Category: Uncategorized

The Bozz Chronicles (1985) #1-6
by David Michelinie, Bret Blevins and people

After a stretch of series from people who’s work I’m quite familiar with (or should that be whoms?), I know little about Michelinie and Blevins. Or, indeed, this series, which I can’t recall knowing existing before starting this blog series.

I’m pretty intrigued immediately by the Victorian setting, the juxtaposition between “imperialist expansion” and the poor, the really detailed artwork (with fun angles), and… “guv”, “malarkey”, “wot don’t know them”: Yes, we have cod Cockney. What’s not to like?

Wowsers. That looks very, very Berni Wrightsonish. In a good way.

And then we’re suddenly six months later and we’re into the first adventure. I really love that they did the “origin story” in just four pages, so that we can get into the concept here: It’s an alien and an ex-prostitute that are private eyes in Victorian England. Concept, ey?

(OK, we get another page later that explains how we got from the garret to the posh flat, but that’s OK.)

So the alien gets suicidally bored, so the gal has to keep him entertained by finding interesting cases for them to solve, see? Yes, this isn’t very serious fare, but it’s inventive, silly when it needs to be, and well-told.

The mysteries they solve aren’t very mysterious, but they work well.

Capitalism’s afoot!

It’s not that often you see anti-unionisation villains.

Blevins does great action scenes, but he’s also really good at keeping things lively.

I think this is pretty flawless. It’s a well-choreographed chase scene with a silly denouement. (The alien guy can talk to animals. I mean, other animals than just humans.)

Al Williamson is listed as co-inker on one issue, and I was curious to see whether any of the pages would look super-Williamsonesque… but they don’t.

Somebody writes in to complain that we never see the alien’s penis.

And there are perhaps one too many scenes like this with things strategically covering up the genitalia, but I think the more annoying thing is that the female protagonist tries to get into his pants, I mean, try to get him into pants and then into them. So much. I mean… it’s just hard to see why she’d be physically attracted to him.

I mean, with all those strategically positioned flower pots.

John Ridgway does the artwork for one issue, and he’s fine, but not as good as Blevins. And has he ever seen anybody do darts? I’m pretty sure the norm isn’t to have your hand 10cm from the board?

The subplots involving the other guys fighting over the female protagonist are fine, I guess, but they crowd out the fun mystery plots that the first issued had.

But, OK, that’s a genius fighting pose.

OK, that’s it: It’s a fun little series, and it’s probably been made into several TV series by now, but under other names. I mean: Alien sleuths doing the Sherlock Holmes thing is just a natural combination.

Somebody writes in Amazing Heroes #104, page 35

The Bozz Chronicles, Michelinie’s
Epic Comics series about a melan-
choly alien stranded on Earth in Vic-
torian England, will end its current
run with issue #6. “It was successful
enough to receive a six-issue
renewal, which I originally accep-
ted.” Unfortunately, a number of
production problems came into play,
threatening the book’s future. Artist
Bret Blevins, moving into numerous
commercial art projects, had diffi-
culties meeting his deadlines.
Michelinie also experienced edi-
torial problems: “In producing the
book, there were a number of
frustrations due to irreconcilable
differences between myself and cer-
tain members of the editorial staff.
“Bozz Chronicles is not neces-
sarily dead, but as of right now, the
regular series is over.”
Michelinie really likes Bozz and
Mandy Flynn (whose Cockney
speech patterns were based on
Fulucating Rita’s Julie Walters), and
hopes to use them again in a special
or a graphic novel. “Bob Layton
informs me that Barry Windsor-
Smith likes the characters and would
like to draw a Bozz story.”

Yeah, I can totally see that Blevins would get hired to do better-paying gigs than this book. But I wonder who those “certain members of the editorial staff” Michelinie had problems with were.

