

Creativity honed by the resplendent and explicitly mature 1950s EC Comics, Carl Barks’ perfectly crafted Duck tales and other classy early strips, a plethora of young artists like Corben responded with numerous small-press publications – including Grim Wit, Skull, Slow Death, Fever Dreams and his own Fantagor – which featured shocking, rebellious, sexed-up, raw, brutal, psychedelically-inspired cartoons and strips blending the new wave of artists’ unconventional lifestyles with their earliest childhood influences… honestly crafting the kind of stories they would like to read.

Corben inevitably graduated to more professional – and paying – venues. As his style and skills developed, he worked for Warren Publishing in Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, Comix International and outrageous adult science fiction anthology 1984/1994. He also famously coloured some strips for the revival of Will Eisner’s The Spirit.

Soon after, he was producing stunning graphic escapades for a number of companies, making animated movies, painting film posters and producing record covers such as multi-million-selling album Bat Out of Hell. He never stopped creating comics but preferred personal independent projects or working with in-tune collaborators such as Bruce Jones, Jan Strnad and Harlan Ellison.

In 1975, Corben approached French fantasy phenomenon Métal Hurlant and quickly became a fixture of its American iteration Heavy Metal, cementing his international reputation in the process. Garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe, he was been regularly collected in luxurious albums even as he seemingly fell out of favour – and print – in his own country. Through it all he never strayed far from his moss-covered roots.

Corben died in 2020.

This particular tome gathers a 2007 return to adaptations of classic literary horror canon. First published as a 3-issue limited series, it features adaptations of poems and stories by an undisputed master of supernal terror: H.P. Lovecraft. The tales are radical reworkings of the troubled author’s works, rendered in line and gray-tones, and each sequential narrative reinterpretation is accompanied by its original prose iteration.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in August 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island and his life in New England was one of gradual loss and despair. His father was institutionalised when he young, and a comfortable life of wealth ended when his grandfather died. Enduring privation, he lost his mother to another asylum in 1919. He married in 1924 after moving to New York, where his writing for Weird Tales and other pulp fiction magazines drew acclaim – and even acolytes – but little by way of commercial security.

He returned to New England in 1926 and wrote ever more fevered and chilling tales of weird science, fantasy and horror fiction. In the next 11 years he penned some of the most disturbing stories in literature, centred around his belief in Civilizational decline and Cosmicism: affirming the insignificance of humanity and its ultimate fragility and inability to endure in a harsh, unforgiving universe.

He is best remembered today for his Cthulhu Mythos: an elder god cosmology as seen in The Call of Cthulhu and other stories.

Lovecraft died in 1937 as a result of stomach cancer.

This selection of speculative meanderings opens with ‘Dagon’, as an ailing and oppressed marine researcher records how a close call with a German U-boat catapulted him onto a lost isle of monsters and ancient artefacts, and forever marked him as prey for an indescribable horror. The original prose vignette follows, after which ‘The Scar’ tells of betrayal and abandonment as a young man opts to save himself but not his companion from hellish plants: – a grisly episode eerily expanded upon from the poem ‘Recognition’ as collected in the tome Fungi from Yuggoth.

From the same book comes both the poem ‘A Memory’ and chilling icy exploration as Jack searches the desolate region that claimed his father and finds a relic that that dooms him via fatal family connection to lost and malign cultists of Shub Niggurath…

The second issue began with ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, as an impoverished student recalls how long ago he lived in a hilltop hovel where an elderly fellow boarder played bizarre melodies that shook the world and summoned arcane atrocities before – again bordered by a text version – another extract from Fungi from Yuggoth finds a flood survivor desperately searching for her lost love in the body-packed detritus of ‘The Canal’…

Sticking with the bulletins from Yuggoth, ‘The Lamp’ focuses on an unexpected and angry archaeological breakthrough that is alive and hungry after four millennia, before the final issue opens with extended scary satire ‘Arthur Jermyn’ and thereafter its primary text ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’. In a wry change of pace, it traces – via his proud descendants -the history and heritage of a gentleman explorer and anthropologist who in 1750 discovered a lost kingdom and injected some new blood into an old, old race.

Of course the miscegenation has resulted in some few throwbacks and anomalies in the hallowed English lineage since then…

Another ravening predator inhabits ‘The Well’ foolishly dug by southern farmer Seth Atwood, one using love and thirst to draw in victims, and our last glimpse of the outer dark comes through ‘The Window’ of a desolate old house as an orphan son returns to discover what took his parents 25 years ago…

A potent and evocative peep into the nastiest places in creation, this collection also includes ‘Cover Sketches’ and ‘Promotional Images’, plus a selection of inked pages prior to the application of the cloaking grey tones.

Infamous for his dark, doom-laden horror stories, Lovecraft was a pioneer of the subgenre of supernal, inescapable terror and under Corben’s imaginative scrutiny, the grim gloomy odes and yarns take on a whole new level of distressing dissonance. This compelling collection of classic chillers is a modern masterpiece of arcane abomination and inhuman horror no shock addict of mystery lover will want to miss.
© 2020 MARVEL.

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Essential Tales of the Zombie volume 1


By Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Stan Lee, Kit Pearson, Marv Wolfman, Tony Isabella, Chuck Robinson, Chris Claremont, Don McGregor, Doug Moench, Gerry Conway, Lin Carter, John Albano, Gerry Boudreau, Len Wein, Carla Joseph, Kenneth Dreyfack, Carl Wessler, David Anthony Kraft, Larry Lieber, John Warner,  Tony DiPreta, Bill Everett, John Buscema, Tom Palmer, Pablo Marcos , Dick Ayers, Tom Sutton, Syd Shores, Gene Colan, Dick Giordano, Winslow Mortimer, George Tuska, Ralph Reese, Vincente Alcazar, Bill Walton, Enrique Badia, Rich Buckler, Vic Martin, Ron Wilson, Ernie Chan, Russ Heath, Frank Springer, Alfredo Alcala, Dan Green, Michael Kaluta, Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, Virgilio Redondo, Yong Montano, Tony DeZuñiga, Rudy Nebres, Boris Vallejo, Earl Norem & various (Marvel)
ISBN 0-7851-1916-7 (TPB)

Inspiration isn’t everything. In fact, as Marvel slowly grew to a position of market dominance in the wake of the losing their two most innovative and inspirational creators, they did so less by experimentation and more by expanding established concepts and properties. The only exception was an en masse creation of horror titles in response to the industry down-turn in super-hero sales – a move expedited by a rapid revision in the wordings of the increasingly ineffectual Comics Code Authority rules.

The switch to sinister supernatural stars brought numerous benefits. Most importantly, it drew a new readership to comics: one attuned to a global revival in spiritualism, Satanism and all things spooky. Almost as important, it gave the reprint-reliant company opportunity to finally recycle old 1950s horror stories that had been rendered unprintable and useless since the code’s inception in 1954.

Spanning August 1973 to March 1975, this moody monochrome tome collects Tales of the Zombie #1-10, plus pertinent portions of Dracula Lives #1-2 but – despite targeting the more mature monochrome magazine market of the 1970s – these stories are oddly coy for a generation born before  video nasties, teen-slasher movies or torture-porn, so it’s unlikely that you’ll need a sofa to hide behind…

The chillers commences with ‘Zombie!’ illustrated by unsung legend Tony DiPreta: one of those aforementioned, unleashed 1950s reprints which found its way as cheap filler into the back of Dracula Lives #1 (August 1973). In this intriguing pot-boiler criminal Blackie Nolan runs for his life when the man he framed for his crimes animates a corpse to exact revenge…

A few months earlier, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas had green-lit a new mature-reader anthology magazine starring a walking deadman, based on a classic 1953 Stan Lee/Bill Everett thriller published in Menace #5.

