Category: Uncategorized

Epic Lite (1991) #1
edited by Fabian Nicieza

If there’s one think I wasn’t expecting Epic to publish around this time, it’s a humour anthology. So here’s a humour anthology.

The book is in Epic’s go-to format at the time: A 48 page book (with thin shiny paper) in a thicker, cardboard-ish cover. Which is a change from what they were doing the previous year, which was 48-page squarebound books (“prestige format”). I wonder whether they changed the format to save money (or bring the price point down)?

Anyway, we get a bunch of four to nine page pieces. There doesn’t seem to be any theme going here… for a title called “Epic Lite” you’d perhaps expect parodies of other Epic comics? Instead it’s a grab bag of … whatever the different artists usually do.

So we get the Murder Family from Evan Dorkin. I don’t know whether this is the first appearance of this unfortunate concept, but I seem to recall reading several of these strips, and they never get much further than what you see on the spread above.

I guess the point is to demonstrate how unfunny sit-coms are? So we get a lot on non-jokes with laugh tracks. Oh, and plenty of slaughter. It’s deep. It’s an indictment of late stage capitalism, man. It’s like Haneke.

I mean, I think Dorkin is pretty talented, but Murder Family is just lazy writing.

Hilary Barta and Doug Rice do a very well-drawn piece of absurdity.

Scott Saavedra does a piece called “Manville” about how people who live outside New York are morons.

Mike Kazaleh! I love Mike Kazaleh! Unfortunately, there’s not really anything funny here? It’s weird. He’s usually dependably hilarious. Still, it looks really good.

Jim Valentino does a normalman thing. What? And spends one page doing a recap of the series before spending the rest of the time on a generic spoof of those zany Hollywood types we’ve all seen before? Was somebody trying to make normalman into a TV series at the time? It has that feeling of undigested frustration… It’s not funny, in any case.

Kyle Baker sticks to his normal layout but uses a somewhat simplified style for his piece about… how people who collect comics as a financial investment are probably going to be disappointed.

It’s true, but that doesn’t make it funny.

What a strange collection of comics! It’s like Nicieza called up a bunch of the funniest people in the business (at the time) and ordered some pages from them, but told them to remove all the humour.

Thomas Harrington writes in Amazing Heroes #195, page 3:

Marvel’s Bottom Ten: As long as
everybody’s talking about how great
Marvel is doing (and Marvel is do-
ing great), it might be interesting to
see what the company’s worst-selling
titles are. Here are Marvel’s ten least-
ordered comics for September, 1991,
according to the Capital City Inter-
nal Correpondence newsletter.
1) [lowest] Alf
2) Sleeze Brothers #1
3) Epic Lite
4) Barbie Fashion #11
5) Zorro
6) Conan Saga #56
7) Metropol #9
8) Barbie
9) Savage Sword of Conan #191
10) Knights of Pendragon #16
Note the lack of of super-hero titles
in the list. Pendragon comes close,
but I suspect its British origins
hampered its development in the U.S.
(Marvel recently announced that it
was being cancelled). Besides that,
what we have here are four licensed
properties (two of which are aimed at
young girls, one of which is based on
a cancelled TV show), three creator-
owned properties and two black &
white barbarian magazines that are
mainly aimed at the newsstand
market.

So this was Marvel’s third-worst-selling comic of the month? I’m not surprised, because anthologies rarely sell well. And humour anthologies?

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #188, page 84:

This summer, the Epic Lite one shot
will be a $3.95 bookshelf comic fea-
turing humor “by the funniest guys in
the industry.” You’ll have to wait to see
just who those funny guys are,
though.

Aha! This was originally announced as being in a squarebound format, so I guess cutting it down to a stapled floppy was a cost-saving measure. And Baker sure was right about comics not being a good financial investment:

You can still find the copy at a nominal 50% off (adjust for inflation yourself).

I couldn’t find any reviews of the book on the web, but there’s this:

Epic Comics – Marvel’s “Adult” imprint – was known to take itself a bit too seriously. So, the slyly named “Epic Lite” was a rather welcomed comedy one-shot. Creators included Hilary Barta, Doug Rice, Mike Kazaleh, and Jim Valentino (doing one of his last Normalman strips). But the big draws for me were Evan Dorkin – debuting The Murder Family, which would become a staple of Dork – and Kyle Baker, whose Al Space strip is the gem of the book.

Al Space was basically a cynical old man who would dress up in a super-hero costume and break children’s hearts by introducing them to the realities of the comic book industry. In this episode, Al confronts a young speculator about his comic book “investment.”

The Transmutation of Ike Garuda (1991) #1-2
by Elaine Lee and James Sherman

This is one of the few Epic comics from this era that I’ve read before… but I read them just a few months ago, before starting this blogging project, and they were probably what pushed me over the edge into actually (re-)reading all the Epic comics: If Epic had published something as wonderful as this without me knowing, what other treasures would be hidden in their catalogue?

Elaine Lee is, of course, the writer of Starstruck, but I’ve haven’t really read anything else she’s done, and for all I knew, perhaps Starstruck was an outlier and her other work would turn out to be naff? So this was a huge joy to read, because it’s awesome.

This is a science fiction slash hard boiled detective story, which isn’t an unusual genre crossover, but Lee (and Sherman) does it so perfectly. The storyline is so dense that it feels like it’ll curl into a black hole at times — there’s not a single wasted page here (over this 2x 48 page series). We get the traditional hard-boiled voice-over captions, while things never stop happening at the same time.

OK, perhaps things get a bit reliant on coincidences at times, but that’s also a genre trope: Is it coincidence or conspiracy? The thing is, when doing something as convoluted as this, if you lose the reader’s confidence that this is all going to come together for a second, everything just turns into a boring slog, but the creators here have pitch perfect control of everything.

I’m not familiar with James Sherman — he seems to just have done an issue here and there, but this seems to be the only stand-alone project he’s done. And I think he does this marvellously: He’s obviously been peeking a bit at some Moebius comics, but also at British artists, I think?

There are so many characters here, and there’s double identities and erased memories, but he has an amazing ability to make characters that are readily discernible so that there’s no extra confusion just because of that. I know that that seems like a minimum requirement for a comic artist, but there’s a tendency among artists to just have a handful of facial features at hand, so if you have, say, ten characters, they start looking very similar. Sherman navigates it all perfectly.

It wouldn’t be an Elaine Lee comic without some text features, eh?

This comic won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. If the exchange above thrills you, then hie thee to Ebay and get buying. If instead you’re going “uh… dur… I eat paste…” then perhaps not.

Or perhaps a quintuple agent!?

Anyway, I loved this book even more the second time I read it, and that’s saying a lot, because I loved it to bits the first time around. Reading it is… thrilling.

Thrilling. That’s the word.

The book has never been reprinted or collected (SHAME! SHAME!), but it has to have some loving fans. You can tell just by its Wikipedia page.

I was unable to find contemporaneous reviews of this book, and (as usual for Epic mini-series), there’s not a lot on the interwebs either:

This is a extravagantly meaty read for its two books totaling 96 pages- the amount of ins, outs and every other direction you can imagine cause this to take an eternity to read if you need to understand every detail.

Here’s a guy on youtube.

Well, I think I know what I have to do: I have to buy everything that Elaine Lee has written. She seems to have had an interesting career, too… Oh, and perhaps this bibliography would also be useful for tracking down her stuff, which seems to be scattered over a bunch of smaller projects.