RA Jones writes in Amazing Heroes #84, page 54

In her relationship with Bozz, she
seems to achieve the balance that
would fulfill the fantasy of many a
human male—being both madonna
and whore; serving as soulmate
without stifling. As she is worldly
wise, Borz is W’ide-eyed innocence
reversal of roles that is refreshing
and rare in a comic book.
After seemingly doing little more
than work from other people’s plots
in recent months, David Michelinie
haq produced one of his better solo
efforts here. His attempt to capture
the various idiosyncrasies of the Brit-
ish dialect succeed better than most,
presenting dialogue that at least
sounds right to my American ears. It
enhances the charm of Mandy
greatly.
I was somewhat surprised by the
visual job done by artist Bret Blevins.
The graphics here far surpass those
I have seen from him in the past. In
those panels where it is at its very
best, his art conjures up memories
of the early work of such names as
Kaluta, Jones and Wrightson.
Blevins has also added another
dimension to Bozz. His portrayal of
Mandy is what one might expect—
a beautiful, shapely woman bound
to stir the blood of most males. Bozz,
on the other hand, has a pointed
head, triple chin, and bloated belly.
If one WdS to judge solely by the
script, it would be believ«i that Man-
dy is attracted to him simply because
of his enlarged genitaliae But Blevins
gives him more than this. With his
wdif-like eyes and his tiny, pouting,
almost feminine mouth—the alien
Bozz is one of the most visually sen-
sual male charaders I have ewr seen
in a comic. Thus, the relationship
between Mandy and Bozz takes on
new depth—it has many levels, pre-
sented through both script and art.
While the plot itself is no great
tredqure, the interplay between Man-
dy and Bozz is appealing enough for
me to recommend that you sample
The Bozz Chronicles.

Er, uhm, OK. Sensual. OK.

A collected edition was released in 2015 from Dover.

This person liked it:

Final Verdict: 8.0 – Given a new lease on life from a sharp-eyed publisher, “The Bozz Chronicles” marries engaging characters and Victorian-era strange case sleuthing with early art by one of the most overlooked draftsmen in modern comics.

So did this one:

And though the charms of and bond between Mandy, Bozz, and Salem will force you to return to this series, the mysteries, while serving primarily as a framework for character development, contain outstanding imagination and just plain fun with a dash of magic.

The One (1985) #1-6
by Rick Veitch

I did read this one as a teenager, but I remember absolutely nothing about it except that I thought it was pretty neat. Veitch later worked some with Alan Moore and did … er … Superbrats? And a bunch of other revisionist super-hero comics (i.e., where the super-heroes are vile monsters). And this series is subtitled “The Last Word in Superheroics”, so was Veitch doing Watchmen before Watchmen?

*gasp* It sure looks like it! We’ve got fake newspaper articles and what looks like is going to be an “oral history” sort of framing, with a mad genius billionaire planning to radically change the world by staging a fake disaster (here, a fake war between the US and the Soviet Union to get rich; in Watchmen it’s a fake alien to make the US and the Soviet Union come together). Hey! It’s totally the same thing! And Veitch did it first…

Except… That fake New York Times article turns out to be real?

And then instead of getting interesting storytelling choices, beyond the oral history thing, we’re back to the old tried-and-true-and-oh-so-tired “having characters willy-nilly just state their plans to the air”.

Basically, the only interesting story-telling device Veitch uses is the four-horizontal-panel-oral-history thing. OK, perhaps this isn’t Watchmen before Watchmen after all.

We get one page of The Puzz Fundles by Rick Grimes per issue. I assume this is Veitch himself in a very different art style? It’s impossible to google since there’s a character in The Walking Dead with the same name. Hm… This seems to imply that he’s not Veitch, but it’s from a Veitch page, so who knows.

None of the one-page strips are particularly rewarding.

The Watchmen TV series ended with I Am The Walrus… and here Veitch references it, too. Did the Watchmen showrunners read The One?

The plot here is more reminiscent of Veitch’s serial in Epic Illustrated, Arbaxas and the Earthman than anything else. It’s about mystical forces and stuff, personified in “The One” and “The Other”. It’s kinda dire.

There’s so many pages like this: Way too much exposition about concepts that really don’t need this much explanation. Yes, a German übermench serum; a big rat; a Soviet super-hero. I wonder whether Veitch meant for these sequences to be funny, and I guess you can read them as parodies of the genre. I mean, with the “GASP!” and all. But is it actually funny?

Yes, it turns out they were brainwashed into believing all that, but was a side effect of the brain washing that they would compulsively recap their backstory to each other? Inquiring minds want to know.

