Category: Uncategorized

Epic Illustrated (1983) #1-34
edited by Archie Goodwin

After the success of having a long, complete-in-one story in an issue in the near past (the Elric thing), I thought Goodwin was going to continue doing stuff like that. But in this issue we instead get three Barry Windsor-Smith pieces, which… I guess… gives you a bit of the same feeling (i.e., something more than just a bunch of random short pieces).

But one of the things in the BWS section is this. Which is a thing I thought EI had completely ditched by now: Somebody writing a story based on a single drawing. Even Goodwin himself, normally a reliable writer, can’t make it work.

Even by cutting up the aforementioned artwork and putting his text in between the bits.

Whaaa!? I’ve never read this Dave Sim piece. I thought he’d republished everything he’s ever done, but not this Arnold the Isshurian two-pager. I mean, it’s just a goof, but it’s… Arnold the Isshurian!

Speaking of Canada, Gene Day had recently died, so we get a short retrospective on his career and some choice artwork.

*gasp* Rick Geary! There can never be a sufficient amount of Rick Geary in any anthology! And he’s got a four-pager here, which is 4x as much as he usually gets in anthologies.

The new long serial starts, and Goodwin talks a bit about its long gestation. Or, really: He’d bought it a couple of years before, but hadn’t the room for another long serial in EI. And this is done “Marvel Style”: Goodwin himself is the “scripter”, which means that Pepe Moreno wrote and drew the thing, and then Goodwin puts the words onto the pages as they arrive.

They’re talking about plants, which are flora, I believe, but I just wanted to mention that the “Marvel style” is perhaps not the best choice here. I mean, do we need to get this backstory here? What I’m saying is that it’s a bit overwritten, but it’s pretty entertaining anyway.

And at random, we get the history of Planet Comics. Well. Perhaps that makes more sense than some of these text pieces, as Planet Comics was more sci-fi than most.

Michael Kaluta spruces up an old story he’d done in 1973, and retrofits a new storyline, and then Goodwin writes the text. It makes zero sense, but it looks nice, eh?

Michael Saenz does a sci-fi story that I thought, for once, wasn’t going to have a twist ending, but then the twist was that there’s a twist ending. But it was properly moody before we got to that point.

What the… Peter Kuper!?

Doing an anthology like this isn’t easy: You have to have some consistency; something to tie things together (thematically or moodwise), and EI certainly succeeds in that: They have a stable of artists that return issue after issue. I’d guesstimate that, like, two thirds of the pages in any issue are by people who have previously appeared in the magazine.

But you also have to surprise and delight readers by bringing in fresh talent and different moods, and Goodwin is good at that, too.

I mean, Peter Kuper. It seems so incongruous in a magazine like this, but it makes total sense for this reader, at least.

Goodwin continues doing the occasional overview of Japanese comic book artists. They’re not very… in depth… but they must have been even more interesting back then than they are now.

And we even get a story by Go Nagai to go with the overview, and I excerpt these two pages in particular because of this letter to the editor:

He seems to think that the penis was added by Marvel? That’s special.

*gasp* More Rick Geary!

Now the ads are getting really good. John Madden will show you how to win at Gorf!

Pepe Moreno has one really annoying tic: Usually the reading order is horizontal, so up there it’s first the two top panels, and then the one below the first panel, and the placement of the speech balloons emphasise that reading order. But most of the time, there’s no such guidance, and sometimes he’ll do the reading order the opposite way. With no indication that he’s doing so.

Stuff like that really get on my tits.

Vaughn Bodé’s son finished up a Cheech Wizard strip that had been written in the early 70s. It was meant for syndication, but Bodé apparently decided that if it couldn’t be raunchy, it’d just be boring. And I say this as somebody who has never liked Cheech Wizard: This stuff is just lame.

Another big serial starts: A Jon Jay Muth thing, so it’s all poetical and mysterious. But it reads well in the context of the magazine.

Oh, right. The Sacred & The Profane. I’ve read that several times in multiple variants, and it doesn’t really get better with repeated readings, so I skipped it that time. But, man, what an introduction.

Pepe Moreno is a good artist, but he does not excel at slapstick. I think that’s supposed to be a spit take?

Robert Gould had illustrated an Elric novel, so EI got him to write and draw an (original?) storylet, too? Vignette?

Moreno starts dropping in pictures into his artwork. Kinda works, doesn’t it?

James Fox and B K Taylor do a pretty original take on #metoo. I love the sheer loathing on display on these pages.