Cover-dated July 1973, Tales of the Zombie #1 contained a mix of all-new material, choice reprints and text features to thrill and chill the voodoo devotees of comics land. The undead excitement began with ‘Altar of the Damned’ by Thomas, Steve Gerber, John Buscema & Tom Palmer, introducing wealthy Louisiana coffee-magnate Simon Garth as he frantically breaks free of a voodoo cult determined to sacrifice him.

He is aided by priestess Layla who usually earns her daily bread as his secretary. Sadly, the attempt fails and Garth dies, only to be brought back as a mighty, mindless slave of his worst enemy Gyps – a petty, lecherous gardener fired for leering at the boss’ daughter…

Next comes a retouched, modified reprint of the aforementioned Everett ‘Zombie!’ yarn, adapted to depict Garth as the corpse-walker rampaging through Mardi Gras and inflicting a far more permanent punishment on the ghastly gardener, after which Dick Ayers limned ‘Iron Head’ as a deep sea diver take a decidedly different look at the native art of resurrection…

‘The Sensuous Zombie!’ is a cinematic history of the sub-genre and ‘Back to Back and Belly to Belly at the Zombie Jamboree Ball!’ delivers an editorial tribute to Bill Everett.

after which Kit Pearson, Marv Wolfman & Pablo Marcos expose the secret of ‘The Thing From the Bog!’ before Tom Sutton applies a disinterred tongue to his cheek for the blackly comic story of ‘The Mastermind!’.

Gerber, Buscema & Syd Shores the saga of Simon Garth in ‘Night of the Walking Dead!’, as the murdered man’s daughter loses the arcane amulet which controls the zombie to a psychotic sneak thief…

Dracula Lives #2 introduces ‘The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans!’ (Thomas, Gene Colan & Dick Giordano relates the Lord of Vampires’ clash with undying mistress of magic Marie Laveau (tenuously included here as the charismatic bloodsucker strides past the recently deceased Garth on a crowded Mardi Gras street) before Tales of the Zombie #2 unfolds in its gory entirety.

Gerber & Marcos led off with ‘Voodoo Island!’ as daughter Donna Garth takes ship for Port-Au-Prince, determined to learn all she can about the dark arts, whilst the shambling cadaver of her father is drawn into the nefarious affairs of criminal mastermind Mr. Six. By circuitous means, mindless but instinct-driven Garth also ends up in Haiti – just as a madman turning women into giant spiders decides Donna is an ideal test subject…

Luckily, the former coffee-king’s best friend Anton Cartier is a resident – and expert in Voodoo lore…

‘Voodoo Unto Others’ by Tony Isabella & Winslow Mortimer tells a grim but affecting tale of the law of the Loa, whilst ‘Acid Test’ by Stan Lee & George Tuska is another 1950’s thriller culled from Marvel’s vaults, followed by a text feature by Isabella trumpeting the company’s “next big thing” with ‘Introducing Brother Voodoo’…

It was back to contemporary times with stunning graveyard re-animator yarn ‘Twin Burial’ by Chuck Robinson & Ralph Reese, balanced by Colan classic ‘From Out of the Grave’ after which Chris Claremont asks in expansive prose piece, ‘Voodoo: What’s It All About, Alfred?’

Gerber & Marcos conclude their Garth saga in ‘Night of the Spider!’ before TotZ #3 sees the Zombie still lurching around Haiti in ‘When the Gods Crave Flesh!’, encountering a manic film director and his histrionic starlet wife who want to expose Voodoo to the judgemental celluloid eye of Hollywood.

Bad, bad, bad idea…

Claremont scripted a prose shocker next, contributing part 1 of ‘With the Dawn Comes Death!’ – illustrated with stock movie stills – before ‘Net Result’ offers another Atlas-era DiPreta delight, after which Isabella & Vincente Alcazar excel with an epic of samurai-against-dragon in ‘Warrior’s Burden’.

Don McGregor’s ‘The Night of the Living Dead Goes on and on and on’ provides in-depth analysis of the movie that restarted it all, and Bill Walton limns Fifties fear-fest ‘I Won’t Stay Dead’ before Doug Moench & Enrique Badia deliver a period piece of perfidious plantation peril in ‘Jilimbi[s Word’.

‘Tales of the Zombie Feature Page’ closes the issue with a Gerber interview and critique of George A. Romero’s film Codename: Trixie – which we know today as The Crazies – before Tales of the Zombie #4 (March 1974) opens with ‘The Law and Phillip Bliss’ as the mystic Amulet of Damballah irresistibly draws Garth back to New Orleans at the unwitting behest of a down-and-out with a grudge…

Another movie feature by McGregor follows, examining the spooky overtones of then-current Bond flick Live and Let Die, after which Gerry Conway, Rich Buckler, Vic Martin & Mortimer crafted a comic strip film-thriller in ‘The Drums of Doom!’

Fantasy author Lin Carter explores modern supernatural proliferation in ‘Neo-Witchcraft’ before ‘Courtship by Voodoo’ (Isabella & Ron Wilson) recounts Egyptian romantic antics, and Moench & Mortimer disclose the downside of desecrating graves in ‘Nightfilth Rising’.

John Albano & Ernie Chua (nee Chan) tell a tragic tale of ‘Four Daughters of Satan’ before ‘The Law and Phillip Bliss’ concludes in cathartic slaughter of high-priced lawyers, whilst ‘The Zombie Feature Page’ highlights the work and life of artist Pablo Marcos.

‘Palace of Black Magic!’ then sees Phil Glass lose the amulet – and control of Garth – to Mr. Six with the Zombie becoming a terrifying weapon of sinister Voodoun lord Papa Shorty, until his new master’s own arrogance lead to carnage and a kind of freedom for the Dead Man Walking. Issue #5 continues with Moench’s filmic tribute article ‘White Zombie: Faithful Unto Death’ and a Russ Heath Atlas classic ‘Who Walks with a Zombie?’

The concluding instalment of Claremont’s article ‘With the Dawn Comes Death!’ precedes text infomercial ‘Brother Voodoo Lives Again’ and new western horror saga ‘Voodoo War’ by Isabella, Shores & Ayers, and TotZ# 5 ends on a gritty high with ‘Death’s Bleak Birth!’: a powerful supernatural crime thriller by Moench & Frank Springer.

Tales of the Zombie #6 (July) opens with a handy update of events thus far before launching into Gerber & Marcos’ ‘Child of Darkness!’ wherein the anguished ambulatory remains of Simon Garth interrupt a Voodoo ritual and encounter once more the Mambo Layla, who tries in vain to save him before his death and revivification. Even together, they are unprepared for the vicious thing lurking in the swamp’s deepest recesses…

Gerry Boudreau explores the genre’s history by critiquing Hammer Films’ ‘The Plague of the Zombies’, followed by a hilarious photo-feature on Zombie/blacksploitation movie ‘Sugar Hill’ and Claremont’s article on all things undead ‘The Compleat Voodoo Man’.

Brother Voodoo initially ran in Strange Tales #169-173 (September 1973-April 1974) but ended on a cliffhanger. It finishes here in Moench, Len Wein, Colan & Frank Chiaramonte’s ‘End of a Legend!’ as the Man with Two Souls finally defeats Voodoo villain Black Talon.

Carla Joseph’s ‘The Voodoo Beat’ rounds up a selection of movies and books then available regarding all things Cadaverous and Fetishy before Moench & Alfredo Alcala provide a fill-in tale in ‘The Blood-Testament of Brian Collier’ wherein Garth shambles into a High Society murder-mystery, followed by a Village Voice article by Kenneth Dreyfack on ‘Voodoo in the Park’, notable for comics fans because it’s illustrated by future great Dan Green.