(And, yes, of course they want to fuck each other.)

That’s also the motivation behind the Russian super-soldier: The scientist behind him wanted to create a real man. To have sex with.

Perhaps Veitch’s sense of humour is perpendicular to mine. I mean, I like a good oops-I-misspoke gag as well as the next person, but the timing seems leaden and tiresome.

The Russian scientist gets raped by the American super-hero.

At least we get a good political discussion. It turns out that the US is better than the CCCP.

OK, that’s a drawing I liked. But it looks really reminiscent of something or other. Hm.

As the issues went on, these “oral history” bits started to make less and less sense, plot-wise. The main story takes place apparently within a day or so, but the mad rich billionaire has time to command people into making a space shuttle getaway for him within that period of time. And we only get to see the two super-beings fight each other in New York, but that was enough to rupture the entire planet for some reason or other?

And Veitch also kinda breaks the narrative logic of having these bits by having most of the people doing them (who seem to be talking from a much later time) being killed off in the story. So these are… what they’d be telling us if they’d be telling us something at the time?

I guess you shouldn’t really be thinking too much about these things.

(It turns out she liked the rape.)

One of the surviving characters sums up the storyline.

I was really surprised at how unimpressed I was by this book. I like Veitch; I’ve bought just about everything he’s made since The One, but I didn’t remember just how half-assed The One is. It’s really a 70s comic with some 80s sheen.

On a positive note, despite being drenched in verbiage, it does read quite well. It’s pretty brisk.

Darwin McPerson interviews Veitch in Amazing Heroes #171, page 27

AH: Can you tell everyone unfamiliar
with it a little about it?
VEITCH•. The One was my attempt
at the revisionist super-hero. This was
in 1984-85, I believe. Alan Moore’s
Marvelman had just come out and we
were just getting it in the States in
Bårrior magazine. I read it and it hit
me while reading it that the super-hero
was a viable idea. It was a viable ve-
hicle with which to express yourself.
Even in the early ’80s a lot of peo-
ple were down on super-heroes be-
cause there werejust so many of them.
It’s like the person who eats too many
McDonald’s hamburgers never wants
to eat another hamburger no matter
who cooks it. But you can look at
super-heroes from a different point of
view. Not from the point of view of
somebody who’s consumed too many
of them, but like a child! We have a
lot going on there in terms of arche-
type and meaningfulness to society.
The thing that was going through
my mind at the time I did The One
was World War Ill. I don’t know if you
remember back then; Reagan was in
the White House•and everything had
become quite confrontational between
the United States and Russia.
AH: When Reagan first became Presi-
dent, I was certain we were talking
wur here;
vE11tH: Everybody was. It just
seemed like they were pushing it too
far with this insane brinksmanship. If
you read The One, you’ll see that the
bomb is like this underlying character
in the whole thing. In fact, World War
Ill is what creates the One out of the
collective unconscious of the human
race. And that’s only the first issue;
[laughs] it gets even bigger from there.
I’m really happy to report all those
tensions between Russia and America
have evaporated and people aren’t as
about it anymore. At the time,
it seemed very real and it definitely
became part of the mix that was The
One.

Finding contemporary reviews is proving difficult, but here’s a new one:

It hits many of the same beats as Watchmen: Cold War focus, alternative history, and the implication that superhumans would be more danger than boon.

By contrast, The One is far more snide and cynical with its allegory. Its tone shows an open disdain for its targets while almost reveling in its own dystopian plot. The One aims to come off as trashy and pulpy while enjoying every minute of it.

IDW did a serial reprint:

Is this a good comic? Heck, yes, it’s a bit dated, being a product of the 80’s, and all, but there are elements that are timeless. Hackers, military cold war, friction with Russia, the birth of new superheroes, these aspects could have been created in 2018.

And Veitch’ own King Hell published a complete edition.

Here’s one that’s all about Veitch:

They’re the best 10 pages of a superhero fight I’ve ever read, truth be told, which is why I was disappointed by their lack. They’re powerful, they’re perfectly paced, they’re violent as all hell and I haven’t found any better comic book fight scenes to this day.

Okidoke.