New Kaluta! The story makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I’ve never seen Kaluta do anything quite in this style before, and it’s magnificent.

A reader lets us know that he’s not a prude, but he’s got some stern words to say about the Strnad/Corben excerpt published some issues before. (See previous blog post for the page he’s talking about.) Be a sleuth and determine from the choice of words what the real issue was. I mean, since he’s not a prude.

Speaking of making no sense… The Muth serial ends, and the artwork remains very attractive.

Jo Duffy writes a paragraph about Love and Rockets, noting that the editorial (by Gary Groth and or Kim Thompson; I don’t recall) is pretty bad. It is. It makes you wonder how much animus was directed towards the Hernandezes in the early years just because of those two editorials.

And that’s 1983. OK, I mean, typing this I see that I seem perhaps kinda negative towards Epic Illustrated, but I’m not. I’m enjoying reading these issues. Goodwin has managed to create a format with great leeway while keeping things cohesive. Even if there’s a couple of duds here and there, when you have a 100 page magazine, the misses don’t matter that much.

Epic Illustrated (1982 #1-34
edited by Archie Goodwin

This blog series is progressing a whole lot slower than I had imagined, but things how just… gotten in the way. But the next few days should be clear, so I hope to get through the Epic Illustrateds by the end of the week, at least, and then we can start on the ostensible subject of this blog: Epic Comics.

Unfortunately, for this post, I read these six magazines over almost a week-long period, so I have no idea what I was going to talk about for this page any more. I mean, it’s Rick Veitch’s grand opus Abraxas and the Earthman… which starts out in this totally bugfuck crazy manner, and then… continues in the same manner. It goes on for at least six issues (it’s not over in this batch of EI), and while… odd… it becomes steadily more engrossing as the issues pass.

This Bird is an odd one out: Goodwin is pretty adamant on focusing on pieces with a strong sense of narrative, and this two-pager by Steadroy Cleghorne is more allusive, I guess. And very pretty. It’s a shame they didn’t print it on the centre pages, because having that middle panel (of the eyes) not line quite up is less than optimal.

Chris Claremont and John Bolton starts their Marada the She-Wolf story, and the storytelling choices are pretty odd: We start with somebody reminiscing about how Marada used to kick ass, but now she’s all demure and stuff. I mean, it does work, but it feels like we’re being given a recap of previous stories, which made me google it:

The story was originally planned for the character of Red Sonja, Conan’s sometime partner, but had to be changed due to issues surrounding the then-in-production Red Sonja movie with Brigitte Nielsen. Claremont moved the historical milieu from the Hyborian Era to the Roman Empire, and changed her hair from red to silver

So it is, indeed, a recap of Red Sonja’s kick-assedness, but retooled to a brand new character, it’s just kinda… “hm”.

(Oh, and spoilers: It turns out that she’d been raped a lot, because that’s what happens to women who are kick-ass.)

Once Goodwin had opened the door for European artists to do stuff in EI, I had expected the floodgates to open and we’d get a bunch of people in. But, no; Goodwin sticks to just a couple of people and they appear regularly in EI. Here’s Pepe Moreno, and he’s fine. And I guess it does make sense to do it this way? It’s less random.

But we do get random stuff, too, like this short piece by Kaze Shinobu, which has to be one of the first Japanese comics published in translation in the US. (I mean, probably not the first first, but perhaps among the first half dozen? I could google it.)

What? Oh, right. Buy US Savings Bonds.

I continue to enjoy these Ken Steacy adaptations of Harlan Ellison stories – a lot more than I enjoy Ellison on his own, really. Of course Steacy’s colour work here is outstanding, but there’s also something really enjoyable about looking at his slightly odd people.

If your reaction to this page (Abraxas and Rick Veitch) is “whaaaa”, then: Good. This is what the serial is like.

Wally Wood dies, so they do a little retrospective on him. It’s nice, but it feels like they could have gone more in-depth and at least published a story or two by him while they were at it.

Robert Rodi/Joe Jusko do a glorious parody of barbarian tropes. I mean, “Prince Hakalot” isn’t the height of comedy, but in the context of Epic Illustrated, it feels like a savage burn, somehow. Oh, and the phallic symbolism.

Did I mention Weirdworld in an earlier post? These panels befuddled me until I realised that it was like a measure of how evil this character had gotten now. (It gets filled up with darkness.) Either that’s clever or it’s… not.

This little story by Jon Jay Muth was pretty lovely. (I know, insightful commentary.)