Moench & Mortimer’s comics featurette ‘Haiti’s Walking Dead’ and Claremont’s book review ‘Inside Voodoo’ take us the issue end and ‘A Second Chance to Die’ – a classy short thriller by Carl Wessler & Alcala.

Tales of the Zombie #8 (November) opens with a similar frontispiece feature by Isabella & Michael Kaluta ‘The Voodoo Killers’ before Gerber & Marcos return with ‘A Death Made of Ticky-Tacky’ as Garth and Layla finally reach New Orleans and fall foul of bored urban swingers seeking a different kind of good time. ‘Jimmy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ offers a chilling prose vignette from David Anthony Kraft, liberally illustrated by Kaluta.

‘Night of the Hunter’ by scripter Larry Lieber and artists Ron Wilson, Mike Esposito & Frank Giacoia sees a corrupt prison guard realise he’s tortured and killed the wrong black man, when the victim’s brother turns up straight from the sinister heart of Haiti…

‘Tales of the Happy Humfo’ is another Claremont voodoo article, spiced up with Kaluta drawings after which Alcala again closes show down with ‘Makao’s Vengeance’: a slick jungle chiller scripted by Kraft.

The first issue of 1975 opens with Isabella & Mortimer’s ‘Was He a Voodoo-Man?’, after which the author scripted stunning Zombie headliner ‘Simon Garth Lives Again!’, illustrated by Virgilio Redondo & Alcala, and Claremont & Yong Montano contribute second chapter ‘A Day in the Life of a Dead Man’ (Alcala inks) before Isabella & Marcos conclude the Garth extravaganza with ‘The Second Death Around’.

As an added bonus Moench & Alcala also designed a swampy slaughter-party in ‘Herbie the Liar Said it Wouldn’t Hurt!’…

Tales of the Zombie #10 (March 1975) leads with a Brother Voodoo tale by Moench & Tony DeZuñiga, wherein the Lord of the Loa struggles to prevent ‘The Resurrection of Papa Jambo’ because the scheduled Simon Garth saga had been lost in the post at time of printing). Bringing up the rear were medical nightmare ‘Eye For an Eye, Tooth For a Tooth’ by Conway, Virgilio Redondo & Rudy Nebres and Wessler, John Warner & Alcazar’s death-row chiller ‘Malaka’s Curse!’ with Sutton’s macabre ‘Grave Business’ the last seen treat…

By this time the horror boom was beginning to bust, and the advertised 11th issue never materialised. An all-reprint Tales of the Zombie Super-Annual was released that summer, with only its cover reproduced here.

Peppered with vivid Zombie pin-ups by Marcos & Sutton, and covers by Boris Vallejo and Earl Norem, this intriguing monochrome compendium – although a bit dated – contains what passed for Explicit Content in the mid-1970s, so although the frights should be nothing for today’s older kids, the occasional nipple or buttock might well send them screaming over the edge.

However, with appropriate mature supervision I’m sure this groovy gore-fest will delight many a brain-eating fright fan, until Marvel get around to properly reviving this tragic revenant’s roots and earliest recorded revels.
© 1973, 1974, 1975, 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Shaft: A Complicated Man


By David F. Walker, Bilquis Evely & various (Dynamite Entertainment)
ISBN: 978-1-60690-757-3 (TPB/Digital edition)

For decades Black consumers of popular entertainments had far too few fictive role models. For the English-speaking world that began changing in the turbulent 1960s and truly took hold during the decade that followed. A lot of the characters developed at that time came from a cultural phenomenon called “Blaxploitation” (other spellings are available). Despite being criticised for their seedy antecedents, stereotypical situations and violence, these films and books were the first mass-market examples of minority characters in leading roles, rather than as mere fodder or flunkies.

One of the earliest movie icons of the genre was a man called Shaft.

The landmark film was scripted by journalist and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman (The French Connection; High Plains Drifter) from his own 1970 novel. He authored six more between 1972 and 1975, with his timeless urban warrior starring in numerous films and a TV series. Eighth novel Shaft’s Revenge was released in 2016, written by David F. Walker.

Amongst his many gifts Walker numbers writing comics (Occupy Avengers; Cyborg; Red Sonja and many more) and in 2014 he was invited to write a long-overdue comics iteration… Illustrated by Bilquis Evely and coloured by Daniela & Miwa (Walker lettered the series himself), the comic book took its look, settings and tone primarily from the novels rather than the Richard Roundtree films. The first 6-chapter story-arc was collected as Shaft: A Complicated Man and offers some intriguing love overdue backstory. In all the detective’s prior appearances, no mention was made of his past, but here Big John gets a proper Origin…

Following an Introduction by educator and author Shawn Taylor, the saga – which won the 2015 Glyph Comics Award for Story of the Year – begins in December 1968. John Shaft is a former marine and veteran of the Vietnam war who’s come home and is trying to find his place in the world. An indomitable fighter, he’s using boxing as his big chance, but when he refuses to throw a fight, he incurs the wrath of both local black gang boss Junius Tate and the district’s mafioso overlord Sal Venneri.

Proud and resolute, but no fool, Shaft wins his bout, and accepts brutal punishment from Tate’s conflicted leg-breaker Bamma Brooks before vanishing from the cloistered island-within-an-island known as Harlem…

Just drifting, Shaft briefly goes to college before the call of adventure finds him joining private detective agency National Investigation & Security Services. His first job is as a plainclothes guard and “undercover negro shopper” at a fancy department store…

While on duty he meets pretty Arletha Havens and finds a reason to stop drifting and start planning. Before long, he’s seeing a bright future together.

That all goes to hell when thugs bust into their apartment looking for a hooker named Marisol Dupree and her pimp Jimmy Style…

With Arletha hostage, Shaft is forced to accompany one of the abductors back to Harlem for the first time in years, hunting the missing woman and a package she’s holding: something someone really important wants back. In fact, Marisol’s mystery treasure has big city money men in a panic and all the criminal factions in Harlem at each other’s throats, but Shaft’s immediate problem is simply staying alive…

After surviving a savage gunfight dropping five bodies in an alley, he returns home to find Arletha’s body and resolves that somebody – maybe everybody – is going to pay…

All on his own again, the coldly furious avenger finds his true calling, tracking down Marisol, methodically putting the pieces together in a chilling city-wide web of graft, favours, murder and money before ensuring the guilty parties pay the ultimate price…

Comprising a devious, byzantine wasps’ nest of civic corruption, crooked cops, warring mobsters and treacherous allies, played out against a tragic backdrop of true love forever lost, Shaft’s first case is a superb crime thriller no fan of the genre should miss and comes with a bevy of bonus features. These include character designs; unused illustrations by Walker & John Jennings; script excerpts; in-production art pages and a covers and variants gallery by Denys Cowan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Ivan Nunes, Francesco Francavilla, Michael Avon Oeming, Ulises Farinas, Matt Haley, Sanford Greene, Nacho Tenorio & Sergio Mora.

It even comes with a toe-tappingly cool playlist to track down and enjoy whilst reading…
Shaft is ™ & © 2015 Ernest Tidyman. All rights reserved.

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Captain America – Truth


By Robert Morales, Kyle Baker & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-3427-9 (TPB/Digital Edition) 978-0785136668 (Premiere HB)

It’s never been more apparent than these days, but Truth is a Weapon. Facts, events and especially interpretations have always been manipulated to further a cause, and that simple premise was the basis of one of the most groundbreaking and controversial comic book stories of all time…

Created by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby in an era of frantic patriotic fervour, Captain America was a dynamic and highly visible response to the horrors of Nazism and the threat of Liberty’s loss. Consequently, the concept quickly lost focus and popularity after hostilities ceased. Fading away during post-war reconstruction, only to briefly reappear after the Korean War: a harder, darker sentinel ferreting out monsters, subversives and the “Reds” who lurked under every American bed.

He abruptly vanished once more, until the burgeoning Marvel Age resurrected him just in time to experience the Land of the Free’s most turbulent and culturally divisive era. Cap quickly became a mainstay of the Marvel Revolution during the Swinging Sixties, but lost his way after that, except for a politically-charged period under scripter Steve Englehart.

Despite everything, Captain America became a powerful symbol for generations of readers and his career can’t help but reflect that of the nation he stands for…

Devised in the Autumn and on newsstand by December 20th 1940, Captain America Comics #1 was cover-dated March 1941 and an instant monster, blockbuster smash-hit. The Sentinel of Liberty had boldly and bombastically launched in his own monthly title with none of the publisher’s customary caution, and instantly became the absolute and undisputed star of Timely’s top-selling “Big Three” – the other two being The Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. He was, however, one of the first to fall from popularity as the Golden Age ended.

For all that initial run, his exploits were tinged – or maybe “tainted” – by the sheer exuberant venom of appalling racial stereotyping and heady fervour of jingoism at a time when America was involved in the greatest war in world history. Nevertheless, the first 10 issues of Captain America Comics are the most exceptional comics in the fledgling company’s history…

You know the origin story as if it were your own. In ‘Meet Captain America’ Simon & Kirby revealed how scrawny, enfeebled patriot and genuinely Good Man Steven Rogers, after being continually rejected by the US Army, is recruited by the Secret Service.

Desperate to stop Nazi-sympathizing atrocity, espionage and sabotage, the passionate teen accepts the chance to become part of a clandestine experimental effort to create physically perfect super-soldiers. However, after a Nazi agent infiltrates the project and murders the pioneering scientist behind it, Rogers is left as the only successful graduate and becomes America’s not-so-secret weapon.

For decades the story has been massaged and refined, yet remained essentially intact, but in 2002 – in the wake of numerous real-world political and social scandals (like the Tuskegee Experiment/Tuskegee Syphilis Study 1932-1972) – writer Robert Morales (Vibe Magazine, Captain America) & Kyle Baker (Nat Turner, Plastic Man, The Shadow, Why I Hate Saturn) took a cynical second look at the legend through the lens of the treatment of and white attitudes towards black American citizens…

The result was Truth: Red, White & Black #1-7 (January-July 2003), initially collected as a Premiere Hardcover edition in 2009 and here in trade paperback and digital formats. This hard-hitting view of the other side of a Marvel Universe foundational myth forever changed the shape of the continuity: using the tragedy and inherent injustice of the situation to add to the pantheon more – and more challenging – heroes of colour and contemporary role models.

‘The Future’ begins at “Negro Week” of the 1940 New York World’s Fair where Isaiah Bradley and his bride Faith learn yet again they are still second class citizens, and that their rights and freedoms are conditional. December in Philadelphia sees young firebrand and workers’ rights activist Maurice Canfield painfully realise that even his father’s hard-earned wealth and position mean nothing as long as their skin is dark in America…

Cleveland in June of 1941 and negro war veteran “Black Cap” is still in the army. It’s fiercely segregated and he’s been demoted to sergeant, but Luke Evans is content to have work and purpose. Since returning from the Great War, Evans has lived through so much crap – even a year of race riots and near-revolution that threatened to wipe out his kind – that he’s content to take each day as it comes.

Everything changes for these black men and thousands like them when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941…

‘The Basics’ opens in 1942 at Camp Cathcart, Mississippi. The base is tense, and strife between partitioned white and black recruits at a perilous boiling point. Brawling between races is constant. Into the explosive situation comes oily G-Man Homer Tully and scientist Dr. Josef Reinstein who petition openly racist commander Major Brackett to give them two battalions of coloured recruits and cover up the fact that they ever existed…

Wartime secrecy is then employed to mask an appalling act of racist cynicism, as hundreds of patriotic black men are trained and callously discarded as Reinstein methodically perfects his super-soldier serum on expendable lower race guinea pigs.

The scene switches to Project Super Soldier (location classified) where Colonel Walker Price supervises ‘The Passage’ of the survivors from human to something else. Bradley, Canfield, Evans and the others have endured a cruel barrage of chemical interventions. Of three hundred, only a handful survive, and all are radically changed… or, more accurately, mutated. Reinstein is acutely aware that his former colleagues in Nazi Germany are just as close to solving the riddle of superhumanity and pushes on with increasing disregard for the laws of science or ethics of civilisation…

Next of kin are informed that their loved ones have been killed in training, but Faith Bradley knows the corpse in the casket is not her man and starts making waves…

Ultimately, military pragmatism supersedes scientific caution and the seven remaining negros – all immensely powerful in radically changed bodies – are pressed into action as an expendable super-suicide squad. Commanded by white supremacist Lieutenant Philip Merritt, ‘The Cut’ sees them deployed to the Black Forest with orders to destroy the rival Uber-mensch project. The mission catastrophically fails, but survivor Isaiah Bradley is coerced by Walker Price into returning to Germany on a solo suicide mission to eradicate the facility. Apparently, the “real” Captain America is unable to get there in time…

Rebellious to the end, Bradley complies, but steals and dons the flashy star-spangled uniform worn by the public – blue-eyed, blonde and exceeding white – face of America’s Super Soldier Project. It’s October 1942 and the last time the world hears from or about Bradley…

The horrors he saw and his spectacular triumph only start emerging in ‘The Math’ as – today in the Bronx – superhero Steve Rogers meets Bradley’s widow and discovers something truly astounding…

Whilst crushing domestic terrorism, Captain America had captured unrepentant mastermind Merritt and learned how the monster had been instrumental in Reinstein’s death decades previously. Further investigation uncovered ‘The Whitewash’ Merritt and his superior Walker Price instigated, and what they perpetrated after Bradley unexpectedly battled his way back to America…

Stunned to have unearthed a secret history of oppression and immorality that occurred all around him without his slightest inkling, Rogers is distraught and furious, resolved to set things right at all costs…

That mission takes him to the highest echelons of government and darkest corners of military intelligence in ‘The Blackvine’, where he learns more uncomfortable truths about his origins and the true nature of the country he loves and represents. Shellshocked and despondent, Cap returns to the Bradley’s home and gets a welcome if belated chance to salve his soul, set history straight and repay moral debts unknowingly incurred in his name…

With covers by Baker, promo art by Joe Quesada, Danny Miki & Richard Isanove, and unused cover treatments, this landmark saga is backed up with a context-laden, disturbingly informative Appendix by Robert Morales: clarifying and expanding on many previously sidelined moments of actual and black history that informed the story.

Powerful, engaging, enlightening and immensely gratifying, this is a story to enrage and enthral, and one no socially aware superfan should miss.
© 2022 MARVEL.

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Shadowman – by Garth Ennis & Ashley Wood


By Garth Ennis, Paul Jenkins & Ashley Wood (Acclaim Comics/Valiant)
ISBN: 978-1-68406-912-5 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-68215-135-8

In the mid-1990s, comics publishing was risky business. In those fickle, febrile times, hits came hard and fast and from utterly unexpected directions, but yesterday’s mega-triumph so often became tomorrow’s unwanted, unsellable surplus in a matter of moments.

During that market-led, gimmick-crazed frenzy, amongst the interminable spin-offs, fads and shiny multiple-cover events a new comics company revived some old characters, invented a few more to supplement their new universe and proved once more that good story-telling never goes out of fashion. As Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter had made Marvel the most profitable and high-profile they had ever been and, after his departure, he used that writing skill and business acumen to transform some almost-forgotten Silver-Age characters into contemporary gold.