Claremont was pretty unique back in those days in putting so many female characters on the page at the same time. Here’s a page where *gasp* there’s only female characters that are talking, and they’re not talking about *gasp* men! It cannot be!

(The story was pretty standard, though.)

At random, we get a long article about Basil Wolverton, and then a reprinted Spacehawk story. I like it, but it does sort of move away from the presumed target audience (people who like Heavy Metal) to a different one: Old people.

As if to drive that point home, a few pages later we get a Ralph Reese pastiche of 50s Mad. It’s well-drawn and paced, but it’s… Mad.

Now here’s some target audience stuff: Zoran Vanjaka doing his impression of Moebius circa 1975.

Oh, wow. James Romberger? I wasn’t aware that he was doing stuff back then (I became aware of him when Uncivilized started publishing him, and I read his Kirby thing just the other week). And I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that he did stuff like this. He’s such a chameleon.

Then: A preview for the Marvel adaptation of Blade Runner.

Arthur Suydam is something else. I love looking at is pages, and I feel that I should appreciate his stories more than I do, because they have stuff like the above, which is just plain silly. And I like silly. But perhaps because they lean into non-sense so heavily it’s hard to become invested?

Ooo. Kanagawa.

I think I raised the issue of EI having too many short bits earlier on this blog? And that was a problem because it just made the texture of the magazine a bit choppy? Apparently Goodwin thought so too, because he’s going to start doing longer, complete-in-on-issue stuff.

So we get the entire While The Gods Laugh story, at (if I count correctly) 28 pages. And it does really help, I think. It’s a gorgeously drawn story, of course, because P. Craig Russell. And it’s a fun story. One thing that is a let-down, though, is that it’s printed both on shiny coated stock and matte paper, so you get these abrupt changes in what the colouring looks like. I presume that Russell didn’t know what pages were going to be printed on what stock, so he couldn’t adjust his colouring.

To go with the long Elric story, we also get an interesting interview with Russell and a look at his process (which is very much based on taking pictures of his friends).

We also get a look at some adjustments he mad in the artwork. Here’s the printed panel:

And here’s what he originally had:

Intradesting!

So: Goodwin is making editorial strides, issue by issue. The concept of EI doesn’t change much, but he’s getting better at putting together an interesting package for each issue as time progresses.

Ah, somebody is doing a restoration of this story. I don’t know whether Titan has published it yet: I bought a bunch of Titan Elric volumes earlier this year, and the reproduction there sucked. It looked like they were shot off of the printed comics.

Oh! I never realised how much Sam Kieth must have been inspired by Arthur Suydam before, because I don’t think I’ve seen Suydam doing black-and-white stiff before. But that’s basically the Outback in Maxx, right?

Goodwin said he kept this Bob Aull piece in the inventory for a while, and you can see why: It’s more undergroundy than perhaps really fits the magazine. And so political (it’s called “The Patriot”), and as Goodwin said, it had become more timely again in 1982.

Well, that’s an ad for Marvel Graphics Novels, I guess, but not a very… imposing one.

Starlin does a short Dreadstar story to tie us over to the new Dreadstar Epic Comics series, and he doesn’t do the “as you know, Bob” plot recap thing: Instead he does “I must now think to myself about my origin story” thing. For pages.

But yes! Epic Comics! The subject of this blog! Soon! It’s happening!

Dreadstar is announced as the first series, and then Coyote. I’m really looking forward to re-reading Coyote: I remember reading it back as a teenager, but then I stopped half-way through. I guess we’ll find out whether it sucks or not.

Oh, wow. Jeremy Brood by the inimitable Richard Corben (and written by Jan Strnad). I thought I had all their stuff? But I missed this one?

The story is weird: It doesn’t really get going, and then it stops. But no “to be continued”. Hm… Oh! The contents page says this is a preview of an upcoming graphic novel! I’ll guess I’ll but that then.

Huh:

Jeremy Brood: Relativity (1982) was originally intended to be the first of a three-part series of sci-fi graphic novels by Richard Corben and Jan Strnad, but disappointing sales lead to its early conclusion. A single, second installment was published as a comic book, “Fantagor Presents Brood” (1983). Later, the two parts were collected into one volume, entitled “Jeremy Brood” (1989).

Perhaps sales would have been helped if Epic Illustrated had actually said something like “Read the complete story in the graphic novel soon to be published by Fantagor” or something near the story itself? Just mentioning that it’s a preview on the contents page is less than optimal.

Anyway!

That’s 1982! It’s the best year yet.