Under various guises and imprints, Western Publishing had been a major player since the industry’s earliest days: blending TV, Movie, animated cartoon and Disney properties with homegrown hits like Turok, Son of Stone and Space Family Robinson. In the 1960s, the superhero boom brought forth Brain Boy, M.A.R.S. Patrol Total War, Magnus, Robot Fighter, Nukla, Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom and others. Despite their titles’ quality and a passionate fan-base, they never captured the media spotlight of DC or Marvel’s costumed cut-ups. Western closed their comics division in 1984.

With an agreement to revive some, any or all of these four-colour veterans, Shooter and co-conspirator Bob Layton made those earlier adventures part-and-parcel of their refit: acutely aware older fans don’t like having their childhood favourites bastardized. To compelling reinterpretations of Magnus, Turok and Solar, Man of the Atom they added latter day hits like Archer & Armstrong, Eternal Warrior, XO-Manowar, Ninjak, Bloodshot, and their own quirky supernatural avenger, who debuted in May 1992…

Hit after hit followed and the pantheon of heroes expanded until troubled market conditions and corporate chicanery ended the company’s stellar expansion. It was taken over and, soon after, disappeared…

Under new ownership (games company Acclaim Entertainment) many characters – radically revised – reappeared in a bold relaunch: just as enjoyable and innovative but still hostages to fortune and turbulent times and tastes. Part of that renaissance was a bleak and extremely adult new iteration of the aforementioned magical warrior: a bold new take resulting from an industry-wide resurgence in terror tales triggered by DC’s Vertigo imprint with its adult-rated material…

In the first instance, struggling session saxophonist Jack Boniface was seduced by a woman he’d picked up in a New Orleans club. Her actions left him unconscious, amnesiac and forever altered by a bite to his neck. She was a Spider Alien: agent of a race preying on humanity for uncounted centuries and responsible for creating many of the paranormal humans who secretly inhabit the world.

Her bite forever changed Jack and when darkness fell he was compelled to roam the Voodoo-haunted streets of the Big Easy as an impulsive daredevil dubbed Shadowman: a violent maniac, hungry for conflict whenever the sun went down. Over years – and 43 issues and specials – the mystical nature and historical role of a succession of Shadowmen was explored and an uncanny, arcane universe was constructed before entering oblivion…

Cover-dated March 1997, a revived, revised version debuted, courtesy of seasoned scripter Garth Ennis and experimental illustrator Ashley Wood. Proudly Irish, Ennis had won a well-deserved reputation for shocking, moving, irreverent and wickedly funny storytelling, and was accomplished in blending genres for maximum effect, as his successes with Preacher, Hellblazer, The Demon, True Faith and dozens of other tales could attest.

Wood is Australian, and combines mixed media painting with digital and multimedia techniques to create unforgettable images on Judge Dredd, Spawn, Zombies vs. Robots, Sam and Twitch, Grendel, Star Wars Tales, Automatic Kafka and for games like Metal Gear Solid.

Here his surreal, moodily amorphous rendering adorns a violent, mordantly wry script as passionate movie buff Ennis strips out all but the barest of plot bones to expose a spartan quest for haunted vengeance, truth and understanding worthy of Sam Peckinpah. Boniface works with voodoo witch Nettie to keep the living world free of undead predators…

Sadly, Nettie’s Shadowman is killed by Tommy-Lee Bones and three other merciless fugitives from the torment that awaits all beings once they die. Their plan seems vague and pointless, but it cannot fail as they’ve already removed their main opposition before tending to the Shadowman…

The “Deadside” they’ve escaped from is an infinite region of pure misery: a purgatorial holding cell containing all who have ever lived, and an obscenely cruel penitentiary the Shadowmen were designed to hold forever shut tight.

Now that they’re out again, Tommy and the lads have no intention of ever going back, but are fine with feeding it every living sod they can get their bloodstained hands on…

With the monsters on a macabre murder spree, things look bleak, but the voodoo queen has been doing this for a long time and has stacked the odds with little thought for who gets hurt. Boniface may be on a slab, but Zero – New Orleans’ most enigmatic, infallible, amnesiac and brain damaged hitman – is already primed to take his place…

Assigning Irish spirit and “walker-between-the-worlds” Jaunty as her prospect’s guide and liaison, Nettie is fine with Zero learning on the job, but has not anticipated how the task might affect Zero’s lost memories. It’s a mistake she’s going to regret…

One area that hasn’t been compromised is his gift for combat risk assessment. As Tommy’s Boys ravage the populace, Jaunty gives Zero a briefing on the real afterlife, but the shadow warrior has no real inkling until Tommy kills him too. Now the Shadowman gets a real tour of Deadside, where – happily, for Zero – death doesn’t take…

When he unexpected returns to the world, Zero discovers his new boss has not been honest with him…

Now, with Bones increasingly in charge and out of control, Zero learns to use his abilities in a way Boniface never could and – reeling with newfound independence – starts doing the job his way: extracting the whole sordid truth of his life and death before dealing with Tommy and his pals…

As well as gathering the 4-issue arc ‘Deadside’ from Shadowman volume 2 #1-4 – which was coloured by Atomic Paintbrush and lettered by Dave Lanphear – this compendium also re-presents another notionally 4-issue treat. Miniseries Deadside was written by Paul Jenkins (Hellblazer, Spectacular Spider-Man, The Inhumans, Sentry) with Wood, Dennis Calero & letterer Chris Eliopoulos handling the bits you saw. In actuality, it should read #1-3, as the series was cancelled before the final issue, but this book at last shows what we all missed…

Here, grisly guide Jaunty tips us off to the horrifically miserable afterlife, in salutary snatches detailing the actions of a mad doctor’s awful science experiment, a dead mother searching in vain for Heaven or Hell, and a sinner who thought he’d deservedly located the latter…

Thanks to the publishing crisis beleaguering the industry back then ‘The Fearsome Finale’ was never completed, but what remains – script pages, finished art and working roughs and sketches – affords the only closure we’re likely to see at this juncture. This book also offers a Gallery of art, character design sketches and variant covers by Charlie Adlard, Vince Evans and Woods.

Although a fresh creative team would cover the further adventures of Shadowman Zero, this eclectic, eccentric episode offers a rowdy, raucous and deliriously demented thrill-ride no fright fan should miss.
© 1997, 1999, 2016 Valiant Entertainment LLC. All rights reserved.

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Angola Janga: Kingdom of Runaway Slaves


By Marcelo D’Salete, translated by Andrea Rosenberg (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-191-8 (HB/Digital edition)

Art historian Professor Marcelo D’Salete is one of Brazil’s most respected authors and graphic novelists. Born in 1979 and a graduate of Carlos de Campos College and the University of São Paulo, he currently resides in Italy. Despite this, the majority of his comics examines Brazil’s history of slavery and consequent issues affecting the vast Afro-Brazilian underclass resulting from it.

After freelancing as an illustrator, D’Salete’s first graphic novel Noite Luz was released in 2008, followed by Encruzilhada in 2011. He acquired a greater degree of fame after his 2014 book Cumbe was translated into English by Fantagraphics in 2017: subsequently garnering a boatload of prizes as Run For It: Stories of Slaves Who Fought for their Freedom.

Technically, the professor followed that multi award-winning volume with this even more ambitious tome, but Angola Janga actually took eleven years to complete and its initial release that same year was simply a fortunate convergence…

This epic expands the story of that escaped slave culture, detailing how Palmares Quilombos (“war camps of runaway slaves”) were crushed by colonisers. Before the story opens, Introduction ‘Mocambos and Plantations’ explains how 16th century Portuguese occupiers moved from enslaving local peoples to importing millions of Africans. These supplemented a huge indigenous workforce toiling to exploit timber, sugarcane and other natural resources for ruthless masters on increasingly prolific and profitable plantations.

Over centuries – but largely due to Dutch attempts to seize control from the Portuguese between 1630-1654 – generations of black slaves (designated “units”) in the Pernambuco region had escaped into the forests and Serra da Barriga hills: founding an outlaw nation of semiautonomous settlements: “mocambos”.

By the time events open here, Palmares or Angola Janga (“Little Angola” in Bantu language Kimbundu) comprised an estimated 20,000 free-living rebellious “blacks”, “Indios”, “mulattos” and other demeaning and pointless designations of mixed race all considered to be property not humanity…

This astounding dramatised examination is delivered in brief vignettes torturously following the entwined paths of key individuals like black leaders Soares, Ganga Zumbi and Ganga Zamba, numerous religious and civic figures and Domingos Jorge Velho: pitiless commander of “Paulista” mercenaries hired to reimpose order and crush the beacon of hope Angola Janga represented.

Crafted in stark edgy monochrome with dialogue and narration at a bare minimum, it begins with ‘The Way to Angola Janga’. Each chapter is preceded by pertinent excerpts from contemporary accounts by the victorious colonisers and historians.

In 1673, two frantic runaways crash through trees and brush. Soares was promised freedom by dying plantation owner Mistress Catarina, but her son Gonçalo chose not to honour her wishes and brutally punished the mulatto (“mixed race”) for demanding his Letter of Emancipation. Now he and companion Osenga are fleeing, searching for a mocambo to take them in. Soares’ past is complex and complicated, but common gossip amongst the slave catchers preparing to bring him back…

‘Birth’ wings back to 1655 and the controversial origins of the “half-caste”: revealing connections that have church and military authorities clashing and colluding in a conspiracy of silence, whilst revealing the inner workings and defence strategies of mocambos and their leaders before the fate of Angolan enclave ‘Aqualtune’ introduces more charismatic defenders of liberty in episodes set in 1677…

When Palmares warriors attack white plantations, outraged plantation owners declare implacable war, but instead of engendering alliances, tribal and sibling rivalries undermine the rebels’ unity with catastrophic consequences…

Moreover, devious white masters employ cruel tactics to regain their valuable Units and maintain the status quo: combining religious tyranny, disease, relentless police actions and bounty hunting with spurious offers of amnesty, designated black Reservations and valueless treaties. These slowly chip away at the hidden free kingdoms, as seen in ‘Scars’, ‘Cucaú’ and ‘Encounters’, with even free-born and emancipated blacks experiencing a rise in intolerance, prejudice and white exceptionalism.

Resistance was common and reprisals inescapable. Always the mocambos called to those brave enough to stand up and fight back, but increasingly they were fighting their own kind rather than their oppressors… sometimes, even their own families…

The saga explores a subtext of religious and political beliefs in opposition, complementing the physical and geographical struggle. ‘Savages’ reveals the turbulent and traumatic early years of Domingos Jorge Velho and how white leaders suborned and seduced native tribes like the Oruazes into joining their ‘War’ against Palmares…

Beginning in 1691 the savage strands converge, as raids by belligerent mocambo warriors and sorties to recapture lost slaves reach lethal levels. With the entire region in turmoil, and death toll mounting, many scared officials and churchmen petition for blanket emancipation to end the bloodshed. However, a final clash is imminent and – risen to high office amongst the runaways – Soares endures the ‘Sweet Hell’ of vindication or defeat, unaware that the foe has deployed the latest weapons technology to conclusively end the struggle …

The triumphant mopping up operation is covered in ‘The Embrace’ as defeated Soares flees, descending into delusion and worse before gaining the truest freedom of all in one last battle, before the end of the campaign and what came after is explored in terms of spirituality and symbolic prognostication with ‘Footsteps in the Night’…

Augmenting this tragic history is a full Glossary of terms, concepts and characters and their originations, and Author’s Afterword ‘Trails and Dreams’ explores the exponential growth of the Portuguese slave trade. Also on view are a ‘Chronology of the Palmares War 1597-1736’, ‘Summary of the Palmares War’, maps and text pieces on ‘Pernambuco, Palmares, towns, mocambos (seventeenth century)’, ‘Principal quilombo and quilombola regions in Brazilian territory’, ‘The region of Angola – one of the largest sources of Africans sent to Brazil’ and truly disturbing charts and maps disclosing ‘Estimates of embarkation and disembarkation of enslaved Africans between 1501 and 1900’. These shocking visual aids are supported by a copious bibliography of References and biography of the author.

Appalling and beautiful, this is a superb testament to the power of resistance and hope: one that should be compulsory reading in every school and college.
© 2019 Marcelo D’Salete. Glossary © 2019 Marcelo D’Salete, Allan da Rosa & Rogério de Campos. Original edition published by Editora Veneta © 2017. All rights reserved.

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Werewolves of Montpellier


By Jason, translated by Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-359-0 (HB/Digital edition)

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterrøy: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won Norway’s biggest comics prize A Sproing Award.

He won another in 2001 for the series Mjau Mjau and by 2002 was almost exclusively producing graphic novels. Now a global star, he has won many more major awards from such disparate regions as France, Slovakia and the USA.

Rife with his signature surreality, this novella was first released in 2010; populated with cinematic, darkly comic anthropomorphs and featuring more bewitching ruminations on his signature themes of relationships and loneliness, viewed as ever through a charmingly macabre cast of bestial movie archetypes and lost modern chumps.

Here he focuses on the hollow life of expatriate Swede Sven, a purposeless artist who has gravitated into a stagnant, romance-lite existence in a provincial French town. Sven fritters away his days just like his close friend Audrey – another listless intellectual looking for the right lady to love.

The only thing quickening his pulse these days is the occasional nocturnal foray over the rooftops: burglarizing houses dressed as a werewolf. Unfortunately, Montpellier already has a genuine lycanthrope community and they don’t look kindly upon gauche parvenus intruding into their world with criminal cosplay…

This post-modern short-&-spooky fable unfolds in Jason’s beguiling, sparse-dialogued, pantomimic progressions delivering resonances of Hitchcock’s bubbly comedy-thrillers, quirkily blended with Bergman’s humanist sensibilities. The enchantingly formal page layouts are rendered in his minimalist evolution of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style: solid blacks, thick lines and settings of seductive simplicity augmented here by a stunning palette of stark pastels and muted primary colours.

Jason’s work always jumps directly into the reader’s brain and heart, deftly probing the nature of “human-ness” by using the beastly and unnatural to ask persistent and pertinent questions. Although the clever sight-gags are less prominent here, his repertory company of “funny-animal” characters still uncannily displays the subtlest emotions with devastating effect, proving again just how good a cartoonist he is.

This comic tale is best suited for adults but makes us all to look at the world through wide-open childish eyes. Jason is instantly addictive and a creator every serious fan of the medium should move to the top of the “Must-Have” list. Buy, borrow or even steal it if you must, but be aware that actions have consequences… even for faux monsters…
© 2010 Jason. All rights reserved.

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Superdupont – The Revival


By Marcel Gotlib, François Boucq & Karim Belkrouf, translated by Edward Gauvin (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: Digital only release

In a world that has apparently devolved far beyond the reach of satire and parody – if not quite yet grotesque caricature – it’s always comforting to look back and recall a time when such creative acts had some effect on morality if not actual behaviour. Once upon a time everyone in Europe believed that the French, British, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Belgians, Irish, Scots and all the rest languished, locked into cultural acts and idiom that made them all unique unto themselves, even as politicians became unwilling “guest stars” in numerous strips.

These days we just call it racism and acknowledge that nearest neighbours are the ones we argue with most, but that doesn’t mean that Asterix, Spirou, Lucky Luke, Clifton and all the rest aren’t still hilarious…

The most comforting aspect of the situation was that the nationalistic, jingoistic True Believers of every nation have always been best taken to task by their own fellow citizens, calling out their innate idiocies via comedy and cartoons. In France, the tradition achieved greater impact when adult comics pioneer Marcel Gotlib (1934-2016: Les Dingodossiers; Rubrique-à-Brac; Clopinettes; Gai-Luron; Pervers Pépère; Hamster Jovial) united with artist Jacques Lob (1932 – 1990): maker of Jerry Spring; Ténébrax; Submerman; Blanche Épiphanie; Ulysse; Snowpiercer and more. As a united front they confronted Gallic nationalism head-on by pinching an idea from America to create a Patriotic Superhero for the post-De Gaulle era…

Superdupont was a strip spoof of patriotic costumed crusaders, targeting France’s ingrained national attitudes in the manner many British comedians today have used when lampooning “frothing Gammons” and “Little Englanders”. Feel free to carry out your own research on those terms…

The strip debuted in the September 21st 1972 issue of increasingly radical comic Pilote, prior to colonising Gotlib’s own mature-reader publication Fluid Glacial three years later. The reason for Superdupont being a collaborative effort is wonderfully egalitarian and fraternal too. When writer/artist Gotlib and Jacques Lob discovered they had both simultaneously come up with the same idea, they joined forces and achieved an even greater satirical synergy as “GotLob”!

They soon relinquished art duties to Alexis (Dominique Vallet) until that artist died in 1977, and thereafter workshopped irregularly seen releases over the years: episodes encompassing visual and verbal contributions from and joint efforts with Jean Solé, Daniel Goossens, Al Coutelis, François Boucq & Karim Belkrouf, Lefred-Thouron and even original American inspiration Neal Adams, who all contributed after Lob’s untimely death in 1990. Sadly, no-one has felt able to continue the feature since Gotlib’s passing in 2016…

In that year, the six original collected Superdupont tomes were at last supplemented by one final sally from Gotlib, in conjunction with modern marvel François Boucq (La Vie, La Mort et Tout le Bazar, Les Leçons du Professeur Bourremou, The Magicians Wife, Face de Lune, Bouncer, Le Janitor, Jérôme Moucherot), and his frequent work-partner Karim Belkrouf (Rock Mastard, Cocktail Transgenic). Superdupont: Renaissance introduced a fresh face to the francophone oeuvre as the mighty modern champion of all things Gaul returned in the role of proud father…

One point to remember here: a big part of Gotlib’s legacy was the brutal enforcement of a modern adult sensibility to the previous kid’s only comics biz. It shows in much of his comics work and particularly in his editorial stance and choices as co-founder of Fluide Glacial and L’Écho des savanes. In Superdupont, it’s seen as deliberately crass and vulgar situations, scenarios and language as well as cruelly satirical social commentary. If you can’t handle it, don’t look, but truly it’s no worse than late night TV or the cartoon equivalent of modern radio “shock jocks”…

In the original texts the beret-bedecked wonder was the son of the Unknown Soldier entombed beneath the Arc de Triomphe: super-powered, manically chauvinistic and resolute in his defence of all things French – especially business, colonialism and women. He battled terrorist gang Anti-France and foreigners in general, who all spoke an unruly linguistic polyglot of English, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian he dismissed as “Anti-Français”…

Clad in slippers, baggy slacks with a tricolour belt, striped jersey beret and safety-pinned cape, he led the resistance against modernism and foreign contamination, swilling red wine, smoking Gauloises and eating far too much soft cheese. Despite his powers, the champion of Camembert prefers to punish his many foes with his mastery of boxe française …what us interlopers would likely call “Savate”…

Translated as Superdupont: The Revival, the fun-filled French lessons restart following Gotlib’s fond reminiscences on the creation of the Gallic Guardian – and his reasons for returning – in revelatory Introduction ‘The Birth of a Legend’, after which the Good Old Days resume with some shocks and surprises…

The cosmos reels like a DC Comics mega-crossover as a nervous, flying, chain-smoking figure circles the maternity wing of a hospital. Inside the doctors and midwives are panicking at a most unusual birth. After some frantic – not to say gross – moments, Superdupont greets his new son: a bonny baby even more gifted and glorious than his proud sire…

After a rapid flashback précising his parents’ amorous assignation and precarious natal achievement, the early days of Superdupont Jr. detail why and how papa takes over the childrearing in a series of spectacular stunts and training exercises – whilst poor mummy recuperates in the ICU…

The infant’s sky-rending antics and fabulous frolics alarm the nation’s trigger-happy military and – after ‘Superdupont Changes a Diaper!’ – lead to a spot of civil unrest when the nipper starts interacting with alarmed ground-based mortals, prompting Da-Da to deliver a quick lecture on power and responsibility in Real Man style.

Tragically, as Superdupont demonstrates the fine art of saving plunging passenger jets, ruthlessly relentless, ever-present evil strikes, abducting his titanic toddler!

Plunged into despondency, Superdupont digs deep into ‘Le Coeur d’un Père’ before renewing his search, unaware that human devil The Pope of Darkness and his lamentable legion of malign malcontents is trying to contaminate the innocent babe with their own wickedness and create an appalling counterpoint to the champion of goodness…

However, as the furious father closes in, wrecking the assembled arsenal of evil, neither he nor his fetid foes have considered how junior might feel about being a pawn in someone else’s game…

Surreal, splendidly self-deprecating and self-referential whilst unceasingly breaking fourth walls – and a bit of the ceiling too – these raucous romps continually play with the accepted tropes and memes of superheroic fiction and even the graphics and visual lexicon of superhero idiom; adding layers of mirth and meta-meaning to the barbed, concealed critiques of the doomed and decaying world we’re now lumbered with…

If you have a quick mind, strong stomach and a dry wit in need of whetting, this is a ludicrous but lovely laugh-bomb you should not miss. Just don’t do the accent, okay?
© 2015 – DARGAUD – BOUCQ, GOTLIB & BELKROUF. All rights reserved.

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Mystery Girl


By Paul Tobin, Alberto J. Albuquerque, Marissa Louise & Marshall Dillon (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-959-5 (TPB/Digital edition)

There are many fabulous smartly entertaining stand-alone comics collections on the market these days, offering readers a single done-in-one hit of graphic entertainment without the grief of buying into massive back-history or infinite cross-continuity.

One of the best I’ve ever seen compiles a fierce, frenetic and funny 4-issue miniseries from 2015, starring the most infallible detective of all time. No sequel yet, but I live in hope, which is a rather apposite thing to say here…

As crafted by American author Paul Tobin (Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, Plants vs. Zombies, Bandette, Colder) and Spanish artist Alberto Jimenez Albuquerque (Les Fugitifs de l’Ombre, Letter 44, Generation X, Wakanda Forever) – with colours by Marissa Louise and letters from Marshall Dillon – this slim, sleek, slick yarn simply screams for more enigmas to be excitingly unravelled by this sleuthing star in waiting.

Like any ancient city, London has its fair share of unique characters and unsolved mysteries, but that’s never the case whenever Trine Dorothy Hampstead sets up her “office” on the pavements and begins chatting…

The effusive, ebullient young woman has an incredible gift. She knows the answer to any question she’s asked. Instantly and infallibly. “Where are my keys?” “Did Dad leave a will?” “Where is my missing son’s body…?”

All inquiries get an instant response and every answer is correct!

Trine is a local celebrity in her community, not only for the fact that she’s never judgemental or exploits her gift, but also because everyone knows there’s only one mystery the poor lass can’t solve: how she got her uncanny power…

Trine has an immense taste for life at full throttle and abiding desire to help those in need: regularly consulting with local private eye Alfie and aiding her perpetually sceptical boyfriend Ken Bloke – a Metropolitan police constable – in his work, even though he refuses to believe in her gift…

Her already extraordinary life takes a big step into the unknown when ancient DNA specialist Jovie Ghislain comes to Trine with a fascinating query. The biologist had been researching a 1930’s expedition to the wild Sakha region of Siberia. In the notes of the fabled Weimar-Steinberg trek, the explorers detailed how they uncovered a frozen mammoth carcass so perfectly preserved that the meat was still fresh and edible. Their records are tragically incomplete and Ghislain – desperate to secure viable DNA from the deceased giant – wants to know where the rest of the body is now…

The answer is not immediately forthcoming. In fact, Trine refuses to say anything unless she can join Jovie’s new expedition to personally show the scientists where it is.

Trine thrives on new experiences and this time her gift pays a huge dividend. As preparations are made, she shrugs off all questions from friends and acquaintances, but does confide in her pet budgie Candide. The reason that mammoth meat was so fresh is obvious. It hadn’t been dead long. Now she’s off to see its kin in the only place on earth where the mighty beasts still live…

Sadly, the original expedition – and its journals – are also the subject of a search by wealthy and far less friendly folk. However, when a mystery billionaire commissions a psychopathic hitman to find and secure all the original journals and stop the new expedition, even deadly Linford is taken with Trine. Foregoing his usual callous efficiency, the murdering mercenary takes his time, insinuating himself into the life of all her friends. It’s all working out just fine until the Mystery Girl is asked about her pal’s latest boyfriend and suddenly “knows” all about the new beau – including his actual profession.

Miss Hampstead’s plan to deal with him is shockingly effective, but doesn’t go nearly far enough…

Believing the coast clear, Trine and Jovie head for the Arctic Circle, blissfully unaware that their trail is being dogged by Linford’s sinister paymaster or that the killer himself is down, but not out. Instead, he has devised a cunning method to turn his opponent’s gift against her…

Even so, the obsessive hitman has underestimated Trine’s power, ingenuity and ruthless resolve. However when finesse fails, he can always fall back on overwhelming firepower and direct action…

With the steadfast explorers nearing their frozen El Dorado, the bad guys make their move, revealing what’s actually behind all the death and destruction. Now it no longer matters if Trine is asked the right question or not…

As the ghastly truth of the Weimar-Steinberg expedition is exposed, their heirs and inheritors prove willing to commit mass murder to keep the bloody secret covered up. Happily, Trine asks herself a different question and a life-saving solution pops into her head…

Fast-paced, spectacularly action-packed, witty and superbly balanced as hero and villain play cat-&-mouse around the world, Mystery Girl is funny, imaginative and savagely uncompromising: a superb introduction to a potent and engaging new female character who seems destined for greatness.

Also included are satisfyingly informative bonus features including a copious and heavily annotated Sketchbook section with commentary from Tobin & Albuquerque; concept to finished art examples; cover roughs: designs and unused cover art, all revealing the masses of effort that went into making this such a treat.

Don’t ask why you weren’t in at the beginning of her climb to stardom: get Mystery Girl and become someone with (some of) the answers…
Mystery Girl ™ & © 2015, 2016 Paul Tobin and Alberto J. Albuquerque. Mystery Girl and all prominently featured characters are trademarks of Paul Tobin and Alberto J. Albuquerque.

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The City: A Vision in Woodcuts


By Frans Masereel (Dover Publications)
ISBN: 978-0-486-44731-5 (TPB/Digital Edition)

We tend to think of graphic novels as being a late 20th century phenomenon, and one that fought long and hard for legitimacy and a sense of worth, but the format was pioneered popularised much earlier in the century… and utilised for the most solemn, serious and worthy purposes.

At the same time as the earliest newspaper strips were being rebound as collected editions, European Fine Artists were addressing the world’s problems in “Wordless Novels”: assembling individual artworks – usually lino or sometimes woodcuts – into narrative sequences which, as the name implies, used images, not dialogue or captions, to tell a story. This also accounts for the other names of the articles – Woodcut Novels/Novels in Woodcut.

The fashion grew out of the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century which revived and repurposed medieval woodblock printing techniques and even imagery for its own artistic agenda and purposes and was most popular during the 1920s and 1930s. The undisputed master of the form was Flemish artisan Frans Masereel, whose many works were phenomenally popular in German and whose influence spread far and wide – particularly to Depression-era America where Lynd Ward adopted the process for his many sallies against social iniquity, and Giacomo Patri unleashed his anti-capitalist salvo in the wordless novel White Collar as well as comedic parodies such as Milt Gross’ He Done Her Wrong…

Masereel (1899-1972) was born in Blankenberge, Belgium and raised by his stepfather, an avowed socialist. He left home to study art in Paris supporting himself through magazine and newspaper illustration, political cartooning and his earliest woodcut prints. He was also a devout pacifist, refusing to fight in WWI, where he instead acted as a translator for the Red Cross. As a result he was unable to return to his homeland and lived most of his life in Germany, Switzerland and France.

In 1918 he created his first narrative: 25 Images of a Man’s Passion and followed up a year later with his masterpiece Passionate Journey. Masereel crafted more than 40 wordless novels, primarily woodcuts, but also a quartet of traditional pen & brush sagas, plus countless illustrations, commissioned paintings, animation works and more. Always stridently and forcefully defending the ordinary man from the horrors of capitalism, disaster and especially warmongering, his potent ability to hone meaning and capture emotion in singular images influenced generations of artists and cartoonists including Ward, Georg Grosz, Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Clifford Harper, Eric Drooker, Otto Nückel, Peter Kuper, George Walker and Peter Arno.

The book under review today was first released in 1925 as La Ville: cent bois gravés in France and as Die Stadt in Germany. Originally comprising 100 prints (13cm x 8cm) bound into book form, it quickly became a touchstone for many artists and critics and was hailed as the precursor of a film genre which made environment the focus of narrative (like Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis or Man With a Movie Camera) and subsequently rereleased in 1961, 1972 and 1988 before this definitive 21st century Dover edition.

The City: A Vision in Woodcuts is translated from the German version as produced by Kurt Wolff Verlag AG (Munich 1925): seeking to forego actual sequential narrative by delivering its stark and startling images encapsulating the modern urban existence. Of course, humans being what we are, readers will find themselves unconsciously imposing form on those unfolding, uncompromising extremely explicit images anyway…

The candid exploration encompasses the highest and lowest echelons of society all rubbing up against each other, zeroing in page by page on the emotions, reactions and consequent horrors such friction creates…

There are bawdy entertainments, diligent toil, crimes of all kinds, quiet times almost unnoticed. We see smoke stacks, railway lines, canals, ports, traffic jams, subways and stations. There are rush hour crowds, fights, civil protests and always personal tragedies: accidents, bad births, thefts, affray, rape murder…

Buildings go up and come down, there is rush and rubbish and courtroom drama: vast office regiments, factory lines and foundry creations. Opulence and desperate poverty co-exist, with the exploited, maimed, forgotten and unwanted ignored by those enjoying themselves at all costs. The masses sing, dance, imbibe carouse and even indulge themselves being part of a grand State funeral. Always people come and people go, some for a different life and others to a “better world”…

It’s a place of constant change and the pace never slows… education, celebration and pauses for thought embrace art edification and human degradation on demand but there is also – for the bold and unbroken – a glimmer of hope…

Stirring, evocative and still movingly inspirational as the world returns to those dark days of Haves, Have-Nots and Why-Should-I-Cares?; this magnificent rediscovery is inventive, ferocious in its dramatic delivery, instantly engaging and enraging: a book long overdue for revival and reassessment and one every callous “I’m All Right” Jackass and “Why Should I Pay For Your…” social misanthrope needs to see or be slapped with…
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